How the ancients formed death
How the ancients formed death is the title of a pamphlet by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing , first published in 1769, which inspired a series of further investigations under the title, in particular that of Johann Gottfried Herders from 1786.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's writing from 1769
Lessing introduces his writing expressly as a polemic and opens it with praise of the genre. The explanations on this are at least as important as the subsequent theses on depictions of death in antiquity: We owe the clarification of important questions to the medium of polemical pamphlets, since here the embellishments are omitted and the matter is spoken harshly - a clear plea for a culture that is controversial not as a problem, but as an opportunity:
“Not as if I didn't regard our public as a little too disgusting for everything that is called polemic and looks like it. It seems to want to forget that it owes the clarification of so many important points to mere contradictions, and that people would still agree on nothing in the world if they had not quarreled about anything in the world. [...]
But the truth, they say, wins so rarely. - So rare? Let it be said that the truth has not yet been determined by a dispute: nevertheless the truth has won in every dispute. The quarrel has nurtured the spirit of the trial, has kept prejudice and prestige in constant shaking; in short, the made-up falsehood prevented from establishing itself in the place of the truth. "
The following statement refers to an attack by Christian Adolph Klotzes , who accused him, Lessing, of claiming that the ancients did not depict death as a skeleton. Klotze can indeed refer to ancient representations of skeletons and accuse Lessing of not wanting to take note of them. Lessing counters, however: he did not deny that there are ancient depictions of skeletons and skeletons. All he said was that they did not depict death iconographically.
The actual explanation applies up to page 50 of the first edition of the question of how the ancients - Greeks and Romans - represented death: according to Homer, as the twin brother of sleep, more precisely: as a youth with crossed legs and wings, confusingly similar to Cupid . In his hand he is holding a downward-pointing, extinguished torch. Sometimes it is also equipped with a wreath or butterfly. The ancient Greeks would have honored their dead with the wreath, the butterfly stood for the soul of the deceased. Several copper engravings prove the thesis. Johann Joachim Winckelmann is the authority in discussions about works of art.
The second part of the treatise applies to the traditional representations of skeletons and their meaning, if they are not supposed to be representations of death. It is of interest that the ancient Greeks considered the corpse to be unclean in the first place and subsequently withdrew it from the representations.
Johann Gottfried Herder's writing from 1786
Herder praises Lessing's work in the first letter, especially since it must be pleasant to us, since with it we would have had a new look at death as a figure that is losing its horror. In the second letter he deconstructs Lessing's simple iconography: We have images that correspond to it, but it has been proven that we follow ancient sources and do not depict death (but Cupid). The solution to the problem is a differentiation: Gods are represented in a standardized way, abstracts like death allow different artistic offers. Letter 3 dissolves the unity of the entire phenomenon proposed by Lessing - under the premise that Lessing was thinking here of a culture in which death was of course a figuratively representable actor, just not the skeleton with the scythe, but a decent youth. The ancient world gave the goddess of fate the power to intervene and had various pictorial signs of death and dying in visualizations. Letter 4 goes a step further in Lessing's destruction, but ties in with Lessing, who already stated that the Greek thought the corpse was unclean. Thanatos , death, was a horror to the Greeks, up to the point of being taboo - the opening that ancient times had a much friendlier image than the Middle Ages and modern times is no longer applicable. Instead, the options are now becoming multiple. The fifth letter interprets various tombs in which the psyche plays a role. Towards the end of the sixth letter , Herder Lessing openly criticized Lessing for simply speaking of the ancients and mainly dwelled on late Roman portraits. The seventh letter continues the deconstruction by dividing the Hebrews apart in time and raising the question of where the Christians got their pictures from - that is the polemical opening question from the Orient, since it is currently the fashion to derive everything from the Orient? Early Christianity is endowed with a diverse repertoire of ancient symbols. In the further history, however, it breaks with the traditions:
“The Christians of the first centuries, especially in Rome, kept themselves free of this skeleton for a long time and it is strange to see how they gradually transformed the symbols on the tombs of the heathen. So come z. B. the two genii with the torch, the dolphins, yes even the bird with the butterflies was at first, until gradually the bird of Noah with the branch of oil, from the fighting cocks the cock of Peter, the lions become the lions of Daniel, the genii become angels, the dolphins become grazing sheep, and instead of the story of gods and heroes, the story of the Bible appears. Even the smaller symbols of the first, especially Roman Christians, the anchor, the lyre or even Orpheus with it, the sailing ship, were old symbols; and he was only kept open to the darkness of the northern midnight, to give castle and castle to death, a knight figure in front of the gate of hell and finally the gallantry that he would dance around with all classes of earth. This belongs just as little to Christianity as it does to the religion of the Dalai Lama in Tibet.
So please allow me, m. That I look away from this mask and still, with one glance, rejoice in the better hopes that Christianity has made us certain. It did not give us pictures: because these are only for children; but truth and conviction. And it is precisely this brighter truth that has displaced those images which could only be sufficient for human understanding in the dawn. Obviously, as we are over the kingdom of Pluto, we are over all those beautiful children's games of Cupid and Psyche, Luna and Endymion, if we do not clothe purer higher truth in them; and this has, as it were, opened the gate to Christianity. It did not turn the hope of a different life into a philosophical question, much less a new image of art, but it did turn it into popular belief and linked to it the most sublime truths of reason and human dignity. "
expenditure
- Johann Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, How the ancients formed death. A treatise (Berlin: Christian Friedrich Voss, 1769). Digitized version : Archive.org full text Zeno.org
- Johann Gottfried Herder, "How the ancients formed death? An addendum to Leßing's treatise with the same title and content", in: Scattered sheets . Second collection (Gotha: Carl Wilhelm Ettinger, 1786), pp. 273–280. Digitized and transcript Wikisource
literature
- Gerhard Seib, The cast iron in the service of honoring the dead in the period between 1750 and 1850. In: Hans-Kurt Boehlke (Hrsg.): How the old formed death. Changes in the Sepulchral Culture 1750–1850. Mainz 1979, ISBN 3-7758-0982-1 , pp. 85-94. (Kassel Studies on Sepulchral Culture Volume 1)