There is Power in Blood: Towards a Eucharistic Interpretation of Ivan Ilyich’s Paradoxical Death and Life Brady Woods

Abstract

According to a certain interpretation of Heidegger, relying solely on his reference to Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, there is no possibility for a religious authentic being-towards-death. In this paper, I seek to refute this position through a reconsideration and reinterpretation of The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Namely, I present five interrelated textual insights demonstrating the sacramental authenticity of Ilyich’s being-towards death, and use Jean-Luc Marion’s Eucharistic phenomenology to weave these threads together to show one way a religious person may possess authentic being-towardsdeath.