Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas

Reverend Francis RitchieMiscellanyLeave a Comment

Vanitas

There’s a form of art called Vanitas (vanity). The point of the art was/is to convey the meaninglessness of much of our lives and the things we chase after. It reflects the absurdity of life captured by the ‘teacher’ of Ecclesiastes in the words ‘Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” (Ecc 1:2 NIV) It’s that verse in Latin that is the title of this post. It also captures what’s at the heart of existential philosophy – the absurdity that life is meaningless beyond the meaning that we give it. Much existential philosophy is then about holding meaning together. I’m thinking about what this means for my life.

To capture this sense of absurdity, Vanitas art that was prominent in the 16th and 17th centuries used many things to symbolise the meaninglessness of life – skulls and rotten fruit were common symbols used. If it had any point it was to cause everyone to reflect on the pointlessness of it all – thus the art carried a certain irony in that it was also pointless. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet the playwright captured it with the Skull of Yorick.

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? – Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1.

One can imagine Shakespeare reflecting on the pointlessness of his own offering to the world when writing the musing of Hamlet about Yorick.

In Yorick we see the contrast between his life of fun and cheer and the finality of death that we will all face – rendering the life Yorick lived as almost pointless.

This can sound morbidly depressing and to a degree, it should. My own delving into this arena has been sparked by a few verses of scripture alongside Ecclesiastes and then a link in contemplative spirituality to how we live. Allow me to take you there.

The last part of Genesis 3:19 offers us a stark thought:

…for you are dust and to dust you will return. – Genesis 3:19B (NIV)

This refrain is repeated a couple of times in scripture and it leads to the famous Ash Wednesday line ‘Remember O mortal that you are dust and to dust you shall return.’

Fast forward to Psalm 90:12 and we get:

Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. (NIV)

The NET Bible states the first half of that verse as ‘So teach us to consider our mortality…’ I think this captures the intent well.

Flick over to Psalm 102:14-16 and you get this within the context of talking of God as a compassionate father and us as his children:

…for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust. The life of mortals is like grass, they flourish like a flower of the field; the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more. (NIV)

There’s a point here – knowing that we are mortal and that one day we’re going to die leads to wisdom. The inevitability of death holds up a mirror to everything we pursue, deem to be important and endow with meaning. It strips away everything the culture around us may say about who we are and what’s important. In what that mirror shows us, there is wisdom. That wisdom stems from the detachment that comes from realising everything is meaningless. In the Christian context that means that there is only one thing that is actually important and of true worth in life – the eternal will of God – that thing that will continue after we’re gone and was active long before we existed. We’re just a fragment of the universe with a place in that story. The point of life is to align ourselves with that.

That detachment from life as we know it can sound morbid or wonderfully freeing. The irony is that once we face this detachment and stop pursuing a whole bunch of meaningless stuff as if it matters, we’re more able to truly love, we’re more able to truly give, be thankful, enjoy life, and we’re more able to put our own selves on the line in the story of justice – the story of God’s will.

This sounds foreign in a world that is shaped by the desire for self gain and self protection. It’s foreign in a world that flees death at all costs rather than facing it, but scripture is riddled with it. Other religions are full of the same idea and much great Christian thought captures it, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s idea of freedom where freedom is found in becoming completely like Christ – disregarding the self in pursuit of the good of the other. Henri Nouwen also captures it in his idea of us all being ‘the beloved.’

There’s a real richness in contemplating and reminding ourselves of our mortality.

Now, this isn’t my complete thinking on the topic – I’m trying to shape it a little better in a book and link it to the spiritual disciplines (silence is the key to this for me) and our wider life, but it does put our toes in the water.