THEOLOGY
Regis Martin, S.T.D.
LECTURE GUIDE
The Four Last Things
Reflections on Death, Judgment, Heaven & Hell
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Lecture Summaries LECTURE 1
Introducing the Study of the Last Things...
LECTURE 2
The Christian Conception of Time and Its Relation to the Last Things...
Feature: The Sacrament of the Present Moment...
LECTURE 3
Exploring the Nature and Dynamism of Hope...
LECTURE 4
On First Opening the Door of Death...
Feature: The Last Rites...
LECTURE 5
On Seeing Death as a Christian and the Consolation It Brings...
LECTURE 6
The Jig Is Up: On Judgment and the World to Come...
Feature: Purgatory...
LECTURE 7
On Going to Hell...
LECTURE 8
On the Reality and Nature of Heaven...
Suggested Reading from Regis Martin, S.T.D....
4
8 12
14
18 22
24
28 32
34
38 42
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Dr. Regis Martin is a longtime Professor of Systematic Theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, where he teaches courses on God and Grace, Christ and the Church, and Mary and the Sacraments. Professor Martin holds both a Licentiate and a Doctorate in Sacred Theology from the Angelicum—the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, Italy.
He is the author of several books, including - The Four Last Things (TAN Books, forthcoming) - The Suffering of Love: Christ’s Descent into the
Hell of Human Hopelessness (Ignatius Press, 2007)
- What is the Church? Confessions of a Cradle Catholic (Emmaus Road, 2003)
- Flannery O’Connor: Unmasking the Devil (Sapientia Press, 2005)
Professor Martin has lectured across the country and his articles have been published by the National Review, Commonweal, Crisis, Lay Witness, and Magnificat Prayer Book. Professor Martin is currently featured on EWTN with Fr.
Michael Scanlon and Dr. Scott Hahn in a popular, long-running series titled Franciscan University Presents.
Regis Martin, S.T.D.
Franciscan University of Steubenville, OH
THEOLOGY
Regis Martin, S.T.D.
The Four Last Things
Reflections on Death, Judgment, Heaven & Hell
Our likeness to God is not the result of our own doing, but of God’s generosity. Thus, our first obligation is gratitude for a gift we can never give ourselves. We have a universal call to prayer which should always begin with thanksgiving.
When we do not pray, we deny our creaturely status and the recognition that from moment to moment, we exist entirely on sufferance. If God were to stop speaking our names, we would be vaporized at once.
We must rely on prayer in order to find the strength and courage necessary to face our end.
The Our Father is the Lord’s Prayer—the most powerful and efficacious prayer of the Church.
It is the only prayer enjoined upon us by our Blessed Savior and thus the most perfect form of petitionary prayer. Additionally, the Our Father is the only prayer in which all the things for which we hope are given profound and lasting expression.
Hope is the key virtue for understanding the Church’s doctrine of the end. The Our Father declares our hope that God will reach down into this fallen world in order to save us. With Hope, we can rest assured in all the promises of our Catholic faith, which include Heaven and the Face of God smiling upon us forever. With Hope, we can also face what imperils those promises and what might lead to the everlasting torments of Hell.
The Our Father is the voice and content of Christian hope.
Introducing the Study of the Last Things The Four Last Things
Regis Martin, S.T.D.
Lecture 1
In our modern age, a perverse silence hovers on the air the moment the subject of death is brought up.
Yes, certainly, Christ tells us: “I am the resurrection and the life” and “he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live” (John 11:25-26).
However, is anyone really interested in dying in order to discover what lies beyond the veil of human mortality, even if that should be Heaven?
As it happens, we have no other point of entry into eternity apart from death. And yet, when we consider the price to be paid, everlasting life seems to hold no appeal. For most people, looking to the end is exactly what they wish to avoid. Ironically, when we do finally turn our heads to face the end, it will most likely be the end. Jesus urged his disciples to watch and pray, to be mindful of the end: “Therefore you also must be ready for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect” (Matthew 24:44).
We are so easily “distracted from distraction by distraction,” to recall Eliot’s image of modern man in fearful flight from death. It seems that our inborn hunger for God and an eternity spent in his com- pany has become a sort of vestigial organ which is no longer exercised.
The Lord’s Prayer
Our Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy Name.
Thy Kingdom come.
Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.
Is it possible that the wings of the human spirit have grown atrophied for want of use?
To speak nowadays of man’s pil- grim state, of his promised home- land in Heaven, of the tribulations of the world, and of the hope we have for life beyond the grave, invites a blank stare of stupefaction from the many for whom eternity has lost all attraction. But the price paid for such silence about death is a heavy one. No one is exempt from the final nightfall through which we shall all one day pass.
Why not then follow the example of Socrates, who famously said that “the unexamined life is not worth living?” Practice imitating those whose life is
nothing more than an extended meditation on death; who carry their deaths before them; who live always on the edge of eternity.
It makes all the difference in the world, as Pascal would say, “if it is certain that we shall not be here for long, and uncertain whether we shall be here even one hour.”
After death begin the things that will go on forever and ever.
“To those who live by faith,” writes Blessed John Henry Cardinal New- man, “everything they see speaks of that future world.... All that we see is destined one day to burst forth into a heavenly bloom. Heaven at present is out of sight, but in due time, as snow melts and discov- ers what it lay upon, so will this visible creation fade away before those greater splendors which are behind it, and on which at pres- ent it depends” (Plain & Parochial Sermons Vol. 4, sermon 14).
And so, as Christians, we do have hope which sustains us in the face of death. Our hope is to share in the glory of Heaven with Our Blessed Lady, whose fiat—her “yes”
to God—opened the door of the world to Christ, our salvation. We can turn to her, asking through her intercession for the gift of Hope, in order that we might both under- stand the Last Things and be given the courage to face them.
Discussion Questions
Notes:
Introducing the Study of the Last Things
1. When we are faced with the Four Last Things, what should be our atti- tude toward prayer? How does the Our Father relate to Hope—the virtue most necessary in facing the End?
2. How does it help us to understand life if we see it, not as a problem to be solved, but as a mystery to be endured?
3. Why is modern man so fearful of the presence of death? Why does our society have such a widespread resistance to eschatological inquiry?
We can think of life as a journey that eventu- ates in death. At birth, we all enter upon the road along which we must travel in the course of living our lives. The road ends with death, which is fol- lowed by judgment and the prospect of an eternity of either Heaven or Hell. Three classifications can be made about this metaphor of life as a journey.
First, life begins, and then it ends. Meanwhile, sandwiched in-between, there is time in each pass- ing moment, replete with all the promise and the possibility of human freedom.
