The Christian Art of Dying: Learning from Jesus - Softcover

Verhey, Allen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802866727 ISBN 13: 9780802866721

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2011

Synopsis

A renowned ethicist who himself faced death during a recent life-threatening illness, Allen Verhey in The Christian Art of Dying sets out to recapture dying from the medical world. Seeking to counter the medicalization of death that is so prevalent today, Verhey revisits the fifteenth-century Ars Moriendi, an illustrated spiritual self-help manual on "the art of dying." Finding much wisdom in that little book but rejecting its Stoic and Platonic worldview, Verhey uncovers in the biblical accounts of Jesus' death a truly helpful paradigm for dying well and faithfully.

About this title

About the Author

 

Allen Verhey (1945-2014) was Robert Earl Cushman Professor of Christian Theology at Duke Divinity School.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Christian Art of Dying

Learning from JesusBy Allen Verhey

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Copyright © 2011 Allen Verhey
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-6672-1

Contents

Preface...........................................................................................................................xi1. Introduction...................................................................................................................1PART ONE: Medicalized Dying.......................................................................................................92. From "Tame Death" to "Medicalized Death".......................................................................................113. In Praise of Medicine — and What Went Wrong on the Way to "Medicalization"...............................................244. Challenging "Medicalization": Patient Rights, "Natural Death," and Hospice.....................................................415. The Silence and Surrender of the Church........................................................................................68PART TWO: Ars Moriendi............................................................................................................776. Death and the Art of Dying in the Fifteenth Century............................................................................797. The "Commendacion of Death"....................................................................................................898. The "Temptacions" and the Virtues..............................................................................................1109. The Temptations and the Virtues: An Assessment.................................................................................13610. "Interrogaciones," "Instruccions," and Prayers................................................................................157PART THREE: Faith and Faithfulness in the Face of Death: Toward a Contemporary Ars Moriendi.......................................17311. A "Commendacion" of Life......................................................................................................17612. The "Instruccion": Remember and Follow Jesus..................................................................................21613. The Virtues for Dying Well....................................................................................................255PART FOUR: The Practices of Christian Community and the Practices of Dying Well and Caring Well for the Dying.....................29514. Gathering on the Lord's Day...................................................................................................30015. Some Practices Old and New....................................................................................................33316. The Practice of Care..........................................................................................................37717. Last Words....................................................................................................................386Subject and Name Index............................................................................................................395Scripture Index...................................................................................................................404

Chapter One

Introduction

Like the cleaning lady, we all come to dust.

Peter De Vries, Slouching toward Kalamazoo

People have been dying for a while now. It started, I guess, with the first human being, and since then the death rate has been right around 100 percent. One might suppose that not much has changed over the years. At the end of life, death; "at the last a little earth is thrown upon our head, and that is the end forever." Much has changed, however, about the ways human beings think about death and about the ways they act in the face of it. The inevitability of death does not make inevitable any particular response to it. Throwing a little dirt on the head of the dead — or burial — is not, after all, a universal practice, and many have challenged the claim that death "is the end forever."

Reflective people have thought about death and dying for as long as there have been reflective people, and the great variety of their thoughts is as plain as the universality of death. Here, in the ancient Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, Siduri, barmaid to the gods, counsels Gilgamesh to give up his hopeless quest for immortality: "Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to? You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man." There, in Plato's Phaedo, Socrates welcomes his death, insisting confidently that the human soul is immortal and that the death of the body simply frees the soul from its imprisonment in the body. And there he counsels his friends against attachment to the very things Siduri had commended.

Here, in a letter to a friend, Seneca gives good Stoic advice to meet death cheerfully, for "dying well means dying gladly." There, in his famous poem, Dylan Thomas gives quite contrary advice:

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Thinking about death has almost inevitably accompanied reflection about the human condition. Who are we? And where are we going? Is there a life after death? And if there is, how shall we prepare for it? Or, if death is the end forever, how should we live knowing that we shall die? Philosophers and theologians and poets and essayists and social scientists — and almost certainly, you — have thought about these questions. Some have despaired of ever answering them; others have quite confidently not only answered them but also recommended their answers as wisdom for living and, of course, for dying. The answers, however, have been various indeed.

It turns out, then, not only that death has a long history but also that that history is marked by a great variety of human responses to death and a great variety of reflective anticipations of death. It is that great variety that makes an effort to write "a brief history of death" imprudent, if not impudent. There is, to be sure, a fine little book by that title by Douglas J. Davies, and there is much to be learned from it, but on one point at least it is quite misleading. Davies claims that "Christianity glorified death." It is true, as we shall note, that "Christianity [sometimes] glorified death." But it was not always so. And it can be argued that it was not so in Scripture. At the very least, there have been a variety of responses to death within the Christian tradition. Indeed, while it is true that "Christianity [sometimes] glorified death," it is also true that Christianity sometimes demonized death. Scripture, after all, can call death "the last enemy," a demonic power whose malicious hold on us is only surrendered when God triumphs over death (1 Cor. 15:26).

