Contemplate, what you will, approve,/ So you will let me love:

The Relationship Between Apophatic Theology and the Neoplatonic Body and Soul in
John Donnes Erotic Verse
Liana Willis
ENGL 4013: 001 John Donne
Dr. David Anderson
May 09, 2014
The declaration of the unity of the lovers souls in Donnes erotic verse has
received plenty of attention by critics interested in understanding Donnes particular
use of Neoplatonism in his poetry. In general, the Neoplatonic idea of unity with the
One is indicative of stability, hence eternality, and thus ultimately exists as the
denition of achieved perfection while on earth. However, while John Donne in his
younger years is interested in defending this ability to experience such unity, most early
moderns would perceive unication as an experience reserved for the union deferred
upon the individual when entering heaven--upon ones death into new life. That is to
say, generally, the temporal and eternal are juxtaposed in early modern England,
especially within a religious context, as so many of John Donnes sermons and
devotions written later in his life persistently communicate. In his erotic verse,
however, Donne seeks to show instead how an eternal moment can be rendered
through a specic temporal, carnal experience with a particular human being who, as a
physical being, is tied to physical reality. Nevertheless, however, he maintains
throughout all his erotic verse that physical being makes possible a spiritual connection
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which can even rival divinitys.
1
Thus, whereas in traditional strands of Neoplatonic
thought, the separation between the physical and carnal versus the heavenly and
spiritual is markedly different--especially those deriving from the Church Fathers or
even the original Greek philosophers-- John Donne, as a metaphysical poet, seeks to
instead portray their interrelation. Indeed, this emphasis on Donne as poet is crucial,
for if a poet like Donne who focuses on real-life occurrences can be dened as one who
is devoted to describing experience as it happens and thus as it is felt, this necessarily
means any use of philosophical or theological thought will possess an entirely different
use, potency, and meaning than its permutations within logic or reason. Yet the
impression left upon readers of the entirety of John Donnes poetry do not feel a logical
consistency in his distinctions or denitions, that is to say, Donne vacillates frequently
between dogged assumptions and distressing uncertainty of his bodily Neoplatonic
truths. However, what constitutes a false conclusion in Neoplatonic philosophy
perhaps simply constitutes the reality of human experience as a poet in the heydays of
his youth comes to grips with it. Indeed, the Donne who writes his erotic poetry could
perhaps be said to be necessarily contradictory because he is devoted to exploring the
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1
In speaking of the irreverence of Donnes erotic verse, R.V. Young cautions us by offering pertinent
biographical information which may explain Donnes intense idealization of his beloved, generally
thought in most cases to be Anne More: It behooves us to recall, again, that in the course of writing these
poems Donne was moving away from the faith of his youth. Most especially, he was relinquishing the
Real Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Sacrament of the Altar-- the ultimate manifestation
of Gods truth in the Catholic liturgy. If the poets reckless marriage to Anne More was the decisive event
in his spiritual journey, then he can be said to have surrendered the Body of Christ for the body of a
woman, the esh and blood present on the altar for the divine presence of the woman in the bed. What
Donne proposes in his most idealized love lyrics, writes Anthony Low, is a union between lovers that is
essentially communal, sacred, and religious in a certain sense, but neither Christian nor social (269).
ineffable depths of human experience and thus, as R.V. Young puts it, describes the
tension at the center of human life [which] nds its analogue in the tension that is
central to poetry, i.e. irony, and which I will argue is, in essence, a validation of the
knowledge acquired through experience--a kind of carnal experiential knowledge
(252).
Yet what is important to note about experiential knowledge is that it is not
achieved via logic or reason, but by an acceptance of experiences and their ability to
evoke some sort of truth which dees rational explanation. In discussing irony, Young
asserts that Donnes poetry refers as well to a particular vision of reality that is marked
by an acute awareness of the fallibility of human knowledge, the uncertainty of human
enterprise, [and] the contingency of human existence itself which are all
characteristics--fallibility, uncertainty, and contingency--that defy any sort of
assured logical categorization or denition and are dened instead by relinquishing the
need for rigorous denition (252). Although the belief that life is full of irony has
become an adage worth taking seriously when analyzing poetry qua poetry, the term
experiential knowledge may be more helpful when trying to understand John
Donnes erotic verse. Indeed, whereas Young focuses on Donnes use of irony in his
rhetorical form, the thematic content underlying this form seem to borrow from
negative theology (via negativa) or Christian mysticism, which ultimately expresses the
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idea that we cannot know what God--or, in this case, love--denitively is, only what it
denitively is not.
Moreover, traditional interpretations of Donnes poetry center around
Neoplatonic conceptions of body and soul and thus inevitably tend, perhaps simply for
the sake of clarity, to disregard negative theology; Similarly, critics engaging with the
use of negative theology fail to fully articulate its specic relationship to other aspects of
Neoplatonic thought in Donnes erotic verse. However, as I will argue, notions of
ineffability--which the via negativa foregrounds as an issue in contemplation of the
divine-- is central to the Neoplatonic assertions Donne makes about the unity between
him and his lover. Thus, an analysis which acknowledges the combined inuence of
these two doctrines helps aid us in our understanding of the particular value
Neoplatonism and mysticism has for Donne both in describing and defending his carnal
experiences. Thus, my analysis will explain Donnes erotic verse--in particular The
Extasie with references to other poems along the way-- by considering negative
theology, specically in relation to the uncertainties of temporal, embodied existence, as
well as in relation to Donnes use of Neoplatonism in his descriptions of the
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interrelationship between body and soul.
