Najbauer Donne Disszertáció
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Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem Bölcsészettudományi Kar DOKTORI DISSZERTÁCIÓ NAJBAUER NOÉMI MÁRIA “THE ART OF SALVATION , IS BUT THE ART OF MEMORY ”: MEMORY AS ART AND DEVOTION IN THE SERMONS OF JOHN DONNE Irodalomtudományi Doktori Iskola Dr. Kulcsár Szabó Ern ő MHAS, egyetemi tanár Reneszánsz és Barokk Angol Irodalom Doktori Program Dr. Kállay Géza PhD, egyetemi tanár A bizottság tagjai: Dr. Géher István CSc, professor emeritus Dr. Tóta Péter Benedek PhD, docens Dr. Almási Zsolt PhD, adjunktus Dr. Ittzés Gábor PhD, docens Dr. Pikli Natália PhD, adjunktus Dr. Vassányi Miklós PhD, docens Dr. Hargitai Mária PhD, adjunktus Témavezet ő: Dr. Fabiny Tibor CSc, egyetemi tanár BUDAPEST, 2010 Acknowledgments I am both humbled and heartened as I recognize those who contributed to the success of this dissertation. I am grateful to my colleagues at the Institute of English Studies, University of Pécs for welcoming me among their ranks in a spirit of trust and for setting high standards of scholarship and pedagogy. I thank especially Mária Kurdi for her professional guidance and goodwill in these first years of my teaching career, Gabriella Hartvig for her expert help with the bibliography and MLA formatting, and Csaba Németh of the Department of Aesthetics for sharing valuable sources. I honor my students of almost six years for their hard work, respect and love. ♦ I owe a debt of gratitude to my learned professors in the English Literature of the Renaissance and Baroque Doctoral Program at the University of Budapest, especially to Péter Dávidházi, warm-hearted mentor and friend. ♦ I acknowledge my unshaken circle of friends, especially Ágnes Streitmann and Noémi Tóth, faithful fellows-in-arms; Kinga Schmidt Kollerné for her continued professional interest and good cheer; Éva Dömötör, τήν καλλίστην διδασκάλισσαν τῆς Ἑλληνικῆς; Tamás Kiss for help with the Hungarian summary; Professor Arno Anzenbacher, Aquinas scholar extraordinaire; Suzana and Cornelia Zorca for their immense generosity enabling me to perform research in the USA in 2008; Márta and Gabriella Jassó for patient care of my Grandmother and timely help in our household; and Angéla Krieser, my guardian angel, for easing the writing process with her gracious companionship. ♦ I gratefully acknowledge my intrepid advisor, Tibor Fabiny, for his professional and personal care. His ongoing quest to unite the noble fields of literature and theology continues to inspire and edify me and all those fortunate to come under his tutelage. I am thankful to the erudite Miklós Vassányi whose meticulous and good-natured comments on my theological chapter helped clarify a number of difficult concepts, elevated the quality of my writing and put my mind at rest. I owe a debt of gratitude to Gábor Ittzés for embodying and exacting a standard of philological excellence to which I can only aspire. ♦ I honor my parents, Zsuzsanna and József, for giving me life and instilling in me a love of learning. Mom, thank you for your warm, motherly care and for selflessly providing for all of my needs during this challenging time. Dad, thank you for believing (and investing!) in me. I could never have written this dissertation without the treasury of books and articles you so generously obtained. Lóránt and Eszter, I am blessed to have you for my brother and sister. I love you all very much. ♦ My highest thanks go to my Lord Jesus Christ, lux mundi , and to His Blessed Mother, sedes sapientiae , for giving me so much to be thankful for. For my mother and my father 2 Table of Contents Foreword ………………………………….…………………………………………… 5 I. Introduction ................................................................................................................ 7 I.1. The Seventeenth-Century Sermon…………………………………………….. 7 I.2. Donne’s Path to His Adopted Church…………………………......................... 8 I.3. Donne the Preacher…………………………………………………………… 11 I.4. The Fate of Donne’s Sermons…………………………………………………15 I.5. Twentieth-Century Response…………………………………………….........17 I.6. Memory in the Sermons……………………………………………………….24 I.7. My Own Niche……………………………………………………….………. 29 II. Three Theories of Memory ……………………………………………………….32 II.1. St. Augustine and Memory…………………………………………………...32 II.1.1. Parallel Lives…………………………………………………………. 32 II.1.2. Augustine’s Memoria vs. Common Conceptions of Memory………….35 II.1.3. The Sensible Memory and Augustine’s Theory of Perception………... 37 II.1.4. Intellective Memory…………………………………………………… 38 II.1.5. Memoria Sui and the Mind as Memory………………………………... 42 II.1.6. Memoria Dei : Finding God in the Soul……………………………….. 43 II.1.7. Memory and the Trinity in Man……………………………….............. 46 II.2. St. Thomas Aquinas and Memory………………………………………........ 53 II.2.1. A Straight Path but Not Narrow……………………………….............. 53 II.2.2. The Soul According to Aquinas and the Habitation of Memory……… 56 II.2.3. The Perception-Storage-Knowledge-Recollection Trajectory………… 59 II.2.4. Aquinas on Aristotle’s De memoria et reminiscentia ............................ 63 II.2.5. Memory Training as Exercise in Virtue……………………….............. 66 II.3. Mnemotechnic Through the Ages………………………………………........ 69 II.3.1. Sources…………………………………………………………..…….. 69 II.3.2. The Birth of Ars Memoriae ………………………………………….… 72 II.3.3. Loci ......................................................................................................... 73 II.3.4. Imagines .................................................................................................. 75 II.3.5. Ars Memoriae Enters the Renaissance………………………………… 79 II.3.6. John Donne Meets Ars Memoriae ……………………………………... 83 II.4. A Syncretic View……………………………………………………………. 85 III. Donne’s Theology of Memory ………………………………………………….. 91 III.1. The Six ‘Memory-Sermons’………………………………………………... 91 III.1.1. Sermon 1……………………………………………………………… 92 III.1.2. Sermon 2……………………………………………………………… 96 III.1.3.Sermon 3……………………………………………………………... 102 III.1.4. Sermon 4…………………………………………………………….. 104 III.1.5. Sermon 5…………………………………………………………….. 108 III.1.6. Sermon 6…………………………………………………………….. 112 III.2. Augustinian Foundations and the Thomistic Divergence…………………. 115 III.3. Healing the Weak Memory………………………………………………... 120 3 IV. Donne ‘Baptizes’ Ars Memoriae …………………...…………......................... 129 IV.1. Loci ............................................................................................................... 129 IV.2. Imagines ........................................................................................................ 142 IV.2.1. Mapping the Images…………………………………………..…….. 142 IV.2.2. The Great Chain of Being…………………………………………… 145 IV.2.3. Elementa mineraliaque ………………………………………………. 149 IV.2.4. Plantae ................................................................................................. 159 IV.2.5 Animalia ................................................................................................ 163 IV.2.6. Homo, Corpus, Domus familiaque, Occupationes, Regnum ecclesiaque …………………………………………………... 169 IV.2.7. Coelum ………………………………………………………………. 193 IV.2.8. Angeli Deusque ……………………………………………………… 195 IV.2.9. The Central Rung……………………………………………………. 196 IV.3. Imagines Agentes and the Emblem Tradition……………………………... 198 IV.4. The Sermon as Journey Through Loci and Imagines ……………………... 204 V. La Corona ……………………………………………………………………….. 207 V.1. A Mnemotechnical Reading………………………………………………... 207 V.2. The Seven Rooms………………………………………………………….. 211 V.2.1. “Annunciation”………………………………………………............. 211 V.2.2. “Nativity”…………………………………………………….............. 213 V.2.3. “Temple”……………………………………………………………... 214 V.2.4. “Crucifying”………………………………………………….............. 215 V.2.5. “Resurrection”………………………………………………………... 216 V.2.6. “Ascension”………………………………………………………….. 217 V.3. Loci as Imagines ………………………………………………………... 219 VI. Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………… 222 Works Cited ………………………………………………………………………… 227 4 Foreword Three years ago, I set out to read the entirety of Donne’s 160 sermons. What began as a laborious task became, as I developed familiarity with his idiom, a source of insight and delight. Upon reading the first twenty, I consulted my advisor who asked what it was that had struck me most during my first encounter with these challenging texts. I believe I spoke of the Good Thief hanging at the right hand of Christ pictured by Donne as a preacher in a congregation of two, and about a trumpet, calling in different modes— alarm, battle, parley, retreat—while the preacher served as both trumpet and trumpeter. I may have mentioned groaning doves, self-shot arrows, garments flowing with sweet oil, sins in swaddling clothes, and other curiosities. I was excited and inarticulate, yet out of our dialogue arose the understanding that it was Donne’s imagery that had captivated me. Unwittingly, like the first twentieth-century critics of Donne’s sermons, I had set out to meet Donne the preacher only to come face to face with Donne the poet. I first resolved to write about the rich imagery of Donne’s sermonic oeuvre. As my gallery of memorable images grew, I stumbled across the following odd conceit from a 1618 sermon on Psalm 38:3 preached at Lincoln’s Inn: “The art of salvation , is but the art of memory .” The metaphor might be dismissed as more witty than just. The interjection ‘but’ even adds a quality of flippancy, yet salvation is the last concept a committed preacher would be flippant about. Intrigued, I read on to discover that the art of memory was in fact a memory training technique invented by the Ancient Greeks, systematized by Roman orators, Christianized