The Church in her wisdom and experience studies time in three distinct disciplines, each of which aims to throw light upon these great and seminal moments of time. Archeology studies the first things. The other end of the stick, Eschatology, studies the end—the Last Things. Finally, Kairology is the study of this present moment, which St. Paul calls kairos. It is not the same as chronos, which is mechanical, segmented time by which we mark off hours and days and weeks. Kairos is God’s time and is therefore free and gracious.
Indeed, kairos is a gift given to us by God so that we can experience this present, passing moment as a means of grace, a sacrament even.
The present moment is intended to lead us to the unending glory of the Kingdom, God, Heaven, the Beatific Vision. The poet T.S. Eliot, in his poem Burnt Norton, describes the present moment as an intersection with eternity—“the still point of Time is the theater for our
journey home to God.
The Christian Conception of Time and Its Relation to the Last Things
The Four Last Things
Regis Martin, S.T.D.
Lecture 2
An Intersection with Eternity
In the New Testament, sometimes the word used for time is the Greek kairos. The other Greek word for time, chronos, means simply the time measured during the passing of a day. Kairos means “the appointed time in the purpose of God.” For example, John the Baptist’s proclamation in Mark 1:15—“The time is accomplished, and the kingdom of God is at hand”—uses kairos because it refers to the coming of Christ in the fullness of time.
During the Divine Liturgy of the Byzantine Catholic Church, the ritual exclamation of the deacon is “Kairos tou poiesai to Kyrio”—“It is time for the Lord to act.” The Liturgy, in this sense, is a moment pregnant with eternity—a
“still point” in our turning world during which we intimately encounter the physical presence the turning world.” In that still point,
that timeless moment, the blessed soul undergoes a transforming union like that rendered by Bernini in his depic- tion of St. Teresa of Avila’s Transver- beration.
For most of us, this extraordinary and lofty moment in the life of the saint is so other-worldly that it does not apply to the ordinary human condition.
Nevertheless, there is a sense in which the “still point” is meant to suffuse and penetrate our lives as well. We have been given the present moment by God to sanctify and to offer back to him.
We are responsible for the moments of time that are not make-believe, but in fact real. We can’t do anything about the past: it’s gone. Nor can we do anything about the future, because it doesn’t yet exist. The present moment is the only experience of time we can have and so we should seize it, take creative posses- sion of it and turn it all to glory.
Now the failure of those who seek to bypass the present, refusing God’s invitation to bloom where they are planted, will typically take one of two forms. We often take flight into the future, fixating on a time which will never exist because it magically seems to hold all the pleasure and satisfaction we can’t get enough of in the present.
On the other hand is the temptation to take refuge in the past, which is an unreal place and time because it never existed as we imagine it did, festooned with all sorts of romance and sentimentality. Those who fall prey to either fixation miss their opportunity to exploit this current moment, the moment of grace which God is giving us right now.
In a wonderful book called Christ and Apollo, American Jesuit Fr. William Lynch points out that the structure of belief in the Apostles’
Creed opens with a God who is without beginning, and then closes on a note of unending union and intimacy with this very same God, who is also without end. God’s very nature of being is both without
beginning or end. Inserted into the gap between these two eternal bookends of God’s being is only one thing: time. Because God is the author of time, he is entirely and unambiguously “pro-time.” Indeed, all the great events of salvation history—
Incarnation, Cross, Resurrection—
take place in time.
As Bl. Pope John Paul II states in a breath-catching assertion in his Apostolic Letter preparing the world for the coming of the Third Millennium, “In Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, time becomes a dimension of God, who is himself eternal.” What is truly astonishing about Christ’s life is the sheer authenticity with which he lives the ordinary, non-miraculous side of it.
The Word of God does in fact really become flesh and blood and bone.
Fr. Lynch calls this Christ’s “resolute living and penetration into human time.”
Fr. Lynch concludes his book with this wonderful provocation:
“It is not accurate to say that Christ redeemed time. For time has never needed redeeming; it only needed someone to explore its inner resources fully, and add even further resources to it, as he did. And so powerful and new is the exploration, in his case, that it is crowned not only with insight but with the Resurrection.”
Discussion Questions
Notes:
The Christian Conception of Time and Its Relation to the Last Things
1. How does kairos differ from chronos, and how might a proper under- standing of time rescue us from the twin fixations with past and future?
2. The title of Fr. William Lynch’s book, Christ and Apollo, suggests two contrasting attitudes toward time. Apollo, god of the sun, symbolizes man’s longing to escape from the world. What attitude toward time does Christ represent, and how does he change our perspective of time?
3. What does it mean to say that “time has never needed redeeming?”
What did Christ do, in time and to time, if he did not redeem it?
The Sacrament of the Present Moment
God continues to speak today as He spoke in former times to our fathers. Then, for those who led a spiritual life, each moment brought some duty to be faithfully accom- plished. Their whole attention was thus concentrated consecutively like a hand that marks the hours which, at each moment, traverses the space allotted to it. Their minds, incessantly animated by the impulsion of divine
grace, turned imperceptibly to each new duty that presented itself by the permission of God at different hours of the day. Such were the hidden springs by which the conduct of Mary was actuated.
“The power of the most High shall over-shadow thee,” said the angel to Mary. This shadow, beneath which is hidden the power of God for the purpose of bringing forth Jesus Christ in the soul, is the duty, the attraction, or the cross that is presented to us at each moment. These are, in fact, but shadows like those in the order of nature which, like a veil, cover sen- sible objects and hide them from us.
Therefore in the moral and supernatural order the duties of each moment conceal, under the sem- blance of dark shadows, the truth of their divine character which alone should rivet the attention. It was in this light that Mary beheld them.
Fr. Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s Abandonment to Divine Providence is also sometimes titled The Sacrament of the Present Moment. The following excerpt from this spiritual classic captures the importance of the intersec- tion of the timeless in time–the kairos–of our everyday life. The “still point”
of union with Divine Love can be grasped through the performance of our daily duties. We have no better example of how to live perfectly this sacra- mental present moment than in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Also these shadows diffused over her faculties, far from creating illu- sion, did but increase her faith in Him who is unchanging and unchange- able. The archangel may depart. He has delivered his message, and his moment has passed. Mary advances without ceasing, and is already far beyond him. The Holy Spirit, who comes to take possession of her under the shadow of the angel’s words, will never abandon her.
There are remarkably few extraordinary characteristics in the outward events of the life of the most holy Virgin, at least there are none recorded in Holy Scripture. Her exterior life is represented as very ordinary and simple. She did and suffered the same things that anyone in a similar state of life might do or suffer. She goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth as her other relatives did.
She took shelter in a stable in conse- quence of her poverty. She returned to Nazareth from whence she had been driven by the persecution of Herod, and lived there with Jesus and Joseph, supporting themselves by the work of their hands. It was in this way that the holy family gained their daily bread. But what a divine
nourishment Mary and Joseph received from this daily bread for the strengthening of their faith! It is like a sacrament to sanctify all their moments.
What treasures of grace lie concealed in these moments filled, apparently, by the most ordinary events. That which is visible might happen to anyone, but the invisible, discerned by faith, is no less than God operating very great things. O Bread of Angels! heavenly manna! pearl of the Gospel! Sacrament of the present moment! thou givest God under as lowly a form as the manger, the hay, or the straw.
The Holy Spirit, who comes to take possession of her under the shadow of the angel’s words, will never abandon her.
To live well in the present moment, we must gird ourselves with hope, which is the operative virtue when facing the end. In paragraph 2090, the Catechism of the Catholic Church describes hope as “the confident expectation of divine blessing and the beatific vision of God.” If the purpose of life is to get to Heaven and there to look upon the face of God forever, then the exer- cise of hope will prove essential in the acquisi- tion of that divine blessing. Only those who are fortified by hope will see God in Heaven.
We find the same words in all the Creeds of Christendom: “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.”
St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s sanctity was character- ized the sheer boundless audacity of her hope.
“They are waiting to see,” she would exclaim speaking of God and his saints, “how far I will go in my trust, but not in vain was my heart pierced by that saying of Job’s: ‘Even if you kill me, I will have hope in you.’” St. Thérèse also made the astonishing claim that “we can never have too much trust in our dear Lord. One receives as much from him as one hopes for.”
The end of the New Testament contains the whole content of the Church’s hope, distilled into three simple words: “Come Lord Jesus.” These words invite a real and lively expectation that Christ will come. Because he has gone to prepare a place for us in Paradise, he will surely come
Exploring the Nature and Dynamism of Hope
The outcome of our hope does not depend on us, but on the grace of God.
The Four Last Things
Regis Martin, S.T.D.
Lecture 3
FROM THE
BALTIMORE CATECHISM
back to fetch us and take us home with him. After all, Jesus made us two promises which bear directly upon our hope and the hope of the Church:
“I go and prepare a place for you...
that where I am you too may be,”
and, “I shall not leave you orphans.”
(Douay-Rheims Bible, John 14:3, 18).
The origin of man belongs at the same time to the very goal and finality of man. We come from God, we go to God, and all the moments in between belong to God. Gerard Manley Hopkins, the 19th century poet whose imagination was steeped with a Catholic sacramental vision, captures our hope in a lovely phrase:
Thee, God, I come from, to thee go, All day long I like fountain flow From thy hand out, swayed about Mote-like in thy mighty glow.”
Whatever else the virtue of hope may be, it represents, from first to last, the deepest possible desire of the human heart; it is the chief and abiding thirst we have.
We are in the grip of hope. It is a drive so fundamental that it defines who we are. Here, in a world characterized by scarcity and sin, the existence of hope presupposes this deep persisting hunger and thirst of the human heart for happiness, both
The Theological Virtues
Those graces or gifts of God by which we believe in him, and hope in him, and love him are called the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity. (Q. 462)
Faith is the theological virtue by which we firmly believe the truths which God has revealed.
(Q. 465)
Hope is the theological virtue by which we firmly trust that God will give us eternal life and the means to obtain it. (Q. 466)
Charity is the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for love of God. (Q. 467)
perfect and unchanging, which we simply do not have, but long to possess.
The German Bishops in their 1989 Catechism state “hope is very different from optimism, which imagines that things will somehow work out. Hope reaches deeper and goes farther. It is an expectation that the bleak monotony and bur- den of everyday life, the inequal- ity and injustice in the world, the reality of evil and suffering, will not have the last word, are not the ultimate reality.”
Indeed, St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that, “Before a thing can be hoped for, it must first be desired.
Things that are not desired are not objects of hope; rather they are feared or even despised.” To be sure, that which is hoped for might be difficult to acquire. Aquinas teaches us that “hope necessarily implies the idea that the good hoped for is hard to get: trifles are the object of contempt rather than of hope.”
Prayer is our language of hope.
It is the recognition that what we ultimately desire, the source and finality of all our hope, does not finally depend on us but on God. We must turn with arms outstretched to God and ask for that which we cannot obtain on our own. “The only genuine hope,”
writes philosopher Gabriel Marcel,
“is one directed toward something that does not depend on us.” If Heaven were an entitlement, then it would not be grace, not be free- dom, not be mercy.
But, Heaven is not anything merited on one’s strength, charm, wit, good looks, or even virtue.
In fact, the only merit we may lay claim to, to quote St. Bernard of Clairvaux, is God’s mercy, which he tends to dispense to those who don’t deserve any. The very first thing the Christian must learn about himself is that he will never be good enough for Heaven and will never be equal to God. Hope is the virtue that enables us to per- severe in the teeth of all that would prevent our going to Heaven; to continue to trust in God with whom all things are possible, including even our own salvation.
Discussion Questions
Notes:
Exploring the Nature and Dynamism of Hope
1. In addition to the Creed and the Catechism definition, in which other prayers or common expressions of the Church can we find expression of Christian hope?
2. Can you describe the distinction between desire and hope? How are they the same, and how are they different? Does the object of desire affect the difference?
3. What does Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, mean by saying that “a Christian is someone who knows that he lives first and foremost as the beneficiary of a bounty…?” How does knowledge of our depen- dence on God affect the genuineness of our hope?
Leaving aside faith and hope for the moment, suppose we take note of our human predicament as if the promise of Revelation had never been made. Man is the only animal who contemplates death, and who ponders the neces- sary and inevitable extinction of all things. Only man is aware of his own death, and is free to meditate and reflect on its meaning. Man is the only one who see his death as the final cancella- tion of all that he might have been or become.
As St. Alphonsus Liguori put it three centu- ries ago, “What else is our life but a light vapor, which is driven away and disappears with the wind—a blade of grass which is dried up in the heat of the sun?” This is true of all contingent beings, but only man knows it and remains truly and deeply troubled by it.
Death is the most commonplace and most banal of all events. Yet at the same time, death is the most painfully incomprehensible and the least welcome of all the things which conspire to overtake and destroy us. We are terrified by the face of death; it makes cowards of us all. When we confront the sheer annihilating fact of death itself, it induces a great and primal fear.
Death, says philosopher Hans Urs von Balthasar, “crushes and scatters to the four winds the little bit of meaning that has been laboriously accumulated in a life.” Strangely enough, faced with such apparent meaninglessness, we humans
On First Opening the Door of Death
Man is alone in knowing he must die and that the prospect fills him with dread.
The Four Last Things
Regis Martin, S.T.D.
Lecture 4
persist in hope, even apart from reli- gion. A man’s gaze remains fixed on all that might lie beyond the horizon of death, even though all the evidence of our senses reveals a very different picture.
All that we are and all that we have; nothing, it seems, is meant to survive. The cosmos, ourselves—
everything—is a mere interlude between two blank spaces of eternal nothingness. As another philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre said, “Nothingness haunts being.” Much of the culture that surrounds us is characterized by this sense of overpowering, pulver- izing dread occasioned by man’s encounter with death and his fear of nothingness which follows.
All of us, some sooner than later, are scheduled to go through the door of death, taking our leave of this life. Right from the beginning, men have lamented their fate.
Dylan Thomas’ poem, Do Not Go Gentle, is a powerful testament to the tenacity of the human spirit, its determination to resist right to the very end the awful finality of fate.
Most of the human race does not wish to “go gently into that good night,” preferring as it were to “rage against the dying of the light.”
Contemplating Death
Two ancient Latin mottos recall death’s imminent presence: respice finem—“consider the end,” and memento mori—“remember, you must die.” These slogans appear frequently throughout Western literature and art. Often, a skull, wilting flowers, or a timepiece will appear in paintings to serve as a reminder of life’s temporality. In the liturgy of Ash Wednesday, Catholics receive a physical memento mori as a cross of ashes on the forehead while the priest reminds them:
“Remember man, you are dust, and to dust you will return.”
Man, alone among all the creatures of the universe, knows four things: first, that he must die;
second, that he remains averse to dying; third, that he must bury his dead; and finally, that it is fitting to mourn and remember those who have died. In addition, man is the only being who shows the least indication of doubt concerning the apparent finality of death. What a curious paradox: on the one hand, only man knows he must die, yet this same “quintessence of dust,”
to quote Shakespeare, strangely persists in believing death won’t last, that it needn’t be forever.
To take an example from literature, Muriel Spark wrote a very strange and prophetic novel in the 1950s called Memento Mori, which from the Latin roughly translates as “remember, you must die.” Her novel is an unsparing, utterly unsentimental account of death, which is the first of the Four Last Things. If for the Victorians sex was the little secret about which men and women were not even to whisper, then for us it is death: the great unmentionable of the modern world, which despite every effort of modern science and technology to eradicate, stubbornly persists in killing us.
In Spark’s novel, a series of characters receive ominous
telephone calls stating:
“Remember, you must die.” Few who receive the calls are thankful for the salutary summons. Instead, they are thrown into sudden panic and consternation. Retired Inspector Mortimer and Granny Taylor are two characters who are unalarmed by Death’s ringing reminder. As Mortimer notes, “It is, you know, an excellent thing to remember, for it is nothing more than the truth.”
“To remember one’s death is, in short, a way of life.”
Granny Taylor says “a good death doesn’t reside in the dignity of bearing, but in the disposition of the soul.”
With such examples, we are reminded that we are Christians, wedded to all the promises of Christ. We should remember that death, which defines our mortal condition, is a result of the sinful estate into which we have all fallen.
With this in mind, let us liberate ourselves from the oppressions of secularity and recall the fact that Christ, by his descent into all that is human, has delivered us from both sin and death.
Discussion Questions
Notes:
On First Opening the Door of Death
1. If death is so ordinary and unexciting an event, why do we live in such mortal terror of it?
2. Why does Dylan Thomas exhort us not to “go gently into that good night…?” What is the poet trying to tell us about death and our response to it?
3. How has our fear of death found expression in secular society?
The Last Rites
The “Last Rites” are actually a collection of three of the sacra- ments: Reconciliation, Viaticum, and Anointing of the Sick. In the Catholic Church, Reconciliation and Holy Eucharist can be received at any time in a person’s life. However, Anointing of the Sick is especially reserved to bring spiritual and phys- ical strength to a person in danger of death due to illness or old age.
During the Last Rites, the first sacrament received is Reconcilia- tion, which can only be adminis- tered by a priest. The sick person has the opportunity to make a good
confession and receive absolution from the priest. At this point, if the person is near to death, it is pos- sible to receive an Apostolic Pardon:
a special indulgence given by the priest for the remission of temporal punishment due to sin. He pro- nounces: “By the authority which the Apostolic See has given me, I grant you a full pardon and the re- mission of all your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
Second, the sick person receives Viaticum, which is a Latin word meaning “provision for the journey.”
It is reception of the Holy Eucha- rist, the “Last Sacrament of the Christian,” which conveys spiritual sustenance for departure from this life and travel into the next. With Viaticum, the Church encourages the dying, saying:
Go forth, Christian soul, from this world in the name of God the almighty Father, who created you, in the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, who suffered for you, in the name of the Holy Spirit, who was poured out upon you. Go forth, faithful Christian!
May the Lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up.
Lastly, according to paragraph 998 of the Code of Canon Law, “the Church commends to the suffer- ing and glorified Lord the faithful who are dangerously sick so that he relieve and save them” through the anointing “with oil and using the words prescribed in the liturgi- cal books.” The priest anoints the sick person’s head with the sign of the cross saying “Through this holy anointing, may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit.” Then, he anoints the hands, saying “May the Lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up.”
Each year, during the Chrism Mass held during Holy Week, the local bishop blesses all the oils used in the sacraments: holy chrism which is used for Baptism, Confirmation, anointing churches and altars, and on the head and hands of priests during ordination;
the oil of catechumens with which candidates for entry into the Church are anointed during their preparation; and the oil of the sick which is used by the priest in administering the sacrament of Anointing of the Sick. Each of
these oils is only used for its specific function.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraph 1532, describes the effects of the Anointing of the Sick as “the uniting of the sick person to the passion of Christ, for his own good and that of the whole Church; the strengthening, peace, and courage to endure in a Christian manner the sufferings of illness or old age;
the forgiveness of sins, if the sick person was not able to obtain it through the sacrament of Penance;
the restoration of health, if it is conducive to the salvation of his soul; the preparation for passing over to eternal life.”
