Gaudy Night Allusions #1

The Epigraph: John Donne's Sermon XIV

One project I have wanted to work on for a long time is what amounts to an annotated edition of the Dorothy L. Sayers novel Gaudy Night. I love Gaudy Night, with the kind of affection that develops when you love a thing early in life — the way some people love The Goonies, or The Emperor’s New Groove. But Gaudy Night is also a masterpiece, a detective novel that transcends the genre and becomes a good novel qua novel.

Here beginneth the project, then. At a slow and leisurely pace, I will go through the novel and identify allusions, quotations, or other references and do my best to both identify the source and offer some sort of interpretive comment about the role of the reference.

The Epigraph

First up, we have the epigraph to the entire novel:

The University is a Paradise, Rivers of Knowledge are there, Arts and Sciences flow from thence. Counsell tables are Horti conclusi, (as it is said in the Canticles) Gardens that are walled in, and they are Fontes signati, Wells that are sealed up; bottomless depths of unsearchable counsels there.

John Donne

The quotation comes from Donne’s “Sermon XIV”, preached at Whitehall on March 4, 1624. The text of the sermon is Matthew 19:17, “And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? There is none good but One; that is, God.”

This epigraph allows for two deep-dives into nerdy precincts. The first is a brief look at the immediate context—is there anything in the sermon just outside the quotation that might be important for understanding why Sayers chose it or what it means for the novel? The second is the liturgical context: why would Donne would have chosen that text for his sermon, and what other liturgical elements related to that day might have influenced his sermon (or Sayers’ choice)?

Immediate Context

The sermon is about the rich young ruler; it opens with a reflection on the practice of fasting and the role of the church in prescribing certain times for fasting¹ before moving onto the “context and pretext” (i.e. occasion and purpose) of the words as well as the words themselves. The occasion is the rich young ruler who is abashed at the thought of renouncing his great possessions; Donne takes occasion to point out that often we have habitual or even hereditary sins that become our “possessions”, and the thought of relinquishing those possessions makes us sad. The rich man’s purpose may be detected in the fact that he came freely of his own accord (which should be read as a great point in his favor). He did not merely profess, but he acted in accord with that profession. Donne emphasizes the need for what we might call continual conversion, a refusal to rely on past good deeds as proof of present merit.² That leads him into the rich young ruler’s acknowledgment that he needed to learn more about Christ: “He was no ignorant man, and yet he acknowledged that he had somewhat more to learn of Christ, than he knew yet. Blessed are they that inanimate all their knowledge, consummate all in Christ Jesus.” This is followed immediately by the passage Sayers selected for her epigraph, which is again followed by the following: “But those Aquae quietudinum, which the prophet speaks of, The waters of rest, they flow from this good master, and flow into him again; all knowledge that begins not, and ends not with his glory, is but a giddy, but a vertiginous circle, but an elaborate and exquisite ignorance . . . . Blessed are they that bring their knowledge into practice; and blessed again, that crown their former practice with future perseverance.” The rest of the sermon expounds on the goodness of God, how it is known, and the salutary effects of that knowledge.

Especially in the first portion of the sermon, Donne has some phrases that may seem relevant to the themes of Gaudy Night. He dwells on the “rich young man” (could it be… St. George? or Lord Peter himself?); he notes that “not many noblemen come to heaven,” which Lord Peter would doubtless have loved to quote against himself; the “giddy vertiginous circle” has some echoes of the lines “we have come, last and best, / From the wide zone through dizzying circles hurled, / To that still centre where the spinning world / Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.”³

What’s really interesting, actually, is how the reference to universities comes almost totally out of the blue in the sermon. It’s not a University Sermon, and the rest of the text does not dwell on school- or university-adjacent things. The lines that form the epigraph come near the end of a paragraph on the rich young ruler’s humility in seeking to know Christ, and are followed up by praise of those who bring knowledge into practice. In this stream of thought, Universities emerge as archetypal places-of-knowledge.

As Sayers uses the lines, they are more ominous than in Donne’s sermon. Later in the book, Harriet will muse that “She was suddenly afraid of all these women: horti conclusi, fontes signati, they were walled in, sealed down, by walls and seals that shut her out. Sitting there in the clear light of morning, staring at the prosaic telephone on the desk, she knew the ancient dread of Artemis, moon-goddess, virgin-huntress, whose arrows are plagues and death.”

