To John Donne, devotion and writing were inseparable. His belief in God was so profoundly word-centred that, in both his theology and his experience, the practice of religious contemplation and spiritual communion with God always and inevitably involved language. The very principle of creation, according to St. John's Gospel, is the divine ''Word,'' and Donne discerned this ''Logos'' writ large in every aspect of God. As one of the late sermons explains, God the Father created the world by a spoken word: ''God spake, and all things were made.'' God the Son, the second person of the Holy Trinity, is the Word ''made flesh'' (John 1:14), the expression of God's sacred text in human form. God the Holy Ghost, completing the Trinity, is the spirit that ''enables us to apprehend, and apply to our selves, the promises of God in him'' (Sermons, vol. VIII, no. 1, p. 52). The actions of the three persons of the Christian God are here understood entirely in terms of linguistic processes: speech, symbolic expression, and interpretation. In this logocentric universe, Donne conceived of the role of human beings in relation to God in an equally and mutually verbal way: ''God made us with his word, and with our words we make God'' (Sermons, vol. III, no. 12, p. 259). This was not a post-structuralist statement before its time - Donne is not implying that God only exists because he is spoken about by us - but it does indicate just how vital words are in Donne's sense of the human relationship with God.