A Christian perspective of death is radically different from prevailing secular views of human mortality. In his book, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, Joseph Ratzinger states that the condi- tion of the modern mind in the face of death is
“remarkably contradictory. On the one hand, death is placed under a taboo.... It must be hidden away, the thought of it repressed. On the other hand, there is a tendency to put death on show.” We either hide death under a bushel basket or we expose it in a way which is obscene. This is the paradox at the heart of our culture of death which constantly engages in a massive denial of death.
There is something naturally, irrepressibly metaphysical about the encounter with death—
something that draws us into a consideration of ultimate truth and meaning. Death spontaneously awakens a lively curiosity about our lives and about the origin and destiny of all human life. Who am I?
Why am I here? Where am I going? Yet, in order to avoid facing these unsettling questions, our culture tries to deprive death of its metaphysical character and demote it to a merely pedestrian event.
In contrast to this self-imposed blindness toward death is the Christian “Litany of the Saints.” The Litany petitions God to deliver us from a sudden and unprepared for death. Such a death, without benefit of the Sacraments and an interior recollection which fortifies the soul, is a real danger to the Christian. A Christian should The Christian view of
death relieves our fear and encourages us to prepare for the end.
On Seeing Death as a Christian and the Consolation It Brings The Four Last Things
Regis Martin, S.T.D.
Lecture 5
want to take ownership of his death. A Christian should desire to be fully alert and ready at the moment when God comes to take possession of his soul for all eternity.
Unfortunately, so many people today want exactly the opposite. Their prayer is for a sudden death which leaves no time for suffering or reflec- tion. They reject a spiritual perspec- tive of death and wish for life to cease with as little discomfort as possible.
Ratzinger reminds us that “attitudes to dying determine attitudes to living.
Death becomes the key to the question:
what really is man?”
Death makes life worth living, but can really only be understood theologi- cally. The price we pay in rejecting the metaphysical nature of death is very high indeed; ignoring ultimate realities threatens to dehumanize life itself. Our lives, and deaths, are only meaningful in the light of divine revelation, in rela- tion to God, in relation to that whole economy of nature and the cosmos.
Death only exists as a punishment for man’s sin. This penal aspect of the experience of death is indispensable to a Christian understanding of the nature of death. All men simply by virtue of having been conceived in original sin are subject to death.
Genesis 2:15-17
And the Lord God [said]: Of every tree of paradise thou shalt eat: But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat.
For in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death.
Wisdom 2:23-24
For God created man incorruptible, and to the image of his own likeness he made him. But by the envy of the devil, death came into the world: And they follow him that are of his side.
Romans 5:12
Wherefore as by one man sin entered into this world, and by sin death; and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned.
I Corinthians 15:25-26
For [Christ] must reign, until he hath put all his enemies under his feet. And the enemy death shall be destroyed last: For he hath put all things under his feet.
Quoted from the Douay-Rheims Translation
In Adam’s fall, we sinned all. Sin leads to death; what sin visited upon the cosmos was death.
Yet, from the beginning, it was never God’s intention that we should die. We were created for eternal life in the Garden, which we lost through rebellion and sin. God is not the author of death. From the beginning, he never intended that man should suffer death. We didn’t have to fall; death is the result of a horrible catastrophe. It wasn’t a piece of determinism that God imposed on the play of our lives.
The evidence of human experi- ence testifies to the sheer universality of the fall—that “aboriginal calam- ity,” according to Bl. John Henry Newman—in which we are all implicated. With that original sin, we brought to grief our entire world.
God is completely acquitted from the charge that in any way, however
remote, he is responsible for the creation of a fallen world. God does not delight in the event of death;
even his own Son sweated drops of blood in fear of the horror of death on the Cross.
Death is the supreme enemy of life, of existence, which is simply another name for God. “I Am Who Am,” God told Moses in the great theophany of the Book of Exodus.
There is no death in ME, says God, nor in the creatures I have fash- ioned in my own image, after the likeness of my own eternity. Death, therefore, is an entirely unnatural separation of the soul from the body, a violent sundering of that which God intended to remain a composite unity of matter and spirit, body and soul.
Because we were created for life eternal, if there is death, it can only have been the result of sin. The last enemy to be destroyed is death, St. Paul tells us in the First Letter to the Corinthians 1:15-26. Christ, because he is God himself, is so intensely alive that he can afford to be dead. He freely entered into that condition of death, taking on the whole sin of the world in order that we may experience a definitive deliv- erance from that final and most fatal consequence of sin, which is Hell, and thus be joined to God forever in Heaven.
Discussion Questions
Notes:
On Seeing Death as a Christian and the Consolation It Brings
1. In startling opposition to modern secular attitudes toward death, there stands the Christian view, which found expression early on in the
“Litany of the Saints,” particularly the refrain, “from a death that is sud- den and unprepared for, deliver us, O Lord.” What is meant by that?
2. Can we vindicate God from the charge that he is responsible for death in the world? By extension, can we also lay to rest the charge that he is responsible for sin and suffering?
3. If God is not responsible for sin and death having entered the world, who exactly is? How can a good God allow death and suffering?
Immediately after death, the soul, disembodied for the very first time, is delivered over to
Almighty God for judgment. At the judgment, we will find ourselves thrown into the light of the total truth and reality of God’s absolute presence. In that moment, all worldly distraction will fall away and we will awaken from the sleep of death to see clearly the true and lasting characteristics of the self we have at last become.
In his book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Blessed Pope John Paul II asks: “Can God who has loved man so much, permit the man who rejects him to be condemned to eternal torment?
And yet, the words of Christ are unequivocal. In Matthew’s Gospel he speaks clearly of those who will go to eternal punishment.” The referenced text of Matthew 25:46 is terrifyingly plain about the eternal prospects of those who disdain the discipline of love.
Christ says that those at his left hand—the men and women who have failed to recognize him in their thirsty, hungry, naked, and imprisoned brothers and sisters—“shall go into everlasting punishment.” Even though Christ’s words might cause us to recoil, a voice in the human heart asks whether God can tolerate the terrible crimes of humanity perpetrated against ourselves forever.
Can the reckoning which history or public opinion has failed to provide be put off indefinitely?
Doesn’t the sinner have to face up to his sin?
The coming judgment will be both definitive and comprehensive.
The Jig Is Up: On Judgment and the World to Come The Four Last Things
Regis Martin, S.T.D.
