Christ Church

At this year’s Atlantic Theological Conference, The Rev’d David Curry made a special presentation on Louise Penny’s novel The Madness of Crowds and other related literature. The YouTube video of Fr. Curry’s talk is posted here; his lecture notes follow below. He also prepared a set of PowerPoint slides, which can be downloaded by clicking on this link.

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well

Thank you for the privilege of offering the Atlantic Theological Conference book study. It marks a new venture and is not without its challenges. In my experience people have quite different opinions and feelings about literary works especially those in the popular realm, both about authors and characters. Some absolutely adore Louise Penny’s novels and her lead character, Armand Gamache; others, well, perhaps, not so much. My interest is not to persuade you one way or another on that score but simply to consider the kinds of ethical questions that such literature raises and the ways in which they are considered.

To that end, I would like to offer some reflections on the conference theme of “Plague, Perseverance, Providence: Adversity and the Christian Response to Adversity” by way of a brief consideration of Louise Penny’s novel ‘The Madness of Crowds’ complemented by a side-long glance at Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ and John Donne’s Sonnet, ‘What if this Present were the World’s Last Night.’ “It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine” (R.E.M. 1987), only we don’t, and perhaps shouldn’t. The accompanying power-point helps to highlight certain passages in the texts.

‘The Madness of Crowds’ was published in 2021 as a post-pandemic novel in her popular series of seventeen Chief Inspector Armand Gamache’s detective mystery stories. The title is taken from Charles MacKay’s ‘Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’ (c. 1841) which explores a great range of examples of the psychology of mass hysteria and which is explicitly referenced in the novel.

Louise Penny’s novels belong to an array of detective mystery stories that explore a number of ethical questions and problems belonging to our contemporary world. Ethical refers to the idea or concept of what is good and right to think and do. It cannot be just for the few; it has to be for all. That is very much at issue in Louise Penny’s novel, The Madness of Crowds. Justice, as Plato shows in ‘The Republic,’ cannot simply be “the interest of the stronger”; in other words, that ‘might equals right.’ The Philosopher, he argues, must return to the Cave; his pursuit of wisdom is not a private matter. He is obliged to seek the good of all.

John Donne begins his wonderful exploration of the paradoxes of relationship in the sonnet entitled ‘Annunciation’ as follows:

Salvation to all that will is nigh,
That All, which always is All every where,
Which cannot sinne, and yet all sinnes must beare,
Which cannot die, yet cannot chuse but die.

This grounds the idea or concept of the good for all, meaning everybody who wills the good which, as Plato teaches, is in effect everybody, however mistakenly, in God who is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent, in short, all in all. Louise Penny’s novels often reference certain theological ideas. In a number of her earlier novels, Mathew 10. 36 serves as an anchoring theme. “And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household” which points to the issues of betrayal and corruption in the soul and in the social order which her novels constantly examine. Here she takes Julian of Norwich’s famous statement as the uniting thread for the novel: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. This is the dominant theme of Providence at work in the novel in the midst of the confusions and complexities of human behaviour and evil; in short, the different forms of our adversities.

Yet the Julian theme is perverted and twisted precisely because it is used in the promotion of an agenda that is not for all, as Armand Gamache rightly notes. He is a thoughtful man with a poetic soul, a French Canadian version of P.D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh, as it were. Ça va bien aller is the shorthand French version of Julian of Norwich’s sentence. Julian, as Gamache notes, “offered hope in a time of great suffering. But unlike Julian of Norwich, Professor Robinson’s brand had a dark core. When Robinson said All will be well, she did not, in fact, mean everything. Or everyone” (16).

The Plague in the novel is not Covid-19 exactly but the pandemic of fear that is its legacy and which leads to the ethical dilemma in the novel about how to deal with future outbreaks. Professor Abigail Robinson is a mathematician and a statistician teaching and working at a Canadian University who has written a report on the social and economic consequences of the pandemic. It was commissioned by the Canadian Government which has then refused to allow it to be published. She undertakes to make it public on her own through social media, where it has gone viral, and a lecture.

Perseverance in the novel is seen in the intent to uncover what is hidden, to get to the truth of things past and present. This involves self-reflection and self-criticism as well as insight into the vagaries of motive and intention, a constant probing into what it means to be human and about the ethical obligations that belong to the forms of human knowing. There is no wisdom, no virtue, in technique, in the technocratic world. Armand Gamache’s four sentences that lead to wisdom as recalled by his son-in-law Jean-Guy Beauvoir are a critical part of the ethical reflection: “‘I’m sorry’. ‘I was wrong.’ ‘I don’t know.’” and ‘I need help’” (63).