2
Moreover, I will endeavor to relate the two
traditions by discussing a seminal source of Neoplatonic thought, Plotinuss Enneads, a
source that is generally disregarded in discussions of Neoplatonism in Donnes erotic
verse given the tendency to reference Christian theologians whom are arguably, in early
modern England, more historically relevant purveyors of Neoplatonic thought.
In regard to the role Neoplatonism plays in Donnes erotic verse, it is helpful to
rst consider the historical trajectory of Neoplatonism in poetry as well as the history of
critical interpretation surrounding Donnes poetry. As Frank Doggett importantly
points out in Donnes Platonism, a predominant strain in English poetry of the late
Elizabethan age was a modied form of Platonism that came to England by way of
Italy resulting in the popularized fashion at Court to dress their aims, moral or
otherwise, in the phrases of the Platonists (274-75). According to Doggett, the most
popular Neoplatonic works deriving from Italy were the works by Ficino and
Castiglione, especially Castigliones The Book of the Courtier which Doggett claims would
have been the best known of the two (275). Furthermore, Doggett insists that for
Donne, such a student of the Church Fathers as he was, a certain inltration of
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2
Young also provides an interesting suggestion regarding another component of the theological
implications embedded within Donnes erotic poetry, namely the juxtaposition between Eros and Agape.
He relies heavily on Monsignor Martin C. DArcys interpretation of Donnes love poetry [which]
depends upon a vision of human love as an experience fraught with tension, a struggle with the central
issue being a tension between Eros and Agape--in the simplest terms, possessive and self-sacricing love,
desire and charity (252). Moreover, the great value of D'Arcy's work lies in his insistence that simply to
favor agape over eros will not sufce: perfect agape is possible only for God whose fund of benevolence
is innite and inexhaustible. A man or a woman cannot give absolutely because we are nite creatures.
A measure of self-assertive egotism, of possessive eros, is (literally) essential for us in order to retain an
identity to be sacriced or surrendered (252).
Platonism was inevitable. He could not fail to absorb it from reading of Augustine
alone, even if Plotinus were unknown to him (275). This leads him to ultimately
conclude that the origins of Donnes particular brand of Neoplatonic philosophy must
derive from the Schoolmen and not from Plotinus, given the lack of aesthetic
foundation that a study of the Enniads [sic] would have given him (275). However,
Catherine Gimelli-Martin, referencing letters written to Donnes good friend Henry
Goodyer, postulates that among the literature Donne read there must have included
among these Church Fathers the high-minded erotology inspired by Ficinos
Commentary on Platos Symposium, the fountainhead not only for the Neo-Platonists
spiritualization of an originally homoerotic tradition, but also for that traditions later
conversion to heterosexual ideals of love, a phenomenon clearly relevant to Donne in
his poetry (126).
3
There is no reason we cannot surmise that Donne would have been familiar with
both schools of thought, but I nd Martins argument more convincing as she goes on to
explain the inuence Plotinus had on Ficino, thus explaining the explanatory power the
Enneads has for interpreting Donnes erotic verse:
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3
The signicance of this turning from an aggrandizement of homosexual relations into the realm of
heterosexual love should not be understated: The difference is that Donnes poem now makes this
dialectic a heterosexual symposium in which masculine and feminine elements gradually merge into a
higher dialogue of one (line 74) (134). The fact that Donne describes his lover in such Neoplatonic
terms, indeed, for some, even to the point of idolatry (as Donne himself, more or less, seemed to view this
period of his life in his later years) is very signicant, not only in its suggestive blasphemy, but also
because it is a distinct departure from the normal use of Neoplatonism in relation to love and thus may
indicate something about the shifting gender politics occurring within the period.
Like Picos, Donnes central point is that since love provides the one true
path from the nite to the innite, the natural/divine course of the will or
appetite (voluntas) is to expand into voluptas, or pleasure. This doctrine in
turn follows directly from Ficinos simultaneous appropriation and
inversion of Plotinus, the locus classicus of both ascetic Neo-Platonism
and negative theology. Yet as Wind shows, Ficino ironically bases his
belief that ecstatic union could be attained not only after the present life
but also while we are living.... In fact, the frequent allusions to the
passions of lovers, by which Plotinus paraphrased the mystical ecstasy,
encouraged Ficino in his belief that voluptas should be reclassied as a
noble passion... [in] agreement... with the Christian creed, [into which] he
tried to infuse... a kind of neopagan joy, for which the passio amatoria
served as a model. (131)
Indeed, Plotinus himself does describe the mystical ecstasy as ultimately being
outside of daily human affairs and available only to the philosopher in search of divine
truth. However, Martins focus on Ficinos renovation of Plotinian thought positions
Ficino as a more reputable source for Donnes Neoplatonism than Plotinus, an
assumption that, while justiable, stunts the growth of critical interpretation regarding
Neoplatonism and Donnes poetry by insisting that we need go no further than Ficino
or, in Doggetts case, the Church Fathers. Moreover, her statement by way of Winds
claim that Ficino allows for an ecstatic union within physical experience as opposed to
Plotinus is incorrect. While Plotinus does indeed paraphrase the ecstatic union by
using lovers as a metaphor to describe mystical union with the One in The Enneads, he
does not altogether refute the ability to come to a mystical understanding in ones
present life. Indeed, the entirety of the Enneads is devoted to describing and asserting
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the possibility of unifying with the One through philosophical contemplation while on
earth.
