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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2025
Mrs. E. M. Simpson has recently published a study of Donne’s prose works. The author of such a study could not avoid giving some account of those ideas which writers on Donne usually label his ‘Medievalism.’ For no one can read either Donne’s poetry or his prose intelligently unless he is fairly well acquainted with what Donne himself calls the philosophy of the ‘Schoole.’ Seemingly conversant with the whole range of scholastic writers, he had studied St. Thomas Aquinas with particular diligence, and he admired his genius profoundly : indeed he puts him on a level with St. Augustine, and in one place, addressing God, he speaks of St. Thomas as ‘that other instrument and engine of thine, whom Thou hadst so enabled that nothing was too minerall and centrick for the search and reach of his wit.’
1 A Study of the Prose Works of John Donny, by Evelyn M. Simpson, D.Phil. Oxford. (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press; 1924.) It may not be altogether useless to say here that Donne was born in 1573, and died in 1631. He belonged to a family of which he himself said that no family ‘which is not of farre larger extent and greater branches hath endured and suffered more in their persons and fortunes, for obeying the teachers of Romane Doctrine.’ His mother, who was connected with the family of Blessed Thomas More, was ever a zealous Catholic, serving the Church to the best of her power. His younger brother, Henry, was-thrown into prison in 1593 for harbouring a Jesuit named Harrington, and died there of a fever a few weeks later. John Donne himself conformed, in his twenties, to the Church of England as by law established, took orders in 1615 at the instigation of James I, and became Dean of St. Paul's in 1621. Of this forsaking of the religion of his fathers, Professor Grierson writes: ‘It would be as absurd … to call it a conversion in the full sense of the term, a changed conviction, as to dub it an apostasy prompted by purely political considerations.’ (Donne's Poetical Works, Vol. ii, p. xvi. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press.) We may leave it at that.
2 Though of the Schoolmen St. Thomas was, of course, for him, facile princeps, he had read, and could quote as theologians of the School, such latc writers as the sixteenth century Dominicans Victoria, Soto, and Bannes, the last of whom died in 1604.
3 Les Doctrines Médiévales chez Donne, le Poète Métaphysicien de l'Angleterre (1573-1631), par Mary Paton Ramsay, M.A., Docteur de l'Université de Paris. (Oxford University Press; 1916.)
4 cf. Donne's ‘so (i.e. in that sense) it is nothing.’
5 Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (p. 105 in the recent edition of Mr. John Sparrow: Cambridge: At the University Prpss, 1923).
6 The Margins of Philosophy, 5th November.