Chapter 2 Art and the Apophatic

The concern about seeing and representation already evident in Donne’s secular poetry becomes more acute when he comes to consider the theological mysteries. His exploration of the words “image” and “likeness” discussed in the previous chapter acquires a new, biblical, resonance in the context of God’s creation of man in Genesis 1: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1: 26). And his early secular poems resemble the sermons from the other end of his career in that artworks still figure not as objects of interest in themselves, but as a starting point for the exploration of something further.1 Ann Hurley observes that in the sermons Donne “refers to painting atypically for his time, that is with attention to the craft of the artist or to the handling of painting’s material properties”. At the same time she observes / points out that his “aesthetic response” in the sermons and letters is “largely incidental, mentioned through analogy or in passing”. Hurley, John Donne’s Poetry, p. 163. Where we might expect to find ekphrasis, or a conclusive link to material visual art, we discover instead a move towards abstraction. The Sermons, more than any other of Donne’s works, demonstrate a knowledge of and interest in visual art that – as we might expect by now – goes beyond a mere surface appreciation. Donne’s practical and theoretical knowledge of painterly technique may well contribute to the visual art metaphors in the sermons, but, as in the poems, what appears on first sight to reference the material proves to lead towards the immaterial. Tracking down the sources of two of Donne’s key visual metaphors in the sermons opens up a new context for his ambivalent references to art. A reference to a “well-made” portrait whose eyes follow you round the room can be traced back to Nicholas of Cusa’s De Visione Dei (1453), while an analogy based on a sculptor’s craft has its source in the Mystical Theology of the sixth-century theologian known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Donne is not generally considered as a “mystical” writer or theologian and I do not intend to identify him as such, but the apophatic approach to God laid out in both of these theological texts provides an illuminating context for his references to artworks. Identifying the source of Donne’s painting and sculpture images in his reading of theology, rather than in his involvement in the art world, leads us away from physical art, away from representation entirely, in a way that parallels his own method when he draws on the field of visual art for his subject matter or metaphors. Indeed his habit of both evoking and swerving away from the image has a lot in common with the apophatic method, and in later sermons he develops his own apophatic take on analogies drawn from visual art, reconciling the notion of the imago Dei with the ultimate unknowability of God.