Posted by Holly Ordway in Literature & Literary Apologetics | 0 Comments
Experiencing the Trinity in Poetry (2): John Donne’s Holy Sonnets 10 and 11
What does it mean that God is Trinity? It is the heart of the Christian faith: that we know God the Father through God the Son in the power of God the Holy Spirit. The more that we know the living God as Trinity, the deeper and richer will be our relationship with Him. As we discussed in Part 1 of this series, poetry is an ideal route for exploring divine mysteries, allowing us to meditate on God and our relationship with Him without trying to “figure Him out” as if He were a math problem. In this essay, we’ll take a look at John Donne’s Holy Sonnets 10 and 11, as Donne moves us closer to experiencing the divine life and love of the Trinity.
In the earlier poems in the Holy Sonnet sequence, Donne explores various issues of importance in the Christian life, but it isn’t until he gets to Sonnet 10 that he explicitly calls on God as Trinity: “three-Person’d God.”
In Holy Sonnet 1, Donne suggests that God has been passive; in contrast, here the poet admits that God has indeed acted, to “knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend” the poet’s soul. God, who seemed distant in the previous sonnets, is recognized as a presence who has been active all along – and not just an active presence, but a loving one. Here, Donne is moving toward the understanding that God’s service is perfect freedom. The poet sees that while Satan’s hold on him is out of hate, God’s “enthralling” is from love; while Satan’s hold on him is slavery, God’s “imprisonment” will make him free.
However, the narrator here is still confused about his relationship with God. He says, “dearly’I love you, and would be loved fain” — he loves God and wants God to love him – not realizing that human love is a response to divine love, not the other way around. Likewise, in the image of the “usurped town,” Donne fails to recognize that Christ has already overcome Satan; Donne is already free, if he would turn to God—which is indeed what he is doing in this poem, even if he is not quite sure of himself.
Holy Sonnet 10
Batter my heart, three-personed God; for, you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’er throw me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town to another due,
Labour to admit you, but oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly’I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy,
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you enthral me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Donne does not leave us in that state of confusion, however. He moves – with a deepening awareness of the Trinity – toward the experience of communion with God, as we see in Holy Sonnet 11, which opens with a question for the reader: “Wilt thou love God, as he thee?”
We now see the poet grasping the truth: God loved him first. The poet includes the reader in his address, offering a challenge, or perhaps an invitation: Do you want to love God, the way that He loves you? If so, consider this… Holy Sonnet 11 then moves toward an appreciation of the communion of the blessed Trinity, referencing the eternal relationship of the Son to the Father: “The Father having begot a Son most blessed, / And still begetting, (for he ne’er begun).” Here we glimpse the eternal nature of God as a loving communion. It isn’t that one day God decided to have a Son, or that the Incarnation was just an event in history, now past. Rather, Our Lord Jesus Christ is one Person in the Trinity, from before creation: begotten, not made, as the Creed reminds us. Here we have a living God who is eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
What’s more, the activity of the Trinity expands outward to draw the poet into the life and love of God. The Holy Spirit, “doth make his temple in thy breast,” the Father “Hath deigned to choose thee by adoption,” and the Son “came down, and was slain, / Us whom he had made, and Satan stol’n, to unbind.”
Holy Sonnet 11 closes with a profound reflection on the Incarnation, “‘Twas much, that man was made like God before, / But, that God should be made like man, much more.” The harshness of language in the previous sonnets has eased. Rather than straining for an explanation of why God hasn’t acted in his life, the poet recognizes that indeed He has acted decisively in human history through the Incarnation, not just for the poet himself but for all humankind.
Holy Sonnet 11
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)
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, 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.
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