Death

Note: Last Updated 7/29/2024.

Sir Walter Scott:

And come he slow, or come he fast, It is but Death who comes at last.

(Sir Walter Scott, Marmion, [Chicago: W. B. Conkey, 1900], Canto 2.30, p. 62.)

Timothy Keller:

     Statements like Diana Athill’s—that we should not want anything other than what is, or that nothing inevitable can be bad—can’t hold up either to rational scrutiny or to our deepest moral convictions. Scientists will all agree that there is nothing more inevitable and natural than violence—evolution and natural selection are based on it. Yet we believe it is bad. And everyone can easily imagine—and want—a world more marvelous than the one we have. Nor is “sliding down” into people. In Samuel Johnson’s famous biography he recounts how a Miss Seward told him that death was only a “pleasing sleep without a dream.” Johnson vehemently denied it, snorting that it was “neither pleasing, nor sleep.” Unconsciousness, violently imposed on someone, is considered a crime. So should we consider death a thief and murderer.

     All ancient myths and legends that deal with death depict it as an intrusion, an aberration, and a monstrosity. It always appears because something has gone wrong. You will not find the accumulated wisdom of the ages insisting that death is perfectly natural. Death is not the way it is supposed to be. “Death does not feel natural, however biologically necessary it may be. This feeling . . . cannot be put to death by reasonable considerations about the cycles of nature. [We simply do] not feel like recycled fertilizer.” Dylan Thomas is far closer to the hearts of most when he counsels us to “not go gentle” into the night of death, that we should “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

(Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical, [New York: Viking, 2016], pp. 161-162.)

Peter Kreeft:

     A few years ago, a relative of my neighbor died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of three. My neighbor’s son, then about seven, asked his mother, “Where is my cousin now?” She did not believe in any form of life after death and she wanted to be honest with her son, so she could not tell him that his cousin was now in Heaven. But she had just read one of the books I have criticized on how to talk to children about death, and its ‘wisdom’ made sense to her—but not to her son. She answered, “Your cousin has gone back to the earth, where we all came from. All of nature is a cycle. Death is a natural part of that cycle. When you see the earth put forth new flowers next spring, you can know that your cousin’s life is fertilizing those flowers.” She was so naïve that she was surprised when her son screamed, “I don’t want him to be fertilizer!” and ran off.

     The old myths are wiser than the new demythologized books. They grow from our race’s subconscious and embody its intuitive wisdom. It is a remarkable fact that all the myths throughout the world see death not as natural but as unnatural, as an accident, a fall, a mistake, a catastrophe that could have been averted but wasn’t. The myth of paradise lost is universal, appearing in many forms: Adam eats forbidden fruit; Pandora opens a box; a bird drops the magic berry of immortality; Primal Woman throws a stone at the sky and chases the gods away. Only then does death appear. Why do all the variations insist on this single theme of paradise lost, of death as an accident? Because death does not feel natural, however biologically necessary it may be. This feeling about death cannot be put to death by reasonable considerations about the cycles of nature. Man does not feel like recycled fertilizer.

(Peter Kreeft, Love is Stronger than Death, [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992], pp. 2-3.)

C. S. Lewis:

To this day I do not know what they mean when they call dead bodies beautiful. The ugliest man alive is an angel of beauty compared with the loveliest of the dead.

(C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, [New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1955], pp. 17-18.)

Blaise Pascal:

The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished for ever.

(Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer, [London: Penguin Books, 1966], # 165 (210), p. 82.)

C. H. Spurgeon:

If you had got all the world you would have got nothing after your coffin lid was shut but grave dust in your mouth.

(C. H. Spurgeon, “The Spiritual Resurrection” (#2554); In: The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit: Vol. 44, [Pasadenia: Pilgrim Publications, 1976], p. 56.)

Stuart B. Babbage:

All our swelling ambitions, all our aspirations and achievements, all our hopes and fears, find their grave at last in the experience of a common mortality.

(Stuart B. Babbage, “The Enigma of Death;” In: Columbia Theological Seminary Bulletin, Volume LVII, No. 3, July 1964, [Decatur: Columbia Theological Seminary, 1964], p. 71.)

Dylan Thomas:

And you, my father, there on the sad height, 

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night. 

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

(Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night;” In: Dylan Thomas: Selected Poems, ed. Walford Davies, [London and Melbourne: J. M. Dent & Sons LTD, 1988], p. 89.)

William Shakespeare (Macbeth):

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

(William Shakespeare, The Plays of Shakespeare: Macbeth: With an Introduction by George Brandes, [New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1905], Act V, sc. V, p. 87.)

The Epic of Gilgamesh: (c. 2100 B.C.)

‘How can I rest, how can I be at peace? Despair is in my heart. What my brother is now, that shall I be when I am dead. Because I am afraid of death I will go as best I can to find Utnapishtim whom they call the Faraway, for he has entered the assembly of the gods.’

(The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. N. K. Sandars, [Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1962], p. 94.)

H. F. Lovell Cocks:

But once the God of religion has extended His rule over the dim lands beyond the grave, belief in an after life, so far from mitigating the dread prospect of death, intensifies its terror; Sheol is transformed into Gehenna. Epicurus, with more insight than some of his modern disciples, saw what man fears is not that death is annihilation, but that it is not; that the horror of death is not extinction but “the wrath to come.”

(H. F. Lovell Cocks, By Faith Alone, [London: James Clarke & Co., 1943], p. 57.)

