I was fifteen years old when it occurred to me that death might be a good thing. My high school sophomore class English teacher, A. J. Powell, read to us Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. It seemed an incredibly complicated book, but he patiently explained the details to us so that the entire class was fully caught up in the story. Then the ending, which is magnificent. Sydney Carton, an unpleasant, embittered alcoholic, voluntarily goes to the guillotine in the place of Charles Darnay, a noble, high-minded man married to Lucie Manette, whom Carton has grown to love. The two men look very much alike, a coincidence that allows Carton to sacrifice himself for Lucie’s sake when Darnay is sentenced to death. The last words of the novel, uttered by Carton shortly before his death, reveal a better man than anyone in my class suspected: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”[1] With these words and the act that follows, Carton redeems his seemingly wasted life.

While mortality is bookended by birth and death, both bookends are more like vanishing points than concrete events. We can’t remember our own birth, and except for planned deaths, none of us knows when we’re going to die. And even for those who plan their deaths (or are put to death according to plan), death is an uncertain doorway. Stories, of course, circulate about what happens after death, some of them told by people who believe they died for a brief time, but here again there is room for doubt. No slam-dunk evidence for life after death exists because all evidence to that effect can be explained away by skeptics who choose to believe differently. Back in the nineteenth century many believed that the practice of Spiritualism (seances meant to call forth spirits of deceased persons) would soon establish life-after-death as scientific fact, but the attempt to do so went up in smoke once scientifically minded observers tried to pin things down. Just too many irregularities and uncontrollable variables.[2]

Death and Family

The uncertainty that enshrouds death is still with us, and to my way of thinking, that is a good thing. We consequently are called upon to make a choice about our own death. Or, better said, about the attitude we adopt toward the surefire prospect of our own death. For good or for ill, modern culture is deeply invested in the present world. A great deal of time, energy, and money is poured into physical structures and technologies that affirm this world as the only reality we can be sure of: sports arenas, skyscrapers, entertainment platforms, shopping malls, cruise ships, transportation hubs, telecommunication networks, and so on. Because none of these ventures points heavenward and all come with a mesmerizing glitter of their own, we may come to believe that this world is as good as it gets. No wonder many people want to hang on as long as possible.

By way of contrast, consider the European Middle Ages. In many communities the biggest, most expensive, and most lovingly crafted buildings were cathedrals, which were explicitly otherworldly. They both reflected and reinforced the sensibility that mortality is prologue and passageway to heaven. Death consequently was not something to be feared but rather welcomed or at least bravely accommodated. Arthur Imhof, a German historian, argues that this was not idle talk. It played out in the way medieval people lived their lives. Simply put, people did not see themselves as self-contained individuals, each with her own project and chance to make a name for himself before being overtaken by death. First and foremost, they were members of a family and members of the body of Christ, the medieval church.

Imhof’s argument rests heavily on his study of multigenerational family farms in Europe. These farms, generally about 100 acres, remained in the same families for centuries. He points out that before the modern era, family was the bulwark, the stabilizing force, against personal misfortune. Any incipient notion of individual self-sufficiency was consequently swallowed up in the idea of family, but not just the nuclear family or even the spatially extended family consisting of living relatives. Rather, the family extended through time. Imhof writes: “What mattered was not the family living [on the farm] at the moment, but the family succession, the family line.”[3] As Imhof portrays it, the family is a kind of multigenerational rhythm and as we move through family roles—children, parents, grandparents—we discover that our lives echo those of our ancestors. This view of ourselves as temporary placeholders in an extended and ongoing family endeavor mitigates the sting of aging and death, says Imhof. We are not living for our individual selves and thereby struggling desperately against the inevitability of physical decline. Rather, we are living, and dying, with our ancestors and our posterity. In sympathetic vibration, as it were.

We do not want to romanticize medieval life: it lacked the wonderful physical comforts, medical advances, and labor-saving devices of modernity. All the same, it gives us reason to reassess our own situation, for modern life is fraught with discomforts and perplexities of its own, many of which are existential in nature. “The question,” says Imhof, “is whether we have traded once-tangible fears for a vague and growing anxiety that is much more difficult to come to terms with.”[4] This anxiety he links with the loss of religious faith that once stretched the self into the past and future as people, instead of seeing themselves as unique individuals anchored in the here and now, knew themselves as participants in a long-term family process. They felt themselves taking the baton from the previous generation and passing it off to the next, not running the race of life for themselves alone. Given this difference in attitude, the worldview of our medieval ancestors, Imhof proposes, “extended infinitely further” than our own, even though their lives were much more physically circumscribed.[5]

To support this judgment, Imhof notes that today our lives are filled with individual projects and so “every death is a tragic event that terminates someone’s life work.”[6] But death, even premature death, was not as catastrophic in the premodern era because people saw themselves as filling roles others could step into should death befall them: who they were was an expression of the ongoing multigenerational responsibility they were temporarily obliged to take up. This helps explain their apparent indifference to the kinds of safety issues that so readily galvanize moderns, persuaded as they are by the modern belief that the worth of a soul inheres in its irreplaceable uniqueness and not in its good or bad deeds.[7] Imhof observes that medieval drawings often reveal rickety, chronically unrepaired manmade structures, and the precariousness of medieval life is attested to by numerous death entries describing collapsing bridges and the like—death traps that no modern society would allow to stand. But, he adds, the blow of death was mitigated, first, by the realization that the “most important part of life . . . was the afterlife,” and second, by the comfort of knowing that the deceased had faithfully discharged his or her family obligation, if only for a little while.[8]

Regarding the first realization, Imhof argues that moderns can barely grasp the promise of the afterlife as it was once experienced by believing Christians. As proof of this claim he notes that the most common modern yardstick for evaluating quality of life is in fact a quantitative measure keyed exclusively to that aspect of our experience over which death has the final say. We compare life expectancies, but so what if moderns live on average twice as long as their medieval ancestors?[9] From a medieval perspective, this fact entirely misses the point of human experience since it exchanges a death-fated existence for the immortal glory of the afterlife. Granted, we can at best only glimpse the afterlife from our present mortal circumstance, but unless mortality is framed by a larger story from which it borrows meaning, by its own admission it ultimately goes nowhere. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, which is why people today struggle to postpone death by any means possible. Samuel Morris Brown insists that “the modern West has lost its ability to confront death,” and attributes this loss in America to the waning of a “remarkably robust death culture with roots stretching from medieval Christianity through early modern England into the colonial churches and antebellum evangelicalism.”[10] Far from being the untimely termination of one’s project, death was once regarded as natural and necessary, and it was bravely embraced as passage into the next world.

In an essay entitled “The Pornography of Death,” Geoffrey Gorer insists that around the turn of the twentieth century people began to regard death as unnatural and indecent.[11] He writes that before that shift, “children were encouraged to think about death, their own deaths and the edifying or cautionary death-beds of others. . . . In the 20^th century, however, there seems to have been an unremarked shift in prudery; whereas copulation has become more and more ‘mentionable,’ particularly in Anglo-Saxon societies, death has become more and more ‘unmentionable’ as a natural process.” We now find aging, physical decline, and death “disgusting,” a hugely inconvenient imposition on our quest to remain young and healthy.[12] Gorer links this modern abhorrence of death to loss of belief in resurrection and afterlife. He states that “without some such belief natural death and physical decomposition become too horrible to contemplate or to discuss.”[13]

