Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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

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The Christian Art of Dying

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

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

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...