The Cusan idea that material images may function as the “human means” by which listeners are “conveyed … unto divine things” re-emerges in an exaggerated fashion in a sermon Donne preached in April 1629. He preached two sermons to the court of Charles I on Genesis 1: 26, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” In the second sermon, particularly, he picks up on the visual vocabulary employed in this bible verse and problematises it. It is a strange sermon in many ways, especially in the way it employs imagery drawn from visual culture. As so often when Donne turns to metaphors drawn from visual art, the sermon has provoked responses that may seem opposed. Norman Farmer quotes from it at length as “impressive for its sustained use of the picture as metaphor”, while David Anderson sees it as evidence that “as he neared the end of his life, Donne grew less comfortable with holy images”.
1 Farmer, Poets and the Visual Arts, p. 20; Anderson, “Internal Images”, pp. 26–27. The sermon’s imagery in fact follows the pattern we have seen elsewhere in Donne’s work: “the picture” is initially presented as if uncomplicated, but it becomes increasingly complex and problematic as his metaphor develops. What is to be “seen”, finally, is not the picture but what lies beyond it. Donne’s method here could indeed be described as apophatic, as he develops metaphorical descriptions of material artifacts only to clear them out of the way, a progression from the kataphatic to the apophatic that recalls what we have seen in the “Hymne to Christ” and the Cusanus-inflected sermons.
Donne’s concern about the dangers of representating the divine in the second of these sermons is couched in terms drawn from negative theology: he cautions that “as when we seek God in his essence, we are advised to proceed by negatives (God is not mortal, not passible:) so when we seek the image of God in man, we begin with a negative, This image is not his Bodie” (9: 76). He rebuts several heretical variations on this (that God had a body; that God assumed a body for the moment of creation; that the reference was to the body of Christ), and takes the opportunity to explicitly condemn religious iconography with a sideswipe at “them of the Roman perswasion” who “come too near giving God a body in their pictures of God the Father” (9: 77). At the same time, though, he makes the anti-iconoclastic claim that “there is no more danger out of a picture, then out of a history, if thou intend no more in either, then example” (9: 76). Rather as he did in his “Væ Idolalatris … Væ Iconoclastis” sermon given two years earlier in 1627 (7: 433), Donne again rhetorically juxtaposes the making and breaking of images and leaves us poised between the two, observing that “God, we see, was the first, that made images; and he was the first, that forbad them. He made them for imitation, he forbad them in danger of adoration” (9: 75). This ambivalence is characteristic of Donne’s treatment of images throughout the sermons, though this time, with some audacity, he attributes both positions to God himself. Given the argument that develops, it might be more accurate to say that God was the first to use the word “image” metaphorically, to describe the relationship between human and divine in terms of images, but not implying material likeness. The language of the book of Genesis appears to prompt Donne’s exploration of the same vocabulary of “image” and “likeness” that had stimulated him in his secular poetry.
His method in the opening section of this sermon is somewhat bizarre but serves to highlight and problematise the key terms of his text, “image” and “likeness”. He begins by insisting on the difference between the two terms, and on the multiple interpretations they have generated: “The variety which the holy Ghost uses here, in the pen of
Moses, hath given occasion to divers, to raise divers observations, upon these words, which seem divers,
Image and
likenesse, as also in the variety of the phrase” (9: 70). He digresses at length – for ninety-eight lines or three pages – on the importance of paying attention to the most minute distinctions between words in the history of scriptural commentary. This lengthy discussion is followed, however, by a move that Jeffrey Johnson describes as “puzzling” and David Colclough as “ironic”. Donne swerves away from actually carrying out the comparison between “image” and “likeness”, and states that for the purposes of the sermon he will treat them as “illustration[s] of one another” for the somewhat unconvincing reason that he does not have time to address the distinction properly.
2 Johnson, Theology, p. 24; David Colclough, ed., The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, Vol. 3: Sermons Preached at the Court of Charles I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 427. Colclough (p. 425) identifies Donne’s probable source of information on the debate as Benedict Pererius’s commentary on Genesis: Benedict Pererius, Commentariorum et Disputationum in Genesim (Lyon, 1599); see also Katrin Ettenhuber, Donne’s Augustine: Renaissance Cultures of Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 91. Donne’s apparent wavering between identifying a distinction between the two terms and allowing them to be taken as synonyms may reflect the fact that Calvin, in his commentary on Genesis, had insisted that there was no distinction between them.
