Donne's View of Ecstasy
John Donne's poems are renown for his description of mutual love as the fullness
of joy. He firmly believes that physical love and union brings us closer to divine love and
this concept can be found throughout his songs and sonnets. Donne does not believe that
Adam's original sin and fall from grace dooms the generations to follow to sin whenever
they express physical love. However, Donne did become a preacher in the Anglican
church and did follow the teachings of St Augustine, who condemned the body and
bodily pleasures as sinful because of their use as the vehicle of the original sin.
Therefore, there exists a great body of literature that strives to prove that Donne's
conversion to the Anglican church (and subsequent promotions to chaplain and later dean
of St. Paul's Church) represents a conversion of ideas from more pagan to more
Augustinian. This paper, by examining Donne's poems The Ecstasy, To His Mistress
Going to Bed and his various sermons will strive to prove that although Donne did
convert to a servant of the Church, he never compromised his beliefs about the value of
physical ecstasy and love as a way to reach God.
Donne's interest in the search for divine love and the body's role in that quest is
obvious in his poem, The Ecstasy where he describes two lovers' abandonment of their
physical bodies and their orgasmic experience in which they experience divine and pure
love. Their love in fact, evokes a third lover (or divine being) who is "gifted with the
complete self-knowledge." (Roberts. 1975. 243.) Donne suggests in this poem that even
as physical union can result in the creation of a third being through pregnancy, it also
creates a divine being who is pure and perfect love.
In the first 28 lines of the Ecstasy, Donne sets the scene and describes the poses of
the lovers. "Where, like a pillow on a bed, a pregnant bank swelled up, to rest the violet's
reclining head, sat we two..." The scene is obviously anticipatory of the lover's union and
the creation of a third soul with its reference to a "pregnant bank."
Donne then
describes how the souls separate from their bodies during the moment of abandonment
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and ecstasy. He the describes the creation of the third entity who is the epitome of an
ideal lover: capable of hearing the wordless communication of the separated souls. The
ideal lover that is created is a perfect form though which the lovers are able to
communicate with the divine. "The basic doctrine here, that heavenly influence works
not directly but through an intermediary, is used to explain the intermediary function of
the body in the union of souls..." (Novarr. 1980. 34) Donne is obvious making a case for
the need for the lover's bodies to unite in order for the divine union to be complete and in
order to release the divine being who provides lies the connection to divine love and
knowledge.
The creation of the divine lover is the culmination of two imperfect beings into
one perfect soul that can communicate to the divine directly without interpretation.
When the spiritual mind (which is heart of our heart and soul of our soul),
through the force of desire, retires within itself to contemplate a beloved
and desired object, it draws every part of the soul to itself, gathering into
one indivisible unit. It is two such 'recollected' or 're-concocted" souls,
'mixed again' by love or desire for union which love unites to make of two
one and of each one two...The union of lovers the union of their
intellectual souls, or spiritual souls. (Roberts. 1975. 253)
Not only is the creation of the ecstatic third necessary in order to reach God,
Donne can also be found lamenting those who never their full potential for growth and
understanding because they believe that physical union creates a gap between them and
God, where Donne will argue the opposite. This type of argument can be found in
Donne's description of the imprisoned prince.
So must pure lover's souls descend
T' affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great prince in heaven lies
Donne's reference is obviously a sexual one, but it also contains a reference to the soul's
confinement within the body that is only released during ecstasy. Not only are the
individual lover's souls release during ecstasy, but the combination of the two creates a
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third that can not be created without physical union. The soul confined in the body can
not reach God and fully experience God's love and knowledge.
If the soul does not thus animate the body in all its parts, it is imprisoned
in a carcass instead of reign in its kingdom. Donne is contrasting the
Platonic view of the soul imprisoned in the flesh with the Aristotelian
conception of the union of the soul and body in man. A prince is not
prince if he does not rule his kingdom and a kingdom without a prince is a
chaos. (Roberts. 1975.256)
Donne promotes the idea that an understanding of both body and soul is necessary
in order to truly understand the self and the divine. Knowledge of one without the other
is incomplete and does not lead to divine knowledge and understanding.
Donne believes that in order for a lover to understand him/herself and his/her soul,
he/she must experience divine love either through intellectual pursuits culminating in
divine ecstasy and through physical ecstatic union.
In Donne's view human sexual
relations are a necessary device to reach divine knowledge, and (as will be shown in his
sermons) he does not believe that they are sinful.
This theme reoccurs in almost all of his poetry and the idea of the creation of an
ideal lover can be found even in his obviously sexual poems. To His Mistress Going to
Bed is a great example. Within the poem, Donne basically describes his persuasion of his
mistress to join him in bed and the events leading up to their sexual union. For example:
"Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime tells me from you, that now 'tis your bed
time." Donne makes a case even here for the validity in sexual union as the union of
souls: " as souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be, to taste whole joys. " With
descriptions like the one in His Mistress Going to Bed, it is hard to image that Donne
would suddenly convert to being a servant of the church who condones anything sexual as
the path away from God, but there exists a large body of criticism that promotes that very
idea.
