Today the Episcopal Church celebrates John Donne, Priest, Poet and Preacher (1573-1631).
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Donne is a fascinating character whose poetry, to the modern reader, occupies a disturbingly ambiguous middle ground between the erotic and the spiritual, between eros and agape. Reading Donne is like reading Shakespeare, his rough contemporary, in that the language is deceptively close to modern English yet uses words and constructions that have since shifted in meaning and context in the intervening centuries. Even understanding these shifts in vocabulary, however, doesn’t fully prepare us for his poetry. Underneath it all, Donne has a significantly different, medieval sensibility that was beginning to be outdated even is his own early-modern era, and is nearly incomprehensible to our post-modernist worldview.
This is the root of the seeming ambiguity between erotic love and spiritual love that permeates Donne’s poetry. Modernists of the 17th Century and onwards deliberately separated the spiritual world from the physical world, removing it to the realm of philosophy where it had no bearing on the modernist’s growing mastery of the scientific method and growing understanding of the physical properties of the world. Donne, in his older medieval mindset, does not separate the two. The physical is the spiritual and the spiritual is the physical. Love of God, to Donne, is not an antiseptic thing of pure mind, but is as earthy, fleshy and physical as love between a man and a woman. They are one and the same.
In my post-modern worldview, I am comfortable keeping the spiritual and the physical safely boxed apart, to be examined and marveled at only separately and on their own unrelated terms. Christ, however, challenges this concept, hanging on his Cross at the intersection of the physical and the spiritual; both God and man, incarnate in a time and place yet timeless and without spacial limits. Donne intuitively understands and celebrates this intersection.
I especially recommend On the Annuciation and the Passion Falling on the Same Day, which explores the deep symbolism of the rare years when the Feast of the Annunciation and Good Friday fall on the same calendar day (occurs only twice this century, in 2005 and 2016). In this poem, through the juxtaposition of opposites, Donne shows us that life and death, youth and age, beginnings and endings, are really the same: “As in plain maps, the furthest west is east…” Note how Donne refers to his soul in the feminine—again, conflating physical and spiritual, love of the spirit with love of a woman. In another line, he says, “Death and conception in mankind is one,” and I have no doubt that he uses the word “conception” fully aware of its sexual overtones, reminding us that our beginning and our end is rooted in earthy physicality, and is yet also the moment in which God gives and retrieves our own souls.
