The Low Countries 8 [antikvár]

It requires a considerable effort to grasp the fact that our drives and patterns of behaviour are subject to time and place; that even the most deeply-felt emotion is no given, but a component of the socio-historical process with a story of its own to be told. Quite literally, every aspect of everything is forever changing; and our outlook on mortality and our attitűdé towards the final hour is no exception. In modern western society a certain display of resistance as a reaction to dying is almost taken for granted. Commoner still are anger and aggression at the apprehension, or certainty, of imminent death. Resignation in the face of mortality is now the prerogative of very few, and then only when they have reached extreme old age. Latterly television has alsó become crucial to the issue by leading and stage-managing a broad-based, emotioncharged média offensive in our own living-rooms. Increasingly the experience of death is moving into the secular, public aréna, as often as not at the victim's own vociferous insistence that all the world should spiritually par~ ticipate in his or her terminál throes. It becomes less and less easy to comprehend that an actual yearning for death was quite widespread in the late Middle Ages. All the same, the origins of this spiritual orientation are not hard to identify. Christianity teaches that one's true life begins only after death. Hence death betokened no more than the culmination, even the fulfilment, of life. It offers the opportunity, to be grasped with thankfulness, to redeem the pressing burden of guilt called life; to cross the threshold into the solace of eternal rest. Above all, death heralded man's reunion with his Creator. For the nuns of the convents of the Modern Devotion, for example, this moment could scarcely come soon enough. In the sisterbooks, the biographies they have leftus, they describe how they would all gather around the deathbed of a fellow-sister and engage the expiring woman in talk for as long as possible. They did this in the hope that she might in her last gasps share with them whatever she could glimpse of what lay on the other side of the door. 'Behold, it comes,' cries out Alijt Comhaer with all her might when the end is upon her. Riveted, the sisters one and all hang on her lips. And as her final words, 'Father, into thy hands I commend my spint,' ring out, her companions are