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Interregnum XI: Mortality
Academic Writing
7 Apr 2015
“Now, then, pain, where are you?” He waited for it attentively.
“Ah, there it is. Well, what of it? Let it be.”
“And death? Where is it?”
He searched for his accustomed fear of death and could not find it. Where was death? What death? There was no
fear because there was no death.
Instead of death there was light.
—Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (133)
Jacques-Louis David’s 1789 painting of The Death of Socrates has etched onto artistic
consciousness an image of the martyred philosopher. In David’s interpretation, Socrates points
heavenward with his left hand; his expression is stern. In the foreground, a youth clad in orange
shades his eyes with one hand and with the other hand holds out the cup of hemlock from which
Socrates shall willingly drink. Of all the characters in the scene, Socrates is the most intrepid.
Figures hasten away, grieving or staring at Socrates in disturbed fascination. The only figure who
will face Socrates directly is the man who sits at the side of the bed, a hand laid upon his
teacher’s thigh.
Socrates is the classic Christ-figure, facing an undeserved death with tranquility. But for
Ivan Ilyich Golovin of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, impending death is
“unfathomable, horrifying” (Tolstoy 121). Ivan Ilyich busies himself with distractions to hide the
fact of his death, and he submits himself to the care of countless prestigious doctors, seeking any
shred of possibility that he might recover. When it becomes apparent that death has at last come
for him, he screams in agony for two whole days.
St. Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthians, presents an alternative to this fear-based
view of mortality: the Christian’s death, though bitter to endure, is the yearned-for mark that an
earthly life has ended, giving way to life eternal. Indeed, Tolstoy shares this realization in the
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final chapter of Ivan Ilyich, allowing Ivan to face mortality with serenity. Ivan’s fear of death
turns into light and bliss (133). Yet Tolstoy’s protagonist remains self-centered until the very last
moment. The vision of mortality depicted in 2 Corinthians 5 is richer, because it lays out the
potential for a redeemed life, not only a redeemed death. Through Christ’s death, the Christian
takes on an immortal life; through Christ’s generous love, the Christian carries out life-giving
ministry towards others.
Investing in the Temporal
For most of his life, Ivan Ilyich glibly pursues ease, pleasure, and propriety. As a law
student he forges his vision of eudaimonia, the good life, making himself “strict to carry out
whatever he considered his duty, and he considered his duty all things that were so designated by
people in authority” (50). He marries Praskovya Fyodorovna, a woman who brings him pleasure
and the approval of his colleagues, though he sees her as a nuisance when her demands during
pregnancy upset his accustomed way of life. Ivan’s natural capabilities allow him to advance in
his career, and he finally achieves the position of judge. The position gives him the authority to
indict and imprison whomever he chooses, a power that delights him (Tolstoy 58).
Despite his successful career, Ivan leads an unhappy life at home: his wife and children
bore to him, continually keeping him from the things he loves most. So he shields himself from
the inconvenience of marriage and fatherhood by attending to official duties and by playing
games of whist with his friends. Ironic in view of the present concerns that stuff his life, Ivan
carries a watch-chain inscribed with respice finem: Latin for “look to the end,” a form of
memento mori (51). Ivan Ilyich is a civil servant who only knows how to serve himself.
After seventeen years of married life, Ivan obtains a salary increase that allows his family
to relocate. Ivan and Praskovya’s marital estrangements subside as they attend in unison to the
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details of interior decorating. But it is Ivan’s very preoccupation with his house that causes his
demise. While standing on a stepladder to hang drapery in his new home, Ivan slips and bumps
his side against the window frame. To Ivan, this is “just a bruise,” but the pain steadily grows
worse, indicating serious internal injury (67). It soon becomes obvious that death is unavoidable.
What good did Ivan’s death serve? The petty means of the death—hanging up curtains—
is humiliating. For all the care they expend on it, the Golovins’ home is “like the homes of all
people who are not really rich but who want to look rich” (70). Ivan’s obsession with home
decoration identifies him as a citizen of earth: he treats his house as an instrument of social
climbing and a welcome distraction from selfless service to his wife. Ultimately, he sacrifices his
life attending to his house and its accoutrements, for he views them as permanent assets.
Tent-Dwelling
But the Christian sees his earthly home as temporary. In 2 Corinthians 4, Paul has
depicted his trying experience of mortality: as an apostle, he has known persecution, perplexity,
and affliction, in a word, death (2 Corinthians 4:8-12). The words of 2 Corinthians 5 come as an
encouragement: “For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a
building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Corinthians 5:1).
Commentator Frank Gaebelein, citing 1 Corinthians 15:35-49, argues that this “building from
God” refers to the glorified bodies that Christians will receive after their death on earth (347).
John Calvin posits that the heavenly building may also refer to “the state of blessed immortality
that awaits believers after death” (67). With either interpretation, Christians can eagerly
anticipate their future inhabitance, for Paul continues: “In this tent we groan, longing to put on
our heavenly dwelling” (2 Corinthians 5:2-3).
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Referring to the life we have in our mortal bodies as tents, Paul reminds the Corinthians
of the impermanence of their current state. The thread of impermanence runs throughout the
Biblical narrative. The Israelites wandered the wilderness for forty years living in tents before
they could enter the land of Canaan. Through the prophet Moses, YHWH prescribed the Feast of
Booths as an embodied reminder of their history (Leviticus 23:42). Tents are the dwellings of
herdsmen and wanderers, and anyone who must leave a site at a moment’s notice. And that is the
nature of the Christian life. The Apostle Peter adjures believers towards a holy life by calling
them “sojourners and exiles” (1 Peter 2:11)—taking a term used to refer to Jews and applying it
to Christians (Barclay 165). Like the Israelites and the early believers after them, the Christian
must continue to be prepared to depart, prepared to die. His true dwelling with the Lord will be
far sweeter.
Thus the Christian has no need to gorge himself on earthly comforts, since he anticipates
with eagerness the coming life in his true home: “For while we are still in this tent, we groan,
being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that
what is mortal may be swallowed up by life” (2 Corinthians 5:4-5).
Preparing for Death
Ivan Ilyich treats his house as his final home and, when that fails, as a screen to obscure
his awareness of death. But the fact of his death—his mortality, which Ivan refers to as It—
pierces through all the screens he erects. As Ivan rearranges a table to perfect his surroundings,
the physical pain returns as an unwelcome reminder of that terrifying, unnamed It.
Ivan has encountered death before, of course, but it has always been abstract or removed.
“It simply was not possible that he should have to die,” he thinks. “That would be too terrible”
(Tolstoy 94). Indeed, Ivan’s view of death before his illness mirrors the perspective his friends
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take when they hear of Ivan’s funeral in the opening chapter. Even his closest colleagues are
concerned with the promotions they might receive, and relieved that it is not they who have died.
As if to up-end the conceits of readers who might be tempted to assume the same posture
of distance, Tolstoy implicates his own readers throughout the narrative structure of the novel.
The first chapter has us contemplate the death of a stranger, a death definitively not ours. As we
follow Ivan through his supposedly happy, pleasant life, we are forced (if we read on) to keep
staring at how mortality disfigures a respectable person. We see this man, an eminent judge,
treated by the doctors with the same callousness and superiority that inhabited his own actions
before his illness. This arbiter of the life and death of others now struggles “as a man condemned
to death struggles in the hands of an executioner, knowing there is no escape” (131).
Ivan must come to know himself as grave-bound, since death is finally happening to him.
And in his vulnerability, his conscience is stirred. “Forgive me,” embarrassed Ivan begs the
butler’s assistant Gerasim, who must empty Ivan’s chamber pot (100). Once the sickness is too
far developed to derive any hope from the doctor’s diagnoses, Ivan reflects for the first time
upon his formerly unexamined life. He looks upon what he regarded as the best moments of his
life, his school, his work, his marriage; he judges that “in public opinion I was moving uphill, but
to the same extent life was slipping away from me” (120). Whereas the Christian groans under
the burdens of this earthly life but rests secure in the knowledge of the future, Ivan has
entertained away all the inconveniences he’s ever faced only to find himself in agony staring into
death.
The vantage point of being near death has stripped away any ability Ivan had to spin
situations to his advantage. Now he must reluctantly admit his guilt—“What if my entire life, my
entire conscious life, simply was not the real thing?” (126). As long as he maintains his own
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conviction of innocence, his moral torment is incoherent and unbearable. As he asks, “What is
the real thing?” the self-centeredness that had stifled him begins to loosen its grip.
In his final minutes, Ivan Ilyich finds the answer: forgiveness. Tolstoy implies that when
Ivan whispers “Forget,” he is praying to God. “He who needed to understand would understand,”
Tolstoy writes (133). In asking forgiveness for his wrong life, Ivan—the convicted judge—is set
at rights with the moral law. Now, his conscience clear, he can face death with Socratic
tranquility. Ivan’s former accustomed fear of death vanishes as he slips into life everlasting. In
Tolstoy’s description, we hear echoes of Paul: “What is mortal may be swallowed up by life” (2
Corinthians 5:5).
