Circle
The Circle Imagery Tradition
The circle is a simple, but mysterious figure; it is used not only as a design, but often as a symbol. Of all circles, the most familiar and awesome were those of the heavens, though they were not real, but imaginary. However, our sense experience naturally concludes that the celestical universe is circular since every star moves round the earth in a circle; Pliny was so sure of the sense experience:
Formam eius in speciem orbis absoluti globatam esse . . . oculorum quoque probatione, quod convexus mediusque quacumque cernatur, cum id accidere in alia no possit figura.
(The world's shape has the rounded appearance of a perfect sphere . . . our eyesight also confirms this belief, because the firmament presents the aspect of a concave hemisphere equidistant in every direction, which would be impossible in the case of any other figure.) (173)
But why is the universe circular? An explanation is supplied by Plato; in his account of Creation in Timaeus the perfect Creator created a perfect universe:
Wherefore he made the world in the form of a globe, round as from a lathe, having its extremes in every direction equidistant from the centre, the most perfect and the most like itself of all figures; for he considered that the like is infinitely fairer than the unlike. (33) (Jowett's translation)
The circle is the most perfect form in Plato as well as in many others; therefore the Creator made the world circular, forming it like himself. Aristotle agrees with Plato about the shape of the universe;
Further, this circular motion is necessarily primary. For the perfect is naturally prior to the imperfect, and the circle is a perfect thing.
On the Heavens, I, ii, trans. Stocks.
Aristotle's idea of the universe is a more elaborate one with concentric spheres; which gave the basic ground to the medieval world-view.
What is contained in Plato's thought is that the universe was created according to God's order; in other words, the "logos" of the Creator permeates the whole universe. So congenial is this idea to Christianity that, as Pelikan points out, "many early Christian thinkers brought to their interpretation of the biblical account of creation an understanding of the origins of the universe that had been profoundly shaped by the Timaeus of Plato..." (61). Thus the image of God and that of the universe were joined together in a Platonic way of thinking and man began to think both of the spiritual and the physical world in terms of circles. Sherwood, quoting from Donne's sermons, summarizes: "The circle, of the 'most convenient Hieroglyphicks of God' . . . expresses further implications of participating likeness between God and man. Christ, his life, the Church, man's soul, man's life, and the history of salvation -- all are 'circles'" (13).
As for the soul as a circle, Plotinus strengthens the idea:
Every soul that knows its history is aware, also, that its movement, unthwaited, is not that of an outgoing line; its natural course may be likened to that in which a circle turns not upon some external but on its own centre, the point to which it owes its rise. The soul's movement will be about its source; to this it will hold, poised intent towards that unity to which all souls should move and the divine souls always move, divine in virtue of that movement. . . .
The Six Enneads, VI, ix; trans. Mackenna and Page.
It should be noted that the soul has a circular movement but that it goes round the divine essence. Here we have one of the origins of the concentric spiritual circles. Now the idea continued persistently through the Middle Ages into the Renaissance. Bernardus Silvestris is faithful to the traditional idea in saying that God's hand set the outline of the world to a circle:
In celo divina manus celique ministris
omne creature primitiavit opus,
celi forma teres, essentia purior ignis,
motus circuitus, numina turba deum--
(In heaven and of the ministers of heaven the divine hand first outlines the whole work of creation, the smooth form of heaven, the purer essence of fire, the circular motion, and the multitudinous crowd of the gods.)
Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, i. 3. 3-6. (Stock 130)
The habit of thinking in terms of circles inevitably leads to the famous definition of God, which, according to Poulet, first appeared in The Book of Twenty-Four Philosophers, a twelfth-century book (25):
Deus est sphaera cujus centrum ubique, circumferentia nusquam.
(God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is
nowhere.)
Poulet provides us with a variety of examples with an important corollary idea that God in the center has direct influence on the circumference.
Ficino is the well-known advocator of Platonized Christianity (or Christianized Platonism?) in the Renaissance; he introduces a concentric spiritual spheres:
Neque ab re theologi veteres bonitatem in centro, pulchritudinem in circulo posuerunt. Bonitatem quidem in centro uno, in circulis autem quatuor pulcritudinem. Centrum unum omnium deus est, circuli quatuor circa deum, mens, anima, natura, materia.
(Ancient philosophers with reason put goodness in the center and beauty in the circle. Goodness in fact is in the center, and beauty is in the four circles. God is the center of all, and intellect, soul, nature and matter are four circles around God. My translation.)
De Amore, II, iii. (42)
These four circles not only go round God; the movements are themselves centripetal. And the created cannot directly go forward the center, but "first they must turn to their own centers"(44). Each center leads to the next spiritually higher plane, thus making a "circuitus spiritualis" (Panofsky 132).
These ideas were stock phrases in the Renaissance, but even in the seventeenth century we see the ideas in literary expressions:
Faith, stretch thy Line, yet That's too short, to sound
Sea without bottom, without bound;
As circular, as infinite shoarlesse round!
Immense ETERNITY! What mystick art
Of thee may coppy any part,
Since THOU an indeterminable CIRCLE art!
Whose very centre so diffus'd is found,
That not Heav'n's circuit can It bound,
Then what, what may the whole circumference surround?
Edward Benlowes, Theophila's Love-Sacrifice, Canto VII, stanzas 7-9.(Saintsbury 1: 382)
Sylvester's translation of The Holy Weeks is faithful to the definition of God:
I (God be praisd) know that the perfect CIRCLE
Whose Center's every-where, of all his circle
Exceeds the circuit; I conceaue aright
Th'Al-mighty-most to be most infinite. . . .
Part I, 2nd Week, 2nd Day, 163-6. (1: 408)
The compleat Circle; from whose every-place
The Center stands an equi-distant space.
Part IIII, 2nd Week, 2nd Day, 161-2. (1: 471)
The well-known idea of macro-microcosm correspondence refers us to the idea that man has the corresponding proportion with the world. Vitrivius intends to build according to the human proportion. Alanus de Insulis saw God as an industrial workman; in other words, "an architect" and "a goldsmith," "forming of this earthly palace"(Kemp 114-5). The word "goldsmith" reminds us of the line of the Valediction: "Like gold to airy thinness beat." The famous drawing by Leonardo da Vinci shows how human body is within a circle: in the occult tradition, too, man is confined, though less realistically, in a circle, like an illustration in Agrippa's De occulta philosophia.
In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as well, physical and metaphysical circles provided man with a structure through which the significance of the human existence could be explored. Hence a French poet looks on human life in terms of circles:
L'homme, contemple en toi deux cercles précieux,
L'âme qui vient du Ciel, doit retourner aux Cieux;
Le corps, de cendre fait, doit retourner en cendre.
(Man, contemplate the two circles in you: / The soul, which comes from heaven, must return to heaven; / And the body, made from dust, must return to dust.)
Lazare de Selve, 1620. (Quoted by Poulet, 63)
As we have seen in the quotation above, it is expected that many "circles," a variety of metaphorical applications of the circle imagery, will be found in Donne's writings; but to explore the whole range of them is beyond my power. My consideration will be limited to the circle/compass imagery of Donne; even so, it may give a valid idea of what lies in the center of the compass-circle imagery.
Go to Compass-Circle Imagery and Donne
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