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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Sometime around 1608, during his years of idleness at Mitcham, John Donne was overwhelmed with a sense of his own vanity in being cut off from “the body of the world.” Since he had been reduced to this state by excessive love of a woman (in his marriage to Ann More) and of knowledge (in his “hydroptic, immoderate desire of human learning”), Donne quite naturally turned to Solomon and the Book of Ecclesiastes for an understanding of his own predicament. The influence endured. The effects of Ecclesiastes are most evident in Donne's Anniversaries but can also be traced through virtually the entire range of his work.
1 The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, & Robert Sanderson, introd. George Saintsbury (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1927), p. 84.
2 A[aron] Ro[thkoff], “Solomon,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1971.
3 The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1953–62), I, 237. Hereafter cited as Sermons. For Donne's special attraction to Paul and Augustine see Simpson's comments (i, 140; x, 348).
4 The Poems of John Donne, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson, 2 vols. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1912). All citations from Donne's poems (except the Anniversaries) are from this edition.
5 “Donne in Our Time,” in A Garland for John Donne: 1631–1931, ed. Theodore Spencer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1931), pp. 18–19. And see Eliot's strictures on Donne's “personality” in “Lancelot Andrewes,” in Selected Essays, new ed. (New York: Harcourt, 1950), pp. 302, 308–10.
6 First edition: Lyons, 1606. Other editions: Mainz, 1607; Lyons, 1613, 1619; Cologne, 1624, 1629, 1642(7). I have used a microfilm copy of the second edition. The Jewish tradition of the chronology of Solomon's works (see n. 2) is cited by Lorinus (Proleg., Ch. iii, p. 9).
Johannes Lorinus, or Jean de Lorin (1559–1634), was a French Jesuit who published commentaries on several of the books of the Bible. Donne also quotes him on the Psalms and the Acts of the Apostles (Sermons, vi, 138; vii, 309; viii, 102, 111; ix, 440). See the articles on Lorinus in Carlos Sommervogel, Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus, new. ed., v (Brussels: Schepens, and Paris: Picard, 1894), 1–6; and Enciclopedia cattolica, 1951.
7 Sermons, iii, 48–49: “how could the wisedome of Solomon and of the Holy Ghost, avile and abase this world more, then by this annihilating of it in the name of vanity, for what is that? It is not enough to receive a definition; it is so absolutely nothing, as that we cannot tell you, what it is.”
8 Edmund Gosse, The Life and Letters of John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's (London: Heinemann, 1899), I, 191. The letters from which the following extracts are taken are all dated 1608 by Gosse (pp. 185–86, 194, 200): “sometimes I think it easier to discharge myself of vice than of vanity, as one may sooner carry the fire out of a room than the smoke; and then I see it was a new vanity to think so”; “Sir, though my fortune hath made me such as I am, rather a sickness and disease of the world than any part of it. . .” ; “and as this letter is nothing, so if ever it come to you, you will know it without a name, and therefore I may end it here.” R. C. Bald, in John Donne: A Life (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 157, confirms that Donne suffered a period of physical illness and severe mental depressions in the winter of 1608–09.
Lorinus notes that the “vanity” of Eccles. i.2 has been interpreted by some as “a vapor of smoke” (Vapor fumi) (p. 18).
9 Essays in Divinity, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), p. 75.
10 See also Sermons, i, 207–08; iv, 160; vi, 299; vii, 149; ix, 293. Cf. Lorinus on “vanity” (Eccles. i.2, 19–20): “Sed primum sensum Hierony, alio loco non minus feliciter persequitur, docens, hoc modo dixisse Deum de se: Ego, Sum Qui Sum. Esther [xiv.ll], idola vocasse eos, qui non sunt, lob [xviii.15], Diabolum, eum, qui non est.”
11 Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. John Sparrow (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1923), p. 98.
12 For an excellent historical survey of the interpretations of Ecclesiastes, see Christian D. Ginsburg, Coheleth, Commonly Called the Book of Ecclesiastes (London: Longman, 1861), pp. 27–243, esp. pp. 112–13 for Luther and Melancthon.
