by
Ted Daniels, Ph.D.
Electronic version copyright © Ted Daniels 1997. All rights reserved
Originally published in Millennialism: An International Bibliography
by Garland Publishing New York, 1992. Reproduced here by permission.
URL for this article is http://www.
Ariés, Philippe. Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974.
Beginning in the eleventh and twelfth centuries individualism was introduced into Western ideas of death. The Last Judgement begins to appear in art and, the Second Coming disappears at about this time. Each individual is judged separately, his deeds read from a book (the Liber Vitae), an individual account book which is closed, not at death but dies illa—at the end of time. The judgement came to be moved to the moment of death in artes moriendi. Saints and demons gather at the deathbed, but God doesn't judge; He is an observer only of this final and decisive trial and temptation, which passed erases all prior sins.
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