Essay 6—
Impossible Radicalism I
Donne and Freedom of Conscience

I

This essay aims to restore a nineteenth and early twentieth-century sense of the young John Donne, a view of him as a bold and radical freethinker, a genuinely independent intellectual. Interestingly, to propound this view of "Jack" Donne sets me against both the older and the newer historicisms, since both of them work to obscure or deny the possibility of true intellectual radicalism in the early modern period.^[1] Again I mean to stand with Empson. The sense of Jack Donne that I wish to restore might truly be called an Empsonian one. From the early 1950s

[1] Donne seems to have coined the Jack Donne / Doctor Donne antithesis in a letter to Sir Robert Carr probably written in 1619. See Letters to Several Persons of Honour by John Donne , ed. Charles Edmund Merrill Jr. (New York: Sturgis and Walton, 1910), 19; dated by the editor (p. 275). With regard to New Historicism, Frank Lentricchia is correct, I think, in taking Marlowe, among figures that Greenblatt has treated, as the best candidate for an English Renaissance author who either was or at least conceived the "rebellious, oppositional subject." I think that Lentricchia is also correct in seeing the effort of Greenblatt's treatment as being to deny the reality of such opposition; see "Foucault's Legacy—A New Historicism?" in H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989), 239–40. Greenblatt has attempted to deny that his work implies the impossibility of genuine resistance or oppositionality in "Resonance and Wonder," Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 165–66. With regard to Shakespeare, he states that "one can readily think of plays where the forces of ideological containment break down," but he (oddly and, I think, revealingly) never goes on to specify which plays so readily leap to mind. And even in the course of defending his belief in the possibility of dissent, his emphasis remains on the difficulty of it (166).

on, one of the great projects of Empson's life was the attempt, as he put it, at "Rescuing Donne" from the hands of conservative or cynical scholars who had truly "kidnapped" him (in the early 1930s, Merritt Hughes, in the name of scholarship, had accused the modernists of "Kidnapping Donne").^[2] Building on the position that he developed in his controversy with Tuve, Empson continued to inveigh against the conservatism and smoothing out effect of historical scholarship oriented toward "tradition."^[3] He warned, in a memorable phrase, against recovering only "subservient or boot-licking morals" from the past.^[4] In our own context, it is important to see that any scholarship obsessed with avoiding "that most dangerous of historical ailments, anachronism,"^[5] or, similarly, with establishing the limits of what was "thinkable" in a period will tend to have this effect. "New" and "old" come strikingly together here, since it makes no difference whether the homogeneous framework that defines the supposed limits of what was thinkable is called a "world picture" or an "episteme."^[6] The result is the same: what is "thinkable" will be presented as quite finite and predictable—and quite conservative.

[2] For Merritt Y. Hughes, "Kidnapping Donne," see University of California Publications in English 4 (1934): 61–89. Most of Empson's essays on Donne from 1949 on have been usefully collected in William Empson, Essays on Renaissance Literature , vol. 1, Donne and the New Philosophy, ed. John Haffenden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

[3] See Essay 1 above. Tuve clearly saw Empson as kidnapping Herbert, though she does not use this particular metaphor (my colleague Douglas Bruster has suggested to me that Hughes's use of it might have been conditioned by the Lindbergh case, so the charge against the modernists is, implicitly, even harsher than it might appear).

[4] William Empson, "'Mine Eyes Dazzle,'" review of Clifford Leech, Webster: The Duchess of Malfi (1963), reprinted in G. K. Hunter and S. K. Hunter, eds., John Webster (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), 195–301; the quotation appears on p. 300.

[5] Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 52.

[6] On the conception of the "episteme" as "the set of constraints and limitations which, at a given moment, are imposed on discourse," see Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 192. For Foucault's account of the Renaissance (sixteenth-century) episteme, see The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1970), chap. 2. This account is strikingly similar to that of E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture: A Study of the Idea of Order in the Age of Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton (New York: Random House, 1944). For an examination of the evidence (or exemplary material) that Foucault adduces for his "Renaissance episteme," see George Huppert, "Divinatio and Eruditio : Thoughts on Foucault," History and Theory 13 (1974): 191–207. For the view that Foucault has aptly described one epistemic formation in the Renaissance (namely that of Renaissance magic) rather than the entire Renaissance episteme, see Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Obviously, concern about anachronism is useful in a monitory way. I am not sure, however, about the notion of "the limits of what was thinkable." This whole approach encourages an emphasis on the limitation of intellectual options, "the set of constraints and limitations." Such an emphasis seems to me dangerous in regard to any historical period, since every period is likely to be less restricted in its range of intellectual options than this approach will suggest. With regard to the early modern period in Europe, however, such an emphasis seems especially inappropriate since the intellectual world of this period was bursting with manifold and contradictory views and positions, old and new, orthodox and heterodox—and all in print. Anyone who has read Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy will be unlikely to be impressed with the "constraints" on discourse in the period.^[7] Stanley Fish's view of Burton and of the intellectual world of the period as essentially nihilistic is, as we have seen, false, yet it is a great improvement over the Tillyard-Foucault picture.^[8] With regard to Donne, the view that ideas were not really important to him, that he was a merely an ambitious young would-be secretary or diplomat advertising his virtuosity to potential patrons produces a view of young Donne that seems to me (as it did to Empson) no more adequate than the view of him as always and everywhere orthodox.^[9]

Empson was right, I think, that Donne—"Jack" Donne, that is—is a particularly important case (as is Marlowe).^[10] If young Donne turns out to be merely orthodox or merely "political" in a very restricted, anti-ideological sense, this is indeed a significant finding. The essay that follows will take as its focus what has been plausibly called "the great, crucial poem of Donne's early manhood," the third Satire ("Of Reli-

[7] The famous "Digression on Air" in the Second Partition of The Anatomy would be a good place to start; see Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1977), 34–61.

[8] For a critique of Fish's view of Burton (and of the way Fish arrives at this view), see Essay 2 above.

[9] The key work for seeing Donne's life and mind as dominated by ambition (and guilt over renouncing Catholicism) is John Carey's John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). Arthur F. Marotti develops Carey's themes in what is proclaimed as a "new historicist" manner in John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986). For the claim to New Historicism, see p. xiv.

[10] It makes perfect sense in this context, which I think is indeed the relevant one, that Empson's last extended critical project was on Marlowe and Dr. Faustus . It has been published as Faustus and the Censor: The English Faust-book and Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus," ed. John Henry Jones (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). See n. 1 above for Marlowe as a test case.

gion").^[11] Empson's wonderful essay on Donne's fantasy of freedom from repression, "Donne the Spaceman," is mainly concerned with the erotic poems, but in the preliminaries to his major argument, Empson makes some remarks en passant about Satire III. With his normal distrust of scholarly truisms and his desire for genuine historicism, Empson notes that although this poem "seems often to be regarded as a commonplace bit of Anglican liberalism," such "liberalism" was not commonplace or even safe in the mid-1590s. He notes, moreover, that despite some familiar rhetoric about fighting the devil, the third Satire seems "somehow also to give [an] inherent argument for freedom of conscience."^[12] I think that Empson has, as usual, gotten to the heart of the matter. In this essay, I will try to demonstrate that Empson was right about the radicalism of the poem, historically right. I will try to demonstrate that such a view is not, after all, anachronistic. I will not argue that Donne's third Satire is consistent in its radicalism—it will, in fact, be part of my argument to deny this—but I will try to show that the radicalism in the poem is genuine, that it can be fully contextualized in the sixteenth-century world, and that it constitutes the poem's deepest and poetically most distinguished strain.

It seems worth stating outright that it would be surprising if a major text "Of Religion" by the young John Donne were a conventional piece. Donne's religious biography is extraordinary. What makes it so is not only his move from the militant Catholicism of his birth and upbringing to the Protestantism of the English Church, though this is interesting enough. Also extraordinary is the length of time it took Donne to make this move and, most of all, his recorded state of mind during the prolonged "in-between" period.^[13] In a world where everyone was a religious something, often a militant something, Donne was, for a remarkably long time, a religious nothing. In the autobiographical "Preface to the Priestes and Jesuits" of Pseudo-martyr , written in 1609–10, Donne acknowledged his love of "freedome and libertie" in his studies, his tendency

[11] Carey, Donne: Life, Mind, and Art , 26. The poem is entitled "Of Religion" in one manuscript and "Uppon Religion" in another. See John Donne: The Satires, Epigrams and Verse Letters, ed. W. Milgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 140. Citations of Satire III are to this edition (hereafter Satires ) and will be given in the text by line number.

[12] William Empson, "Donne the Spaceman," Kenyon Review 19 (1957): 341–42.; Empson, Donne and the New Philosophy , 82.

[13] For Donne's ancestry, childhood, and upbringing, see R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), chaps. 2 and 3.

toward what he describes as an intellectual and religious bachelorhood, a temperamental unwillingness to "betroth or enthral my selfe, to any one science, which should possesse or denominate me."^[14] The identification of commitment with enthrallment is a familiar feature of the erotic life that Donne represents in his lyrics ("Rob mee, but binde me not, and let me go"); in this preface to his most sober, important, and public piece of writing up to that time, Donne uses the identification of commitment with enthrallment to explain his intellectual and spiritual life.^[15] He sees his unwillingness to espouse a single religious position as having produced a promiscuity in him, an "easiness" to afford "a sweete and gentle Interpretation, to all professors" of Christianity.

In the context of this candid but rhetorically complex self-characterization (is it praise or blame? or is it praise masquerading as blame?) Donne proceeds to an account of his religious history. He used, he says, "no inordinate haste, nor precipitation in binding my conscience to any locall Religion." "Binding" the conscience sounds negative here, as does the rather belittling "locall Religion." One would think that by the time of writing Pseudo-martyr in 1610, Donne had indeed "bound" his conscience to the "locall Religion" of England, but it should be remembered that it took five more years and considerable political pressure for Donne finally to take orders in this "local" church.^[16] He presents his long period of what he calls "irresolution," which he acknowledges "bred some scandall," as having consisted of two phases. The work of the first phase was negative. Since Donne began his spiritual life with a heavily inscribed rather than a clean slate, to get to a position of neutrality he had "first to blot out certaine impressions of the Romane religion." Changing the image to make it more personal, Donne had, he says, "to wrastle both against the examples and against the reasons, by which some hold was taken, and some anticipations early laid upon my conscience" by "Persons who by nature had a power and superiority over my will" (parents and relatives) and by other Catholic adults who "by their learning and good life" made "impressions" on Donne's youthfull psyche.^[17]

[14] John Donne, Pseudo-Martyr (London, 1610), B 2r–v.

[15] See "The Indifferent," line 16. All citations from Donne's poetry other than the Satires and verse letters are from The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York: Doubleday, 1967).

[16] See Bald, Donne , 204–20; Dennis Flynn, "Donne's Catholicism: II," Recusant History 13 (1976): 178–95; and Carey, Donne: Life, Mind, and Art, chap. 3.

[17] On the significance of the coin imagery here, see John Carey, "Donne and Coins," in John Carey, ed., English Renaissance Studies Presented to Dame Helen Gardner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 151–63; and Richard Strier, "John Donne Awry and Squint: The 'Holy Sonnets,' 1608–10," Modern Philology 86 (1989): 357–84.

It is inaccurate, therefore, to say that Donne "would not abandon the religion of his youth until he had satisfied himself intellectually and morally that it was the right thing to do."^[18] Donne presents abandoning the religion of his youth as a prerequisite for attaining intellectual satisfaction: "first to blot out certaine impressions." After the blotting out came a period of "search and disquisition" in which Donne attempted to survey and digest "the whole body of Divinity, controverted between ours and the Romane church." This was a lengthy process. As late as 1608, a friend who had converted to Roman Catholicism described Donne not as a committed Protestant but as (strikingly) "a mere libertine" in religion.^[19] Donne saw Biathanatos , composed in 1607 or 1608, when he was at least thirty-four, as "written by Jack Donne."^[20] And even in the preface to Pseudo-Martyr , Donne earnestly warned against thinking "that hee hath no Religion, which dares not call his Religion by some newer name than Christian ." The third Satire was written in the mid-1590s, early in the period of Donne's suspension of commitment; I believe that its ultimate import is to stand as a defense of such suspension.

In interpreting Donne's account of his religious biography as I have above, and in taking this account, so interpreted, as providing a useful context for approaching Satire III, I am implicitly rejecting the claim, made by various scholars, that the Satires are fundamentally Roman Catholic in point of view and sensibility.^[21] This claim tends in itself to produce a conservative Donne. Yet as R. C. Bald says, the biographical evidence makes it unlikely that by the mid-1590s Donne was "an unyielding Catholic."^[22] The most important evidence is provided by the Satires themselves. The five Satires seem to have circulated in manu-

[18] Marotti, Donne, Coterie Poet , 43.

[19] See the excerpt from Sir Toby Matthew's Relation of his conversion to Catholicism in Bald, Donne , 188. In the essay cited in n. 17 above, I argue that the process of religious transformation was still incomplete in the period when Donne was composing the bulk of the "Holy Sonnets," and that this can be seen in the poems themselves.

[20] See n. 1 above.

[21] See, for instance, The Poems of John Donne , ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 2:117; Clay Hunt, Donne's Poetry: Essays in Literary Analysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 170–72; and M. Thomas Hester, Kinde Pitty and Brave Scorn: John Donne's "Satyres" (Durham: Duke University Press, 1982).

[22] Bald, Donne , 70.

script as a book or group in the order in which they appear in the first printed editions, and they were probably composed in this order.^[23] The other Satires, then, especially the second and fourth, should throw some light on the third. In the second, Donne shows a detailed knowledge of Catholic institutional and intellectual structures ("Confession . . . Schoolmen . . . Canonists" [lines 33–38]), and in the fourth, as Erskine-Smith has suggested, Donne may well be drawing on the experience of danger and vulnerability of a Catholic in a Protestant state.^[24] Yet what is most striking in the religious references of these satires is their independence from any established religious position.

Donne's aim (or fantasy) in these poems is to stand clear of the religious, political, and social pressures of his world. The second Satire is especially striking for its political daring, its references (censored in the first edition of the Poems ) to lying "Like a Kings favorite, yea like a King" (line 70) and to bastardy "in Kings titles" (which is likened, in its abundance, to "Symonie' and Sodomy in Churchmen's lives" [74–75].^[25] With regard to texts, sacred and otherwise, Satire II is cynical about the procedures of all commentators and controversialists (99–102). The fourth Satire continues this detachment. It equates Catholic and Protestant persecutions ("protestation" at Rome could throw anyone "into the'Inquisition" while, in England, swearing an oath "by Jesu" can put one at the mercy of a Topcliffe).^[26] This satire carefully balances Protestants and Catholics in contexts of both praise and blame: as lying historians ("Jovius or Sleidan" [47–48]) and as eminent scholars ("Beza . . . some Jesuites" [55–56]).^[27] This is not the writing of a Catholic—or at least not of a normative post-Tridentine Catholic. It may well be the position of an Erasmian, but that was a very different matter. The Council of Trent was vehemently anti-Erasmian.^[28] Erasmus was the

[23] See Alan MacColl, "The Circulation of Donne's Poems in Manuscript," in A. J. Smith, ed., John Donne: Essays in Celebration (London: Methuen, 1972), 42, and Satires, xlv–xlvii.

[24] Howard Erskine-Smith, "Courtiers out of Horace," in Smith, ed., Donne: Essays in Celebration , 283.

[25] In Donne, Poems, By J. D. with Elegies on the Authors Death (London, 1633), p. 331, lines 69–70 and lines 74–75 are excised, with broken horizontal lines representing the number of lines missing. Hereafter cited as Poems 1633.

[26] In later revisions, Donne changed "Topcliffe" to "Pursevant" (see Satires , 162).

[27] The Protestant Sleidan was later replaced by the Catholic responder to Sleidan, Surius (see Satires , 152–53).

[28] For a clear account of the history of Erasmus's reputation through the mid-eighteenth century, and especially for the radical devaluation of Erasmus by the Catholic Church after the Council of Trent, see Bruce Mansfield, Phoenix of His Age: Interpretations of Erasmus, 1550–1750 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), esp. chap. 2.

preeminent case of a figure who was frequently thought to have "no Religion" because he refused to "call his Religion by some newer name than Christian ." Odd as it may seem to us, at the end of the sixteenth century, and perhaps throughout it, in many contexts to be an Erasmian was to be a radical.^[29]

II

The remainder of this essay is devoted to a "close reading" of Donne's third Satire. This kind of sequential, nearly line-by-line reading, bearing as it does the taint of formalism, is no longer in fashion. Yet if one is interested in the "inside" perspective at all, it is the only way to enter into the emotional and intellectual tensions and eddies of a text, indeed, of the mind of a nonliving person.^[30] Generalizations about a text are rarely helpful about that text, though they may be so for other purposes. With regard to individual texts, tracking their movements from beginning to end is our only hope for real engagement. To pick out bits and pieces of a text, and then to contextualize those bits and pieces as imaginatively as possible, can be exciting and extraordinarily illuminating. It creates the wonderful collage effects of New Historicism. But if you wish to see the mind of a particular historical individual at work (or play), there is no substitute for relatively thorough "close reading." It is only in the tiny details of a text—especially (but not exclusively) in a poem, where an extraordinary number of meaning-bearing elements are at work—that we can hope to capture the real complexity of lived experience and thought in the past.^[31] To do "close reading" with as

[29] For a good sense of the potential and actual radicalism of Erasmus's religious views, see Marcel Bataillon, Erasme et l'Espagne (1937; rev. ed., 3 vols., Geneva: Droz, 1991); Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century (1942), trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), chap. 8; Roland H. Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom (New York: Scribner's, 1969); E. G. Rupp, Patterns of Reformation (London: Epworth, 1969); and Carlos M. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

[30] On the importance of the "inside" perspective, see Essay 4 above.

[31] I would defend the "close reading" of historical "documents" as well as poems. I have attempted such a defense, and such an activity, in "Describing and Curing a National Disaster: The Roots and Branches Petition and the Grand Remonstrance," in David L. Smith, Richard Strier, and David Bevington, eds., The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre, and Literature in London, 1576–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

much knowledge but as few preconceptions as possible is, as I have suggested, the only way in which we will ever be able to come close to recreating the thought and lifeworlds of particular individuals. Ultimately we may well be interested in something larger than individuals, but we cannot properly get to the "something larger" without attending to what we can reconstruct of the intimate emotional and intellectual lives of individuals and of represented individuals. Even if we are prepared to dismiss much of what we find as "false consciousness" of one sort or another, it is historical data of immense importance nonetheless.

Donne is a great opener of poems. Where the first two Satires immediately establish a dialogical frame (their opening words are "Away thou" and "Sir, though" respectively), the third opens with the speaker in a state of puzzled yet highly stylized self-contemplation.^[32] There is no clear interlocutor.^[33] The speaker stresses both his emotionality and his bafflement as he watches his passions interfere with one another: "Kinde pitty chokes my spleene." This is strange and striking. We are thrown suddenly and uncomfortably not just into the speaker's mind but into his internal bodily processes, into (as Eliot hauntingly said) "the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, the digestive tract."^[34] "Spleen" was a term with a range of reference simultaneously and ambiguously psychological and physiological. "Chokes" dominates the half line, making the kindness of pity seem purely ascriptive. The speaker seems splenetic toward pity.

The rest of the line is more stable and controlled: "brave scorn forbids." We are now in a world where the epithet and the verb cor-

[32] In referring to "the speaker" of the poem, I do not mean to imply that I think that the poem is spoken by a "persona." I believe "the speaker" of Satire III to be a direct projection of the historical John Donne. I use the term only in a rhetorical sense. For the non-inevitability of the notion of a persona in lyric poetry, see the discussion of George Herbert's "The Church-porch" in Essay 5 above, especially pp. 96–101.

[33] While N. J. C. Andreasen, "Theme and Structure in Donne's Satyres," Studies in English Literature 3 (1963): 59–75, sees Satire III as a soliloquy, Thomas O. Sloan, "The Persona as Rhetor: An Interpretation of Donne's Satyre III," Quarterly Journal of Speech 51 (1965): 14–27, sees the mode of the poem as that of deliberative oratory. I think that both scholars are right. I do not believe that persuading oneself and persuading others were seen as distinct activities by Renaissance persons.

[34] T. S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets," Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), 250.

respond ("brave . . . forbids") rather than conflict ("kind . . . chokes"). We are far from physiology and have entered the realm of will and lordly control ("forbids"). The second line, however, brings us back to uncomfortable physical proximity. What "brave scorn forbids" is "Those teares to issue which swell my eye-lids" (line 2). We are awfully close to the speaker's face, and there is something (from the staunchly male point of view of "brave scorn") embarrassingly "feminine" and physiological in "swell my eye-lids." The image of a full pregnancy not allowed to "issue" into a birth is as uncomfortable as the image of choking.^[35] The speaker (Donne?) really does seem mired in conflicting emotions. The spleen and scorn of the first line are convincing, but no more so than the extraordinary delicacy of the second.

It is a relief to encounter an ethical rather than a physiological subject at the beginning of the third line. We encounter an "I" with some moral distance from physiology: "I must not laugh, nor weepe sinnes" (line 3a). Why this speaker "must not laugh" [at] sins is easily apprehended, but why not "weepe sinnes"? Jesus, after all, wept for Jerusalem.^[36] The rest of the line explains why this speaker cannot allow himself either of his contradictory responses. He cannot do so "and be wise" (line 3b). The desire to be "wise" in a strongly classical, distinctively Stoic sense is more important to this speaker than sorting out, tempering, or expressing his emotions.^[37] The disconcertingly wet and physiological emotionality of the opening is perhaps meant to have the effect of leading us (presumed male) as well as the speaker to value the "dry light" and unemotionality of Stoic wisdom.^[38]

The opening sentence ends with the speaker considering a response different from both laughing and weeping, an option that is presumably (but not assuredly) compatible with "wisdom": "Can railing then cure these worne maladies?" (line 4). "Railing" is a technical term. Donne

[35] On pregnant tears, see "A valediction of weeping."

[36] Here and in the rest of this paragraph, I am deeply indebted to Gregory Vlastos's remarkable comparison of Jesus and Socrates in "Introduction: The Paradox of Socrates," in Gregory Vlastos, ed., The Philosophy of Socrates (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 15–17.

[37] Joshua Scodel in "The Medium is the Message: Donne's 'Satire 3,' 'To Sir Henry Wotton ("Sir, more then kisses"),' and the Ideologies of the Mean," Modern Philology 91 (1993): 482, asserts that Donne's speaker "does not seek Stoic impassivity." Scodel is committed to seeing the poem as embracing a consistent, if idiosyncratic, Aristotelian position (see n. 56 below).

[38] For "dry light" (lumen siccum ), see Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, in Selected Writings , ed. Hugh G. Dick (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1955), 165 (citing Heraclitus).

is contemplating Juvenalian satire conceived, as Sidney conceived it, in semimedical terms, with sins redescribed as "maladies." This is tentatively approached, and we can understand why. Even accepting the equation of sins with diseases, it seems a lot to ask from "railing" that it cure established maladies. This is more than Sidney credited to "bold but wholesome Iambic."^[39] Donne's complex and conflicted proem to the Satire seems to end (fitly) by questioning the efficacy of a mode that it was about to adopt. Neither we nor the poet are sure that any satiric mode will be able to "cure these worne maladies" and enable the speaker to "be wise." It is not clear that "railing" should even be tried. Perhaps the moral essay would be the better genre. Already, within four lines, the poem is deeply self-conscious and self-questioning.

The second sentence is another question. Meant to be sarcastic, perhaps a form of "railing," it emerges as more baffled than biting. Donne reveals that the sins or "maladies" with which he is concerned are failures in spiritual commitment. Since his conception of wisdom is deeply classical, it is natural for this speaker to view "our" degree of spiritual commitment and its object against that of the pagans of the classical period and theirs, asking

Is not our Mistresse faire Religion,
As worthy'of all our Soules devotion,
As vertue was to the first blinded age? (5–7)

Donne is saying (or at least implying) something remarkable in his presentation of "the first blinded age." The highest goal of pagan practical life, "vertue," is presented as having been an object of "Soules devotion," a term that normally designates a specifically Christian or at least biblical activity. The speaker is genuinely puzzled at the inefficacy of "faire Religion" to inspire an (at least) equivalent intensity. "Devotion," here, is a matter of commitment, not of religiosity. The "Soules devotion" of "the first blinded age" is unquestioned; it is the premise of the comparison. The sense in which this age was "blinded" is obvious—it was not privy to the sight of "faire Religion" (Christianity)—but this blindness seems merely technical. The point is the superiority, not the inferiority of the pagans. Donne tries the comparison again in the next sentence, explicitly measuring "our" failures (and their success) by the extent of our advantages: "Are not heavens joyes as valiant to

[39] Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry , ed. Geoffrey Shepherd(London: Nelson, 1965), 116.

asswage / Lusts as earths honour was to them?" (8–9). The test of "devotion" is, apparently, moral: its ability, as the enjambment insists, to "asswage / Lusts," to lead persons to suppress or (better) to redirect their appetites and passions.

In the midst of these questionings, the speaker stops to reflect. The tone shifts from scorn to sorrow as Donne contemplates the difference between "heavens joyes" and "earths honour": "Alas, / As wee do them in meanes, shall they surpasse / Us in the end" (10–11). This is elegantly compact and precise. The contrast blends the philosophical one between ends and means and the religious one between other ends and "the end." The mention of "heavens joyes" in line 8 generates a transcendental, even apocalyptic context. It follows from the speaker's argument that the pagans who gave "Soules devotion" to virtue will attain the transcendental "end." The idea of heaven seems regularly to have stirred the thought of fathers in Donne's mind. In the sonnet beginning "If faithfull soules," Donne fantasizes that his glorified father can behold Donne's spiritual athleticism ("valiantly I hels wide mouth o'rstride"). Here, Donne contemplates the possibility that "thy fathers spirit" shall

Meete blinde Philosophers in heaven, whose merit
Of strict life may be'imputed faith, and heare
Thee, whom hee taught so easie wayes and neare
To follow, damn'd?  (12–15)

This is tricky, although its general outlines are clear: Donne is continuing his radically humanist line of thought. The "blind Philosophers" are unequivocally "in heaven," not in limbo or Purgatory.^[40] They seem, in fact, more solidly and substantially there than does "thy fathers spirit."^[41] We must stop and ask some questions here lest we take all of this too casually. One puzzle is how the philosophers got to heaven. They did so, it seems, on a strictly Catholic conception, through, as the line break suggests, "merit." The explication of "merit" as "strict life"

[40] On the salvation of the virtuous pagans in humanist thought, see George Huntson Williams, "Erasmus and the Reformers on Non-Christian Religions and Salus Extra Ecclesiam, " in Theodore K. Rabb and Jerrold E. Seigel, eds., Action and Conviction in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Memory of E. H. Harbison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 319–70.

