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In "An Anatomie of the World" (1612), John Donne dissects the fresh corpse of the world, stopping only when he concludes that the stench has grown unbearable.¹ The putative occasion for this gruesome work was the one-year anniversary of Elizabeth Drury's death, but the poem's apocalyptic imagery has seemed too excessive to represent genuine grief for a girl Donne never knew, and the elegy has instead become famous as a meditation on the bleak worldview ushered in by atomism, Copernicism, and the rest of the "new philosophy."² In a 1623 essay that opens with a direct quote from "An Anatomie," William Drummond remarks:

The Element of Fire is quite put out, the Aire is but Water rarified, the Earth is found to move, and is no more the Center of the Universe, is turned into a Magnet. . . . Thus, Sciences by the diverse Motiones of this Globe of the Braine of Man, are become Opiniones, nay Errores, and leave the Imagination in a thousand Labyrinthes.³

Drummond's interpretation of "An Anatomie" has been widely accepted, and Donne's poem has become a favorite example of the traumatic effects of the new science.⁴

Nevertheless, there is an interesting incongruity between Drummond's essay and "An Anatomie": Donne does not view magnetism with the same gloom as Drummond. After describing the worldly decay that has followed Drury's passing, the poet cries:

This is the worlds condition now, and now She that should all parts to reunion bow, She that had all Magnetique force alone, To draw, and fasten sundered parts in one; She whom wise nature had invented then When she observ'd that every sort of men Did in their voyage in this worlds Sea stray, And needed a new compasse for their way

("A," 219-26) [End Page 1]

Even as he bemoans the loss of traditional views of nature, the poet idealizes the discovery of the compass, the very instrument that Francis Bacon hailed as the harbinger of experimental science.⁵ Moreover, by claiming Drury as a magnetic power that sustained the living earth, the poet aligns himself with a major work of the new philosophy: William Gilbert's De Magnete.⁶ Published in 1600, De Magnete offers a meticulous description of the compass, explaining its usefulness as a navigational tool by claiming that the world itself was a giant loadstone animated by a magnetic soul:

the earth's magnetic force [magnetica vis] and the formate soul or animate form of the globes . . . exert an innate action, alive [vividum], definite, directive, harmonious, through the whole mass of matter.⁷

For Gilbert, the earth's "magnetic force" made it "alive," an idea reflected in Donne's claim that the world died after its "Magnetique force" had departed. Unlike Drummond, Donne is not upset at finding "the Earth . . . turned into a Magnet." Where other recent forays into natural philosophy had reduced the world to a lifeless body of atoms, De Magnete lent credence to the poet's conceit of a vital globe.

On some level, it is unsurprising that Donne would adopt Gilbert's notion of a magnetic world-soul, for this aspect of De Magnete has often seemed wholly at odds with its experimental method. Although Gilbert's observations were hailed by Galileo as "enviable," his belief in the earth's animate nature was described by Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum as "incredible and vain," and most twentieth-century scholars similarly tended to view his metaphysical system as an embarrassing anachronism that should be overlooked when praising his empirical precision.⁸ The new philosophy, it would seem, is acceptable to Donne only when it turns out to be old. Recent study on De Magnete has demonstrated, however, that it is not so easy to separate Gilbert's research into medieval and modern components.⁹ John Henry has explained Gilbert's empirical approach as a product of his alchemical background, and in the first half of this essay, I will extend Henry's conclusions by suggesting that Gilbert arrived at his belief in a living world when his experiments confirmed the Paracelsian claim that all physical changes had psychic origins.¹⁰ The result was the view that magnetism involved the awakening of previously insentient matter, leading Gilbert to interpret his discovery of the world's magnetic nature as a sign that it possessed the same living [End Page 2] consciousness as a human mind. In the second half of this essay, I will explore the importance of De Magnete to Donne's views on grace. The poet was well versed in Paracelsian ideas, and his description of Drury as a magnetic world-soul that moves the mariner's needle reveals that he shared Gilbert's willingness to see the immaterial at work in the achievements of the experimental sciences. Indeed, as I hope to show, Donne was particularly interested in De Magnete because its empirical observations aided his efforts to revive an ancient theology of grace that had been obscured by the recent wrangling between Catholics and Calvinists over the role of human agency in salvation. Using Gilbert's theory of magnetism to illustrate the Augustinian notion of grace as a sudden awakening, Donne shifted attention back from intention onto conscious awareness, using new philosophy to justify old faith.

