Arts Publications

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

Cusa enables these explorations by locating microcosmic man's perfection in his "middle" capacity to understand universal or macrocosmic being through dialectical human reason. According to Gordon Worth O'Brien, he accomplishes this by exploiting Aquinas's elevation of "two-fold" human reason above the unitary intuition of the angels. Although Aquinas still orthodoxly conceives divine perfection as a mysterious Oneness and the discursive human mind as a lesser light than the intuitive angelic mind, he makes man's need to exercise free will (which angels conventionally lack) a closer reflection of the divine image than the angelic mind. Cusa's main addition to this line of thought derives from his principal axiom, that "if a thing is not purely its own essence it suffers limitation." (42) This innovation becomes especially radical in rebutting the orthodox view that all created things differ from God as the finite from the infinite, the active from the static, or the embodied from the ineffable. Since the essence of Cusa's deity is action, not passive contemplation, his material creation now mirrors him not through its static immortal soul but through "motion, or the spirit of connection ... the 'third something' between body and soul, power and act, matter and manner." As the spirit of motion, the human imago dei thus acquires an active godlike dimension even though its passive matter remains conventionally subordinate to its spirit. This new identification of man's essence with his "animate" freedom from restraint then prepares the way for the Italian Neo-Platonists' celebration of mankind's dialectical capacity to ascend toward an "uninhibited and limitless power" not possessed by the angels themselves. While the fullness of this capacity is still conventionally reserved for the incarnate Christ, as his bride and image, the elect become the true counterparts of this man-god. Yet while O'Brien traces the influence of Cusa's revolutionary thought to "Pico, Ficino, Lord Herbert, and Milton," he fails to place Donne in this lineage, perhaps because Donne's Anniversaries seems to renounce the "Faustian" or alchemical dream of abstracting the "'knot and band' of all phenomena, both material and spiritual," so that either base matter or microcosmic man can take on "whatever nature he might will it to assume." For O'Brien, this aspiration is the materialist culmination of Cusa's dynamic philosophy of motion as the essence of godlikeness, which in turn proceeds from his revitalization of the formerly static doctrine of correspondences. Although devout Neo-Platonists such as Ficino will continue to conceive of spiritual ascent as a process of purging the passive, enlightened soul and replacing its gross material "knot with divine essences," his increasingly radical heirs begin to conceive of liberated matter as the philosophical soul's conduit to light. (43)