A Good Death. Selected writings from Romano Amerio
This is an introductory article for "A Good Death" section of “The Flying Fish” substack
The Christian conception of death is characterised by two ideas: that death is an act that a man performs; and that death is a moment that decides the whole of a man’s destiny. Both these ideas are set aside and downplayed by contemporary thinking.—Romano Amerio (1905-1997), Iota Unum
(. . .) dying is still an action, and so we need to prepare ourselves for doing it, not for not doing it; we prepare to die, not to be dead.
(. . .) preparation for death includes both hope, and fear at the prospect of meeting God’s judgment; our preparation is hopeful and awesome at once inasmuch as an eternity of bliss or woe depends upon the outcome.—Romano Amerio (1905-1997), Iota Unum
A Good Death
As mentioned previously1, this part of "The Flying Fish" is dedicated to seeking advice on how to die a good death according to Christian precepts.
The Flying Fish hopes to undertake an exploration of poetic, ascetical, theological, and (rarely) philosophical thought on how to ‘die well’, especially the thought pre-dating Vatican II. In the exploration, the works of Romano Amerio fell into my hands. I am a humble admirer, he is a man supreme.
In this article, which begins “A Good Death” series, let us attend to relevant selection of Amerio’s magnificent Iota Unum.2 All selected sub-chapters come from Chapter XL—Theodicy.3
I’m nothing but an ignorant lay man, therefore I shall refrain from commentary. In short, I’d only mention (FWIW) that, to me, those writings are foundational.
Oh, lest I forget. The footnotes marked “TR” are the Translator’s, marked “TG” are (very humbly) mine. All web-links (in red-coloured font) are mine. The unmarked footnotes are Romano Amerio’s.
Thanks for reading The Flying Fish. I kiss you on the mouth.
In die judicii, libera nos Domine.
Tomasz Goetel
the Present Writer
Ibiza, Spain
20 June AD 2023
Death as an evil.
According to the Catholic Faith, death, like the universe in general, has a moral cause, meaning and purpose that Providence will fulfill, even by turning evil itself to that end. But the outstanding feature of the modern attitude to death is the denial of its moral importance, and its removal from the religious context which it has enjoyed in all previous civilizations.
Epicureanism took death as the fundamental problem facing man, and the supposed mortality of the soul as the key to happiness. It took the form of a perpetual struggle against the fear of death, a search for serenity that would overcome that terror which pervades the whole of life in overt or hidden ways and disturbs it at its most profound level. This struggle had a moral purpose for Epicurus, inasmuch as the fear of death as he understood it was fear of an immortality devoid of any sort of moral fulfillment or reward or punishment; an abyss of netherlife inhabited by shades. It was thus the opposite of the Chris- tian vision of the life to come, in which man’s moral life, and indeed the whole universe, attains its fulfillment through the realization of justice. The Epicurean celebration of mortality, inasmuch as it was a denial of a meaningless eternity, can therefore be regarded as a preparation for Christian faith and hope.
The Christian conception of death is characterized by two ideas: that death is an act that a man performs; and that death is a moment that decides the whole of a man’s destiny. Both these ideas are set aside and downplayed by contemporary thinking.
(. . .) The Christian religion teaches that the death of human beings is a penalty for sin; it does not therefore deny the sadness that stems from it; even the Incarnate God felt it.4 But death is also a point at which this life of trial ends, and at which the mixture of goods and evils therefore ceases, and justice is done; that is, there is a definitive conjunction of virtue and happiness, in which the latter is achieved through the perfection of the former.
Preparation for death and forgetfulness of death.
Since death is the decisive point in the whole of a man’s existence, it is a definite act, indeed the supreme act, that a man performs; it is not a mere breaking off, a falling away from individual existence into an undifferentiated non-existence, as happens as a beast falls to earth in a slaughterhouse beneath the butcher’s blow. We have already discussed the moral life as something existing at a particular point in time.[39] What is important here is to emphasize the sovereign importance that Christianity assigns to the act of dying: like all moral acts, it ought to be considered and meditated upon.
