Doctor Donne's Magical Sermon.

This article analyzes John Donne’s 1622/3 Lenten sermon on the biblical verse "Jesus wept" (John 11:35), focusing on Donne’s conception of an ultimate affective experience that unites human and divine sorrow and joy. Donne presents Christ’s tears as a model of perfect human affectivity—an intersubjective, embodied compassion that transcends ordinary passions and enables believers to participate sacramentally in Christ’s grief through the sermon’s verbal and performative power. The sermon functions as a Protestant homiletic analogue to Catholic sacramental magic, aiming to spiritually “raise the dead” by transforming the audience’s affections into Christ’s own tears, thereby achieving a paradoxical unity of sorrow and joy. Donne’s theology emphasizes a cooperative dualism of body and soul, where holy affections are natural and embodied, and godly sorrow leads to spiritual regeneration akin to baptism, restoring believers to an earthly paradise as a foretaste of heavenly unity.