Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma: Riddles, Rhetoric, and Theology [1 ed.] 0268101620, 9780268101626

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Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma

Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma Riddles, Rhetoric, and Theology

CURTIS A. GRUENLER

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Copyright © 2017 by University of Notre Dame Published in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gruenler, Curtis A., 1964– author. Title: Piers Plowman and the poetics of enigma : riddles, rhetoric, and theology / Curtis A. Gruenler. Description: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016053425 (print) | LCCN 2017005369 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268101626 (hardback) | ISBN 0268101620 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780268101640 (pdf ) | ISBN 9780268101657 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Langland, William, 1330?-1400? Piers Plowman. | Ambiguity in literature. | Riddles in literature. | Langland, William, 1330?–1400?— Aesthetics. | Poetics--History-—To 1500. | Aesthetics, Medieval. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Renaissance. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Medieval. Classification: LCC PR2017.A53 G78 2017 (print) | LCC PR2017.A53 (ebook) | DDC 821/.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016053425 ISBN 9780268101640 ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [email protected].

For Pauline and Eric

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction CHAPTER 1

Language for a Theology of Participation, Theory for a Poetics of Enigma

ix

1 31

RIDDLES Enigma as Play CHAPTER 2

Riddling Traditions, Participatory Play, and Langland’s First Vision

CHAPTER 3

Riddle Contests and Langland’s Fourth Vision

83 130

RHETORIC Enigma as Persuasion CHAPTER 4

Enigma in the Curriculum: Langland’s Third Vision

173

CHAPTER 5

Enigmatic Authority: Langland’s Second Vision

220

viii

Contents

THEOLOGY Enigma as Participation CHAPTER 6

Enigma and Participation in Langland’s Fifth Vision and Julian’s Revelation

271

CHAPTER 7

Games of Heaven, Games of Earth: Ending with Enigmas

329

Epilogue

380

List of Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index

387 388 506 555

P R E FA C E and AC K N OW L E D G M E N TS

This book tries to do two things, either of which might have been sufficiently ambitious on its own. First, it makes a broad case, based on the three fields of meaning of the Latin word aenigma in the Middle Ages— riddles, rhetoric, and theology—that a poetics of enigma was recognized across the medieval period and provides an important way of understanding, in their own terms, many of the most ambitious medieval literary works. Second, it seeks, in a more focused and sustained way, to unlock perhaps the most enigmatic medieval text, William Langland’s Piers Plowman. This remarkable poem provides the most comprehensive and self-aware guide to the medieval poetics of enigma. While such a poetics was widely practiced and the rationale for it was expressed in many places, in most cases it is less explicit and is visible only a facet at a time. Piers Plowman plays across the whole range of the potential that medieval authors found in the enigmatic, and seeing this potential from other sources illuminates what this poem is up to and how it shaped English literature to come. As a third, bonus goal, then, I also suggest that the medieval poetics of enigma is a major root of what has come, in the modern period, to be called literature. One of the virtues of enigmatic texts is that they appeal to beginners while occasioning new insights for those already familiar with a subject. I hope that will be true here too. Note that the spelling of Middle English texts has been modernized throughout (except in titles of modern publications) to avoid obsolete characters. The spelling of both Middle English and Latin has been regularized to follow modern orthography of i and u as vowels and j and v as ix

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consonants. Curly brackets indicate emendations of texts made by editors of the editions cited or, in the case of translations, the original language; square brackets indicate my own glosses of difficult words. Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. Unless otherwise noted, Piers Plowman citations are to Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions, edited by A. V. C. Schmidt, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011), by version, passus, and line number(s).

* *

*

This project began many years ago with my dissertation research, and I am grateful for help from many people. The cochairs of my dissertation committee, Henry Ansgar Kelly and V. A. Kolve, provided essential teaching and guidance, marvelously different and each the most excellent one could want. To my other committee member, Patrick Geary, I owe in particular the image of the project as resting upon a three-legged stool, which has been in my mind ever since. UCLA provided a stimulating and supportive scholarly community. I want to express particular thanks to some other members of the English faculty: Michael J. B. Allen, Lynn Batten, Edward I. Condren, Lowell Gallagher, Arthur L. Little, Donka Minkova, Joseph F. Nagy, Jonathan F. S. Post, Allen Roper, Paul D. Sheats, Debora K. Shuger, George Tennyson, and Robert N. Watson. Thanks also to the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies for the opportunities it provided and to staff member Blair Sullivan for her collegiality. I also thank my undergraduate adviser from Stanford, Martin Evans, for showing me what literary scholarship could do and for sending me to UCLA, the single best piece of advice I’ve ever gotten. Graduate student friends at UCLA gave me an experience of intellectual friendship that I hope shines through in this book’s ideal of community, among them Terri Bays, Thad Bower, Jessica Brantley, Paul Bryant, John Dalton, Greg Jackson, Martin Kevorkian, Sarah McNamer, Stanley Orr, Tanya Paull, Catherine Sanok, and Dana Cairns Watson. Many other scholars have helped and encouraged me, not least through their models of scholarship: James Alison, Ann Astell, Sherwood Belangia, Peter Brown, Christopher Cannon, Cristina Maria Cervone, René Girard, Robert Hamerton-Kelly, David Lyle Jeffrey, Kerilyn Harka-

Preface and Acknowledgments

xi

way Krieger, Traugott Lawler, Ryan McDermott, Anne Middleton, Derek Pearsall, James Simpson, Emily Steiner, Sarah Tolmie, and Lawrence Warner. No doubt there are other important conversations I am forgetting. One little story distills how this project has been intertwined with relationships. One day, soon after coming up with enigma as a focus, I was walking with my friend John Dalton through UCLA’s Rolfe Hall and asked him where he would look for Middle English riddles. That evening I found in my mailbox the issue of Speculum with Andrew Galloway’s article “The Rhetoric of Riddling in Late-Medieval England.” I first thought I would need to find another topic, then realized that his article was just what I needed to move forward—something I am glad to have been able to acknowledge to him in person already. Hope College has been a wonderful place to work and to take a long time to write a book. For patient, consistent support both practical and personal, I thank my provosts, Jacob E. Nyenhuis, James Boelkins, and Richard Ray; my deans, William Reynolds and Patrice Rankine; and my department chairpersons, Peter Schakel, David Klooster, and Ernest Cole. Colleagues in English and other departments have also given many kinds of support and helpful responses to my work, including Susanna Childress Banner, Steve Bouma-Prediger, Rhoda Burton, John Cox, David Cunningham, Natalie Dykstra, Janis Gibbs, Stephen Hemenway, Charles Huttar, Rob Kenagy, James Kennedy, Julie Kipp, Joseph LaPorte, Marla Lunderberg, Steve Maiullo, Jesus Montaño, Jared Ortiz, William Pannapacker, Jack Ridl, Heather Sellers, Caroline Simon, Jennifer Young Tait, Beth Trembley, Jeff Tyler, Kathleen Verduin, Leslie Werkman, and Courtney Werner. Many thanks also to the English department’s office managers, Myra Kohsel and Sarah Baar, and the staff of Van Wylen Library. It is a special pleasure to thank Hope students who have been stellar research assistants and collaborators: Andrea Antenan, Rebecca Fox, Anna Goodling, Peter Kleczynski, Katherine Masterton, Heather Patnott, and Matthew Vermaire. I thank Western Theological Seminary for the use of an office and the chance to participate in its community during a sabbatical. Among its faculty I am especially grateful for the friendship of James Brownson,

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Steven Chase, and Christopher Kaiser, who have also helped make Hope Church an intellectual as well as spiritual home. Thanks also to its pastors, Kathy Davelaar, Gordon Wiersma, and Jill Russell, for their leadership and friendship. I would not be a scholar and writer at all without some friends from my hometown, especially Benjamin Pierce, Daniel Snowden-Ifft, and Bennet Wang, and friends from Stanford, especially Ruben and Marit DiRado, Paul Gutjahr, and Dave Schmelzer. I am grateful for the following financial support: the Daniel G. Calder Memorial Dissertation Fellowship from UCLA Friends of English; a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation; an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant through the Huntington Library; Hope College’s Sluyter Fellowship and several summer grants through the CrossRoads Project and the Jacob E. Nyenhuis program, including the Brookstra, Reimold, Miner and Dureth Bouma Stegenga, and Willard Wichers faculty development funds. Portions of chapter 3 appeared in Speculum, the journal of the Medieval Academy of America, and I thank the academy for permission to use them here. I am grateful to Stephen Little and to the staff and associates of the University of Notre Dame Press for their careful attention. Special thanks to Traugott Lawler and another, anonymous reader for the press, each of whom went through the entire manuscript twice. Their careful attention saved me from many errors and made this a much better book. To my wife, Lezlie, who has given me more than I could ever say, and my children, Samuel and Genevieve, who have waited their entire lives for this book to be finished, thanks for making every day a delight. Last, and first, thanks to my parents, Eric and Pauline Gruenler, to whom this book is dedicated.

I N T RO D U C T I O N

To be enigmatic remains a prized feature of literature. In English, enigma now refers to anything mysterious, but it descends from the oldest and most consistent term in Western letters for riddling language. Enigma, in this ancient and medieval sense, stretches literary art toward what resists saying—or, what is perhaps ultimately the same thing, presses ever further into the riches of what is always already being said. This book aims to recover a distinctive poetics of enigma essential to many of the most enduring works of medieval literature. Modern (and postmodern) expectations for the enigmatic, while they have much in common with older ones, are nonetheless liable to miss important interests of these works. The most explicit literary theory native to the Middle Ages, on the other hand, is dominated by doctrines that might not seem hospitable to the playfulness and power of enigma. Yet the term was in widespread and sophisticated use. To see what enigma might have meant to a medieval author or reader—how it names a kind of reading experience they sought—brings to light a formative literary idea born at the intersection of riddles, rhetoric, and theology. The term enigma makes more recognizable what I will often call a mode that moves beyond the riddle as a short form or genre to elements of riddling that can be incorporated into larger literary forms. Poetics in this application means more than principles for making a literary work; it means what the work itself does, or rather what author and audience 1

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PIERS PLOWMAN AND THE POETICS OF ENIGMA

together do by means of it. In the hands of an author such as William Langland, the poetics of enigma reaches toward nothing less than a fuller participation in the divine act of creation and re-creation.

LANGLAND’S POETIC SIGNATURE

Much about the late fourteenth-century poem known as Piers Plowman is a riddle, including the name of its author. Cryptic signatures within the poem, in fact, provide some of the best evidence for calling him William Langland. Nine lines after the fullest of these, “I have lyved in londe . . . my name is Longe Wille,” follows a different kind of signature, one that labels the kind of poetry this poet makes his own: Clerkes kenne me that Crist is in alle places; Ac I seigh hym nevere soothly but as myself in a mirour: Hic in enigmate, tunc facie ad faciem. [The learned teach me that Christ is in all places; But I see him never truly except as myself in a mirror: Here in a riddle, then face to face.]1 Langland here partially translates and provocatively merges into his own text a favorite Bible verse of medieval theologians: “Videmus nunc per speculum in enigmate, tunc autem facie ad faciem” (We see now through a mirror in an enigma, but then face to face).2 Most boldly, he changes St. Paul’s word Nunc (Now) to Hic (Here). What could Hic refer to? “As myself in a mirour” invokes one of the main theological traditions carried by this verse: seeing the human person, especially oneself, as the fullest mirror of the divine, but an obscure one. It seems as if Langland’s narrator is finding himself to be a riddle to which Christ is the answer. This narrator has by this point, almost five thousand lines through a poem of more than seven thousand lines, wrestled explicitly with his work as a poet and his larger quest for an effective form of language. In this extraordinary moment of poetic self-consciousness, then, Hic further designates the poem itself as an enigma, a game of composition and in-

Introduction

3

terpretation interested in theological vision and even transfiguration. Behind what “Long Wille” the narrator could be saying to his interlocutor, Langland the poet is describing what his poem does and giving us a word for how it works: “Here, in the poem you are reading, one may see Christ truly, but in an enigma.” Langland’s poetic signature draws out what is latent in the three fields of meaning of the medieval Latin word aenigma: riddles, rhetoric, and theology. His poem stands as a sort of summa aenigmatica, a gathering and synthesis of medieval aspects of the enigmatic. Langland’s uses of riddling language activate central capacities of medieval literary and theological tradition in order to address acute needs of his time and place. Yet beyond this late fourteenth-century English flourishing of the poetics of enigma, shared with authors such as Chaucer and Julian of Norwich, there is a broad range of medieval art, both literary and visual, both major and minor, that can be better understood—both on its own terms and as a formative tradition that has been obscured, in large part, by the glare of its extensive modern legacy—in light of the poetics of enigma. Ancient Greeks valued the enigmatic enough that αίνιγμα is one of the earliest recorded words used to label a poetic form according to a quality of meaning.3 For much of Western history, however, literary criticism and theory preferred instead a different notion of eloquence that came to dominate classical literary criticism, one more oriented to clarity and grace. Modern literary movements—the metaphysical poetry of Donne and Herbert, the romanticism of Coleridge and Keats, the modernism of Eliot and Stevens—repeatedly cultivated the enigmatic over against classicism, even if they did not use this word to identify what they were doing. While the meaning of this word itself has stayed remarkably consistent from Greek into Latin and thence into English and other modern languages, it has dropped out of literary theory and now refers more often, at least in English, to people and things than to language. With the enigmatic in the ascendant more than ever in the twenty-first century, it is a good time to understand anew its significance in the Middle Ages, familiar in some ways and deeply strange in others.4 What surfaces in Langland, then, is a fertile conjunction, available throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, of three sources of literary thinking tied to the term enigma:

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PIERS PLOWMAN AND THE POETICS OF ENIGMA

•

Aenigma was the main Latin word for riddles of all sorts—from oral, folk riddles to elaborate literary ones—a pervasive and perennial source of verbal creativity with a range as great as that of poetry itself. In rhetoric and related disciplines, classical treatments of figurative language defined enigma as a kind of allegory distinguished by its obscurity. As medieval schools used and extended these textbooks, and as allegory became a dominant mode of composition and interpretation, the figure of enigma named an important literary place for play at the boundaries of language. Theologians, under the influence of Augustine’s interpretation of 1 Corinthians 13:12, took this single use of it in the New Testament to be a major clue to the Bible’s own poetics and connected it to a dynamic understanding of the divine use of signs that both hide and reveal and thus solicit ever-renewed contemplation. In this domain, enigma partakes of a sacramental sense of the depth of language.

•

•

At the juncture of these three realms of thought and language, theologians and poets reconceived the value of difficult reading in education and spiritual formation. Medieval interest in the potential of enigma for theological imagination also sheds light on the relocation of the enigmatic to a more secular, more purely literary sphere near the end of the Middle Ages—by Boccaccio, Chaucer, and others—and into modernity. Aenigma’s three fields of meaning also involve three major domains of writing in which scholars have increasingly found the makings of medieval literary theory: • • •

vernacular literature, from patterns of form and moments of theorizing in literary works themselves to the study of folklore and orality5 the theory taught in the arts of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic), including treatises on poetic composition and on reading6 theology, both Latin and vernacular, as it addresses topics such as the theory of the literal and spiritual senses of scripture and the general nature of language7

The connections marked by the term enigma across these discourses yield a more robust framework for interpreting deliberately obscure medieval

Introduction

5

texts than is apparent in any of them on its own. Rhetoric, taken by itself, seems dominated by classical ideals of eloquence; theology, by constraints of orthodoxy. The thread of enigma running through both, however, reveals greater flexibility and potential for the kind of reading now seen as literary. Discussions of enigma in these more theoretical contexts, meanwhile, suggest how the dynamics of riddling were seen to extend from the most local wordplay to the largest puzzles of structure and symbol.8 In the end, the enigmatic is less about a form than a function. Each of the three semantic fields of aenigma brings out a different element of purpose: • • •

play, seen most purely as a goal in riddles persuasion, conceptualized in rhetoric around the treatment of figures participation, a theological concept crucial to medieval Christian Platonism and expressed in commentary on 1 Corinthians 13:12

These purposes will be the ultimate criteria for identifying what is enigmatic and what is not. This approach allows for an expansive definition while avoiding the temptation to call everything enigmatic—though it will also become clear that in the outlook that most embraced the enigmatic, everything in fact is. It is at the level of purpose that the enigmatic can best be seen to differ from and often compete with other modes, even within the same text. The two close neighbors that most resemble and oppose the enigmatic are what I will call the didactic and the esoteric. An overview of enigma’s defining purposes will distinguish it from other modes, place it in relation to some ancient and modern ideas, and introduce the structure of the book.

PLAY

The enigmatic differs from the didactic and the esoteric in that, whatever other purposes it may be seen to serve, it seeks to remain playful and continue the playing. The difference can be seen in the first riddle I remember from childhood, “What is black and white and red/read all over?”

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It is the pun that makes it work, and thus it could have a didactic function of teaching awareness of homonyms. What makes it memorable, however, probably has more to do with the little thrill of getting the answer (a newspaper) and crossing the divide from those who don’t get it to those who do. This is the esoteric mode that marks a boundary of knowledge and erects a sign of belonging within it. Yet the newspaper riddle becomes more enigmatic when one keeps reading it, looking for other answers: a penguin with the chickenpox? A blushing zebra? Someone in a tuxedo who doesn’t get the answer? How many answers could there be? Now the game has shifted from a finite one with a certain answer to infinite play with the fit between language and the world. One can make it even more self-referential by noticing that the newspaper riddle combines a reference to the world of printing with an oral pun on the word read, from which riddle (in its original form redels) derives. Riddles also play with the mysteries of things themselves, as in this brief one from the famous Old English collection in the tenth-century manuscript known as the Exeter Book: Ic þa wiht geseah on weg feran; heo wæs wrætlice wundrum gegierwed. Wunder wearð on wege: wæter wearð to bane.9 [I saw a creature wandering the way: She was devastating—beautifully adorned. On the wave a wonder: water turned to bone.]10 This one also turns on a pun: weg, way, becomes wege, wave. But the “wonder” is how water becomes ice. This is also the topic of the Latin riddle used in the standard medieval definition of enigma, where, as often in the Exeter Book riddles, the object to be guessed is also the speaker of the riddle (see below, chapter 4, the section “Grammar”). Even without such prosopopoeia, however, this Old English riddle imagines life in things and invites the reader to participate in that life. A series of six questions on biblical subjects from a fifteenth-century manuscript shows the enigmatic breaking through the didactic on a religious topic like those common in Middle English verse. The questions and answers rehearse biblical knowledge in a mode similar to a catechism:

Introduction

7

Who was ded ande never borne? Adam, that was oure first beforne. Who was borne and never deed? Ennok and Ely, that we of reed [read]. Who was borne er fader or moder? Cayme, that slough Abel his brother. Who was borne and twyes deed? Lasare, which God areysed. Who spake, affter that he was dede? Samuel the glorious prophete. Who spake, or that he was borne? John the baptiste of olde in the moder wombe.11 By cataloguing various exceptions to the usual realities of birth and death, however, these not only teach but also invite contemplation of deeper mysteries in the history of salvation. None of the six give Christ as their answer, yet all perhaps point to Christ as the greater enigma behind the riddles: fulfillment of and master over these realities. While the whole, seemingly complete list of biblical anomalies implies a riddle-like sense of closure, it also opens onto a larger, endless game of interpreting the significance of each of these facts, and the stories they are part of, within the history of salvation. As a concept for thinking about the purposes of a poetics, play keeps in view its multiple possibilities and the fluid movement between them. In The Ambiguity of Play, Brian Sutton-Smith identifies seven “rhetorics” that theorists ancient and modern have found in various forms of play: education, games of fate, contests, formation of group identity, imagination, selfhood, and frivolity. All seven apply to riddling. Riddling is also unusual for its cultural universality. Chapter 2 will make use of a wide array of studies from around the world to supplement direct evidence of riddling in the Middle Ages. Oral riddling is always found to happen in the context of some kind of contest. When riddling becomes literary, it never completely loses the sense of contest, but other rhetorics emerge. Didactic and esoteric uses of riddling remain closer to the competitive, contest dynamic while also serving an educational purpose or forming identity around secret knowledge. Theological reflection on the enigmatic, however, brings out a range of purposes more like what Sutton-Smith identifies as imagination and selfhood.12 Enigmatic play moves between a social, horizontal dimension and an inward,

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vertical one. It forms community not by competition and exclusion but by sharing in the game of interpretation. Important to this kind of community is an element of frivolity, a commitment to playing for the sake of playing and continuing the play. Perhaps the best medieval term for the kind of play invited by enigma is contemplation. Commenting on Ecclesiasticus 32:15–16, “Run ahead into your house and gather yourself there and play there and pursue your thoughts,” Thomas Aquinas writes: There are two features of play which make it appropriate to compare the contemplation of wisdom to playing. First, we enjoy playing, and there is the greatest enjoyment of all to be had in the contemplation of wisdom. . . . Secondly, playing has no purpose beyond itself; what we do in play is done for its own sake. And the same applies to the pleasure of wisdom. If we are enjoying thinking about the things we long for or the things we are proposing to do, this kind of enjoyment looks beyond itself to something else which we are eager to attain, and if we fail to attain it or if there is a delay in attaining it, our pleasure is mingled with a proportionate distress. . . . But the contemplation of wisdom contains within itself the cause of its own enjoyment, and so it is not exposed to the kind of anxiety that goes with waiting for something which we lack. . . . It is for this reason that divine Wisdom compares her enjoyment to playing in Proverbs 8:30, “I enjoyed myself every single day, playing before him,” each single day meaning the consideration of some different truth.13 This passage begins by making an analogy between play and the contemplation of wisdom, but with the concluding verse from Proverbs the analogy collapses: Wisdom plays. Contemplative play participates in the play of Wisdom by which the world was made. A remarkable connection between play, the enigmatic, and the pursuit of knowledge can be seen in John of Trevisa’s translation of the thirteenth-century encyclopedia by Bartholomaeus Anglicus known as De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things ). Trevisa prefaces his translation with a verse asking for blessing on what he calls “this game” (lines 23, 26):

Introduction

9

In the firste lessoun that I took Thanne I lerned a and be And othir lettres by here [their] names. But alwey God spede [provided] me That [What] is me nedeful in alle games If I pleyde in felde other in medes. Outhir stille [quietly] outhir with noyce [noise] I prey{d}e help in alle {my dedis} Of hym that deyde uppon the croyce. Now divers pleyes in his name I schal let passe forth and fare And aventure to pleye oo [one] longe game.14 Game and play in Middle English had a semantic range as broad as our word play or Latin ludus, extending from the most trifling amusements to the more serious play of battle, drama, or music. All three languages, that is, mark a strong continuity across a wide range of activities, a range spanning from low to high like that covered by aenigma.15 Trevisa indicates a broad range of play, but he starts with lessons in the schoolroom. Since riddles often appear in medieval school texts, schoolroom play likely included riddling. The “one long game” he now plays certainly does. On the next page, Trevisa translates Bartholomaeus’s statement of the purpose of his encyclopedia: “By help of God this werk is compiled, profitable to me and on cas to othir that knowith nought the kyndes and propirtees of thinges that beth toschift and isprad [spread about] ful wide in bokes of holy seyntes and philosophris, to undirstonde redels and menynges [riddles and meanings] of scriptures and of writinges that the holy gost hath iyeve [given] derkliche ihid [hidden] and wrapped undir liknes and fygures of propirtees of thinges of kynde and craft [nature and art].”16 “Redels and menynges” here translates enigmata. As chapter 4 will show, 1 Corinthians 13:12 was often taken to mean that scripture itself was full of enigmas. Bartholomaeus’s collection of learning—which begins with the names of God and proceeds through the hierarchies of angels to the properties of human beings, the bodies of heaven, the parts of time, the elements, birds, fish, geography, minerals, plants, animals, and miscellaneous “accidents” such as colors—all has as its first goal the

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understanding of scripture. At the same time, however, scripture is also the key to reading the enigmas of things themselves. Trevisa’s translation continues: “The apostle seith that the unseye [unseen] thinges of God beth iknowe and understonde by thinges that beth iseye [seen]. Therfore divynyte usith holy informacione and poesies that [in order that] myistik and dirk undirstondinge and figuratif speches, menynge what we schal trowe [believe], may be itake of the liknes of thinges that beth iseye [seen], so that spiritual thinges and thinges unseye may be covenabliche [conveniently] ordeyned to fleisschliche and to thinges that beth iseye.”17 The game, that is, goes in both directions. Interpreting the riddles of scripture gives meaning to the things of the sensible world as well. This is the long game, one that riddles and other enigmatic texts can also play and, indeed, can bring to greater awareness and intensity.

PERSUASION

The definition of enigma as an obscure allegory came to the Middle Ages from classical rhetoric, which was shaped by the needs of Greco-Roman civic communities. St. Paul’s use of the term in 1 Corinthians 13:12, by contrast, comes at the center of his articulation of the Christian sacramental community: the institution of the Lord’s Supper in chapter 11; the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the description of the Christian community as Christ’s body in chapter 12; chapter 13’s discourse on love; directions for worship and the use of gifts in chapter 14; and resurrection in Christ in chapter 15. The guiding purposes of classical eloquence, expressed most influentially by Cicero, were to teach, to delight, and to move. The obscurity of enigma never fit comfortably into this rhetoric, with its preference for clarity. Rather, the poetics of enigma became a prime way to adapt classical rhetoric to a Christian vision of life and community. Two shifts between the goals of classical and Christian rhetoric bring the enigmatic into prominence. First, Christian emphasis on fulfillment in a life to come, of which this life is a mere shadow, gives the obscurity of enigma value for recognizing the gap and projecting across it. The question of how the tools of that rhetoric might be used to approach and

Introduction

11

prepare for such a fulfillment opened a wide field for creative reappropriation. Enigma became the central paradigm for language that both affirms symbolic meaning and denies its adequacy in the face of transcendent mystery. Second, the New Testament vision of community is shaped less by conformity to a political hierarchy and formation of group identity against outsiders and more by conversion away from visible group identities and toward inner conformity to Christ. Chapters 4 and 5 will show how enigma suits meditative reading oriented to conversion and a politics of compassion toward the excluded. To express the rhetorical shift within the categories of the Ciceronian dictum, the cognitive goal becomes not so much teaching as contemplation of what exceeds comprehension; the affective goal becomes not so much delight as longing; the volitional goal becomes not just virtuous action but conversion, compassion, and empathetic participation. The goals of reading conceived through enigma have much in common with modern notions of aesthetic experience. In literary theory, the New Critics, though they did not favor the term enigma, emphasized similar features such as ambiguity, irony, and paradox in order to articulate the bounded but still potentially infinite interpretability of aesthetic objects. Northrop Frye, in an essay called “Charms and Riddles” that is part of his attempt to articulate what he called an “anatomy of criticism” from within literary traditions, describes a spectrum that characterizes all lyric poetry. His choice of terms comes from those used to label two kinds of short verse common in Old English, but he could also be describing a shift toward the enigmatic that was happening in the twentieth century—or the fourteenth. Charms use sound and devices such as repetition to lull their audience; riddles use imagery and a different range of verbal figures to provoke vigorous engagement and play. Whereas charms render their audience subject to their powers, riddles empower their subjects as players, interpreters, and even coauthors. To one composing a charm, things are to be controlled, but to one composing a riddle, things are to be played with to see what they resemble and what they hide. In a medieval way of looking at the world, or any view oriented toward participation, these secrets and resemblances are not random but clues to the meaning of things.18

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Poststructuralist thinkers have employed the term enigma even more broadly to imply that riddling does not just intensify one function of language but reveals the basic condition of all language. Indeed, the term is enlisted as a tool of awakening to endless deferral of meaning when Jacques Derrida announces in Of Grammatology, “To make enigmatic what one thinks one understands by the words ‘proximity,’ ‘immediacy,’ ‘presence’ . . . is my final intention in this book.”19 Because riddles block the immediate reference of language by hiding their answers behind novel figures, they do something, even in spoken language, that is like what all writing does when it removes language from the presence of speaker and listener whose shared situation can ground meaning. Whereas the free play of the deconstructed signifier is radically unbounded, however, the infinite potential of signs in the medieval poetics of enigma converges on transcendent reality. Suspicion of the possibilities of organic meaning associated with symbolism since the romantic era led Paul de Man to prefer the mechanisms of allegory that bare the inadequacies of their devices. Enigmatic allegories of the Middle Ages, on the other hand, draw attention to the work of interpretation precisely in order to project their capacity as machines of transcendence toward an infinite Other in  whom every presence is recovered. Yet there is an ethical similarity between medieval enigma and the postmodern resistance to the dominating tendencies of the sign: both play with language in order to recognize the otherness of the other. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s account of the importance of play for hermeneutics captures this compatibility: “The spectator is set at an absolute distance, a distance that precludes practical or goal-oriented participation. But this distance is aesthetic distance in a true sense, for it signifies the distance necessary for seeing, and thus makes possible a genuine and comprehensive participation in what is presented before us. A spectator’s ecstatic self-forgetfulness corresponds to his continuity with himself. Precisely that in which one loses oneself as a spectator demands that one grasp the continuity of meaning.”20 Gadamer completes the circle between recognition of the other and recovery of the self that is implicit in the medieval poetics of enigma. His use of the term participation here remains primarily within the sphere of the theater, yet it perhaps also invokes the wider, philosophical and theological concept of participation that undergirds the rhetorical and poetic capacities of the enigmatic.

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PARTICIPATION

The audience’s participation in the theater was likely one of the senses of the Greek term methexis (also metoche) that Plato was building on when he used it metaphorically to refer to the relationship between perceivable things and the world of Ideas. This metaphysical sense, as taken up by theologians, is what participation means when it first comes into English use in the late fourteenth century. Though the Oxford English Dictionary labels this sense as obsolete, it is still in use among theologians.21 Indeed, it has undergone something of a revival in recent years.22 There seems to be no term more apt for the conception of immediate, sensible reality as a sharing in something unseen. Only later in English usage did it gain the current, social senses, such as participation in classroom discussion— thus reversing Plato’s metaphorical turn from the perceptible to the imperceptible. In Latin, participatio carried a particular philosophical sense among those who imported Platonic metaphysics into Christian theology. The metaphysics and theology of participation have implications, in turn, for thinking about how knowledge works and about the psychology of spiritual experiences. An important bridge to application of the term in these more subjective senses seems to have been discussion of participation in the sacraments. All of these—participation as a way of conceiving both objective reality and our subjective knowledge and experience of it—are important to the medieval uses of enigma. To put it briefly and perhaps, at this point, cryptically, the enigmatic mediates a participatory view of reality and brings participation to consciousness. Participation first appears in English in Chaucer’s translation (ca. 1380) of Boethius’s early sixth-century Consolation of Philosophy, one of the principal conduits of Christianized Platonism. The three times Boethius uses participatio, all carried into English by Chaucer, can serve to introduce three of the idea’s key aspects. The first is the central Christian adaptation of Plato’s metaphysics: the participation of human beings in the divine. Lady Philosophy, in her dialogue with the persona of the imprisoned author, leads him to understand that all partial goods, the loss of which he has been lamenting, derive from one, perfect good, which is God. Further, God is thus also “sovereyne blisfulnesse,” so that to be truly happy is to be God. “But,” she immediately qualifies, “certes by nature

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ther nys but o God; but by the participacioun of dyvinite ther ne let ne distourbeth nothyng that ther ne ben many goddis.”23 Participation in God is the human destiny. This idea is one of the ways that the early Christian doctrine of divinization, captured in the saying, “God became human that humans might become God,” remained important in Western theology.24 Boethius’s two other uses of participatio, also transmitted by Chaucer, suggest two further aspects of the idea inherited by medieval thinkers from the church fathers: a passive participation by nature, and an active participation by free will and grace. Passive, natural participation applies to all things. “But alle thing that is good,” says Lady Philosophy, “grauntestow that it be good by the participacioun of good, or no?”25 This is the core Platonic idea: all things are and are what they are by participation in the Forms: good by participation in the Good, beautiful by participation in Beauty, and so on.26 In the Christian Platonism conveyed by Augustine, human nature participates, especially, in the personal nature of the Trinity. Simply to be human, and thus to be made in the image and likeness of God, is to participate in God by nature. In humankind, degrees of participation also involve choice. Lady Philosophy, in her discussion of the problem of evil, asks whether we should not consider a completely evil, wretched person to be more “unsely [unhappy] thanne thilke wrecche of which the unselyness is relevid by the participacioun of som good?”27 The Consolation of Philosophy is one of the classic explorations of how humanity’s rational nature includes freedom to choose good or evil, that is, greater or lesser participation. Boethius does not deal at length with how participation can increase—though this is the implied goal of reading his work. Mostly he asserts that Providence always works to correct evil and increase good. The relationship between free human agency and the all-powerful, all-loving will of God is a mystery that Lady Philosophy says is beyond her, yet she holds that freedom is found in contemplation and virtue.28 For later medieval theologians, the notion of active participation in the divine will is a central conceptual tool for thinking about the cooperation of free will and divine grace in the restoration of humanity from the effects of the Fall. Different conceptions of the effects of the Fall (or degrees of emphasis on those effects) lead to differing accounts of how

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the active aspect of participation plays out. Augustine, though his works include a range of views, placed an influential emphasis on the inheritance of original sin that renders humanity incapable of any good until divine grace takes the initiative. On the other hand, another important patristic influence on the theology of participation in the later Middle Ages, the unknown fifth-century author now called Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, takes a more positive view of human capacity to engage in sacramental and contemplative practices that approach the divine.29 Both authors, however, probe the ultimately mysterious interplay between divine and human agency and share the basic outlook that shows up in Boethius as participation. Moreover, both use enigmatic language in order to come as close as possible to a reality that ultimately goes beyond words, and both theorize the importance of the enigmatic for articulating and entering further into this reality. What the theology of participation has to do with enigmatic language, particularly as received from Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius through theological and mystical writing, will be the burden of chapter 1. In order to look ahead to the literary importance of enigma, however, it may help to consider how it fits into the subjective side of participation, that is, what implications a participatory view of reality has for epistemology (conceptions of how we know things) and for what kind of representations best mediate knowledge and experience of spiritual reality. One way to grasp a participatory view of knowledge is by contrast to the more usual modern view that could be called correspondence. At its simplest, the correspondence view sees the mind as a screen upon which representations of external reality are projected. Of course, more sophisticated modern and postmodern epistemologies give the mind a more active role in constructing these representations—and, indeed, reintroduce to it something much more like the idea of participation.30 Philosophers have, since Kant, recognized the importance of the knowing subject in constituting the known object from the raw data of perception. As Wordsworth put it in “Tintern Abbey,” we half create what we perceive. More recently, cognitive scientists have investigated the neuropsychological mechanisms by which we construct our worlds. If, as many cognitive theorists argue, all language builds on metaphors from embodied

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experience, riddles make explicit and puzzling the basic processes of constructing meaning that are usually tacit and relatively transparent.31 Yet modern views still work within a paradigm of correspondence rather than participation to the extent that they assume a gap between knower and known that is overcome by something that goes on in the mind in order to achieve a correspondence to external reality. Participation, on the other hand, takes knowledge to be a real relation between knower and known, more than just material cause and effect through sense data. For Plato, true knowledge comes from the mind’s participation in the transcendent Forms. Aristotle says the mind becomes in some sense what it knows.32 Augustine influentially uses the metaphor of illumination: the mind’s participation in the light of divine truth makes it possible to know things truly. Most important in the present context, for Augustine and the tradition that followed him, “Truthful speech is a participation in the life of God the Holy Trinity.”33 Knowledge by means of language activates a latent capacity to participate in divine personhood. In a correspondence view, signs are disposable containers, as it were, of nonverbal representations of the substances that make up reality. In a participatory view, on the other hand, signs are indispensable mediators of the relations that, more than substances, compose reality.34 The shift in paradigms of knowledge, and the place of the enigmatic within them, are both reflected in English translations of 1 Corinthians 13:12. For English speakers, the meaning of this verse has been shaped by the translation in the Authorized (or King James) Version, which gave rise to an English idiom: “For now we see through a glasse, darkely.” A marginal note to “darkely” included in the original, 1611 printing, and preserved in many later ones, indicates that the Greek means “in a riddle.” In Latin, when patristic and medieval authors quote this verse, often no doubt from memory, they frequently insert an “et” (and) between “per speculum” and “in enigmate,” which implies that they thought of the two phrases somewhat separately.35 Medieval commentators can be grouped in two camps: some focus on “speculum” and assimilate “in enigmate” to the visual metaphor as merely denoting obscurity; others take mirror and riddle as two separate figures, one about vision and one about words. Early English translations show both approaches. Tyndale’s 1534 translation, “Now we se in a glasse even in a dark speakynge,” keeps the verbal

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nature of an enigma and even implies an oral situation, though qualified with an adjective drawn from vision. The King James translators usually follow Tyndale, but in this case they adopted the wording first used in the Geneva Bible of 1560, “through a glasse darkely,” which renders St. Paul’s second prepositional phrase into a mere adverbial modifier of the visual metaphor. Already in the 1380s, however, the Wycliffite translation had largely subordinated “in enigmate” to the visual metaphor: “We seen now bi a myrrour in derknesse.”36 Loss of the idea of riddling in this verse suggests a loss of the idea of participation visible in English thought during the fourteenth century, as chapter 6 will explore. Whereas the mirror metaphor fits comfortably within a correspondence model of knowledge, riddling touches on a different paradigm of knowledge, one associated not with correspondence between images but rather with verbal dialogue. In this paradigm, representations, whether verbal or visual, do not merely reflect something of objective reality in the mind of the subject but instead mediate a real relation, a shared participation in being, between knower and known. Truth is conceived, not so much as the accurate description of things considered in themselves, objectively, but as the identity of each thing as constituted by its relations with all other things.37 Medieval commentators on 1 Corinthians 13:12, even in their discussions of the mirror metaphor, remain within a participatory understanding of knowledge mediated by symbolism rather than moving toward a modern epistemology of correspondence. If the soul is seen as a mirror here, this is not because it is seen to function like a mirror that reflects representations that correspond to things but because it is taken as itself a symbol of what God is. Likewise scripture and the created world are taken as full of symbols that communicate God’s nature.38 Monastic commentators especially imply a connection between this verse and the practices of contemplative reading of scripture (lectio divina) and meditation on creation.39 Hervé of Bourg-Dieu (ca. 1080–1150) interprets the whole phrase through the grammatical definition of enigma as an obscure allegory and emphasizes the difficulty of the interpretive labor involved in knowledge mediated by symbols.40 For Hugh of St. Victor (ca. 1096– 1141), one of the fathers of Scholasticism, the enigma is scripture and the mirror is your heart, and both are sacraments, that is, signs of sacred things.41 One of Hugh’s students, Robert of Melun (ca. 1100–1167),

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adds that, while every creature is now a mirror or obscure similitude of God, in the future God will be the mirror in which we see everything.42 Then, as Dante portrays it in his Paradiso, the mediation will be reversed: whereas now knowledge of God is mediated by created things, then knowledge of created things will be mediated, and completed, by immediate knowledge of God. Because all things participate in God by virtue of their creation, knowledge of created things is completed only by knowledge of the Creator. The two paradigms of knowledge also entail different views of what kind of knowledge is possible or desirable. A modern, correspondence paradigm tends to see an opposition between subjective and objective knowledge: the kind of knowledge epitomized by poetry is seen to have a symbolic and emotional richness that comes at the expense of scientific precision. Participation, on the other hand, favors the symbolic and enigmatic for their capacity to move toward both fullness and precision at once. Commentary on St. Paul’s next clause, “but then face to face,” suggests the ultimate goal of enigmatic rhetoric, what it both approaches most closely and recognizes as still distant. Hervé reserves the metaphor of vision for this direct presence of sight without intermediary.43 Atto, bishop of Vercelli (924/5–960/61), on the other hand, describes this face-to-face knowledge of God in wholly aesthetic and affective terms: “For we will see joy, gladness, and the end of our desire.”44 For Hugh of St. Victor, the increases of faith as image and sacrament, that is, as mediated by symbols, lead to the goals of both knowing more fully and loving more ardently.45 When Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) characterizes this face-to-face knowledge as clear and open, he could be said to combine representational clarity with the fullness or wholeness that comes, not from knowing merely through the limiting mediation of symbols, but from intimacy with that to which the symbols point.46 Bonaventure (1221–74), in a sermon, glosses “face to face” as “in claritate plenaria,” full clarity that also implies clear fullness.47 An epistemology based on the metaphysics of participation does not neglect the goal of precise representation of reality in language but rather subordinates it to the function of signs within relationships.48 After Aquinas, however, with the cluster of intellectual developments linked to nominalism, what would coalesce as the modern representa-

Introduction

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tional paradigm comes to be articulated in ways that exclude the symbolic, and the language of precision completely dominates the “speculative” discourses of theology and philosophy.49 Under the paradigm of correspondence, language serves an ideal of objectivity: that is, it becomes a tool for reducing the objects that appear in the mind to basic properties that are not dependent on a subject. Accuracy and precision are the goal. As this happens, literature and mysticism are relegated to shadow discourses, and the enigmatic, with its relational orientation and capacity for affective richness, is identified with the subjective over against the objective. “Through a glass darkly” suggests a gulf between human representations and true knowledge of the divine that can be crossed only by direct revelation. The poetics of enigma, however, mediates continuous approach to ever greater participation that will be fulfilled in knowledge “face to face.” The enigmatic inhabits the gap between perceptible things and the divine that, from the late Middle Ages on, came to seem less and less bridgeable. It works largely by intensifying the interplay between affirmations and negations of the divine reflected in the sensible. In fact, the usual medieval conception of reality sees not so much a gap as a hierarchy stretching by degrees from the highest order of angels, who enjoy the most intimate knowledge of God, down through the rest of the angelic hierarchy and then to humanity and the rest of creation. This, indeed, is the arrangement of On the Properties of Things, which transmits the common understanding, derived from Pseudo-Dionysius, of the angels’ place in this hierarchic cosmos: “For this lawe is iholde and kept in the ordur of aungels: in participacioun of grace and of blisse somme beth the first and somme the secound and somme the last.”50 Bartholomaeus goes on to explain that one primary function of each of the nine angelic orders is to mediate knowledge to the next. Angels, that is, have their own ways of playing what Trevisa’s prefatory poem calls the game that the whole encyclopedia aims to equip its readers for by giving them tools for contemplating the enigmas of the book of nature and the book of scripture. Enigmatic narratives represent the playing out of the game of active participation in historical time. The organization of an encyclopedia suits the metaphor of a mirror because it is static and spatial and closely tied to the technologies of making words visible as texts.51 Riddles, on the

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other hand, engage the temporal character of speech and its orientation toward narrative. The enigmatic, that is, applies more even to discovering the participation of events in larger narratives than to contemplating the timeless order of creation. While a modern view tends to separate secular history from spiritual narratives, the enigmatic serves a medieval interest in continuity between mundane events and overarching narratives of salvation history. The allegorical interpretation of the Bible called figural or typological finds vertical references between events and theological meaning that also connect events in horizontal, historical patterns, which point, enigmatically, to a fulfillment at the end of time.52 This is the basis of a participatory understanding of history. It can also lead a reader to consider his or her own life as participating in the relations of meaning disclosed in the interpretation of scripture. Augustine’s Confessions is the classic example of a narrative constructed this way, and chapter 4 will show how Augustine understands his own text to be precisely a product of learning to read enigmatically. Mysticism, at least in the Western Christian tradition, could be said to involve cultivating not just a metaphysics and epistemology of participation but a consciousness of participation in the moment.53 Enigmatic narrative poems, meanwhile, imagine possibilities of the participation of agents and events in a larger order of meaning both temporal and eternal, immanent and transcendent. The central Christian experience of participation in a larger order of meaning is the sacraments. In 1 Corinthians 10, St. Paul’s main text about the Eucharist, the Vulgate uses the term participatio, kept in a Middle English translation: “and the bred that we brekyn is it not the particypacyoun of goddys body.”54 To my knowledge, the term enigma is not much used in discussions of what came to be defined during the Scholastic period as the seven official sacraments of the church. Controversy over the Eucharist in particular pushed discourse about it toward logical precision. Yet a sacrament, in its broadest, most traditional Christian meaning, is, like a theological enigma, the sign of a mystery.55 The conscious, subjective sense of participation cultivated by the enigmatic is an aspect of a general sacramental mentality with both horizontal and vertical dimensions. The body of Christ in which a communicant participated was traditionally understood to be not only the body present in the elements on the altar but also the whole church, articulated as a body

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in 1 Corinthians 12, as well as the risen Christ in heaven.56 Sacramental participation is both spiritual and social. The reading of enigmatic texts, likewise, works both vertically and horizontally: it stimulates both contemplation of the reality of metaphysical participation and membership in an interpretive community. To summarize, literary riddling, especially within the intellectual conditions of medieval culture, summons readers into contemplative, open-ended play that gives them power to form a certain sort of interpretive community and lends itself to deepening an awareness and experience of what is best called participation. Many patristic and medieval Christian theologians, authorized by 1 Corinthians 13:12 and working from hints to be found in classical rhetoric, recognized the suitability of enigmatic language to the nature and experience of truth as participation in mystery.57 A poetics of enigma nurtures a kind of community, oriented toward a center equally accessible to all and fully possessed by no one, that is always in tension with the more stable boundary making of didactic and esoteric rhetoric. Piers Plowman is strenuously occupied with the conflict between these two visions of ecclesiastical community; indeed, Langland’s poetic signature turns his poem toward its most sustained treatment of where to find the true church. For this quest, as well as for the poem’s more inward pursuit of conversion, learning to read enigmatically is crucial. Langland’s poem, like the enigmatic Grail stories of Chretien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach and like Dante’s Commedia, emerges when fruit from the tree of Latin theological discourse falls into the soil of vernacular culture, where it sprouts into many different forms, from mysticism to the novel, related to the original tree not necessarily by theological aims but by an ethos of interpretive community and a sense of spiritual participation.58 This book is concerned with those first vernacular seedlings, primarily in English and especially in Piers Plowman. To find the conditions of possibility and productivity for the poetics of enigma, it charts the landscape of thought marked by the word itself through the territory of riddles, rhetoric, and theology. The most fully developed enigmatic texts take into themselves this entire terrain of thought: they embed simple riddle forms within allegorical narratives that use a theological framework to initiate an endless game of interpretation.

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PIERS PLOWMAN

Piers Plowman puzzles readers from the start with the question of what kind of a poem it is. “Enigmatic” is an easy answer, and indeed this word is often used, though without reference to its particular medieval domains of meaning.59 It mixes elements of many medieval genres into a frame of dream-vision allegory.60 Unlike any other dream-vision poem, however, it is made up of more than one dream—no less than eight in its fullest versions, plus two dreams within dreams. The resulting discontinuities make it very difficult to discern an overall structure or design that would clarify its form and direction. Yet the poem clearly intends to make some kind of progress: it is divided into sections called passus, meaning a step in Latin (plural passūs), usually several per dream, and it repeatedly invokes the notions of pilgrimage and quest. Within the dreams, its allegorical modes are quite fluid, much like actual dreams. Personifications of mental faculties mix with others representing social groups or institutions. The poem resists continuity and arrests interpretive attention with its density of wordplay, symbol, allusion, and selfcommentary. Occasionally it even uses variations on what are recorded elsewhere as actual riddles. The definition of enigma as obscure allegory fits it at every scale, and recovery of the poetics of enigma can do much more to explain the kind of play the poem asks of readers and how this play was understood to be productive. The problem of form has been a persistent one in Piers Plowman scholarship, yet in many ways this scholarship has been moving toward the understanding proposed here. In a 1998 account of Piers Plowman criticism, Anne Middleton identified the “hunger for significant form” as a feature both of the poem itself and of writing about it, one that was articulated in a 1939 survey by Morton Bloomfield and “remains in part unsatisfied.”61 Middleton’s own answer to this hunger maps out how the poetics of enigma builds on earlier enterprises in Langland studies, though she does not use the term except to locate Piers Plowman among “other medieval long poems of enigmatic character yet compelling power” (such as Beowulf and The Romance of the Rose).62 Middleton lauds the “crux-busting” accomplishments of scholars, which have solved, or at

Introduction

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least shed light on, many of the poem’s riddles, both those that take a recognizably riddling form and other kinds of difficulties. More important for the question of form, however, and more relevant to the poetics of enigma, is not what such passages mean but how they function within the poem as a whole. In medieval understanding of the verbal arts, writes Middleton, a mode such as Langland’s, “deeply figurative and analogous in its manner of proceeding,” produces “as its most characteristic and beneficial experience startling and pleasurable recognitions that repeatedly elude argumentative formulation” (106). The best medieval name for this mode and the figure most closely associated with this kind of knowledge is enigma.63 At the opposite level of scale, the poem’s relation to its intellectual and literary backgrounds, the question of form shifts attention, again, from what background is relevant to how it is used. Here Middleton cites Bloomfield’s famous comment that the effect of Langland’s loose but extensive use of various sources “is like reading a commentary on an unknown text.”64 She then suggests that the purpose of such “dislocation of the refound and reused fragment from its primary site of production” is “to return this treasure of wit to productive utility in sustaining the community and the individual desirous spiritual imagination” (109). What I will call the rhetoric of enigma could hardly be put more concisely. Langland’s formal innovation is, to quote Middleton one more time, “a long narrative poem . . . conceived as an extended ‘reading lesson’” (109). What the poetics of enigma generates, at every level, is not just meaning but models and parameters for playing a game of interpretation. Seen in this way, the poem’s lack of a more consistent or closed form becomes, in part at least, a strategy for producing the kind of reading it has, in fact, often received. Indeed, the space of play with institutional authorities that Langland opens up is one of his major contributions to the development of literary culture in English. The surviving manuscripts of Piers Plowman indicate that it was probably “the single most popular verse text disseminated in the fourteenth-century.”65 It was a London “best seller,” as it were, during the writing career of Chaucer, whose works were not widely copied until the fifteenth century. My final two chapters will add to the arguments for Langland’s influence on both Chaucer and Julian of Norwich

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by suggesting that his early and formative dream-vision The House of Fame and her Revelation were responding to the poetics of enigma as they had encountered it largely through Piers Plowman. Copies of poems at this time were not so much sold as commissioned one by one, and the fifty-odd manuscripts of Piers Plowman show a great deal of variation that points to active, even playful involvement of copyists in constructing Langland’s text.66 Mostly, though, the manuscript variation has been understood to show the author’s own process of revision, resulting in at least three different versions, A, B, and C, made available for copying at intervals datable from references to historical events: “Most typically, A is placed in the later 1360s (certainly after 1362), B around 1377 (and before 1381), and C after 1388 and perhaps so late as 1390.”67 Langland, that is, spent an entire poetic career writing, expanding, and revising a single poem—perhaps more continuously than the usual dating of the three versions implies—in response to events, to his audience, and, most of all, to rereading what he had already written. Langland’s responses to his own previous enigmas make Piers Plowman an especially rich study in the poetics of enigma. The A version consists of three visions, and all three end, as Ralph Hanna puts it, “in aporia or enigma.”68 These endings concentrate the difficulties that have energized each vision and, in turn, seed the visions that follow. The end of the second vision, the notorious tearing of the pardon sent to Piers—which Hanna calls “the poem’s signal passage of enigma”—generates not only the remainder of the A text but also, as Nevill Coghill argued before the British Academy in 1945, the five further visions added in the B text as well as important revisions in the B version of the first three visions.69 The tearing of the pardon is indeed an enigma, I will argue, in more precise ways than have been recognized, and Langland answered his climactic invention in the A text in large part by developing a more thoroughly enigmatic style. Thus almost all passages that will be central to this study, other than the pardon tearing, are new in the B text—such as the signature passage discussed above. The tearing of the pardon, equally notoriously, is omitted from the C text. This is one of many changes, large and small, that have led many to see the C text as less enigmatic than B.70 Derek Pearsall, for instance, in his edition of the C text, suggests that its revisions are driven by an “overriding desire for clarity, economy, and unambiguity.”71 A. V. C. Schmidt finds a pattern in the C text’s “movement

Introduction

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from the obscurity of aenigma to the clarity of expositio.”72 My argument, however, is that the C text works to make the poem’s enigmas more readable without making them less enigmatic. A distinction between enigma and aporia might be helpful here. An aporia, not a common term in the Latin Middle Ages, might be said to be a problem that is seemingly insoluble, at least in the terms with which it is expressed. An enigma, on the other hand, presents a problem but also provides terms or images for productive thought. Langland writes both but increasingly, I suggest, aims for enigma. When he removes the tearing of the pardon, I will argue (following the suggestion made by Hanna and others), Langland adds new passages surrounding the deletion that compensate for it by offering new enigmas that are less problematic but at least as meaningful.73 Changes in C, then, can shed interpretive light on the B text. This study will move back and forth some between the B and C texts but will primarily follow the C text as its guide to the poem’s fullest and clearest intentions. Citations will indicate passages from other versions that closely parallel the one being quoted in order to help those interested in tracking development across versions, though usually without comment about how close the parallels are or how much revision is involved.74 Langland honed the poetics of enigma largely because the problems his poem wrestles with led him toward theological perspectives that require it. Much of the scholarship on Langland’s theology has tended, like much theological writing itself, to make a case for one or the other position on a controversial issue. Is he a semi-Pelagian who holds that human works contribute to salvation or a neo-Augustinian who holds that salvation is purely by God’s predestined grace?75 Do his views align with the Latin inheritance (either older, patristic authorities or newer, Scholastic ones), or do they situate him over against this inheritance as an early voice of what has come to be called vernacular theology?76 The vernacular was certainly becoming a more important and contested field for theological discourse, and Langland’s was an important voice within it. Nicholas Watson has associated Langland with a distinctively inclusive salvation theology that corresponded to the inclusivity of the vernacular language in which it was articulated.77 I will suggest that this aspect of Langland’s theology can also be seen as part of a larger attempt to express in vernacular poetry a perspective—what I am calling participation— that has patristic and Scholastic roots yet took on new inflections over

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against Latin-dominated ecclesiastical institutions. This perspective also cuts across other distinctions that typically frame the analysis of Langland’s theology, especially between an emphasis on grace or works in salvation and the corresponding emphasis on divine or human agency. Enigma and participation are closely related to the “functional ambiguity” that Kathryn Kerby-Fulton finds in writing that made revelatory claims touching on theological controversies during Langland’s time. While she finds it “tantalizing to believe that Langland wanted it both ways: an overtly orthodox theology hiding a daringly liberal salvation message—or at least its hope,” Kerby-Fulton emphasizes the need for ambiguity in order to avoid suspicion and censure in an increasingly dangerous theological climate and sees pluralism about salvation theologies as the primary goal.78 The poetics of enigma, however, leads in a somewhat different but not incompatible direction: the goal is a theological perspective that includes and reconciles positions that were increasingly seen as incompatible, and the function of ambiguity is not so much to hide— though this is an acknowledged use of enigma—as to explore the play of meaning within orthodoxy. The poetics of enigma is one of Langland’s major tools for his twin and interdependent goals, as James Simpson has emphasized, of reforming the individual and reforming the church.79 Why would a poetics of enigma have had a particular appeal in late fourteenth-century England?80 A familiar narrative of the social context of Piers Plowman suggests a general answer. In Langland’s time, as now, crises of institutional authorities and the discourses associated with them left a vacuum that invited explorations of alternate, literary modes of finding meaning, hope, and community. Yet if modern and postmodern fascination with enigma finds in it an alternative to discredited cultural foundations, the medieval poetics of enigma, on the other hand, appeals to an ancient fruitfulness still potent in the roots of old authorities— more reformist than revolutionary, as Simpson uses the terms.81 In 1377, the earliest date usually given for completion of the B text, the succession of ten-year-old Richard II to the throne exacerbated a crisis in national government that had been building since the beginning of the Hundred Years War in 1337. Similarly, the beginning of the Great Schism in 1378 deepened the crisis of ecclesiastical authority that had already found a focus in the so-called Babylonian captivity of the papacy in Avignon beginning in 1307. The more basic and widespread social crises in the

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wake of the Black Death of 1347–51 reached a flashpoint in England with the Rising of 1381, which registers the earliest response to Piers Plowman (see chapter 2, the section “The Letters of John Ball”) and likely led Langland to delete the tearing of the pardon (see chapter 5, the section “C-Text Enigmas I”). At least as important, however, for Langland’s ongoing attempt to rearticulate a basis of individual and communal well-being in largely noninstitutional terms were the increasingly technical nature of academic discourse and several related changes in thought that undermined a theology of participation.82 I imagine small groups of people listening to Piers Plowman being read aloud, puzzling over it together, and finding empowering seeds of thought and friendship in tumultuous times—while, in the process, giving vernacular literature a new place in English culture.

OVERVIEW

This book reconstructs the elements of the poetics of enigma as they might have been known to an author such as Langland, Chaucer, or Julian of Norwich. Situating this study in late fourteenth-century England sets some limits to its coverage of the traditions of riddles, rhetoric, and theology, though much of the material included is much older and was widely enough known that the poetics recovered here is broadly relevant across medieval literature. Early authorities such as Augustine and the grammarian Donatus remained the most influential, and making sense of how they were received involves telling stories that also include some texts not well known later. Although the riddles of the Anglo-Saxon bishop Aldhelm, for example, were probably gathering dust in monastic libraries, his brilliance is irresistible and his influence likely profound even if untraceable. As the enigmatic moves toward an encounter face to face, so this book moves toward an encounter with literary works. Each chapter moves from theory to practice, and the whole sequence of seven chapters braids together the three strands of riddles, rhetoric, and theology. The three strands, the enigmatic as form, as invitation to a kind of reading, and as a way of seeing reality—with the attendant purposes of play, persuasion, and participation—each take their turns at the forefront but are

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also interwoven throughout. Examples from Piers Plowman in each chapter further tie the book together. Chapter 1 focuses on major texts in the Latin medieval tradition that articulate the value of enigmatic language for the sake of understanding the theology of participation and entering into a deeper experience of it. Augustine and Aquinas are the most important theologians of participation and its implications for language, while practices based on it can be seen in the program of contemplative reading represented by William of St. Thierry’s Enigma of Faith and Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon and reaching its Latin culmination in Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind to God. The Middle English Cloud of Unknowing receives brief treatment here with the reception of the mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius. This chapter closes with a sketch of changes in the climate of late Scholasticism toward the fourteenth century that would shift the poetics of enigma from Latin to the vernacular. Chapters 2 and 3 turn attention to traditions of riddling in both Latin and the vernacular. Chapter 2 focuses on evidence of riddling as a practice and on riddles that survive in collections or on their own, while chapter 3 looks at riddle contests, from simple catechetical dialogues to contests within larger narratives. Chapter 2 gathers for the first time the scattered and heterogeneous evidence of Middle English riddles that survive outside of stories or dialogues and sorts it in relation to classical and Christian, Anglo-Saxon legacies of riddling. Two examples from the first vision of Piers Plowman, the Plant of Peace passage and Conscience’s prophecy, as well as the so-called John Ball letters from the Rising of 1381, begin to suggest what the form could do in the conditions of late fourteenth-century England. In chapter 3, the most complex and fully developed riddle contest in medieval literature, Langland’s banquet of Conscience, is seen to reveal the theological and anti-institutional potential of play found in two texts it may well have been modeled on, the two most well-known riddle contests in the late Middle Ages: the story of St. Andrew and the Three Questions and the dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf. Chapters 4 and 5 reconstruct the medieval rhetoric of enigma, both as taught in the arts of language and as expressed in literary works. Chapter 4 follows the understanding of enigma that a student might have

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gained through texts read in school. It frames this account through the narrative of education in the third vision of Piers Plowman, which interprets and is in turn interpreted by this rhetorical teaching. At the center of this chapter (and thus the center of the whole book) is Augustine’s story in the Confessions of learning to read the Bible, the world, and himself, still unsurpassed as a reflection on the rhetoric of enigma. Chapter 5 explores the rhetoric implied by Langland’s most important instance of enigmatic reading within his poem, the tearing of the pardon, and his reformulation of that enigma in the C text. It also suggests that Langland’s construction of Piers and his narrator as models of desire points to the function of similar models in other enigmatic medieval narratives. Chapter 6 resumes the story of the theology of participation and the poetics of enigma with developments in England in the fourteenth century in order to argue that Langland, especially in the fifth vision of Piers Plowman, and Julian of Norwich, in her parable of the lord and the servant, practice a self-consciously enigmatic mode in the vernacular in order to sustain and intensify a vision of conscious participation in the life of the Trinity. A final chapter braids together the concepts of play, persuasion, and participation through the convention of riddles as an ending move. The endings of Piers Plowman inherit a tradition of enigmatic endings that links the enigmatic mode to both pastoral and apocalyptic poetry, a conjunction also seen in The Romance of the Rose and Dante’s Commedia. Chaucer’s House of Fame, meanwhile, reorients this tradition to a secular but no less enigmatic fulfillment. A brief epilogue looks ahead to the afterlife of the medieval poetics of enigma in modernity. Chapters are meant to proceed in a conceptual order but be selfcontained enough to be comprehensible in any order. Chapter 1 shares a theological focus with chapters 6 and 7 but comes first because it is the most occupied with sources prior to Piers Plowman and discusses what I expect to be the least familiar idea in the book, the theology of participation. Chapters 3 through 5, as indicated in their titles, treat the middle visions of Piers Plowman in reverse order. Readers unfamiliar with the poem, especially if they are reading it along with this book, may want to follow the order of the poem and read these chapters in reverse.

C H A P T E R

1

L A N G UAG E F O R A T H E O LO G Y O F PA RT I C I PAT I O N , T H E O RY FOR A POETICS OF ENIGMA

The poetics of enigma, as employed by medieval authors, draws on three kinds of sources. Oral riddling is enigma’s most ancient and basic expression. The classical discipline of rhetoric made enigma an object of explicit reflection. Yet the richest springs of enigma are sacred scriptures, not just the Bible, both Jewish and Christian, but others such as the Sanskrit Vedas and the Qur’an. During the Middle Ages, when Christian faith harnessed the institutions of literacy, the enigmatic mode powered a theological vision, and theologians pondered its power. Because the enigmatic is now more associated with a secular literary aesthetic, with immanent rather than transcendent mystery, its distinctively medieval uses and rationales will make more sense within an understanding of the theological vision that embraces such a playful sort of persuasion. This vision, for which I will use the term participation, could be called a doctrine. Yet it is also a way of seeing or a practice of faith, one that fades when reduced to stable, precise formulation. Keeping participation conceptually alive, so that it can become a summons and not simply an idea, requires a different sort of language. 31

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This chapter will show how medieval theologians understood the enigmatic as a kind of language most suited to the goal of entering further into participation in the divine. It will also sketch, at the end, how this vision began to fall apart in the later Middle Ages, especially in the sophisticated, academic theology that was still being conducted in Latin. In this changing intellectual climate, literary experiments with the enigmatic mode in vernacular languages would preserve and reimagine a theology of participation. To say that enigma serves a vision merely restates 1 Corinthians 13:12—“We see now through a mirror in an enigma, then face to face”— but also poses a puzzle. How is it possible to see in a riddle? And how, to take this verse as it was taken throughout the Middle Ages, could this be the closest approach now to the vision face to face that is yet to come? Medieval thinking about this verse and its implications followed lines laid down by Augustine, who quoted it, alluded to it, or otherwise used the term enigma with reference to it throughout his works.1 It is in his treatise De Trinitate, however, that he uses the term most often and speculates about it most fully. This is the essential starting point from which this chapter will chart representative developments in the interpretation of 1 Corinthians 13:12 and, more broadly, in monastic, Scholastic, and mystical theology that condition the later medieval understanding of enigma within the theology of participation.2

THE ENIGMA OF THE WORD IN AUGUSTINE’S DE TRINITATE

Augustine’s De Trinitate remains a classic resource for thinking about one of the central problems of Christian theology: how to find language for a God at once infinitely transcendent, intimately personal, and mysteriously triune. It has had incalculable influence not just on the Christian doctrine of God but on the practice of theology, its interaction with philosophy, and even certain topics that have become more the province of philosophy proper.3 Even its style and its circuitous, repetitive structure draw readers into a labyrinth of what Anselm would call “faith seeking understanding.”4 As a recent English translator writes, “Augustine is pro-

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posing the quest for, or the exploration of, the mystery of the Trinity as a complete program for the Christian spiritual life, a program of conversion and renewal and discovery of self in God and God in self.”5 Augustine’s itinerary takes into account all that is said both openly and obscurely about the Trinity in scripture and encompasses all, both in outer, historical life and in inner, psychological life, that participates in the being of the Trinity—which is, in principle, everything. For Augustine, as David N. Bell puts it, “We are, and we are what we are, by participation in God.”6 Participation is an idea Augustine took from Neoplatonism, adapted to Christian theology without ever systematically arguing or explicating it, and made part of the soil of medieval thought in which the enigmatic would thrive. Augustine cites 1 Corinthians 13:12 at least twenty-seven times in De Trinitate, more often than any other verse. It distills the interpretive procedure by which Augustine follows the guidance of scripture in moving from created things to the divine while avoiding speculative excess. Until we live in glory, “We see now through a glass in a puzzle [in aenigmate], that is in symbols [in similitudinibus].”7 Even the credal language for the Trinity is inadequate and provisional: “And provided one can understand what is said at least in a puzzle [in aenigmate], it has been agreed to say it like that, simply in order to be able to say something when asked ‘Three what?’” (7.7, p. 224). After the first half of the treatise treats references to the Trinity in scripture, the second, more famous half focuses on the image of God in the human soul. Though “worn out and distorted” (14.11, p. 379), this image can be reformed if the soul turns its fundamental reflection of the Trinity, the threefold activity of remembering, understanding, and loving, not toward the world or itself but toward God. “But the image which is being renewed in the spirit of the mind in the recognition of God, not outwardly but inwardly from day to day, this image will be perfected in the vision that will then be face to face after the judgment, while now it makes progress through a puzzling reflection in a mirror [per speculum in aenigmate]” (14.25, p. 391). Perfect knowledge and love will involve perfection of the knower transformed into the image of the One known. The vision “face to face,” for Augustine, means full participation.8 Until then, he writes, we progress through enigmas. The

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enigmatic is not just an unavoidable condition of our language about the divine but a means of growing into greater participation in God. Augustine emphasizes its capacity to engage and heighten both understanding and love in his rhetoric of spiritual reading, spelled out in De doctrina Christiana and the Confessions.9 In De Trinitate, his focus on enigma leads rather to something more like a philosophy of language grounded in an underlying theology of participation in the second person of the Trinity. The enigma verse takes center stage in the final book when, having reached the image of the Trinity in human remembering, understanding, and loving, Augustine asserts also its utter inadequacy because none of these capacities can be attributed to one person of the Trinity alone. Augustine looks once more for a better image, and the extended reflection on 1 Corinthians 13:12 through which he frames this contemplation became the direct source for nearly every medieval commentary on it. In the Glossa ordinaria, the standard biblical commentary of the later Middle Ages, the longer, marginal comment summarizes Augustine’s explication: “Mirror. Is the soul, through the force of which we know God in some way, but obscurely. Riddle. Is not every allegory, but an obscure one. Whence just as through ‘mirror’ he signified an image, so by the term ‘enigma’ he signified a likeness that is, however, obscure and difficult to comprehend.”10 In the source passage, Augustine, rhetoric teacher that he was, glosses enigma according to its standard definition as a kind of allegory distinguished by obscurity. As an example he cites Proverbs 30:15, “‘The blood-sucker had three daughters,’ and other sayings like that” (15.15, p. 407). He adds that, like the story of Isaac and Ishmael that Paul discusses as an allegory in Galatians 4:24, what functions as an enigma can be not just words but things. “Now,” he continues, “we can indeed take it that by the use of the words ‘mirror’ and ‘enigma’ the apostle meant any likenesses that are useful for understanding God with, as far as this is possible; but of such likenesses none is more suitable than the one which is not called God’s image for nothing” (15.16, p. 407). He returns to the image of God in the human person, but now to intensify his exploration of both its likeness and its unlikeness as they follow from what we now call the mystery of consciousness. “If it was easy to see, the word ‘enigma’ would not be mentioned in this connection. And what

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makes the enigma all the more puzzling is that we should be unable to see what we cannot not see. Who fails to see his own thoughts? And on the other hand who does see his own thoughts . . . ?” (15.16, p. 407). Yet enigma not only signifies the obscurity of this most inward image but further leads Augustine to focus on the experience of thought in language. For Augustine, the ability to know and say something true is grounded in the participation of our thought in what it knows, which in turn depends on the participation of our minds in the relation between the second and first persons of the Trinity. If anyone then can understand how a word can be, not only before it is spoken aloud but even before the images of its sounds are turned over in thought—this word that belongs to no language, that is to none of what are called the languages of the nations, of which ours is  Latin; if anyone, I say, can understand this, he can already see through this mirror and in this enigma some likeness of that Word of which it is said, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ( Jn 1:1). For when we utter something true, that is when we utter what we know, a word is necessarily born from the knowledge which we hold in the memory, a word which is absolutely the same kind of thing as the knowledge it is born from. (15.19, p. 409) This section of book 15 was one of the major sources for the medieval consensus that the inner or mental words Augustine is talking about have a real relation with the things they signify.11 As Etienne Gilson puts it, the Son is Resemblance itself, by participation in which all created things have the resemblance to God by which they exist and are what they are.12 For human beings this participation includes the capacity for rational knowledge, and, on the authority of the prologue to the Gospel of John, Augustine finds this participation to be raised to the highest order and made conscious in language. “But,” he says of the ways that human languages are expressed or even thought of silently, “we must go beyond all these and come to that word of man through whose likeness of a sort the Word of God may somehow or other be seen in an enigma” (15.20,

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p. 410). Here, as Augustine contemplates for several pages the likeness and unlikeness of a mental word to the Word made flesh, he leaves the mirror metaphor behind for a while.13 The central enigma of our word’s participation in the divine Word not only grounds all capacity for true speech but also implies a special potential for enigmatic writing. So when that which is in the awareness is also in a word, then it is a true word, and truth such as a man looks for so that what is in awareness should also be in a word and what is not in awareness should not either be in a word. It is here that one acknowledges the Yes, yes; no, no (Mt 5:37; 2 Cor 1:17; Jas 5:12). In this way this likeness of the made image approaches as far as it can to the likeness of the born image, in which God the Son is declared to be substantially like the Father in all respects. (15.20, p. 410) As if anticipating the Derridean, poststructuralist critique, Augustine points to the need for a Transcendental Signifier and Signified in order to anchor referentiality in human language.14 But that is not all. The clear and wholehearted “yes” or “no” that expresses perfect integrity of knowledge and word is not a minimal representation but a maximal affirmation. It is both full and precise: “And the reason this Word is truly truth is that whatever is in the knowledge of which it is begotten is also in it; and anything that is not in that knowledge is not in it” (15.23, p. 415). Augustine’s inquiry here is primarily into the nature of God and the human mind, with the goal of further activating in himself and his readers their latent participation in the divine life.15 Along the way, however, he lays out a theory of language which includes an ideal of truthfulness— not just lack of error but fullness of meaning—that is modeled on the relation between the First and Second Persons of the Trinity. There seems room to take this ideal as a goal of poetic language, even though the enigma through which Augustine contemplates Christ as the Word is a purely mental word, not an articulated one, and despite his occasional harsh words about fictions. He certainly attributes such a goal to the language of scripture. Yet he also quotes Virgil, “an outstanding master of words, one who knew them well and had looked closely into

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the bias of thought” (15.25, p. 417), in support of a related psychological point. Even Virgil’s poetry helps, albeit in a very minor way, mediate his relation to the Word as enigma.16 To have its restorative effect, the enigma of the inner word must elicit not just contemplation of self-presence but a mental act of referring this relation to its source. However, those who do see through this mirror and in this puzzle [in quo aenigmate], as much as it is granted to see in this life, are not those who merely observe in their own minds what we have discussed and suggested, but those who see it precisely as an image, so that they can in some fashion refer what they see to that of which it is an image, and also see that other by inference through its image which they see by observation, since they cannot see it face to face. For the apostle did not say “We see now in a mirror,” but We see by a mirror. (15.44, p. 429) The function of the enigmatic, in this passage, seems to be the decisive one of making the image in the mirror signify, so that the visual metaphor requires the verbal one. The richness of signification Augustine finds in the inner word as image applies to allegory in general, especially when found in things and not just words (that is, in history and not fiction). Enigma’s distinctive obscurity, however, further implies the negative aspect of the image, its dissimilarity to the divine, which is in fact the major emphasis of book 15 of De Trinitate. As Marcia Colish points out, book 15 adds the negative counterpart to the positive exploration of images for the Trinity that makes up books 1 to 14 of Augustine’s treatise.17 A dynamic interplay between affirmation and negation is crucial to how contemplating the Trinity becomes a spiritual way toward increasing participation. The inner word is enigmatic not only because it is difficult to understand in itself. Calling it enigmatic also points to the usefulness of enigma for keeping both likeness and unlikeness in mind. One wonders, particularly when he uses the word without more of 1 Corinthians 13:12, if Augustine was thinking of the riddle as a form that combines both figures that point to an answer and others that block that reference. As one holds an enigma of the Trinity in mind—ruminates on it, as the

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monks would come to say—its obscurity prolongs and deepens the work of understanding and loving: Why then look for something when you have comprehended the incomprehensibility of what you are looking for, if not because you should not give up the search as long as you are making progress in your inquiry into things incomprehensible, and because you become better and better by looking for so great a good which is both sought in order to be found and found in order to be sought? It is sought in order to be found all the more delightfully, and it is found in order to be sought all the more avidly. (15.2, p. 396) While his express intent in De Trinitate seems theological, Augustine’s rhetorical orientation keeps him aware of the interpretive experience that he describes and seeks to elicit, and that is in fact his deeper goal. Progress depends on the affective as well as cognitive impact of the enigmatic. It aims not only to articulate the webs of participation that make the creation but to transform the contemplator of this order by engaging the most intense, self-conscious acts of understanding and love. Augustine’s meditation on human participation in the only-begotten Word in the final book of De Trinitate intensifies several themes of his theology and Christianized rhetoric, all of which would remain central to the culture in which vernacular theological writing would eventually take shape. Participation is for Augustine both latent and active.18 It is a given in his theology that all things are what they are through participation in the source of all being, and that human beings, as rational beings, are in the image of God as a latent participation no matter how much it is disfigured. At the same time, he conceives salvation as a process of entering into greater participation in the life of the Trinity that happens at once by the gift of grace and by the most active cooperation. He sometimes distinguishes this active participation from the latent image as degrees of likeness that can vary.19 The idea of participation is crucial to how Augustine and many thinkers influenced by him maintain the paradoxes of grace and works and of divine and human agency as productive tensions rather than mere dichotomies. The reception of the divine Word as an inner word imagines that the will becomes most free by participation in

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divine knowledge, which makes possible knowledge of truth and truly free action.20 Augustine’s theology of the Word is one instance in the long history of the Judeo-Christian discovery of a God who does not overpower or displace human agency but brings it to freedom and fulfillment. The enigmatic, with its interplay of activity and receptiveness, knowledge and desire, affirmation and negation, becomes an important way of not only transmitting this theology but also entering into it as a lived experience. One further passage from De Trinitate hints at how its theology might authorize not only the contemplative reading of enigmas given in scripture and the world but the writing of new ones: There is another likeness to the Word of God that can be observed in this enigma; just as it is said of that Word, All things were made through him (Jn 1:3), stating that God made all things through his only-begotten Word, so too there are no works of man which are not first uttered in the heart. . . . Here too, if it is a true word, it is the beginning of a good work. And a word is true when it is begotten of the knowledge of how to work well, so that here too one may apply the Yes, yes; no, no. (15.20, pp. 410–11) Augustine’s account of human action as a participation in the divine work of creation could be read narrowly to support the writing of literature only as a didactic adjunct to moral philosophy, which became a typical medieval view. Yet Langland’s defense of writing poetry as part of doing well, and the similar views to be found in Dante, Chaucer, and others, reflect a later medieval humanism that is also Augustinian in its view of artistic creation as a participation in the creativity of the Word. For both the general case of all good work and the specific case of poetic work, the enigma of the inner word makes such participation a conscious, creative, individual act.21 Augustine’s theology of enigma as an occasion for a deepened experience of participation in the Trinity became a key ingredient in the medieval development of theological speculation, contemplative practice, and creative writing. All of these cultivated the enigmatic mode. The remainder of this chapter will consider several texts and traditions

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that inflected the later reception of enigma’s theological significance and articulated it anew in response to conditions that would tend to marginalize it. Paul Ricoeur has suggested that two “spurious substitutes” threaten “an interpretation that would respect the original enigma of symbols.”22 Ricoeur calls these substitutes allegory and gnosticism, terms that fit well the early development of Christian theology. Augustine’s own fashioning of theological language is poised between the danger of oversimplifying the Christian mysteries through allegorical interpretation and, on the other side, the danger of claiming a secret knowledge that cannot be publicly disclosed, as seen in the gnostic Manichees to whom he was attracted in his youth.23 In De Trinitate, the emphasis on enigma in the final book balances between the inadequacy of the analogies to human psychology made in the previous books and the inaccessibility of a privileged and wordless communion with the divine. M.-D. Chenu points out similar, divergent tendencies in the twelfth-century “symbolist mentality” stemming from, on one hand, Augustine’s theory of the sign and, on the other, the approach to symbolism found in the works of the sixth-century author now known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.24 To combine Chenu’s contrast with Ricoeur’s, the more Augustinian approach tended toward allegorical didacticism and the Pseudo-Dionysian toward gnostic esotericism. Yet Pseudo-Dionysius shares with Augustine a theology of participation experienced and expressed through enigma. Several important later medieval authors illustrate different versions of articulating this theology while resisting the didactic and esoteric temptations. Out of this tension emerge aspects of the poetics of enigma seen more fully in vernacular, literary manifestations: the role of affect, engagement with history and daily life, expansion into analogy, and intensification in visionary experience and sacrament. Writing in the first half of the twelfth century, William of St. Thierry and Hugh of St. Victor illustrate at once the maturation of monastic theology and the beginnings of Scholasticism. Both are strongly Augustinian thinkers (though Hugh was also an important early commentator on Pseudo-Dionysius) and helped shape Augustine’s continuing influence. William’s Enigma of Faith, written for a community of monks, teaches advanced contemplation of the Trinity while avoiding esotericism, in

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part through his emphasis on affect. Hugh’s Didascalicon, meanwhile, lays down what would become the curriculum of Scholasticism but keeps doctrine alive and enigmatic through constant return to the historical sense of scripture and to history itself. The influence of Pseudo-Dionysius toward the esoteric has two sides that became more distinct over the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. One, the Dionysian strain in vernacular mysticism, verges toward gnosticism but often, as in the case of The Cloud of Unknowing, remains in the territory of enigma by its contact with ordinary life. The use of Pseudo-Dionysius by Scholastic authors, on the other hand, strengthens the enigmatic interplay between positive and negative language about God. In Aquinas, especially, this dynamic becomes the basis of an entire philosophical method of analogical discourse in service of a full-fledged metaphysics of participation. Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind to God, woven on the frame of 1 Corinthians 13:12, achieves a remarkable synthesis of all these theological strands through a meditation on St. Francis’s ecstatic mystical experience. Both Aquinas and Bonaventure also witness to a growing late medieval tendency to locate the prime experience of the enigmatic in the sacrament of the Eucharist.

MONASTIC THEOLOGY: WILLIAM OF ST. THIERRY’S ENIGMA OF FAITH

In the monasteries that became the centers of European learning after the decline of Rome, a vision of spiritual life grew around a program of reading and prayer that put into practice the uses of enigma described by Augustine. Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604), monasticism’s other favorite model of reading the Bible, explains the rationale in the opening sentences of his commentary on the Song of Songs: After its banishment from the joys of Paradise, the human race came to the pilgrimage of this present life with a heart blind to spiritual understanding. If the divine voice had said to this blind heart, “Follow God!” or, “Love God!” (as was said to it in the Law), once this was uttered, the numbing cold of its obtuseness would have prevented it from grasping what it heard. Accordingly, divine speech is

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communicated to the cold and numb soul by means of enigmas and in a hidden manner instills in her the love she does not know by means of what she knows. Allegory provides the soul set far below God with a kind of crane whereby she may be lifted to God. If enigmas are placed between God and the soul, when the soul recognizes something of her own in the language of the enigmas, through the meaning of this language she understands something that is not her own and by means of earthly language hopes for eternal things.25 In a hymn addressed to Gregory, the eleventh-century monastic reformer Peter Damian admires his example of reading in terms that express the goal of participation through the enigmatic: “You marvelously solve the mystic / Riddles of holy scripture; / Truth itself teaches you / Mysteries of contemplation.”26 “Mystic” here could suggest monastic theology’s tendency to treat the Christian mysteries as hidden secrets requiring spiritual advancement. Leclercq, however, in his classic study, suggests that the term gnosis is appropriate for monastic theology to designate not “a secret doctrine reserved for the initiate” but rather “that kind of higher knowledge which is the complement, the fruition of faith, and which reaches completion in prayer and contemplation.”27 Leclercq’s prime example, Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), is no doubt the most important, but Bernard’s friend and fellow abbot William of St. Thierry (d. 1148) more consistently uses the language of 1 Corinthians 13:12 to articulate the open rather than hidden, yet endless and recursive progress of the contemplative way.28 William is particularly known for the term affectus, which expresses his version of monastic thought’s “dependence on experience.”29 A complex and untranslatable word in William’s work, affectus leans toward an emphasis, shared with Bernard, on love as the heart of contemplation, yet not at all to the exclusion of knowledge. Indeed, affectus engages reason as much as it does emotion (“affect” in the current, psychological sense). Moreover, affectus conveys active participation. “On the one hand,” writes W. Zwingmann, “affectus relates to the soul’s ascent towards God (man is active); on the other, it also serves to designate the condescending grace of God, who stoops to the soul in search of Him (so that man,

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in a sense, is passive). . . . One may say that in the affectus God works in us and we cooperate in this divine action.”30 William unfolds the components of this cooperation in two treatises that he describes as one work divided into two books, “the first of which, because it is straightforward and easy, I entitled The Mirror of Faith; the second, because it will be found to contain a summary of the grounds and formulations of faith according to the words and the thought of the Catholic Fathers and is a little more obscure, The Enigma of Faith.”31 The Mirror revolves around affectus, while the Enigma aims more at what he calls ratio fidei, the reasoning of faith. In the Mirror, William guides readers to contemplating and being shaped into the image of the Trinity and the incarnate Christ through the purity of faith, hope, and love: “Those who are alone with themselves are likewise made worthy of seeing in yet another way, by reflecting through faith; in another way he is in them through the grace that affects and they in him through the affectus of devotion.”32 Yet the Mirror also looks ahead to, and already enters, the stage of enigma that is more rational: “Since man still sees in a mirror and in an enigma and passes like an image, it is in a mirror that we are taught by metaphor, and it is by a yet more obscure enigma that we are trained, in the simple and evident image that we are more sweetly affected. Yet, piety itself, truth itself, is given or taught only by the Holy Spirit! Only by the finger of God is it inscribed on the mind.”33 The sequence here, placing the simple and evident image after the enigma, or perhaps coordinating them, bends the stages into a cycle. The action of intellectus relaxes into the passivity of affectus, yet understanding is also a reception of the Word and affectus is an action of the heart. The whole rhythm, moreover, participates in the Trinity imaged in remembering, understanding, and loving.34 Remembering corresponds to latent participation, while understanding and loving correspond to the active participation that William is more interested in.35 William is also famous as a critic of the pioneering Scholastic thinker and teacher Peter Abelard (d. 1142), whose preoccupation with logic he saw as dangerous to the authority on which faith depends. In the Mirror, William could be said to offer a corrective by way of contrast.36 The Enigma of Faith, however, teaches and exemplifies a rational, even

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philosophical process integrated into the progress of faith. The Enigma, which borrows much from Augustine, especially De Trinitate, is primarily an extended meditation on the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Indeed, on the one occasion when he uses the phrase “enigma of faith,” William seems to have in mind not a verbal formulation but the mystery of participation in the Trinity made possible by the Incarnation.37 He discusses the need to transcend the form of words and at the same time to continue to be informed and formed by them. “This occurs,” he writes, “when faith, beginning to work through love, also begins to be formed into love and through love into understanding, and through understanding into love, or into understanding and love at the same time. It is difficult for a man so affected to discern which comes from which, since already in the heart of the one who believes, understands, and loves, these three are one, somewhat in the likeness of the supreme Trinity.”38 Reasoning is crucial but needs to happen as part of personal relationship that is always moving toward the vision “face to face.” This is what makes it the “reasoning of faith.” Indeed, for William as for Augustine, the inner, true word in the depths of each person’s heart is already a participation in the Word made flesh.39 Delving into the limits and “labyrinth” of the terminology of substance and relation for the nature of the Trinity, William reminds readers that the meaning of the words must be informed by the reality beginning to be experienced through faith and love, but insists on bringing along the orthodox form of words with all of its enigmas.40 At the center of The Enigma of Faith is a passage on the three degrees of understanding by which faith progresses. These initially sound like a linear ascent to a stable state of perfect enjoyment: The first degree, which is founded on authority, is that of faith, and it has the form of faith which has been formed from the credible witness of a proven authority. The second is that of reason, not of human reason, but of that which is proper to faith and which has itself the form of words sound in faith, and in agreement with divine authority in all things. . . . Now, the third degree is that of illumining and beautifying grace which puts an end to faith, or rather transforms it beatifically into love. It conveys a person from faith to vision by initiating a knowledge which is not that which faith possesses.41

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The possibility of ecstatic union with God in this life, reached through love and participation in the Holy Spirit rather than participation in the Word, is explored in many of William’s other works.42 Yet here William is careful to add, “Arrival belongs to the next life”; what matters now is to continue the journey. And in the meantime as we examine the mysteries [aenigmata] of this first knowledge of God which is through faith, let us call upon him who made darkness his cover, not that he might not be seen but that he might be sought after more carefully, and to the degree that he would be sought after more carefully, to be more dearly loved when he shall have been found. Through his help and instruction, let us strive and seek to understand him through faith to the degree that he grants this for now; later it will be through his grace that we pass from faith to vision.43 The aenigmata, that is, both the mysteries themselves and the words that express them, play a special part in propelling the cycle of reasoning and affectus by which both knowledge and love increase. Scripture, the creeds, and the works of the fathers, particularly where they are most difficult and obscure, are an inexhaustible resource for the growth of faith conceived not just as a virtue but as fuller participation. William’s emphasis on the enigmatic serves to temper two kinds of what I am calling esotericism: that of the cloister, focused purely on affective experience; and that of the schools, focused on the methods of elite learning. The prestige of each would grow in the following centuries. Franciscan spirituality would take the affective emphasis beyond the cloister, and the universities would make the application of philosophy to theology ever more intricate and impressive. William shows how Augustine remained a resource for finding a balance, one that Bonaventure, writing from the center of affective and Scholastic influence, would rearticulate. Likewise, cultivating the enigmatic mode in the vernacular would help fourteenth-century authors to give life to the practice of theology that was becoming forbiddingly technical, while also giving intellectual depth to the movement that scholars now call affective piety. In vernacular prose, Julian of Norwich, noted for drawing on learned

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sources in order to move beyond merely affective devotion, does so especially by theorizing cyclic stages of contemplation that progress by means of ever-renewed interpretation.44 For later writers such as Julian and Langland, it will be clear that the activity of writing is itself an important part of a spiritual process, but this must be true for William of St. Thierry and other monastic authors as well. One can see an embrace of the enigmatic mode in the style of monastic writing, as in that of William’s great model, Augustine. Whereas Scholastic style seeks clarity, writes Leclercq, “The monks speak in images and comparisons borrowed from the Bible and possessing both a richness and an obscurity in keeping with the mystery to be expressed.”45 Monastic communities imbibed the enigmatic daily in the liturgy, including the singing of the Psalms, the section of the Bible that most clearly indicates its own use of this mode.46 Composing new texts for the liturgy involves remixing the sacred words in order to evoke further shades of their mysteries.47 Authors of liturgical texts might not have seen themselves as participating in the creativity of God in a modern, romantic, Coleridgean sense. The image of God is seen instead, as William says, in believing (or remembering), understanding, and loving. To compose verses for a new feast, for example, just as to compose prose aids to contemplation, is merely to renew the action by which the community receives God’s prior action of drawing believers into greater participation, with enigma as a means of that cooperation. The further extension of participation to meditation on all the things of the world as enigmas, already a part of monastic spirituality, becomes linked to a general program of academic study through the influential work of William’s contemporary, Hugh of St. Victor.

VICTORINE READING: HUGH OF ST. VICTOR’S DIDASCALICON

The tradition of monastic reading now known as lectio divina was seen as participatory in the simple sense of being “an intimate dialogue with a living, present, divine interlocutor.”48 Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1142) taught at a new house of Augustinian canons established just outside Paris in the

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early twelfth century and focused on learning. His influential writings make monastic reading practices and Augustinian theology into a plan for education and the Scholasticism that would emerge from the universities. In his widely read Didascalicon, in particular, he consolidates the interpretation of the Bible according to its various senses as the basis for a course of contemplative reading that includes every other academic subject. Augustine had made the case for the Christian value of classical learning, and monastic schooling had nurtured the core disciplines of the trivium and quadrivium while deploying, sometimes to a dizzying extent, the exegetical doctrine of the three- or fourfold senses passed down by Augustine and other fathers. Hugh’s Didascalicon, however, synthesizes the order of the disciplines, the doctrine of the senses, and monastic reading practices to form a design for all study.49 It provides a helpful bridge from Augustine’s theology of the Word to vernacular authors of the fourteenth century who were trying to uncover the mystery of the presence of the Word in the particularities of their own time and place. The two halves of the Didascalicon, three books on studying the arts and three on studying scripture, might seem to anticipate the modern separation between secular and sacred, or between philosophy and theology. But the first half ’s discussion of the arts, or kinds of knowledge, includes theology as the highest of them, all encompassed within philosophy as “the love of that Wisdom which, wanting in nothing, is a living Mind and the sole primordial Idea or Pattern of things.”50 Thus the scope of the arts is knowledge of all things, the book of creation and its Author, and the second half takes the book of scripture as the key to learning how to read the book of creation for its wisdom. For, as Augustine had written and Thomas and others would repeat, “In the divine utterance not only words but even things have a meaning.” Hugh, however, adds the revealing comment that this is “a way of communication not usually found to such an extent in other writings” (5.3, p. 121). Scripture is exceptional in this respect, but not unique; other texts too explore the meaning of things, but with less authority. Hugh holds up the goal that all reading and writing penetrate to an understanding of how all things participate in divine Wisdom. Like William, Hugh is aware of the esoteric dangers of enigma (and also perhaps saw them in Abelard).51 His main discussion of the moral or

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tropological sense of scripture warns against getting too caught up in zeal for knowledge and for penetrating the obscurities of the allegorical sense, to the detriment of “desire to imitate the virtues set forth” (5.7, p. 128). Here he mentions the danger of exclusive interest in “untangling the enigmas of the Prophets and the mystical meanings of sacred symbols [sacramentorum]” (5.7, p. 129). Yet this warning assumes the appeal of such study and implies its value when it does lead to desire for the things signified. Later, after laying out historical and allegorical understanding as the foundation and superstructure that tropological understanding then decorates, Hugh offers this brief, pregnant paragraph: Concerning tropology I shall not at present say anything more than what was said above, except that it is more the meaning of things than the meaning of words which seems to pertain to it. For in the meaning of things lies natural justice, out of which the discipline of our own morals, that is, positive justice, arises. By contemplating what God has made we realize what we ourselves ought to do. Every nature tells of God; every nature teaches man; every nature reproduces its essential form, and nothing in the universe is infecund. (6.5, pp. 144–45) The moral sense is not primarily in explicit moral commands but in seeing the divine action in nature and history. Here is the basis for the development of what Hugh classifies in book 2 as the practical arts of ethics, economics, and politics under a theory of natural law (perhaps giving a nod to the natural philosophy being developed by his contemporaries associated with the school of Chartres).52 Worthy as these disciplines might be on their own, Hugh sees greater importance in reading the endlessly fertile participation of nature in the divine mysteries as a means of lifting up each individual into love of wisdom.53 Hugh’s guide to reading flirts with didacticism more than esotericism. His own style, though lyrical at times and effective in its use of extended images, shows that he was in fact a schoolmaster. His plan of learning can be seen in retrospect as preparing the way for methodical and increasingly specialized Scholastic practices. Three central principles, however, keep his guidance oriented to the enigmatic: that the interpre-

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tive process should be flexible and recursive; that a reader needs to assemble and comprehend the various kinds of knowledge as an integrated whole; and that reading is completed in meditation that leads to contemplation. Hugh’s approach to interpretation, grounded in Augustine’s theology of the Word, spirals endlessly toward fuller and clearer understanding of the implications of that theology. He summarizes the core idea with immediate reference to scripture but wider significance for other kinds of reading: “What, therefore, the sound of the mouth, which all in the same moment begins to subsist and fades away, is to the idea in the mind, that the whole extent of time is to eternity. The idea in the mind is the internal word, which is shown forth by the sound of the voice, that is, by the external word. And the divine Wisdom, which the Father has uttered out of his heart, invisible in Itself, is recognized through creatures and in them” (5.3, p. 122). How, then, is one to study to recognize the eternal Word in the creations of time? Each half of the Didascalicon contains a chapter with the title “Concerning the Method of Expounding a Text,” the only title that is repeated, and the latter one, on scripture, merely summarizes the former. In either case, his procedure moves from the finite to the infinite, from what is better known to what lies hidden, from universals to particulars in order “to investigate the nature of the things those universals contain” (3.9, p. 92). Study and meditation are the first of five steps leading through prayer and performance to contemplation (5.9, p. 132). Ascent is the goal, but life is such that we must also continually descend and begin again.54 Yet this ascent also requires a circulation between analysis and synthesis, the particular and the universal, worked out through the relationship between what Hugh calls the letter, the sense, and the sententia, or deeper meaning. With scripture, the sense or obvious meaning corresponds to what exegetical tradition called the literal or historical sense, and the deeper meaning corresponds to the spiritual senses. Hugh acknowledges the problem that sometimes in scripture there is no sense, no obvious meaning that makes sense or accords with truth, only the letter and a deeper meaning.55 Yet he counsels not to move past the sense too quickly but to dwell on it for what it might yet reveal if interpreted in the order of history, what we would now call historical context. Thus Hugh has

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rightly been lauded as a pioneer of modern exegetical scholarship.56 More central to the Didascalicon, however, is the spiraling movement between letter, sense, and deeper meaning in order to find more that has been hidden in the letter and in the individual particulars to which it most directly refers. The exegetical doctrine of the spiritual senses provides the primary blueprint for this movement, and Hugh’s emphasis on the integration of the literal and spiritual senses ensures that the interpretive spiral is ever widening and generative. Hugh’s main discussion of the senses of scripture here uses a threefold model: history and two spiritual senses, allegory and tropology. The image of constructing a building, adapted from Gregory the Great, establishes the importance of keeping the three senses united in proper order.57 History is the foundation because the spiritual senses apply not just to words but to things, and the things are related as events in a narrative, so the whole foundation needs to be laid out in order for upper levels of the structure to be built on it. Hugh makes a plea for learning even those details of history that seem inconsequential so that their significance can be seen in light of the whole. It is in this context of studying the historical sense that he famously writes, “Learn everything; you will see afterwards that nothing is superfluous. A skimpy knowledge is not a pleasing thing” (6.3, p. 137). Allegory, then, “is that spiritual structure which is raised on high, built, as it were, with as many courses of stones as it contains mysteries” (6.4, p. 141). Hugh envisions this as pressing further and further into obscurity, and to that end he supplies a brief, narratively ordered account of the mysteries to be found, from the Trinity to the resurrection of the body. This summary would in fact become the outline for his much larger work De sacramentis, often seen as the first great medieval summa of theology. For Hugh understands theology less as a separate science working logically from a set of presuppositions than as an art of interpretation constantly turning again to the inexhaustible letter and the historical sense. This historical orientation extends beyond theology as a set of eternal truths to an awareness of the unfolding of revelation within time, its stages and renewals, and the consequent need to pay attention to history beyond the closure of the scriptural canon.58 The interconnection of the scriptural senses and their basis in history resist the didactic tendency that can come from detaching

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them into separate categories of doctrine. Rather, the enigmas of history remain sources of new spiritual insight. This vision of the participation of all history in the divine plan includes the life of the reader through the formative results Hugh sees in good reading. The two spiritual senses correspond to two fruits of sacred reading, knowledge and morals (6.6), and to the two actions that increase active participation in the divine and set the program for all study, “the contemplation of truth and the practice of virtue” (1.8, pp. 54–55). The reformation of the reader through contemplation and virtue is the goal of reading both in the arts and in theology. Each half of the Didascalicon, on the arts and on scripture, includes a section on the meditation that reading should lead to. The three kinds of meditation that follow from the arts already anticipate the spiritual senses that structure interpretation of scripture: “One consists in a consideration of morals, the second in a scrutiny of the commandments, and the third in an investigation of the divine works” (3.10, p. 93). The first two correspond to the tropological sense and the third to the allegorical, built on the foundation of history. In the arts as in scripture, the path of study leads from things to their participation in the divine, and in each case Hugh is primarily interested in actions, that is, events in history. Meditation seems to arise especially from obscurities but moves beyond interpretive procedure: “Meditation takes its start from reading but is bound by none of reading’s rules or precepts. For it delights to range along open ground, where it fixes its free gaze upon the contemplation of truth, drawing together now these, now those causes of things, or now penetrating into profundities, leaving nothing doubtful, nothing obscure. The start of learning, thus, lies in reading, but its consummation lies in meditation” (3.10, pp. 92–93). In the second half, Hugh adds that reading and meditation lead to further ascent through prayer, action, and contemplation and that this ascent often requires descending again to previous stages (5.9). After these hints that obscurities have a special role in moving readers toward meditation and contemplation, Hugh ends the Didascalicon by saying that meditation has not been written about well and reserving it for separate treatment. One place to look for this treatment is his De arca Noe morali, the first of three treatises on spiritual life that unfold as interpretations of Noah’s ark.59 While performing the kind of integrated

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reading according to several senses taught in the Didascalicon, Hugh gives instruction on how God’s work of restoration in history can become a focus of meditation for the sake of personal, inner restoration.60 Chapter 4 of the fourth and final book addresses why God speaks secretly and obscurely. God hides, Hugh says, in order to arouse desire: “For such is the heart of man, that if it cannot gain possession of the thing it loves, it burns the more with longing.”61 Interweaving his own text with references to the Song of Songs, Hugh depicts how God speaks in hiding in order to move the soul to follow into another country where they can be intimate. This summons is the reason God speaks from hiding, as it were, in the law and the prophets as well as, in the Gospels, through parables and riddles (per parabolas et aenigmata). He adds that it is fitting for the secrets of mystical understanding to be hidden in figures so they are not cheapened by being open to everyone. While mention of enigmas also brings to mind a more esoteric function of excluding, Hugh’s discussion of the uses of obscurity for the restoration of the soul emphasizes how it excites desire and inquiry.62 By grounding it in this monastic sense of the value of enigma for contemplation and in the study of history, Hugh strengthens the capacity of the threefold scheme of exegesis—more widespread and familiar in its fourfold variation—to articulate the narrative dimension of the theology of participation. The place of this exegetical scheme in Hugh’s work shows how it is not so much a key to orthodox decoding of obscure, figurative texts as it is the most well-articulated and influential approach to reading the world according to a theology of participation, and in particular to a theology of history as participation in the unfolding of divine purpose.63 Certainly the three- or fourfold scheme could harden into method and produce reductively didactic or fancifully esoteric interpretations of scripture. The Scholastic move toward more analytical ways of organizing theological knowledge would somewhat eclipse Hugh’s emphasis on history.64 History becomes another field for the encyclopedic compilation of symbolism, along with lapidaries and bestiaries, analysis of names and etymologies, commentaries on colors and numbers in the Bible and the liturgy, as in the massive, four-part Speculum quadruplex by Vincent of Beauvais. Yet for people faced with the necessity of acting in the world, and for literature imitating action in order to shed some light

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on it, the most important kind of symbols were those to which Erich Auerbach drew attention under the term figura: people and actions linked to an understanding of meaningful patterns in history revealed in Christ (allegory), happening in the life of every individual (tropology), and to be consummated in the new heavens and new earth (anagogy).65 Bonaventure’s Breviloquium uses the Pauline figure of breadth, length, height, and depth to include the spiritual senses in an even more expansive vision of how scripture is the key to understanding all things, especially history, and thus to participation in divine action. Scripture’s breadth is its division into two testaments, each containing the other; its height is its unfolding of hierarchies rising into increasing mystery; its depth is its spiritual senses; and its length is its narration of all history “like a beautifully composed poem” that provides the overall view needed for beginning to guess the riddles of historical particulars.66 Exegetical approaches to opening the mysteries presented by the Christian theology of participation are bound up with other aspects of later medieval culture that begin to flourish in the Renaissance of the twelfth century. As Auerbach shows in Mimesis, the figural view of history contributes to breaking down the classical rules of literary decorum, so that the lives of ordinary individuals come to be portrayed as sharing in the most momentous patterns of history.67 Similarly, Hugh’s program of study is related to what Chenu calls a new awareness of history, which also includes new forms of historical writing more interested in making sense of the present and less dominated by transmitting an epic view of the past.68 Like Hugh’s Didascalicon and De sacramentis, works such as Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica provided an aid for gaining the narrative framework needed to see present events as meaningful. More broadly still, the cultural expressions associated with what Colin Morris has called the medieval discovery of the individual—such as the writing of autobiography, the increasing practice of confession, and the invention of romantic love—all help cultivate attention to the significance of individual experience in the light of larger structures of meaning.69 Works such as the Divine Comedy and Piers Plowman would use the enigmatic to cultivate readers’ interpretation of their own history as part of a larger, unfolding narrative. Yet this new awareness of history could also find expression in an interpretive scheme that was less than enigmatic, as in the

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influential apocalypticism of Joachim of Fiore, which manages to be both didactic and esoteric.70 Meanwhile, the multifaceted late medieval flourishing of what we now call mysticism often moves away from history and toward esotericism, yet, in the legacy of Pseudo-Dionysius, preserves and amplifies another of medieval Christian theology’s most dynamic expressions of participation in the play of enigma.

DENIS AND THE CLOUD: ENIGMA AND MYSTICISM

Mysticism has a long medieval history, largely under the continuous influence of Augustine and Gregory the Great, transmitted and reformulated by authors such as William of St. Thierry and Hugh of St. Victor. Later medieval mystical theology also bears the strong stamp of PseudoDionysius the Areopagite, or Denis, as he was known in Middle English (and will henceforth be referred to here).71 As central as interplay between positive and negative language about the divine is to Augustine’s theology, it is even more prominent in Denis. Modern use of the Greek terms cataphatic and apophatic for these two poles of theological discourse, or sometimes even for two different kinds of theology, stems from his works. Though now thought to have written in Syria in the fifth or sixth century, this Greek-speaking author successfully posed as the Dionysius of Acts 17 who was converted by the apostle Paul himself. Thus his writings were given near-canonical authority until his identity began to be questioned by modern scholars. His influence in the West was limited during the early Middle Ages but grew steadily over the twelfth century and exploded in the thirteenth and fourteenth. Throughout the later Middle Ages he was further conflated with the St. Denis who, by legend, established Christianity in Paris. Aquinas and other Scholastics frequently cite the four treatises attributed to him, The Divine Names, The Celestial Hierarchy, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, and Mystical Theology.72 Even the currency of the term mystical derives from the last of these. The second canon of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), in rejecting Joachim of Fiore’s reduction of the mystery of the Trinity, uses the language of Denis’s mystical theology to reassert it: “For between the Creator and a creature there can be remarked no similarity so great that a

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greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them.”73 Altogether, Denis’s works both reinforced Augustine’s approach to the enigmatic and introduced an alternative, more esoteric use of figurative language and symbolism in theology. The twelfth-century wave of commentary on Denis’s works began with Hugh of St. Victor’s exposition of The Celestial Hierarchy. In the Latin translation he used, enigma occurs in a sentence that gives it the more esoteric function of hiding the understanding of “supermundane” truth. Yet this is part of a larger passage on the need for images based on sensory experience in order to lift contemplation to what it cannot access directly. Hugh’s commentary on this passage focuses, as in De arca Noe morali, not on the negative use of the parables and figures of scripture to conceal, but rather on their capacity to stimulate study and devotion.74 Hugh includes a definition of symbol that reflects the Platonism shared by both Denis and Augustine: “A symbol is a juxtaposition, that is, a coaptation of visible forms brought forth to demonstrate some invisible matter.”75 In Denis, as in book 15 of De Trinitate, the movement from visible to invisible is driven by a dialectic of affirming the similarity in the symbol while removing the dissimilarity. Denis, however, in his Mystical Theology, dwells on negation, which his works at times seem to imply allows a closer approach to the mystery of what exceeds comprehension. Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173), successor of Hugh, states the core principle: “Every figure demonstrates the truth the more clearly in proportion as by dissimilar similitude it figures that it is itself the truth and does not prove the truth; in so doing, dissimilar similitudes lead the mind closer to the truth by not allowing the mind to rest in the similitude alone.”76 Such a concentrated combination of similarity and dissimilarity sounds even more like what riddles do than Augustine’s extended, rhetorical approach to obscurity. Denis’s approach to symbols also wants to organize contemplation of the transcendent according to hierarchies, components of the grand scale of being, so that one begins with those furthest from the source of all being and thus most apt to remind one of the inadequacy of all symbols. Even when contemplation reaches the top of the hierarchy, the essential action is to negate all knowledge and enter into what an anonymous English author of the fourteenth century would call “the cloud of unknowing.”

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This term comes from Mystical Theology, which the author of The Cloud of Unknowing translated into English under the title Deonise [Denis’s] Hid Divinity.77 Denis’s typically paradoxical style comes out in the translation of his opening prayer, in which sovereyn, mostly translating the Latin source’s super, expresses a supernegative or superpositive that points toward the divine: Thou unbigonne and everlastyng Wysdome, the whiche in thiself arte the sovereyn-substancyal Firstheed [Firstness], the sovereyn Goddesse [Godness, not goddess], and the sovereyn Good, the inliche [inward] beholder of the godliche maad [divinely made] wisdome of Cristen men: I beseche thee for to drawe us up in an acordyng abilnes to the sovereyn-unknowen and the sovereyn-schinyng height of thi derke inspirid spekynges, where all the pryve thinges of devinytee ben koverid and hid under the sovereyn-schinyng derknes of wisest silence, makyng the sovereyn-clerest sovereynly for to schine prively in the derkyst; and the which is—in a maner that is alweys invisible and ungropable—sovereynli fulfillyng with ful fayre cleertees all thoo soules that ben not havyng iyen [eyes] of mynde.78 Those whose minds lack eyes include everyone, as is clearer in the Latin source. Denis, by comparison to Augustine, is not interested in remedying the effects of sin as much as in pressing to the limits of human finitude. The possibility of attaining any wisdom depends on the principle of participation, as the English translator has made plainer by replacing “Trinitas” with “Wisdom” as the name by which God is addressed. God’s own vision as “beholder” is likewise the means of participation in wisdom, so that human sight is a sort of return to God of the divine sight. This metaphor reflects Denis’s Neoplatonic view of the creation as proceeding from and returning to the divine. The language of this prayer for ascent (or return) already performs the interplay between affirmation and negation that is the treatise’s basic teaching. The enigmatic could be said to reach an extreme of compressed intensity in Denis. The goal of both fullness and clarity in the kind of knowledge sought could hardly be better expressed. Yet there is a loss of the interpretive process important to the rhetoric of enigma, and this is related to Denis’s disengagement from history.

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The Mystical Theology does not mention Christ or give a role to love in the approach to God. Commentaries on Denis, beginning with Hugh’s, worked to accommodate his teaching to the dominant, Augustinian theology. A later Victorine, Thomas Gallus (ca. 1200–1246), introduced in his commentary on Denis’s works the idea, like that found in William of St. Thierry, of an “affectus” of the mind that goes beyond intellect in the ecstasy of the cloud of unknowing.79 Thus, following Gallus, the Cloud author expands the simple “This is my prayer” at the end of the opening prayer in Mystical Theology into “And for alle thees thinges ben aboven mynde, therfore with affeccyon aboven mynde as I may, I desire to purchase hem unto me with this preier.”80 Similarly Gallus himself hints, in a summary of the first part of Mystical Theology, at how its way of negation might be reconciled with book 15 of De Trinitate: “Having got that far, knowledge itself is darkened since it is increased beyond itself towards greater knowledge. Also the breadth of the vocal word, or even of the mental one, is restricted to the simplicity of the eternal Word. And it is there also that deification occurs, that is to say, a changeover from human things to divine.”81 Thus Augustine’s theology of the Word and Denis’s ascent by unknowing could come together, as Aquinas and Bonaventure would show more comprehensively, to enrich and reinforce the theological significance of the enigmatic. Yet these two major sources for thinking about theological language and the interpretation of signs and symbols could also lead in somewhat contrary directions: on one hand, to didactic allegorism that emphasizes the positive character of theological language, the transparency of signs, and the way of affirmation; and on the other hand, to esoteric gnosticism that emphasizes the limits of language, the opacity of symbols, the way of negation, and the superiority of affective experience. Entering the cloud of unknowing requires a demanding mental operation of purification. Even the way of affirmation as treated by Denis can make elaborate, stepwise ascent through the mediation of hierarchies, both human and cosmic, seem necessary.82 When the goal is seen to be a kind of experience rather than understanding, it leads away from the time-bound, the created, the historical, the sphere of becoming, embodiment, and individuality. The Cloud of Unknowing offers an instructive example, among many from the flourishing of mysticism in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, of both the temptation to gnosticism and the potential of the

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enigmatic to offset it.83 The Cloud marks itself as esoteric in the most obvious way by announcing that its teaching is only for those who have advanced to the second-highest degree of Christian life and are ready for the highest. Its author directs the friend to whom he is writing to leave all created things behind. His concern is with the inner life, and while he acknowledges the value of considering God’s gifts, he teaches an austere and demanding technique: “to think apon the nakid beyng of him, and to love him and preise him for him-self.”84 To place the negative way— entry into “the cloud of unknowing”—on a higher level is to separate it sharply from the way of affirmation. The Cloud requires self-forgetting and self-abandonment, either as an inner motion or as a surrendered state.85 Like Gallus’s commentaries, the Cloud also supplements Denis’s strictly intellectual movement of contemplation with the idea that what goes beyond understanding is love. The same author’s Book of Privy Counselling explains human life as a participation in the life of God, but the directions for contemplation are not to embrace creation as the book of God but rather to exclude everything, including all conceptions of God, and begin from “nakid entent.”86 Even when the summit of contemplation is reconceived as not just a stark negation of intellect but a being-affected that suggests some sort of feeling, this approach to God collapses the prolongation of interpretive work that stimulates both understanding and desire, activity as well as receptiveness. The Cloud ’s recommendation of single-syllable prayers shows such a collapse, yet these prayers can also be seen as akin to riddles in their concentration of the interplay between affirmation and negation, activity and passivity. The author commends this technique as an exception to his central teaching “that in this werk men schul use no menes [means, methods]” (71). He acknowledges the value of reading, meditation, and prayer for beginners. Indeed, digressing briefly to insist that these three must be kept together, he seems to uphold the tradition of monastic reading seen in William of St. Thierry and Hugh of St. Victor.87 He calls scripture a mirror in which the eye of reason sees the “visage goostly” of conscience (72). If this is an allusion to 1 Corinthians 13:12, then “in aenigmate” is reduced, in a fashion that radicalizes the orthodox, Augustinian gloss, to the self alone.88 For those who do the work of the Cloud, “Theire meditacions ben as thei were sodein conseites and blynde felynges of theire owne wrechidnes, or of the goodnes of God, with-outyn any menes of

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redyng or heryng comyng before, and with-outyn any specyal beholdyng of any thing under God” (73). And when they pray in words, which is seldom, it is “bot in ful fewe wordes; ye, and in ever the fewer the betir” (74). Despite this extreme concentration of any verbal mediation, however, the ensuing explanation of the power of one-syllable prayers includes notable instances of narrative imagination and interpretive subtlety and shows the Cloud giving guidance to mystical practice not just through negations—unknowing—but through vivid images from everyday life. What the author calls an “ensaumple in the cours of kynde [nature]” (74) posits a man or woman in an emergency, such as a fire, calling for help with one piercing word. Such one-syllable prayers are so powerful, he adds, because they are prayed with the full spirit in all its height, depth, length, and breadth. This figure comes from St. Paul’s prayer that his readers might be “filled unto all the fulness of God” (Eph. 3:19). The Cloud author applies it first to the one praying and then to God so that it becomes a sort of diagram for how such a prayer is a participation in the basic divine attributes and conforms the soul to “the ymage and the liknes of God” (75).89 Whereas Bonaventure, in the Breviloquium, uses the same figure expansively, for the endless meaning of scripture as gateway to participation, the Cloud uses it more intensively, for mystical experience. Such a combination of a brief but allegorical and Scholasticsounding bit of exegesis with a dramatic example from ordinary life captures a playfulness that runs throughout the Cloud and lightens its esoteric gravity. One-syllable prayers are rather like riddles in their humble, even playful attempt to invest language with fullness of meaning. Elsewhere the author calls the highest contemplation play (55) and says one ought to feel like a child being played with affectionately by its father (88). As others have suggested, some of its strategies might best be seen as games like hide and seek.90 Its single-syllable prayers could perhaps become playful if treated like a mantra. Moreover, even if the Cloud does not recommend meditation on more extended, enigmatic texts or on the created world, the treatise itself is carefully adventurous in its use of paradoxes and comparisons to physical reality, of which the title image is only the most prominent.91 Like this image’s source, and perhaps like most mystical texts, the Cloud prefers the visual to the verbal for metaphors of knowing. Whether positive or negative, these suggest an instantaneous, timeless experience as opposed to the duration and process

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implied by figures such as the Augustinian inner word. Nonetheless, the work of the Cloud involves play with words that keeps its rather gnostic goal connected to the everyday, with the potential to inject ordinary life with depth even if the ordinary is not the means to that depth.

THE ENIGMATIC METAPHYSICS OF THOMAS AQUINAS

The Cloud shows the tendency for the enigmatic to drop out of a mysticism oriented to negation over affirmation and to experience over understanding, but it brings something like enigma back to make the path more accessible and ground it in the familiar. Enigma tends to drop out of Scholasticism too because of its opposite orientation toward what can be said positively and toward knowledge expressed with logical precision in the formats derived from schoolroom lectures and disputations. Indeed, Scholastic theology became increasingly divorced from the need to be oriented toward the contemplative practices that Hugh saw as the culmination of reading. This separation of theology from the practical disciplines of Christian life would eventually be exacerbated by intellectual innovations that undermined the thought structure of participation.92 Yet Thomas Aquinas, in combining the Neoplatonic theology received especially from Augustine and Denis with the philosophy of Aristotle, provides the richest intellectual basis for a poetics of enigma. Aquinas elaborates the idea of latent participation into a full-fledged metaphysics.93 At the same time, his attention to the conditions of human knowledge implies a phenomenology of active participation, one in which the sacraments become central.94 Aquinas’s commentary on 1 Corinthians 13:12 reflects his use of the term enigma throughout his vast corpus and situates his understanding of it within major aspects of his thought. Beginning, in good Scholastic style, with a distinction between three kinds of seeing, he takes the indirectness of seeing in a mirror to mean that “we know the invisible things of God through creatures,” as taught by Romans 1:20 and followed by Augustine, Denis, and exegetical tradition. “And so,” continues Thomas. “all creation is a mirror for us, because from the order and goodness and magnitude which are caused in things by God, we come to a knowledge of His power, goodness and eminence. And this knowledge is called see-

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ing in a mirror.”95 The principle is familiar, but the phrasing deserves scrutiny. The language of causation recalls Aristotle but could also come from Augustine or Denis, and it suggests how Thomas takes Aristotle up into the Christian doctrine of creation in order to refine the metaphysics of participation. Using the Aristotelian categories of act and potentiality and of form and matter, Thomas asserts that God is pure Act, who gives to all material beings the raw potentiality that is matter. Things are what they are because their matter participates in their given form, which in turn participates to a given degree in the essential form that is God’s action.96 Intelligent beings participate in the highest degree by being able to understand and to will. Negative theology, which Thomas derives principally from Denis, underwrites his claim that God, in the simplicity of pure Act, is utterly beyond comprehension (other than God’s own). Even being cannot be said properly of God but is rather a participation in God. At the same time, Aquinas integrates the negative with the affirmative so that the negative cannot be an end point of thought, the sheer darkness of unknowing. Instead the two are always kept in dynamic interplay. Causality is the basis of affirmations from what is seen of God in creatures, as “in a mirror.” His commentary’s first two examples of what is reflected are wisdom and goodness, those divine attributes that call to intelligence and will, respectively. The third attribute, eminence, is precisely that by which God’s incomprehensibility exceeds what can be seen, said, or known. Magnitude refers to hierarchies of being within creation that point to the idea of such eminence, which keeps human knowledge from ending in negation. Behind every negation is always a supereminent (“soverein” in the language of the Cloud author) affirmation. Yet negation is necessary to move up the hierarchy and to understand that the created hierarchy is not in continuity with the divine because there is no continuity of the finite with the infinite. Affirmation and negation are equal partners in the dance of knowledge, and Aquinas identifies enigma particularly with negation: It should be further noted that a likeness of this sort, which is of a likeness gleaming back on someone else, is twofold: because sometimes it is clear and open, as that which appears in a mirror, sometimes it is obscure and secret [obscura et occulta], and then that vision

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is said to be enigmatic, as when I say: “Me a mother begot, and the same is born from me.” That is secret by a simile [per simile occultum]. And it is said of ice, which is born from frozen water and the water is born from the melted ice. Thus, therefore, it is clear that vision through the likeness of a likeness is in a mirror, by a likeness hidden in an enigma, but a clear and open likeness makes another kind of allegorical vision. Therefore, inasmuch as we know the invisible things of God through creatures, we are said to see through a mirror. Inasmuch as those invisible things are secrets [occulta] to us, we see in an enigma.97 Aquinas follows Augustine’s rhetorical analysis, substituting for Augustine’s biblical example of a riddle the one that had become standard from the grammar textbook of Donatus (see below, chapter 4, the section “Grammar”). He calls enigma first “obscure,” the word used by both Augustine and Donatus and used most often elsewhere by Aquinas. But then he calls it “occulta,” secret or hidden, a word smacking of Denis at his more esoteric. Yet he also expresses the whole figure of vision through a mirror in an enigma much more positively as “through the likeness of a likeness” (per similitudinem similitudinis). Enigma brings the negative but also contains within its own figure the endlessness of the interplay between affirmation and negation. Thomas’s interpreters, perhaps following the lead of Thomas himself, have focused on the concept of analogy as his way of expressing the metaphysics of participation and balancing affirmation and negation.98 Analogy is a mean between univocity and equivocity that is necessitated by rejecting those two alternatives on theological grounds. If any terms were univocal when said of both God and a creature, that is, if they meant precisely the same thing, then there would be categories of affirmation unlimited by any negation that would thus be metaphysically prior to God, not a participation in God. In that respect, God would be brought within the sphere of human comprehension. Later, some Scholastic thinkers, beginning with John Duns Scotus, would consider the notion of being to be univocal. On the other hand, if language is equivocal with regard to God and anything else, then the knowledge of God is limited to negation and the links of participation are broken. But, as

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Gregory P. Rocca puts it, “Analogy points to a relation between creatures and God, by which we compare things to God as to their first origin and thus attribute to God the names of perfections.”99 The metaphysics of participation means that all things created by God are in some way signs of God, even if what they show is true of God eminently and incomprehensibly. Analogy could be said to be the linguistic logic of the poetics of enigma, though I am not aware of any medieval author who says just that. But Aquinas comes close. Most often when Thomas uses the term enigma, whether in the phrase from 1 Corinthians 13:12 or on its own, commonly in adjectival form, it describes the knowledge of faith. In one sense, as in the contrast to “through a mirror” in his commentary, it expresses the limits of knowledge of divine things in this life.100 But, especially when used on its own, it also expresses the possibility of the kind of knowledge that Aquinas calls faith. Enigma works as a shorthand term for all that Aquinas works out logically in terms of analogy.101 Aristotelian psychology commits Aquinas to the view that what we know, we know from sense experience and authoritative words. Yet Thomas also combines Aristotle’s approach to knowledge with Augustine’s conception of the inner word as a participation in the Word.102 All cognition involves inner, mental signs that mediate relations between psychological states and external realities. This extension of Augustinian sign theory manifests how all human reasoning participates in divine intelligence.103 Enigmatic signs mediate the knowledge called faith by directing cognition to its highest object, the knowledge of God, in which it is destined to find fulfillment and rest. At the same time, the Aristotelian component of this Christian theory of knowledge extends the enigmatic to all fields of knowledge and includes them, even more thoroughly than did Augustine or Hugh, within a theological project.104 Thomas’s thought clarifies from a theological perspective how enigma engages believers as whole people. Knowledge and love are no more separable for Thomas than for Augustine or for William of St. Thierry. For Thomas the Aristotelian, however, because we are embodied creatures, our thinking remains tied to images from our senses. Sense knowledge, moreover, is what moves us. Plus, as Thomas further indicates in his article on why theology uses metaphor, images from lowly things have the

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advantage of reminding us of the unlikeness that attends any likeness they have to God.105 Analogies are products not of intuition but of judgment, which is aware of how they both affirm and deny in order to assert “what cannot be fully conceived or defined.”106 And these judgments are made by faith that is not only knowledge but also a virtue by which the will assents to certain fundamental truths about God as infinite creator and the creation as a likeness of God, all of which are summarized, as it were, in the doctrine of participation.107 Enigma engages natural capacities toward perfection by the work of grace. Such grace too is participation of human agency in divine agency, participation by which human agency, far from being displaced by the divine, is brought to full activity, to fulfillment in understanding and joy.108 Aquinas acknowledges extraordinary cases of knowledge that he calls enigmatic, such as the visions, dreams, and parables typical of prophecy, but his emphasis is on the ordinary.109 For Thomas, this means the sacraments. Responding to the question of whether sacraments are necessary after the coming of Christ, Thomas writes, As Dionysius [Denis] says, the state of the New Law is an intermediate one, half way between the Old Law on the one hand, the figures of which are fulfilled in the New, and the state of glory on the other, in which every truth will be made manifest fully and absolutely in itself. Hence in the latter state there will be no sacraments. At present, however, as long as we know as in a mirror darkly, as we are told in 1 Corinthians, we need sensible signs of some kind to enable us to attain to spiritual realities. And this is something that pertains to the very nature of the sacraments.110 Thomas’s own devotion to the Eucharist is well known. His formulation of the doctrine of transubstantiation could be seen as a concentrated instance of his thinking about how the enigmatic works, though I am not aware that he uses the word there.111 More relevant, though, is the single instance of Thomas as practitioner of enigmatic poetry: his hymns for the feast of Corpus Christi. The fourth stanza of his “Pange lingua gloriosi,” famously difficult to translate, plays in compressed, paradoxical fashion with the theology of the Word that is at the root of the poetics of enigma:

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Verbum caro panem verum Verbo carnem efficit; Fitque sanguis Christi merum; Et si sensus deficit, Ad firmandum cor sincerum Sola fides sufficit. [Word made Flesh, by Word He maketh very bread his flesh to be; Man in wine Christ’s Blood partaketh, And if senses fail to see, Faith alone the true heart waketh To behold the mystery.]112 Christ himself, the paradigm of all enigmas, fashions what was no doubt the prime experience of the enigmatic in medieval life, the Eucharist. The hymn invites meditation not just on the mysteries but on the sign’s effect in at once stretching toward and falling short of the truth. It calls forth the knowledge that is of the heart rather than of the head but that is no less knowledge for deriving its strength from the will. Neale’s translation further adds the appropriate note that such knowledge is not the sleep of reason but a waking into the highest knowledge. Whether poetic fictions outside the liturgy could have such an effect is something that Aquinas (along with Hugh, William, and Augustine) would have doubted, yet to which his work might nonetheless point the way.113

THE BONAVENTURAN SYNTHESIS

One final theological text, Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind to God (Itinerarium mentis in Deum, 1259), weaves together all of the strands already discussed and adds others that relate the enigmatic to important later medieval trends.114 While the Didascalicon organized and directed a basic approach to reading, the Itinerarium envisions and theorizes its furthest extension into contemplation. Hugh addressed the Didascalicon to members of a school community; Bonaventure addresses his text to those at an advanced stage of devotion ready to ruminate over the words of one of

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the most elevated contemplative texts, and yet also to anyone in “this vale of tears” ready to receive help to rise up to God.115 Hugh was master of a group of Augustinian canons, a new order that was part of a twelfthcentury movement seeking close imitation of the apostles beyond the restrictions of the Benedictine cloister. Bonaventure, who introduces himself in the Itinerarium as the seventh successor to Francis as minister general of the Franciscan order, was at the center of that more prominent and radical movement. Nonetheless, much of what distinguishes the Franciscans and other mendicant orders extends the Victorine emphasis on history and the literal sense into the conviction that, as Chenu puts it, “exegesis, dogmatics, and preaching could not be separated for one who would master the gospels, because they could be fully comprehended only by participation in the immediate action of the word.”116 Like many of Bonaventure’s works of instruction and devotion, the Itinerarium crafts a style of order, balance, and concision that resembles the enigmatic in its aesthetic unfolding of the endless significance guaranteed by the theology of participation.117 At the same time, however, in his refinement of the Augustinian path through inwardness to universality, Bonaventure anticipates the increasing focus on individuality that would, in later Franciscans such as Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, begin to erode the epistemology of participation.118 The Itinerarium itself intensifies this epistemology by centering it on the individual’s participation in the unique event of the Incarnation and Passion. This experience reached its height, for Francis and many others in the late Middle Ages, in a personal vision. Three new emphases in Bonaventure’s treatment of contemplation are crucial for later enigmatic literature: focus on the suffering Christ, greater individualism, and the authority of visions. The Itinerarium was occasioned, Bonaventure writes, by his own experience, though not a visionary one: a visit to Mount Alverna, site of the most influential of all medieval Christian visions, in which Francis saw “a winged seraph in the form of the Crucified” and received the stigmata (prol. 2, p. 1). Bonaventure’s treatise takes his recollection of Francis’s vision as its focal, enigmatic text and derives from it a seven-chapter structure, with the seraph’s six wings forming six steps of contemplation that climax in Christ on the cross as the door to the final passage beyond contemplation. Bonaventure uses the term enigma only once, in a quo-

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tation of 1 Corinthians 13:12 at the transition from seeing vestiges of God in the external world to seeing the image of God within the mind— precisely the interpretation of this verse made authoritative by Augustine. Yet this verse also structures the entire Itinerarium because the six steps are grouped in pairs according to the prepositions used by St. Paul, with the first step in each pair being a “speculation . . . per” and the second a “speculation . . . in.”119 Like the Cloud author, Bonaventure prefers visual metaphors throughout. He uses the image of a mirror with both “through” and “in,” and he consistently expresses the epistemology of participation through the metaphor of illumination. Indeed, he shares to a great extent in the orientation toward clarity associated with the visual over the verbal and with philosophy over rhetoric. The Itinerarium is concerned to certify the possibility of true knowledge of God despite the conditions of this life. And yet recognizing how and why this knowledge is obscure provokes the movement upward from step to step. To this end, Bonaventure elaborates Augustine’s epistemology of the inner word. Movement from the first step to the second, from seeing God through the things of the external world to seeing God in the world, proceeds by inquiring into how we know external things. Bonaventure articulates in Scholastic, philosophical terms the process by which the mind combines what it perceives with a mental word that participates in the divine, creating Word, so that we recognize things for what they really are as known by God. This analysis also brings out, however, the inadequacy of actual vocal or written language to express this mental knowledge. Experience of this gap between word and truth helps propel the ascent from “through” to “in,” to a deeper penetration of how we refer things to their Creator. The ability to read things as signs is impaired by both finitude and fallenness, and these deficits are met by the function of things both as signs given in the order of nature and as special, supernaturally instituted signs: For creatures of this visible world signify the invisible things of God . . . partly by their own proper representation; partly because of their prophetic prefiguring; partly because of angelic operation; partly also by virtue of superadded institution. For every creature is by its very nature a figure and likeness of the eternal Wisdom, but

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especially a creature that has been raised by the Spirit of Prophecy to prefigure spiritual things in the book of Scriptures; and more especially those creatures in whose figures it pleased God to appear through the ministry of the angels; and, finally, and most especially, any creature which He chose to institute for the purpose of signifying, and which not only has the character of sign in the ordinary sense of the term, but also the character of sacrament as well. (2.12, p. 16)120 The action of grace adds to the natural signification of things a further, metaphorical significance by which they show not only, for instance, the goodness of God by their beauty but also God’s special, saving action. Emphasis on the sacraments here may reflect the growing devotion to the Eucharist during the thirteenth century but anchors it in the kind of reading of all things taught by Hugh and theorized also by Aquinas. Of all natural signs, as Augustine had taught, the most meaningful for us is our own minds, the focus of the Itinerarium’s steps 3 and 4. Here again ascent from seeing through to seeing in depends on grasping why we are obscure to ourselves and on receiving restoration through the Word made flesh. For this inward repair of true signification, the given signs of scripture are especially helpful, and Bonaventure explains how scripture’s three spiritual senses facilitate three means of active participation: “the tropological which purifies for righteousness of life; the allegorical which enlightens for clearness of understanding; and the anagogical which perfects through spiritual transports and the most sweet perceptions of wisdom” (4.6, p. 26). Like Hugh’s treatment of the first two spiritual senses of scripture, Bonaventure’s three are a capacious and flexible part of a dynamic process, not merely of making statements that are true according to a representational epistemology, but of restoring signs to their full referentiality by restoring our own spiritual senses, that is, spiritual seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling. Then the sign that is the human mind can refer fully by becoming fully conscious of its participation in the divine. The final chapters deal in paradoxes that resist summary even more than the rest of this gemlike work, but they exemplify the theological use of the enigmatic to press into mystery and bring an acute consciousness

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of the fulfillment of signs in pointing beyond themselves—which is itself one of the ways that Bonaventure points to the fulfillment of persons in the relationality of the Trinity. Chapter 5, moving from speculatio through and in the mind to speculatio through Being as the name of divine unity, dwells first on why the intellect is blind to the Being itself that illuminates it. As in Aquinas, Bonaventure’s therapy for this blindness involves submitting the logic of Aristotelian metaphysics to the Pseudo-Dionysian play of affirmation and negation that makes it work analogically. The sixth step moves further beyond the capacities of natural reason to the mysteries of the Trinity in its name of the Good, which include the sending of the Son and the Spirit. Here Bonaventure reaches the climax of an exegetical image used across this pair of chapters: entry into the Holy of Holies to see the ark described in Exodus 25. He identifies the two cherubim overshadowing the mercy seat as contemplation of God in Being and Goodness, Unity and Trinity, and, at the end of chapter 6, invites the reader to be each of these in turn as they gaze at the mercy seat between them, signifying the incarnate Christ as this divinity joined with humanity in even greater mystery. Bonaventure attaches to this image of presence and absence carefully piled patterns of paradox that play with all the resources of Scholastic Latin. It is like a riddle in reverse, one that gathers into itself all the exposition that has preceded it with maximum linguistic compression in order to await a flash of insight into what is already known. In such a perfect illumination, the one contemplating would be not just an image but a likeness, as the Son is of the invisible God. Bonaventure makes the vision of participation radically Christological. Christ, then, as chapter 7 sets out, is the way and the door by which the mind transcends not only signs but itself. This taking up of humanity into the divine is the ultimate fruit of the ultimate enigma of the taking on of humanity by the divine. Enigma is the most apt term, in medieval Latin or modern English, for the idea of a maximal fullness of meaning that, by its hidden density, points most powerfully beyond itself. Bonaventure evokes the final transport of the mind to rest in God in three different ways, each of which points to a major current of enigmatic discourse in the later Middle Ages. The first is exegetical, what Hugh would call historical and allegorical: a brief recital of how Christ’s passion

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fulfills what is prefigured in the Exodus. This salvation narrative makes it possible for the one contemplating Christ to participate in the same meaningful pattern of a passage into new life. Images of the Red Sea and “hidden manna” might point to the Eucharist as a particular occasion of sharing in this passage. Second, Bonaventure returns to the model of Francis receiving the vision of the seraph fastened to a cross. Third, he describes the relinquishing of all intellectual activity in a transport of the affectus, as taught by William of St. Thierry and Thomas Gallus, and quotes the opening prayer of Denis’s Mystical Theology, given above in the Middle English translation by the Cloud author. Thus he joins the two most enduring sources of theological enigma, exegesis and Denis’s play of affirmation and negation, with a major new one of the late Middle Ages, individual visions. Finally, Bonaventure’s own discourse passes over from a mode of seeing, that is, one dominated by visual metaphors, to one of asking and praying, framed as a dialogue: “If you wish to know how these things may come about, ask grace, not learning; desire, not understanding; the groaning of prayer, not diligence in reading; the Bridegroom, not the teacher; God, not man; darkness, not clarity; not light, but the fire that wholly inflames and carries one into God through transporting unctions and consuming affections” (7.6, p. 39). Affection should perhaps be seen, not to leave knowledge behind, but to thicken it, to make it felt as well as seen, in the way that fire is a fuller sensory experience than just light.121 Bonaventure emphasizes fullness over clarity and the verbal over the visual in another way when he closes by quoting scriptural declarations from Philip, Paul, and David of complete satisfaction in God and then adds a short prayer of his own: “Fiat, fiat. Amen” (So be it . . .). In one sense this anticipates the Cloud’s one-syllable prayers that condense every dimension of one’s spirit. Yet Bonaventure invites not just heartfelt prayer but also a final act of understanding his treatise. He had introduced the three pairs of steps as corresponding, in reverse order, to the formula “Fiat, fecit, et factus est” (“Let it be made, He made it, and it was made”; 1.3, p. 6). Fiat is of course also the word by which God creates in Genesis 1, and Bonaventure’s whole treatise begins with the same phrase as both Genesis and the Gospel of John, “In principio. . . .” Likewise, amen is almost the last word of St. John’s Apocalypse (followed by “Come Lord Jesus”). Thus, in recollecting the whole course of the Itinerarium, Bona-

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venture’s simple prayer recalls the entire biblical narrative and every dimension of sacred history. Both in its content and in its use of Latin prose, the Itinerarium expresses and puts to compact, powerful use the poetics of enigma and the theology that embraces it.

LOOKING TOWARD THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

This genealogy of the theological ideas most important to a distinctively medieval poetics of enigma has followed themes and texts that were important in their own times and remained influential in fourteenthcentury England. In particular, as the chronological detour through the work of the Cloud author was meant to suggest, Denis’s impact has hardly been greater at any other time and place. Toward the later Middle Ages, theologically ambitious uses of enigma shift from Latin to the vernacular and from the genres of theology to those of poetry and mysticism. A signal transition in all these kinds of writing happens between Bonaventure and Dante, who was born nine years before Bonaventure and Aquinas died.122 Changes in the writing of theology, simultaneous with a host of other factors that have to do with the general rise of vernacular literature, left a sort of gap that vernacular literature could fill. And by filling it, this literature gained a new standing and new capabilities that would soon be turned to less obviously theological purposes. Making the transition from classic works in Latin by men writing with great theological authority to highly experimental works in the vernacular by writers lacking any position of authority calls for an attempt to clarify the theological inheritance of the poetics of enigma and how it might relate to fourteenth-century English texts. As a theological idea, the enigmatic might best be defined as a style or practice of language that intensifies spiritual meaning by generating a metaphorical surplus while drawing attention to its inadequacy in the face of what it points to. It thrives within a metaphysics of participation in which words are seen to mediate real relations that follow, in a Christian version, from the creative and restorative action of God. The metaphorical transference from a literal to a figurative sense is seen to be fulfilled in an elevation or restoration of the mind, and this is best empowered not by just any metaphor or allegory but by one that engages the

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cognitive effort and affective desire associated with enigma as rhetoric. In addition, a theology of participation supports a constant renewal of this process by asserting that there is always more significance to be found in the literal sense. The literal is illuminated by the spiritual, which in turn is informed by the literal. The mutually informing relation between the two remains open and productive while working from orthodox principles. Other criteria, such as physical reality of the literal sense or doctrinal correctness of the allegorical, are also required to secure the truth of such insights. What distinguishes enigmatic allegory, however, is the potential for ever-new understanding within the bounds of these criteria. Though the enigmatic significance is in one sense given, it is also always emergent from the equipoise between literal and figurative senses, neither sense taking control of the signifying relation and forcing interpretation to run in only one direction. In the later Middle Ages, three developments steer theology away from the enigmatic mode: specialization, the rise of what would come to be called modern theology, and growing theological pluralism. Specialization, already mentioned, is described by de Lubac as the “explosion of the three disciplines” from the spiritual senses of scripture and, more basically, the separation of theory from practice and experience, so that theology and its subfields are viewed as academic subjects rather than a way of life.123 A tribute to Hugh of St. Victor in Bonaventure’s On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology shows both the continuing vision of a synthesis and the lines along which specialization would divide. Bonaventure recommends, among the fathers, Augustine as the chief teacher for the allegorical sense, Gregory for the moral, and Denis for the anagogical. “Anselm follows Augustine, Bernard follows Gregory, Richard (of St. Victor) follows Denis, for Anselm excels in reasoning, Bernard in preaching, Richard in contemplation, but Hugh, in all three.”124 Growing specialization of the disciplines that Hugh’s Didascalicon had sought to coordinate (including the discipline of the letter that would become philology) enabled greater precision and rigor but discouraged theological writing in Latin that crossed these disciplinary boundaries. Although less specialized exegesis did not come to an end, increasing elaboration and technical terminology tended toward doctrinal didacticism and esoteric inaccessibility.125 Dante’s Commedia marks a shift toward vernacular

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works that use literary means, including the enigmatic, to encompass all of these kinds of theological thinking at once. At the same time, another kind of specialization focused on experience, which could either intensify the enigmatic or pull it toward the esoteric, accompanied the rise of what has been called the new mysticism around 1200. Bernard McGinn identifies several characteristics that define the new mysticism, all of which also apply to enigmatic literary works: a shift of authority away from the clerical elite and especially to women; use of vernacular languages and with them different literary genres, including visions and personification dialogues; and an emphasis on mystical experiences both visionary and bodily. Francis’s vision on Mount Alverna became a paradigm of both kinds of experience. Bonaventure, by casting his whole Itinerarium as a gloss on Francis’s vision, embeds experience in theology while leaving it as a sign of passing beyond. Thus he avoids making it an instance of mere esoteric gnosis, wholly incommunicable to the uninitiated, yet neither does he merely allegorize the vision by replacing it with a conceptual explanation. Bringing exegesis and vision, theology and symbolism together, he writes a kind of treatise that is unclassifiable according to the developing categories of specialized discourse. The result, like a good riddle or poetic image, both opens the mystery of its subject and points to its limitless depths. Nonetheless, an emphasis on experience tends to divorce it from interpretability and therefore from theology.126 Specialization, particularly the application of sophisticated logic, enabled the fourteenth-century emergence of so-called modern theology, the intellectual cutting edge that would sever the relations integral to the theology of participation and the view of the world and of Christian life that goes with it.127 As a result of this and several interrelated factors to be considered in more detail at the beginning of chapter 6 below, a gulf began to open up between the natural, conceived on its own as the realm of reason and science, and the supernatural, conceived over against the natural as the realm of faith, grace, revelation, and theology rather than as the ground of nature’s being. The consequences of these changes for conceptions of God and humanity are often called voluntarism to indicate the focus on will as opposed to intellect or reason. God’s grace takes the form it does simply because God has willed it to be so, and its operation

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is not accessible to reason. It must be believed simply as an act of will, aside from rational persuasion or contemplative understanding, an approach to faith known as fideism. More important, the freedom of God is now conceived of as absolute in an arbitrary sense rather than as part of the transcendental infinity of God’s unity, truth, goodness, and beauty. Likewise, human freedom comes to be seen as the fundamental autonomy of the will, familiar to the modern outlook, rather than as a participation in divine freedom that involves both willing and knowing. Seen in this modern way, divine and human agency tend to be conceived as displacing each other. Whereas the theology of participation, of the creation as the gift of God’s infinite love, had removed the possibility of God being in rivalry with anything that is, voluntarism brings new sophistication to the original human inclination to see God as a rival. Institutional authority, too, comes to be seen less as a means of participation in a cosmic hierarchy and more as something imposed by the collective will of the institution over the autonomous will of the individual. This extrinsic rather than intrinsic view of institutional authority no doubt has to do also with increasing externalization of authority in written documents and the gradual movement away from the “communal, non-individualistic, and authoritarian” orientation of oral cultures.128 When church authorities are seen less as mediators within a hierarchy that participates in divine action and more as human and juridical, church authority also becomes increasingly separate from the authority of scripture itself, now seen more as the voice of God accessible directly to individuals.129 The loss of participation is accompanied, to be sure, by what might be called the discovery of nature and the empowering of individuals, changes that would lead to modern science, political liberty, and even to the opening of literature as an autonomous sphere of individual creativity. Yet perhaps these need not come at the cost of the sense of identity that arises from Aquinas’s metaphysics, as expressed by Balthasar: “It is precisely when the creature feels itself to be separate in being from God that it knows itself to be the most immediate object of God’s love and concern; and it is precisely when its essential finitude shows it to be something quite different from God that it knows that, as a real being, it has had bestowed upon it that most extravagant gift—participation in the real being of God.”130 The poetics of enigma could, in the work of Dante

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or Langland, Julian of Norwich or Catherine of Siena (or, for that matter, John Donne or George Herbert, Bob Dylan or Marilynne Robinson), help critique institutions and express individuality while conserving an ideal of participation in social and cosmic harmony. It would also, in the cultural space left on the secular side of the new chasm, serve the literary exploration, by Chaucer and many others, of immanent, human mystery. Finally, the poetics of enigma enables resistance to the third development, which follows from the previous two: increasing theological pluralism and rivalries between schools of thought. A growing perception of pluralism and division into camps precedes the late fourteenthcentury outbreaks of heresy coming now not from a charismatic fringe, as with the Waldensians, but from the most learned, such as Wyclif and Hus.131 Kathryn Kerby-Fulton has shown how the atmosphere of controversy added “opportunities for the creation of ambiguity” among poets and other authors of “revelatory genres.”132 Enigmatic language holds the great advantage for theology of being able to maintain a productive tension between seemingly opposed concepts or positions that shape much of Christian theology: faith and works, predestination and free will, justice and mercy, divine sovereignty and human agency, understanding and love, concept and experience, contemplation and action, the hierarchical and the individual. These issues have been only at the periphery of this discussion of the participationist theology behind enigma, precisely because this theology does not depend on any particular, doctrinal resolution of them but rather moves beyond the terms of controversy to their resolution in mystery. Part of the appeal and authority that made Augustine’s work a continual resource for a theological synthesis negotiating these tensions was his literary genius as both scriptural interpreter and theological writer. Similar literary skills contributed also to the success of Bonaventure’s rearticulation of the Augustinian synthesis, not just in the Itinerarium but in texts such as his version of a Scholastic summa, the Breviloquium. Aquinas’s alternate version of Augustine’s synthesis does not avail itself of such literary means, but the overall structures of his two great summas, based on Denis’s Neoplatonic theology of the creation proceeding from and returning to God, enact in a different way the theoretical importance of the enigmatic in his work and serve to rise above matters of controversy.133 Debates over theological positions have never

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been lacking, but after the age of the summas, they dominate the theological landscape. Association of theological controversies with ecclesiopolitical rivalries, greater reliance on the tools of logic, and erosion of the metaphysics of participation all contribute to the hardening of theological positions. Piers Plowman, on the other hand, probes theological controversies of its time and uses the poetics of enigma not so much to resolve them as to find a way to move onward within the tensions between them. Two brief discussions of 1 Corinthians 13:12 from closer to Langland’s time and place show the combined effects of specialization, the loss of participation, and theological pluralism in two powerful late medieval trends: affective mysticism and vernacular religious instruction. Neither explicitly opposes the enigmatic style, or the theology of participation behind it, but they show how these can simply drop out in the pursuit of an esoteric mystical experience, on the one hand, or, sharp, didactic, catechetical distinctions on the other. In the chapter on contemplation that ends his Emendatio Vitae, a treatise on spiritual progress beginning with conversion, the hermit and mystic Richard Rolle (ca. 1300–1349) acknowledges the tradition based on reading but sets it aside in favor of an approach, more typical of his works, predicated on a disjunction between natural effort and the supernatural gift of affective experience. The Emendatio Vitae, probably Rolle’s last work in Latin (dated after 1340), survives in over a hundred manuscripts as well as seven independent Latin translations, making it the most popular work of the English mystic who was by far the most widely read through the end of the fifteenth century.134 Its initial division of contemplation into reading, prayer, and meditation resembles Hugh of St. Victor’s but probably comes, like the similar one in the Cloud of Unknowing, from the influential Ladder of Monks by Guido II.135 Rolle prefers instead, however, a focus on joy, sweetness, and song, affective themes found throughout his writings, for which solitude and utter detachment from worldly desires are the requirements. He cites the first part of 1 Corinthians 13:12 to indicate merely the cognitive obscurity that affective experience moves beyond, even at the height of contemplation: “The sight of the soule is taken up and biholdeth gostli thinges as it were in a schadewe and not cleerly. For as long as we gon bi feith we seen not but

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as it were thoruh a mirrour and a liknesse. For thouh the eye of understondinge be bisy for to biholde gostly light, nevertheles the light as it is in itself he may not yit see. And yit he feeleth wel that he hath ben there as longe as he holdeth the savour and the fervour of the light with him.”136 Seeing through a mirror in an enigma is simply a cognitive limit, not a means to a continual deepening of understanding. But feeling is not as limited as sight; the light can be felt but not seen. The next part of the verse appears a couple of pages later, embedded in a quotation from the Song of Songs that uses the language of a kiss to convey the contemplative’s greatest anticipation of eternal consummation: “And therfore for she is so delicatly fed al with inward delices, no wunder thouh she be reised up in desire and seye: ‘Who shal yive me thee, my brother, that I may fynde thee withoute and kisse thee?’ That is: That I mai be departed fro this dedly flesh, and so fynde thee, and seen thee face to face, and be festened to thee withoute ende; ‘and thanne shal no man despise me.’”137 Rolle’s language of ravishment and of a revelation in joy and sweetness that overpasses the limits of reason moves away from active cooperation of reason. Even will and feeling seem passive in much of Rolle’s imagery. The mysticism of the Pseudo-Dionysian treatises tends, as seen above, toward an esoteric focus on cognitive difficulty to the extent of intensifying it in a transcendent suspense—a suspense softened and made more accessible in the practices taught by the Cloud. Rolle, however, gives little place to cognitive difficulty at all. He is not esoteric through excess obscurity—in that sense he is quite populist in minimizing the value of learning. But minimizing the elevating effect of meditation on words and symbols risks an elitism of affective experience reserved for those who also pass a high threshold of purity. Rolle’s own experiments with language, such as the densely alliterative Latin prose of his Melos amoris, have a paradoxically similar effect, according to Bernard McGinn: “Thus, he tries to unsay ordinary language about God and love of God through the strategy of creating a surfeit of words that overwhelm the reader and lead her to a state in which words as signifiers become irrelevant and music is all.”138 A poetics of enigma, by contrast, by deepening and intensifying the significance of each word, each sign, embraces a conjunction between the exercise of mind and heart and, even more, between active interpretive exertion and reception of divine revelation and grace.

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In The Prick of Conscience, a disjunction between divine and human action and between this world and the next leads instead to didactic excess. This nearly ten-thousand-line poem in four-stress couplets, once attributed to Rolle but now thought to have been written by an unknown contemporary, seems to have been the most popular Middle English poem (judging by manuscript survival; The Canterbury Tales is second, Piers Plowman third). It takes to a certain extreme the program of doctrinal instruction initiated by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215—another major driver of specialization in theological writing witnessed abundantly in both Latin and the vernacular, both prose and verse. The Prick, as its name implies, is about motivating confession and obedience. It thus shares Rolle’s affective emphasis more than does, say, a simple treatise on the seven deadly sins, but works by teaching confidently and at great length about the wretchedness of human nature and this world and, especially, about last things: death, purgatory, judgment, the pains of hell, and the joys of heaven. A comment on the vision of God in heaven uses 1 Corinthians 13:12 to express the clarity of contrast that governs this entire text: In this lyfe here men sese him noght Bot anely thurgh ryght trowth in thoght, Als thurgh a myroure by lyknes, Bot thare sall men se him als he es. Here men him sese gastly thurgh grace, Bot thare sall men se him face tyll face, And that syght thare sall all men have Withouten ende, that sall be save.139 The value of the enigmatic for contemplation is elided entirely in favor of doctrinal correctness, “ryght truth in thoght.” This world and its history, sources of hidden meaning under the guidance of scripture for authors from Augustine to Bonaventure, Dante, and Langland, are merely to be despised. The Prick begins, after an invocation of all three Persons of the Trinity, with an easy-to-digest explanation of Trinitarian doctrine and what the creation owes the Creator. Piers Plowman begins with puzzles:

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In a somer sesoun, whanne soft was the sonne, I shop me into shroudes as I a shep were, In abite [habit] as an ermyte unholy of werkis, Wente wyde in this world wondris to here. But on a May morwenyng on Malverne Hilles Me befel a ferly [wonder], of fairie me thoughte. I was wery ofwandrit and wente me to reste Undir a brood bank be a bourne [stream] side; And as I lay and lenide [leaned] and lokide on the watris, I slomeride [slumbered] into a slepyng, it swiyede so merye. Thanne gan {me} mete a merveillous swevene— That I was in a wildernesse, wiste [knew] I nevere where. Ac [But] as I beheld into the est an heigh to the sonne, I saigh [saw] a tour on a toft triyely imakid. . . . (A.Pr.1–14/B.Pr.1–14, cf. C.Pr.1–15) We do not know what kind of poem this is going to be or what kind of authority its narrator claims. His clothing is famously ambiguous: Is he literally wearing wool to signify a choice to become a hermit, like Rolle? Or is he a figurative sheep? Either way, is he sincere, like the audience one imagines for The Prick, or just putting on? These opening lines invite associations with various genres—romance, dream vision, religious allegory—all of which and more will figure, to varying degrees, into the poem’s relentlessly puzzling form. The play of language itself, echoes of the participation of words in the Word, is Langland’s favorite way into truth. That the tower is made “triyely” could be, in addition to puns on words meaning excellently and truly, a reference to the Trinity.140 The doctrine of the Trinity will be everywhere behind the poem’s visions, but approached primarily by analogies drawn from common experience and, in turn, giving it significance. This prologue continues with a rather didactic sorting of the sinners from the righteous, yet it ends with a crowded street scene described without analysis. The B text further complicates questions of judgment by adding, before the street scene, an allegorical drama about royal authority and parliamentary debate, one that cuts close to recent events and controversies and invites more careful reflection, not just on the poem,

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but on history itself. Such engagement with possibilities of how daily realities participate in a theologically meaningful narrative will eventually call forth the poem’s translation and quotation of 1 Corinthians 13:12 in order to name what it is doing and the mode of its authority. The chapters that follow assemble some basic components of the poetics of enigma from which Piers Plowman is constructed, riddle forms and rhetorical principles, and consider examples that illustrate their particular contributions, playfulness and an ideal of persuasion. In both cases, the enigmatic will be pulled in the direction of the didactic on one side and the esoteric on the other—or, perhaps more accurately, will emerge from such prior sorts of play and rhetoric by converting them to a purpose more like participation. Participation will thus remain a guiding principle throughout the coming chapters and will return to prominence in the final two, where the scope of examples will broaden from Piers Plowman to other major medieval works.

RIDDLES E n i g m a a s P l ay

C H A P T E R

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RIDDLING TRADITIONS, PA RT I C I PATO RY P L AY, A N D LANGLAND’S FIRST VISION

It is easy to see why English translators of 1 Corinthians 13:12 have avoided the word riddle. “We see now through a mirror in a riddle” probably sounded too much like a game even before riddling became associated mostly with children. In St. Paul’s time, however, Greek ainigma embraced riddling forms from games to oracles. Christian poets of the Middle Ages, gleaning from classical culture as well as folk tradition, distilled a poetics of enigma that elevates riddling in accord with the theology of participation but retains its playfulness. To see how Langland and other poets adapted long traditions of riddling, a good place to begin is the Plant of Peace, a famous example of Piers Plowman at its enigmatic best. Langland’s dreamer is struggling to understand his first allegorical guide, Holy Church, as she explains the scene of the opening vision: a tower, a dungeon, and a field full of mostly wayward folk in between. Twice he pleads for “kynde knowing,” a pregnant phrase, enigmatic in itself, that will accumulate significance throughout the poem. Usually explained as wisdom or as experiential, intuitive, and affective knowledge, not just theoretical or rational, it is even better understood, I suggest, as 83

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participation in the divine.1 “Kynde” will be a name in the poem for God as active in the natural order of the world. “Kynde wit,” another troublesome term, could be seen as a natural capacity for reason, part of humanity’s latent participation in the divine Logos, finite and fallen but never completely lost. “Kynde knowing,” by contrast, suggests active participation, the full functioning of memory, intellect, and will that make up the divine image in humanity, which is at the same time a cooperation with God’s gift of reason and knowledge. Human “kynde” also includes the body, and the dreamer’s dialogue with Holy Church is particularly concerned with the relation between matter and spirit.2 After the dreamer’s second plea, Holy Church answers that “kynde knowing” is “to lovye thy Lord” and explains: “Love is the plonte of pees, most precious of vertues: For hevene holde hit ne myghte [might not hold it], so hevy hit semede, Til hit hadde of erthe ygoten hitsilve. Was nevere lef uppon lynde [leaf upon linden tree] lyhtere theraftur, As when hit hadde of th{is} folde flesch and blode taken. Tho [Then] was hit portatif [light, mobile] and persaunt [piercing] as the point of a nelde [needle], May noon armure hit lette [stop it] ne none heye walles.”3 Such play with natural images combined incongruously and linked in a narrative is typical of riddles. Though the meaning is told in advance, as in some riddle collections that give the answers as titles, the images here create difficulties that provoke further interpretation. How is the plant first heavy and then light? How is it portable and piercing? Even after one sees that these images refer to the Incarnation and the Resurrection, there is room to explore their metaphoric potential. Are the Harrowing of Hell and the Ascension here too? The image enlivens familiar catechetical knowledge while investing ordinary, natural things with spiritual significance. It presents the incarnation of love in surprising images of embodiment that invite not just understanding but imagination and even an imitation of a vegetable sort of bodily desire.

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The full use of the enigmatic mode as a means to “kynde knowing” seems to have emerged as Langland wrote and revised his poem. In the A text of Piers Plowman, the dreamer makes the same pleas for “kynde knowing” and the answer is to love, but the explanation is much shorter: “For thus wytnessith his woord—werche thou theraftir— That love is the levest [dearest] thing that Oure Lord askith, And ek the plante of pes—preche it in thin harpe Ther thou art mery at mete, yif men bidde the yedde.”4 Yedde here, from Old English gieddian, means “to sing or speak formally or poetically.”5 The context envisioned is a festive meal where riddling might be one of the entertainments expected. It is as if the reference to “the plante of pes” is merely the suggestion of an image upon which to improvise, and it stands out from the rest of Holy Church’s rather sermonic discourse. The B text, however, replaces these lines with a riddling elaboration of the image that is then slightly streamlined in the C version given above. This sequence of revision exemplifies a larger pattern of relations between the three versions. While the A text begins to explore the possibilities of the enigmatic mode (most notably in the tearing of the pardon sent from Truth, discussed below in chapter 5), the B text deploys it much more thoroughly, both in additions like this to the three visions of A and in five more visions that, together, double the poem’s size. The C version then refines some of B’s more venturesome passages but retains the enigmatic mode as a crucial means of reaching the goals of the poem—including “kynde knowing.” It will be the task of later chapters to show how the later versions and later visions of Piers Plowman put the enigmatic mode to further use and draw on other aspects of it besides brief riddles. In this and the following chapter, I aim to recreate the tradition of riddling as it might have been known by Langland and other late medieval authors. This chapter will focus on riddles that survive alone or in riddle collections; the next, on those found in dialogues or other kinds of narratives. Together, these two chapters constitute the first general account of riddling in later medieval England.6 More important here, though, is a larger argument about the enigmatic mode. Among the various forms and functions of riddles in

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evidence, I will emphasize those that lend themselves to a participatory sort of play and cultivate “kynde knowing,” as distinguished from those that serve more didactic or esoteric ends. The next chapter will fill in, from the situations portrayed in medieval riddling dialogues, this chapter’s conclusions, based on broader scholarship and more diffuse evidence, about the functions of riddling. While riddles likely originate in a situation of contest or rivalry, the development of sophisticated, literary forms also enables riddling to be a center of more harmonious participation in a game of interpretation. Before turning in this chapter to surviving medieval riddles, I will draw on studies of riddling by folklorists and anthropologists, theories of orality and literacy, and the etymology of words for riddles to construct a framework for thinking about riddling. The richer, more well-studied evidence of riddles from the Old English period, particularly the Christian rethinking of riddles by Aldhelm, will then set up the search for the truly enigmatic among the scattered survivals of riddles from later medieval England, both in Latin and in English, as well as closer consideration of two fascinating and complex instances of literary riddling embedded in contexts that offer hints of its wider social use: an apocalyptic prophecy from later in the first vision of Piers Plowman and the so-called letters of John Ball written during the Rising of 1381.

ANTHROPOLOGY

The territory of riddles is vast and difficult to delineate. Oral riddling seems to be found in every culture, or nearly so, but those who study it, folklorists and anthropologists, have not been able to agree on a definition of the riddle, much less an understanding of its cultural functions. The one clear line that can be drawn, though even this gets blurry, is between oral riddles, often called folk riddles, and literary riddles.7 Given that all evidence of ancient or medieval riddling is written, even when it reflects an oral situation it shows various degrees of assimilation to literacy. Nonetheless there is enough evidence to indicate pervasive traditions of oral riddling. In medieval Europe, there is a further distinction between vernacular and Latin riddling. While literary riddling is somewhat

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different in Latin than in Old or Middle English (and oral riddling in Latin, if it happened, must have been a special and strange case), the greater differences would have been between oral and literary riddling. Oral riddling seems to function more as a win-or-lose contest than as a means to knowledge. The element of what I will call participatory play that is only incipient in oral riddling can emerge in literary riddling as a focus of shared contemplation. Like any cultural practice, the nature and significance of riddling vary from culture to culture. Widely distributed similarities in surviving riddles, however, show strong continuities across time and place, so that studies based on anthropological observations, modern folklore collections, and ancient texts all have some relevance to the Middle Ages.8 An influential attempt by the folklorists Robert A. Georges and Alan Dundes at a structural definition of the riddle that would span the varieties of riddling shows the limits of an approach based on form: “A riddle is a traditional verbal expression which contains one or more descriptive elements, a pair of which may be in opposition; the referent of the elements is to be guessed.”9 The formal part of this description is admirably minimal and flexible, but what cannot be defined formally is the solicitation of a guess, which may be explicit or contextual and has everything to do with the functions of riddling. A later definition by Dundes and another folklorist, Roger D. Abrahams, focuses instead on intention and context: “Riddles are questions that are framed with the purpose of confusing or testing the wits of those who do not know the answer. They are commonly called forth during ‘riddling sessions’—special occasions during which such witty devices may be used in a properly playful contest situation.”10 Whether folk riddles are meant to be solved by wit or known already, their purpose follows from the social process they are part of. Abrahams writes elsewhere: “It is the riddling process and the riddling conventions and the riddling occasion and the presence of riddlers that produce riddles and cause the group to find enjoyment in the common release of energy, the common celebration attendant on rehearsing principles of order.”11 Folk riddles depend on and reinforce a sense of shared ways of using words and looking at the world. They can be more benign or more threatening depending on the extent to which membership or status in the community of interpretation is at stake.

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Johan Huizinga’s pioneering historical study of what he called the “higher forms” of play distinguished two basic motives: “as contest for something or a representation of something.”12 Riddles are noteworthy for their strong combination of both functions, but one or the other may still come to the fore. Thomas A. Burns summarizes five broad, common functions that anthropologists have found riddles to serve: “(a) in reflecting the cognitive abilities as well as the categories of environmental concern of different peoples; (b) as educational devices to exercise and train the intellect, to instill cultural values and attitudes, and to teach dominance and submission roles; (c) as verbal outlets for aggressive feelings and sexual desires; (d) as devices for mediating conceptual ambiguity and stimulating cognitive reexamination; and (e) in promoting the unity and cohesion of the group.”13 Abrahams notes the educational function but adds that traditional oral riddling “must involve astonishing with accuracy, the criterion by which we are asked to judge an image.” He then synthesizes these two views: “Even where the audience knows the answers and recites them catechetically, the question-and-answer pattern reactivates the sense of wonder at again bringing the diverse elements of the world together, replaying the primal educational scene in which these correspondences and continuities were first dramatized.”14 A shared sense of wonder describes the purpose of oral riddling at its most contemplative. Saveliı Senderovich, on the other hand, citing different anthropological studies, emphasizes the competitive element of riddling found where it is seen as “a merry game, a contest, a team competition, an occasion to obtain membership among ‘the society of knowers,’ or to gain personal prestige as one who knows.”15 While some particular oral contexts may manifest a certain function especially clearly, most no doubt show a mix of them. One classic study of riddling in a culture with a mix of orality and literacy not unlike the later Middle Ages finds no function to be central.16 The functions of knowledge and contest, however, seem to account for the findings of anthropologists and suggest two basic tendencies. The contrast between the psychodynamics of orality and literacy helps to characterize further the tensions in oral riddling and what happens to them when riddling moves to a written medium. Walter Ong cites riddles as an example of what he calls the agonistic tone of oral performance and of oral culture in general: “Proverbs and riddles are not

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used simply to store knowledge but to engage others in verbal and intellectual combat: utterance of one proverb or riddle challenges hearers to top it with a more apposite or contradictory one.”17 At the very least, hearing a riddle face to face cannot help but be felt as a challenge. Oral riddling is often close to, or even a category within, the flyting that is typical of oral cultures and their literature. An agonistic tone long persisted in spheres of learned inquiry even among the literate through training in dialectic and rhetoric.18 At the same time, riddles as a way of knowing often manifest a quite different aspect of orality: “For an oral culture learning or knowing means achieving close, empathetic, communal identification with the known. . . . Writing separates the knower from the known and thus sets up conditions for ‘objectivity,’ in the sense of personal disengagement or distancing.”19 Ong calls this aspect of orality “participatory,” which is not the same as the theology and epistemology of participation considered above in chapter 1 but bears a relation to it. Empathetic, participatory knowledge assumes and experiences—lives within—the connections between knower and what is known that the philosophical idea of participation brings to conscious reflection. Literacy helps enable reflection on such knowledge even as it opens possibilities for more objectively distanced knowing. The participatory aspect of riddling knowledge also has to do with the social participation mediated by riddling as a means of sharing not just a set of riddles and answers but a common world, a common language, and common ways of playing with the relationship between the two. Participatory knowledge in this social sense (though Ong does not use the term in this way) involves the group solidarity that oral riddling has often been found to promote. Participation in both senses, in the life of what is known and in the community of fellow knowers, can come to the fore as the agonistic dimension of riddling recedes. Literary riddling prolongs, deepens, and reorients the participatory kind of knowing inherited, as it were, from oral culture, and can do so in part because it distances riddling from the agonistic climate of orality and in part also because it is able to make more sustained use of literary figures such as prosopopoeia (making things speak). Whether as contest or knowledge, oral or literate, riddling’s effects can be either violent or reconciling. In general, as Ong points out, “Oral communication unites people in groups. Writing and reading are solitary

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activities that throw the psyche back on itself.”20 Riddling as contest can unite a group in a “merry game” but can also mark boundaries between those who know and those who do not. Riddling as a way of knowing reinforces community among those who share the same ways of playing the game. When this community of knowledge is formed by exclusion, riddling becomes more didactic or esoteric and less enigmatic. In medieval theology, as argued above in chapter 1, enigma designates a means of entering contemplatively and to some degree consciously into a theology of participation. Considered more anthropologically—on the social, horizontal dimension—the kind of riddling associated during the Middle Ages with the term enigma promotes an open, shared, noncompetitive playing at knowledge from which contemplative participation can arise. It activates riddling’s capacity to divide insiders from outsiders in order to subvert and transcend it. René Girard’s mimetic theory offers an anthropological model for understanding the power of riddles to fascinate and the relational dynamics that make riddling tend toward the exclusivity of the didactic and esoteric—why human communities tend toward exclusion and how unnatural, in a sense, enigmatic inclusivity is. Yet the same model also helps illuminate how contemplation can emerge from competition. The enigmatic possibility works from the same underlying structure of desire that tends toward competition and is always vulnerable to being swallowed up again by it. Mimetic theory explains the origins and evolution of many aspects of culture through the operation of two dynamics: mimetic desire and scapegoating.21 The idea of mimetic desire locates the main source of human violence, and the scapegoat mechanism accounts for the development of cultural institutions, beginning with religion, as ways of managing this violence. Riddling can play a role within these dynamics, but it also brings them within language so as to play with them and, potentially, redirect desire away from violence. Mimetic theory posits that all desire, beyond bodily appetites, is formed mimetically, that is, by unconscious imitation of another’s desire. If the object is finite and the model close at hand, mimetic desire leads to rivalry between subject and model. Think of two children in a room full of toys fighting over the same one. There are many permutations of this basic, triangular structure of desire. The model being imitated often becomes an obstacle to acquiring the object, which further enflames de-

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sire and leads to the subject’s fascination with the model/obstacle—what Girard calls scandal (following the usage of the Greek term for a stumbling block in the Gospels).22 The rival may eclipse the object, so that desire shifts from the initial object to the being of the model. Wanting what someone has becomes wanting to be that someone, especially if that someone was already prestigious, that is, a model and object of others’ desire. Objects of mimetic desire need not be tangible—indeed, rivalry is often subtler and more intense when the object is something intangible, like honor or being part of an inner ring. The dynamics of mimetic desire and rivalry are at work in riddling and within riddles themselves. A riddle attracts attention, like a toy, and invites rivalry. To pose a riddle is to model both a desire to know and a desire to be one of those who know. Even apart from an oral situation, a riddle contains a model of desire by pointing to a solution. At the same time, the blocking element of riddles serves as an obstacle that frustrates and fascinates, thus increasing desire—something other forms of language such as prohibitions can also do. Jeremiah Alberg suggests that all language is scandalous in this sense.23 The potential for language to block what it points to grows when writing removes it from an oral situation. Riddling anticipates this textual effect, and literary riddling intensifies it. The fascination of riddling can seduce an audience away from other desires and rivalries but can also trap listeners or readers in a new rivalry and leave them fixated on the divide between knowing and not knowing, between insiders and outsiders. At its most enigmatic, however, riddling points to knowledge that cannot be simply possessed but asks to be played with in the company of other players. Mimetic desire is not necessarily violent. Indeed, the human capacity for imitation, the ability to choose a model, frees us from being driven by appetite and programmed by instinct. Mimetic desire can avoid rivalry if its object is sharable and the model is not rivalrous. The enigmatic brings this positive kind of mimesis into language by pointing, ultimately, to an infinite object and by beginning a game of interpretation that can be continued indefinitely without rivalry. Such positive mimesis is crucial to participation in both the vertical, theological dimension and the horizontal, social one. If the goal of the poetics of enigma is serene participation, the hook of riddling is a necessary risk that poses the continual threat of devolving into rivalry, or worse. Riddles, as both models and

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obstacles for the desire to know, capture attention that can then, as evidence of the social functions of riddling suggests, be directed toward winning a contest or toward an object of knowledge contemplated through the veils of language. As a means of nonviolent participation, the enigmatic is always swimming against a tide of violence that structures social order, including riddling, in a way that mimetic theory explains through its second principle, the scapegoat mechanism. Mimetic rivalry tends to escalate until it threatens to swallow entire communities. Scapegoating emerges in human prehistory as a means of avoiding this fate by directing violence, spontaneously and mimetically, against a marginal member of the community, who is blamed for it. Persecuting this victim brings about a temporary unanimity. As the community repeats this pattern, it gives rise to sacrificial ritual and all the other features of primitive religion, as well as later aspects of social order such as legal systems. Misremembering victims as gods who both deliver and threaten covers over the original violence and gives rise to myths, which serve to underwrite further scapegoating violence. All of human culture, then, comes from violence made sacred, that is, more and more sophisticated means of forming solidarity through exclusion and persecution and the projection of human violence onto divinities.24 Girard has noted the use of riddles as a means for randomly designating sacrificial victims.25 Surely it is no accident that obscure language gathers around the sacred. Much of the earliest, scattered evidence of riddling and other kinds of intentionally obscure language suggests a primarily esoteric function that helps produce the sacred.26 Continued dynamics of inclusion and exclusion for the sake of reaffirming social boundaries can be seen in many of the functions anthropologists have found in oral riddling, and literary riddling does the same when it tends toward the didactic or esoteric. The enigmatic, on the other hand, is an element of literature’s larger potential to bring scapegoating to light and redirect the scandalizing capacity of language toward forming a different sort of community. The story of Oedipus, particularly as retold in tragic form by Sophocles, pulls the curtain back partway on the process of mythic concealment and gives riddling a dual role of both managing violence and enabling deliverance.27 The fateful and enigmatic prophecy that Oedipus would

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kill his father and marry his mother reflects, according to Girard, an accusation like those made against victims of scapegoating, regardless of actual guilt. Indeed, the Oedipal triangle depicted by the prophecy hints at the structure of mimetic desire and rivalry. Both the Sphinx and the plague in Thebes signify the crisis that results from escalating mimetic violence. The prophecy then serves to designate Oedipus as the victim the city needs to restore solidarity. Yet, of course, Oedipus has previously delivered both the city and himself, temporarily, by solving the Sphinx’s riddle. The category of riddles that folklorists call neck-riddles shows a similar ambiguity. These riddles are embedded in stories in which someone saves his or her own neck by proposing a riddle that cannot be answered because it depends on particular circumstances known only to the riddler. Many of these riddles themselves hinge on an image of life coming from death. Classic in both respects is the riddle proposed by Samson in Judges 14:14, “Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness,” referring to bees and a honeycomb that he found in the mouth of a lion he had killed. In neck-riddles, the death is often explicitly sacrificial, so that something has given its life for the sake of life.28 In one sense, then, neck-riddles take to an extreme the agonistic situation of oral riddling and perhaps even indicate the use of riddles in prior acts of sanctioned violence that had a pacifying effect. On the other hand, neck-riddles save victims from death and point to the potential for riddles to defer or defuse violence.29 The capacity for the enigmatic to redirect rivalry away from violence is clearer in the etymology Girard finds behind the Gospels’ use of the term parable: “Paraballo means to throw the crowd something edible in order to assuage its appetite for violence, preferably a victim, someone condemned to death. Obviously, this is a way out of a very difficult situation. The speaker has recourse to a parable—that is, a metaphor—in order to prevent the crowd from turning on him.”30 The parable, another term borrowed into Latin from Greek, was commonly linked to the enigma by medieval biblical commentators.31 Like Gospel parables, riddles can engage an audience in an act of interpretation that displaces the impulse to violence. The poetics of enigma risks fixation on inclusion and exclusion for the sake of, instead, deferring violence and forming

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community differently around an infinite game of interpretation. This too is a mimetic process in which the desire being imitated leads beyond rivalry to a shared process of understanding—the anthropological, human side of the theology of participation. Evidence in the history of words for riddles shows an awareness of such an alternative, one developed by medieval Christian authors of riddles and riddle contests and, above all, by Langland.

ETYMOLOGY

A similar tension between contest and knowledge and between exclusion and interpretative play can be seen in the history of words for riddles in European languages and the particular forms of riddling associated with them. In addition to aenigma, Latin has two less common words for riddle, scirpus and griphus (plus related words such as problema and ambages that can be used in a similar sense, particularly in a literary context). The second-century Roman judge Aulus Gellius, in one of the rare discussions of riddling to be found in classical Latin, gives scirpus, a native word meaning basket-rush, as a synonym for aenigma.32 More common than scirpus, though, is griphus, which, like aenigma, is borrowed from Greek. The figurative sense of both scirpus and Greek griphos probably comes from the intricacy of weaving patterns (as does the Latin root of English text ).33 Greek ainigma, by contrast, derives from ainos, a fable, by way of a sense of hidden meaning.34 Etymologically, then, there is a contrast in the Greek origins of the Latin words for riddle between an emphasis on puzzling form in the case of griphus and scirpus and depth of meaning in the case of aenigma. Usage of these terms also suggests a long-standing perception of two different tendencies in classical riddling, toward after-dinner gaming on one hand and oracular significance on the other.35 To take a late example, the witty fourth-century Latin poet Ausonius wrote a “Griphus on the Number Three,” which has nothing to do with guessing an answer but instead demonstrates literary trivia cleverly woven into verse. Ausonius’s prefatory letter places the composition of the poem in a scene of drinking, and a single Christian reference at the end to the Trinity follows a command to “Thrice drink!” Within the griphus, however, he refers to

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the triple “aenigma” of the Sphinx, probably the most well-known classical riddle.36 Similarly, the longest treatment of riddles to survive in ancient Greek, in book 10 of Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae (ca. 200 CE), is framed as a discussion of griphos “that will give us a brief interval, at least, away from our cups.” Its definition of griphos, from the lost work On Riddles by Clearchus, specifies the function as contest: “A riddle is a problem put in jest, requiring, by searching the mind, the answer to the problem to be given for prize or forfeit.” Next it gives Clearchus’s classification of seven kinds of griphos, which have to do with various tricks for manipulating letters and syllables, and his penalty for failing to answer: “Drink the cup.” Athenaeus’s examples draw largely on comic poets, yet his speakers also refer to poets writing “enigmatically” by using metaphor, and they use the term ainigma for certain specimens such as, again, the riddle of the Sphinx.37 In both Greek and Latin, then, the two terms seem to share a common core, the kind of riddle that Athenaeus says “is most closely related to the true nature of the riddle (griphos),” such as “What is it that we all teach but do not know?” (Answer: the possession of souls).38 But the griphus is most at home around the banquet table and includes various kinds of problems, even mathematical ones or those based on literary trivia. Ausonius and Aulus Gellius as well as Petronius in his Satyricon and, as we will see below, the important riddle collection by Symphosius all give evidence that such riddling for entertainment continued in the Roman world.39 The native habitat of Greek ainigma, on the other hand, was more serious, even a matter of life and death, as in the case of the Sphinx. Her riddle, “What goes on four feet, two feet, and three feet, but remains the same,” perhaps qualifies as an ainigma also because it invites reflection on the course of a human life, in particular that of its solver, Oedipus.40 Plato writes in the Timaeus that seers, in a mantic state, see riddles (ainigmoi) and visions that others are appointed to explain.41 Among the examples with which Athenaeus uses the word ainigma are a series of proverbs attributed to Pythagoras, such as “Poke not the fire with a knife,” that is, “Wrangle not with an angry man.”42 A proverb is akin to a riddle in its use of metaphor, but differs from a griphos in meaningfulness. Whereas a griphos tries to deceive, an ainigma asks to be understood, so that guessing an ainigma depends on general ingenuity or a lucky insight, while a griphos instead tests memory and technique.43

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Both provoke a conscious experience of interpretive difficulty through means of simultaneously concealing and revealing, but a griphos succeeds by keeping hidden, while an ainigma lives through its power to reveal. A griphos is a guessing game with a definite end, while an ainigma, because it depends not on tricks but on playing with the relations between language and reality, opens up contemplation that is potentially endless. In later antiquity, ainigma came to be especially associated with myth as an esoteric source of higher truth, whether treated with suspicion by an author like Plutarch or with expectation in the Neoplatonists.44 The English word riddle has shifted toward the sense of a puzzle, like the Greek griphos, since enigma became current in the modern period, but its medieval origin and use manifest an old connection between riddling, reading, and interpretation in general. Riddle comes from read by adding the same suffix that makes burial from bury. Middle English pronunciation, as shown by the most common spellings, redels and rede, would have kept the connection more apparent. Indeed, the phrase “to rede redels,” which Langland puts into the mouth of his character Clergie, was a common Middle English idiom.45 In Middle English, the semantic range of read included not only the operations of literacy but the giving and taking of counsel, guiding and governing, and discerning or expounding the meaning of things like dreams, parables, and riddles.46 The connection between riddles and literacy, then, goes back to a world in which both had to do with a larger sense of sage mastery that involved seeing into mysteries. The word riddle itself is used in a Wycliffite sermon to mean “a religious mystery”: “mo redelis than we can tell ben soth of Crist bi his two kindis.”47 The etymology of riddle, then, manifests again the multiple, ambiguous functions of riddles, in this case as a means of guarding access to knowledge and power and of entering into contemplation.

BISHOP ALDHELM RESHAPES CLASSICAL RIDDLING

If anthropology and etymology take us as close as possible to oral riddling and the beginnings of its transition to literacy, the Latin enigmata of Aldhelm are all the way at the other extreme of highly literary riddling that shows a thorough Christian appropriation of classical learning. While

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clearly meant to display and challenge wit, these riddles are explicitly intended for friendship rather than contest. Although they often teach doctrine, Aldhelm expresses a deeper goal of turning literary devices to the purpose of something like participatory play. And though they were almost certainly unknown in the fourteenth century, their influence earlier in the Middle Ages was great. Many other enigmatic authors would follow Aldhelm’s lead. Born around 635, roughly when the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex converted to Christianity, Aldhelm is one of the shadowy geniuses of the so-called Dark Ages, harvesting the fruits of classical and patristic learning, much of which would soon be lost, and planting the seeds of a Christian cultural renewal. He became the first abbot of Malmesbury and served as bishop of Sherborne for a few years before his death in 709 or 710. How he gained his “astonishing breadth of learning” remains something of a mystery, but he spent at least some time in Canterbury at the school of Abbot Hadrian, whom Archbishop Theodore had brought with him from Italy.48 Aldhelm’s works, including his collection of one hundred enigmata, became a staple of the Anglo-Saxon curriculum, and his influence on medieval literary endeavor extended to the Continent in succeeding generations through the missionary work of Boniface and the educational program established by Alcuin of York at the court of Charlemagne.49 The Enigmata began a vogue for riddling evident in other collections of Latin riddles, three by later Anglo-Saxon authors and two from the Continent, as well as in the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book.50 Two Exeter Book riddles are translations from Aldhelm, and, for all we know, Aldhelm himself may have written some of these English riddles. Though no vernacular poetry survives under his name, he had a great reputation for it. The historian William of Malmesbury recounts that Aldhelm pretended to be a minstrel and sang from the bridge in Malmesbury. As people began to come in crowds, he “gradually inserted the words of Scripture into his ballads and so brought the people back to their senses.”51 His enigmata and the treatise into which they are inserted as a set of examples articulate a rare degree of self-consciousness about literary principles as he adapts traditions of literary riddling to the kind of contemplation and formation of peaceful community that enact the theology of participation.

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Aldhelm’s Enigmata begins with a verse preface that pointedly invokes the aid of the Christian God, rather than classical sources of inspiration, “to lay out things’ / clandestine mysteries through spoken verse.”52 A. M. Juster’s translation of enigmata here as “mysteries” emphasizes that Aldhelm writes riddles not so much to create verbal puzzles as to represent the mysteries inherent in the created world. This is not to say that Aldhelm’s style is not puzzling. Indeed, he is the founder of what has been called the “hermeneutic” style in Anglo-Saxon Latin because of its difficult vocabulary and constructions. But here, as throughout his works, interpretive difficulty seems meant to serve a contemplative engagement with the meaning instilled by their Creator in things themselves.53 Since the answers to the riddles are given as titles, the guessing game gives way to another aspect of reading riddles. Here is number 76, “Apple-Tree,” in a translation that removes the difficulties presented by Aldhelm’s Latin: Our newborn race was fortunate at first Until The Devil’s cunning made it cursed. I caused the ancient fall from innocence; I gave sweet apples to fresh immigrants. Behold, I witnessed Earth’s renewed salvation When, spread on wood, the Judge of every nation (and Thunder’s Holy Son) paid reparation.54 Many of Aldhelm’s riddles turn on transformations, such as snow that doesn’t melt in the fire but becomes hard (flour from a sieve becomes bread, numbers 67 and 70). They also often involve linguistic play, but this too pertains to the mysteries of things through the medieval fascination with etymology whereby relations between words become clues to what things really are.55 The apple tree riddle, however, names a transformation that is not natural or linguistic but historical and theological. It does not just point to the apple tree but makes it witness to the participation of all trees in the Christian drama of sin and grace through sharing the form of both the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of the cross. Later enigmatic texts, such as Langland’s Plant of Peace passage, build on the tradition of seeing doctrine through the figure of a tree. Mercy, one of the daughters of God who appears at the climax of Piers

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Plowman, cites the same theological fact as part of her explanation of the Atonement: “And that was tynt [lost] thorugh tree, tree shal it wynne” (B.18.140/C.20.142).56 Such enigmatizing stands in great contrast to the riddling known from the late classical world, as Aldhelm was quite aware. While introducing his own Enigmata, Aldhelm invites comparison to his most direct predecessor: “For we read that Symphosius, a skillful poet, taking up meager subject matter, composed hidden propositions of riddles in playful language and completed every single set of propositions in just three lines.”57 The one hundred, late classical (ca. 400?) enigmata of Symphosius make up by far the most influential collection of riddles from antiquity: various versions of the popular story of Apollonius King of Tyre contain as many as ten of these riddles; Alcuin paraphrases seven in his Disputatio with Pippin; and they are a separate influence on the Exeter Book riddles along with Aldhelm and, perhaps, some of the Latin riddle collections that follow him.58 Symphosius served Aldhelm and others as a model for the number of riddles in a collection and also, it seems, for the convention of giving the answers to their riddles as titles. Aldhelm’s praise of Symphosius, however, draws attention more to the differences between their works than to the similarities. For one thing, rather than keeping to a consistent three lines, Aldhelm’s riddles vary from four lines to a final riddle of eighty-three lines. Symphosius does not ascribe any symbolic importance to his three-line form; its repeated compression is merely, from Aldhelm’s perspective, a platform for verbal dexterity. Aldhelm, on the other hand, lets the nature of his subject dictate the length of his treatment. The subject of his final, eighty-three-line riddle, for instance, is the whole “Creation.” For Aldhelm, this difference in form seems to correspond to a difference in purpose. Symphosius’s “ordinary subject matter” contrasts with Aldhelm’s stated aim to open the mysteries of things. The riddles of Symphosius are about simple things of this world, both natural and artificial, treated in a this-worldly fashion. Aldhelm’s subjects sometimes go beyond this world, but even when they are animals, plants, weather conditions, and artifacts, like those of Symphosius, the manner of treatment is far different.59 Here is Symphosius’s riddle on “Apple,” which may have inspired Aldhelm’s “Apple-Tree”: “The name for sheep in Greek, the cause of great strife among the goddesses, the guile of the girded youth, the care

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of many sisters, the destruction of Troy what time I brought to an end bloody wars.”60 Mythological references are actually unusual for Symphosius, who depends more on wordplay, as in the first phrase here, and clever descriptions of observable features. But even when his riddles draw on learned lore, they remain mostly demonstrations of cleverness in concision, style, and versifying.61 Symphosius’s “Apple” perhaps implies something about human conflict, but not with the grave, revelatory clarity of Aldhelm’s “Apple-Tree.” Symphosius’s riddles are artifacts to be admired; Aldhelm’s are windows into the nature of the world. In his verse preface, Symphosius tells us that he made his riddles as part of an after-dinner contest of wit by versifying others’ contributions. He thus places them in the context of gaming seen, for example, in Ausonius’s “Griphus on the Number Three.” “Pardon, reader,” he adds, “the indiscretions of a tipsy Muse.”62 Aldhelm’s reference to Symphosius’s “playful language” seems meant to distinguish his own purpose from this kind of recreation. Aldhelm is playful too, but his performance aims not so much to win admiration as to invite wonder. Aldhelm draws particular attention to prosopopoeia, making things speak, as a feature of riddling he shares with Symphosius but redirects from mere literary play to the theology of participation. He traces this figure of speech to the Bible rather than classical sources, with two examples from the Psalms, one from 2 Kings 14, and an important one of speaking trees from Judges 9.63 One further example comes from the definition of aenigma as a figure of speech a medieval student would likely have encountered, in the grammar textbook called the Ars major by Donatus (fourth century CE): “My mother bore me, then the same was born from me” (ice and water; see further below, chapter 4, the section “Grammar”). For one firmly in the patristic tradition of seeing elementary, secular education as useful preparation for higher spiritual understanding, this would have been a friendlier classical authority than Symphosius’s “tipsy Muse.” Peter Dale Scott has drawn attention to Aldhelm as “the first poet to bring systematically together two different traditions: the formalism and enigmatic playfulness” of late antique verse such as that of Symphosius, which breathes the air of the schoolroom, and “the enigmatic seriousness of the Old Testament’s prophetic discourse, where the fact in all its majestic obscurity . . . is nonetheless potentially a concrete

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or typological portent.”64 In Aldhelm’s biblical examples, such as Psalm 97:8, “The rivers shall clap their hands, the mountains shall rejoice together,” prosopopoeia is one expression of a larger biblical vision of a cosmos animated by participation in the saving justice of God. The Enigmata translates this vision into the highly cultivated idiom of Latin verse while losing nothing of its capacity to reveal grandeur in the ordinary. By making his apple tree speak, like those in Judges 9, Aldhelm allows readers to join it as participant observers of salvation history. Aldhelm’s understanding of the capacity of aenigma, like that of all medieval authors, was no doubt shaped by Jerome’s usage in the Vulgate Old Testament. In translating the Hebrew scriptures, Jerome avoids using aenigma to refer to Samson’s neck-riddle.65 Instead he calls it a problema (five times) or a propositio (twice), even though each time the Hebrew term he translates is chidhah, which elsewhere is the word he translates (except in one case) as aenigma. He reserves aenigma instead for contexts that have to do with wisdom and prophecy.66 Thus Jerome applies to a single Hebrew word the classical distinction between aenigma and other terms for riddle—one that is, indeed, close to the distinction between enigma and riddle in modern English. Aldhelm also cites a single Greek antecedent, Aristotle, “keenest of philosophers,” who, he says, “relying on the eloquence of prose, adduces as proof no less obscure enigmas.”67 Aldhelm’s likely source here is again Jerome, who mentions Aristotle as one of those who preserved the proverb-like enigmas of Pythagoras that Athenaeus also cites.68 This classical reference, like the biblical ones, distances Aldhelm from Symphosius with its sense of enigma’s substance, its worthiness of the true leisure of contemplation that Aristotle distinguishes from mere amusement in book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics—a text that Aldhelm probably did not know, but that would become important to the later Middle Ages especially through Aquinas’s use of it.69 The rapid movement of the collection’s themes from, for example, fate to the Pleiades to diamond to dog to bellows (numbers 7 through 11) gives a taste of the playful seriousness of these riddles, but the concluding one on the creation shows Aldhelm at his most expansive. One of two Aldhelmian riddles translated in the Exeter Book, it is built out of antitheses that schematically articulate the simultaneous affirmation and

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negation by which the creation manifests the Creator. Some lines taken almost at random: Behold! I see God’s secrets down through sky Yet under land foul Hell attracts my eye; I lived before time, older than the Earth. Behold! My mother’s womb begets my birth, More gorgeous than gold amulets that glitter, More gross than thorns, more vile than low-tide litter. Behold! I’m wider than the limits of earth’s lands, Yet can be held within a person’s hands.70 With its answer given in advance, the riddle becomes a meditation built on the principle that the created world combines images that reflect the divine and others that show the distance between God and creation. This is the interplay of affirmation and negation associated especially with the term enigma by theologians after Augustine. A similar antithesis is applied to the riddle itself in its closing lines: Believers: note my words that seem arcane (Which skilled speech teachers hardly could explain), And yet no doubting reader thinks them lame. I ask the windbag scholars for my name.71 The riddle is both beneath and beyond learned exposition. Alluding perhaps to 1 Corinthians 1:17–29, Aldhelm implies that like the Gospel itself his riddle’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom. This is the only one of his riddles to close with a demand for an answer, and it implies that all of them are addressed to belief even more than to wit. Play with words serves the serious purpose of contemplation by means of a participatory identification with things and the mysteries they manifest. The image Aldhelm’s long riddle builds up of creation as an image of the Creator anticipates Langland’s portrayal of Kynde, and his reflection on riddling as a kind of knowledge is akin to Langland’s “kynde knowing.” Aldhelm’s arrangement of the riddles in his collection may also be ordered toward contemplation. Mercedes Salvador-Bello has mounted

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a strong case that groupings of riddles within it reflect the principles of cosmological order made authoritative for the Middle Ages by Isidore of Seville’s seventh-century encyclopedia called Etymologiae. Some pairs of riddles suggest juxtapositions that correspond to larger patterns, like those catalogued within the “Creation” riddle. Others illustrate categories within the overall scheme of the creation or the allegorical significance of its parts. Thus the apple tree riddle is followed by one on the fig tree that continues the allusion to the Fall in Eden and is also part of a larger botanical sequence. The encyclopedic background implies a function Salvador-Bello calls didactic, but even Isidore invites contemplating each thing in light of a larger order of significance. Recasting such knowledge in a riddle collection, with the relationships between riddles as a larger web of signification, enhances the enigmatic, rather than merely didactic, value of the exercise. Similar principles of structure in riddle collections influenced by Aldhelm show later audiences playing the same game.72 Though they often circulated separately, and may have been composed separately, Aldhelm included his enigmata in a long letter to one “Acircius,” almost certainly the learned King Aldfrith of Northumbria, who was his godson. The riddles are situated between two lengthy treatises on poetic meter, which, he says in the introduction to the Enigmata, are meant in part to explain them.73 As much as Aldhelm is dressing up his treatments of the numbers and composition of various meters with clever examples, his riddles are clearly much more than stylistic exercises in decorating with the trope aenigma. The rest of the letter helps explain his intentions further. It begins with an extended consideration of the significance of the number seven, primarily in the Bible but also in connection with the seven arts.74 The subject is treated as inexhaustible, a matter of Old Testament mysteries revealed in the New, which in turn presents its own mysteries, including the gifts of the Holy Spirit, to which Aldhelm ascribes the success of his own literary efforts. Introducing one of the metrical treatises, he says he will discuss the twenty-eight (four times seven) “regular metrical feet.”75 Elsewhere, in another of his letters, Aldhelm calls the metrical art itself a “sevenfold discipline” of “letters, words, feet, poetic figures, verses, accents, and rhythms.”76 A more basic connection between numerology, metrics, and the Enigmata, however, lies in the medieval aesthetic founded on Wisdom 11:21, “Thou hast

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ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight.”77 Number was seen as a universal form that mediated the metaphysics of participation as far back as Pythagoras and Plato and throughout the Middle Ages.78 Aldhelm joins the metrical treatises to the Enigmata, then, “in order that the theory behind these things [i.e., the riddles] should be more clearly apparent.”79 The mathematical ordering of words in them represents and brings to awareness the hidden order of creation, just as the meanings of the words point to the meaning of creation. Such contemplation, however, is, in the widest context of the Letter to Acircius, subordinated to another dimension of earnest play: friendship. Aldhelm concludes his discourse on the number seven, and prefaces his introduction to the Enigmata, by stressing that he is sending this material for the sake of renewing a relationship that is vulnerable to time and distance. Indeed, he implies that the difficulty of his style, in particular, is meant to help build a spiritual “bond of unbroken charity.” He places himself in an apostolic tradition of using highly figured writing to maintain a spiritual relationship over distance. After quoting Romans 5:4–5, “And patience trial; and trial hope; and hope confoundeth not: because the charity of God is poured forth in our hearts, by the Holy Ghost, who is given us,” he pauses to note that Paul is using the “concatenated style” that the Greeks call climax.80 In the section of the letter that follows the riddle collection, he sets this overall aim in a different light again by urging that he has written these things “with the greatest sweat and toil” so that “they might be examined and considered without the grind of sweat and toil” and so that Aldfrith might not allow his mental gifts “to be neglected in the idleness of sluggish leisure [torpentis otii ].”81 That is, he invites his reader into a space of interpretation that he distinguishes both from the labor of writing through which he has built it and from “sluggish leisure,” such as the drinking party where Symphosius began his riddles—or, perhaps, the Northumbrian king’s mead hall. Because this space of strenuous but playful contemplation is shared between author and reader, it becomes also a space of communion in love.82 Aldhelm’s riddles serve not just to demonstrate metrical forms but to draw his reader’s attention into playful participation in the meaning of things and the renewal of friendship across distance. Thinking of King Aldfrith retiring from his Northumbrian mead hall, with its boisterous and bawdy games, to ponder the riddles sent by

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his mentor suggests the spectrum along which medieval authors of the enigmatic worked. The riddle as a form is almost unique for traversing such distance from the purely oral to the elaborately literate. Aldhelm’s Christian vision accentuates the more literary capacities of riddling. He converts the challenge of contest and the threat of exclusion into an occasion for contemplation and community. His Enigmata would have many imitators, both immediate and at great remove, including some vernacular authors who would seek to combine his kind of literate participation with the oral power of the mother tongue.83

PARTICIPATORY PLAY IN THE EXETER BOOK

Though the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book were, like Aldhelm’s enigmata, unknown during the Middle English period, they deserve consideration here, not just because they testify to his influence, but even more because they have been the major focus of scholarly attention to the enigmatic mode in the Middle Ages. They are splendid examples of participatory play, invigorated by cross-fertilization between oral and literary, vernacular and Latin, humble and learned traditions.84 Their gnomic power is evident in the only riddle that appears twice in the collection (with slight variation): Ic eom legbysig, lace mid winde, bewunden mid wuldre, wedre gesomnad, fus forðweges, fyre gebysgad, bearu blowende, byrnende gled. Ful oft mec gesiþas sendað æfter hondum, þæt mec weras ond wif wlonce cyssað. Þonne ic mec onhæbbe, ond hi onhnigaþ to me monige mid miltse, þær ic monnum sceal ycan upcyme eadignesse.85 [I am troubled by fire, play with the wind, wound with glory, gathered in good weather, ready for the way forward, burned by fire, a blooming grove, a burning ember.

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Very often companions send me along hands, so that splendid men and women kiss me. When I raise myself up, and many bow down to me with mildness, there for men I will increase a rising of blessedness.] The widely accepted answer is “tree” or “beam,” either of which in Old English could mean a tree as well as cut lumber or something made from it such as, here, a cup and a cross or perhaps a harp.86 There are two kinds of play going on here: play with the fit between language and reality and what Williamson calls the “projective play” of these riddles, in which we are invited to identify imaginatively with the objects that speak them.87 That is, like the riddles of Aldhelm, this one invites two kinds of heightened consciousness, both of language and of the world it refers to. Even more than in Aldhelm, prosopopoeia here calls forth the capacity to project oneself into the life of things. In this light, some of the opening phrases become particularly self-reflexive. The speaker “plays,” as a riddle does, “with wind,” which is also breath. It is immersed in its environment, as riddles invite us to make ourselves one with parts of ours. And it is “wound with glory” as are both world and reader in a process Williamson describes well: “The riddler invites us to witness a lyric epiphany as we see the world of our own shaping and realize that flesh is spirit embodied; spirit, symbolizing flesh. Riddlic poetry brings us to this recognition—we shape the Other and in shaping, embody the Self. Without meeting the creature, we are locked in the prison of reified categories and recognized truth. To grow beyond the known we must enter the riddlic world of unrecognizable shapes and make them ours.”88 While glory is a given attribute of the tree, it is also a product, here and throughout the Exeter Book riddles, of riddling play that clothes the world afresh. Part of this riddle’s appeal to the monks who made the Exeter Book, with its preponderance of poems on Christian themes, no doubt rests in its closing image of honoring a cross.89 Such piety need not conflict with “projective play” but rather extends it in a religious dimension. To use instead the term participatory for this kind of play relates it to the philosophical and theological concept of participation. Aldhelm’s apple tree riddle views theological participation from above, as it were, in which the form of a tree is taken up into the drama of salvation stretching from Fall

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to Atonement. The Old English tree riddle, on the other hand, enters the life of individual trees more from below, seeing their glory in the drama of the natural world before imagining their potential to gain meaning as part of the human and spiritual life-world. The great Old English poem The Dream of the Rood combines both of these perspectives and uses the enigmatic mode to enter into the mysteries of the Atonement even more fully.90 In the Old English tree riddle, the sense of mystery also arises from the contrasts that organize it: fire and wind, blossom and ember, cup and cross, raising and bowing. Antithesis, another common figure in these riddles (seen extensively in Aldhelm’s “Creatura,” quoted above and adapted in the Exeter Book), instances the theological paradox of affirmation and negation that mediates knowledge of participation, “This also is Thou, neither is this Thou.”91 Finally, while the riddles with clearer answers still elicit continued contemplation after they are guessed, those with multiple good answers prolong the process of interpretation even further and make it more social. As Niles writes with regard to Riddle 49, “Bread, gold, and the word of God: which is of truest value? Here is an instance where the importance of an Exeter Book riddle might reside in its ability to stimulate discussion among members of a textual community, as opposed to closing off debate via a single indisputable answer.”92 As in Aldhelm’s letter to his friend, participatory play can become participation in a community of interpretation. Another riddle from the Exeter Book manifests the same qualities of participatory play, this one based on a Latin riddle from the collection of Symphosius: Nis min sele swige, ne ic sylfa hlud ymb * * * ; unc dryhten scop siþ ætsomne. Ic eom swiftre þonne he, þragum strengra, he þreohtigra. Hwilum ic me reste; he sceal rinnan forð. Ic him in wunige a þenden ic lifge; gif wit unc gedælað, me bið deað witod.93 [My house is not silent, nor I myself loud about . . . ; the lord made for us two a journey together. I am swifter than he,

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sometimes stronger, he more enduring. Sometimes I rest; he must run onwards. I dwell in him ever while I live; if we part ourselves, death for me is certain.] Symphosius gives the answer “fish and river,” and the two riddles share the Old English one’s opening images of house and inhabitant, loud and silent, and shared journey. But the Old English author adds the rest: the further contrasts that imagine the life of both, the reference to their Creator, and the threat of death for one. The Old English riddle also differs in making the fish the speaker. The result is a far more dramatic projection into the life of things seen as participating in a created order. Adding more clues also invites more possible answers, and the concluding reference to death especially brings to mind the separation of soul and body. Thus even when the “right” answer is given, the fish in the river becomes a potential metaphor for something else. The Old English author has brought the idea from Symphosius closer to the empathetic, participatory kind of knowledge characteristic of orality, yet the amplification of carefully balanced contrasts and the theological reference also take full advantage of literacy’s value for contemplation. Few surviving short poems from the Middle English period are so successfully enigmatic, for reasons we can only guess, yet the enigmatic mode glimmers throughout later English riddles, both Latin and vernacular, and reemerges fully when incorporated into larger vernacular texts such as Piers Plowman.

RIDDLING IN LATER MEDIEVAL ENGLAND: PICTORIAL AND LATIN

Trying to distinguish what might count as a riddle in Middle English presents an especially tough case of the general difficulty in drawing a clear boundary around the riddle as a form. Most of the candidates could also be classified as something else, so that a map of the Middle English riddles discussed below would have a small center and a large, fuzzy fringe that overlaps with other genres. This situation is enough to explain why there has been no modern, scholarly attempt to collect Middle En-

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glish riddles. Yet in addition to Langland’s adaptations and compositions within Piers Plowman there is at least one anonymous medieval example of collecting riddles and enigmatic verses in Middle English. There are also several collections of riddles in Latin that were made in England during the same period. Since it is likely that only a small fraction of medieval literature of any sort has survived, the few riddling texts that do, whether in collections or individually, can be taken to exemplify others that are lost. Many of the most playful riddling verses are found in margins and flyleaves, which might imply that they are the sort of thing less likely to have been copied at all. All of this supports the hypothesis that riddling was common enough to be recognizable as a tradition with both oral and literary expressions.94 In addition, the enigmatic mode more broadly conceived pervades many categories of Middle English poetry, including various kinds of short lyrics. By focusing on those riddles that are recorded in a context that indicates some recognition of their riddling form, we can see the range of styles and implied purposes of riddles during this period as well as some indications of their reception and uses. There seems to be a strong pull toward a contest rather than knowledge function, not through being used in an actual contest but through an emphasis on the right answer. Such an emphasis implies an intent that is more esoteric or didactic than enigmatic. Nonetheless, some examples show the persistence of a more contemplative aim. Before we turn to written evidence, however, it is worth noting signs of the enigmatic in the visual arts, where the pervasiveness of medieval riddling and its complex purposes are perhaps most apparent and most well known. The gargoyles of Gothic cathedrals, heraldic emblems and mottoes—to begin what could be a long list—and above all the bewildering multitude of images that play in the margins of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts: all of these challenge interpretation in much the way riddles do, despite the variety of their overall functions. In rare instances such images can be linked to surviving verbal riddles, as in a misericord carving from Worcester Cathedral of a girl riding a goat, wearing a net, and carrying a rabbit. Though we have no direct written witness to the currency of this story in late fourteenth-century England, when the carving was made, it undoubtedly depicts the widespread tale

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of “the clever daughter” who is given a number of riddling tasks in order to win the king’s hand in marriage. In the version depicted on the misericord, she must come to him riding but not riding (she has one foot on the ground), clothed but not clothed (in a net), and bearing a gift that cannot be given (since the rabbit will squirm away as soon as she tries to give it).95 The setting of this image—nearby misericords show scenes from the Old Testament and the childhood of Christ, knights and laborers in characteristic activities, and beasts both common (a boar) and fantastic (a sphinx and a bird with two human heads)—shows a typical lack of boundaries between puzzling images and more easily legible ones and between different kinds of stories. The separation between the serious and the playful, between center and margin, that often structures manuscript pages also sets up subtle, riddling relations between apparently unrelated images. A picture similar to that of the clever daughter decorates the margin of the Ormesby Psalter, but the figure is instead Marcolf, the riddling trickster who outwits King Solomon in a popular dialogue (see next chapter). Details of posture and clothing here connect Solomon and Marcolf to scenes of the devil tempting Jesus in the page’s central initial of Psalm 52, which begins: “The fool said in his heart: There is no God.” Here the riddle image is more pointed in complicating the distinction of wisdom and folly by adding the idea of a wise fool.96 Even marginal images that are less directly connected to a verbal riddle, however, can infect the interpretation of what they surround with their playfulness. Such interactions emerging from the scriptorium between written texts and the nonverbal riddling of marginal images are clues to similar interactions between grammatical instruction and riddling in the place associated with the main riddle collections that survive from this period: the schoolroom. Unlike Aldhelm’s goal of communion in charity, the six collections of Anglo-Latin riddles made in England in the later Middle Ages seem meant to foster an exclusive sense of community based on knowing certain tricks.97 The Secretum philosophorum, where these tricks are explained, is a late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century manual of cautelae (cautions or “tricks” to be cautious of ) popular enough to survive in at least sixteen manuscripts. It classifies these cautelae under the seven liberal arts, and its section on rhetoric is taken up by discussion of riddle

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techniques that manipulate letters and syllables. Here riddling is part of a larger play with secret knowledge and with the boundaries of what constitutes valid and worthwhile learning.98 Latin riddles become even more esoteric in the five late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century collections outside the Secretum philosophorum. “The separation of enigmatic verses from their explanatory commentaries,” writes Andrew Galloway, “suggests at once a game, a strenuous lexical exercise, and a principle of intellectual and hence social exclusion.”99 Rather than expanding the highest forms of literacy to the mother tongue, as the Exeter Book riddles and the rest of Old English literature did in the Anglo-Saxon monastic context, these collections restrict it to those advanced in their study of Latin. Demanding as they are, however, these riddles bring with them other dimensions of the play of riddling. The Secretum philosophorum introduces its riddles by defining them broadly as ornate figures of speech combined to make something that seems astounding and is to be meditated on, like divinations. Its first example requires no special tricks but instead plays with a traditional riddle that goes back at least to Symphosius: “My enemies came to my house and my house went out through the openings, and I alone remained amidst my enemies.”100 This riddle goes a step beyond the fish-and-river riddles of both Symphosius and the Exeter Book: the fish is forsaken by its house. The openings are not windows of the house but of the net, as the Secretum goes on to explain, so that the fish meets its doom amid a threatening instability of boundaries between inside and outside, friend and foe. There is here perhaps a sense of the threat of not knowing the kinds of arcane tricks the Secretum is out to teach. But behind this, the tools of literacy and the act of interpretation become caught up in imaginative participation in another mode of existence. One of the Latin collections, found in manuscript Harley 3362, includes some riddles that put the esoteric to more didactic and perhaps enigmatic use.101 The other contents of this manuscript, which include a treatise on synonyms and equivocal words and two courtesy books for boys, link it to the study of grammar and rhetoric, the early stages of medieval education.102 Riddles and proverbs, both in English and in Latin (with frequent English glosses), are common in collections of Middle English grammatical texts, “consistent with the attempts to make latinitas

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topical and interesting.”103 The Latin riddles in Harley 3362 range from the simple and traditional to some that require certain deciphering techniques. The first riddle in the collection, for instance, runs: “Lune dimidium solis pariterque rotundum, / Et pars quarta rote: nihil plus deus exigit a te” (Half of a moon and equally the round of a sun, / And the fourth part of a wheel: nothing more does God demand from you). The solution depends on taking the first two images as shapes of the letters and adding one of the four letters in rota to spell the Latin word cor, heart.104 Readers must have been expected to know the techniques explained in the Secretum, which also includes this riddle, but the riddle turns attention to a spiritual requirement. In another riddle using a similar letter-coding scheme, also found in several of these collections, the very act of decoding might become an object of reflection—an instance of the faculty of forming a mental word that Augustine sees as an image of the second person of the Trinity: Filia sum solis, [set sine] sole creata, Sum quinque decies et quinque decemque vocata.105 [I am daughter of the sun and was created without the sun I am called fifty, five, and ten.] The first line plays on the story in Genesis 1 that light was created on the first day and the sun not until the fourth. In the second line, which refers by Roman numerals to the letters “lvx,” the participle “vocata” evokes the idea that light was created by the calling of its name, “Dixitque Deus, ‘Fiat lux,’ et facta est lux” (Gen. 1:2). Indeed, the riddle reenacts—or rather, causes its reader to reenact mentally, by forming the name of light—scripture’s narration of the act that created it. Thus the riddle leads its reader to create a mental image of the word lux by which the Word is said to have created lux, and so to exercise the capacity by which the reader is an enigmatic image of the Word (see above, chapter 1, on Augustine). Perhaps such self-reflexivity is a lot to find in the riddle games of biblical allusion and letter substitution that were typical of the medieval schoolroom. Nonetheless, the riddles on cor and lux do not merely reinforce religious knowledge and literate status. The concentrated effort of interpretation becomes an experience of what the riddles mean: devotion of heart and participation in the creating word.

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One more Latin riddle from Harley 3362—one that does not depend on special tricks—brings explicit attention to the self-consciousness about the interpretive act that is a constant part of riddling: “A bed is woody but cut from no tree; / let whoever can crack it crack it, and it will be his [Nut].”106 The second line suggests a comparison between cracking a nut, an image often used for interpreting allegories, and solving the riddle itself. A riddle is like a nut not only because of the process of unlocking it but also because of the result, ownership. With a nut, if you can crack it, you get to eat it. With a riddle, ownership makes an apt figure for the results of determined interpretative effort. Ownership, in the context of Harley 3362, involves a sense of technical mastery through using the right tools. In these Latin riddles, a highly self-conscious literacy gives words a sense of power to unlock secrets and gain entry into a community privileged with tools of knowledge. Yet while membership in this community is a serious business for the student audience of these riddles, some of them, at least, have affinities with the worshipful play of Aldhelm and the sense of a changed self and world through imaginative participation elicited by the Exeter Book riddles. Indeed, these highly condensed Latin riddles take to an extreme the self-consciousness of riddling’s interpretive play that Aldhelm’s “hermeneutic” style also emphasizes. As the techniques of riddling come into the foreground, however, the subjects of the riddles tend to fade, so that these become riddles about riddling and this Latin tradition of school riddling tends to close in on itself.

COLLECTING MIDDLE ENGLISH RIDDLES

Harley 3362 also includes, in the margin next to one of its simpler riddles, an adaptation of it into Middle English verse. Of surviving Middle English riddles, this one is closest in form to folk riddles, with its closing challenge and its focus on a single metaphor: I wot a tree xii [12] bowys betake lii [52] nestys beth ther up ymad in every nest beth bryddys vii [7] ithankyd be the God of hevene

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and every bryd with selcouth name. Ared now that withoute blame.107 The content of this riddle is traditional too. Riddles comparing the year to a tree are found throughout the world.108 The Middle English riddle retains perhaps a glimmer of the participatory play of the Exeter Book riddles. The word selcouth for each bird’s name translates generale in the parallel Latin riddle, meaning “of its kind” (the early modern version in the Book of Meery Riddles reads “divers”). Yet selcouth can also mean marvelous or strange, which would give the birds a hint of wonder that then infuses what they represent, the days of each week.109 We might think of the fantastic birds common in manuscript illuminations and imagine the divisions of the calendar (as in the calendar pages that often provided showcases at the beginning of books of hours) adorned by marvels of creation. The line “ithankyd be the God of hevene,” a tag to rhyme with “seven,” also states an attitude that is to follow from the riddle’s subtle stance of wonder. Indeed, the image of a marvelous tree, like the trees of Eden or the Jesse tree used for illustrating the ancestry of Jesus (or Langland’s Tree of Charity), and the names of the many birds, taken together, recall Adam in the garden naming the animals, exercising the human power to give new names to things—a power that riddles repeat and revive. Riddles are found in all the main, recognized categories of Middle English verse. Opening the net rather wide, stand-alone texts in Middle English that might be called riddles can be sorted into five somewhat overlapping categories: sexual double-entendres, trivial puzzles, religious poems, proverbial or monitory verses, and political prophecies. Since the riddles on sex are framed as love poetry, these categories follow common classifications of Middle English lyrics in general.110 Riddling play in these specimens tends toward the puzzle or griphus type but, on occasion, plays more enigmatically with common topics. Most of the puzzle-verses are religious and show the tendency of late medieval religious culture toward the didactic, but some religious riddles are more truly enigmatic. For instance, a fourteenth-century manuscript of Latin theological and moral texts interspersed with English and French verse includes several riddlelike verses on religious topics, such as this couplet titled “Pride” by a

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modern editor: “In all maner thrifte, y passe alle thingge; / yif oni thing be lic me, to det I ssal him bringe.”111 Prosopopoeia and a suggestive economic metaphor here perhaps begin to depict a psychological state, not just a classifiable sin (as Langland’s portraits of the seven deadly sins do at much greater and more dramatic length; see below, chapter 5, the section “The Authority of Piers the Plowman”). An acrostic on love in the same manuscript, however, is more typical.112 One manuscript that shows some interest in collecting pieces according to the poetics of enigma, British Library manuscript Royal 17.A.xvi, can also serve as a frame for looking at other religious, moral, and prophetic riddles. Most of this manuscript is an astronomical calendar in Latin for the year 1420, but a few pages at the beginning and end include some shorter items in multiple hands: a Latin explanation of why to feast on Fridays, three poems in English on the Virgin, and four riddling pieces. One of these puts into a riddling idiom the kind of instruction about the Eucharist that was given to laypeople at the time through many vernacular poems and prayers: Hyt semes quite [white], and is red Hyt is quike and semes dede Hyt is fleshe and semes bred Hyt is on [one] and semes too Hyt is God body and no more.113 Four brief, paradoxical lines accentuate the sense of mystery that is at the heart of the sacrament. Yet the last line answers the riddle with such finality that it seems to close off contemplation and urge instead mere assent to doctrine. Instruction is a strong tendency throughout Middle English religious verse, even when the doctrine is the inadequacy of wit in the face of holy wonders.114 At the same time, many of the most wellknown English religious lyrics, though not in riddle form, deserve to be called enigmatic.115 One, found in forty-one manuscripts of the Speculum ecclesiae by Edmund Rich, archbishop of Canterbury, is worth noting because of how it links Marian devotion to the tradition of tree riddles: Now gooth the sunne undir the wode Me rewith marie thi faire rode

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Now gooth the sunne undir the tre Me rewith marie thi sone & thee.116 While this poem expresses a feeling, it also plays more cognitively with the meaning generated by the juxtaposition between its lines. As the Eucharist draws the experience of eating into the drama of salvation, adding significance to one while giving a means of entering the other, so this poem does with the daily sunset and the imagination of Mary before the cross. Another poem in ms. Royal 17.A.xvi exemplifies the assimilation of one of the most successfully enigmatic of Middle English lyrics to the imperatives of doctrine and piety. It is a later version of a popular poem whose original is probably best represented in the important early fourteenth-century anthology Harley 2253: Erthe toc of erthe erthe wyth woh, Erthe other erthe to the erthe droh, Erthe leyde erthe in erthene throh, Tho hevede erthe of erthe erthe ynoh.117 [Earth took of earth earth with woe. Earth other earth to the earth drew. Earth laid earth in earthen tomb. Then had earth of earth earth enough.] The context of these lines, between poems on the deaths of Simon de Montfort and Simon Fraser, implies that the scribe saw it as a poem about “the futility of life.”118 Four distinct later versions of “Erthe upon Erthe”— found in forty-one manuscripts, often as filler at the beginning or end, and also inscribed on walls and tombstones—begin with something like this but add several stanzas that elaborate the same idea and, so to speak, drive it into the ground. The version in Royal 17.A.xvi is close to another from the fifteenth century that begins: Erthe upon erthe is waxin and wrought, Erthe takys on erth a nobylay [nobility] of nought,

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Now erthe upon erthe layes all his thought How erthe upon erthe sattys [sets] all at noght.119 Already in this first stanza, the punning possibilities of “earth”—as human flesh, Adam, soil, the world, worldly possessions, grave—have been focused on a warning against worldliness because it all returns to earth. As the first stanza of a longer poem, it only begins a narrative arc, the ending of which is also prolonged in a vein that becomes less riddling and more homiletic, though still playing with the same word. The original kernel, more compressed in its wordplay and more pointed in its tight four lines, allows much more play with other possible interpretations beyond mere mortality: the overcoming of lovesickness in the satisfaction of sexual love, Adam’s desire for Eve and its consequences, humanity’s inheritance from Adam of death and the woes of the world, Christ’s taking on human woe and satisfying the claims of death.120 It seems to have started a game that later writers wanted to join but also to bring under control. Only the second version quoted above comes around, after sixty lines, to expanding the riddle’s potential reference to the Incarnation. Yet even if they show riddling being swallowed by didactic tendencies in late medieval England, the versions of “Erthe upon Erthe” also suggest the initial riddle’s ability to engage its audience. Langland may well have been part of that audience. His Plant of Peace, which heaven could not hold “Til hit hadde of erthe ygoten hitsilve,” grafts the same conceit into his sequence of more compressed images.121 The remaining two riddling poems from Royal 17.A.xvi represent two categories, proverb and prophecy, that are more inherently enigmatic than love or religious verse and that turn toward the serious and hortatory while retaining an air of mystery. Both proverb and prophecy are like riddling in their use of rhetorical figures, their invitation to interpretation and reinterpretation, and their sense of patterns and truths being continually revealed and concealed beneath the surface of experience. Proverbs and riddles have been seen by folklorists as two sides of the same coin, one formed as a statement and the other as a question, but both brief and often centered on metaphor.122 Each depends on what might be called a certain ring of truth that is often underscored through prosodic devices such as alliteration and rhyme. Proverb seems the best

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label for a poem in Royal 17.A.xvi that takes double speech as its subject: “It is a wonder be the rode [cross] / Whan too hedys loke in a hode [one hood] / And in this worlde kan I not rede / Whan too tunges speke in on hede.”123 Perhaps this is a warning against duplicity, but calling its subject a wonder invites contemplation as well as judgment. The final riddling poem in Royal 17.A.xvi, variations of which are found in fourteen other manuscripts, was often called “Merlin’s Prophecy” and sometimes ascribed instead to Chaucer: Whenne feith fayles in prestys sawes And lordys willes been had for lawes And lechery is pryvy solace And robery is houlden good purchase Thenne shall the lond of Albyon [Com]in unto confusion.124 The point, as with biblical prophecy, is not so much prediction as criticism of current conditions, and the conditions stated are not so much clues to a riddle as accusations of who is to blame for the troubles to come. Political prophecy was rife in late medieval English verse, and we will see that Langland puts the most puzzling sort of it to use at pivotal points in his poem that interrogate precisely the preoccupation with violent apocalypticism and the accompanying tendency toward scapegoating. The four riddling poems in manuscript Royal 17.A.xvi span categories important also to Piers Plowman: religious verse, proverbs, and prophecy. Altogether, these items represent a cross section of things that mattered in the early fifteenth century, so that the common thread of enigmatic style among otherwise heterogeneous components is all the more significant as a sign that this mode is itself a feature of interest. While the two religious pieces lean toward the didactic, the proverb and prophecy are more esoteric, yet not so exclusive as to depend on a secret key to decipherment. The simplicity of form and style in these texts keeps them close to orality, yet they solicit participatory play more than competition for a right answer. They show an interest, shared among those who copied these pieces, in the enigmatic as a way of considering the mean-

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ing of a variety of things—a motive visible also in the astronomical tables and Marian poems that fill most of this manuscript. It is perhaps not too much of a stretch to say that these poems show something like the desire for “kynde knowing” expressed by Langland’s dreamer. Royal 17.A.xvi is only one manuscript, and a rather unusual one, important here largely for its gathering of texts also attested elsewhere. Yet it helps show that the enigmatic as found in Piers Plowman has a basis in a conception widely shared among Langland’s audience.

CONSCIENCE’S APOCALYPTIC RIDDLE

All these strands of riddling tradition, oral and literate, ancient and medieval, illuminate the “kynde knowing” that Langland’s Plant of Peace activates by means of its literary form. Like Aldhelm’s apple tree riddle, it provides rich, provocative clothing for doctrines worn out by familiarity. It plays with catechetical knowledge in a way that evokes wonder, much as the year-tree riddle does with the simple idea of the calendar, and it invites, like the Old English riddle on “tree” or “beam,” the kind of imaginative knowing we have called participatory play. It joins its hearer to a community of those on a quest to know truth more fully by interpreting its mysterious appearances. Yet the Plant of Peace is also more dynamic than these other tree riddles. A plant that can move from heaven to earth to piercing high walls embodies the paradoxical strength-in-weakness of Christ on which the poem will play innumerable variations. Joined to this power is a sense of desire, felt almost along the veins, that blends the desire to know the answer to a riddle with the stronger medicine of love—what the poem, in the image that precedes the Plant of Peace, calls “triacle for synne” (C.1.145; B.1.148, “triacle of hevene”). Plant imagery, gathered around the agricultural figure of Piers the Plowman, ramifies throughout the poem and becomes a major vehicle for mediating a vision of theological participation.125 Langland’s use of the enigmatic mode, greatly augmented between the A and B texts, distances his poem from the didactic and esoteric tendencies often seen in riddling and from the resulting formation of ingroup and out-group. The Plant of Peace challenges the institutional

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church, of which Holy Church is an idealized representation, to offer more than didacticism, to renew its authority instead from contemplation of the endless mystery of its doctrines. A riddle-like passage later in the first vision of Piers Plowman directs a similar challenge to the esoteric temptation of apocalypticism. Conscience’s apocalyptic riddle attempts to bring some closure to the first vision’s extended satire of late fourteenth-century society centered on Lady Mede, to whom Holy Church points when the dreamer asks to know what is false. Lady Mede seems to be a figure of pure corruption, a cause of widespread, allegorically dramatized evil whose nature is confirmed by her impending marriage to False. Yet her name means simply reward, and when she is brought to the king, he attempts to legitimate her by marrying her instead to Conscience. Conscience refuses reconciliation and begins a debate in which the two become figures of rival ideologies: rule by largesse versus the administration of justice. This contest between two approaches to royal power and political order brings out tensions that were at issue in various levels of late fourteenth-century society, from the conduct of the war with France to the resolution of local property disputes. Conscience’s defense against the accusations of Mede ends, in the A text, with a brief prediction of his eventual victory, a reign of reason and love in which, presumably, reward will have no place. The B text extends this with a full description, retained in C, of a utopian era of peace and justice, which concludes with this prophecy: And er this fortune falle, fynde men shul the worste, By sixe sonnes and a ship and half a shef of arwes; And the myddel of a moone shal make the Jewes torne, And Sarsynes for that sighte shul synge Gloria in excelsis— For Makometh and Mede myshappe shul that tyme. (B.3.325–29, cf. C.3.477–81)126 The prophetic signs here have frustrated the best deciphering efforts. Perhaps some in the poem’s audience knew a key to deciphering them that is now lost, and perhaps even those who did not would have taken the ominous sense of threat seriously. But the tradition of the enigmatic, as opposed to the esotericism typical of apocalyptic discourse, makes avail-

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able another reading of these lines not as anticipating judgment but rather as making room for further understanding. They place the clarity of Conscience’s utopian rule at a distance and leave the present under the sign of enigma, an era of crisis with no sure basis of judgment. Rather than a convergent fullness of meaning, like that of the Plant of Peace, the effect of these lines, beyond sheer puzzlement, is to call to mind possible interpretive strategies without giving enough information to reach a resolution. They evoke prophecy and esoteric riddling primarily to suspend them. An allusion to a well-known and more decipherable text could perhaps trump other possibilities, but none of the riddling prophecies popular at the time seem to match.127 As Andrew Galloway suggests, “the myddel of a moone” likely alludes instead to the conventions of Latin riddling explained in the Secretum philosophorum and in particular to the first phrase of the riddle quoted above on the word cor, heart, “Lune dimidium”—a riddle that appears not only in Latin riddle collections but also in preaching handbooks. Using an archaic sense of the word middle meaning division into halves, “the myddel of a moone” shapes the letter c. The answer, as Galloway points out, would reaffirm Conscience’s earlier prophecy that the Jews will “have wonder in hire hertes that men beth so trewe” (B.3.304, cf. C.3.456). Nonetheless, Conscience’s use of this riddle is highly elusive compared to those in the sample sermons, which not only give the full riddle but also explain it.128 In addition, “the myddel of a moone,” once removed from the rest of its riddle, translated into English, and joined to Langland’s previous line, easily opens to additional readings. The previous line, too, invites interpretation both according to the symbolic associations of the things it mentions—suns, a ship, a sheaf of arrows, and the numbers six and twelve (half of a sheaf of twenty-four arrows)—and according to tricks of translating these clues into letters or numbers. Schmidt suggests an iconographical reading: the ship as the church, the number twelve as the apostles, and the moon as the Paschal full moon, with the underlying sense that the faithfulness of Christians will bring about the new age or will not occur until the end of the world. Another approach, however, might draw again on riddle tricks. The Secretum philosophorum explains how Roman numerals can be combined to make not dates but words, and gives as an example the riddle on

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lux discussed above. In this case, the number vi, the first letter of “ship,” and the number xii could combine to spell vis xii, the power of Christ.129 It is a ragged solution, worth advancing not as a particularly persuasive answer but as an example of yet another sort of interpretation that the line opens up, one that parallels Galloway’s solution for the following line both in method and in yielding not a time but a means by which the prophecy would come true. In any case, partial success in finding keys that would open this prophecy only demonstrates its effectiveness in prolonging the work of interpretation rather than closing it off. Such multiplying of elusive puzzles might also work well as parody of the contemporary prophetic vogue, a view taken by Rupert Taylor a century ago.130 “If so,” notes Richard K. Emmerson, “the parody clearly escaped later readers of the poem, who annotated such passages as ‘prophecie’ and who included them in collections of prophetiae.”131 More recent readers have found parody incompatible with the seriousness of the poem’s apocalypticism in general and of Conscience’s speech in particular.132 Taylor cites no other examples of parodic prophecies in English before the Renaissance, and Langland’s poem is too clearly interested in reform for these lines to be mere burlesque.133 When Emmerson says that the poem “seems more interested in using ‘prophecies’ to reproach sinful society in the present rather than to provide revelations of the future,” he likens passages such as this to a poem “On the Earthquake of 1382”: The rysyng of the comuynes in lond, The pestilens, and the eorthe-qwake, Theose threo thinges, I understonde, Beoth tokenes the grete vengaunce and wrake That schulde falle for synnes sake, As this clerkes conne declare. Now may we chese to leve or take, For warnyng have we to be ware.134 Yet this decidedly unenigmatic prophecy is more illuminating by contrast to the obscurity with which Conscience’s prophecy ends. Rather than turning the whole prophecy to outright parody or adding weight to its reproach, the enigmatic mode invites subtler interpretive attention to the prophecy and its relation to Lady Mede and her discourse.

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Both Conscience and the poem as a whole ask finally not for submission to divine sanction but for an exercise of interpretation and understanding. Unlike prophets who base their authority on some kind of divine revelation, such as by a vision or by inspired interpretation of a dream or a text, for which an enigmatic quality may act as confirmation, Conscience claims to have been taught merely by “Kynde Wit” (B.3.284/ C.3.436).135 His debate with Mede ends in a contest of scriptural interpretation, one that he wins but only in a way that strikes a balance between the closure he is attempting to achieve and the need for continued discernment. Conscience catches Mede quoting the first half of a distich from Proverbs that would seem to endorse the concept she stands for, “Honorem adquiret qui dat munera,” “He that maketh presents shall purchase honor,” but only until one reads the second half, “Animam autem aufert accipientium” “But he carrieth away the souls of the receivers” (B.3.336, 350/C.3.486a, 497, quoting Prov. 22:9b). This final rebuke silences Mede. Though she remains central to the 196 lines of passus 4 that conclude the first vision and is described at points as winking and mourning, she never speaks again. Conscience, however, in order to make a larger point here about the danger of selective quotation, gives another, more ambiguous example: a lady, upon reading at the bottom of a page the first half of 1 Thessalonians 5:21, “Omnia probate” (Prove everything), is pleased that the line is no longer; but if she had turned the page she would find “Quod bonum est tenete” (Hold fast that which is good). While Conscience’s point is to support his conclusive judgment of Lady Mede, the same verse will be quoted again much later in the poem in a context that emphasizes instead the need to undergo trials in order to seek “kynde knowing.” There it is God who, astonishingly, is said to take human “kynde” in order to have full knowledge of what it is to suffer.136 Langland’s poem will continue at great length its attempt to test everything before reaching a climactic but highly enigmatic reconciliation in the sixth vision of the B and C texts. In the remainder of the first vision, a series of trial scenes leads to no final action. “Omnia probate” requires continued probing, and the good that is to be held fast is still to seek. Even if Conscience is seen to have intended his apocalyptic riddle to signify a separation of the sheep and the goats, then, its larger significance in the poem is to defer apocalyptic judgment in favor of the continued play of interpretation. The prophecy hints at the poem’s larger interest

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most strongly through its prediction of the conversion of Jews and Muslims. Where the B text has Saracens singing “Gloria in excelsis,” the C text has “Credo in spiritum sanctum,” both of which, as Schmidt points out, are texts from the Mass, the primary medieval experience of reconciliation.137 Such reconciliation is said to depend on the failure of Mohammed and Mede, which, following from the usual medieval understanding of Mohammed as a schismatic, might be seen as the end of their divisive influence.138 While Conscience’s prophecy does not make at all clear what will lead to the conversion of Jews and Muslims, it seems to have to do with being drawn into the interpretation of enigmatic signs. If the Plant of Peace is an early pointer to the kind of interpretive play that Langland will increasingly put to use for the sake of initiating reconciliation, Conscience’s riddle serves, rather playfully and at his own expense, to block the formation of community based on a more exclusive sort of discourse and to clear the way for something harder to achieve that depends on patience with ambiguity. Later chapters will explore Langland’s use of the enigmatic in the successive visions of Piers Plowman in order, among other effects, to engender reconciling participation, both social and spiritual. One final example of riddling in medieval England, meanwhile, will give an extraordinary window into the uses of the enigmatic mode at the boundary between orality and literacy and in the midst of the most unprecedented social crisis of Langland’s time.

THE LETTERS OF JOHN BALL

The so-called letters of John Ball locate instances of enigmatic language in a richer context of documented history than perhaps any other riddling texts from this period or before. This context presents its own ambiguities that magnify the interpretive problems and possibilities of these seven brief Middle English texts found in Latin chronicles of the year 1381. There is even a question of what to call the events they were part of, the Peasants’ Revolt or the Rising. How we imagine these events cannot help but color how we see the texts, to a degree that makes them even more enigmatic than they seem to have been intended. Thinking

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more about how they mean than what they mean, as with Conscience’s riddle above, provides a way of accounting for various possible senses of their words while shifting attention to the social implications of their mode. Like Piers Plowman, these texts solicit participation in an act of interpretive imagination, focused more narrowly in this case on political life. To see enigmatic language used in this way is to see not just the possible influence of Piers Plowman but, even more, the general availability of the poetics of enigma for such use. The single one of these texts that Thomas Walsingham includes in his Chronica maiora is the longest of them, shares the most phrasing with the others, and so can stand here for all of them.139 John Ball, a dissident priest who had become a leader in the Rising, was captured when it reached St. Albans, where Walsingham was a monk. There Ball was tried, hanged, and quartered. Walsingham, at the end of his account of Ball’s part in stirring up rebellion, writes, “Moreover, he had sent a letter full of hidden meanings [enigmatibus plenam] to the leaders of the commons in Essex to urge them to finish the deeds which had been begun. This was later found in the sleeve of a man who was to be hanged for taking part in the rebellion; its contents were roughly as follows.” He then gives the text in English: Johon Schep, som tyme Seynte Marie prest of York, and now of Colchestre, greteth wel Johan Nameles, and Johan the Mullere, and Johon Cartere, and biddeth hem that thei bee war of gyle in borugh, and stondeth togidedre in Godes name, and biddeth Peres Plouyman go to his werk, and chastise wel Hobbe the robbere, and taketh with yow Johan Trewman, and alle his felawes, and no mo, and loke schappe you to on heved [head], and no mo. Johan the Mullere hath ygrounde smal, smal, smal; The Kynges sone of hevene schal paye for al. Be war or ye be wo, Knoweth your freend fro your foo. Haveth ynow, and seithe “Hoo”: And do wel and bettre, and fleth [flee] synne, And seketh pees, and hold you therinne; and so biddeth Johan Trewman and alle his felawes.140

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The translation of “aenigmatibus plenam” as “full of hidden meanings” fits Walsingham’s portrayal of Ball as rebel mastermind, and later commentators have often followed suit in seeing the letters’ riddling language as a secret code.141 The letters look rather esoteric, and Walsingham reacts as a rival excluded from comprehension. Yet the riddling forms that Walsingham recognized can appear more like participatory play if one takes a more sympathetic view of the rebels. Such a view builds on recent reconsideration of the letters’ likely means of transmission and on literary attention to their language. Though Walsingham calls this text a letter, it is probably more accurate to call it a broadside, that is, a single sheet widely copied among the rebels and posted as a public notice. In a world ruled by Latin literacy, the chief significance of such a broadside would have lain not in its message but in its medium. “Merely by existing,” writes Steven Justice, “it asserted, tendentiously or not, that those who read only English—or even could only have English read to them—had a stake in the intellectual and political life of church and realm.”142 Accompanied by action that often focused on destroying legal documents such as charters and demanding new ones, the broadsides claimed what Justice calls an “insurgent literacy” by which the rebels aimed to remake their world. Displayed publicly, rather than sent in secret, these documents made an open invitation to join a community centered on the outlook they articulated. Though understanding the letters might have been a mark of belonging to a certain group (as with the Latin riddles of the Secretum philosophorum for university students), this group appealed largely to those at the bottom of the social hierarchy and offered an alternative to that order. Whether the rebels saw their goals as a radical return to an ancient golden age or a new order altogether, they were creating a new social body with its own sense of identity.143 The enigmatic mode of the letters, then, does not so much communicate a message, whether open or secret, as form a community around the interpretation of the text. In this case the text could be both the letters themselves and the texts they invoke, especially the Bible but also Piers Plowman. The letters begin a work of interpretation to be completed, and acted on, by those who join the community. In this way they could become a basis of what Brian Stock calls a textual community, even for the nonliterate who could only hear them read out loud.144

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In the Walsingham text, concern for group membership is most visible in its play with names. Besides generic names according to profession, such as “John Sheep,” likely a code name for John Ball as spiritual shepherd, there is “John True-man,” used twice in a way that refers both to the leader of the group and to all of its members. Using the same name, John, for different professions and for both leader and followers breaks down distinctions between members of the community while drawing a distinction between the community and everyone else: “Knoweth your freend fro your foo.” References to Piers Plowman and Hobbe the Robber (also perhaps cited from Langland’s poem) not only use allegory to enjoin action but also locate community in the imagination rather than in visible distinctions.145 Moreover, to be a true-man, one might say, is to be true to one’s kind, so that being a true-man and recognizing another one is not far from Langland’s “kynde knowing.” Breaking down social differences and redrawing them on moral and spiritual lines seems the central thrust of Ball’s preaching, according at least to Walsingham’s report of it. Indeed, in their opposition to all forms of social hierarchy, Ball and the Rising of 1381 went beyond all other contemporary calls for reform, even those of Wycliffites, as indicated in the famous text of Ball’s sermon at Blackheath, “Whan Adam dalf, and Eve span, / Wo [Who] was thanne a gentilman?”146 That this text is not a biblical verse but a vernacular rhyming question makes it another example of riddling used to shape a community of interpretation. The letters are not made up of riddles in a pure sense but rather riddling proverbs and prophecies. Many of their phrases have parallels in proverbs found in sermons and collections of preaching materials.147 One likely model comes from an exemplum called “The Sayings of the Four Philosophers”: One is two frend is foo wil is wo.148 In all three manuscripts in which this story is preserved, the “sayings” are followed by commentary, though the commentary is entirely different in each manuscript.149 When accompanied by commentary, the verses work

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like proverbs, but on their own they are more like riddles in their challenge to interpretation. Likewise, the prophecy that “Johan the Mullere hath ygrounde smal, smal, smal; / The Kynges sone of hevene schal paye for al” may have been clearer then than now, but seems phrased to evoke multiple meanings.150 Guidance for what it might mean to “do wel and bettre” could certainly be found in the later visions of Piers Plowman, but this would deepen the enigma of one of the letter’s less cryptic lines. It is possible that Ball’s preaching would have supplied some interpretation of the rebels’ broadsides, but if their purpose were only to recall a message, it would seem they could be clearer. Altogether, the enigmatic phrases, along with the final injunction to seek peace, seem to work less like slogans in a political contest than like appeals to a perennial wisdom ever in need of interpretive application to current circumstances. Despite instances of targeted violence—such as, in addition to destroying documents, burning Duke John of Gaunt’s splendid London palace and killing two of the chief ministers of the realm—the rebels seem to have managed not to become the kind of mindless, frenzied mob that Walsingham describes. As Paul Strohm has argued, their ideology involved a strong element of Bakhtinian carnival, with its inversion and dissolution of hierarchies based on status, its ridicule of the “high,” and its generally ludic atmosphere. Their cry as they rampaged through London, according to the Westminster chronicler, was “A revelle! A revelle!”151 Their broadsides claim a part in a sphere of activity that is prior and superior to the work of laborer or lord—a sphere that is the birthright of all “true men.” The Walsingham broadside, beneath its claim to literacy, its formation of a community identity, and its moral and prophetic message, is a call to a higher activity of remaking the order of the world. While this play (in Huizinga’s large sense) has a strong element of contest and rivalry, the object the letters hold out as desirable is not just political retribution or victory but political participation. In this respect the letters bear a dim resemblance to the more spiritual and more highly literate play of Aldhelm. The range of enigmatic play in Langland spans both. Piers Plowman and the John Ball letters inherit an ancient tradition of literary riddling that moves from contest to knowledge, forms community through shared interpretive play, and imagines the unseen participation of all things in an endlessly meaningful cosmos. Langland’s

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poem was likely an important source of the letters’ enigmatic mode and may well have helped also to give content to the rebels’ political imagination.152 Looking at the broadsides apart from the most politically relevant sections of Piers Plowman, however, emphasizes instead the degree to which they are both “full of enigmas.” The broadsides’ use of the enigmatic mode, noticed if not fully understood by Walsingham, indicates its wide currency among a large audience of varied literacy. While the C text of Piers Plowman, and perhaps even the B text, may register some changes Langland made in response to the events of 1381, his overall use of the enigmatic mode continued, as indicated by the fact that the Plant of Peace and Conscience’s apocalyptic riddle are added in B and remain equally enigmatic as revised in C. The next chapter will look at a more extended scene from Piers Plowman in the context of the tradition of riddling dialogues to see how they represent within themselves the process and effects of reading enigmas.

C H A P T E R

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RIDDLE CONTESTS AND L A N G L A N D ’ S F O U RT H V I S I O N

Contests are the usual narrative home of riddles. Oral riddling always implies a contest, friendly or not, and literary developments of the riddle into larger forms most often involve some sort of challenge. A king, for instance, tests his daughter’s suitors with riddles (or impossible tasks). Yet riddling can mediate forms of relationship other than competition. Without a narrative context—in collections such as those of Aldhelm, the Exeter Book, and the Secretum philosophorum, or on the flyleaves of manuscripts—the form of the riddle lends itself more to an act of understanding that involves heightened participation in the act of interpreting, in the object of knowledge, and in community with fellow knowers. Riddle contests, too, need not end merely in victory for one side over the other. The riddle set by King Antiochus in the story of Apollonius of Tyre, probably the most well-known riddle tale throughout the Middle Ages, not only guards his daughter but reveals to Apollonius the secret of his incest. Later, before a despairing Apollonius and his long-lost daughter rediscover each other, she uses riddles to work in him a change of heart and rouse him to come from the darkness of his ship’s hold out into the light.1 The most compelling contests, those that most engage the capacity of riddles as a kind of knowledge, heighten the potential of interpretive play for revelation and conversion. At the same time, they open estab130

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lished authority to a dialogic and unpredictable game. When riddle stories and dialogues turn riddling from its competitive bent, they show, even more than riddles by themselves, the power of enigmatic knowledge for participatory play. In Langland’s banquet of Conscience, one of the characters wins the riddle contest, but in a larger sense the victor is the enigmatic mode itself. Behind this scene lie various riddling forms current in the fourteenth century, from the most arcane Latin riddle tricks to popular stories of riddle contests, all with roots in ancient and widespread riddling traditions. Three particular stories, each older and more widely known than Langland’s poem, likely shaped the expectations of Langland’s audience. Each reflects certain widespread patterns in riddle stories but also refashions them toward larger, more truly enigmatic ends. The Eclogue of Theodulus, one of the most common grammar school texts of the later Middle Ages, incorporates riddles into a pedagogical dialogue, where they both serve its didactic aims and point to a more open, eschatological horizon. The story of St. Andrew and the Three Questions aligns riddling with holiness but also with an outsider to the halls of power. The Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf sets up a contest between the wisdom of the king and that of the trickster, with results that affirm nothing more than playing the game. These examples ascend from the elementary schoolroom to common religious reading to learned recreation. At the same time, they move outward from Latin literacy to texts translated into the vernacular and closer to oral forms. Thus they span a wide range of audiences and media and mark a trajectory of complexity and educational advancement that points to Piers Plowman as a sort of culmination. The banquet of Conscience encapsulates Langland’s remarkable recapitulation and extension of these traditions and indicates his own interpretation of the potential of the enigmatic implicit in them. In the end, the enigmatic requires renunciation of contests and rivalry and subordination of finite, competitive games to an infinite one.

“RIDDLES IN THE DARK”

The riddle contest between Bilbo Baggins and Gollum in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, likely the most familiar example for twenty-first-century

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readers, reflects his broad knowledge of medieval riddling.2 Though Tolkien’s influences, particularly from Old Norse, extend beyond what could have been known to a medieval English author, his distillation of medieval traditions can serve to introduce some of their basic elements.3 Even more, Bilbo’s desperate contest, like Conscience’s banquet in Piers Plowman, serves a larger tale in which tests of wit are merely gateways to higher forms of escape, consolation, and recovery.4 When Gollum finds Bilbo lost and alone deep in a mountain, he proposes riddling as a seemingly friendly game to occupy them and defer combat while he sizes the hobbit up. But he quickly sets a stake, and a typically grave one at that: if Bilbo wins, Gollum helps him escape from the mountain they are under; if he loses, Gollum eats him. Both parties accept the riddle contest as somehow the best way to resolve Bilbo’s predicament, and both know that the game has rules by which they must play. Bilbo wins, however, through an unintentional stretching of the rules when he says to himself, “What have I got in my pocket?” and Gollum takes it as a riddle.5 Such, indeed, is the nature of the game: the players play it, but it also plays the players. To enter the game is to submit to something sacred that, even in his corrupted state, Gollum still recognizes. And Bilbo’s victory seems to come not so much from his wit as from being a bit of a fool, or what might be called, in Middle English, “sely,” that is, innocent, lowly, and blessed or lucky.6 The riddles themselves, based on traditional and in some cases medieval sources, manifest the participation of the familiar in the mysterious: “Voiceless it cries, / Wingless flutters, / Toothless bites, / Mouthless mutters.”7 This and Gollum’s other, rather menacing riddles—on mountain, darkness, time, and fish—draw Bilbo further into his world, while some of Bilbo’s—on an egg and on the sun shining on daisies—require Gollum to remember his life above ground long ago. Each, that is, must enter into the other’s imagination. That Bilbo solves one of Gollum’s riddles by sheer luck adds to the sense of larger forces at work. Riddles carry similar weight throughout Tolkien’s world as prophecies, marks of identity, and tests.8 They manifest the Christian paradox of power that is at the heart of Tolkien’s story: that the most decisive deeds will be done by the least powerful—hobbits—and that, in the end, those who grasp for power will lose it and those who relinquish it receive unex-

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pected help, the conversion from catastrophe to what Tolkien calls eucatastrophe, “the true form of the fairy-tale, and its highest function.”9 The ring that is the answer to Bilbo’s last, accidental riddle will be the symbol of rivalry for power that he and eventually Frodo must finally renounce. Riddles, on the other hand, require patience and present an opportunity to imagine and join the creative rather than the dominating forces of the world. Giving riddles such significance is possible within a whole complex of linguistic, social, and, ultimately, theological attitudes that Tolkien’s world shares with the Middle Ages.

THE ECLOGUE OF THEODULUS

Written in the ninth or tenth century, the Eclogue attributed to an otherwise unknown Theodulus was one of the most widely read poems in later medieval Europe. Second in popularity as a grammar school text only to Cato’s Distichs, the Eclogue survives in more than two hundred manuscripts and remained a standard component of elementary Latin readers from the twelfth century to the end of the Middle Ages and beyond. Fourteenth-century students would likely have read it after having learned little more than the basics of Latin grammar and how to sing the liturgy.10 In its ending they would have found their experience of riddles as an oral, folk art taken up within the discourse of institutional authority and given a far-reaching sense of poetic and theological possibilities—an elementary version of the poetics of enigma that texts encountered later, in the curriculum and beyond, could reinforce and extend. The Eclogue accentuates the tension between riddling as a win-lose contest and the enigmatic as a means of contemplation. Like most eclogues, this one is a dialogue between shepherds. Theodulus signals didactic intentions in the names of his two main speakers: Pseustis, whose name in Greek means liar or falsehood, and Alithia, meaning truth. These two engage in a singing contest that takes up most of the poem, with a shepherdess named Phronesis (practical wisdom) appointed as judge.11 Pseustis is introduced as a shepherd from Athens, and Alithia is a shepherdess “descended from King David.”12 Their contest consists of alternating quatrains in which Pseustis summarizes stories from classical

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mythology and Alithia answers with stories from the Old Testament. Pseustis begins, for instance, with a quatrain telling that Saturn, father of the pagan gods, founded a golden age, and Alithia answers with one on Adam and Eve as the origin of sin. More often, however, in thirty-six more pairs of stories that follow in the order of biblical history, Alithia’s turn out better than the compressed pagan lore from Pseustis to which they correspond thematically. Daedalus’s son Icarus dies, for instance, while Abraham’s son Isaac is spared. The contest closes when Pseustis, after calling on the gods for help, challenges Alithia with a theological riddle, she answers with one in return, and he concedes. The poem ends, in most manuscripts, with Alithia’s prayer for divine judgment. The Eclogue condenses a wealth of knowledge, both pagan and Christian, that must have opened up new worlds to young students. They likely found here their first overview of both biblical narrative and classical mythology. While the names of the speakers assert the superiority of Christian knowledge, the corresponding pairs of stories suggest the potential for finding truth in pagan lore by reading it in a Christian light. Some of the connections are less than obvious, and all of the stories are told so briefly as to evoke wonder about the fuller versions that lie behind them. Though she narrates no events from the New Testament, Alithia alludes, just before the riddle-exchange, to Christ as “the holy paschal Lamb” (141), the Last Judgment, and the creating Word, as if the enigmas of Hebrew scripture, and perhaps pagan myth as well, point forward to Christian revelation. The riddles themselves, to which the poem gives no answers, make the whole of it an invitation to a game of reading that could continue for a student’s whole life. It is worth imagining how these riddles might have struck a sharp young medieval student primed with the preceding glimpses of biblical and literary knowledge: Pseustis: Tell me: When Proserpina went to the gloomy realm, and was given back to her mother, on condition that her daughter was willing to return, who first betrayed the taste of treachery in his mouth? Tell me and be praised for knowing a Trojan secret. Alithia: The sea sits under the earth, and the earth under Olympus, and forever between them hangs the air, so tell me: where does the

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earth rise above the weightless sphere of the heavens? Tell me, and I say that you can utter the tetragrammaton.13 Schoolmasters could get help from a vigorous tradition of commentaries on Theodulus, beginning with Bernard of Utrecht in the eleventh century.14 He answers Pseustis’s riddle from book 5 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Ascalaphus, who was turned into a screech owl after he found Proserpina eating pomegranate seeds in the underworld and she threw the waters of Phlegethon on him. The taste was treacherous because it bound Proserpina to the underworld and prevented her from returning fully when Jupiter granted her mother, Ceres, the right to take her back from Pluto, with the result that she spends six months in each place.15 The ambivalent consequences of this classical just-so story contrast to the riddle that follows. Bernard’s solution, “the flesh of Christ, which was caused to rise from death above the sky,” implies the Incarnation, Resurrection, and Ascension, conveyed, as in Langland’s Plant of Peace, through a brief sequence of physical images.16 Whereas Proserpina can be liberated from hell for only half of the year and winter always follows summer, Christ is raised to heaven for all eternity, and in him, at least potentially, all humanity. This difference reverses the opening contrast between the Golden Age and the Fall; at the end, the Christian story is the comic (or eucatastrophic) answer to pagan tragedy. The enigmatic potential of the riddles might seem to be subordinated to the win-lose contest between pagan myth and Christian truth. Yet the nature of the riddles themselves frames the contest as one between two kinds of play. Pseustis’s riddle is more like the kind called griphos in Greek, whereas Alithia’s fits the original Greek use of ainigma.17 Pseustis refers to specific details of a myth and thus requires special knowledge that a student would not learn directly until reading Ovid. Alithia’s riddle, on the other hand, draws on the main contours of the Gospel story, known already from the liturgy, but fashions it into something strange that can yield, in turn, a new way of contemplating that story. It gazes at a mystery rather than unlocking a puzzle. The rewards promised by Pseustis and Alithia for solving their riddles underscore this contrast. According again to Bernard of Utrecht, the “Trojan secret” refers to the hidden location of the statue of Pallas brought from Troy to Rome, so that knowing it “means

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to be privy to something highly esoteric.”18 Uttering the tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of God in Hebrew that Jewish tradition forbade to be pronounced, may, as modern commentators suggest, be a promise that shows Alithia’s confidence that Pseustis will not be able to answer.19 Rather than such esoteric exclusivity, however, Bernard proposes a more enigmatic significance. After using the tools of philology to explore some meanings of the tetragrammaton letter by letter, he concludes that the point is not so much that it cannot be pronounced but rather that its mysteries cannot be comprehended. Despite the poem’s somewhat didactic assertion of the truth of Christianity, Alithia’s victory also advances the enigmatic over the esoteric. The poem’s two speakers further align their riddles with competition on one side and contemplation on the other. After Alithia proposes her riddle, Pseustis complains, “If this girl beats me today with her tricks, and the victory goes to Mopsus, I’ll grieve like Calchas.” He alludes here to a contest between Greek soothsayers in which the deciding question was merely how many apples were on a certain tree, and the loser, Calchas, died of shame. Alithia replies, “I shall rely especially on the four books of the Good News, telling how God took on our mortal body from a Virgin, and your efforts won’t bother me a bit.”20 The contrast between the two kinds of riddle is here magnified into the difference between pure trivia and the inexhaustibly meaningful source of Alithia’s enigma, the Christian learning that lies at the apex of the education grammar students were beginning and that, the poem implies, fulfills prior enigmas. Pseustis has been fixated merely on winning or losing. After Pseustis concedes and Phronesis acknowledges Alithia’s victory, Alithia ends with a prayer to the Triune God as ruler and judge. Though she seems pleased to have won the contest, she is also rather detached from it throughout and models another sort of motivation to play the game, less driven by rivalry and more oriented to future fulfillment. The exchange of riddles at the end of the Eclogue both remains within what one would expect of a didactic textbook and steps outside of it. Christian learning trumps classical, but also provides a framework within which the classical can be reinterpreted for hidden meaning, as vigorous later efforts at allegorical commentary on classical myth would do. The riddles fit the pattern of the whole contest between classical and Christian lore, but they remain unanswered and mysterious.

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Ending a pastoral singing contest with an exchange of riddles is a pattern that originates in Virgil’s third eclogue, which was not well known in the Middle Ages.21 Yet Theodulus’s eclogue also resembles two more widespread and well-known forms, tales that climax with riddle challenges and dialogues featuring repeated riddle exchanges. Each of these categories includes a range of texts: some that operate more didactically to reaffirm established power structures and discourses; others that engage in more enigmatic play. The most prominent examples of each form, the tale of St. Andrew and the Three Questions and the dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf, could well have been important in funneling these broader traditions to Langland and his audience. In each, though in quite different ways, the truly enigmatic emerges from a contest narrative.

SAINT AS RIDDLEMASTER

The St. Andrew legend’s motif of three questions and its combination of decisive contest and educational process make it an important model for understanding Langland’s more intricate use of riddling traditions. Its sheer popularity makes it the best example for thinking about how folktales of riddle contests contribute to the medieval poetics of enigma. Folklorists have classified it as one of many variations on the tale type “Catch the Devil through a Riddle”; the Grimm brothers’ story “The Devil and His Grandmother” might represent common oral versions.22 The first recorded instances of this tale type, one told of St. Andrew and another of St. Bartholomew, occur in one of the most widely known texts of the late Middle Ages, the collection of saints’ lives called the Legenda aurea. In the Bartholomew version the saint asks the riddles, while in the Andrew version he answers them, but the context and effect are the same.23 The Andrew version went on to appear as a separate exemplum in Arnold of Liège’s Alphabetum narrationum and in the thirteenth-century South English Legendary, as well as many similar collections in both Latin and Middle English.24 Even the translations suggest that it was something of a favorite: the South English Legendary and Mirk’s Festial each select only parts from the rest of St. Andrew’s life as it is transmitted in the Legenda aurea, differ in the parts they select, and often abbreviate them, but both include a full retelling of the miracle of the three riddles. It thus survives

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in far more medieval copies than any other riddle story. I will quote from the Middle English version in the South English Legendary, which is in verse rather than prose and embellishes the riddles while somewhat condensing the rest of the story. A bishop’s special devotion to St. Andrew arouses the envy of the devil. So the devil comes to the bishop as a beautiful maiden demanding that he hear her confession. He reluctantly agrees, and then invites her to dine with him and his household. When he is on the point of deciding to “do folie” with her, one calling himself “a seli pilgrim” knocks on the bishop’s gate.25 The bishop tells the porter to let him in, but the maiden, warning against admitting a beguiler, recommends that they first ask him “a good demaunde.” All agree that she should ask it, since she is “queintest of thoght.” She reluctantly agrees: Esche him wuche is the meste wonder that the kyng of all kynge Our Lord evere an erthe dude in a lutel thinge. (lines 181–82, p. 548) [Ask him which is the greatest wonder that the king of all kings, Our Lord, ever did on earth in a little thing.] The pilgrim answers well: the human face. The maiden insists on asking a second, “straunger demaund”: “in wuche stude erthe heiere then hevene be” (lines 196–97, p. 549; Where does earth stand higher than heaven)? He answers: Tho God was an erthe man, erthe he was inough. To hevene seththe in is monhede erthe with him drough, And ther as he is in is trone, above the hevene he is. There is erthe in is manhede, heiere then hevene iwis. (lines 203–6, p. 549)26 [When God was man on earth, earth he was enough. Since then to heaven in his humanity {he} drew earth with him, And there as he is in his throne, above heaven he is. Thus there is earth in his humanity higher than heaven.]

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All wonder at his answer, and the maiden asks a third question, “Hou muche is bitwene hevene and erthe, and hou mony myle” (line 212, p. 549; How far is it between heaven and earth, and how many miles)? The porter escte this demaunde, tho he to the gate wende. “Escce of him sulf,” quath this other, “that the huder sende, Vor he it met tho he vel fram hevene to helle With Lucifer and other develes. He may the bet telle.” Queynte was the escere that so queinte understod, Ac queintore was the answeriare that is answere was so good. The porter sede is erande that the pilgrim hem sende. Tho the devel ihurde this, adevelwei he wende. (lines 215–22, pp. 549–50)27 [The porter asked this riddle when he went to the gate. “Ask of himself,” said this other, “who sent you hither, For he found out when he fell from heaven to hell With Lucifer and other devils—he may tell you better.” Clever was the asker, who so cleverly understood, But cleverer was the answerer that his answer was so good. The porter said his errand, that the pilgrim on him sent. When the devil heard this, a-devil-way he went.] The pilgrim also disappears, and the repentant bishop later receives a sign in prayer that he was St. Andrew. This tale’s decisive reversal of power at the end aligns it with a large, widespread group of tales, with matrimonial, judicial, political, or religious settings, that climax in riddle contests. Referring to the most widespread types of these tales, in which those challenged are suitors for a princess or prisoners of a judge, Christine Goldberg writes, “The common forms of these tales involve a double twist: the party ostensibly in power (princess, judge) sets up a test that causes itself to be tested by the subordinate party ( youth, prisoner). The subordinate wins not only by meeting a challenge but by exposing, humiliating, or shaming a superior.” More important, “There is never any extraneous guessing or taunting of the loser, and very little fanfare for the winner.”28 Knowing the answers

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to the riddles, which are often given to the audience before the riddles are stated, creates a bond between hero and audience over against the opponent, but the result also involves reconciliation, best represented in the tales that end in marriage. In “St. Andrew and the Three Questions,” the subordinate position is filled by the unrecognized saint who remains outside the door as a pilgrim. Riddling builds a bond with the audience and also enables reconciliation between the bishop and the saint, but only later, in prayer, after both saint and disguised devil disappear.29 As in many riddle contests, the riddles themselves require more than just wit and so point to participation in a different sort of power. Whether Andrew answers the riddles or Bartholomew asks them, the third one reveals the true nature of the other contestant. In the Legenda aurea, Andrew declares that the woman is the devil in disguise, but the South English Legendary emphasizes the revelatory power of the pilgrim’s answer to the third question by omitting this explicit declaration and letting the riddle do all the work. The first two riddles rise above the stark confrontation of good and evil to instruct more enigmatically about the marvels first of creation and then of redemption. As E. Gordon Whatley has noted, the riddles “revolve around the crisis at hand,” with the first drawing attention to the source of the bishop’s temptation and the second to the only body he should be devoted to.30 All three of these riddles require taking a spiritual view of earthly, physical things. The second and third answer a seemingly physical question with a spiritual event. The first seems to ask for a spiritual answer, but the solution is a physical reality that comes to be seen as an ordinary miracle: the face as the most familiar boundary where the meeting of physical and spiritual is apparent. The second riddle, meanwhile, calls to mind the similar paradoxes of earthly and heavenly, heavy and light, that Langland’s Plant of Peace passage locates in the unique event of the Incarnation. The version in the South English Legendary, moreover, resembles the widespread Middle English riddling verse “Erthe upon Erthe.” The end of an eighty-two-line version of that poem applies the same play on “earth” to the Incarnation and Ascension: And God ros ought of the est this erth for to spede, And went into hell as was gret need,

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And toke erth from sorowe thus erth for to spede, The right wey to heven blys Jesus Cryst us lede.31 The concept behind this second riddle, as expressed more briefly in the Legenda aurea’s original version, is even closer to Alithia’s riddle in the Eclogue of Theodulus. As in that text, the contest of knowledge and power conducted by riddles here is entirely conclusive, yet also points to a larger quest for understanding—for Langland’s “kynde knowing.” “St. Andrew and the Three Questions” accentuates the comic turn typical of medieval riddle tales by contrast to the tragic pattern exemplified by Oedipus.32 Indeed, this contrast fits the general pattern of classical tragedy and Christian comedy laid out by Theodulus. Yet accompanying the resolution of the contest, as also in Theodulus, is the continuation of a larger game in which the object is contemplation and reconciliation. This game comes to the fore in riddling dialogues, most challengingly when one of the contestants is the scoundrel trickster named Marcolf.

THE WISE FOOL MARCOLF

The English text printed in 1492 under the title The Dyalogus or Communyng betwixt the wise King Salomon and Marcolphus reflects a Latin tradition that was already at least five centuries old and seems to have had a late medieval explosion of popularity. It translates a Latin text that survives in other Latin and vernacular versions, all of which suggest continuous fluctuation “between spoken and scripted iterations.”33 The editors of the Latin text call it simply Solomon and Marcolf, and I will use that title to refer to the whole tradition in both Latin and vernacular versions. Though this tradition shares the figure of Solomon with other dialogues, it does not seem to descend directly from them. It draws on a much wider range of riddling forms and combines them into a tale that highlights the capacity of the enigmatic to deflect the violence associated with hierarchical authority.34 Various English references to Marcolf, both visual and verbal, show that this tradition had been well known in England since at least the thirteenth century.35 A room in Westminster Palace known as the Marculph

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Chamber was painted around 1252 with scenes from the story of Solomon and Marcolf.36 The English proverbs of Hendyng that circulated widely from the early fourteenth century refer to their author as Marcolf ’s son, and in the fifteenth century, two English poets, John Lydgate and John Audelay, each mention Marcolf.37 There is no clear evidence that Langland knew Solomon and Marcolf, and its surviving textual witnesses are too late to consider a particular version of it as a source. They provide, however, suggestive analogues for Langland’s handling of the riddle contest at the banquet of Conscience as well as for some of his characters. More important, this whole tradition realizes most fully the potential, glimpsed in other dialogues, for riddling to destabilize authorities and replace them with a wisdom that emerges from the kind of play with words and bodies more often seen as folly. Solomon and Marcolf likely also draws on oral riddling games in which such play with authority is even stronger. It removes its games, however, to a timelessness somewhere between the farmyard present and the Old Testament past. Piers Plowman will graft similar kinds of challenge onto conversations between personas connected instead to particular discourses of its time and place. Solomon and Marcolf combines several kinds of contests, all with a riddling aspect, within a larger narrative frame. The English translation, like most of the surviving versions, marks a division into two parts in which the first is dominated by an exchange of proverbs and the second reads as a series of narrative vignettes. Nancy Mason Bradbury has proposed a division into a series of five separate contests: first a contest of ancestry; second and longest, the duel of proverbs; third, a series of riddle challenges; fourth, the proving of “arguable propositions”; and fifth, “arguments on both sides of an issue,” the issue being whether women are good or bad.38 This view emphasizes the competition between what she calls two kinds of “rival wisdom,” and certainly the back-andforth of challenge and response is the basic structure throughout the text. Most of the earliest references to Marcolf seem to refer to the proverb contest.39 One of them, however, speaks of enigmas: William of Tyre, referring to one Abdemon who helped Hiram, King of Tyre, in a legendary exchange of riddles with Solomon, writes, “Possibly this is the man who in fictitious popular narratives is called Marcolf, of whom it is said that he used to solve the riddles of Solomon and in turn responded to him, reciprocating with riddles to be solved in turn.”40 While this likely refers to an

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earlier version of the dialogue, it suggests that riddling could be seen as the basic form of the contests brought together in the surviving versions and the element that makes them cohere. More important, to see riddling as the primary mode of contest here helps answer the question of how the text resolves the opposition between the two kinds of wisdom represented by Solomon and Marcolf. Is the audience asked to choose sides or invited to join a game that ascribes wisdom to both? Although only the middle of the five contests distinguished by Bradbury uses classic riddle forms paralleled in other tales, they all depend on witty tricks and wordplay.41 In the first, the contest of ancestry, Marcolf answers Solomon’s lineage of twelve patriarchs going back to Judah with his own lineage of twelve names that include variations on his own name, variations on the Latin word rusticus or peasant, and a few others harder to guess that might have to do with wine dregs and grain.42 He gives a similar genealogy for his wife. Proverbs, the second contest, can be seen as the inverse of riddles in their use of figurative language, as noted above in chapter 2, and are especially close in form and function to the riddles of catechetical dialogues. Whereas Solomon’s proverbs here sound just like the biblical book of Proverbs, which in fact they often quote, Marcolf answers with proverbs that hover between sense and nonsense, sometimes tending toward parody and sometimes drawing on an alternative stock of proverbs closer to peasant life, but consistently inviting the question of what alternative wisdom they might offer. Some are riddling in themselves: “S: ‘It becomth no foles to speke or to brynge forth any wyse reason.’ M: ‘It becomyth not a dogge to bere a sadylle [saddle].’”43 The fourth contest, too, shares a riddling aspect with tales that involve performing impossible tasks. The contest itself is to stay awake; each time Marcolf is caught falling asleep, he says he was only thinking and states a seemingly unprovable proposition he was thinking about. Solomon then challenges him to prove them all. The fifth contest, which follows after the famous story of Solomon’s judgment between two women who each claimed the same child, is the least riddling but turns on a similar sort of trick in which a verbal challenge is used to deflect violence. Riddling is at the center of this text and draws the other forms of contest into its orbit. The frame narrative makes Solomon and Marcolf more than a series of contests and celebrates the kind of playfulness embodied in Marcolf. Donald Beecher has drawn attention to how the whole text combines

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what the folklorist André Jolles called the “simple forms” of proverb, riddle, and jest into a nascent example of the jest cycle or trickster biography, a genre that grew and multiplied in early modern texts such as Tyl Eulenspiegel and its English imitators and analogues.44 Thomas Lederer has noted similarities between the shape of Eulenspiegel’s story and some of its episodes, at least in some versions, and the Gospels.45 There are also parallels, different but equally strong, between the Gospels and Marcolf ’s story. Solomon and Marcolf starts with genealogy, like the genealogies of Jesus in Matthew 1 and Luke 3. It ends with Solomon sentencing Marcolf to be hanged on a tree. Here the Latin versions use the same phrase, “in ligno,” as do the descriptions of Christ’s crucifixion at Acts 5:30 and 10:39.46 In between, the contests of wisdom between Marcolf and Solomon recall the confrontations between Christ and the Pharisees. Marcolf ’s proverbs and riddles often draw on imagery from peasant life and agriculture, as many of Christ’s parables do, and in ways that similarly leave their meaning open to interpretation: “S: ‘He that sowyth wyckydnesse shal repe evyll.’ M: ‘He that sowyth chaf shal porely mowe.’”47 In this exchange, Marcolf literalizes Solomon’s metaphor and recalls imagery of sowing and reaping, wheat and chaff in several Gospel parables. To stretch the comparison a bit further, Marcolf ’s riddle-tricks might be likened to Christ’s miracles, though their purpose is merely to escape the judgments and threats of Solomon. In that respect, they parallel Christ’s responses to the accusations and traps laid by the Pharisees. One particular sequence recalls the typical dynamics of the Gospels. Marcolf, having been driven from King Solomon’s court for the second time, returns by bringing a rabbit under his clothes to release when the dogs are set on him. Solomon, apparently knowing Marcolf ’s habits, warns him not to spit anywhere but on the bare ground. The whole palace is covered in finery, though, so the command is a bit of a test, even a temptation. Marcolf, “full of spytyll” from all of his talking and clattering, starts to “cough and reche up” and spits on a bald man’s head, who of course complains to the king. Called to account, Marcolf makes of it a joke that evokes not only the agricultural imagery of several Gospel parables and miracles of multiplication but two notable instances of healing: “My lord, have ye not forbedyn me that this daye I shulde not spytte but upon the bare erthe? And I sawe his forehede alle bare of herys, and

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thynkyng it be bare erthe, and therefore I spyttyd upon it. The king shall not be angry for this thing for I have done it for the manys proffyte, for and if his forehede were thus usyd to be made fat, the herys shulde ayen encrease and multiplye.”48 Twice Jesus heals blind men by means of spitting. In Mark 8, the miracle follows shortly after the Pharisees demand a sign in order to tempt him. In John 9, it sets up the comparison between the physical blindness of the cured man and the spiritual blindness of the Pharisees. Marcolf claims only to cure baldness, and the efficacy of his cure is doubtful. Yet Marcolf ’s tricks, especially in the third contest, depend on and thus expose a certain blindness to the ways of common medieval life on Solomon’s part, despite his wisdom.49 It would be a mistake, however, simply to identify Solomon with the Pharisees (or the Old Testament) and Marcolf with Christ (or the New Testament), or even to identify Solomon with the serious and Marcolf with the playful. Solomon, while preserving his regal dignity and his reputation for at least one kind of wisdom, plays along with the game. The valence of Marcolf—like that of Piers the Plowman, another figure identified as the carrier of a compelling but extrainstitutional outlook in later works that invoke him—is harder to measure. Marcolf frequently draws on the “material bodily lower stratum” that Bakhtin analyzes as an important component of the carnivalesque, as in this typical exchange: “S: ‘Of habundance of th’erte the mouth spekyst.’ M: ‘Out of a full wombe th’ars trompyth.”50 Indeed, Bakhtin points to Solomon and Marcolf as an example of a much more general process in the later Middle Ages in which unified discourse of high literary genres, represented by authorities like Solomon, is “dialogized” when confronted by the low, parodic, rustic discourse of an outsider like Marcolf.51 As Richard Firth Green argues from Audelay’s references to Marcolf, he does not merely represent a “licensed misrule.”52 Marcolf ’s literalizing proverbs result in parody but have their own sort of common wisdom.53 Marcolf is not a mere folk alternative to Latin culture, whatever folk forms might lie behind the text that grew within institutions of Latin learning, nor is he a serious challenge to institutional power.54 Rather, the dialogue strings together variations on a form in which each voice can be tried and find its place. The last of the arguable propositions offers an interpretation of what Marcolf and Solomon each represent and who wins. The proposition is

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that nature goes before learning, which Marcolf proves in a version of a widespread folktale.55 Solomon has a cat he had trained to hold a candle at supper, and Marcolf comes with three mice up his sleeve. Marcolf lets the mice go one by one, and Solomon’s glare keeps the cat from chasing the first two but not the third. Since Marcolf has been associated with nature and Solomon with learning all along, the jest here becomes a commentary on the relative wisdom and authority of the contestants. Better, however, as Bradbury argues, to see the dialogue’s contests as unresolved, with the wisdom of each side qualifying the other and exposing its incompleteness, but neither side vanquished or subordinated to the other. The form of open contest dictates openness to multiple valid but inadequate perspectives. Following a suggestion from Helen Cooper, Bradbury compares this dialogue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in that both juxtapose perspectives to each other in order to enrich each one, but without implying resolution in an overarching perspective.56 Riddling is the paradigm here of a game that perpetuates itself rather than leading to victory for one side. Marcolf plays not for power but for the game. When Solomon gives up the proverb contest after ninety or so exchanges, Marcolf insists on the prize he was promised if he could answer all of Solomon’s “questions”: to be made rich above all others in the kingdom. Solomon’s ministers object and insist on driving Marcolf out with staves, but the king says to let him eat and drink well and then “goo in peace,” “in pace dimittatur,” words that Ziolkowski has suggested might allude to Simeon’s words upon seeing the infant Christ.57 Surely Marcolf does not expect the prize and demands it only to test the king and prolong the game. Marcolf ’s parting words show his disappointment and get one more lick in the proverb contest: “I shall alweyes saye, ‘There is no king were no lawe is.’”58 The only authority he recognizes is within the terms of the game. While his wit and wisdom are recognized by Solomon, he remains an outsider and wins nothing other than his own freedom. At the same time, Solomon too chooses the game rather than rivalry by refraining from violence and letting Marcolf live to play another day. In the following episodes, the threat of banishment or worse always hangs over their encounters, and Marcolf initiates riddle games to defer violence, even while shaming the king. The king, to his credit, laughs and even imitates Marcolf with riddle challenges of his own. Solomon seems

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to enjoy the game even though his position forces him to pass judgment against Marcolf. Throughout the contests, Marcolf escapes Solomon’s sentences by playfulness that is at once inferior to Solomon’s wisdom in its rustic crudeness and superior in its grasp of the intricacies of both language and human nature. In the final contest, Solomon himself occupies both positions, the height of wisdom and the nadir of simplicity. It begins with Marcolf witnessing Solomon’s judgment between two women in rivalry for one child, told in 1 Kings 3 as the epitome of Solomon’s wisdom. The story moves much like the enigmatic from contest to knowledge, but it is Solomon’s power of judgment instead of a question that reveals the truth. When he orders the child to be cut in half, the love shown by the one who surrenders her claim shows her to be the true mother. Solomon uses the threat of violence to subvert the contest between the women and show truth to be aligned instead with the renunciation of rivalry. Marcolf, however, questions Solomon’s knowledge by accusing women of deceptiveness. When Solomon answers with a long speech in praise of women, Marcolf promises to make him dispraise them just as much by the end of the day. This he does by finding the mother and telling her Solomon has changed his mind and decided to give her just one half of the child after all, plus require all men to have seven wives. She gathers the women of the town and they come to Solomon as a mob to decry his injustice. Initially he responds playfully, as he might with Marcolf, but when this fails he launches into the antifeminist tirade Marcolf had predicted. After sending Marcolf away for the third time, he explains to the women what happened and mollifies them with a second speech in their praise. From his wisest moment he has been reduced to a flip-flopper trading in stereotypes and flattery. The shadow of antifeminism darkens the dialogue’s games at this point, yet perhaps it is also possible to see a Marcolfian realism behind both positive and negative stereotypes. Solomon’s wisdom has been brought into dialogue with Marcolf ’s, yet not by outright subversion of his initial judgment for maternal love over rivalry. The potential of wit to subordinate competition to knowledge has also been tested by the threat of a mob, but Solomon manages to make peace. Despite the honor given to Solomon, the Dialogue’s comic ending has him foiled again by Marcolf. Solomon, tricked into looking at Marcolf ’s

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arse in an oven, finally loses his patience and sentences him to be hanged. Marcolf asks to choose the tree on which he will hang, and, once more, Solomon plays along. Marcolf takes his guards on a search beyond Jerusalem all the way to the Red Sea (thus recapitulating Israel’s wilderness journey in reverse) and, of course, does not find a tree to his liking. “And thus he askapyd out of the dawnger and handes of King Salomon, and turnyd ayen unto hys howse, and levyd in pease and joye.”59 Solomon and Marcolf does not end in reconciliation, but, like the riddles at the end of the Eclogue of Theodulus, it inhabits a sphere of meaningful play that moves beyond rivalry. For the audience, this opens the opportunity of keeping the wisdom of both sides in play. One medieval category through which Marcolf ’s wisdom can be taken seriously alongside Solomon’s is the notion of wise folly. Marcolf himself states the principle when Solomon, in the middle of their riddle contest, asks him the source of his wisdom: “He is holdyn wyse that reputyth hymself a fole.”60 The Middle English term fool sage, which could apply to both of the kinds that would come to be distinguished by the early modern era as “the ‘natural’ fool (a mentally deficient person kept as entertainer) and the ‘artificial’ fool (a mentally normal person who pretends to be mad in order to be kept as entertainer),” implied that a fool might speak wisdom and had the privilege to speak freely even if bluntly and critically.61 Siegfried Wenzel has analyzed seven stories, found in collections of sermon exempla going back to the beginning of the fourteenth century, of household fools who speak wisdom under the guise of nonsense. Arguing that these are the direct ancestors of the “fool sage,” he discusses the stories’ common “concern for the poor and for the plight of the lower classes,” not only as the fool’s social equals, but also in recognition of the true wisdom of detachment from the world.62 The fifteenthcentury poet John Audelay identifies Marcolf, “the more fole mon,” as a spokesman on behalf of the poor.63 Marcolf, then, might be seen as a literary cousin of the “fool sage,” an apparent fool found to be wise, who wins for the lowly and their discourse a hearing with—and escape from— those in authority.64 In Solomon and Marcolf, his folly is both beneath and beyond the king’s wisdom, and he gains this ambiguous place above all through riddling. Marcolf ’s responses to Solomon’s challenges all tend to reduce the difference between them, to make the fool appear wise and the wise king

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seem a fool. The king, by repeatedly casting Marcolf out and threatening him with violence, moves to restore the difference and to mark Marcolf as the poor victim. Marcolf ’s tricks, almost all based on riddling wordplay, deflect the violence through the king’s faithfulness to his own word—a word that turns out to mean more than he knows. Yet Marcolf, even more than St. Andrew, troubles the boundary of outside and inside: he is the outsider with inside knowledge. In the final contest, Marcolf, through mere false accusation, puts Solomon in the position of victim and aligns Solomon with his own mixture of wisdom and folly. Marcolf ’s use of riddle tricks to disarm the power of Solomon as king and sage, precisely because he plays for the game rather than for power, finds a parallel in Langland’s association of riddles with the patient folly of the Gospel. Both the theological riddles of “St. Andrew and the Three Questions” and the endless play of Solomon and Marcolf open the contest dynamic in riddle stories to participation in infinite mystery. Further, the position of both Andrew and Marcolf as outsiders locates them in a tradition that Langland will more explicitly designate as wise folly. Langland’s contemporary setting and his theological orthodoxy, however, complicate the project of aligning Gospel truth with play that potentially undermines established authority.

CONTEST AND DIALOGUE IN PIERS PLOWMAN

The banquet of Conscience (sometimes called the feast of Patience), one of Langland’s most compelling narrative episodes, is unusual in his poem for gathering together characters that have appeared in all three of its previous visions. It does not continue the story lines in which they played parts, but resumes important topics of earlier debate and uses these personifications to stand for kinds of authority. It takes up again the poem’s questions of justice and salvation by staging a contest between ways of answering them. Riddling provides the form of the contest and signifies, within it, a larger mode of inquiry and authority. Thus the riddle contest also illuminates why Piers Plowman is also willing to be so enigmatic in its large-scale, nonlinear strategies of organization.65 The five principal characters in the scene are the dreamer, Conscience, Clergy, an academic “maister,” and Patience. Conscience became

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the main voice of authority in the first vision after the departure of Holy Church, a status enhanced in the C text by his appearance in the waking scene added between the first and second visions, in which he and Reason call the dreamer to account for his life. His role is much like that of a bishop, including the capacity of senior government minister or counselor often served by bishops during this time. His concern, as his name would imply, has been matters of justice and the discernment of right and wrong. Clergy was one of the dreamer’s teachers in the third vision, part of a sequence representing clerical education that leads to controversy over the value of learning for salvation. The “maister” (or doctor of divinity) and Patience are both new in the fourth vision. A sixth figure who will be important in this scene—quoted in the B text and speaking in C—is Piers Plowman, who became the imaginative center of the second vision and its interest in true penance and good work. The narrator/ dreamer, who has come to be known as Wille during the third vision in the B text, is of course the thread that has connected everything thus far. The poem has resolved none of the issues it has raised, neither those of social, political, and economic welfare nor those of individual or corporate spiritual welfare, and its most consistent through-line has been a quest for a kind of knowledge that would be transformative, “kynde knowing.” The waking scene that precedes the fourth vision is the only one in the poem in which Wille rehearses moments from the previous vision and tries to collect his experience before moving on. This brief interlude touches impressionistically, as in the first remembrance of a dream, on images that stand for the poem’s ongoing concerns, then comes to rest on a figure of the enigmatic discourse through which it will increasingly address them. Wille describes himself on waking as “nearly witless” (“witlees nerhande,” B.13.1/C.15.1), walking many years like one doomed to die (“fey,” B.13.2/C.15.2) and dressed as a mendicant. His spiritual state is as ambiguous as at the beginning of the poem, and despite all that he has seen and all the teachers he has had, he seems no nearer to understanding. Yet his very lack reaffirms the poem’s main goal, the “kynde knowing” that would come with power to save his soul. His witlessness, in the fourth vision, will become not just a device to move the poem forward but a sort of poverty to be embraced, the makings of wise folly. Wille’s waking recollections of previous visions touch on their concern for both material and spiritual poverty. From the third vision’s dream

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within a dream, he remembers his own loss of fortune and all the poor neglected by friars who trade penitential absolution for donations. This leads his thoughts beyond the third vision to how “coveitise,” immoderate desire for worldly things, overcomes everyone, both rich and poor, lettered and unlettered, as seen most vividly in the first vision’s representation of the subtle warping of social relations through the power of reward (Lady Mede). The second vision too explored all kinds of fallen desires in its portraits of the seven sins and the obstacles to working out true penance through good work presided over by Piers. Reference to the lettered and unlettered cues the dreamer’s worries about the fate of the unlettered without good clergy and recalls the question of learning that was central to the third vision. Intellectual poverty too is a deficit the poem seeks to turn to gain. The waking scene ends by recalling some of the poem’s strongest pointers thus far in the direction it will go in Conscience’s riddle contest. Wille recalls the vision of Kynde from the inner dream of the third vision and the knowledge that Kynde gives to every living thing, which gives hope that humanity can receive the “kynde knowing” we need. Finally the dreamer thinks of his last teacher from the third vision, Ymaginatif, and how he said, “Vix iustus salvabitur” (B.13.19; The righteous man will scarcely be saved). This may not sound hopeful, but it refers, rather cryptically, to the final lines of the vision, in which Ymaginatif, through dense wordplay, asserts that even pagans may be saved by their own truth because it participates in God’s truth. Ymaginatif might be said to represent literary knowledge, the category of which the enigmatic is a part.66 The dreamer’s dialogue with Ymaginatif, in fact, was his most riddling thus far. Much of Piers Plowman is made up of dialogues and debates, the broader category that includes riddle exchanges. In the first vision, what begins as a straightforward catechetical dialogue between the dreamernarrator and the authoritative figure Holy Church is enriched by the poetic language of Holy Church’s ever-longer answers to the dreamer’s questions, such as the Plant of Peace passage.67 Later in the first vision, a courtroom confrontation between Conscience and the temptress Lady Mede introduces a debate format seen also in the second vision, with different tones, between Piers and Hunger and, after he tears the pardon sent from Truth, between Piers and the priest who reads it (B text only). Debate continues in a more academic vein in the third vision, marked by the

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formulaic interjection for introducing a rebuttal, “Contra!” taken from oral disputations and Scholastic treatises.68 Wille asks questions, again, of a series of personifications of faculties of learning, both mental and institutional. The questions are mostly about Dowel, a term that comes from the first half of Piers’s pardon: “Do wel and have wel, and God shal have thi soule.” Wille quickly begins to think of Dowel as the object of a quest, another genre that often includes riddles. His first guide in the third vision, Thought, splits Dowel into three, Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest, that unfold its grammatical potential. Thus to the ambiguity of whether Dowel is concrete or abstract—whether it is a matter of where it lives or what it is—is added the question of whether it is one or three. The question of Dowel, that is, becomes more of a riddle as Wille keeps asking it. Langland’s use of riddling dialogue will become most intensely enigmatic in the sixth vision’s debate of the four daughters of God. In the transition from the end of third vision to the beginning of the fourth, however, the riddling aspect of the poem’s dialogues becomes most explicit. Wille’s last and most vivid recollection in the waking scene, the only one that actually quotes an earlier speaker, and the enigma that is in his thoughts as he lays down again to sleep, picks up on some lines spoken by his most recent interlocutor, Ymaginatif, which use tricks typical of Latin riddling at the time. In response to Wille’s repetition of the clerical teaching that non-Christians cannot be saved (a subtopic of the ongoing question of the value of learning), “Contra!” quod Ymaginatif thoo, and comsed for to loure, And seide, “Salvabitur vix justus in die judicii; Ergo salvabitur!” quod he. (B.12.277–9/C.14.202–4)69 This is the line Wille quotes in the B-text waking scene. Ymaginatif ’s defense of this paradoxical assertion includes an acronym: “For ‘Deus dicitur quasi dans {eternam vitam} suis, hoc est fidelibus,’ ” that is, as glossed by A. V. C. Schmidt, “God is called Deus because his name spells salvation to his people—i.e. ‘dans eternam vitam suis’ gives ‘devs.’”70 The C text removes this line from Ymaginatif ’s speech and adds something even more riddle-like to the dreamer’s waking recollection:

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And Y merveyled in herte how Ymaginatif saide That justus bifore Jesu in die judicii Non salvabitur bote if vix helpe. (C.15.21–23) The just man who died before Jesus, that is, will not be saved on the Day of Judgment unless “vix” help, which turns vix from the Latin adverb meaning “scarcely” into a sort of acronym in which “v” stands for the five wounds of “ix,” the Greek initials of Iesus Christ.71 To call these tricks, however, is to understate the capacity they evidently had for Langland’s audience to manifest the participation of words in reality. Even games with letters can be evidence for an assertion. More characteristic of Ymaginatif ’s play with meaning is another comment on the extent of salvation that picks up on the imagery of the Plant of Peace: “Ac grace is a gras therfore, tho grevaunces to abate. / Ac grace ne groweth noght but amonges {gomes} lowe [humble men]” (B.12.59–60, cf. C.14.23–24). Ymaginatif ’s use of riddling play with words and letters subordinates it to a life of love lived out in patient poverty, and it is this idea that will become, in the fourth vision, both a personification and the answer to a winning riddle that turns on the poem’s most intricate instance of transcendence by means of grammar and turns the esoteric tools of academic insiders against exclusion.

CONSCIENCE’S RIDDLE CONTEST

The fourth vision is thus set to take up major threads from the previous three, and it does so by staging a brilliant scene that turns the poem’s ideas into characters whose words and actions can be read in multiple allegorical senses (social, psychological, theological) even as they make direct, dramatic sense.72 James Simpson describes the scene as “a representation of an academic feast, where Conscience is the master of the college and Clergy and the doctor of divinity his guests on high table, while Patience and Wille sit on the side-tables in the body of the hall.”73 The conversation forms a series of “comic agons,” to extend a phrase from Traugott Lawler’s thorough reading of this scene.74 It begins with a rather straightforward contrast between the rich food indulged in by the doctor and the

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simple, penitential food enjoyed by Patience and, somewhat grudgingly, Wille. To see the central agon here as a riddle contest not only identifies important analogues and possible sources of this scene but, more important, clarifies how it resolves the conflict of discourses—and of poetics— that is behind it.75 Whereas interpretation of the riddles in the banquet of Conscience has necessarily begun with what they mean, even more important is how they mean, as with Conscience’s own riddling prophecy in the first vision. The riddles themselves become much less prominent in the C text’s revisions to this scene, but the larger dynamics of the scene remain much the same. I will discuss the B version first, then the changes in C. One important model for this episode has been suggested by Lawler: “the scene in Matthew 22 in which a Pharisee who is a doctor of the law baits Jesus by asking him, ‘Which is the great commandment in the law?’”76 Wille confronts the doctor in a similar spirit, after they have eaten, with his question about the identity of Dowel. But the scene leaves this model behind in important ways because the doctor is not so successful in answering, nor does Wille lose the game like the Pharisee. The doctor’s brief answer, that Dowel is “Do noon yvel to thyn evencristen” (B.13.105, cf. C.15.114), fails to satisfy because it is merely a negation and also, as Wille points out, conflicts with the doctor’s own gluttonous injustice to the poor. Moreover, Langland’s scene includes three other participants in the conversation. When Conscience repeats the question more courteously, he turns the confrontation into more of an academic game, which then follows a variant of the common folktale pattern of threes by asking the same question of three different people, who give increasingly riddling answers. The doctor defends the authority of his institution more plainly by defining Dowel as obedience to the teaching of the clergy. Clergy is asked second and defers to some cryptic words of Piers the Plowman that, at a minimum, signal the limitations of academic learning. The third one asked, Patience, answers with a notoriously difficult riddle (to be considered in a moment) that makes the doctor quit the game. It is rather as if Langland had blended “St. Andrew and the Three Questions” with the dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf. Wille is, like Marcolf, a low-status outsider impertinently challenging a figure of supposed

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wisdom who turns out to be not so wise, although it is Clergy who will, like Solomon, accept at the end the limitations of his own knowledge. The doctor, then, is more like the devil in the St. Andrew story: sitting in the position of honor, seducing his host (to physical and spiritual gluttony, rather than to lust), appealed to for knowledge, and exposed by the contest. Conscience, the host and object of seduction, thus resembles the bishop. Hosting an academic feast would be a typical role for a bishop, though it would be a mistake to say that Conscience always stands for a bishop in the poem’s allegory.77 What links him more importantly to the bishop in the St. Andrew legend is the shape of the plot. Like him, Conscience is the protagonist, the moderator of the contest, and, above all, the one who is rescued through it.78 Patience, finally, is like St. Andrew. He is said to be clothed as a pilgrim, what Andrew claims to be in the South English Legendary, and appears uninvited, begging at the palace. His holiness is obvious, and his riddle in answer to the question of Dowel exposes to Conscience the doctor’s seduction. That he asks a riddle rather than answering them parallels the Bartholomew version of the miracle of the three questions, but the existence of the two versions implies the reversibility of the roles of asking and answering. The exposure that results in Piers Plowman, however, is not as dramatic. Neither the doctor nor Patience vanishes, but Conscience makes the choice to leave the doctor behind and become a pilgrim with Patience and Wille. Even the decisiveness of this choice is mitigated, however, when Conscience reconciles with Clergy before leaving, an irenic conclusion that, like the dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf, retains respect for one kind of knowledge while preferring the other. Patience, who wins the contest as both mystic riddler and holy fool, becomes one of the poem’s several bearers of enigmatic authority, while the more comprehensive and perplexing folly of the narrator mediates and models reception of such authority, and thus of the poem itself. Reading the scene in this way highlights Langland’s careful balance between satire of the doctor’s academic idolatry and affirmation of the proper place of “clergy,” academic learning, under an integrating wisdom enacted with patience and a penitent will. The names of the personified actors imply such abstract notions of discourses and attitudes, but to restate the scene in this way cannot capture what it achieves through

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harmonizing two such different stories of riddling. Moving from modes of dialogue or contest focused on two opponents to a drama with five characters opens up richer possibilities of resolution. Patience defeats the doctor and wins Conscience over, but the peaceful parting of Conscience and Clergy adds a note that anticipates Conscience’s cry for Clergy near the end of the poem’s final vision. The whole scene looks forward to the sixth vision’s reconciliation of the four daughters of God, when they are joined in song with Love as a fifth. In both places, decisive exposure and playful reconciliation combine in a counterpoint that moves toward a more capacious understanding. Patience’s answer to the question of Dowel begins, in fact, with what could be a description of the method of both scenes: “At your preiere,” quod Pacience tho, “{by} so no man displese hym: Disce,” quod he, “doce; dilige inimicos. Disce, and Dowel; doce, and Dobet; Dilige, and Dobest—thus taughte me ones A lemman that I lovede: Love was hir name.” (B.13.136–40)79 The first two commands, to learn and to teach, name the two sides of the dyadic structure of catechetical dialogue, but the third, to love enemies, opens it to a reconciling triad.80 Langland has moved from the opening dialogue between two speakers, the dreamer and Holy Church, to gradually more complex dialogic and dramatic structures. Patience’s words here, however, suggest that the ideal structure toward which this poem moves is not a democratic wealth of style but rather Trinitarian, since the Third Person of the Trinity has, since at least Augustine, been identified with love. Enigmatic language points to a fullness realized in the Trinity of the relations enabled by language.81 More remarkable still is how the contest between kinds of knowledge plays out also in the riddles themselves through the kinds of learning they draw on. Like all good riddles in a riddle tale, they further disclose the significance of the story. Here they add not only metaphoric richness but a metalevel of reference to the various realms of knowledge that the speakers in the scene signify and put into dialogue.

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Several persuasive approaches to solving Patience’s riddle have been offered, all of which agree on the basic answer. Taken together, however, they show the poem engaging an astonishing range of learning within a few lines and pulling the discursive fields they come from into the contest. The riddle is contained in a speech that begins with Patience’s answer to the question of Dowel quoted above, which already gives away the solution: love.82 Attention thus shifts from what the riddle means to how. Here is the riddle: “With half a laumpe lyne in Latyn, Ex vi transicionis, I bere therinne aboute faste ybounde Dowel, In a signe of the Saterday that sette first the kalender, And al the wit of the Wodnesday of the nexte wike after; The myddel of the moone is the myght of bothe. And herwith am I welcome ther I have it with me. Undo it—lat this doctour se if Dowel be therinne.” (B.13.152–58) No subsequent proposals have contradicted Skeat’s century-old suggestion that “The general solution . . . is Charity, exercised with Patience,” yet no single approach gives adequate sense to these lines on its own.83 Compatible as these solutions are, Langland could hardly expect a single reader to come up with all of them, though any of them could be within reach of a well-educated one. Andrew Galloway solves some parts of the riddle by appealing to the tradition of Latin riddling current during Langland’s time. Thus “half a laumpe lyne in Latyn” and “the myddel of the moone” both parallel the beginning of a Latin riddle that describes the shapes of the letters that spell cor. Galloway takes the Latin phrase “Ex vi transicionis” to refer to the kind of decoding involved, one of several modes of what the Secretum philosophorum calls “variatio,” representations of individual letters in a word—although it does not use the word transitio.84 This approach is the more convincing because it also entirely explains the C text’s one-line abbreviation of Patience’s riddle, “In the corner of a cart-whel, with a crow croune” (C.15.163), as another riddle on cor. A better attested and a more accessible context for “Ex vi transicionis” is elementary grammar, in which this phrase was used to refer to how a

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transitive verb rules the grammatical case of its object. Cynthia Bland has shown that this phrase and the system of grammatical analysis oriented around such rules, called regimen, were sufficiently common in school texts during Langland’s lifetime that “the term would not have been obscure to a literate person.” She adds that “ex vi transicionis as a grammatical term is metaphorical in itself and thus invites the use of it made by Langland.”85 Using it to refer to a riddle trick transfers its sense from basic language arts to more arcane ones. Two related readings of “Ex vi transicionis” also address further lines of the riddle through biblical and exegetical sources. The least plausible, perhaps, because it depends on such a specific reference, is Ben H. Smith’s suggestion that line 152 refers to what Hugh of St. Cher calls the “transitive” reading of the first half of Psalm 4:7, “The light of thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us.” Smith coordinates this with Peter of Blois’s scheme for matching the seven days of Creation to seven symbolic days of the Re-creation, so that “the Saterday that sette first the kalender” is the seventh day of Creation, when God rested and human history began, and “the Wodnesday of the nexte wike after” is the Passion. “The myddel of the moone” is then the full moon of Easter, which divides the two eras and represents the power of the Resurrection.86 R. E. Kaske develops another of Smith’s suggestions from Peter of Blois, who also links the days of the week to the seven virtues, so that Saturday stands for charity and Wednesday for prudence or wisdom. By means of a complex yet persuasive web of allusions to grammatical, theological, and biblical texts, Kaske reads “Ex vi transicionis” as a grammatical metaphor for how patience guards all the virtues with the help of charity and wisdom.87 Equally persuasive is the liturgical solution developed by Edward Schweitzer from J. F. Goodridge’s suggestion that “Ex vi transicionis” refers to “‘the Passover, the slaying of the paschal lamb, and the crossing of the Red Sea, which symbolize a Christian’s passing from the Old Law to the new life of grace’ through baptism.”88 This approach does not converge on a single answer but opens onto wide associations with the course of salvation history celebrated at Easter. Such an answer is attractive because liturgy was probably more familiar than academic riddles, exegetical commentaries, or even grammar books. Yet it is difficult to prefer any one solution over the others because, in each case, bringing to bear a less obscure discourse also yields a less precise solution.

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And there is no need to choose, because all of these solutions share the notion that Dowel is a change of heart toward charity. Thus the riddle’s answer points beyond academic learning, and Patience’s challenge, “Undo it—lat this doctour se if Dowel be therinne” (B.13.158), uses a typical way of closing a riddle to tell the doctor to look into his own heart. By constructing his riddle from largely academic materials, however, Patience shows both the potential and limits of learning at the same time that he sets himself over the doctor as an authority. Indeed, readers unable to solve the riddle might nonetheless recognize the kinds of discourse it draws on, and for them the claim to superior knowledge, or to what Galloway calls “rhetorical power,” would be its primary meaning. Galloway finds “a sustained uneasiness on Langland’s part regarding the status and effects of such riddling activities and communities.”89 This scene, built on the hierarchy of a college dining hall, puts its most esoteric language in the mouth of Patience in order to explode the exclusivity of academic communities and relocate authority in a more accessible poetics of enigma. A similar authority is ascribed earlier in this scene to Piers himself by means of a riddling metaphor drawn from grammar. Before Conscience asks Patience about Dowel, he asks Clergy, who defers to the answer he has somehow heard from Piers: “that Dowel and Dobet arn two infinites, / Which infinites with a feith fynden out Dobest, / Which shal save mannes soule” (B.13.128–30). Anne Middleton has explicated these lines according to the grammarian Priscian’s discussion both of infinitive verbs and of the “infinite” or interrogative pronoun. In either case, the metaphor suggests that Dowel and Dobet cannot be limited to specific commands, social functions, or stages of spiritual growth but are instead open containers that point beyond themselves to their fulfillment in the perfection of Dobest. More important, Middleton argues, grammatical metaphor, in an era when grammar was thought to describe the real relations of things in the universe as made and known by God, would be able to rise highest within the temporal limits that make all knowledge of spiritual truths at best enigmatic. Indeed, grammatical metaphor draws attention to these very limits.90 Patience’s riddle likewise deploys academic learning in order to go beyond it. The kinds of learning that it potentially draws on—grammar,

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exegesis, the liturgy—could each claim a superior access to spiritual truth. In the form of a riddle, however, especially one that also involves Latin word games, this intellectual authority becomes double-edged. On one hand, academic learning reinforces, and is in turn reinforced by, the realist metaphysics implicit in much medieval riddling. In this view, all of language is, as Wit had said earlier, “a game of hevene” (B.9.102). Solving riddles intensifies the experience of language as a means of participation in the meaning of things—even if Patience’s riddle results in superfluity of signification rather than luminous clarity. On the other hand, putting academic learning into riddle form has a leveling effect. It questions whether a science such as exegesis has any greater access to truth than do riddle tricks. The leveling effect is all the more challenging coming from an academic outsider such as Patience or Piers. Indeed, the fact that Clergy defers to the authority of Piers, and then ascribes to him a grammatical metaphor, underscores the similarity between Patience’s confrontation with the doctor and Piers’s earlier confrontation with the priest over the pardon.91 Both challenge the institutional authority represented by their opponent. As Piers quotes the Latin Bible against the priest, so Patience makes use of his opponent’s kind of learning. They even share one quotation (Matt. 6:25 at B.7.127 and 14.34b). And both center their challenge on an enigma. Like Patience’s riddle, the tearing of the pardon points to the need for inner conversion rather than conformity to institutional authority. Finally, Patience’s riddle, like Piers’s resolution after tearing the pardon, aligns him with social groups that stand outside the institutional order. For Patience and Piers these extrainstitutional associations include elements of holiness and folly that take wisdom out of the realm of academic discourse and out of the control of official culture. Like the devil in the story of St. Andrew warning the bishop not to admit a beguiler, the doctor of divinity responds to Patience’s riddle by accusing him of being a “disour,” a disreputable kind of storyteller (which Piers had earlier warned against; A.7.47–49/B.6.52–54/C.8.50–52). Of course Patience’s holiness is obvious, and the poem really does recommend the way of patient penitence. Yet the doctor’s accusation might alert us to the possibility that Patience also includes a dash of the trickster Marcolf. Before letting the doctor answer, Patience claimed that his riddle could somehow give mastery over all men:

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“And ek, have God my soule! and [if ] thow wilt it crave, Ther nys neither emperour ne emperesse, erl, kyng ne baroun, Pope ne patriark, that pur reson ne shal make thee Maister of all tho men thorugh myght of this redels— Nought thorugh wicchecraft but thorugh wit; and thow wilt thiselve Do kyng and quene and alle the comune after Gyve thee al that thei may gyve, as thee for best yemere [guardian], And as thow demest wil thei do alle hir dayes after: Pacientes vincunt [the patient conquer].” (B.13.165–72a) Although this power must have to do with the change of heart and love of enemies the riddle refers to, the domain in which Patience locates it is not devotional but courtly, including the courts of both secular and ecclesiastical rulers. A reference to witchcraft suggests the charmlike fascination of riddles, though Patience specifies that this power derives not from witchcraft but from wit.92 Though we might envision some sort of wise counselor, the better comparison might again be Marcolf, who masters Solomon and was promised mastery of the rest of his kingdom. Patiently— if also playfully—suffering one’s enemies is arguably closer to the way Marcolf disarms Solomon through tricks than to St. Andrew’s victory over the devil. Langland’s poetics of enigma finally leaves these models behind, but they help show that, while the enigmatic spans the hierarchical range of medieval discourse, it is most pure at the extremes: the expression of theological mysteries, as in riddles answered by St. Andrew, and the riddles of common folklore or academic recreation. Patience’s riddle links these extremes, which also correspond to his dual social status as saint and outsider. Although theological enigma would normally be associated with the discourses of the church, the surrounding dialogue instead unites both the high and low registers of the enigmatic in opposition to official authority, and thus fashions a discourse resistant to institutional ownership.93 Noting that riddle contests have been classified among the few kinds of folktales that are realistic rather than marvelous, Christine Goldberg suggests that the enigmatic functions much like marvels. In riddle tales,

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“The enjoyment of the audience comes not just from having one character outwit another of higher status, but also from having the central character redefine the problem in such a way that he or she is in control. This stepping outside the boundaries gives these novelle the same kind of intellectual lift that wonder motifs can to magic tales.”94 However well Langland’s audience understands the riddles at the feast of Conscience, wonder surely ought to be one of their effects. They help fulfill the promise made at its very beginning when the dreamer says he “wente wyde in this world wondris to here” (A/B/C.prol.4). The enigmatic is the marvelous in Piers Plowman, and by pulling the tradition of the riddle contest into a full theological vision, Langland enhances its visionary potential. At the end of the scene, the doctor, rather than vanishing like the devil in the St. Andrew story, merely dismisses Patience’s words, pushes the table away, and takes Clergy and Conscience aside to urge them to expel Patience as a liar. Conscience, however, opts against the institution in which he himself has been host by choosing to join Patience as a pilgrim. In response, Clergy reiterates the doctor’s accusation and implies that, by choosing Patience, Conscience is choosing the life of a wandering minstrel, “hankering after New Year’s gifts and odd bits of largesse.”95 And indeed, as Simpson suggests, Patience comes to represent a sort of minstrelsy.96 Later in this vision in the B text, Langland’s narrator warns lords against feeding “fool-sages, flatereris and lieris” who make them laugh (B.13.422–27). Minstrels of various sorts and those who employ them receive some of the poem’s most severe censure.97 Patience combines in one figure the constellation of minstrels, beggars, and lying pilgrims introduced in the poem’s prologue and satirized throughout. His holiness, however, shown especially when scripture is his food at the banquet, makes his a positive, holy minstrelsy that will lead to a list of three good kinds of minstrels: beggars, the poor for a “fool sage,” and learned men to teach about Christ’s passion (B.13.437–52). Both Marcolf and St. Andrew fit these good classes of minstrelsy better than the bad ones and could be seen to contribute to them. Another important model for Patience’s minstrelsy is no doubt the more diffuse and powerful image associated with St. Francis of the “joculatores Domini,” which Donaldson has shown to lie behind the dreamer’s phrase “God’s minstrels” (B.13.440).98 Langland’s construction of a holy minstrelsy includes all of these and thus goes beyond any one of them. Riddling is harnessed

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to a devout poetics and makes it all the more powerful and uncontainable, both in its engagement of mental faculties and in its challenge to institutions. The C text loses much of the explicit attention to riddles but gains, through the sudden appearance and disappearance of Piers, a new emphasis on what the answer to the riddle of Dowel means for the contest itself. Gone are both Clergy’s riddle on the “two infinites,” attributed to Piers, and Patience’s long riddle on love, except for the vestige of the riddle on cor quoted above. Gone also are Clergy’s rebuke of Conscience for wanting “to rede redels” and their parting reconciliation. Third position in answering the question of Dowel is now given to Piers, though until that point it is not clear that Piers is present in the scene.99 Clergy, going second, still defers to Piers and gives much the same answer as in B, minus the “two infinites” and thus focused more clearly on love. Then Piers speaks, without being asked, and radicalizes what love means, especially for speaking to an opponent: Quod Peres the Ploghman, “Pacientes vincunt. Byfore perpetuel pees Y shal preve that Y saide, And avowe byfore God, and forsaken hit nevere, That Disce, doce, dilige Deum And thyn enemy helpe emforth [to the extent of ] thy myhte. Caste hote coles on his heved [head] of alle kynde speche; Fond thorw wit and with word his love to wynne; Yef hym eft and eft [Give to him again and again], evere at his nede; Conforte hym with thy catel and with thy kynde speche, And ley on hym thus with love til he lauhe on [rejoice with] the; And bote he bowe for this betynge, blynde mote he worthen!” And whan he hadde yworded thus, wiste no man aftur Where Peres the Ploghman bycam, so priveliche he wente. (C.15.139–51, cf. B.13.135a–48) Piers’s first words here, the aphorism on patience, were given in B to Conscience when he asked Patience for his answer, and most of the rest is from the beginning of Patience’s speech, before he gives his riddle. Thus the idea of loving enemies with both “kynde speche” and actions is not new, but it is newly prominent in Piers’s mouth. The wonder of the scene becomes

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Piers’s presence, after being absent from the long third vision, and even more his “priveliche” (secret and perhaps mysterious) disappearance. Patience, speaking as soon as Piers leaves and under his endorsement, then asserts further the power of love and patience. At the end, the scene focuses more squarely on Conscience’s recognition that the kind of learning the doctor represents does not know “what is kynde Pacience” and on his choice to go with Patience “parfitnesse to fynde” (C.15.183–85). The scene in C is less a reflection on the enigmatic and more a model of what kind of response it requires. It depends less on who wins the contest and more on what sort of game Conscience chooses to play. The doctor remains within the frame of a win-lose contest. Patience’s game, on the other hand, is an endless one of knowledge that leads to transformation, “kynde knowing” that leads to “kynde speche” and kindness toward opponents. Rather than seeking to exclude a loser, this game is radically inclusive. This requires renouncing rivalry. If a situation forces competition, the patient one must choose to leave or wait and suffer exclusion. The disappearance of Piers can then be seen as both an example of renunciation and a further step in his transformation into an enigma himself. Schmidt has noted that “Piers’s sudden departure distantly recalls that of Jesus at Emmaus (Lk 24:31) and is the first hint in C that he is a figura of Christ.”100 Another possible Gospel parallel is from the beginning of Christ’s ministry, when the scandalized crowd is about to cast him out from the top of a hill, “But he passing through the midst of them, went his way” (Luke 4:30). More often, Christ redirects confrontation toward interpretation through riddling devices like parables, changing the game from contest to contemplation. In the Emmaus story, after Christ disappears, the two disciples who walked with him without recognizing him say to one another, “Was not our heart burning within us, whilst he spoke in the way, and opened to us the scriptures?” (Luke 24:32). A similar enthusiasm proceeding from insight can be seen in Conscience as he sets out with Patience in both the B and C texts. It will eventually be seen in the dreamer as well.

READING LIKE A FOOL

What riddling most pervasively does for Langland’s poem is to shape a stance for its readers to occupy, or, in other words, to project how the

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poem wants to be read. To put it simply, the poem wants readers to play its games and to do so in pursuit of wisdom.101 One can easily imagine that Langland found in St. Andrew and Marcolf not only models for Patience and Wille at the banquet of Conscience but models for playing along with his poem as a whole. The dreamer, while often read as an avatar of the poet, also stands in for the reader, especially in the more dialogic parts of the poem. Conscience too is becoming a stand-in for the reader, as he will be more clearly by the end of the poem, when he says he is setting off, once more, on pilgrimage, this time to seek Piers the Plowman. At the end of the banquet scene, he exemplifies the decision the poem wants its readers to make, to choose the way of patience, a way of holiness and wisdom that moves outside of institutional power and authority, yet is tainted by suspicions of folly and idle minstrelsy. The character of Patience would then be a model of the poet. The scenario of Wille and Conscience on an unspecified pilgrimage with Patience in the middle of the poem is, then, a little allegory of reading the poem. As the figure of authority in this scene, Patience is the poem’s strongest model so far of holy minstrelsy in contrast to the kind that has drawn suspicion earlier in the poem. In the third vision, the voice of suspicion comes mostly from Dame Study, who complains of the debasements of minstrels and, on the other hand, the presumption of theologians who make jokes about the Trinity at feasts when the minstrels take a break (B.10.5–70/C.11.5–53).102 Patience’s holy and enigmatic minstrelsy at the banquet of Conscience begins to help answer this problem of authority by playing both high and low discourses, mystery and folly, against the middle, and thus shifting to a different kind of poetry. Patience’s authority faces another test when he, Conscience, and Wille meet another kind of minstrel named Haukyn.103 Unlike Patience, Haukyn is far from holiness; his dirty cloak is allegorized as an inventory of the seven deadly sins. He seems to justify the criticisms leveled against minstrels elsewhere in the poem, including the banquet scene. Yet the poem again disengages the notion of minstrelsy from its usual connotations, largely through continued metaphors of food and hunger. For Haukyn is a particular kind of minstrel, a “waferer” attached to a household (rather than a wandering minstrel), charged with making the special biscuits that accompanied the sweet wine at the end of a meal and with providing mealtime entertainment. Haukyn explains,

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however, that he is a failure as a minstrel because he cannot do the entertaining things that minstrels do, like singing, dancing, and telling stories.104 He is also something of a general baker who serves everyone from beggars to the pope, and thus, as a provider of food, he resembles Piers the Plowman. But unlike Piers he cannot provide spiritual food and initially does not desire it for himself. While Patience figures an enigmatic minstrelsy that is poor in body and overflowing in spiritual and semantic riches, Haukyn is the reverse, a minstrel who is poor in song and wit and is occupied only with the body. As unpromising as Haukyn’s minstrelsy seems, the ministry of Patience makes it possible to see in it the spiritual poverty of those to whom, Jesus says at the beginning of Beatitudes, the kingdom of heaven belongs. So poor is Haukyn, indeed, that he does not know his poverty. The Beatitudes, as Simpson notes, are the “base text” here from which Patience develops the paradoxes of how salvation comes first to the poor.105 Patience responds to Haukyn’s need by offering to teach him to repent in terms that recall both the food imagery of the banquet scene and the allegory of plowing as penitence in the second vision.106 To Haukyn’s skepticism, Patience answers “paciently, and out of his poke hente [took] / Vitailles of grete vertues for alle manere beestes, / And seide, ‘Lo! Here liflode ynogh, if oure bileve be trewe’” (B.14.37–39/C.15.239). What follows is a splendid ecological vision of the plenty of creation that feeds all things, from the worms on up.107 To receive this plenty requires choosing a life of patient, material poverty. Yet this plenty is manifest to Haukyn as Patience’s words, unfolding the riches that were enclosed in his riddle on love. The food that Patience offers is “a pece of the Paternoster” (B.14.49/C.15.250), and he makes of this image, as A. V. C. Schmidt points out, an enigma about how riddling language nourishes through the chewing it requires.108 The climax of their dialogue turns again to a more sustained enigmatic mode in response to Haukyn’s question “What is poverty?” Patience answers by quoting from a Latin text, translated from a Greek dialogue that is part of a tradition of riddling dialogues associated with Emperor Hadrian, in which one Secundus responds to questions with riddling sequences of phrases.109 When Haukyn then asks to be taught in English, Patience expands playfully on each of the nine phrases, all the while de-

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veloping the key idea that poverty is “odibile bonum” (B.14.276/C.16.115) a hateful good, because it is suffering for the body but health for the soul. Haukyn’s emptiness is an enigma in itself that needs and thus summons compassionate, enigmatic fullness, keeping it ever moving, ever giving, never rigid and controllable. Haukyn’s narrative ends with a sort of riddle of what will become of him: just as he has reached the cusp of despair and contrition, between the unpardonable sin and the fundamental act of salvation, Wille awakens.110 The poem’s most explicit proposal for an alternative, holy minstrelsy, in a passage already mentioned above, appeals to a scriptural precedent chosen, it seems, to emphasize the evangelical authority that attaches to those who suffer. Clerkes and knyghtes welcometh kynges minstrales, And for love of hir lord litheth [comfort/listen to] hem at festes; Muche moore, me thynketh, riche men sholde Have beggeres bifore hem, the which ben Goddes minstrales, As he seith hymself—Seynt Johan bereth witnesse: Qui vos spernit me spernit. Forthi I rede yow riche {th}at reveles whan ye maketh, For to solace youre soules, swiche minstrales to have— The povere for a fool sage sittynge at th{i} table, And a lered man to lere [teach] thee what Oure Lord suffred For to save thi soule fram Sathan thyn enemy, And fithele [fiddle] thee, withoute flaterynge, of Good Friday the storye, And a blynd man for a bourdeour, or a bedrede womman To crie a largesse tofore Oure Lord, your good loos to shewe. (B.13.437–49)111 The narrator, addressing readers directly, introduces three kinds of “Goddes minstrales” with a Latin quotation that, although attributed to St. John, actually comes from Luke, where it concludes Christ’s instructions to the seventy-two disciples sent out to preach: “He that heareth you, heareth me; and he that despiseth you, despiseth me; and he that despiseth me, despiseth him that sent me.”112 The rest of Christ’s instructions

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were a major source for the model of radical discipleship practiced by those who came to be known throughout Christian tradition as fools of God and describe not just poverty but the social alienation also characteristic of fools and minstrels. Langland implies that the poor are fit preachers not only because they understand the Gospel but also because they are like Christ in having been rejected. The Latin verse does in fact recall one from John’s Gospel, near the end of Christ’s last speech before the beginning of the Passion narrative proper, that uses the same verb, spernit, of those who reject Christ and his words.113 Langland’s proposal opens the possibility, reasserted more provocatively elsewhere in the poem, that fools and other victims have authority to speak because they are like Christ, not least in being abused social outcasts.114 This passage also includes scholars among its three kinds of minstrels, but would have them teach of Christ’s sufferings and do so in a way that it compares to musicians. Thus academic learning is not excluded from the authority of holy minstrelsy but is assimilated to its playfulness and to identifying with the persecuted. Such folly resembles the foolishness that St. Paul attributes to preaching, through which God saves those who believe.115 Indeed, this famous passage from the beginning of 1 Corinthians makes the revelation of the Gospel sound like a riddle game in which those who think themselves wise and strong are humbled. St. Paul’s implication that those who are made wise in Christ must somehow continue to embrace their foolishness is probably the ultimate basis for Langland’s synthesis of the Marcolf and St. Andrew versions of riddling dialogue through the figure of wise folly. It is a question not of one sort of authority defeating or excluding another but of renouncing the mode of contest and rivalry for the sake of something else, participating in a game in which truth is not to be owned or mastered and instead involves playing endlessly with what always remains other. To appeal to riddling dialogues as a model for textual authority also implies a model of reading. Like Marcolf, the voices of Piers Plowman keep starting the game again and inviting readers to keep playing.116 For the poetics of enigma, continuing the game is essential; Marcolf never runs out of tricks. But like St. Andrew and Theodulus’s Alithia, Langland’s personifications also seek to disclose truths through their riddles and invite belief in what they disclose. The riddle of Dowel is infinite in

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the theological sense of surpassing human capacity for complete knowledge or perfect action in this life. The hermeneutic posture that results might be compared to what Paul Ricoeur posits as a “second naïveté,” a  renewed and deepened belief that can come after a passage through critical interpretation.117 In Langland the passage is not through sophisticated modern modes of criticism, though the exegetical techniques that were current in his day are indeed part of the process of enigmatic reading. More fundamentally, his poem summons its readers to a second naïveté by passing repeatedly—with Patience, with Piers the Plowman, with Wille, and finally with Conscience—from the position of Marcolf, outside institutional authority, to the high table where, like a saint, one is farther inside than the insiders, and then out again, to exile and to pilgrimage. The next chapter will turn from riddling traditions to analysis of enigma as a trope within academic texts. Classical rhetoric did not welcome what it saw as the obscurity of riddles, but its development in late antiquity and the Middle Ages found serious purposes for enigmatic playfulness. What emerges, especially from Augustinian, theologically oriented rhetoric, is an emphasis on the exercise of desire for what cannot be expressed otherwise than in mysterious figures, which fits the riddling traditions that prefer knowledge to contest and go beyond the didactic and exclusive. Chapter 5 will then consider ways other than short riddle forms that late medieval authors implement this poetics, with Piers Plowman as primary example. We will find there also a further representation of the social dynamics of the enigmatic, one even more closely engaged with history than the banquet of Conscience.

R H E TO R I C Enigma as Persuasion

C H A P T E R

4

E N I G M A I N T H E C U R R I C U LU M Langland’s Third Vision

Classical rhetoric, as received in the Middle Ages and beyond, tended to make a sharp distinction between clarity and obscurity, openness and impenetrability, transparency and opacity. There would not seem to be much room for the enigmatic. Discourses on reading and writing continued, however, to include the term enigma, and thus to make a place for the play of openness and hiddenness that is the essence of riddles. The enigmatic is, in one common image, a veiling, something that neither exposes to plain view nor completely hides; it is a gate of horn rather than ivory, to use the Greek images invoked by Virgil at the end of Aeneid book 6. While enigmatic authors themselves must ultimately teach us how to read their works, the curriculum through which they learned to read and write offers clues about how they might have conceived of what they were trying to do. This chapter asks what a medieval student might have learned about enigma and how this might have given an author, especially an allegorical poet, a rationale for writing a deliberately difficult work. It will focus on the texts in which a fourteenth-century English student, and others throughout late medieval Europe, would likely have encountered the term aenigma. The medieval curriculum was standard enough that this account 173

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pertains not just to English authors such as Langland and Chaucer but to others such as Wolfram von Eschenbach, Jean de Meun, Dante, or even mystics such as Bonaventure. Influential school texts are often old ones, so even though adopting a late medieval frame of reference means leaving out some earlier material, the rhetoric of enigma reconstructed here has early roots and is evident throughout the Middle Ages. Two separate parts of the late medieval curriculum dealt with enigma: the arts curriculum common to all medieval students, particularly grammar and rhetoric; and the more advanced curriculum in theology, particularly biblical exegesis.1 Grammar and rhetoric were more overshadowed by classical preferences, yet possibilities glimmered in those elementary discussions of enigma that came into fuller flower in exegetical theory about how to read the enigmas of the Bible and, by extension, the world. Augustine takes center stage again here, not just as the great theological interpreter of the book of scripture and the book of human nature, but as the great Christian rhetorical theorist. His Confessions, a work widely available and influential even though not read in school, deploys the term as an important marker of his path from ancient rhetorical and esoteric tradition to his refashioning of both within a Christian practice of reading and writing. The heart of this chapter unfolds the significance of enigmatic reading in Augustine’s story of conversion and in his view of the ongoing formation of the church. Augustine established a powerful model of what enigma can do to shape souls and communities through the work of interpretation. I will frame the story of enigma in the curriculum with moments from the third vision of Piers Plowman that tell an Augustinian story of conversion through learning to read the enigmas of scripture, self, and world. The main narrative stem of Langland’s long third vision, upon which much else is grafted, follows the dreamer’s progress through stages of education, from grammar to theology and finally to literature. As has often been noted, the dreamer’s story seems to come closer and closer in this vision to the life of the author, until, in the last section of this vision in the B text, his work as a poet becomes a topic of discussion. Even more, this vision’s exploration of the enigmatic parallels the life of the author because it is in the third vision that the B text picks up where the A text left off and it is between the A and B versions of the poem that

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Langland takes the biggest step toward his poetics of enigma. The B text continuation could be seen as Langland’s solution to the problem that had stymied him, and the poetics of enigma is an essential part of this solution.2 Langland’s third vision begins with his dreamer’s quest for what he calls Dowel, a personification he has invented from the pardon granted through Piers the Plowman in the second vision to all those who “do well.” Thought, who stands for the dreamer’s first seven years, sends him to Wit and Dame Study, who represent the arts curriculum and pass him on to Clergy and Scripture, the theological curriculum. Here the A text, having apparently come to an impasse when the dreamer goes on a tirade against the value of book learning, ends without even waking him up.3 The B continuation starts with the innovative device of a dream-withina-dream that further heightens the consciousness about interpretation that comes with recounting dreams.4 This inner dream’s representation of how the dreamer learns to enter into a mode of enigmatic reading seems to parallel Langland’s own refinement of an enigmatic mode of writing that helped him complete the third vision and add the others that make up the B text, the first complete version of the poem. Strong and surprising parallels between Augustine’s Confessions and this inner dream illuminate how it moves the poem forward toward eventual fulfillment in an interpretive community mediated by Piers the Plowman. The full third vision in the B and C texts is chiastic in structure, completed by the last section of the outer dream, a dialogue with Ymaginatif (see table 4.1). This returns the narrative to the arts curriculum, but now with an answer for the value of literary writing that emerges from the more theological lessons of the inner dream. Part of this answer has to do with scaling up the notion of enigma from local riddles to a larger rhetoric that operates across other forms and long stretches of text. Langland’s third vision provides a lens for interpreting the possibilities only implied in the curricular texts. Augustine develops these possibilities more explicitly in his Confessions, and it is possible that Langland read this text and was influenced by it. But direct influence is not necessary to explain anything about Piers Plowman or, for that matter, the significance of the Confessions for other late medieval authors. Rather, these two remarkable stories of the experience of learning to read and, by

A text 9: Thought 10: Wit 11: Dame Study Clergy Scripture [12: short continuation not in B or C, found in only 3 mss.]

B text 8: Thought 9: Wit 10: Dame Study Clergy Scripture 11: [Inner dream begins.] “Mirror of Middle Earth” Scripture (among others) Trajan Trajan speaks as Christ. “Mountain of Middle Earth” Reason [Inner dream ends.] 12: Ymaginatif

(Numerals indicate passus numbers used in manuscripts.) C text 10: Thought Wit 11: Dame Study Clergy Scripture [Inner dream begins.] “Mirror of Middle Earth” 12: Rechelesnesse, Scripture, others Trajan, Rechelesnesse Voice of Christ 13: Rechelesnesse Reason [Inner dream ends.] 14: Ymaginatif arts

arts

theology

curriculum

Table 4.1. Chiastic structure in the A, B, and C versions of the third vision of Piers Plowman and correspondence to parts of the medieval curriculum

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extension, write enigmatically, one from the beginning of the Middle Ages and the other from near the end, illuminate a path that was available to readers and writers throughout the era. Our path here will follow the order of the curriculum and work from the outer parts of Langland’s third vision to the inner, so that it ends with Augustine’s Confessions and Langland’s inner dream.

GRAMMAR: ARE TROPES ORNAMENTAL OR NECESSARY?

Enigma was a term learned early and used at every level of education. The definition of enigma encountered first and repeated most often by other authorities comes from the Ars major by the fourth-century grammarian Donatus, one of the basic Latin textbooks across Europe throughout the Middle Ages and into early modernity. Its third and last section, often copied separately, ends with a list of tropes, phrases in which a word is “turned” (the meaning of trope in Greek) from its proper or usual sense to another, figurative one. First is metaphor and last is allegory, which has seven noteworthy species. One of these is enigma: “a hidden meaning through a secret likeness of things, such as: ‘a mother gave me birth, and then the same one was born from me,’ when it signifies that water grows together/hardens in ice and then again flows out from the same.”5 The example sounds like a riddle and stands out as the only example of a trope (other than a few short phrases) that Donatus does not quote from a literary author, usually Virgil. A commentary on Donatus by the late fifth-century grammarian Pompeius, often copied in manuscripts with the Ars major, identifies this example with children’s play.6 It is as if enigma is outside the scope of literature but must nonetheless be taken into account, and is outside not just because of its obscurity but also because of its nursery-room playfulness. Yet the focus of the definition itself, disclosing secret likenesses in things, suggests the deepest inside knowledge, a participation in the mysterious life of things like that seen in other riddles. Donatus says little about the purpose or value of tropes in general, but his short comment at the beginning of his list of tropes that they are “for the sake of ornament or necessity” (or perhaps both, “ornatus

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necessitatisve causa”) evokes one of the original controversies in Western literary criticism.7 If tropes are merely for ornament, then anything said with them can also be said more plainly. This view, stemming principally from Aristotle, makes a sharp distinction between form and content. Content should be clear, and form is mostly treated as pleasing but disposable ornament. The discipline of grammar developed within this tradition; lists of tropes and figures are one of its main tools for analyzing form. The fact that Donatus includes tropes at the end of a section that begins with barbarisms and solecisms implies that they too are nonstandard language. This classical separation of style and substance supports the notion of a medieval “delight in the enigmatic” that was purely aesthetic.8 Yet Donatus’s remark on tropes acknowledges another view. If tropes are sometimes necessary, then some things cannot be said in any other way, and form and content are not so separable. Indeed, the Aristotelian grammatical tradition, primarily interested in composition, arose in response to a prior approach to literary language, more interested in interpretation, that leaves its earliest traces in what have been called the allegorical interpreters of Homer. In this tradition, poets are understood to use the forms they do in order to reveal deep truths. Getting at such hidden wisdom is the original emphasis of this interpretive tradition, and ainigma was the main term these ancient Greek interpreters used, before the terms allegory and symbol had begun to be used in a literary sense, for the special language by which poetry conveys a surplus of meaning. Later, after the rise of the Aristotelian tradition, this prior tradition would be revived by Neoplatonic thinkers who would, in turn, influence Augustine. Peter T. Struck has shown that Aristotle’s elevation of metaphor over enigma, one of the moves that initiated the system of classifying figurative language passed on to the Middle Ages by Donatus, was part of a strategy of replacing the poetics of enigma with a poetics of clarity.9 Yet for Donatus to allude to the topic of whether tropes are ornamental or necessary opens the question of the purposes of poetic language. The next definition of enigma a late medieval student would likely have seen, from Alexander of Villedieu’s versified summary of grammatical teaching called the Doctrinale, is at once briefer and more farreaching than Donatus: “an obscure saying, as if to be wondered at.”10

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This is one of a very few of Alexander’s definitions in which he implies the purpose of a trope. Wonder has an aesthetic aspect that could be seen as ornamental, but it also implies pointing to something mysterious or otherwise inexpressible. Alexander repeats the ice riddle from Donatus and adds another example—something he does with none of the other tropes from Donatus—that turns wonder from the natural world to history: “The offspring kills this father in the mother’s womb.” Glosses to the Doctrinale give the solution as “blessed Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, whom Henry, King of England, had killed in front of the altar.”11 Applying the metaphor of church as family in two different ways, bishop as father and church building as mother, yields a solution to the puzzle but also brings the spiritual drama of martyrdom and sainthood closer to home, as it were, and anticipates the richer environment for enigma in the theological curriculum.12 Alexander’s changes and additions to Donatus imply that he sees more going on in enigma than the standard grammatical approach accounted for. Langland opens room for wonder and play in his educational sequence through a passage, added to the B text early in the third vision, that envisions a purpose for all language. The personification called Wit, the dreamer’s first teacher, in the course of his general instruction about good use of one’s “inwit” or reason, warns him against wasting time or speech. Good use of speech is the point of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, but Wit’s notion of using language well makes it instrumental in a more musical sense: {Tyn}ynge [losing] of tyme, Truthe woot the sothe, Is moost yhated upon erthe of hem that ben in hevene; And siththe [next] to spille speche, that spire is of grace, And Goddes gleman [minstrel] and a game of hevene. Wolde nevere the feithful fader his fithele [fiddle] were untempered, Ne his gleman a gedelyng [scoundrel], a goere to tavernes. (B.9.99–104)13 This passage constructs a whimsical little allegory full of punning metaphors. Speech is compared to entertainment at a feast, where a minstrel’s

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tricks might actually include riddles. Wit is careful to distinguish the minstrelsy he has in mind from the intemperate and out-of-tune (“untempered”) entertainment of the tavern.14 Rather, the image is eschatological, the banquet of heaven, the celebration of the saints. Most enigmatic here is the phrase “spire of grace.” In Middle English pronunciation, grace and grass are homophones, and spire can mean sprout or shoot as well as breath (through forms derived from Latin spiritus, such as “inspire”).15 Speech as a breath of grace and a shoot of grass recalls the riddle of the Plant of Peace from the first vision as well as other agricultural imagery throughout the poem. In this early stage of Langland’s path through the curriculum in his revised third vision, then, Wit points to a purpose for this punning sort of wordplay as a “game of heaven” that goes beyond mere ornament and builds on the hidden likenesses and wonder attached to enigma by the most elementary Latin textbooks.

RHETORIC: HOW CAN DIFFICULTY BE GOOD?

