Jesse Sharpe PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

Donne’s Incarnating Words 38
between individuals and between humanity and the divine. As Richard E. Hughes has
stated of Donne’s theology ‘his is an incarnational theology, sustained by his belief that all
things are in Christ and Christ is in all things’, 5 and he further states that ‘as theologian he
accepted the Incarnation as an ever-recurring event with human action transformed into
sacrament by Christ’s indwelling presence’. 6
The fact that all things are in Christ and he
is in all things allows Donne the dynamic that he needs to inform all divisions of his life
with a sense of the incarnated self. This then creates an intense pursuit of communion and
union that was paramount to John Donne, and in his pursuit of unity, the reader finds that
it is through the Incarnation that Donne seeks to bring about his goals. The unification of
body and soul then becomes the basis for the unification of individual to individual. As
Felicia Wright McDuffie finds, ‘Donne’s most distinctive focus is the embodiment of the
Word in body itself, not only in the incarnation of Christ, but in the bodies of all of
humanity’. 7
The ‘Word in body’ and the ‘bodies of all humanity’ here correctly illustrates
that while Targoff is indeed correct to see the need for a unified body and soul in Donne’s
writings, it is emblematic of a deeper desire, the desire of complete communion of
humanity, the desire that can lead to the meditation of ‘No Man is an Iland’. 8 Finally, this
ability of individuals to find communion with one another becomes emblematic of the
ability of individuals to find union with the Divine, the incorporeal God, which leads
Eleanor McNees to state, ‘For Donne, the Incarnation introduces the possibility for a
fusion of divine and human’. 9
As the reader begins to work through the writings and sermons of John Donne, one
is repeatedly met with the concept of death, and in these discussions about death, Matthew
5 Richard E. Hughes, ‘Metaphysical Poetry as Event’, University of Hartford Studies in Literature 3 (1971),
195.
6 ‘Metaphysical Poetry as Event’, p. 195.
7 Felicia Wright McDuffie, To Our Bodies Turn We Then (London, 2005), p. 69.
8 John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (Oxford, 1975), p.87.
9 Eleanor McNees, ‘John Donne and the Anglican Doctrine of the Eucharist’, Texas Studies in Literature and
Language 29.1 (1987), 95.