The Symbolism of Bells

From useful signal to sacred sign

At the origin, Christians invented nothing: to gather a community, people struck a sounding board, shook a handbell, blew a horn. The need was first practical. In the earliest monasteries, a signal was needed to wake the monks at night and call them to the office, to table, to work. The Rule of Saint Benedict (c. 540) speaks simply of the signum, the "signal": "as soon as the signal has been heard" (cum exauditum fuerit signum), the monks must rise without delay^[2]. The word does not yet designate a bell in the modern sense, but already the object is defined by its function: to give a sign.

It is this shift — from useful signal to sacred sign — that founds the whole symbolism of the bell. Very quickly, the sound that summons the assembly was heard as far more than a time warning. When the bell calls to Mass, it does not merely say "it is time": it says "the Lord calls you." The useful object becomes the bearer of a voice that is no longer its own.

The voice of God who summons

The liturgy has always treated the bell as a voice, and precisely as an echo of the voice of God. The rite of the blessing of bells applies to bronze the psalm verse on the voice of the Lord shaking creation: "The voice of the LORD is powerful, the voice of the LORD is full of majesty" (vox Domini in virtute, vox Domini in magnificentia, Ps 29:4)^[3]. The bell lends its sounding power to this voice: it carries far, over walls and fields, the call that no human word could make heard.

Hence the lasting dignity of the bell in worship: it does not ring for itself, but as a herald. Where the silver trumpet of the Old Covenant summoned Israel (cf. Nb 10:2), the bell summons the Church; and where, in towns, the public crier proclaimed edicts, the bell proclaims the mysteries of God. That is why it is never rung just anyhow: each manner of ringing — full-circle ringing, which swings it fully; chiming, which strikes it stationary; the spaced knell of the dead; the hurried tocsin of alarm — is a word in a language the whole countryside understood without ever having learned it.

The names of the object: from signum to campana

The very vocabulary of the bell tells of this ascent from signal to sign. Christian Latin first said signum, the "signal." Then two words appeared that made their fortune. The first, campana, prevailed for the great bells and gave Italian campana, Spanish campana, and our campanile. The second, nola, designated little handbells. A medieval tradition, reported in the 9th century by Walafrid Strabo, derived both words from Campania and the town of Nola in southern Italy, and attributed the invention of the church bell to Saint Paulinus of Nola (d. 431)^[4].

Modern scholarship is more cautious. The old Catholic Encyclopedia notes that the Campania etymology "lacks support," and that the Paulinus legend is "extremely improbable": in the minute description he left of his own church, Paulinus nowhere mentions a bell^[5]. The word campana originally meant, rather, a "vessel of bronze." As for the family of the French cloche, it comes from the Celtic clocca, a word of Irish origin attested as early as the end of the 7th century in the Book of Armagh and in Adomnán^[6] — a memory of the little handbells the Irish missionary monks carried to call to prayer. Honesty requires saying it: the legend is beautiful, but the church bell was not born from a single man or a single town; it is the slow fruit of a usage become sacred.

The bell is a Christian invention, but the meaning it carries is older than it. Scripture already knows a sacred sound: a sound that does not amuse the ear but accompanies worship, summons the people, and signals the presence of God. The bell is its heir.

The little golden bells of the high priest

The founding text is the description of Aaron's priestly garment, the high priest, in the Book of Exodus. Along the lower hem of his robe, God prescribes alternating colored pomegranates and little bells of gold:

"On its skirts you shall make pomegranates of blue and purple and scarlet stuff, with bells of gold between them round about: a golden bell and a pomegranate round about on the skirts of the robe. And it shall be upon Aaron when he ministers, and its sound shall be heard when he goes into the holy place before the LORD, and when he comes out, lest he die." — Book of Exodus, 28:33-35^[7]

The detail is striking. The sound of the bells is no ornament: it is vital. It accompanies the priest's entrance into the holy place and brings him out alive; it signals, in advance, the approach of the sacred. Christian tradition saw a prefiguration in it: as Aaron's robe tinkled at the threshold of the Holy of Holies, the church bell tinkles at the threshold of the holy mysteries. The bronze hung in the belfry prolongs the gold sewn on the robe: a sound announcing entry into the sphere of God.

The trumpets of the summons and the cymbals of praise

The sacred sound of the Old Covenant has two other great uses, which the bell would later unite. First, the summons. In the desert, God orders Moses to make two silver trumpets, "to use them for summoning the congregation, and for breaking camp" (cf. Nb 10:2): a sound that gathers the scattered people and tells them to march. That is exactly the bell's first function: plebem voco, "I call the people."

