Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

Variable, and therefore miserable condition of Man; this minute I was well, and am ill, this minute. (John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), Meditation 1)

In late November 1623 the poet John Donne took to his bed in the Deanery at St Paul’s. He had been struck down by the epidemic fever that was raging through London. As he lay alone, noting the symptoms that grew worse by the hour, and knowing he was likely to die, Donne let his mind range, over everything and anything that struck his fancy, or his fear:

As sickness is the greatest misery, [he noted], so the greatest misery of sickness is solitude;... A long sickness will weary friends at last, but a pestilential sickness averts them from the beginning. ... this makes an infectious bed equal, nay, worse than a grave[.] (Mediation 5)

And as he lay awake a few nights later,

He that hath seen his friend die today, or knows he shall see it tomorrow, yet will sink into a sleep between. I cannot, and oh, if I be entering now into Eternity, where there shall be no more distinction of hours, why is it all my business now to tell Clocks? (Meditation 15)

Donne’s sleepless nights eventually ended, and the hours continued, and that illness was not his entry into eternity. As he recovered he collected all those fabulously roving thoughts into the Devotions upon emergent occasions (1624), entered into the Stationer’s Register only a month later. At the beginning of term I chose the Devotions as the basis of the Readings and Music for Lent that was meant to take place in the chapel this evening; there is a kind of delicious irony in the fact that that service has fallen victim to this wretched virus that has changed us all. Donne’s magpie thoughts from his sickbed seem to speak to us from across four hundred years, to give voice to our fears and frustrations, our terrible hopes and the grinding realities that remind us, over and over, that we are but dust, destined for the grave:

Let [Man] be a world, and himself will be the land, and misery the sea. His misery ...as the sea, swells above all the hills, and reaches to the remotest parts of this earth, man; who of himself is but dust, and coagulated and kneaded into earth by tears; his matter is earth, his form misery. (Meditation 8)

That body which scarce three minutes since was such a house, as that that soule, which made but one step from thence to Heaven, was scarce thoroughly content, to leave that for Heaven: that body hath lost the name of a dwelling house, because none dwells in it, and is making haste to lose the name of a body, and dissolve to putrefaction. ...Now all the parts built up, and knit by a lovely soul, now but a statue of clay, and now these limbs melted off, as if that clay were but snow; and now the whole house is but a handful of sand, so much dust, and but a peck of rubbish, so much bone. (Meditation 18)

The Devotions return over and over to this truth of sickness, a truth that we squirrel away and cover up, and do everything to avoid seeing: that even living ‘[we are] borne dead, and from the first laying of these mud-walls in [our] conception, they have moldred away, and the whole course of life is but an active death.’ ‘I am a dead man now...I have been a dead man all this while’ (Meditation 19), Donne concludes, in terms that make us recoil. Surely such a morbid preoccupation with death cannot be...healthy?

Donne, of course, lived at a time when illnesses that are now easily cured killed many, when epidemics chased one another through the city and the plague bills broadcast the numbers of dead by parish as efficiently and terrifyingly as twitter. We have been waking up, over the past few days, to a glimpse of what that must have been like, of what it will be like, waking up to helplessness in the face of a poison we cannot see but can share, to the loneliness of quarantine, to the fear of contagion. And Donne, I think, has a hard lesson for us, if we are brave enough to learn it: that now is the time to remember that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. For Donne, the growing consciousness of the fever coursing through his veins reminded him of all of the other ways in which he was frail and faulty, reminded him, in short, that he was a sinner. The most famous sequence in the Devotions records how he was reminded, over and over again, of his mortality, as the bells tolled to mark the dying, death and burial of an unknown neighbour, ‘[an usher] to me in this school of death’. The centrepiece of this sequence is the ‘No man is an island’ passage which is often misprinted as a poem:

No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main. If a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a Promontory were, as well as if a Manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; Any Man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. (Meditation 17)

Taken in isolation, this is a hymn of solidarity, of rousing shared humanity. But for Donne it was a reminder that ‘afflicition is a treasure, and scarce any Man hath enough of it’ (Meditation 17). Affliction—suffering, sickness, intimations of mortality—was a reminder that we are but dust, and therefore a reminder of our utter dependence upon one another, and upon God. It was a reminder of the need for amendment of life, for the humility of repentance, for the sloughing off of the hubris that imagines we are invincible.

Like Donne lying in his sickbed, with nothing to do but think; nothing to hear but the bells calling death, death, death; nothing to remember but his own dying, we too have a chance to pause now, and reassess, a Lent thrust upon us that may last forty weeks rather than forty days and forty nights. What has got us here, we might ask ourselves, when a virus can travel around the globe in hours and days, on the fumes of the planes that are destroying our planet? What do we owe to one another, as the world changes inexorably around us, and many face uncertainty and loss, and the bells begin to toll? What might we be together, when we rise up from the bed this virus has made for us, and wake up to a brave new world?

In his final meditation, Donne considers the physicians’ warnings that he might relapse, might rise from his bed to return to it, and descend again into the abyss. It is a warning that rings with a terrifying truth for anyone who has experienced illness; you can never really shake the fear that you will never really be well again, that health is the outlier, and illness the steady state. But as a reflection on our failings it should also strike home: will we learn anything from this calamity, or will we take up again with terrifying speed the conviction that we are invincible? Could this affliction be our treasure?

Donne closes each of his devotions with a prayer, and one will suffice for us this morning:

O eternal and most gracious God, ...having married this soul and this body in me, I humbly beseech thee, that this soule may look, and make her use of thy merciful proceedings towards my bodily restitution, and go the same way to a spiritual...I have, O Lord, a River in my body, but a Sea in my soule, and a Sea swoln into the depth of a Deluge, above the Sea. Thou hast raised up certaine hills in me heretofore, by which I might have stood safe, from these inundations of sin. Education, study, observation, example...but this Deluge, this inundation, is got above all my Hills; and I have sinned and sinned, and multiplied sinne to sinne, after all these thy assistances against sin, and where is there water enough to wash away this Deluge? There is a red Sea, greater than this Ocean; and there is a little spring, through which this Ocean, may powre it selfe into that red Sea. Let thy Spirit of true contrition, and sorrow passe all my sins through these eyes, into the wounds of thy Son, and I shall be clean, and my soule so much better purged than my body, as it is ordained for a better, and a longer life. (Prayer 20)

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The full text of the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624) can be found online at:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23772/23772-h/23772-h.htm