Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England

THREE. Representation and Embodiment in John Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions

THREE Representation and Embodiment in John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions “If a misfortune befalls us, we can get over it either by removing its cause or by changing the effect that it has on our sensibility.” — Nietzsche As I observed in the introduction, Donne’s First Anniversary laments the loss of the idea of woman — a loss, that is, in the sacramental relation between an ideal form and its embodiment in a human person . For Donne, as for other early modern thinkers, the sublation of particular to universal, of human to ideal, constituted a significant ontotheological problem.1 For many in the English Renaissance, the rhetorical and conceptual paradigms inherited from scholastic and other medieval traditions appeared no longer capable of accommodating the complexities of the early modern world. Few texts exemplify this crisis in Platonic-Christian metaphysics more than John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1623). In this text, Donne diagnoses and seeks to mitigate the newly pressing 151 152 Divine Subjection metaphysical problems involved in formally mediating the passage from the material body to the immaterial soul, and even more fundamentally , from the letter to the spirit. If Southwell’s experience of language as a “region of unlikeness” is occasioned by his encounter with the cavernous world of Saint Gothard’s Pass, then the cavities of the body itself are the regio dissimulitudinis that Donne navigates in his attempt to move from the sinews of his ailing body to the sinews of God’s healing word. Just as critiques of Transubstantiation unsettled poetic representations of the Eucharist, so too the emergence of anatomical science complicated representations of the body’s natural order. These changes in concepts of the body are registered at their most fundamental level, as Jonathan Sawday explains, with respect to the fact that, despite the continual assertions of poets and anatomists “that the body mirrored the harmonious orchestration of the universe , what they confronted in reality was something else: a structure of such bewildering complexity, such a confusion of function and organic integrity, that the outcome of every such interior voyage hovered on the edge of disaster.”2 Once the discrete object of empirical analysis, rather than the fleshy cabinet of the soul, the body became the “locus of all [philosophical] doubt,” the “alien territory”3 whose labyrinthine forms succinctly expressed the increased sense of metaphysical incoherence that Donne diagnoses in the Anniversaries. If the body is God’s “book” (as Donne remarked in a famous reassertion of Plato’s idea in Timaeus that the body and soul are proportioned to the universe), then the anatomical adventure of early modern science rendered the transcendental script of the liber corporis increasingly illegible within the analogically based paradigms of both Galenic and Paracelsian thought. While Sawday and others have demonstrated the extent to which the Devotions records the increasing incoherence of an analogically structured body, critics have not fully recognized how the Devotions registers and responds to this sense of incoherence by reorganizing the hieratic signifying power of language as it relates to and even arises from the humoral body. What is ultimately at stake in the Devotions’ most conceptually elaborate meditations on the body is the sacramental efficacy, if not the anatomical integrity, of the Galenic and Paracelsian lexicons. What is at issue, in other words, is Donne’s capacity to compellingly articulate the experience of coming to know Christ in and through the linguistic and conceptual resources of the early modern body at a moment when the body appears as an incomprehensible mixture of Galenic, Paracelsian and Vesalian elements.4 Undeterred, as he says in line 469 of the Anniversaries , by incomprehensibleness, Donne seeks Christ’s presence in the most chaotic of places: the body’s organs and fluids. This sacramental quest is made possible, for Donne, insofar as humorally based language retains its capacity to inscribe — or as the Neoplatonists would have it, “infold” — God’s ongoing presence in time. Indeed, despite the fact that Donne demystifies the ontological validity of the micro/macro relation as a convincing form for representing the body’s structure when he claims, for instance, that “as the whole world hath nothing, to which the something in man doth not answere, so hath man many pieces of which the whol world hath no representation,” he nonetheless retains a sacramental conception of language that is very much grounded in the materiality of...