Nearly every influential philosophy or religion speculates on death, since life’s meaning often hinges on one’s perception of the afterlife. Arguably the four most influential philosophies spanning the East and West—Hinduism, Buddhism, Platonism, and Christianity—reveal that death is valuable as a means to grasp at a higher reality, to recognize that the real world is not this transient, material world of constant flux and decay. Facing imminent death awakens us to the weighty things of true worth. J. J. Abrams explores this theme in Armageddon. People live ordinary, mundane (we could almost say illusionary) lives until the threat of world extinction is discovered. Ordinary people are forced to react to a “global killer” and although there is no emphasis on the next life per se, we do see that all the characters have ethical responses. Such an ethical response is vital to Hinduism, Buddhism, Platonism, and Christianity, for metaphysics is part and parcel with ethical response. In this chapter I will argue that the threat of global disaster is valuable as a means to enlightenment, and I will develop this argument by examining the perspectives of the four aforementioned philosophies on these matters, using examples from Armageddon to support this thesis.
The Hindu worldview perceives life as inextricably intertwined with suffering: for every existent pleasure, there is a corresponding pain.1 There is no resolution to this dynamic since the soul of every individual, shaped by karma, or the ethical choices made in life, is reincarnated to a higher or lower life form within the giant cycle of life and death, samsāra.2 In Armageddon, the working-class men who work on the oil platforms with Harry Stampers (Bruce Willis) are clearly not those who’ve reincarnated on the peak cycle of samsāra. They are the nonconformists, the rebels, outcasts, and criminals; their list of compensatory requests for their volunteer work reveals something about their simple and worldly nature: fifty-six parking tickets taken care of, two women friends made American citizens (no questions asked), eight-track tapes brought back, an Emperor’s Package at Caesar’s Palace, the disclosure of who killed Kennedy, a summer in the Lincoln bedroom at the White House, and never to pay taxes again. Ever. And yet their journey will change their fate forever. A new cycle of life is to unfold, a new entry into samsāra.
This samsāric kind of fate wasn’t acceptable for the Hindus, who define happiness as the absence of suffering. Hindus believe that pain—which permanently resides in the samsāric cycle—must be obliterated in the end, much like the literal Texas-sized meteor headed for Earth in Armageddon. The destruction of the latter will prevent annihilation of Earth and its inhabitants. For the Hindus, believing that suffering arises out of ignorance, in particular, ignorance of reality, one must escape from the deception that one has an essential self or soul. Such intentional or unintentional ignorance fatefully ensnares the individual in perpetual reincarnation and therefore in the clutches of pain. Much like the ignorant person dwelling in the samsāric circle, Stampers’s men are initially unable to see the consequences of their actions or even grasp at the magnitude of the task at hand—what it means for them to volunteer to save the world! Stampers chooses to help because he trusts no one else to do it, and the remainder of them volunteer out of a filial loyalty to Stampers. Oscar Choi (Owen Wilson) is the exception; his bright-eyed enthusiasm indicates that he sees this act on the mythic level—it’s “deep blue hero stuff.”
The enlightened individual knows reality, understanding the eternal truth, which “does not see death, nor illness, nor pain; he sees everything as the Self, and obtains all.”3 Stampers’s final act of self-sacrifice (detonating the nuke manually) shows that he has reached this higher level of understanding, for he gains himself by sacrificing himself; when he says to his daughter, “We win, Gracie!” he means just that: we—the unity of all reality—is revealed by the elimination of the narrow individualistic ego. Stampers obtains all by sacrificing all. Like the enlightened individual who, through meditation and spiritual exercise, comes to see that at his core he isn’t an individual self at all but rather is identical to Ātman—the ultimate self, or totality of all souls—which is another word for Brahman, or ultimate reality, Stamper recognizes a greater reality: death in his case is victory, not defeat.
Furthermore, the unenlightened individual is trapped in the illusion of samsāra. But the truly happy individual is the one who achieves moksha, or freedom from all illusions and delusions—when he realizes that there is no self, there is only Self; there is no physical world or cycle of death and rebirth, there is only reality.4 Both the body and self/ego are illusionary and belief in these is the cause of all the woes of the world: “Fools follow the desires of the flesh and fall into the snare of all-encompassing death; but the wise, knowing the Self as eternal, seek not the things that pass away.”5
If a Hindu sees death as illusionary in its ultimate sense, then there is no fear of dying. The Hindu’s only concern is the realization of the Self. Consequently, the Hindu could take the prospect of death—for example, the prospect of meteorites destroying the ego and all that it holds on to—as a very good thing. It could be, as with Christianity, a chance to wake up to the larger concern. Moreover, acts of heroism, though again not valuable for their own sake, are still valuable as a means to eliminate the ego by focusing on others, which Stampers and his men are able to do for the chance at saving Earth.
Siddhārtha Gautama, who founded Buddhism, was an Indian prince who renounced wealth and family to become an ascetic once he was given the Four Signs, which led him to see the reality of old age, sickness, death, and most importantly, the possibility of escaping from these inevitable forms of suffering.6 Recognizing that suffering threatened to diminish all earthly pleasures, the Buddha left everything behind in search of the means to escape from suffering. And perhaps this is the case with some of the men who volunteer with Stampers. Chick (Will Patton) seems to hold deep remorse about his failed relationship with the mother of his child and uses life away from society as a coping mechanism, and Rockhound (Steve Buscemi) is an academic genius who chooses the life of an oil driller because “the money’s good, the scenery changes and they let [him] use explosives.” Life on an oil platform is their form of escape from a society that they have difficulty fitting into.
Siddhārtha studied and trained with many Indian philosophers and yogis, seeking the means to eliminate suffering permanently; however, the best they could do was temporarily suspend suffering, not obliterate it altogether. Still in search of an end to suffering, Siddhārtha accepted the Hindu doctrines of karma (“fruits of action”), samsāra (“the wheel of rebirth”), and most significantly, the idea that escape from samsāra and suffering is the highest good. When Siddhārtha ultimately achieved enlightenment and became the Buddha, he spoke of his own enlightenment as simply the inverse of Hindu enlightenment; while the Hindus spoke of enlightenment as the realization and experience of the self as Ātman, which is Brahman, or the culmination of all substantial things, the Buddha spoke of enlightenment as the realization of anātman, or “no-self”—the denial of any concrete reality—and the subsequent experience of the extinguishing of self, or nirvana, through such knowledge.
It’s clear that the Buddha, like the Hindus, defined happiness as the absence of suffering since he denied substantial reality, including a substantial self and even a substantial law of karma; all of existence was unavoidably linked to pain and suffering. Eliminating all desires ultimately leads to an escape from samsāra and into nothingness.
In Buddhism death and dying are, as with Hinduism, illusionary. And, also like Hinduism, Buddhism rejects the concept of a substantial self or ego. However, while Hinduism says that the self is actually Self, or Ātman, Buddhism denies this. All is illusionary. But this doesn’t mean that the threat of death has no value. If we restrict our talk to reincarnation within samsāra, then it’s clear that moral actions will give us good karma, which, when accumulated, will eventually help us get to the point where we really understand the nature of existence and can thus achieve enlightenment. Moral actions might not be good in and of themselves, but they are certainly valuable means of self-eliminating, thus freeing us from a powerful barrier to our own happiness.
A great illustration is from the story of two Buddhist monks who saw a beautiful woman unable to cross a river. The older monk, without hesitation, picked up the woman and carried her across and then the two monks continued on their way. A short while later the younger monk accused the older monk of focusing on worldly concerns and pleasures, to which the older monk replied, “I have left her behind, but you haven’t.” In Armageddon, when Harry Stamper sacrifices himself for his future son-in-law, he performs an action that is not egocentric—he leaves himself behind for another—and so moves one step closer, in the next life, to the realization that there is no ego. Eventually, if he keeps on performing these types of actions in future lives, he may get to the point where he finally realizes that all things are illusionary and that taking a shotgun to A. J. for romancing his daughter, Grace (Liv Tyler), is quite unnecessary and inappropriate in the grand scheme of things.