But moderns struggle not only against death’s indecency; they also struggle for secular immortality by avoiding what David Loy calls “the living death of being unknown.”[14] Unsure of the next world, Westerners have increasingly sought to make their mark in this one. “No wonder the eighteenth century was the first great age of biography and autobiography,” writes Leo Braudy (in his aptly titled book, The Frenzy of Renown) while remarking that in the early modern period, “where talk of the afterlife was becoming less and less important to theology, let alone the ordinary believer, the hope of fame on earth was part of the expectation that one might be fulfilled, that is, recognized in one’s lifetime.” And not just recognized in one’s lifetime, but also extolled by future generations, which adulation “redeem[s] the individual and his work from the envy of the present,” much as Christ’s redemption was once thought to turn the tables on the malefactors of the prevailing world order.[15] What is more, for those unable to achieve fame, there was, in the spirit of democracy, the budding option of fandom whereby the unrecognized many could attach themselves to the celebrated few.[16] Thus, though everyone would eventually die, no one, it was felt, would be absolutely forgotten or left behind.

Death and Transformative Faith

Modern secular culture still holds forth the prospect of immortality, but a very different kind of immortality than that described in Christian scripture. Is our highest priority to leave a mark in this world, hoping that it will not be effaced, or do we reach for something better after death, trusting in the scriptural proposition that “this life is the time for men [and women] to prepare to meet God” (Alma 34:32)?

Those who have traveled around Europe will recall the cathedral and church spires that announce from a distance the existence of towns and small cities. This is a throwback to the “Age of Faith” when cathedrals were the tallest, most massive buildings throughout Europe and the tallest structures in the world.[17] Now in large European cities, they no longer dominate the skyline or the everyday priorities of the community. They attract visitors by token of their intriguing otherworldliness, relics of an age gone by.

As Latter-day Saint temples proliferate throughout the world, we sometimes see real-time reenactments of the Age of Faith. My wife and I live just a few miles from the Brigham City Utah Temple. It is the tallest building in the city, and one obviously built with heaven in mind. When we lived in Ogden, not far from the Ogden Utah Temple, we noticed a bearded man wearing a turban and white flowing robes who regularly bowed and prayed toward the temple. He was a Sikh from the Punjab region of India, as I learned one evening in conversation with him, who practiced his religion happily and graciously, and he instinctively recognized the Ogden Temple as a house of God. It was his temple too.

Temples, we believe, are places where heaven touches earth. Among Latter-day Saints, Hugh Nibley has written expansively about the temple, insisting that it is a “scale model of the universe.”[18] This is a striking and monumental claim, given that modern cosmology depicts the universe as cold and uncaring. As early as the seventeenth century Pascal foresaw what lay on the horizon as science began to dismantle the spiritually hierarchical, heaven-bound universe that so transfixed earlier generations and that Dante movingly described in his Divine Comedy. Sensing he had lost his place both physically and spiritually in a vastly expanded cosmos, a cosmos indifferent to his existence, Pascal stated that he felt “frightened” by “the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not.”[19]

What does it mean then to say that Latter-day Saint temples are scale models of the universe? It means Pascal’s fright was misplaced. True, it is hard now to look up at the night sky and not see what he feared—a spiritually blank cosmos. As we follow Captain Kirk and Han Solo while they explore new galaxies and fight against evil, we never get the sense that they are being lifted heavenward. Their universe, which is the universe of modern popular imagination, is modeled on the assumption that no place in the universe is intrinsically better—intrinsically more heavenly—than any other place, and up and down are merely relative terms keyed to individual observers. But this model of the universe is of recent vintage, and the temple harks back to an older, very different model.

In the temple and the scriptures, we learn that the universe is on our side when it comes to the question of life after death. It is not spiritually blank or flat but three dimensional in the sense of holding forth intrinsically higher, better possibilities. Because up is utterly different from down, we are cleansed and fitted for heaven as we travel upward through the cosmos. This we do symbolically as we progress through temple ordinances, but the actual experience might approximate Dante’s. When he was astonished that he was drawn upward through the heavenly spheres, Beatrice, his guide, explained to him that this motion stems from his being caught up in the universe’s elemental inclination to draw near unto God.[20] From this experience Dante learned that God’s love “moves the sun and the other stars.”[21]

C. S. Lewis, inspired by medieval cosmology, had something similar in mind when he wrote the Narnia series and other works of fiction. Space is not flat sameness that senselessly stretches on forever; rather it teems with life that befits God’s infinite creativity. To follow Elwin Ransom as he is transported to Mars in Out of the Silent Planet:

A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of “Space” [and thought of] the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. . . . Now the very name “Space” seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it “dead”; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren; he saw now that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the Earth with so many eyes. . . . No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens.[22]

In brief, we live in a life-friendly, salvation-friendly cosmos—this is the import of Hugh Nibley’s claim that the temple is a “scale model of the universe.” But it takes faith to see it this way. We must bathe nature in a different interpretive light, one consistent with gospel understanding.[23]

No doubt with temple promises in mind, Hugh B. Brown, former member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles and First Counselor to President David O. McKay, approached death with an open, inquisitive mind. “Never once did he speak fearfully or regretfully or disparagingly about death,” wrote his grandson Edwin B. Firmage while describing his last years on earth. “He loved life and enjoyed it enormously, to the full. But he also anticipated death with what I can only describe as a very positive zest. He was not preoccupied by death, but he was enormously curious. . . . He had absolutely no doubt about our continuing life.”[24]

In his younger years, Hugh B. Brown made a choice. He realized that faith in God and the fundamental goodness of others make a transformative difference in one’s life. Given life’s essential uncertainty, we do ourselves (and others) a huge favor by trusting in God or, if our faith is weak, in the mere possibility of God, as the younger Alma recommended (see Alma 32:27). In a letter to a friend who was questioning his commitment to the Church, Hugh wrote that he himself had passed through periods of darkness when he was “tempted to ‘chuck it all,’ to wrap myself in the comfortless blanket of doubt and self-commiseration and just quit the field.” But then he added that along with the valleys of despair came mountaintop peaks, and “that each peak which I have climbed has seemed higher and more inspiring than the last, due at least in part, I think, to the dark background of the valley through which I came. Sharp contrasts are sometimes most revealing.”[25]

While young, Hugh embraced God’s invitation and thereafter, despite some setbacks, learned that exercising faith in God “pays dividends of joy as we go along.”[26] He further likened death to birth, imagining an unborn child protesting that she cannot leave her mother’s womb. Her tiny lungs could never breathe on their own, she says, and without an umbilical cord, how could she ever take in nourishment? We approach death with similar fears, unable to see how our mortal selves, so well adapted to this world, could ever survive passage into any other world. But having survived once, we can survive again.

There is, of course, always an alternative backstory that tests our faith and challenges our hope of life after death. For Elwin Ransom it was “the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds,” implying that life is an aberration about to be snuffed out by cosmic darkness. The alternative backstory to mortal birth—now the “official” storyline in many circles—is just a variation on the darkness motif. Somehow we got here through a series of chance events, all of which were perfectly meaningless and the string of which was so astronomically improbable that it is madness to hope for another birth experience after death. We won the cosmic lottery once; how could it ever happen again?

As anyone can see, however, this story requires great faith. It asks us to believe that sight, intelligence, and human warmth arose from blind chance. That such an incredible story now prevails among intelligent people is testimony to our enduring capacity to create narratives in the face of uncertainty. To spin facts that are not facts at all. Where there is a graveyard, even just an imaginary one, we must whistle as we hurry past it in the dark. Further, as noted earlier, this bleak narrative comports with some people’s inclination to jump into cold ponds and rivers in the middle of the winter.[27] They like icy waters, at least for a minute or two.

This is not to say, of course, that those who hope for life after death do not also exercise faith. But for me a warm, caring universe is more appealing than a cold, impersonal one. I like to take hot showers in the middle of the winter, and since the warm, light-filled universe is no less a leap of faith than the cold, dark one, I choose to leap toward warmth and light. If I am deemed foolish by others, fine. Because everyone walks by faith in some unproven narrative, we are all fools of one kind or another. Paul the apostle felt blessed to identify himself and other Christians as “fools for Christ’s sake” (1 Corinthians 4:10), noting that their foolishness and weakness made them wise and strong in Christ.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, is said to have admired Latter-day Saints for their faith.[28] He likened them to people wearing big clown shoes; their shoes were so big that they kept people from falling through spaces between boards as they walked across bridges. His point, or at least the point I drew from his remark, was that practices inspired by faith in God’s loving-kindness, though they may appear clownish to some, protect faithful Latter-day Saints against mishap and discouragement as they cross the perilous bridge of life. It keeps them progressing on the bridge when otherwise they would likely fall through the cracks.

To similar effect Hugh B. Brown testified that faith in God “pays dividends of joy as we go along.”[29] Plant the seed of faith in God, the younger Alma taught, and wait to see if it sprouts joy, the most precious of all human experiences.[30] Other seeds may produce fame, monetary wealth, professional success, heartache, ennui, or nothing at all. But joy is the fruit that Alma and Hugh B. Brown explicitly link to faith in God, and as Alma asks rhetorically, “Is not this real?” (Alma 32:35). It is real, though only to those who experience the joyful love of God. Paul wrote, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9). Centuries later Bernard of Clairvaux similarly wrote, “The love of Jesus, what it is, / None but his loved ones know.”[31] And William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, noted: “In the glowing hour of excitement, all incomprehensibilities are solved, and what was so enigmatical from without becomes transparently obvious. Each emotion obeys a logic of its own, and makes deductions which no other logic can draw. Piety and charity [and joy, I would add] live in a different universe from worldly lusts and fears, and form a different center of energy altogether.”[32]

Faith is the fulcrum upon which reality tips this way or that. What kind of narrative do we want to live within? To paraphrase James, what kind of logical universe? Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Protestant pastor, believed like Paul that Christ takes the sting out of death. Pushing back against the self-centeredness that he saw among twentieth-century Christians—their overriding concern with their salvation—he taught that Christian discipleship demands self-forgetful living and dying for others, after the manner of Christ. Christ and his commandments are not impossible ideals from which we are exempted by reason of our fallen humanity, and salvation is not just a matter of grace that makes up the wide difference between a comfortable Christian life and Christ’s sacrificial sufferings for all creation. Grace, as Bonhoeffer believed, does rescue us, but not before we meekly follow Christ into the abyss, if need be.

This devotion Bonhoeffer exemplified as he joined others in the anti-Nazi underground during World War II, working to rescue Jews and topple the Nazi regime. After the Gestapo became aware of the full extent of his underground activities (including a plot to assassinate Hitler), he was taken to Flossenbürg concentration camp, and along with several of his co-conspirators, was hanged. He was thirty-nine years old, and he and his friends died less than a month before the war ended in Europe. The camp medical doctor, not knowing at the time the person he was observing, described Bonhoeffer’s last moments.

Through the half-open door in one room of the huts I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer, before taking off his prison garb, kneeling on the floor, praying fervently to his God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the steps of the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.[33]

Years earlier Bonhoeffer had stated that the good news of Christ’s resurrection turns believers into “homesick” pilgrims who joyfully await their release from mortal tribulation. He added, “Death is not bitter if we have not become bitter ourselves. Death is grace, the greatest gift of grace that God gives to people who believe in him. . . . It beckons to us with heavenly power, if only we realize that it is the gateway to our homeland.”[34]

Bohhoeffer’s legacy lives on in his writings, some lines of which have been put to music. Particularly beautiful, in my mind, is “Von Guten Mächten Wunderbar Geborgen” (“By Gentle Powers Lovingly Surrounded”), Siegfried Fietz’s adaptation of a poem Bonhoeffer wrote in 1944 while in prison.[35] The second stanza, which serves as the chorus in Fietz’s hymn, goes as follows:

By gentle powers lovingly surrounded,
With patience we’ll endure, let come what may.
God is with us at night and in the morning,
And certainly on every future day.

