The Weight/lessness of Sin: Donne's "Thou Hast Made Me" and the Psychostatic Tradition

Abstract

Through the tropological level of allegory, seventeenth-century devotional writers present paradigmatic journeys to what historian of religion Mircea Eliade calls sacred time, recreating for and within the reader the crucial events of Christian mythology.' Transcending the realm of the secular and mundane, the poet encapsules the spiritual history of humankind in the word and can return the reader to the Creation, through the discovery of the paradise within; to the Incarnation, as each soul becomes the virginal womb fructified with the Man-God; to the Nativity, as the soul gives birth to joy; to the Circumcision and the cutting of the fleshly heart; to the Crucifixion, as the old Adam dies to sin; and to the Resurrection, as the new Adam emerges from the sepulchre, the heart's virgin tomb. Yet the pilgrimage through sacred time is a journey not only to the spiritual past of humanity, but to the future as well. In a sermon on Psalm 38.3, Donne argues that the faculty of memory enables the Christian to move both backward and forward through sacred time. Asserting that the individual who hears no sermons and reads no scriptures still has the Bible, Donne articulates the way in which the major events of Christianity are contained within the memory and pattern one's daily existence: