Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  The devotions also include what is surely Donne’s best-known prose work, the meditation, mistakenly thought by many to be only metaphoric, that asks for whom the bell tolls. Donne was listening to real bells. In the depths of his fever, he paid close attention to London church bells to keep himself informed about weddings, funerals, and other events signaled by the chimes. The title of the meditation could hardly be more specific: “Now, this bell tolling softly for another, says to me: Thou must die.” In opening, Donne clarifies what “Catholic” meant to him.

  Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language….God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scatterd leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

  Later in that meditation come the famous lines: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.”11

  Donne delivered his final sermon, “Death’s Duel,” from the pulpit of Saint Paul’s on February 25, 1631, less than a month before his own death. Izaak Walton, Donne’s friend and first biographer, recalled that the congregants were terrified by Donne’s skeletal appearance. Walton wrote, in 1840, “When to the amazement of some beholders he appeared in the pulpit, many of them thought he presented himself not to preach mortification by a living voice: but, mortality by a decayed body and dying face.” For the congregation of Saint Paul’s it was as if “Dr Donne had preached his own Funeral Sermon.”12

  Donne’s final sermon is a grim treatise, primarily focused, as befitted the Lenten season, on the meaning of Christ’s voluntary death to redeem man from sin. There is little of the optimism that portrayed the afterlife as a great library in which “every book shall lie open to one another.” And Donne reflects on life from the perspective of a dying man who seems capable of remembering the pleasures of his youth only as sins. “Our youth is hungry and thirsty after those sins which our infancy knew not,” he told the congregation, “and our age is sorry and angry, that it cannot pursue those sins which our youth did….”13

  In spite of its bleakness, there is a raw honesty in this image of old age; the thought is no less unsettling if one substitutes the word “pleasures” for “sins.” Donne, after all, was equally insistent on the intermingling of body and soul when pleasure, not sin, dominated his writing. We remember “License my roving hands, and let them go / Before, behind, between, above, below,” but often forget the lines that follow in short order in the elegy “To His Mistress Going to Bed.”

  Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.

  Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee;

  As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be

  To taste whole joys.

  Would Donne have viewed the stages of life—his own or anyone else’s—in a significantly different way had the Reformation and his ambitions not pulled him away from the faith of his fathers? Did conversion, in his case with a whiff of Calvinist damnation of the sensual, cast Donne’s earlier joyful analogies between body and soul into darkness, or was his last sermon simply a product of his last illness? These are unanswerable questions about a convert for whom the secular and spiritual dimensions of his changing faith were inseparable.

  * * *

  *1 The question of whether Shakespeare was a Protestant or a Catholic—or any sort of conventional religious believer—like so much of Shakespeare’s sparsely documented personal history, has never been settled definitively, nor should it be. Shakespeare’s writings do not, of course, provide the undeniable evidence of Protestant convictions that Donne’s status as an ordained priest of the Church of England, as well as his polemics against Roman Catholicism, did. However, the idea that Shakespeare was some sort of “secret Catholic” in Elizabethan England is considered unlikely or downright preposterous by most historians and literary scholars. The claim that Shakespeare was a Catholic—or, for that matter, an ardent nationalistic supporter of the Church of England—may originate in the same wishful thinking that has made some American Christians claim Abraham Lincoln as a devout believer in Jesus. In fact, Lincoln never joined a church, never mentioned Jesus in his public speeches, and wrote in private correspondence that he did not believe Jesus was divine. When you are as great as Lincoln and Shakespeare, everyone wants to own a piece of your soul.

  *2 See John Stubbs, John Donne, The Reformed Soul, p. xxi. The date of this poem, like many of Donne’s verses, cannot be established with certainty. Few of his poems were published in his lifetime. “The Ecstasy” may well have been written for Donne’s wife, but many of his sentiments in the poem are not far removed from earlier verse associated with the rake and seducer Donne was said to have been before his marriage at age twenty-nine. The reader should also bear in mind the cautionary preface to John Donne’s complete poems by its editor, A. J. Smith, who observes, “We rarely know when he wrote this poem or that.” This was true even in 1635, when the first collection of Donne’s poetry was published four years after his death.

  *3 Then as now, one important difference between the Anglican and the Roman Catholic churches—at least for clerics—is that Anglican priests may marry.

  *4 Anglican converts to Roman Catholicism must, however, be reconfirmed, and if priests, they must be reordained. But former Anglican priests who convert to Roman Catholicism are allowed to remain married if they already have a wife. Marriage is, of course, forbidden to priests originally ordained in the Roman Catholic Church.

  *5 The Lord Keeper had physical custody of the Great Seal of England. The actual importance of the office varied greatly, depending on the relationship between the particular monarch and the particular Lord Keeper.

  *6 One tale was that Donne himself had scribbled the line on the door of his lodgings on their wedding day.

  *7 The anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, November 5, is still celebrated as Guy Fawkes Day or Bonfire Night throughout the United Kingdom. The celebrations include bonfires and fireworks, and no one seems to care about the irony of commemorating with incendiary displays a plot to blow up Parliament. Guards, however, still perform a ritual search of the Houses of Parliament to make sure that no twenty-first-century arsonist is lurking—just another English tradition in the spirit of having a town crier, in the digital age, announce the birth of an heir to the throne. In 2007, the libertarian conservative Representative Ron Paul, who was then running for the presidency, set up a Web site honoring Guy Fawkes and raised more than four million dollars for his campaign on the anniversary day alone. Why Paul would consider Fawkes a hero is something of a mystery, since Catholics of that era wished only to substitute one theocratic state for another—a goal inconsistent with Paul’s professed libertarianism. Perhaps Paul’s attraction to Fawkes has something to do with the American right-wing libertarian position that everyone should have access to guns and ammunition without government regulation.

  *8 I have taken the liberty of altering seventeenth-century spelling and punctuation in some quotations from Pseudo-Martyr, which, unlike most of Donne’s essays, sermons, and poetry, is extraordinarily difficult for a general reader to follow today.

  8

/>   “NOT WITH SWORD…BUT WITH PRINTING”

  JOHN FOXE, in his popular sixteenth-century English Book of Martyrs, summarized his support for Protestantism by calling the printing press an instrument of divine providence. “God works for his church,” he wrote, “not with sword and target…but with printing, writing, and reading….Hereby tongues be known, knowledge groweth, judgment increaseth, books are dispersed, the Scriptures are seen…stories be opened, times compared, truth discerned, falsehood detected….”*1 Either the pope must abolish knowledge and printing, Foxe asserted, or “printing must at length root him out.”1

  Twenty-first-century Americans have repeatedly expressed astonishment at the rapid change in public attitudes toward gays and same-sex marriage during the past two decades. We know that twenty years, even in an era of instantaneous communication, remains an extraordinarily short period for large numbers of people to change their minds about any sensitive, fundamental social value. And yet that is exactly what happened in roughly three decades on the continent of Europe five hundred years ago, on a subject far more basic than any single social issue such as modern gay rights. Between, roughly, 1517 and 1550, huge numbers of Europeans changed their minds about what constituted the foundation of their lives—encompassing their view of the universe, of relations between God and man, and of the proper way for individual human beings to seek truth.

  For a millennium, the Roman Catholic Church had been the lodestar, the sole route to salvation for Western Christians—even though the relationship between religious and secular authority varied from country to country and region to region. That the majority of illiterate Europeans—95 percent of the population, by most estimates, at the beginning of the sixteenth century—did not concern themselves with abstract theological matters such as the Trinity or transubstantiation made the church more, not less, powerful in its role as keeper of the gate to the afterlife. Dissident movements, like the Cathars in the early thirteenth century, were ruthlessly extirpated by the combined power of Christian soldiers and the newly established Inquisition. Three hundred years later, the printing press made it impossible for the church to do the same thing to a new generation of dissidents and reformers.

  In any analysis of the secular factors affecting religious conversions on a large scale, it is always tempting, and often correct, to place primary emphasis on shifts in political power, the acts of churches themselves, and the relationship between the two. In the early Christian era, the triumph of the Gospel of Jesus cannot be seen apart from the decay of the Roman Empire and the pro–Roman Catholic position taken by certain politically effective (notwithstanding the continuing deterioration of the empire itself when viewed in retrospect) emperors in the West. The conversions of vast numbers of Jews and Muslims in Iberia would not have happened had they not been forced by cycles of violence during the Reconquista, the stark choice of conversion or expulsion later presented to the Jews by Ferdinand and Isabella, and the support of the church throughout the Inquisition. The Protestant Reformation—if one views it in a broad sense as the emergence of multiple forms of Christianity, each with its own political turf—could not have been accomplished without bloodshed and outright civil war in much of Northern Europe and England. Yet there can be no doubt that the printing press was the single most important secular factor in the development of the Reformation in Europe and in the eventual arrival of Protestantism on the shores of North America. In each country, the Reformation had a distinct national character, depending in significant measure on the religious sentiments and political power of secular rulers. The one common factor was movable type and its power to spread religious dissent as well as new ideas of all kinds. It is hardly a coincidence that there was never anything resembling a large-scale religious reformation in tsarist Russia, and that the only printing press in Russia from 1565 until the last quarter of the seventeenth century was owned and operated by the Russian Orthodox Church. Ivan the Terrible (Elizabeth I’s contemporary, let us not forget) had permitted foreigners to bring one printing press to Moscow, and the first book published in Russia, The Acts of the Apostles, appeared in 1564. Only a year later, though, Ivan pacified Slavophiles who hated all foreign inventions by allowing them to burn the press. After that, until the reign of the westernizing Peter the Great began in 1682, the church controlled the only press. In the spread of the printed word beyond an elite, Russia was two full centuries behind Western Europe.

