While much of the literature on the ars moriendi comes from the Puritans, examination of the subject did not begin in their era. By the time Reformed and Puritan writers began producing their own manuals, sermons, and prayers on death, they were entering a much older conversation. Christians had long known that death was not merely a medical event; it was a spiritual trial. The dying man or woman faced weakness, fear, regret, temptation, unfinished earthly business, and the nearness of eternity. The question was never simply, How can the body be made comfortable? The question was, How can the soul be prepared to meet God?

This is one reason the medieval ars moriendi became so important. The phrase means “the art of dying” or, more fully, the “art of dying well.” The literary tradition is usually traced to the early fifteenth century, though the theological concern is older.¹ The church had long prayed for the sick, ministered to the dying, and exhorted believers to face death in faith. But the ars moriendi gave that concern a recognizable literary and pastoral form.

The medieval world experienced death more closely than most modern Western Christians do. Plague, famine, war, and disease made death a visible presence. People died at home and in public. Communities watched death. Families prepared for death. The church surrounded death with rituals, prayers, warnings, and consolations. In such a world, the dying needed instruction, and those attending them needed guidance.

The original Ars Moriendi assumed that the dying person might need help in the absence of a priest. This point is especially important. The medieval church developed the sacrament of extreme unction, later more commonly called anointing of the sick, as a preparation for death. The sacrament was associated, they said, with James 5:14–15, where the sick are instructed to call for the elders of the church, who pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord.² In developed medieval doctrine, extreme unction was numbered among the seven sacraments, with the priest as minister and consecrated oil as the matter of the sacrament.³

But what happened if a priest was not available? Allen Verhey observes that the questions contained in the Ars Moriendi would ordinarily be asked by a priest, but priests were not always available, especially in the centuries marked by plague. The manual therefore functioned as a kind of aid for the dying and those gathered around them. If no priest or friend was present, the dying person could consider the questions inwardly “in his soul.”⁴ What was most remarkable about this was that many Catholic priests refused to meet with the dying to avoid catching the various plagues.

This helps explain the practical force of the medieval Ars. It was not a detached theological treatise. It was a bedside manual. It imagined a dying Christian surrounded by spiritual danger and in need of help. The opening of the original Ars calls for a “special friend” to assist the dying person, pray for him, counsel him, and see that others around him do the same.⁵ The dying person is exhorted to remember the blessedness of those who die in the Lord, departing from the world and its pleasures in the true faith of the church and in repentance for sin.⁶

There is much here that Christians should recognize as wise. A person should not face death alone if it can be helped. The dying need prayer and friends who will speak truth. They need help resisting despair and to be reminded of the promises of God. They need to be prepared to leave this world. Yet this medieval form also reflected the errors of medieval theology.

The dying person was directed not only to Christ but also to the saints and Mary, the blessed mother. The struggle at the deathbed was closely connected to sacramental mediation. Assurance was not grounded simply in Christ received by faith but was entangled with the church’s sacramental system and the believer’s actions. The dying were exhorted, but the structure of comfort remained unstable because justification by faith alone and full gospel assurance had been obscured.

The Reformation did not abolish the concern for dying well. It transformed it. The Reformers and their heirs did not say, “Because we reject extreme unction, Christians need no preparation for death.” They said something closer to this: “Because Christ alone is the Savior, and because the believer is justified by faith alone, the Christian’s preparation for death must be grounded in Christ, practiced throughout life, and comforted by the promises of the gospel.”

Philip Benedict summarizes the shift well. Reformed manuals replaced the pre-Reformation emphasis on the deathbed struggle against despair and the devil’s temptations, fought largely through sacramental means, with an emphasis on consoling the dying person and those gathered around the deathbed. They directed attention away from the moment of death alone and toward the believer’s earlier pilgrimage of faith.⁷ In other words, the decisive issue was not whether the dying person could perform well in the last hour. The decisive issue was whether the dying person belonged to Christ.

This was a profound pastoral change. Medieval deathbed piety could easily concentrate anxiety at the final moment. Had the dying man confessed sufficiently? Had the proper rites been performed? Had the temptations of the devil been resisted in the proper way? Had he died in the visible communion of the church? These questions were not all wrong, but they could place enormous weight on the final moments of life.

