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Fuga Saeculi or Holy Hatred of the World: John Donne and Henry Hawkins
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2016
Extract
Many of the devotional works written for English Catholics, at home and in exile, assure the weary pilgrim that the battle will end and the soul will be at peace; or that in the midst of it there can be inner quietness; or that man must flee the conflict altogether and engage in a different kind of warfare, the Pauline struggle within oneself. The emphasis in all of them is that here is no abiding city, or state, or régime. This world was shown to be full of alarms and omens and disasters as well as vanities and temptations. Man's safety and peace lay in eschewing the world altogether, either literally or symbolically.
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References
Notes
1 John, Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 1563.Google Scholar
2 For life and work of Henry Hawkins see my article in Recusant History (April, 1972). In a more recent article in The London Recusant, vol. 2, no. 1 (January 1972),Google Scholar Christopher Buckingham claims that Hawkins was in fact married before ordination, to Aphra, daughter of Thomas Norton of Fordwich. I had assumed the marriage to be a fiction.
3 Supposedly printed in Paris. Allison and Rogers claim that this is a false imprint and that it actually came from the press of the English College at St Omer.
4 Life of St Aldegunde, History of St Elizabeth (1632).
5 Certain Selected Epistles of St Hierome (1630). The Partheneia Sacra, his prose emblem-book, the most valuable of his literary works, was to appear in the year following Fuga Saeculi.
6 Saints Malachy, Antony, Pachomius, Martin, Fulgentius, Theodosius, Benet, Stephen, Edward Confessour, Anselme, Otho, Bernard, Hugh, Antony of Padua, Thomas Aquinas, Andrew (Italy), and Laurence Iustinian.
7 For Donne's association with the Catholic tradition through his Catholic family, and particularly with Jesuits, see Bald, R. C., John Donne: A Life (Oxford, 1970).Google Scholar
8 The Partheneia Sacra was written for the Parthenian Sodality of the Virgin Mary and was devoted entirely to a demonstration of her virtues through a series of emblems taken from the symbolic garden, the ‘Hortus Conclusus’ of the Song of Solomon.
9 See Louis, Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (Yale University Press, 1954).Google Scholar
10 Donne was born in 1572 and died in 1631. Hawkins was born in the early 1570s and diedin 1646.
11 Frank Manly notes some of them in his edition of The Anniversaries (John Hopkins Press, 1963), pp. 7ff.Google Scholar
12 At this time Donne was on the Continent with her family—wooed as prospective patrons.
13 Manly records this fact, pp. 4–5.
14 For example, his brother Thomas was knighted by James I. He was quite well known atcourt and, amongst other things, translated Horace.
15 Rembrandt's, for example.
16 In a very different vein, see Donne's reference to this in the ‘Sunne Rising’.
17 F.A. 19–24. All quotations from the ‘First Anniversary’ are taken from Manly's edition.
18 John, Gerard, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, translated from the Latin by Philip, Caraman (Longmans, 1951)Google Scholar ‘The Author's Preface’.
19 English Catholics were particularly interested in this kind of detail in their concern with the history of England in the justification of their cause. For a typical use of it see Verstegan's Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities (1605). It is discussed by A. G. R. Petti, ‘A Study of the Life and Writings of Richard Verstegan’, unpublished M.A. Thesis (University of London, 1957), ch. 13, particularly pp. 426ff.
20 Quotations from Grierson's edition.
21 For example: ‘Spheare’ is quite common, but mainly in F.A., the ‘Extasie’ and ‘Good Friday’. ‘Proportion’ is used fourteen times in all, ten of them in F.A. ‘Elements’ is quitecommon, but again, most used in this group of poems. ‘Coherence’, ‘Connexion’, ‘Essence’, and ‘Sympathie’ are used once only.
22 Indications of an earlier, and still popular tradition occur in Hawkins’ constant, if moderate, references to natural history (e.g., the notorious crocodiles on the river Nile at the beginning of the poem) and the numerous classical allusions.
23 It was a hermetic belief that the universe was ‘wearing down’. Henry Vaughan refers to it, for example, in ‘The Night’.