Spenser, Donne, and the theology of joy

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

The which he shortly did, and Una left to mourne. (1.12.41.1-9)

Redcrosse is still in the Faerie Queene's service; thus, his supreme joy passes within this stanza into Una's mourning at his necessary departure. Such is Spenser's final word on joy in the world. As Redcrosse came to understand in his vision of the New Jerusalem, "great joy"--the fullness and permanence of joy--belongs only with saints and angels at the end of history (1.10.56-7, 1.10.56.4).

In the meanwhile, joylessness remains a problem. Just as the visible form of the church is subject to violation by Puritan lawlessness, so is the spirit of the true church threatened by joylessness. Redcrosse does defeat Sans-Joy in canto 5, but the victory appears hollow and temporary. The end of canto 5 implies that the wounded Sans-Joy, once healed by Aesculapius in the underworld, will resurface once again. (44) Spenser depicts joylessness as an abiding problem for the church. That it is temporarily held at bay seems more a courtly compliment to Elizabeth's reign than a tenet of his faith.

In 1625, from the pulpit at St. Paul's Cathedral, John Donne explicitly addressed joylessness as a problem for the individual and for the corporate church or, more specifically, for the English individual and the Anglican Church:

     I would always raise your hearts, and dilate your hearts, to a holy   Joy, to a joy in the Holy Ghost. There may be a just feare, that men   doe not grieve enough for their sinnes; but there may bee a just   jealousie, and suspition too, that they may fall into inordinate   griefe, and diffidence of Gods mercy; And God hath reserved us to such   times, as being the later times, give us even the dregs and lees of   misery to drinke. For, God hath not onely let loose into the world a   new spirituall disease; which is, an equality, and an indifferency,   which religion our children, or our servants, or our companions   professe ... but God hath accompanied, and complicated almost all our   bodily diseases of these times, with an extraordinary sadnesse, a   predominant melancholy, a faintnesse of heart, a chearlesnesse, a   joylessnesse of spirit, and therefore I returne often to this endeavor   of raising your hearts, dilating your hearts with a holy Joy, Joy in   the holy Ghost, for Under the shadow of his wings, you may, you   should, rejoyce [Psalm 63:7]. (45) 

Donne's sermon is breathtaking both in its diagnosis of cultural joylessness and its bravura appeal to ecclesiastic rejoicing. Donne winds here between seeing Jacobean joylessness as an effect of a Calvinist "diffidence of Gods mercy"; as a part of God's eschatological plan (these are "the later times"--i.e., the end isn't far off); and as the psychosomatic corollary of the new spiritual disease of religious carelessness. England and its church have, in Spenser's terms, been attacked by Sans-Joy and Sans-Loy. Donne responds by prescribing a regimen of spiritual joy. He does so here in a rhetorical performance that derives its incantatory force--to analyze only Donne's last sentence--from gradatio as "sadness" and "melancholy" mount to "joylessnesse of spirit"; amplification and epistrophe, in "raising your hearts, dilating your hearts"; the chiasmic effect of his refrain, "a holy Joy, Joy in the holy Ghost"; and, finally, within the metaphorical shadow of God's wings, the correctio of "you may, you should, rejoyce," verbally enacting the transformation of possibility into obligation. Donne's eloquence serves the "holy stirring of religious affections" he saw as the function of pulpit oratory (8:95); but the ultimate religious affection, the end to which instrumental fear and melancholy lead, is joy. (46)