Whereas the Christian religion is, as Gregory n.a.z.ianzen says, "simplex et nuda, nisi prave in artem difficillimam converteretur": it is a plain, an easy, a perspicuous truth.
A religion of ideas, spiritual truths, or truth-powers,--not of notions and conceptions, the manufacture of the understanding,--is therefore "simplex et nuda", that is, immediate; like the clear blue heaven of Italy, deep and transparent, an ocean unfathomable in its depth, and yet ground all the way. Still as meditation soars upwards, it meets the arched firmament with all its suspended lamps of light. O, let not the "simplex et nuda" of Gregory be perverted to the Socinian, "plain and easy for the meanest understandings!" The truth in Christ, like the peace of Christ, pa.s.seth all understanding. If ever there was a mischievous misuse of words, the confusion of the terms, "reason" and "understanding," "ideas" and "notions," or "conceptions," is most mischievous; a Surinam toad with a swarm of toadlings sprouting out of its back and sides.
Serm. VIII. Mat. v. 16. p. 77.
Ib. C.
Either of the names of this day were text enough for a sermon, Purification or Candlemas. Join we them together, and raise we only this one note from both, that all true purification is in the light, &c.
The ill.u.s.tration of the name of the day contained in the first two or three paragraphs of this sermon would be censured as quaint by our modern critics. Would to heaven we had but even a few preachers capable of such quaintnesses!
Ib. D.
Every good work hath faith for the root; but every faith hath not good works for the fruit thereof.
Faith, that is, fidelity--the fealty of the finite will and understanding to the reason, "the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world", as one with, and representative of, the absolute will, and to the ideas or truths of the pure reason, the supersensuous truths, which in relation to the finite will, and as meant to determine the will, are moral laws, the voice and dictates of the conscience;--this faith is properly a state and disposition of the will, or rather of the whole man, the I, or finite will, self-affirmed. It is therefore the ground, the root, of which the actions, the works, the believings, as acts of the will in the understanding, are the trunk and the branches. But these must be in the light. The disposition to see must have organs, objects, direction, and an outward light. The three latter of these our Lord gives to his disciples in this blessed sermon on the Mount, preparatorily, and, as Donne rightly goes on to observe, presupposing faith as the ground and root. Indeed the whole of this and the next page affords a n.o.ble specimen, how a minister of the Church of England should preach the doctrine of good works, purified from the poison of the practical Romish doctrine of works, as the mandioc is evenomated by fire, and rendered safe, nutritious, a bread of life. To Donne"s exposition the heroic Solifidian, Martin Luther himself, would have subscribed, hand and heart.
Ib. p. 78. C.
And therefore our latter men of the Reformation are not to be blamed, who for the most, pursuing St. Cyril"s interpretation, interpret this universal "light that lighteneth every man" to be the light of nature.
The error here, and it is a grievous error, consists in the word "nature." There is, there can be, no light of nature: there may be a light in or upon nature; but this is the light that shineth down into the darkness, that is, the nature, and the darkness comprehendeth it not. All ideas, or spiritual truths, are supernatural.
Ib. p. 79.
Throughout this page, Donne rather too much plays the rhetorician. If the faith worketh the works, what is true of the former must be equally affirmed of the latter;--"causa causae causa causati". Besides, he falls into something like a confusion of faith with belief, taken as a conviction or a.s.sent of the judgment. The faith and the righteousness of a Christian are both alike his, and not his--the faith of Christ in him, the righteousness in and for him. "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet, not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of G.o.d, who loved me, and gave himself for me". [7]
Donne was a truly great man; but, after all, he did not possess that full, steady, deep, and yet comprehensive, insight into the nature of faith and works which was vouchsafed to Martin Luther. Donne had not attained to the reconciling of distinct.i.ty with unity,--ours, yet G.o.d"s; G.o.d"s, yet ours.
Ib. D.
"Velle et nolle nostrum est", to a.s.sent, or to dis-a.s.sent, is our own.
Is not this, even with the saving afterwards, too nakedly expressed?
Ib.
And certainly our works are more ours than our faith is; and man concurs otherwise in the acting and perpetration of a good work, than he doth in the reception and admission of faith.
Why? Because Donne confounds the act of faith with the a.s.sent of the fancy and understanding to certain words and conceptions. Indeed, with all my reverence for Dr. Donne, I must warn against the contents of this page, as scarcely tenable in logic, unsound in metaphysics, and unsafe, slippery divinity; and princ.i.p.ally in that he confounds faith-- essentially an act, the fundamental work of the Spirit--with belief, which is then only good when it is the effect and accompaniment of faith.
Ib. p. 80. D.
Because things good in their inst.i.tution may he depraved in their practice--"ergone nihil ceremoniarum rudioribus dabitur, ad juvandam eorum imperitiam?"
Some ceremonies may be for the conservation of order and civility, or to prevent confusion and unseemliness; others are the natural or conventional language of our feelings, as bending the knees, or bowing the head; and to neither of these two sorts do I object. But as to the "adjuvandam rudiorum imperitiam", I protest against all such ceremonies, and the pretexts for them, "in toto". What? Can any ceremony be more instructive than the words required to explain the ceremony? I make but two exceptions, and those where the truths signified are so vital, so momentous, that the very occasion and necessity of explaining the sign are of the highest spiritual value. Yet, alas! to what gross and calamitous superst.i.tions have not even the visible signs in Baptism and the Eucharist given occasion!
Ib. p. 81. E.
Blessed St. Augustine reports, (if that epistle be St. Augustine"s) that when himself was writing to St. Hierome, to know his opinion of the measure and quality of the joy and glory of heaven, suddenly in his chamber there appeared "ineffabile lumen", says he, an unspeakable, an unexpressible light, ... and out of that light issued this voice, "Hieronymi anima sum", &c.
The grave recital of this ridiculous legend is one instance of what I have called the Patristic leaven in Donne, who a.s.suredly had no belief himself in the authenticity of this letter. But yet it served a purpose.
As to Master Conradus, just above, who could read at night by the light at his fingers" ends, he must of course have very recently been shaking hands with Lucifer.
Ib. p. 83. D.
Eve"s recognition upon the birth of her first son, "Cain I have gotten, I possess a man from the Lord."
"I have gotten the Jehovah-man", is, I believe, the true rendering and sense of the Hebrew words. Eve, full of the promise, supposed her first-born, the first-born on earth, to be the promised deliverer.
Ib. p. 84. D. E.
Serm. IX. Rom. xiii. 7. p. 86, Admirable pa.s.sages. Ib. p. 90. A.
That soul that is accustomed, &c.
Ib. p. 94. A. B.
Serm. XII. Mat. v. 2. p. 112.
Ib. B. C. D.
The disposition of our Church divines, under James I, to bring back the stream of the Reformation to the channel and within the banks formed in the first six centuries of the Church, and their alienation from the great patriarchs of Protestantism, Luther, Calvin, Zuinglius, and others, who held the Fathers of the "ante"-Papal Church, with exception of Augustine, in light esteem, this disposition betrays itself here and in many other parts of Donne. For here Donne plays the Jesuit, disguising the truth, that even as early as the third century the Church had begun to Paganize Christianity, under the pretext, and no doubt in the hope, of Christianizing Paganism. The mountain would not go to Mahomet, and therefore Mahomet went to the mountain.
Ib. p. 115. A.
An excellent pa.s.sage.
Ib. p. 117. E.
And therefore when the prophet says, "Quis sapiens, et intelliget haec?
Who is so wise as to find out this way"? he places this cleanness which we inquire after in wisdom. What is wisdom?