Moreover, Plotinuss Enneads also does not see the physical as inherently bad;
Actually, it is perceived as good since it is considered to be in direct correlation with the
realm of the Nous where it originated. Rather, the proper place of the physical is
subsidiary to that of the heavenly, and should serve only as a means toward the
virtuous end which is achieving unity and understanding with The One (Nous). While
Plotinus maintains, like many of the Christian theologians indebted to him, that
nevertheless earthly interests are distractions from the truly virtuous goal of
philosophical speculation, Donne instead shows that the experience of unication with
The One--here, the lover--is achievable only through physical means. Thus, whereas
most early modern poets emphasized that spiritual love was unaffected by time or
space, as the lover carried the idea of his beloved in his soul particularly through a
mingling of souls, of minds, of essences in an effort to oppose the idea of physical
passion in love, Donne rather seems to elevate carnality to the realm of spiritual
perfection (Doggett 277; emphasis mine).
4
The intention is not to obscure the reality of
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4
Theresa DiPasquales article From Here to Aeviternity: Donnes Atemporal Clocks also provides an
interesting analysis in terms of the intermediate state of being that the scholastics dubbed aeviternity,
the atemporal state of angels and disembodied souls (226). Pasquale believes that Donne juggles time,
trying to redress the imbalance between the shortness of the present and the length of eternity (227) and
that only the meeting of the eternal and the temporal in a dynamic aeviternity satises Donnes
durational needs. He looks to afrm the angel-like, aeviternal existence of the redeemed human body/
soul not as strictly atemporal but as an experience of time transgured (232). In regard to my analysis, it
is interesting to note how DiPasquales focus on Donnes quest to satisfy durational needs by nding
an eternal moment within temporality (and thus elevate the small pleasures of embodied existence)
dovetails with my own emphasis on Donnes desire to justify the satisfaction of his bodily needs.
his baser instincts by using Neoplatonic virtues as a veil, but rather to infuse his
description of this particular moment of temporal and carnal existence with aspects of
the divine in accordance with his experience--i.e. his experiential knowledge--which
deems it as undoubtedly divine on the sole basis of the carnal experience itself.
The Extasie clearly demonstrates Donnes motivation to elevate the status of
carnal experience particularly through Neoplatonic imagery.
5
He describes the speaker
and beloveds souls leaving behind their corporeality like sepulchrall statues (ll. 18) in
order to advance their state (ll. 15), and as their souls negotiate (ll. 17) outside the
body, the speaker challenges those who may spectate upon his union with his beloved:
If any, so by love rend,
That he soules language understood,
And by good love were growen all minde,
Within convenient distance stood,
He (though he knowes not which soul spake,
Because both meant, both spake the same)
Might thence a new concoction take,
And part farre purer then he came.
This Extasie doth unperplex
(We said) and tell us what we love,
Wee see by this, it was not sexe
Wee see, we saw not what did move:
But as all severall soules containe
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5
Gimelli-Martin offers a brief and helpful explanation of the history of critical scholarship surrounding
Neoplatonism in The Extasie worth noting in its awareness of the tendency to see Donne as insincere
in his erotic verse as a result of such scholarship: [O]nly a generation ago, literary critics regularly
followed Herbert J.C. Grierson and Helen Gardner in regarding the major love lyrics as sincere if also
riddling defenses of incarnational Neo-Platonism. This view rst faded under the inuence of Pierre
Legouis, whose rereading of The Extasie as a seduction poem proved broadly inuential among second-
generation New Critics, for whom the ironic mode was fast becoming the insincere mode later canonized
in Stephen Greenblatts Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Yet one of the standard objections to this new
orthodoxy--that it turns all forms of inwardness, including religious meditation, into mere social
constructions--is especially applicable to Donnes erotic meditations. (123)
Mixture of things, they know not what,
Love, these mixt soules, doth mixe againe,
And makes both one, each this and that. (ll. 21-37)
The two lovers have thus become one through sex which the speaker claims, in keeping
with the via negativa, was not sexe, but something else--something which only those
who speak soules language can understand. For now the speaker indicates that it is
knowledge which is entirely of the minde and not of the physical, elevating the
Extasie to a higher realm of experience by justifying its spiritual capacities. Moreover,
it is an experience that dees rational explanation, for they know not what yet assert
nevertheless it is a love rend. As Doggett explains, Ecstasy was the state attained
in the sanctuary when the soul escaped from the body and won a vision of the Ultimate;
it was the desire of the soul to merge with God, a desire that goes back to the Greek
philosophers like Plotinus who emphasized the souls ultimate desire to reunite with
The One (284). As Plotinus describes of the philosophers vision of the Ultimate in The
Enneads, ...she has seen that Presence suddenly manifesting within her, for there is
nothing between, nor are they any longer two, but one; for so long as the Presence
holds, all distinction fades; it is as lover and beloved here, in a copy of that union, long
to blend their being (203). But whereas Plotinus emphasizes that the soul has now no
further awareness of the body, and thus is disengag[ed] from the physical in order to
hold [oneself] above all passions and affection, Donne does not view the body as an
inhibition, but rather as the inevitable mechanism by which the lovers can achieve a
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divine unity between themselves (203).