3 John Calvin, A Commentarie… vpon the first booke of Moses called Genesis, C6r. [Institutes 1.15.3 ] See Colclough, Sermons, p. 427; Winfried Schleiner, The Imagery of John Donne’s Sermons (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1970), p. 118. But in setting up the expectation of a distinction between image and likeness and then apparently dismissing it, Donne creates a certain confusion that nonetheless has the effect of sharpening our alertness to the shades of meaning attached to the terms in the discussion to come. Having drawn our attention to the terms and insisted, with heavy repetition, on their “divers” significations, he sets up the multiple visual culture metaphors that he will draw on in the course of the sermon.
He continues his double-handed approach to the image question, using the Platonic distinction between original and copy, first of all in an apparent attempt to free the word “image” from its idolatrous associations, but then to reinforce the potential for idolatry in any artificial likeness. “We are made to an image, to a pattern”, Donne reminds his listeners: “God himselfe made all that he made according to a pattern. God had deposited, and laid up in himselfe certaine forms, patterns,
Ideas of every thing that he made” (9: 73–74). And he develops this, invoking the Platonic theory of mimesis in the service of the commandment against idolatry: “For,
Qualis dementiæ est id colere, quod melius est? What a drowsinesse, what a lazinesse, what a cowardlinesse of the soule is it to worship that, which does but represent a better thing than itself” (9: 75).
4 Colclough points out that this passage appears to have undergone significant authorial revision (p. 429), which in itself suggests the care that Donne was taking in establishing his Platonic analogy. The version printed in Six Sermons Upon Severall Occasions (Cambridge 1634), which Colclough uses as copy-text, reads: “God (we see) was the first that made images, and he was the first that forbad them; he made them for imitation, he forbad them in danger of adoration. For, what a basenesse, what a madnesse of the soul is it, to worship that which is no better, nay, not so good as it self!” (Colclough, Sermons, p. 183). By juxtaposing the ideas of image as God’s pattern and image as inferior copy, he invokes the idea of God the creator as craftsman, validating the image metaphor while simultaneously casting suspicion on material likenesses.
The passage of the sermon that Farmer finds so “impressive” for its “sustained use of picture as metaphor”
5 Farmer, Poets and the Visual Arts, p. 20. grows out of this tension within the idea of the image. In three pages of dense visual imagery Donne guides his listeners through a sequence of different metaphors drawn from visual art in order to elucidate the “image of God in the soule of man” (9: 79). Extremely rich in its evocation of detail, in its description of both the materials and the culture of visual art, Donne’s riff on material artworks can feel at times like an overdose of the visual, and like the emblematic opening of the “Hymne to Christ”, it is eventually replaced by a more apophatic conclusion.
On the surface, the passage is a development and illustration of his two key points about the imago Dei: that to speak of man being made in God’s image does not imply that God exists physically; and that God’s image should not be overwritten. The image of God is in man’s body, he explains, as a precious painting is housed within an outer case:
as you see some pictures, to which the very tables are Jewells; some Watches, to which the very cases are Jewells, and therefore they have outward cases too; and so the Picture, and the Watch is in that outward case, of what meaner stuffe soever that be: so is this Image in this body as in an outward case. […] [T]he body is but the out-case, and God looks not for the gilding, or enamelling, or painting of that: but requires the labour, and cost therein to be bestowed upon the table it selfe, in which this Image is immediately, that is the soule. (9: 79)
The embedded structure of the artefact in this metaphor is echoed in Donne’s way of developing it, moving outward in layers to establish the difference, and the distance, between the
imago Dei and the body of man. He first emphasises the material on which the image is executed, describing pictures painted on the surfaces of jewels, which Colclough suggests may refer to engraved gems, or oil paintings on onyx.
6 Colclough, Sermons (citing the art historian and curator Susan Foister), p. 432. In contrast to such a treasure the body is merely the case of “meaner stuff” that contains the precious artwork. Here Donne impresses on his listeners that while they should take care of the “out-case” that contains such a treasure, it is the soul rather than the body that requires care, attention and maintenance. Even as he distinguishes between body and soul, the description he gives of the soul as the “table [made of] Jewells” that receives the image of God emphasises that even the soul is only the surface upon which the
imago Dei is painted, and not the image itself.
