Reflections on Materialism, With Help from John Donne
If your most important contribution to the world was something you did for material gain, then you have not contributed anything of great importance to the world. The profit motive exists, and works well, but what profit motivates is not of a higher nature. Or rather, even the most potentially beautiful activity becomes pedestrian and merely practical to the extent that profit is its motive, for profit is inherently connected to the needs, desires, and fears of the body, which is to say to mere survival or vested interests. Hence, the profit motive may indeed provide for and sustain the sturdiest hull of the ship of state, but the strongest ship without a clear direction and steady navigator is worthless and ineffectual, as matter without form is nothing. To mistake the hull for the helm is to sail with neither a sound sense of destination nor even senses to recognize the dangers of sea and sky, thereby ensuring an era of aimless drift, followed, inevitably, by a devastating shipwreck.
From John Donne’s “The Litanie,” a series of twenty-eight lyrics corresponding to the order of the Litany of the Anglican mass, and written during the poet’s recovery from serious illness, we have stanza XXI:
When senses, which thy souldiers are,
Wee arme against thee, and they fight for sinne,
When want, sent but to tame, doth warre
And worke despaire a breach to enter in,
When plenty, Gods image, and seale
Makes us Idolatrous,
And love it, not him, whom it should reveale,
When wee are mov’d to seeme religious
Only to vent wit, Lord deliver us.1Donne, John, Sonnet XXI in “The Litanie,” in John Donne: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose (John Hayward, ed.), London: Nonesuch Press, 1990, p. 300.
An elegant observation on the dangers inherent in our God-given composite nature, observations consistent with the Scholastic discussions of the meaning of free will and the so-called problem of evil.
The senses, which is to say the bodily organs through which spiritual growth not only begins but is made possible, are inherently necessary to our intellectual development; and yet these same vital tools may easily become instruments of temptation away from the mind and spirit, which is to say that habit may arm these physical instruments as an insurrectionist force against the regime of truth-seeking and self-examination that they were naturally meant to serve.
Likewise the suffering occasioned by lack is the great educator of longing, self-discipline, and forbearance (“sent but to tame”); so often, however, rather than teaching farsightedness and character, the pain of want (of all kinds) is distorted by immaturity or weakness into the desperation that undermines diligence and resilience while feeding rationalizations and recriminations against “an unjust cosmos” or “an uncaring divinity.”
By contrast, the temporal boons afforded us in practical life ought to inspire us as quaint pencil sketch reminders of the beauties available to the soul that increasingly sets its sights on eternity, and yet these immediate prizes, rather than being received as beneficial hints of higher goods, so commonly reduce us to grovellers before the false god of wealth and material satisfaction for its own sake — which is to say they trap us in worshipfulness to the idols of idleness, or obsessive and laborious acquisitiveness, or frivolous amusement, or wasteful comfort, all aimed, in general, at the mere physio-temporal prolongation of an essential emptiness.
Finally, Donne laments, with more than a hint of ironic self-examination, at how often our overt efforts to appear pious and respectful of the higher goods merely mask a not so covert infatuation with the eloquence or impressiveness of our expression, in effect making an avowed humility our subtle exhibition of hubris, and the declared renunciation of narrow private advantage our special form of applause-seeking or reputation-building.
In the historical rivalry between the poets and the philosophers, I come down firmly and permanently, both by temperament and by reasoning, on the side of the philosophers. Nevertheless, I have no objection to acknowledging a poet’s valuable ventures into a sort of imitation of philosophic rhetoric, as we see in this stanza from “The Litanie.” On the contrary, I am most pleased to acknowledge such moments, partly as evidence that the ancient philosophers have indeed gained a little territory in this battle; that, in the sense indicated in Plato’s Republic, rational purpose has gradually exerted a certain salutary influence over some of the emissaries of the muses, somewhat (though never completely, of course) tethering their flights to the distant post of reasoned consideration, and even, as in this poem’s case, to the twin causes of moderated passion and self-understanding.
