Dionysian Negative Theology in Donne’s “A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day”

One of the crucial interpretive problems that remains at the heart of Donne’s “Nocturnall” is that of nothingness. Critics have consistently explained this nothingness within an alchemical context. Such a context is, without a doubt, a key part of the poem: in alchemy, base metal is reduced to a “quintessence of nothingness” on its way to becoming gold.¹ Alchemy was practiced seriously in the seventeenth century, and the literal goal of the science was also a common analogy for the deepest movements of spiritual purification, conversion, and contemplative ascent. This is, however, just where the puzzle lies in the “Nocturnall.” An alchemical metaphor is at work, but the movement toward regeneration that the reader expects from this metaphor appears nonexistent. At the end of the poem (“This/ Both the year’s, and the day’s deep midnight is” [ll.44–45]), the speaker seems to stand in the same despairing darkness in which he began (“’Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s” [l.1]). If the sole context of the poem is alchemy, is it merely a failed, abortive alchemy? As Edgar Hill Duncan noted early in the poem’s critical history, “Much of the subtlety, and, one may add, the difficulty of the poem arises from the fact that Donne applies the terms of the figure to a situation which is the complete reverse of the alchemists’ dream. Instead of the ‘Elixir of All’ we have here the quintessence of nothingness.”²

This essay argues that there is an additional context that makes sense of the puzzle in the “Nocturnall”—a context that has, so far, gone unnoticed. Nothingness, as critics have shown, does express the tremendous force of Donne’s grief at the death of his beloved. I will show, however, that even as Donne uses “nothingness” to denote this despair, he simultaneously uses the word within another context that was as familiar to his readers as alchemy: the context of Dionysian negative theology. The Dionysian mystical tradition is a tradition of apophatic neoplatonic theology. The tradition maintains that nothing can be predicated of God—God is neither light nor darkness, being nor nonbeing, love nor hate. Rather, God’s utter transcendence means that he cannot be spoken of at all. The best language can do is to articulate paradoxes, whose logical possibilities point to that which cannot “be”: God is spoken of as a dark radiance, an absent presence, a death that is life, a nothing that is all things. To become one with this kind of radically transcendent God, the soul must leave aside everything that is temporal and physical, emptying herself of all that is worldly until she reaches a joyful union with her bridegroom in heaven. Such a union is described in negative terms (darkness, absence, death, nothingness), but this negativity is the ecstatic union of the soul with her lover. In the light of Dionysian negative theology, the vexing interpretive question as to why the speaker in the “Nocturnall” makes no discernible movement toward redemption resolves itself: while he remains in darkness at the last line of the poem, it is a much different darkness from the despair in which he begins the poem. Without overt theological references to God or the soul, Donne suggests throughout the “Nocturnall” that this final darkness is the nothingness that denotes a soul’s union with her divine beloved. The alchemical context is unmistakably present, but it creates a dilemma that is solved only by adding the additional context of apophatic theology.

I. The Parallel Vocabulary of Dionysian Theology and Seventeenth-Century Alchemy

While readers of Donne have long been aware of the profound influence of alchemical thinking on the poets of the seventeenth century, the influence of negative theology has not received as much attention. In the 1625 sermon on Matthew 19.17, Donne cites Dionysius by name as he expostulates on the text: “There is none good but one; that is, God.” In this sermon, Donne writes that there is nothing essentially good but God, and yet God’s goodness is...