One of the key ways in which Donne appropriates and adapts the language of mystical theology is by turning away from the darkness of unknowing and focusing rather on Christ and the sacrifice of the Crucifixion, a shift that is to be found in his divine poems too. In his sermons we can trace a network of references to the ideas of Pseudo-Dionysius and Nicholas of Cusa which combine mystical thought with a much more Christological theology, and interestingly he often achieves this through visual and optical metaphors – sometimes drawn from Cusanus and sometimes apparently his own. His references to the Cusean “well-made picture” are to be found in sermons preached between 1619 and 1622, and his use of the Dionysian metaphor of the sculptor is in a sermon from 1627. These seem to be periods in which he is particularly preoccupied by mystical theology and its implications, as the threads in this network of optical imagery confirm. It can become quite complicated tracing the variations and echoes of his adaptations of apophatic thought, but the echoes and cross-references in different sermons and poems, moving from seeing to darkness, and from darkness to Christ’s blood, weave a convincing web of adapted apophatic imagery.
A good place to start is Donne’s “Hymne to Christ, at the Authors last going into Germany”, which opens with the visual imagery of the emblem, a ship which is “my Embleme of thy Arke” (2) at sail on a sea that functions as “an Embleme of thy bloud” (4).
1 Johnson et al., eds., Variorum 7.2: Divine Poems, p. 172. The apparent gloom and self-negation of the hymn has attracted many biographical readings. His valediction poems, as we observed in Chapter 1, often tend to generate biographical associations, and the commonly used title of this hymn fixes it to a specific journey, Donne’s departure on the embassy to Germany in 1619 with James Hay, Viscount Doncaster. Donne’s letters reveal a certain lack of enthusiasm at the prospect of this trip:
I leave a scattered flock of wretched children, and I carry an infirm and valetudinary body, and I go into the mouth of such adversaries as I cannot blame for hating me, the Jesuits, and yet I go.
2 Letter to Henry Goodyer, dated 9 March [1619], Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, 174–175. See Johnson, Theology of John Donne, pp. 107–110, for a discussion of the biographical context and circumstances of the composition of the hymn. For R. C. Bald, in this poem we see Donne “weighed down by fears of shipwreck or of drowning”.3 Bald, Donne, p. 343. Anthony Parr observes that the poem reflects “Donne’s particular circumstances and state of mind before departure … there is every indication that illness and financial worries were besetting him and that he feared he would not return alive”.4 Anthony Parr, “John Donne, Travel Writer”, Huntington Library Quarterly 70:1 (2007): 61–85, 77. But as well as placing the hymn at a particular moment in Donne’s life, the date and title relate it to his Valediction sermon preached before the same trip – which is where we find his most developed reference to the “well-made and well-placed picture”: Nicholas of Cusa’s omnivoyant icon. Several sermons from the period of the embassy and the years just following contain references to mystical theology, and reading the hymn in this context reinforces the impression that it is one of Donne’s most explicitly apophatic poems. It draws on the mystical tradition of the via negativa in its closing lines, which strongly evoke Nicholas of Cusa’s “sacred darkness” or Pseudo-Dionysius’ “darkness so far above light”:
Churches are best for Prayer that haue least light;
To see God only, I goe out of sight:
And to scape stormy dayes, I choose an everlasting Night. (ll. 26–28)
Like Cusanus’s “omnivoyant icon”, the imagery of the hymn leads “by human means unto divine things”, from allusions to the material world of emblem books to the darkness of unseeing.
John J. Pollock has found thematic and linguistic correspondences between the valedictory hymn and sermon, particularly in the sermon’s references to the Ark metaphor – “God remembered Noah”– and the “sea of his blood” (
Sermons 2: 236; 249). He finds a patterning of light and dark in both poem and sermon, although the sermon is resolved in images of light while the hymn concludes with an image of darkness.
5 John J. Pollock, “A Mystical Impulse in Donne’s Devotional Poetry”, Studia Mystica 2:2 (1979): 17–24. Evelyn Simpson also cites (and quotes in full) the “Hymn to Christ” as an illustration of Donne’s mysticism in the first edition of A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924), p. 103, although interestingly she removes this passage from the second edition published in 1948. Pollock concludes that in the Hymne to Christ Donne reveals “an impulse toward the purely mystical apprehension of God”, yet also points out that in the valedictory sermon he seems more critical of mystical attitudes, observing that “retiring thyself from the world [may] degenerate into a contempt and despising of others, and an overvaluing of thine own perfections” (2: 243).
