Ramie Targoff, John Donne: Body and SoulJohn Donne: Body and Soul. Ramie Targoff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. xiv+213.

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Previous articleNext article FreeRamie Targoff, John Donne: Body and Soul John Donne: Body and Soul. Ramie Targoff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. xiv+213.Harold SkulskyHarold SkulskyHofstra University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreRamie Targoff means to show that “Donne’s fascination with parting runs throughout his poetry and prose” (1), but that the parting that fascinates him most is the dissolving of the union between body and soul, a prospect that Donne contemplates with the same “structure of feeling” as he does the parting between two people (2). In fact, “the most continuous and abiding feature” of Donne’s work is his pursuit of “metaphysical questions” about the body-soul relation (5). Though Targoff acknowledges Herbert Grierson’s “case for Donne’s metaphysical seriousness” (3), she thinks that her predecessors have largely missed the centrality of body-soul questions in Donne’s work and have done so because of a critical bias against the possibility that Donne could take metaphysical or philosophical questions seriously. (Something tells me that this mass professional oversight will come as news to many if not most of the critic’s predecessors, but I will leave this issue to them.)Targoff defends her thesis by closely considering six of Donne’s major works in as many chapters. According to chapter 1, the “theory of letter writing” to be found in Donne’s letters is as “underappreciated” as it is “striking” (27). Letters, for Donne, have an “unusual capacity” to “share souls between friends without the constraints or demands of physical intimacy” (31), with the result that the letter writer’s soul is “twice embodied,” first in his body and then in the letter whose “matter” (or message) he comes to “animate” (39). According to chapter 2, “skepticism and idealism about the possibilities for loving another person in body and soul” pervade the Songs and Sonnets (52), in many of which the departing lover is hard put to “remain present to his beloved without actually surrendering crucial parts of himself ” (65). According to chapter 3, Donne defies English Protestant tradition in The Second Anniversarie by candidly representing the soul as unable to reconcile itself to leaving the body behind—“an achievement unparalleled in English poetry” (103). According to chapter 4, the speaker’s concern in the Holy Sonnets for the fate of his soul is mingled with concern for the fate of his body (106), though the former concern is central and inspires Donne’s recurring attempts to “control” God’s judgment (107). According to chapter 5, the exactingly sensitive response to threatening illness in the Devotions manages to give the body’s sufferings their due, once again in defiance of English Protestant tradition (140, 153). According to chapter 6, the sermon Deaths Duell shows Donne finally transcending the fear of death by welcoming death itself; the “we” of his last sentence, in which he leaves his congregation to the contemplation of the crucified Christ, has the effect of coupling the preacher’s triumph over death with the triumph of his Savior (180).Readers acquainted with sixteenth-century controversies over the Aristotelian “separable intellect” (De anima 3.5),1 or with the copious seventeenth-century literature on the body-mind problem (e.g., Descartes’s classic exchanges with his critics), will be surprised to learn that Targoff’s observations (see above) supply the slightest evidence of Donne’s serious philosophical engagement with the body-mind problem in its early modern form, or in any form. Philosophy is not about claims or beliefs but about the arguments that justify them. Readers will look in vain in these chapters for a single argument from Donne on the alleged focus of his philosophical seriousness.It does not inspire confidence in Targoff’s thesis that her remarks about the relevant intellectual background of this seriousness are so often less than helpful. Thus, it is misleading to claim that the Aristotelian teaching about the vegetable, animal, and rational parts of the soul compromises the soul’s unity (11), since in the prevailing (Scholastic) interpretation these so-called parts are simply functions of a single soul.2Likewise, it is misleading for Targoff to report that, for the Latin Fathers, “original sin” is original not by virtue of being hereditary but by virtue of being chosen by each soul “from the start,” and hence at each soul’s “origin” (13); in The City of God, no less a Latin father than Augustine defines original sin as a “transmission” or legacy, from Adam to his posterity, of the natural inclination to sin and hence death. The arch-Augustinian Calvin accordingly defines original sin as “the hereditary depravity of our nature.”3Again, if English Protestantism is hostile to “the idea that the soul resisted its departure from the flesh” (79–80, 149), how are we to account for the English Church’s acknowledgment (in the Exhortation against the Feare of Death “appointed to be read in Churches”) that “the flesh abhorreth naturally his owne sorrowful dissolution”? How are we to account for the common doctrine, affirmed by Calvin among countless Reform and Roman theologians, that the disembodied soul is not a person, and that consequently “it is not surprising if the natural sense in us recoils in horror at hearing of our dissolution”?4Again, it is misleading of Targoff to accuse Donne’s speaker in Holy Sonnet 5 of the “heretical suggestion” (115) that the soul dies with the body at the moment of death when it is a theological commonplace (based on Rev. 2:11) that the spiritual (or “second”) death is damnation. What the speaker says here is merely that both his soul and body must die, not that they must die the same kind of death; the gloss on the soul’s death follows, when the speaker goes on to explain that, like the great world, his “little world” of body and soul “must be burnt” (i.e., damned), just as vicious passions “have burnt it heretofore.”5Again, pace Targoff (134), there is no fatal contradiction in English Protestantism between its endorsement of Predestination (Article 17) and its homiletic reminder that “sickness provides an opportunity to show one’s mettle.”6 Given Predestination, the “mettle” is a nature redeemed by grace, and the “opportunity” is available only to the Elect.Again, pace Targoff (169), the Book of Common Prayer need not fall into contradiction by promising that our body will be “changed” at Resurrection, and at the same time identifying the body after the “change” with the body before; to be changed, however gloriously, is not to be replaced. Targoff, once again, would profit from rereading Calvin’s authoritative and standard argument to this effect.7In addition to her project of exploring her main thesis and its background, Targoff also offers a great many close readings of individual passages, designed to illuminate Donne’s literary response to his ultimate concern. Her approach to this task is innocent of attempts to flatter one or another fashionable pretense to sophistication expressed by reading Donne “against the grain.” This is all to the good. Unfortunately, few of the resulting interpretations are free of such questionable moves as neglect of context, arbitrary forcing of the text, and disregard of various rhetorical and fictive strategies. The latter include dramatic irony and one other that I will reserve for last, because it may just possibly have something important to tell us about the main question Targoff raises about Donne: whether and how he exhibits philosophical seriousness.Donne‘s last will and testament begins by consecrating his soul and body to God and thanking God “for that assurance which his blessed Spiritt ympryntes in me now of the Salvation of the one & the Resurrection of the other.” According to Targoff, Donne in these words is “imagining salvation and resurrection as concurrent events, ‘ymprynte[d] in me now’” (5). But a glance at the grammatical antecedent of “which” shows that these events or their images are not what God’s spirit is imprinting in Donne, but rather a state of grace: Donne’s double “assurance” (or fiduciary faith) that his soul will be saved and his body resurrected. Again, Donne writes in the Devotions that “it is hard to charge the soule with the guiltiness of Originall sinne, if the soule were infused into a body in which it must necessarily grow foule and contract originall sinne whether it will or no.” According to Targoff, Donne is struggling here with the idea that a soul created pure by God “could be susceptible to bodily infection” (97). But this is to overlook or dismiss the key word “guiltiness.” What Donne is implicitly rejecting—not “struggling with”—is the idea that God could justly condemn the soul for an infection that God forced the soul to incur. In a letter to Henry Goodyer that Targoff quotes much earlier in her book, Donne puts the same objection to the infusion theory as follows: “The soul is forced to take this infection, and comes not into the body of her own disposition” (12). What Donne is objecting to in this