Questions to Guide Your Reading

Richard John Neuhaus, The Eternal Pity: Reflections on Dying, "Introduction"

1. In his introduction, Fr. Neuhaus proclaims that his subject is dying: the prospect of death, and how we experience the death of others.  He then says that his subject is not "what to do about death." Why not?  What is he interested in helping us to do instead?

2. What does Fr. Neuhaus mean when he says, "We are born to die" ?

3. According to Fr. Neuhaus, what does the poet T. S. Eliot mean when he writes: "Where is the Life we have lost in living?  Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?  Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

4. What are the two forces in human life that, according to Fr. Neuhaus, have been engaged in a danse macabre throughout history and many cultures?  Why?  Both of these, says Fr. Neuhaus, have been "problematized,"that is, made into "problems" to be "solved" by various techniques or technologies.  How ought we rather to view them?  (On this, take a look back at what The Catholic Adult Catechism has to say about religion and mystery.  And then take a look at what Fr. Bouyer has to say about the proper meaning of "mystery" in his article on "The Paschal Mystery." )

5. When encountering death, what is in order, according to Fr. Neuhaus?

6. According to Fr. Neuhaus, the worst thing is not the sorrow or the loss or the heartbreak of death.  What is worse?

7. What do "traditions of wisdom" encourage us to do with death?  Explain, for example, the Jewish tradition of observing shiva.

8. According to Fr. Neuhaus, what is the importance of ritual in the face of death?

9. What, according to Fr. Neuhaus, is the attitude of the "brave new world of much modern philosophy" about death?  Why, for example, do philosophers of the Anglo-American analytic school suggest that not much can meaningfully be said about death?

10. What does Edna St. Villa Millay say about death and childhood?

11. What famous comment does Rousseau make about human beings and death?  Compare this comment with what Pope John Paul II says in the preface to his encyclical Fides et Ratio about what makes us truly human.  Compare both of these with what Walker Percy teaches us in Lost in the Cosmos about our self-knowledge.  If we were truly to follow Pope John Paul II"™s admonition to "Know Thyself" at the beginning of Fides et Ratio, what would be our attitude toward death?

12. What does the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus say about death?  What are the pros and cons of this position?

13. What was the position of the Stoics with regard to death?  What are the pros and cons of this position?

14. What did Freud mean when he said, "Our own death is unimaginable" ?  (In your answer, you will want to include the insights of psychiatrist Karl Meninger and the Heideggerian philosopher Peter Koestenbaum.)

15. What does the American philosopher George Santayana say is "a good way of testing the caliber of a philosophy" ?

16. What does Hinduism say about death?  What are the pros and cons of this position?

17. What does Buddhism say about death?  What are the pros and cons of this position?

18. What does Islam say about death?  What are the pros and cons of this position?

19. What does Judaism say about death?  What are the pros and cons of this position?  How does the Jewish view serve as a basis for the Christian view?

20. According to Fr. Neuhaus, what the Christian tradition has to say about death is both straightforward and modest.  In what way is it straightforward?  In what way modest?

21. What does Christianity mean when it affirms that death is not "natural" ?

22. What does Fr. Neuhaus mean when he claims that death is a "consequence, not punishment" of sin?

23. How do Christians understand "heaven" ?

24. What concerns Fr. Neuhaus about Christians who have "imbibed too well" certain Platonic or Buddhist conceptions of death?

25. What, by contrast, does the mainstream of the Christian tradition (following the Jewish view) say about death and life?  Sin and life?  Death and God?

26. Given this view of Life and God, what is true death?  In this light, what does theologian Paul Tillich say about "the heart of being in sin" ?

27. What do Christians have to say about the "resurrection of the body" ?  Explain.

28. Discuss the following passage from Caroline Walker Bynum's The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity: "For however absurd it seems -- and some of the greatest theologians have grappled with that absurdity  -- it is a concept of sublime courage and optimism.  It locates redemption where ultimate horror also resides -- in pain, mutilation, death, and decay....  It was the stench and fragmentation they saw lifted to glory in resurrection."

29. Discuss the following passage from the work of theologian Jaraslov Pelikan: "Having taken on flesh, Christ is obedient to the death of the cross.  To live a genuine human life means to live a life that is formed by the shape of death.  By going through death rather than around death, he transforms the shape of death into the shape of life....  This is what makes the coming of Christ literally a matter of life and death.  His history must be as genuine a part of the human story as the history of Adam or the history of any other man.  Irenaeus defends the genuineness of this history with all the passion and rhetoric he can summon against the heretics who transform the story of Christ into something less than history in their effort to transform it into something more than history.  Only if his history is a real history can it save men who live and die in real history."

30. Compare what Prof. Pelikan says in the quotation above with what Fr. René Latourelle says in the selection entitled "Revelation and History" about what notion of salvation is made possible by the Jewish notion of history.