Truth in Dying: The Perfection of the Virtues in a Dying Christian

This article presents a Thomistic portrait of how the virtues of the Christian life come to their full flowering in the person who is dying in the state of grace. Please note that the article is not only concerned with the infused virtues, but also with the acquired virtues.¹ In the first part of the article, I focus on the general architecture of the virtues and how the nature of the virtues gives them a particular significance when considered in the dying person. In the second part, I focus on the architectonic role of charity in the final perfection of the virtuous human person. In the third part, I explain how charity commands the acts of two particular virtues in the dying person: faith and fortitude.

Part I: The Architecture of the Virtues in the Dying Person

Understanding the mechanics of the full flowering of the virtues in a dying person gives us the clarity with which to recognize how such a person obeys the Lord’s command to be perfect (Matt. 5:48, RSVCE) (ST Ia IIae, q. 55, a. 1, resp.).² The first key point in this regard is that because virtues are habits, their quality in the dying person ought to reflect the utmost actualization of that habit, as the culmination of a life lived in grace.³ The Christian has, ideally, spent a lifetime availing himself of grace in order to carve and shape the imago within, acquiring the habits of various virtues by a life well lived in accordance with upright reason (recta ratio), while simultaneously receiving them as free gifts of the Lord, gifts which remain to be cultivated.⁴ St. Thomas is so adamant that the human being, even in the condition of his fallen state, has the ability to be perfected by cooperation with divine grace, that he justifiably holds to the necessity for the virtues to “sink down” or permeate into the lower sensitive appetites (cf. ST Ia IIae, q. 56, a. 4, resp.).⁵ This is true to such an extent that a dying Christian, far from having given up his lower appetites in his old age, can now hold them in their utmost perfection. Senility does not replace lifelong virtue, for Aquinas: an old Christian man holds his appetites in check and exercises them as appropriate not because he is senile and cannot help it, but because he is virtuous.⁶ The perfection of virtue provides in miniature an example of a much larger theological principle: grace perfects nature, yes, even fallen nature (ST Ia, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2). By way of example: because the charitable man has been given Christ’s own charity to be his own, that man can, by grace, make of his life — even now — a perfect gift of self to God as his highest Good, and to his neighbor as a (potential) sharer in that good (2 Pet. 1:4).

The second key point in this regard is that because virtues are habitus, their exercise — or at the very least, the intent to exercise them — need not be hindered by the ambiguous mental or physical acuity of the dying person. Christian truth takes seriously the radical transformation of a person by grace, such that the new nature need not be destroyed by mere infirmity of body or mind, so long as physical and psychological pain are prevented by grace from harming the good habits of a man’s soul. It is here where Aquinas comes into his own as a specifically Christian thinker about virtue.⁷ Virtues are habits or powers for good human actions in accordance with man’s reasonable, beatific end. As such, virtue and death have an innate affinity for one another, by shaping and determining one another.⁸ A dying Christian can and ought to be, morally speaking, “at the top of his game,” when he knows that he is soon to meet his divine Master face to face. In this regard, Christ is our Exemplar, in that He merited, by His charitable devotion in undergoing the Passion, the reward of His risen glory (ST IIIa q. 22, a. 4, ad 2). Moreover, a Christian’s veritas vitae, the uprightness of his life in accordance with graced reason, is best seen in the retrospective offered by life’s evening.⁹ Thus, the virtuous life is both at prime capacity for actualization, and at prime capacity for self-recognition, at the end of life.¹⁰ The habits of the immortal human soul, by which our virtues are constituted, are not destroyed by death. Just as grace does not destroy but perfects nature, so too physical death does not destroy but perfects the acts of the virtues, so that the good acts they commanded in earthly life can attain their full flowering in the one passing from this world in the state of grace. While it is true that certain of the virtues pass away as distinct habitus when we die, the perfections of soul which they instantiated in life remain.

We should add a note on the Christological density of human virtue in death. Aquinas tells us that, among the created perfections possessed by the human soul of Our Lord, one of them is His quality as our true Friend, a manifestation of His created charity (ST Ia IIae, q. 108, a. 4, sed contra). It is significant that this quality of Christ is nowhere more true than in His Passion, when, as our true Friend, He gives us all good things (cf. ST IIIa, qq. 46–48). The maximal display of friendship in the dying Christ is both the exemplar and efficient cause of the perfection of virtue in us, in dying. When we enter our final agony, we, by grace, really and truly enter into the mystery of Gethsemane, and likewise the mystery of the three hours of darkness during Christ’s final agony on the Cross. Because of this, the virtues displayed by Christ in His final agony — above all, His charity and obedience — actually become ours, because of the physical contact we make with the once-for-all glorified body of Christ in the Sacraments.¹¹ More than this, as the Passion was the occasion, not for a greater charity in Christ, but for its more perfect exercise, given the material element of His body’s torturous immolation, so too when we enter our own death throes, if we have lived the Christian life with perseverance, our virtues will receive the occasion for their most perfect exercise.¹²

