Donne reconciles the split in belief of a Last Judgment and the concept from Egypt of the dead standing before their judge
One of the things that divides agnostics is the attitudes it is possible to have to the paradoxes and inconsistencies obviously demonstrable in the faith of believers. There is, I would maintain, simply little point in petty point scoring about this – a certain humility is always a good idea and most intelligent believers are just as aware of the problems as we are. Some, like John Donne, actively glory in them.
Even before some American evangelists tried to resolve all the problems implicit in the concept of the Judgment by inventing the Rapture of all true believers as a quick fix that created even more problems than it resolved, Christians were torn between a belief in the Last Judgment when all sins would be known and punished in front of all of humanity, and the particular judgment, when the dead stand before their judge one at a time and know their fate. The latter, of course, is an idea that goes back to Egypt at least, where the heart was weighed against a feather; the Last Judgment an idea that has produced much of the west's finest art.
Donne's seventh Holy Sonnet shares with Michaelangelo's painting and Verdi, Mozart and Berlioz settings of the Dies Irae that particular quality the Italians call terribilita. (It is probably damnable aesthetic snobbery to remark that the best that believers in the Rapture have managed to come up with is Tim LeHay's Left Behind books.)
At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go ;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent, for that's as good
As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.
Donne starts his poem with an implied reconciliation of the split in belief between the two kinds of judgment – just as we know the world is a sphere, but think of it as a map, so the judgment is at once, in eternity, both general and particular. It looks as if Donne opted for the solution that has the judgment take place at the end of time, and the dead sleep until then – but in the last analysis he doesn't care. As with the Dies Irae hymn – a relic of Donne's early Catholicism, which clearly still matters to him – the vast vista of humanity across time fades before a particular sense of the appalling prospect of being judged for one's own sins. The Last Trump, the serried crowds, fade and a sense of shortness of time, the necessity of repentance, becomes paramount.
And without a sense of the divine, what do we have left? A sense of how we look and, perhaps most importantly, how we will look – a consciousness of guilt that is also a consciousness of shame – a sense, of which we can think the religious version only one possible sense, that the unexamined life is not worth living. And the hope that we can be objective enough about what is important in our petty sins, to set aside the petty prejudices and excuses of our time and place, and be at once hard and at ease with ourselves. We need to change our lives, and put things right, and then and only then will we fear no second inquisition.
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