he has probably in mind the opinion of Dionysius the Areopagite (adopted by Aquinas), that the four highest orders of angels (Dominations, Thrones, Cherubs, and Seraphim) never leave God's presence to bear messages.
The Fathers,
&c.
Donne is as familiar with the Fathers as with the Schoolmen, especially Tertullian and Augustine, and of them too he makes use in poems neither serious nor edifying. His work with Morton had familiarized him with the whole range of Catholic controversy from Bellarmine to Spanish and German Jesuit pamphleteers and casuists. The Progresse of the Soule reveals his acquaintance with Jewish apocryphal legends.
Law.
But Donne's studies were not confined to Divinity. When a Law-student he was 'diverted by the worst voluptuousness, which is an hydroptic immoderate desire of humane learning and languages'; but his legal studies have left their mark in his Songs and Sonets. Of Medicine he had made an extensive study, and the poems abound in allusions to both the orthodox Galenist doctrines and the new Paracelsian medicine with its chemical drugs and homoeopathic cures.[2] In Physics he knows, like Milton, the older doctrines, the elements, their concentric arrangement, the origin of winds and meteors, &c., and at the same time is acutely interested in the speculations of the newer science, of Copernicus and Galileo, and the disintegrating effect of their doctrines on the traditional views.
[2] In the Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, &c. (1651, 1654), pp. 14-15, Donne gives a short sketch of the history of medical doctrines from Hippocrates through Galen to Paracelsus, but declares that the new principles are attributed to the latter 'too much to his honour'.
Travels.
A special feature of Donne's imagery is the use of images drawn from the voyages and discoveries of the age. Sir Walter Raleigh has not included Donne among the poets whom he discusses in considering the influence of the Voyages on Poetry and Imagination (The English Voyages of the Sixteenth Century. Glasgow, 1906, iii), but perhaps none took a more curious interest. His mistress is 'my America, my Newfoundland', his East and West Indies; he sees, at least in imagination,
a Tenarif, or higher Hill
Rise so high like a Rocke, that one might thinke