This preparation for death is not something that only Christianity teaches; the Platonists used to say meditatio mortis, id est meditatio vitae5, and Stoics and Epicureans looked upon philosophy as an exercise that strips man of his last garment, the most difficult of all to remove, namely the fear of death. So then, itisnot true that the ancient philosophical schools taught men to abandon the consideration of death by losing themselves in pleasure; it is, in fact, the pragmatic approach to life that leads in that direction.
For many centuries, an important part of ascetical teaching was that one should prepare for death, in order to acquire the moral dispositions one needed in order to die well; the ars bene moriendi6 gave rise to a myriad of books great and small used by ordinary people, it was a common theme for sermons and it reached its heights in masterpieces like L’uomo al punto by Daniello Bartoli, and Pascal’s letter to Madame Périer. Until Vatican II, preparation for a good death was a subject treated in manuals of piety and a practice followed by the devout. A “Mass for imploring the grace of dying well” figured among the votive Masses of the old Missal. To keep one’s attention fixed on the idea of death is a difficult exercise that requires a precise technique, since death conflicts with our natural energies and the mind recoils from it, and from the inert and motionless quality that is its principal accompaniment. Nonetheless, Christianity requires us to make this effort to prepare for death, inasmuch as a Christian’s death is an action, not simply a ceasing of action. The Epicureans tried to deny that death had any contact with man. The Jacobins put the same idea in the famous couplet: Pourquoi pour la mort tant de cris superflus? Tu es, elle nest pas; elle est, tu n’es plus.7 But in fact the idea of death is part of the idea of man’s total destiny; the old saying chiseled the idea into mens minds: memorare novissima tua et in aeternum non peccabis.8 This right disposition towards death is difficult to acquire inasmuch as we have not experienced death yet, only thought about it; thus, as the Stoics said, we can never know whether we are really prepared for it or not. Spiritual writers insist on the difficulty of dying well and on the need to prepare to do it. The clouding of the mind that often precedes a man’s passing, illusions arising from within or suggested from without and temptations to despair coming from the Evil One all make it difficult to confront death in the right frame of mind.9
An unprepared death. Pius XI.
Sentiat se mori10 was a form of studied cruelty, as intended by the Roman Emperor Caligula in instructions to executioners, but becomes in the Christian sense a grace and a moral duty. Death is the supreme evil for animals, for in them the sensitive principle is not joined to an immaterial, immortal intellectual principle. But it is not the supreme evil for the Christian, since for him both the greatest good and the greatest evil lie beyond the destruction wrought by death.
The outlook of the men of our age has undergone a marked change in this matter; they fly from the consideration of death and remove anything that might remind them of it, because death is for them merely anti-life, a cutting off, a non-being. Every word, idea, gesture or symbol, including even the Cross inasmuch as it signifies suffering; anything that pertains to our ending is removed from social relations with a diligent care fed by a hidden fear. A desire to prepare for death, in order to make sure that one’s last act was consciously and deliberately performed, has now been replaced by a desire for a death of which one isunconscious. That sudden, unprepared death people once abhorred, or even regarded as a punishment, and from which they prayed to be spared in the marvelous litany of the saints, has become what people hope for, and procure, so far as they can, by anesthetics.11 Once upon a time people used to ask: “Did he receive the sacraments? Did he make his confession? Did he forgive his enemies?” but now it is: “Did he know he was dying? Did he suffer?”
This change in outlook involves two convictions: that this life is the whole of life and that what gives value to life is the enjoyment of pleasures; and the consequent conviction that this life is not a preparation or a ripening for a life to come. The two together amount to a belief in Diesseitigkeit, or this-worldliness.
Pius XI told his Maestro di Camera, Mgr Arborio Mella di Sant Elia, that he hoped for a sudden death. He used to pray to St. Andrew of Avellino for the grace of dying thus, which is curious because that saint is usually invoked against sudden seizures. The way the Pope defended his devotion in the face of lively objections from Mgr Arborio is also odd. He said a Christian should always be prepared for death and should not need to get ready for it. It is odd because dying is still an action, and so we need to prepare ourselves for doing it, not for not doing it; we prepare to die, not to be dead.