[41] Carey's suggestion (Donne: Life, Mind, and Art , 28) that Donne is echoing Hamlet is fanciful and probably impossible (unless we accept the existence of a pre-Shakespearean ur-Hamlet with this phrase in it), but Carey is right about the strangeness and wraithlike quality of "thy fathers spirit," especially in comparison to the substantiality of the "blinde Philosophers."

is fully intelligible and fully in keeping with the stress in the poem on the capacity of devotion to "asswage / Lusts." But the situation is not so straightforward. As the enjambed sentence continues, it turns out that salvation is by faith, after all, and that Donne is speculating or postulating that "merit . . . may be'imputed faith." "Imputation" is a technical and loaded theological term central to Luther's theology. Donne is making startlingly un-Lutheran use of the key Lutheran terms of "imputation" and faith, since the force of the notion of imputed righteousness was precisely to oppose the philosophical, classical, and commonsense idea of achieved or actual righteousness.^[42] Milgate sees Donne using the terms impudently here.^[43] This is plausible and may be correct, but I wonder whether we ought to consider taking Donne at his word. Perhaps he is being boldly syncretic, trying to find a formula for the salvation of the philosophers that would include the key notions of both theologies. Donne is certainly playing, speculating ("may be imputed") but this may be serious play.

Other puzzles are how the father got to heaven and what the "easie wayes" are. It is unlikely that Donne is expressing the view (historically well-founded though it may be) that salvation by faith was meant to be an easy way.^[44] It is also unlikely that Donne would present his father as having been saved by "faith alone." Biography works against this, as does the overall context of the poem, which is strongly moralistic. So the father must have gotten to heaven through some combination of "merit / Of strict life" and faith. But in that case where are the "easie wayes"? They are a chimera.^[45] I would argue that the writing itself attests

[42] On imputed versus actual or "philosophical" righteousness, see Luther's Preface to [his] Latin Writings; Preface to Romans; and 1531 Commentary on Galatians. The first two of these can be found complete, along with selections from the Galatians commentary, in Martin Luther: Selections from his Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961). Donne uses "imputed grace" in the "Going to Bed" elegy (line 42) in a way that relies on the Lutheran view.

[43] See Satires , 141.

[44] C. S. Lewis repeatedly explained that when Protestantism first emerged, it seemed not too grim but too glad to be true. See "Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century," in Seventeenth-Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson , preface by J. Dover Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 75; English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 33–35, 187–92. See also Strier, "John Donne Awry and Squint," 361–64.

[45] Carey, Donne: Life, Mind and Art , has some shrewd comments on the oddness of "easie wayes" in the poem (28). We agree on the contradictions that this conception generates in the poem, but Carey sees "easie wayes" as playing a more important psychological role in the poem than I do.

to this. Donne's elaboration on "easie wayes" produces the weak enjambment and redundancy of "and neare / To follow." What this signifies, I think, is that in the poem there is really no alternative to "merit/ Of strict life." But if that is the case, a central problem in Renaissance religious thought emerges here: where is the superiority—and distinctiveness—of Christianity?^[46] Deconstruction can help us here. In the poem, the difference disappears. Donne does not want this to surface; he wants to pretend to maintain the difference, but the poetry and the argument are working, perhaps semiconsciously, in the other direction. A subtle sign of this is that, functionally, within the imagined narrative, the father's spirit could in fact be just as blind as the philosophers, since this spirit does not get to see but only to "heare" the special (bad) news. The privileging of sight that underwrites the denigration of the philosophers is never imagistically activated. "Close reading" here reveals ambivalence and potential heterodoxy. The distinction between Christian and philosophical salvation deconstructs itself.

With the reference to damnation, a new section begins. Courage becomes central (a theme, it should be noted, that further undermines the praise of "easie wayes"). In good Aristotelian fashion, the true courage is seen as involving proper fear: "O if thou dar'st, feare this, / This feare great courage and high valour is."^[47] Nonetheless, despite the redefinition of courage as Christian fear, Donne admires the military and navigational daring, even the foolhardiness, of his generation.^[48] The voice takes on Donne's characteristic wit (ships as "wooden sepulchres"), love of catalogues ("To leaders rage, to stormes, to shot, to dearth"), and range of reference ("limbecks"). The passage describes secular activities but, again taking a cue from deconstruction, we can see that the

[46] On this problem in Renaissance religious thought, see the remarkable essay by Roland H. Bainton, "Man, God, and the Church in the Age of the Renaissance," in The Renaissance: Six Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 77–96.

[47] On courage as a mean involving the appropriate amount of fear, with foolhardiness as an extreme, see Nicomachean Ethics, 1115b, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1934), 153–73. For a thoughtful exposition and analysis, see David Pears, "Courage as a Mean," in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle's Ethics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University, of Calfornia Press, 1980), 171–87.

[48] I think Hester is wrong to see the sailors, etc. merely as negative exempla. Hallett Smith seems to me more accurate in seeing the poem as basically admiring of Elizabethan courage (Elizabethan Poetry [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952], 224). Empson, "Donne the Spaceman," said the same (342; Donne and the New Philosophy, 82). Hester (Kinde Pitty and Brave Scorn , 148) quotes Smith without acknowledgment that their views are different. Scodel ("The Medium is the Message," 484) also sees the explorers, etc. merely as negative exemplars.

realms refuse to stay apart. In considering his countrymen's relation to heat and cold, Donne's mind leaps with characteristic nimbleness and characteristic inability (or refusal) to keep the secular and the sacred distinct. In a dizzying flurry, he sees his contemporaries "for gain" bringing "couragious fire" to the cold north, and enduring equatorial heat and the "fires of Spain" better than "Salamanders" and "like divine / Children in th' oven" (21–24). "Fires of Spain" sounds Inquisitorial as well as geographical, and Milgate reminds us that in the Book of Daniel, the story of the "children" in the fire is an emblem of resistance to state-commanded idolatry.^[49] So for a moment, the mercenary English sea-dogs are "divine" in resisting idolatrous tyranny. The poem seems to be proceeding on two different levels, with the associations established by the imagery not entirely consonant with the distinctions established by the discourse.

Imagery and discursive content are again at odds in the final instance of improper courage: "must every hee / Which cryes not, Goddesse, to thy Mistresse, draw . . . ?" (27–28). This is obviously meant to be an image of spurious, misapplied valor, but the imagistic context complicates this intention. The only mistress previously mentioned in the poem is "our Mistresse faire Religion." This connection suggests that perhaps violent defense of this Mistress against every other is "courage of straw" as well. Perhaps "faire Religion" is not to be defended by the sword, and perhaps other "mistresses" are fair—like virtue, for instance, or other, non-Christian religions. The poem does not, at this point, develop these suggestions, but they seem to be pressing on the surface of the argument. Despite some lively writing, the poem seems not yet to have found its thematic center.

At the end of the section, the imagery supports a distinction. In a strongly enjambed phrase, the divinely appointed duty "to stand" (30) contrasts sharply with all the frenzied motion that Donne has just evoked. The necessity to "stand / Sentinell" in this world and not desert one's post is familiar from the classical debate over suicide; it fits in nicely with the hint of Erasmian pacifism in "for forbidden warres, leave th' appointed field" (32) since from the perspective of spiritual combat, all material wars would be forbidden.^[50] In treating the traditional spiritual

[49] Satires , 142. On Daniel as a patron of resistance theory, see Essay 7, p. 194 below.

[50] On the sentinel image in the argument against suicide, see Phaedo, 62b, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 45; and Cicero, De Senectute, 20, text with a trans. by W. A. Falconer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1923), 47. Redcrosse attempts to use this argument against Despair in The Faerie Queene , 1.9.41. For Erasmus's loathing of war, see (intra alia ) "The Complaint of Peace," in The Essential Erasmus , ed. and trans. John P. Dolan (New York: New American Library, 1964), 177–204, and see Essay 2, n. 22 above. For the assertion that "une guerre spirituelle doit etre menée par armes spirituelles" ("a spiritual war should be conducted [only] by spiritual weapons"), see Sebastien Castellion [Castellio], De l'impunité des hérétiques (De Haereticis non puniendis), Latin text ed. Bruno Becker, French text ed. M. Valkhoff (Geneva: Droz, 1971), 289. English translation my own.

foes, the writing comes alive only at the mention of the last of them, in Donne's order, the flesh.^[51] The poetry gets more interesting as its topic recedes (or returns) from the specifically Christian ("the foule Devill") to the philosophical. Donne attempts a complex argument: to show his contemporaries that their behavior contradicts exactly the values they think it embodies, that they are unwittingly enacting a deep ontological and philosophical contradiction. The image of the second foe, the world, as a "worne strumpet" leads to the thought of sensual pleasure—which leads to linguistic and conceptual refinement:

Flesh (it selfes death) and joyes which flesh can taste,
Thou lov'st; and thy faire goodly soule, which doth
Give this flesh power to taste joy, thou dost loath. (40–42.)

Again we must recognize the unconventional. This is not a traditional argument against "the flesh," a phrase which Donne does not use. Despite the interjected parenthesis, it is not, in fact, an argument against "flesh" at all. "Joyes which flesh can taste" are never rejected or even devalued. They cannot be, since the argument for the amiability of the soul is precisely that it is what enables flesh to "taste" joy. The plea is not to renounce "joyes which flesh can taste" but to have a proper philosophical understanding of them, to see them, in Aristotelian fashion, as ontologically dependent on the "fair goodly soule." The soul should get credit for the body's joys. This is an argument not for asceticism but for holism. The conception of "tasting" joy, closely associated with the idea of nakedness, always led Donne in this holistic direction.^[52] The

[51] It was the conventionality of this section, I believe, that misled Empson into underestimating the interest of the poem as a whole: "the poem apparently is using the courage of the maritime adventurers simply to argue that we should be as brave in fighting the Devil" ("Donne the Spaceman," 342; Donne and the New Philosophy, 82).

[52] For the holistic emphasis, see the parallel between the ways in which souls and bodies must both be "naked" to "taste whole joyes " in lines 33–35 of the "Going to Bed" elegy. The strange lines on the spiritual potential of nakedness in Satire I (lines 37–45) show the power of the conceptions of nakedness and joy to elevate rather than to degrade the flesh in Donne's view. In those lines, the reference to a "plumpe muddy whore, or prostitute boy" leads Donne to contemplate Edenic innocence.

argument is radically humanist and philosophical. The point is to love the soul, not to loathe the body. The status of the "faire goodly soule," however, has not been worked out in the poem. The relation between this "faire goodly" one and "our Mistresse faire Religion" has not been explicated. Is "Soules devotion" devotion to the beauty of the soul? O sancte Socrate, ora pro nobis .^[53]

III

My argument throughout this book has been that we must attend at least as much to overt as to hidden structures. After the section on the soul, Donne's third Satire explicitly re-begins. Its focus becomes epistemological. The thought seems to be that merely ceasing from misguided uses of energy does not guarantee stability. It only puts one in a position to begin: "Seeke true religion" (43). This is the speaker's message to his pleasure-loving and desperately adventurous generation. Such a message would seem unexceptionable, but we must recognize that, in the context of late sixteenth-century Europe, it is odd. For most Europeans in this period, religion was not something to be sought; it was something given, something into which one was born or which was dictated to one from above. It was not the object of an intellectual quest. Donne's injunction requires a highly unusual detachment from existing commitments, a detachment like Donne's own in the mid-1590s. If courage is still at issue, it has become an intellectual matter, a matter of inquiry rather than of moral battle. The emphasis on truth keeps the focus intellectual, and the emphasis on seeking suggests a more active and unsettled position than does the image of the sentinel stoutly maintaining his post (though we will see that Donne returns to this image). The oddness of the injunction is intensified by what follows it. We must, as Stanley Fish has urged, attempt to be aware of logical and

[53] Desiderius Erasmus, "Convivium Religiosum," in Opera Omnia, 10 vols. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1961–62), 1:683. See "The Godly Feast," in The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 68: "Saint Socrates, pray for us!"

semantic expectations.^[54] Instead of detailed rules for the quest, Donne asks an abrupt and, for the first time in the poem, a fully genuine question: "O where?" Imagistically, the poem has already suggested that the answer to this question cannot be geographical. The answer, it would seem, must be, "Within the 'faire goodly soule' itself," but neither the poem nor the poet are willing as yet to make such a move.

The geographical possibilities must first be discursively rejected. We begin to get satirical portraits, and with these portraits, the poem finds its voice. Since the first is of a Catholic, we might think that we will be getting a typically "Anglican" scheme of extremes followed by a proper, modestly Protestant mean.^[55] But this is not what Donne gives us.^[56] Mirreus, the Catholic, is an Englishman, by birth presumably a Protestant, who leaves "here" and seeks "true religion" at Rome, "because hee doth know / That she was there a thousand yeares agoe" (45–46). What makes this choice irrational is the clear implication that true religion is no longer "there." The present situation is different from that of "a thousand yeares agoe." The substance is gone; "He loves her ragges" (47a). Just at this point, however, when "we" (as an English Protestant—and, as we have seen, male—audience) are smugly contemptuous of the misguided and relic-worshiping Mirreus, Donne asserts a continuity between Mirreus's behavior "there" and our behavior here: "He loves her ragges so, as we here obey / The statecloth where the Prince sate yesterday" (47–48). Suddenly idolatry is not some weird thing that they do "there" but a familiar thing that we do here, and it is suddenly and disconcertingly operative in a secular context, in a context not of bizarre religious practice but of political obedience. There is perhaps even an implication that Mirreus learned the habit of mind that sent him to the Roman church from the English attitude toward the state. Moreover if,

[54] This is the (procedural) argument of "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics," Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), 382–427.

