Making Mental Images

Aristotle held that the intellect thinks with “images.” The paradigm stuck. How were these images relevant to rhetoric? How did they arise in the mind? An enargetic rhetoric first needs to evoke mental images before it can make persuasive use of them. This chapter explores the variables of enargetic style and how Bacon and Donne employ unique enargetic styles in the New Atlantis and the Verse Letters, respectively, to evoke persuasive mental images.^[2]

I will use the term “mental image” here to refer to the mental product that one particular capability of the imaginative faculty produces. It is the part that can take a variety of discrete and already existing memory images—what Aristotle called phantasmata—and build them into composite thoughts, cohering into a larger image that can be “seen” in the mind. I am speaking, then, not of the phantasmata that Aristotle held were stored in memory for thinking but of the more distinct mental images made from them when combined by the imagination. Such composite mental images are not the only kind of images in the mind, from an Aristotelian point of view, just as the process of putting one together is not the only function of the imagination. It is the rhetorical usefulness of such composite mental images that I shall consider here.

Aristotle made the distinction between memory and recollection, and he held that memory was the “having of an image (phantasma), relating as a likeness to that of which it is an image.”^[3] The faculty of imagination produces phantasmata by turning sense perceptions into a form that can be stored in memory and used as the basis for further mental activities, such as recall, intellectual reflection, and especially, the creative reconstitution of phantasmata into new composite mental images. Aristotle’s discussion itself is complicated by the difficulties of his use of terms.^[4] What is of most concern here is the means by which his paradigm was transmitted through the rhetorical tradition, becoming available as a cognitive model for early modern writers and speakers to draw on in rhetorical practice.

Karnes helpfully describes Aristotle’s paradigm of the imagination’s primary function of storing sense data, as it developed in medieval theories of cognition. It is a process whereby “the senses pass data on to common sense and then to imagination. Imagination’s image, or phantasma, configures the data in such a way that the intellect can act on them, separating the intelligible wheat from the sensible chaff. The intellect does this through abstraction (for Aristotelians), illumination (for Augustinians).”^[5]

I am interested here in what rhetoric can do with phantasmata by stimulating creative combination. It is the combinatory capability of the imagination, to put various phantasmata together, which rhetoric may most exploit—a capability that grew more and more frightening for Renaissance thinkers thanks to its unpredictable power.^[6] The mental image then is a product of the vis cogitativa, the mental capability that Carruthers has linked to the act of “trained recollection” or mental composition.^[7] Mental images are the compositions that people make mentally in response to rhetoric, constructed out of items in personal and cultural memory, that is, from the things they “know.” Here I want to examine the early modern rhetor’s ability to activate recollection and make composite mental images happen in a reader’s mind. How do Bacon and Donne use those processes variously for their own divergent concerns?

Enargeia and the Evocation of Mental Images

In coming to the issue of how to evoke mental images in listeners or readers, ancient and Renaissance theorists focused, unsurprisingly, on the sorts of techniques that most engage the imagination and memory: metaphor, allegory, and, of course, enargeia, or vivid description, in which a “visible” set of memories were set as if before the eyes (sub oculos subiectio). In Latin the technique was called evidentia.^[8] The imagination and memory were closely linked.^[9] Their connection derives in large part from the Aristotelian distinction between memory (memoria) and recollection (reminiscendi), a foundational distinction prevalent even up to the work of Locke and Hume, until it began to be taken apart by Hegel and others.^[10] Visual memory in particular was central to mental image making and thus to epistemology and persuasion. In De Oratore, Cicero’s Crassus wonders why people enjoy metaphor so much. He suggests that it is because metaphor engages the sense of sight in particular.^[11] Quintilian’s first mention of enargeia also links it closely to sight.^[12] In the Rhetoric, Aristotle points out that imaginative engagement comes from a lively, vivid picture, which represents “activity.”^[13] For Thomas Wilson, “among all the senses, the eyesight is most quick and conteineth the impression of things more assuredly than any of the other senses do.”^[14] Wilson imitates and further develops the comment made about metaphor by Cicero’s Cassus in De Oratore, mentioned above. Crassus’s point about the effect of metaphor—“He who listens is lead by further cogitation”—becomes the following in Wilson: “The hearer is lead by cogitation upon rehearsal of a metaphor, and thinketh more by rememberance of a word translated [metaphor] than is there expressly spoken.”^[15] The most significant and powerful techniques for an enargetic rhetoric will be those that dig the most out of visual memory with which to cogitate.

Forms of ellipsis like synecdoche as well as sharp metaphorical contrasts allow the orator to dig into an audience’s visual memory, but it was enargeia, through its specification of details, that most enabled Bacon and Donne to direct the creation of useful mental images.^[16] Metaphor may mine familiar things out of memory by virtue of its comparisons, but metaphor and enargeia are distinct. A metaphoric comparison may involve no enargeia, and a distinct mental image present to the “mind’s eye” does not necessarily involve an explicit comparison with another field of meaning, though, of course, it may. Enargeia involves a number of distinct qualities, which I want now to focus on for a moment in order to elucidate what is encompassed in an “enargetic” style.

Enargeia is often described as “vivid description,” but it is a multivalent term. For Quintilian, enargeia is what happens when an orator has vividly imagined a mental picture of an “absent thing.” The effect of his subsequent description will be as if he is exhibiting something rather than just talking about it. Quintilian holds that emotion is most reliably generated if we display it ourselves, but, he asks, in one of his major discussions of emotion, how do we become moved ourselves? The answer is to bring forth phantasiai from memory—from the stock of abstracted and remembered sense perceptions that Aristotle called phantasmata—visions of absent things. Orators should do it as if they were actually seeing those memories with their eyes and as if the contents were physically present. The orator who can do that and make the audience see it as well will have great emotional power.^[17] If, for example, you want to generate pity, first in yourself and then in your audience, Quintilian says, make the details of the pitiable situation not only present and visible to the mind’s eye but make it personal, as if it affected your and your audience closely.^[18] In another place, Quintilian links enargeia to clarity of style and to the expression of detail.^[19] In yet another place, enargeia means, for Quintilian, showing how something took place, instead of just stating that it did.^[20] Those attempts to explain it are not necessarily contradictory, simply dispersed throughout separate discussions.

In an effort to bring together Quintilian’s version(s) of enargeia, critics from the Renaissance to the present have come up with a useful variety of ways to explain what it is. For Erasmus it is like setting up “a picture to look at,” turning the hearer or reader into an “audience at a theatre.”^[21] If enargeia is about “seeing,” then, for Walker, it is the “representation of spectatorship,” or textual self-consciousness, that “enhances” a narrative’s “visibility,” and thus its enargetic power.^[22] Textual self-consciousness thus is one means of identifying a text as enargetic. Marion Wells emphasizes enargeia’s absorptive quality, the way it takes a reader or hearer in.^[23] Other critics have noted enargeia’s ability to take the audience into the “presence” of the vividly described object. Through enargeia, Sharpling states, “the graphic portrayal of living experience” is intended “to construct a credible image which will take the audience into the presence of an object.”^[24] Lunde summarizes it thus: “Enargeia amounts to visual clarity, immediacy and strong emotional appeal.”^[25] The enargetic, then, is all of these: descriptive, vivid, emotional, theatrical, sudden, physical, visible, and absorbing, taking us into the “presence” of what is described.

How else can we know whether a given example of rhetorical activity is enargetic, something to be “seen,” and thus is supposed to evoke mental images? Two significant critical discussions offer help on the question of criteria. Beth Innocenti’s discussion of the linguistic markers of “vivid description” offers some useful criteria, including the way a text mentions the particulars of a scene rather than over-using descriptive adjectives and adverbs, and the way it includes auditory and other sensory details rather than merely the visual, as well as the way it notes forceful or sudden actions, and uses contrast.^[26] But that begs another question: Is it the case, Scholz asks, that the reader is turned into a spectator simply by having paid attention to the “enargeia-signals in the text,” or does the reader have to have become a spectator first before recognizing that the text has enargetic qualities?^[27] Do we, that is, experience mental images in Bacon’s and Donne’s texts first, before taking cognizance of the enargetic qualities in their writing, or is it the other way around? Scholz’s answer—again, a useful one—is to suggest that in enargeia the reader becomes a spectator when he or she sees “seeing itself.” “The reader, one might put it, discovers his own double in the scene.”^[28] When a trace of that textual self-consciousness is left in the text, it is something the critic can recognize without having, necessarily, to become a spectator himself. From that point of view, even while many mental images will occur to many different readers differently in different readings, a text’s attempt to give rise to a specific mental image can be subjected to rhetorical analysis to the extent that it is clearly self-conscious about scenes being seen. Two different critical readers may see different mental images in the same text but may agree that a mental image is being evoked to the extent that the textual self-consciousness of spectatorship is being constructed—though that will not be totally independent of the process of actually constructing their own mental image. We see mental images “naturally,” but also take the cues provided by an enargetic rhetoric when forming them. The critic may still see the mental image, even if estranged from the full rational and emotional force it was intended to have in a historical context.

Like a cue, self-conscious spectatorship, then, is another means for the orator or writer, alongside “vivid description,” to encourage listeners and readers to build composite mental images in a certain way. That is to say, through spectatorship an enargetic rhetorical style extends beyond the merely descriptive. It makes the reader recognize his or her own “seeing.” Considering enargetic style aside from description is an important critical perspective when coming to Donne’s Verse Letters. Given the genre and the tight metacommunicative context, including an established intimacy and shared but unstated knowledge, Donne can rely more confidently on a particular sort of mental image actually occurring to his friends than if he were writing (in print) to unknown readers.^[29] To that extent, in Donne’s Verse Letters there is less trace of vivid description by which we might identify an enargetic rhetoric that will evoke a mental image. The criterion of self-conscious spectatorship thus becomes important. Donne does not have to—and does not have the space to—specify as many vivid particulars and describe physically appealing scenes in order to bridge some intimacy-gap. Bacon, however, must do that because his New Atlantis—one great big mental image itself—needs to make a distant and generalized readership put together something inherently unfamiliar: a unique utopian vision. An appeal to the broadly familiar—the sensual—is therefore important for him. Donne, however, can predict to a greater extent what will occur to his readers since they are, in this instance, close friends. While we cannot recover in much detail the knowledge he shared with his readers in the Verse Letters or predict what occurred to Donne’s friends as they read his letters, it is possible to use what we do know of the context to inquire about further criteria (beyond vivid description) for establishing the enargetic qualities of his verse, and what the potentially resulting mental images were being made to do.

To the criteria of vivid description and self-conscious spectatorship, I would like to add one more. For an enargetic rhetoric to evoke and control a useful mental image, the scene needs to be easily locatable within a strong and recognizable sense of place. In that way it becomes especially buildable, for many other details can be made to lock onto a clear sense of place. The enargetic power to make a reader build more onto a given sense of place can come as much from vivid description as it can from simply mentioning what a reader knows intimately well. That “mere mention” can be done with limited textual space if a great deal of shared knowledge exists between writer and reader.

