Donne's Religious Writing

A Discourse of Feigned Devotion

P.M. Oliver, P. M. Oliver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780582250178
• eBook ISBN: 9781317891079
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This, the first book to focus solely on Donne's religious writing, also places his work in a literary context and attempts to reach a more realistic assessment of its originality than has been possible hitherto. The prose works that are examined in detail include the controversial treatises Bianthanatos and Pseudo-Martyr, the satirical Ignatius His Conclave, the much-quoted Essays and Devotions and, of course, Donne's sermons.

Chapter 1

From Catholic to Protestant

A convenient point from which to begin an attempt to gain some understanding of Donne’s world is the train of events which culminated in the execution of Sir Thomas More in July 1536. More was the uncle of Donne’s maternal grandmother and the author of Utopia, as well as of a host of theological and devotional works.¹ Donne was to call him ‘a man of the most tender and delicate conscience that the world saw since [St] Augustine’ (Donne 1984, p. 62). Henry VIII’s confidant and – from 1529 until his resignation in 1532 – his Chancellor, More was beheaded for his opposition to the king’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and usurpation, as it appeared to him, of papal authority.

Henry had married Catherine in 1509. From about 1525 he became increasingly convinced that their marriage was illegal on the grounds that she was his brother’s widow. (He had come to believe that such marriages were forbidden by Leviticus 20:21. As many people were to point out, Deuteronomy 25:5 provides a different viewpoint.) His conviction grew out of his dissatisfaction with Catherine’s failure to produce a male heir and his growing infatuation with Anne Boleyn. At first he looked to the pope to annul his marriage, but he seriously underestimated the weakness of his case in canon law and the unwillingness of Pope Clement VII to overturn the dispensation which had given Henry permission to marry his sister-in-law in the first place. His situation was not helped by the fact that the pope was virtually the prisoner of Catherine of Aragon’s nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Relations between the papacy and the English crown quickly deteriorated, despite Henry’s having been awarded the title ‘Defender of the Faith’ in 1521 for his defence of Catholic doctrines – including the papal supremacy – against the onslaught of the early German Protestant, Martin Luther. It soon became clear to Henry that the divorce could be achieved only by the denial of papal authority. The English Reformation was under way.

Before he launched his main attack on the pope’s jurisdiction, the king took steps to disable the clerical assembly, or Convocation, of the ecclesiastical province of Canterbury. His weapon was the fourteenth-century Statute of Praemunire, which dealt with the question of men’s conflicting loyalties to the pope and their monarch. He instructed his Attorney-General to proceed against the bishops on the grounds that they had themselves incurred the penalties of Praemunire by accepting the authority of Cardinal Wolsey, the papal legate who died in disgrace in 1530. The Act for the Pardon of the Clergy of Canterbury (1531) pardoned this alleged misdemeanour on the part of the clergy in return for an agreement on their part to pay a fine of .£100,000 – though not before the king had extracted from them an agreement to acknowledge him as Supreme Head of the Church of England ‘as far as the law of Christ allows’ (Tanner 1930a, p. 17).

The following year the Submission of the Clergy made canon law subservient to the law of the land, provoking More’s resignation on the pretext of ill health. What remained of the centuries-old bond between Rome and England was finally broken in 1533 when the Act in Restraint of Appeals pronounced that all ‘causes of matrimony and divorces … shall be from henceforth heard … within the king’s jurisdiction and authority and not elsewhere’ (Tanner 1930a, p. 43). In May of that year Thomas Cranmer, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, pronounced the king’s marriage to Catherine null and void and declared in favour of the marriage he had secretly contracted with Anne Boleyn five months previously. Early in 1534 Parliament passed the First Succession Act, establishing the right of succession of the heirs of Henry and Anne Boleyn.

The act required the taking of an oath as to the lawfulness of the king’s second marriage and the succession of its offspring. Compliance was the norm. More was one of a very small number who refused to swear the oath. He had no difficulty in agreeing that Parliament was able to settle the succession, but he believed that the oath also committed those who swore it to a rejection of papal authority. He was imprisoned in the Tower and, certain that this marked the beginning of the end, began to prepare for death. He was entirely correct about the anti-papal implications of the oath of succession: in the autumn the Act of Supremacy confirmed the king’s position as Supreme Head of the Church of England. No limits were now set to his spiritual jurisdiction. To allow Henry to express the full extent of his sense of betrayal at More’s hands, an act of attainder was passed condemning More by name to perpetual imprisonment. In the end he was tried and condemned on the evidence of the Solicitor-General, Richard Rich, who claimed to have heard him deny the royal supremacy. Once found guilty, More left his accusers in no doubt where he stood on the authority of the pope.² His good spirits and humour in the days before his death and on the scaffold itself are legendary, and Thomas Cromwell, who (despite being a layman) had been appointed Vicar General over the Church, had his work cut out in convincing interested parties in Europe that More had deserved to die.

Although the Act of Supremacy gave the king the right to interfere in doctrinal matters, it was at no stage his intention to institute a general overturning of Catholic teaching. This may help to explain why his claim to spiritual supremacy was resisted by only one bishop, the ascetic John Fisher.³ Moreover, despite the huge advances it had made on the mainland of Europe, Protestant opposition to traditional Catholicism did not as yet have more than a toe-hold in England. However, 1536 represented a watershed because in June of that year the newly appointed Bishop of Worcester, Hugh Latimer, one of the earliest English Protestants,⁴ was chosen to preach two sermons before Convocation. Latimer used the occasion to denounce purgatory, the use of relics and images of Christ and the saints, many ceremonies and other longstanding elements of Catholic belief and practice.⁵ Following this, Convocation devised Ten Articles of religious doctrine which were endorsed by Royal Injunctions. Among the articles was one which dealt with the eucharist and which could be interpreted in either a Catholic or a Lutheran sense. (Catholics believed in transubstantiation, the change of the whole substance of the eucharistic bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, while Luther favoured consubstantiation, arguing that Christ was present in the bread and wine.) Another of the articles reduced the number of sacraments from the late medieval seven to the three deemed necessary for salvation: baptism, penance and the eucharist. The Royal Injunctions also urged the clergy to restrain their parishioners’ enthusiasm for traditional devotions.

In July 1537 the bishops issued The Institution of a Christian Man (the ‘Bishops’ Book’), which restored the four rejected sacraments of confirmation, marriage, holy orders and extreme unction. At the same time the book was ambiguous about transubstantiation and stressed the importance of justification – that is, acceptance and eventual salvation – by faith alone. This central tenet of Luther’s teaching attacked Catholicism head-on by denying the importance of ‘good works’ such as the practice of piety and charity as a means to salvation.⁶

The theological debate set in train by these events led the king in 1539 to devise a plan for securing authoritative answers to the controverted questions. Acting through an intermediary, he posed the House of Lords six questions so phrased as to be likely to elicit Catholic answers. The resultant Act of Six Articles (subtitled ‘An Act Abolishing Diversity in Opinions’) called for the continued use of traditional Catholic practices and threatened anyone who denied transubstantiation with burning at the stake – even though it had for a while been legitimate to dally with the Lutheran alternative. Except for the fact that it imposed doctrine on the sole authority of the king, the act constituted an overwhelming victory for conservative opinion and a significant setback for the reforming party. Latimer’s resignation from his bishopric is a good indication of the reformers’ mood. In 1543 the bishops followed up the king’s initiative with the publication of The Necessary Doctrine and Erudition of a Christian Man (the ‘King’s Book’: Henry wrote a preface for it). In addition to reaffirming Catholic teaching on a range of issues, this explicitly condemned the doctrine of justification by faith. Yet even though Catholic orthodoxy was the order of the day, Cranmer set in motion a programme of reform of the service-books. An English version of the supplicatory prayer known as the Litany was issued for immediate use in 1544; until this moment the Church’s worship had been conducted entirely in Latin. However, no further changes were mandated as long as the king lived.

On Henry’s death in January 1547, his nine-year-old son by Anne Boleyn ascended the throne. Edward VI’s education had run counter to the generally reactionary thrust of the final years of his father’s reign in that it had been entrusted to men of known Protestant sympathies. In fact, Henry’s death saw control of the country being placed firmly in Protestant hands: Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford and Protector of the Realm, fully supported Cranmer’s desire for further reformation. Catholic bishops were deposed and sent to the Tower. It was announced almost at once that English was to be used at mass for the readings from the Bible, and the opening of Edward’s first Parliament was celebrated with a mass at which the Gloria, Credo and Agnus Dei were sung in English for the first time ever.⁷ The first act of the administration, the Act against Revilers, was phrased in such a way as to placate conservatives (it maintained the ‘real presence’ of Christ in the eucharist) while establishing the practice, viewed as essential by all leading Protestants, of receiving communion ‘under both kinds’ – in the form of wine, that is, as well as of bread.⁸ The act, therefore, gave mixed messages about the theological direction which the new regime was likely to take, though there could be little doubt that change was on the way. In January 1548, after a silence of eight years, Hugh Latimer preached his famous Sermon of the Plough before the who...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface and acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Introduction: The two Donnes
• Chapter 1 From Catholic to Protestant
• Chapter 2 The individual and the state
• Chapter 3 The art of devotion
• Chapter 4 Sighs and tears: the Holy Sonnets
• Chapter 5 The originality of the Holy Sonnets
• Chapter 6 Tracts for the times
• Chapter 7 Revelations of self
• Chapter 8 The art of death
• Chapter 9 Recollections of the player-preacher
• Bibliography
• Index