And then, this verse, intimating sore trials that only faith in God can transcend and transform:

And though you offer us the cup so heavy,
So painful, it’s the most that we can stand,
Not faltering, with thanks we will accept it,
And take it as a gift from your good hand.

A similar leap from imminent death to joy and gratitude, faith in God being the springboard, is found in “Come, Come, Ye Saints”: “And should we die before our journey’s through, happy day! All is well! We then are free from toil and sorrow, too; with the just, we shall dwell!”[36]

“All is well!” Amy K. Wright stated that when she was diagnosed with cancer, her thoughts turned to her children: “In my mind I asked Heavenly Father, ‘Am I going to die?’ The Holy Ghost whispered, ‘Everything is going to be OK.’ Then I asked, ‘Am I going to live?’ Again, the answer came: ‘Everything is going to be OK.’” At first confused, she came to realize that “because of Jesus Christ, everything can be OK.”[37]

The magnificence of Christ’s redemptive love moved Paul to write, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain [reward]” (Philippians 1:21). Paul went on to explain that he was “in a strait betwixt” death and continued mortality for the sake of others, though speaking only for himself, he wished to die, “having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ, which is far better” (Philippians 1:23). Elsewhere he wrote that “our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (2 Corinthians 4:17). Heaven can turn our present difficulty, no matter how heavy it may now seem, into a “light affliction.” And more, as I propose in the next chapter.

Notes

[1] Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1902), 454.

[2] Dan Burton and David Grandy, Magic, Mystery, and Science: The Occult in Western Civilization (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), 183–207.

[3] Arthur E. Imhof, Lost Worlds: How Our European Ancestors Coped with Everyday Life and Why Life Is So Hard Today, trans. Thomas Robisheaux (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia), 5.

[4] Imhof, Lost Worlds, 8.

[5] Imhof, Lost Worlds, 9–10.

[6] Imhof, Lost Worlds, 118.

[7] Imhof, Lost Worlds, 5.

[8] Imhof, Lost Worlds, 6.

[9] Imhof, Lost Worlds, 2. Imhof notes on page 3 that statistical life expectancy accurately represents life experience only when “people live roughly the same length of time, and such has been the case for only a few generations.” In the premodern era, however, “one person died in infancy, another in old age, and yet another sometime in between. One mother died while giving to her first child, but another died long after she had buried every single one of her children. What does a statistical ‘average age’ of thirty possibly about tell us this period? It actually confuses us about the realities of the time more than it explains them.”

[10] Samuel Morris Brown, In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3.

[11] Geoffrey Gorer, “The Pornography of Death,” appendix 4 of Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britain (London: Cresset Press, 1965), 169–75.

[12] Gorer, “The Pornography of Death,” 171–72; original emphasis.

[13] Gorer, “The Pornography of Death,” 173.

[14] David R. Loy, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2018), 137.

[15] Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 378–79.

[16] Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, 380.

[17] For nearly four millennia the Great Pyramid of Giza was the tallest structure in the world at 481 feet. It was superseded by two European cathedrals in the early fourteenth century, and from then until the late nineteenth century, cathedrals stood out as the world’s tallest buildings. “History of the World’s Tallest Buildings,” https://wikipedia.org/.

[18] Hugh Nibley, Temple and Cosmos: Beyond This Ignorant Present, vol. 12 of The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, ed. Don E. Norton (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1992), 15.

[19] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Pensées 205–206, p. 52. Alexandre Koyré writes that this and similar statements do “not express Pascal’s own feeling—as is generally assumed by Pascal’s historians—but that of the atheist ‘libertin.’” From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957), 283. As a devout Christian, Pascal himself was probably more alarmed at the changing cosmology, and the skepticism it heralded, than frightened. His sympathies lay with the older cosmological model.

