Paradox and Religious Beliefs
Paradox and Religious Beliefs
Though historians of religion have demonstrated that the theological
commitments of early modern English people were labile and complex,
there was nonetheless a prevailing sense in the period that belief posited
bodily consequences. This article considers this bodily presence in John
Danne's poetry by exploring the humoral construction of religious
identity in his Holy Sonnets. Donne's conversion provided him with an
unusual perspective: not many people were positioned to hold as nuanced
a view of religious ideology. It is surprising, then, that when Donne
considers his conversion which he does in little and large in the Holy
Sonnets he casts it in somatic terms. Donne's humoral constitution of
faith in the Holy Sonnets anatomizes the vexed transactions of body and
soul particular to late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century thought.
He depicts his body in the same terms that he uses to represent his
religious temperament as changeable and lacking integrity (MLA Coles,
1947, p53).
soul." Donne's inquiry into the nature of the soul, and the nature of
the soul within the body, was not an investigation peculiar to himself: it
was peculiar to the period to which Donne belonged. Arguments in
natural philosophy and theology had set the matter of souls at the
foreground of religious debate. The "lazie weariness" that Donne invokes
was earned by "long disputations and controversies" within "all sects of
Christians" concerning the soul's essence. The theoretical success of
arguments that affirmed the soul as "the highest material form" of human
being had forced considerable re-litigation of the definition of soul. Advancements in medical treatment for melancholy and other diseases of
the mind had further situated the higher faculties of the rational soul
within the scope of natural philosophy, and Galenic medical theory itself
(from which these treatments were derived) insinuated the soul's corporal
nature. While no medical writer of the period unequivocally asserted that
the soul was matter - as Galen (130 CE-200 CE)
himself was ambiguous
on the point the accretion of these arguments provided the strong
suggestion of a material aspect of the soul. Such intimations rendered the
category to which the soul belonged subject to question. At stake in the
subsequent debate was whether the soul was nothing more than the
property of a complete substance, the represented position of followers of
Galen;
In the 1651 edition of the Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, this
letter is directed to Thomas] Lucey (11), but modern editors of the letters
have reached consensus that it is actually addressed to Goodyer: see
Donne, 2002, 27-30. The dating of the letters is uncertain: in the facsimile
edition of the Letters, edited by M. T. Hester in Donne, 1977, both of the
letters under interrogation in the opening section of this article are
assigned a date of spring of 1608. However, P. M. Oliver sets the
composition of the first at October 1607, and the second at March 1608. 1
have tried to preserve the uncertain date of the letters under interrogation,
while assigning them collectively to a particular period.
Donne, 1651, 13
Donne compares this "lazie weariness" to "Princes
[who having) travailed with long and wastfull war, descend to such
conditions of peace, as they are soon after ashamed to have embraced":
ibid., 12.Kessler, 503. Kessler describes the position of Pietro
Pomponazzi, who reasoned that since the soul "acted materially in sense
perception and immaterially in intellection, it must partake of both
12
ontological realms. In situating the soul's essence, Pomponazzi placed it
in the material realm, maintaining that the soul "was the highest material
form, attaining in its most elevated operations something beyond
materiality": ibid. Pomponazzi was arguing against the Averroist position
of a single and unified intellect informing the form of man. There was no
way, he reasoned, of proving man an individual, rational
animal, composed of body and soul, if man is subject to the higher
faculties of the rational soul alone (Gowland, 2006, P62; 97).
See also Trevor, 56. Des Chene, 69. While Des Chene asserts this as a
position in the contemporary argument, it is telling that he is forced to
resort to contemporary theologians, all of whom want to construct
Galenic physicians as atheistic materialists (my thanks to Angus Gowland
for pointing this out to me). Des Chene is absolutely right, however, to
model this as an actual position in the debate, even if it did not proceed
directly from the Galenists themselves(Coles, 2015,p3)
In this essay from The Well-Wrought Urn (1947), Brooks defines the
New Critical conception of poetry. Brooks' essay makes clear the debt the
New Critics owed to Romanticism and especially to the idealist poetic
theories of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Romanticism, in their work,
represented an attempt to reassert the claims of religion in the face of the
rationalist skeptical critique of religion that emerged in the eighteenth
century. The New Criticism is in some respects a latter-day Romantic
school of thought that also seeks to reintroduce reli- gious meaning into
literary study.
Few of us are prepared to accept the statement that the language of poetry
is the language of paradox. Paradox is the language of sophistry, hard,
bright, witty; it is hardly the language of the soul.
We are willing to allow that paradox is a permissible weapon which a Chesterton may on
occasion exploit. We may permit it in epigram, a special sub variety of
poetry: and in satire, which though useful, we are hardly willing to allow
to be poetry at all. Our prejudices force us to regard paradox as
intellectual rather than emotional. clever rather than profound, rational
rather than divinely irrational.
Yet there is a sense in which paradox is the language appropriate and
inevitable to poetry. It is the scientist whose truth requires a language
purged of every trace of paradox: apparently the truth which the poet
utters can be approached only in terms of paradox.
I overstate the case, to
be sure; it is possible that the title of this chapter is itself to be treated as
merely a paradox. But there are reasons for thinking that the
overstatement which I propose may light up some elements in the nature
of poetry which tend to be overlooked. The case of William Wordsworth,
for instance, is instructive on this point. His poetry would not appear to
promise many examples of the language of paradox. He usually prefers
the direct attack. He insists on simplicity, he distrusts whatever seems
sophistical. And yet the typical Wordsworth poem is based upon a
paradoxical situation. Consider his celebrated
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun,N Breathless with adoration.....
The poet is filled with worship, but the girl who walks beside him is
not worshiping. The implication is that she should respond to the holy
time, and become like the evening itself, nunlike; but she seems less
worshipful than inanimate nature itself. Yet
There is one more factor in developing and sustaining the final effect.
The poem is an instance of the doctrine which it asserts: it is both the
assertion and the realization of the assertion. The poet has actually before
our eyes built within the song the pretty room" with which he says the
lovers can be content.
The poem itself is the well-wrought urn which can hold the lovers' ashes and which will not suffer in comparison with the
prince's" halfe-acre tomb".
And how necessary are the paradoxes? Donne might have said
directly." Love in a cottage is enough." The Canonization" contains this
admirable thesis, but it contains a great deal more. He might have been as
forthright as a later lyricist who wrote," We'll build a sweet little
nest./Somewhere out in the West./And let the rest of the world go by."
He
might even have imitated that more metaphysical lyric, which maintains
"You're the cream in my coffee."" The Canonization" touches on all these
observations, but it goes beyond them, not merely in dignity, but in
precision. I submit that the only way by which the poet could say what
" The Canonization" says is by paradox. More direct methods may be
tempting, but all of them enfeeble and distort what is to he said. This
statement may seem the less surprising when we reflect on how many of
the important things which the poet has to say have to be said by means
of paradox: most of the language of lovers is such-" The Canonization" is
a good example: so is most of the language of religion-" He who would
save his life, must lose it";" The last shall be first. Indeed, almost any
insight important enough to warrant a great poem apparently has to be
stated in such terms. Deprived of the character of paradox with its twin
concomitants of irony and wonder, the matter of Donne's poem unravels
into "facts," biological, sociological, and economic. (Brooks, 1947, p
53,66)
References
- Brooks, Cleanth. The language of paradox. na, 1947.
- Coles, Kimberly Anne. "The matter of belief in john donne's holy sonnets." Renaissance Quarterly 68.3 (2015): 899-931.