13 Ginsburg, p. 119. Some Protestants also wrote works in the older tradition (pp. 114, 118–19).
14 Marginal note to 11. 251–320 of The Second Anniversary. Citations from the Anniversaries are from John Donne: The Anniversaries, ed. Frank Manley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963). The relevant information on the walking of the soul (ambulatio animae) is to be found in Lorinus' commentary on Eccles. vi.9 (pp. 213–14).
15 The Contemple of the World, and the Vanitie Thereof ([Rouen?], 1584), f. 7V . This is a considerable elaboration on the original Spanish: “Si el mundo con el cuchillo de la verdad fuese abierto, seria visto ser falso, y vano” ([Madrid, 1787], p. 5). I have not seen G. C.'s source, the Italian translation by Gieremia Foresti; but the Latin translation (from the Italian) by Petrus Burgundus and the “Protestant” English translation (from G. C. and Burgundus) by Thomas Rogers also fail to mention anatomists or anatomy.
18 Readers interested in the details will find such an account shrouded in the decent obscurity of my unpublished dissertation (“Solomon's Method: A Study of John Donne's Anniversary Poems,'” Columbia 1970).
17 Biathanatos (New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1930), p. 216. This statement of the aim of Biathanatos occurs in a context that obviously anticipates The First Anniversary. In the preceding paragraph: St. Cyprian's encouragement to death “out of a contemplation that the whole frame of the world decayed and languished,” and a quotation from Paracelsus that glosses 11. 159–60. In the following paragraph: quotations from Paracelsus and Pomponazzi that gloss 11. 391–95.
The mystical flight described in The Second Anniversary is another kind of self-willed death, “a death of rapture, and of extasie, that death which S. Paul died more then once, The death which S. Gregory speaks of, Divina contemplatio quoddam sepulchrum animae, The contemplation of God, and heaven, is a kinde of buriall, and Sepulchre, and rest of the soule” (Sermons, ii, 210). I think that their experience of ecstasy is another reason for Donne's special interest in St. Paul, St. Augustine, and Solomon.
18 See Manley's comments in the introd. to his ed. of the Anniversaries (pp. 18–19, 47–49).
19 Consider, e.g., 11. 155–57:
We seeme ambitious, Gods whole worke t'vndoe;
Of nothing he made vs, and we striue too,
To bring our selues to nothing backe.
The image goes back to Donne's years of unemployment, as we see in the following extract from a letter dated March 1607:
Though I know you have many worthy friends of all ranks, yet I add something, since I which am of none, would fain be your friend too. There is some of the honour and some of the degrees of a Creation to make a friendship of nothing.
Yet, not to annihilate myself utterly (for though it seem humbleness, yet it is a work of as much almightiness to bring a thing to nothing as from nothing). . . . (Gosse, p. 181)
20 LI. 197–98—“Venus retards her (the soul) not, to'enquire, how shee / Can, (being one Star) Hesper, and Vesper bee,”—are similarly autobiographical, recalling one of Donne's youthful Problems (IX), “Why is Venus-star multinominous, called both Hesperus and Vesper V Paradoxes and Problemes by lohn Donne with Two Characters and an Essay of Valour, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Soho: Nonesuch, 1923).
21 Proleg., Ch. v, p. 13. Elsewhere, studium scientiarum (p. 12) and immodica libido sciendi (Eccles. vii.30, p. 270). Donne provides a partial translation of Lorinus' list of the 10 vanities refuted in Ecclesiastes: “knowledge in the first Chapter, delicacies in the second, long life in the third, Ambition, Riches, Fame, strength in the rest” (Sermons, iii, 48). The remaining 3 vanities are “the art of divina-tion and foreknowledge of future events,” “the pursuit of fortune,” and “the look of the bloom of youth.” At least 6 of the 10 vanities are refuted also in the Anniversaries: in The First Anniversary, “bodily strength” (corporis robuf) in 11. 91–110,121–26,135–54; long life in 11. 111–20,127–34; divination in 11. 387–98; in The Second Anniversary, knowledge in 11. 45–64, 189–206, 251–320; youthful beauty in 11. 389–400; fame in 11. 401–12.
22 James Smith, “On Metaphysical Poetry,” Scrutiny, 2 (1933), 222–39; Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, 1947), p. 17; Doniphan Louthan, The Poetry of John Donne: A Study in Explication (New York: Bookman Associates, 1951), pp. 173–74.
