Once dismissed as a department ‘closed for repair’, eschatology has seen something of a comeback among Catholic theologians in recent years. Ecumenical dialogue, panels at professional societies, doctoral dissertations and monographs by senior scholars demonstrate this renewed interest – suggesting that there is in fact a future for the ‘last things’.
Leonard DeLorenzo's Work of Love is a creative contribution to this conversation. The book is itself a work of love, a passionate plea for a thoroughly relational understanding of humanity's ultimate destiny. DeLorenzo seeks to fire the eschatological imagination through a reconsideration of the communion of saints. It is a task, he argues, that has to embrace the absolute rupture of death and, at the same time, allow for communication across this chasm. The bridge that spans the gap – linking those above to those below – is love, the love of God in Christ that reaches out through the unending mercy of the saints. ‘[T]hose who rest in glory are the same ones who trouble themselves with the salvation of those yet to come’ (p. 225). Indeed, the whole book can be read as an extended theological meditation on the dying prayer of St Thérèse of Lisieux: ‘I want to spend my heaven in doing good on earth’ (p. 140).
DeLorenzo begins with a brief historical overview (chapter 1) before confronting the failure of modernity to take death seriously (chapter 2). Signalling the eclectic choice of sources that marks this study, DeLorenzo draws on the social historian Philippe Ariès, the poet Rainer Marie Rilke and the philosopher Martin Heidegger to discuss the contemporary context. Appreciating the way that Rilke and Heidegger face the meaning of death head on, DeLorenzo concludes that, ultimately, both rely on an individualistic vision that is inimical to Christian hope.
The next two chapters treat death and resurrection, respectively. Rahner's eschatology, Ratzinger's reading of death in the Hebrew Bible and (especially) von Balthasar's meditation on Holy Saturday constitute the first movement. In the second, DeLorenzo offers a narrative analysis of the resurrection narratives, an extended Augustinian response to Heidegger and a synopsis of Henri de Lubac on nature and grace. What holds these pieces together is a thoroughgoing christocentrism that grounds DeLorenzo's attempt to speak meaningfully about both communion among the dead (chapter 3) and communication from the dead to the living (chapter 4).
Chapter 5 is the most creative – and the most concerning – part of DeLorenzo's argument. At its heart is a theological reflection on Dante's Divina Commedia. Although he takes no position on the revelatory status of this poem (even though he does raise the question), DeLorenzo clearly sees Dante as the key to unlocking the meaning of the communion of saints. It is a bold move, particularly in light of contemporary critiques that argue Dante transposes hierarchical social structures into the eschaton, separating saints according to merit, and ‘thus petrifying in heaven a caste system of holiness for all eternity’ (p. 142). In making his case, DeLorenzo disagrees with John Thiel's reading of Dante, and dismisses Elizabeth Johnson's feminist critique of the ‘patronage model’ the poem depicts. Despite its power to disrupt the ‘hegemonies of the present’, DeLorenzo quickly dispatches Johnson's alternative ‘companionship model’ as merely replacing one socio-political paradigm with another (p. 153).
In his defence of the ‘hierarchical ordering of relations’ within the communion of saints, DeLorenzo sees in the Commedia a movement of love ‘where the saints reach down in charity to inspire the pilgrim's ascent’ (p. 142). That action of bending down and lifting up is central to Work of Love, which again and again returns to spatial metaphors of distance and descent in order to imagine the movement of love and mercy: ‘the downward movement of charity’ works ‘to draw upward those members further removed from their final beatific end’ (p. 167). This spiritualised noblesse oblige plays out in chapter 6 as a pedagogy of mercy, illustrated through idiosyncratic appeals to John's prologue, a typological reading of Exodus, the biographies of four holy women, four liturgical texts and Pope Francis’ comments on popular piety.
‘In the hierarchy of love and mercy that I am proposing, power is translated into service, authority into care, and holiness into sacrifice’ (p. 153). Contemporary readers could be excused for hearing in such statements the echoes of other, less charitable, rationales for reinscribing privilege. DeLorenzo describes Work of Love as a ‘distinctly Catholic construction’ whose ecumenical value should be judged by its success in showing ‘the coherence of the Catholic emphasis on communion’ (p. 3). Catholics too have to ask whether this particular construal of communion as a heavenly hierarchy of sanctity coheres with their own hope of eternal life.
