Luận án: Đọc, Viết, Huyền Bí & Hiện Diện trong Thơ Tôn Giáo của John Donne (Mark O'Donnell)

Cover Page The following handle holds various files of this Leiden University dissertation: http://hdl.net/1887/80153 Author: O'Donnell, M. Title: A glimmering light: reading, writing, mysticism and presence in the religious verse of John Donne Issue Date: 2019-11-05 ‘A Glimmering Light’ Reading, Writing, Mysticism and Presence in the Religious Verse of John Donne a thesis for the degree of Ph. by Mark O’Donnell ‘A Glimmering Light’  Reading, Writing, Mysticism and Presence in the Religious Verse of John Donne Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van Doctor aan de Universiteit Leiden, op gezag van Rector Magnificus prof. Stolker, volgens besluit van het College voor Promoties te verdedigen op 5 november 2019 klokke 13.45 uur door Mark O’Donnell geboren te Londen in 1979 2 Promotor: Prof.

Frans-Willem Korsten Copromotores: Dr. Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen Dr. Madeleine Kasten Promotiecommissie: Prof. Peter Liebregts Prof.

Jürgen Pieters (University of Ghent) Prof. Paul Smith Dr. Lieke Stelling (University of Utrecht) 3 for Dieuw 4 Through the veile of his flesh, Such beames he cast, as behind those clouds, they might know, there was a sunne Lancelot Andrewes1 1 XCVI Sermons p. 49 5 A Note on the Text The typology and spelling of quoted texts have been preserved throughout.

Where appropriate I have used English translations of Latin texts that were available in seventeenth-century England, e. Nicholas Love’s translation of the Vitae Christi rather than Bonaventure’s original (for details please see bibliography). In cases where texts would have been read in the Latin I have used more recent academic translations. The exception to this rule is the work of Bernard of Clairvaux whose work was potentially read in the seventeenth century in both languages.

As no English complete works exists, I have used a number of different translations and, where necessary, referred to the Latin in footnotes; all sources are clearly indicated in the text. All biblical quotations are taken from the King James Bible. 6 Contents Introduction Reading, Writing, Mysticism and Presence in the Religious Verse of John Donne p. 8 What Follows: Presence Lost, Sought and Reformed p.

Preamble Medieval Mysticism and ‘Reading to Experience’ p. 13 Early Seventeenth-Century Meditation and ‘Reading for Knowledge’ p. 22 Devotional Plurality and the Continued Possibility of Mystical Reading p. Presence Lost The Anniversaries and the Reading of Creation p.

35 The Rejection of the World and a Continuing Attachment to Materiality p. 38 The Precise Nature of The Anniversaries’ Critique of Worldly Knowledge p. 44 Looking for Life in a World that is Dead p. 51 “Thou shouldest for life, and death, a patterne bee”: the Source of Donne’s Authority p.

58 Donne’s Reading of Elizabeth Drury p. 63 “Th'Art of knowing Heauen”: Reading Experientially p. 67 Presenting Presence Lost p. Presence Sought Writing the Life of Christ in “La Corona” p.

81 “La Corona’s” Voicing p. 84 The ‘Speaking’ Reader and the Issue of Intent p. 91 Experiencing Christ in ‘La Corona’ in the Light of the Medieval Tradition p. 95 The ‘Meditative Lives’, English Passion Poetry and “La Corona” p.

102 “La Corona” and the Path of Reform in Reformation England p. 108 “La Corona” and the Non-Description of Christ p. 113 Caught between Preacher and Poet: Donne’s Absence and the Reader’s task p. Presence Reformed From Reading to Writing in “Goodfriday, 1613.

127 “Goodfriday’s” Endorsement of the Cataphatic Tradition p. 130 The Issue of Meditative Success: Ignatian Arguments for Mental Balance p. 136 The Issue of Meditative Success: the Rider’s Hesitancy in the Face of the Crucifixion p. 139 Meditative Reading and Lyric Theory: “Goodfriday’s” Treatment of Time p.

144 Meditative Reading and Lyric Theory: the Balance between Reader and Rider p. 156 Conclusion The Challenge of Writing Religious Verse and the Possibilities of Experiential Reading p. 161 Bibliography Primary Texts p. 198 8 Introduction Reading, Writing, Mysticism and Presence in the Religious Verse of John Donne Burn with desire not so much to know as to experience Bernard of Clairvaux2 This thesis is concerned with the pursuit of presence through reading.

Concentrating upon a small corpus of John Donne’s religious verse, I investigate its engagement with a venerable and essentially mystical tradition that sought to deliver the appropriately attentive reader directly into the presence of God.3 At the heart of this tradition was a conception of reading as an activity whose value was fundamentally intrinsic to its pursuit; what mattered was not what a reader might derive from a text, but the more holistically registered experience of that text’s reading. Striving, in the words of Saint Paul, to move from “the things that are made” to “the Godhead” itself (Romans 1:20), the monastics who pioneered these practices sought not to deduce God from his works, but to directly encounter him within their readings of them. Written in the years leading up to Donne’s ordination and professed renunciation of poetry in 1614,4 the poems discussed in this thesis are preoccupied with both the possibilities of religious verse and its limitations. While the sheer fact of these poems’ existence argues for Donne having had at least some faith in their usefulness, any such faith is consistently mixed in the texts with hesitations and disquiet.

