Immediacy in John Donne’s Holy Sonnets

ABSTRACT

John Donne’s Holy Sonnets represent the most visible exploration in his poetry of the fault-lines between his early Catholicism and his experience of the English Reformed Church into which he was later ordained. The essay focuses upon one aspect of the strain, recorded within the Holy Sonnets, which emerged from the loss of the Catholic apparatus of grace, namely the problem of God’s immediacy. By the term “immediacy” I refer to the removal of the various Catholic helps and means that were once available to Donne to provide assurance and bridge, or mediate, the distance between God and the human subject. I suggest that the shift from Catholic to Protestant modes of doctrinal thought, worship, and practice could dramatically alter the confidence with which Donne could accept that God could be accessible to him. The essay goes on to examine Donne’s treatment of immediacy in four Holy Sonnets that either engage with the Catholic means of grace through the intercession of angels and saints or provocatively probe the possibility of inventing alternative helps or sacraments. I conclude by proposing that Donne may have found a way out of the impasse between Catholic and Reformed theologies of grace by entertaining a vision of Christendom that was prepared to embrace greater toleration and ecumenism.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank my friend and colleague Robert W. Reeder, Donne scholar extraordinaire, for reading through a draft of this essay and bringing his reliably subtle and illuminating intelligence to bear on this piece as I revised and nuanced my argument. I would also like to express my gratitude to the journal’s anonymous peer reviewers for their careful attention to the essay’s penultimate draft and for offering invaluable suggestions for improvement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, 9:179. Further citations from Donne’s sermons will be to this edition and will be cited in the text by volume and page number.

2 I will occasionally use the term “Catholic” for convenience, but it is worth noting that Donne tends to use “Rome” and “the Roman Church” and was critical of the post-Tridentine Roman Catholic Church in particular. For this reason, I will largely use the terminology “Rome,” “Roman,” and “the Roman Church.” Below I discuss Donne’s deliberate broadening of the term “Catholic.”

3 Hardy, 229.

4 Nor does Donne’s censure of the Roman Church end there. A broader survey of the anti-Roman rhetoric of Donne’s sermons is instructive in its tone and thoroughness. Through biblical exegesis Donne twice denies the apostle Peter’s “imaginary primacy” (3:350) in “the building of the Church” (2:272). Apostolic succession and papal infallibility are “an usurpation, an imposture, an illusion … a forgery” (2:302); for Peter to deny his master was “an Acte of Infirmitie” and a poor foundation (6:248). Donne further repudiates the Roman Church’s infrastructure for being plagued by nepotism (10:143) and accuses the monastic orders of wallowing in their luxurious lives, remarking that they “anoint themselves with other mens sweat, and lard themselves with other mens fat” (3:169). The Roman Church is guilty of extortion through “prodigality and prostitution of miracles” (8:366) and their “Marts of miracles” (3:370). In their creation of Indulgences Romans are “Farmers of [an] imaginary satisfaction” (7:162). Donne draws lurid and vivid pictures of a lecherous Jesuit “solicit[ing] the chastity of a daughter of the house, where he is harboured” (4:155), and of English-born, low-life Romans unscrupulously seeking every opportunity to convert the Protestant English in “every Tavern, and Ordinary,” at “a Comedy,” beside “the death-bed,” “in the bed of sicknesse,” and “in the bed of wantonnesse” (4:301–2). He dismisses the Virgin Mary’s role as a mediatrix or a second Eve (1:200) and rails against Rome’s disproportionate veneration of the Virgin (9:53–54). Saints’ legends are blasphemous and fabulous stuff—the “Revelations of S[aint] Brigid” are less credible than “Ovids Metamorphoses” (10:146). The Roman Church’s recognition of the apocryphal books is detrimental to the Canon of Holy Scripture (7:120). Rome tends to contaminate sacred with secular ideas and installs Machiavelli, Aristotle, and Virgil as its Popes in “politicall,” “Philosophicall,” and “Poeticall Divinity” respectively (7:131). Donne denounces relics, where “any ragge of [the saints’] skin, or chip of their bones, or lock of their haire, is … made an Universall balme, and Amulet, and Antidote” (6:270–71). Purgatory and Limbo are fables that multiply Hells (7:242) and the doctrine of Purgatory is extorted from Scripture as a “worke of Alchymy” (7:191; see 4:141). Donne derides pilgrimages as a “superstitious fixing of God to the free-hold” (9:209). Donne insists that the Son of God is not present in the Roman Mass (4:69) and refutes Roman priests’ “power to forgive all sins” (10:82; and see 10:129). He castigates Rome’s ecclesiastical corruption, and especially the vice of nepotism (10:143). Finally, Roman worship is an incomprehensible Babel-babble (10:144) made up of indigestible, “ridiculous and histrionicall Ceremonies in their service” (10:145).

