Chapter 11

‘Tears of Passion’ and

‘Inordinate Lamentation’:
Complicated Grief in Donne and Augustine
Katrin Ettenhuber

Chapter 11 of John’s Gospel recounts the death and resurrection of Lazarus. It

confronts Christ with the pain and suffering of a grieving community: the tears
of Mary of Bethany and of the citizens of Jerusalem who have come to comfort
her. The Authorized Version of the Bible records that Christ ‘groned in the Spirit
and, and was troubled ’ (11.33); finally, in the shortest verse of Scripture, we learn
that ‘Iesus wept’ (11.35). Christ’s tears, and John’s account of his weeping more
particularly, were almost entirely neglected by early modern preachers. There are
only two extant sermons on John 11.35: one by Thomas Jackson, preached for the
funeral of the Kentish gentleman John Moyle on 6 January 1614, and the other by
John Donne, delivered on the first Friday in Lent 1623. Jackson reads the Lazarus
episode as a whole as ‘infallible’ evidence of the hypostatic union – both ‘his
Diuinitie, and humanitie’ – but Christ’s tears specifically emphasise ‘the truth of
his humane nature’; Jackson’s concluding exhortation to the audience presents a
‘Redeemer … who hath felt in his owne soule and body, the manifold straitning
passions and perplexities that we feele in our seuerall afflictions’.1 Where Jackson
is keen to stress the parallels between Christ’s compassionate weeping and our
own tears, Donne highlights points of divergence and qualitative contrast. In his
most extended treatment of the ‘Religious affections’, Donne initially sets up
Christ’s tears for Lazarus as ‘a necessary occasion to shew that he was true Man’;
subsequently, however, he shows far more interest in the miracle of Lazarus’
resurrection.2 Unlike Jackson, Donne invokes ‘humane nature’ principally to place
Christ at a safe distance from its weaknesses and failings:

He wept as man doth weepe, and he wept as man may weepe … but no distrustfull,
no inordinate man. … Not as sinfull man, not as a man, that had let fall his bridle,
by which he should turne his horse[…] … Not as a man that had lost his interest
and power in his affections and passions; … Christ might ungirt himselfe, and
give more scope and liberty to his passions, then any other man: both because he

1
Thomas Jackson, Sinnelesse sorrow for the dead (London, 1614), pp. 11–12, 23, 25.
2
The Sermons of John Donne, ed. by George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10
vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–62), iv .330, iv. 326.
202 Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture / Ettenhuber

had no Originall sin within, to drive him, no inordinate love without to draw him,
when his affections were moved; which all other men have.3

The process of weeping, characteristically for Donne, precipitates more global

reflections the nature of passionate agency. Throughout his sermon, Donne
works with a qualified endorsement of the religious passions, but he circles
back repeatedly to the issue of emotional regulation and governance. The term
inordinate, used twice in this short passage, plays a key part in Donne’s theology
of the affections. It describes a complex moral disorder, which embraces flawed
cognition, deliberation, and action. Christ, Donne notes elsewhere in the sermon,
‘had his own actions, and passions, and their interpretations in his own power’;
man, on the other hand, is bound to react to the internal compulsions of ‘Originall
sin’ and the external temptations of ‘inordinate love’.4
By insisting that throughout his life and ministry, Christ ‘came nearer to an
excesse of passion, then to an Indolencie, to a senselesnesse, to a privation of
… affections’, Donne echoes classic Christian arguments about the moral and
philosophical limitations of Stoic apatheia.5 In Book 3 of the Institutes, for instance,
Calvin derides the Stoic ideal of ‘“the great-souled man”: one who, having cast off
all human qualities, was affected equally by adversity and prosperity … nay, who
like a stone was not affected at all.’6 However, Donne’s constant recourse to ideas
of emotional moderation and self-discipline ‒ Christ ‘shed teares voluntarily, and
without violence’, even as his detractors ‘scourged, … nailed … [and] pierced’
him ‒ can be traced to a more specific source: St Augustine’s anatomisation of the
sacred affections.7
I want to use Augustine’s Christian psychology initially as a window on to
Donne’s approach to the passions more generally, but my argument will come to
focus more particularly on the theory and experience of grief. Through engagement
with the Confessions, The City of God, Enarrations on the Psalms, and Tractates

3
Donne, Sermons, iv. 328. On Donne’s sermon, see Marjory E. Lange, Telling Tears
in the English Renaissance (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), pp. 156–85; and Margo Swiss,
‘Lachrymae Christi: The Theology of Tears in Milton’s Lycidas and Donne’s Sermon
“Jesus Wept”’, in Heirs of Fame: Milton and Writers of the English Renaissance, ed. Margo
Swiss and David A. Kent (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995), pp. 135–57.
Donne’s horsemanship metaphor recalls Plato’s description of the soul in Phaedrus.
4
Donne, Sermons, iv. 329.
5
Ibid., iv. 329–30.
6
Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. by John T. McNeill, 2 vols (London:
S.C.M. Press, 1960), i. 709 (3.8.8). For an overview of the contrast between Stoic and
Christian approaches to the passions, see Richard Strier, ‘Against the Rule of Reason:
Praise of Passion from Petrarch to Luther to Shakespeare to Herbert’, in Reading the Early
Modern Passions, pp. 23–42. See also, for a more for a more focussed comparison of
classical and Christian perspectives on the passions, Johannes Brachtendorf, ‘Cicero and
Augustine on the Passions’, Revue des Études Augustiniennes, 43 (1997): 289–308.
7
Donne, Sermons, iv. 331.
 ‘Tears of Passion’ and ‘Inordinate Lamentation’ 203

