Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  Anne Donne, dead at age thirty-two and undoubtedly exhausted by repeated childbearing, is simply one of many—most—women tragically lost to history. But she must have been a woman of great spirit and courage to marry a man whose inappropriateness, in the eyes of her father, was certain to deprive her of the social standing and financial comfort to which her family background would ordinarily have entitled her. John Donne wrote no elegy for his wife, and none of her letters to him survive. We may infer, from Donne’s poems to her, that she was unusually educated for a woman of her time, perhaps by sharing in the knowledge that would have been extended to her brothers through private tutors. There is no question that John and Anne’s relationship was intellectual as well as sexual, and that she was acquainted with the scholarship and philosophy of her time in ways that few women were. Donne’s poem “A Valediction: of the Book” clearly conveys his regard for Anne’s learning and intellect.

  Study our manuscripts, those myriads

  Of letters, which have past ’twixt thee and me,

  Thence write our annals, and in them will be

  To all whom love’s subliming fire invades,

  Rule and example found;

  There, the faith of any ground

  No schismatic will dare to wound,

  That sees, how Love this grace to us affords,

  To make, to keep, to use, to be these his records.

  This book, as long lived as the elements,

  Or as the world’s form, this all-graved tome

  In cypher write, or new made idiom;

  We for Love’s clergy only are instruments,

  When this book is made thus,

  Should again the ravenous

  Vandals and Goths inundate us,

  Learning were safe; in this our universe

  Schools might learn sciences, spheres music, angels verse.

  •

  Although we do not know the timing of Donne’s spiritual conversion to the Church of England, his Protestant loyalties had been publicly displayed long before his ordination to the priesthood. In the first decade of the seventeenth century, he became a protégé of Sir Thomas Morton, chaplain to the earl of Rutland and a favorite of James I, who had succeeded to the throne of both England and Scotland (the latter as James VI) after Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603. (The son of the executed Mary, Queen of Scots, James had been raised a Protestant. His rule was characterized by consistent support for the more moderate doctrines of the Church of England over the more radical Puritanism spearheaded by the dour John Knox in his native Scotland.)

  Morton was a leading anti–Roman Catholic polemicist, and he frequently consulted Donne while drafting his manuscripts. Although James was a “moderate” in theological terms, the political split between the Church of England and the “papist” recusants had grown deeper and more bitter since Elizabeth’s death. Shortly after he ascended the throne, James had made an overture to the Vatican that seemed to offer the possibility of liberalization regarding Catholics. Fidelity to Protestantism, James wrote, should “beget no such severity toward those who are otherwise persuaded, but that they may enjoy under us the same fruits of justice, comfort, and safety, which others of our people do, till we shall find that disloyalty is covered with the mask of conscience.”4 The key phrase in this sentence, however, turned out to be “till we shall find that disloyalty is covered with the mask of conscience.” James’s attitudes would harden in 1605 as a result of the infamous Gunpowder Plot, which would have blown up Parliament and killed the king, his sons, and many nobles. The conspirators included Guy Fawkes, a Protestant convert to Roman Catholicism, who, along with other conspirators, rented a cellar underneath the Parliament building and stowed away at least twenty barrels of gunpowder—more than enough to blow up the entire establishment, had the plot not been discovered.*7 Fawkes was convicted of treason and hanged, drawn, and quartered, according to the traditional Christian concept—adhered to by both the Vatican and the Church of England—of the mercy deserved by traitors. After the Gunpowder Plot, King James adopted harsher policies toward recusants than Elizabeth had; pardoning convicted traitors on their way to Tyburn was not his style. Parliament passed a new Oath of Allegiance requiring Catholics to acknowledge that the monarch could not be removed by any papal decree and to “abhor, detest, abjure, as impious and heretical, this damnable doctrine and position, that princes which be excommunicated or deprived by the Pope, may be deposed or murdered by their subjects.” The heart of the matter was that Catholics had to swear not to try to assassinate the English monarch. In the bitter controversy that ensued in the years after the oath became law, Donne sided publicly with the Crown and the English church.

  The affair led, in 1610, to the publication of his first book, Pseudo-Martyr, dedicated to King James. Donne made it clear that, in spite of, or perhaps because of, a family history that included recusants convicted of treason, he held radical Catholics—not the English monarchs or English church—responsible for the misguided choices of his relatives.

  The title itself reflected the bitter contemporary dispute between English Catholics and Protestants over whose martyrs were the real martyrs. Executed Jesuits like Father Campion, the friend of Donne’s uncle Jasper Heywood, and political figures like Thomas More were traitors—pseudo-martyrs—to English Protestants, and saintly heroes to Catholics. Archbishop Cranmer, executed by Mary Tudor, was a martyr to Protestants. To the modern reader, Pseudo-Martyr is a tedious, politically tendentious work; it might be used to make a case that Donne the convert has deservedly been forgotten. The tract should be read not as a spiritual meditation but as the statement of an ambitious man coming out, irreversibly and unmistakably, on the winning side of an ongoing religious and political war. This means not that Donne’s religious convictions were insincere but that they were certainly expedient in that they fell on the side of the victors—the English side. “The king therefore defends the liberties of the Church,” he wrote, “as the nature of his office, which he has acknowledged, and declared, and sealed to his subjects by an Oath, binds him to do, if he defend the Church of England from foreign usurpation.”*8 It could not have been more evident that Donne’s religious and secular allegiances were fused. He noted that “the title by which the Prince has to us by Generation, and which the Church has by Regeneration, is all but one now. For we are not only subjects to a Prince, but Christian subjects to a Christian Prince, and members as well of the Church as of the Commonwealth in which the Church is.”5

  In a preface pointedly addressed to “the Priests, and Jesuits, and to their Disciples in this Kingdom,” Donne speaks candidly about the time and personal sorrow it has taken for him to overcome the loyalties instilled by his Catholic upbringing.

  They who have descended so low, as to take knowledge of me, and to admit me into their consideration, know well that I used no inordinate haste, nor precipitation in binding my conscience to any local religion. I had a longer work to do than many other men; for I was first to blot out, certain impressions of the Roman religion, and to wrestle both against the examples and against the reasons, by which some hold was taken; and some anticipations early laid upon my conscience, both by persons who by nature had a power and superiority over my will, and others who by their learning and good life, seemed to me justly to claim an interest for the guiding and rectifying of my understanding in these matters. And although I apprehended well enough, that this irresolution not only retarded my fortune, but also bred some scandal, and endangered my spiritual reputation, by laying me open to many misinterpretations; yet all these respects did not transport me to any violent and sudden determination, till I had, to the measure of my poor wit and judgement, surveyed and digested the whole body of Divinity, controverted between ours and the Roman church. In which search and disquisition, that God, which awakened me then, and has never forsaken me in that industry, as he is the Author of that purpose, so is he a witness of this protestation; that I behave myself, and proceeded therein with humili
ty, and diffidence in myself; and by that, which by his grace, I took to be ordinary means, which is frequent prayer, and equal and indifferent affections.6

  Nearly every reference to theology in Pseudo-Martyr is related, in some way, to the conflict between the secular authority of the English Crown and the claim of a foreign pope to authority not only in matters of faith and morals but over the ways in which monarchs might interpret and choose to resolve secular controversies in their own lands. The Roman Catholic religion, Donne concluded, had undermined secular laws and lawmakers—first, by giving priority to ecclesiastical privilege; second, by teaching that martyrdom was the way to expand the influence of the church (“that the treasure of the Church, is by this expense of our blood increased”); and, third, by the doctrine of purgatory, which supposedly allows people to escape just punishment for their actions on earth.7 The English church’s article of religion on purgatory, unlike many other articles of faith, could not have been more straightforward: “The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping, and Adoration as well of images as of Reliques, and also invocation of Saints, is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.” Without purgatory, there could be no reason for the buying and selling of indulgences that played such a critical role in Luther’s rebellion: once you were in hell, no prayers offered up for you on earth, whatever their price, could help you.

  It is somewhat paradoxical that Donne mentions his reluctance to bind himself to a “local religion” in Pseudo-Martyr, because his later writings are filled with a love of England—a sense of “chosenness” that resembles the writings of the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Although Donne was well aware of the many manifestations of the Reformation in continental Europe, and shared many of the views of German and French Protestants, it is likely that the particular, more moderate national character of the English Reformation decided him, once and for all, against Rome. “God shin’d upon this Island early,” he observed in a sermon delivered in 1622, “early in the plantation of the Gospel, (for we had not our seed-Corn from Rome, howsoever we may have had some waterings from thence) and early in the Reformation of the Church: for we had not the model of any other Forreign Church for our pattern; we stript not the Church into a nakedness, nor into rags; we divested her not of her possessions, nor of her Ceremonies, but received such a Reformation at home, by their hands whom God enlightened, as left her neither in a Dropsie nor in Consumption….Early in the Plantation, early in the Reformation, Illuxit Nobis, and we have light enough, without either seeing other light from Rome, or more of this light from other places….We shall not need any such re-Reformation, or super-Reformation, as swirling brains will need cross the Seas for. The Word of God is not above thee, says Moses, nor beyond the Sea.”8

