Death and otherness - a note for the feast of the Holy Innocents

Today, December 28, is the feast of the Holy Innocents, instituted to commemorate the children murdered on the orders of Herod according to the Gospel of Matthew. Throughout the Latin Middle Ages, the feast held a high liturgical rank, and the episode itself was frequently depicted in various media. One of the best preserved examples is from the ciborium of Ål stave church, which was painted sometime in the second half of the thirteenth century. The scene is deeply moving, and hits immensely hard with its detailed rendition of violence and blood, and the raw humanity of the pleading mothers.  

Detail from the ciborium of Ål stave church 

Norway, thirteenth century 

Currently at the Museum of Cultural History, Oslo

This scene reminds me how universal grief is, and how the violent loss of children is a tragedy recognisable across temporal and cultural divide. Heart-rending and disturbing though it is, the depiction of the royally ordered slaughter of young children is nonetheless a valuable reminder of grief, of pain, and of motherly love. 

The scene unfolding in frozen timelessness on the wooden planks of the medieval ciborium also serves as a reminder of two great untruths that continue to influence the way many people deal with death and the cultural and temporal Other. There is a pervasive and seemingly inextinguishable idea that people in the past did not care that much about the loss of their children, as lower life expectancies had inured them against the pain of loss. While there might be variations of this idea where the callousness expected from medieval parents is not as hard, and where some grief is admitted, the core of the idea is nonetheless that grief hit differently back then. The temporal otherness of medieval people has enabled some of us to see them as different, and by consequence also less human. 

The reminder that the temporal Other could grieve like we do, is also tragically relevant in the second year of the genocide against the Palestinian people executed by the Israeli government. The way that the West has failed the Palestinians in their enormous and publicly unfolding tragedy is a blemish beyond words, and I believe it is related to deeply rooted prejudices that make so many people think that the cultural Other does not grieve and does not feel the way we do.  

The present blogpost is merely a grievous sigh in the midst of this ongoing calamity, and a faint hope that we might remember that grief, pain, and loss are human universals that cut like knives across temporal or cultural divides.