![]() ![]() It bore the prolix title: A Salve for a Sicke Man: or A Treatise Containing the Nature, Differences, and Kinds of Death: As also the Right Manner of Dying Well. One of the Puritans I have studied, William Perkins, wrote such a book in 1595. Allan Gilbert to be particularly effective.Ī common genre of writing was the Ars bene moriendi, the art of dying well. I have always found the 1892 drawing, “All is Vanity,” by C. In older art, this motif is nearly ubiquitous and one that we today might find morbid simply because we live in a culture that denies and avoids the thought of death. I don’t know a great deal about art history, but it doesn’t take much to know that the image of a skull is a kind of memento mori, a warning against vanity. But why do I have to remember it? That sounds a bit morbid–literally. This verse comes into the liturgy for Ash Wednesday: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” It’s a fact. “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Genesis 3:19 Long before that, the Hebrew Scriptures shatter our illusions of invincibility with this stark and often unwelcome fact: But also because the Christian church has long urged believers to not only be aware of but to actively cultivate a healthy sense of one’s mortality. ![]() Not only because I like Latin phrases, which I do.
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