Abstract
AbstractAs King James I moved to censor Puritan opponents, he called upon John Donne to defend his policies from the pulpit. As text‚ then‚ for a sermon at St Paul’s, Donne chose Lamentations 4:20, a notorious crux. The Geneva Bible glosses ‘the anointed’ in this verse as a good king, Josiah; Calvin in his Institutes as a bad king, Zedekiah. The phrase ‘the breath of our nostrils’, an allusion to Genesis 2:7, introduces further complications. Is ‘breath’ here neshamah, nepesh, or ruach? pnoē, psychē, or pneuma? Drawing on fine distinctions between ‘breath,’ ‘soul’, and ‘spirit’ in the languages of Scripture, Donne crafts a defence of James’s ‘Directions concerning Preachers’ that is erudite, ingenious, equivocal, and disconcerting: an argument against such arguments as ‘things indifferent’ (adiaphora).
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
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