Formed by death: A constructive ethical study of death, fear of death, and remembrance of death in Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov and Thomas Hobbes

The present day context of ethics demands robust theological-political responses to the challenges of human death and terror. To build one such response, this dissertation examines the writings of two thinkers, Fr. Sophrony Sakharov (1896--1993), a Russian-born Orthodox Christian theologian, and Thomas Hobbes (1588--1679), the well-known British political philosopher. The study makes methodological, interpretive, and constructive contributions. Methodologically, the novel concept of "thanatomorphicity," of being "formed by death," is proposed and developed together with a typology of death, fear of death, and remembrance of death. Interpretively, it advances current scholarship on both Fr. Sophrony and Hobbes by examining each author's claims regarding: (1) the place of "death" in the human predicament, (2) the ways in which different types of the "fear of death" do and should inform human agency at various stages of the ethical life, and (3) the function of practices of "remembrance of death" in transforming personal and communal life and in bringing about partial or full resolutions to the human predicament. On the constructive level, the study effects a dialectical engagement between the two selected authors that builds toward an analysis of September 11, 2001 and culminates in a proposed response to the following question: How should death form us as persons and communities? Two extremes are proscribed. Hobbes's effort to secularize or sublimate religious convictions to strictly political ends by absolutizing the fear of physical death and eliminating the fear of eternal death is rejected not only on religious grounds but also because it undermines a vital basis for setting limits on states. At the other pole, religiously-based dismissals of secular concerns as well as religious endorsements of terrorism and violence are critiqued by arguing for the crucial place of the fear of the death of the other. The study thus develops a normative stance from which to engage pressing contemporary concerns and offers fresh resources, drawn especially from the Eastern Christian tradition, for thinking at the crossroads of politics and religion.