Passion and Perception

Robert Cockcroft sums up the problem of early modern “rhetorical affect,” identified by Lawrence Green, in the following way: “There was agreement on techniques for moving emotion, but no clear idea as to what was being moved, or to what effect.”^[1] As Cockcroft goes on to detail, however, the sheer variety of ideas about the interrelations between soul, mind, and body do not mean that there were no coherent connections made at all between the “how” and the “what” of rhetorical emotion. The “how” and the “what” of moving emotions—or passions—do come together.^[2] In this chapter I would like to examine how they come together usefully for Bacon in his parliamentary oratory and for Donne in his sermons.

In the discussions of rhetoric and the passions that Bacon and Donne inherited, passionate stances toward objects were usually conceived in connection with sensory and rational perceptions of those objects. How humans perceive things is commensurably related to how they feel toward them. When speaking of fear in the Rhetoric, Aristotle brings out the relation clearly: fear, for Aristotle, is a “pain or agitation derived from the imagination of a future destructive or painful evil.”^[3] Fear of an evil implies the imagination or perception of its imminence. Aristotle also made similar links between passion and imaginative perception when describing other passions. For example, anger derived from imagined slights, confidence from the absence of danger, and shame from being shown how disgraceful one’s actions are.^[4] As recent work on stoicism and emotion shows, ancient stoics developed a conception of emotion as an actual judgment of reason. Emotion, in stoic thought, was often related to rational perception. The view is often traced to Chrysippus.^[5] Thus, from the point of view of Bacon’s and Donne’s rhetoric, trying to alter a person’s or group’s perception of something would be the most likely means of altering passionate responses to it. What was being moved when moving the passions, on this model, was sensory and rational perception. I shall explore here how this deeply rooted model of passionate psychology provided Bacon and Donne with a means to theorize engagements of passionate feeling in their public oratory—in Parliament and pulpit—and how the passion-perception model explains some of the rhetorical decisions they have made.

Speaking of a passion-perception model raises the whole question of the relationship of reason and emotion running through the ancient sources of rhetorical theory. Classical rhetorical theory acknowledged the power of the passions to achieve rhetoric’s ends, but many of its exemplars insisted that reason had a priority both for the mind itself and for the sake of persuasive power. Aristotle held that moving a judge purely by anger, envy, or pity is a kind of perversion, as if one were to make “a straight-edge ruler crooked before using it.”^[6] The paradigm seems to have remained compelling: judgment was somehow primary and emotions were powerful in a secondary sense as ways of affecting or diminishing judgment. Quintilian, for example, advises that too much excitement will make the judge return to a more rational state of mind.^[7] Cicero adds that since judgment is primary, a “statement will be convincing (probabilis) . . . if what we say appears to be based on evidence, and to be in agreement with the judgment of mankind.”^[8] In the same way, Quintilian claims that the real backbone of the judge’s consent will be his feeling that he has been instructed and reasoned with, no matter how much emotion is involved.^[9] Quintilian does admit the power of the passions when he says that “the major force of eloquence in fact lies in its power to arouse emotion”; yet, it is in the context of explaining how one particular partition of a speech serves “to rob the judge of his power of judgment.”^[10] Rational judgment had to give way before the passions could have their power. The less “rationality” the orator has to deal with the easier it is to use the passions. Yet, passions could also be figured as judgments of reason.

If fear is an imagined evil and the imagination does rational work, then there must be something of the rational faculty involved in the production or modification of passionate feeling. Perhaps the problem is the ambiguity of “reason.” Bacon says that “the duty and office of Rhetoric is to apply Reason to Imagination for the better moving of the will.” He also believes that when the will is captive to the “affections,” eloquence is supposed to “win the Imagination from the Affection’s part, and contract a confederacy between Reason and Imagination against the Affections” (III: 410). What does he mean by “reason” here? Does he mean simply a “correct” judgment from elsewhere or the faculty of perceiving consistency or inconsistency between judgments and the familiar? Perhaps he means both. To the extent that Bacon’s “reason” here means the perception of consistency and inconsistency, reason becomes implicated in the very imaginative constructions that both create and diminish passionate feeling. For example, if an imagined evil is to be truly fearful it will have to be both consistent with the known capabilities of the enemy and inconsistent with the known conditions of safety. Many other perceptions of consistency and inconsistency will be involved—not all of which would have to be consciously thought through before having a passionate response, of course, because the consistencies and inconsistencies can be encapsulated in a mental image or in highly figurative, tropical language.

So while there is a tendency to separate reasoned judgment from emotional states in the tradition Bacon and Donne drew on there is also a precedent for relating reasoned perception to emotional intervention, as the stoics did. It was not always conceived as an equation, however. Bacon does not think that an emotion is a judgment, even if the stoic tradition offers some precedent for that conception. Yet to have a means of controlling passions was also to have a means of controlling reasoned perception. The task of this chapter is, partly, to evaluate how useful this relation of passion-perception is for understanding what Bacon and Donne are doing rhetorically in emotionally charged contexts.

On the whole, critics have not adequately explored the dynamics between passion and perception or the role of amplification in early modern thinking about how to adjust it. Sloan identifies some of the links made by Thomas Wright in his Passions of the Mind in Generall (1604), between the passions, amplification, and the rational control of the imagination.^[11] Deborah Shuger draws attention to passion and perception in outlining the meaning of “sacred rhetoric,” but she does so within a confined scope.^[12] The Christian grand style—always passionate—derives the power to evoke desire, or love, above all, in Shuger’s view, from the vivid presence of something good to the imagination.^[13] Thus, the Christian grand style responds to the “ancient dilemma” in which there is an “inverse proportion” between the “excellence of an object” (its magnitdo) and “our knowledge of it” (how present it is to us).^[14] In other words, the more distant an object is from the particulars familiar to our sense memory, the more worthy it is of knowing, and the more difficult it is to know. The problem for a Christian rhetoric is how to make that distant excellence (God) close, or present, to the imagination.^[15] When the distant excellent object is presented to the imagination through vivid description and mental images, it moves “down” into the realm of the passions. Mental images can bring the distant object into an impassioned presence. Yet the passions are also implicated in our rhetorical attempts to make certain things look better than they appear to be and thus more worth desiring. For Bacon, that is precisely rhetoric’s job: to make the better judgments of reason present to the imagination’s mental images. Vividness may make the object present, but, as Shuger notes, in the Christian grand style, amplification will make it seem good (or bad).^[16] Amplification gave Renaissance rhetoricians a way of managing which things ought to be desired and which ought not to be. Modifying how the audience perceives something means modifying the passionate stance to be taken toward it. Obviously, that dynamic does not allow a preacher to predict everything that the individuals in an audience will do emotionally. Rather, it gives him a way of striving to control the passionate potential of a topic. In amplification, the “how” joins up with the “what.”

As illuminating as Shuger’s discussion is, the desire for God-the-greatest-of-all-goods is not all there is to the connection between passion and perception. For one thing, the dynamic is a useful rhetorical resource for other writers or speakers in domains beyond “sacred discourse.” A whole range of dynamics in the perception-passion model give Bacon a means of thinking about how to engage the passionate aspects of his parliamentary context, in ways far beyond just generating desire for an ultimate good. Other passions than desire are relevant. Even for Donne—whose sermon rhetoric fits very comfortably within the Augustinian psychology that Shuger discusses—a variety of different passions beyond desire and the perception of good are relevant to his shifting contexts. They include hatred, aversion, pity, fear, hope, despair, audacity, and righteous anger. Many of those are foundational passions in the Aristotelian faculty psychology that Bacon and Donne inherited. They ought to be explored in more detail when thinking about how Renaissance rhetoric tried to engage passion through perception.

In order to draw attention to the range of dynamics between passion-perception and rhetoric, I shall focus on Aquinas’s systematic and influential model. The Thomist system of explaining the passions of the mind powerfully transmitted classical ideas on the passions in a form not significantly challenged until the seventeenth century.^[17] Even the English writer Thomas Wright in 1604 felt the need to quote Aquinas’s account and take issue with it above other philosophers’ accounts.^[18] Wright disagreed with Aquinas more in respect to his arrangement of and names for the principal passions rather than the actual model of passion-perception in which the precise perception of things as good or relatively problematic was thought to induce the variety of passions.^[19] Susan James describes the Thomist (and Aristotelian) passions as “thoughts or states of the soul which represent things as good or evil for us and are therefore seen as objects of inclination or aversion.”^[20] In a recent discussion of the “activation” of the Thomist passions, Miner discusses the roles Aquinas gave to the imagination and the “particular reason” in affecting the soul’s perception.^[21] The passion-perception link is explicit in Aquinas too.

Aquinas’s eleven fundamental passions are divided into the six that potentially arise from the “concupiscible” appetite and the five that potentially arise from the “irascible” appetite.^[22] In the “concupiscible” appetite, love (amor) gives rise to desire (desiderium), which, depending on its successful satisfaction, gives rise to joy (gaudium / delectatio) or sorrow (tristitia / dolor). By contrast, hatred (odium) gives rise to aversion (fuga), which, depending on success, also gives rise to joy or sorrow. In the “irascible” appetite, more complicated passions arise because of impediments to desire and to aversion. Desire for a good thing that is difficult to attain is hope (spes). Being repelled by the extreme difficulty of attaining that thing, or of avoiding an evil, is despair (desperatio). The movement toward something threatening is courage (audacia), while the perception of an imminent danger and the difficulty of avoiding it is fear (timor). The desire to resist an evil thing is anger (ira).^[23] Aquinas locates those passions and their interrelations in the sensitive soul—that is, in visual cognition, imagination, and memory. However, the intellectual soul, crucially, is capable of shifting perception. Thus, as James puts it, “While many objects present themselves to us as good or bad, we are not compelled to take these presentations at face value.”^[24]

Various rhetorical implications emerge from the variety of dynamics between passion and perception in Aquinas’s model. Obviously, if you want to move an individual’s desire toward something, that thing needs to be represented as good. Less obviously, if you want to generate fear for something, it is helpful to represent it both as threatening and difficult to avoid. If the fear of something needs to be removed, its threatening nature must be collapsed or represented as avoidable. If you want to engender communal delight (delectatio) in the idea of possessing something, for the sake of strengthening a community, it is important to avoid carefully any perceived obstacles to the fact that the desire for it will be satisfied. If despair needs to be broken down for the sake of consolation, it is important to attack the sense that something is insurmountably difficult to attain or impossible to escape.

Such dynamics turn on relative representations of a thing’s value. Ancient theorists thought that the passions could be engaged partly by the orator’s simply enacting the passionate response he wanted from his audience.^[25] But generating passionate responses to things also turned on how the orator represents them as good or bad, and in what precise way. Take, for example, the ancient teaching on pity and how to generate it. Aristotle describes the passion as “a certain pain at an apparently destructive or painful event happening to one who does not deserve it and which a person might expect himself or one of his own to suffer, and this when it seems close at hand.”^[26] To generate pity the orator needs to make that evil seem as vividly destructive, painful, and repeatable as possible, within the limits of decorum. Mental imagery could intensify those representations and thus the predicted passionate response. The author of Ad Herennium adds to Aristotle that pity for what will befall a person can be extended by putting the representation into a larger narrative describing what will happen to other connected people whom we care about—our families, for example.^[27] Quintilian adds that pity for the evil situation of a victim can be enhanced through vivid description of the kind of future we might have if justice is not provided, so that pity mixes productively with fear.^[28] Passionate feeling, in this ancient model, therefore, derives from the beliefs we maintain about a thing’s goodness or badness, and the precise sense in which it is good or bad.

In the context of rhetoric, then, making use of the passions requires trying to direct people’s cognitive reconstructions of things, and thus the kinds of beliefs about them that will lead to passionate responses. Such a rhetoric I will call “tropical.” It involves the skills of amplification, principally, including the tropes and figures, to the extent that such skills modify perceptions of objects. The expression “tropical rhetoric” is intended to capture more than just the use of tropes and figures. Those skills can be used for many purposes. Tropical rhetoric here refers to the way tropes and figures could be used to affect passion-perception.

Amplification was widely identified as a rhetorical skill connected with emotion. Thomas Wilson perpetuates the classical teaching on the conclusion of a speech (peroratio), whose traditional purpose was to arouse the emotions and finish with zest.^[29] “The other part of a conclusion,” he says, “resteth either in augmenting and vehemently enlarging that which before was in few words spoken, to set the judge or hearers in a heat, or else to mitigate and assuage displeasure conceived.”^[30] A peroration ought to amplify and drive the emotions. In theory at least, amplification and emotion went together in early modern rhetorical culture. As Mack points out, though, highly emotional behavior in Elizabethan parliamentary oratory is always accountable to the strictures of decorum.^[31] For example, the peroration of Sir Christopher Hatton’s speech, which opened Parliament in 1589, was used, in good classical style, “to summarize the argument, to turn the audience and to propose the solution with the greatest possible emotional force.”^[32] Yet even in Hatton’s particular case, as was often true of Elizabethan Parliaments, there was no question of the Parliament rushing off to carry out some drastic action at the whim of the speaker. Instead, Hatton’s “vituperation against a common enemy [Catholicism] aims to unite Parliament before his much more contentious criticism of Protestant innovation.”^[33] Amplification and its emotional power serves Hatton’s own ethos and emphasizes communal identity. Amplification could also create emotional distance through technical display, where the audience is invited simply to appreciate virtuosity and literary allusion.^[34] Amplification did more than just generate emotion at the end of the speech.

Amplification has both a general and a specific meaning. Specifically, it could refer to the orator’s ability to enlarge or reduce something, especially its goodness or evil. Enlargement happens, for example, when using words with different degrees of moral meaning—for example, calling a thief a “plunderer.” Quintilian describes four other more elaborate ways of enlarging the sense of how bad or good things are, through incrementum, comparatio, ratiocinatio (inference or implication), and congeries (accumulation). They involve comparing extents of seriousness on a scale, making each new stage seem better or worse than the previous one. Quintilian offers an example from Cicero of the combination of incrementum with comparatio: “That great man, Publius Scipio . . . acting as private citizen, killed Tiberius Gracchus, whose subversion of the existing political order was not very radical: shall we, as consuls, tolerate Catiline, whose ambition is to devastate the world with fire and sword?”^[35] Cicero here has deployed amplification by comparing Gracchus and Catiline so that the latter’s relative badness is constructed more precisely: Gracchus was a nonradical subverter of the existing order but Catiline is a devastator of the world. The comparison is intended to script an appropriate passionate stance for Cicero’s listeners to take toward Catiline—moral indignation. Donne and Bacon also make use of such forms of comparative enlargement (and diminution) in their speeches, along with many forms of figuration.

Amplification, more generally, also denotes the forms of figuration included under lists of tropes and figures. When discussing the tropes and figures used by Bacon and Donne in their public speaking, I draw principally on Erasmus’s De Copia and on the discussion in Quintilian that stands behind it.^[36] Despite recent challenges to the idea that Erasmus’s De Copia was as influential as is often claimed, it is reasonable to assume that the discussions of the figures and tropes in Quintilian and Erasmus were deeply formative in university education.^[37] Some of the tropes and figures were known through the widely familiar English style manuals of Richard Sherry, Henry Peacham, Thomas Wilson, Angel Day, and John Hoskins, for example. However, most of those English manuals were derivations from a group of popular neo-Latin texts, such as Erasmus’s De Copia, Peter Shade’s (Mosellanus’s) Tabulae de Schematibus et Tropibus (London, 1573), and the discussion in Melanchthon’s Institutiones Rhetoricae (Hagenau, 1521), all of which were themselves adaptations of Cicero and Quintilian, and all of which were more commonly studied at university and used by Latin-speaking professionals (such as Bacon and Donne) than the English handbooks.^[38]

Bacon’s and Donne’s tropical rhetoric must do two things in seeking to alter perceptions. It must both get at the contents of listeners’ memories and influence their reconstruction into mental images and comparisons. It will be helpful, then, to describe the range of amplificatory figuration both men employ in their own way by tentatively distinguishing between what I would call “representational” figures and more “organizational” ones. Representational figures are those that are capable of engaging the sense memory directly in order to get its contents into the imagination. They include figures like metaphor, metalepsis, metonymy, allegory, enargeia, comparison, synoeciosis (coupling of categories), interrogatio (rhetorical question), ratiocinatio (answering your own questions), and so on. Such figures mine the memory because of their comparisons and ellipsis especially, which activate the imagination. Organizational figures give structural guidance as to how the imagination might reconstruct the memory contents. They include figures of repetition especially, such as parison, anaphora, and accumulatio, for example. The difference between representational and organizational figures is not just that between tropes and figures. In any case, it matters little whether the techniques I have identified were characterized as tropes or figures by Quintilian, Erasmus, or anyone else, since I am primarily concerned with what they are being made to do. Both representational and organizational figures have different but vital roles to play in a rhetoric designed to engage the passions. I do not pretend that the distinction can be drawn absolutely. I intend it rather to be suggestive of the kinds of roles that particular figures might take on. The range of figuration Bacon and Donne use to engage the passions includes more than just the “fields of imagery” identified by Schleiner.^[39] Organizational figures play just as crucial a role in setting up structures for controlling mental comparison as the representational ones that we might tend to associate with the development of fields of imagery. Both kinds are important and interact with each other.

Bacon’s Parliamentary Orations

Bacon’s parliamentary orations have hardly been studied at all in comparison with his philosophical works.^[40] The seven relatively complete extant orations are clever handlings of a series of political and legal matters of great import to the state made with all the ingredients of a master of humanist rhetoric.^[41] Bacon’s speeches are fairly typical examples of humanist argument and amplification, at times impassioned but usually restrained and purposefully diffident, with decorous respect for the venerability of the men he is addressing. I shall first discuss a speech Bacon made against the practice of dueling in which he tries to excite the passion of moral disgust. By comparison, I then consider two speeches in which the context requires Bacon to try to reduce the threatening and powerful passions of fear and uncertainty.

