Memento mori

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The last judgment . From the Bamberg Apocalypse , around 1000. The manuscript was commissioned by either Otto III. or Heinrich II.

The expression memento mori (Latin for "be aware of mortality") comes from medieval monk Latin . It is a symbol of vanitas , of transience, and was an essential part of the Cluniac liturgy .

Memento mori does not refer to a cult of the dead or ancestors . It also does not contain a cult of death or the longing for eternity typical of romanticism .

Historical and intellectual background

Detail from the wood engraving "Dance of Death" ( Hans Holbein the Younger , 1538). Holbein shows here that the plague knew neither class nor class.
Mors certa hora incerta ( New Town Hall (Leipzig) ).

After the end of the Carolingian rich during the so-called " dark century " 882-962 church life was morally fallen to a low point and had developed serious abuses, resulted in a backlash at the beginning of the High Middle Ages, especially the Cluniac Reforms to increased asceticism and Purification of everything worldly within the church, especially in the monasteries, with an increasing mysticism (best known is the Benedictine Hildegard von Bingen ). Around 150 reform monasteries were founded in Germany alone (it was around 2000 across Europe), including mainly in the southern German and Austrian region of St. Blasien , Hirsau as the center of the Hirsau reform , Melk and Zwiefalten . The central point was the idea of vanitas , from which it was inevitably concluded that the most important thing in life was to prepare for death and for the final judgment that followed, in order to guarantee one's own salvation. There have been similar ideas again and again later and in other religions, but seldom with this absolute consistency.

Another consequence of the Cluniac reform, when it lost its strength and Cluny had become a very rich abbey with the associated phenomena of decadence, was the establishment of the contemplative- oriented Cistercian order from 1112 with the aim of strictly following the order of Benedict of Nursia ( Regula Benedicti ) to live in poverty and according to the principle of Ora et labora, which was formulated only in the late Middle Ages . Bernhard von Clairvaux was decisive for the flourishing and expansion of the Cistercians . Several popes supported the reform, most notably Leo IX. , Gregory VII , Urban II and Paschal II , while the investiture controversy with the German king and later Roman emperor Heinrich IV raged and political turmoil with several opposing popes shook the Holy See . The last three popes had previously been monks in Cluny Abbey .

The catastrophic epidemic occurrence of the plague in Europe from the middle of the 14th century led again to an intensification of the memento-mori idea (see history of the plague ). Hermann Hesse dealt with this topic in his novel Narziss und Goldmund , published in 1930 . In the fine arts, too, there is a strikingly frequent representation of the memento mori in this context, especially on and in church and monastery buildings. Typical representations of the dance of death and later plague columns .

However, the Bible already conveys awareness of the ephemeral in various places. The original memento mori could come from Psalm 90 , verse 12: "Teach us to remember that we must die so that we may become wise". In use is also Memento mortis ( "Remember the death"). Associated with the motif are sayings such as Media vita in morte sumus (in the middle of life we ​​are in death) or Mors certa hora incerta (death is certain, the hour uncertain), for example on the town hall clock in Leipzig (around 1900). However, here, as in other forms, for example in art, there is already a post-Cluniac flattening of the originally deep philosophical-theological concept of the Cluniac reform and its only decorative function up to our time.

Medieval literature

Already in the time of the Carolingians there had been poems with a comparable subject here and there, which sometimes made use of the end rhyme instead of the old alliance rhyme . But it was not until the beginning of the High Middle Ages that memento mori became the dominant basic idea with the Cluniac reform movement for about 100 years. Central to the Cluniac reform was that the church began to speak in the language of the lay people, i.e. in German, no longer in Latin. Accordingly, early Middle High German literature began, with religious texts at its center and lasting from 1060 to 1170. De Boor writes: “The ascetic ideals of monasticism are also preached to the laity as a form of life worth striving for, and before the threatening memento mori and the eternal decisions of the Last Judgment , the nullity of all earthly things is made clear to him and he is called to a life of turning away from the world and denying this world . ”The corresponding literature is therefore also called“ Cluniac ”and one of its essential forms was the rhyming sermon. A total of six of these great rhyming sermons, some of which were also written in confessional form, have survived: the Ezzo song , which is handed down together with the Memento mori in the same Ochsenhausen manuscript, Heaven and Hell (it contains the famous lament: “In the hello there is tôt anô tôt “), The Viennese Genesis , the Annolied , a saint's life in style , and finally the Merigarto , remnant of a creation account with the earliest depiction of Ireland.

