The Whole Host of Heaven: John Donne and the Political Economy of Heaven

David Nicholls (1936-1996; an Anglo-Catholic Anglican priest, historian) sought to reconstruct Christian political theology through the ages. Besides a long career as a historian of Haiti, Nicholls' major project was intended to be a trilogy (sadly, he died before he finished it) about the relationship between views of God and views of government, working backwards from the 20th c. He sought to correlate political doctrines to theological doctrines, showing mutual influence and conceptual overlap (without trying to establish causation). Theology is never done in a vacuum and thought does not operate according to neat, artificial, categories. When sovereignty was fragmented or rejected, God was reduced to a committee member or a plurality of democratic forces. When sovereignty was strongly asserted, as in the early modern prince or the modern dictator, then God's absolute and withering aloneness prevailed. Nevertheless, Nicholls is sensitive to exceptions that prove the rule. He argues "puritans" (a hostile category he is somewhat weak in defining) had an unrelenting, near tyrannical, view of God, and yet pursued a limited monarch bound by the aristocracy, parliament, and ancient constitution. I think he got "the puritans" wrong, but that actually works in his favor (its less of an exception than he thinks).

Anyway, Nicholls continued this project in an article appendix: "the Political Theology of John Donne". Nicholls is keen to point out John Donne's rich trinitarian theology that paralleled his concerns for the earthly realm. Donne was a poet, a courtier, and (after much self-struggle) a priest. He was of that generation of Elizabethan and Jacobean churchmen who prized England's unique reformation heritage. The decision to defend a reformation settlement forged during her brother's earlier reign, the English Reformed reflected earlier emphases from the Reformation. Only the unlearned or propagandist will argue the Church of England was a compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism. While closer, it's not quite right to say it was a compromised between Lutheranism or the Reformed either. Rather, the Church of England solidified the irenic (and far more humanistic) Reformed positions of men like Bucer, Vermigli, and Cranmer as normative.

However, continental changes (particularly in Geneva) offered a differently developed set of Reformed doctrines. Calvin's work became increasingly reified, along with a whole host of other theologians, as the confessional age dawned. Some in the Church of England wanted more reform, linking up with brethren in Scotland (particularly Knox's followers) and on the Continent. Other were weary of further changes, but were willing friends to Reformed elsewhere (despite what later presbyterians argued, Calvin was never, in principle, opposed to bishops). The English reformation tended to preserve both the drive to systematize the doctrines of the Reformation with its earlier humanistic drive (focused not only on scripture, but patristics). As systematic theology dominated the continent, English divines became the stupor mundi (wonder of the world) for their patristic scholarship. This applied even to puritans (it was James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, who determined the authentic letters of Ignatius of Antioch). Donne was among churchmen like Lancelot Andrewes, who sought to balanced their Reformed position with a historically inclined hermeneutic of ad fontes when it came to scripture and patristic sources.

It was this theology that fueled his account of both the divine and the earthly. For Donne, the Father, Son, and Spirit ruled as one, a plurality in unity. The Father is the generator of Son and Spirit, but God is one. The Father ruled through His Word (Logos, or Reason; Word also traditionally identified with biblical Wisdom), and thus God's rule was never arbitrary. Yet even as the tri-unity God ruled, His unity in plurality spilled out into the wider creation. The heavenly court was aflutter with the wings of angels and the prayers of saints. Thus, John Donne argues:

"not only an onely God in heaven; but a Father, a Son and a Holy Ghost in that God; which are names of a plurality, and sociable relations, conversable notions. There is not only one angel, a Gabriel; but to thee all angels cry aloud; and cherubim and seraphim are plural terminations; many cherubs, many seraphs in heaven. There is not only one monarchal apostle, a Peter, but the glorious company of the apostles praise thee"

Just as heaven, Donne believed the church was a plurality in unity as well. Constituted by various dioceses and bishops, in various countries and of various tongues, Christ Jesus ruled as monarch through His various councilors (bishops, priests, etc.). Living saints and faithful departed populated this unified body of many parts, along with the whole host of angels. Donne resisted the urge among some to "depopulate [God's] country and leave him without subjects", defending the "ministry and protection of angels" and "the prayers of the saints in heaven for us". The correlary was both theological and political. Just as Donne saw those who would reduce God's throne to an arbitrary (a Logos-less God) despot, who ruled alone eternally alone, so too did Donne oppose royal absolutism. As courtier, and sometime flattered, Donne saw himself as a royal advisor: princes should not rule outside of their court, parliament, and the support of the common people. Such was not to diminish royal sovereignty, but to situate government in public institutions. Monarchs should rule while seated among councilors, and through delegated authority. As God ruled in Heaven, so kings should rule on earth.

