Meditating Death in Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Writing: From Bonaventure to Luther by Mark Chinca (review)

Philosophy, as Plato famously said, is meditation on death. The biblical author Jesus ben Sirach similarly wrote, “In all thy works remember thy last end, and thou shalt never sin” (Sir 7:40). Mark Chinca’s careful study traces select Christian attempts to obey that precept from the thirteenth century through the sixteenth, with a coda on Descartes. His method is partly rhetorical, partly psychological, as he parses the fine distinctions among various techniques for meditating. Beyond his specific focus on the four last things (death, judgment, hell, and heaven), Chinca examines modes of meditation per se as a devotional exercise.

According to the jacket copy, meditating on death was an important premodern technique “for developing a sense of individual selfhood.” But Chinca’s work hardly bears out that claim if we take “individual selfhood” in its usual sense, for the goal of these devout meditations was in no way to cultivate or express one’s unique personality. It was rather to internalize universal truths so as to take personal responsibility for them. At one point Chinca devotes ten pages to the maxim “all humans are mortal,” showing how reiterated exempla impressed it on the believer’s soul. Modes of death vary, as in Leonard Cohen’s haunting Jewish meditation: “And who by fire, who by water,/Who in the sunshine, who in the night time,/Who by high ordeal, who by common trial,/Who in your merry merry month of May,/Who by very slow decay,/And who shall I say is calling?” But medieval treatises did not encourage speculation on how death might come. They insisted instead that it would come, making that certainty the touchstone of the believer’s approach to life.

Chinca’s first chapter treats three influential texts by Bonaventure: De regimine animae, Soliloquium, and De triplici via. Although all three are in Latin, they adapt traditional monastic exercises for secular users. De triplici via introduces the familiar scheme of three spiritual “ways”: purgative, illuminative, and unitive. Concentrating on such terms as gradus and scala, Chinca argues that in the Benedictine Rule, the ladder of the soul’s progress with its rungs is a metaphor drawn from artisanal labor, since the monastery was conceived as a spiritual workshop. But in Bonaventure these terms become equivocal—sometimes metaphors, but sometimes technical terms for stages in a systematic scheme of meditation. Always methodical, Bonaventure directs the soul to turn its “ray of contemplation” in four directions—toward its interior, to see how it has been “formed by nature, deformed by sin, and reformed by grace” (60); toward external things to learn contemptus mundi; toward what is below it to attain fear of death, judgment, and hell; and finally toward what is above it to cultivate longing for celestial joy. Within each of these contemplations, the Soliloquium provides detailed points and images for the exercitant to ponder, in a program meant to be repeated frequently to enhance its transformative power.

Chapter 2 deals with the Somme le Roi, a handbook compiled by the Dominican Friar Laurent for King Philip III of France in 1279. Though not original with this author, the Somme le Roi outpaced many comparable works. Its ars moriendi chapters were continually copied for two centuries, making their way into print and multiple translations. The work sends its reader on an imaginative journey: “go out of yourself, go out of this world, learn to die, separate your soul from your body in thought. Send your heart into the other world—that is, into heaven, hell, and purgatory” (66). Dante took that journey, as did many visionaries. But the purpose of the exercise is less to create vivid pictures of the afterlife than to keep death before the mind’s eye at all times. The believer should “learn to die” not like the worldly wise...