Al Pacino says there’s nothing after death: here’s why he’s wrong

(LifeSiteNews) — Al Pacino recently told The New York Times that “there’s nothing there” after we die.

The 84-year-old actor, who starred in the film series The Godfather and in Scarface, has presumed to tell the world what happens after we die because of a near-death experience he had in 2020 whilst suffering from COVID-19.

Pacino described feeling “unusually not good” with a fever and dehydration, and says that while he was being hydrated by a nurse, “I was sitting there in my house, and I was gone – like that. [Snaps his fingers.]”

Emergency responders panicked, as he appeared to have no pulse (although Pacino suggested he may have had one which was “very, very low.”)

He then explains his experience:

I didn’t see the white light or anything like that. I… there’s nothing there. As Hamlet says it, ‘To be or not to be,’ you know? ‘The unknown country from whose bourn no traveller returns.’ And he says two words: ‘No more.’ Heh heh! It was no more.

And I don’t like that, that there’s no more. It’s gone – you’re gone.

Elsewhere in the same interview he gives a similar account:

They said my pulse was gone. It was so… so…

You’re here, you’re not. You’re here, you’re not. I thought: Wow, you don’t even have your memories? 

You have nothing! Strange porridge.^[1]

Near-death experiences are a popular genre topic, and some people really think that they can be treated as offering reliable insight into what awaits us after death. There’s something very ironic about Pacino’s story, as we shall see at the end.

But can we know whether our souls survive death or not?

Revelation and reason

Many have a kind of feeling, intuition, or opinion that the soul is immortal – that is, that they continue to exist after we die. In our day, this is probably how most people “know” this.

However, this is an unstable foundation for such an idea, and is vulnerable to the “refutations” of those who say, with Pacino, that there is “no more” after death.

There are two other ways in which we can know that our souls are immortal.

The first way is by seeing that God himself has told us this fact.

We know that he has told us this, because it is a fundamental truth of divine revelation, which we know in turn because the Catholic Church proposes it to us for belief. The Catholic Church has been stamped with marks which show that she is the divinely-instituted and divinely-protected means of proposing God’s revelation to mankind. Because of this, we can assent to God revealing the immortality of the soul on the basis of his authority, truth, and goodness.

We must hold that the soul is immortal as a part of taking care of it properly in this life and saving it in the next.

However, the immortality of the soul is not a “religious” truth, or one that we would not know if God hadn’t revealed it. On the contrary, it is naturally knowable through a process of observation, reflection, and reasoning about the world around us.

But this process is difficult, and few have the time, ability, or willingness to engage in it. It also hard to present this reasoning in terms that will be understood by such persons, or by children.

It is for this reason that God, in his goodness, included so many naturally knowable truths like this in the deposit of faith, given to the apostles. It is much simpler to point to the testimony, teaching, and authority of the Catholic Church – whose very life and existence validates her own divine claims, even in our day.

However, it is important to be able to give a basic explanation of how we know, through natural reason alone, that the human soul is immortal. This is the purpose of this article.

What is life?

We cannot consider life after death unless we first consider life and death in themselves.

There is a distinction between something which is living, and something which is not (whether it be dead, or simply non-living, like a stone).

We call a living body an “organism” because it is organized; it is a composite of different parts, organized and united into a single, harmonious whole, which is ordered towards its own good – e.g., its growth, reproduction, movement, etc.

Similarly, all living bodies have something which makes them be the particular thing that they are. For example, there is necessarily some sort of principle by which a particular body is a living dog, rather than a cat, or a stone, or dead body.

But when a living body becomes a dead body, something happens to it. The cells, enzymes, and so on which previously worked together as a whole, cease to do so.

This is precisely why we talk about the “decomposition” of a dead body. “A dead body” is no longer a single body or “substance” composed of parts; rather, it is an “accidental” collection of those parts, which are gradually separating themselves (de-composing) from each other.

Whatever was holding them together before, now stops doing so.

The ‘principle of life’

It is the absence of this principle which marks a living body from a dead body. In its own way, death shows that there must be some principle of life, which holds all these parts together as a living body, and which makes the body a single compound substance, with all its parts ordered to one end.

This is why “death” does not refer merely to the heart or brain stopping, and why we are only sure that the principle has life is in fact absence once this decomposition begins.^[2]

We can also call the principle of life the “substantial form,” because it is what makes a particular body be the substance that it is (e.g., a dog, or a man, or anything else). Once the substantial form of a dog is gone, we are not left with “a dead dog” or “a dog which is lacking life,” as if life were simply a quality of the body. “The body of the dog” has no existence apart from the form or soul: what is left is an collection of parts which formerly made up the body of a dog, and which will rapidly decompose.

This is why the principle of life and the substantial form are the same thing. This, and nothing mystical at all, is what we mean by “the soul.”

Some might misunderstand what is being said here, due to a lot of baggage the term “soul” might drag along with it (like Jacob Marley’s chains).

They might think that, in the absence of harder facts, we are imagining some sort of ghost which takes possession of a body and holds its parts together. Others might think that we are suggesting a supernatural explanation for an unknown physical cause.

None of this is true. We are only speaking about the natural order, and based ourselves solely on what is observable and what we can reasonably conclude from it.

What we are saying is very prosaic. It is that there necessarily is some principle by which a given living body is this kind of living being rather than another kind, or non-living.

Only once we have understood, in this prosaic way, that there must exist something which distinguishes the organic unity of a particular living being from the accidental unity of a dead body, only then can we discuss anything about what this something must be like.

The powers of the soul determines what sort of soul it is

It is sometimes said that “dogs don’t have souls.” This is imprecise. Every living body, of whatever kind, is made a living body by the very fact of the principle of life and substantial form we have discussed, namely its soul.

