Textual Immortality: Divine Authority in Bunyan and Lanyer
“And as I slept I dreamed a Dream ... If you believe not me, read here in this Book: and for the truth of what is exprest therein behold all is confirmed by the blood of him that made it.”
-John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress
The vitality of the Bible resonated with the men and women of the Renaissance and across the ages. The Bible was not only an incarnation of Jesus Chris and God Himself, but in its divinity it also challenged the physical limitations of the written word. Throughout the Renaissance, writers recognized the paradoxical nature of a text’s active materiality. While the book itself was limited in its physicality, it was simultaneously empowered by it: books were and are the material manifestations of enlightened thought and reason that offered immortality in their transcendent truth. Writers such as the metaphysical poet John Donne discovered literature’s power to reconcile man’s struggle with his own mortality on earth; while “many a man lives a burden to the earth ... a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life” (Milton 563). In this discovery of texts’ immortal life, which in respects also imparted immortality onto the writers who produced them, writers were able to produce active, timeless texts. In this competitive literary environment, writers sought to prove themselves as authoritative voices whose works were manifestations of enlightened thought and reason. While the desire to be the next Dante or Shakespeare is a common feat among inspired writers, seventeenth century authors sought a source of legitimacy for their talents that trumped the likes of published poets and rival contemporaries: divine grace and empowerment.
As the Reformation took its toll on a society that revolved itself around faith, it left many suspended between the seemingly irreconcilable realms of agency and grace, the physical and the metaphysical, mortality and eternal life. People, and as we see throughout Renaissance text, writers especially, sought the medium by which they could unite man’s existence on earth with his faith in the heavens. John Bunyan in The Pilgrim’s Progress, and Aemilia Lanyer in her Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, used dreams as the medium by which man can reach spiritual ascension, and each attributed divinity to their texts in order to substantiate the works’ immortality and importance. For Bunyan’s religious allegory, and Lanyer’s female perspective and advocation for women’s role in the Passion, dreams offered both divine authority and a compromise between the physical and metaphysical spheres. Throughout their respective works, Lanyer and Bunyan strive to legitimize their arguments by claiming they were “appointed to performe” these works, “a key concept in the Reformed doctrines of election and calling” (Hodgson 108). By elevating one’s text as the word of God and projecting one’s own authorship onto a divine voice, writers such as Lanyer, Bunyan, and even Milton himself, immortalized their works as beacons of religious enlightenment.
In his religious allegory, Bunyan sought to impart religious guidance and truth on his readers, pilgrims themselves on the journey to Christian salvation. A Puritan Separatist in the time of the Reformation and imprisoned throughout much of his life for his sermons and unlicensed preaching (Hinson 236), Bunyan sought the divine authority he lacked in the society’s politics of religion. Puritans did not merit the word of dissenters, and Bunyan’s metaphors to express Calvinist theology required a risk on his part (247). His text needed more than authority as a legitimate source of writing, but as a source of religious enlightenment it needed to be “not simply a product of divine inspiration but evidence of emblem of divine sanction” (Machosky 182). As we see in his defense of his allegorical mode in his apology, writing, “My dark and cloudy words they do but hold the Truth, as Cabinets inclose the Gold” (Bunyan 5) Bunyan recognized the use of allegory in the Bible and saw its merits in fiction. For Bunyan, “allegory could present truth in a way more adequate to the divine than the straight-forward prose of a sermon or treatise” (Machosky 187), but he had to prove himself, both as an author and as a messenger of God’s word. Bunyan projects authorship off of himself by qualifying his writing as an instrument of God. Just as he unknowingly “fell suddenly into an Allegory” (Bunyan 1), so did the allegory fall from divine inspiration.
In the very title of his work The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to That Which is to Come: Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream ..., Bunyan materializes the medium but which divine inspiration set about “to guide [his] Mind and Pens for his Design” (Bunyan 5). As Milton does in Paradise Lost, and Lanyer does in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Bunyan “invokes this role” of divine prophet “through a divinely inspired dream” (Hodgson 106). Dreams have been a gateway of communication between the divine and mankind throughout Christian history. In his title Bunyan sources his work as being “delivered” by dream, elevates his text to the similar level as a medium between his readers and God. In a time when the paradoxical natures of predestination and salvation, people yearned (as we see in John Donne’s own religious crisis) to forge a more interactive relationship with God. While the Bible allowed for this sort of reconciliation between the living Gospel and the book itself, dead in its physicality, Bunyan and others recognized the potential of text to bridge the two spheres. As the Bible was given life, and divinity through God’s word, so Bunyan and others strove to prove their texts took part in God’s work. Bunyan exerts the divine authority of his text while simultaneously asserting his being elected; Bunyan did not set out himself to impart this religious allegory, “Nay [he] had undertook to make another” and rather than pursuing the work, it was “delivered” to him “under the similitude of a dream” (7).
As Bunyan claims divine deliverance through a dream in his title for the work that follows, Lanyer actually gives credit to the medium of the divine for the title of her work itself. In the tradition of text as an author’s offfspring and means of immortality through creation, and in the tradition of dreams as means of imparting both divine wisdom and knowledge, Lanyer substantializes her text as both divine and lasting. Just as Gabriel came to Mary in a dream and told her about the son, God’s son, who she would name Jesus Christ, so Lanyer argues the title “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum” (Hail God, King of the Jews) came to her in a dream:
To the doubtfull Reader Gente Reader, if though desire to be resolved, why I give this Title, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, know for certaine; that it was delivered unto me in sleepe many years before I had any intent to write in this maner, and was quite out of my memory until I had written the Passion of the Christ, when immediately it came into my remembrance, what I had dreamed long before; and thinking it a significant token, that I was appointed to performe this Work, I gave the very same words I received in sleepe the fittest Title I could devise for this Booke. (Lanyer 139)
While Bunyan sought scriptural and ecclesiastical authority to legitimatize what he hoped would be a sermon of sorts for Christian pilgrims, Lanyer needed defend her role as a female writer approaching male dominated fields of society’s politics over religion and gender stratification. Here we see Lanyer hand over much of her own agency in order to prove God’s hand in her work as she also uses the phrase “delivered” and even says she forgot ever having the dream, as it came to her before she herself set out to write the work. She is careful, however, to only impart some credit to divine inspiration; whereas Bunyan’s words “began to multiply, like sparks that from the coasts of fire to fly” outside his own purpose, Lanyer reserves that divine authorship to her title alone. Rather than limiting herself as a puppet for God’s own pen, Lanyer instead “conflates her verse with the Bible and herself with Christ so as to substantiate her claim to be the irrefutable intermediary of God” (Tinkham 70). While Bunyan’s need for authority stems primarily from his struggles to be read as a source of religious guidance, Lanyer must defend herself further as a female writer arguing a radical stance for the time on the placement of women, both in Christianity and in society because of their placement in Christianity’s history. As Lanyer “never directly confirms the possibility that her work was given to her by God, the possibility, without assertion, of divine inspiration (or at least of divine confirmation) of her role as a writer and her work as written is one of Lanyer’s most powerful but ambiguous defenses against those who would deny her the ability or the permission to public” (Hodgson 110).
What both Bunyan and Lanyer discover is that they cannot claim supreme divine authority in their texts because of their limitations as human beings, but by actually humbling themselves as agents of God’s word, they can elevate the texts written by their hand. Lanyer, especially, illustrates her unworthiness in her “poor infant verse” (Lanyer ll.279) and describes her attempts to write a text worthy of God’s praise as: “With Icarus though seekest now to try,/ Not with waxen wings, but they poor barren brain,/ Which far too weak, these silly lines descry” (ll. 275-277) and she prays for grave to give her “the power and strength to write” (ll.298). Like Bunyan, Lanyer treads an ambiguous place of authorship between defending her right and skill to write, and humbling herself and her “wanting skill” (ll. 13). By stressing one’s inadequacies in relation to God, or as Bunyan more so refracts credit than saying he is undeserving, both writers claim virtue as their merit -- the virtue required for divine election and the virtue that relieves them of vanity for the divine authority they have attributed to their works. Elizabeth Hodgson argues in her critique of prophecy in Lanyer’s works that Lanyer “models herself as a poor suppliant whose very humility affords her a special spiritual virtue and privilege” (102). Bunyan, on the other hand, seems to attribute his literary election for a transcendent text to his pre-existing merits as a writer -- he was chosen because of his skill, a skill given to him by divine grace.
As Milton asserts in his “Areopagitica” speech, books are “that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself ... an immorality rather than a life” (564). Literature should be the manifestation of knowledge itself, and its authority and significance is by and for not only the writers but for the readers as well. In the texts we have explored, Bunyan and Lanyer prove the merits of the works in their “divine confirmation” they must also prove their worth by the movement they make upon the reader. Both Bunyan and Lanyer recognize their need to effect their readers, to impart a pilgrimage of sorts in the reader experience they offer. As Sir Phillip Sidney appropriates in his Defense of Poesy, it is the authoritative duty of the poet to “both to delight and teach, and delight to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger; and teach to make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved” (10). Just as a dream offers that aforementioned religious ascension, so do Bunyan’s and Lanyer’s text over a spiritual and political religious journey, respectively. Introduced explicitly as a Christian’s pilgrimage to salvation, Bunyan makes clear from the very beginning his intensions for movement and guidance throughout the allegory. In a method used “beginning with Luther, Protestants asserted scriptural authority in opposition to traditional ecclesiastical authority. Standing on what John Bunyan called the “plain and simple words” of the Bible” (Goldman 461), Bunyan utilizes his command of scripture to offer a religious lesson that perpetuates itself throughout the pilgrims’ (both the character’s and the reader’s) ascension to heaven. By keeping this ascension in the realm of a dream, Bunyan can inverse reality by use of allegory without sacrificing the truth his wishes to impart. His goal is to move the Christian and his reader from his temporal home on earth surrounded by sin and desire to his destined home with God, and does so by ensuring the correct reading of his text, so that by the completion of the journey, the Christian and the reader are eternally one and the same.
As a female writer praising the Christian God while simultaneous criticizing both society’s class and gender stratifications, Lanyer uses and substantiates her divine authority and command of scripture in a different kind of movement: she elevates the role of women in Christianity’s tradition from their blame in the Original Sin to their role in the passion in which she actually eventually places women on the level if not above man (and even Jesus Christ himself). In her “Defense of Eve,” Lanyer uses scripture in a way similar to the mechanics of Milton, re-telling Genesis in a way that fits her argument where Eve should not be blame for her ignorance, but rather Adam at fault since he was blessed with intellectual dominion (ll. 769-778). Likewise, she inverts man as the source of woman to woman as the source of man, which began following the original sin. In the coming of Christ, therefore, man and woman find themselves on an equal playing field, as each are derived from one another (as Eve is from Adam’s rib but Christ is born of woman through immaculate conception) and equal under God; however, the passion changes all of this, and propels, at least in Lanyer’s argument, women above men. While Pontius Pilate “is to judge the cause of faultless Jesus” (ll. 745-746), his wife again through a dream, is credited as begging for Jesus’s life (ll. 751-752). Furthermore, Lanyer argues that “when spiteful men with torments did oppress/ The afflicted body of this innocent dove” (ll. 993-994), those “most blessed daughters of Jerusalem (ll. 985) were there at the Cross. We see in Lanyer’s movement through scripture that she simultaneously calls for the elevation of the status of women as judged in Christian tradition, and calls on her readership to elevate themselves to the authority she attributes to them. As Ben Jonson writes in his poem, “On Lucy, Countess of Bedford” (where Bunyan is actually from), reality must reflect art, so that rather than art imitating life as Sidney and others propose, the teaching through art actually calls on life to imitate art (Jonson 148). Her text becomes a manifestation of her struggle “for the public recognition of her authorial right to shape the commonwealth” (Tinkham 53) as well as the means by which she intends to prove that right.
All of these writers concerned with the value of their text -- from Donne and Milton, to Shakespeare, Jonson, Sidney and the two discussed her, Bunyan and Lanyer -- identify the elements that attributed to the transcendent nature of both writing and reading. It is not only the text itself that finds immortality in its simultaneous physicality and vitality, but the writers themselves and the readers who engage in and interpret them. In his sonnets, Shakespeare argues time and time again that poetry gives live to the poem’s subject,. He tells his readers that the lines, in their very physicality, immortalize the reader: “In eternal lines to time thou growest:/ So long as men can breathe and eyes can see,/ So long lives this and this gives life to thee” (Sonnet 18 ll. 12-14). While writers find their own immortality through creation off texts, much as man finds immortality in a sense through reproduction, the creations themselves find mortality through an active readership that keeps them alive. The Bible, the ultimate living, breathing document that holds the word of the divine, transcends not solely because of its religious Gospel, but because of those who believe in its legitimacy and engage with it in active interpretation.
The authority Lanyer and Bunyan seek in their religious conversations, as well as that sought out by their contemporaries, is found in the immortality of the text itself, as Milton argues all literature is fit for print, at least until discerned otherwise (562). But by claiming divine authorization, both writers take their texts a step farther in their reflection of the religious reformation that surrounded them. While the papal doctrine called for a black and white text in the Bible, one that was closed for new insight and interpretation, Protestantism intrigued its followers not to be passive listenings but active readers. Bunyan and Lanyer justified their authority themselves not in necessarily being orators for the divine, but for their dissemination of reason brought on by their own active interrogation with Biblical texts and ideas. Bunyan points out this very idea his apology for The Pilgrim’s Progress, as he defends his use of allegory by paralelling it with the Bible: if metaphor is accoladed in the Bible, there is no reason for critics to ridicule metaphor in his own works. Ironically, Bunyan calls out here the very reason he does not need authority outside of his own merit. As the Gospel preaches its word in religious allegory to instruct its followers, it perpetuates its own vitality, just as Bunyan intends to do by seeking divine compliment, as “happy is he that finds the light, and the grace that in them be” (Bunyan 3). While his and Lanyer’s lengths to prove their abilities show their hopes for creating immortal works that impart enlightened reason, “the eye of God” (Milton564), the criticism or doubt that cause them worry are the very sources that give them legitimacy and immortality. While writers of their time, including Donne and Shakespeare themselves, deal with the misreading of their works and the critics who shun them, it is this irreconcilable open interpretation that sustains their works and their names in those works. While seeking religious authority may have given Bunyan and Lanyer legitimacy to the religious readers and the writers’ critics in the era of the Reformation, their engagement in the nature of intertextuality and the reading and writing experiences themselves gave them literary authority they sought.
Works Cited
Bunyan,
Goldman, Peter. “Living Words: Iconoclasm and Beyond in John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding.” New Literary History. V. 33. No. 3.Summer 2002, 461-489.
Hinson, E. Glenn. “The Progression of Grace: A Re-Reading of Pilgrim’s Progress. Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality. October 2003, 233-256.
Lanyer, Aemilia. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Susanne Woods, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Machosky, Brenda. “Trope and Truth in The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900. V. 47. No. 1.Winter 2007, 179-198.
Milton, John. “Areopagitica.” Broadview anthology of seventeenth-century verse & prose. Peterborough, Ont: Broadview, 561-588.
Ng, Su Fang. “Aemilia Lanyer and the Politics of Praise.” ELH. C. 56. No. 2. Summer 2000, 433-451.
Sidney, Sir Phillip. Defense of Poesy. Boston: Ginn & Company, 1890.
Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 18.”
Tinkham, Audrey E. “Owning in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.” Studies in Philology. V. 106. No. 1. Winter 2009, 52-75.
[1]
Esther Richey 11/15/09 7:39 AM DATE \@ "M/d/yy h:mm AM/PM"
Are you sure it said Paul?
[2]
Esther Richey 11/18/09 6:28 AM DATE \@ "M/d/yy h:mm AM/PM"
His name is John.
“Waiting at ‘Death’s Twilight: Donne, Herbert and Predestination”
“Love bade me welcome: yet I my soul drew back, guilty of dust and sin.”
— George Herbert, “Love (III)”
During the Reformation, people found themselves suspended in a theology limbo, torn between the religion of the past and present, and looking into what this era of religious turmoil would mean for them. Among the defining changes of this time was the introduction of a belief in predestination, which meant an unfamiliar loss of agency in one’s own salvation for many accustomed to a more interactive doctrine. While John Donne in the sixteenth century finds himself in a sort of spiritual confusion in dealing with this shift, George Herbert in the seventeenth century is more at terms with man’s vulnerability to divine grace, though he still utilizes similar mechanics and language to express the experience of divine possession and interaction. As Herbert and Donne examine their own spirituality and the intimate relationship between the divine and mankind, which becomes even more complex through the incarnation of God through Jesus Christ, each poet develops analogous religious and secular verses to depict this shift of power caused by predestination and the replacement of virtue with grace as the gateway into heaven.
In “Satire III,” Donne struggles with the state of the soul under the doctrine of predestination as he fears, or even actually observes, his society’s simultaneous disregard for the moral-driven life. In examination of this work especially along with Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 14” and “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day” being the shortest day, we find a reiterated conflict in this system in which “we no longer have to exercise those tedious virtues of patience, perseverance, and constancy” (Newman 1) that constitute an existence based on one’s honorable life. Donne juxtaposes religion and virtue in his “Satire III” to show that the church has changed, as the religious path is not synonymous or even necessarily inclusive of the virtuous path, as he asks, “Is not our mistress fair Religion,/ As worthy of all our soul’s devotion,/ As virtue was to the first blinded age?” (ll. 5-7). Here Donne yearns for the practices of the past, hinting that those of the “blinded age” were actually closer to understanding the union between the morality and spirituality of the soul, despite or because of the supposed lack of light in pre-Reformation Christianity. Throughout the poem, Donne seems conflicted between embracing the light of his age and holding on to pre-Calvinist theology, offering a text that presents itself at times as a soliloquy, particularly in lines such as “I must” (ll. 1) and the pattern of hypothetical questions, “Is not our mistress fair Religion,/ As worthy” (ll. 5-6) and, “Are not the heaven’s joys as valiant to assuage/ Lusts, as earth’s honour was to them?” (ll. 8-9). It is significant that his expression lacks the assertive quality of a confident sermon, because he offers no confirmations, to himself or a listening audience, and rather than asking what is, he asks what is not. As Donne works through “Satire III,” however, his language slowly adopts the authoritative voice of a sermon as to encourage his listeners to look inside themselves for the answers to the conflicting questions of one’s own place under God, as he does himself throughout the text (ll. 80-84).
