The crucifix had been a highly charged religious and political image in England since the 1540s when all church crucifixes were destroyed under Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, following the Royal Injunctions of 1538. They were reinstated during Mary’s reign, but many in a very temporary fashion, painted on canvas or on boards, only to be swept away again with the accession of Elizabeth to the throne in 1558.
1 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 406–407; p. 454; Phillips, Reformation of Images, pp. 109–110. For an in-depth discuss of the place of the cross “at the heart of all iconoclastic controversy”, see Aston, Broken Idols, pp. 707–882. In Donne’s period, the crucifix was still a contested image. “The Crosse” is often read in this context as an anti-iconoclastic defence of the “image”, the “picture”, the physical crucifix, opening as it does, “Since Christ embraced the Crosse itt selfe, dare I / His image, th’image of his Crosse deny?” (ll. 1–2). Helen Gardner describes the poem as Donne “defending the cross as a pious and proper personal possession”.
2 Gardner, ed., Divine Poems, p. 92. The opening part does insist on the physical form of the cross, yet this is qualified by the lines: “Materiall crosses, then, good Phisick bee, / And yett Spirituall haue cheefe dignitie; /… and cure mvch better” (ll. 25–26; 28). This shift to “spirituall” crosses is often used to link the poem’s defence of the cross to the controversy surrounding the Puritan ministers’ call to abolish the sign of the cross in baptism in 1603–1604.
3 William A. McQueen, “Donne’s ‘The Crosse’”, Explicator 45, no. 3 (1987), 9. See also Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, p. 873 n. 508.At the precise midpoint of the poem, however, in line 33, we find Donne evoking a visual artwork of quite a different sort:
As perchaunce Caruers doe not faces make,
But that away, which hid them there, do take.
Lett Crosses soe, take what hid Christ in thee,
And bee his Image, or not his, butt Hee. (ll. 33–36)
This condensed, oblique reference to the sculptor’s “substractive” practice of removing, rather than adding material from his medium to create the work of art has been paralleled with Michelangelo’s evocation of the art of the sculptor in his Rima 151: “Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto / c’un marmo solo in sé no circonscriva” (“The best of artists can no subject find / That is not in a single block of stone”).
4 Michelangelo, Poems and Letters, trans. Anthony Mortimer (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 151. Having suggested the parallel, Mario Praz points out that at the moment of writing “The Crosse” Donne “could not have known of Michelangelo’s sonnets, which were posthumously published in 1623”.
5 Mario Praz, The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli and Other Studies of the Relation between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1966), p. 203. This identification is also made by both Smith, ed., Donne, Complete English Poems, p. 648 and Alexander B. Chambers, Transfigured Rites in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), p. 207. However, as with his reference to the “Statuaries” who represent men “by Substraction” in his 1627 Trinity Sunday sermon (8: 54), the source seems likely to be Pseudo-Dionysius’s use of the sculptor in the second chapter of his treatise
The Mystical Theology to illustrate the
via negativa.
6 See Chapter 2 of this book, pp. 58–61. Robin Robbins identifies the parallel between the sermon passage and “The Crosse”, though does not suggest Pseudo-Dionysius as a source, Poems of John Donne, 2: p. 11. Michael Martin finds a parallel between Donne’s account of the affirmative way of representing God in the passage quoted above and the language used in another work of Dionysius’, The Divine Names, which similarly describes humankind attributing human or physical forms to God: “they praise its eyes, ears, hair, face, hands, back, wings, and arms, a posterior, and feet”, Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, p. 57. Martin agrees that Donne “relies heavily on Dionysius” in the 1627 Trinity Sunday sermon, though he does not identify the statue imagery as originating with Dionysius. Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), p. 65.Here the mystical method of approaching God through acknowledgement of what he is not is compared to the practice of the sculptor who chips extraneous material away from the marble to reveal the work of art:
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.
7 Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, p. 138.Donne’s concise reference to Pseudo-Dionysius’s carver who removes rather than creating certainly evokes the via negativa of the mystics, but the way he develops it takes the principles of negation in quite a different direction.
In “The Crosse” Donne takes the negation, the subtraction, illustrated by the art of the carver or sculptor and applies it not to the knowledge of God but rather to the soul of man. His reinterpretation of the statue analogy is developed in the couplet “Lett Crosses soe, take what hid Christ in thee, / And bee his Image, or not his, but Hee” (ll. 35–36). The image in question is no longer – or not only – the image of Christ on the cross but the image of God in man that is to be revealed, and the cross takes on the role of the carver, or the carver’s chisel, working on man in order to erase “what hid Christ in thee” (35). The internal idols that obscure the imago Dei are chipped away as “the Crosse of Christ work[s] fruitefullye / With in our Harts” (61–62). Donne uses a very similar image, though without the explicitly apophatic associations, in a sermon preached in 1620 to the Countess of Bedford:
So then the children of God, are the Marble, and the Ivory, upon which he works; In them his purpose is, to re-engrave, and restore his Image; and affliction, and the malignity of man, and the deceits of Heretiques, and the tentations of the Devill him selfe, are but his instruments, his tools, to make his Image more discernable, and more durable in us. (9: 193)
The metaphor of the sculptor turns the cross from a passive icon of Christ into an active participant in the redemptive process. This brings it much closer to a Lutheran kind of apophatic theology than to the original Pseudo-Dionysian metaphor. And this metaphor at the midpoint of the poem transforms not only the cross but the direction of the poem itself.
At first sight, the opening of “The Crosse” seems to be an affirmation of the material cross rather than any kind of negation, with the list of crosses to be found in nature functioning to reinforce the visual validity of the “image of the cross”. Yet although Donne’s speaker asks “who can blott out the Crosse…?” (l. 15), the rapid succession of examples of naturally occurring cruciforms in lines 17–32 serves, if not exactly to blot out, certainly to blur the image of the crucifix. The first half of the poem also introduces the standard transferred use of “cross” to mean “affliction”, and this double meaning contributes to the blurring repetition of the word, as the “crosses” borne by the Christian are celebrated alongside the array of manmade and natural crosses to be perceived in the world around us. This distorting multiplication of cross-like shapes leads into the “spirituall” and internal cross of the second part of the poem and prepares the reader for Donne’s play with the word “cross”, creating a much more complex engagement with the crucifix than the opening of the poem might lead us to expect. It is only in the second half of the poem, however, following the Pseudo-Dionysian sculptor metaphor of lines 33–34, that the cross itself is grammatically transformed from noun into verb and begins to act rather than simply being. The cross becomes the carver’s tool that chips away to remove or scratch out “what hid Christ in thee”. It does this by becoming a verb of negative action, taking on the meaning of cancel or erase (OED cross v. 4. a): “crosse / Your ioy in crosses (41–42); “crosse thy senses” (43); “Crosse the rest: / Make them indifferent” (47–48); “Crosse those deiections” (53); “Crosse, and correct Concupissence of witt” (58); “crosse thy selfe in all” (60).
The idea that the action of the cross will work on the sinner to reveal God’s grace within him is very Lutheran, indeed the basis of Luther’s theology of the cross. And Donne’s move in this poem from the statue analogy to the action of the cross is highly reminiscent of Luther’s own adaptation and appropriation of the terms of Pseudo-Dionysian apophatic theology. As Paul Rorem has shown, despite his statements rejecting negative theology as practised by Pseudo-Dionysius, “Luther explicitly moves from a Pseudo-Dionysian apophatic to a ‘negative theology’ of the cross”.
8 Paul Rorem, “Negative Theologies and The Cross”, Harvard Theological Review 101, no. 3/4 (2008): 458–463 (p. 462). Luther is fairly abrupt in dismissing Pseudo-Dionysius’s ideas, writing in 1520 in the treatise
The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, “So far, indeed, from learning Christ in [Pseudo-Dionysius’s works], you will lose even what you already know of him. I speak from experience. Let us rather hear Paul, that we may learn Jesus Christ and him crucified.”
9 Luther’s Works, ed. by Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehman, 55 vols (Philadelphia: Muehlenberg and Fortress, and St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1955–1986), 36: 109 (hereafter LW). Luther’s Latin reads, “Christum ibi adeo non disces ut, si etiam scias, amittas. Expertus loquor. Paulum potius audiamus, ut Iesum Christum et hunc crucfixum discamus”. Luther, Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. by J. F. K. Knake, 67 vols (Weimar: Hermann Bohlaus Nachfolger, 1883–1997), 6:562.8–13 (hereafter WA = Weimarer Ausgabe). Pseudo-Dionysius and Luther both reject intellectual or metaphysical knowledge as a way to approach the divine, and find God rather in darkness, although for Pseudo-Dionysius this means “plung[ing] into that darkness which is beyond intellect” to become “speechless and unknowing”,
10 Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, p. 139. whereas for Luther the darkness is to be found in Christ’s suffering on the cross. Some fifteen years later Luther explicitly moves from a dismissal of Pseudo-Dionysius into a reappropriation of the term “negative theology” in the light of the theology of the cross: “Therefore Dionysius, who wrote about ‘negative theology’ and ‘affirmative theology,’ deserves to be ridiculed … If we wish to give a true definition of “negative theology”, we should say that it is the holy cross and the afflictions [attending it].”
