When asked how we want to live, the French Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne replied: “Don't be afraid of death.” Montaigne knew what he was talking about.

First, his best friend Étienne de La Boétie succumbed to the plague at a young age.

Then the father died, probably from complications of renal colic.

The following year he lost his younger brother in a sports accident.

And then four of his own children died too;

only one daughter reached adulthood.

Rainer Hank

Freelance writer in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

  • Follow I follow

The fact that we are “surrounded by death in the middle of life”, as it is called in a hymn translated by Luther into German, was for centuries people's fate and everyday experience at the same time. Montaigne's "Memento mori" read: "Let us not think about anything as often as death."

We have to look at this wisdom of living in order to see how far this all has become.

The daily fear of death has turned into daily efforts to live as long as possible.

“I feel extremely agile,” said the TV presenter Nina Ruge recently on the occasion of her sixty-fifth birthday.

“Life may tug at my eyelids a little, but I'm neither rickety nor do I have any problem with age.” Ms. Ruge's goal of living a very long time costs a lot.

The food supplement and coaching market is not cheap.

Going to bed early, occasionally having sex ("makes the parasympathetic nervous system happy") and, an insider tip, olive press water nourish your hope for eternal life.

"To become like God"

How different has our world become? In the past, pious people had to invest a lot for “eternal life”: go on pilgrimages, pray daily, do good works. But it was about heavenly and not earthly life, which inevitably ends with death. In the Old Testament, the “righteous” are promised that God will let them live forever. The fact that the eternal God became man, which Christians celebrate at Christmas, does not mean that man should become God. “To become like God” - this was the seductive promise of the serpent in Paradise, which Adam and Eve had to give in to pay with the eternal penalty of mortality.

People have made the best of their exile on earth.

“Our desire for health, happiness and power” knows no bounds, writes the Israeli historian Yuval Harari in his bestseller “Homo Deus” (“Man as God”).

Science and capitalism are allies of progress, the success of which has made reverence for the transcendent obsolete.

The hope of an eternal life in the hereafter lost its attractiveness to the extent that eternal life on earth became realizable.

Loosely based on Heinrich Heine's winter fairy tale, we want to build the kingdom of heaven here on earth.