Katherine Rundell: commitment

Transcript context

…The early John Donne — he writes poetry about the transmigration of souls. He writes a tract defending suicide that even suggests, possibly, Christ committed suicide on purpose. Was early John Donne at all a Christian? It’s a really good question. The one that we will never know the answer to is what precise shape did his inner religious life take because, of course, the central thing that most people who know a little bit about Donne know is that he was born into a Catholic family at a time when to be Catholic was to be persecuted, and he died the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. That necessitated both a conversion and an emphaticness in his allegiance to the religion of the crown. He didn’t just cease to be a Catholic. He wrote two major tracts against Catholicism, Pseudo-Martyr and Ignatius His Conclave. The question of how far he ever believed, how far his Christianity, his Catholicism was real, and how far his later religion was real, and how far it was a necessity born of poverty or a questing ambition is something that a huge number of people will never agree on. Personally, I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. It was a time when many people changed religions throughout their lives. I think that his writing, the passion and fervor in his religious poetry, the focus and intelligence in his sermons, the breadth of dedication of thought, and the time it will have taken — I find it very easy to believe both in the reality of his Catholicism and in the reality of his Protestant conversion. Just a general question for perspective: If you take poets and intellectuals in early to mid-19th-century England, or London life, what percentage of them do you think believed, not in God, but in the Trinity, in literal Christian doctrine?…

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