In the last weeks of 1623 London was in the throes of one of those infectious disease outbreaks characteristic of the era. A “spotted fever,” most likely typhus, was cutting a swath through the city’s tightly packed neighborhoods, and in late November it laid low England’s most famous preacher. John Donne was fifty-one years old, and dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, though he had come late to holy orders. In his early days, as a womanizing gallant, he had authored the most scandalous and original love poetry of the era. Life, though, had transformed the young scapegrace and reordered his concerns. Marriage had brought poverty and a dozen children, a tragic number of whom failed to outlive their infancy. Finally, Anne Donne died following the stillbirth of their twelfth. It had been but a few years since Donne had found a measure of material comfort and prominence; now it was slipping away into pain, fear, and indignity. He lay racked by fever, chills, palpitations, and delirium, assisted, if we can call it that, by physicians who purged and bled his already weak body and, in a gesture that seems absurd even for early modern medicos, laid dead pigeons at his feet in the hopes of “drawing the vapours from the head.”

Twenty-three days after the disease announced itself, Donne discovered that he had survived. Yet the illness left an imprint on his soul, as witnessed by the frenetic burst of writing that immediately followed his recovery. On January 9, 1624 – less than a month after the crisis had passed – a book was entered in the Stationers’ Register entitled Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and severall steps in my Sicknes. At once thorny and lyrical, vexing and profound, Devotions prompts one to ask, on the four hundredth anniversary of its publication: What it is about the ordeal that spurred such urgency in the book’s drafting and publication? Why did a man, so recently freed from his deathbed, spend the next few weeks filling page after page with a quill pen, until his hand and back must have ached and his eyes watered?

Part of the answer is implied in the very form of Devotions, which is made up of twenty-three chapters called “Stations,” no doubt in reference to the traditional contemplation upon the Stations of the Cross. Each chapter, comprised of a “meditation” on a phase of the illness, an “expostulation” or personal response to that phase, and a concluding prayer, chronicles a day on the road to Donne’s personal Calvary and eventual rising. Thus, the book is Donne’s coming-to-terms before God with those long, wearing days spent in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Donne’s mind had long orbited the great paradoxes of the Christian faith: that one can die and yet live; be small and yet great; a fool and yet wise; a sinner and yet justified. Now, though, they come home to him and inhabit him.

Even in his suffering Donne is not a man to be placated by trite platitudes about divine love. Grace may be offered freely, but it entails the exposure and destruction of sin and Donne hates and fears his sinfulness. Employing a metaphor that cannot, under these circumstances, be casually chosen, he writes that though he would avoid physical death through any means at his disposal, he has habitually courted the second death of the soul, enamored of the sin that is the fever’s spiritual equivalent. “I fly into the way of temptation,” he writes, “nay, I break into houses where the plague is…. I fall sick of sin.” Sin goes deeper than we realize, though, unless we attend to our “spiritual health” with uncommon attention. Satan, he states, “works upon us in secret … [and] his masterpiece is to make us sin in secret, so as that we may not see ourselves sin.” Though writing more than two centuries prior to the germ theory of disease, Donne posits something not unlike a germ theory of moral corruption. He suggests that we are beset by an unseen malignancy that need not burst forth in external symptoms in order to spread putrefaction throughout the inner man. He confesses, “There is no artery in me that hath not the spirit of error, the spirit of lust, the spirit of giddiness in it; no bone in me that is not hardened with the custom of sin and nourished and suppled with the marrow of sin; no sinews, no ligaments, that do not tie and chain sin and sin together.”

Thus, Donne’s illness becomes itself a kind of biopsy, a thing that, though it hurts him, shows him the truth of his condition, that necessary first step toward a cure. As Death hovers over the bedridden man, grinning and unblinking, Donne knows that God is using its fearsome proximity for his good. We can see as much in his discussion of the cathedral’s tolling bells, which includes the well-known passage from Meditation 17:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

The bell regularly informs the stricken Donne that yet another plague victim is being carried from a funeral service in Saint Paul’s to the burying ground. Familiarity has dulled us to those few sentences, which now echo as little more than a vague appeal to fellow-feeling. However, the lesson Donne takes from the bells is richer, initially sobering but ultimately uplifting. No sound, he explains, has ever affected him as much as these peals, forcing him to wonder “might I not have been that man that is carried to his grave now?” “O my God, my God,” he protests, “do I that have this fever need other remembrances of my mortality?” However, he decides that tolling represents not just a memento mori but a “sermon,” explaining “I can hear thy instructions, in another man’s [funeral bell] to consider my own condition.” Donne is reminded that he is a sinner, but at the same time he is reminded of the God who forgives sinners, calling all of us not only to a common grave, but to “one communion of saints.”

Here, as throughout Devotions, Donne asserts that the life of a Christian does not consist in avoiding suffering, nor simply enduring it, but in witnessing its transfiguration. That a sinner can repent and be forgiven is a miracle; that the darkest, loneliest, most painful moments of our lives can be recognized as gifts is a further miracle. Fear itself becomes something desirable for Donne, “the fear … of which I may not be afraid.” He prays:

Though I pretend to no other degree of wisdom, I am abundantly rich in this, that I lie here possessed with that fear which is thy fear, both that this sickness is thy immediate correction, and not merely a natural accident … and that this fear preserves me from all inordinate fear, arising out of the infirmity of nature, because thy hand being upon me, thou wilt never let me fall out of thy hand.

Many today recoil from the idea that God chastises us with afflictions; for Donne it brings comfort and even joy. “Thou intendest all for physic,” he tells God, asking him to “prescribe” whatever he deems necessary for the patient’s flourishing: “If it be a long and painful holding of this soul in sickness, it is physic … and it is physic if it be a speedy departing of this soul, if I may discern thy hand to receive it.” He is under the care of a doctor whom he trusts to make even protracted suffering or sudden death into saving medicines.

In fact, God allowed Donne another seven years of life. We can only conjecture as to what particular course of “physic” that time amounted to, but in the final station Donne treats his incipient return to health soberly, praying to be saved from “a relapse into those sins which I have truly repented, and thou hast fully pardoned.” His book could thus be regarded as the first fruits of a renewed spiritual seriousness. But it is also a proclamation. Over those twenty-three days Donne comes to understand that everything that happens to us, whether it seems good or ill, sweet or bitter, is a gesture of divine love, meant for our ultimate healing. Little wonder that the author of Devotions worked so furiously see his book in print. It contains a truth that his fellow Londoners, as they emerged from yet another harrowing season of deadly illness, needed to hear. Though four centuries have passed, that need has not diminished.