on St. John’s Gospel, Donne evolves a model of devotional identity which absorbs,
extends, and modifies Augustinian notions of affective agency and volitional ethics.
For Augustine, the interior life of the sinful subject requires constant monitoring
and regulation: the deviant will must be consciously redirected from worldly and
selfish desires and trained on the source of true love and delight – God. The uses
and problems of this model are shown most clearly in Donne’s treatments of grief,
which subject the processes of emotional self-regulation to intense and complex
scrutiny. My analysis will focus on three groups of Donnean texts: the holy
sonnets, the elegies for Bridget Markham and Cecilia Bulstrode, and his treatment
in the sermons of Confessions 9.12–13, where Augustine mourns the loss of his
mother, Monica. In these texts, images of tears, sponges and wax objects are used
to construct a malleable and porous self, whose religious affections can be directed,
pressed, and moulded ‒ and ultimately aligned with divine will. However, the holy
sonnets in particular question the possibility and value of emotional and devotional
continence. In ‘Oh might those sighes and teares returne again’, self-love proves a
critical impediment to productive mourning; and ‘Since she whom I loved’ insists
on the autonomy of individual grief, resisting the subsumption of human love into
divine caritas that Augustine prescribes.

***

In chapter 9 of book 14 of The City of God, Augustine famously attempts a refutation

of the Stoic principle of apatheia or ‘inpassibilitas’, ‘a condition’, he says, ‘such
that the mind cannot be touched by any emotion whatsoever’.8 Augustine has built
up to this refutation by drawing a central distinction between two different kinds
of emotion: the voluntary affections of the soul (described as either ‘affectus’ or
‘motus’), on the one hand, and passions – the involuntary movement of the lower,
sensory appetite (‘passiones’) – on the other.9 It is Augustine’s treatment of the
former category which leads to a limited endorsement of emotion, in the form of
holy affections guided by the will. In an iconic passage from chapter 6, Augustine
describes how the movements of the soul acquire a positive or negative moral
inflection as they are directed by the will:

What is important here is the quality of a man’s will. For if the will is perverse,
the affections will be perverse; but if it is righteous, the affections will be not
only blameless, but praiseworthy. The will is engaged in all of them; indeed they
are all no more than acts of the will.10

8
Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. by R. W. Dyson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 600 (xiv. 9).
9
On the ‘central distinction between affections and passions’, see Dixon, From
Passions to Emotions, pp. 45–8.
10
City of God, p. 590 (xiv. 6); see Dixon, pp. 46–7. Dyson translates Augustine’s
‘motus’ as ‘emotions’; I have replaced this with ‘affections’ to preserve clarity of argument.
204 Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture / Ettenhuber

In chapter 7, Augustine expands the scope of the argument further still. Having
classified affections such as joy, fear, and sadness as various manifestations of
the will, he goes on to subsume them into the even more capacious category of
‘love’, or ‘amor’: ‘A righteous will, then, is a good love; and a perverted will is
an evil love. … Accordingly, these feelings are bad if the love is bad, and good if
it is good.11
In Augustine, ‘amor’, ‘dilectio’ and ‘caritas’ often serve as strategic short-hand
terminology for the voluntary, rational or higher affections of the soul. Particular
emotions accrue or shed value through their attachment to ‘righteous’ or selfish
forms of love. This graduated dynamic is clearly at work in the following two
quotations from The City of God, which in many ways summarise the larger aims
of Augustine’s project:

Two cities, then, have been created by two loves: that is, the earthly by love
of self extending even to contempt of God, and the heavenly by love of God
extending to contempt of self. The one, therefore, glories in itself; the other in
the Lord[…]12

We Christians … are citizens of the Holy City of God […] … Such citizens feel
fear and desire, pain and gladness, but in a manner consistent with the Holy
Scriptures and wholesome doctrine; and because their love is righteous, all these
affections are righteous in them … They feel pain for their sins, and gladness in
their good works.13

The quality of love determines the quality of the affection: ‘rectus amor’ produces
‘affectiones rectas’. But here also, finally, the ultimate goal or object of this
seemingly infinite definitional regress comes into view. An emotion is righteous
if love is righteous, and love is righteous if the will is righteous. Now we know,
however, what defines a righteous will: its direction or orientation towards God,
in conformity ‘with the Holy Scriptures and wholesome doctrine’. The aim, then,
is to focus the will on something outside the self, and to find ways of conditioning
and directing it towards God. It is to channel devotional energies in the appropriate
direction, to regulate the passions and align human will with divine.14
I have used the passages from The City of God as an efficient way of assembling
the basic building blocks of Augustine’s theory, but from the evidence of Donne’s
citations it is unlikely that he collected his material from that text. Augustine’s

11
City of God, p. 592 (xiv. 7).
12
City of God, p. 632 (xiv. 28).
13
City of God, p. 597 (xiv. 9); see Dixon, pp. 54–6.
14
On the role of love in Augustine’s ‘relational anthropology’, see Matt Jenson,
The Gravity of Sin: Augustine, Luther and Barth on homo incurvatus in se (London: T.
& T. Clark, 2006), pp. 6–8. Jenson emphasises the dynamic, transactional and relational
character of love, a ‘complex of willing attending and loving in the context of particular
relationships’ (p. 7).
 ‘Tears of Passion’ and ‘Inordinate Lamentation’ 205

treatment of the sacred affections has a complex and variegated reception history
in the early modern period: from Calvin’s Institutes to Protestant and Roman
treatises on the passions, from controversial tracts to devotional manuals, and
from Scripture commentaries to patristic excerpt collections. Donne channels his
response to Augustine’s Christian psychology mainly through quotations from
the Confessions, the Enarrations on the Psalms, and the Tractates on St John’s
Gospel.15 These works present ideas that are also dealt with in The City of God,
but in the more accessible forms of the sermon and autobiographical narrative,
respectively. In the following extract, Donne amalgamates passages from the
Confessions and Tractates on St. John’s Gospel, for instance; these passages in turn
mediate a key concept from City of God 15.22, the ‘ordo amoris’, or order of love.
The ‘ordo amoris’ systematises Augustine’s doctrine of governance and volitional
redirection; human beings must love every element of creation according to its
relationship with God, which means loving God above all else in creation and not
inordinately loving any creature for its own sake:

O dementiam nescientem amare homines humaniter! [Conf 4.7.12] what a

perverse madness is it, to love a creature and not as a creature, that is, with all the
adjuncts, and circumstances, and qualities of a creature, of which the principal is
that, that love raise us to the contemplation of the Creator; for if it do so, we may
love our selves, as we are the Images of God; and so we may love other men,
as they are the Images of us, and our nature[…] … Si malè amaveris tunc odisti
[Tract 51.10]; If thou hast lov’d thy self, or any body else principally; or so, that
when thou dost any act of love, thou canst not say to thine own conscience, I
do this for Gods sake, and for his glory; if thou hast loved so, thou hast hated
thy self, and him whom thou hast loved, and God whom thou shouldest love.16

Donne’s main reference points are Confessions 4.7 and Tractates on St. John’s
Gospel 51.10. The ‘principal’ aspiration is to love other creatures in the right
measure and degree: affection for other human beings directs us to a higher goal,
‘the contemplation of the Creator’. Donne’s brief nod to the exposition of John’s
Gospel provides further clarification and adds a well-known Augustinian paradox:
selfish love is equated with self-hatred; only love of God the creator – a love that
reaches beyond the human sphere – qualifies as true self-love.
Donne’s sermons also dwell extensively on the processes by which love, and
the affections more generally, can be directed towards these worthier objects.
Donne’s sermon on Psalms 32.9, for instance, draws in detail on an Augustinian
sermon on the same Scripture text to make this point:

15
For Donne’s frequent recourse to these three texts, and for an account of Donne’s
Augustinian reading more generally, see Katrin Ettenhuber, Donne’s Augustine: Renaissance
Cultures of Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
16
Donne, Sermons, i. 243. For the reference to Confessions 4.7.12, see Patrologiae
cursus completus …. series latina, ed. by J.P. Migne et al., 221 vols. [Paris, 1844–1903],
xxxii. 698; for Tractates on John’s Gospel 51.10, see PL xxxv. 1767.
206 Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture / Ettenhuber

purga amorem, saith hee [Augustine], I doe not forbid thee loving, (it is a noble
affection) but purge and purifie thy love; Aquam fluentem in cloacam converte
in hortum; Turne that water which hath served thy stables, and sewers before,
into thy gardens: Turne those teares which thou hast spent upon thy love, or thy
losses, upon thy sinnes, and the displeasure of thy God, and Quales impetus
habebas ad mundum, habebis ad Creatorem mundi, Those passions which
transported thee upon the creature, will establish thee upon the Creator.17

The language of this extract figures good governance as a matter of personal

moral hygiene: emotions are processed, purified, and converted from profane to
sacred uses, and the cultivation of holy affections fosters spiritual growth. It is also
worth noting that well-regulated emotions promote devotional stability; passions
expended on the creature ‘transport’, while those invested in the ‘Creator’ settle
and establish.
Reflections on love and rightly ordered affections are often channelled through
images of tears and weeping in Donne’s works. This is no coincidence: tears
shed in his writing are usually signs of grief (rather than of joy or ecstasy) –
and it is the issue of grief which for Donne presents the greatest challenge to
Augustine’s doctrine of the passions.18 Grief, like love, is frequently represented
as a dominant category in the early modern register of the passions: Burton argues
in The Anatomy of Melancholy, for instance, that ‘when griefe appeares, all other
passions vanish’.19 That said, there are some relatively straightforward applications
of Augustine’s model, such as the reformation of weeping depicted in Donne’s
elegy for Cecilia Bulstrode (a friend of his patroness Lucy Russell, Countess of
Bedford), who died in 1609.20 In the final lines of the poem, addressing death,
Donne urges Bulstrode’s friends to turn tears of loss and passionate grief into signs
of repentance:

Yet though these wayes be lost, thou hast left one, [i.e. ways for death to triumph]
Which is, immoderate grief that she is gone.
But we may scape that sinne, yet weepe as much,
Our teares are due because we are not such.

17
Donne, Sermons, ix. 384; Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 31.2.5 (PL xxxvi.
260).
18
On early modern literary representations of grief, see Speaking Grief in English
Literary Culture: Shakespeare to Milton, ed. by Margo Swiss and David A. Kent (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 2002); on the social and political contexts governing the
expression of grief, see Anne Laurence, ‘Godly Grief: Individual Responses to Death in
Seventeenth-Century Britain’, in Death, Ritual, and Bereavement, ed. by Ralph Houlbrooke
(London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 62–76.
19
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. by Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K.
Kiessling and Rhonda L. Blair, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000), i. 257.
20
For an analysis of Donne’s elegies for Cecilia Bulstrode and Bridget Markham
in the context of his relationship with the Countess of Bedford, see Claude J. Summers,
‘Donne’s 1609 Sequence of Grief and Comfort’, Studies in Philology, 89 (1992): 211–31.
 ‘Tears of Passion’ and ‘Inordinate Lamentation’ 207

Some tears, that knot of friends, her death must cost,

Because the chaine is broke, though no linke lost.21

Some tears are appropriate because they deplore our moral failings rather than
personal losses: we mourn because ‘we are not such’, that is, in the state of
virtue attributed to Cecilia Bulstrode in the poem. Donne’s sermon on John 11.35
constructs a similar contrast between rectified and indecorous weeping: ‘there
be good teares and bad teares, teares that wash away sin, and teares that are sin
… After we have distinguished our teares, naturall from spirituall, worldly from
heavenly, then … there is a heaven opened to us’.22 This hierarchy of grief also
operates in Donne’s elegy for Bridget Markham, which separates ‘our land waters’
or ‘teares of passion’ from ‘Our waters … above our firmament’, the devout
‘Teares which our Soule for her sins let fall’.23 In a sermon preached at Whitehall
on the occasion of the fast on 5 April 1628, on Psalms 6.6–7, Donne describes
David’s struggle to achieve continence and contrition, illustrating the effort of will
involved in fruitful weeping:

The concupiscencies of man, are naturally dry powder, combustible easily, easily
apt to take fire; but teares dampen them, and give them a little more leasure, and
us intermission and consideration. David had laboured hard; first Ad ruborem,
as Physitians advise, to a rednesse, to a blushing, to a shame of his sin; And now
Ad sudorem, he had laboured to a sweat: for Lacrymae sudor animæ mœrentis,
Teares are the sweat of a labouring soule, and that soule that labours as David
did, will sweat, as David did, in the teares of contrition […]24

The labour of repentance reintegrates body and soul, believer and God, as Donne
combines two images of liquefaction – sweat and tears – to invoke the somatic
response of the atoning spirit. In the rhetoric of devotional conditioning, it is the
porous, pliant, malleable subject that achieves ontological integrity and emotional

21
Donne, ‘An Elegie vpon the death of Mrs Bulstrod’ (‘Death I recant’), in The
Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, vol. 6, gen. edn Gary Stringer (Indiana:
University of Indiana Press, 1995), ll. 69–74. For an introduction to the genre, see G.W.
Pigman III, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985).
22
Donne, Sermons, iv. 340. For a discussion of the ethics of weeping Crashaw’s poetry,
see Paul A. Parrish, ‘Moderate Sorrow and Immoderate Tears: Mourning in Crashaw’, in
Speaking Grief in English Literary Culture, pp. 217–41.
23
Donne, ‘An Elegie vpon the death of the Ladie Marckam’ (‘Man is the world,
and Death the Ocean’), in Variorum, vol. 6, ll. 7–9. Robin Robbins’ notes on the poem
emphasise ‘the implicit blasphemy’ of sorrowing for the dead (The Complete Poems of
John Donne (Harlow: Pearson, 2008; rev. edn 2010), p. 537); the 1559 Book of Common
Prayer insists that ‘the dead …. reste from their labours’ and exist in a state of permanent
‘joye and felicitie’ (Book of Common Prayer, ed. Cummings, pp. 172, 174).
24
Donne, Sermons, viii. 200.
208 Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture / Ettenhuber

continence.25 Righteous repentance, and the godly outpouring of grief, are often
figured in the image of the sponge, as in the ‘Jesus Wept’ sermon of 1623: ‘man is
a spunge; And in Codice scripta, all our sins are written in Gods Booke, saies S.
Chrysostome: If there I can fill my spunge with teares, and so wipe out all my sins
out of that Book, it is a blessed use of the Spunge’.26 Donne’s ‘spunge’ represents
the sinful self – all sponges ‘weep’ – but also, in a recalibration of agency, the
object and process that facilitates spiritual rectification. ‘True holy teares’, as
he observes when preaching on Psalms 6.6–7, ‘carry us above all’: they are a
‘present remedy’ but also promise a more ‘permanent’ emotional reorientation.27
To ‘weep for sin’ rather than ‘mourne passionately for the love of this world …
or imoderately for the death of any that is passed out of this world’, is to prepare
the soul’s ground for the Holy Spirit, who ‘loves to work’ with ductile material,
‘in Waxe, and not in Marble’.28 God’s actions are, in a double sense, expressions
of our fallen nature:

Every man is but a spunge, and but a spunge filled with teares: and whether you
lay your right hand or your left upon a full spunge, it will weep. Whether God lay
his left hand, temporall calamities, or his right hand, temporall prosperity; even
that temporall prosperity comes alwaies accompanied with … much anxiety in
our selves […]29

Affliction, however, also poses a challenge to this state, and potentially sullies the
moral transparency of repentant tears; Donne identifies ‘a tincture, a deep dye of
murmuring in [the] … tears’ of the wandering Israelites, for instance.30 These are
the tears that cause cognitive impairment in Donne’s elegy for Bridget Markham:
‘false spectacles: we cannot see / Through passion’s mist, what we are, nor what
she’.31 Vehement and excessive venting of emotion makes us less receptive to
articulations of God’s will, and eventually leads to a state of moral petrification:

But to weep for other things, and not to weep for sin, or if not to teares, yet not
to come to that tendernesse, to that melting, to that thawing, that resolving of the
bowels which good soules feele; this is a spunge … dried up into a Pumice stone;

25
Tracing allusions to the humoral body in Donne, Nancy Selleck has argued that
‘Donne likes to evoke a sense of selfhood that is never securely bounded. …. Donne’s
humoralism makes his physical imagery …. a way of representing the self’s connection
and even subjection to other bodies and minds’ (Nancy Selleck, ‘Donne’s Body’, Studies in
English Literature, 41 (2001), 149–74 [p. 150]).
26
Donne, Sermons, iv. 342.
27
Ibid., viii. 200.
28
Ibid., iv. 341, iv. 340.
29
Ibid., iv. 337.
30
Ibid., iv. 328.
31
‘Man is the world, and Death the Ocean’, ll. 15–16.
 ‘Tears of Passion’ and ‘Inordinate Lamentation’ 209

the lightnesse, the hollownesse of a spunge is there still, but (as the Pumice is)
dried in the Ætnaes of lust, of ambition, of other flames of this world.32