The Charge of Sir Francis Bacon, Knight, His Majesty’s Attorney-General, Touching Duels addressed the Star Chamber on January 26, 1614, in response to the ongoing general problem of private dueling. Bacon clearly felt it was an outdated and problematic way of solving disputes. The apparent value of the kind of “honor” tied up with dueling comes under question too.^[42] Bacon brought his charge to the House by addressing a particular dueling case involving the gentlemen William Priest and Richard Wright, whose case Bacon used both as an excuse to get a general injunction against dueling and a way of warning bigger fish than Priest and Wright. The issue itself was not new. Bacon acknowledges straightaway that a legal solution to the problem had been sought before (XI: 399). The problem had its roots in early modernity’s gradual transformation of the chivalric code of honor, with its hypersensitivity to individualistic worth upheld by violence, into a variety of newer notions of honor shaped by humanist Protestantism’s fusion of classical and Christian virtue. The fusion also involved a growing concern to bring people in the civic body under the authority of law and sovereign.^[43] Both contexts inform Bacon’s legislative interests here: The authority of law and sovereign and the different meanings of honor both come out loud and clear in his speech. There was no confusion about where Bacon stood on the matter.

In his divisio, Bacon first wishes “to speak somewhat” and of course to amplify “the nature and greatness of this mischief” of dueling (XI: 399). The amplification becomes an emotional and rational basis for why it is necessary to eradicate it. The relevant passion to generate is moral disgust. Bacon builds his own ethos into a community of judges who are all supposed to feel moral disgust, and which is particularly persuasive. The political purpose is to create law, and punishment, against something bad. Moral disgust will help not merely because it provides a rationality for action, but because it defines a moral community of thought against something that community considers a bad thing.

Given the link between passion and (moral) perception, Bacon’s generation of indignation will turn on the strength of his representation of dueling as a threatening evil. He begins his amplification—appropriately enough, given that he is speaking to a bunch of judges—by positioning the evil as an attempted escape from law, after which “no man can foresee the dangers and inconveniencies that may arise and multiply thereupon” (XI: 400). Its evil effects are so bad they are past reckoning. There follows a textbook example of gradatio used to achieve Quintilian’s first form of amplification, incrementum, in which the goal is to reach a point of extremity beyond which nothing else can be added:

The endpoint of Bacon’s gradatio-incrementum, his “no man can foresee” and his “fall not under foresight,” is such a large category that it has become totally vague. It draws imaginative attention to the “unspeakable” by refusing to speak about it. The absences these phrases imply are engaging and suggestive, because they ask the imagination to fill in the gaps.

Two “body” tropes follow that gradatio-incrementum, which give a little more specificity to the precise quality of the evil. In both tropes the pleasing image of a well-ordered, happy, and youthful human body is under threat. The state not subjugated to law and sovereign, Bacon says, is “like a distempered and unperfect body, continually subject to inflammations and convulsions” (XI: 400). A little argument follows, and then a second trope is developed: “It is a miserable effect, when young men full of towardness and hope, such as the poets call aurorae filii, sons of the morning, in whom the expectation and comfort of their friends consisteth, shall be cast away and destroyed in such a vain manner” (XI: 400). The appealing visuality of youth as morning, in its warmth, hopefulness, and promise, will be the basis of the pathos felt in its destruction. It is not just anything that is being destroyed but something particularly valuable.

Dueling contradicts the very value placed in the goodness of youthfulness by a wasteful and preventable death. Such a contradiction informs the larger distinction Bacon is trying to encourage between the “honor” in dueling and the “honor” of upholding the natural values that the legal code is supposed to protect. The “honor” in dueling is a false honor, he intimates, a contradiction in terms. Bacon is associating the contradiction between true honor and false honor with the contradiction of the value of youthful vitality by fighting in the streets. He wants his lawmakers to feel the same negative pathos he has associated with the image of aurorae filii—fear, moral indignation, and empathetic sorrow—toward the (dis)honor of dueling. The speech would hardly work in an age that still widely valued the honor code. Older concepts of the honor code that made dueling so important were fracturing in Bacon’s time into a range of new conceptions developed in the context of Christianity.^[44] Space opened up in the concept of honor for other things than the (spurious) “honor” in dueling. Bacon exploits that space for a rewriting of “honor.” It is therefore not a conflict over human law per se—that is, about what should be legal and illegal. It is a conflict over readings of the natural moral law. Is one to read honor into the act of protecting a good name to the death, or does honor really exist more in protecting youth and vitality until it has a greater purpose? The passionate feelings tied to Bacon’s representation of dueling are deeply tied up with rational analysis.

Bacon then compares aurorae filii dying on the battlefield in the service of King and country, and aurorae filii dying at home in the streets. “But much more it is to be deplored when so much noble and gentle blood shall be spilt on such follies, as if it were adventured in the field in service of the King and realm . . . ” (XI: 400–401). There are two implications here. First, it is not just that the “sons of the morning” are cut off. The problem is that “sons of the morning are being cut off ironically, purposelessly, as if it were done for king and country with a (real) purpose. Second, at another level of comparison, if it is bad enough that young men’s blood is spilt for king and country, how much worse is it that it should be spilt in the same way at home for no purpose! Bacon has now resituated the mental image of youth in the morning within two (very negative) situations: wasteful dying at home and abroad. That resituating is useful for Bacon’s invitation to indignation because it adds further moral reasoning to the mental image of aurorae filii. It intensifies the negativity of the resulting mental images, by asking for reasoned analysis within the imagination of the inconsistency between the value of aurorae filii and dueling’s wasteful compromises of it. Bacon’s amplification here highlights the function of comparison in the process of representing relative goods and evils.

He maintains the same strength of attitude toward this “desperate evil” (XI: 401) further on in the speech when he comes to the causes of dueling. It is a kind of “sorcery” enchanting the minds of youth with species falsa and “a kind of satanical illusion and apparition of honour” (XI: 401). Duels occur among people of “unsound and depraved opinions, like the dominations and spirits of the air which the Scripture speaketh of” (XI: 401). The law must repress “this depraved custom” (XI: 402). At one level, Bacon’s characterization of dueling as actually demonic is highly appropriate for a legal argument about a practice that goes against the very concept of law, especially to the extent that human law for most early modern thinkers rested on a natural-divine one.

Bacon’s growing ethopoiea (character construction) of the spiritual darkness of practitioners of dueling is more than a decorous play to his legal listeners. It adds to the representation of dueling’s badness and thus the production of moral indignation. His anaphora (repeated first words) in the line: “against religion, against law, against moral virtue, and against the precedents and examples of the best times . . . ” (XI: 401), is emotionally powerful only because a strong perception of dueling as destructive and demonic has already been set up. We may choose to call anaphora an “organizational” figure, in that it is less obviously used to mine the memory for comparative material. However, it does closely combine with the representational figures that more explicitly link dueling to the psychology of demonic possession. Donne’s passionate rhetoric in the sermons involves similar combinations of representational and organizational figures.

By comparison with Bacon’s attempts in the dueling speech to generate the passion of moral indignation, I now wish to examine two speeches in which the mitigation of passions, rather, is more important to the context than generating them. The speech Bacon made to Parliament on February 17, 1606/7, regarding the naturalization of Scots, and the one he made to Parliament early in 1614 on the issue of undertaking, were both attempts at restraining fears of various threats to the English way of doing things. I shall be mostly concerned here with the way Bacon deploys amplificatory figuration when dealing with the emotional panic of anxiety or fear. Of course, throughout these speeches Bacon also tries to convince people of reasons to be calm through syllogistic argument, historical examples, and thetical commonplaces.

Bacon made the speech on the naturalization of Scots early in the reign of James, 1606/7. The issue of national union and the naturalization of Scots were big problems. Spedding notes that his speech was the first reply made to Nicholas Fuller, who had argued against naturalization on the predictable grounds that England is everywhere full and that the great influx of Scotts following from naturalization would only make things worse.^[45] Bacon’s response explicitly casts itself as a speech about “differing degrees of good and evil” (X: 308). His approach to Fuller’s unsettling prediction is to deconstruct sober-mindedly the fear-mongering rhetoric that must have characterized it, using as little amplification as possible. Perhaps the limited deployment of amplificatory figures in this beginning section served to cast his own ethos as the opposite of Fuller’s: an agent of calm and toleration. Trying to generate more comforting passions to counter Fuller’s fear-mongering would hardly have been useful. The means of persuasion, beyond direct deconstructive argument, is to articulate clear historical examples of similar situations.

He begins by answering “those inconveniences which have been alleged to ensue” (presumably by Fuller) from naturalization (X: 309), in order to deconstruct the amplificatory fear generated by them. The first inconvenience is the idea that there will be “a surcharge of people upon this realm” (X: 309). His response is to argue that Fuller’s argument only seems to be true at a superficial level. To illustrate, he zeroes in immediately on the “similitudes,” the false consentanea, advanced by his opponents to strengthen their conviction that an influx of Scots would be harmful:

His opponents presumably had argued that the Scots would be like those trees and cattle, who thrive at any new opportunity, and thus that English folk might justly be frightened of their opportunity taking. Bacon attacks such links as weak consentanea. Trees and cattle, he says, have too limited a resemblance to the migration of real Scottish families. He goes on to explain why his opponents’ faulty comparisons shouldn’t have the force of persuasion. It is important to note that Bacon’s opponents have only done what Bacon does in his charge against dueling. Bacon deconstructs their similitudes in the same manner we might expect of an orator who wanted to challenge Bacon’s own charge against dueling. The point to emphasize is that Bacon’s critical evaluation of and attack on Fuller’s comparisons highlights the extent to which comparisons construct both rational analysis and passionate feeling within the same set of dynamics. Comparisons involve the politics of what people think they already know. Both Bacon and Fuller draw on the same memories of those listeners: examples of the grass-is-always-greener phenomenon. Their disagreement is about the extent to which that knowledge should build into further “knowledge”—rational construction—by linking to it the hypothetical situation of a Scottish influx. Bacon’s rhetoric is a renegotiation of what is and can be known. To that extent it renegotiates what should and should not be felt.

Bacon made the speech on the practice of undertaking in his capacity as a member of the committee that had been set up to investigate who might have been undertaking for the king, how, and what could be done about it if so. Undertaking meant the action of privately reporting to the king on parliamentary events and seeking to move it toward his will. Suspicions of undertaking ran high and, though the committee Bacon was on found no one to prosecute, anxiety in the house about a threat to Parliament’s autonomy, equal in seriousness almost to the gunpowder plot, only increased after the committee had given its report.^[46] It was that anxiety Bacon was trying to calm in this speech. He hoped his argument would help avoid a fresh committee inquiry. Given the magnitude of the supposed crime, he must have thought a new inquiry would be uncomfortably invasive, breeding fresh grudges with the potential to disrupt that particular Parliament’s main agendas by fragmenting its community. He failed, however, and the inquiry was launched.^[47] It was hardly relevant or possible for Bacon to represent undertaking in some freshly amplified degree of goodness or badness. Instead Bacon makes the parliamentary institution’s own goodness or badness the issue. In order to attenuate people’s fear of undertaking and reduce the chance of that fear’s engendering new committee powers, Bacon tries instead to reframe the sense of the parliamentary community around its identity as a firmly established ancient institution impervious to such threats. Reconstructing the political body as an impervious institution recasts the political community. A recasted political community is a fresh object for the observer to consider, defining a fresh emotional stance toward it.

Bacon begins by saying, disingenuously, that one reason why he has been silent on the issue of undertaking is that he did not understand what it meant, and he did not understand what it meant because he could not conceive of how the very idea should “enter into the brain of a sober man” (XII: 42). Every one knows, says Bacon, that the House is so open to reason and its power to overcome the mind and change our thoughts that no one can predict what they will think until “they hear things argued and debated” (XII: 43). Much less “can any man make a policy of assurance, what ship shall come safe into the harbour in these seas” (XII: 43). Bacon’s “harbour” metaphor develops into a powerful allegory, with different levels of connection: “ships” are policies and ends; “these seas” are the procedural environment of the Parliament; the “harbour” is decision, resolution, and the good effects that we as the Parliament are trying to accomplish.^[48] Bacon’s tropical rhetoric joins the Parliament to memories of ships, seas, and harbors. Those memories get their enargetic power from the inherent spectatorship tied up with a harbor’s simple events, as well as the following series of rhetorical questions. “Must there be a new passage found for the King’s business by a point of the compass that was never sailed by before?” he asks (XII: 43). His listeners are invited to infer that no such passage could exist. “Or must there be some forts built in this House that may command and contain the rest?” asks Bacon and answers immediately that he knows only two “forts” in this House (sea) of the king: affection and reason (XII: 43). Within Bacon’s allegory, Parliament grows into the more solid place of the mental image in which undulating and shifting issues are steered toward the right decisions by the firm strength of reason. The idea that a single person could move a ship into the harbor in a predefined way has no visible space in the mental image. Bacon has tried to edit it out. The shaped mental image of Bacon’s enargetic rhetoric shapes a new (rational and passionate) view of Parliament. Tropical rhetoric draws on enargetic rhetoric in the same way that reasoned/passionate perception draws on mental images.

The very idea of undertaking Bacon describes as the “dust,” “these vapours,” this “cloud,” these “light rumours” (XII: 43). Through that word-pattern Bacon reinforces the notion of undertaking as the opposite of the solid forts of Parliament. The mental image of the harbor and its comparison with Parliament is able to bring emotional distance because it invites the inference that what is feared is impossible. Another way to describe it is that Bacon has taken away the fear that comes, in the Thomist model, from an impediment to escape. He has provided the means of escape—that is, the perception that undertaking is impossible in such an institution, in just the same way that bringing a boat into a harbor is impossible without considering contingencies like wind, currents, and existing guides. Bacon’s mode of reducing fear here works more by stimulating the imaginative and rational cogitation that will efface that fear’s perceptual grounds than it does by directly generating counterpassions like hope. The allegory is a trope, but Bacon does not use it to generate passionate feeling. We cannot therefore simply equate the “tropical” with any rhetoric that involves impassioned amplification. The function of Bacon’s tropical rhetoric in allegory here is to diminish fear. As such it is as much an engagement of the reason as it is a means of negotiating passion. The tropical involves many more dynamics than simply repulsion and attraction to very good or very bad things, a point that should become clearer when considering Donne’s tropical styles.

Donne’s Sermons

The critical study of Donne’s sermons has started to pay more attention to their character as occasional acts of communication, with distinct rhetorical purposes.^[49] An impressive example is Brent Nelson’s recent book on Donne’s sermon rhetoric, Holy Ambition, which draws attention to the passion of desire in so far as it is a form of “courtship”—sexual, social, and transcendent. The idea is related to Kenneth Burke’s understanding of rhetoric as an attempt to bridge the “conditions of estrangement,” or the sexual, social, and transcendent hierarchies.^[50] “Courtship” describes Donne’s overall rhetorical purpose—that is, his attempt to move his audience toward greater devotion.^[51] While a sermon ostensibly tries “to admonish the sinful, to encourage the saints, to comfort the sorrowful,” the overall function of Donne’s sermon rhetoric, as Nelson understands it, is understood as a “purgative-redemptive” ambition toward the ultimate term of courtship, God.^[52] The passion of desire, naturally, becomes the principal focus. However, it is important to ask how Donne’s rhetoric in specific sermons is engaging other passions that may be relevant to his contexts, such as fear, hatred, hope, despair, and so on, and how those passions might relate to each other.^[53] In what follows I analyze the figurative rhetoric of two sermons of Donne’s that deal with sorrow, despair, fear, and joy, in particular.

Donne’s sermon on Job 13:15, “Loe, though he slay me, yet will I trust in him” (III, 3: 187–205) was given for the Countess of Bedford at Harrington House on January 7, 1620/21.^[54] It is a consolation sermon arguing that to see God within life’s calamities is to see his workmanship in our lives leading toward a higher good and purpose.^[55] Donne constructs a theodicy around Job’s life, suffering, death, and his perpetual sentiment of trust in God despite all. The text was perhaps chosen with the troublesome circumstances of Lady Bedford’s recent past in mind. Between 1610 and 1620 Lady Bedford had to deal with a whole series of deaths in her immediate family: her daughter in 1610, a miscarriage in 1611, her father in 1613, her brother in 1614.^[56] On top of that, she was seriously ill between 1612 and 1613, and her own patron, the powerful Robert Cecil, died in 1612. Later in the decade, amid the crisis of her own aristocratic family’s debts and her desperate attempts to offset them with patronage and royal grants, Queen Anne (on whom Lady Bedford was attending) died in 1619. It makes sense that in 1621 Donne should craft for her a sober-minded consolatory sermon striving to make sense of suffering and inevitable death but also the sense of transitoriness, sharply reflected in the Countess’s own dwindling (Harrington) family estate. Donne’s sermon addresses the feelings of intense sorrow and the sense of defeat that must have been relevant to Lady Bedford and her circle. His tropical rhetoric, I would argue, sets out to turn the perceptions that might have led to such sorrow into ones that encourage a passion like hopeful anticipation of the positive results of suffering for Christ.

