SOURCE: Corthell, Ronald J. “Joseph Hall and Protestant Meditation.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 20, no. 3 (fall 1978): 367-85.

[In this essay, Corthell explores the Protestant undertones of Hall's method of meditation, particularly focusing on the relationship between Hall's Protestant ethos and his Senecan prose style. Corthell describes Hall's meditations as an example of his integrated approach to Protestant Christianity, merging strains of Puritan and Anglican thought.]

I

Several recent studies in seventeenth-century literature have drawn attention to a distinctively Protestant theory and practice of formal meditation which developed as a response to the widely disseminated method of the Jesuits and which, like the Ignatian exercises, contributed significantly to the literary temper of the age.¹ U. Milo Kaufmann and Barbara K. Lewalski agree that one of the most important sources of this Protestant tradition is Joseph Hall's Arte of Divine Meditation (1606). Thus, to Hall's impressive string of “firsts” in English literature—his formal verse satires, his Characters of Vertues and Vices, and his Epistles—we must now add the treatise on meditation. However, the distinguishing features of Protestant meditation, as defined by Hall, have been debated. Kaufmann, who prefers the term Puritan in describing Hall's meditative theory, notes Hall's failure to use the imagination, while Lewalski emphasizes the near-equation of sermon and meditation and suggests connections between Hall's method and Donne's poetry.² In brief, Protestant meditation has been evaluated in terms of its ability or inability to foster imaginative literature; however, as even Kaufmann is forced to admit, the imagination is regarded with considerable suspicion by both Catholic and Protestant devotional writers; thus, to discuss either Catholic or Protestant meditation from the perspective of the imaginative literature it inspired is to distort to some extent our picture of these devotional practices. The purpose of this article is to suggest that the theme and structure of Hall's own formal meditations are the best clues to what is Protestant in his approach and that the “Protestant” structure is supported by Hall's famous “Senecan” prose style.

Both Lewalski and Kaufmann build upon Louis L. Martz's seminal study, The Poetry of Meditation.³ Martz used the researches of the historians of “devout humanism,” Henri Bremond and Pierre Pourrat, as a starting point for his attempt to relate certain poetical habits of thought and structure in the seventeenth century to the great meditative models of the period. The Poetry of Meditation focuses on the Ignatian exercises as a spiritual discipline which integrates, through a carefully modulated structure, the three powers of memory, intellect, and will. In The Paradise Within, Martz has extended his treatment of the meditative tradition through the later seventeenth century by examining works of Vaughan, Traherne, and Milton from the perspective of the Augustinian concept of interior illumination.⁴ Martz argues persuasively that Augustine's principle of the “indwelling Teacher” replaces the Ignatian model in English meditative works after 1650 and that this shift is part of “a vital transformation in the religious outlook of the age” (PW, p. 4)—a movement toward the individual, as opposed to ecclesiastical, communion with God which we conventionally associate with Protestantism. Thus Martz's later book outlines his version of Protestant meditation, which is seen to diverge from Catholic practice in theme and structure: the meditation on the cross, central in the Ignatian exercises, is gradually replaced by the paradisal vision, or “meditation on the ‘End,’ or the ‘fruition,’ the enjoyment of ‘His Eternal Glory’” (PW, p. 59). This thematic departure is accompanied by a modification in meditative structure; the “precise, tightly articulated method” of Ignatius yields to a digressive and “iterative manner” which presents the soul's explorations in ultimate truth (PW, pp. 43 ff.).

Martz discusses Hall's Arte of Divine Meditation at some length in The Poetry of Meditation, where he argues that Hall's indebtedness to the Rosetum, which, directly or indirectly, influenced Ignatius, places his treatise in the Continental tradition epitomized by the Spiritual Exercises.⁵ Martz's identification of Hall's source suggests that meditative writers of the early seventeenth century were not rigidly sectarian, that the meditative tradition is as rich and complex as the literary tradition it parallels. However, there is also evidence that Hall was reacting against certain trends in Catholic devotion. Hall had glanced satirically at Jesuit practice in his anti-Romish dystopia, Mundus Alter et Idem (1605), when he described the walls of the Temple of Famine, “all painted about with all manner of good victualls, onely to excite the prisoners appetite unto his greater plague, and verily one Jesuite or other hath scene these walles, and thereupon devised pictures for their Chambers of meditation.”⁶ And, as Kaufmann has noted, Hall silently excised the critical “composition of place” in his Arte.⁷ But more important than this anti-Jesuit tone, which we expect from a churchman of Hall's generation, is Hall's departure from Catholic models in those areas of theme and structure which Martz has analyzed in the works of Vaughan, Traherne, and Milton. Hall loosens the older structures of a Mauburnus, and he points toward later efforts to recover “the paradise within.” By meditation, Hall writes in the opening paragraph of the Arte, “we grow to be (as wee are) straungers upon earth, and out of a right estimation of all earthly things, into a sweet fruition of invisible comforts: by this, wee see our Saviour with Steven, we talke with God as Moses, and by this we are ravished with blessed Paul into Paradise; and see that heaven which we are loath to leave, which we cannot utter.”⁸ Hall's treatise is an important link in the developing meditative tradition which Martz has described.

Martz notes that studies of Augustine's influence on the seventeenth century frequently overlook his concept of illumination in favor of his teachings on predestination (PW, pp. xiv-xv). It is difficult not to emphasize the latter, since Augustine's views on predestination were codified in the Thirty-Nine Articles. Seventeenth-century Anglican writers like Hall were keenly aware of both dimensions of Augustine's thought and of the problems involved in reconciling the concept of an inner light with ideas of human depravity and divine predestination. Because of this awareness, as Helen C. White has pointed out, Protestant devotional writers confronted a number of difficulties in devising counterparts to Catholic devotional practices.⁹ From a doctrinal point of view, the art of meditation was especially problematic: the various ladders, scales, and exercises designed to stir up devotion were human inventions; Catholic writers, then, found a place for human initiatives in the plan of salvation. The Jesuits did acknowledge the primacy of the divine will in salvation; as Ignatius wrote at the opening of his manual, “spiritual exercises are methods of preparing and disposing the soul to free itself of all inordinate attachments, and after accomplishing this, of seeking and discovering the Divine Will regarding the disposition of one's life, thus insuring the salvation of his soul.”¹⁰ Still, Ignatian meditation places special emphasis on the human powers of memory, understanding, and will which, properly disciplined, can turn man to God's purposes. Such a view of man's role in salvation is hard to reconcile with a theology of predestination and prevenient grace. Article XVII of the Thirty-Nine Articles maintains that “Predestination to life is God's everlasting purpose and decree, secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen.” This teaching is supported by Articles IX and XII, which state that “We have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God without the grace of God by Christ preventing us” (IX); and the “Works done before the grace of Christ and the inspiration of His Spirit do not please God or prepare for grace, but have the nature of sin” (XII).¹¹ Given the fact of predestination and the teachings on prevenient grace, are rules for devotion required, or even desirable? How does one know whether his meditation is “prevented,” and therefore good, or presumptuous, and therefore sinful?

A theory of Protestant meditation must be especially careful to provide a framework in which man can exercise his faculties within the context of grace. The notion of spiritual accomplishment, which informs Ignatius's metaphor of exercise, will be qualified: one does not accomplish, or even “prepare” for, salvation; one is saved, and one's spiritual accomplishment is “prevented” by Christ's saving grace. Hall's Arte of Divine Meditation is an eminently clear solution to the Protestant dilemma; it teaches and exemplifies meditation as an art informed by divine purposefulness. In Hall's meditative program the meditator does not move through various stages toward a goal; rather, he realizes with a new intensity where he already is. Hall does not prepare himself for Christ; he discovers that he exists in Christ and in Paradise, and they in him.

II

Hall certainly borrowed from Mauburnus, whom he calls an “obscure namelesse Monke,” but his approach to meditation was also shaped by a more secular tradition. The Arte of Divine Mediation first appeared in 1606, when Hall was in the midst of publishing works that would earn him the title “the English Seneca.” His Heaven upon Earth was published earlier that year, and, in 1605, he had presented his benefactor, Sir Robert Drury, with the first two books of Meditations and Vowes Divine and Morall. Yet to appear after the Arte had gone through its second edition in 1607 were the Characters of Vertues and Vices (1608) and Epistles in Sixe Decades (1608-11). Hall refers to Heaven upon Earth and Meditations and Vowes in the dedication of the Arte and implies that the treatise on meditation, with its sample meditation “Of Eternal Life,” is the completion of a sequence of works: “Wherefore after those sudden Meditations which passed me without rule, I was easily induced by their successe … to send foorth this Rule of Meditation; and after my Heaven upon earth, to discourse (although by way of example) of heaven above” (Arte, sig. A4^r).

Although Hall was far from being a thoroughgoing Neostoic like Justus Lipsius, he began thinking about meditation in a Stoical context.¹²Meditations and Vowes is markedly Senecan in style and subject. Hall's technique, repeated in each of the three hundred paragraphs that comprise his collected “sudden meditations,” is admirably simple. Hall typically moves from a moral commonplace, through a reconsideration of this general truth, to an application to the self. Christian doctrine is reformulated in the stile coupé, and the good Christian is portrayed as the immovable and upright Wise Man of the Stoics. Meditation 59 from the Third Century typifies Hall's concept of the “sudden meditation”:

He is wealthy enough that wanteth not; he is great enough, that is his own master; he is happy enough, that lives to die well. Other things I will not care for; nor too much for these, save only for the last, which alone can admit of no immoderation.¹³

Meditation is largely a pointed handling of moral commonplaces. Three parasonic aphorisms project a tidy formula for the happy life. The second half of the meditation qualifies the ready and easy wisdom of the first part and achieves an effect of extemporaneity, particularly in the final member of the period. The afterthought of “immoderation” contradicts the repeated emphasis on “enough” in the aphorisms and thus lends the unity of paradox to the piece. This exercise of wit, Hall writes, is “the most pleasing and noble business of man, being the natural and immediate issue of that reason whereby he is severed from brute creatures”; moreover, by writing down our meditations “we make others partners of those rich excellencies which God hath hid in the mind.”¹⁴ Hall will develop this concept of “hidden excellencies” in The Arte of Divine Meditation.

In Meditation and Vowes, Hall promoted the Stoical ideals of retirement and self-examination in a literary form which proved immensely attractive to devotional writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.¹⁵ These Stoic values were conducive to Hall's developing view of the Christian life as one which finds its chief support and meaning in the act of meditation. In addition, Hall associated meditation with the “Senecan amble,” a style which, as Morris Croll has argued, attempts to portray the individual mind moving toward understanding.¹⁶ Hall's version of this style is highly contrived, though it can, as we have seen, achieve extemporal effects. Hall seems to aim at a combination of artfulness and naturalness; his style imitates the movement of a highly trained and self-conscious mind whose thinking is inseparable from figures of thought.

Heaven upon Earth is a more systematic exposition of Hall's Stoical ideal of the perfect Christian life. Hall ostensibly follows Neostoical works like Justus Lipsius's Two Bookes of Constancie (English translation 1594) and Guillaume du Vair's The Moral Philosophie of the Stoics (English translation 1598) in writing a book which instructs the reader in the art of living in “true peace, and tranquillity of mind.” As the title suggests, the treatise is built around a paradox which it is Hall's purpose to examine in all its ramifications. The discourse of heaven upon earth is an exfoliation of dichotomies—nature and grace, reason and faith, Athens and Jerusalem—through which Hall explores the possibility of achieving true peace of mind. In later editions of his works Hall underlined this feature of the treatise by supplying it with a Ramist “analysis,” However, despite the logical apparatus and the obvious borrowings from Seneca's De Tranquillitate Animi and other Stoical writings, Heaven upon Earth is primarily a meditation on a Christian mystery; for Hall, tranquillity is dependent upon the workings of faith in the individual soul: “receive peace & be happy beleve & thou hast received. … The apprehending of this all-sufficient satisfaction makes it ours.”¹⁷ The chief means whereby we apprehend satisfaction is meditation: “He that will have and hold right Tranquillity must find in himselfe a sweete fruition of God and a feeling apprehension of his presence” through “a daily renuing of hevenly familiarity, by seeking him up, … by talking with him in our secret invocations, by hearing his conference with us; and by mutual intertainment of ech other in the sweete discourses of our daily meditations.”¹⁸ Thus, for Hall, the “rules” of peace lead directly to the rules of divine meditation; the act of meditation is the highest form of Christian experience, the communion of the individual soul with God.

Hall's achievement as the “English Seneca” was to bring Neostoicism into the field of “devout humanism,” defined by Henri Bremond as “une école de sainteté personnelle; … affective et tout dirigée vers la pratique.”¹⁹ Both Meditations and Vowes and Heaven upon Earth are devotional in temper; as Hall wrote to Lady Drury in the dedication to the Second Century of his “sudden meditations,” “I made them not for the eye, but for the heart: neither do I commend them to your reading, but your practice.”²⁰ Hall's devotional approach to Neostoicism led him to meditation, the supreme devotional art, which surpasses the Stoics by giving us rules for achieving the “peace which passeth understanding.” Hall writes in Heaven upon Earth that he has “followed Seneca and gone beyond him; followed him as a Philosopher, gone beyond him as a Christian, as a Divine.”²¹ The Stoical values of self-examination, the inner life, and personal sanctity harmonized with Hall's views on the meditative life; thus far he could follow Seneca. He goes beyond him by identifying the act of meditation with the experience of grace, “a sweete fruition of God” within the individual soul. In addition, Hall's experiments with the Senecan style would have their “fruition” in a form of meditation characterized by Augustine as a “darting hither and thither with a kind of movement of passage.”²²

III

The Arte of Divine Meditation shares with Meditations and Vowes and Heaven upon Earth devout humanism's emphasis on practicality and its broad, even popular, appeal. Hall models his treatment of “deliberate” meditation after an isagogic genre familiar to many of his seventeenth-century readers, the preceptive ars rhetoricae.²³ Like the teacher of rhetoric, Hall divides the art into its parts and sets down “rules of thrift” which will help the student to achieve proficiency. This preceptive feature of divine meditation distinguishes it from the “sudden,” or “extemporal,” variety: “Of Extemporal Meditation there may be much use, no rule: forasmuch as our conceits herein varie according to the infinite multitude of objects, and their divers manner of profering themselves to the minde; as also for the suddennesse of this acte” (Arte, pp. 10-11). On the other hand, deliberate meditation, which is “wrought out of our owne heart,” “both may be wel guided, and shall be not a little furthered by precepts; part whereof the labours of others shall yeeld us, and part the plainest mistresse, Experience” (Arte, pp. 7, 23). Hall's aim, then, is to set forth an “art” which can be fitted to the individual devotional needs of the meditator.

The Arte also treats of the moral qualities of the person fit for meditation (in rhetorical parlance, the “bonus rhetor”), and of the “circumstances” of time, place, and gesture. Hall recommends “Solitarinesse of Place” on the basis of the examples of Christ on the mount, Isaac in the fields, John the Baptist in the desert, and David on his bed (Arte, p. 49); meditation is a private form of rhetoric, a “secret invocation.” The proper time for meditation cannot be prescribed, nor can gesture, which varies as the matter meditated (Arte, pp. 55-63). To aid the “unlearned reader,” Hall supplements his suggestions and precepts with a sample meditation “Of Eternal Life,” “so what might seeme obscure in the one [precepts], may by the other be explained; and the same steps he sees me take in this [example], hee may accordingly treade in any other Theme” (Arte, p. 94). Thus Hall's approach to meditation embraces theory, imitation, and practice, the three areas into which ancient writers divided the teaching of rhetoric.

Throughout the treatise Hall presents meditation as an art which can be easily mastered but which is ignored at the expense of spiritual perfection: “Learne it who can, and neglect it who list; hee shall never find joy, neither in God nor in himselfe, which doeth not both knowe and practise it” (Arte, p. 4). This insistence upon the absolute necessity of meditation became a convention of Protestant meditation after Hall.²⁴ Hall's earlier Neostoical works help to explain his contribution to the convention. Hall developed an approach to the Christian life which placed the meditative act at the center of experience: meditation is the experience of sanctification, “a feeling apprehension” of the presence of grace; it “is the very end God hath given us our soules” (Arte, p. 188). Furthermore, Hall's phrasing here in the Arte defines the Protestant art of meditation as a very special art indeed: those who “can” learn it will find joy; those who “list” not will never find it. The choice of verbs is theologically charged; Hall carefully allows only a negative function to human initiative in meditation. The invitation to the meditative life is not Hall's but God's: one does not choose to meditate; one is chosen to meditate. Meditation is for the elect.

The art of meditation, then, is a distinctive form of rhetoric: it is an art of persuasion designed for a particularly fit audience, one “prevented” by the grace of Christ. This prevenient feature of the art is reflected in Hall's “proceeding” in the two parts of meditation. Hall presents his meditative program as a carefully modulated sequence through which the soul moves gradually toward its end. Like a good speech, deliberate meditation succeeds by observing the rules of logic and rhetoric, by building incrementally toward a conclusion; it moves “not suddenly, but by certain staires and degrees, til we come to the highest” (Arte, pp. 84-85). If we turn from Hall's precepts to his practice, however, we discover that sequence frequently yields to a technique of repetition, the “iterative manner,” which Martz has analyzed in Traherne. This technique, I hope to show, is a reflection, in meditative structure, of the doctrine of “prevention.”

The sequence which Hall proposes deserves attention. Meditation “begins in the understanding, ends in the affections … begins in the braine, descends to the heart; Begins on earth, ascends to heaven” (Arte, p. 85). With respect to the understanding, Hall requires “only a deep and firme Consideration of the thing propounded”; this is best achieved by drawing the subject “through all, or the principall of those places which natural reason doth afford us” (Arte, p. 88). These places, the familiar places of invention in logic and rhetoric, include description, division, causes, effects, subject, qualities, contraries, comparisons, names, and testimonies.²⁵ Hall argues that his logical scheme avoids the “darkness and coincidence” of scholastic directions for proceeding in the understanding. In addition, Hall insists that all readers will grasp these rules of logic, for they are but nature methodized: “Let no man plead ignorance, or feare difficulty; we are all thus farre borne Logicians” (Arte, p. 89).

This emphasis on “natural reason,” as opposed to the artificial scales of the Catholic writers, corresponds to an important feature of the Augustinian view of interior illumination. As Martz explains, “Augustine's incessant search for ultimate truth derives from a conviction that the intellect of man is an indestructible inner ‘light,’ which works toward knowledge through the guidance of a higher ‘Light’ that is always present to the mind, even when the mind is not conscious of its presence” (PW, p. xiv). The “inner light” is, of course, reason, however impaired since the fall. Logic, the art of right reason, was also considered by Renaissance logicians to be a gift of God to fallen man, as Thomas Wilson maintained in his Rule of Reason (1552).²⁶ The Ramists took up this idea and argued that the rules of artificial logic “first were collected out of, and alwayes must be conformable unto those sparks of naturall reason, not lurking in the obscure headpeeces of one or two loytering Fryers.”²⁷ The passage recalls Hall's attack in the Arte on “hidden Cloysterers” who have “ingrossed” meditation to themselves and “confined it within their Celles” (Arte, pp. 4-5); and Hall's notion of an innate power which makes every man a “borne Logician” seems to derive from Ramist teaching on logic. But more important, the concept of a “natural reason” supports the view of meditation outlined above and anticipates the Augustinian principle of illumination as developed by later seventeenth-century writers. There is no need for man to invent ladders and stairs of perfection; the principles and structure of divine meditation already exist within the individual Christian as the gift of reason.

Hall, then, proposes a meditative approach based on logical sequence. It would be a mistake, however, to characterize his use of the logical places as the ordered investigation of a subject. His sample meditation “Of Eternal Life” is also marked by “coincidence.” For example, the following statements appear, respectively, under the first five heads of natural reason—description, division, causes, effects, and subject:

1. Who are the Saints, but those which having been weakely holy upon earth, are perfectly holy above?
2. In this life there may be degrees, there can be no imperfection.
3. Thou livest here through his blessing, but by bread; thou shalt live above through his mercy.
4. We sowed in tears, reape in joy; there was some comfort in those tears, when they were at worst; but there is no danger of complaint in this heavenly mirth.
5. Here belowe wee dwell, or rather we wander in a continued wildernesse; there wee shall rest us in the true Eden.

Each place allows Hall to approach the subject from a new perspective; however, there is no progress, no genuine development as we move through the various forms of discourse. The meditator is repeatedly confronted by the same truth which is apprehended by faith and expressed in the here/there, now/then antitheses. Hall's technique of repetition, like Traherne's, aims “to restore, by a continual effort of meditation, those truths that have been restored in the mind a hundred or a thousand times before” (PW, p. 51).

In Hall's meditation “Of Eternal Life,” the understanding, represented by the “places which natural reason doth afford us,” is directed by faith. In each of the places, Hall's discourse moves quickly from logical considerations to articles of belief which often modify our notions of cause, effect, and division. The section on the “causes” of eternal life, for instance, poses and answers the question of cause very succinctly: “Whence is this eternal life, but from him?” In the ensuing discourse, however, it is difficult to distinguish cause from effect:

Looke up to him, therefore, O my soule, as the beginner & finisher of thy salvation; and while thou magnifiest the Author, be ravished with the glorie of the worke: which farre passeth both the tongue of Angels, and the heart of man: It can bee no good thing that is not there; Howe can they want water that have the spring? … wee see there, as wee are seen … Howe worthy art thou, O Lord, that through us thou shouldest looke at thy selfe!

(Arte, pp. 104-06)

The “argument” of this section is typical of the various steps in Hall's logical investigation of the eternal life; deliberation upon the cause of eternal life unfolds into traditional Christian paradoxes which are validated by faith, not by the operations of reason. Hall investigates the cause of eternal life only to discover God as the “beginner & finisher” of his salvation. His deliberations give place to praise of their “Author.” Instead of logical analysis, Hall proposes ravishment, for the rules of discourse cannot comprehend “the glorie of the worke: which farre passeth … the tongue of Angels.”

Still, reason provides a structure out of which Hall can rise to an o altitudo. So, in the “division” of the subject, Hall considers the various “statures” of the eternal life, only to conclude with a statement that challenges the reader's notions about “degree”:

This life of thine therefore, as the other [human life], hath his ages, hath his statures; for it enters upon his birth, when thou passest out of thy body, and changest this earthly house for an heavenly: it enters into his full vigour, when at the day of the common resurrection, thou resumest this thy companion, unlike to it selfe, like to thee, like to thy Saviour, immortall now, and glorious. In this life there may be degrees, there can be no imperfection: if some be like the skie, others like the starres, yet all shine; If some sit at their Saviours right hand, others at his left, all are blessed; If some vessels hold more, all are full; none complaynes of want, none envies at him, that hath more.

(Arte, pp. 98-100)

The meditation opens by asserting the correspondence between the traditional “ages” of man's earthly life and the “statures” of eternal life. Hall pursues the comparison to the point at which the comparison must fail; for the age of man which follows the period of “full vigour” is, as melancholy Jacques tells us, old age, the prelude to “mere oblivion.” Here Hall shifts to his favorite device, the antithesis; the notion of order and degree in the earthly kingdom is found not to apply in the heavenly order. As a result, our logical principle of “division” is tested and modified: “If some vessels hold more, all are full.” Similarly, we find in the ninth “place” of invention that the “Titles and Names of the thing considered,” which “secretly comprehend the nature of the thing which they represent,” do not, in fact, comprehend it; for the “dying and false life, which wee enjoy here” is “scarce a shadowe and counterfeit of that other” (Arte, p. 140). Thus reason finishes its work in Hall's meditative scale by recalling “pregnant Testimonies of Scripture concerning our Theme … for that in these matters of God, none but divine authoritie can command assent, and settle the conscience” (Arte, p. 145). As Hall wrote of the subject of tranquillity in Heaven upon Earth, “Not Athens must teach this lesson, but Jerusalem.”²⁸

The various forms of discourse, then, point beyond themselves, to an extralogical dimension of meaning: human understanding must be perfected by faith and grace, and this doctrinal requirement is reflected in Hall's structure, which repeatedly directs the understanding toward the mysteries of faith. Again, Hall follows Augustine on the process of illumination:

To a mind inclining to take pride in a good supposed of its own making, the truth is told by the apostle: “What hast thou that thou hast not received: and if thou hast received, why dost thou boast thyself as though thou hadst not received?” But when it duly remembers its Lord, it receives his Spirit, and becomes fully conscious of the truth learnt from the indwelling Teacher, that it can rise only by his undeserved goodness. … It can only believe, on the faith of the Scriptures of its God, written by his prophet, the story of a happiness of paradise.²⁹

Divine meditation moves the meditator to a “feeling apprehension” of what he has “received.”

Hall's recommendation of a strictly observed logical sequence in proceeding in the understanding is somewhat modified by his practice in the sample meditation “Of Eternal Life.” The movement of deliberate meditation through the “places” resembles that of what Stanley E. Fish has termed the “self-consuming artifact.” In particular, Fish's description of the effect upon the reader of a self-consuming work is a fitting comment upon the meditative process we have been observing:

The reader-hearer will pass through doors [the degrees of meditation] only to find himself in the room he has just left. Sequence will not be the generator of meaning, but the marking off of discrete areas within which the audience will or will not make contact with the one true meaning, as its great author permits.³⁰

In meditation, as in the self-consuming artifact, the relationship between sequence and meaning ultimately depends upon the relationship between the meditator and the “great author.” Early in his treatise, Hall defines this meditative relationship: “as prayer is our speech to God, so is each good Meditation (according to Bernard) GODS speech to the heart” (Arte, pp. 77-78). In Hall's view, the meditator does not find truth; rather, the truth finds him: “Howe worthy art thou, o Lord, that through us thou shouldest looke at thy selfe!” (Arte, p. 106).

The structural features of Hall's proceeding in the understanding outlined above are admirably served by the prose style which earned Hall the title of “our English Seneca.” The movement of the curt or serried periods supports Hall's movement in the various degrees of the understanding. Like meditation, the Senecan style does not progress logically: as Morris W. Croll has noted, a période coupée ends where it begins; instead of logical progress, the curt style offers “a progress of imaginative apprehension, a revolving and upward motion of the mind as it rises in energy, and views the same point from new levels”³¹—the progress of meditation. The treatment of the “adjunct” in Hall's meditation “Of Death” typifies this confluence of style and meditative technique:

What then doest thou feare, O my soule? There are but two stages of death, the bed, and the grave; This latter, if it have senselesnesse, yet it hath rest; The former, if it have paine, yet it hath speediness; and when it lights upon a faithfull heart, meets with many and strong antidotes of comfort: The evill that is ever in motion is not fearfull! That which both time, and eternitie finde standing where it was, is worthie of terror: well may those tremble at death, which find more distresse within, then without, whose consciences are more sick, and nearer to death, then their bodies: It was thy fathers wrath that did so terrifie thy soule, O my Saviour, that it put thy body into a bloody sweat. The mention and thought of death ended in a Psalme, but this began in an agonie: Then didst thou sweat out my feares; The power of that agony doth more comfort all thine, then the Angels could comfort thee; The very voyce deserved an eternall separation of horror from death, where thou saydst, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken mee? Thou hadst not complained of being left, if thou wouldest have any of thine left destitute of comfort, in their parting. I knowe not whome I can feare, while I knowe whome I have beleeved; how can I be discouraged with the sight of my losse, when I see so cleare an advantage?³²

This is the style of Hall's Meditations and Vowes, an aphoristic prose marked by symmetry and point. The passage opens with a mannerism of Hall's style, the Ramistic analysis of the subject into two parts followed by antithetical members. Hall then moves abruptly, by means of an aphorism, to a philosophical argument: “The evill that is ever in motion is not fearfull.” The notion of time calls up its opposite, eternity. In a striking transition, Hall next shifts to a consideration of Christ's death; the tendency of meditative address to move freely between the self and God makes it first appear that Hall is speaking of his own relationship with the “father”: “It was thy fathers wrath that did so terrifie thy soule.” The ambiguity is temporarily removed by the apostrophe, “my Saviour,” and is finally resolved by the meditator's assertion of his union with the suffering Christ: “Then didst thou sweat out my feares.” The remaining pointed periods serve to intensify this central realization which was implicit in the opening rhetorical question. As if to emphasize the circular movement of the passage, Hall closes with another rhetorical question.

The figure of antithesis exhausts the “logic” of Hall's consideration of the “adjuncts” of death. The section is essentially a series of expanded antitheses, none of which are logically related. Each antithetical group allows Hall to view the subject from a different perspective, but the movement from group to group is not logically motivated. Still, the effect is not one of disorder; Hall achieves an imaginative coherence that is stronger and more affecting than any chain of logical demonstrations.

Structurally and stylistically, then, Hall's proceeding in the understanding supports the doctrines of predestination and prevenient grace; in meditation one does not advance toward a goal; rather, one achieves a more vivid realization of something that has already happened: “Then didst thou sweat out my feares.” With this statement Hall finds a kind of repose in his “darting movement”; the historical moment of redemption is recreated in the meditator's soul, and he discovers that he has been “prevented” in his fears. Like Augustine and Traherne, Hall finds that “in its abiding attention, the mind becomes a focal point of light where all times exist in the present” (PW, p. 53). Around this point of light Hall builds his consideration of the “adjuncts” of death.

The act of attention is completed by the second part of meditation, “which is in the affections”; here, the soul “shall indevour to find … some feeling touch, & sweete relish in that which it hath thus chewed” (Arte, pp. 150-51). The shift to the affections is most clearly indicated by Hall's style. I have tried to show how the pointed Senecan manner served for the “difficult and knotty part” of meditation. In the affective sections figures of thought yield to figures of sound, in particular anaphora and exclamation. The “hearty exclamation” and the “complaint” from the affective section typify Hall's manner: “Oh blessed estate of the Saints: O glorie not to bee expressed, even by those which are glorified! O incomprehensible salvation! What savour hath this world to thee?” (Arte, p. 152); “But alas, where is my love? where is my longing? where art thou, O my soule? what heavinesse hath overtaken thee? How hath the worlde bewitched and possessed thee?” (Arte, p. 155). Hall describes the effect of this shift: “Thus we have found, that our Meditation like the winde, gathers strength in proceeding; and as naturall bodies, the neerer they come to their places, move with more celerity, so doth the soule in this course of meditation” (Arte, pp. 178-79). The “progress” of meditation is nothing more, and nothing less, than a modulation of literary style which, in itself, epitomizes Hall's meditative method of varied approaches to and perspectives on “the one true meaning.” In the affective part of meditation, Hall aims at an effect similar to that of the Psalms, perhaps the greatest of meditative models. The meditator moves “with more celerity,” from Senecan points to petitions and praises.

Hall emphasizes the intellective-affective sequence of meditation: “David sayes, Oh taste and see how sweete the Lord is. In Mediation wee doe both see and taste; but we see before we taste” (Arte, p. 151). It first appears that Hall reverses the order of tasting and seeing prescribed by David; however, further consideration suggests that the two operations are simultaneous: “sight is of the understanding; taste, of the affection: Neither can we see, but we must taste; we can not knowe aright, but wee must needes bee affected” (Arte, p. 151). Cognition and will are inseparable; they form the two parts of an infolding structure. The meditator who finds his thoughts and feelings dissociated has failed at meditation.

As Martz has demonstrated, Hall follows very closely the Scala Meditationis of Mauburnus in the affective section of the Arte. Again Hall recommends a carefully graduated method of proceeding. Finally, after “the mind is by turns depressed and lifted up” by the various degrees of the affections, it comes to rest in a “chearfull Confidence of obtaining what wee have requested & enforced” (Arte, p. 175). Hall's expression of this confidence ratifies the repetitive technique and prevenient character of his meditative art. In the meditation “Of Eternal Life,” he concludes with a realization of the “paradise within”:

God is faithfull, and I doe beleeve: who shall separate mee from the love of Christ? from my glorie with Christ, who shall pull mee out of my heaven? Goe to then, and returne to thy rest, O my soule; make use of that heaven wherein thou art, and be happie.

(Arte, p. 178; my italics)

We have encountered this confidence before, in the consideration of the “cause” of eternal life: “Looke up to him, therefore, O my soule, as the beginner & finisher of thy salvation.” The meditator ends where he began—“make use of that heaven wherein thou art.” Hall's other deliberate meditation, “Of Death,” ends on a similarly proleptic note:

Art thou not a member of that body, whereof thy Saviour is the head? Canst thou drowne, when they head is above? was it not for thee, that hee triumpht over death? Is there any feare in a foiled adversarie? Oh my redeemer, I have already overcome in thee.³³

Again, Hall's “deliberate” meditations do not advance step by step toward a goal of union with Christ; rather, in their beginnings and endings, they are marked by a divine “coincidence.” The sequence and order of the preceptive part of his treatise defers in practice to a technique of repetition as the meditator, at each step, realizes his election: “I have already overcome in thee”; “Then didst thou sweat out my feares.”

Hall's art is a “divine” art. As Evelyn Underhill has written, meditation, in its purest form, is “the turning inwards of the whole conative powers for a purpose rather believed in than known.”³⁴ Protestant meditation, as exemplified by Hall, is an attempt to restore faith to its primary role in this process of introversion; the “divine heate” of meditation “proceedes not so much from reason as from faith” (Arte, p. 9). “Natural reason,” God's gift to fallen man, provides the surest entrance into the work, but the operations of reason are controlled and perfected by the supernatural action of grace in the elect soul; in each step of proceeding in the understanding, reason moves with a “Senecan amble” around the central apprehension of faith—“I have already overcome.” The second part of meditation—“in the affections”—affirms what has been implicit throughout; here the style of Seneca, who followed Nature as far as she could lead him, gathers to the passionate exclamations of the Psalms.

The Arte of Divine Meditation is a key text in the developing tradition of Protestant meditation in the seventeenth century. It consolidates many of the insights of the spiritual masters of the Middle Ages and Renaissance and looks forward to the new approaches analyzed by Martz in The Paradise Within. Hall borrows from Catholic writers like Bernard and Mauburnus when they serve his purposes and maintains parts of the older scales and ladders of perfection. In practice, however, he moves toward a freer, more intuitive form. He recommends a method which begins with the principles of “natural reason,” tempered by “the plainest mistresse, Experience”; he does not insist on strict observance of his rules of proceeding in the understanding, for he recognizes that “Divers paths lead ofttimes to the same end, and every man aboundeth in his owne sense” (Arte, pp. 186-87). Furthermore, his choice of “The End,” eternal life, as a subject of meditation anticipates the efforts of later meditative writers to recover the “paradise within.”

As Kaufmann has pointed out, Hall's method also proved immensely attractive to Puritan devotional writers like Isaac Ambrose and Edmund Calamy.³⁵ The rationality and orderliness of his “arte” harmonized with the Puritan interest in the logical and doctrinal unfolding of a subject or text. Hall's approach to meditation, however, is more complex than these Puritan versions would suggest; it is an amalgam of Senecan, Catholic, and Augustinian materials. Hall himself was a complex figure: educated at Emmanuel college, the seminary of so many famous Puritan preachers, he nevertheless rose to the eminence of an Anglican bishopric; if he influenced Puritans like Ambrose and Calamy, he also served as “harbinger” to Donne's Anniversaries. While it is usual to characterize Hall as a Calvinist in theology and an Anglican in politics, his literary works, including his various meditative writings, evidence a thoroughly integrated personality. Hall, who later staked his ecclesiastical career on the belief that Puritan could live with Anglican, achieved his ideal of compromise in a meditative work which could appeal to men of such disparate interests as Calamy and Donne.³⁶ This work is wrought out of an interpretation of Christianity which places special emphasis on the inner life of the individual, in which meditation “is the very end God hath given us our soules.” In addition, The Arte of Divine Meditation combines Hall's Calvinistic theological predilections with what might be called his “Anglican” delight in wit and rhetoric. Hall developed a meditative structure consistent with the doctrine of predestination, and he portrayed the meditator's grappling with this mystery through a style which begins, in Montaigne's phrase, at le dernier poinct, the point aimed at.³⁷

Notes

1. U. Milo Kaufmann, The Pilgrim's Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation, Yale Studies in English, vol. 163 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966); Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Donne's Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973); Norman S. Grabo, “The Arte of Puritan Meditation,” Seventeenth-Century News, 26 (1968), 7-9.

2. Kaufmann, pp. 120-33; Lewalski, pp. 82-92.

3. Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1962).

4. Louis L. Martz, The Paradise Within: Studies in Vaughan, Traherne, and Milton (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964); hereafter referred to in the text as PW.

5. Martz, Poetry of Meditation, pp. 331-52.

6. The translation is that of John Healey, The Discovery of a New World, ed. Huntington Brown (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1937), p. 36.

7. Kaufmann, p. 124.

8. Joseph Hall, The Arte of Divine Meditation (London, 1606), pp. 3-4; hereafter referred to in the text as Arte.

9. Helen C. White, English Devotional Literature [Prose] 1600-1640, University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, no. 29 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1931), pp. 30-31.

10. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, trans. Anthony Mottola (Garden City: Image Books, 1964), p. 37.

11. Citations are from the text of the Thirty-Nine Articles reprinted by W. A. Curtis, “Confessions in Anglican Churches,” Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962).

12. On Hall's Neostoicism, see Phillip A. Smith, “Bishop Hall, ‘Our English Seneca,’” PMLA, 63 (1948), 1191-1204; Audrey Chew, “Joseph Hall and Neo-Stoicism,” PMLA, 65 (1950), 1130-45; and Harold Fisch, “The Limits of Hall's Senecanism,” Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 6 (1950), 453-63.

13. Joseph Hall, Meditations and Vowes Divine and Morall: A Third Century (London, 1606), pp. 112-13.

14. Ibid., sig. A₂^r-v.

15. On the influence of Hall's “sudden” meditations, see Harold Fisch, “Bishop Hall's Meditations,” RES, 25 (1949), 210-21.

16. Croll's well-known essays have been collected in Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm: Essays by Morris W. Croll, ed. J. Max Patrick, et al. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966).

17. Joseph Hall, Heaven upon Earth, or Of true Peace, and Tranquillity of Minde (London, 1606), p. 49.

18. Ibid., pp. 153-54, 164-65.

19. Henri Bremond, Histoire Litteraire du Sentiment Religieux en France (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1916), I, 17.

20. Hall, The Second Booke of Meditations and Vowes, pp. 124-25.

21. Hall, Heaven upon Earth, sig. A4^v.

22. Augustine, De Trinitate, 15.25; quoted in Martz, Paradise Within, p. 49.

23. On the preceptive tradition of rhetorical teaching, see James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1974). The relationship between rhetoric and meditation has been explored in detail by Thomas O. Sloan, “Rhetoric and Meditation: Three Case Studies,” JMRS, 1 (1971), 45-58.

24. See Kaufmann, pp. 118-19.

25. On Hall's “places” and the places of logical invention, see Kaufmann, pp. 122-24.

26. On “natural reason” and logic, see Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939; rpt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), ch. 5, “The Instrument of Reason.”

27. Ibid., p. 145.

28. Hall, Heaven upon Earth, p. 5.

29. Augustine, De Trinitate, 14.20; quoted in Martz, Paradise Within, p. xviii.

30. Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1972), p. 42.

31. Morris W. Croll, “The Baroque Style in Prose,” in Studies in English Philology: A Miscellany in Honor of Frederick Klaeber, ed. Kemp Malone and Martin B. Rund (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1929), p. 440.

32. Joseph Hall, A Recollection of such Treatises as have bene heretofore severally published, and are nowe revised, corrected, augmented (London, 1615), pp. 180-81. The meditation “Of Death” appears with the Arte in all collected editions of Hall's works. “Of Eternal Life” and “Of Death” were Hall's only attempts at “deliberate” meditation according to his own rules.

33. Hall, A Recollection, p. 184.

34. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness (1910; rpt. New York: Meridian Books, 1955), p. 314.

35. Kaufmann, pp. 130-33.

36. The “strong possibility” of Hall's influence on Donne is discussed by Lewalski, pp. 82-84. For an overview of Hall's role as a moderate in ecclesiastical controversy, see Don M. Wolfe, ed., Complete Prose Works of John Milton, I (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953), pp. 53-56, 76-86.

37. Montaigne is quoted by Croll, “Baroque Style,” p. 433.