Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  * * *

  *1 All quotations from the edict are contained in an excellent translation from the Castilian, by Edward Peters, provided online by the Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture, http://www.sephardicstudies.org/​decree.html. The translation is based on the fullest version of the original text, Documentos acerca de la expulsión de los Judios, edited by Louis Suárez-Fernández.

  *2 The Singing Nun is not to be confused with the sixties’ American television series titled The Flying Nun, starring the young Sally Field. The nun who recorded “Dominique” was a Belgian, Soeur Sourire, who sang in French. Field did not sing (at least not well), but she did fly with the aid of television’s then primitive special effects.

  · PART III ·

  REFORMATIONS

  7

  JOHN DONNE (1572–1631)

  To our bodies turn we then, that so

  Weak men on love revealed may look;

  Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,

  But yet the body is his book.

  —“THE ECSTASY”

  Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for, you

  As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

  That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

  Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new…

  Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,

  Take me to you, imprison me, for I

  Except you enthral me, never shall be free,

  Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

  —“DIVINE MEDITATIONS,” 14

  JOHN DONNE was the first great English-language writer to ally himself openly and unequivocally with Protestantism. His choice of the Protestant Church of England over the Roman Catholic faith in which he was raised was one of the two most significant decisions of his life—the other being what was considered a socially unsuitable marriage for love. Absent conversion to Protestantism, the poet would never have become the dean of Saint Paul’s in London and one of the most influential preachers of his era. He would doubtless have been a great poet regardless of his religion, although he might not have lived as long had he chosen Catholicism at a dangerous time in England for those who adhered to the old faith.*1

  Donne was born in 1572, fourteen years after the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I ascended the throne and sixteen years before the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The Donnes were a family of Roman Catholics known as recusants—those who considered the pope in Rome, not the English monarch, the head of the only true church. Donne’s childhood and adolescence took place during a period of intense religious controversy and suspicion, as Elizabeth struggled to consolidate the gains of the Protestant reformed church while many who remained loyal to the old faith still longed for a reconciliation with Rome that would replace Elizabeth (presumably by killing her) with her Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. Elizabeth herself was a Protestant moderate, more interested that her subjects behave in a fashion loyal to the Crown (and not openly contemptuous of the English church) than she was in the fine points of doctrine. She once described the dispute of theologians, over which so much blood had already been shed, as “ropes of sand or sea-slime leading to the moon.”1 As one scholar sums up the situation, “From Donne’s earliest childhood, the fight over God was everywhere.”2 It was everywhere within England, everywhere in Europe, and everywhere between the Protestant and Catholic European powers. Donne himself would play a bit part in the military struggle over religion, when he joined an English expedition in 1596 to capture the Spanish Catholic city of Cádiz.

  Today, lovers of Donne’s poetry are unlikely to give much thought to him as a religious convert or warrior (albeit a halfhearted one), mainly because the secular love poems of the wild, seductive young Jack Donne are much better known—and much more suited to modern sensibilities—than the religious explorations of his later poems. However, all of Donne’s most famous sensual poems deal, on some level, with the relationship between body and soul. “The Ecstasy,” which Donne probably wrote for his wife, Anne, whom he married secretly in 1601 against her father’s wishes, is a passionate man’s poem of both spiritual love and carnality.*2 It is also a statement of the mind-body problem that has more in common with Spinoza, whose Ethics lay three-quarters of a century in the future, than with Augustine, to whom Donne has often been compared. “Divine Meditations,” by contrast, was written by an older, more intensely and overtly religious man, who, after converting to the Protestant, state-established Church of England, became a priest and one of the most admired clerical orators of his time.*3 Here he does sound like Augustine, who was certain that only divine grace could suppress shameful bodily urges. The body is no longer the book upon which the soul’s love is written, but an object that can be purified only through the overwhelming force of God—“except you ravish me.” Or, as Augustine put it, “Our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.” The contrast, and conflict, between Donne the poetic student of the body and the priestly Donne lasted a lifetime, because the older poet-priest wrote as precise an anatomy of the sick and dying corpus as the young man had of the sensual body at the height of health and desire.

  •

  Donne’s father was a successful, rich ironmonger who, although he died when John was only four years old, left enough money to provide the best possible education for his children (at least, for his two boys). In an England ruled by a queen who had declared that she had no desire to “make windows into men’s souls,” an English family could remain true to its Catholic roots—although its male members could not aspire to any significant state office—as long as its religious practices were private and did not involve an attempt to convert others or plot against the monarch. Donne’s father seems to have been that sort of circumspect Catholic.