Then, praise. The last psalm of the Psalter deploys the whole orchestra of the Temple to acclaim God, and ends on resounding bronze:

"Praise him with trumpet sound, praise him with lute and harp! […] Praise him with sounding cymbals, praise him with loud clashing cymbals! Let everything that breathes praise the LORD!" — Psalm 150:3-6^[8]

The bell would inherit both registers: at times it summons like the trumpet, at times it praises like the cymbal, bursting with joy on feast days. The same voice of bronze speaks the call and the gladness, whether it rings to gather or to sing.

The liturgical bell has a history — that of a monastic signal become the voice of all Christendom. Tracing it shows that its symbolic charge was not decreed all at once, but deposited in successive layers, from the monks' desert to the cathedral belfries.

The first witnesses: Gregory of Tours and the monks

The first Christian writer to mention bells frequently is Gregory of Tours, around 585. He speaks of signa that were "struck or shaken" by means of a rope, and that rang before the offices and drew the monks from their beds^[9]. At the same period, the Life of Saint Columban (c. 615) describes the gathering of the community in one phrase: "signo tacto omnes adesse imperavit" — "the signal having been struck, he ordered all to be present"^[10]. The bell is thus born in the cloister, in the service of the prayer of the hours: from the origin, it is the instrument that tears from sleep and calls to praise God.

From monastery to parish

In the 8th century, the usage spread across the whole West. The Venerable Bede (c. 710) already uses the word campana for church bells^[11]. Pope Stephen II (752-757) had a bell tower with three bells raised at Saint Peter's basilica^[12]: the bell entered the city and stood above the sanctuary. Under Charlemagne, at the beginning of the 9th century, each parish church was expected to have its bell^[13]. Within a few generations, the monks' signal had become the voice of all Christendom: no belfry without a bell, no village without that voice marking the day.

Of all the objects of the liturgy, the bell is the one the Church treats most like a person. She does not merely bless it: she exorcizes it, washes it, anoints it with the holy oils, gives it a name and a godfather. This very particular rite, the Benedictio campanae, so struck minds that people ended up calling it — improperly — the "baptism of bells."

A rite that resembles baptism

The formulary, whose origin the Catholic Encyclopedia traces back "perhaps to the episcopate of Egbert of York, archbishop, in the middle of the 8th century"^[14], does indeed borrow much from baptism. The bishop first recites seven psalms with the clergy. Then a water mixed with salt is prepared with prayers of exorcism, as for holy water. Then the bishop washes the bell, inside and out, with this water, and wipes it^[15]. Exorcism, water, salt: an attentive faithful recognizes the gestures accompanying a Christian's entry into the Church.

The anointing with oil and holy chrism

Then comes the most solemn gesture, the one that makes the bell a consecrated object. The bishop traces, with the oil of the sick, seven crosses on the outside of the vessel, then, with holy chrism, four crosses on the inside. With each anointing, he pronounces a formula of consecration:

"May this bell be hallowed, O Lord, and consecrated, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. In honour of St. N. Peace be to thee." — Roman Pontifical, Benedictio campanae (anointing formula)^[16]

Finally, a thurible burning incense and myrrh is placed beneath the bell, whose fragrant smoke envelops it from within, and a Gospel passage is proclaimed — that of Martha and Mary receiving the Lord^[17]. Oil, chrism, incense: the bell receives the anointings and perfumes reserved for holy things. Henceforth its voice is no mere noise of metal: it is held to be a sacramental, a sign sanctified by the Church.

The name and the godfather

Like a newly baptized child, the bell receives a name — often that of a saint, of the Virgin, or of the donor — and, in former times, a godfather charged with suggesting it^[18]. That is why great bells bear proper names, sometimes famous: the Savoyarde of the Sacré-Cœur in Montmartre, the Emmanuel of Notre-Dame de Paris, the Pummerin of Vienna. The bronze becomes someone, with a name engraved on its robe that the community knows.

"Baptism": a popular word, never recognized

Should we then speak of "baptism"? The expression is old — found in France as early as the 11th century — but it is improper. The Catholic Encyclopedia says it plainly:

"The phrase 'baptism of bells' is merely popular and metaphorical. It has been tolerated, but has never been formally recognized by the Church." — The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907-1912), art. "Bells"^[19]

And with good reason: baptism is the sacrament that regenerates a person; objects are not baptized. The resemblances with baptism — water, salt, anointing, name — are real but superficial: there is neither triple immersion nor the essential form that makes the sacrament^[20]. The rite is a consecratory blessing, not a baptism. The distinction is no detail: it protects the very truth of baptism by reserving the word and the thing to what regenerates a soul. The bell is not baptized; it is consecrated to carry, in the world, the voice of the Church.

