Let’s Talk About Dying (Well)

Dying is not, of course, a common topic of discussion when we awake — unless one had a horrible night of sleep and one feels the creep of death in the body and head. Dying and dying well have been intense topics of Christians for the history of the church, and it is indeed sad that we are afraid to raise the topic in pleasant company.

One doesn’t normally want to go to church to hear a sermon on dying well, either.

But Matt Levering, the wonderful professor of theology at St Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein Illinois, and a truly remarkable Catholic theologian of our day, has a new book called Dying and the Virtues. It’s an extraordinary book. Buy it to read it and read it slowly. Digest it because his writing is paced for those who want to think hard and carefully. Join me for this series on Matt’s book.

What does it mean to die? What is death and dying? He begins with Hans Urs von Balthasar, the theologian with the best name in theological history:

Balthasar, then, offers the following three paths: dying is a devastation and a contradiction, since it seemingly obliterates the meaning that we are sure is there and for which we so urgently strive; dying is basically nothing, since in Christ we have already died and have already begun to share in his resurrected life; and dying is our response to God’s dying for us in Christ, whose death is the source of our true life.

Here is Levering’s big question, and his focus is on virtues:

What would it look like for a dying person to have a “life… hid with Christ in God” and to “blossom” on Christ’s grave? My answer involves what call the “virtues of dying.”

What do the virtues have to do with dying? Here is answer:

Rather, these virtues, given by God, inscribe a Godward and utterly God-dependent mode of living in Christ, as members of his body.

Although true virtues, bestowed by the Holy Spirit, do not take away the radical physical and mental anguish of dying, such virtues do provide an interior path through mortal suffering, in union with Christ and his suffering body the church.

Even if this [centralizing of dying as the aim of ethics] is an exaggeration, as Samuel Johnson insists it is in his novel Rasselas, it remains the case that virtue ethics takes shape around the human journey that culminates in dying, and that the virtues are not worth much if they cannot nourish our dying.

Levering will probe and turn and ask questions by examining the following domains:

The book of Job, Ezekiel 20, the dying of Jesus Christ, the dying of the first martyr (Stephen), Hebrews 11, Gregory of Nyssa’s account of the dying of his sister Macrina, the tradition of ars moriendi (Robert Bellarmine, Francis de Sales, Jean-Pierre de Caussade), the consolations of philosophy (Josef Pieper), the divine mercy (Faustina Kowalska), the sacrament of anointing of the sick, liberation theology’s emphasis on solidarity with those who are suffering, biblical eschatology, and contemporary medical perspectives—in addition to the fear of annihilation expressed so frequently in elite culture today, and to the New Age spirituality that is popular in less intellectual circles. My book is therefore a work on the border of virtue ethics and other theological, exegetical, and cultural domains…

If following Jesus is the way for the Christian, if Christoformity is the core idea, then…

We need to be among those who follow Jesus in this way, because the life of the Lamb—of possessing in order to give away—is the only true and meaningful mode of living, just as it is the only true and meaningful mode of dying.