A reiteration of the analogy at the beginning of the next paragraph exchanges the miniature artworks evoked above, the watch-case and the painted precious stone, for larger images of containment and interiority:
The Sphear then of this intelligence, the Gallery for this Picture, The Arch for this Statue, the Table, and frame and shrine for the Image of God, is inwardly and immediately the Soul of man. Not immediately so, as that the soule of man is a part of the Essence of God; for so essentially, Christ onely is the Image of God. (9: 79)
Donne maintains the sense of interiority and enclosure but by shifting his referents he creates the effect of zooming out of the original metaphor to insist on the soul as only the container of the image. Not only are the artworks of a larger size, but the imagined physical space in which they are situated magnifies the distance between man and God, between body, soul and divine image.
He then shifts focus again, to a metaphor he returns to repeatedly, that of the imprint in a wax seal, reiterating the point that man’s soul is simply the material that receives God’s image:
this Image is in our soule, as our soule is the wax, and this Image the seale. The Comparison is Saint
Cyrills, and he addes well, that no seale but that, which printed the wax at first, can fit that wax, and fill that impression after. No Image, but the Image of God can fit our soule (9: 80).
7 Colclough (Sermons, p. 432) identifies Donne’s source as Cyril of Alexandria, Thesaurus de Sancta et Consubstantiali Trinitate, Assertio XXXIV (PG 75. 609).Winfried Schleiner devotes a sub-chapter to the imagery of the seal, and related vocabulary of imprinting, impressing and engraving, to describe the
imago Dei, which recurs throughout the
Sermons.
8 Schleiner, Imagery, pp. 110–114. Donne develops the idea of “no Image, but the image of God…” with a series of new seals – “a Rose, or a bunch of Grapes” – that cannot replace God’s original seal.
9 This idea of images opposed to each other, in competition or conflict, is one to which Donne returns, and illustrated well by a passage from another sermon preached in 1624 to the Earl of Exeter, Sermons 6: 158–159.Yet ironically, perhaps, the seal imagery is quickly replaced by an extended metaphor based on paintings. It represents his fullest development of a visual art metaphor in the sermons, and is based not on the production of an image, but on the purchasing of paintings:
We should wonder to see a Mother in the midst of many sweet Children passing her time in making babies and puppets for her own delight. We should wonder to see a man, whose Chambers and Galleries were full of curious master-peeces, thrust in a Village Fair to looke upon sixpenny pictures, and three farthing prints. We have all the Image of God at home, and we all make babies, fancies of honour, in our ambitions. The master-peece is our own, in our own bosome; and we thrust in countrey Fairs, that is, we endure the distempers of any unseasonable weather, in night-journies, and watchings: […] we indure the guiltinesse, and reproach of having deceived the trust, which a confident friend reposes in us, and solicit his wife, or daughter: we endure the decay of fortune, of body, of soule, of honour, to possesse lower Pictures; pictures that are not originalls, not made by that hand of God, nature; but Artificiall beauties. And for that body, we give a soule, and for that drugge, which might have been bought, where they bought it, for a shilling, we give an estate. The Image of God is more worth then all substances; and we give it, for colours, for dreames, for shadowes. (9: 80–81)
Donne picks up on the tension between image-original and image-copy that he established several pages earlier, and into this narrative of images in competition he builds both the positive and the negative connotations that he attributes to artworks. At the same time, he uses vocabulary that locates this positive-negative contrast within the hierarchies of visual art. The term “curious” was commonly used to “indicate the art associated with Dürer, or Michelangelo, or Hilliard” and to distinguish it from house-painting or other forms of painting. Richard Haydocke translated Lomazzo’s “trattato dell’arte della pittura” as “the art of curious painting”.
10 Gent, Picture and Poetry, p. 7. And “masterpiece” to designate “a work of outstanding mastery or skill” (OED) was a relatively recent calque, or loan translation, into English from Dutch or German, and Donne is not original in his figurative use of it to describe man as God’s creation.
11 According to the OED “in early use [it was] often applied to man as the ‘masterpiece’ of God or nature”. masterpiece 1 a. The OED gives its first usage as 1600. The term recurs several times in Donne’s writing, in the sermon preached at the funeral of Sir William Cockayne, 1626 (7: 259), in a verse letter to the Countess of Bedford,
12 “To the Countesse of Bedford” [“Reason is our Soules left-hand”], l. 33. Johnson et al. eds., Variorum 5: Verse Letters (2019), pp. 278–279 (p. 279). and finally in “Death’s Duell” where he describes himself as “the Masterpeece of the greatest Master” (10: 232). The hierarchy established between the “curious master-peeces” and the “sixpenny pictures”, “lower Pictures” puts different painterly terms into conflict. While Donne’s little parable identifies “curious” and “master-peece” positively with the terms “originals… made by that hand of God, nature”, a more negative connotation attaches to the “colours” and “shadows” of the “Artificiall beauties” representing the undesirable counter-images that distract from God’s original, the
imago Dei.
