Ante Mortem

My last essay was about the Early Modern Christian idea of the Final Moment before death. (Most of my evidence came from manuscripts and monographs written in the 16th and 17th centuries.) At the time, Renaissance Christianity more or less taught that one's damnation or salvation would be determined by one's state of being in extremis, that is, at the point of death. No matter how spic-and-span you lived your Christian life, if you weren't clean before dying, you weren't getting in to heaven. People were obsessed with ars moriendi, or the Art of Dying, and several guidebooks had been written on the subject of "how to die well".

The deathbed scene—in which one's eternal fate was decided—became central to Christian art that dealt with death, and woodcuts often depicted the dying man sandwiched between a patient reception of heavenly figures and an enticing mob of demons, with each member of the latter group holding a sort of diabolical pennant or scroll that marked their tool of temptation (e.g., pride, lust, etc.). In the image here, it seems like our boy has sold out to earthly perversions (note the disapproving faces of the godly figures in the background):




Getting the Final Moment "right" was crucial and, as explained in my essay excerpt below, it just about required the precision of a sniper. And, as in the case with most snipers, you only had a single chance to get it right:

To corroborate the emphasis on the Final Moment, Wunderli cites the English reformer and Marian Exile, Miles Coverdale, who said that at the time of death (and not at the Final Judgement) ‘the soul…doeth either out of the mouth ascend up to heaven, or else from the mouth descendeth into the pit of hell’ (266). Coverdale also employed a metaphor of a marksman firing for a target: if his aim veers even slightly at exactly the moment of expelling his gun, he misses his target and all his preparation was for naught. The decision regarding one’s afterlife, regardless of the piety of one’s life, was determined in the final moment. Talk about laying it on.