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

Donne’s Incarnating Words 36
II
JOHN DONNE’S INCARNATING WORDS
The Incarnation is a doctrine of union. It is the union between God and humanity,
the union of the Divine with the flesh, of creator and created, of the high becoming low
and the low becoming high, and of the finite being taken into the infinite. In the
Incarnation the divisions that separate individuals from each other and from God are done
away with, because if the divine can become human and relate to humans as one of them,
it can also bring humans into the divine – into the Holy Trinity. This ability of the
Incarnation to transcend boundaries and to bring about temporal, and eventually eternal,
union becomes vital to John Donne’s attempts to overcome the anxiety of separation, an
anxiety that has been well documented and discussed in the scholarship of his writings.
For example, John Carey has famously written of a possible fear of apostasy in Donne’s
life and writings. 1
In this Carey sees an underlying anxiety that the Reformation and its
schismatic nature spread throughout society, including a potential antagonism existing
between John Donne and the rest of his family after John converted from Roman
Catholicism to Protestantism. Robert N. Watson has shown that Donne’s writings contain
an anxiety regarding the fear of death and the possibility of the separation of body and soul
after death. 2
This division of person would not only separate the very being of a person
from itself, but also separate the individual from humanity, from creation, and from God at
the point of death. And Ramie Targoff has recently shown the intense anxiety revealed in
Donne’s desire to ensure the union of body to soul, and that it is only in this union that
1 John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art, New edn. (London, 1981).
2 Robert N. Watson, The Rest is Silence (London, 1994).