Vigils Reading – Office of the Dead

A THEOLOGY OF DEATH

By Karl Rahner1

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The ultimate act of freedom, in which we decide our own fate totally and

irrevocably, is the act in which we either willingly accept or definitively rebel

against our own utter impotence, in which we are utterly subject to the control

of a mystery which cannot be expressed – that mystery which we call God. In

death a human being is totally withdrawn from self. Every power, down to the

last vestige of a possibility, of autonomously controlling its own destiny is taken

away.

Thus the exercise of freedom taken as a whole is summed up at this point

on one single decision: whether we yield everything up or whether everything is

taken from us by force, whether we respond to this radical deprivation of all

power by uttering our assent in faith and hope to the nameless mystery which

we call God, or whether even at this point we seek to cling on to our own

autonomy, protest against this fall into helplessness, and, because of our

disbelief, suppose that we are falling into the abyss of nothingness when in

reality we are falling into the unfathomable depths of God.

On the basis of this it is possible for us to realize that death can be either

an act of faith or a mortal sin. In order rightly to understand this we must

consider (and perhaps it would have been clearer to make this point right from

the first) that the actual act of dying does not necessarily occur at that point in

time in the physical order at which doctors suppose it to take place, and at which

it is considered to take place in the popular estimation when we speak of the

final departure and of death as coming at the end of life. In reality we are dying

all our lives through right up to this, the final point in the process of dying…9

Now this death in life or living death, as it may be called, can become one

of two things: it can be made into an enduring act of faith in the fact that our

lives and destinies are being directed and controlled by another and that this

direction is right; the willing acceptance of our destiny, the ultimate act of self-

commitment to that destiny, a renunciation which we make in anticipation of

our final end because in the end we must renounce all things; also because we

believe that it is only by this poverty entailed in freely accepting our own destiny

that we can free ourselves for the hand of God in God’s unfathomable power

and grace to dispose of us as God wills.

Alternatively, this death in the midst of life can become an act of

desperately clinging on by main force to that which is destined to fall away from

us, a protest, whether silent or expressed, against this death in life, the despair

of one who is avid for life and who imagines that by sinning happiness is

obtained by force. The death that is accomplished in life, therefore, must be

really the act of that loving and therefore trustful faith which gives us courage

to allow ourselves to be taken up by another. Otherwise, it will become the

mortal sin which consists in the pride of seeking one’s own absolute autonomy,

anxiety (Angst) and despair all in one.