Abstract
In Dying and the Virtues, Levering reaffirms a traditional understanding of the ‘good death’. If a person is to die well, he argues, they must embrace nine key virtues: love, hope, faith, penitence, gratitude, solidarity, humility, surrender and courage. He then illustrates what this means by drawing on a variety of writings and lived examples from across the centuries, exploring each virtue in turn and also some critical issue that arises as a result. So, for example, the first chapter considers love – our love of God and one another, and God’s love of us. This is where the religious person finds meaning for their life. Yet this raises an acute problem. In the end, all seems meaningless because death annihilates us and those whom we love, and it ends our relationship with God. He sees this painfully explored in the story of Job. At first glance, Job is distressed because he knows that he has done nothing to deserve his sufferings – the loss of health, wealth and children. In fact, his real anguish is because, in the light of that suffering, he does not know whether God really loves human beings and is lovable or not. The Book of Job offers reassurance because it ‘suggests that God ensures that annihilation is not what happens to his human creatures’ (p. 27). Leaving aside whether this is what Job suggests, the idea of survival beyond death is the constant theme that makes final sense of each of the nine virtues. If there is nothing beyond the grave, then all our fears are justified. If there is, then the virtues prepare us well.
Throughout the book Levering uses a range of conversation partners and cites liberally from Scripture, written documents from Christian history, papal encyclicals, other academic disciplines, and so on. Perhaps the genesis of the book is in lectures he gives to the seminarians he teaches, but for the general reader this is daunting: almost every paragraph is peppered with references. As a result, of the 348 pages, only 169 are text; the rest are given over to notes, bibliography and indexes.
I have no doubt that dying well is an issue that the Church needs to explore afresh in our present age. Levering makes the point that people die, and therefore make sense of death, in particular contexts. But the British context is different from the American – and from that of previous centuries. America is a religious culture; the British context is deeply secular and, consequently, poses some difficult questions that are not fully reckoned with here. We live in a time when most people will spend their final days in hospital, slipping in and out of consciousness, often at a distance from the congregations that have supported them, and where many funerals relentlessly train us to deal with death through denial – only looking back over lives lived, never forward. This does not prepare us well for our own dying. In that respect, Levering has a point.
Alan Billings
Sheffield