Rhetorical Uses of the Mental Image

Some of the rhetorical possibilities of an enargetic rhetoric that evokes mental images now need to be considered. What do Bacon and Donne achieve in the New Atlantis and the Verse Letters, by trying to evoke and control mental images? A place to begin is to say that since a mental image gives the writer a strong and naturalized sense of place in the reader’s mind, which can be built up, the mental image is a useful platform for layering one identifiable situation over others, and in some cases making wholesale conflations of ideas or sets of concepts. In that sense, the mental image can stage further engagements with reason and the passions. Onto the background of a particular mental image and its unique emotional register, the writer can graft another idea or situation with another familiar order altogether, in order to question or modify it. The consequent layering is one way of getting the bits and pieces of memory together so that an intervention becomes possible. In the Verse Letters, Donne often overlays a mental image with another set of familiar concerns, so that he can direct how an object should be viewed.

Mental images can also bring a temporal or logical order for the imagination to follow. Such narrative-orders are implicit in the imagined space of the mental image. By focusing in on a specific familiar logical/temporal order, a mental image can delimit what an audience does rather than merely suggest what it might do. The narrative-scripts implicit in mental images provide emotionally and rationally powerful points of access to people’s familiar beliefs about the order(s) of the world. If a mental image can latch onto a familiar order it becomes potentially powerful. For example, in the ecphrasis or vivid description exercise from the Progymnasmata, both Aphthonius and Hermogenes suggest that different forms of narrative order should be layered over a description to encourage a mental image with a powerful structure. It depends on what one is describing: if describing a person, then go from head to foot; if a war, then go in order of events (recruitment-slaughter-paeans).^[30] In that way the growing mental image generates, at each stage, its own narrative-script running forward and backward. The whole can be taken in at once. It will be persuasive to the extent that its order accords with familiar processes in the world. The narrative structure will seem more or less logical because it is forged from the materials of memory.

Whole mental images might be developed around remembered narrative-scripts that already exist in cultural or personal memory. For example, when Crassus in De Oratore is teaching his young friends about the value of written preparations for speaking, he states that if an orator needs to use a written note in a speech, he will, after reading it, transition back into his own speaking-language style much more elegantly if that speaking-language has been molded by the practice of writing. Such practice will make the transition feel seamless. The assumption is that writing brings more studied eloquence to the speech than impromptu speaking can. To give his friends an example, Crassus then draws a similitude for his view of the transition back into speaking-language style again, evoking a mental image of vivid action. The desired speaking-continuity, he says, is like the momentum retained by a swift ship when the oarsmen have stopped rowing.^[31] Each of Crassus’s friends, imaginatively putting together a mental image of rowing, almost certainly has boating memory to bring to it: the sight, smell, speed, and power of that moment in the water. The image has a physical order, a narrative-script, but a very simple and memorable one. The order is this: the heaving effort of the oarsmen relaxes and the gliding moment in the water begins. Crassus uses that familiar physical narrative (reconstructed within a mental image) to strengthen the metaphoric link between gliding boats and seamless speaking transitions. Mental images and their static compression of ordered process can serve a metaphoric link developed separately.

The mental reconstruction and the links that occur in the imagination will of course vary from mind to mind among Crassus’s interlocutors. For example, Sulpicius might associate the sequence of remembered events on the water with the orator’s shift from reading a written source back into his own speech again, as Crassus seems to intend, while Cotta might associate his mental image rather with the momentum that one has going into a speech to begin with, after having done written preparation. Still, because of the “ordered” nature of the mental image Crassus evokes, he can purposefully delimit, to a huge extent, the many points of connection that exist between sailing and speaking. The almost palpable physicality of such narrative-scripts can even have a force that occludes unwanted critical responses, such as disagreement about why transitions in speech are not, perhaps, so continuous, or why anyone should think the “continuity” of written style into speech particularly important anyway. Mental images, like rhetorical questions, can glide over potential critical objection.

In the New Atlantis, Bacon’s enargetic rhetoric often involves adding such narrative-scripts to mental images. This allows him to use one familiar logical process—often from the common physical experience of embodied life and typically located as a “natural” one—to illuminate and legitimate unfamiliar processes. It is a pattern that will become recognizable in his Novum Organum too.

To summarize, mental images do a number of things. They construct and make use of narrative and logical orders, laying familiar things over less familiar contexts, or vice versa. They also form a basis on which the other cognitive processes of reasoning and passionate feeling interact—processes that I will explore in the following chapters. Mental images have a special role to play for most theorists in generating or diminishing passionate emotion because of their ability to represent a situation as particularly good or particularly bad. Such representations can be the basis on which an orator encourages an emotional response. Mental images are not, of course, the only or even the most common way to engage an audience’s reasoning and passions, yet they and the techniques that evoke them have a primacy in rhetorical theory reflecting the centrality of the imagination and memory in the psychological tradition Bacon and Donne inherited.

Both Bacon’s New Atlantis and Donne’s Verse Letters participate in recognizable discourses about virtue and the “good,” which should be kept in mind. That makes them interesting to compare. The New Atlantis, self-conscious as it is both of Plato’s Republic and More’s Utopia, at once plays with a vision of natural philosophy as utopian political ideal at the same time as drawing on the satiric side of utopian fictions. Donne’s Verse Letters draw on the sources and ideas of stoicism, especially its satiric dimensions derived from Horace, Donne’s principal classical source for the verse letter form.^[32] Both the New Atlantis and the Verse Letters participate in discourses of virtue that stem at least in part from a satiric view of the world. Their interest in what is virtuous, or more broadly “good,” partly informs which enargetic passages I examine, and what functions of the mental image I am seeking to illuminate. Their interest in the “good,” and in compromises of it, will be of much importance for the comparisons I make between the rhetorical practices of Donne and Bacon in later chapters, as it is these notions of “ought” that shape, in my view, how they appropriate cultural resources for rhetorical power, that is, how they deal with what is familiar.

Bacon’s New Atlantis

Bacon’s “utopian” New Atlantis is widely considered a reflection of his overall philosophical project. “No one doubts,” says Kendrick, that The New Atlantis was “propaganda” for the Baconian project of “refashioning . . . intellectual production.”^[33] It has also been thought of as an “apotheosis” of Bacon’s “scientific” ideas. ^[34] At the heart of the utopian island Bensalem’s political structure, the natural philosophy research institute “Salomon’s house” stands much stronger than any of the island’s other institutions. Bacon’s European narrator and his friends have been let onto the island and have been given much information, but, curiously, they are not allowed to see any real politics of dissention and control in action. This is a problem that has mystified critics. In connection with that, there is also a marked lack of singular ethical coherence to Bacon’s famous utopian fiction, as David Colclough has pointed out; a coherence understood, that is, in the classical Aristotelian sense of what leads to eudaimonia.^[35] While I agree that The New Atlantis certainly is moving away from a Morean use of “utopia” as the expression of a coherent ideal, and representing what Colclough calls instead “the Baconian mind in action,” I would stress that we can add to our sense of what is at stake in The New Atlantis if we see how it represents Baconian “value” in action: that is, Bacon’s sense of the importance of doing natural philosophy and not just of the importance of doing it the right way.^[36]

Bacon evokes two central mental images in the course of his narrative that I think are integral to his purpose of putting natural philosophy’s value on display and relating it to values familiar to his first readers. The first is the conversion scene and the second is the feast of the family. In both scenes, Bacon’s enargetic rhetoric locates the value of natural philosophy in the religious contexts of worship and moral living, respectively. The conversion scene asks readers to “look at” natural philosophy’s relevance to what Bacon describes in his Advancement of Learning as the attempt to “raise and aduance our Reason to the diuine Truthe.”^[37] The mental image puts on display reason’s contribution—via deeper knowledge of nature—to the understanding of the world within which people worship God. The feast of the family scene exposes connections between the apparently observable benefits of following the natural (moral) law—resting as it does on an implicit divine law—and the observable benefits of understanding and controlling natural (material) law. Bacon does not seem to have believed that natural philosophy could help determine the precepts of divinity or the structure of natural moral law.^[38] However, the similarity between the different benefits of satisfaction equally derivable from both different forms of endeavor (material and moral-divine) is still a powerful rhetorical trope in Bacon’s employ.

The Conversion Scene

A number of things happen to the narrator and the other European visitors before they are told about Bensalem’s conversion. The narrator speaks first of their coming to the island, almost shipwrecked. He then mentions how they met Bensalem’s port officials. The visitors are then conducted to the “Stranger’s House” to receive the medical care they have asked for. Another priest-official comes to visit. He assures the visitors that all will be provided for, since Bensalem has had no visitors for thirty-seven years so there are plenty of provisions laid up. On another day he comes again to talk more generally about whatever the visitors want to know. The Bensalemites seem to know much more about the rest of the world than the rest of the world knows about them. Accordingly, the confused European visitors are invited to ask about the island on the principle of “he that knoweth least is fittest to ask questions” (136). Emboldened by the happiness of being saved from drowning by an accidental landing, and finding that island to share substantial portions of Europe’s Christian worldview, they direct their first question to discover “who was the apostle of that nation and how it was converted to the faith?” (137). The priest is very happy to tell them.

However, the means by which the conversion story reaches readers involves many interlocking viewing-frames, including the priest’s own telling. Eyewitnesses of the event wrote the story down fifteen hundred years ago. The priest has clearly read this account and memorized it. He tells it to the visitors. The European narrator has clearly remembered that telling, and written it down for readers. Those different viewing-frames emphasize the scene’s built-in spectatorship. They legitimate our critical focus on the scene as an example of Bacon’s attempt to generate and utilize a specific mental image. This series of observational frames can be summarized thus. In reporting the scene of Bensalem’s conversion for European readers, Bacon’s European narrator recollects what the Bensalemite priest recollected of his own reading of the recollection of the eyewitnesses who saw the events that happened on that day long ago. The result of this recollective activity is that Bacon’s readers can see that the events (of the conversion day) have themselves been seen and mentally reconstructed at least four times, each depending on the act that went before it: 1) by the witnesses writing the story down, 2) by the priest who read the account and formed a mental image for further tellings, 3) by the narrator who wrote what he heard from the priest, and 4) by the European reader of Bacon’s tale. As if that were not enough to emphasize the spectatorship of the scene, further indications come.