6
The difference for Donne is that the souls
attention and sexual appetite, which Plotinus sees as ideally opposed to one another,
are actually completely, inextricably and necessarily intertwined (203). Thus, whereas
Plotinus believes that the true man knows that the things of this world are of a lower
order and do not constitute his happiness, Donne seems to elevate the ontological
status of the physical world by emphasizing its utility in achieving a moment of
perfection--nearly literally a heaven on earth (Plotinus 33-34). Indeed, the speaker in
The Extasie does become the man Plotinus describes as adept for understanding
that the means of happiness, the way to good, are within, for nothing is good that lies
outside him and therefore seeks nothing else (33-34; emphasis mine). The difference
for young John Donne is that the internalized union he has achieved with his beloved is
inextricably tied to carnal experience and therefore is not a less worthy thing since his
own all-encompassing Good is, at least in this moment, his lover (33-34).
7

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6
Gimelli-Martin also sees Donne emanating a fascination with Thomistic paradoxes (e.g. Thomas
Aquinass insistence that the natural light is both stronger and darker, while supernatural light is smaller,
more remote, and yet more powerful.) as well as sentiments in alignment with Nicholas of Cusas Docta
Ignorantia (Learned Ignorance): Cusa enables these explorations by locating microcosmic mans
perfection in his middle capacity to understand universal or macrocosmic being through dialectical
human reason (132) I disagree that this is applicable to Donne, at least in relation to his erotic verse, for
he seems to suggest that the middle capacity to understand is not through reason, but directly
through immediate experience. This would put him more in line with Plotinus in this regard and,
moreover, seems to confess an aspect of mysticism and apophatic theology instead which, as I endeavor
to show here, is truer to the text (132).
7
Although I am not as concerned with The Undertaking here, it is interesting to note that when Donne
says he has done a braver thing/ Then all the Worthies did, it is an allusion to ancient Greek society. It
is possible that Donne is fully conscious of the tendency to see heterosexual love as less worthy and of a
lower order, and seeks to adamantly assert otherwise, maybe even specically within a Neoplatonic
context in order to invert the claims that Plotinus and other like-minded Neoplatonic philosophers make
about the worth of heterosexual love.
Thus, whereas Plotinus sees philosophical contemplation as the true path toward
the Good, Donne clearly experiences intellection through physical action, through
actualizing experiences made possible through embodiment itself, i.e. through the
literal embodiment of ones love. Plotinus says in the chapter entitled Time and
Happiness that To place happiness in actions is to put it in things that are outside
virtue and outside the Soul; for the Souls expression is not in action but in wisdom, in a
contemplative operation within itself; and this, this alone, is happiness (41). However,
in his erotic verse, Donnes actions are contemplative and merge the intellectual with
the physical, for the sensuous in [Donne] serves the intellect: so much so that for
Donne to think is almost a sensuous act (Doggett 74). He sees the physical experience
which allows unication to come into fruition as completely internal just as Plotinus
insists, however it is clear the wisdom the erotic verses espouse come from direct
ecstatic experience which in turn call for a poets reection and contemplation, not vice
versa. Here, the revelation is that in the highest spiritual life, as in the fullest and most
perfect love, body and soul are complimentary, are merged in each other,(Doggett 291)
or, as the speaker says in the poem, that So must pure lovers, soules descend/
Taffections, and to faculties/ Which sense may reach and apprehend/ Else a great
Prince in prison lies (ll. 66-69). It is a revelation achieved through direct, carnal
experience; It is, in essence, experiential knowledge.
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But it is important to also note Donnes confession in The Extasie that what
they see, i.e. this Neoplatonic vision, is not something they can explain (we know
not what) and yet nevertheless believe in, pointing to the distinctly apophatic qualities
of the experience, especially as it is understood via Neoplatonism. Moreover, the
speaker in the last lines of the poem imagines voyeuristic spectators who will thus learn
from this booke, yet given its tendency to defy explanation, Donne thus faces the
challenge that generations of Christian theologians and Greek philosophers have
grappled with in explaining such a profound mystery nevertheless believed to be an
undeniable truth. The method of apophatic theology is the resulting mode by which
explanations are sought, for even if we do not grasp It by knowledge, that does not
mean that we do not seize It at all (Plotinus 162). Once again, an excerpt from The
Enneads usefully demonstrates this epistemological dilemma:
The Good is beyond beautiful, beyond the Highest, holding kingly state in
that Intellectual Cosmos of which the Principle is wholly unlike what is
known as intelligence in us. Our intelligence works by reasonings,
examines links of demonstration, and comes to know the world of Being
also by the steps of logical process... But the divine Mind is not of such a
kind. It possesses all, It is all. It has all by other means than having, for
what It possesses is still Itself. (54)
Intelligence, which is bolstered by links of demonstration, categorization and, in a
word, reason, ultimately fails when one tries to determine just what the Good
denitively is. However, just because it cannot be known by the normal avenues of
human thought, it does not mean, as Plotinus says above, that we cannot know it at all.
