Inspiration comes through the strangest means.
When a friend and I decided to visit Pompeii near the end of our Rome semester, she convinced me that it would be fun to listen to Bastille’s “Pompeii” in the middle of the actual ruins. I acquiesced—and so, on a pleasant May afternoon, the sounds of a 2013 British pop song played to an empty first-century basilica in the Pompeii forum.
“But if you close your eyes
Does it almost feel like nothing changed at all?”*
If I had closed mine, it would have felt like everything had begun to change.
I had never listened closely to the song before, but, as I paid attention to the lyrics, the words sent chills up my spine—and not merely because I was in Pompeii. The lines “We were caught up and lost in all of our vices” and “Oh, where do we begin, the rubble or our sins?” emphasized an underlying motif of sin in the song that had never struck me before.* Intrigued, I studied the lyrics and read up on the piece over the next day or so. What I learned fascinated me and laid the groundwork for this reflection.
In several interviews, bandmember Dan Smith, who composed the song, said that he wrote it after being struck by an image of a pair of Pompeii’s victims. “[I]t got me thinking,” he said in one interview, “about how boring it must have been emotionally after the event. To be sort of stuck in that same position for hundreds and hundreds of years.”1 Whether or not he realized it, Smith struck at an important truth: the inherent connection between personal stagnation and sin.
This quote reminded me of C.S. Lewis’ imagining of Hell in The Great Divorce. At the very beginning of the book, the author finds himself in a rather unpleasant town, which he describes as a place of “mean streets, always in the rain and always in evening twilight. Time seemed to have paused on that dismal moment when only a few shops have lit up and it is not yet dark enough for their windows to look cheering” (C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 1). Here, there is no real life because life entails movement, but, except for movement away from each other, everything in this town is stagnant. It could even be called boring. No one there is fully human anymore; when compared to the real, “solid” bodies of those in Heaven, the townspeople appear to be “ghosts,” mere hints of persons (23, 19). We later learn that this town is the “Valley of the Shadow of Death;” for those who remain there, it is Hell.
Lewis’ point here is jarring; sin stagnates us and makes us less than human. How? Think of the opposite of sin: virtue. According to Aristotle and many classical philosophers, human excellence equals the virtuous life. The more one grows in virtue, the more excellent he becomes and the more fully he develops his humanity. Acquiring virtue comes through habit, through deliberately and regularly choosing certain courses of action to change oneself into a better person. Such change is difficult, even painful, but it is necessary. When man does not push himself to grow, when he refuses to let himself be transformed, he cannot grow in virtue. Such a person who refuses to change may not be vicious at first, but one never stays lukewarm forever. Eventually, he will turn, by gradual but steady steps, more and more to vice. In short, one who does not choose virtue not only slips into vice, but also fails to develop his human nature. He has stunted himself as a person.
Not all the residents of Lewis’ Hell (or “The Valley of the Shadow of Death”) were flagrant sinners. Many are men and women who, on the outside, seemed on earth to be decent folk. However, when challenged with the chance to change their flaws, to let go of their egos, lusts, grudges, and griefs, they refuse. They choose to remain as they are. As a result, they never go beyond being a ghost (and some even vanish entirely and lose what body they had).
The unchanging rain and twilight of the monotonous town represent what happens when man lives without striving for virtue. He becomes stuck in a rut, never changing or growing into anything better. Virtue is vibrant, exciting, and freeing; it provides a banquet of choices for how to act rightly. In comparison, sin is dull and stifling because it tends to keep man trapped in a certain course of action (for example, liars become trapped in their own lies). Not until Dr. Whitmore’s moral theology class did I fully understand this point—and the fact that today’s culture obscures it. This world teaches that a story’s characters are most fascinating when breaking moral codes drives their actions. Good and evil have become confused, so it is no wonder, then, why many fail to see themselves and their actions for what they are.
How does all of this relate to Pompeii and the eponymous pop song? Pompeii was, in many ways, very much like our modern world. Like the modern generation, many of Pompeii’s residents immersed themselves in the comforts of the material world, evidenced by their elaborate frescoes, mosaics, and abundant jewelry. Their lives were worldly, focused on pursuing things other than virtue. They became stagnant in soul well before the eruption froze their bodies. Nothing, indeed, changed at all. “Pompeii” captures this reality perfectly; the victims in the song lived all “caught up” in their “vices,” but there was “nothing to show,” no personal growth.* Their lives remained empty. For those who lived this way, nothing changed in their life above the soil, and nothing would be different about their life beneath it.
However, Pompeii illustrates more than the problem—it also illustrates the solution. At several spots in the Pompeii ruins, visitors can glimpse the belltower of the Pontifical Shrine of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary of Pompeii, erected in the modern town in the late 1800s by Blessed Bartolo Longo. Although others were touring Pompeii that day, often, my friend and I were alone amidst the ruins. However, when we visited the Shrine, we found the front rows filled with faithful pilgrims, with more trickling in for the Mass that was just about to begin. Old Pompeii no longer bustles; the Shrine offers Masses, Rosaries, and other devotions several times a day. All this life, this activity, is precisely what happens when one lives virtuously. Through prayer and works, all for Jesus through Mary, the virtuous soul blossoms like a beautiful flower, always changing as it transforms into something beautiful.
We all are called to blossom and to change into something beautiful. The beginning of a new academic year is a fitting time for everyone—freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors, faculty, and staff—to look back and compare who they are now to who they were last year, or two, three, five, ten years ago. Everyone has undergone some external change, whether from high school to college, from freshman year to senior year, or from young to old. The real question, though, is whether we have changed internally. When we look back at ourselves as high school seniors, as freshmen, as first-time faculty, do we see any change in our characters? Are we the same people now that we were back then? When you “close your eyes,” do you find a different self, or, as the song says do you “feel like you’ve been here before?”* These are honest but hard questions. If we do not ask them, though, we will stagnate because we may never change. Self-reflection is difficult, and we cannot always see the flaws or shortcomings in ourselves. We need the help of our neighbor and especially of God to know what we must perfect in ourselves and to act on that knowledge. Starting today, we must choose virtue daily to form the habits that will make us into the men and women that we need to be.
Ultimately, Pompeii’s citizens had a choice: to stay or to flee. While many chose to flee, some chose to stay, whether out of necessity or out of foolish attachment to their things. Likewise, in The Great Divorce, the town’s residents had a choice: to stay as they were and find themselves in Hell or to change themselves and enter Heaven. We, too, have a choice. We can choose to work with God to transform ourselves into people of virtue, or we can choose to be comfortable as we are in our old, sinful habits. No one ends up in Heaven or Hell by accident; we will spend eternity in either place because of the choices that we make today, tomorrow, and every day of our lives.
What do you choose?
Notes:
*Lyrics of “Pompeii” can be found at https://genius.com/Bastille-pompeii-lyrics (accessed September 6, 2021). All subsequent lyric quotes are from the same link and will be starred at the end of the sentence.