6 Pollock, “Mystical Impulse”, p. 23. It is worth recalling Stein’s cautious assessment that Donne’s “honest attraction” to negative theology does not necessarily influence his formal theological stance.
7 Stein, John Donne’s Lyrics, p. 175, p. 180. While Donne’s public prose maintains a distance from the doctrines of unknowing, the poetic persona of the “Hymne to Christ” allows him to approach the subject from a different angle. This does not necessarily mean that we should read the hymn as Donne himself choosing “the total abandonment of the self into the nothingness of the Godhead,” as Pollock suggests.
8 Pollock, “Mystical Impulse”, p. 23. The “hymn” permits Donne, rather, to dramatise such an abandonment of the self, and through the poet’s sleight of hand the confident “I” of the first stanza, who is able to find earthly and material metaphors to describe his understanding of Christ, finishes by “go[ing] out of sight” in order to “see God only”.
The speaker’s contemplation of Christ’s blood in the first stanza of the hymn, as the first step in his apophatic journey, suggests further links with Donne’s adaptation of the thought and imagery of Nicholas of Cusa in his sermons, where we see him turning the language of negative theology to more specifically Christological ends. Other sermons from the period of the embassy and the years just following contain apophatic passages that can be linked directly with the “Hymne to Christ” and with Nicholas of Cusa’s meditations on the omnivoyant icon in De Visione Dei. Two stand out particularly: the sermon preached at The Hague in December 1619 on the embassy’s way back to England, and the one preached at Hanworth on August 25, 1622, to James Hay and company. The latter contains a passage which resonates with the apophatic conclusion of Donne’s hymn:
Man sees best in the light, but meditates best in the darke; for our sight of God, it is enough, that God gives the light of nature; to behold him so, as to fixe upon him in meditation, God benights us, or eclipses us, or casts a cloud of medicinall afflictions, and wholsome corrections upon us. (4: 174)
Although removed in time by a few years, the Hanworth sermon is linked to the 1619 valedictory sermon and poem through the person of James Hay, who, as Viscount Doncaster, had headed the embassy to Germany. In his address to Hay and the assembled company, including Hay’s father-in-law, Henry Percy the Earl of Northumberland, Donne navigates between life experiences of tribulation and of privilege, steering a middle way between the seeing of God in darkness and the revelation of God in light. Despite the apparently mystical language, before very long the suggestion of the apophatic gives way to “darkness” in the sense of “affliction” and “correction”. This suggests that Donne is to some extent tailoring his moral to his audience – the references to affliction are clearly directed, at least in part, to Henry Percy, recently released from the Tower of London, while the counter-examples of riches and privilege characterise Hay’s legendary prodigality and excess.
9 See Johnson, Theology, pp. 79–80. The blurring of mystical darkness with earthly tribulation in the sermon provides the context for Donne’s development of Nicholas of Cusa’s imagery in ways that are comparable to the valediction hymn.
The “Hymne to Christ”’s opening reference to the visual representational tradition of the emblem book shifts and becomes increasingly problematised as the poem develops from the middle of the first stanza onwards:
Though thou with Clowds of Anger doe disguise
Thy face, yet through that Mask I know those eyes
Which though they turne away sometimes, they never will despise. (5–7)
There are strong echoes of Nicholas of Cusa’s omnivoyant icon in this insistence on the eyes of God. Yet Donne plays with Cusanus’s ideas – and the ideas of negative theology more generally – in a number of ways, raising questions about the representation of the divine. In the sermons, Donne’s repeated reference to the “well-made, and well-placed picture” is ultimately reassuring – so long as you keep your eye on God, he will keep his eye on you. In the hymn, though, the eyes of God may be turned away. God is attributed both a face and a human emotion in the description of the “clouds of anger” obscuring him, a kataphatic representation that seems likely to have its roots in the thinking of Nicholas of Cusa and Pseudo-Dionysius.
In the third chapter of
Mystical Theology Dionysius acknowledges the ways God has been described as having human actions and attributes: “his anger, grief and rage, of how he is said to be drunk and hungover, of his oaths and curses, of his sleeping and waking”.