To summarize, the following is what happens in the conversion scene itself. A miracle occurs one night shortly after the time of Jesus’s ascension, when some people on the east of the island notice a “great pillar of light,” about a mile out on the sea, “not sharp, but in the form of a column or cylinder, rising from the sea a great way up toward heaven: and on the top of it was seen a large cross of light, more bright and resplendent than the body of the pillar” (137). “Upon which so strange a spectacle,” the narrator continues, “the people of the city gathered apace together upon the sands, to wonder; and so after put themselves into a number of small boats, to go nearer to this marvelous sight” (137). When they get near it, they feel bound by an invisible force preventing them from moving closer. At about sixty yards from the pillar, “they found themselves all bound, and could go no further; yet so as they might move to go about, but might not approach nearer: so as the boats stood all as in a theatre, beholding this light as an heavenly sign” (137). A member of Salomon’s house meditates on the vision for a while, and after falling on his face and raising himself to his knees and praying humbly to God in recognition of the miracle, he says: “Lord God of heaven and earth, thou has vouchsafed of thy grace to those our order [Salomon’s house], to know thy works of creation, and the secrets of them, and to discern (as far as appertaineth to the generations of men) between divine miracles, works of nature, works of art, and impostures and illusions of all sorts” (137). After he acknowledges officially that the wonder before them all is God’s “Finger and a true Miracle” (137), he is then able to move forward toward the light, “whereas all the rest remained still fast” (138). As he does so, the light, and the cross at the top of it, break up and he finds an “ark” containing the Christian scriptures commended by Saint Bartholomew (138).

Two elements of this striking passage identify its enargetic quality. The first is the overt physicality of the represented human experience. People in the narration do not say much. They do, they feel, and they see. They and the mental-image-making readers of the scene first look in wonder, then feel the barrier, then watch the light break up, and finally watch the Salomon’s house member’s new-found ability to move forward. The only actual speech that takes place in the scene’s narrative time is the Salomon’s house member’s prayer. It is reported in direct speech with little introduction. That enhances the immediacy of the action for readers and privileges visibility over reflection. Another enargetic element is the priestly narrator’s use of the word “theatre” (137) as he describes the way the boats were bound by an invisible force keeping them from getting any closer to the wondrous light they are staring at.^[39] The narrator says that “the boats stood all as in a theatre, beholding this light as an heavenly sign” (137). The self-conscious spectatorship registered in that comment (“theatre” and static “beholding”) is enhanced also by the fact that the viewers on the sea on that day are restricted by the force, glued to the scene, unable to move or look elsewhere.^[40] There are other signifiers of spectatorship too. The light is “resplendent.” The pillar is a “spectacle.” The people gathered “to wonder.” It was a “marvelous sight.” The word choices signify traces of the visuality of the mental experience through which this scene has been imagined and reimagined so many times. They signify its status as a scene to be seen.

The succession of narrative frames, like a mise en abîme, thus aligns readers with the in-scene viewers on the sea, so that they, the readers, are not only asked to construct an image of the light-event but of the light-event as the ocean-viewers see and feel it, restrained by a physical force. This encourages readers to build a fuller mental image by adding haptic phantasmata to visual phantasmata, in that they are asked to imagine the feeling of restriction, as well as the sight of the pillar, and integrate it into their mental images. Phantasmic memories of the physical experience of boats, water, light, and stars will likely be added as well.

That Bacon envisages such a “building” is also suggested by other aspects of his enargetic style. He evokes the mental image here around a strong and buildable sense of place, onto which the mental image maker can place the various sensual and physical elements of the scene. The result ideally is a simple and ordered narrative-script. The “place” is out on the ocean to the east of the Island, but it is defined principally by what everybody is staring at: that is, the bright and frighteningly unusual light marking a place on the ocean where the books of the Bible will be found. It is a place all alone “out there,” uncomplicated by relations to other things or places, as would be the case if located in a city. There is a simplicity to the events in that place, which means they easily and quickly build into a composite mental image with a recognizable narrative order that refers to memories of physical experience. Here is the order: they wonder at the light; they move toward it; they feel the barrier; they hear the prayer; they watch the priest move toward the light and the light dissipate.

While the order is simple, the mental image is at once visual, tactile, and auditory. Some sensory aspects coincide to compound the effect of being immersed in a sequence familiar from physical experience. For example, people in the boats see the Salomon’s house member able to move forwards after his prayer even as they continue to feel their own containment. The “background” of this mental image—its locus on the sea—frames the simple sequence of physical order. The joining of locus and order recalls the famous joining of background and image suggested by the author of the ancient handbook Rhetorica ad Herennium as a mnemonic tool. Onto the background of a bedroom, the orator who must remember his case is supposed to compress all the linked propositions of a particular legal case by imagining a sick man on a bed with a cup and tablets and a ram’s testicles in his hands.^[41] A range of synaesthetic experience thus ties into one identifiable place, which is able to become, thereby, a composite mental image.

Bacon, of course, is only partly in control of how any given reader will go through the cognitive process of putting the mental image together. However, he does delimit, by his choice of location and spectatorship, the range of connections he can expect his readers to make. One of these is the potential link between the natural knowledge possessed by the wise man of Salomon’s house and his spiritual wisdom. To the extent that he knows the “natural,” the philosopher also senses the supranatural, the “author” of the natural. The mental image we have built exposes an instance of such a philosopher-priest, one who recognizes stylistic similarities between God’s created order and God’s self-revelation. The mental image reveals such similarities in action, so that natural knowledge itself becomes the operative value, rather than the “wise man.”

It is the operative power of natural knowledge, rather than the wise man, that is the key focus of the image. Crucially, it is the anonymous member of Salomon’s house who is able to move forward. This wise man is an unidentified thinking and praying “I” who makes operational the knowledge of his college. Given the auspiciousness of this moment for Bensalem’s history and historiography, his lack of a name suggests that his personal identity is unimportant in relation to the operational importance of the natural knowledge he possesses. Bacon hints that the knowledge the wise man participates in is bigger than both the wise man himself and his act of recognition that leads Bensalem into a new spiritual formation. His personal insignificance is something the wise man confesses in his prayer: “Thou hast vouchsafed of thy grace to those of our order, to know thy works of creation” (137). Such privileged insight though is not yet within the purview of those merely beholding the scene’s “theatre”—the people on the water and the readers. Bacon positions such people outside the privileged extent of natural knowledge necessary for that extent of spiritual insight, which Salomon’s house, the “eye” of the kingdom, apparently possessed even back at the time of the conversion. The distinction between the ordinary people and the wise man, as far as their level of knowledge goes, is crucial. It is the difference of knowledge, rather than of personage per se, that causes the wise man’s recognition of the miracle’s divine source. He has insight, they have hindsight. Yet, they all have “sight.” The possession and benefit of natural knowledge is and becomes widespread. It is far from completely the possession of a privileged and powerful institution.

If the institution did not gain its privilege through greater possession of a shared value—natural knowledge—then the only other explanation is that its members have forced a hollow supremacy on the rest of their fellow inhabitants. But that contradicts much of the open observation that underpins its very claim to legitimate power, an “openness” I will consider in chapter 4 when discussing the rhetorical strategies of Bacon’s Novum Organum. Some secrecy seems to shroud Salomon’s house, certainly, but the benefit of natural knowledge is meant to be shared, even if it itself is protected, for a time, by secrecy. Bacon draws attention to the difference of degree in knowledge by making ordered physical experience visible in the sequence of events. Everyone else wonders, the wise man prays (with his knowledge), and they watch him move forward from the position of their own continued restriction. A mental image built in that way hints that Bacon’s European readers also lack the prized possession—natural knowledge.

Even though Bacon did not believe that natural knowledge could or should be used to confirm or derive divinity and knowledge of natural law—thinking instead that such things could only come from revelation—that does not mean that the two forms of “knowledge” were not homogeneous or mutually enhancing for Bacon’s first readers and even for Bacon himself. Any correspondence between them would have been useful for Bacon precisely because it would have resonated with his immediate readers.

It might be the case that the conversion scene is one big illusion put on by the members of Salomon’s house, in order to legitimate their hegemony through the creation of religious fantasies that sanction their material power derived from elsewhere. The function of the conversion scene in that case would be as a mirror in which the more knowing of Bacon’s readers (who do not share the island’s religious ideology) can see how natural knowledge translates into political power over those who cannot hope to understand what they find impenetrable. Some of the weirdness of the conversion scene can be explained by taking this view, such as the fact that the Salomon’s house member is the only one able to get through the invisible force, and the odd way in which the books of the Bible are simply given, shortly after the ascension of the savior! Many critics feel, with some ground, that the conversion scene is an elaborate deception. For García, the use of religious discourse to “establish a common idiom, within which scientists can talk to nonscientists and attribute “the source of their political power to the dictates of an unreachable higher being” is one reason for looking at the conversion scene as an elaborate deception.^[42] David Innes and Jerry Weinberger also emphasize the idea that the conversion has to be some sort of gigantic trick by the possessors of knowledge and power since, for them, Bacon’s search for natural knowledge ultimately supplants any religious framework of viewing the world.^[43] Such views, as helpful as they are in their own right, say more about the worldview of those critics than about how Bacon’s rhetoric functions in the religious culture that he himself was part of.

The trouble here is that if Bacon, for whatever reason, was inherently misaligned with the religious world of his contemporaries and is implicitly encouraging readers in the know to trick nonscientists with elaborate deceits hypocritically indoctrinating them with a worldview that legitimates sheer power, then he is doing it in a way that violates the rigorous principle of noncontradiction standing underneath the very natural philosophy project itself, since that project seeks knowledge by open experiments and itself rejects indoctrination. Bacon is legitimating natural knowledge and its seekers with reference to Christian faith by giving natural knowledge an operative power in a reader’s Christianized mental image of the conversion scene. The value of natural knowledge, and thus its legitimation in relation to the early modern value accorded to religious worship, relies on the widely shared value of having religious wisdom; otherwise no value is given to natural knowledge by the relationship.

An alternative and more plausible possibility for understanding the conversion scene is that New Atlantis’s representation of natural knowledge is meant to lead to a further consideration of what religion might become, something moving beyond the wastes of divided community that Bacon knew so well and despised. Readers cannot see Christianity in any recognizable early modern form in Bensalem, and there are hints at a secularity in which various faiths play a part in the community’s life.^[44] On the issue of Protestant dissension as reflected in the conversion scene, Renaker, for instance, reads the odd givenness of the scriptures as a (Protestant) “miracle to end all miracles,” out on the ocean where there is no temptation to make a monastic community and exploit people’s belief in miraculous relics; thus Bacon “has obviated millennia of superstitious practices.”^[45] For Renaker, the Salomon’s house member’s knowledge, which helps to recognize God’s hand in the miracle, shows how “the book of God’s works [nature] is here brought forward to authenticate the book of God’s word [the Bible].”^[46] In doing so, natural philosophy reveals its value as something that leads to spiritual recognition and the formation of a religious framework with no outrageous miracles, no theological fights, and no wrangling over textual and hermeneutic histories.^[47] Yet the scene has a dynamism that does more than just make religious debates otiose or privilege natural philosophy over polemical divinity. Bacon is not just making a point about what has to stop, in religious terms, before natural philosophy can take off. Rather he is implicating natural knowledge in a vision of what religion might entail in the future: a worship stripped of the wasted energies of theological disagreement and focused on God, less as savior than as the author of a most potent nature. Other critics have hinted at that too. Colclough suggests that Bacon offers “a model of the use of knowledge” in The New Atlantis, and Richard Serjeantson suggests that the purpose of natural knowledge extends beyond human utility and becomes a platform for honoring the creator.^[48] The rhetorical power of the scene’s mental image is its potential to facilitate an evaluation of natural knowledge in spiritual terms. Natural knowledge, Bacon suggests, opens out onto the revitalization of religion.

