In “Good friday, Made as I was Rideing westward, that daye”, a similar tension between the present and the absent cross is spatially enacted in the conceit of the speaker being “carried towards the west / … when [his] soules forme, bends towards the East” (ll. 9–10). The verbal paradoxes of the “Sun by ryseing sett” (11) or “Christ, on this Cross [who] did rise and fall” (13) suggest a similarly cruciform logic. As in “The Crosse”, the 1613 poem signals and then adapts an apophatic context. Its geographical conceit superimposes the metaphor of life running from east to west onto the spatial symbolism of medieval church architecture in which the crucifix was traditionally hung over the altar in the east of the building. The speaker, “whirl’d” westwards for business or for pleasure, does not contemplate the crucifix, and admits to being “glad” that he “doe[s] not see / That Spectacle, of too much weight for mee” (ll. 15–16), continuing “Whoe sees Gods face, that is self life, must dye; / What a death were it then to see God dye?” (ll. 17–18). As most of the poem’s commentators note, line 17 is a direct reference to God’s words to Moses in Exodus 33: 20: “You cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live”, the scriptural basis for the idea of the hidden God or Deus absconditus. But Donne adapts the warning in Exodus 33 by adding his own: “What a death were it then to see God dye?”, thus rhetorically, at least, placing the sight of the Crucifixion in the same category as the unimaginable, uncontemplable sight of God’s face in glory.
This juxtaposition of the hidden revelation of Exodus 33 with the Crucifixion is also central to Luther’s theology of the cross, as laid out in the theses of the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518. Theses 19 and 20 are of particular interest as they contain key statements highlighting the centrality of how we look at God:
19. Non ille digne Theologus dicitur, qui invisibilia Dei per ea, quae facta sunt, intellecta conspicit. (Anyone who observes the invisible things of God, understood through those things that are created, does not deserve to be called a theologian.)
20.
Sed qui visibilia et posteriora Dei per passiones et crucem conspecta intelligit. (But anyone who understands the visible rearward parts of God as observed in suffering and the cross does deserve to be called a theologian.)
1 WA, 1, pp. 362–363; translation: McGrath, Luther’s Theology, pp. 204–205.The English translation here is taken from Alister McGrath’s
Luther’s Theology of the Cross because, as McGrath points out, Jaroslav Pelikan’s standard English translation of thesis 20 does not highlight Luther’s reference to a key moment of divine self-revelation.
2 Jaroslav Pelikan’s translation of Luther’s twentieth Heidelberg thesis in Luther’s Works is: “He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross” (LW 31:52; my emphasis). McGrath argues that Luther’s use of the word
posteriora is a direct reference to the use of the word in God’s warning to Moses at Sinai. Having told Moses “there shall no man see me, and live”, God goes on to say, “Thou shalt see my back parts, but my face shall not be seen”, which in the Vulgate is “
videbis posteriora mea faciem autem meam videre non poteris” (Exodus 33: 23). McGrath’s translation of
visibilia et posteriora Dei as “visible rearward parts of God as observed in suffering and the cross” (as opposed to Pelikan’s “visible manifest things of God”) insists on the reference to Exodus 33 and therefore on the fact that this is a
hidden revelation. According to McGrath, “it is clear that this is precisely what Luther intended to convey by the phrase”.
3 McGrath, Luther’s Theology, p. 204. Luther’s bringing together of the hidden revelation of Exodus 33 and Christ’s suffering on the cross is central to his theology of the cross. For Luther, Christ’s incarnation and specifically his suffering on the cross
is the “back side of God” or the “visible rearward parts of God”, and it is all we can see. McGrath also points out that the theological engagement implied in the theology of the cross is not merely rational but also visual. A theologian of the cross “understands what is seen” rather than “observing through what is understood”.
The paraphrase of Exodus 33:20 in line 17 of “Good friday” – “Whoe sees Gods face, that is self life, must dye” – immediately followed by Donne’s development of this – “What a death were it then to see God dye” – seems to invoke the logic of Luther’s theology of the cross as expressed in his twentieth Heidelberg thesis. This reference to the Deus absconditus in the context of the Crucifixion highlights the opposition Luther makes between seeing God and understanding God as observed in suffering and the cross.
