The Liberation of Life through Death: Reading Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” 303107615X, 9783031076152

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
About the Author
Introduction
Part I: The Liberation of Life from the Dualism of Supernatural and Natural Ends
Part II: The Life and Death of Ivan Ilyich
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

The Liberation of Life through Death Reading Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”

Jason Hoult

The Liberation of Life through Death

Jason Hoult

The Liberation of Life through Death Reading Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”

Jason Hoult St. Jerome’s University Waterloo, ON, Canada

ISBN 978-3-031-07615-2    ISBN 978-3-031-07616-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07616-9 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

I want to dedicate my study to the life of my grandfather, Ernst Boersig (October 16, 1934–July 31, 2013), and to his loving partner, Christl (January 21, 1938–).

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Nick Valkanis for reading my study and for offering me critical comments on it. A previous version of this study was presented as a paper at “Crossing Over: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Death and Morbidity” hosted by the Humanities Graduate Student Association at York University, Toronto, February 17–18, 2017.

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Contents

 Part I: The Liberation of Life from the Dualism of Supernatural and Natural Ends 1 Part II: The Life and Death of Ivan Ilyich23 Conclusion43 References45 Index47

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About the Author

Jason Hoult  (PhD in Social and Political Thought) is serving as a part-­ time instructor at the University of Guelph and at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo. The overall focus of his academic research is the relationship between philosophy and theology, reason and faith, and the religious and the secular in works of modern philosophy and literature. His dissertation, “The Art of Ethics and the Ethics of Art: Between Kant and Wallace Stevens” (York University, 2018), argues that we can truly account for the relationship between ethics and art in modern philosophy and modern poetry only when we see that modern thought is biblical in origin and that biblical thinking is altogether different from ancient Greek philosophy.

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Introduction

What I want to show, above all, in this study is how the exercise of reading Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”1 involves articulating for ourselves, as readers, what it means to liberate life through death. Our understanding of the meaning of Tolstoy’s short story entirely rests, therefore, on how we comprehend its ending. For, as we shall see, the story ends, in narrating the final thoughts of Ivan Ilyich as he lies dying in bed surrounded by people who are unwilling to understand the significance of the hour, with an expression of joy and an image of light. The point of the story is thereby concentrated into one question, from which arises a series of questions: How do you, reader, understand the end? How do you comprehend—what is your conception of—your end: death? What is the end of the story? What does the liberation of life mean when death shows us that we are not free to choose not to die, when the end of the story shows us that Ivan is not free not to die? What does liberation mean when freedom in life is confined (limited) to death? Moreover, we ask: What does it mean when Ivan states, immediately prior to dying, that “Death is finished,” that it is “no more”?2 Do we read (understand) the light that enters into the mind of Ivan at the end of the story as supernatural? Do we read the death of Ivan Ilyich as conveying a belief in an afterlife and so as “religious”? Or do we read, rather, the conclusion of the story as denying a belief in anything after life and so as “secular”? Is the religious position—for example, the understanding of life and death espoused by the authors and figures of the Bible (whether Jewish or Christian)—truly that we (our souls) continue to exist in another xiii

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space and time after death? Is the secular position—as embodied by the champions of the right to the freedom of expression (which entails the freedom of religious expression, including the right not to believe in any of the dogmas that are commonly associated with religion)—truly that death involves nothing else besides the natural expiration of our bodies? Is death, then, whether we understand it as the soul’s supernatural migration to immortal life or as a natural transmutation in the ever decaying life of the body (from the beginning of senescence after, say, our twenty-fifth year), not the joyful liberation from the diseases of life? Is the joy that Ivan expresses (thoughtfully) at the end of the story a joy in death, consistent with the “cheerful pleasantness” that attends the “moderate liberalism” defining his life (14, 13)? But does Tolstoy not also show us that the joys that characterize Ivan’s life are inadequate, that, because he founds his life on the enjoyment of those immediate pleasures that he views as the aim of life in “high” society, his death remains impenetrable and incomprehensible to him? Does Tolstoy not show us, consequently, that Ivan’s view of life is unable to account for death—or life? Does Tolstoy not critically distinguish, therefore, the joy that enlightens Ivan’s life immediately prior to his death from the joy that confounds Ivan’s life and that represses (rationalizes) death? Is how we understand the end of the story, according to the values that are introduced therein, (not) also how we understand the beginning, as narrating Ivan’s fateful practice of shirking those values? How does the story begin? Given that, as I intimate in these opening questions, Tolstoy’s story does not begin where the narrative literally begins (but presupposes a set of values that he introduces as his story proceeds and that he anticipates, from the beginning, in self-consciously exposing the contradictions involved in Ivan’s point of view), I want to begin by examining, in Part I of my study, the history of these values. For how we understand our end— and the end of Tolstoy’s short story—is intimately bound up with how we understand the history of the values that, as we shall see, involve the affirmation of the dignity of human life, even unto death. Moreover, how we understand the history of these values (and the concepts of life and death that are entailed therein) reflects and exposes how we understand the relationship between the religious and the secular (and so between religious and secular conceptions of death). I also want to examine, therefore, prior to turning to Tolstoy’s short story in Part II of my study, the themes and common assumptions that are involved, first, in the arguments that support the belief in the persistence of the soul after death and, second, in the

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arguments that reduce death to nothing but the natural expiry of life. For, as we shall see, the common set of assumptions shared by the proponents of these two positions gives rise to the dualism, the opposition, between religious and secular conceptions of death that prevents us from truly comprehending the paradox that encompasses the end of Tolstoy’s story. As the corollary to my overall argument, then, that reading Tolstoy’s short story provides us with an avenue for conceiving of what it means to be liberated from and through death, I shall also argue that the ending of Tolstoy’s story is no more (or less) religious than it is secular. That is, I shall support my analysis of Tolstoy’s story by showing that, when we examine the history of the values that Tolstoy invokes in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” we discover that both religious and secular concepts of life (and death) truly locate the joys of humanity not in death but in the life of human relationship (what modern social justice activists support in the name of freedom, equality, and diversity). I want to challenge, therefore, the commonly held view that the religious concept of death, as articulated by the authors of the Bible, involves the belief in a supernatural transfer of one’s soul to a place after life (evincing God’s supernatural power) and that the secular view of death connotes a completely natural transfer in life before which nothing we do or did— nothing of life—is ultimately of any consequence or meaning (evincing the meaninglessness of any concept of God or the soul—of existence— that is not natural). That is, I want to show, as the consequence of my argument that the death of Ivan Ilyich is no more (or less) religious than it is secular, that these commonly held views are neither truly religious nor truly secular. In deconstructing, then, the false premises, both historical and analytic (existential), of these positions, I shall undertake to show throughout my study that understanding what it means to liberate life from death involves viewing death not from any theoretical but from a purely practical point of view—as a subject of moral, human practice—as Tolstoy also determines in his short story. As we shall see in Part II of our study, what Tolstoy shows his readers is that death remains impenetrable to us—that we remain enslaved to it—insofar as we devote ourselves to the idol of fortune—the ideal of painless, harmless, happy, decent, deathless existence—at the expense of ourselves and of our neighbors. But what readers are thereby called to show in response to the end of the story—as Tolstoy’s end and aim in writing the story—is that life is liberated from the power of death insofar as, in recognizing that we err (in recognizing the ways in which we sin), we recommit ourselves to the daily task of

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embodying in our intercourse with one another the command to love God (the principle of relationship: in whatever form or image you conceive of it) and to love your neighbor as yourself (which the authors and figures of the Bible view as providing a profound summary of the biblical message). In Part I of my essay, then, I shall analyze the dualism between supernatural and natural ends that gives rise to the opposition between religious and secular concepts of life and death and that thereby prevents us from truly comprehending the paradox that confronts readers at the end of Tolstoy’s short story. I shall also examine the history of the values that Tolstoy’s story embodies. In Part II, I analyze the story of the life and death of Ivan Ilyich in order to show how the exercise of reading Tolstoy’s short story involves us in the task of articulating for ourselves what it means to liberate life through death.

Notes 1. I characterize “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” as a short story throughout my study (and not as a novella or as a book). Thus, I reference the title in quotation marks, instead of italicizing it. 2. Tolstoy, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” 53; hereafter cited in the text. All citations from “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” reference the translation of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (see Bibliography for information on the specific edition that I cite).

Part I: The Liberation of Life from the Dualism of Supernatural and Natural Ends

Abstract  In Part I of my study, I analyze the themes and common assumptions involved, first, in the argument for the persistence of the soul after death (i.e., in the argument for the supernatural existence of an afterlife) and, second, in the argument that reduces death to nothing but the natural expiry of life (i.e., in the argument that death exposes to us the nothingness or meaninglessness of life). I also examine the history of the values that are embodied in Tolstoy’s short story, citing key passages from the works of Kant, Hegel, Plato, Homer, and the Bible, as well as the penetrating study by Oscar Cullman, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? The Witness of the New Testament. In analyzing these passages, I expose, with Cullman, the radical difference between ancient Greek and biblical notions of death. I do so in order to challenge the common assumption that the authors of the Bible advance a concept of heaven as a supernatural place outside of the space and time of life. For it is only insofar as we overcome this mistaken assumption, I argue, that we will be in the position to see why and how it is that the ending of Tolstoy’s short story is no more (or less) religious than it is secular. Keywords  The Bible • Supernatural • Natural • Death • Love • Immortality

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Hoult, The Liberation of Life through Death, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07616-9_1

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The argument for the existence of an afterlife proceeds, generally, as follows: As a person, I am more than merely the sum of my natural parts: I am not merely physical, but more than what is immediately physical about me. Therefore, I must have a soul, a part of me which is not subject to natural death and that persists in a place and time after my body expires. But note, here, the leap. The soul, which, we are told in the beginning, is not physical, ends up taking on physical attributes: it gets imagined according to concepts that apply solely to nature—the concepts of space (or place) and time.1 To state, not incorrectly, that I cannot be reduced to my physical attributes precludes the next statement, in which the soul—or what I am—is conceived as an object of possible experience through categories that apply solely to our physical nature (to use the terms that Kant employs in the Critique of Pure Reason). Thus, the beginning of this argument contradicts its ending. Or, rather, the ending exposes for us the mistaken assumption with which the argument begins. Although it is undoubtedly true that what I am—who I am as a person—cannot be reduced to my physical attributes or cognitive abilities, it is therefore also true that what I am or who I am is not an object that it is ever possible to experience through the senses. The false premise on which the argument for an afterlife often begins is that it is through experience that we learn that we are “more” than this physical body. Through experience, however, we never learn anything of the sort. For through experience—through any experience that is available to our senses—we can only learn about what is physical or immediately cognitive about us. The second response to death is no less surreptitious. The argument that there is nothing after life but death, that death exposes for us the nothingness of life or that death reduces human life back to nothingness, goes as follows: All that lives dies, everything in nature is subject to natural termination. Thus, death shows us that life is ultimately meaningless. That is, because one sees, not incorrectly, that everything about human beings is subject to the vicissitudes of natural time, one concludes that there is nothing about being human that is not natural. A variant on this position is the argument that, because everything dies in nature, there is nothing left for us to do but to live for the day: seize the moment, carpe diem! However, because this position does not articulate for us how or what it means to seize the day, because it appears that there is nothing in life to seize but the day and its fleeting pleasures, those who hold this position end up resorting to immediate experiences of pleasure, to the pleasure of our senses, to supply the end all and be all of life. Yet, no pleasure, as Kant

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demonstrates throughout the Critique of Practical Reason and the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, is everlasting. Thus, this variant arrives at the same conclusion as its parent, and, perhaps, balder, version: the position that holds that ultimately nothing we do in life counts, that nothing is of any real consequence or meaning. But note, again, the leap that this argument entails. There is no reason why it follows that, because everything in nature dies, human life is meaningless. To claim that there is no meaning to our individual lives or that we, in dying, return to nothingness involves a leap. Here, the conclusion—what, we are told, “must” be concluded from an observation of the facts of life—contradicts its beginning. For to imply that we “return” to nothingness presupposes that we possess a concept of ourselves—or of what people would say it is about us—that is not immediately identifiable with our natural bodies. The assumption with which the argument begins exposes the error involved in its end. For to know that nature is nothing in itself, to expose the nothingness of everything under the sun, shows us that we are nothing natural and that nothing natural accounts for what we consider to be truly valuable. The paradox involved in the very idea of nature is that it presupposes a consciousness of it that nothing natural can be used to explain. In other words, nature does not know itself; nature knows nothing about itself; it possesses no concept of its own nothingness. Moreover, to suggest that life within nature is without meaning reveals that we do, in fact, know what it would mean for existence to be meaningful. The very argument presupposes that one possesses a concept of meaning that one uses as a point of reference in order to show that this life is without “meaning.” Kant’s repudiation of the claim made by empiricists that the exercise of human freedom is contradicted (and so disproved) by the facts of natural necessity is so instructive here.2 For what Kant points out, to the astonishment of his empiricist readers, is that, when they claim to reject freedom on the grounds of natural necessity, they continue to conceive of the soul or the mind (the will) through concepts that properly apply only to physical objects. That is, Kant observes that empiricists continue to conceive of human consciousness in the same way as their opponents: the idealists who conceive of the existence of the soul or the mind according to the categories of space and time. We cannot think of human beings as free on the basis of concepts that apply to nature. But it follows, then, that we cannot use the concepts of nature to deny the existence of freedom (as a consequence of human intelligence, which describes our ability, Kant

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argues, to determine our actions according to moral principles).3 Indeed, the very idea that life is nothing outside of its natural facts—including death—presupposes a concept of “nothing” that is not derived from our understanding of the absence of objects but embodies the consciousness of ourselves as evaluative subjects, that is, as subjects whose consciousness is constituted by concepts of value. I want to be sure to note, then, that the argument that reduces death to nothing but the natural expiry of life shares a common set of assumptions with the argument for the persistence of the soul after life. The proponents of each of these positions hold that God or the soul (whatever is not merely natural about us) is supernatural and that human beings are merely natural. But what is staggering about each of these arguments is that their initial premises—that there is a point of view from which human existence cannot be understood according to natural concepts and that there is a point of view from which human life can only be understood according to natural concepts—expose their errors (contradictions): What is true in part of the presentation of both arguments shows each of them to be wholly false. That is, the fundamental assumption that proponents of these positions share, and that we need to overcome in order to conceive of the paradox that is presented by Tolstoy at the end of his short story, is that these two points of view from which we conceive of human existence exclude each other. The proponents of these positions (unconsciously) presuppose that these points of view—that we are more than the mere sum of our parts and that there is no part of human beings that is not subject to the contingencies of natural life—cannot both be true. But they are—they can and they must—both be true. The truth of the one presupposes and demonstrates the truth of the other. As I have already pointed out, the very recognition of ourselves as natural beings presupposes a point of view that is not merely natural. The recognition that, as natural, we are nothing—but ashes and dust—shows us that we are nothing natural (and that the images that we use to conceive of our natural life—e.g., ashes and dust—are not derived from our understanding of natural processes). It follows that the point of view that we embody as human beings—what makes us who we are—is unable to be explained or understood according to any of the categories (of space and time) that properly apply to natural things. The only way in which we are able to account for what makes us human in practical (as opposed to empirical) terms is by evaluating our words and deeds according to the moral principle that supports the freedom and equality of all persons.

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Let me add that neither of these arguments—the conventional, modern argument for the persistence of the soul after life or the conventional, modern argument that nothing (but death) succeeds the natural end of life—is found either in the texts of the ancient Greeks or in the Bible (whether Hebrew or Christian)—albeit, for very different reasons. Indeed, the Bible opens by indicating that to return to a state of paradise in which we never die is not an option for us as human beings. In the story of Adam and Eve, after they have eaten of the tree of knowledge and have become “like” God knowing good and evil, the Lord expels them from the garden “lest” they should eat of the tree of life and live for ever.4 The Bible blocks at every turn the attempt to locate the meaning of life—the end of life—in a state of immortal happiness after death. Let the dead bury the dead, Jesus observes, for God is not the God of the dead but the God of the living.5 While the Bible does include concepts of eternal life and of that which does not perish—recognizing, however, that all flesh is grass6—the authors of the Bible never suggest that the soul can be known as an object of experience separately from the body. Thus, to read the Bible coherently, we must not confuse the concept of eternal life with an immortal state of happiness located after death.7 Were I teaching a class on the Bible, I would put my point here in the following way: I would challenge my students to find a passage in the Bible that confirmed the existence of an afterlife or that demonstrated a belief in the immortality of the soul on the part of its authors and primary figures. What they would find is that Moses, the prophets, the psalmists, the Preacher, Jesus, and Paul (as well as the apostles James and John) all demand that you choose life, not death, by loving God above all others and your neighbor as yourself.8 Eternal life means that human life, founded upon the knowledge of good and evil, is not bound by or to the exigencies of nature, but that we are free to live all that nature throws our way on the everlasting grounds of love. Eternal life does not mean that we do not die. Rather, it is because human life is not founded on anything natural— because who we are as people is not explicable by anything natural about us—that death becomes truly significant for human beings. As Oscar Cullman points out in his penetrating study of the “radical difference” between the concept of the immortality of the soul that is expounded by ancient Greek philosophers and the concept of the resurrection of the dead that is espoused by biblical authors, the “soul is not immortal” for the authors and figures of the Bible.9 Because the body—comprising all of the appearances of a person’s life—is transformed by the soul or spirit

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through the daily activity of loving one another, the death of the body is not only the death of the body. Rather, as Cullman points out, the death of the body is also the death of the soul: it is the death, the absolute end, of the whole person. Indeed, Cullman observes, “nothing shows better the radical difference between the Greek doctrine of the immortality of the soul and the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection” than putting the death of Socrates and the death of Jesus side by side (25). “Because Jesus underwent death in all its horror, not only in his body but also in his soul… He must indeed be the very one,” as regarded by Christians as the mediator of salvation, “who in His death conquers death itself” (25). He cannot “obtain this victory,” Cullman continues, “by simply living on as an immortal soul, thus fundamentally not dying. He can conquer death only by actually dying…. Whoever wants to conquer death must die; he must really cease to live—not simply live on as an immortal soul, but die in body and soul, lose life itself, the most precious good that God has given us” (25-6). Furthermore, Cullman notes, “if life is to issue out of so genuine a death as this,” a new act of creation is necessary that “calls back to life not just a part of the man but the whole man—all that God had created and death had annihilated. For Socrates and Plato,” Cullman goes on, “no new act of creation is necessary. For the body is indeed bad and should not live on. And that part which is to live on, the soul, does not die at all.” If, however, we want to understand the Christian faith in the Resurrection, we must completely disregard the Greek thought that the material, the body, the corporeal is bad and must be destroyed, so that the death of the body would not be in any sense a destruction of true life. For Christian (and Jewish) thinking the death of the body is also the destruction of God-created life. No distinction is made: even the life of the body is true life…. Therefore it is death and not the body which must be conquered by the Resurrection. (26)

The liberation of life from and through death, as conceived in the Bible, is altogether opposed to the idea that death is the liberation from life, which is the view that Socrates embodies when, as he dies, he tells his friend Crito to sacrifice a cock to the god of healing (Asclepius), for death is a cure for the ills of life.10 For Socrates, as Cullman observes, “Our body is only an outer garment which, as long as we live, prevents our soul from moving freely and from living in conformity to its proper eternal essence…. The soul, confined within the body, belongs to the eternal world. As long

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as we live, our soul finds itself in a prison, that is, in a body essentially alien to it. Death, in fact, is the great liberator” (19-20). “Since,” then, Cullman continues, “body and soul are radically different from one another and belong to different worlds” for the ancient Greek philosophers, “the destruction of the body cannot mean the destruction of the soul, any more than a musical composition can be destroyed when the instrument is destroyed” (20). For Christians, however, who believe in the swallowing up of death through the resurrection of the dead and who also share, Cullman notes, the Jewish concept of creation in which life is created good, “The basic distinction [from ancient Greek metaphysics] lies here. Body and soul are not opposites” (30). For the biblical authors and figures, the spirit constitutes the life of the body—everything that comprises the appearances and the facts of a person’s life: physical, cognitive, and social. The spirit describes the point of view from which we interpret the body when we undertake to account for what these appearances mean for our human relationships. The body or the flesh of “man” becomes the body of God when we interpret our actions, feelings, and words according to the principle of relationship: the golden rule. The spirit is not a supernatural entity but a concept that shows us that who we are as people in our daily practice is not reducible to the immediate facts of our natural lives. Who we are as people, rather, involves and expresses how—on what grounds—we constitute our relationships with others. Death, then, describes the absolute loss of everything that comprises our relationship with another person. But, in recognizing the content of what we lost as absolute, so we also affirm that nothing (no amount of time that passes) can take away from the significance of that person and of that relationship in our lives. Death can and must be recognized as the truly sad—the horrifying and the painful—end of life for the very reason that we do not view death as the end and aim of life. Rather, it is our love for one another that constitutes the end, the aim, the goal of life in and through death. Death is not the liberating end of life. Life—lived on the grounds of absolute love—is the liberating end of death. So Jesus commands his followers not to fear what can kill the body only but to fear what can kill both the body and the soul, what can send both body and soul down to death, to the Pit, to Sheol, to invoke the terms of the psalmists (Matt. 10.28).11 What can kill both the body (flesh) and the soul (spirit) is what Paul calls the law of sin in his letter to the Romans. “For those who live,” Paul reports, “according to the flesh set their minds

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on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, indeed it cannot…” (Rom. 8.5-8). The problem is not the body, the flesh, but setting one’s mind on the flesh according to the “law of sin.” For the flesh is redeemed—created good—when we set our minds on the “things of the Spirit,” the endeavors that we see as and that become good for us when we aim to live our lives according to the law of God: the moral command to treat one another as persons with dignity and not as objects with a price or as instruments to be used or fixed (to invoke Kant once again). To set ourselves free from “the law of sin and death” involves recognizing the ways in which we enslave ourselves to what Kant describes as the principle of happiness: the ideal of happy, pain-free, pleasant, idle, decent, deathless… existence at the expense of ourselves and of our neighbors and thereby recommitting ourselves to the law of God by loving our neighbors as ourselves.12 Indeed, as we shall see in our analysis of Tolstoy’s story, we cannot do both; we cannot commit ourselves both to the principle of happiness and to the commands of God at one and the same time. We cannot serve two masters. Life is wasted when we do not spend our time in the service of loving one another by ensuring that the pleasures of life are mutually enjoyed. Life is wasted when it is spent, instead, in the pursuit of immediate pleasures without fearing the loss of what it is that constitutes our human relations: the loss of which gives death the power to eliminate the significance of our lives. The wages of sin, then—what we get out of life when we subordinate our human relations to the pursuit of diversions and pleasures that are transient and fleeting—are death. Still, what is so redeeming about the power of loving human relations, as the embodiment of the command of God, is that we are able to make use even of the time that we have wasted, that we are able to redeem our wasted time by putting the knowledge that we have wasted our time to good use (as we shall also discover in undertaking to interpret the significance of the final moments of Ivan Ilyich’s life). So Paul sardonically admonishes his readers, as he defends the belief in the resurrection of the dead: “What do I gain if I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised,” he states, parodying the position of his opponents, “‘Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die.’” But do not be deceived, Paul states, bad company ruins good morals, “Come to your

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right mind and sin no more. For some have no knowledge of God,” which he says to the shame of his listeners (1 Cor. 15.32-34). But Paul then equally, and in as acerbic a tone, rebukes those who ask: “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” (15.35) That is, Paul rejects any conception of the resurrection of the body that is based on the categories that we use to conceive of the body. Paul does so, however, by drawing a comparison between the many different kinds of bodies of which he is aware. Yet he shows his readers, through this comparison, that there is no comparison to be drawn between the spiritual body, the body when it is transformed by the life-giving spirit (which, we know, represents the appearances of life when conceived according to moral categories: i.e., the practice of human beings when interpreted according to the moral commands of God), and the body in the flesh. For, Paul states, “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable” (1 Cor. 15.50). All flesh is grass—there is nothing in nature that does not perish. What is perishable about us does not take on, through supernatural means, an imperishable form in a boundless space within never-ending time. Paul echoes, rather, the demonstration of Pascal in the seventeenth century that we are unable to form any true concept of the eternal or the infinite through the categories of space and time that properly apply to our concept of nature or the body: “Nature always keeps repeating the same things—years, days, hours; spaces, too, and numbers are in succession one after another. Thus is formed,” Pascal continues, “a sort of infinity and eternity.” But it is “not that there is in all that anything truly infinite and eternal”; rather, “these finite things are multiplied infinitely.”13 Paul is also advancing the ontology—the concept of existence: of life and death—that Augustine of Hippo presupposes when he indicates in the early fifth century (CE) that there was (and will be) no time when there was (and will be) no time (just as there is no space where there is no space).14 The categories of space and time cannot be used to conceive of what is imperishable. Rather, space and time describe the ways in which we measure what is mortal and perishable (to use Paul’s terms). Yet Paul then indicates, in one and the same stroke, as he carries his argument to its conclusion, that he wants to tell us a mystery. Indeed, he writes, in the twinkling of an eye, we shall be changed. For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on

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immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’ ‘O death, where is thy victory. O death, where is thy sting.’ (1 Cor. 15.51-55)

For, he concludes, “the sting of death is sin and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory” over sin and so over death (1 Cor. 15.56-57). The victory over death describes the “change” of heart and mind through which, in recognizing the ways in which we reduce life to an immediate reflection of the body, we reconstitute our lives by committing ourselves, in all we do, to the law of God, fearing the loss of what it is that constitutes the true significance of life: human relationships.15 The resurrection of the dead is not, to return to Oscar Cullman’s study, “a transition from this world to another world, as is the case of the immortal soul freed from the body; rather it is the transition from the present age to the future. It is tied to the whole process of redemption” (38). I do not want to pretend, however, that the idea that, upon dying, the soul is transferred to another place and time (to “heaven” when it is not damned within the fiery furnaces of “hell”) does not exist within Christendom. There is certainly a belief in an afterlife within Christendom (not to mention certain sects of Judaism). There is also, as any student soon discovers upon first reading Homer’s Odyssey, a portrait of an afterlife put forward in ancient Greek texts. There is not, however, any portrait of an experience of the soul apart from the body given in the Hebrew Bible or in the Gospels (not to mention the epistles of Paul, James, or John). Yet, the authors of these biblical texts resolutely deny that life is thereby in any way meaningless or reducible to its natural traits. Indeed, Cullman does not intend to challenge, in his study, the fact that there is, within Christendom, a belief in the immortality of the soul that is couched in the terms of “resurrection” (in addition to the terms of “eternal life,” “eternal salvation,” “the Kingdom of God,” and “the last judgment”). That fact is certain. But what he does challenge, through an exegesis of key passages in the New Testament, is the assumption that the certainty of this fact is true to the concept of resurrection that is presented in the Bible and that is espoused by early Christians. “The fact,” he observes, “that later Christianity effected a link between the two beliefs” and that ordinarily today the conception of the immortality of the soul is confused with the belief in the resurrection of the dead (by both Christians and non-­ Christians) “has not persuaded me to be silent about what I… regard as

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true; and all the more so,” he continues, “since the link established between the expectation of the ‘resurrection of the dead’ and the belief in ‘the immortality of the soul’ is not in fact a link at all but a renunciation of the one in favour of the other” (7-8). He then puts his point in resounding exegetical terms: “1 Corinthians 15 has been sacrificed for the Phaedo” (8). I raise these comments on the history of death for two reasons. First, I want to note, with Cullman, “how widespread is the mistake of attributing to primitive [i.e., ‘early’] Christianity the Greek belief in the immortality of the soul” (7).16 Neither the God of the Bible nor the soul of the people in the Bible is immortal—when what we understand by immortality is what Pascal describes as the unending multiplication of finite time and space. God and the soul—that which constitutes human existence—are nothing in spatio-temporal terms. The God of the Bible, as portrayed in the Psalms, is deeply concerned with showing human beings that they are nothing—from the point of view that uses the categories of space and time to measure life. For God’s chief concern is to teach and to re-teach his people the hard lesson that, to avoid the pitfalls of death, they must found their existence upon the divine command to love your neighbor (including your enemy) as yourself. Not only, then, is the concept of immortality that is conceived by Paul as the burden of our mortal nature altogether different from the concept of the immortality of the soul in ancient Greek thought. But also the concept of nothingness engendered by the authors of the Bible is altogether different from the concept of nothing—from which nothing comes—conceived by ancient Greek thinkers. For, in the Bible, the understanding of our own nothingness—as but breath, grass, shadows, dreams… within the unending measurements of space and time—follows upon learning that human existence is truly worthwhile as the practice of loving one another. But I also want to point out, as the second reason that I raise these historical issues, that neither of the conventional arguments with which I began my essay is found in ancient Greek texts. There are two options for the ancient Greeks, as Socrates says as he ends the Apology: “either the dead are nothing and have no perception of anything, or it is, as we are told, a change and a relocating for the soul from here to another place.”17 Socrates never chooses between these alternatives.18 Nonetheless, Socrates never doubts the immortality of the soul, for it is evident to all that, because nothing comes from nothing, so nothing ever returns to nothing: “All would agree,” Socrates states as he concludes his argument in the

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Phaedo, “that the god and the Form of life itself, and anything that is deathless, are never destroyed.”19 I want to point out, then, that, for Socrates, the immortality of the soul is entirely natural. Socrates deduces his argument from the concept of nature and the understanding of natural processes that he shares with his fellow Athenians. But what is important to note, to repeat, is that neither the modern argument for the existence of an afterlife nor the modern argument from which it appears to follow that nothing in life is of any meaning or value is found in Plato’s texts. For these arguments, as I have indicated, are based, on the one hand, on the assumption that human beings are not merely natural and, on the other hand, on the assumption that there is nothing that is not natural about the human body. Both of these assumptions are true: they accurately describe the human condition as we understand it today (in modernity). But neither of these assumptions are shared by Socrates. The ancient Greeks’ concept of death bears no resemblance to our own (neither the concept of death put forward by modern thinkers who espouse the paradox that shapes the concept of life found in the Bible nor the misunderstandings of death that follow, with two different results, from the proposed opposition between the divine— as supernatural—and the human—as natural—which shapes the arguments with which I began). For the ancient Greeks possess a wholly different concept of nature, of life, which is divided—in itself—between what moves all things (and is moved by none) and what is moved by all things (and moves none).20 What an understanding of Socrates’ position allows us to do is to sharpen our understanding of the concept of death put forward in Tolstoy’s short story by challenging the misconception, in historical terms, that the authors of the Bible believe in a concept of heaven as a supernatural place outside the space and time of life.21 I want to take up one final passage, then, before turning to Tolstoy’s short story in Part II of my study, through which I am able to provide yet further evidence for my claim that the ancient Greek conception of death (as articulated and embodied by Socrates) is wholly different from our own. Within the Lectures on Fine Art, as Hegel undertakes to distinguish “romantic” or modern art from the classical art of the ancient Greeks and Romans, he observes that we “cannot say that the Greeks interpreted death in its essential meaning.”22 For, he continues, “Neither the natural as such nor spirit’s immediate unity with the body counted for them as something inherently negative, and therefore death for them was only an abstract passing, without terrors and formidability, [or] a ceasing without

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further immeasurable consequences for the dying individual.” The ancient Greeks surrounded death, therefore, Hegel notes, with “cheerful images.” Yet, “on the other hand,” he observes, “death does not gain” for the ancient Greeks “the affirmative meaning” which it acquires for us. For the Greeks “did not take seriously what we call immortality” (522-23). For us, because we view each and every individual as possessing infinite worth in upholding what Hegel views as the principle of modern art—the principle of infinite subjectivity—death is both absolutely negative (involving the “expiry of the soul”) and absolutely affirmative (523). That is, because recognizing (with infinite grief and suffering) the significance of this negation, this loss, involves the affirmation of the principle of subjectivity, the absolute worth of every individual, the pain and work of mourning the death of a loved one demonstrates that what comprises the joy of life for us is our relationships with one another. But what is staggering here is the evidence that Hegel provides for his claim that the ancient Greeks did not interpret death in the same way that we do in not taking seriously “what we call immortality.” For the sole passage that he cites as evidence of the distinction between ancient and modern notions of death is the passage in Homer’s Odyssey in which Odysseus meets Achilles in the underworld (Hades) and congratulates him, Hegel states, “on the grounds of his happiness, greater than that of all those before or after him, because, hitherto honoured as though he were a god, he is now a ruler among the dead.” Achilles responds, “as everyone knows,” by stating: “‘Odysseus should speak no word of consolation for death rather would I be a serf, and, poor myself, serve a poor man for wages, than rule here below over all the shades of the dead’” (523).23 Not only does Hegel’s use of this passage as evidence that the ancient Greeks did not take seriously the concept of immortality demand that we distinguish between the ancient Greek concept of the immortality of the soul and the modern concept of immortality that Hegel views as embodied by the resurrection of Christ. But also Hegel’s use of this passage as evidence for the radical difference between ancient Greek and modern (“romantic”) notions of death challenges our own comprehension of the “essential meaning” of life and death. For Achilles’ response to Odysseus is often cited by scholars today as evidence for what Achilles learned from the Trojan War, what Odysseus learned from his trip to Hades—what death teaches life—and so what we learn from Homer’s Odyssey. What Odysseus learns, we are told, is that peace trumps war and that life trumps death. In other words, Achilles’

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response is routinely used as evidence for demonstrating that we share a common understanding of life and death with Homer and the ancient Greeks (in direct contrast with the purposes for which Hegel is employing this passage). Yet it is seldom asked by commentators today what it is that constitutes peace and life here. It is important to note that the focus of the contrast or comparison in Achilles’ statement is not between life (existence) and death (non-existence), as we suppose when we undertake to interpret Achilles’ remark according to our own worldview. Rather, Achilles focuses, in comparing life and death, on the contrast between ruler (king) and ruled (slave). That is, in Achilles’ retort to Odysseus, the distinction between life and death, better and worse, happy and unhappy depends upon the contradictory opposition between ruler and ruled, master and slave. Life is viewed as “better” by Achilles—who reverses, here, the heroic dictum that it is “better” to rule than to be ruled—within the peaceful state in which one works as the slave of others. To be at peace, to be happy, is to be enslaved to a poor farmhand. For it appears that the life of the slave, at least, is not subject to the same reversals of fortune that plague the lives of kings and heroes (rulers). There is no consolation for the death of a hero—one who seeks to master others—because, in mastering one’s own life by refusing to be mastered by others, one shows oneself to be enslaved, ultimately, to life’s fatal master: death. Achilles, in heroically killing Hector, is fated to be heroically killed prior to the end of the Trojan War. But the awesome implication of Hegel’s use of this passage as evidence for his claim that the ancient Greek notion of death is wholly different from our own is that, because we do comprehend death in its “essential meaning” as the absolute loss and so the absolute affirmation of life, we do not share Achilles’ position: that is, it is not at all evident that we “would rather” choose to become the slaves of others than to die. In the infinite variety of life, there are times when, in defense of life—in standing up for the values that enable us to choose life, not death, and peace, not war— one chooses to brave the consequences that put one in harm’s way, to brave death, rather than succumb to the oppression of others. Still, it is these very values that, in shaping our concept of peace—as the celebration of human freedom, equality, and diversity—also allow us to preserve our integrity in those awful situations in which we are compelled to bear the oppression of others by demonstrating, even silently, that we do so against our will. What an analysis of Hegel’s commentary on the difference between ancient Greek and modern notions of death shows us is that we

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can truly choose life over death and peace over war only insofar as that choice bespeaks our commitment to the freedom of one and all. Thus, Hegel concludes his comments by indicating that “this fundamental principle,” the principle of infinite subjectivity (i.e., freedom), “does not merely affect the fact of death as it comes to man from the side of nature; on the contrary, death is a process through which the spirit,” no longer determined by natural causes, “must itself go in order truly to live.” The reason that death truly leads to life—that death gives birth to life—is not that the soul is reincarnated in a new bodily form. Resurrection is not reincarnation. Rather, the reason that we do not become nothing when we die—as persons whose actions are not determined by natural causes—is that we do not become nothing for those who succeed us. The affirmation of Christ’s resurrection involves acknowledging that death truly leads to life through the work of mourning in which we express the desire to share yet again in the good of the relationship that we enjoyed with the person whom we lost and, therefore, renew our commitment to embodying the spirit of love in life. Hegel does not challenge the concept of death put forward by ancient Greek thinkers (e.g., Homer). However, reading Hegel’s analysis of the difference between ancient Greek and biblical notions of death (and understanding how and why he uses Achilles’ remark as evidence here), challenges us to articulate for ourselves what it means to choose life over death and peace over war. Moreover, learning how to articulate the difference between what we understand today as the “essential meaning” of death and the ancient Greek concept of immortality, further sharpens our understanding of the notion of death—as the way to life—advanced by the authors of the Bible. That is, what I want to point out here, in concert with Hegel, is that the concept of death, and so the experience of death, is not the same for all people at all times. Death is not a ubiquitous experience; rather, death—to know what it means to die as a human being— requires that we probe what we view as the purpose, the point, the origin, the goal… of life. For the purposes of this study, it is important to note the “radical difference” between ancient Greek and biblical notions of death—and life— in order to clarify the history of the values that Tolstoy’s story embodies (and the concepts of life and death that are entailed therein). For it is only insofar as we overcome the mistaken assumption that the Bible embraces the concept of an afterlife that we are in the position to see that Tolstoy’s ending is no more (or less) religious than it is secular.24 It is also insofar as

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we learn to distinguish between biblical and Greek notions of death that we are in the position to account for the set of assumptions that give rise to the dualistic opposition between so-called religious and so-called secular views of life and death in modernity. That is, as I undertook to show in the opening of my study, the common assumption that the divine and the human are opposed—that is, that the divine is supernatural and that the human is merely natural—is contradicted and disproved by the premises upon which the arguments that support these views are based. Tolstoy’s short story is often viewed by commentators as conveying a belief in an afterlife (consistent with Tolstoy’s own conversion to Christianity, notwithstanding his vehement attack against the rituals and institutional hierarchies of the Church, for which he was excommunicated in 1901). Just as often, then, the ending of Tolstoy’s story is ignored or dismissed as inconsistent with the body of the work, in which all life is reduced to meaninglessness by death. Neither of these views, however, can account for the paradox with which Tolstoy’s story ends. As we shall see in Part II of our study, what Tolstoy truly shows us in his short story is that we can account for death (as the limit of life) only when we undertake to view life—and death—according to purely practical or moral (as opposed to any theoretical) principles.

Notes 1. As Kant demonstrates in the Critique of Pure Reason, space and time are not things in and of themselves; they are concepts, rather, that we use to describe the way in which we experience the world through the senses (see Part I of the “Transcendental Doctrine of the Elements,” which Kant titles the “Transcendental Aesthetic”: A19/B33-B73). 2. See the final section prior to the Conclusion of the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, 455-463. 3. It is worth noting that Kant himself directly links his own moral imperative (the categorical imperative) with the moral imperatives found in the Bible. See, for example, the Critique of Practical Reason 5:83, the Grounding 399, and Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason 6:160, where Kant “sums up all duties” by recapitulating the instruction of Matt. 22 to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. 4. Genesis 3.22. For biblical references, I cite the Revised Standard Version, unless otherwise noted. 5. See Matt. 8.22 and Matt. 22.32. Jesus also states, when he is asked when the Kingdom of God was coming in the Gospel of Luke, “‘The kingdom

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of God is not coming with signs that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Lo, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you’” (17.20). 6. Isaiah 40.6. 7. For a focused and comprehensive analysis of the concept of life and death presented in the Bible (in Hebrew and Christian Scripture, in contrast with the concepts of life and death that are found in ancient Greek texts), see Brayton Polka’s book Understanding Death as Life’s Paradox. In Part I of his book, Polka provides an exegesis of the concepts of life (as the reward of walking in the ways of the Lord) and death (as the consequence of failing to uphold God’s commands) in Proverbs, Deuteronomy, the Psalms, and Job, in addition to a critical commentary on Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians and his Letter to the Romans (among other key passages in both Hebrew and Christian Scripture). In Part II, Polka focuses on key works of modern literature (John Donne’s Two Anniversary Poems, Shakespeare’s King Lear and The Winter’s Tale, and Tennyson’s Enoch Arden). Overall, in exposing what it is that constitutes the relationship between the divine and the human in works of sacred and secular scripture, he argues that, “as the sacred Word of the Bible is no less human than it is divine” in voicing the command to love one another (as he shows in Part I), “so the secular word of modern literature is no less divine than it is human” in its “common faithfulness to the covenantal word of creative love” (118). Consequently, he undertakes to show in his study that “we can develop a comprehensive conception of life and so of death solely insofar as we learn to overcome the dualistic (idolatrous) opposition” between the divine and the human and so between theology and philosophy “that continues today to falsify our understanding of not only the secular but also the religious” (viii). I want to acknowledge that my own study of the concept of death (and life) presented in Tolstoy’s short story is critically indebted to the work of Polka, not only to his book on death but also to his numerous other books, essays, and reviews in which he analyzes the relationship between love and death, the divine and the human, theology and philosophy, the Bible and modernity, and the religious and the secular. 8. In Deuteronomy 30, Moses states, “this commandment which I command you this day is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us…?’ Neither is it beyond the sea…. But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.” He continues by calling upon heaven and earth to bear witness that, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice, and cleaving to him; for that means life to you and length of days…” (11-20).

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9. Cullman, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? The Witness of the New Testament, 36; hereafter cited in the text. 10. Plato, Phaedo, 118a. 11. The prophets and the psalmists (together with the authors of the wisdom books Proverbs and Ecclesiastes) repeatedly invoke “Sheol” (“Abaddon” in Psalm 88) in reference to the Pit of death in which life is “no more” (as in Psalm 32). But these authors never provide a portrait of the life of the soul apart from the body or indicate that the soul passes on to another life. Rather, Sheol invariably refers to that which does not exist (i.e., to the extinction of life), reflecting the perishing of those who do not walk in the ways of the Lord by observing his commands. (Those who walk in the ways of the Lord, we are told, do not perish but live—and die—in observing God’s commands.) Indeed, as Brayton Polka points out in his commentary on Proverbs, “Sheol is the shadowy underworld that ancient Israel traditionally associated with the place of the dead (the pit). It was not viewed as hell (i.e., as a place of judgment and punishment). But what is so worthy of note,” he continues, “regarding the invocation in Proverbs of Sheol (or death), in contrast with life, is that its authors never suggest that, at death, individuals pass on to another life” (46). As Robert Alter also notes, in discussing his decision to avoid the term “soul” in translating the Hebrew term Nefesh in the Psalms (which is generally rendered as anima in the Vulgate, St. Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible commissioned in 382 CE), “‘soul’ strongly suggests a body-soul split—with implications of an afterlife—which is alien to the Hebrew Bible and to Psalms in particular. (There are indications of a Hades-like underworld, Sheol, a shadowy realm of non-being into which the dead descend, but this remains far from the distinct afterworld of later Judaism and Christianity.)” (32–3) 12. See Rom. 8.2. In the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant writes, as he undertakes to show how and why the counsels of prudence are unable to serve as principles for human conduct, “the concept of happiness” that prudence aims to attain “is such an indeterminate one that even though everyone wishes to attain happiness, yet he can never say definitely and consistently what it is that he really wishes and wills. The reason for this,” Kant continues, “is that all the elements belonging to the concept of happiness are unexceptionally empirical, i.e., they must be borrowed from experience, which for the idea of happiness there is required an absolute whole, a maximum of well-being in my present and in every future condition. Now it is impossible,” for anyone, however insightful or powerful, “to frame here a determinate concept of what it is that he really wills” (418). It is important to note, however, that Kant also holds that “the distinction of the principle of happiness from that of morality is not, for this reason, at once an opposition between them.” For “practical reason does

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not require that one should renounce claims to happiness but only that as soon as duty is in question one should take no account of them” (Critique of Practical Reason, 5:93). Rather, he argues that, although the concept of happiness cannot be used to determine what constitutes our duty to one another, it is a duty to foster our happiness, both individually and collectively. In short, the experience of happiness is not the problem; the problem arises when we attempt to make happiness into a principle for our actions. (I shall return to my analysis of the relationship between the concept of happiness and morality in Part II of my study.) 13. Pascal, Selections from the Thoughts, #76. 14. Augustine, Confessions, Bk. XI, ch. 13. See also the City of God, Bk. VII, ch. 15. 15. There is, however, a dramatic tension between the abiding concept of love or charity that Paul advocates (as upholding or fulfilling the law) and the opposition between “now” and “then” that he sets out in 1 Cor. 13—“For now we see as in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall understand fully…”—which he replicates in his commentary on the spiritual body that is provided by God in 1 Cor. 15. It is evident, however, that when Paul writes in the beginning of 1 Cor. (4-7) that those who believe in Jesus as the Christ are enriched with all speech and all knowledge “so that [they] are not lacking in any spiritual gift” he renders problematic the apparent opposition between now and then with which he ends. It is also worth noting, then, that the King James Version translates the final verse of 1 Cor. 13 “And now abideth faith, hope, and charity [love], these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (my emphasis). Love never ends, Paul writes (1 Cor. 13.8). And love abides—now. The tension here is consistent with the tension between Paul’s claim that he and his fellow followers of Jesus as the Christ fulfill the law of Scripture (by overcoming the law) and his claim to be at one with Hebrew Scripture. Insofar as Paul sees the overcoming of the “old written code” by the “new life of the spirit” according to an opposition between now and then (whether past or future), he is wrong (Rom. 7.6). For he thus fails to appreciate his own claim that the law is fulfilled whenever the practice of loving oneself and others is embodied in life, whether by old or young, Jew or Gentile. Insofar as Paul understands, however, the overcoming of the old written code as the overcoming of the faithless spirit that is enslaved to the letter of the law (in which the spirit of the code is reduced to its immediate terms, i.e., to ritual observance), he is right. For the miraculous change through which we die to sin, to put it in Paul’s terms, describes the moral transformation through which people who abide in love ever learn how to embody this commitment in new (deeper, richer, ampler) ways, which involves becoming further and further aware of the ways in which

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we err. I read Paul’s comments on the change through which this body takes on the imperishable, thereby becoming the spiritual body, in 1 Cor. 15 not as a change from life to death (as would appear to follow from a purely temporal logic of first and second, old and new, now and then) but from death to life, consistent with Paul’s letter to the Romans, in which he indicates that we, followers of Christ who “were buried with him,” are “raised from death to life” now by embodying the spirit and mind of Christ insofar as we fulfill the law by becoming “obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching” to which we are committed and thereby overcome the power of sin, the law of sin, that serves death (Rom. 6.4-17). (See Rom. 12 for Paul’s touching account of what constitutes faith in Jesus as the Christ, i.e., what constitutes the “standard of teaching” to which he is committed.) 16. In observing the agreement from “intelligent people committed to the principles of sound, scientific exegesis” and from “believers who profess to rely on the revelation in Holy Scripture” that his study on the difference between the death of Socrates and the death of Jesus is “displeasing,” Cullman notes that this “remarkable agreement” shows him “how widespread is the mistake of attributing to primitive Christianity the Greek belief in the immortality of the soul” (6). Indeed, he writes, “We can respect and admire both views…. But that is no reason for denying a radical difference between the Christian expectation of the resurrection of the dead and the Greek belief in the immortality of the soul. However sincere our admiration for both,” he observes, “it cannot allow us to pretend… that they are compatible.” For the “fundamental inspiration,” the spirit, the concept, the origin, the principle and the goal (the end) of the Greek and the Christian conceptions of death is “totally different” (7). 17. Plato, Apology, 40c-d. 18. Rather, he argues in the Phaedo that the argument for the immortality of the soul is the “best and most irrefutable of men’s theories,” for it follows necessarily from the logical rules that constitute the reasoning part of man, though neither he nor any mortal could ever know which of the two alternatives is the case (85d). Still, he observes in the Apology, those who “believe that death is an evil are certainly mistaken… [For] there is good hope that death is a blessing.” If it is a complete lack of perception, then “death would be a great advantage,” like a dreamless sleep unruffled by life’s turmoil (as effected by human desires and aversions). But if “death is a change from here to another place, and what we are told is true… what greater blessing could there be?” For Socrates tells his audience that he will then have the opportunity to question and to examine the dead (including Hesiod and Homer) as he has examined the living, to see “whom among them is wise, and who thinks he is, but is not” (41a-b). (Socrates has previ-

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ously told his audience that what he found upon examining people in life was that human wisdom is worthless and that he is the wisest man in ancient Athens because he, at least, knows that he knows nothing.) Socrates concludes: “Now the hour to part has come. I go to die, you go to live. Which of us goes to the better lot is known to no one, except the god” (42a). 19. Plato, Phaedo, 106d. At the end of the Phaedo, Socrates observes that everything cannot be destructible, for then it would come to be that nothing at all exists. But, he points out, things are—therefore, there must be a form of being (a soul, which shares the Form of life itself) that is indestructible or immortal. In other words, because nothing comes from nothing, nothing—in itself—returns to nothing. Socrates then concludes the Phaedo with a portrait of the soul’s experience after it escapes the life of the body, in which we are told that good men are rewarded and evil men are punished for what they did on earth (113d). Yet, as Socrates has already indicated, (mortal) human beings are ignorant of the (immortal) good. Consequently, the dead are rewarded and punished for what they did in life in ignorance (of the good). 20. The difference between the ancient Greek conception of nature and our modern concept of nature is the difference between viewing nature as a thing in itself (as it was understood by the ancient Greeks) and viewing nature as nothing in itself (which is a modern and, I would argue, a biblical concept). Because nature is viewed as a thing in itself (possessing its own motivating force or principle: nous, logos, anima, psuche) by Socrates and his fellow Athenians, they do not—they cannot—share the idea that the transfer of one’s soul to another place and time after death is super-natural or that it abrogates the laws of nature. Nothing can contradict nature (fate) because nature is not nothing in itself in the ancient Greek world. 21. What we learn when we attempt to revert back to the argument for the immortality of the soul (i.e., to the belief in an afterlife) as wrought in Plato’s dialogues is that there is no going back: the way back is barred to us forever. For Plato (Socrates) does not share the assumptions on which our conventional, modern arguments are based. It follows that neither of the alternatives that Socrates presents in the Apology are options for us today. The choice, therefore, that confronts us today in undertaking to conceive of death is not a choice between Jesus and Socrates (or between the Bible and ancient Greek texts).The choice with which we are confronted is either to distinguish, with Cullman, between the concept of death elaborated by the ancient Greeks and the concept of death illustrated in the Bible or else, in failing to distinguish between ancient Greek and biblical notions of death, to risk repeating the conventional arguments (the rationalizations) that are unable to account for what death means to us