The Reformed tradition did not deny that the final moments mattered—how a Christian died mattered. The dying should be prayed for, exhorted, comforted, and surrounded by the church. But the final hour was not treated as though it could overturn the life of faith. Benedict notes that Reformed believers could be reassured that even if they uttered some horrible blasphemy in a final moment of pain or delirium, those who had lived according to God’s Word would reach heaven.⁸

This is a pastorally necessary point. Anyone who has attended the dying knows that the final hours may be confusing, painful, and medically complicated. A dying believer may be sedated. He may be incoherent. She may be frightened. He may say things that do not represent his settled faith. She may be unable to speak at all. If assurance rests on the visible composure of the final moments, then many grieving families will be left in torment. But if assurance rests on Christ, then the final weakness of the believer cannot nullify the Savior’s faithfulness.

John Calvin helps us understand the theological heart of this shift. Calvin was not a Puritan, but the Puritans drank deeply from his theology. J. I. Packer famously described the Puritan goal as completing what England’s Reformation had begun, and he identified “serious Calvinistic piety” as one of the marks of Puritanism.⁹ Calvin’s teaching on death, therefore, stands behind much of the later Reformed and Puritan approach.

In the Institutes, Calvin treats meditation on the future life as part of the Christian life. His point is not that Christians should despise creation as evil. Nor is his point that Christians should be eager for death in a reckless or unnatural way. Rather, he insists that believers must learn to entrust the whole course of life and death to God. The Christian is the one who has “resigned himself entirely to the Lord,” placing the whole course of his life at God’s disposal.¹⁰

That kind of resignation is not fatalism. Calvin knew the realities that press Christians toward bitterness: disease, pestilence, war, poverty, bereavement, disaster, and the destruction of earthly hopes. He knew that such events tempt men to curse life, detest the day of their birth, and accuse God of cruelty or injustice. But the believer must learn, in these very things, to “contemplate the mercy and fatherly kindness of God.”¹¹

That sentence captures much of the Reformed art of dying. Christians do not prepare for death by pretending that suffering is not suffering. Calvin could say plainly that poverty, exile, contempt, imprisonment, disgrace, and death are miserable. Death itself is “the last of all calamities. But when God’s favor rests upon the believer, none of these things can finally destroy him.”¹²

The comfort is not in the event; it is in the Father. The comfort is not that death has ceased to be an enemy; it is that death is now governed by the God who has given his Son for us. The believer can say, “The Lord so willed it, therefore let us follow his will.”¹³ This is not stoic resignation. It is filial trust. The Christian faces death not as an orphan under fate but as a child under the hand of a father.

Calvin also gives the church a more robust heavenly-mindedness. “If heaven is our country,” he asks, “what can the earth be but a place of exile?” And if departure from the world is entrance into life, then earthly life must be viewed considering the life to come.¹⁴ This is not an invitation to neglect earthly callings. Calvin was no quietist. But he understood that Christians cannot die well if they have spent their whole lives treating this world as home.

This point may be one of the most necessary recoveries for the modern church. Many Christians want heaven eventually, but not particularly. They want Christ, but not yet. They want resurrection, but mostly as a guarantee that their present comforts will not be permanently lost. Calvin presses us harder. If death recalls us from exile to our heavenly country, should that not comfort us?¹⁵ Should we not learn now to desire the fixed and immortal condition that cannot be found on earth?

This teaching also appeared in Calvin’s preaching. Summarizing Calvin’s sermons on Job, Derek Thomas notes that dark providences provoke us to consider death. Death should not surprise us. Life is uncertain. Even the memory of great men fades. Such reflection should humble us and make us sober though not drive us into melancholy.¹⁶ This distinction is crucial. Christian meditation on death is not gloom. It is sobriety. It does not make us less faithful in earthly life. It makes us more faithful because it teaches us to live before God with eternity in view.