Because it is a voice, the bell ended up speaking in the first person. Since the Middle Ages, Latin verses have been engraved on its robe in which the bell itself states its function. These inscriptions are a true popular theology cast in bronze: to understand what the Church expects of her bells, one need only read what she makes them say.

The six offices of the bell

The most famous of these inscriptions, found on countless medieval bells, sums up in two verses the whole office of sacred bronze:

"I praise the true God, I call the people, I gather the clergy; I mourn the dead, I drive away plague, I grace the feasts." — Bell inscription, "Laudo Deum verum, plebem voco, congrego clerum / Defunctos ploro, pestem fugo, festa decoro"^[21]

Everything is said. The bell praises God, like the cymbal of the psalm; it calls the people and gathers the clergy, like the trumpet of the summons; it mourns the dead with the knell; it graces the feasts with joyful pealing; and it even claims to drive away the storm. A single voice of bronze thus holds every use, from the most solemn to the most everyday.

"I call the living, I mourn the dead, I break the lightning"

Another formula, briefer and more famous still, gathers the essential in three verbs:

"I call the living, I mourn the dead, I break the lightning." — Bell motto, "Vivos voco, mortuos plango, fulgura frango"^[22]

These words the poet Friedrich Schiller noted on the great bell of the Schaffhausen Minster, in Switzerland, and made the epigraph of his famous Song of the Bell (Das Lied von der Glocke, 1799)^[23]. They speak the three great moments when the bell accompanies a life: it greets the living whom it calls to the assembly, it mourns the dead borne to the earth, it averts the threatening lightning. From birth to death, the voice of bronze watches over the Christian people.

Marian and saints' inscriptions

Many bells finally bear the name of the heaven under which they were placed. On bells of the Virgin are engraved supplications such as "Holy Mary, protect with thy loving prayer those whom I summon" (Protege prece pia quos convoco, Sancta Maria) or "My name is Mary. O King of glory, come with peace"^[24]. Others invoke Saint Peter: "May Peter lead us to the pastures of eternal life" (Petrus ad aeternae ducat nos pascua vitae)^[25]. The bell is not anonymous: it prays to the saint whose name it bears, and joins to its call the whole communion of saints.

The Middle Ages systematized this grammar of bronze. The great liturgist William Durand of Mende (c. 1230-1296), in his Rationale divinorum officiorum, devotes a whole chapter to bells (book I), unfolding a spiritual reading of each of their parts.

The bell, image of the preacher

For Durand, the bell is first a figure of the preacher:

"Bells do signify preachers, who ought after the likeness of a bell to exhort the faithful to the faith." — William Durand of Mende, Rationale divinorum officiorum, book I (Of bells)^[26]

The image is apt: like the bell, the preacher raises his voice above the crowd to gather it; like it, he calls, warns, consoles, and celebrates. And just as the bell sounds only because it is struck, the preacher truly speaks only when touched, himself, by grace.

The clapper, the wood, the rope

Durand continues by reading each piece of the bell. The clapper — the iron tongue which, striking both walls, makes the sound burst forth — figures the preacher's tongue, which makes the two Testaments, Old and New, resound^[27]. The hardness of the metal signifies the firmness of the preacher's soul. The wood from which the bell hangs figures the wood of the Lord's Cross; the iron fittings fixing it to the yoke, the charity uniting the preacher to Christ. The rope, finally, by which the bell is set swinging, signifies now the humility of him who preaches, now the chaining of the Scriptures by which preaching holds to the Word of God^[28]. Nothing is left to chance: the whole bell becomes an image of the Church proclaiming the Gospel.

Why sound drives away demons and storms

There remains the most astonishing use: ringing bells against the tempest. The inscription already claimed it — pestem fugo, fulgura frango — and Durand embraces it: the sound of bells, he writes, is hateful to demons and has a protective virtue against storms and plagues^[29]. Here one must be exact, in line with Catholic doctrine: the Church never taught that bronze would by itself have a magical power over lightning. What tradition says is that the consecrated bell carries the Church's prayer, and that ringing against the storm is crying out to God with the voice of bronze — an act of prayer, not of superstition. The rite of blessing formulates it thus: that wherever this bell shall sound, the power of enemies retreat, and the faithful be called to prayer. The bell does not fight lightning like a lightning rod; it calls for help upon Him whose "voice is powerful"^[30].

Through the year and the Christian life, the bell changes its accent according to the mystery it serves. One same bronze speaks now the joy of the feast, now the call to evening prayer, now the mourning of a departed soul, now the adoration of the Body of Christ.

The Angelus: the bell that marks prayer

Three times a day — morning, noon, and evening — a particular ringing calls the faithful to recite the Angelus, that prayer meditating on the Incarnation. In the Middle Ages, the Angelus was commonly rung with three spaced strokes, repeated three times, followed by a peal^[31]: three tolls for each of the three versicles, then the chime of joy. A special bell, often called the "Gabriel bell" — after the angel of the Annunciation — was sometimes dedicated to it^[32]. Through the Angelus, the bell sanctifies the day's labour: it interrupts fields and workshops for a moment to recall that "the Word was made flesh." It is this scene that Jean-François Millet would paint in his famous Angelus (1857-1859), where two peasants stop, heads bowed, at the sound of the distant bell.

The knell: the bell of the dead

When a Christian dies, the bell takes a grave and slow voice: the knell. As early as the Middle Ages, a "passing bell" was rung when a member of the community lay dying, to call the brethren to the bedside or to prayer^[33]. The knell then accompanies the departed to the church and the graveyard. Its slowness speaks mourning; but, rung by a consecrated and Christian bell, it also speaks hope: the same voice that mourns the dead greeted his birth and called him all his life to prayer. Mortuos plango — "I mourn the dead" — is never a cry of despair, but the farewell of a Church that believes in the resurrection.

The Elevation and the sanctus bell

Not all bells are in the belfry. At the heart of Mass, a little handbell rings at the holiest moment. From the 13th century, with the appearance of the elevation of the Host, the custom arose of ringing a bell when the priest raises the Body of Christ, to warn the faithful — and even people in the fields — to join in adoration^[34]. Hence the Sanctus bell and the bell of the consecration, still heard at the altar today. Here the bell comes down inside the sanctuary: no longer summoning from afar, it underscores the mystery present on the altar. The proper meaning of the altar and of what is accomplished there is treated in The Symbolism of the Altar.

The tocsin and the curfew

The bell also served the whole city. Rung in hurried, repeated strokes, it became the tocsin: the alarm rousing the village in case of fire, flood, or danger. In the evening, the curfew warned to put out fires and lights before night^[35]. These civil uses are no strangers to religious symbolism: they show that the bell was the common voice, watching over the social body as over souls. The blessed bronze of the church protected, by its voice, everyone's daily life.

The silence of the Triduum: "the bells have flown to Rome"

There is one moment in the year when the bell speaks by falling silent. From the Gloria of Holy Thursday to the Gloria of the Easter Vigil, the bells are silent — a rule going back to the 8th century^[36]. During this great silence, commemorating the hours of Christ's Passion and entombment, the sound of bronze is replaced by a simple wooden rattle to announce the offices^[37]. The muteness of the bells is itself a sign: the Church holds back her voice of joy while her Lord lies in the tomb.

To explain this silence to children, a charming popular legend, born in France and Belgium, tells that the bells "have flown to Rome": they fly away on Holy Thursday to the pope who blesses them, and return on Easter morning pealing, scattering Easter eggs in gardens as they pass^[38]. The legend is obviously nothing official, but it prettily speaks the liturgical truth: when the bells return, at the Easter Vigil, their great peal proclaims that Christ is risen. The silence of the tomb ends in the splendour of bronze regained.

As with the candles of the altar, the number of bells was never indifferent: it manifests the dignity of the church. Canonical tradition reserved at least five bells for a cathedral, two or three for a parish church, while the churches of the mendicant orders were at first allowed only one^[39]. The more important the church, the richer its voice: a true ensemble of tuned bells, in which the largest, the bourdon, gives the deep fundamental note, while the smaller ones weave the chime. The hierarchy of bronze repeats, in the order of sound, what the hierarchy of candles said in the order of light — see The Symbolism of Candles: the solemnity of the feast is measured by the abundance of the sign.

Thus, from the signum struck in a 6th-century cloister to the great bourdon of a cathedral, the bell never ceased to be what it was from the origin: not an instrument, but a voice. A voice blessed as one consecrates a holy thing, named as one names a child, which, from atop the belfry, repeats each day to the world the single call: "Come, the Lord awaits you."

• The Symbolism of Candles — the light of Christ borne on the altar, the other great sensible sign of the liturgy.
• The Symbolism of Incense — the fragrance and rising prayer, the incense also placed beneath the bell being blessed.
• The Symbolism of the Altar — the table announced by the Sanctus bell at the moment of the elevation.
• The Symbolism of the Tabernacle — the Real Presence toward which the bell calls the faithful.
• The Architecture of a Cathedral — the bell tower and belfry, the place of bronze in sacred space.
• Why Are Churches Oriented? — the orientation of the prayer to which the bell summons.