Koerner points out the irony inherent in the iconoclastic defacement of the crucifix. He argues that the crucifix is itself already an image of defacement, and the emphasis laid on the scourging and piercing of the body of Christ in meditations on the Passion foreshadows the defacement of the crucifix by the iconoclasts.
1 Koerner, Reformation, p. 109–111. Passion plays rigorously re-enacted Christ’s flagellation and torture, and in some pre-Reformation Crucifixion images it is difficult to distinguish the body of Christ behind the blood that covers it. The blood of Christ already serves to hide his body from view, rather as, in our sonnet, the blood of the crucified Christ serves to fill in and smooth out the frowns of Christ the Judge. The final effect of the practice of affective piety, “this exercise of achieving a mental picture of the ruination of a body” was, in Koerner’s words, “the recognition that what we end up seeing, in our head, in the painting, is also everything Christ is
not”.
2 Koerner, Reformation, p. 126. In other words, Christ’s divinity is concealed by the extreme humanity of his Crucifixion, the humility and the ugliness of it. As prophesised in Isaiah, “he hath no form nor comeliness, and when we shall see him there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is … a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isa. 53: 2–3).
The verse from Isaiah contextualises, but also problematises, Donne’s language in the sestet of the sonnet and particularly its closing lines. The “beauteous forme” of the last line seems to deliberately counter the man of sorrows verse, with its insistence that Christ will have “no form … no beauty”. Critics have dealt with this by claiming that the beauty of the last line refers to the “ethical beauty” of Christ’s act of redemption, in which the “event becomes beautiful”.
3 Doniphan Louthan, The Poetry of John Donne: A Study in Explication (New York: Bookman Associates, 1951), p. 122; Paul W. Harland, “‘A True Transubstantiation’: Donne, Self-love, and the Passion”, in John Donne’s Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross, ed. by Raymond-Jean Frontain and Frances M. Malpezzi (Conway, AR: UCA Press, 1995), pp. 162–180 (p. 167). We might, though, be tempted to read the “beauteous” Christ of the last line as the Christ Judge, revealed in glory. It may have been temporarily erased, or concealed, by the picture of Christ crucified in the octave, but at the end of the sestet, Christ’s divine beauty seems to reassert itself. It is as if the act of iconoclasm attempted in the octave, the erasure of Christ Judge by Christ crucified, has not entirely succeeded. If the erasure of the octave worked by superimposing the picture of Christ crucified on top of the picture of Christ Judge, concealing but not destroying it, perhaps the two overlaid pictures can be seen as a kind of palimpsest. The scene of Judgement and Christ’s divine beauty are temporarily concealed, but in time begin to show through again, the “amazeing light” once more penetrating the mess of blood and tears which obscured it.
4 Catherine Gimelli Martin also sees a “palimpsest” in this sonnet, although for her it is “a two-sided scroll or palimpsest reflecting the two opposing images of God: on the one side beauty and pity, on the other duplicity and death”. “Unmeete Contraryes: The Reformed Subject and the Triangulation of Religious Desire in Donne’s Anniversaries and Holy Sonnets”, in John Donne and the Protestant Reformation, ed. by Mary Arshagouni Papazian (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), pp. 193–220 (p. 209).However this reading is not entirely satisfactory because it does not take into account the other elements in the sestet that further complicate the images of the octave. The sestet has proved consistently problematic for critics, partly because of the intrusion of Donne’s “profane mistresses” into the sacred territory of the sonnet, and partly because of an uneasiness regarding the logic of the context in which they appear. The argument that emerges from Donne’s tortured syntax uses an analogy from the profane world to assuage his spiritual doubts. Donne’s persona used to flatter and seduce his mistresses with the argument that a beautiful woman would take pity on her lover and succumb to his advances, while a less beautiful woman would maintain an unfeeling “rigour”. The spurious logic of this then appears to be transferred to the contemplation of the image of Christ: “so I say to thee” the persona addresses (presumably) his soul, “To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assign’d / This beauteous forme assures a piteous minde.” It is the unhelpful juxtaposition of the profane and the sacred in the sestet, as well as its faulty logic, that has caused such a strong critical reaction. Martz finds the sonnet’s sestet “unworthy of [the] opening: the reference to ‘all my profane mistresses’ is in the worst of taste: there is almost a tone of bragging here”, and Richard Gill, too, comments on the possibly “boastful” recollections of his profane mistresses.
