The Death of Staliln

Apparently the death of Stalin was not entirely as in the film. He lingered for three days, drifting in and out of consciousness. And his daughter, who was present, says that at the last moment, he lifted his fist toward the ceiling, fell back and died.

Somehow, I expected him to show fear.

As Joan Crawford, lay dying, her housekeeper tried to pray in her behalf; and she objected: “Damn it! Don’t you dare ask God to help me.”

Hitler seems to have been unrepentant too. He cursed the German people for having let him down.

There seems something troublingly admirable in this holding out defiant and unrepentant to the end. One thinks of Jacob wrestling with the angel. God gave us free will; should we surrender it so easily?

There is obviously a conflict in our consciences.

Do not go gentle into that good night
Old age should burn and rave at close of day
Rage, rage, at the dying of the light.

And aren’t these ends more admirable, at least, than Judas’s reported end, hanging himself from a tree in his remorse? That seems, by comparison, rather more despicable. It feels like an attempt to get out of making amends. As Saul did. As Peter did.

Judas is, by tradition, the one person we know with certainty to be in Hell.

Catholic teaching is that God sends nobody to Hell. We decide to go ourselves. Is this what we see here? In their defiance, are Stalin or Hitler or Crawford choosing Hell?

Milton has Satan justify his rebellion against God with the famous phrase, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

This sounds plausibly like the rationale here: a proud refusal to submit your own will to another.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

And yet, again, many or most of us find the sentiment in that famous poem admirable.

Stalin or Crawford or Hitler are, in the end, taking full responsibility for their actions, and in doing so, are also implicitly accepting punishment for their actions.

Perhaps they merit an incalculably long period in purgatory, rather than Hell. Or perhaps at least the lower circles of Hell are reserved for those who, like Judas, do their evil in secret and sly ways, pretend to piety, do harm while feigning affection, and then deny they did it.