The novel begins in media res. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache has been tasked with protecting Professor Abigail Robinson at a public lecture taking place during Christmas week in a university gymnasium in L’Estrie, the French neologism for the Eastern Townships, before a crowd of more than five hundred people who are strongly divided in their emotions and opinions. They are, as Penny observes, “tired of being afraid” (15). And there are “seeds of anger sown”(9). Lines of poetry attributed to Ruth Zardo, the poet in Three Pines in the novels are actually from Margaret Atwood’s poems or, as here, from Marylyn Plessner’s ‘Beyond Repair’. “Who hurt you, once, so far beyond repair/ that you would greet each overture with curling lip?/ When were these seeds of anger sown, and on what ground/ that they should flourish so, watered by tears of rage, or grief?/ It was not always so” (278).

There are those who see her proposal as the only way forward “as a merciful and practical solution,” on the one hand, and “those who saw it as an outrage. A shameful violation of all they held sacred,” on the other hand (17).

There are the contemporary ethical concerns about freedom of speech in relation to public safety. “Québec was a society that felt things strongly and wasn’t afraid to express them. Which was a good thing. It meant that they were doing something right. The goal of any healthy society was to keep people safe to express sometimes unpopular views. But there was a limit to that expression, a line. And Armand Gamache knew he was standing on it”(8), trying to “find and defend that spot between freedom and safety” (24).

Even more, he is being asked to protect someone whose views he strongly disagrees with. The ethical and the personal are intertwined throughout the novel and in interesting ways. What drives him is what happened in the nursing homes during the pandemic.

Called to a nursing home, he discovered that “the most vulnerable. The weak. The infirm. Those who could not care for themselves had been abandoned. Left to die. And die they had. Armand had been the first in and last out. Staying with each man and woman, each body, until all had been removed” and then sending teams to other nursing homes until “all the horrors [were] uncovered” (156).

“It was a shame he’d carry all his life. Not that he himself had abandoned these people, but that Québec had. Quebeckers had. And he, as a senior police officer, hadn’t realized sooner that this could happen in a pandemic. That this could ever happen. Here. Here” (156). And on another personal level, his latest granddaughter, Idola, has Down’s Syndrome. All this adds to the dilemma of having to protect Professor Abigail Robinson. Her solution is the mandatory euthanization of the elderly and the frail and the termination of all pregnancies with defects. This is how all will be well – at least for some.

The solution, as she says, is “mercy killing”. But in Armand’s mind, “it wasn’t mercy killing she was proposing. It was, he knew, just killing” (48), even as he saves her when fire-crackers go off and gun-shots are fired. The ambiguities and complexities of motive and intention are carefully explored often in surprising ways. The shooter, Édouard Tardiff, for instance, deliberately undertook to miss. He turns out not to be some right- wing extremist gun-toting nut-bar but a woodsman committed to forest management. Yet he distinguishes between the culling of the trees of the forest and the culling of human life. There is a difference, he says, between a tree and a person. What drives him and his family – brother and son – is that his mother has survived Covid but wouldn’t survive what Abigail Robinson is proposing. Hence the “seeds of anger sown,” the seeds of division and animosity.

The entanglement of the personal and the ethical are constantly in play. We discover that Abigail Robinson has come to L’Estrie at the invitation of those who actually want to try to convince her not to proceed with her project. Chancellor Colette Roberge points out to Armand that “mathematics is not linear. It’s a curve. And in the brightest, most nimble of minds, it arcs around to meet philosophy, music, art.” She references Bach. This is not new to Gamache – he has heard the same from the artist Clara Morrow at Three Pines (28). But does Abigail have this kind of understanding, this kind of wisdom? Later Colette admits to Armand that what Abigail is proposing is “morally repugnant but factually correct” (99). This is a wonderful insight into the limits of the forms of our knowing.

I think Louise Penny is raising some critical questions about the ethics of what she calls ‘physician-assisted suicide’ (usually referred to now as ‘M.a.i.d’, meaning medical assistance in dying) in a compassionate and thoughtful way. Abigail Robinson’s position is a kind of scientism, the idea that science explains everything. It doesn’t. It is a kind of religion, the religion of science, but without ethical wisdom. Knowledge as power without wisdom is destructive and deadly. It can be twisted and perverted.