[20] Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Carlyle-Wicksteed (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 405–6.

[21] Dante, Divine Comedy, 606.

[22] C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 32.

[23] This may seem hard to do so, given a prevailing worldview that bathes nature in a lifeless, indifferent light. But we can make it a practice to push the envelope. David D. Allred, professor of physics and astronomy at Brigham Young University, has written that, cosmically speaking, “we live in a dangerous neighborhood, but we have powerful, helpful neighbors.” Jupiter in particular “soaks up most comets or hurls them into the sun or out of the solar system before they can reach the earth.” It also, owing to its massive size, consequent gravitational force, and nearly circular orbit, stabilizes the earth’s orbit and thereby, perhaps, made the earth suitable for life. Given this, Allred sees Jupiter as a Kolob-like body that acts as a protector and governor in our solar system. This, of course, is an imaginative leap, but imagination plays into all human thought, science included. It is just a question of which types of imaginative leaps are permitted in which settings. Going a bit further, I note that Jupiter’s giant red spot has been seen as a wound and likened to the sacrificial blood of Christ. As Allred points out, Jupiter has taken some hard hits on our behalf. Not unlike Christ. For the relevance of this kind of thinking, see Moses 6:63. For Jupiter’s red spot, see Michael Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), 56. For Jupiter’s Kolob-like aspect, see David D. Allred, “Bounds and Conditions: A Kolob in Our Solar System?” Faculty Publications, Brigham Young University, 269, http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/2671.

[24] Edwin B. Firmage, “Hugh B. Brown in His Final Years,” Sunstone, November 1987, 10.

[25] Steven Densley Jr., “Never-Before-Seen Letter on Doubt by Hugh B. Brown,” Third Hour (blog). The letter is dated November 8, 1946, and was written while Hugh B. Brown was a professor at Brigham Young University. Steven Densley states that he received a copy of the letter from his grandmother, who was Hugh’s secretary at the time and who typed the letter. Elder Brown permitted her to make and keep a copy, provided the name of the recipient were removed from her copy. A scan of her copy may be found at the URL address that follows, along with additional information: https://thirdhour.org/blog/top-articles/never-seen-letter-doubt-hugh-b-brown/.

[26] Densley, “Never-Before-Seen Letter.”

[27] Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 137.

[28] I heard of Wittgenstein’s admiration of Latter-day Saints many years ago while I was in graduate school. The detail about big clown shoes particularly stuck in my memory. The admiration is documented online, though the big shoes are not described as clown shoes. The omission, though, does not change the point of the analogy, and I believe Wittgenstein would agree that from the perspective of a disbeliever, faith in God includes an element of foolishness or clownishness. Christian Swenson, “Why Wittgenstein Admired Mormons,” A Mystic in the Church of Jesus Christ (blog), http://www.journalsofamormonmystic.com/.

[29] Densley, “Never-Before-Seen Letter.”

[30] Alma describes the fruit of faith just as Lehi described the fruit of the tree of life. Not only is it “delicious” (Alma 32:28), but it is also “most precious . . . [and] sweet above all that is sweet, and . . . white above all that is white . . . and pure above all that is pure” (v. 42). In brief, it is what is “most joyous” to our souls (1 Nephi 11:23).

[31] Bernard of Clairvaux, “Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee,” trans. Edward Caswall, https://hymnary.org/.

[32] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004), 286.

[33] Quoted by Eric Metaxas, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, rev. ed. (Nashville, TN: Nelson Books, 2020), 531.

[34] Metaxas, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 531.

[35] Fietz sings the hymn to his own piano accompaniment at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aN7dGz6NH5M.

[36] “Come, Come, Ye Saints,” Hymns, no. 30.

[37] Amy A. Wright, “Abide the Day in Christ,” Liahona, November 2023.