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With all of this evidence supporting Donne's enjoyment of bodily pleasures and
his dedication to the idea that sexual union leads to divine union, it is hard to imagine
Donne converting to become a Dean of an Anglican Church (St. Paul's Cathedral) and a
supporter of St. Augustine's theories about the original sin. A definition of St.
Augustine's definition of original sin is needed as a comparison to Donne's beliefs about
Adam and Eve's fall from grace.
St. Augustine believed that in Eden, Adam was perfect, the
archetype of humanity. Because he was tempted by Eve, he fell
and the reward of his sin was the curse of death, the suffering of
broken will and a decayed intellect. Adam's sons inherit his sin
through a mystical identity with the archetypal father and by the
passing of sin through human reproduction. Human reason (verses
human passion) is therefore distinctly and vigorously repudiated as
a sole means of salvation...(Grant. 1974. 9)
What many people seem to overlook is the difference between Donne's definition of
original sin and St. Augustine's. Donne never viewed the body as corrupt. He viewed
Eve's fall from grace as a defiance of God's will but also a necessary step in her growth
toward divine knowledge. This can be shown in the Ecstasy when Donne mentions the
necessity to join in physical union "else a prince in heaven lies". If Adam and Eve did not
eat the tree of knowledge, not only would they not grow intellectual or otherwise, but
Jesus Christ would not have visited the Earth to spread the word of God to his people.
Donne believes that her persuasion of Adam to eat the apple should not be placed in a
sexual framework at all, but in the framework of sharing knowledge in order to try to
discover divine intellect. Adam and Eve's fall from grace is one of disobedience and their
sin is one of imperfection (an imperfection which mankind always has to work to remedy
through an increase of divine knowledge.)
Donne firmly believes that the sin of Adam and Eve is connected to disobedience
of God rather than anything inherently sexual, and therefore he suggests that successive
generations do not "inherit" the sin of Adam and Eve because God would not create
anything that is inherently sinful. This theme appears in all of Donne's orations and
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writings and it spurns his belief that the original sin was not related to the sexual
relationship between Adam and Eve, but related to a simple disobedience of God's order.
There is even perhaps an inclining in his sermons that Donne believes that somehow
Adam and Eve's sins have been forgiven, because God does not create anything in his
likeness that is sinful and God himself is not sinful. In Donne's own words: "Let no man
antedate his Pardon, and say, His sins were forgiven in a Eternal Decree, and that no
many that hath his name in the booke of life, hath the addition, sinner, that is he were
there from the beginning, from the beginning he was no sinner. " (Roberts. 1975.108) I
would suggest that Donne's view of sin and the value of the body as a vehicle not toward
sin but toward divine knowledge is a radical one and I do not believe that he promoted
many of the traditional ideals of the Church or St. Augustine.
Donne does seem to promote some of St. Augustine's ideals such as the belief that
sin is as violation of the eternal laws and therefor sin signifies disorder. But, when one
looks further one uncovers Donne's unique deconstruction of that belief. Donne would
argue that since there is only harmony and order in God, disorder can not be ordained by
God-he would not create disorder because he only creates perfection. Therefore God is
not the author of sin. Or as Donne describes God's will for us: "Not good always so, as
that He hath no room for any evil in himself, but good so too, as that the Or as Donne
would say in his own words: "As God hath no room for any ill will towards any man, no
man's damnation, no man's sin, grows radically from this tree. When God had made all,
sayes Tertullian, he blessed all...God no more mean ill, that does ill; God could not more
make sin, then sin himself. " (Novarr. 1980. 83)
Donne has definitely made a strong case in support of physical ecstasy as a way to
reach divine knowledge. His beliefs obviously (once one looks at his sermons) did not
change when he entered into the Anglican Church. This discussion of Donne's belief and
devotion to the idea of physical union as a way to reach divine union does prove that his
conversion did not affect his beliefs in the validity of the body or the absence of sin.
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However, this discussion did create the atmosphere for various questions to arise that
warrant further research and discussion in another setting:
Donne's role and influence in the Church still remains undiscussed. In recognition
of the fact that Donne wrote and gave sermons during a time period where the majority of
the population was Puritan, why wasn't his poetry seen as radical? Why did he even join
the Church? And why did the Church not protest his seemingly radical views?
Considering his popularity as an orator, it is also interesting to speculate about why his
ideas about man's original sin were not taken seriously and adopted while the views of St.
Augustine's were. What if John Donne had joined the Roman Catholic Church rather
than the Anglican Church? This world would definitely be a different place if the
Catholic Church were now exposing the views of John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's
Cathedral rather that St. Augustine's. It's interesting to speculate how different today's
society would be if the Church's predominant mandate is that physical union among
lovers is divine and a necessary way to reach communion with God. The ideas ones
imagination creates around that concept are infinite.
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