Any man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind, and therefore send not to know for whom the bells toll; it tolls for thee.

These were the words of John Donne (1572 – 1631), poet, MP, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral.

This resonant phrase came to mind when I heard on Monday morning of the death of Osama Bin Laden.

What should my reaction be, I pondered? Should I be relieved that such a terrible man was no more, or should I, like Donne, feel ‘diminished’ by his death?

My conclusion was – both.

Bin Laden was one of the most wicked people of the world’s post-war history.

He was responsible for the deaths of thousands.

He perverted one of the world’s great religions, and, in the ‘name’ of Islam, secured that there were more of the Muslim faith among his victims than from any religion.

His awful, tyrannical rantings fuelled Islamaphobia.

So I was and am relieved that he is dead; and the idea that he could have been taken alive was ever fanciful, given that he himself had made clear he would never countenance this.

But I feel diminished, too.

Diminished by the fact that we live in a world where this action – by the US Special Forces – was necessary; diminished by the notion that a fellow member of the human race, who by all accounts, enjoyed a materially prosperous and secure childhood, should have become so monstrous as an adult; diminished that the pattern of history and events, especially across the Middle East and south Asia, should have provided such fertile ground for his pernicious, and ultimately self-defeating ideology.

Donne wrote these lines as he recovered from a serious illness, and England was riven by religious conflict.

Ten years after his death, this conflict erupted into the English Civil War, estimated to have killed one in 10 men in this land.

Our religions are noble, essential.

The destruction wreaked in their name can be terrible, and that diminishes me too.