If the question in grammar was one of purpose—ornament or necessity— the question in rhetoric, the next discipline of the trivium, broadens to include effects on the reader. Teaching of rhetoric varied greatly during the Middle Ages, and a likely fourteenth-century curriculum could include several approaches. The classical, Ciceronian treatises mostly censure enigma as a violation of the core value of lucidity and exclude the possibility that some things can only be said obscurely. But enigma persists, and treatments of it in other texts that a student might encounter further in the curriculum, treatises on poetry and commentaries on Aristotle, open the question of how its difficulty can be good.16 The most common rhetorical treatise, the Ad Herennium attributed to Cicero, omits enigma, and the brief mention of it in his genuine but lesser known De oratore makes clear why it does not fit Ciceronian stylistic ideals.17 Both texts treat style primarily through articulating virtues that continue the Aristotelian emphasis on clarity.18 De oratore mentions enigma after a discussion of chains of metaphors: “This is a valuable stylistic ornament; but care must be taken to avoid obscurity—and in fact it is usually the way in which what are called riddles are constructed.”19

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Enigma, that is, labels a common but defective instance of the technique. Metaphoric language can supply a term that makes “a direct appeal to the senses” or can please in various ways, but the obscurity of enigma would be too likely to let a hearer’s thoughts go astray, and this would be fatal to the orator’s purpose.20 This purpose, “to prove, to please, and to sway or persuade,” tends to support a strict distinction between style and content, which leaves no use for obscurity.21 Good oratory should not require interpretation. The medieval application of classical, Ciceronian rhetoric to poetry was largely mediated by the so-called Ars poetica of Cicero’s contemporary Horace, a work known in the Middle Ages as the Poetria and acknowledged in the title commonly given to what would become its most popular medieval successor, Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s Poetria nova. Throughout his rather eclectic advice on poetic composition, Horace censures obscurity in favor of an easy, familiar style that conceals its artifice. Indeed, in a revealing passage, Horace associates unaccustomed style and obscurities of thought “attuned to the oracles of Delphi” with the decadence of increasing wealth and declining taste.22 Horace’s depiction of the urbane poet upholding proper Republican taste and morals through elegant verses assimilates poetry instead to the civic oratorical program. The prophetic poet of Horace’s Odes, caught up in an eloquence that goes beyond him, is pushed aside in favor of the poet as craftsman, laboring with skills made his own through long practice and exemplifying the self-disciplined Roman citizen. In the later Middle Ages, the Ars poetica was accompanied by commentaries that made it useful for elementary Latin instruction. One of these, taken by Rita Copeland to exemplify “how medieval teachers . . . link Horace’s precepts to the compositional needs of their students,” sharpens his censure of obscurity.23 With the emphasis on craft over inspiration goes, again, a sharp distinction between style and meaning, which finds influential expression in Horace’s famous statement of the purpose of poetry, clearly indebted to Cicero and the analytical tradition: “Poets aim either to benefit, or to amuse, or to utter words at once pleasing and helpful to life.”24 Medieval treatises on general composition tend to harden the division between teaching and delight through a structure that separates matter and form, but they also strain toward a more holistic view of poetry’s purpose.25

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The treatises known as artes poetriae likely reflect how poetic composition was taught in late medieval classrooms, though their direct influence on late fourteenth-century Middle English literature, or on any poetry in the vernacular, has been much debated.26 All of them, starting with the earliest one, Matthew of Vendôme’s Ars versificatoria (written before 1175), continue the treatment of style mostly through lists of figures and tropes.27 Nonetheless, their discussions of enigma show new attention to the uses and effects of difficult figurative language. For one thing, as Jeff Rider notes, “The warnings against the dangers of obscurity which accompany the discussion of enigma in the classical textbooks tend to disappear from the medieval textbooks.”28 Whereas the classical inheritance tends toward a sharp opposition between clarity and obscurity, which leaves the didactic and the esoteric as the only options, persistence of the term enigma points to a third way. Matthew selects from Donatus those figures that he judges to be most useful for versifying and offers a bit more explanation and examples. His definition of enigma rephrases Donatus only slightly, but he adds to the ice riddle two further examples, from poetry common in the curriculum, that imply a broader sense of rhetorical purpose than Cicero’s.29 The first comes from an exchange of riddles between shepherds that concludes Virgil’s third eclogue: “Tell me in what lands (and you shall be my great Apollo) / Heaven’s space is not more than three ells broad.”30 The second is Matthew’s own, based on a line from Ovid’s story of Narcissus: “A lover seeks what he has, what he loves, what he seeks. It is proper to a lover that though he abounds in property, he is destitute.”31 Both use paradox like the ice riddle, but they also suggest that enigma can be part of a larger literary work and even bring it to a climax or compress its theme. Matthew might ascribe to them the effects that elsewhere he attributes to his own allegory of eloquence as a spring garden: that “receptivity might be plentiful, attention be refreshed, good will flourish, the audience resonate, the annoyance of boredom be averted, and the productive desire for learning be more richly fulfilled.”32 This blend of teaching and delight, substance and style, anticipates a richer analysis of poetry’s effect on various mental faculties that would arise shortly after Matthew’s time through the recovery of Aristotelian psychology, while it also echoes the Augustinian rhetoric we will consider further on.33

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Gervais of Melkley, writing a generation after Matthew, undertakes a comprehensive rethinking of tropes that further breaks down the distinction between form and content and opens new ways of thinking about the meaning and effect of enigma. While referring constantly to Donatus, Gervais reanalyzes the traditional tropes under his own categories of how their meaning is constructed.34 This leads him to the insight that, whereas metaphor transfers the meaning of a single word, enigma transfers the meaning of a whole sentence. As a result, enigma escapes his logical categories, and Gervais turns instead to its effect on its audience: “Enigma is any obscure statement that tries the cleverness of the one guessing.”35 The word he uses for an enigma’s audience, divinans, literally a diviner, recalls the ancient association of the enigmatic with oracles and prophecies and suggests an event of revelation. His examples convey what kind of riddles Gervais has in mind and what they ask of their audience. In addition to the standard definition and example from Donatus, Gervais gives two others. One, which rearranges words and letters to spell his own name, resembles the methods used by Langland and many other medieval poets to hide signatures within their works.36 The other has two parts: “I am the daughter of the sun and I am created with the sun. I am called ten times five, and five plus ten.” The first part is like the ice riddle and even uses the image of parenthood; the second is like the puzzle on his name but uses numbers to stand for the letters in the word lux.37 These examples invite both interpretive wondering at a paradox and analytical puzzle solving that finds a definite answer. Wonder and difficulty come together in Gervais’s discussion of another trope, antithesis. While he explains its hidden logic with examples drawn mostly, as usual, from classical authors, he sets aside theological antithesis as having a different sort of resolution, “For sometimes impossibility itself is truth.”38 His examples refer to the Incarnation, the virgin birth, and the Eucharist. Whereas in one case his examples reach outside ornament to word games and difficult philosophy, in the other they point to theological mystery and parallel contemporary defenses of figurative language in the Bible, as we will see. A more suggestive treatment of the purpose of tropes and the poetic uses of difficulty emerges in the Poetria nova by Geoffrey of Vinsauf, whose ingenuity in opposing obscurity yet embracing difficulty has not been fully appreciated.39 Geoffrey’s was to become by far the most influential of the medieval treatises on composition—well known enough to

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earn a parody in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest Tale.40 Though he does not mention enigma, the reason is simply that he takes his list of tropes from the pseudo-Ciceronian Ad Herennium, which, as noted above, omits it. Geoffrey introduces into the preceptive framework of the arts a more fully developed rethinking of style and composition that, like the discussions of enigma found elsewhere, comes closer to accounting for what much poetry of his time is often doing. If Geoffrey underscores more heavily than his contemporaries the danger of obscurity at the end of his extensive discussion of tropes, he does so largely as a counterweight to the emphasis he places on their usefulness.41 He includes among the effects of tropes traditional stylistic concepts such as color and sweetness, but what distinguishes tropes from other figures is gravity. In part, gravity means difficulty.42 Yet gravitas, with its sense of dignity and importance, further implies the response that this kind of difficulty seeks, which surely includes a seriousness of interpretive attention. Geoffrey’s notion of gravity establishes a distinction between obscurity and difficulty that was fuzzy at best in his predecessors. It allows for a process of interpretation oriented toward fullness of meaning that is not opposed to clarity. Geoffrey’s most far-reaching reconsideration of figurative language comes in his detailed advice about the aspect of arrangement he calls amplification. As Douglas Kelly has pointed out, composition takes on a hermeneutic function in all of the medieval arts of poetry because part of the poet’s task is to uncover new meaning in a given matter, whether a traditional story or a recent event.43 Whereas ornament can seem a matter of mere dressing up, amplification involves unfolding hidden meaning and gives figurative language a hermeneutic, not just ornamental, purpose. Geoffrey also calls amplification “delay,” as if the goal is to keep interpretation in suspense and open to finding new meaning in familiar matter.44 Geoffrey’s overall conception of poetic making sets up an analogy between the poet and both the Christian God and the Neoplatonic vision of Nature.45 It draws on the Christian Neoplatonism developed allegorically in the twelfth century by authors such as Bernard Silvestris and Alan of Lille and visible also later in Langland’s naming of God as Kynde. Geoffrey’s term for the plan with which a poet begins, status archetypus, brings to bear the Neoplatonic theory of divine creation through inter-

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mediary ideas, a theory assimilated to Christian theology through the teaching, from the opening of John’s Gospel, that God created all things through Christ the Word. The poet too unfolds the meaning of a single word, and the amplified structure of the poem becomes for the reader a means of entering into the hidden riches of that word. Often this word is not just the poet’s own but also a prior word that he is translating and amplifying. Geoffrey’s approach to poetic invention through interpretation provides a rationale for how a poet like Langland could scale up from riddles to longer enigmatic forms.

IMAGINATION: THE AMBIGUITY OF ARISTOTLE

Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s account of poetic creation draws on the same ideas as Wit’s description, early in Piers Plowman’s third vision, of the power of speech as a participation in the divine nature. This section of the poem employs something like Geoffrey’s technique of interpretive amplification in its frequent return to the question of the identity of Dowel. Already in the waking section before the third vision, the narrator had turned the verb phrase “do well” to a noun, and his first interlocutor in the dream, Thought, had added Dobet and Dobest. When Wit, in answer to the dreamer’s quest for Dowel, gives five different definitions of Dowel, he departs from restrictive analysis to follow instead a poetics of amplification through play with multiple meanings, a counterpart of the enigmatic compression that makes speech a “spyre of grace.”46 Like Langland’s Wit, Geoffrey of Vinsauf manifests a theological idea of creativity that could support intricate poetic making, but one other, less theological development in the arts curriculum needs to be considered as part of the medieval poetics of enigma. While Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics were fundamental for establishing the classical analysis of tropes, these texts were not known in medieval Europe until the thirteenth century. When they were rediscovered, their influence on poetics was ambiguous, both because of their uncertain place in the curriculum and because Aristotle’s own separation of substance and style was not as rigid as the tradition that followed.47 Thus his Rhetoric links enigma to metaphor in its section on style but gives it a cognitive rather than ornamental function:

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Further, metaphors must not be far-fetched, but we must give names to things that have none by deriving the metaphor from what is akin and of the same kind, so that, as soon as it is uttered, it is clearly seen to be akin, as in the famous enigma, I saw a man who glued bronze with fire upon another. There was no name for what took place, but as in both cases there is a kind of application, he called the application of the cupping-glass “gluing.” And, generally speaking, clever enigmas furnish good metaphors; for metaphor is a kind of enigma, so that it is clear that the transference is clever.48 Aristotle’s Poetics is blunter about how enigmas detract from the central value of clarity, but its influence also moved in the opposite direction because the most common Latin translation came from a version by the Islamic scholar Averroes.49 The Averroist version of the Poetics replaces Aristotle’s concept of imitation with one of imagination. Aligning poetry with imagination, which was seen to be important to both learning and feeling, tends to break down the split between teaching and delight, substance and style. It results in a more active notion of reading, as described by Vincent Gillespie: “The imagination is provoked or invited to assessment or moral judgement by the images or similitudes used in the representation, and by the riddling element of indirect and metaphorical modes of expression typically used by poetry.”50 By Langland’s time, the Aristotelian-Averroist conception of imagination could be found in common reference works, not just advanced Scholastic texts.51 This psychological and poetic faculty is an ingredient in Langland’s Ymaginatif, the personification who appears after the inner dream and concludes the third vision, but the sense of poetry’s potential he represents depends even more on the comprehensive theological recovery of the rhetoric of enigma that follows from the work of Augustine.

THEOLOGICAL GRAMMAR: THE NAMING OF HIDDEN AND INFINITE THINGS

The theological curriculum included its own grammar and rhetoric, oriented toward the reading of scripture rather than classical poetry and the

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composition of sermons rather than verse. It offers very different answers to the questions of the purpose of tropes and the value of interpretive difficulty. Coming from the arts curriculum to the foundational text of the theological curriculum, Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana, a medieval student might notice that it embraces figurative language, with enigma as its most obscure extreme, not as an exception to normal usage for the sake of ornament but as integral to Christian understanding. Augustine’s arguments for the value of enigma, which echo through his other works and those of his fellow architects of Christian rhetoric, fall into two parts according to the aspect of the human condition they remedy: finitude and fallenness. Tropes, including enigma, are now seen as necessary to articulating theological truth within the conditions of finitude and embodiment. And interpretive difficulty plays a key part in a spirituality of reading as a remedy for human fallenness. These textbook principles find fullest expression in Augustine’s Confessions, which joins them to a larger conception of authoritative and hopeful interpretation that happens in a community shaped by reading. The Confessions, while telling how Augustine was converted by learning to read enigmatically, also has intricacies of composition that move in the direction of Langland’s highly enigmatic reading lesson in the inner dream, which will come into the spotlight at the end of the chapter. Enigma addresses human finitude by mediating the openness of both scripture and the world to multiple spiritual meanings. Indeed, enigma is for Augustine a necessary part of all language. Figurative language is not, he holds, the preserve of poets and orators, as for Aristotle and the classical tradition, but ubiquitous in everyday, uneducated speech.52 Figurative language is shown to be all the more necessary when he takes scripture’s authoritative use of tropes as a manual for how to understand the things of the world, both nature and history, as signs of divinity. The obscurity of enigma is unavoidable because the meanings of things themselves are hidden and require the keys of revelation to open. How to interpret obscurities is the focus of books 2 and 3 of Augustine’s four-book De doctrina, which reconceived the arts of grammar and rhetoric for Christians and remained a central textbook throughout the Middle Ages.53 Augustine uses the word enigma six times in this work, in three different but related senses that chart an extension similar to the one seen in On the Trinity: from short, isolatable riddles to larger structures of

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meaning. Twice he refers to enigma as a specific trope (3.11.17, 3.29.40). Twice he refers more broadly to “aenigmata scripturarum” as any textual obscurity or puzzle or mystery, synonymous with various other terms for difficulty (2.16.23, 2.29.45). To tackle scriptural signs that are difficult because of their unfamiliarity, he lays out a program for bringing to bear every kind of learning, Christian or pagan. In effect, the Bible becomes the key for finding the theological meaning of the objects of any department of knowledge and turns them all into potential enigmas. Thus, two other times, in allusions to 1 Corinthians 13:12, Augustine extends the term to include all the ways by which a believer becomes able to see the light of God short of direct vision in heaven (1.30.31, 2.7.11). To put the importance of enigma in terms of the basic distinctions that structure Augustine’s treatise, all things other than God can become signs that are useful for enjoyment of God, but in most cases this useful sign-value is obscure and appears as a sort of riddle.54 While Augustine is teaching how to interpret obscurities correctly, this is part of a larger goal of treasuring the endless multiplicity of meaning that makes scripture obscure in part because it is capable of conveying the meaningfulness of things and events themselves. After book 3’s discussion of obscurities that require figurative interpretation, Augustine comments: “Could God have built into the divine eloquence a more generous or bountiful gift than the possibility of understanding the same words in several ways, all of them deriving confirmation from other no less divinely inspired passages?”55 Of course Augustine is also interested in distinguishing true interpretations from false ones. He alludes here to another of his central principles: interpreting obscure passages in the light of clearer ones. But correctness of interpretation remains balanced with plumbing the depth of meaning in scripture.56 A concern for correct interpretation could be said to increase in the later Middle Ages through developments such as the Fourth Lateran Council’s emphasis on doctrine and the institutionalized debates of the new universities and Scholasticism. Even at its most elaborate, however, later medieval exegesis remained dependent for its validity on theological criteria external to the method itself that are more aesthetic and historical. These were encapsulated by Augustine in the principle of charity, which gains infinite horizon from the mystery that God is charity and Christ is charity incarnate.

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Scholarly and doctrinal criteria would become much more prominent with humanism and the Reformation.57 For medieval exegesis, both the abundance of meaning in the divine gift of signs and their correct interpretation are subordinate to the goal of communion in love.58 The Venerable Bede makes enigma the prime example of scripture’s poetic fullness of meaning in his early eighth-century textbook Concerning Figures and Tropes. Fleshing out Augustine’s idea that the Bible itself uses all the figures known to classical grammar, Bede takes the standard list from Donatus and replaces its classical examples with biblical ones. He gives enigma prominent treatment: “An enigma is an obscure thought through a hidden similitude of things, like ‘the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her pinions with yellow gold’ [Ps. 67:14], which may signify that the language of Scripture is full of divine spiritual light, but its inner meaning gleams with the greater beauty of heavenly wisdom; or it may signify that although the present life of the holy church rejoices in the wings of virtue, the life that is to come, which is in heaven, will enjoy eternal splendor with the Lord.”59 While the definition is straight from Donatus, the example hardly sounds like a riddle. Indeed, it is more like what we would now call a symbol or poetic image, but is better understood through the explanation Bede would likely have known from Isidore of Seville’s early seventh-century encyclopedia, Etymologies. Unlike an allegorical double meaning, says Isidore, an enigma “merely has an obscure meaning, and its solution is hinted at through certain images.”60 Bede’s first interpretation of his example takes it as an image of the fullness and depth of meaning to be found in all of scripture and thus makes enigma into a sort of metatrope encompassing all of biblical language. Then, by offering a second interpretation, Bede further illustrates the depth of meaning found in this example and at the same time models the kind of exegesis that the enigmatic dimension of scripture was thought to invite: multiple interpretations all taken as equally true and implying more. Indeed, this second interpretation gestures toward the fulfillment of this endless interpretability in a heavenly banquet of meaning. Here, as often in Augustine, enigma seems to expand from a species of allegory to a larger, more flexible category of hidden meaning. In both the theory and practice of medieval exegesis, distinctions between style and meaning and the rivalry between rhetoric and philosophy are swallowed up in a celebration of scripture’s fruitful obscurity as both beautiful and true.

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Wyclif ’s 1377–78 treatise On the Truth of Holy Scripture offers an example, close in place and time to Langland, in which enigma serves as a general term for necessarily obscure figurative language. Wyclif defends scripture’s use of forms like allegory and parable in the context of a larger attempt to elucidate the logic and metaphysics that are inherent in scripture and may vary from those of Aristotle. Through a logic of permitted equivocation and a metaphysics involving five levels of verbal reality signified by the term Holy Scripture itself, Wyclif develops what is essentially a commitment to thinking along with scripture even when it seems to defeat understanding. He wrestles in this context with the familiar scheme of the four senses of scripture (literal, allegorical, tropological, anagogical), but in a way that keeps it open to criteria of truth that are more holistic. Here, as throughout medieval exegesis, the four senses are less a rigid method than a scheme for interpretive invention.61 Playful is perhaps not the word for Wyclif ’s exegesis, returning as it often does to his hobbyhorses and propensity for diatribe, but his principles defend a traditional view of scripture’s enigmatic fullness of meaning as realized in a tradition of inspired interpretation.62 Other fourteenth-century exegetes, such as Jacques Fournier (Pope Benedict XII, d. 1342), Henry of Lagenstein (d. 1397), and Jean Gerson (d. 1429), articulate similar understandings of scriptural language, building on a tradition of Scholastic subordination of logic and other disciplines to scripture that went back to Hugh of St. Victor and Peter the Chanter in twelfth-century Paris.63

THEOLOGICAL RHETORIC: FORMING READERS IN LOVE

Early in his treatise on the Trinity, Augustine mixes play and medicine into an image for enigma’s rhetorical value at the nexus between the words of scripture and the things of the world: “But from things that simply do not exist [Holy Scripture] never has drawn any names to form into figures of speech or weave into riddles. . . . The divine scriptures then are in the habit of making something like children’s toys out of things that occur in creation, by which to entice our sickly gaze and get us step by step to seek as best we can the things that are above and forsake the things that are below.”64 Indeed, this Christian game of reading, rather

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than classical rhetoric, is likely behind Alexander of Villedieu’s association of enigma with wonder and Gervais of Melkley’s with divining. Augustine begins his instructions for playing the game, in De doctrina Christiana, by stating its object: “There are certain rules for interpreting the scriptures which, as I am well aware, can usefully be passed on to those with an appetite for such study to make it possible for them to progress not just by reading the work of others who have illuminated the obscurities of divine literature, but also by finding illumination for themselves.”65 The aim of the game is spiritual growth, and De doctrina’s guidance for such progress through reading was developed throughout the Middle Ages, in monasteries, schools, and, increasingly in the later Middle Ages, among lay people.66 Throughout this tradition, enigmatic texts were understood to sharpen both the affective and intellectual benefits of reading. While human finitude is the basic condition that makes the signs both in scripture and in nature necessarily enigmatic, the fallenness of human will and reason also receive correction and aid from the reading of enigmatic texts. Augustine writes in De doctrina: “But casual readers are misled by problems and ambiguities of many kinds, mistaking one thing for another. In some passages they find no meaning at all that they can grasp at, even falsely, so thick is the fog created by some obscure phrases. I have no doubt that this is all divinely predetermined, so that pride may be subdued by hard work and intellects which tend to despise things that are easily discovered may be rescued from boredom and reinvigorated.”67 At times Augustine emphasizes the sharpening of readers’ minds through this labor.68 But in this passage he focuses on the will that needs to be delivered from pride and from lethargy that finds delight in base things. Interpretive difficulty redirects desire, and holy desire in turn makes possible further understanding. Augustine goes on to emphasize the affective rather than the cognitive effects of obscurity when he compares a straightforward, abstract teaching on holiness to an allegorical reading of images from the Song of Songs: “Exactly why this picture gives me greater pleasure than if no such imagery were presented by the divine books, since the topic is the same, and the lesson the same, it is difficult to say; this, however, is another question entirely. But no-one disputes that it is much more pleasant to learn lessons presented through imagery, and much more rewarding to discover meanings that are won only with

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difficulty.”69 The labor required by obscure, figurative expressions of truth, as opposed to clear ones, joins intellectual exercise and affective pleasure in the truths they communicate. Elsewhere, in a sermon, Augustine combines the intellectual and the affective in the image of the divine physician’s use of scripture’s obscurity to revive and exercise his listeners so that they will be expanded and able to hold what it gives.70 Moreover, Augustine posits that, whereas desire for temporal things always disappoints because they lose their appeal when attained, the eternal “is loved more passionately when obtained than when desired.”71 This aesthetic experience of desire that grows even as it is satisfied will be fully realized in heaven but can be tasted even now in knowledge of eternal things. This kind of love, which Augustine identifies with the virtue that surpasses faith and hope in 1 Corinthians 13:13, thus becomes a criterion of truth in Augustinian exegesis and remains important, though often implicit, in its medieval development.72 Major exegetical theorists from Augustine through the late Middle Ages affirm the uses of enigmatic obscurity to convert both mind and heart.73 Hugh of St. Victor, describing the usefulness of difficult texts to prepare for the meditation he saw as the goal of reading, uses precisely the two terms that characterize enigma in the definition from Donatus: “Meditation is an assiduous and keen attentiveness of thought, gleaming brightly to illuminate something dark [obscurum] or looking closely to see something hidden [occultum].”74 Even when, in the Scholastic milieu of the thirteenth century, increasingly elaborate analysis of scripture’s stylistic modes leads some theologians to put priority on scripture’s appeal to the intellect and others on its appeal to the affections, these are merely emphases within a larger tradition.75 Aquinas, for example, uses the term enigma most often to describe the obscurity of the kind of knowledge that constitutes faith and focuses on enigma’s cognitive effects.76 Bonaventure, typical of the other side, writes that scripture’s various modes address the will, not just speculation.77 Certainly these two emphases also led to different devotional and literary practices. Enigma is not, to my knowledge, one of the terms commonly used for scripture’s stylistic modes, which A. J. Minnis traces to the standard Ciceronian works on rhetoric.78 Rather, discussions of enigma, in both exegetical theory and practice, cut across these categories and the distinctions they tend to em-

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phasize. Henry of Ghent, a great theological synthesizer from the generation after Aquinas and Bonaventure, rejects the approach of classifying scripture’s different stylistic modes in favor of the idea that all of scripture is written in a single, unique mode that combines every sort of appeal— to mind and heart, to the simple and the advanced—at every point.79 Rather than decide between modes or senses, late medieval exegesis tends to accept them all under capacious notions of both authorial intention (human as well as divine) and reader response. The Augustinian understanding of the combined cognitive and affective uses of obscurity provided one of the essential concepts of reader response. In book 4 of De doctrina, which turns to the preacher’s delivery of what he has found through interpretation, Augustine cites Cicero’s teaching “that the eloquent should speak in such a way as to instruct, delight, and move the listeners.”80 Whereas the poetics descending from Cicero by way of Horace tends to truncate this list to teaching and delighting, and then to consider these separately by aligning them with content and style, the direction of Augustine’s treatment is opposite. He cites the principle of decorum by which Cicero’s three functions of oratory were each assigned a different style, low, middle, or grand, but then argues that the nature and purpose of Christian truth transcend such distinctions, infusing all of Cicero’s purposes into each style. The truth itself, even presented plainly, ought to delight and move. The hard-hearted, on the other hand, will not be converted by even the highest eloquence. Thus, although the preacher can profit from the art of oratory, much more important is his own ongoing conversion through reading, that is, his growth in faith and love.81 Ultimately, love is Augustine’s word for both the purpose of reading and its guiding interpretive principle. He states the principle, which he himself calls the rule of faith, most succinctly in book 3: “But scripture enjoins nothing but love, and censures nothing but lust, and moulds men’s minds accordingly.”82 The rule pertains not just to the doctrinal content of scripture but also to the reader’s own charity in the act of reading. The General Prologue to the Wycliffite translation of the Bible, which draws its reading aids for “simple men” mainly from De doctrina, brings out this emphasis in its translation of the passage just quoted: “Hooly scripture comaundith no thing no but charite, it blamith no thing

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no but covetise; and in that manere it enfoormeth the vertues either goode condiscouns of men.”83 Middle English enform preserves from informare in Augustine’s Latin the combined sense of both forming and informing. The goal is the whole condition of the reader, and this is served both by the doctrinal content of the text and by the practice of reading that it elicits, a practice that unites knowledge and desire in love. Adding things up slightly differently, Rowan Williams writes of De doctrina, “Because he is ceaselessly attentive to the inseparability of knowledge from love, Augustine’s own concern is . . . to understand how language in its fluidity and displacements is inseparably interwoven with the restlessness or openness of desire that is what is fundamentally human.”84 A further statement from book 1 is even clearer in saying that charity pertains principally to the life of the interpreter, not the meaning of a given passage: “So anyone who thinks that he has understood the divine scriptures or any part of them, but cannot by his understanding build up this double love of God and neighbor, has not yet succeeded in understanding them.”85 Charity in reading is finally not about transmitting a doctrine or assimilating all texts to a single meaning but about the formation of a charitable self in front of the text. For Augustine and the central tradition of reading in the Middle Ages, enigma serves this formation. Nowhere are the implications of this kind of reading, for both self and community, seen more fully than in his Confessions.

ENIGMA IN AUGUSTINE’S CONFESSIONS: CONVERSION AND COMMUNITY

Although its place in the curriculum and general medieval influence are difficult to trace, the Confessions no doubt opened up bountiful possibilities for later readers and writers—not just those writing autobiography but those exploring representations of subjectivity in response to the reading of the Bible, which is to say, a great deal of medieval literature.86 In the Confessions, just as much as in his biblical commentaries and sermons, Augustine puts into practice the exegetical and rhetorical theory of De doctrina, the first three books of which were written around the same time. In other words, the Confessions narrate and model the kind of

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spiritual growth through reading that is the goal of his instruction in De doctrina. Emphasized among the various kinds of reading recounted in the Confessions, both beneficial and harmful, is a sort of illustrated rhetoric of enigma that emphasizes how it moves desire and joins readers in community. Before focusing on his theory of reading, it is worth noting some of Augustine’s literary strategies in the Confessions. Like Langland (and Dante), Augustine freely mixes modes of prayer, narrative, allegory, theological argument, and more. He alludes both obviously and subtly not just to the Bible but to works such as the Aeneid. His style of poetic prose here is unique both within his own works and in all of ancient literature.87 Much of his riddling wordplay, in particular, which ties into patterns of allusion and structure, is untranslatable. Above all, the text’s many layers of self-consciousness about its own hermeneutic and rhetorical strategies, while managed with an unrivaled fluency, give the Confessions its own sort of enigmatic density. Indeed, it would not be going too far to say that the Confessions is the most important Christian model of enigmatic composition in extended narrative form besides the Bible itself. Augustine uses the term enigma ten times in the Confessions. Five instances in the autobiographical portion track his conversion through reading. Five more in books 10 to 13, the more expository portion, mark places where he makes his interpretive experience the basis of Christian community. Connecting the dots between these passages turns out to be a good way of capturing the book’s overall exploration of how saving truth emerges in the encounter of self and scripture. The autobiographical first half largely tells how Augustine is converted through reading, while at the same time it performs a reading of scriptural truth through his own story. In the second half, Augustine leaves narrative behind in order to explore this work of interpretation more thematically and in general terms that apply to anyone who would like to join in.88 Both explorations begin with the self as a barrier but find it redeemed as the site of both understanding and desire that are carried beyond the self by grace operating largely through the work of interpretation.89 Augustine first mentions enigma at the end of an episode that situates it as the Christian alternative to two inferior kinds of rhetoric, classical Ciceronian and gnostic Manichean. The direct reference here is to

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Manichean gnosticism: “I had stumbled on that bold-faced woman, lacking in prudence, who in Solomon’s allegory [aenigma] sits on a chair outside her door and says ‘Enjoy a meal of secret bread and drink sweet stolen water’ (Prov. 9:17). She seduced me; for she found me living outside myself, seeing only with the eye of the flesh, and chewing over in myself such food as I had devoured by means of that eye.”90 What seduces Augustine about Manichean rhetoric is its claim to reveal the hidden significance of both texts and things. Indeed, the Manichees represent an esoteric extreme of the allegorical interpretive tradition in which enigma is the oldest central term.91 Augustine rejects Manichean interpretations as false, even by comparison to the pagan literature that, as a rhetoric instructor, he was teaching his students to interpret allegorically.92 Yet he recognizes in them a powerful kind of interpretive community in which esotericism incites desire for hidden meaning. At the same time, he affirms the Bible to be a source of enigmas both lofty and open, as certified by the capacity of the verse from Proverbs to interpret for him his own experience. On the other side, biblical enigma differs from classical rhetoric. Shortly before he tells of falling for the Manichees, Augustine describes his study of “textbooks on eloquence” (3.4.7, p. 38). The effect of Cicero’s eloquence, however, was that his exhortations moved Augustine to hunger for wisdom. This led him to look at the Bible, but he was put off by its style, which he found “unworthy [indigna] in comparison with the dignity of Cicero” (3.5.9, p. 40)—dignity being the third of the Ad Herennium’s three virtues of style. His dissatisfaction with scripture, he continues, helped drive him to the Manichees. Yet he describes its contrast to both classical eloquence and gnostic esotericism in positive terms: “something neither open to the proud nor laid bare to mere children; a text lowly to the beginner but, on further reading, of mountainous difficulty and enveloped in mysteries [velatam mysteriis]” (3.5.9, p. 40).93 By affirming enigma as part of scripture’s rhetoric, Augustine passes along to the Middle Ages a version of the ancient, allegorical interpretive tradition inoculated against esotericism while still oriented to hidden and potentially infinite depths. Augustine places these three rhetorical options within a larger analysis of desire that runs throughout his text. The imitative nature of desire and

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its potential for rivalry and envy draw Augustine’s attention from his description of infancy on. Most emblematic is the famous pear tree episode, where he emphasizes that the desire to steal the pears was a mimetic contagion he picked up from his fellow teenagers: “Alone I would not have done it” (2.9.17, p. 33). Indeed, Augustine strikingly anticipates Girard’s theory of mimetic desire and rivalry.94 Yet his desire to steal the pears puts him into rivalry not with his fellow thieves but rather with God. Looking back, he sees himself doing something forbidden in order to imitate the power and freedom of God in a rivalry for his own sense of freedom and self-sovereignty.95 This rivalry with God for agency will be resolved through a theology of participation activated by the poetics of enigma. Extending his analysis of desire to reading, Augustine depicts his response to Cicero’s Hortensius as mere imitation of the desire expressed in what was for him a classic text, too far removed to be a source of rivalry. The rhetoric of the Manichees, however, is the esoteric opposite to the didacticism of Cicero: withheld secrets and the teachings of a group with an inner circle. The Manichees exemplify for Augustine the capacity of enigma to model desire and then further inflame and fascinate it by becoming a rival and obstacle—what Girard calls scandal.96 Because they are unable to answer his questions, he develops an intense, competitive desire to get close to one of their renowned teachers, Faustus. When he finally does, it is precisely Faustus’s refusal to enter into rivalry with Augustine that makes him begin to lose interest in Manichean teaching. The rivalry ends, and the desire increased by it ends too. Enigmatic reading, by contrast, is a third option, one that intensifies desire through the obstacle of obscurity but mediates peaceful participation rather than rivalry because the object is infinite and can be shared. Augustine finds a model of this third rhetoric, and enters the Christian community, through Ambrose, bishop of Milan. Though Ambrose’s style is what initially attracts him, he also finds that the bishop’s approach to interpretation makes the difficulties of scripture productive rather than simply barriers. “Above all, I heard first one, then another, then many difficult passages in the Old Testament scriptures figuratively interpreted [aenigmate soluto], where I, by taking them literally, had found them to kill.”97 Augustine learned from Ambrose what he would teach medieval students by precept in De doctrina, where he twice uses the same verb for

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“solving” scriptural enigmas. What Augustine learned from Ambrose must have gone beyond the allegorical method of reading poetry that he already knew. No doubt he is crediting the humble style of scripture with a greater capacity for figurative meaning than he would have ascribed to classical poetry. Equally important, however, is the humility of Ambrose himself, a master of eloquence, before the text. As with Faustus, Augustine desires to come close to Ambrose, and he famously finds Ambrose reading silently, a model of contemplation finding spiritual nourishment in the text. Learning to read spiritually from Ambrose involves both being oriented to the truly infinite object of desire and gaining a hermeneutic by which to pursue it. As a Manichee, Augustine writes, “I had not the least notion or even an obscure [in aenigmate] suspicion how there could be spiritual substance.”98 He is helped toward understanding the eternal, spiritual nature of God by another school of thought that promoted allegorical interpretation, Neoplatonism. In this connection, he applies 1 Corinthians 13:12, not to reading scripture itself, but to what he had learned about reading signs of the spiritual in the material: “Your words stuck fast in my heart and on all sides I was defended by you. Of your eternal life I was certain, though I saw it ‘in an enigma and as if in a mirror.’ All doubt had been taken from me that there is indestructible substance from which comes all substance. My desire was not to be more certain of you but to be more stable in you.”99 Neoplatonism, however, does not affirm the Christian truth of God’s entry into embodied history in the Incarnation and thus does not extend to the potential significance of individual life stories. The climax of Augustine’s conversion comes through an event of reading that is just as much an experience of being read. The sequence leading to the famous moment in the garden foregrounds the drama of Augustine’s desire. He narrates the building up of positive mimetic desire through a series of models of conversion: the philosopher Victorinus, an African compatriot named Ponticianus, and the unnamed civil servants whom Augustine refers to as indocti, “uneducated people” (8.8.19, p. 146). Behind them all is St. Anthony, whose conversion through hearing a verse from the Gospels Augustine recalls when, in a garden outside Milan, he hears a voice as of a child repeating “Take up

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and read” and his eyes fall on a verse from Romans, the significance of which for him is immediately clear and resolves his crisis. In one sense it is an exceptionally unenigmatic moment. Yet it is also an instance of discovering in his own life the mysterious cosmic pattern of the incarnation of the Logos. Finding that scripture is the key to reading his own life in the light of grace brings relief on multiple levels, and one of them is that it opens before him an endless project of continuing to let himself be read by scripture, as it were.100 It also turns his fellow converts from potential rivals for some sort of status or possession to fellow readers, fellow subjects constituted by interpretation. Near the end of the narrative half of Confessions, Augustine recounts his fullest experience of the potential of enigmatic interpretation, one that would become paradigmatic for all of Western Christian mysticism. The so-called vision at Ostia that he shares with his mother Monica synthesizes his Christian revision of the Neoplatonic path of ascent to the divine through allegorical meditation on the created order and makes it an occasion of the most intimate relationship.101 In the first of its two movements, meditation on temporal things leads to a touching of eternal wisdom conceived in terms of language rather than light. The ascent by means of reading the world involves, as its final jumping-off point, a heightened consciousness of the act of interpretation itself. The second movement, one long Latin sentence that enacts the ascent through syntactic suspense, translates the affirmations of the first movement into negations. He asks what if all temporal things, all things and signs, which all point to their creator, were to fall silent, and God alone speaks, not through such things but through himself, so that we hear his Word, not uttered by a tongue of flesh, nor by an angel’s voice, nor by the sound of thunder, nor by the riddle of a similitude, but by himself whom we love in these things, himself we hear without their aid,—even as we then reached out and in swift thought attained to that eternal Wisdom which abides over all things—if this could be prolonged, and other visions of a far inferior kind could be withdrawn, and this one alone ravish, and absorb, and hide away its beholder within its deepest joys, so that sempiternal life might be such as was that moment of understanding for which we sighed, would it not be this: “Enter into the joy of your Lord?”102

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Effort gives way to passive silence; ascent receives the descent of the Word. As the clarity of scripture had been a gift in the garden near Milan, so now the fullness of the Word Himself comes as a gift rather than an intellectual achievement. We can hardly read too much, I think, into the position of “aenigma similitudinis” as the last kind of sign that is transcended. It stands cumulatively for the whole ascent by means of analogy and hermeneutic effort. Since a tongue of flesh, the voice of an angel, and the sound of thunder could be read as similitudes of the Word itself, “the riddle of a similitude” becomes a sort of metasimilitude, an analogy for analogy. Moreover, since these other three are events as well as analogies, the enigmatic also takes on the character of an event, a moment of revelation, as well as a sign to be interpreted. Augustine’s theological and epistemological emphasis on the initiative taken by God in the Incarnation of the Word yields here an insight into the experience of interpretation. The interpretive effort elicited by enigma approaches an instant of transcendent understanding that has the force of revelation, yet without ever fully or permanently reaching it. Meanwhile, though, as the act of interpretation comes to consciousness, it partakes of the goal to which it also refers. The Word comes to Augustine as the answer comes to one contemplating a riddle.103 Moreover, it does not come to him alone but to the primal community constituted by himself and his mother, Monica. As Andrew Louth points out about this vision’s importance in the history of Christian mysticism: “It is at once an account of a personal experience, and yet not a purely solitary one.”104 Although it is not clear how important community is for Augustine in the mystical ascent generally, there is no doubt that he found it essential to hermeneutic work. That the person sharing this experience is an illiterate woman suggests how wide his vision of the interpretive community is. The joining of the individual and the communal here follows from the combination of openness and inexhaustible depth, accessibility to the unlearned and exercise for the learned, that Augustine sees as the distinctive, supremely eloquent quality of scripture. What lingers most from the vision, however, is the joy that makes all other delights fall away and unites mother and son. In books 10 to 13, the model of Augustine and his mother sharing a foretaste of perfected participation in the divine life through a shared ex-

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perience of interpretation becomes a plan for the life of the whole church. These last four books pass from narration of Augustine’s personal experience to exposition of universal human truth.105 Again in this half, the word aenigma occurs in passages where the work of interpretation becomes most conscious. As Augustine begins, in book 10, to confront more philosophically the limitations of embodiment and epistemological subjectivity, he takes hope from 1 Corinthians 13:12 that self-knowledge can be a path, however tangled, to knowledge of God (10.5.7). Biblical enigma here, as in book 3, guides him past confusions and temptations. There they came from outside him and were interpreted by a verse from the Old Testament; here they come from within and the diagnosis comes from the New Testament. The hermeneutic of reading the Old Testament enigmatically in light of the New, learned from Ambrose, continues to impel Augustine to read his own experience in the same light and find ever more meaning there because he believes in the Incarnation of the Word. Books 11 to 13 build a maximal structure for enigmatic reading by connecting the exposition of Genesis 1 to the persons of the Trinity.106 This is a structure for reading the significance of history through the lens of scripture. Augustine moves from the basic human experience of temporality to the history of the church in order to create a community of readers who can join him in this work. Book 11 articulates one aporia after another about measuring time until Augustine exclaims, “My mind is on fire to solve this very intricate enigma.”107 The enigma here is not the text of the Bible itself so much as the mysteries that arise from dwelling for a whole book on a single verse, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” Having expressed how the enigma has aroused his desire to understand, Augustine turns to his experience of the language of scripture in order to think about the puzzles of time. As in the vision at Ostia, language itself becomes a privileged sign of the eternal impinging on the temporal.108 Book 12 places the turn to language in the relational context that is necessary for the full emergence of meaning. Indeed, later medieval theologians such as Henry of Ghent pointed to Confessions 12 as Augustine’s most important treatment of how to read scripture and the infinite meaning to be found there.109 He develops his interpretive principles in response to the

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epistemological gap figured by the difference between heaven and earth: “My provisional interpretation of that is that ‘heaven’ means the ‘heaven of heaven,’ the intellectual, non-physical heaven where the intelligence’s knowing is a matter of simultaneity—not in part, not in an enigma, not through a mirror, but complete, in total openness, ‘face to face.’ This knowing is not of one thing at one moment and of another thing at another moment, but is concurrent without any temporal successiveness.”110 In order to approach the fullness of heavenly simultaneity, Augustine adds to this initial exegesis of Genesis 1:1 as many other potentially valid interpretations as he can think of and, rather than decide between them, accumulates them as ultimately convergent interpretations of a single scriptural text. Whereas theories of signs tend to see meaning as either univocal or ambiguous, Augustine ultimately, as in De doctrina, subordinates the distinction between signs and things to the distinction between things and persons. Signs are something to be used for the sake of persons and loving relations between persons. Confessions 12, however, advances beyond De doctrina in its exploration of a kind of meaning that is neither univocal nor merely ambiguous but characterized by a multiplicity that converges eschatologically on fuller meaning. This alternative to univocity and ambiguity would later be developed, especially by Aquinas, as analogy. Augustine compares this fullness not only to the simultaneity of eternity but also to an overflowing fountain and the fecundity of a dense jungle (12.27.37–28.38). Yet fullness of meaning finds its best earthly representation in human relations, the meaning encountered in a person. Indeed, the ability “to give a plurality of meanings to a single obscure expression in a text we have read” is the allegorical meaning that he will find in the blessing upon humans, “Increase and multiply.”111 Despite Augustine’s anxiety about the fallenness of signs, he holds out hope that, because they have been redeemed by the incarnate Word, signs, especially enigmatic ones, can still be a means of participating in this meaningfulness. To describe the vision that enigma approaches as “face to face” connotes not just the clarity and openness but the meaningfulness of friends in conversation or lovers looking at one another. As he works out his interpretations with hypothetical interlocutors, Augustine also imagines a noncompetitive community of interpretation in which, as long as all are

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moved by a sincere love of truth, there can be many different good readings of a text, even beyond those intended by the author (12.18.27). Put another way, this is the capacity of the enigmatic to mediate intense, shared desire without rivalry. Augustine and Monica had tasted this completion of reading at Ostia; book 13 gathers the whole church under it. Allegorizing the seven days of Creation as the Spirit’s work in the church, Augustine interprets the firmament of heaven dividing the waters to be scripture as the firmament of authority under which the human community exists. Above this firmament are the angels, who do not need scripture’s authority but represent the goal of faithfulness to it: “They ever ‘see your face’ (Mt. 18:10) and there, without syllables requiring time to pronounce, they read what your eternal will intends. They read, they choose, they love. They ever read, and what they read never passes away. By choosing and loving they read the immutability of your design. Their codex is never closed, nor is their book ever folded shut. For you yourself are a book to them and you are ‘for eternity’” (Ps. 47:15).112 The punning of “Legunt eligunt et diligunt,” typical of the poetic style of Confessions, expresses the potential of fully conscious, charitable reading.113 Augustine then turns to human experience in this life, using the image of a cloud (nubis, which in the vision at Ostia precedes the reference to “aenigma similitudinis”): Now your word appears to us in the “enigmatic obscurity” of clouds and through the “mirror” of heaven, not as it really is. For although we are beloved by your Son, “it does not yet appear what we shall be” (1 Jn. 3:2). “He looked through the lattice” of our flesh and caressed us and set us on fire; and we run after his perfume (Cant. 2:9, 1:3, 11). “But when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 Jn. 3:2). “As he is” Lord will be ours to see; but it is not yet given to us.114 The authority constituted under the firmament is secured eschatologically by anticipating the complete revelation that this firmament both reveals and conceals. Augustine’s interweaving of references from across the Bible also conveys the eschatological tendency of scripture by which the Old Testament anticipates the fuller and clearer revelation of the New,

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which in turn anticipates a yet fuller and clearer one. At the same time, this anticipation is also experienced in returning from the clear passages to the obscure in order to search out again what they might reveal to the soul that is always in the process of being converted. Reading enigmatically affords both the consciousness that this process is never complete and the opportunity to choose again more consciously the path of loving desire that leads to its completion. In this expectation, under this firmament of authority, the believer and the community find their identity.115 Such shaping of individual and community, in which difficult texts play a special role, ultimately constitutes scripture’s authority. Enigmatic texts make more apparent the kind of reading by which all of scripture’s authority becomes actual. Augustine reaches his allegorical reading of the firmament as scripture by way of two other verses: Isaiah 34:4, “The heaven will fold up like a book,” and Psalms 103:2, “Like a skin it is stretched out.” Books were then made of skins, of course, and the skins that clothed Adam and Eve lead Augustine to think of human mortality, specifically that of scripture’s authors, and then to the startling claim that the death of the authors increases the authority of the text.116 He implies that the fact of textuality, by which the authors’ words can spread the authority of their mediated presence, also adds authority to them because the authors’ absence gives rise to the work of interpretation. Moses’s words become more meaningful and authoritative because he is not here to tell us what he meant. In the Middle Ages, as Mary Carruthers argues, “A text achieves full authority not by closing debate but by accumulating it.”117 By locating its authority in not just a text but a text that insists on the limitlessness of its own meaning, Christianity forms itself around the shared work of interpretation and preserves, within the political structures that accumulate and are sloughed off around it, resources for conversion and renewal. At the beginning of book 13, Augustine notes the completion of the Trinitarian structure of the final three books: “Here in an enigmatic image I discern the Trinity, which you are, my God.”118 His immediate reference is to the first three verses of Genesis, but following the lead of his exploration of the human image of God in On the Trinity, we might take “ecce,” like “hic” in Langland’s quotation of 1 Corinthians 13:12, to refer also to himself, his text, and the reading experience that has shaped

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both. The aenigma passages in the Confessions, moving from the image of the Manichean secrets as a seductress to that of the skin of scripture as a firmament, chart the importance of intensive reading experiences to his ongoing conversion. He recounts how he came to find in scripture the most powerful instance of the potential available in classical rhetoric for enigmatic language to lead into mystery. This becomes one of a host of narrative and figurative strategies he deploys in order to read scripture, his life, and the world in light of each other—a continuous and endless discovery of further significance. In this cognitive stance, all experience and authority become riddles, always yielding new insight but never fully solved. The Confessions aims to form a community of interpretive desire around the enigmatic texts of scripture itself as the firmament under which other riddles can be read. As the church became increasingly institutionalized over the course of the Middle Ages, what Augustine elsewhere calls “this truly liberal and noble game” of studying scripture was sometimes reduced to method.119 No doubt the spirit of Augustine’s exegetical approach is liable to be lost in following the letter of his rules. Nonetheless, it is easy for modern scholars to overemphasize the use of rigorous interpretive method in medieval interpretation. A historian of exegesis may tend to look for antecedents of the methods of modern scholarship, or a literary critic may look for medieval models of interpretation that would be practicable outside of the community of charity Augustine envisions and would be easily teachable to undergraduates.120 Christopher Ocker’s study of fourteenthand fifteenth-century exegesis argues that the basis to which exegetes appealed for the validity of their doctrinal interpretations was not a new consolidation of method but a consensus of “shared, supernatural subjectivity” that joined readers to the inspired authors and translators of scripture as well as to previous inspired readers. Scholastic exegetes’ use of logical tools was in fact rather eclectic, and their common basis of authority and interpretive procedure was instead a conviction that the biblical text becomes meaningful through a communion of the reader with its divine and human authors. Their logical approach led to new ways of expressing this rhetoric of communion that conceived it less as the result of the consciously contemplative act of reading advocated in monastic reading practices than as a theological reality, a gift of the Holy Spirit,

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present in all faithful reading.121 Judson Boyce Allen’s The Friar as Critic shows how, in the work of some representative fourteenth-century scholars, the distinction between commentary on scriptural and classical texts was breaking down, so that they applied to all of it the Augustinian hermeneutic open to endless spiritual interpretation. Despite the calcification of ecclesiastical authority formed by other means, the exegetical stance that Augustine arrives at through his unsurpassed story of enigmatic reading in the Confessions echoed down to the later Middle Ages through his own text as well as through broadly shared attitudes toward reading and the communities they shaped.

THEOLOGICAL RHETORIC IN LANGLAND’S FIRST INNER DREAM

The inner dream of Langland’s third vision enacts the Augustinian rhetoric behind medieval exegesis. Its direct and personal encounter with the biblical text has the sort of converting effect on the dreamer that Augustine and others describe. As a result, the dreamer “makes crucial recognitions,” writes Simpson, “that are the intellectual and emotional pivot of the whole poem.”122 The dreamer was prepared for the inner dream by Dame Study, who, as Nicolette Zeeman has observed, represents the practices of study in which the reading of enigmatic texts was valued.123 Next Clergy and Scripture, who stand for the Christian authorities to be studied, repeatedly corrected and rebuked Will. They gave him a hard time, one might say, in order to provoke interpretive effort and desire, as difficult texts are supposed to. But at that point Will lacked patience for the uses of enigma. He attacked, through oversimplified claims, the value of learning represented by his interlocutors. Langland’s inner dream reverses course from Scholastic debate to an intensely reflective reading lesson. The device of a dream within a dream intensifies the enigmatic potential of dreaming even as the dreamer’s encounter with a personification called Scripture leads to a highly figurative encounter with scripture itself, the text of the Bible.124 The dreamer’s rant against learning includes the complaint that Scripture speaks “derkliche”

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(B.10.372). Even if Langland’s “derkliche” is not a reference to “in aenigmate,” it suggests that the dreamer is bringing to his theological education a vaguely classical prejudice against obscurity. Yet Augustine, as we have seen, made enigma the central term for affirming the necessity and value of obscurity, and Langland’s Clergy, in the C text, cites Augustine as an authority on the doctrine of the Trinity.125 In the closing movement of his long treatise On the Trinity, as seen above in chapter 1, Augustine draws on the same tradition as Donatus in defining enigma as a species of allegory distinguished by obscurity. There, and more fully in the Confessions, he extends scriptural enigma from the most local (a brief proverb) to whole narratives and, indeed, to the structural relation between the Old and New Testaments, to the human person itself—made in God’s image and remade in the Incarnation of the Word—and to all of God’s work in history.126 Langland’s inner dream will follow a similar trajectory. Just before the inner dream, the dreamer caps his criticism of learning with a famous line from the Confessions, but a closer look at the quotation points to precisely what he could learn about reading from the great saint. The dreamer quotes him as follows: “Ecce ipsi idiote rapiunt celum ubi nos sapientes in inferno mergimur” (Behold even the uneducated capture heaven while we wise ones sink into hell).127 A modern critical edition of the Confessions, however, reads: “Surgunt indocti et caelum rapiunt, et nos cum doctrinis nostris sine corde, ecce ubi volutamur in carne et sanguine” (The unlearned rise up and take heaven by storm, and we, with all our erudition but empty of heart, see how we wallow in flesh and blood!).128 Langland’s version omits “sine corde,” without heart. Augustine’s trouble, in this lead-up to his moment of conversion through reading scripture in the garden outside Milan, is that his learning has not changed his heart. The same could be said for Langland’s dreamer at this point, and it will be through reading scripture that his heart changes. Like the Confessions, Langland’s inner dream links a theory of reading to a narrative of conversion. Both reflect on the poetics of enigma while showing it in action. Remarkable parallels between the Confessions and the inner dream of Langland’s third vision locate this episode within the Augustinian tradition that valued the reading of difficult scriptural texts not just for

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self-knowledge but for self-transcendence in conversion. The inner dream is provoked by the personified Scripture’s rebuke of the dreamer: “Multi multa sciunt et seipsos nesciunt” (B.11.3/C.11.165; Many know many things yet do not know themselves). Taken from a text attributed at the time to St. Bernard, this line invokes a monastic tradition of spiritual growth through self-knowledge and self-knowledge through reading for which the Confessions is the most important precursor.129 The inner dream that follows both enacts this tradition and stretches to the furthest imaginable extent Augustine’s conception that interpretation forms ecclesial community and generates authority. Several broad, structural parallels between the inner dream and the Confessions identify a shared story of conversion in which enigmatic reading is central.130 In the opening books of the Confessions, Augustine looks back through a scriptural lens on the sins of his youth. Similarly, the inner dream’s initial retrospective of the dreamer’s life allegorizes it according to the three categories of sin from 1 John 2:16, “Concupiscencia Carnis,” “Coveitise of Eiyes,” and “Pryde of Parfit Lyvynge.”131 Likewise, the Confessions ends with a reading of the world through the creation story in Genesis 1, and the inner dream ends with a vision of rational order in nature.132 In between, most of the inner dream is made up of a long, rather diffuse interpretive dialogue about the Gospel’s banquet parables as retold by Scripture, a process that resembles Augustine’s constant engagement with biblical texts. Langland’s interpretive process begins with a reflection on the very act of written confession that constitutes his poem—much like the reflection that begins the expository section of Augustine’s Confessions in book 10—when the dreamer expresses concern about confessing in public the vision of his youthful sins. Will’s interlocutor in this reflection, Lewte, encourages him to write his dream for a purpose that sounds like Augustine’s: “to arate [reprove] dedly synne” (B.11.102/C.12.37).133 Just short of the center of the inner dream in the B text (lines 191–95 of the first four hundred or so lines of passus 11), Christ himself speaks in the first person; likewise Augustine receives a direct word from God through scripture at the end of book 8, just before the numerical center of the Confessions. In both texts, such presence of the divine Word is the hard-won fruit of reading under the conditions of finitude and fallibility that make enigmatic knowledge both necessary

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and usually the best we can do—conditions Langland’s poem dramatizes in the dreamer’s misunderstanding and resistance. Taken “into the lond of longynge,” the dreamer is made to look into a mirror called “Middelerthe” (B.11.8–9/C.11.169–70).134 This inner dream is structured around two reading lessons. An early passage deepens the dreamer’s dialogue with Scripture that had begun in the outer vision and explores the playful depth of exegesis—the grammar of enigma— through engagement with Gospel parables. A similar lesson, this time in reading the world enigmatically, makes up the last part of the inner dream (set off in B as the mountain of Middle Earth; C sticks with mirror). In between, Langland presses the rhetoric of enigma through the startling voice of Trajan, a pagan emperor whose inclusion among the saved is itself a puzzle. After considering these elements of the inner dream’s education in theological reading, we will look at the trajectory of the whole by comparison with Augustine’s Confessions. Like Augustine, Langland appropriates the Christian recovery of the potential of enigma for conversion and community, but for a work that is itself a pervasively obscure allegory rather than an autobiographical narrative. Before Scripture reappears in the inner dream, the dreamer undergoes a self-examination that also recapitulates the poem thus far, moving from personifications of sin, as in the first vision, to a scene of confession and pardon as in the second. Because the dreamer’s confessor is a friar, controversy about friars shifts the allegory to more of a debate like those that have made up the third vision and raises the question of whether the dreamer should publish his criticisms. When it touches on the dreamer’s work as a writer, this recapitulation makes its strongest suggestion that it is autobiographical. Yet precisely here the poem switches modes. Scripture, who has followed the dreamer from the outer to the inner dream, “skips on high” to preach. All we get, however, is her text, three lines that compress Christ’s banquet parables from Matthew 22 and Luke 14: Multi to a mangerie and to the mete were sompned [summoned]; And whan the peple was plener [all] comen, the porter unpynned the yate And plukked in Pauci pryveliche and leet the remenaunt go rome. (B.11.112–14/C.12.48–50)

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The dreamer is stopped in his tracks, both emotionally and intellectually: “All for tene [distress] of hir text trembled myn herte, / And in a weer gan I wexe [began to grow confused and anxious], and with myself to dispute / Wheither I were chose or noght chose” (B.11.115–17/C.12.51–53). Scripture does not explain her condensed parable. Rather, the poem interprets it through dialogue and more figures. The dreamer, anxious about the implied question of whether he is one of God’s chosen, tries out a parable of his own.135 His “weer” or perplexity begins to sort itself out through the strenuous work of interpretation. By the end of the inner dream, his “tene” or grievous anger softens enough that he is willing to be taught by Ymaginatif. In the process, the poem demonstrates both the cognitive and the affective values of the rhetoric of enigma. Moreover, the work of interpretation pulls him away from conflictual, win-or-lose debate with his allegorical interlocutors and into a shared desire for understanding that can be the basis of community. Parables are the category of scriptural discourse most associated with the enigmatic mode. Lists of figures kept enigma and parable separate, since Donatus classified parables as a kind of homoeosis (resemblance) rather than allegory. Yet four of the ten times Jerome’s Vulgate uses the word enigma, it is in parallel with parable, and the two had long been linked.136 This link became if anything more prominent in late medieval exegesis through attempts such as Wyclif ’s to derive exegetical methods and terminology from the Bible itself rather than from classical learning.137 Yet the strong tendency in medieval exegesis is to interpret parables, as well as other difficult figures and puzzling narratives, by reference to clear, propositional statements elsewhere in scripture, as taught by Augustine in De doctrina (2.9.14). It is a familiar strategy for closing down interpretive possibilities.138 Langland’s dreamer will put a clearer verse in Scripture’s mouth, but only after initiating a very different kind of interpretive process that complicates rather than clarifying. The dreamer’s initial response to Scripture’s parable text—distress, confusion, and debating with himself—could seem unpropitious for interpretive progress, but its intellectual and emotional intensity prepares the way for what Augustine sees as the benefits of difficulty. In his debate with himself, the dreamer dwells on the apparent and distressing message of the banquet parables: that few will be included and many excluded.

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But, he thinks, Christ made an open invitation to all, even Saracens and schismatics. He recalls his baptism, which he takes to be irrevocable, and to support this he invents a brief, contemporary parable that plays off the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Just as a bondsman cannot make a charter to sell his possessions without the permission of his lord, so no one can renounce his baptism. If he tried, Reason and Conscience would call him to account “at the last” and imprison him in purgatory unless contrition came and cried mercy for him.139 Scripture affirms his words: “That is sooth,” seide Scripture, “may no synne lette Mercy, may al amende, and [if ] mekenesse hir folwe; For thei beth, as oure bokes telleth, above Goddes werkes: Misericordia eius super omnia opera eius.” (B.11.137–39a/C.12.73–75a) The quote, from Psalm 144:9, affirms the divine mercy implied in the dreamer’s scenario and seems to contradict Scripture’s version of the banquet parables. Divine action is portrayed as mainly inclusive in one and exclusive in the other, and humans would seem to have no ultimate agency at all. The dreamer’s parable is particularly troubling because it finds comfort in the contemporary condition of bond-slavery that would seem to contradict the liberty represented, for instance, in Piers the Plowman. Yet Piers is introduced as a bondsman of Truth. The poem will return to these mysteries of agency and inclusion in the course of this and the following visions. There is a hint of how it will handle them in Scripture’s gloss on the psalm verse. Meekness, the necessary, repentant response to God’s mercy, is said to be also above God’s works. In a sense, then, it must be one of God’s works, a participation in the divine made possible, as later visions will develop, by the meekness displayed in the Incarnation. Particularly important for the inner dream is how parables and enigmas both make the turn from hidden meanings of signs to hidden meanings of things themselves, a turn the inner dream makes in its last section. Christian riddles in the tradition of Aldhelm build on the Gospel parables’ revelation of spiritual truth in the humble things of the world. The Augustinian game of extending enigma from the biblical model to all of

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creation, including human history, was the project of medieval encyclopedias, which often, as in Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum quadruplex, took their title from the visual metaphor in 1 Corinthians 13:12.140 What John Trevisa, in his translation of Bartholomaeus’s On the Properties of Things, calls scripture’s “holy informacioun and poesies” provides a model for the play of finding the spiritual in the visible that might be continued in other texts.141 Specialized encyclopedias such as bestiaries, herbals, and lapidaries carry out this program in detail.142 Bestiaries and herbals are particularly relevant to the last part of the inner dream, where Kynde, God in the aspect of nature, guides the dreamer “Thorugh ech a creature, Kynde my creatour to lovye” (B.11.325/C.13.133). In the panorama of nature that the dreamer sees, he notices especially the fruitfulness of plants and animals. References to specific creatures, like the peacock, no doubt allude to specific lessons of the sort that are dwelt on in encyclopedic works and riddles, and that the dialogue with Ymaginatif after the inner dream picks up on. As we began to see above, in the early part of the third vision Wit articulated an idea of linguistic fruitfulness grounded, as in Augustine and Geoffrey of Vinsauf, on the doctrine of creation. He initially directs the dreamer, in his quest for Dowel, to “a castel that Kynde made” (A.10.2/ B.9.2/C.10.2). Used here as a name of God, the concept of “kynde” as nature also shapes the dreamer’s quest for “kynde knowing” of truth, the whole-person, participatory knowledge that the enigmatic helps mediate. Wit’s description of Creator and creation culminates in humans as subcreators through language: Ac [But] man is hym moost lik of marc and of shafte. For thorugh the word that he spak woxen forth beestes: Dixit et facta sunt. (B.9.31–32a, cf. A.10.32–34a, C.10.157–58) The human likeness to God is most manifest, that is, in our use of language.143 Wit’s discussion of the human imitation of divine creativity includes not just language but also other kinds of “werkmanshipe” (B.9.45), especially sexual procreation, all by way of explaining the right use of reason. The game of heaven, then, involves all of these, but Wit gives speech, the fruitful use of the word, the leading role.

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The restorative usefulness of language and of enigmas in the natural world is reasserted at the end of the inner dream, but now against the sense of fallibility that has developed over the course of the third vision. In response to the wonders of nature he is shown, the dreamer becomes upset that reason rules all animals except humans. The rebuke he addresses to the personified Reason, as expanded in the C text, makes clear that the transgressions the dreamer has in mind involve not just food, clothing, and sex but words as well (C.13.189). Obedience to reason makes the rest of nature fruitful symbolically as well as biologically. Because it accords with the mind of its maker, creation reflects that mind and ought to bear further fruit in leading the dreamer to the wonders of Kynde behind it all. Enigmatic language is a central means of meditating on such hidden meaning and participating in a uniquely human, rational, conscious harmony of created and uncreated agency. Conversely, one of the results of disobedience is to make humans unable to read the creation fruitfully. Reason begins to anatomize the dreamer’s failures of both thought and feeling. Ashamed, he awakens from the inner dream and laments that it didn’t continue so he could have learned more. The Augustinian rhetoric of enigma for the sake of reforming the heart, implied in the exercise of learning to love the Creator through the creation, is expressed more directly in the central part of the inner dream. Its most challenging speaker, Trajan, says that all kinds of knowledge, . . . the sevene arts and alle! But thei be lerned for Oure Lordes love, lost is al the tyme, For no cause to cacche silver therby, ne to be called a maister, But al for love of Oure Lord and the bet to love the peple. (B.11.171–74, cf. C.12.95–99) How this works is powerfully suggested by Trajan’s use of the traditional image of a nut: As on a walnote—withoute is a bitter barke, And after that bitter bark, be the shelle aweye, Is a kernel of confort kynde to restore. So is after poverte or penaunce paciently ytake,

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Maketh a man to have mynde in God and a gret wille To wepe and to wel bidde, wherof wexeth mercy, Of which Crist is a kernell to conforte the soule. (B.11.258–64, cf. C.12.147–52)144 The explicit analogy here is to poverty, not allegory, but Trajan’s whole speech compares the hidden riches of poverty and the hidden riches of words. For a modern reader, the shell-and-kernel image might imply deciphering a doctrinally correct spiritual meaning in a text through a methodical hermeneutic and then casting aside any potentially interesting but superficial features. And indeed, the kernel in the allegory of allegory here is simply Christ. Yet the point of the analogy here is poverty’s benefits for both mind and will, with the implication that difficult texts offer similar benefits. The kernel is not merely knowledge about Christ, but loving communion with Christ in a number of senses: participation in Christ as the model of patient poverty, the presence of Christ as comfort, becoming like Christ in mind and heart. The trial of getting there is more a game than a method, yet one played by rules that keep it centered on Christ.145 Above all, the process of conversion in which reading enigmatically plays a central part is, in both the Confessions and Langland’s inner dream, a change of desire. Moreover, the device of the inner dream achieves something like Augustine’s innovation of a double narrative voice that interweaves the perspectives of his pre- and postconversion selves.146 The inner dream is at once an interval within the process of the outer dream and a way of recounting his entire life up to that point from the perspective at which he has arrived through writing the poem. From temptation by the three sins in “the lond of longynge and love” (B.11.8/C.11.169), the inner dream moves to a mood of wonder and marvel, a state conducive both to thinking more clearly and to coming to love Kynde through the creation. In the vision of nature that ends the inner dream, there is unmistakable longing when Langland laments the human failure to live in harmony with Kynde. In between, the extended interpretation of the parable of the wedding banquet deals largely with the treatment of the poor. It is important to love the poor because Christ appears, enigmatically, in their guise. Even more, poverty is itself a blessed state because it

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purifies desire. This point is supported, in the midst of a mostly scriptural discussion, with a line taken from Alexander of Villedieu’s Doctrinale: “Pauper ego ludo dum tu dives meditaris” (Though poor, I play, but you, though rich, must brood).147 In the outer dream, the dreamer had argued that knowing the Paternoster was enough for salvation, but through the inner dream he comes to a place of accepting intellectual and spiritual poverty as the starting point for a pilgrimage of ongoing conversion—a point made clearer in the fourth vision by Patience. One important fruit of such poverty is that it enables and motivates the dream to join a community of shared desire for understanding. Desire shared without rivalry, in both Langland’s inner dream and Augustine, leads to building a community of readers. Langland’s representations of interpretive community are allegorical, such as Lewte and Scripture, textual, in citations from authorities such as canon law and Alexander of Villedieu, and also, in the astonishing case of Trajan, historical. After Will interprets Scripture’s version of the banquet parables through his own, contemporary version of “The Prodigal Son” and receives Scripture’s affirmation—the first time a figure in the long third dream has agreed with him—their Bible study is interrupted: “‘Ye, baw for bokes!’ quod oon was broken out of helle,” who turns out to be the pagan Roman emperor, well known in medieval legend to have been saved posthumously by the prayers and tears of St. Gregory the Great (B.11.140/C.12.77).148 Trajan is a challenging test case for the question at issue of what it takes to be saved.149 Yet he speaks, if he is the same “oon” referred to in line 319, far longer than anyone else in the B text’s inner dream, and his speech includes most of the explicitly exegetical material.150 It is Trajan who takes it upon himself to speak in the voice of Christ—or alternatively, it is he through whom Christ speaks—at the center of the inner dream. To use the image of the nut, quoted above, which Trajan gives shortly thereafter, he is like a shell containing the kernel Christ and is himself contained by the fiction of the inner dream, which is in turn contained by the elaborate curricular progress of the outer dream. The voice of Christ, expanding a command he gives in Luke 14 just before he tells the Parable of the Banquet, applies not just to loving the materially poor but to inviting the spiritually poor, like Trajan himself, into the community of readers:

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Ac calleth the carefulle therto, the croked [disabled] and the povere; For youre frendes wol feden yow, and fonde yow to quyte [repay] Youre festynge and youre faire giftes—ech frend quyt so oother. Ac for the povere I shal paie, and pure wel quyte hir travaille That gyveth hem mete or moneie and loveth hem for my sake. (B.11.191–95, cf. C.12.105–9) It is as if the banquet parables, in which the hosts send their servants out to the highways to compel the poor to come in, have also become a template for the Augustinian hermeneutic program, and the poor in learning are being brought to the exegetical feast. After he awakens from the inner dream, the dreamer’s interactions with Ymaginatif are less combative than with the personifications that precede the inner dream. They show a renewed desire to understand and a new humility in the face of difficulty that will facilitate further entry into community without rivalry. The poem’s next vision will begin with Conscience following this command by inviting the dreamer and Patience to an academic feast. As a pagan who claims salvation, Trajan presents a theological challenge, but the poem forestalls rivalry by making him stand for the hermeneutic of finding Christ in the poor and letting him explicate the attendant paradoxes of literal and spiritual poverty and riches. Through poverty and gift giving, humanity participates in Christ. How one treats the poor is not so much a test of one’s righteousness as it is an opportunity to encounter Christ, “For in hir liknesse Oure Lord ofte hath ben yknowe” (B.11.231/C.12.123), and thus to participate in God’s love as its agent. So the famous story of Trajan stopping to help a widow could be read as not just a good deed but a meeting with Christ. The challenge of Trajan’s salvation by “pure truth” will be definitively, if riddlingly, resolved by Ymaginatif ’s explanation of his participation in the nature of God: “Ne wolde nevere trewe God but trewe truthe were allowed” (B.12.287/C.14.212).151 Trajan himself expresses the mystery in terms that move from a gift-giving metaphor to one of embodiment and kinship: For alle are we Cristes creatures, and of his cofres riche, And bretheren as of oo [one] blood, as wel beggeres as erles.

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For at Calvarie, of Cristes blood Cristendom gan sprynge, And blody bretheren we bicome there, of o body ywonne. (B.11.198–201/C.12.110–11) In Christ’s great speech at the Harrowing of Hell in the sixth vision, he will call all humankind his “brethren of blood” (B.18.377/C.20.418) when he articulates the power of his saving work as a real sharing in the divine “kynde.” Piers the Plowman, the poem’s central figure of both interpretive community and participation in Christ, uses the phrase “bloody brethren” in the second vision for the Wasters who disrupt the community’s work but whom he sees he ought to love anyway (B.6.207/C.8.217). Piers exhibits more clearly even than Trajan how interpretation leads to participation that grounds authority. The pardon sent from Truth at the end of the second vision aligns Piers with the work of interpretation, and when Piers is next referred to, in the fourth and fifth visions, it is in connection with interpreting difficult texts. Beginning in the fifth vision, the poem will narrate allegorically the entire formation of the Christian interpretive community from Abraham through its fourteenth-century crises in the seventh vision’s failed barn of Unity. Before that failure, Piers will be the one driving the plow of the two testaments pulled by the oxen of the evangelists and the horses of the church fathers, that is, providing for the church by interpreting the scriptures. Meanwhile, with the appearance of Ymaginatif, the third vision arrives at one of Langland’s treatments of poetry as a means of redressing human failure. In the closing episode of the inner dream, a manifestation of perfect procreativity leads the dreamer to see the failure of humanity to participate fully in this rational order. Yet Wit’s discussion of Kynde early in the third vision compared natural generativity to fruitfulness in language. This kind of fruitfulness will be an important means of the dreamer’s participation in Christ: the work of writing poetry. After the inner dream, Ymaginatif both cautions the dreamer against misuse of his poetic gifts and continues to model their success by inventing complex figures that we might call enigmas.152 Indeed, Ymaginatif seems to represent the natural capacity for participation in the divine through what Langland calls “kynde wit,” which the remainder of the poem will intensify through revelation and sacrament into a more salvific “kynde knowing.”

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While associated with faculty psychology and the AristotelianAverroist idea of imagination, Ymaginatif also serves to recapitulate the treatment of language throughout the curriculum, both arts and theology, for the sake of a positive view of enigmatic poetry.153 Ymaginatif ’s own forms of discourse and range of references stay close to the elementary curriculum. Rather than precise, rigorous distinctions, he makes loose associations and analogies. His answer to the question of whether nonChristians can be saved makes, as Ralph Hanna puts it, “inspired leaps of similitude” from “four fragments which derive either from the child’s garden of parish priest knowledge or from grammatical culture.”154 One of these fragments is an acrostic riddle on the etymology of deus that is found also in a manuscript of the latest of the Latin artes poetriae, Evrard the German’s Laborintus.155 Throughout, Ymaginatif deals in the sort of suggestive similitudes from which riddles are made.156 He represents allegorically what John Gower describes when the king in his “Tale of Three Questions” makes riddles out of “depe ymaginaciouns / And strange interpretaciouns.”157 When Langland’s dreamer asks his name, Ymaginatif adds, “ydel was I nevere” (B.12.1/C.14.1) as if to say he has always been with the dreamer and is not something to be learned. Their conversation is about how to put this faculty to greater use. Ymaginatif anticipates uses of the term imagination in literary theory all the way up to its Coleridgean apotheosis as the faculty of participation.158 Yet he also personifies modes of engaging readers that had long been common to the schoolroom and available to poets but had received official sanction only at its margins, most of all under the label of enigma. Ymaginatif ’s whole speech works as commentary on what has gone before in the third vision and moves toward synthesizing answers to its questions about learning and salvation, not through rigorous argumentation but through images that engage both thought and feeling. When he says, “Ac grace is a gras” (B.12.59/C.14.23), he is returning to Wit’s multivalent assertion that speech is a “spyre of grace” in order to express how grace works with humble, natural materials like schoolroom learning. Ymaginatif ’s act of interpreting an earlier section of the poem demonstrates the capacity for contemplative reading he represents. The narrator’s skepticism before the inner dream about the value of learning set up a highly didactic idea of religious knowledge that opposed it to

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works of love. After the inner dream, Ymaginatif returns the dreamer to the schoolroom, now seen through a psychology perhaps derived from the arts curriculum as well as a theology that embraces the capacity of literary, enigmatic knowledge for conversion and contemplation. Just as Augustine’s vision at Ostia included his uneducated mother in the experience of interpreting the riddles of creation, which led them to communion with Christ, so Langland’s inner dream and Ymaginatif invite poets into the game. Rarely was the medieval rhetoric of enigma demonstrated as intricately or self-consciously as by Langland. Nonetheless, it is not hard to see other ambitious medieval poets—Jean de Meun, Dante, the Pearl poet—following the trail signposted in school texts by the term. Particularly comparable to the first inner dream of Piers Plowman is Pearl’s focus on the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard at the center of an interpretive process that leads beyond rivalry to a desire for the infinite city of God shown in figures. The educational sequence in Piers Plowman, however, goes so far as to imply that the possibilities of enigmatic rhetoric are latent in the medieval curriculum’s inheritance of the ancient traditions of literary study. Even more, it constructs a narrative in which discovery of this rhetoric is central to its protagonist’s conversion, as it was for Augustine. No doubt the teaching and learning of literary terms and exegetical principles mostly fell far short of enigma’s horizon. But, in the relative absence of the many kinds of reductionism that would gain influence over the course of modernity, the idea of enigma kept reading and writing oriented to an open but directed fullness of meaning, the benefits of interpretive difficulty, and the peaceful community generated through the play of interpretation. Other parts of Piers Plowman develop more fully the social dynamics of the enigmatic and, in particular, its capacity to mediate, better than the didactic or the esoteric, the constitution of free, Christ-like, individual subjects in community. This promise is, in the end, the poem’s claim to authority and its means of persuasion.

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E N I G M AT I C AU T H O R I T Y Langland’s Second Vision

Rhetorical ideals imply political visions. The classical ideal of clarity and decoration supported, broadly speaking, the authority of a well-educated, centralized elite. Rita Copeland has argued that a strong separation between the literal and spiritual senses of scripture reinforced hierarchical church authority.1 The political implications of the rhetoric of enigma, on the other hand, are more protean. As seen above in chapter 3’s riddling dialogues, the enigmatic opposes the settled possession of academic and clerical authority, and does so at once from above and below. It does not support an institutional order so much as reorient a community’s sense of identity around hospitality toward an intimate stranger, both immanent and transcendent, present but infinite, to whom it looks for the source of its own truth. Institutions tend to derive authority from controlling knowledge that is either open, what might be called didactic authority, or secret, that is, esoteric. The enigmatic is open, like the didactic, but infinite, mysterious, and unpossessable. Didactic texts avoid obscurity. A didactic religious text like The Prick of Conscience may use many rhetorical tools of amplification, but for repetition or direct emotional appeals rather than to challenge interpretation. When they are allegorical, didactic texts 220

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invent extended metaphors and unambiguous personifications in order to teach familiar truths.2 Both enigmatic and esoteric texts, on the other hand, cultivate obscurity for the sake of authority. Esotericism, such as codes that require a secret key or oracles interpretable only by a priest, uses obscurity to deny understanding, so that truth remains the privileged possession of a few initiates. Pure examples are perhaps nonexistent in Middle English because the most esoteric discourse happened in Latin, still the language of the learned. One Middle English text that leans a bit in the direction of the esoteric, however, is Mandeville’s Travels, the text that happens to survive most often in bindings that also include copies of Piers Plowman. Its instructions for potential pilgrims are mostly didactic, and insofar as it unfolds the revelation of divine wonders in various places and times, it invites attention like the enigmatic. But its claims to privileged knowledge and the blank inscrutability of many of its marvels also give this text an air of the esoteric, of authority that confers status. Protecting the truth from the unworthy is one of the uses often ascribed to the enigmatic, but enigmatic texts primarily use difficulty to elicit a quality of cognitive and affective engagement adequate to the truth they aim to contemplate. Neither didactic nor esoteric allegory invites further interpretation once understood. As seen above in chapter 4, Aristotle had defined enigma in a way that detached it from a view of the poet as seer and attached it instead to one of poetry as craft. Ancient poetics can be seen as divided between esotericism and didacticism.3 Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana, as a handbook for preachers, works within the didacticism of classical rhetoric but moves toward the enigmatic rhetoric he finds in the Bible. His larger project has more to do with identifying a Christian poetics that avoids both the didactic and the esoteric by opening at once to simplicity and endless mystery, as the Confessions situates the Bible in opposition to both classical rhetoric and Manichean esotericism.4 For Augustine the more important difference is between the enigmatic and the esoteric because the latter is elitist and exclusive, whereas the former is continuous with the humility and openness of biblical language. Didactic and esoteric authority both remain closely tied to institutions that deploy them and sanction their content. Each makes a strong distinction between insiders and outsiders, marked publicly by didactic

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authority and secretly by the esoteric. Each implies its institution’s complete possession of what one needs to know. The major medieval didactic authority is, of course, the church. Esoteric communities are necessarily more varied and marginal, but perhaps the most important one, at least of those coexisting with the church, was centered on the developing institutions of learning. Tricks for the seven liberal arts in the Secretum philosophorum, including riddle codes in the section on rhetoric, verge on the esoteric (as do the riddles in Piers Plowman that use such tricks).5 The politics of enigma might be expressed as participation in a reading community rather than subjection to an institution or initiation into a cult. Enigmatic authority is not anti-institutional, exactly, but it maintains a tension between the institution and the individual reader of the institution’s founding text. Both are seen as partial and provisional in contrast to a fulfillment yet to be revealed or reached. In the enigmatic view of reality, the entire world and any individual’s experience can provide further texts to be interpreted in relation to the canonical one. An open but disciplined and shared work of interpretation becomes the basis for a community that is moving forward together, gradually or haltingly, up steps described by William of St. Thierry in The Enigma of Faith: first, faith in the authority of tradition as represented by the fathers and passed down in texts that have the force of revelation, above all scripture and the liturgy; second, reasoning about what is given in these authorities; third, the imaginative vision that transforms faith and reason into love and that begins now but is perfected only in the next life. The program of meditative reading carried on the monasteries and revised for the scholastic context by Hugh of St. Victor in the Didascalicon nurtured community around enigmatic authority. There is room, ideally, for no end of advanced and difficult, scholarly conversation, carried on in the atmosphere of friendship expressed by Aldhelm in the letter accompanying his collection of riddles. The character of both individual and community would confirm, for these writers, the influence of the kind of authority they point to in the enigmatic text. The sacraments too are a locus for shared interpretive contemplation of the kind modeled by Thomas Aquinas in his Eucharistic hymns and, together with the scriptures, suggest the participation of all things in the sacramental dynamic of presence in absence.6 Participation in the sacraments, in the most ordinary, physical

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sense, provides the best figure for the kind of community enabled also by enigmatic texts. For participation, in a more psychological and spiritual sense—or as Auerbach puts it, “sharing and not a purely rational understanding”—is also the goal of a poetics that emerges from enigmatic allegory and the overturning of classical decorum.7 The enigmatic is such a central feature of modern literature, and literature has become so well established as a means of challenging institutional authority, that it is easy to overlook the difficulty medieval authors faced in fashioning an enigmatic voice. Conversely, it is easy to miss it when they do. All of the prestigious medieval genres tend toward idealized representations of discourses associated with powerful institutions. Yet romance, allegory, and legends of saints, three main narrative forms of the later Middle Ages, can create a locus of alternative, enigmatic authority through figures located both within and beyond institutional structures. These figures serve as models for the capacities of enigma: cognitive play with the mysteries of things, persuasion to a pattern of desire beyond rivalry and exclusion, and participation in peaceful community and divine grace. Piers the Plowman is by no means the first medieval figure of enigmatic authority, and some important precursors can suggest the contrast between these models and representations of more didactic or esoteric authority. Grail stories, proliferating from the highly enigmatic fragment left by Chretien de Troyes, develop a range of enigmatic figures. The innumerable hermit guides tend toward the didactic, while the Fisher King and the Grail community lean toward a more esoteric sense of elite initiation. Readers share in the education of Chretien’s central figure, the holy fool Perceval, through puzzlement and difficulty.8 Dante’s three principal guides display three kinds of allegorical authority more clearly. Virgil, as befits the orientation of classical rhetoric toward teaching, is the more didactic. St. Bernard, to whom were attributed the highest flights of mystical contemplation, serves the esoteric role of initiating Dante into the beatific vision. In between these, Beatrice—herself the most enigmatic symbol in the Commedia—accompanies Dante the pilgrim as he participates in the ideal interpretive community of the saints in paradise. Langland’s allegorical authorities, such as Holy Church or Conscience in the first vision or the sequence of educational personifications in the third,

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often start out rather didactic before they get entangled in the poem’s enigmas. But Langland moves from the didactic to the enigmatic most completely, and conveys the authority of his poetics in relation to the authorities of his time most powerfully, in Piers. At the same time, the second vision, particularly through the waking scene added before it in the C text, also sets up his narrator as a locus of the poem’s enigmatic authority. This chapter will follow these two developments, with particular focus on the notorious episode of Piers’s pardon, before returning at the end to implications for understanding the poetics of enigma in other medieval texts.

THE AUTHORITY OF PIERS THE PLOWMAN

The identity and significance of Piers, beginning with his first entrance into the poem and persisting after his final exit, heightened by other exits and re-entrances, are surely the central riddle of Piers Plowman. An important part of this enigma’s meaning is its effect as represented within the poem by the responses of other characters, especially the narrator, and as manifested also in the poem’s reception. Inclusion of his name in its common titles shows his centrality for early readers and makes him even more of an enigma. If, however, much of what this poem has to offer is formation in a way of reading, Piers functions not only as a figure to be interpreted but also as a model of how to interpret. This, in fact, is one of the ways he is most like Christ. Christ was not called an enigma by medieval commentators; rather, the story of Jesus as told in the Gospels was said to solve the enigmas of the Old Testament. This work of interpretation begins within the Gospels themselves, as represented summarily in the episode of Christ’s post-Resurrection appearance to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, during which “he expounded to them in all the scriptures, the things that were concerning him” (Luke 24:27). Christ’s authority thus includes the interpretation of enigmatic texts, texts that, in the case of the Old Testament, represent literal, historical truth. Parallels between Piers and the Emmaus episode across the whole poem show a steady increase in his interpretive authority from the second vision onward. As Christ mysteriously joined the two disciples who were

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already on the road, so Piers initially comes out of nowhere to direct the folk who are setting out on a pilgrimage to St. Truth but do not know the way. His final appearance, five visions later, when he becomes an apostolic leader of the historical church, conveys his authority through the allegorical image of plowing with a team of oxen representing the four Gospels and cultivating “all Holy Scripture” with a harrow made up of the two Testaments and pulled by the four major patristic exegetes. In the Emmaus episode the two disciples do not recognize Jesus until, when they ask him to stay with them at the end of the day, he blesses and breaks bread and gives it to them, and their eyes are opened. Then he vanishes. Piers too vanishes mysteriously after putting his exegetical team to work. The poem does not indicate the moment of his final departure, but it happens at the time that the faithful are building the barn of Unity and beginning to celebrate the sacraments, representations of the founding acts of the church that parallel those at the end of the Emmaus story.9 Some of these responses, indeed, echo the comment between the disciples at Emmaus after Christ has vanished: “Was not our heart burning within us, whilst he spoke in the way, and opened to us the scriptures?” (Luke 24:32). Initial formation of Piers the Plowman as an authoritative but enigmatic guide in the second vision of the poem that came to bear his name passes through several modulations that culminate, in the A and B texts, in an act of interpretation that is itself in need of deciphering. The episode in which Piers tears the pardon sent from St. Truth has probably been called enigmatic more often than any other in Piers Plowman—and for reasons even better than those who have used the term have indicated.10 Its puzzles include not just how to read his action but also what to make of the C text’s deletion of the pardon tearing and its addition of important new material. The medieval poetics of enigma sheds further light on the pardon scene, but, more important for the larger argument of this book, its socially charged narrative context in turn extends the implications of enigma for Piers as an authority within the poem, for the authority of the poem itself, and for understanding enigmatic authority as a political stance in other texts and in society. An account of how the B-text version of the second vision fashions a poetics of enigma around Piers will set up a consideration of how the major C-text additions to

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this section of the poem—the apparently autobiographical waking scene added before the second vision and the “lunatic lollers” added to the pardon—sharpen the social implications of this poetics. Entering the poem midway through its second vision, Piers offers to guide a penitential process already under way. This vision has been well understood as a sequence of actions that gradually deepens the idea of what makes for true penance. The result, in the community briefly organized under the leadership of Piers, is faithful to the church’s teaching on penance yet also poses a challenge to its institutional authority. Though Piers will, in the poem’s final vision, represent a sort of idealized pope, part of the succession of St. Peter (whose name he shares), we do not see him rise through any ecclesiastical ranks. He is both an idealized religious leader and a figure of noninstitutional authority that follows from a more direct relationship to truth, enacted in the poem through a process of interpretation. His authority is, in a broad sense, literary, identical with the authority claimed by the poem itself. Reading in such a way as to undergo conversion from sin and reception of grace is the poem’s fundamental response to sin. This begins in the second vision with reading sin itself. Enigmatic reading as a means of penance responds to reading sin as itself enigmatic, one of the ways in which we are, as Augustine articulates in his Confessions, mysteries to ourselves. Langland constructs his vision from the same traditional materials as a highly didactic poem contemporary with the B text of Piers Plowman, John Gower’s Mirour de l’omme.11 Gower renders penitential material into couplets composed in the version of French that was still spoken among the English elite, “for the information of the lay folk,” he says, “and as a reminder to the clerics.”12 In other words, Gower’s poem is instructional and mnemonic. It combines “the manual of vices and virtues, the attack on the evils of existing society from the highest place downwards, and . . . the versified summary of Scripture history and legend” in a disembodied fusion of learned authorities that results in what Macaulay, its modern editor, calls “a kind of perpetual Last Judgement.”13 Langland puts these same materials together much differently. He constructs something more like riddles that lead to a more compassionate, mysterious, and incipiently sociological view of sin. The germ of Langland’s portraits of the seven deadly sins might have come from another fourteenth-century text, the Speculum Christiani, an

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otherwise rather didactic handbook of church teaching in Latin and English. Book 4 of the Speculum Christiani catalogs the seven sins by giving for each, first, a quatrain in English spoken by the sin itself. Without any narrative context, the use of prosopopoeia makes these sound like riddles. I am ful sory in myn herte For other mens hele and querte [health and well-being]. I banne [curse/blame] and bacbyte wyckedly, And hyndre al that I may sykerly.14 Each of these leads to a selection of authoritative statements about the sin in Latin—the sort of thing that the Mirour de l’omme’s eighteen thousand lines on the vices and virtues translate and versify. In Gower, however, the seven sins and their progeny (five each) never speak. They are not personifications so much as parts of a mnemonic organizing scheme. In Piers Plowman, on the other hand, the seven sins are the frame for a series of confessional dialogues between Repentance and members of the “field full of folk.” These full-fledged personifications of the vices could be seen as extensions of the Speculum Christiani’s English verses. Envy’s speech in Piers Plowman, for example, ends with an ironic turn on his sorrow similar to the verse above from the Speculum: “I am evere sory,” quod {Envye}, “I am but selde oother, And that maketh me thus megre, for I ne may me venge, Amonges burgeis have I be, {bigg}yng at Londoun, And gart bakbityng be a brocour to blame mennes ware. Whan he solde and I nought, thanne was I aredy To lye and loure on my neghebore and to lakke his chaffare. I wole amende this if I may, thorugh might of God Almyghty.” (B.5.126–32, cf. A.5.105–6, C.6.93–102) Here though, the final note of prayer to make a true repentance balances Envy’s misdirected sorrow toward others’ good fortune. Langland’s portraits of the vices retain the admonitory force of traditional teaching but also identify with sinners’ powerlessness before their own sin. They further elicit empathy by including a social dimension of sin. Their confessions of how they harm others and themselves show them to be entangled

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in a larger social dynamic. Thus Envy is seen both to aggravate and to arise from rivalry between households and desire for success. Wrath, Coveteise, and Gloton are portrayed even less individually and more as products of social situations. The personified sins come to seem like victims of social and spiritual contagion transmitted by mimetic desire, much like Augustine’s understanding of his desire to steal pears in the Confessions.15 Langland’s portrayal of sinners’ inability to repent and do good, so different from most literature of the seven deadly sins, becomes most acute in the final portraits of Sloth and of Robert the Robber, one a figure of spiritual poverty and the other of material. In his catalogs of the sins, Langland consistently rearranges the traditional order by putting sloth in the prominent final position. Sloth’s confession, which includes many of the other sins as well, shows it to be, as John M. Bowers puts it, “the vice toward which all other vices move, if not erased, as their grim spiritual end.”16 Langland’s Sloth again goes beyond the traditional analysis by articulating the paradox of a predicament that one both suffers and is responsible for. The essential passivity of sloth, indeed, makes it an apt figure for this aspect of all the sins. Robert the Robber, an eighth portrait following the seven sins in the A and B texts, both emblematizes more concretely the sinner’s predicament and points toward the poem’s response to it through intensive engagement with the scriptural narrative of the Passion.17 In him spiritual powerlessness is represented by material poverty—he does not have the means to make the restitution that his sin so obviously requires. Ac yet the synfulle sherewe [scoundrel] seide to hymselve: “Crist, that on Calvarie upon the cros deidest, Tho [When] Dysmas my brother bisoughte thee of grace, And haddest mercy on that man for Memento sake, So rewe on this Rober{d} that Reddere ne have, Ne nevere wene to wynne with craft that I knowe. But for thi muchel mercy mitigacion I biseche: Dampne me noght at Domesday for that I dide so ille.” (B.5.464–71, cf. A.5.237–46, C.6.317–24) The narrator goes on to say that, although Robert wept and vowed penitence, he cannot say what happened to him, an irresolution that hangs

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over all of Langland’s personified sins. Yet Robert’s particular case, theft and inability to repay, gains an added layer of hopeful significance because it identifies him figurally with Dysmas, the repentant thief who had no chance to make restitution because he was being crucified next to Jesus. Like Dysmas, and unlike the previous sinners, Robert addresses Christ rather than the allegorical intermediary Repentance. The way Piers Plowman treats sin will depart increasingly from allegorical depiction of the normal penitential process, even to the point of depicting in its final vision the failure of that process. Instead, it will move toward enabling readers to find themselves in the scriptural text as Robert the Robber does, and thus to find surprising grace in the words of Christ, as Dysmas did.18 Piers himself will be the chief model of an ordinary Christian who enters the biblical story. A passage added after the confessions in the B text completes the shift from seven sins material to versified scripture. Repentance offers an intercessory prayer that narrates the entire story of salvation from Creation and Fall to Passion and Resurrection in language dense with metaphor and with allusion to scripture and liturgy—language that the remainder of the poem will work to unfold. Images such as Christ’s “doughtiest dedes . . . doon in oure armes” (B.5.501/cf. C.7.140) will eventually be developed in the figure of Piers. Most important for the view of sin already implied in Langland’s confession scene, however, is the prayer’s celebration of the idea of the Fortunate Fall: “Now God,” quod he, “that of Thi goodnesse gonne [did] the world make, And of naught madest aught and man moost lik to thiselve, And sithen suffredest hym to synne, a siknesse to us alle— And al for the beste, as I bileve, whatevere the Book telleth: O felix culpa! O necessarium peccatum Ade! For thorugh that synne Thi sone sent was to this erthe And bicam man of a maide mankynde to save. . . .” (B.5.481–86/C.7.122–27) Sin is, paradoxically, both an evil to be judged and a necessity to be suffered for the sake of the fulfillment of divine mercy. Whereas Gower’s vast, pitiless inventory of sins in the Mirour de l’omme asks mercy in the

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end only for its narrator, Langland refuses to separate justice from mercy, sin as stigma from sin as suffering. The doctrine of the felix culpa, in fact, makes the stigma a means of participation in a greater glory, rather than just a sign of blame, by viewing it through the Passion. Crucial to this participation is sustained engagement with the Gospel story that keeps it from dissolving into didacticism. Indeed, the difficulty of enigmatic texts is, for Langland as for Augustine, a means of grace for dealing with the predicament of sin. As Piers comes on the scene, the second vision tries out representations of didactic and esoteric authority on its way toward the enigmatic mode, the poem’s answer to the problems of spiritual, physical, and social well-being it depicts. Repentance’s prayer has inspired the field full of folk with desire to seek Truth, but they wander aimlessly because no one knows the way. They first meet one “Aparailid as a paynym in pilgrimys wyse” (A.6.4/B.5.516/C.7.160), carrying a staff with souvenirs of pilgrimage sites he has visited, who says, however, that he has never heard of St. Truth. One of the poem’s many satires of an outward form of religion that lacks substance, the pilgrim also stands for an esoteric kind of authority, having arduously won possession of signs that grant elite status but lack either direct or deep meaning.19 Just at this point, Piers enters the story as if poking his head through a hedge and says of Truth, “I knowe hym as kyndely as clerk doth his bokis.” Moments later he adds, “He is as lough [low] as a lomb and loveliche of speche” (A.6.26, 40/B.5.538, 553/C.7.182, altered 196). The humility and approachableness of Truth is borne out by the fact that Piers’s knowledge comes merely from working on his estate, that is, from forty years’ faithful work as a plowman. Truth is not esoterically withheld but, on the contrary, marked by generosity. Piers’s claim to “kynde knowing” as opposed to a clerk’s book knowledge sets up another contrast. The dreamer and Holy Church had used this phrase in the first vision to express what the dreamer needs and wants, and the poem returns to it throughout in ways that make it a sort of condensed riddle, open to further definition, and a name for the mystery of humanity’s free, active participation in the divine. Piers seems to have this knowledge merely by virtue of working for Truth, allegorized as the estate owner. The difference here is between literate knowledge and what might be called personal or relational knowledge. To say that Piers

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has face-to-face knowledge of Truth from working for him suggests how he will become linked to the kind of knowledge that St. Paul says is reserved beyond death and approached now and here “through a mirror in an enigma.” While Piers will be the poem’s principal guide on just such a journey and points already to the goal, the poem also keeps it at a distance. It is too soon to call his authority enigmatic. A better description might be experiential, positioned as a simple alternative to clerical authority rather than the refashioning it will become. After the folk accept his guidance, Piers gives directions to Truth that turn basic instruction common to penitential literature into an allegorical topography of Truth’s estate (including the two great commandments to love God and neighbor, the Ten Commandments, the process of penance, devotion to Mary, and the seven remedial virtues). The effect is to provide a mnemonic based on sensory—and in that sense “kynde” or natural—knowledge and yet at the same time to scramble typical didactic allegory into something puzzling, though not very helpfully so.20 Piers’s first enigmatizing of didactic authority is mostly a failure. His authority grows further in the next episode, the plowing of the half-acre, but leads to an impasse that nonetheless hints enigmatically at the way forward. When the folk ask Piers to be their guide, he consents on the condition that they first help him plow a field, but what seems an interruption proves to be a substitute that defines, as Simpson puts it, “the most real kind of pilgrimage, which in fact involves staying at home and fulfilling the demands of Truthe.”21 The literal, picturable aspect of the poem changes from a jumbled landscape with allegorical labels hung on some parts into a coherent, imaginatively compelling description of a farming community at work. The authority of Piers becomes political leadership of an idealized communal order that also carries spiritual significance. But this communal labor quickly runs into the enigma of sin in the literal and historically pressing form of the Wasters, who are unwilling to work.22 Piers’s response implies another expansion of his authority, for he is able to summon Hunger, a personification of famine, and discuss with him the ethics of charity. Though Hunger briefly compels the Wasters to work, as soon as he goes to sleep they lapse again into idleness. The authority of Piers has up to this point developed in a direction toward the literal or even physical, that is, from allegorical teaching through political leadership to coercion by famine. In each case he has sought a didactic clarity about what to do.

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At the same time, the half-acre scene deepens the dilemma of the spiritual poverty of sin by embedding it in the social and psychological situation of material poverty. As Kate Crassons has shown, the dialogues between Piers and Hunger have the effect of “undermining any stable definition of need.”23 The enigma of need will recur throughout the poem as an urgent call to charitable interpretation. For now, however, the result is a sense of crisis expressed by the narrator’s warning to the Wasters that Hunger will return, a warning given urgency by the prophecy that concludes the half-acre scene: And so seith Saturne and sente yow to warne: Whan ye merke the sonne amys and two monkes heddes, And a mayde have the maistrie, and multiplied by eighte, Than shal deeth withdrawe and derthe be iustice, And Dawe the Dykere deye for hunger— But if God of his goodnesse graunte us a trewe. (B.6.324–29) The riddles in lines 325–26 have not been solved.24 They evoke esoteric signs of apocalyptic prophecy but, like Conscience’s riddling prophecy in the first vision, mark threats of judgment as a dead end rather than a way forward.25 The lines that follow align such portents with a sort of justice from which this poem seeks divine deliverance. Langland invites continued reading of the history found in one’s neighbor rather than in astronomical portents. The remainder of the second vision, occupied with the pardon sent to Piers, climaxes in the A and B texts with the poem’s most notorious enigma, the tearing of the pardon. In the C text, this action is famously removed, but new additions offer guidance in how to interpret the change. In each case, enigma turns spiritual poverty to blessing.

THE TEARING OF THE PARDON UNVEILED

For Piers to tear a written pardon in front of a priest is both a blatant challenge to church authority and, as many have recognized, a potentially

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significant gesture toward a different kind of authority. The new interpretation of this action offered here adds to previous readings a greater clarity about exactly how this action situates Piers and the poem over against institutional authority. I will argue that, when read in the light of a littlenoticed biblical allusion and its commentary tradition, the tearing of the pardon is one of the poem’s most self-reflexive interpretive moments. It situates the problems of sin and poverty, grace and authority within a sense of what kind of understanding is possible and what kind of interpretation is needed. This also has the effect of placing the positive content of the action, its alternative authority, at a distance that requires a long journey. In creating this enigma, Langland perhaps discovered how to turn difficulty and lack of understanding into spiritual progress of just the sort that unfolds in the rest of the B and C texts. Reading the pardon tearing in this way, however, is too subtle compared to its overt impact, especially in the wake of the actual challenges to institutional authority that erupted in 1381. In the C text, then, Langland found ways to replace it with new passages that more effectively point to the kind of enigmatic authority the poem seeks to offer. The confrontation with the priest that provokes the pardon tearing at once rejects the version of institutional authority represented by the priest and saves the larger idea behind that authority—church teaching about penance and the social teaching about good work it supports—to be further deepened and vivified in Piers. It opens wide the contrast, which the rest of the poem will develop, between authority based on the confident possession of knowledge and authority that follows from discovering the mysterious presence of the divine. Most of the episode is taken up by an explanation of the pardon sent to Piers from Truth that is unattributed in the text but one way or another puts Piers in the position of mediating to the folk of each estate—kings, bishops, merchants, lawyers, laborers—what amounts to a mandate for good work in the world. Yet this explanation, like the scene on the half-acre, ends with the problem of what to do with those who do not work. Already in the A text, before it is augmented in B and much more in C, this last part tries to spell out, in a way that is pastorally attuned to the spiritual consequences of true and false begging for both those who give and those who receive, a framework for discerning worthy and unworthy beggars. Thus it aligns

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Piers, through his pardon, with a more penetrating interpretation of the problem of poverty, but one still aligned with an institutional perspective concerned mainly with judgment. Then judgment materializes in the form of a priest: “Piers,” quath a prest tho [then], “thi pardon muste I rede; For I shal construe iche clause and kenne it the on Englissh.” And Peris at his preyour the pardoun unfoldith— And I behynde hem bothe beheld al the bulle. In two lynes it lay, and nought o lettre more, And was ywriten right thus in witnesse of Treuthe: Et qui bona egerunt ibunt in vitam eternam; Qui vero mala, in ignem eternum. “Petir!” quath the prest tho, “I can no pardoun fynde But ‘Do wel and have wel, and God shal have thi soule,’ And ‘Do evele and have evele, and hope thou non other That aftir thi deth day the devel shal have thi soule!’” (A.8.89–100/B.7.105–14/C.9.280–91) The priest is fit for his authority by virtue of his literacy in Latin, and his notion of what could constitute a pardon is a literal one, apparently dependent on the legal formulas in which pardons were written.26 Even before Piers’s response, there is good ground for seeing the priest’s interpretation as superficial, severe, and reductive—that is, didactic in the worst way. The two lines of Latin that make up the actual text of Piers’s pardon, taken from the penultimate clause of the Athanasian Creed, are unimpeachably orthodox and carry the fullest force of institutional authority.27 Behind these lines lies a complex of similar binary statements in the Gospels, and the context of these, not to mention the rest of the poem, makes clear that among those who do well are those who repent and pray for pardon, so that this pardon is indeed a pardon, not an impossible demand for perfection, and aligns with the promise of grace made already by Repentance.28 Moreover, the usual understanding of indulgences, the kind of pardon the poem seems to be leading up to when Piers unfolds it, saw them only as a way for the church to make available to its members the merit of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.29 So even a literal reading of the pardon must be expansive, including a theological understanding of the

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source of pardons in the Atonement. The simplicity of the pardon’s text and the challenge of the priest’s objection form a sort of riddle that requires searching attention in order to judge claims of spiritual authority according to their true basis—a riddle that remains in the C text, in which the dreamer awakens after a slightly different version of the lines just quoted. What could it mean, then, that in the next line of the A and B texts, “Piers for pure tene [anger] pulde it atweyne” (A.8.101/B.7.115)? Certainly it demonstrates what Robert Frank calls a “clash between form and content” and thus a judgment on the literalism of the priest.30 Indeed, this is the lesson Wille takes away from this confrontation after he awakens (even in the C text): to trust in doing well, the substance of Piers’s pardon, rather than in formal pardons granted by the pope. But there is more. Langland invents here an enigma that can be read as richly as the scriptural enigmas in which exegetes found multiple, convergent meaning. Turning Piers’s action into a riddling question can open its further significance: What was torn in two during an act of general pardon? Answer: the temple veil at the moment of Christ’s death.31 This event is recorded similarly in all the synoptic Gospels, but Matthew’s version carries the major commentary tradition: “And Jesus again crying with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. And behold the veil of the temple was rent in two from the top even to the bottom, and the earth quaked, and the rocks were rent.”32 The crucial detail is the fact, so emphasized in the Gospel, that the veil was torn into two parts, just as Piers pulls the pardon “atweyne.”33 Such an allusion is powerfully suggestive even aside from the commentary tradition on this biblical text. To begin with, calling to mind the tearing of the temple veil aligns Piers with Christ and the priest with the Jewish temple priesthood whose authority is being superseded, an association that fits the poem’s critique of the institutional church.34 Moreover, merely by its place in the Christian narrative of salvation, the tearing of the temple veil invokes the moment of passing from the old age of the law to the new age of grace. In this connection, Piers’s action also brings into play another allusion, Moses’s breaking of the tablets of the law, even though visually, tearing a piece of parchment is closer to tearing a single veil in two than to breaking two stone tablets in many pieces. Exegetical tradition read the breaking of the tablets as prefiguring the transition from the old law to the new,

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from life without grace to life empowered by grace through the coming of Christ, both in history and in the life of an individual.35 The tearing of the temple veil marks the same transition more directly. Indeed, the tearing of the veil, with its picture of access to the holiest part of the temple, a place associated with salvation, fits better with the simultaneous denial of the letter and affirmation of its spirit that many have associated with Piers’s action as a sign of fulfillment. His action is not a judgment against the people, like Moses’s action; it is instead a judgment against such judgments. The Glossa ordinaria, the standard biblical commentary of the later Middle Ages, in fact refers the tearing of the temple veil to the larger story of the fulfillment of the covenant with Moses. It explains that the temple veil is torn “in order that the ark of the testament and all holy things of the law which had been hidden would appear and cross over to the nations. Josephus says angelic powers once presiding over the temple then all at once exclaimed: Let us cross over from these seats. The veil referred to is the exterior one: for now we see in part, but when what is perfect comes, then the interior veil will be shattered.”36 The central idea here, greater access to the mysteries of the Jewish law, has two aspects that are stated in the first sentence and then developed in the next two: extension of the divine presence to the Gentiles, and greater understanding of the mysteries themselves. Both lines of thought come from the most ancient Christian sources, and both have further implications for the tearing of the pardon. Extending the covenant to the Gentiles implies a fundamental challenge to the Jewish temple. Commentators, beginning at least with Jerome, seem to take the voice of the departing angels as further confirmation that the temple and its priesthood are no longer necessary.37 If this critique were transferred to the Christian priesthood of the fourteenth century, what alternative to priestly control of the means of grace would the tearing of the pardon suggest? While this question lies behind the rest of the poem, the second line of thought about the tearing of the temple veil in the commentary tradition points the way. The Glossa ordinaria interprets the tearing of the veil as a sort of diagram of the church’s in-between state of knowledge. This idea comes from a letter of Jerome (ca. 347–420), which is worth quoting at length:

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Next, according to the anagogical sense, it has to be said that while Jesus cried out and gave up the ghost, the veil of the Temple was torn in two parts from the top even to the bottom and all mysteries of the Law were revealed, in order that what was formerly kept hidden might go out to all nations. In two parts, however, in the Old and New Testaments; and from the top even to the bottom, from the beginning of the world, when man was created—and sacred history narrates the remaining things that are done in the middle—up until the consummation of the world. And it has to be asked, which veil of the Temple was torn, the exterior or the interior? It seems to me that in the Lord’s passion that veil was torn apart which was placed in the tabernacle, in the outside part of the Temple, and was called the outer veil, because “now we see in part, and we know in part, but when that which is perfect comes” [1 Cor. 13:9–10, misquoted], then the interior veil too has to be shattered, in order that we may see all things that are now concealed from us, the holy things of God’s house. We may see what the two Cherubim, what the oracle, what the vessel of gold in which manna was put away signify. “Now indeed we see through a mirror in an enigma.” And even while for us the veil of history is torn, that we may enter God’s entrance hall, nevertheless his secrets and all mysteries, which are kept back closed in the heavenly Jerusalem, we are not able to know.38 Jerome makes clear the logic implied by the Ordinary Gloss: the mysteries of the law may go out to the nations because they have been revealed, but there are further mysteries that remain hidden. The church stands, as it were, between the two veils, one that has been torn and another that remains until the end. Aquinas specifies that the first veil signifies the veiling of the mysteries pertaining to the church, while the second signifies veiling of the heavenly mysteries.39 While the enigmas of the Old Testament have been revealed by their fulfillment in Christ, that fulfillment in turn points to mysteries that remain enigmatic and thus require the kind of knowledge that is faith. This is the understanding of the history of revelation that shapes the typological or figural interpretation of the Bible prevalent in medieval exegesis. Jerome’s use of the term anagogical refers to what was to become the familiar fourfold scheme of allegorical exegesis, which, even if it came to

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be expressed in a formula, was applied flexibly and provided not so much a method as a scheme for interpretive exploration. Not every sense was to be found in every passage, and often multiple possibilities for one category of sense would be offered. The usual treatment of the fourfold scheme, as seen most clearly in Aquinas, suggests that its success as a framework for interpretation lay in distilling the theory of history behind figural exegesis to its essentials: events in the distant past (the literal sense, particularly in the Old Testament) are figures of events in the more recent past (the allegorical sense proper, particularly the events of the New Testament), in the present (the tropological or moral sense), and in the future (the anagogical sense, referring to the fulfillment of history at the end and in heaven).40 It is noteworthy that Jerome expresses this exegetical situation through quotations from 1 Corinthians 13:9–12, the first of which is picked up in the Glossa ordinaria. More important than the precise fourfold scheme (and alternative threefold variations) was the essential dynamic behind it, to which the rhetoric of enigma is a guide. Medieval exegesis interprets the Old Testament allegorically as full of mysteries prefiguring the revelations of the New Testament, but these allegorical interpretations remain enigmatic because they also point forward to further meaning to be endlessly filled out, both in history and beyond. Such a dynamic enables scripture to nurture faith not as merely adherence to static doctrine but as participation in a continuing, unending process of interpretation based on the action of God in history.41 What replaces priestly authority in Piers Plowman, then, is a notion of faith conceived as the particular kind of knowledge made possible by the opening of the holy mysteries in Christ’s passion but still enigmatic in comparison to the complete knowledge available only in eternity. Langland’s poem enacts that dynamic by constructing enigmas that succeed in engaging a similar process of interpretation and reinterpretation, applied in the first instance to the poem itself, but beyond that to the biblical text, as well as to received religious and social ideology. To take an allusion to the tearing of the temple veil here as a key to the poem’s poetics of enigma is to see that this poetics is neither a matter of simple equivalences between a literal narrative and abstract, doctrinal assertions nor an embrace of the slipperiness of endlessly deferred meaning. Rather, it reaches for meaning that could be called infinite in the sense that it is

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always mysterious and open to further understanding, yet still stable and ultimately knowable because it is secured in a divine Word. In sum, an allusion to the tearing of the temple veil illuminates Piers’s action in at least three ways. First, it clarifies how the tearing serves to interpret the meaning of the pardon.42 Whatever disagreements about the theology of forgiveness are hinted at in the conflict between Piers and the priest, tearing the pardon at least signifies the inadequacy of merely translating its quotation from the Athanasian Creed. On the contrary, the problems of works and grace, of justice and mercy, that lie behind the pardon episode would seem to be mysteries that are veiled until the end—though later sections of the poem will press further into them through a theology of participation. To one who did not take theological positions based on a competitive view of divine and human agency, the increasing attention such positions received in fourteenth-century England might well have underscored the mystery. By tearing the pardon, Piers aligns it with mysteries to be lived into by faith rather than open revelations possessed.43 This much could perhaps be said even without considering an allusion to the tearing of the veil or the breaking of the tablets of the law. But an allusion to the fulfillment of the old law by the new goes further. For at the same time that Piers rejects the authority of the church, as represented both by the priest and by the pardon document itself, he reestablishes it in a more qualified way as a figure of the mysteries of Christ. Thus, second, the tearing of the pardon does to the medieval church what Christ does to the old law, that is, refounds its authority on its significance as a mystery of things to come rather than on its ownership of complete truth. The church itself is not the source of grace and truth but only an enigmatic vehicle of it. With the tearing of the pardon, the authority of Piers becomes aligned with an approach to biblical authority based on its “marvelous depths” and preserved through the continued work of interpreting this revelation, rather than an approach based on mere assertion of settled doctrine. Tearing the pardon asserts that its authority, and thus its efficacy, requires a similar attitude, rather than the quick judgment made by the priest that it is no pardon. Third, this interpretation of the tearing makes it a turning point in the changing significance of Piers himself. Instead of attempting to assert

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didactic authority, he performs an enigma. Piers has been mysterious from his entrance, but this episode makes him the primary figure of the enigmatic kind of authority claimed by the whole of Langland’s poem. For, to return to Jerome’s gloss, if there is an analogue in Langland’s poem to the inner veil that remains in place in the temple, it must be the text itself, the document held by the reader: “Hic in enigmate” (B.15.162a/ C.16.294a). The most ordinary and yet most intense opportunity for transformation by means of the enigmatic, the sacraments, offers yet another figural reading of Piers’s action, one that brings the narrative of salvation into the present. Lay participation in the Eucharist was most often visual, focused on the moment of the elevation of the host. It is worth considering that tearing the pardon might bring to mind the breaking of the bread, the rite of fraction, by which the Eucharistic host is divided before the communion.44 The process of penance was understood to lead to the Eucharist, so that a Eucharistic reference would be fitting at the end of the extended penitential action of the second dream. It would also anticipate the celebration of the sacrament at the time of the final disappearance of Piers from the poem in the seventh vision. A visual echo of the fraction affirms the continuing validity of the pardon after it is torn and suggests the act of making it available. Further, it makes the enigmatic authority of Piers a more authentic kind of priesthood. The combination of allusions to the tearing of the temple veil and the breaking of the bread make the tearing of the pardon a highly condensed reference to the Emmaus road story in its movement from Christ’s teaching the two disciples to read the Old Testament figurally to their recognizing him “in the breaking of bread.”45

FROM RIVALRY TO INFINITE DESIRE

Figuratively rich as the tearing of the pardon may be as an image on its own, its meaning is greatly influenced by the dialogue that follows between Piers and the priest. The rest of the scene, and of the whole poem, plays out largely as a conflict of interpretations in which Piers is indirectly and increasingly identified with Christ and in which Christian au-

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thority is linked to the enigmatic. Piers’s confrontation with the priest after tearing the pardon in the A and B texts begins a long process of working out the relationship between this enigmatic authority and institutional religious authorities. Hardly broached in the remainder of the A text, this theme begins to be visible in the B text’s revisions to A, is more prominent in the B continuation, and emerges most fully in the C text’s revisions of the second vision. The confrontation between Piers and the priest over the pardon brings to a head the potential for rivalry between kinds of authority they represent. One of Langland’s great achievements in fashioning the enigmatic authority of his poem, however, is to show how it moves beyond the kind of desire that leads to rivalry, and the violence that results from it, by nurturing instead a nonpossessive desire and a nonviolent kind of community. To put it this way is to invoke a Girardian analysis of desire and violence, which is plausible because Girard finds the principles of mimetic theory to be shown most clearly in the Judeo-Christian scriptures. There too, in fact, they are part of a critique of religious authority within the Bible itself, which becomes foundational to Christian tradition and is in constant tension with the institutional forces of what Girard calls the sacred. Langland, in this view, is part of a long line of those who seek to renew what could be called an antireligious vision of Christianity over against the forms of institutional religion it inescapably falls into.46 What is distinctive about Langland, and what his poem can add to mimetic theory, is the specific alternative to rivalry opened up by the poetics of enigma as a positive kind of mimetic desire. A dialogue between mimetic theory and Langland’s poetics, picking up on the discussion of mimetic theory in chapter 2 (in the section “Anthropology”), will shed light on both the aftermath of the pardon tearing in the A and B texts and the new passages in C that replace it. Girard’s thesis that all desire is mimetic usually leads to a focus on what he calls acquisitive desires, the kind that lead to rivalry, but mimetic desires can also be nonacquisitive and thus nonconflictual.47 Augustine makes a similar distinction in The City of God between the love of finite things that drives the city of man and the love of infinite things that characterizes the heavenly city. Dante’s Virgil invokes this distinction to explain the root of envy, the ancient term for mimetic rivalry, by contrast

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to the desire enjoyed in paradise, which he calls love.48 Two lines from the passage leading to Langland’s poetic signature come close to a mimetic diagnosis of acquisitive desire as opposed to charity. Mention of “perfect charity” provokes an outburst from the dreamer that ends with the quotation of 1 Corinthians 13:12. He describes what he sees instead of charity: Ac charite that Poul preiseth best and moost plesaunt to Oure Saveour— As Non inflatur, non est ambiciosa, non querit que sua sunt— I seigh [saw] nevere swich a man, so me God helpe, That he ne wolde aske after his, and outherwhile coveite Thyng that neded hym noght—and nyme it, if he myghte! (B.15.156–60, cf. C.16.288–92) The opposite of charity, and perhaps the fundamental obstacle to it, is desire for what people do not even need, which leads them to violence. Use of the word covet perhaps hints at the last of the Ten Commandments, which Girard finds to be a diagnosis of what drives the other prohibited actions: desiring what one’s neighbor has, that is, imitating the nearest model of acquisitive desire.49 The portraits of the seven deadly sins early in the second vision, not just Envy, come even closer to seeing all sin as rooted in desires caught from others. Lady Mede, in Langland’s first vision, might also be seen as a focus of escalating rivalry in a monetized, market economy that makes all objects of desire convertible into a price that becomes the sign of that desire. The enigmatic, on the other hand, redirects desire away from objects of mimetic rivalry and toward a transcendent, infinite other. Such desire can be imitated and shared without conflict. This is part of enigma’s relationship to charity. Langland’s movement toward the enigmatic in the second vision, however, passes through the tendency to scapegoating that Girard sees as the usual way in which the violence of mimetic rivalry is temporarily resolved. When Piers’s authority leads to persecution of a stigmatized group in the half-acre scene, the poem sets up a contrast between the enigmatic authority he will come to represent and the subtly violent authority of didactic and esoteric rhetoric. The conflict with the Wasters shows some

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features of mimetic rivalry. By asserting control over their own labor and the privilege to eat without laboring in the fields, they are imitating those in positions of authority. Famine, as represented by Hunger, is typical of circumstances that bring simmering mimetic conflict to crisis. Piers, in dialogue with Hunger, seeks the didactic authority to blame and punish the Wasters, but Hunger, in a gesture toward the enigma of poverty, defers granting it. The prophecy that ends the half-acre episode approaches persecution from the other direction, the esotericism of apocalyptic rhetoric, but this too is deferred by being rendered enigmatic. Both versions of the condemnation of sin, the didactic and the apocalyptic, project violence onto the divine. For mimetic theory, these are examples of the construction of the sacred in the image of human violence as a means of managing it through scapegoating. Langland may not fully expose scapegoating as a mechanism, but its incipient presence prepares the way for the alternative to which Piers will turn after being tempted once again to scapegoating by his confrontation with the priest. A pardon, specifying who is in and who is out, could be a useful scapegoating tool, but the conclusion of the second vision in the A and B texts puts Piers’s pardon to another use: to indicate a path to penance that is less occupied with separating sheep from goats. When it turns out to contain just the two lines from the Athanasian Creed, the threat of judgment becomes at once more transparent and more in need of interpretation. Tearing the pardon turns it into an enigma, and Piers negotiates the conflict between kinds of authority through a somewhat riddling dialogue with the priest, after which the dreamer awakens: And Piers for pure tene pulled it atweyne And seide, “Si ambulavero in medio umbre mortis Non timebo mala, quoniam tu mecum es [For though I should walk in the midst of the shadow of death, I will fear no evils, for thou art with me, Ps. 22:4]. “I shal cessen of my sowyng,” quod Piers, “and swynke [work] noght so harde, Ne aboute my bely joye so bisy be na moore; Of preieres and of penaunce my plough shal ben herafter, And wepen whan I sholde slepe, though whete breed me faille.

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“The prophete his payn eet in penaunce and in sorwe, By that the Sauter seith—so dide othere manye. That loveth God lelly, his liflode is ful esy: Fuerunt michi lacrime mee panes die ac nocte [My tears have been my bread day and night, Ps. 41:4]. And but if Luc lye, he lereth [teaches] us be fooles: We sholde noght be to bisy about the worldes blisse. Ne soliciti sitis [Be not solicitous, Luke 12:22], he seith in the Gospel, And sheweth us by ensamples us selve to wisse. The foweles in the feld, who fynt [provides] hem mete at wynter? Have thei no gerner [granary] to go to, but God fynt hem alle.” “What!” quod the preest to Perkyn, “Peter! as me thynketh, Thow are lettred a litel—who lerned thee on boke?” “Abstynence the Abbesse,” quod Piers, “myn a.b.c. me taughte, And Conscience cam afterward and kenned me muche moore.” “Were thow a preest, Piers,” quod he, “thow myghtest preche where thow woldest As divinour in divinite, with Dixit insipiens [The fool hath said . . . , Ps. 13:1/52:1] to thi teme.” “Lewed lorel!” quod Piers, “litel lokestow on the Bible; On Salomons sawes selden [seldom] thow biholdest— Eice derisores et iurgia cum eis ne crescent . . . [Cast out the scoffers, lest with them quarrels abound, Prov. 22:10]” (B.7.115–38a, cf. A.8.101–25a) The dialogue at the end resembles the closing exchange of riddles between shepherds in the Eclogue of Theodulus and, before that, Virgil’s third eclogue.50 It is a contest of learning, conducted in stanzas of equal length, through clever allusions, between two speakers who are metaphorical shepherds. There is a gesture in this form toward the need for interpretation, but nothing here is exactly a riddle and the exchange is not very playful. On the contrary, learned wordplay is here subordinated to religious rivalry. Yet the contents of the scene, and its inconclusiveness, point to a reconstitution of authority beyond rivalry, to be figured more

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fully later, above all when Peace comes “pleyinge, in pacience yclothed” (B.18.167/C.20.170). Piers has been positioned as a rival for authority before, first to the sham pilgrim whom the folk meet just before Piers enters and then to a knight in the half-acre scene. These deferred to Piers, but rivalry becomes acute when a church authority steps forward and, at the same moment, a symbol of religious authority appears physically in Piers’s hand. One can easily imagine the priest as moved to read the pardon out of a perception that Piers is a competitor. Tearing the pardon is, again, a riddle: Does it assert possession, or is it a radical renunciation of the acquisitive desire that drives rivalry? The dialogue between Piers and the priest implies an analysis in both directions. Judson Boyce Allen argues, from exegetical sources, that Piers’s quotation from Psalm 22 identifies the priest as a detractor.51 Detraction was commonly categorized as a daughter of envy and thus implies mimetic rivalry.52 One can imagine the priest trying to make the crowd turn on Piers as a scapegoat. Yet if envy makes the priest into a detractor, Piers is close to becoming one himself in return. The standard glosses on Psalm 22:4 cite Cassiodorus’s comment that “the shadow of death” is heretics and schismatics, so that Piers’s quotation implies an accusation.53 The priest responds to Piers’s continued claims to authority by cleverly calling him a fool, saying he could preach on the text “The fool hath said . . .” (Ps. 13:1/52:1). Piers replies in kind by attacking the priest’s learning and quoting a verse that calls for his expulsion: “Cast out the scoffers, lest with them quarrels abound” (Prov. 22:10). Each speaker is scandalized by the other and tries to differentiate himself, but they both descend into a crisis in which they instead imitate each other to the point of trying to expel one another. Expulsion of a scapegoat not only establishes unanimity, according to mimetic theory, but generates and affirms the sacred authority of the priests who preside at the ritual. Ending the second dream here would seem to leave the dreamer, as well as readers, with the question of who deserves expulsion and whose authority to accept. Despite the conflict that pushes Piers toward imitating and even scapegoating the priest, however, his words also indicate a conversion away from his previous desires and toward identification with victims of persecution. Piers’s quotation of Psalm 22, whether or not taken as a

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reference to detractors, speaks from the perspective of a victim.54 His resolution to seek prayers, penance, and a simple life rather than being busy about his bodily needs shifts from desire for goods that are subject to scarcity, and thus rivalry, to those that are infinite and become more abundant as more pursue them. Yet this life also involves suffering, as indicated by the reference to David as prophet and model of penance. The puns on fowl and fool in reference to Christ’s commands to the disciples in the Gospels also move beyond holy innocence to receiving ridicule, as confirmed when the priest insults Piers with “The fool has said [in his heart there is no God].”55 David, the disciples, even Abstynence the Abbesse are models of renouncing acquisitive desire and rivalry while also carrying authority, and scriptural authority at that.56 Behind them all, however, lies Christ, who went to death avoiding rivalry with the Jews and Romans, and yet whose death, as signified by the tearing of the temple veil, marked the superseding of their authority. Indeed, the pardon’s quotation from the Athanasian Creed comes in turn from the verse in Matthew that concludes the chapter in which Christ says that he appears in the poor: “Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me.”57 This interpretation of Piers’s words to the priest finds behind the torn pardon the riddle of material and spiritual poverty and the possibility of an enigmatic authority built on identification with the poor and outcast. The tearing of the pardon looks even more like a moment of conversion for Piers, a reversal of direction and desire, in light of the poem’s treatment of poverty and work. After tearing the pardon, he risks the very sort of accusation he made against the Wasters for not working enough by retreating from the ideology of good work as penance he previously embodied and enforced in favor of a rather ambiguous commitment to penance instead of work.58 Piers calls for an enigmatic kind of reading, not only of the pardon, but of himself. The language of judgment that tries to draw clear lines between good and bad workers, winners and wasters, or worthy and unworthy recipients of charity, is itself judged insufficient, and the poem instead calls for a suspension of superficial judgment and closer attention to what might be hidden in the pardon’s binary formula, the violence of tearing it, and ambiguous figures who choose not to work—now including Piers. An allusion to the tearing of

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the temple veil points to the poetics of enigma as an alternative, one that deepens judgment by finding ever more spiritual meaning in the literal. The identification of Piers with Christ as interpreter of mysteries leads, through Piers’s conversion, to finding Christ in those who suffer patiently, and perhaps even in those who suffer crankily. Reading more enigmatically the riddle of poverty, both material and spiritual, means reading more mercifully rather than resolving a crisis by finding a scapegoat. Later in the poem, as Piers returns only occasionally, patient poverty will become a key thread that guides readers, through further riddling passages, to participation in charity and in Christ. In the next vision, Trajan expounds the idea: “For oure joy and oure {ju}ele, Jesu Crist of heven, / In a povere mannes apparaille pursueth us evere” (B.11.184– 85).59 The poem will eventually find all the estates, not just the poor, to be enigmas of Christ. Through the several retellings of the life of Christ that lead to its climax, it recapitulates the estates included in the pardon, not in order to urge them to perform their proper function, but to transform those functions, as the Passion transforms the rituals of the old law, into images of the Atonement. In the retelling of the Passion in the sixth vision, Christ will be a knight winning a joust, and in the Harrowing of Hell a lawyer winning a legal case against the devil. Mercantile imagery, which began in the first vision with Holy Church’s theme, “Whan alle tresors arn tried, Truthe is the beste” (B.1.135), and is implicit in the biblical language of redemption and ransom that occurs throughout, is finally transfigured in the seventh vision when the true pardon given to Piers by Christ after his resurrection is expressed in terms of economic exchange.60 Even the medical profession, which receives strong criticism in the episode of the Wasters, is later dignified as a frequent metaphor for the work of Christ.61 By using various metaphors for Christ’s work, Langland implies that not only a plowman but a member of any of the estates, or of none, can be like Christ. Through patient suffering, which makes one an enigma of Christ rather than an institutional functionary, one may participate in the grace promised by Piers’s torn pardon. The truth toward which Piers guides readers, the historical referent that fulfills the poem’s figures and comes from learning to interpret the poem’s fictional narrative, is ultimately (as with Dante’s Commedia) the reader’s reinterpretation of his or her own lived narrative.

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Piers functions as an example both through his ability to reach this kind of knowledge and through his desire for it. Later in the poem his knowledge will be called deeper than that of clerks: “Ac Piers the Plowman parceyveth moore depper / That is the wille, and wherfore that many wight [person] suffreth” (B.15.199–200). Emotional vigor, no doubt part of what makes Piers imaginatively compelling, also makes him a model of the kind of response enigma invites. With regard to his affect, desire is not perhaps what is most obvious. He tears the pardon “for pure tene,” anger with a connotation of anxiety or hurt, and the same phrase describes him two other times: when he is angry at the Wasters (B.6.117/ C.8.124) and on behalf of the souls stolen by the devil in the Tree of Charity passage (B.16.86). The latter, especially, suggests that “pure” indicates both the intensity of his anger and its righteousness. More important, though, the purity of his anger implies a purity of desire behind it, desire for the spiritual truth of pardon both hidden and revealed by the action of tearing what it is written on. Desire comes more to the fore when Piers goes on to announce his new sense of vocation. Not being so busy about his “bely joye” signals a shift in desire even more than it does a change of occupation (B.7.119). Psalm 41, from which Piers quotes the verse “My tears have been my bread day and night,” puts such pain in the context of one of scripture’s great statements of desire for God, beginning “As the hart panteth after the fountains of water; so my soul panteth after thee, O God.” Similarly, the doctrine of “Be not solicitous” involves and enables an elevation of desire. Thus, while Piers’s action presents an enigma and his transfiguration will project the goal of the poem’s poetics, his most human dimension, his anger and his longing, demonstrates and calls forth by empathy the aesthetic aspect of the enigmatic as well. As a model of desire, Piers could easily displace, for his followers, the object of their shared pursuit and become himself the object of their desire. The dreamer’s “pure joye” (B.16.18) at the presence of Piers in the transition to the inner dream of the Tree of Charity is ambiguous in this respect. Is it enthusiasm for what Piers can show him, or simply for Piers himself ? Likewise at the end, Piers sounds like something that can be possessed when Conscience announces his intention, rather like Piers after tearing the pardon, to leave his work and go on pilgrimage “til I

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have Piers the Plowman” (B.20.386/C.22.386). On the other hand, the elusiveness of Piers prevents him from being caught in rivalry or owned, and Conscience could be seen as imitating his converted desire. The poem’s climactic narration of Christ’s passion begins with him entering Jerusalem to joust with death in Piers’s armor, that is, in nothing but the naked vulnerability of human flesh. Piers is thus further aligned with victory that comes from suffering violence rather than returning rivalry. His final action in the poem, founding the church figured as the barn of Unity, ends with his mysterious and unmarked disappearance as soon as pride and other vices begin to attack. Rather than doing battle for truth, Piers signifies something more like renunciation of rivalry. Like an enigma, Piers stands for a truth that cannot be owned but remains ungraspable and always yet to be further understood even as its meaningfulness grows. The more he is recognized as Christ-like, the more distant he becomes. What it might mean to seek Piers the Plowman is the poem’s final riddle, much as the Gospels end with the question of what it might mean to follow the resurrected Christ. The enigmatic provokes desire by difficulty, even by throwing down obstacles to understanding. Yet this desire for inexhaustibly radiant knowledge is itself one of the goals of the poetics of enigma. Rather than possession of knowledge and exclusion of those who lack it, enigma mediates participation in an endless process of discovery that moves toward compassion for victims and relationship with persons. In its representations of religious and political authority, the poem is leaving behind figures of stable structure in favor of Piers as a figure of contemplative desire for the infinite that reconstitutes individuals as persons in peaceful relation.

C-TEXT ENIGMAS I: THE LUNATIC LOLLERS

The political visions implied by the poetics of enigma are easily misunderstood. One way, at least, to explain the C text’s omission of the pardon tearing and the ensuing dialogue is the possibility that Langland gave up on it because events either showed that it had been misunderstood or made misunderstanding more likely—or both. Did he also, then, give up on what this passage tries to do? In particular, did he give up on the

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enigmatic mode that I have argued is part of the message? Major additions to the second vision in C, I suggest, can be seen to compensate for the deletion by being even more effectively enigmatic. The addition of the “lynatyk lollares” to the pardon scene and the dreamer’s waking dialogue with Reason and Conscience avoid the pardon tearing’s liabilities by identifying the enigmatic more firmly with figures safe from confusion with authority of either a didactic or an esoteric sort.62 Revisions from the B to C texts of Piers Plowman provide a remarkable opportunity to see an enigmatic poet revising his work, likely in response to tumultuous contemporary events, and perhaps also in response to misreading of his text, or just confusion about it. To comment on these passages is to enter into a thicket of fascinating but irresolvable questions, beginning with larger patterns of relationship between the B and C texts and each version’s relationship to complex and controversial contemporary history: the Rising of 1381, growing influence of Wyclif and eruption of controversy over his teachings, continuing antifraternalism and broader anticlericalism, and institutional responses to the economic and labor changes accelerated by the Black Death.63 Yet a poetics of enigma leans away from clear stance taking and centers the poem’s purpose instead on the value of further interpretation. The additions to the C text that can be seen to replace and revise the tearing of the pardon evince an obliquity that can itself be read as a reassertion of the enigmatic mode. They focus interpretive attention, not on a textual puzzle or specific historical events, but on the meeting of letter and spirit in immediate experience of one’s neighbor and oneself. Removing the pardon tearing and the dialogue that follows must be, one way or another—whether or not in response to misreading by the rebels of 1381—a judgment on its failure. The leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 refer to Piers the Plowman in some of their communications recorded by chroniclers of the time, and their violence was often directed at documents that they thought perpetuated unjust property arrangements. But their violence also went much further, all the way up to murdering bishops.64 They could be seen to have imitated Piers’s actions, destroying a document and opposing religious authority, all too literally. At the same time, the ensuing violence, especially against those accused of being false religious leaders, such as Archbishop (and Lord Chancellor)

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Sudbury on one side and the rebel priest John Ball on the other, might seem to have realized the potential for scapegoating that charges the dialogue between Piers and the priest. Langland’s so-called autobiography added before the second vision and the long passages about the poor added to the explanation of the pardon have both been read in relation to the deletion of the pardon tearing.65 Like the short passage they seem to replace, these additions work with complex theological symbols and exegetical references. But they add a new layer of significance found in present historical conditions and members of the community. Whereas the tearing of the pardon made literal reading a problem, the new passages begin with reading literally the concrete situation of poor neighbors and of the author behind the poem. These passages are no less concerned with interpretation, but they shift the focus of interpretation outside the poem to the lives of contemporary people. In this sense, they fulfill the potential of enigmatic exegesis to open the meaning of contemporary history. The C text’s additions to the pardon scene take up more fully the issue of who deserves charity in such a way as to nurture a hermeneutic of charity, not just with texts but with people. Like the B text in its section on what the pardon means for beggars, C acknowledges that there are both worthy and unworthy beggars and that the difference is impossible to know for sure. The C text’s first addition, however, shifts decisively out of the mode of academic discussion: “Ac that most neden aren our neyhebores, and we nyme gode hede, / As prisones in puttes and pore folk in cotes, / Charged with childrene and chief lordes rente” (C.9.71– 73: But those in most need are our neighbors, if we take good heed, such as prisoners in dungeons and poor folk in huts, burdened with children and landlords’ rent). Langland’s expanded meditation on poverty and begging proceeds from an exhortation to pay attention to real, individual poor people one knows as well as discussions in books. What needs interpretation, in the end, is not texts but the lives of real people. The previous distinctions, in the half-acre scene, between those who suffer poverty patiently and those who beg under false pretenses are expanded in three ways that guide such reading of one’s neighbor. First, there is more on false beggars. Second, a lengthy description of the brutal conditions of poverty, especially for mothers, invites not just recognition and alms but

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compassionate empathy.66 Together, these two kinds of additions serve to complicate from both sides the hermeneutic problem of reading poverty.67 Most important, this passage adds a third category of the poor, the puzzling “lynatyk lollares” (C.9.107, 137). The puzzles attending them are manifold, but it is worth noting first that these, too, are described with notable compassion. As with the scriptural enigmas that Augustine saw to be useful for engaging readers affectively with a longing for the truth they veil, so these real-life enigmas are for Langland not just complications of an argument but objects of fond attention that can then, perhaps, extend to others who had been viewed negatively or even condemned. The affective impact of the sympathetically described “lynatyk lollares” deepens with the several layers of cognitive difficulty they present. For both modern readers and Langland’s contemporaries, the first conundrum is the word lollares. Used once in B, but then deleted there and used thirteen times in C’s additions to the second vision, the term has perplexed later readers because of the question of how closely Langland’s use relates to Lollard in the sense it eventually came to have, those who held opinions associated with John Wyclif. Borrowed from a Dutch word meaning “mumbler or mutterer,” it had already been used pejoratively earlier in the century in both Dutch and Latin for persons of suspect religious practice, particularly the excessive and hypocritical devotion that could go along with mumbling a lot of prayers. Andrew Cole has shown the centrality of Langland’s C text in shaping the use of the term Lollard in both positive and negative senses that were then taken up by writers on both sides of the controversy over Wyclif and the 1382 condemnation of some of his opinions. For Langland’s initial audience, this term must have been still unstable: already useful for scapegoating, but also for defending those who choose a life of evangelical poverty outside of usual institutions such as religious orders.68 Langland resists specification of the term by providing an etymology based on the verb loll as it might describe the posture of someone who is lame or, perhaps, poses as lame in order to beg falsely (C.9.213–16). Like the etymology in Dutch ascertained by modern scholars, this one plays with the issue of making judgments about authenticity based on superficial appearances. Whether or not it was clear that a rather general slur was becoming a more precise

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and consequential one in the atmosphere that was heating up around the Wycliffites, Langland’s use of it moves in the opposite direction, toward making it a term that can provoke thought as well as channel blame. Using it to refer to the surprising category of “lynatyk lollares” does even more than playing with etymology to direct attention to realities that might be more mysterious than they seem. Langland’s sense of lolling serves a simple binary distinction between holy hermits and “this lollares and lewede ermites” (C.9.240), the same group that the B text’s single use of loller identifies as one in which the personified Charity could not be found. That line follows a crucial passage, deleted from C, identifying Piers as the guide to finding Charity: Therfore by colour ne by clergie knowe shaltow hym nevere, Neither thorugh wordes ne werkes, but thorugh wil oone, And that knoweth no clerk ne creature on erthe But Piers the Plowman—Petrus, id est, Christus. For he nys noght in lolleris ne in londleperis heremytes. . . . (B.15.209–13) This reference to Piers, anticipating his reappearance in the poem in the sixth and seventh visions, identifies him with a chain of figural symbolism more certainly than does the tearing of the pardon, but no less enigmatically. The power attributed to Piers here, to see past words and works to the will, also recalls the movement from his work on the field and the words of his pardon to his resolution after tearing it to practice a more inward devotion. It identifies him, as the Latin words say more clearly, with Christ and also with empathetic knowledge. Yet lollers and false hermits, in whom, according to this passage, Piers would not find charity beneath their ambiguously devout appearance, are precisely what Piers himself might look like if we were to see him follow through with the resolution he makes in B after tearing the pardon. The new passage in C that defines “lollers” clarifies this ambiguity by giving readers more help in discerning the difference between true and false hermits, and goes further to identify the false hermits’ core problem as lack of obedience and to blame bishops for not disciplining their flocks. At the same time, however, the “lynatyk lollares” add a category of people who, like Piers after

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the tearing of the pardon, are able-bodied but not laboring as the ablebodied should, and thus open to suspicion when they beg. Yet whereas Piers, in the deleted scene, entered into ambiguous contention with the priest who read the pardon, the lunatic lollers are unequivocally worthy of pity, perhaps of reverence, and certainly of charitable attention. For not only does their existence trouble simple distinctions, but the lunatic lollers are held up as possible sources of revelation if read well. No doubt mental disability or illness is always mysterious and a source of new perspectives on what it is to be human, and perhaps this lies behind the wisdom credited to the lunatic lollers and those hospitable to them. On the other hand, as Cole suggests, such foolishness might be “a matter of erroneous, persecutory perception.”69 In either case, the specific claims the poem advances for them make them a powerful extension of the poetics of enigma. They act crazy, it says, and wander about careless of their circumstances—like the apostles, though without doing miracles, “ac [but] many tymes hem happeth / To profecye of the peple, pleying, as hit were” (C.9.113–14). The conjunction of prophecy and play is akin to riddling, and the substance of what they say seems to be not so much the point as the mode in which they speak, or at least could be heard, and how it suits the position they occupy. The passage goes on to describe how they fit the instructions Christ gave when he sent out his disciples, such as not to take bread, bag, or money. It then returns attention to their words: “For hit aren merye-mouthed men, munstrals of hevene, / And Godes boys, bourdyors [jesters], as the Book telleth: / Si quis videtur sapiens, fiet stultus ut sit sapiens [If any man among you seem to be wise . . . let him become a fool that he may be wise]” (C.9.126–27a). Quoting 1 Corinthians 3:18 is as close as the passage comes to indicating what sort of prophecy could be expected from the lunatic lollers, which resembles the poem’s treatment of folly elsewhere. In the fourth vision in particular, folly is connected to a position outside of institutional authorities that is nonetheless closer to the center of the truth they are founded on.70 The C text’s striking addition of Piers to the fourth vision’s banquet makes its discovery of an authoritative voice more evident but still enigmatic. Similarly, the lunatic lollers clarify the way the poem finds the enigmatic in folly more generally.

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The lunatic lollers’ poverty of both body and mind is enigmatic in two ways. First, it is itself “a wholly ambivalent sign,” subject to judgment about its human motives and, in the troubling cases of involuntary poverty, inquiry into the divine design.71 Second, poverty of wit is the position of everyone in the face of expressions of mystery, which is to say, in the face of the fuller truth that always lies behind appearances. The lunatic lollers bring together several strands of the poetics of enigma—its play with words and categories, its associations with poverty and folly, its evangelical authority—in a way that compensates for the loss of the more strictly exegetical approach to the enigmatic in the tearing of the pardon, and moves instead in the direction of the poem’s depiction of its narrator. The passage on “lynatyk lollares” concludes, in fact, by comparing them to minstrels.72 E. Talbot Donaldson argues that the phrase “God’s minstrels” applied to them likely refers to the term joculatores Domini claimed by St. Francis and his followers.73 As God has suffered the “lynatyk lollares” to be poor for the sake of being his apostles, so the rich ought to receive all kinds of minstrels graciously and suffer “al that suche sayen and in solace taketh” (C.9.131). Implied is not only that minstrels are another category of those who deserve charity but also that their hosts will be exchanging an obvious sort of wealth for a more hidden sort that comes only with a kind of intellectual hospitality. What does it mean, then, that both Piers and the “lynatyk lollares” gain the kind of authority I am calling enigmatic? Each is associated in the poem with the life led by prophets and apostles, a model with the greatest cultural prestige though also fundamentally opposed to institutional authorities. They are vehicles of knowledge that carries the authority of inspiration (the capacity of the lunatic lollers to prophesy), yet is riddling and playful, not a possession so much as a participation. Likewise, their detachment from worldly things, their “rechelesnesse,” models a desire oriented away from what can be possessed and toward something mysterious and spiritual. These two qualities, the cognitive and the affective, enact the Augustinian rhetoric of enigma. What most decisively prevents these tokens of authority from assimilation to didactic or esoteric voices, however, is their situation as victims, outcasts either by choice after confrontation with central authorities or simply because of disability.

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If Cole is right that Langland used the term lollar as he did in order to present a sympathetic view of those that the Blackfriars Council of 1382 began to persecute as Wycliffite heretics, it links Langland’s figures, as well as the poem’s narrator, to quite specific potential victims.74 The lunatic lollers, however, are potential victims whose vulnerability to being cast out can most easily be seen as resulting from a fundamental innocence. In them, Piers Plowman urges compassionate attention toward those neighbors whom it might be easiest to dismiss but who for that very reason can serve as revelatory enigmas.

C-TEXT ENIGMAS II: POET AS VICTIM

More challenging than finding one’s own potential victims to be innocent enigmas is the implication that the knowledge and desire mediated by the enigmatic lead to following the way of the misunderstood victim. The waking scene added in the C text before the second vision shows the poem’s narrator making such a choice and thus identifies the authority behind the whole poem most firmly with the enigmatic. Usually taken as an autobiography of Langland himself, these 108 lines replace a six-line waking scene in the A and B texts with a new one that is fraught with many-layered references to social and political conditions of the time.75 Its placement here, rather than at the start of the poem, sets up the second vision’s central function—in C’s additions to the pardon as it had been in the pardon tearing of A and B—of establishing the poem’s claim to enigmatic authority, with Piers as its central spokesman. Anne Middleton has explicated how this passage constructs enigmatic authority that it locates finally outside the text: “Langland seems to have chosen to rest his ultimate defense of his makings on the enigmatic status of a way of life, and the social and cognitive legitimacy of his ‘work,’ rather than on the integrity and generic stability of his texts, as the vehicle by which his ‘intent’ was likeliest to be fully intelligible, and to pass sympathetic muster in its, and his, reckoning by its ultimate judge(s).”76 I would like to supplement Middleton’s analysis by showing how the C-text autobiography itself, and not just the life it refers to, employs the poetics of enigma to assert literary authority.

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Two things stand out: the narrative of potential persecution that leads instead to at least partial reconciliation, and the use of Gospel texts, especially parables. Both base the poetics of enigma firmly in the Gospels, where Girard’s mimetic theory finds the dynamics of scapegoating most clearly exposed. The passage begins by emphasizing the suspect situation of the narrator, already implied in the second line of the whole poem (in all its versions) by the description of his ambiguous clothing, and here associated with the troublesome term lollar. Yet the narrator compounds the ambiguity by implying that he is also a critic of the lollars he lives among. Nonetheless, he is “arated,” that is, rebuked or berated, by Reason and Conscience. These had been the king’s good counselors in the preceding vision during the trial of Lady Mede, and here they seem to stand both for the faculties of the narrator himself and for official discourses of church and state. Middleton emphasizes the authorities of the state as they were being advanced in the 1388 Statute of Laborers against vagrants. Also at issue, however, is Langland’s entrance into rivalry with institutional religious authority simply by writing such a religious poem. More specifically, in the climate of controversy surrounding both friars and Wycliffite poor preachers, for the narrator to align himself with the positive notion of “lynatyk lollares” is still to place himself outside church authority and risk condemnation.77 Reason questions him suspiciously about what kind of work he does and, when he says he is unfit for labor, accuses him of vagrancy and challenges him to state his excuse. He seems to be headed, like Christ, toward persecution by representatives of both civic and ecclesiastical authority. Yet he de-escalates the confrontation through a complex rhetorical performance that climaxes in a clever appropriation of Christ’s response to Satan’s first temptation in the desert: “Forthy [Therefore] rebuke me ryhte nauhte [not much], Resoun, Y yow praye; For in my conscience Y knowe what Crist wolde Y wrouhte [would that I do]. Preyers of a parfit man and penaunce discrete Is the levest [best] labour that Oure Lord pleseth.

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Non de solo [not from the soil],” Y sayde, “for sothe vivit homo [in truth man lives], Nec in pane et in pabulo [nor by bread or by food], the Pater-noster [Our Father] wittenesseth; Fiat voluntas Dei [God’s will be done]—that fynt [provides] us alle thynges.” (C.5.82–88) To cast himself as Christ being tempted by the devil is to identify himself as an innocent victim. It would also seem to demonize Reason and Conscience. The punning change from “Non in solo pane,” not by bread alone, from the words of Christ when tempted by Satan (Matt. 4:4), to “Non de solo,” not from the soil, adapts the text to Reason’s charge that he ought to live from manual labor of some sort. But the larger strategy of the narrator’s response is not defensive; rather, it attempts to find common ground with his accusers and to find room within scripture for his choice to live by saying prayers and making poetry. Conscience, answering in a similar spirit, affirms his principles but questions his practice. After a further confession of faith from the narrator, the dialogue ends with exhortations from Reason and Conscience to live the calling he has articulated. The narrator has succeeded in establishing his innocence while reconciling with his accusers. Or perhaps it would be better to say he has staged a model of such reconciliation. It is made possible by forthright, Augustine-style confession of his life as well as negotiation of various current controversies about labor and vocation. At its heart, though, are two things: the invitation to see his life compassionately from his own perspective as someone who does not fit neatly into standard categories of judgment—rather like the pilgrims of Chaucer’s General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales—and his hopeful appropriation of scripture, particularly parables. The narrator’s part in this dialogue begins and ends with references to parables. Parables were often linked to enigma in discussing scripture’s use of figurative language.78 They are prominent throughout Langland’s engagement with the Bible, especially in places where his poem is particularly self-reflective about its own poetics. Kate Crassons has explicated Langland’s complex, developing use of the Parable of the Rich Man

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and Lazarus to explain how the ambiguous sign of poverty calls for charity, both material and hermeneutic.79 The call to a posture of patient poverty waiting for surprising grace that Langland repeatedly finds in parables epitomizes his extension of the poetics of enigma. Nowhere is such a posture asserted more audaciously than in the narrator’s first response to Reason. His plea, when first questioned, that he is too weak to labor alludes to the Parable of the Unjust Steward, perennially recognized as one of the most difficult Gospel texts. In it, a steward, fired for his mismanagement, says to himself, “To dig I am not able; to beg I am ashamed” (Luke 16:3). He resolves to go to his lord’s debtors and reduce their debts. Upon finding this out, his lord, to the perpetual perplexity of interpreters, commends the steward for his shrewdness. The one consistent line of medieval interpretation follows from Christ’s exhortation in the next verse, “Make unto you friends of the mammon of iniquity; that when you shall fail, they may receive you into everlasting dwellings” (Luke 16:9). That is, commentators agreed that the parable teaches “to bestow wealth in charity and works of mercy, and (by extension) upon ritually poor religious for intercessory prayers for heavenly favor.”80 Langland’s narrator, as one who will go on to say he makes his living saying prayers, could qualify for this narrow implication. But the larger effect of his allusion follows from its enigmatizing of the allegorical dialogue. The narrator casts himself as the steward in the parable, and indeed he has just been questioned about his stewardship of his ability to work for the common good. He takes a risk by implicating himself in what could be seen as the steward’s theft from his lord’s accounts. The lord could then be Reason, but a better reading would see God as the lord, the one who has given the narrator his abilities. The line he alludes to is one that the steward in the parable speaks to himself, just the kind of interior dialogue dramatized here by a waking encounter with Reason and Conscience.81 Either way, the narrator hazards that his interlocutors will follow the lead of the lord in the parable and turn their accusation to commendation. The parable offers a model of surprising grace that, in the poem, requires conversion from following the judgment of the Statute of Laborers to something more merciful and mysterious. The scene closes with cautious affirmations by Conscience and Reason of Wille’s apologia pro vita sua,

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which draw from the parable a tense balance between fidelity to religious authority and fidelity to a more creative, daring, and individual sense of vocation. The key to reconciling the conflict and potential rivalry between internal and external, individual and corporate claims to authority, and to soliciting compassionate regard for a potential victim of the Statute of Laborers, is the vision of abundance that is latent in the lord’s response to the unjust steward but comes to the fore in the narrator’s final words to his allegorical interlocutors. Conscience urges the need for beggars to be under obedience to a religious authority. In response: “That is soth,” Y saide, “and so I beknowe— That Y have ytynt [wasted] tyme, and tyme myspened [misspent]; Ac yut [But yet], I hope—as he that ofte hath ychaffared [traded] And ay loste and lost, and at the laste hym happed A bouhte [To buy] suche a bargayn he was the bet evere, And sette al his lost at a leef at the last ende, Such a wynnyng hym warth [befell] thorw wordes of grace: Simile est regnum celorum thesauro abscondito in agro. [The kingdom of heaven is like unto a treasure hidden in a field, Matt. 13:44] Mulier que invenit dragmam . . . [The woman who found the drachma, alluding to Luke 8:8–9] So hope Y to have of Hym that is almyghty A gobet of his grace, and bigynne a tyme That alle tymes of my tyme to profit shal turne.” (C.5.92–101)82 The Parable of the Pearl, alluded to in the image of trading (“chaffar”), and the Parable of the Buried Treasure, quoted in the first line of Latin, come from near the end of the central discourse about parables that begins with the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13. Both distill the focus on surprising abundance that is a dominant note in many other Gospel parables. The narrator’s second line of Latin summons also the Parable of the Lost Coin, the middle of three parables about extravagant celebration of the salvation of individual lost souls that are part of a string of parables in Luke 15–16 leading to “The Prodigal Son,” “The Unjust Steward,”

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and “The Rich Man and Lazarus.” In his moving words of confession— of sin and even more of faith—one cannot help but hear the poet speaking for himself at the end of a career spent writing and revising poetry in English, work that was hardly recognized as worthwhile, let alone prestigious, but would come to be seen so partly through his own influence— a result that might be to no one’s greater surprise than his own. His hope reflects the mystery of many of the parables, their sense that does not make worldly sense, the grace beyond desert that makes them perpetual riddles in the face of reality as we know it. Riddle and parable, forms of language basic to the success of Langland’s poetry, share a logic of abundance found in unexpected places, or that takes one by surprise. He uses these forms to reveal such abundance in a simple plowman, in fools, in “lynatyk lollares,” and in Wille’s alienation, sloth, and seeming idleness. The hope of abundance nurtured by these forms also helps defuse the conflict between the narrator/poet and Reason. Rivalry for worldly and finite authority dissolves in the face of desire reoriented toward the gift of even a gobbet of grace. The authority that the poem is moving toward, on the other hand, emerges from a participation in that infinity. Frank Kermode, in The Genesis of Secrecy, emphasizes how the Parable of the Sower and its interpretation seem to divide insiders from outsiders.83 The didactic and the esoteric are the voices of those who claim to be insiders. The enigmatic, on the other hand, makes everyone outsiders and thus, paradoxically, also insiders. For Langland, the parables are models of enigmatic discourse that need to be played with in order to renew their capacity to render one an outsider being granted the gift of the mystery. In some instances, like Langland’s subtle appropriation of the Parable of the Sower in the speech of Rechelesnesse added to the third vision in the C text, his own text becomes almost impenetrably unstable. But even there the aim can be seen as interpretive play, not esoteric secrecy, and recognition of everyone’s ultimate poverty of understanding before realities both material and spiritual.84 Whereas the tearing of the pardon and the dialogue between Piers and the priest had threatened to cast out those who claim to be insiders and to install someone else in their place, the major additions to this part of the C text set up figures less marked as potential authorities and thus less likely to provoke rivalry. In various ways, however, they do the same work that I have argued was intended

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by the tearing of the pardon: reorienting Christian authority to the enigmatic and inviting an ongoing play of interpretation. The lunatic lollers go a step farther by focusing this interpretation on present, historical neighbors. The narrator’s confrontation with Reason and Conscience locates the source of the poem’s authority more explicitly in the narrator’s own waking experience. Yet Piers the Plowman, even in the C text, will remain, along with the narrator, a carrier of this authority later in the poem.

AUTHORITY FOR CONVERSION

Enigmatic authority claims orthodoxy, a truthfulness that is faithful to a tradition, just as much as didactic or esoteric authority. Yet its truth is not something that can be possessed, not a sign of status or membership, but rather an experience of ongoing conversion—something not achieved but undergone. Such authority does not police a border between inside and outside or right and wrong. Rather, it persuades one to undertake a journey without end in the company of other fellow pilgrims. The remainder of Piers Plowman unfolds the implications of this kind of authority in two dimensions, horizontal and vertical. Along the horizontal or social axis, enigmatic authority shapes communities around shared participation in the work of interpretation, rather than through exclusion of an unorthodox other.85 Along the vertical or inward axis, enigmatic reading mediates theological participation, the classic, spiritual sense of conversion. Both horizontal and vertical dimensions also describe the kind of literary authority Langland constructs. Each aspect of participation, the social and the theological, involves conversion to a new pattern of desire, beyond rivalry for the finite to play with the infinite. In Piers Plowman, the conversion called for by the pardon episode becomes a pilgrimage stretching over the succeeding visions, and not completed within the poem, through the narrator’s quest for Dowel. Musing on the pardon after he awakens, the narrator decides to trust in its enigmatic content, which he personifies as Dowel, rather than the institutional authority a pardon represents. At the beginning of the third vision, Dowel will be multiplied by the dreamer’s first interlocutor, Thought, into Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest, the identity of which

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becomes a sort of riddle that receives further answers as the quest continues, notably, but not finally, at the banquet of Conscience (discussed above in chapter 3). Indeed, the rubrics in manuscripts of the A, B, and C texts all use these three terms to group the remaining visions into larger sections, so that puzzling out the pardon becomes the plan of the whole journey. Whether these rubrics come originally from the author or were added by scribes, they convey a sense of progress, but there will be no clear sense of arrival. The most satisfying moments to come, as in the Tree of Charity in the fifth vision or the Crucifixion and Harrowing of Hell in the sixth, are satisfying precisely through the rhetoric of enigma. Cognitively, they convey a richness of meaning in need of further interpretation that surpasses the limits of understanding. Affectively, by humbling reason as much as they fulfill it, these visions capture the dreamer’s heart and deepen his sense of longing and need. On the horizontal, social dimension, the dreamer’s growing sense of need will lead him into a series of partnerships with fellow pilgrims and other helpful guides and interlocutors. The combative dialogues he has with standard curricular authorities in the third vision, before its inner dream, give way to more inward and spiritual authorities with whom he is more receptive: Ymaginatif at the end of the third vision, Patience in the fourth, Anima/Liberum Arbitrium in the fifth, the four daughters of God in the sixth, and, most surprisingly in the waking scene between the seventh and eighth, Need itself.86 Many of these are positioned outside institutional structures and discourses, some even as victims of them. It is noteworthy that when the narrator questions the authority of dreams after waking from the second vision, the two biblical examples he thinks of, Joseph and Daniel, were also victims of persecution who were delivered precisely through their ability to interpret dreams.87 In the same passage he also rebukes the rich for trusting in pardons they can purchase rather than in Dowel. The waking scene after the second vision, then, indicates the identification with potential victims and with the poor, whether materially, intellectually, or spiritually, that the rest of the poem will develop (and that the C text has already accentuated in its additions earlier). This horizontal dimension of enigma will lead, in Piers Plowman, to the mystery of the church as a sort of anti-institutional institution. The next two chapters will touch on representations in later visions of the

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church as a sacramental community marked by suffering, though there is much more to be said about Langland’s conception of the church that is beyond my scope.88 Identification with the poor and the suffering is not just an ethic, a matter of doing well, but a hermeneutic stance. To take the part of victims of social structures, whether civic or ecclesiastical, is necessary in order to see clearly, in order to avoid the distortions that legitimate violence, whether subtle or overt.89 An interpretive posture of humility accompanies compassionate attention to others and allows one’s neighbors, and especially one’s own potential scapegoats, to be enigmas through whom one can participate in the divine. The vertical, theological dimension of the enigmatic, mostly as mediated by texts, will be the focus of the following two chapters, but I will end this one with a consideration of how Piers Plowman bends the horizontal rhetoric of enigma toward the theological without becoming coercive. Like some other enigmatic texts, it creates models of the kind of desire it seeks to elicit. Religious and theological discourse tends unavoidably toward the didactic and the esoteric, for reasons that mimetic theory would say go back to the foundation of the sacred on scapegoating violence. Regardless of the overall validity of this theory of cultural origins, it sheds light on what Langland does with the figure of Piers. One can imagine him continuing to be the kind of allegorical guide to familiar catechetical doctrine that he was when he started to guide the field full of folk to St. Truth. Needless to say, this would make for a less interesting poem. Rather, Piers is absent from the rest of the A text and returns or is mentioned in the B and C texts only much later and relatively briefly. His entrances and exits are surprising and mysterious. He is elusive, not subject to appropriation or willing to use any kind of force, rhetorical or otherwise. He is persuasive primarily by being enigmatic, a sign to be wondered at whose meaning lies largely in pointing to and longing for divine grace. His most important reappearance is Christ’s appearance in his likeness on the way to the Crucifixion in vision 6. Here the potential at the end of the second vision for the priest to designate Piers an object of the crowd’s violence is realized. Piers is a model of participation in Christ in several senses, but perhaps the central one is highlighted by the additions to the second vision in the C text: willingness to be a victim and surrender to the mysterious promise of the Resurrection. The hori-

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zontal dimension of compassion toward those who suffer thus turns into the way of the cross and is joined to the vertical. Enigmatic authority is founded on relinquishing rivalry for authority based on worldly power. If Piers is a mostly absent model of desire for participation in Christ, the much more present model is the dreamer/narrator. His authority is at least as important to that of the text itself, especially after the C-text addition of the waking scene before the second vision. There he is forthright about the desire for grace to which he hopes his authorship will lead. Throughout the text he places himself at the reader’s level, subject to ordinary finitude and fallibility, in need of repeated conversion. His function as model and mediator requires an intimate sharing of both confusion and insight, frustration and delight. Just as he encounters guides along the way, he implicitly invites readers to join him in a community of interpretation.90 The potential for rivalry within such a community is dramatized several times, most notably at the banquet of Conscience. Langland’s strategy for converting rivalry to partnership, there and elsewhere, is perhaps clearest, again, in the C-text waking scene with Reason and Conscience. As representatives of both external, institutional authorities and the narrator’s own faculties, they can also stand for the judgment of readers, which we are asked to suspend in favor of patience with the poem’s difficult process.91 The narrator, and through him the poet, invite readers to be companions on the steps, the passūs, that make up the poem, which will end with the question of whether to join Conscience in seeking Piers. This combination of two kinds of models for the reader, one ideal but elusive and the other familiar but fallible, is a pattern Piers Plowman shares with other literary texts that cultivate enigmatic authority. This is a version of the riddling dialogue, with the audience in the position of pupils guessing the riddles of a master. The most important source of this pattern is no doubt the Gospels, where Christ teaches largely in parables and the disciples are mostly eager but uncomprehending. Another important root, however, is the dialogues of Plato, transmitted as a pattern of dialogue to the Middle Ages principally through Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. The healing of Boethius the prisoner through his dialogue with Lady Philosophy has much to do with the reorientation of his desire toward the infinite good. Lady Philosophy is didactic

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more often than Socrates but is at least as clear about the limitations of her knowledge in the face of the transcendent. Boethius also adds a further enigmatic element through the sections in verse, which enrich the central train of thought from several oblique angles, some more expressive and illustrative, others more dense and enigmatic.92 In the Grail stories, similarly, readers identify with the foolish Perceval and the worldly Lancelot while they are guided by a series of more and less enigmatic but consistently elevated and elusive figures placed in their paths. The Pearl poet employs both the allegorical vision form and the Arthurian romance form of this pattern. In Pearl, the clueless narrator is locked in rivalry for much of the poem with the young girl who is his guide over whether she is eligible for her exalted status, and his conversion to grace coincides with his conversion—by means of a parable, among other enigmatic features of this poem—away from envy.93 In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the reader struggles with Gawain through the mysterious Green Knight’s games, and Gawain remains to the end too engaged in rivalry to receive the Green Knight’s mercy. Examples could be multiplied to include, for instance, the narrator of Mum and the Sothsegger and the beekeeper he meets in his dream. The riddling Love Rune, in which Thomas of Hales guides his female reader from love for a man, perhaps himself, to love for Christ, presents a somewhat incomplete version of the pattern.94 Chaucer, meanwhile, both employs and parodies this pattern with Geffrey and the windy eagle of The House of Fame. Another version of this pattern, which exposes the dynamic that must underpin them all, locates both models, both subject positions, in the narrator, one as represented within the narrative and the other as the voice of the topmost frame of narration. Dante follows both patterns: he provides Beatrice as a model of desire for his pilgrim self within the Commedia—and invites readers to identify their own Beatrices—but also addresses readers from the perspective of the poet who has already undergone the story of conversion told in the poem. The prime example of this use of dual narratorial perspectives in an autobiography of conversion is Augustine’s Confessions, where, as seen above in chapter 4, it is integral to bringing readers into the experience of enigmatic reading by which Augustine himself was converted. Langland’s third vision does something similar with the device of an autobiographical inner dream.

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More broadly, the movement from the A to the B text and again from the B to the C text strengthens the differentiation between Langland’s portrayal of his dreamer and the hints of insights won by the author that have allowed him to write and rewrite the poem.95 The versions of Piers Plowman suggest an experience of gradual, repeated conversion on the part of the author that corresponds to what the poem depicts. Chaucer, finally, in the Canterbury Tales, opens a similar gap between his elusive voice as poet and his fumbling pilgrim persona, with potential for seeing in it a story of conversion, but he populates it with a gallery of other pilgrim narrators and their tales that eclipses the vertical axis of enigma with horizontal ones that point in many of the directions modern literature would follow.

T H E O LO G Y E n i g m a a s Pa rt i c i pat i o n

C H A P T E R

6

E N I G M A A N D PA RT I C I PAT I O N IN LANGLAND’S FIFTH VISION A N D J U L I A N ’ S R EV E L AT I O N

Ambitions to articulate and enact a theology of participation through a poetics of enigma led to some of the most innovative and challenging Middle English literature. These may not have been the terms with which vernacular authors would have identified their aims, yet we have seen that aenigma and participatio were used capaciously in Latin for central, far-reaching concepts that had been refined and extended over centuries. As seen above in the Introduction, participation entered English when Chaucer used it in this sense in his translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Two other English authors, William Langland and Julian of Norwich, develop powerful vernacular versions of the theology of participation. Though they do not use this word, both Langland and Julian reflect in their works on their own uses of language to convey such a theology. For Langland, this involves bringing the term enigma and its scriptural context into his poem. Julian’s more thoroughly vernacular writing avoids Latinate terms such as enigma or participation, but they are appropriate labels for her poetics and theology. In the pivotal section of her text focused on her parable of a lord and a servant, her uses of enigma are even more intimate, self-conscious, and far-reaching than Langland’s. 271

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Chapter 1’s account of the link between enigma and participation in some important Latin sources concluded with the claim that the later medieval flourishing of enigmatic theological writing in the vernacular fills a gap, as it were, left by changes of thought and expression in Latin discourse. The four intervening chapters, while keeping the theological significance of enigma in view, have focused on the form of enigma as riddle and its effects as rhetoric. Even the form of enigma, we found, resides less in a verbal structure than in a kind of interaction or relationship. Enigma invites participatory play, play that involves not just guessing a right answer but cooperative exploration of the meaning of things—a possibility predicated on a view of things as themselves meaningful and open to understanding through language. Enigmatic play involves participation both in a community of interpreters and in the meaning of nature, history, and soul that is given yet infinite. A rhetoric based on such play sees a need for obscure linguistic form in order to apprehend mysterious reality and embraces the interpretive process as itself transformational. Enigmatic persuasion forms a sort of community that is—in contrast to institutions maintained through didactic or esoteric authority—less coercive, less invested in distinctions between insiders and outsiders, and more inclined to learn from victims of power what they are able to see. This chapter returns to the question of the theology of enigma and how it responds to the intellectual and institutional climate of the late Middle Ages in general and of late fourteenth-century England in particular. Langland and Julian could not have seen their place in a larger history of thought and culture in the way that we are able to, though there are plenty of indications that they saw their work in tension with the authorities of their time. Placing them in a larger story helps clarify the significance of their texts, both what they mean and how they are historically important. Both authors are major players in a drama with two contrary movements. In the long term, the theology of participation and the conditions that supported it were in decline. For a time, however, at least in England, theological interests and other cultural trends also showed an opposite movement, toward revival and even extension of a participatory theological vision. Langland best exemplifies this English movement and explores the distinctive capacities of enigmatic language in the vernacular to express a traditional but threatened theology. Julian, a generation or so

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later, makes particular moves that suggest Langland’s influence in ways that have not been fully seen before. The fifth vision of Piers Plowman and Julian’s parable of the lord and the servant show both authors working out and naming the poetics of their own texts as a means of entering into more active participation in the life of the Trinity. In both texts, explicit reflection on interpretive process—what is both behind the writing of the text and projected in front of it as its aim for readers—consolidates vernacular authority through adventurous articulation of classic theology. Before turning to these central moments of vernacular theological poetics, this chapter will set the scene of academic theological discourse in fourteenth-century England. It picks up where chapter 1 left off with sketching the late medieval erosion of the theology of participation.

THE LOSS OF PARTICIPATION

Langland is the first author to use the word theology in English.1 His usage implies both theology’s proximity to his work and his aims to do something different from the theology of his day. Dame Study, in his third vision, says, “Teology hath tened me ten score tymes: / The more Y muse theron, the mystiloker hit semeth, / And the deppore Y devine, the derkore me thynketh hit” (C.11.128–30/B.10.182–84). A bit later, in the B text, the dreamer also refers to theology negatively and associates it with speaking “derkliche” (B.10.372–73). Yet Langland’s own enigmatic mode, of course, is just that: it speaks rather darkly and gains mystery as one muses on it. In vision 1, “Theologie” is the name of the first personification to critique those taking advantage of Lady Mede. What the dreamer says, in fact, is that Theology “tened” them, the same verb Dame Study uses for what Theology does to her (C.2.116/B.2.115/A.2.79). Here Theology serves briefly as the poem’s next voice of authority after the departure of its first one, Holy Church.2 Neither Holy Church nor Theology, however, will appear in the poem again.3 Rather, Langland will increasingly construct figures of enigmatic rather than institutional authority, most of all in the figures of Piers and the dreamer. Piers is set over against a representative of the church and, at least to some extent, theology when he responds with “pure tene” to the priest who reads his

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pardon.4 By the final vision, the true faithful will be a persecuted remnant of fools suffering the church’s systemic failure at its institutional heart, the sacrament of penance. Already in the first vision, then, the transitions from Holy Church to Theology to Reason and Conscience as authorities point in the direction the whole poem will go: away from the institutional church and academic discourse, toward the individual reading scripture and other texts in the company of other pilgrims on their way through life. In this shift to individual conscience, Langland was part of a much larger fourteenthcentury movement that included a wide range of thinkers. For some, such as William of Ockham or John Wyclif, this pitted them against ecclesiastical authority in the name of what were really new theological positions. Langland, however, locates authority in Conscience, Piers, and finally his own poetic voice precisely by preserving an old theological vision of participation that both new theology and strong assertions of church authority in his time were making harder to imagine—yet one that found expression not only in biblical commentary and contemplative theology but also in the church’s liturgy. The theology of participation has no doubt always been hard to imagine. Language and embodied experience lead to conceiving God as an agent like all the other agents we know and thus to seeing divine and human agency as excluding each other.5 From a modern Western perspective hyperoriented to individual agency and inclined as well to project a notion of freedom as pure power onto the divine, the coexistence of divine and human freedom becomes an especially difficult paradox, but clearly it was hard enough in Langland’s time—or Augustine’s, for that matter. The idea of a truly transcendent God who is not a being among other beings but made all things from nothing and maintains them in being by participation is a hard-won fruit of Judeo-Christian tradition, aided by Platonic metaphysics. Continuing obstacles to understanding such transcendent agency include not just human finitude but also, according to the tradition, fallibility—in other words, sin. Girard’s mimetic anthropology emphasizes the social dimension of sin as perpetual rivalry and the violent structures of exclusion and persecution that arise to manage this violence. The sense of the sacred that legitimates these structures projects rivalrous human agency onto imaginations of the di-

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vine. This Girardian view only makes all the more remarkable the imagination of a transcendent Other who is not in rivalry with anything that is.6 Texts such as Piers Plowman and Augustine’s Confessions stretch the resources of narrative and enigma in order to surmount these limitations and begin to imagine another kind of relationship with God.7 Perennial limits of imagination become more insuperable through what has come to be seen as a late medieval watershed that would cut modern thought off from earlier resources for conceiving participation and would replace them with habits of thought that further divide divine and human agency. Three main components of these changes are especially relevant for both Langland and Julian: the increasing prevalence of logical analysis in theology, which supports styles of thought that exclude participation; the bundle of theological and philosophical ideas often labeled nominalism, which cut the ties of participation most explicitly; and what has been called the juridicization of the church, which supported both of these intellectual changes by speaking of human, ecclesiastical agency more separately from divine action and presence. Indeed, Piers Plowman is a crucial witness to these developments and the connections between them from the standpoint of someone living through them and, I suggest, resisting them. Fourteenth-century English schools are an early instance of what the theologian Kathryn Tanner has called the “modern preoccupation with certainty, clarity and linear order” that led “the Moderns” to “quarrel with the Ancients because of what now seems to be the latter’s intolerable and offensive penchant for the dark density of ambiguous and polysemous discourse, for the concentric circularity and random inclusiveness of orderings according to resemblance.”8 One of the developments made possible by the modern, increasingly rigorous and technical methods of English scholars was the intertwining of logic, theology, metaphysics, and even physics. As the historian William Courtenay observes, “Works ostensibly in one field were designed to make contributions in one or two other areas as well.”9 Theology conducted this way became a new kind of specialized discipline, the ancestor of what is now called systematic as opposed to biblical or other kinds of theology. At the same time, then, these methods divided theology as a technical pursuit from other discourses that had also been considered theology. The leading theological innovators John

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Duns Scotus (ca. 1266–1308) and William of Ockham (1288–1348) wrote very little about scripture, a dramatic change from Aquinas, who, just a generation before Scotus, had deployed similar technical apparatus alongside constant reference to scripture and the fathers. Esoteric technicality, logic-chopping, and distance from scripture are what Langland draws most direct attention to when criticizing the theology of his day. The master of divinity at the banquet of Conscience dines on rich foods while Patience and the dreamer nourish themselves with scripture. The way Langland does theology out of dialogue with scripture can be seen as itself a critique of cutting-edge, academic theology—or at least a rejection of its logical style in favor of an older one. Ockham and other early fourteenth-century English scholars pioneered an approach to resolving problems in theology, metaphysics, and logic according to distinctions of how terms could signify—not distinctions of allegorical sense according to a figural view of history but distinctions of logical sense according to a more psychological conception of meaning called supposition theory. Ockham’s use of logical tools follows from his view of the relation between language and reality, such that ordinary language, “simple supposition,” is an “intention in the mind” rather than a reference to any real universal. This is Ockham’s version of nominalism in the narrow sense of a view that linguistic signs do not participate in essential realities but are only conventional labels for products of human thought. Any nominalist view of language will tend to erode the participatory outlook seen in places like medieval etymologies, but nominalism need not conflict with the theology of participation itself. In Ockham’s case, however, nominalism and the tools of supposition theory are consistent with his rejection of “common nature” shared among things perceived as similar that would link them to ideas conceived either as Platonic forms or as ideas in the mind of the Creator.10 New tools of theological analysis thus undermined a theology and metaphysics of participation and opened a sense of distance between God and nature. In a broad sense, participation requires a lot of both-and thinking, whereas nominalism extends from and underwrites either/or logic.11 The principle of parsimony known as Ockham’s razor, though variously phrased and named for him only much later, captures just this preference for a single explanation, which often forces a choice between the natural

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and the supernatural, now conceived over against each other, rather than imagining a fluid and mysterious interaction or coincidence between the two. Style need not determine theological substance, but it is hard to escape a general sense that, especially in early fourteenth-century England, the language of disambiguation, exclusive categories, and logical demonstration contributed to dismantling the participatory imagination of human freedom and salvation that had been cultivated through other forms of writing.12 Because of the consequences of new methods and of the view of language underlying them, the term nominalism has also become associated with an interrelated bundle of theological ideas that were especially prominent in English schools and scholars during the early fourteenth century. The ideas most opposed to the theology of participation include the univocity of being taught by Scotus; voluntarism, that is, an emphasis on both divine will and human will over against knowledge; emphasis on the distinction between the absolute and the ordained power of God as a way of solving theological problems; and the polarization between views of salvation derived from the patristic debate between Augustine and Pelagius.13 Though Scotus affirmed a notion of full human freedom as participation in perfect divine freedom and rationality, the influence of his ideas tended rather to sever the ties of participation and to support instead a notion of absolute divine freedom and of radical human freedom conceived apart from divine enabling.14 As seen by recent historians, the break begins with Scotus’s assertion of a logically necessary, Aristotelian univocity of being when being is predicated of either God or created things, rather than the absolute transcendence taught from Augustine to Aquinas that places God beyond even being and sees the existence of all things as a participation in a God beyond being.15 To locate God and humanity in the same sphere of being tends, at least in later thinkers, toward a view of divine and human agency as interacting in the same space. It also undermines the discipline, refined by Aquinas under the term analogy, of maintaining the interplay between affirmation and negation in saying anything about God. If God is a being among beings but is nonetheless incomprehensible, then the possibility of growing in knowledge of God by contemplative ascent and participation in the divine reason and love is curtailed.

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What can be known of God is strictly what God has revealed, understood as a direct action of God’s will, and the human response is a response of pure will. Divine law is good simply because God wills it rather than because it manifests God’s transcendent but nonetheless rationally comprehensible goodness. Will and reason are thus sharply divided, and will becomes the more important, especially in matters of salvation. The consequences of this voluntarism can be seen, for instance, in mysticism’s increasing shift away from meditation on the books of nature and history and toward greater emphasis on visionary experience and affective responses, which focus on extraordinary divine initiative and the engagement of human will rather than participation in the Logos.16 Julian’s Revelation, as many have noted, begins with affective devotion and receiving a vision but then turns against the contemporary course of mysticism by reintegrating hermeneutic contemplation, above all in her meditations on the parable of the lord and the servant. Connections between styles of thought and theological positions touch Langland and Julian most deeply with regard to issues of human and divine agency in salvation. Here the loss of a theology of participation and the rise of more rigorously analytic thought can be seen behind better-known aspects of nominalism and responses to it. If divine and human agency are seen as excluding each other, then the relationships between divine grace and human works and between predestination and free will become not mysteries to contemplate but seemingly intractable problems to solve. Ockham’s influential solution was to use the distinction made by previous theologians between absolute and ordained powers of God to an unprecedented degree as a problem solver.17 In traditional Scholastic use, talk of God’s absolute power affirmed divine transcendence, while talk of God’s ordained power affirmed “the genuine existence of created beings in dependence on God” who are given authentic agency in that dependence.18 Both are in effect at once and at all times. Under discursive conditions that begin with Ockham and find clear expression in the theology of Gabriel Biel (1420–95), “These different aspects of the same agency and operation come to be reified as separate domains.”19 God’s absolute power now refers to God’s total freedom to do anything that is not a logical contradiction, detached from any notion of transcendent truth or goodness, while God’s ordained power refers to God’s self-

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constraint to act toward humanity according to revealed law. Under God’s ordained power, divine and human agency are seen to operate in the same order. The result is an apparent need to choose between giving scope to divine grace or human will in the work of salvation. The “nominalist” view, using traditional expressions for how God accepts the efforts of those who do their best ( facere quod in se est) as meritorious toward salvation, now seems to deny the dependence of human freedom on divine creative agency and to qualify the role of divine grace in salvation.20 This view is often seen as a modified revival of the position taken almost a millennium earlier by Pelagius, and opposed by Augustine, that humans are capable of achieving salvation by their own will. The classic response to Ockhamist theology made by Thomas Bradwardine (ca. 1290–1349) in his De causa Dei contra Pelagium articulated instead a strong view of divine determinism that “reduces human initiative in favor of divine action.”21 Though this is understandably called an Augustinian position because of what it opposed, it takes the sovereignty of divine omnipotence to a logical extreme that excludes other aspects of Augustine’s much more complex theology, particularly its affirmation of human agency.22 The fact that Bradwardine modeled his great treatise on Euclid’s Elements suggests the degree to which the logical style characterized both nominalism and the most prominent responses to it, at least initially.23 Such a drastic change in thinking about divine and human agency in salvation suggests that more was going on, however, than the influence of cutting-edge theological ideas and Scholastic methods. Another development that is particularly relevant to Langland has been discussed by the historian and theologian Yves Congar: institutional changes in the church and a consequent reconceiving of the church’s agency. When the eleventhcentury Gregorian reform movement reasserted the ancient claims of the bishop of Rome, it also began a long process of establishing the administrative institutions necessary for the papacy to enforce its claims. These include the study of canon law, which cultivated “juridical ways of thinking in ecclesiology.” Thus, continues Congar, “In place of the idea of the manifestation and service of the transcendent, but present action of God, there comes the idea of a trustee of powers, the idea of an authority given to the hierarchic ministry.”24 The agency of the human institution and its

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officers, that is, comes to be more sharply distinguished from divine agency. Juridical means of establishing truth were consolidated through combat against heresies, beginning in the twelfth century, and through adjudication of high-profile theological controversies, such as those over Franciscan poverty and the beatific vision in the early fourteenth century.25 Intellectual support for this operational separation between divine and human agency also came from what has been called the twelfthcentury “discovery of nature” as a system that operates according to its own immanent causes apart from another order, now designated the supernatural.26 The nominalist distinction between absolute and ordained powers of God, part of a later stage in the separation of natural and supernatural, helps locate the authority of the church even more firmly within the realm of ordained and, in that sense, natural causes as opposed to the now strictly unknowable, infinitely distant absolute.27 In Congar’s own summary (using the term subject in a grammatical rather than poststructuralist, Althusserian or Foucauldian sense), the Gregorian Reform initiated the transition from an appreciation of the ever active presence of God to that of juridical powers put at the free disposal of, and perhaps even handed over as its property to, “the Church,” i.e. the hierarchy. For the Fathers and the early Middle Ages, the sacred actions are performed in the Church, according to the forms of the Church, and are rigorously sacred as such. But their subject is God, in an actual and direct way. Ecclesiastical structures are much more the manifestation and form of God’s action than a subject whose internal quality or power could constitute an adequate basis for the certain production of the expected effect. The categories of thought are less those of (efficient) causality than those of the manifestation of the invisible via the visible, and a symphony of the two—the invisible retaining a primacy of presence and operation. From the beginning of the twelfth century, a double process comes into operation, which will take nearly two centuries to have its full effect: a process of interpretation in terms of juridical realities and powers, a process of translation or construction of the Christian realities in terms of form

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or  nature and of causality, within the scholastic context, with its “physicism” and its ontology.28 Though Congar does not use the language of participation, the older view of church authority he describes follows from a participatory theology. This older view is expressed and persists above all in the language of the liturgy, with its rich representation of intertwined human and divine action.29 Legal language, on the other hand, in order to be more precise, tends to make sharper distinctions of agency and operation. We might, then, see a broad opposition between two kinds of language in which the late medieval church conducted itself and projected its authority: the precise, technical languages of law and logic, oriented to sharp distinctions and opposed to ambiguity; and the more literary language of liturgy, traditional biblical commentary, and contemplative theology, oriented to a fullness of signification and multiple meanings. Legal and logical language were in the ascendant with the proliferating administrative and academic institutions of the church, and they took to new heights what we have called didactic and esoteric rhetoric. Liturgy and other forms of devotion, such as the new feast of Corpus Christi, the flowering of mysticism, and increasing lay piety, continued to draw on the enigmatic mode. The two styles of language are conducive to differing theological perspectives. Precise language tends to separate levels of reality in general and divine from human agency in particular, whereas literary language is more able to express a theology of participation. Despite the overall tendency away from participatory thought augured by the innovations of early fourteenth-century English scholars, the era after the Black Death saw a return to older methods and themes: a preference for philosophical realism over nominalism; biblical commentary as a way of doing theology along with more Scholastic forms; and penance seen in terms of virtue and vice alongside logical analysis of volition and the dialectic of divine power in matters of salvation.30 Even in Latin, though, this distinction between kinds of language and the kinds of theological thinking they promote is clear only at the extremes. Most of the church’s language—preaching, works of instruction, devotional texts—was somewhere in between.

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In Middle English before Langland, such a distinction between the language of technical precision and that of enigmatic fullness or between the new, nominalist theology and a strong articulation of a theology of participation hardly applies. While there is good reason to suspect the existence of a lively tradition of vernacular riddling, few of the surviving examples are theological. Some of the religious lyrics that are not in riddle form are nevertheless better examples of theological enigma, but these are hard to date. On the other side, it seems likely that the language of logic and canon law accentuated the didacticism of the religious literature that circulated increasingly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. All in all, however, one of the many astonishing things about Piers Plowman is the degree to which it pioneers the use in vernacular literature of the new languages of law and logic at the same time that it fashions a poetics of enigma. While Langland accomplishes many things through his use of up-to-date language from the schools and law courts, he incorporates such language into enigmatic forms that redirect it toward a theology of participation.

LANGLAND’S POETIC EXEGESIS OF 1 CORINTHIANS 13

Piers Plowman performs a striking reversal of the transition from liturgical to juridical models of church authority. While its first vision attempts a resolution through judicial process, its climactic and most satisfying sixth vision is framed by the liturgy and largely woven from liturgical materials. In the first vision, Reason and Conscience, acting like the bishops who were also major royal ministers in fourteenth-century England, make cases before the king, but their agreement at the end promises little real change. The “autobiographical” scene added in the C text between the first two visions brings Reason and Conscience into the waking world of the poem, again seemingly as judicial officers, but here the narrator initiates the poem’s pivot toward a different kind of authority by responding in scriptural, parabolic language that presumes the hidden, mysterious agency of God at work in his choice of an unconventional vocation. The second vision’s attempted means of resolution, the pardon, represents the church’s authority in the form of a legal instrument and seems

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to express salvation theology as a sharp either/or. Yet the agency behind the pardon is ambiguous: it is sent from Truth and mediated by Piers, neither of whom stands for the pope. Piers introduces himself as participating in Truth by “kynde knowing.” This ambiguity and dual agency is felt in the uncertain attribution of the long description of the pardon’s contents that precedes the priest’s request to read it. Even the meaning of the pardon’s Latin text undergoes a similar ambiguation as the poem proceeds, changing from a statement of judgment and consequence to the object of the quest for Dowel, which unfolds as a never-ending process of penance. This quest plays out as both an effort of will and the receipt of a gift, and the paradigm for this playing out is the liturgy. The sixth vision begins during the Palm Sunday Mass, follows the events remembered during Holy Week, and ties itself to the liturgy through a dense web of word and image.31 Even in its final two visions, when the action returns to something like the first vision’s scene of contemporary institutional realities, the church is shown to be constituted by the reading of scripture and participation in the sacraments, and its emblematic failure is a failure of the sacrament of penance exacerbated by jurisdictional rivalry between parish clergy and friars. The poem’s middle visions work out a voice of poetic authority that is suited to a theology of participation. While Langland puts his poetics of enigma to work at the level of the line throughout, visions 3 through 5 show a particular self-consciousness about fashioning this poetics into a larger voice that can carry authority. Vision 3, the poem’s inward turn to the life and education of the dreamer, is also its academic turn toward the rhetoric of enigma, as seen above in chapter 4. Rather than leading on to logic and to logic-driven theology, as in the most advanced scholarship of his day, this rhetoric leads to an older mode of theology that proceeds by rumination on the books of scripture, soul, and world. Vision 4’s riddle contest, with its satire of the doctor of divinity, turns more sharply away from academic discourse and toward the enigmatic mode. Vision 5, then, the least coherent in overall structure among the poem’s eight visions, multiplies and dilates enigmas into a series of subtly connected episodes that discover the hidden but present, always-coming-tolight action of God in a panorama of human activities: the reading of scripture, the lives of saints and families, daily labor, and above all the life

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of Christ and the sacraments.32 Of equal concern throughout is what impedes recognition of and participation in the work of grace and how the poetics of enigma not only presents a theology but invites conversion. The riches of the fifth vision far exceed what can be explicated here. Working through it in roughly narrative order, however, we can find a sort of argument that is at the same time a therapeutic process for the dreamer. It begins with Langland’s most extensive attempt at a poetic commentary on scripture, which, because it treats 1 Corinthians 13, is also his fullest treatment of his own poetics. From this center point of a scriptural poet’s participation in the revelation of divine love, the vision expands to include the history of the church, both recent and ancient, while it constructs elaborate enigmas that disclose figures of the Trinity in ordinary life. These explorations of history and human nature as theaters of participation include a long, somewhat heterogeneous dialogue with Liberum Arbitrium (Anima in the B text), the inner dream of the Tree of Charity, and successive encounters and dialogues with Faith, Hope, and the Good Samaritan. All of this comes to rest at the end of the vision in striking images of baptism and the Eucharist that combine the strands of scriptural interpretation, historical imagination, and daily routine. Nowhere does Langland undertake such extended, intensive, and creative interpretation of a biblical passage as he does with 1 Corinthians 13 in the fifth vision. It refers to a single passage more often and in more different ways than any other part of the poem: quotations of the Latin text, paraphrases and more oblique echoes, details that likely come from commentary on specific verses, and ideas that shape long narrative sequences.33 Only his use of some parables, also important in this vision, and of the Passion narrative in the sixth vision come close. Unlike those biblical texts, 1 Corinthians 13 is not a narrative, but Langland builds one around it by integrating its concepts into a dialogue and then turning them into increasingly concrete and historical figures and topics. He moves also from close, word-by-word commentary on St. Paul’s text (of a unique, Langlandian sort) to longer, structural envisioning of it. This movement from small scale to large parallels the form of Langland’s poetics of enigma throughout. The most recognizably enigmatic passages, more prevalent earlier in the poem, are local, isolated riddles like the Plant of Peace or Patience’s riddle at the banquet of Conscience.

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Instances of multivalent, riddling wordplay are also local enigmas, yet they often build into what might be called enigma-expressions, like “kynde knowing,” which carry a surplus of meaning that accumulates from various contexts over the poem’s course.34 In the dialogue with Liberum Arbitrium, “charity” becomes an enigma-expression, and various local enigmas, some involving St. Paul’s text, develop it. Langland’s use of 1 Corinthians 13, however, exemplifies how he gathers local enigmas and enigma-expressions into what might be called structural enigmas that work more symphonically. The Plant of Peace will grow here into the Tree of Charity and its succeeding narrative of the Incarnation, which will become more fully related to the “kynde” that is part of “kynde knowing.” Sustained passages of extended theology, which include treatment of the potential for language to participate in the natural signs that reflect the uncreated Word, in turn charge the enigmatic wordplay of Piers Plowman with potential meaning.35 All of this will be embedded in a poetic realization of St. Paul’s argument about knowledge and love from 1 Corinthians 13, which culminates in its classic list of the three theological virtues, faith, hope, and love. Before looking closely at the complex ways in which Langland weaves St. Paul’s text into his poem, it is worth framing the significance of writing such an enigmatic and literary scriptural commentary, even aside from the fact that it is about the only New Testament text that uses the word enigma. As the poem distances itself from academic and ecclesiastical authority—in the previous vision both Clergy and the doctor of divinity were left behind when the dreamer departed the banquet in the company of Conscience and Patience—it ties its authority to the Bible more directly. More important, Langland’s poetic appropriation of this scriptural text resists the specialization of attention to different senses of scripture that was on the rise in the fourteenth century. As de Lubac’s history of medieval exegesis shows, the relations between the literal or historical and the various spiritual senses provided the main heuristic framework for working out the implications of a theology of participation for Christian life.36 This is the framework described by Hugh of St. Victor, drawing on the fathers, in the image of a building, the foundation of which is history and the structure built on it the spiritual senses. The historical sense links events in a temporal order that includes not just

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the biblical past but the history of the church, the present time of the reader, and the eschatological future. The spiritual senses connect this order vertically to narrative patterns, symbolic resemblances, and doctrinal principles that give meaning to the action of history.37 Interpretation of scripture, itself a participation in the divine action that is always at work within the temporal order of human action, is the key to recognizing and entering further into participation elsewhere, especially when human action is at its most rational, creative, and free. To focus exclusively on the literal or the doctrinal or the moral or the mystical sense, as seen in early fourteenth-century exegetes such as Nicholas of Lyra and Meister Eckhart, can be a means of reaching a more robust understanding when these senses are brought together. It runs the risk, however, of cutting them off from each other, severing the horizontal from the vertical so that the order of history is seen as a realm of merely human, natural causes and the spiritual becomes limited to individual, interior experience. The wholeness of participation in the single source of goodness, truth, and beauty then fractures into moral, doctrinal, legal, logical, “spiritual,” and other imperatives.38 Langland’s interpretation of 1 Corinthians 13 is poetic, not just because it is in verse and is part of a larger poem, but because the poetry itself enacts a holistic response to the biblical text. It might be possible to analyze and classify this interpretation according to the traditional four categories of medieval exegesis, but the direction of Langland’s reading is opposite: toward a synthetic grasp of the significance of his life and times as part of the scriptural understanding of history, to which the fourfold scheme was a heuristic key. Further, this work of commentary is enigmatic, not just because it is indirect, complex, and interwoven with many other narrative and thematic threads, but also because it aims at a fullness of meaning that would imitate that of scripture itself while acknowledging also its inevitable failure. That it can venture such an attempt at all depends on a hope that the act of creative interpretation can itself participate in the theology of participation it seeks to express and be met by a similar act on the part of a reader. Langland’s mode of commentary and of appropriating scriptural authority, then, performs the faith in the availability of participation in divine charity that is the fifth vision’s overarching theme.

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The beginning of the fifth vision is the dense center of an engagement with the book of 1 Corinthians that radiates out from it in both directions (see table 6.1). So far, the poem’s fullest articulation of the kind of knowledge it seeks came at the end of the third vision from Ymaginatif, who cites 1 Corinthians 3:19 while contrasting knowledge based on nature with the knowledge made possible by the Incarnation: “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.”39 The C text quotes the previous verse, “If any . . . seem to be wise . . . let him become a fool, that he may be wise,” even earlier, in the description of the “lunatyk lolleres” added to the pardon scene (C.9.127a; see above, chapter 5, the section “C-Text Enigmas I”). Chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians returns to the theme of empty knowledge, and it is here that the fifth vision picks up text and theme again. Well before its first direct quotation, a program of dramatizing begins with the dreamer asking Liberum Arbitrium what he is. His reply, a long list of names according to the various faculties that manifest free will, given in both English and Latin, provokes this rather obtuse response: “Ye beth as a bischop,” quod Y, al bourdynge that tyme, “For bisshopes yblessed, thei bereth many names— Presul and Pontifex and Metropolitanus, And othere names an heep, Episcopus and Pastor.” (C.16.200–203/B.15.40–43) “Bourdynge,” jesting, the same word used with the “lunatyk lolleres,” here seems more pejorative and recalls the empty speech criticized in the first verse of 1 Corinthians 13, “If I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”40 The dreamer also uses a second tongue, and Liberum Arbitrium seems to see in him the kind of idle curiosity St. Paul goes on to censure: “That is soth,” he sayde; “now Y se thy wille! Thow woldest knowe and conne the cause of alle here names, And of myn, yf thow myhteste, me thynketh by thy speche!” (C.16.204–6/B.15.45–47)

Table 6.1. References to 1 Corinthians in Piers Plowman Bold = quotation in Latin Normal = paraphrase/allusion () = reference to commentary on the biblical text C Text

B Text

5.43a

. . . in the same calling in which he was called. (Also A.10.112)1 3:18 . . . if any man among you seem to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. 7.37–38 For he that hath determined being steadfast in his heart, having no necessity, but having power of his own will; and hath judged this in his heart, to keep his virgin, doth well. Therefore, both he that giveth his virgin in marriage, doth well; and he that giveth her not, doth better.2 7:1–2 . . . It is good for a man not to touch a woman. But for fear of fornication . . . 11:20–30 (on sacramental meals in Corinth)3 13:12 We see now through a glass . . . 13:13 And now there remain faith, hope, and charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity. 8:1 Knowledge puffeth up . . . 3:19 For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God . . . 13:4 Charity is patient . . . 13:4 Charity . . . is kind. 13:8 . . . tongues shall cease . . . 13:2 And if I should have prophecy and should know all mysteries, and all knowledge, and if I should have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. 13:4 . . . charity envieth not, dealeth not perversely . . . 13:4 . . . is not puffed up; is not ambitious, seeketh not her own . . . 13:12 We see now through a glass in a dark manner, then face to face. 13:5 . . . is not provoked to anger, thinketh no evil . . . 7:20

9.127a 10.204

9.108

10.296a

9.191a

11.40–53 11.170

10.56–70 11.9 12.29–30

14.83a

1 Corinthians (Douay-Rheims translation)

12.57a 12.139a

15.161

13.1404 13.151 ?15.13 16.208–9 15.48–49 (C.16.211a/B.15.51a) (C.16.264–69/B.15.111–16) 16.288 16.289a

15.157

16.294a

15.162–162a 15.165

1. This verse, in both instances, is central to the argument of Isabel Davis, Writing Masculinity, 12–37. 2. Isabel Davis, Writing Masculinity, 22–24, connects this passage to these lines from Wit’s speech and suggests its wider significance as a source for the three “Do’s.” 3. See Aers, Sanctifying Signs, 39, also 42, 50. 4. Barney, Penn Commentary, 48: Love is Patience’s “lemman.”

(16.296a)5

(15.149a)

?16.297–308

?15.166–172

16.309–10

15.173–4

(16.338a)

(15.200a)

17.5a passūs 18–19

15.212 15.258–71 passūs 16–17

?18.4 ?18.7 18.34, 40

16.30, 36

19.81 19.218

17.85 17.252

19.225

17.2597

20.115

18.112

20.156–61

18.153–58

20.2648

18.254

21.229a–52

19.229a–52

13:11 When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But, when I became a man, I put away the things of a child. 13:6 Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth with the truth. 13.7 Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Commentary on 13:12 in Augustine, De Trinitate 15 citing Matt. 9:4 and Luke 5:226 10:4 . . . and the rock was Christ. 13:4–7 Charity . . . endureth all things. Structure based on 13:13, “And now there remain faith, hope, and charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity,” and the Ordinary Gloss on 13:7, “Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.” 2:9 But, as it is written: That eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, what things God hath prepared for them that love him. 11:7 . . . because he is the image and glory of God . . . 1:24 . . . Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. 14:1 Follow after charity . . . 13:3 And if I should distribute all my goods to feed the poor, and if I should deliver my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. 13:1 If I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. (Also C.16.200/B.15.40?) 15:4 . . . according to the scriptures . . . (also in the Nicene Creed) 15:55 O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting? 15:14 And if Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. 12:4 Now there are diversities of graces, but the same Spirit . . .

5. The verse quoted here in both versions, Matt. 18:3, occurs in commentaries on 1 Cor. 13:11 by Hugh of St. Cher and Nicholas de Gorran. 6. See Simpson, “‘Et Vidit Deus Cogitaciones Eorum.’” 7. Davlin, “Piers Plowman,” 88–89. 8. Barney, Penn Commentary, 59.

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The ensuing dialogue engages more closely with the Pauline text: “Ye, sire,” Y sayde, “by so no man were ygreved, Alle the sciences under sonne and alle the sotil craftes Y wolde Y knewe and couthe kyndeliche in myn herte!” “Thenne artow inparfit,” quod he, “and oen of Pruydes knyhtes! For such a lust and lykyng Lucifer ful fram hevene: Ponam pedem meum in aquiline . . . [I shall set my foot in the north . . .] “Hit were ageyns kynde,” quod he, “and alle kyne resoun That eny creature sholde conne al, excepte Crist one.” (C.16.207–13/B.15.48–54) “Alle the sciences under sonne and alle the sotile craftes” transposes and translates two phrases from St. Paul’s next sentence: “Et si habuero prophetiam, et noverim mysteria omnia, et omnem scientiam: et habuero omnem fidem, ita ut montes transferam, charitatem autem non habuero, nihil sum.”41 This exchange pulls St. Paul’s argument into the dreamer’s ongoing quest for “kynde knowing.” The biblical subtext makes clear that to be “ageyns kynde” is to lack charity, while the path to “kynde knowing” is not sheer desire for knowledge but the pursuit of charity, to which the poem is turning. Yet the full implications of “kynde” do not emerge until this dream’s later explorations of the Trinity, the last of which makes clear what is at stake by quoting 1 Corinthians 13:1 outright as an example of “unkyndeness” (C.19.225/B.17.259). As their dialogue about knowledge proceeds, the dreamer and Liberum Arbitrium polarize into an esoteric approach to theological truth on one hand and a didactic approach on the other. Though the dreamer has attacked learning in earlier dreams, his sudden desire for “all the sciences” aligns him with an overemphasis on the value of elite knowledge. In correcting him, Liberum Arbitrium criticizes friars who preach to the folk about “insolibles and falaes,” that is, the logical insolubilia (paradoxes) and fallacies that were the most abstruse part of current theological speculation.42 The main force of Liberum Arbitrium’s attack, though, is against clergy who do not practice what they preach, and some of his images for hypocrisy draw on Gospel descriptions of the Pharisees that might have

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been suggested by the Ordinary Gloss on “scientia” in 1 Corinthians 13:2.43 For Liberum Arbitrium, preachers would be better off to stick to teaching the Ten Commandments and practicing what they preach. He quotes St. Bernard on both the importance of turning the words of scripture to works and the danger of desire for knowledge, which in Eden cost humanity everlasting glory. Bernard’s stature as a model of affective devotion no doubt contributes to the poem’s movement in this section from purely intellectual knowledge to knowledge that involves the whole heart.44 But Liberum Arbitrium, in the early part of his dialogue with the dreamer, seems to represent the inability of mere exhortation and critique to move the will, so that he shows the inadequacy of didactic forms of teaching associated with church authorities, while the dreamer stands for the idleness of the esoteric. Opposition on an intellectual plane between speculative interest and authoritative teaching collapses, however, and makes way for richer knowledge when Liberum Arbitrium mentions the word charity. At this moment, as the dreamer’s affect changes from jesting to earnest longing, the poem’s engagement with 1 Corinthians 13 becomes explicit and signifies a new awareness of how to continue its quest and construct its own authority. Here is the C-text revision of the signature passage discussed above at the beginning of the Introduction: “Charite!” quod Y tho, “that is a thyng, forsothe, That maistres commenden moche; where may hit be yfounde? Ich have yleved in Londone monye longe yeres And fonde I nevere, in faith, as freres hit precheth, Charite, that chargeth naught, ne chyt [quarrels], thow me greve hym, As Poul in his pistul of hym bereth wittenesse: Non inflatur, non est ambiciosa. I knewe nevere, by Crist, clerk nother lewed That he ne askede aftur his, and otherewhiles coveytede Thyng that neded hym nauhte—and nyme hit, yf a myhte [took it, if he might]! For thogh me souhte alle the sektes of susturne and of brethurne And fynde hym, but figuratyfly, a ferly me thynketh:

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Hic in enigmate, tunc facie ad faciem. And so Y trowe [believe] treuly, by that me telleth of Charite.” (C.16.284–95) The dreamer treats the finding of charity as both an urgently practical matter and a topic of theological speculation. To pursue it, he turns to scripture. Line 289a quotes two phrases from 1 Corinthians 13:4– 5, and lines 288–92 render into Langland’s alliterative meter the distinctive rhetoric of the whole passage’s negations of verbs and qualities: “Charity is patient, is kind: charity envieth not, dealeth not perversely; is not puffed up; is not ambitious, seeketh not her own, is not provoked to anger, thinketh no evil.” Then, in the next lines, comes the heart of Langland’s appropriation of scripture, which sets up his own enigmatic and scriptural poetics as a means of finding charity in the world. Two changes in Langland’s reference to 1 Corinthians 13:12 from the B text to the C redirect and sharpen the poem’s claims for visionary scriptural literature.45 Whereas, in the B text, the dreamer says that the clergy teach him that Christ is in all places but he sees him never truly “but as myself in a mirour,” here he says something that is more ambiguous but looks outward rather than inward and refers to literary language in place of the visual image of a mirror. The “sektes of susturne and of brethurne” no doubt refer to the religious orders, which Liberum Arbitrium will discuss fifty lines later. Saying it is a wonder (“ferly”) to find charity there, even figuratively, could be a criticism of the orders but also implies the difficulty of finding charity anywhere, since the saints of the orders and their life according to rule had long been seen as exemplars of the work of God on earth. Likewise, the words figuratyfly and ferly not only imply that charity is hidden and rare but also indicate the conditions of its manifestation. These words alliterating with find name distinctive characteristics of the two most common kinds of literature in Langland’s time: the figures of allegory and the marvels, or ferlies, of romance. Literature teaches how to recognize the mysterious presence of love in history. The C text’s replacement of the B text’s image of seeing “as myself in a mirour” with references to literary language makes the direct quotation from 1 Corinthians 13:12 refer even more strongly to the text the reader

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is holding. As in B, the change from St. Paul’s “Nunc” (now) to “Hic” (here), highlighted by coming at the beginning of a line and by the mismatch with “tunc,” preserves the primary reference to the present time, or here on earth, by contrast to the next life in heaven. It could also still carry the reference to the dreamer himself, cued in the B text and important later in the fifth vision’s development of “kynde knowyng” as the soul’s participation in the Trinity. The C text, however, which also drops the preceding anagram on Langland’s name (“‘I have lyved in londe,’ quod I, ‘my name is Longe Wille,’” B.15.152, cf. C.16.286), shifts the major self-reference from the poet to his text. Reading an enigmatic text is preparation for the encounter face to face. Finally, “Hic” could also refer to scripture, the text that Langland is coming closer and closer to imitating and even merging with his own poem. Thus there is a sort of fourfold significance to the word Langland has altered in the scriptural text, one that does not map directly onto the fourfold scheme of exegesis but captures a similar dynamic of significance found here and now through participation in the advent of Word made flesh: the letter of scripture itself, the image of God in the human person, the action of God in history, and the new text that constructs riddles out of the relations between them. Langland’s enigmatic mode imitates scripture in both concealing and revealing—concealing in order to reveal—significance that is given in the order of things. The remainder of the fifth vision uses 1 Corinthians 13 more expansively as a frame on which to weave the same range of genres that make up the whole poem—dialogue with personifications, allegorical imagery, preaching, scriptural commentary—but moves from abstract allegory to both extended theological analogy and representations of historical reality, culminating in the Incarnation and Passion.46 The lines that follow the quotation of the enigma verse give a personified description of Charity, which continues, in the mode of alliterative paraphrase and expansion, to draw from 1 Corinthians 13 and adds to it from St. Paul’s other major discourse on love in Romans 12.47 This expands into an allegory about how Charity lives, which includes details such as the fact that he feasts on Fiat-voluntas-tua, what the previous vision said Patience had in his “poke” (C.15.249–52, cf. B.14.48–49). Here the poem also invokes Piers again as it turns toward disclosure of the wonder of charity,

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not as mere concept or personification, but as the continuing presence of Christ in history. In answer to the dreamer’s question whether the clergy who keep Holy Church know Charity, Liberum Arbitrium replies, “Peres the Plouhman . . . most parfitlyche hym knoweth: Et vidit Deus cogitaciones eorum. [And God saw their thoughts.] By clothyng ne by carpynge [speech] knowe shaltow hym nevere, Ac thorw werkes thow myhte wyte wher-forth he walketh.” (C.16.338–40, cf. B.15.199–200a, 209–10)48 This puzzling, isolated reference to Piers as more like Christ than the clergy (using a quotation adapted from Luke 11:17) continues the trajectory of the second vision—from his allegorical instructions to the wouldbe pilgrims, through leadership of work on the half-acre, to superseding the priest—and anticipates his increasing likeness to Christ in later visions. Liberum Arbitrium goes on to give the saintly kings Edmond and Edward as examples, and the remainder of the dreamer’s dialogue with him continues in a general vein of reading the presence (or absence) of charity in the history of the church, in contemporary religious life, and in Jews and Muslims.49 The C text confirms that Liberum Arbitrium’s description of the suffering of saints is still part of an expansive commentary on 1 Corinthians 13 by adding a quotation from verse 7 (C.17.5a). Before Piers returns in the guise of Christ in the next two visions, the poem will interweave allegory and history, still on the capacious loom of 1 Corinthians 13, by constructing a narrative, inset with enigmatic figures, based on the three theological virtues of verse 13: “And now there remain faith, hope, and charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity.”50 The theological virtues are perhaps the most common scheme in Christian tradition for thinking about human participation in the divine. In the Pauline text, they bring to a conclusion the discourse on love and knowledge. Knowledge and love were seen, following Augustine, as the two primary means of active participation, and commentary on the theological virtues found in them the elevation of both cognitive and affective capacities to their perfect employment. In Aquinas’s treatment, informed by more Aristotelian philosophical analysis, the theological virtues are a key form of participation, where the classical notion of virtue

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as habituated human agency meets the Christian notion of grace as infused, empowering divine agency.51 The rhetoric of enigma was also seen to elevate both knowledge and love, so that the theological virtues can be seen as the goal of this rhetoric—just what they are in Langland’s fifth vision. Rather than something like a theological treatise on them, however, the poem expands them into a hybrid of scriptural commentary, typological allegory, and enigmatic analogies that summons readers into loving knowledge.

SALVATION AS PARTICIPATION IN KYNDE

Within its overall structure based on 1 Corinthians 13, the fifth vision, like the third, can be seen as a somewhat chiastic structure centered on an inner dream.52 Surrounding this inner dream are extended passages occupied with history. The remainder of the outer vision, before the inner dream begins, roams through various topics in recent history in order to look for signs of charity—that is, of participation, or its failure. After the inner dream, the dreamer will encounter three typological figures based on the theological virtues, who become his guides and companions on the way: Faith, who is also clearly Abraham and tells the stories of the covenant with Abraham that were seen to prefigure the New Testament, including symbols of the Trinity and the Eucharist; Hope, who carries the law given on Sinai and seeks the Christ who has yet to put his seal on it; and the Good Samaritan of Christ’s parable, who becomes associated with love when he stops to help one half alive whom the other two have passed by, and whose help points to Christ’s passion and the sacraments.53 This sequence shifts the poem into a mode that James Simpson calls “participation in biblical narrative,” which will continue through the final visions.54 Embedded in it are analogies that keep the grand, biblical narrative of the advent of divine presence connected to homely images of the Trinity made known in human “kynde.” The inner dream itself falls into two halves: the extended image of the Tree of Charity, which also focuses on human participation in the Trinity; and the poem’s fullest narration of the life of Christ, stopping just short of the Passion. Joining these two halves at the center of the

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inner dream is the Annunciation, which comes at the fullness of time, plenitudo temporis, so that the Incarnation stands at the structural center of the fifth vision as what enables its participatory theology.55 The inner dream’s movement from Trinity to Incarnation in order to understand the nature of God in the mystery of human life is the same one seen in book 15 of De Trinitate and in the final chapters of Bonaventure’s Itinerarium. The rest of the outer dream, the narrative constructed from 1 Corinthians 13:13, brings in a typologically interpreted overview of the story from the first five books of the Old Testament and, like the second part of the inner dream, leads up to the Passion, which will be the story of the next vision. The episodes of the fifth vision constitute the poem’s deepest penetration of salvation theology, both because of the structure that joins them and because they are each so enigmatic line by line. The sixth vision will complete them with a multilayered understanding of Atonement theology, but this one gives both a wider panorama of salvation history and a more interior, psychological, even phenomenological probing of how salvation works. In this it compares to the philosophical theology of the fourteenth century, with its subtle analysis of volition. Robert Adams, in an influential study of Langland’s theology, rightly draws attention to the Tree of Charity and the Samaritan’s Trinitarian analogies in order to clarify the issues raised by the pardon episode.56 Yet Adams, like many other Langland scholars, mostly tries to translate the poem into the kind of theological language that was increasingly dominating the schools and making a participatory vision harder to sustain.57 The result is to see Langland finding a compromise or “middle way” between positions that had been rendered contradictory by an underlying view of divine and human agency as exclusive. “As with the doctrinal paradoxes concerning Christ’s dual nature or the Trinity of the Godhead,” writes Adams, “the aim of ‘orthodox’ teaching in this area was to strike some balance between the two extremes so as to preserve both human responsibility and the necessity for grace.”58 This balance has been called semi-Pelagian because it resists strong notions of divine action or human capability, positions associated with Augustine and Pelagius, either of which would be seen as canceling the other out. Yet as Adams’s mention of paradox with regard to the doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity might suggest, orthodoxy has to do with embracing seemingly incompatible truths as mystery, not find-

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ing a middle way between them. His overview of salvation theologies does not consider participation as an available option. Nonetheless, Adams’s own summaries of his analysis of Langland’s theology resort to terms more compatible with participation. Calling Ymaginatif ’s account of the salvation of Trajan a “synergistic theory” invokes a term brought into English in the seventeenth century precisely to express “cooperation between human will and divine grace in the work of regeneration.”59 His summary of the pardon episode’s lesson approaches the enigmatic: “It is more like an unpleasant old maxim reasserting itself when we least would like or expect it: the only free ride is the one you get when you walk. The only pardon comes when you try to avoid offending God in the first place.”60 Langland’s own enigmas resist the dichotomous thinking that was gaining strength in his time in favor of a theology of participation. The continued dialogue between the dreamer and Liberum Arbitrium before the inner dream, as it moves away from poetic commentary on 1 Corinthians 13, prepares the soil for later enigmas of participation by invoking the language of “kynde” as the common nature by which creation participates in the divine. Indeed, the full significance of “kynde” as the poem’s central term for a theology of participation emerges over the course of the fifth vision. Kynde had a wide range of meanings in Middle English that included the nature both of God and of created things and implied, throughout its senses, the connection between the two, as in the definition given by the Promptorium parvulum: “Kende, or kynde of thyngys that Godd cowrsly hathe insett: Natura.”61 Liberum Arbitrium proceeds throughout, while taking up urgent issues such as calls for the conversion of Jews and Saracens and for disendowment of the church, by holding history and nature up to scripture in order to discern charity, that is, God’s work both in the church and outside it. Stories of saints aided by animals, for instance, are read as tokens that “trewe man” can always find charity through others (C.17.32–34/cf. B.15.305–6). The true identity of Holy Church, constituted by its law, is charity, and yet Muslims and Jews might also know charity through “law of kynde,” that is, through reading nature—above all through their own nature, for it “is kyndly thyng, creature his creatour to honoure” (C.17.153). Systemic failures of interpretation emphasize even more the importance of recognizing the relationship between God and creation through shared kynde. Liberum Arbitrium complains that, though nature is true,

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those who ought to be able to read it, such as astronomers and shipmen, are failing. Likewise, the interpretation of books is failing at every level, from philosophy down to grammar school, where they cannot “construe kyndelyche that [what] poetes made” (C.17.110). Reading according to kynde applies also to the works of poets, not just to work of God as Creator, and this implies the value of poetry for understanding participation through kynde. The theological dimension of reading according to kynde comes to light by contrast to the deception that lured the Muslims from following the “lawe of kynde” (C.17.160). If church leaders acted according to “kynde,” they would ask for the true dove, the Holy Ghost, “To make a perpetuel pees bitwene the prince of hevene / And alle maner men that on this molde libbeth” (C.17.248–49). “Kyndelyche” interpretation recognizes the capacity of nature to participate in grace, something that reading the enigmatic had long been seen to stimulate and that the remainder of the fifth vision brings further to light. The Trinitarian analogies of the fifth vision, including the Tree of Charity, work like riddles to penetrate imaginatively the greatest puzzle of participation in divine kynde, the relationship between divine and human agency. Langland’s analogies offer ways of seeing oneself, not as a solitary embodied will at loose in the world, but as living in relationship to the Trinity, a relationality that itself proceeds from the Triune nature and receives from it the capacity to do well. To become free is not to be autonomous but to become more consciously cooperative with that nature, or “kynde.” These passages indicate how the participation of “kynde wit” in the “kynde” of the Trinity elevates it to the saving knowledge that is “kynde knowyng” and the saving action that is doing well.62 The first of these analogies of the Trinity, the Tree of Charity, expresses participation by invoking the Augustinian theology of the Trinitarian shape of the soul when the dreamer says the tree was called “Ymagodei.” Liberum Arbitrium elaborates: “The tree hatte Trewe-love,” quod he, “the Trinite hit sette [planted]; Thorw lovely lokynges hit lyveth and launseth up blosmes, The whiche blosmes buirnes [people] Benigne-speche hit calleth. And therof cometh a goed fruyt, the whiche men calleth werkes

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Of holynesse, of hendenesse, of help-hym-that-nedeth, The whiche is Caritas ykald, Cristes oune fode. . . .” (C.18.9–14)63 Langland makes the Trinity the “setter” of the “ympe” (graft or sapling), yet the life within it also grows in three phases that condense and translate into plant imagery Augustine’s progression from thought (or life) to word to work in De Trinitate 15 (a scheme so influential it could have come to Langland from many other sources). This progression follows from the triad of memory, understanding, and will that recurs throughout the later books of De Trinitate: an inner word expresses knowledge possessed, for which Augustine sometimes uses the language of something seen, and it issues in a work.64 The “lovely lokynges” through which the tree called Trewe-love lives and blooms are like the knowledge of the Father, known with certainty of sight but also, as Augustine would agree, an expression and consequence of love. “Benigne-speche” is like the Word that perfectly communicates this loving knowledge, and the fruit of charity is like the Holy Spirit, which Augustine identifies not only with works that follow from words, and with will, but also with the idea of gift, like the fruit by which a tree gives its life to others. Highly condensed, enigmatic language using plant imagery here expresses participation in the Trinity much as the Plant of Peace encodes the Incarnation in the first vision. The agricultural imagery also connects this passage to Piers Plowman, Langland’s chief figure of active participation (even though Piers is not mentioned in the C-text version of this scene as he is in B). This introduction to the Tree of Charity as the Triune “Ymago-Dei” expresses double agency in a state of peace; its two sides are then distinguished when the Persons of the Trinity are portrayed as three props and weapons that protect humanity, the tree, against the winds of world, flesh, and devil. Yet the mystery of participation only becomes more acute. When the devil attacks the fruit of the tree, Thenne moved hym in moed in magestate Dei [in the majesty of God], That Libera Voluntas Dei [the Free Will of God] lauhte [seized] the myddel shoriare [prop]

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And hit aftur the fende, happe how hit myhte. Filius [the Son], by the Fadres wille, fley [hastened] with Spiritus Sanctus To go ransake that ragman and reve hym of his apples, That thorw fals biheste and fruyt furste man disseyved. (C.18.118–23) A movement in “moed,” which carries in Middle English the breadth of denotation from Old English mōd that makes it synonymous with spirit, mind, or heart, fills human free will with the free will of God. There are two parallel passages in the B text, one in which Piers says that Liberum Arbitrium picks up a plank and pursues the devil “thorugh grace / And help of the Holy Goost” (B.16.51–52) and another in which the dreamer says that Piers does it himself, “Filius by the Faderes wille and frenesse of Spiritus Sancti, / To go robbe that rageman and reve the fruyt from hym” (B.16.88–89). Such capacity for action on the part of human free will suggests to Adams a semi-Pelagian theory of salvation through doing one’s best and earning grace.65 Up until this point, the further exposition of the tree image for bearing the fruit of good works through divine grace has been a largely static, spatial one in which the human plant is supported by Trinitarian props, two physical agents working side by side. When the image becomes briefly active, however, rather than one agent becoming active and the other passive, both are now active at once in the image of a person in whom two different kinds of will, human and divine, cooperate. Yet the C text’s brief renaming of Liberum Arbitrium as Libera Voluntas Dei when he suddenly becomes a doer and not just a guide only confirms the mystery of agency present throughout this analogy: when human free will is most effective, it is somehow also the free will of God. The chief image of such freedom in a mere human is Mary, and the poem’s next lines tell the story of the Annunciation, the beginning of a retelling of the work of Christ in the remainder of the inner dream, which unfolds what was glimpsed in the riddle of the Plant of Peace. The Tree of Charity passage also uses the language of kynde to mark the image’s implication that human fruitfulness is a participation in the Triune life. The fruits, Liberum Arbitrium explains, are the three “de-

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grees” of virginity, widowhood, and married life, the first two sweeter by  virtue of their freedom for a life of contemplation, but, as Teresa Tavormina writes, “All participate worthily in humankind, in Charity, and in the Ymago-dei planted in the world and in man’s heart.”66 “Kynde” links the degrees of humanity, like apples of one “kynde” (C.18.70), on one level and the persons of the Trinity, represented as props of the same color and “kynde” (C.18.21) holding up the tree, on another. These similes of “kynde” come as if in answer to the plea implied earlier in the fifth vision when the dreamer quoted 1 Corinthians 13:12: they are enigmas in which he finds charity figuratively, and more fully now than he had before. The fact that virginity is the fairest fruit even confirms that charity was to be found among “the sektes of susturne and of brethurne” (C.16.293), though it is also found in himself as a married man (as implied in B.15.162). Charity appears as a “ferly” (C.18.56, repeated from 16.294) in all kinds of life. This nexus of participation, more than anything specific about the Trinitarian nature itself, is what the Tree of Charity invites readers to contemplate. After the inner dream, Faith’s Trinitarian similes, while suiting his allegorical name by making the doctrine of the Trinity more believable, also unfold further aspects of participation in divine “kynde.” They work from interpersonal relations and thus have a broad, corporate scope. The first is ecclesial: the Trinity is compared to Christ, the Christian Church, and the individual Christians who are their children. Since Christ is a member of both sides of this analogy, participation is not just represented through analogy but also mediated through the Incarnation. Faith’s more extended simile, comparing the Trinity to the first family of Adam, Eve, and Abel, signifies participation in the divine through family life.67 It concludes with a riddling formula: “‘In matrimonie aren thre and of o man cam alle thre, / And to Godhede goth thre, and o God is alle thre. / Lo, treys encountre treys,’ quod he, ‘in Godhede and in manhede’” (C.18.237– 39). The enigmatic phrasing, which includes an expression from dice games, invites contemplative play with the possible meanings.68 There may also be an echo here of the Neoplatonic, pseudo-Dionysian language of procession and return, translated to an immanent, natural procession by birth that is nonetheless destined for union with the Godhead whose “kynde” it shares, the ultimate meeting of divine and human made possible by the Incarnation.

