On Friday, I read Tolstoy’s novella, The Death of Ivan Ilych.
In fact, it was a day for Ivan I’s, since later that night, I raced through Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health.
The two are so closely related in theme, it’s uncanny, and I’m sure I’m not the first to notice it.
I will be writing about the latter over the week. I won’t say it rocked my world, because it was more of an experience of confirmation and affirmation more than anything else. But what I want to do is to look into how thinkers have been reflecting on the past two years in Illich’s framework. They’re out there. I just need to sort it out. And it’s particularly fitting now, since there seems to be quite a bit of public rethinking going on at the moment.
Anyway, let’s get back to the first Ivan, the mid-19th century lawyer who did everything right, and now is facing death, terrified.
That’s the situation. Ivan Ilych, married with two living children, is a successful lawyer who has led a very conventional, socially acceptable life. He had what seemed to be just a slight accident, bruised a kidney, and is now suffering greatly because of it. That he dies is no spoiler, since it’s in the title. But how he dies – there’s the suspense.
And I don’t mean medically, but rather mentally and spiritually.
For the issue is, how is Ivan Ilych facing the reality of his suffering and the certainty of his death?
And that’s the question we must all ask, isn’t it?
There’s a lot to say about Ivan Ilych and of course most of it has been said over the past century and a half.
But what I want to focus on is this:
The fundamental reason Ilych is suffering – truly suffering in the deepest sense – is because the very proper framework of his life was centered on the wrong things. It was all about the superficial, material and worldly success, comfort and appearances. Most important of all, it ignored the inevitability of death.
He was absolutely unprepared because the foundation and narrative upon which he had built his life ignored death, pushed it out of the frame and diminished the importance of authentic human connection and love.
So in the end, if that’s what your life has been built on: appearances, material comfort and the subconscious assumption that this is all there is, this all that needs to be, and the happiness that comes from this is enough – facing the extinction of all of that, yes, there will be a crisis.
“Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done,” it suddenly occurred to him. “But how could that be, when I did everything properly?” he replied, and immediately dismissed from his mind this, the sole solution of all the riddles of life and death, as something quite impossible.
Her dress, her figure, the expression of her face, the tone of her voice, all revealed the same thing. “This is wrong, it is not as it should be. All you have lived for and still live for is falsehood and deception, hiding life and death from you.” And as soon as he admitted that thought, his hatred and his agonizing physical suffering again sprang up, and with that suffering a consciousness of the unavoidable, approaching end. And to this was added a new sensation of grinding shooting pain and a feeling of suffocation.
This is something I return to again and again, it seems, no matter what the topic I address here: church matters, politics, culture, history. Daily life.
The Real exists, and what that is is all laid out for us in Genesis: Creator, creation, goodness, sin, death. And then the thread is picked up again in the Gospels: Redeemer, redemption, victory, love, life.
The struggle of life – after simple survival, of course – is to live in that Real. It is a daily, even hourly struggle, for the temptations are great – of course they are, or they wouldn’t be temptations, would they?
When I think of the failures of the contemporary Church, much is included – the bourgeois-ification of western Catholicism, the cowardice, and so much else. But fundamental, it seems, is the quite bizarre abandonment of the age-old, organic rootedness in the Real, embodied in late-20th century idealism about human nature and “progress.” Bizarre, as I’ve said before, for men who’d just lived through the Holocaust, a World War and the dropping of atomic bombs.
In sum, the trashing of the crucifix and the unrelenting insistence that all we need to know to get through life is that we are an “Easter People,” combined with that bourgeois-ification and the equation of journey towards personal fulfillment with faith – made us all into Ivan Ilych in the end. Anxious, wondering what we spent our life doing, perhaps even terrified, ill-equipped to understand our suffering and the apparent darkness ahead.
For three whole days, during which time did not exist for him, he struggled in that black sack into which he was being thrust by an invisible, resistless force. He struggled as a man condemned to death struggles in the hands of the executioner, knowing that he cannot save himself. And every moment he felt that despite all his efforts he was drawing nearer and nearer to what terrified him. He felt that his agony was due to his being thrust into that black hole and still more to his not being able to get right into it. He was hindered from getting into it by his conviction that his life had been a good one. That very justification of his life held him fast and prevented his moving forward, and it caused him most torment of all.
Read those last two sentences again.
This is existential, of course, as I’ve highlighted above, but what Tolstoy describes here is a dynamic applicable to a number of situations in which we find ourselves.
It is simply, how the inability to admit that we’ve been wrong – about anything – holds us back. About the freedom that is just beyond our reach, right on the other side of that wall of pride.
Charlotte was Both 
Tolstoy had his own particular brand of Christianity which might look more familiar to contemporary Americans than it had to the countrymen of his day, both Orthodox and secular. He didn’t like mumbo jumbo of any kind, but came only to articulate religious convictions gradually…beginning with War and Peace. But once he began to write in an explicitly religious vein, it sounded rather half-hearted. His pared down Christianity did resemble Quakerism or (old) Unitarianism. His chief examples of virtue were the peasants, possibly because their more immediate grasp of reality and the Christianity they were exposed to formed their characters into tremendously patient and humble people…As opposed to the upper classes, whose lives were focused on warfare, getting a place at court, making the right matches and various preoccupations with western European ephemera. Tolstoy even had followers like a religious denomination or party, but it was something he wasn’t really involved in personally.