"For reason, put to her best extension, / Almost meets faith":

The Flawed Dialectical Structure in Donne's Sonnets

Margaret J. Oakes
Funnan University

"So perish souls, which more choose men's unjust / Power from
God claimed, than God himself to trust." John Donne's satire
condemning flawed human efforts to find true religion ends with a
sentiment that might cause us to conclude that reason and faith are
incompatible, even contradictory elements of human experience.
However, some of Donne's "Holy Sonnets" show that he does not
always think of these two notions as polar opposites: instead,
those seemingly opposite modes of comprehension or awareness
serve a joint function in his thought. Reason and faith act like the
two sides of a coin, closely allied but inherently opposite, as he
tries to understand both larger doctrinal issues and the personal
issue of his own salvation. Donne devises a syncretic epistemologi-
cal strategy incorporating both reason and faith because, as he
says in his verse letter to the Countess of Bedford, "By these we
reach divinity." For Donne, the journey to the divine begins with
reason, which can lead the human mind to understanding and then
faith. This epistemological process, deemed Donne's "Reason-
Faith Equation" by Irving Lowe (389), is explained in the elegy
written after the death of James 1's son Henry, and in the verse let-
ter to Lucy Harington, the Countess of Bedford, which I just quot-
ed. Today I will synthesize Donne's explanation of this process in
the two poems, and then show how he tries to use it-with vary-
ing success-in two of the "Holy Sonnets" which are meditations
on Donne's own salvation.
As with many of Donne's poems, the "Prince Henry" elegy
divulges as much about Donne's opinions on other things as it
does about its purported subject. The first section of the lament
does not even mention the deceased Prince, rather, it explains
Donne's conviction that reason can be used to comprehend matters
of faith:

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 Look to me faith, and look to my faith, God;
For both my centres feel this period.
Of weight one centre, one of greatness is;
And reason is that centre, faith is this.
For into our reason flow, and there do end,
All that this natural world doth comprehend:
Quotidian things, and equidistant hence,
Shut in, for man, in one circumference.
But, for the enormous greatnesses, which are
So disproportioned, and so angular,
As is God's essence, place and providence,
Where, how, when, what souls, do, departed hence,
These things (eccentric else) on faith do strike;
Yet neither all, nor upon all alike.
For reason, put to her best extension,
Almost meets faith, and makes both centres one. (1-16)
This passage compares the circumscribable field of reason to
the unlimited and unlimitable field of faith. Donne is discomfited
by the unforeseeable, unknowable aspects of faith: "the dispropor-
tion between our finite understanding and the infinite essence of
God" (Gilson 41). Lines 11 and 12 specifically mention the prob-
lem of knowing God's providence and the fate of the departed as
matters which "our reason cannot fit. . . into any coherent pattern
" (Smith, Notes 582). The next four lines explain Donne's method
of dealing with this situation. He proposes that reason works with
faith; they are two centers balanced in equilibrium, each playing a
necessary role in making the "greatnesses" of the divine realm as
knowable as the "quotidian" things of the natural world. Since
"faith presupposes the mind's rational self-knowledge" (Sherwood,
"Reason, Faith" 60), Donne believes that reason, if "put to her
best extension," has the capacity to resolve the problems that faith
presents.
Writing to his friend and patroness, the Countess of Bedford,
Donne further expands his claim that both reason and faith are
necessary to understand "divinity" (which is equated with the
Countess herself):
Reason is our soul's left hand, Faith her right,
By these we reach divinity, that's you;
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Their loves, who have the blessing of your sight,
Grew from their reason, mine from fair faith grew.
But as, although a squint lefthandedness
Be ungracious, yet we cannot want that hand,
So would I, not to increase, but to express
My faith, as I believe, so understand. (1-8)
The metaphor describes a physical connection, a fraternal but
conjoined twinship in which the two partners are functionally dif-
ferent in their manner of achieving a goal - in this case, the
acquisition of a certain kind of knowledge - but are equally indis-
pensable in the quest for that knowledge. It is clear that reason
will never dominate: this more "human" of the two qualities is
acknowledged to be "ungracious," relegated to the so-called "sin-
ister" left hand, and is somewhat awkward or pedestrian in its
procedures. Apparently wanting to avoid the implication that his
faith in his patroness may be less than complete,) Donne adds the
important qualification that reason will not increase his already
immeasurable faith in the Countess, preferring to emphasize that
faith will be made manifest by combining it with reason.
Nevertheless, the operation of the human intellect is essential to
"express" and "understand" his faith.
The convictions expressed in these poems are a complex mix-
ture of certain strains of Thomistic and Augustinian thinking.
Thomas Aquinas concurs with Aristotle that the human process of
acquiring knowledge starts with the sensory world: "according to
its manner of knowing in the present life, the intellect depends on
the sense for the origin of knowledge " (Aquinas, Summa Contra
Gentiles I:iii:3). In the elegy, Donne agrees that "All that this nat-
ural world doth comprehend" (6) is the result of reason; in the
Bedford letter, he explains that being within Lucy's field of vision
- and, presumably, also, the ability to see her - has caused oth-
ers to develop love for her "from their reason" (4). But there is
another step: by analogy, reason can move to an understanding of
higher truths. This is how Aquinas believes we begin to know
things about God: "things proved demonstratively [ . . are pre-
requisites to the things that are of faith. . . " (Aquinas, On
faith vol. 1, 2-2, q. 1, art. 5). Aquinas even echoes Aristotle's
words on this point: "beginning with sensible things, our intellect
 is led to the point of knowing about God that He exists, and other
such characteristics that must be attributed to the First Principle"
(Aquinas, SCG I:iii:3). According to Aquinas' commentator Rene
Gilson, the sensory world is truly the only way we can begin to
know things about the divine: "The knowledge which we have of
God is, therefore, only such as a person starting from sense-data,
can acquire of a being which is purely intelligible" (41). Similarly,
Donne claims that "reason, put to her best extension / Almost
meets faith." Since knowledge attained through reason can lead to
knowledge of God, and since principles of reason are also part of
God's wisdom, applying rational methods to revealed truths can
lead to higher truths not comprehensible by reason alone:
In describing the "Reason-Faith" equation, Irving Lowe argues
that in his sermons, Donne follows Aquinas in calling us to start
with reason - the "knowable things of the world" - and move
to faith - "the mysteries of Revelation" (394). Both are necessary
to come to faith. But I believe Aquinas adds an additional, initiat-
ing step that Donne also adopts: reason cannot achieve divine
truth without the initial prompting of faith, which influences rea-
son to strive toward higher truths even when it cannot compre-
hend them:
it was necessary for the human mind to be called to some-
thing higher than the human reason here and now can
reach, so that it would thus learn to desire something and
with zeal tend toward something that surpasses the whole
state of the present life (Aquinas, SCG I:iii:5).
The will is motivated to start the intellectual operation by belief, a
dim but sure knowledge of that final object: .
[H]uman reason can stand as consequence to the will of the
believer. When a man has a will prompt in believing, he
loves the believed truth, and thinks about it, and he
embraces reasons for it if he can find them (Aquinas, On
faith vol. 2-2, q. 2, art. 10).
Thus, the process starts with a prompting faith, feeble as it might
be, in the truths of divinity, leading to the desire to pursue a
greater understanding of those truths with reason, leading in turn
to a more profound faith in revealed truths.
In the "Prince Henry" poem, Donne describes these higher
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truths as greater "things [that] on faith do strike," "enormous
greatnesses" which, unlike the "equidistant" and regular things of
the natural world, are "disproportioned," "angular" and "eccen-
tric," making them all the more difficult fo.r reason to grasp on its
own. He recognizes the power of faith, both dominant and initia.t-
ing, as he calls "Look to me faith" at the beginning of the elegy,
and explicitly states the appropriate order of the faith-rea son-faith
process in the Bedford poem: "as I believe, so understand." Thus,
in the schemes of both Aquinas and Donne, supported by
Aristotelian thinking, reason and faith work together, in turn, to
approach divine truth. Faith comes both before and behind reason
in expanding, but clearly defining, the limits of the human intellect
as it approaches God. And, in assertions such as "reason is that
centre, faith is this" and "Reason is our soul's left hand, Faith her
right," Donne acknowledges both "The Thomistic interdependence
of reason and faith" (Henriksen 21) and the autonomy and dissim-
ilarity of their natures.
The Thomistic idea that we start on the road to divine knowl-
edge through human sensory apprehension opposes the
Augustinian notion of the superiority of Christ's authority; howev-
er, Donne's dialectial construct is a blend of Thomistic and
Augustinian philosophy. The primacy of God's sovereignty under-
girded the Protestant emphasis on the utter inability of human
thought or effort to participate in the soul's salvation. On this
point, Augustine was viewed by Protestant reformers as an anti-
intellectualist who spoke of humankind's irrevocably flawed post-
lapsarian nature. However, Donne's sermons stress "those aspects
of Augustinianism that are compatible with Thomism" (Henriksen
21); for instance, Terry Sherwood demonstrates that Donne incor-
porates Augustine's distinction between ratio (the faculty of reason
which allows us to know of temporal things) and intellectus (the
faculty of reason which leads to knowledge or wisdom of the
divine) in his thinking, as Donne and Augustine each attempts "to
create a role for reason consistent with both his own intellectual
nature and his sense of human limitations. . . " (Sherwood,
"Reason in Sermons" 358). Donne is also indebted to Augustine
in the "Prince Henry" elegy regarding "both fate and the means of
understanding it." As reason "Almost meets faith, and makes bpth
 centres one" (16), we can see "Augustine's emphasis upon the pri-
ority of reason and his rejection of skepticism" (Sherwood,
"Reason, Faith" 62, 63). Augustine's own intellectual efforts
enabled him to reject the false doctrines of Manicheism; it is this
attitude toward the capabilities of reason, not the anti-intellectual
interpretation, which we see in Aquinas's and Donne's thinking.
Much as Donne is influenced by Thomistic and Augustinian
notions to shape the relationship between reason and faith, he
adds his own innovations in creating an epistemological process
which uses them to progress to greater faith. Donne's modifica-
tions are, in fact, even more complex than they appear on the sur-
face. A.J. Smith, argues that, in the opening passage from the
elegy, Donne claims that "reason and faith are concentric circles,"
but "in our dislocated understanding these centres do not coin-
cide" (Notes 581). This conclusion is based on the final words of
the opening of the poem: "For reason, put to her best extension, I
Almost meets faith, and makes both centres one" (15-16). But this
interpretation of the reason-faith relationship sees the relationship
as being a circle of finite circumference laid over a circle of infinite
circumference: reason attempts to situate itself over faith, and
thereby confine faith to the limits of reason. This conclusion mis-
construes the importance of both the old and the new "philoso-
phies" for Donne. The plain words of this often obscure poem
show that the two realms are separate, in accord with Thomistic
philosophy: "Reason is that centre, faith is this" (4) and "Of
weight one centre, one of greatness is" (3). To think of reason and
faith as completely overlapping disregards Aquinas' stipulation
that the two ways of knowing do not merge but exist in joint and
complementary roles, sharing the same goal and common ground
in their subjects of inquiry but differing in their methods of
demonstration (Gilson 48-49). More importantly, the notion of
reason and faith being joined with one center neglects discoveries
of the "new Philosophy" of which we know Donne was aware.
The problem stems from a misinterpretation of the astronomical
references in the poem. Assuming that faith and reason have the
same center leads to Smith's conclusion that there are two separate
figures created, both of which are intended to be circular. This
form recalls the Copernican scheme of circular planetary orbits.
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But Donne did not have Copernicus in mind: he had studied
Kepler's more recent De stella nova (in fact, Donne's annotated
copy of the book is still extant), which describes those orbits as
elliptical rather than circular. The key is the word "eccentric" in
line 12. Bruce Henricksen suggests that this is "a synonym for
'elliptical'," which points to the Keplerian model:
An ellipse is an orbit such that the sum of the distances between
two points and the circumference remains constant. Put to her
best extension, as figured in Kepler's model, reason becomes a cen-
ter of heavenly movement - reason and faith are the two foci that
keep our ellipse, if not our circle, just (28).
Donne specifically describes the spatial object of the "Prince Henry"
poem as having not one but two "centres," a non-scientific way of
describing the foci of the ellipse. "Both centres" are not literally
made "one," but as the two defining elements of the ellipse maintain
a constant and interdependent relationship. The proper constitution
of the relationship between reason and faith requires not one but
two "centres": it is not that they cannot meet, but that they do not
need to meet because they are working in tandem to reach greater
faith.
Armed with this epistemelogical model, I now turn to the
"Holy Sonnets" for two examples of its operation - one successful
and one unsuccessful - in Donne's most intimate expressions of
his personal beliefs and fears about his own salvation. In some of
the "Holy Sonnets," Donne wields the twin weapons of reason
and faith to try to believe in what seems to be unbelievable, even
impossible to him: that the man of the "black soul" whom he sees
in the mirror could possibly be one of the elect.
Sonnet XV shows Donne's epistemological process at its best,
using faith and reason to enable him to express a degree of belief
in his salvation. The sonnet begins with faith in the promises of
Christ's crucifixion and resurrection:
Wilt thou love God, as he thee? then digest,
My soul, this wholesome meditation,
How God the Spirit, by angels waited on
In heaven, doth make his temple in thy breast.
The Father having begot a Son most blessed,
And still begetting, (for he ne'er begun)
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 Hath deigned to choose thee by adoption,
Coheir to' his glory, 'and Sabbath's endless rest;
And as a robbed man, which by search doth find
His stol'n stuff sold, must lose or buy it again:
The Son of glory came down, and was slain,
Us whom he had made, and Satan stol'n to unbind.
'Twas much, that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more. (1-14)
The faith-reason-faith model is in full operation in this poem. The
opening question declares the speaker's final objective - a convic-
tion that God loves him - and asks the soul whether it returns
that love, prompting it to reason to its final truth. Evidence is
then presented to the soul (which it will "digest," a process as
human as reasoning) of God's attitude toward him. In lines 5-8 he
elaborates on both God's position in the relationship (the adoptive
Father) and his own as the chosen heir of glory. The sestet reasons
through an earthly analogy of loss and retrieval of material goods
to try to understand the higher truth of Christ's sacrifice for
humankind. The closing couplet returns to the divine, employing
the Old Testament story of human creation to link our lives with
the New Testament divine life of Christ: the phrases '''Twas much"
and "much more" which enclose the couplet suggest the turn from
a knowledge of the truths of human existence known from
Scripture ("man was made like God") to a higher belief in the eter-
nal promises of God's coming to earth ("that God should be made
like man").
Sonnet XV lives up to Donne's claim that it is his most "whole-
some meditation," as he seems to have subdued his fears of
damnation sufficiently to be able to celebrate God's devotion to
humankind, the saving power of Christ's death, and his being cho-
sen by God "by adoption" (7). This last term is especially signifi-
cant for Reformation thinkers. Jean Calvin uses it more than once
in the Institutes to emphasize the feeling that assurance brings:
What does [adoption] mean? That we should not
be borne down by an unending bondage, which would ago-
nize our consciences with the fear of death (II.vii.16).
We ought to grasp this: however deficient or weak
faith may be in the elect, still, because the Spirit of God is
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for them the sure guarantee and seal of their adoption, the
mark he has engraved can never be erased from their hearts
(III.ii.12).
"Adoption" suggests some of the more comforting aspects of
Reformation doctrine in its suggestion of conscious choice and lov-
ing acceptance, and its use is appropriate in a sonnet which trum-
pets assurance of Donne's position as "Coheir to [God's] glory"
(8). This sonnet shows that Donne's will can initiate a reasoning
process to help him understand the divine truth of God's love for
him as one of His children. It is a complete example of Donne's
epistemological model leading to assurance of salvation: reason
ponders the aspects of divine truth to the best of its ability and
then becomes unnecessary when his comprehension of those mar-
velous truths compels belief in his position among the elect.
However, reason and faith do not always cooperate, causing
the process to collapse due to the failure of the "prompting will."
For example, in Sonnet I, Donne can neither articulate a hypothe-
sis of faith on which to set his sights nor undertake the rational
inquiry to get there, demonstrating the failure of the proposed
dialectic. This failure is caused by Donne's dogged confidence in
reason and the profound and tenacious fears about his reprobate
nature, which paralyze his intellectual processes. He has great dif-
ficulty acknowledging that reason's ability to understand revealed
truth is limited, and he hangs on to reason even when it clearly
leads him astray. In addition, he is so convinced that his sinfulness
is beyond all hope, his salvation an utter. impossibility, that the rea-
soning process has no basis of faith in divine truth to which to
direct itself, and he is defeated from the start. In the octave he can
see only the imminence of death and damnation:
Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?
Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste,
I run to death, and death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday,
I dare not move my dim eyes any way,
Despair behind, and death before doth cast
Such terror, and my feeble flesh doth waste
By sin in it, which do towards hell doth weigh; (1-8)
He will tell us later in the sestet that he wants to believe with
 Aquinas that reason, assisted by faith, can "gather certain likeness-
es" (SCG Lviii.1) of the truths of faith: "when towards thee / By
thy leave I can look, I rise again." However, Donne is handi-
capped in this poem by the fact that he does not, as Aquinas
requires, already embrace "the believed truth" (Summa Theologiae
2-2, q.2, art. 10) of his own election. The opening line rebukes
God for abandoning the poet to his own devices; he sees that he is
not equipped to maintain his sights on his spiritual goals and
anticipates the plunge toward hell caused by uncertainty and mis-
direction. By the end of the octave, he has reached the depths of
despair and doubt as his "feeble flesh" is being pressed to hell.