If it really is true, as the Angelic Doctor teaches, that the virtues enable a limited but real perfection of human life in via towards the beatific vision, then, necessarily, their interaction with the dying process takes on a particular significance. Those that deny this have not actually understood the res that is the shaping of the human person — intellectually, volitionally, and passionately — and thus have neglected to plumb the full depths of Christian and Catholic teaching on virtue.¹³ The one who does not understand virtue sees only the spontaneity of panic, overwhelming fear, and ultimately of despair in the dying person. The one who understands virtue sees these natural movements of passion, more often than not disordered in the human person, brought as fully as possible under the sway of a stable recta ratio, even and especially in the wayfarer about to reach the end of life’s journey. The one who has spent a lifetime habituating himself to rightly ordered loves, and to rightly-ordered emotional responses to actual evils, finds that divine grace can give him great peace as he dies, and can preserve his interior shaping from the often violent passions of the body’s dissolution — this is the perfection of the acquired virtues. The one who has spent a lifetime frequenting the Sacraments (especially Reconciliation and the Eucharist) finds that the divine Physician can bestow on his soul the gift of final perseverance and the perfection of faith and hope — this is the perfection of the infused virtues. In both cases, we are conformed, really and actually, to Christ, in His laborious life and His torturous death.

Part II: Christic Charity as the Form of the Virtues in the Dying Person

What is true of the substantial union of Christ’s soul with His divinity, and the graced union thereof with the indwelling Holy Spirit, is also true of any human soul, as it approaches the fiery forge of the throne of God, whence it was made, in death: “For the nearer any recipient is to an inflowing cause, the more does it partake of its influence” (ST IIIa, q. 7, a. 1, resp.).¹⁴,¹⁵ Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. restates the same truth in more poetic terms, as such: “Just as bodies fall faster the closer they come to earth, so souls in the state of grace ought to advance faster toward God the closer they come to Him and are drawn by Him. This is realized in the saints toward the end of their lives.”¹⁶ In these few words, Garrigou-Lagrange captures the basic claim of this entire essay. When the human person enters the dying process, his preceding Christian life, including all of his virtues, are perfectly united and crystallized as a completed spiritual masterwork, under the auspices of a single, defining virtue: charity as friendship with God, bringing about a dynamism in man’s soul that propels him forward towards his beloved Master, Who awaits him at the other side of death. Aquinas tells us that the acts of all the other virtues are properly “informed acts,” insofar as charity gives them their tendency or dynamism unto the last end of union with God as beatific, triune Good (ST IIa IIae, q. 23, a. 8, resp.). As such, the fire of charity burning in the soul of the wayfarer in the state of grace “flashes forth” in its informing the acts of every other virtue to move the human person toward his final end (Job 41:18-21; Ps. 18:14; 29:7). In this way, the more wholesome a man’s Christian life is, the more speedily is he impelled, by charity’s commanding the ship of his rational soul, toward that union with his Beloved which can only be accomplished in death.

Insofar as a man has charity, his virtuous acts — acts characteristic of the Christian life and its ability to perfect even a fallen man — actually draw him closer to death, in the sense that, like St. Paul, his intellect and will desire and begin to taste already that mutual indwelling and extasis (cf. ST Ia IIae, q. 28, aa. 2-3), which is the very substance of the beatific vision in Heaven.¹⁷ Charity properly unites us with the End towards which all the other virtues (including even faith and hope), on their own, merely tend.¹⁸ As such, the habitus of charity in the soul of a dying man, in those final moments when it is most proximate to complete and eternal concretization in the visio, activates the powers of all the other virtues in a greater way than at any other moment of life. The fire of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling by infused caritas enkindles the lesser lights of all the other powers to a full burn, the closer the Spirit approaches to the Eternal Sun/Son from Whom He is poured out. If it is true that “grace is caused in man by the presence of the Godhead, as light in the air by the presence of the sun” (ST IIIa, q. 7, a. 13, resp.) at every moment of his Christian life, then we ought to understand that such causality becomes supremely effectual as we approach, temporally, our presence to the Risen Christ in judgment. Like Christ in His own Passion and exitum from this world (ST IIIa, q. 46, a. 4, ad 1), when we die in the state of grace, all of the virtues of our life are burned up by our charity, not in the sense of being destroyed, but in the sense of being sublimated, taken up into a single odor of sweetness to the Father (Eph. 5:2). Thus, in the very act of dying with, in, and through the crucified Christ and His Spirit, we make of our life, now being at once judged and beatified, a pleasing aroma to the Father, a fragrant holocaust of charity, having taken on the fragrance of Christ (2 Cor. 2:15).¹⁹ The timbers of the altar of holocausts from the Old Testament, of which Aquinas speaks in ST IIIa, q. 46, a. 4, ad 1, are, in us, constituted by all the virtues of our Christian life, burned up and divinized in the fire of our own dying charity, a sacramental and ecclesial participation in and extension of Christ’s own paschal and pneumatic charity (ST IIIa, q. 48, a. 2, ad 1).