The sermon is about the ultimate meaning of Job’s (and our) suffering—that is, the mysterious larger good that God envisages—and about the sentiment in Job 13:15, “Loe, though he slay me, yet will I trust in him,” which relies on that larger good. To create a context for understanding the verse, Donne begins the sermon by constructing a series of diminishing parameters highlighting a variety of contexts in which to see suffering. He moves from the Identity of God, Qui sum, I am, to Christ the Alpha and Omega—God within time—to the Alpha and Omega of human life from cradle to grave. In other words, physical life has a beginning and end, which is contained within Christ as time’s Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end of (the Greek) language, which is contained within God beyond time.

Donne aligns physical life and language, which sets up a comparison exploiting an important metaphor: life as language and events as letters. “Our whole life is but a parenthesis, our receiving of our soule, and delivering it back againe, makes up the perfect sentence” (III: 188). Thinking of life as a painful “sentence” becomes a way into the transitory events in Job’s experience and the “letters” of his book. The life-language metaphor shows us a dynamic discernable across Donne’s set of interlocking contextual frames for suffering: self-effacing signification of the painful letters and events in life’s “sentence” moves toward meaning. The death of our daily lives signifies (in a couple of senses) real life in our afterlives. Donne’s life-language idea runs across each of the contextual frames, from cradle and grave to Qui sum, I am, each one giving way to the next. Thus Donne creates the possibility for a transmutation, let us call it, of passionate sorrow into hope because the sorrow relevant to one perceptual context is immediately contained within successive larger ones so that perceptions of the painful letter-events of life shift because of the changing perspective. The comparison life-as-sentence is virtually an allegory, with related sets of links across two conceptual realms or fields of imagery: life and grammar. Donne now places the “alphabet” of Job’s life into that comparison, and the Book of Job itself as actual language. In doing so he is emphasizing the larger contextual factors of Job’s life and his book, its beginning and its end. The range of frames to move through encourages listeners to begin to break down and reimagine the meaning of their own suffering too.

All that occurs before Donne even states his divisio (partition of contents). In order to make sense of Job’s and our suffering he will first deal with the propositum: “the purpose . . . of a godly man, which is to rely upon God” (III: 189). Second, he will deal with the praepositum, the ground and reason of Job’s resolution to trust God in the face of certain death. The first of those—the purpose of “a godly man”—breaks up further into the quem (“person” or God) and the quid (“affection” or trust) of Job’s sentiment. When dealing with this, Donne makes another absolutely crucial figurative move for his transmutation of misery about death and the fear of meaninglessness into the hope of life in God beyond death. Thinking through the quem, Donne considers what version of God Job has in mind when he makes his statement of trust. Donne’s answer: God as Shaddai (III: 190). Donne’s whole theodicy will turn on his ability to rope together, in this one name and identity of God, Shaddai, two things that seem contradictory: the tumultuous calamities of life and the good purposes of God. After listing the variety of negative meanings of Shaddai as it is found in the Hebrew scriptures, Donne expostulates the word’s meaning in the following heavily figured passage:

The passage appears to have at least two important functions. First, it extends further the allegorical conceit of life-as-language in so far as God, in the name Shaddai, embodies and makes experience ultimately meaningful. Second, by roping together two very contrasting things, it compresses the calamities that mar our lives back into God’s very identity. In doing so, the new perspective (of Shaddai) asks Donne’s listeners to dissolve the series of interlocking contextual frames that were set up at the beginning, as well as to dissolve the pain created by the tendency to see the calamities as contradictory to God’s apparent goodness. In the context of that compression (Shaddai), anything truly bad that happens is absorbed into the sheer largeness of God’s supra-temporal understanding. The tropical rhetoric here though involves more than just similitude; it involves a synoeciosis, a binding together of contrasting things: that is, of the congeries of evils, “dishonor and disreputation” and so on, on the one hand, and on the other, “the power and purpose of God.” The synoeciosis is achieved by the following organizational figures. Parison, or the repetition of balanced clauses, as in “when we see and consider . . . / we may see and consider” and “I cannot call . . . but . . . God / I cannot feel . . . but . . . God,” joins together the contrasting things, calamity and God’s purpose, as if to run them into each other, because each pair of joined clauses contains the two “opposites” within its own linking work. The joining exhibited in those clauses combines with Donne’s use of anaphora and epistrophe, which repeat words and phrases at the beginning and end of the clauses, amplifying the effect. Furthermore, the tendentiously ordered repetition of key words, or ploce, in the following sequence also has a powerful connective effect, asking for a collapsing of the distinction between calamity and God: “calamity . . . calamity . . . name . . . name . . . name . . . God.” Figuring God with the epithet Shaddai clearly represents him in a certain way, but such organizational figures as synoeciosis, parison, anaphora, epistrophe, and ploce give structural definition to the relationships and dissolving that Donne wants to evoke.

In Aquinas’s model, sorrow is produced by the obstacles that get in the path of the desiring mind and, on the other side of the same coin, by the impossibility of avoiding something bad: death, for example. The function of Donne’s Shaddai epithet and its enhancing figuration is to deal with the obstacle—the sense of distance and contradiction between God and our calamitous lives.

With an ultimate context in place for understanding suffering, Donne is now in a position to amplify gently the negative passions implicit in the context, pressing them so that they amplify their ultimate significance—the good of God’s purposes. In this way, Donne encourages a transmutation of despair into hope, pain into relief, confusion into understanding, and collapse into new construct. He immediately brings to the imagination gory and sense-laden mental images of destruction, mostly from Lamentations, of, for example, dying among the dung-heaps in the streets, pitiful women boiling their own children to avoid starvation, human beings shattered like broken pottery (III: 192). A further series of evocative metaphors provides the explanation for those things, as well as the transmutation, and perhaps the desired consolation. We are like marble or ivory, Donne says, in which “his purpose is, to re-engrave, and restore his Image,” and the horrors of life are, actually, “but his instruments, his tools” (III: 193). Perhaps at this point the Lady Bedford was supposed to begin detecting God’s own handwriting in the calamitous “letters” of her life. Another spectacularly visual metaphor also provides “explanation.” When God throws me down, as if I were a ball, against the wall, he intends “that that ball should returne back” (III: 193). Balls not only return, but the depression on their surfaces, made by the violence of physical contact with a wall, return to normal (more or less) as if nothing had really happened. We have to be able to “see and consider” God within, the “calamity” of being crushed like a ball against a wall, if our self-comprehension is to be broken up and reinterpreted and the sense of contradiction dissolved. Those “representational” metaphors bring new perspectives to bear on the apparent “badness” of our calamities, viewed now from the point of view of Shaddai.

Donne completes the shift, with the structure of containment in Shaddai now in place, by amplifying, indirectly, the value of the ultimate purposes of God. The indirectness is perhaps an act of decorum. He does this by amplifying directly the comparatively valueless and inevitably mortal condition of the “whole frame of the world” (III: 202). Donne uses his listeners’ knowledge of well-known scripture passages in order to construct life in the world as having less significance than the eternal, in a way that scripts for them the kind of thetical meditation discussed in the previous chapter:

Following on from the air he addresses the other elements of the “whole frame of the world,” water and earth. We are to “Looke upon the water, and we are as that, and as that spilt upon the ground: Look to the earth, and we are not like that, but we are earth itself” (III: 202). The “whole frame of the world” has been characterized as a light and airy thing that must of necessity pass away. Donne uses subiectio here, asking and answering his own (St James’s) question, and a multitude of other representational figures that build up a comparative field of imagery: air, wind, cloud, and vapour, and so on. Interestingly, Bacon chooses the same field for constructing “insignificance” in the speech concerning undertaking discussed above (XII: 43). Continuing the characterization of the transient “frame of the world,” Donne says: “At our Tables we feed upon the dead, and in the Temple we tread upon the dead” (III: 202)—bad news for the noblesse! Here again parison marks the passage, with two balanced and roughly equal length clauses, themselves linked by alliteration, paronomasia, and antistrophe. To cap off the amplification Donne says: “I know there is an infalliblenesse in the Decree, an inevitablenesse in nature, an inexorablenesse in God, I must die” (III: 203). Whether the auditory stops to consider the precise differences between each of those words, what emerges from the engaging congeries or accumulation is an otherwise stronger sense of necessity—I must die. From the highly figured perspective on life in this world that Donne has asked his auditory to adopt, the coming movement forward into eternal life (death) might have seemed like a release.

The organizational figures in this passage do not appear to have quite the same structural purpose as those employed on behalf of the Shaddai epithet. Their purpose perhaps is more to mark the passage with attention-grabbing interest before turning at the end to a restatement of our “hope in God, before death, in the agony of death, and after death” (III: 203). Illustrating the first of those, hope in God “before death,” Donne reifies (in the imagination) the very transmutation of passionate states I have been talking about. “This life,” he says, “shall be a gallery into a better roome, and deliver us over to a better Country” (III: 203). In suggesting that, Donne emphasizes the corridor as an escape from the obstacle of death and calamity. Yet he also extends the life-language figure right out to the end of the sermon, in which signifiers lead away into meaning. “Real” meaning exists in that better room. Looking down the gallery toward it is the hope of meaning.