Recent scholarship has demonstrated that Donne’s couplet referencing Exodus has a somewhat unstable status in the poem’s history. The couplet (ll. 17–18) is not included in two manuscript versions of “Good friday” in the hand of Nathaniel Rich, discovered in the 1970s, one of which misses out the following couplet as well.
4 Margaret Maurer and Dennis Flynn, “The text of Goodf and Donne’s Itinerary in April 1613”, in Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation 8, no. 2 (2013): 50–94 (pp. 84–87). Beal, Index, DnJ 1430 (P2), in private hands; Beal, Index, DnJ 1431 (PT2), Robert Taylor Collection, Princeton University Library. Although bibliographical evidence cannot conclusively determine whether the version of “Good friday” recorded in these two manuscript versions is the result of scribal error, or whether it records an earlier authorial version, various circumstances lead Margaret Maurer and Dennis Flynn to cautiously conclude that the Rich manuscripts record an earlier stage in the poem’s composition, prior to the manuscript tradition recorded in the 1633
Poems. Donne’s close relationship with the Rich family at this period reinforces this hypothesis, but the most compelling, though circumstantial, evidence that these manuscripts record an earlier “tentative authorial trial” is the internal coherence of the variant readings found in them: none of the “missing” couplets leads to an obviously faulty reading.
5 Maurer and Flynn, “Text of Goodf”, p. 60; p. 66.Maurer and Flynn demonstrate how, if we accept this chronology of authorial revision, the addition of the reference to Exodus 33:20, combined with other changes made to the poem, chart a shift from an earlier emphasis on the Crucifixion as a past, biblical event, to a revised version that recognises the Crucifixion as a “present possibility” in the life of the speaker.
6 Maurer and Flynn, “Text of Goodf”, p. 77. This is most noticeable in a marked change of tense in line 15 (the couplet that would immediately precede the lines referencing Exodus 33), which in the earlier version of “Good friday”, reads: “Yett am I almost glad, I
did not see / That spectacle, of too much weight for me” (P2, 15–16). In the later canonical version the couplet is: “Yet dare I almost bee glad, I
doe not see / That Spectacle of too much weight for mee” (ll. 15–16; my emphasis). The poem, Maurer and Flynn argue, thus emphasises the life-journey of the speaker as “a mortal being” – a mortality which is emphasised by the “dye / dye” rhyme of the added couplet – who, though constrained by life’s duties to pursue business or pleasure, “can only trust that God’s grace will find in time some means to restore God’s image in him for that final reckoning”.
7 Maurer and Flynn, “Text of Goodf”, p. 82. The juxtaposition of the present-tense “Spectacle” of the Crucifixion with the added reference to the divine self-revelation of Exodus 33 means that the poem progresses toward an assertion of the presence of the cross in the life of the speaker which corresponds closely to Luther’s theology of the cross.
Yet, having apparently established this parallel between the
Deus absconditus and the Crucifixion, Donne immediately goes in another direction. The fact that his speaker is “almost … glad”
not to “see / That Spectacle …” (ll. 15–16) seems to run counter to the logic of Luther’s twentieth thesis. While for Luther, God is “hidden” in the Crucifixion and so the Crucifixion with all its suffering must be observed, Donne’s speaker in “Good friday” seems to shy away from looking at the cross. God seems to be “hidden” in Donne’s poem because the speaker does not engage visually with the Crucifixion. He does, however, engage with the Crucifixion through the faculty of memory: “these things … are present yet vnto my Memorie” (ll. 33–34). As Maurer and Flynn highlight, the speaker of the revised version of the poem “takes comfort in an assured assertion that … the faculty of memory has been and will always be available to assist his meditation on that event”.
8 Maurer and Flynn, “Text of Goodf”, p. 8. Read in the context of Donne’s fascination with memory in his sermons, the insistence on memory in “Good friday” may point toward a new way of understanding the
posteriora Dei, the visible rearward parts of God.
9 On memory and salvation in Donne, see Achsah Guibbory, “John Donne and Memory as the ‘Art of Salvation’”, Huntington Library Quarterly 43, no. 4 (1980): 261–274, and Donald M. Friedman, “Memory and the Art of Salvation in Donne’s Goodfriday Poem”, English Literary Renaissance 3, no. 3 (1973): 418–422. Donne’s sermon preached at Hanworth to James Hay, Earl of Carlisle and company in 1622, already briefly discussed in Chapter 2, contains many parallels to his Good Friday poem, and particularly illuminates the role played by the memory in this scheme of salvation. The Hanworth sermon is an important part of the network of texts reflecting Donne’s thinking on negative theology and the hidden God. In this sermon, as in “The Crosse”, Donne evokes some of the ideas of mystical theology only to adapt them to a more Christological kind of negative theology. The sermon opens by juxtaposing two verses from the Psalms – “God hath made darknesse his secret place” (Ps. 18.11) and “God covers himself with light as with a garment” (Ps. 104.2) – in order to oppose darkness and light as ways of seeing God (Sermons 4:164). While the first part of the sermon rejects the idea that God is only to be found in darkness (4: 168–169), the second part proposes darkness as a corrective to our sight and a means to prepare for the vision of God in glory. This paradox sounds like textbook mystical theology, but Donne is not referring to the mystical darkness of unknowing and the via negativa, or at least not directly. Rather, by darkness he means affliction or suffering, which, he explains, in a complicated chain of medicinal metaphors, is the corrective “eye-salve”, or the corrective “spectacles” that will improve our spiritual sight. Just as in “The Crosse”, afflictions, or crosses, proved to be “good Phisick” (l. 25), here Donne similarly merges the lexical fields of vision and affliction, in order to develop this very specific medicinal metaphor: “God made the Sun, and Moon, and Stars, glorious lights for man to see by; but man’s infirmity requires spectacles, and affliction does that office” (4: 171).
Affliction is the corrective glass through which man must look in order to prepare to see God, and Donne develops his theme of the spectacles of affliction in a passage that strongly evokes the rhetoric of mystical theology, but uses this language to shift to a focus on the sufferings of Christ:
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 afflications, and wholsome corrections upon us. … 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)
The reference to the “red glass” here, drawn from Nicholas of Cusa’s
De Visione Dei,
10 See Chapter 2, pp. 65–67. while still used in the context of man’s vision of God, is given a much more Christological focus, just as the language of the opening sentence here, so reminiscent of the mystical darkness of Pseudo-Dionysius and Nicholas of Cusa, quickly resolves itself into the idea of darkness as affliction. As in “The Crosse”, a visual metaphor explaining the mystical project of going beyond human knowledge in order to see God is subtly altered to acquire a much more Christological perspective. While for Cusanus the image illustrated the way in which, just as the “bodily eye, looking through a red glass, judges as red whatever it sees”, or can visualise God only in human terms, the “red glass” in Donne’s sermon is adapted to signify the passion and blood of Christ. Mystical theology continues to provide Donne with metaphors and analogies that feed into his fascination with how we see the world and try to see God. The insistence of mystical writers such as Pseudo-Dionysius and Nicholas of Cusa that we have to move beyond the material is well adapted to the Reformation climate of suspicion of idolatry. But in the cases of both the Dionysian statue and the Cusean red glass Donne transposes the mystical metaphor in such a way that it is at once more human and rooted in the theology of the incarnation.
While the language of crosses and afflictions used here strongly echoes “The Crosse”, Donne goes on in the passage immediately following to develop the sight of “Christ Jesus in his blood” into a vision of God that has many linguistic and thematic parallels with “Good friday”, including an explicit reference to the hidden God of Exodus 33:23:
he hath manifested himselfe to me in his Sonne, being mounted, and raised by dwelling in his Church, being made like unto him, in suffering, as he suffered, I can see round about me, even to the Horizon, and beyond it, I can see both Hemispheres at once, God in this, God in the next world too. I can see him, in the Zenith, in the highest point … and I can see him in the Nadir, in the lowest dejection; I can see him in the East, see how mercifully he brought the Christian Religion amongst us, and see him in the West, see how justly he might remove that againe… I can see him in all angles, in all postures; … Abraham saw God coming [to him]; Moses saw God going, his glory passing by; he saw posteriora, his hinder parts; so I can see God in the memory of his blessings formerly conferred on me. (4: 175)
The way that this passage situates the crucified Christ visually in space, in the Zenith and the Nadir, in the East and in the West, parallels it both iconographically and linguistically with “Good friday”. In the poem, the speaker contemplates the cross through a series of questions, an approach that is apophatic in the rhetorical as well as the theological sense:
Could I behold those hands which span the Poles,
And turne all Spheres at once pierc’d with those holes?