Who lives? Who dies? Who decides? and on what basis? The ethical dilemmas are couched explicitly in terms of Christ’s agony in Gethsemane: “Let this cup pass from me” (Mt. 26. 39). As Myrna Landers, the psychologist who ends up in Three Pines, observes, “What Abigail Robinson is proposing isn’t new. It isn’t revolutionary. It’s evolutionary. It’s already happening … Québec was the first province to legalize physician-assisted suicide.” “With strict rules and oversight,” said Armand. “That’s a choice.” This identifies the principle of autonomy and individual agency which is used as the justification for ending a life. But Myrna responds, “But pulling the plug isn’t. At least not by the person about to die. It’s a choice made by relatives. And it’s a cruel position to be put in. Maybe we’d be better off if that decision was taken out of our hands. Off our conscience.”

“Are you saying you agree with her?” he asks. “I’m saying it’s not so clear-cut. People have dug themselves into positions, but maybe we need to listen with a more open mind. I’ve had to pull a plug. I’ll never get over the trauma. Killing my own mother. That’s what it felt like. I’d have liked that cup taken from me” (200/01). But does deferring to the authority and actions of medical professionals and the State really remove that cup from us? Do we want to abdicate our ethical responsibilities and give it over to technocratic authorities?

On the medical side of things, Gamache asks the police pathologist, Dr. Sharon Harris, “How would doctors feel about mandatory euthanasia? And terminating all pregnancies with defects?” She replies, “‘Appalled’ is the word. But then many were initially appalled with physician-assisted suicide. But once it became law, we got used to it. We can even see the virtue in it, to ease suffering … It is the mandatory aspect that’s troubling … it seems inconceivable that any government would allow what she’s suggesting.” To which he replies, “We’ve seen a lot of the inconceivable lately” (173/4). It is to the novel’s credit that such ethical questions are raised and explored.

It is really a question about what is in our hearts. A line from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s ‘The Little Prince’ and from ‘Les Fables de la Fontaine’ contribute to that question: “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye” (83), and “by history we find it noted/ That lives have been just so devoted./ Then let us all turn eyes within,/ and ferret out the hidden sin” (147). These lines lead us into the dark heart of the novel.

The murder of Debbie Schneider on New Year’s Eve, a childhood friend of Abigail and now her secretary, results in the uncovering of the dark things of the past. The “ferret[ing[ out [of] the hidden sin” is from Les Animaux Malades de la Peste in Fontaine’s Fables acted out by the children on New Year’s Eve. Note, it is ‘The Animals Sick of the Plague,’ not with the plague (145). What will be “ferret[ed] out” will be the dark story of Ewen Cameron which along with the remarkable character of Haniya Daoud serve to challenge any kind of Canadian smugness and complacency about our inherent niceness.

Haniya is a Sudanese woman who has survived the brutalities of rape and violence and has killed not only to save herself but others. She is committed to the children of Sudan and is about to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She is in Three Pines because the community has wanted to honour her. Along with Vincent Gilbert, a famous doctor and humanitarian with a guilty conscience and now a recluse in the woods behind Three Pines, she, too, is a difficult person and together they are viewed as ‘the two asshole saints’; kindness and cruelty reside side by side sometimes in the human heart. As Armand says about Haniya, she sees clearly what’s wrong with the world but not what’s right in it. The last lines of Les Animaux Malades de la Peste are repeated several times and point to the moral dilemma; it is the world of Thrasymachus.

Thus human courts acquit the strong,
And doom the weak, as therefore wrong. (148)

Ewan Cameron was a psychiatrist of considerable note who “was conducting experiments on his patients, for the CIA and the Canadian government” such as “Mind control. Brainwashing. He used LSD. Sleep deprivation. Electric shocks” (413). Illegally and unethically. MKUltra was the name of the programme used by the CIA in developing “the psychological torture methods they still use today” (265). Thus Canada is complicit in the horrors of Guantanamo Bay. Vincent Gilbert as a young intern worked in the same facility and knew what was going on. He has tried to erase any traces of his work in the records of the Osler Library at McGill but can do nothing about bills issued in his name for the medical treatments done by Ewen Cameron. Looking at his photo, “The Prince of darkness is a gentleman,” the librarian of the Osler says, quoting ‘King Lear’ (Act 3, Sc.4).