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today. In other words, the critical distinction is not between ancient and modern views. But making this distinction, whether we put it in ontological (existential) or in historical terms, is critical for learning how to clarify our knowledge of the critical distinction that we must make between life that serves death (when it is based on a false notion of existence) and life that, in dying, serves to overcome the sins that sentence life to death by loving one’s neighbor as oneself. That is, the choice with which death confronts us is how—on what basis—we can and must accept life (as involving death). Do we conceive of the purpose of this life as a preparation for the next, that is, for death? Or is there no other purpose but to live for the fleshpots of the hour? Is death natural? Is it unnatural? Is death positive? Is it negative? As we shall continue to see, in denying ourselves the basis for a conception of life that involves dividing existence between supernatural and natural ends, we discover that death can only be truly understood as affirmative (of life) if we recognize death as an absolute loss (of life), that is, as absolutely negative. 22. Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art, 522; hereafter cited in the text. 23. Hegel’s paraphrase of Achilles’ remark, which I cite, is not entirely accurate. In Homer’s Odyssey Achilles replies by stating: “O shining Odysseus, never try to console me for dying. / I would rather follow the plow as thrall [i.e., as slave!] to another / man, one with no land allotted him and not much to live on / than be king over all the perished dead” (Book XI, 488-91). Achilles indicates that he “would rather” become a slave to a poor man, not one who works for wages, than be king over all the dead. 24. I want to indicate that I am not here concerned with Tolstoy’s own understanding—or misunderstanding—of the history of these values that he presents in his critical works, letters, and other works of literature (e.g., “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in which, in the judgment of this reader, Tolstoy fails to provide his readers with a point of view from which to understand the concepts of love, life, and the human that are invoked in his story outside of the false opposition between love as depraved, bestial lust and love as pure spirit that is set out therein). My concern, rather, is to expose the history of values that enables us to understand the paradox of the ending of Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”—and the ending as a paradox.

Part II: The Life and Death of Ivan Ilyich

Abstract  In Part II, I analyze the values that are embodied in Tolstoy’s short story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” Through this analysis, I show that we can comprehend the paradox that confronts us at the end of the story only from a moral or practical (as opposed to any theoretical) point of view. What we discover, consequently, is that the tragedy of death involves the moral transformation through which we renew our commitment to the dignity of human life. I conclude Part II by indicating how and why it follows that the death of Ivan Ilyich is at once religious and secular. Keywords  Religious • Secular • Ivan Ilyich • Tolstoy • Death • Paradox In Part I of my study, I analyzed the common set of assumptions that gives rise to the dualistic opposition between so-called religious and so-called secular views of life and death in modernity. I also undertook to expose the radical difference between ancient Greek and biblical notions of life and death in order to challenge the misconception that the authors of the Bible advance a concept of heaven as a supernatural place outside of the space and time of life. We learned not only that the dualism between supernatural (divine) ends and natural (human) ends does not account for the concepts of life and death presented in the Bible (in which God’s chosen people are commanded to choose life by loving one another), but also © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Hoult, The Liberation of Life through Death, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07616-9_2

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that this dualism is contradicted by the true premises that found our modern views of life and death. In Part II, I shall analyze the values that are embodied in Tolstoy’s short story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” For it is only when we see that the values embedded in Tolstoy’s story are one with the values espoused by the authors of the Bible that we shall be in a position to see why and how it is that the death of Ivan Ilyich is no more (or less) religious than it is secular. I shall also undertake to show, then, that we can comprehend the paradox that confronts us at the end of the story only from a moral or practical (as opposed to any theoretical) point of view. Consequently, the exercise of reading Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” demands that we, as readers, learn to articulate for ourselves what it means to liberate life through death. What we shall learn is that the tragedy of death involves the moral transformation through which we renew our commitment to the dignity of human life. Tolstoy begins his story at the end—with life after death. He begins with Pyotr Ivanovich, a “friend” and former colleague of Ivan Ilyich, who reads of Ivan’s death in the newspaper.1 The narrative proceeds to follow Pyotr as he attends Ivan’s funeral. But what is important to note here is how the narrative begins to position its readers. The first thought, we are told, of Ivan’s closest friends “was of what this death might mean in terms of transfers or promotions” for themselves or their acquaintances. Moreover, we are told that, “Apart from the reflections this death called up in each of them about the transfers and possible changes at work [in the office of the Court of Law]…, the very fact of the death of a close acquaintance called up in all those who heard of it, as always, a feeling of joy that it was he who was dead and not I” (2). Already, the reader is on high alert: how do we read, how do we understand the tone of the words “as always”? Does this include me? Does the description of the thoughts and feelings of these friends reflect my own thoughts and feelings? Do I feel joy at the prospect of my friends’ death? How do I respond, as a reader, to the death of Ivan Ilyich? Are my feelings the result of the thought that it is Ivan (a fictional character, surely) who died, not me, as Tolstoy (or, at least, our narrator) says “always” occurs? We then follow Pyotr to the funeral service where he encounters Schwartz, another friend and former colleague of Ivan, who stops and winks at Pyotr, “as if to say: ‘Ivan Ilyich made a botch of it; we’ll do better you and I.’” Pyotr proceeds to the room in which Ivan’s body is lying. He “went in,” we are told, “as always happens, with some perplexity as to

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what to do there” (3). He performs the usual rites and customary greetings to Ivan’s wife. But then he is confronted by Ivan’s dead body and the expression on Ivan’s face: “There was on his face the expression,” our narrator observes, “that what needed to be done had been done, and done rightly. Besides that, there was also in that expression a reproach or a reminder to the living...” (4). Pyotr shakes off this unpleasant reproach with the thought that “this had happened to Ivan Ilyich and not to him, that it should and could not happen to him, and thinking so he had succumbed to a gloomy mood, which ought not to be done, as was obvious from Schwarz’s face” (7). For Schwarz’s look told him: “there were no grounds for this incident to prevent us from spending [the] evening pleasantly” (4). (Schwarz previously told Pyotr to join him for a game of vint— a card game—that evening.) Pyotr thus returns to asking about the circumstances and details of his friend’s death as his method for shirking the thought of his own, as though death and suffering belonged “only to Ivan” and not at all to himself (7). But note the standards of what, in these opening pages, we are told “ought” to be done. According to Pyotr and his friends, one ought never to be gloomy but, instead, to be pleasant, happy, care-free, and unobligated. There is an evident incongruity between the point of view of Pyotr—what he and his friends consider “ought” to be done—and the point of view of the narrator (Tolstoy). But the narrative does not explicitly effect this separation; rather, the narrative slides between the (omniscient) point of view of the narrator and a (first person) account of the consciousness of its characters (without any evident change in tone). The narrative does, however, explicate this separation through the evaluative terms that it uses (as we shall see) when assessing the point of view shared by Ivan and his friends, which presupposes, and thereby introduces, a set of values that directly contrasts with the values that shape Ivan’s life. That is, Tolstoy begins his short story by inviting his readers to share the perspective of his main characters. But the narrative proceeds by undercutting this point of view at every turn. The narrative of Tolstoy exposes the falseness of the position from which it narrates—when narrating the consciousness of Ivan (the values of which are shared by his friends)—by showing us that he is incapable of accounting for death on these terms. So we read, in the opening line of Chap. 2, in which Tolstoy begins to tell the story of Ivan’s life and death: “The past history of Ivan Ilyich’s life,” prior to his final days, “was most simple and ordinary and most terrible” (9). The sobriety of Tolstoy’s prose is intoxicating (consistent with

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the miraculous way in which Jesus intoxicated his listeners, surely, by the sober words with which he spoke about love in celebration of a marriage, turning water into wine). In a single line, Tolstoy indicates, in simple, ordinary prose, that what is simple and ordinary does not serve to provide us with a standard for assessing what is simple and ordinary (everyday actions and life). There is nothing that is exceptional or unordinary in what Ivan does or what occurs to him in his life. He grows up to be the pride of his family (so we are told). He goes to law school and finishes law school. He gets married. There are children. He becomes a magistrate in the Court of Law. He plays cards. Two of his children die (followed by a third). He attends dinners. He gets promoted. He falls off a ladder while arranging drapery. The (seemingly minor) injury to his side proves fatal. Ivan dies. But what is it, then, that accounts for what is so “terrible” about Ivan’s life? Why is it “most” terrible (note the superlative)? In reporting the consciousness of Ivan Ilyich, the narrator goes on to indicate that Ivan considered ease, pleasure, merriment, policy, and decency as approved of by society to be the “very essence” and character of life (13). He “considered his duty all that was so considered by highly placed people,” and not as a subject for his conscience (9). He elected to count official relations, therefore, as important and to discard the human, to discard the human core of his relations, whenever he felt the need to preserve his office or standing. “All the passions of childhood and youth went by,” we learn in the opening paragraphs, “without leaving big traces on [Ivan]; he had been given to sensuality and vanity and—towards the end, in the upper classes—to liberalism, but it was all within certain limits,” limits, as we then discover, that are defined not by conscience but by social convention (“public opinion”) (10, 14). In general, we are told that “Ivan Ilyich’s life went on as he believed it ought to go: easily, pleasantly, and decently.” To do so: “one had to know how to exclude [at work—as a judge in the Court of Law] all that was raw, vital—which always disrupts the regular flow of official business; one had to allow no relations with people apart from official ones, and the cause of the relations must be only official and the relations themselves only official…” (20).2 Here is where we learn why one cannot serve two masters: All relationships involve roles (whether in work, family life, education…). There are no relationships without these roles (together with the officiousness, the duties, the habits, the customs…: in sum, the “paperwork” that our roles require). But there can be no vitality to our relationships—we fail to fulfill the aim or purpose of human relationships—when we found our relations

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upon the performance of these roles (for the purposes of securing our own immediate state of pleasure, instead of becoming responsible for the roles that we play by using those roles in the service and care for one another). To be sure, the point is not that we do not want pleasure or that we ought not to be happy. The point is not to give up on good fortune. Rather, we wish for the good fortune (the health and happiness) of ourselves and others for the same reason that we want to fulfill the moral law: because we love one another. To choose between happiness and morality is, therefore, evil, according to the same principle of morality that we (falsely) attempt to uphold in feigning to choose morality over happiness. The choice, rather, regards what it is that we prioritize: the principle, the duty, of conscience? or happiness? For, as Tolstoy shows us in his story, making happiness—which is incapable of accounting for pain or suffering—the principle of our words and deeds results in treating people as means to be used, as we undertake to avoid the experience of pain or the consciousness of suffering at all costs, and not as subjects with dignity. Ivan’s misstep is “most simple and ordinary.” But its implications are “most terrible.” Ivan serves humanity insofar as this service adds to the pleasantness of his life, which includes the joy and pleasure he experiences from the consciousness of his power over others (as a judge). As our narrator observes, “Ivan never misused his power” as a magistrate, “on the contrary, he tried to soften its expression; but for him the consciousness of this power and the possibility of softening it constituted the main interest and attraction of his new work” (12). Indeed, the consciousness of his power, the possibility of destroying any man he wanted to destroy, his importance, even externally, as he entered the court or met with subordinates, his success before his superiors and his subordinates, and, above all, his skills in pleading cases, which he was aware of—all this was a cause for joy, and, along with friends, dinners, and whist, filled his life. So that generally the life of Ivan Ilyich continued to go as he thought it should go: pleasantly and decently. (15)

His capacity for mercy, for “softening” his judgment, serves as a sign to demonstrate his own superiority and the dependence of others upon him. When we undertake to serve two masters, the official (whose aim is pleasure: happiness) and the human, we use humanity to serve our own ends. Good serves evil. Life serves death—in deadening our human relations.

