A "Living" Baroque Exemplum of Dying

CRITICISM A "LIVING" BAROQUE EXEMPLUM OF DYING William F. Schereb "A time to weep, and a time to fough." —Ecclesiastes 3 "Dieu seul est grand!" were die irrefutable first words of Jean Baptiste Massillon's funeral oration for the "Roi Soleil," Louis XIV. At the feet of his court chaplain, his French subjects, and before all of Europe, the once great "Sun King" lay in deuth. It was 1715. Only a few years before in another part of Europe, the splendid Habsburg Imperial residence-city of Vienna throbbed with the violent tenor and enthusiasm of the European Baroque— a phenomenon which in the preceding century had flourished with enormous extravagance at both the court of Louis XIV and that of his rival Viennese cousin, Leopold I. But by 1705, Leopold lay flat and secure in the "Kapuzinergruft " (the Capuchin Imperial Vault) with the rest of the Habsburg royalty, encased in a massive sarcophagus adorned with fitting emblems of an obsessive Baroque Weltanschauung that emphasized the transient nature of things, human equality in mortality, and the vanity of earthly glory. In life Leopold's pompous son, Charles VI, was heir to the Baroque flamboyance of his father: Charles' corpse followed the Baroque monarch's (and that of his brother, Joseph I) in another lead sarcophagus upon which were mounted four regally crowned skull's heads. The crown of one sunken-eyed skull was a replica of the Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Emperor, thus symbolizing that death reigns supremely over all men. Leopold himself had erected the monumental plague-pillar in Vienna, edifying death's supremacy: a sculptural memento mori for his 70,000 fellowmen who succumbed to the devastating plague in 1679. "Leute sterben heute, die noch nie vorher gestorben sind!" is a typically sardonic Viennese saying,1 emphasizing paradoxically the exclusiveness of each man's experience of dying and the uncanny "democracy" of death: all men must die. Despite the universality of this experience, Jacob Boehme, the "Einige reisset die Pest also augenblicklich hinweg, wie ich anno 1679 selbst 11TeOpIe are dying today who have never died before!" From The Meaning of Death, ed. Herman Feifel (New York, 1959), xi. 4 RMMLA BtjlletinMarch 1973 das grösste Geheimnis."2 The Baroque Age, moved by an overwhelming impulse to bridge the cleavage between vanitas and aetemitas, produced rich homiletical thought based upon the Christian topos of salvation—transcendental extension of the human spirit beyond the existence of mortal flesh. Tliis 'breakthrough" governed the drama of living a "Baroque" life and dying a "Baroque" death. Due to an acute awareness of uriminent death, time became the prime obsession of the Baroque.3 There arose a frantic endeavor to express in every human manifestation an immediate feeling for the truly permanent, the eternal, in the midst of temporal contingency. This was the thrust which gave the Baroque epoch its characteristic intensity, its neurotic dynamism.4 The immediate time in history is a few minutes before midday, December 1, 1709. In the Habsburg capital, a rigorous old Augustinian monk lies on his deathbed in a small chamber of the vast court. His secular name was Johann Ulrich Megerle, bom 1644, the son of a Swabian innkeeper. Now, after sixtyfive years which have brought him recognition throughout Europe, "Abraham à Sancta Clara" Imperial Court Chaplain, prepares to die. Four years before he had delivered the funeral oration for Leopold I. Thousands listened in awe to Pater Abraham's emotionally charged sermons, witnessing an eloquence of delivery reminiscent of the brilliant Bossuet. With his forceful oratory and genial wit, Abraham had become a folk poet among the Aiistrian populace, renowned and beloved by both nobleman and peasant.8 At the height of his life's endeavor as preacher and poet, he faced the moment of death. Death, however, was no novelty for him. He had entered this world of vanity and deception in the wake of the Thirty Years' War. In the small Swabian village of Kreenheinstettin in Würtemberg-Baden, young Ulrich Megerle had seen the results of war with a child's eye, as the German duchy was reduced from 400,000 to 48,000 inhabitants. During 1679, as a claustral prior, he...