We learn how the lives of two women were destroyed by these experiments: Enid Horton from Three Pines whose papers contain the drawings of monkeys, and Abigail Robinson’s own mother who committed suicide. Both were broken souls ruined by Cameron. The monkey drawings by Enid, unearthed in her effects by Reine-Marie, Gamache’s wife, belong to the trauma of sleep deprivation in which she heard constantly the screams of monkeys under torture; it tortured her. Louise Penny connects the monkeys with “the hundredth monkey effect” from social anthropology about the idea of a tipping point, namely “when an idea explodes – people doing or believing the same thing”(157/8). This is an essential aspect of the madness of crowds.

The key to the unravelling of the murder mystery about Debbie Schneider is the nickname used by Abigail’s mother for her daughters and subsequently by Debbie for Abigail. It is “Abby Maria,” a play on Ave Maria and also on the word ‘well’; ave/salve. This is yet another scriptural reference used in the novel. Abigail had a sister, Maria, who was severely disabled. The inquiry into the murder of Debbie Schneider leads to the “ferret[ing] out” of Maria’s death as murder and not accidental. “Abby Maria” was the mother’s way of connecting or uniting her two girls. Abigail’s father, another mathematician and statistician and friend of Colette Roberge, committed suicide after Maria’s death and wrote a letter to Abigail entrusted to the care of Colette while at Oxford. A photograph and the letter are critical to the resolution of the novel: both are misinterpreted. It is the perseverance of Gamache, the intensity of his quest for the truth, which “ferrets out” the hidden sin and reveals the deeper motives of the heart.

The letter seems to contradict what everyone said about Abigail’s father. At first, it seemed to Gamache “cruel and vindictive” (411). “I couldn’t reconcile the two. A loving father who kills one child and burdens another with a lifetime of guilt? How could this be love? How could love, real love, ever be a reason to murder?”

“I know how,” said Haniya.
Gamache looked at her and nodded. “Yes, you do. You survived for love. And what you did you did for love. And now, I think, I also understand.”
“Now it is now, and the dark thing is here,” said Gilbert quietly (quoting Margaret Atwood’s poem, ‘Waiting’).
“It’s not dark yet,” said Gamache. “But it’s getting there” (quoting Bob Dylan!) (412).

The letter from the father was misunderstood as a confession of his killing Maria and then himself out of remorse. Yet, as Gamache says, the letter which seemed so puzzling is really a letter of love. He was covering up the death of Maria which he didn’t commit by killing himself so as to protect Abigail. All out of love. Because he knew that Abigail had killed her disabled sister. “He knew you. Where he was selfless, you were selfish. Where he was sincere, you were manipulative. Where he put family first, you put your ambitions first … he loved you and wanted to protect you” (420).

Debbie Schneider had also come to know the truth of the letter but wanted to see Maria’s death as a mercy killing and to support Abigail in her ambition. Her constant reference to Abigail as “Abby Maria” threatens Abigail – it might lead to questions about the past which, paradoxically, it does. Thus she kills her, somewhat impulsively, on New Year’s Eve. Abigail never fully confesses in the final stand-off in the cabin in the woods but tries to get Jean-Guy Beauvoir, Gamache’s son-in-law and the father of Idola, to shoot her thus making her a martyr for her cause. He doesn’t and Abigail is arrested, though not for the murders, for without a confession there are questions about material evidence. But there is the whole matter of the ideas that take hold of people, the madness of crowds. It is one thing to kill a person but how do you kill an idea?

Has Abigail’s idea achieved “the tipping point” into the madness of crowds? Colette thinks that “she’s scared enough people into believing there won’t be enough resources to recover from the pandemic, never mind handle another. Unless the sick and elderly are allowed to die.”

“Made to die,” said Armand. By lethal injection. Capital punishment for men and women whose crime wasn’t killing, but taking too long to die” (428).

That is a pretty strong ethical statement backed up with a commitment to act upon it. He has collected “the mounting evidence… against those responsible for abandoning the elderly and frail in care homes during the pandemic” (428). He is meeting with the Premier of Québec the next day “to show him the files. And to let him know, quietly, confidentially, that if there was any move to adopt mandatory euthanasia, or anything vaguely smelling of eugenics, those files would go public. It was, he knew, blackmail. But he and his conscience could live with that” (428).

“May you be a brave man in a brave country” is a line from Marilynne Robinson’s novel ‘Gilead’ which has been carved on a bench in Three Pines. Written underneath are words from Wordsworth, “Surprised by Joy.” Gamache has throughout the novel had to question himself about bravery and about the best. Such is the struggle. “Where shall wisdom be found? And Where is the place of understanding?” Job’s questions from evensong yesterday are very much the questions of the novel (Job 28.20).

In a way, the novel forces us to look into the abyss and to face ourselves in the face of the adversities that belong to human suffering and evil.