The rhyming sermon "Memento mori"

The torments of the 8th circle of hell in the 18th song of the Divine Comedy by Sandro Botticelli . The punishments shown, such as burning and chopping up, were taken quite literally in the Middle Ages, and people tried to avoid them through piety as much as possible.

Like the version S of the Ezzo song, the rhyming sermon “Memento mori” is handed down in the Ochsenhausen manuscript and was written around 1070 in the Hirsau reform monastery in the early Middle High German Alemannic dialect , which is sometimes attributed to Old High German, for example by Braune, but also to Old High German, as it is a transitional form represents. The poem is written consecutively, but divided into stanzas with pairs of rhymes. It ends quite unusually with the line: daz machot all a noker , which gave rise to all kinds of speculations about the author. The tone and content, however, are Cluniac. Only the reference to the Swiss monk Notker, who was involved in the replacement of the Hirsau hermitage (1065) and who later worked as Abbot “Noggerus” in Zwiefalten, solved the problem.

The theme is the eternal contrast between this world and the hereafter, God and the world. The world is bad and full of evil, it is ephemeral and determined by death. This also applies to all kinds of worldly order with poor and rich, noble or low. However, man has a free will, the selbwala , which was given to him by God. With this he has to prove himself in earthly life with charity, justice and giving away wealth. However, this does not mean education for Christian community life, as was customary in memento-mori sermons of the late Cluniac period, but a form of renunciation of the world and preparation for the Last Judgment . There is no longer any question of certainty of salvation, what remains is just the fear of fate after death and the finality and severity of the divine judgment to which one has to submit.

With the cause of this attitude is the theological inconsistency of the New Testament : Here forgiveness of sins through Christ's death on the cross as the Romans , Galatians and Corinthians of Paul , there eschatological threat schrecklichster punishment in hell as in the Book of Revelation as above all Dante Alighieri in the Divine Comedy , begun in 1307, are portrayed so drastically against the formal background of scholasticism , at the center of which, as confirmed by Dante himself, is the long, arduous path of a soul to heavenly salvation. From the 31st song, Dante even lets Bernhard von Clairvaux personally lead him to God's throne, whom he clearly adored.

The memento-mori thought emphasizes the punitive character, which can only be mitigated through enormous human efforts, and largely ignores the thought of redemption. During the history of the Church , the focus has shifted back and forth between these two poles time and again, but rarely as relentlessly extreme as here. During the Reformation , for example, the doctrine of justification already drafted by Augustine was the center of the Lutheran doctrine of grace , and thus the idea of ​​salvation was at the center.

aftermath

In the late Cluniac period , ascetic memento-mori penance sermons have been handed down mainly by poor Hartmann and, in particular, in a more perfect form by Heinrich von Melk, along with a few minor poets . The rhyming sermon finally developed into a genre of its own. Especially Henry is doing the feeling of a new era expression, during which the purely religious certain standard of living makes way for the raising of a culture in which this world is always in the affirmative: the courtly culture of the Middle Ages, in the center then the very worldly, life- minstrelsy was , which formally owes much to the poetry of the Cluniac period (e.g. the stanza and the end rhyme ). Heinrich led the last battle of retreat of the Cluniac way of life against this new lifestyle, which he perceived as bad custom, and the positive worldly view that went with it, and above all fought against the renewed incursion of the three main vices among the clergy: greed , simony and lavish lifestyle, a fight who ultimately even made him a satirist , who now increasingly replaced the memento-mori theme, which was purely aimed at the hereafter, with social criticism , which had previously only been a secondary theme in the criticism of everything worldly and the primacy of humility and charity .

The high medieval hymn Dies irae in Latin, congenially set to music by Verdi and others, is one of the most important artistic adaptations of the Memento mori of the subsequent period and was a liturgical part of the Catholic Requiem until 1970 . The author is Thomas von Celano (* around 1190; † around 1260), friend and biographer of Francis of Assisi . That probably by Thomas a Kempis wrote late medieval Sic transit gloria mundi , which the liturgy during a papal coronation is still part probably also stems from yet these after-effects of mind and shows affinity with the Fortuna motif.

