The Self Seers (Death and Man), by Egon Schiele
The 20th Century Jesuit theologian, Karl Rahner, is known for many things. Among his many writings, one prominent topic is death and sickness. So Rahner is, in many respects, a perfect interlocutor for our own times, in which sickness, daily disruption and unavoidable confrontation with our own mortality has been traumatic for us at an individual and societal level. My own experience of COVID has been characterised by profound disempowerment: the ways I shaped my days, my identity and my growth have all been curtailed or reshaped by the pandemic. I am isolated in my home, separated from my family, limited in my social life and distracted and limited in the self-expression of work.
But sickness need not be so disempowering. Rahner argues that times of confrontation with sickness and death should be for individual Christians (and so, I would add, for Christian society also) among the most important phases of our lives; an opportunity to anticipate our death, to rehearse surrendering to the grace of the invisible God, and to live life with a renewed hope and energy.
Three sorts of death
In his On the Theology of Death,[1] Rahner outlines a threefold theological anthropology of death.
First, death can be described in existentially neutral terms, as simply a dissolution of the fundamental unity of our body and soul (an anthropology which he admits is firm in the Catholic tradition but sketchy in terms of biblical grounding). He explores ideas about how the soul can be said to meaningfully exist after our death, given that the union of the body and soul is so important to both before our death, and develops a theory of the pan-cosmic soul which is opened up to all reality.
Second, Rahner considers the sense in which death is a negative event: death as the consequence of sin. In this early book Rahner, rejected any notion that death, the result of sin, was caused by human guilt. Sin is not caused by guilt in Rahner's early thought. Rather, he argues that the destiny of human lives is to be brought to consummation in union with God, but that God has given human beings the freedom to decide whether this destiny will be fulfilled. The death in sin is a death in denial of this destiny; of who and what we are at our most fundamental level.This death is the curse that we inherit, left to live with the curse of what Rahner would later call the supernatural existential, our unfulfilled yearning for the fullness of God.
But it can be otherwise, and this is the third kind of death in Rahner's theology: death as dying with Christ; a positive death. Christ achieved the death which Adam would have died if Adam had never fallen; a death truly in surrender to the reality of the human person, in surrender to the destiny of humanity to reach consummation in the fullness of union with God. And so if we die with Christ, we can die as we were meant to: not in denial, but surrendering ourselves to the fullness of divine life which is our destiny.
Sickness, daily death and human freedom
This makes for a powerful theology of the moment of our death. But that moment of decision, surrender and consummation is not limited to the moment of our final surrender into the incomprehensible darkness of God's loving purpose for us. We rehearse this dying with Christ throughout our lives, in the liturgy – in Baptism, Eucharist, Extreme Unction – but also every time we encounter our mortality in sickness. Sickness for Rahner is an "imminent death" and an unjust "expression of sin and the threat which sin contains". Sickness, and our encounter with it, is nothing less than a foretaste of our encounter with dissolution and destruction in death. But this means that it can be two things to us. Sickness can be to us a foretaste of the negative death, of a death with our face turned away from God and ourselves. Or sickness can be a foretaste of the positive death; dying with Christ, with face turned towards the darkness of unknowing which is only dark because the light of God's fullness is too bright to see.
The two ways of human death, Rahner argues, are an expression of our freedom. And so sickness too is an expression of the freedom of the human person to shape our own eternal life; the freedom we have for our moral quality to be of significance. In an essay entitled, "The Liberty of the Sick", Rahner writes:
Liberty is a mystery. In its fundamental character, it is the necessity imposed on man to decide freely for or against the Incomprehensibility which we call God. It is the possibility of letting oneself fall in hope and in unconditional trust into this Incomprehensibility as goal, bliss and human fulfilment. The highest power which liberty has is consummated in the helplessness of death.[2]
In sickness we experience a "mysterious interplay" of activity and passivity: we have freedom to make an active decision for or against our own consummation in God, but that decision is only possible because death and sickness are thrust upon us in ways which we do not control. And this confrontation can itself be a moment of confrontation with our humanity as it really is; an opportunity to surrender to and accept the reality of our existence under God:
Sickness sharpens a man’s awareness of both factors in his life, both that he is in control and that at the same time he is subject to control from without. .... And if he does this, if he accepts his sickness as a single reality involving both action and passion but ultimately a mystery beyond our own personal control, then both the sick man himself and his sickness are in God’s hands. Then the sickness acquires a redemptive value.[3]
In times of sickness, we do not yet have the freedom to ultimately dispose of ourselves by abandoning ourselves into the love of God. Time is still running for us, and only our final death can give us the freedom to make our ultimate decision. But in sickness we can rehearse that final decision. By rehearsing it, we can grow in confidence, in resoluteness and habitual abandonment into the care and love of God. It is not easy, when push comes to shove, to abandon ourselves to the invisible God, and so sickness affords us the opportunity for some practice before the main event.
Empowerment: sickness reveals our reality
At the very general level of the social experience of sickness, Rahner's theology of sickness asks the question, Where do you decide who you really are? You say it is in Christ, but is it really in living the life you can no longer live, with the people you no longer see and being productive in the ways you no longer are? Isn't that really how you have been trying to reach the consummation of your being?
And for me, COVID has also gifted the experience of actually having the virus, of being bedridden, terrified and alone; now recovering slowly but limited in what I can do, and often in pain. So COViD has exposed my piety, my claims to know my identity primarily in Christ, as being naive and largely unfounded. It has asked the rather scary question, "If you found it hard to trust in God now, to abandon yourself in this, how will it be on your deathbed?"
That is the scary and rather brutal aspect of Rahner's theology of sickness: that it asks us, "Where do you actually decide who you really are?" But Rahner does not leave us there in bleakness, in a sense of inadequacy and despair.
First, the goal of Rahner's theology of sickness isn't that we will live "better" lives, or throw ourselves into missionary work in some far-flung place, or that we will cast off our families, our work, our hobbies and our friends. We don't have to earn our consummation by suffering the lack of all the things which bring us fulfilment in life. What we are charged to do is to learn indifference, the Jesuit charism which does not mean not caring, but rather a willingness to accept God's will in all things, a habit of seeing God's grace at work even when the things we cherish are stripped away from us. And if we can learn this, it will be a source of liberty to us: the freedom to live as we really are, as beings enjoying many and varied foretastes of our final consummation in union with God.
And second, this learning abandonment to God is a process which ends in grace. In an essay written late in his life, Rahner considered the importance in old age of reflection on our lives: the shape of our life is not decided until it ends. But he writes:
We old people are not finished with our lives yet. In a true sense everything is still open; only the future will reveal the outcome of life's drama. And everything that is inexorable in the light of the past is subject to the verdict of the God of a love that can transform everything, and who can also change our past life into blessed freedom without having to wipe it out. In his eternity all our time can remain valid and yet be so transformed that our time has been preserved and can then be accepted without regret. To be sure, our hope of this has its source in a faith that is credible only in the light of Jesus Christ and his message. That faith must be proclaimed in the Church over and over again.[4]
It may well be that after years of trying, after opportunities to practice abandonment in sickness, I still cling on to things. I expect I will. But God in grace will accept my attempt to die the death of Christ, because to die calling on his name is, fundamentally, what it means to die in Christ.
For Rahner, sickness is not merely a blip, or a trial to be endured. It is an encounter with ourselves as we truly are, as mortal and under the grace of God. It is a chance to learn to accept this, empowering us to learn to live as we truly are. In this sense, for all its horrors, this time of sickness experienced individually and together can be for us a time of empowerment and life.
Fr Thomas Sharp is a PhD student at the University of Durham and an Anglican Priest serving at Newcastle Cathedral.
[1] Karl Rahner, trans. Charles H. Henkey, On the Theology of Death (London: Herder, 1961)
[2] "The Liberty of the Sick", p.113
[3] "On Proving Oneself in Time of Sickness" in Theological Investigations 7.25, pp.275-284, p.279
[4] "A basic theological and anthropological understanding of old age", in Theological Investigations 23.5, pp.50-60, pp.53-54.