Prior to the publication of De Magnete, magnetic attraction was generally conceded to be a one-sided affair.¹¹ While Porphyry claimed that the loadstone placed a soul into iron and Lucretius argued that the loadstone dragged iron by bombarding it with a stream of specially shaped atoms, both mystics and materialists agreed that magnetic attraction involved no input from the iron. Gilbert rejected this traditional view, arguing instead that the iron had its magnetic nature "awakened" by the loadstone and rushed forward to embrace it:

[A]s soon as it comes within the loadstone's sphere of influence, though it be at some distance from the loadstone itself, the iron changes instantly, and has its form renewed, which before was dormant and inert, but now is alive and active. Thus the magnetic coition is the act of the loadstone and of the iron, and not of one of them alone . . . it is conactus rather than sympathy . . . thus the iron puts on anew its form; and because that is awakened, as also in order more surely to gain its form, it rushes headlong on the lodestone.

(D, 2.4)¹²

This view of the iron's active role allowed Gilbert to envision magnetic attraction not as a violent struggle of bodies or a forced imposition of will, but as a joint undertaking:

And a loadstone recalls the cognate substance, iron, to formate energy and gives it position: hence does it leap to the loadstone and eagerly conforms thereto (the forces of both harmoniously working to bring them together); for the coition is not indeterminate and confused, it is not a violent inclination of body to body, not a mad chance confluence. Here no violence is offered to bodies, there are no strifes or discords; but here we have, as the condition of the world [End Page 3] holding together, a concerted action—to wit, an accordance of the perfect, homogeneous parts of the world's globe with the whole, a mutual agreement of the chief forces therein for soundness, continuity, position, direction, and unity.

(D, 2.4)¹³

In place of the view that the loadstone compelled the iron, Gilbert saw a harmonious process that explained the unified form of the world: "[M]atter is thus awakened, and tends to union, which is the bond of the earth, and the necessary condition for the conservation of all things" (D, 2.4).¹⁴

As Gilbert's emphasis upon the awakening of iron suggests, one consequence of his theory was that loadstone and iron were both conscious beings: "[T]he properties of iron which are primal are awakened by the approach of a loadstone: like brute animals and men when awakened out of a sleep, the properties of iron now move and put forth their strength" (D, 3.13).¹⁵ And although quick to admit that iron bodies lack sensory organs, De Magnete nevertheless insists that the awareness possessed by these bodies is superior to that of humans, for it is based purely upon an innate reason:

The human soul uses reason, sees many things, investigates many more; but however well equipped, it gets light and the beginnings of knowledge from the outer senses, as from beyond a barrier—hence the very many ignorances and foolishnesses whereby our judgements and our life-actions are confused, so that few or none do rightly and duly order their acts. . . . Yet [magnetic] movements in nature's fonts are not produced by thoughts or reasonings or conjectures, like human acts, which are contingent, imperfect, and indeterminate, but connate in them are reason, knowledge, science, judgement, whence proceed acts positive and definite from the very foundations and beginnings of the world: these because of the weakness of our soul, we cannot comprehend. Wherefore, not without reason, Thales, as Aristotle reports in his book De Anima, declares the loadstone to be animate, a part of the animate mother earth and her beloved offspring.

(D, 5.12)¹⁶

For Gilbert, the loadstone, the earth, and all other magnetic bodies are made animate by their awareness of a truth that drives their harmonious motions, and though this "primal" knowledge sleeps in iron like reason in a dreamer, once awakened, it joins the iron to a cosmic striving for perfection.

As fanciful as this view of magnetism may seem, it was derived from empirical observation. Gilbert's experiments suggested that [End Page 4] magnetic attraction had no material basis, for thick objects interposed between loadstone and iron had no effect on coition. Moreover, his refutation of many occult claims (for example, the ability of garlic to block magnetic attraction) steered him away from magical notions of sympathy. In place of these previous explanations, Gilbert settled on an idea suggested to him by his medical background. A doctor by trade, Gilbert became convinced through his daily practice of the inadequacy of the Galenic theories that had driven medicine for the past fourteen centuries. Referencing the widespread practice of purging, he notes: "Medical men also (at the bidding of Galen), in proving that purgative medicines exercise attraction through likeness of substance and kinships of juices (a silly and gratuitous error) bring in as a witness the loadstone" (D, 2.2).¹⁷ Gilbert thus counseled his contemporaries not to remain overly reliant upon ancient authority, but to make themselves aware of recent discoveries in natural philosophy. As he notes in the preface to De Magnete:

To those men of early times and, as it were, first parents of philosophy, to Aristotle, Theophrastus, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Galen, be due honor rendered ever, for from them has knowledge descended to those that have come after them: but our age has discovered and brought to light many things which they too, were they among the living, would cheerfully adopt.