Liturgical Context

The sermon was preached on March 4, 1624, which would have been the Monday after the second Sunday in Lent. The then-current edition of the Book of Common Prayer would have been the 1604 edition (which was “a modest revision” of the 1559 edition).⁴

Curiously, I cannot figure out why Donne would have been preaching on that text. This is probably something that someone like Ben Crosby could answer in a heartbeat, but as I look at the col

The readings for Morning Prayer that day would have been Psalms 15, 16, & 17;⁵ the OT lesson was Deuteronomy 13, and the NT lesson was Luke 15. At Evening Prayer, the Psalm would have 18, the OT lesson was Deuteronomy 14, and the NT lesson was Philippians 13. None of these are the passage from Matthew which Donne took as his text for the week.

Perhaps he was working from the Sunday readings? The 1559 order for how Holy Scripture is to be read dictates that “the Collect Epistle and Gospell, appointed for the Sondaie shal serve al the weke after, except there fall some feast that hath his proper.” The Epistle for Sunday was 1 Thessalonians 4:1-8; the Gospel was Matthew 15:21-28 (several chapters earlier than the Matthew text of the sermon), and the Collect does not allude to the rich young ruler.⁶

BUT! After doing all this, I remembered that England did not switch from the Gregorian to the Julian calendar until 1752! The day of the week that Google gave me for March 4, 1624 was a Monday. But actually, on the Julian calendar, March 4 would have been a Thursday and it would have been after the third Sunday in Lent. That doesn’t really change the outcome, though. The Sunday Gospel isn’t even in Matthew that week. The daily readings do not depend on the movable feasts—they are fixed to the month and day, and so it doesn’t matter if you’re on the Julian or the Gregorian calendar.

I don’t know how the editors of the edition I’m working from identified the dates for the sermons. But it doesn’t seem that

All that to say, I ran down the possible options as best I could and found nothing. My best guess, until an Anglican preaching expert comes along to correct me, is that Donne chose the text himself for his own reasons (which may have had to do with local events, his parishioners’ needs, or something else entirely unknown to us).

1. The whole opening paragraph is wonderful (though it might trigger some of those who have been through what I have taken to calling #LentWars in protestant churches): “That which God commanded by his Word, to be done at some times (that we should humble our souls by fasting) the same God commands by his church, to be done now: in the Scriptures you have praeceptum, The thing itself, what; in the church, you have the Nunc, The time, when. The Scriptures are God's voice; the church is his echo; a redoubling, a repeating of some particular syllables, and accents of the same voice. And as we hearken with some earnestness, and some admiration at an echo, when perchance we do not understand the voice that occasioned that echo; so do the obedient children of God apply themselves to the echo of his church, when perchance otherwise they would less understand the voice of God, in his Scriptures, if that voice were not so redoubled unto them. This fasting then, thus enjoined by God, for the general, in his word, and thus limited to this time, for the particular, in his church, is indeed but a continuation of a great feast: where, the first course (that which we begin to serve in now) is manna, food of angels, plentiful, frequent preaching; but the second course, is the very body and blood of Christ Jesus, shed for us, and given to us, in that blessed sacrament, of which himself makes us worthy receivers at that time. Now, as the end of all bodily eating, is assimilation, that after all other concoctions, that meat may be made idem corpus, the same body that I am; so the end of all spiritual eating, is assimilation too, that after all hearing, and all receiving, I may be made idem spiritus cum Domino, the same spirit, that my God is: for, though it be good to hear, good to receive, good to meditate, yet, (if we speak effectually, and consummatively) why call we these good? There is nothing good but One, that is, assimilation to God; in which perfect and consummative sense, Christ says to this man, in this text, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but One, that is God.”

Taken from the HTML version here with light edits correcting OCR errors (by referring to the Google Books digitized edition here)

2. “The good services that a man hath done to God by pen, or sword, are wings, and they exalt him if he would go forward; but they are weights and depress him, and aggravate his condemnation, if his presumption upon the merit of those former services, retard him for the future.” ibid.

3. I do think there is probably more of Eliot than of Donne in these lines, though, as we shall come to whenever I get to the sonnet (probably in several years).

4. According to the introduction written here.

5. Because February “borrows” the first day of March and the last day of January in order to complete a 30-day psalm cycle, the 4th day of March is the 3rd day of the cycle.

6. The Second Sunday after Lent