John Donne on Repentance:

Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?

1572 – 1631

John Donne’s Life

1571/72 Born of a mother from an eminent Roman Catholic family 1576 His father dies 1584 Begins study at Hart Hall, Oxford 1592 Studies law at Lincoln’s Inn (as a Roman Catholic, could not receive an Oxford degree); begins writing “secular poetry”; becomes a “man about town,” an admirer of “fair women.” 1593 Donne’s brother Henry dies in Newgate Prison after sheltering a Roman Catholic priest; Donne tends toward scepticism 1596/97 “Military Adventure”: serves Earl of Essex in expedition against Cadiz, in the Azores 1598? Conforms to Church of England; becomes secretary to Sir Thomas Edgerton 1601-1615 Secretly marries Ann More, niece of Edgerton’s wife, a minor (age 17); Donne is briefly imprisoned and they live in poverty. Ann gives birth to 12 children, five of whom die; Donne writes religious poetry and controversial religious writings: Pseudo-Martyr; John Donne’s Life

1615 Ordained to C of E at King James’s encouragement 1616 Divinity Reader, Lincoln’s Inn 1617 Ann More dies in childbirth (age 33); Donne deeply affected by her death 1621 Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral

1623 Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (during an illness)

1631 Preaches “Death’s Duel,” his final sermon; Dies March 31 Donne’s Writings

• Religious Poetry • Prose – La Corona – Essays in Divinity – – Sermons (Ten Volumes) “Batter my heart, three – Devotions Upon Emergent person’d God . . .” Occasions – A Litanie – The Crosse – Hymne to God My God, in My Sicknesse – A Hymne to God the Father • “Wilt thou forgive that sinne . . . ?” The Pattern of Repentance in Donne’s Poetry and Sermons

• Meditation on the Word: The Word (Scriptures) and the Words (preached and written) • “The bold use of metaphor is the most constant and memorable feature of Donne’s rhetoric . . . metaphor is often the best means of applying God’s word directly to the human heart.” Ellen F. Davis, “Holy Preaching.” • Donne’s poetry and sermons are meditative in their approach. In sermons, there is a three-fold pattern: Preparation (biblical text and prayer); explication of the text; application of the text to one’s life. A similar pattern occurs in the arrangement of his poems, e.g., The Holy Sonnets. Donne’s poetry and sermons are structured so as to lead the reader/hearer to repentance. (John Booty)

The Pattern of Repentance in Donne’s Poetry and Sermons

Donne’s reading of Scripture “MY God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all that thou sayest? but thou art also (Lord, I intend it to thy glory, and let no profane misinterpreter abuse it to thy diminution), thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too; a God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch remote and precious metaphors, such extensions, such spreadings, such curtains of allegories, such third heavens of hyperboles, so harmonious elocutions, so retired and so reserved expressions, so commanding persuasions, so persuading commandments, such sinews even in thy milk, and such things in thy words, as all profane authors seem of the seed of the serpent that creeps, thou art the Dove that flies.” Exposition 19, Devotions on Emergent Occasions

The Pattern of Repentance in Donne’s Poetry and Sermons Love and Death: – Two Key Themes in Donne’s Writings – A Dialectic Between Love and Death, Grace and Sin • Love  Death • Death  Sin • Sin  Redemption • Redemption  Grace • Grace  Repentance • Repentance  Love

Beginning With Love: The Triune God God’s goodness and grace prior to our sin “It was the entertainment of God himself, his delight, his contemplation, for those infinite millions of generations, when he was without a world, without creatures to joy in one another, in the Trinity: It was the Father's delight, to look upon himself in the Son; and to see the whole godhead, in a threefold, and an equal glory. It was God's own delight, and it must be the delight of every Christian, upon particular occasions to carry his thoughts upon the several persons of the Trinity. If I have a bar of iron, that bar in that form will not nail a door; if a sow of lead, that lead in that form will not stop a leak; if a wedge of gold, that wedge will not buy my bread. The general notion of a mighty God, may less fit my particular purposes. But I coin my gold into current money, when I apprehend God, in the several notions of the Trinity . . .” Beginning With Love: The Triune God God’s goodness and grace prior to our sin “That if I have been a prodigal son, I have a Father in heaven, and can go to him, and say, Father I have sinned, and be received by him. That if I be a decayed father, and need the sustentation of mine own children; there is a Son in heaven, that will do more for me, than mine own, of what good means or what good nature soever they be, can or will do. If I be dejected in spirit, there is a holy Spirit in heaven, which shall bear witness to my spirit, that I am the child of God. And if the ghosts of those sinners, whom I made sinners, haunt me after their deaths, in returning to my memory, and reproaching to my conscience, the heavy judgments that I have brought upon them: if after the death of mine own sin, when my appetite is dead to some particular sin, the memory and sinful delight of past sins, the ghosts of those sins haunt me again; yet there is a Holy Ghost in heaven, that shall exorcise these, and shall overshadow me, the God of all comfort and consolation. God is the God of the whole world, in the general notion, as he is so, God; but he is my God, most especially, and most appliably, as he receives me in the several notions of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” PREACHED TO THE KING, AT THE COURT, IN APRIL, 1629 Beginning With Love: The Triune God God’s goodness and grace prior to our sin “Anyone who wishes correctly to approach our subject must speak first of the Gospel. . . . the Law followed the promise. It must follow the promise, but it must follow the promise.” Karl Barth, “Gospel and Law”

“But if we take this instrument, when God's hand tuned it . . . in the promise of a Messiah, and offer of the love and mercy of God to all that will receive it in him; then we are truly musicum carmen, as a love-song, when we present the love of God to you, and raise you to the love of God in Christ Jesus: for, for the music of the spheres, whatsoever it be, we cannot hear it; for the decrees of God in heaven, we cannot say we have seen them; our music is only that salvation which is declared in the Gospel to all them, and to them only, who take God by the right hand, as he delivers himself in Christ.” A LENT SERMON PREACHED AT WHITEHALL, FEBRUARY 12, 1618.

Beginning With Love: The Triune God We are made to know and love God “Every man, even in nature, hath that appetite, that desire, to know God.” Preached at S. Pauls, 28 January, 1626

“The soule of man brings with it, into the body, a sense and an acknowledgment of God; neither can all the abuses that the body puts upon the soule, whilst they dwell together . . . devest that acknowledgement, or extinguish that sense of God in the soule.” Preached at S. Pauls in the Evening, Upon the day of S. Pauls Conversion 1628

“You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

Awareness of Death Leading to Awareness of Sin

“It is every mans case then every man dyes and though it may perchance be but a meere Hebraisme to say that every man shall see death, perchance it amounts to no more but to that phrase to taste death yet thus much may be implied in it too that as every man must dye so every man may see that he must dye as it cannot be avoided so it may be understood.” Preached to the Lord’s on Easter Day

“But then this exitus à 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. “ Death’s Duel

Awareness of Death Leading to Awareness of Sin “The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does, belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingraffed into that body, whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me; . . . No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions

We sin constantly . . .

“ We sin constantly, and we sin continually, and we sin confidently and we finde so much pleasure and profit in sin, as that we have made a league, and sworn a friendship with sin; and we keep that perverse, and irreligious promise over religiously; and the sins of our youth flow into other sins, when age disables us for them.” A Lent - Sermon Preached at White Hall February 20, 1628.

We sin constantly . . . . Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun, Which was my sin, though it were done before? Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run And do run still, though still I do deplore? When thou hast done, thou hast not done; For I have more. Wilt thou forgive that sin, which I have won Others to sin, and made my sin their door? Wilt thou forgive that sin, which I did shun A year or two, but wallowed in a score? When thou hast done, thou hast not done; For I have more. I have a sin of fear, that when I’ve spun My last thread, I shall perish on the shore; But swear by thyself, that at my death thy Son Shall shine, as he shines now and heretofore: And having done that, thou hast done; I fear no more.

Incarnation and Redemption: Jesus Christ as the resolution of the antimony between Love and Death • “And therefore he made Christ, God and man in one person, Creature and Creator together; One greater then the Seraphim, and yet lesse then a worme; Soveraigne to all nature, and yet subject to naturall infirmities; Lord of life, life it selfe, and yet prisoner to death; Before and beyond all measures of Time, and yet Born at so many moneths, Circumcised at so many days, Crucified at so many years, Rose againe at so many Houres; How sure did God make himselfe of a companion in Christ, who united himselfe in his godhead, so inseparably to him, as that that Godhead left not that body, then when it lay dead in the grave, but staid with it then as closely as when he wrought his greatest miracles.” Preached to the Earl of Exeter, and his company, in his Chappell at Saint Johns; 13. Jun. 1624

• “If the treasure of the blood of Christ Jesus be not sufficient, Lord what addition can I find, to match them, to piece out them! And if it be sufficient of it selfe, what addition need I seek? Other mens crosses are not mine, other mens merits cannot save me.” Untitled [second sermon preached at the Hague] Grace Leading to Repentance “What great benefit (however the dignity had been great to all mankind) had mankind had, if Christ had saved no more than that one person whom he assumed? The largeness and bounty of Christ is, to give us of his best treasure, knowledge, and to give us most at last, to know Christ in me. For, to know that he is in his Father, this may serve me to convince another, that denies the Trinity; to know that we are in Christ, so as that he took our nature, this may show me an honour done to us, more than the angels; but what gets a lame wretch at the pool, how sovereign soever the water be, if no body put him in? What gets a naked beggar by knowing that a dead man hath left much to pious uses, if the executors take no knowledge of him? What get I by my knowledge of Christ in the Father, and of us in Christ so, if I find not Christ in me?” PREACHED UPON WHITSUNDAY.

Grace Leading to Repentance “He came to call sinners, and only sinners; that is, only in that capacity in that contemplation, as they were sinners . . . He came for sinners; for sinners onely; else he had not come. And then he came for all kind of sinners [publicans, prostitutes] and yet for these, for the worst of these, for all these, there is a voice gone out, Christ is come to call sinners, onely sinners, all sinners.” Preached to the Household at Whitehall, April 30, 1626

“To make haste, the circumstance only required here, is that he be sought early; and to invite thee to it, consider how early he sought thee; it is a great mercy that he stays so long for thee; it was more to seek thee so early: Dost thou not feel that he seeks thee now, in offering his love and desiring thine? Canst not thou remember that he sought thee yesterday, that is, that some temptations besieged thee then, and he sought thee out by his grace, and preserved thee and hath he not sought thee so, so early, as from the beginning of thy life? nay, dost thou not remember that after thou hadst committed that sin, he sought thee by imprinting some remorse, some apprehension of his judgments, . . . A SERMON PREACHED TO QUEEN ANNE, AT DENMARK-HOUSE, DECEMBER 14, 1617

Grace Leading to Repentance “Yet if we have omitted our first early, our youth, there is one early left for us; this minute; seek Christ early, now, now, as soon as his Spirit begins to shine upon your hearts. Now as soon as you begin your day of regeneration, seek him the first minute of this day, for you know not whether this day shall have two minutes or no, that is, whether his Spirit, that descends upon you now, will tarry and rest upon you or not, as it did upon Christ at his baptism.” A SERMON PREACHED TO QUEEN ANNE, AT DENMARK-HOUSE, DECEMBER 14, 1617

Repentance as Return to Divine Love Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay? Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste; I run to Death, and Death meets me as fast, And all my pleasures are like yesterday. I dare not move my dim eyes any way, Despair behind, and Death before doth cast Such terror, and my feeble flesh doth waste By sin in it, which it towards hell doth weigh: Only thou art above, and when towards thee By thy leave I can look, I rise again; But our old subtle foe so tempteth me, That not one hour myself I can sustain; Thy grace may wing me to prevent his art, And thou like adamant draw mine iron heart. Holy Sonnets

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

Repentance as Return to Divine Love “T]he effect of Christ's calling, that whomsoever he calls, or how, or whensoever, it is to repentance. . . . The Holy Ghost tells us; it is to repentance: Are ye to learn now what that is? He that cannot define repentance, that he cannot spell it, may have it; and he that hath written whole books, great volumes of it, may be without it. . . it is a turning from our sins, and a returning to our God. . . . Christ justifies feasting; he feasts you with himself: and feasting in an apostle's house, in his own house; he feasts you often here: and he admits publicans to this feast, men whose full and open life, in court, must necessarily expose them, to many hazards of sin: and the Pharisees . . . This Christ, with joy and thanksgiving we acknowledge to be come; to be come actually; we expect no other after him, we join no other to him: and come freely, without any necessity imposed by any above him, and without any invitation from us here: come, not to meet us, who were not able to rise, without him; but yet not to force us, to save us against our wills, but come to call us, by his ordinances in his church; us, not as we pretend any righteousness of our own, but as we confess ourselves to be sinners, and sinners led by this call, to repentance; which repentance, is an everlasting divorce from our beloved sin, and an everlasting marriage and superinduction of our ever-living God.” PREACHED TO THE HOUSEHOLD AT WHITEHALL, APRIL, 1626 Repentance as Return to Divine Love

“This Christ, with joy and thanksgiving we acknowledge to be come; to be come actually; we expect no other after him, we join no other to him: and come freely, without any necessity imposed by any above him, and without any invitation from us here: come, not to meet us, who were not able to rise, without him; but yet not to force us, to save us against our wills, but come to call us, by his ordinances in his church; us, not as we pretend any righteousness of our own, but as we confess ourselves to be sinners, and sinners led by this call, to repentance; which repentance, is an everlasting divorce from our beloved sin, and an everlasting marriage and superinduction of our ever-living God.” PREACHED TO THE HOUSEHOLD AT WHITEHALL, APRIL, 1626 Death Overcome by Love Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow, And soonest our best men with thee do go, Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery. Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then? One short sleep past, we wake eternally And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Holy Sonnets

Death Overcome by Love Towards noon Pilate gave judgment, and they made such haste to execution as that by noon he was upon the cross. 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 them 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. . . . 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. Amen. Death’s Duel

O Lord and Ruler of Heaven’s Hosts O God of Abraham Lord God of Isaac, Jacob and Of all their righteous clan You made the heavens and formed the earth With all their vast array Before You all things quake with fear And tremble in dismay But yet Your love surpasses all The measure of our mind You Lord are patient, merciful And infinitely kind You do not judge as we deserve In Your great goodness, Lord You offer pardon that we may Repent and be restored And now O Lord I bend my knee And make my sure appeal For I have sinned Lord and I know My wickedness too well Therefore I make this prayer to You Forgive me, Lord, forgive Let me not perish in my sin Let me not die but live