Article: "Lines which circles do contain": circles, the cross, and Donne's dialectic scheme of salvation. (John Donne)

The vast importance attached to the figure of the circle in the theological and cosmological constructs of 17th-century writers is by now a critical commonplace.1 In the works of John Donne, the circle assumes the status of controlling metaphor: it is a figure which at once represents the perfection of God, the cycles of Nature and of the human beings caught up therein, and the solipsistic repetitions of sin. "God hath made all things in a Roundnesse," he maintains in a sermon, "from the round superficies of this earth, which we tread here, to the round convexity of those heavens which ... shall be our footstool, when we come to heaven, God hath wrapped up all things in ...

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