The Calvinism that lingered throughout the Church of England during Donne’s life said people “could no longer access the divine through the church’s institution” (Guibbory 234), as God’s selected elect were predestined and out of human control. In this theology, a person’s deeds in their lifetime, both good and bad, have no bearing on the ultimate fate after death, and Donne’s poetry illustrates his struggle with this lack of control in which man’s goodwill, honor, and worth lose all bargaining power for “death’s twilight” (Satire III ll. 83). While he goes back and forth encouraging his reader to seek out truth and true religion, in the end “thy soul rest, for none can work in that night” (ll. 84) where God is the ultimate divine reader and has total agency in the final judgment. Throughout much of Donne’s religious literature, he loses himself in a lamentation of sorts over the lack of purpose in an inconsequential relationship between one’s “shrunk/ Dead and interred” (Nocturnal ll. 7-8) life and predetermined afterlife. If Donne alludes to judgment as “death’s twilight,” as he does in his satire, then the nocturnal which “both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight” (ll. 45) is acts as Donne’s purgatory, a place of pure nothingness in between death and the afterlife in which he has no control. Throughout “Nocturnal,” Donne wallows in an abyss of emptiness as he goes to the point of seeing himself as a carcass or “grave,” seeming devoid of “life, soul, form, spirit” (ll. 20) and even suggests blaming God for this sense of emptiness and almost abandonment he feels after the loss of the woman he loves. What is interesting yet is the parallel between his anxiety over separation from his passed lover and that between himself and his soul; as Carol Marks Sicherman notes in Donne’s Discoveries, Donne feels “no relation between his spiritual numbness and his biological life” (Sicherman 81) in this seclusion in which he places and finds himself:
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruined me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death — things which are not. (Nocturnal, ll. 12-18)
While Donne is mourning over the death of his lover, it’s important not to overlook the mirroring of human relationships with those of the divine, a metaphysical sequence Donne takes on throughout his various works. His “interpenetration of the secular and religious world” not only marks this constant duality in physical and spiritual relationships, hence the metaphysical nature of his works, but it also acts as evidence of Donne’s conflict with what he sees as a distancing between himself and God in the predestination doctrine. “Love” in this poem is God, a name that portrays a certain type of intimate relationship with the Majestic, and he says that God “wrought new alchemy” and that the speaker is now “re-begot” of “a quintessence even from nothingness.” Taking a look into the language, we see find this attitude of anger, resentment, and even accusation as God takes away what he has blessed onto man in the first place. His use of language with “alchemy” and “quintessence” suggest a metaphor in which God distilled his soul, infusing his body with a celestial substance, and then robbing him of that very metaphysical ownership: on one level his secular relationship, and on the other his spiritual life and agency (OED).
Donne yearns for a closer, more intimate relationship with God, which may be represented most effectively in his “Holy Sonnet 14” where he begins by pleading to God, “Batter my heart” (ll. 1). He yearns not for a religious relationship in which his interaction with God is limited to an election made separate from him, but a relationship that requires, or at least entertains, a spiritual conversation. As Donne works through the limitations his beliefs impose on humanity, he looks into a relationship of mutual limitations between mankind and the divine, but one that still allows closeness. It is this call for an interaction infused with his theatrics as an animated preacher that develop the language of Donne’s sonnet, as well as other fervent religious poetry. The interaction he calls for here is not simply a marriage but a metaphysical penetration: “Take me to you, imprison me, for I,/ Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,/ Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me” (ll. 12-14). “Ravish” has multiple definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary, and more than one of them fits this poem. The more obvious definition here is rape, which fits the brutal acts implicated in the poem’s context, but ravish can also be defined as to “transport with the strength of some emotion” or “to fill with ecstacy, intense delight, or enrapture” (OED). In the theme of duality, this final plea of interaction can take on both meanings, and bridge the duplicitous sexuality and spirituality of Donne’s consummation with God.
As Donne’s religious poetry comes from a place of uncertainty and profound inner-self confliction, his language presents a profane and provocative spiritual union. The concept of the relationship between God and man as a marriage or even on the level of comparing the religious experience to the sexual is not unique to Donne; Herbert writes a similar metaphor in his own religious poem, “Love (III). Like “Love” in Donne’s “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day,” Herbert names God “Love,” introducing this spiritual being as an intimate partner or host — it is substantial to note that God is not gender-specific in this work nor in any of Donne’s works depicted here. Herbert’s poem works as a spiritual and sensual poem as well, but it takes on a different attitude than that of Donne. While Donne’s spiritual intercourse is a violent ravishing, Herbert introduces a kind, seductive host that bades, draws in, and takes the speaker by the hand “smilingly,” pulling him in (ll. 1, 5, 11). Calvin supports a unity of physicality to spirituality in this incarnation, specifically the Eucharist: the actually consumption of Christ’s body makes one more like Christ, bringing him or her closer to God. Herbert’s host suggests a divine host inviting the speaker in to participate in the Eucharist (ll. 17-18), but also takes it on the sensual level. While it may be easy to dismiss phallic symbols found in religious literature; instead of looking down on these extractions, exploring them actually shows how the merging of the two spheres, the sexual and the spiritual, enhance an understanding of both. The incarnation of Christ, the moment in history when God became not only a spiritual but physical being as well, united these fronts and acted as a “primary example of divine accommodation” between God and mankind, “the divine appearing in human form” (Williams 13). While Donne’s speaker is alone and pleads for a violent ravishing by God, Herbert’s speaker is seduced by a Love, who also participates and initiates the conversation of the poem. The speaker in Herbert’s poem shares a conflicted attitude over predestination, but it does not lay in lack of agency but in a sinful nature that shames him and makes him feel unworthy (ll. 7) and “guilty of dust and sin (ll. 2). It is this sense of unworthiness — like Donne, Herbert struggles with grace’s replacement of virtue, finding himself undeserving of heaven though God has predestined him to be there — that finds Herbert’s speaking “grow slack from [his] first entrance in” and lacking a guest, in his eyes, worthy to be with God (ll. 3-7).
