The association of Donne’s visual art metaphors with the Cusan’s “most sacred darkness” is reinforced when we consider it in parallel with another visual art analogy from the sermons. A sermon preached at St Dunstan’s on Trinity Sunday, 1627, contains another passage which has been cited as evidence of Donne’s familiarity with early modern visual culture, but which is better understood as part of his reflection on negative theology. Discussing, once again, our ways of conceptualising the divine, he compares the practices of sculptors and painters:
To make representations of men, or of other creatures, we finde two wayes; Statuaries have one way, and Painters have another: Statuaries doe it by Substraction; They take away, they pare off some parts of that stone, or that timber, which they work upon, and then that which they leave, becomes like that man, whom they would represent: Painters doe it by Addition; Whereas the cloth, or table presented nothing before, they adde colours, and lights, and shadowes, and so there arises a representation. Sometimes we represent God by Substraction, by Negation, by saying, God is that, which is not mortall, not passible, not moveable: Sometimes we present him by Addition; by adding our bodily lineaments to him, and saying, that God hath hands, and feet, and eares, and eyes; and adding our affections, and passions to him, and saying, that God is glad, or sorry, angry, or reconciled, as we are. (8: 54)
Semler and Hurley both cite this passage in their overviews of Donne’s knowledge of the visual arts, both finding parallels in exactly the same passages from Lomazzo’s
Tracte, Vasari’s
Lives of the Artists and Henry Wotton’s
Elements of Architecture.
1 Semler, English Mannerist Poets, pp. 47–48; Hurley, John Donne’s Poetry, p. 176.The language of the Wotton passage is indeed remarkably close to Donne’s, describing as it does how “the
Plasterer doth make his Figures by
Addition, and the
Caruer by
Substraction…”
2 Henry Wotton, The Elements of Architecture (1624), pp. 107–108. Wotton cannot be ruled out as a source, but in the passage from his
Elements he is describing the practice of actual plasterers and carvers literally and not metaphorically. Donne uses the techniques employed by painters and sculptors to represent the human form analogously, to describe the ways we imagine the divine. His comparison of addition and negation in human attempts to comprehend God strongly suggests that his principal source is the work of the late fifth- or early sixth-century philosopher known as Pseudo-Dionysius. In particular, his reference to the craft of the “statuary” as an analogy for representing God “by negation” looks like a direct reference to Dionysius’ very similar, and well-known, use of a statue in the second chapter of his
Mystical Theology, his short work that lays out the principles of negative or apophatic theology:
I pray we could come to this darkness so far above light! If only we lacked sight and knowledge so as to see, so as to know, unseeing and unknowing, that which lies beyond all vision and knowledge. For this would be really to see and to know: to praise the Transcendent One in a transcending way, namely through the denial of all beings. We would be like sculptors who set out to carve a statue. They remove every obstacle to the pure view of the hidden image, and simply by this act of clearing aside they show up the beauty which is hidden.
3 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works. Trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), p. 138. As with his multiple references to Nicholas of Cusa’s “omnivoyant image”, with the image of the sculptor Donne picks up on a metaphor from a text of mystical theology and makes it his own. Once more a reference to visual art serves to explain human perception of the divine. And while the painter, who represents by addition, is used to describe a kataphatic, or affirmative, way of imagining the divine, the sculptor chipping away at his statue, paradoxically, is used to lead us away from any sort of material representation, into the apophatic darkness of the via negativa.
In what is still the most developed consideration of Donne’s attitude toward negative theology to date, Arnold Stein argues that while “Donne’s formal positions as theologian have little sympathy with the negative approach to God”, he is nonetheless “honestly attracted to some of the doctrines of unknowing” although they “do not engage [his] mind so deeply as other problems of consciousness”.
4 Arnold Stein, John Donne’s Lyrics: The Eloquence of Action (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), p. 175; p. 180, and p. 181. Although more recent critics have argued that the influence of mystical writers such as Pseudo-Dionysius and Nicholas of Cusa had a much more profound influence on Donne’s thought and work,
5 See Martin, Literature and the Encounter with God, pp. 61–68. Stein’s balanced and cautious assessment remains convincing.
Donne uses the sculptor image much more concisely in his poem “The Crosse” (ll. 33–36), which will be discussed in Chapter 4. The influence of the ideas of Pseudo-Dionysius is also evident in his secular poetry. His short poem “Negative Love” is, in the words of Sean Ford, a “compact expression of the
via negativa”,
6 Sean Ford, “Nothing’s Paradox in Donne’s ‘Negative Love’ and ‘A Nocturnal upon S. Lucy’s Day,’” Quidditas 22 (2001): 99–113 (p. 104). drawing on both Dionysian and Cusan ideas. As we have already seen, exchanges and encounters between lovers provide a context for Donne’s exploration of the possibility – or impossibility – of representing the self, or the other. Similarly to the failed and fragmented blazons of “The Comparison” and “His Picture”, “Negative Love” rejects Petrarchan verbal portraiture: “I neuer stoopd soe lowe as they, / Which on an eye, cheeke, lip, can pray” (1–2), claiming that acknowledging the impossibility of ever fully knowing the other person “though sillie is more braue” (7). The second stanza succinctly sums up the principles of the
via negativa:
If that bee simply perfectest,
Which cann by noe waie bee exprest
But Negatiues, my love is soe
To all which all loue, I saie no.
If any who deciphers best,
What we know not our selues can know,
Let him teach mee that nothing … (ll. 10–16
7 Johnson et al., eds., Variorum 4.3: Songs and Sonnets, p. 237.)
Ford compares this directly to the sculptor image of the
Mystical Theology: “the ‘hidden statue’ of the Pseudo-Dionysius finds its parallel in the love described in the poem, which pushes negative definition to its extremes to argue that denying all positive attributes ultimately leads to nothingness”.
8 Ford, “Nothing’s Paradox”, pp. 104–105. Ford and Stein both identify “A Nocturnall Upon St. Lucie’s Day”, with its references to absence, darkness and non-existence as Donne’s fullest exploration of the implications of the via negativa, Stein, John Donne’s Lyrics, p. 175; p. 180; Ford, “Nothing’s Paradox”, pp. 106–112; see also Jennifer L. Nichols, “Dionysian Negative Theology in Donne’s ‘A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day’”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 53.3 (2011): 352–367 (p. 352). Donne’s most extended discussion of Pseudo-Dionysius’s negative theology is in the Essays in Divinity, where he refers directly to Pseudo-Dionysius’s On the Celestial Hierarchies, describing its author as “a devout speculative man”. Although he acknowledges that attempting to draw “knowledge of God … from effects” will be inadequate, the via negativa does not provide a fully satisfactory alternative:
Canst thou rely and leane upon so infirm a knowledg [sic], as is delivered by negations? And because a devout speculative man hath said,
Negationes de Deo sunt verae, affirmationes autem sunt inconvenientes, will it serve thy turn to hear, that God is that which cannot be named, cannot be comprehended, or which is nothing else? When every negation implyes some privation, which cannot be safely enough admitted in God; and is, besides, so inconsiderable a kind of proofe, that in civill and judic<i>all practice, no man is bound by it, nor bound to prove it.
9 Donne, Essays in Divinity, p. 21. The writings of Pseudo-Dionysius circulated widely in Latin translation in the sixteenth century. According to Karlfried Froehlich, the version most read among humanists, including Protestant reformers, was the 1436 Latin translation by Ambrogio Traversari, first printed in Bruges in 1480 (Karlfried Froehlich, “Pseudo-Dionysius and the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century”, in Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, pp. 33–46 (p. 34)). Donne may also have been aware of the translation by Marsilio Ficino (Florence, 1496). According to Philippe Chevallier’s Dionysiaca, sixty-four editions of Pseudo-Dionysius’s Mystical Theology were produced in the sixteenth century, seventeen of them based on Ambrogio’s Latin translation and sixteen on Ficino’s (Dionysiaca, ed. by Philippe Chevallier (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1989), 1, p. lx). Donne’s citation of Pseudo-Dionysius here seems to be drawn virtually word for word from Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Iª q. 13 a. 12 arg. 1 (http://www.unifr.ch/bkv/summa/kapitel14-12.htm), although Donne’s use of inconvenientes rather than Aquinas’s incompactae suggests he had direct knowledge of one of the Latin translations, possibly via the edition of his works published in Cologne in 1556. The ambivalent attitude toward the apophatic here supports Stein’s view that Donne’s undoubted knowledge of and interest in negative theology does not make him a mystical poet or theologian. I would, however, dispute Stein’s conclusion that his lack of engagement is simply because his imagination is more stimulated by “other problems of consciousness”. Donne repeatedly invokes the language and imagery of negative theology not as an end in itself but because doing so allows him to develop his own arguments. In doing so he both adapts apophatic thought to his own purposes and uses it to challenge and expand his ideas.