Anatomy and Progress: The Drama of Conversion in Donne's Men of a 'Middle Nature'

Abstract

Anyone who studies Donne's entire career can readily observe his concern with ordinary human doubts about the justice of God's ways. For the men of a 'middle nature' who constitute his audience, Donne realizes, the greatest problem is not a lack of faith but an inability to apply that faith to an increasingly uncertain, even incomprehensible seventeenth-century world. The question that most engaged him was how to rouse the hearts of such men from their lethargy and despair, how to transform their general sense of God's providence into a motive for personal response to him. And he becomes increasingly aware that the re-energizing effect he seeks is best achieved through the force of examples, both fictional and historical, of people resolving their doubts without losing sight of God's providential purposes in exercising them as he does.

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