As I pondered the art of dying well in my accustomed retreat, where, free from public business, I have leisure to attend to myself, and asked myself what the reason might be that so very few endeavor to learn the art of dying well, though it ought to be most familiar to all, nothing occurred to me except what the Wise Man says: the number of fools is infinite (Eccl. 1). For what greater folly can be imagined or conceived than to neglect that art on which the highest and everlasting goods depend, and yet to learn with great labor, and to practice with no less zeal, very many and almost innumerable arts, by which perishable goods are either preserved or increased? Moreover, that the art of dying well is the greatest of all arts, no one will deny who is willing to reflect attentively that at death an account must be rendered to God of all that we have done, said, or thought during the whole course of our life (Matt. 12), down to a single idle word, with the Devil accusing and conscience bearing witness, while the punishment of eternal death or an everlasting reward awaits us. Even in matters of the slightest importance, litigants take no rest, but go now to advocates, now to attorneys, now to judges, now to the friends or relatives of these same men; and yet at death, when a cause touching eternal life or eternal death is pending before the Judge, the defendant, often unprepared and weighed down by sickness, scarcely in possession of himself, is compelled to render an account of things of which, while he was in good health, he perhaps never once thought. Hence it is that wretched mortals rush in throngs into hell; and as St. Peter says: If the just man shall scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear? (1 Pet. 4). I therefore thought it worthwhile first to admonish myself, and then my brethren, that we should highly esteem the art of dying well; and if there be any who have not yet learned this art from other, more learned teachers, that they should at least not despise what we have taken care to gather concerning this art from the sacred books and the writings of the ancient masters. But before we come to the precepts of this art, I thought it worthwhile to inquire into the nature of death: whether death is to be ranked among good or among evil things. And indeed, if death be considered in itself, it must without any doubt be reckoned an evil, since it is opposed to life, which we cannot deny to be a good. Moreover, as the Wise Man teaches, God made not death, but by the envy of the devil death entered into the world (Wis. 1–2); and the Apostle Paul agrees with this when he says: By one man sin entered into the world, and by sin death, in which all have sinned (Rom. 5). Certainly, if God did not make death, it cannot be good, since everything that God made is good, as Moses says: And God saw all the things that He had made, and they were very good (Gen. 1).
But although death is not good in itself, yet the wisdom of God knew how to season it, so to speak, so that many good things can arise from death. Hence David sings: Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints (Ps. 115); and the Church, speaking of Christ, says: Who by dying destroyed our death, and by rising again restored life. Surely the death that destroyed death and restored life must needs have been exceedingly good; accordingly, if not every death, at least some death must be called good. And so St. Ambrose did not hesitate to give a book the title On the Good of Death, in which book he shows plainly enough that death, though born of sin, has no small advantages of its own.
There is, finally, a further reason which shows that death, though evil in itself, can by the grace of God produce many good things. For first, we gather a great good from death in that it puts an end to the very many and greatest miseries of this life. Holy Job laments in express words the miseries of the present life: Man, he says, born of a woman, living for a short time, is filled with many miseries (Job 14). Ecclesiastes says: I have praised the dead rather than the living, and I judged happier than either him who has not yet been born nor seen the evils that are done under the sun (Eccl. 4). Ecclesiasticus adds and says: A great travail is created for all men, and a heavy yoke is upon the children of Adam, from the day of their coming out of their mother's womb until the day of their burial into the mother of all (Sir. 40). The Apostle also laments the miseries of this life and says: Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death? (Rom. 7).
By these testimonies of the divine oracles, then, it is sufficiently proved that death has this good in it, that it frees man from the very many miseries of this life. Then death brings a still more excellent good, since it becomes a gate leading from a prison to a kingdom. This was revealed by the Lord to St. John the Evangelist and Apostle when he was in exile for the faith on the island of Patmos: I heard, he says, a voice from heaven saying to me: Write: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord. From henceforth now, says the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors; for their works follow them (Rev. 14). Truly blessed is the death of the saints, which at the bidding of the heavenly King leads the soul out of the prison-house of the flesh and brings it to the heavenly kingdom, where holy souls that have finished their labors sweetly rest and receive the crown of the kingdom as the reward of their works. But death also brings no slight benefit to the souls that are led to purgatory, since it frees them from the fear of hell and makes them certain of future and everlasting happiness. What is more, even to the wicked themselves the coming of death seems to bring some advantage, for by separating them from the body it brings it about that the measure of their punishment increases no further. On account of these excellent benefits, death does not show to pious men a horrifying face, but a gentle one; not terrible, but lovely. Hence the Apostle Paul confidently exclaims: For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain (Phil. 1), having a desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ. And in his first Epistle to the Thessalonians, he admonishes good Christians (1 Thess. 4) not to be saddened at the deaths of their dear ones, nor to mourn them as dead, but to look upon them as sleeping. There also lived, within the memory of our forefathers, a certain holy woman named Catherine Adorna, of Genoa, who so burned with the love of Christ that with incredible desire she longed to be dissolved and to depart to her Beloved; hence, as though captivated by a love of death, she often praised it as most beautiful and most lovely, finding fault with it only for this, that it fled from those who sought it and sought those who fled from it. Let the reader consult the life of Blessed Catherine of Genoa, ch. 7. From what has been said, then, we hold that death, as the offspring of sin, is an evil; but that by the grace of Christ, who deigned to undergo death for us, it has become in many ways useful and salutary, lovely and desirable.