[55] On the problems with "Anglicanism" as a term applying to sixteenth or seventeenth-century England, see Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 13; and the same author's The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), ix; also Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–1640 , rev. paper ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), vii–viii, xviii; and Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans: Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988).

[56] Scodel, "The Medium is the Message," agrees that Donne undercuts the notion of the "mean" here, but argues that Donne reinvests an idiosyncratic version of the notion in the course of the poem. See also n. 145 below.

as I believe likely, there is a suggestion of menstrual rags in the picture of Mirreus's misplaced devotion to the "ragges" of an imagined Roman female, then there is a continuity from Rome to England in the imagery of unsavory devotion to objects associated with the lower body ("where the Prince sate"), a misogynist connection that is even tighter if "the Prince" in question is, as at the time of the composition of the poem it was, Queen Elizabeth. Elizabeth regularly referred to herself as a "Prince," and we recall Tribulation Wholesome's praise of "the beauteous discipline / Against the menstruous rags of Rome ."^[57] Donne's vision of how "we here obey" as repellent and demeaning state-worship was hardly part of the normal self-conception of English Protestantism.

Having complicated in this way his critique of Roman devotion, Donne can proceed to the other "extreme," the presbyterian. He now explicitly activates the erotic component of "true religion" as female and as (presumably) equivalent to "faire Religion," who should be "our Mistresse." The imagistic context becomes male heterosexual object-choice. While Crants refuses to be "inthrall'd" by gaudy rags, he does have an exclusive passion; he "loves her onely, who'at Geneva's call'd / Religion, plaine, simple, sullen, yong, / Contemptuous, yet unhansome" (49–52). This is perhaps a less perverse object-choice than that made by the fetishizer, but it still seems perverse, especially as an exclusive devotion, "her onely." The explanatory analogy, however, serves to make Crants's choice seem more rather than less intelligible to Donne's (male) audience. Donne presents Crants's behavior as familiar: "As among / Lecherous humours, there is one that judges / No wenches wholsome, but course country drudges" (52b–54). The trouble with this is that it really is familiar. One can imagine the case being made. It is Touchstone and Audrey. The plain and the rural can always be activated as morally su-

[57] For Elizabeth referring to herself as a "Prince," see J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 2 vols. (New York: Norton, 1966), 1:50, 126–127, 146, 150, 173–76, 365–66; 2:99–100, 119, 213, 321, 389. For Tribulation's lines, see Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, 3.1.32–33 (emphasis mine), in Ben Jonson: Three Comedies , ed. Michael Jamieson (London: Penguin, 1966), 244. There is often, as here in Tribulation, a misogynist dimension to attacks on Rome (and on idolatry generally). On "a menstruous cloth" and idolatry, see Isaiah 30:22. The fact that, as Milgate points out (Satires , 144), the statecloth is a canopy does not alter the association with the lower body—"The statecloth where the Prince sate." For speculations on the anxieties aroused in Protestant Englishmen by the Virgin Queen, see Louis Montrose, "'Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture," Representations 1 (1983): 61–94; and Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 51–96.

perior, especially in contexts where wholesomeness (rather than, say, beauty) is the issue. And one can imagine Donne making the case. He comes close to doing so, in fact, in those moments, frequent in the Elegies, when he praises "use" over beauty, leather over silk and gold ("For one nights revels silk and gold we chuse, / But in long journeys cloth and leather use").^[58] The erotic analogy undercuts the weirdness of Crants's choice. Again, the apparently balanced scheme breaks down.

If we were still (somehow) expecting the conventional scheme, the real surprise comes with the figure who stays home:

Graius stayes still at home here, and because
Some Preachers, vile ambitious bauds, and lawes
Still new like fashions, bid him thinke that shee
Which dwels with us, is onely perfect, hee
Imbraceth her, whom his Godfathers will
Tender to him, being tender, as Wards still
Take such wives as their Guardians offer, or
Pay valewes. (55–62)

This is powerful and passionate writing. There has been nothing in the poem quite like this straightforward attack on "some" established English preachers—the qualifier is perhaps self-protective—as "vile ambitious bawds." This is the first clear instance in the poem of "railing," of the Juvenalian mode of "bold and open crying out against naughtiness."^[59] As the extraordinary lines on Mirreus and English state-worship implied, Donne has contempt for the whole system of state-enforced religion, with its ambitious preachers willing to sell "faire Religion" to the highest political bidder and with its associated legislative system constantly issuing new laws to regulate religious behavior. The idea of "ideological state apparatuses" would not have surprised Donne.^[60] He does not, however, see its power over thought and behavior as irresistible.

[58] "The Anagram," lines 33–34; and, for more elaborate development, see "Loves Progress," lines 11–16, 33–36. "The Anagram" was Donne's most popular poem in manuscript. See John Donne: The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets , ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 138.

[59] Sidney, Apology, 116. Scodel,"The Medium is the Message"(488), suggests that in the name "Graius," Donne is recalling the attack on Greeks as sycophantic mimics of their patrons in Juvenal's Satire 3. This is plausible, though there is no emphasis on mimicry in the Donne portrait.

[60] The phrase, of course, is that of Louis Althusser in "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86.

His contempt for the individuals who are part of the "apparatus" is perhaps exceeded by his contempt for the individual who allows his thought to be controlled by the apparatus, who indeed thinks what the preachers and laws "bid him thinke," namely, "that shee / Which dwels with us, is onely perfect." In the erotic context, this figure is a childgroom: "hee / Imbraceth her, whom his Godfathers will / Tender to him, being tender." He willingly accepts whatever religion his official sponsors "Tender to him." He allows himself to be treated as an intellectual and spiritual "ward" of the state-church.^[61] Donne has only contempt for such "tenderness." This may be the contempt of the "recusant," who refused to attend his parish church, but at this point some historical clarification is called for. It has been too readily assumed that this is the contempt of the Catholic recusant.

If, as I think we should, we take the reference to "new lawes" literally, the most likely reference would be to the activities of the 1593 Parliament. In the realm of religious regulation, what this Parliament did was to extend the anti-Catholic legislation Of 1581 to the Puritans, who were punished more harshly than Catholics under its provisions. J. E. Neale sees the transformation in the 1593 Parliament of an anti-Catholic bill into "an Act against Protestant sectaries" as the most striking development of this parliament. Neale calls it "a revolution in parliamentary policy."^[62] To speak of "the anti-Catholic legislation of the 1590s" (and to cite Neale as the source for this) is, therefore, extremely misleading.^[63] "Recusants," in the mid-1590s, could be either Catholic or Protestant, although the new laws and ambitious preachers at the time were primarily anti-Puritan. Donne is speaking for recusants of all kinds. It is hard to see how these portraits could have been written by any sort of normative Catholic. The portrait of Mirreus is hardly flattering to Rome, and the main object of Donne's contempt seems to be lack of intellectual toughness and independence. An insistence on self-reliance, an equal contempt for the regulators of conscience and the willing objects of their endeavors—these are hardly the characteristics of institutional Catholicism, English or Continental, at the end of the sixteenth century. Many English Catholics resisted the English state-church, but they did so in the name of embracing the religion that their fathers and godfathers did

[61] It may be relevant here that control over "wardship" was one of the great money-making operations of Elizabethan government. See Joel Hurstfield, The Queen's Wards: Wardship and Marriage under Elizabeth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), especially chaps. 10 and 16.

[62] Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 2:296–97.

[63] Marotti, Donne, Coterie Poet , 304.

indeed tender to them. They believed that she which dwells at Rome "is onely perfect." The speaker of Donne's lines does not sound like a person whose aim is merely to claim one set of godfathers over another. He wants adulthood and autonomy, not dependence.

With Mirreus, Crants, and Graius, Donne would seem to have exhausted the major possibilities in the European world for locating "true religion." The series, however, continues. Again, we must work to recognize daring here. Critics tend to take the continuation of the portraits as obvious or inevitable, but the last two are utterly surprising. They are the most brilliant of the portraits and a tribute to the rigor and daring of Donne's inquiry. If each claim that true religion is "onely perfect" in a particular place is misguided, then two other logical possibilities present themselves—but only, it should be said, to a mind as rigorous and uninhibited as (Jack) Donne's. The first is enacted by "Carelesse Phrygius," who "doth abhorre / All, because all cannot be good, as one / Knowing some women whores, dares marry none" (62b–64). At first glance, Phrygius seems merely to be making a logical mistake. "All" (as so often in Donne) is the key word. It does not follow from the premise that all "cannot be good" that all must be bad, so it seems precipitous, therefore, to "abhorre / All." However, when Donne shifts to the erotic analogy and activates the pun on "abhorre," the situation becomes more complicated, and the context shifts from attitudes to behavior. The one who "Knowing some women whores, dares marry none" is not being precipitous; he is being timid or cowardly—a major failure in a poem committed to "great courage." On the other hand, maybe Phrygius is not being timid. Maybe he is merely being prudent. If Phrygius's view is not in fact that all women / churches are "whores" / impure, but that one (male) can't tell which are and which aren't, then his position, whether prudence or timidity, seems more intelligible. And if the consequences of making a mistake are disastrous, if divorce is not possible or (taking marriage to stand in for sexuality in general) if non-"wholesomeness" is fatal, then Phrygius's timidity edges closer to prudence.

In the view that I am suggesting, Phrygius is a skeptic, and here the erotic and the epistemological are strongly bound. There is some support here for Stanley Cavell's contention for a deep connection in the early modern period between philosophical skepticism and male anxieties about marriage.^[64] Phrygius's problem with knowledge leads to a prob-

[64] Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 10, 20, and chap. 3 ("Othello and the Stake of the Other").

lem with commitment: he "dares marry none." He is unwilling, in Bacon's terms, "to fix a Beleefe," or in Donne's, to "betroth" himself (recall Donne's confessed unwillingness, with regard to religion, "to betroth, or enthrall my selfe").^[65] It is important to see that Phrygius is not what, in philosophical terms, would be called a "negative dogmatist."^[66] His position, to reiterate, is not that all women / churches are bad. In religious terms, this means that he is not a Separatist, one who thought all existing churches false, that is, impure, tainted.^[67] The Separatists were indeed "negative dogmatists," but Phrygius is a skeptic in exactly the way Descartes was. He knows something—that "some women" are "false" (and some are not)—just as Descartes knew that some ordinary beliefs are false (and some true).^[68] The problem is knowing which are which, and Phrygius, unlike Descartes, but like the erotic abstainer, treats this problem as insoluble.

It should not be surprising that the deepest moments in Satire III are produced by erotic analogies. Donne is, after all, our greatest lyric analyst of (at least) heterosexual male erotic psychology.^[69] We have already seen how the erotic context complicates the criticism of Crants, with his quest for the "wholsome." Phrygius's worry is not infection but betrayal, and this seems to be an anxiety even more widespread in the early modern period than anxiety about infection.^[70] The male who "doth abhorre / All" women is a familiar figure in Donne's erotic lyrics, where this figure's motive for adopting such an attitude is clear. The goal is to avoid vulnerability—in particular, to avoid the vulnerability to betrayal that would come with having made a commitment. In "Woman's Constancy," Donne's speaker avoids vulnerability by insisting on his knowl-

[65] Francis Bacon, "Of Truth," in Selected Writings , ed. Dick, 7. See also p. 27 above.

[66] See Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), xvii.

[67] For Phrygius as a Separatist, see Appendix A, "Careless Phrygius," in Hester, Kinde Pitty and Brave Scorn, 119–27.

[68] For Descartes's project in the Meditations , see Harry G. Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen: The Defense of Reason in Descartes's "Meditations" (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970); and E. M. Curley, Descartes against the Skeptics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978).

[69] In "Lesbian Erotics: The Utopian Trope of Donne's 'Sapho to Philaenus,'" Janel Mueller has argued that Donne's insights extend beyond male heterosexuality; see Claude J. Summers, ed., Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England (San Francisco: Haworth, 1992) 103–32.

[70] For anxiety about cuckoldry in early modern England, see Katherine Eisaman Maus, "Horns of Dilemma: Jealousy, Gender, and Spectatorship in English Renaissance Drama," ELH 54 (1987): 561–83.

edge of the addressee's (as yet unmanifested) intention to betray him and on his own full acceptance of the situation that he has postulated. In "The Indifferent," the speaker wishes on any woman who seeks to "stablish dangerous constancie" the ultimate horror, the experience of being committed to someone who will betray her. In "Loves Diet," the process of "ab-whoring" a threateningly devoted woman results in a happy state of psychological uninvolvement in which the speaker is even indifferent to sex ("negligent of sport").^[71]

This last phrase brings us back to a striking formal feature in the characterization of Phrygius, his epithet: "Carelesse Phrygius." He is the only figure to have an epithet, yet the one that he has seems inappropriate. If anything, "Carelesse Phrygius" would seem to be overly careful. The only scholar until very recently to have puzzled over the epithet adopts the view of Phrygius as a Separatist, so that "as a separatist sectarian, he cares for no one else."^[72] But this is neither lexicographically nor historically plausible. There is no instance of "careless" as "caring for no one else" in the OED , and the sectarians were notably clannish and group-oriented rather than individualistic. They were the brethren, and they attempted to establish "pure" churches.^[73] Phrygius is a nonjoiner, a noncommitter; he is not in an enthusiastic "frenzy."^[74] The most interesting possibility is that Phrygius is "careless" because he is free from care, se-cura (the first meaning in the OED ). This is the ataraxia of the ancient skeptics, for whom skepticism, as Popkin reminds us, "was a cure for the disease called Dogmatism or rashness."^[75] The state of indifference, of happy negligence, was a condition to which Donne, in the erotic context at least, was highly attracted (and again, I do not think that this should be moralized away or fobbed off on personae). Phrygius is, to be sure, a negative exemplum, but not, it turns out, unambiguously so.