(D, xxx)

Instead of mindlessly following the bidding of past doctors, Gilbert committed himself to what he believed was their larger example: a cheerful willingness to be enlightened.

In Gilbert's view, one source of such enlightenment was the new chemical approach to physic developed by Paracelsus in the sixteenth century. As a contemporary observed, Gilbert "addicted himself to chemistry, attaining to great exactness therein."¹⁸ A major feature of this chemical approach to medicine was the emphasis it placed upon the heavens. Complaining that previous doctors' ignorance about astrology had mistakenly led them to dismiss many illnesses as either imagined or incurable, Paracelsus claimed that all disease had astral origins: "Heaven makes disease: the physician drives it away again."¹⁹ This theory of pathology was frequently seen as blasphemous, for it implied that God was responsible for human corruption and suffering, but in fact Paracelsus's view of disease was less a foray into theodicy than a result of the primacy he placed upon the imagination. For Paracelsus, all corporeal changes originated in the imagination, which was not simply a faculty of the conscious mind, but the [End Page 5] animating spirit of all of nature. Indeed, as Paracelsus reveals in De Virtute Imaginativa, this metaphysical perspective formed the basis for his theory of disease:

Let no one be surprised that corporeal works should proceed from the imagination, since similar results are manifest with other things. The whole heaven, indeed, is nothing other than an imagination. Heaven works in man, stirs up plagues, sores, and other things, but it does not produce these by corporeal instruments, but after the same manner that the sun burns. The sun indeed is of one power only, the moon of one power only, and every separate star is of one power only. Man, however, is altogether a star. Even as he imagines himself to be, such he is, and he is that also which he imagines. If he imagines fever, there results fever; if war, then war ensues; and so on in like manner. This is the whole reason why the imagination is in itself a complete sun.²⁰

While the heavens are the ultimate source of sickness, the human mind possesses an imaginative power that makes it "altogether a star." No less than the sun, man's imagination can transform his body, so that when "he imagines fever, there results fever." For this reason, Paracelsus claimed that plague could take root when the rotting odor of a corpse prompted people to recoil in fear as they imagined themselves succumbing in a similar manner. With the seeds of disease thus planted in the imagination, the mind proceeded to make the body sick by physically generating the same phenomena that were imprinted upon its psyche.²¹ Although Paracelsus never offers a fully systematic faculty psychology, allowing terms like belief, imagination, and knowledge to merge into each other, there is nevertheless a core coherence to his views. Because he sees mind as the driving force behind all natural change, he views the cosmos as a web of different psychic repositories that exert influence by tapping into each other's awareness. The collection of sensations, images, and beliefs that people experience as their imagination is thus a miniature of the animate perception that characterizes the universe as a whole, and people's experience of the way their mind drives their body is a small-scale version of the way that all physical change occurs.

Paracelsus exerted an increasing influence in England from the late sixteenth century onwards, in no small part because his focus upon subjective awareness filled a gap in the traditional medicine of the period.²² Galenic physic paid little attention to patients' firsthand experience of living within their bodies and instead concentrated [End Page 6] almost exclusively on humoral theory, anatomy, and other objective accounts of health and sickness. Paracelsus's psychological focus, however, not only brought sudden attention to bear upon mania, dementia, and other types of mental disturbance, but by stressing the psychosomatic components of illness also helped to inaugurate a more holistic approach to medicine. Even doctors who continued to hold to the general tenets of Galenic medicine thus often adopted some of Paracelsus's ideas about the mental aspects of health, and Gilbert's own comments about Paracelsus reveal a similar open-mindedness. Although Gilbert is quick to reject some of Paracelsus's specific claims about the magnet, he also shows a willingness to defend the medical man from undue criticism. At the outset of De Magnete, for example, he asserts "Thomas Erastus, knowing naught of the nature of the loadstone, draws from it weak arguments [infirmas rationes] against Paracelsus" (D, 1.1).

