Memento Anima

Stoic Philosophers coined the term Memento Mori – a Latin phrase that means “bear in mind your mortality”. In other words “remember you will die”. The Bible expresses this same truth in James 4:14. “For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.”

Getting acquainted with death and realizing your own mortality will help you live a life of honor and virtue, but it’s not enough. The real question is – What happens next?

I cannot prove my belief that each of us has an eternal soul. I can prove that Jesus Christ walked this earth and died on a cross. The Bible and other historical texts of the time bear this truth. But if you read what Jesus said, you are faced with a dilemma. He is either who he said he was or he was crazy. I think C.S. Lewis said it best.

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. … Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

C.S Lewis – Mere Christianity

Maybe we should use a new term, Memento Anima – “bear in mind the soul”. In other words, “Remember Life.”

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