Could I behold that endless height, which is
Zenith to vs…?” (ll. 21–24)
In the sermon, however, Donne confidently asserts, “I can see him, in the Zenith … I can see him in the East … and see him in the West … I can see him in all angles.” Poem and sermon, though, come to the same point, asserting that the sight of God is to be found in the memory. In the poem this is what resolves the problem of not seeing, or of looking in the wrong direction: “Though these things as I ride bee from mine eye, / They’are present yet vnto my Memorie” (ll. 33–34). And in the sermon the realisation that “I can see God in the memory of his blessings formerly conferred on me” is directly paralleled with the hidden revelation of Exodus 33.23. Like Luther in his twentieth thesis, Donne quotes the Vulgate’s “posteriora”, translating it himself as “hinder parts”: “Moses saw God going, his glory passing by; he saw posteriora, his hinder parts; so I can see God in the memory of his blessings.”
This paralleling of Moses’s vision of God’s hinder parts and God as seen in the memory of his blessings may be related to the theory, to be found in the writings of Galen and Avicenna, that the memory is anatomically located in the rearmost chamber or “ventricle” of the brain.
11 See Andrew Hiscock, Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 28–30; p. 183. Donne himself refers to this tradition when he preaches on memory in his “Sermon of Valediction at my going into Germany” on April 18, 1619, another of the sermons that contains imagery drawn from Nicholas of Cusa’s
De Visione Dei: ”Remember therefore, and remember now, though the Memory be placed in the hindermost part of the brain, defer not thou thy remembring to the hindermost part of thy life, but doe that now
in die, in the day, whil’st thou hast light” (2:235). The association of the memory with the hinder parts (of the brain, of God) helps to resolve what might seem to be a contradiction in Donne’s Good Friday poem. Although a Lutheran interpretation of Exodus 33:20 implies that the only way to approach God would be through the contemplation of Christ’s suffering on the cross, the speaker of “Good friday” seems to turn away from a Lutheran theology of the cross as he shies away from the Crucifixion, “glad [not to] see / That Spectacle, of too much weight for mee” (15–16). But if we read the poem in the light of the Hanworth sermon and the revelation that looking backward in time, into the memory, may be equated to Moses looking at God from behind, then the speaker’s convoluted refusal to look at the scene of the Crucifixion reveals a new understanding of the
Deus absconditus. The memory represents the
posteriora Dei and it is there that the sight of Christ’s passion is located.
This apparent reversal of the Lutheran contemplation of Christ crucified and the replacement of the eye by the memory is illustrated by the almost chiasmic structure of line 35. The lack of a perfect chiasmus, in fact, shows the imperfection of sinful man’s attempt to contemplate God. The act of looking is strangely deferred: “that” (his memory) looks towards “them” (“these things”, images of God). God’s gaze is much simpler and more direct: “thou look’st towards mee”, and yet the speaker seems to be in some doubt as to whether God will “know” him (l. 42).
Donne’s reinterpretation of Exodus 33:23 is marked by a pointed reversal of the dynamics of the Exodus verse: whereas God showed Moses his back, in the poem it is the speaker, the sinner, who turns his back to God “to receiue / Corrections” (ll. 37–38), asking the Saviour to “Burne off my Rusts, and my deformitye, / Restore thine Image” (ll. 40–41). This corrective and corrosive action of the crucifix at the end of “Good friday” can be directly paralleled with the application of the cross to the person of the sinner to remove “what hid Christ in thee” in “The Crosse” (l. 35). The negative, erasing action of the cross in both poems is ultimately positive, creative like the sculptor’s tool as it restores the imago Dei.