No More Learning

It would be as
absurd, in the face of a poem like this and of all that we know of
Donne's subsequent life, to call it a conversion in the full sense of
the term, a changed conviction, as to dub it an apostasy prompted
by purely political considerations. Yet doubtless the latter
predominated. The position of a Catholic in the reign of Elizabeth
was that of a man cut off rigorously from the main life of the nation,
with every avenue of honourable ambition closed to him. He had to live
the starved, suspected life of a recusant or to seek service under a
foreign power. Some of the most pathetic documents in Strype's _Annals
of the Reformation_ are those in which we hear the cry of young men of
secure station and means driven by conscientious conviction to abandon
home and country. It is possible that before 1592 Donne himself had
been sent abroad by relatives with a view to his entering a seminary
or the service of a foreign power. His mother spent a great part of
her life abroad, and his own relatives were among those who suffered
most severely under Walsingham's persecution. 'I had', Donne says, 'my
first breeding and conversation with men of suppressed and afflicted
Religion, accustomed to the despite of death, and hungry of an
imagined Martyrdome. ' To a young man of ambition, and as yet certainly
with no bent to devotion or martyrdom, it was only common sense to
conform if he might.

From this dilemma Donne escaped, not by any opportune change of
conviction, or by any insincere profession, but by the way of
intellectual emancipation. He looks round in this satire and sees that
whichever be the true Church it is not by any painful quest of truth,
and through the attainment of conviction, that most people have
accepted the Church to which they may belong. Circumstances and
whim have had more to do with their choice than reason and serious
conviction. Yet it is only by search that truth is to be found:

On a huge hill
Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will
Reach her, about must, and about must goe;
And what the hills suddenes resists win so.
Yet strive so, that before age, deaths twilight,
Thy Soule rest, for none can work in that night.

It was not often in the sixteenth or seventeenth century that a
completely emancipated and critical attitude on religious, not
philosophical, questions was expressed with such entire frankness and
seriousness.
From this position, Walton would have us believe, Donne
advanced through the study of Bellarmine and other controversialists
to a convinced acceptance of Anglican doctrine. The evidence points to
a rather different conclusion on Donne's part. He came to think that
all the Churches were 'virtual beams of one sun', 'connatural pieces
of one circle', a position from which the next step was to the
conclusion that for an Englishman the Anglican Church was the right
choice (Cujus regio, ejus religio); but Donne had not reached this
conclusion when he wrote the _Satyre_, and doubtless did not till he
had satisfied himself that the Church of England offered a reasonable
_via media_. But changes of creed made on purely intellectual grounds,
and prompted by practical motives, are not unattended with danger to
a man's moral and spiritual life. Donne had doubtless outwardly
conformed before he entered Egerton's service in 1598, but long
afterwards, when he is already in Orders, he utters a cry which
betrays how real the dilemma still was:

Show me, deare Christ, thy spouse, so bright and clear;

and the first result of his 'conversion' was apparently to deepen the
sceptical vein in his mind.

Scepticism and melancholy, bitter and sardonic, are certainly the
dominant notes in the sombre fragment of satire _The Progresse of the
Soule_, which he composed in 1601, when he was Sir Thomas Egerton's
secretary, four months before his marriage and six months after the
death of the Earl of Essex. There can be little doubt, as I have
ventured to suggest elsewhere, that it was the latter event which
provoked this strange and sombre explosion of spleen, a satire of the
same order as the _Tale of a Tub_ or the _Vision of Judgment_. The
account of the poem which Jonson gave to Drummond does not seem to be
quite accurate, though it was probably derived from Donne himself. It
was, one suspects from several circumstances, a little Donne's way in
later years to disguise the footprints of his earlier indiscretions.
According to this tradition the final _habitat_ of the soul which
'inanimated' the apple

Whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe,

was to be John Calvin. The tradition is interesting as marking how far
Donne was in 1601 from his later orthodox Protestantism, for Calvin is
never mentioned but with respect in the _Sermons_. A few months
later he wrote to Egerton disclaiming warmly all 'love of a corrupt
religion'. But, though sceptical in tone, the poem is written from a
Catholic standpoint; its theme is the progress of the soul of heresy.
And, as the seventh stanza clearly indicates, the great heretic in
whom the line closed was to be not Calvin but Queen Elizabeth:

the great soule which here among us now
Doth dwell, and moves that hand, and tongue, and brow
Which, as the Moone the sea, moves us.

Donne can hardly have thought of publishing such a poem, or
circulating it in the Queen's lifetime. It was an expression of the
mood which begot the 'black and envious slanders breath'd against
Diana for her divine justice on Actaeon' to which Jonson refers in
_Cynthia's Revels_ the same year.