Vanessa Rasmussen

Death’s Duality:

The Dialectics of Donne’s Final Sermon

     The Christian conception of God originates in mystery and contradiction and emanates from paradox. Entirely comfortable with professing that God is both three persons and one at once, a Christian will also tell you that God—or the son of God—had an earthly mother who conceived him while maintaining her virginity. S/he will further explain to you that when this God was born, he was both human and divine at one and the same time. Solemnly, s/he will relate the persecution of the Lord by those he was sent to save and emphasize that although he was put to death at the hands of his own people, he yet returned from the dead to save this faithless populace. The Christian will say that by sacrificing himself,—or his only son—God substituted one death for the countless deaths of all humanity. And what’s more, God will descend once more from heaven where he had returned, this time to judge and claim the souls of all humanity that he himself had died to save.

     The figure of Jesus, the center of Christianity, embodies—indeed makes flesh—the contradictions inherent in the official religion of the England of John Donne’s day. For Donne, this 1600-year-old cryptic figure served as the crux of his sustaining belief and the hinge upon which his life was able to swing. The religion built up around this figure, while maintaining the appearance of an orderly system, is entirely dependent on irrational leaps of faith and a mystical appreciation of irreconcilable differences. As a historical and religious figure interpreted by priests, preachers, and religious scholars through the centuries, Jesus Christ, the vessel of the human and the divine, sustains and enacts all of the paradoxes of Christianity. He collapses oppositions, reconciles diametrically opposed ideas, and reduces humanity’s sharp and listless rationality to a blunt and useful synthetic tool. His interpreters carefully maintain the contradictory descriptors that determine him: he is both human and divine; he is not a motley mixture of the two. He has both died and is risen; he is not simply a ghost. He has both saved the world and will come to destroy it on Judgment Day; he is an enigma.

     Thus interpreted, Jesus forms the perfect figure for reading Donne’s own paradoxical life: while it is possible to read his life in retrospect as disjointed, the connection between Donne’s human and divine personas is less of a static beginning and ending and more of a pivot upon which he turned from time to time. Donne was also able to channel this duality into the thought and arguments presented in his sermons. Relying on the pre-established two-fold nature of the Son of God and of the very religion in which he is situated, Donne is able to preach Christianity to his congregations in a dialectical manner that maintains the complexity of its doctrine. Classical Greek dialectics discovered truth in argument or debate through the revelation of contradictions. In our modern sensibility, we use the term to describe the performance of an argument that is interested in internal tensions and contradictions. Donne’s sermons, through the use of Christ as a pivotal figure, employ a dialectical framework in order to illustrate for his congregation the true complexity of Christianity and maintain the mysteries inherent in the religion, even while ostensibly explaining them. In effect, Donne’s sermons, in which the enigma of Christ is used as a frequent metaphor, become performances of the paradoxes inherent in Christianity and demonstrate for his congregation the real difficulty involved in the Christian beliefs they take for granted.

     During Elizabeth I’s reign, from 1558 to 1603, and James I’s reign, from 1603 to 1625, preaching had become a political and precarious profession. Not all of its work was dictated by the desire to justify God’s ways to man; in fact, much of the preaching, including Donne’s, that occurred during Elizabeth’s and James’ time concerned the justification of royal ways to men. In his study The Elizabethan Sermon, Alan Fager Herr explains that the Queen’s ascension to the throne caused turmoil in the pulpit. Protestant preachers breathed a breath of fresh air, feeling freshly legitimized, and circulated this fresh air vehemently within their congregations. Catholic preachers, on the other hand, afraid that their previously established position would crumble, took care to edify their congregations. Herr notes that “in their fervor both parties took great liberties in their sermons and assumed impertinent attitudes towards the Crown” (12). Therefore, Elizabeth sought to regulate the profession, and a number of strict proclamations issued forth, among which were the prohibition of preaching on any topic unrelated to the Gospels or epistles and the regulation of preaching licenses, which determined that preachers “must subscribe to three main points of the established religion: first (1559) to the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Queen, later (1561) to the lawfulness of the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal, and finally (1603) to the thirty-nine Articles of Religion” (Herr 3). Such state controls of religion, which later deterred Donne from ordination for several years, enforced a uniformity of worship to which all citizens were required to subscribe by law. There is evidence in personal effects that Donne first felt his calling in 1612, but waited two years to act on it, possibly because of his objection to the strict state requirements for the fulfillment of that calling and a very private conception of religious sentiment.

     In addition to being controlled by the state, preachers and their congregations were sometimes subject to “officially inspired” sermons, argues Herr. Such sermons served political purposes, such as denouncing the primacy of the pope and directing public opinion on events such as executions. Herr notes that “detailed evidence of such [official] inspiration is, however, rare, as might be expected, since the force of the sermon on the audience would be lost if it were known that pressure had been put upon the preacher” (49). Elizabeth also enacted a law that required at least four sermons from preachers during the course of the year, and later revised the number to one a month. Set, then, at one sermon a month, the requirement proved reasonable since preachers themselves believed that more than one sermon a month resulted in an inferior product and was to be avoided. The framework of preaching, thus established largely by political forces, did, however, leave the particular preacher room to maneuver when preaching a personal sermon. Herr explains that “it is not surprising to find that ecclesiastical inspiration is more common and less interesting than civil inspiration” (49). Most preachers did use their understanding of the Bible as the basis of their sermons to greater or lesser effect; Herr’s comment that ecclesiastical inspiration is somehow more dull than civil inspiration may be in part due to the fact that Herr did not extend his study to include the work of Donne, who would often choose a single line from the Bible and unravel his entire sermon from it.

     If preachers were regulated by the crown, their congregations were also controlled to some extent by their sovereign. If they did not attend weekly services, the citizenry could expect to pay a fine. While some individuals did opt to pay the fine, Herr notes that “the great majority went to church without grumbling or making an issue of it” (16). It is easy to see why: sermons at St. Paul’s Cross often included sideshows of public penitence; some preachers experienced a theft of the bread and wine needed for communion, others were interrupted by the spontaneous overflow of emotion in the form of mischievous and loudly delivered songs; congregations were wont to parade new frocks, lie down in church, talk about business, and throw written objections to the sermon up to the pulpit. Besides entertaining themselves, Elizabethan congregations expected to be fully entertained by their preacher and would sit through lengthy sermons—upwards of an hour—and feel slighted if not engaged this long. They also expected a rousing delivery and gesticular innovations; says Herr, “they liked their pulpits well pounded” (36).

     Donne ventured into this milieu when it was obvious to him that all other paths to preferment were closed. Donne, who had been in search of secular employment for most of his life, at last accepted Holy Orders at the age of 42. Stevie Davies, a biographer of Donne, argues that Donne’s reluctance to undertake a religious vocation was due to his worldly aspirations: “coveting a worldly glory fitted to the brilliance of his pyrotechnic skills; conscientiously aware of his unfitness for Holy Orders…Donne held back until well into middle age” (55). However, Davies notes that his age seemed to be no detriment to his advancement: “with bizarre celerity he shot up the ladder of ecclesiastical preferment like a middle-aged infant prodigy, hurtling heavenwards in the pride of office with demonic energy” (55). In spite of her mixed metaphors, Davies highlights Donne’s amazing rise once he understood that King James meant business when, upon denying numerous entreaties by Donne for favor, he said that Donne should not expect to succeed in any other field. Once ordained, Donne was quickly appointed Royal Chaplain and was granted an honorary doctorate by the University of Cambridge. He was made divinity reader of Lincoln’s Inn in 1616, was elected Dean of St. Paul’s in 1621, and was being considered for a Bishopric at the time of his death. We know that Donne was most likely a popular preacher. His sharp wit and gift for language surely guaranteed a quality sermonic experience for his audience. Herr notes that “sermons of men sensational in either dress or sermon style were well attended” (39). While it is doubtful that Donne fit into the former category, it is certain that he was a member of the latter. William R. Mueller, a biographer of Donne as a preacher, notes that “remarks by Donne’s contemporaries attest to the fact that the sermons were impressively delivered” (209) and that “there was probably little enough dozing in his seventeenth-century congregations” (257).

This Particular Preacher

     In preaching, Donne was able to find a home for his metaphysical wit and a use for his broad education. Having studied law, literature, and religion, Donne was uniquely positioned for preaching, since he could reach a diverse population by drawing examples from these fields to illustrate his sermons. He was most likely comforted by the thought that, though the country had suffered a dearth of educated clergy during Elizabeth’s reign, his own membership enhanced the profession considerably and followed in the line of great preachers since Jesus. Centuries removed from Christ’s simple preaching style, Donne seems to have embellished the rhetorical devices used to win souls: while he was always careful to remember not to estrange the less sharp members of his congregation, he was also equally careful to layer his sermons so that various intellects would be able to cut their religious teeth on something difficult.ⁱ On every level, Donne was careful to preserve the complexity and even the contradictions inherent in the Christian faith, for, Donne knew, to collapse the faith into easily digestible maxims is to betray it.

     As an individual, Donne maintained his own complexity: like Christ who was both human and divine, Donne was both “Jack” and “John” Donne, a human man given over to the temptations of youth, and later a divine, a preacher with a unique understanding of the tribulations facing humanity. As the composer of poems as diverse as “On His Mistress Going to Bed” and “Hymn to God, My God, In My Sickness,” Donne certainly had a wealth of both secular and religious experience to draw upon when trying to reach his congregation. Recognizing the apparent disparity in his personality between the pre- and post-ordination Donne, the preacher was able to channel the conflict into his sermons and enact a synthesis of sinner and preacher. Likewise, through his experience with the complexities of the English language, Donne was able to draw together the conflicting ends of Christian faith in typical metaphysical fashion in order to keep his congregation actively enacting their faith. Finally, perhaps because of parallels he saw between Christ’s life on earth and his own, Donne seemed to have made a deeper connection with Christ’s paradoxical life than most preachers, who were wont to use Christ’s teachings as straightforward examples. Donne’s sermons often describe Christ’s personality and his struggles with his dual nature. Through his recognition of these personal oppositions at play within the course of his own life, Donne was able to realize for his congregation the complexities of Christianity and was unwilling in his sermons to let any neat and easy conclusions be drawn.

Preaching the Word

     The dialectics described above find a full expression in Donne’s final sermon, which was preached on Psalm 68:20, “And unto God the Lord belong the issues of death.” Given just five weeks before his own death, this sermon, preached at Whitehall before King James in the beginning of Lent, 1630, was called “Deaths Duell” by its printers a year later. The sermon attests to his daily concern with the dual nature of life and death and takes its form from a dialectic argument. Donne consistently argues one thing, then its opposite, and eventually condenses both extremes in the example of Christ, while maintaining the oppositions. Such a rhetorical move was typical of Donne, in both his poetry and in his sermons, and his final sermon fell in line with much of his earlier work, albeit more marvelous for its timing and its personal nature. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter argue in the Introduction to the final volume of their collection of Donne’s sermons that “in Deaths Duell Donne was treading a path which he had often trod before,” (35) but also note that “now at last, when he knew himself to be a dying man, and the plaudits of men meant nothing to him, he could speak more freely than ever before of the central fact of his religion, of the amazing, the unending paradox that God could die, and would die for the love of man” (35). Donne’s final sermon, then, was both typical of his former work and exemplary in its fearlessness.

     Beginning the sermon with an architectural image, Donne sets down the structure of the meditation. This will be no rambling discussion, but an edifying experience:

Buildings stand by the benefit of their foundations that sustain and support them and of their buttresses that comprehend and embrace them, and of their contignations that knit and unite them: the foundations suffer them not to sink, the buttresses suffer them not to swerve, and the contignation and knitting suffers them not to cleave...(1)

Buildings are sturdy, physical reminders of the world in which we live and as such, they rhetorically place the congregation fully in the physical world, standing upon a firm foundation.

     But Donne will not let his congregation feel too confident for long; in the very next sentence, he dispels all concrete (or wooden, as it were) images and reconfigures the solid building as an intangible metaphor for God: “the body of our building is in the former part of this verse [the Psalm]: it is this, he that is our God is the God of salvation…” (1). Donne then explains to the congregation that these three supports of a building, its foundation, buttresses, and contignations (or beams, in the sense of contiguous scaffolding) represent the three ways in which God handles the issues of death: the foundation represents the power of God over death, the buttresses become the manner of our death, and the contignations figure the divine life and death of Christ.

     The building is no longer a building, firm and secure unto itself; it has become the ephemeral body of each member of the congregation, whose existences are founded on the separation from death which occurred at their births, whose lives are buttressed against the continual presence of death, and whose lives are structured around the example of Christ, whose life on earth glorified death. The threefold conceit of the building or the human being’s structure echoes the threefold person of God, which Donne lays out for his congregation, lest they be too stunned by their newfound architectural nature to comprehend anything but their more or less well constructed façades:

In all these three lines then, we shall look upon these words; first, as the God of power, the Almighty Father rescues his servants from the jaws of death: and then as the God of mercy, the glorious Son rescued us, by taking upon himself this issue of death: and then between these two, as the God of comfort, the holy Ghost rescues us from all discomfort by his blessed impressions beforehand, that what manner of death soever be ordained for us, yet this exitus mortis shall be introitus in vitam, our issue in death (shall be an entrance into everlasting life). (4)

Three supports for buildings which become three supports for human life, three issues of death, and three persons of God, each of which has its own function, have been introduced in just the first few minutes of the sermon. Here Donne is fusing meanings tightly together, relying on the weight that the number three has for good Christians. He is ordering their world for them while simultaneously dismantling it, for the supports of life become the issues of death in almost one breath. This segment of the sermon recalls Donne’s earlier poem “Batter my heart, three-personed God,” one of his Holy Sonnets, in which Donne embraces the contradictions of possession by God in triplicate. The structural imagery of the town in the earlier poem are echoed in the sermon and so keep a correspondence between the earlier and later Donne. The language both in the poem and in the sermon argue both sides of the issues at stake through the tightly woven imagery used and ultimately produce a complex combination of the two as the desired result. Gale Carrithers notes that Donne’s language in sermons often collapses meanings intentionally, since any word other than God’s Word loses something essential:

The special way [Donne] responded to the prevailing ambivalence toward language and toward the unsteady relationships of words and referents [and, I might add, their spelling] harmonizes with his general behavior in his sermons and likewise his whole relationship with his congregation. What are the ties that bind a word and its referent? If words are iconic, are parts of that to which they refer, then any word other than God’s word, any name other than one given by Adam to a creature ‘according to its nature’ is absurd, a kind of crazy nothingness. (80)

As a poet, Donne obviously had a deeper understanding of language and its possibilities than most and exploited its intricacies. Moving on from the resonant triadic imagery, Donne approaches the binaries of life and death, conflating each with the other until his pitiable congregation must have questioned whether they ever had drawn or still drew breath. Donne does not accord a glory to the occasion of birth; he seems to save it for the occasion of death. Over the course of seven pages, Donne ruminates about the death inherent in birth and the birth inherent in death: “our very birth and entrance into this life is exitus a morte, an issue from death, for in our mother’s womb we are dead so, as that we do not know we live” (5). Further images conflate the womb with the grave, in which the worm’s activity becomes a kind of life; there is mention of a dead child in the womb killing its mother, and there is the curious description of a procession of ceaseless deaths, beginning with birth. The passage is worth quoting at length to display its intricacies:

But then this exitus a morte, is but introitus in mortem, this issue, this deliverance from that death, the death of the womb, is an entrance, a delivering over to another death, the manifold deaths of this world. We have a winding sheet in our mother’s womb, which grows with us from our conception, and we come into the world, wound up in that winding sheet, for we come to seek a grave; and as prisoners discharged of actions may lie for fees; so when the womb hath discharged us, yet we are bound to it by cords of flesh, by such a string, as that we cannot go thence, nor stay there. We celebrate our own funerals with cries, even at our birth; as though our threescore and ten years of life were spent in our mother’s labor, and our circle made up in the first point thereof. We beg one baptism with another, a sacrament of tears; and we come into a world that lasts many ages, but we last not...this whole world is but a universal church yard, but our common grave; and the life and motion that the greatest persons have in it, is but as the shaking of buried bodies in their graves by an earth-quake. That which we call life, is but Hebdomada mortium, a week of deaths, seven days, seven periods of our life spent in dying, a dying seven times over; and there is an end. Our birth dies in infancy, and our infancy dies in youth, and youth and the rest die in age and age also dies and determines all. Nor do all these, youth out of infancy, or age out of youth arise so, as a Phoenix out of the ashes of another Phoenix formerly dead, but as a wasp or a serpent out of a carrion, or as a snake out of dung. Our youth is worse than our infancy, and our age worse than our youth. Our youth is hungry and thirsty, after those sins, which our infancy knew not; and our age is sorry and angry, that it cannot pursue those sins which our youth did. And besides, all the way, so many deaths, that is, so many deadly calamities accompany every condition, and every period of this life, as that death itself would be an ease to them that suffer them. (9)

By arguing first that in our birth we experience a death, and later that in our death we experience a birth, Donne employs a dialectical argument whose resolution is that mankind must be in a kind of continual limbo. Donne’s womb/grave imagery seems to present the congregation with terrible and uncontrollable images of confinement at both the beginning and end of life, between which, as he notes elsewhere in the sermon, is a succession of small deaths in the form of our daily tribulations. To strengthen his congregation’s resolve to go on living, Donne has presented the image of Christ as an alternative to such dying, for Christ, in effect, reverses the nature of our existence. While humans must continually die in this world, even in birth, Christ is continually born to this world, even in death. Christ is born in the nativity, in the resurrection, and in the future Second Coming. Donne offers this example as consolation elsewhere in the sermon, but is quick to mention that Christ is only able to reverse the cycle due to his divine nature. Humanity’s negative echo of dying even in birth and still more even in death can only be silenced when Christ is once again born to the world on Judgment Day. This rebirth of Christ is Donne’s main concern and impetus for the sermon, for he suffers from the knowledge that his own body will be in sorry shape when Christ comes for him. Davies notes this concern for the physical aspect of death as a reflection of spiritual flaws when she says “the imperatives of the sermons are founded upon a deeper than average cognizance of inner foulness. They are also sharply aware of the mortality of the human animal” (56).

Donne’s Dead

     Following a discussion of Christ’s incorruptible body and the perfect state in which those souls taken on the day of judgement will be assumed into heaven, Donne moves into a discourse of the state in which all persons who have died previous to the second coming must necessarily lie. This reflection is most likely occasioned by Donne’s distaste for his own arrangements in the near future, and shares the strong language and uncomfortable fusion of his metaphysical poetry:

But for us that die now and sleep in the state of the dead, we must all pass this posthume death, this death after death, nay this death after burial, this dissolution after dissolution, this death of corruption and putrifaction, of vermiculation and incineration, of dissolution and dispersion in and from the grave. When those bodies that have been the children of royal parents, and the parents of royal children, must say with Job, to corruption thou art my father, and to the Worm thou art my mother and my sister. Miserable riddle, when the same worm must be my mother, and my sister, and my self. Miserable incest, when I must be married to my mother and my sister, and be both father and mother to my own mother and sister, beget, and bear that worm which is all that miserable penury; when my mouth shall be filled with dust, and the worm shall feed, and feed sweetly upon me, when the ambitious man shall have no satisfaction, if the poorest alive tread upon him, nor the poorest receive any contentment in being made equal to princes, for they shall be equal but in dust. One dyeth at his full strength, being wholly at ease and in quiet, and another dies in the bitterness of his soul, and never eats with pleasure, but they lie down alike in the dust, and the worm covers them. (20)

In the beginning of the passage, Donne defines and redefines what he calls the “death after death.” He is concerned with the second death that must occur for “us that die now”; for those Christians who, dying in the seventeenth century—before Christ’s return on Judgment Day—must suffer a terrible dissolution of the body. It seems that, according to Donne, after the first death in which the soul is separated from the body, there occurs a second death where the body in the grave is itself separated from the earth in which it is encased. The grave, for Donne, is no final resting place; it is a place of intense activity. Even while decomposing, Donne’s dead do more than continually die. They also actively suffer “vermiculation and incineration” (20). While it would not seem strange for the dead bodies to be infested with worms, it is odd that they should be somehow incinerated in their earthen graves, simultaneously being eaten and corrupted in other ways.

     Donne’s dead do not seem to rest; indeed they seem to have entered a second womb in their graves where, instead of developing as human beings, they disintegrate into the grave, or the womb, which seems to be interchangeable for Donne. In the womb of the grave, each body suffers “corruption and putrifaction... vermiculation and incineration... dissolution and dispersion in and from the grave.” Instead of cells binding together and forming a human being, here the body decomposes, but seems to be born in the same way, since the movement at the end of the sentence is both “in and from the grave.” There is an issuing forth in both the womb and the grave; in both places the body is in an active state. Donne so compounds the images of life and death and womb and grave that with each mention of either term, his congregation can not help but summon the other into consciousness. They enact the synthetic power of his dialectic argument by creating a third position that both collapses the meanings of the words and maintains their distinctions.

     While for most of the passage Donne seems to look at the bodies from above, he soon begins to discuss the dead from a vantage point below ground with them, since the mouth that is filled with dust is his. This movement in perspective further conflates the life/death imagery. As a living preacher, Donne literally and figuratively has one foot in the grave and the congregation is forced to watch the process of his death. Since he meditates on their state, he, as a (barely) living man, endows the corpses with all the attributes of the living. This activity, however painful and degrading, still allows Donne to show his congregation a continuity between this world and the next; to do so, action is necessary. While being purified, Donne’s dead also sleep, speak, marry, conceive, give birth, and have emotional reactions to the world above. Aside from this activity, the dead are also passively being eaten by worms. The activity of the dead belies their soulless state; Donne’s dead seem to function much as they would if they were buried alive.

     It is important to Donne that his dead be active, for only through their activity can they prove their individuality, a factor that is important if one is to be assumed into heaven as a discrete entity. It is necessary for Donne and for God to be able to distinguish one body from another, and thus, one soul from another. This is why each body in Donne’s vision remains active. Mueller notes that “one of Donne’s most fascinating speculations concerns the way in which God will, on the Last Day, enable the soul to return to the physical world to reassemble all those parts, those atoms, of the body in which it once dwelt” (201). However, the paradox remains: active or not, sovereign or not, these bodies will be in a serious state of decay, having been subjected to “putrifaction” and “vermiculation.” How then, Donne wonders, will the body be in adequate readiness for the glory of God?

     This line of questioning shows a literal interpretation of the prophecy that when Christ comes again, immaculate in body, the dead will rise. Ever the logician, Donne wonders about his own fitness of body when he shall be raised, hundreds of years later, to meet his immaculate God. In this passage, Donne is concerned with the death of those persons who pass before Judgment Day, a day which, according to Donne, will entail the perfect death of the living, a death which will not involve corruption of the body. Elsewhere in the sermon, Donne meditates on the reasons that Christ’s own body was not corrupted after his death, almost as if he is searching for a way to avoid his own corruption. Unfortunately, Donne decides that Christ’s uncorrupted body is due to his divine nature. The concern with the dead body stems from Church doctrine, as Mueller notes: “[T]he doctrine of the body’s resurrection, not so self-evident, calls for an Article in the Creed and an act of faith” (198). Donne’s concern, then, while extreme, is not unfounded. Mueller finds further examples of Donne’s belief in a bodily reassembling and resurrection in the poems and other sermons as well, where much concern has been lavished on the particulars of body parts meeting up once again, regardless of the conditions of their parting (202).

     Donne seems to think of his soul as a bodily extension of his physical being, one that is mutable and affected by the actions of the body. Davies notes that “Donne was always, not just self-conscious, but soul-conscious. He knew that you could lose, relinquish, perjure, give, or animalize the soul. All human transactions affected it and might leave an indelible mark” (56). In another sermon, Davies sees Donne preaching to his congregation on a similar topic: “with grisly relish, he described the decay and decomposition of the human corpse; when he judged that the congregation had been reduced to a sufficient state of nausea, he sprang the resurrection on them, triumphantly” (75). Donne’s morbidity emphasizes for his congregation the link between life and death, and the “indelible marks” that a life such as his might leave on the soul.

     Familial relationships are likewise dismantled when Donne turns his concern to the time “When those bodies that have been the children of royal parents, and the parents of royal children, must say with Job, to corruption thou art my father, and to the Worm thou art my mother and my sister.” Here, by inverting the order of relationship (the children of royal parents/the parents of royal children), Donne seems to be positing that familial relationships have no meaning in the grave. This idea is further picked up in the address to corruption and the worm in familiar terms. Once buried, Donne seems to say, all fellows are related; all distinctions of birth are equalized. The physical nature of the worm that passes through all that was once living and now faces a second death equalizes all bodies in stature, sin, and relationship. However, while Donne seems to imply that the worm is the great equalizer, that royal personages and common folk, strong people and weak, happy and unhappy are all consumed by the worm so that even titles such as mother/father/sister/self make no difference, he maintains the implications of identity: when the worm passes through him and his family, Donne does not perceive the movement as the mere decomposition of dead bodies; it is an unpardonable sin—incest—which is altogether based on discrete identities. Even in death it is possible for Donne’s dead to sin, which presupposes a kind of life, individuality, and personality even in the grave.

     The most striking image, that of the worm causing he and his mother and sister to commit the sin of incest, closely recalls his poem “The Flea,” in which Donne argues to his lover that since a flea has bitten them both, their blood is mingled in it and the sexual union has already been consummated. Further denials of the sexual act are useless. The shock of his words and the memory of his youth that the imagery surely recalled for his congregation must have stunned them, and may have been Donne’s desired effect. William Mueller notes, “It is with a grandiloquent and horrible prose, a prose which had stunned his hearers for many years, that Donne reflects on the vanity and decay of every act that falls within the limits of, and is destroyed by the specters of, time and space” (5). By sexualizing death in the most taboo way possible, Donne certainly must have caused at least a few of his flock to reconsider how they were currently living.

     One of the main needs of life, the need to eat, is also prominently figured in the passage and reminiscent of the Egyptian concept of the world of the dead, where food was left in the tomb for the dead person to consume. Donne laments that his own mouth will be “filled with dust” while the worm will “feed sweetly upon me” (21). The act of eating also figures in the last forging of identities and sticks out oddly: “one man dies in full strength, being wholly at ease and in quiet, and another dies in the bitterness of this soul, and never eats with pleasure” (21). In this odd qualification, we may perhaps see reflected Donne’s lean years, where he was able to feed his family only poorly, being without patronage.

     These are very physical actions, committed through the agency of the worm. Both eating and intercourse require an active physical body, and we have seen that Donne’s dead are indeed active. Interestingly, Davies tells us that Donne had referred to himself as a “worm” in his former life: “Ironically the ‘worm’ or ‘nothing’ who had solicited patronage from the great was now in a position to dispense influence and largesse; his charitable gifts were exemplary” (55). If Donne was thinking of this former analogy of his, the implications are that he will be both agent and object in the grave, committing and being forced to commit unpardonable sins. The extended meditation on the death of the body in Donne’s final sermon makes very clear to his congregation that their time on earth is but a pause between the eternally opposed forces of life and death, and that, paradoxically, in their bodies the two conjoin in such a way as to enact the paradox of living and dying within the Christian faith daily. Donne’s dialectical methodology here implicates his listeners in such a way that they can not help but sustain the mystery within their own bodies, even if they are unable or unwilling to understand and accept it mentally or spiritually.

     The key that unlocks the significance of the passage is the line “Miserable riddle, when the same worm must be my mother, and my sister, and my self” (20). This line can be seen as a hinge between the opening of the passage and its preceding meditation on the incorruptible body of Christ and the extended discussion of the sins and unpleasantries of the grave. Donne here gives his congregation the key to the puzzle of how Christ was able to maintain himself impeccably in the grave, and how we all might as well. If we focus on the physical aspect of death, we will undoubtedly be riddled with worms, with incestuous relationships, and with dissolution. A body can not help but be physical. However, if we focus on the spiritual aspect of death, then the riddling becomes an intellectual and spiritual riddle, meant to be pondered and meant to direct the soul heavenward while the dead wait for their own resurrection on Judgment Day. Mueller tells us that “following the preaching of ‘Death’s Duel,’ the five remaining weeks of Donne’s life were devoted to meticulous preparations for death” (33). Perhaps satisfied that he had worked out at least one of God’s mysteries, Donne prepared well for his own death, and was careful to have his portrait drawn, smiling in his death shroud, in the event that God had trouble piecing him together.

The Resurrection

     The last thirteen pages form an extended discussion of the passion and death of Christ. Simpson and Potter call it “the fullest meditation on our Lord’s death which Donne has left us” (35). Donne asks his congregation to verily take the place of Christ in his dying hours. From the last supper to the passion in the garden to the betrayal to the various humiliations at the hands of his captors and finally through Christ’s last hours on the cross, Donne brings his congregation through the end of Christ’s life on earth, and remonstrates them to live this death along with Jesus in order to prove themselves worthy Christians.

     Donne takes great care to point out to his congregation the dialectical oppositions that construct the death of Christ in order to make present to them the wonder of their faith. “That God, this Lord, the Lord of life could die, is a strange contemplation,” says Donne, “that the Red Sea could be dry, that the sun could stand still, than an oven could be seven times heat and not burn, that lions could be hungry and not bite, it is strange, miraculously strange, but supermiraculous that God could die; but that God would die is an exaltation of that” (31). The Old Testament stories that Donne refers to—the Exodus, Daniel in the lion’s den, and others—all concern humanity’s strength of faith in the face of seemingly unvanquishable oppositions. God has often generated paradoxes for the protection of his people in the form of miracles, Donne argues, but none is so miraculous as the death of God. By invoking the images of the Old Testament God, Donne has partially explained the necessity of Christ’s death: “God is the God of revenges, he would not pass over the Son of Man unrevenged, unpunished” (32). That God would not spare even his own son, even himself, is baffling to Donne, and he takes care to describe in detail the passion and the death of Christ to his congregation so that they might see the mystery involved in it, and not just in the resurrection.

