Travis Ryan Pickell. ET3316 Ethics and the Problem of Evil. Mid-term Paper

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1 Travis Ryan Pickell ET3316 Ethics and the Problem of Evil Mid-term Paper Batter my heart: A Theological Reflection on the Metaphorical Language of John Donne, in Conversation with St. Augustine October 14, 2009

2 Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurped town, to another due, Labor to admit you, but O, to no end; Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captived, and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain, But am betrothed unto your enemy. Divorce me, untie or break that knot again; Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. 1 [God] built for himself a humble habitation of our own clay, so that he might pull down from themselves and win over to himself those whom he is to bring subject to him; lowering their pride and heightening their love 2 1 John Donne, Holy Sonnet no. 14, in The Problem of Evil: A Reader, ed. Mark Larrimore (Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2001), St. Augustine, Confessions, ed. trans., Albert Cook Outler (Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc., 2002), 122. Italics mine.

3 In his fourteenth Holy Sonnet, John Donne uses disarmingly graphic language to describe the heart s conflict between love of God and bondage to sin. His words are disarming because they refer to God with metaphorical images of sexual and physical violence. One rightly balks at the idea of God battering, breaking, imprisoning, and ravishing a human subject. And yet, Donne s poem juxtaposes these images with those of mending, freeing, enthralling, chastening, and loving. The result is a dizzying mixture of sensuality, violence and redemption one that understandably incites varied reactions among readers, and most likely within each individual reader. Before passing judgment on Donne s metaphorical language, one ought to seek to understand the context from which it was written and the intent with which it is employed. This essay will focus on the latter question, pausing momentarily to address the former. Donne was an Anglican priest during the English Reformation, rooted deeply within a late- Augustinian (anti-pelagian) theological paradigm. In fact, he has been called a second St. Augustine, not only in reference to his conversion experience but also because of his affinity for Augustinian theology, especially the Confessions. 3 Taking this context as its starting point, this essay will proceed in three stages. First, it will explore the theme of Force in Augustine s Confessions 4. Next it will explore the theme of Seduction in the same work. Finally, it will revisit Donne s poem, equipped with Augustinian concepts, evaluating the theological import of his metaphorical language. In his Confessions, Augustine reflects upon his journey toward faith in Jesus Christ, seeking to understand the cause of his former life of and continued struggle 3 Mary Arshagouni Papazian, The Augustinian Donne: How a Second S. Augustine? in John Donne and the Protestant Reformation: new perspectives, ed. Mary Arshagouni Papazian (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), For brevity s sake, this essay will only focus on Books II and VII of the Confessions, which describe Augustine s struggle with sin and movement toward conversion, respectively.

4 with sin, in light of his conversion experience. His search takes the form of the question Whence is evil? 5 His answer is that free will is the cause of our doing evil I was utterly certain that it was none but myself who willed or was unwilling and immediately I realized that there was the cause of my sin. 6 And yet, for Augustine the problem remains: if the will, knowing full well that God is the greater good, chooses sin anyway, how can one not sin? It is helpful at this point to address Augustine s understanding of the will. For Augustine, everything that has been created by God is good, including the will. And yet, the will is capable of wickedness due to its corrupted state, a perversion of the will bent aside from God, the supreme substance, toward lower things. 7 Redemption, then, is a removal of this corruption, a reorientation of the will toward God. We are not free to love what we judge to be good unless God affects our will from the outside, as it were. From a human perspective, this redemption feels like a forceful violation of our counterfeit liberty [and] deluded sense of omnipotence. 8 Augustine describes this process in his own life in the following way: It was pleasing in thy sight to reform my deformity, and by inward stings thou didst disturb me so that I was impatient until thou wert made clear to my inward sight made whole by the stinging salve of wholesome grief. 9 A salve is an ointment used to sooth pain, yet the salve of God is a stinging one. Salvation can only be experienced in this paradox: God must forcefully wrest away that which we feel is ours, and yet is not truly who we are, only a corruption of it. God is the one who dost 5 St. Augustine, Confessions, Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., 114, italics mine.

5 teach us by sorrow, who woundest us to heal us, and dost kill us that we may not die apart from [him]. 10 The will, however, is not the only relevant internal human dimension. The problem of a corrupted will is related to that of disordered loves. One cannot will not to sin as long as there is something in the act of sinning that one loves. Reflecting upon his licentious youth, Augustine states, I loved my own undoing, I loved my error. 11 Sin draws the heart away from God, toward a forbidden desire. It so powerfully affects the heart that Augustine must use the language of seduction to properly describe it even when the sin to which he refers is not sexual in nature. My invisible enemy trod me down and seduced me, for I was easy to seduce. 12 Again, O friendship all unfriendly! You strange seducer of the soul, who hungers for mischief. 13 Once more, Thus the soul commits fornication when she is turned from thee, and seeks apart from thee what she cannot find pure and untainted until she returns to thee. 14 And yet, as with the will s counterfeit liberty, the love to which the heart is seduced is a false love. What was it that delighted me save to love and to be loved?... instead, the mists of passion so obscured and overcast my heart that I was unable to distinguish pure affection from unholy desire. 15 In order to redeem the heart from this unholy desire, God must affect the heart as well as the will. Despite the sinner s love of her own sin, God must somehow reclaim her heart, from the outside, once again. It is only in the reclamation of the heart and will, and the reorientation of each toward its proper Object, from which redemption comes. 10 Ibid., 22, italics mine. 11 Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., 27.

6 Returning to Donne s Holy Sonnet, we see that Donne is describing this process in a way similar to Augustine. The speaker in the poem acknowledges the desire to love and be loved by God, and his inability to do so. He is betrothed unto God s enemy. His otherwise useful Reason is captived, and proves weak or untrue. He labors to admit [God], but O, to no end. Knowing that God is the highest good, the speaker is yet bound by, in Augustine s words, counterfeit liberty and unholy desire. In order to experience redemption, God must affect his will and his heart from the outside. This experience feels like a violation. His heart must be battered, his will must be imprisoned. Ultimately, in the climactic phrase, he must be ravished an act that combines force (will) and seduction (loves). And yet, the speaker in the poem knows that in the violation of his counterfeit liberty and unholy desire he is restored to true liberty, holy love. Here is the great irony of Donne s poem: in God s hands, what feels like a violation is, in fact, a restoration. God saves us in spite of ourselves. Donne stands squarely within his English Reformation context, as a champion of the Reformation affirmation of the nature of redemption: Sola Gratia by grace alone. His metaphorical use of violent and sexual language ought not be applied anthropomorphically to God, as if God were a corporal being. Holy Sonnet (no. 14) is no work of Christian Dogmatics; it is a poem and ought to be experienced as such. As with any poetic expression, it has limits and must be used sensitively as a tool for reflection upon God. Yet, poetry may also do what Dogmatics cannot. It evokes. Donne s poem evokes an experience of anguish, frustration, and reliance upon God that is true to the Christian experience of redemption in Christ.

7 Bibliography Donne, John. Holy Sonnet no. 14, in The Problem of Evil: A Reader, edited by Mark Larrimore, 145. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Originally published in M.H. Abrams, gen. ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6 th edn. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), I Papazian, Mary Arshagouni. The Augustinian Donne: How a Second S. Augustine? In John Donne and the Protestant Reformation: new perspectives, edited by Mary Arshagouni Papazian, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, St. Augustine, Confessions. Edited and Translated by Albert Cook Outler. Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc., 2002.

21L.004 Reading Poetry

MIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu 21L.004 Reading Poetry Spring 2009 For information about citing these materials or our Terms of Use, visit: http://ocw.mit.edu/terms. Xu 1 MIT Student 21L.004.02 Prof.