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Ivan’s relations with his wife are also mired in hateful contradictions. He marries his wife not because he loves her (though she loves him), but because he began to think “that marriage not only would not disrupt” the character of his life—“easy, pleasant, merry, and always decent and approved of by society”—“but would even add to it” (13). As soon as he is married, however, jealousy, illness, obligations, pain… begin to encroach upon his ease: “He realized that marital life—at least with his wife—was not always conducive to the pleasantness and decency of life, but on the contrary, even disrupted them, and that it was therefore necessary to protect himself against these disruptions” (14). With the birth of a child, his daughter, “the attempts at nursing and various failures at it, with illness, real and imaginary, of the child and of the mother, in which it was demanded that he participate, but in which he could understand nothing, Ivan Ilyich’s need to fence off a world for himself outside the family became still more imperative” (14). Thus he views the goal of his relationship with his wife to be estrangement from his family: the goal of his personal relations is not to engage in any personal relations. Amorousness serves (in concealing) enmity. “This estrangement might have upset Ivan Ilyich,” our narrator reports, “if he had considered that it ought not to be so, but by now he took his situation not only as normal, but as the goal of his activity in the family” (15). His goal, therefore, “consisted in freeing himself more and more from these unpleasantnesses and in giving them the character of harmlessness and decency…” (15). So Ivan sets up “screens” in all areas of his life, introducing diversions at work (in discussing familial goings on) and diversions at home by “spending less and less time with his family, and when he is forced to do so,” trying “to secure his position by the presence of outsiders”—all in the name of pleasure and decency (15). But when Ivan is confronted by his imminent demise, he learns that his standards for life are incapable of accounting for death— which is anything but pleasant, happy, care-free, or without obligations. He finds that the way in which he organized his life concealed both his death and his life from him, and he becomes tormented, as he is dying, by the thought that “Something’s not right” (31). I do not want to belittle the difficulty of the task with which Ivan is confronted when death begins to penetrate and so to expose the meaninglessness of his life. For when it occurred to Ivan, “as it often did, that all this was happening because he had not lived right, he at once recalled all the correctness of his life and drove this strange thought away” (47). Here the psychology of Ivan’s life is exposed: It is love that drives him, as it does

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all of us, not to want pain or harm for himself or others. It is also love that drives our desire, as it does Ivan’s, to associate socially with others. How can Ivan have done anything wrong when his constant pursuit is health and happiness? How can Ivan have done anything wrong when he is doing everything that he is told he “ought” to do, when everything he does is correct according to the social norms with which he compares his life? Still, while love is the driving force for avoiding pain and associating with others, it is also love that shows us that “something’s not right” with the solution that Ivan poses to the riddle, to the problems, of existence. It is not as if Ivan does not, in the beginning, feel the pangs of conscience: In law school, we are told that he “committed acts which had formerly seemed to him of great vileness and had inspired a feeling of self-loathing; but subsequently, seeing that such acts were also committed by highly placed people and were not considered bad, he, without really thinking them good, forgot all about them…” (11). There is no mistake, he does nothing bad, when he considers his actions from the point of view of the “highest society.” How is he ever to understand that his worldview—his aims and purposes: the creed by which he lives—is evil when his own standards for good and evil show him that his mistakes are not even mistakes? “‘Maybe I did not live as I should have?’ would suddenly come into his head. ‘But how,’” Ivan then asks himself, “‘if I did everything one ought to?’ he would say this to himself,” our narrator reports, “and at once drive this sole solution to the whole riddle of his life and death away from him as something completely impossible” (47). Tolstoy’s narrative is constantly creating, in reflecting, the conflict of values that torments Ivan by invoking and then hiding the values that show him that he did not live “as he should have.” Ivan commits the sin against the spirit, the mortal sin that is unforgiveable (to recall Matt. 12.32). For his mistake here consists in his denial that he has made any mistakes. Indeed, following his realization that “Something’s not right,” Ivan asks himself again what it is that he wants: to live, he repeats. But to live how? As he did in the days before his illness? As he did when he held sessions in the Court of Law? “‘Court is in session,’” he says to himself, pondering his life. He then suddenly cries out: “‘Here is that court!’” Here is the judgment. Here is the Judge who examines our deeds in the Court of life. “But I’m not guilty!” he says angrily (47). Ivan’s mistake is not a breach of the legal (or social) code. Ivan is guilty for his claim to be innocent (i.e., for substituting the Law of love with the standards by which he lives). Indeed, we make mistakes. But the greatest mistake—the source

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for our constant mistakes—is the act of excusing our mistakes. We even excuse ourselves with the phrase “we all make mistakes.” Boys will be boys, Ivan says as he considers the propriety with which his vile acts in law school had been performed. In other words, even our “mistakes” can be used as excuses for not overcoming our mistakes. Ivan’s sin is unforgiveable because he refuses to recognize any need for forgiveness. Still, it is evident from Ivan’s avowal of his innocence that he is not ignorant of the Law before which he stands accused. The evil of the standards for good and evil (for “nice” and “not nice”) by which he lives is fully exposed by the conflict of values that confronts Ivan. He knows that the idea that he did not live rightly—that he did not live according to what is right—shows him that his own statement regarding the “correctness” of his life is incorrect. He is lying. He is deceiving himself. As Ivan gains insight into his own lie, he soon realizes that no one around him, including his doctors, knows or wants to understand what is going on or to feel pity: “They’re playing,” he notes (31). It is this dissembling, this pretense, that Ivan then characterizes as the lie that serves as the main source of his torment as he is dying. All those around him, he observes, “wanted to lie to him about his terrible situation” and its meaning, “and [they] wanted him to participate in that lie…. This dreadful terrible act of his dying, he saw, was reduced by all those around him to the level of an accidental unpleasantness, partly an indecency.” They do so, the narrator then reports, “in the name of that very ‘decency’” that he, Ivan, “had served all his life; he saw,” therefore, “that no one would feel sorry for him, because no one even wanted to understand his situation” (37). Instead, those around him demand—as consistent with the aims and purposes for which they live—that he pretend that he does not want them to trouble themselves for him.3 The only person in Ivan Iyich’s life who does not participate in this lie is Gerasim, a servant in his household who treats him with care and kindness, holding his legs upright to alleviate his pain. Gerasim does it willingly, without begrudging or resenting the task. “‘Why not take the trouble?’” Gerasim asks, expressing by his question that “he was not burdened by his trouble precisely because he was bearing it for a dying man and hoped that when his time came someone would go to the same trouble for him” (38). Tolstoy echoes here the moral principle that is espoused by the authors and figures of the Bible: the golden rule. He also embodies this principle in his description of the feelings that accompany Ivan as he dies. All that Ivan wants is to be “caressed, kissed, wept over”; however,

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because he has surrounded himself with people who share his concern for decency and decorum, there is no one, with the exception of Gerasim (in addition to Ivan’s young son in the final hours before he dies), who allows himself or herself to show Ivan this care (38). Gerasim’s kindness serves to show, with ominous piquancy, the cruelty of the people around him. Following upon a dose of opium and a bout of oblivion, in which it seemed to Ivan, our narrator reports (anticipating the ending) that the people around him “were pushing him painfully into some narrow and deep black sack, and kept pushing him further, and could not push him through,” Ivan wakes up to find Gerasim still sitting (dosing) by his side, holding his feet. He dismisses Gerasim: “He waited only until Gerasim went to the next room, and then stopped holding himself back and wept like a child. He wept over his helplessness, over his terrible loneliness, over the cruelty of people, over the cruelty of God, over the absence of God” (45). Tolstoy puts us on notice that, where and when people are cruel, God is absent. So we read the instruction in 1 John: “Beloved,” the author of the epistle says, “let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God,” that is, he is a child of God, “and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love” (4.7-8). Where love abides, there God is known. “In this,” the author of 1 John continues, “is love perfected with us, that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so are we in this world” (4.17). So God—so love (the principle of relationship)—cruelly shows us where and when we have wasted our lives in the service of all that perishes. So love recalls this thought to mind now, each day, “in this world” as we sit before the judgment of the Court of the Law of life. But what does this mean, then, for our death? Given that “God is love,” that love is God—that the love of God can only be known in and through our love for one another “in this world”—can God, we ask, make it so that we do not die? Love does not have the power—God does not have the power—to make it so that we do not die. But what does it mean, then, that God is able to save those who walk in his ways from death? What does it mean—to return to the theme of my study—to liberate life from and through death given that, rather than eliminate the significance of death in our lives, it is our love for one another that exposes the significance of one’s death? So we come to the finale of Tolstoy’s short story. Before, however, we encounter the miraculous change that occurs at the end of the story, I want to make two further observations about how Tolstoy prepares us to

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understand his ending. First, Tolstoy indicates that logic does not provide us with any grounds for comprehending what it means to die as a human being. Indeed, Ivan knows that he is dying but, we are told, “not only was he not accustomed to it, he simply did not, he could not understand it” (32). Ivan understood the syllogism: Caius is a man; all men are mortal; therefore, Caius is mortal. But, the narrator reports, “this had seemed to him all his life to be correct only in relation to Caius, [and] by no means to himself. For the man Caius, man in general, it was perfectly correct; but he was not Caius and not man in general.” Tolstoy proceeds to narrate the thoughts of Ivan in moving terms: he had always been quite, quite separate from all other beings; he was Vanya, with mama, with papa, with Mitya and Volodya [his siblings], with toys, the coachman, with a nanny, then with Katenka, with all the joys, griefs, and delights of childhood…. Was it Caius who had kissed his mother’s hand like that, and was it for Caius that the silk folds of his mother’s dress had rustled like that? Was it he who had mutinied against bad food in law school? Was it Caius who had been in love like that? ... And Caius is indeed mortal, and it’s right that he die, but for me, Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all my feelings and thoughts—for me it’s another matter. And it cannot be that I should die. It would be too terrible. (32)

There is no man in general (to recall Hegel4). Logical identity cannot account for human identity. For the use of general logic, through which we clarify our terms (according to the law of contradiction), is altogether different from the use of moral logic, which involves thinking about (assessing, justifying) all of our human practices (according to the principle of relationship) and thereby creating what it is that constitutes our identity within our relationships with one another. Second, Tolstoy points out, once again through his description of the thought-processes and experiences of his main character, Ivan, that we cannot conceive of death—or of what it means to die—on scientific or empirical terms. Ivan is visited by many famous doctors of his time and country. But each of them fails to make their patient—Ivan—the focus of their treatment. Instead, they concentrate on his failing organs without paying any heed to the person whom those organs are failing. But this is “not a matter,” Ivan says to himself, “‘of the appendix or the kidney, but of life and… death’” (30). Science can explain everything about how we die. But it cannot account for the “matter” of life and death, for it cannot

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account for what we lose—and gain. No scientific explanation can account for the life of the person who dies—for who they were as a person—or, therefore, for what that person brought to our lives and the absence that we feel when the person whom we loved dies. In other words, no empirical cause for death can ever explain why death—why even the thought of our own death or the death of a loved one—is so painful. There is—and there must be—a mystery surrounding death. But the mystery is not that there are no scientific explanations for how we die. The mystery is that no theoretical explanation—whether wrought in empirical or in logical terms—can ever account for what it means to live and so to die as human beings. As we approach the final scene, we are thus told that Ivan’s physical sufferings “were terrible” but “more terrible than his physical sufferings were his moral sufferings” (50). His moral suffering “consisted in the fact that, looking at Gerasim’s sleepy, good-natured, high-cheekboned face that night, it had suddenly occurred to him: And what if my whole life, my conscious life, has indeed been ‘not right’?” (50) Ivan then begins to survey his life, and he notices that “those barely noticeable impulses he had felt to fight against what highly placed people considered good, barely noticeable impulses which he had immediately driven away—that they might be the real thing, and all the rest might have not been right” (50). We are told earlier that “all the best moments in his life seemed now,” from this point of view, “not at all as they had seemed then—except for his first memories in childhood. There, in childhood, there had been something really pleasant, which one could live with if it came back. But the man who had experienced that pleasure was no more: it was as if the memory was about someone else” (46). For the Ivan Ilyich of today, “all that had seemed like joys melted away and turned into something worthless and often vile… the sensuality, the dissembling! And this deadly service, and these worries about money, and that for a year, and two, and ten, and twenty—and all of it the same. And the further, the deadlier. As if I was going steadily downhill, while imagining I was going up” (46). It is his life, not death, that is “deadly”—that kills him—in stripping him of the opportunity to realize his own humanity in recognizing the humanity of others. Because, however, Ivan does not want to accept the idea that he did not live as he ought to—that he did not live rightly—realizing that this thought exposes the vanity of his whole life—his death remains incomprehensible to him until his final moments. In his final hours, we are told that Ivan’s

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torment “lay in being thrust into that black hole, and still more in being unable to get into it. What kept him from getting into it was the claim that his had been a good life. This justification of his life” prevented him from getting through, from seeing through, from living through death (52). Suddenly, however, he falls through, “and there, at the end of the hole, something lit up. What was done to him,” we are told, “was like what happens on the train, when you think you are moving forward, but are moving backward, and suddenly find out the real direction” (52). In the twinkling of an eye, Ivan’s consciousness is changed in succumbing to the truth of his life. He finds his real direction in learning that everything that he thought he ought to do, everything that he thought right “‘was all not right.’” His life “had not been what it ought” but “it could still be rectified,” our narrator reports. “He asked himself,” then, “what was ‘right,’ and grew still, listening” (52). Ivan then realizes that his young son is kissing his hand weeping and turns to his wife. She is standing open-mouthed with “unwiped” tears streaming down her cheeks. He felt sorry for her. “I must act,” he thought. He then asks his wife to take his son away saying “sorry… for you too….” We are told that Ivan “also wanted to say ‘Forgive,’ but said ‘Forgo,’ and, no longer able to correct himself, waved his hand, knowing that the one who had to would understand” (52). In these short words, Ivan undertakes to alleviate the suffering of his son and his wife. What is staggering is that it is in these words that Ivan penetrates death, he sees through death by seeing that on the other side of death is life, the lives of those who survive him. For, “suddenly it became clear to him that what was tormenting him and would not be resolved was suddenly resolved at once, on two sides, on ten sides, on all sides.” Ivan does not directly answer the question he poses: what is “right”? Instead, he shows us. Ivan is delivered from death in and through the work of caring for the suffering of others, of delivering others from suffering—as he wants to be so delivered. He does what is right. “He was sorry for them, he had to act so that it was not painful for them. To deliver them and deliver himself from these sufferings. ‘How good and how simple,’ he thought” (53). His expression of care and concern for the pain of others serves as the location in which he finds his own life saved (from suffering), redeemed (from sin), and liberated (as we shall see, from death). Ivan is a worker at the eleventh hour. Indeed, Ivan is a worker who joins the labor force but prior to the stroke of midnight. In attempting to ask his wife’s forgiveness, he admits that he is a sinner (one who violated the

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duty to love one another). But it is not insofar as he is a sinner that he is saved (liberated) from death. For, insofar as he is a sinner in serving Mammon, to put it in biblical terms, instead of the law of God (as the law of love), death consumes his life by swallowing up everything for which he lived (just as the good of the lives of those who survive him must consume his cruelty in rendering it all for naught). But it is also not insofar as he is not a sinner that he experiences his liberation. For it is only in finally admitting to himself the error of his ways that he overcomes his sin (of excusing his errors) and, therefore, death. Sin is a demonstration of the holiness of the law (as Paul would say). That is, your understanding of your sin (the particular ways in which you mistreated yourself and others) demonstrates not that you are not holy (or imperfect) but that you—your life and your self—are holy, are perfect, are good in identifying yourself with the commitment to love others as you would want to be loved by them. Ivan then asks himself about his pain: “What’s become of it? Where are you, pain?” He became attentive. “Yes, there it is. Well, then, let there be pain.” “And death? Where is it?” He sought his old habitual fear of death and could not find it. Where was it? What death? There was no more fear because there was no more death. Instead of death there was light. “So that’s it!” he suddenly said aloud: “What joy!” For him all this happened in an instant and the significance of that instant never changed. (53)

There are all sorts of images that we use to comprehend death, including “loss,” “nothingness,” “darkness,” “silence,” “sleep,” “rest,” “the last post,” etc. We cannot do without images. Still, as I indicated in Part I of my essay, we cannot use the categories of space and time (the ways in which we understand natural or finite images: e.g., the natural light of the sun) to understand what we mean when we use these images to capture human life and death. The question, then, is how do we render our (finite) images of death infinite? The “light” that illuminates the end of the story is an image that echoes the “light” that accompanies Ivan’s moral transformation and that he sees at the terminus of the “black hole,” the pit, in which he imagines his death: “Just then,” we read, as Ivan accepts the knowledge of the failure

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of his life, “Ivan Ilyich fell through, saw light, and it was revealed to him that his life had not been what it ought….” (52). The “light” that death sheds on life is neither natural nor supernatural but moral. The image of light that Tolstoy introduces in his final scene describes the moral clarity through which Ivan realizes the end, the purpose, of his life (exposing the total darkness of the false lights that formerly attracted him).5 The expression of joy, then, that accompanies Ivan’s revelation, following his work to alleviate the pain and suffering of his wife and son, is utterly different from the joys that accompanied him in life. He is not looking here at an afterlife modeled on the habits of nature but at the promise of the future embodied in himself and in his own care for humanity through his loving response to human suffering.6 The narrator then (impossibly) reports the final thoughts of Ivan in the moment of his death: “It is finished,” someone said over him. He heard those words and repeated them in his soul. “Death is finished,” he said to himself. “It is no more.”7

So Ivan dies. So the end of the story returns us to its beginning—with the scenes that occur after the death of Ivan Ilyich. But what does it mean, then, that, following upon the instant (and the action) that embodies the moral transformation through which he chooses life, chooses to live, by loving his neighbor as himself, he is liberated from the power of death? He dies, and yet, we are told, death is “no more”? What does it mean that death is “no more” for a person who dies—in living—unto love? How do we understand the death of Ivan Ilyich? Before I undertake to respond to these questions, I want to explore one final and ever so subtle comment in Tolstoy’s story (cited in the narrative above). After Ivan undertakes to alleviate the pain of his son and wife, he attempts to say “forgive” (prosti) but ends up saying “forgo” (propusti), as we saw.8 No longer able to correct himself, we are told, he waved his hand, “knowing that the one who had to would understand” (52). But who is it who understands? Who is “the one who had to”? For Tolstoy began his story by showing us that none of his friends or his wife or his daughter understands the meaning of Ivan’s death. Is the one who understands God? But what, then, does God understand? What do we understand God to understand?

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I expect that my reader has anticipated my point. The one who has to understand, the one who must understand, is the reader: you and I. What we must understand is that we can only forgive both ourselves and others for our improper understanding of life—which breeds our indifference toward one another’s suffering—by forgoing the point of view of Ivan and his wife. To forgo sin is to ask and to receive forgiveness. Understanding, then, the paradox, which constitutes Ivan’s life as he dies, rests squarely on the shoulders of Tolstoy’s readers. The final scene is written for no one else but the reader (the narrative impossibly relating thoughts that Ivan does not communicate to anyone present). But what we must understand, as Tolstoy makes clear, is that death can be put to death—death is “finished”—only by embodying the spirit of love in life. Still, it is in undertaking the task of treating others as one would want to be treated by them—through which we also show them how we want them to treat themselves—that one’s death becomes an absolute loss. It is in embodying the spirit of love in life that we show one another that people are irreplaceable. Because we recognize that each and every person is irreplaceable—as uniquely constituting and uniquely constituted by his or her relationships—death becomes absolutely significant. But what follows is surprising: it is the miracle of life and death. For, in recognizing that a person’s death is absolutely significant (as the death of the whole person: the absolute end of one’s relationship with that person), we discover—lo and behold!—that death can take away nothing from the significance of that person’s life. For it is the memory of how that person loved others in his life—of how he showed me how to love myself—through which we renew our relationships with one another (including others who share in the loss of the person who died). So we read that “the significance” of Ivan’s final moments “never changed.”9 Tolstoy’s short story serves life, therefore, not death. For his story is aimed at the conversion of his readers by challenging and so changing the way in which we view life. As we have seen, Tolstoy invites his readers to share the point of view of his main characters so that we, in recognizing the failure of this point of view to account for the truth of life and death, undertake to distinguish ourselves and our own point of view from the point of view of Ivan (et al.). His story thereby demands that we distinguish between the ways in which our lives serve death (in sacrificing life unto the service of immediate pleasure, decency, or fortune) and the ways in which our lives serve life (by embodying the joyful practices of Ivan’s humble servant, Gerasim, whose actions incorporate the principle of love).

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The exercise of reading Tolstoy’s story shows us, therefore, that what it means to liberate life through death is to forgive ourselves of those instances in which we use the goods of life to inure us, to harden our hearts, to death (human pain and suffering) by forgoing the mortal sin that sentences life to death: the sin that, in pursuing a pleasant, decent, harmless, happy existence, involves ignoring the needs of ourselves and others. To liberate life through death does not mean—it cannot mean— that we do not die (just as Ivan’s liberation does not mean that he does not die at the end of the story or that the feelings of liberation that he experiences are a premonition of the supernatural release of his soul from his body upon death). Moreover, to liberate life through death does not mean that we hold death to be insignificant (just as it does not mean that Ivan holds his death to be insignificant: for it is the significance of his death that reveals to him the true significance, the true meaningfulness, of life). Rather, what we readers are called to show in response to the end of the story—as Tolstoy’s end and aim in writing the story—is that life is liberated from the power of death insofar as, in recognizing that we err (in recognizing the ways in which we sin), we recommit ourselves to the daily task of embodying in our intercourse with one another the command to love God (the principle of love or relationship: in whatever form or image you conceive of it) by loving your neighbor as yourself. While there is a tradition in the scholarship on Tolstoy’s short story in which Ivan’s life and death are compared to the life and death of Jesus, it is important to note that the story of Ivan is not the story of Jesus (as the Christ, the Messiah, for Christians).10 Indeed, it is evident that Tolstoy’s story embodies biblical values. But it is precisely these values that expose the difference between Tolstoy’s story and Jesus’ story (as narrated in the Gospels). The tragedy of Ivan’s life is that the values that he enacts at the end of the story show him that he wasted his adult life (save for a single moment). The tragedy of Jesus’ death is that his life, in embodying these values, exposes the horrendous cruelty of the people who, in transgressing these values, sentence him to death. The miracle of Jesus’ life, then, is that the values according to which he lives are also responsible for the way in which we evaluate his death. That is, while Jesus is not responsible for his murder upon the Roman cross, in fulfilling the promise to be a loving person (as the promise of every child who is born of woman, yet guided—we hope!—by the commands of God) he is responsible for what enables us to see his death as a tragedy (along

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with the death of each and every person). It is love, we can say, that brings death into existence as the practice of mourning the tragedy in which we recognize the absolute loss—and so affirm the absolute dignity—of human life. It is impossible, therefore, for Jesus’ murderers to take anything away from the significance of his life or from the significance of that for which he lived (just as it is impossible for the assassins of our modern social justice activists, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi, to diminish the significance of their lives: what you live for is—always—what you die for). All that we learn, therefore, from a comparison of the motifs, images, and themes that are common both to the story of Ivan Ilyich and to the story of Jesus is that we cannot learn anything about the content of life or death on the immediate basis of these motifs, images, and themes. It is also important to point out, for the purposes of this study, that the transformation of Ivan Ilyich at the end of the story is no ordinary bedside conversion. Indeed, Tolstoy introduces a scene immediately prior to the final scene in which a priest visits and “confesses” Ivan as he lies on his deathbed. But it is evident, after the priest leaves, that it is not the rites that Ivan performs with the priest that liberate him from the power of death. Tolstoy introduces this scene to prevent his readers from understanding the death of Ivan Ilyich, the ending of his story, through the common tropes or motifs of a bedside conversion. Tolstoy also shows us, consequently, that religion—that confession and conversion—is a practice that is not reducible to ritual observance or ceremony. That is, in embodying biblical values, his story of the life and death of Ivan Ilyich is religious. But he also shows us, in exposing the failure of the observance of these rites to account for the values of religion, that these values can only be truly lived in the secular world of the life and death of human beings. Still, the consequences of Tolstoy’s story for our understanding of the relationship between the religious and the secular unravel yet further when we see that secular practices—all of the practices that constitute our life and death—must be understood and evaluated according to the same principle that structures the concepts of life and death found in the Bible (as we have seen). In other words, to understand the end of Tolstoy’s story as secular or in secular terms requires that we invoke the values that are also espoused by the authors and figures of the Bible. What we learn, then, when we see that the secular life and death of human beings (as wrought in a work of modern literature) can be

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comprehended only on the basis of values that are, historically, biblical and that biblical religion can only ever be embodied in the everyday practice of loving one another, is that the ending of Tolstoy’s short story is at once religious and secular.