Sharing in Death with Christ
Tolstoy bespeaks his Christian vision when he allows Ivan Ilyich’s fear and pain to
dissipate with the word, “Forget.” For peace to descend upon a dying man depends upon some
vehicle to take away the horror inherent in death, since, as Sinclair Ferguson points out, death is
ugly and destructive (Ferguson 183) and the last enemy to be destroyed (1 Corinthians 15:26).
In his undeserved crucifixion Jesus Christ put Death itself to death. Christ partook of the
burdens of mortal humanness so He could substitute for us in the punishment for our wrongliving. As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:19, “In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself,
not counting their trespasses against them.” Victor Paul Furnish adds that the reconciliation
described here is substitutionary, for in Christ implies through Christ’s death (335-6).
Just as The Death of Ivan Ilyich allows us to taste our own death in beholding Ivan
Ilyich’s, Christ invites us to identify ourselves with his death. “One has died for all, therefore all
have died” (2 Corinthians 5:14). All have died, Paul says. Even with Christ’s sacrifice, no one is
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exempt from mortality: all humans suffer either “the death deservedly theirs because of sin . . . or
the death to sin and self that is involved in Christian living” (Gaebelein 351).
Rescued from his sin-earned death (Romans 6:23), the Christian must still mortify his
independent, self-centered life. In exchange, Christ reconciles the Christian to God, and imputes
to him a life imbued with the Holy Spirit—that same spirit that raised Christ Jesus from the dead
(Romans 8:11). In a spiritual sense (“one has died for all, therefore all have died”) the Christian
and Christ share in death together. And they will share in life together as well. John Donne
writes of the triumphant future Christians can anticipate: “One short sleep past, we wake
eternally, / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”
Free to Minister
The life that rises when man’s self-centered, God-less way of life dies is such a radical
rebirth that Paul calls his Corinthian readers “new creations” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Receiving the
love of God and the gift of the Spirit is liberating, for the Christian no longer fears death. He is
no longer bound to the servile aims of ease, pleasure, and propriety that suffocated Ivan Ilyich,
for he has been given a larger task: the ministry of reconciliation.
After inviting his readers to identify with Christ’s death, Paul goes on: “And he died for
all that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died
and was raised” (2 Corinthians 5:15). Granted ransom from a permanent death, the Christian
stands in debt to God. This debt of love fills his sails, reorienting him to share the good news
with others: Death shall be no more! Christ offers pardon freely! “There is no separation from
Christ’s love,” Furnish maintains, “or release from the never-ending debt to manifest that love to
the world” (326).
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Socrates lived as close to his conscience as he knew how and died fearlessly. But for
most, mortality is terrifying. Through work, status, power, and entertainment, we shield
ourselves from experiencing death and the burdens of life. In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo
Tolstoy depicts a man whose willful blindness to mortality—his attempt to treat a temporary
home as a permanent one—speeds his own death. Chained by his own assurance of innocence,
Ivan Ilyich waits until the end of his time to reject his selfishness and become a new creation. In
2 Corinthians 5, Paul commends the Christian to persevere in his mortal body but to yearn for his
eternal home, that gift of immortality granted through Christ’s reconciling sacrifice. Gaze upon
the death of Christ that nullified sin and death’s power over you, Paul urges the Christian, and
with Him put to death your old sinful ways. Spirit-filled, the Christian turns outward, extending
Christ’s invitation of reconciliation to others, for Christ’s sake. An exile from heaven, he still
dwells in a death-shadowed tent, but the light has come. Already Christ has vanquished
mortality.
2490 words.
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Works Cited
Barclay, William. The Letters of James and Peter. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976.
Print.
Calvin, Jean. The Second Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians and the Epistles to
Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. Trans. T.A. Small. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans,
1964. Print.
David, Jacques-Louis. The Death of Socrates. 1789. Painting. The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, NY.
Donne, John. "Death, Be Not Proud (Holy Sonnet 10)." Poets.org. Academy of American Poets,
n.d. Web. 04 Apr. 2015. Ferguson, Sinclair B. The Christian Life: A Doctrinal Introduction. Carlisle, PA: Banner of
Truth Trust, 1981. Print. Furnish, Victor Paul. The Anchor Bible: II Corinthians. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984.
Print.
Gaebelein, Frank E., Ed. The Expositor’s Bible Commentary. Vol. 10. Grand Rapids: Regency
Reference Library, 1976. Print.
The Holy Bible. English Standard Version, n.d. Web. 4 Apr. 2015. Tolstoy, Leo. The Death of Ivan Illyich. Trans. Lynn Solotaroff. New York: Bantam, 1981. Print.