[In the following essay, Klause examines how Donne uses the concept of miracles and alchemy—the science of changing matter into gold—in his elaborate, sometimes satirical metaphysical conceits in poets such as “Loves Alchymie,” “The Canonization,” “The Extasie” and “A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day,” as well as in religious essays.]

In Ignatius His Conclave Donne mocks Paracelsus, portraying “Bombast of Hohenheim” as a foolish innovator whose empty, in some ways pernicious, works and pomps fail to win him distinction even in the precincts of hell.¹ Since Donne's writings often rely upon the alchemical “mystery” to which Paracelsus contributed, the satirist's contempt, playful as it is, may seem like ingratitude. We cannot take seriously his reference to Paracelsus as “an excellent Chirurgian” (Biath., p. 216). Even so, Donne's implicit acknowledgment that alchemy might have important imaginative uses is perhaps tribute and atonement enough. He goes shamelessly to the “pregnant pot” for conceits that will prove love to be “imposture” (“Loves Alchymie”) or authentic sanctity (“The Canonization”); for a language that can speak rapture or despair (“The Exstasie,” “A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day”); for a sermon-rhetoric that might render God more comprehensible or make sin more likely to be feared. The concoctions, refinements, and sublimations, the balms, elixirs, electrums, tinctures, limbecks and stones, the quintessences, phoenixes, eagles, and doves all seem an essential part of Donne's vocabulary. He is fortunate to be able to play the Paracelsan expert.

Donne could hardly avoid this role once he discovered it; for there is a deep if narrow affinity between his impatient “Hydroptique” soul and that of the character whose lust for alchemy has come to seem archetypal, Sir Epicure Mammon. Mammon's desire was to “firke nature up, in her own center” (The Alchemist, 2.1.28).²—to “drive” or “press” her, also (the word “firk” can bear both meanings, and with sexual overtones) to “cheat” her. Through his alchemist-pander, Subtle, he would “sublimate” his delights by pitching them ever higher in a series of distillations, hoping for the delirious enjoyment that would result from seizing pleasures out of season and concentrating them in a moment.

Great Salomon's Ophir! He was sayling to't
Three yeeres, but we have reach'd it in ten months.
                                                                                                                        The secret …
Cures all diseases, comming of all causes,
A month's griefe, in a day; a yeeres, in twelve.

(2.1.4-5, 63-66)

Donne was hardly so crass a sybarite as Sir Epicure, but his imagination was in its own way greedily alchemical. In his poetry and in the poetical flights of his prose he often appears to be “firking nature up,” heightening moments by foreshortening them, hastily, importunely tricking “Quotidian things” (“Prince Henry,” 7) into yielding a magic or ecstatic experience. This practice accounts in large part for the distress that many readers have felt about what might be called the factitiousness of Donne's art. Modern criticism has sought to explain and sometimes to defend Donne's apparently cavalier manipulation of ideas in his quest for a truth of feeling (both the truth that is uniquely accessible to feeling: for which le coeur a ses raisons … ; and the truth which is feeling itself: what is more real or authentic than “mere” knowledge), as though he might be allowed to cheat his way like an alchemist to a quintessence of surpassing value.

Drummond, Dryden, and Doctor Johnson had seen “metaphysical” poetry as inimical to sentiment. But T. S. Eliot, moving beyond Grierson's observation that Donne's lyrics were a “blend” of “feeling and ratiocination,” posited that in the poetry “thought” was in fact ancillary to “feeling.” J. E. V. Crofts found Donne's thought to be no more than a “convolvulus growth of intellectual whim-whams,” which created a “kind of suspense …, endangering and making more arduous his heart's right of way,” but which yielded finally in all its irrelevance to “passion: the passion of love, or the passion of faith.” The “poetry of meditation” which Louis Martz and (from a different perspective) Barbara Lewalski have discerned in Donne's writing involved a “fusion of passion and thought,” but aimed at “cultivat[ing] … emotional tumult,” meditation having its proximate end in “the affections,” its ultimate end in the “love” that is felt, willed, and acted upon. In more recent commentary, Murray Roston has compared Donne with religious moralists of the Counter-Reformation and mannerist artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who toyed with facts and logic in order to prove the validity of a non-propositional truth, a spiritual experience beyond the competence of thought. Less devoutly, more reductively, but within the tradition, John Carey has contended that for Donne, “argument … is at the service of the will. Logic is a convenient and adaptable screen for appetite.”³

These suggestions that Donne's imagination is a limbeck,⁴ which attempts by devious means to transmute the dross of reason into the gold of passion, alert us to important features of his work and character. We may still wish to know, however, since the answers are not as obvious as they seem, what the “feelings” are that he hopes to experience and why he strains so insistently after them. Are they as various and contradictory as the moods that his poems embody? Or can they be related to a dominant passion that colors and directs them all? Are they as ordinary as the lust, love, hate, fear, disgust, despair, and dread that we hear so clearly in Donne's voice?⁵ Or should we, mindful of his disdain for the conventional, search for an exotic passion at the source of his energies? And is there more to be said about the factitiousness that affords these energies release? Help with these questions may come less from a consideration of alchemical processes, which were useful to Donne primarily as metaphors, than from a study of their more legitimate congeners, miracles, whose magic, unlike that of the “Almighty Chymicks” (“The Bracelet,” 44), catered to a deep and holy hunger. The alchemist boasted of a power that would produce wealth, which could buy pleasure. He wrought marvels, so he professed, by tricking and cajoling nature, and the wonder he inspired in those who observed his “achievement” merely attended the act. God, the worker of miracles, the author of nature, had loftier ends. The evocation of wonder was central to his purpose, and the experience of the miraculous might satisfy a soul's appetite as would nothing else.

Donne writes often about miracles, not always with solemnity or reverence. If he uses them to flatter a patroness—the Countess of Huntington (“a new starre … / Is miracle”) or the Countess of Bedford (“my verse built of your just praise … / And made of miracle”)—he may as readily work them into a witty insult to an anonymous lady:

I would that age were by this paper taught
What miracles wee harmlesse lovers wrought.
                    First, we lov'd well and faithfully,
                    Yet knew not what wee lov'd, nor why,
                    Difference of sex no more wee knew,
                    Then our Guardian Angells doe;
                                        Comming and going, wee
Perchance might kisse, but not between those meales;
                              Our hands ne'r toucht the seales,
Which nature, injur'd by late law, sets free:
These miracles wee did; but now alas,
All measure, and all language, I should passe,
Should I tell what a miracle shee was.

(“The Relique,” 21-33)

The poet grieves, not because the woman has died (in the usual sense), but because she is no longer a marvel of fidelity and chastity. In panegyric or obloquy miracles tend to become, like alchemical processes, mere tropes.

As an apologist for Protestant Christianity, Donne must never deny the essentially miraculous character of his religion; and he often refers to the wonders wrought by God in the Old Testament, even more frequently to the miracles of Christ and the Apostles in the New. But like Protestant theologians before him, who wished to make their faith less mystical and at the same time to answer the taunts of Roman adversaries that the paucity of miracles in the Reformed Church proved it to be without divine sanction,⁶ Donne would restrict the age of miracles to the era of primitive Christianity.

