The Sermons of John Donne

The recent publication of the tenth and final volume of The Sermons of John Donne has brought to a close one of the great homiletic publishing events of the twentieth century. (The Sermons of John Donne, 10 vols., ed. by George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1953–1962; all volume and page references in this essay are to this edition.) Praises of John Donne the metaphysical poet—most distinguished member of a school numbering George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traherne—have long been sung; indeed there was no English non-dramatic poet of Donne’s stature between Edmund Spenser and John Milton. But only with the publication of this definitive edition of the sermons is the magnitude of his prose achievement likely to become known. Since 1953 the handsome, well-made volumes containing the 160 extant sermons of perhaps the greatest preacher in England’s history have been issuing from the University of California Press. The editors—Mrs. Evelyn M. Simpson of Oxford, England, and the late Professor George R. Potter of the University of California—have, with a brilliantly exacting scholarship, set their texts from various manuscripts and from the three great folio volumes of Donne’s sermons: the LXXX Sermons of 1640, the Fifty Sermons of 1649, and the XXVI Sermons of 1661. They have also supplied excellent introductory material and critical essays.

Difficult it is to find a more moving example of devotion to one’s calling than that of Mrs. Simpson and Mr. Potter. Mrs. Simpson was publishing material on Donne as early as 1913, Mr. Potter as early as 1927. It was in the mid-1940’s that they determined their collaborative effort, the exciting course of which took on saga-like proportions—a transcontinental, transoceanic enterprise (except for a summer together in 1949), spanning the miles from Berkeley, California, to Oxford, England. Mr. Potter’s lamentable death on April 12, 1954, brought to Mrs. Simpson the full responsibility of completing the task. The measure of her achievement—and of Mr. Potter’s too—lies in ten magnificent volumes.

Born in 1572 in London of Roman Catholic parents—his mother traced her lineage back to the family of Sir (and Saint) Thomas More—Donne was in childhood privately tutored, and then successively attended Oxford University, Cambridge University, and the London schools of law at Thavies Inn and Lincoln’s Inn. During the first decade of the seventeenth century, no longer a member of the Roman communion, he assisted Thomas Morton, later Bishop of Durham, in writing treatises designed to persuade English Papists of some of the errors of their ways. After much casting about for a calling, after full inner questioning and debate, early in 1615 in his forty-third year he took orders in the Church of England. His first biographer, Isaak Walton, a parishioner of Donne’s from 1624 to 1631 at the Church of St. Dunstan’s in the West, wrote that, with Donne’s ordination, “the English Church had gain’d a second St. Austine [Augustine], for, I think, none was so like him before his Conversion: none so like St. Ambrose after it: and if his youth had the in firmities of the one, his age had the excellencies of the other; the learning and holiness of both.”

Majesty In Preaching

Donne’s first major charge as preacher came with his invitation in 1616 to serve as Reader in Divinity at Lincoln’s Inn, England’s greatest law school; here for over five years he preached to the academic community twice every Sunday during the terms of study, resigning his post shortly after his induction as Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral on November 19, 1621. The Dean-ship he graced with fullest distinction until his death on March 31, 1631. To gain some sense of Donne’s preaching majesty we may turn once again to Walton, who describes him as preaching the Word so, as shewed his own heart was possest with those very thoughts and joys that he laboured to distill into others: A Preacher in earnest; weeping sometimes for his Auditory, sometimes with them: always preaching to himself, like an Angel from a cloud, but in none; carrying some, as St. Paul was, to Heaven in holy raptures, and inticing others by a sacred Art and Courtship to amend their lives; here picturing a vice so as to make it ugly to those that practised it; and a vertue so, as to make it be beloved even by those that lov’d it not; and all this with a most particular grace and an unexpressible addition of comeliness.

Man’S Calling Under God

Donne’s awareness of this significance of a man’s calling under God was immense. And he was—certainly in all measurable respects—fit for his vocation. He had some facility in Hebrew and Greek; knew well the various translations of the Bible, particularly the Greek Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate, and the various English versions; had a thorough knowledge of the Church Fathers, especially St. Augustine; was well read in the Medieval and Renaissance biblical commentators and theological controversialists. His control over his own language has seldom been equalled, and he was, judging by contemporary reports (including Walton’s), a moving and commanding speaker. The preparation of a sermon was to him a true discipline in devotion, for he knew a sermon’s purpose to be the proclamation of God’s saving power:

There is no salvation but by faith, nor faith but by hearing, nor hearing but by preaching; and they that thinke meanliest of the Keyes of the Church, and speake faintliest of the Absolution of the Church, will yet allow, That those Keyes lock, and unlock in Preaching; That Absolution is conferred, or withheld in Preaching, That the proposing of the promises of the Gospel in preaching, is that binding and loosing on earth, which bindes and looses in heaven (VII: 320).

The center of preaching, Donne asserts on another occasion, is “Christ Jesus, and him crucified; and whosoever preaches any other Gospell, or any other thing for Gospell, let him be accursed” (IV:231).

Piercing Into God’S Revelation

To speak of Donne’s greatness as a preacher is to speak also of his literary craftsmanship and his theological acumen. He is a master of organization. The basic pattern of his sermons (the written texts average 9,000 words, though the preached sermons were in most cases shorter) is to begin with a brief introduction, to move to a minute division of his text, and to proceed to a most detailed exposition of each part of the division. One is impressed again and again by his sure sense of architectonics, by his ability to unfold his exegesis layer by layer, piercing deeper and deeper into God’s revelation and holding everything firmly in its ordered place, moving from beginning to middle to end and keeping his reader (or hearer) in constant touch with the development of his exposition.

As it is with the whole, so it is with the parts, for Donne exercises the same control over each section, each paragraph, each sentence. A superb rhetorician, he constructs his phrases and clauses and chooses his words to fashion a gloriously rhythmical style. Note for example the following quotation (a passage describing a man spiritually ill), in which there is just enough parallelism to make for an exhilarating flow of language and just enough asymmetry to prevent monotony:

Every fit of an Ague is an Earth-quake that swallows him, every fainting of the knee, is a step to Hell; every lying down at night is a funerall; and every quaking is a rising to judgment; every bell that distinguishes times, is a passing-bell, and every passing-bell, his own; every singing in the ear, is an Angels Trumpet; at every dimnesse of the candle, he heares that voice, Fool, this night they will fetch away thy soul; and in every judgement denounced against sin, he hears an Ito maledicte upon himself, Goe thou accursed into hell fire (II:84).

Still another compelling aspect of Donne’s style is his seemingly endless treasury of apt and striking figures of speech; he forges his images from the fields of medicine, law, cosmology, exploration and discovery, commerce, agriculture—and the list could go on. A few examples must suffice. To distinguish between the original sin and our daily sins, he invokes a commercial image: “In Adam we were sold in grosse; in our selves we were sold by retail” (II:115). He draws from agriculture to trace the growth of the Kingdom within a human being: the Kingdom is “planted in your election; watred in your Baptisme; fatned with the blood of Christ Jesus, ploughed up with many calamities, and tribulations; weeded with often repentances of particular sins …” (II:337). And how well, through bodily analogy, he describes woman’s proper place in the world! “[Eve] was not taken out of the foot, to be troden upon, nor out of the head, to be an overseer of him [Adam]; but out of his side, where she weakens him enough, and therefore should do all she can, to be a Helper” (II:346).

Theological Perspective

If Donne was a great stylist he was also a sound Anglican theologian. In the immediate tradition of such towering Anglicans as Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes, he is a supreme exponent of the via media, dead center between Rome and Geneva. In ritualistic and ceremonial matters Rome was superfluous, the Puritan offspring of Geneva deficient. The fount of right practice is to be found in Canterbury, not “either in a painted Church, on one side, or in a naked Church, on another; a Church in a Dropsie, overflowne with Ceremonies, or a Church in a Consumption” (VI: 284). In doctrinal matters Rome also asked too much, demanding assent not only to what Donne deemed certain fundamental beliefs to which every Christian must adhere, but also to nonfundamental matters, assent to which or dissent from which was peripheral to the determination of a man’s salvation. “Certainly nothing endangers a Church more,” Donne writes with a glance toward Rome, “then to draw indifferent things to be necessary” (II:204). And how could the very heart of the Christian faith be succinctly stated? Donne would affirm that “there is one God in three persons, That the second of those, the Sonne of God, tooke our nature, and dyed for mankinde; And that there is a Holy Ghost, which in the Communion of Saints, the Church established by Christ, applies to every particular soule the benefit of Christs universall redemption” (V:276).

Basic Christian Themes

The themes on which Donne’s sermons play constant and mighty variations are the great themes of the Christian tradition: sin and redemption, grace and free will, death and resurrection. Original sin is “that snake in my bosome … that poyson in my blood … that leaven and tartar in all my actions” (II: 120). Cursed and ravaged as we are by the fall, however, we may look with joy to one of the many paradoxes of our faith, knowing that “if I say my sins are mine own, they are none of mine, but, by that confessing and appropriating of those sins to my selfe, they are made the sins of him, who hath suffered enough for all, my blessed Lord and Saviour, Christ Jesus” (II:102).

In his views on grace and free will he threads his customary way between the Roman Catholic and Reformed positions. The Catholics think too highly of man’s freedom of will, of his intrinsic powers: witness the Roman belief in works of supererogation, those good deeds of the saints which go beyond what is necessary for their own salvation and which may consequently serve to help effect the salvation of their less virtuous brothers. To Donne the blood of Christ alone is sufficient for salvation; no man can begin to atone for his own sins, much less for those of others. And Donne was equally dismayed by the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination, which would seem to deny any freedom of the will. Beautifully expressed is Donne’s conviction that the flow of grace is continuous and that man, through the response of his heart, may in his freedom accept God’s inexpressibly gracious gift:

… As his mercy is new every morning, so his grace is renewed to me every minute, That is not by yesterdaies grace that I live now, but that I have Panem quotidianum, and Panem horarium, My daily bread, my hourely bread, in a continuall succession of his grace.… God made the Angels all of one naturall condition, in nature all alike; and God gave them all such grace, as that thereby they might have stood; and to them that used that grace aright, he gave a farther, a continuall succession of grace, and that is their Confirmation; Not that they cannot, but that they shall not fall; not that they are safe in themselves, but by Gods preservation safe … (VIII: 368).

The doctrine of the resurrection, Donne was convinced, lay at the center of the Christian faith. Death, man’s last enemy, will ultimately die, and the Last Day will be a summoning of the faithful to the Kingdom. The soul’s immortality Donne viewed as so self-evident as to need little argument. The resurrection of the body poses certain problems, but for those who wonder, for example, how a body which has lost some of its members or blood or bones can be reunited on the Day of Judgment, Donne has a ready answer. Picture yourselves, he tells them, seated at a table scattered with coins and effortlessly bringing those coins together as you compute your account; Donne continues: “Consider how much lesse, all this earth is to him, that sits in heaven, and spans all this world, and reunites in an instant armes, and legs, bloud, and bones, in what corners so ever they be scattered” (III: 109). The redeemed and resurrected man may be sure of a bliss unknown in this fallen world:

We shall see him [Christ] in a transfiguration, all clouds of sadness remov’d; and a transubstantiation, all his tears changed to Pearls, all his Blood-drops into Rubies, all the Thorns of his Crown into Diamonds: for, where we shall see the Walls of his Palace to be Saphyr, and Emerald, and Amethist, and all stones that are precious, what shall we not see in the face of Christ Jesus? and whatsoever we do see, by that very sight becomes ours (IV: 129).

A Beneficent Tonic

John Donne knew that the sermon is the proclamation of God’s Word, not an occasion for the expression of man’s foolishness. An expository preacher, he asserted the judgment and the mercy of God as it is revealed in Scripture, realizing that a sermon begins with, develops, and never loses sight of, a biblical text. On the other hand he was not so intent upon biblical exegesis as to lose sight of the congregation to whom he preached; he never forgot that the Bible is an account of God’s ways in history and toward man. He was uninterested in any form of biblical gamesmanship, of displaying ostentatiously his own subtle and acute textual understanding, cut off from the immediate relevance of the text to the hopeful sinner in the pew. He was forever concerned with God’s ways with man, with each man, and with the wondrous possibilities of man’s response to these gracious ways. He preached not of damnation and salvation in general, but of the necessity of each man’s deciding, always with the possibility of God’s grace, for life or for death. And he never forgot that the Christian life, in this world and the next, is one of abundant joy: “See him [God] here in his Blessings, and you shall joy in those blessings here; and when you come to see him Sicuti est, in his Essence, then you shall have this Joy in Essence, and in fulnesse …” (X:228). The contemporary preacher will find a careful reading of Donne a most beneficent tonic.

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