The argumentative structure of the sermon, itself shaped by Donne’s figuration, may be described in the following way: death is a calamity, but such calamites are also inevitable, and since calamity is contained by God’s (trustworthy) identity and higher purpose, hope is possible and necessary. On the whole, however, the generation of a particular passion is less relevant to this careful consolatory sermon than its control and transmutation of sorrow. That is predictable given that the context involves the existentially bruised Lady Bedford. There is some amplification in the sense of enlargement, but Donne’s variety of figuration (involving both the traditional figures and tropes), as I have tried to show, aims at both representation, getting at relevant contents of memory, and organization, putting those contents together in coherent and specific ways so that sorrow potentially transmutes into hope.

Bacon’s parliamentary contexts require more generation and diminishing of passions than Donne’s do. Donne’s contexts instead seem to require him to shift or modify emotions from one place to another more than Bacon’s do, perhaps out of issues of decorum. In the consolation sermon above, one passion (sorrow) must be turned into another (hope) by removing an obstacle. In the following marriage sermon, the desire, excitement, and joy of one context becomes associated with another.

It was given for the marriage of Miss Margaret Washington at the church of St. Clement Danes on May 30, 1621. On this occasion Donne preached on Hosea 2:19, “And I will mary thee unto me forever” (III: 241–55). Potter and Simpson state that there is no evidence for Donne having a friendship with the Washington family that would explain his giving the sermon, and that the surviving evidence suggests that it was given at Lord and Lady Doncasters’ request, who had enjoyed his sermons on their trip to Germany.^[58] If so, then we can assume that Donne would have approached this as he might any marriage between prominent people, blending his brand of piety with his reputation as an entertaining preacher. The most relevant passions to the context here are joy (Aquinas’s gaudium) or as Hyperius’s translator Ludham put it, “delectation,” as a result of contemplating marriage, and hatred as an aversion to what were thought to be “sinful” forms of it.^[59] I shall treat this sermon then as one designed, among other things, to celebrate the marriage.^[60]

The first thing Donne does is set up an allegory by breaking up the verse to be discussed from Hosea—“I will mary thee unto me forever”—into the different things it might refer to. The verse, he says, both looks back to the “first” marriage between Adam and Eve, and looks forward to the “last” marriage between Christ and the church. He will apply it to three different marriage “scenes”: first, (human) marriage, then, spiritual marriage in the church, and then, the eternal marriage in heaven. He will “present” those scenes, he tells his auditory, “to your religious considerations” (III: 241). He will move between them too, comparing them on the basis of the characteristics of marriage that they share: their participants, the action involved, and the term of contract. The allegorical connections across these “marriages” give him both a structure for the sermon itself as well as a structure for the exchange of joy across the scenes of marriage, so that if he amplifies it in one scene, he can amplify by association the other scenes, whose direct amplification might be indecorous. If the emotional purpose of the sermon is to associate and energize the marriage-day’s joy with the joy to be had by Christians in eternity, then the allegorical structure shows us how Donne’s amplification of the eternal marriage feeds back into the secular feelings. And it goes the other way too. The allegorical structure makes it possible for the couple’s erotic passions (assuming there were some) to strengthen their spiritual contemplation.

The first of Donne’s three marriage scenes, the “secular marriage in Paradise” (III: 242), is nowhere near as charged with amplificatory rhetoric as his handling of the spiritual and eternal ones. His tropical rhetoric here instead gently amplifies the “evil” of resisting human marriage, fortifying the sense of sacramental community among the people present, who are not marked by such an evil. That indirectness enables Donne to ground the whole discussion in a unambiguously good secular human marriage without taking anything away from the dramatic shift into amplificatory display in the more spiritual scenes of marriage. “They that build wals and cloysters to frustrate Gods institution of mariage,” Donne begins, “advance the Doctrine of Devils in forbidding mariage” (III: 242). Cloisters, of course, do not exist among the English folk being addressed. This is an exercise both in the construction of Donne’s ethos before the people in front of him and an exercise in the creation of sacramental community defined against what that community sees as Continental (Catholic) heresy. He continues, marking his speech carefully with parison and anaphora once again:

Apart from constructing the non-English stuff out there as unequivocally evil, the rhetoric, with its balance and repetition, marks the speech with enough skillfulness to demand its being looked at and thought about in a peering distant way. The figuration gives the passage a certain objectivity because it draws attention through its noticeably stylistic manner. The objectivity of the sacramental community is built around the emphasized evils of other heretical viewpoints, and couched within the safety and assurance that the ceremony (today) is the right response to God’s commandments. The effect is not a powerful generation of passionate feeling, though it has the ability to generate hatred for sin to the extent that it represents clearly the “badness” of foreign practices. The organizational figures of repetition are important for generating attention, but they do not have the potential to generate hatred by themselves. The representational figures, which encode badness, do that. The metaphor of “wall,” for example, and the metonymic power of “cloysters,” as physical and especially man-made “frustrations” of the strength of natural desire (III: 242), can evoke mental images—say of the psychomachic implications of restricting desire, for example—since walls and cloisters each involve a strong sense of place. Out of the badness, then, comes fear and hatred. However, Donne’s purpose here is not really to generate fear about the influence of “evil” heretical approaches but to use the hatred of sin to strengthen a sacramental community. The rhetoric managing this passion of hatred, though, is very understated.

When Donne moves into his discussion of the spiritual and eternal marriages, the tone shifts dramatically, the amplificatory rhetoric shifts gears, and the emotional power of his speech seems consequently to increase. That effect is recognizable, I would suggest, because more representational figures are deployed to engage the memory directly. Gladness and excitement are perhaps simply more decorous passions in relation to the spiritual and eternal marriage scenes. Yet, despite the platonic distaste for matter that Donne often displays, he speaks here as a pastor who believes that the sacrament of human marriage has inherent value, and he makes his spiritual amplification work to energize whatever excitement might have been relevant to this human marriage.

Coming to the “spirituall marriage,” he notes the “persons” involved, Christ and (my) soul, and then launches into his amplification.

On he goes in a similar way with more gory images that intensify the difference between Christ and his soul. There’s an auxesis (enlargement) here of the goodness of Christ, and a meiosis or diminution of the human soul, working in tandem, each to strengthen the distinctiveness of the other.^[61] The amplification is handled mainly by contrast. The contrast between Christ’s goodness and his soul’s badness is intensified by metaphors that compare strikingly divergent registers of goodness and badness when put alongside each other, such as blossoms and mud, or, stamped metal and scratched rusty copper. But he also intensifies that contrast with double comparisons. For example, his soul is not so much a clay jar but the clay itself. The difference between a clay jar and clay itself intensifies the comparative worthlessness of his soul in relation to his spiritual marriage partner. Furthermore, their contrariness lends an erotic excitement to the relationship when it collapses in marriage.

Both kinds of figures, again, play a role. The passage is marked by common organizational figures: polysyndeton (repeated particles), parison, and anaphora, for example. Those give structure to the contrast, mark it as display and give it a greater weight. However, the representational figures, such as rhetorical questions, subiectio (asking and answering them), the metaphoric comparisons, and substitutive tropes, given that they directly engage the memory, are more important for encoding the goodness of Christ, the badness of his soul, and the subsequently enhanced erotic joys of union.

In the third “eternal” marriage scene, the persons are the Lamb and the human soul again. A similar contrast develops: “That Lamb who was brought to the slaughter and opened not his mouth, and I who have opened my mouth and poured out imprecations and curses upon men. . . . This Lamb and I . . . shall meet and marry” (III: 253). The spiritual and eternal marriages are to be the model for the human. Contrasts meet and qualify one another. Badness is absorbed and transformed by goodness. The potential for joy (gaudium) created by Donne’s removal of obstacles like sin serves the pastoral purpose of energizing the community’s witness to a legal and sacramental human marriage. The sacrament itself derives value from the fact that the community is courting, in Nelson’s terms, the ultimate desired other. Obviously, I am not trying to prove that Donne’s auditory actually felt each of these things on the day he gave the sermon. Rather, I am trying to show how his tropical rhetoric is a means of approaching the passionate potential of his audience in ways that were relevant to his contexts.

Remaking the Familiar: Enargetic, Thetical,
and Tropical Rhetorics

The dynamics of comparisons are one of the variables of a tropical style. Comparisons expose the similarities and differences between things. Thus they gave Donne and Bacon resources for engaging the passions. To recast similarities and differences—a rational enterprise—was also to work toward recasting the emotional stance with which an audience could view the subject or object spoken of. But two compared things can be set together in a variety of ways. For example, two or more things could be put together in order to make one of them more valuable or lamentable in relation to another, or to make one of them more intelligible by reference to another, or to infuse one thing with the significance and excitement of another. A given tropical style will reflect a particular combination of those dynamics. Predictably enough, the comparisons of both men make their topics more intelligible. Dueling, for lawmakers, will be well understood in terms of the demonic. The painful events of life, for the suffering congregation member, are more intelligible in terms of self-effacing language components. However, Donne’s comparisons tend to bring the related value of one thing to bear on another, while Bacon’s tend to bring the lamentable in one thing to bear on another. For example, Donne makes positive connections between the meaning beyond self-effacing language and the ultimate meaning in eternity beyond self-effacing suffering, as well as positive connections between the values of different forms of “marriage.” In Bacon’s case, an obvious example of mobilizing the lamentable is the connection he makes between dueling and the demonic. But even when he addresses the fear of undertaking, his comparison of Parliament to sea and harbor is relatively value-neutral: the Parliament hardly derives value from the inherent nature of a harbor. Rather, the function of the allegory is to show up what is not in both the harbor and the Parliament—that is, any threat of secret operations.

