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

Incarnation as Social Protest 116
Th’afflicted body of this innocent Dove,
Poore women seeing how much they did trangresse,
By teares, by sighes, by cries intreat, may prove,
What may be done among the thickest presse,
They labor still these tyrants hearts to move;
In pitie and compassion to forbeare
Their whipping, spurning, tearing of his haire. (993-1000)
That the arrest, trial, and execution of Jesus are moments in his life of great
humility is made perfectly clear by Lanyer. She states ‘Loe here thy great Humility was
found,’ (473) and ‘the sonne of Man to be, | To purge our pride by thy Humilitie’. (479-
480) This is the perfect embodiment of Donne’s phrase, ‘humbled in the flesh’ 43 as Jesus
is God, and yet he is allowing himself to be arrested, falsely tried, beaten, and killed by
those whom he created. He is, at this moment, the true embodiment of the meek inheriting
the earth. The paradox of the Almighty God being a weak man on trial is one which
Lanyer continuously draws attention to. The reader finds lines such as ‘He was content to
stoope unto their Lure, | Although his Greatnesse might doe otherwise’ (523-24) and
Now al their powres, their wits, their strengths, they bend
Against one siely, weake, unarmed man,
Who no resistance makes, though much he can (550-52)
and again ‘Perfections height in lowest penury, | Such glorious poverty as they never
knew.’ (893-94) The height of perfection submits to death by corrupt men in order that he
43 George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (eds.), The Sermons of John Donne, vol. 3, (Berkeley, 1962), p.
206.