“Terrible suffering. When the end was inevitable but taking too long. Plugs were pulled and respirators turned off. Hands were held, and prayers and promises and goodbyes whispered. But what happens when the suffering continued? Or when there were no plugs to pull? Just a loved one wracked with uncontrollable pain and begging for help.

What happened when nature was taking its time to take its course? When the necessary permission for assisted suicide hadn’t been given in time?

Was a nudge necessary?
Did mercy sound like a soft footstep in the middle of the night? Did it look like a syringe? A pillow?
But was it always mercy?

If looked at from a certain angle, in a certain light, did the kind angel become wicked? Dispatching not a tormented loved one, but an inconvenience. Wasn’t that the debate they were locked in now, thanks to Abigail Robinson and her campaign for mandatory euthanasia.

Everyone was quick to say what happened was heartbreaking. But really, privately, they considered the tragedies of the pandemic a cull. Of the weak” (321).

The novel has the courage to wrestle with such things through a kind of ethical lens about what it means to be human. Christian language and images abound, to be sure, but the institutional churches are not in the story, perhaps because they are caught between the scientism of technocratic culture, on the one hand, and the modern gnostic ontology of identity politics in that culture, on the other hand, profoundly uncertain of the ethical wisdom of redemptive suffering which the novel paradoxically and so powerfully portrays.

Armand and Reine-Marie are not particularly religious “though they both had a steadfast and private belief in God” (276). Armand entering St. Thomas’s church in Three Pines “crossed himself by habit, even though this was not a Catholic church. And he no longer considered himself Catholic, Or Protestant. Or Jewish. Or Muslim” (343). Yet certain ethical, spiritual and theological ideas drive the argument, often through poetry. “When my death us do part/ Then shall forgiven and forgiving meet again,/Or will it be, as always, too late?” The last phrase of this poem was co-opted by Abigail Robinson in the same way as Julian of Norwich’s famous statement.

Forgiveness and love are the principles upon which the novel ends. The two “asshole saints” meet in the Bistro. Vincent explains that he had wanted to apologize to Abigail for what had happened to her mother – a movement of the heart towards reconciliation. Meanwhile Haniya is learning to think differently about adversity.

“She’d thought of the men she’d killed as inhuman … But now she was beginning to realize a greater truth. That those men and boys had families. Had motives, however flawed. Had wounds of their own. They almost certainly had not been born with the desire to rape, to torture, to torment and murder … they were monsters, but they were also human. And maybe, maybe in realizing the truth, she could finally find some measure of peace. Maybe that was the real prize” (425).

She suggests that Vincent try out his apology on her which he does – a kind of substitution in love. The novel ends with Haniya opening a card from her friends at Three Pines which contains the words “ça va bien aller. She thought maybe it was true” (432). Wonderful.

We end, in other words, with a deeper understanding of the providential words of Julien of Norwich. “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” A way to face adversity. But it takes courage.

We turn now to Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1842). It is a powerful and compact short story that complements what we have considered in ‘The Madness of Crowds.’ What is good, again, cannot be for the few at the expense of the many. We are all implicated in the confusions of our world and day in some sense or another. There is no escaping what confronts us all, no escape for the elites into their hedonistic pursuits from what befalls us all. The following short extracts in the power-point convey something of the drama of the story.

It begins with a sense of the horror of the plague.

The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avator and its seal – the redness and the horror of blood.

But the Prince Prospero {an ironic reference perhaps to Shakespeares’ Prospero in The Tempest) was happy and dauntless, and sagacious. When his dominions were half-populated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron …

Such is the flight of the elites from the ravages of the plague, we might say, highlighted by a wonderful phrase in the contrast between what is within and what is without.

There was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”

The story continues with the inauguration of a great masque, a festive occasion that emphasizes the contrast between the world of the elites and everyone else who is suffering. The word ‘voluptuous’ speaks volumes.

It was towards the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most usual magnificence. It was a voluptuous scene that masquerade.

Poe goes on to describe in considerable detail seven grand rooms in Prospero’s “castellated abbey,” particularly the last and seventh.

The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But, in this chamber only, the color of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes here were scarlet – a deep blood color.

An important feature of the story and the seventh apartment is the clock.

It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony. Its pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when its minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came forth from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians in the orchestra were constrained to pause, momently, in their performance, to harken to the sound; and thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions; and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and that the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation.

The effect of the clock signals the possibility of an awakening (“or will it be, as always, too late?”). The figure of the “Red Death” appears and adds to the sense of impending doom.

