The Sermons of John Donne, Volume III

The Sermons of John Donne, edited with introductions and critical apparatus by George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, Volume III, traces Donne’s preaching from April 1620 to February 1622, a transitional period culminating in his appointment as Dean of St. Paul’s. The sermons of these years reveal striking fluctuations of tone. In the early months Donne is preoccupied with human frailty, lamenting the “vanity of vanities” and expressing unease at the political and religious upheavals of Europe, particularly the collapse of the Elector Palatine’s cause after the Battle of White Mountain. At Lincoln’s Inn, he exhorts patience amid uncertainty, warning his hearers against rash judgments of monarch or state, while at Whitehall he balances admonitions against wealth and ambition with affirmations of national blessings under King James. The sermons of this period display both Donne’s capacity for sombre reflection and his insistence on trust in God despite affliction—a perspective shared with his poetry, including the Holy Sonnets of the same years.

As the volume progresses, the tone becomes more luminous, focusing on Christ as the true Light who dispels the “long and frozen winter nights of sinne.” Donne’s first sermon as Dean of St. Paul’s, preached on Christmas Day 1621, exemplifies this shift: drawing on the prologue to John’s Gospel, he presents Christ as the eternal Logos whose light informs reason, grace, and glory alike. Other notable sermons include marriage homilies that expand into meditations on the mystical union between Christ and the Church, and a Trinity Term series at Lincoln’s Inn where Donne examines each person of the Trinity in relation to the believer’s life. By the close of the period, with his formal resignation from Lincoln’s Inn, Donne emerges as a preacher of national stature. These sermons, whether marked by melancholy or radiant hope, demonstrate his gift for weaving theology, Scripture, and lived experience into prose that is at once intellectually rigorous and imaginatively compelling, laying the foundation for his great work at St. Paul’s.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1957.