Unlike the distanced God being pulled in by Donne, Herbert’s God pulls in the sinner in predestination. Juxtaposing the two texts and the authors behind them, we see that Christ’s sacrifice, which allows for predestination, “restores humanity through that very same sensuous beauty that, at other times, can draw it away from God” (Blaise). For Donne, predestination trivializes the need for virtue in human existence, at least on the level of one’s election for afterlife. Man’s loss of agency causes a rift between the self and the Creator, as Donne feels bereft of an interactive spiritual relationship. Though Herbert recognizes the implications of this doctrine and similarly finds displacement, as humanity is lost in a nature of sin, his text suggests an acceptance and even comfort in this system of grace as salvation. What Donne touches in “Holy Sonnet 14,” and what Herbert finds in his own poem, is the suggestion of an empowerment in one’s vulnerability under God’s total election. Though Donne struggles with his limitations, he works through finding a sense of responsibility and finds a voice for himself in the sonnet. While God “as yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend” (“Holy Sonnet 14”, ll. 2-3), the speaker is the one to call for action within his own power, that of prayer, as he recognizes God’s own limitations. In their own interrogations of the judgment of worthiness in a system of divine grace of the previously accepted notion of virtue-obtained salvation, Donne and Herbert strive for and arguably find a balance between the physical and spiritual nature of their existence as a subject of God.
Works Cited
Blaise, Anne-Marie Miller. “’Sweetness readie penn’s’: Herbert’s Theology of Beauty.” George Herbert Journal. University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin, 2003. 1-21.
Donne, John. "Holy Sonnet 14." Broadview anthology of seventeenth-century verse & prose. Peterborough, Ont: Broadview, 2000. 124-125.
"A Nocturnal on St. Lucy’s Day." Broadview anthology of seventeenth-century verse & prose. Peterborough, Ont: Broadview, 2000. 112-113.
"Satire III." Broadview anthology of seventeenth-century verse & prose. Peterborough, Ont: Broadview, 2000. 120-122.
Guibbory, Achsah. Early Modern English Poetry. Ed. Patrick Cheney. Oxford: 2007. 229-238/
Herbert, George. "Love III." Broadview anthology of seventeenth-century verse & prose. Peterborough, Ont: Broadview, 2000. 379.
Newman, Barbara. “Rereading John Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnet 14.’” Spiritus 4. John Hopkins University Press, 2004.
Old English Dictionary. www.oedonline.com
Sicherman, Carol Marks. “Donne’s Discoveries.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. Vol. 11. The English Renaissance: 1971. 69-88.
Williams, Anne. “Gravious Accomodations: Herbert’s ‘Love III.’ Modern Philology. V. 82 No. 1. University of Chicago Press, Aug. 1984. 13-22.
— George Herbert, “Love (III)”
During the Reformation, people found themselves suspended in a theology limbo, torn between the religion of the past and present, and looking into what this era of religious turmoil would mean for them. Among the defining changes of this time was the introduction of a belief in predestination, which meant an unfamiliar loss of agency in one’s own salvation for many accustomed to a more interactive doctrine. While John Donne in the sixteenth century finds himself in a sort of spiritual confusion in dealing with this shift, George Herbert in the seventeenth century is more at terms with man’s vulnerability to divine grace, though he still utilizes similar mechanics and language to express the experience of divine possession and interaction. As Herbert and Donne examine their own spirituality and the intimate relationship between the divine and mankind, which becomes even more complex through the incarnation of God through Jesus Christ, each poet develops analogous religious and secular verses to depict this shift of power caused by predestination and the replacement of virtue with grace as the gateway into heaven.