Indeed, Gilbert's explanation for the loadstone's powers draws explicitly upon Paracelsian views of causation. He asserts in De Magnete that the "cause" of magnetic coition is the "form" of magnetic bodies:

[I]t is the form of the prime and principal globes; and it is of the homogenous and not altered parts thereof, the proper entity and existence which we may call the primary, radical, and astral form; not Aristotle's prime form, but that unique form which keeps and orders its own globe. Such form is in each globe—the sun, the moon, the stars—one; in earth also is one, and it is that true magnetic power which we call the primary energy . . . for there is in the earth a magnetic strength or energy of its own, as sun and moon have each its own forma.

(D, 2.4)²³

Here, Gilbert carefully distinguishes his own notion of form from the traditional scholastic view, asserting that he is interested in the "astral form . . . which keeps and orders its own globe." His emphasis on the "astral" origins of causation aligns him with the central theme of Paracelsian medicine, and he is at pains to emphasize Paracelsus's claim that each stellar body has its own unique form. In an echo of Paracelsus's remark that "[t]he sun indeed is of one power only, the moon of one power only, and every separate star is of one power only," Gilbert says of the astral form: "This form is unique and peculiar. . . . Such form is in each globe—the sun, the moon, the stars—one; in earth also is one." Following Paracelsus's assertion that astral bodies possessed their own individual power, Gilbert's discovery [End Page 7] of the world's "true magnetic power" has led him to believe that it, too, had an astral form. Although Robert Fludd vigorously criticized De Magnete for departing from Paracelsus's specific views about the nature of the earth, in fact Gilbert upholds the core teachings of Paracelsianism.²⁴ By using the theory of astral form to explain the magnetic properties of the world, Gilbert does not challenge the views of the Swiss physician, but uses experimental research to extend their domain. In the same way that Gilbert honors Galen not by pedantically adopting his precise theories but by instead assuming his general spirit of curiosity, so too does De Magnete find the essence of Paracelsus in his experimental discovery of astral form.

Gilbert's belief in the world's astral form explains the connection he makes between magnetism and conscious behavior. Just as Paracelsus thought that the harmonious behavior of worldly bodies demonstrated their government by a heavenly imagination, so too did Gilbert think that the earth's unified function must be driven by a conscious purpose. He remarks of the effects of the earth's magnetic power: "[M]atter is thus awakened, and tends to union, which is the bond of the earth." Any matter influenced by magnetism is thus awake and aware, quite literally—as Gilbert puts it—"alive" [vividum]. As a result, not only the world itself, but all individual magnetic bodies—from loadstones to magnetized iron—participate in the same conscious purpose that Paracelsus had located in the stars. This is why Gilbert claims that when a piece of iron is brought near a loadstone, it "puts on anew its form; and because that is awakened, as also in order more surely to gain its form, it rushes headlong on the loadstone." Through his discovery of the earth's magnetic power, Gilbert was encouraged to elaborate upon the psychic account of causation developed by chemical medicine. Adapting Paracelsus's claim that bodily change occurs when the mind becomes suddenly conscious of a plague-ridden corpse, De Magnete argues that iron moves when the loadstone awakens its slumbering awareness.

Donne not only owned a copy of Gilbert's De Magnete, but directly cited it in his Essays on Divinity, written during the same period as "The Anatomy of the World."²⁵ Moreover, in his "To Mr. Tilman After He Had Taken Orders" (c. 1619), Donne explicitly references Gilbert's view that magnetic coition is marked by the awakening of a new awareness in the iron:

What bringst thou home with thee? How is thy mind Affected since the vintage? Dost thou find [End Page 8] New thoughts and stirrings in thee? And as Steel Touched with a loadstone, dost new motions feel?²⁶

Here is Gilbert's notion that magnetic bodies are not—as had previously been assumed—insentient beings, but possess consciousness. In fact, Donne's grasp of De Magnete is so exact that he preserves Gilbert's unusual claim that the iron has the same body before and after magnetization. As Gilbert claims, "A body that is attracted by a magnetic body is not by it altered, but remains unimpaired and unchanged as it was before" (D, 2.4), so too does Donne assert of Tilman: "Thou art the same materials, as before, / Only the stamp is changed; but no more."²⁷

In drawing upon De Magnete in this manner, Donne is making a witty point about the transformation his friend has undergone since taking orders. On the one hand, Tilman is unchanged, made of the same clay as always. But on the other, he has assumed a new knowledge of "Gods message," and although this heightened state of awareness cannot be discerned from his external features, it is as real as the change in the human condition wrought by Christ's sacrifice: "so hath grace / Changed only Gods old Image by Creation, / To Christs new stamp, at this thy Coronation."²⁸ Gilbert is thus useful to Donne because his view of magnetism allows the poet to imagine the strange alteration that has taken place in his friend. Like magnetized iron, which is outwardly indistinguishable from ordinary iron but has an inner knowledge that has lent it life, so too has grace produced a fundamental reorientation of Tilman's perspective. Although he retains the physical form given by God at creation, he now is suddenly possessed of the power "[t]o open life."²⁹ So powerful is this apparently imperceptible change of consciousness that it can awaken insentient things and make them living.