II

When Donne is concerned with miracles in their own right he adopts several, sometimes inconsistent, points of view. Donne the enlightened rationalist refuses to be impressed by the “Mirabilarii & Mythologistes” who in the name of piety flood the world with spectacular manifestations of divine or saintly power (Ps.-M., p. 110). Nor does he believe in the efficacy of “reliques” and “charms” and “incantations” (Serms., X. 126).⁷ He does not credit the assertion of hagiographers that “St. Francis was seen to goe out of the wound in Christ's side with a banner, and a great Armie,” or that the ground at Cologne, “where some of S. Ursulaes eleven thousand Virgines are buried … will cast up … any that is enterred there, except shee were of that company” (Ps.-M., 110, 139; see also 126-27). He will not give the Virgin Mary leave to “keep a shop of Miracles greater than her Sons” (Essayes, p. 85), much less protect from irony her latter-day emulators: “of [the Roman Church's] last made Goddesse, Francisca Romana, they say: that the bed where shee lay with her husband, was perpetuall Martyrdome to her, and a shop of miracles” (Ignatius, p. 67).

[Christ] came to call [sinners] by the power of Miracles when he lived upon earth, and then he staies to call by the power of his word, now he is ascended into heaven; for as a furnace needs not the same measure and proportion of fire to keep it boiling, as it did to heat it; but yet it doth need the same fire …, so the Church of God needs not miracles now it is established; but still there is the same fire, the working of the same spirit to save sinners.

(Serms., I.314)⁸

That is not to say that “God doth no Miracle now,” for “that were to shorten his power, or to understand his counsels” (Essayes, p. 84; see also Serms., VIII.366). Besides, one would surrender too much to the enemy to deny that the Reformation was “advanced and prospered” by God “miraculously,” or that God's “deliverances” of Church and State (from the Armada, the Gunpowder Treason, the Plague) were miraculous interventions.⁹

Yet Donne would not have wonders “easie and cheap,” as he finds them to be in the Roman Church: “their quotidian miracles … destroy and contradict even the nature of the miracle, to make miracles ordinary, and fixed, constant and certain.” One demeans the divine power by applying it “to make a miraculous drawing of a tooth, a miraculous cutting of a corn,” curing of a colic, ague, or stone.¹⁰

Spokesman for a church most sensitive about the legitimacy and necessity of its mediation between the Creator and his creatures, Donne takes care to exalt the importance of “ordinary means” to union with God (moral effort, prayer, the sacraments, sermons) over less reliable, more spectacular ones. Do not “thinke to have miracles in ordinary, and neglect ordinary remedies,” he tells his flock (Serms., I.264). “Put not God to save thee by a miracle, without means” (Serms., X.63). “Miracle or no miracle is not our issue; witnesses for Christ, require not wonder, but beliefe; we pretend not miracles, but propose Gods ordinary meanes” (Serms., IV.151-52).

Donne has other reasons to qualify his enthusiasm for miracles. Since they emphasize the divine Power rather than Mercy or Justice, they are meant “to terrifie [God's] enemies, rather then comfort his children” (Essayes, p. 84). They may tempt to vainglory one who works them (Biath., p. 168; Essayes, p. 5). They may be performed or counterfeited by the wicked and too easily believed by the credulous (Ps.-M., p. 197; Serms., IX.253; Essayes, p. 83). Miracles do not infallibly work moral transformations, which are more important than any marvellous effects in nature (Serms., VII.381, VIII.294, 303-34). They may threaten the orthodoxy of a Christian's belief, deflecting him from what has been “commanded in Scripture” (Serms., IX.204). And they “lessen the merit of faith”—blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed (Essayes, p. 84). Although God may “glorifie himself sometimes, in doing a miracle,” thus inspiring faith and awe in torpid souls, “there is in every miracle, a silent chiding of the world, and a tacite reprehension of them, who require, or who need miracles” (Serms., VII.374).

These attitudes seem as heartfelt as they are official, as plausible in the preacher and apologist as a less pious skepticism was in the rambunctious worldling. And yet in thinking of the character that Donne reveals to us in his works we may judge that there are few who “need miracles” more than he does, few who seek them more strenuously.

Even when he attempts to be theologically correct he betrays his need to save something of the miraculous from a corrosive rationalism. He ridicules and proscribes the “piae fraudes” of the Romans: “No hardness of heart is enough to justifie a toleration of [their] devout deceits and holy lyes” (Ps.-M., p. 88; Essayes, p. 85; also Ignatius, pp. 10-11; Serms., VI.300, VII.126). But he himself sometimes appropriates the formula “pie credi potest” (Serms., VIII.100; also VII.132, VIII.272), finding a miraculous tale profitable if, like the story of the monastery bells in his Devotions, it fosters in a believer salutary religious feelings (Devs., p. 82).¹¹ Donne must not only admit, as he once does explicitly, that “idolatry is better than Atheisme, and superstition better then profanenesse” (Serms., IX.145; also Ignatius, p. 33); he feels compelled to find in his religion an essential place for the mira, the wonder, that his reason has come close to dissipating.

It is a paradox that Donne undertakes this work of rescue through a process of rationalization. If miracles as commonly known have become an embarrassment to the enlightened mind, he will redefine them into respectability—or at least follow certain doctrinal emphases that Reformation thought had brought into prominence for the sake of minds like his own. Luther had taught that the greatest and most important miracles were those worked by God in the soul.¹² Donne, exquisitely introspective himself, gladly looks for wonders within, where he may find the only true miracle of “Transubstantiation,” that which is worked by the Holy Ghost (Serms., VII.321; also I.249; II.159; V.50). For a man beset with a “sinne of feare” that he may “perish on the shore” and miss salvation (“A hymne to God the Father,” 13-14) the miracle of grace is the one most worthy of attention (Serms., V.146).

But there are others to be savored if one would attend to them.

There is nothing that God hath established in a constant course of nature, and which therefore is done every day, but would seeme a Miracle, and exercise our admiration, if it were done but once; Nay, the ordinary things in Nature, would be greater miracles, then the extraordinary, which we admire most, if they were done but once; The standing still of the Sun, for Ioshuahs use, was not, in it selfe, so wonderfull a thing, as that so vast and immense a body as the Sun, should run so many miles, in a minute; The motion of the Sun were a greater wonder then the standing still, if all were to begin againe, And onely the daily doing takes off the admiration.

(Serms., VII.373-74)

Here again, in this passage from a sermon, the preacher follows Luther, or perhaps more directly St. Augustine.¹³ Whatever the source of its inspiration, this “natural supernaturalism” is an important feature of Donne's thought and suggests a starting point for determining why the miraculous was indispensable to him and what he might do to satisfy his “need” for it.

In his Essayes in Divinity, he appealed to Aquinas and to some extent to Augustine to show how miracles might be “against the whole Order of Nature,” and yet worked without contradiction by the Author of Nature—the explanation being that “the Miracles which are produced to day, were determined and inserted into the body of the whole History of Nature (though they seem to us to be but interlineary and Marginall), at the beginning.” Therefore, “if we understood all created Nature, nothing would be Mirum to us; so if we knew Gods purpose, nothing would be Miraculum,” and nothing would be seen as “done against the Order of Nature,” which is simply God's “Decree” (pp. 81-82). Our sense of the miraculous, then, is the result of ignorance; as Aquinas says, “admiration … arises when an effect is manifest, and its cause is hidden. … Those things which God does outside those causes which we know, are called miracles” (Summa Theologica, I, q. 105, art. 7). Donne was, however, able to approach the matter from a different perspective, insofar as he believed that (as he asserts in the sermon) true wonder might somehow be the result of knowledge, of a penetration through a film of the “quotidian” which adheres to reality.

Works, therefore, like a parting of the sea, a cure of a cripple, a conversion by the Holy Ghost, may be called miracles and command attention; but Donne seems more interested in the miraculous as a condition—as an objective quality in things (that which evokes wonder), and even more as the soul's rapt experience of the wonder-ful. “O Lord,” he prays at the conclusion of the Essayes, “I most humbly acknowledg and confess, that I feel in me so many strong effects of thy Power, as only for the Ordinariness and frequency thereof, they are not Miracles” (p. 96). When the “effects” become in large measure the feelings themselves, the “frequency” of which need not prejudice their special character, a way has been found for miracle to go, like Milton's Paradise, “within.”

