The Metaphysics of Labor in John Donne's Sermon to the Virginia Company

Abstract

The Metaphysics of Labor in John Donne's Sermon to the Virginia Company Thomas Festa The record of John Donne's employment is not usually the first consideration of readers of his poetry. Still, in the background of the most influential twentieth-century criticism of the poet, the rakish wit of the Satyres, Elegies, and Songs and Sonets, now rightly placed in the historical context of his coterie, malingers about the edges of the Inns of Court, the Egerton and Drury households, Parliament—even the Virginia Company—eventually seeking preferment as a royal polemicist, a charismatic preacher, and then, finally, as the dean of St. Paul's. At the same time, it has become something of a critical commonplace to discuss Donne's "apostasy" in relation to his quest for patronage in the Jacobean court—a trend that makes especially clear the inextricable link between his religious conversion and his sense of worldly work1. Yet for critics who do not concede to the secularizing depreciation of his faith, Donne offers in his sermons a long and complex record of literary thought and performance that belies any simple biographical or Whiggish reading. Revaluations of the sermon as a central genre during [End Page 76] the reign of King James I have opened up this relatively neglected body of literature and discovered a virtual anatomy of early modern political life2. Donne's rhetorical mastery allows his various ambitions, whether professional or spiritual, to appear with great subtlety and effect in his sermons as in his poems. Moreover, the genre brings out his attitudes toward labor, with critical implications for understanding his politics3. One of the most revealing places in Donne's writings to appraise these attitudes is his sermon to the Virginia Company, preached on 13 November 1622, which throws Donne's theoretical abstractions about the redemptive value of work into stark contrast with the realities of the labor required to run the joint-stock operation—the Company's investors', the plantation's settlers', and the Native Americans', in addition to his own. In the context of New World speculation, the contradictions between Donne's humane admonition to charity toward the Indians and his legal justification for colonization cause him to formulate increasingly complex metaphorical relationships among trade, travel, and religious conversion. Donne's ongoing investment in these metaphoric "conversions" returns its richest and most complex figural dividend in the Virginia Company sermon, where the argument for redeeming the failed colonial venture centers on labor as a metaphysical conceit. When he publishes the sermon, Donne gives material form to the exchange of the homily for his honorarium of forty shillings, as he tells the members of the Virginia Company in the dedication: "after it was preach'd, it was not mine, but yours."4 As he put it in a letter to Sir [End Page 77] Thomas Roe, "I preached, by invitation of the Virginian Company, to an honorable auditory, and they recompenced me with a new commandment, in their Service, to printe that."5 The dedication calls attention to the sermon's underlying analogies between spiritual travail, publication, and mercantile travel: "now I am an Adventurer; if not to Virginia, yet for Virginia; for, every man, that Prints, Adventures" (Sermons, 4:264). According to early modern usage, an "adventurer" is not merely a traveler but also "one who undertakes, or shares in, commercial adventures or enterprises; a speculator." Like those who lay down the capital to fund the plantation, Donne risks vulnerability in consenting to print. To allow the sermon to be published is to make an investment of self that reads as self-effacement on behalf of the corporate entity and marks his labor "in their Service." Even as it openly advertises the patronage of the Company, which of course occasioned the writing, the rhetorical gesture of disavowal speaks loudly of Donne's unease at appearing in print7. Donne's labor and his time figure prominently: "For the Preaching of this Sermon, I was but under your Invitation; my Time was mine owne"; whereas "for the Printing of this Sermon, I am not onely under your Invitation, but under your Commandement" (Sermons, 4:264). Powerful members...