In truth the masquerade license of the night was nearly unlimited; but the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone beyond the bounds of even the prince’s indefinite decorum. There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be properly made. The whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and bearing of the stranger neither wit nor propriety existed. The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood – and his brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.

The story mounts to its climax in the twelfth hour marked, of course, by the tolling of the bell of the clock.

And the revel went whirlingly on, until at length was sounded the twelfth hour upon the clock. And then the music ceased, as I have told; the evolutions of the waltzers were quieted; and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before. But now there were twelve strokes to be counted by the bell of the clock; and thus it happened, perhaps, that more of thought crept, with more of time, into the mediations of the thoughtful among those who revelled. And thus, again, it happened, perhaps, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before. And the rumour of this new presence having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, expressive at first of disapprobation and surprise – then, finally, of terror, of horror, and of disgust.

The masked figure is seen as an offense and this excites the anger of Prince Prospero.

Prince Prospero, maddening with rage … rushed hurriedly through the six chambers – while none followed him on a account of a deadly terror that had seized upon all. He bore aloft a drawn dagger, and had approached, in rapid impetuosity, to within three or four feet of the retreating figure, when the latter, having attained the extremity of the velvet apartment, turned suddenly round and confronted his pursuer. There was a sharp cry – and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which instantly afterwards, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero.

In almost Homeric fashion, what happens to those who rule affects those who are ruled.

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night, And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed hall of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

The bell tolls. “Send not to know for whom,” John Donne reminds us. For “No man is an island … Each man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”

A sonnet by John Donne (1572-1631), first published in 1633, offers a profound meditation on how we face the end of the world whether in the sense of our own deaths or something more cosmic and apocalyptic.

What if this present were the worlds last night?
Marke in my heart, O Soule, where thou dost dwell,
The picture of Christ crucified, and tell
Whether his countenance can thee affright,
Teares in his eyes quench the amasing light,
Blood fills his frownes, which from his pierc’d head fell
And can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell,
Which pray’d forgiveness for his foes fierce spigth?
No, no; but as in my idolatrie
I said to all my profane mistresses,
Beauty of pitty, foulnesse onely is
A signe of rigour: so I say to thee,
To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assign’d,
This beauteous forme assures a pitious mind.

The inward looking attention is on remembering the image of Christ crucified as indicated in the Octaet. “Mark in my heart, O Soul, where thou dost dwell, the picture of Christ crucified.” The opening question of the sonnet is answered by a twofold rhetorical question. Can what you see (as remembered) of the face or countenance of Christ frighten you? Can what you hear (as remembered) in the first words of the Crucified judge or condemn you?

There are different ways in which the crucifixion has been depicted. One of the earliest forms of the crucifixion is known as the Christus Rex which emphasizes Christ’s victory and reign. He is depicted as robed in royal garb and with a crown. That depiction then gives way in the course of the early to the late medieval world to an emphasis on the suffering humanity but in differing degrees of suffering.

The image that he has in mind may be depictions of the crucifixion such as the famous Isenheim altarpiece by Nikolaus Haguenau and Matthias Grünewald (1512-1516) which shows Christ bearing the marks of the plaque, thus identifying himself with the forms of our suffering humanity.

The detail of the Christus shows the marks of the plague.

The answer to the questions of the octet is “No, no.” No to both our being frightened or our being condemned. Yet the sestet convicts us in our idolatry, our pursuit of “profane mistresses,” meaning all and everything pro fanum, outside the temple which we worship in place of God, hence idolatry. What follows is an ellipsis, meaning the insertion of certain words needed to make sense of it. “Beauty of pity, foulness only is a sign of rigour” means that beauty is a sign of pity just as foulness is a sign of rigour in the sense of death and decay as in rigour mortis. The conceit or idea here is that the beautiful woman always has pity or mercy on the lover. What should frighten us is our attachment to wickedness thus “to wicked spirits are horrid shapes assigned.” But the image of Christ Crucified even in the hideous form of the plague is actually something beautiful and merciful. “This beauteous form assures a piteous mind,” a mind that is aware of the need for mercy.

“What is essential is invisible to the eye.” It is about looking to Christ in his redemptive sufferings for us and the world on the Cross. That requires perseverance in our loving attention to Him in His word and sacraments even in the midst of adversity. It is only possible out of a powerful sense of God’s Providence for only so can “all be well.”

Fr. David Curry
Plague, Perseverance, Providence: Adversity and the Christian Response to Adversity ATC, June 2022