Dying without God — The Absence of Belief at Life’s End
March 21, 2009 by Albert Mohler
Filed under Blogs
Journalist Franz-Olivier Giesbert spent untold hours with the late French President Francois Mitterand, and many of these hours were devoted to discussions about death. After serving two seven-year terms as the French President, Mitterand revealed that he had been fighting prostate cancer throughout his years in the Elysee Palace.
Born into a Roman Catholic family, Mitterand became an ardent agnostic. In Dying without God: Francois Mitterand’s Meditations on Living and Dying, Giesbert sheds considerable light on Mitterand’s understanding of what it meant to die without any belief in God.
Giesbert describes Mitterand as “a Nietzschean until his dying day.” He described himself as a mystic with the mind of a rationalist. He did not deny that a form of transcendence might exist, but he described the idea that his spirit might survive his death as “embarrassing.” He was fond of paraphrasing Celine: “Eternity must be very long, especially toward the end.”
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How very sad for someone to die without hope. How empty his life must have felt at the end of it. How hollow it must seem now, especially given where he went.