Furthermore, these feelings are no more than knowledge (felt perception) of the most basic and universal truth, and as such may be aspired to (though never fully achieved) by all—by Donne himself, who does not have to wait for special signs from heaven to experience wonder. We have seen that he can protest vehemently against making miracles ordinary; yet, in a way, he wishes to make miraculous nothing less than the whole “ordinary” world. He pities those who “require” wonders because wonder is everywhere available.

This is not in Donne an abrupt change of thought, but an acceptance upon reflection of most congenial doctrine, his divinity in this case following the logic and illogic of his imaginative, affective, and spiritual life. Nor should the history of this life be divided here into periods of impiety and devotion. Several times in his sermons he calls attention to continuities which a wayfaring religious soul might expect to find in its biography—to find as surely as Donne has discovered them in his own. “A covetous person, who is now truly converted to God, he will exercise a spiritual covetousness still. … So will a voluptuous man, who is turned to God, find plenty and deliciousnes enough in him … ; and so an angry and passionate man, will find zeal enough in the house of God to eat him up” (Serms., I.236-37). “God will speak unto me, in that voice, and in that way, which I am most delighted with, and hearken most to” (Serms., X.110; also IV.363, VII.390, VIII.82, 190). Early and late, profane and heavenly-minded, Donne covets, craves, and burns with a zeal for miracles. This is to say, for feelings of wonder which miracles evoke and which, if they are the effects of grace, are miracles themselves.

Desire or appetite is not, strictly speaking, emotion; but emotion can be considered the object of desire. As Socrates proposed in Plato's Philebus (34D-35B), a thirsty man desires not so much a beverage as a feeling that is different from the one he has. He desires to be filled and to feel full. Donne's “thirsts,” then, may be described not only in relation to the external objects that would quench them but to the internal states that these objects, if possessed, would change.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion of the critics cited earlier that Donne is a man who thinks in order to feel. Not only does he illustrate, in ways that many have charted, how genuine and spurious learning and argument may serve “the passion of love, or the passion of faith”; he conceives of mind itself as an appetite, potentially, though not inevitably, “Hydroptique” and “subject to the concupiscence of inaccessible knowledges and transcendencies” (Letters [1651], no. 18; Essayes, p. 13; also “To Mr. B. B.,” 1; Essayes, p. 9). To be wise (sapiens), to understand, is to taste (sapere); to know is to have a satisfied hunger (Serms., VII.338-39, VIII.254). Indeed, Donne tends to describe whatever is momentous in physical or spiritual life in appetitive terms. Earthly love and ambition are, of course, “desire.” But so, Donne insists, in spite of his awareness of the distinction between eros and agape (Serms., VII.445), are their heavenly counterparts. He hardly departs from the mystics in advancing this theme;¹⁴ yet his relentless iteration of their teaching suggests that for him it is more than academic orthodoxy.

Metaphors of “inhiation” embody secular lusts: “the thirst / Of honour, or faire death” (“The Calme,” 41-42); the sucking “on countrey pleasures” or mutual sucking of “soules” (“The Good-morrow,” 3; “The Expiration,” 2); the feeding of love unto “corpulence” (“Loves Diet,” 2). The figures remain the same when the passions are transmogrified: “a holy thirsty dropsy melts mee yett” (“Holy Sonnet XVII,” 8); “[Christ is] Deus lactens, God, at whose breasts all creatures suck” (Serms., VI.184); “that God should … poure down his dew, and sweeten that dew with his honey, and crust that honied dew into Manna, and multiply that Manna into Gomers, and fill those Gomers every day, and give every particular man his Gomer. …” (Serms., VII.134); “the kingdom of heaven is a feast. …” (Serms., III.47). Wherever the soul turns it is voracious: for the food of “meditations,” for “the bread,” the “nourishment” of tribulations, or even of martyrdom (Serms., II.49, 54; III.166; Biath., p. 65). When it is “sterved” for a sermon, it may feed on the word (Serms., IV.261). If it should “hunger, and thirst, and pant after … Iustice, or Righteousnesse,” it must be patient, content with the daily bread of grace, which God provides in abundance (Serms., VIII.83, 368). The faithful soul swallows its beliefs “without mastication, or digestion” (Essayes, p. 54); the sinful soul drinks iniquity (Serms., II.114; Ps.-M., p. 91). There are also cosmic appetites of which individual souls are objects. “The Lord … had a Sitio in heaven, as well as upon the Crosse; He thirsted our salvation there” (Serms., III.302)—in opposition to the power of “gluttonous death,” omnivorous disease, and despair, that would have “suck'd out all the marrow” from our bones (“Holy Sonnet VI,” 5; Serms., II.84, VII.242).

Donne's obsession with the idea of God's Justice and with the question of his own salvation has tended to make his religion appear more juridical than affective. God the Judge, however, often yields precedence in Donne's mind to the God who “is a full, and … filling good” (The Second Anniversarie, 445). And although Divine Bounty may pour into his creature innumerable “spiritual blessings,” to “fill all penuries” with “faith,” “mercy,” and “grace,” the preeminent gift is God's communication of himself in his “infinite fulness” to a soul then possessed of “essentiall joy.”¹⁵ There is a hole in the human heart in the shape of God, and Donne would have that emptiness filled. He cannot understand how a putative mystic like Philip Neri, whose body had been wasted by his raptures, might complain of a superflux:

The founder of the last Order [in the Roman Church], Philip Nerius …, not onely utterly emptied his heart of the world, but had fill'd it too full of God; for, so (say they) he was fain to cry sometimes Recede a me Domine, O Lord go farther from me, and let me have a less portion of thee. But who would be loath to sink, by being overfraited with God … ? Privation of the presence of God, is Hell; a diminution of it, a step toward it. Fruition of his presence is Heaven; and shall any Man be afraid of having too much Heaven, too much God?

(Serms., I.186)

Donne was not afraid. “Satura nos mane,” he prays, “Satisfie us early … ; let us bee full, and let us feele it, and rest in that fulnesse” (Serms., V.273-74).

III

Since such a prayer, however, is ultimately eschatological—there can be no fulfillment in this life—what shall the heart feed upon now? Its loves, one might answer. The loves that Donne imagines or knows throughout his life are intense and various, cause for rhapsody, amusement, and bitterness. They are indispensable to him; yet they never seem to be his heart's essential good. He realizes that “no man is an island”; but, as a man hardly insular himself, a devoted friend and lover, he does not greatly fear loneliness—the word occurs only once in his poetry, and then when “defects of loneliness” seem to be “controule[d].”¹⁶ (The thought of his eternal separation from God is another matter.) He does not profess to ache for tenderness, which he rarely displays or appeals for in his songs of “love.” He reveals no compulsion to surrender to another as she is, uniquely herself, neither goddess nor saint; and he never, totally enamored, describes a beloved in any detail. When love is uncompounded with alloys of awe, mystical exaltation, rage, or desperation, it often seems more for him an emetic than a “filling good”: he goes to war to “disuse” himself “from the queasie paine / Of being belov'd, and loving” (“The Calme,” 40-41; and see “Loves Progress,” 1-3).

What Donne fears more than lovelessness, perhaps more than anything else, is “stupidity,” “stupefaction.” He repeats the words (or their cognates) obsessively in his prose, where he can be explicit, and he implies the concept everywhere.

He suggests an elementary definition of stupidity in deriding a certain kind of secular sage: “Learn patience, not from the stupidity of Philosophers, who are but their own statues, men of stone, without sense, without affections” (Serms., II.53). Stupidity is much more, however, than a single defect of temperament. It informs and colors other shortcomings—a “stupid” humility or patience or obedience; a “stupefaction of the conscience,” a “stupid neglecting” of duties.¹⁷

If there may exist a “holy stupefaction” or “religious stupidity” (Serms., IX.341, VII.285), Donne barely acknowledges it. He is preoccupied rather with the sin of stupidity, which is either a fearful insensitivity to one's own sinful condition, or one of sin's most horrible punishments.

Ignorance …, a kinde of slumbering, or stupidity …, or
Lethargy …, is not only the drousinesse, the sillinesse,
but the wickednesse of the soule.
As long as there is in you a sense of your sinnes,
as long as we can touch the offended and wounded
part …, you are not desperate. … But when you feele
nothing …, your soule is in an Hectique fever … ;
nay, your soule it selfe is become a carcasse.
Oh, slownes is our punishment and sinne.(18)

Whenever, whatever he writes, metaphors, synonyms, and near-synonyms for stupidity pour from Donne with an appalling ease: damps, vapors, and mists, drugs, carcasses, rusts, clods, mosses, and stones; insipidness, paleness, and phlegm—“white alone is a paleness, and God loves not a pale soule”; “ab inimico flegmatico libera me Domine” (from a phlegmatic enemy deliver me, Lord) (Serms., VI.57, II.77-78); laziness, languishment, lethargy, drowsiness, slumber, sullenness, sleep; indifference, idleness, indolence, negligence, sheepishness, slackness, and sloth; dulness, coldness, deafness, blindness, faintness, numbness, nullity, benighting, and death. Stupidity becomes in Donne's imagination almost a cosmic principle, a “Dulness” far more solemn, and real, than Pope's. It is that “quintessence even from nothingnesse, / From dull privations, and leane emptinesse” that Donne finds himself to be “upon S. Lucies Day.”

His antidote to stupefaction is not the passion of love, but the experience of miracles. “No quintessence” itself (“Loves Growth,” 8), love cannot be applied to a malady that is. And Donne longs for a purity of feeling to redeem his soul: for an emotion that is enthralling, but free from the curse of a certain kind of “familiarity.”

He seems to have been embarrassed by intimacy that made majesty appear common. His apology to a correspondent for descending to the “homely” facts of his domestic life can be understood as a protocol (Letters [1651], no. 101). But it is not merely a sense of etiquette that provokes him to complain of “a familiarity with greatnesse,” of ambitions to “speake playnly and fellowly of Lords and Kings.” A “dayly Acquaytance and conversation with it” may “breede a contempt of all greatnesse” (Paradoxes, pp. 23, 28). Donne can be repelled by the ordinary and by the feelings it stirs in him. He cannot allow his mistress to be a body, a face, warm flesh, a lively mind, an attractive character, an intimate partner—a person. Her body is either “my America, my new found lande,” or “Mummy”; her mind, either more than angelic, or non-existence (“To his Mistris, Going to Bed,” 27; “Loves Alchymie,” 23-24; “The Dreame,” 13-20). Donne's love poems generally turn upon crises: seductions, valedictions, betrayals, doubts, meditations that occasion cynicism or despair, ecstasies of love or hatred. They are filled with witchcraft, curses, apparitions, and deaths. There is no sense in the poems that love or the beloved can be a “daily beauty,” which may be rested in and enjoyed familiarly—for that way “queasiness” lies.

Nor would Donne be familiar with the divine. He proscribes “too much familiarity in our accesses, and conversation with God,” and would not “make Jesus his companion [or] his servant” (Serms., X.145; also VII.324, VI.125-26). Abhorring the almost physical intimacies of Roman Catholic devotion, he would keep religious experience removed from the familiarities of “touch”: “Our Saviour Christ corrected Mary Magdalens zeale, where she flew to him, in a personall devotion; and he said, Touch me not: for I am not yet ascended to my Father. Fix your meditations upon Christ Jesus so, as he is now at the right hand of his Father in heaven” (Serms., IX.77; also VII.267). In his own meditations Donne rarely departs from this counsel, and his frequent considerations of the crucified Christ—exceptions to the norm—do little to encourage the devotee to assume a cordial intimacy. When Donne goes so far as to ask to be “enthrall[ed]” and “ravish[ed]” by God (“Holy Sonnet XIV,” 13-14), the metaphors seem so abstract, so sanitized by wit and paradox, so clearly metaphorical, that we could never find in them the ambiguities apparent in the mystics' spiritual “union” or “marriage.” The difference between Donne's experience and that of the mystics is obvious when we compare, for example, the audacious familiarity of John of the Cross—

                    Upon my flowery breast
                    Wholly for Him and save Himself for none,
                    There did I give sweet rest
                    To my beloved one:
The fanning of the cedars breathed thereon—(19)

with one of Donne's boldest approaches to a union with Christ: “I put my hands into [Christ's] hands, and hang upon his nailes. … I put my mouth upon his mouth, and it is I that say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”²⁰ Donne does not in his meditation embrace Christ and put “mouth to mouth.” Rather, Christ's hands become his hands, Christ's mouth becomes his mouth, through which a sinful man speaks to the Father. The palpable other disappears at a certain point of closeness.

IV

As we have seen, Donne attempts to place the more important miracles within the soul; at the same time, he wishes to protect the miraculous from the contamination of a personal, “familiar” mysticism. The miraculous then may become that quintessence of feeling—purified from the debased intimacies of both profane and sacred “love”—with which he woud have his soul be full.²¹

But miracles, certainly those worked by God, are gifts. If one has no right to them, how is one to depend upon them as essential food? In answering this question we may see how crucial it was for Donne to believe that the miraculous could be known by an eager soul through a process of defamiliarization, in which wonder could be found in that “which is done every day.” He allows himself to be passive before God's special eruptions into history, and he preaches incessantly about the special working of the Holy Ghost in the fundamentally passive soul; but long before his days as a preacher Donne actively sought the “admiration” that was essential to a sense of the miraculous; and he continued to do so as a spiritual alchemist, through methods sanctioned both by his heart and by his religious tradition.

It is possible to view much of his literary achievement as a result of an imaginative quest for the “clean,” controlled, indeed diluted, but intense and somehow mystical experience of wonder. He seems to have distrusted profoundly such plenary mysticism as the Catholic saints claimed for themselves (one may ask how he would have regarded it had he felt that it were truly available to him).²² And the word “mystical” cannot, of course, be applied univocally to all the experiences in which he sought miracles; for wonder was quite often for him an aesthetic rather than a religious affection,²³ and the excitement or fascination that colored his feeling could be trivial, morally indifferent, or positively profane. We have noted, however, that Donne saw no absolute, necessary dichotomy between secular and holy energies. A passion for the marvellous was a basic fact of his psychic life, an impulse which had to be redirected, not repressed, when he turned toward religious ends.

And it is important to realize that for Donne wonder was an end. He sometimes speaks as if it were not—when, for example, he preaches that “the first step to faith, is to wonder. … If I know a thing, or beleeve a thing, I do no longer wonder: but when I finde that I have reason to stop upon the consideration of a thing, so, as that I see enough to induce admiration, to make me wonder, I come by that step … to a knowledge … or to a faith” (Serms., VI.265).²⁴ But he knows more than the kind of wonder that is at issue here. Albertus Magnus described the mira that leads to “inquiry” and hence to philosophy as a mere physiological sensation, like the “constriction and suspension of the heart caused by amazement at the sensible appearance of something so portentous, great, and unusual that the heart suffers a systole.”²⁵ This is mira begotten by ignorance, and clearly a means to a higher condition: “wonder is the movement of the man who does not know on his way to finding out.”²⁶ Less respectable than such propaedeutic admiration, and therefore even less to be rested in as an end, is the feeling inspired by “prodigy,” which Donne carefully distinguishes from “miracle” (“Obsequies to the Lord Harrington,” 157; and see “To the Countess of Huntington” [“Madame, Man to God's image …”], 5-8). In contrast, Donne considers the wonder begotten by knowledge to be something ultimate: not a single emotion that serves as a means to virtue but the condition of a virtuous soul whose life is felt at its highest pitch, whose mind, will, and affections are in their final, proper attitude toward truth. “All love is wonder,” says Donne,²⁷ and many other virtues may merge into wonder in a rapt soul—as they do, indeed, in the saints who enjoy the Beatific Vision, the final goal of human striving. Since this Vision is “Rapture” experienced when the soul sees the divine “Essence,” its cause is different from those marvels that produce the wonderful joys of the earth.²⁸ Yet Donne believes in continuities between one state and the next: “The Joy … which the pure in heart have here, is not a joy severed from the Joy of Heaven, but a Joy that begins in us here, and continues, and accompanies us thither, and there flowes on, and dilates it selfe” (Serms., VII.340). Since it is a response of the whole person to truth, wonder, like joy, endures in heaven “not a breach” from its temporal state but an “expansion.” And like other gifts that constitute ultimate happiness it may be sought for itself, not merely propter aliquid aliud, for the sake of something else.²⁹

When one pursues wonder instead of awaiting its discovery, one is often in the position of trying to produce what is to be “found.” This personal exertion, this contribution to the experience, may raise questions about nature and trustworthiness of feelings that are not always recognizable as manifestations of religious piety. But Donne proceeds urgently through and beyond any qualms he may have had about the legitimacy of his efforts. He attempts to “life the veil” of custom and make “familiar objects be as if they were not familiar”—not, of course, in the same way that the Romantics would promise to do, through a surrender to primal impulses or to Visions or to Nature. He searches for feeling in the labyrinth of his own mind, and with the assumption that he has license to be factitious. Something may be done to “worke” the soul up to its “first pitch” again (The Second Anniversarie, 435).

Men force the Sunne with much more force to passe,
By gathering his beames with a christall glasse;
So wee, if wee into our selves will turne,
… may outburne
The straw, which doth about our hearts sojourne.

(“To Mr. Rowland Woodward,” 20-24)

Barred from an appreciation of the truly miraculous by a misperception, one may attain the authentic feeling that truth should evoke by a mis-mis-perception, for it is more important to live feelingly than to see correctly, and we may know the truth by seeing incorrectly. Donne points out that God himself is not straightforward and open in all his dealings, the Author of Truth looking sometimes “as though he would kill,” and meaning “nothing but good” (Serms., X.205), allowing obscurities and inconsistencies in Scripture for his own moral ends (Essayes, pp. 56-57)—this God who works as often through a “Pillar of Cloud” as through a “Pillar of Fire.”³⁰ God is served and devotion exalted in the check or defeat of the intellect as well as in its triumphs. Readers have observed that Donne often deliberately tangles his mind into “perplexities” and fills his work with sophistries that prove only the weakness of the mind that would assent to them.³¹ He does so in part because he will not give up, despite his awareness that it is provisional and not to be rested in, the “admiration” that comes from ignorance or uncertainty, the awe that wells up in darkness: those churches are “best for Prayer, that have least light” (“A Hymne to Christ,” 29). He also likes to astonish his rational powers by applying them to the “infinite”—not just to the infinite God, but to infinite places, generations, abysses, danger, miseries, disproportions, and (as might be predicted) to infinite love and fulness. At times, he can barely contain his urge to multiply the unmultipliable, lest astonishment be diminished: “God had been an infinite, superinfinite, an unimaginable space, millions of millions of unimaginable spaces in heaven before the Creation.” “Many, and many, and very many, infinite, and infinitely infinite are the terrours of that day” (Serms., VI.363, VIII.69). Donne is fascinated by extreme possibilities—as most of his poems testify—and impossibilities: “we are swallowed up, irreparably, irrevocably, irrecoverably, irremediably” (Serms., VII.57). His thoughts of “nothingness,” often troubled, are also thrilling: he sees exciting profundities in negation—in the thought that for lovers “nothing else is” (“The Sunne Rising,” 22); or in the irony that “perfectest” things “can by no way be exprest / But Negatives” (“Negative Love,” 10-12); or in the mystery that God created the world ex nihilo: “A Leviathan, a Whale, from a grain of Spawn; an Oke from a buried Akehorn, is a great; but a great world from nothing, is a strange improvement. We wonder to see a man rise from nothing to a great Estate; but that Nothing is but nothing in comparison; but absolutely nothing, meerly nothing, is more incomprehensible then any thing, then all things together” (Serms., IV.101). This is all cheating, in a way; for the wonder that Donne produces by tantalizing his mind and making it giddy may not respond to any qualities in Dingen an sich. But he believes that the feeling itself, even when his mind's own motions, and not “things,” are primarily responsible for initiating it, is the proper response to the truth that lies beyond appearances or logic. And he hopes that the different kinds of wonder achieved through various psychological ploys may prepare for or be assimilated into the feeling that is a divine gift. A “true Rapture” is one in which “we doe nothing our selves” (Serms., IV.82); it does not follow that what we fabricate has no relation to truth.

Infinity, negation, or other extremes may create in the intellect a welcome discomfiture; for Donne, however, bafflement is not an end in itself. He does not despise the mind. Knowledge may bring its own kind of exhilaration, helping to feed and stimulate an hydroptic thirst. Donne constantly reveals a susceptibility to the excitement that may be stirred by the driest of sciences or by the most barren of controversies. Despite his reputation for abstractness he knows how to extract wonder from particular facts through close observation. These facts are most often psychological, the meanderings of the idiosyncratic mind portrayed in his verse and devotions, for he is intensely moved by the spectacle of his self-dramatization. But he can also fascinate himself with physical detail: the exquisitely “tender labyrinth of a soft maids eare” (“Satyre II,” 58) or

                              a small blew shell, the which a poore
Warme bird orespread, and sat still evermore,
          Till her enclos'd child kickt, and peck'd it selfe a dore.
Outcrept a sparrow, this soules moving Inne,
On whose raw armes stiffe feathers now begin,
As childrens teeth through gummes, to breake with paine,
His flesh is jelly yet, and his bones threds,
All a new downy mantle overspreads;
A mouth he opes, which would as much containe
As his late house, and the first houre speaks plaine,
And he chirps alowd for meat.

(Metampsychosis, 178-88)³²

Donne is most avid, however, for meaning; and he focuses on several categories of meaning which are especially inimical to the stale, flat, and unprofitable “ordinary;” these are paradox, essence, uniqueness, precariousness, disintegration, power, and guilt.

V

Donne's compulsive attraction to paradoxes is obvious. Whether his mind discovers them in the nature of things, or manufactures them, they feed his heart by creating their own kind of wonder.³³ Dulness he counters by the sharpness (acutezza) of wit (argutezza); he makes paradoxes—the suspect ones to be found in the Juvenilia and throughout the Songs and Sonets, or those more solemn and respectable paradoxes of the Christian religion—serve as “alarums to truth” (Letters, Burley MS, no. 11) when his soul is dozing in an unfeeling acquiescence to custom.

One reason for the hold of alchemy over Donne's imagination is its promise of a quintessence. There is something magical for him in the notion that one may appropriate the heart of a being by an intellectual command or an emotional experience of its essential “center” or “kernel.”³⁴ Accident is ordinary; substance, essence, is mystical. It is no mere pedantic theological fact that God himself is “essence.” Donne is actually moved when he remembers (as he often does) that God's “radicall, his fundamentall, his primarie, his essentiall name [is] the name of being, Iehovah” (Serms., V.320; also VI.194, VII.446, VIII.75, 144, 177). “God is in the Center” (Serms., IX.406); and it is only at the center, with essence, that an “insatiate soule” can “serve [its] thirst”:

Then, Soule, to thy first pitch worke up againe;
Know that all lines which circles doe containe,
For once that they the center touch, do touch
Twice the circumference; and be thou such.
Double on Heaven, thy thoughts on Earth emploid;
All will not serve; Onely who have enjoyd
The sight of God, in fulnesse, can thinke it;
For it is both the object, and the wit.
This is essentiall joye, where neither hee
Can suffer Diminution, nor wee;
'Tis such a full, and such a filling good.

(The Second Anniversarie, 45-46, 435-45)

If, as T. S. Eliot said of Donne, he “knew the anguish of the marrow” (“Whispers of Immortality”), he desired, as well, to know the marrow's ecstasy. He allows the soul to have “bones,” so that it may possess a “marrow” of its own (Serms., II.84, 86; VIII.195; IX.292). One of his favorite divine promises is that God will fill his chosen with the essential distillations of “Marrow and Fatnesse” (Serms., III.81, 353; IV.363; VII.53, 304; X.167). The mundane lover also hungers for the essential, mimicking the devout soul by seeking satisfaction in a “centrique happinesse” (“Loves Alchymie,” 2) and turning that hunger into cynical lust: “When hee hath the kernell eate, / Who doth not fling away the shell?” (“Communitie,” 23-24). Because one gets to roots or centers by dissection (The First Anniversarie, 66) or by digging (Letters [1651], no. 27; “Loves Alchymie,” 1), anatomies are as prominent in Donne's mind as alchemical processes.

Essence is by definition singular, unique. Donne believed that the human mind loses its sense of the miraculous when miracles become common, are done “every day.” In a way, then, a grasp of the essential can recover a sense of the admirable. So too can an imaginative awareness of what is unique to a privileged initiation. Donne's lovers provide a “patterne” to succeeding generations (“The Canonization,” 45; “The Exstasie,” 21-28); but in their own time they stand alone in sainthood, separated from the “layetie” (“A Valediction: forbidding Mourning,” 8), at all costs different: in heaven “wee shall be throughly blest,” one lover admits, “But wee no more, then all the rest. / Here upon earth, we'are Kings, and none but wee / Can be such Kings, nor of such subjects bee” (“The Anniversarie,” 21-24). The singularity here resides more in a strained imagination than in the “saints” themselves; yet the fabrication is necessary. Even when Donne religiously longs for a heaven that will level many distinctions, he must try to achieve a sense of his soul's uniqueness. The “numberlesse infinities / Of soules” awaiting judgment, “let them sleepe, Lord” and attend to “mee,” my repentance (“Holy Sonnet VII,” 3, 9). In meditation Donne works to define the individual soul against what seems like the undifferentiated mass composed of every other: “how early did God seek thee, when he sought thee in Adam's confused loynes, and out of that leavened and sowre loaf in which we were all kneaded up, out of that massa damnata, that refuse and condemned lump of dough, he sought and sever'd out that grain which thou shouldst be” (Serms., I.249).

Nothing underscores the value of what is unique more than a threat to its existence; and Donne keeps his mind attuned to things on edge (the universe itself is “almost created lame,” its bodies “Scarce” obeying their natural forms [The First Anniversarie, 192, 268-76; “Good Friday, 1613,” 6]). He even courts a knowledge of their precariousness. His poetry, as Robert Ellrodt has pointed out,³⁵ continually dramatizes the moment of crisis, which undermines confidence in any secure state—even when a lover believes in and boasts of “everlasting day” (“The Anniversarie,” 10). Love may be “a growing, or full constant light”; but constancy must forever live in a fear for itself, since love's “first minute, after noone, is night” (“A Lecture upon the Shadow,” 25-26). Many of the most important events occur “this minute,” “for a minute,” “in a minute,” “in an instant,” “at once,” “in ictu oculi,” “like a flash”—little time being left for one to become comfortable with the quotidian. Donne views life as a progress through single moments—in each of which he requires from God a special act of “Conservation” to keep him from annihilation (Essayes, p. 76)—and toward a single moment, his condition at which instant will determine his fate for eternity.

This is my playes last scene, here heavens appoint
My pilgrimages last mile; and my race
Idly, yet quickly runne, hath this last pace,
My spans last inch, my minutes last point.

(“Holy Sonnet VI,” 1-4)

He can do little to redeem his vulnerability, to make it useful, except by studying it into a source of feeling: thinking of himself as almost a nothing—a “quasi” nothing, “neere a degree towards Vacuitie” (Devs., p. 110; Serms., IX.136; Devs., p. 25)—and considering how small a fillip would do him to death:

What will not kill a man, if a vapor will? how great an Elephant, how small a Mouse destroyes? To dye by a bullet is the Souldiers dayly bread; but few men dye by a haile-shot. A man is more worth, then to be sold for single money; a life to valued above a trifle. … We have heard of death, upon small occasions, and by scornefull instruments; a pinne, a combe, a haire pulled, hath gangred, & kill'd; But when I have said, a vapour, if I were asked again, what is a vapour, I could not tell, it is so insensible a thing; so neere nothing is that reduces us to nothing.

(Devs., pp. 62-63)

Thoughts of disintegration, then, not only warn Donne to lead a moral life, they help him to feel his life, and to feel it as something exceptional. Sighs of love are intensified when they become the breath of the dying (“The Expiration”). An imagined struggle with death can be bracing: “I would not that death should take me asleep. I would not have him meerly seise me, and onely declare me to be dead, but win me, and overcome me. When I must shipwrack, I would do it in a Sea, where mine impotencie might have some excuse; not in a sullen weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming” (Letters [1651], no. 18). Death taunts Donne into the half-serious intellectual exertions of Bianthantos, or into an imagined physical recovery: “Death came so fast towards me, that the over-joy of that recovered mee” (Letters [1651], no. 117). And Donne taunts back: turning decay into eloquence in his Devotions and Sermons, sneering at the death of death, dressing himself in his shroud and lying in his coffin near his “playes last scene.” Death sanctifies his “metaphysical shudder” when it creates religious devotion out of thoughts that he is “ground even to an attenuation, and must proceed to evacuation, all waies to exinanition and annihilation” (Devs., p. 106). Nothing is “ordinary” in the valley of the shadow of death, where there is always possible a remarkable contiguity: “A bracelet of bright haire about the bone” (“The Relique,” 6).

