Spenser, Donne, and the theology of joy

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Wntr, 2006 by Adam Potkay

Yet joy may not be possible for everyone. Donne, after elaborating at some length on joy as a moral and religious obligation, pulls back from his emphasis on what we should freely do and treats rejoicing as something that God enables us to do: "The best evidence that a Man is at peace, and in favour with God, is, that he can rejoyce" (10:215). From this, it does not follow that God bestows favor on all--the ability to rejoice and with it, since Donne has linked the two, the potential for salvation. The issues that Donne here skirts--free will's relation to prevenient grace or to predestination, Calvinism versus Arminianism--loom large in Protestant theological controversy. That he wraps them so elegantly within a mollifying discourse of joy abounds to his oratorical credit and reveals his Anglican commitment to allowing for some latitude of opinion in matters of doctrinal dispute. (50)

The flexibility Donne demonstrates in his theology of joy carries over into his ecclesiology as well. Like Spenser (and the Gospel of John) Donne claims that real joy abides only in the true church or body of believers--Donne even invokes the "the Catholique [i.e., universal] Church" and its "unanime consent"--yet Donne speaks not of the "one true Church" but of "a true Church," broaching the grammatical possibility of a plurality of true churches (presumably including the continental Protestant churches) whose confederacy would form "the Catholique Church" (3:87). (Indeed, one wonders if Spenser could have intended the same ambiguity in his use of the Italian Una--"one" or "a"--for a character who represents some version of church and truth.) Who, indeed, is a true Christian? Donne universalizes only in terms of inner joy and "a true Church":

   joy, true joy is truly, properly, onely belonging to a Christian;   because this joy is the Testimony of a good conscience, that wee have   received God, so as God hath manifested himself in Christ, and   worshipt God, so God hath ordained, in a true Church. There are many   tesserae externae, outward badges and marks, by which others may   judge, and pronounce mee to bee a true Christian; But the tessera   interna, the inward badge and marke, by which I know this my selfe, is   joy.   (3:339) 

Donne's contention that inner joy and not external affiliation mark the true Christian--along with his minimal requirement that the true Christian worships God in "a true Church"--would seem to allow for an enlightened religious pluralism.

Donne's pluralism, however, is finally palliative rather than radical, a rhetorical means of softening divisions within the Church of England rather than those between the church and outsiders. Recall that in his survey of England's spiritual woes, Donne singled out as a special disease the indifference to interdenominational differences or of thinking of all religions as equal. (51) For all the latitude implied by Donne's expression "a true Church," it nevertheless conjures the oppositional figure of some false church--and that, of course, is the "Roman Church." "The Pope is Antichrist," and his doctrine, "the doctrine of Devils"; Tridentine Catholicism is "Heresie," its attitude toward the Eucharist, "Idolatry" (3:124, 132). The Roman Church is Babylon, and worse than Babylon: "Babylon is Confusion, disorder, but at Rome all sinnes are committed in order, by the book" (10:171). Such stuff was homiletic boilerplate, especially after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, yet Donne adds to it not only the biographical resonance of his own renounced Catholicism but also an ethical possibility for church building: "Let us therefore make use of those enemies, and of their aery insolences, and their frothy confidences, as thereby to be the firmer in our selves" (3:124). The negative strategy of John's gospel of joy could not be stated any more clearly than this, and indeed, nodding to the opening of John, Donne proceeds to emphasize that what sets the true church in England apart from the false is "we make the Word the onely rule of our faith" (3:129). One problem with Donne's as with Johannine ethics is that its stance of embattled group separatism generates further, intragroup separatism as indeed it did apace in Jacobean England. Donne looked askance at Presbyterian and Congregationalist "secession" from the church (the effect of "distempered men"), but did not dignify these denominations with the appellation of "church" (10:174). Nonetheless, churches they were, and claimants to being true churches. Donne records their complaint without an effective rejoinder: "Many of these extemporall men have gone away from us, and vainly said, that they have as good cause to separate from us [the Church of England], as we from Rome. But can they call our Church, a Babylon; Confusion, disorder?" (10:174).