To refer to a collection of essays on death, loss, and grief in any such terms clearly carries a risk of sounding eccentric, not to say perverse, but I am nonetheless compelled to describe this as a beautiful and, indeed, often an enjoyable book.
It is also a profoundly hopeful one, not least because of the intellectual irenicism it implicitly brokers. This is partly on account of the sheer breadth of academic and professional ground it covers, bringing into dialogue a range of voices speaking in widely differing disciplinary accents. Its roll call of contributors encompasses, inter alia, novelists, artists and practitioners of several medical specialties, alongside the theologians and philosophers who unsurprisingly predominate. There are treatments of ancient texts, both patristic and pre-Christian, and essays focusing on responses to COVID-19. There is a fascinating evaluation of the consolatory potential of competing architectural styles, and numerous allusions to mourning in literature, ranging from Sophocles to T S Eliot, via Dante and the Pearl-poet, Tolstoy and Thomas Hardy. Meanwhile, the essays assembled here bespeak a variety of interpretations of the object of mourning: above all concerned with grief as universal human response to the universal phenomenon of human death, the book finds room for both analogical extension of and narrowing of focus from this central vantage point. There are thus essays here, for example, on moral philosophical responses to the Nietzschean death of God, and on the particular philosophical and practical issues raised by the experience of bereavement in the academy. Whilst no such anthology can hope to be absolutely comprehensive in its content, there is quite non-trivially something here for almost everyone.
But the participants in this conversation also hail from starkly contrasting confessional and political vantage points. Both grief and the loss to which it is a reaction may be universal features on the landscape of human experience, but there is in theory virtually no limit to the ways in which such responses are ritually codified. Something similar can be said of the evaluative interpretation put on the phenomena of mourning, and both aspects of this hermeneutic diversity are strikingly reflected in the present work. Thus to read the volume from cover to cover, as the editor suggests one should, is to be brought unavoidably into contact with at least some perspectives that will be refreshingly novel, challengingly alien, or, indeed, both. This is so not only on account of technical vocabulary but in terms of their most fundamental underlying presuppositions. Strikingly, for this reviewer at any rate, texts where the author’s point of departure is most radically at odds with that of the reader are often as fruitfully stimulating as those where these perspectives coincide, gesturing to the possibility of genuine and mutually enlightening dialogue across a series of divides all too readily dismissed as unbridgeable.
The presence in one relatively modestly sized collection of, for example, Raymond Tallis’s strikingly polymathic essay on the ‘difficult art of outliving’, drawing both on poetic and dramatic sources and on the author’s experience as a physician involved in end-of-life care, alongside Richard Conrad OP’s detailed comparative survey of the texts and rubrics of pre- and post-conciliar Roman Catholic funerals and related rites perhaps makes the point sufficiently. It would be morally and emotionally obtuse for any Christian reader to doubt the good faith energising Tallis’s empathetic, sophisticated and at times lyrical account of the humane philosophical task in the face of the death of loved ones simply because of his self-identifying as an ‘infidel; to whom the alleged consolations offered by religion appear as ‘magical thinking’. Meanwhile, Conrad’s is a careful reflection on Catholic liturgical expressions of compassion both for the dead and for those who mourn them, a compassion manifested not least in providing an arena in which anger at both the departed and the deity may be honestly and robustly articulated. This, if read with genuine openness, surely has the potential to destabilize certain secularist assumptions about the evasive motivations, obeisance to oppressive and psychologically punitive authority, and puerile levels of self-understanding to be expected of believers.
None of this, of course, is intended to imply that there is some substratum of comprehensive agreement, potentially accessible if only the conversation continue long enough, beneath the profoundly divergent outlooks that undoubtedly characterise the contributors. But the nuance and intellectual generosity inherent in so many of the texts included in this volume surely does suggest the welcome possibility of dialogues that generate more light than heat.
Among other equally provocative examples that could be adduced here is the late Roger Scruton’s contribution, which begins from the assertion that, despite the author’s generally negative evaluation of psychoanalytic theory, Freud was ‘on the right lines’ in his characterisation of the work of mourning as the means by which pathological response to loss may be averted. It should perhaps be added that the somewhat pyrotechnic conclusion of Scruton’s essay evinces a rather less hospitable approach to perspectives other than his own, with an evaluation of the unconscious motivation of recent German domestic and foreign policy that many may well find baffling at best.
Another of this collection’s many strengths is the way in which in the more overtly theological contributions connections are made between the book’s central concerns and other issues of systematic importance in a way likely to prove symbiotically fruitful. Amber L Griffioen’s essay on the philosophical theology of pregnancy loss, for instance, is profoundly impressive on many counts, but among these is its audacious and intriguing implications for the doctrine of God, in particular for the impassibility debate.
A final, perhaps deceptively mundane, but very important virtue of this work is the strikingly rich and full bibliography appended by most authors to their contributions. In consequence, The Meaning of Mourning offers not only a compelling invitation to further conversation on this most urgent if uncomfortable of topics but also a wealth of resources for its continuation.
