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Perspectives - The development of the European understanding of death
Carmine Di Sante
This article first appeared in the Italian Review, SERVIZIO DELLA PAROLA, No. 101, Sept. 1978, ed. Queri¬niana. It is published here with the kind permission of the editor and the author. The entire issue of this par¬ticular Review is devoted to an analysis of the new Funeral Rite of the Roman Catholic Church which was com¬posed according to the renewal of the liturgy which followed the Second Vatican Council and which was issued in 1969. This is the Rite to which reference is made in the second paragraph of our article.
Whoever is used to an Aristotelian-Thomistic view of reality could be led to think that the problem of death and the manner of reacting to it would show the same immutable aspects, valid in all ages and for all peoples. Popular wisdom loves to repeat: "We are born different, but death makes all men equal." Applied to the study of the many different cultures in which human groups live and whose values they embody, cultural anthropology demonstrates that this saying is not so apt after all, or at least only to a certain extent. Just as people are neither born nor live equal, since their linguistic-expressive mediation and their socio-econ¬omic situations are different, so neither do people die equal, because their ways of dying are different also; the understanding and description of death do not have the same meaning for everyone. This varies not only according to different cultures, but also according to a given period within a single culture. The meaning of death, not unlike the significance of other phenomena, is a cultural "product" which must be critically examined before being universally accepted.
Consciousness that the way of behaving in the face of death is a cultural "product" and not a natural attribute is significant: first and foremost because it encourages a critical attitude and, secondly, because it stimulates people to create different and more adequate interpretative patterns. The new "Funeral Rite" was worked out without considering this cultural point of view. The death of which its pages speak is again the death of a presumed homo universalis and not the death of industrial and post-industrial man. It is perhaps for this reason that the way in which the Church, the com¬munity of faith, "assumes responsibility for death" does not succeed in opposing but only in enduring our dehumanized and alienated society's way of "assuming responsibility for death". "As we live" says the popular saying, "so shall we die." If our society is alienated, as we realize more and more in so far as we look at it closely, it comes as no surprise that we die alienated.
It would be easier to come to an understanding and an appraisal of the way a person dies in our society today if we were to look at it in the light of other ways of dying in previous times. We touch on a few of these in schematic form, insufficient as they are, in order that, through their development, the pastor of souls and even the simple believer himself may feel invited to work out the most fitting pattern to express the faith vision of the Prophet of Nazareth.
Death: A Positive Call
Death, right up until the late middle ages, did not inspire fear in people's hearts, nor lead to despair. For almost a thousand years, until the Renaissance, church¬yards and cemeteries have been stages for dancing.
"Death was an occasion to reaffirm life. Dancing with the dead on their tombs was one way of proclaiming the joy of life, and supplied the theme for many erotic songs and poems."
Today a similar reaction would tempt us to judge it as a provocation and a desecration. Apart from the significance of these dances, there is one important thing to note: for Christianity, death is the result of a personal intervention by God. This is not a punish¬ment by God but a call (let us remember that, for Pelagius, death is in no way linked to sin and that Adam would have died anyway, even if he had not committed sin); it is not the end, but a summoning forth.
Death: An Occasion for Introspective Meditation
It has been acknowledged that the Renaissance witnessed a notable shift in accent. The focal point is no longer God but man. The manner of approaching death reflects this different view. The significance of dancing in cemeteries is modified: from being an en¬counter of the living with those who have passed on, it has been changed into an introspective experience, an incentive to meditation. People no longer dance joyously with their predecessors, but are portrayed as being in
"a world in which each one, for the whole of his life, dances hand in hand with his own mortality. Death thus interiorized is a constant reminder of the gaping tomb." 2
Death, from being God's call, has become the awareness of old age and decomposition: the theatre of its realiz¬ation is no longer the will of God but the harrowing experience of man.
Death: A Natural Event to be Examined
Snatched from transcendental realms, and thrown into the field of personal consciousness, the vision of death is transformed into what will become known as "natural death": the intrinsic and inevitable importance of human life and no longer the result brought about by an external decision; an event of an instant which interrupts the sequence of life and no longer the conclusion of a phase which leads into life. The most .loquent symbol of this new concept is the clock which, since 1500, has begun to proliferate in an amazing way. Skeletons with hour glasses in their hands, macabre figures which strike the hours from the clock tower, bells with bone-shaped tongues, are many such signs of he "naturalization" of life and of death, the expression of the anguish of a span of time so short that only by measuring it is it hoped to keep it under control. Having become a natural force, an effort is made to dominate death by learning the art or the skill of dying.
"Ars Morendi, one of the first books of the `do it yourself' kind to be printed and made available, enjoyed enormous success in its various versions for two centuries. Many learned to read by studying its pages. The most widespread version was published by Caxton and printed by the Westminster Press in 1491. Before 1500, more than one hundred copies had already been printed on wooden type or with mobile type, entitled: The Art and the Ability of Learning how to Die Well. In small format, printed in gothic type, it formed part of a series which set out to teach the perfect gentleman noble and devout behavior, from the way to use a knife at table, to the way of conducting a conversation; from the art of crying and blowing one's nose to the art of playing chess and of dying." 3
Death, become a natural event, must be examined and enquired into just as any other natural event such as walking, crying or playing.
Death: A Force to be Dominated
In the baroque period, death was represented by a great reaper who raised its blade without making any distinction between rank or position. With the rise of the bourgeois family, this equality before death ends; whoever is able, begins to pay to keep it at bay as much as possible. In this way a new attitude creeps in; death is rebelled against in the secret hope of being able to dominate it somehow.