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The last two in this series of analogies, those spoken by the Samaritan, build on the relationships of “kynde” already developed in the previous ones and point up the question of agency by focusing more on “unkyndeness.” To be unkind to one’s neighbor, to withhold charity (quoting 1 Cor. 13:1), is to cut oneself off from the loving action of God, to quench the Spirit, “Godes owene kynde” (C.19.254/B.17.272). The Samaritan makes this vivid in his second analogy by comparing the Trinity to a candle and unkyndeness to a wind that blows it out. Yet he also uses the candle analogy to express salvation by obedience: love and faith fan the flames and repentance gives them fuel. Adams sees here “radical human freedom for moral self-determination” and “an almost mechanical conception of the divine role in justification.”69 Such a view emphasizes human agency in accepting or rejecting divine grace, and grace is given by divine action in response—what has often been conceived on the analogy of a covenant between two people. Langland, however, frames the candle analogy so that it shifts between human and divine agency more enigmatically and portrays participation rather than covenantal exchange. The Samaritan introduces it with reference to workers using a candle but makes the image refer to God working love and faith in people, not just responding to them: And as wex and weke and warm fuyr togyderes Fostren forth a flaume and a feyr lye [fair blaze] That serveth this swynkares [these workers] to se by a-nyhtes, So doth the Sire and the Sone and Seynt Spirit togyderes Fostren forth amonges folke fyn love and bileve, That alle kyne Cristene clanseth of synne. (C.19.172–77/B.17.205–11) A worker holding a candle can already, in the poem’s theology of labor, be seen to participate in the creative work of God. At the end of the discussion of the candle analogy, it refers not to God but to the fulfillment of human participation in the Trinity through worship: “For every manere goed man may be likned to a torche, / Or elles to a taper, to reverense with the Trinite” (C.19.260–61/B.17.278–79). The candle image thus moves between different levels of agency: the natural, on which it is

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a mere tool that enables physical human agency; a human level of spiritual agency, on which it figures worship; and a divine level of spiritual agency, on which it figures divine action in humanity. The image of unkyndeness as blowing out the candle also operates on all three of these levels. To confine the candle image to divine agency collapses these levels onto a single plane where agents compete. Reducing the ambiguity of the image makes it easier to state its meaning in logical terms but makes an inadequate answer to an enigma that asks readers to imagine divine and human agency interpenetrating without competition. The Samaritan’s other analogy, to a hand, makes the Trinity more intimate by comparing it to a part of one’s own body. Most of the exposition of the image is directed, like Faith’s social analogies, toward understanding the three-in-oneness of the Trinity: the Father is the fist, the Son the fingers, and the Holy Spirit the palm. As a static image it is a clumsy one because the first component comprises the other two. The emphasis, however, is on the hand in action. This leads to a point about the sin against the Holy Spirit as unforgivable, since injury to the palm prevents the action of the whole hand, a topic then developed through the focus on “unkyndeness” in the image of the candle. Tacitly, however, the power of the hand analogy lies in comparing the Trinity to the main part of the body through which we act and the part that physically most distinguishes humans from other animals. The Trinity is known in human action because freedom to act in fully human ways follows from participation in divine action. One general function of the Trinitarian enigmas inserted in this vision’s narratives is to provide models for reading the action of God in history. Faith/Abraham provides another metaphor for the use of these enigmas when he calls himself the herald of a champion whose coat of arms, “thre persones in o pensel [one banner]” (C.18.188, cf. B.16.181), in turn occasions the ecclesial and familial similes of the Trinity discussed above. Just as a banner identifies an otherwise concealed jouster, the similes identify the champion who appears in the guise of the Good Samaritan. Yet, as Andrew Galloway has pointed out, the Trinitarian similes taught by Abraham and the Samaritan are notable for embracing physical analogues that have lowly associations with women and workers. Abraham’s not only treats the familial analogy that Augustine’s inward, mental

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emphasis led him to avoid but does so in a way that honors the generativity of bodily motherhood and links it to Christ despite—or rather, as implied by other passages, because of—its suffering and associations with passivity. Similarly, the Samaritan details how the candle of his second simile gladdens “werkmen / That worchen and waken in wynteres nyhtes” (C.19.184–85/B.17.218–19).70 Thus these lessons in reading the Trinity in the world not only make a theological point about participation in God’s “kynde” but model how to read the action of God in historical reality.71 Moreover, to read the tracks of the Trinity in action is already to participate in that action, the coming to consciousness of the Word as it returns to the Father.

POETRY AND SACRAMENT

Near the end of De Trinitate, Augustine locates himself where Langland places humanity at the end of the narrative that his fifth vision spins from 1 Corinthians 13: But you, O my soul, among all these things that I have said about that supreme trinity—and I dare not claim that any of them is worthy of this unimaginable mystery, but must rather confess that his knowledge is too wonderful for me and has been too mighty and I have not been capable of it—where do you perceive that you are among all these things, where do you lie or where do you stand until all your sicknesses are healed by him who has shown himself gracious to all your iniquities? You certainly realize that you are in that tavern to which that Samaritan brought the man he found half-dead from the many wounds inflicted on him by robbers. And yet you have seen many true things, and I do not mean with these eyes which see colored bodies, but the ones the man was praying about who said, “Let my eyes see justice.” (Ps. 17:11)72 Augustine then closes his great theological exploration with a prayer for salvation. Langland, whose climactic responses to the predicament of humanity are yet to come in the following visions, adapts the Parable of the

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Good Samaritan to imply, in part, the healing power of the poetry that this vision has named enigma. David Aers has shown how this episode most fully conveys Langland’s theology. It faces the effects of sin while figuring an authentically Augustinian double agency of divine grace and human free will in salvation. The remedy for semyvief, the half-dead victim in the parable, is the sacraments, which bring into the poem’s depiction of salvation an element of mediation through community that is lacking earlier in the poem.73 To Aers’s analysis of the narrative and dialectical significance of Langland’s handling of the parable, I would add the significance of its enigmatic style. Sacramental imagery here signifies not just authorized means of grace in scripture and sacrament but a sacramentalizing of all creation and any kind of human work, including poetry, as a means to greater participation. The enigmatic mode both extends this episode’s vision of how salvation is received and enacts it by the kind of attention it solicits. The Eucharist, as noted above in chapter 1 (in the section “The Enigmatic Metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas”), was no doubt the most prevalent experience of the enigmatic in medieval life. The sacraments were the prime locus of “the interweaving of natural and supernatural with human action.”74 When the elevation of the host became the prime mode of lay participation in the Eucharist, it became even more an act of reading. In the early thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse, a strong link between the Eucharistic elements and the rhetoric of enigma concludes the section of Latin meditations for use while prostrate during the Mass: “Grant, we beseech you, almighty God, that him whom we see enigmatically and under another form, on whom we feed sacramentally on earth, we may see face to face.”75 The use of enigmatice as an adverb explained by “under another form” and without reference to “per speculum” from 1 Corinthians 13:12 shows, again, the conception of enigma as a separate metaphor and its theological use in a technical sense derived from rhetoric. What is seen in the sacrament is also mediated in various textual enigmas by Langland (as well as Julian and others) toward the same end of a greater sharing in the mysterious life of the Trinity. There are two distinct references to sacramental imagery in the Samaritan’s actions and words, and they pass from simple transmission of the biblical text to Langlandian play with image and interpretation. The first describes the Samaritan’s actions when he stops to tend to semyvief:

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And unbokelede his boteles, and bothe he atamede [opened]. With wyn and with oyle his woundes he can lithe [ease the pain of ], Enbaumed hym and boend his heved [bound his head], and on bayard [a horse] hym sette And ladde hym forth to Lavacrum-lex-Dei, a grange. (C.19.70–73, cf. B.17.69–72) These lines add little to Luke 10:34–35. Washing the wounds with wine and oil was commonly read in reference to the sacraments of baptism, penance, and the Eucharist.76 The name of the “grange,” changed from the B text’s “Lex Christi” to C’s “Lavacrum-lex-Dei” (bath of the law of God), adds, as Pearsall notes, further suggestions of both baptism and penance. Indeed, it recalls the elaborate image of Charity’s penitential laundry from earlier in this vision (C.16.328–34/B.15.186–94). Jill Mann has pointed to that passage as an example of how Langland’s allegories bend the spiritual back onto the worldly: “So far from seeing Charity’s laundry-work as purely metaphorical, we derive the impression that washing clothes could really have a penitential dimension.”77 Something similar happens to the sacramental significance of caring for the wounded when Langland concludes the quest for charity by retelling the story of the Good Samaritan. He both invokes standard allegorical interpretations and extends them to real instances of charitable work (and maybe giving or even taking a bath). A second passage, while emphasizing the need for the canonical sacraments as a reception of the saving action of Christ, also further cultivates this sacramental view of ordinary life. After the Samaritan leaves semyvief with the hosteler to recuperate, Faith, Hope, and the dreamer all follow him, an addition to the action of the Gospel parable that further integrates it with the poetic exposition of 1 Corinthians, since chapter 14 begins “Sectamini caritatem . . .” (“Follow charity . . .”).78 When he hears how Faith and Hope avoided the wounded semyvief : “Have hem excused,” quod the Samaritaen, “here [their] helpe may not availe, Ne no medicyne under molde [earth] the man to hele [health] brynge— Nother Faith ne fyn Hope, so festred aren his woundes;

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Withoute the bloed of a barn [child] he beth nat ysaved— The whiche barn mote nedes be born of a mayde— And with the bloed of that barn enbaumed and ybaptised. And thouh he stande and steppe, right stronge worth he nevere Til he have eten all that barn and his bloed dronken, And yut be plasterud with pacience when {priketh hym fondynges} [temptations].” (C.19.83–91/B.17.91–98) This shocking insistence on the blood of a child does several things at once. A bloody infant is an image recognizable from various common Eucharistic miracle stories meant to build faith in the efficacy of the sacrament and associated with the rise of affective piety.79 Schmidt has suggested that the phrasing here might evoke instead “demonic childsacrifice,”80 and the description of doing various things with the blood might also call to mind alchemical rites. Such a clash of positive and negative associations commands interpretive attention. In the narrative, this passage reaches both backward to the birth and childhood of Christ seen in the inner vision of the Tree of Charity and forward to the Passion yet to be narrated. In addition, imagery of healing and eating in this passage brings out the sacramental potential of such imagery spread throughout the poem. The most surprising part of the earlier retelling of Christ’s life during the fifth vision’s inner dream is its framing of his earthly ministry as the practice of a “lechecraeft,” medical skill, learned from Liberum Arbitrium (C.18.138, or Piers in B.16.104). This is the center of an important constellation of medical images for the work of grace that begins in the first vision with the Plant of Peace as “treacle” and “spice” and recurs throughout the poem.81 Christ’s training in lechecraft, because it comes from an allegorical figure of human capacity and pertains to both physical and spiritual healing, fuses the literal and spiritual domains of the metaphor. The Samaritan continues the metaphor, now in an allegory of treating primarily spiritual sickness, yet the potential remains for physical medicine, like physical cleansing, to gain spiritual significance. Similarly, eating and drinking the child’s body and blood, while referring to the Eucharist, also invokes a strong and diffuse web of references to eating

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and drinking throughout the poem that both allegorize spiritual reality and sacramentalize ordinary eating, beginning with the street vendor’s cry “Hote pyes, hote!” at the end of the prologue (C.pr.227, B.pr.226, A.pr.104) and culminating when Conscience presides at the Eucharist in the barn called Unity Holy Church.82 Langland’s enigmatic style, with its play between letter and spirit, history and transcendence, has a salutary effect of cultivating a view of the spiritual in the ordinary. While this passage activates broad networks of meaning about eating, washing, and tending wounds, its central thrust remains the necessity of the canonical sacraments themselves. It invites renewed understanding of their meaning. The relation between the enigmatic and the sacraments is twofold: the sacraments epitomize the metaphysics of participation the enigmatic is grounded on, and in turn the enigmatic can restore to the practice of the sacraments a fuller reception of their truth. Like anything so important to a powerful institution’s projection of its authority, the sacraments tend toward a rhetoric that is either didactic or esoteric.83 Their meaning can be reduced to rote or removed to mystification in any number of ways. In the case of the Eucharist, consolidation of the doctrine of transubstantiation led, on one hand, to repetition, in devotional as well as academic texts, of the formula of physical appearance and spiritual reality made authoritative by the Fourth Lateran Council.84 Although the verse “It seems white, and is red . . .” uses a riddling form and begins by imagining something bloody like the Samaritan’s prescription, by the end of its five lines it reads more like the answer to a catechetical question.85 Even the Eucharistic hymns attributed to Aquinas, for all their play with paradox, revolve around teaching a certain propositional version of how to understand the sacrament. On the other hand, the esoteric tendency appears in stories about the powers attributed to the sacrament and the dangers of transgressing it or voiding it through misperformance. To take one example, Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne tells a story derived from Bede of a captured knight whose brother, an abbot, thinking him dead, says Masses for his soul. Their effect, since he is not in purgatory, is instead to prevent any fetters from binding him, an effect attributed by his captors to sorcery or witchcraft.86 The Samaritan’s words might seem similarly occult. But because his references to the sacraments are easily recognized yet unfamiliar and perhaps disturbing, they are more likely to engage thought than to lull it

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into mere acceptance of a formula, whether comprehended or not. They do not so much contain an understanding of the sacraments as provoke questions and desire that could lead to fuller understanding. In this vision’s fictional narrative, the Samaritan’s words prophesy something unknown, a fulfillment expected by Faith, Hope, and the Samaritan himself, even as he prefigures Christ. For the reader, playing along and recognizing what the prophecy refers to, there is potential for further wonder about how the sacraments provide the remedy that the faith of Abraham, the hope associated with Israel in the wilderness and the giving of the law, and Christ’s teaching in the parables could only look forward to. What is the power of “the blood of that barn,” and how do the sacraments transmit it? This passage does not answer these questions, but the poem’s following visions use enigmatic allegories of the Passion story, the Eucharist, and Penance as well as metaphors of eating and drinking, medicine, and other aspects of ordinary life to imagine this power and how the church can participate in it, or fail to. Piers Plowman here develops a general link between the medieval poetics of enigma and the sacraments. Both place readers or recipients in that in-between space diagrammed by the tearing of the outer veil of the temple: entering the truth of Christ that unveils the mysteries of the Old Testament but still awaiting the revelation of the heavenly mysteries signified by the symbols of the New Covenant. This, in fact, is how Aquinas explains the necessity of the sacraments against the objection that “figures should cease once the truth comes.”87 Similar connections between medieval sacramental theology and the poetics of enigma could be multiplied. Hugh of St. Victor’s On the Sacraments pivotally articulates a notion of sacrament in which the canonical rites are the center of the way of reading endlessly back and forth between history and spirit, keyed to scripture, that he lays out in the Didascalicon. Among modern historians of theology, de Lubac has influentially recovered both this link between exegesis and the sacraments and the quality of mystery essential to both. His comments on medieval theologians’ use of the term mystery expand it from something signified to an action participated in, so that the poetics of enigma can be seen to be like the sacraments, not just when it signifies the same theological truths, but when it conveys a similar kind of relationship and invites a similar act of apprehension, at least its interpretive component.

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It is not only in its content, because of what it designates, that the mystery is essentially an action. . . . It focuses less on the apparent sign, or rather the hidden reality, than on both at the same time: on their mutual relationship, union and implications, on the way in which one passes into the other, or is penetrated by the other. It focuses on the appeal which the first term makes to the second, or better, on the hidden presence of the second term within the first, already at work secretly but effectively. . . . I would add that, as the basis of this double aptitude, this is the ratio mystica through which the thing lies within the sign, and the sign, in some way, and to different degrees depending on the case, participates in the higher reality of the thing.88 The poetics of enigma follows from a view of the unlimited reality of such participation and cultivates a habit of reading such signification, of bringing to consciousness meanings already given. The Eucharist in particular carries a communal dimension of this mystery that is important to the poetics of enigma, especially as practiced by Langland. One of the ancient meanings of the Eucharistic corpus mysticum, in addition to the historical, resurrected body of Christ and the presence of Christ in the elements of the liturgical rite, is the corporate body of Christ made up of the faithful, as taught by Paul in 1 Corinthians 12. De Lubac shows how the pressure of Eucharistic controversy, among other developments in medieval theology, led to a specialization of terminology, so that corpus mysticum came to be used mainly for the corporate body and other terms were used for Christ’s presence in history and in the ritual elements.89 Yet Jennifer Garrison has argued that the linkages between different senses of “the body of Christ” persisted in late medieval literature, both Latin and vernacular. For Langland, Eucharistic signs do not just meet the general need “to understand the complex ways in which signs provide access to the divine”; they also transmit the “obligation to become one with that signified body.”90 In the Eucharist especially, enigmatic signs have both a vertical and a horizontal dimension. They mediate relationship both to the divine and to the human community. To partake of the sacrament is both to participate in the transcendent meaning of its signs and to participate in the communal body of

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believers. Discussion of the sacraments often uses the language of participation in a weak sense, as in partaking of a meal, but the poetics of enigma requires a stronger sense: to understand a spiritual sign is to experience, to be joined with, to receive the reality it refers to. The Samaritan’s imagery of blood brings attention to this horizontal dimension and extends it to other sacraments. What would it mean, not only to have shared in the meal of the child’s body and blood, but to share the mark of having been embalmed and baptized by it? Though embalming can mean any anointing, the suggestion of death, along with the rebirth of baptism, could call to mind the resurrected body of Christ to which the faithful are somehow joined, and the sharing of one blood implies being joined in one body. The seventh vision’s allegory of the barn of Unity draws explicitly on St. Paul’s discussion of spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12, which follows his instructions about receiving the Eucharist and leads to the image of the body of Christ.91 This charismatic approach to Christian community through word and sacrament is often at odds with church hierarchy and thus resembles critiques of the church as institution made during the fourteenth century by Dante, Marsilius of Padua, Wyclif, and even Ockham.92 Only Dante, however, approaches Langland’s emphasis on the enigmatic as a means of participation that is both spiritual and ecclesial. The junction between Langland’s poetic commentary on 1 Corinthians 13 and his invocation of the power of the sacraments, which itself arises from Paul’s text, crystallizes a final point about his poetics. Even while his poem defers to scripture and the sacraments, it also implies a challenging claim to share, largely through enigmatic language, in their power.93 Perhaps above all, this shared poetics of enigma realizes its power by forming a community of reader-recipients, identified less as subjects of the hierarchical authority of didactic texts or esoteric rites than as fellow participants in the ongoing revelation of mystery in action.

JULIAN’S PARABLE OF THE LORD AND THE SERVANT

Among the early readers of Piers Plowman may well have been Julian of Norwich. If her work shows Langland’s influence, the strongest mark of

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it is her use of a poetics of scriptural enigma much like his, especially as she approaches the most theologically dense and innovative part of her text. On the other hand, if she did not read Piers Plowman, her work is an even more remarkable witness to the presence of a poetics of enigma in late medieval English vernacular writing. In either case, the passage of Julian’s Long Text centered on her parable of the lord and the servant reinforces a pattern shared with Langland and rooted in Latin theological writing, Augustine’s above all: 1 Corinthians 13:12 as a way of situating theological knowledge and authorship; enigmatic modes at multiple levels that sustain and deepen an interpretive process; expansion and imitation of biblical parables; and the use of enigmatic language to articulate and enact the theological inheritance commonly called participation. The sixteen “shewings” that make up Julian of Norwich’s “revelation of love,” focused on Christ’s incarnation and passion, the Trinity, and the “oning” (union) of the soul with God, present a very different textual world than the encyclopedic, politically engaged dream-visions of Piers Plowman.94 Julian’s work is intimate and mystical, while Langland’s is expansive and allegorical. Yet both, in their latest forms, are the products of at least twenty years spent interpreting their visions, revising their initial tellings, and adding new parts that deepen, clarify, and reorient what has gone before. Both invite their readers into a similar work of interpretation and reinterpretation—Julian more explicitly than Langland. Her final chapter starts, “This boke is begonne by Goddes gifte and his grace, but it is not yet performed, as to my sight. For charite pray we alle togeder, with Goddes wurking: thanking, trusting, enjoyeng” (86.1–3). Prayer, for Julian, as is abundantly clear by the end of her text, also includes reading the totality of one’s experience with eyes of faith, eyes that have been formed, both for her and for her readers, through the process recorded in her text. Julian and Langland share what Barbara Newman has called an “aesthetic of process.”95 This, according to Newman, sets Julian’s text apart from the claims to authority made by other visionaries of the late Middle Ages: “Just as Langland rejects the convention of the single revelatory, self-authorizing dream, Julian renounces a claim that almost all other women’s vision-texts make either explicitly or implicitly—the claim that their visions are self-interpreting.”96 Julian does not claim to have fully

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understood the import of her vision at once, nor does she have it explained for her by a visionary guide. Rather, her text accumulates layers of vision and keys to understanding that initiate a process of contemplation even more than they give insights—much as Langland’s series of visions engages in constant revision. Julian’s faculties are not suspended but active, like Langland’s dreamer in dialogue with his guides, and vision becomes so entangled with interpretation as to become inseparable.97 The resulting texts are not highly wrought literary products but rather honor the messy, unfinished business of the process, so that “both narratives encourage a response of deep if puzzled immersion in their mystery, rather than the awed admiration we pay as tribute to Pearl or the Commedia.”98 Nicholas Watson, comparing the work of Julian and Langland with others that also show the theological potential of the vernacular, similarly finds theirs set apart by the degree to which they insist “on the endlessness of the truths to be found within their pages but also on their own incompleteness.”99 Julian’s parable of the lord and the servant, the most sustained, self-conscious act of interpreting an enigma in Middle English literature, projects more carefully and thoroughly than Piers Plowman the capacity of such reading to lead to theological understanding and to reveal a way of being that the reader can inhabit. (I will return at the end of this chapter to the question of Julian as a reader of Langland.) The parable of the lord and the servant is not present in the Short Text of Julian’s Revelation, even though the Long Text implies that it was among what she calls the “shewings” that she received on May 13, 1373, during a grave illness. Not until nearly twenty years later, she says in the course of discussing the parable, did she receive the further revelation she needed in order to understand it and, apparently, to write about it (51.73).100 As the only part of the showings themselves that Julian excluded from the short text, commonly taken as written first, the parable also has a special status that derives from the difficulty she had interpreting it. It fits, however, into a larger pattern of revision (resulting in a text nearly six times as long) that adds primarily to the interpretive component of each showing and thus takes on authority derived more from interpretation than visionary experience.101 After describing the parable, she says it included “as it were the beginning of an A. B. C., wherby I may have some understonding of our lordes mening” (51.228–30), as if it

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taught the way of reading that she needed in order to further understand her visions, and which, perhaps even more than the several messages of the visions themselves, she seeks to teach her readers.102 Understanding this reading lesson seems to have helped Julian write the well-known parts of her text that follow after it in the long fourteenth revelation—on the “substance” and “sensuality” of human nature and on the motherhood of Jesus—which unfold her version of a theology of participation in more conceptual and discursive language. Early in this longest addition to Julian’s Long Text, a reworking of 1 Corinthians 13:12 joins the tradition of commentary on this verse and indicates the new material’s expanded focus on how one can enter into fuller participation in the divine. The material carried over from the short text concerns prayer, which, says Julian, “oneth [unites] the soule to God” (43.1). After these two and a half chapters of specific directions about prayer, midway through chapter 43, Julian makes a transition to the larger topic that will occupy the new section that continues through chapter 63: the conditions of human knowledge of the divine, both its limitations in this life and how it can most anticipate the fullness to come. And thus shalle we, with his swete grace, in our owne meke, continual prayer come into him now in this life by many prevy touchinges of swete, gostly sightes and felinges, mesured to us as oure simpilhed may bere it. And this is wrought and shall be by the grace of the holy gost, so long till we shall die in longing for love. And than shall we alle come into oure lorde, oureselfe clerely knowing and God fulsomly having; and we endlesly be alle had in God, him verely seyeng and fulsomly feling, and him gostely hering, and him delectably smelling, and him swetly swelwing. And than shall we se God face to face, homely and fulsomly. The creature that is made shall see and endlesly beholde God which is the maker. For thus may no man se God and live after, that is to sey, in this dedely life. But whan he of his special grace will shewe him here, he strengtheth the creature aboven the selfe, and he mesureth the shewing after his awne wille, as it is profitable for the tym. (43.36–47) Julian’s amplification of 1 Corinthians 13:12 here both accentuates the contrast in St. Paul’s descriptions of knowledge “now” and “then” and

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treats the two kinds of knowledge as essentially continuous. St. Paul’s metaphors of mirror and riddle become “swete, gostly sightes and felinges,” “gostly sight” being the same term Julian uses to describe the most profound and inexpressible component of her showings.103 Her phrase “oureselfe clerely knowing and God fulsomely having” recalls the standard Augustinian interpretation of “in aenigmate” that sees the chief enigma as the human image as known in oneself. The adverbs combine precision and fullness as characteristics of the knowledge that the enigmatic anticipates.104 Likewise, as she does throughout her Revelation, Julian emphasizes here the fruitful interplay between enigmatic knowledge and spiritual desire, leading, as she explains in the next chapter, to love. Knowledge face to face will still be “gostly” and sweet but will become more intense and enjoyable. It will still be sight and feeling but will involve the other, more intimate senses as well.105 Finally, in this passage, Julian considers what happens when a “creature” is given a vision beyond her own capacity. The remainder of her fourteenth revelation will explore how this works and what its transformative effects are on the creature in relation to self, God, and other Christians. Though Julian does not use the terms mirror and enigma here, her reference to the verse is strong and pivotal enough to suggest that the essay on spiritual hermeneutics to come can be taken as a sort of extended gloss on them. When Julian comes to the parable itself, she labels its difference from the rest of her text with two terms that, together, capture well in Middle English the kinds of literary expression that had become attached to per speculum in aenigmate: “And then oure curteyse lorde answered in shewing, full mistely, by a wonderful example of a lorde that hath a servant, and gave me sight to my understanding of both” (51.1–3). First, she says that this showing, unlike the others, came “full mistely.” From the contemporary uses of mistily given by the Oxford English Dictionary, Colledge and Walsh judge that Julian blends senses related to both mist and mystic, both visual obscurity as if concealed by a mist and hidden spiritual significance “pertaining to the mysteries of the faith.”106 Second, Julian classifies this showing as an “example,” a word derived from Latin exemplum, which had a literary sense meaning an instructive narrative, such as a parable, often used in sermons.107 Julian’s narrative has obvious similarities to the characters and plots of many of the Gospel parables, above all that of the Prodigal Son.108 To a modern ear, at least, calling it a parable

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best captures its combination of brief, enigmatic narrative with equally enigmatic commentary. Together, then, the phrase “misty example” that she uses elsewhere might be translated “enigmatic parable,” as Nicholas Watson suggests.109 Its authority and impact come from opening up interpretive possibilities it by no means exhausts. The “misty example,” that is, works rather like a riddle by holding open two lines of interpretation at once and building further spiritual meaning from the relations between them, much as the enigmas of figural reading work in medieval exegesis. This is how it answers Julian’s dilemma and leads her onward. The enigmatic is, for Julian as for Langland, a way of responding to the conflict between the official authority of the church and the more compassionate perspective on sinners that their visions lead them to. Julian makes an explicit contrast between two “domes,” judgments: “God demeth us upon oure kindely substance, which is ever kepte one in him, hole and safe without ende, and this dome is of his rightfulhede. And man demeth upon oure changeable sensualite, which semeth now one and now another, after that it taketh of the parties and shewith outward” (45.1–4).110 From this description, it might seem that the higher, divine judgment is more didactic because single and unchanging (and more esoteric because “kept”), whereas the lower, human judgment is more enigmatic because it includes multiple perspectives. Yet the higher judgment is the one shown throughout her revelations, in which God assigns to humanity “no maner of blame.” The lower, on the other hand, is that of “holy church” in which “sinners be sometime wurthy blame and wrath, and theyse two culde I not see in God” (45.12–19). The puzzle is how these could in some sense both be true in such a way that the higher one be more true and include the lower. “Then was this my desyer: that I might se in God in what manner that the dome of holy church herein techeth is tru in his sight, and howe it longeth to me sothly to know it, whereby they might both be saved, so as it ware wurshipfulle to God and right wey to me. And to alle this I ne had no nother answere but a mervelous example of a lorde and of a servant, as I shall sey after, and that full mistely shewed” (45.23–27). The conflict between the two judgments is not merely between visionary experience and institutional teaching but between the perspective of eternity, only partially available now, and the perspective from within history and the effects of the Fall, where we necessarily begin and which dominates our view in this life.

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Julian poses the opposition between the judgment of Holy Church and that of God more clearly than Langland and thus brings into acute focus the problem of sin, which takes a particular shape in a theology of participation. If all human agency is a participation in divine agency, where does sin come from? How do humans have agency to disobey the perfect, all-powerful will of God? The classic, Augustinian answer, based on a view of evil as privation of goodness and being, sees sin as permitted by God and as a failure of human agency turning from freedom to bondage. This basic, privative view is apparent in Julian but for the most part not stated explicitly and not in those terms. Rather, especially in the long section centered on her parable, she wrestles not so much with the origin or metaphysical status of evil as with God’s response. She sees no wrath or blame in God. The question of God’s response to sin can be seen, however, as a version of the same problem of agency. Do humans have the agency to cause something that requires a response from God? The notion that sin causes divine anger that needs to be appeased or an infinite debt that must be repaid leads to the satisfaction theory of Atonement that has received various formulations beginning with Anselm. A sense of divine anger places divine and human agency at odds, with—to put it reductively, but also in keeping with a powerful set of underlying theological metaphors—God as a spurned sovereign and humanity as the subjects who have declared independence. The distinction between the absolute and the ordained power of God that became central to much fourteenth-century theology formalizes this metaphor. While it saves a sense of God’s transcendent agency through the idea of absolute power, it sets off a sphere of independent agency for humanity under God’s ordained power, where the ordinance has to do precisely with how God responds to human initiative. Reconciliation then becomes a matter of acting according to the terms of a covenant set by the sovereign (so-called semi-Pelagianism). The other option, with human agency not seen as participatory, is overpowering divine grace (the so-called Augustinianism of Bradwardine). Neither of these is Julian’s understanding of reconciliation and union with God.111 The central mystery of Julian’s parable is that God heals the Fall by participating in it. Sin is both real, something done by humans contrary to God’s will, and yet also contained within God’s agency and always already reconciled. Indeed, it is part of a higher will that realizes a greater

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glory. She will try various ways of conceptualizing the theology contained in the parable and unfolding the interpretation included in it, but none of them, neither the terminology of substance and sensuality nor the portrayal of Jesus as Mother, is a fully adequate explication. The parable itself remains her furthest penetration of the higher “dome” that remains available to only partial understanding. Its importance for the poetics of enigma is threefold: it shows the most intensive, sustained use of figurative language for doing theology; it confronts the hardest problem for a theology of participation; and it includes Julian’s fullest reflections on how her experience of contemplating her revelations is itself a means of becoming conscious of participation in the Trinity and being rescued from the blindness that she sees at the root of sin. In her initial telling, Julian already signals the parable’s interpretive complexities, but its basic narrative is as simple as can be: a lord sends his servant to do his will, and the servant, “in gret hast for love to do his lordes wille,” falls in a ditch and is unable to rise (51.11–12). Before she even tells this story, however, Julian makes clear that this action— in exegetical terms, the literal sense—includes a double perspective on both lord and servant: “That one perty was shewed gostly in bodely liknesse. That other perty was shewed more gostly withoute bodely liknes” (51.4–5). So after the servant falls, she sees pity on the lord’s face, but, “with a leding of my understanding in to the lorde” (51.36), she also sees that his goodness is such that he will reward the servant even better than if he had never fallen in the ditch. She describes the effect of this understanding again in terms that start to blur distinctions between letter and commentary: “And in this, an inwarde gostely shewing of the lordes mening descended into my soule, in which I saw that it behoveth nedes to be, standing his gret goodness and his owne wurshippe, that his deerworthy servant, which he loved so moch, shulde be hyely and blissefully rewarded withoute end, above that he shulde have be if he had not fallen” (51.45–49). The literal content, in the thoughts attributed to one of its characters, looks ahead to a resolution that lies beyond the narrative, one that Julian will approach only by mixing story and commentary. These two components, more distinct at the beginning of her long chapter, alternate more rapidly as it progresses, until by the end the important distinction is not between narrative and meaning but between two simul-

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taneous visions of the same story, each with its own set of imagery and interpretation. The result achieves a richness of theological implication that defies summary analysis.112 The principal engine that elevates Julian’s understanding through the parable and moves toward a vision of participation is the understanding that the servant is both Adam and Christ. “When Adam felle, Godes sonne fell. For the rightful oning which was made in heven, Goddes sonne might not be seperath from Adam, for by Adam I understond alle man. Adam fell fro life to deth: into the slade of this wreched worlde, and after that into hell. Goddes son fell with Adam into the slade of the maidens wombe, which was the fairest doughter of Adam—and that for to excuse Adam from blame in heven and in erth—and mightely he feched him out of hell” (51.185–91). To say how these two can be the same, how the fall into the ditch can mean both the Fall in Eden and the Incarnation, will occupy the rest of Julian’s text and remain beyond it. The Incarnation overcomes the divide between what she calls human “sensuality” and “substance” and reveals what she will conceive as the maternal face of God. Meanwhile, Julian condenses the already enigmatic language of Adam as a type of Christ from Romans 5 and from 1 Corinthians 15 into a sort of double vision that glimpses the divine in the human and the human in the divine. Julian’s parable, together with her visions of Christ on the cross, could be seen as a sequel to Bonaventure’s concentration, at the end of the Itinerarium, on both the apophatic surplus of meaning and the cross. She offers, not an answer to the riddles of how the transcendent Trinity is supremely revealed and made available to humanity in the suffering Christ, but a model of entering playfully into the mysteries. The enigmatic operates in Julian’s parable on both the largest scale of the entire narrative patterns by which the Fall is seen to be recapitulated and redeemed in Christ and the smallest scale of particular details. Julian unfolds the richness of spiritual interpretation by returning to the literal, especially to the servant’s clothes, which remain linked to Adam: “By the wisdom and the goodnesse that was in the servant is understond Goddes son. By the pore clothing as a laborer, stonding nere the left side, is understonde the manhode and Adam, with alle the mischefe and febilnesse that foloweth. For in alle this, oure good lorde shewed his owne

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son and Adam but one man” (51.192–95). As he becomes a sign of the Incarnation, by which all blame is done away, the servant’s clothes too gain new meaning by showing how Jesus has taken on Adam’s estate of embodiment, poverty, labor, and travail. When she retells the parable as the story of Christ, beginning with the Incarnation, the damage evident in the servant’s clothes signifies the suffering that is Christ’s own proper work: “the sweppes and the scorges, the thornes and the nailes, the drawing and the dragging, his tender flesh renting” (51.246–48). Rather than linger at the stage of meditation on the Passion that was typical of affective piety, however, Julian briskly tells the Harrowing and sees the servant’s clothes as those of the resurrected and ascended Christ: “And oure foule dedely flesh, that Goddes sone toke upon him—which was Adams olde kirtel, straite, bare, and shorte—then by oure savioure was made fair, new, whit, and bright, and of endlesse clennesse, wide and side, fair and richar than was the clothing which I saw on the fader. For that clothing was blew, and Cristes clothing is now of fair, semely medolour [mixture] which is so mervelous that I can it not discrive, for it is all of very wurshippe” (51.259–64). Here is the end of the story, which until now had ended with the servant writhing in the ditch. But it would be better to say that here the beginning of the story is transfigured, its inner truth now outwardly manifest. Impossibly, Christ’s glory is greater than the Father’s, so that rather than a clear point of Trinitarian doctrine, we are left with the dim imagination of divine joy in the glory of the other. The sight of Christ’s transfigured clothes is indescribable, just as the reality of now-hidden but already-given-in-Christ human happiness is incomprehensible.113 What follows after Julian’s meditation on the parable transforms concepts drawn from more properly theological discourse in light of it. After the final image of the servant/Son glorified and restored to the right hand of his lord/Father, Julian begins chapter 52, “And thus I saw that God enjoyeth that he is our fader, and God enjoyeth that he is our moder, and God enjoyeth that he is our very spouse, and our soule his loved wife” (52.1–3). The ensuing passage, which is also entirely new to the long text, includes her most noted contributions to medieval mystical theology. Central ideas developed here unfold what is already implied in the parable, including why the mode of the parable is itself unsurpassed in mediating the fullness of what Julian received in her revelations.

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Closest in style to the academic theology of her time is her analysis of the relationship between human nature and God in terms of the distinction between what she calls our “substance” and our “sensuality.” She introduces this distinction even before her parable in connection with the contrast between the judgment of God and that of the church: And the more knowing and understonding by the gracious leding of the holy gost that we have of these two domes, the more we shalle see and know oure failinges. And ever the more that we see them, the more kindly by grace we shall long to be fulfilled of endlesse joy and blisse, for we be made therto. And oure kindely substance is now blisseful in God, and hath bene sithen it was made, and shalle be withoute ende. But oure passing living that we have in our sensualite knoweth not what ourselfe is but in our faith. (45.30–46.2) Julian’s phrase “kindely substance” links her language for participation to Langland’s. What Langland implies through his flexible use of “kynde” for God, human nature, and a kind of knowledge that brings them closer, Julian’s develops more precisely and rigorously.114 Through the parable’s way of understanding “oure failinges,” Julian can return to this language of substance and sensuality in order to press further into the higher vision that is available to our substance and yet see how even our sensuality is taken up into God’s mercy. She uses the terms kynde and substance carefully and flexibly to describe a union between God, “substantial kinde unmade” (53.39), and an aspect of human nature that is untouched by the Fall and that remains knit to God by a “knot . . . so suttel and so mighty that it it is oned into God, in which oning it is made endlesly holy” (53.50–52). Langland’s “kynde knowing” receives a partial gloss in Julian’s discussion and exploration of “gostly” or high understanding that leads into consciousness of substantial union and glimpses of God’s own judgment: “A hye understanding it is inwardly to se and to know that God, which is oure maker, wonneth in oure soule; and a higher understanding it is and more, inwardly to se and to know oure soule, that is made, wonneth in God in substance—of which substaunce, by God, we be that we be” (54.9–12). Both Langland’s “kynde knowing” and Julian’s knowledge according to substance involve a created, natural participation restored and elevated by grace.

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“Sensuality” is the aspect of human nature that experiences the Fall and the aspect of the soul that is joined to the body. Whereas substance participates in all three persons of the Trinity, sensuality participates in the second person, and indeed it is in Christ that “oure two kindes be oned” (57.16). As in the parable, then, the Fall is in one sense always already remedied in our participation in the Incarnation. Yet sin is real and the soul remains in need of remedy: “For into the time that it is in the full mightis, we may not be alle full holy—and that is that oure sensualite, by the vertu of Cristes passion, be brought up into the substance, with all the profites of our tribulation that our lorde shall make us to get by mercy and grace” (56.29–32). Julian makes the distinction between substance and sensuality into a basis for thinking about sin and salvation through a corresponding distinction between God’s action in “kinde” and in mercy and grace: “For in kinde we have our life and oure being, and in mercy and grace we have oure encres and oure fulfilling” (56.37– 38).115 God’s work “in kinde” corresponds to substantial union as a result of Creation that is given apart from any human action and remains essentially untouched by it—what I have called passive participation. Mercy and grace address sensuality and are gifts that need to be received, though even the ability to receive them comes from the “kinde goodhede that we have of [God]” (57.10). From this gift of mercy and grace come all the other gifts pertaining to salvation, which enact it—make it active participation—in body, time, and history: loving and keeping what God commands, hating and refusing what God forbids, practicing the sacraments and the virtues (57.25–35). Julian’s understanding of sensuality, then, begins to explicate both the participation in Christ signified in the parable by the fact that the servant is both Adam and Christ and what is implied in the latter part when Adam is restored through Christ. But the distinction of substance and sensuality, far from exhausting the parable, only half explains what it means for Christ to share Adam’s fall. With her meditations on the motherhood of God, Julian returns from the quasi-Scholastic language of substance and sensuality to the more figurative language of her revelations in general and to her parable in particular. Union with Christ in sensuality is a way of thinking about the doctrine of the Incarnation, but the motherhood of the second person of the Trinity extends to include the Passion, how and why God

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shares in humanity’s fall not just into embodiment but into the suffering of sin and thereby overcomes it. Indeed, Julian expresses her insight into participation in Christ through several images of kinship, of which motherhood is the most prominent and powerful. Christ joins the kinship within the Trinity to human kinship by being a member of both systems, just as in Faith/Abraham’s familial analogy of the Trinity.116 Julian enriches the analogy of motherhood into a wonderfully fertile vehicle for contemplation by combining the most universal and familiar experience of love with revelations she has had about the Virgin Mary and Christ’s passion. Her use of the image goes far beyond the forms of riddling (How is Jesus like a mother?), yet considering it as an enigma draws attention to the fact that its purpose is cognitive at least as much as it is affective. By meditation on Jesus as Mother, Julian comes to the fullest understanding, not just of God’s love, but of human falling and how God’s love is known most in our falling: “And by the assey of this falling we shalle have an high and a mervelous knowing of love in God without ende. For hard and mervelous is that love which may not, nor will not, be broken for trespas” (61.20–23). The pure love of God in the face of sin is the higher “dome” to which the parable was her primary answer, and in that sense the motherhood of Jesus is part of Julian’s understanding of that enigma.117 The form of the parable and the interpretive process that unwinds from it are crucial to how it shows and, in part, gives a remedy for the blindness that Julian sees as the root of sin. “For if,” she says of humanity, “he saw God continually, he shulde have no mischevous feling, ne no maner stering no sorowing that serveth to sinne” (47.16–17). In the section on Jesus as Mother, Julian uses a particularly resonant Middle English verb to express what begins his whole reconciling work: “He kindeleth oure understanding, he prepareth oure weyes, he eseth oure consciens, he conforteth our soule, he lighteth oure harte and geveth us in party knowing and loving in his blisseful godhede—with gracious minde in his swete manhood and his blessed passion, with curtesse merveling in his hye, overpassing goodnesse—and maketh us to love all that he loveth for his love, and to be well apaid with him and with alle his werkes” (61.3–8). The first verb here, kindel, combines two senses with separate etymologies: setting on fire, the familiar modern sense; and giving birth, derived

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from kindel as a noun meaning the offspring of any animal, which in turn derives from kynde.118 The “kindeling” of understanding makes it, in a sense, the first work of Jesus as Mother and combines elements of participation in Trinitarian “kynde” developed separately in Langland’s analogies of family, hand, and candle. The motherhood of Christ conveys the creation and restoration of God’s image in humanity much as psychological analogies and the language of Christ as Word do in Augustine.119 Yet Julian’s fullest explanation of how this “kindeling” came to her is contained in the narration of her parable. Realizing that not only this “marvelous . . . misty example” but “every shewing” is full of hidden meaning, she enumerates “thre propertes in which I am somdele esed” despite the lack of full understanding: “The furst is the beginning of teching that I understode therin in the same time. The secunde is the inwarde lerning that I have understonde therein sithen. The third is alle the hole revelation, fro the beginning to the ende, which oure lorde God of his goodnes bringeth oftimes frely to the sight of my understonding. And theyse thre be so oned, as to my understonding, that I can not nor may deperte them” (51.63–68). Watson points out the parallels between these three and the Augustinian psychological triads to which Julian alludes throughout her Revelation. The “beginning of teaching” implies memory, associated with might and the Father; “inward lerning” suggests reason and the wisdom of the Son; “the hole revelation,” perhaps by way of evoking its effect, then relates to the will and love, which Augustine links to the Holy Spirit. Applied to her book, this hermeneutic asserts, by virtue of the principle of three-in-one, that “her written account of the ‘revelation of love’ is authentic not in spite of the fact that, but because, revelation and interpretation are impossible to disentangle.”120 Further, what Watson calls her “Trinitarian hermeneutic” asserts that revelation and interpretation are a participation in the Trinity. Divine and human agency are inseparable, and her twenty-year process of interpretation is as much a work of God as the initial revelation. Moreover, this hermeneutic passage is appropriately embedded in the parable because the parable at once distends the interpretive process to the maximum extent and maximally compresses its three components in the telling. The second component, “inwarde lerning,” if it means her interpretive conclusions, does not simply supersede or complete the ini-

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tial vision but instead requires a third operation of comprehending the whole. Comprehension of the whole could then become the beginning of a new cycle of the same process, leading each time toward a more comprehensive whole—and this is what the process of her whole text points to. Newman has described an eddying motion by which both Piers Plowman and Julian’s Revelation “convey a sense of urgent movement forward coupled, paradoxically, with a meditative wish to circle back and revisit earlier moments.”121 In her parable, Julian comes closest to stepping outside the eddies of time to an eternal simultaneity. What the superimposed narratives of Adam and Christ join into a whole the exposition in terms of substance and sensuality or motherhood can analyze only one aspect at a time.122 Analysis within the conditions of temporality must represent as either sequential or static what the parable can combine as dynamic yet simultaneous. Again, the participation of divine and human agency, in particular, requires such language—and such language, in turn, gives rise to an interpretive process that takes part in what it seeks to understand. At the same time, the condition of enigma draws attention to its own limits. The parable’s description of the blindness that afflicts the servant after he falls in the ditch anticipates, through another allusion to 1 Corinthians 13, the fullness of heavenly sight: “And this is to him gret sorow and grevous disses, for neither he seeth clerly his loving lorde, which is to him full meke and milde, nor he seeth truly what himselfe is in the sight of his loving lord. And welle I wot, when theyse two be wisely and truly seen, we shall get rest and peas: here in party and the fulhede in the blisse in heven, by his plentuous grace” (51.93–97). The contrast between “in party” and “fulhede” echoes the contrast between “ex parte” and “perfectum” in 1 Corinthians 13:10, “cum autem venerit quod perfectum est evacuabitur quod ex parte est” (But when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away). This contrast is repeated in verse 12, both in the first half, “Videmus nunc per speculum in enigmate tunc autem facie ad faciem,” and in the second half, which again uses the phrase “ex parte”: “Nunc cognosco ex parte tunc autem cognoscam sicut et cognitus sum” (Now I know in part; but then I shall know even as I am known).123 The language of Julian’s parable, both in its imagery of the characters seeing each other and in her descriptions of her own degrees of vision and knowledge, looks to the vision face to face and knowing even

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as one is known. Yet the need for a long labor of interpretation in order for understanding to be born intensifies the sense of how short even this revelation falls. Julian’s parable blends ingredients she could have found in Langland in such a way as to preserve their fullness of meaning while also achieving a precision that rivals Scholastic, logical language. Her parable has been called “one of the most important examples of Langlandian influence,” yet it is perhaps more illuminating to consider it as reception, an interpretive response to Piers Plowman.124 The twenty years in which she continued to meditate on the parable before receiving the further prompting that apparently enabled her to write about it, 1373–93, span the initial years of circulation of the B and C versions of Piers. Langland’s fifth vision is particularly parallel to the long portion centered on the parable that Julian added to her Long Text. Both begin with reference to 1 Corinthians 13 and include their authors’ most explicit reflection on their own poetics and hermeneutics. Langland adapts Gospel parables throughout, but his use of the Parable of the Good Samaritan is especially close to Julian’s use of her parable of the lord and the servant. Langland’s Good Samaritan depicts and interprets the divine response to human fallenness. More important, he is the last in a series of figures that anticipate the appearance of Christ, in the following passus, clothed in the flesh of Piers and ready to suffer the Passion and harrow hell. The Samaritan also reaches back to Piers as Langland’s chief figure of humanity transfigured through free participation in Christ. Julian specifies that the servant in her parable is an agricultural laborer, though she calls him a gardener rather than a plowman.125 The strongest connection between Julian’s servant and Piers, however, is that both begin as figures of the merely human, in that they are given an initial, natural participation in the divine and a finite freedom but are liable to fail, and then become figures of the divine at work in the human through the Incarnation. Both are vehicles of an enigmatic double vision enabling continual pursuit of further revelations of grace. Like Piers, the servant of Julian’s parable becomes an inexhaustible sign of the transfiguration of humanity. Julian’s exposition of her parable could also be seen to integrate into it conceptions of participation in the Trinity that Langland develops in various analogies: the Tree of Charity, the familial analogies of Faith/Abraham, and the analogies to a

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hand and a candle spoken by the Samaritan. Seen in this way, Julian harmonizes components found in narrative sequence in Langland. What Langland links episodically, Julian combines in a denser enigma and its unfolding. The result is a richer sense of what enigmatic language is capable of, most of all to project a fullness of theological vision that exceeds expression. Julian’s enigmatic parable models most fully the kind of continued interpretive work that the revised, long version of her entire text invites. Her “example” is an exercise through which she developed the capacity to see at once the reality of sin, guilt, and suffering and the greater reality of Christ’s motherly love that, by taking all to himself, turns all to good. Likewise, Langland’s poem both tells a story of interpretive difficulty and creates such an experience for its audience, all in pursuit of a similarly comprehensive vision. Both texts finally use the enigmatic mode to cultivate authority based not so much on submission to the traditional truths they transmit as on their readers’ choice, educated and formed by the text, to continue the work of reading text, self, and world with charity. Participation can look to modern eyes like a loss of selfhood and authenticity, a surrender of freedom. Such a view is colored by currents of thought that were already becoming prominent in fourteenth-century philosophy and theology. But Julian exhibits a “oneing” that is the fruit of a highly conscious work of interpretation, sustained by intention over many years, in which both intelligence and desire come to their highest pitch and can be recognized as participation in grace. The enigmatic brings participation to consciousness. It invites interpretive work that can, especially when shared among a community, renew from within the authority that is also the basis of an institution that guards the mysteries it both conceals and reveals. Yet this work can also compete and conflict with institutional authority, not just by pointing to a greater fullness of which the institution, like the rest of history, is only a shadow, but by requiring an open field for interpretive play. Indeed, play is finally a better word for what the enigmatic invites, and the question becomes how it plays a game that avoids merely competing for authority. Julian is quite clear that receiving God’s meaning is endless. She has brought the process to an extraordinary degree of self-consciousness through the seemingly simple exemplum that becomes a complex and

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moving enigma by virtue of the interpretive attention she gives it. In this meditation, what Augustine called the Inner Word is born anew in her, and she enters further, more consciously, into participation in the life of the Trinity. What she means by inviting her readers to perform her book no doubt includes many things, but it must involve continuing to play the kind of interpretive games that she has demonstrated because they mediate such relational communion. Much more could be said about the role of the enigmatic in mysticism, but the next chapter will pull together the threads of play, persuasion, and participation by looking at how some enigmatic literary texts prolong their games beyond their endings.

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G A M E S O F H E AV E N , G A M E S O F E A RT H Ending with Enigmas

In modern English, one solves a riddle but contemplates an enigma. Medieval Latin aenigma, like Old English rædels, can include both senses, and the uses of obscurity in medieval traditions of riddling, rhetoric, and theology hover between, on one hand, didactic or esoteric closure and, on the other, the truly enigmatic. Play with multiple meanings can be part of either a finite game or an infinite one. In a finite game, players play to win; in an infinite game, players play to continue the playing.1 Solomon passes judgment; Marcolf always has another trick to play. Augustine is tempted by Manichean esotericism and willing to exclude heretics, but he embraces a spiritual rhetoric of endless yet convergent interpretation. Julian of Norwich acknowledges the church’s authoritative teaching, but she sees a higher mystery of participation in divine agency by which even sin is enfolded within the surpassing, incarnate, suffering, maternal love of Christ. The poetics of enigma invites readers into an infinite game, whether the game is literature or theology. Middle English redels likely leaned already in the direction of modern riddle because of its common collocation with the verb reden, as 329

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when, at Conscience’s banquet in the fourth dream of Piers Plowman, Clergy asks him contemptuously if he yearns “to rede redels” (B.13.185). Rede is the Middle English form of modern read. Answering a riddle can be seen as a special sense of deciphering written signs. Both probably have roots in an older meaning, still available in Middle English, of advising or interpreting. All the senses of reading, however—solving a riddle, interpreting a dream, instructing a prince how to rule, advising a lord how to win a battle or make a good business deal—have to do with situations that could be described as finite games. Most medieval texts give laws, instructions, or advice for playing a finite game in society, one in which the object is to control the future in some way and to earn property or status. Didactic and esoteric kinds of riddling are both part of finite games. It is only when there is a different kind of text that reading becomes part of an infinite game. Such a text seeks play for its own sake and, indeed, treats everything else as play, including the finite games that take themselves more seriously. Enigma enters English with associations that reach back to its Greek meaning through the riddle of the Sphinx, in which the finite game of answering the riddle is caught up in the larger mystery of human suffering. Above all, however, it is the theological dimension of enigma that joins it to infinite play. Theological truth, being infinite, cannot be contained within the conventional words and rules of language but must play with them in order to stretch their meaning. As a result, these conventions and the human realities to which they refer are shown to fall forever short of the sacramental meaning being revealed through them. The theology of participation implies the infinite play of anticipating and entering an encounter face to face, being transformed into the image of God “from glory to glory” (2 Cor. 3:18). Of course theology can also be harnessed to other kinds of rhetoric: didacticism coerces assent; esotericism fashions signs to justify the possession of power. The enigmatic response to these finite games, as Piers Plowman affirms in its imitation of the Gospels, is to outplay them not by beating them at their own game but by becoming vulnerable to them in order to include them in an infinite game. Playfulness seems essential to the whole genre of contemplative writing. There is a certain playfulness even in the Latin texts that theorized

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the enigmatic as the language of participation. In De Trinitate, Augustine tries out any number of analogies for the Trinity before coming to rest in one, the inner word, that is a sort of metasign for the games of signification by which he has approached the mystery. In both Augustine and Denis, this game is generalized into the interplay between affirmation and negation. Hugh of St. Victor, working from both, develops a Scholastic program in the Didascalicon that might also be described as rules for a game: the game of finding bounded but infinite sententia through continued return to the literal sense, whether of nature or history. Even a text as comprehensive and precise as Bonaventure’s Itinerarium plays a game of ascending perspectives and ends with a vertiginous leap toward, at the same time, both Dionysian transcendence and Franciscan meditation on the cross. Later medieval devotion to the sacraments might be seen as one culmination of such play. Transubstantiation formulates propositionally what, experientially or hermeneutically, is a kind of double vision or rapid alternation—play—between aspects of a single reality. Langland and Julian are more adventurous and explicitly riddling in their play than any of these, but no less theological or scriptural. In Piers Plowman, enigmatic play becomes the dominant mode, even the content, of the text, but still as a means of entry into the reality of participation. The clearest indication of what kind of game a text is playing comes at the end. Both Piers Plowman and Chaucer’s House of Fame, the principal English texts of this chapter, have famously open endings. In the last line of Piers Plowman, the dreamer awakens after seeing Conscience, leader of a remnant of the true church in the poem’s eighth vision, resolve to follow Piers the Plowman and become a pilgrim. As inconclusive as this is, the moment of waking at least marks it as an ending. The last line of The House of Fame is often given ellipsis points and labeled unfinished. Yet the appearance of an unidentified “man of grete auctorite . . .” is often seen as a fit ending to a poem that raises a series of questions about literary authority but repeatedly defers answering them.2 Both poems make strong invitations to games that continue beyond the text. In Piers Plowman, Conscience cries out at the end for both vengeance and grace, a choice between finite and infinite games. I will argue that Piers Plowman has two enigmatic conclusions, one of fullness and one of lack, and maintains a tension between them at every level in order to project a grace

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beyond finite realization while remaining acutely mindful of present emptiness, need, and failure. To imagine an infinite game of grace is to hope that even failure can be turned from rupture to participation. In Chaucer’s House of Fame, the game is literature itself. Chaucer plays out and exhausts a series of finite literary games before abandoning them in pursuit of a game that will have as its object the continuation of a mode of infinite literary play that can absorb into itself every finite game. His greatest achievement of this mode will be The Canterbury Tales. One of the dilemmas in Chaucer scholarship is whether to read this human infinity as participating in an eternal one. Langland and Chaucer share credit, according to the Middle English Dictionary, for introducing the term infinite into the English language. During the riddle contest at Conscience’s banquet, Clergy attributes to Piers Plowman the enigmatic claim “that Dowel and Dobet arn two infinites, / Whiche infinites with a feith fynden out Dobest” (B.13.128– 29). Langland is punning on both infinite and infinitive, so that the grammatical openness of an infinitive verb, which can be inflected with particular tense, number, gender, and mode, becomes a metaphor for how the objects of the dreamer’s quest are an infinite goal, known by faith and capable of instantiation at any moment but never fully arrived at in this life.3 Ascribing this idea to Piers is, in the long middle section of the poem where he is absent, an important step toward identifying him with the infinite questing he will come to represent by the end when Conscience sets out after him. Langland’s play on words about words also implies how for him the infinite is also intimate, found on our tongues and more intimately still in our minds, in the inner word that is for Augustine the best enigma of the Word made flesh. Around the time that Langland finished the B text, Chaucer used infinite as both noun and adjective in his translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, a major source for theological thinking about the infinite in the Middle Ages. It first occurs when Lady Philosophy is exposing the vanity of desire for fame and glory by comparing the longest possible renown to “eternyte, that is unstaunchable and infynyt.”4 Chaucer’s House of Fame makes a similar comparison spatially rather than temporally by situating its ironic treatment of literary fame in a place reached by a flight that makes everything on earth seem tiny. Boethius’s principal

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discussion of infinity, however, and Chaucer’s repeated use of the term in his translation, comes in the final section of the Consolation, where the infinite is not equated to eternity but rather contrasted to it. God, says Lady Philosophy, exists outside of time, not in endless, infinite time, and therefore sees all of time at once, in an eternal present. Her point is that this kind of “science,” this “simple knowynge,” for which the proper term is “purveance,” is not available to human beings.5 Philosophy brackets the theological from consideration, just as Chaucer will in The House of Fame. Even at the end of his ascent to Fame’s house, the narrator will remain in this world and the poem will be occupied with secular history and literature. Indeed, its world is one constructed by these stories. Its project is to see this world not as finite but as infinite on a horizontal, secular plane, as stories open to continual interpretation and evaluation. Whereas Langland’s enigmatic infinities point vertically to an eternal, theological fulfillment, Chaucer’s, at least in The House of Fame, stay in the sphere accessible to literary fame. How does the goal of an encounter “face to face” translate from St. Paul’s game of love to secular literature? It seems possible that Chaucer’s poetics owes something to the theological implications of enigma even as it makes a space for endless literary play merely in this world—a kind of play that largely characterizes what has come to be called literature. Two other literary traditions, the pastoral and the apocalyptic, are closely interwoven with the use of enigma as an ending move and, more broadly, its incorporation as a moment and a strategy within larger, hybrid texts. At this level of generality, indeed, riddling—uses of language that block ordinary reference and force a self-conscious moment of interpretation—can be seen as a common feature of many literary genres and one that sets them apart from other discourse precisely because they play language games. The pastoral genre has been a particularly important laboratory for experiments in literary play and includes, beginning with the third of Virgil’s influential eclogues, a frequent pattern of ending with an exchange of riddles. Apocalyptic literature, while almost the opposite of pastoral in its gravity, nevertheless shares with it a penchant for allegory and puzzling language. And of course the apocalyptic is all about the end. Yet whereas the apocalyptic tends toward the closure of judgment, the combination of enigma, pastoral, and apocalyptic found

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in Jean de Meun’s continuation of The Romance of the Rose, Dante’s Purgatorio, Piers Plowman, and The House of Fame converts apocalyptic judgment into something more open-ended that can be called instead eschatological. In Dante and Langland, the poetics of enigma reaches toward glimpsing the participation of finite history in the play of an infinite game of grace. In Chaucer’s House of Fame, the question of whether literature could mediate such meaningfulness is itself left unresolved.

ENIGMA, PASTORAL, AND APOCALYPSE

Virgil no doubt seems an odd place to begin a chapter on the theological implications of enigma. Yet the pastoral, particularly as developed by Virgil, seems to have been a crucial detour by which riddling language, when incorporated into long, mixed-genre works of encyclopedic scope, could be detached from the didactic or esoteric and made free, so to speak, to be truly enigmatic. Since their origins in the Idylls of Theocritus (third century BCE) and the Eclogues of Virgil (first century BCE), pastoral poems have used their distance from the earnest concerns of civic life to cultivate the sort of contemplative leisure the Greeks termed schole, from which, by way of Latin, English gets the word school.6 Though Virgil’s eclogues were not well known in the Middle Ages, the Eclogue of Theodulus, a basic school text throughout the later Middle Ages (see chapter 3 above), brought Virgilian pastoral fiction into Christian use. Theodulus’s opening scene imitates Virgil’s usual signifiers of pastoral leisure: Pseustis plays his pipe while his goats rest beneath a tree and Alithia plays her harp by a river. Theodulus also follows Virgil in making such leisure carry grander themes.7 Pseustis’s invitation to Phronesis to judge the contest, “There’s enough of the day left for you to put work aside and pay attention to our game,” recalls the opening speech of Tityrus in Virgil’s first eclogue:8 O, Meliboeus, a god has given me this ease— One who will always be a god to me, whose altar I’ll steep with the blood of many a tender lamb from my sheepfolds.

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It’s by his grace, you see, that my cattle browse and I Can play whatever tunes I like on this country reed-pipe.9 The word for play here, ludere, has a much broader sense than the verbs Virgil elsewhere uses for playing the pipe, one that encompasses the whole range of “play” and “game” in modern English. Ludi was, for instance, the Roman term for the public games given in honor of the gods. Theodulus, by having Pseustis call his singing match a ludus, places it in this wider sphere. Virgil also calls the pastoral sphere otium, “ease,” especially leisure used for literary pursuits. Medieval commentary, following the Roman one by Servius, consistently took Tityrus as an allegory for Virgil himself, so that his otium is the freedom to write the Eclogues, and poetry is his ludus. One detail copied by Theodulus from the opening of Virgil’s eighth eclogue conveys the leisurely spirit of pastoral play with particular power. Hearing the sweetness of Alithia’s harp playing, the nearby river stands still.10 Virgilian pastoral occurs in a time outside of time. Virgil elevates pastoral song from mere rustic recreation to an art that transcends the cycle of work and rest. Theodulus then redirects this Virgilian image of pastoral leisure by adding a biblical corollary: Phronesis commences the singing match with the words “I pray that the sun may increase time.”11 This refers to the sun standing still at Joshua’s prayer in the book of Joshua, chapter 10, a story that Alithia tells later in the contest. In this story, the extra time is for Israel to rout its enemies, but Alithia also implies, as she does only seldom in this text, an allegorical interpretation: “Learn, all, what the rewards of sacred faith are.”12 Virgil uses the pastoral to explore the place and potential of poetry itself, so that the pastoral time-outside-of-time becomes the time of poetry, play not for the sake of prizes but for the sake of play itself. Theodulus, however, tends to reinscribe the time of play within goals of victory, instruction, and reward. Nonetheless, the exchange of riddles that ends his eclogue turns it finally toward infinite play that is both Christian and Virgilian. The riddles at the end of the singing match in Virgil’s third eclogue, the model for Theodulus’s enigmatic ending, crown what has been called “a larger attempt at a redefinition of pastoral in loftier terms.”13 This modern account no doubt goes beyond those of medieval commentators,

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yet it suggests the potential of riddles as an ending move that Theodulus clearly grasped.14 For authors who knew Virgil’s Eclogues directly, such as Dante and Chaucer, possibly Jean de Meun, and perhaps even Langland, Virgil’s riddles would have been an important guide to the uses of enigma. Medieval interpretation of Virgil associated the Eclogues with the contemplative life in a scheme that also linked his Georgics and Aeneid with the sensual and active lives, respectively.15 His fourth eclogue, famously interpreted in the Middle Ages as a prophecy of the birth of Christ, ends with the repeated command to the wondrous boy to “begin,” and it is above all this eclogue, which announces itself as “a slightly grander song,” that authorized lowly pastoral as a fit carrier of higher themes. Indeed, Fulgentius, in the prologue to his popular Christian commentary on the Aeneid, forgoes comment on either the Eclogues or the Georgics, saying that they “are interwoven with concepts so profound that in those books Vergil has included the secrets of almost every art.”16 The eclogues were also associated, since the early commentaries of Donatus and Servius, with “the first condition of man,” an age of innocence, and the fourth eclogue prophesies the return of the golden age of Saturn—to begin with the birth of a boy.17 These connotations of Virgil’s authoritative version of the pastoral made it ripe for medieval development parallel to that of riddling.18 Virgil’s riddles are the final exchange between two competing shepherds before a third closes the poem by refusing to judge between them. Damoetas: Say in what lands (and you shall be my great Apollo) The spacious sky extends no wider than three ells. Menalcas: Say in what lands the flowers inscribed with names of kings Are born, and you shall have our Phyllis to yourself.19 The second riddle refers to the places where the hyacinth grew from the blood of either Hyancinthus or Ajax, according to different traditions. The first riddle is more controversial, but Segal follows the argument that it refers to a model of the heavens, either the orrery of Archimedes in Rome or the planetarium of Posidonius in Rhodes.20 The larger significance of the riddles, however, rests not so much on their solutions

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as on the dense web of connections to references and images earlier in the poem that they tie together. Segal’s conclusions are worth quoting at length: The two riddles, then, concentrate a number of important contrasts presented throughout the poem: the astronomers and Orpheus, erudition and simplicity, useful scientific knowledge and poetic myth, sky and earth, large themes of cosmic significance (caeli spatium, magnus Apollo) and humbler pastoral song (Phyllida). . . . The first riddle seems to be a version of an especially popular and widespread “folk-riddle.” But Vergil has taken this popular form and made it a vehicle for the learned themes of astronomy and mythology within the complex, allusive structure of his own poem. What he does with the riddles, therefore, is only another example of what he does with the whole of the Theocritean pastoral world: transform the rustic frame by infusing into it an elaborate poetic sophistication and a self-conscious sense of structure and symbol.21 Both riddles in Theodulus follow Virgil’s first riddle in their cosmological significance and have a similar effect of elevating the lore that precedes them. As Segal writes further, “The riddles may be there to suggest those primally unresolved—and unresolvable—elements that lie at the heart of perhaps all poetry and certainly of Virgil’s” (308). There is also a parallel between the rewards offered in each text. The “Trojan secret” promised by Theodulus’s Pseustis, like Menalcas’s offer of Phyllis, is a prize that can be possessed, whereas uttering the tetragrammaton (Alithia’s pledge in Theodulus) or being divinized as Apollo indicates a higher knowledge suited to contemplation rather than rivalry. The final line of Virgil’s poem, “Lads, let down the hatches, the fields have drunk their fill,” suggests a poetic fullness of meaning.22 The riddles thus mark an end that is also a beginning, an opening out onto serious leisure and literary art. Virgil ends his contest in a draw that preserves the game as open, to be played and enjoyed for its own sake, whereas Pseustis, Theodulus’s spokesman for pagan lore, concedes victory to Alithia’s Christian truth. Yet Theodulus subordinates this closure to a prayer of eschatological expectation. The relationship between an infinite literary game within the present world

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and one that participates in a theological infinity is one that later poets would explore. As Bernard of Utrecht points out, in what became the standard commentary on the Eclogue of Theodulus, the precedents for its enigmas lie not only in Virgil but also in scripture.23 Medieval exegesis, as discussed in chapter 5, saw scripture as full of enigmas that pointed to future revelation, both within and beyond the text. The attempt to read the past and present in light of a promised future unites the prophetic books that are gathered at the end of the Hebrew scriptures and governs the whole of it when these are seen by Christians as the Old Testament. Each of the four Gospels, most notably Mark, ends with an enigmatic pointer toward future fulfillment. And of course the New Testament, and thus the Bible as a whole, ends with the sustained puzzles of the book called Apocalypse. In the imagination of the promised end, there is a tension between just judgment and mysterious mercy. For all of the climactic violence these texts envision and seek to interpret, St. John’s Apocalypse affirms the fulfillment of human history in a paradise of peace and freedom. The theologian James Alison suggests a distinction between the apocalyptic on one hand, oriented toward dualisms and exclusion, and the eschatological on the other, open-ended, surprising—especially in its inclusivity—and playful.24 Stories about the end, what has come to be called apocalypse as a genre, can follow a didactic or esoteric rhetoric toward apocalyptic closure or an enigmatic rhetoric toward eschatological mystery. Derived from a Greek word meaning “to unveil,” the apocalyptic is usually taken to include both texts that lay out the meaning of history from its end and texts that look beyond history to the fate of individuals and all humanity beyond death.25 Some apocalyptic texts show the end through story and symbol, while others work primarily by commentary on other texts and on events themselves. The first kind of texts, the visions, often use obscure, allegorical language, and the second, the commentaries, interpret whatever they are reading as if it does. Much apocalypticism deals with obscurities in ways that would be better characterized as esoteric—indeed, esotericism is often seen as one of apocalypticism’s defining features.26 Yet in what Dennis Costa has called the irenic apocalypse, characterized by “a moment of fullness of knowledge of which lack

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or not-knowing is thoroughly, even pre-eminently a part,” properly enigmatic language comes to the fore.27 If apocalypticism favors the esoteric when it separates the sheep from the goats and those who have hidden knowledge from those who lack it, it requires the enigmatic in order to glimpse the peace that passes all understanding and to induce, instead of judgment, compassionate contemplation, especially of victims and those one might be inclined to blame.28 The irenic, eschatological apocalypse finds a surprising ally in the pastoral through biblical uses of pastoral imagery that, while excluded by Theodulus from his Virgilian framework, are very much behind the visions of Jean de Meun, Dante, and Langland. Moses and David began as shepherds and provide models of prophetic authorship through the Pentateuch and the Psalms. Several of the prophets, especially Ezekiel, use shepherds as a metaphor for the leaders of Israel in visions of divine judgment and promise. In the New Testament, shepherds are the first, besides the holy family, to know of Christ’s birth. A favorite subject of the mystery plays, the shepherds of the Nativity are portrayed, especially by the Wakefield Master, as rustic and playful, yet they participate in what Helen Cooper calls “the apotheosis of pastoral.”29 Christ, who calls himself the Good Shepherd, joins the pastoral, the apocalyptic, and the enigmatic above all in the parable of separating the sheep and the goats. Christ himself is also the Lamb who was slain and lives again in St. John’s Apocalypse. The Apocalypse’s Lamb and its concluding vision of the New Jerusalem are the major reference points for the pastoral and eschatological vision that is one of two climaxes in Jean de Meun’s continuation of The Romance of the Rose, the other being the conquest of the rose. Together, these two episodes draw a stark contrast between finite and infinite games.

THE PARK OF THE LAMB IN THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE

Jean de Meun’s 17,722-line continuation of the 4,058 lines of The Romance of the Rose left unfinished by Guillaume de Lorris in the 1230s makes an unprecedented game out of the project of ending. The final plucking of the Rose that ends Jean’s part might seem to close off its

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games in violent finitude, but Genius’s description of the park of the Lamb not far from the end opens the poem to an infinite horizon through its use of pastoral, eschatological, and enigmatic motifs. Guillaume’s allegorical depiction of the inner experience of a lover in courtly pursuit of his Rose seems to stop not far from some sort of resolution, though opinions differ over whether that would involve winning her. Writing about forty years later, at the height of the Scholastic period, Jean expands Guillaume’s scenario into the first great encyclopedic allegory of the Middle Ages. His last major digression, a sermon by Genius, priest of Lady Nature, serves mainly to justify sexual love before the final assault on the Rose. Its use of pastoral and other agricultural language throughout, with explicit references to Virgil and allusions to the Eclogues, is fitting, according to Helen Cooper, because pastoral, especially in its medieval vernacular forms, is the only literary mode in which free, natural love is conventional.30 At the same time, however, the seven-hundred-line description of the park of the Lamb, which makes up most of the sermon, constructs an eschatological vision out of central themes from Virgil and Theodulus. Genius promises that those who procreate, live a good life, and preach Nature’s law “will never be prevented from entering the fair and verdant park where the Virgin’s son, the white-fleeced lamb, brings the sheep with him, leaping ahead over the grass.”31 Pastoral leisure as a time out of time becomes eternity, “an eternal springtime” that outshines even the golden age of Saturn (308). Games, music, and dance are the business of the park, but they are elevated to indescribability, “for no heart could conceive nor human tongue relate the immense beauty and worth of the things contained therein, nor the lovely games nor the great, lasting, true joys experienced by the dancers who dwell within the enclosure” (313–14). Indeed, Genius explicitly contrasts the park and its games to the rest of the poem’s setting, the garden of Pleasure with its love songs and dancing. He justifies romantic love only for the sake of procreation, his practical concern, whereas he justifies procreation for the sake of the play of heaven. Thus pastoral here signifies a sphere of play that is superior to practical work and is to be enjoyed for its own sake, as opposed to play that is inferior and derives its value from serving a practical end. To put it this way invokes the threefold distinction between amusement, work, and leisure made classic by Aristotle in book 10 of his

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Nicomachean Ethics and cited by Aquinas, Jean’s contemporary, in his discussion of virtuous play.32 The basic distinction Genius makes here, however, is not between work and either amusement or leisure but between the finite sphere of work and play (which he places under the symbolic dominion of Jupiter and which includes the arts) and the sphere of the infinite. The park’s central image, a spring from which the “sheep” derive life, transforms the simple river or fountain of the pastoral into a symbol of everlasting life and an object of mystical contemplation. It wells up through three channels “so close together that they all become one” (315) and nourishes an olive tree whose fruit is called the fruit of salvation. The allegory is straightforward, even if what it refers to, the doctrine of the Trinity and the mysteries of salvation associated with scriptural tree symbolism, is not. It becomes more puzzling and self-referential, however, with the three-faceted carbuncle that shines in the spring. Know too that the virtue of this stone and the reciprocal power of the facets are such that each facet is equal in worth to the other two, and those two are equal to it, no matter how fair each one may be. No amount of thought could enable you to divide them, or to join them in such a way that there is no distinction between them. . . . And it has such marvelous power that as soon as those who go to see it turn towards it and look at their own faces in the water, whatever side of it they are on, they are always able to see, and rightly to understand, all the things in the park and themselves as well. (316) Mathematical and physical paradoxes, like those used by Dante in the final cantos of the Paradiso, point to the inadequacies of language and finite understanding to grasp transcendent reality. Genius’s fountain translates the image of a river that stands still into a paradoxical and more robust union of perfect, balanced, symmetrical, gemlike stasis and turbulent, ever-abundant dynamism. An extended contrast of this spring to the spring of Love described earlier in the poem underscores the difference between the play of this park and the love games played elsewhere (314).33 Earthly games lead to jealousy and rivalry and fixations like that of Narcissus. The park also is a place of desire, but it is a calm desire without either satiety or lack.34

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One further aspect of the description of the park of the Lamb implies how contemplative play could take into itself the finite games that make up the rest of the poem. The outside of the garden of Pleasure, in Guillaume’s section of The Romance of the Rose, is painted with allegorical images of obstacles to pleasure like baseness and old age. The outside of Jean’s park, however, is said to depict hell, all the things of earth, and the heavens “with all the clarity of their actual appearance” (313). While this signifies, in one sense, that all lower things are excluded from the park, the relationship of exterior and interior is also metaphorical, so that just as pastoral imagery can describe heaven, all created things can be read as the outer, physical appearance of inner, spiritual reality. Such understanding, in fact, is the result of contemplating the carbuncle. Seen in this way, even sexual love would be valuable for its spiritual meaning rather than just for its practical purpose. This reading of the whole world as an enigma finally joins in the play of perspectives that is the larger game of The Romance of the Rose, at least in Jean’s continuation. The frame of transcendent, endless play, in turn, enables allegorical readings on the earthly plane as well—even, perhaps, of the plucking of the Rose.35 Jean’s whole ending is ambiguously poised between two kinds of game, an infinite one that ultimately refers vertically to a continuation beyond the natural, and a finite one that has been played out horizontally, within Guillaume’s conception, to extreme length. Three important fourteenth-century inheritors of the Romance’s innovations with allegory, pastoral, and apocalypse make different choices between these vertical and horizontal options. Dante and Langland, while highly conscious of the distance between present reality and eschatological fulfillment, will reach across that distance by reading history as already participating in its enigmatic consummation. Chaucer’s metafictional apocalypse in The House of Fame, on the other hand, will confine its interpretive play to the realm of texts and find it to be a sphere of infinite play.

DANTE’S EARTHLY PARADISE

Dante’s Commedia considers the tension between finite and infinite games more insistently and explicitly than The Romance of the Rose.

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Whereas the conquest of the Rose, at least in a straightforward reading, identifies love as a finite, earthly game connected to the infinite generativity of the heavenly park only by its procreative potential, Dante finds earthly love to be a much stronger portal to “the love that moves the sun and other stars.”36 Already in the Vita nuova, Dante began to represent romantic love as a participation in something more transcendent. But love can be a prison too. The Inferno catalogs desires that are fallen in large part because they are stuck on finite things. Those in purgatory are completing their conversion to desire for the infinite and eternal. The Paradiso presents enjoyment of the infinite precisely as play. Dante’s many uses of obscure allegory and other verbal difficulty to imagine these realities with the greatest possible fullness and precision go far beyond what can be discussed here. He draws particular attention to the enigmatic, however, in the earthly paradise at the end of the Purgatorio, where the pilgrim reaches the crisis of his own conversion from the finite to the infinite. Here the poem works within the linked traditions of the enigmatic, the pastoral, and the apocalyptic to portray infinite play on the plane of human history, and this middle canticle ends, as does Piers Plowman, with a dual vision of history, seen as both participating in eternal fulfillment and falling far short of it. Dante has Virgil explain the difference between desire for the finite and for the infinite in Purgatorio 15, the first of four cantos, at the numerical and philosophical center of the Commedia, that together explain how love works in both sin and salvation. Canto 15 begins with an image of play, a complex reference to the time of day according to sections of the sphere “that always plays like a little child,” referring to the orbit of the sun.37 As they are climbing from the terrace of envy to that of anger, Virgil locates the cause of envy in desire for finite things rather than for “love of the highest sphere” (15.52), antidote to not just this vice but every other. Repetition of the word sphere (spera) converts the image of the physical sun playing like a child into a metaphor for the playfulness of “that infinite and ineffable Good” (15.67) that radiates in the highest sphere, the sphere beyond space and time.38 The Paradiso will dramatize this metaphor and its view of love as play when the pilgrim ascends to the sphere of the sun and sees the saints of wisdom dancing. An implied contrast to the futile motion of Inferno 15 strengthens the paradisal sense of

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infinite play.39 That canto ends with the image of Dante’s old mentor Brunetto Latini looking like one who had run in a traditional footrace outside Verona. The poem highlights the competitive nature of this kind of play by saying that Brunetto seemed like one who wins, not one who loses. The appearance of victory could indicate that Dante’s poem will grant Brunetto the literary fame he desires, but with the irony that this desire is itself ultimately sterile because finite. Brunetto is in the circle of the sodomites, symbolized by the sterility of burning sands, though his conversation with the pilgrim focuses on the issue of literary fruitfulness. The episode thus raises the question, crucial for Dante, of how literary art can participate in an infinite game. Purgatorio 15 hints at how Dante the poet found his way to answering this question simply by putting the speech on infinite goods in the mouth of Virgil. Commentators have pointed to Augustine’s City of God as the source for the distinction between desire for finite and infinite goods, one of the basic differences that divides the city of man from the city of God. Augustine traces the two cities to Cain and Abel, slain because of Cain’s envy of his goodness. But, writes Augustine, “The goodness that a person possesses is, in fact, not at all diminished if it comes to be or continues to be shared with another.”40 He cites Romulus and Remus as emblems of desire for finite goods and consistently identifies Virgil with the city of man, characterized by desire for domination and epitomized by Rome. Dante, on the other hand, seems to have found in Virgil a model of poetic practice capable, at least, of adaptation to desire for the infinite. One sign of the real Virgil’s value for Dante comes a bit later in the Purgatorio through the story Dante invents that the firstcentury Roman poet Statius, who, like Dante the pilgrim, says he learned poetic art from Virgil, was also converted to Christianity through him. The text Statius cites is Virgil’s fourth eclogue, with its apparent prophecy of the birth of Christ. Reference earlier to Virgil as “the singer of the bucolic songs” (22.57) implies Virgil’s ability to use a low and playful genre to a higher purpose, one even higher than he himself could be aware of. Dante’s Virgil is above all the Virgil of Aeneid book 6, the journey to the underworld where Virgil encloses what might be called an apocalyptic vision within signs of enigma: the labyrinth of Daedalus sculpted on the doors of the temple at Cumae, the sybil’s “ambages” (6.99), and the gate of ivory through which Aeneas passes on his return.41

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In the Paradiso, Dante projects a vision of fulfillment that answers to the infinite desire taught and formed in the Purgatorio, and does so largely through imagery of play. Giuseppe Mazzotta has argued that, for Dante, “play, as an esthetic manifestation, is the activity that best uncovers God’s deepest being.”42 The play metaphors of Paradiso come mostly from images of artistic beauty: “The music of the spheres, accordingly, is heard in paradise; the heavenly city is a garden of delights as well as an amphitheater; the blessed sing and dance; the universe laughs; the heavens themselves rhythmically whirl around the divine being; stars dance and woo each other with a weight of love that keeps the universe from falling asunder.”43 Harmony and dance in particular work as repeated metaphors for a community in which differences are reconciled and lead not to conflict but to celebration. The order of the cosmos is most comprehensively portrayed as play when, as Beatrice and the pilgrim pass the boundary between time and eternity, she explains the hierarchy and operation of the angels, ending with reference to “Angelic games.”44 Given the limits of language and imagination that the Paradiso keeps persistently in mind, the infinite character of the angelic games is implied through contrast not just with the demonic games of Inferno but also with fallen, earthly games. In canto 27, St. Peter makes a final, vociferous condemnation of the church’s corruption by desire for finite things like money and power. In canto 29, Beatrice belittles the angelology taught by academics competing for recognition and preachers trying to get a laugh.45 In between, the play of the angels in Paradiso 28 enacts the hierarchy by which the whole creation participates in the life of God who created it.46 In order to try to imagine the games of paradise despite human limits, Dante fashions in the Paradiso a kind of play with language, including newly coined words and a range of puzzling but precise optical, astronomical, and mathematical similes that could be seen as enigmatic but are in many ways unique (and beyond my scope). While the Paradiso is about souls enjoying the fullness of participation, the Purgatorio shows souls being restored to innocence in preparation for this fulfillment. In the second of the major speeches at the center of the Purgatorio, Marco Lombardo describes the seed, as it were, of this purified state: “From the hand of him who desires it before it exists, like a little girl who weeps and laughs childishly, the simple little soul comes forth, knowing nothing except that, set in motion by a happy

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Maker, it gladly turns to what amuses it” (16.85–90). Innocence and playfulness go together at the beginning of life as in its goal; as Mazzotta puts it, “The harmonious playfulness binding the Creator to his creatures is a miniature representation of what is called theologia ludens, the view of God as a playmaker waiting for the soul to return home to play.”47 Virgil, in a speech that distills ideas likely taken by Dante from Aquinas, will call this playfulness natural love (17.91–92). Schooled by right reason, as Marco and Virgil both explain, such innocent, playful desire is the basis of human freedom. “At the same time,” writes Mazzotta, “the view of Deus ludens makes play a sacer ludus, a sacred activity, which, as such, puts work in a different perspective from the conventional one. From the perspective of God as playmaker, it can be said that work is no longer the telos of life; play, rather, is both the foundation and the aim of life.”48 Aquinas, following Aristotle, emphasizes contemplation as the kind of leisure that is the goal of human life. Dante, without departing from this vision, imagines it as play and thus establishes its continuity with forms of play known in this life, especially literary play. In the cantos of the earthly paradise, the final episode of the Purgatorio, Dante assembles a variety of play forms and literary puzzles that enacts and theorizes a view of present participation in the divine game and gives a prominent place to the poetics of enigma. Whereas the games of the Paradiso imagine the realization of the happy end in the next world, the Purgatorio ends in this world with an emphasis on how short it falls of promised fullness. Indeed, the enigmatic is important, first of all, because it keeps this gap in view even while it stretches desire and understanding across it. Paradiso tries to look through the mirror and in the enigma; the end of Purgatorio is where Dante looks at them. The last canto of the Purgatorio includes the Commedia’s single use of the term enigma. It is significant that this term would appear in the episode that crosses the boundary between knowledge unaided by revelation, represented by the guide the pilgrim here leaves behind, Virgil, and knowledge received purely by supernatural gift, represented by the guide who will take the pilgrim to paradise, Beatrice. Framing the reunion with Beatrice are two pageants representing the history of the church: first, the Church Triumphant, a procession made up of authors of scripture, the seven virtues, and a symbolic number of the saved; and second, the

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Church Militant, a sort of masque with allegorical scenes of the church’s historical trials. Both evoke theatrical play.49 In the final canto, Beatrice takes up her office of guide by commenting on the masque and adding to it her prophecy of “a five hundred ten and five, messenger of God” (33.43–44) who will defend the church. Beatrice calls her prophecy a “hard enigma” (33.50, enigma forte) and, when the pilgrim asks why her words fly so far above him, she answers, “So that you . . . may see that your way is as distant from God’s as the heaven that most hastens on high differs from earth” (33.85–90).50 This heaven, the Primum Mobile, is where the pilgrim will later see the hierarchical play of the angels, and Beatrice has indicated the earthly contrast by saying that even if the pilgrim cannot understand the enigma, he must write her words “to those who live the life that is a race to death” (33.53–54). The phrase “race to death” has often been traced to Augustine’s City of God, which only underscores a contrast between games of earth and a higher kind of game to which the enigma could be an invitation. Beatrice goes on in the same passage to lament that the pilgrim’s intellect is dazzled by her words because his intellect is darkened and turned to stone. Petrifaction recalls the poem’s address to the reader in canto 9 of the Inferno, when the pilgrim and Virgil were confronted by the Medusa, a warning that, as Freccero has argued, implies the danger of not reading beyond the literal surface of the text.51 The whole interpretive sequence in the earthly paradise lends support to the idea that what matters about Beatrice’s enigma is not so much what it means but rather what kind of response it solicits. The dominant style of play in the earthly paradise is pastoral. As the pilgrim, Virgil, and Statius enter the garden through the wall of flame separating it from the terrace of lust, they hear an unidentified voice calling “Venite, benedicti Patris mei” (27.58, quoting Matt. 25:34, “Come, ye blessed of my father”), the words with which Christ welcomes the blessed in the parable of the sheep and the goats. This quotation announces a closely woven extension of the pastoral, apocalyptic, and enigmatic traditions.52 Next, a pastoral simile of three companions settling down for the night juggles references to them as both shepherds and, ironically, goats. When they awaken and are met by the lovely Matelda, the pilgrim’s greeting to her plays on the form known as the pastorella, a  love song addressed to a shepherdess. There is some comedy in the

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pilgrim mistakenly thinking that she might warm to such an amorous approach and in her laughing offer to tell them what the place is really about. At the same time, Dante’s play with this minor genre initiates the elevation of romance that he will accomplish more splendidly through Beatrice. Matelda explains that they have come to where humanity lost “virtuous laughter and sweet play” (28.96), a telling expansion on what little is said in Genesis about life in Eden. Uses of the pastoral idiom evoke the domain of innocent literary games that the enigmatic will redirect, by way of the apocalyptic pageants, to eschatological but equally playful purposes.53 The enigmatic enters this whole episode not just at the end, with Beatrice’s prophecy, but in veiled references to 1 Corinthians 13:12 throughout. Before he is reunited with Beatrice, the pilgrim has a dream: a woman, who identifies herself as Leah, says that she is gathering flowers to adorn herself while her sister sits all day in front of her mirror, “desirous to see her lovely eyes” (27.106). The story of the two wives of Jacob, long identified with the distinction between the active and contemplative lives, does not mention a mirror. Adding one through which a figure associated with contemplation looks into her own eyes could illustrate the Augustinian interpretation of “per speculum in aenigmate” carried by the Ordinary Gloss, which treats the enigma seen in the mirror as the soul.54 Dante might have found the connection to the enigma verse in Richard of St. Victor’s Benjamin minor, which is framed entirely as exposition of Leah and Rachel, their handmaids, and their children. Allegorizing Rachel’s two sons, Joseph and Benjamin, as the graces of discretion and of contemplation, Richard writes: “As long as we still see by a mirror and in an enigma, we cannot find, as I have said, a mirror more apt for imaginative vision of Him than the rational spirit. Whoever thirsts to see his God—let him wipe his mirror, let him cleanse his spirit. . . . When the mirror has been wiped and gazed into for a long time, a kind of splendor of divine light begins to shine in it and a great beam of unexpected vision appears to his eyes.”55 Leah and Rachel parallel Matelda and Beatrice, who elevate their earthly version of action and contemplation from finite to infinite games. Whereas Leah gathers flowers to adorn herself, Matelda has a complex role of conducting the pilgrim through the earthly paradise so that its delights will have the spiritual effect of launching him into the

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next phase of his journey. And whereas Rachel looks at her own eyes in the mirror, Dante’s encounter with the gaze of Beatrice will have a twopart effect much like what Richard finds symbolized in Rachel’s two sons. First, Beatrice will lead the pilgrim to discern and confess his sin in pursuing earthly loves instead of keeping his love fixed on her in her transcendence after death. Then Beatrice’s eyes become a mirror (31.121) in which the pilgrim sees the gryphon who pulls the cart that carries her in the procession of the Church Triumphant. Dante has dramatized the movement into contemplation, made it relational, by making the riddle seen in the mirror be, not the self directly, but the other, the self known through the other, and the one who reconciles self and other. The pilgrim, Beatrice, and the gryphon together make an enigma of participation in Trinitarian life that anticipates the Paradiso’s final, geometric image of the Trinity. In an episode full of riddles, the two-natured gryphon is the most obvious in both senses: the poem draws the most attention to it, and its meaning, the Incarnate Christ, is not far to seek. Eleanor Cook suggests that Dante is punning on the Greek word griphos, so that the gryphon is a sort of enigma about riddles, and argues that it represents specifically Christ’s sacramental manifestation in the Eucharist.56 If the gryphon is a  griphos with a simple answer, Dante plays with giving it mysterious depths. A possible political reference to the ideal emperor, suggested by some, could be part of a larger meaning, the union of divine and human natures and the reconciliation that this union in Christ makes possible. As certain as this Christological meaning is, it appears to the reader through a series of veils, as the image of the gryphon reflected in Beatrice’s eyes appears comprehensibly to the pilgrim only after passing twice through the veil that still covers her face. Even when she is unveiled, Beatrice herself remains only a sort of veil of the highest wisdom. In the earthly paradise, the pilgrim and the reader both learn to play the interpretive games required, at least in this life, in order to contemplate infinite truth. At the same time, Dante says that, in seeing the reflected gryphon, “My soul tasted that food which, by satisfying, makes one thirst for it” (31.128– 29), a quality that he repeats at the end of this episode (33.138) and several times in the Paradiso. This is the quality that, as Augustine says in De doctrina, applies both to direct vision of the divine and to the experience of learning to read its veiled and enigmatic appearances.57

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Beatrice’s “enigma forte,” two cantos after the gryphon, intensifies the predicament of those still living in history, between promise and fulfillment. The pilgrim has seen the gryphon and the rest of his procession return to heaven, a movement that corresponds to the grand image of procession and return central to the Christian Neoplatonic theology of participation that is behind the understanding of cosmos and history as enigmas of the divine. Closer to mind would be liturgical processions that manifest the same underlying conception and similarly place the church in between the two advents of Christ, the Incarnation and the Last Judgment. After the procession’s departure, in the more-difficult-toread scenes of the suffering Church Militant, fullness is followed by lack, a pattern that will be repeated in the endings of Piers Plowman. The “five hundred ten and five,” whatever its meaning, captures this situation of longing expectation and baffled need. Beatrice has said the enigma refers to a deliverer, but commentators have been as much at a loss to decipher it as the pilgrim seems to be. It is usually read by converting the numbers to Roman numerals, DXV, which are then taken to mean either a human leader or Christ.58 As with the gryphon, both meanings can be valid, so that the deeper truth is the union of human and divine. In this case, though, the veil is perplexing numbers and letters rather than a fantastic dual creature, a digital cipher rather than rich, analogue symbolism. Dante has turned typical riddle techniques, more like those of the sphinx mentioned here by Beatrice, from a game with a finite answer to a signifier of infinite interpretation. Beatrice has also said that events will interpret the enigma. The game, then, is the endless one of reading history, finding the signs of spiritual truth hidden in appearances—just what Dante’s whole poem teaches readers to play. While the Paradiso goes on to plumb the heights of fulfillment, the Purgatorio ends as Piers Plowman does, with high tension between a glimpse of the heights and the failure of present language and understanding.

THE FINAL VISIONS OF PIERS PLOWMAN

Langland’s narrator, unlike Dante’s, never reaches a transhumanization (see Paradiso 1.70) beyond the need for enigma.59 Though Dante’s poetry

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is arguable enigmatic throughout, he confines his references to enigma between visions of the failure of participation, lost beyond recognition in the Inferno and awaited on the terraces of the Purgatorio, and of its perfect fulfillment in the Paradiso. The visions that make up Piers Plowman, on the other hand, all take place in the realm of history, where enigma cultivates awareness both of participation in the drama of salvation and of fallibility and finitude. Toward the end of its complete versions (the B  and C texts), its enigmatic mode intensifies in order to portray the Atonement precisely as play, in the sixth vision, and to contemplate, in visions 7 and 8, the church’s participation in grace despite its many failings. These three, final visions do not offer episodes of explicit riddling or reflection on enigma—these have come before—but they are more successful at weaving the enigmatic mode into passages of visionary power. Passages of enigmatic metaphor do not stand out in these final visions, but only because this mode becomes more constant. There is no riddle contest as at the banquet of Conscience, but the Atonement is rendered as a series of games in which the grammar of enigma helps subordinate orthodoxy to mercy and mystery. There are no crises of enigmatic reading like the tearing of the pardon and the plight of the “lunatyk lollers,” but the exegetical authority now invested in Piers propels an unveiling of history that is as eschatological as the pageants in Dante’s earthly paradise. There is no sustained poetic exegesis or analogizing of doctrine as in the fifth vision; these are intertwined with the story of salvation that continues into these visions, which grow more concrete and realistic as they approach the present.60 The final three visions amplify the mode first fully seen in the brief Plant of Peace passage. Indeed, even its particular metaphors of descent, hunger, growth, remedy, and overcoming barriers receive extensive development, especially in the great sixth vision. The spiritualizing of an agricultural image is a sort of seed from which the figure of Piers the Plowman seems to grow, and Piers is in turn the central image through which the extended allegorical scenarios of the last three visions develop. His flesh is the armor that Christ wears to joust at the Crucifixion, and he returns to the poem again as a plowman in the seventh vision, but now also as a successor of St. Peter. In these and many other ways, the final visions gather together much that has gone before and keep it all in play. Phrases

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like “kynde knowyng” and “brethren of one blood,” while attaching these visions to earlier episodes, also take on their full meaning as enigmaexpressions.61 More than the earlier visions, these keep multiple perspectives and levels of signification in view at once and continuously: the spiritual and the natural, the historical and the doctrinal, the political and the personal. To call all of this enigmatic is perhaps to stretch the term beyond meaningful limits. Whereas Dante uses enigma to draw temporary attention to the difficulty of theological vision that his poem sustains throughout by other means and from a more coherent and systematic theology, in Langland the enigmatic seems to be how he finds his way to such a knotting together of vision. Dante makes the enigmatic explicit in an episode occupied with the limits of earthly knowledge, while Langland learns to link more and more thread into larger and larger knots.62 This is one way to think about C. S. Lewis’s famous judgment, after quoting the Plant of Peace, that Langland “is a very great poet” but “hardly makes his poetry into a poem.”63 If the enigmatic is a major ingredient of Langland’s best poetry, in the last visions he comes closer to extending it into a poem. Among the many threads that the last visions of Piers Plowman tie together are the literary styles and genres that shape earlier episodes, including the pastoral and the apocalyptic. The Plant of Peace invokes them both, especially if one hears in it an echo of Alithia’s riddle from the Eclogue of Theodulus, and they are an ingredient already in the Prologue’s “field full of folk.” Pastoral is, for Langland, intertwined with other agricultural imagery as a way of thinking about labor, when agricultural work appears literally, and about the clergy, when it appears as a metaphor.64 In the second vision’s scene of plowing Piers’s half-acre, the literal sense is to the fore, though the action has spiritual significance too because farmwork has replaced the pilgrimage that the folk had set out on. Playfulness figures here negatively, as recreation rather than leisure, when the Wasters refuse to work and instead help only with “Hey trollilolly!” (C.8.123/ B.6.116/A.7.108). The half-acre scene ends with a prophecy of apocalyptic judgment subverted by the obscurity of its riddles.65 The next scene, the pardon, also threatens judgment, but the burden of attention at the end of the second vision shifts from watching for an apocalyptic sign to contemplating the enigma of Piers and, in the C text, of the poor fool next door.

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The enigmatic rather than the pastoral is the primary vehicle of play and of the eschatological subversion of apocalypse in Piers Plowman. Both pastoral and apocalyptic recede in the middle visions and emerge in the seventh and eighth visions even more entangled with other genres and modes. There, what starts out looking like Dante’s procession of the Church Triumphant put to farmwork soon turns to an improvised response to the temptations and persecutions of the Church Militant. Before that, the sixth vision represents the Atonement as a series of games in which Christ plays best. The result is to summon readers to share in Christ’s winning strategy of passionate patience, played out in the life of the church depicted in the final two visions. The sixth vision constructs a nested set of contests: the Crucifixion as a joust, a battle between Death and Life, the debate of the four daughters of God, and the confrontation between Christ and the devils at the Harrowing of Hell conducted as a courtroom drama (see table 7.1).66 There is no doubt about the outcome; the interest comes in how Christ succeeds. The contests perform answers to the question of how the Atonement works: why Christ had to die and how his death delivers humanity. Each has tradition behind it, but Langland handles them with an originality that makes his specific sources untraceable.67 Embedded in them are further metaphors, many extended from earlier in the poem, and some of Langland’s most famous and powerful poetry and wordplay,

Table 7.1. Chiastic structure of the sixth vision of Piers Plowman (passus C.20, little revised from B.18) Lines 1–7: Palm Sunday liturgy (dreamer falls asleep) 8–113: Jesus jousting in Piers’s arms (also battle of Life and Death) 114–238: Debate of the four daughters of God (from Psalm 85:10) 239–270: Speech of Book 271–360: Harrowing of Hell: Debate among devils 360–444: Christ’s speech 445–449: Binding of Lucifer 450–469: Dance of the four daughters of God 470–end: Easter liturgy (dreamer awakens)

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which compress these various ways of looking at the Passion into little fireworks set off as one reads.68 Altogether the effect is dazzling; each metaphor sparkles into brief clarity and then fades as another rises into view. A single line can bring the joust, the battle of life and death, and the metaphor of light into the pathos of the scene on the cross: “The lord of lyf and liht tho leyde his eyes togederes” (C.20.59/B.18.59). No single scheme of understanding becomes definitive; rather, the array that accumulates in memory implies a greater light of truth than any image, or even all of them together, can bear. There is potential controversy involved in the theology behind some of these metaphors, particularly the issue of the devil’s rights that comes up at the Harrowing, and Langland treats the implications with care.69 The point of the contests, however, is not to work out arguments according to the terms of the various metaphors, much less to decide between them, but to use them as means to contemplate the mysterious reality named in theology by the terms atonement and reconciliation. At the center of the structure of contexts and metaphors is Christ’s assertion, “Y may do mercy of my rihtwyssnesse, and alle myn wordes trewe” (C.20.431/B.18.390). Reconciliation between humanity and God, or between mercy and justice, happens according to the core principle of “ars ut artem falleret,” one trick or stratagem in order to defeat another, quoted twice from the sixth-century hymn “Pange lingua” by Venantius Fortunatus and echoed in a number of ways throughout the vision (C.20.164a, 392a/B.18.161a). Christ, who quotes it the second time, extends the pattern: “Ergo soule shal soule quyte [requite, make recompense for] and synne to synne wende [go] And al that man mysdede, Y man to amenden hit; And that Deth fordede [destroyed] my deth to releve, And bothe quykie [revive] and quyte that queynte was [requite what was quenched] thorw synne; And gyle be bigyled thorw grace at the laste.” (C.20.388–92, cf. B.18.346–48, 358) There is perhaps a logic of sacrificial compensation in these lines, but more important is their aesthetic of symmetry and, further, their implied

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receptiveness to the addition of more explanations into a grand harmony of understanding. The poem enacts this principle by putting multiple, related games into play all at once so that they point to the infinite grace that transcends them. The model for this climactic vision’s solemn play, and the most potent source of its enigmas, is the liturgy. Liturgical references surround and permeate its games, connecting them to each other and to the continuing life of believers. The dreamer falls asleep during Lent, and the dream begins in church with a Palm Sunday procession that quickly becomes the entry of Christ into Jerusalem to joust in the armor of Piers. When the dreamer awakens, he hears Easter bells and calls his family to go to church in order to participate liturgically in recalling and celebrating the victory seen in the vision itself.70 In between, this vision is denser with liturgical quotations than any other part of the poem.71 They mostly follow the liturgy of Holy Week; Fortunatus’s “Pange lingua,” for instance, was sung both on Palm Sunday and during the Veneration of the Cross on Good Friday. But they are more improvised than programmatic. One near the end looks ahead to the vigil of Ascension Day: “Flesh sins, flesh frees from sin; / God reigns, God’s flesh within.”72 This line, which condenses the action of the entire vision around the central image of Christ fighting in the flesh of Piers, makes the transition from the angels’ celebrations of the Harrowing back to the scene of the four daughters of God, which also ends not just in reconciliation but celebration: “Thenne piped Pees of poetes a note” (C.20.452/B.18.410). Mercy and Truth, Righteousness and Peace kiss each other and, now joined by Love, erupt in song, or perhaps instrumental music, which becomes the Easter bells the dreamer hears. Stress on the performative, artistic dimensions of the liturgy at the beginning and end of the vision, along with the wordplay of the hymn quotations, establishes a frame of the liturgy itself as a kind of play that in turn inflects the entire vision.73 When the four daughters of God hold their own contest, a debate over the logic of the Atonement, they serve as exemplary readers of the events witnessed by the dreamer. Whereas previous instances of this tradition place it prior to the Annunciation, so that it sets up the problem resolved when the Second Person of the Trinity volunteers to become incarnate, Langland places it where it can help the dreamer interpret what

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he sees at the Crucifixion and then at the Harrowing. The hermeneutic attitude that Peace models by piping poetry at the end picks up on her entrance as described by Mercy: “Y se here bi southe / Where cometh Pees pleiynge, in pacience yclothed” (C.20.169–70/B.18.166–67).74 Playfulness and patience include here a cognitive commitment to continued attention and learning. Mercy and Peace each respond to Righteousness and Truth with appeals to criteria that are ultimately aesthetic—what might be called an aesthetics of enigma. They offer ways of seeing the saving effects of the Passion that seem fitting on a level different from the legal arguments against the justice of reconciliation made by Righteousness and Truth. Their force is not like that of a syllogism but more like the metaphorical ring of truth in a good answer to a hard riddle. Mercy draws further on Fortunatus’s “Pange lingua”: For patriarkes and prophetes haen preched herof oft— That was tynt thorw tre, tre shal it wynne, And that Deth down brouhte, deth shal releve. (C.20.141–43/B.18.138, 140–41)75 The appeal to a symmetry of narrative attached to the image of trees is the same one seen in Aldhelm’s apple tree riddle and visible, now, behind Langland’s plant imagery stretching all the way back to the Plant of Peace. Aquinas, in answer to the question “Whether it was necessary for the restoration of the human race that the Word of God should become incarnate?” answers that it is necessary, not in the sense that it is impossible otherwise, but in the sense that there is no more fitting and convenient way. After giving many reasons why this is so, he adds, “And there are very many other advantages which accrued, above man’s apprehension.”76 The sense of truth as beautiful and infinite follows from the same sense of its mysterious transcendence that makes the enigmatic appropriate and animates medieval exegesis. Inserted between the debate of the four daughters and the Harrowing, the speech of Book, “a bolde man of speche” with “two brode yes [eyes]” that represent the two testaments (and the literal and spiritual senses of scripture, and the past and the future), reads details from the Gospels as if the four physical elements bear witness to the power of the Incarnation and the Passion.77 Through the

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book of scripture, the book of nature too becomes full of further signs that have implications beyond understanding. The music of the daughters’ celebration at the end, then, conveys not just a mood but an affirmation of truth as harmony, or harmony as truth. This is the closest Langland comes to the grand music of Dante’s Paradiso, yet he suggests as strongly as Dante that the Atonement is true because the power to reconcile, to play a theme that brings harmony out of dissonance, is a quality of infinite truth. The central rhetorical and theological charge of Piers Plowman—to listen for the harmonics of truth, for the greater improvisation that reconciles apparent conflict—is also formulated as its main ethical charge when Truth twice says, “Soffre we!”78 What she means, first after Mercy replies to her and again after the dialogue between Righteousness and Peace and the speech of Book, is most simply, “Wait, let’s listen!” But what follows in each case expands “soffre” to include the call to participate in Christ’s passion. The speech of Peace and Christ’s great oration at the Harrowing both elaborate patient, compassionate endurance as a means of reconciliation and of the “kynde knowing” the dreamer has sought since the first vision. Peace’s speech, which seems to contradict the doctrine of divine omniscience by saying that Christ became incarnate in order to learn, includes the suffering of human limitation within “kynde knowing” as participation. She invokes the principle of knowing things by their contraries in order to explain why humanity had to suffer the woe of sin in order to know the “wele” of salvation (C.20.208–10/B.18.203–5).79 In vision 2, Repentance proclaimed the traditional idea of the felix culpa: that the Fall had the happy outcome of necessitating the glory of the Incarnation and Passion (C.7.120–50/B.5.479–506). Peace now adds that God needed to learn by suffering: “Ne hadde God ysoffred of som other then hymsulve, / he hadde nat wist witterly where deth were sour or swete” (C.20.216–17). These lines, new in C, sharpen the paradox behind her speech, which is one of the many paradoxes of the Incarnation. The question of how the knowledge gained through human experience can add to the infinite knowledge internal to the Trinity is a corollary of how divine infinity can enter human finitude at all. God’s infinite personhood must have always already included the possibility of selflimitation to human personhood, and thus also the possibility of raising

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humanity to participate in the divine.80 All of this is implied, perhaps, by Peace at the center of her speech, if by “rest” she means a full sense of heavenly peace. So God that began al of his gode wille Bycam man of a mayde mankynde to save, And soffred to be sold, to se the sorwe of deynge, The which unknytteth all care, and comsyng is of reste. (C.20.220–23/B.18.211–14) By coming after humanity in the experience, or “kynde knowing,” of suffering, Christ mysteriously goes before humanity to open the way to heavenly life. Forthy God, of his goednesse, the furste gome [man] Adam, Sette hym in solace furste and in sovereyne merthe; And sethe he soffrede hym to synne, sorwe to fele— To wyte what wele was ther-thorw, kyndeliche to knowe. And aftur, God auntred [ventured] hymsulve and toek Adames kynde To wyte what he hath soffred in thre sundry places, Bothe in hevene and in erthe—and now to helle he thenketh, To wyte what al wo is, that woet of alle ioye. (C.20.226–33/B.18.217–24)81 That God “adventured” himself in the Incarnation brings into this passage the image of the joust and the larger sense of play and improvisation. The prime enigma-expressions here, however, are “soffre” and “kynde.” God patiently endures loss both when Adam falls and when God, following, falls to earth and then to hell. Shared kynde and kynde knowing bind Christ and humanity together. Packed into Langland’s poetry here is an image much like the one developed more fully by Julian in her parable of the lord and the servant. Through suffering the Incarnation, Christ comes to “kynde knowing” of human finitude and, through suffering the Passion, of human sin, all in order to join humanity to himself in his return to the Father and to bring about a greater “wele.” Further,

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Christ comes, through this experience of lack, to feel compassion for human need, as Pearsall suggests and as Julian also affirms in her treatment of the union with humanity in both substance and “sensuality” that manifests Christ’s maternal aspect.82 The idea that Christ would feel a lack is one of the major metaphors developed in his speech at the Harrowing, and the enigma of human need will become central in the poem’s last vision. These episodes press further into the mystery of how following Christ in the “kynde knowing” of loss and brokenness is the way to the “kynde knowing” of truth and grace that the dreamer desires. Christ’s exuberant speech at the Harrowing of Hell, the riches of which go far beyond what can be unpacked here, sustains the enigmatic mode at high intensity for a seventy-five-line argument. Pearsall calls it “the antithesis of dialectic. Qualifications are piled up through the use of coordinate clauses so that the full complexity and near-undecidability of every key issue is made syntactically manifest.”83 This could describe the syntax of one of the longer Old English riddles, but the issues here are weighty matters of theology. Intricately packed with responses to the points made by the devils and with images and ideas from earlier in the poem, the speech feels at once like a closing argument at a trial and a victory speech, yet it happens not before or after but precisely during the moment of deliverance, which it performs. Like Peace’s speech, it is theologically adventurous: Langland approaches the possibility of universal salvation but leaves it open. The main question is whether any obstacle could possibly hinder Christ’s love from accomplishing reconciliation with all of humanity, and if so, what kind of response from a person is needed. While within the story it accomplishes the pivotal moment of salvation history, then, this speech also challenges the reader to unriddle what this action means for someone now. Four major metaphors, reaching back to themes from the whole poem, organize Christ’s speech: his right and ability to out-guile the beguiler; his love as thirst; his bond of kynde with his “brethrene of o bloed [one blood]” (C.20.418/B.18.377); and a king’s power to pardon. All of these have been well discussed elsewhere. The metaphor of thirst is especially enigmatic in its combination of bodily feeling and homely imagery with theological paradox.84 It recalls the wine merchants hawking their wares at the end of the Prologue and the hunger of the Plant of Peace

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while making more concrete the mysteries of Peace’s speech about why Christ took human kynde: For Y that am lord of lyf, love is my drynke, And for that drynke today Y deyede, as it semede. . . . Y fauht so, me fursteth [thirsteth] yut, for mannes soule sake: Sicio [I thirst, John 19:28] May no pyement [mulled wine] ne pomade [cider?] ne preciouse drynkes Moiste me to the fulle ne my furst slokke [thirst slake], Til the ventage valle [grape harvest fall] in the vale of Iosophat, And {Y} drynke riht rype must [new wine], resureccio mortuorum [resurrection of the dead]. (C.20.403–4, 408–12/B.18.366–71) The riddle might be how love is a drink. The paradox might be that love is both the thirst and the drink. The mystery might be how the resurrected, infinite God can still suffer a lack and a need. The enigma might be raising such a visceral human need and desire to infinite power, which makes a stronger, more inviting image for love than one of fullness and overflow, an image equally true and more mindful of the inadequacy of any analogy. The other metaphors of Christ’s speech depend on the howmuch-more logic they share with some Gospel parables, and all of them together generate a surplus of meaning that matches the surplus of grace in the passage as a whole. Yet thirst as lack, need, and desire also points to what will be the poem’s final enigma as it envisions the history of the church’s mediation of and resistance to Christ’s saving work. The sixth vision is in some ways the climax of Langland’s poetic manifestation of human participation in the divine economy of grace.85 Langland’s narrator had described himself, before the sixth vision began, wandering like a “lorel,” a fool, weary of the world, alienated from society, and close to the state of the “lynatyk lolleres” added to the C-text second vision.86 When he awakens afterwards, his vision has seemingly restored him both to spiritual health and to society: he brings his family to church on Easter and invites them to honor the cross. At the beginning of the next vision, he is at Mass, falls asleep just before Communion,

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and dreams “That Peres the Plouhman was peynted al blody / And cam in with a cros bifore the comune peple / And riht lyke in alle lymes to Oure Lord Jesu” (C.21.6–8/B.19.6–8).87 The start of the seventh vision thus brings the sixth one’s depiction of the Passion and its effects into the present life of the dreamer. It will imagine the foundation of the church under the leadership of Piers and its testing after he departs the poem, trials that will continue into the eighth and final vision. As the rest of the poem might lead one to expect, the vision of reconciled peace and wholeness made into a way of life through the church proves fragile. Part of the trial—indeed, Antichrist’s major weapon—is falsehood and twisting of language. The insufficiencies of language that make the enigmatic both necessary and the closest earthly approach to the fullness of heavenly truth take on their more usual aspect of truth’s undoing. At the same time, however, the inadequacy of language felt in enigma becomes itself a sign, the enigma of enigma, that redeems need and failure as participation. There is an element of pastoral in the seventh vision’s return to a scene of agricultural labor, but the stronger mode is eschatology, not predicting the last things but revealing the inner, spiritual reality of ordinary life. Such eschatological apocalypse extends the enigmatic mode because it too aims at an awareness of how all things and all actions participate in spiritual reality.88 What Langland shows to be at stake here includes the folk’s very ability to maintain this kind of awareness, which the preceding visions have offered. Most of the seventh vision is taken up with trying out ways of imagining political, social, and ecclesiastical life as participating in divine action. In a sort of warm-up for Conscience’s narration of the life of Christ, which will lead to installing Piers in the office of St. Peter, the dreamer asks about the name “Christ.” Conscience’s explanation according to the titles knight, king, and conqueror works not so much to define Christ by those human offices as to reenvision secular authority according to the model of Christ. While the essence of following this model is to seek joy through choosing to suffer penance and poverty, the gamesmanship of the sixth vision shows up again in the sly resourcefulness, “sleythes . . . wyles and wyt,” by which such a leader can be a conqueror (C.21/ B19.99–100). The two primary ways to participate in a divine order of

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action that the seventh vision offers in its central movement, though, are liturgy and vocation. Pentecost, the birth of the church, is depicted as a liturgical celebration that imitates the kneeling and singing of angels at the Resurrection (C.21/B.19.150–52, 207–11). The hymn “Veni creator spiritus,” in which the dreamer joins, makes a strong connection between the natural and the supernatural through the Holy Spirit’s distribution of the gifts of grace. Then Grace, personified, equips the folk for all kinds of jobs and gives Piers seeds to sow that are the cardinal virtues of temperance, fortitude, justice, and prudence, those that, as opposed to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love that formed the fifth vision, apply primarily to natural life. It is not a secular vision, however, but one that sees all work and all moral life as part of spiritual life—finite games that are part of an infinite game. Vocation and liturgy come together in the sacraments of penance and the Eucharist, which is both reward and strengthening for faithful use of the gifts of grace.89 Labor and liturgy, earthly games and heavenly games, are joined above all in the principle “Redde quod debes,” “Pay what you owe,” repeated several times in different contexts across the seventh and eighth visions. The phrase has been taken as an equivalent of the theological tag “Facere quod in se est,” “Do what is in you,” used to mark a semi-Pelagian position on salvation. In this view, divine and human agency are seen as exclusive, and salvation is seen as divine action granted on the condition of doing what one is naturally capable of.90 Each Latin phrase is also, however, susceptible of a participatory view, if what is in humanity is both nature and grace. Langland’s use of his phrase moves between nature and grace in order to reclaim a participatory vision. It refers most directly to the requirement of restitution as part of penance, but it takes on a larger significance here through being used as a name or title for Piers’s pardon, which now means his power as quasi-pope to mediate forgiveness. In the context of personified Grace setting up the folk in their “crafts,” it becomes a principle of justice in economic affairs, what each person owes to another and to their vocation, offered to Piers as agent of Grace’s gifts (C.21.253–62/B.19.253–63). It is also part of the sacrament of penance as preparation for the Eucharist (C.21.393/B.19.394). What each person owes, however, is not only fair dealing and restitution of measurable debt, but forgiveness and charity. The link between forgiving and receiv-

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ing forgiveness, familiar from the petition about forgiveness of debts in the Our Father (cited at C.21.397a/B.19.398a), can be seen as a conditional transaction but also implies a human participation in divinely initiated forgiveness. The phrase “Redde quod debes” comes from the Parable of the Wicked Servant, who says this when he refuses to forgive a fellow servant’s minor debt after their lord has forgiven his own enormous one.91 Forgiveness is more a gift the wicked servant refuses to participate in than a promise his actions can earn. The difference in scale between the two debts is so great as to imply the difference between finite and infinite. Langland’s ironic use of the servant’s words retains a sense of threat but also implies a possibility for earthly relationships to participate in the infinite reconciliation consummated in the sixth vision. Part of the challenge is simply to see this infinite significance in the finite. “Redde quod debes” states this challenge if there is a pun on redde and rede, the word for “read” and the source of redels, Middle English for riddle. Then “quod debes,” what one owes, becomes a riddle to be read. Paying what one owes depends on understanding what that truly is, which in turn requires contemplating how earthly affairs participate in heavenly ones. Failures of participation in divine grace manifested as failures of ethical action are put on display at the end of the seventh vision through four speakers: a brewer, a “lewed vicary” (unlettered parish priest), a lord, and a king, all together representing the estates of society.92 The brewer defends his ability to get a better deal by surreptitiously mixing bad ale with good, and the king defends his power to take anything he thinks he needs from the people. Both cite their “kynde” in a way that shows a view of it confined to what we would now call human nature, rather than the sort of participation in divine “Kynde” that Langland indicates when he uses that term as a manifestation of God, which he does again in the next vision. The knight’s justification of taking advantage through clever accounting practices, which fits the lewed vicary’s general description of the use of “gyle” and “sleythe” to hide sin (C.21.457–61/B.19.458–62), shows a similarly restricted perspective. Of course these are all examples of age-old faults and the natural result of being in rivalry for earthly things, but after terms like gyle and sleythe have been applied to Christ’s gracious play, their familiar use seems like a failure to play a higher game.

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The lewed vicary himself is more ambiguous. Much of his long speech criticizes church leaders for their worldliness and echoes similar complaints such as the one Dante puts in the mouth of St. Peter in Paradiso 27. But he also asserts the goodness of Piers by contrast. His view of Piers seems a bit too simple, though, and, like the three other speakers here, he misses the connection between human striving and divine grace. That he is uneducated suggests that, even if his sentiments are right, he lacks the more penetrating perspective that literate learning, such as Langland’s poem, can provide. On the other hand, a perspective more focused on individual need rather than participation in a larger order was to be the consequence of the so-called modern theology, associated especially with Franciscans like Ockham, that treated divine and human action as excluding each other rather than cooperating.93 A lewed vicary would be an odd spokesman for a cutting-edge view, but given the prominence of friars in the next vision, perhaps Langland sees a similar mistake in both the unlearned and the most learned. Participation is not a natural idea, either for the unlearned or for the advanced understanding of nature being developed in Langland’s time by Ockhamist thinkers. But certain ways of using language can nurture it. If using language well is essential to doing well, misusing it is also the prime weapon in the arsenal of the church’s enemies, one that comes uncomfortably close to the arts of figurative language and paradox that the enigmatic employs. Pride, who begins the attack in the seventh vision, comes armed with “colours and queyntise,” the tricks of rhetoric and logic, in order to cover Piers’s cart called Christendom with “sophistrie” (C.21.354, 349/B.19.355, 350). In the eighth vision, Antichrist’s first attack is to spread falsehood. Succeeding waves all emphasize language, until finally Hende Speche lets a friar named Sir Penetrans-domos into the barn of Unity, where the faithful “fools” have taken refuge. The grim humor of the allegorical names sharpens the satire of how the winning words of friars are perverting the sacrament of penance from heavenly to their own earthly ends. The friars go to school to learn “logyk and lawe, and eke contemplacioun” (C.22/B.20.274), but their approach can also be quite direct—an indictment of how both the didactic and the esoteric tend to bend language to serve finite games of power. Sacraments, and by implication their language and approach to reality, have been the church’s

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main defense, but by the end of the last vision the remedies of penance have been turned to a narcotic. The poem ends with the inarticulacy of Conscience crying out for grace as the dreamer wakes. Language seems irreparable and exhausted, and yet accepting poverty and need, including the poverty of language, is the poem’s final enigma and where it finds hope. The eighth vision’s focus on the enigma of need is announced by Wille’s waking dialogue with a perplexing figure named Need. At first Need seems to justify a “law of kynde” that would support the use of “sleithe” outside the legal code in order to meet one’s own dire, physical need. But then he shifts to honoring those who abide in need, above all Christ, who became needy in order to “soffre sorwes ful soure, that shal to ioye torne” (C.22/B.20.47). One’s own need is a puzzle that can be resolved only by being put in a larger perspective of both natural and spiritual order. Need is, after all, what joins one most urgently to a larger order. In the midst of the apocalyptic battle, Conscience calls on Kynde, whose aid comes in the form of various kinds of natural suffering, that is, aggravated need. Elde, riding in the vanguard of Kynde, runs over the dreamer’s head and, despite his protestations, visits him with all manner of geriatric problems. This ruefully funny interlude conveys the dreamer’s— and perhaps the poet’s—acceptance of his own neediness. The dreamer asks Kynde about how to meet his own basic needs, and Kynde’s reply echoes the Sermon on the Mount’s lesson from God’s care for the birds and flowers: “And thow love lelly [loyally], lacke shal the nevere / Wede ne worldly mete, while thy life lasteth” (C.22/B.20.210–11). When Conscience later invokes Francis and Dominic as examples of just such an approach to need, he sets the stage to see friars like Sir Penetrans-domos as misconstruing their own voluntary poverty. Rather than enduring it for a greater end, they assuage it by turning penance to profit. When Conscience finally departs to seek Piers, one reason is to seek help so “that freres hadde a fyndynge [provision for livelihood] that for nede flateren” (C.22/B.20.384). In choosing to follow Piers as a pilgrim, Conscience is choosing to become a needy traveler in order to seek a remedy for a greater communal and spiritual need. The grounds for hope, however, are not so much in meeting those needs as in finding in the fact of need signs of divine presence rather than absence and a basis for peace rather than rivalry.94 One of the patterns with Piers throughout the poem is that

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when he gets drawn into competitive rivalry, either as object or rival, he leaves and redirects desire from a finite game to the infinite. In choosing to seek Piers, Conscience chooses this sign of endless need and transforms himself into a similar sign. Langland’s poetics of enigma is needy language, ever conscious of its distance from the fullness of meaning it nonetheless projects. So it is also hopeful language. It makes room for the greater harmony it awaits. It tries to name the realities of grace already present while recognizing how little is yet seen. Most of all, it invites a vigorous, playful, free response from readers. Piers Plowman opens a new space in English literature for playing with the serious matters usually reserved in its time to the judgment of religious and political authorities. It wagers that enigmatic play can move readers and listeners to the kinds of participation that press further into a realization of truth even as they deepen yearning for the fullness of mystery seen face to face. Langland’s own last response to the fragments, frailty, and failures of his own improvised verse making is likely found in the narrator’s final words to Reason and Conscience in the autobiographical scene added to the C text, discussed above in chapter 5 (the section “C-Text Enigmas II”). He compares his career as a poet to the merchant, in one of the Gospel parables of surprising grace, who has traded and lost, again and again, yet finally finds a pearl of great price. “So hope Y to have of Hym that is almyghty / A gobet of his grace, and bigynne a tyme / That alle tymes of my tyme to profit shal turne” (C.5.99–101).95 These might also be the words of those who have spent time studying his poem, to whom it is left to keep playing with, contemplating, and trying to perform its enigmas.

CHAUCER BRINGS THE ENIGMATIC DOWN TO EARTH

One of Langland’s early readers was surely Geoffrey Chaucer, who, in this era before poetry was a recognized profession, perhaps marveled at how Langland spent his time even as he contemplated spending more time that way himself. Chaucer’s House of Fame, a complex and adventurous meditation on his own position as an author, is commonly dated a year or two after the B text of Piers Plowman.96 Noting that Chaucer’s London

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residence at Aldgate during these years “stood no more than a quartermile from Cornhill,” where Langland’s narrator places himself in the Ctext autobiography, Frank Grady has made a persuasive argument for Langland’s influence on this poem. The sense of incompletion at the end of both poems points, Grady suggests, to “the infinitely generative possibilities of the dream vision form” that Chaucer might have learned from “Langland’s innovation of piling dream upon succeeding dream.”97 Yet the kinds of possibility the two poems explore differ drastically. Langland’s infinity moves primarily in a vertical, that is, an inward, transcendent, theological dimension. Chaucer’s infinite games, on the other hand, remain in a horizontal dimension of human social experience and communication. The two dimensions do not necessarily exclude each other and may even, for both poets, ultimately enhance each other. The contrast, however, indicates different directions in which the poetics of enigma would develop with the growing emergence of a secular sphere of culture and the increasing separation of sacred and secular. The House of Fame shows the way toward the uses of enigma in modern literature to represent immanent mystery, yet without closing off the possibility that human mystery might dimly reflect and participate in something higher. Chaucer does not give signs that he sees himself working within the medieval poetics of enigma, as Dante and Langland do. He does not use the term or quote 1 Corinthians 13:12, and instances of what might be called riddles in his works, such as the question of what women most desire in The Wife of Bath’s Tale, are rather distant from riddling traditions. Yet Chaucer is undoubtedly responding to what Dante and Langland did with the poetics of enigma, particularly their use of it to subvert apocalyptic judgment in favor of a playful eschatology that sees time as participation in eternity. The enigma of The House of Fame is what happens when such an eschatology of emergent meaning is confined to a world of texts. One result is to highlight by contrast the work enigma does for Langland, Dante, and other medieval authors. To call Piers Plowman vertical and The House of Fame horizontal might seem backwards on the face of things. Langland’s poem takes place on earth, except for the Harrowing of Hell, and it ends by seeming to  begin again a pilgrimage in this world. Chaucer’s poem envisions a physical ascent and belongs to a genre that A. J. Minnis calls “the

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intellectual or mental flight.”98 Usually considered Chaucer’s second longform work and second dream vision, The House of Fame takes great strides of ambition beyond his first, The Book of the Duchess. It is the first poem in English to use the classical device of dividing itself into books, and its three books, unlike the passūs of Piers Plowman, make a steady progression: from the temple of glass where the dreamer sees depicted the story of Virgil’s Aeneid, to his flight in the talons of a giant eagle whose in-flight entertainment is a windy lecture on the physics of sound and the denizens of the air and the heavens, and then to their arrival at the House of Fame and the neighboring House of Rumor. Vertical flight in Chaucer’s poem is not, however, a figure for spiritual progress or perspective but a device for setting up a sphere of literary play. Each book’s hypothetical scenario initiates a sort of game involving problems of literary authority. What if one tried to combine Virgil’s portrayal of Dido with Ovid’s much different one from the Heroides? What if claims to higher knowledge were the topic of a dialogue between a guide from above who pretends to know more than he does and a narrator who does not want to know? What if literary history were like characters asking for fame from a goddess who is sister to Boethius’s inconstant Lady Fortune? Put this way, each game seems bound to end inconclusively and to leave unfulfilled any expectation that it might resolve, on a higher level, the questions opened by the previous one. Chaucer fashions here, as John Fyler has argued, an untrustworthy narrator and an authority figure who lacks real authority, types that will characterize all of his poetry and that he derives above all from Ovid. As in Ovid, moreover, “We repeatedly find thesis and antithesis, with no synthesis. We encounter elaborate systems that collapse as soon as they are built.” Chaucer’s wordplay and verbal figures are like Ovid’s “vocabulary of paradox and juxtaposition.”99 The comparison to Ovid helps especially to characterize Chaucer’s style in contrast to Langland’s, which gravitates around metaphors that serve the goal of unlocking hidden meaning. Langland is after marvelous depths, even if he recognizes the difficulties of securing them; Chaucer tantalizes with the prospect of deeper understanding while gleefully pushing the problem into the next book and finally onto the last line’s “man of grete auctorite.” The House of Fame, then, hardly fits the sense of enigma that this book has empha-

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sized. Yet it is full of puzzles that tell something about what difficult literary language does under the conditions Chaucer has set. He sets his conditions largely by his choice of the range of literary reference within which his poem will work, one that distinguishes it further from Piers Plowman but that also, especially by its exclusions, locates them in a shared tradition of interest in problems of reading. A famous fifty-one-line sentence at the beginning hits you over the head with a jumbled catalog of kinds and sources of dreams that neither offers guidance for interpretation nor wins any confidence. It speaks a pseudoscientific vocabulary drawn from unnamed sources, primarily Jean de Meun’s goddess Nature and Macrobius’s influential commentary on the dream of Scipio. Conspicuously absent, however, is any mention of biblical precedents for true dreams and their interpretation. When Langland’s narrator worries about the truth of dreams, he thinks right away of Daniel and Joseph (C.9.302–16/B.7.149–67/A.8.134–49), just as he cites the Bible throughout and even builds parts of his poem around biblical passages. John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, which might well have been Chaucer’s intermediate source for Macrobius, combines classical and biblical sources on dreams. John uses Macrobius’s categories to frame the problem that much cleverness is needed “for the interpretation of dreams and the elucidation of riddles and signs” but then turns to biblical examples in order to hold out hope that God could give the ability to “solve the riddle of dreams and at the dictation of the Lord clarify the obscurity of allegory.”100 Chaucer gives the riddles without the elucidation throughout The House of Fame in part because he keeps the poem within a largely classical frame of literary reference, dominated by Virgil and Ovid, while excluding the Bible almost entirely (with a handful of rather sportive exceptions to be considered below).101 The Bible is left out most obviously when the narrator enters Fame’s house and sees those who uphold the fame of various realms of narrative. The first is the story of the Hebrews, but the only author mentioned is Josephus, not any of the authors of the Old Testament. The House of Fame shares with Piers Plowman a tendency to draw on school texts, including Theodulus, but Chaucer draws on them for scientific and literary learning, while Langland most often cites them for moral teaching, even when making use of riddle tricks that traveled in them.

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The differences in how Chaucer and Langland place their work in literary tradition can be seen by focusing on the pastoral and apocalyptic elements of The House of Fame. In each mode, whereas Dante and Langland used the resources of enigma to heighten awareness of participation in deeper, heavenly meaning while recognizing distance from its fulfillment, Chaucer brackets heavenly participation out of his frame but discovers a potentially infinite fullness of meaning on an earthly plane. Pastoral, a minor but important presence in The House of Fame, as in Piers Plowman, epitomizes the contrast between Langland’s theologizing and Chaucer’s secularizing. Among the various kinds of musicians who inhabit niches on the outside of Fame’s house are those who play pipes like shepherds. The second one the narrator names is “of Athenes Daun Pseustis” (1228), the singer of pagan stories from the Eclogue of Theodulus. Like the other categories that decorate the outside of the house, pastoral song is merely a kind of music, described only by its sound, not its sense. Even inside Fame’s house, the emphasis on the contents of literary tradition will yield no claimant to truth like the Eclogue’s Alithia. The contrast between these echoes of the schoolroom is stark: while Langland’s Plant of Peace, if it took its literary seed from Alithia’s riddle, elevates it to visionary power, Chaucer’s explicit catalog of literary history takes from Theodulus merely a signifier of pagan falsehood.102 More broadly, Jean de Meun, Dante, and Langland all incorporate pastoral symbolism of work and play into their larger patterns of figural meaning, so that shepherds’ leisure points to paradise and an agricultural community is a model of greater peace. Chaucer’s eagle explains that the object of taking the narrator to Fame’s house is “disport and game” (664), but this is not theologia ludens. Superficially, it is like the entertainment of teeming minstrels and jesters outside Fame’s house, including a mysterious “Colle tregetour” whose trick with a windmill and a walnut shell is perhaps the closest thing to a riddle in the poem (1277–81). The more significant dimension of Chaucer’s play, however, draws exclusively on the literary self-consciousness that is part of pastoral tradition and bends it, like all the other materials of his poem, back onto itself in order to look at it rather than see through it. Self-reflexivity becomes most acute in passages where these poets sign their names, another feature that both connects Chaucer’s work to

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that of Dante and Langland and highlights his opposite use of the device: to fictionalize his authorship rather than to authorize his fiction. Chaucer emphasizes the self-reflexive component of pastoral by having the first such poet his narrator sees be Atiteris, probably a scrambling (either cryptic or corrupt) of Tityrus, the shepherd from Virgil’s Eclogues who, at the start of his first eclogue, sings of poetic leisure and was commonly taken as standing for Virgil himself. Chaucer’s signature, however, is not riddling, like Langland’s, but direct, like Dante’s. In the Purgatorio’s earthly paradise, when Beatrice is about to confront the pilgrim with his need to repent of forsaking her, she calls him by name, the only time his name appears in the Commedia. Besides its emotional charge in the dialogue, this singular address draws attention to the distance between the poet and his persona even as it asserts most boldly their identity. The heightening of this tension parallels and is embedded in the polarity of fullness and lack that reaches its greatest expansion in the earthly paradise and puts the enigmatic to most explicit use. Signatures of poet and poetics go together even more closely in Langland, who conceals his name in the two places where he proceeds most revealingly to anatomize the enigmatic: the third vision’s inner dream of the land of longing and the fifth vision.103 As in Dante, Langland’s signatures bare the status of the text as text, yet also, more fundamentally, support its claim to truthfulness. Chaucer’s references to himself distill the reflection on literary authority that pervades The House of Fame. When, in the midst of a discourse on how poetic language works, Chaucer’s eagle calls the narrator Geffrey, the emphasis is on what resists rather than aids the ascent to truth. The figure of an eagle, an allusion both to St. John and to the eagle Dante’s pilgrim sees in a dream early in the Purgatorio, implies revelation and contemplation.104 But Chaucer pokes fun at his eagle’s pedantry. To take a small example, the eagle boasts about avoiding prolixity and verbal figures at some length while using the figure called anaphora. Such jokes make it hard to know how to read the assertion of the classical separability of style and substance that follows: “For harde langage and hard matere / Ys encombrous for to here / Attones” (861–63). This seems to reject any idea of useful obscurity for purposes such as elevating language. The eagle answers Geffrey’s skepticism about how all tidings of love could come to Fame’s house with a lesson on the physics of sound as

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“noght but eyre y-broken” (765; nothing but broken air—or breaking wind). It is a virtuoso piece of explaining science in verse, but in the context of the larger literary problems the poem deals with, it cannot help but draw attention to the opportunities for confusion and misunderstanding. Chaucer’s representation of his own body underscores the implications of his signature and its contrast to Dante and Langland. Geffrey’s weighty corpulence fits the reluctance he expresses to undergo the flight to the revelation he has been promised. Dante, by contrast, portrays himself in the first canto of Paradiso rising effortlessly through the air as fast as lightning because he has shed the weight of sin and now his body is free to move to where it belongs, in the direct presence of God. He has been, as Beatrice puts it, transhumanized, and the Paradiso, through its coinages, similes, and innumerable other devices of figure and structure, aims to transhumanize language, to stretch or refine it to perfection. Chaucer too matches his language to his description of his body by focusing, in the eagle’s central speech, on the physical characteristics of speech as sound. Even when he arrives at Fame’s house, what he discovers about the randomness of fame and the mixture of truth and falsehood in all stories compares rather to the Inferno’s depiction of language’s capacity for deception and nonsense, where Dante the pilgrim still has weight and is prone to resist his journey. The House of Fame reorients the enigmatic toward the finite world both affectively and cognitively. Enigma is, for Dante and Langland, as for Augustine, the language of spiritual desire and of seeing the spiritual reflected obscurely in history. Geffrey’s ascent remains in the realm of the finite, just as his heaviness weighs him down. What interests him is the literary infinity that emerges from Fame’s house. Chaucer’s mysteries are those of narrative itself. By making his narrator affectively neutral and his guide figure more questionable than Dante’s or most of Langland’s, he provides a blank space for readers to inhabit, rather than models of desire or understanding. Christopher Baswell has shown how, in later medieval England and elsewhere, commentaries on the Aeneid, both individually and even more when taken together, increasingly made it seem “so densely figured, so multiply interpreted and redacted, as to elicit either a frustrated refusal to understand it coherently, or a readership almost heroic in its complexity.”105 It presented, that is,

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challenges and possibilities like those texts called enigmas. In part 1, where Geffrey reads the story of the Aeneid from images depicted in the temple of Venus, he is following Aeneas as what Baswell calls a “hermeneutic hero,” one who reads signs made by human artifice.106 The way Chaucer has his narrator retell the story, particularly by centering emotional identification on Dido rather than Aeneas and blending Virgil’s and Ovid’s versions of her, plays with its potential, already a product of Virgil’s artistry, for multiple interpretations. Dante had retrieved Virgil as an authoritative guide to history and thus had incorporated him into his overall project of reading the enigmatic signs made by the Author of history. Chaucer’s project, on the other hand, sets aside any attempt at such spiritual reading in order to dwell on the immanent enigmas of human intention. History for Chaucer is to be read, not in the light of eternity, as for Dante, or as the operation of Kynde, as for Langland, but in the experience of its victims, like Dido and like those overlooked by fame altogether.107 Part 3 of The House of Fame will find these enigmas of experience not only in the greatest works of literary art but in the stories everyone tells. The House of Fame, then, disclaims any eschatological perspective, but it does so with a parody of apocalyptic vision that invites the question of what might replace or supplement it.108 Chaucer does an outright parody of final judgment in Fame’s house, but he plays with the possibility of revelation throughout, beginning with the jumbled catalog of dream types. The invocation to Morpheus that follows makes even more comic the exclusion of higher inspiration. At the end of part 2, after the narrator has been marveling at what he can see from the heights his ascent has reached, a sequence of allusions sets up complex relationships to prior apocalyptic texts: Thoo gan y wexen in a were [Then I began to grow in confusion and anxiety], And seyde, “Y wote [know] wel y am here, But wher [whether] in body or in gost I not [know not], y-wys, but, God, thou wost [know]!” For more clere entendement [explanation] Nas me never yit y-sent [was never yet sent to me]. (979–84)

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In one of this poem’s rare scriptural references, Geffrey quotes from 2 Corinthians 12:2–4, where St. Paul tells of someone, usually taken to be himself, who was “caught up to the third heaven” and “heard secret words, which it is not granted to man to utter.” Dante refers to this passage in Inferno 2 when his pilgrim self worries whether he is capable of a similar journey since he is not Aeneas or Paul. In Paradiso 1, he echoes the same passage in order to describe where he has, after all, arrived. Langland inserts the part about “archana verba” that cannot be uttered into the climax of Christ’s great sermon at the Harrowing, where it floats as a narratorial comment that implies incomprehensible transcendent meaning behind or beyond what the poem can express about the work of  salvation.109 Geffrey, however, has merely been looking at “ayerissh bestes,” creatures of the air. Lines 983–84 perhaps allude to Purgatorio 4.76–78, where the pilgrim is talking astronomy with Virgil, but even there the significance Dante finds in the cosmic order is ultimately spiritual, whereas Chaucer’s poem remains fixed on the physical.110 A possible allusion to Piers Plowman points further to the direction Chaucer’s poem does not go. “Tho gan I wexen in a were” is very close to what Langland’s narrator says after hearing scripture’s compressed version of the Parable of the Great Banquet (see chapter 4, the section “Theological Rhetoric in Langland’s First Inner Dream”): “Al for tene of hir text trembled my herte, / And in a weer gan I wexe, and with myself to dispute / Wheither I were chose or noght chose . . .” (B.11.115–17/C.12.51–53).111 Whereas Langland works through anxieties about his own last judgment by pressing further into the enigmatic rhetoric of scripture, Chaucer instead proceeds to a scene of judgment that concerns mere fame and reduces mystery to randomness. His poem resists theology, but so teasingly that it invites its alternatives to be seen theologically. Many have suggested that Chaucer’s portrayal of a capricious Fame pertains to nominalist theology, in particular the distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God.112 A God who acts according to an absolute power that works prior to and outside of the ordained power reflected in creation and even in scriptural revelation could be seen as entirely beyond reason, simply unknowable and not even a mysterious object of contemplation. At some level, no doubt, Chaucer is playing with such concepts. Fame doles out earthly reward and punishment with no clear regard for what any of the nine groups who seek her have asked

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for or done, unlike the principles of judgment Dante works out carefully, yet with some room for mystery, in the nine levels of each canticle of the Commedia. But in The House of Fame, Chaucer is not finally interested in taking a direct position on theological questions. Rather, his portrayal of Fame results from an experiment that is better understood in Boethian terms. Like The Consolation of Philosophy, Chaucer’s poem restricts its scope to what is accessible to natural human faculties, even if it imagines, on the basis of the authority of Virgil and Ovid, Fame’s far-off house. If there is a larger order to the disposition of fame, it is, like the perspective of Providence in Boethius, beyond the capacity of the poem to depict. Yet just as The Consolation of Philosophy holds out the possibility that Christian truth may be better understood after the detour through philosophy, Chaucer leaves open the possibility that Christian truth may be better understood after the detour through pure literary play. A suspension of apocalyptic judgment is needed in order for human truth, which must be part of Christian truth, to emerge fully. This is where Chaucer will find his enigmas. The House of Fame discovers—or, better, recovers from classical texts—a poetics of enigma in the absence of a Christian Platonic vision of participation. For Boethius and Dante, the image of a mental flight assumes the participation of human reason in the divine. Here too Chaucer uses allusion to draw a contrast. Just before he quotes St. Paul on his heavenly ascent, he refers to Boethius on the flight of thought.113 He transfers it, however, to a bodily flight, one that remains within the sublunary realm of change. A similar contrast appears between Chaucer and Langland in their use of the word kynde. For Langland, this word names both God and nature, including human nature, and implies the analogical connection between them that results from creaturely participation in the Creator. In The House of Fame, however, kynde refers only to nature. The eagle’s physics lesson, for instance, explains how sound, like all things, moves according to its “kyndely enclynyng” (734). Even the seeming wonders of Fame’s house are a merely natural process, for fame’s “kynde” is to make things seem bigger than they are (1292). But for Geffrey the narrator, the grandeur of his flight, the magnitude of Fame, and the competition for renown hold little interest. One might expect Geffrey’s restlessness to lead him instead to some kind of contemplation of eternity. The true wonders he finds, however, come not as

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revelations of transcendent mystery, but rather as the purely immanent tidings that circulate next door to Fame in the house of Rumor, which nonetheless project a potential for mystery and infinity. Led by an unnamed guide, Geffrey leaves the “castle” of Fame to find in a valley beside it the poem’s most playful invention: a gigantic, spinning house made all of twigs, more wonderful, he tells us, than the labyrinth of Daedalus. He eventually describes the people whose apparitions inhabit this structure, a list of ordinary tale-tellers that begins with shipmen and pilgrims. First, however, he emphasizes the great noise, not just of the creaking house itself, but even more of the information, news, and gossip that circulate in it and emanate from it. The difference between the house of Fame and the house of Rumor invites comparison to that between a library and the World Wide Web. For a comparison accessible to Chaucer and cued by his reference to the labyrinth, Baswell has suggested Aeneas’s descent from civilization into the “unmediated reality” of the underworld.114 Traditional ideas of the labyrinth, as Penelope Doob has shown, illuminate not just this section but Chaucer’s whole poem.115 A labyrinth risks error and confusion, it requires patience, persistence, and ingenuity, and it constantly defers meaning and truth—all of which parallel the challenges of the enigmatic. The image of the labyrinth does not, however, capture the promise of the enigmatic. Challenge rather than promise, and the labyrinth rather than the riddle, are the stronger theme in Chaucer’s poem. The stories told in the whirling wicker house are subject to all the distortions of rumor. Geffrey sees “a lesyng and a sad sothe sawe,” a lie and serious, true story, emerging from the same window (like the screen of an Internet browser) and getting inextricably “compouned” (2089, 2108). Nonetheless, the house of Rumor’s wealth of information and the excitement it generates in Geffrey portend some greater compendium or composition, not just of literary tradition, but of human stories. The riddle of who might be the mysterious “man of gret auctorite” (2143, 2158) awaited by a crowd gathered at the poem’s seemingly unfinished ending implies the greater enigma of what could give someone authority here. There seems to be a stark opposition between the fragmentary, questionable stories barely distinguishable from noise and any imaginable external authority. Perhaps the “man” does not speak because any “authoritative word,” to use Bakhtin’s term, would be inimical to the

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endless fertility of the spinning nest of narrative.116 Yet communication without authority is impossible. What kind of authorship can preserve the richness of the house of Rumor while making it meaningful and even finding its truth? As a matter of literary technique, this question points to Chaucer’s later development of his own literary art. First, however, it is worth considering a theological answer according to the poetics of enigma. Chaucer makes a sort of parody of the Incarnation, which also indicates a theology behind The House of Fame, when his eagle explains how the speakers in the house of Fame, and presumably the house of Rumor too, come to be there: Whan eny spech y-comen ys Up to the paleys, anon-ryght Hyt wexeth lyk the same wight [It becomes like the same person] Which that the worde in erthe spak— Be hyt clothed rede or blake— And hath so verrey hys lyknesse [carries so truly his likeness] That spak the word, that thou wilt gesse That it the same body be— Man or woman, he or she. And ys not this a wonder thynge? (1074–83) What fills Fame’s house is the appearance of words made flesh, as if people, like little trinities, beget revelations of themselves through the spiration of sound. If the colors red and black refer to ink, then this analogy extends to writing and reading as a further mediation of this communion among persons. Despite the poem’s exclusion of theological participation from its scope, then, the relation between the avatars that appear in part 3 and real speaking persons could be seen as a model of a theological conception of authority grounded in the creation of human beings in God’s image. It is possible to see behind this imagery Augustine’s interpretation of 1 Corinthians 13:12: that the human person is the enigma that comes closest to the divine, and that truth is accessible at all only because of a mental participation in the Incarnation of the Word made flesh. Chaucer plays further with the analogy of incarnation when he dramatizes the compounding of lie and truth trying to exit the house of

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Rumor at the same hole as a dialogue between them, as if they have become persons. Such a fracturing of people into all the sentences that come from our mouths or pens stretches the analogy to absurdity and brings to a climax the whole poem’s emphasis on all that impedes true communication across the distances between people. Still, the analogy holds on to a faith that words have the authority of representing persons who, in turn, derive authority from their participation in the divine. They are second-order enigmas, verbal enigmas of human enigmas. Such authority may not be able to compete against “gret auctorite,” yet it is precious, not just for entertainment value, but as a piece of the ultimate, infinite puzzle. For all its apparent exclusion of theological perspective, The House of Fame can be seen to offer a vision of the body of Christ dispersed into as many authorities as there are storytellers.117 What is unveiled at the end of the poem could be just enigmas in a mirror. Chaucer’s later works, above all The Canterbury Tales, find ways of representing the process of storytelling that make meaning from experience and generate surprising authorities while avoiding the premature imposition of traditional authority. The General Prologue, another place where Langlandian influence is especially apparent, plays evenhandedly between institutionalized moral perspectives and the self-authorizing subjectivities of the pilgrims.118 Characters become authorities, which is to say they become imaginable persons, by telling enigmatic stories, stories that invite interpretation in any number of ways, including their relation to a frame of other stories. Plot, character, and complex focal images become the carriers of enigma more than allegory or wordplay. In one sense this is simply to say that Chaucer chooses not to write allegorical visions anymore. But The House of Fame shows how, in another sense, his development of complexly mediated narrative art extends from the dream vision by bending its movement toward a heavenly infinity back around to an earthly one. In Troilus, Chaucer assigns dreams to characters rather than using them to frame the whole narrative.119 Chaucer can be seen as more committed even than Dante or Langland to a sacramental understanding of art that finds the transcendent in the immanent, divinity in the particular. As in nominalism, focus shifts from the universal to the species, and risks disconnection, but it also retains at least the possibility of participation in the divine through the infinite mystery of human ex-

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perience. Recognizing the slippages that threaten not only the reading of literature but even the most familiar, normal communications—what The House of Fame envisions—introduces the distance that makes them enigmatic and thus into objects of contemplation through which mystery can appear. Chaucer also follows and extends Langland by finding enigmatic authority especially among victims and the marginalized, those most likely to be excluded by great authorities. Sympathy for Dido in The House of Fame begins this pattern, and it continues notably through other enigmatic women such as Criseyde, the Wife of Bath, Griselda, or Dorigen.120 Like Dante and Langland, Chaucer represents himself as an enigmatic victim when his own authority is most at issue: Dante in conversation with Cacciaguida (Paradiso 17); Langland in the C-text autobiography and the concluding apocalypse, when he is run over by Kynde; Chaucer when he assigns himself the tales of Sir Thopas and Melibee in The Canterbury Tales.121 There are many reasons for solidarity with victims, starting with the Gospel ethic of patient suffering and love for the poor. To render one’s own authority enigmatic by identifying it with the despised and rejected, however, is a crucial means of avoiding the finite games of rivalry and instead soliciting contemplative attention and its alternate potential for persuasion. Chaucer’s reorientation of the enigmatic to earthly infinities points to the direction in which modern literature would develop. Character as enigma even fits the way the meaning of the word would change. A riddle usually still refers to some kind of text, but enigma more likely refers to a person.122 To see in the medieval poetics of enigma some roots of modern literary interest in the enigmatic, under whatever name, and of modern humanism more broadly, is perhaps to find surprising continuity with literary developments that thrived in a framework of Christian orthodoxy.123 The poetics of enigma plays an infinite game, in which everything and everyone, especially those most easily excluded from finite games, holds the possibility, when opened to obscure but true and unlimited reading, of gentle persuasion to greater participation in mysteries at once transcendent and immanent.

E P I LO G U E

This book has followed three paths marked by the word enigma—riddles, rhetoric, and theology—that together lead to a distinctive vision of the purposes of literature. Medieval literary works that share the poetics of enigma solicit playful attention to interpretive difficulties in hope of a fullness of meaning while recognizing the limits of language. Yet even as this poetics was helping to energize the flourishing of vernacular literature, the broad forces of what has come to be called secularization were working to pull its components apart. The enigmatic would live on and, indeed, only become more central to literary art, but in forms increasingly cut off from medieval roots. Indeed, our inheritance of secularization makes it difficult even to see these roots for what they are. The transformation of the poetics of enigma in modernity can be seen as a separation of horizontal and vertical dimensions. Enigma’s horizontal, social dimension is part of what I have called its rhetoric: the capacity of difficult, obscure texts, within a context that nonetheless guides their interpretation, to form a community of shared, ongoing interpretive discovery. This rhetoric is persuasive in an invitational, inclusive, noncoercive sense opposed to the kinds of rhetoric I have called didactic or esoteric. The vertical component of enigma, by contrast, is theological, based on the participation of all creation and history in the divine. Riddles often play on a merely horizontal, this-worldly plane, but much of 380

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what animates medieval enigma is its play between the horizontal and the vertical, between the ordinary relations that language mediates with people and things and hints of a divine Author at work in them. Participation, indeed, moves in both directions: the central Christian experience of participation in the divine, the sacraments, is also the central medieval experience of participation in social community. The word participation, however, after entering the English language in the late fourteenth century with reference to this vertical dimension, now refers almost always to the horizontal (except for its recent reclamation by theologians). Likewise, the rhetoric of enigma, which has an inward component that had been conceived theologically as, for instance, conversion or contemplation, gradually becomes available to a notion of selfhood without transcendent reference. After the Middle Ages, the poetics of enigma continues on the horizontal plane. Indeed, the purpose of forming communities of reading alongside hierarchical institutions becomes a more prominent function of literature. In some ways enigma can proliferate on the horizontal plane precisely because it is cut off from a vertical, theological dimension. Yet one of the legacies of the medieval poetics of enigma is the potential, perhaps even the necessity, of interdependence and interplay between the two dimensions. Secularization in general has to do with the cutting off of the horizontal, social and political dimension of culture from the vertical, theological and religious one. How and why this happened are broadly familiar, and the competing explanations that have been offered are far too many to review here. Many of them feature the influence of the theological changes discussed in chapter 6 under the banner of nominalism.1 A separation of the vertical and horizontal dimensions is perhaps most obvious in the rigorous deployment of the distinction between the absolute and the ordained power of God. When God’s higher, absolute will is seen as inscrutable, the theology of participation fades; the world operating under God’s ordained power is then to be understood primarily or even purely through cause and effect, on a horizontal plane, and comes to be seen as functionally autonomous. People relate to the things of the world less in light of their participation in higher things and more exclusively for practical purposes. As the philosopher Charles Taylor puts it, speaking as an inheritor of modernity who appreciates its gains while

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recognizing its losses, “We have to abandon the attempt to read the cosmos as the locus of signs, reject this as illusion, in order to adopt the instrumental stance effectively.”2 A general, cultural separation of the vertical and horizontal dimensions of thought and relationship involves a loss of participatory consciousness in every respect: the theology of participation weakens in the face of newer theological tendencies; sociality formed through sacramental participation in the body of Christ fades before more instrumental, economic and political forms of organization as well as rising individualism; and the habit of play between the vertical and horizontal is displaced by increasingly objective modes of thought and consciousness.3 Secular literature emerges in modernity as the primary space for the play of enigma, an alternative both to the pietism and doctrinal controversy of religious writing and to increasingly objective, scientific forms of knowledge (which themselves have theological origins).4 Referring to “charades, riddles, and enigmas,” Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse expresses perhaps a neoclassical aversion to interpretive difficulty, perhaps her own impatience, or just a widespread preference: “Such things in general cannot be too short.”5 From, say, Chaucer to Austen, a secular poetics of enigma was overshadowed by classical ideals of eloquence. Even the fashion for elaborate literary riddles, such as Swift’s, made them guessing contests rather than enigmas in a fuller sense.6 Since 1800 or so, however, the enigmatic has returned to prominence.7 Riddling is seen to be, as the poet John Fuller puts it in his recent, book-length survey of the matter, “at the heart of the poetic enterprise.”8 In prose narrative as well, an enigmatic richness of possibility and engagement of interpretive attention seem to be part of the criteria for good characters and plots, at least in what is called “literary fiction” and “creative nonfiction.” In drama, the unsurpassedly enigmatic wordplay of Shakespeare stands as one of his excellences. There is more to the story of the enigmatic in modernity, however, than the separation of what I am calling the horizontal and the vertical. On one hand, modern literature embraces the enigmatic in the process of, and to some extent for the sake of, establishing itself on a horizontal plane, independent of vertical, religious or theological authority. To explore human mysteries, authors have to establish a secular space, as seen

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already in Boccaccio’s Decameron or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. On the other hand, the strong link between the poetics of enigma on the horizontal and vertical planes found in Langland, as well as Dante, Julian, and the Pearl poet, continues, often tacitly, beyond the Middle Ages.9 Some of the major figures who reassert the enigmatic mode against neoclassical fashion, for instance, draw on its vertical dimension even when writing on secular topics. It would be hard to find a more concise statement of both the horizontal and vertical axes of participation essential to the medieval poetics of enigma than John Donne’s Meditation 17 (“No man is an island . . .”) and Expostulation 19 (“My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God. . . . But thou art also . . . a figurative, a metaphorical God too”), and no doubt this is behind his love poetry as much as it is his devotional poetry.10 As much as Donne had a vision that united horizontal and vertical participation, though, reception of his poems divides them between “secular” ones on the intimacy of lovers and religious ones of inward, individual devotion. Samuel Taylor Coleridge probes in his Biographia Literaria and elsewhere the theology of participation that lay behind the breakthroughs of his and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads.11 Yet as the enigmatic has more and more displaced the neoclassical over the past two centuries, it seems to have become, with some exceptions, increasingly secular. In one sense, the horizontal had to break free of the vertical, but in another sense the two are interdependent. What matters is whether the vertical, theological discourse is didactic, esoteric, or enigmatic. After the Reformation, the constraints of controversy that had already been growing with the theological pluralism of the later Middle Ages hardened into polemic and defense and all but expelled any room for contemplative play, at least in public.12 In England, as Nicholas Watson has argued, vernacular theological writing and circulation had already almost shut down after Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409.13 Even before that, the climate for theological exploration had been growing steadily more difficult and pushing adventurous religious writers toward defensive obscurity.14 Indeed, the tendency toward didactic and esoteric rhetoric in religious institutions is perennial. Theological enigma has always to be asserted against more exclusive and coercive rhetorics. The rise of the enigmatic

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in secular literature, then, can be seen, not as a break with theological enigma, but rather as an extension of it. To take a Girardian view, sacred authority is built from discourses that enable the exclusion of outsiders and persecution of victims. Secularism arises from the critique of the violent sacred, for which the JudeoChristian scriptures are the primary engine.15 From the perspective of a forgiving victim, sacred violence can be seen to be the basis of religion and the normal source of social order. The poetics of enigma, as I hope I have shown, is an important part of this critique. It makes visible the violence of sacred authority by opening up an alternative that operates both vertically and horizontally. Vertically, by imagining and mediating a peaceful participation in an infinite, transcendent Other who is also intimate, incarnate, and liberating, the enigmatic exposes other kinds of transcendence built, one way or another, on violent otherness and rivalry. Horizontally, it cultivates a peaceful community of shared interpretation that can learn from differences rather than making them a basis for exclusion. Yet the church continually readopts forms of the violent sacred and institutionalizes itself around them. Thus secular visions of noncoercive social order that can include difference and protect individual liberty are, according to this view, nurtured in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but the church also drives this vision out when it reasserts the violent sacred and the coercive kinds of rhetoric that go along with it. The idea that the horizontal and vertical dimension of enigma are interdependent suggests, for instance, a modification to Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of the novel as “internally persuasive discourse” over against “authoritative discourse.”16 Classical epic is the narrative epitome of an authoritative word that comes to a reader from outside and above and that demands allegiance. Novels, on the other hand, can allow multiple discourses to enter into dialogue with each other and thus represent the process of human becoming through freely internalizing the language of others. While the Bible certainly insists on being authoritative discourse, medieval treatment of it as enigmatic allows it to be internally persuasive as well. The Bible reads the world and history from the perspective of the marginalized and the victims and needs, in turn, to be read in ongoing dialogue with their experience. Such dialogue animates the narrative engagement with the Bible in authors such as Augustine, Dante, and Langland—and points from medieval forms to the novel, much as

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Bakhtin finds anticipations of novelistic dialogism in some medieval riddling dialogues. Enigmatic forms engage readers in a process of interpretation that could lead to what we might call free, noncoerced persuasion as opposed to, say, indoctrination. They do so, most basically, by making interpretation into a game, a metaphor that often becomes explicit. Another metaphor might be a dance between the horizontal and the vertical, each partner improvising for the sake of a mutual freedom. The vertical, that is, may still have a part to play. For the medieval poetics of enigma, the ultimate goal is inward and upward movement toward Christ as the Word made flesh, both intimate in participation and transcendently other. The farther this poetics travels the world and history in its encounter with horizontal others, the stronger this inward, vertical conversion. Common to the medieval appeal of the enigmatic as riddle, rhetoric, and theology is an awakening to responsive, creative freedom that is conceived, not over against, but in harmony with a higher, ultimately divine will. Such an ideal is certainly not limited to the Middle Ages; it is expressed in all times and in many forms. Bakhtin and Girard find it in the novels they consider truly novelistic. It contributes to J. R. R. Tolkien’s view of fairy stories, yet also characterizes the modernism of T. S. Eliot. It is at the center of the great Greek and Shakespearean tragedies. Whereas the program of literary reading in the service of forming free individuals is often attributed to the Renaissance classical revival by contrast to the Middle Ages, the medieval poetics of enigma moves in the direction of such a modern-seeming literary experience, beyond what had become a confining classical agenda to teach, to delight, and to move. Representing others enigmatically, whether they are persons or things, makes them recipients of imaginative, compassionate contemplation rather than objects of praise, blame, or desire for power, and this, in turn, enables the truly liberal self. Yet we moderns recognize ourselves to be in the predicament of the pilgrim Dante at the beginning of the Commedia: the direct way is lost. Indeed, to whom as to Dante have the gates of heaven ever been twice opened (see Paradiso 15.28–30)? Auerbach argued that Dante’s theological view of history led him to an intensity of literary realism that ended up overwhelming his allegorical poetics—the horizontal displacing the vertical.17 It is equally true, however, to see this as a continuation of the poetics of enigma in which the starting and ending points remain

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the same even as the path between them lengthens and becomes more overgrown with realistic representation. That is to say, the meaningfulness of literary representations still assumes the presence of an unrepresentable fullness of meaning as affirmed in the medieval poetics of enigma. The road becomes longer and the vertical goal less accessible precisely because avoiding the coercive rhetorics of the violent sacred requires facing difficult reality. With Langland and Julian, the road to participation is seen to pass through the most intractable difficulties of theological mystery and human brokenness. Chaucer’s “man of great authority” never speaks, and his pilgrims aim for Canterbury, symbol of the celestial Jerusalem, but never arrive. The enigmas posed by one’s neighbors and fellow pilgrims are enough. To set out with Patience to read riddles, to set out with Conscience to seek Piers the Plowman—icon of ordinary participation in the divine—is to play a long game.

L I S T O F A B B R E V I AT I O N S

The following abbreviations are used in the notes and bibliography. CCCM: Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis CCSL: Corpus Christianorum Series Latina DDC: Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). DIMEV: Linne R. Mooney, Daniel W. Mosser, and Elizabeth Solopova, eds., Digital Index of Middle English Verse, n.d., www.dimev.net/. EETS: Early English Text Society (o.s.= original series, e.s. = extra series). EM: Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale, 2 vols. in 2 parts each (Paris: Aubier, 1959–64), cited by volume/part and page. ME: Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, trans. Marc Sebanc and E. M. Macierowski, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998–2009), cited by volume and page. MED: Hans Kurath et al., eds., Middle English Dictionary, 22 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952–2001), http://quod.lib .umich.edu/m/med/. MLTC: A. J. Minnis and A. Brian Scott, eds., Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c. 1100-c. 1375 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). OED: Oxford English Dictionary, online edition: www.oed.com. PG: J.-P. Migne, ed. Patrologiae cursus completus, series Graeca, 161 vols. (Paris, 1856–66), cited by volume and column number. PL: J.-P. Migne, ed. Patrologiae cursus completus, series Latina, 221 vols. (Paris, 1841–65), cited by volume and column number. ST: Aquinas, Summa theologica: Latin and English, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 60 vols. (Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1964). References are to part, question, article, and sometimes section of article. STC: Short Title Catalog, accessed on Early English Books Online (EEBO). YLS: The Yearbook of Langland Studies

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1. Langland, Piers Plowman, B.15.152, 161–62a, ed. Schmidt, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition; throughout this book, all citations to Piers Plowman are to this edition unless otherwise noted. Piers Plowman survives in what scholars have agreed are at least three different versions, each divided into sections called passūs (singular passus). Citations indicate version, passus number, and line number. On versions and divisions of the poem, see the overview later in this introduction. In the case of these lines, the C text revises what I am calling the poetic signature in important ways that will be discussed below in chapter 6, the section “Langland’s Poetic Exegesis of 1 Corinthians 13.” On Langland’s poetic signatures, see Middleton, “William Langland’s ‘Kynde Name.’” 2. 1 Cor. 13:12a, altered from the Douay-Rheims translation (ed. Challoner), which I use elsewhere for translations from the Vulgate (Biblia sacra iuxta vulgata versionem, ed. Weber) and which here reads, “We see now through a glass in a dark manner. . . .” The original Greek word for riddle here, transliterated into the Latin alphabet, is ainigma. 3. See Struck, Birth of the Symbol, 23–50. 4. A resurgent interest in explicit riddling forms in contemporary poetry is only the tip of the iceberg. See, for instance, Crossley-Holland and Sail, New Exeter Book of Riddles, and the long list of current poets enlisted in the complete new translation of the actual riddles of the Exeter Book included in Delanty and Matto, Word Exchange. 5. Passages of literary theory in Middle English are gathered in WoganBrowne et al., Idea of the Vernacular. 6. For a thorough selection of these sources, see Copeland and Sluiter, Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric. 7. Theological approaches to literary theory are well represented in MLTC. A good guide to all three of these domains and more is Minnis and Johnson, Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2.

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8. The most sustained previous treatment of the medieval poetics of enigma, in D. W. Robertson Jr.’s influential Preface to Chaucer (see 57–63 and index under “enigmatic mode”), indicates the range of enigmatic works in the Middle Ages and gathers illuminating texts about their poetics but gives a rather reductive account of its purposes and appeal. Ian Bishop uses the term enigma for a certain kind of poetic language in Pearl in Its Setting (66–68) but narrows its meaning. Priscilla Martin briefly invokes Bishop’s treatment of the term with respect to Piers Plowman (“Piers Plowman,” 107–10). Recent discussions of poetic form in Middle English studies have emphasized the need to understand how it integrates various structural levels, such as prosody, style, figurative language, and plot. See Cannon, “Form,” 178, and Cervone, Poetics of the Incarnation, 12–13. 9. Williamson, Old English Riddles, 106. Riddle number 66 in his numbering, 68–69 in Krapp and Dobbie, Exeter Book. 10. Translation altered from Williamson, Feast of Creatures, 128. 11. Förster, “Kleinere Mittelenglische Texte,” 212–13; DIMEV 6585. The rest of this manuscript includes many instructional and religious verses as well as a riddling prophecy attributed sometimes to Merlin and sometimes to Chaucer (DIMEV 6299; see below, chapter 2, the section “Collecting Middle English Riddles”). 12. Sutton-Smith holds that the rhetoric of progress (education or individual development), the rhetoric of the imaginary, and the rhetoric of the self (aimed at peak experiences) “constitute the modern set of rhetorics, with a history largely elaborated ideologically only in the past two hundred years” (Ambiguity of Play, 11). Medieval theories of the enigmatic, however, will suggest earlier antecedents for these views of play. Sutton-Smith suggests that proponents of each purpose tend to argue its importance by categorizing as frivolous those sorts of play that do not fit that purpose well (203–4). He also discusses the importance of Johan Huizinga’s argument in Homo Ludens that play lies at the origin of many forms of civilization and gains its originary power precisely by remaining set apart from purposes other than the playing (78–80, 202–3). See Huizinga’s treatment of riddles in Homo Ludens at 110–11. Jim Rhodes draws on Wolfgang Iser’s conception of literary play in order to talk about the theological thinking that goes on in some major fourteenth-century English poems (Poetry Does Theology). Iser’s approach applies particularly well to narrative and provides a way of extending the riddling sense of play focused on figurative language and the dialogic situation. 13. From the “Prologue to the Commentary on Boethius’ De Hebdomadibus” in Albert the Great and Aquinas, Albert and Thomas, trans. Simon Tugwell, 527–28. Thomas’s comparison draws on the reasons that Aristotle, in book 10 of Nicomachean Ethics, finds contemplation to be superior to practical virtue: it

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is self-sufficient, is pursued for its own sake, and engages the highest element in us. Aristotle distinguishes between a kind of play, often translated as leisure, that is superior to practical pursuits, and another, amusement, that is inferior but necessary for recreation. Most famously, he writes, “Happiness is thought to depend on leisure, for we do business in order to have leisure” (10.7.6, trans. Rackham, 614–15). Thomas works from this section of Aristotle in developing the idea of a virtue of play in ST IIª–IIae, q. 168 a. 2. On Thomas’s theory of play and the virtue of eutrapelia, see Rahner, Man at Play. Robert Holcot, citing Thomas’s distinction between kinds of play in his popular commentary on the Book of Wisdom, written around 1335, adds another example of the devotional kind, “such as Christians perform on the day of Corpus Christi.” This is probably an early reference to a Corpus Christi play (Holcot quoted in Wenzel, “Early Reference,” 390–91). See also the commentary by Luiz Jean Lauand, “Ludus,” which gives a list of all the passages in which Thomas uses the term. G. Olson’s Literature as Recreation explores this medieval justification of literature, which I would distinguish from the contemplative play of enigma. 14. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, lines 7–18, ed. Seymour et al., 42. 15. Aertsen, Play in Middle English, which also includes the similarly broad synonyms disport and leik. See Huizinga’s discussion of words for play across the European languages in Homo Ludens, 28–45. 16. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, ed. Seymour et al., 43, and De rerum proprietatibus, 1: “Utile mihi et forsitan aliis, qui naturas rerum et proprietates per sanctorum libros nec non et Philosophorum dispersas non cognoverunt, ad intelligenda aenigmata scripturarum, quae sub symbolis et figuris proprietatum rerum naturalium et artificialium a Spiritu sancto sunt traditae et velatae.” 17. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, ed. Seymour et al., 43, and De rerum proprietatibus, 2: “Invisibilia enim Dei per ea quae facta sunt intellecta conspiciuntur, ut dicit Apostolus. Et ideo Theologia provide sacris et poeticis informationibus usa est, ut et rerum visibilium similitudinibus allegoricae locutiones et mystici intellectus transumptiones formentur, et sic carnalibus et visibilibus spiritualia et invisibilia coaptentur.” 18. Wilbur makes a similar distinction between charm and riddle in “Persistence of Riddles,” 55n1. 19. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 70: “Rendre énigmatique ce que l’on croit entendre sous les noms de proximité, d’immédiateté, de présence (le proche, le propre et le pré- de la présence), telle serait donc la dernière intention du présent essai” (De la grammatologie, 103). Kermode refers to “enigma” repeatedly in Genesis of Secrecy, where the central

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notion of secrecy associated with the Gospel of Mark and parables moves between what I would call the esoteric and the enigmatic according to whether those who find themselves on the outside believe there is an absence or a presence behind the apparent mystery. In Fish’s deft summary of the postmodern legacy, “All of us, not just believers, see through a glass darkly” (“God Talk, Part 2”). 20. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 128. Spariosu, seeking in Wreath of Wild Olive an alternative to theories of literature preoccupied with power dynamics, emphasizes the liminality of play as a way of conceiving the potential of literature to project irenic worlds beyond the dominant order of agonistic conflict. Even more suggestive for the continuity between recent and medieval literary theory in general, and for the value of dwelling in the interpretive space opened by the enigmatic, is the work of Paul Ricoeur. His balanced attention to the constraints of form, the dynamics of rhetorical situation, and the potential for ever-renewed semantic innovation provides a model for working across the dimensions of meaning exposed by the different senses of enigma and extending them to metaphor and narrative more broadly. See, e.g., Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, and Bontekoe, “Ricoeur, Paul.” Rider appropriates Ricoeur for the criticism of medieval literature in “Whence? Whither?” 21. OED, entry updated June 2005. 22. Participation is a particularly important word and concept in the theological movement known as Radical Orthodoxy associated especially with the work of John Milbank. See J. Milbank, Pickstock, and Ward, Radical Orthodoxy, 3–4. 23. Chaucer, “Boece,” bk. 3, prosa 10, lines 127 and 144–48, ed. Hanna and Lawler, 432–33. Modern English trans. from Latin by Richard Green: “Thus everyone who is happy is a god and, although it is true that God is one by nature, still there may be many gods by participation” (63). Chaucer’s translation here, as often, follows the French translation by Jean de Meun; see Machan and Minnis, Sources of the Boece, p. 123, lines 90–93, for the French and p. 120, lines 71–72, for the Latin as it was likely known by Chaucer and his contemporaries. 24. See Balás, “Participation.” A version of this saying is found in Athanasius, On the Incarnation, section 54, and was also attributed to Augustine (see Constable, Three Studies, 146n10). 25. Chaucer, “Boece,” bk. 3, prosa 11, lines 40–42, ed. Hanna and Lawler, 434; Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Green: “But, if you also grant that every good is good by participating in the perfect good . . .” (66). 26. Though Aristotle denied the transcendental status of Plato’s forms, his metaphysics of substance as union of matter and form can be seen as a reformulation of the principle of participation (see Morrison, “I Am You,” 12–14). This Aristotelian version was integrated with a Christian theology of participation by

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Aquinas (see below, chapter 1). On the combined Platonic-Aristotelian-Christian view broadly shared by thinkers such as Aquinas and Dante, see Moevs, Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy, 58. On the importance of Boethius’s logical and theological works for Christian development of the metaphysics of participation, see Pabst, Metaphysics, 113–41. 27. Chaucer, “Boece,” bk. 4, prosa 4, lines 113–14, ed. Hanna and Lawler, 447; trans. Green: “And, if the misery of the man who has no good at all is increased by additional evils, isn’t he much unhappier than the man who is relieved by acquiring some good?” (86). Cf. Machan and Minnis, Sources of the Boece, p. 162, line 52, and p. 163, line 66. 28. Chaucer, “Boece,” bk. 5, prosa 2, lines 26–34: “But the soules of men moten nedes be more fre whan thei loken hem in the speculacion or lokyng of the devyne thought; and lasse fre whan thei slyden into the bodyes; and yit lasse fre whan thei ben gadrid togidre and comprehended in erthli membres; but the last servage is whan that thei ben yeven to vices and han ifalle fro the possessioun of hir propre resoun.” 29. Vance emphasizes the difference between Augustine and PseudoDionysius in order to connect the latter’s positive view of eros to the devotional extension of the language of courtly love in Pearl (“Pearl ”). Chapter 1 below will consider these differences further. 30. On how the complexities of thinking about representations lead toward something like participation, see R. Williams, Edge of Words, 19–30 and 186–97. 31. For this general cognitive approach to language, see, among many others, the work of George Lakoff and his various collaborators. For an approach to literary allegory that draws on the theory of conceptual blending in particular, see Kasten and Gruenler, “Point of the Plow.” 32. On Plato and Aristotle, see Morrison, “I Am You,” 16–17 and references. Aquinas, as discussed below in chapter 1, works out a Christian version of the Aristotelian view. 33. R. Williams, Edge of Words, 47. On this distinction between medieval and modern views of mind and knowing, see McIntosh, Mystical Theology, 70. 34. On the metaphysics of substance and the metaphysics of relations and their consequences in Western thought, see Pabst, Metaphysics. 35. Even if the “et” in modern editions is sometimes a product of scribal miscopying of manuscripts, the point is the same. 36. Tregelles, English Hexapla. A Wycliffite sermon in English on 1 Corinthians 13 intersperses a translation of the whole chapter except for the phrase “in enigmate” (Hudson, English Wycliffite Sermons, 1:539–45). Another Middle English translation contemporary with the Wycliffite also reads “in derknesse” (Paues, Fourteenth-Century English Biblical Version). The fourteenth-century,

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northern Middle English translation of The Pauline Epistles preserved in ms. Parker 32 keeps both prepositional phrases but loses the verbal metaphor and the sense of obscurity: “Now forsothe we seen by the myrour in the licnesse” (Powell, Pauline Epistles, 87). Miles Coverdale’s 1535 translation (STC 2063) and the Great Bible of 1539 (Tregelles, English Hexapla) keep Tyndale’s wording here. On the intellectual contexts of the sixteenth-century translations of this verse, see Gruenler, “Dark Speakyng.” 37. Another reason for the early modern preference for subordinating the riddle metaphor to modify the mirror metaphor might be the improved technology of mirror making. Recent commentary on this verse finds that Hellenistic culture in St. Paul’s time took pride in the quality of its mirrors and thus argues that he refers to the indirectness of knowledge of the divine, not its poor quality (Hugedé, Métaphore du miroir, 97–137; Gooch, Partial Knowledge, 147–51; Fee, First Epistle, 647–48). Medieval commentary, however, apparently less impressed with mirrors, takes the image in a mirror to be both indirect and obscure. Late medieval and early modern interpreters might have been led by the improvements in glass making that made possible large, clear mirrors to assume that, since ancient ones would have been much poorer, the emphasis in the metaphor must be on the obscurity of the image they would reflect. On medieval mirrors and the use of mirrors in medieval art in relation to 1 Cor. 13:12, see Kessler, “Speculum.” 38. See Pelagius (attributed in the Middle Ages to Jerome), PL 30.758–59; Sedulius Scotus, PL 103.154–55. 39. On these practices in general, see Leclercq, Love of Learning. 40. PL 181.957. 41. Hugh of St. Victor, On the Sacraments 1.10.9 (trans. Deferrari, 181). 42. Robert of Melun, Oeuvres, ed. Martin, 2:214–15. 43. PL 181.957C: “Videbimus facie ad faciem, id est manifeste ad similitudinem duorum, qui se invicem directo vultu sine aliqua re interposita aspiciunt” (“We will see face to face, that is, manifestly, like two who look each other directly in the face without anything else interposed”). 44. PL 134, col. 388D: “Nostrum gaudium, laetitiam et finem nostri desiderii videbimus.” Atto interprets both mirror and riddle as being about seeing similitudes that must be interpreted. The idea of a similitude could pertain to either participation or correspondence, but Atto’s explanation of enigma here, by saying that similitudes work by allegory, makes clear that he means participation in a cosmos of symbolic relations. 45. Hugh of St. Victor, On the Sacraments 1.10.9 (trans. Deferrari, 181). 46. Aquinas, “Commentary on the First Epistle,” section 13-4, “clara et aperta.” Nicholas of Lyra is similar: “Clare et nude videbimus divinam essentiam”

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(Biblia Sacra). Perhaps “open” could be read as a synonym for “clear” in a representational paradigm, but Aquinas’s discussion of our present, mediated knowledge leads me to read it as adding something not expressed by “clear,” something more like the full disclosure of completely open dialogue. See further on Aquinas below, chapter 1. The phrase “nude, clara et aperta” is used in conjunction with the idea of vision face to face in Pope Benedict XII’s attempt to resolve the controversy over the beatific vision provoked by his predecessor John XXII (KerbyFulton, Books under Suspicion, 368). The importance of the phrase “face to face” in this controversy as well as the subsequent one in England over the teachings of Uthred of Boldon that lasted throughout Langland’s career (see Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, 365–74) would have heightened attention to 1 Cor. 13:12. 47. Bonaventure, Opera omnia, 9:49. 48. For an argument that only a theology of participation can save a correspondence model of truth, see J. Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, 1–18. 49. See Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 80–84, and chapter 6, the section “The Loss of Participation,” below. Huizinga is eloquent on the culture surrounding 1 Cor. 13:12; what he sees as “the decline of symbolism” and relates to an excess of the symbolic habit of thought and increasing emphasis on the visual could also be related to an attenuation of the historical basis of enigmatic interpretation (Autumn, 234–48). 50. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties, lines 1–3, ed. Seymour et al., 69. This is the next occurrence of the term participation in English after Chaucer’s translation of Boethius, according to MED. 51. Louise Bishop shows in Words, Stones, and Herbs how the healing power of the knowledge contained in encyclopedic works such as lapidaries and herbals and activated by charms can be understood through the idea of “participatory consciousness.” 52. See Auerbach’s classic essay “Figura,” oriented toward Dante’s poetics. Recent work on “theological interpretation” of the Bible, aiming to overcome the dominance of modern philosophical hermeneutics, has come back around to an appreciation of medieval exegesis for precisely its orientation to an enigmatic fullness of meaning. See Levering, Participatory Biblical Exegesis, and Leithart, Deep Exegesis. Recovery of medieval exegesis among theologians stems from de Lubac’s fundamental organization and interpretation of the evidence in EM. J. Milbank, Suspended Middle, gives an accessible account of de Lubac’s larger theological work that also identifies his significance for Radical Orthodoxy. The following passage suggests how recovery of the ancient idea of participation relates to modern theologies and philosophies that make a sharper distinction between natural and supernatural as well as how it is conducive to a poetics of enigma: “For de Lubac the enigma ran equally in two opposite directions. On

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one hand, the extra-ordinary, the supernatural, which is always manifest within the Creation, is present at the heart of the ordinary. . . . On the other hand, the ordinary and given always at its heart points beyond itself and in its spiritual nature aspires upwards to the highest. Grace is always kenotic; the natural is always elevated but not destroyed. Yet by a symmetrical paradox the ‘more’ that is demanded by nature can only be received from God as a gift” (5–6). 53. This is perhaps the place to mention the anthropologist Claude LevyBruhl’s idea of “participation mystique” attributed to the mentality of primitive peoples, adopted from him by Carl Jung (Haule, “Participation Mystique”). Owen Barfield’s still-astonishing book Saving the Appearances links Levy-Bruhl’s idea to a philosophical and theological account of participation aimed at its postmodern recovery. 54. Verse 16, Powell, Pauline Epistles, 77. The Vulgate uses participatio in two other instances, 2 Cor. 6:14 and Ps. 121:3. Augustine comments on the latter in Trinity 3.8 (trans. Hill, 131) as a reference to human reason sharing in divine wisdom. The Orcherd of Syon, an early fifteenth-century translation of Catherine of Siena’s Dialogue, also uses “participacioun” (line 16) to describe the effect of the sacrament (ed. Hodgson and Liegey, 65). The entries in Latham’s Dictionary of Medieval Latin for participare and participatio include examples of philosophical, theological, and sacramental senses as well as a variety of social uses, such as in legal sources. 55. See de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 45–54. 56. See Macy, Banquet’s Wisdom, 17, 29, 41–42, 53–54, 69, and de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum. Morrison shows the distinction of passive and active participation in Gerhoh of Reichersberg’s Eucharistic theology, “I Am You,” 206–7. It may not be going too far to say that, as the theology of the sacraments became more controversial and sophisticated in the later Middle Ages, it tended toward rhetoric that was more didactic or esoteric, more concerned with exclusion, and thus the enigmatic became all the more important for the sake of cultivating ever-deeper participation. 57. The relevance of enigma to medieval Jewish and Muslim theology is, unfortunately, beyond my scope. 58. On Chrétien, see Rider, “Perpetual Enigma,” and Pickens, Perceval and Gawain. Wolfram’s Parzival signals its pervasively enigmatic poetics with a veiled reference to 1 Cor. 13:12 in its prologue: “Tin coated with glass on the other side, and the blind man’s dream—these yield a countenance’s shimmer, but that dull light’s sheen cannot keep company with constancy” (ed. Edwards, 3; see Haug, Vernacular Literary Theory, 153–77). On Dante, see chapter 7 below. Sarah Kay develops a Lacanian view of riddling and the enigmatic in Occitan poetry and the Old French romances of Thebes, Eneas, and Troie in Courtly Contradictions, 143–78.

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Notes to Pages 22–24

59. The list of examples is too long to cite; many will appear below. A search on Google Books for “enigmatic” and Piers Plowman yielded 1,290 hits, the first 28 of which, and many more, call the poem or part of it enigmatic (conducted April 23, 2015). Simpson, “Et Vidit,” has given the most sustained attention to the importance for the poem of medieval theological reflection on 1 Cor. 13:12. Carruthers equates enigma with obscuritas in her extended discussion of the importance of the latter in Langland (“Allegory without the Teeth,” 29, 33, 41). Schmidt notes this discussion in the latest of his several mentions of aenigma in articles on Langland; here he also comes closest to articulating what I call the rhetoric of enigma and finds it to be sustained in the C text as well as the B (“Unity, Unanimity and Peace,” 332, 335, 342, and 346n15). 60. Bloomfield’s account of the poem’s form is still helpful. While calling it an apocalypse, he discusses the influence of “three literary genres: the allegorical dream narrative; the dialogue, consolatio, or debate; and the encyclopedic (or Menippean) satire,” as well as “three religious genres (or forms): the complaint, the commentary, and the sermon” (“Piers Plowman,” 10). Four of these seven— apocalypse, allegorical dream, dialogue/debate, and commentary—are related especially closely to the enigmatic mode, as will be seen. 61. Middleton, “Piers Plowman, the Monsters,” 95. Cole and Galloway provide a handy starting point for reviewing the history of Piers Plowman criticism in their introduction to Cambridge Companion. See also Schmidt’s history of the treatment of form in Piers Plowman in the context of an account especially compatible with the importance of enigma (“Formosa Deformitas”). 62. Middleton, “Piers Plowman, the Monsters,” 96–97, citing Bloomfield, “Present State.” To specify the poem’s mode as enigmatic is a further step in what Cole and Galloway have recently described as “more self-conscious pursuits of the idea of ‘the literary’ as such in medieval culture” that have characterized much recent Langland scholarship (Cambridge Companion, 3). 63. Nicolette Zeeman points out that Piers Plowman is “profoundly selfreflexive and self-theorized” but that “Langland is rarely explicit about his theoretical reflections” (“Piers Plowman in Theory,” 214, 227). I would say that his poetic signature is the major exception. 64. Middleton, “Piers Plowman,” 32. 65. Hanna, “Versions and Revisions,” 33. 66. Closest to Langland himself is probably the author of the “John But” ending to the A text, which, as Kerby-Fulton puts it, presents “a riddle of sorts” and shows awareness of an audience that “appreciates playful allusion to the poem” (Books under Suspicion, 384, 386). Current work on the manuscripts of Piers Plowman is gradually making their evidence more available and bringing to light what it implies about the poem’s initial reception. Such evidence would be

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an important test for the idea of a broadly shared interest in a poetics of enigma, but it is beyond the scope of this study, which works almost entirely from conventional editions and imagines ideal readers projected by the text as reconstructed by editors (while acknowledging that these ideal readers are to some extent projected by the editors). For a comprehensive gathering of, and contribution to, work on Langland’s early reception, see Bowers, Chaucer and Langland. 67. Hanna, “Versions and Revisions,” 38. A fourth version, Z, is more controversial. Since Schmidt includes it in the parallel-text edition that I cite throughout, I will sometimes note when lines from Z parallel those in other versions, but I do not take a position on its authority or dating. 68. Hanna, “Versions and Revisions,” 44. 69. Ibid., 48; Coghill, “Pardon of Piers Plowman.” Coghill’s word for the pardon itself, “enigmatic” (at 137, 153, 174, and 193), seems meant to express precisely its effect of provoking further thought. He goes so far as to say that the result for the B text as a whole was “adding a mode of meaning that was to transmute it into a new species of poetry” (151). I would not go quite so far, but the passages Coghill draws attention to are among those I would consider most enigmatic. His essay “God’s Wenches” is another important attempt to articulate what the poetics of enigma names more precisely. The earliest description of Piers Plowman as “enigmatic” that I have found is a note in Skeat’s parallel-texts edition (Langland, Vision of William; 1886) to line B.13.152, where he uses it in the older English sense of riddle as verbal form. 70. The C text is usually taken to retain the structure of eight visions from B, though with some major shifts. Warner, however, has recently argued that the B revision ended with the sixth vision and that the seventh and eighth were composed for C but were added to all B manuscripts in order to complete them (see Lost History). The sixth vision is in many ways the most sustained and finished example of the poetics of enigma, but the seventh and eighth complete some of the most enigmatic aspects of the whole poem in a more open-ended fashion (see chapter 7 below). In short, the question of whether to see the final two visions as part of the B text does not have major consequences for the overall view of the poem proposed here. 71. Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition, ed. Pearsall, 26. 72. Schmidt, “Langland’s Visions and Revisions,” 202. 73. See most recently Hanna, “‘Absent’ Pardon-Tearing.” 74. When citations are given to multiple versions, the first one is the one quoted exactly. If they are separated by a slash, I take the variations to make little difference of sense. If the differences are more substantial, I separate them with a comma and “cf.” My choice of which version to cite is driven primarily by which one my argument is following and whether I am considering the poem

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Notes to Pages 25–32

prospectively, in light of revisions to come, or retrospectively, in light of revisions made. Occasionally I choose according to familiarity of spelling or phrasing. 75. The semi-Pelagian position has become common since Adams’s influential article, “Piers’s Pardon” (see below, chapter 6, the section “Salvation as Participation in Kynde”). My account of Langland’s theology is in agreement with that of Aers, who, particularly in Salvation and Sin, finds in Piers Plowman an authentic Augustinianism distinct from, on the one hand, the neo-Pelagianism of William of Ockham and his followers and, on the other, the neo-Augustinianism formulated in fourteenth-century England most influentially by Thomas Bradwardine. Related to this controversy is another over a false dichotomy, whether the poem’s theological interest primarily concerns salvation or, as Bloomfield (“Piers Plowman” ) suggests, Christian perfection. 76. For an overview, see Gillespie, “Vernacular Theology.” 77. Watson, “Visions of Inclusion.” 78. Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, 383. For the phrase “functional ambiguity,” see, e.g., 375, 378. 79. See most recently Simpson, “Religious Forms and Institutions.” 80. Compare Rider’s argument for why French literature saw a flourishing of enigmatic style in the twelfth century (“Enigmatic Style”). 81. Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 2. 82. See below, chapter 6, the section “The Loss of Participation.” Leff ’s Dissolution of the Medieval Outlook provides a helpful overview of the new lines of thinking in fourteenth-century England. C H A P T E R O N E . Language for a Theology of Participation, Theory for a Poetics of Enigma

1. On the importance of the term and concept throughout Augustine’s works, see “Aenigma” in Mayer, Augustinus-Lexicon. See also Allard, “Énigme et la culture.” On his use of aenigma in De doctrina Christiana and the Confessions, with further references to other works, see chapter 4 below. 2. For a similar overview of participation in medieval ontology, epistemology, and mysticism, oriented toward the image of the mirror rather than the riddle, the lucidity of Dante rather than the convolutions of Langland (though chapter 7 will argue they share the poetics of enigma), see Moevs, Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy, 57–71. 3. Gareth B. Matthews discusses its pioneering importance for the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the philosophy of language in his introduction to Augustine, On the Trinity, Books 8–15.

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4. See Daniels, “Argument,” who notes Anselm’s reference to it in the preface to the Monologion as a guide to how his own work should be read, and Worthen, “Augustine’s De Trinitate.” Anselm’s Monologion also includes, in chap. 65, a reflection on ineffability indebted to Augustine’s discussion of 1 Cor. 13:12 in De Trinitate (Basic Writings, trans. Deane, 174–77). On the importance of Augustine’s De Trinitate and Anselm’s similar understanding of enigma for what she calls the “verbal epistemology” of the Middle Ages, see Colish, Mirror of Language, 49–54, 94–95. 5. Introduction to Augustine, Trinity, trans. Hill, 19. See also Emery, “Trinitarian Theology,” 2–17. 6. Bell, Image and Likeness, 22. Bell gives an account of Augustine’s “doctrine of participation” and its importance for his mystical theology, with references to many of his works and to previous scholarship (21–64). For Augustine’s place in the development of the theory of participation from Plato to Aquinas, see Annice, “Historical Sketch”; Fabro, “Intensive Hermeneutics,” 460–62; and Pabst, Metaphysics, 74–111. 7. Augustine, De Trinitate 1.16, trans. Hill, 76. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text, using, for the Latin text, book and paragraph numbers without the section number that traditionally comes between them, and referring to Hill’s translation, Trinity, by page number. See Emery, “Trinitarian Theology,” 12n64, on Augustine’s citations of 1 Cor. 13:12 within a larger pattern of “words which Augustine uses to qualify the knowledge that we can have of the Trinitarian mystery” (11). 8. Bell, Image and Likeness, 34, 76. 9. See chapter 4 below. 10. Froelich, Biblia Latina: “Speculum. Est anima, vi cuius aliquo modo Deum noscimus, sed obscure. Enigma. Est non omnis sed obscura allegoria. Unde sicut per speculum imaginem, ita nomine aenigmatis similitudinem quamvis obscuram et ad percipiendum difficilem significavit.” The brief, interlinear gloss on “per speculum in enigmate” condenses and broadens the same reading: “imaginem obscuram, creaturas in quibus aliqua similitudo dei relucet, et hoc satis obscure” (an obscure image, creatures in which some similitude of God shines out, and this sufficiently obscurely). 11. Perler, “Medieval Philosophy of Language,” 492. Perler goes on to describe the late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century controversies over this view that would lead to nominalist rejection of it. On the transmission of Augustine’s ontology and epistemology of the word through Isidore of Seville, see Irvine, Making of Textual Culture, 223. 12. Gilson, Christian Philosophy, 211, 223. See also Daniels, “Argument,” 50.

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13. Augustine’s epistemology is usually discussed as one of illumination, but this too he treats as a metaphor (Gilson, Christian Philosophy, 78–81), one that Clifford Ando suggests he preferred because sight is (or seems) instantaneous (“Augustine on Language,” 75). He brings the two metaphors of illumination and participation in the Word together at De Trinitate 4.4. 14. See Schildgen, “Augustine’s Answer.” 15. For an account of the overall argument of De Trinitate that brings out its relational view of the Trinity in light of previous scholarship on it, see R. Williams, “Sapientia and the Trinity.” 16. See also Augustine’s Quaestionum in Heptateuchem 45, ed. Schwank, 263–64, on poets as “enigmatists.” 17. Colish, Mirror of Language, 49–50. 18. See Bell, Image and Likeness, 32–33; the terms come from Gilson. Fabro uses the terms metaphysical and phenomenological in his discussion of Aquinas’s philosophical refinement of the idea of participation (“Intensive Hermeneutics,” 466). The two aspects might also be called objective and subjective, as we now use those terms, with the proviso that use of the terms subject and object has almost reversed from their use in Latin and in older periods of English, and that these changes indicate the underlying shifts in mentality or consciousness toward a modern sense of self-contained subjectivity that makes a theology of participation harder to imagine than it might have been for medieval readers (see Ong, Presence of the Word, 222–31, and Barfield, History in English Words, 176). 19. Bell, Image and Likeness, 35–47, 108–10. See also 131–32 on William of St. Theirry’s distinction between two kinds of grace at work in each kind of participation. 20. For Augustine’s epistemology of the word in other works besides De Trinitate, see Colish, Mirror of Language, 7–49. 21. See Daniels, “Argument,” 51. 22. Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations, 299–300. 23. On his rhetorical handling of these temptations, see chapter 4 below on De doctrina Christiana, which deals more with the allegorical, and the Confessions, which deals more with the gnostic. 24. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, 99–145. 25. Gregory I, Gregory the Great, trans. DelCogliano, 109. On Gregory and his importance for monastic reading and spirituality, see Leclercq, Love of Learning, 25–36. De Lubac discusses Gregory’s prominence for allegorical interpretation in general throughout what he calls “the Gregorian Middle Ages” (ME, 2:117–25). Especially in the twelfth century, the image of the enigmatic as a lifting machine must have called to mind the great treadmills and windlasses used for raising people and materials into the heights of the soaring Gothic cathedrals

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that were beginning to be built. Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173) begins his commentary on the Song of Songs by quoting this passage with slight variation (PL 196.405): “Postquam a paradisi gaudiis expulsum est genus humanum, in istam peregrinationem vitae praesentis veniens, caecum cor a spirituali intellectum habet. Cui caeco cordi si diceretur voce humana: Sequere Deum, vel: Dilige Deum, sicut ei in lege dictum est, semel foris missum et per torporem infidelitatis frigidum, non caperet quod audiret. Idcirco per quaedam aenigmata sermo divinus animae torpenti et frigidae loquitur, et de rebus quas novit latenter insinuat ei amorem quem non novit. Allegoria enim animae longe a Deo positae quasi quamdam machinam facit, ut per illa levetur ad Deum, interpositis quippe aenigmatibus, dum quoddam in verbis cognoscit quod suum est, in sensu verborum intelligit quod suum non est, et per terrena verba separatur a terra.” Two of Richard’s longer works use exegesis of Old Testament texts to lay out the stages to contemplation. The Benjamin minor includes, at cap. 72, a brief integration of Augustine’s interpretation of 1 Cor. 13:12 from De Trinitate into the contemplative process: “We read and we believe that regarding the soul, humans have been made in the likeness of God and therefore as long as we walk by faith and not by sight, as long as we still see by a mirror and in an enigma, we cannot find, as I have said, a mirror more apt for imaginative vision of Him than the rational spirit” (published under the alternate title The Twelve Patriarchs, trans. Zinn, 129–30). The Benjamin major also treats enigmatic language at 4.10, 4.14, 5.12, and 5.14. Mary Carruthers has drawn attention to “the paramount spiritual role given in monasticism to meditation, and the continuing—even increasing— emphasis in monastic reading upon what was obscure, hidden, and dark” (Craft of Thought, 124). 26. ME, 2:120; original at EM, 2:346n58, “Scripturae sacrae mystica / Mire solvis aenigmata, / Theorica mysteria / Te docet ipsa Veritas,” from PL 145.987. Cf. Dreves, Hymni inediti, 119, which reads “mystico.” 27. Leclercq, Love of Learning, 216, 214. 28. The last section of Bernard’s last work, On Consideration, begins with a citation of 1 Corinthians 13:12 and is comparable to William’s works (in Selected Works, trans. Evans); see Karl Morrison, “Hermeneutics and Enigma,” who emphasizes the affective value of enigma. 29. Leclercq, Love of Learning, 223. 30. Quoted by Davis in the appendix on affectus in his translation of William of St. Thierry, Mirror of Faith, 94. See Bell, Image and Likeness, 132. 31. William of St. Thierry, Golden Epistle, prefatory letter, para. 7, trans. Berkeley, 5. 32. William of St. Thierry, Mirror of Faith, para. 26, trans. Davis, 69. 33. Ibid., para. 23, trans. Davis, 55.

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Notes to Pages 43–48

34. Ibid., para. 23, trans. Davis, 57. 35. Bell, Image and Likeness, 103–4. 36. See William of St. Thierry, Mirror of Faith, para. 6, trans. Davis, 16, and E. Rozanne Elder’s introduction to the translation. 37. William of St. Thierry, Enigma of Faith, para. 59, trans. Anderson, 90. 38. Ibid., para. 73, trans. Anderson, 104. 39. Ibid., para. 80, trans. Anderson, 110. 40. Ibid., para. 60, trans. Anderson, 91. 41. Ibid., para. 37, trans. Anderson, 68–69. 42. See Bell, Image and Likeness, 167–249, 253. 43. Enigma of Faith, para. 39, trans. Anderson, 71. See Bell, Image and Likeness, 115–16, 157–58. 44. See below, chapter 6. 45. Leclercq, Love of Learning, 200. See also 75, 142. 46. Ps. 77:2 (Vulgate, iuxta Hebraicum trans.). 47. Leclercq, Love of Learning, 239–44. Study of the enigmatic mode in the Latin liturgy is beyond my scope, but see Ong, “Wit and Mystery,” and Pickstock, After Writing, 169–266. 48. Duncan Robertson, Lectio Divina, xii. 49. See Harkins and van Liere, introduction to Interpretation of Scripture, 32–41, for a brief account focused on Hugh’s exegetical works. Rorem, Hugh of St.Victor, gives an overview of Hugh’s context and works that tracks the principles of the Didascalicon throughout his wide-ranging corpus. For an account of Hugh as consolidator of traditional exegesis, see ME, 3:211–67. On Hugh as theorist of reading, see Duncan Robertson, Lectio Divina, 211–24, and Stock, Implications of Literacy, 322–25. Zeeman argues that while Hugh censures poetry, he also recognizes its similarity to scripture in its use of language (“Schools Give a License,” 171–73). 50. Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon 2.1, trans. Taylor, 61, quoting Boethius, In Porphyrium dialogi (see Taylor’s note). Subsequent citations to this work are to this translation and are given parenthetically in the text. 51. See ME, 3:219–222. 52. Taylor discusses Hugh’s handling of Chartrian cosmology in the introduction to his translation of the Didascalicon, 19–28. 53. See Illich, In the Vineyard, 123. The kind of interpretation Hugh has in mind is envisioned in the “mountain of Middelerth” passage at the end of the first dream-within-a-dream of Piers Plowman (B.11.320–402/C.13.131–213, discussed below in chapter 4, the section “Theological Rhetoric in Langland’s First Inner Dream”) where the fruitfulness of nature manifests participation in divine wisdom and inspires desire to imitate it, but is also a lesson in how to read

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the world for the sake of thinking about the practical problems of ethics, economics, and politics that concern Langland’s poem. 54. See Sweeney, “Hugh of St. Victor.” 55. Aquinas refines Hugh’s distinctions by classifying the obvious meaning of a poetic figure in scripture as part of the literal sense in order to reserve the spiritual senses for the meaning of the things referred to. Aquinas thus works within a twofold distinction of sign and meaning that accords better with Augustine’s theory of signs in De doctrina Christiana (ST 1.1.10). Hugh’s more flexible, threefold distinction, working rather from Augustine’s theology of the Word, implies a sentence-based rather than a word-based theory of metaphor, so that metaphor is not a transference of meaning based on resemblances (the Aristotelian approach) but an innovation of meaning from the ruins of an absurd literal sense. Such a notion of the capacity of metaphor to create new meaning is a literary counterpart of the theological concept of analogy that grounds knowledge of the transcendent in Aquinas. See Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, esp. 272–80. For a somewhat different account of the relations between Hugh, Thomas, and their shared patristic sources, see Turner, “Allegory.” 56. Smalley, Study of the Bible, 83–106, who also gives a helpful introduction to Hugh and the community of St. Victor. 57. Rorem, Hugh of St. Victor, 32. On Hugh’s greater emphasis on history within an otherwise Augustinian program of transformation through reading, see Harkins, Reading. 58. Hugh of St. Victor, On the Sacraments 1.10.6. See Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, 172–73; and ME, 3:254–67. 59. See Aelred Squire’s overview of these treatises on pp. 24–40 of his introduction to a partial translation of them in Hugh of St. Victor, Selected Spiritual Writings. 60. See Zinn, “Historia Fundamentum Est.” 61. PL 176.669, trans. by a Religious of C.S.M.V., excerpted in Hugh of St. Victor, Selected Spiritual Writings, 132. 62. Here is the relevant passage: “Haec est causa, quare Deus in abscondito semper loquator. Sicut in lege, et prophetis, et in Evangelio per parabolas et aenigmata locutus est. Dignum est enim, ut sub figuris verborum abscondantur secreta mysticorum intellectum, quia cito vilescerent si passim omnibus paterent. Ita enim veritas et per inquisitionem fideles exercet, et ne ab infidelibus inveniatur, occulta permanet. Istos, dum difficile invenitur, majori desiderio inflammat; illos, dum omnino inveniri non potest, excaecat” (PL 176.670). 63. For a similar twelfth-century pioneer of historical thinking who articulated a hermeneutic of shared interpretive play for the sake of participation, see Morrison, “Anselm of Havelberg.” Allen, Ethical Poetic, gives an expansive

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account of fourfold exegesis as a broad instance of the medieval theoretical approach to meaning in poetic language, a system of systems for relating categories of thought to each other. Allen treats its categories too independently to be useful for enigmatic texts, though this reflects the direction taken by the most advanced Scholastic thinkers. 64. See Zinn, “Historia Fundamentum Est,” 143. 65. Auerbach, “Figura.” See also A. C. Charity, Events and Their Afterlife. Johan Chydenius includes both natural and historical symbols under his category “interpretative symbols,” which corresponds closely to enigma, and notes that Hugh of St. Victor, in fact, “distinguishes between six classes of interpretative symbols: things in a restricted sense, persons, numbers, places, points of time, and events” (Theory of Medieval Symbolism, 14, citing Hugh’s De Scripturis et Scriptoribus Sacris 14). De Lubac, in ME, 2:90, notes that St. Paul’s use of the word allegory diverted it from its prior, merely literary meaning in order to carry the new conception of the participation of history in a mysterious, unfolding, providential design. 66. Bonaventure, Breviloquium, prol.2, trans. de Vinck, 11. Stephen F. Brown notes the Augustinian basis of this view in his edition of Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind to God, 51n55. 67. See, e.g., his discussion of the late twelfth-century Mystere d’Adam in Mimesis, 156. 68. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, 162–201. 69. C. Morris, Discovery of the Individual. 70. Joachim both claimed to find detailed prophecies of the present in scripture and withheld understanding to those charismatically gifted and to an “idiosyncratic scheme” of twelve senses (McGinn, Visions of the End, 127). See ME, 3:327–419. 71. On the question of whether Denis too influenced William, see Bell, Image and Likeness, 15 and 121. 72. For an overview of the works and their reception, see Rorem, PseudoDionysius; Golitzin, Mystagogy, xix–xxxv, 1–58; and Corrigan and Harrington, “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.” For Denis’s place in the early history of negative theology, see Rocca, Speaking the Incomprehensible God, 3–26. For his place in the development of the medieval theology of participation, see Pabst, Metaphysics, 141–51. 73. Rothwell, English Historical Documents, 3:645. See ME, 2:66. 74. The sentence from chapter 2 of the Latin translation of De caelesti ierarchia reads “Sed quia et hoc misticis Eloquiis est decentissimum, per incomprehensibilia divina enigmata occultare et inviam multis ponere sacram abditam supermundanorum intellectum veritatem.” Hugh comments: “Propterea enim

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‘enigmata’ et parabolae et figurae in mistico Eloquio Scripturarum apponuntur, ne veritas {et} spiritalium rerum carnalibus et immundis spiritibus patescat, et ut simul studiosos et devotos ipsa sua profunditate exerceat; quam tamen causam hic auctor ex superhabundanti commemorare judicavit. Ideo igitur tecta sunt, ne omnibus pateant divina sacramenta, quia omnes digni non sunt agnitione veritas.” Hugh of St. Victor, Super ierarchiam Dionisii, ed. Poirel, 363–64, 463. 75. Quoted in Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, 103, citing Hugh’s commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy from PL 175.760D. 76. Richard of St. Victor, In Apocal. (PL 196.689), quoted in Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, 140n77. 77. On the works of the Cloud author, see McGinn, Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 396–424, who stresses his debt to Augustine and Augustinian tradition as well as to Denis. 78. Deonise Hid Divinity, ed. Hodgson, 2. This is translated by Walsh in Pursuit of Wisdom, 74–75. Compare to the modern English translation from the Greek original by Luibhéid in Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, 135. 79. On the later medieval reception of Denis’s works, especially in England, see Louth, “Influence of Denys,” and Boenig, “Pseudo-Dionysius.” 80. Deonise Hid Diuinity, ed. Hodgson, 2. 81. McEvoy, Mystical Theology, 17. 82. Medieval reception bears out Rocca’s conclusion “that to some degree Dionysius recognizes two kinds of negative theology: one is exoteric and forms a dialectic with the assertions of affirmative theology, while the other is an esoteric, mystical unknowing based on the dark ascents” (Speaking the Incomprehensible God, 21). 83. For a different but complementary account of the Cloud ’s resistance to what I am calling esotericism, see Turner, Darkness of God, 186–210. 84. Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Hodgson, 25. Subsequent citations to this work are given parenthetically in the text by page numbers. 85. Compare the more ecstatic language in Deonise Hid Divinity of being “ravischid to beholde aboven kynde” (ed. Hodgson, 4), cited by Clark, “Sources and Theology,” 102, a thorough analysis of the Cloud ’s roots in Denis as well as much other medieval theology. This phrase contrasts with the “kynde knowing” that is the explicit goal of the dreamer in Piers Plowman (see below, the opening of chapter 2 and the section in chapter 6 entitled “Salvation as Participation in Kynde”). 86. Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Hodgson, 136. 87. McGinn notes that this section has been seen as referring specifically to The Ladder of Monks by another monastic author, the Carthusian Guido II, but

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suggests it might also refer to Hilton’s Scale of Perfection (Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 412). 88. Hodgson notes references to scripture as a mirror in Augustine and Gregory. Hugh, on the other hand, as noted above, calls scripture the enigma and one’s heart the mirror, through the two of which together the sacrament of faith operates. 89. McGinn points out that the Cloud author often uses a phrase, “facere quod in se est” (doing what is one’s own power to do), that was important in later medieval theology (see below, in chapter 6, the section “The Loss of Participation,” and in chapter 7, the section “The Final Visions of Piers Plowman”), “but never in the semi-Pelagian sense of unaided human effort exercising what it can do on its own to prepare for grace, but always . . . to insist that as a result of God’s prevenient operative grace, his friends are called upon to cooperate with the divine love that draws them to God” (Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 403). 90. See Englert, “Of Another Mind,” and Tixier, “‘Good Gamesumli Pley.’” 91. See McGinn, Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 414–16, with further references. 92. See R. Williams, Wound of Knowledge, 139, and the last section of this chapter. 93. Pabst gives a general account of Aquinas’s metaphysics, with reference to previous scholarship, in the chapter entitled “Participation in the Act of Being” that is central to his Metaphysics, 201–71. 94. J. Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, 48. 95. Aquinas, “Commentary on the First Epistle,” trans. Larcher (altered), para. 800. 96. ST I.3.2. See Luscombe, Medieval Thought, 102. Luscombe attends to the importance of participation throughout his account of medieval intellectual history; see 11, 21, 24, 65–6, 80, 98, 122. 97. Aquinas, “Commentary on the First Epistle,” trans. Larcher, para. 801. 98. See Fabro, “Intensive Hermeneutics,” 481–86; Colish, Mirror of Language, 142–50; and Rocca, Speaking the Incomprehensible God, 77–195 with further references. 99. Rocca, Speaking the Incomprehensible God, 180. 100. For example, in his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard: “The realities of the faith are proposed to the understanding of believers not in themselves but through certain words which do not suffice to express them and through certain similitudes which do not suffice to represent them; that is why it is said that one knows them through a mirror in an enigma” (Aquinas, III Scriptum super libros Sententiarum, dist. 24, q. 1, a. 2, qla 3, sol., trans. in Emery, “Trinitarian Theology,” 20).

Notes to Pages 63–70

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101. Colish, Mirror of Faith, 150: “Analogies of God are, for Thomas, aenigmata.” 102. Ibid., 117–25. 103. See Deely, Four Ages of Understanding, 331–41. 104. J. Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, 41–42. 105. ST I.1.8. Here Thomas cites Denis. 106. Rocca, Speaking the Incomprehensible God, 194, italics in original. 107. Ibid., 199–298. 108. Velde, Aquinas on God, 178. See also Emery, “Trinitarian Theology,” 17–40. 109. Aquinas, “Commentary on the First Epistle,” para. 788. 110. ST III.61.4, reply to objection 1, trans. Blackfriars, vol. 56, citing Pseudo-Dionysius, On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 5. 111. For a provocative argument that the Eucharist grounds Aquinas’s view of language in the theology of participation, see J. Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, 88–111. 112. Henry, “Pange lingua gloriosi,” trans. Neale. See Ong, “Wit and Mystery,” 316–17. 113. See Curtius, European Literature, 214–21. 114. McGinn, Flowering of Mysticism, 87–112, presents Bonaventure’s “mystical synthesis” throughout his works as both an integration of “all the major streams of earlier Western mysticism—Augustinian, Dionysian, Gregorian, Cistercian, Victorine” and a transformation of them largely through “Bonaventure’s meditation on the meaning of Francis’s relation to the Verbum incarnatum” (93). As a measure of his influence through both authentic and inauthentic works, McGinn notes that Bonaventure probably had more pseudonymous writings attributed to him than any other medieval author (377n1). On Bonaventure’s harmonizing and interiorizing of Augustine and Denis in particular, see Turner, Darkness of God, 102–34. 115. Bonaventure, Journey of the Mind prol.5, 1.1, ed. Brown, 3, 5. Subsequent citations of this work are to this translation and are given parenthetically in the text. 116. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, 253. 117. See Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, 2:260–70. 118. Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 38–40. 119. See Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, 2:301. 120. See Costa’s further exploration of the place of signs in the Intinerarium in “Conversion to the Text’s Terms.” 121. See McGinn, Flowering of Mysticism, 110–11, on controversy over the relative roles of love and knowledge in Bonaventure.

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Notes to Pages 71–75

122. Balthasar, in Glory of the Lord, concludes vol. 2, Studies in Theological Style: Clerical Styles, with Bonaventure, and begins vol. 3, Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles, with Dante. Much of what Balthasar describes in these volumes could be seen as variations on the enigmatic mode. 123. Section heading of ME, 3:311–26. 124. Bonaventure, De reductione artium ad theologiam, trans. Healy, 47. Bonaventure’s highly schematic and theoretical successor to the Didascalicon pays an even greater tribute to Hugh’s influence by using the three spiritual senses of scripture as a framework to show how every sort of knowledge may be seen to participate in divine Wisdom. 125. See Ocker, Biblical Poetics. Hazard, Literal Sense, shows how fourteenth-century texts such as the biblical commentaries of Nicholas of Lyra and the Cursor mundi continue the legacies of Hugh of St. Victor and Aquinas in the way they “overcome the traditional split between the literal and spiritual senses, to emphasize their interdependence and continuity, the importance of putting literal meaning in terms of what is meaningful” (xv). See also McDermott, “Henri de Lubac’s Genealogy,” on “the mutual interiority of letter and spirit” (146) in Nicholas of Lyra and other fourteenth-century writers on the Bible. 126. McGinn argues against the error in modern scholarship of equating mysticism with experience and disconnecting it from theological thinking and discourse (Flowering of Mysticism, 12–27). 127. The image of participation as a fabric that unravels and then is cut during this period is from Boersma, who gives an overview of these developments with references to previous scholarship in Heavenly Participation, 52–83. See also Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, 5:9–21; Luscombe, Medieval Thought, 122–58; and Dupré, Passage to Modernity. 128. Ong, Presence of the Word, 283. At a deep, prereflective level, the erosion of participation accompanies the rise of literacy; see Ong, Orality and Literacy. For the long-term evolution of consciousness from participation to objectivity, see Barfield, Saving the Appearances. 129. Boersma, Heavenly Participation, 54–56, 61–63. See below, chapter 6, the section “The Loss of Participation.” 130. Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, 4:404. 131. See Pelikan, Reformation of Church, 10–68. 132. Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, 20. 133. See Velde, Participation and Substantiality; O’Rourke, PseudoDionysius; Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius, 167–74. Moevs has provided a similar account of the basis of Dante’s poetics, drawing primarily on Aquinas, in Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy.

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134. See the introduction to the English translation, “The Mendynge of Lyfe,” in Windeatt, English Mystics, 18, which will be used for Middle English text below. For an overview of Rolle and his works, see McGinn, Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 339–70. 135. McGinn, Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 615n58. 136. Windeatt, English Mystics, 20. Rolle, Emendatio vitae, ed. Watson, 65: “Mentalis enim vis{is}io sursum capitur, et celestia contemplatur—per visionem tamen enigmaticam et speculativam, non claram et perspicuam, quia dum per fidem currimus, per speculum in enigmate videmus. Si enim oculus intellectualis nititur in lucem spiritualem, lumen illud ut in se est non videt, sentit tamen se ibi fuisse, dum saporem et fervorem incircumscripti luminis secum retinet.” 137. Windeatt, English Mystics, 22; I have added the second set of quotation marks to indicate the completion of the quotation from Canticles 8:1. Rolle, Emendatio vitae, ed. Watson, 67: “et quia interius deliciis delicate pascitur, non est mirum si suspirans dicat: Quis michi det te, fratrem meum, ut inveniuam te foris et deosculer? id est, soluta carne te invenire merear, et facie ad faciem videns tecum ineternum conjungar; et iam nemo me despiciat.” Rolle refers to 1 Corinthians 13:12 several times in a similar discussion in chap. 5 of his Contra amatores mundi (ed. and trans. Theiner, 88–89 and 172–74). 138. McGinn, Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 346. Tekla Bude, in “Panis Angelorum,” contrasts Rolle and Langland and argues that Langland exposes the limits of Rollean song and reincorporates it in an interpretive process. 139. The Prick of Conscience, lines 8670–78, ed. Hanna, Wood, and Morris, Richard Morris’s Prick of Conscience, 237. 140. Quilligan, Language of Allegory, 58–59, citing Huppé, “Petrus, Id Est Christus,” 163. CHAPTER 2.

First Vision

Riddling Traditions, Participatory Play, and Langland’s

1. The idea of participation is compatible with the approaches to “kynde knowing” taken by Davlin, “Kynde Knowyng,” and White, Nature and Salvation, though they do not use the term. White is right to locate an element of passivity in the poem’s eventual embrace of knowledge through suffering (113) but misses the way participation transcends the opposition of passive and active. On the other hand, Harwood’s identification of “kynde knowing” with intuitive cognition, notitia intuitiva, as it became important in the epistemology of Duns Scotus and his followers, links Langland with the loss of participation I think he is out to resist (“Langland’s ‘Kynde Knowyng’” and “Piers Plowman” ). Which view is better depends on interpreting the whole poem rather than searching it for clear

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Notes to Pages 84–87

definitions. On the theology of participation, see chapter 1. On the relation of “kynde knowing” to other cognitive terms, see Schmidt’s notes to C.1.136–44. 2. See Steiner, Reading“Piers Plowman,” 21–59, on value, both material and spiritual, as a unifying topic of passūs 1–4 and the importance of the literary embodiment of truth. Note that I will refer to Langland’s narrative persona as the dreamer during visions, as the narrator during waking scenes, and occasionally as Wille (a name he receives at different points in different versions), especially when it seems important that he personifies the faculty of will. 3. C.1.147–53, somewhat revised from B.1.152–8. C. S. Lewis praises these lines as an example of Langland’s “power of rendering imaginable what before was only intelligible” (Allegory of Love, 160). For explications of this passage using various traditional sources, mostly scriptural, exegetical, and liturgical, see Langland, Piers Plowman, ed. Bennett, 113–14; Kean, “Langland and the Incarnation”; B. Smith, Traditional Imagery of Charity, 21–40; Heffernan, “Piers Plowman B.I.153–158”; Adams, “Editing”; Galloway, Penn Commentary, 1:204– 10; Cervone, Poetics of the Incarnation, 105–17. 4. A.1.135–38. The Z text is the same in this section. Steiner notes the similar expansion of the narration of Lucifer’s fall between A.1.112–13 and B.1.114–24 (Reading “Piers Plowman,” 34). 5. MED, s.v. “yedden.” On the noun form, giedd, one of the main Old English terms for poetry, including riddles, see Niles, Homo Narrans, 16–30. 6. The multivolume revision of Severs, Hartung, and Beidler, Manual of the Writings in Middle English, which seems to include every possible category of literary work, does not include a section on riddles, nor is one planned. 7. Archer Taylor lays out a helpful distinction between “the true riddle,” “literary riddles,” and “riddling questions” in “Riddle.” His overview Literary Riddle before 1600 is also still helpful but includes no examples from Europe between the Exeter Book and the early modern period. For consideration of riddles as a genre interacting with other genres, see Frow, Genre, 32–43. 8. Charles T. Scott reviews riddle scholarship through the late 1960s in “Some Approaches.” See also de Caro, “Riddles and Proverbs,” and Abrahams and Dundes, “Riddles.” Senderovich has more recently gathered a great deal of scholarship into an argument for the origins of riddling in Riddle of the Riddle. A. Taylor’s remarkable English Riddles from Oral Tradition is a gateway to previous monuments of comparatist scholarship. Tupper’s argument in “Comparative Study of Riddles” for the interconnections between oral and literary traditions, often separated in folklore studies, is especially important for the Middle Ages, as his comparative work in Riddles of the Exeter Book shows. Gray surveys riddle scholarship from a literary perspective, with a medieval focus, in Simple Forms, 178–92.

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9. Georges and Dundes, “Toward a Structural Definition,” 113; discussed by Senderovich, Riddle of the Riddle, 14. 10. Abrahams and Dundes, “Riddles,” 130. 11. Abrahams, “Literary Study,” 182. 12. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 13. Compare the happy terms taken by Adam Davis from Greek for the functions of the Exeter Book riddles, agon and gnomon (“Agon and Gnomon”). 13. Burns, “Riddling,” 139. If there is a leading function that emerges in riddle scholarship, it has to do with Burns’s functions (a) and (d), that is, with how riddles play with the categories that structure perception, thinking, and worldview. Indeed, behind Burns’s separation of these two closely related functions lies a controversy over how deep this play with categories goes. Does it merely play with conventions (Pepicello and Green, Language of Riddles), or more deeply with concepts and ways of seeing (Hamnett, “Ambiguity, Classification and Change”)? Does it challenge and cross the boundaries between categories (Ben-Amos, “Solutions to Riddles”), or just explore and reaffirm them (Maranda, “Riddles and Riddling”; Lieber, “Riddles, Cultural Categories”)? 14. Abrahams, “Literary Study,” 183. One recent gathering of riddle scholarship, spanning literary, folkloristic, and anthropological approaches as well as various cultures around the world, shows a shift of interest away from function to the “existential expressivity” of riddles (Hasan-Rokem and Shulman, Untying the Knot; see especially the editors’ introduction, 3–9, and afterword, 316–20). 15. Senderovich, Riddle of the Riddle, 21. 16. Donn V. Hart, Riddles in Filipino Folklore, 65. 17. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 44. 18. Ong, Presence of the Word, 207–22. 19. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 45–46. 20. Ibid., 69. 21. For an introduction to Girard, with guidance to his previous work, see Girard Reader and Girard, Antonello, and de Castro Rocha, Evolution and Conversion. 22. Girard, Things Hidden, 416–31, and I See Satan Fall, 16–24. 23. Alberg, Beneath the Veil, 1–17. 24. This is the thesis of Girard’s Violence and the Sacred, further argued in many of his later works. 25. Girard, Antonello, and de Castro Rocha, Evolution and Conversion, 69–70. On the ritual function of play and games in general, see Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 119, 152, 154, 311, and Things Hidden, 100–101. 26. Heller-Roazen attends mostly to the esoteric function of riddling and other kinds of obscurity in Dark Tongues. See, for example, his discussion of the

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Notes to Pages 92–94

Sanskrit Veda that links a riddle exchange to the sacrifice of a horse (75–76). Calvert Watkins, in his discussion of the liturgy of this ritual, suggests that its series of riddles reflects a prosodic riddle style that is probably common throughout the Indo-European language family (How to Kill a Dragon, 270). On the relationship between riddles and sacrifice in Hindu myth and ritual, see B. Collins, Head beneath the Altar, 182–95. 27. Girard develops his account of the Oedipus story throughout Violence and the Sacred and in the essays collected in Oedipus Unbound. For a convenient overview with comparison to the biblical story of Joseph, see “Myth of Oedipus.” It is worth noting that the riddling aspect of the dreams in the story of Joseph have a similarly ambiguous function of both leading to his scapegoating and enabling his deliverance. 28. Abrahams, “Literary Study,” 183–86. 29. See Elias, “Neck-Riddles in Mimetic Theory.” 30. Girard, Scapegoat, 192–93. Frank Kermode finds such a pattern in the case of the testing of Jesus by a lawyer that leads to the parable of the Good Samaritan: “Such contests often breed parables; so Luke includes one” (Genesis of Secrecy, 34). Kermode also notes that in the Greek Septuagint parable is equivalent to the Hebrew words for riddle (23). On the Gospel parables’ transformation of the dynamics of scandal, see Alberg, Beneath the Veil, 82–97. 31. See below, chapter 4, the section “Theological Rhetoric in Langland’s First Inner Dream.” 32. Gellius, Attic Nights 18.2. 33. Scirpus as a word for a riddle is probably a calque of Greek griphos (Hornblower and Spawforth, Oxford Classical Dictionary, 1317, s.v. “riddle”). 34. Ainos came to refer in classical Greek to a kind of praise poetry, but, according to Nagy’s analysis, it designated not so much a genre as a mode that drew attention to the occasion in which a poem was spoken and its use of language “as a difficult code that bears a difficult but correct message for the qualified and a wrong message or messages for the unqualified” (“Early Greek Views,” 11). Ford shows that the semantic range of ainos and ainigma included the sense of allegory before that term came into use (Origins of Criticism, 72–77). Chantraine expresses the etymological link between ainos and ainigma in terms of their fullness of meaning. Ainos originally meant speech or stories full of meaning, such as fables, and from this primitive sense derives an intermediate verb form meaning to speak significantly, hence in a manner difficult to comprehend, and hence in an ainigma. The common element between these words remained “speech charged with meaning” (Dictionnaire étymologique, 35). 35. Cook attends to this difference in both ancient and modern eras throughout Enigmas and Riddles, particularly in her chapter “Riddle as Scheme: A Case for a New Griph-Class,” 139–59.