This emphasis on an emergent awareness similarly informs Donne's use of magnetism in "An Anatomy of the World." For all the poet's despair at the extent of the world's corruption, he remains optimistic that Drury's passing can prepare the way for a new time of paradise. He insists that although the world has lost its "sense and memory" ("A," 28), there remain those who can make use of the knowledge gained by its demise:

Let no man say, the world itselfe being dead 'Tis labor lost to have discovered The worlds infirmities, since there is none Alive to study this dissectione.

("A," 63-66) [End Page 9]

Although the world is no longer living, the readers of Donne's poem remain alive and aware, and those who grasp Drury's "worth" find that that "in this last long night . . . The twilight of her memory doth stay / Which, from the carcass of the old world, free, / Creates a new world" ("A," 69-75). In effect, a new world can be located in the consciousness of those who survive Drury and profit from her memory. Nevertheless, there appears to be some tension in the poet's mind as to what exactly inheres in this consciousness. By first suggesting that something can be learned from "dissectione," the poet indicates that the "worlds infirmities" are in themselves instructive; however, by then claiming that the memory of Drury is redemptive, he appears to contradict his initial statement. After all, if the admirable example of Drury's virtue can make a new world, why study the gross deformities of the old?

The poet's discussion of the loadstone provides an answer to this puzzle. Despite the litany of complaints brought against Copernicus and his ilk, the poet retains a positive view of recent discoveries about magnetism. What makes the magnet different from other objects of natural philosophizing, in the poet's view, is that it continually reminds people of their involvement in an order that extends beyond themselves. In the lines that preface his discussion of the loadstone, the poet rails that the new philosophy has destroyed all sense of perspective, generating a vast egotism:

'Tis all in pieces, all cohaerence gone; All just supply, and all Relation: Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot, For every man alone thinkes he hath got To be a Phoenix, and that there can bee None of that kind, of which he is, but hee.

("A," 213-18)

The rise of the new science has driven out all consciousness of natural hierarchy, so that people no longer think of themselves as sons and subjects, but—like the phoenix—uniquely self-begot.

At this point, the poet turns to the alternate perspective encouraged by recent understandings of the loadstone, first referencing the earth-soul of De Magnete and then comparing Drury to the mariner's needle. This last simile preserves Gilbert's sense of the way that the magnet awakens understanding, although now of course it is not alerting iron to its hidden powers but giving sailors knowledge of their whereabouts. Moreover, this simile drives home the fact that [End Page 10] people must recognize not only the power of the loadstone but their constant dependence upon that power. While the compass renders the world into a comprehensible whole, it does not do so in a single magic act. Instead, mariners must be continually aware that they need the loadstone's guidance in order for it to be effective. Otherwise, no matter how many compasses they possess, they will still "in this worlds Sea stray." In short, the study of magnetism differs from other recent forays into natural philosophy because it leads not to a sense of self-sufficiency but to a conscious recognition of a greater power. By likening Drury to a compass, Donne reveals that her example is not redemptive in and of itself. Rather, it is a source of salvation only when it leads to a new awareness. The poet's decision to anatomize the dead world thus does not detract from his emphasis upon the saving power of Drury's example; rather, it generates a feeling of shock and despair that prepares for the realization that life without Drury is like an ocean voyage without a compass.

