king’s own physician. The disease worsens imperceptibly; a cordial is administered for the heart, and pigeons are applied to the feet to draw off humors from the head. Spots appear and the crisis deepens. Tolling bells of a nearby church signal the death of a neighbor. The physicians detect hopeful signs, and at last the patient rises from bed, as Lazarus from the grave, but with warning of the danger of relapsing.

The meditations thus detail the patient’s physical state or his treatment; they take the body as a type or figure for the self and the human condition, and they usually reflect not directly on religious themes but on secular ones. The third meditation, for example, focuses on the patient taking to his bed, on the likeness of the grave to the sickbed, and on the contrariness between the prone position of the sick and the natural upright position to which God created us. The Renaissance commonplace that “man is a little world” is the motif for the fourth meditation. How much greater than nature are human beings, whose thoughts reach around the globe and from earth to heaven, and how strange it is that they have need of physicians, when even wild creatures are physicians to themselves. At every point, we are confronted by our paradoxical nature, at once a wonder of the world and a fickle, variable thing, prone to sudden alteration, dissolution, decay, and decomposition. “Let [the self] be a world,” we read in the eighth meditation, “and him self be the land, and misery the sea.” The waters of the sea swell above the hills, whelming kings and commoners alike, for all are dust, “coagulated and kneaded into earth, by tears.”

The meditations take measure of the human condition: “Variable, and therefore miserable condition of man!” Throughout, the human condition is discovered in the condition of the human body, the principal analogue for the meditator’s larger text, God’s Second Book, the historical world of time and space. The expostulations repeat the themes or the motifs of the meditations for, in Donne’s words, “the body dost effigiate my soul to me.” The expostulations, however, are more passionate, more urgent than the meditations. In the expostulations, for example, the meditator exegetes Scripture and anatomizes the spirit’s health: The soul hangs in the balance. Thus, nature’s inconstancy is the theme of a meditation arising from the sudden weakening of the body’s faculties with the first approach of the sickness; the expostulation turns on the soul’s vulnerability. His prostrate body occasions a meditation on human dignity; the expostulation focuses on spiritual impotency. The prospect of universal ruin accompanies the “insensible” or imperceptible progress of the disease; the expostulation wrestles with Eve’s temptation and Adam’s sin, with the serpent within the human heart and the lie that conceals the heart’s guilt.

The devotions progress from a general meditation in the first section to the soul’s concrete expostulation of God in the second, from thoughts on the condition of humankind to the private afflictions of the individual soul, from contemplation of the world of humanity to an anxiety about the state of the spirit. A resultant energy and passionate intensity characterize Donne’s exegesis of God’s Third Book, the Bible, in the middle section of each devotion, and this level of intensity sets these spiritual exercises apart from most traditional meditations. Rather than spiritual colloquies, the soul’s conversations with God, the expostulations take the form (as the Latin of “expostulation” indicates) of urgent demands or passionate interrogations. The biblical text is interrogated for answers to the exegete’s own bewilderment in face of the text’s ambiguities or the soul’s doubts and uncertainties. In the sixth devotion, for example, the patient marks the apprehension in his physician and the mounting fear in himself. In the expostulation he searches Scripture to resolve his mind that fear need not be evidence of despair. He reads in Scripture that “fear is a stifling spirit,” and asks: “Shall a fear of thee take away my devotion to thee?” He discovers also that fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and that a holy fear is an antidote against “inordinate fear.” From start to finish, the exegete scrutinizes biblical texts and presses God for a clarification of his meaning (“Dost thou command me to speak to thee, and command me to fear thee?”), pressing the demand at times very near complaint, “too near murmuring.” In the end, the questions are answered, the ambiguities and doubts are resolved, and the expostulations attain a kind of equilibrium in what amounts to an intellectual assurance, propaedeutic to the affective or emotional acceptance of the prayers, which conclude each devotion.

Taken separately, the expostulations move from ambiguity and doubt to clarity and assurance. Collectively, they chart the soul’s conversion from a self-preoccupation and a “care” for its own preservation to a concern for the neighbor, from anxiety and fear to patience and assurance. By the sixth devotion, absorption with sin, God’s anger, spiritual impotency, and isolation have been somewhat mollified intellectually—if not affectively—by an acceptance of a wholesome fear of the Lord. In the seventh devotion we hear also of the “multiplication” of divine assistances and of Donne’s profound dependency on the Church and its Sacraments. We become aware too that the spiritual exercises, while they are intensely personal, are not private. The Church is never far from the meditator’s mind, nor are the Sacraments—confession, baptism, Eucharist—ever without a place in his devotion. Even confinement to the sickbed in the second devotion causes Donne anxious concern for his soul’s safety. “It is not a recusancy,” protesting his absence from church, “for I would come [to thy holy temple], but an excommunication, I must not come.” Thus, when the seventh devotion notes the consultation of his physicians, the meditator’s mind turns to God’s manner of proceeding with the soul afflicted with spiritual disease. “Thy way from the beginning,” he announces, “is multiplication of thy helps.” Helps multiply for the assistance of human weakness, but not as schismatics multiply. God’s health-giving Word is not to be sought among “comers or conventicles or schismatical singularies but from the association and communion of thy Catholic church.” Divine assistance is multiple, though the Church principally administers that assistance in the form of the divine Word and the Sacraments. Donne’s own personal Easter—“my quickening in this world, and my immortal establishing in the next"—is in fact associated with the reappropriation and interiorization of the Church’s sacramental life during the course of the spiritual exercises. Though confined to a sickbed, he experiences anew the Sacraments that chasten, quicken, and communicate Christ’s mystical body to the diseased soul.

Donne’s universalism is also the expression of this Catholic view of the Church. At the devotions’ spiritual center, in devotion 17, the meditator hears the bells of a nearby church, tolling the passing of one who, perhaps like Donne, had fallen victim of the fever that swept through London. Earlier, in the seventh devotion, preoccupation with the self had been temporarily interrupted with thought for the need of others more destitute and with great reason to complain of aloneness, and the meditator interrogates himself: “Is not my Meditation rather to be inclined another way, to condole, and communicate their distress, who have none [to aid them]?” Now the enlarging of this meditation in the seventeenth devotion comes about when thoughts of the neighbor, audibly present to the meditator in the bells, are joined with thoughts of the universal fellowship of Christians in the mystical body of Christ. The Church, he says, is universal; “so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all.” The baptism of a child—“That action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too.” The burial of a man—“That action concerns me.” All of humankind is of “one author, and is one volume,” and in the last day God will “bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.” As if by anticipation of that eschatological age, where “every book shall be open to one another,” we are given Donne’s consummate expression of universalism and Christian charity:

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.

Here is no gloomy obsession with death but rather confirmation that even in seeming isolation, the isolation of a sick man’s closet, God has us speak to and serve one another.

After the meditations and the expostulations, where the emotional experience of the devotions is sustained by taut historical description, argument, and exegesis, the prayers give us the measured assurance of one who is planted firmly in the Church. Beginning with an invocation to the eternal and gracious God, the prayers call to mind God’s mercy and eternal ways and make petition for the soul’s needs. Above all, the meditator asks for a will obedient to God’s directives and for the soul’s conformity to Christ’s example. In the seventeenth prayer the meditator, having given thanks for divine instruction mediated through “this sad and funeral bell,” makes priestly intercession for the one, “the voice of whose bell hath called me to this devotion.” The meditator’s prayers, in short, revolve on God’s mercy and God’s power to communicate grace to the members of his Church, and by stages the meditator arrives at an ever-deepening conviction that his sickness is a “correction” and a preparation of his spirit, that it might be “conformed to thy will.”

In conforming the soul to the pattern of Christ’s affliction, Donne does not promise a spirituality of safe harbor. Yet, though the waters of destruction mount, the Church, a type of the Ark, is envisioned as a refuge when the flood grows “too deep for us.” Like Noah, members of Christ’s mystical body have God’s Word and the divine Sacraments, rising above the Flood’s destruction, and in a personal confession of gratitude the meditator says “to the top of these hills, thou hast brought me.” Still the rigor of the spiritual exercise does not dissipate with the prospect of recovery. In the last devotion, Donne asks for assistance against presumptuous security, mindful that, as his physicians counsel watchfulness against the fever’s recurrence, so strict vigilance is also wise counsel against a future lapsing of the spirit from grace.

Christian Themes

Devotions upon Emergent Occasions addresses the Christian response to the human condition: Sudden illness occasions the thought of life’s variableness and of the soul’s imminent danger in face of the body’s death. Meditations on the misery of the human condition, on spiritual impotency and isolation, and on the mysterious ways of God confront the self with its own spiritual destiny. Finally, meditative insight reveals to the soul a God who multiplies aid for human spiritual assistance and above all makes us ministers in mutual assistance to one another in Christ and Christ’s body, the Church.

Sources for Further Study

• Frost, Kate Gartner. Holy Delight: Typology, Numerology, and Autobiography in Donne’s “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.” Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. Frost argues that the work, despite its idiosyncrasies, belongs to the tradition of English devotional literature and spiritual autobiography.
• Guibbory, Achsah, ed. The Cambridge Companion to John Donne. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Provides a comprehensive survey of essays on Donne’s life and writings. Of particular interest are “Donne’s Religious World,” by Alison Shell and Arnold Hunt; “Devotional Writing,” by Helen Wilcox; and “Facing Death,” by Ramie Targoff.
• Mueller, Janel. Introduction to Donne’s Prebend Sermons. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971. The superb introduction treats the sermons from the period following Donne’s illness, a period informed by Donne’s conviction that he had been restored to health so that he could preach.
• Raspa, Anthony. Introduction to Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. Edited with commentary by Anthony Raspa. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Provides an interesting review of the scholarly conjecture concerning Donne’s illness and an excellent discussion of Donne and the meditative tradition.
• Weber, Joan. Contrary Music: The Prose Style of John Donne. 1963. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. An insightful discussion of Donne’s religious prose with a concluding section on the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and its tripartite division.