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

Donne’s Incarnating Words 91
created humans and he became human and it is through the physical that the work of
salvation was performed and is remembered. In a related passage in Donne’s Devotions
upon Emergent Occasions, Donne tries to use God’s laws as found in the Old Testament
book of Leviticus to show why Jesus must save his sick body, and if not his body, then
surely his soul,
And it is thine owne Law, O God, that if a man bee smitten so by another, as that
hee keepe his bed, though he dye not, hee that hurt him, must take care of his
healing, and recompence him. Thy hand strikes mee into this bed; and therefore if
I rise againe, thou wilt bee my recompence, all the dayes of my life, in making the
memory of the sicknes beneficiall to me; and if my body fall yet lower, thou wilt
take my soule out of this bath, & present it to thy Father, washed againe, and
againe, and again, in thine own teares, in thine owne sweat, in thine owne blood. 80
The path that Jesus has won for his followers as found in the ‘La Corona’ cycle with the
poem ‘Ascension’ has now become a vehicle by which Donne can argue that Jesus must
behave in certain ways because he has provided a path for humanity to God by way of his
becoming human. The incarnational paradox of the high becoming low now takes on the
responsibility that the high must then raise up the low. Donne is appealing to God’s sense
of ownership, God’s sense of law, and God’s humanness in his quest to create arguments
that God will be unable to overcome, and therefore God will have no choice but to save
Donne when the Day of Judgement comes. Donne is doing his best to use God’s
reasoning against him in order to guarantee his salvation and thereby his permanent
unification of self with God and creation.
80 John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (Oxford, 1975), pp. 17-18.