Religious criticism, the verse epistle, and Donne's daring discretion

Christianity and Literature, Autumn, 2005 by Gregory Kneidel

John Donne's verse epistle, "Honour is so sublime perfection," is his most religious poem, (1) at least in the restricted sense that the word "religion" appears in it more often than in any of his other poems. (2) This curious fact might surprise both specialist and non-specialist readers of Donne alike. The poem is never printed with or listed among his religious poems. Like Donne's other neglected verse epistles, it lacks the qualities we most readily associate with his best studied religious poetry: the witty profanity of the Songs and Sonnets, the searching skepticism of "Satyre III," and the devotional intensity of the Holy Sonnets. (3) Indeed, since it takes up Horatian themes of friendship and patronage, ethics and politics, it is unclear how "Honour is so sublime perfection" might qualify as a religious poem in the first place. This problem has been made all the more acute in the wake of the so-called "turn to religion" in early modern literary criticism. (4) This turn is now far enough advanced that its methods and motives have begun to be challenged. One objection has been that it has tended to equate religion with inwardness, so that religious criticism adopts the agenda of analytic psychology and existentialist phenomenology and searches out a lineage of spiritual self-alienation that links Saint Paul with Levinas via Augustine, Luther, and Freud. In this essay, I will propose a further turn within the "turn to religion" that will enable our conception of Renaissance religion to encompass "Honour is so sublime perfection." This further turn away from inwardness has been made in other disciplines--specifically in biblical scholarship, early church history, and post-secular critical theory--and has only just begun to register in early modern literary criticism. (5) In "Honour is so sublime perfection," Donne likewise turns to religion in order to move away from inwardness. His model for doing this is Paul, from whom Donne gleans a strategy for reconciling daring and discretion, two qualities that critics tend to polarize as the hallmarks of Donne's rakish youth and his prosperous maturity, respectively. But, by explaining how Donne reconciles daring and discretion in this poem of his middle years, I hope to interject at least one of Donne's verse epistles into our critical discussions of Donne's religious poetics and the scriptural poetics of the early modern period more generally.

"Hee must worke and frame it after the modell of that panta pasi, all things to all men"

"The Reformation fought and conquered," Albert Schweitzer once wrote, "in the name of Paul" (2). Schweitzer could have gone further and said that the Reformation fought for a specific version of Paul. It was Luther who, following Augustine, read Paul's description of the self divided between the flesh and the spirit in Romans 6-8 as autobiography and then made it the normative account of the Christian condition (see Steinmetz). For Luther and later reformers, the core of Paul's theology was the introspective analysis of the subconscious, the motives, desires, and anxieties that betray our human frailties. Their Paul had established a new Christian faith that rejected both Hebraic work-righteousness and Hellenistic rationalism in favor of absolute dependence on God's saving grace. Because of his belief in humanity's fallen epistemology and enslaved will (non posse non peccare), Paul helped Reformed theologians to enshrine what Richard Lanham has called the Christian West's "bad conscience about language" (5). On this view, Paul rejected worldly rhetoric as sinfully carnal and sinfully rational (cf. 1 Cor. 1-3), so that his own style became idealized as simple and transparent. In his study Saint Paul and Protestantism, Matthew Arnold would complain, not altogether fairly, that Calvin, the "heavy-handed Protestant Philistine," would read every verse of Paul as if it were a mere "formal scientific proposition" (70).

The Reformations version of inward-looking Paul has come under attack in recent years by biblical scholars and critical theorists alike. Among biblical scholars, what is sometimes called the "new perspective" in Pauline studies grew out of Krister Stendahl's important 1963 essay, "The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West." A Lutheran bishop himself, Stendahl argued that Paul was not introspective and was not interested in defining a uniquely Christian psychology. Paul was not a divided self but a beleaguered mediator who had to talk Gentiles and Jews into coexistence within contentious, heterogeneous communities consisting of men and women, rich and poor, servants and masters, Judaizing and gnostic factions. (6) These public, even political disputes, and not the inner battle between the flesh and the spirit in each Christian's soul, are rightly thought of as the focus of Paul's ministry. Similarly treating Paul as a man of his times, postsecular critical theorists over the last decade have come to see the greatest of all Christian theologians as a radical Jew of the Diaspora, a Roman citizen who wrote in inelegant Greek, spoke Hebrew, was mistaken for a pagan god, and quoted from classical tragedians. He became the Apostle to the Gentiles as well as the putative author of the Epistle to the Hebrews and preached charity and unity and claimed divine inspiration while fighting bitterly for authority in nascent church communities against a whole array of detractors and enemies, including the redoubtable Peter, whom Paul defied "to his face" (Gal. 2:11). (7) These kinds of tensions and multiplicities in Paul's identity could be easily multiplied. (8) But it is important to notice that they supercede Paul's talk of the inward conflict between the flesh and the spirit and that they are by no means incidental given Paul's constant concern with defining his religion, which would only later be known as Christianity, not so much against but within his world's dominant Jewish and pagan cultures. Given the complexity of Paul's identity politics, it is easy to see why postsecular critical theorists--Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek, for example--have analyzed Paul not to critique the vacuity of liberal individualism to the paradoxes of liberal multiculturalism.