[71] See the fine reading of "Love's Diet" in Barbara Hardy's "Thinking and Feeling in the Songs and Sonets," in Smith, ed., Donne: Essays in Celebration , 79–80; also in Hardy, The Advantage of feeling: Essays on Feeling in Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 24. In this reading, Hardy does what Empson calls "attend[ing] to the story" (see Essay 1, n. 23 above), a procedure for which Hardy praises Empson in "The Critics Who Made Us: William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity," Sewanee Review 90 (1982): 430–39.

[72] C. A. Patrides in The Complete English Poems of John Donne (London: Dent, 1985), 227.

[73] For some actual Separatist texts, see George Huntston Williams, ed., Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1957).

[74] Hester's work on "Phrygian frenzies" (Kinde Pitty and Brave Scorn , 125) is interesting but not clearly relevant to Donne's portrait.

[75] Popkin, The History of Scepticism , xv.

The final portrait is even more complex. It presents another version of indifference, but this time the positive rather than the negative version: "Graccus loves all as one." He is like "the indifferent" of the lyrics, who "can love both faire and browne," who can love "any"—so long as they do not try to "bind" him. Before telling us what Graccus believes, Donne gives us a coy enjambment ("he thinks that so"—line break), and we expect that what follows will be at least as fallacious as Phrygius's reasoning. Yet instead, Graccus thinks that "As women do in divers countries goe / In divers habits, yet are still one kinde, / So doth, so is Religion" (66–68). What is striking about Graccus's view is how sensible it is. It involves neither a false premise (like "she must be there because she used to be there") nor any obviously false reasoning (like moving from some to all). In one of his elegies, Donne holds it as obvious that entities are "still one kinde" in different clothing and in different conditions.^[76] It's hard to see what's wrong with Graccus's view. But perhaps, in the religious context, we are being anachronistic; this is, as we have seen, the great club of the conservative historical scholar. Or perhaps, as Empson maintained, there were more attitudes available to a sixteenth-century intellectual than modern orthodoxy would like to allow.^[77] After all, an eccentric Friulian miller of Donne's day held (and was burned for holding) that "the majesty of God has given the Holy Spirit to all, to all Christians, to heretics, to Turks, and to the Jews; and he considers them all dear, and they are all saved in the same manner."^[78]

And perhaps this view was not merely eccentric. Menocchio went very far, but it might plausibly be said that the ultimate sponsor of Menocchio's view of the immense mercy of God was the figure of "the great Erasmus."^[79] Erasmus held that "whatever is devout and contributes to

[76] "Richly cloath'd Apes, are call'd Apes, and as soone / Ecclips'd as bright we call the Moone the Moone," "Elegie: On his Mistress," lines 31–32. The fact that these entities, apes and the moon, are famously unstable only intensifies the ontological identity claim. Compare Descartes's wax; see "Meditation 2" in Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), 1:154–57.

[77] This is the point of most of Empson's essays on Donne (see n. 2 above).

[78] See Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller , trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 9–10.

[79] For "the great Erasmus," see "The Printer to the Reader," in John Donne, Ignatius His Conclave , ed. and trans. T. S. Healy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). For Erasmus on "The Immense Mercy of God," see The Essential Erasmus , ed. Dolan, 226–70. In this sermon, Erasmus does not reject Origen's view that everyone, including demons and the damned, will eventually be saved, though he does mention that this view has been condemned (242). On the attractiveness of this view to Erasmus, see Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom , 194. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, 51, mentions the closeness of Menocchio's views to those of certain humanist scholars, but Ginzburg's programmatic antipathy toward high-to-low models of cultural transmission prevents him from exploring this closeness. Ginzburg's attempt (in n. 58, pp. 154–55) to defend his general procedures and, in particular, his occlusion of Ficino against Paola Zambelli's critique is, I think, disingenuous and unsuccessful; for the critique, see Zambelli, "Uno, due, tre, mille Menoechio?" Archivo storico italiano 137 (1979): 51–90. I would add to this critique the occlusion of Erasmus, and I would argue that on the matter of toleration, the difference between Menocchio and these culturally "higher" types lies only in the unself-consciousness of Menocchio's views, not in the content of those views.

good morals should not be called profane" and that "perhaps the spirit of Christ is more widespread than we understand."^[80] Another intellectual ancestor of this view was a great friend of the great Erasmus and a literal ancestor of John Donne: Sir Thomas More. Donne refers to More a number of times, and these references are always to the humanist, not to the hammer of Protestants. For Donne, More is the translator of Lucian and, especially, the author of Utopia .^[81] In Utopia, the possibility is explicitly raised that religious diversity is perhaps a good rather than a bad thing.^[82] Ficino entertained this view, and Nicholas of Cusa asserted it.^[83] The greatest skeptic of the Renaissance held that "Of all the ancient human opinions concerning religion," that one "was most probable and most excusable which recognized God as an incomprehensible power, origin and preserver of all things, all goodness, all perfection, accepting and taking in good part the honor and reverence that human beings rendered him, under whatever aspect, under whatever name, in whatever

[80] "The Godly Feast," in Colloquies of Erasmus , 65 (emphasis mine). In On the Providence of God (De Providentia) , Zwingli virtually paraphrases this: "why call that 'philosophical' [in a pejorative sense—that is, merely philosophical] which is sacred and according to religion . . . [for] the truth, wherever found and by whomever brought out, is from the Holy Spirit"; The Latin Works of Huldreich Zwingli , trans. S. M. Jackson (Philadelphia: Heidelberg Press, 1929), 3:144.

[81] For More as translator of Lucian, see Pseudo-martyr , 108; for admiring references to Utopia , see Biathanatos, facsimile (New York: Arno, 1977), 74 and 123.

[82] Utopus, the founder of the Utopian polity, "was uncertain whether God did not desire a varied and manifold worship and therefore did not inspire different people with different views." St. Thomas More, Utopia , ed. Edward J. Surtz and J. H. Hexter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 221.

[83] Ficino and Cusa are cited by Surtz (p. 522) in his commentary on the passage quoted in the previous note. On Cusa's religious universalism, see Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 27–30. On Ficino, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 315–22. Donne knew some of the writings of cusa and discusses his Cribratio Alcorani in Essays in Divinity , ed. Evelyn M. Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), 9.

manner ."^[84] Most of all, Graccus's view is close to that of the writer who insisted that "Synagogue and Church" named "the same thing," and that "Roman and Reformed, and all other distinctions of place, Discipline, or Person" named "but one Church." This same writer, in a work that he knew was going to be accused of "Erasmiando ," called for a "humane indifferency," noting that "the free Spirit of God" blows "where it listeth, not tied nor imprison'd to any place or person." This writer proudly affirmed to his best friend that "I never fettered nor imprisoned the word Religion . . . immuring it in a Rome, or a Wittemberg, or a Geneva," and claimed that for him these churches were always "all virtuall beames of one Sun." This writer, of course, was John Donne.^[85]

But there must be something wrong with Graccus's view. Donne's comment on it is ambiguous. In a violent enjambment, Donne says of the position that "this blind- / nesse too much light breeds" (68b–69a). The enjambment serves to establish, for a moment, "blind" as a noun. This might suggest that Graccus's view is a pretext, some sort of hypocritical concealment, but this possibility is left entirely undeveloped. In the actual context of the poem, what the unusual mid-word line break does is to connect Graccus, at least momentarily, with the other "blind" figures in the poem, the philosophers, whom Donne, like Erasmus and Zwingli, placed in heaven.^[86] This association is appropriate, given Graccus's religious view, but it cuts against the moral condemnation of him. Will he end up a philosopher in heaven? Insofar as there is any moral condemnation of Graccus, it occurs in the half line that completes the thought about blindness: "this blind- / nesse too much light breeds." Yet in the tradition of Ficino and Cusa, the "blindness" that is bred from "too much light," from the "virtuall beames of

[84] Michel de Montaigne, "Apology for Raymond Sebond," in The Complete Essays of Montaigne , trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 380 (emphasis added). Montaigne's phrasing here ("most excusable") is typically careful.

[85] For the references, see Donne, Essays in Divinity , 51; Pseudo-martyr, sig. B1r, 135; and Letters , 25. For another positive use by Donne of the notion of "indifferency" in the religious context (with an acknowledgment that this stance often breeds some scandal), see Letters , 87. For the Erasmian nature of one of the works that Donne probably drew on in Pseudo-martyr , see Dominic Baker-Smith, "John Donne's Critique of True Religion ," in Smith, ed., Donne: Essays in Celebration , 420–23.

[86] For Zwingli, see, most spectacularly, the list of "saints and sages" in An Exposition of the Faith , in Latin Works of Huldreich Zwingli , 2:272; also in Zwingli and Bullinger , ed. G. W. Bromiley (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953), 275.

one Sun," is entirely positive.^[87] But perhaps the primary reading is to follow the actual word order and take "blindnesse" as the subject rather than the object of "breeds," so that the blindness breeds "too much light." This would intensify the implication of promiscuity that is certainly meant to be here (as in "light" women), but even so this implication too is strangely undeveloped. Donne never translates Graccus's position into the description of a promiscuous lecherous humor. This would have been extremely easy (recall "The Indifferent"), but Donne does not do it.^[88] The condemnation of Graccus remains perfunctory, abstract, and, most of all, ambiguous. As I have already suggested, it is at least odd, in an epistemological context, to complain about "too much light," and even in an ethical context, as the Wife of Bath suggests, and as Donne dramatizes in one of his most famous and spectacular images, promiscuity can be presented as a form of charity.^[89]

IV

Yet Graccus's position does breed "too much light"—or rather, in the late sixteenth-century context, potentially too much heat. Donne is not prepared to endorse so heretically liberal a view. He did not know about Menocchio, but he certainly did know about Michael

[87] On the "Orphic" reading of Blind Love, see Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance , rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1968), 53–58; 218–21.

[88] Scodel, "The Medium is the Message," 492, calls attention to a portrait of a Gracchus together with a reference to "the Phrygian manner" ("Phrygio . . . more ") in Juvenal's second Satire (lines 114–26); see Juvenal and Persius , trans. G. G. Ramsay, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1940), 26. This is an important discovery with regard to the names, but Scodel's attempt to connect Donne's Graccus substantively to Juvenal's is not convincing (his attempt to connect Donne's Phrygius to "the Phrygian manner," self-castration, works better). Donne's Graccus is simply not Juvenal's transvestite awaiting a husband. Moreover, apart from the name (on which see also Milgate, Satires , 145), to argue, as Scodel does, that Graccus cannot be a positive model because the poem's quest is not for Religion but for "true religion" is to beg the key question of whether the poem consistently maintains this distinction.

[89] Geoffrey Chaucer, "The Wife of Bath's Prologue," lines 621–26, in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer , ed. F. N. Robinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 82. For Donne's image, see his Holy Sonnet on the church, where the church is most pleasing and faithful to God "When she'is embrac'd and open to most men."

Servetus, burned in Geneva in 1553, and many others.^[90] Donne pulls back from Graccus's view, from the blindness of too much light. We can see here the pressure of history on a text. Dominic Baker-Smith, referring to the passage on "humane indifferency" and "the free spirit of God" in Pseudo-martyr , asserts wonderfully that "if Satire III is about anything it is about the free spirit of God."^[91] Unfortunately, this is not completely true. Yet we need not go to the other extreme and accept Carey's view that the third Satire is fiercely intolerant of tolerances.^[92] What we need to acknowledge is that the poem is more nervous and conflicted about its theological radicalism than Baker-Smith's wonderful asseveration suggests. When, in the third clearly marked section of the poem, Donne returns to the mode of direct, second-person singular address, he comments only on the final two options, those embodied by Phrygius and Graccus. "Unmoved" by these examples, "thou," unlike Phrygius, "Of force must one" position take, and unlike Graccus, when "forc'd" must "but one allow" (70). Why the individual "must one" take is never explained. The editors say that "Of force" means "of necessity," but they do not explain whence this necessity arises. Milgate cleverly suggests that the sense appears to be that "one cannot be religious without 'having a religion.'"^[93] Yet perhaps this is too conservative. Even many years after the Satire, Donne imagined the possibility of a person who was religious without "having a religion," who believed in God but thought there was "a way to salvation without any particular religion."^[94] And in the second half of the line, "forc'd" seems to represent mere coercion. Apparently the non-"tender" individual "but one" allows only under duress.

Donne seems to accept a position of forced choice, of, in the erotic analogy, marriage under duress, though with some resistance. We would seem to have come to a full stop here ("Of force must one, and forc'd but one allow") yet the beginning of the next line adds, with the loosest of connectives an afterthought that redirects the entire course of the argument: "And the right" (line 71a). This should, I think, come as a shock. Not only must the individual "allow" one religious position, and,

[90] On Servetus, see Roland H. Bainton, Hunted Heretic: The Life and Death of Michael Servetus, 1511–1553 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953).

