John Donne - Delphi Poets Series

by John Donne

  7.—As improperly and unprofitably to their ends and purpose they offer the text from Ecclesiasticus 30:16, “There is no wealth above the wealth of physical health.” I place it here, although out of order, because of the affinity between this text and the last one, and since one answer is at least enough for both. While this text may prove that we naturally love this body—the text is not about the safety of the body, as if all men desired that the body might live, but about bodily health while it does live—still it does not prove that we may in no case abandon it.

  8.—The most proper and direct and the strongest text, for it is of moral law, is the commandment, “You shall not kill” (Exod. 20:13). This text is cited by all to this purpose.

  I must be allowed to depart here from the opinion of Saint Augustine, who thinks that this commandment is more earnestly bent upon a man’s own self than upon another, because here there is no addition, as there is in the other, “Against your neighbor” (Exod. 20:16). Certainly I am as much forbidden by the commandment falsely to accuse myself as my neighbor, although he alone is named in it. By this one I am as much forbidden to kill my neighbor as myself, although nobody is named. What holds within the compass of the commandment may also hold within the exceptions to it. Although the words are general, “You shall not kill,” we may kill beasts. Magistrates may kill men. A private man in a just war may not only kill, contrary to the sound of this commandment, but he may kill his father, contrary to another one!

  When two natural laws contrary to one another occur, we are bound to the one that is of the stricter bind. All laws concerning the honor of God and faith also concern, by virtue of charity, the Second Table of commandments, which is directed toward our neighbor. If, therefore, there could be a necessity that I must do an act of idolatry or kill, I would be bound by the latter commandment and commit idolatry.

  If perchance a public, exemplary person, who had a just assurance that his example would govern the people, should be forced by a tyrant to do an act of idolatry (even if under the circumstance he could satisfy his own conscience that he did not sin in doing it) and so scandalize and endanger the people, if the matter were so carried out and disguised that in no way he could let them know that he did it under constraint and not voluntarily, I say by this rule that perhaps he had better kill himself.

  A safe rule of Ennenckel’s is, “It is not possible to modify divine law unless the modification itself agrees with divine law.” But since it is not thought by Navarrus a violation of that rule, “To kill by public authority, or in a just war, or in defense of one’s life or of another’s,” why may not our case be as safe and innocent? If anyone importunes me to show the privilege or exemption of this case from the commandment, I may with Soto hurl it back and call for their privilege to kill a day-thief or any man in defense of another.

  As these laws may be logically deduced from the conformity of other laws and from a general authority that God has afforded to all sovereigns to provide as necessities arise, so may our case be derived as well from the necessary obligation that always lies upon us of preferring God’s glory over all human concerns. We cannot be put upon to show or to plead any exemption unless, when such a case arises, we say that the case never was within reach of that law. The same is true of all the other things that we heretofore called exemptions. Whatever might have been done prior to the law (as this might, if it is against neither nature nor justice, from both of which we claim to have acquitted it), this commandment never fell upon that or extended to it.

  9. I have also found a text urged from Wisdom 1:12, “Seek not death in the error of your life.” It is always coupled with a text from Deuteronomy 4:24, so that by collating the two it appears that what is forbidden there is idolatry and by death is meant the second death of eternal damnation, or the way to it.

  So this distinction, which was intended for the texts cited from the books of the Old Testament, shall here end, and to the next we assign those of the New Testament.

  Distinction III

  1. The first that I have observed in the New Testament is Matthew 4:6, where the devil tempts Christ, “If you are the son of God, cast yourself down.” With all expositors I confess that this was a temptation to vainglory and therefore applies to our case. We claim that we work somewhat to the service of God and the advancement of his glory when we allow self-homicide to be done. It is a very slippery passage, and a devout man by the nature of devotion would be more likely to err that way than a worldly man, except that the hand of God is extended to protect such men.