  For Donne, England is what the Massachusetts Bay Colony, “a city on a hill,” would be for John Winthrop. The Church of England, not the Church of Rome—and not, for all Donne’s affinities with other forms of Protestantism, the churches of Calvin or Luther—is its moral center. It is worth noting that Winthrop was only fifteen years younger than Donne and that their views about history and theology, although they reached different conclusions, were shaped by many of the same events. Donne’s thinking about matters of religious doctrine, apart from the elephant of papal authority, did not differ radically from that of moderate Roman Catholics in England. Yet the Augustinian importance he assigned to the role of divine grace in individual human destiny did have much in common with the Puritans who, feeling stifled by the political demands of the Church of England and displeased by a theology that seemed too “Romish,” set out for the New World. “O, my America, my Newfoundland.” Some recent revisionist scholarship has attempted to turn Donne into a believer in predestination akin to Augustine (the elderly Augustine, that is) and contemporary Puritans. But Donne’s later “Holy Sonnets,” as well as the sermons he delivered from the pulpit of Saint Paul’s, indicated that he could never resolve the issue of predestination to his own satisfaction as a theologian or as a human being. Even as a committed Protestant priest, he could not bring himself to conclude that there was no salvation for those outside his church. In one sonnet, he expresses the conviction that his father, whom he barely remembers and who died a Catholic, must, or at least might, be in paradise: “If faithful souls be alike glorified / As angels, then my father’s soul doth see….”9 The Articles of Religion provided plenty of wiggle room for those similarly reluctant to consign recalcitrant or religiously suspect relatives and friends to the fires of hell. That cruel brand of predestination was left for those who, in Donne’s words, sought light from other places.

  Would Donne ever have become a Protestant had the Reformation not unfolded as it did in his native land, any more than Paul of Burgos would have become a Catholic had the persecution of Jews not intensified in Spain at the end of the fourteenth century? I will go out on a strong limb and say no and no. Although Paul of Burgos was not, as far as we know, a great writer in any language, he and Donne had one important characteristic in common—ambition. Donne wanted to be not only a man of letters but a man of influence, and he tried unsuccessfully to obtain positions at court during the many years when he resisted his patron Morton’s urging that he take Holy Orders and enter the service of the church. Only in his early forties, with no other sure route to a secure financial future and public position, did Donne finally accept ordination.

  And yet, when one reflects on Donne’s lifelong preoccupation with the relationship between the flesh and the spirit, even when he is at his most carnal in his youthful poems, it is apparent that the Protestantism of the established English church offered a broader template for his philosophy than Roman Catholicism did. Throughout his life, Donne referred to his own faith as “Catholic”—meaning universal, in the sense that would now be spelled with a small “c.” As an adult, he came to regard the Roman Catholic Church as exclusionary, attempting to circumscribe and control not only the actions but the thoughts of men, and the English church as the more expansive, inclusionary faith. The greatest of Donne’s small-“c” catholic writings are the meditations he produced when, in November 1623, he was stricken and nearly died in an epidemic of what was called “spotted,” or relapsing, fever—probably typhus. No one survived this fever unless he or she broke out into a rash, which doctors attempted to induce by, among other brilliant methods, the application of dead pigeons to the patient’s feet to draw the “evil humours” of the fever away from the head. In Donne’s case, the rash did appear, but it was known that the fever might return and that patients who succumbed to a second bout nearly always died. The only remedy, it was thought, was to administer laxatives and induce a long cycle of vomiting and diarrhea. Patients who survived the “purge” generally did live—undoubtedly because their ability to endure this treatment indicated that they had been unusually hardy physical specimens when they caught the fever in the first place. Between November, when he was first diagnosed, and January, by which time it seemed likely that he would remain among the living, Donne had written his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a great humanistic work that extends—in spite of itself—beyond the boundaries of purely Christian humanism.

  In Meditation IV, wryly titled “The physician is sent for,” Donne combines philosophy with sharp, direct observation of the limits of whatever “treatment” he is receiving.

  Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than the world; than the world doth, nay, than the world is. And if those pieces were extended, and stretched out in man as they are in the world, man would be the giant, and the world the dwarf, the world but the map, and the man the world. If all the veins in our bodies were extended to rivers, and all the sinews to veins of mines, and all the muscles that lie upon one another, to hills, and all the bones to quarries of stones, and all the other pieces to the proportion of those which correspond to them in the world, the air would be too little for this orb of man
to move in, the firmament would be but enough for this star; for, as the whole world hath nothing, to which something in man doth not answer, so hath man many pieces of which the whole world hath no representation. Enlarge this meditation upon this great world, man, so far as to consider the immensity of the creatures this world produces; our creatures are our thoughts….Inexplicable mystery; I their creator am in a close prison, in a sick bed, any where, and any one of my creatures, my thoughts, is with the sun, and overgoes the sun in one pace, one step, everywhere.

  As the larger physical world produces vipers and other dangerous beings, Donne observes, so does the singular world of the human body produce “venomous and infectious diseases” for which “as yet we have not names.” In falling victim to diseases that cannot be named, much less cured, Donne observes, “we shrink in our proportion, sink in our dignity, in respect of very mean creatures, who are physicians to themselves.” Dogs know enough to eat grass to induce vomiting, he notes, but “man hath not that innate instinct, to apply those natural medicines to his present danger, as those inferior creatures have; he is not his own apothecary, his own physician, as they are.” Therefore, a sick man must send for the physician, but the physician is himself no more than a man.10

  These meditations were written even though fever patients were supposed to be forbidden to read, much less write, as part of their treatment. The dean of Saint Paul’s had enough power to get reading and writing materials past the proscriptions of the doctors, who included the king’s personal physician.