Theology and Poetry in Donne's Conclave
1965; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2872253
ISSN1080-6547
Autores Tópico(s)Medieval Literature and History
ResumoWhat is the meaning of Donne's Ignatius His Conclave? It was published in 1611 as a satirical tract in the controversy between Catholics and Protestants over the nature of church and civil government. Donne directed it mainly against Ignatius Loyola, the Spanish mystic who founded the Society of Jesus in 1540, but he attacked many other people not obviously connected with him as and creators of new matter. ' These terms are the key to Donne's meaning. New matter was the product of any human endeavour, political, religious, scientific or literary, that was not based on a moral prototype in the Bible. W. C. Coffin defined it generally as a denial of truth. 2 An innovator was a man who produced it. But the simplicity of these definitions must not be allowed to blur the complexity of the theology underlying Donne's attack. Donne judged the innovators according to a system of morality based on three books, the first Book of Life or Register of the Elect, the second Book of Life or Bible, and the Book of Creatures which was subsidiary to the Bible. In the first book lay the rules for the composition of the church, in the second lay moral certainty and in the third the material for sacred poetry. Innovators and new matter are understandable in terms of the complex connections binding these three into a system, which this paper explores. The system also explains the structure of the Conclave, correctly identified as a mock vision by George Williamson,3 as a satire on the composition of the fictional image in the mind of the exercitant in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, and of the aesthetic counterpart of this image in profane poetry.
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