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Jennifer Nichols discusses Dionysian negative theology, particularly in relation to A
Nocturnall Upon St. Lucies Day, and in her discussion offers a brief explanation of
Dionysian negative theology: She says that because Gods utter transcendence means
that he cannot be spoken of at all, this means that the best language can do is to
articulate paradoxes, whose logical possibilities point to that which cannot be (353).
Thus when union is achieved with The Good, the One, or the lover, it is described in
negative terms (darkness, absence, death, nothingness), but this negativity is the ecstatic
union of the soul with her lover (353).
8
In The Extasie the speaker describes his
unication with the beloved as something he know[s] not what (ll. 34) yet maintains
all the same that This Extasie doth unperplex (ll. 29).
Similarly, in Aire and Angells, he describes the beloved as a glorious
nothing, inevitably concluding, in keeping with the apophatic tradition, that she is a
nothing which, like Plotinuss One or God Himself, cannot be worshipped for its
physicality because her qualities go beyond the eshly and all logical categorization
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8
Although Nichols article is helpful in order to gain a preliminary understanding of negative theology in
relation to Donne in particular, it is important to note that her focus is on The Nocturnall. This focus
predisposes her to make arguments about the use of negative theology in Donnes poetry as a whole
which are, in actuality, only relevant to poems similar to A Nocturnall wherein an negative emotional
register matches the apophatic rhetoric. For example, when she says The mystical way of knowing by
unknowing, then, is the way of emptying oneself of bodily and intellectual appetites. As Gregory of
Nyssa writes, the way to union with God is the way of detachment (apatheia): The soul must transform
passion into passionlessness so that when every corporeal affection has been quenched, our mind may
seethe with passion for the spirit alone and be warmed by that re which the Lord came to cast upon the
earth. (361) Clearly passionlessness is not what Donne is arguing in The Extasie and other like-
minded poems. Additionally, I am skeptical of attaching an essentially Stoic position (apatheia) to Donne--
it seems to me to be counterintuitive, especially given the rest of his corpus wherein he consistently
advises against having, for example, stony hearts.
completely. When the speaker thus says that he has loves pinnace overfraught,
whereas one interpretation of the line might say that Donne means that upon a closer
look the beloved does not live up to the accolades he has bestowed upon her, a reading
that makes more sense via the apophatic lens is that he has overfraught her because
he has focused on those limmes of esh and the fact that she has assum[ed] [a]
body. The speaker is aware that he has justied his lustful commentary on her
appearance and allowed himself to xe his gaze on her body due to the fact that her
soul xe it self in [her] lip, eye, and brow (ll. 12). However, as a glorious nothing,
all powerful and encompassing, yet entirely ineffable because she is All, she thus
cannot be properly worshipped for her body. Realizing that his previous idolization of
her physical form is not what she deserves as this All, the speakers ultimate
conclusion is that Just such disparitie/ As is twixt Aire and Angells puritie/ Twixt
womens love, and mens will ever be (ll. 26-8). Thus, as Martin notes in her analysis of
A Nocturnall,the focus on nothingness directly echoes the negative language of the
Dionysian tradition, where nothingness denotes not nonbeing but transcendence beyond
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the categories of being and nonbeing (356; emphasis mine).
9
Furthermore, this is also
an instance paralleled explicitly in The Extasie in which the soul literally transcends
the body, achieves unication, and yet nevertheless returns having proven the heavenly
riches offered through carnal experience.
10
The fact that in The Extasie the souls return to their bodies shows that while
Donne may demote the bodily in Aire and Angells, he does not do so everywhere. In
most of his erotic verse wherein he elevates the role of the bodily, it is for the purpose of
validating the worth of carnal experience by investing them with Neoplatonic values,
i.e. not simply navel-gazing at the physical form like the speaker in the rst few lines of
Aire and Angells, but rather completely enjoying bodily form as a means toward
spiritual unication--the epitome of Neoplatonic perfection. Thus, when Nichols
inevitably concludes that the lovers in the Nocturnall abandon all hints of anything
carnal, it is important to note that she does not go on to discuss Donnes emphasis on
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9
Nichols also offers an excerpt from Gregory of Nyssa, showing how the Bible itself is steeped in
apophatic language: Mosess ascent to Mount Sinai as a biblical example of this mystical knowing by
unknowing, emphasizing that union with God is not only beyond sense but also beyond all intelligence.
The souls union with God is also described as an absence. In his commentary on the Song of Songs,
Gregory of Nyssa writes that having seemingly attained the object of her desire, the soul actually
experiences a lack of the divine presence:
The bride is perplexed and distressed because she does not have the object of her desire, and
she makes known her souls anxiety by describing how she found the object of her search. (358)
It may also be the case that Donne himself has anxiety, as all lovers do, about whether or not he has fully
attained the object of his own search. This would account along theological lines what R.V. Young points
out in his article as the innate human inconsistency engendering Donnes erotic poems generally.
