Renaissance Tropologies: The Cultural Imagination of Early Modern England

Chapter 2. Salvific Moments in John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

45 Salvific Moments in John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions Eric C. Brown Of the four dominant tropes treated by Gale Carrithers and James Hardy, it is moment—“the defining (ideally the salvific) moment of illumination or choice”—that primarily informs their reading of John Donne’s sermons.1 “The tropic moment in particular and time in general have been especially scanted in previous attention to the sermons,” they suggest, and in turn offer a rich explication of Donnean time throughout those texts, arguing that Donne’s “orientation toward heavenly eternity was implicit in the innumerable metaphors and metonymies of Christian journey and was synecdochically suggested by the moment of loving revelation or graced retorqueo” (Age of Iron, 137).2 This “differentiating ” moment becomes a “conclusive attestation of power so profound it could transform life from errancy or stasis to heavenward mobility, imperception to perception, rancor or 2v 46 Salvific Moments in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions indifference to love, in the instant of a word” (ibid., xi, 156). This formulation also serves as a useful interpretive model for reading Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, where Donne’s preoccupation with time is both highly wrought (for example, its 23 “stationes” coupled with its cyclical divisions, each proceeding chronologically through his illness of 1623) and intensely attentive to the transformations of a moment.3 Indeed, as Carrithers and Hardy mention briefly, the opening of the Devotions contains “a famous Donnean instance of bad moment,” a counterpoint expressively “bad” for its rendering of the “endlessly disjunctive moments of tychastic [from tuchē, chance] time.” That is, the Devotions begins with a complaint against “meaningless moments disconnected from one another by their emptiness of charitable love” (138n7, 137, 160): Donne’s “sudden change, and alteration to worse” that he “can impute...to no cause, nor call...by any name.”4 The Devotions gradually unfolds this originary and chance “bad moment” into a consideration of what Carrithers and Hardy term the “salvific moment” and what Donne himself might have called “occasional time.”5 The Devotions, partly modeling Augustine’s Confessions, becomes a movement from sickness to health in which Augustine’s “distension” of the soul (a kind of gold to airy thinness beat) becomes for Donne the rightly ordered translation of fear, regret, and inattention—modalities of the soul in tripartite time (future, past, and present)—into expectation , remembrance, and salvation. I want to begin by briefly glossing two terms, both active in England during Donne’s life, for the measurement and, secondarily, conceptualization of time: calculation and computation .6 The two have radically different etymologies, both significant as a means of understanding the relationship betweentimeandmoment.Theformertakesitsmeaningfrom the small stones (calculi, whence calcium) used in ancient mathematical arrangement, and vividly renders the fantasy Eric C. Brown 47 of early geometricians who sought to “square” the circle by filling chalk enclosures with increasingly infinitesimal bits of mineral. “Calculation” suggests both an earthy (even geologic) materiality and an additive linearity (the pebbles of an abacus, say). The latter term, “computation,” is resolutely removed from such materials: from the Latin “computare” (also the root of “count”), it signifies an abstract reckoning —one performed exclusively, and perhaps detachedly, with the mind. Thus Suffolk in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI, for instance, claims “a cunning man did my birth calculate,” conveying the astrological apparatuses of charts, graphs, and text, while elsewhere the imminent Richard III can speak of the “true computation of the time” as a counterdiscourse, one framed upon the very lack of material evidence evoked by “calculation.”7 The two words can be read, in tropological terms, as metonymic on the one hand (we read the concept of “number” or difference in its diminutive, “calculable” expressions) and synecdochic on the other (we read the processes of measurement as comprising number itself). In terms of the “salvific moment,” Carrithers and Hardy illuminate this signifying divide: “Moment as trope manifests the metonymic (as when the sinner may ‘turn from his wickedness and live’) becoming synecdochic. It 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” (Age of Iron, 3–4).8 In other words, two distinct relationships with time are at play (or in contest) in the moment when choice and transcendence coalesce: metaphors of...