Shayne Looper: The Christian roots of Memento Mori art

My wife and I are with friends in Germany this week. We stopped in Nuremberg, where we visited St. Siebold’s Church, which dates back to the beginning of the thirteenth century. St. Siebold’s was remodeled in the 17th century in a Gothic Style. It is impressive with its vaulting ceilings, 14th-century organ, and Renaissance art.

Among the pieces of art is one in the Memento Mori style, showing young children, bursting with life, alongside images of death-eaten bodies. Memento Mori is Latin for, “Remember: You must die,” and art in this style dates back to at least the fifteenth century. It frequently features images of healthy men and women alongside their presumably future self in skeletal form.

Artists have never stopped producing Memento Mori pieces. Van Gogh famously painted a skeleton with a burning cigarette between its teeth. Cézanne painted a “Pyramid of Skulls.” The contemporary British photographer Sarah Lucas did a self-portrait in which she sits on the floor with her arms resting on her knees and a skull between her feet.

This fixation with death seems morose. The artists who painted in this style must, one can only assume, have battled with depression. Yet the artistic roots of Memento Mori are certainly not planted in despair but in the soil of Christian belief. How is it that the religion of the resurrection produced artwork that focuses on human remains?

It would be a mistake to think that Memento Mori artists were all depressives. Memento Mori was not, at least in its Christian forms, a statement on the futility of life or the hopelessness of death. Despair does not enter the picture. It offers a reminder that we will all die, but Christians have never thought of death as the end of all things.

One source of Memento Mori art may be found in the psalms, and particularly in the 90th Psalm, known as the Psalm of Moses. In it, the author asks God to “Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” The entire Psalm, as well as the Psalm that precedes it, is a testament to human frailty. We are mortal. To pretend otherwise is to deceive ourselves, and the self-deceived cannot live well.

Memento Mori does not call people to despair but to realism. It is true that human beings cannot in their own power transcend their mortality, but the psalmist pairs human impotence with divine ability. His prayer is for God’s majesty and power to be displayed to his frail children. Memento Mori teaches us dependence on God.

An awareness of death can enable people to live wisely and fully in the years allotted to them. People who refuse to acknowledge that death awaits them are susceptible to wasting the life they have been given. They spend time as if it were limitless. Then they wake to find they have spent minutes and days, and even years and decades, failing to live in a way that brings fulfillment.

Jesus told the story of a successful man who planned his future without regard for the fact that he would one day die. He invested his life in money rather than relationships with God and others. He spent his life accumulating riches, but never got the opportunity to enjoy them. He traded his hours and minutes for far too small a return.

In the Christian tradition of Memento Mori, death is not seen as a disaster because it is not seen as terminal. While death’s inevitability is never denied, the sure and certain hope of the resurrection is never forgotten. Yes, death will be our dance partner, and an ugly one at that, but it will be a short dance, and then the beloved will cut in.

The Apostle Peter perfectly illustrates this calm assurance in the face of death. He says in his second letter that it is clear that he will soon die, but to him death is no more than taking down his tent so that he can move into a new home. Death is a “departure,” but it is not a terminus. It is a brief layover that precedes a glorious arrival.

— Find this and other articles by Shayne Looper at shaynelooper.com.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Shayne Looper: The Christian roots of Memento Mori art