Seeing God Through Spectacles: Donne’s “Engines” of the Imagination

In his 1619 Lincoln’s Inn “Sermon of Valediction,” John Donne offers a “bold” revision of Bernard of Clairvaux’s figuration of the memory as the “stomach of the soul.” In place of the latter’s organic metaphor, he substitutes a far more iconophilic similitude in describing it instead as a “Gallery … hang’d with so many, and so lively pictures of the goodness and mercies of thy God to thee.” Donne’s reimagining of Bernard’s conceit, this chapter argues, reflects both his conception of remembering as a visual process that involves the imagination and also his broader cultivation of these lower faculties as devotional prostheses that compensate, and correct, for the failings of the intellect. Where, for Donne, confessional differences result in the understanding being habitually “perplexed” by scriptural interpretation, remembering provides what he describes as “the nearest way” of coming to God. Building on this sermon’s reorientation of the hierarchical relationship joining the rational and sensitive souls, this chapter attends to his fashioning of himself in the pulpit as a surrogate imagination generating “lively pictures” to furbish his audience’s galleries with images that can instruct the understanding and more effectively guide the will.