Essay Questions

How does the author suggest that death may not always be something to fear but rather something to welcome?

One of the messages the sermon is attempting to deliver is that life itself is not something to be valued or treasured merely as a state of existence. In fact, on a certain level, at various points this work almost threatens to become an existential thesis on the meaning of life. (And this was several centuries before existentialism was even conceptualized.) Because the overarching message is that one should live their life in devotion to the one and only means of attaining salvation--belief specifically in the Judeo-Christian God--it is existentialist only to a point. The existential point is that mere existence is not the essence of life. One must choose to pursue a life that is devoted to attaining salvation if one really wants life to have meaning. This idea is encapsulated in the assertion that "Our critical day is not the very day of our death, but the whole course of our life."

What is the difference between the merely strangely miraculous and the super-miraculous and why does it matter?

Donne outlines a number of events which would seem to qualify as being far enough beyond the miraculous to qualify as super-miraculous. The Red Sea suddenly going dry, the sun stopping its movement across the sky, a hot oven which does burn to the touch and a hungry lion which does not bite. These are classified as merely strange--but miraculously strange. The difference between them and the next level--the super-miraculous--is that a God could actually die. But there is something beyond even that level, something described an exaltation of the super-miraculous: that God not only could die, but would choose to die. And it is in that exaltation that the meaning of mortality can be found and must be accepted. For, after all, how can one complain that life is without meaning because it always ends in death if God not only can die but chooses to?

What historical novel about John Donne did this sermon inspire?

In 2015, Garry O'Connor published a historical novel titled Death's Duel. Though the novel is set in 1586, some four decades before Donne would actually his sermon of the same name, many of the same themes are play and the choice of title is not merely arbitrary. The plot of the novel revolves around the early life of Donne during the history-based crackdown on Catholics during Elizabethan England. Donne is almost literally made the victim of a witch hunt as he becomes blacklisted for refusing to renounce Catholicism and convert to the Protestant faith. Ultimately, the real duel that Donne faces is between life as a Catholic and life as an Anglican Church member with the underlying truth beneath the struggle being that regardless of path, it is the destination that matters: faith that the Christian God is the only God of salvation.