Lecture 6
The Last Judgment
Christ will judge us immediately after our death, and on the last day. The Particular Judgment will be held in the place where each person dies, and the soul will go immediately to its reward or punishment. The sentence given at the Particular Judgment will not be changed at the General Judgment, but it will be repeated and made public to all. (Q. 1371, 1373, 1375)
There is need of a General Judgment, though everyone is judged immediately after death, that the Providence of God, which, on earth, often permits the good to suffer and the wicked to prosper, may in the end appear just before all men. (Q. 1387)
C.S. Lewis once preached a magnificent sermon on the theme of glory, Heaven, Hell, and damnation.
“In the end,” he said, “that Face which is the delight or the terror of the uni- verse must be turned upon each of us either with one expression or with the other, either conferring glory inex- pressible or inflicting shame that can never be cured or disguised.” In the light of the awful majesty of Almighty God, we will either receive glory with him in Heaven or the unending gro- tesquerie of self-centeredness in Hell.
This is what the Church under- stands by the thing we call “judg- ment.” It is a profound, eschatological mystery of God’s final reckoning of the worth of a man, the definitive moral weight of all that we’ve done in this world, and thus what we’re destined to become in the next.
Yet, judgment cannot be understood apart from Christ who is the great Advocate of Love. The Eternal Love is nothing like the kind of counterfeit love we fallen human beings often profess. What we call love is sometimes no more than an attitude in which we remain fundamentally indifferent to our beloved. Real love is not self-seeking or self-centered.
FROM THE
BALTIMORE
CATECHISM
Love must surely be a mighty and powerful thing. Dante calls love “a lord of terrible aspect”
who “moves the heavens and the earth and all the stars and planets.”
The Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky calls love “a harsh and dreadful thing”—the very opposite of the sentimental play-acting love sold to us by popular culture which masks deep indifference or even hostility for the beloved other.
God, who is true Love, may never reconcile himself to the hideousness of sin. When we sin, we become less than human and allow the negation of sin to undermine the integrity of our God-created being. Even so, Love may yet be reconciled to the sinner because he can always change and be restored to innocence and holiness.
The repentant sinner can be perfected and made whole in his being and relation to God.
As Catholics, we believe there are two separate judgments which face us after death. The first, the immediate judgment after death, is called the Particular Judgment, and the second, the public and comprehensive judgment of all
souls at the end of the world, is the General Judgment.
At the Particular Judgment, each of us will know himself exactly as he is known by God.
The soul will see how God judges and its conscience will confirm the justice of its sentence. “For those who die in mortal sin,” writes James T. O’Connor in his book Land of the Living, “it will be a confirmation of all the horror of death itself. For others it will be the very beginning of their victory over the death they have just experienced.”
The General Judgment will demonstrate in the most unmistakable terms both the justice of God in condemning sinners and the depth of his mercy to those who are saved. The General Judgment will take place in the presence of the glorified Christ, amid all the resurrected bodies at the very end of the world. In the blazing presence of Truth, Christ himself to whom all judgment has been given by the Father, every man who has ever lived will stand and the truth of his relationship to God will be laid bare before the world. Because God does exist, it will be made finally and forever clear that Truth is the absolutely last Word.
Discussion Questions
Notes:
The Jig Is Up: On Judgment and the World to Come
1. What are the two Judgments that no man may escape? Why must there be two?
2. If the Judgment is implicit in the event of Death, is there ever a time when we are not under Judgment? After all, isn’t the whole course of living simply a preparation for dying?
3. What does Joseph Ratzinger mean when he writes of the Judgment of God as follows: “The masquerade of living with its constant retreat behind posturing and fictions, is now over?”
Purgatory
Purgatory, from the Latin purgare—“to cleanse” or “to purify,”
is a state through which a soul who dies in a state of grace, but is nonetheless still imperfect and flawed, is cleansed from all venial sins and the temporal punishment due for already forgiven sins.
According to paragraph 1030 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church,
“All who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death
they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of Heaven.” We refer to the souls in Purgatory as “holy souls” because we know that they will eventually enjoy the Heavenly Banquet.
We can compare Purgatory to “a refining fire” (Malachi 3:2), the heat of which scours and burns away any remaining impurities from a soul.
The pains suffered in Purgatory are nothing at all like the punishments of damned souls in Hell. Purgatory is a process, a final refining which removes all the dross from the gold of a holy soul.
The pains of Purgatory, accord- ing to St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica, are twofold: “the pain of loss, namely the delay of the divine vision, and the pain of sense, namely punishment by corporeal fire.” Aquinas says that “the least pain of Purgatory surpasses the greatest pain of this life” because the holy souls’ desire for union with God is “the most intense longing—
both because their longing is not held back by the weight of the body, and because, had there been no obstacle [of sins yet to be purified],
A great happiness is granted them which never fails;
rather it grows as they draw nearer God.
they would already have gained the goal of enjoying the Sovereign Good—it follows that they grieve exceedingly for their delay.”
According to St. Catherine of Genoa in her “Treatise on Purga- tory,” far from being unhappy or bitter about their sufferings, the holy souls have “before their eyes two works of God.” They “suffer pain willingly… knowing that they most fully deserve it” for “it seems to them that [God] has shown them great mercy.” Despite the pangs of loss and the ever-increasingly fiery desire for the Beatific Vision, as the holy souls contemplate God’s mercy, “a great happiness is granted them which never fails; rather it grows as they draw nearer God.” So while these souls suffer pains which destroy selfishness, pride, and all remaining attachment to sin, they do so both willingly and with great joy because they draw ever closer to the resplendent Throne of God.
Every year on November 2nd, the Catholic Church celebrates the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, commonly called
“All Souls Day.” On this day and during the eight days following,
any Catholic who visits a cemetery or church and prays for the dead can obtain a plenary indulgence and release from Purgatory for one holy soul. A plenary indulgence is the remission of all temporal punishment due to sin. In order to receive the grace of an indulgence, a Catholic must make a good confession within eight days, worthily receive Holy Communion, be free from attachment to sin, and pray for the intentions of the Pope.
This is an important practice—souls released from Purgatory by the prayers of the faithful on Earth are sure to return the favor by interceding for us in God’s presence.
For more information on Purgatory and the Holy Souls:
Hungry Souls
Gerard J.M. van den Aardweg (TAN Books, 2009)
Spiritual Doctrine of St. Catherine of Genoa ed. Don Cattaneo Marabotto (TAN Books, 1989)
The Biblical Basis for Purgatory John Salza
(Saint Benedict Press, 2009)
The whole of Christian life and worship depends on three things being true: there is a God; he is gracious and good; and the world he created is worth redeeming. Because we all must die and face judgment as a result of Adam’s original sin, we should be curious about the two eternal possibilities that await us on the other side: Heaven and Hell.
God is being, is life itself, and all creation shares in that same vibrant intensity of life. We must love, accept, and affirm this world simply because in its share of God’s life, it is good. After all, we know that evil is the absence of the good.
So if the world were bad or evil, there would be nothing for grace and glory to build on and per- fect. God, out of an incomprehensible depth of love, has fashioned men and women for himself alone and invites them to eternal joy with him in Heaven.
Hell is man’s refusal to countenance God’s joy. It is made from the contempt of those who say to God and their neighbors: “I don’t want to love. I don’t want to be loved. Just leave me to myself.” God will not stop any man from choosing not to love or to be loved. He has paid each of us the astonishing compliment of taking our liberty seriously, even when it carries us straight to Hell. When we say “no” to God, we succumb to nihilism: the notion that nothing, not even God’s offer of salvation, is of any value.
The damned are unwilling to be loved and so they separate themselves from God eternally.
On Going to Hell The Four Last Things
Regis Martin, S.T.D.
Lecture 7
In its most serious expression, this rejection amounts to the sin against the Holy Ghost (final and resolute impenitence), which on the strength of its malice, will carry uninterrupted any unrepentant soul into Hell.
Hell is filled with those who will not be reconciled with God. In the end, as C.S. Lewis reminds us, “every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind is Hell.”
As Lewis believes, the gates remain locked and secured on the inside.
The inmates of Hell have no inclina- tion to take flight from the torment of being forever alone. Jean Paul Sarte was wrong: Hell is not other people, as depicted in his play “No Exit.” Hell is being alone, absolutely and forever.
In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s great novel, The Brothers Karamozov, Fr.
Zosima asks, “What is Hell?” and answers, “It is the suffering of being unable to love.” Hell depends on the anchoring of all one’s love to one’s own self instead of exercising one’s capacity to love another. “What is Hell?” questions the loveless husband in “Cocktail Party” by T.S. Eliot. He says: “Hell is oneself, Hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projec- tions. There is nothing to escape
The Number of Lost Souls
How many souls are damned to spend an eternity in Hell and who might they be?
The Church has no information whatsoever and is forbidden to speculate. Neither the number of the lost nor the names of any whom we might imagine to be lost have ever been or ever will be revealed. However infamous the deeds of wicked men, it is not for other men to pronounce on their eternal destiny. The Church has elevated many, but determines as reprobate none.
All the Church’s strictures on the subject are meant to remind the faithful that the distinct possibility exists that we, ourselves, may go to Hell, not our neighbors or any of the rogues and rascals who swell the ranks of human depravity.
Thus, we are free to trust in God’s mercy that it may yet, in the language of the Letter of Saint James 2:13, “triumph over justice.”
from and nothing to escape to.
One is always alone.”
The unquenchable fire amid the precincts of Hell spoken of in the Scriptures is not a conflagra- tion ignited by God. It is not the wrath of Heaven whose torments assail the damned, as if God took delight in constructing a place of everlasting torture. Hell is not his creation, but the result of the sins of angels and men who choose to go there. Hell’s fires are lit entirely by the flames of malice, deceit, and injustice committed against the order of divine love.
We are not thrown by another into the sea of fire; it is our own sins that fill that seething cauldron of self-imposed enmity and pain.
“At a certain point,” writes Origen, the great Church Father of the early third century, “in a soul that has accumulated all sorts of evil... this mixture catches fire and begins, in punishment of the soul, to burn.... The soul that finds itself outside of the order and harmony for which it was created by God will itself suffer the pain and punishment of its transgressions.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraph 1057, is very plain about the sufferings of Hell.
They chiefly involve the pain of loss caused by an eternal separa- tion from God “in whom alone
man can have the life and happi- ness for which he was created and for which he longs.” There can be neither misery nor sadness to equal the horror of the loss of God forever.
God’s provision making man free to enter such a state of abso- lute loneliness is precisely what makes it Hell. There will never be a time when the damned will even wish to be set free. A man will refuse forever Christ’s offer of forgiving love because he exercises his God-given free will. Man will not suffer himself to budge from the bastion of his pride, and so, insists on remaining aimless and alone always in an eternity of grief which no creature was ever created by God to have to endure. Such is the power given to created man—
freedom to destroy every last bridge to that beatitude for which he was made.
Discussion Questions
On Going to Hell
1. How does our human experience lend credence to a belief in the existence of Hell? How is the experience of Hell described? Will it ever have an end for the damned souls?
2. In what sense does the existence of Hell ensure the operations of a healthy moral conscience? How is Hell a safeguard of man’s conscience? What is T.S. Eliot getting at when he says an aspect of man’s “glory is his capacity for damnation?”
3. How many souls are there in Hell? Why doesn’t the Church simply state the number of the damned, just as she has done for the canon- ized saints in Heaven?
Notes:
The most sensible thing anyone could possi- bly say about Heaven is that it is certain to prove infinitely greater than any description of it.
John Donne, the Elizabethan poet and preacher, refused to utter a single word concerning the nature of Heaven. We are reduced to silence, the blessed silence of those who have gone before us, because, very simply, it is impossible to fit an infinite reality into a finite mind. This must be why Lazarus, despite having died and come back from the grave, left very little evidence of what he’d seen or experienced.
The great pilgrim-poet Dante, who despite every resource of language and metaphor, is reduced to a kind of inspired babbling when he looks on the very face of God in the final Canto of the Paradiso. Lost in a swoon of perfect contemplative bliss, he tells us that at that high moment, his ability to describe what he sees utterly fails. The highest reaches of the imagina- tion, even when anointed by grace, are helpless to express the nature of ultimate reality.
The point here is a Christological one:
Jesus Christ came among us to announce that he himself is the way to Heaven. We therefore need to look to him to see what Heaven really is. “All the way to Heaven, is Heaven because Christ is the way,” St. Catherine of Siena tells us. Our proximity to Christ is the clearest sign of Heaven because Heaven is a Christological Only the merest glints
of future glory may be glimpsed amid the shadow world we inhabit.
On the Reality and Nature of Heaven The Four Last Things
Regis Martin, S.T.D.
Lecture 8
place. The God who became Man creates a space for us in the very being which is God.
In his book, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, Joseph Ratzinger says that in our being with Christ,
“we find the true location of our existence as human beings in God.
Heaven is thus primarily a personal reality, and one that remains forever shaped by its historical origin in the paschal mystery of death and resurrection.” Christ, in other words, as the temple of the final age, as the very enfleshment of eternity in time, is Heaven and the New Jerusalem.