Death and judgment.
There are many considerations that make death less terrible to the eyes of a believer. Beyond those provided by pagan philosophy, there are others peculiar to the Christian faith: the death of the Incarnate God, the example of the saints, the merit stemming from consenting to die which is what makes a good death, hope for the Kingdom; for these reasons St. Jerome applied to death the words of the Song of Songs: Nigra sum, sed formosa.12 There is something terrible, or at least fearful about death nonetheless, essentially because it leads to an absolute and inevitable judgment upon a man’s works and his faithfulness to the law, whether he has conceived the latter as being merely an absolute, impersonal idea in an abstract system of values, or whether he has seen it as a command coming from a divine Person.13
The Christian’s attitude while awaiting God’s judgment is primarily one of hope which, in Catholic teaching, isa looking forward to the final triumph of perfect justice. This brings with it the happiness of heaven. But this hope, this lively hope, does not remove all uncertainty on man’s part. Though justice and mercy co-exist in God, the point at which they meet escapes man’s understanding. But we do know that virtue must finally be rewarded by happiness; Kant posited the necessity of the immortality of the soul on this ground; and we do know that punishment is just and right, inasmuch as the God who established the moral order cannot be indifferent to its observance. He cannot therefore ordain that obedience and disobedience to it should ultimately come to the same thing.
So a Christian has a lively hope, but it does not exclude uncertainty as to his own eternal salvation. Calvin thought that there was a contradiction in this view, and taught that every Christian must be certain that he is going to arrive at eternal life through the mercy of Christ.14 He says “only he is truly faithful who, trusting in the promises of the divine favor towards him, awaits in advance his eternal salvation, with full certainty.”15 But a solution like this, that attempts to remove all uncertainty from Christian hope, is a mixing up of two elements: faith, which is certain, and hope, which is an anticipation. The two are incompatible, since one cannot hope for something which is certain, and one cannot believe that one will inevitably receive something that is merely hoped for. That God rewards the just with eternal life is a certainty of faith, not an object of hope; the object of hope is that God will reward me specifically. This hope is very real and lively considering the faithfulness and power of the one who promises me eternal life; but it remains a pure hope, that is a waiting in suspense, considering that the promise is conditional upon my behavior.
The element of uncertainty in our hope for salvation is a truth of faith defined by the Council of Trent,16 which taught that man’s will is always changeable during this life and that therefore one is not normally certain of one’s own salvation.
We might allege in support of this doctrine the statement in “Ecclesiastes,”17 “Nor can any tell whether they have earned his love or his displeasure.” Certainly, by consulting his conscience a man can grasp his own moral condition, but an uncertainty is thrown upon his own conclusions by the profundity of the soul which, as the Fathers say, scatet mysteriis;18 it produces apparently humble sentiments that are rooted in pride, loving thoughts that are a disguised hatred, good thoughts that are demons transfigured into angels of light. Well before Freud, these depths of the soul that make true self-knowledge so difficult were known to spiritual writers, who were well aware that unrecognized thoughts and desires can stain and deflect our good intentions. Hence the exercise of purifying one’s motives, that has become common in Catholic ascetical practice. Thus preparation for death includes both hope, and fear at the prospect of meeting God’s judgment; our preparation is hopeful and awesome at once inasmuch as an eternity of bliss or woe depends upon the outcome.
Justice and mercy in Christian death.
Modern theology tends to amalgamate the point of death and the meeting with Christ the Savior, while saying nothing about Christ as judge. Of the two things that make death awe- some theologically, namely that it is a consequence of sin, and the fact that it is the moment of judgment, the latter is only lightly touched upon.
