De Mortuis

According to some Christians, all of a man's life is simply a preparation for "a good death." Virginia Moore, an Episcopalian, believes that there are fashions in dying and that men die as they live--according to the style of their times. Last week she buttressed this thesis in a macabre treasury of last words (Ho for Heaven; Dutton, $3).

Eight thousand years ago, says Necrologist Moore, the unknown inhabitants of the Indian peninsula seem to have had no fear of death, regarded earthly life as a kind of spiritual education, death as release for the soul to return home. But from then until the coming of Christ, mankind grew more & more entangled in material things, and correspondingly loth to leave them.

To the early Greeks death was simply an unavoidable calamity. The dead Achilles warned Odysseus that it was better to be a beggar on earth than a king in Hades. Later their philosophers tried to reason with death and strike a bargain they could make the best of: "There is either annihilation or immortality," said Socrates. "Either is well."

Two thousand years ago man's manner of dying was profoundly changed by the greatest of valedictories: "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit."

Faith and Flair. Combined with the deep faith that grew in the Middle Ages, the flair of the Renaissance for zestful living produced men whose deaths were proud as well as pious. Mounting the scaffold, Sir Thomas More joked: "I pray thee, Mr. Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down, let me shift for myself."

In the 18th Century death seemed "selfconscious . . . with . . . eyes less on God than on the bystanders." When the priest rose to leave Mme. Pompadour's bedside, she stopped him. "One moment, M. le Cure," she said, "and we will depart together." Cracked Voltaire, when a lamp flared in his death chamber: "The flames? Already!"

A nation's funeral customs, says Author Moore, are a barometer of its belief about death. U.S. customs (and, by implication, belief) got a lashing last week from the Rev. Josiah R. Bartlett of Seattle's University Unitarian Church. Said he:

". . . Under the pressure of materialism and advertising and salesmanship, America's funerals have, within the past fifty years, degenerated into a pagan preoccupation with vulgar display and pagan concern for the body, to the almost total neglect of the spirit. . . .

"First of all we can blame our popular religion. . . . Next . . . our own popular bad taste. . . . But . . . the funeral industry itself is most to blame. . . ."

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