There is, therefore, a reticence in all the poems covered that questions the project to which they 2 Taken from the first sermon of Bernard’s cycle on the Song of Songs (translation is from Leclercq’s, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God 5). 3 Though the mystical reading approach which interests me here still retains some importance within the Catholic monastic communities where it first developed, I am principally concerned with its manifestation from the close of antiquity through to the early seventeenth century and it is consequently discussed in the past tense throughout what follows. 4 On the express request of James I, Donne finally opted to take Holy orders in late 1614 and wrote to his friend Henry Goodyer declaring his intention to quit verse in connection with this step (Gosse ii. Donne’s professed abandonment of verse after his eventual ordination in January 1615 has not typically been taken entirely seriously (see Oliver 194), and there is clear evidence that a small number of poems were written after this date.

Some of these issues will be revisited in my text. 9 would otherwise seem to belong. While the monastic tradition sought colloquy through reading – a direct and essentially mystical meeting with the divine – such a state is never unambiguously secured in the works I discuss. The divine’s legibility is maintained – and these works may thus be seen to be about reading the divine – yet the monastic tradition had not restricted itself to the maintenance of reading’s effectiveness.

Presence in medieval monasticism was not something stated but something read, an experience involving both mental and physical components which happened to a reader in the moment of a text’s unfolding. Maintaining that Donne’s own verse could be utilised in this way is problematic, and, as I go on to suggest, there are reasons to believe that he himself harboured doubts in relation to the suitability of this procedure in respect to his own poems. What is much clearer, however, is that Donne never doubted his own ability to read in this manner, and it is thus with the unpacking and engineering of such apprehension that I see him to be concerned in all the verse discussed in this thesis. My investigation begins from a point of relative confidence.

Donne in The Anniversaries claims to have experienced the divine’s “glimmering light” (FirAn 70) and sets out in his verse to reciprocally provide this experience to his readership. It is in the completion of this task, however, that I see The Anniversaries – and all the other works I discuss – to struggle. On the one hand, the parallels I outline between these poems and monastic practice clearly suggest Donne to have harboured what might be characterised as a medieval faith in reading’s possibilities; on the other, however, these poems also suggest that Donne repeatedly struggles to avoid a series of more potentially reformed doubts regarding writing. In documenting Donne’s striving to reconcile the roles of reader and writer, this thesis ultimately investigates the implications that I see these poems to hold for both religious verse more generally and for wider issues related to textual connection.

As discussed in each of my three chapters, it is Donne’s authorship model which most evidently hampers his engagement with an earlier tradition. Monastic authors had typically shown scant concern for originality. Entwining scriptural quotation with the works of their predecessors, they created texts grounded within not only authorial subjectivity but a broader unbroken tradition that stretched back towards Scripture itself. 5 The contrast between this practice and Donne’s largely coterie model of 5 See Duncan Robertson’s discussion in Lectio Divina (105), but also the whole thrust of Jean Leclercq’s The Love of Learning and the Desire for God.

10 authorship is stark. Donne’s verse was initially read within a context of which he himself was part, a situation even more evident in regard to his religious verse, which, circulating among a tighter circle than his secular works, 6 was often personally addressed.7 Writing for fame, but also sustenance, Donne, unlike monastic authors, had no call upon or duty of care for his readers, who, on receiving a ‘Donne poem’, were presented not with monasticism’s timeless tradition and direct revelation, but a missive from the author himself, a known and evidently fallen hand which lacked any obvious claim to divine inspiration.8 While works of devotion from non-ordained sources had also been composed in the medieval period, these works typically rested on claims of revelation, or – in a more literary mode – an appeal to some form of heavenly muse.9 None of the Donne poems discussed in this thesis fit either of these models, however, and all are thus at risk of being judged under-determined. Apparently writing under only the fiat of his own wit, Donne’s ability – and even right – to produce divine verse neither was, nor is, entirely obvious. Given that the monastic tradition’s concern was principally with origins (Scripture ultimately came from God), formalist arguments that demand verse be interpreted without reference to its authorship would have been beside the point for his initial readership.

Whether ‘John Donne’ stood as a friend, a petitioner, or an (in)famous poet, he was – and still is – a figure singularly lacking the kind of divine authority which many would have sought. Bridging the gap between Donne, a coterie poet seeking patronage, and the inspired monks of medieval practice is a challenge which looms over all the verse I 6 The precise circulation of most Donne poems is hard to accurately recreate, but the relative dearth of surviving manuscript copies of Donne’s religious poems (in comparison to the ‘Songs and Sonnets’) suggests they were “kept quite close” (Freiman & Marroti 73). 7 The two Anniversary poems, openly published in 1611/1612, are the exception among Donne’s work, yet their status as works explicitly commissioned by the Drury family – which Donne himself had reservations about distributing more widely – clearly places their author and initial readership into a direct relationship (these issues will be further discussed in Chapter Two). “La Corona” – it has been strongly suggested (see Novar, Gardner and Walton) – was initially addressed directly to ‘Lady’ Magdalen Herbert (see Chapter Three).

In the case of “Goodfriday” Stubbs claims (287), following other biographers (e.25), that the poem was first addressed to either Edward Herbert (to whom Donne was travelling on Good Friday 1613) or Henry Goodyer (whose house he had left that day at dawn). 8 While it is true that works within the kind of the mystical tradition to which I point were also on occasion personally addressed, these works can be seen as originating from the wider monastic tradition and not purely from their addressors.