10
Doggett also notes how poets in early modern England began to move way from the more traditional,
Petrarchan emphasis on physical beauty by incorporating Neoplatonic ideals into their poetry. Donne
seems to fall into this category with this poem in particular. In general, however, Doggett asserts that
even if [Donne] did consider beauty to be color and proportion, as a poet he did not seek to praise it, or
express it reecting his Neoplatonic point of view since Neo-Platonists believed that beauty was purely
spiritual rather than a perfection due to balance of physical aesthetic qualities (282).
the corporeal. When she asserts that Donne is expressing a radical dualism of the
apophatic tradition, if considered in relation to the rest of Donnes erotic verse,
especially The Extasie, there seems to be room for a modication of our
understanding of Donnes use of negative theology. In understanding the classical
Neoplatonic elements of Donnes poetry alongside and in direct relation to the instances
of apophatic theology, we begin to see that Donne instead insists on the notion of
experience as transformative in its illuminations rather than a sort of distinctly rigorous
apophatic reasoning which undergoes a logical process of unknowing in the
Dionysian negative tradition (Nichols 353). One cannot know what God is, only what
He is not; Similarly, we cannot say what love is, only what is not, and only, as Donne
argues, on the basis of experience (Callaghan 63; emphasis mine).
Moreover, this experiential knowledge is conveyed through a traditional
Neoplatonic expression of the unity between the seer and seen--a vision acquired
through absorbed contemplation according to Plotinus:
In this state of absorbed contemplation there is no longer question of
holding an object in view; the vision is continuous so that seeing and seen
are one; object and act of vision have become identical; of all that until
then lled the eye no memory remains. The rst seeing is of Intellect
knowing, the second that of Intellect in love; stripped of its wisdom in the
intoxication of the nectar, it comes to love; by this excess it is made
simplex and happy. (204; emphasis mine)
Although Plotinus here emphasizes contemplation, it is interesting to see that he
differentiates between two possible stages of the Intellects act of vision: There is
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ordinary knowing in which the seer and seen are still separate, and then there is the
seeing which is the Intellect in love. Thus, for Plotinus, the way one comes to
understand the One, after being absorbed in contemplation, is to experience what he
specically calls the Intellect in love. With Donne, however, the relationship between
love and the Intellect seems to be converse, or at least conated into the carnal
experience altogether. For example, in The Extasie he seems to once again borrow
from Neoplatonic discourse in his description of the lovers eyes:
Our hands were rmely cimented
With a fast balme, which thence did spring
Our eye-beames twisted, and did thred
Our eyes, upon one double string,
So toentergraft our hands, as yet
Was all the meanes to make us one
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation. (ll. 5-12)
Thus, the speaker describes a unication which is accomplished through action. Their
eyes are intertwined to the point of a complete unity where we neither see nor
distinguish nor are there two. The man is changed, no longer himself nor self-
belonging; he is merged with the Supreme, sunken into It, one with It and hence the
reason why there is still a lingering of mysticism, of an apophatic conundrum. The
speaker still insists they know not what their love qualitatively is; This is why the
vision bafes telling; for how could a man bring back tidings of the Supreme as
detached when he has seen It as one with himself? (Plotinus 222). However, Donne
differs ultimately from Plotinus in that the physical act is in itself illuminating, not the
Willis 19
other way around. Contemplation is not what is emphasized, the experience itself is.
Whereas Plotinus emphasizes that to place happiness in actions is to put it in things
that are outside virtue and outside the Soul; for the Souls expression is not in action but
in wisdom, in a contemplative operation within itself, Donne emphasizes a physical
state which is itself, as experienced through action, a sensation that guarantees the same
revelations as Plotinuss sedentary contemplation (41). Thus Donnes actions are
contemplative and merge the intellectual with the physical. He sees the physical
experience which brings unity as completely interiorized, just like Plotinus, however it
is clear the wisdom the erotic verses espouse come rst and foremost from direct
experience: In The Extasie, the eye-beams that actively twist and thread the lovers
eyes upon one double string (line 8) thus allude to this protodivine synthesis of
passive and active vision, which ultimately licenses their frankly carnal propagation as
a form of spiritual knowledge (Gimelli-Martin 140). As the speaker reassures his
beloved in A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, they are, after all, interassured of
the minde (ll. 19) or, as he says in The Extasie, interinanimat[ed] (ll. 42). The
footnote to the Everymans Library edition conveniently explains the word to mean
intimates anima (vital principle, hence soul) as much as animal, underscoring the
fact that the interrelationship between body and soul is so important to Donne that he
went so far as to even invent a word for it (101).
Willis 20
Rather than let the point of view of the late Dr. Donne determine our reading of
the erotic verse and thus immediately read it as somehow immoral in Donnes eyes and
thus perhaps disingenuous, we should instead see the fact that his libertine days
weighed so much on his conscience as perhaps evidence of how deeply he felt the truth
embedded within the erotic experiences he describes in his poems. The spiritual would
indeed come to matter more than the physical for Donne, especially after the death of
Anne More in 1617. In the erotic verse of his younger days, however, the body is just as
important as the spirit, because it is a mechanism by which the spiritual union,
epitomized by the unication of lovers both sexually and intellectually, is able to be
experienced. Donne suggests that, in a physical world, there is a means toward
experiencing unity--through love, indeed, even carnal love-- and thus the spiritual and
the carnal are inextricably intertwined, making the release of the spirit through the
physical a crucial endeavor:
But O alas, so long, so farre
Our bodies why doe wee forbeare?
They are ours, though not wee, Wee are
The intelligences, they the spheares.
We owe them thankes, because they thus,
Did us, to us, at rst convay,
Yeelded their senses force to us,
Nor are drosse to us, but allay.
[...]
So must pure lovers, soules descend
Taffections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great Prince in prison lies.
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Toour bodies turne wee then, that so
Weake men on love reveald may looke;
Loves mysteries in soules doe grow,
But yet the body is his booke.
And if some lover, such as wee,
Have heard this dialogue of one,
Let him still marke us, he shall see
Small change, when weare to bodies gone. (Extasie; ll. 49-77)
The body and soul dichotomy is the subtle knot which makes us man, (ll. 65) and
thus for Donne both body and soul have their functions and who denies either denies
all, because both are necessary for the whole man (Doggett 290). Moreover, Donne
also foresees an educational opportunity for those who have read his poem, this
dialogue of one. Indeed, he even predicates the lovers returns to their bodies for the
sake of those who may learn for it, so [that] weake men on love reveald may look.
Certainly, as many critics argue, there is an aspect of playfulness to these lines--
the speaker cleverly justies a return to the body for the edication of others, since of
course unied lovers who have reached a union of their souls would theoretically have
no need to return to their bodies. Yet I would postulate that above all the sentiment is
sincere, going beyond a merely coquettish request for more sexual intercourse for the
purposes of others edication. Elsewhere in his erotic verse, Donne seems to express
the pressing need for the lovers to show their love so as to spiritually inculcate the
layetie [to their] love (A Valediction Forbidding Mourning; ll. 8) who would benet
from learning from their souls combined purity and effortless unity. For example, in
The Canonization, the speaker encourages those who have been criticizing him and
Willis 22
his lover to thus invoke [them] (ll. 36), believing that they have gone from a state in
which love was peace to one that now is rage (ll. 38). Throughout the entirety of
the poem the speaker juxtaposes his love which injures (ll. 10) no one to those who
are tragically unlike them, such as the soldiers [who] nde warres(ll. 16) or Lawyers
[who] nde out still/ Litigious men (ll. 16-17). This leads him to his exclamation at the
end of the poem: that rather than criticize them, Countries, Townes, Courts: [should]
Beg from above/ A patterne of [their] love (ll. 42-3). As Doggett notes in his discussion
of The Extasie, gratitude is owed the esh, because it, through its powers of
movement and sense, has brought them together (287). Moreover, it is also a means by
which others can learn and be brought together by the same: Thus let lover and
beloved turn to their bodies so that weak men may see love revealed. The mysteries of
love grow in souls, but must be read in the body and thus become intelligible to others
too (Doggett 287).
But such intelligibility can of course be understood not just by the bawdy
viewing of the physical act itself, but by reading it sincerely, experiencing it through the
translation it undergoes as Donne transcribes it into poetry; As he says in The
Canonization, And if unt for tombes and hearse,/ Our legend bee, it will be t for
verse (ll. 28-9), and in its immortalization in verse, it will be able to reach those who
most need to be affected by it. As Plotinus says, it is a divine vision, and it is no surprise
that we could perhaps even characterize Donnes erotic verse as visionary, although the
Willis 23
vision is, as it should be for one so engaged with Neoplatonic beliefs, concentrated
inward. In a way it could even be loosely described as utopian, in so far as Donnes
erotic verse renders a highly personal utopia in opposition to the exterior world by
imagining an interior, intimate spiritual world within. As Richard Helgerson notes in
his discussion of utopian thought in the works of Rabelais and Thomas More in
Inventing Noplace, or the Power of Negative Thinking, the imagining of a second
world that underlies so much of the poetry, drama, and ction of the late sixteenth
century has at its origin a negative response to the rst world of our ordinary
experience (104). He provides a history of this negative response in relation to
apophatic theology, marking the rising popularity of utopian thought indebted partially
to the apophatic tradition:
Through the Middle Ages, the negative other, the ~x, was an unworldly
and nonhuman divinity--an other that served to dene by opposition the
general human condition rather than the condition of some particular
social order. But early in the sixteenth century, in the minds and in the
writings of at least a few men, the axis of negative thought rotated from
the vertical to the horizontal, from theology to social criticism. No longer
was perfection sought exclusively outside the world. Instead men began
to consider the possibility of perfecting human society--or at least of
dening its ills in terms proper to a particular and contingent set of social
institutions and customs. In the wake of the voyages of discovery that
had opened vast new spaces on the physical plane, negative thinking of
this new horizontal sort opened equally vast space on the cultural plane.
By putting the sign of negation on the world they knew, men opened the
way to another world. (102)
While Helgerson here clearly refers to the burgeoning idea of utopia specically as a
way of providing critiques of socioeconomic concerns, we also see this same sentiment
Willis 24
from Donne in his erotic verse. He separates the outer world from the inner world he
shares with the beloved while also offering his own subtle invectives against the
Countries, Townes, [and] Courts. It is his own other world in which perfection has
been reached in clear opposition to a world that distracts him from the utopia he has
reached with his lover. Like in Erasmuss Praise of Folly, another work indebted to
Neoplatonic perceptions on body and soul, the notion of a union with the divine or the
beloved is expressed as something that the world will see as pure madness, mired as
they are in their own self-possessed ways.
11
As he says, [I]t far exceeds all pleasures of
the body, even if all mortal delights were rolled into one, so much does the spiritual
surpass the physical, the invisible the visible...So those who are granted a foretaste of
this-- and very few have the good fortune -- experience something like madness (132).
Like the varying personalities we see in the entire spectrum of Donnes erotic verse and
his entire life, One moment they are excited, the next depressed, they weep and laugh
and sigh by turns; in fact they truly are quite beside themselves...They cannot remember
what they have heard or seen or said or done, except in a mist, like a dream (as Donne
in fact describes in his elegy The Dreame specically), thus all they know is that they
Willis 25
11
In relation to Gimelli-Martins concern about critics tendencies to see Donne as insincere, what
Helgerson points out that in the works he is concerned with (More and Rabelais) seems to relate as well
to this question about discerning what is playful or insincere from something far more serious: in
the opinion of many readers, playfulness is the chief quality of Mores book and of Rabelais. According
to this view, both are merely jokes, witty humanist exercises in the paradoxical Lucianic mode, or
simply entertaining (117). This seems to me to be a statement that is applied also, more or less, to John
Donne, in so far as the erotic verses can sometimes seem simply entertaining too. Furthermore, as the
quotation from Erasmuss Praise of Folly (a satire, after all) shows, reasoning by negation is often
inherently playful, thus also explaining partially the playfulness of Donnes erotic verse although, as I
believe, they are intensely serious and sincere too.
were happiest when they were out of their senses in this way, and they lament their
return to reason, for all they want is to be mad for ever with this kind of madness. And
this only the merest taste of the happiness to come (132-134).
For the young John Donne, however, the difference is that he conceives of a
happiness within that one does not need to wait for; It is available to those here and
now, provided that they are willing to relinquish their logical axioms in order to
experience it. Moreover, as he elevates the carnal, heterosexual experience to a realm of
experience on par with the Neoplatonic doctrine of Ecstasy, it is dened in opposition
to the rest of the physical world around him. As the notion of an idealized unity with
another distinguishes itself from an unideal world, a world that cannot understand
unless it is willing, Donne thus insists we follow his lovers guide in order to take
them to a place beyond human understanding, to utopia, to Extasie-- the spiritual
revery within carnality which is nothing but the experience of an embodied soul in love.
Even if incomprehensible, it does not mean it is not fundamental, for Donnes erotic
poetry nonetheless asserts with an experiential, apophatic certainty the spiritual wealth
inherent within our incarnation which is, for Donne, a Neoplatonic necessity. Call us
what you will / We are made such by love, Donne ultimately says, for as he concludes
in his elegy The Dreame, it is a far better position to love even if one may know not
what it denitively is, for Alas, true joyes at best are dreame enough (ll. 22) and
even at rst lifes Taper is a snuffe (ll. 24). Yet even if out of discussion we call to
Willis 26
vision; to those desiring to see [and] point the path... the seeing must be the very act of
him who has made this choice, and thus must be willing to enter into an experiential
knowledge which is uncomfortable in its mysticism, yet ultimately is so fullling it
transcends human comprehension (Plotinus 216; emphasis mine). An experience of
Donnes All is inextricably tied to the body and thus to direct experience: To those
that do not see entire, the immediate impression is alone taken into account; but those
drunken with this wine, lled with the nectar, all their soul penetrated by this Beauty,
cannot remain mere gazers; they hold the vision within themselves (Plotinus 177) and
within their poetry too which by these hymnes, all shall approve/ Us Canonizd for
Love (ll. 34-5).
Willis 27
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DiPasquale, Theresa. From Here to Aeviternity: Donnes Atemporal Clocks. Modern
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Doggett, Frank A. Donnes Platonism. The Sewanee Review. John Hopkins UP. Vol.
42. No. 3. September 1934. Online.
Donne, John. The Complete English Poems of John Donne. Ed. C. A. Patrides. London:
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Helgerson, Richard. "Inventing Noplace, or the Power of Negative Thinking." The Power
of Forms in the English Renaissance. Ed. Stephen J. Greenblatt. Norman: Pilgrim,
1982. 101-21. Print.
Martin, Catherine Gimelli. The Erotology of Donnes Extasie and the Secret History of
Voluptuous Rationalism. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. Rice University
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Nichols, Jennifer L. Dionysian Negative Theology in Donnes A Nocturnall upon S.
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Porphyry's Life of Plotinus. Ed. Grace Hill Turnbull. Trans. Stephen Mackenna.
New York: Oxford UP, 1934. Print.
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Young, R.V. Love, Poetry, and John Donne in the Love Poetry of John Donne.
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