1948 Borges Biathanatos
1948 Borges Biathanatos
1948 Borges Biathanatos
I owe to De Quincey (to whom my debt is so vast that to point out only one
part of it may appear to repudiate or silence the others) my first notice of
Biathanatos, a treatise composed at the beginning of the seventeenth cen
tury by the great poet John Donne,' who left the manuscript to Sir Robert
Carr without other restriction than that it be given "to the Press or the Fire."
Donne died in 1631; in 1642 civil war broke out; in 1644, the poet's firstborn
son gave the old manuscript to the press to save it from the fire. Biathanatos
extends to about two hundred pages; De Quincey ( Writings VIII, 336)
abridges them thus: Suicide is one of the forms of homicide; the canonists
make a distinction between willful murder and justifiable homicide; by
parity of reason, suicide is open to distinctions of the same kind. Just as not
every homicide is a murder, not every suicide is a mortal sin. Such is the
apparent thesis of Biathanatos; this is declared by the subtitle ( That Self
homicide is not so Naturally Sin that it may never be otherwise), and is illus
trated or overtaxed by a learned catalog of fabled or authentic examples,
ranging from Homer,> "who had written a thousand things, which no man
else understood, and is said to have hanged himself because he understood
not the fishermen's riddle," to the pelican, symbol of paternal love, and the
bees, which, according to St. Ambrose's Hexameron, put themselves to death
"when they find themselves guilty of having broken any of their king's
Laws." The catalog takes up three pages, and in them I note this vanity: the
matter to him-and why should it have?-or only mattered as, shall we say,
an "emblem of Christ." There is not a hero in the Old Testament who has
not been promoted to this authority: for St. Paul, Adam is the figure of He
who was to come; for St. Augustine, Abel represents the death of the Savior,
and his brother Seth the resurrection; for Quevedo, Job was a "prodigious
design" for Christ. Donne perpetrated his trivial analogy to make his read
ers understand: "The foregoing, said of Samson, may well be false; it is not
when said of Christ."
The chapter that speaks directly of Christ is not effusive. It does no
more than evoke two passages of Scripture: the phrase "I lay down my life
for the sheep" ( John 10:15) and the curious expression, "He gave up the
ghost," that all four evangelists use to say "He died." From these passages,
which are confirmed by the verse "No man taketh my life from me, but I lay
it down of myself" ( John 10:18), he infers that the agony on the cross did not
kill Jesus Christ and that in truth Christ took his own life with a voluntary
and marvelous emission of his soul. Donne wrote this conjecture in 1608: in
1631 he included it in a sermon he preached, while virtually in the throes of
death, in the Whitehall Palace chapel.
The stated aim of Biathanatos is to mitigate suicide; the fundamental
aim, to indicate that Christ committed suicide.J That, in demonstrating this
hypothesis, Donne would find himself reduced to a verse from St. John and
the repetition of the verb to expire, is an implausible and even incredible
thing; he undoubtedly preferred not to insist on a blasphemous point. For
the Christian, the life and death of Christ are the central event in the history
of the world; the centuries before prepared for it, those after reflect it. Be
fore Adam was formed from the dust of the earth, before the firmament
separated the waters from the waters, the Father knew that the Son was to
die on the cross and, as the theater of this future death, created the heavens
and the earth. Christ died a voluntary death, Donne suggests, and this
means that the elements and the terrestrial orb and the generations of
mankind and Egypt and Rome and Babylon and Judah were extracted from
nothingness in order to destroy him. Perhaps iron was created for the nails,
and thorns for the mock crown, and blood and water for the wound. This
baroque idea glimmers behind Biathanatos. The idea of a god who creates
the universe in order to create his own gallows.
Rereading this note, I think of the tragic Philipp Batz, known to the
JCf. De Quincey, Writings VIII, 398; Kant, Religion innehalb der Grenzen der Ver
nunft II, 2.
J O RG E L U I S B O RG E S
[EA]