While living beings in our world can be distinguished and classified to a fine degree, they may also be grouped into three general classes:

• Plants have the power to nourish themselves (and to grow) and to reproduce.
• Animals have all those powers too, along with the powers of sense and, in many cases, self-directed movement (locomotion).
• Man has all of the above powers, along with the powers of abstract understanding and of corresponding volition (will).

Each class of living bodies has additional and higher operations which are lacking in the previous class.

This means that each three classes must have three distinct types of first principle. This is because “action follows being” (agere sequitur esse): a given thing acts according to what it is. If we see activity, we know that there is some kind of agent. This means that the proper activity of a living being tells us something about its essence, as well as what this given essence can and cannot do.

The activity of both animals and plants is wholly material, depending on physical matter (e.g., nutrition, growth, generation, sensation of particular material things). If plants or animals had any kind of non-organic or immaterial existence, they would have activities that demonstrated this.

Because plants and mere animals are both wholly material in their activity and functions, they provide us with no reason for thinking that their souls survive death.

But what about humans and the human soul?

The human soul is immaterial

Just as animals have powers and operations which are higher and essentially distinct from those of plants, so too do we have powers and operations which are higher and essentially distinct from all other animals as well as plants:

• We can grasp universals and immaterial concepts (like love, truth, justice, triangularity, mathematics, etc.) which we have abstracted from particular material things that exist.
• We can engage in the process of reasoning (drawing conclusions from premises).
• We can turn our intellectual powers back upon themselves, and think about thinking, know about knowing, and reason about reasoning.
• Finally, we can choose freely between options, based on our intellect and reasoning.

These operations do not in themselves depend on the human body. While the body provides the intellect and will with “data” from material things, they themselves deal with immaterial and non-organic objects, and their activity is not carried out by any organ – even the brain.^[3]

But because “action follows being,” and because a being acts according to what it is, we must conclude from the soul’s own way of existing and working, independent of the material and organic body, that it is itself something independent of the material and organic body. In other words, the human soul is immaterial and non-organic. This is what is meant when we say that the rational soul is “spiritual.”

In what sense is it immaterial? Even though the rational soul of man is supposed to be united to the body as its form, St. Thomas Aquinas and the philosophers say that it is itself a substance.^[4] This is not saying that the rational soul is some sort of ghostly “ectoplasm,” but that it subsists itself, without depending on matter.

But if the rational soul is an immaterial, spiritual substance, then there is no reason to say that it ceases to exist when the man, of which it is the principle, dies. The dissolution and destruction of the living body at death does not entail the destruction of an immaterial substance which is independent of it – even if this separation is against what should be the case (namely, the substantial union of soul and body).

In other words, the soul is “naturally immortal” and continues to exist, separate from the body of which it had been the principle, and to which it is still supposed to be united.

Given this natural immortality, the only alternative possibility to the soul continuing would be that something else annihilates it, once it is separate from the body.

But the only force that could be capable of destroying a spiritual substance would be God; and we have no reason to think that he annihilates spiritual beings, but this idea runs contrary to other ideas that know about God from natural reason.

Note that we are talking about God from the point of view of natural reason: we are still on the level of natural philosophy alone, rather than religion or revelation.

However, the idea that God annihilates separated souls also runs contrary, both to what God has actually revealed about himself, and about the state of the souls after death.

Conclusion: Returning to Al Pacino

To summarize, natural reason alone tells us that every single human being has (or, if they have already died, had) a soul, which is immortal because of its own immaterial nature, and so survives death.

It can be challenging to explain or to follow such arguments – which is precisely why God, in his goodness, has also revealed such truths to mankind.

What happens to the subsisting soul after death is outside our scope, but is by no means uncertain. Revelation tells us that the soul is immediately judged by Jesus Christ, and goes to its proper place; heaven (via purgatory, if necessary) or hell. It stays there until it is reunited with its body on the last day, with its reward or punishment thus intensified and continuing for eternity.

Compared to this, the idea that nothing awaits us or our souls after our death may appear comforting to many people, including perhaps Al Pacino. But it is false.

In many other cases, the idea that there is “no more” after death is simply wishful thinking and self-delusion, and perhaps fear of the difficulty of getting oneself right with God before death.

This article has been a basic answer to any wishful thinking or self-delusion, and its points are proved with more detail and rigor by the scholastic philosophers.

But with regards to fear of difficulty: Christ said, “My yoke is sweet and my burden is light.” (Mt. 11.30) It is the devil, the enemy of our immortal souls, that wants to overwhelm us with such fears.

On the contrary, all that is necessary to save our souls is to enter the Roman Catholic Church, and to worship God by faith, hope and charity – that is, by believing his revelation as proposed by the Church; hoping in his promises, mercy and power; and by loving him with all our heart and above all things.

Depending on the circumstances, a little water in baptism or a little diligence in preparing for a confession (which is never as hard as anyone fears it will be) will make all the difference for eternity. Those in situations like this should pray to God, who will not let their prayers go unheard. 

However, let’s be clear about this particular Pacino interview.

It is absurd to see a living man, on the basis of a supposed near-death experience (in which he neither died nor actually even experienced anything) telling us what we should believe about what happens after death.

It is also absurd to think that anyone might turn to a Hollywood actor for philosophical or theological truth.

—

Works Used

Mgr. Paul J. Glenn, Psychology: A Class Manual, B. Herder Book Co., London, 1955.

Fr. Henri Grenier, Thomistic Philosophy Vol. I, St Dunstan’s University, Charlottetown, Canada, 1948.

Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier, A Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy Vol. I, B. Herder Book Company, 1921.