Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead

Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 208 p.

Tradition, Chesterton remarked, is the “democracy of the dead.” For Robert Pogue Harrison, Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature at Stanford University, this form of democracy at least is inescapable. In The Dominion of the Dead, Harrison meditates on how “our basic human institutions – religion, matrimony, burial, if one goes along with Giambattista Vico, but also law, language, literature” gifts from “those who came before.” We bury the dead, giving them a future, so that “they may give us a past.” And in giving us a past, the dead “help us go forward.” We bury the dead so that natural death is turned to culture, and to “humanize the ground” beneath our cultural worlds. Near the center of the book, he sets Walter Pater’s argument that Roman Christianity fulfilled the hopes of pagan epicureanism against Nietzsche’s complaint that Christianity rests on a denial of life. Pater comes out the better for the debate. Harrison meditates on the fundamental cultural challenge posed by the empty tomb: “Where the dead are simply dead, the living are in some sense already dead as well. Conversely, where the afterlife of the dead receives new life, the earth as a whole receives a new blessing.” More a meditation than an argument, this is a subtle and enchanting book, one to be savored.