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John Donne on Repentance

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John Donne on Repentance 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; Essays in Divinity 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 – Holy Sonnets – 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 .
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