The process has been flawed from the start because his decay and
betrayal are more convincing to him than his status as one of
God's treasured creatures.
The effects of insufficient will emerge in the sestet, where any
attempts on his part to rise to divinity are preempted because he
will succumb to the devil's temptation to sin:
Only thou art above, and when towards thee
By thy leave I can look, I rise again;
But our old subtle foe so tempteth me,
That not one hour I can myself sustain;
Thy Grace may wing me to prevent his art;
And thou like adamant draw mine iron heart. (9-14)
He knows on an intellectual level that God's mercy could draw
him away from sin, but he has no faith that God actually does so.
And he still insists in line 10, seemingly unconsciously, that the
ability to "sustain" his attention to the divine object belongs to
him. His only recourse is a prayer for repentance in the final two
lines - a request that God's grace, perhaps prevenient, may save
him. The shaky note on which this poem closes affirms that weak-
ness of faith crippled this "spiritual exercise" even before it was
begun. Reason has been given no base, no direction in which to
find belief that he will face anything other than "Despair behind,
and death before" (6). Using faith and reason as dialectical terms
has failed. Donne's attempt to apply his academic training to
questions of faith does not succeed on its own, forcing him, in
other poems, to experiment with alternate measures to resolve the
argument and find a sense of assurance in his salvation.
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Through these "Holy Sonnets" and others, Donne devises an epis-
temological model based on Catholic and scientific modes of
though but uses it to analyze Protestant doctrine; he champions
faith but clings faintheartedly to reason; he is the commanding
preacher of St. Paul's but also the self-abasing sinner excluded
from God's promise of salvation. However, I believe that this seem-
ingly Janus-faced quality is typical of the way he thinks about
everything, including, and perhaps particularly, theology. The
Protestantism which he adopted included the potentially paradoxi-
cal Reformation principles of Scriptural fidelity and individual
interpretation of Scripture, which give believers the support of
God's Word but also the sometimes treacherous power to find
their own religious truths. Bequeathed these potent ingredients,
Donne uses a free hand in selecting his weapons to attack his per-
sonal theological questions. The fact that these practices take him
across spectra of epistemological and theological concepts but can
also leave him with unresolved questions could suggest an undis-
cerning or mercurial mind. In truth, however, his choices of
method and doctrine - whether successfulor not - are achieved
only after rigorous thought, grounded in an ardent love of God
and a sincere desire to "reach divinity."
Notes
IThe abbreviation SCG will hereafter be used to refer to this
work.
uln analyzing the sermons, Irving Lowe argues against the early
twentieth-century critical tradition of "Donne as skeptic" and
claims a Thomistic position for Donne: "Donne tells us that
nature directs us to faith. Mere reason apprehends the goal; recti-
fied reason compasses the leap" (394).
Works Cited
Aquinas, St. Thomas. On Faith: Summa theologiae,2-2, qq. 1-
16. Trans. Mark D. Jordan. Readings in the Summa theologiae.
Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1990.
Summa Contra Gentiles. Trans. Anton C. Pegis. Notre
Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1975.
Summa Theologica. 3 vols. New York: BenzigerBros., 1947.
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Calvin,Jean. Institutes of the Christian Religion.
Ed. John T. McNeill. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. 2 vols.
Philadelphia: Westminster,1960.
Donne, John. The Complete English Poems. Ed. A.J. Smith.
London: Penguin, 1971. .
Gilson, Etienne. The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Trans.
Edward Bullough. Ed. G.A. Elrington. 1937. Freeport, NY:
Books for Libraries P, 1971. .
Henricksen, Bruce. "The Unity of Reason and Faith in Donne's
Sermons." Papers on Language and Literature 11 (1975):
18-30.
Lowe, Irving. "Both Centres One: The Reason-Faith Equation in
Donne's Sermons." Journal of the History of Ideas. 22
(1961):
389-397.
Sherwood, Terry G. "Reason, Faith, and Just Augustinian
Lamentation in Donne's Elegy on Prince Henry." Studies
tn English Literature, 1500-1900 13 (1973):
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"Reason in Donne's Sermons." English Literary History 39.3
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