Matthew Adams

The greatest puzzle of all | 17 January 2013

A few months before he passed away, responding to a question about his doubts and beliefs, Jorge Luis Borges offered a rapt and potted account of the many cultural and religious registers in which human beings have for centuries been telling themselves stories about their own deaths. He then posed the following question: ‘Where does this tendency of man come from, to try to imagine and describe something that he cannot possibly know?’

Though Borges’s words do not feature in The Undiscovered Country, the force of his question can be felt on almost every page. For what Carl Watkins offers is an account of how ‘ordinary people’, from the Middle Ages to the aftermath of the Great War, have imagined, limned, mourned and memorialised the dead. This is not, Watkins swiftly asserts, a contribution to the history of ideas: there will be no tours of abstract theology, no treks through arcane philosophy. What there will be, as he somewhat bizarrely puts it, is ‘a modest bid to raise the dead’. This is a ‘book of many stories … set before the reader for contemplation’.

More bluntly, what we have here is something akin to a social history of death, a work of what we might term popular eschatology. Yet one wonders if such an approach can add anything new. Much of the early part of the book is comprised of a fairly standard discussion of the eschatological and soteriological ideas promulgated by the Catholic church in the Middle Ages, and the disruption of those ideas that was engendered by what the 16th-century clergyman Robert Parkyn called the ‘grevus matters’ of the English Reformation. Watkins’s sources might differ from those of the great intellectual and religious historians of the period, but the picture that emerges is, largely, a familiar one. (One of the problems with The Undiscovered Country is that much of the country has been discovered already.)

Accordingly, we see the enchanted world of medieval Catholicism — with its saints’ days and indulgences, its good works and post-mortem prayer, its Purgatory and psychostasis — give way to the relatively austere apparatus of Protestantism (which itself gives way, in time, to deism and atheism).

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