AAR/SBL 2019 Review Panel | Speaking of Death: Rhetoric and the Postmortal

We have a terrific graphic artist in our office, who—seeing her designs appear on signs created by other departments in the same building--came up with a new twist on an old saying. Imitation, she said, is the laziest form of flattery. If that is the case, there’s more than a little laziness here, for in my remarks today I essentially imitate Ellen’s argument, applying it to different material but drawing similar conclusions. In the spirit of the classical rhetoricians Ellen Muehlberger studies and the Renaissance humanists I know best, however, I prefer to think what I’m affirming here is the transformative power of the model and the value of careful copying. Put more plainly, I learned much from Moment of Reckoning, and have found it remarkably generative when applied to Christian materials in a very different place and time.

Take Martin Luther, for example. Did he die in agony or in peace? Was he felled by regular bouts of overeating and too much drinking? Did he pass from this life in the grip of fear, uncertain and tremulous? Or did he approach his own moment of reckoning with calm confidence? Was he filled with the certitude he had long declared the sine qua non of true faith? Enquiring minds wanted to know. And Luther’s followers immediately obliged. They knew that reports of Herr Doktor’s death would affirm or undermine his message, that lessons would be drawn and conclusions reported in letters, in sermons, and in conversations throughout Europe. If the songbird of Wittenberg died while gasping for breath and bereft of words, overcome by his body’s vulnerability as his heart ceased beating, then there was good reason to doubt that his message was true, that salvation was assured for those who had faith, and that the Word alone was the source of this certainty.

Justus Jonas, an eyewitness to Luther’s death on February 18th, 1546, published an account within weeks.[1] According to Jonas’s popular and influential account, which remains the primary source for devout as well as scholarly assessments of Luther’s last hours of life in this world, the pastor who had denounced papal power and the sacramental system, and been condemned in turn, moved from room to room throughout the long night of his death. As he entered his bedroom, he uttered these words: “In manus tuas commendo spiritum meum, Redemisti me Domine DEUS veritatis” (I place my soul in thy hands, for thou, God, has truly redeemed me). The emphasis on Luther’s words was not incidental, for it was the Word he claimed as the protection and surety he denied that relics, sacraments, and indulgences could provide. Justus’s account details Luther’s ailments, the pressure on his chest, the hot compresses that a pharmacist applied, and the various attempts to ease his pain. Yet Justus attributes the peace that he insists Luther felt to the Word, and cites Luther’s words as evidence of this peace. The reformer complained of severe pressure on his chest, but the account suggests that because of his ritual incantation of these words, his “heart did not pain him.”[2]

As further evidence that Luther’s experience of death was defined by the power of the Word, Justus points to what he identifies as Luther’s last authentic remain, preserved by his followers: an inscription into an estate manager’s book of sermons, citing John 8:51, ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death.’ According to Justus, the “dearly beloved Father” interpreted it as follows: Never see death. ‘Truly, these words are beyond belief, and contradict general, every day experiences; and yet, they are quite true: If a man contemplates God’s word with sincerity, from his heart, believes in Him and falls asleep with his thought, or dies, then he fades and passes on before he recognizes faith or is aware of it, then he must surely pass on with a certainty in the Word he believed and valued.’ Under this was written: ‘Martinus Luther, Doctor 1546, done on the 7th day of February.’”[3]

This inscription confirms what he himself viewed as the single most important message he preached, that the power of faith was primarily bound to the biblical word, “verbum suum, SUUM verbum, Dei verbum.” As a pastor and believer, however, he paired this conviction with the equally powerful recognition that it was difficult for people to experience the power of the Word. This is why, even as he rejected the sacramentalist faith in the power of relics or amulets or other objects, he put biblical words in their place. For Luther’s followers, inscription itself became what Ulinka Rublack has called a “grapho-relic.”[4] The word “Christ” alone could slay the devil, Luther’s most famous hymn, “A mighty fortress,” attests. Onto the walls of his rooms in Coburg castle, Luther protected himself against the devil by writing the verses of Psalm 118.17 in red letters: “I shall not die but live, and I shall declare the words of God.”[5] As evidence that this practice was widespread and popular, already in Luther’s lifetime, Rublack cites popular Lutheran spiritual treatises such as Johann Spangenberg’s 1542 publication, “Booklet for the Comfort of the Sick,” which praised biblical passages such as the psalm verses that Luther, Melanchthon and other reformers frequently inscribed in Bibles and other books as shields able to “quench all the flaming arrows of the Evil One.” The Booklet detailed which inscriptions worked particularly well, including as an antidote to the terror often felt at the moment of death.

