Jorge Luis Borges: John Donne's Biathanatos

To De Quincey (my debt to him is so vast that to specify a part of it seems to repudiate or to silence the others) I owe my first knowledge of the Biathanatos.  It was written at the beginning of the seventeenth century by the great poet John Donne, who left the manuscript to Sir Robert Carr with one stipulation: [that it not be published but also not burned]....The Biathanatos is about two hundred pages long; De Quincey (Writings, VIII, 336) sums them up as follows:  Suicide is one form of homicide; the canonists distinguish voluntary homicide from justifiable homicide; logically, that distinction should also apply to suicide...

...The chapter that speaks directly of Christ is not effusive.  It merely invokes two scriptural passages: the phrase "I lay down my life for the sheep" (John 10:15) and the curious expression "he gave up the ghosts," which the four Evangelists use to say "died".  From those passages, which are confirmed by the verse "No man taketh my life from me, but I lay it down of myself" (John 10:18), Donne infers that the suffering on the Cross did not kill Jesus Christ but that He, in fact, killed Himself with a prodigious and voluntary emission of His soul.  Donne wrote that conjecture down in 1608; in 1631 he included it in a sermon he preached, at the point of death, in the chapel of Whitehall Palace.

The avowed purpose of the Biathanatos is to palliate suicide; the underlying aim is to indicate that Christ committed suicide.*  It seems unlikely and even incredible that Donne's only way to reveal this thesis was the use of a verse from St. John and the repetition of the verb to expire; no doubt he preferred not to insist on a blasphemous theme.  For the Christian the life and death of Christ are the central occurrences in the history of the world.  The previous ages prepared the way for those events, and the subsequent centuries reflected them.  Before Adam was formed from the dust of the earth, before the firmament separated the waters from the waters, the Father already knew that the Son would die on the Cross, and He created the earth and the heavens as a stage for the Son's future death.  Christ died a voluntary death, Donne suggests, implying that the elements and the world and the generations of men and Egypt and Rome and Babylon and Judah were drawn from nothingness to destroy Him.  Perhaps iron was created for the nails, thorns for the crown of mockery, and blood and water for the wound.  That baroque idea is perceived beneath the Biathanatos - the idea of a god who fabricates the universe in order to fabricate his scaffold.

As I reread this essay, I think of the tragic Philipp Batz, who is called Philipp Mainlander in the history of philosophy.  Like me, he was an impassioned reader of Schopenhauer, under whose influence (and perhaps under the influence of the Gnostics) he imagined that we are fragments of a God who destroyed Himself at the beginning of time, because He did not wish to exist.  Universal history is the obscure agony of those fragments.  Mainlander was born in 1841; in 1876 he published his book Philosophy of the Redemption.  That same year he killed himself.




*Cf. De Quincey, Writings, VIII, 398; Kant, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der Vernunft, II, 2.


trns. by Ruth L.C. Simms


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