After hearing his description of the conversion scene, the European visitors now ask their new priest-friend to elaborate on why the island of Bensalem seems to have so much knowledge of the world of Europe, while Europe, for all its recent discoveries, has never heard of this island (139). The question gives Bacon the chance to introduce some discussion of the establishment of Salomon’s house many years before the conversion. That contextualizes the coming description of its strange events a little more. The visitors are now armed with a proper understanding of the importance of Salomon’s house. They go out adventuring on the island and one of the things they witness is the “feast of the family.”

The Feast of the Family

When reporting impressions of the feast of the family, Bacon shifts his narrative’s focus from the value of natural knowledge in the context of Christian worship to its value in the sphere of moral living among Bensalem’s ordinary members. Bacon’s enargetic rhetoric here seeks to evoke a mental image of how natural knowledge helps in the attempt to live according to natural (moral) law. The vision of natural law Bacon presents, as uncomfortably patriarchal as it is, gives him a set of connections between natural (material) law, and natural (moral) law, which he can exploit for showing his readers how natural knowledge has value at a multitude of levels.

The manner in which natural law rests on divine law, as presented here, derives from an ancient legal concept that Bacon can draw on with confidence.^[49] Cicero’s comment, in De re publica, that there is one eternal law valid for all nations and all times, with one master, is a particularly important source of the idea that natural law depends on divine law: “Et omnes gentes et omni tempore una lex et sempiterna et immutabilis continebit, unusque erit communis quasi magister et imperator omnium deus, ille legis huius inventor, disceptator, lator” (One eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is, God, over us all, for he is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge).^[50] Aquinas, too, developed a very influential theory of natural law in Summa Theologiae, which places natural (moral) law upon the bedrock of divine law.^[51] The allusions Bacon develops within the feast of the family scene locate natural (moral) law within a divine framework and expose the apparent benefits of observing it.

Before getting to the mental image of the feast of the family, it is worth paying attention to a comment made by the narrator just before he describes for us the feast. The narrator here suggests a significant criterion for deciding what is important to relate to his European readers. He tells us that they saw “many things right worthy of observation and relation” (147). And in the very next sentence he begins his account of the feast of the family. The word “observation” is important. Bacon uses its Latin etymon in the passage on rhetoric in De Augmentis. There he says, in Spedding’s English: “The end of rhetoric is to fill the imagination with observations and images.”^[52] The comment draws attention to the fact that our imaginations are about to be filled. Readers are thereby implicated as secondary “observers,” along with the narrator. In making the comment, the narrator is admitting selectivity and thus highlighting the relevance of the coming observation for the overall argument of the text and for the larger mental image we are building of Bensalem and its “natural” ways.

The description of the feast now begins. “It is granted to any man that shall live to see thirty persons descended of his body alive together, and all above three years old, to make this feast; which is done at the cost of the state” (147). The father of such a great family they call “the Tirsan” (147). Having noted the Tirsan’s preparations for the feast—“consultation concerning the good estate of the family” (148)—the narrator gives to the action a very strong sense of locality, in which the simple and physical feast-day events occur. That locality is a room, “which room hath an half-pace at the upper end. Against the wall, in the middle of the half-pace, is a chair placed for him [the Tirsan], with a table and carpet before it. Over the chair is a state, made round or oval, and it is of ivy” (148). The “room”—an ancient commonplace metaphor for memory space—is particularly useful as a background for the mental image.^[53] Rooms are eminently buildable. They can easily link up multiple ideas and events that are even more evocative. The “half-pace,” or dais, and the “state,” or canopy, have heavy political connotations, which construct the room’s contents, that is, the family, as a successful political entity blessed with plenitude and well-being because of the participation of its male headship in the natural, and of course divine, law. That is to say, Tirsans are, by definition, those who have constrained their sexual, reproductive, and political power into the production of a family, which is their “natural” purpose. That impression is only strengthened when Bacon comes to the allusion to the grapevine and the divine family.

The room forms the background but now we get three sets of simple events to observe. Each of them happen after the Tirsan has retired and then returned to the room of action. That makes the mental image readers are creating more vivid by emphasizing a single location for the events to be seen with the mind’s eye. In the first set, the Tirsan comes into the room with all the “fruit” of his body, a herald reads a royal charter to him full of privileges, a boy presents him with the cluster of enameled grapes, and then he retires. In the second set, he comes back in, they all eat dinner and sing a hymn of praise to one of the Bible’s pious peoplers of the earth, and he retires to pray. Third, he returns to the same locus again and blesses each of his children, after which they all “fall to music and dances” (151).

A number of aspects of the sequence mark it as enargetic. In the mental image we are creating, each set of events signifies “bounty” at different levels: richness of family, plentiful food, celebratory art. Each event is thus analogous, and they compound. The events are also simple. There is little discussion, only a few formal speaking acts: the herald’s reading, various acclamations, and the Tirsan’s blessings. The narrative’s paucity of actual discussion contributes to the vividness of the scene as a mental video to be watched—an observatio. Furthermore, the rhetorical choice of narrating with present simple tense across the whole description lifts it out of an occurrence in actual time (once) and aligns it with the more abstract mental construction of “this is the manner of it” (147). For example, the “Tirsan cometh forth” (148), “none of his descendants sit with him” (150), “there is an hymn sung” (150). This means that readers are being encouraged to supply details to construct a sharp picture of what happens, not what might have happened on a particular feast-day occasion. The present simple tense creates more vividness because it eradicates any need to add to the mental image any of the complex variables that might be associated with a particular occasion in history. The narrator is recalling the event. He, and of course, Bacon, is packaging it as something worth observing, something with a mechanics that can be inducted from repeated instances or observations. If it were relayed in past simple tense, as in fact we might expect from the narrator’s confession that two of the visitors went “one day” (147), the enargetic vividness of our growing mental image, not to mention the reader-alignment with the practice of inductive observatio, would be diminished.

The apparent blessing of living according to natural law by directing male power into families is on display here, but Bacon also invites readers to build his religious allusions into their mental image of the scene and lay the allusions over its relatively basic physicality. The effect will be to drive home the connection between natural law, observed and obeyed, and the divine law it rests in. The Bensalemites, that is, in so far as they fulfill the natural law, seem to have gone further than Europeans in rehabilitating the divine order, which, for Protestants, was severely compromised by the fall.

The following are examples of Bacon’s religious allusions. The “cluster of grapes” (149) given to the Tirsan to symbolize his abundant progeny as well as the epithet “Son of the Vine” (150) applied to his number one son, taken together, constitute a grapevine allusion. The herald gives this grape cluster to the Tirsan with grapes equaling the number of his descendants (150). If males are predominant the golden grapes are enameled purple; if females, greenish yellow. The special in-house son, chosen by the Tirsan, then bears both the cluster of grapes and the epithet “Son of the Vine.”

Reading the feast of the family as an engagement with issues of political authority, Suzanne Smith sees the images of grapes and vine, in association with Bacchanalian debauchery, as a way for Bacon to make fun of the patriarchal authority of the Tirsan as “monarch.”^[54] That is not, however, their only possible meaningful allusion. The epithet “Son of the Vine” almost inevitably will have called to mind for Bacon’s early modern readers both the Old Testament metaphor for the Jewish remnant as “vine” and Jesus’s use of vine imagery in the Gospel of John. In the Old Testament, Israel is often regarded as a vine planted by God.^[55] Jesus describes himself in the gospel of John as a vine that belongs to God—the gardener—as a way of describing his messianic significance to his disciples.^[56] Jesus’s followers were to be part of the large vine that God is creating: a living, growing spiritual family. Jesus connects the bearing of “fruit” in that divine “family” to having much joy (v.11). It is an eschatological image. The significance of vines—and grapes and wine—in representing material and divine blessing, especially in connection to weddings, perhaps also evokes the familiarity that Bacon’s contemporaries would have had with the image of the wedding supper of the lamb.^[57] Given that “Son of the Vine,” in the language of John’s gospel, means “Son of Christ,” Jesus’s self-identification as the rehabilitating new vine draws an eschatological sense of fulfillment into Bacon’s enargeia. One potential effect of the grapevine allusion, then, is to encourage mental image makers to draw links between the natural (moral) order, the divine order, and the well-being of humanity, links that rely on the cross-contextual significance of vines, grapes, and wine to signify material and divine blessing. If observation and adherence to the natural (moral) law has led the Bensalemites further in their quest to rehabilitate human participation in the divine order, isn’t Bacon suggesting that their observation of the natural (material) order, philosophia naturalis, had something to do with it, given their success in that too? Even the register of the word instauratio, a key word in the politics of project-Bacon, contains, as Charles Whitney points out, the idea of a restitution of the prelapsarian state: an attempt to deal with the disjunction of the human law and the natural (divine) law.^[58] Such uses of the word instauratio implicate it in providential sacred history.^[59]

By evoking a mental image of the feast of the family, Bacon can try to make visible the commonplace process whereby observing the natural law, in both senses of that term “to look at” and “to obey,” leads to personal and public well-being. The feast of the family displays the well-being that supposedly derives from the moral actions of its members, represented by its patriarchal headship, in particular his sexual self-control, and his giving himself outward toward his family. The idea of giving and getting in return itself is an ancient Christian one. For example, Jesus teaches, in various contexts in the gospels, that self-giving leads to receiving in abundance, as an example of the commonplace logical connection between moral choices and beneficial outcomes.^[60] It is unsurprising then to find Bacon evoking a strong connection between the “natural” order on display within the mental image and various allusions to material and emotional blessing. As questionable as this connection may be—surely “moral” living strictly defined does not always lead to blessing—it was useful to Bacon to the extent that he could rely on people believing in it and believed in it himself.

Through his conversation with Joabin the Jew, Bacon’s narrator now gives further sharpness to the growing mental image of that commonplace process whereby following the natural law, in so far as we can understand what it requires, leads to personal and social benefit. They discuss sexual and marriage customs, and the other side of the same consequential process. The different forms of sexual “excess” that Joabin mentions here are set in contradistinction to the Tirsan’s self-control. Joabin cannot believe that in Europe there are people who “have cast away so basely so much of their strength” (477). The Tirsan, as the opposite of one who casts away “strength,” contains his own in one special place, a self-strengthening and ever growing vine or family made “visible” by the mental image. Reprimanding the implied European reader, Joabin mentions the Bensalemite commonplace that “the reverence of a man’s self is, next religion, the chiefest bridle of all vices” (477). Knowledge, on the negative side of the moral equation, is also a matter of observation. Over time, the Bensalemite people, we can assume, have confirmed their ideas about natural law and come to some agreement, on the basis of observations of their own moral experience and that of the other countries they know about, that there is a benefit to living in accordance (consistently) with one’s own moral ideas, and that that benefit is a good reason for doing so.

The function of a mental image built up and developed in that way, I would argue, is to try to create a mental space in which to exploit the analogous connection between the natural (moral) law(s) and the natural (material) laws, which the Bensalemites seek and know, and which Bacon wants his readers to discover by using a novum organum (“new tool”). Readers familiar with the connection Bacon typically draws between natural philosophy research and the benefits of increased human power and dignity are invited to consider the analogous connection between lives lived according to natural law and the social well-being it allegedly gives rise to. Natural philosophy, that is, leads to power and dignity in the same way that “natural” living brings social well-being. Bacon invites his readers to see that connection, without spelling it out, by means of an enargetic rhetoric displaying one side of it in particular.

Establishing such a connection between the benefits of observing the natural law and the benefits of natural philosophy has at least three possible implications in the context of Bacon’s rhetoric in The New Atlantis. First, given that the well-being derived from natural law is of virtually unquestionable importance for most of Bacon’s early modern readers, the connection allows him to situate his relatively unfamiliar ideas about the well-being derivable from natural (material) philosophy within something that has a related, and familiar, value. That is to say, the well-being in natural law becomes a related example for readers trying to understand what well-being would come from natural philosophy. Because of our familiarity with the “scientific” in Baconian thought, it is crucial to keep in mind the fact that Bacon’s project was unfamiliar to those of his own time whom he needed to engage.

Second, readers might reasonably infer that doing natural philosophy and seeing its benefits will help them follow the natural law and better participate in divine law. That greater participation would not happen in the sense that natural material knowledge would somehow teach divinity. Bacon thought it could not. Rather it would happen in the sense that natural material knowledge and its predicted power serve as a strong motivational and rationalizing reference point for worship and moral living. As Bacon put it, people should “raise and aduance” the reason “to the diuine Truthe.”^[61] After all, the Bensalemites seem to do both very well. “Seeing” the feast of the family gives us one more perspective in hindsight on the conversion scene and the trust people have in the wise man’s knowledge. If there is a perceived connection between the two different orders of natural wellness—the moral and the material—then the Bensalemites’ experience of one of those orders in the life of their community is another reason why the wise man’s knowledge will be trustworthy to them, and why Salomon’s house has little need to bother with tricking them. All the Bensalemites Bacon gives us access to seem to believe that God stands behind both the moral and the material orders. Indeed, Bacon suggests in the Advancement of Learning that the one thing that can be derived from natural material knowledge is God’s existence, power, and glory—his “Omnipotencie and wisedome.”^[62] Perhaps the Bensalemites have mutual understanding because of the homogeneity between moral and material knowledge in terms of benefits. Salomon’s house certainly appears capable of deceiving the populace, but why should we think it does when both mental images (of the conversion and the feast) display the successful operation of a spectrum of homogenous knowledge shared to greater, lesser, and perhaps growing extents between all the Bensalemites? I am not making the argument that the moral and the material “natures” are actually homogenous, only that close links are drawn by Bacon’s enargetic rhetoric and that it suits his legitimating purposes to draw the links and rely on them. Perhaps if Europeans were to adopt a more rigorous practice of natural philosophy, Bacon intimates, as the Bensalemites have, they might live out a better (albeit different) Christianity.

Third, and following on from the second, Bacon could indeed be suggesting that natural philosophy is a yet-to-be-discovered part of the divine purpose of regenerating, transforming, and perfecting people, that is, a “scientific” part, tangential to the Christian revelation and the Christian gospel, though complementary and cooperative. To fulfill that role, natural philosophy would not even have to be “Christian” or to imply and support the Christian revelation. The Bensalemites are not morally good because it is right by Christianity’s code of behavior or because, as some critics have suggested, it is a morality-religion imposed on them by the miracle-producing wonder workers of Salomon’s house, but because they have observed it to be advantageous to their well-being. We may legitimately question whether it is an image of well-being. But that seems to be what Bacon wants his (mostly male) readers to infer. Neither are they Christians simply because that religion’s code of behavior follows from their moral observations. It is Joabin the (non-Christian) Jew who is given the narrative-task of praising what he sees as Bensalem’s moral excellence. Thus Bacon locates the perception of Bensalem’s moral achievements outside of the Christian religious tradition per se and positions it rather as a kind of knowledge that anyone with observing eyes has access to. Though this would not have been fully compatible with the dominant Christianities of Bacon’s time, the idea is not necessarily inimical to the sort of revitalized Christianity Bacon could have imagined. However skeptical modernity became about the existence of a natural (moral) law derivable from the scientific study of the natural world, the dynamics of Bacon’s legitimating purposes here seem to rely on a belief in one. Just because Bacon believed that one could not derive or confirm divinity and natural law from the scientific study of nature does not mean he thought the two realms of thought to be unrelated or mutually exclusive. The two realms of thought could be thought of as motivating and informing one another. Bacon’s rhetoric relies on this connection. Bacon himself did not necessarily think differently.

Donne’s Verse Letters

Within the collection of Donne’s Verse Letters, I examine six that closely relate to the problem of being virtuous in unvirtuous surroundings. Donne wrote each of them to his male friends: Rowland Woodward, Henry Wotton, and Henry Goodyere. In all of the poems, Donne emphasizes communal “seeing” and confluent feeling by means of the mental images they evoke.

A number of contextual factors need to be kept in mind. They will expose Donne’s different rhetorical situation from Bacon’s and thus the different kind of enargetic rhetoric he employs. One factor is that many of the verse letters participate in the paraenetic tradition of oratory. To that extent they manifest “a moral regard for the inner life” and are exhortative and didactic,^[63] though, as Storhoff notes, Donne, in giving advice, “must not be condescending, for a haughty tone would obviously alienate both audiences [initial recipients and wider readers].”^[64] The exhortative role Donne plays gives him the chance to emphasize the common ground he shares with his friends. When giving advice he often recognizes that the recipient knows the lesson as well as he does, and in fact first taught it to him.

Of course, the epistles were also, at first, coterie literature, circulating in various manuscript exchanges among his recipients, Donne’s Inns of Court friends.^[65] The verse letters, then, as they were first conceived, achieve the ephemeral task of “performing” for his friends. Marroti’s concept of “metacommunication”—that is, the variety of factors that make up the relationship between writer and recipient—is helpful here: “The interpersonal relationship,” Marotti claims, “not the circumstantial content, was what mattered.”^[66] In the verse letters, Donne emphasizes points of commonality between himself and his friends and makes himself “present” to them in different ways. The mental images he evokes create a space in which he can be perceived as vitally connected to them. Even in the early days before the social upsets of his marriage, Donne was uneasy about the extent to which he belonged to the establishment. The work of Flynn, Carey, and Stubbs makes a good case for the Donne family’s Catholicism being a source of anxiety about belonging.^[67] The rhetorical will to self-inclusion is an interesting angle from which to analyze his enargetic rhetoric, for from it his attempts to emphasize shared understandings of virtue come into view.

The letter “If, as mine is” was written to Rowland Woodward. It breaks into two stages. Donne first emphasizes the way the letter makes him “present” with Woodward. He then sets up connections between the colonial space of “Guyana” and moral “virtue” as foreign but desirable objects that he and Rowland can long for together. The mental image of Guyana as a virtuous thing, “out there” in the West, is crucial to the sense of togetherness.

The situation of the letter, if Milgate is right, is that Donne is away from London with the navy, in some “haven,” awaiting “newes” (l.15) of Raleigh and Essex’s trip to the Queen. They were seeking permission to renew an attack on the Spanish and colonize Guyana. Elizabeth refused and the waiting fleet was sorely disappointed, as Donne’s language suggests.^[68] It seems at least that Rowland is far from Donne, as line 15 suggests: “All newes I thinke sooner reach thee then mee.” Woodward is closer to London, the source of news.

In the first half of the poem, Donne positions himself and his friend as “present” together though they are physically in different places. He uses the old and well-beloved conceit of making a letter the bearer of a writer’s presence.^[69] First Donne describes his dreamy letter-presence as something like the god of sleep, Morpheus, disguised—as Morpheus was wont to do in dreams—in Donne’s shape. Donne’s rhetoric invites Woodward to add to the ghostly mental image, mentally building his friend’s “presence” by recollecting from memory Donne’s “name, words, hand, feet, heart, minde and wit” (l.6). But the mental image is complicated by other likenesses. The letter-presence is also like a “deed of gift” and the “legacie” of a will (ll.7–8), Donne says. Woodward now has a “picture” (l.14) of Donne with him. From this mental place of togetherness, they are both waiting for “newes” (l.15).

Lines 16–19 contain directions for another interesting mental image. Donne describes his situation by developing a sense of place with typical activities. “Havens are Heavens, and Ships wing’d Angels be, / The which both Gospell, and sterne threatnings bring; / Guyanaes harvest is nip’d in the spring, / I feare.” The lines encourage Woodward to “look at” Donne’s current overall physical situation—in a ship waiting in a haven ready to embark on the activity of offering and collecting good things. It is a mental image of potential sea adventure.

Yet Donne has conflated the language of spiritual endeavor with the geographical language of colonial endeavor. The conflation allows him to draw into the growing mental image of Donne in the harbor the connections between Guyana out there and other more religious sorts of “vertue” (l.28). Guyana is perhaps also “out there” in the sense that the quest for virtue is ongoing. The allegorical conflation of spiritual and colonial endeavor is achieved by a compressed list of metaphoric connections paring the spiritual and physical dimensions: havens are “heavens,” ships are “angels,” and the gospel in Guyana is a “harvest” (ll.16–18). Donne then builds the connection by comparing “us” with Moses: “And with us (me thinks) Fate deales so / As with the Jewes guide God did; he did show / Him the rich land, but bar’d his entry in” (ll.19–21). Both men are looking at the hope of Guyana out there like Moses for the Promised Land, but if all their hopes “smoake away,” Donne asks, “Is not Almightie Vertue’an India?” (ll.27–28). Virtue, Donne implies, is a comparably worthy thing to seek for. Woodward is invited to agree. Donne’s shift into the use of first person pronouns here—“us” at line 19 and “our” at line 22—also ask Woodward to join Donne in the desire for “Guyana” in so far as he too is English, and in the desire for “Vertue” in so far as he too, like Donne, is a young political aspirant with a humanist moral education.^[70] The pronouns and the position of Guyana and virtue as “out there” help to construct mutuality of vision.

The enargetic rhetoric of that section and its potential mental image of readiness for sea adventure is only one aspect of Donne’s overall strategy here for developing a self-inclusive rhetoric, but it is a significant one. There are further things that support that purpose. For example, in lines 23–26 Donne compares the Spanish block on the English colonization of Guyana—and what would otherwise be Guyana’s reflected “light”—to the Earth as it eclipses the moon’s reflection of the sun. (England, of course, is the sun.) Just mentioning the Earth, the moon, the sun, and their movements potentially evokes a mental image, although Donne’s mention of those is not controlled by a single sense of place. However, any mental image of the Earth-moon-sun illustration will support the hope for a removal of the “blockage.”

The lines on havens, ships, and harvest, though, serve a mutual mental image and pathos of awaited sea adventure on account of the stronger sense of locality and spectatorship they involve. Donne’s enargetic rhetoric in the mental image of awaited sea adventure involves spectatorship, because mutual seeing is made to happen from the same place (letter-like togetherness) and toward the same place (Guyana and virtue) with the same sense of hopeful desire. Those qualities of mutuality give the metaphoric connection between Guyana and virtue—between colonial and spiritual endeavor—more enargetic and emotional power. The emotional power serves Donne’s interest in emphasizing a mutual pathos with Woodward. By bringing hopeful desire for Guyana into alignment with hopeful desire for virtue, Donne can emphasize the positive ethos that both men might reasonably hope to share.

The mental image facilitates a transmission of feeling. It works by trying to reach Woodward’s likely desire for Guyana’s riches and then to associate that feeling with the author’s own at two different levels: colonial and spiritual endeavor.

A similar transmission of feeling is encouraged in “Like one who.” The occasion of this poem, as Milgate suggests, is the apparent request of Rowland Woodward for more of Donne’s poetry.^[71] Donne uses Woodward’s desire for more poetry to make a tongue-in-cheek exhortation that they both desire virtue instead. At the beginning of the poem, Donne’s muse is a farmer of “love-song weeds” and “Satyric thornes” (l.5). At the end of the poem, Donne and Woodward are both “farmers of our selves” storing up treasure for the “great rent day” (ll.31–33). First Donne lays out the reason for farming the self instead of wasting time on the seeds of poetry in stanzas 4 and 5: in God’s “faithfull scales” (l.11), “vanity weighs as much as sinne” (l.12). Now they have a reason to “Seeke wee then our selves in our selves” (l.19). That process of seeking is demonstrated by comparison with two other activities that are vivid enough to become useful mental images. The first, developed in stanzas 7 and 8, is the use of a “christall glass” to concentrate the sun so that it might “blow our sparkes of vertue” (l.23) and burn the straw about their hearts (l.24). Farming the soul’s soil for virtue means looking inward and focusing the sun’s fire on its inner potential. Donne develops the second activity in stanzas 9 and 10. The activity there is the alchemical process of infusing the properties of simple substance into a liquid metal to make it a new material.^[72] This involves placing it in a warm place and waiting. Farming the soul’s soil for virtue, in that case, means a “retirednesse” (l.28), in which one does not “giddily” (l.29) roam everywhere. A chaste fallowness allows the soul’s soil to be infused instead with virtue.

In one sense those two metaphorical links—between soul-farming and the crystal glass and between soul-farming and alchemy—are just “illustrations.” However, the fact that they involve scenes with activities happening “within” them means that the metaphors rely on more complicated mental reconstructions than would be the case in a relatively simple metaphor like the soul as soil. The processes need to be imagined by adding more memory phantasmata to the relatively simple sense of location. The resulting mental images of the crystal glass and alchemy that result serve their respective metaphorical links with soul-farming as well. The rhetoric is not as enargetically powerful as those passages of Bacon’s discussed above or even the scene of awaited sea adventures in “If, as mine is.” There is no self-conscious spectatorship and no strong sense of place, though the processes of using a crystal glass and doing alchemy would have been familiar enough to both men and could easily be imagined mutually. Perhaps the most that can be said of the enargetic function of these two metaphors is that they serve to amplify Woodward’s conception of the larger self-farming conceit. They aid in the shift of focus from farming poetry to farming virtue. At least they purport to, since they are presented as explicatory evidence of the similarity between the two different kinds of farming. The grammatical structure of comparison, as . . . so . . . , repeated twice, suggests so, and also speeds up the tendentious swing of the poem toward the climax of its “pious” concerns. There are functional mental images being evoked in this poem, since Donne’s enargetic choices locate certain activities in imagined places. However, they are not closely controlled or used as clearly to structure the relationship between the writer and the reader as they are in “If, as mine is.” Furthermore, the sense of locality is much vaguer.

Pebworth and Summers argue that another of Donne’s Verse Letters, “Here’s no more newes,” initiates a sequential exchange with Henry Wotton: Wotton replies with the poem “’Tis not coate of gray,” and Donne answers the reply with “Sir, more than kisses.”^[73] I want to consider here the first poem of this exchange, “Here’s no more newes.”

Milgate accepts the date of the letter as July 1598, and Pebworth and Summers place the whole exchange in that summer.^[74] The context, then, involves Wotton’s steadily growing problem with the Earl of Essex and the earl’s falling fortunes. By 1598, both Donne and Wotton had experienced together the military campaigns to Cadiz and to the Azores, both lead by Essex, which Donne mentions in line 2. By 1598 Donne had gone into Egerton’s service, but Wotton remained an Essex employee until 1599, at which point he simply had to dissociate himself from Essex if he wanted to survive politically.^[75] “Here’s no more newes” is principally a satiric gaze at the court and the unvirtuous circumstances in which both young men were trying to make a political career. Being anywhere else than “at court” is “the better stile” (l.27). Amid the disappointment, the idea is that both friends may revert to the role of stoic observers, making satiric fun of the political world’s vicious absurdity and “at these mimicke antiques jeast” (l.22). The poem is a mutual consolation.

In “Here’s no more newes,” Donne employs an enargetic rhetoric with much potential to evoke a powerful mental image that, when “looked at,” is a platform for mutual consolation. It develops in stanzas 4 and 5.

The “worlds warefare” (l.10) is a commonplace stoic figure of life in the world.^[76] Donne asks Woodward to imagine an example of such warfare, where Indians (those who wish to be “honest”) are set to lose to the enemies of virtue as if against “Spanish hosts” (l.15). The language is enargetic to the extent that it locates potential military action—the obliteration of Indians by Spanish hosts—in a sense of place: the battlefield. Such a place is easily imaginable and highly familiar to both men, because of the vivid set of memories they share. Donne knows some of the things that might come to Wotton’s mind. He can rely on Wotton to add some details from his own memory to the mental image of the battlefield.

In that sense, the mental image is a shared space, a scene they are both looking at together, precisely because of the shared memories of battle. But it ties them together as mutual observers in another sense too. Donne makes the battlefield describe the court, where he is but Wotton is not. To that extent Donne asks Wotton to recollect the court Wotton is away from in terms of a battle scene, which Wotton is closer to than Donne, being employed by Essex. Donne and Wotton share identities and histories in both places—court and battle. Though each occupies a different place, they come together in the structure of the shareable mental image. Donne encourages a mental conflation of both places by situating both the “Spanish hosts” and the “seely honest” who stand hopelessly against them with “neate integritie” as part of the “Courts Squadron.” The court, then, is like a battlefield in which two extremes fight and one overcomes the other. The conflation aligns the two men’s current experience. It brings together Donne’s “at court” in Egerton’s service and Wotton’s “at war” in Essex’s service. And the courtly “squadron,” Donne tells us in the first few stanzas, is made up of those who are only free from vice to the extent that others are worse than them! Everyone within the mental image is in some way compromised. Donne and Wotton are, of course, part of the courtly battlefield, somewhere in the middle of the foolish but admirable honest and the powerful but abominable hosts of the vicious, yet they become distanced from the scene of war. They themselves sit in neither of those categories and must see the scene together as if from the outside. Distance from its perturbations gives them a peace and consolation they can share.

The distance comes when Donne tells Wotton what to do with the mental image of court-battle. After suggesting that courts are also like plays at the theatre in lines 19–21, he says:

The activities of the court-wars are as relatively trivial as a play or a game of chess. Donne is perhaps warning Wotton to be careful in associating himself with Essex’s dangerous exploits. In any case, the stance Donne encourages toward the warfare of court life is to see it from the outside, to see it with the distance that comes from trivializing it. Of course, the alternative—being truly virtuous—is next to impossible, as the mental image suggests. The desire to be virtuous is set in tension with stoic apathetic distance. It is that very tension that both men can share. Together they are both stoic transcenders of the unhappy world and sharers in the pathos of virtuous ideals.

“Who makes the Past” is a paraenetic verse letter written to Sir Henry Goodere offering him advice about how to effect further spiritual striving. At least, it is ostensibly that. Goodere, it seems, was being a little extravagant with his limited funds. He was a landowner with continual financial problems and had at least two contested and unprofitable parts of other estates conferred on him without profit.^[77] Donne offers advice, which Goodere already knows and which even “fables” teach (l.44), in order to draw attention to what they can feel mutually. The letter consolidates the friendship and emphasizes their commonality.^[78]

Donne energizes the spiritual quest, to which he and Goodere ought to aspire, by comparing it allegorically to the physical quest of a palace’s inhabitant “to urge upward, and his fortune raise” (l.8).

Just as the palace has a fortune-seeking inhabitant, Goodere’s body too, Donne suggests in the next stanza, has a “faire larger guest” (l.11), which also ought to strive for greater (spiritual) fortunes. Donne’s enargetic language focuses on the thriving palace-inhabitant. The idea of the thriving palace is a location that Goodere can easily imagine, since that, apparently, is what he has fumblingly sought for. On the basis of such a mental image, Donne can now exploit the emotional potential of the metaphorical link between Goodere’s bodily concerns (as the inhabitant of his own palatial home) and Goodere’s spiritual concerns (as inhabitant of his own physical body). Donne asks Goodere to look at his own physical concerns through the mental image of the palace and make them the concerns of his soul too. Goodere’s desire for a thriving palace is made to energize his limping desire for a thriving virtue. The mental image of a palace becomes the basis early in the poem for Donne’s attempt to evoke that “bodily” pathos and transform it into “spiritual” pathos, or desire for virtue. He amplifies the transformation in later lines by referring to the physical body’s processes and growth: getting “lustier” (l.13), and having a better “appetite” and “digestion” (l.14). Donne also, as Goodere knows, is a man desperately looking for better physical fortunes at this point.^[79] The mental image of the palace serves Donne’s metaphorical connection between two whole fields of thought, memory, and feeling: that is, between physical and spiritual wealth, both of which are to be desired by the two men. Thus the mental image, when viewed with mutuality in mind, serves the poem’s attempt to energize their desired transformations as well as the mutuality of those desires, which informs their friendship.

Conclusion

Bacon and Donne employ a different style of enargetic rhetoric in these texts. The difference stems from divergent contexts and purposes. Their different purposes, and stances toward different readerships, call for variations in the aspects of enargetic style I discussed at the beginning: mental image structure, kind of spectatorship, kind of process or logical order involved, and sense of locality. I would like to consider now how those variables offer us a sense of the different enargetic styles Bacon and Donne employ in their different contexts.

Bacon’s purpose in New Atlantis is to demonstrate the significance of natural philosophy in relation to the early modern values of worship, the spiritual and material quest to understand God’s works, laws, and will, and of living according to the natural (moral) law. His readership is an abstracted, diverse, and distant one which he cannot predict as closely as Donne. Bacon needs to reach as many people as possible. This means appealing to the most generalized human experience, because his relatively unfamiliar vision needs to be related to something more familiar. But his appeal to the physical experience of the body (and commonplace ideas about its well-being) in New Atlantis not only serves an attempt to reach the widest possible audience. It plays into his politics too. Bacon’s wider project is to make us attend to the material and moral mechanics of what he took to be “nature.”^[80]

Donne’s purpose in the verse letters, among other things, is to fuse his recipients’ feelings with his own, to strengthen political ties, and to divert any suspicion about his not belonging to the coterie circle. The generic constraints give him less scope than Bacon has for directing what visual and tactile memory should go into making his mental images, but the shared metacommunicative knowledge means he can draw on a wider variety of subtler mental images than Bacon’s images of common physical experience. Donne’s, though, do have to be mental images that draw on shared knowledge for the sake of his soul-mingling purposes. Donne’s enargetic style does not demonstrate so much as join together. His stance toward his readership is defined by close friendship, mutual knowledge and experience, and limited space. The precise quality of the mental images and the things they link up is less important than the fact that they can be shared. His choice of what mental images to evoke, then, is much more varied. Their contents and processes are visually vaguer and subtler.

The structure of Bacon’s and Donne’s mental images thus diverges. Bacon’s are defined by what leads to vivid clarity, so that the mechanics of the processes within them are exposed to view. Donne’s mental images are structured around the need to be of service to larger metaphorical connections, such as between Guyana and virtue, through which he and his friends can share a view of the world. Bacon’s mental images of the conversion events and of the feast of the family focus readers’ attention on the events and processes within them. Readers of New Atlantis are made—at least invited—to induce connections between those physical processes and the natural philosophy discussed elsewhere in the text and his other writing. Bacon encourages this by closely conflating two realms of meaning, material and spiritual, in his mental images. The connection is meant to feel natural. Readers are to focus on the link here rather than the link that is shared. By contrast, Donne’s mental images of Guyana’s riches in the New World, of alchemical process, of concentrated sunlight burning straw, of the court battlefield, of the self-enriching palace all serve metaphorical links with larger concepts of virtue and vice. They bring intensity to the larger metaphorical connections, which Donne wants to share with his friends. Bacon’s mental images guide us in, toward their own processes. Donne’s lead us quickly back out, into the realm of relations between people and things.

For these reasons it is hardly surprising that the extent of self-conscious spectatorship in Bacon’s enargetic rhetoric is much greater and involves many more enargeia signals than Donne’s. Looking at the simple physical events needs no constructed mutuality. Reader alignment comes through Bacon’s enargeia signals. Without that, Bacon’s rhetoric would have less enargetic power to reach a distant readership. For Bacon, there is little need for immediately shared perception. Readers are not aligned with other readers in New Atlantis, they are aligned with the participants of the mental image scenes themselves. That obscures the larger relations between, say, the European narrators and their priest-guide. But clear observation is the primary thing at stake for Bacon, not shared observation, unless it is “inaccurate.” Even when the narrator discusses the feast of the family with Joabin the Jew, the conversation turns immediately to Bensalem’s sexual mores rather than to any shared perceptions or interpretations of the feast day events (151–52). The spectatorship in Bacon’s mental images emphasizes visual clarity and signals its own visibility for the reader-observer’s sake. Donne’s mental images are less self-evidently scenes to be seen. Their emphasis is not only on a shared metaphorical connection, but also on what the two participants do together in relation to the “same” mental image: for example, in the letter to Wotton, “Here’s no more newes,” Donne evokes the court-battle scene and says, “Let us at these mimicke antiques jeast” (l.22). Spectatorship here is constructed by the relative position of the two friends to what is in the mental image. Strong focal points are still important for Donne when evoking the quality of mutual spectatorship, but control over the vividness of visual spectacle is less so.

A related divergence of enargetic style emerges at the level of order in the mental images. The sense of ordered logic that runs through the processes in Bacon’s mental images is tied to the familiar material order: to the physicality of body that his readers experience every day. One prominent example is the commonplace idea that following natural law leads to social benefit, which Bacon presumes people will believe. In comparison with that, the narrative-scripts in Donne’s mental images are either more static, such as the poised battle-scene at court, or involve physical movements less commonplace than bodily experience such as the subtler slower processes of alchemical transformation, farming, and the growing wealth of a palace. The images are potentially vivid but there is much in them to unpack. Their vaguer processes are still useful because the point is the relationship more than the seeing.

The difference in purpose and stance also extends to the kind of localities chosen to structure both men’s mental images. Bacon’s localities are bare: the ocean and the large room furnished only with the trappings of the Tirsan’s chair. Again this serves to expose the processes and their mechanics, and to encourage observatio. Donne’s localities are much vaguer and more complicated places: the farm, the court, the palace. They are vivid enough, but again, they require unpacking. The key thing is that they are familiar to the two participants, writer and reader. That makes them useful for constructing mutuality. If Donne were concerned with making his friends intently observe things in his mental images to the extent that Bacon is, his locations would surely be simpler places, for there is so much more room for imaginative play when considering a court rather than the surface of the ocean, or a palace rather than an empty room.

Both Bacon and Donne envisage places that are “better” in these texts but have slightly different stances toward virtue, or the good, which in turn affect their enargetic styles. Bacon wants to show how natural knowledge will contribute to the material, moral, social, individual, and religious conceptions of the “good.” His enargetic rhetoric needs to evoke mental images demonstrating the contribution. Donne, more skeptical and less visionary in respect to the “good,” wants friends with which to set himself against the vicious world. His enargetic rhetoric evokes mental images that are at once conflictual and yet bring conflict into communal resolution. For Bacon, the good is something to be observed. For Donne it defines a way of being against something mutually problematic. Bacon’s enargetic rhetoric in New Atlantis makes the good feel like something we can pick up and enact. Donne’s enargetic rhetoric in the Verse Letters makes the good feel distant and impossible to attain, no matter how much we long to be a part of it.

In summary, mental images link different ideas into a naturalized whole, support a larger metaphorical structure, and structure the relationship of writer to reader. Since they are developed out of the phantasmata that Aristotle thought to be the basis of thought, it ought to be clear by now just how integral and foundational mental images were thought to be for the two other categories of cognitive process considered in this book: reasoning and the passions. A mental image gathers together a set of perceptions, and to that extent it can stand in for or support any proposition serving a syllogism. That is, it may distill into a compressed commonplace or support belief in one, and thence become mobilized into another disputation. Indeed a mental image can be used in place of disputation or evoke disputative analysis of a topic. The next chapter explores some of these dynamics. But a mental image might also serve the rhetor’s attempt to evoke a passionate response to an object. As I shall show in chapter 3, passionate responses toward an object, in Aristotelian-Thomist terms, depended on the precise perception of that object. Mental images can intensify or diminish such perceptions. Despite the close interrelations between all three categories of mental activity—mental image making, reasoning, and passionate feeling—there is a certain cognitive primacy given by ancient rhetorical theorists to mental image formation and visual rhetoric, and that reflects the epistemological primacy accorded to the faculties of memory and imagination. It was easier to conceive of a mental image driving the other two categories, reasoning and the passions, than it was to conceive of them driving a mental image. Furthermore, the primacy of mental images accords in interesting ways with Bacon’s teaching that the imagination ought always to be a faithful nuntius, or messenger, among the other faculties of perception, memory, reason, and the affections. The imagination, says Bacon, should ultimately be subordinate to reason and not to the affections. If the imagination becomes enthralled by the affections, it is then the duty of rhetoric to redress the problem.^[81] In the next two chapters, I will focus on Bacon’s and Donne’s engagements with reasoning and the passions, their thetical and tropical rhetorics, respectively, keeping the diverse functions of mental images in mind.

Notes

^{1. Aristotle, On the Soul, 431^a16, Barnes, 685.}

^{2. References to Bacon’s New Atlantis are to the page numbers from The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (London: Longman,
1861–1879), vol. 3. References to Donne’s Verse Letters are to the line numbers from The Satires, Epigrams, and Verse Letters, ed. Wesley Milgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).}

^{3. Aristotle, On Memory, 451^a15, Barnes, 714–20.}

^{4. For a helpful discussion of Aristotle’s concept of the imagination and the difficulty
of Aristotle’s vocabulary, see Joseph B. Juhasz, “Greek Theories of the Imagination,”
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 7, no. 1 (1971): 53–57.}

^{5. Michelle Karnes, “Nicholas Love and Medieval Meditations on Christ,” Speculum 82, no. 2 (2007): 390.}

^{6. For a discussion of the growing concern over the productive power of “phantasy,” see
William A. Covino, Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy: An Eccentric History of the Composing Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 37–40, who links the “composing
imagination” explicitly to rhetoric. George Puttenham was concerned that this negative
power of the poetic imagination to create “busy and disordered fantasies” might be
the very reason why poets “in these days” are, in his opinion, “despised.” George
Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007),
109.}

^{7. See Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 197; this power of cogitatio is an act of invention that gathers and combines in a new place “divided bits previously
filed and cross-filed in other discrete loci of memory.”}

^{8. Lee A. Sonnino, A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 216.}

^{9. See, for example, Robert Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Mary J. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).}

^{10. See Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead, Theories of Memory: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 4.}

^{11. Cicero, De Orat., III.160–61. On metaphor and sight see also Cicero, De Part. Orat., 20.}

^{12. Quintilian, IO, 4.2.63–64.}

^{13. The process gives rise to energeia, or vigour, a concept closely related to enargeia, or sharp clarity: see Rhetoric, 1411^b25–30, 221.}

^{14. Wilson, Art, 240.}

^{15. Cicero, De Orat., III.160: “is qui audit alio ducitur cogitatione”; Wilson, Art, 196–97.}

^{16. On ellipsis, see Cicero, De Orat., III.160 and Wilson, Art, 197. On synecdoche’s elliptical power, see Quintilian, IO, 8.6.19.}