Plato’s Republic attempts to define morality. In the first book, the sophist Thrasymachus argues that morality is simply a tool by which (immoral) rulers manipulate those below them, a means to an end and not something good in and of itself.7 In the second book, this belief that morality is a social construct is refined by Socrates’s friend, Glaucon. Glaucon asks, “Is morality good in all circumstances or the appearance of morality in all circumstances?”8 Glaucon agrees with the latter, maintaining that if people can act immorally without experiencing any negative effects, such as punishment or social instability, everyone would do so since immorality is more beneficial than morality. That is, the only reason people act morally is because they are afraid of the consequences of not doing so—not because they actually think morality is good in and of itself. To make his point, Glaucon tells the story of Gyges and his magical ring:
An ancestor of Gyges of Lydia, a shepherd by all accounts, was in the service of the Lydian ruler of the time, when a heavy rainstorm occurred and an earthquake cracked open the land to a certain extent, and a chasm appeared in the region where he was pasturing his flocks. He was fascinated by the sight, and went down into the chasm and saw there, among other artifacts, a bronze horse, which was hollow and had windows set in it; he stooped and looked in through the windows and saw a corpse inside, which seemed to be that of a giant. The corpse was naked, but had a golden ring on one finger; he took the ring off the finger and left. Now, the shepherds used to meet once a month to keep the king informed about his flocks, and our protagonist came to the meeting wearing the ring. He was sitting down among the others, and happened to twist the ring’s bezel in the direction of his body, towards the inner part of his hand. When he did this, he became invisible to his neighbors, and to his astonishment they talked about him as if he’d left. While he was fiddling about with the ring again, he turned the bezel outwards and became visible. He thought about this and experimented to see if it was the ring which had this power; in this way he eventually found that turning the bezel inwards made him invisible and turning it outwards made him visible. As soon as he realized this, he arranged to be made one of the delegates to the king; once he was inside the palace, he seduced the king’s wife and with her help assaulted and killed the king, and so took possession of the throne.9
After telling this tale, Glaucon states, “Now suppose there were two such rings—one worn by our moral person, the other by the immoral person. There is no one, on this view, who has enough willpower to maintain his morality and find the strength of purpose to keep his hands off what doesn’t belong to him.”10
Socrates, however, disagrees with this belief that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Throughout the remainder of the book, and in his other works as well, he attempts to show that morality is something to be valued for its own sake. He asserts that power will not corrupt the virtuous man, magic rings or not. We see this exemplified in Armageddon—none of the men show signs of megalomania (in fact, they seem like eager children doting on a parent’s response or waiting on gifts from Santa, rather than men who feel entitled to all that they’ve requested); none of their requests to the government seems unreasonable, and Stampers himself doesn’t seem to have particular requests for his service to the world.
Socrates defends his argument of the incorruptible man with a myth-like story: The eternal world is the abode of all perfections—the source of beauty, rationality, knowledge, moral goodness, happiness, and countless other “forms.” In our previous lives (a notion shared with Hinduism and Buddhism) we were disembodied rational souls who enjoyed perfect happiness insofar as we could contemplate and enjoy the vision of the world of forms. However, one day our souls, exercising imperfect control over our emotional faculties, looked away from the world of forms and fell far from it, deep into the physical world, until our souls were cloaked in matter, which caused in us a kind of trauma resulting in an almost complete loss of the memory our original home and happiness.11 Fortunately, innate within our souls is some knowledge of and longing for our true home and happiness. However, though we have some knowledge of our true home, complete knowledge of it and the subsequent knowledge of the way to return there have been obscured through the devastating effect of following our base desires and emotions rather than our rational desires informed by our knowledge of true happiness. Consequently, the goal of this life is to pursue knowledge and wisdom—to become lovers of wisdom, philosophers—which in turn will give us a better idea about true happiness and how we can recover it.12
Because true happiness is linked to perfect rationality, which is connected with goodness, the happy person is he who acts wisely and thus morally. The idea is that such a person first knows what is rational and good and then uses his desires to effectively apply these principles.13 Desires, in other words, are not bad in and of themselves but are bad only insofar as they dominate the moral dictates derived from reason. Furthermore, because our happiness resides in rational contemplation of the world of forms, including the form of the good, morality must be good in and of itself: simply to contemplate and enjoy goodness (and the rest of the forms) constitutes our very happiness.
