The Four Last Things: Death

Fairly recently, I was listening to a friend talk about the many ways the Four Sundays of Advent are themed. His personal favorite marks this Sunday as Hope Sunday, a choice matched by my very positive parish. I, however, am intrigued by the theming of the weeks of Advent with the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Hell, and Heaven. MadPriest has a slightly different list, which replaces Judgment with some weird UK reference. Bosch paints on the Four Last Things, suggesting that the theme at least dates to the Reformation. How it became associated with Advent is a puzzle I'll let my more expert readers fill in. Yet I think the theme fits quite well with the penitential and apocalyptic emphasis of the season, which I am trying in some small manner to reclaim this year. So there will be some reflections during the next few weeks here, and I welcome anyone else who's interested to join in.

Death

Death and I are not particularly intimate. The very few funerals I remember attending have been for nearly complete strangers for reasons that seem appropriate at the time. But this week very much is associated for me with death. It was this week a few years ago that saw my mother's father fall asleep. And in the very same week, a relatively new student at my college (R.) and fellow communicant perished in one of the most mysterious misadventures I've ever encountered.

My grandfather and R. may have died the same week, but the circumstances of their deaths were very different. One died very much as Shakespeare describes in the Seven Ages of Man in As You Like It sans everything it seemed but joy. It wasn't what I thought would be the last thing. But when my grandfather saw the small baby (my senior cousin by order of primogeniture, quite my junior by age) who carried his name and the names of his ancestors, he verily beamed. Everything had been stripped away from a very hearty man and a very hard one, who should have died a thousand deaths during the previous few years. But joy remained of a kind that I had not seen before, even when his beloved daughters wedded or when he received an important award for his long years as a soccer coach. Something else had been there. Something else had held him back. If I should die so slowly, I only hope that joy will be left at the end.

R. died early and quickly. No one knows why. If I remain in academia, I suspect the list of puzzling deaths of promising youths will grow longer. It already has.

There's a song from that irreverent Broadway musical Avenue Q called "For Now" in which memento mori and timor mortis conturbat me are pretty much turned on their heads and the vanitas vanitatum of Solomon seems all too familiar. A character complains that his life is without purpose and his erstwhile beloved replies in concert with the Chorus, "that except for death and paying taxes, everything is only for now." Both the good and bad of life are temporary and have a final end. The chief ancient response to this situation would be to emphasize some form of secular immortality in the name of one's family, the fame of one's deeds, or the endurance of one's poetry. The first of these consumes the Old Testament, in which hope of a world to come continually grew even as God still promised the immortality of lineage to the righteous. The latter response of some Jewish and most Christian thinkers was to posit that the dead would live again in a world reformed and restored, though the exact details and the nature of the new world varied. Avenue Q embraces neither Christian nor pagan hope. Death is merely the end of a stream of variably convenient accidents.

When I was very little, I remember feeling quite uninvested in life. When I was about three, I remember distinctly wondering if I really was in my body and whether I really had to live life, whether I could stop its inexorable progress through the events that would shape my identity as it had shaped the lunching men and women sitting on the stools and behind the counter where I, too, was sitting. I can say with great enthusiasm that I no longer indulge in that type of detachment. But it does suggest the question of whither the timor mortis really arises. At the age of three, the argument between being and non-being or activity and potentiality (depending on whether one is Aristotelian or not) becomes surprisingly odd when many of the high-faluting aspects of being are completely or nearly foreign to one's experience. I'm not arguing for infanticide here, indeed quite against it, because irrespective of whether the infant etc. or anyone else ever should be able to choose non-being over being, it seems especially horrible to kill a fellow who has little way to judge whether life is anything in particular. What I sensed when I was three was that being had something to it because it had the potential of progress, not in the necessarily positive sense, just the one of growth and change to something different from before. Death, in my limited understanding, was the end to that. Death too is an end to routine as well, ending order and discipline as it ends the person. This is one of the many local expressions of entropy.

Of endings, the Apostle says, "Love shall never end, but where there are prophecies, they shall lose effect, and where there are tongues, they shall cease, and where there is knowledge, it shall become useless." (I Corinthians 13:8). Love is not just only for now. Paul is putting forth his usual teaching on spiritual gifts, but the basis of his argument is that there is a path to immortality which the grave cannot touch, founded on agape that joins this life to the next.