5 Indeed, scholarship on the sermons has increasingly emphasized their occasional nature, a stress reflected in the Oxford editors’ decision to arrange their new edition by venue rather than by chronology.

6 Flynn, ‘Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility’, 305–23. See also Flynn’s monograph of the same title (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

7 Donne, Pseudo-Martyr, 8.

8 ibid., 13.

9 Halewood; Lewalski, 253–82.

10 Stubbs gives Donne’s early association with the Roman Church fairly short shrift in John Donne: The Reformed Soul, 91–93, 238–39, and 266–67.

11 Carey, 15; Read, 70.

12 Donne, The Complete Poems of John Donne, 241. All references to Donne’s poetry will be to Robbins’s edition and will be cited in the text by line number.

13 Spurr, 137. For a very different reading of La Corona, see Patterson, 69–93.

14 Spurr, 138.

15 John Donne: The Critical Heritage, 69.

16 Donne, The Life and Letters of John Donne, 1:196.

17 ibid., 1:196.

18 ibid., 1:196.

19 Young, ‘Donne’s Holy Sonnets and the Theology of Grace’, 38–39.

20 Strier argues that what preoccupies Donne in the Holy Sonnets is “doubt about the very means or method of salvation” and that this “theological indecision” resulted from “tremendous pressure, both external and internal, to join himself with a religious collectivity” and, in particular, the prevailing Calvinism that characterized the Church of England early in the seventeenth century, about which Donne came to have significant misgivings: see Strier, ‘John Donne Awry and Squint’, 364, 376, and 366. So too Martin writes of how Donne “baroquely mix[es] Catholic with Protestant tropes,” and Low finds the Holy Sonnets “pervasively Catholic in method, yet … deeply influenced by Calvinism in their doubts and anxieties”: see Martin, ‘Unmeete Contraryes’, 198; and Low, ‘Absence in Donne’s Holy Sonnets’, 96.

21 Guibbory, 208. I am greatly indebted to Guibbory’s “Donne’s Religious Poetry and the Trauma of Grace,” chapter 11 in Returning to John Donne, 201–12, for stimulating and supporting the ideas in this essay.

22 See Duffy.

23 Theresa DiPasquale begins to make sense of Donne’s Holy Sonnets in this way when she reads “I ame a litle World, made cunningly” as a reaction to the loss of access to the sacrament of penance and explores the speaker’s preoccupation with the possibility of a supplementary second baptism. DiPasquale, Literature & Sacrament, 105–19.

24 O’Neill, 289.

25 ibid., 289.

26 Aquinas, 65.2 (pp. 12–13): “singulae creaturae sunt propter perfectionem totius universi”; “creatura aliqua habet esse, repraesentat divinum esse et bonitatem eius”; and “divina bonitas est finis omnium corporalium.”

27 Hopkins, 44 (lines 1, 9–10).

28 Strier, ‘John Donne Awry and Squint’, 374.

29 Donne, Essays in Divinity, 49 and 51.

30 Donne, Letters, 2:78–79.

31 ibid., 2:78; emphasis added. Donne inherits the mastoid image from the Song of Songs 1:13, “A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.” Scriptural quotations, here and elsewhere, derive from The King James Version of 1611: Standard Text Edition. In Essays in Divinity Donne reads this biblical verse allegorically, interpreting the bundle of myrrh as Christ, who, despite the Great East-West Schism of 1054, remains the foundation of Eastern and Western Christianity, which are the breasts that give suck: “yet though we branch out East and West, that Church concurs with us in the root, and sucks her vegetation from one and the same ground, Christ Jesus; who, as it is in the Canticle lies between the brests of his Church, and gives suck on both sides [Marginalia: Cant. [Song of Sol.] 1:12]” (50). Donne’s adoption of this biblical image is an indication of his discreet ecumenism.

32 The Book of Common Prayer, 679.

33 Herbert, 281–82. Further references to Herbert’s poetry derive from Wilcox’s definitive edition and are cited in the text by line number.

34 Elsewhere Donne argues that the “object of prayer, to whom it must be directed, is limited, it is but [to God], unto thee hee shall pray, beyond him wee cannot goe, and he that prayes short of him, to any on this side of God, falls short in his prayer” (9:316–17).

35 Pope Benedict XII had issued the Constitution Benedictus Deus of 1336, which granted that bodiless souls, if purified, immediately behold God’s face after death, but, crucially, before their bodily resurrection. “Constitition Benedictus Deus (1336),” in The Christian Faith in the Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church, 624.

36 Robert W. Reeder offers the most detailed discussion of this sonnet to date and considers the poem’s relation to Thomism. See Reeder, 97–113.

37 Stachniewski, 693.

38 Reeder, 110.

39 Mary-Ann Radzinowicz writes of the “darkening” mood of this Holy Sonnet in her essay “‘Anima Mea’ Psalms and John Donne’s Religious Poetry,” in “Bright Shoots of Everlastingnesse,” 58.

