Saint Augustine had a smartphone filled with umpteen-thousand photos?) Or, as Saint John of the Cross wrote, “Live as if only God and yourself were in this world, so that your heart may not be detained by anything human.” At which point, perhaps, one might be able to say, with Saint Teresa of Ávila, “At the moment of my entrance into this new state, I felt a joy so great that it has never failed me even to this day.” Early in its career in the English language, the word ecstasy wasn’t such a positive term. The word occurs seventeen
The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed. —Jiddu Krishnamurti
times in Shakespeare’s works, usually meaning not “out of oneself” but “out of one’s mind.” Polonius overhears Hamlet’s disordered ramblings to Ophelia and describes them as “the very ecstasy of love.” Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, blames the “ecstasy” of his grief for his accusations against her. “Ecstasy?” the prince replies. “My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time / And makes as healthful music. It is not madness / That I have utt’red.” And Macbeth bemoans the guilt and fear that have brought him sleepless nights and “the torture of the mind to lie / In restless ecstasy.” JOY TO TR AN SC E NDE NC E
But just a generation later, the word underwent a sea change, in the works of
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the erotic-poet-turned-Anglican-priest John Donne, whose poem “The Extasie” explored the interaction between earthly and divine love, the body and the out-ofbody. Of lover’s bodies he wrote, “We owe them thankes, because they thus, / Did us, to us, at first convay . . . Loves mysteries in soules doe grow, / But yet the body is his booke.” Perhaps this is what Saint Augustine meant when he departed briefly from the doctrine of renunciation to utter his famous prayer, “O Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.” (And what about the holy Teresa, who went on in the above passage to report, suggestively enough, that “God converted the dryness of my soul into a very great tenderness”?) In any case, the “metaphysical” poetpriest Donne would likely have found a soul brother two centuries later in Franz Liszt, composer and dazzling performer of Transcendental Etudes for the piano. Like Donne’s, Liszt’s career arc took him from fame as an artist and notorious ladies’ man to retirement, retreat, and instruction to
The moment eternal — just that and no more, / When ecstasy’s utmost we clutch at the core / While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut, and lips meet! —Robert Browning
become a priest, known to his friends as the Abbé Liszt. Liszt joined with Wagner, his eventual son-in-law, to proclaim the “Music of the Future,” in Romantic rebellion against the rationalistic strictures of the 18th century. And even these two worldly artists would
Ecstasy: Experimentation
The Cleveland Orchestra