No Man is an Island:The Timely Wisdom of John DonneAn Adult Class for Easter SundayMichael Jinkins

The metaphor “Lenten Lands” has taken on new significance as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on every populated continent. The word quarantine itself comes from the Italian quaranta meaning for-ty. It is a direct reference to the biblical idea that somehow forty, as in the forty days of Lent, is the appropriate length of time for purification. Originally, therefore, a quarantine was enforced for forty days. A person suspected of illness still is quarantined from the public (though now the length of time is determined by medical science rather than biblical theology) so as not to infect others. In plagues, past and present, some people in quarantine got well, and others perished.

Whether because of pestilence or other causes, the ever-present threat of death and reflections on the after-life formed the backdrop for the thought and writings of some of history’s greatest poets. Anyone familiar with William Shakespeare knows of the Bard’s meditations on life’s “sound and fury” in our brief “strut upon the stage.” But it was a contemporary of Shakespeare’s who bequeathed to us some of the most memorable passages regarding life’s final and ultimate boundary, John Donne. A former libertine, a chancer and a rake, a convert to Protestantism from his family’s English Catholicism, and finally a saint in the Anglican tradition, Donne’s writings remind us of the interconnectedness of all human life and proclaim the Easter message of God’s triumph over death. His writings provide a bracing and comforting word to us in this difficult season of life and in this glorious season of faith.

A Personal Note: I’m not sure that my first impression of John Donne was altogether positive. This impression was confirmed by reading John Carey’s biography of him some years ago. Carey’s portrait of Donne emphasized what ap-peared to be a questionable moral flexibility. The poet T. S. Eliot also was very skeptical, if not downright cynical, about the sincerity of Donne’s remorse and repentance. In other words, there were important questions raised about Donne by influential critical voices. But preparing for our study today, I confess that I came truly to like and respect Donne as a person of forthright honesty about himself, in-cluding his failings. Perhaps it is Donn’e self-awareness and candor that has confused some scholars. Others, however, like the great Isaak Walton, a contemporary of Donne’s and his first biographer, adored the man, as a poet and a priest.

John Donne remains an enthralling figure to this day, but it is impossible for us even to begin to glimpse the signif-icance he had among his own contemporaries. Born in 1572, Donne was a child of a family which stood among the leading Roman Catholic families of Protestant Eliza-bethan England. He was descended, on his mother’s side, from Sir Thomas (“A Man for all Seasons”) More, who was martyred under Henry VIII. Donne’s uncle, Jasper Hey-

wood, was the leader of the underground Jesuit mission in England until he was captured.

This was in a time when Roman Catholics in England were subject to ongoing suspicion, regular searches of their homes, persecution and, in some instances, execu-tion. Early on, Donne gloried in his family’s Roman Cath-olic heroism. As a teenager, Donne treasured a miniature painting of himself, that showed him with crucifix ear-rings, clasping a sword under the daring motto (in Spanish no less): “Sooner dead than changed.”

Yet change he did, a fact which led John Carey, his most distinguished twentieth-century biographer to write: “The first thing to remember about Donne is that he was a Cath-olic; the second, that he betrayed his Faith.” What caused this change (whether conversion or betrayal), remains a mystery, though we do have clues along the way.

As a well-born Catholic student at Oxford, and later as a law student at London’s Inns of Court, Donne distin-guished himself mostly as a “party animal.” Fellow stu-dents of law selected him as Master of the Revels in 1593. He knew his way around the various sources of pleasure. He was a very popular young man. His portraits attest to

A Simple History of a Complex Figure

the fact that he was also an attractive young man, and he seems to have proven irresistible to many women.

Donne “swaggers” through his poetry in this early stage, writes Carey, as an imprudent “friendly conformist but an outsider, a social freebooter, preying on the wives and daughters of the bourgeoisie.” As a member of a well-known Catholic family, he was surrounded by the spies and informants. Protestant authorities were actively out to get him.

Donne, throughout this time, however, was less likely to cause offense for his Roman Catholicism, than for his “ri-otous living” and naked ambition. Donne made no effort to hide his opportunism. He is “lewd,” writes Carey, “blas-phemous, and cruel .... [yet] dazzlingly intelligent and so-phisticated.” He was a young man on the make.

He was also a young man in full, though covert, rebellion against the Protestant culture that hounded and threat-ened him. He was desperate for the social advancement that was open only to Protestants, so he generally kept his religious convictions to himself.

Donne’s ambition of social advancement seemed on the cusp of success when he was attached to the service and household of Sir Thomas Egerton, an influential courtier to Queen Elizabeth I. Donne lived in Egerton’s London house, and was given important assignments on behalf of the queen’s administration. He was so well connected at this time that it is believed he was present at court when Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” was first performed in the presence of the queen.

All his ambitions came crashing down in 1601, however, when Donne, then twenty-nine, entered into a secret mar-riage with a sixteen or seventeen year old girl, Ann More, who was under the care and protection of Sir Thomas and who also lived at his home. The fact that Donne has wooed and won the fair Ann under his own roof was seen by Sir Thomas and Ann’s father as a violation of trust. Thus be-gan a fourteen year period of abject poverty and ostracism from society, when Donne’s hopes for a high position in society were erased and he began to produce some of his finest poetry. He and Ann were banished from society.

During Donne’s social exile, after some time, he gradually began to develop new ties to potentially beneficial figures in society. By this point, Queen Elizabeth had died, and King James I (he was already King James IV of Scotland) had come to the throne of England. Among the new gen-eration of the Jacobean Court’s social influencers was Lucy, Countess of Bedford, a favorite lady-in-waiting to

Queen Anne. This young woman, nine years younger than Donne, was a beautiful, dazzling and complex person in her own right, a devout Calvinist who, nonetheless, was known (perhaps “notorious” is a better word) for her edgy social shenanigans. For example, Lucy once appeared at a formal ball in a gown which (how may one say this?) revealed the most interesting aspects of her upper torso to the admiring visage of the those present. No one other than Donne’s beloved wife, Ann (to whom he was happily married till her death in childbirth in 1617), had a more profound effect on him and his poetry during these years than did Lucy. His Holy Sonnets, including “Death be not proud,” apparently were written for her, and in conversa-tion with her.

Among the other important connections during these years as Donne gradually emerged from social ruin was Lady Magdalen Herbert, mother of Edward Herbert, the famous Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the founding light of English Deism (which eventually became the most signifi-cant religious movement in the Age of Enlightenment) and the incomparable Reverend George Herbert (the Anglican parson whose own poetry has arguably had even a greater influence on the history of poetry than Donne’s own).

As Donne began to be accepted again into the highest circles of English society, it was as a poet whose religious thought transcended sectarian divisions, not as a player in the political sphere. His poetry touched upon that light-ening-charged core of human experience in the presence of the divine. Donne’s spirituality and theology had been slowly transitioning for years from the tradition of his fam-ily toward a broader Christian faith, more catholic than ever, but no longer Roman Catholic. In the fullness of time, it was at the urging of no less than King James I himself that Donne, in 1615, made his decisive move, that change which was for an English Catholic no less than apostasy, to enter the Anglican Church, indeed, to seek holy orders as a Protestant minister.

As an Anglican priest, Donne was renowned for his dy-namic preaching. The popularity of Donne’s preaching, first as a simple priest and later as Dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, far surpassed even that of his poetry. Theodore Gill, in an introduction to a collection of Don-ne’s sermons, writes that whenever it was announced that Donne was to preach, throngs would rush to the venue, packing in members of the royal family, the Archbishop of Canterbury, first lords and ladies of the realm, visiting diplomats from other countries, leading statesmen and intellectuals like Francis Bacon, “and always the people.” On one occasion, when Donne preached at Lincoln’s Inn, the crush of his hearers became so violent that some in

the crowd were feared dead “with the extreme press and thronging.”

What was it about Donne that moved his audiences and still captivates readers? In an undated edition of Donne’s writings, George Saintsbury writes: “Always in him are the two conflicting forces of intense enjoyment of the present and intense feeling of the contrast of that present with the future. He has at once the transcendentalism which saves sensuality and the passion which saves mysticism.” What some have seen as Donne’s sensuality or eroticism (as when he writes of the beauty of his patron’s body or his delight in being covered by his wife in bed) is not detached from his profound spirituality. He approaches all of life with the immediate attentiveness of the poet, but of the poet as re-ceiving all the wonders of creation from God’s hand.

John Carey characterizes Donne’s preaching this way: “His wonderment at God’s creation of the world out of nothing repeated in sermon after sermon, arises from the same imaginative and linguistic complex as the workman, with his globe and maps, who could quickly make that which was nothing, All.’”

A Dutch diplomat attending a sermon is reported to have said that Donne’s wit was unmatched. He had the capacity to move his hearers from tears to pealed of laughter, to take them deep into their own most closely felt fears, and to draw them up into the stratosphere of mystical specu-lation.

Probably the best known fact about Donne is that he posed for his last portrait wrapped in his own death shroud not long before his death on March 31, 1631. But this story is just another instance of his complexity and contradiction. To this day, no one really understands the mystery of this man who appears both self-centered and selfless, death-ob-sessed and death-defying, morbid and captivated by the joy of life, a dedicated student of the sensual in love and a mystic devoted to the life of the spirit, a preacher who seemed to be able to read the inner thoughts of his audi-tors but who preached primarily to himself, a dedicated lover of his wife who never stopped admiring other wom-en, a brilliant wit, full of himself and of his own intellec-tual superiority who strove to achieve humility as though it were the highest honor in the world.

What remains now, is for us to read a very brief selection from his writings...

Among Donne’s most beloved poems is the one from which Ernest Hemingway borrowed a title for one of his finest novels, “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

No Man Is an IslandJohn Donne

No man is an Island,Entire of itself;Every man is a piece of the continent,A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,Europe is the less,As well as if a promontory were:As well as if a manor of thy friend’sOr of thine own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me,Because I am involved in mankind.And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;It tolls for thee.

Another writer to borrow from this poem the title of his book was Thomas Merton. Merton and Donne seem cut from the same bolt of cloth.

Those familiar with Merton’s life story, and with his journals (especially Volume Six: “Learning to Love”), will be aware of his Donne-like life-long struggle with chastity. But it is this poem by Donne that marks their similarity most strikingly, because Donne’s intuition of the interconnectedness of life seems echoed in the mystical experience of oneness with all humanity which Merton underwent on March 18, 1958, on the streets of Louisville, Kentucky.

This is the only mystical experience I know of in our country that has earned a historical marker right there on the sidewalk at the corner of Fourth Street and what is now Muhammed Ali Street). The marker incorporates Merton’s account of his epiphany. He wrote:

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was sudden-ly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers .... There is no way of telling peo-ple that they are walking around shining like the sun.”

Merton had been a Cistercian monk (a Trappist) for over ten years by this point. He was steeped in the tra-ditions of Roman Catholic mysticism, including Eva-grius Ponticus, John Cassian, Meister Eckhart and St. John of the Cross. Merton has also begun to explore Eastern religious and philosophical thought in ear-nest, particularly Zen Buddhism, with its concept that all that lives shares in the same being. Through these sources he came to a profound intuition of the in-terconnectedness of humanity, an intuition to which Donne gave poetic voice three centuries earlier.

There may be no more important insight in our own time of pandemic than this. Although separated, we sense our oneness with all people. A sneeze or a cough in one part of the world affects the lives and livelihood of people a world away. The more we are alone, they more we long for contact and conversation, the more we miss those simple expressions of comradely and friendship we once took for granted. No one is an Is-land.

A Selection of Donne’s Writings

Holy Sonnets (Six)John Donne

Death be not proud, though some have called theeMighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so,For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me;From rest and sleep, which but thy picture be,Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,And soonest our best men with thee do go,Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,And poppy, or charms, can make us sleep as well,And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?One short sleep past, we wake eternally,And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.

Donne’s “Holy Sonnet, No. Six” reads almost like a poetic commentary on Saint Paul’s discussion of the resurrection of the dead in Christ, in I Corinthians 15, culminating in vv. 54-55.

“So when this corruption shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall it come to pass the saying that is written, ‘Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’”

Indeed, this chapter from First Corinthians figures largely in Donne’s thinking. He marveled at the idea that not ev-eryone alive would suffer death, that some few would be “changed in the twinkling of an eye,” as St. Paul intimates in First Corinthians, and immediately transported to the presence of God. Whether Donne believed or hoped or dreamed that he would be among this undying minori-ty, may be debated. But what cannot be debated is that when he ascended his last pulpit, on February 25, 1630, to preach his most famous sermon, he was committing himself to the unknowable will of God in whose hand lies our ultimate disposition. He was, by then, a very sick man, preparing himself to die.

Of this sermon, titled “Death’s Duel,” it has been said, “Dr Donne had preached his own funeral sermon.” It has been called morbid, but I confess I find it more bracing than morbid, like being struck in the face by a fierce frigid wind that awakens us to reality. Among the most bracing lines in the sermon are these: “We have a winding sheet in our mother’s womb, which grows with us from our con-

ception, and we come into the world, wound up in that winding sheet, for we come to seek a grave.”

Donne’s message seems, at first, only to be a reminder of our own mortality, but then he makes a dramatic turn in his sermon, a rhetorical pirouette that illuminates the spir-itual meaning of the incarnation: Christ united himself fully with our humanity. And Christ lived this humanity from first to last toward a singular end: “Being come into this life in our mortal nature, he could not go out of it any other way but by death.”

You may recall my quoting recently what Carlyle Marney once said, “Christ died because we die.” This is precisely what Donne is saying.

Christ’s union with us extends to the cross and into the grave. Christ went there, the full distance of the mortal journey, because he come here as one of us. Donne said to his hearers at Whitehall on that final occasion: “There we leave you in that blessed dependency, to hang upon him that hangs upon the cross.” Remain there, Donne tells us, utterly dependent, helpless, silent in the grave, until by the grace of God in Christ we are raised again from the dead. What a perfect word to hear on this Easter Sunday.

Once we begin examining Donne’s writings, I find it hard to find a stopping place. He gave us so many powerful im-ages and ideas, especially in his incomparable “Holy Son-nets”:

“This is my play’s last scene,” he writes, opening Sonnet No. 3.

“Satan hates me, yet is loathe to lose me,” he writes in the closing lines of Sonnet No. 1.

Or “What if this present were the world’s last night?” he asks in the opening line of Sonnet No. 9. (Which brings to mind jazz pianist’s Mose Allison’s classic song, “Ever Since the World Ended.”)

Or, the delightful passage in Sonnet No. 13, “I am a lit-tle world made cunningly/ Of elements, and an angelic sprite.”

But, we will close our readings with the most controversial of the Holy Sonnets.

Holy Sonnets, No. 10.John Donne

Batter my heart, three-personed God, for, youAs yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bendYour force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.I, like an usurped town, to another due,Labour to admit you, but oh, to no end,Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,But am betrothed unto your enemy,Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,Take me to you, imprison me, for IExcept you enthral me, never shall be free,Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

When I taught my first theology class in a Presbyterian seminary in 1992, I entered the academic world at a mo-ment when this particular sonnet was unspeakable in the classroom. It had been decided that Donne’s Holy Sonnet, No. 10, endorsed domestic violence, attributing to God the battery of a partner or a child, thus justifying such actions.

Without a doubt, this interpretation was largely inspired by great pain and was well-intended as a protest against a view of God and of fathers and parents in general whose actions deserve condemnation. But, I have never been able to apply this interpretation to this particular poem myself.

To me, this poem represents yet another version of what the biblical metaphor of “the refiner’s furnace” is intended to convey. It is about what it takes for God to transform us into the likeness of Jesus Christ. As C. S. Lewis once observed: we do not doubt that God’s ultimate will is to transform us into the likeness of Christ; what we worry about is how much that transformation will hurt.

Donne plays upon several images in this poem. The first image is the most abstract, “my heart,” the seat of my af-fection, emotions, feelings: he recognizes how easily the heart becomes attached to those things which will harm us. He prays that God will tear our hearts loose from those attachments. That I may learn to rise up and stand, he asks God to humble him, realizing (as St. Thomas a Kempis also recognized centuries before) that there is a direct rela-tionship between humility (a quality we desire) and humil-iation (an experience we dread).

Donne speaks here of towns occupied by an enemy force (for me, bringing to mind one of St. Athanasius’ most viv-id metaphors in his “On the Incarnation”). Donne speaks also of the role of reason in faith, observing how easily rea-son can be captured and used against faith, although both come from God. He speaks of a kind of engagement we have entered into to wed ourselves to evil, and begs God to undo that betrothal (the only actual domestic image in the poem). The poet prays that God would constrain him so he can be free, using both the images of prison and ser-vitude. And, finally, in a manner reminiscent of The Song of Songs, he prays that God will ravish him so that he may become chaste.

That last line brings to mind both St. Augustine of Hip-po’s confession, “Lord, make me chaste, just not yet.” and Soren Kierkegaard’s enigmatic “Diary of a Seducer,” which intimates that God is the divine lover who uses every trick in the book to make us his beloved. I can’t read these lines from Donne without thinking of “Les Liaisons dan-gereuses” by Pierre Chonderios de Laclos, and “The End of the Affair,” by Graham Greene, in both of which God becomes the principle agent in luring a woman to fall in love with divine goodness (in the case of the first novel) or

God, the Agent of Transformation

to abandon the man with whom she is having an affair (in the second). These are undoubtedly powerful, even shock-ing, images. But we are dealing with reality here, human life in its totality. I don’t see why shocking images should shock us in such service.

What we find in Donne is a willingness fearlessly to ex-plore the divine/human relationship in all its dimensions, drawing on his own experiences. I think it was Karl Barth who once said, in light of the incarnation nothing human is foreign to God. Donne takes this insight and relentlessly follows it.

Final ThoughtSomeone has also said that Donne tends to breed either fans or opponents, with nothing in between. I suspect there’s some truth in this. Those who think in straight lines are not likely to be drawn to John Donne. Indeed, they may be repelled by him. For Donne, truth is dialectical, el-liptical, and “stranger than fiction.” Those who think that the true and the clear and the straightforward are identical are unlikely to be willing to endure the labyrinthine jour-neys into which Donne would lead them.

On the other hand, those who believe that truth rarely gives up its greatest treasures without a struggle, who be-lieve what we see is seldom, if ever, what is real, will value Donne as much for how he says things as for what he says.

As Donne himself writes, in the poem that begins, “In what torne ship soever I embarke”:

Churches are best for Prayer, that have least light:To see God only, I goe out of sight:And to scape stormy days, I chuseAn Everlasting night.

I confess, I have become a fan of John Donne.

Sources & ResourcesUnfortunately, given the current conditions of the pan-demic, I only had available those resources that are in our own home. But such as they are:

John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (Lon-don: Faber and Faber, 1981/1990).

John Donne, edited by John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

Poems of John Donne, edited by E. K. Chambers, with an introduction by George Saintsbury (London: George Routledge & Sons, ND), two volumes.

The Sermons of John Donne, selected and intro-duced by Theodore Gill (New York: Living Age Books/Meridian, 1958).

No Man is an Island: A Selection of the Prose of John Donne, selected, edited and introduced by Rivers Scott (London: The Folio Society, 1997).