Of course, Donne fears disintegration, but then he cherishes his fears. Just as he proscribes the fear that attenuates lust or love (“The Dreame,” 24-26; “The Good Morrow,” 8-9) yet admits (officially, at least) that “reverentiall feare” ennobles love (“Womans Constancy,” 6), he resists the “sinne of feare” that issues in doubt or despair (“A Hymne to God the Father,” 13) but exults in “a religious fear,” a “holy amazement” and the “terror” inspired by the Holy Ghost (Serms., III.72, VII.316, VIII.68).³⁶ In his attempts to reinterpret miracles, he does not abandon their meaning as signs, which has always been prominent in theological discussion of the miraculous.³⁷ If authentication of truth must come to him through feeling rather than through visible spectacles in nature or from a voice in the whirlwind, he accepts with relief and gratitude the trembling that ought to accompany an experience of the numinous. Donne's God is, as John Carey says, a “powerhouse,” but not, as in Carey's suggestion, because he finds “in God and in his own position as God's spokesman, a final and fully adequate expression of his power lust.”³⁸ Donne needs to suffer the effects of the power more than to wield it, to be broken and burned, to “receive Corrections” as signs that he is “worth” God's “anger” (“Holy Sonnet XIV,” “Good Friday,” 37-39). Fear of anger and awe in the face of power are alternatives to stupefaction, proving that his soul has not become a carcass; proving too, perhaps, as much as any theological argument or visible effect, that he depends on Another for his life. And guilt itself, his soul's disease, because it requires the most potent and therefore most terrifying therapy, can be regarded as a felix culpa (Serms., VI.238-39).

Since Donne never seems to feel “miracles” without effort, he may never be certain that wonder is given to him by truth, and therefore that he has ever really known the miraculous. His greatest exertion must then be to maintain a faith that he is not merely “firking” himself up when performing his spiritual alchemies—such faith as any person must have who methodically practices devotion while desiring only to be moved by a Spirit not his own. It is the prerogative of God to make human and divine motions in the soul congruent or continuous, and what can a soul do but leave the matter of authentication to him?

If one's own efforts may be the sign or the occasion but never the cause of a divine gift, they need not be categorically honest (that is, anything more than humanly imperfect) to be valuable. Donne knows that dissimulation and sophistry may bespeak love. Although repelled by cosmetics, he can urge (without being utterly ironical): “love her who shewe her great love to thee by taking this paines to seem lovely to thee” (Paradoxes, p. 4). His “wit of love” must often fall back upon this principle for its validity. In “Goodfriday, 1613,” for example, when the poet tells his Saviour, “I turn my back to thee, but to receive / Corrections” (37-38), he is clearly not telling the simple truth, for he has already suggested that “Pleasure or business” has “carried” him westward (7-9), the direction in which he continues to ride. Not strong enough to bend his soul toward the east, he can nevertheless offer as proof of his will-to-love the labor of his wit, which though the effort of pretense turns an embarrassing truancy into a pious act. Donne does not, however, wish his strainings after miracles to be only signs of love or tokens of worship, as his strainings after witty arguments and conceits might be: wonder is for him an end in itself; and he keeps to the end of his life a faith or a hope that it is for his heart a true and “essentiall” good.

In the sermon, “deaths Duell,” which he preached when death was coming “fast towards” him, and in which his powers seem concentrated as they rarely had been in his oratory, Donne recapitulates many of the themes that bear upon his attitude toward the wonderful. He fears a “dangerous damp and stupefaction, and insensibility” (Serms., X.240). He contemplates “miraculously strange … super-miraculous” works of God (243). He thinks of death as hunger, love as thirst, and joy as a filling good (243-44, 231). He seeks to feel and to convey astonishment. In paradoxes: “We celebrate our own funeralls with cryes, even at our birth”; “the Lord of life could dye” (233-243). In vivid images of “corruption and putrifaction, of vermiculation and incineration, of dissolution and dispersion,” of appetites dead and rampant: “my mouth shall be filled with dust, and the worme shall feed, and feed sweetely upon me” (238) in thoughts of “nullification” and the “irrecoverable” (239). In alertness to such crucial “moments” as the “instant” of the body's “dissolution” and “redintegration,” or the “minutes” of God's mercies, or the “houre” of Christ's passion (238, 240, 245). And in submission to “the God of power” (231). Donne complains that some “miserable men” have “made themselves too familiar” with Christ (245). Yet at this late hour, contemplating his crucified Lord, he goes farther than ever toward a mystical familiarity that has always embarrassed and angered him. He leaves his congregation and himself “in that blessed dependancy, to hang upon him that hangs upon the Crosse, there bath in his teares, there suck at his woundes” (248). The body of Christ no longer disappears at Donne's close approach; for him the age of earthly miracles has passed, the season of a clean, sober, effortful, spiritual wonder is at an end, and it is time for touching.

In preaching his own funeral sermon Donne tried to turn the private “exercise” of dying into a public lesson. His passion for the original and for the unique coexisted in him with the need to speak as a representative man; and it would not be wrong to search in his experience for something paradigmatic—as those have recognized who have studied his art and piety in relation to the ideologies of Mannerism and the Baroque. His need for miracles must surely have a prominent place among those features of his temperament that distinguish him as a man of his age: as one who flees from “medievalism” toward “enlightenment,” compulsively rationalistic, who is yet frustrated by the impotencies of reason, even scornful of them, and who longs for the ecstasy that some rational programmes would drily mock out of existence.³⁹

But Donne would never have liked being considered a mere paradigm. He was most acutely aware of the personal drama of accomodation between his own necessities and the official ideals that he attempted to embrace. This drama, we must (and can only) suspect, was tense with the suppressions necessary for compromise.

He desired and courted wonder, but he feared wildness as much as he dreaded stupefaction. When he professes to “hate extreames” (“The Autumnall,” 45), to believe that “means bless” (“Satyre II,” 107), to value “Meane waies” and to seek an “evennesse [of] pietie” (“A Litanie,” 116-17, 208-09), we can see the plausibility of his becoming an Anglican priest, and can understand why he would try to tame the miraculous somehow and make it respectable. The mysticism for which he allows himself to yearn is neither radical nor heroic. He was perhaps too cautious, too skeptical, too egocentric to surrender to rapture. He would be “ravished,” but without being duped or annihilated. We must also admit, however, that he is hardly a blithe, convincing champion of the golden mean. If mediocritas is virtus, Donne seems to have spent much of his life yielding unvirtuously to temptation. He was ordained only reluctantly in the church which became his refuge from and atonement for extremes, and even as a churchman who was himself given and who preached only the “ordinary meanes” to blessedness he tried to turn those means into miracles. He did not wish to remain earthbound until he could “be caught up … to meet the Lord in the air” (1 Thess. 4.17; see Serms., IV.63-88); but his via media was, until the meeting and touching at the end of it, hardly a straight, untroubled thoroughfare.

Notes

1. See pp. 19-25. The editions of Donne's works cited in this essay are listed, with abbreviations as follows:

   Biath.: John Donne, Biathanatos. Reproduced from the First Edition [1647], with a Bibliographical Note by J. W. Hebel. New York, 1930; Devs: John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. Ed. Anthony Raspa. Montreal, 1975; John Donne, The Divine Poems. Ed. Helen Gardner, 2nd ed. Oxford, 1978. (I follow Grierson's numbering of the Holy Sonnets.); John Donne, The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets. Ed. Helen Gardner. Oxford, 1965; John Donne, The Epithalamions, Anniversaries and Epicedes. Ed. W. Milgate. Oxford, 1978; Essayes: John Donne, Essays in Divinity. Ed. Evelyn M. Simpson. Oxford, 1952; Gosse: Edmund Gosse, The Life and Letters of John Donne. 2 vols. London, 1899; Ignatius: John Donne, Ignatius His Conclave. Ed. T. S. Healy, S. J. Oxford, 1969; Letters: John Donne, Letters to Severall Persons of Honour (1651). A Facsimile Reproduction with an Introduction by M. Thomas Hester. Delmar, N.Y., 1977. Other letters are quoted from Gosse (above) and from Evelyn M. Simpson, A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne. 2nd ed. Oxford, 1948; Paradoxes: John Donne, Paradoxes and Problems. Ed. Helen Peters. Oxford, 1980; Ps.-M.: John Donne, Pseudo-Martyr (1610). A Facsimile Reproduction with an Introduction by Francis Jacques Sypher. Delmar, N.Y., 1974; Serms: The Sermons of John Donne. Ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson. 10 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1953-1962.

2. Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, in vol. V of Ben Jonson (Oxford, 1925-1952).

3. H. J. C. Grierson, Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1921), p. xvi; T. S. Eliot, “Rhyme and Reason: the Poetry of John Donne,” The Listener 3 (19 March 1930), 502-03; J. E. V. Crofts, “John Donne: a Reconsideration,” in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association (Oxford, 1937), reprinted in Helen Gardner, ed., John Donne: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962), p. 89; Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation, 2nd ed. (New Haven, Conn., 1962), pp. 14-15, 25, 83, 147; Barbara Lewalski, Donne's Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise (Princeton, N.J., 1973), p. 86; Murray Roston, The Soul of Wit (Oxford, 1974); John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (New York, 1981), p. 231.

4. Donne himself compares “Wit” to alchemy (“To E. of D.,” 13-14).

5. Why not “Donne's” voice, or voices? This reading of Donne's work assumes (because there is no space to argue the point) that in spite of the multiple and often contradictory poses of the poet, essayist, and preacher, something of the “man” can be discerned behind all the masks, and that the “masterful and duplicitous ventriloquism” noted by Judith Scherer Herz is not somehow mysteriously disembodied. She attributes to Donne an “Escher-like virtuosity” that is its “own excuse for being,” and she finds fault on principle with attempts like John Carey's to study “Donne's putatively retrievable mind.” (See “An Excellent Exercise of Wit … : Donne and the Poetics of Concealment,” in C. J. Summers and T. L. Pebworth, eds., The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne [Columbia, Mo., 1986], pp. 3-14.)

6. See, for example, Thomas More's attack on Tyndale in The Confutation of Tyndale's Answer, in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. VIII, part i, ed. Louis A. Schuster, et al. (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1973), pp. 251ff. For the Roman Catholic attack in Donne's own day, see Robert Bellarmine, De Notis Verae Ecclesiae, IV.xiv, in Opera Omnia, ed. Justinus Fèvre (Paris, 1870-1874), vol. II.

7. Donne's uncles, the Jesuits Ellis and Jasper Heywood, seem to have possessed a relic of their kinsman, Sir Thomas More. “Either of them being desirous to haue [the tooth] to himselfe, it suddenly, to the admiration of both, parted in two” (Cresacre More's Life of More, quoted in R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life [Oxford, 1970], p. 25).

8. See also Essayes, pp. 84-85; Serms., X.172-73. Cf. Luther Sämmtliche Werke (Erlangen, 1826-57), XVI.191; L.86-87.

9. Ps.-M., Preface, Sig. D4v; Serms., VI.251-52; VIII.155, 305; I.219.

10. Serms., III.370; IV.278, 311; also VII.294 and Essayes, pp. 84-85.

11. We can never be sure, of course, when in the enigmatic Biathanatos Donne is to be taken in utter seriousness.

12. Werke (Erlangen Ausgabe), XVI.190; LVIII.95; LIX.3.

13. Cf. Augustine, City of God, X.xii; Luther, Werke (Weimar, 1883-), XVI.301; XXII.121.

14. See Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (1911; rpt. London, 1977), passim.

15. Serms., III.73; VI.172; Essayes, p. 16; Devs., p. 123; Serms., IX.106; IV.287ff.; The Second Anniversarie, 443.

16. “The Exstasie,” 44. The adjective alone appears frequently in the verse, but usually with the meaning “only.”

17. Essayes, p. 5; Ignatius, p. 25; Ps.-M., p. 174; Serms., VI.329; III.196.

18. Serms., VIII.257; III.364-65; “To Mr. R. W.” [“If, as mine is”], 22. See also Devs., p. 8; Serms., V.386.

19. “Obscure Night,” 26-30; trans. Arthur Symons; quoted in Underhill, Mysticism, p. 420.

20. Serms., II.300. Cf. “Holy Sonnet XI.” See also Serms., III.313ff., on the text: “Kiss the Son, lest he be angry.” “Kiss the Son” turns out to mean, “hang at his lips,” or “listen to his word.”

21. The “intellectual” piety of Donne is sometimes contrasted with the more purely “sensible devotion” of Crashaw. This distinction, while understandable, does full justice neither to the affective element in Donne's devotion nor to the intellectual element in Crashaw's. The contrast might be sharpened by a consideration of the attitude of each man towards “familiarity”—which is related to what Anthony Low, with deference to Christopher Ricks, calls in Crashaw's work the element of “embarrassment” (Love's Architecture: Devotional Modes in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry [New York, 1978], p. 157).

22. See Michael F. Moloney, John Donne: His Flight from Medievalism (Urbana, Ill., 1944), pp. 165-95; Helen Gardner, “John Donne: A Note on Elegy V, ‘His Picture,’” Modern Language Review 39 (1944), 333-37.

23. On the aesthetic affection of wonder, see James V. Mirollo, The Poet of the Marvelous: Giambattista Marino (New York and London, 1963).

24. It is the view of Dennis Quinn (“Donne and the Wane of Wonder,” ELH 36 [1969], 626-47) that Donne always looks upon wonder as a means (p. 629).

25. Quoted in J. V. Cunningham, Woe or Wonder. The Emotional Effect of Shakespearean Tragedy (Denver, Col., 1951), p. 79. The passage is from Albert's Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, II.vi.

26. Cunningham, p. 80.

27. “The Anagram,” 25. The definition does not seem to be vitiated by its use in this ironical elegy. See also “A Funerall Elegie” for Elizabeth Drury, 29, where “Wonder and love” may well be a hendiadys; and “A Valediction: of the Booke,” 28-29.

28. Serms., VIII.313, 231-32. See Evelyn Simpson, A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1948), p. 96.

29. See Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, III.xxxiv, xxxvii.

30. Essayes, p. 39; Letters, (Sir Tobie Matthew Coll.), Gosse, II, 207; Serms., IV.83; V.293; VI.189; VII.275, VIII.121; IX.233-34, 362-63.

31. See especially Roston, The Soul of Wit.

32. See Carey, John Donne, p. 149.

33. On the traditional association of paradox with wonder, see Quinn, “Donne and the Wane of Wonder,” p. 633.

34. On Donne's preoccupation with the image of the circle, see Michael L. Hall, “Circles and Circumvention in Donne's Sermons,” JEGP 82 (1983), 201-14. Hall cites earlier studies of the same subject.

35. See L'Inspiration personelle et l'esprit du temps chez les poètes métaphysiques anglais (Paris, 1960), I.i.82-94.

36. On the relationship of fear to love, as set forth in the meditative tradition, see Martz, The Poetry of Meditation, pp. 146-47. See also Robert J. Blanch, “Fear and Despair in Donne's Holy Sonnets,” American Benedictine Review 25 (1974), 476-84.

37. See, for example, James Hastings, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (New York, 1908), s.v. “Miracles”; The New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), s.v. “Miracles (Theology of).” In the New Testament, “signs” (semeia) is one of the words for miracles, which are seen as giving testimony to the divine mission of those who work for them.

38. Carey, John Donne, p. 122.

39. Moloney, opposing the medieval to the Renaissance man, concluded that in Donne “the rationalistic spirit close[d] to the theologian the avenues of mystical experience to which the poet's intuition was an open sesame” (Flight from Medievalism, p. 195). The rationalist in Donne was not, I think, so clearly victorious; and since Moloney wrote (in the 1940s), we have become much more aware that the Baroque world-view was in crucial respects quite different from that of the Renaissance.