The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death Over the Last One Thousand Years by Philippe Aries

Author:Philippe Aries [Aries, Philippe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780804152006
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 18666226
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-11-13T06:00:00+00:00

7

The Vanities

This chapter is a continuation of the previous one. It provides a different set of illustrations for the same phenomenon: the subtle distancing of a death that is nevertheless still close. In it we propose to trace the rise, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in the second half of the eighteenth century, of a desire for simplicity in the things connected with death. At first this desire expresses, but with more conviction than in the past, the traditional belief in the fragility of life and the corruption of the body. Later, it reveals an anxious sense of nothingness, which finds no solace in hope of the beyond, although this hope continues to be expressed. Eventually, it culminates in a kind of indifference to death and the dead, which may signify an abandonment to a benevolent nature among the literate elite or an unconscious negligence among the urban masses. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there is a kind of inexorable downward movement on all levels of society toward the yawning gulf of nothingness.

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