The Sacrament of the Suffering Body

Felecia Wright McDuffie’s To Our Bodies Turn We Then is a study of Donne’s understanding of the body as “word and sacrament.” Drawing from Donne’s poetry, sermons, and prose writing, she summarizes Donne’s view of the human body as created, fallen, redeemed, and recreated. All along the way, McDuffie exposes Donne’s eccentric views, arrestingly presented.

Regarding the created body, for instance, “Donne argues against the traditional view that the body is ‘enlivened’ by the soul.” Rather, “he claims that the soul ‘is enabled by our body, not this by that,’ and goes on to say that ‘my body licenseth my soul to see the world’s beauties.” Donne was no Calvinist, and he insists that the senses remain functional even after the fall, so that “even before a religious conversion, the body can play a redemptive role. Even the fallen senses can ‘read’ God’s work in the ‘book of creatures’ . . . thus providing the mind with material to deduce God’s existence and something of his attributes. That, in turn, serves as a step toward true knowledge of God and, eventually, to a restoration of lost union with him” (7).

McDuffie is interested, in part, in the “sacramental” dimensions of Donne’s theology of the body: “Just as he embraces the traditional view of the human person as a unique combination of the material and spiritual that ties together the created order, so also does he present the human person as the linchpin of the redemptive order. He lifts the created body toward the realm of spirit, and he lifts the redeemed body into the realm of signs. For Donne the redeemed body is first and foremost significative, a material object that can exhibit or point to spiritual realities” (69). He sees the embodiment of the Word not only in Christ but “in the bodies of all of humanity. He consistently uses the human body as a sign of redemption throughout his career,” though he emphasizes different images before and after his ordination: “In his early work, he emphasizes the bodies of women as signs of redemption” while after his ordination he “turns primarily to the eucharistic body of Christ as the sign and sacrament of present redemption” (69).

Donne’s theology of the redeemed body is not, however, a theology of glory. The suffering body too may be the sign and sacrament of redeemed body: “The suffering body can be the epiphany or manifestation of God’s presence. . . . First, Donne depicts the sufferings of believers, voluntary or involuntary, as a sign of God’s grace and presence in the one who suffers.” He says in a sermon that “suffering and calamities are to be interpreted as the sign of the cross on God’s saints. The afflicted person should take that sign as a promise that ‘the Son of Man Christ Jesus is coming towards thee; and as thou hast the sign, thou shalt have the substance, as thou hast his cross, thou shalt have his glory.’” McDuffie writes that “Donne habitually refers to tribulations directly as sacraments or speaks of them surrounded by indirect sacramental terms or images: seals, cups, blood, water, signs, and substance.” Further, when someone “embraces the pains and sacrifices of ascetic practice, that person can manifest Christ to others in his or her own body. That body fulfills the suffering of Christ in present flesh and becomes a part of a continuum of signs, pointing to the suffering of Christ, which in turn points toward God’s promise of salvation to all” (74).