[91] Baker-Smith, "Donne's Critique of True Religion ," 431.

[92] See Carey, Donne: Life, Mind and Art , 29.

[93] Satires, 145.

[94] The Sermons of John Donne , ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Calfornia Press, 1953–62), 3:276.

if forced, "but one," but that one must be "the right." Suddenly there is only one right answer. Suddenly it is not foolish to think that one church or position "is onely perfect." In pulling back from Phrygius and Graccus, Donne suddenly asserts the preeminence of ortho-doxy, right belief. The epistemological context of "true religion" is sheered off from the erotic context of "faire Religion" (which allowed for the praise of diversity, "both faire and browne"). This turn becomes even odder when we are told how to find "true religion": "aske thy father which is shee" (line 71b). Donne seems suddenly to be recommending Graius's obedient position. Only the suppression of the erotic analogy obscures the connection. A reasonably full reading of this poem must acknowledge the strangeness of this turn and must, I think, offer some account of it.

Here is one way to understand what has happened: in attempting to distance himself from the compelling heterodoxies of the "indifferent" figures, Donne has swung to an extreme conservatism.^[95] One of the main reasons to work through a text in detail is to be able to chart such ebbs and flows. After "aske thy father," Donne begins to pull back from (as I see it) this protective lurch into conservatism. To "aske thy father which is shee" would seem to be a straightforward matter, but again it turns out that "easie wayes and neare" are not really available. If the historical Donne were to have imagined an answer from his father (or either of his stepfathers), there is no doubt whom "shee" would be, but to "aske thy father" turns out to be only the beginning of a process: "Let him aske his," and so on. The only guarantee against infinite regress that Donne offers is the very qualified assertion that "though truth and falshood bee / Neare twins, yet truth a little elder is" (72–73). This is hardly reassuring. "A little elder" does not seem very strong or immediately apprehensible; it seems an awfully small difference on which to base the status of truth. Yet the attempt, widespread in the scholarship, to see the poem as endorsing some familiar combination of "right reason aided by tradition" rests on these lines.^[96] The lines themselves have barely been

[95] I cannot agree with Carey that the tensions in the poem are to be seen as springing entirely (or even primarily) from Donne's ambivalence about adult independence (Donne: Life, Mind and Art , 28). The example of Servetus (and, later, of Bruno) suggests that there was truly something to be nervous about with regard to religious freethinking in the sixteenth century. Again, however, Carey is right to see the tensions. Our disagreement seems to me to be a model of agreeing on the facts (see p. 3 above).

[96] The quotation is from Camille Wells Slights, The Casuistical Tradition in Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 164; see also Sister M. Geraldine, "John Donne and the Mindes Indeavours," Studies in English Literature 5 (1965): 117; and many others.

analyzed. J. B. Leishman is the only critic to have put them under any pressure. Leishman seems to me correct in seeing these lines as untraditional in their rationalist and humanist emphasis: "This saving truth is, in a sense, factual rather than doctrinal, and to be attained not in some beatific vision, but as the result of a long and laborious process of historical, or semi-historical, research."^[97] Even this account, however, suggests more reassurance than the very vexed and modest imagery of the poem does. Are truth and falsehood twins or not?

The next lines complete the swing back to autonomy. The fathers fall away, and again the emphasis is on personal effort: "Be busie to seeke her" (74a). In the rest of the couplet that completes this rededication, Donne (or his "speaker") underlines his commitment by strongly asserting his sincerity: "Beleeve mee this," he adjures (74b). What we are so solemnly adjured to believe is that "Hee's not of none, nor worst, that seekes the best" (75). This is a remarkable assertion; it insists on the religious standing of the seeker. And it is not clear what it means to say that such a figure is "not of none." The point of the line seems precisely to defend the earnest seeker who is "of none." Or perhaps there is a church of seekers, or a church that includes all the pious who are "without any particular religion." Donne's effort is to defend the figure who at least looks as if he is "of none." He returns to the viewpoint of Phrygius, who "doth abhorre / All," although now the context is purely epistemological, without the erotic analogy and with the skepticism precise and explicit: "To'adore, or scorne an image, or protest, / May all be bad" (76–77a). In propria persona Donne presents the possibility that "all" the major religious possibilities in Europe may "be bad." He does not say merely that any one of them may be bad but that it is possible that they all may be. Again, this would justify being "of none." The message of the poem becomes that of Socrates (surely one of the "blind Philosophers in heaven"), the great proponent of therapeutic skepticism: "Doubt wisely" (77b).^[98] This may give us a perspective from

[97] J. B. Leishman, The Monarch of Wit: An Analytical and Comparative Study of the Poetry of John Donne, 5th ed. (London: Hutchinson, 1962), 116. Compare Carey, Donne: Life, Mind and Art : "The poem's effort is to make out that choosing a religion is a purely intellectual business" (p. 29).

[98] Socrates distinguishes wise from unwise, productive from unproductive (eristic ) doubt in Meno , 80d–81e, Complete Dialogues of Plato, 363–64. In Biathanatos , Donne speaks of "that successive Trinity of humane wisedome, Socrates , Plato , and Aristotle " (p. 58).

which to understand the true status of Phrygius (and perhaps Graccus) in the poem. Perhaps in their cases it is true that the trouble is not with their views but with the way they hold them. They are perhaps too tranquil in their positions. If the search for "true religion" takes place in the realm of opinion rather than that of knowledge, then (according to Donne much later), hesitation is appropriate, but "indifferency, and equanimity" are not.^[99]

But does the search take place in the realm of opinion? This question haunts this section of the poem. In explaining wise doubt, Donne notes that "in a strange way / To stand inquiring right, is not to stray," while "To sleepe, or runne wrong, is" (77c–79a). This passage rests uneasily on two conflicting contrasts: right and wrong, on the one hand, and sleeping versus running on the other. The punctuation suggests that the contrast is between sleeping and running wrong, but semantically (with some help from the syntax) the contrast is between sleeping and running—what is wrong is running, that is, being precipitous. Socrates' daemon always told him not to do things.^[100] In one reading, the emphasis is on finding the right way; in the other, it is on proceeding in the proper manner. One way to focus the problem would be to ask whether the passage would seem to approve (or conceive of) running right.^[101] The same ambiguity exists in the phrase "inquiring right" itself. The traveler image suggests that the phrase means, "inquiring which is the right path," but the phrase can also be read as recommending "inquiring in the right manner." This same hesitation between emphasizing success and emphasizing effort, between result and process, is at work in the poem's most famous passage, the image of the hill of Truth:

                                   On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will

[99] Donne, Sermons , 6:317.

[100] "It always dissuades me from what I am proposing to do, and never urges me on," Apology , 31d, Complete Dialogues, 17.

[101] The passage which Milgate (Satires , 146) quotes from the Sermons (8:54) on the relation between doubting and truth can be seen as a conservative recuperation (by "Doctor Donne") of this passage in the Satire. The emphasis in the sermon is on doubt as a step toward resolution. In the passage from Chrysostom that Donne there quotes, the soul that has first doubted is seen as accepting resolution more readily ("facile solutionem accipit anima, quae prius dubitavit" ). This facility in accepting resolution is not in the poem.

Reach her, about must, and about must goe;
And what th'hills suddennes resists, winne so. (79b–82.)

This image is neither as conventional as it seems nor, like the "truth as elder" trope, as reassuring as it is commonly taken to be. An abstraction on a hill is a familiar allegorical tableau, but none of the analogues cited by Milgate have the specific content of Donne's image. Normally, it is virtue or education on the hill. Again, "tradition" tends to blur rather than to clarify. Milgate himself acknowledges that an apparent analogue in one of Donne's sermons is strikingly different from the passage in the Satire. In the sermon, "we must leave our naturall reason . . . at the bottome of the hill."^[102] Thomas V. Moore has offered a penetrating critique of the general tendency of critics to overstate the positive aspects of the satire and especially of this image.^[103] He notes, for instance, that the emphasis in this passage is not, as Helen Gardner suggested, on the solidity and visibility of truth but on the difficulty of the quest.^[104] Perhaps the most remarkable later instance of both the general and the particular tendencies that Moore discusses is this confident assertion: "the hill can be won and man one with God through His Son, the satirist confirms."^[105] This is an assertion that leaves the poem entirely behind; Christ never appears in it. Rather than relying on "tradition" or "knowledge"—what must be there—we can trust the verse. It gives us stresses on "huge," "cragged," and "steep," and a most powerful evocation of repetitive circularity: "about must, and about must." There is no sense of progress in this line, only of effort. Poetically, the whole next line (82) is an afterthought. It comes as an addition, after a full stop, and its own structure is anticlimactic. Its final two words ("winne so") are weak. the energy of the line goes into the hill's resistance. The imagination of effort and resistance here is much more powerful than the imagination of success.^[106]

[102] See Satires , 292.

[103] Thomas V. Moore, "Donne's Use of uncertainty As a Vital Force in Satyre III ," Modern Philology 67 (1969): 43.

[104] Moore, "Donne's Use of Uncertainty," 47. For Gardner's claim, see John Donne: The Divine Poems , ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), xix.

[105] Hester, Kinde Pitty and Brave Scorn , 66.

[106] In a comment on an earlier form of this essay given at a panel on resistance in the Renaissance, Annabel Patterson noted that it is only in this passage that any form of the word "resist" appears in the poem. If it is true (as I argue) that resistance is a crucial theme in the poem, the appearance of the word here would suggest that Donne in this image identifies more fully with the resistant hill than with the "winning" seeker. Psychological and political "resistance" would merge here.

We can trust the verse further. The poem proceeds as if the line about winning didn't exist. After "winne so," Donne continues, "yet strive so, that before age, deaths twilight, / Thy Soule rest" (83–84a). "Yet strive so" follows from "about must, and about must," not from "winne so." And what is the conception of "rest" here? It surely involves a notion of arriving at settled convictions sometime in one's lifetime before old age sets in, but whether the emphasis is on attaining a settled sense of one's own convictions or on attaining "the right" convictions remains unclear. Donne's revision of the lines may reflect this uncertainty. In a number of manuscripts (presumably reflecting earlier states of the poem), it is the mind rather than the soul that is to find rest before death approaches.^[107] In shifting from "mynde" to "Soule," Donne may very well have been trying to push toward the more absolutist conception, since, as Milgate points out, Donne seems (at times, at least) to have used "mind" to designate a particularized subjectivity. In a letter to Goodyere, Donne distinguishes between, on the one hand, both the soul and the body—which both have preset ontological goals—and on the other "our third part, the minde, which is our naturall guide here, [and] chooses to every man a severall way."^[108] The concern about "age, deaths twilight," would seem to call for "our naturall guide here," but I am not sure, in any case, that the change from "mynde" to "soule" eliminates the previous sense. The emphasis seems to be earthly rather than transcendental, and even the portentous reference to the gospel of John, "none can worke in that night" (84b), only serves to give more weight to a carpe diem for the intellectual life. The reference seems to be more to Catullus's everlasting night than to the apocalyptic context of the gospel.^[109] . Protestantism made this classical view available to the Christian by insisting that "none can worke" after death—that is, by eliminating Purgatory from the cosmos (famously in Dante, a hill up which souls labor). Donne saw "all discourse of Purgatorie" as "but the Mythologie of the Romane Church."^[110]

The carpe diem feeling dominates the line that follows. Intention and resolution will not suffice; what is necessary is action: "To will, implyes

[107] Satires , 13; Complete Poetry , ed. Shawcross, 430.

[108] Satires , 146; Donne, Letters , 62–63.

[109] For nox  . . . perpetua in the most famous of all carpe diem poems, see Catullus, "Vivamus mea Lesbia," lines 11–12, in Catullus, Tibullus, Pervigilium Veneris, Catullus trans. F. W. Cornish, rev. G. P. Goold, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1988), 6.

[110] Donne, Pseudo-martyr , 106.

delay, therefore now doe" (85). But since the context is an intellectual one, Donne has to make clear what such "doing" consists of and what it can hope to accomplish. He reverts to his earlier appeal to physical heroism: "Hard deeds, the bodies paines; hard knowledge too / The mindes indeavours reach" (86–87a). This is bracing and highly reassuring, but it is almost too pragmatic and matter-of-fact. The context, after all, is not that of intellectual life in general but of the religious life in particular. Donne recoils from the view that Leishman has plausibly attributed to him, that saving truth is "factual" and to be attained by laborious scholarship and reasoning. After this picture of the inevitable success of "the mindes indeavours"—the Soul has dropped away again—Donne adds two words that return us to the religious realm: "and mysteries" (87b). Donne has to try somehow to reconcile his rationalism with an acknowledgment of "mysteries." The enjambment again creates an ambiguity. At first, taking "and mysteries" as continuous with the previous lines, it seems that "the mindes indeavours" can reach mysteries as well as "hard knowledge." But the next line denies this possibility: mysteries "Are like the Sunne, dazling, yet plaine to'all eyes" (88). No commentator has yet plucked out the heart of the mysteries in these "dazling, yet plaine" lines. The lines imply that "mysteries" are unequivocally there , that the existence of these mysteries cannot be denied—it is "plaine to'all eyes," even if the content of these mysteries is "dazling." But what is the relationship between the "dazling" of this sun and the "blind- / nesse" of Graccus and the pagan philosophers? The relationship between "the mindes indeavours" and mysteries" is left thoroughly unclear.^[111]

Perhaps Donne is suggesting that there are two different realms, in one of which, that of empirical truth and of diverse opinions, "the mindes indeavours" can work appropriately, whereas the other realm contains incontrovertible, nonempirical truths that are "plaine to'all eyes," including those of the philosophers. This is not a position unknown to the sixteenth century. "Doubt wisely" might suggest not only Socrates but the Erasmian (and Socratic) author of De arte dubitandi , Sebastian Castellio. Donne could not have known De arte dubitandi , but he could easily have read Concerning Heretics , Castellio's most famous work, and it is very unlikely that he would not at least have heard of

[111] Helen Gardner again provides a reassuring and noncontextual gloss; see Divine Poems, xix.