11 LW 13:110–111, quoted by Rorem, “Negative Theologies”, p. 462 n. 51. “Quare merito ridetur Dionysius, qui scripsit de Theologia Negativa et Affirmitiva…. Nos autem, si vere volumus Theologiam negativam definire, statuemus eam esse sanctam Crucem et tentationes, in quibus Deus quidem non cernitur, et tamen adest ille gemitus, de quo iam dixi”: Enarratio Psalmi 90 (1534/35 [1541]); Ps. 90:7 (WA, 40/3, p. 543.8–13). Even the phrase that has become a kind of motto for Luther’s theology of the cross, “Crux sola est nostra theologia”, or “The Cross alone is our theology”, comes from a passage in
Operationes in Psalmos (1519–1521) where Luther disputes the mystical theologians’ interpretation of “going into the darkness, ascending beyond being and non-being”, adding, “truly I do not know whether they understand themselves, if they attribute it to [humanly] elicited acts and do not rather believe that the sufferings of the cross, death and hell are being signified. The CROSS alone is our theology.”
12 Rorem, “Negative Theologies”, p. 462. “Hunc ductum Theologici mystici vocant In tenebras ire, ascendere super ens et non ens. Verum nescio, an scipsos intelligant, si id actibuts elicitis tribuunt et non potius crucis, mortis infernique passiones significari credunt. CRUX sola est nostra Theologia”: Operationes in Psalmos (WA, 5, p. 176.27–33).Such an “incarnational apophatic”, as Rorem terms it, does not originate with Luther, but can be seen as part of a tradition that includes the writings of the seventh-century Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor and St Bonaventure in the thirteenth century.
13 Rorem, “Negative Theologies”, pp. 460–461. What is more specifically Lutheran is the idea of the cross acting on man to improve him. As another Lutheran theologian puts it:
Luther was an apophatic (negative) theologian of a different sort … Luther did not understand the negation only as a moment in one’s use of analogy to “unsay” what cannot rightly be said of an infinite being. Instead, the negation is always the act of God applying the cross to our very persons in this world.
14 Stephen D. Paulson, “Luther on the Hidden God”, Word and World 19:4 (1999): 362–371 (p. 364).In a sermon preached at St Paul’s Donne describes a similar shift from the desire for metaphysical knowledge of God to the knowledge that comes only from Christ’s passion, insisting on the importance of applying this to the self. He refers, like Luther, to Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 2: 2: “I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified”:
I may have as much knowledge, as is presently necessary for my salvation, and yet have a restlesse and unsatisfied desire, to search into unprofitable curiosities, unrevealed mysteries, and inextricable perplexities: And, on the other side, a man may be satisfied, and thinke he knowes all, when, God knowes, he knowes nothing at all; for, I know nothing, if I know not Christ crucified, And I know not that, if I know not how to apply him to my selfe… (5:276)
It is precisely this shift from the Pseudo-Dionysian apophatic to the application of the cross that we see in Donne’s poem, as “crosses” are applied to “take what hid Christ in thee” and reveal the image of God in man. This shift in the second part of “The Crosse” not only moves the poem away from being a defence of the cross as a physical, visual work of art to be looked at, but also strongly suggests that its corrective and erasing action is inherent to, indeed constitutive of, the cross itself. The poem splits precisely into two parts and the shift in focus is marked both by the introduction of the Pseudo-Dionysian carver and the printed cruciform letter x, which, as Theresa DiPasquale persuasively points out, appears at the poem’s centre in the word “crucifix” at the end of line 32.
15 Theresa M. DiPasquale, Literature and Sacrament: The Sacred and the Secular in John Donne, Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies (MRLS) (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1999), p. 40. I find DiPasquale’s point about the x marking the mid-point of the poem more persuasive if the word “crucifix” ends in “–x”, as it does in just over a third of the extant manuscript versions of the poem. Other manuscript versions and all the early printed versions before 1669 have “crucifixe”..
This central x is iconically appropriate since the change of direction in the second half of the poem is what gives it the form of the cross.