5 Martz, Poetry of Meditation, p. 84; Richard Gill, John Donne: Selected Poems (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 10. John Carey goes further, describing the sestet as “blasphemous” and continuing:
He contemplates the Saviour’s bloody face, and searches for some argument that will assure him of salvation. But all he can find among the dazed, licentious thoughts that have become habitual to him is the hideous piffle about pity and pretty faces which the last six lines throw up.
6 Carey, John Donne, p. 47.The perceived bragging and blasphemy of the sestet, however, do not invalidate the power of the octave. The mention of the mistresses, and particularly their qualification as “profane”, has the effect of bringing the sonnet firmly back down to earth and reminds us that the word “beauty” may be used in many contexts.
The whole sonnet has been following a downward trajectory, in a sense, from the “last night” suspended above the Crucifixion as in a pre-Reformation church, through the increasingly human and bloody depiction of the crucified Christ. Coming immediately after the octave’s images in conflict, the mention of “idolatrie” in line 9 reinserts us in the iconophobic context of Donne’s time with a pertinent reminder of the potential result of relying too strongly on “pictures”. This is followed by the dissonance caused by the introduction of the profane mistresses and the “piffle” of the speaker’s spurious analogy, which forcefully reminds us of physical, worldly beauty and its effect on the sinful self. The evocation of idolatry and of the mistresses combined have the effect of calling into question the meaning of the word “beauty” at the same time as the syntax of the poem leaves the reader in some doubt as to whose mind is “piteous”. Thomas O. Sloane points out that, depending on how we understand the word “piteous”, the “piteous minde” could belong to the speaker or the reader as much as to Christ: “‘Piteous’ means both full of pity, or compassionate (in which case the ‘minde’ is Christ’s), and pitiful, or moving to compassion (in which case the ‘minde’ is the speaker’s, and ours)”.
7 Thomas O. Sloane, Donne, Milton, and the End of Humanist Rhetoric (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1985), p. 206. For Paul W. Harland, “because the speaker is able to identify the Crucifixion as ‘beauteous,’ he demonstrates his own ‘piteous mind.’ The reader is thus able to recognise the transformation that has taken place in the speaker.”
8 Harland, “True Transubstantiation”, p. 167. If the referent of “piteous minde” is thus uncertain, so too is that of the “beauteous forme”, which by this point could refer to Christ in judgement, or Christ crucified, to the “profane mistress” or, arguably, to the speaker himself.
The speaker is, in Harland’s term, “transformed” by the action of the “picture of Christ crucified” within his heart. Like the cross as sculptor’s chisel, “work[ing] fruitefullye / With in our Harts” (Crosse, ll. 61–62), the crucifix here, too, works correctively within the heart to “take what hid Christ in thee” (Crosse, l. 35). In “The Crosse” Donne played with the potentially destructive or erasing capabilities contained within both the name and the simple form of the cross. In “What if this present” that logic is extended to the defacement that is already contained within the image of the crucified Christ. The blood that fills and the tears that quench are the aspects of the “picture” that performed the “erasure” or “iconoclasm” in the octave of the sonnet, and these are the same elements that appeal to affective piety and provoke pity in the spectator. The “picture of Christ crucified” effaces the image of the judging Christ in glory, but the ultimate effect of this act of erasure, as in “The Crosse” and “Good friday”, is on the heart of man himself. The contemplation of the Crucifixion generates the pity that works within man to reveal the hidden beauty of the imago Dei in his heart, “burn[ing] off … rusts and … deformity” in order to “restore thine Image” (Goodf, ll. 40–41). In this sense, the “beauteous forme assures a piteous mind”.
In all three of these poems Donne restores the crucifix as the central, inevitable and active focus of the Christian faith. Just as the speaker of “The Crosse” sees crosses everywhere, so Donne seems to be able to find, in widely different sources, language and imagery that reinforces his vision. The lexical fields of church-worship, of negative theology, and of Luther’s theology of the cross come together to support his celebration of the Crucifixion. All of these poems stage a cross that is in some way difficult to look at, described in language that recalls the context of iconoclastic controversy. But Donne does not turn away from visual culture in order to reinstate the cross. Although his crosses work internally – in the heart, in the memory – they acquire their power from his appropriation of the vocabulary of both image worship and iconoclasm to describe their effects. The crucifix, as Koerner puts it, is already an image of defacement. The cross is formed by one line striking out another. It is precisely this paradoxical and oppositional energy that Donne draws on to construct his crosses, transforming the doubt and anxiety attached to a contested material icon into a powerful affirmation of the cross as a dynamic force working to reveal the divine image in man.