10 Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, p. 139. This is precisely what Donne himself describes in the passage from the 1627 sermon that introduces the analogy with the sculptor and the painter: “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). He also explores the topic in the 1619 sermon preached at The Hague during the Doncaster embassy:
God in the Scriptures is often by the Holy Ghost invested, and represented in the qualities and affections of men; and to constitute a commerce and familiarity between God and man, God is not only said to have bodily lineaments, eyes and eares, and hands, and feet, and to have some of the natural affections of men, as Joy, in particular… And pity too… (2:288–289)
This attribution of human emotions to God is part of the network of references Donne makes to the principles of negative theology around this time, and in the “Hymne to Christ” the “clouds of anger” are succeeded by a play on the Old Testament description of a “jealous God” compared to human jealousy:
As thou
Art jealous, Lord, soe I am iealous nowe…
O, if thou car’st not whom I loue, Alas, thou lou’st not me (ll. 17–18; 21).
The projection of human emotion onto God is highlighted by Donne’s speaker’s rather petulant insistence that “I am jealous nowe” and the hyperbolic conclusion that “if thou car’st not whom I love, Alas, thou lov’st not me”. The chiasmus in line 18 (jealous Lord / I am jealous) emphasises the idea that the human emotions ascribed to God are only a reflection of the speaker’s own emotional state, and this idea too can be traced to Nicholas of Cusa’s De Visione Dei.
Extrapolating from his starting point of the painted face that always seems turned towards spectators, no matter where they stand in the room, Cusanus develops, like Donne in the Hymn, the idea that humankind projects human emotions onto the divine:
Just as while I look from the east at this depicted face it seems likewise to look eastwardly at me […] In a similar way, Your Face is turned toward every face that looks unto You. […] Accordingly, whoever looks unto You with a loving face will find only Your Face looking lovingly upon him […] Whoever looks angrily unto You will find Your Face likewise to display anger. Whoever looks unto You joyfully will find Your Face likewise to be joyous, just as is the face of him is looking unto You. (DVD 6.20, 137)
For Nicholas of Cusa, mankind’s vision of God is necessarily mediated by his own subjective condition. Limited by his human frame of knowledge and experience, man can only visualise God in human terms. The passage continues directly:
For just as the bodily eye, in looking through a red glass, judges as red whatever it sees, and as green whatever it sees if looking through a green glass, so each mental eye, cloaked with contraction and passion, judges You who are the object of the mind, according to the nature of the contraction and the passion. A man can judge only in a human way. (DVD 6.20, 137)
Cusanus’s optical imagery here is quite striking and memorable, concisely conveying the idea that human perception is limited. Donne picks up on the reference to “looking through a red glass” in the 1622 sermon preached to Hay and company at Hanworth. Although, as before, he does not cite Cusanus as his source, he does seem to refer directly to this passage of De Visione Dei. Significantly though, he adapts it to his own purposes, rather as he did with the “well-made picture”, and the new emphasis he gives to the metaphor of the “red glass” is indicative of the use he makes of mystical theology in general.
Immediately following the apophatic-like reference to meditating best in the dark towards the end of the Hanworth sermon, Donne incorporates the idea of the “red glass” into his elaboration on “darkness” in the sense of “affliction”:
Man
sees best in the
light, but
meditates best in the
darke; for our sight of God, it is enough, that God gives the light of
nature; to behold him so, as to fixe upon him in meditation, God benights us, or eclipses us, or casts a cloud of medicinall afflictions, and wholsome corrections upon us. Naturally we dwell longer upon the consideration of God, when we see the Sun eclipsed, then when we see it rise, we passe by that as an ordinary thing; and so in our afflictions we stand, and looke upon God, and we behold him. A man may see God, and forget that ever he saw him … but Christ remembers that they did see him, but not
behold him, see him, and looke off, see him so as aggraved their sin, more then if they had never seene him. But that man, who through his owne
red glasse, can see Christ, in that colour too, through his own miseries, can see Christ Jesus in his blood, that through the calumnies that have been put upon himself, can see the revilings that were multiplied upon Christ, that in his own imprisonment, can see Christ in the grave, and in his owne enlargement, Christ in his resurrection, this man … beholds God… (4: 174–175, italics in original)
11 This reference to De Visione Dei is not recorded in Stephan Meier-Oeser’s indispensable guide to Nicholas of Cusa’s legacy, Die Präsenz des Vergessenen: Zur Rezeption der Philosophie des Nicolaus Cusanus vom 15. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Münster, Germany: Aschendorff, 1989), or its follow-up: Stephan Meier-Oeser, “Die Cusanus-Rezeption im deutschen Renaissancehumanismus des 16. Jahrhunderts”, in Nicolaus Cusanus zwischen Deutschland und Italien. Edited by Martin Thurner (Berlin: Akademie, 2002), pp. 617–632.For Nicholas of Cusa, looking through the red glass simply illustrated the way in which all the perceptions of the “bodily eye” will be coloured by the medium through which it looks – if the glass is red or green the view will be tinted with red or green too – and in the same way mankind can only approach God with human sight and human preconceptions. Like seeing through a glass darkly (1 Cor. 13.12), the red glass metaphor illustrates the inevitable distortion imposed on spiritual understanding by the human condition. For Donne, however, the glass is tinted red by the miseries and afflictions that are part of man’s fallen condition, and it is precisely this human misery that allows him to approach and contemplate “Christ Jesus in his blood” and thence “Christ in his resurrection” in which lies the hope of salvation. (He abandons the Cusan’s green glass, which does not have these fleshly overtones.) To view Christ through the red lens of human suffering is to find a particular understanding of Christ’s sacrifice.
12 Cf. another reference to “spectacles” in the fifth of Donne’s Prebend Sermons upon five Psalms: Preached at S. Pauls: “I am not able of my selfe to dye that glasse, that spectacle, thorow which I looke upon this God, in what colour I will; whether this glasse shall be black, through my despaire, and so I shall see God in the cloud of my sinnes, or red in the blood of Christ Jesus and I shall see God in a Bath of the blood of his Sonne”. Sermons, 8: 123.The paradox of entering darkness in order to see, encapsulated in the closing lines of the “Hymne to Christ”, is fundamental to the via negativa. The sermons of 1619 and 1622 treat the tenets of mystical theology more circumspectly. But if the speaker of “Hymne to Christ” ultimately abandons the emblem of the sea of blood and other kataphatic representations of the divine to enter into the darkness of unknowing, the path taken by Donne the preacher in the sermons is just as compelling. In the sermons, Donne evokes mystical and apophatic language only to turn it to a much more Christological use. In the Hanworth sermon, mystical darkness becomes the darkness of affliction, and Nicholas of Cusa’s metaphor of the “red glass” to describe limited human perspective is similarly transformed into the “red” of human suffering and of Christ’s blood. The way Donne combines the apophatic and the Christological becomes particularly significant in his divine poems dealing with the Crucifixion, which will be discussed in Chapter 4.
The references to Nicholas of Cusa’s
De Visione Dei in both the 1622 Hanworth sermon and in the 1619 valedictory sermon, and the parallels of both to the 1619 hymn, make it tempting to speculate that mystical theology in general or Nicholas of Cusa in particular were interests that Donne and Hay shared, since he was a key figure in the auditory for both sermons.
13 Johnson (Theology, pp. 78–79) suggests rather that Henry Percy’s known interest in natural philosophy and alchemy provides a context in which to read the Hanworth sermon. It seems reasonable, at any rate, to deduce that Donne and Hay shared an interest in visual art, as Donne bequeathed to Hay the “picture of the Blessed Virgin Mary which hangs in the little dining-chamber”, which was almost certainly a work by Titian.
14 Johnson, Theology, p. 84; Milgate, Dr. Donne’s Art Gallery, pp. 318–319. This may be considered merely a detail, but it reinserts a material artwork into the discussion, rooting Donne’s imagery in his ownership and donation of visual art, rather as Nicholas of Cusa’s treatise was apparently accompanied by an actual example of an omnivoyant image, the better to illustrate his points. In a sermon preached to Hay, Donne adapted Cusanus’s omnivoyant image hanging on the wall into a gallery of illustrations of God’s mercy, and then ten years later took a painting from the wall of his own “art gallery” and presented it to his friend and patron. Donne’s practical interest in material visual art may well contribute to the fact that what he primarily takes from the mystical texts of Pseudo-Dionysius and Nicholas of Cusa are their visual metaphors – the picture, the sculptor, the red glass. But as in his exploration of the limits of representation in his secular poetry, he consistently uses these metaphors of art and painting to go beyond the material, to point to what cannot be seen or understood.