The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [91]
The commentary attached to Fear and Fascination extended, elaborated, and diversified the arguments contained in its immediate predecessor, particularly in respect of the Christian world of the Medieval period and the Renaissance. It had much to say about art and literature, and the images contained therein. It had substantial chapters on the personification of death as the Grim Reaper, on the iconography of the danse macabre, on the topics of memento mori and artes moriendi. It included comprehensive analyses of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and graveyard poetry. These were by no means exercises in conventional criticism; they were elements of a long and convoluted argument about the contributions made by the individual creative imagination to the war of ideas, which raged on the only battleground on which man could as yet constructively oppose the specter of death.
My text also dealt with the persecution of heretics and the subsequent elaboration of Christian Demonology, which had led to the witch craze of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. I gave considerable attention to various thriving folkloristic traditions that had confused the notion of death, especially to the popularity of fictions and fears regarding premature burial, ghosts, and various species of the “undead” who were said to rise from their graves as ghouls or vampires. To me, all these phenomena were symptomatic of a crisis in Western civilization’s imaginative dealings with the idea of death: a feverish heating up of a conflict that had been in danger of becoming desultory.
The cities of men had been under perpetual siege from death since the time of their first building, but in the Middle Ages—in one part of the world, at least—the perception of that siege had sharpened. A kind of spiritual starvation and panic had set in, and the progress that had been made in the war by virtue of the ideological imperialism of Christ’s Holy Cross had seemed imperiled by disintegration. That Empire of Faith had begun to break up under the stress of skepticism, and men were faced with the prospect of going into battle against their most ancient enemy with their armor in tatters.
Just as the Protestants were trying to replace the Catholic Church’s centralized authority with a more personal relationship between men and God, I argued, so the creative artists of the era were trying to achieve a more personal and more intimate form of reconciliation between men and death, equipping individuals with the power to mount their own idiosyncratic ideative assaults.
The Medieval personalization of death, whether as a hooded figure carrying a scythe or as the leader of the dance of death, seemed to me to be part and parcel of the re-creation of human personality. This was the period in which the individual gave way to the ego, in which the humans of the Western World first attained the privilege of uniqueness. As the human personality became unique and idiosyncratic, so did the death of that personality. Death became a visitor knocking at the door and demanding admission. The ghostly voices that had formerly been bound together into an ancestral chorus became distinct as the dead became as distinct and idiosyncratic as the living, demanding specific reparation for particular slights. The ever-present ancestors of the tribe and the demons of general temptation were replaced by lone haunters and possessors who settled upon equally isolated victims. The universal war against death dissolved into a chaotic mass of hand-to-hand combats.
I drew numerous parallels, of course, between what happened in the Christian world and similar periods of crisis that were discernible in other cultures at other times, but I cannot deny that my study of Fear and Fascination was ethnocentric in the extreme. It was, I suppose, inevitable that so many of my peers would claim that my cross-cultural analogies were fatally weak and that such generalizations as I attempted were illusory, but that was the temper of the times with