John Donne Pt. I
One of the most distinguished spiritual leaders of the Anglican church is John Donne (1572–1631). He enjoyed high esteem in his own day as a diplomat, traveller, courtier, and poet, but especially as a preacher. His own ambitions may at first have been secular, but King James I is said to have refused him important preferment until he had settled on a vocation in the church. With the likelihood of Royal prompting, he was ordained deacon and priest in 1615, and shortly thereafter he was appointed one of the King’s chaplains. He was made an honorary doctor of divinity in this same year, and so he began the important ecclesiastical career that included his being elected Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1621. A frequent preacher both at St. Paul’s and also at court, Donne commanded wide attention for his often impassioned sermons and for the high seriousness and evident sincerity of his ministry.
The old idea that Donne turned his back on a formerly loose and easy life in order to fit the different expectations of a proper churchman has never quite died, perhaps because Donne helped to create the legend of conversion by comparing himself with St. Augustine, who, in the Confessions, writes of a formerly loose life that is transformed to a holy one. And also we have trouble in reconciling Donne the poet of love with Donne the preacher, as if one could be frivolous and playful, high minded and sober only by progressive turns. But Donne’s life was never so rigid nor divided into incompatible portions. His interests changed or received a different kind of emphasis as he grew older, but he was always the same person. The extent to which he remained so much the same, making use of all he had learned as a young poet while living in the maturity of his age, has always fascinated his readers and critics. The question to ask is, ‘How might Donne Christianise art and transcribe the Word into the world?’
Donne believed that poetry, as a central part of our lives, is at the centre of our souls’ destiny. Since our communication with God is (or should be) marked by constant devotion, so poetic faithfulness must not be made up of ‘interjections’ or ‘parentheses’ which can be forgotten or omitted: “They err equally that make a God of necessity, and that make a God of contingency . . . God’s service is no extemporal thing”. Neither is this moral life a ‘parenthesis’, for “upon every minute of this life, depend millions of years in the next”. Consequently, art expressed as praise and prayer is the measure of our life’s sojourn—a sojourn that is soon finished, yet endless, containing all of eternity. The life of man finds its speech in art—in the Word of God—at the meeting place where expressive sound has a harmony that is both human and divine.
Because Donne cannot think of the relationship between God and man apart from the Word and the words of human art, his considerations of life and death are permeated with literary metaphors: “the letters in this alphabet of our life”; a well made ‘sentence’ whose first part “pieces well with the last, and never respects, never hearkens after the parenthesis that comes between”. Devotion must necessarily be poetic since it is celebrated in God’s Word, “as the voice of the Seraphim in Isaiah, thrice repeated, Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, Holy, holy, holy”, a reverence that refers to the heart, the tongue, and the hand—a lesser trinity which reflects the greater one. Donne summarises this idea in a metaphor: “Christ places a tongue in the hands; actions speak. . . . There is not only a tongue, but a trumpet, in every good work”. Donne thus returns us to the mutual and reciprocal action between God and man, where calling is the equivalent of contemplation, feeling of wishing or desiring.
Many dangers lurk within this connection between God the Word and man the sound and performer. No part of man is more rebellious than his tongue—and Donne gives the text from Luke 16.24, “Father Abraham, have mercy upon me . . . and cool my tongue”. That organ which is so useful in praising God “no man can tame” (James 3.8), and it is always likely to speak falsely by praising the self, by suggesting that the beauty of a poem comes from the self rather than from the gracious meeting of man and God in sound and Word. Donne is recalling the admonition that learning and art may be deceiving, that “art is suspicious” in some circumstances.
This idea is common in Donne’s time, and it has certainly survived into our own day. The concept is aptly summarised in the lines attributed to St. Augustine: “The pious and devout, though unlearned, went to heaven, whilst other men, trusting to their learning, disputed it quite away”. The reason rectified by nature—by the natural soul—provides the antidote; the right measure lies in “the testimony of our own natural soul” and in the poets that St. Paul cites, who say, “We are the offspring of God” (Acts 17.28). Apollo must be reconciled to the Holy Ghost, and the nine muses answer to the twelve Apostles. “To end all”, we find Donne saying in a sermon filled with warnings, “embrace fundamental, dogmatical, evident divinity. . . . And it begins with . . . belief in God, and not in man, nor traditions of men”.