^{17. Quintilian, IO, 6.2.29: “Quas phantasias Graeci vocant (nos sane visiones appellemus), per quas imagines rerum absentium ita repraesentantur animo ut eas cernere oculis ac praesentes habere videamur, has quisquis bene ceperit is erit in adfectibus potentissimus” (The person who will show the greatest power in the expression of emotions will
be the person who has properly formed what the Greeks call phantasiai (let us call them “visions”), by which the images of absent things are presented
to the mind in such a way that we seem actually to see them with our eyes and have
them physically present to us).}

^{18. IO, 6.2.34–35.}

^{19. IO, 8.3.61–72.}

^{20. Ibid., 9.2.40.}

^{21. Erasmus, De Cop., II.5, 577.}

^{22. Andrew D. Walker, “Enargeia and the Spectator in Greek Historiography,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 123 (1993): 354.}

^{23. Marion A. Wells, “‘to find a face where all distress is stell’d’: Enargeia, Ekphrasis, and Mourning in The Rape of Lucrece and the Aeneid,” Comparative Literature 54, no. 2 (2002): 101.}

^{24. Gerard Paul Sharpling, “Towards a Rhetoric of Experience: The Role of Enargeia in
the Essays of Montaigne,” Rhetorica 20, no. 2 (2002): 173.}

^{25. Ingunn Lunde, “Rhetorical Enargeia and Linguistic Pragmatics: On Speech-Reporting
Strategies in East Slavic Medieval Hagiography and Homiletics,” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 5 (2004): 50, 52.}

^{26. Beth Innocenti, “Toward a Theory of Vivid Description as Practiced in Cicero’s Verrine Orations,” Rhetorica 7, no. 4 (1994): 374. Innocenti mentions enargeia principally as Quintilian’s word for the technique of vivid description.}

^{27. Bernard F. Scholz, “Ekphrasis and Enargeia in Quintilian’s Institutionis Oratoriae Libri XII,” in Rhetorica Movet: Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric in Honor of Heinrich F. Plett, ed. Peter L. Oesterreich and Thomas O. Sloan (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 8.}

^{28. Ibid., 11.}

^{29. The notion of “metacommunication” in the context of Donne was, of course, discussed
by Arthur Marotti, see John Donne, Coterie Poet (1986; repr.. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2008), 20–22. I will return to this idea
when discussing the Verse Letters.}

^{30. See Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric, ed. George A. Kennedy (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 117 for
Aphthonius and 86 for Hermogenes.}

^{31. Cicero, De Orat., I.153.}

^{32. The verse letter was a relatively new English genre in the 1590s, and Thomas Lodge
claims for himself the honor of being its first modern English practitioner in A Fig for Momus; see David Palmer, “The Verse Epistle,” in Metaphysical Poetry, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970),
79, who claims that “the strong vein of stoicism in Horace’s epistles suggests why
Donne turned in this direction [stoic elements] to give his letters moral depth.”}

^{33. Christopher Kendrick, “The Imperial Laboratory: Discovering Forms in ‘The New Atlantis,’”
English Literary History 70, no. 4 (2003): 1021.}

^{34. See Bronwen Price, ed., Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002), 2. Sarah Hutton, “Persuasians
to Science: Baconian Rhetoric and the New Atlantis,” in the same collection, calls the text a “parabolical . . . glimpse of the Baconian
scientific method in action,” 52.}

^{35. David Colclough, “Ethics and Politics in the New Atlantis,” in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Bronwen Price (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002), 62. For Aristotle’s
discussion of the variety of definitions of what eudaimonia is, see his Nichomachean Ethics, 1095^a15–30, in Barnes, The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, 1730.}

^{36. Colclough, “Ethics and Politics,” 69.}

^{37. Advancement, 79 (Works, III: 350).}

^{38. Ibid., 182 (Works, III: 477).}

^{39. Brian Vickers, ed., Francis Bacon: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 791, glosses Bacon’s use of “theatre” here
as “a beholding-place.”}

^{40. It is worth recalling here Erasmus’s description in De Copia of enargeia’s effect as making the reader feel like “an audience at a theatre,” II.5, 577.}

^{41. Ad Her., III.33–34.}

^{42. José María Rodríguez García, “Patterns of Conversion in Francis Bacon’s ‘New Atlantis,’”
Literature Interpretation Theory 17, no. 2 (2006): 198–99.}

^{43. See David C. Innes, “Bacon’s New Atlantis: The Christian Hope and the Modern Hope,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 22, no. 1 (1994): 3–37; as well as Jerry Weinberger, “On the Miracles in Bacon’s
New Atlantis,” in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Bronwen Price (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002), 113–14.}

^{44. Joabim is a good example, but Bensalem also has “some stirps and little tribes” of
“Persians, Chaldeans,” and “Arabians” (141), whose ancestors arrived thousands of
years earlier, and who, it seems, have happily survived into the present.}

^{45. David Renaker, “A Miracle of Engineering: The Conversion of Bensalem in Francis Bacon’s
‘New Atlantis,’” Studies in Philology 87, no. 2 (1990): 188.}

^{46. Ibid., 191.}

^{47. DeCook suggests that since the biblical books in the ark are comprehensible, and they
do not need to go through a canon-forming process, the “Bensalemite revelation obviates
both the need for humanist philology and textual criticism.” Travis DeCook, “The Ark
and Immediate Revelation in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis,” Studies in Philology 105, no. 1 (2008): 116.}

^{48. See Colclough, “Ethics and Politics,” 70, and Richard Serjeantson, “Natural Knowledge
in the New Atlantis,” in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Bronwen Price (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002), 87.}

^{49. See R. S. White’s discussion in Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 21–43 in particular.}

^{50. See Cicero, De re publica, De legibus, ed. and trans. Clinton Walker Keyes, Loeb Classical Library (1928; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970),
XXII, 33.}

^{51. Aquinas develops his highly influential theory of natural law in Summa Theologiae, at 1a2æ 90–97. For a more specific discussion of Aquinas’s influential theory, see
Anthony J. Lisska, Aquinas’s Theory of Natural Law: An Analytic Reconstruction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 82–115.}

^{52. Works, IV: 456. Bacon’s Latin, following Spedding’s text, reads: “finis denique rhetoricae phantasiam implere obversationibus [sic] et simulachris.” Given Spedding’s translation, “observations,” the Latin was perhaps actually “observationibus.”}

^{53. The transmission of the memory-room commonplace was due in no small part to Augustine’s
discussion of the “lata praetoria memoriae,” the vast palace of memory, in his Confessions, X, viii. For the Latin text of the Confessions, see Augustine, Confessions, ed. James J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).}

^{54. Susan Smith, “The New Atlantis: Francis Bacon’s Theological-Political Utopia?,” Harvard Theological Review 101 (2008): 118.}

^{55. See Psalm 80:8–16; Isaiah 17:10; Jeremiah 2:21, 5:10–11; Ezekiel 19:10; Hosea 10:1–2;
and Song of Songs 7:12.}

^{56. See Gospel of John 15:1–11, especially.}

^{57. Revelation 19:6–8.}

^{58. Charles Whitney, “Francis Bacon’s Instauratio: Dominion of and over Humanity,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50, no. 3 (1989): 377–81.}

^{59. On Bacon’s view of instauration as an event in sacred history, see also the discussion
in Steven Mathews, Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 51–58.}

^{60. See, for example, the representative examples in Mark 10: 29–31 and Luke 6:35, 38.}

^{61. Advancement, 79 (Works, III: 350).}

^{62. Ibid.}

^{63. Allen Barry Cameron, “Donne’s Deliberative Verse Epistles,” English Literary Renaissance 6 (1976): 372.}

^{64. Gary P. Storhoff, “Social Mode and Poetic Strategies: Donne’s Verse Letters to His
Friends,” Essays in Literature 4, no. 1 (1977): 11.}

^{65. Marotti, Coterie Poet, 34–38.}

^{66. Ibid., 20–21.}

^{67. See Dennis Flynn, John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 67–79; John Carey,
John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (1981; repr., London: Faber, 2008), 37–59; and John Stubbs, Donne: The Reformed Soul (London: Penguin, 2007), 21–46, where Stubbs describes the horrible ordeal of Donne’s
brother Henry’s death as an imprisoned Catholic, an image indelibly etched in Donne’s
mind of what might happen if he was unable to belong.}

^{68. See Milgate’s note, Satires, Epigrams, and Verse Letters, 217.}

^{69. Donne follows a Senecan precedent here; for an example, see Ad Lucilium epistulae morales, trans. Richard M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library (1917; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1967) XL.1, vol. 1, 263.}

^{70. Little is known about Woodward’s life. However, he was serving in Venice with Wotton
in 1605. See M. C. Deas, “A Note on Rowland Woodward, the Friend of Donne,” Review of English Studies 7, no. 28 (1931): 454. He was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in 1591. Milgate, Satires, Epigrams, and Verse Letters, 214.}

^{71. See Milgate’s note, Satires, Epigrams, and Verse Letters, 223.}

^{72. Milgate offers further comment on the alchemical background; Ibid., 224.}

^{73. Ted-Larry Pebworth and Claude J. Summers, “‘Thus Friends Absent Speake’: The Exchange
of Verse Letters between John Donne and Henry Wotton,” Modern Philology 81, no. 4 (1984): 361.}

^{74. Milgate, Satires, Epigrams, and Verse Letters, 230; Pebworth and Summers, “‘Friends Absent,’” 365.}

^{75. Stubbs, Reformed Soul, 117.}

^{76. Milgate, Satires, Epigrams, and Verse Letters, 231. See Seneca’s Epistulae morales, LI.6, vol. 1, 339. For Epictetus, too, “the business of life is a [military] campaign”:
see Arrian’s Discourses of Epictetus, trans. W. A. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library (1928; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1966), III.xxiv.31, vol. 2, 195.}

^{77. John Considine, “Goodere, Sir Henry (bap. 1571, d. 1627),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004);
online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11003
(accessed November 6, 2011).}

^{78. Donne was on very familiar terms with Goodere by this stage, between 1605 and 1610,
writing weekly letters; see Milgate, Satires, Epigrams, and Verse Letters, 238.}

^{79. He was clearly living at Micham at the time (line 48). The years 1607–1610, years
lived at Micham and spent in the desperate hope of government employment, were, as
Bald says “probably the most disturbed and anxious years of Donne’s life”; John Donne: A Life, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 235.}

^{80. For discussion of Bacon’s engagements with Renaissance concepts of nature, see John
Briggs, Francis Bacon and the Rhetoric of Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).}

^{81. Advancement, Works, III: 408–411. On Bacon’s view of the imagination and memory, see also Karl Wallace,
Francis Bacon on the Nature of Man: The Faculties of Man’s Soul; Understanding, Reason, Imagination, Memory, Will, and Appetite (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 55–95.}

Making Mental Images

Enargeia and the Evocation of Mental Images

Rhetorical Uses of the Mental Image

Bacon’s New Atlantis

The Conversion Scene

The Feast of the Family

Donne’s Verse Letters

Conclusion

Notes