In the film Cast Away, a FedEx engineer named Chuck Noland, played by Tom Hanks, survives a plane crash and washes up alone on an island. He manages to find sufficient means of survival. He also discovers in the plane’s wreckage a volleyball. He marks it up to look like a face and names it Wilson. The closest thing Noland has to a companion, Wilson becomes a source of solace and comfort, a guard for his sanity, and even a well of strength, which helps him guard against giving up when being rescued seems impossible. The film powerfully shows how love and companionship—even if only in the form of a volleyball—are nearly as necessary to human survival as food, water, and shelter.
THE NECESSITY OF FRIENDSHIP
Aristotle says friendship “is an absolute necessity in life.” No one “would choose to live without friends, even if he had all the other goods” that life offers.1 In The Art of Loving, psychologist Erich Fromm claims that the “deepest need of man” is “the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.”2 This need is so strong, Fromm writes, that if it goes unmet, it will result in insanity. We need companionship—love—so badly that if we lack it, we will create the illusion of it, as Noland does with his volleyball named Wilson, just to survive.
Research backs this up. Various studies have shown how poorly children do in institutions where their physical requirements are met but their need for love is not. One study showed that children raised by their mothers in prison did better than children raised by highly trained professionals in a well-equipped institution.3 Another study found that the lack of love can actually be fatal for children.4 Harvard Medical School’s famous Grant Study, which followed the lives of hundreds of men for seventy-five years, concluded that the most significant factor in life satisfaction is warm and loving relationships throughout one’s life. The study’s director summarized the findings this way: “Happiness is love. Full stop.”5
It is love, as Dante famously says in the last line of The Divine Comedy, that “moves the sun and the other stars.”6 But we don’t need ancient Greek philosophers or medieval Italian poets, or even modern-day sociologists (not to mention just about every pop song ever written), to tell us how necessary love is to human flourishing or our individual happiness; we just know. In Faith, Hope, Love, Josef Pieper puts it this way: “What matters to us, beyond mere existence, is the explicit confirmation: It is good that you exist; how wonderful that you are! In other words, what we need over and above sheer existence is: to be loved by another person.”7
TOO MANY LOVES
When it comes to love, we who communicate with the English language are at a great disadvantage. We have essentially one word to cover a wide variety of loves. We love our children; we love our dogs; we love mint-chip ice cream (at least, I do!); we love summer; and we love our spouses. All of these are, obviously, different kinds of loves. We have to rely on context in order to know that the word love when we talk about “making love” does not have the same meaning as when we say we “love” our grandmother. (Nor did it as far back as 1880, when Henry James used the phrase “making love” in Portrait of a Lady.)
Other languages have more words for love. The Indian language of Boro has a word for the kind of love that is temporal. Chinese has a word for the kind of love that is eternal. Danish has a word for the sense of falling in love. Hindi has a word for the realization of love that comes only from being separated. Portuguese has a word for the love felt for someone who was part of your past. Spanish has a word for the love of things, as opposed to people. And Greek has several words for the forms of love that define various human relationships.
It’s more than simply a vocabulary problem, however. In each of these usages above, the context makes the meaning clear. However, when a single word bears the weight of so many different meanings, the distinctions between those meanings are inevitably blurred. When Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, met NFL player Michael Vick for the first time while Vick was imprisoned for convictions related to his dog-fighting operation (which involved horrific abuse of the animals, along with other crimes), Vick insisted to Pacelle that he “loves” dogs. As that conversation unfolded, it became clear that Vick, sadly, was confusing pride in possession with love.8 He’s not entirely to blame. The meaning of the word love has become so broad that the incoherent slogan “Love is love is love is love is love . . . ,” proclaimed by the creator of a wildly successful Broadway show, has become the mantra of a generation.9
The Christian understanding of love offers a sharp contrast to this linguistic and moral fuzziness. The Greek of the New Testament uses a variety of words to refer to various kinds of love. In his book The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis famously explored four types of love, each associated with words from the Greek language: empathy (storge), friendship (philia), desire (eros), and the highest form of love (agape).
Godly love or agape is the kind of love meant in the First Epistle of John when it says that God is love (4:8). The King James Bible often translates agape as “charity” (e.g., 1 Cor. 13), which comes from a root word meaning “valued” or “dear.” Agape is sacrificial and self-giving love, and has come to be associated with godly love because it reflects the “triune God who is a communion of persons in self-giving love [who] created all things out of love. All persons are created to be in union with God in ultimate happiness.”10
Happiness here, it’s important to note, “is not some vague sense of goodwill,” but is attained only “with a rich and complete understanding of what is truly good, in an ultimate sense.”11 This ultimate good is “union with God, which is true happiness.”12 Aquinas sums up the virtue of charity by calling it simply friendship with God,13 and stating that the “perfection of the Christian life consists radically in charity.”14 Indeed, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:13, only faith, hope, and love (or charity) are everlasting—but “the greatest of these is love.”
Charity perfects all the other virtues and contains all the virtues. The definition of charity given by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 encompasses the virtues of patience, kindness, contentment, humility, temperance, justice, purity, honesty, wisdom, courage, faith, generosity, and perseverance. The definition reflects the very character of God.15 The form of all the virtues is love. Charity “gives shape to (or trans-forms) acts of all the virtues by directing them toward the ultimate goal of union with God.”16 Only when we love as God loves can we heed the beautiful exhortation of Augustine: “Love, and do what you will: whether you hold your peace, through love hold your peace; whether you cry out, through love cry out; whether you correct, through love correct; whether you spare, through love do you spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.”17
AGAPE: SUPERNATURAL LOVE
Clearly, not all that we call “love” is this kind of love, charity. Charity is “loving God first, and all else in God.”18 Charity, therefore, has its source in God. Such love is not natural to human beings but is supernatural.19 It is a gift from God. Having the capability of this kind of love is part of what it means to be made in God’s image.
Yet being capable of this love does not necessarily translate into possessing it. In fact, two of the profoundest miracles in my life consisted of God granting me supernatural love for two people for whom I could not muster love from my own strength despite my great effort to do so. Both were fellow Christians with whom I worked closely. Both were people whose personalities simply rubbed against mine. I willed myself to love them in my own strength, but I could not. Finally, I asked God to give me a supernatural love for both of these people. It did not happen overnight. I did not feel it taking place. But in both cases, after a few months passed, I suddenly realized that my attitude and feelings toward these people had gradually but completely transformed. I loved them. And in loving them, I came to see them completely differently. Nothing about them had changed. Everything in me had utterly changed. This was supernatural love. It reflects what Lewis writes in Mere Christianity: “He will give us feelings of love if he pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves.”20
THE VICE OF CUPIDITY
This supernatural, theological love is a powerful theme in Leo Tolstoy’s short novel The Death of Ivan Ilych. In the story, charity sharply contrasts with the empty, self-centered lives that populate the story. Ivan’s life in particular is characterized not by the virtue of charity but by another kind of love: the vice of cupidity.
Most of us connect the word cupidity with its source, Cupid, the god of desire and erotic love in classical mythology. We associate Cupid with romance and Valentine’s Day, but this sort of desire is not all that cupidity entails. Within ancient Christian tradition, cupidity was associated with lust and ambition, the counterpart of the virtue of charity or godly love. Augustine explains that love is the “impulse” to “enjoy God on his own account and one’s neighbor on account of God.” In contrast, cupidity (or lust) is “the impulse of one’s mind to enjoy oneself and one’s neighbor and any corporeal thing not on account of God.”21 While charity is desire that moves us toward God, cupidity is desire that moves us away from God. Thus, while there are many kinds of loves that are proper and many things that are proper to love, to love well requires the proper ordering of these loves, Augustine says.
The person who lives a just and holy life is one who is a sound judge of these things. He is also a person who has ordered his love so that he does not love what it is wrong to love, or fail to love what should be loved, or love too much what should be loved less (or love too little what should be loved more), or love two things equally if one of them should be loved either less or more than the other, or love things either more or less if they should be loved equally.22
There is no tyranny like the tyranny of a desire that draws us away from God.
