Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: English Protestant moral theory and regeneration
- Chapter 1 Shame, guilt, and moral character in early modern English Protestant theology and Sir Philip Sidney's Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia
- Chapter 2 The three orders of nature, grace, and law in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book II
- Chapter 3 Conformist and puritan moral theory: from Richard Hooker's natural law theory to Richard Sibbes's ethical occasionalism
- Chapter 4 The elect body in pain: Godly fear and sanctification in John Donne's poetry and prose
- Chapter 5 Absent neighbors in George Herbert's “The Church,” or Why Agape becomes Caritas in English Protestant devotional poetry
- Chapter 6 Moral pragmatism in the theology of John Milton and his contemporaries
- Epilogue: theorizing early modern moral selfhood
- Notes
- Index
Chapter 4 - The elect body in pain: Godly fear and sanctification in John Donne's poetry and prose
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: English Protestant moral theory and regeneration
- Chapter 1 Shame, guilt, and moral character in early modern English Protestant theology and Sir Philip Sidney's Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia
- Chapter 2 The three orders of nature, grace, and law in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book II
- Chapter 3 Conformist and puritan moral theory: from Richard Hooker's natural law theory to Richard Sibbes's ethical occasionalism
- Chapter 4 The elect body in pain: Godly fear and sanctification in John Donne's poetry and prose
- Chapter 5 Absent neighbors in George Herbert's “The Church,” or Why Agape becomes Caritas in English Protestant devotional poetry
- Chapter 6 Moral pragmatism in the theology of John Milton and his contemporaries
- Epilogue: theorizing early modern moral selfhood
- Notes
- Index
Summary
In an influential interpretation of John Donne's religious poetry, John Stachniewski argues that doctrinal Calvinism underwrites the expressions of passivity, fear, and resentment in Donne's Holy Sonnets. After tracing the influence of the Calvinist emphasis on total depravity, double predestination, and prevenient grace in Donne's religious lyrics, Stachniewski concludes that “the sonnets reveal that Donne experienced tormented doubt of his salvation in a way not dissimilar to [the] Calvinist despairers.” In response to such a one-sidedly Calvinist reading of the sonnets – a reading that Stachniewski shares with John Carey and, with certain qualifications, Barbara Lewalski – Richard Strier has provocatively argued that Donne's Holy Sonnets are not consistently Calvinist in theology, and that throughout the Holy Sonnets, Donne alternates between on the one hand an “Erasmian belief in repentance as a means to salvation,” and on the other hand a mainstream Reformation belief in “passively received, justified righteousness.”
In advancing his argument, Strier suggests that Stachniewski and others have mistakenly linked the Holy Sonnets and Calvinism because Donne's evident preoccupation with religious fear, broadly defined, is a preoccupation that runs throughout Reformation theology and Puritan sermons. Strier rightly questions such an affiliation by pointing out that Calvinist theology, particularly the doctrine of justification by faith, was not meant to inspire fear but rather “the sweetness of psychological comfort” and the experience of assurance.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Moral Identity in Early Modern English Literature , pp. 115 - 133Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004