So what does all this have to do with Ellen’s argument? Moment of Reckoning is full of bold and compelling arguments. But to my mind the most intriguing, if subtle, concerns the relationship between rhetoric and identity. How do words define people? How might personhood be conjured, and changed, by language? These questions are at the heart of Ellen’s project, even if they seem unremarkable when compared to the drama of what Ellen persuasively reveals to be late antiquity’s new attitude toward death and the alarmingly consequential link between this attitude and Christianity’s embrace of a culture of compulsion. With maggots and the threat of torture on the one hand, it’s no wonder I want to talk about prosopopoeia or speech in character. A sign of a weak stomach, to be sure, and confirmation that I’m one of those people who can’t sit through a horror flick. No wonder I ended up studying Renaissance humanists. Still, this is a point worth making. The question of death was, as Ellen puts it, a question about “the individuality of persons living and dead.”[6] And this –namely individuality—was a paradoxical and complicated effect of rhetoric.

Ellen explains this as follows. “To the extent that Christians developed a well-detailed and imagined expectation for how death would be—a thanatology—and mobilized that expectation as part of an ethical program,” she observes,” they were simply extending rhetorical formation to a new context.”[7] There may seem to be some incongruity here, between the claim that rhetorical formation is the source of Christian attitudes and Ellen’s assertion that “Christian imagining of death was defined by embodiment.”[8] But in fact rhetoric bridges the gap, for it was words about the body that defined the Christian experience of embodiment. The physical facts of death had not changed. Judgments about those physical facts had, with significant consequences for Christian attitudes toward human power, morality, and indeed the very nature and value of life.[9] The claim also that this rhetoric had an individualizing effect may also raise questions, given rhetoric’s concern with generic rather than unique characters—with generic here importantly linked to genre. Rhetorical voices are successful because and insofar as they stay in character. Rhetoric’s appeal to pathos, its strategic deployment of first- and second-person speech, and the training that associated speech in character with attention to a character’s present, past, and future—all this training informed the Christian creation of the postmortal as a newly conceived “lifestage of interest.”[10]

“The same lines of exposition and inquiry,” Ellen writes, “that allowed a student of rhetoric to imaginatively explore the experience of a character in a tragic situation prepared Christian preachers to imaginatively visualize the generic Christian at the moment of her death.”[11] This generic Christian was the selfsame figure individualized by Christian interest in the postmortal. Again, rhetoric bridges the gap. As Ellen perceptively notes, the reality of characters and their stories had long been central to Christianity’s truth claims. “In fact, much of late ancient Christian theology hangs on the reality of narrative, in that it takes the words of actions of characters in the gospels as reliable indicators of the nature of human beings and of God.”[12] In focusing interest on the postmortal, Christian preachers drew especially on the narrative structure of classical tragedy, with its focus on how the past and the present might inform one’s understanding of the future, “to think of one’s own life, to gauge its significance, to evaluate its summary value from the perspective of one pitched and tragic moment which was solely one’s own.”[13] Specifically, Ellen explains, “the exercise known as prosopopoeia, or speech in character, trained young writers to examining tragic circumstances through the eyes of characters who experienced tragedy and according to a certain temporal pattern.” This pattern could be applied because each individual character had generic characteristics: “the accumulation of translocal similarity in notions about the death of the generic Christian can be sourced to how preachers learned to write and to think about individuals in dire straits.”[14]

Note this coincidence of generic and individualized, the idea that each singular person can be shaped and understood according to generic patterns. To reiterate the point in a way that highlights the distinctive feature of this logic, the assumption here is that generic patterns are the best and most effective way for individuals to come to understand one’s natural state as a human being.[15] All obvious and unsurprising to students of classical and humanist rhetoric and to anyone who has been reminded that Augustine’s Confessions, for example, is unlike a modern autobiography in precisely this respect: because Augustine imagined that the boy from Thagaste who wept at Dido’s fate and watched in fascination as Ambrose read silently, who felt the sizzling heat of corruption in Carthage and the cool peace of a garden in Ostia, was experiencing the story of every person who ever lived. Still, this coincidence of the individual and the universal is a notable claim, crucial to the power of rhetoric as Ellen describes it.