Heaven is a relationship with Christ in God, and we can hardly begin to imagine the intensity and joy of it. We don’t get Heaven as something owed to us; it is not a function of justice, but of grace, of mercy. We could never produce that relationship or bliss on our own.
Even though we desire it more than any other thing in the universe, only God can lavish Heaven upon us.
The human heart is a kind of God-shaped vacuum, a divinely hollowed out space that only Christ can fill. As St. Augustine tells us, our hearts will remain forever restless until they find rest in God. It is the
The Nature of Heaven
He that asks me what Heaven is means not to hear me, but to silence me; he knows I cannot tell him; when I meet him there, I shall be able to tell him, and then he will be as able to tell me; yet then we shall be but able to tell one another this, this that we enjoy is Heaven, but the tongues of angels, the tongues of glorified saints, shall not be able to express what that heaven is; for even in Heaven our faculties shall be finite.
–John Donne, Sermon XXIII, Folio of 1640
whole paradox of man that he should long for what is ordained beyond the strength and power of his own nature. Even though we were created by God for God, we are unable to take ourselves home to God. “Without Me, you can do nothing,” says Jesus. We are like beggars in a ditch, free to look up at the stars, but utterly unable to reach even the closest one. Only grace can give us the ultimate fulfillment of Heaven.
To be in Heaven is to be in soli- darity with God and our neighbor, to achieve the complete integration of self and community. In other words, when we find ourselves forever in the company of Christ and all the blessed souls whom God has called home, we will have achieved the greatest possible actu- alization of the self. The rapture of the soul redeemed by Christ will overflow into its glorified body;
and together, in the very resplen- dence of the Paradisal state, we shall shine like the sun.
In his great masterpiece, The City of God, St. Augustine gives stirring expression of what the joys of Heaven will finally consist:
“There we shall rest and we shall see; we shall see and we shall love;
we shall love and we shall praise.
Behold what shall be in the end and shall not end.” However gorgeous
the sunsets or ardent and deep our friendships, nothing in this world will finally satisfy our perpetual longing for God, who mysteriously plants this desire deep within the soul of every created being.
It may well be, as George Macdonald reminds the young visionary who finds himself mysteriously on board the bus bound for glory in C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, that “Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly.” Hans Urs von Balthasar tells us that for “anyone who is permitted to step out of his own narrow and finalized life, and into this life of God’s, it seems as if vast spaces are opened up before one, taking one’s breath away... Life in God becomes an absolute miracle.”
Discussion Questions
Notes:
On the Reality and Nature of Heaven
1. Why must the exercise in enumerating the joys of Heaven always end in exhaustion? Will it even be possible to adequately describe Heaven when, please God, we arrive there?
2. Despite our difficulty describing it, much less getting there, why does humankind still long for Heaven? How can we defend the statement that God made us to be with him?
3. In what sense will Heaven be a community and why do we not go alone to God? How does the isolated, self-centered self ensure his own damnation?
If you would like to read the works referenced in this course or would like to learn more about the Four Last Things, Professor Regis Martin, S.T.D. recommends:
Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets. Harcourt, Brace and World, 1943.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Oxford University Press, 1948.
John Paul II. Crossing the Threshold of Hope. Knopf, 1994.
Lewis, C.S. The Great Divorce. Macmillan, 1946.
Newman, John Henry, ed. Erich Pryzwara, S.J. The Heart of Newman. Ignatius Press, 1997.
Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Penguin Books, 1966.
Péguy, Charles, trans. Julian Green. God Speaks.
Pantheon, 1943.
Pieper, Josef. On Hope. Ignatius Press, 1986.
Ratzinger, Joseph, trans. Michael Waldstein. Escha- tology—Death and Eternal Life. Catholic University of America Press, 1988.
Ulanov, Barry, ed. Death: A Book of Preparation and Consolation. Sheed and Ward, 1959.
Excerpts from the English translation of the Cat- echism of the Catholic Church for use in the United States of America Copyright 1994, United States Catholic Conference, Inc. –Libreria Editrice Vati- cana. Used with Permission.
Suggested
READING
ABOUT CATHOLIC COURSES
Catholic Courses produces college-level courses on the most important topics from the Catholic intellectual tradition. Through an extensive selection process, we find the Church’s most distinguished professors to teach relevant, faithful, and engaging lectures. Catholic Courses feeds your mind and your soul, helping you Learn More about Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.
Learn More
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Professor: Dr. Regis Martin
Graphic Design: Christopher Pelicano, Abby Pelicano Editor: Sarah Laurell
Special thanks to Belmont Abbey College and Dr. William K. Thierfelder, Kevin Gallagher, Zachery Brakefield, Jonathan Torres, Eliana Gallagher, and McKenzie Armstrong
IMAGE CREDITS
Pgs. 15 & 29: Baltimore Catechism No. 3 cover courtesy TAN Books.
All copyrighted images, video, and text are used with the expressed written consent of the owner(s) or have been deemed fair use for the specific instances used.
Other images, video, and text are from public domain sources. All trademarks are used with the permission of their owners or have been deemed nominative fair use for the specific instances used. Use of trademarked or copyrighted material in no way implies endorsement by the owner(s) or source. For comments about the copyright or trademark status of any image, video, or text used in this course, please contact Catholic Courses at [email protected].
Catholic Courses . 1-800-437-5876
Contact us for more
The Four Last Things
Reflections on Death, Judgment, Heaven & Hell
Learn More
A lively interest in death and the life to come is necessary to our identity and vocation as Christians. How will we face the end? On whom does our hope finally depend? In short, what are the last things ever to be remembered?
“Nothing is more certain than death,” declares St. Anselm, “nothing more uncertain than its hour.” While others recoil from the prospect of death, we who have been redeemed by the blood of Christ remain serene in the practice of hope, which enables us to face the end with joy and gratitude.
In this course, Professor Regis Martin identifies the Last Things each of us is destined to face—namely, Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell—reviewing them in the context of Christian hope, which is the virtue most necessary to the happy outcome of our journey home to God.
Dr. Regis Martin holds a Doctorate in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical University of St.
Thomas Aquinas in Rome, Italy. He is a Professor of Systematic Theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, and the author of more than a half-dozen books, including The Four Last Things (TAN Books, forthcoming) and The Suffering of Love (Ignatius Press, 2007). His articles have been published by the National Review, Commonweal, Crisis, Lay Witness, and Magnificat Prayer Book.
Regis Martin, S.T.D.
Franciscan University of Steubenville, OH
Catholic Courses P.O. Box 410487 Charlotte, NC 28241 Catholic Courses offers trusted content in high quality
video & audio formats on discs or digital downloads.
