Secularization, Countersecularization, and the Fate of the Flesh in Donne

Abstract

The chapter begins by examining the thought of Edward Herbert. In his de Veritate Herbert articulates a reasonable, rationalized version of Christianity that is founded on dualist assumptions and that is compatible with science and rational inquiry. Donne oscillates between between Herbert’s secularization project and a counter-secularization built on embracing the “rump” elements of Christianity, including monist-materialism. In his sermons and other religious writings Donne foregrounds the body as a material life that is alien to any conventionally socialized sense of agency or identity. This use of the body also energizes Donne’s formally experimental erotic verse. Donne’s erotic poems suggest an understanding of sexuality in which interruption, deferral, and blockage are valued as a way of intensifying and increasing the experience of being a body with a life of its own separate from the conscious and reasoning life of a supposed soul. The formal experimentalism generated by Donne’s commitment to resurrection is precisely what T.S.Eliot later recognizes as modernism avant la lettre so that this chapter argues that Donne’s writings should be termed not “metaphysical” but “avant-garde.”