With Luther, then, we can see both the enduring legacy of the development Ellen explains and the distinctiveness of the sixteenth century version. Unlike most of the authors Ellen surveys, Luther claimed the Psalms alone, rather than the Psalms as well as Cicero, Quintilian, and other rhetoricians, as the source of his rhetorical training. And what did Luther find in the Psalms? He found, first of all, what pious readers before and after him had found—a view confirmed in the commentaries Ellen surveys: the whole range of human emotions and the words to express them. It is “easy,” Luther wrote in 1528, “to understand why the Book of Psalms is the favorite book of all the saints. For every man on every occasion can find in it Psalms which fit his needs, which he feels to be as appropriate as if they had been set there just for his sake.”

The Psalms are exceptionally effective because our primary needs are emotional. “The human heart is like a ship on a stormy sea driven about by winds blowing from all four corners of heaven,” Luther writes with poetic sympathy. “In one man, there is fear and anxiety about impending disaster; another groans and moans at all the surrounding evil. One man mingles hope and presumption out of the good fortune to which he is looking forward; and another is puffed up with a confidence and pleasure in his present possessions.”[16] The storms are essential, for they teach us to speak “sincerely and frankly,” to “make a clean breast.” But although this comes from experience, an experience we each must feel for ourselves, we need help to give voice to those things that lie in the “bottom of [our] hearts.” Speech is the “most powerful and exalted of human faculties,” Luther affirms. But that does not mean we can simply speak our experiences. To “lay bare” the heart, to see the “deepest treasures hidden in [the] soul,” and to understand the nature and causes of human action, we need the “noble utterances” recorded in the Psalms. “Where can one find nobler words to express joy than in the Psalms of praise or gratitude?” Luther asked. “Or where can one find more profound, more penitent, more sorrowful words in which to express grief than in the Psalms of lamentation?” Emotion relies on speech, and speech gains power from its capacity to express emotion. In an era that exalted rhetoric, the Psalms exemplify the height of rhetorical power. “So, too, when the Psalms speak of fear or hope, they depict fear and hope more vividly than any painter could do, and with more eloquence than that possessed by Cicero or the greatest of the orators.”[17]

“I live by faith in Your Son,” Vivo autem in fide filii tui, Luther observes in his comments on Ps 119:50, “because Your Word has given me life” quia eloquium tuum vivificavit me.[18] What is, in Ellen’s era, a new insistence that words individualize by focusing each generic Christian on her particular fate, on the connections between her past actions and her postmortal condition, becomes in Luther’s hands a conviction that the Word supplants this individual review. At death Luther confirmed that the Word defeated death by inscribing this claim on the eve of his death and restating it near the moment when his breath left his body. He did not imbue rhetoric with a talismanic power, but he did suggest that God’s eloquium, as read, written, and restated by human beings, could preclude the pains of death and the threat of eternal consequences for mistakes made during life.

In a word, as Rublack concludes, “Luther in this way and through the use of his motto Vivit (‘He lives’), turned himself into the embodiment of one of the most potent forces of religious belief: he could triumph over death, and so could those who believed in his truth.” Even as the enduring fixation on the circumstances of Luther’s death confirms the story of the postmortal told in Moment of Reckoning, Luther’s own account of eloquium reveals that rhetoric could alleviate the very concern with individual fate that rhetorical training had inspired.

[1]  Johann Spangenberg, Robert Kolb, A Booklet of Comfort for the Sick, &: On the Christian Knight (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 2007), 127.

[2] Justus Jonas, Michael Caelius, and Martin Ebon. The Last Days of Luther [1st ed.] (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 69.

[3] Ibid., 78-80.

[4] See Ulinka Rublack, “Grapho-Relics: Lutheranism and the Materialization of the Word.” Past and Present, no.5 (July 2010).

[5] Ibid., 150.

[6] Ellen Muehlberger, Moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death and Its Consequences In Late Ancient Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 152.

[7] Ibid., 142.

[8] Ibid., 145.

[9] See Ibid., 150.

[10] Ibid., 149.

[11] Ibid., 147.

[12] Ibid., 156. For discussion of the pattern of “continuity in character”, she refers us to Chapter 2 “Locating Christ in Scripture” in her Angels in Late Ancient Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

[13] Ibid., 103.

[14] Ibid., 110.

[15] Ibid.

[16] John Dillenberger, Martin Luther: Selections From His Writings (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1962), 39.

[17] Ibid., 39-40.

[18] WA 4:332, 31-32; LW 11:453.

Constance Furey is Professor and Chair in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. Author of two monographs, most recently Poetic Relations: Faith and Intimacy in the English Reformation (University of Chicago, 2017), she is also Co-PI of Being Human: Public Scholarship as Theological Anthropology, funded by the Luce Foundation.