Ben Jonson claimed that Donne's poem was "profane and full of blasphemies" for attributing so much to the power of a single woman, but "An Anatomie" is not intended to generate a myopic obsession with Drury herself.³⁰ As Donne reveals in the first of his Holy Sonnets, the supreme example of a magnetic body is not Drury, but God. Like "An Anatomie," this sonnet—entitled "Thou hast made me"—opens with an anguished encounter with death: "I runne to death, and death meets me as fast."³¹ In following lines, the poet elaborates the psychological effects of his confrontation with mortality—"Despaire behind, and death before doth cast / Such terrour" ("H," 5-6)—and at last his fears grow so great that he admits, "not one houre I can my selfe sustaine" ("H," 12). Just as in "An Anatomie," however, this mood of despair ends when magnetic attraction is used to imagine salvation. Begging God to protect him from his "old subtle foe" ("H," 11) the poet cries: "Thy Grace may wing me to prevent his art / And thou like Adamant draw mine iron heart" ("H," 13-14).³² For Donne, the magnetic power that holds things together flows ultimately from God, and so when he wrote "An Anatomie," he was not seriously implying that a fourteen-year-old girl was the source of worldly unity. As the poet explained in response to Jonson's critique, she was a symbol of a divine "Ideal."³³ Just as each loadstone is a manifestation of the greater purpose embedded in the world's astral form, so too is Drury's "Magnetique power" evidence of the larger logic of heavenly grace. [End Page 11]

By using the loadstone to illustrate his understanding of grace, Donne offers a moment of insight into his religious perspective. In general, the theology of Donne's religious verse has proved frustratingly elusive. Many readers have stressed the poet's fervent desire to be saved, arguing that he betrays the Arminian or even Catholic view that the will of the worshipper is an important precursor to salvation.³⁴ Others have felt, however, that the poet's hyperbolic demands reveal a Calvinist despair at the insignificance of his own will.³⁵ Confronted with this interpretative impasse, many scholars have come to the conclusion that the tensions and ambiguities of his poetry are permanently irresolvable, a consequence of Donne's active mind, or of his poetic sensibilities, or of the thorniness of the theology involved.³⁶ The loadstone, however, was a well-established way for Christian thinkers to illustrate difficult points of theology. Augustine had cited the magnet as evidence for the existence of hell, Nicholas of Cusa had used it to claim that people are naturally inclined to seek the wisdom of God, and Albertus Magnus had argued that it proved the existence of the great chain of being.³⁷ Donne's similar hope for the loadstone is indicated by its prominent place—it is the culmination of the holy sonnet used to introduce the entire sequence—and indeed a number of critics have already attempted to use the image of the loadstone as a window into the poet's religious perspective.³⁸ Even so, this effort has encountered the same problem besetting other interpretations of Donne's religious lyrics. While Barbara Lewalski asserts that this image demonstrates the total helplessness of the speaker, Paul Cefalu argues that it instead reveals the speaker actively asserting his worth.³⁹ Once again, scholarship has run aground on the issue of intention.

Both Lewalski and Cefalu, however, base their interpretations on slender discussions of magnetism. The former cites a single contemporary emblem, while the latter quotes a treatise published after the poet's death. Neither critic references Gilbert, and for this reason, neither recognizes why Donne would have perceived magnetism as an effective image for clarifying his views on grace. As we have seen, Gilbert understands magnetic attraction as a sudden awakening, and like Paracelsus before him, he looks not to the will but to a conscious imagination as the origin of bodily change. He thus makes conscious experience, not intention, the center of his metaphysics. This is not to say that Gilbert entirely disregards the issue of agency. He makes it clear that the iron is a participant in the process of unification, for it "runs" [ruit] to meet the loadstone (D, 2.4). Nevertheless, by [End Page 12] stressing the subjective experience of attraction, Gilbert reveals that, from the iron's perspective, the significance of this process lies ultimately not in the exercise of intention but in a feeling of awakening. The iron is compelled by its abrupt consciousness of its larger destiny, finding meaning in an age-old purpose that has suddenly become part of its current perspective.

Like De Magnete, both "An Anatomie" and "Thou hast made me" stress the importance of conscious experience over the will. Throughout "An Anatomie," the poet rails against the blindness of his contemporaries, attempting to move them to despair. He asserts that "thou, sicke world mistak'st thy selfe to bee / Well, when alas, thou'rt in a Letargee" ("A," 23-24), and that Adam and Eve fell because "strength . . . by confidence growes weake" ("A," 86), and that "profusely blind, / We kill our selves, to propagate our kinde" ("A," 109-10). All these claims align death with a lack of awareness, and by alerting readers to their own frailty, the poet prepares for a consciousness of the unifying power of Drury's magnetic force. The emphasis thus falls not on intentional decision-making but upon an awakening, and indeed by drawing on De Magnete's account of the psychic origins of magnetism, "An Anatomie" arrives at an account of disease very like that of Gilbert's own source. No less than the plague-ridden corpses that figure in Paracelsian pathology, Donne's grisly image of the world's rotting body claims the power to stir a transformative despair. "Thou hast made me" similarly stresses the potential of an emergent consciousness of death, suggesting that like iron roused by the loadstone into life, the poet has been awakened to the life to come. So it is that when the poet broaches the subject of agency, he does so in a manner identical to that of Gilbert. Of his own mortality, the poet observes, "I runne to death, and death meets me as fast." With its tangle of agencies, this line is not invested in whether the poet or death is ultimately responsible for their encounter. Rather, this line is an attempt to make clear the poet's conscious awareness of his involvement in a larger destiny. Like Gilbert's iron, which is awakened to "run" headlong towards the loadstone, so too does the poet experience himself running towards an end that is compelling because he cannot imagine it any other way.

