Nunc lento sonitu dicunt, morieris

The text we’re looking at is nunc lento sonitu dicunt, morieris: now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, thou must die.

“Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me and see my state may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and engrafted into the body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. As therefore the bell that rings a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness. There was a contention as far as a suit (in which piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled) which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his whose indeed it is. The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee […].”[1]

There are two major symbols used in this meditation: the bell and the island.

In the tradition of the time, the church bell would be rung to mark the death of one of its parishioners. This would most likely be a frequent occurrence, since when he was writing this work many people around him were dying from the Plague and other illnesses. Being constantly surrounded by death, and being seriously ill himself, the tolling of the bell came to mean more than one more death out of so many. Andrew Sanders, in The Short Oxford History of English Literature says:

“Death, as all of Donne's contemporaries readily recognized, was not simply inevitable and all-pervasive; it was a familiar presence in an unstable, unhygienic, and disease-ridden world. The tolling of the passing bell for a dying parishioner was to Donne not simply a stimulus to pray for a troubled soul but a personal memento mori.”[2]

The bell therefore becomes a symbol not only of death, but also of Donne’s own human mortality.

This is linked with the other important image, the island. Islands are a symbol of isolation and solitude, but Donne believes that humanity is interconnected. To use his own imagery, mankind is not a group of islands, each independent of the others, but part of one great continent. Even the smallest lump of dirt falling away into the sea has an effect on the continent. In the same way, one person’s death affects the whole of mankind.

Though medicine has made huge advances since the 17^th century and the Plague is no longer a big problem, Donne’s reflections are far from irrelevant. Every day, more than 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes.[3] This is a huge amount, 5,840,000 children per year. (Switzerland has around 1,243,235 children[4]; that’s the amount that dies of hunger in two months.)

If humanity is one continent, then how can we sit back and watch as large parts of it are dying because they don’t have enough to eat?

- andrew, from my travail de maturité

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[1] Donne, John. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. pp. 107ss

[2] The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Andrew Sanders. p. 196

[3] http://www.bread.org/hungerbasics/international.html

[4] http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/sz.html

Touched by the hem of his garment

My third text is taken once again from the Bible, it is actually two separate texts that I’m grouping into one. The first is found in the book of Matthew at chapter eight, verses one to four. The second is from Mark 5:25-33

“When he came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him. A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, "Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean."

Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. "I am willing," he said. "Be clean!" Immediately he was cured of his leprosy. Then Jesus said to him, "See that you don't tell anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift Moses commanded, as a testimony to them."”[1]

And also:

“A large crowd followed and pressed around him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, "If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed." Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.

At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, "Who touched my clothes?"

"You see the people crowding against you," his disciples answered, "and yet you can ask, 'Who touched me?' "

But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth.”[2]

At first glance, these biblical verses may seem completely irrelevant to us here today, but if we take a closer look, we can begin to see similarities with what’s happening in our world.

We know today that leprosy (Hansen’s disease, though the Greek lepra could refer to many different skin diseases) is not contagious, but in Jesus’ time Jewish law was quite clear about how it should be treated:

“The person with such an infectious disease must wear torn clothes, let his hair be unkempt, cover the lower part of his face and cry out, 'Unclean! Unclean!'

As long as he has the infection he remains unclean. He must live alone; he must live outside the camp.”[3]

People were certainly afraid of contamination, but the disease became more of a ritual impurity than a medical problem. Those living with the disease were forced “outside the camp”, no longer allowed to be a part of normal life, they were considered worthless.

Today of course, we tell ourselves that we’re far more civilised than that, that we wouldn’t make people walk around shouting that they’re ‘unclean’, that we’re not as primitive as to marginalise a woman because she’s “bleeding”. The world has moved on we say…

In 1989, as the AIDS virus was spreading rapidly, Amanda Heggs, a young sufferer of the virus said, “Sometimes I have a terrible feeling that I am dying not from the virus, but from being untouchable.”[4]

Untouchable is exactly the right word to describe those who had leprosy and the woman who’s bleeding. Unfortunately, it’s also a word which all too often can be used to describe people with AIDS today.

AIDS is still associated with homosexuality, prostitution and drug use, allowing people to stigmatise sufferers and increasing the psychological and physical exclusion.

In 1985, the late Princess Diana shocked many people by touching a patient in an AIDS hospital. Two thousand years before, Jesus shocked everyone by touching a leper and a haemorrhaging woman. The significance of the action was in breaking down social boundaries and prejudices.

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[1] Mathew 8:1-4, New International Version

[2] Mark 5:25-33, ibid

[3] Leviticus 13: 45-46, ibid

[4] Amanda Heggs, AIDS sufferer. Quoted in The Guardian, June 12, 1989

- andrew, from my travail de maturité

The Word

The Word was first,

the Word present to God,

God present to the Word.

The Word was God,

in readiness for God from day one.

Everything was created through him;

nothing--not one thing!-

came into being without him.

What came into existence was Life,

and the Life was Light to live by.

The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness;

the darkness couldn't put it out.

In The Message, Eugene Peterson

In these first few verses of his gospel, the author (who may or may not have been John) presents a Christological view of Creation, affirming that Christ played a central role in the creation of the universe.