It was in this vein that Donne opposed (his native) Roman Catholicism. He rejected the cult of saints, whose advocates "changed the kingdom of heaven into an oligarchy". While Donne revered Mary as the Mother-of-God, he attacked the popular Roman doctrine that Mary was mediatrix. She did not run a heavenly court of mercy, softening her Son's just wrath. Such was to turn wholesome piety into vulgar idolatry. As Donne stated: "howsoever subtle men may distil out of them a wholesome sense, yet vulgarly and ordinarily they beget a belief, or at least a blind practice, derogatory to the majesty and monarchy of God". In other words,

"Jehovah is the name of the whole Trinity, and there are no more, no queen-mother in heaven, no councillors in heaven in commission with the Trinity"

Donne offers an earlier, oft untaken road, among the Reformed, who often depopulated Heaven. Later Protestants, in an effort to rebut charges of superstition from Deists, made increasing moves towards a quasi-Deism. Newtonian mechanistic philosophy made realms of angels to appear mythological and quaint. And if these spirits did exist, they certainly had no influence over earthly affairs. Biblical prohibitions about necromancy or praying to spirits were interpreted as prohibitions on the childish and stupid. There was no real spiritual darkness that could be tapped through these occult practices. And yet, these efforts to "disenchant" the world (trying to cut Deist empirical positivism off at the path) drained some of the cosmic vitality from Reformed Christianity. The cheery optimism of naive common-sense and a-historic rationality made the bloody pages of the Bible appear outmoded. Nature was not spooky, but naked and apparent to all who mustered the energy to look. And yet, even as these stupid views flourished among the mildly educated, scientists, philosophers, and poets recognized the problem in such views. Sometimes it degenerated into irrational mysticism (hence the vitalist movement in the 19th and 20th centuries), but it could also mesh well with historical inquiry to understand the real (which was what Hegel's project was about). The point is that even the common-sense realism, positivism, and naive empiricism quickly showed its own inability to account for itself. The criticisms of the Deists were, in the main, empty.

My point here is not to return to an uncritical numinous philosophy, imagining fantastical creatures for every bump in the dark. And yet, there's still much that is unknown in the world. Is it impossible for malevolent, incorporeal, intelligences to exist? Science Fiction doesn't think so, as evil AIs manifest in apocalyptic stories like Terminator, I-Robot, The Matrix, etc. Again, the point isn't to mystify. However, I think the work of Walter Wink and William Stringfellow is useful here. Christian demonology, while ontic, does not require ghouls and ghosts and other spooky phenomena. Instead, they are systematic phenomena, organizing social principles. Neoliberalism can be recognized as a particular organizing force/system for private government and market idolatry, it is also a spiritual darkness. It is what St. Paul referred to as "powers and principalities" and "spiritual darkness" that reigns in the heavenlies. The dynamics of power in this world is why the Apostle can refer to the devil as "the god of this age" and ruler of the air. Similarly, organizing social phenomena that orients people towards justice, perhaps despite themselves, may be the touch of angels. God does not abandon this world, and even pagan peoples were aided by God's servants (despite their wickedness, perversion, and idolatry). Nevertheless, the heavens are populated with these powers (though, as in scripture, rational and empirically describable, even if not controllable).

Similarly, Nicholls' project should be taken seriously. The Lord's prayer instructs that one prays "your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven". The prayer is eschatological, a hearkening to the future. But expectations of that future will form what justice looks like, even as a glimmer, in the present. It does not mean that, like Donne, one becomes a courtier and advisor, but it shapes how one assesses one regime from another. Donne's theological program, like his political program, is worthy of reflection.