Chapter 5
Judgement
Truly, the
Creation and the
last Judgement, are the
Diluculum and
Crepusculum, the
Morning and the
Evening twi-lights of the long day of this world. Which times, though they be not utterly dark, yet they are but of uncertain, doubtfull, and conjecturall light. … the birth of the world [is] more discernable than the death, because upon this God hath cast more clouds…
1 Simpson, ed., Essays in Divinity, p. 19. Like “La Corona”, Donne’s sequence of Holy Sonnets seems to invite comparison with visual art, and Louis Martz finds the sonnets exemplary of the “graphically imaged openings” that he considers characteristic of the metaphysical poets.
2 Martz, Poetry of Meditation, p. 31. Looking forward to the end of time and the moment of the Last Judgement, the sequence is read by Helen Gardner as a “meditation designed to deepen religious fear” completed by a “meditation to awaken love”.
3 Gardner, ed., Divine Poems, p. xlii. The sonnets explicitly devoted to the last things, which Gardner describes as the “core” of the sequence, receive particular mention from Martz, as he evokes “those grand and passionate openings … where the moment of death, or the Passion of Christ, or the Day of Doom is there, now, before the eyes of the writer, brought home to the soul by vivid ‘similitudes’”.
4 Martz, Poetry of Meditation, p. 31. For Martz, as for Gardner, these “vivid similitudes” derive from the prescribed pattern of meditation in the
Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola (1548), with its insistence on clearly visualising the object of meditation.
5 Martz, Poetry of Meditation, pp. 43–53; Helen Gardner, “Introduction”, Divine Poems, pp. l–lv. Martz and Gardner claim to have come to their conclusions regarding the “Holy Sonnets” independently almost simultaneously. Martz first developed the connection between Donne and the Spiritual Exercises with reference to Donne’s Anniversaries in “John Donne in Meditation: the Anniversaries”, ELH (1947). Gardner notes that: “It was after I had come to my own conclusions on the ‘Holy Sonnets’ that I read the article. It was encouraging to find we had independently arrived at the same conclusion”. Divine Poems, p. liv, n. 1. Martz for his part states “…I learned from Miss Helen Gardner that she was well advanced in the preparation of an edition of Donne’s Divine Poems, […] and studying the order, dating, and significance of the ‘Holy Sonnets’ from a standpoint similar to my own”. Poetry of Meditation, p. vii. But as in “La Corona”, the apparent invitation to read the sequence visually is the first step towards a much more complex reflexion on what it means to look at Judgement – or to look at all. The Holy Sonnets form a twelve-sonnet sequence, but two distinct versions of the sequence exist, and the revised version sees whole sonnets cut and added as well as some reordering of those that remain.
6 Stringer et al. eds., Variorum 7.1: Holy Sonnets, pp. lx–lxxi. Discussed further on p. 147 ff. This evident authorial revision and re-thinking reflects a theme that is prominent in the sonnets themselves, the painstaking questioning and reassessment of how to approach God. Although the Revised Sequence retains the central focus on the last things, the way of approaching that final moment is literally revised.
7 For Gardner, “The core of the two sets [of sonnet sequences] is the six sonnets on the Last Things (1–6 of 1633). These appear in the same order in each set, although in Group III other sonnets are interspersed among them”. Divine Poems, p. xlii. See further discussion this chapter, p. 147. In a sequence that is very concerned about what way to look, Donne makes some crucial changes to his
ways of seeing in the later version of the Holy Sonnets, and qualifies the metaphors of seeing and visual art that characterise his imagining of the divine up in other poems. The circumscription and spatial paradox of “La Corona” are poetic and human solutions that highlight Christ’s humanity and the mystery of the Incarnation.
Contemplation of Christ after his death and Resurrection, and contemplation of what comes after the General Resurrection and the Last Judgement, move the representational problems Donne addresses on to a new level. In the divine poems that approach these mysteries – the Holy Sonnets but also “Resurrection. Imperfect” – the attempt to imagine Christ in glory is deferred and circumvented, and it is in the sonnet sequence that we understand most clearly the correspondences that Donne establishes between the limits of visual representation and the limits of his own, verbal, representation.
The contemplation of the cross discussed in the previous chapter already illustrates to what extent Donne insists that looking is problematic. “Most the Eie needs crossing”, he writes in “Of the Crosse” (l. 49), qualifying the insistence in the first half of the poem that by looking at nature we can somehow approach knowledge of Christ. “The picture of Christ crucified” (l. 3) invoked in the Holy Sonnet “What if this present were the world’s last night”, as we have seen, is far from simple, and is summoned up to counter the even more problematic vision of the Last Judgement in the poem’s opening line. The problem with the scene of Judgement is both personal and doctrinal as well as representational. The personal fear of contemplating that irreversible judgement and the doctrinal concern that salvation rather than judgement should be emphasised are brought together in the problem of how to represent that moment at all – how to represent Christ, the Judge, in glory. The representational and theological problem around depictions of Christ after his Crucifixion and death is concisely expressed by Hegel in his Lectures on Fine Art:
… the means at the disposal of painting, the human figure and its colour, the flash and glance of the eye, are insufficient in themselves to give perfect expression to what is implicit in Christ in situations like these. Least of all can the forms of classical beauty suffice. In particular, the Resurrection, Transfiguration, and Ascension, and in general all the scenes in the life of Christ when, after the Crucifixion and his death, he has withdrawn from immediate existence as simply this individual man and is on the way to return to his father, demand in Christ himself a higher expression of Divinity than painting is completely able to give to him; for its proper means for portraying him, namely human individuality and its external form, it should expunge here and glorify him in a purer light.