  The maternal side of Donne’s family, however, belonged to the unreconciled branch of Roman Catholicism. Elizabeth Heywood Donne, John’s mother, was a great-niece of Thomas More, the Catholic chancellor of England executed by Henry VIII in 1535 for refusing to recognize the king as head of the church. More, canonized in 1935, was already considered a martyr by English Catholics at the time of Donne’s birth. Donne’s maternal grandfather, John Heywood, a singer and comedian at Henry’s court, was actually convicted of treason and condemned to die in 1542 after becoming involved in a plot against the powerful archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer (who had first obliged his king by declaring his marriage to Anne Boleyn ecclesiastically valid and then, three years later, by declaring it invalid so that Anne could be executed and Henry could marry his new favorite, Jane Seymour). Heywood, whose performances had apparently pleased Henry in happier days, was pardoned by the king at the last minute, after he had already been brought from the Tower of London to the execution ground at Tyburn.

  Nor had the Heywood family’s involvement in what was defined as treason come to an end by the time of Donne’s birth. Donne’s uncle Jasper Heywood had fled the country and become a Jesuit in Rome. In 1581, when his nephew was nine, Jasper returned to England after meeting Father Edmund Campion, who had already secretly entered the country in order to encourage the recusants. By then, Jesuits were banned from England altogether. Jasper was arrested in 1583, along with five other priests, and, like his father, convicted of treason and sentenced to death. But—again like his father—he was allowed to live, and his sentence was commuted, certainly by order of the queen herself, to exile. He died in Naples—not a terrible fate for one who might have perished as his friend Campion did in 1581, by being drawn, quartered, and having his sexual organs cut off at Tyburn. Campion was arrested, tried, and convicted of treason after several hundred copies of his pamphlet, Ten Reasons (against the Church of England), were found on benches at the 1581 commencement ceremony of Saint Mary’s College, Oxford. These were the years when Elizabeth was receiving many reports (some true) of plots against her life, with the ultimate aim of placing Mary on the throne. The issue was not settled definitively until an indecisive Elizabe
th finally signed the order for Mary’s execution in 1587, just a year before the Spanish Armada sailed against England and united most of its citizens behind their Protestant queen. The wreck of the Armada, greatly aided by a fierce storm at sea, was regarded by the English as a sign of God’s providence and approval, not only of their nation but of their reformed religion. This defining event in the history of England would surely have made a powerful impression on the sixteen-year-old Donne.

  Given the religious affiliations of Donne’s mother, it is all but certain that he was privately baptized and instructed in the teachings of the old faith. Many of those basic doctrines did not differ greatly from the theology of the Church of England, which—like Roman Catholicism—accepted the stain of original sin and that perennial religious conversation stopper the Holy Trinity. What the Church of England did not recognize was the supremacy, religious or secular, of the pope in Rome. There were other differences as well—the ascendancy of the vernacular over Latin in English church rituals; a lessened emphasis on saints and the role of the Virgin Mary; and, most of all, an affinity for, if not total agreement with, Calvin’s acceptance of the Augustinian view of divine grace, not free will to do good works, as the key element in salvation. Article 9 of the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, ratified at a convocation in 1564, even takes a swipe at the forgotten Pelagius (whose works were as unknown to the average sixteenth-century Englishman as they are to the average churchgoer in the United States and Europe today). “Original Sin standeth not in the following of Adam, (as the Pelagians do vainly talk), but it is the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man, that naturally is ingendered in the offspring of Adam; whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the spirit….”3

  However, the Church of England was always a halfway house between Roman Catholicism and Puritanism and would remain closer, in many respects, to both of those branches of Christianity than to the more liberal, individualistic Protestant sects, such as the Quakers, that began to proliferate in the seventeenth century. The views on predestination laid out in the crucial Article 17 of the Articles of Religion never approached the absolute belief in divinely determined damnation or salvation from birth that led to (or at least provided one doctrinal rather than political excuse for) the religious wars between Puritans and the adherents to the established English church in the seventeenth century. The article declares that “godly consideration of Predestination, and our Election in Christ, is full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to godly persons, and such as feel in themselves the working of the Spirit of Christ, mortifying the works of the flesh,…and drawing up their mind to high and heavenly things…because it doth fervently kindle their love towards God.” Yet it would be wrong, according to the article, for “curious and carnal persons” to behave in an ungodly fashion because they “have continually before their eyes the sentence of God’s Predestination.” In other words, faithful communicants of the English church are bound, exactly as a Roman Catholic is, to act as if good works matter and to behave well in this life if they desire eternal life. There is not a word in this compromise theology, despite the church’s affirmation of the doctrine of original sin, to make any Protestant English parent worry that his or her baby, sleeping peacefully in the crib, might already be damned for all eternity. Many of the articles, based on earlier drafts by Cranmer and approved by the Queen, were deliberately designed to provide a middle path for those within the realm who held differing interpretations of church doctrine. But even as new Protestant sects emerged and diverged widely on doctrinal matters, “batter my heart, three-personed God” would remain a sentiment that the Church of England and the Church of Rome could share, whether one emphasized “batter” or “three-personed.”

