The Last Temptation of Everyman
[In the following essay, Spinrad examines in-turn the temptations faced by Everyman, discussing the significance of each for both the original audience and the contemporary reader.]
Because Everyman is virtually the last of the Catholic morality plays, we are often tempted to analyze it in terms of others of its kind: a soul struggles with temptations, falls into sin, is arrested by Death, and at the last moment calls on the mercy of God and is saved. Within this linear analysis, many subanalyses are possible. Lawrence V. Ryan, for example, stresses Everyman's doctrinal education, pointing out that Everyman is taught to find his way back to the Church and its sacraments before finding his way to heaven; and Allen D. Goldhammer uses Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages of the dying process to show Everyman's anagnorisis as a psychological as well as a theological state.1 Such analyses are certainly valid; Everyman would not retain its power over us if it did not work on many levels. But the approaches are often misleading, forcing as they do a nonlinear play into a linear progression. Everyman's meeting with Knowledge, and his reception of the sacraments, are not the end of the play, but rather a signal that the play is about to begin again; at the moment when Everyman should march triumphantly off to heaven, he instead succumbs to the most insidious temptation of all.
To understand what happens to Everyman at this second starting-point of the play, we must disregard for the moment other morality plays, most of which end with death, and turn to another form of literature, which, like Everyman, begins with death: the medieval Ars Moriendi, the art of dying. These treatises were extremely popular in the century preceding Everyman, appearing all over Europe in manuscript and printed form, with and without illustrations, and sometimes in illustrations without text for the illiterate. They were no “remote preparation for death,” as Sr. Mary Catherine O'Connor points out, but rather “a complete and intelligible guide to the business of dying … no more intended to frighten and depress than is any medieval book on hunting or hawking or on table manners for children.”2 Although the author of Everyman may have found a judicious amount of fright dramatically appropriate, he appears to have drawn much of his method from the step-by-step approach taken by the treatises.
The typical Ars Moriendi is divided into six parts:3 (1) reasons why one “oughte to dye gladly”; (2) the temptations at the moment of death; (3) questions to be put to the dying; (4) instructions to be given to the dying; (5) meditations on the sufferings of Christ; and (6) prayers to be said by the dying and by those assisting at their deathbeds (A1r). The first section opens with the apparently granted assumption that the death of the body is the most fearful thing imaginable. The treatise makes no effort to deny this, but hastens to assure the reader that once the pain is over, the soul will have escaped an unsatisfactory world to live in a perfect one with God—that is, if the soul has made adequate preparation by living a good life or at least being contrite for a bad one. Death, then, is only “the goynge oute of pryson” and a laying down of the heavy weight of a body (A1v). Even the pagans have said that one “ought sonner to chose the bodily deth” than to do anything contrary to virtue, so surely a death that is so universally praised cannot be totally bad (A2r).
There is something a little spurious about this reasoning, and indeed it is contradicted by the carefully outlined procedures in the other sections for escaping all the dangers surrounding death. But the first sections of all these treatises are meant to comfort before the battle against temptation begins, and the net effect is to direct the mind toward death as a threshold to be crossed rather than as a pain to be undergone.
And at this threshold the temptations are mighty, as the devils gather for their last assault on the soul. According to all the Artes, those “in thartycle of death haue many greuous & strong temptacions vereli suche that in their lyf they neuer had lyke” (A2r), and these are five in number:
1. The temptation “of the fayth,” when the devil will try to deceive Moriens (the dying man) into falling away from Christ, through “errours superstycions or heresie.” Moriens must remember that a Christian is required to stand firm in his faith, and he may take comfort in knowing that “the deuyll maye not ouercome the persone as longe as he shall haue the usage of his free wyll well dysposed, if by his owne agrement he wyll not consent to the deuil.” As an aid to resistance against this temptation, Moriens or those attending him should repeat the Creed “wyth an hye voys,” and call to mind the constancy of all the saints, martyrs, apostles, and even good pagans as encouragement to steadfastness (A2r-v).
2. The temptation “ayente hope by dyspayre,” when the devil takes advantage of Moriens's weakened condition to make him grieve so much over his sins that he will despair of being forgiven. But Moriens must remember that God's capacity for mercy is infinitely greater than man's capacity for sin, and that “though that he had commited as many murthers and theftes as there ben dropes of water and small grauell in the see,” though he may never have confessed his sins before, even though he may be too ill to confess them aloud now—still, if he repents in his mind at this last moment, God will accept his contrition: “for god dyspyseth neuer a contryte herte and humble.” As an exercise, Moriens should contemplate Christ on the cross:
For he hath the hede inclyned and bowed to kysse us, the armes stratched abrode for tembrace us, the handes perced & opened for to gyue to us, the syde open for to loue us, and all his body stratched for to gyue hym selfe all to us.
And for encouragement, Moriens should call to mind other sinners who were forgiven: Peter, Paul, Matthew, Mary Magdalene, the woman taken in adultery, the Good Thief, and “many moo other whyche were grete synners & horryble” (A2v-A3v).
3. The temptation “by impacyence: that is ayenste charite.” In the great sorrow and pain of dying, Moriens may be tempted to “murmure or grutche” against God, and to act as though he were mad, tormenting not only himself but the people around him. He must remember, in this sore temptation, that charity and patience will bring him closer to God, and that, furthermore, the pain against which he is railing was sent him on purpose to help him atone for his sins.
4. The temptation to “spirituell pryde, by the whiche the deuylle assayleth most theym that be deuoute.” Since the devil cannot make the devout lose faith, hope, or charity, he rather inflates them with vainglory about their ability to withstand the other temptations. “O how thou art ferme & stedfaste in the faythe,” says the devil in Moriens's heart; “o how thou art sure in hope, o how thou art stronge & pacyent, o how thou haste doon many good dedes.” It is an easy step from such thoughts to the sin of presumption, and when Moriens finds himself thinking such thoughts, he must try to humble himself, particularly by remembering his sins, but not so much that he will despair; rather, he must keep in mind that “none is certayn, yf he be dygne or worthy to haue deserued the loue of god, or the hate of god” (A4r-v).
5. The temptation “that most troubleth the seculers and wordly [sic] men … the ouer grete ocupacyon of outwerde thinges and temporall … which he hath moost loued in his lyf.” Moriens must put all such temporal thoughts from his mind and renounce the things of the world that he is about to leave, strengthening his resolve with the thought that the renunciation itself is a form of penance that may atone for at least the venial sins, and so spare him some of the pains of purgatory. Above all Moriens must loose his hold on life itself:
But it happeth not ofte that only be founde be he seculer or reguler that hopeth not but to escape fro deth, and alwaye this folyshe hope is a thinge ryght peryllous & moche dysordred in euery crysten man and that ofte cometh by intyncyon of the deuyl.
(A4v)
In the illustrated versions of the treatise, there are two woodcuts for each temptation: one showing the devils swarming about Moriens's bed, and one showing Moriens resisting their temptations, often with so many saints and angels on hand to help that the room seems crowded to the very doors and windows.
In the third section of the treatise, attendants at Moriens's bedside are required to ask him questions about his faith, his willingness to repent, and his readiness to die. If there are no friends present, Moriens may ask the questions silently of himself, but it is expected that the deathbed will be a communal affair, and that the friends present are morally obligated to help Moriens turn his mind to heaven. By no means is anyone to delude the dying person into hoping for a longer life, because such a vain hope will turn his mind earthward and endanger his soul.
The remaining sections are given to meditations on the life and death of Christ (in which Moriens is reminded that Christ, too, moaned and wept at his death); prayers for different stages in the dying process; and admonitions to attendants at the deathbed that they not only help Moriens to a good death, but also learn from the procedure how to make a good death themselves when the time comes. Throughout the whole treatise, the emphasis is on comfort, a comfort reached, one may say, by staying busy.
Parallels between the Ars and Everyman are immediately evident. The very comfort of the Ars introduction is echoed by God in the play, who tempers the usual wrathful indictment of the Morality pronouncements (and the Mystery Judgment plays) by adding that death is really meant for the sinner's good as well as for his punishment. If people are not called to account periodically, says God, they will fall away not only from grace but also from their own human nature:
For, and I leave the people thus alone
In their life and wicked tempests,
Verily they will become much worse than beasts;
For now one would by envy another up eat;
Charity they do all clean forget.
(47-51)4
Good Deeds and Knowledge, too, take part in the ritual. As in parts three, four, and six of the Ars, they catechize and instruct Everyman as he prepares for death, and, like the crowds of comforters in part two, they support him during his abandonment by the second set of false friends. Even the false friends have a cautionary role, showing the audience how not to behave at the deathbed. Not only do they fail to give spiritual advice, but they sometimes tempt Everyman to commit a few last sins before he goes (Fellowship, Kindred), or encourage him to cling to life (Fellowship). Strength alone counsels Everyman against a sin—impatience—but does it with so much impatience himself that the moral is lost:
Thou art but a fool to complain
You spend your speech and waste your brain;
Go, thrust thee into the ground.
(823-25)
But it is in the temptations themselves that we most see the influence of the medieval treatise. The first temptation, infidelity, may be likened to the modern phase of denial. Although Everyman has been taught all his life about his duty to God and the fact of his inevitable death, when Death approaches him, he fails to recognize the skeletonic messenger or understand what Death is telling him. Everyman's original audience would undoubtedly have been struck even more forcefully than we are by the incongruity of the scene—as though the heroine in one of our own horror films were to tell the crazed and blood-spattered monster not to interrupt her in the middle of her favorite television program. Does Everyman not notice that a skeleton is standing in front of him? Obviously his agnosticism has blinded his perception.
The remedy for this temptation comes from Death himself, who announces his identity, at last, in no uncertain terms, and from Good Deeds, Knowledge, Confession, and Five Wits, who instruct Everyman in the process of repentance and the efficacy of the sacraments.5 We see Everyman gradually becoming undeceived about his previous assumptions, and by the time he begins scourging himself, he is ready to repeat his lessons “wyth an hye voys” (Ars, A2v).
The second temptation, despair, is not so immediately evident, and tends to merge with the third temptation, impatience. Everyman “murmures and grutches” against everyone, God's messenger, his old friends, his new friends, his solitude, and finally his failing body. He vacillates between giving up all hope and blaming his plight on others, until Good Deeds and Knowledge, as usual, show him the remedy: in the first part of the play, penance and reliance on himself rather than the external things of the world; and in the second, prayers and meditation on the sufferings of Christ.
The fifth temptation, attachment to worldly things, is so blatant as to require little comment on top of the reams of commentary that have gone before. One observation, however, must be added. The first set of false friends, as Ryan has shown, “appear in a climactic order according to the increasing danger of each as a distraction from one's maker”;6 and, indeed, the Empress in John Lydgate's Dance of Death (c. 1430) gives the lures of the world in exactly the same sequence, although in descending rather than ascending order of importance:
All worldly power / now may me nat availe
Raunson kyndrede / frenshype nor worthynesse
Syn deth is com / myn hih estat tassaile.(7)
But, in addition, such a hierarchic ranking of theological dangers is grounded in the psychology of relationships between the self and things outside the self. Each false friend in the play is closer to Everyman's self: Fellowship is a peripheral thing often changed with time, locality, or mood; Kindred is something closer to the self, something that is always there and can be drawn on at will; Cousin is the specific manifestation of Kindred that seems to mirror the self; and Goods is a mistaken image of the self—personal objects that one has gathered outside oneself as an identity for the self. It is this increasing degree of identification with the self that makes each attachment increasingly dangerous to the soul, and increasingly shattering to the psyche when the objects are removed. One must now face oneself without props, naked and unadorned.
At this moment of spiritual and emotional nakedness, Good Deeds and Knowledge step into the breach. They help Everyman cure his infidelity, despair, impatience, and attachment; lead him through the rituals of the Church; and clothe him in the symbolic garments of repentance. Everyman, now secure in his new holiness, cheerfully announces his eagerness to begin the journey:
EVERYMAN:
Now blessed be Jesu, Mary's Son,
For now have I on true contrition.
And let us go now without tarrying;
Good Deeds, have we clear our reckoning?
GOOD Deeds:
Yea, indeed I have it here.
EVERYMAN:
Then I trust we need not fear.
Now friends, let us not part in twain.
