The Four Last Things - by St Thomas More : The Remembrance of Death (Pt 1)

Sir Thomas More. Holbein the Younger (1527). Frick Collection.

The following posts reproduce the text and notes of an edition by D. O’Connor published in 1903 which is close to the English original of 1557. 

The 1903 footnotes are indicated by [ ] and my own by [ ].

 

👈While outwardly he enjoyed a life of comfort, in the privacy of his spiritual life he wore a hair shirt, attended daily Mass, and practised a strict discipline of prayer. He is believed to have become a Third Order Franciscan (and indeed his name is listed in the calendar of Franciscan saints). This may be the significance of the cord shown. 

Sancte Thoma 

Ora pro nobis.

The Remembrance of Death (Pt 1)

Death

What profit and commodity cometh unto man’s soul by the meditation of death, is not only marked of the chosen people of God, but also of such as were the best sort among gentiles and painims[1]. 

Philosophy 

For some of the old famous philosophers, when they were demanded what faculty philosophy was, answered that it was the meditation or exercise of death. For like as death maketh a severance of the body and the soul, when they by course of nature must needs depart asunder, so, said they, doth the study of philosophy labour to sever the soul from the love and affections of the body while they be together.

Dance of death in Poules (Paul’s). The first printed version from 1554: 
“The Daunce of Machabree.” See The Dance of Death in London. 

Now if this be the whole study and labour of philosophy, as the best philosopher said that it is, then may we within a short time be well learned in philosophy. For nothing is there that may more effectually withdraw the soul from the wretched affections of the body than may the remembrance of death, if we do not remember it hourly[2], as one heareth a word and let it pass by his ear without any receiving of the sentence into his heart. But if we not only hear this word “death,” but also let sink into our heart the very fantasy and deep imagination thereof, we shall perceive thereby that we were never so greatly moved by the beholding of the dance of death pictured in Poules[3] as we shall feel ourselves stirred and altered by the feeling of that imagination in our hearts. And no marvel. For those pictures express only the loathly figure of our dead bony bodies, bitten away the flesh, which though it be ugly to behold, yet neither the sight thereof nor the sight of all the dead heads in the charnel house[4], nor the apparition of a very ghost, is half so grisly as the deep-conceived fantasy of death in his nature by the lively imagination graven in thine own heart. For there seest thou not one plain grievous sight of the bare bones hanging by the sinews, but thou seest (if thou fantasy thine own death, for so art thou by this counsel advised), thou seest, I say, thyself, if thou die no worse death, yet at the leastwise lying in thy bed, thy head shooting, thy back aching, thy veins beating, thine heart panting, thy throat rattling, thy flesh trembling, thy mouth gaping, thy nose sharping[5], thy legs cooling, thy fingers fumbling, thy breath shorting, all thy strength fainting, thy life vanishing, and thy death drawing on.

If thou couldst now call to thy remembrance some of those sicknesses which have most grieved thee and tormented thee in thy days, as every man hath felt some, and then findest thou that some one disease in some one part of thy body, as percase[6] the stone or the strangury[7], have put thee to thine own mind to no less torment than thou shouldst have felt if one had put up a knife into the same place, and wouldst, as thee then seemed, have been content with such a change, think what it will be then when thou shalt feel so many such pains in every part of thy body breaking thy veins and thy life-strings with like pain and grief as though as many knives as thy body might receive should everywhere enter and meet in the midst.

A stroke of a staff, a cut of a knife, the flesh singed with fire, the pain of sundry sickness, many men have assayed in themselves. And they that have not yet, somewhat have heard by them that felt it. But what manner dolour and pain, what manner of grievous pangs, what intolerable torment the silly[8] creature feeleth in the dissolution and severance of the soul from the body, never was there body that yet could tell the tale.

Christ cried, (Matt. xxvii, Mark xv, Luke xxiii).

Some conjecture and token of this point we have of the bitter passion and piteous departing of our Saviour Jesu Christ, of whom we nothing read that ever He cried for any pain, neither for the whips and rods beating His blessed body, or the sharp thorns pricking His holy head, or the great long nails piercing His precious hands and feet. But when the point approached in which His sacred soul should depart out of His blessed body, at that point He cried loud once or twice to His Father in heaven, into whose mighty and merciful hands at that extreme point with a great loud cry He gave up the Ghost. Now if that death was so painful and rageous[9] to our Saviour Christ, whose joy and comfort of His Godhead, if He would have suffered it, might in such wise have redounded into His soul, and so forth into His body, that it should not only have supped up all His pain, but also have transformed His holy body into a glorious form, and made it impossible, what intolerable torment will death be then to us miserable wretches, of which, the more part, among the pangs of our passage, shall have yet so painful twitches of our own conscience that the fear of hell, the dread of the devil, and sorrow at our heart at the sight of our sins, shall pass and exceed the deadly pains of our body !

Footnotes

[1] i.e., pagans.

[2] for a short time; quickly, cursorily. Obsolete.  [OED 2. 1529-49].

[3] Poules : Paul’s.  An allusion to the famous picture, the “Dance of Death,” in the cloister of Pardon Church Haugh, at old St Paul’s, London. Death was represented by a skeleton, leading away all sorts and conditions of men, beginning with pope and emperor. The accompanying verse of John Lydgate, monk of Bury, was as gruesome as the picture itself. See The Daunce of Machabree.

[4] The charnel-house was situated near the Haugh, and contained a chapel and three chantries. Underneath was a vault for the decent reception of any bones that might be disinterred, and hence the name.

[5] narrowing.

[6] i.e., perhaps.

[7] A disease of the urinary organs characterized by slow and painful emission of urine; also the condition of slow and painful urination.

[8] i.e., weak, helpless.

[9] i.e., violent.[ rageous :of things, as fire, the sea, the wind, etc.: violent, severe, full of furious activity. OED 1.].  

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The Virgin of Tenderness. >12th century.

SUB tuum præsidium confugimus, Sancta Dei Genitrix. Nostras deprecationes ne despicias in necessitatibus, sed a periculis cunctis libera nos semper, Virgo gloriosa et benedicta. Amen. 

 

Totus tuus ego sum

Et omnia mea tua sunt;

Tecum semper tutus sum:

Ad Jesum per Mariam.

He that hearkeneth to me, shall not be confounded: and they that work by me, shall not sin. They that explain me shall have life everlasting. Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) xxiv. 30-31.