Chapter 4 Crucifixion

Christ’s cross is the central image of Western Christian iconography, yet perhaps no image is more contested. So it is perhaps not surprising that in his poems on the cross Donne most pointedly highlights the conflicting discourses of iconolatry and iconoclasm. We have already seen that his treatment of the scene of the Crucifixion, in the context of his Annunciation poems, is far from straightforward. In “La Corona”, he represents the Crucifixion in terms of spatial paradox rather than describing it visually, and in “Upon the Annunciation”, despite the poem’s insistence on “seeing”, the soul contemplates only the fringes of the scene of the Passion through the figure of the Virgin Mary without confronting the Crucifixion head-on. Donne repeatedly highlights and problematises the status of the cross as a visual icon, and in the three poems that deal most explicitly with the topic, his approach continues to be oblique. In “Good friday, Made as I was Rideing westward, that daye”1 The title “Good friday, Made as I was Rideing westward, that daye” is the one used in the Variorum so I adopt it here. Hereafter in the chapter I will use the short form “Good friday”, Johnson et al., Variorum 7.2, pp. 147–148. the speaker is facing in the wrong direction to contemplate the “Spectacle” (ll. 15; 13) of “Christ, on this Cross”, while in the Holy Sonnet “What if this present were the world’s last night”, the “picture of Christ crucified” (l. 3) is forced into conflict with the competing image of Christ at the Last Judgement. The vocabulary of the visual in these poems – the “spectacle”, the “picture” – is also used in “The Crosse”,2 Johnson et al., eds., Variorum 7.2: Divine Poems, pp. 114–115. In Variorum the poem has the title “Of the Crosse”, but I will use the shorter (and more familiar) version “The Crosse” throughout. which opens with the “Image of his Crosse” (l. 2). But although this poem seems at first to be a relatively unproblematic celebration of the cruciform and its place in worship, the cross proves to be a slippery signifier. As in all of these poems, its status is far from simple. The anxiety about looking at the cross that Donne stages in these poems can be seen as an extension of his concern about representation in general, and representation of the divine in particular, as discussed in previous chapters. The contemplation of Christ’s death, however, brings with it a special set of strictures and concerns. In both “Good friday” and “The Crosse”, Donne parallels his problematic pictures of the cross with images drawn from mystical and apophatic theology. “The Crosse” makes use of a key metaphor also used by the sixth-century theologian Pseudo-Dionysius in his The Mystical Theology. Finally, however, the negative theology that enables his speakers to interact with the crosses and crucifixes in these poems is not so much Dionysian as Lutheran. Luther’s “theology of the cross” provides an important context for the centrality of the cross to Donne’s thinking, and his anti-iconoclastic writings also influence Donne’s attitudes to religious iconography in his own iconoclastic society.