Skeletons in the Closet

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE HOUR OF OUR DEATH by Philippe Aries

Translated by Helen Weaver; Knopf; 651 pages; $20

Philippe Aries is an unusual figure in the formal and rigorous world of French historiography. He is not a professional scholar, but head of the information center of the Institute of Applied Research for Tropical and Subtropical Fruits in Maisons-Lafitte. Clearly mangoes and papayas have not been enough to satisfy his voracious intellect. Aries is best known as the author of Centuries of Childhood (1962), a landmark study that demonstrated that benevolent child rearing is a relatively recent practice in the West.

The Hour of Our Death takes on the last stage of life. The book is a majestically ambitious attempt to isolate, define and synthesize a thousand years of attitudes about dying, burying, grieving and remembering. Aries has burrowed through centuries of literature, folklore, religious history and civic and private documents. He has filled his eye with cemetery architecture, iconography, art and funeral kitsch. His conclusions: a millennium of living and dying in the West can be understood in five models.

The first, dating from the early Middle Ages, Aries calls "the tame death," a calm acceptance of the end of life. He notes that in the Song of Roland and the Arthurian legends, heroes had premonitions of their deaths. In the final hour they prepared themselves with a simple, dignified ritual that reflected a world made whole by faith, community and a sense of common destiny. To die was to enter a long sleep until the day of resurrection.

The second model, "the death of the self," attempts to describe changes that Aries believes began in the 11th century. The tightly woven tapestry of knights and monks gracefully facing their fate was attacked by the moths of individualism. The world became more worldly, and so did the otherworld. Ambitious men sought to preserve their identities beyond the grave. Hence the development of wills providing for memorial Masses and religious endowments that could be good investments in heaven.

The result: "The idea of an immortal soul, the seat of individuality, which had long been cultivated in the world of clergymen, gradually spread, from the 11th to the 17th century, until eventually it gained almost universal acceptance. This new eschatology caused the word death to be replaced by trite circumlocutions such as 'he gave up the ghost' or 'God has his soul.' "

Aries' story is one of decline, fall and trivialization. Through slow and elaborate psychological artifice, death loses respect. The rise of science and rationalism in the 17th and 18th centuries disrupted the traditional divine order and laid the basis for Model 3: "remote and imminent death." This is a bold construct in which the beliefs and rituals curbing natural behavior were breached. Sex and death, two of nature's most powerful expressions, were confused; the macabre became eroticized. Aries illustrates this slippery thesis with Sade's tales of necrophilia.

His next transformations in death-style take place in the drawing rooms of the 19th century bourgeois family. Where once death aroused a pathos shared by a whole community, now the sense of privacy dominated thought and feeling. "Death," writes Aries, "was no longer familiar and tame, as in traditional societies, but neither was it absolutely wild. It had become moving and beautiful like nature." Heaven, in turn, became a future home where one would be reunited with the dearly departed.

This sentimental optimism in what Aries calls "the death of the other" hardened into "the invisible death." The end of life is treated as an obscenity; physicians prevaricate with fatally ill patients; the afflicted die alone, plugged into the engines of Hygeia; emotional and public grieving is thought to be in bad taste.

"A heavy silence has fallen over the subject," concludes Aries. "When this silence is broken, as it sometimes is in America today, it is to reduce death to the insignificance of an ordinary event that is mentioned with feigned indifference. Either way, the result is the same: neither the individual nor the community is strong enough to recognize the existence of death."

One might argue that Western man never really knew how to die in the serene manner, and that the author has fashioned his grand fugue of the macabre on elite ideals, his own deep spiritual convictions and his vision of a golden age of Christian polity. One might also question the almost cavalier way he selects and blends literature, history, religion, art and psychology and plasters them across the centuries. But it is impossible to deny the vitality and invention of the work, or to feign indifference to the most democratic and, at the same time, most aristocratic of subjects.

--By R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"For thousands of years, Homo sapiens owed his progress to the defense system he erected against nature. Nature is not some well-regulated and beneficent Providence, but a world of annihilation and violence that, although it may be judged more or less good or evil according to the tendencies of philosphers, always remains external, if not hostile, to man. Man has therefore set the society that he has constructed against the nature that he has controlled. The violence of nature had to be maintained outside the domain reserved by man for society. The defense system was achieved and maintained by the creation of a morality and a religion."

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