In the contrast between “the Image of God at home” and the “night-journies … to possess lower Pictures”, Donne invokes the association of idolatry and adultery that was a staple of much anti-idolatry rhetoric. The Elizabethan Homilie against Perill of Idolatrie (1563), asks:
Doeth not the word of GOD call Idolatrie spiritual fornication: Doeth it not call a gylte or painted Idol or Image, a strumpet with a painted face: Bee not the spirituall wickednesses of an Idols inticing, like the flatteries of a wanton harlot: Bee not men and women as prone to spirituall fornication (I meane Idolatrie) as to carnall fornication.
13 Homilie against Perill of Idolatrie (1563), Certaine Sermons or Homilies (London 1623; facsimile Gainsville, Florida: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1965), p. 61. Quoted and discussed by Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry, p. 132.In Donne’s sermon, by contrast, the association seems to be reversed – rather than equating idolatry with fornication, here the transgression of soliciting a friend’s wife or daughter is described as “possess[ing] lower Pictures; pictures that are not originalls, not made by that hand of God, nature; but Artificiall beauties”. Adultery and fornication are described in terms of poor aesthetic judgement, and perhaps even of a poor investment.
Donne does, as Hurley observes, “readily” turn to visual art as a source of analogy for moral and theological points in the sermons.
14 Hurley, John Donne’s Poetry, p. 175. But something a bit different seems to be happening here. The proliferation of so much art imagery over more than fifty lines is rich to the point of being overpowering. Donne insists on the materiality of his metaphorical objects, with the detail of the “jewels” that make paintings or watchcases, the “outcases” that do not require “gilding or enameling or painting”, the multiple seals that cannot efface God’s original, the “master-peece” and the prints. His metaphors are all of enclosing, of layering and superimposing. Like the layers of paint that deface and obscure the seal of the
imago Dei in the 1624 sermon, the layers of Donne’s imagery here feel overdone, overworked, with so many materials and media competing for space. Combined with the abrupt shifts in the ground of his metaphor this does nothing to clarify the
imago Dei, but makes it confusing and indistinct.
One page later Donne makes a move that may explain, or at least provide context for, his encrusted visual metaphors, as he returns to his old fascination with “nothing”:
In Nature then, man, that is, the soule of man hath this Image of God, of God considered in his Unity, intirely, altogether, in this, that this soule is made of nothing, proceeds of nothing. All other creatures are made of that pre-existent matter, which God had made before, so were our bodies too; But our soules of nothing. Now, not to be made at all, is to be God himselfe: Onely God himselfe was never made. But to be made of nothing; to have no other parent but God, no other element but the breath of God, no other instrument but the purpose of God, this is to be the Image of God. (9: 82)
Although not articulated explicitly as such, Donne’s method here is apophatic. The mess of material objects has been evoked in order to be brushed away. It is the contrast with the colours and shadows that preceded it that gives this moment of the sermon such force. In “Negative Love”, Donne’s speaker asked, “Let him teach mee that nothing” (16), and in this sermon he seems to be employing material objects as the “human means” to teach and understand the divine nothing. After all his material metaphors of making, Donne shifts to his essential, anti-corporeal point: God is not made; and the soul is made of nothing.
It may seem somewhat ironic that the principal images Donne draws from the negative theologians are their metaphors of visual artworks, when they ultimately recommend moving beyond sight into darkness. But the way that visual art metaphors and negative theology repeatedly intersect in the sermons reveal something about Donne’s attitude to both. Material art provides him with analogies to illustrate abstract theological ideas. All of the material metaphors discussed here – the imago Dei, the omnivoyant icon and the statue metaphor – provide different angles on the incommensurable relationship between man and God. As Nicholas of Cusa’s picture demonstrates, God’s creation of man “in his own image and likeness”, and His vision of humanity are mirrored by mankind’s vision of God and attempts to conceptualise the divine, whether in positive or in negative terms. And like Nicholas of Cusa, Donne uses all these metaphors of art and painting to point beyond any material understanding of the human condition, towards what cannot be seen or understood.