The hardening of hearts and the Jews’ ‘murmuring … tears’ are countered
by Christ’s example: the ‘passionate deprecation’ uttered in the Garden of
Gethsemane is ‘instantly washed with … a present and a full submitting of all to
Gods pleasure, Yet not my will O Father, but thine be done.’33 This is Augustine’s
volitional dynamic in its purest form: ‘the flames of this world’ are quelled by
repentant tears, and the ‘lightnesse’ and ‘hollownesse’ of self-love yield to more
substantial resolutions of the soul.
Donne’s elegies for two young women with whom he had, at best, a passing
acquaintance through his patroness, Lucy Bedford, exhibit the Augustinian pattern
of emotional conditioning in fairly schematic form: uncontrolled weeping is
converted into decorous tears of repentance. This perspective on grief, and the
crisis of emotion and conscience it represents, is as attractive in its solidity as it
is unforgiving in its moral rigour. In the holy sonnets, the notion that passionate
engagement with the world can give way fully, ‘instantly’ and unproblematically to
‘Gods pleasure’ is subjected to more intense and painful scrutiny. ‘Oh might those
sighes and teares returne againe’, for instance, initially presents a straighforward
implementation of Augustine’s processing system, as Donne’s speaker prays for
his passionate tears to be transformed into holy weeping:

Oh might those sighes and teares returne againe

Into my brest and eyes, which I haue spent
That I might in this holy discontent
Mourne with some fruite, as I haue mourn’d in vaine.
In my Idolatry what shoures of rayne
Mine eyes did wast? what greifs my hart did rent?
That sufferance was my sinne, nowe I repent;
Because I did suffer, I must suffer paine.34

Robbins’ exemplary notes draw the reader’s attention to Donne’s sermon on

Psalms 32.9 (quoted above), which in turn invokes Augustine’s Enarration 32:
‘purge and purifie thy love … Turne those teares which thou hast spent upon thy
love, or thy losses, upon thy sinnes, and the displeasure of thy God’.35 In preaching
to the St Paul’s audience, Donne asks for a sustained effort of the will, the kind of

32
Donne, Sermons, iv. 339.
33
Ibid.,, iv. 328.
34
Donne, ‘Oh might those sighes’, in Variorum, vol. 2, gen. edn Gary Stringer (Pt. I),
ll. 1–8 (I am quoting from the ‘Original Sequence’). See also Tina Skouen, ‘The Rhetoric
of Passion in Donne’s Holy Sonnets’, Rhetorica, 27 (2009): 159–88. Skouen focuses on
‘the problem of representing passion’ and on the pedagogic uses of depicting ‘the negative
effects of excessive emotion’ (p. 160). On the role of sacred affections in the devotional
poetry of Herbert and Crashaw, see Tilmouth, Passion’s Triumph, pp. 157–79.
35
Donne, Sermons, ix. 384; Robbins, Complete Poems , p. 525.
210 Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture / Ettenhuber

soul-labour that made David blush, sweat and weep. However, the speaker of his
holy sonnet spectacularly fails to effect such a moral turn-around. Donne’s poem
is pointed in its use of repetition: wasteful and repentant ‘eyes’ (ll. 2, 6); ‘[m]ourne
with … fruite’ and ‘mourn’d in vaine’ (l. 4); ‘greifs’ and ‘greife’ (ll. 6, 13). These
repetitions indicate a semiotic (or hermeneutic) crisis, which in its turn reveals the
speaker’s flawed devotional state. Tears are neutral or (in Donne’s vocabulary)
‘indifferent’ signifiers: despite their transparent texture, tears of ‘Idolatry’ are not
easily distinguished from those of genuine repentance. It is the inward disposition,
then, which requires rectification and reconditioning, in a ‘full submitting’ of
previous worldly desires to God’s will. Yet Donne’s poem does not admit this
emotional conversion as a realistic possibility. Far from making a deliberate and
positive resolution to submit himself to God’s ‘pleasure’, its speaker is locked in a
position of self-pity and passivity at the end of the poem:

to poore me is allow’d
Noe ease, for longe yet vehement greife hath byn
Th’effect and cause, the punishment and sinne.36

The focus is on the suffering self (‘poore me’), whose chief flaw has been the
‘sufferance’ – or weak-willed toleration – of the wrong kind of grief all along.
In the penultimate line, even the crucial distinction between constructive and
‘vaine’ mourning is collapsed into one amorphous concept of ‘longe’ grief, with a
seemingly inescapable cyclical dynamic.37
In the sermons, as we have seen, Augustine’s theory of volitional redirection is
endorsed in general terms: Donne exhorts his listeners to ‘[p]lace the affection upon
the right object God’ and affirms that ‘[t]he rule is, we must avoid inordinateness
of affections’.38 ‘[W]hen we come to examples of that rule’, however, Donne’s
preaching exhibits more complex forms of moral attention.39 The most arresting
of these examples is the autobiographical treatment of grief in the Confessions,
where Augustine recalls his mother’s death and burial, and vividly chronicles
the struggle to order his feelings. I would suggest that being confronted with
Augustine’s emotional self-denial led Donne to think more deeply about the
broader implications of Augustine’s system of self-regulation for the grieving
individual, about the autonomy and agency of human suffering, and about the
tension between accepted devotional precept and the subjective experience of
mourning.
At the end of book 9 of the Confessions, for two whole chapters, Augustine
labours to suppress grief, in language which dramatically illustrates the emotional

36
Donne, ‘Oh might those sighes’, ll. 12–14.
37
Skouen’s reading of ‘Oh might those sighes’ is more optimistic than mine: ‘he [the
speaker] clearly assumes that something good will come out of it [the pain of repentant
weeping] in the end’ (p. 177).
38
Donne, Sermons, vi. 113, iv. 329; see Skouen, pp. 170–171.
39
Ibid., iv. 329.
 ‘Tears of Passion’ and ‘Inordinate Lamentation’ 211

cost of such self-control. After he closed his mother’s eyes, Augustine tells us, ‘an
overwhelming grief welled into my heart and was about to flow forth in floods of
tears. But at the same time under a powerful act of mental control my eyes held
back the flood and dried it up’.40 The ‘powerful act of mental control’ is ‘violento
animi imperio’, an assertion of authority on the part of the rational soul over the
more primitive or visceral passions; and the ‘heart’ is ‘praecordia mea’ – the
threshold to Augustine’s inner being rather than the heart itself – as he imposes
lexical as well as emotional discipline to stem the tide of grief. Augustine goes
on to reproach himself for ‘the softness of my feelings’ and checks the tears of
his young son Adeodatus, who ‘cried out in sorrow and was pressed by all of us
to be silent’.41 At the end of the day, still ‘inwardly oppressed with sadness and
with a troubled mind’, he decides to ‘take a bath, because I had heard that baths,
for which the Greeks say balaneion, get their name from throwing anxiety out of
the mind’.42 When this physiological intervention provides no relief, Augustine
eventually allows himself to weep. By the end of chapter 12, however, he still
struggles to reconcile himself to this temporary breakdown of self-discipline; his
tone is defensive:

If he finds fault that I wept for my mother for a fraction of an hour, the mother
who had died before my eyes who had wept for me that I might live before your
[God’s] eyes, let him not mock me but rather, if a person of much charity, let him
weep himself before you for my sins […]43

Thereafter, Augustine tells us that his ‘heart is healed of that wound’, but his
narrative continues to exhibit signs of anxiety: more than half of chapter 13 is
devoted to prayers for his mother’s soul, despite Augustine’s assurances to God
that ‘I believe you have already done what I am asking of you’.44 Grief keeps
breaking the banks of self-control, accompanied by a rising sense of shame.
In his sermons, Donne addresses this passage from the Confessions in detail on
three occasions: in the ‘Jesus Wept’ sermon preached at Whitehall in Lent 1623,
in a St Paul’s sermon of May 1626, and again at St Paul’s on Easter Day 1630.
In the St Paul’s sermon of 1626, Donne’s analysis of Confessions 9.12 and 13
operates with a highly charged moral vocabulary, which initially seems to affirm
Augustine’s own distinction between higher and baser emotions:

[I]f a man should have found S. Augustine in his Meditations after his Mothers
death, and heard him say, Pro peccatis Matris meæ deprecor te, Lord I am a
suiter now for my Mothers sinnes … [and pressed Ambrose and Augustine] for

40
Augustine, Confessions, trans. by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1991), p. 174 (9.12.29).
41
Confessions, p. 174 (9.12.29).
42
Ibid., p. 175 (9.12.32).
43
Ibid., p. 176 (9.12.33).
44
Ibid., p. 177 (9.13.36).
212 Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture / Ettenhuber

a full reason of those prayers, … they could hardly give any farther account, but
that it was, if not an inordinate, yet an inconsiderate piety, and a Devotion, that
did rather transport them, then direct them.45

Donne invokes the work of the passions (rather than the affections) here; as he
asserts in a St Paul’s sermon of 1628 (on Acts 28.6), these ‘inferior servants of
the soule’ typically rob us of direction, agency, and purpose: ‘Men subject to the
transportation of passion, doe nothing of themselves, but are meerly passive’.46
In moments of passion, we are overwhelmed and swept on, rather than guided
by our moral compass. And in 1630, the language sounds remarkably similar:
‘S. Augustine for his mother Monica, … S. Ambrose for his Master Theodosius;
They prayed inconsiderately, … [and delivered] vehement, and indeed, exorbitant
declarations of piety mixt with passion’.47 ‘[E]xorbitant’ literally means ‘off track’,
as Augustine and Ambrose are once again derailed by vehement emotion. However,
just as Augustine and Ambrose’s actions exhibit signs of ‘piety mixt with passion’,
Donne’s analysis of the Confessions stops short of a morally one-dimensional
response. Once again, a closer look at his emotional lexicon is revealing.
Augustine’s reaction to his mother’s death is described as ‘inconsiderate’, but not
‘inordinate’, and for Donne that distinction is absolutely crucial. Elsewhere in
the sermons, when he deploys the language of moral deviation and degradation,
‘inordinate’ is the default descriptor of misguided love and affection. Donne notes,
as we have seen, that in contrast to fallen humanity, Christ had ‘no Originall sin
within, to drive him, no inordinate love without to draw him’.48 The ‘affections of
Christ were moved, but … in that holy vessell they would contract no foulenesse,
no declination towards inordinatenesse’.49
The term ‘inordinatenesse’ clearly addresses Augustine’s doctrine or ‘order’
of love, and is routinely associated with it in Donne’s sermons: its core meanings
– the absence of regulation and failure to achieve temperance – once again
crystallise the issue of moral and emotional self-governance. Christ cannot be
drawn or attracted by unworthy objects: his will is perfectly aligned with God’s,
displays no ‘declination’ towards excessive or indecorous affections, and points in
the right direction, upwards. Augustine, by contrast, finds himself on the opposite
trajectory, praying in desperate concern for his mother’s soul. In light of all this,
‘inordinate’ would seem like the obvious adjective of choice (especially given
Augustine’s dubious position on purgatory), but instead Donne resorts, on two
occasions, to ‘inconsiderate’ / ‘inconsiderately’. ‘Inconsiderate’ is, of course, a
similarly fraught term in Donne’s system of volitional ethics: it shows Augustine
acting ‘without deliberation’, bypassing the regulatory systems of the rational

45
Donne, Sermons, vii. 179.
46
Ibid., viii. 327.
47
Ibid., ix. 200.
48
Ibid., iv. 328.
49
Ibid., iv. 329.
 ‘Tears of Passion’ and ‘Inordinate Lamentation’ 213

will, with its hierarchies of desire. Donne’s discussion of Confessions 9.13 in his
Lent sermon of 1623 explains why this might have been the case: ‘S. Augustine
sayes, that he knew well enough, that his mother was in heaven’, but because he
‘saw not in what state’ she was, Augustine thought that ‘something might be asked
at Gods hands’ on her behalf; ‘and so out of a humane and pious officiousnesse, in
a devotion perchance indigested, uncocted, and retaining yet some crudities, some
irresolutions’ he ‘strayed into prayers’ for her after her death.50 Donne attempts to
negotiate two different modes of devotional cognition here: Augustine, whilst busy
praying, claims to have unconditional faith in God’s providential plan, but Donne –
in an explicit admission of doubt completely absent from Augustine’s own account
– insists that Monica’s son is sabotaged by the senses, a competing desire for some
kind of visible, palpable, assurance. Donne shores up this argument further by
describing grief as a state of physiological impurity, ‘indigested, uncocted, and
retaining yet some crudities’: a residual anxiety that is associated, emphatically,
with material and somatic experience. Donne’s version of Confessions 9.12–13
places Augustine in extremis, at a point of acute crisis, and highlights the difficulty
of sublimating and converting intense emotion by foregrounding elements of
internal conflict that are left implicit in Augustine’s narrative. Elsewhere in the
sermons, the physiological equivalent of rightly ordered love is found not in
‘uncocted passion’, but in Donne’s use of the concept of ‘radicall moisture’ (or
vital spirit), the rarified liquid always already escaping from its material state.
Augustine’s tears for his mother are not yet the good tears invoked in the ‘Jesus
Wept’ sermon: ‘our best blood, so agitated, so ventilated, so purified, so rarified
into spirits, as that thereby I become Idem spiritus, one Spirit with God’.51
There are moments in Donne’s writing, however, where the value of ‘rarefied’
emotion is subjected to more critical scrutiny. Drawing on Ambrose’s funeral
speech for the Emperor Valentinian in the St Paul’s sermon of 1626, for instance,
Donne notes that ‘Est in piis affectibus quædam flendi voluptas, In tender hearts,
and in good natures, there is a kinde of satisfaction, and more then that, a holy
voluptuousnesse in weeping, in lamenting, in deploring the losse of a friend
[…]’52 There, the sensual intensity of passionate lamentation offers a physiological
counterbalance to the epistemic and moral uncertainty represented by death. Unlike
Augustine, who tries to stifle rebellious passions by taking baths, Donne tries to
anchor feelings of loss and absence in a more solidly physical response. Tears lend
gravity and substance, keep grief – and its object – from being ‘purified’ into divine
love immediately. By indulging Ambrose’s ‘holy voluptuousnesse’, Donne’s also
sermon qualifies Augustine’s demand for direct emotional transposition from the
beloved human being to a loving God. Another way of putting this is that Donne

50
Ibid., iv. 332.
51
Sermons, iv. 339.
52
Sermons, vii. 179; Ambrose, De Obitu Valentiniani Consolatio, PL xvi. 1372A: ‘est
enim piis affectibus quaedam etiam flendi voluptas, et plerumque gravis lacrymis evaporat
dolor’.
214 Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture / Ettenhuber

seems more willing to acknowledge the feeling of grief as a process which allows
for a gradual untethering of connections between individuals; individuals who
inhabit their own sphere of volitional engagement and attachment, and do not
always maintain the unconditional focus on God that Augustine asks for. To revisit
an earlier passage from the sermons, the water of the ‘stables, and sewers’ does
not inevitably produce flowers of devotional growth; and the ‘voluptousnesse’
of human tears possesses its own kind of fertility. In the Confessions, Monica
remains a ‘handmaid’ to Augustine’s salvation; he tells us that he weeps for her
primarily because she wept for him, ‘that I might live before your [God’s] eyes’.53
Donne’s holy sonnet ‘Since She whome I lovd’ questions the relegation of human
relationships to such an instrumental position, engaging deeply with Augustine’s
idea of the order of love and rendering it openly problematic:

Since She whome I lovd, hath payd her last debt

To Nature, and to hers, and my good is dead
And her Soule early into heauen rauished,
Wholy in heauenly things my Mind is sett.
Here the admyring her my Mind did whett
To seeke thee God; so streames do shew the head54

Donne’s poem initially seems to endorse the hierarchy of affections prescribed by

Augustine’s Christian psychology. The departed ‘She’ serves as the conduit to a
higher kind of good and beauty: ‘so streames do shew the head’ (l. 6). Unlike ‘Oh
might those sighes’, however, there is no suggestion of ‘Idolatry’ or misdirected
love. In this sense, ‘Since She whome I lovd’ steers clear of ‘a false Method in
this art of love’, a ‘love that is divided between Christ and the world’, as Donne
counsels with reference to Confessions 10.29 in a sermon of December 1619.55
‘The true [method] is, radically to love God for himselfe, and other things for
his sake, so far, as he may receive glory in our having, and using them.’56 This is
an Augustinian commonplace in Donne’s preaching; in a sermon on Psalms 32.6
he argues that ‘to seeke God with the whole heart, is to seeke nothing with that
Primary, and Radicall, and Fundamentall affection, as God; To seek nothing for it
selfe, but God’.57 The ‘art of love’ does not admit of lexical or moral compromise:
it asks for total commitment – the ‘entire heart’ – and compels attention to man’s
point of origin in demanding that ‘Primary’, ‘Radicall’, ‘Fundamentall’ affection
be reserved for the source of all being.
Donne’s speaker, however, despite his declaration that ‘Wholy in heauenly
things my Mind is sett’, subverts the unidirectional flow of affection and radical
focus on God: ‘But though I haue found thee,’and thou my thirst hast fed, / A

53
Augustine, Confessions, p. 176 (9.12.33).
54
Donne, ‘Since She whome I lovd’, in Variorum, vol. 2 (Pt. I), ll. 1–6.
55
Donne, Sermons, ii. 283.
56
Sermons, ii. 283.
57
Donne, Sermons, ix. 328.
 ‘Tears of Passion’ and ‘Inordinate Lamentation’ 215

holy thirsty dropsy melts mee yett’ (ll. 7–8). Such language certainly breaks the
bounds of emotional governance: ‘dropsy’ is an immoderate, uncontrollable thirst,
caused by the accumulation of watery fluids in the tissues. Scriptural resonances
further destabilise the speaker’s moral resolve. Chapter 4 of John’s Gospel
recounts Christ’s meeting with the woman of Samaria at Jacob’s well. The gospel
account distinguishes between ‘worldly’ and ‘holy’ waters at verse 13–14: ‘Iesus
answered, and said vnto her, Whosoeuer drinketh of this water shall thirst againe:
/ But whosoeuer drinketh of the water that I shal giue him shall neuer thirst’
(Authorized Version).58 The speaker of Donne’s holy sonnet, by contrast, has been
‘fed’, but his thirst remains unsatisfied:

But why should I begg more Love, when as thou

Dost woe my Soule, for hers offring all thine:
And dost not only feare least I allow
My Love to Saints and Angels, things diuine,
But in thy tender iealosy dost doubt
Least the World, fleshe, yea Deuill putt thee out.59

Attention is divided between God on the one hand, and ‘the World, fleshe, …
Deuill’ on the other. There is no question now of complete devotion to ‘heauenly
things’. Robert Innes has argued that for Augustine, desire of God ‘is the basic
drive which draws the self on to maturity and integration’, at once a ‘reaching
out to what lies transcendentally beyond ourselves and … [a realisation of] the
fundamental immanent principle of our own being’.60 At Confessions 11.29–30,
Augustine contrasts this movement or extension towards God with the distraction
of worldly desires: ‘[t]he storms of incoherent events tear to pieces my thoughts,
the inmost entrails of my soul, until that day when, purified and molten by the
fire of your love, I flow together to merge into you. Then shall I find stability
and solidity in you […]’61 Donne’s speaker, by contrast, ‘melts’ – dissolves,
disintegrates – under the pressure of uncontrollable craving, and projects fear
and jealousy on to a God who has ‘rauished’ his ‘good’(ll. 2–3).62 In the second
elegy for Cecilia Bulstrode, the priorities seemed clear: ‘God took her hence [to
heaven] lest some of us should love / Her … him and his laws above’.63 And at the
funeral for William Cokayne in December 1626, Donne similarly counsels against

58
Robbins, Complete Poems, p. 574.
59
Donne, ‘Since She whome I lovd’, ll. 9–14.
60
Robert Innes, ‘Integrating the Self through Desire of God’, Augustinian Studies, 28
(1997), 67–109 (pp. 71, 98).
61
Augustine, Confessions, p. 244 (11.29.39-11.30.40).
62
Tilmouth notes the link between ideas of moral incontinence and images of
liquefaction in The Faerie Queene (Passion’s Triumph, p. 56).
63
Donne, ‘Elegie vpon the death of Mrs. Boulstred’ (‘Language thou art too narrowe’),
ll. 39–40.
216 Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture / Ettenhuber

‘inordinate lamentation’ for a ‘dead friend’: ‘if I doe beleeve him to be in heaven,
deliberately, advisedly to wish him here … is an uncharitable desire’.64
Unlike these texts, however, ‘Since She whome I lovd’ fails to attain the perfectly
ordered state of dependence on God; it exchanges the promise of spiritual peace
and freedom from sin for the autonomy of continued, and passionate, desire of
human and worldly love. The poem presents love as a ‘Possessory Affection’ in the
absolute sense, and pursues the idea of individual choice and control to its utmost
consequences.65 Donne situates God at the extreme opposite end of Augustine’s
scale of desire: not as the deserving and unquestioned object of ‘Primary’ and
‘Fundamentall’ affection, but as the desiring suitor in danger of being eclipsed by
the devil. From an ontological perspective, this position has obvious limitations,
as Donne knows his readers will realise: God cannot really be ‘putt … out’ by
the devil, except in the speaker’s desperate fiction of emotional dominance. The
poem is best understood perhaps not as a comprehensive recalibration or radical
rethinking of Augustine’s psychology of the passions, but as a comment on the
literary treatment of grief – and therefore also on the relationship between moral
precept and subjective experience. G. W. Pigman has defined the elegy as ‘an
abbreviated process of mourning’: this is an accurate description of Donne’s
tributes to Bridget Markham and Cecilia Bulstrode, where complexly unfolding
feelings are successfully compacted to accommodate Augustine’s protocol of
grief.66 ‘Since She whome I lovd’, by contrast, responds to the pressures of loss
by imagining an inversion of desire, and a reversal of power relations between
God and the speaker. Donne’s poem employs a physiopathological conceit – the
unquenchable thirst caused by swollen organ tissue – to enact the speaker’s crisis
of devotional identity. This is the opposite of the pliant sponge that weeps under the
pressure of shame and guilt: the grieving body of Donne’s sonnet bloats and swells
insistently, with a clear implication of eventual decline and morbidity. Instead of
purgation and purification, we find only stubborn retention; at the same time,
however, this absence of physiological resolution and relief signals a passionate
refusal to relinquish the ties of physical, human love. In the ‘little roome’ of this
holy sonnet, at least, intense yearning for the ‘She’ is figured not simply as a
failure of the will, but as the material bond which keeps alive a connection with
the departed – not quite as a poetic alternative to the liminal space of purgatory,
but as a reminder of the sacrifice involved in the work of Augustinian mourning,
in emotional conversion and sublimation. Donne adopts this strategy ‘deliberately’
(if not necessarily ‘advisedly’), in a wilful affirmation of ‘worldly’ love, but in full
acknowledgement of its spiritual cost.

64
Donne, Sermons, vii. 269. Skouen (pp. 179–80) argues that ‘Since She whome I
lovd’ represents an example of a passionate response ‘not worthy of imitation, by giving
vent to uncontrolled emotion’.
65
Donne, Sermons, i. 184.
66
Pigman, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy, p. 45.