After the revival during the late medieval and early modern plagues, the memento-mori idea gradually degenerated into a purely external motif of the sale of indulgences , as was particularly spectacular at the beginning of the 16th century by the Dominican Johann Tetzel with the slogan “As soon as the gold in the Basin sounds / in the huy the soul jumps in the sky ”and was one of the triggers for Martin Luther's Reformation . The vanitas and memento-mori ideas flared up again briefly in the early Baroque during the horrors of the Thirty Years' War ; a well-known and impressive example is Andreas Gryphius ' poem “Vanitas! Vanitatum! Vanitas! ". The concept of vanitas was largely forgotten in modern times; today also knows Bildungsburgertum him barely (or rezipiert only important part of ' vanity ', probably influenced by the English word 'vanity'). In popular piety of the 17th to 19th centuries envisioned figurative representations like the Betrachtungssärglein the memento mori in tangible ways.

Today the topics of dying and death are rarely discussed in public. For example, when Apple founder Steve Jobs gave a 'memento-mori speech' to graduates of Stanford University in California on June 12, 2005 (in which he addressed the cancer he had discovered a year earlier), this speech was received as memorable; his sentence Death is very likely the single best invention of Life (for example: "Death is the best invention of life") became popular.

Memento mori in non-Christian and historical religions

The prerequisite for this was and is always the idea of ​​a judgment of the dead , of whatever kind , as it exists above all in the Abrahamic religions Christianity and Islam, but also appears in the religion of ancient Egypt and Zoroastrianism. Judgment of the dead is an authority here that judges according to good and bad behavior in life, i.e. morally, with good and bad representing moral, relative and culture-specific quantities. Overall, the basic vanitas idea is largely missing in all of the examples below .

As far as the religion of ancient Egypt is concerned, there is indeed a strict judgment for the dead, whose moral concept also influenced Christian ideas; Magical formulas and amulets, as they are described in the Book of the Dead especially from the New Kingdom onwards , however, enable the deceased to outsmart this judgment, a downright perverse idea for the Abrahamic religions. In addition, ethical misconduct is only given relatively little consideration, at the center of the proceedings before the throne of Osiris are rather offenses in a legal sense, violation of rules of propriety, violation of cultic regulations, etc., i.e. a so-called negative confession of sin .

The Tartarus of Greek mythology , in turn, is a special place of punishment for enemies (the Titans , Tantalus ) and rivals of the gods themselves. The Hades , however, all the dead was understood as a unified and eternal abode. Any kind of memento-mori ideology was thus superfluous. On the other hand, from Pindar , Heraclitus and Hesiod , but especially with Plato in Book 10 of the Politeia , Greek philosophy began to develop numerous ideas, some of which later found their way into Christianity.

According to an old Roman custom, behind a victorious general, for whom a triumphal procession was celebrated, stood a slave or priest who held a laurel wreath or the golden oak leaf crown of the Temple of Jupiter over his head and repeatedly warned: “ Memento moriendum eat! ”(German:“ Remember that you have to die / are mortal! ”). This was more of a warning against hubris of believing oneself to be divine to the people, less of a reminder of personal vanitas.

The concept of transmigration of souls , as it can be found above all in Hinduism and Buddhism (but also in Greek philosophy), contains similar ideas, but which are supposed to lead on a hierarchical path to the ultimate goal of nirvana ( Dharma and Karma ) and therefore those Despite the widespread idea of asceticism, the finality of the divine judgment is missing in the western religions, which was the sole motivation for the memento-mori thought, which therefore remained alien to these religions, especially since their conception of evil, especially in the violation of cosmic, religious ones , ritual, social or natural order and harmony. (Something similar in Chinese Daoism .) Evil as a concept has therefore not emerged as an ethical category in these religions . In addition, death is viewed only as sleep before rebirth.

The Zoroastrianism , which focuses first of the free will of man is, knows a strict judgment of the dead. His judgments lead to punishment, which is not final, but rather equalized by Ahura Mazda's final victory over the evil of Ahriman . Memento mori, however, implies the irrevocable finality of a punishment, which must therefore be avoided at all costs.

Despite the Kabbalah, the memento-mori idea has also remained quite alien to Judaism .

In Islam , the first examination by the angel of death is only to determine whether the deceased is a Muslim. At the Last Judgment, however, there is a moral value. However, asceticism was largely foreign to this, and monasticism as in Christianity is hardly developed here, despite the Islamic mysticism. The decisive factor here, however, is the strict Islamic doctrine of predestination . It gave “no room for the development of an autonomous evil, since evil was not linked to the ground of human existence. The Christian tradition, which is very closely linked to the problem of people born in sin and burdened by original sin, is not an Islamic topic. ”The death wish of Islamist suicide bombers is even the opposite of the memento-mori idea, because they believe through theirs Indeed, as a martyr ( Shahid ), paradise with its joys is safe for you directly and without a final judgment. According to literature, this attitude has only superficially to do with religion, more with a modern sense of identity that subordinates individual death to an immortal idea.

