The erotology of Donne's "Extasie" and the secret history of voluptuous rationalism

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Wntr, 2004 by Catherine Gimelli Martin

While neither these youthful exercises nor the erotology of the seduction poems is usually portrayed in such a serious light, their mores are completely consistent with the mature position of Donne's Holy Sonnet 18. "Show me deare Christ, thy Spouse" takes a similarly sober but highly unconventional stance in proposing that the church herself is a most true "bride" while also a most unvirginal spouse inconstantly embracing "most men" (lines 13-4).

Donne's sermons also contain milder, less obviously heterodox versions of this rejection of static spiritual purity. On at least one occasion, they even restate Pico's fundamentally Neo-Platonic view of human nature as a dynamic or "meteoric" union of body and soul. Since God's children unite "both heaven and earth," just "as our bodies glorified shall be capable of spiritual joy, so our souls demerged into those bodies are allowed to take earthly pleasure. Our soul is not sent hither, only to go back again: we have some errand to do here; nor is it sent into prison because it comes innocent, and he which sent it is just." (33) This passage essentially paraphrases Pico's exalted restatement of the view "that man is the intermediary between creatures, the intimate of the gods, the king of the lower beings, by the acuteness of his senses, by the discernment of his reason, and by the light of his intelligence the interpreter of nature, the interval between fixed eternity and fleeting time, and (as the Persians say) the bond, nay, rather the marriage song of the world, on David's testimony but little lower than the angels, [whose] court ... is beyond the world and nearest to the Godhead." Yet like Donne's, Pico's spiritual vocabulary partially conceals the radicalness of his voluptuous rationalism, which daringly converts man's bodily nature from the enemy of his soul to its proper vehicle. Then, once the body ceases to be a tainted and instead becomes a fit partaker of the spirit, he can even argue that it is no "sundering from body but his spiritual intelligence ... [that] makes the angel," whose higher essence is closely tied to his capacity to be "rapt to the heights of love." For from this pinnacle, the body/soul may both ascend and "descend, well taught and well prepared, to the functions of active life." (34)