Rhetoric and the Familiar in Francis Bacon and John Donne by Derrin Daniel;

Author:Derrin, Daniel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Published: 2012-03-22T04:00:00+00:00

Donne’s Sermons

The critical study of Donne’s sermons has started to pay more attention to their character as occasional acts of communication, with distinct rhetorical purposes.[49] An impressive example is Brent Nelson’s recent book on Donne’s sermon rhetoric, Holy Ambition, which draws attention to the passion of desire in so far as it is a form of “courtship”—sexual, social, and transcendent. The idea is related to Kenneth Burke’s understanding of rhetoric as an attempt to bridge the “conditions of estrangement,” or the sexual, social, and transcendent hierarchies.[50] “Courtship” describes Donne’s overall rhetorical purpose—that is, his attempt to move his audience toward greater devotion.[51] While a sermon ostensibly tries “to admonish the sinful, to encourage the saints, to comfort the sorrowful,” the overall function of Donne’s sermon rhetoric, as Nelson understands it, is understood as a “purgative-redemptive” ambition toward the ultimate term of courtship, God.[52] The passion of desire, naturally, becomes the principal focus. However, it is important to ask how Donne’s rhetoric in specific sermons is engaging other passions that may be relevant to his contexts, such as fear, hatred, hope, despair, and so on, and how those passions might relate to each other.[53] In what follows I analyze the figurative rhetoric of two sermons of Donne’s that deal with sorrow, despair, fear, and joy, in particular.

Donne’s sermon on Job 13:15, “Loe, though he slay me, yet will I trust in him” (III, 3: 187–205) was given for the Countess of Bedford at Harrington House on January 7, 1620/21.[54] It is a consolation sermon arguing that to see God within life’s calamities is to see his workmanship in our lives leading toward a higher good and purpose.[55] Donne constructs a theodicy around Job’s life, suffering, death, and his perpetual sentiment of trust in God despite all. The text was perhaps chosen with the troublesome circumstances of Lady Bedford’s recent past in mind. Between 1610 and 1620 Lady Bedford had to deal with a whole series of deaths in her immediate family: her daughter in 1610, a miscarriage in 1611, her father in 1613, her brother in 1614.[56] On top of that, she was seriously ill between 1612 and 1613, and her own patron, the powerful Robert Cecil, died in 1612. Later in the decade, amid the crisis of her own aristocratic family’s debts and her desperate attempts to offset them with patronage and royal grants, Queen Anne (on whom Lady Bedford was attending) died in 1619. It makes sense that in 1621 Donne should craft for her a sober-minded consolatory sermon striving to make sense of suffering and inevitable death but also the sense of transitoriness, sharply reflected in the Countess’s own dwindling (Harrington) family estate. Donne’s sermon addresses the feelings of intense sorrow and the sense of defeat that must have been relevant to Lady Bedford and her circle. His tropical rhetoric, I would argue, sets out to turn the perceptions that might have led to such sorrow into ones that encourage a passion like hopeful anticipation of the positive results of suffering for Christ.

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