Death's Duel and the Dean of St. Paul's

In February 1631, John Donne stood in the pulpit of St. Paul's Cathedral, London, visibly wasting from stomach cancer, and preached what his friends called his own funeral sermon. The congregation wept. Donne looked like a man already halfway through the grave. Yet his voice carried a defiance that startled everyone present.

Years earlier, Donne had written lines that still thunder across the centuries: "Death, be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so." He was not bluffing. That final sermon — titled Death's Duel — argued that every moment of human life is a kind of deliverance from death, and that Christ's own death had broken death's stranglehold forever.

Donne died on March 31, 1631. Before the end, he posed for a sketch in his burial shroud, eyes closed, mouth set in peace — not despair. He wanted the image carved in marble for his monument, which still stands in St. Paul's today, one of the few to survive the Great Fire of 1666.

Paul writes to the Corinthians that "the last enemy to be destroyed is death." Donne understood this in his bones. He did not face death with grim resignation or wishful thinking. He faced it the way a soldier faces an enemy whose defeat has already been secured — because Christ, the firstfruits of resurrection, had gone ahead of him through the grave and out the other side.