  Taken directly, this text will not shake or defy our proposition, for although Christ would neither satisfy the devil nor disclose who he was, when it served his own purposes he did as much as the devil tempted him to do in this text or the other, both in changing the species and nature of water into wine and in exposing himself to certain danger when he walked upon the waters. Christ neither rejected difficulties nor abstained from miracles when he knew he profited the beholders. I do not say that in any other case than when we are probably and excusably assured that it is to a good end may self-homicide be lawful for us.

  2.—The next text is in the Acts of the Apostles 16:28, “The keeper of the prison drew out his sword and would have killed himself, supposing the prisoners to be gone, but Paul cried, ‘Do yourself no harm, for we are all here.’”To this I say that by the same spirit by which Paul, being in the inner prison in the dark, knew what the keeper thought and what he was about to do, he also knew God’s purpose to be glorified in the conversion of the keeper and his family. Therefore, he not only restrained the keeper from his intent, which was inordinate and for his own sake, to escape punishment (in which we still may observe how readily man’s nature inclines him to this remedy), Paul also forbore to take benefit from the miracle by escaping. Although he rescues the keeper, he betrays himself.

  Thus Calvin poses to himself this objection to the text, that “Paul, seeing all hope of escape to consist in the death of the keeper, neglected the means of liberty that God offered him, when he restrained the keeper from killing himself”; Calvin answers only that “He had a knowledge and insight into God’s purpose and decree.” Otherwise, if he had not had that understanding (which very few achieve), it seems he ought to have let the keeper proceed, in order to facilitate his means of escaping.

  3.—This also infers an answer to another text of Saint Paul, where he rids and discharges himself and his fellow apostles of having taught this doctrine, “That a man might do evil in order that good might come of it” (Rom. 3:8). Consequently it is well and by just inference pronounced that he forbids that doctrine. We also humbly subscribe to the same rule and interpret it just as Saint Paul intended it, of things made evil by nature and not by circumstance. We agree in these things also, when any such circumstance does make them evil, if another contrary circumstance does not preponderate and overrule this one. We take liberty to illumine this point with a larger discourse.

  God always makes others his executioners of the evils that seem to us to be evils of punishment, of which death is. The greatest of all these, hardness of heart, although it is spiritual, is not worked immediately by God himself, as his spiritual comforts are, but occasionally and by desertion. In these cases God sometimes employs his angels, sometimes the magistrate, and sometimes ourselves. Still, all that God does in this life in any of these cases is only medicine, for even the blinding and hardening of the heart are sent to further salvation in some and are inflicted medicinally.

  These ministers and instruments of his are our physicians, and we may not refuse any bitterness, not even that which is naturally poison, since we are wholesomely corrected by them. As in the case of cramps, which are contortions of the sinews, or of rigors and stiffness in the muscles, we may bring about in ourselves a fever to thaw them, or we may bring about a burning fever to recondense and retemper our blood, so in all rebellions and disobediences of our flesh we may minister to ourselves such corrections and remedies as the magistr
ate might, if the deed was perfectly plain. Even though for the prevention beforehand of evil we may perform all the offices of a magistrate upon ourselves, in such secret cases it is debatable whether or not we have the authority to do so afterwards, especially in capital matters. Since at this time we need not affirm precisely that authority, I shall not now examine further the extent of that power.

  Rather, I go on to the kind of evil that must necessarily be understood in this text of Paul’s, which is what we count as naturally evil. Even in that, the bishops of Rome have exercised their power to give dispensation for bigamy, which according to their doctrine is directly against God’s commandment and therefore naturally evil. Nicholas V dispensed a bishop in Germany to consult with witches for the recovery of his health. It would be easy to amass many cases of similar presumption. In like manner the imperial law tolerates usury, prescribing in bad faith, and deceit of the public, and it expressly allows witchcraft—to good purposes. “Conformably to which law,” Paracelsus says, “it is all one whether God or the devil cures, just so the patient gets well.”

  Thus the canons have prescribed certain rules for doing evil—when we are overtaken with perplexities, to choose the least serious case. Saint Gregory gives a natural example: “A man confronting a high wall and forced to leap it would choose the lowest part of the wall.” Agreeing with all these, the casuists say that “In extreme necessity I do not sin if I induce a man to lend me money usuriously. The reason is that I incline him to a lesser sin, usury, when otherwise he would be a homicide by virtue of not relieving me.”

  God himself is said to work evil in us after this fashion, because when our heart is full of evil purposes he governs and disposes us to this evil rather than to that one. In this case, although the virtue and the evil are ours, still the order is from God, and it is good. Indeed, he positively inclines one to some certain evil in that he infuses into a man some good thoughts by which he, out of his viciousness, takes occasion to think he is better off to do some other sin than the one he intended to do. Since all these laws and practices agree that we sometimes do such evil not only for express and positive good but to avoid greater evil, it all seems to me to be against that doctrine of Saint Paul’s.

  Whatever any human power may dispense us from we may dispense ourselves from in extreme necessity, in the impossibility of recourse to better counsel, in the case of an erring conscience, and in many such cases, since the canon about two evils leaves it to our natural reason to judge, value, compare, and distinguish which of the two evils will occur. Since, for all of this, it is certain that no such dispensation, either from another or from myself, so alters the nature of the thing that it becomes thereby more or less evil, there appears to me no other safe interpretation but this one, that there is no external act that is naturally evil, and that circumstances condition such acts and give them their nature. In this way scandal can make heinous at a given time something that is not heinous if some person goes out of the room or winks.

  The law itself is given us as a light that we might not stumble. We need it, but not to see what is naturally evil, for such evil we see naturally, and it was so even before the law declared it to us. Rather, we need this light to see what would be evil (that is, produce evil effects) if we did it at a certain time and under such and such circumstances.

  That law is not itself absolutely good but good to the extent and in such respects that what it forbids is evil. Pico, comparing the law to the firmament (as Moses meant the word) observes that on the second day, when God made the firmament (Gen. 1:6), he did not say that it was good, as he did of every other day’s work, but it was not evil; for then, says Pico, it could not have received the sun, for if it had been good it would not have needed it. He reprehends the Manichaeans for saying that the law was evil, while he holds to the text of Ezekiel 20:25 that it was not good.

  The evil,.therefore, that is forbidden by Saint Paul in this text is either acts of infidelity that no dispensation can deliver from the reach of the law or else acts that by our nature and reason and by the approbation of nations are counted evil or are declared by law or custom to be evil. Because of their ordinary evil effects, these cast guiltiness upon the doer ordinarily and for the most part, and always unless his case is exempt and privileged. This consideration moved Chrysostom, whom I cited before, to think a lie and a consent to adultery were not evil in Sarah. The same consideration corrected Saint Augustine’s squeamishness so far that he leaves us free to think what we will of that wife’s act who to pay her husband’s debt sold herself for one night.

  If any of these things had once been naturally evil, they could never recover from that sickness. As I intimated before, those things that we call miracles were written in the story of God’s purpose as precisely (and were as sure to come to pass as the sun’s rising and setting) and as naturally in nature’s whole compass, for in that book of God nothing is written between the lines. In his eternal register, where he foresees all our acts, he has preserved and defended neutral things from ordinary corruption—of evil purpose, of inexcusable ignorance, of scandal, and similar neutral corruptions. So he is said to have preserved our blessed Virgin from original sin in her conception.

  To those who do not studiously distinguish circumstances or do not see the doer’s conscience and the testimony of God’s spirit, some of those acts of ours may at first taste have some of the brackishness of sin. So it was with Moses’ killing of the Egyptians (Exod. 12:12), for which there appears no special calling from God. Because this does not happen often, Saint Paul would not embolden us to do any of those things that are customarily reputed to be evil.

  If others are delighted with the more ordinary interpretation of this text, that it speaks of everything we call sin, I will not reject that interpretation, provided they do not make the apostle’s rule (although in this text it is not properly and exactly given as a rule) more strict than the moral precepts of the Decalogue itself, in which, as in all rules, there are naturally included and incorporated some exceptions. If they allow exceptions to this one, they are still at the beginning, for the case of self-homicide may itself fall within those exceptions.

