The Eternal Pity

by Neuhaus, Richard John

• ISBN13: 9780268027575
• ISBN10: 0268027579
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-05-01
• Publisher: Univ of Notre Dame Pr

Summary

Drawing upon a vast range of human experience and reflection, The Eternal Pity: Reflections on Dying demonstrates how people have tried to cope with the inevitability of death. Different cultures, informed by religious belief and sometimes desperate hope, teach people to respond to their own death and the death of others in modes as various as defiance, stoic resignation, and grief unbridled to the point of exhaustion. In addition to examples from literature, poetry, and religious texts, Father Richard John Neuhaus provides an intensely personal account of his encounter with death through emergency cancer surgery, and reflects on the changes that encounter has made in the way he lives.

While some contemporary writers have deplored the "denial of death" in our culture, The Eternal Pity shows how themes of death and dying are perennial and pervasive, although not always made entirely specific. Society may be viewed as a disorganized march of multitudes waving little banners of meaning in the face of the threat of non-being that is death. Some selections in this

Author Biography

Father Richard John Neuhaus is President of the Institute on Religion and Public Life in New York, editor-in-chief of First Things

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(38)
I. Thinking about Dying: Twelve Classic Visions
The Certainty of Death (George Herbert, ``Mortification'')	39	(3)
The Figure of Death (The Katha-Upanishad)	42	(4)
The Romance of Death (Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son)	46	(4)
Where Are the Snows of Yesteryear? (Manuel Bandeira, ``Profundamente'')	50	(2)
In the Midst of Life We Are in Death (John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions)	52	(3)
The Morality of Death (Flannery O'Connor, ``A Good Man Is Hard to Find')'	55	(7)
Death in War (William Shakespeare, Henry V, Wilfred Owen, ``Anthem for Doomed Youth')'	62	(4)
Acceptance beyond Fear (Montaigne, ``To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die'')	66	(5)
Eat, Drink, and Be Merry (Edward FitzGerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam)	71	(3)
Fate as the Will of God (The Quran)	74	(9)
The Phenomenon of Hope (Dietrich von Hildebrand, Jaws of Death, Gate of Heaven)	83	(4)
The Irreplaceable Dead (Dylan Thomas, ``A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London'')	87	(4)
II. When We Die
The Experience of Death (Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych)	91	(9)
The Ease of Death (Ernest Sandeen, ``Do Not Go Gentle'')	100	(2)
The Testimony of the Dying (Carol Zaleski, The Life of the World to Come)	102	(8)
Choosing Suicide (A. Alvarez, The Savage God)	110	(6)
Choosing to Live (Gilbert Meilaender, ``I Want to Burden My Loved Ones'')	116	(5)
Hastening Death (Jeffrey E. Ford, ``Mercy Killing at Golgotha'')	121	(4)
Holding Still for Death (Christian de Cherge, ``Last Testament'')	125	(6)
III. When Others Die
The Experience of Grief (C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed)	131	(6)
Burying the Dead (Ralph Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down)	137	(8)
Dying Alone (Alane Salierno Mason, ``Reconciliation of Unbelief'')	145	(6)
Watching Others Die (Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb)	151	(13)
The Uses of Ritual (Milton Himmelfarb, ``Going to Shul'')	164	(3)
Refusing Consolation (Jody Bottum, ``All That Lives Must Die'')	167	(6)
The Life of the World to Come (The Book of Common Prayer)	173	(6)
Sources and Credits	179