Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

Picot looked after his friends in France who had not yet received a copy

of thePassions.His thoughts were focused resolutely on the future, on

a possible relocation to France or, more likely, a return to the welcome

solitude of Egmond.

Death in Stockholm

Heroic figures of the past were expected to die a heroic death, just as saints

were supposed to expire in the odour of sanctity. Descartes invoked the

first model in his efforts to comfort Princess Elizabeth about the execution

of her uncle, Charles I, by commending the merits of a quick public death

in contrast with an extended mortal illness. In doing so, he gave some

hints about how he would have preferred to die himself had he pursued a

military career.

Although there seems to be something more terrifying about this death [of Charles I],

which is so violent, than the death one awaits in bed, it is nevertheless more glorious,

happier, and sweeter when it is properly understood, so that those of its features which

especially frighten ordinary people should provide a consolation for your highness.

There is great glory in dying in circumstances such that one is universally regretted,

praised, and pitied by all those who have any human emotion. It is certain that, without

this ordeal, the clemency and other virtues of the late king would never have been so

widely noticed and so much admired.

There was no hope that Descartes could have emulated the glorious death

of the king of England, as if he were still a soldier in the service of his

prince and ready to lay down his life for a worthy cause. The sudden,

public death of a warrior was impossible for a philosopher in the frozen

butrelatively peaceful wilderness of Sweden.

However, there was another model available of how to die well, which

was exemplified in the terminal illness of the Calvinist theologian Jacques

Rivet. Rivet’s death at the age of seventy-eight, in January, was

preceded by a week of dying during which he prayed continuously with his

family by his bedside. This was such an exemplary Christian death that his

followers arranged to publish, almost immediately, a detailed account of

his death for the edification of other Christians.Rivet was suffering from

abowelobstruction, which provided an opportunity to his friends to reflect

onthe misery and insignificance of human life in comparison to the divine

if one’s life can be ended by a piece of human excrement. Rivet prayed,

as he lay dying: ‘O God, do not withdraw your protection from these