The Christian tradition does not speak with one voice about death — nor for that matter does the Christian canon. There is too much variety within the Christian tradition to attempt even "a brief history of Christian death." This book will not undertake anything like a complete and objective history of death. It will not undertake even "a brief history of Christian death." It admits to being partial — and partial in two senses of the word.

It is partial, first, by being quite selective. It will attend to just three episodes in the history of death, the "medicalized" dying of the mid–twentieth century, the "art of dying" in the fifteenth century, and the death of Jesus in the first century.

It will attend to "medicalized" dying because that episode in the recent history of death is often blamed for undercutting "the art of dying." People still die, of course, but the accusation is that in a "medicalized" dying, people frequently do not die well. The first part of the book will join the chorus of voices that have complained that the medicalization of death makes dying well difficult. In a "medicalized" dying death is regarded as the great enemy to be defeated by the greater powers of science and medicine. The death rate remains right around 100 percent, of course, but in a "medicalized" dying there is only one focus: avoiding death. Moreover, the confidence in medicine's great powers and the hope of avoiding death have nurtured a denial that anyone is dying. People may be sick, quite sick, but to admit that they are dying seems a betrayal of the confidence we have in medicine and its technology. The "dying role" is lost; only the "sick role" remains. And the "sick role" requires that we put ourselves in the hands of a competent medical expert and hope for recovery. So a "medicalized" dying usually happens in a hospital, in a sterile environment, and in the company of technology and the medical experts who know how to use it. Little wonder, then, that death has been reduced to a medical event and that the art of dying well has been largely lost.

"Medicalized" dying can be traced to the triumphs and the ambitions of medical science in the mid–twentieth century. We may and should be grateful, of course, for the great advances of medical care in the last century. None of us wants to return to bloodletting and snake oil. We must not neglect the fact that there was a time, not so long ago, when physicians were relatively powerless against the diseases that threaten death and when their ministrations were as likely to kill you as to cure you. The desire of medicine to heal motivated those advances. It is not difficult to understand and to appreciate that desire. It belongs to the long history of medicine and of medical ethics. To understand how that ambition became Promethean, however, it will be necessary to revisit briefly the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the Enlightenment's dreams of scientific progress. There has been great scientific progress, but with the great advances in the powers of medicine have come some problems. There have been great successes, but with the great successes of medicine have come the failures of those successes. And among those problems and failures many now count a "medicalized" dying.

We still live in that episode of the human history of dying, but there have been complaints about it and increasingly powerful challenges to it. Complaints about "medicalized death" have echoed in the literature on medical ethics, in the death awareness movement, and in the hospice movement. It is not difficult to understand and to appreciate the complaints either. To the complaints are usually joined some proposals to remedy the problems, and we will attend briefly to the proposals of standard bioethics, of the death awareness movement, and of hospice. These proposals have had some successes, but the successes have been limited, and with the successes have come again some failures of the successes.

Having joined the chorus of voices complaining about a "medicalized" dying but having complained as well that some of the voices in that chorus sound a little off-key, the book begins its search for a better way of dying. One earlier episode in the long history of dying that presents an obvious alternative to "medicalized" death is the "art of dying" in the fifteenth century. That will be the focus of the second part of the book.

In the fifteenth century a little self-help book was published with the title Ars Moriendi (the "art of dying"). It gave instructions about how to die well. It was an illustrated and abridged edition of a longer text, the Tractatis Artis Bene Moriendi, which was translated into several European languages and provided a model for a number of other works on the theme of the "art of dying." Such works were enormously popular in the late fifteenth century and continued to be written and read for centuries after that. They remained popular to the middle of the nineteenth century. There were works in a variety of languages. There were works by Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, and Anabaptists. As popular as such works were in the late medieval and early modern periods, however, they are largely neglected and forgotten today.

We will revisit this neglected tradition in the second part of this book, attempting to understand and appreciate this other way of dying. Again, however, to do that will require that we reach a little further back in the history of dying, back to the Black Death, surely, but also back to the Renaissance philosophers and theologians who retrieved Plato and the consolation literature of the Stoics as resources for a theological response to death. There is much to appreciate in this neglected tradition. Its concern for a faithful dying, its attention to the virtues for dying well, and much else in it may help us to imagine a contemporary alternative to "medicalized death," to begin to construct a contemporary Christian ars moriendi. But there are also problems in it, and any effort to retrieve it must also acknowledge those problems. Indeed, any effort to retrieve it must engage in the tasks of assessment, selection, and correction. Because Ars Moriendi recognized Scripture as the final source and test for the meaning of a faithful dying, it will not be inappropriate either to it or to my own convictions to test it and qualify it by remembering the story Scripture tells.