(649-55)
Members of the audience now begin gathering up their cloaks, preparing to duck away before the inevitable moralizing epilogue and the passing of the hat. But they will have to resettle themselves, because now the play begins again. Everyman does not march away to heaven, nor does he (as many critics have claimed) take the desertion of Beauty, Strength, Discretion, and Five Wits with more equanimity than he showed when his first set of five friends left him. Indeed, he falls once more into “murmuring and grutching” as each friend leaves him, and the departure of the last one draws from him his most agonized outcry of the play: “O Jesu, help! All hath forsaken me!” (851). We are back where we started. What has happened?
The astute reader will note that my list of Everyman's temptations has hitherto omitted the most insidious one of all: spiritual pride, or vainglory. Everyman, having given up his attachment to things outside himself, has come to rely too much on himself; having cast off despair and watched his Good Deeds grow, he has wandered too close to the sin of presumption. Like Moriens in the Ars, he has heard the devil's whisper: “O how thou arte ferme & steadfaste in the faythe, o how thou art sure in hope, o how thou art strong & pacyent, o how thou haste doon many good dedes” (Ars, A4r).
It is not surprising that modern readers miss the full impact of this last temptation; we are more familiar with post-Reformation Arts of Dying (especially Jeremy Taylor's seventeenth-century one) than with those of the Catholic middle ages. And with only a few exceptions, warnings against vainglory are absent from Protestant deathbed preaching.
According to most of the new doctrines, especially those of the Calvinists, in order to be saved one must be assured that one is saved. As the Calvinist preacher, William Perkins, explained:
Certentie of faith, is whereby any thing is certenly beleeved: and it is either generall or speciall. Generall certentie, is to beleeue assuredly that the word of God is truth it selfe, and this both we and Papists allow. Speciall certentie, is by faith to apply the promise of salvation to our selves, and to beleeve without doubt, that remission of sinnes by Christ and life ever lasting belong to us. This kind of certentie we hold and maintaine, and Papists with one consent deny it; acknowledging no assurance but by hope.8
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, treatise after treatise came off English presses to show people the way to this certainty, or assurance, of salvation. The new Arts of Dying, too, emphasized the need for assurance at the moment of death, and in the most popular sixteenth-century treatise of the kind, Thomas Becon's Sicke Mannes Salve, the dying man is specifically praised by his friends for his assumption that he will go straight to heaven when he dies:
I greatly [thank] the Lord my God, good neighbor Epaphrodite, to se you in so good a mind, and to hear so goodly wordes procede out of your mouthe. These thinges are euident testimonies of your good conscience toward God. Feare you not, the Lord hath sealed you with his holy spirit, & made you through his mercy, a vessell unto honor.9
Vainglory, then, becomes obsolete, or is seen as the positive goal of assurance, in the new Arts of Dying. Myles Coverdale, for example, lists the temptations as infidelity, despair, impatience, and attachment; Christopher Sutton gives them as attachment, impatience, and despair; Lewis Bayly as infidelity and despair; and John More as despair and attachment.10 Although Bayly reluctantly admits that doubts about one's destination may occur at death, he urges the reader to disregard them rather than welcome them as a cure to vainglory, as the medieval Artes would have done (p. 697), and More sums up the post-Reformation outlook by claiming total confidence at death as the sign of salvation, putting it second only to faith itself: “A greater token (next faith in Christ) there is not for our election, then not to stand in feare of Death” (E6v).
Presumption, of course, is not absent from the new list of sins, but it takes an entirely different form: as a false assurance that one is saved, identifiable by its vanishing at the moment of death.11 According to this view, Everyman cannot possibly go to heaven after his bout with vainglory—not because he has felt it, but rather because it has abandoned him, revealing him as a reprobate.
But Everyman does go to heaven, finally. And here the playwright has been remarkably clever in preaching the Ars Moriendi to his audience. In earlier plays like The Castle of Perseverance, the soul obtains its last-minute salvation through the mercy of God, but then God or a chorus-figure must come out on stage to lecture the audience about not presuming on such mercy themselves. In Everyman, the audience has its presumption broken down along with the hero's, experiencing dramatically the danger of relying too much on one's own virtues, or on one's own Self.12 As Beauty, Strength, Discretion, and Five Wits depart, Everyman and the audience face together the unexpected and the unthinkable: the happy ending that is almost not a happy ending, and the shock of parting with selfhood.
The last shock is the worst of all. It is the letting go of our only universe, our consciousness and the five senses that feed it. It is the recognition that there is nothing more to be done, that we have lost control, that our solipsistic assumptions about our own importance are being dissolved before our eyes. At this moment of apparent annihilation, who would not be tempted to cry with Everyman, “All hath forsaken me”? The answer, of course, as Conrad Aiken has pointed out, is that Christ himself “cried his ‘forsaken’ … on the darkening hilltop.”13 And Everyman, in his final letting go, is joining himself with Christ in that final agony.
The Ars Moriendi, as I have noted, devotes a whole chapter to such meditations on Christ's sufferings. Although Everyman has perhaps echoed Christ's words unconsciously in his last shock of realization, his doing so rescues him from vainglory, forces him to turn back to Good Deeds instead of his earthly personhood, elicits an act of faith from him, and replaces him on the correct road to heaven: that state of healthy uncertainty prescribed by the Ars, in which the soul will not presume to say “yf he be dygne or worthy to haue deserued the loue of god, or the hate of god.” He commends his soul into the hands of God: “In manus tuas—of might's most / Forever—commendo spiritum meum” (886-87); and with this second echo of Christ's last words on his lips finally descends into the grave with the proper mixture of hope and fear.
It is ended. Knowledge announces that Everyman has indeed made a good reckoning, and an Angel appears to call Everyman's soul to bliss. Everything has happened with lightning speed: 150 lines from the first appearance of vainglory to Everyman's death and salvation, as opposed to 700 lines from Death's announcement to Everyman's penance. Here again the playwright shows his astuteness; with such a shock to deliver, he must deliver it quickly—a whirlwind ending that leaves the audience as stunned as is Everyman himself.
The Doctor's epilogue, then, like the last words of Fortinbras or Albany, are meant more to ease the tension than to instruct. The spectators have already experienced the moral, and as they gather up their cloaks a second time and trail out into the street, they will not be able to forget the lesson in laughter over comic Vices. Stunned and drained, they will more likely be looking cautiously over their shoulders, wondering, like Everyman, whether they “be dygne or worthy to haue deserued the loue of god, or the hate of god.”
Notes
-
Ryan, “Doctrine and Dramatic Structure in Everyman,” Speculum 32 (1957): 722-35; Goldhammer, “Everyman: A Dramatization of Death,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 59 (1973): 87-98.
-
O'Connor, The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi (1942; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1966), pp. 4-5.
-
Throughout this essay, I quote from William Caxton's 1490 printing, The Arte & Crafte to Knowe Well to Dye, STC 789, since it is a late abridgement, and may therefore be taken as a compendium of what readers at the time thought most cogent and most representative of the genre.
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I have used the modern-spelling edition given by Edgar T. Schell and J. D Shuchter in English Morality Plays and Moral Interludes (New York: Holt, 1969).
-
Interestingly, Five Wits shows his ambiguous nature even in the midst of his sermon on the priesthood. Knowledge has to remind him sharply that, although the priesthood. itself is good, there are some bad priests who betray their calling. This additional sermon to the priests in the audience is lost on Five Wits, who blithely announces, “I trust to God no such may we find” (764), thus showing his insufficiency as a complete guide for Everyman.
-
Ryan, “Doctrine and Dramatic Structure,” p. 726.
-
Lydgate, The Dance of Death, ed. Florence Warren (London: EETS, 1931), 78-80.
-
Perkins, A Discourse of Conscience, ed. Thomas F. Merrill (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1966), p. 49.
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Becon, The Sicke Mannes Salve (London, 1561), STC 1757, pp. 198-99.
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Coverdale, Remains of Myles Coverdale, ed. George Person (Cambridge: The Parker Society, 1846); Sutton, Disce Mori. Learne to Die (London, 1600), STC 23474; Bayly, The Practise of Pietie (London, 1612), STC 1603; More, A Liuely Anatomie of Death (London, 1596), STC 18073.
-
See especially Perkins, Discourse, pp. 21, 63.
-
Critics who claim that Everyman preaches salvation by works alone have obviously overlooked this turn at the end of the play. Everyman discovers most emphatically that his Good Deeds are not sufficient unto themselves if he does not have the right inclination of will toward God—that is, if he does not have faith.
-
Aiken, “Tetelestai,” in Collected Poems (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1953), p. 299.
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