The Puritans received this Reformed inheritance and made it intensely pastoral. They rejected all sacraments except the two instituted by Christ: baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Therefore, deathbed preparation could not be treated as a matter of receiving an additional sacramental grace through extreme unction. The point was not to secure a superstitious preparation for death but to comfort God’s people in Christ.¹⁷

William Perkins illustrates this change clearly. His Salve for a Sick Man, published in 1595, was a treatise on the nature, kinds, and differences of death and on the right manner of dying well.¹⁸ Perkins begins with Ecclesiastes 7:1–2:

A good name is better than precious ointment,

and the day of death than the day of birth.

It is better to go to the house of mourning

than to go to the house of feasting.

Like the writers of the older Ars Moriendi, Perkins wants Christians to consider death seriously, but his framework is thoroughly evangelical.

This is still needed. Many modern Christians no longer fear missing the priest’s last rites, but we have our own forms of deathbed anxiety. We fear loss of control, pain, indignity, dementia, silence, dependence, and leaving things unfinished. Families fear that if their loved one’s final days were confused or difficult, something spiritually deficient occurred. Pastors fear saying too much or too little. Churches often avoid the subject until death is imminent.

The Reformation helps us speak more clearly. The dying believer’s hope is not the quality of his final experience. His hope is Christ. His assurance is not founded on the beauty of his last words. It is founded on the Word made flesh. His comfort is not that he has performed the final duties sufficiently. It is that Christ has lived, died, risen, and intercedes for him.

This does not remove the need for preparation. It actually deepens it. If Christians die in gospel assurance rather than in sacramental anxiety, then that assurance should be cultivated throughout life. The promises that comfort the dying should be preached, prayed, sung, and believed long before the final illness. The Christian should not wait until the last hour to learn the language of faith.

This is where William Perkins will help us next. The Reformation changed the foundation of dying well by locating comfort in Christ and his promises. Perkins shows how that comfort is learned throughout the whole course of life. The Christian art of dying well does not begin with last rites at the edge of death. It begins with living now by faith in the Savior who has conquered death.

Notes

1. Nancy Lee Beaty, The Craft of Dying: A Study in the Literary Tradition of the Ars Moriendi in England (Yale University Press, 1970), 1.
2. The Catholic Encyclopedia, “Extreme Unction,” accessed March 2, 2015, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05716a.htm. It should be noted that the goal here is to explain the history of the ars moriendi. I am aware that last rites as conceived by the medieval church was not biblical. There is no danger of a true believer dying outside of friendship with God and of not being allowed to enter purgatory, a place that does not exist.
3. F. L. Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford University Press, 2005), 1668.
4. Allen Verhey, The Christian Art of Dying: Learning from Jesus (Eerdmans, 2011), 158.
5. Here begynneth a lytell treatyse called Ars moriendi, in Early English Books Online, https://name.umdl.umich.edu/A21562.0001.001, University of Michigan Library Digital Collections.
6. Ars moriendi.
7. Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (Yale University Press, 2002), 507.
8. Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed, 507.
9. J. I. Packer, A Quest for Godliness: A Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (Crossway, 1990), 28, 35.
10. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.7.10.
11. Calvin, Institutes, 3.7.10.
12. Calvin, Institutes, 3.8.7.
13. Calvin, Institutes, 3.8.10.
14. Calvin, Institutes, 3.9.4.
15. Calvin, Institutes, 3.9.5.
16. Derek Thomas, Proclaiming the Incomprehensible God: Calvin’s Teaching on Job (Mentor, 2004), 240–41.
17. David Sceats, “‘Precious in the Sight of the Lord…’: The Theme of Death in Puritan Pastoral Theology,” Churchman 95, no. 4 (1981), accessed January 31, 2015.
18. William Perkins, Salve for a Sick Man; or, A Treatise Containing the Nature, Differences, and Kinds of Death; as Also the Right Manner of Dying Well (London, 1616), Kindle, loc. 1–11.

©Everett Henes. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• Everett Henes

  

  Everett Henes (MDiv, ThM, DMin) is pastor of Hillsdale Orthodox Presbyterian Church, where he has served since 2008. He is husband to Kimberly and father of five children and grandfather of five (and counting!). He teaches US History and Philosophy of History for Jackson College in Michigan. He is currently working towards a PhD in Humanities with a focus in US Religious History from Faulkner University. In his spare time, he enjoys competing in powerlifting and strongman and teaching homeschoolers Taekwondo.

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