Logic and Paradox in the Structure of Donne's Sermons

One of the more persistent of the received notions about Donne's sermons is that which insists on the looseness of their structures, by which is meant a devaluation of logical arrangement favor of associative, metaphoric connections. Joan Webber, Winfreid Schleiner, Janel Mueller, and Stanley Fish, to name four of our generation's most influential students of Donne's preaching, all speak decisively against the importance of reason and the sermons.' Webber, for example, categorically asserts that disliked logic (4), claiming that in later writing Donne builds sentences whose clauses, even when periodic, move associatively rather than logically (7), and that his faith.., .is based on an intuitional and literary rather than on a and logical mode of apprehensison (12). Even more extreme is Fish's contention that a Donne sermon, divisions and transitions do not indicate the stages of a progression, either the argument or the hearer's understanding; they are merely 'ands,' marking out areas and opportunities for illumination .... The movement of the sermon's central action is away from its discursive machinery... and therefore away from the listener's powers, which are increasingly (75). The idea that Donne renounces reason and the logical forms that attend it, however, has itself recently been disabled by Terry Sherwood's incisive demonstration of the centrality of reason to all aspects of Donne's epistemology. Sherwood shows that the propensity of today's critics to subordinate reason to memory Donne's thought, thus ignoring or diminishing the importance of logical arrangement works, is largely a result of Louis Bredvold's misreading of the significance of reason the Augustinian epistemology Donne adopts. Bredvold's claim that Donne's Thomistic confidence reason diminished as Augustinianism grew, Sherwood asserts, ignores Augustine's demonstration Chapters xxvi and xxvii of Book XI of The City of God that proofs of the death of reason presuppose the existence of reason. Sherwood shows that for both Augustine and Donne, rational consciousness itself establishes reason.2 In making the case for Donne's rationalist faith, he contends, rightly I think, that both analogy and

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