l. 4. Then worst of civill vices, thanklessenesse. 'Naturall and morall men are better acquainted with the duty of gratitude, of thankesgiving, before they come to the Scriptures, then they are with the other duty of repentance which belongs to Prayer; for in all Solomons bookes, you shall not finde halfe so much of the duty of thankefulnesse, as you shall in Seneca and in Plutarch. No book of Ethicks, of moral doctrine, is come to us, where there is not, almost in every leafe, some detestation, some Anathema against ingratitude.' Sermons 80. 55. 550.
Page 197, l. 54. Wee (but no forraine tyrants could) remove. Following the hint of O'F, I have bracketed all these words to show that the verb to 'Wee' is 'remove', not 'could remove'.
ll. 57-8. For, bodies shall from death redeemed bee,
Soules but preserved, not naturally free.
Here the later editions change 'not' to 'borne', and the correction has been accepted by Grosart and Chambers. But 1633 is right. If 'not' be changed, the force of the antithesis is lost. What is 'borne free' does not need to be preserved. What Donne expresses is a form of the doctrine of conditional immortality. In a sermon on the Penitential Psalms (Sermons 80. 53. 532) he says: 'We have a full cleerenesse of the state of the soule after this life, not only above those of the old Law, but above those of the Primitive Christian Church, which, in some hundreds of years, came not to a cleere understanding in that point, whether the soule were immortall by nature, or but by preservation, whether the soule could not die or only should not die,' &c. Here the antithesis between 'being preserved' and 'being naturally free' (i.e. immortal) is presented as sharply as in this line of the verse Letter. But Donne states the doctrine tentatively 'because that perchance may be without any constant cleerenesse yet'. Elsewhere he seems to accept it: 'And for the Immortality of the Soule, it is safelier said to be immortall by preservation, then immortal, by nature; That God keepes it from dying, then, that it cannot dye.' Sermons 80. 27. 269. This makes the correct reading of the line quite certain.
The tenor of Donne's thought seems to me to be as follows: He is speaking of the soul's eclipse by the body (ll. 40-2), by the body which should itself be an organ of the soul's life, of prayer as well as labour (ll. 43-8). He returns in ll. 49-52 to the main theme of the body's corrupting influence, and this leads him to a new thought. It is not only the soul which suffers by this absorption in the body, but the body itself:
What hate could hurt our bodies like our love?
By this descent of the soul into the body we deprive the latter of its proper dignity, to be the Casket, Temple, Palace of the Soul. Then Donne turns aside to enforce the dignity of the Body. It will be redeemed from death, and the Soul is only preserved. No more than the Body is the Soul naturally immortal. These lines are almost a parenthesis. The poet returns once more to his main theme, the degradation of the soul by our exclusive regard for the body.
Thus the deepest thought of Donne's poetry, his love poetry and his religious poetry, emerges here again. He will not accept the antithesis between soul and body. The dignity of the body is hardly less than that of the soul. But we cannot exalt the body at the expense of the soul. If we immerse the soul in the body it is not the soul alone which suffers but the body also. In the highest spiritual life, as in the fullest and most perfect love, body and soul are complementary, are merged in each other; and after death the life of the soul is in some measure incomplete, the end for which it was created is not obtained until it is reunited to the body. 'Yet have not those Fathers, nor those Expositors, who have in this text, acknowledged a Resurrection of the soule, mistaken nor miscalled the matter. Take Damascens owne definition of Resurrection: Resurrectio est ejus quod cecidit secunda surrectio: A Resurrection is a second rising to that state, from which anything is formerly fallen. Now though by death, the soule do not fall into any such state, as that it can complaine, (for what can that lack, which God fils?) yet by death, the soule fals from that, for which it was infused, and poured into man at first; that is to be the forme of that body, the King of that Kingdome; and therefore, when in the generall Resurrection, the soule returns to that state, for which it was created, and to which it hath had an affection, and a desire, even in the fulnesse of the Joyes of Heaven, then, when the soule returns to her office, to make up the man, because the whole man hath, therefore the soule hath a Resurrection: not from death, but from a deprivation of her former state; that state which she was made for, and is ever enclined to.' Sermons 80. 19. 189.
Here, as before, Donne is probably following St. Augustine, who combats the Neo-Platonic view (to which mediaeval thought tended to recur) that a direct source of evil was the descent of the soul into the body. The body is not essentially evil. It is not the body as such that weighs down the soul (aggravat animam), but the body corrupted by sin: 'Nam corruptio corporis ... non peccati primi est causa, sed poena; nec caro corruptibilis animam peccatricem, sed anima peccatrix fecit esse corruptibilem carnem.' In the Resurrection we desire not to escape from the body but to be clothed with a new body,—'nolumus corpore exspoliari, sed ejus immortalitate vestiri.' Aug. De Civ. Dei, xiv. 3, 5. He cites St. Paul, 2 Cor. v. 1-4.