8 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), vol 2, p. 822. It is the flip side of the argument put forward by John of Damascus, that the Incarnation meant that Christ could be depicted by human means, though John also acknowledged that “it is impossible to depict one who is incorporeal and formless, invisible and uncircumscribable”.
9 St John of Damascus, Oratio apologetica, III, 2 (and II, 5), PG 94: p. 1320. Translation in St John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, ed. by Andrew Louth (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), p. 82. See Chapter 2 p. 87. But the moments mentioned by Hegel, when Christ is in human form, seen by the apostles and yet seen differently, pose a particular kind of representational problem. The human form and, specifically, human individuality, cease to be adequate means for representing Christ, who is “on the way to return to his Father”, on a trajectory out of representatable space. The images of Christ’s feet disappearing out of the top of the frame which are an iconographic staple of paintings of the Ascension may appear comic but they illustrate the point nicely – they capture the moment beyond which the pictorial space will no longer be able to contain Christ.
Hegel uses a lexicon of light – “a purer light” – to indicate the difference between the resurrected and glorified Christ and the Christ who could be represented as a simple human figure. In doing so he may be drawing on the description of the Transfiguration in the three synoptic gospels, where the change in Christ is described in terms of light and whiteness: “his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light” (Matt. 17.2), though Luke also adds “the fashion of his countenance was altered” (Lk. 9.29). Light functions to blot out the body that cannot be represented visually or verbally. Donne too draws on the Transfiguration’s vocabulary of light when he addresses the same representational problem, which he does in a sermon preached at Lincoln’s Inn in 1620. Taking as his text 1 Cor. 15.50, he explores “the qualities of bodies in the resurrection”, (117), and evokes the Transfiguration as a type of the Resurrection (both Christ’s Resurrection and the General Resurrection), describing it as “the best glasse to see this resurrection, and state of glory in”. Donne refers to St Jerome’s translation in order to describe the vision of the transfigured Christ, and, although he picks up on the language of the gospels, he discusses not the appearance of Christ himself so much as the effect upon the apostles’ sight of him:
We content our selves with Saint
Hieromes expressing of it,
non pristinam amisit veritatem, vel formam corporis; Christ had still the same true, and reall body, and he had the same forme, and proportion, and lineaments, and dimensions of his body, in it selfe.
Transfiguratio non faciem subtraxit, sed splendorem additit, sayes he; It gave him not another face, but it super-immitted such a light, such an illustration upon him, as, by that irradiation, that coruscation, the beames of their eys were scatterd, and disgregated, dissipated so, as that they could not collect them, as at other times, nor constantly, and confidently discerne him.
10 Potter and Simpson, eds., Sermons, 3, p. 118.Donne develops the idea of addition to something already perfect through his accumulation of light-words: light illuminating, sending out rays, sparkling. In her biography of Donne,
Super-Infinite,
Katherine Rundell makes much of Donne’s use of the prefix “super-”, claiming that “he loved to coin formations with the
super- prefix: super-edifications, super-exaltation, super-dying, super-universal, super-miraculous. It was part of his bid to invent a language that would reach beyond language, because infinite wasn’t enough: both in heaven, but also here and now on earth, Donne wanted to know something larger than infinity.”
11 Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (London: Faber & Faber, 2022), p. 14. Virtually all of her examples refer to the unimaginable divine. “Super-miraculous” and “super-exaltation” come from his final sermon, “Deaths Duell”, and describe the enormity of the fact that Christ must die. As in the “super-imitted” of our passage on the Transfiguration, Donne uses the prefix very precisely to indicate what is beyond description, and what might even seem contradictory – “super-infinite” being a case in point. The Transfiguration not only adds but
super-adds something unviewable, undiscernable, to the apostles’ knowledge of Christ: “a higher expression of Divinity”, as Hegel expressed it, “than painting is completely able to give to him”.
In the sermon, Donne highlights that it is not that the face of Christ in glory has changed beyond recognition, rather, the change lies in the fact that it is now impossible to contemplate. His image of the “scatterd” eye-beams of the apostles is like a reversal of the lovers’ eye-beams “twisted and thred[ed] upon one double stringe” in “The Ecstasy”.
12 “Extasie”, ll. 7–8. Johnson et al. eds., Variorum 4.3: Songs and Sonnets, p. 106. The visual and human connection between the ecstatic lovers is not possible between the apostles and Christ when they witness Him transfigured. While Donne insists on the fact that Christ manifested himself to “naturall men”, he also emphasises the connection between the impossibility of seeing the transfigured Christ and the impossibility of communicating the nature of the transfigured Christ – or any resurrected body – in words:
remember that in this reall parable, in this Type of the Resurrection, the transfiguration of Christ, it is said that even Peter himself wist not what to say [Mark 9:6]; and remember too, That Christ himself forbad them to say anything at all of it, till his Resurrection. Till our Resurrection, we cannot know clearly, we should not speak boldly, of the glory of the Saints of God, nor of our blessed endowments in that state. (3: 122; emphasis in original)
This shift from seeing to speaking, or rather from the impossibility of seeing to the impossibility of putting into words, is fundamental to Donne’s engagement with the representation of the divine – and with representation more generally. He emphasises here that we will neither be able to know nor to to speak of Christ or the Saints in glory, or of the General Resurrection, until our own resurrection. The Transfiguration is a type of that moment, prefigures it, but it is nonetheless a “parable” of not seeing and not speaking, a moment that encapsulates the distance in understanding between now and then.
The scriptural touchstone for the opposition of human knowledge now and the knowledge of the world to come is 1 Corinthians 13:12, “For now we see through a glasse darkly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know even as I am knowne”, and Donne’s description of the Transfiguration as “the best glasse to see this resurrection … in” seems to echo that famous passage. His sermon on 1 Corinthians 13:12, preached at St Paul’s on Easter Sunday 1628, opens by explicating the epistemological and the temporal implications of the verse:
These two termes in our Text, Nunc and Tunc, Now and Then, Now in a glasse, Then face to face, Now in part, Then in perfection, these two secular termes, of which, one designes the whole Age of this world from the Creation, to the dissolution thereof (for, all that is comprehended in this word, Now) And the other designes the everlastingnesse of the next world, (for that incomprehensiblenesse is comprehended in the other word, Then). (8: 219)
The contraction of the span of human time into the incomprehensible moment of Judgement and Resurrection fascinates Donne, and becomes a recurrent motif in his Holy Sonnets. The word Now encapsulates all of human time from Creation to the end of time; this is opposed to the ungraspable, incomprehensible “everlastingnesse of the next world”. These two ages, he says in this sermon, “are now met in one Day; in this Day in which we celebrate all Resurrections in the roote” (219). In preaching a sermon about the day of Judgement (when we shall see face to face, and know as we are known) on Easter Day, Donne deliberately conflates Christ’s Resurrection with the General Resurrection. Christ’s Resurrection is the root of all resurrections because it is the sign of redemption and it prefigures the resurrection of all flesh on the “last and everlasting day” (Corona 6, 14). But he also describes Now in more immediately graspable terms: it describes “that very act, that we do now at this present, the Ministry of the Gospell, of declaring God in his Ordinance, of Preaching his word”. He tells his congregation that “now (now in this Preaching) you have some sight, and then, … you shall have a perfect sight of all” (219–220).
Knowledge of God, described in visual terms, is transmitted, imperfectly, through the word preached, a slippage between the visual and the word that continues throughout the sermon. Although early on he states, supported by Augustine, that “sight is so much the Noblest of all the senses, as that it is all the senses” (221),
13 Ettenhuber identifies the source of this as Augustine’s Sermon on Luke 14: 16–24, ch. 6; PL 38.646, in Donne’s Augustine, p. 223, n. 60. This idea of sight englobing all the senses is one of Donne’s recurring snippets in his meditations on sight in the Sermons: it also occurs, as Ettenhuber mentions, in his Candlemas sermon of 1627 (7: 346), and a Whitehall sermon from 1625 (6: 235–236). It also seems to be a favourite with Augustine himself: he refers to it in Chapter 10 of the Confessions (X. xxxv (54)). St Augustine, Confessions, trans. and intro. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 211. by the mid-point of the sermon he is celebrating the power of hearing the word of God over the dangers associated with sight: “The eye is the devils doore, before the eare: for, though he doe enter at the eare, by wanton discourse, yet he was at the eye before…” (228). The sermon places the eye-ear opposition in the context of controversy surrounding ritual in the Church:
The eare is the Holy Ghosts first door, He assists us with Rituall and Ceremoniall things, which we see in the Church; but Ceremonies have their right use, when their right use hath been first taught by preaching. (228)
Donne’s ambivalence about the eye, his swerving away from putting trust in the visual, is once more on display. But while the preacher’s words may provide some stability and guidance in this example, words in general prove no more reliable than the visual when it comes to approaching the divine.
This idea persists throughout his works that confront the difficulty of representing – of understanding – the Resurrection: both Christ’s Resurrection and the general resurrection of the Last Judgement. Anxiety about looking, about how to look, and specifically how to look at God, permeates the Holy Sonnets in ways that recall the now in a glass; then face to face of 1 Corinthians 13:12. Donne’s only occasional poem on Christ’s Resurrection can be seen as acting out the difficulty experienced by the apostles at the type of the Resurrection, the Transfiguration – “even Peter himself wist not what to say”. He seems to suggest that the figurative means at the disposal of the poet will be equally insufficent as those of the painter.