If there is a different tropical style here—in the foregoing dynamics of comparisons—it probably reflects Bacon’s and Donne’s divergent contexts. All engagements with the passions in Donne’s sermon rhetoric are always framed by the need to construct a positive communal connection with the ultimate good, so it is hardly surprising to find a tendency toward comparisons that bring the related value of one thing to bear on another. I am not saying Donne does not refer to lamentable things such as what counts as “sin,” or that no comparisons exist in his sermons between one lamentable thing and another, only that he gravitates, in the sermons discussed here, toward comparing positive values, rather than negative ones, since everything lamentable is, in his context, ultimately contained by God, the highest good. If it were not, his sermons could hardly be consolatory or celebratory. The legal rhetoric of Bacon, or anyone else, however, will be framed by the need to legislate against what is seen as a compromise of natural law—how things ought to be—as well as the need to define natural law by establishing what it is exactly about things like dueling or naturalization that makes them compromises. Of course, there would be nothing stopping Donne from taking up a style more like Bacon’s in another context, say, in the context of the Verse Letters’ emotional mutuality. Tropical styles also form part of a writer’s rhetorical repertoire.

Accordingly, a tropical style will also be defined by the dynamics between the different passions. Passions may be generated or diminished, especially with comparisons that bring together the related negative or positive qualities of two things. But also one intense existing passion might be transformed into another one, through modification of perception. Bacon’s context requires him to generate and mitigate passion more than Donne does. Donne’s contextual need to point toward the ultimate good seems to require him to try to move between passions, transforming existing ones or exchanging them across similar contexts, more than Bacon does. Again, the stylistic difference relates to contextual need.

That difference of dynamics between passions explains another difference of tropical style on the “surface” of their language: more of what I have called organizational figures can be detected in Donne’s sermons than in Bacon’s speeches. There are many more places in Donne’s oratory that are strongly marked by figuration that seems to display itself ostentatiously. This can be partly explained by different decorum needs. Parliamentary decorum required one to use amplificatory display with caution. However, the difference in use of organizational figures also relates to the dynamics between passions. Is the orator is trying to generate or diminish a given passion, or, rather, the more difficult task of transmuting one into another? Bacon’s attempt to bring moral indignation to bear on the practice of dueling so that legislation might be passed against it requires mainly that he connect it with other “evil” concepts in memory and show how it contradicts things of value, such as the aurorae filii. What he needs are strong contrasts between the topic in front of the judges and the things in their memories. When Bacon deconstructs the same sort of dynamic created by other parliamentary orators, by attacking their contrasts, he moves in the same kind of tropical territory, only from the other side. Donne generates and diminishes passions too, of course, but his more complicated transmutations of passion into passion and his transplantations of desire from one place to another require him to specify in more detail how the relations exist. He needs a tropical rhetoric that digs into familiar material, but also one that constructs a more nuanced array of precise perceptions. For sorrow to be recast as hope, in the sermon for Lady Bedford, the precise relationship of the auditory to God needs to be redefined. Using the epithet Shaddai for God, Donne constructs with careful organizational figures a rigid roping together of human calamity and God as Shaddai so that the difference between them collapses, and the sorrow that difference had caused turns, potentially, into hope. In the marriage sermon for Margaret Washington, Donne sets up an allegory of different marriage types and a bunch of comparisons between them through representational figures mostly. When coming to the last of them, the spiritual marriage of the Lamb and the human soul, Donne’s organizational figures mark the passage with great ostentation, which give it weight and signal that the excitement to be had in contemplating human marriage is more perfectly decorous in the context of the highest marriage. The organizational figures enable him to draw attention to the similarities between the marriages and encourage shared feelings across the different types, types that Donne has already set up. Donne and Bacon both use a variety of representational and organizational figuration, but the balances and thus their tropical styles are functionally different.

Perhaps their tropical styles are defined also by the extent to which they construct and make use of a sense of community. Both men are clearly dealing with communities, parliamentary and sacramental. Bacon’s creation of community seems designed to serve his other persuasive purposes, while in Donne’s sermons community is the whole point of the exercise. That is to say, the passions that bind Donne’s communities together are less tied to an ulterior persuasive purpose. Sharing them is the purpose. For Bacon, in the undertaking and dueling speeches especially, managing passion is more a rhetorical tool used to make other things happen.

I have now outlined three kinds of rhetorical resources for approaching an audience’s cognition in mental images, reasoning, and passionate emotion. “Enargetic rhetoric” has come to mean the resources available to Bacon and Donne for approaching the task of evoking and trying to control an audience’s reconstruction of mental images. “Thetical rhetoric” refers to a range of approaches to mobilizing well-known propositions into new places so that readers are encouraged to reevaluate old ideas against the contents of personal memory. “Tropical rhetoric” is a set of resources for determining how best to affect precise perceptions and thus passionate responses. In saying that each of these is a set of “rhetorical resources,” in each case I refer to the set of ways in which rhetorical skills were thought to connect with mental activity. Those connections were implied in the rhetorical tradition Bacon and Donne inherited. In employing these terms it is possible to identify how people connected rhetorical skills with psychological understanding and to explain how writers like Bacon and Donne selected from their understanding of the connections when they tried to persuade people on various occasions. Selections constitute an individual style because they are selected in accordance with the kind of stance toward an audience required on a given occasion. Each resource, then, is an analytical tool for the crucial task of predicting an audience’s mental responses to certain ways of putting an argument. All three connect up too, of course, since mental images, reasoning, and emotion are related cognitive dimensions of faculty psychology.

More importantly, each resource is a way of accessing familiar things and an angle from which to challenge the familiar or the “known.” An enargetic rhetoric “locates” an emerging mental image so that familiar entities can be resituated in new places or made to operate in new narratives and overlaid upon other things. A thetical rhetoric puts familiar and compressed ideas into new arrangements. Such arrangements might be predictable or unpredictable. The arrangement may specify the syllogistic connections by which the compressed ideas should join up, or it may not. New arrangements mean that old concepts have be rethought in new places and either reaffirmed or rejected. A tropical rhetoric involves refiguring the precise perceptions of a familiar thing so that familiar feelings are reshaped.

In chapters 4 and 5, respectively, I shall analyze Bacon’s and Donne’s long-reigning personal projects from a perspective that integrates more closely the three rhetorical resources I have been discussing. Bacon and Donne held these projects close to their hearts. Their projects involved specific views about how things in the world ought to be ideally. In each case, they involve concerns that run across many different writings and genres but emerge more strongly in particular texts. Bacon’s Novum Organum and Donne’s Holy Sonnets are of interest here not only because they exemplify project-Bacon and project-Donne, but also because they involve an attempt to overcome something familiar that has become problematic. In Novum Organum, Bacon advertises his vision of scientific knowledge creation in the starkest terms possible. He self-consciously analyzes his own communicative situation in terms of all three rhetorical resources of power over the minds of others. The human mental capacity for imagining and passionate feeling creates problems for Bacon’s method itself. That means communicating the method requires him to be particularly creative with his own enargetic and thetical style in particular. His own style here is modified in order to remain consistent with the communicative limits imposed on him by the method itself. In the Holy Sonnets, Donne confronts the familiar and compromised public selfhood that got in his way of finding the right employment. His style of combining enargetic, thetical, and tropical resources is shaped by the desire to put a religious speaker on display that draws attention to similarities and differences between the speaker’s and his own lives, as well as to his desire for a reshaping of public selfhood in terms of honorable inclusion.

