principally for his poetry and for his sermons, and the poetry seems hardly political at all. But it seems to
me that one cannot rule out the possibility that Donne’s conforming to the Church of England resulted from
deep reflection that ought properly to be called theological-political. The argument of Pseudo-Martyr, after
all, is that martyrdom is suicidal if not attentive to the fullness of the circumstances in which a life is risked
and sacrificed; in particular, the witness of a Thomas More at the moment of the rupture of Christendom is
not repeated in the context of all-pervasive religious warfare and alternating martyrdoms on both sides.
The taking of the oath to James in the early 1600s, in other words, where recusancy threatens social
coherence, is not the same as More’s refusal to swear an oath to a monarch who sought to break away from
the ancient faith. That such immersion in the circumstances of action is needed to judge their morality is
no surprise to a student of Aristotelian prudence. What Le Roy points out in his introduction about the
possibility of using Aristotle’s Politics to understand political questions in terms not overwhelmed by
theological controversy seems, in short, to apply as well to the situation Donne’s generation of Catholics
faced in England. After all, those in France who sought to settle the question of succession to the throne
apart from the question of the faith of the monarch – the question of the day since Henri III, Le Roy’s
dedicatee, was childless and his presumptive heir, Henri de Navarre, was a Protestant – were dubbed “les
politiques,” which of course was also the name of Aristotle’s book.
THE PREFATORY LETTERS
A full account of the translation of the Politics into English must pay attention to the translation of
Aristotle’s text itself – not to mention would have to try the various statistical techniques now available to
determine authorship – and in this all-too-preliminary analysis I have time for neither. I would indicate to
the reader, however, one particularly suggestive word: the use of the term “company” to translate the Greek
“koinonia.” This comes from the French, “compagnie,” and has as a happy consequence the signal that the
true city is based upon a kind of friendship – think of the English word “companion” or the French
“copain.” It also should remind us that the founding of Virginia – by the Virginia Company – was not a
mere business enterprise but a project of political ambition, with deep roots in the Elizabethan mind.
Still, a word is due about the English translator’s prefatory materials, which I include as
appendices to this short essay. There are two: an Epistle Dedicatory and an Epsitle to the Reader. (They
are followed by translations of Le Roy’s analogous materials: the dedication to Henri III, King of France
9
Convention