Douglas Murray (The Free Press), Things Worth Remembering: The Resurrection of the Body and the Immortality of the Soul:
Preacher-poet John Donne gave voice to his faith with a sermon on how God will raise the dead.
I wonder if there has ever been a bigger change in our collective way of thinking than in our transition from the age of faith to the age of doubt. Inevitably, it is on my mind this Easter.
Millions of people around the world believe in the literal resurrection, when God lifts His believers into heaven. I suppose untold numbers are unsure or doubtful about this, while keeping within the borders of faith. For myself, I can’t help looking back at the age of faith—or even certainty—with envy.
Last year, I wrote in this space about the great English poet John Donne. He was perhaps the greatest of the “metaphysical” poets, a man whose work was laced with a raciness and a realness that, for some, lay in contradiction with his position as a clergyman and dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. …
His very last sermon, given on February 25, 1631, and posthumously published as “Death’s Duel,” was given when Donne was so feeble that those who saw him give it said he already resembled a corpse.
In an age of doubt all this might have been depressing. But in an age of faith—and faith such as Donne’s—it was something beautiful. As he wrote in his Devotions: “I am more than dust and ashes: I am my best part, I am my soul.” …
One of his greatest sermons, Sermon LXXXI, he preached at the Earl of Bridgewater’s House in London on November 19, 1627, where he reflected on one of the most curious aspects of the resurrection.
The problem he turns over in this sermon—given, astonishingly, at the marriage of the Earl’s daughter—is how God, on the day of resurrection, will reassemble the bodies of the faithful long after they have decayed. Some of the dead, he says, have left limbs in other lands, or their bodies have turned to mulch. Others have ended up in the sea’s mouth. So how is it, on the day of resurrection, that God can call even one of these bodies, let alone all of these bodies, together? Donne both addresses these questions unsparingly and gives an answer that is wonderful—wonderful in its faith, and in its theology also. But perhaps most astonishing to me is the wonder of Donne’s language.
For me, this sings beautifully on the page, but it sounds even better to the ear [read by Douglas Murray here].
There are so many evidences of the immortality of the soul, even to a natural man’s reason, that it required not an article of the creed, to fix this notion of the immortality of the soul. But the resurrection of the body is discernible by no other light, but that of faith, nor could be fixed by any less assurance than an article of the creed. Where be all the splinters of that bone, which a shot hath shivered and scattered in the air? Where be all the atoms of that flesh, which a corrosive hath eat away, or a consumption hath breathed, and exhaled away from our arms, and other limbs? In what wrinkle, in what furrow, in what bowel of the earth, lie all the grains of the ashes of a body burnt a thousand years since? In what corner, in what ventricle of the sea, lies all the jelly of a body drowned in the general flood? What coherence, what sympathy, what dependence maintains any relation, any correspondence, between that arm which was lost in Europe, and that leg, that was lost in Africa or Asia, scores of years between? One humour of our dead body produces worms, and those worms suck and exhaust all other humour, and then all dies, and all dries, and molders into dust, and that dust is blown into the river, and that puddled water tumbled into the sea, and that ebbs and flows in infinite revolutions, and still, still God knows in what cabinet every seed-pearl lies, in what part of the world every grain of every man’s dust lies; and sibilat populum suum (as his prophet speaks in another case), he whispers, he hisses, he beckons for the bodies of his saints, and in the twinkling of an eye, that body that was scattered over all the elements, is sat down at the right hand of God, in a glorious resurrection. A dropsy hath extended me to an enormous corpulency, and unwieldiness; a consumption hath attenuated me to a feeble macilency and leanness, and God raises me a body, such as it should have been, if these infirmities had not intervened and deformed it.
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