Ivan Ilych has spent his life in pursuit of such desires. In his youth “he succumbed to sensuality, to vanity” and “liberalism.” He was a sycophant, “by nature attracted to people of high station as a fly is drawn to the light, assimilating their ways and views of life and establishing friendly relations with them.”23 He ordered his life around a received vision of how a successful life should go: “easily, pleasantly, and decorously.”24 His life was most markedly characterized, in fact, by decorum, a standard that, by definition, is based on surface appearances determined by ever-changing and fickle taste and manners.
Ivan’s ontological orientation toward decorum is conveyed materially in his obsession with decor. As his successes in career and income increase, so too do his concerns over the appearance of his home (which is ironic, given the lack of familial love within the home). Even while at work, Ivan finds himself, despite liking his job and being successful at it, contemplating his furniture, curtains, and cornices. And it is while decorating that Ivan Ilych suffers his literal (and metaphorical) fall. Hanging drapery in his newest home, the grandest one yet, he slips and falls, bruising his side. The injury turns out to be fatal.
Ironically, tragically, Ivan’s obsessive decorum is not even close to the accomplishment he fancies it to be: “In reality it was just what is usually seen in the houses of people of moderate means who want to appear rich, and therefore succeed only in resembling others like themselves: there are damasks, dark wood, plants, rugs, and dull and polished bronzes—all the things people of a certain class have in order to resemble other people of that class. His house was so like the others that it would never have been noticed, but to him it all seemed to be quite exceptional.”25 As the most famous line from the novel says, “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore, most terrible.”26 There is perhaps no more apt object of pity than he who thinks himself exceptional but turns out to be merely ordinary. The tragedy, of course, is not in failing to be exceptional but in the greater loss of rejecting the glories of everyday gifts.
One of these great gifts that Ivan rejects is friendship. The love between friends is called philia in Greek (from which we get the word filial). This kind of love refers to the mutual affection, respect, and interconnectedness that “seeks the well-being of humanity”27 that marks deep friendship. Many think that we in modern Western culture have lost much of the richness of this kind of brotherly love or deep friendship, particularly in the church, where both opposite and same-sex friendships are surrounded by anxiety because of our culture’s tendency to equate nearly all forms of love with sex. Lewis mourns this loss. Because friendship is not necessary to human existence in the way that food and sex are, Lewis says, it should be valued all the more in being “freely chosen.”28
Ivan Ilych clearly does not have this kind of love. The story begins with the announcement of his death at age forty-five. The opening focuses primarily on the responses of Ivan’s colleagues and acquaintances to his premature death. These people cannot properly be called friends, and it quickly becomes clear that throughout his life Ivan utterly lacked the experience of the love of true friendship. It is a most unsettling start, striking an opening note of coldness that permeates nearly the entire story, beginning with that of those left to remember Ivan. Where we expect to find sadness and grief, we find selfishness and greed. Where we hope to witness love and loss, we witness callousness and complacency. Of all those ruminating on the death of Ivan, we read, “Each one thought or felt, ‘Well, he’s dead but I’m alive!’”29
Those closest to Ivan, whom the story refers to as “his so-called friends” and who are hardly close at all, are bothered more by the inconvenient obligations of paying condolences and attending the funeral than by Ivan’s death. They find solace for their inconvenience in the fact that his death will open up a position that may allow some of them to advance in their careers.
A LIFE WITHOUT LOVE
The reader naturally feels pity for Ivan to have been surrounded by such people. But as the story goes on, we learn that Ivan structured his life in such a way as to keep people at a distance both at work and at home. At work he “would maintain the semblance of friendly human relations.” But “as soon as the official relations ended, so did everything else.” He prided himself on his “capacity to separate his real life from the official side of affairs and not mix the two,” managing these distinct relations “easily, pleasantly, correctly, and even artistically.”30 He maintained this distance even with those in his social circle, which consisted not of real friends but merely of “acquaintances among the best people and . . . people of importance.” As for the rest, the “shabby friends and relations,” Ivan, his wife, and their eldest daughter “were entirely agreed, and tacitly and unanimously kept at arm’s length,” shaking them off until “only the best people remained.”31 The startlingly cold reception of the news of Ivan’s death turns out to be the fruit of what Ivan’s life has sown.