Castellio and his views.^[112] Castellio held, briefly, that, as Dryden later put it, "The things we must believe are few and plain": the existence and goodness of God, the immortality of the soul, the moral law.^[113] These things can not rationally be doubted. On the other hand, everything else is in the realm of opinion, and can, indeed should, rationally be doubted (Castellio remarked that "l'autheur principal de ceste opinion et secte a esté Socrates ").^[114] Prolonged controversy over a question is a sign of its dubitability, and it makes no sense to persecute someone for holding a particular view on an essentially contestable matter.^[115] Castellio echoes and develops King Utopus's doubts about whether "God did not desire a varied and manifold worship and therefore did not inspire different people with different views." "Perhaps," Castellio speculated, "God is the better pleased not to be easily known and to be glorified in different ways ."^[116] Closer to home and to reality, a philosopher who was to become a close friend of Donne's, Edward (Lord) Herbert (George's older brother) came to hold a view of religious truth quite similar to Castellio's.^[117]

[112] De arte dubitandi et confidendi, ignorandi et sciendi remained in manuscript until it was edited and published by Elizabeth Feist in D. Cantimori and Elizabeth Feist, eds., Per la storia degli eretici Italiani del secolo XVI in Europa (Rome: Reale Accademia D'Italia, 1937), 307– 430. Castellio is responsible for making Calvin's burning of Servetus into "the Servetus affair." Calvin and Beza both answered Castellio's attacks on the persecution of "heretics" (see nn. 50 above and 113 below). It is noteworthy with regard to the English context that Castellio dedicated his Latin translation of the Bible to Edward VI. The definitive study remains Ferdinand Buisson, Sébastien Castellion: Sa vie et son oeuvre , 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1892). A useful collection, including Roland Bainton's "Sebastian Castellio, Champion of Religious Liberty," is Castellioniana: Quatre études sur Sébastien Castellion et l'idée de la tolérance (Leiden: Brill, 1951). Castellio's influence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has not been fully explored. There is a beginning in J. Lindbloom, "La Place de Castellion dans l'histoire de l'esprit" in B. Becker, ed., Autour de Michel Servet et de Sébastien Castellion (Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 1953), 158–80.

[113] Dryden, "Religio Laici," line 432, in The Poetical Works of John Dryden , ed. George R. Noyes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), 167; Castellio, De arte dubitandi , 309–10, 351.

[114] Castellio, De l'impunité des hérétiques, 224.

[115] De arte dubitandi , 346–48; De l'impunité des hérétiques, 224–26.

[116] Sebastian Castellio, Concerning Heretics , trans. Roland Bainton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), 237 (emphasis mine). For Utopus, see n. 82 above.

[117] See Edward (Lord) Herbert of Cherbury, De Veritate , trans. Meyrick H. Carr (Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1937). In "The Grounds of Religious Toleration in the Thought of John Donne," Church History 11 (1942), Roy W. Battenhouse notes that Donne "sometimes reminds us of his friend, Lord Herbert of Cherbury" (233). I am not suggesting that Donne was already friends with Edward Herbert in 1595; they probably met in 1599 (see Gardner, ed., Elegies and Songs and Sonnets , 254). I am only suggesting that Castellio's views were less "outlandish" than they might seem.

One of the consequences of Castellio's position was the absoluteness of the individual conscience. In trying to contextualize Menocchio's view that "every man could be saved through his own religion," Carlo Ginzburg cites Castellio as an analogue.^[118] Donne's advice to the lifelong seeker of religious truth culminates in one admonition: "Keepe the truth which thou'hast found" (89a). This admonition precisely recapitulates the central ambiguity of this section of the poem: on one reading, the aim is to keep that part or aspect of the objective truth that you have managed to recognize ("Keepe the truth which thou'hast found"); on the other reading, you are to keep what has impressed you as the truth ("Keepe the truth which thou'hast found "). The first reading asserts the primacy of truth; the second the primacy of conscience—even over truth. The poem hesitates between these views, and it is important not dismiss the second as an anachronism, a Romantic innovation projected back into the Renaissance. It was a genuine historical possibility. Luther meant to equate rather than to distinguish truth and conscience at Worms, but when he stated that "to act against conscience is neither safe for us, nor open to us," he necessarily provided a psychological and conceptual structure for the primacy of conscience.^[119] Castellio took the next step. He noted that everyone feels his conscience to be compelled or captured by the truth he believes in; Castellio asserted, moreover, that God will love "those who with good intent defend that which they conceive to be true ."^[120] In the first Satire, Donne played lightly with the idea that the unpardonable "offense" is to sin against one's own conscience; with conscious hyperbole, he asked, "But how shall I be pardon'd my offense / That thus have sinn'd against my conscience?" (65–66). In a letter to Goodyere he again lightly alluded to the idea that "it is a sinne to doe against the conscience, though that erre "—exactly Castellio's position.^[121] In Biathanatos , Donne expounds this position at length, arguing that "a conscience that erreth justly, probably, and bona fide , that is, after all morall industry and diligence hath been used" is "bound to doe according to that misinformation and the misperswasion

[118] Ginzburg, Cheese and Worms, 51.

[119] H. Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Christian Church , 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), 285.

[120] "Reply to Calvin's Book in which he Endeavors to Show that Heretics should be Coerced by the Right of the Sword," in Concerning Heretics , 281, 223.

[121] Donne, Letters , 76 (emphasis mine); Castellio, Concerning Heretics , 124, 215.

so contracted." Moreover, Donne adds, even if a conscience "erre negligently or otherwise vitiously, and mala fide, as long as that errour remains and resides in it, a man is bound not to doe against his conscience."^[122]

V

Donne retreated from Biathanatos . In Pseudo-martyr he argued that "it is not conscience it selfe that bindes us," but rather "that law which the Conscience takes knowledge of."^[123] Satire III and Biathanatos are major works by "Jack" Donne "Of Religion," and the latter is probably our best guide to the former. In Biathanatos, the assertion of the supremacy of "conscience it selfe" is tied to a strong anti-authoritarianism and assertion of the authority of the individual. The obligation that our conscience casts upon us, says Jack, is "of stronger hold and straighter band, then the precept of any Superiour, whether Law or person ."^[124] Again and again in this text, Donne insists on the autonomy and autarchy of the individual: "in secret cases between the Spirit of God, and my conscience, of which there is not certainly constituted any exteriour Judge, we are our selves sufficient to doe all the Offices; and then delivered from all bondage, and restored to our naturall libertie, we are in the same condition as Princes are"; in private cases of conscience, "a private man is Emperor of himselfe."^[125] Princes do but play us. Any reader of Donne's love poetry knows the hold that the idea of being "in the same condition as Princes are" had on Donne's imagination.^[126] The final movement of the Satire is a defense of the individual

[122] Donne, Biathanatos , 142.

[123] Donne, Pseudo-martyr , 237. Even after Pseudo-martyr , Donne seems to have sometimes returned to his earlier position, at least in private. See the letter to the Duke of Buckingham in 1623 reproduced in Bald, Donne, 446, in which Donne writes that the Spanish divines, "though they say not true, yet they do not ly, because they speake their Conscience." I believe that Bald seriously misreads this letter.

[124] Donne, Biathanatos, 143 (emphasis mine).

[125] Donne, Biathanatos, 107, 47.

[126] For some wonderfully suggestive writing on Donne and kingship, see Carey, Donne: Life, Mind and Art , 115; and Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 165–76. Donne's status, even after Pseudomartyr, as a devoted "king's man" has been questioned by Annabel Patterson in two essays, "All Donne," in Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katherine Eisaman Maus, eds., Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 37–67; and "John Donne, Kingsman?" in Linda Peck, ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 251–72. Also in Soliciting Interpretation , see David Norbrook, "The Monarchy of Wit and the Republic of Letters: Donne's Politics," 3–36. I have contested the views of Patterson and Norbrook in "Donne and the Politics of Devotion" in Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier, eds., Religion, Politics and Literature in Post-Reformation England, 1540–1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). I argue both that Donne was not a sycophant and that Carey's position retains much of its power.

conscience in the face of political power. The culminating exhortation in the realm of epistemology ("Keepe the truth which thou hast found" [89a]) leads directly to this issue:

                                    men do not stand
In so'ill case here, that God hath with his hand
Sign'd Kings blanck-charters to kill whom they hate,
Nor are they Vicars, but hangmen to Fate. (89b–92)

There are definite limits to what kings can legitimately do. As D. C. Allen pointed out, this passage echoes Luther's treatise on Secular Authority—to What Extent It Should Be Obeyed ; the "hangmen" kings are Luther's.^[127] This is not merely a verbal connection. Donne's fundamental emphasis, like Luther's and Castellio's, is on one's individual responsibility for one's spiritual state. "Every man," said Luther, in a passage prominently reproduced by Castellio, "is responsible for his own faith."^[128] Donne's worry in this poem is not about the tyranny of kings and princes—which he, like Luther, seems to take for granted—but rather about the tendency of the individual to allow external authorities to dictate to the conscience, to forget how and where persons politically "stand."^[129] Donne returns to Graius, to his attack on the "tender" and complaisant. With a sudden renewal of vehemence, he exclaims: "Foole and wretch, wilt thou let thy Soule be ty'd / To mans lawes, by which she shall not be try'd / At the last day?" (93–95a). There is real contempt here for "mans lawes" in the realm of the soul, but the emphasis here,

[127] D.C. Allen, "Two Notes on John Donne," Modern Language Notes 65 (1950): 103; Satires , 147; Luther, Secular Authority—to What Extent It Should be Obeyed , in Luther: Selections , ed. Dillenberger, 388–89.

[128] Luther, Secular Authority , 385. Castellio's Concerning Heretics is largely a collection of excerpts; this segment from Luther's Secular Authority is the first and longest excerpt in the volume (pp. 141–53).

[129] For "from the beginning of the world a wise prince is a rare bird indeed," see Luther, Secular Authority , 388.

as in Biathanatos, is on the soul's inherent freedom, on its proper refusal to be tied, its special standing. The enjambment of line 93 allows "wilt thou let thy Soule be ty'd" to exist for a moment as a question in itself. The soul can only be "ty'd / To mans lawes" if, foolishly and wretchedly, it allows itself to be so. "Wilt thou let" is the heart of the question.

The next lines continue the insistence on personal responsibility. In attacking spiritual subservience, Donne is careful to include all forms of authority in his purview, Catholic as well as Protestant, secular as well as religious. Maintaining the apocalyptic context of "At the last day," he asks: "Will it then boot thee / To say a Philip, or a Gregory, / A Harry, or a Martin taught thee this?" (95b–97).^[130] The survey of conflicting possibilities leads back into the epistemological realm—"Is not this excuse for mere contraries, / Equally strong? cannot both sides say so?"—but this is only momentary.^[131] Donne's focus remains on the individual's relation to authority. He unpacks the political meaning of "Keepe the truth which thou'hast found" by providing a parallel admonition and a monitory explanation:

That thou may'st rightly'obey power, her bounds know;
Those past, her nature and name's chang'd; to be
Then humble to her is idolatrie. (100–102)

The issue here is not right belief but right obedience; religious truth may be difficult, but this truth, the truth about "power," the conscientious individual must "know." There is no room for doubt here. The essential thing to know about "power" is "her bounds." Right obedience knows these bounds; it is limited. Humility can be, as Milton puts it, "unseasonable."^[132] Some humility is "idolatrie." This is rich and complex writing. Donne is invoking the great Protestant bugaboo, idolatry, in a context that includes secular as well as religious powers, princes as well as popes. As in the passage on obedience to "the statecloth where the Prince sate," Donne wants to draw the Protestant horror of idolatry into

[130] In a number of manuscripts, these lines are even stronger, beginning, "Oh will" or "Oh, will"; Satires , 13; Complete Poetry , ed. Shawcross, 430 (Shawcross prints "Oh, will").

[131] The epistemological quandary is put even more sharply in one manuscript which has "equally true" rather than "equally strong." See Complete Poetry , ed. Shawcross, 430.