sentence, according to Targoff, is the heretical implication that “God contaminates each soul with original sin before placing it in the body” (13). But to achieve this result, we have to override the tight contrastive relation between the key word “disposition” and the notion of being “forced”: the soul comes into the body not of her own accord (“disposition”) but because she is forced to; by being forced to come into the body, she is forced to be infected by it—a contamination that comes after, and not before, being placed in the body.One further questionable reading by Targoff (110–13) deserves attention here. According to the speaker’s plea at the beginning of Holy Sonnet 1, it would be unseemly for God to make something and then let it fall into disrepair: “Thou hast made me, And shall thy worke decay? / Repaire me now” (lines 1–2). But Targoff sees another possibility: the speaker could be using “decay” transitively, to mean “cause to decay,” as “decay” sometimes does (a reference to the OED would have been helpful here); the result: “Thou hast made me, and [thou] shall [cause] thy worke [to] decay.” Never mind that this reading erases the rhetorical question, the argument, and any trace of the speaker’s reason for demanding repair as if he had a right to it. And never mind that “shall” is the wrong form of the verb, and the wrong meaning too, since it generally expresses a command, and would have the speaker asking God to inflict the very same damage that he immediately asks God to undo. And never mind that the reading drains the lines of their dramatic irony: that the “decay” the speaker thinks of as grounding his right to be repaired is actually (since “decay” in this context is sin) the ground of God’s right to abandon him.These lapses are not trivial; they keep Targoff from taking the measure of Donne’s real concerns in his discussions of the infusion theory and in the Holy Sonnets, respectively: acquitting God of injustice and capturing a guilty mind in the act of grasping at straws. The pervasive dramatic irony of the Holy Sonnets, in particular, invariably escapes this critic, largely for lack of recognizing the fact that the theologically accomplished Donne could hardly be unaware of the howlers he assigns his surrogate in these poems, not the least of which is the assumption that God’s judgment can somehow be “controlled” (107). Thus, in Holy Sonnet 7, the speaker urges Christ to “Teach mee how to repent, for that’s as good / As if thou’hadst seal’d my pardon with thy blood” (lines 13–14). Targoff reads the contrafactual “as if” clause as Donne’s admission that “he has been excluded from the general dispensation of Christian souls” (120); but then we have a Donne theologically uninformed enough not to notice that this exclusion totally rules out the divine instruction he has just been praying for. In the process, we have lost a vividly stark dramatic representation of religious panic in a Christian Protestant Everyman. Again, the speaker of Holy Sonnet 13, meditating on his mental image of Christ crucified, ends by trying to comfort his soul with his speech to the mistresses of his days of “Idolatrie”: “This beauteous forme assures a piteous mind” (line 14). Unlike the idolatrous lover, by implication, the fearful sinner has reason to be “assured.” According to Targoff, Donne is slyly addressing the speech to Christ and thereby implying that Christ “can be persuaded or seduced into merciful behavior because such behavior will render him beautiful” (127). Christ’s cosmetic motive for mercy is a pathetic straw that a dramatic surrogate in extremis might grasp at; as Donne’s notion of a live possibility, once again, it stretches credibility to the breaking point.Early in her study (12), Targoff shows Donne discussing the origin of the individual human soul in a letter to Henry Goodyer and considering two mutually exhaustive and opposite theories: (a) that the soul is born with the body and derives from the individual’s parents by propagation, and (b) that each soul is specially created and then “infused” into the body. In the course of the letter, Donne demonstrates that both a and b have unacceptable implications, and the discussion ends in suspense.In “The Extasie,” Donne raises the question of whether lovers’ souls can unite directly, without the intermediation of bodies. He offers two conflicting arguments back to back. In one (lines 29–48), the answer is yes; the means of union is “not sex” but ecstasy—when souls “go out” of bodies to “advance their state” (lines 15–16).8 The result of ecstasy is souls that are “interinanimated” by love, forming a composite soul that “no change can