The dying man experiences his friendship with God as the last thing he can hold on to with any certainty — indeed, as the only thing he can take with him. This certainty, fortified by faith and hope’s clinging to God as First Truth and Omnipotent Mercy, informs all of the infused moral virtues, which in turn empower the psychological formation brought about by the acquired virtues. Charity thus commands the entire moral structure of the Christian life, and this is never more true than when its created flame is about to join the eternal fire of the divine essence (ST IIa IIae, q. 23, a. 4, ad 2). The infused and acquired virtues of fortitude are so formed by a dying man’s charity that he sustains the pains of leaving this world with one singular recta ratio: namely, to do the will of his heavenly Father, to Whom he will be perfected united by his death, and to leave to his loved ones the touching marks of a life of sacrificial love directed to them. The dynamism of charity, whereby the Christian truly possesses the indwelling Divine Persons by the mode of sanctifying grace, while at the same time progressing towards a final and interminable union with the Same, reflects the truth of mortal Christian life, post-Fall: that man must do all his actions, having in mind that he will only go to meet his last end in God by passing through the door of death (ST Ia IIae, q. 1, a. 4, resp.). At every moment of a man’s life, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit impels him towards the final perfection which he will accomplish by dying in a state of grace, with the full complement of the virtues and Gifts.

Part III: Faith and Fortitude As Final Perfections of A Man Rooted in Charity

In the previous section, we looked at the powerful role played by charity in commanding the acts of all the virtues in the dying man. Now, having this background, we can look at specific examples of virtues acting in a charity-filled manner, drawing the dying man to his final perfection — in accordance with the measure of grace Christ wishes to bestow on him.

Faith: By the Light of First Truth, I Approach My Destination

The theological virtue of faith is that by which we grasp He Who is First Truth in Being, through the light He provides as First Truth in Speaking. Faith gives us to actually possess, in a manner appropriate to the status of the viator, the transcendent and simple res which is conveyed by the complex articles of faith, i.e. “I believe that . . .” (ST IIa IIae, q. 1, a. 2, resp.).²⁰ It is difficult to overestimate the propositional status of what the Church holds out to be believed with divine and Catholic faith: the importance of the articles of faith are no less important than their primary analogate, Christ’s own humanity, as it is compared with His divinity. In any case, living faith, animated by charity, gives us to know, as loved, First Truth, Who communicates Himself to us in an utterly gratuitous manner. Without living faith, we either do not know Him at all, or we have a merely human grasp of abstract propositions without connaturally knowing or loving them. The reality described by the Old Testament, whereby the patriarchs and prophets knew the Lord God intimately (Exod. 33:11), has become the Catholic heritage of the entire Christian people, washed clean in the limpid waters of Baptism — this comes about by the infusion of faith, activated by charity.

It is faith’s allowing us to grasp First Truth in Being by grace, as our richest possession (Matt. 13:45–46), that gives it a particular, unique dynamism in the dying Christian. We often affirm, rightly, that there can be no direct knowledge of the essence of God in this life, neither by nature nor by grace. We affirm, by revelation, that God is Trinity, and that His justice and mercy are completely at one: but we do not yet see how these truths hold together in one utterly simple and infinite God. Thus, even the light of theological faith allows us only to see in a mirror dimly, and not yet face to face (1 Cor. 13:12). And yet, by faith, we truly grasp and take possession of First Truth as speaking to us. Though we do not yet see His essence by clear vision, He is present within us in a far greater way than He is present in all things by His essence, presence, and power. Because of this, we can and ought to affirm that as the man possessing theological faith nears his death, his faith becomes more firmly implanted in his intellect by his charity, if for no other reason than that it is about to be transfigured into vision. As it draws closer to, but has not yet arrived at, the vision of First Truth, a man’s faith becomes more firmly strengthened, and it is steeled against the assaults of rebellion against the truth. First Truth draws the man sweetly and desirously, reminding him of the truth of His love, and the utter faithfulness of He Who needs no faith (Jer. 31:3).²¹ It is in the reality of death being, most often, a drawn-out process, and not a simple falling asleep, that the faith of a Christian is proved by his Lord (Super Matt. C.9, L.5, n. 792).²² The merit of a man’s dying with theological (charity-filled) faith in his intellect can most emphatically be seen in the example of those great Saints and Doctors who underwent the dark night of the soul. When the Beloved seems to retreat and withdraws all His sensible affections, it is then that His status as First Truth in Being, Who speaks to us through the Scriptures and by His Church, must be most radically clasped and clung unto. Even if a man feels nothing but dryness amidst the agonies of his exitum from the world (ST IIIa, q. 46, proem.), his loving grasp of theological faith “fulfills the divine promise of salvation . . . entirely transformed by [the Spirit’s] love.”²³

