Ars Moriendi: Death and the Gift of Life

David Glick '23

To read about life in early modern Europe is to read about death too. Though science was beginning to make inroads toward medicine, vaccines, and new sanitation practices, most of these breakthroughs were still on the horizon in the 16th and 17th centuries, and therefore much as in the Middle Ages, to live was to live in fear of death. Life was hardly promised, dying certainly was. Mothers passed away during childbirth with frequency, and one reason for begetting large families was the assumption that some of the children would likely die before adolescence. Life was, especially for the destitute, that Hobbesian norm, spent in “continual fear, and danger of violent death [...], solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”^[1] Death was never far from the door, and it could come for anyone.

In our Reformation Europe class, we read the prologue to From Madrid to Purgatory, a book by Carlos M.N. Eire on “the art and craft of dying in sixteenth-century Spain.”^[2] In the flow of the readings for our class, this piece was nearly an aside, only three pages long, a quick read. But as happens so often with brief, pointed pieces, these three pages punched hard. In his short prologue, Eire presents two unlikely partners to open his conversation on death, bullfights and Francis Borgia (of Jesuit fame). Bullfights, begins Eire, have long been a part of Spanish lore and life, and serve as a useful example of the Spanish fascination and flirtation with death. The Spanish, he writes, have long recognized the bullfight as “a ritual theater of the deepest human fear”^[3], and the theater is crowded not in spite of this terrible truth, but indeed because of it. If you know Spanish bullfighting, you understand that death comes not only for a bull, but sometimes, it comes for the spectators too. To sit near the action is to tempt death herself, and not all come away to tell their tales. What it means, says Eire, is that the Spaniards have “long confronted mortality in its own ways”^[4], and they, rather than averting their gaze, have stared death down and stood tall.

As in the bullring, so in life. To see a medieval bullfight — or in modern Spain, bull running — as somehow detached from the guttural elements of life itself would be to miss Eire’s point completely. Death comes to all, and the gory art of the bullfight is not a mere symbol of death’s visitation to the human experience, it is a veritable example of it. If most spectators return home safely after the fight, a few, perhaps, do not. For the bullfight attendee, to sit near the action was merely to practice experientially what was already quite true. Death was always at hand, but at the bullfight, one could engage that reality in a way that was inescapable. What these long-ago spectators realized, and what bull runners in Pamplona today understand is this: we are all already in the arena. To sit in the “safe seats” at the bullfight is to deny the realities of living. We exist but a breath away from death, and only the man who allows himself to experience this truth can really begin to live.

To example an awakening to death’s realness, Eire utilizes Francis Borgia. One of Europe’s most powerful, wealthy men, Francis was born into royalty, and lived a life of unimaginable luxury. By all accounts, his life was a happy one; he had no want for anything, all the fineries of the good life were his. So what was it that caused him to renounce his titles and wealth and enter the Society of Jesus? It was death, Eire says, the demise of his friend, the Empress Isabel. Upon the sight (and smell) of her corpse, Francis was exposed for the first time to the raw, inescapable nature of death. And seeing her decaying body, devoid of life, he meditated on his own, “This same death which struck the Imperial Crown now bends its bow and aims its arrow at me ….. Would it not be better to die to the world while living, in order to live with God after death?”^[5] By these words, Francis’ conversion began. His luxury and power he left behind, and forsaking all, he vowed himself to the consecrated life. In dying to himself and the world, Francis Borgia found life eternal.

I will die. You too, will die. One or both of us may well die before “our time”, whatever that means. We are the spectators at the bullfight, the only question that remains is whether we will awake to that reality, and enjoy the sport of it. We are Francis, choosing between two kinds of death and life; will we forsake ourselves and the world now, or when we draw our last breath? To die now is excruciating, but it comes with a particular prize: we gain, like the bullfight spectator and like Francis Borgia, the ability to laugh in the face of death forever.

^[1] Hobbes, Thomas, and Edwin Curley. Leviathan: With selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1994, 76.

^[2] Eire, Carlos M. From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

^[3] Ibid., 1

^[4] Ibid.

^[5] Juan Eusebio Nierenberg, S.J. Hechos politicos y religiosos del que fue Quarto de Gandia, Virey de Cataluna y despues tercero General de la Compania de Jesus, el Beato Fransisco de Borgia (1643). Later edition (Barcelona 1882), 2 vols., vol. 1, p. 61.