Donne's Religious Affiliation

So, it turns out that The Cambridge Companion to John Donne is this super awesome collection of essays, some of which have titles that sound exciting and related to my research! So that's super exciting!

As I continue with my late night foray into Donne scholarship, this blog will probably see a few more articles from this same book, because it's awesome. The one I'm looking at at the moment is called "Donne's religious world" by Alison Shell and Arnold Hunt. This article is cool because it is examining Donne's interactions with the prevailing religious ideas of his time, and how he responded to them. I find it particularly interesting that Donne seems to have almost pointedly avoided identifying with a particular religious ideology, in most cases referring to his religious affiliations as merely “Christian”. Shell and Hunt point out that in Pseudo-Martyr, “he characterizes himself as one who ‘dares not call his Religion by some newer name than Christian.’ But in his will, written in December 1630, three months before his death, he chose to define himself in more detail, not merely as a Christian but as a member of the established Church of England” (67).

Shell and Hunt demonstrate why scholars seem to always disagree over whether Donne was better categorized as Catholic or Protestant in showing how different parts of Donne’s writings support, by turns, different parts of the often-conflicting ideas of the two distinct facets of Christianity. They conclude by pointing out Donne’s “emotionally charged interest in finding common ground between the denominations” (78). Reading Donne’s religious writings makes it clear that his beliefs are extremely nuanced and difficult to decipher. We will probably never have a full understanding of how Donne understood the divide between two denominations at war.

In my researching, I’m hoping to zero in on Donne’s use of the paradox, and how his paradoxical constructions inform his notion of the self. Reading his works gives me the impression that Donne thinks that to be human is to be at the point of contradiction of several paradoxes at once. I think that perhaps an examination of his religious affiliations (or lack thereof) supports this idea as his faith, on which he constructs his view of the rest of the world, seems to itself affirm contradictory things, and perhaps to embrace the paradoxes from which he writes so often.

Guibbory, Achsah. The Cambridge Companion to John Donne. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Print.