Attention as Proof of Faith

Abstract

This essay asks the question: can a poem serve as proof for religious belief? By reading John Donne’s devotional sonnets in light of the Pauline letters, the argument unfolds in two parallel directions. First, it shows that in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, the concept of pistis (proof or belief) refers primarily to Christian faith as a self-referential proof. Second, it argues that Donne’s poems enact this sense of faith-as-proof by using language as material for attention exercises. The essay concludes by suggesting that the connection that these poems reveal about certainty and attentiveness gives us a way to think about the continuity between early modern devotion and emergent discourses of philosophy.