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Donne’s Anglicanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2016

David Chanoff
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Extract

Dennis Flynn has written convincingly of the Catholic sympathies of Donne's middle years. But anyone who reads through the sermons, particularly those composed after 1618, cannot fail to be convinced that in the end Donne's Anglicanism was a mature and heartfelt commitment. To understand how a man with such rooted Catholic sympathies could find his spiritual home in the English Church, we must recognise how much he needed to be engaged with others in worship, in friendship and in love.

Type
Articles
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , October 1979 , pp. 154 - 167
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1979

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References

Notes

1 ‘Donne's Catholicism: I’, Recusant History, vol. 13 (1975), pp. 1–15;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘Donne's Catholicism: II’, Recusant History, vol. 13 (1976), pp. 178–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Grierson remarks that ‘The feeling one gets [of Donne's Anglicanism] is that of acquiescence rather than passionate conviction attained after much doubt and uncertainty’. ‘Donne’, he says, ‘writes somewhat as an advocate who having accepted his brief is prepared to defend every article of the creed he has adopted’. (Itrat, Husain, The Dogmatic and Mystical Theology of John Donne [London, 1935], p. x).Google Scholar This is a sensitive characterisation of Donne's position based on Tseudo Martyr, Essays in Divinity, and the early sermons. But it fails to catch the deeper feelings of his later years.

3 In his review of contemporary Catholic opinion (‘The Catholic Exiles and the Elizabethan Religious Settlement’, The Catholic Historical Review, vol. 22 [1936], pp. 129–48),Google Scholar Leo Hicks demonstrates the clarity with which Elizabethan Catholics saw this fundamental choice forced on them by the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity.

4 Jackson, Donne's Christian Vocation (Evanston, 1970), p. 37.Google Scholar

5 Arnold Stein observed that ‘Life for Donne was too complex to be resolved by satire’: ‘Donne and the Satiric Spirit’, ELH II (1944), p. 282. One is also reminded of Sparrow's comment that ‘With Donne, belief and conduct lived in separate worlds’. John, Sparrow, ‘Donne's Religious Development’, Theology, XXII (1931), p. 147.Google Scholar

6 Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, ed. C. E. Merrill (New York, 1910), p. 39.Google Scholar

7 ‘Donne's Catholicism: II’, p. 185ff.

8 Letters, p. 10.

9 Prose Works, p. 107.

10 Ibid., p. 121.

11 Ignatius His Conclave, ed. Timothy Healy (Oxford, 1969), p. xxxvii.Google Scholar

12 We know that Donne owned copies of the Rules of the Franciscan and Benedictine Ordersand that he also had a book on Carthusian life (Keynes: LI8, LI53, LI75). In light of hisdeeper interest in the Jesuits, it seems reasonable to assume that he possessed a copy of theirconstitution as well.

13 The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, trans. George E. Ganss, S.J. (St Louis, 1970).

14 Constitutions, p. 285.

15 Ibid., p. 292.

16 Ibid., p. 336.

17 See the Book of Common Prayer, Order of Commumon. Donne's lines here are patterned after the Anglican prayer of oblation and not the Catholic. This is apparently anomalous since he habitually structures his poetry according to Catholic forms of worship. But the idea of a common sacrifice is so pronounced in the Mass that it could not easily serve as a model for private prayer, whereas the ambiguous Anglican formula could. This point is perhaps of minor interest, but it does indicate that in 1608 Donne was sensitive to the real distinctions between the Catholic and Anglican concepts of liturgical sacrifice, distinctions that he did his best to minimise in later years.

18 See Richard, Hughes, The Progress of the Soul: The Interior Career of John Donne (New York, 1968), p. 138.Google Scholar

19 The Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford, 1952), p. xxvii.Google Scholar

20 The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven, 1954), p. 107.Google Scholar

21 See the Introduction to Manley's edition of ‘The Anniversaries’ (Baltimore, 1963).

22 Donne’s Christian Vocation, p. 41.

23 Devotional Poetry in France (Cambridge, England, 1962), p. 5.Google Scholar

24 Pierre, Pourrat, Christian Spirituality, vol. III, trans. W. H. Mitchell (New York, 1927), pp. 108–19.Google Scholar

25 Ibid., pp. 110-11.

26 Pierre, Janelle, Robert Southwell the Writer (London, 1925), p. 273.Google Scholar

27 Iparraguirre, I., ‘Para la Historia de la Oración en el Colegio Romano Durante la Segunda Mitad del Sieglo XVI’, Archivum Historicum Societatis Jesu 15 (1946), p. 99.Google Scholar

28 Ibid., pp. 125, 126.

29 Ibid., p. 126. Borgia wrote, ‘With regard to the subject of the meditation, this is not left to the choice of the one meditating, but for his greater security, let him take those which the Roman Church, the Spouse of Christ, has chosen according to the gospels which she has proposed for Sundays and other feasts, because as a true and prudent mother, she knows how to choose the food most fitting for her children’ (Borgia, Opera Omnia, quoted in Schumacher, J., ‘Ignatian Spirituality and the Liturgy’, Woodstock Letters [1958], p. 31).Google Scholar

30 This book is discussed by Nicoleau, M., ‘Liturgia y Ejercicios’, Manresa XX (1948), pp.233–74.Google Scholar

31 Notae in evangélicas lectiones, quae per totum annum dominicis diebus in ecclesia catholicarecitantur … (Friburg, 1591) and Notae in evangelicas lectiones, quae per totum annum festissanctorum diebus in ecclesia catholica recitantur … (Friburg, 1593).

32 de Puente, L., Vida del P. Balthasa Alvarez La Torre (Madrid, 1880), pp. 458, 459,Google Scholar as quotedin Nicoleau, Liturgia y Ejercicios, p. 270.

33 Libro de la Oración, Libro Segundo de la Oracion, and Libro Tercero de la Oracion (Lérida).

34 Nicoleau, Liturgia y Ejercicios, p. 268.

35 Jerome Nadal, Platicas en Coimbra, quoted in Schumacher, Ignatian Spirituality, p. 29.

36 Foley, I (London, 1877), pp. 388-405. ff, as Bald believes, Donne was in Rome in 1589 or 1590, he might well have visited Haywood at the College. As a young and promising English Catholic with high connections, he very likely would have been invited to participate in the spiritual life of the Institution.

37 Prose Works, p. 131.

38 The following discussion confirms and amplifies that of Flynn, ‘Donne's Catholicism: II’, pp. 189-90.

39 The Divine Poems, p. xxv.

40 Ibid., p. xxvi.

41 Sermons, IV, p. 375.

42 Sermons, IV, p. 71.

43 Janel Mueller confirms this impression of Donne's development. She writes that ‘Theprayers that resolve Donne's separate spiritual crises in the twenty-three units of the Devotions make the same affirmation of the authority of the Church that resounds throughhis preaching, especially after he was appointed Dean of St Paul's’ (italics mine): ‘The Exegesisof Experience, Dean Donne's Devotions’, JEGP 67, p. 5.

44 Sermons, V, p. 250.

45 Sermons, V, p. 123.

46 Sermons, II, p. 190.

47 Devotions, p. 33.

48 Sermons, III, p. 251.

49 Sermons, V, p. 141.

50 William, James, Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, 1907), p. 211.Google Scholar

51 Sermons, II, p. 226.

52 Sermons, IV, p. 310.

53 Sermons, V, p. 345.

54 Sermons, V, p. 276.

55 Sermons, II, p. 254.

56 Sermons, IV, p. 358.

57 Devotions, p. 48.

58 Sermons, V, p. 310.

59 Sermons, V, p. 169.