  “We must root out printing, or printing will root us out,” the Vicar of Croydon supposedly said in a sermon preached at Saint Paul’s Cross during the reign of Henry VIII—presumably before Henry broke with Rome in order to marry Anne Boleyn. The vicar was right, but by the time he voiced these sentiments, it was already too late to stop the revolution initiated by the publication in 1455 of the first vernacular Bible produced by Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press. Ironically, at a time in the 1520s when Martin Luther’s first German translations of the New Testament were being widely read in his homeland, the English scholar William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536) had to flee to Germany and to Luther’s town of Wittenberg to finish his English translation of the Bible—copies of which were then smuggled back into Henry’s realm. When a priest attacked Tyndale for his desire to make the Scriptures available to ordinary, ill-educated people without the approval of the church, the translator replied, “If God spare my life, ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow in England to know more about the Scriptures than thou dost.”*2 This quotation echoes Tyndale’s onetime teacher, the Catholic humanist Erasmus, who wrote in the preface to his 1516 Greek-Latin New Testament, “I would to God, the plowman would sing a text of the scripture at his plowbeam, and that the weaver at his loom, with this would drive away the tediousness of time. I would the wayfaring man with this pastime, would express the weariness of his journey.” Erasmus’s works were all placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, an arm of the Inquisition in Rome, by Pope Paul IV in 1559. Unlike Tyndale, who was pursued by agents of Henry VIII and tried, convicted of heresy, strangled, and burned to death in 1536 in Belgium by a special commission of the Holy Roman Empire, Erasmus died a natural death in that same year.

  The spread of vernacular Bibles, which took place much earlier on the continent than in England, did allow every literate person direct access to the Scriptures without the mediation of priests—the result long feared by Catholic satraps as well as the pope. Luther’s first translation of the New Testament was published in 1522, and though he was not the first to translate the Bible into German since the invention of the printing press, his was the best and most influential version. His sermons, as well as his Bible translation, were published and made him a best-selling author in the 1520s and the most widely read writer in Germany throughout the early Reformation.2

  The King James Bible, which adopted much of Tyndale’s once-forbidden language, was not published until 1611, and the English-speaking world finally had a Protestant vernacular Bible that not only was a glory to the language but, unlike Tyndale’s Bible, was approved by both church and state. Puritans did not use the King James Version but the English translation of Calvin’s Geneva Bible, published in English in 1560. The Pilgrims brought the Geneva Bible along on the Mayflower. The language of the King James translation, however, ultimately won out in America. Whether one is listening to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, or the tribute paid to that speech fifty years later by President Barack Obama, the Bible being quoted is the King James Version, not Calvin’s. (Even though the King James Version has been replaced in many churches by pedestrian translations designed to eliminate all of the supposedly archaic, beautiful, lyrical phrases presumed to be too challenging for the readers reared on text messages, the King James text has a way of creeping into important public speeches and occasions that seem to call for more elevated language. Somehow, the New Living Translation version of Psalm 23—“Even when I walk through the darkest valley / I will not be afr
aid, for you are close beside me”—doesn’t quite measure up to the King James’s “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.”)

  In the sixteenth century, there proved to be no way, despite the ardent efforts of ecclesiastical censors, to suppress the widespread questioning of dogmas and practices promulgated by the church but never mentioned in the Bible. Purgatory—the church teaching that led to the sale of indulgences—was only one of the concepts that readers of the Bible in their native languages could see was never mentioned by the authors of the New Testament. Those who could read—many of them monks and priests—spread doubts and questions to the illiterate in sermons preached from the pulpits of German and Swiss churches once loyal to Rome. Moreover, there is no question that literacy itself was encouraged by the new possibility of access to the Gospels in a language that people already spoke; many who would never have learned to read Latin did learn to read German, English, French, or Italian—thereby spreading heresy even in the Papal States, under the direct political authority of the Vatican. When Luther supposedly nailed his theses against indulgences to the door of the Chapel Church of the University of Wittenberg on October 31, 1517, he touched a chord in huge numbers of people—educated and uneducated, literate and illiterate—who were ready to think for themselves about religion and to say no to the inquisitors.*3 But the printing press not only made it possible to publish Bibles; it also encouraged the dissemination of discussions about theology by both laymen and clerics. The swift appearance of pamphlets written by educated laymen (and even a few women) was one of the true marvels of the Reformation, because the Catholic Church had long permitted only clerics to write about what were considered theological matters—and only in Latin. The motto of Christian humanists of the Renaissance was ad fontes (back to the sources)—meaning sources of classical learning from Greece and Rome, as well as manuscripts of the Bible in Greek and Hebrew, and not only in Latin translations approved by the church. This was, of course, an elite movement, but with the invention of the printing press, it began to have an impact, as one historian of religion puts it, that “outpaced the increase in actual literacy rates” and rendered books—and the ideas they contained—important even to people who could not themselves read or write.3