So even if the moral person had the power of the ring of Gyges, he wouldn’t use it for evil since his happiness resides in valuing morality for its own sake. And here we can see how death and dying or the threat of dying fits in: no one actually ever dies. Yes, the body will fade, but the soul, being immortal, lives on. And moreover, since moral action helps the soul to recover its true happiness, when the body is threatened with death, moral considerations always remain. Plato would laud Stampers, who selflessly gives his life for A. J. Frost (Ben Affleck) as well as for all humanity since by performing this act of general benevolence his soul keeps its “eye” on the true and beautiful.
The impending global annihilation in Armageddon is a direct reference to the biblical end times: “basically,” as Dan Truman (Billy Bob Thornton) states, “the worst parts of the Bible.” Derived from a Hebrew term meaning “Mountain of Megiddo” and mentioned once in the Greek New Testament, Armageddon is often ascribed as the place of the apocalyptic battle between good and evil.14 If the title Armageddon alone doesn’t conjure up images of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the opening narration by the man who played Moses should, as he closes his narration by referring to the ominous inevitability of earthly destruction: “It happened before. It’ll happen again. It’s just a question of when.”
Unlike Hinduism, Buddhism, and Platonism, Christianity perceives the afterlife as the true and eternal reality while also embracing the present reality as good in and of itself: God created the heavens and the earth and declared them “good.” Though humanity is fallen because of sin, this does not mean that God’s creation is utterly depraved; the story of humanity is still unfolding. Beauty and truth are intrinsic parts of existence: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”15 The future reality is far more concrete in its clarity and beauty; the present is but a shadow to the object of grandeur that is the future, the afterlife.
Whatever is good and true exists in the here and now but is fully unveiled in the hereafter. C. S. Lewis illustrates this in his novel The Magician’s Nephew: “ ‘Glory be!’ said the Cabby. ‘I’d ha’ been a better man all my life if I’d known there were things like this.’ ”16 You cannot deny the ever-present good in this present reality. The heroic acts of ordinary citizens who risk all for a small chance at saving humanity is but a microcosmic reflection of this good.
All eight of the selected men volunteer to save the world. Their sense of loyalty and trust toward Stampers runs deep—all accede because they see themselves as members of Stampers’s team. And whether out of loyalty or duty, these men reflect some of the good of mankind in their willingness to sacrifice their lives for the sake of saving humanity from annihilation. In this, at least, they are reflections of Christ.
From the East to the West, humanity is unified by a singular response to the inescapable clutches of death. Death or impending death awakens us to the meaningful things in life—obliteration becomes illumination. The transient and superficial things that we hold dear show themselves unadorned and trivial in the face of death. Things that come into focus are relationships, forgiveness, love, and all things that fall under the category of virtue—the things of the soul and not those of the illusionary or trivial realm. Hinduism, Buddhism, Platonism, and Christianity all emphasize the importance of recognizing true reality. This life is but a journey to a destination of a greater reality, an entry into an enduring world more awake than our own. Armageddon expounds some of the truths relayed by the aforementioned philosophies. It demonstrates the gravity of death and how ordinary individuals act in the face of impending earthly doom. In the face of death, Harry Stampers’s crew—who’ve often chosen unethical paths in the past—choose to act morally and ethically as they see beyond the illusionary world and attain a glimpse of the enduring one.
1. The Upanishads: Breath of the Eternal, trans. Swami Prabhavanada and Frederick Manchester (New York: Signet, 2002), 44. Good introductions to Hinduism and many of the world’s major religions include Huston Smith, The World’s Religions (New York: HarperOne, 2009); Warren Matthews, World Religions (Florence, KY: Cengage Learning, 2010).
2. Even the gods and goddesses, such as Shiva and Indra, can exist only within samsāra (albeit in one of its highest heavens) and as such still experience pleasure and pain.
3. Upanishads, 73 (italics in the original).
4. Ibid., 87.
5. Ibid., 20.
6. Ibid., 59.
7. Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 348d.
8. Ibid., 357a.
9. Ibid., 359d–360b.
10. Ibid., 360b.
11. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 249–50.
12. Plato, Symposium, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 204d.
13. Plato, Republic, 410e.
14. 2 Peter 3:12, NIV.
15. 1 Corinthians 13:12, KJV.
16. C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (New York: HarperCollins, 1955), 94.