Notes

^{1. See Robert Cockcroft, Rhetorical Affect in Early Modern Writing: Renaissance Passions Reconsidered (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 39, where he cites Lawrence Green’s
conference paper, “The Pathetic Renaissance,” Biennial Conference of the ISHR, Warsaw,
July 25, 2001.}

^{2. The word emotion here will be used more as an alternative for the passiones that were part of the faculty psychology Bacon and Donne inherited. As Thomas Dixon
shows, the concept of an emotion is more a modern secular category for phenomena like fear, anger, love, and hate,
but it remains a handy general word; see Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4–20.}

^{3. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1382^a21–23, 128.}

^{4. See, for example, Rhetoric, 1379^a9–26–1384^a21–22, 118–134.}

^{5. On the Chrysippean view of an emotion as a judgment of reason, see, for example, Steven
K. Strange, “The Stoics on the Voluntariness of the Passions,” in Stoicism: Traditions and Transformations, ed. Steven K. Strange and Jack Zupko (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
32–51; and Lawrence C. Becker, “Stoic Emotion,” in the same collection, 250–275. See
also Margaret Graver, Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).}

^{6. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1354^a24–25; 31–32.}

^{7. Quintilian, IO, 6.1. 28–29: “ad rationem redit.”}

^{8. Cicero, De Part. Orat., 32: “Probabilis autem erit . . . si testata dici videbuntur, si cum hominum auctoritate.”}

^{9. Quintilian, IO, 5.8. 3: “Nec abnuerim esse aliquid in delectatione, multum vero in commovendis adfectibus: sed haec ipsa plus valent cum se didicisse iudex putat” (I would not deny that there is some good in giving pleasure, and a great deal in
exciting emotion; but even these achievements are more effective when the judge thinks
he has been properly instructed).}

^{10. Ibid., 4.5. 6: “Non enim solum oratoris est docere, sed plus eloquentia circa movendum valet.”}

^{11. Thomas O. Sloan, “A Renaissance Controversialist on Rhetoric: Thomas Wright’s Passions of the Mind in Generall,” Speech Monographs 36, no. 1 (1969): 43–51.}

^{12. Deborah Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).}

^{13. Ibid., 193.}

^{14. Ibid., 196.}

^{15. The same challenge underlies Bacon’s own view of rhetoric as an interventionary power
that tries to make the distant good of fully reasoned perception present to an imagination
otherwise besotted with more immediate “lower” goods. See Advancement, 128–29 (III: 410–11).}

^{16. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, 223–24.}

^{17. On the broad influence of Aquinas’s model see Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 47.}

^{18. See Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in General, (London, 1604).}

^{19. Ibid., 22–26.}

^{20. James, Passion and Action, 4.}

^{21. Robert Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions: A Study of Summa Theologiae 1a2ae 22–48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 65–82.}

^{22. Aquinas’s main discussion of the passions is in Summa Theologiae 1a2æ 22–48, vols. 19–21 of Summa Theologiae: Latin Text and English Translation, Introductions, Notes, Appendices, and Glossaries (Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1964–1981).}

^{23. See James, Passion and Action, 54–64, and Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 239–55.}

^{24. James, Passion and Action, 60.}

^{25. See Quintilian, IO, 9.2. 26 and Wilson, Art, 163.}

^{26. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1385^b11–16, 139.}

^{27. Ad Her., II. 50.}

^{28. Quintilian, IO, 6.1. 19.}

^{29. On the connections between amplification, peroration, and emotional persuasion made
by the ancients, see Ad Her., II. 47–50; Cicero, De inventione, trans. H. M. Hubbell, Loeb Classical Library (1949; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2006), I. 98–109; Cicero, De Orat., II. 178, III. 105–106; Quintilian, IO, 6.1. 1–20.}

^{30. Wilson, Art, 146.}

^{31. Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 216.}

^{32. Ibid., 231.}

^{33. Ibid., 238.}

^{34. Ibid., 153.}

^{35. Quintilian, IO, 8.4. 13–14: “vir amplissimus P. Scipio pontifex maximus Ti. Gracchum mediocriter labefactantem statum rei publicae privates interfecit: Catalinam orbem terrae caede atque incendio vastare cupientem nos consules perferemus?” The source is Cicero’s In Catilinam, I.3.}

^{36. Quintilian discusses the tropes at IO, 8.6, and the figures of thought and speech at 9.1–3.}

^{37. On the influence of De Copia, see David Herbert Rix, “The Editions of Erasmus’ De Copia,” Studies in Philology 43 (1946), 601–603. Lawrence Green has recently challenged the extent of De Copia’s influence; see Lawrence Green, “Grammatica Movet: Renaissance Grammar Books and Elocutio,” 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), 74–79. Mack,
however, seems confident that a bibliographical update of Rix’s account would only
serve to confirm the influence of De Copia; see Elizabethan Rhetoric, 31.}

^{38. Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 84–102.}

^{39. See Winifried Schleiner, The Imagery of John Donne’s Sermons (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1970), 63–162.}

^{40. Julian Martin, Francis Bacon, the State, and the Reform of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), situates Bacon’s legal career within
his reform of legal practice, but does not discuss the speeches’ rhetorical methods
at all. The two main studies are Robert Hannah, “Francis Bacon: The Political Orator,”
in Studies in Rhetoric and Public Speaking in Honor of James Albert Winans (New York: The Century Co., 1925), and Karl Wallace, “Chief Guides for the Study
of Bacon’s Speeches,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 4, no. 1 (1971): 173–88, both of which are extremely limited in scope.}

^{41. The extant texts were collected in Spedding’s edition, in the last seven volumes of
the Works.}

^{42. For context, see Spedding, Works, XI: 399–409.}

^{43. Mervyn James, Society, Politics, and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 308–415.}

^{44. Ibid.}

^{45. X: 307. Spedding also notes the significant anti-Scottish feeling and speeches that
had broken out even before Fuller’s oration (X: 306).}

^{46. See Spedding’s commentary, XII: 41–42, 48–49.}

^{47. Spedding quotes the journal record of an actual enlargement of the committee following
the debate. See XII: 48.}

^{48. For Quintilian on allegory, see I.O., 8.6. 44–53. The main form of allegory, he says, in Russell’s translation, “generally
consists of a succession of metaphors” (44). Bacon’s harbor allegory here resembles
Quintilian’s first example, from Horace’s Carmina 1.14, in which a ship and the ocean represent the state and civil war, respectively.
Lanham also describes allegory as the act of “extending a metaphor”; see A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 4.}

^{49. See Lori Anne Ferrel and Peter McCullough, eds., The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature, and History, 1600–1750 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000), 2–3; and Jeanne Shami, John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 8–12.}

^{50. Brent Nelson, Holy Ambition: Rhetoric, Courtship, and Devotion in the Sermons of John Donne (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 9.}

^{51. Ibid., 2.}

^{52. Ibid., 7, 9.}

^{53. For a recent discussion of “affective” rhetoric in the wider context of sermon culture,
see Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 81–94.}

^{54. On her relationship with Donne, see P. Thomson, “John Donne and the Countess of Bedford,”
Modern Language Review 44, no. 3 (1949): 329–40.}

^{55. Andreas Hyperius’s popular preaching manual, De formandis concionibus sacris (1553), discussed the common sermon genres, of which consolation was one. That text
was also available to Donne in the English translation by John Ludham under the title
The Practis of Preaching (1577). For a discussion of Hyperius’s sermon genres and their influence, see Jameela
Lares, Milton and the Preaching Arts (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 56–80.}

^{56. Helen Payne, “Russell, Lucy, countess of Bedford (bap. 1581, 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 (accessed November 6, 2011), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24330.}

^{57. Donne alludes here to Hebrews 9:27 and James 4:14, quoted more or less exactly from
the Geneva Bible.}

^{58. Margaret Washington was the daughter of Lawrence Washington of Sulgrave; her eldest
brother, Sir William Washington, married a half sister of the Duke of Buckingham,
and one of her younger brothers was a page to Prince Charles. The illustrious George
Washington was a descendant of her family; Sermons (III: 19–20).}

^{59. Ludham, The Practis of Preaching, 1577. STC 2nd ed. 11758, translation of Andreas Hyperius’s De formandis concionibus sacris, 1553, 41r.}

^{60. Erica Longfellow challenges the idea that the early modern “marriage sermon” was celebratory,
since it betrays, for her, a tendency to be “guided by very modern assumptions about
what a marriage sermon should be”; see Erica Longfellow, “‘the office of a man and
wife’ in John Donne’s Marriage Sermons,” John Donne Journal 29 (2010): 18. Marriage sermons for her were more a matter of asserting gender roles
based on “objectionable arguments” (21) than celebrating them. Yet she does not make
clear why it is a curiously “modern assumption” that marriages are to be celebrated
nor why prominent early modern women were so naturally offended by marriage clichés
that a preacher like Donne had to be careful not to celebrate the “offices” of man
and wife too much for fear of offending them.}

^{61. Sonnino associates auxesis with incrementum, Quintilian’s first method of amplification (IO, 8.4. 3–4) moving up by degrees. See Lee A. Sonnino, A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 111. But auxesis is also a general term for making something seem bigger, as in Erasmus’s use of the
term for his fifteenth method of variety in De Copia, CWE, 24:343–44. Meiosis (minutio / diminutio) or “attenuation” is discussed by Quintilian at I.O., 8.4. 28 and is used to mean the opposite of auxesis. Meiosis in Erasmus is the opposite of the general sense of auxesis; De Copia, 344.}

Passion and Perception

Bacon’s Parliamentary Orations

Donne’s Sermons

Remaking the Familiar: Enargetic, Thetical, and Tropical Rhetorics

Notes

Remaking the Familiar: Enargetic, Thetical,
and Tropical Rhetorics