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18 - Birth and death

from Part IV - Christianity as Lived Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2010

By
Frederick S. Paxton
Edited by
Thomas F. X. Noble  and
Julia M. H. Smith
Thomas F. X. Noble
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame, Indiana
Julia M. H. Smith
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
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Summary

When responding to birth and death, early medieval Christians leaned heavily upon two fundamental features of their culture: the centrality of birth, death, and resurrection in their faith, and the importance of families in their mental horizons and social organization. Over the course of the early Middle Ages, most Christians came to regard the baptism of newborns as a necessary and normal initiation into church, kin, and Christian society. At the same time, liturgical specialists expanded the comparatively simple funeral and commemorative practices of Christian antiquity into a fully articulated rite of passage meant to facilitate each step of the transition from the community of the living to the community of the faithful departed: preparing body and soul for death itself, properly disposing of the corporeal remains, and overseeing the successful incorporation of the soul into the ranks of the blessed. The faithful, both new and old, also gave up a variety of more or less ancient burial practices for an almost universal pattern of simple interment in and around churches at the heart of settled areas. When they did, the living and the dead became members of a single community, united in space and time. Overall, the business of preparing Christians for death and seeing to their welfare in the afterlife, which began at baptism, gave rise to an extraordinary system of spiritual and temporal exchange – an economy of salvation, based on gift-giving and fueled by the circulation of people, prayers, and property – that is one of the most striking features of the age.

Type
Chapter
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The Cambridge History of Christianity , pp. 381 - 398
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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