From the origin and range of poetry, and then to its limitations, Donne turns us to its special possibilities. Calling preachers “Trumpets and Trumpeters” of the Word, Donne describes the musicum carmen, the love-song between God and man, which, when rightly made, is the music of salvation declared in the Gospel. “Religious preaching is a grave exercise”, Donne observes (likely with a pun), “but not a sordid, not a barbarous, not a negligent”. The Scriptures contain an abundance of tropes and figures, set in a style that is diligent, artificial, in large part musical, metrical, and in measured composition or verse; and at important times, God gives instruction in song, especially when He wants to be certain that His Law is remembered (Deut. 31.19-22). Preaching may be corrective, and offer “a present inchoation [that is, ‘commencement’ or ‘beginning’] of the joys of heaven”. This “religious preaching” replaces the ancient oratory of praise, so often artificial and inappropriate to the subject who really deserves an “increpation” or rebuke. Now unworthy men can be shown that they are fallen and yet be urged to arise again, “and that’s the richest gain that we can get”.
In another passage that reminds us of his “Canonization” poem, Donne speaks of the process by which the words of Elihu, a ‘natural’ man, are ‘canonized’ into the Word of God: “Every man may see it [that is, the natural man]; man may behold it afar off”. Thus the words of secular writers may be sanctified and inserted into the book of God. Donne continues to urge us toward a rectified conscience, toward seeing God now, and in this moment. Every man shall see light in his salvation, and so may go in peace; in every desire of the heart is a meeting with God. All is motion, and yet fixity, with the sealing of truths by “Selah” and “Amen”, expressed in the “two blessed monosyllables, “Pray” and “Stay”. “To ascend to God, to attend God’s descent to us, is the motion and rest of a Christian; . . . all motion is for rest”. Donne treats every aspect of the poetry and the language of God and man with earnest affection, even to the “shutting up” of all metrical compositions. The best and most forceful impression must be left by the end, for “the whole frame of the poem is a beating out of a piece of gold, but the last clause is as the impression of the stamp, and that is it that makes it current”, not false or counterfeit, but valuable and true.
Donne gave the last fifteen years of his life to preaching and to the cure of souls. He wrote very little poetry after his ordination in 1615, his sermons becoming his principal literary expression; but in a sense the 160 published sermons include his best poetry. Preaching is “calling”, Donne says in several places. Of Christ’s mission, Donne says that “He came to save by calling us”, even as we, or the preacher speaking to us and on our behalf, calls on us, his auditors. This calling is “vocatio radicalis, the calling that is the root and foundation of all”, shining in every kind of darkness. Such “calling” depends upon a two-way response; teaching implies listening, acting, coming: “Come ye children, hearken unto me, and I will teach you the fear of the Lord” (Ps. 34.11). Characteristically, Donne appreciates the dual nature inherent in preaching and in all worship, and he explores this vision with the imagery of war: “In every man, there are two sides, two armies: the flesh fights against the spirit. This is but a civil war. . . . That war God hath kindled, and that war must be maintained, and maintained by His way; and His way, and His ordinance in this war is preaching”.
Sermons have many varieties, Donne observes; but they all seek the same end and rely upon a common desire. The highest and most persuasive force of any sermon—whatever it may be called and however it may be constructed—derives from the ‘ethical proof’ of the preacher himself. The preacher is a person who speaks more than words, for he also expresses the love of God. Like many other learned preachers of his time, Donne is indebted to classical oratory, as formulated by Aristotle and others, for the shape and plan of his sermons and for the importance ascribed to the moral example of the speaker. Oratory, of course, and secular art, becomes Christianised in Donne, where good character is real and never simulated, and where sermon structure is a convenient means for emphasising and shoring up the faith of believing people. Truth lies in the Word of God, and the preacher is the messenger: “It becometh me to make myself as acceptable a messenger as I can, and infuse the Word of God into you, as powerfull as I can”; but, Donne continues, the greatest part lies in our own application, “and that must proceed from the Word of God itself, quickened by His Spirit”.
©P. G. Stanwood, 2007
