ABSTRACT
John Donne's devotional movement from the Meditation to its Expostulation and Prayer is both a movement from fear to faith, common to the genre of Christian meditation, and a movement through the interpretation of meteorophysiology from polytheistic and materialist to Christian foundations. He diagnoses the condition of calm in overtly distinctly meteorological terms, borrowing from materialist earthquake theory. Donne perceived himself as more stable in construction, with a body that would join with his soul for eternity in still more stable form and realm. In Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Donne records these bodily disruptions as "these earthquakes in himself, sodaine shakings; these lightnings, sodaine flashes; these thunders, sodaine noises; these Eclypses, sodain offuscations, & darknings of his senses. God's voice is the earthquake of the body, of the mind, and, later, of the bell that tolls, a terrible and wonderful sign coming "at the beginning", "at the approach", of destruction and of resurrection.