It is noteworthy that as “cross” becomes a verb and takes on this cancelling and corrective role, its corrective function is applied particularly to the sense of sight and the appreciation of icons – the appreciation of the cross itself – which is precisely what seemed to be celebrated in the first part of the poem:
Therfore crosse
Your ioy in crosses, els tis double losse;
And crosse thy senses, els both they, and thou
Must perish soone, and to destruction bowe.
[…]
But most the Eie needs crossing, that can rome,
And move… (41–44; 49–50)
Significantly, while all the senses have to be checked, “the Eie needs crossing” most of all. While the first part of the poem established the cross as the “chosen Altar” (4) of Christ’s sacrifice, and rhetorically demanded how it could be despised, the second part warns that in the case of an excessive “ioy in crosses”, both idol and idolator will potentially perish.
Such an even-handed consideration of the image question is characteristic of Donne’s judicious approach to the religious image throughout his work. As he puts it in “Satyre 3”, “To’adore, or scorne an Image, or protest,/ May all be bad; doubt wisely; In strange way /To stand inquyring right, is not to stray” (ll. 76–78).
16 Stringer et al., eds., Variorum 3: Satyres, p. 92. Indeed the move in “The Crosse”, from an apparent criticism of iconoclasm to a warning about the dangers of idolatry, can be read as an inverted version of his later, much-quoted, balanced take on the image question in a sermon of 1627:
Væ Idolalatris, woe to such advancers of Images, as would throw down Christ, rather then his Image: But Væ Iconoclastis too, woe to such peremptory abhorrers of Pictures, and to such uncharitable condemners of all those who admit any use of them, as had rather throw down a Church, than let a Picture stand. (7:433)
If our eyes cannot distinguish good crosses from bad, the speaker of “The Crosse” continues, we should treat them all as “indifferent” – “Make them indifferent” (48) – an expression which, in this context, refers clearly to the debates of the iconoclastic controversy and Luther’s identification of images and other contentious rituals as “adiaphora”: neither essential to salvation nor harmful.
17 Koerner, Reformation of the Image, p. 157.Just as the cross – like “The Crosse” – contains the potential for both idolatry and iconoclasm, the crosses of the first half of the poem, both material images and afflictions, are “crossed” – cancelled or erased – by the second half of the poem. Indeed, the second half of the poem can be seen to correct the first half in more ways than one, calling into question not only the speaker’s initial defiant justification of the physical image but also his somewhat self-flagellating pleasure in tribulation. “Better were worse”, the speaker asserts in the first half of the poem, “for no affliction, / No crosse is soe extreame as to haue none” (13–14), which reads almost as a caricature of a Christian willing acceptance of suffering, and recalls the similarly ambiguous lines on martyrdom in “A Litany”: “oh, to some, / Not to bee Martyres, ys a Martyrdome” (89–90). The second half of “The Crosse”, in contrast, warns against the risks of undue pleasure in adversity: “so may a selfe despising, gett selfe loue … Soe is Pride issued from hvmilitie” (38, 40). This “ioy in crosses”, too, must be “crossed”. The heart must also be crossed, “for that in Mann alone / Poynts downewardes, and hath Palpitation” (51–52). These lines have been interpreted as referring to lusts and base desires,
18 See, e.g., The Complete Poems of John Donne, ed. by Robin Robbins (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 473. but the following lines gloss this downward tendency of the heart as “deiections”, which are as potentially dangerous to its owner as upward aspirations to “forbidden heights” (54). This again corrects the rather self-aggrandising image of the speaker in the first half of the poem stretching his arms to become his own cross: “Who can deny mee power, and liberty / To strech myne Armes, and myne owne Crosse to bee?” (17–18).
The contradictory, cancelling logic that opposes the first half of the poem to the second half is what turns it into a “Crosse”, just as a cross is made of one line crossing out another. The first half which asserts the primacy of the material image is simultaneously present and cancelled out by the second half, an act of erasure in the Heideggerean or Derridean sense of the term.
19 See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 60–61, and Spivak’s translator’s introduction to the same volume, pp. xv–xviii. The two halves of the poem intersect at the central statue image drawn from Pseudo-Dionysius’
Mystical Theology, which appears to generate Donne’s play with the word
cross that permits the cancelling action of the verb. The cross both visually and verbally carries within itself the erasing and destructive action that Donne’s poem wittily mimics, and so is an apt sign for the paradoxical nature of Christ’s sacrifice, a paradox that is contained within Luther’s theology of the cross, where God is both revealed and, paradoxically, hidden in the cross of Christ.
20 Alister E. McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), p. 149.