ABSTRACT
Through the long middle ages,1 these same two strands of necrophilia and natality, the forensic and the organic, intertwined in complicated ways. The emphasis in Christendom on the afterlife, and especially on the terrors of hell, made an obsession with death inevitable, and did much to displace beauty from the earth. Anxieties build up a need for mastery; once again we can see both external representations in the violence of the Crusades and the hunt for heretics, and internal manifestations in the insistence of asceticism, mortification, self-sacrifice, and the invention of purgatory. On the other hand, there were others, especially among the great mystics
and spiritual writers, whowere deeply engaged by beauty, both of the world and of God, andwho kept alive the choice for flourishing. They looked for alternatives to violence, for social justice rather than holy war, for desire and joy in sanctity and the delights of heaven upon the earth. The two strandswere inseparable: one could hardly find a ‘pure’ example of either, though there are strong differences of emphasis. The point of presenting them as alternatives is not to pretend that historically there were clear contrasts, but rather to show in a schematic fashion how the genealogy of death and the displacement of beauty shifted through the medieval period and bequeathed to modernity its formative choices.