  •

  The date of Donne’s conversion is unknown, since it was certainly a process rather than a Pauline bolt from the sky or the sort of specific occasion described by Augustine in Confessions. In any case, there would have been no special ceremony. Conversion from Roman Catholicism to the Church of England (the Anglican Communion today)—or vice versa—does not require “rebaptism.”*4 There are good biographical reasons to conclude that Donne, in spite of his Catholic background, was more inclined toward Protestantism as a young man than the rest of his family. In 1593, Donne’s brother, Henry, with whom he had studied at Cambridge, died in Newgate Prison, where he was being held on charges of harboring a Jesuit. The following year, Donne accepted his share of Henry’s inheritance.

  In 1596, Donne signed on for the English expedition to Cádiz under the command of Sir Walter Raleigh and Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex and a favorite of Queen Elizabeth (though he would eventually lose his head). It should be noted that Donne paid his own way as a sort of gentleman adventurer—not quite a professional soldier—attached to an enterprise that would, if successful, reward him with stories to tell his children and connections with the right people. Many such expeditions failed (as one of Donne’s later ventures would), but the attack on Cádiz did not. The Catholic city was captured and looted by the English in late June, and the expedition returned home in August. It is highly unlikely that a young man with strong Catholic sympathies, in spite of old family ties and friendships, would have joined this expedition to sack a city in a Catholic nation that, only eight years earlier, had launched a major attack on England. In 1597, his bellicose seafaring adventures concluded, Donne became secretary to Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper of England.*5 This position, though advancing his connections, did not provide him with the financial means to launch an adult life of substance. As the poet and lover approached age thirty, he needed an income sufficient to fund a marriage.

  In 1601, Donne secretly married sixteen-year-old Anne More, the daughter of a well-off Protestant landowner whose economic and social standing was higher than that of the Donnes. The ceremony was performed, with only a few close friends in attendance, by a priest of the Church of England, because Anne’s father, Sir George More, strongly opposed the match. For decades—even after Anne had died in 1617 after giving birth to a stillborn baby (she was pregnant at least twelve times in sixteen years of wedlock), their marriage was summed up by the pun, “John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone.”*6

  What was so terrible about this marriage that Sir George (who later was appointed lord lieutenant of the Tower of London) refused to recognize the union, arranged to have Donne fired from his job as secretary to the Lord Keeper, and even helped engineer the brief arrest of his son-in-law? Money. Or, rather, Donne’s lack of a reliable income. Moreover, Sir George had lost a marital pawn—which all daughters were at the time—who might have increased his own influence and fortune. Then, too, John and Anne had violated church law. Marriages were supposed to take place only after publication of banns in church—and there were no banns, because Anne’s father would never have allowed the wedding to take place. Also, marriages were not supposed to be solemnized during Lent and Advent, and the couple was married in December—which always falls within Advent, because Christmas, unlike Easter, is not a movable feast. Needless to say, these church rules were far from inflexible in view of the undeniable fact that many couples committed the sin of having sex before marriage, and it was better to have a wedding in Advent or Lent than to have a visibly pregnant bride or a baby born too soon to stop tongues from wagging. But Anne More either was not pregnant at the time of her marriage or suffered a miscarriage soon afterward; the couple’s first child was born in 1603. Had she turned up visibly pregnant within a few months of the marriage, her father might have been forced to take a less harsh line toward his son-in-law.

  There has always been controversy, among Donne’s contemporaries as well as scholars for the past four hundred years, about whether the poet married Anne for love or for the status and money he could hope to obtain through an alliance with the More family. The flowering of enduring love poems like “The Ecst
asy,” generally dated from the beginning of John’s relationship with Anne, would argue for love. The clandestine nature of the wedding also provides strong evidence that John knew exactly how angry his new father-in-law would be when he learned about the marriage. He may have hoped that Sir George’s attitude would soften sooner than it did; five years would pass before Anne’s father granted her a marriage settlement of eighty pounds a year—only a portion of what would have been her dowry had she married a man considered suitable by her family. The money enabled the couple to establish a home of their own for the first time; until then, they had moved from place to place, depending on the kindness of friends for shelter.

  Another piece of evidence supporting the case that Donne’s was a love match was his failure to marry again after Anne’s death. He was only forty-five: most men whose wives died in childbirth did remarry, if only to provide a mother for the young children left behind. By then, however, Donne did not have to find a new wife, as most widowers (nobles and commoners alike) did to manage their domestic affairs. In 1615, he had been ordained as a priest and deacon at Saint Paul’s and appointed a royal chaplain. By the command of King James I, he received an honorary doctor of divinity degree from Cambridge. At the time of Anne’s death, the family was living in a well-appointed rectory supplied by the church; a prominent preacher who was a royal favorite did not have to worry about who would take care of his children if he chose not to marry again. It is certainly possible that, even if Donne was still deeply in love with his wife at the time of her death, he decided that he would be able to pursue his own endeavors, both as a writer and an increasingly prominent preacher, without the distraction and demands of a wife (not to mention the possibility that the birth of more children in a new union would inevitably increase those demands).