For several years now, my favorite poem by the English poet, John Donne, has been one of the sonnets from his series of “Holy Sonnets.” It goes like this:
Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurp'd town to another due, Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end; Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain, But am betroth'd unto your enemy; Divorce me, untie or break that knot again, Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
This poem attracts me for two related reasons, which bear very directly on many themes touched-upon on this blog (including the last two posts):
1) First, it draws attention to the violence of God’s purifying process. In the Christian tradition, it is sometimes said that the fire of hell is not other than the fire of divine love. The difference between the damned and the blessed is not a difference between the fires of hell and the fires of heaven, but between what is burned. In hell, the damned are like stones eternally scorched by the flames, but never consumed by it. In heaven, the blessed are like wood, not only burned but actually consumed by the flames, to the point where it actually becomes itself the flame. Purgatory’s fire is also the same fire, and its inhabitants are those who have yet to become blessed: wood burning, soon to be totally consumed, but not yet quite there. The pains suffered by the predestined here on earth are also those of an earthly purgatory: we are wood, burning under the flame of God’s love, eventually (we hope) to be consumed and destroyed by it, in the process of becoming it—becoming Love. Whereas the reprobate will never be consumed by it: they will burn eternally, trapped forever in the pain of that burning, resisting it always, hating and fear it. Donne’s poem expresses what is at the heart of every Christian’s desire: the desire to be burned so as to be consumed. The desire to be transformed into God by the annihilation of all in me that is not divine, just as wood is destroyed in the process of becoming fire. We desire to “suffer divine things,” in a famous phrase of Dionysius the Areopagite, which is usually taken to refer mainly to the “passivity” of the soul’s stance toward God, but may just as well refer to its victimhood of the divine violence—the all-consuming violence of divine love.
2) The final phrases of Donne’s poem capture the paradoxical nature of this divine violence with remarkable clarity and concision: “imprison me, for I, / Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” The paradox is: I shall never be free until I am imprisoned by God. I shall never be chaste until I am ravished by God. Following Donne’s own imagery of a violent battering, breaking, and burning, one might press even further with these paradoxes: I am not alive unless I am killed by God. Further still, I do not exist unless I am annihilated by God. Notice how such paradox does more than postulate death as a pre-condition for resurrection, as if to state the rather obvious and uninteresting chronological fact that before I get to heaven I’ve got to die first. Rather, it practically identifies eternal life with absolute death, true existence with annihilation—just as Donne provocatively identifies true freedom with being imprisoned by God, and even chastity with being ravished by God. The upper reaches of the Christian vocation require us to get comfortable with this extreme degree of paradox. To desire eternal life is to desire death. To desire freedom is to desire being subject to God’s violence.
What atittude should I take towards other people then?