we are accustomed to thinking that earlier ages clung to consolations that we moderns have rejected. But the pattern is not so clear. Homer, sounding a cheerful, icy, unsurpassable note as the West began its endless circling dance around finitude, describes the death of a warrior as if writing about a fly being squished. No transcendence, no vast Truth such as fills the Old Testament or the Koran, redeems it. A sharp spear cleaves through a man's chest; there is a spasm of animal agony and, in the poet's tag formulation, "he falls heavily and his armor clatters upon him." His guts aren't even lugged, Polonius-style, into the next room: They just lie there, taking up real estate. Next.

Homeric death has been largely erased by our rational culture, but it lives on in the movies, when characters die hissing defiance, reaching for the gun as they croak. This was the go-down-swinging exit celebrated by Nietzsche, who wrote that "to die fighting and squander a great soul" was the second-best death (the best is voluntary death, a path enigmatically followed by Sally Binford.) The clarion call to resist death's dominion was sounded by Dylan Thomas, who urged us to "rage, rage against the dying of the light." In a similar vein, certain warlike Indian tribes invoked physical courage against death, a muscular spirituality summed up by the haunting war cry "Today is a good day to die!"

If Homer's bright-eyed nihilism provided little or no consolation, the triumph of Christianity in the West was a decidedly mixed blessing. Christianity removed some of death's primal terrors, but exacerbated others. No other religion, after all, is centered on a crucifixion; Christianity's insistence on the inextricable relationship between a human god's gruesome torture and his miraculous rebirth made death, certainly in the Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance, not just a metaphysical consolation but a horror show. The age's obsession with death, reflected in the cult of the memento mori, the mania for writings about the exact moment of death, the paintings of the danse macabre, the endless nauseating depictions of putrefaction in the tomb, may have been inspired less by religious fervor than by sheer physical terror.

Moreover, the style itself became reified, merely rhetorical. As Johan Huizinga writes in his classic "The Waning of the Middle Ages," "Neither the conception of death the consoler, nor that of rest long wished for, of the end of suffering, of the task performed or interrupted, have a share in the funeral sentiment of that epoch...pity, resignation, longing, consolation, remained unexpressed and (were), so to say, absorbed by the too much accentuated and too vivid representation of Death hideous and threatening. Living emotion stiffens amid the abused imagery of skeletons and worms."

Using the Middle Age's obsession with corpses to judge its attitude toward death may be only slightly more valid than citing some beret-wearing hepcat's gobbledygook about "the absurd" and "the existential void" as the final arbiter of 20th-century "despair." Nonetheless, the men and women of the Middle Ages were forced to confront death far more frequently and more intensely than we are; and it's hard to escape the feeling as we look at a Gothic cathedral -- spires rising above, damned souls sculpted below -- that we have lost something. Or is it that our memento moris have simply gone elsewhere?

The Renaissance, in many ways, offers an eclectic vision of death similar to, if far more energetic than, that of our own time -- with our great truth, science, playing the same affirming, questioning, debunking role as its exultant humanism. Shakespeare's conception of death may be larger than most of ours, as most of his conceptions are, but it is not different in kind: He is by turns a believer and an atheist, a Greek and a Jew, a tragedian for whom death proves man's nobility and an ironist for whom it proves nothing.

Certain ages are more death-obsessed than others, and mortality flared up in the 19th century with the Romantics, those mostly youthful connoisseurs of transience. For the Romantics, death was the great seductive limit, the dark hue that made the evanescent colors of life glow. "Darkling I listen; and for many a time/I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme..." Keats celebrates death (and its simulacrum, art) as a portal into eternity, while recognizing the bitterness of mortal finitude -- a tension that gives his poetry enormous pathos.

The post-Romantic 19th century was the great train wreck of death. As Christianity lost its grip and science replaced it -- but a science still too new to have acquired full explanatory status -- the monsters of unreason leaped out, filling the canvases of Bocklin and Munch, haunting the pages of Buchner, Kierkegaard, Melville, Poe, Dostoevsky, Kafka and Nietzsche. Never before or since, perhaps, has death been quite so problematic, terrifying and uncertain. (The age's sentimentality, evidenced in the tear-jerking death scenes in Dickens and the Victorian sensibility in general, was probably a defensive reaction.)

In the 20th century, still under the ambiguous banner of science, we stumble uneasily between the consolations of progressive humanism and the dread of meaninglessness left in its wake. But in the end, an age's dominant ideology -- its "episteme," in the jargon -- may matter less than the encounter with the unknown that waits, sooner or later, for all of us.