Where Is Thy Sting?

It is the conceit of today’s raconteurs and scholars of Death and Dying that no one talked about the subject until they came along. A variant of this pitch has it that postwar Americans are distinctively benighted in this respect. Robert Jay Lifton, for instance, could claim in a book published in 1979 that “there is good reason to believe that the American suppression of death imagery in young adulthood is uniquely intense and constitutes a cultural suppression of life’s possibilities.” (Lifton clearly wasn’t going to the movies or listening to such pop songs as “Last Kiss.”)

If that conceit was ever even faintly persuasive, it surely isn’t today, besieged as we are by grief counselors and garrulous souls who want to tell us in exquisite detail about the death of a mother, a sibling, a “partner,” a spouse. (There’s even a thriving new genre that can only be called the “cremation memoir” — “Burning Oliver: The Brief Life and Burial of an Infant Son” by Greg Foy in Harper’s, for example.)

In this climate, an anthology of “reflections on dying” might seem redundant. But it isn’t, for the real antidote to all the chatter about death in our own day isn’t silence but better talk. In The Eternal Pity, Richard John Neuhaus has brought to the task an urbane wisdom reminiscent of another great Catholic convert, John Henry Newman. If you obtain a copy of The Eternal Pity just to read Neuhaus’s introductory essay — including an account of his own near-death experience — you won’t have been cheated.

But the selections in the anthology proper, ranging across centuries and cultures, repay attention in their own right. Recently the New York Times Magazine reported that nearly 50 percent of Americans believe that the best religion is one that combines elements from many religions. One of the merits of this anthology is that it presents a variety of incompatible understandings of death: death as terminus, death as transformation, death as a dissolving into something larger. These cannot be reconciled or otherwise “combined.” Either identity persists after death, or it does not. Reality isn’t subject to polling.

The consensus, at least among the ostensible intelligentsia these days, is that death is the destruction of identity. It’s straight out of a PBS documentary: Falling leaves, pond scum, hyenas tearing at the remains of a zebra — there’s only Nature, baby. You don’t like it? Tough.

The same shtick can be given a lyrical spin. “We are made of stardust” (I’m quoting from the Fall 2000 catalogue of Yale University Press) “and so is all life as we know it.” Hence the mature twenty-first-century American regards the prospect of death with equanimity. From stardust we come, and to stardust we return. Death is the great Recycler.

Needless to say, this runs counter to the understanding of death that prevailed in the West from the birth of Christianity into the nineteenth century. In this opposing view, death is unnatural, the result of man’s willful defiance of God, traceable to the primeval disobedience that is the subject of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. And this in turn — so Christians say — explains why, contrary to the Naturalists, many people persist in feeling that human life is skewed somehow, that something about us is bent and needs fixing.

For a very long time, the connection between death and sin was known (whether or not accepted) by everyone in the West. That is no longer the case, and so we are also in Richard John Neuhaus’s debt for his other recent book, Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus on the Cross, which could be read as a companion volume to The Eternal Pity. Here Neuhaus focuses on a single death, the crucifixion of Jesus.

Most who read Death on a Friday Afternoon will come to the book already believing in the unique efficacy of the death that is its subject. They will read to deepen their wonder, to renew their faith, to wrestle with unanswered questions. But let me suggest a second readership: those who wish to know what it is exactly that Christians believe, those whose knowledge is hazy at best and who desire, if only for the sake of cultural literacy, to be better informed.

How large is this potential audience, how significant? It would include a large slice of all the people working at this moment in newsrooms, a large slice of the professoriate, a large slice of everyone employed in “new media.” It probably would include a significant chunk of the readership of this magazine.

For such readers, Neuhaus is the perfect guide: not a bumptious testifier ready to thrust a tract in your hand, not a self-absorbed explainer who seems eager to assure you that of course, he doesn’t believe all those old fairy tales. Imagine instead that in Paris, say, you find yourself standing next to an American priest, who seems a good person to ask about the tortured figure on the massive crucifix you’re contemplating. Or maybe you’ve just emerged from a performance of Haydn’s Seven Last Words. In any case you end up talking for hours with this priest, who is good company. That, more or less, is what it’s like to read Death on a Friday Afternoon.

The priest will tell you how a sinless man, Jesus, who was also God, accepted death on our behalf and thus vanquished both sin and death. It is a peculiar story, but over the centuries many have found that it has the ring of truth — and found, in that story, an answer to the eternal pity.

John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture.