Conclusion

Between the 1580s and the 1640s there was a reconfiguration of the discursive environment in which meditation on death and the afterlife was conducted. The conclusion traces this reconfiguration in writings by Montaigne, Bacon, and especially Descartes. In their different ways, all three writers contributed to a new pluralism of discourse surrounding death and the afterlife, one where philosophy and Christian remembrance of the last end, which had hitherto been regarded as one and the same discourse, or at least in close alliance, could no longer be assumed to reinforce each other.

Grace, Faith, Scripture, Spirit

The chapter examines the prolific quantity of writings on death and the afterlife that Lutheran authors produced in the second half of the sixteenth century, and argues that the constitutive presuppositions of their discourse came to be centered on four of Luther’s famous sola principles. Sola gratia, “by grace alone,” gave a new prominence among the last things to death, since it was through acknowledging the fact of her own finitude that a person came to realize that the present time was the kairos, the “time of grace” in which salvation is freely available to all believers. Sola fide, “by faith alone,” meant that elaborate regimes of spiritual exercise of the kind followed by Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits were regarded with suspicion by Lutherans, since exercise could easily become a self-justifying work. Sola scriptura held that “scripture alone” was the authoritative guide for faith, and that it required only to be heard and believed; meditation accordingly became reduced to the simple hearing and believing of God’s Word. The principle of solo spiritu, which states that the Word becomes effective in the believer “by the Spirit alone,” is reflected in exhortations to readers to let the Spirit enter their hearts and minds, and even take over their language, as they learn to replace their habitual words for death with the vocabulary of peaceful sleep and repose that the Spirit uses in the Bible.

Introduction

Christian devotional culture took very seriously the instruction of the Bible maxim “In all thy works remember thy last end [memorare novissima tua] and thou shalt never sin” (Sirach 7:40). From it were derived all kinds of practices and schemes for meditating on the so-called “last things”: death, judgment, hell, heaven, and (once the belief was codified dogmatically) purgatory. The introduction explains why the period from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century was crucial for the dissemination and transformation of instructions for meditating on death and the afterlife, and draws attention to the importance of written texts in enabling and supporting individual believers in their daily routines of devotion and meditation.

Rewriting the Text of the Soul

The chapter is about the radically text-centered form of meditation that emerged in and around the Devotio Moderna movement toward the end of the fourteenth century. In working with written text, adherents of the movement believed they were simultaneously working on their souls, especially because these too were believed to resemble a text, susceptible of being rewritten in a new and better order. Schemes for meditation by Florens Radewijns and Gerard Zerbolt of Zutphen, two leading exponents of the Devotio Moderna, require their readers to implement them by reproducing in the virtuality of thought one or other of the compositional principles by which the schemes were constituted as texts in the first place. With the Cordiale, seu quatuor novissima, a devotional tract on eschatology written around the same time as the exercises of Radewijns and Zerbolt, readers are similarly exhorted to meditate by transferring the “process” of the text—its unfolding as a rhetorically composed argument—to the process of their reflections on death and the afterlife.

Monastic Meditation Transformed

The chapter has two purposes: to provide a survey of monastic traditions of meditation from roughly the sixth century to the end of the twelfth century, and to describe the transformation of those traditions in the thirteenth century into a systematic regimen of spiritual exercise with clear and explicit instructions that could be followed by users who did not have the resources of a monastic education and community to draw on. The key figure in this transformation is Bonaventure; the chapter concentrates on the ways in which he introduced greater technical rigor into the practice of meditation and endowed it with the directive quality of a method.

Touching Eternity

This chapter is concerned with Heinrich Seuse’s mystical treatise, the Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit (ca. 1330), and the way in which it seeks to bring about a meditative experience of life after death which it describes as enphintlich: “sensible” or “feeling.” The organs of this experience are the inner senses: spiritual analogues of the corporeal senses which, in a tradition of Christian mysticism descended from Origen, are capable of directly seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching God when they detect his presence in the divine Word. In Seuse’s version, readers of the Büchlein are encouraged to feel God’s eternity as an inner touch: an encounter in which the boundaries of the self dissolve because in the moment of contact it is impossible to distinguish between the one who touches and the one who is touched.

Out of This World

The chapter examines the earliest set of instructions in the vernacular for meditating on death and the afterlife. First included in a handbook of practical and pastoral theology dating from the 1270s called the Miroir du Monde, these instructions achieved widespread diffusion through all classes of laypeople and clergy in the revised version of the Miroir by Friar Laurent d’Orléans, the Somme le Roi (1279). The instructions exhort readers to “go out of this world” once a day by imagining that they have died and their souls have gone first to hell, then to purgatory and paradise, in order to see what punishments and rewards await human beings in the next life. The chapter discusses the epistemology of meditative vision, and its background in Augustine’s theory of corporeal, spiritual, and intellectual vision; it examines how readers’ meditative visualization of the afterlife is facilitated by key metaphors of the text, sometimes accompanied by manuscript illustrations; it also describes the linguistic consequences of a daily implementation of the exercise.