By using magnetism to symbolize an emergent awareness of a greater reality, Donne thus is able to admit the greater order of things while explaining the personal investment of each individual in that order. Like the works of Paracelsus and Gilbert, which locate the origins of change in astral form, "An Anatomie" and "Thou hast made [End Page 13] me" look to the heavens as the source of ultimate purpose. At the same time, though, this external cause is not experienced as an imposition from without. Because it emerges within the poet's consciousness, it manifests itself as part of his own personal perspective, and the poet, no less than Gilbert's iron, feels himself actively pursuing unity with his original. Making abrupt demands such as "Repaire me now" ("H," 2), the poet reveals the fervent desire that has followed in the wake of his new consciousness. When scholars debate over Donne's views of the origins of salvation, they thus threaten to obscure the theological perspective of his poems. In these works, grace is meaningful not because it represents a personal choice, nor because it bears the stamp of God's absolute authority. Rather, it is meaningful because it emerges through the personal experience of awakening into a larger destiny.

Despite Donne's general conviction that the "new philosophy" is opposed to the religious traditions he holds dear, this magnetic view of grace does not break with previous theology, but in fact revives a thousand-year-old perspective on redemption. In the sixteenth century, Martin Luther had railed against the view that the taking of the Eucharist was an intentional act, a so-called "good work."⁴⁰ For Luther, the Eucharist was instead an encounter that made the worshipper aware of the possibility of a future reunification with God. Even as Luther denied human agency, however, he preserved the value of personal perspective by insisting that the Eucharist was meaningful only from within the subjective experience of each individual worshipper. Calling the sacrament itself "the external sign," he placed emphasis upon that which "is internal, within the heart . . . the attitude the heart should have towards the external sacrament." Most of his contemporaries, he claimed, had disregarded this internal attitude: "[T]hey discuss exclusively . . . the sign or sacrament, not teaching faith, but their preparations and works, participations and fruits of the mass. They come then to the profundities, babble of transubstantiation and endless other metaphysical trivialities, disregarding faith and causing Christ's people to forget their God."⁴¹ Condemning this focus on external matters such as the metaphysics of action and outcome, Luther shifts attention inward, describing the experience of feeling despair banished by a striving for unity with God.

Luther attributed this focus on the subjective experience of grace to Augustine, and indeed the Confessions explicitly treats conversion as an awakening. Roused from a lengthy bout of misery by a child's [End Page 14] voice telling him to read, Augustine remembers how Anthony had "fortuitously" [forte] come across a reading of the gospel and listened "as if it were intended for him."⁴² Augustine then picks up the gospel and reads where his eyes happen to fall, feeling a sudden sense of purpose rouse him from "darkness" [tenebrae].⁴³ Plainly, the event that prompts this conversion does not originate within Augustine himself. Nevertheless, because it is prepared for by his psychological state, and because he experiences it as part of his subjective consciousness, it becomes an intimate part of his personal perspective. Unlike the theologians that Luther accuses of obsessively dwelling upon outward detail, Augustine finds meaning by internalizing an external event. For him the issue of intention is subordinate to psychological experience, supporting Luther's view that his contemporaries had lost sight of the real meaning of grace through their investment in the mechanisms of works and rewards.

Despite Luther's efforts to shift attention back towards the inward feeling of grace, his attack on the logic of good works was used by subsequent reformers, most notably John Calvin, to underwrite the doctrine of predestination. Rather than shifting emphasis from external mechanism to inward experience, the Protestants who followed Luther thus rejected one mechanism in favor of another. While Catholics insisted that individual Christians could play an active role in their own salvation, Calvinists thundered about God's omnipotence. Luther's attempted revival of inwardness had instead renewed fascination with the metaphysics of salvation, and the resulting debates over human agency created an awkward situation for the preachers of Donne's time. Charged with upholding Calvinist doctrine, they did not wish to encourage overconfidence in the value of the human will, and yet they were also aware that belief in a timeless elect could produce its own presumption.⁴⁴ As Donne noted in his own sermons, there was something equally troubling about "those men, who in an over-valuation of their own merits, think to save themselves and others too, by their supererogations" and "those men, who in an over-valuation of their own purity, despise others, as men whom nothing can save."⁴⁵

Given this distaste for the self-importance bred by detached considerations of the mechanics of grace, it is not surprising that Donne's sermons seek to emphasize the psychological experience of awaking into grace: [End Page 15]

The gentiles, in their ignorance, are dead; we, in our corrupt nature, dead, as dead as they, we cannot heare the voice, we cannot see the light; without Gods subsequent grace, the Christian can no more proceed, than the Gentile can without his preventing grace. But, because, amongst us, he hath established the Gospell, and in the ministry and dispensation thereof, ordinary meanes for the conveyance of his farther grace, we now are but asleep and may wake.⁴⁶

Although God has given Christians "preventing grace," this grace is useless to them in their unconscious stupor. Only when they are exposed to God's "subsequent grace" do they awaken from their insentient state and into the fullness of faith. The emphasis here is upon a grace conferred upon the worshipper from without, and yet like Luther and Augustine, Donne's investment in a conscious awakening allows him to argue that individual worshippers are directly involved in their own salvation. Quoting Augustine's claim that the most powerful joy comes out of despair, Donne notes:

This is the way of joy, not to seek occasions of sorrow, which they have not, but to finde out those which they have, and know not; that is, their secret sins, the causes of Gods judgements in themselves. To discern that that correction that is upon me is from God, and not a naturall accident, this is a beam of joy, for I see that he would cure me, though by corrosives.⁴⁷

Although the lashings of God's judgment awaken the need for grace, it is when worshippers discern that their suffering flows from God that they experience the joy of grace. Because grace is not a mechanical process, but one that occurs within the space of the individual awareness, the worshippers who possess this awareness are themselves crucial participants in their own salvation. As Donne goes on to observe: "[I]t is not enough to come to a sorrow in my sin, that may flow out into despair, but I must come to a joy in my sorrow, for that fixes me upon the application of Christ, and such a joy a man must suscitate and awaken in himself." At the end of his sermon, Donne qualifies this assessment of human agency, remarking that joy should ultimately be seen as a spontaneous response to the awareness of God's presence: "[T]he seeing of God shall produce in us . . . Joy. The measure of our seeing God is the measure of Joy."⁴⁸ Nevertheless, when Donne argues that Christians must "suscitate and awaken" this joy in themselves, he is not forgetting that God is ultimately the source of grace. Rather, he is making the point that because the [End Page 16] recognition—the seeing—of God occurs within the individual consciousness, the individual is consciously involved in grace. Through the sensation of awakening first into despair and then into joy, the worshipper finds grace, as Donne notes, "in himself."

When Donne uses the magnet in his poetry to illustrate this experience of awakening, he thus is not using new science to replace old beliefs. Rather, he sees in De Magnete a way to renew awareness of a theological perspective that was in danger of being forgotten amidst metaphysical disputes over the significance of the human will. Like Augustine's Confessions, "An Anatomie" and "Thou hast made me" emphasize terrible despair as a source of awakening. Despair alone, however, cannot produce the change of consciousness associated with grace. Luther frankly admitted that an excess of despair doomed individuals by separating them from God, and Donne himself shares this concern.⁴⁹ By ending "An Anatomie" when the corpse begins to stink too heavily, the poet reveals that his final aim is not to reproduce the killing odor described by Paracelsian pathology. Instead, by turning to the image of a magnetic force, the poet reminds his readers of Augustine's discovery of a divine meaning in despair. Just as Augustine becomes aware through his suffering of his dependence upon God, the sailors of Donne's poem become conscious, after wandering lost at sea, of a magnetic power that unifies the world. Gilbert's descriptions of the rousing of iron to its greater purpose thus support Augustinian theology, so that a novel course of experiment justifies a long-established perspective on grace. Nevertheless, the sense of newness infused into Donne's poems by his references to magnetism was not inappropriate to his purpose. The poet was not interested in producing an academic reminder of past theologies; he wanted the urgency of a sudden realization, of something long-true becoming intimate to the moment. By referencing the fresh insights of De Magnete, Donne was able to generate this sense of epiphany, awakening his readers to a new sense of life by reminding them of their original.