In “Satire III,” Donne struggles with the state of the soul under the doctrine of predestination as he fears, or even actually observes, his society’s simultaneous disregard for the moral-driven life. In examination of this work especially along with Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 14” and “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day” being the shortest day, we find a reiterated conflict in this system in which “we no longer have to exercise those tedious virtues of patience, perseverance, and constancy” (Newman 1) that constitute an existence based on one’s honorable life. Donne juxtaposes religion and virtue in his “Satire III” to show that the church has changed, as the religious path is not synonymous or even necessarily inclusive of the virtuous path, as he asks, “Is not our mistress fair Religion,/ As worthy of all our soul’s devotion,/ As virtue was to the first blinded age?” (ll. 5-7). Here Donne yearns for the practices of the past, hinting that those of the “blinded age” were actually closer to understanding the union between the morality and spirituality of the soul, despite or because of the supposed lack of light in pre-Reformation Christianity. Throughout the poem, Donne seems conflicted between embracing the light of his age and holding on to pre-Calvinist theology, offering a text that presents itself at times as a soliloquy, particularly in lines such as “I must” (ll. 1) and the pattern of hypothetical questions, “Is not our mistress fair Religion,/ As worthy” (ll. 5-6) and, “Are not the heaven’s joys as valiant to assuage/ Lusts, as earth’s honour was to them?” (ll. 8-9). It is significant that his expression lacks the assertive quality of a confident sermon, because he offers no confirmations, to himself or a listening audience, and rather than asking what is, he asks what is not. As Donne works through “Satire III,” however, his language slowly adopts the authoritative voice of a sermon as to encourage his listeners to look inside themselves for the answers to the conflicting questions of one’s own place under God, as he does himself throughout the text (ll. 80-84).
The Calvinism that lingered throughout the Church of England during Donne’s life said people “could no longer access the divine through the church’s institution” (Guibbory 234), as God’s selected elect were predestined and out of human control. In this theology, a person’s deeds in their lifetime, both good and bad, have no bearing on the ultimate fate after death, and Donne’s poetry illustrates his struggle with this lack of control in which man’s goodwill, honor, and worth lose all bargaining power for “death’s twilight” (Satire III ll. 83). While he goes back and forth encouraging his reader to seek out truth and true religion, in the end “thy soul rest, for none can work in that night” (ll. 84) where God is the ultimate divine reader and has total agency in the final judgment. Throughout much of Donne’s religious literature, he loses himself in a lamentation of sorts over the lack of purpose in an inconsequential relationship between one’s “shrunk/ Dead and interred” (Nocturnal ll. 7-8) life and predetermined afterlife. If Donne alludes to judgment as “death’s twilight,” as he does in his satire, then the nocturnal which “both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight” (ll. 45) is acts as Donne’s purgatory, a place of pure nothingness in between death and the afterlife in which he has no control. Throughout “Nocturnal,” Donne wallows in an abyss of emptiness as he goes to the point of seeing himself as a carcass or “grave,” seeming devoid of “life, soul, form, spirit” (ll. 20) and even suggests blaming God for this sense of emptiness and almost abandonment he feels after the loss of the woman he loves. What is interesting yet is the parallel between his anxiety over separation from his passed lover and that between himself and his soul; as Carol Marks Sicherman notes in Donne’s Discoveries, Donne feels “no relation between his spiritual numbness and his biological life” (Sicherman 81) in this seclusion in which he places and finds himself:
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruined me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death — things which are not. (Nocturnal, ll. 12-18)
While Donne is mourning over the death of his lover, it’s important not to overlook the mirroring of human relationships with those of the divine, a metaphysical sequence Donne takes on throughout his various works. His “interpenetration of the secular and religious world” not only marks this constant duality in physical and spiritual relationships, hence the metaphysical nature of his works, but it also acts as evidence of Donne’s conflict with what he sees as a distancing between himself and God in the predestination doctrine. “Love” in this poem is God, a name that portrays a certain type of intimate relationship with the Majestic, and he says that God “wrought new alchemy” and that the speaker is now “re-begot” of “a quintessence even from nothingness.” Taking a look into the language, we see find this attitude of anger, resentment, and even accusation as God takes away what he has blessed onto man in the first place. His use of language with “alchemy” and “quintessence” suggest a metaphor in which God distilled his soul, infusing his body with a celestial substance, and then robbing him of that very metaphysical ownership: on one level his secular relationship, and on the other his spiritual life and agency (OED).
Donne yearns for a closer, more intimate relationship with God, which may be represented most effectively in his “Holy Sonnet 14” where he begins by pleading to God, “Batter my heart” (ll. 1). He yearns not for a religious relationship in which his interaction with God is limited to an election made separate from him, but a relationship that requires, or at least entertains, a spiritual conversation. As Donne works through the limitations his beliefs impose on humanity, he looks into a relationship of mutual limitations between mankind and the divine, but one that still allows closeness. It is this call for an interaction infused with his theatrics as an animated preacher that develop the language of Donne’s sonnet, as well as other fervent religious poetry. The interaction he calls for here is not simply a marriage but a metaphysical penetration: “Take me to you, imprison me, for I,/ Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,/ Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me” (ll. 12-14). “Ravish” has multiple definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary, and more than one of them fits this poem. The more obvious definition here is rape, which fits the brutal acts implicated in the poem’s context, but ravish can also be defined as to “transport with the strength of some emotion” or “to fill with ecstacy, intense delight, or enrapture” (OED). In the theme of duality, this final plea of interaction can take on both meanings, and bridge the duplicitous sexuality and spirituality of Donne’s consummation with God.