Ars Moriendi itself had called attention to that still earlier episode in the history of dying, the death of Jesus. It regarded the death of Jesus as paradigmatic for a Christian's faithful dying. So does the third part of this book. Taking that cue from Ars Moriendi, it turns to the story of Jesus. The death of Jesus is hardly what we think of when we think of dying well. He died young and violently, the victim of a judicial murder. He died — according to Mark, at least — abandoned by friends and followers. And he died an excruciatingly painful death. Even so, the story has quite clearly paradigmatic significance for Christians; they are called, after all, to follow him, indeed, to "take up the cross." The story of Jesus is the story Christians remember, the story they love to tell and long to live, even as they are dying. It is the story that is determinative for Christian discernment, and it provides, I think, a corrective both to the tradition of Ars Moriendi and to "medicalized" dying. The story does not "glorify" or even commend either death or suffering, but neither does it deny death and suffering or allow us to reduce them to medical events. The story of Jesus may, I hope, provide some clues to the meaning of a faithful dying today, a contemporary Christian ars moriendi.

The final part of the book returns to the present, attending to practices of Christian community that bear the promise of helping Christians to die well and faithfully and of forming communities that care well and faithfully for those who are dying. We will attend to some practices central to the common life of the church, to gathering for worship, to reading Scripture and to prayer, to the Eucharist and baptism, and to the ways these practices could form and inform our dying and our care for the dying. And we will attend to some other practices that have a place in Christian community, to practices of mourning and comforting and to funerals and remembering the stories of the saints, of course, but also to the practices of catechesis and communal discernment.

The book, as you have surely noted by now, is also partial in another sense. I have acknowledged that it is hardly comprehensive; it will deal only with these selected episodes in the long history of death. But let me acknowledge also that it is hardly unbiased. I do not pretend to consider death with an impartial objectivity — as if that were possible without reducing death to a crude fact of nature (and that too would be partial). Let me be candid about my perspective. I write as a Christian theologian, as someone who cherishes the gospel and tries to think about all things, including dying, in relation to that gospel. And I write as a mortal, as someone who has been reminded recently of my own mortality. I do not claim to be "impartial," not at least in the sense of being a "disinterested spectator" of human mortality.

A few years ago I was diagnosed as having amyloidosis, a rare blood disorder. I told the story briefly in the preface. But for about six months my own mortality was vivid to me. I wanted to live, and I was grateful for the skillful doctors and sophisticated technology upon which my life depended. But if I was going to die, I wanted it to be my death, the final chapter in my story and not a footnote in a research report some day. I wanted it to be a faithful dying, a dying worthy of one who cherishes the gospel. This book started in conversation with myself, myself as theologian talking with myself as mortal. Sometimes, frankly, the mortal talked back. I think I became a better theologian by listening to my mortal self, and I hope my voice in this book is that of a mortal theologian, a man who knows that he will die and who believes that the last word belongs to God, a man who cherishes both the Christian tradition and life. I also hope that my voice can bring both comfort and courage to other mortal Christians and confidence to the Christian communities who are called to care for them.

This book, however, is not a memoir. When some friends who knew I had been sick asked what I was working on, I told them I was working on a book on dying. And when their reaction displayed some alarm, I thanked them for their concern and assured them that I was not writing a memoir. This book is not a memoir. It is not about me or about my experience of dying. I will, however, tell a story or two from my experience along the way, and one story, a story that celebrates mortal life, seems a fitting way to conclude this introduction.

My wife, Phyllis, is a big fan of Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. When the kids were growing up, she would insist that everyone in the family watch it together on the weekend before Christmas. The kids knew all the lines and would sometimes quote a line or two. If there was a crash somewhere in the house, for example, it was not unusual that it would be followed by somebody quoting Uncle Billy, "I'm alright! I'm alright!" Now that the kids are grown, they sometimes give Phyllis gifts related to the Capra movie. We have, for example, ornaments for the Christmas tree, one that captures the joyful final scene with George holding Suzi, and another that is an angel bearing the words "Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings." We have a (boring) board game based on the movie. For her birthday a few years ago the kids gave Phyllis a wall plaque that simply bore the legend "It's a Wonderful Life." She instructed me to hang it above the back door, so that as we left each day we would be reminded that it is a wonderful life. I did as I was told, but evidently not very well. That was a couple of weeks before I would visit the doctor and be told that I had amyloidosis. A couple of days after that visit, when I left the house and closed that back door, I heard a crash. I wanted to say, "I'm alright! I'm alright!" but the words caught in my throat. When I opened the door, it was as I had feared.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Christian Art of Dyingby Allen Verhey Copyright © 2011 by Allen Verhey. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802866727
• ISBN 13: 9780802866721
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 423