The Hour of Our Death by Philippe Aries (review)

86ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW Philippe Aries. The Hour of Our Death. Translated by Helen Weaver. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. 651p. It is not surprising that Philippe Aries's monumental and evocative book on the most puzzling and moving of human issues has been received with both awe and interest. Unlike most modern academic scholars, he dares to trace a cultural history of attitudes and practices in The Hour of Our Death (originally published in France as L'Homme devant la mort) from the early Middle Ages through a brief section entitled "The Case in America," which deals with what he calls the modern attitude towards death as "the invisible death." Such breadth is in these days of narrow speculation and fine analysis refreshing. It allows him the perspective from which to generalize in interesting ways, whether we entirely accept the generalization or not. The reader — even the scholar — is disposed to respect the quality of Aries's speculation, however, partly on the basis of the massive collection of materials: fascinating visual and verbal texts from the history of death that Aries has collected over a lifetime. One of Aries's major ideas is that death in the early Middle Ages, under ideal circumstances at least, was a "tamedeath"(asinthecaseofRoland)characteristicof a very old and enduring civilization that is "only now dying out before our eyes." Within the variations of attitudes in the Middle Ages death remains linked to a vision of a peaceful end and an ultimate resurrection until about the fourteenth century when the macabre elements seemed to loom in a terrifying way. Aries recognizes that many scholars link the terror that surfaced in the Danse macabre tradition to the devastation of the plague, but he cites Tenenti for support of the idea that there was more fundamentally a shift from the image ofdeath as transition to that ofdeath as decomposition. In other words the physical fact of death somehow replaced the subordination of death to images of judgment. This theory can be seen as the beginning of secularity or the incentive to a secular humanism in which people affirmed a greater sense of the value of worldly existence. Aries, however, corrects this thesis by suggesting that love of life is fundamental to the Middle Ages as well as .the Renaissance, and Christianity remains a continuing and essential aspect of the new humanism. Such a perspective on this life has emerged from the increasing sense of the value of a particular life. As Aries puts it: "The art of the macabre can only be understood as the final phase in the relation between death and individualism, a gradual process that began in the twelfth century and that arrived in the fifteenth at a summit never to be reached again." Aries records, as I suggested earlier, the continuing transformation ofdeath and illustrates from numerous places his ideas of the changing modes of death: the skeleton as a simple agent of Providence and nature; the skull that is so pervasive in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a remote and rather clean symbol. Symbol and artifice replace the physicality of corruption. Eventually the church itself begins to separate cemeteries from the place of worship, to distance the physical aspects of death, until gradually by modern times people attempt to ignore the presence of death itself. Societies dedicated to technology and happiness seem unable to confront the fact of death, according to Aries — hence current and nineteenth-century attempts to sentimentalize or even ignore its presence. Aries suggests, however, the impossibility of maintaining such a stance: "The beliefin evil was necessary to the taming of death; the disappearance of the belief has restored death to its savage state." The book is probably most valuable in its discussion of death in the Middle Ages. The ideas there are most fully integrated with the evidence : cultural artifacts from literature, tombs, and funeral practice. The modern reader will find discussion of Book Reviews87 the artes moriendi especially illuminating. Aries's discussion of the continuity between the medieval and the Renaissance periods is a particularly persuasive strand of the argument. Inevitably the occasional brief treatment of crucial issues and the scattered comments on the matters...