Notes 1. In his discussion of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” in the Lectures on Russian Literature (posthumously published in 1981), Nabokov notes that “Ivan of course is the Russian for John, and John in Hebrew means, God is good, God is gracious.” He then observes that the patronymic Ilyich, which “means the son of Ilya, [is] the Russian version of the name Elias or Elijah, which incidentally means in Hebrew, Jehovah is God” (236). Nabokov’s comment on how the style of Tolstoy’s narrative proceeds to capture its content (similar to the way in which biblical authors use parallelism) is noteworthy for scholars of Tolstoy. But his reading of Tolstoy’s short story is steeped in the false and falsifying tradition in which the end of the story is seen as conveying the supernatural release of Ivan’s soul (which does not die) from the natural life of the body (which dies). Nabokov states: “The physical death described in the story is part of mortal life, it is merely the last phase of mortality. According to Tolstoy, mortal man, personal man, individual man, physical man, goes his physical way to nature’s garbage can; according to Tolstoy, spiritual man returns to the cloudless region of universal God-love, an abode of neutral bliss so dear to Oriental mystics. The Tolstoyan formula is: Ivan lived a bad life and since a bad life is nothing but the death of the soul, then Ivan lived a living death, and since beyond death is God’s living light, then Ivan died into new life—Life with a capital L” (237). As I undertake to show in Part II of my study, neither the view that Ivan’s mortal life is meaningless nor the view that Ivan’s spiritual life transcends death is adequate, for neither of these views truly accounts for the paradox that confronts readers at the end of the story. 2. In the passage that follows, we read that Ivan became so skilled at separating the official from the human that, “like a virtuoso, he sometimes allowed himself, as if jokingly, to mix human and official relations.” He allows himself this liberty “because he felt himself capable of separating the official when he needed to and of discarding the human” (20). 3. The contradictory ramifications of this lie are captured in an exchange between Ivan and his wife. She asks him to see yet another “famous doctor.” She tells him to do it not for himself but for herself. Ivan reflects: “He felt that this lie surrounding him was so entangled that it was very hard to sort anything out” (42). He continues: “Everything she [his wife] did for him she did only for herself [to prevent her from understanding the impli-

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cations of his death for her own life], and she said to him that she was doing for herself that which she was in fact doing for herself, as if it was such an incredible thing that he would have to understand it inversely” (42). 4. “The object” of private, human interest and activity “is so bound up with man’s will that it entirely and alone determines” one’s resolutions. “It has become the very essence of his volition. For a person is a specific existence; not man in general (a term to which no real existence corresponds) but a particular human being. The term ‘character’ likewise expresses this idiosyncrasy of Will and Intelligence” (Hegel, Philosophy of History, 24). 5. See David Danaher’s essay “Tolstoy’s Use of Light and Dark Imagery in The Death of Ivan Il’ic ̌,” in which he examines the many instances in which Tolstoy uses light-imagery to embody both the true light and the false lights of Ivan’s life, reflecting the conflict of values that Tolstoy’s narrative enacts. 6. In his essay “Tolstoy and the Moral Instructions of Death,” Dennis Sansom provides an illuminating commentary on Ivan’s moral transformation. In the opening paragraph, he writes: “Moments before Ivan Ilyich dies he asks himself, ‘What is the right thing?’ After 45 years of life, 17 years of marriage, five children (three who had died), and a successful legal career, he does not know how to answer the question, and the reason why he does not know how to answer the question reveals the theme of the novella…. It is not until something outside of himself happens to him, as he lies dying in great pain that he can begin to see an answer to the question. The answer comes in the form of empathy for another’s suffering, in particular his schoolboy son Vasya. He realizes the value of his life only by actually caring for another. Compassion for others, the desire and ability to bear and feel [for others’] suffering and their solitude, ironically [i.e., paradoxically] fortifies Ivan to face his own demise. A transfer of the existential ordeal of another’s destiny into our own self-consciousness, into our own self-value, becomes the foundation upon which moral relationships are built” (417). Sansom proceeds to describe Vasya’s kiss in moving terms: “He kisses the hand [Ivan’s hand] that no one else wants to touch…. For Tolstoy, as for Dostoevsky,” Sansom points out, “a kiss unites the body and soul…. Vasya with a kiss had done something for him [Ivan] that the doctors and social conventions could not do for him. In taking pity upon his son, Ivan’s life becomes integrated in the compassion of the moment both from Vasya to his father and from Ivan to his son…. Vasya’s kiss opens the world, the meaning of life, to Ivan. In that tender meeting of body (the lips) and soul (Vasya’s pain and love for his father) Ivan glimpses what connects his present suffering with all of his life, both past and future. Compassion for others provides a chance to integrate a persons’ past to his future [uniting] his with the soul of all others” (426–7). Stephen Carter also aptly describes Ivan’s transformation, consistent with Sansom, when

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he writes in his review of Tolstoy’s short story, “No longer a human cliché, Ivan achieves selfhood in the last few seconds of his life” (16). 7. The final line then reads: “[Ivan] drew in air, stopped at mid-breath, stretched out, and died” (53). Tolstoy never narrates any thoughts or experiences after Ivan dies. He “died.” Full stop. 8. In his essay “The Role of the Ending in Lev Tolstoi’s The Death of Ivan Il’ich,” Gary Jahn notes that “Prosti means ‘forgive;’ propusti means ‘pass through,’ ‘let through,’” which recalls the image of the black bag or sack through which Ivan passes at the end of the story by forgoing the former criteria (the conventions) according to which he viewed his life (235). 9. The description of the “significance” of Ivan’s final moments (including his final act: not dying, but living—in so minimal a way—by loving his neighbor as himself) echoes the earlier passage in which we read that, as Ivan confronts the eventuality of his death, “It was impossible to deceive himself: something dreadful, new, and so significant that nothing more significant had ever happened in his life, was being accomplished in Ivan Ilyich” (16). 10. See William Giraldi’s article “The Way of All Flesh: On Tolstoy and Mortality,” in which he observes that, “Because Ilyich ‘sees the light,’ as the cliché has it, because he comes to comprehend that his existence has been in error, the story amounts to a confirmation of the Christian paradox that one must die in order to live, that one’s true life—true because eternal—begins at death” (215). Giraldi continues: “Scholars have noted, too, that the ending of Ivan Ilyich smacks of Christ’s crucifixion: Ilyich’s final agonizing stretch of three days, his exacerbated inquiry, ‘Why, why do you torment me so horribly?,’ an unambiguous echo of Christ’s famous ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’” He then observes that the literary scholar Victor Brombert “skillfully shows,” in his new book Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi, “how ‘the transition from chapter 6 to chapter 9 [in Tolstoy’s story] closely parallels the transition from the sixth to the ninth hour of the Crucifixion’” (215). See also, for example, Gary Jahn’s essay “The Role of the Ending in Lev Tolstoi’s The Death of Ivan Il’ich,” in which he compares the final statement of Christ in John 19.30 to the statement “It is finished” at the end of Tolstoy’s short story. In observing that the “story’s final chapter implies a connection between Ivan’s demise and Christ’s passion,” Jahn suggests that “Ivan’s escape from the power of death, his ‘rebirth,’ seems quite in place in this context, especially as the appropriateness of the reader’s natural inclination to infer the Resurrection from the Passion is confirmed by the earlier comparison of Ivan to the mythological phoenix” (237).



Conclusion

So we come to the end. We end where we began—with the values, at once religious and secular, that Tolstoy introduces as his story proceeds and that he anticipates (by presupposing) from the beginning by exposing the contradictions involved in Ivan’s point of view. So Tolstoy leaves us, his readers, with the task of incorporating these values into our lives upon reading the end of his story. The task with which we are confronted after Tolstoy’s story ends—after death—involves renewing and reconstituting our relationships on the everlasting grounds of love. But reading Tolstoy’s story also exposes for us, then, the task with which we are confronted in life—before death. There is nothing after death—but life. Both “before” and “after”—both the beginning and the end—become meaningful designations of time within the life of each and every one of us from the point of view that recognizes the dignity of human existence. So the human story gains its continuity, its history, when we view the time of our lives according to what it means for us in our relationships with one another. So our days are bound each to each (as Wordsworth puts it1). So life envelops death—on the eternal grounds of love.

Note 1. In his poem “My Heart Leaps Up.”

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References

Alter, Robert. The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary. New  York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2007. Augustine. Confessions. Translated by R.S. Pine-Coffin Toronto: Penguin Books, 1961. Augustine. City of God. Translated by Marcus Dods. New York: Modern Library, 2000. Bible. Revised Standard Version. Toronto: Penguin Books, 1962. Bible. King James Version. London: Cambridge University Press, 1913. Carter, Stephen. “Tolstoy’s the Death of Ivan Ilyich.” The Explicator 62, no. 1 (2010): 15-16. Retrieved from https://search-­proquest-­com.ezproxy.library. yorku.ca/docview/216776585?rfr_id=info%3Axri%2Fsid%3Aprimo Cullman, Oscar. Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? The Witness of the New Testament. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1964. Danaher, David. “Tolstoy’s Use of Light and Dark Imagery in The Death of Ivan Il’ic ̌.” The Slavic and East European Journal 39, no. 2 (Summer, 1995): 227–240. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/309375. Giraldi, William. “The Way of All Flesh: On Tolstoy and Mortality.” The Virginia Quarterly Review 90, no. 1 (2014): 212–217. Retrieved from https://www. vqronline.org/way-­all-­flesh-­tolstoy-­and-­mortality. Hegel, Georg W. F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. 2 vols. Trans. T. M. Knox. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2010. Hegel, Georg W. F.. Philosophy of History. Translated by J. Sibree. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1991. Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Richmond Lattimore. New  York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1967.

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Jahn, Gary. “The Role of the Ending in Lev Tolstoi’s The Death of Ivan Il’ich.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 24, no. 3 (September 1982): 229–238. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40868015.pdf. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Ed. and Trans. Mary Gregor. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998a. Kant, Immanuel. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by James W. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Inc., 1993. Kant, Immanuel. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Ed. Trans. Allen Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998b. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Russian Literature. Edited by Fredson Bowers. Toronto: Harcourt Books, 1981. Pascal, Blaise. Selections from the Thoughts. Translated by Arthur H.  Beattie. Wheeling, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1965. Plato. Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo. 2nd Ed. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2002. Polka, Brayton. Understanding Death as Life’s Paradox. Newcastle, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019. Sansom, Dennis. “Tolstoy and the Moral Instructions of Death.” Philosophy and Literature 28, no. 2 (2004): 417–429. Retrieved from https://search-­ proquest-­c om.ezproxy.librar y.yorku.ca/docview/43105043/7CA0D2 EF11684FF4PQ/2?accountid=15182. Tolstoy, Leo. “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Toronto: Vintage Books, 2009. Wordsworth, William. “My Heart Leaps Up” in The Works of William Wordsworth. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1994.

Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS 1 Corinthians, 8–11, 19n15 1 John, 31 A Achilles, 14 response to Odysseus, 13, 14, 22n23 Adam and Eve, 5 Afterlife, 10, 12, 16, 36 argument for, 2 Augustine, 9 B Bible, the, 5–6, 10, 11, 23 C Christ, 15, 19n15, 38 Christendom, 10

Conscience, 26, 29 Conversion (bedside), 39 Cullman, Oscar, 5, 10 on Socrates and Jesus, 6–7, 20n16 D Death, see specific topics Dualism, ix, x, 23 E Eternal life, 5–6 F Flesh, 7–9 Forgiveness, 30, 37 prosti, 36, 42n8 Freedom, viii, ix, 3, 14, 15

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

G Gandhi, Mohandas, 39 Gerasim, 30, 31, 37 God, 5, 11, 31 body of, 7 as love, 31 Golden rule, the, 7, 30 H Happiness, 27 principle of, 8, 18n12 Heaven, 10, 12, 23 Hegel, G.W.F., 14, 15 Lectures on Fine Art, 12–13 Hell, 10, 18n11 Homer Odyssey, 13, 22n23 I Images (of death), 35 Immortality of the soul, 5, 10–13, 21n21 Infinite subjectivity, 13, 15 Ivan Ilyich patronymic, 40n1 See also Part II (The Life and Death of Ivan Ilyich) J Jahn, Gary, 42n8, 42n10 Jesus, 5, 7, 19n15, 26, 38 death of, 6 K Kant, Immanuel, 2, 3, 8 Critique of Practical Reason, 3 Critique of Pure Reason, 2 Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, 3, 18n12

King Jr., Martin Luther, 39 Kingdom of God, 16n5 L Letter to the Romans, 7, 20n15 Liberation, vii, 6, 35, 38 Light, image of, vii, 35 Logic, 32 Love, 28, 29, 31, 39, 43 as God, 31 of God, x, 38 of neighbor, x, 5, 8, 11, 38 M Meaning, 3 Moses, 5, 17n8 Mourning, 15, 39 N Nabokov, Vladimir, 40n1 Nature, 3 Greek concept of, 12, 21n20 images of, 4 Nothing, 4, 11 Nothingness, 11 P Paradox, ix, 12, 37 of nature, 3 Part II (The Life and Death of Ivan Ilyich), ix, x, 12, 16, 17n7, 19n12, 23–42 Pascal, 9 Paul (Saint), see 1 Corinthians; Letter to the Romans Plato, 21n21 Apology, 11, 20n18 Phaedo, 11, 12, 20n18, 21n19 Polka, Brayton, 17n7, 18n11

 INDEX 

R Religion, 39 Religious, viii–x, 15, 40 relationship with the secular, 39 Resurrection, 5, 8, 10, 15 S Science (natural), 32 Secular, viii–x, 15, 40 relationship with the religious, 39 Sheol, 7, 18n11 Sin, 8, 10, 30, 35 law of, 7 mortal sin, 38 Socrates, 11, 12, 20n18, 21n19, 21n20, 21n21

death of, 6 Soul, 2, 10, 11, 18n11 Spirit, 7, 8 Supernatural, vii–x, 4, 16 T Theoretical, ix, 33 Tolstoy (as an author), 16, 22n24 Kreutzer Sonata, the, 22n24 Tragedy, 24, 38 W Wordsworth, William, 43

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