For centuries, the rule De mortuis nil nisi bonum (“say nothing but good of the dead”) governed public speech. The old restraint has vanished from public life, and with it, one of the last bonds of our culture.

The wisdom of antiquity reflected the rules of discourse. Oratory and dialogue presupposed presence, response, and the hope of persuasion—none possible for the dead. To speak ill of them was, in a sense, to violate those very rules. The seventeenth-century Bible scholar Matthew Henry recalled the Latin saying as he reflected on David’s tender lament for King Saul (2 Samuel 1), honoring his dead rival and being silent about his faults: “Let the blemish be hidden and a veil drawn over the deformity.”

In Henry’s view, the old proverb reflected more than rhetorical etiquette. It reflected the virtue of charity that restrained vengeance and humanized even one’s enemies. For both the Greeks and the Hebrews, honoring the dead preserved communal harmony and acknowledged the limits of human judgment.

[In David's lament for King Saul], David’s ease in honoring his adversary sprang from a twofold awareness: seeing beyond himself—recognizing Saul as God’s anointed and part of a larger story—and knowing himself rightly, as a sinner. This eulogy did not alter historical memory. Scripture remembers Saul as a man whose life was a tragedy, and tragedy begets sorrow, not scorn.

Similarly, Abraham Lincoln refused to see enemies in the fallen in his Gettysburg Address. In keeping with the classical and biblical moral tradition, he recognized that death ended the dispute. We are no longer humbled by the gravity of death; instead, we feel compelled to “talk back” with an adolescent mix of defiance and urgency. Death does not have the last word; our comments on X or a TikTok video do.

--Olga Deitlin, Professing in an Age of Therapeutic Rage: A Lamentation