I think Dun's own faith is theology. It saw salvation as something that was simple, not as a kind of complicated wrangling. Sifting is a wonderful image of how you work through your life and a contrite. That's not to say that it's a fear-based faith. I think he talks about the love of God a lot in his sermons. The paradoxical idea that the best days are the ones where you shake with fear is very much live throughout Dun's whole life and career. And it's not of perhaps linear progress of getting better all the time, but rather always kind of hanging in the balance,. looking both ways and recognising your own fragility.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Donne (1573-1631), known now as one of England’s finest poets of love and notable in his own time as an astonishing preacher. He was born a Catholic in a Protestant country and, when he married Anne More without her father's knowledge, Donne lost his job in the government circle and fell into a poverty that only ended once he became a priest in the Church of England. As Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, his sermons were celebrated, perhaps none more than his final one in 1631 when he was plainly in his dying days, as if preaching at his own funeral.
The image above is from a miniature in the Royal Collection and was painted in 1616 by Isaac Oliver (1565-1617)
With
Mary Ann Lund
Associate Professor in Renaissance English Literature at the University of Leicester
Sue Wiseman
Professor of Seventeenth Century Literature at Birkbeck, University of London
And
Hugh Adlington
Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham