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The Understanding of Sickness in Donne's Devotions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Jonathan Goldberg
Jonathan Goldberg*
Affiliation:
Temple University
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Extract

While no one would deny that Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions is a unique work of the imagination, critical comment has generally failed to perceive the commonplaces that lie behind Donne's thought. All too often the work has been labeled the 'curious’ product of an ‘anxious and restless mind' when, in fact, Donne's devotional aims lead him to traditional themes and to a view of the self that tends to deny value to personal idiosyncracies. Devotional literature generally demands from both reader and author a kind of impersonality, or better, universality of self. The author of a devotional work focuses on that area of the self in which he and his reader share similar needs: both identify themselves as fallen men, the crucial fact in their self-understanding.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , Winter 1971 , pp. 507 - 517
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1971

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References

1 White, Helen C., English Devotional Literature [Prose] 1600-1640 (Madison, 1931), p. 254 Google Scholar. Stranks, Cf. C. J., Anglican Devotion (London, 1961), p. 65 Google Scholar. For the adjective ‘curious,’ see Simpson, Evelyn, A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne (Oxford, 1948), p. 251 Google Scholar; Le Comte, Edward, Grace to a Witty Sinner (New York, 1965), p. 186 Google Scholar; Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, ed. John Sparrow, ‘Introduction,’ p. xx. Page references to the Devotions within my text refer to this edition. One tradition in which the Devotions has been placed is that of meditation, by Andreasen, N.J. C., ‘Donne's Devotions and the Psychology of Assent,’ MP, 62 (1965), 207–216 Google Scholar, and by Thomas F. Van Laan, ‘John Donne's Devotions and the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises,’ SP, 60 (1963), 191-202. One indication of the flimsiness of these connections is the opposing uses each critic makes of Ignatian techniques.

2 Cited in White, English Devotional Literature, p. 92. For a handling of these matters from the point of view of the ‘conservative Anglican’ tradition, see Webber, Joan, The Eloquent ‘I’ (Madison, 1968), pp. 3–14 Google Scholar, and esp. pp. 34ff., on the generalized I in Donne's Devotions.

3 The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI (London, 1960), pp. 260-261. (Further citations from this edition appear in my text.) Cf. Lancelot Andrewes, Manual of Directions for the Sick, tr. Drake, Richard in Two Answers to Cardinal Perron, and other Miscellaneous Works (Oxford, 1854), p. 181 Google Scholar.

4 See, e.g., The Sycke Mans Salve, London, 1561. Becon first shows the sick man's comforters arousing him from despair by convincing him that God visits him in his illness. Philemon, the principal comforter, presents the sick man with what amounts to some thirty pages (pp. 13-44) of argument and example to win Epaphroditus over to this point of view. For another example, see the opening of A new Boke, Conteyninge An Exhortation to the Sycke, London, 1548.

5 Sermons, ed. Potter, George and Simpson, Evelyn (Berkeley, 1953-1962), x, 80 Google Scholar. Further citations from Donne's sermons appear in the text and refer to this edition. Compare John King's sermon preached upon King James’ recovery from an illness: ‘Sinne, the sicknesse of the soule, is the reall and radical cause of all bodily sicknesse’ (A Sermon of Publicize Thanks-Giving [London, 1619], p. 33). Thomas More, Cf. St., The Four Last Things, ed. Campbell, W. E. & Reed, A. W., The English Works of Sir Thomas More, Vol. 1 (London, 1931), p. 474 Google Scholar; de La Primaudaye, Peter, The French Academie, tr. T. B. (London, 1586), pp. 29–30 Google Scholar; Bayly, Lewis, The Practise of Pietie (London, 1619), pp. 624–625,635.Google Scholar

6 Thomas Becon, Cf., The Physyke of the Soule (London, 1549)Google Scholar, sig. A7V; Sycke Mans Salve, p. 47; Donne, Sermons, in, 83.

7 Donne's style is not illogical: it displays a parataxis best understood through Morris Croll's articles on Senecan style now gathered in Style, Rhetoric and Rhythm, ed. Patrick, J. M., et al., Princeton, 1966 Google Scholar. Donne's style also has a strong place in Christian stylistics (cf. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, tr. “Willard Trask, Garden City, 1957, and Literary Language and Its Public inLate Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, tr.Ralph Manheim, New York, 1965). Donne's parataxis reflects a figural view of reality, and his connections depend upon the Christian metaphors used to present his experience and place it within the context of Christian history. For closer analysis of the style of the Devotions, the final chapter of Joan Webber's Contrary Music (Madison, 1963) remains the best guide.

8 This is Epaphroditus’ experience in the Sycke Mans Salve, pp. 48-60. Robert Filler, Cf., A Treatise Conteining Certain Meditations (London, 1564)Google Scholar, sig. civ; A New Boke, sigs. A3, B3; First and Second Prayer Books, p. 261. The paradox is developed in Phineas Fletcher's Joy in Tribulation (London, 1632), pp. 22-23, and neatly summarized in Steven Jerome's Seaven Helpes to Heaven, 3rd ed. (London, 1620), sig. D4: ‘Afflictions are trials, not punishments if we be sonnes; punishment, and not tryals if we be slaves.'

9 Mabb, John, The Afflicted Mans Vow (London, 1609), p. 11 Google Scholar.

10 This is equally the rhythm of St. Augustine's Confessions and thus a primary ingredient in Christian self-understanding. It is mirrored in Donne's prose and derives from the paradox of sublimitas/humilitas. In style and subject, the Devotions is an imitatio Christi. Cf. Erich Auerbach, Literary Language, pp. 25-66; Mazzeo, J. A., Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies (New York, 1964), pp. 183–193 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 191ff.

11 In the Sycke Mans Salve Becon flattens out the paradox somewhat but does not lose it entirely: ‘the nature and property of God is to wound: before he healeth, to throwe downe: before he lifteth up, to kill: before he quickneth, to condemne: before he saveth’ (p- 373)- Elsewhere, however, Becon is more in tune with the paradox. In The Pomaunder of Prayer (London, 1557/58) the exercise ‘for a pacient and thankefull hart in sickness’ recognizes illness as God's ‘loving scourge’ (sig. D I V ) .

12 Microcosmos (Oxford, 1603), p. 80.

13 The Synagogue, or The Shadow of the Temple (London, 1640), pp. 13-14.

14 To cite all the books which refer to the texts noted would be a prodigious and futile task. Hardly any of the books fail to mention at least one of the texts. Most cite all of them. A partial list of examples might include: Thomas Becon, The Physyke of the Soule, sig. A8; The Pomaunder of Prayer, sigs. c i , DI - DIv; The Solace of the Soule, London, 1548; The Sycke Mans Salve, pp. 70, 373; Maister Beza's Houshold Prayers (London, 1607), sig. H3v; Featley, Daniel, Ancilla Pietatis, or the Hand-Maid to Private Devotion (London, 1626), pp. 516–517 Google Scholar; First and Second Prayer Books, p. 261; Peter de La Primaudaye, French Academic, p. 20; JohnMabb, The Afflicted Mans Vow, p. II ; Parsons, Robert, A Booke of Christen Exercise, Appertaining to Resolution (London, 1585), p. 221 Google Scholar; Rogers, Richard, A Garden of Spirituall Flowers (London, 1610)Google Scholar, sig. E8.

15 Thus, in a popular collection of prayers, Augustine's A Pretious Booke of Heavenlie Meditations (London, 1581), Christ cures sickness since He took upon Himself the sins of mankind: ‘Sick I am, I crie unto The physician; blinde I am, I hasten to the light; I am dead, and I sigh for life. Thou art the physician; thou art the light; the life thou art, 6 Iesus of Nazareth’ (p. 13). Christ is physician in Becon's Sycke Mans Salve, p. 43, and in several of Donne's sermons, e.g., v, 347 and vi, 72.

16 This is Donne's method throughout the expostulations. He constantly seeks out the Biblical text which illuminates his situation and tries to understand his condition by understanding the Biblical figures who anticipated him. While the meditations serve to place Donne in the context of fallen humanity, the expostulations place him in the context of Christian history. Through them, Donne makes himself into a Christian type. Each prayer then understands that type as a figura Christi. For the relationship of Donne's experience to Biblical archetypes, see Mueller, Janel M., ‘The Exegesis of Experience: Dean Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,’ JEGP, 67 (1968), 1–19 Google Scholar.

17 And, it would seem, the speaker becomes the new Adam; thus, in the third prayer he first calls himself God's sacrifice ('me thy Sacrifice,’ p . 14), and later, though a calculated syntactic ambiguity, equates himself with Christ: ‘Doe this, O Lord, for his sake, who did, and suffered so much, that thou mightest, as well in thy Justice, as well as in thy Mercy, doe it for me, thy Sonne, our Saviour, Christ Jesus’ (p. 15).

18 Becon, The Pomaunder of Prayer, sig. DIV. Cf. Sycke Mans Salve, p. 74; Bayly, Practise of Pietie, p. 664. For the theme of recreation (based on Isaiah lxii.2: ‘Thou shalt be called by a new name, which the mouth of the Lord shall name’) see Taylor, Thomas, A Man in Christ, or A new Creature (London, 1629), p. 53 Google Scholar.

19 Andreasen, N.J. C. arrives at similar conclusions in her study of the ‘psychology of assent,’ MP, 62 (1965), 208–209 Google Scholar, 216.

20 Paradoxic! Epidemica (Princeton, 1966), passim, but esp. pp. 28-33. The complex relationship between the personal and universal aspects of the self, and the solution of the tensions between them, is the focus of Richard E. Hughes's illuminating biography of Donne, The Progress of the Soul, New York, 1968.