Desunt Caetera

Sleep sleep old Sun, thou canst not have repast

As yet, the wound thou took’st on friday last;

Sleep then, and rest; The world may bearer thy stay,

A better Sun rose before thee to day,

Who, not content to’englighten all that dwell

On the earths face, as thou, enlightned hell,

And made the darker fires languish in that vale,

As, at thy presence here, our fires grow pale.

Whose body having walk’d on earth, and now

Hasting to Heaven, would, that he might allow

Himself unto all stations, and fill all,

For these three days become a mineral;

He was all gold when he lay down, but rose

All tincture, and doth not alone dispose

Leaden and iron wills to good, but is

Of power to make even sinful flesh like his.

Had one of those, whose credulous piety

Thought, that a Soul one might discern and see

Go from a body,’at this sepulcher been,

And, issuing from the sheet, this body seen,

He would have justly thought this body a soul,

If not of any man, yet of the whole.

Desunt cætera
John Donne


When asked what the tattoo on my wrist means, I lazily default to the same humdrum response as it requires more than a brief description for one to fully grasp the meaning behind Desunt Caetera. Here is my feeble attempt to explain the above Donne poem and the significance of the Latin phrase in question.
I believe that the resurrection represents an image of complete and perfect unity-of man and God, of the real and the ideal, of body and soul, of the individual and the collective, of present and future, of time and eternity, of subject and object, of man's beginning and end. Donne was consumed by the desire to discover a unity that could rescue man from his mortal destiny of fragmentation and dissolution: "Cum credimus, nihil desideramus ultra credere; when I believe God in Christ, dead, and risen again according to the Scriptures, I have nothing else to believe.” What is surprising is that knowing Donne felt this way, many assume he didn’t finish the poem, a conclusion suggested by the Latin tag “Desunt Caetera”- ‘the rest is lacking’-at the end and the title, Resurrection, Imperfect. The ambivalent "imperfect" in the title was for many years regarded as a comment on the unfinished state of the text. However, many scholars have suggested that both the title and the Latin end tag are not only Donne's own, but serve to emphasize that the resurrection of the soul, as represented by Christ, is perfect but the resurrection of man, as imagined in the daily resurrecting of the physical sun, is an unfinished task, and will remain so until the end of the world.
The "wound" taken by the "old Sun" on "friday last"-that is, the eclipse of the sun from noon until 3 P.M. while Christ suffered on the cross (Matt. 27.45)-suggests the imperfection of nature as a result of original sin, as opposed to the perfection of a super nature which redeemed humankind from that sin and so allows us to "eclipse" or transcend the natural order of sin and death. Two days have passed, and the "old Sun" has yet to "repast" or recover (or pass beyond) from that wound, Donne writes. The two "suns" seem to compete and the poem works to contrast both them and in effect extending the conclusion that Christ changed the course of nature and so proved Himself the Lord of ALL. The "old Sun," created on the fourth day of the world (Gen. 1.14-19) and functioning daily since, has been eclipsed in strength and vigor by "A better Sun"-Jesus, the Son of God and Light of the World. The "old Sun" in Resurrection, Imperfect is feeble and needs rest. The "better Sun," youthful and more vigorous, actually rose before the elderly planet on Easter Sunday morning, for as Matt. 28.1-7 records, when the two Marys went to the tomb as it began to dawn, the body of their crucified Lord had already risen from the dead. As part of the natural order, the "old Sun" is "content" to enlighten only "all that dwell / On the earths face." But through his Harrowing of Hell, while his mortal part was consigned to the tomb, the Son penetrated both spatially below the "earths face" where the other's light has never reached. While the "old Sun" has power over the physical world, the "better Sun" easily "allows Himself unto all stations" or regions, his light "fill[ing] all.” The sun, omnipotent in the natural order, is here relatively powerless, its sphere of influence more narrowly circumscribed than that of the "better" sun. Indeed, the power of nature, Donne suggests, is entirely relative: just as a fire's light pales before the light of the sun, so the sun's light fades before the more powerful spiritual revelation of the Son.
The conflict between the physical and spiritual orders, between nature and grace, develops in the alchemical ideas that dominates the poem. Alchemists believed that the sun possessed the transmutative power to change into gold the minerals buried beneath the earth's surface when they were warmed by its heat. For three days the inanimate body of the crucified Christ likewise lay as "a mineral" beneath the earth's surface; but He was already "all gold when he lay down" only to rise on Easter Sunday morning "All tincture"-that is, as the quintessence or most highly refined material. But Donne pushes this alchemical idea even further. Tincture is a necessary agent for changing low and imperfect metals in nature to higher and purer ones. Medicinally, it purges elements of their base qualities and supplements their good ones. Because the "better Sun's" powers are spiritual, not merely physical, Christ is able to "dispose / Leaden and iron wills to good.” The "old Sun" is incapable of enlightening the human heart, which the "better Sun" harrows even as he did Hell, the light of his grace reducing the darkness of sin until, spiritually converted, men struggle to control their sinful impulses and, spiritually rarified, become more like Christ himself.
Monotonously repeating daily what the "better Sun" has done once and for eternity-and performing merely on a physical plane what the "better Sun" does "unto all stations"-the "old Sun" in its natural resurrection is but an imperfect copy of the supernatural one, the paradigm of all resurrections. "Resurrection, imperfect" can patronizingly tell the "old Sun" to stay in bed and rest, for its services are no longer needed, having been superseded.
The poem's final lines, however, both suggest why any description of the perfect resurrection is ultimately imperfect, and move towards a realization of the value of the albeit imperfect daily resurrection of the "Old Sun." Scripture records that no mortal witnessed Christ's resurrection from the tomb, which makes the Resurrection a matter of faith, something to be taken on “the evidence of things not seen”(Heb. 11.1). Hypothesizing the existence of someone so piously credulous as to believe the soul can be seen leaving the body after death, the speaker insists that the transfigured body which arose from the tomb would have appeared so glorious and so unlike any other body that a witness could only have concluded it was not a body but a soul, and not even the soul of any individual but that “of the whole.” Human intelligence, limited to what it can read in God's book, teases from what can be seen the evidence of that which cannot. The sun's resurrection, imperfect as it is, is the best emblem of that "better" resurrection that is available to man. "Desunt caetera” the rest is lacking – implies that our physical resurrection of daily life, which is controlled by the physical sun, is in no way a match for Christ's resurrection which is “of power to make even sinful flesh like his.” The rest truly is lacking.
How beautiful is that?