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9 Pathopoeia and the Protestant Form of Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions brent nelson ohn Donne was at the height of his preaching career when he wrote his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, a long devotional work occasioned by his illness in December 1623 and published in early 1624. He had been dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London , arguably the most popular pulpit in England, for just over two years. Despite his considerable administrative responsibilities, Dean Donne took every opportunity to ascend the pulpit. So when he decided to adapt his own meditations on the occasion of his illness to the devotional benefit of a public audience, it was natural for him to draw upon his resources as a preacher. Yet despite Barbara Lewalski’s assertion of the “near-identification of sermons and meditation in terms of methods and purposes” (83), only Janel Mueller has looked to Donne’s sermons for clues to his method in the Devotions .1 Mueller focuses on the similarity of thought, describing Donne’s coupling of “preaching procedures and meditative ones” to account for the predominance of exegesis, both of Scripture and of human experience, in the Devotions (3). The sermons and the Devotions, I would also argue, share similar rhetorical purposes and strategies as well. In his sermons Donne typically adheres to what Debora Shuger calls the “grand style” of preaching , which is marked by strategies of pathopoeia, the arousing of the emotions . He uses similar pathopoeic devices in his Devotions. Specifically, in both the sermons and the Devotions, Donne uses hypotyposis, or vivid depictions of emotionally charged circumstances, to incite the passions of his audience and motivate them in devotion. These circumstances typically bear a formal pattern of fall and redemption, a distinctively Protestant emphasis in 247 J devotional experience, which aims to move the congregant or reader to feel profoundly his or her complete dependence on God’s grace and to respond with faith in Christ. In looking to the sermon, I hope to account for two key features of the Devotions that have been largely overlooked in scholarship: its audience orientation and its emotional appeal. Scholars have identified numerous generic influences on the Devotions, usually dividing along Roman Catholic/Protestant lines. An undeniable influence is the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, while proposed Protestant models include spiritual autobiography, the “holy soliloquy,” Richard Hooker’s paradigm of repentance, and various models of Protestant meditation, including the occasional meditations of Joseph Hall.2 These sources have accounted for the private, personal quality that is so striking in the Devotions, but they have not enabled scholars from either camp adequately to account for the public, rhetorical orientation that is also evident.3 Those who acknowledge the audience orientation of the Devotions have difficulty reconciling the ostensible rhetorical purpose of the work with its apparently confessional , self-expressive nature.4 Even among those who have acknowledged the public address of the Devotions, the emphasis is on what it reveals about its author and his experience rather than the effect it was designed to produce for the reader. Yet despite its obviously personal matter, Donne clearly intended his Devotions for an audience’s edification.5 The questions remain, what effect does this text aim to produce in its audience, and what means does it employ to achieve this effect? Concomitant with this focus on the private, personal orientation of the Devotions is an emphasis on its discursive function.6 And once again, this logical turn typically is seen as a personal reflection of the mind of the author. Murray Arndt, for example, argues that “the emphasis that Ignatius placed upon the intellect in the achievement of willed affirmation unfortunately encouraged Donne’s tendency toward rationalization and clever control of experienced materials” resulting in an “intellectualized defense” that enabled Donne to avoid the issues of pain and death (43). Although he acknowledges an emotional element in the “meditations” (the first part of each devotional cycle), Arndt leaves this feature unexamined, hastening instead to focus on what he sees as the rationalizing and spiritualizing of experience that takes place in the “expostulations” (the second part of each cycle).7 This emphasis on the rational function of discourse (logos) has carried over into discussion of the Protestant forms of Donne’s Devotions. Even though Andreasen emphasizes the Protestant influence on Donne’s Devotions, she nonetheless finds in it a discursive quality that func248 · Brent Nelson...

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