As Donne’s religious poetry comes from a place of uncertainty and profound inner-self confliction, his language presents a profane and provocative spiritual union. The concept of the relationship between God and man as a marriage or even on the level of comparing the religious experience to the sexual is not unique to Donne; Herbert writes a similar metaphor in his own religious poem, “Love (III). Like “Love” in Donne’s “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day,” Herbert names God “Love,” introducing this spiritual being as an intimate partner or host — it is substantial to note that God is not gender-specific in this work nor in any of Donne’s works depicted here. Herbert’s poem works as a spiritual and sensual poem as well, but it takes on a different attitude than that of Donne. While Donne’s spiritual intercourse is a violent ravishing, Herbert introduces a kind, seductive host that bades, draws in, and takes the speaker by the hand “smilingly,” pulling him in (ll. 1, 5, 11). Calvin supports a unity of physicality to spirituality in this incarnation, specifically the Eucharist: the actually consumption of Christ’s body makes one more like Christ, bringing him or her closer to God. Herbert’s host suggests a divine host inviting the speaker in to participate in the Eucharist (ll. 17-18), but also takes it on the sensual level. While it may be easy to dismiss phallic symbols found in religious literature; instead of looking down on these extractions, exploring them actually shows how the merging of the two spheres, the sexual and the spiritual, enhance an understanding of both. The incarnation of Christ, the moment in history when God became not only a spiritual but physical being as well, united these fronts and acted as a “primary example of divine accommodation” between God and mankind, “the divine appearing in human form” (Williams 13). While Donne’s speaker is alone and pleads for a violent ravishing by God, Herbert’s speaker is seduced by a Love, who also participates and initiates the conversation of the poem. The speaker in Herbert’s poem shares a conflicted attitude over predestination, but it does not lay in lack of agency but in a sinful nature that shames him and makes him feel unworthy (ll. 7) and “guilty of dust and sin (ll. 2). It is this sense of unworthiness — like Donne, Herbert struggles with grace’s replacement of virtue, finding himself undeserving of heaven though God has predestined him to be there — that finds Herbert’s speaking “grow slack from [his] first entrance in” and lacking a guest, in his eyes, worthy to be with God (ll. 3-7).
Unlike the distanced God being pulled in by Donne, Herbert’s God pulls in the sinner in predestination. Juxtaposing the two texts and the authors behind them, we see that Christ’s sacrifice, which allows for predestination, “restores humanity through that very same sensuous beauty that, at other times, can draw it away from God” (Blaise). For Donne, predestination trivializes the need for virtue in human existence, at least on the level of one’s election for afterlife. Man’s loss of agency causes a rift between the self and the Creator, as Donne feels bereft of an interactive spiritual relationship. Though Herbert recognizes the implications of this doctrine and similarly finds displacement, as humanity is lost in a nature of sin, his text suggests an acceptance and even comfort in this system of grace as salvation. What Donne touches in “Holy Sonnet 14,” and what Herbert finds in his own poem, is the suggestion of an empowerment in one’s vulnerability under God’s total election. Though Donne struggles with his limitations, he works through finding a sense of responsibility and finds a voice for himself in the sonnet. While God “as yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend” (“Holy Sonnet 14”, ll. 2-3), the speaker is the one to call for action within his own power, that of prayer, as he recognizes God’s own limitations. In their own interrogations of the judgment of worthiness in a system of divine grace of the previously accepted notion of virtue-obtained salvation, Donne and Herbert strive for and arguably find a balance between the physical and spiritual nature of their existence as a subject of God.
Works Cited
Blaise, Anne-Marie Miller. “’Sweetness readie penn’s’: Herbert’s Theology of Beauty.” George Herbert Journal. University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin, 2003. 1-21.
Donne, John. "Holy Sonnet 14." Broadview anthology of seventeenth-century verse & prose. Peterborough, Ont: Broadview, 2000. 124-125.
"A Nocturnal on St. Lucy’s Day." Broadview anthology of seventeenth-century verse & prose. Peterborough, Ont: Broadview, 2000. 112-113.
"Satire III." Broadview anthology of seventeenth-century verse & prose. Peterborough, Ont: Broadview, 2000. 120-122.
Guibbory, Achsah. Early Modern English Poetry. Ed. Patrick Cheney. Oxford: 2007. 229-238/
Herbert, George. "Love III." Broadview anthology of seventeenth-century verse & prose. Peterborough, Ont: Broadview, 2000. 379.
Newman, Barbara. “Rereading John Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnet 14.’” Spiritus 4. John Hopkins University Press, 2004.
Old English Dictionary. www.oedonline.com
Sicherman, Carol Marks. “Donne’s Discoveries.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. Vol. 11. The English Renaissance: 1971. 69-88.
Williams, Anne. “Gravious Accomodations: Herbert’s ‘Love III.’ Modern Philology. V. 82 No. 1. University of Chicago Press, Aug. 1984. 13-22.