But revelation itself leaves no room for doubt. There is no need to cite the Old Testament, which is full of the terribleness of God’s judgments, whether in this life or in the next. It is enough to recall Christ’s depiction of the last judgment bringing reward or condemnation, or his parables of the foolish virgins or the unprofitable servant, all of which teach a divine rejection of some men.19 The idea of the separation of the reprobate and the elect isvery clearly articulated; sheep and goats, the merciful and the cruel, venite benedicti and discedite maledicti.20 In Hebrews the idea of judgment is no less clearly put; mihi vindicta et ego retribuam and horrendum est incidere in manus Dei viventis.21 It has admittedly always been difficult to keep the balance between hope and fear; generations of men, either beaten down by misfortune or flattered by prosperity, have oscillated between a carefree hope seasoned with awe, and a waking terror shot through with hope. The two ends of the chain ought to be joined in a unified circle.
Fear of judgment is essential to the Christian religion; it has always moved Christian peoples from their innermost depths, and inspired great artistic works; Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, the anonymous Dies Irae, or the baroque ossuaries. Prior to the liturgical changes, the liturgy of the dead was shaped by the notion of judgment, which is the primary reality death brings; the judgment in itself implies neither a favorable nor an unfavorable outcome, it is judgment simply as such that is so awesome. But within that preoccupation the joyful notion of hope had free reign; in Masses for the dead God was asked to give the dead eternal light and over and over again came the phrase quia pius es, “for Thou art faithful”; the Lord was addressed as veniae largitor et humanae salutis amator, indulgentiarum Dominus, as one cui proprium est misereri semper et parcere and cuius misertcordiae non est numerus.22 All of this was united however to the idea of judgment, and in the first of the three Masses for the dead the Gospel is taken from John, chapter five, and announces the judgment at the end of time: Et procedent qui bona fecerunt in resurrectionem vitae, qui vero mala egerunt in resurrectionem tudicit.23
St. Francis of Assisi’s Canticle also shows that the idea of a Christian death contains both hope and fear in that it praises the Lord for “our sister death,” but immediately adds: “woe to those who die in mortal sin” and conversely “blessed are those whom it finds in his holy will.” The prospect of judgment was mentioned in the rite for funerals, but no more than the divine mercy; in the opening prayer of the absolutions following immediately after the Mass it is nobly proclaimed that nobody is justified except by the pardoning grace of Christ, and the prayer says: non ergo eum tua iudicialis sententia premat, sed gratia tua illi succurrente mereatur evadere iudicium ultionis.24 In the responsory Libera me Domine that follows, the grandiose scene of the last judgment, with its passing away of heaven and earth, is certainly fit to astound human hearts and the whole of nature itself, but even in this dies magna et amara valde,25 there comes at last the consolation of eternal light, lux perpetua luceat eis, even though it be on a day of wrath, a dies irae.
Hope often led to a sort of joy in death. In the famous Triumph of Death at Clusone in the Val Seriana, which is one of the most striking displays of the idea of death entertained in the past, in this case the fifteenth century, one of the captions explaining the scene carries the words: O tu che servi Dio di buon cuore; non aver paura a questo ballo venire; ma allegramente vieni e non temire; poiché chi nasce gli convien morire.26
Marginalization of the fear of judgment.