William Shakespeare: (Hamlet)

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause. 

(William Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” Act III, Scene I; In: William Shakespeare, Hamlet, and As You Like It: A Specimen of a New Edition of Shakespeare, ed. Thomas Caldecott, [London: John Murray, 1820], pp. 67-68.)

William Shakespeare: (Hamlet)

But that the dread of something after death, 

The undiscovered country, from whose bourn 

No traveller returns, puzzles the will; 

And makes us rather bear those ills we have, 

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

(William Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” Act III, Scene I; In: William Shakespeare, Hamlet, and As You Like It: A Specimen of a New Edition of Shakespeare, ed. Thomas Caldecott, [London: John Murray, 1820], pp. 68-69.)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

He who pretends to look on death without fear lies. All men are afraid of dying, this is the great law of sentient beings, without which the entire human species would soon be destroyed.

(Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, Or The New Eloise; Quoted in: The Oxford Book of Death, ed. D. J. Enright, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983], p. 22.)

Samuel Johnson:

No rational man can die without uneasy apprehension.

(C. Adams, Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., [New York, Carlton & Lanahan, 1869], p. 271.)

W. B. Yeats:

Nor dread nor hope attend

A dying animal;

A man awaits his end

Dreading and hoping all;

(W. B. Yeats, “Death;” In: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, [New York: The Macmillan Company, 1951], p. 230.)

T. S. Elliot:

The white flat face of Death, God’s silent servant,

And behind the face of Death the Judgement

And behind the Judgement, the Void, more horrid than active shapes of hell;

Emptiness, absence, separation from God;

The horror of the effortless journey, to the empty land

Which is no land, only emptiness, absence, the Void,

Where those who were men can no longer turn the mind

To distraction, delusion, escape into dream, pretense,

Where the soul is no longer deceived, for there are no objects, no tones,

No colours, no forms to distract, to divert the soul

From seeing itself, foully united forever, nothing with nothing,

Not what we call death, but what beyond death is not death,

We fear, we fear.

(T. S. Elliot, Murder in the Cathedral, [New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935], p. 69.)

Hope (Death).

George Herbert:

Christian. Death.

Chr.     Alas, poore Death, where is thy glorie?

Where is thy famous force, the ancient sting?

Dea.     Alas poore mortall, void of storie,

Go spell and reade how I have kill’d thy King.

Chr.     Poore Death! and who was hurt thereby?

Thy curse being laid on him, makes thee accurst.

Dea.     Let losers talk: yet thou shalt die;

These arms shall crush thee.

Chr.     Spare not, do thy worst.

I shall be one day better then before:

Thou so much worse, that thou shalt be no more.

(George Herbert, “A Dialogue-Antheme;” In: The English poems of George Herbert, ed. C. A. Patrides, [London: Dent, 1974], p. 175.)

Athanasius of Alexandria:

Death has become like a tyrant who has been completely conquered by the legitimate monarch; bound hand and foot the passers-by jeer at him, hitting him and abusing him, no longer afraid of his cruelty and rage, because of the king who has conquered him. So has death been conquered and branded for what it is by the Saviour on the cross. It is bound hand and foot, all who are in Christ trample it as they pass and as witnesses to Him deride it, scoffing and saying, “O Death, where is thy victory? O Grave, where is thy sting?”

(Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation, 5.27; trans. St. Athanasius, The Incarnation of the World of God, trans. A Religious of C.S.M.V. S.Th., [New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957], pp. 57-58.) See also: ccel.org.

Cf. 1 Corinthians 15:55-57:

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

(King James Version.)

Athanasius of Alexandria:

Every one is by nature afraid of death and of bodily dissolution; the marvel of marvels is that he who is enfolded in the faith of the cross despises this natural fear and for the sake of the cross is no longer cowardly in face of it.

(Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation, 5.28; trans. St. Athanasius, The Incarnation of the World of God, trans. A Religious of C.S.M.V. S.Th., [New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957], p. 58.) See also: ccel.org.

Athanasius of Alexandria:

…through death deathlessness has been made known to us…

(Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation, 8.54; trans. St. Athanasius, The Incarnation of the World of God, trans. A Religious of C.S.M.V. S.Th., [New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957], p. 93.) See also: ccel.org.

Alister McGrath:

Many people are terrified at the thought of death. The fact that they will one day cease to exist frightens them. One way of responding is to deny death. In his famous book The Denial of Death Ernest Becker points out how many humans have spent the best part of their lives trying to deny that they are going to die. “Death is something that happens to someone else. It won’t happen to me!” And so such people build their lives on a grand illusion. In reality they are frightened and anxious, but they project the appearance of success, permanence and calm. Some Christians, too, are anxious about death and wonder what to make of it.

     It is here that the gospel has enormous implications. Jesus Christ suffered and died “so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Hebrews 2:14-15). We are not talking about some soothing words to ease the pain of death and dying, words with no foundation in reality—such as saying “It’s all right” when in reality things could not be worse. No! We are talking about a real and decisive victory over death, by which its power is broken. A new attitude to death and dying is possible because a new situation has dawned. Through faith we are given the privilege of sharing in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. “Thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:57). “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade” (1 Peter 1:3-4).

     Socrates may have taught us how to die with dignity, but after Jesus Christ, human beings are able to suffer and die in real hope. 

(Alister McGrath, “I Believe”: Exploring the Apostles’ Creed, [Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998], pp. 70-71.)

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria