Doctor Donne’s Magical Sermon

Abstract

Throughout his writing life, John Donne kept imagining an ultimate affective experience: an encounter between two selves that shares them both with each other completely, ‘intersubjectivity’ at its most etymological.¹ This mutuality would be by definition ἐκ-static, being taken out of the self with, by, and into an other.² Each aspect of the self, and each self, must engage with its complementary opposite in order to comprehend its own limited identity at once maximized and transcended. Body to be fully body requires soul, and vice versa; self to be fully self requires an other, and vice versa. You are your self, and not, and greater than your self, all at the same time.³ Donne needs two for this sort of experience to work. He tries a woman, often, exemplarily for our purposes in ‘Extasie’. Bodies join, at the hands; souls meet, mix, flow into each other, fuse into a ‘newe soule’ (line 45), but cannot stop there, necessarily ‘descend[ing] / T’affections, and to faculties’ again (lines 65–6).⁴ Body, soul, self, other, two, one, two. He tries friends, telling Henry Goodere that letter-writing, ‘when it is with any seriousness, is a kind of extasie, and a departure and secession and suspension of the soul, w^ch doth then communicate it self to two bodies’.⁵ Body, soul, self, other, two, one, two. But even the best of these occasions pass away, disrupted by ‘The Sunne Rising’, reduced to ‘The Relique’ of a moment that once felt as though it was infinite. Ramie Targoff wrote a whole book examining ‘Donne’s expression of his belief in the mutual necessity of body and soul, and his obsessive imagining of their parting’,⁶ his ‘fantasy of being fully present’ and his inability ‘to make time stand still’ when that fantasy seemed achievable.⁷ Donne knew what he wanted, and maybe how to think he had got it for a moment, but not how to seize or keep it.⁸

Eventually, though, he found what he was looking for. And he told a congregation about it—‘White-hall, the first Friday in Lent’ of our year 1623 (324)⁹—and invited them to join him.

It turns out that an ultimate, and ultimately stable, intersubjective experience is possible if the Other with whom one is mutual is divine and consequently infinite, and not just infinitely divine, but infinitely divine and human, and human in body and soul. Merely Neoplatonic vocabulary fails this experience; only theological words like ‘incarnation’ and ‘sacrament’ will do, directions in which Donne’s religio-erotic poetry had always pointed anyhow.¹⁰ Donne believed that Christ the incarnate God was at once divine and human, body and soul, and that Christ manifests throughout Christian history to his human devotees in material sacraments, what Donne in Augustinian terms calls ‘visible signes of invisible Grace’ (8.71).¹¹ Perhaps Christ does not continuously re-incarnate his personal matter directly into the Eucharist, as Catholic theology said he did, but observant early Protestant theologians and poets (Donne not least) noticed that using matter to convey the fulness of spirit is how the Christian God claims to make meaning. In this view, God manifests specifically in the church-ratified sacraments proper of baptism and communion but more generally in an ‘abundance theology’ of Elizabethan and Jacobean Anglicanism, in which all sorts of ‘things of this world are seen to convey God’s grace in ways that are efficacious, real, and transforming’.¹² Donne himself uses ‘sacrament’ loosely. Even when he defines it with perfect orthodoxy as ‘visible signes of invisible Grace’, he does so in order to deploy it outside literal precision: ‘all our fiery tribulations fall under the nature, and definition of Sacraments’, and ‘every correction from Gods hand is a Rebaptization to mee’ (8.71). It is an affective sacrament, or at least sacrament-function, Donne has really been after,¹³ and an affective sacrament-function he offers: a sermon on weeping not merely one’s own tears but those of Jesus.

We have known for a long time that seventeenth-century English sermons are rhetorical technologies for sanctifying the affect. Seventeenth-century preachers thought so in abundance.¹⁴ Donne himself included ‘a holy stirring of religious affections’ as one of the three purposes of a sermon (8.95). Once these sermons fell out of fashion, however, readers seem to have forgotten their original purpose, until T. S. Eliot could regretfully chide Donne for being ‘a little of the religious spellbinder, the Reverend Billy Sunday of his time, the flesh-creeper, the sorcerer of emotional orgy’,¹⁵ as if stoking the fires of passion in a sermon was a category mistake. On the other hand, for those readers looking for passion, Donne’s careful, public sermons can seem, in comparison to the personal outbursts of his poetry, like not just a different register but a different world.¹⁶ But attentive scholars have recently been reviving the fact that Donne and his contemporaries preached to make the feelings of their auditors holy.¹⁷ In two articles, an edited journal issue, and a forthcoming book, Jennifer Clement has begun to exposit it.¹⁸

In his White-hall sermon, on ‘Jesus wept’ (John 11:35), Donne gives us his philosopher’s stone of affective homiletics: a parodic Protestant appropriation of Catholic sacramental magic. He needs supernatural power; his goal in the sermon is, he acknowledges, impossible: a ‘spiritual raising of the dead’ (327) as Jesus did Lazarus. Raising the contrariously dysfunctional feelings of his target audience—running hot, cold, wet, and dry, at once and by turns—would require a ‘Miracle’, which Donne defines as ‘contrary musique to charme him, contrary physick to cure him’ (327).¹⁹ The miracle arrives through the incantatory performative²⁰ of Donne’s sermon, enacting a Protestant homiletic version of the verbal potency Donne would elsewhere scorn as ‘every Priests charme’ (5.105): the formulae of sacramental institution. When Donne’s sermon applies the text ‘Jesus wept’ to his audience, Christ’s baptismal tears²¹ purify that audience from the outside so miraculously that the audience cries Christ’s tears out from the inside, their tears made his. The sermon may not be a sacrament, but it can do, supernaturally, what Catholics say sacraments do; it can change the material (human tears) and affective (human grief) until that material and affect can—literally, metaphorically, metonymically, synecdochically, somehow—participate in the human grief and tears of Christ. For Augustine and for John Calvin, the power of the sacraments themselves depended upon a separate catalysing word.²² Here Donne’s preached word has sacramentalesque effects. Using words like ‘spellbinder’ and ‘sorcerer’, Eliot wrote more truly than he knew, although he missed his golden chance at ‘necromancer’.

Discourses available to Donne describing the intricacies of affect address issues familiar to us in terms strange to us. The proto-scientific lore of the four humours—black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm producing melancholy, choleric, sanguine, and phlegmatic temperaments, respectively—offered a materialist explanation for felt consciousness.²³ Instead of the word ‘emotion’, Donne’s contemporaries used ‘affection’ or ‘passion’, the former’s etymology suggesting that a will could affect subjective experience, the latter that human will is deterministically passive toward the uproar of its subjectivity.²⁴ Although ‘affection’ and ‘passion’ were often functional synonyms, any deliberate distinction between them signalled an inclination toward dualism. If differentiated, affections were higher-order characteristics located in the human ‘rational soul’ or intellect, while passions were located in the ‘sensitive soul’ people share with animals.²⁵ Passions were what happened when external sense stimuli registered upon a passive or, at best, reactive soul inextricable from material experience. They produced irrational motions, or forces, that Thomas Wright in 1604 called ‘perturbations of the mind’ whose effects manifested in the body.²⁶ Higher-order affections one could call ‘spiritual’ or ‘holy’;²⁷ humans could share them with God, whose divine essence no interaction with the senses can trouble.²⁸ People disagreed over the proper relation between higher affection and lower passion: whether reason could and should stamp passions out, neo-Stoically, or whether it should risk trying to channel passions’ undeniable force toward positive causes.²⁹ Humans might be essentially material,³⁰ but if they were dual, should the relationship between soul and body (alternatively, between spiritual soul and sense-dependent soul) be primarily adversarial or cooperative? What is the proper way to think our feelings into submission?

Offering the weeping Christ as an exemplar of perfect human affect, Donne in his ‘Jesus wept’ sermon practises a companionate, egalitarian dualism of body and soul.³¹ He is not interested in a merely bodily account of affect: ‘To weep for sin is not a damp of melancholy, to sigh for sin, is not a vapour of the spleene’ (343). He is also not interested in a merely spiritual account: ‘I forbeare Gregory Nyssens metaphor …; Teares are our best blood, so … rarified into spirits as that thereby I become Idem spiritus, one spirit with my God’ (339). He does not want to use the body to transcend the body. Instead, he insists that the soul requires the body to be considered human; a disembodied soul is not enough: ‘Christ himselfe, when he lay dead in the grave, was no man’ (331–2) because ‘it is not the soule, but the union of the soul, that makes the man’ (332). The soul is a necessary condition of humanity, but the union of soul with body is the sufficient condition, and Donne is more interested in the sufficient condition, that which directly renders humanity. More specifically, he is interested in the relations or ‘ligatures’ that make up the union between soul and body.³²

Cooperative dualism means that Donne does not differentiate between holy, spiritual affections and unholy, bodily passions. He uses ‘affections’ and ‘passions’ interchangeably: as appositives (‘affections, and passions’ [328]), as parallel (‘inordinatenesse of affections’ and ‘excesse of passion’ [329]), affections negatively (‘cold affections’ [327]), and passions positively (‘Christ had his … passions’ [329]). Most importantly, he favours the term ‘affections’ when paired with the word ‘natural’ (325, 330, 331). At Christ’s most human, most according-to-nature, he weeps tears of affection from the earthly grief over his friend Lazarus’s death. His tears over the spiritual calamities of sin are not qualitatively different than these natural tears; there are just more of them. Although the three points of Donne’s sermon classify different forms or stages of affect, he files ‘Religious affections’ under ‘natural affections’ (330), cites Augustine as the reason why, and does not seem to see religious or holy affections as conceptually distinct from other types of affection.

Donne does, however, employ basic materialist binaries—hot/cold, wet/dry—drawn from humoral psychology to describe the people he is trying to raise from the affective dead. Binaries are his problem:

And truly, in our spirituall raising of the dead, to raise a sinner putrified in his owne earth, resolv’d in his owne dung, especially that hath passed many transformations, from shape to shape, from sin to sin, (he hath beene a Salamander and lived in the fire, in the fire successively, in the fire of lust in his youth, and in his age in the fire of Ambition; and then he hath beene a Serpent, a Fish, and lived in the waters, in the water successively, in the troubled water of sedition in his youth, and in his age in the cold waters of indevotion) how shall we raise this Salamander and this Serpent, when this Serpent and this Salamander is all one person, and must have contrary musique to charme him, contrary physick to cure him? (327)

Donne begins the sentence with the category ‘spirituall’, but brings it quickly down to ‘earth’, and not just earth but ‘dung’, by way of putrefaction. Then comes a double contrast with the single image cluster of fire. Fire is dry when set against both examples of moisture, and hot when set against ‘the cold waters of indevotion’. The same sinner is at odds with himself at any given point—fiery with lust and troubled with choppy waves of sedition in his youth, fiery with ambition and chill with indevotion in his age—and at odds with his previous identities by transforming from year to year, ‘shape to shape’, ‘sin to sin’. Spiritual or material, wet or dry, hot or cold? All of the above. Medical authorities treated by means of opposition and balance; they might cool the feverish psyche, warm the chill body, flush out a flux of a particular humour, or nutritionally support a humour running low. But the spiritually dead are neither stable nor inert. ‘This Serpent and this Salamander is all one person’; all humours dominate, both at once and successively; and Donne cannot find a deficiency from which his contrarian treatment can oppose an ascendant humour into moderation.

As a literal medical diagnosis, this is aggressively nonsense. The sinner has every humoral superfluity everywhere all at once and all the time. Clement has shown how preachers of the time used the language and images of the body metaphorically and metonymically, not to ignore or deny ‘biological processes and humoral physiology, but … figuratively to express what is otherwise inexpressible’.³³ It seems likely that she is right, at least for Donne and at least here. Donne neither affirms nor denies the humoral theories. He is functioning as a poet, not in the business of doing either. Scientific theories (like, say, cosmology) are for plundering, on the behalf of figuration.

In the person of Jesus Christ the weeper, Donne unfolds his full account of normative human affect. Jesus is ‘true man’; his tears declared him so (328). He ‘wept Humanitus’ over Lazarus in order to take this ‘necessary occasion to shew that he was true Man’ (326). That Jesus wept is conclusive proof of his human nature, ‘for though the lineaments of mans bodie, eyes and eares, hands and feet, be ascribed to God in the Scriptures, though the affections of mans mind be ascribed to him, … I doe not remember that ever God is said to have wept: It is for man’ (331).³⁴ The brief verse ‘Jesus wept’ is so capacious—‘there is not a shorter verse in the Bible, nor a larger Text’ (324–5)—because it opens into the hypostatic union of Christ’s two natures (God and humanity), showing what Christ’s humanity looks like when fully operative. Christ as human is doing something not even God can do.

The language of the body Donne is using here, literally or figuratively, does not refer to the circulation of humours or its ambient temperature but to the malleability of the heart on which sense impressions can register. Christ is ‘humane’, spelt like that into a pun (338) and placed in parallel with the word ‘natural’ (325). Being human meant being ‘humane’, ‘civil, courteous, or obliging towards others’³⁵ not just oneself. Being humane results in ‘naturall affections’ (325, twice on 330, 331), which in turn modulates to ‘naturall tendernesse’ (twice on 331) and the ‘good nature’ of ‘a tender heart’ (341). The distinguishing characteristic of normal human affectivity, according to John Donne’s Jesus, is a tenderness that takes impression from the experiences of others. Christ the human is changeable, ‘stirred’, ‘moved’, ‘troubled’ (329). Our suffering changes his ‘tender heart’ (340). ‘I am now but upon the Compassion of Christ’ (324) opens the sermon—not Christ’s own passion or suffering but his compassion, his soft heart capable of registering the suffering of others.³⁶ That softness Donne invites his hearers into: ‘Let me chafe the wax, and melt your soules in a bath of his Teares now’ (324). To raise the dead of Donne’s listeners means to soften the heart and render it capable of impression. After all, ‘the Holy Ghost loves to work in Waxe, and not in Marble’ (340); presumably, preachers do as well.

The abundant life of Christ’s abundant affections, ‘nearer to an excesse of passion, then to an Indolencie’ (330), derives not from his divinity but from the fact that it is uniquely ‘safe’ (329) for him to be fully human, malleable to encounter: ‘Christ might goe farther that way, then any other man: Christ might ungirt himself, and give more scope and liberty to his passions, then any other man: both because he had no Originall sin within, to drive him, no inordinate love without to draw him, when his affections were moved; which all other men have’ (328). Naturally dead in original sin and inordinate love, the rest of us are not human enough to weep appropriately. We have passions bubbling up within, but not human compassion open to the outside. Donne’s interest in mutuality between selves touches on the supple affective interior, the impinging and pressurizing exterior, and the complex driving and drawing negotiations of their relationship. Nothing inside Christ compromised his relations with those whom he loved. Original sin had not broken his affective mechanism; ‘all these passions were sanctified in the roote’ (328). Nothing outside drew him disproportionate to its value, either; his passions ‘were instantly washed with … a present and full submitting of all to Gods pleasure’ (328). His affects were never reducible to his interiority alone. As soon as passion stirred, instantly, he always com-passionately took into account the affect of others, God the Father most fundamentally of all.

If, as Donne argues, passionlessness is being the kind of dead he is trying to raise,³⁷ the affective traditions Donne inherited worried that most live humans err toward the opposite extreme: flares of inordinate affection, affection unsupervised by the ordering function of reason.³⁸ John Donne worried about it in this sermon, using some form of ‘inordinate’ eight times. Katrin Ettenhuber argues that rectifying ‘vehement and excessive venting of emotion’ is Donne’s point in this sermon in particular.³⁹ She is right as far as she goes, but the logic of the sermon extends farther: we have to avoid inordinacy only because we are not perfectly human. Human affection is neither naturally nor intrinsically inordinate. Christ proves that. It is impossible for a thorough sharing of selves to be affectively inordinate because the one who feels is always in true contact with the true being of the other.⁴⁰ No impression is false if the contact is immediate. Inordinacy never had a chance in Christ the perfect vessel of affection:

Here in our Text, Jesus was troubled, and he groaned; and vehemently, and often, his affections were stirred: but as in a clean glasse, if water be stirred and troubled, though it may conceive a little light froth, yet it contracts no fouleness in that clean glasse, the affections of Christ were moved, but so: in that holy vessel they would contract no foulenesse, no declination towards inordinatenesse. (329)⁴¹

There was nothing in Christ to foul the full encounter with another, so he could groan vehemently and often, get stirred up, and exhibit all sorts of being troubled, all without any danger of disorientation or destabilization. The hermetic purity of the encounter, not the abstracted oversight of reason, guaranteed the ordinacy of his affections as well as his control over them. Donne elsewhere, in Sonnet 17, conceives of desire as ‘a holy thirsty dropsy [that] melts mee yett’ (line 8).⁴² ‘Dropsy’ for Donne usually figures immoderate desire, a swamped and bloated thirst,⁴³ but a holy thirsty dropsy is conceivable because the object of his desire for God is infinite, so a pure, authentic encounter with God would call forth nothing less than insatiability.⁴⁴

Christ’s ‘holy teares’ (342) for which Donne is advocating activate every human affective faculty maximally and leave none behind. The natural spring of grief over Lazarus’s death and its prospects for the sisters who depend on him flows naturally into a public river of grief for the demise of Jerusalem, and into a spiritual sea of grief for the ravages of sin on the human race, but it is all water, the same qualitative grief, and it never shuts off the original spring.⁴⁵ We keep finding our way from bodily to spiritual grief, and it keeps being expressed through our physical tear ducts. The sermon has three points that lift us from bodily to spiritual grief, but nearly half the sermon (369 of its 743 printed lines in the Simpson/Potter edition) disproportionately focuses on the most natural, tender, bodily response of grief: from Jesus toward his friends. Donne is most intent on getting the spring unplugged, not hoisting sail on the sea. Christ’s physical raising of Lazarus was the greatest miracle he ever did; Donne says this twice (326–7). When Nature itself takes a turn on the stage, mourning the infinite calamity of the death of its Creator on the cross, the ultimate natural affection manifests not as passion but as compassion: ‘How did the whole frame of nature mourn in Eclipses, and tremble in earth-quakes, and dissolve and shed in pieces in the opening of the Temple, Quia mortuus, because he was dead’ (333). This inhuman nature is not thinking, is unreasonable. It suffers without taking an action of the will. It is troubled throughout its entire frame, and comes apart in what looks like destructive passion. The most potently fundamental natural affective instinct is, consequently, perfectly compassionate, perfectly manipulable by sense data, but open to wherever love of the Other takes it, which is, behind the curtain of the Temple, into the Holy of Holies, where God could be found. The most complete throes of sorrow are the gateway to infinite joy, and, not coincidentally, Donne identifies the ultimate affective experience as a sorrow indistinguishable from joy.

The contrary music, the dissonant affective chord, Donne plays at the end of his sermon consists of sorrow and joy, or sorrow-joy. It is the sum of what he has to say: ‘I contract all to this one, which is all: to how many blessednesses must these teares, this godly sorrow reach by the way, when as it reaches to the very extreme, to that which is opposed to it, to Joy? for godlie sorrow is Joy’ (342–3). This all, which is one, which is all, is sorrow, which is joy. The paradoxical incommensurability of these affirmations is the point; experiencing contraries means experiencing both as well as the unbridgeable gap between them, means experiencing them in addition to the attraction and repulsion of their relation, means experiencing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts whose individual intensities already lie at the limits of our capacity to feel.⁴⁶ The sermon arranges sorrow and joy in a logical progression from sorrowful spring to sorrowful river to sorrowful sea, then, upon arriving at the sea of sorrow for the totality of human sin, begins to call that sorrow ‘true’ and ‘godly’, and those tears ‘holy’, ‘true’, ‘godly’, and ‘the holiest water’ (342–3). But in the end, Donne relativizes sequence altogether: ‘To conceive true sorrow and true joy, are things not onely continuous, but continuall; they doe not onely touch and follow one another in a certaine succession, Joy assuredly after sorrow, but they consist together, they are all one, Joy and Sorrow’ (343). The ultimate human affective experience, after the example of Jesus Christ, escapes the sequential experience of time. It also collapses the binaries and categories of language: ‘So equall, so indifferent a thing is it, when we come to godly sorrow, whether we call it sorrow or joy, weeping or singing’ (343). The distinctions involved in logic, time, and language all dissolve in a peroration that distends them into transcendence, just as Donne has predicted at the beginning of his last point. As the sands of time drain much diminished through the hour-glass visible to the congregation, Donne promises to deliver ‘those teares we called the Sea, but a Sea which must now be bounded with a very little sand’ (338). Only a very short beach of sandy time, logic, language remains, on which the great full weight of the sermon is put, sand so pressurised it almost turns to diamond, but it lets onto the sea, and is a sure way to the sea, and the only way.

In writing about sorrow as the gateway to sorrow-joy, Donne consciously⁴⁷ contributes to a long-standing Christian literature of tears that describes godly sorrow as the most significant spiritual feeling,⁴⁸ in part because it leads to sorrow-joy, ‘an entirely new realm of affective experience’ for the believer who can reach it.⁴⁹ Godly, repentant sorrow makes us feel how different and lesser we are from God, how Other God is; it is kenotic.⁵⁰ Yet, because it is a form of spiritual revelation from God, it is God speaking to us in us.⁵¹ As Gary Kuchar explains, being able to feel God operating within one’s own humanity ‘inscribes the inscrutable paradoxes of Christian faith, particularly the simultaneous coexistence of God in man’ and in so doing permits the understanding of ‘the mysteries of incarnationist thought at the level of affect rather than just at the level of cognition’.⁵² As specifically godly sorrow, it is a sign of divine blessing, election, and miracle, generating joy and comfort⁵³ accurate to the objective reassurance it provides. An ecstatic religious experience in contradictory modes that cannot be reconciled, of interior incursion by a Person who cannot be comprehended, it perfectly manifests an affectively transcendent encounter with transcendence.⁵⁴

By placing godly sorrow(-joy) in the context of raising Lazarus from the dead, Donne can make a claim more audacious still: that godly sorrow re-creates us right now into an analogue for the primordial human perfection last available in the Garden of Eden. Abruptly the current of aqueous figures carries the sermon into myth in a dense and complex allusive image. The tears produced by considering ‘where [unrepentant] man was [Eden], where he is [swamped in temptation], where he shall be [Hell], where he shall never be [Heaven], are foure such Rivers, as constitute a Paradise’ (340). The paradise Donne refers to here must be the original Garden of Eden, fed as it was by four rivers (Gen. 2:10–14). Godly sorrow over these four sequential tragic griefs and losses uproots all human grief and loss at the root by undoing the first loss in the sequence. It returns the spiritually repentant dead in Donne’s audience to the state before they died, before humanity died, before death was born. This paradise is, however, an earthly paradise, still off-centre from perfection. These paradisal tears are still tears of sorrow, repentance, and grief, although they irrigate and fructify a state of joy. They remake an original from ruinous raw material; the root is uprooted but the bitter fruit remains.

Donne identifies the divisions of his sermon as analogous to the cosmic divisions in creation and paradise, as participatory in their primal divisive processes, and as the way back to the original unity that lies behind them. The original four rivers of Eden divided from one—‘And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads’ (Gen. 2:10, Authorized Version)—and the heavenly river where humanity ‘shall be’ has the river of the water of life undivided (Rev. 22:1). Division and fragmentation designate a fall from what is one at the source. Yet in God’s perfect creative process, even before making paradise, God exercised creative division: ‘And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven’ (Gen. 1:6–8). Original unity divides into sacral distinctions that permit the conceptual distinctiveness of Heaven, even as Heaven remains made of the same stuff as earthly waters. Donne has this passage in mind. A paragraph after he identifies the four tear-rivers of Eden, he returns to the Creation account: ‘God made the Firmament, which he called Heaven, after it had divided the waters: After we have distinguished our teares, naturall from spirituall, worldly from heavenly, then there is a Firmament established in us, then there is a heaven opened to us’ (340). Distinguishing worldly from heavenly enables us both to understand the heavenly as a category and to discourage tears over merely ‘worldly losses’ (340).⁵⁵ Heaven does not exist as a separate place until it has been divided from earth, yet earth and heaven reach for each other continually across the gulf and throughout the sermon and do not rest until they meet and interpenetrate and fuse again.

These Edenic divisions render the infinite experience of Christ’s grief microcosmically into banked, boundaried channels appropriate to nourish an interior self. Creation of Eden drew divine perfection into a plot internal, confined, private, and above all permeable. In Donne’s sermon, life-giving rivers of divine grief come from outside the sorrowful, but the life they give grows inside the sorrowful. And if creation was regulation, sorting waters into appropriate categories, creating Donne’s homiletic garden in Eden regulates Christ’s infinite affect into rivers encounterable enough not to overwhelm. Floodwaters of grief destroy life, Donne points out (340), thinking of the Flood just downstream the Genesis narrative. Donne’s rivers of Eden are not flooded; they are finite as well as infinite. They have everything, but within their geographic limits, irrigated by infinity. They are bounded and porous, stable and growing, constitutive of Eden but not rising within Eden. They are a rebirth of their dead audience into an earthly paradise whose blend of spiritual and earthly water of grief and fruit of joy is a foretaste of the paradise that will arrive when a new heaven touches new earth.

Within Donne’s affective model that prioritizes the interrelated experiences of body and soul, he proposes the self-deconstructing affection sorrow-joy, understood by the literature-of-tears tradition in which he preaches as a gift from the divine within the human. These fusions and elisions of spiritual and material,⁵⁶ of divine and human, follow a logic of sacramental incarnation, visible signs of the invisible. Critics have sensed that Donne’s sermons pick up a sacramental work analogous to or participatory in the gracious union of divine and human found in the words of Scripture, at once human and divine.⁵⁷ Matthew J. Smith finds that, according to Donne, ‘sermons are like sacraments’ because their experience through the sense of hearing ‘operates according to the sacramental understanding that any performance of the sacred alleges to give form to a sacred substance that precedes the performance’.⁵⁸ Robert Whalen associates Donne’s homiletic practice with the specific sacrament of the Eucharist; Donne breaks apart the word into rhetorical divisio so that his hearers can ingest and assimilate; ultimately ‘both Christ’s body and Simeon’s exemplary characters … “may become our body”’.⁵⁹ By ‘sacrament’ these scholars seem to mean the material manifestation of some spiritual power so that human life can participate in divine life, exactly what Donne is offering. But they seem to mean it loosely.⁶⁰ For these scholars’ Donne, sermon is sacrament like the Protestant bread is Jesus’ body; it is not, quite, for ‘is’ is not literal. ‘Contrary musique to charm him, contrary physick to cure him’, Donne’s ‘Jesus wept’ sermon is no Protestant sacrament, but calling it ‘sacramental’ is appropriate in a literal sense. It carries the divine verbal power that can make sacraments, that in Calvin’s view even must make sacraments; it runs on the same power sacrament runs. As if innovatory words of institution, it transubstantiates the baptismal tears of its auditors into the tears of Christ.

For ‘charm’ to Donne meant both the Catholic words of consecration over the Eucharist, in malo, and the supernatural salvific power of Protestant gospel and preaching, in bono. With a lip-curl of contempt he tells an audience at a christening that the Lamb of God is ‘not called down from heaven, to an Altar, by every Priests charme, to be a witnesse of secrecy in the Sacrament’ (5.105). A Eucharistic transubstantiatory charm is Catholic magic that misfires, that cannot do what it says, cannot make bread the body of the Lamb. Real magic is a psalm: ‘Any Psalme is Exorcisme enough to expel any Devil, Charme enough to remove any tentation, Enchantment enough to ease, nay to sweeten any tribulation’ (6.292).⁶¹ Real magic is a sermon: ‘this blessed exorcisme, this holy Charme, this Ordinance of God, the word of God in the mouth of his servant’ (5.344).⁶² Real magic is the person of Christ, for Mary Magdalene ‘hearken[ed] after the powerfull charm of the Gospel, and presently believe[d] that she should be welcom into his arms’ (3.221–2). Real magic is the ‘eternall Decree of thine Election’, divine utterance Donne calls ‘a holy Charm, a blessed Incantation’ (7.356). Psalm, sermon, Gospel, divine performative are all the same sort of verbal magic, of which transubstantiation is a false shadow. And this magic has power over the affections. David, the ‘sweet Psalmist’, ‘had an harmonious, a melodious, a charming, a powerful way of entring into the soule, and working upon the affections of men’ (9.252). David’s Psalm-writing charms found their way to the soul through melody—not so far from Donne’s own ‘contrary musique to charm’. And that sweet Psalmist ‘employed his faculties’ sacramentally ‘for the conveying of the God of Israel, into the Israel of God’ (9.252). Charmed, Israel and God got chiastically related, interchangeable, each the other’s. God got inside Israel, so that when someone met Israel, they met God. Of course, ‘charm’ could merely mean eloquence to Donne, a harmony of cadence and structure in word and/or music, a demystified aural event. Donne’s uses of the word range from literal to figurative and multivalent, because in Donne’s lexicon ‘charm’ is a word that works like a sacrament. It can mean figuratively and literally at once: a figuratively disenchanted verbal artefact of a sermon, a literally enchanted incantation that could raise God within the affections of the dead.⁶³

Donne’s ‘Jesus wept’ sermon effects sacramental magic because its divine-human double discourse verbally manifests and performs a divine presence within triple agency and materiality. The work of raising godly tears is Donne’s from the beginning: ‘Let me chafe the wax, and melt your soules in a bath of his Teares now’ (324, my emphasis). The miracle of raising his audience from affective death, ‘the greatest worke’ (327), is also Donne’s in some measure, but in a tantalizing first-person plural. Commenting on Christ raising Lazarus, Donne points out that ‘Christ would worke upon … a body putrified’ before in the next sentence applying the principle: ‘in our spirituall raising of the dead, to raise a sinner putrified. … how shall we raise [him]?’ (327, my emphasis). ‘We’ could be the homiletic ‘we’, a reverberatively authoritative voice from the pulpit, Donne alone or Donne among the preachers, although to this point in the sermon it has not been. ‘We’ could, and logically must, be Donne aided by an antecedent Christ whose power alone can raise the dead. Donne’s words are raising the affections of the dead, and, as if in the words of consecration, he and God are doing that work through the same words. ‘I am thy Confessor’, he says, raising the ghost of the Catholic sacramental power of absolution, before backing away immediately in an emphatic repetition, ‘non ego, sed Dominus; not I, but the spirit of God himself is thy Confessor, and he absolves thee’ (343), as if the Latin were not enough. Donne means himself, but also almost entirely not himself but the spirit of God. But the work of being raised is the work of his audience, too:⁶⁴ ‘be willing to heare’ (324) he orders them before the first paragraph ends, and in the last paragraph ‘wash thy selfe in these three examplar bathes of Christs teares’ so that they can ‘be tenderly affected’ (343). From beginning to end, alpha to omega, divine to human, the affective event of the sermon is one action belonging to Christ, Donne, and their audience.

The resulting tears are also triple. Donne is re-presenting Christ’s tears. Known for tears from the pulpit,⁶⁵ he is crying his own, likely while delivering the sermon: ‘When men are so refractory, as that they forbeare to heare, or heare and resist our preaching, we must pray; and where they dispise or forbid our praying, we must lament them, we must weep’ (335). His tears are his own, and they are making the audience cry, and they are part of the tears of the corporate body of Christ gathered in Whitehall, so that Christ’s compassionate tears over sin become the audience’s sacred tears over sin through Donne’s sacredly compassionate tears over the audience’s sin.

Water is the material mode of what Donne explicitly invokes as the sacrament of baptism.⁶⁶ Christ’s tears, divine water, wash the audience from outside, cleansing them from their sin. Donne brings the term ‘baptisme’ into the sermon rather late and slant: ‘Water does now one good office, which no ill quality that is in it can equall, it washes our soules in Baptisme’ (340). He is comparing this guaranteed goodness with the guaranteed good sign that tears always are ‘of good nature, of a tender heart’ (340); baptism is only a point of comparison to illuminate tears. But the word is in his sermon now, and he does not forget it, bringing it back in his triumphant peroration. Now tears modulate into baptism itself:

Wash thy selfe in these three examplar bathes of Christs teares[;] … the soule bathed in these teares cannot perish: for this is trina immersio, that threefold dipping which was used in the Primitive Church in baptisme. And in this baptism, thou takest a new Christian name, thou who wast but a Christian, art now a regenerate Christian; and as Naaman the Leper came cleaner out of Jordan, than he was before his leprosie, (for his flesh came as the flesh of a child) so there shall be better evidence in this baptisme of thy repentance, then in thy first baptisme. (343–4)

The three episodes of Christ weeping become a ‘threefold dipping’ as fundamentally and traditionally Christian a baptism as in the primitive church. Donne has been baptizing his audience this whole time, point by point by point, without their knowing. He has been giving the audience the new Christian name of ‘regenerate Christian’, as if holding an infant at the font. Weeping for one’s own sin cleanses the mourner of the leprosy of sin. It is dipping, immersion, a total cleansing; the waters of death close over the catechumen’s head, three times, only for the baptized to rise into new life, as the sermon after a spring, river, and sea of tears is rising, now, in this last paragraph, in these last sentences. Donne is claiming so very much for his sermon.⁶⁷ And he reports how such a baptism would feel: ‘If I can feel the dew of thy teares upon me, if I can discern the eye of thy compassion bent toward me, I have comfort all the way, and that comfort will flow into an infallibility at the end’ (336). Christ’s eye inclines toward the sinner; the tears lie upon the sinner’s skin. They soak from the outside in, purifying as they go.⁶⁸

But once they are on the inside, they will come out again as human tears, as if they were wine turned to water then somehow to a divine-human incarnate holy water. Compassionate selves sop up the feelings of others, even God’s feelings, and make the others’ feelings theirs. The logic is clear: ‘Every man is but a spunge, and but a spunge filled with teares: and whether you lay your right hand or your left upon a full spunge, it will weep’ (337). People who soak Christ’s tears in would logically weep Christ’s tears out under pressure. The result of this line of thought is so daringly near the unspeakable that Donne buries it in an antecedent. ‘Weep these teares truly’ (344), Donne says, at the beginning of the last sentence of the sermon, what it all has led up to. But which ‘teares’ are ‘these’? The paragraph lays a pronoun trail backward—‘this baptism of thy repentance’ (344), ‘this baptism’ (343), ‘the soule bathed in these teares’ (343)—until we arrive at the tears’ true identity: ‘Wash thy selfe in these three examplar bathes of Christs teares’ (343). Weep these tears—Christ’s tears that have washed into you. Weep from the inside out what has come to you from the outside in, in an ultimate com-passion, a feeling together with Christ. Weep Christ’s tears through your physical eyes, a hypostatic union in which you baptize yourself with Christ’s tears through your repentant tears in church, by means of the sermon that magically converts Christ’s tears to Christ’s tears through you. The verbal presentation and performance of the sermon text ‘Jesus wept’ in the sermon effect a redemptive parody of the Catholic Eucharist. Somehow, not literally but not merely figuratively or memorially, through an act of foreseeable but inexplicable grace, Christ’s feelings and Christ’s tears are really present in the feelings and tears of the receptive members of Donne’s audience, who therewith really participate in Christ’s body.⁶⁹

Donne’s ‘Jesus wept’ sermon is perhaps the crucial theoretical document in a homiletic programme of holy affectivity that spanned his ecclesiastical career. The godly tears and sorrow-joy he describes therein objectively fulfil the criteria laid out in his poetry for the transcendence he was trying to feel: material, spiritual, divine, human, interfaculty, intersubjective. Whether he felt that passion himself, and experienced it as satisfactory and stable, we can believe chiefly if we assume for his sermons what so many have for his poetry: that when he talks about feelings he knows what he is talking about. The affective power of the sermon remains.⁷⁰ Whether it lived up to its electrifying claims, whether it did what it said it would in its original context, we have only the indirect testimony of Henry Valentine’s elegy mourning the loss of Donne whose preaching ‘even to Extasie/ Could charme the Soule’.⁷¹

Footnotes