In the post-conciliar mentality, and in the liturgical reform, the idea of death as a judgment or final discrimen is downplayed and is obscured by the idea of eternal salvation; no more appearing for trial, as it were, but an immediate continuity between earthly life and eternal salvation.27 Death is stripped of its two-edged character and presented as an event which brings one immediately into the glory of Christ. Words that allude to judgment, hell or purgatory, which prayers for the dead used to mention without embarrassment, are generally expunged from the new rite. The invocation: In die judicii, libera nos Domine28 was cut out of the litany of the saints. Death is presented as having only one univocal aspect; it is not seen as a meeting with Christ our judge but as being exclusively a meeting with Christ as savior, despite the fact that the Apostles’ Creed says venturus est judicare vivos et mortuos.29 Hence the so-called paschal character of the new liturgy for the dead, the introduction of the Alleluia,30 the expulsion of the Dies irae,31 and the changing of the color of the vestments from black to violet or rose.32
These changes have not been introduced through a concern to give greater emphasis to a particular aspect of a complex reality, but are presented rather as the one true understanding of Christian death which, allegedly, has been rediscovered at last. And of course there is the usual denigration of the historic Church; not content merely with emphasizing hope more than was usual when the idea of judgment was dominant, the innovators go on to assert that to think of judgment at all in connection with Christian death, and thus to regard it with a feeling of awe “is a very feeble sort of Christianity.”33 It is true that the second formulary of Mass for the dead in the new rite uses the eschatological Gospel from Matthew, chapter 25, but the preceding acclamation only mentions the blessed who are called to heaven; in the interpretation of this gospel text given in the people’s Messale dell’assemblea cristiana34 published by the Italian Episcopal Conference, the meaning is reduced to the “coming of Jesus the Messiah-King who transfers his elect from his kingdom to that of the Father.” But the real meaning of the word “elect” is in fact rejected by the new theology of death, because it involves the ideas of distinguishing, passing over, and drawing out of a mass, and so refers to the idea of predestination. The instruction prefixed to the liturgy of the dead in this people’s Missal states that “death is essentially not death, but life, glory, resurrection.”35
This is an illegitimate assertion of identity between two distinct ideas; that of the general resurrection whereby the bodies of all the dead are raised to life, which happens universally without respect to anyone’s moral standing; and that other kind of resurrection whereby faithful souls receive glorified bodies that will live in heaven forever. The resurrection in the general sense is not the result of a judgment about an individual’s merits, but in the limited sense it is; and the alternative to a glorious resurrection, that is, a resurrection of the former sort, is referred to as a second death; but this is not mentioned at all in the Missal in question. The Missal does make a fleeting reference to the need for purification on the part of souls that have been saved, and it gives an inchoate statement of the doctrine of purgatory, without ever using that term although it is the one adopted by the Church; but it makes no mention at all of the possibility of eternal loss. In short, the Four Last Things, death, judgment, heaven and hell, seem to be reduced to two; death and heaven. The history of the Christian religion nonetheless contains thousands of examples of a lucid death, without any exultant expression of hope, but free too of any display of an undue lack of trust in God that would have upset or disturbed life’s end. Rosmini and Enrichetta Manzoni gave examples at their deaths of a Catholic faith of this sort.36
(Last updated: 15 February AD 2024)
TG: At this substack’s navigation menu: the write-up to the section (tab) titled “A Good Death”.
TG: Romano Amerio, Iota Unum: A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the Twentieth Century, Angelus Press, (1996), translated from the Second Italian Edition by Rev. Fr. John P. Parsons. Amerio’s writing of Iota Unum began in 1935 and was published for the first time in 1985. The book is available here. One can learn more about Iota Unum’s Author by reading short texts (much more truthful, perhaps, than the damned wikipedia) here and here.
To Amerio, ‘theodicy’ means the consideration of the divine government of the world, the operations of Providence, and the rational justification of belief; a mixture of natural theology and apologetics.
Cf. Matthew, 26:38 and Luke, 22:44.
TG: Amerio, throughout his Iota Unum, refers readers to additional resources, references, quotes, publications, etcetera. The Author uses “Cf.” (Latin confer) in the sense of “See” and “See also”, and NOT in the sense of “compare,” generally used by others with the implication of a different view. The abbreviation in his text isn’t used in the more modern sense of providing resources that contradict the main argument.
TG: Matthew 26:38 (KJV): “Then saith he unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with me.” Luke 22:44 (KJV): “And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”
“To meditate upon death is to meditate on life.”
“The Art of Dying Well.”
“Why so many unnecessary cries because of death? Where you are, itisnot; where itis,you are no more.”
Ecclesiasticus, 7:40. “Remember your last end, and you will not sin forever.”
Cf. The first section of the third part of Segneri’s, Il Cristiano Istruito, The Christian Instructed.
“Let him feel that he is dying.”
