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

Christianity and Literature, Autumn, 2005 by Gregory Kneidel

Thus, Paul stands out from other biblical writers in Renaissance religious writing as a denizen of the ancient Mediterranean world and as a self-fashioning author. Jeffrey Knapp has recently shown that Erasmus's appreciation of Paul's "cunning" had great currency among a large and largely moderate group of English dramatists-cum-prelates. As Paul's example influenced English drama, so too did it influence English rhetorical theory. A certain D. T., writing on the arts of "conversation" and "negotiation" in a work titled The dove and the serpent (1614), imagines the ideal diplomat as a "Dove-like-Serpent." This decorous, chimerical creature

   must take heede that this appropriation and fitting of himself to
   such diversitie of Forms, bee so limited and circumscribed according
   to the rules and precepts of Divinitie, that the extent thereof may
   no way over-peere the bounds of Christian purenesse and integritie.
   Hee must worke and flame it after the modell of that panta pasi, all
   things to all men [1 Cor. 9:22], of S. Paules, and then he shalbe
   sure continually to walke aright. (36)

A logician might object that once Paul's "all things to all men" is taken as a model, it is hard to see what "rules" "precepts" and "bounds" could restrict the pure and integral self. But the point is that Paul was not a logician or a systematic theologian. Consequently, we need to abandon the tepid notion that, in David Daniell's words, during the English Reformation "the effect of Paul's writing is to create a plain and simple presence" (252). Certainly Paul is sometimes plain, and he sometimes claims to be simple (in fact, he claims to be idiotes--untrained). But he claims and does much more. The very first sentence of the French Protestant Sebastian Castellio's preface to Galatians asserts that Paul can be found "teaching," "swearing" "vituperating" "condemning" "anathematizing" "recalling," "praising" "commending," "persuading" and "insinuating" Indeed, one of the things Paul praises is his own person (Pauli personam ... orans; Pearson, 7:3287).

Further evidences of this variable, cunning, citizen Paul's presence in post-Reformation England will be given below. But the main point is that during Donne's lifetime Paul could be thought of as an apostolic homo rhetoricus, even though, like other rhetorical men, he assumed the role of homo seriousus. According to Lanham, homo rhetoricus had to sacrifice "religious sublimity, and its reassuring, if breathtaking, unities" for a sense of creating worlds through words (5). As we will see, Donne's "Honour is so sublime perfection" readily sacrifices sublimity and unity for something like, to use Arnold's phrase, Pauline "elasticity" But, pace Lanham, it does this by turning to, not from, religion.

"as an amber drop enwraps a bee"

Like the six other verse epistles Donne addressed to Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, "Honour is so sublime perfection" mixes offerings of friendly advice with elaborate metaphysical conceits (many recycled elsewhere in Donne's corpus) and courtly compliment, all in the hope of securing her patronage. The poem consists of eighteen rhymed tercets in rough iambic pentameter and does not reveal the exact occasion of its composition, although it is thought to have been composed between 1609 and 1614, in the second half of Donne's middle period between his professionally disastrous marriage in 1602 and his decision to take holy orders in 1615. The best critical reading of the poem remains Margaret Mauer's 1980 essay, "The Real Presence of Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, and the Terms of John Donne's 'Honour is so Sublime Prefection.'" Mauer sets out to recover the "grossly hyperbolical" and "conspicuous impropriety" created by Donne's mingling of courtly and religious vocabularies. Mauer reads the poem as a letter of instruction in which Donne sets up his own daring poetic indiscretion as a model for Bedford to adopt in her courtly affairs (205-206; see also Marotti, 227-29). The curious effect of Mauer's perceptive reading is to suggest that the poem is just about court conduct and not about religion, rather as if Andres Serrano's inflammatory "Piss Christ" (1989) were said to be just about public funding for the arts and not about Christianity. In Mauer's reading, the religious imagery merely adds shock value to the poems lesson about courtly conduct--Donne's religion is Serrano's piss. Mauer had a good reason for downplaying religion: she wanted to recover Bedford's life and her importance as recipient of the epistle. But with that work done, I hope to restore religion to the "place" (line 38) that Donne's poem itself claims for it.