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Ivan Ilyich's death in Tolstoy's novel speaks to more than the certainty and inevitability of physical cessation. Ilyich is dead as the novel opens, and the announcement of his death spreads and envelopes the entire novel. Yet this is not the entire breadth and scope of what the author reveals. Revelation occurs as the novel progresses and Ivan Ilyich's awareness of his wasted life grows. Not only has Ivan Ilyich died, but he has always been dead, and having died, he now lives. To understand the underlying theme of the novel one must consider the cultural and religious world view that influenced Tolstoy, particularly as his beliefs relate to the Russian Orthodox Church.
While Tolstoy was at odds with the institutional power structure, as well as with the Christological theology of Russian Orthodoxy, it would be absurd to suggest that he rejected all presupposition assumptions implicit in Orthodox piety as they relate to issues of life and death. In our own cultural heritage, western Catholicism and Protestantism has fundamentally defined death as a sort of legal punishment, an expression of God's wrath. Death is entrenched within a judicial context; it is a sentence for sin. A gross oversimplification and popular caricature of the historical understanding of death in the West paints an ugly and frightening picture for those who take it seriously. Good people or redeemed people who have faith overcome the punishment of death and go to heaven; unrepentant sinners suffer their just punishment and are cast howling into hell for their evil deeds. Death is the legal sentence of all humanity; some overcome it, others do not.
Since we live in the West it may be a temptation to succumb to a concept of Christian death that has been truncated into these cartoonish images in our post-Christian, postmodern era. It is equally easy to misunderstand Tolstoy's concept of death as we attempt to filter his works through our own cultural and religious misunderstandings, to think that Ilyich's final redemption corresponds to something we once heard Jimmy Swaggart preaching. We may be inclined to assume Tolstoy "cops out" at the end, and grants his suffering, reflective and repentant sinner heaven, much like Dickens's Scrooge turns to good deeds in A Christmas Carol after a few harrowing hallucinations. We do a disservice to Tolstoy, though, if this is our presumption. Ivan Ilyich's repentant frame of mind culminates after three days of screaming, a painful period that is ignited immediately after taking the Eucharist, an allusion that resonates with Biblical significance. The prophet Jonah is brought to a similar repentance after three days in the belly of a fish.
Christ himself predicts his own death and resurrection when he says, .".. as Jonah was three days and nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and nights in the heart of the earth" (Mt. 12: 40). The three days of screaming experienced by Ilyich, wherein "time ceased to exist for him" and he "struggled as a man condemned to death struggles in the hands of an executioner, knowing there is no escape" (131), is a type of purgation. The "black sack" into which he seems to be shoved by an unseen force reverberates with connotations of the grave, the darkening of the ego and its lower passions, the classical death to one's self promoted by ancient Christian mystics. Within this three day period, Ilyich comes to terms with ultimate concerns which he has successfully eluded his entire life. He is silenced by the question: "What is the real thing?" (132).
If his life has been a facade, a mediocre self-justification, where is reality to be found? As he asks the question, there is an implication that Ilyich already recognizes that he has not lived his life with any regard for reality, or in reference to the absolute recognition of life's value and death's certainty. Sobriety comes to Ilyich only at the end, an hour before his life's summation, when he realizes that his entire existence has been spent for nothing, and that his ending will release his family from his own egoistic impulses. Such unselfish thoughts free him, and his repentance is realized. Like the Apostle Paul, who writes, "O death, where is thy sting?" Ilyich asks, "And death?
Where is it? ... he searched for his accustomed fear of death, but could not find it. Where was death? What death? There was no fear because there was no death... Instead of death, there was light" (133).
As he finally passes into the light, someone close by echoes the phrase uttered by Christ in his last hours, "it is all over" (134). Rather than thinking, "now my life is over, my life is finished, " Ilyich thinks, "Death is over, there is no more death" (134). We see from this that ilyich's final realization is that his entire existence has been spent in death's realm. Unlike the scholastic theologians of western Christianity, who emphasize death as the legal consequence of sin, eastern Christianity sees death as an ontological condition and state of existence.
For those in the West, death largely connotes inactivity, the cessation of life. This is not the case in the east. For the Orthodox Christian, death is rather the activity of disintegration, the divorce of realities that are meant to be essentially united. The separation of the spirit and the body at the end of Ilyich's life is thus merely the culmination of a long period of smaller separations; his existence is filled with estrangement: his childhood from adulthood, the lack of communion between he and his wife, the neglect of his family in favor of work, the chasm which exists between his heart and mind. At some point after his early childhood, he begins to gradually experience the effects of spiritual corruption that have marked and charted his adulthood, a corruption that distances him from ultimate personal issues. For the Orthodox, and perhaps theoretically for Tolstoy, death is much more than the cessation of one's earthly existence, but it is also the source of corruption and spiritual myopia.
As Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann writes: "When we see the world as an end in itself, everything in itself becomes a value and consequently loses all value, because only in God is found the meaning (value) of everything, and the world is meaningful only when it is the 'sacrament' of God's presence. Things treated merely as things in themselves destroy themselves because only in God have they any life. The world of nature, cut off from the source of life, is a dying world. For one who thinks food in itself is the source of life, eating is communion with the dying world, it is communion with death. Food itself is dead, it is life that has died and it must be kept in refrigerators like a corpse" (17). This state of continuous disintegration, both material and spiritual, is a central tenet in the contextual world view in which Tolstoy writes.
Therefore, when Ilyich makes his life "an end in itself, " when he becomes a slave to duty and to that which is socially acceptable, and his own self-promotion and well-being also becomes a final objective, his existence suffers. He is dead before he dies, and his whole person from the time of his early adulthood until the moment he understands his life has been wasted is encapsulated in the anguish of his scream. His life spent under the rubric of death's domain, Ilyich's scream penetrates into our own secularized era as well, wherein particulars become final objectives, and we are left without any ultimate reference point which might inform and lend substance to everyday life. The "death of Ivan Ilyich" is not only about the moment he stops breathing, but also the death implicit in his living, and therefore it also connotes the death of his significance. We all die, like Ilyich, and if we only live to live, to create and carve our own meaning into the universe, then life itself becomes ultimately meaningless and painfully insignificant. We are consumed by our own deaths.
We struggle against such an assertion, much like Ilyich struggles as he is shoved into the sack of his insignificance. Ilyich struggles; he visits various doctors but cannot diagnose his illness. he seeks remedies and cures from alternative sources, but finds only temporary relief. He continues to suffer. Pain awakens Ilyich to his need, yet his death is amorphous and inscrutable; the source of his illness is as much spiritual as it is physical.
Each sought-for cure is a smokescreen that shrouds him from the responsibility that coming to terms with eternal issues would imply. He finds himself "half-believing" in a miracle-working icon, yet quickly shrugs off any transcendent solution to his dilemma. Given Tolstoy's aura of Christianity, this rejection should not be overlooked. Ilyich seeks help from human resources but never turns to God for healing, until, perhaps, the very end. Likewise, in our own era we, like Becket's bums, wait for divine intervention while simultaneously shirking responsibility or even belief in anything that transcends our own logical constructs of knowledge. If we are insignificant, we are also no longer responsible for the way we live our lives.
There is no longer any need for Ilyich's self-justification; a life that merely exists is self-justified; meaninglessness is nicely egalitarian. Ivan Ilyich screams in the abyss of his despair; we revel in our newfound license. Ilyich's scream, the three day furnace of purgation, is elicited immediately after he receives the sacrament. For Tolstoy, this also has profound implications. In the West, the Eucharist is denigrated into magical ceremonialism through the scholastic doctrines of Roman Catholics, and is reduced to mere memorialize by Anglicans and Protestants.
In Eastern Orthodoxy, however, the Eucharist is viewed very differently. Partaking Christ's body and blood is the antidote to an existence spent "eating death. " In the Eucharist, the participant willfully eats life. One partakes of spiritual food, bread and wine that has been sanctified and transformed by the life and death of Christ. This transformative action does not end at the altar in church; but all of life, including matter and nature, is also transformed, offered to God in thanksgiving, and sanctified. When Ivan Ilyich receives the Eucharist he, even against his own intuition, expresses an initiative towards that which transcends his own existence and ego. Ilyich's participation in sacramental communion is the pivot of the entire novel.
it has been oddly neglected by western critics, and far too easily dismissed. Tolstoy expresses a belief in the power of the Eucharist; it is Ilyich's expression of faith and thanksgiving which brings him into communion with God. His struggle during the duration of his frantic screaming is redemptive suffering. The final communion he has with light may be contrasted with the disunity and disintegration of his former death.
In other words, Ilyich, who has suffered from the corrupt and dissolute effects of spiritual and physical death, takes communion, and the death of his whole existence is overcome. Communion integrates that which has been disunited; the particulars of his existence are brought into focus in relationship to God, and the sting of death no longer fills him with despair. Rich with the theology of Tolstoy's nominal Orthodoxy, at the moment of Ilyich's physical cessation, death is paradoxically overwhelmed, it is "all over with, " and seeking forgiveness from his family, Ilyich enters into light; in fact, death becomes light. Ilyich dies when he inhales, and we are meant to deduce from this that he exhales again in the dimension of another kingdom, having finally achieved victory over the death of this one.
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Research essay sample on Days And Nights Life And Death