Fortitude: In My Last Agony, I Meet Christ in Gethsemane

Both the acquired and infused virtue of fortitude perfect a man’s ability to withstand evil, rightly ordering the passions that deal with arduous evil (daring, fear, anger) and looking it squarely in the face. Principally, fortitude is concerned with action in the face of death, insofar as the prospect of death appears to a fallen man to be the greatest obstacle to his acting in accord with recta ratio.²⁴ As is to be expected of the realist genius of the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas has the virtue of fortitude seep down into the irascible appetite, while being under the intellectual governance of prudence; thus, the exercise of this virtue is a hylomorphic affair. As one of the final acts of the complete body-soul composite that is a human person (this side of the Parousia) a dying man’s fortitude thus takes on a particular significance. Already, though, from the beginning, fortitude has death in view as its opponent in the agon of Christian living. It is of significance that among the four cardinal virtues, fortitude is the only one to have no subjective parts, no differentiated species. It cannot: there is no special circumstance or class of people exempt from or having a unique relationship to death.²⁵

At the level of the infused virtue of fortitude, a man’s rational rectitude, charity-filled in quality, forms and shapes his irascible appetite, and in particular brings his contending passions under the direction of charity. The infusion of charity-filled fortitude does not constitute a replacement for the acquired virtue of fortitude. In fact, its infusion demands that a person take up an integral, inward psychological shaping, by which he becomes connaturalized to the direction of the infused virtue, and its counterpart among the Gifts.²⁶ After a lifetime of psychological shaping to withstand the arduous evil, a man comes at the end of his life to face the greatest temporal evil, the separation of his body and soul in death. His mind and irascible appetite have been shaped not to retreat from this moment. Infused fortitude gives him a supernatural strength and wisdom to withstand the particular effrontery to his soul presented by the prospect of death, insofar as infused fortitude is aided by the Gift of the same name. Insofar as the object of fortitude depends upon the presence of the arduous evil, there is perhaps no virtue which is so clearly “called to bat” at the end of a man’s life. What is particular to the Christian is that the infused virtue of fortitude, cooperating with the psychological acquisition of habitus, conforms him to the dying Christ. A Christian receives a real participation, by grace, in the fortitude with which Christ prayed in Gethsemane, the fortitude with which He yielded His body to the scourges of His executioners, the fortitude by which He mounted the wood of the Cross. The Christian, no matter what degree of pain his death might entail, is, as it were, able to look death in the face, because he is looking past it, to the visage of His bloodied but unbroken Master, bent low over the rocks and bushes of Gethsemane’s olive grove, taking upon Himself the weight of the world’s iniquity and accepting its punishment. Like Christ, the dying Christian does not revolt against the fact of his death, but instead embraces it as the means by which he goes out to meet Christ, this time in the garden of Paradise (ST IIa IIae, q. 123, a. 6, resp.). It should be noted that the dying man’s fortitude, like Christ’s own, is not a Stoic suppression of passion. It is, rather, a perfection, a power, a shaping, by which his passion attains the rule of reason, and enables him, quite truly, to suffer (that is, feel) his own death in a meritorious manner, by withstanding it out of charity.²⁷ As with our Head principally and formally, so too with us by overflow (ST IIIa, q. 46, a. 6, ad 2).

Conclusion

We have seen how the architecture of the virtues is brought out in high relief in the specific case of a dying Christian. The reader is encouraged to meditate on the great dignity of the Christian, by which he is enabled, in Christ’s own Spirit, to be a co-redeemer of his own life. St. Thomas captures the synergy of acquired and infused virtue in the Christian moral life, even and especially for the man who seeks truth in dying: that is, dying well, dying in Christ.