  Otherwise, the general application of this rule is improper. As from infinite other texts it appears evident from the passage in Bellarmine where he says that by reason of this rule a man may not adorn a church by neglecting a poor neighbor. Still, there are a great many cases in which we may neglect this poor neighbor, and therefore to do so is not naturally evil. Surely whoever is delighted with such arguments and such an application of this text would not only have called to Lot’s attention this rule when (Gen. 19:6-8) he offered his daughters (for there it might have color), but also would have joined with Judas when the woman anointed Christ (Mark 14:3-11, John 12:3-7) and would have told her that although the office that she did was good yet the waste that she first made was evil and against this rule.

  4. The same apostle in various other texts uses this phrase, “We are the temples of the Holy Ghost.” From this it is argued that to demolish or to deface those temples is an unlawful sacrifice. But we are the temples of God in the same way that we are his images; that is, by his residing in our hearts. Who may doubt that the blessed souls of the departed are still his temples and images? Even among heathens those temples that were consecrated to their gods might be demolished in cases of public good or harm, and still the ground remained sacred.

  In the first two texts (II Cor. 6:16 and I Cor. 3:16) there is only an exhortation against polluting our hearts, which are God’s temples, with idolatry or other sin. In the other text (I Cor. 6:16) he calls our material body the temple, and he makes it an argument to us that we should flee from fornication, because therein we trespass against our own body. There arises here a double argument, that we may not do injury to our own bodies either as it is our own or as it is God’s.

  In the first of these he says, “A fornicator sins against his body,” for, as he said two verses before, “He makes himself
one body with a harlot,” and thus he diminishes the dignity of his own person. But is this so in our case?—when he withdraws and purges his body from all corruptions and delivers it from all the pollutions, venom, and malign machinations of his (and God’s) adversaries and prepares it by God’s inspiration and concurrence for the glory that, without death, cannot be attained!

  Is it a lesser dignity that one be the priest of God or the sacrifice of God than that one be the temple of God? Says Paul, “Your body is the temple of God, and you are not your own” (I Cor. 6:19). But Calvin on this point says that you are not your own in that you may live according to your own will or abuse your body with pollutions and uncleanness. Our body is so much our own that we may use it to God’s glory, and it is so little our own that when he is pleased to have it we do well in resigning it to him, by whatever officer he accepts it, whether by angel, sickness, persecution, magistrate, or ourselves. Just be careful of this last lesson, in which Paul amasses and gathers together all his previous doctrine: “Glorify God in your body and in your spirit, for they are his” (I Cor. 6:20).

  5. The text in Ephesians 4:15-16, “But let us follow the truth in love and in all things grow up into him who is the head, that is, Christ, until we are all come together into a perfect man,” has some affinity with this one. By this we receive the honor to be one body with Christ our head, which is afterward more expressly declared, “We are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bone” (Eph. 5:30). Therefore, they say that to withdraw ourselves, who are the limbs of him, is not only homicide of ourselves, who cannot live without him, but a parricide towards him who is our common father.

  However, as in fencing passion lays a man as open as unskillfulness, and a troubled desire to hit makes him not only miss but also receive a wound, so he who alleges this text overreaches to his own danger. For only this is taught here: all our growth and vegetation flows from our head, Christ, who has chosen for himself, to perfect his body, limbs proportional to it, and as a soul must live through all the body so it, and as a soul must live through all the body so must this care live and dwell in every part, always ready to do its proper function and also to succor those other parts for whose relief or sustenance it is framed and planted in the body. Thus no literal construction is to be admitted here, as though the body of Christ could be damaged by the removal of any man. As some leaves pass their natural course and season and fall again from the tree, being withered with age, and some fruits are gathered unripe and some ripe, and some branches that fall off in a storm are carried to the fire, so in this body of Christ, the church—I mean that which is visible—all these are also fulfilled and performed, and yet the body suffers no maims, much less the head any detriment.