Sadly, this same lovelessness also characterizes Ivan’s marriage. The Greek term for the kind of love at the center of a romantic or sexual relationship is eros, from which we get the English word erotic. In Greek, the word refers to deep desire and is usually associated with sexual love. But Plato discusses eros more broadly to refer to the kind of intense desire that draws us out of ourselves toward the transcendent. For Plato such transcendence referred to the Ideal. But for Christians this transcendent desire—whether rooted in sexual desire for another person or in the longing caused by an object of beauty or visions of the good life cast by literature, film, or even advertising—points to God as the source of all beauty and goodness. Ivan seems to lack this kind of deep desire for something beyond and outside of himself, whether for another person or for God.
Ivan seems never to have experienced erotic desire. He had dalliances in his youth, we learn, but as with all his accomplishments, the proverbial sowing of Ivan’s wild oats was rather like the fulfillment of some proper duty more than arising from some deep, if illicit, desire: “all done with clean hands, in clean linen, with French phrases, and above all among people of the best society and consequently with the approval of people of rank.”32 Even Ivan’s marriage to Praskovya Fedorovna stems from duty rather than desire. After achieving professional success, Ivan attracts her at the local dances. At first Ivan doesn’t even intend to marry, but when Fedorovna falls in love with him he says to himself, “Really, why shouldn’t I marry?” After all, it is a match that offers Ivan “personal satisfaction” and meets the approval of “the most highly placed of his associates.” “So,” rather anti-climactically, “Ivan Ilych got married.”33
The start of marriage for Ivan is “very pleasant.” He enjoys the “conjugal caresses, the new furniture, new crockery, and new linen.” But this pleasantness ends with the most natural of events: his wife becomes pregnant. And “from the first months of his wife’s pregnancy, something new, unpleasant, depressing, and unseemly, and from which there was no way of escape, unexpectedly showed itself.”34 Ivan cares nothing about the birth and subsequent care of mother and child and withdraws from his family with the exception of “rare periods of amorousness which still came to them at times but did not last long.”35 Such moments are “islets at which they anchored for a while and then again set out upon that ocean of veiled hostility which showed itself in their aloofness from one another.” Eventually, Ivan seeks from his wife and family only “those conveniences—dinner at home, housewife, and bed—which it could give him, and above all that propriety of external forms required by public opinion.”36
Ivan’s life lacks the love of both friendship and erotic desire. And when his children come along, we see he lacks even the love of family members for one another, which the Greek language calls storge.