"Medieval death held an hour glass in its hand; in early prints the skeleton and the spectator were sneering when the victim refused to die. Now, the bourgeoisie claim the clock and pay the doctors who will decide when death is to strike."'
Death: An Event to be Vanquished
The step from "a force to be dominated" to "an enemy to be vanquished" is a short one. If man has succeeded in controlling the earth, why may he not succeed in controlling death? Death is due to causes which it is hoped will soon be specified and controllable. Death has become the battlefield between the doctor and the patient. This new attitude in the face of death emerges more clearly if the new relationship established in the nineteenth century between the doctor and death is considered.
"Up until the eighteen hundreds death always plays the lead rather than the doctor or the sick person. Both contestants stand on either side of the bed on which the patient is lying. Only when clinical illness and clinical death have considerably evolved do we find the first pictures in which the initiative belongs to the doctor, who intervenes between the patient and death. We have to wait until after the first world war to see the doctor struggling with the skeleton, freeing a young woman from its grip or wrenching the sickle from its hands. Towards 1930 a smiling man in a white shirt is depicted as hurling himself on a whimpering skeleton and squashing it as one does a fly. In other pictures, the doctor is holding by the wrists a young woman whose feet have been grabbed by death and is pushing away the latter with his hand outstretched in an avenging gesture. Max Klinger, on the other hand, represents the doctor who is plucking the feathers from an enormous winged creature. Others rep¬resent him in the act of imprisoning the skeleton in a cage or even kicking its bony behind. It is not the patient but the doctor who is now strug¬gling with death." 5
The most important consequence of this new way of dying is its de-individualization and its ensuing social¬ization: death no longer concerns the individual, but the social class of doctors. The dying person no longer assumes his own responsibility but the doctors around him who take over the situation.
In the last few years, the phenomenon has been reaching greater and more worrying proportions: not only medicine, but social work, international aid, devel- opment programs and the various world organizations are committed to the struggle against death in the name of respect for "life" and "humanity". People die when and how the industrialized megasociety decides. Death, snatched away from the dying person concerned, is "medicalized" and "socialized" and taken in charge by technical power which is anonymous and inhuman.
"In its extreme form, `natural death' is today the point at which the human organism refuses any other therapeutic applications. A person dies when a flat electro-encephalogram indicates that his brain cells are definitively inactive... The death approved by society is the one which happens when man has become useless not only as a producer, but also as a consumer. It is the moment when the consumer, educated at great cost, must be finally obliterated as a dead loss. Dying is the consumer's most extreme form of resistance." 6
Death: A Taboo to be Exorcized
But death is not an easy enemy to vanquish. Nothwithstanding the myth of European man's "domi¬nation", of his "progress" and "science", nobody deludes himself that he has reduced death to silence. To fight it is vain, and above all absurd. Considering it an "enemy" to be slain, instead of a call of God to be listened to or a natural event to be accepted, Western man has set off down a blind alley which leads to an ever more despairing darkness. The consequence has been that death is changed into a taboo which we try to exorcise with every available means: people die in silence, in places set apart (hospitals), as we tiptoe around with a feeling of shame: not only on the part of he who is dying, but also of those who remain: the first as though he were doing a bad thing, the second (relations, friends, medical and paramedical personnel), as though they were suffering a shameful defeat. And rightly so. From the moment people want to vanquish death, it is death itself which continues to vanquish.
The guilty silence which envelops modern death appears in all its scandalous light if it is compared with the way of dying of only a few centuries ago. In 1500, when death was already beginning to take the shape of a natural event, the dying person was still the "possessor" of his death, which was "celebrated" in a public and official atmosphere. In spite of the possibility of numerous remedies and medicines, the decision to let them be administered always depended on him, and he played his role actively and responsibly. It is he who said when he wished to be taken from the bed and placed on the ground, and when the prayers ought to begin. Even the onlookers had a different way of behaving. Children were called upon to hold the hands of dying parents on condition that they did not hinder them with their tears; the others present avoided making any sound and kept the doors open so that death could enter and make his encounter with the dying without fear. Today, children are forbidden to see people dying; even those other members of the family do not have the courage to be present at the death bed of their dear one. Doctors and nurses do all in their power to hush up the truth about the state of the dying person. The priest himself, out of "compassion", does not have the courage to help the dying man to become aware of what his true situation is. And so in this way people die in a contest of reciprocal lies. Is this courtesy and respect for the doomed person, or barbarity and the last step in alienation?
The community of the faithful, responsible for what concerns the death of those who believe in the Rison One from Nazareth, cannot avoid finding an answer to this way of dying which has become that of modern man, by sharing with him in a spirit of solidarity his terrible weight of loneliness and alienation, but especially by offering an alternative pattern which is responsible and liberating.
"Western man has lost his right of presiding over the act of death."'
Those who are the followers of Jesus, know that death is the passage from "this world to the Father" 8 and have a great deal to do in order that death might return to being a conscious act, so that each person may be able to take his own death in hand again.
1. I. Illich, Nemesi Medica. L'espropriazione della Salute. Mondadori, Milano 1977, p. 192. Page references are to the Italian edition. It is published in English under the title: Limits to Medicine. Medical Nemesis: the Expropriation of Health, Marion Boyars Ltd., London 1976. The author owes the major part of the observations in this article to the above work by Illich.
2. Ibid., p. 193.
3. Ibid., pp. 198f.
4. Ibid., p. 210.
5. Ibid., p. 216.
6. Ibid., p. 222.
7. Ibid., p. 223.
8. Jn. 13:1.