Later reception in poetry and fine arts

The memento-mori motif faded over time to a purely formal motto on tombstones, to a motto in obituaries and finally only appears as a purely artistic motif of still lifes . It can be found as a style motif in all epochs of art. Typical motifs in the Vanitas still life are rotting fruits, pomegranates covered with flies, overturned wine glasses, skulls and similar objects that symbolize transience. The motif of the dance of death , for example by Hans Holbein the Younger , is also related .

The idea of ​​the memento mori , albeit weakened and non-religious, continues into modern times and can be found here e.g. B. with Salvador Dalí , the photographer Man Ray or the pop art artist Warhol . Cinematically, the topic was treated by Ingmar Bergman in 1957 in The Seventh Seal and in 1998 by Martin Brest in Rendezvous with Joe Black .

  • Medieval fresco . The picture is an excerpt from the ceiling painting of the church in Skibby on Zealand in Denmark in 1065 and shows the joie de vivre of 3 young kings with tiger-colored horses, hunting dogs and falcons and then the death they ride towards.

  • Memento Mori on a rosary from the early 16th century, life (face) and death (skull), split on a head, as an amulet .

  • An exhibit in Ambras Castle (Austria). Skeleton, depicted in strong, dance-like counterost. Attributed to Hans Leinberger , in the inventory of 1596.

  • St. Georg Collegiate Church, Tübingen. Detail of one of the funerary monuments: Memento mori. Baroque style ( putti ) .

  • Paul Cézanne - Still Life with a Skull (1895–1900), oil.

  • Anita Rée - Still Life with Hebbel's Death Mask, 1915, oil

See also

literature

  • Brockhaus encyclopedia in 24 volumes. 19th edition FA Brockhaus, Mannheim 1994, ISBN 3-7653-1200-2 .
  • Helmut De Boor: The German literature from Charlemagne to the beginning of courtly poetry. Vol. 1st 4th edition CH Beck, Munich 1949.
  • Wilhelm Braune : Old High German Reader. 13th edition edit. v. Karl Helm. Max Niemeyer Verl., Tübingen 1958.
  • Richard Cavendish, Trevor O. Ling: Mythology. An illustrated world history of mythical-religious thought. Christian Verlag, Munich 1981, ISBN 3-88472-061-9 .
  • Rudolf Fischer-Wolpert: Lexicon of the Popes. Marix Verlag, Wiesbaden 2004, ISBN 3-937715-68-1 .
  • Herbert A. u. Elisabeth Frenzen: Dates of German poetry. Chronological outline of German literary history. Vol. I. 4th edition dtv, Munich 1967.
  • Wolfgang Helck , Eberhard Otto : Small Lexicon of Egyptology . 4th edition Harrassowith Verlag, Wiesbaden 1999, ISBN 3-447-04027-0 .
  • Kurt Hennig (Ed.): Jerusalem Bibellexikon . 3rd edition. Hänssler Verlag, Neuhausen-Stuttgart 1990, ISBN 3-7751-2367-9 .
  • Gottfried Hierzenberger : Faith in the ancient high cultures: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indo-Europeans, Old Americans. Lahn Verlag, Limburg 2003, ISBN 3-7867-8473-6 .
  • Thomas Patrick Hughes: Lexicon of Islam. Fourier Verlag, Wiesbaden 1995. ISBN 3-925037-61-6
  • Andrea von Hülsen-Esch, Hiltrud Westermann-Angerhausen (Ed.): To die beautiful. Age, dance of death and the art of dying from 1500 to today . Schnell & Steiner, 2006.
  • Walter Jens (Ed.): Kindlers New Literature Lexicon. Kindler Verlag, Munich; Komet Verlag, Frechen 1988/1998, ISBN 3-89836-214-0 .
  • Adel Theodor Khoury , Ludwig Hagemann, Peter Heine : Islam-Lexikon . 3 vols. Herder-Verlag, Freiburg 1991, ISBN 3-451-04036-0 .
  • Johannes Laube: (Ed.): Evil in the world religions. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2003, ISBN 3-534-14985-8 .
  • Tom Lowenstein: Buddhism . Taschen-Verlag, Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-8228-1343-5 .
  • Heiner Meininghaus: Memento mori . In: Weltkunst . Volume 71, No. 12. 2001. pp. 1856-1859.
  • Monika u. Udo Tworuschka: Religions of the World. In the past and present. Bassermann Verlag, Munich 1992/2000, ISBN 3-8094-5005-7 .
  • Richard Waterstone: India. Gods and cosmos, karma and enlightenment, meditation and yoga. Taschen-Verlag, Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-8228-1335-4 .
  • The New Encyclopedia Britannica . 15th ed. Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., Chicago 1993, ISBN 0-85229-571-5 .

Web links

Commons : Memento mori  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Explanation of the Latin forms: memento = imperative (command form) (“remember, be aware”) from memini, meminisse ; mori = infinitive passive ( Deponens ) ("to die"). According to another explanation, memento mori would be the short form of memento moriendum esse (with the gerundive ) “remember that you have to die”.
  2. ^ Rudolf Fischer-Wolpert: Lexicon of the Popes. Marix Verlag, Wiesbaden 2004, ISBN 3-937715-68-1 , p. 175.
  3. ↑ Herbert A. Frenzen, Elisabeth Frenzen: Data German poetry. Chronological outline of German literary history. Vol. I. 4th edition dtv, Munich 1967, p. 17.
  4. ↑ Fischer-Wollpert, pp. 65-71, 175f, 204ff.
  5. ↑ Helmut De Boor: The German literature from Charlemagne to the beginning of courtly poetry. Vol. 1. 4th ed. CH Beck, Munich 1949, pp. 74ff.
  6. ↑ De Boor, p. 136ff.
  7. ↑ De Boor, pp. 143-154.
  8. ^ Memento mori. - Text with translation ( memento of the original from November 16, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.german.sbc.edu
  9. ^ Wilhelm Braune: Old High German Reading Book. 13th edition edit. v. Karl Helm. Max Niemeyer Verl., Tübingen 1958, p. 174.
  10. ↑ a b De Boor, p. 148.
  11. ↑ Kurt Hennig (Ed.): Jerusalem Bibellexikon . 3rd edition. Hänssler Verlag, Neuhausen-Stuttgart 1990, ISBN 3-7751-2367-9 , pp. 224f.
  12. ↑ Walter Jens (Ed.): Kindlers New Literature Lexicon. Kindler Verlag, Munich; Komet Verlag, Frechen 1988/1998, ISBN 3-89836-214-0 , vol. 1 p. 316.
  13. ^ The New Encyclopedia Britannica . 15th ed. Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., Chicago 1993, ISBN 0-85229-571-5 , Vol. 6, p. 662.
  14. ↑ De Boor, pp. 179-187.
  15. ↑ Speech text (translation)
  16. ↑ stanford.edu
  17. ^ Britannica, Vol. 24, p. 111.
  18. ↑ Wolfgang Helck, Eberhard Otto: Small Lexicon of Egyptology . 4th edition Harrassowith Verlag, Wiesbaden 1999, ISBN 3-447-04027-0 , pp. 134f.
  19. ^ Richard Cavendish, Trevor O. Ling: Mythology. An illustrated world history of mythical-religious thought. Christian Verlag, Munich 1981, ISBN 3-88472-061-9 , p. 134f.
  20. ↑ Britannica, Vol. 7, pp. 175f; Johannes Laube: (Ed.): Evil in the world religions. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2003, ISBN 3-534-14985-8 , p. 201; Richard Waterstone: India. Gods and cosmos, karma and enlightenment, meditation and yoga. Taschen-Verlag, Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-8228-1335-4 , p. 126f; Tom Lowenstein: Buddhism . Taschen-Verlag, Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-8228-1343-5 , p. 16f.
  21. ↑ Monika Tworuschka, Udo Tworuschka: Religions of the world. In the past and present. Bassermann Verlag, Munich 1992/2000, ISBN 3-8094-5005-7 , pp. 251f; Gottfried Hierzenberger: Faith in the ancient high cultures: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indo-Europeans, Old Americans. Lahn Verlag, Limburg 2003, ISBN 3-7867-8473-6 , pp. 91-98.
  22. ↑ Hennig, pp. 224f.
  23. ↑ Laube, p. 131.
  24. ↑ Hughes, S. 463f.
  25. ↑ Talal Asad: On Suicide Bombing , New York: Columbia Univ. Press 2007, p. 96.
  26. ↑ Hans Georg Wehrens: The dance of death in the Alemannic language area. "I have to do it - and don't know what" . Schnell & Steiner, Regensburg 2012, p. 14, 49ff. and 145ff. ISBN 978-3-7954-2563-0 .