An unforeseen death seemed the summa vitae felicitas, “the crowning happiness of life, to the pagans.” See Pliny, Nat. Hist. VII, 180.
Song of Songs, 1:4. “I am black but beautiful.”
Mer Favreau, coadjutor bishop of La Rochelle, and later Bishop of Nanterre, denies that judgment is a future event, in the book Des évéques disent lafoi de l’Eglise, Paris 1978, in which the French bishops set forth Catholic teaching: Le jugement c’est maintenant. Aussi avons-nous a comprendre et a faire comprendre: c’est notre vie d’aujourd hui qui nous juge, p.275. “The judgment is now. That is what we must understand, and get others to understand: it is our life today that judges us.” The obvious reply is that judgment and the act it is judging cannot exist at the same time.
TR: This was also Luther’s view, and is still held by traditional Protestants.
Cited by Manzoni in chapter VIII of Morale Cattolica, ed. cit., Vol II, p.160. The whole treatment given here is inspired by Manzoni’s teaching.
Session VI. Chapters 12 and 13. Canons 15 and 16.
Ecclesiastes, 9:1-2.
TG: (NIV) “So I reflected on all this and concluded that the righteous and the wise and what they do are in God’s hands, but no one knows whether love or hate awaits them. All share a common destiny—the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not.
As it is with the good,
so with the sinful;
as it is with those who take oaths,
so with those who are afraid to take them.
“It spouts mysteries.”
“Come you blessed” and “Depart you cursed.”
Hebrews, 10:30-31. “Vengeance is mine and I will repay” and “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
“Bestower of forgiveness and lover of human salvation,” “Lord of forgiveness,” one “whose nature it is always to be merciful and to relent” and “whose mercy is beyond measuring.”
“And those who have done good will go into the resurrection of life, but those who have done evil, into the resurrection of judgment.”
“Let not the sentence of thy judgment oppress him, but, thy grace coming to his aid, may he be worthy to escape the judgment of condemnation.”
“Great and very bitter day.”
“O thou that servest God with a good heart,
Be not afraid to come into this dance,
But come thou joyfully and do not fear;
Who’er is born, befits it him to die.”
Connected with this is the new fangled theory that the soul takes on an incorruptible body at the death of each individual, and thus enters into glory no different from that of the Virgin whose earthly body was assumed into heaven. It is just as if everyone had been assumed likewise. It would be a waste of words to spend time going into the absurdity and superficiality of this opinion. It constitutes a denial of the general resurrection of the bodies of the dead that is asserted in the Creed to be an event that will happen in the future at the end of time; it means we are not the same in our risen identity materially (as Christ was); and it abolishes the special privileges of the Blessed Virgin, despite the fact that her special status is expressly referred to in Pius XII’s solemn definition of the Assumption, a reference which the innovators think was out of place or unwarranted. These heretical views are popularized in Catholic papers. See for example S. Vitalini in Giornale del Popolo, 14 August 1982.
“In the day of judgment, deliver us O Lord.”
“He will come to judge the living and the dead.”
This Alleluia is an archaizing restoration. St. Ambrose mentions it.
TR: Still occasionally used; as at the solemn requiem for Pope John Paul I in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem in 1978.
TR: The new Missal introduces violet merely as an alternative to black, but in fact the latter is hardly ever seen. Many bishops and priests now use white, even in countries where black is the traditional color. This is a direct violation of the new Missal’s provisions.
S.Vitalini, Preghiamo Insieme, “Let us pray together,” Lugano 1975, p.19. The Fribourg professor has forgotten about the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, and how Savonarola used to stir Guicciardini (F. Guicciardini, Estratti Savonaroliani, in Scritti, Bari 1936, pp.285 ff.) and how Don Bosco used to move his hearers to groans and cries when preaching about judgment (Memorie Biografiche, Vol. IV, p.421).
Missal ofthe Christian Assembly.
Messale dell’assemblea Cristiana, p.1300.
For Rosmini see the bulletin Charitas, July 1971, p.15 and for Manzoni, Epistolario, ed. cit. Vol. II, p.26.