     As he draws his congregation closer and closer to Christ and his passion, the gulf that separates them becomes paradoxically larger: Donne tells his congregation “prayer actually accompanied with shedding of tears, and dispositively in a readiness to shed blood for his glory in necessary cases, puts thee into a conformity with him” (39). In prayer, then, and in a willingness to suffer, the congregation are, according to Donne, like Christ. He then asks them, “about midnight he was taken and bound with a kiss, art thou not too conformable to him in that? Is not that too literally, too exactly thy case? At midnight to have been taken and bound with a kiss?” (39). Here the congregation surely must have been in doubt as to which side of the kiss they were on—Donne seems to imply, through the use of the words “conformable to him” as opposed to “with him” that the congregation is at once the kisser and the kissed; and therefore the condemner and the condemned.

     Donne knits the images of Christ and his congregations’ own lives so tightly together that the final image of Christ is as horrible as it is inspirational, for each auditor is placed on the cross with Christ. Donne asks his congregation not only to meditate upon Christ’s passion, but also to experience it along with him, which is why the final image is so unsettling:

There now hangs that sacred body upon the cross, rebaptized in his own tears and sweat, and embalmed in his own blood alive. There are those bowels of compassion, which are so conspicuous, so manifested, as that you may see through his wounds. There those glorious eyes grew faint in their sight: so as the sun ashamed to survive them, departed with his light too. And then that Son of God, who was never from us, and yet had now come a new way unto us in assuming our nature delivers that soul (which was never out of his Father’s hands) by a new way, a voluntary emission of it into his Father’s hands; for though to this God our Lord, belonged these issues of death, so that considered in his own contract; he must necessarily die, yet at no breach of battery, which they had made upon his sacred body, issued his soul, but emissit, he gave up the Ghost, and as God breathed a soul into the first Adam, so this second Adam breathed his soul into God, into the hands of God. There we leave you in that blessed dependency, to hang upon him that hangs upon the cross, there bathe in his tears, there suck at his wounds, and lie down in peace in his grave, till he vouchsafe you a resurrection, and an ascension into that Kingdom, which he hath prepared for you, with the inestimable price of his incorruptible blood. (42)

The congregation here, in effect, has become Christ, since they also hang upon the cross and lie down in his grave, awaiting their own resurrections. Donne has collapsed the difference between man and God and even between Christ and his congregation in this final image, while maintaining the oppositions with such words as “inestimable” and “incorruptible.”

     At the end of the sermon, Donne has both drawn together and kept separate the mysteries of life and death and God and man that form the basis of Christian doctrine. By presenting his final sermon in a dialectical mode, Donne was able to embrace the full complexity of Christian thought. By arguing two separate strains of understanding, Donne preserves the separation of life and death and of God and man while drawing them together within the argument for the congregation’s sake. He has drawn his congregation closer to the mystery so that they might catch a glimpse of its meaning, but is careful to maintain the distance necessary to effect the practice of worship. For Donne, a dedication to Christ demanded a dialectical mind, a mind capable of collapsing and maintaining oppositions simultaneously, a mind that could hold the mystery of its faith within the framework of doctrine. Donne’s devotion to Christ embraced the paradoxes that a Christian would profess in a manner that only a metaphysical poet is able to achieve.

Works Cited

• Davies, Stevie. John Donne. Plymouth, UK: Northcote House, 1994.
• Donne, John. Death’s Duell. 1632.
• Menston, England: Scolar Press Limited, 1969. Herr, Alan Fager. The Elizabethan Sermon: A Survey and a Bibliography. New York: Octagon Books, 1969.
• Mueller, William R. John Donne: Preacher. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1962.
• Simpson, Evelyn M. and George R. Potter, eds. The Sermons of John Donne. Vol. 10. Berkeley: U of California P, 1962.

Notes

i. Mueller discusses the character of Donne’s congregation in some detail, including various expectations of intellectual and spiritual difficulty that the citizens carried with them to church.

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