ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Augustine's Christian psychology initially as a window on to John Donne's approach to the passions more generally, but focuses more particularly on the theory and experience of grief. The chapter focuses on three groups of Donne texts: the holy sonnets, the elegies for Bridget Markham and Cecilia Bulstrode. G. W. Pigman has defined the elegy as an abbreviated process of mourning: this is an accurate description of Donne's tributes to Bridget Markham and Cecilia Bulstrode, where complexly unfolding feelings are successfully compacted to accommodate Augustine's protocol of grief. Augustine's treatment of the sacred affections has a complex and variegated reception history in the early modern period: from Calvin's Institutes to Protestant and Roman treatises on the passions, from controversial tracts to devotional manuals, and from Scripture commentaries to patristic excerpt collections. Donne's poem employs a physiopathological conceit, the unquenchable thirst caused by swollen organ tissue, to enact the speaker's crisis of devotional identity.