40 Guibbory, 211; DiPasquale, ‘Ambivalent Mourning’, 45–56.

41 Young, ‘The Religious Sonnet’, 228–29.

42 DiPasquale’s fine close reading of “Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt” in her essay “Ambivalent Mourning” picks up on Donne’s “good/God” quibble as well as on a number of other puns.

43 Kuchar, 174.

44 Alighieri, canto 1.64–72.

45 Sanders, 126.

46 Ibid.

47 Stachniewski, 691.

48 Howard, 34.

49 Ettenhuber, 216.

50 For example, 1 Cor. 15:54–55 and Heb. 2:14.

51 Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, 96 and 126.

52 Targoff, 181. For Walton’s full account, see Walton, 78. The sculptor Nicholas Stone carved a marble effigy based upon the portrait that Donne had commissioned. The statue, the only monument to survive the Great Fire of London of 1666, stands to this day in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

53 Targoff, 183. Other passages from Donne’s sermons that re-conceive death as a means to eternal life include, passim: 2:202; 3:101; 4:54 and 135; 6:71–72, 212, 289, 291, 323–24, and 357; 7:273, 278, and 360; 8:79, 91, and 189–91; 9:51 and 108; and 10:244.

54 The seven holy sacraments of the Roman Church are Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, Penance, Anointing of the Sick, Holy Orders, and Matrimony.

55 When George Puttenham undertook to translate the Greco-Roman terms for rhetorical tropes and schemes into vernacular English he rendered “Hiperbole [as] the Ouer-reacher, otherwise called the loud lyer.” Puttenham, 159.

56 See Rom. 12:5; 1 Cor. 12:12–27; Eph. 3:6 and 5:23; and Col. 1:18 and 1:24.

57 Strier, ‘Donne and the Politics of Devotion’, 93–114, and especially 108–09; and Guibbory, “Donne’s Religion: Montagu, Arminianism, and Donne’s Sermons, 1624–1630,” chap. 10 in Returning to John Donne, 175–200. In a recent article, Martin has argued for Donne’s adoption of a “new middle way” steering between orthodox Calvinism and Arminianism in his embrace of elements of voluntarism in William Perkins’s experimental predestination: see ‘Experimental Predestination in Donne’s Holy Sonnets’, 350–81. In a germane essay, Dominic Baker-Smith seeks to define Donne’s “habit of mind” and locates a peculiarly modern “new mode of religious sensibility” that mixes a healthy skepticism, “an alert and sensitive act of discrimination,” with “personal responsibility” and “constant self-discipline, a refusal to settle for an idol or pseudo-Church which relieves the individual of his obligations.” Baker-Smith, 410, 408, 407, and 432.

58 Guibbory, 198.

59 ibid., 198–99.

60 Donne, Essays in Divinity, 51.

61 ibid., 50.

62 In the same sermon, Donne colorfully argues that true Christians agree upon essential doctrines. He describes how, in order to maintain a ship’s ballast, “[i]n stormes and tempests at sea men come sometimes to cut down Galleries, and teare up Cabins, and cast them overboard to ease the ship, and sometimes to hew downe the Mast it selfe … But to the keele of the ship, to the fundamentall articles of Religion, may no violence, in any case, be offered” (10:109).

63 Donne, Letters, 1:226.

64 Young, ‘The Religious Sonnet’, 230.

65 Cyprian of Carthage coined the expression. Since Patristic times the Roman and Eastern Orthodox Churches have taken up Cyprian’s sentiment as dogma.

66 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “embrace,” v[erb] 2, definitions 1a and 1b.

67 Lewalski, 274. Edmund Gosse remarks that the three sonnets exclusive to the Westmoreland manuscript have a “leaning which they betrayed to certain Romish doctrines” (Letters 2:109). Gosse adds that “they offer to us a remarkable contribution to our knowledge of the inner mind of Donne. They seem to prove that even after the death of his wife, and his subsequent conversion, he hankered after some tenets of the Roman faith, or at least that he still doubted as to his attitude with regard to them” (Letters 2:109–10). Gosse presumably forms his judgment on the basis of Donne’s reference to “saints and angels” (12) in “Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt” and the closing image of the true Church as a trollop in “Show me, dear Christ, thy Spouse so bright and clear.”

68 Guibbory, 199.

69 Smith, 138.

70 Donne’s speaker does say that the Church/Bride/dove is “most … pleasing” (13) to Christ when embraced by most men, which may hint that God shares Donne’s ecumenical impulses, yet this assertion may equally be folded into the speaker’s wish, or perhaps be an attempt on the speaker’s part to nudge Christ toward acquiescence. Helen Wilcox catches at the unease underlying this sonnet: “Donne’s questions are deeply troubling … The probing uncertainty of this poem is … typical of the way in which devotional poetry could function in this period: as a place of exploration and a site for the confession of not knowing.” Wilcox, 22.