Three of the children Ivan’s wife bears die, and they are barely mentioned. Three children live. Eventually, when Ivan lies dying in his room, his eldest daughter is annoyed that his condition interrupts her evening plans. “Is it our fault?” she asks her mother. “It’s as if we were to blame! I am sorry for papa, but why should we be tortured?”37 Ivan’s wife has a similar attitude. When Ivan falls ill and his sufferings increase unbearably, his wife thinks only of how miserable he has made her life: “She began to feel sorry for herself, and the more she pitied herself the more she hated her husband. She began to wish he would die; yet she did not want him to die because then his salary would cease. And this irritated her against him still more.”38 When Ivan tries to tell her the most recent doctor’s report, she listens only until their daughter comes in, dressed to go out, and they depart, leaving Ivan alone. “Those about him did not understand or would not understand it,” Ivan realizes, three months into his sickness. “His wife, his daughter, his son, his acquaintances, the doctors, the servants, and above all he himself, were aware that the whole interest he had for other people was whether he would soon vacate his place, and at last release the living from the discomfort caused by his presence and be himself released from his sufferings.”39
Their lack of love “tormented Ivan Ilych more than anything.”40 Worse than his tremendous physical pain is his realization that he must “live thus all alone on the brink of an abyss, with no one who understood or pitied him.”41 No one feels compassion for him.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN EMPATHY AND COMPASSION
While not the same as love, compassion is connected to love. Moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum explains that compassion is more than empathy.42 Empathy allows someone to imagine what the experience of the sufferer might be like, but compassion goes beyond empathy. Compassion characterized Jesus’s earthly ministry, leading him time and time again to heal or help those suffering. To have compassion is, literally, to “suffer with” someone (com meaning “with” and passion meaning “suffer”). Compassion involves “a sense of mature judgment and an understanding of the relatedness of life” and “directs our attention to life and the suffering of others.”43 Psychologist Paul Bloom, author of Against Empathy, argues that compassion—love, concern, and motivation to help others in their suffering—is more helpful and healthy than empathy—the ability to feel another’s pain.44 Charity is the bridge between mere empathy and compassion. Charity “orders our lives and our loves toward God and, subsequently, the whole of creation”45 and “always seeks the best for its beloved.”46
Ivan’s colleague Peter Ivanovich illustrates the difference between empathy and compassion. He initially feels some sorrow and a sense of horror at the thought of Ivan’s suffering. But it soon is evident that Peter Ivanovich’s fear is really for himself: “‘Three days of frightful suffering and the death! Why, that might suddenly, at any time, happen to me,’ he thought, and for a moment felt terrified.” He takes comfort “that this had happened to Ivan Ilych and not to him, and that it should not and could not happen to him.”47 Peter Ivanovich feels enough empathy to imagine Ivan’s suffering and to fear it for himself. He does not feel the compassion that would have led him to suffer with Ivan on Ivan’s behalf.
LOVE GROUNDED IN REALITY
But even Ivan himself is guilty of denial of his own mortality. He knows “in the depth of his heart” the truth that he is dying, but his mind cannot accept it. He recalls a lesson from his youth: “The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter’s Logic: ‘Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,’ had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius—man in the abstract—was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others.” Facing the reality of his life and his death requires Ivan to see himself not in the abstract but in the particular:
He had been little Vanya, with a mamma and a papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with the toys, a coachman and a nurse, afterwards with Katenka and with all the joys, griefs, and delights of childhood, boyhood, and youth. What did Caius know of the smell of that striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond of? Had Caius kissed his mother’s hand like that, and did the silk of her dress rustle so for Caius? Had he rioted like that at school when the pastry was bad? Had Caius been in love like that? Could Caius preside at a session as he did? “Caius really was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my thoughts and emotions, it’s altogether a different matter. It cannot be that I ought to die. That would be too terrible.”48
Ivan’s physical condition, caused by his literal fall, is emblematic of his spiritual condition, one we all share in being mortal. Charity—godly love—cannot be separated from truth. Not just lofty transcendent truths, but the truth about the here and now and all the reality it entails—including our mortality. Truth is true and love is loving only in application.
But Ivan is not the only one having difficulty facing the truth. The people around him are in denial too, and this only makes his sickness even harder to bear: “What tormented Ivan Ilych most was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill. . . . This deception tortured him—their not wishing to admit what they all knew and what he knew, but wanting to lie to him concerning his terrible condition, and wishing and forcing him to participate in that lie.”49 To love something for its own sake requires being truthful about what it is. Shakespeare expresses this poignantly in Sonnet 73. Addressed to the lover who sees the beloved’s life nearing death, the poem closes with these two lines: “This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”50 Augustine points to the necessity of truth to love when he says, “What is not loved for its own sake is not loved at all.”51 To face a beloved’s weaknesses, including his mortality, is necessary to loving that person well by giving what is truly needed. Ivan wants—and needs—compassion (which is often, as here, translated as pity): “Apart from this lying, or because of it, what most tormented Ivan Ilych was that no one pitied him as he wished to be pitied. At certain moments after prolonged suffering he wished most of all (though he would have been ashamed to confess it) for someone to pity him as a sick child is pitied. He longed to be petted and comforted. . . . This falsity around him and within him did more than anything else to poison his last days.” He yearns to shout at them, “Stop lying! You know and I know that I am dying. Then at least stop lying about it!” But he lacks the will to do so. And so those around him reduce his dying to a mere “unpleasant” and “indecorous incident.”52
Ironically, this state of affairs is the result of “that very decorum which he had served all his life long” in his self-deception. But finally, after one of many doctor’s visits, as he tries to decipher the doctor’s inscrutable medical jargon, Ivan is finally willing to face the most important questions honestly: “Is my condition bad? Is it very bad? Or is there as yet nothing much wrong?”53
The answer, yet unknown to him, is that his condition, both physical and spiritual, is very bad. The cavalier philosophy of the Latin carpe diem—eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die—is only half true. Tomorrow you die: so how you live today may determine who tends to your most basic needs in your dying days. And for Ivan, this turns out to be not his wife or his child or a friend, but the family’s servant, Gerasim.
SERVANT LOVE
Gerasim is mentioned briefly in the opening chapter, but his real introduction occurs in the most humiliating circumstance for Ivan: “For his excretions also special arrangements had to be made, and this was a torment to him every time—a torment from the uncleanliness, the unseemliness, and the smell, and from knowing that another person had to take part in it.”54 Yet, the next line says, “through his most unpleasant matter, Ivan Ilych obtained comfort.” Ivan speaks apologetically to Gerasim:
“That must be very unpleasant for you. You must forgive me. I am helpless.”
“Oh, why, sir,” and Gerasim’s eyes beamed and he showed his glistening white teeth, “what’s a little trouble? It’s a case of illness with you, sir.”
And his deft strong hands did their accustomed task, and he went out of the room stepping lightly. Five minutes later he as lightly returned.55
In the midst of the most universal, most humbling, most unpleasant, and most human situation, Ivan finds the charity that has been absent most of his life. Only Gerasim faces the truth about Ivan’s condition. Thus he is the only one capable of offering charity—love that seeks the good of the other in the knowledge that what is good is also true. Consequently, Ivan feels “at ease only with him.” Gerasim tells Ivan the truth about us all, truth that others in the story shield themselves from: “We shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble?” Gerasim does not “think his work burdensome, because he was doing it for a dying man and hoped someone would do the same for him when his time came.”56 Gerasim understands that charity “is love received and given.”57 Gerasim’s is a love that “rejoices with the truth” (1 Cor. 13:6).
Only in truth does charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived. Truth is the light that gives meaning and value to charity. That light is both the light of reason and the light of faith, through which the intellect attains to the natural and supernatural truth of charity: it grasps its meaning as gift, acceptance, and communion. Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. It falls prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word “love” is abused and distorted, to the point where it comes to mean the opposite.58
This is what Flannery O’Connor means by her startling claim, “In the absence of faith, we govern by tenderness. . . . When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror.” Such tenderness, O’Connor says, “leads to the gas chamber.”59 When love is unmoored from unchanging truth, it becomes mere sentiment or tenderness. Sentiment and tenderness are opposed to suffering and can do anything to avoid pain. And the only end to earthly pain is death. Tenderness prefers death over suffering. Charity chooses to “suffer with,” the literal meaning of compassion. Gerasim has true compassion for Ivan, a love rooted in acknowledgment of the truth of Ivan’s condition.
As the weeks and months pass, one symptom leads to another, the doctors are unable to arrive at a diagnosis, and pain takes over. In the face of his family’s indifference, Ivan begins to feel hatred toward them. His physical pain increases, as too his spiritual and emotional anguish that nothing he has achieved in his life means anything. He comes to see the deceptiveness of his whole life that has kept love from his life: “‘This is wrong, it is not as it should be. All you have lived for and still live for is falsehood and deception, hiding life and death from you.’ And as soon as he admitted that thought, his hatred and his agonizing physical suffering again sprang up, and with that suffering a consciousness of the unavoidable, approaching end.”60
As his death draws near, Ivan’s torments increase. Opium helps some of the physical suffering, but there seems to be no relief from his spiritual anguish. One night he cries out in anger to the God he had ignored his whole life:
“Why hast Thou done all this? Why hast Thou brought me here? Why, why dost Thou torment me so terribly?” . . . And in imagination he began to recall the best moments of his pleasant life. But strange to say none of those best moments of his pleasant life now seemed at all what they had then seemed. . . . “It is as if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up. And that is really what it was. I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it is all done and there is only death.”61
As his condition worsens, he discovers, rather accidentally, that his pain is alleviated when Gerasim holds up his legs. One night, gazing into Gerasim’s face, Ivan Ilych suddenly wonders, “What if my whole life has been wrong?”62 In facing this question, his mental sufferings became even worse than his physical pain.
For the last three days of his life, Ivan screams.
In the midst of this, two hours before his death, he finally asks himself, “But what is the right thing?” And upon asking this question, . . . he felt that someone was kissing his hand. He opened his eyes, looked at his son, and felt sorry for him. His wife came up to him and he glanced at her. She was gazing at him open-mouthed, with undried tears on her nose and cheek and a despairing look on her face. He felt sorry for her too. . . .
And suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him and would not leave him was all dropping away at once from two sides, from ten sides, and from all sides. He was sorry for them, he must act so as not to hurt them: release them and free himself from these sufferings. “How good and how simple!” he thought. “And the pain?” he asked himself. “What has become of it? Where are you, pain?” He turned his attention to it. “Yes, here it is. Well, what of it? Let the pain be.” “And death . . . where is it?” He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. “Where is it? What death?” There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light. “So that’s what it is!” he suddenly exclaimed aloud. “What joy!”
To him all this happened in a single instant, and the meaning of that instant did not change. For those present his agony continued for another two hours. Something rattled in his throat, his emaciated body twitched, then the gasping and rattle became less and less frequent. “It is finished!” said someone near him.
He heard these words and repeated them in his soul. “Death is finished,” he said to himself. “It is no more!” He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died.63
These are the last words of the story. In death, Ivan Ilych finds a true vision for the good life. Indeed, he finds life itself. “We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other” (1 John 3:14).
In his sermon “On Love,” John Wesley makes two important claims about love. First, Wesley says, “Without love nothing can so profit us as to make our lives happy.” He explains further: “By happiness I mean, not a slight, trifling pleasure, that perhaps begins and ends in the same hour; but such a state of well-being as contents the soul, and gives it a steady, lasting satisfaction.” Surely, by the end of his life, Ivan has learned this truth. Without love, Wesley says, “nothing can make death comfortable.”64
It so happens that my most recent rereading of The Death of Ivan Ilych took place amid intimations of mortality in my own life. I think I am like most of us in wanting to shield myself from the intimate, uncomfortable, messy processes that mark the ending stages of life. We live in a culture that keeps death, dying, and aging as far from most of us for as long as possible. Geography often separates us from the aging of our elders, and medical science from our own aging.
I have been given the gift, however, of having my aging parents brought back into close proximity, and with their proximity has come the bodily, physical presence of the sights, sounds, scents, and servitude of illness and aging. And so it happened that the day before I bore helpless witness, quite recently, to my father’s groanings in a hospital bed, I had only just reread the pages of Ivan Ilych’s final fear- and scream-filled days.
Reading them prepared me for something I didn’t know I needed to be prepared for. Facing something terrible, I could behold something less terrible, something good even, because I knew from reading The Death of Ivan Ilych that it is a terrible but wonderful thing that binds all of humanity together: the bearing of one another’s burdens.
My father is now well. But one day, he—like all of us here—won’t be. Death will come. And when he does, he will not be a stranger. Death is the shadow that has trailed us all our days, and comes ’round to meet us at the front door. No lock can keep him out forever.
How we die will depend on how we live and how we love, as The Death of Ivan Ilych helps us see. Its vision of charity—love given and received—is the image of the servant who, by tending the feet of others, bears their suffering.