“Remedies” for the Death of a Loved One: Consolation in the Early Modern Times Religious Literature

Abstract

The European writings with motives of solace on the occasion of the death of a loved one are very diverse in genre terms (reflections on death, consolatory letters, self-consolation dialogues, consolation treatises, ars moriendi manuals, funeral sample sermons and orations, elegiac poetry, manuals on rhetoric, etc.). Elements of continuity may be found between consolatory arguments, developed in the Antiquity and those found in the Middle Ages and by the authors of the early Modern period (death as a necessity and as an act of mercy that spares further suffering and sins; immortality of the soul and the hope of afterlife reunion, etc.); throughout all epochs, the tradition of presenting consolations in the form of soul-healing “remedies” also persists. Christian authors reinterpreted ancient consolation arguments in the light of Christian doctrine; also, the main task of solace or remedies for grief is no more to achieve control over emotions, but to strengthen the Christian in faith. The early Modern period turns with a new intensity to the philosophical heritage of antiquity and the personal examples of thinkers and historical figures of the past, who, along with the biblical king David and the suffering Job, are presented as models for acceptable mourning, attitude towards suffering and death. Catholic consolatory eloquence for the death influenced the Eastern Christian tradition, which produced in the XVII century first examples of consolatory texts (sample sermons for burial in liturgical books, the author's works of Symeon Polotsky), replicating the solace “remedies” circulated in the European culture. Such a similarity of particular ideas and arguments of ancient and Christian authors of different times does not always indicate borrowing or direct continuity, but is only a consequence of the common existential experience of people of different epochs.