Renaissance Tropologies: The Cultural Imagination of Early Modern England

4. Troping Religious Identity: Circumcision and Transubstantiation in Donne’s Sermons

89 Troping Religious Identity Circumcision and Transubstantiation in Donne’s Sermons Jeanne Shami This essay will uncover Donne’s rhetorical moves in turning public matters of ecclesiastical doctrine and ritual into personal matters of spirituality and sanctification by deploying “circumcision” and “transubstantiation”—controversial terms fundamental to the religious identities of Jews, on the one hand, and Roman Catholics, on the other—as tropes. This use of tropes, while grounded theologically in the example of the Holy Spirit, who is sometimes “metaphorical,” is part of Donne’s characteristic practice of moderating—or redirecting—the polemical thrust of explicitly controversial terms.1 In particular, I will examine how Donne’s tropes probe the unstable boundaries defining personal and institutional religious commitment and animate the “infected will[s]” of his congregations. The poetics of spirituality Donne creates through these tropic transformations reveals the sphere of his interpretive imagination: the stewardship he exercises over 4v 90 Troping Religious Identity language as he turns his “erected wit”2 into a spiritual means of moving his hearers to assume their true religious identities. This discussion of Donne’s tropology, understood as a conversion of religious identity using the terms of seventeenth century religious debate, begins with Gale Carrithers and James Hardy, who observe that “The tropic moment in particular and time in general have been especially scanted in previous attention to [Donne’s] sermons.”3 Particularly in their emphasis on the trope of “the defining (ideally the salvific) moment of illumination or choice,” they note that moment “defines a condition of discontinuity, in which the present suddenly, in ‘the twinkling of an eye,’ becomes ontologically different from the past and in which the present will inform the future” (3). The biblical allusion (1 Cor. 15:51– 54) recalls the “beheaded Man” of the second Anniversary, whose twinkling eye and rolling tongue beckon his soul, even as his “Carkas” signals the failure of “commerce twixt heauen and earth” (FA 399).4 In this fallen world, “The art is lost, and correspondence too” (FA 396), and that loss of discernment is figured as the distortions of “spectacles” (SA 293) as we “peepe through lattices of eies” and hear “through Laberinths of eares,” learning through “circuit” and “collections ” (SA 296–98). Tropes are a means of regaining this commerce and can themselves be troped as “watch-towre” (SA 294) words, which allow us to see things “despoyld of fallacies” (SA 295). Carrithers and Hardy note that, unlike the scholastic taxonomy of literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical meaning, what is key to tropes’ efficacy is that they are not hierarchical or static, but instead are associated with “movement, change, dynamism, and creativity” (Age of Iron, 15). That Donne tropes such controversial words is significant in an age of “theological debate that tended toward polemical and quasiprecise definitions of the unknowable” (Age of Iron, 30). Focus on the “figurative” potential of a word could have Jeanne Shami 91 multiple effects: releasing its creative and regenerative energies , on the one hand, or its satirical, polemical, and potentially destructive powers, on the other. In this dialectic of love and power that Carrithers and Hardy name as the “metalanguage ” that embraces the major tropes, Donne’s interpretive practices moved beyond “the transient manifestations of political power” (13) to the side of the dialectic that accorded more readily with an Augustinian hermeneutics of “charity.” Donne achieved such charitable interpretation by engaging in a “discourse of perspective,” striving for inclusiveness by aiming toward “perceptual wholeness, a way of comprehending that modulates from the letter to the spirit by enlarging the literal sense rather than pitting it against the metaphorical .”5 Accordingly, he frequently figures interpretive infirmities as perceptual handicaps, literally as “imperfect sense[s]”: hearing with only one ear (7:74), or seeing things with a “squint-eye” (3:229).6 These perceptual flaws commonly produce interpretations that are “singular,” both in their limited focus and in their one-sided distortion of truths. Donne’s metaphorical redefinition of controversial terms rids them of their conventional polemical baggage, primarily by allowing them to be understood spiritually as well as literally .7 This is the language of love—or, at least, of toleration. But Donne’s renovations of polemical terms also participate in the language of power, in that they are deployed polemically against Catholics who do not effect the “true transubstantiation ” and against Jews who...