Lent and Death: A Eulogy for David Solomon

On Ash Wednesday, a cross is drawn on our foreheads with ashes and we hear the words God said to Adam and Eve after the Fall: “From dust you have come and to dust you shall return.”  With their sin, they brought death into the world.  And that “death” was not merely the end of this human life. Adam and Eve were always meant for a more profound union and communion with God after their earthly life.  What they brought was the darkness of death as the negation of life.

Sin brings with it alienation from God, from others, and from ourselves.  When we sin, we fail to become the just, loving, generous persons we set out to be. And in death, it seems as though this dissolution of the self and our alienation from God and others has reached its natural culmination. With its destruction now complete, sin’s grasp on us seems to have won its final victory.

Man’s days are like those of grass;
like a flower of the field he blooms;
The wind sweeps over him and he is gone,
and his place knows him no more. (Psalm 105)

And Psalm 90 teaches us “to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

I am not pious or saintly enough to take comfort in any of this, but I suppose it is unrealistic to expect reality to be comforting.  Aeschylus undoubtedly spoke truly when he wrote: “Wisdom comes through suffering” – and often only through suffering.

This dark lesson of Lent came early for me this year upon hearing of the death of my beloved mentor, David Solomon, decades-long professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and founder of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture.  For years, the joke was that a Baptist from Baylor was the staunchest defender of the Catholic character of the university, and when administrators wanted to show prospective donors that Notre Dame was still “Catholic,” they would send them over to Solomon’s Center, the place where philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre had found a home in the later years of his academic career.

There have been several encomia to David. Good descriptions of his life and legacy can be found here, and here, but the best tribute was undoubtedly the one written by his long-time friend and colleague, Fr. Bill Miscamble.  There will no doubt be others forthcoming in the days and years ahead.

David Solomon, though a Baptist for most of his life, was finally received into the Catholic Church last year, several months before his death.  Though a Baptist, he was known far and wide in Catholic circles. The annual Center for Ethics and Culture Conference at Notre Dame has for years been one of the most important and most enjoyable Catholic conferences in the country.  For decades, David sponsored a conference on Catholic biomedical ethics.  And in the summers, he would direct a week-long educational retreat, the Vita Institute, to train future pro-life leaders.

David Solomon was, in short, one of the most important driving forces in Catholic intellectual and moral life during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His passing is a great sorrow and a great loss to his family, friends, and the Church.  Like the death of his great friend Ralph McInerny, David’s passing leaves a hole that simply cannot be filled.  One can only devotedly carry on the work they began – the work they so dutifully inherited from their forebears and so nobly carried on themselves.

There is no way of summing up the significance of a life, especially one as significant as David Solomon’s.  But perhaps three brief lessons are in order.  The first is simply how much of a difference one man can make.  This is something worth remembering in a world that seems so often to be spinning totally beyond our control.

A second lesson comes from a story David would tell after he became Catholic.  He directed and taught in Notre Dame’s London Program for a time, and he would pass a lovely, little Catholic church on his way home each day. He would often stop in and pray and thus seeds were planted that would bear its full fruit only years later.

And there is one last lesson.  When Fr. Paul Scalia, a writer well-known to readers of The Catholic Thing, gave the funeral homily for his father, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, he began thus: “We are gathered here because of one man. A man known personally to many of us, known only by reputation to even more. A man loved by many, scorned by others. A man known for great controversy, and for great compassion. That man, of course, is Jesus of Nazareth. It is He whom we proclaim.”

So too, my first Easter as a Catholic convert was spent at mass in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. But my second Easter as a Catholic was spent at the deathbed of my mother, who died on a cold, crisp Easter morning.  I remember being driven to the hospital one last time and saying to myself: “Well, this is what this Catholic thing is all about.”  I was either going to accept Christ’s promise that nothing could separate us from God’s love, and that He had broken “the chains of death,” or. . . .What else was there? Lent’s darkness is only overcome by Easter’s light.

If Christ is not raised, as St. Paul said (1 Corinthians 15:14), then sin and death have been victorious, and we are the most miserable of men. But if Christ has risen, then by faith we know, even when shaken by grief, that nothing, not even death, can separate us from the love of God – a love that we have been privileged to share in this life with family, friends, and neighbors, a love that is not lost in death, but risen and gloried with Christ in the communion of God and His saints.