[132] Of Reformation , in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton , 8 Vols. (New Heaven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 1:523) (see also 1:522). See Richard Strier, "Milton against Humility" (forthcoming).

the arena of political behavior. Milton will attempt the same in Eikonoklastes .^[133]

The conception of right obedience as limited obedience is precisely the mechanism that allowed the radical English and Scottish resistance theorists of the sixteenth century, especially Ponet, Goodman, and Buchanan, to characterize resistance as true service in certain situations.^[134] There is some confusion in the scholarship over whether this conception of limited obedience is a Catholic or a Protestant phenomenon. This is a classic example of "une question mal posée ". As Cardinal William Allen pointed out in 1584, both Catholics and Protestants agreed "that princes may for some causes, and especially for their defection in faith and religion, be resisted."^[135] Donne noted this convergence in Biathanatos (and again, in a different key, in Ignatius his Conclave) .^[136] The difference between the churches was not on whether resistance "for some causes" was allowable or necessary but rather on how such resistance was authorized. The Protestants, according to Allen, "do adjudge by their private folly and fantasy"—that is, by individual conscience—whereas the Catholics, "not trusting their own particular imaginations" do commit "the direction of matters so important to the church." Donne is certainly, in this respect, on the "Protestant" side; his conception of conscience is radically individualistic. He is not about to trust the direction of his soul or behavior to any institutional authority.

One critic has seen Satire III as ending with "a metaphysical plea for humble devotion," a "final 'act of self-immolation'"; the peroration is merely "an amplification of the commonplace Renaissance defense of 'right order.'"^[137] This assertion, with its assured sense of the relevance of the great commonplaces, is precisely the move that Empson meant to warn against. A radical position is assimilated to a conservative (not to say "boot-licking") commonplace. An insistence that the individual must understand the limits of government is taken as an assertion that the individual "must understand his limitations"; an insistence on re-

[133] The people says Milton, "are prone ofttimes not to a religious only, but to a civil kind of idolatry in idolizing their kings." Eikonoklastes, in Complete Prose , 3:343.

[134] For exposition and documentation, see Essay 7, pp. 174–75, below.

[135] William Allen, A True, Sincere, and Modest Defense of English Catholics , ed. Robert M. Kingdon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965), 142. The quotation from Allen later in this paragraph is from the same page.

[136] Donne, Biathanatos , 120; Ignatius His Conclave , 77.

[137] Hester, Kinde Pitty , 57, 67, 69. The quotes from Hester in the rest of this paragraph are all from p. 69.

sistance, on not allowing oneself to be moved by external powers, is seen as a warning against being "led improvidently into rebellion." This reading is a classic case of knowing in advance, from an "historical" point of view, what the text must be saying. The critic has been misled by his awareness of the commonplaces into thinking that they must always be present. The extended analogy with which Donne ends the Satire is difficult, but we can catch what Milton would call its "drift and scope" if we attend to its structure and function.^[138] Grammatically and rhetorically, the analogy must follow from the lines that introduce it. Whatever the peroration is doing, it must be amplifying the great final injunction about obeying power through knowing "her bounds." From a purely "internal" point of view, we can say that the peroration must be continuing Donne's critique of secular idolatry. This is not an a priori necessity, but one that derives from the local and immediate context.

The mention of "power" in collocation with "bounds" seems to have given Donne his image: "As streames are, Power is" (103a). From the history of this image in political discourse, we would expect a discussion of how the "stream" of power gets troubled or swollen.^[139] But we must look. For the special purposes of this poem, Donne has started at the wrong end of the image. He wants to continue the discussion of power, but the poem, unlike the political tradition, is not interested in charting the ways in which power becomes abusive. Donne is interested in how the individual is to act once power has become so. That it will become so is, again, taken for granted. Immediately after announcing the analogy, Donne shifts his focus. The result is wildly disjunctive: "As streames are, Power is; those blest flowers that dwell" (103). Suddenly these hitherto unmentioned "flowers" are the focus. The puzzle is to find the

[138] See The Reason of Church-government Urg'd against Prelaty, in Complete Prose , 1:750.

[139] The image of the "rough stream" in a political context is familiar from classical poetry and drama. In Roman poetry, especially in Horace and Lucan, the image of the flooding river becomes specialized as the image of civil war; see D. C. Allen, Image and Meaning: Metaphoric Traditions in Renaissance Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1960), 132–33. Donne is not using the image in this way. It may be relevant to the way Donne does use the image that, in the political discourse of early seventeenth-century England, as John M. Wallace points out, the metaphor of a flooding river "was employed most often by the opposition [to the Crown]." In Coke and others, the flooding river is especially associated with the extension of royal prerogative. See John M. Wallace, "Cooper's Hill : The Manifesto of Parliamentary Royalism, 1641," ELH 41 (1974): 523. Donne's image, I would argue, tells us which tradition to link it to. We cannot know in advance what the image must mean.

tenor of this vehicle. The next line tells us that "those blest flowers that dwell / At the rough streames calme head, thrive and prove well."^[140] One might think that "those blest flowers" are godly earthly princes who "dwell" close to the divine source of their power, but neither the general nor the local context of the poem supports this. The general context has been intensely concerned with the private subject in both the political and the psychological-philosophical sense. The local context goes on to discuss flowers that become the victims of the "tyrannous rage" of the stream (106), and in the final couplet the extended image as a whole is applied by Donne to individual "Soules" (109). It would seem then, that we need to interpret the "blest flowers" as private individuals who maintain a proper relation to "Power."

We should therefore be on (so to speak) firm ground, since we already know what the individual's relation to power should be: to know its bounds and not be improperly humble to it. Both of these are negative relations, however; both of them conceive of power as external, political, and coercive. "The rough streames calme head," however, seems to be different. It seems to suggest a divine source. The "blest flowers" thrive through dwelling at this source. But what does that mean? Here the meaning of "to dwell" in early modern English might help us. The word had a strong meaning, suggesting possession and full inhabitation, as at the end of Ben Jonson's "To Penshurst," "thy lord dwells." In Donne as in Jonson, the philosophical coloration of the word is Stoic; "Be then thine owne home, and in thy selfe dwell," Donne advises Sir Henry Wotton.^[141] To "dwell" in this sense is an action, not a state; it is something that one consciously does, so that to say that those who act in this way "prove" (or "do") well is not merely to say again that they "thrive." The image takes its place with the other images in the poem of virtuous immobility, of figures who stand: the "Sentinell in this worlds garrison"; the wise doubter; and Truth, who "stands" on her hill. It is not insignificant, I would suggest, that in many manuscripts, including some very

[140] There is major editorial disagreement about line 104. Poems 1633 and some manuscripts have "thrive and do well." This is the reading that Grierson and Shawcross adopt. The majority of manuscripts have "thrive and prove well," the reading that is adopted by Milgate. I have followed Milgate, though I think that here, as elsewhere in the poem, the textual ambiguity is significant and probably authorial.

[141] "Sir, more then kisses," line 47 (Satires , 72). Scodel, "The Medium is the Message," is as concerned to downplay the Stoicism in this epistle as in the satire (see n. 37 above).

good ones, Truth does not stand on her hill but rather "dwells" there.^[142] The deepest positive image in the poem is not of motion but of stasis. The image of inquiry, of repetitive and purposive motion "about . . . and about," takes place within a context of standing: "To stand inquiring right."^[143] The flowers are "blest" through consciously remaining "At the rough streames calme head"—through maintaining, perhaps, their direct and unmediated relation to the divine source.

This reading is sustained (if not made inevitable) by the lines that follow. As the mention of the "calme head" in the context of the rough stream suggests, Donne is more eager in this poem (a satire, after all) to describe failures than successes, negative rather than positive exempla. Without any warning, and as if telling a continuous story (as, with regard to many individuals, he certainly thinks that he is), Donne shifts to describing the fate of those "flowers" that do not "dwell,"

But having left their roots, and themselves given
To the streames tyrannous rage, alas, are driven
Through mills, and rockes, and woods,'and at last, almost
Consum'd in going, in the sea are lost. (105–108)

The crucial fact is again volition: "having left their roots, and themselves given ." Again, attention to verbal detail pays off. The rhyme tells the story; it is through having "given" themselves to the stream of Power that the flowers are "driven" by it. "Tyrannous," of course, is part of the tenor as well as the vehicle here. Those who are humble to tyranny become its victims. "Kind pity" seems truly to choke Donne's spleen here in his sorrowful evocation ("alas") of those (like devoted courtiers?) who are "almost / Consum'd in going" only to be finally "lost" when they reach their goal. I am not sure what to make of the "mills, and rockes, and woods." The concreteness seems misplaced. It is hard, however, not to hear in the thudding slowness and onomatopoetic structure of the line an echo of "about must, and about must goe." Donne is now, as I have suggested, occupying (dwelling in) the position of Truth. He does, as we have noted, know the truth about Power. The figures who are in motion here are not autonomously and diligently proceeding, though

[142] Satires , 13; on the value of the different manuscripts, see pp. xli–lxii.

[143] Part of the special horror of Graius is perhaps that he stays home without "standing," that he accepts "shee / Which dwels with us" rather than "dwelling" in himself. His immobility is pliant rather than resistant.

in circles, but being driven. Donne is now the Lucretian sage, watching from his secure height—though, as Bacon says "with pity and not with swelling pride"—the tribulations of sea-tossed others.^[144]

Strained readings take special effort from the critic and the reader. It is hard to see in the vision of drowning a positive "act of self-immolation," since self-immolation is precisely what the foolishly humble and obedient souls who "in the sea are lost" endure. Loss of individuation seems to be the ultimate terror—giving up one's will. Again, the "given/driven" rhyme is crucial. There seem to be only two possibilities in this world: absolute self-containment and absolute other-dependence. The one is calm and "blessed," the other tumultuous and fatal. The ideal figure in this poem, like the triumphant soul in Herbert's "Vertue," "never gives." The obscurity of the image here might derive from the fact that while the feeling in this passage, as in Herbert's poem, is apocalyptic, the content is not. Being "lost" in this case is a temporal state; it has to do with a relation to earthly power "here" ("men do not stand / In so'ill case here"). The Lucretian image is Donne's way of conveying an innerworldly and naturalistic version of losing one's soul.

In the final couplet, Donne explicates his image. All talk about flowers and streams disappears. Grammatically, as a continuation of the previous narrative, this couplet is descriptive; in tone, however, and in its relative syntactic independence (reinforced by its couplet status), it sounds like a grimly prophetic command or prayer:

So perish Soules, which more chuse mens unjust
Power from God claym'd, then God himselfe to trust.  (109–110)

Donne's focus remains on the will, on what persons "chuse." The choice is between "mens unjust / Power" and "God himself." There is no conception of men's just power. This is the idea that Hester and Scodel assume, quite reasonably, must be in the poem but that does not actually exist in it. As we have seen so often, we can trust the verse. The enjambment is illuminating: "mens unjust" is a complete thought. This poem cannot imagine benign earthly power. There is no support in the poem for the view that human souls "can be nurtured rather than destroyed

[144] See Lucretius, De Rerum Natura , 2.1–13, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, rev. Martin F. Smith, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1982), 94; Bacon, "Of Truth," Selected Writings , 8. The pity, the attempt to avoid straightforward rejoicing at the destruction of the foolish, is part of the Lucretian topos. Milgate, Satires, 292, sees this Lucretian passage as contributing to the image of Truth on a hill, but I think that the passage is more deeply related to the conclusion of Donne's poem.

by worldly authority."^[145] The "stream" is calm only at the head, which is divine. As soon as the stream becomes earthly power, it becomes "rough." Earthly power is a scourge that must be resisted: "Nor are they Vicars, but hangmen to Fate."

Power, in the poem, means power to bind or "tie" the soul. This sort of power is always illegitimate when exercised by anything but the Spirit of God. We recall Biathanatos , where "in secret cases between the Spirit of God, and my conscience, of which there is not certainly constituted any exteriour Judge, we are ourselves sufficient to doe all the Offices; and then delivered from all bondage, and restored to our naturall libertie." In this realm one has no superior but God—whatever divine source or sanction men's power may claim. As Luther said in his essay on the extent to which secular authority should be obeyed, "No one but God can have authority over souls."^[146] The final words of the satire are "God himselfe to trust." To trust "God himselfe" in this context means to stand aloof from all earthly pressures on the conscience. To "dwell / At the rough streames calme head" is to maintain one's own integrity, to have a proper sense of one's own "naturall libertie" and individual access to the divine.

The integral soul, standing still, refusing to be bound, waiting for a personal revelation that may or may not come, is the final positive image of Satire III. To be such a figure is "not to stray." Jack Donne, the "mere libertine" in religion who thinks that the philosophers are in heaven and that "To'adore, or scorne an image, or protest / May all be bad," insists that he is "blest" and truly faithful. They also serve who resist and doubt. I do not see any criticism of or fetters on the autonomous self here. The individual depicted and represented in this poem does not seem to me "remarkably unfree"—though he is (potentially) in physical danger.^[147]

[145] Scodel, "The Medium is the Message," 500. Scodel needs this notion to locate a proper "mean" in relation to political authority in the poem. His scheme (the mean) is here, I think, dictating his reading.

[146] Luther: Selections, 386. And see Castellio, Concerning Heretics , 124, 143 (an excerpt from Luther).

[147] For Stephen Greenblatt's view of the Renaissance individual as "remarkably unfree," see Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Tyndale (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 256. Scodel wants to soften this view, but nevertheless insists that the speaker imagined or projected in the third Satire is not "the fully autonomous person imagined by the Enlightenment" ("The Medium is the Message," 501). While it is true that the self is autonomous here "under God," I am not sure that this is felt in the poem (or the Enlightenment) as a constraint. I think, to reiterate, that we should resist (or at least be extremely wary of) such sharp period divisions.

In terms of intellectual history, Donne can be seen to have shown, in the strongest parts of the third Satire, the perhaps surprising compatibility of three of the most radical notions of the European sixteenth-century: Erasmus's "philosophy of Christ," Castellio's vindication of doubt, and Luther's conception of conscience. Informed "close reading" reveals this conjuncture.