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When John Donne, in a 1617 sermon to Queen Anne and her court, says "what a perverse madness is it, to love a creature, and not as a creature, that is, with all the adjuncts, and circumstances, and qualities of a creature," he brings together two popular subjects in Donne studies: love and metaphysics.1 Knowing what Donne means by "all the adjuncts, and circumstances, and qualities of a creature" is to know what he believes about souls, bodies, minds, passions and affections, Galenic humors, and the relationship between the embodied human soul and God—in short, it is to have a sense of his metaphysical world-view. Accordingly, the last decade has seen an increased emphasis on the creaturely body in Donne's philosophical and theological thought. Blaine Greteman and Ramie Targoff both explore ways in which Donne complicates traditional Greek and Christian dualisms between body and soul; Nancy Selleck notices Donne's "keen awareness of the already interpersonally inflected soul" and his "interest in the physical media through which [spiritual] 'influence' works"; Brian Cummings, like Selleck, considers Donne's sense of contingent and "shared" subjectivity, but he follows a "more philosophical sense based on the analysis of the passions," according to which affections, or emotions, particularly within the realm of friendship, exist "somewhere between a philosophical theory and a practice of everyday ethics."2 While Cummings gestures toward ethics in his attention to friendship, all four of these studies focus primarily on metaphysics, ontology, and the relationship between affect and epistemology. And while recent work by Ben Saunders, Catherine Gimelli Martin, and Don Beecher explores a strictly romantic sense of Neoplatonic love in Donne's work, far less attention has been paid to finding out what, for Donne, makes a creature lovable in the first place.3 Answering this question requires us to see it the way Donne saw it—as inseparably coincident with epistemological and ontological questions of bodies, minds, and souls. I speak of lovability in this general sense, instead of cupiditas or eros, or caritas or agape, because I will argue that for Donne's mature philosophy of love, cupiditas, the love of earthly things as ends in themselves, and caritas, the love of earthly things in sole service of God's glory, are more...