‘in the womb we are taught cruelty’

In many of his sermons Donne talks about death, the most famous of them being ‘Deaths’ Duel’. There, the preacher states that even the very moment of birth is an ‘exitus á morte, an issue from death, for in our mother’s womb we are dead, so as that we do not know that we live’. Idiosyncratically for Donne the terror of the womb is greater than the terror of the tomb. The position in which the foetus finds itself in mother’s womb is much more vulnerable than the position of a dead person in relation to the prospect of salvation and deliverance from death. Donne argues that the mother’s womb for an unborn child would be as close to it as a grave, ‘or so putrid a prison, (…) if we stayed in it beyond our time, or died there before our time’. Unlike a dead person in the grave, whose carcass becomes nourishment for worms, the dead child in the womb is ‘a murderer, nay, a parricide’ of its mother, ‘her that gave us our first life, our life of vegetation’. In his peculiar way Donne mixes Latin phrases with the ‘vulgarity’ of English words to make his stance and to emphasise the dangers of not-living. He compares the dead-like state of the unborn to the Pharisees when paraphrasing Christ’s words from Mark 8.18: ‘In the womb we have eyes and see not, ears and hear not’. Nevertheless, his main concern is the danger of a prenatal or a postnatal death of an unbaptized baby. The promise of salvation for a Christian soul lies in the sacrament of baptism and therefore an unborn child is deprived of the prospect of achieving eternal life. While in the womb the foetus exists in a state between life and death; as Donne explains in the sermon: ‘There in the womb we are fitted for works of darkness, all the while deprived of light; and there in the womb we are taught cruelty, by being fed with blood, and may be damned, though we be never born’.

Although the moment of birth is an exitus á morte and brings the prospect of salvation, it is only another stage in the cycle of deaths in what Donne regards as life. To read more of that, check out John Donne, 1631,’ Death’s Duel’.