invade” (lines 42, 48). In the other argument (lines 49–68), the answer is no—ecstasy, and hence direct soul union, are not possible; the union of substances always requires physical intermediation. For example, for a soul to unite with its body, the required medium consists of rarefied material spirits, which are as soul-like as the blood can manage to make them. In the same way, for a soul to unite with a soul, it must “to body first repair” (line 60); the required medium in the case of soul union consists of sensory “affections” and “faculties” (line 66). Without sensory and (in the current context) sexual contact, a “great Prince”—the composite soul—“in prison lies” (line 68).In discussing the Goodyer letter and “The Extasie,” Targoff presents the evidence for antinomy without noticing it and thereby overlooks evidence (otherwise missing from her book) of precisely how, if at all, Donne seriously engages with philosophy. There is a notorious ancient school of philosophy, revived in Donne’s period by Montaigne, Charron, Sanchez, and others, that rejects the possibility of resolving any philosophical dispute. Its most notorious dialectical technique is to address any philosophical question by presenting arguments on both sides of any question, arguments that turn out to have equal persuasive force (isostheneia) and hence to cancel each other out. In Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), the Archangel Raphael anticipates the school of philosophy by pioneering its recipe for generating suspension of judgment (epoché ). Raphael’s purpose is to baffle the intellectual arrogance of Adam, who imagines that he can reason his way into the hidden architecture of the universe (Paradise Lost 8.90–113, 8.122–58). The school of philosophy that patented the recipe is, of course, Pyrrhonian skepticism. The point is not that Donne was a disciple of Montaigne—though, as Targoff is aware (79), Donne is very likely to have known the Essays. The point is that a deft master of isostheneia and epoché is unlikely to have had much use for the kind of philosophical seriousness—an investment in the constructive power of theorizing—that Targoff apparently thinks she has found in his body of work. Notes 1.See Harold Skulsky, “Paduan Epistemology and the Doctrine of the One Mind,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 6 (1968): 341–61.2.The locus classicus of the Scholastic reading is Aquinas, Summa theologica, ed. Bernardo Maria de Rubeis and Charles René Billuart (Turin: Marietti, 1922), 1.76.3. This reading is straightforwardly implied by Aristotle’s text at the relevant places; see De anima, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), 414a29–32, 414b28–32.3.Augustine, De civitate Dei, ed. J. E. C. Welldon (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1924), 14.1, my translation. See also John Calvin, Institutio Christianae religionis, ed. August Tholuck (Berlin: Eichler, 1834), 2.1.8.4.Exhortation against the Feare of Death, in Certain Sermons or Homilies (London: Bill, 1623), 59. See also Calvin, Institutio Christianae religionis 1.15.2, 2.14.1, 3.9.5; cf. Aquinas, Summa theologica 1–2.5.3, 1.29.1 ad 5.5.John Donne, Holy Sonnet 5, lines 1, 10–11, in The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, vol. 7, pt. 1, The Holy Sonnets, ed. Gary A. Stringer, Dennis Flynn, and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); the sonnets in this volume will be hereafter cited parenthetically by line number. Compare Aquinas on Rom. 6:16: the slaves of sin are “in mortem, id est aeternam damnationem praecipitandi” (to be hurled into death, that is, into eternal damnation) (Super epistolam Beati Pauli ad Romanos lectura, caput 6, lectio 3, in Sancti Thomae Aquinatis super epistolas Sancti Pauli lectura, vol. 1, ed. Raffaele Cai [Turin: Marietti, 1953], my translation).6.The Book of Common Prayer (Oxford University Press, 1922), 639–40.7.Calvin, Institutio Christianae religionis 3.25.7: “Si nova corpora formaret Deus, ubi haec qualitatis mutatio?” Compare “Although we have our soules separated from our bodies for a season, yet at the generall Resurrection we shall be more fresh, beautifull, and perfect then we be now” (Exhortation against the Feare of Death, 60). It goes almost without saying that to be separated from one’s body only “for a season” is to be gloriously reunited with that very body eventually, not gloriously compensated for its loss.8.John Donne, “The Extasie,” in The Poems of John Donne, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, 2 vols. (1912; repr., Oxford University Press, 1963), 1:53. 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