ars moriendi

The ars moriendi is the Christian desert tradition’s art of dying: the mortification of the ego and withdrawal from worldly life in hope of passing through death to the Redeemer and an inalienable reward. In the fictional Lives, the ideal is both a demanding spiritual discipline and a point of tension, where renunciation can shade into forbidden pagan practice or even a perilous desire for self-destruction.

Ascetic Practice and Its Inheritance

The desert hermits inhabit places where barren wilderness gives way to a spring, vegetation, or an oasis. Some live alone, others in small brotherhoods; poverty and love of neighbor shape a life organized around renunciation. Their ars moriendi asks the penitent to die to the world and mortify the ego, making earthly death a passage toward the Redeemer rather than an end in itself. They pray, write hymns, expel demons, heal, and bless, and their renunciation is presented as a counterweight to the brutality and sensuality of other ages.

This Christian discipline has a submerged history. Some penitents may know ancient pagan purification practices and spiritual exercises developed in Asia, but such methods are no longer taught: Christianity increasingly forbids what it classifies as pagan. The tradition therefore carries an inheritance it officially disavows. Its aspiration to spiritualization resembles older practices even as its institutions draw a boundary against them.

The Penitent’s Struggle

The second fictional Life places its protagonist within a Christian desert world of fasting, prayer, and temptation. Sun and sand wear down the body; he waits for sunset before eating a few dates, and answers the devils’ mockery and trials with penitence and renunciation. Yet his nights among the stars are not spiritually simple. He reads constellations as stories of gods and symbols of human nature, an imaginative habit from his pagan days that the presbyters condemn. His struggle thus unfolds between the ascetic ideal he serves and forms of knowledge that his Christian surroundings reject.

The account distinguishes willingness to die from the urge to destroy oneself. The penitent reflects that a Christian should not be an enemy of death and that a saint may regard life as an offering, but he judges suicidal desire diabolic: in his understanding, it belongs to a soul no longer guarded by God’s angels. The distinction makes the art of dying more than an injunction to endure or to seek death. Its spiritual meaning depends on how surrender is understood.

Sacrifice, Despair, and Recognition

After fleeing a life of spiritual despair, the penitent looks back on his former fixation on suicide with horror. He recognizes that the temptation carried two meanings: an echo of the ancient custom in which a king, saint, or chosen tribal figure gives up his life for the community, and a shocking urge to imitate the Redeemer’s voluntary death on the cross. That imitation could seem to claim either an act of self-sacrifice or, more dangerously, that the Redeemer’s work had not been sufficient. His flight, rather than a grand heroic death, places him once more in God’s hands and marks his escape from that peril.

The same expression also illuminates the broader form of the Lives. These are official exercises in which young students imagine themselves living in other historical periods; their flexible play with past lives retains a trace of Asian reincarnation doctrine without making it a dogma. The desert penitent’s story gives that imaginative exercise a severe Christian setting, while its conflict over pagan knowledge and voluntary death prevents renunciation from becoming a single, settled formula. The ars moriendi names an aspiration toward redemption, but the story tests that aspiration against the motives and dangers concealed within the wish to die.