He refers to Christ here as ‘the Word’. This is from the Greek word logos, which as well as word can also mean reason or argument.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus was probably the first to use Logos in a metaphysical sense; he believed that the Logos was a divine force which produces order in the chaos of nature. He said the world is constantly changing (“You cannot step into the same river twice, for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.”) and is controlled by this eternal force which not only governs the world, but is the world; Heraclitus was one of the first pantheists.

In Chinese Bibles, Logos is translated as Tao. In Chinese philosophy, Tao is the supreme Force, the Rhythm of Life which pulsates throughout the whole universe. The Chinese religion of Taoism is largely based on the writings of the sixth century BCE philosopher Lao Tzu. He said of the Tao:

“The Tao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.

The name is the mother of the ten thousand things.”[1]

This is, in a lot of ways, very similar to the beginning of John’s gospel. The Tao was with God, and at the same time was God.

Whatever we choose to call It, the important part (to my mind at least) is that the Logos had an important part to play in the creation story, and It did not simply disappear after the creation act, but goes on even today.

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[1] Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu

Technology

"Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age. This transition has been under way since at least the end of the 1950s, which for Europe marks the completion of reconstruction. The pace is faster or slower depending on the country, and within countries it varies according to the sector of activity: the general situation is one of temporal disjunction which makes sketching an overview difficult. A portion of the description would necessarily be conjectural. At any rate, we know that it is unwise to put too much faith in futurology."

- Jean-François Lyotard

Tao Te Ching

The Tao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The name is the mother of the ten thousand things.

Send your desires away and you will see the mystery.
Be filled with desire and you will see only the manifestation.

As these two come forth they differ in name.
Yet at their source they are the same.
This source is called a mystery.

Darkness within darkness, the gateway to all mystery.

-Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu

- andrew

Immediacy

There are two important aspects of what I call the 'immediacy' that we see in the emerging culture. One is what’s known as the ‘fast-food syndrome’: people are impatient with any delay. Thanks to technology, we can have most of what we want when we want it. A meal can be bought frozen and ready to eat in three minutes with the help of a microwave. To contact someone on the other side of the world, we only have to click ‘send’ and they can receive the message instantaneously. The downside of this ability to do everything quickly is that we expect everything to be done quickly! Anything that takes time (such as, in this case, studying religious texts) is generally not considered to be worthwhile.

The second and more subtle aspect has to do with a connection to the immediate experience. Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana, committed suicide in part because of this. In his early days, he felt an amazing feeling of exhilaration and adrenaline when performing, especially in front of large crowds. Later in his life however, he found this feeling harder and harder to get, despite being a superstar and performing in front of huge crowds. In his suicide note, he wrote, “…I don’t have the passion anymore…”

For the post-modern person, the past and the future have no importance compared with the present. Delayed gratification has no meaning compared to the thrill of the now. In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the neurologist and anthropologistau Oliver Sacks writes about a man who has no short term memory. He can’t remember anything that happened even a few minutes earlier. Sacks wrote of him, “He is, as it were, isolated in a single moment of being, with a moat or lacuna of forgetting all around him…He is a man without a past (or future), stuck in a constantly changing, meaningless moment.”[1] In many ways, this describes post-modern culture.

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[1] Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. p. 34

Postmodernity

This breaking down of modernity can’t be given a precise date, as it was a long and gradual process. However, just as the Enlightenment was the period in which modernity took shape, post-modern philosophers tend to agree that the two world wars were what announced the end of modernity. Jean-François Lyotard, one of the pioneers of post-modern philosophy, says that Auschwitz “is the crime which opened the post-modern era”[1]. Not all agree on the exact point in time, some say for example that it was the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The idea, however, is the same: that modernity’s belief in human progress through technology was suddenly shattered as this technology was used for entirely negative purposes. In dialectic terms there is no possible aufhebung*, modernity is dead.

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[1] Lyotard J.-F., The Postmodern explained. p. 19

Modernity

What we call the modern age is generally thought to have begun in the 18^th century with the effects of the Enlightenment. Immanuel Kant described this as:

“[…] man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [Dare to know] "Have courage to use your own understanding!"--That is the motto of enlightenment.”[1]

The Enlightenment (and to a lesser extent, modernity itself) can be defined by the importance that it places on the use of reason. This however, was not an original idea of Enlightenment philosophers. In the 16^th century, the Reformation made such thinking possible by questioning what the church held to be true and allowing people to study the scriptures for themselves and think through what they believe as individuals. Martin Luther said:

“Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason — I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other — my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe.”[2]

To my mind, this flourishing of individual thought is one of the main consequences of the Reformation, and the Enlightenment that it made possible. It led to an outburst of creative energy that shows itself very clearly in the Industrial Revolution. But perhaps more importantly, it led to a particular way of thinking about life: the assumption that humanity was inevitably improving with every passing year, and that our scientific discoveries would increasingly allow us to understand and control our universe. The conflict between Galileo and the Church, which was frightened of such thinking, was the precursor to a much wider struggle between the claims of science and the claims of faith. For the most part, science won the upper hand.

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[1] Kant, Immanuel, What is Enlightenment?

[2] Bainton, Roland H, Here I Stand: a Life of Martin Luther. p. 143