At God’s request, Death finds Everyman on Earth and announces that Everyman must leave his worldly life behind in order to be judged. Everyman begs Death to grant him more time so that he might put his affairs in order, and Death denies this request, alluding to the biblical figure of Adam:
Thee availeth not to cry, weep, and pray:
But haste thee lightly that you were gone the journey,
And prove thy friends if thou can.
For, wete thou well, the tide abideth no man,
And in the world each living creature
For Adam’s sin must die of nature.
Death tells Everyman that pleading will not change anything, as Death does not wait for any man but is instead inevitable, like “the tide.” He further explains that “each living creature” on Earth must “die of nature” (or, in other words, die of natural causes) for “Adam’s sin.” Here, he alludes to Adam, the first human created by God in the Old Testament. In the biblical narrative, Adam’s decision to follow Eve in eating fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil leads God to expel the first two humans from Paradise, forcing them to live a mortal existence on Earth. Death, then, reminds Everyman that death was brought into the world by human actions.
At the urging of Good Deeds and Knowledge, Everyman attempts to purify himself of his sins, first by confessing them to a priest and later by using a “scourge” or whip to punish himself physically in imitation of the sufferings of Christ during his crucifixion. This practice of “mortification of the flesh” was commonly practiced throughout Europe in the medieval and early modern periods as a mode of penance. Reflecting upon his own mixed feelings, Everyman uses a paradox that imagines pain as a positive sensation:
Thanked be God for his gracious work!
For now I will my penance begin;
This hath rejoiced and lighted my heart,
Though the knots be painful and hard within.
Everyman is happy to begin working toward his own spiritual rehabilitation, thanking God for his assistance. He has “rejoiced” in the opportunity to purify his soul, which has “lighted his heart” despite the “knots” that are “painful and hard.” Here, he references the “knots” of the body, but he also alludes to the hard knots braided into the whip used for self-mortification. In imagining the pain of whipping as a positive feeling, Everyman uses a paradox that was common in literature of the Tudor period, in which the play was produced. The pain, he implies, becomes pleasurable to Everyman despite his discomfort because he believes that it is purifying his soul.