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36. Ausonius, Ausonius, trans. Evelyn-White, 1:352–69, quotation from 369. 37. Athenaeus, Deipnosophists, 10.448b–e, 451c, 451f, 456b; trans. Gulick, 4:531–33, 545, 549, 569. On riddles as an aspect of verbal contestation in Greek culture, see D. Collins, Master of the Game, 127–32, and Węcowski, Rise of the Greek Aristocratic Banquet, 51. 38. Athenaeus, Deipnosophists, 10.453b, trans. Gulick, 553–55. 39. Petronius, Satyricon 58, trans. Heseltine, 107; Gellius, Attic Nights 18.2. 40. See the suggestive essay by Rokem, “One Voice and Many Legs.” Athenaeus gives a longer version in Deipnosophists 10.456b. A brief, common version found in early modern collections implies its oral currency (see A. Taylor, English Riddles, nos. 46–47). Fifteenth-century poet John Lydgate tells the story of Oedipus in his Middle English Siege of Thebes with a highly elaborated version of the riddle of the Sphinx (lines 659–78, ed. Erdmann, 29); Latin and French versions would also have been known in England. 41. 71e–2b. See Nagy, “Early Greek Views,” 25–26. Plato also dismisses riddles as an inferior form of knowledge at Republic 5.479c, using as an example a riddle that Athenaeus cites in Deipnosophists at 10.452d, but Ford shows the ambivalence of his attitude toward ainigma (Origins of Criticism, 85–89). On the “poetics of the enigma” in Plato and other Greek writers, see Struck, Birth of the Symbol, 38–52. 42. Athenaeus, Deipnosophists, 10.452d, trans. Gulick, 551. In Plato’s early dialogue Charmides, ainigma is used to indicate that the maxims the speakers are discussing mean something more or different than they appear to (161C, 162D, 164E). 43. Ohlert, Rätsel und Rätselspiele, 22. 44. See Stroumsa, “Myth as Enigma.” Struck treats ainigma as the most frequent technical term used by the allegorical interpreters who are the focus of his Birth of the Symbol; see especially 170–79. He offers a reconstruction and translation from the Derveni papyrus (4th c. BCE) of what might be the earliest notice of a distinction between kinds of riddles, both here labeled with derivatives of ainigma: “Orpheus did not mean to say in it riddles that are contestable, but rather great things in riddles” (31). 45. Piers Plowman B.13.185. See MED, s.v. “redels,” sense (b), and Eleanor Cook’s etymological appendix to Enigmas and Riddles, 257–65. 46. MED, s.v. “reden.” The occasional use of the spelling rede as a conscious archaism apparently led the OED to give separate entries for the verbs read and rede while admitting that they are the same word. For full history of the word, both entries must be consulted. Cf. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 110. 47. MED, s.v. “redels,” sense (c), citing an English sermon for Christmas Day attributed to Wyclif (ed. Arnold, Select English Works, 1:320).

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Notes to Pages 97–98

48. See the sketch of Aldhelm’s life, with references, in introduction to Aldhelm, Poetic Works, ed. Lapidge and Rosier, 5–9; quote taken from 7. The question of Aldhelm’s knowledge of Greek remains open; Lapidge and Herren summarize the state of the question in their introduction to their translation of Aldheim, Prose Works, 8–9. Archbishop Theodore was from Greek-speaking Tarsus in Asia Minor. Andy Orchard analyzes his knowledge of Latin poetry, both classical and Christian, and makes the case for seeing him as “the father of AngloLatin verse” (Poetic Art of Aldhelm, ix). For a recent overview of Aldhelm’s life and works with reference to previous scholarship, see Aldhelm, Saint Aldhelm’s Riddles, trans. Juster, xiii–xix. Juster’s thorough commentary gives an even better sense of Aldhelm’s learning. 49. Curtius points in particular to the importance for later medieval Latin poetry of the study of figures of speech—aenigma itself as well as the many other figures demonstrated in the Enigmata—promoted by Aldhelm and his successors such as Bede (European Literature, 45–48). 50. See Aldheim, Poetic Works, trans. Lapidge and Rosier, 66–69 and notes. The Anglo-Saxon riddlers are Tatwine, “Eusebius,” and Boniface; the continental collections are those known as the “Lorsch Riddles” and the “Bern Riddles.” Two collections of riddles were also attributed to Bede, one of which, contained in a manuscript with the other Anglo-Saxon collections mentioned above, includes important glosses that show the kind of close, contemplative attention they received (Tupper, “Riddles of the Bede Tradition”). Salvador-Bello, Isidorean Perceptions of Order, gives an overview of scholarship on Aldhelm and his riddles (162–221) in the course of what amounts to the most extensive case for his influence. Another mysterious author, Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, has now been shown to belong to this tradition as well; see Law, Wisdom, Authority, especially chapter 2. 51. William of Malmesbury, Deeds of the Bishops, trans. Preest, 228. See further Remley, “Aldhelm as Old English Poet,” and Orchard, Poetic Art of Aldhelm, 119–25. 52. Aldhelm, St. Aldhelm’s Riddles, trans. Juster, 3: “pandere rerum versibus enigmata queam clandistina fatu” (2). 53. Dungey, discussing both Aldhelm’s poetry and his prose, calls the effect a remystifying of creation: “Faith in the Darkness,” 18. 54. Aldhelm, St. Aldhelm’s Riddles, trans. Juster, 47: “Fausta fuit primo mundi nascentis origo / Donec prostratus succumberet arte maligni. / Ex me tunc priscae processit causa ruinae; / Dulcia quae rudibus tradebam mala colonis. / En iterum mundo testor remeasse salutem / Stipite de patulo dum penderet arbiter orbis / Et poenas lueret soboles veneranda Tonantis” (46).

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55. See Howe’s study of this aspect, “Aldhelm’s Enigmata.” He concludes: “For Aldhelm, the linguistic riddle is a recreation of this act of naming: to solve it means to participate in the initial act of identification and thus of naming. It means, in short, to remember the first act of riddling in Christian history, Adam’s naming of the animals in Eden” (57). On the use of etymology in Old English riddles, see Bitterli, Say What I Am Called, 35–56. On medieval etymology in general see also Ohly, Sensus Spiritualis, 18–20. 56. The major carrier of the correspondence between the tree of Eden and the cross during the Middle Ages is the hymn “Pange Lingua” by Venantius Fortunatus, written in 570 and sung on various liturgical occasions. For the wider tradition of tree imagery in Christian art and its development by Joachim of Fiore, see Reeves and Hirsch-Reich, “Figurae” of Joachim of Fiore, 24–38. Bonaventure notably uses the tree image in his popular Lignum vitae. 57. Aldhelm, Opera omnia, ed. Ehwald, 75–76: “Nam Simfosius poeta, versificus metricae artis peritia praeditus, occultas enigmatum propositiones, exili materia sumpta, ludibundis apicibus legitur cecinisse et singulas quasque propositionum formulas tribus versiculis terminasse.” 58. See Ohl, “Enigmas of Symphosius,” 20–23. Orchard notes, however, that “there is no compelling evidence that any Anglo-Latin composer of Enigmata after Aldhelm was directly influenced by Symphosius” (Poetic Art of Aldhelm, 156). The title of Symphosius’s collection of after-dinner riddles, Enigmata, suggests a breakdown of the distinction between aenigma and griphus, though it might be explained by the fact that the latter and its calque, scirpus, were rare words. Cook attributes the loss of distinction to Donatus (Enigmas and Riddles, 140). In one common version of the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri, the riddles taken from Symphosius are all called “quaestiones” except for when Tarsia first challenges Apollonius “parabolarum mearum solveris questionem” (Gesta Romanorum, ed. Oesterley, 527–28). Perhaps these terms show a tendency to reserve aenigma for more theologically significant matters on the model of biblical usage. John Gower’s version of Apollonius in book 8 of his Confessio amantis omits the riddles posed by Taise to Apollonius, saying only that she “axeth him demaundes strange” and “many soubtil question” and spoke “in proverbe and in probleme” (lines 1677–83, ed. Peck, vol. 1). Gower retains only the “question” on incest that Antiochus poses his daughter’s suitors (lines 363, 398–427). 59. Peter Dale Scott draws the contrast well in “Rhetorical and Symbolic Ambiguity.” Orchard notes the didactic function of Aldhelm’s riddles as illustrations for a treatise on Latin metrics (Poetic Art of Aldhelm, 158). 60. Ohl, “Enigmas of Symphosius,” his trans., 117; his ed., 116: “Nomen ovis graece, contentio magna dearum, / Fraus iuvenis cincti, multarum cura sororum, / Excidium Troiae, dum bella cruenta peregi.”

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61. Ohl gives an admiring overview of Symphosius’s technical skill, ibid., 16–19. 62. Ibid., trans. Ohl, 31; his ed., 30: “Da veniam, lector, quod non sapit ebria Musa.” 63. Aldhelm, Opera omnia, ed. Ehwald, 76–77. Augustine cites the Judges text in defense of the proper use of fictions, and it would go on to be much discussed with regard to scripture’s use of enigma and of questionable cases in distinguishing literal and figurative senses. See MLTC, 48, 209–10, 222, 262–64, 366, 424, 438, and Wyclif, De veritate Sacrae Scripturae, ed. Buddensieg, 1:63f. 64. P. Scott, “Rhetorical and Symbolic Ambiguity,” 127–28. For a suggestion that Aldhelm’s combination of classical and Christian riddling follows Byzantine tradition, known perhaps through Theodore, see Milovanović-Barham, “Aldhelm’s Enigmata,” who also notes that he may have known and been similarly influenced by the seventh-century Latin Berne Riddles. 65. Judges 14:14. Jerome’s choice here follows the Greek Septuagint (Cook, Enigmas and Riddles, 263). For an argument that Riddle 17 of the Old English Exeter Book rewrites Samson’s riddle in ways that better fit the sense of aenigma as I distinguish it here, see P. Murphy, Unriddling the Exeter Riddles, 153–73. 66. In 1 Kings 10:1 and 2 Chronicles 9:1, the queen of Sheba comes to test Solomon with riddles (enigmatibus); Sirach 47:17, praising Solomon’s wisdom, says, “Replesti in conparationibus enigmata” (Thou didst multiply riddles in parables). Solomon’s legendary prowess with riddles was upheld in a tradition of riddling dialogues we will consider in chapter 3. Job calls attention to his own “enigmata” (13:17), and “enigmata” are associated with the wise in Proverbs 1:6. Numbers 12:8 firmly connects enigma with divine revelation when the Lord says to Aaron and Miriam that he appears to other prophets in visions and speaks in dreams, “At non talis servus meus Moses . . . ore enim ad os loquor ei, et palam non per enigmata et figuras Dominum videt” (But it is not so with my servant Moses. . . . For I speak to him mouth to mouth: and plainly, and not by riddles and figures doth he see the Lord). Again in Ezechiel 17:2, the son of man is commanded, “Propone enigma et narra parabolam,” after which follows an obscure prophecy about two eagles and its interpretation. In Habakkuk 2:6, also translating chidhah, enigma is again associated with parabola, but this time not as wise sayings or prophecy but as derision. On the relevance to Aldhelm of these biblical references and the patristic discussions of enigma following from them, see Stork, Through a Gloss Darkly, 60–64. 67. Aldhelm, Opera omnia, ed. Ehwald, 76: “Sed et Aristoteles, philosophorum acerrimus, perplexa nihilominus enigmata prosae locutionis facundia fretus argumentatur.”

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68. Jerome, Contra Rufinum 3.39, PL 23, cols. 507–8. A collection called Enigmata circulated widely under Aristotle’s name from at least the ninth century (Schmitt and Knox, Pseudo-Aristoteles Latinus, 30–31). Its contents, however, come from the body of what Struck calls “enigmatic epigrams” (Birth of the Symbol, 97). Struck shows that the most common term for these sayings, “symbols,” comes from their use as markers of membership in the Pythagorean circle, but their riddling aspect is responsible for starting that term’s “role as a label for enigmatic language that carries a hidden significance” (Birth of the Symbol, 102). 69. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 10.7; Aquinas, ST II-II.168.2. See Introduction above, the section “Play.” 70. Aldhelm, Saint Aldhelm’s Riddles, “Creation,” lines 21–28, trans. Juster, 63. Line 24 perhaps extends the riddle on ice given by Donatus to all of nature. Lines 27–28 capture the paradox also articulated in Julian of Norwich’s image of creation as a hazelnut from section 4 of her short text and chapter 5 of her long text (Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, 69, 139). 71. Aldhelm, Saint Aldhelm’s Riddles, trans. Juster, 67. 72. Salvador-Bello, Isidorean Perceptions of Order, 177–283. Salvador-Bello finds similar ordering principles in Symphosius but notes that the order in which his riddles come down to us may reflect the work of later scribes, monks influenced by both Isidore and Aldhelm, rather than Symphosius himself (143–44), and thus perhaps show the adaptation of pagan riddling to Christian culture (138). Nancy Porter Stork, on the basis of her analysis of glosses in manuscripts of Aldhelm’s Enigmata, finds much evidence for their didactic use in the schoolroom, but the preponderance of glosses she classifies as “interpretive” suggests that they were also read for more enigmatic purposes (Through a Gloss Darkly, 59–66). 73. See Aldhelm, Opera omnia, ed. Ehwald, 76, trans. in Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, 202–3. 74. Not the usual trivium and quadrivium, but “arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, astrology, mechanics, and medicine” (Aldhelm, Prose Works, trans. Lapidge and Herren, 42), a contemporary Irish curriculum (MayrHartung, Coming of Christianity, 196). 75. Trans. Neil Wright, in Aldhelm, Poetic Works, ed. Lapidge and Rosier, 191. 76. Letter I, in Aldhelm, Prose Works, trans. Lapidge and Herren, 152. 77. “Sed omnia mensura et numero et pondere disposuisti.” See Bruyne, Esthetics of the Middle Ages, 5, 90–96. 78. See Fabro, “Intensive Hermeneutics,” 454. For a typical medieval reference, see Augustine, On Free Will 2.24, cited by John of Salisbury, Metalogicon

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4.15 (trans. McGarry, 226). For a full treatment, see Albertson, Mathematical Theologies. 79. Trans. Neil Wright, in Aldhelm, Poetic Works, ed. Lapidge and Rosier, 191 and 265n1. 80. Aldhelm, Prose Works, trans. Herren, 44. 81. Ibid., 46; Aldhelm, Opera omnia, ed. Ehwald, 203. 82. Alcuin too, according to Martha Bayless, used “encoding” as “a sign of affection or familiarity” (“Alcuin’s Disputatio Pippini,” 163). The English nun Leobgyda, in a letter to Boniface, quotes from Aldhelm’s prologue to put the verses she has composed in a similar context of inviting communion (Stork, Through a Gloss Darkly, 72). 83. Rabanus Maurus’s In honorem Sanctae Crucis (ninth century), a series of twenty-eight elaborate shaped poems on religious subjects, had a great reputation in the Middle Ages; see the edition by Perrin, also ME, 1:160–65. The form of these poems is modeled on Optatian Porphyry, a Latin poet active ca. 300, but what Rabanus does with this form is much like what Aldhelm does with Symphosius. A student of Alcuin, Rabanus was a direct heir of Aldhelm’s literary program. 84. P. Murphy, Unriddling the Exeter Riddles, makes a strong case for interweaving of oral and literary riddling in the Exeter Book and gives a convenient introduction to the riddles with an up-to-date overview of scholarship. For compelling recent considerations of the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book as part of a single, coherent tradition stemming from the Latin collections of Symphosius and Aldhelm, see Orchard, “Enigma Variations,” Bitterli, Say What I Am Called, and Salvador-Bello, Isidorean Perceptions of Order. For three different attempts to read their purposes in context, see A. Davis, “Agon and Gnomon”; Lerer, Literacy and Power, 97–125; and Nelson, “Four Social Functions.” For treatment of them as the center of a category of “enigmatic poetry” that finally includes all of Old English poetry and is marked by interpretive play that has an answer but is only begun when the answer is found, see Niles, Old English Enigmatic Poems. Widespread Old English use of kennings, metaphorical circumlocutions that can be seen as highly condensed riddles, can be seen as a broader example of the enigmatic mode. The term kenning comes from Old Norse, where it is a major poetic device, as are riddles, primarily in dialogues; see Heller-Roazen, Dark Tongues, 55–82. 85. Riddle 30a, ed. Krapp and Dobbie, Exeter Book, 195–96, cf. Riddle 30b, 224–25 (Riddles 28a and 28b in Williamson’s numbering). 86. See Niles, Old English Enigmatic Poems, 130, for “tree”; Niles also proposes that another of the Exeter Book riddles is also about a tree transformed and

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notes the group of such Exeter Book riddles (11–56). Williamson summarizes previous solutions offered and favors “beam”; Old English Riddles, 230–31. 87. Williamson, Feast of Creatures, 8. 88. Ibid., 36. Williamson’s section “Poetry and the Primitive,” 43–46, offers a suggestive discussion of the importance of this kind of participation to poetry in general. See also Patricia Dailey’s notion of “responsiveness” in “Riddles, Wonder and Responsiveness.” 89. Liuzza points out the proximity of the second version of the riddle to a group of short religious poems in his thorough analysis of the two versions, “Texts of the Old English Riddle 30,” 12. 90. Craig Williamson discusses The Dream of the Rood in relation to the riddles in Feast of Creatures, 41–42. 91. I derive this maxim from Charles Williams; see Figure of Beatrice, 8. On antithesis in the Exeter Book riddles, see Nelson, “Rhetoric,” 430f. 92. Niles, Old English Enigmatic Poems, 107. 93. Williamson, Old English Riddles, 115, number 81; numbered 85 in Krapp and Dobbie, Exeter Book, 238. The asterisks indicate a space left in the manuscript. See Ohl, Enigmas of Symphosius, 44–45; Tupper, “Comparative Study,” 3, and Riddles of the Exeter Book, 225–26. The Symphosius riddle was paraphrased by Alcuin in his Disputatio Pippini cum Albino, incorporated into various versions of the widely known story of Apollonius of Tyre, and included in the compilation called the Collectanea of pseudo-Bede, any of which could have been the Old English author’s source (Bitterli, Say What I Am Called, 13–18). 94. Leisure-time riddling could still be found in Britain holding out against broadcast media until at least the mid-twentieth century, though rural Scots recalled riddling sessions having been more popular before World War I; see Goldstein, “Riddling Traditions.” While the assumption of a vigorous folk tradition that left few written traces before the age of print is common among scholars, Tomas Tomasek has argued that in Germany, where the manuscript survivals are similar to those in England but more plentiful and more studied, riddling as a folk phenomenon emerged from the literary tradition of riddling, encountered largely in the schoolroom, as that tradition shifted from Latin to the vernacular, which did not happen until the late Middle Ages (“Medieval German Riddles”). 95. MacColl, “Grania in Church,” drawing on the more extensive discussion by F. J. Child in the introduction to “The Elfin Knight,” item 2 in English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 96. Camille, Image on the Edge, 26–28. Camille discusses another example of a manuscript image related to a riddle, 18–20. For other manuscript images of Marcolf, see Green, “Marcolf the Fool,” 559–62, 572, and notes. Umberto

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Eco imagines a conversation about manuscript images and the poetics of enigma in Name of the Rose, chapter “After Nones” of the first day (71–83). 97. Galloway, “Rhetoric of Riddling,” lists all six (98) and transcribes and annotates those not previously published. Latin riddles are also found scattered in places like flyleaves, mixed, often a few at a time, with other short pieces such as proverbs, drinking and begging poems, and literary extracts. One particularly noteworthy such case, pointed out to me by Galloway, is the flyleaves added to Ms. Bodley 851, which contains, among other things (including another Latin riddle on fol. 120v), the Z text of Piers Plowman (see Rigg, “MS Bodley 851,” 37–42). 98. See Friedman, “Safe Magic.” Riddles may also be associated with rhetoric in the satire of the liberal arts within Mum and the Sothsegger, if “Rethoric-is reasons” (line 340) involves a pun on the sense of “reason” as riddle (MED sense 8d, cited by Barr, “Piers Plowman” Tradition, 307). 99. Galloway, “Rhetoric of Riddling,” 84. 100. Ibid., 74: “Inimici mei venerunt ad domum meam et domus mea exivit per foramina et ego solus remansi inter inimicos meos.” A. Taylor, English Riddles, 332–34, gives references to further scholarship on riddles of fish and net and cites one collected in Scotland. See also A. Taylor, Literary Riddle, 7–9. 101. Galloway prints all twenty-six riddles from ms. Harley 3362, with notes, in “Rhetoric of Riddling,” 98–101. 102. Pantin, “Medieval Collection,” 83; Galloway, “Rhetoric of Riddling,” 69. Rylands ms. 394 contains proverbs quoted by Langland at C.1.139a/B.1.140a, just after the dreamer’s plea for “kynde knowing” (repeated at C.7.54a/B.5.441a), and at B.10.260a, which suggests his familiarity with this sort of collection. 103. D. Thomson, Descriptive Catalogue, 30. This volume includes an index of riddles. 104. Text, translation, and solution in Galloway, “Rhetoric of Riddling,” 87. Claretus includes a series of fifteen such “logogriphs” in his collection (Enigmata, ed. Peachy, 2). 105. Galloway, “Rhetoric of Riddling,” 77. He gives another version of the same riddle at 102. 106. “Ligneus est lectus nulla tamen arbore sectus; / Solvere qui poterit solvat et eius erit. [Nux]” Harley 3362, #7; also with slight variation in Sloane 513, #2, and Gonville and Caius 230/116, #8 (Galloway, “Rhetoric of Riddling,” 99, 101, 104). Thanks to Traugott Lawler for this translation. 107. “I know a tree that has twelve branches. Fifty-two nests are made therein. In every nest are seven birds—thanks be to the God of heaven—and every bird with special name. Undo now that without blame.” Text from Galloway, “Rhetoric of Riddling,” 99n104, previously printed by Robbins, Secular

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Lyrics, 62, without the final line supplied by Galloway from the manuscript, which is neglected also in DIMEV, no. 2327. Ared here may be a pun on aredde, meaning to set free from bondage and aread, meaning to interpret or solve; hence my translation as “undo.” Exeter Book Riddles 59 and 61 also use ræd in their challenges instead of the usual Saga hwæt ic hatte. The Latin poem ostensibly translated by the English reads: “Est arbor quedam ramos retinens duodenos, / Quinquaginta duos rami retinent sibi nidos. / Nid{u}s quisque septem volucres habet in se, / Et volucrum quisque sibi nomen habet generale” (Galloway, “Rhetoric of Riddling,” 99). The fourteenth-century Bohemian monk Claretus includes a different version in the proem to his Latin riddle collection (Enigmata, ed. Peachy, 13). 108. See A. Taylor, English Riddles, 412–21, for an overview, examples, and bibliography. Taylor’s English example comes from The Book of Meery Riddles, published in 1629 (Riddle number 5 in the collection, STC, 2nd ed., 3323). The year-tree riddle also figures in many folk tales involving riddles; see Goldberg, Turandot’s Sisters, 100–102, also 17, 26, 27, 30, 40, 44, 93, 94, 95, 161. Exeter Book Riddle 22 is usually taken to be about the month of December. For The Book of Meery Riddles and other early modern collections that evince a common stock of oral riddles, see Brandl, “Shakespeares ‘Book of merry Riddles’”; Tupper, “Holme Riddles”; and The Demaundes Joyous, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1511 (Wright and Halliwell, Reliquiae Antiquae, 2:72–75; Kemble, Dialogue of Salomon and Saturnus, 287–301, who notes that half are translated from a French original and traces the remainder to Germanic sources). Resemblances between riddles in Anglo-Saxon and early modern collections manifest a continuity of riddling, probably through oral tradition, over a millennium that spans our period. None of the parallels are exact enough to show direct influence from AngloSaxon to early modern collections. Nonetheless, while each of these collections includes some riddles with worldwide parallels, some of the closest parallels of an Anglo-Saxon with an early modern riddle lack such widespread analogues and thus point to a more local tradition. See the ship riddles in the Exeter Book (nos. 32 and 36 in Krapp and Dobbie, Exeter Book) and Tupper, “Holme Riddles” (nos. 69 and 70), or the bee riddles in Aldhelm’s Latin collection (no. 20) and three early modern collections (Demaundes Joyous no. 40, The Book of Prettie Riddles no. 64 [in Brandl, “Shakespeares ‘Book of Merry Riddles,’” 60–61], and Tupper, “Holme Riddles” no. 140; see A. Taylor, English Riddles, 793). The famous bookworm riddle of the Exeter Book (Krapp and Dobbie, Exeter Book, no. 47) has a close parallel in Tupper, “Holme Riddles,” no. 13, but Tupper notes in his editions of both collections that its ultimate source is a riddle in the collection of Symphosius. A written source makes sense for such a bookish riddle, but nonetheless the Holme manuscript testifies to its transmission orally and,

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thus, to the two-way interplay in the Middle Ages between oral and written traditions of riddling. While there are frequent references in medieval English sources to the playing of verbal games, the only one to my knowledge that specifies riddling is the special case of the banquet of Conscience in Piers Plowman (to be discussed in chapter 3). Pfeffer considers the jeux-partis, poetic debates on courtly subjects composed in answer to a question by the bourgeois of thirteenthcentury Arras, to be a kind of riddle contest (“Riddle of the Proverb”). 109. At C.Pr.4–5, Langland’s narrator says he “Wente forth in the world wondres to here, / And say [saw] many sellies [marvels] and selkouthe thynges.” 110. As seen in the full title of Chambers and Sidgwick, Early English Lyrics: Amorous, Divine, Moral and Trivial. Since there is no bibliography of Middle English riddles, I will list in notes others that I would include in each category, though without any claim that these lists are exhaustive. The Digital Index of Middle English Verse (DIMEV), along with its printed predecessors, makes possible a more thorough search in verse than is possible in prose until the Index of Middle English Prose is complete. The remainder of this note lists sexual or amorous riddles. Ms. B.M. Sloane 2593, a collection of a large variety of Middle English verse from the early fifteenth century, includes four double entendres: DIMEV 2167, “I have a gentle cock”; 2172, “I have a newe gardyn”; 2365, “If I singe, ye will me lakke”; and 6163, “We bearen about none cats skins.” The same manuscript also contains DIMEV 2174, “I have a young sister far beyonden the sea,” a love song with riddling questions similar to the impossible tasks in the story of the clever daughter behind the misericord carving discussed above. Two riddling erotic songs are found in another fifteenth-century manuscript, Camb. Univ. Add. 5943: DIMEV 719, “At the northe ende of selver whyte”; and 3453, “May no man slepe in youre halle.” A page of Cambridge University Library ms. Dd.5.75 contains five double-entendre riddles and one other: DIMEV 748, “Backe bent smocke rent”; 2168, “I have a hole above my knee”; 2173, “I have a thing and roughe yt is”; 5572, “Ther ys a thyng as I suppose”; 5595, “Ther was a ladie leaned her backe to a wall”; and 6093, “Two stones hathe yt or els yt is wrong.” From other mss.: DIMEV 351, “All night by the rose”; and 4966, “Summe men sayon that y am blak.” See Welty, “Middle English Lyrics,” 84– 123. Vasvári takes a Bakhtinian approach to “I have a gentil cok” and its modern reception in “Fowl Play.” More enigmatic in a full-fledged sense is the unclassifiable “Maiden in the mor lay,” DIMEV 3328, as testified by the wealth of comment inspired by its riddling repetition of simple questions and imagery. D. W. Robertson, “Historical Criticism,” reads it as a cardinal example of aenigma, which he treats in a narrowly rhetorical sense, but the enigmatic mode allows scope for the play of interpretation, as suggested by others; see the excerpts gathered by Luria and Hoffman, Middle English Lyrics, 321–25, and the review of

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scholarship and argument for seeing it as a festive dance song by Richard Firth Green, “What Was the Maiden in the Moor Made For?” DIMEV 697, “At a springe-well under a thorn,” is similar. More surprising in their imagery, like the Old English double-entendre riddles, are six written in an early sixteenth-century hand on a flyleaf of Cambridge Univ. ms. DD.5.76 (Person, Cambridge Middle English Lyrics, 53–54). 111. “In all manner of wealth, I surpass all things; if any thing be like me, to debt/death I shall bring him,” DIMEV 2468 (Furnivall, Political, Religious, and Love Poems, 263). 112. DIMEV 2737 “Hit is Lawe þat failleþ noth” (Furnivall, Political, Religious, and Love Poems, 231). Also from ms. Harley 7322 (with title and page from Furnivall’s edition): DIMEV 178 “A tokne of godes louiinge” (“Humility,” 257); 179 “A tresour of gret Richesse” (“Chastity,” 260); 1312, “Fir & water, wind & lond” (“Four Inscriptions,” 262, also included in a sermon in the Fasciculus morum); 2752, “Hit resteth and hit quemeth” (“Poverty,” 260); 4287, “On hit is, and ne haveth nother” (“The Covetous Man,” 253). Religious and moral puzzle verses from other mss.: DIMEV 154, “A scheld of red, a crosse of grene” (found in three manuscripts); 174, “A thyng that must nedys be hadde”; 1180, “viij ys my love if ix go before” (found in five manuscripts); 2097, “{I a}ll way serche & neuer fynd”; 2576, “In seyven foretene & foure / Is all my trust & store”; 5597, “There was a man that hadde nought”; 5629, “Theves frend and louerdes porse”; 6560, “Qwo set euer hys fote abouyn þe seys wawe.” Another poem that might fit the category of religious and moral, though it is more gnomic than riddling, is the popular “Pees Maketh Plente” (DIMEV 4354), which survives with some variation in fifteen manuscripts. Similar also are the riddles on the seven deadly sins in the fourth chapter of the Speculum Christiani, DIMEV 2144 and 6643 (fifty total manuscripts). The second and third riddles of Gower’s “Tale of Three Questions,” on humility and pride, also fit this category (Confessio amantis, lines 3271–3321). Puzzle verses concealing women’s names: DIMEV 979, “Childern profyt & lycor faylyng” (three manuscripts); 1250, “Fair laydis I pray you tell me”; 5108, “Take þe seventeþ in ordere sette.” Some other obscure verses in riddle form: DIMEV 666, “As other men hathe in londe”; 2124, “I am nott he that yow wolde fayne see”; 2216, “I love good all that ys no fayle”; 2262, “I saw iij hedles playen at a ball” (two versions); 4804, “Silly sicht I seich, unsembly for te se”; 5600, “Ther was kast a ston that no man mighte lefte”; 6092, “Two partes in on ye may asspy.” DIMEV 2100, called “Riddle of the hart and hare” and found in Oxford, Bodleian Library ms. Bodley 851, which also contains a C text of Piers Plowman, reads like a piece of bestiary lore in riddle form. 113. London, British Library ms. Royal 17.A.xvi, fol. 27v, DIMEV 2754. This poem survives separately in three other manuscripts and also as part of the

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“Long Charter of Christ” (nine manuscripts) and two carols. See Robbins, “Popular Prayers,” 343–44. A more enigmatic poem on the host occurs in the margins of Hereford Cath. O.iv.14, fol. 225r (DIMEV 881): “Blodles & bonles blod has non bon / ffadur had fadu tht ffadur has non / the werk & werkmon hoe ben al on / He tht neuer ne ede ffyrryste had y-gon.” The famously enigmatic “Corpus Christi Carol” (DIMEV 1820) belongs in this category if it reflects medieval Eucharistic imagery, even though it is not recorded until the early sixteenth century and then may have been adapted to a political complaint about Anne Boleyn; see Greene, Early English Carols, 195–96 and 423f. 114. E.g., DIMEV 51, “A God and yet a man”; 807, “Behalde merveylis: a mayde ys moder”; 1542, “God against nature thre wonders haith wrought”; and 6709, “Witt hath wunder that reson ne tell can,” the latter surviving in seventeen manuscripts. The religious paradoxes sound even more like riddles when put in question-and-answer form in 6585, “Who was ded ande never borne” (see Introduction above). The fullest account of the constraining influences on religious writing in late medieval England is now Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion. 115. In Poetics of the Incarnation, Cervone brings out enigmatic aspects of several longer Middle English lyrics that are too often “classified as didactic, or affective” (209). 116. DIMEV 3742, this text from Oxford, Bodleian Library ms. Douce 52. 117. DIMEV 6292, text from Murray, Middle English Poem, 1. On the question of the priority of this version, see xxix–xxxv; also Woolf, English Religious Lyric, 84n6. Other riddling lyrics on death: DIMEV 4476, “Riche mannis riflowr”; 6456, “When the turuf is thi tuur.” 118. Stemmler, “Miscellany or Anthology?” 115. 119. Murray, Middle English Poem, 32, from ms. Cambridge Univ. Libr. Ii.4.9, f. 67r; DIMEV 1171. The text in ms. Royal 17.A.xvi has not been edited. Other versions of “Erthe upon Erthe” are listed at DIMEV 1167, 1170, 6293, and 6369. 120. These suggestions all come from Peck, “Public Dreams,” 465–66; the whole article is an eloquent and suggestive exploration of enigmatic play in medieval culture. The interpretation by Rios, “Erþ Toc of Erþe,” is unconvincing. 121. C.1.149. B.1.154 is even closer: “Til it hadde of the erthe eten his fille.” 122. See De Caro, “Riddles and Proverbs,” 183–84. 123. Fol. 3v, DIMEV 2719. A misericord carving from Worcester Cathedral of a hooded figure with two faces offers a suggestive visual analogue. Other possible proverb-like riddles: DIMEV 5170.5, “That schort was turned into longe”; 5410, “The more I go the further I am behynde” (attributed to Lydgate, 3 mss.). A riddle-like proverb attributed to Chaucer survives in three copies, DIMEV 6251, “What shul these clothes thus many folde.”

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124. Fol. 27v, DIMEV 6299; see Robbins, Secular Lyrics, 241. “Thomas of Erceldoune’s Prophecy” (DIMEV 6372, also variant 6053) and “When Rome is removed into England” (DIMEV 6398, 6399, and 6400; twenty-two witnesses total) are longer and more enigmatic. All are kinds of what Siegfried Wenzel calls complaint verses, which often use riddling forms; see Wenzel Preachers, Poets, 174–208, esp. 193f. on “Merlin’s Prophecy,” and Dean, Medieval English Political Writings, 1–29. See also DIMEV 3741, “Now goot falshed in everi flok” (two manuscripts); 4522, “S mysed in myndes and merke ther a P” (two manuscripts); and 6444, “When the hills smoken.” 125. Tree imagery may begin even earlier, in line 14 of the prologue (quoted above at the end of chapter 1), when the narrator describes the tower he sees in his first dream as “triyely ymaked.” “Triyely” (“trieliche” in the B text) suggests excellence, truth, and the threeness of God, major themes of the poem, but might also suggest “treelike” and thus set up the poem’s later use of tree imagery to develop these themes. 126. The C text further adds to the speech of Conscience an extended grammatical allegory that adds a layer of theological significance on top of the distinction between kinds of reward (3.332–405a). Made obscure by its use of technical vocabulary and intricate wordplay, it fits the standard definition of an enigma and anticipates attempts to explore human participation in the Trinity and Incarnation through analogies and grammatical metaphor later in the B and C continuations. See Galloway, Penn Commentary, 340–60. 127. Morton Bloomfield reports, “in spite of diligent search among the many prophecies of the fourteenth century current in Europe, I have not yet been able to find an exact or even close parallel to this puzzling prediction” (“Piers Plowman,” 211n42). Bloomfield also explores possible astronomical references and takes the lines as portents of “a new or final apocalyptic age” (212n42). See also the notes of Skeat, Bennett, and Schmidt in their editions and Galloway, Penn Commentary, 368–69. 128. Galloway, “Rhetoric of Riddling,” 87–90. Besides a list of Latin riddles, complete versions of this riddle occur in two well-known fourteenth-century preaching handbooks, the Fasciculus morum and John Bromyard’s Summa praedicantium, as well as in a fifteenth-century preacher’s commonplace book, a collection of exempla, and the flyleaf of a manuscript of the Legenda aurea. In a sermon exemplum against pride of heart, for instance, it is solved and commented on by an angel (Fasciculus morum, ed. Wenzel, 44). 129. There are several problems with this solution: it ignores “sonnes”; it takes “ship” as clue to its first letter (not unknown in literary riddling) rather than a Roman numeral; and Christi should be abbreviated xi, although the fact that the letter i occurs twice in the word might make xii allowable in an alliterating riddle if a clue for eleven is too far to seek. Alternatively, if “sonnes” simply refers

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to years, and a “ship” is the numeral x, and we just add the numbers, we get twenty-eight years, roughly a generation, a typical range at which late medieval prophecies placed their predictions, though they seem to have preferred to give dates rather than durations. Henry Bradley explained a similar line from a prophecy in the C text, “Thre shypes and a shaft with an viii folwynge” (8.349), by taking the shaft as an l and the three ships as xxx, so that the whole line predicts a judgment to come in 1388. Though Bradley noted the similarity, he apparently gave up on solving Conscience’s prophecy the same way (“Some Cruces,” 342). Using words to refer to a date in Roman numerals is one of the techniques explained in the “Prophecies of John of Bridlington,” written about 1363 and among the most popular such collections of the time (T. Wright, Political Poems and Songs, 1:126–27). Bloomfield notes the popularity of this work and discusses its date and author in “Piers Plowman,” 91–92; see also R. Taylor, Political Prophecy in England, 5–6, 51–57; Curley, “Cloak of Ambiguity”; Rigg, “John of Bridlington’s Prophecy”; Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, 106–8. 130. R. Taylor, Political Prophecy in England, 127. 131. Emmerson, “‘Or Yernen to Rede Redels?,’” 40. 132. Bloomfield, “Piers Plowman,” 212n44; see also the notes on this passage in Bennett, Pearsall, and Schmidt in their editions. 133. Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism and Books under Suspicion, argues for a tradition of texts that use apocalyptic writing to envision and motivate reform. Piers Plowman makes a similar use of apocalyptic discourse, but only as one discourse among many. Yet it could be seen as extending the tendency begun by these texts to disengage apocalypticism from an orthodox sequence of events in order to put it to use. Langland goes further by disengaging the apocalyptic from the author’s own voice. The “énigme en prophecie” that Rabelais incorporates into the last chapter of book 1 of Gargantua and Pantagruel provides an interesting comparison to this passage. It follows the description of a vaguely humanistic utopia instituted in the Abbey of Thélème, and it issues in a controversy between a serious, apocalyptic reading and an entirely playful, parodic one. Bakhtin reads this episode in the context of the popularity of both riddles and parodic prophecies, each expressing a carnivalesque alternative to the seriousness of the official culture, here seen as gloomy apocalypticism (Rabelais and His World, 232–38). Bakhtin’s examples of parodic prophecy extend back only to the fifteenth century, though elsewhere he establishes the strong tradition of medieval parody in general as one of the “popular-festive forms” that partakes of the carnival worldview. Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale parodies astrological prophecy in a context that has much in common with Bakhtinian carnival. Anne Middleton reads a passage from the commentary on “The Prophecies of John of Bridlington” as “self-consciously and self-reflexively comic” (“Passion of Seint Averoys,” 38n12).

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134. T. Wright, Political Poems and Songs, 1:252, cited in Emmerson, “‘Or Yernen to Rede Redels?’” 40–41. 135. See Emmerson, “‘Or Yernen to Rede Redels?’” 65–67. Of the two most influential prophets of the later Middle Ages, Hildegard of Bingen claimed to receive visions from God, while Joachim of Fiore claimed not to be a visionary at all but rather an inspired interpreter of scripture and history. The authority of Langland’s fictional speaker is less like that of Daniel than like that of Raphael Hythloday, the traveler whose testimony makes up Thomas More’s Utopia. 136. C.20.226–33a; B.18.217–24 is closely parallel but lacks the quotation from Proverbs at the end. See chapter 7 below on this scene. 137. See Schmidt’s notes in his parallel-text edition. Galloway notes the repeated rejection in passus 4 of attempts at reconciling disputes as an alternative to judicial process and suggests that Langland may see such attempts as a travesty of the spiritual reconciliation that is the poem’s ultimate concern (Penn Commentary, 372–74). 138. Dante’s treatment of Mohammed as a schismatic in Inferno 28 is typical (Fletcher, Cross and the Crescent, 18, 158). 139. Dean, Medieval English Political Writings, edits the letter recorded by Walsingham and the five recorded in Henry Knighton’s contemporary chronicle as well as one printed in Stowe’s sixteenth-century Annales, 119–39. Some of Knighton’s are attributed to other, apparently pseudonymous authors, but all of them are often collectively referred to under Ball’s name. 140. Walsingham, St. Albans Chronicle, ed. Taylor et al., 1:548–49. 141. See, for example, Hudson, “Piers Plowman,” 99. 142. Justice, Writing and Rebellion, 30. 143. Richard Firth Green, “John Ball’s Letters,” and Astell, Political Allegory, 44–72, situate the letters helpfully against the historiography of the Rising. 144. Stock, Implications of Literacy, 18, 88–92. 145. See the penitent “Roberd the robbere” in B.5.462, changed to “Robert the ruyflare” in C.6.315. “Hobbe the robbere” could also be a stock reference to thieves or a specific reference to Robert Hales, the Royal Treasurer, who was killed by the rebels. 146. Dean, Medieval English Political Writings, 140. See R. Hilton, Class Conflict, 149–53, and Justice, Writing and Rebellion, 102. 147. Richard Firth Green, “John Ball’s Letters”; see 184–85 on the Walsingham letter. Green’s “dusty assembling of analogues” (188) associates the letters with the kinds of proverbial verses often found in sermons of the time. Many of these are expressed in riddling modes, and thus my analysis complements his, though it attributes somewhat more radical intentions to the rebels than he does.

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148. Astell, Political Allegory, 52, quoting the edition by Gustaf Holmstedt in an appendix to Speculum Christiani, 331. Compare “One is two” to “schappe you to on heved, and no mo,” “frend is foo” to “Knoweth your freend fro your foo” and “wil is wo” to “Be war or ye be wo.” The sayings also occur in the Sexta Tabula of the Speculum Christiani itself; see Robbins, Historical Poems, 325. 149. Siegfried Wenzel, Preachers, Poets, 186–87. 150. For a similar reading of this line and the first letter given by Knighton, which includes a similar line, see Marshall, “John Ball’s Revolutionary Windmill.” For a study of the allegorical dimensions of the rebels’ words and actions that finds them to be more esoteric, see Ronan, “1381.” 151. Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 46. William Morris, in his Dream of John Ball, imagines the rebels’ actions as stemming from an experience of festive community. 152. Questions of how Langland might specifically have influenced the rebels and how he might have revised his poem in response to the events of 1381 are complicated by uncertainties in the dating of the B text. Hudson challenges the usual dating of B before 1381 in “Piers Plowman.” Chapter 5 below will offer a variation on the argument that changes to the second vision between the B and C texts respond in part to the Rising. CHAPTER 3.

Riddle Contests and Langland’s Fourth Vision

1. One of the most popular nonreligious stories throughout the Middle Ages, Apollonius of Tyre descends from a lost Greek or Latin original from the late classical era and was common across Europe in Latin as well as vernacular versions (see Goldberg, Turandot’s Sisters, 18–20). It was translated once into Old English and twice into Middle English (once by John Gower as the last story of the Confessio amantis), and it is the source for Shakespeare’s Pericles. Inverting the story of Oedipus, Apollonius escapes the doom of incest at the outset of the story, and a series of reversals and recognitions leads to a happy ending. Critics have discussed the connection between the riddles and both incest and the story’s redemptive turns (see Archibald, Apollonius of Tyre, 23–25). The ten riddles posed by his daughter in the fullest Latin versions of the tale (taken from the collection by Symphosius) unwittingly evoke scenes from Apollonius’s many changes of fortune. Kortekaas, Commentary on the “Historia,” provides thorough notes on the Latin riddles at 35, 51–52, and 703–37. The language of bringing him from darkness to light comes from the Latin versions. Gower does not give the riddles his daughter used but says she “axeth him demandes strange, / Wherof sche made his herte change” (8.1677–78).

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2. Vying with Bilbo for popularity as a riddle solver more recently is Robert Langdon, protagonist of Dan Brown’s series of novels beginning with Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code. Though called a symbologist, he merely solves elaborate riddle games, often constructed from medieval and Renaissance works of art and architecture that imply the more enigmatic intentions of their makers. More popular still is the Harry Potter series, which increasingly becomes a quest driven by solving riddles until in the seventh book the plot hinges on finding the seven “horcruxes” hidden by a villain whose given name is Tom Riddle. The list of modern fantasy stories that involve riddles would be long indeed; giving such importance to riddles, rather than the transformations of the enigmatic mode more typical of modern literature, contributes to their medievalism. 3. See Shippey, Road to Middle Earth, appendix A, 343–52, and Roberts, Riddles of “The Hobbit.” 4. Escape, consolation, and recovery are Tolkien’s organizing terms for his analysis of the appeal of what he calls fairy-stories in On Fairy-Stories. On the implications of riddling in Tolkien, see A. Milbank, Chesterton and Tolkien, 95–113. 5. Tolkien, Annotated Hobbit, ed. Anderson, 125. In the original version of The Hobbit, Gollum promises that if he loses he will give Bilbo a present, but Tolkien altered this section of the story considerably after the intended present, Gollum’s precious ring, took on greater significance in The Lord of the Rings and it became unimaginable that Gollum would even consider giving it away. See Annotated Hobbit, 121n12 and 128n25. 6. Shippey makes a similar point about Bilbo through the modern English word luck in connection to the Old English word wyrd ( J. R. R. Tolkien, 27–8, 143–47). 7. Tolkien, Annotated Hobbit, 121–22. Answer: wind. Tolkien adapted Gollum’s riddle on time from one on old age in the Old English poem Solomon and Saturn II (Shippey, Road to Middle Earth, 112). Gollum’s riddle on darkness may also be inspired by the dialogue there that follows Solomon’s question “But tell me what things were that were not” (trans. Shippey, Poems of Wisdom, 95). For notes on all of Tolkien’s riddles, see Tolkien, Annotated Hobbit, and Shippey’s commentary in J. R. R. Tolkien, 23–27. 8. For example: the verse that foretells the coming of hobbits to Gondor; the verse attached to Aragorn, “All that is gold does not glitter”; and the clue to the password through the gates of Moria, “Speak friend and enter.” The riddling dialogue between Bilbo and the dragon Smaug again defers immediate violence and redirects the dragon’s desire from rivalry to curiosity. 9. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories, ed. Flieger and Anderson, 75.

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Notes to Pages 133–135

10. I. Thomson and Perraud, Ten Latin Schooltexts, 5–32, 110–26. See also Hamilton, “Theodulus”; Curtius, European Literature, 48–51; Chance, Medieval Mythography, 1:347–63; and Woods and Copeland, “Classroom and Confession,” 380–84. Rabelais, in the fifteenth century, mentions Theodulus as one of Gargantua’s first four schooltexts in Gargantua and Pantagruel, bk. 1, chap. 14 (trans. Cohen, 70). 11. The Eclogue’s characters had a life of their own in fourteenth-century England: they are the names of the three speakers in John Wyclif ’s Trialogus, and Pseustis is mentioned with Virgil’s Tityrus among the rustic pipers in Chaucer’s House of Fame. 12. Thomson and Perraud, trans., Ten Latin Schooltexts, 126. 13. Trans. altered from Thomson and Perraud, Ten Latin Schooltexts, 142– 43. Latin from Bernard of Utrecht, Commentum in Theodolum, ed. Huygens, 17: “Pseustis. Dic mihi: dum tristes adiit Proserpina sedes / Lege data matri, si vellet nata reverti, / Gustum perfidiae quis primum prodidit ore? / Dic et Troianum lauderis scire secretum. / Alithia. Cum pelagus mundo subsidat, mundus olimpo, / In medio semper consistat pendulus aër, / Dic: ubi terra levem caeli supereminet axem? / Et te posse Dei tetragrammaton annuo fari.” 14. Commentaries on Theodulus survive in ninety-two manuscripts and sixty-eight early printed editions that show a continuous tradition of accumulation and revision throughout the Middle Ages: see Quinn, “Theodulus”; Thomson and Perraud, Ten Latin Schooltexts, 3–4, 114–22. The main lines of commentary I have given from Bernard are still prominent in the commentary by Odo Picardus, written ca. 1406–7 and printed in many early editions of Theodulus (e.g., STC 23940, 23940.3, 23941, 23943). Bernard’s approach to his commentary throughout is typical of medieval interpretation of both classical and scriptural authors. Whether a story is classical or biblical, he gives a line-by-line expansion of the story itself, under the rubric historia, or often, with the pagan ones, fabula. With classical stories he then continues under the rubrics misterium, which involves euhemeristic or other kinds of rationalizing explanation, and physice, which pertains to natural science. With the biblical stories, on the other hand, he proceeds under the rubrics allegoria, applications to events of the Christian dispensation, and moralitas, moral lessons. His analysis of the flood stories of Deucalion and Pyrrha and of Noah exemplifies his method and also comments on the method itself. The misterium of the classical story is about primitive society and the physice is about the creation of all things from humors and warmth. Allegorically, the story of Noah is about the church, with the rainbow in the sky as a representation of Holy Scripture, which appears in the clouds because “videmus nunc per speculum in enigmate.” (Compare Augustine’s citation of 1 Cor. 13:12 with cloud imagery in connection with the firmament of Gen. 1 in Confes-

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sions 13.15.18; see chapter 4 below.) Morally it represents building the ark through living by divine precepts, including understanding scripture according to the three senses: literal, allegorical, and moral (Commentum in Theodolum, ed. Huygens, 40–43). 15. Thomson and Perraud, Ten Latin Schooltexts, 156n152; Bernard of Utrecht, Commentum in Theodolum, ed. Huygens, 127. 16. Commentum in Theodolum, ed. Huygens, 130: “caro Christi . . . quae suscitata a mortuis super celos.” Anne Middleton suggested that Langland’s Plant of Peace alludes to Theodulus in a paper delivered at the Thirty-Seventh International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, May 3, 2002. On the Plant of Peace, see the beginning of chapter 2 above. 17. For more on these terms, see chapter 2, the section “Etymology.” 18. Thomson and Perraud, Ten Latin Schooltexts, 156n152. 19. Ibid., 156–7n153. 20. Ibid., 143 and 157n154, on the tale of Mopsus and Calchas, citing the First and Second Vatican Mythographers. 21. See below, chapter 7, the section “Enigma, Pastoral, and Apocalypse.” 22. Uther and Fellows, Types of International Folktales, #812; see Goldberg, Turandot’s Sisters, 146–48. 23. The Legenda aurea survives in some one thousand manuscripts, an astounding number; see Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, trans. Ryan, 1:xiii and 18–20; 2:113–14. A Middle English translation survives “more or less complete” in seven manuscripts; see Jacobus de Voragine, Gilte Legende, ed. Hamer and Russell, 1:xi and 9–12. Andrew, whose feast is on November 30, is first in the order of legends. In the Middle English translation, which omits the prologue and material about Advent as well as a short concluding story about Andrew, his legend becomes the first item and the story of the three riddles the last story in his legend. The first two of the three riddles also differ somewhat between the Andrew and Bartholomew versions. 24. On the Alphabetum narrationum, which survives in more than fifty manuscripts, see Cooke, “Tales,” #216, pp. 3291–321 and 3568–69, and Banks, Alphabet of Tales, 1:49–51. The holdings of the British Library alone include six collections of exempla in Latin, all differing in plan and contents, that include the miracle of the three riddles, four of which date from the fourteenth century; see Herbert, Catalogue of Romances, vol. 3, p. 66, #75; p. 540, #30; p. 568, #115; p. 641, #33; p. 674, #1; and p. 679, #34 (indexed, along with a selection of others from throughout Europe, in Tubach, Index exemplorum, 23, #214). The South English Legendary survives in twenty-five complete manuscripts plus nineteen fragmentary ones (Whatley, Thompson, and Upchurch, Saints’ Lives, 12; see 39n1 on the Andrew legend). Ralph Hanna notes that the South English

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Legendary is the only Middle English verse text to rival Piers Plowman in circulation during the fourteenth century (“Versions and Revisions,” 33). DIMEV #4540 indicates that the life of St. Andrew appears in fifteen manuscripts of the South English Legendary, but this may not include its occurrence in partial versions of the collection. Other Middle English collections containing this story include the Gilte Legende, Caxton’s Golden Legend, and John Mirk’s late fourteenth-century Festial (ed. Erbe, 9–11). The Speculum sacerdotale contains a Middle English translation of the Bartholomew version (ed. Weatherly, 193–94). 25. South English Legendary, lines 160, 167, ed. D’Evelyn and Mill, 548; orthography modernized and punctuation added. Subsequent citations are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text by line and page numbers. 26. Andrew’s answer in Jacobus de Voragine’s Gilte Legende is simply, “In hevene imperiall wher that the body of Jhesu Crist is” (ed. Hamer, 11). 27. This question, unlike the first two, is one of the more common riddles in folklore, but St. Andrew’s answer appears to be unique. See Thompson, Motif Index, H682.1, and Anderson, Kaiser und Abt, 113–29. 28. Goldberg, Turandot’s Sisters, 171. The two types under discussion are Aarne-Thompson nos. 851 and 927 (see Uther and Fellows, Types of International Folktales). Goldberg discusses medieval examples of riddle tales (31–38) and the relationship between riddles and power (157–60) with extensive bibliography on the study of riddle tales. 29. Behind Andrew as riddlemaster we might also see the legends of King Solomon, who (earlier than the Christian saints) was reputed to have power over demons as well as mastery of riddles. Indeed, the sexual charge of the story might seem to associate the bishop too with Solomon as one tempted to lust, so that several Solomonic motifs are echoed and given a Christian, comic turn. Relevant here is a particularly interesting cousin to the tradition of riddling dialogues edited by Ziolkowski as Jezebel. Galloway, “Word-Play and Political Satire,” has persuasively emended the beginning of this 141-line poem to reveal its use of graphic riddles similar to those he has shown to be present in Piers Plowman (“Rhetoric of Riddling”). These emendations also clarify Jezebel’s satiric thrust as ridicule of profligate sexuality despite its clever expressions of it. 30. Whatley, Thompson, and Upchurch, Saints’ Lives, 65–66, notes to the version in the Scottish Legendary. See also Whatley’s wide-ranging commentary on possible sources and backgrounds for this story, 39–45. 31. Murray, Middle English Poem, 34, noting that “est” in the first line of this stanza may be an error for “erthe.” See above, chapter 2, the section “Collecting Middle English Riddles.” 32. For further medieval examples, see Gruenler, “How to Read,” 593–97, drawing on Eleanor Cook’s distinction of Pauline and Sphinxine riddling in Enigmas and Riddles, 64–91.

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33. Ziolkowski, introduction to Solomon and Marcolf, 12. 34. For other Middle English riddling dialogues and their relations to the same complex of ancient tradition associated with Solomon and Emperor Hadrian, see Gruenler, “How to Read,” 598–601. 35. Some account of a confrontation between these two figures was known at the monastery of St. Gall already in the tenth century, and there are three twelfth-century witnesses to some version of the dialogue. About sixty fifteenthcentury manuscripts of the Latin text seem to have survived in modern times, mostly from German-speaking areas, and there are forty-nine surviving early prints of it, as well as translations into German, Dutch, French, Italian, and English. The best overviews of the entire tradition are now Ziolkowski’s edition and translation of the Latin text, Solomon and Marcolf, and the Bradbury and Bradbury edition of the 1492 English text and the Latin it translates, Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf, both with full introduction, commentary, and appendices of background texts. See also Beecher and Wallis’s edition of the English text, Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolphus, 72–96; Bradbury, “Rival Wisdom,” 331n1; R. F. Green, “Marcolf the Fool”; Schultz, “Solomon and Marcolf,” 367; and Menner, Poetical Dialogues of Solomon, 28–29. 36. Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting, 89 and 575. Similar scenes were painted in a number of fourteenth-century English and Flemish manuscripts, carved on misericords, and also mentioned in inventories of tapestries; see Jones, “Marcolf the Trickster.” 37. Cited and discussed by Richard Firth Green, “Marcolf the Fool,” 564– 65. Audelay’s poem now known as Marcolf and Solomon (in Poems and Carols, ed. Fein) labels its long discussion of the clergy as spoken by these two, though, as Pearsall writes, “Audelay makes little use of the opportunities offered by the genre” (“Audelay’s Marcolf and Solomon,” 140). Pearsall questions the arguments made by Simpson and Green for the influence of Langland on Audelay, though without ruling the possibility out (Simpson, “Saving Satire”; Richard Firth Green, “Marcolf the Fool” and “Langland and Audelay”). His suggestion that both may reflect the influence of oral tradition and poems that circulated in ephemeral forms (148–49) fits the connection I would posit between Piers Plowman and the tradition witnessed by the surviving texts of Solomon and Marcolf, and indeed between both texts and more diffuse traditions of enigmatic debates and dialogues. 38. Bradbury and Bradbury, Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf, 8, and Bradbury, “Rival Wisdom,” 334 and 346–64. 39. Bradbury and Bradbury, Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf, 13. 40. Ziolkowski, Solomon and Marcolf, 335–36, citing William of Tyre, Chronicon 13.1.59–82, ed. Huygens, 1:585–86, and translation modified from History of Deeds Done beyond the Sea, trans. Babcock and Krey, 2:3: “Et hic

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Notes to Pages 143–145

fortasse est quem fabulose popularium narrationes Marcolfum vocant, de quo dicitur quod Salomonis solvebat enigmata et ei respondebat equipollenter, iterum solvenda proponens.” William wrote circa 1181–84. 41. The riddles in the third contest, sections 6–8 of the Bradbury edition (part 2, chaps. 1–3 in Ziolkowski’s edition), include a series shared with the folktales of “The Clever Farmgirl,” Aarne-Thompson #875, and “The King and the Peasant’s Son,” Aarne-Thompson #921 (Ziolkowski, Solomon and Marcolf, 195–96). The later oral currency in English of a group of these riddles is shown by “The Clever Boy” (Briggs and Norton, Dictionary of British Folk-Tales, 2:391–92). 42. Bradbury and Bradbury, Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf, 9, 66. 43. “S: ‘Non decent stulto verba composita.’ M: ‘Non decet canem sellam portare.’” Bradbury and Bradbury, Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf, 38–39. Some of the proverbs have parallels in Piers Plowman, though they are sufficiently explained by drawing on common sources. Compare Marcolf ’s “The shepherde that wakyth welle, ther shall the wolf no wolle shyte” to Piers Plowman C.9.264– 65 (Bradbury and Bradbury, Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf, 39 and 79n; see also ed. Beecher and Wallis, Dialogue of Solomon, 209–10) and “An angry howsewyf, the smoke, the ratte, and a broken plater are often tymes unprofytable in an howse” to B.17.317–28 (Bradbury and Bradbury, Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf, 35 and 74n). 44. Bradbury and Bradbury, Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf, 18–43. 45. Lederer, “Dil Ulenspiegel,” 95–96. 46. Pointed out by Ziolkowski, Solomon and Marcolf, 243. 47. Bradbury and Bradbury, Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf, 31. 48. Ibid., 53. 49. Ibid., 10. 50. Ibid., 39; they note that Solomon’s proverb here quotes Matt. 12:34 and Luke 6:45 (78). See Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 368–436. 51. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 76–77. Bradbury argues that the dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf is more important to Bakhtin’s thought than is immediately obvious from his references to it: “Newcomers to the work are often struck by how ‘carnivalesque’ or ‘Bakhtinian’ is Marcolf ’s subversion of authority, but describing Bakhtin’s theory as Marcolfian would be truer to the historical reality” (“Rival Wisdom,” 336). 52. Richard Firth Green, “Marcolf the Fool,” 564. Ziolkowski makes a similar point in Solomon and Marcolf, 41–42. 53. See Beecher’s introduction to Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolphus, ed. Beecher and Wallis, 27–35. 54. See ibid., 43–48.

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55. On its analogues, see the appendix to Beecher and Wallis, Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolphus, 215–16, as well as Ziolkowski, Solomon and Marcolf, 217–18. 56. Bradbury, “Rival Wisdom,” 345–46 and 355. Cooper, in “Frame,” 17, identifies this dialogue as a “powerfully suggestive analogue to Chaucer’s method in the Tales.” Cannon arrives at a similar view of The Owl and the Nightingale as an expression, not of superior enlightenment, but of the purity of dialogue as a form (Grounds of English Literature, 138). 57. Bradbury and Bradbury, Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf, 40–41; Ziolkowski, Solomon and Marcolf, 193. To the extent that Solomon is aligned with the Old Testament and Marcolf with Christ, allusion to Simeon suggests continuity rather than contrast between them. 58. Bradbury and Bradbury, Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf, 41. Compare the Latin text, “Ubi non est lex, ibi non est rex” (Ziolkowski, Solomon and Marcolf, 74, with notes to parallels at 193–94), to the similar proverb spoken by “a goliardeis” in Piers Plowman, “Dum ‘rex’ a ‘regere’ dicatur nomen habere, / Nomen habet sine re nisi studet iura tenere” (B.prol.141–42). Andrew Galloway translates this saying, “Since rex [king] is said to have its name from ‘rectification’ [regere], it has the name without the substance unless he is zealous to uphold the laws,” discusses the goliard as “a voice of truth outside the courtly world,” and calls his speech a “commonplace” with many possible sources (Penn Commentary, 128). 59. Bradbury and Bradbury, Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf, 63. 60. “Talis dicitur esse sapiens qui seipsum habet pro stulto.” Bradbury and Bradbury, Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf, 42–43. Marcolf calls himself “follus” at the end of the genealogy by which he introduces himself (28) and is called the same by Solomon’s stewards at the end of the exchange of proverbs and by the narrator at the beginning of the next section (40). 61. Wenzel, “Wisdom of the Fool,” 235. See MED, s.v. “fol” and s.v. “sage”; the latter includes this collocation under adjectival sense (d). Chaucer mentions a “kynges fool” who teaches ladies the transience of beauty in Troilus 2.400–406. On the fool’s right of free speech, see Welsford, Fool, 198 and 237. Welsford’s study approaches the fool as one who “breaks down the distinction both between folly and wisdom, and between life and art” (27). Swain suggests that the fool’s “‘innocence’ lowered him beyond the reach of vengeance and left him free to speak his mind” (Fools and Folly, 54). Pearsall cautions against idealizing the subversive potential of fools (“Lunatyk Lollares,” 174). 62. Wenzel, “Wisdom of the Fool,” 235 and 237. 63. Audelay, Poems of John Audelay, line 66, ed. Whiting, 12; see also line 989, p. 45. Lydgate also refers twice to Marcolf as a fool, but less positively:

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Notes to Pages 148–153

Minor Poems, ed. McCracken, 2:449 (in Order of Fools, line 5), and 564 (in Debate of the Horse, line 608). On Lydgate, see Schieberle, “Proverbial Fools.” 64. Swain discusses Marcolf in Fools and Folly, 30–36, and Welsford in Fool, 35–40. 65. For a powerful suggestion of how Wynnere and Wastoure served Langland as a model for what she calls “speculative personification allegory,” similar to and compatible with the model of riddle contests, see Breen, “Need for Allegory.” She calls Wynnere and Wastoure “enigmatic,” in a sense true to the term’s medieval usage, at 212 and 221. 66. On Ymaginatif and the lessons of the third vision, see the final section of chapter 4 below. 67. On the form of passus 1, see Galloway’s headnote in the Penn Commentary, 1:147–53. On Holy Church’s language, see Davlin, Game of Heuene, 25–46. 68. Said by Wille at 8.20 and 10.343 and by Ymaginatif at 12.277. Huizinga traces academic disputation to riddling in Homo Ludens, 112–18. 69. Translation of the Latin from the commentary in Schmidt’s parallel-text edition: “‘The just man shall scarcely be saved’ (1 Pet. 4.18) on the day of judgement; therefore—he shall be saved!” On the wordplay in this part of B passus 12 and the part of passus 11 it develops, see Davlin, Game of Heuene, 72–80. 70. B.12.290. See Alford, “Piers Plowman”: A Guide, 81, who also cites possible biblical allusions and notes Schmidt’s reference to a similar etymological explanation of the word Deus in Evrard of Béthune’s Laborintus, a late medieval grammatical text. See also Frank, “Pardon Scene,” 330n39. The brackets indicate that all the manuscripts of the poem transpose two words of the acronym, which would suggest that scribes did not recognize it. 71. See Pearsall’s note to his edition, 251, citing a text by Wyclif. Schmidt draws attention to C.14.214a–17 as another passage added in C that compensates for the deletion of the riddle on “Deus.” While it is less riddling, and thus “consonant with [Langland’s] removal in C of other aenigmata such as the Tearing of the Pardon,” it also involves, as Schmidt goes on to show, complex references to Gospel parables that make it enigmatic in the larger sense proposed here (“‘Courtesy More than Covenant,’” 102). 72. Zeeman uses this scene to close her article “Piers Plowman in Theory,” 228–29, because what she calls its “self-theorization” invites many of the readings inflected by modern and postmodern literary theory that have been applied to the poem as a whole. The way in which she lays out these theoretical perspectives and the tensions between them suggests that the polarity between affirmation and negation sustained by the poetics of enigma, both cognitively and affectively, both socially and spiritually, has much to do with how Langland keeps them all in play.

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73. Simpson, “Desire and the Scriptural Text,” 225; see also his treatment of this scene in “Piers Plowman,” 126–34. Burrow gives a well-balanced account of the scene in Langland’s Fictions, 44–52. 74. Lawler, “Conscience’s Dinner,” 96. Kirk notes that the most important thing about Patience’s riddle is that it is a riddle and makes its impact by revealing the different approaches the characters in the scene take to it (Dream Thought, 152). 75. Though most of Langland’s sources are impossible to pin down, he certainly knew the Legenda aurea, the earliest source of “St. Andrew and the Three Questions.” The B text refers to the “Legenda Sanctorum” in the third vision (11.160, 219), and the fifth vision cites the same title before talking about several saints, including mention of Andrew (B.15.269, 292/C.17.19). This, as well as the “book” cited by Ymaginatif as the source of Trajan’s story (B.12.281/ C.14.206, from the legend of St. Gregory), is almost surely the Legenda aurea. Alford makes a strong case for finding some sources of this scene’s ideas in the exegesis of Proverbs 23, but these sources do not pertain to its drama or its riddles (“Langland’s Exegetical Drama”). On the cornucopia of sources for the imagery of eating and drinking here, see Mann, “Eating and Drinking.” 76. Lawler, “Conscience’s Dinner,” 89. 77. See Lawler, “Secular Clergy,” 115–16. 78. That Conscience is “the central figure of the scene” is a major point of Lawler’s in “Conscience’s Dinner” (88). 79. In the C text, this answer to the question of Dowel is abbreviated and put in the mouth of the mysteriously disappearing Piers. 80. Christopher Cannon finds a similar movement in The Owl and the Nightingale when they are joined by a third speaker, the wren (Grounds of English Literature, 135–36). Recalling Cooper’s suggestion, amplified by Bradbury, that the lack of closure in Solomon and Marcolf resembles Chaucer’s method in the Canterbury Tales, we might find the same shift from the dyadic structure of the middle part of The House of Fame to the multiplicity of perspectives in the Tales. 81. Compare to the opening of Ypotis, discussed in Gruenler, “How to Read,” 601–2. 82. See Lawler, “Conscience’s Dinner,” 92–93. 83. Langland, Vision of William, ed. Skeat, 2:196. 84. Andrew Galloway, “Rhetoric of Riddling,” 86–94. Neither does the second preface to “The Prophecies of John of Bridlington,” the only other late medieval English explanation of riddle tricks known to me, use the term transitio (T. Wright, Political Poems and Songs, 126–27). 85. Bland, “Langland’s Use,” 133. 86. B. Smith, Traditional Imagery of Charity, 40–55. See also Langland, Vision of William, ed. Skeat, 2:196–97.

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Notes to Pages 158–162

87. Kaske, “‘Ex vi transicionis.’” 88. Schweitzer, “‘Half a Laumpe Lyne in Latyne,’” 315n8, quoting Goodridge in Langland, Piers the Plowman, 294. 89. Galloway, “Rhetoric of Riddling,” 92, 93. 90. Middleton, “Two Infinites.” Building on Middleton, D. Vance Smith reads Dowel as lacking vis transicionis, construed as the power of transitivity, in order to argue that these riddles are an instance of the whole poem’s focus on the problem of beginning: “how one passes from the beginning that Dowel represents to the completion that Dobest represents” (Book of the Incipit, 208). That it is Conscience who must become a beginner again underscores the point, especially if, acting as a bishop, he brings to mind the association of bishops earlier, in the poem’s first two definitions of the three Do’s, with Dobest (B.8.95 and 9.14, perhaps recalled in the doctor’s definition of it at 13.118 as those who do as they preach, since bishops exemplified those who combine lives of teaching and action). On the other hand, while Smith sees Wille “bound in a life of pure beginning, a life of pure, undirected action with no possible end” (210), I would argue that Patience also figures the poem’s way forward. 91. Noted by Simpson, “Piers Plowman,” 227–28, and Kirk, Dream Thought, 152. On the pardon episode, see further chapter 5 below. 92. Kaske seems to consider the riddle to be a sort of charm: “‘Ex vi transicionis,’” 229, 247, and 255. Better to see here an opposition between them like that proposed by Frye in “Charms and Riddles.” The parallel passage in C.15.167–71 omits Patience’s reference to “this redels” and the power of wit and says such power is simply the result of living “as thow techest” (171), though Patience still uses a brief riddle at line 163. 93. In this respect, the rhetoric of enigma is similar to that of the sermo humilis described by Auerbach (Literary Language, 25–66). 94. Goldberg, Turandot’s Sisters, 190. 95. Schmidt’s translation (Piers Plowman: A New Translation, 143) from B.13.184–85, “‘What!’ quod Clergie to Concience, ‘are ye coveitous nouthe / After yeresyeves or giftes, or yernen to rede redels?’” Alford associates line 185 with scholars rather than minstrels, taking “to rede redels” as “evidently a hallmark of professional scholars, especially of those eager to gain from their knowledge” and “yeresyeves or yiftes” as “common ploys for getting around the prohibition” against selling knowledge (“Langland’s Exegetical Drama,” 105–6). He apparently reads “nouthe” in line 184 as “not,” even though it clearly means “now” at B.3.290, 6.205, and 10.48, and both Donaldson and Schmidt translate it as “now” here. In his “Piers Plowman”: A Glossary, Alford cites the OED definition of “yeresyeve”: “A gift customarily given or exacted at the New Year, or at

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the beginning of a year of office” (170). At B.3.100/A.3.89 “yeresyeve” is connected with officials who take bribes, and it is used metaphorically at B.8.52, but at B.10.47 it refers specifically to minstrels retained by nobility. 96. Simpson, “Piers Plowman,” 135–38. 97. See E. Talbot Donaldson’s “Piers Plowman,” 135–48, for comprehensive treatment of minstrelsy in all three versions of the poem. 98. Ibid., 146–47. 99. On the question of Piers’s presence from the start of the scene, see notes to line C.15.34 by Schmidt and Pearsall in their editions. 100. Schmidt’s parallel-text edition, note to lines C.15.150–51. 101. For a similar reflection on the musical riddle of J. S. Bach’s Quadruple Fugue, see Ferguson, “On the Audacity.” 102. Both Middleton (“Passion of Seint Averoys,” 32) and Simpson (“Piers Plowman,” 138) have noted how this scene anticipates the banquet of Conscience. Ymaginatif criticizes Wille’s idle verse making at B.12.16–19, but these lines are removed in C. 103. The C text changes the name of this character to Activa Vita and makes him less of a loser, but it does not change the basic contrast developed here. 104. See Southworth, English Medieval Minstrel, 80–81. I am ignoring the larger economic implications of Haukyn; see Aers, Community, Gender, 58–62. 105. Simpson, “Piers Plowman,” 145. Patience quotes the first verse of the Beatitudes at B.14.215a; the omission of “spiritu” makes it closer to the version in Luke 6.20 than Matt. 5.3 (see Alford, “Piers Plowman”: A Guide, 90). Though C omits this quotation, it still stands behind the C version of this passage. 106. B.14.29–34a, cf. Piers’s resolution after tearing the pardon, 7.119 and 126–30. These passages from the second vision are absent in C, but Patience’s similar words to “Sire Actyf ” at C.15.234–38 still evoke Piers. 107. See Steiner, Reading “Piers Plowman,” 143–52. 108. Schmidt, “Langland’s Structural Imagery,” 231–35. 109. See Lawler’s notes on this passage in his forthcoming volume 3 of the Penn Commentary. On other texts in this tradition, see Gruenler, “How to Read,” 598–99. 110. The C text includes no response by Activa Vita to Patience’s explanation of poverty and continues, without a waking scene, into the material from the B text’s next (fifth) vision, which will include Langland’s poetic signature that quotes 1 Cor. 13:12. This confusion is most likely a matter of incomplete or faulty revision, but also suits the endlessness of the poem’s riddle games. 111. See Ralph Hanna’s discussion of these lines in their altered location in C.7.96–108 (“Will’s Work,” 45–48), which puts the idea of holy minstrelsy in a different context but does not change its significance for the poem.

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Notes to Pages 167–175

112. Luke 10:16, “Qui vos audit, me audit; et qui vos spernit, me spernit; qui autem me spernit spernit eum qui me misit.” The parallels at Matt. 10:40 and John 13:20 speak only of receiving, not rejecting, those whom Christ sends. Pearsall emphasizes the relevance of this and similar Gospel texts to the “lunatyk lollares” also added to the C text (“‘Lunatyk Lollares,’” 169). 113. John 12:48, “Qui spernit me et non accipit verba mea habet qui iudicet eum; sermo quem locutus sum ille iudicabit eum in novissimo die” (He that despiseth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him; the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day). The great spurning of Jesus is the Passion itself, and this same verb is used again by Luke: “Sprevit autem illum Herodes cum exercitu suo et inlusit, indutum veste alba” (23:11; And Herod with his army set him at nought, and mocked him, putting on him a white garment). Wyclif compares those who read scripture irreverently with “those Gentiles who reckoned Christ to be a fool on account of his humility and forbearance” (On the Truth, trans. Levy, 103). The Passion plays of the Corpus Christi cycles indicate how far the foolishness of Christ, and perhaps the Christlikeness of fools, might go. In two of the surviving cycles, Christ is explicitly made into a fool during his trial and torture (noted by Billington, Social History, 18–19): the York plays of the Litsters and of the Tilemakers (Beadle, York Plays, 273–80 and 302–304) and the Wakefield Buffeting (Cawley, Wakefield Pageants, 87–89). See Kolve, Play Called Corpus Christi, 175–205. 114. See below, chapter 5, the section “C-Text Enigmas I.” On the authority of the victim versus the authority of the crowd and its leaders/puppets, see Hamerton-Kelly, Gospel and the Sacred, 22–34, applying Girard’s mimetic theory to the Passion in Mark. 115. 1 Cor. 1:21: “placuit Deo per stultitiam praedicationis salvos facere credentes.” 116. D. Vance Smith’s Book of the Incipit treats the poem as constantly beginning, though perhaps in a less playful light. 117. Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, trans. Buchanan, 351–52.

C H A P T E R 4 . Enigma in the Curriculum

1. See Curtius, European Literature, 39; McKeon, “Rhetoric in the Middle Ages”; Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric; J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages; Copeland and Ziolkowski, “Medieval Rhetoric.” 2. Middleton suggests that “the poet evidently considered a sine qua non of the poem’s extension into its two long versions” that it make explicit “the vexed question of the discursive intent and mode of the work itself, and the importance

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of clear distinctions between it and the instrumental discourses that pervade its language and reference.” I am offering enigma as the best medieval term for what Middleton identifies as “the special, non-demonstrative auspices under which these familiar didactic ingredients are offered as, among other things, imaginative fiction, requiring the reader to consider what kind of ‘truth’ is available to a reader by a work so insistently ‘clergial’ in matter yet literary in mode—which is to say, as all medieval expositors of the artes knew, deeply figurative and analogous in its manner of proceeding, and producing as its most characteristic and beneficial experience startling and pleasurable recognitions that repeatedly elude argumentative formulation” (“Piers Plowman, the Monsters,” 105–6, emphasis in original). 3. A twelfth passus found in a few manuscripts of the A version continues the poem a little farther but without resolution. This chapter will not further complicate an already complex argument by trying to account for the changes in the third vision between the B and C versions, which are substantial and perplexing. 4. For a similar view of reading in Piers Plowman drawn from later sections of the poem, see Batkie, “‘Thanne Artow Inparfit.’” 5. Translated in Irvine and Thomson, “Grammatica and Literary Theory,” 35–36. Keil, ed., Grammatici Latini, 4:401–2: “Allegoria est tropus, quo aliud significatur quam dicitur. . . . Huius species multae sunt, ex quibus eminent septem, ironia, antiphrasis, aenigma, charientismos, paroemia, sarcasmos, astismos. . . . Aenigma est obscura sententia per occultam similitudinem rerum, ut mater me genuit, eadem mox gignitur ex me, cum significet aquam in glaciam concrescere et ex eadem rursus effluere.” On Donatus in the medieval curriculum, see Courtenay, Schools and Scholars, 31; Irvine, Making of Textual Culture, 58–59, 104–7; Orme, Medieval Schools, 28–29, 88, 90. This definition of enigma was repeated verbatim in standard medieval works such as Hugh of St. Victor’s De grammatica (in Hugonis de Sancto Victore opera propaedeutica, ed. Baron, 155) and Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum doctrinale (in Speculum quadruplex, 2.193). Aldhelm cites the same riddle in the Epistle to Acircius (in Opera omnia, ed. Ehwald, 77; see chapter 2 above). Other versions of this ice riddle are widespread in the Middle Ages, whether because of its popular origin or its use in Donatus. See Tupper, “Comparative Study,” 4, “Riddles of the Bede Tradition,” 562–64, and Riddles of the Exeter Book, 147–48; also A. Taylor, English Riddles, 392–94. In the Old English Exeter Book, it is extended and spoken by an iceberg ( Williamson, Old English Riddles, 87–88, 237–42, #31 in his numbering, #33 in Krapp and Dobbie, Exeter Book). For a shorter example from the Exeter Book without prosopopoeia, see above, Introduction, the section “Play.” Thomas Klein reviews a wealth of riddles on water, in both Latin and Old English, which all seem to flow from Donatus, on the way to proposing that another of the Exeter

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Book riddles is about the three forms of water in association with the Holy Spirit (“Of Water”). The ice riddle also shows up, with an additional line that restates the paradox, in the fourteenth-century ms. Harley 3362 (Galloway, “Rhetoric of Riddling,” 99). Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival puts a version of it in the mouth of his Queen Arnive (book 13, section 659; trans. Edwards, 276). One imagines centuries of schoolchildren being taught from Donatus and inspired, or assigned, to compose another version of his riddle. 6. “An enigma is what even children play with among themselves when they propose to each other trifling questions that no one understands. ‘Tell me, what is its mother’s daughter, and its mother is her daughter’s daughter?’ Who can understand this, ‘My mother bore me; she is then born of me?’ It is an enigma” (“Aenigma est, quo ludunt etiam parvuli inter se, quando sibi proponunt quaestiunculas, quas nullus intellegit. ‘Dic mihi, quid est hoc, est quaedam filia matris et mater filia est filiae suae?’ Hoc qui potest intellegere, ‘Mater me genuit, eadem mox gignitur ex me?’ Aenigma est”; Commentum artis Donati, ed. Keil, Grammatici Latini, 5:311). On Pompeius, see Irvine, Making of Textual Culture, 59, and on knowledge of his work in England, at least during the Anglo-Saxon period, see Ogilvy, Books Known, 224. 7. Keil, ed., Grammatici Latini, 4:399. Martianus Capella gives a similar explanation of the purpose of metaphorical language in his influential guide to the seven arts, Marriage of Philology and Mercury 5.512 (trans. in Stahl and Burge, Martianus Capella, 2:190). 8. D. W. Robertson, Preface to Chaucer, 63; see also 15, 32–33, 57–64, 190. 9. Struck traces these developments through the major Neoplatonic thinkers, with concluding suggestions for its later reception by Augustine and others, in Birth of the Symbol. See especially his overview of the “poetics of the enigma” and discussion of the Derveni papyrus, 1–50. He traces the first use of symbol as a literary term, synonymous with enigma, to Demosthenes in the fourth century BCE and notes that Plutarch says “allegory” is “a neologism in his time,” the first century after Christ (170). Enigma, however, was already used as a literary term by the dramatists of the fifth century BCE. Of the pivotal influence of Aristotle, Struck writes, “Once reduced to a question of style the enigma can no longer serve as a provocation to peek under the veil of language at the underlying structures of being” (65). See also p. 2 of the introduction to Copeland and Struck, Cambridge Companion to Allegory, and Obbink, “Early Greek Allegory,” 15–25; also Cook, Enigmas and Riddles, 33. Nicolette Zeeman, citing Donatus, presents a broader but complementary argument that figurative language in general “is the unstable site where the grammarians negotiate and hold in play a series of extreme polarizations” (“Schools Give a License,” 161). The position of enigma

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with respect to the polarization of clarity and opacity in classical and medieval rhetoric is similar to the position of symbolism with respect to allegory in modern literary theory. Allegory is associated, rather paradoxically, with either transparency or opacity. Goethe and Coleridge, for instance, see allegory as too clear and didactic and prefer what they call symbolism as less so, but not opaque. Likewise, Northrop Frye called a text allegorical when it gives directions for interpretive commentary (Anatomy of Criticism, 90). On the other hand, for Walter Benjamin or Paul de Man, allegory draws attention to the inescapable incoherence of language and its failure to represent reality. Language is then revealed as opaque and a tool of power rather than meaning—that is, esoteric, if in a different way from the mysteries of a cult—and this is for them more truthful than the mystifications of symbolism. See Whitman, Interpretation and Allegory, 295–303. 10. Alexander de Villa Dei, Doctrinale, line 2550, ed. Reichling, 171: “obscurus sermo, quasi mirandus.” The Doctrinale concludes, like Donatus’s Ars major, with lists of figures, including the same seven species of allegory. It gradually replaced Priscian’s Institutio grammaticae as the standard advanced text on grammar after 1200 or so. See J. Murphy, Rhetoric, 139; Orme, Medieval Schools, 90–92, 122. Langland quotes from earlier in Alexander’s treatise at B.11.267a/ C.12.155a. 11. Alexander de Villa Dei, Doctrinale, line 2551, ed. Reichling, 171: “Patrem progenies occidit matris in alvo.” The same solution is given in the 1492 edition printed in London by Richard Pynson (STC no. 316, n.p.). The notes in Reichling’s edition cite another version of this same solution from several glosses: “de beato Thoma Cantuariensi archimandrita, quem occidi fecerat ante altare Henricus, rex Angliae” (171, note to line 2550). Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence, first published in 1577, includes as its first example of enigma a sort of blend of both of Alexander’s: “I consume my mother that bare me, I eat up my nurse that fed me, then I die leaving them all blind that saw me. Meant of the flame of a candle” (27). 12. For an approach to enigma in terms of recent cognitive theory, in particular Fauconnier and Turner’s idea of conceptual blending (Way We Think), see Kasten and Gruenler, “Point of the Plow.” Alexander of Villedieu’s additional riddle can be analyzed well as a double-scope blend. It requires resolving two clashing inputs from family relations through separate metaphoric extensions to the church, the bishop as a father and the church building as a womb, with emergent understandings of the nature of the murder and its significance for those involved. The Christian idea of the book of nature and the book of scripture, that is, of all creation as a revelation of the nature of spiritual things and all history as the unfolding drama of salvation focused on the life of Christ, could

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be seen as an enormous exercise in conscious double-scope blending, with all of its parts available as inputs to new blends. Behind this is a theological approach to language oriented toward infinitely emergent meaning in the Second Person of the Trinity as Word. Cervone takes a cognitive approach to older discussions of the necessity of metaphor in Poetics of the Incarnation, 31–34. Modern analytic philosophy might be seen as the extreme development of the Aristotelian tradition that separates style and substance, while cognitive theory is the latest way of understanding the necessity of figurative language (e.g., Lakoff and Turner, More Than Cool Reason). 13. On this passage and Langland’s poetics, see Aers, “Piers Plowman,” 66– 67, and Davlin, Game of Heuene, 58–60. In the C text, this passage is condensed to a half line saying that one should “Ne spille speche ne tyme” (C.10.187), but some of its phrasing also appears in the rewritten beginning of the speech of Ymaginatif, later in the third vision, who now says he has counseled the dreamer “Nother to lye ne to lacke, ne lere [teach] that is defended, / Ne to spille no speche, as for to speke on ydel, / Ne no tyme to tyne ne trewe thyng tene” (C.14.6–8). Economou argues persuasively that these revisions to Ymaginatif ’s speech are part of Langland’s strengthened defense in C of his work as a poet (“Self-Consciousness of Poetic Activity,” 189–93). 14. These images also anticipate the transformation of the idea of minstrelsy that happens through the rest of the third vision and the fourth. See above, chapter 3, and Steiner, Reading “Piers Plowman,” 121–24. 15. On the reading of “spire” as breath, as well as the self-referentiality of the pun, see Shoaf, “‘Speche That Spire Is of Grace.’” 16. See Gillespie, “From the Twelfth Century,” 160–78. 17. Ward summarizes evidence on the medieval reading of Ciceronian and other rhetorical texts, “From Antiquity,” 53–56. See also J. Murphy, Rhetoric, 106–22. 18. In the Ad Herennium, the qualities of good style are elegantia (consisting of Latinitas and explanatio), compositio, and dignitas, which Caplan translates as taste (correct Latinity and clarity), artistic composition, and distinction (Cicero[?], Ad C. Herennium 4.12.17, ed. Caplan, 268–69). Similarly, De oratore specifies “that our language should be correct, lucid, ornate and suitably appropriate to the particular matter under discussion” (3.10.37, trans. Rackham, 2:31: “quam ut Latine, ut plane, ut ornate, ut ad id quodcumque agetur apte congruenterque dicamus”). The Ad Herennium’s term for clarity, explanatio, is more often used in the sense of “explanation,” such as that required by obscure dreams and oracles (e.g., Cicero, De divinatione 1.51.116). 19. Cicero, De oratore 3.42.167, trans. Rackham, 2:131: “Est hoc magnum ornamentum orationis. In quo obscuritas fugienda est: etenim ex hoc genere fiunt ea quae dicuntur aenigmata.”

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20. Cicero, De oratore 3.40.160; trans. Rackham, 2:125–27. Quintilian, who was the other great Roman teacher of rhetoric but was largely ignored between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, mentions enigma as the term for an allegory that is too obscure and considers it a vice “in view of the fact that lucidity is a virtue,” though he admits that poets use it and gives an example from Virgil (Institutio oratoria 8.6.52, trans. Butler, 331; see J. Murphy, Rhetoric, 121–30). Quintilian’s distinction between those tropes that are both necessary and ornamental and those that are purely ornamental seems to have been lost on medieval analysis of tropes (except perhaps for its ambiguous vestige in Donatus). Oddly, Quintilian classifies allegory as purely ornamental while metaphor is chief of those tropes necessary for meaning. 21. Cicero, Orator 21.69, “ut probet, ut delectet, ut flectat”; trans. Hubbell, 357. 22. Horace, Ars poetica 216–19, trans. Fairclough, Satires, Epistles, 469. 23. Copeland, “Horace’s Ars poetica,” 20–21. 24. Horace, Ars poetica 333–34, “Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae / aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere vitae.” Trans. Fairclough, Satires, Epistles, 479. Habib gives a good general account of Horace in his History of Literary Criticism, 105–17. On the medieval influence of Horace’s strict distinction of content and form, see G. Olson, Literature as Recreation, 20–22. 25. Reasons for a sharper split between moral content and aesthetic style might include poetry’s shift from a cosmopolitan to an academic context that reduced the cultural and especially political importance of eloquence, which is reflected in the change in format from Horace, who packages his treatise as a personal letter, to the preceptive, textbook format of the artes poetria. In addition, Christian reception of classical poetry made a sharp distinction between style and substance in order to learn from the ancients’ technique while rejecting their pagan meaning (see Payne, Key of Remembrance, 22–48). Zeeman points to a passage from Lactantius, quoted in some school texts such as Isidore’s Etymologies, that carried into the Middle Ages a more positive view of figurative obscurity: “Schools Give a License,” 156–57; see also her “Imaginative Theory,” 222–23. 26. See J. Murphy’s overview of the artes poetriae and their significance in “Arts of Poetry.” On the relevance of these treatises to Chaucer, see Payne’s still valuable overview of prior work in “Chaucer and the Art” and, in the context of Langland’s learning to compose in Latin, Lawler, “Langland Versificator,” 46–47. 27. Text in Faral, Arts poétiques, who explains this dating on p. 3. He lists five manuscripts, including two at Balliol College, Oxford, and one in Glasgow. 28. Rider, “Enigmatic Style,” 57. 29. “Aenigma est sententiarum obscuritas quodam verborum involucro occultata” (Matthew of Vendôme, Ars versificatoria, ed. Faral, Arts poétiques, 177). The substitution of the latter phrase for “per occultam similitudinem rerum” in

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Donatus perhaps indicates the currency of “involucrum” in the interpretative works of those associated with the twelfth-century school of Chartres, such as Bernard Silvestris, with whom Matthew says he studied at Tours (Faral, Arts poétiques, 1). The literary theory of the school of Chartres touches on the poetics of enigma in several ways that have been shown by Peter Dronke in Fabula, but because its influence was receding even as Matthew wrote, I leave it aside. Wetherbee illuminates the influence on Matthew of the school of Chartres in Platonism and Poetry, 146–51. He also notes that, in joining expression and ornament as functions of metaphor and allegory, Matthew may have been influenced by the section on rhetoric in Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury. 30. Matthew of Vendôme, Ars versificatoria, trans. Parr, 90. This riddle, lines 104–5 of Eclogue 3, is also the one that Quintilian quotes to show that poets use enigmas, but Matthew does not appear to refer to Quintilian anywhere else. For further discussion of this riddle, see below, chapter 7, the section “Enigma, Pastoral, and Apocalypse.” 31. Matthew of Vendôme, Ars versificatoria, trans. Parr, 90, altered; “Quaerit amans quod habet, quod amat, quod quaerit; amantis / Est proprium: propriis rebus abundat, eget” (ed. Faral, Arts poétiques, 177). See Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.466. 32. Matthew of Vendôme, Ars versificatoria, trans. altered from Parr, 61; ed. Faral, Arts poétiques, 151. Note that Faral’s edition gives only the short version of this description. See D. Kelly, Arts of Poetry, 11. 33. Extended passages of paradox and allegory that might be called enigma in two of Matthew’s own compositions, Pyramus and Thisbe and Tobias, which were to become common school texts, show a use of similar ornament that begins to carry a weight of mystery. See the translations and commentary in Thomson and Perraud, Ten Latin Schooltexts, 224–26 and 238–39. In Piers Plowman, Dame Study refers twice to the story of Tobias, at 10.33 and 87, and though she quotes in the latter instance from the biblical book of Tobit, the references to this story help connect this section of Langland’s poem to the medieval grammar classroom. 34. The three categories are identity, similitude, and contrariety: “Idemptitas enim, similitudo et contrarietas, si usui cognitionique tradantur, eloquentiae generant venustatem” (Gervais of Melkley, Ars poetica, ed. Gräbener, 6). Metaphor is the main kind of similitude and allegory is a major category of contrariety—each of its seven species, that is, except for enigma, which is another kind of similitude. This treatise, which deals almost exclusively with figures and tropes, survives in a total of three manuscripts, two at Balliol College, Oxford, and one in Glasgow. Faral dates it between 1209 and 1216 (Arts poétiques,

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35–37). James Murphy notes a reference to it by one Thomas Merke, writing De moderno dictamine while at Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1405 (Rhetoric, 239). 35. Gervais of Melkley, Ars poetica, trans. altered from Giles, “Treatise on the Art,” 139; “Enigma est quelibet obscura sententia probans ingenium divinandi” (ed. Gräbener, 149). 36. “Quis dedit huic operi lucem? vis nomen haberi? / Adde caput gaure tamen transposita suis aure!” (Gervais of Melkley, Ars poetica, ed. Gräbener, 149). Trans. altered from Giles, “Treatise on the Art,” 154n179: “Who gave light to this work? Do you wish to have the name? Add the peak of Gaurus to its air, yet transposed.” Gräbener gives the solution: G (“peak of Gaurus”) + eruasius (“suis aure” reversed). On Langland’s signature, see above, Introduction. 37. Gervais of Melkley, Ars poetica, trans. Giles, “Treatise on the Art,” 154n180: “Filia sum solis et sum cum sole creata, / Sum decies quinque, sum quinque decemque vocata” (ed. Gräbener, 149). The letters for 50, 5, and 10 spell LVX. Such techniques are found also in the riddles of the Secretum philosophorum and some of Langland’s more arcane riddles (see chapter 2, the section “Riddling in Later Medieval England,” and chapter 3, the section “Conscience’s Riddle Contest”). Gervais’s final words on enigma note the usual stricture against its obscurity while suggesting another purpose, authority, that can come precisely from its violation of clarity: “Such are rarely found in authoritative works, although the works of Aristotle are metaphorically called enigmas because of their obscurity” (Gervais of Melkley, Ars poetica, trans. altered from Giles, “Treatise on the Art,” 139: “Huiusmodi raro inveniuntur in operibus autenticis, quamvis propter obscuritatem suam transumptive dicantur opera Aristotolis enigmata” [ed. Gräbener, 150]). The word here translated “metaphorically,” transumptive, refers to the category of which enigma is the final species, so that this joke on Aristotle is also a self-referential example. Gervais may be alluding to Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus, which he quotes elsewhere. In a portrait of famous logicians, Alan depicts Porphyry “like a second Oedipus, solving the riddle of our Sphinx,” because of his Introduction to the Categories of Aristotle, and he goes on to comment that Aristotle intentionally veils his subjects in order to preserve their dignity and mystery (trans. Sheridan, 95–96). Aldhelm had also referred to Aristotle as author of enigmas (see above, chapter 2, with discussion of possible classical sources). Gervais notes in his preface that, although he has chosen to sacrifice brevity for the sake of clarity, it seems to be difficulty that makes books authoritative (Gervais of Melkley, Ars poetica, ed. Gräbener, 1). 38. Gervais of Melkley, Ars poetica, trans. Giles, 171. 39. Many discussions of Geoffrey attend to just one side. For instance, Ziolkowski credits Geoffrey with extending to poets the rhetorical strictures against obscurity from which they had previously been exempted (“Theories of

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Obscurity,” 105), while Doob finds in Geoffrey an aesthetics of difficult process associated with the idea of the labyrinth (Idea of the Labyrinth, 103–13). 40. Canterbury Tales 7.3338–52. It survives in over two hundred manuscripts (Gallo, “Poetria Nova,” 68), an extremely large number for a work not a basic school or religious text. Faral dates it between 1208 and 1213; it is cited already by Gervais, whose treatise was probably written only a few years later (Arts poétiques, 28–37). Douglas Kelly suggests that, whereas the prose treatises of Matthew and Gervais were meant for students, Geoffrey’s verse treatise was aimed at instructors (Arts of Poetry, 43). 41. The kind of obscurity he specifically proscribes is not that associated with enigma but rather “exotic or abstruse words.” For this he uses the image of a cloud—“Yet be weighty in such wise that the topic is not covered with a cloud”—after having used the same image for the means by which tropes achieve their effects: “And thus [the statement] covers itself, as it were, with a cloud (still clear, however, under its cloud).” The ambiguity of the cloud image signals the connection between two ideas that Geoffrey is otherwise trying to distinguish. When expression is clouded in a positive sense, the principal effect is what he calls gravity. Geoffrey of Vinsauf, “New Poetics,” trans. Kopp, 72, 71; Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova, lines 1074, 1063, 1050, ed. Faral, Arts poétiques, 230, 229. Note that Augustine, in Confessions 13.15.18, interprets two references to clouds in the Psalms as images of God’s word appearing “in aenigmate” (see below). 42. In his closely related prose treatise, Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi, Geoffrey labels tropes as “ornata difficultas” as opposed to other figures of speech, the “ornata facilitas” (ed. Faral, Arts póetiques, 263–320). This seems to be the basis for Faral’s use of these phrases as subheadings for the sections on tropes and on other figures in his edition of the Poetria nova. 43. D. Kelly, Arts of Poetry, 130. Geoffrey’s instruction on amplification fits within Copeland’s larger case that the artes poetriae turn the grammatical procedure of commentary into a rhetorical one of invention, for which Augustine’s treatment of exegesis as rhetorical invention, to be discussed below, provides the crucial enabling move (Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, 151–78). Enigma’s resistance to treatment as a trope and Geoffrey’s shift to a focus on amplification both anticipate Ricoeur’s reframing of metaphor in Rule of Metaphor from tropology (and Saussurean semiotics) to a theory of discourse, that is, as something that needs to be understood on the level of the sentence rather than the level of words or signs. Gervais’s semantic rather than formal analysis of figures and tropes makes a similar shift. 44. Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova, line 264, mora, ed. Faral, Arts poétiques, 205, trans. Kopp, “New Poetics,” 43. 45. D. Kelly, Arts of Poetry, 64–68.

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46. See Davlin, Game of Heuene, 48. 47. See Gillespie, “From the Twelfth Century,” 171–77. Although Aristotle’s Rhetoric was listed as an assigned university text on rhetoric, it seems to have been largely absorbed into dialectic and read in conjunction with works on moral and political philosophy. Like his Poetics, it appears to have had little direct influence on the medieval trivium. See J. Murphy, Rhetoric, 90–101; Weisheipl, “Curriculum of the Faculty,” 169. Latin translations of the Rhetoric were widely available, but those of the Poetics were not. 48. Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric 3.2.12, trans. Freese, 359. Here is William of Moerbeke’s rather literal translation: “Adhunc autem non de longe sed ex cognatis et eiusdem speciei transferre que non nominata nominando quod pronuntiatum manifestum est quia cognatum (ut puta in enigmate approbato: ‘virum vidi ignitum es super virum collisantem,’ id est adherere facientem; innominata enim passio, sunt autem ambo appositio quedam; collisim igitur dixit ventose appositionem), et totaliter ex bene enigmatizatis est metaforas accipere congruas; metafore enim enigmatizantur, quare palam quia bene translate sunt” (Rhetorica, ed. Schneider, 285–86). For a searching and provocative study of Aristotle on metaphor, see Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 9–43. Alexander of Villedieu’s definition of enigma in relation to wonder might come to mind in connection with another text of Aristotle, also recovered in the later Middle Ages, that ascribes to wonder an even more fundamental cognitive role. In a now-famous passage near the beginning of the Metaphysics, Aristotle writes, “For it is because of wonder that men both now and formerly began to philosophize” (trans. John P. Rowan from the Latin translation of William of Moerbeke used by Thomas Aquinas, in Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, 22). Patrick Boyde, discussing the importance of this passage for Dante, gives William’s Latin: “Nam propter admirari homines nunc et primum incoeperunt philosophari” (Dante Philomythes and Philosopher, 50). 49. While William of Moerbeke made a translation from Aristotle’s Greek text in 1278, this was mostly ignored in favor of the 1256 translation by Hermann the German, a monk living in Toledo, from the Arabic translation with interspersed commentary by Averroes. On Aristotle on enigma, see Struck, Birth of the Symbol, 64–65. 50. Gillespie, “From the Twelfth Century,” 174. See also Zeeman, “Alterations of Language,” 224–25. 51. See Minnis, “Langland’s Ymaginatyf.” 52. DDC 3.29.40–41. 53. See, among others, Irvine, Making of Textual Culture, 178–89; Copeland and Ziolkowski, “Medieval Rhetoric,” 472. As Augustine notes at the beginning of book 1, books 1–3 treat the first part of rhetoric, invention or the discovery of the matter of the speech, and book 4 treats the remaining parts

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concerning presentation, mainly as they apply to a preacher. The most extensive analysis of Augustine’s theory of reading and argument for its importance is Stock’s Augustine the Reader. Stock summarizes his conclusions in the introduction to After Augustine. Allard discusses Augustine as “a thinker of the enigmatic” in the context of late antique culture in “Énigme et la culture littéraire.” 54. On Augustine’s wider philosophy of language, see Markus, “Signs, Communication”; Ando, “Augustine on Language”; and Jackson, “Theory of Signs.” 55. DDC 3.27.38, trans. Green, 169–71. On how Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Henry of Ghent maintain room for multiple interpretations as a consequence of Augustine’s hermeneutics, see Wawrykow, “Reflections on the Place,” 111–14. 56. De Lubac grounds his account of medieval exegesis in the shared conviction of what Augustine, in Confessions 12.14.17, calls scripture’s “marvelous depths”: “Scripture is like the world: ‘undecipherable in its fullness and in the multiplicity of its meanings.’ A deep forest, with innumerable branches, ‘an infinite forest of meanings’: the more involved one gets in it, the more one discovers that it is impossible to explore it right to the end. It is a table arranged by Wisdom, laden with food, where the unfathomable divinity of the Savior is itself offered as nourishment to all. Treasure of the Holy Spirit, whose riches are as infinite as himself. True labyrinth. Deep heavens, unfathomable abyss. Vast sea, where there is endless voyaging ‘with all sails set.’ Ocean of mystery. Or raging torrent” (ME, 1:75, with notes to patristic and medieval sources for these images). On patristic origins of this idea, see Irvine, Making of Textual Culture, 162–68, 179. See also Evans, Language and Logic [Earlier Middle Ages], 1–5. For two representative and influential restatements of Augustine’s exegetical principles that avoid being reductive, see Bonaventure, Breviloquium, prol.6, and Henry of Ghent, Sum of Ordinary Questions, art. 16, q. 3 (both trans. in MLTC, 236–38 and 256–62). For a late witness, see Wyclif, De veritate Sacrae Scripturae, 1:27, 168. Augustine’s principles anticipate the idea of a productive rather than reductive hermeneutic circle as developed by thinkers such as Schleiermacher, Heidegger, and Gadamer, but without their sustained attention to the effects of temporal distance; see Gadamer, Truth and Method, 190–92, 291–300. Bruce Holsinger cites de Lubac’s passage on “marvelous depths” alongside one from Roland Barthes S/Z in making a persuasive case for the deep influence of medieval exegesis on postmodern theory and criticism (Premodern Condition, 185). On the contrast in how they each approach the play of meaning, see Schildgen, “Augustine’s Answer.” 57. Of course, the continuities and changes after the Middle Ages are complex, the changes gradual, and their lingering effects more complex still. Ocker

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emphasizes important continuities in the early Reformers, but also a renewed emphasis on clarity (Biblical Poetics, 184–219). See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 174–76. Emphasis on accuracy and avoiding error in interpretation gets a boost from humanist methods and Reformation polemic and arguably grows in modernity. In this light the construal and deployment of medieval exegesis in the so-called exegetical criticism associated with D. W. Robertson Jr. appear highly modern, invested in correct interpretation as an academic end in itself divorced from the larger goals that medieval concern for accuracy served and that tempered such concern. 58. One of Augustine’s best explanations of this position is his later De spiritu et littera. There he accepts that 2 Cor. 3:6, “Littera occidit, spiritus autem vivificat,” can be taken to mean that we must understand the deeper significance of figurative sayings in scripture, but he argues that its more important meaning is that the good life in accord with the law, which ought to be taken literally, is impossible without the gift of the Spirit “shedding charity abroad in our hearts” (Rom. 5:5 as cited in De spiritu et littera 6, trans. Burnaby, “Spirit and the Letter,” 198). De Lubac notes that Scholastic thinkers tend to follow this interpretation (EM 2/2, 103); see also Donahue, “Patristic Exegesis,” 68–72. 59. Bede the Venerable, De schematibus et tropis 2.2, trans. Irvine, Making of Textual Culture, 294; ed. Kendall, 163: “Enigma est obscura sententia per occultam similitudinem rerum, ut: ‘Pennae columbae deargentatae, et posteriora dorsi eius in specie auri,’ cum significet eloquia Scripturae spiritalis divino lumine plena, sensum vero eius interiorem majori caelestis sapientiae gratia refulgentem, vel certe vitam sanctae ecclesiae praesentem, virtutum pennis gaudentem, futuram autem, quae in caelis est, aeterna cum Domino claritate fruituram.” This passage from Bede would also have been accessible in the late Middle Ages in the treatment of enigma in the list of tropes that precedes the dictionary section of the Catholicon by Giovanni Balbi, which was completed in 1286 and quickly became a standard reference. Its paragraph on enigma also includes the definitions and examples from Donatus, Alexander’s Doctrinale, and Isidore’s Etymologies. 60. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 1.37.26, ed. Lindsay, trans. Barney et al., Etymologies, 63: “aenigma vero sensus tantum obscurus est, et per quasdam imagines adumbratus.” See Irvine, Making of Textual Culture, 230–34, on Isidore’s definition and its sources. Isidore’s section on grammar was sometimes used in the arts curriculum. His reference to images with enigma perhaps reflects the combination of visual and verbal metaphors in 1 Cor. 13:12. 61. McDermott, “‘Beatus Qui Verba Vertit in Opera,” draws attention to the tropological sense in particular as a theory of interpretive invention that leads to ethical invention, or action: “Tropological making, then, is not merely writing

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about ethical themes or even for the purpose of inspiring ethical action, but a habit of invention that translates idea into action with a ‘reductive’ momentum leading back to Scripture and (at the same time) forward toward full correspondence with its model, toward the soul’s mystical union with God and the Church’s fulfilment in the Kingdom of Heaven. That is to say, tropological making happens between the letter of Scripture (the literal sense), the truth of salvation history (the allegorical sense), and their eschatological fulfilment (the anagogical sense)” (187–88). 62. Wyclif, De veritate Sacrae Scripturae, cap. I–VII, vol. 1, 1–158 (On the Truth of Holy Scripture, trans. Levy, 41–118). See also Evans, Language and Logic [Road to Reformation], 111–20, and “Wyclif ’s Logic,” 287–300. Wyclif, however, forbids imitating scripture’s use of enigma in terms much stronger and more universal than Augustine’s recommendation in De doctrina that preachers should stick to clarity. That he finds such a proscription necessary, however, suggests that he saw others doing it. 63. For Hugh, see above, chapter 1. On Hugh’s influence, especially on Nicholas of Lyra, see Hazard, Literal Sense, 2–10. Peter the Chanter’s Tractatus de tropis loquendi is another early attempt to use logical tools to resolve apparent contradictions, and it begins with commentary on 1 Cor. 13:12 that projects an eschatological view of multiple, convergent interpretations (Guisberti, Materials for a Study, 103–4; see Evans, Language and Logic [Earlier Middle Ages], 149–50, 155–63). Aquinas’s argument in ST I.1.9 that metaphor is both necessary and useful in scripture, although it is merely pleasing in poetry, aligns both discourses in opposition to philosophy in their use of language (see Ong, “Wit and Mystery,” 325). For the fourteenth-century exegetes, see Ocker, Biblical Poetics, and McDermott, “Henri de Lubac’s Genealogy.” 64. Augustine, De Trinitate 1.2, trans. Hill, The Trinity, 66; CCSL 50, 29: “De rebus autem quae omnino non sunt non traxit aliqua vocabula quibus vel figuraret locutiones vel sirparet aenigmata. . . . Rebus enim quae in creatura reperiuntur solet scriptura divina velut infantilia oblectamenta formare quibus infirmorum ad quaerenda superiora et inferiora deserenda pro suo modulo tamquam passibus moveretur aspectus.” The verb Augustine uses here with aenigma, more commonly spelled scirpo, means to weave from rushes and is the source of scirpus, a rare Latin synonym for aenigma (see above, chapter 2, the section “Etymology”). 65. DDC pref.1, trans. Green, 3. Ed. Green: “Sunt praecepta quaedam tractandarum scripturarum quae studiosis earum video non incommode posse tradi, ut non solum legendo alios qui divinarum litterarum operta aperuerunt sed etiam ipsi aperiendo proficiant.”

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66. See above, chapter 1. On the later medieval development of a lectio spiritualis more oriented to the individual reader and to cultivating emotion in contemplation, see Stock, After Augustine, 101–14. On reception of De doctrina, see English, Reading and Wisdom. 67. DDC 2.6.7, trans. Green, 61: “Sed multis et multiplicibus obscuritatibus et ambiguitatibus decipiuntur qui temere legunt, aliud pro alio sentientes. Quibusdam autem locis quid vel falso suspicentur non inveniunt: ita obscure dicta quaedam densissimam caliginem obducunt. Quod totum provisum esse divinitus non dubito, ad edomandam labore superbiam et intellectum a fastidio renovandum, cui facile investigata plerumque vilescunt.” He calls interpretation of difficulties “opus et labor” at 2.9.14, alluding perhaps to Aeneid 6.129, where the sybil says of getting out of the labyrinthine underworld, “Hic opus, hic labor est.” On the labyrinth as a figure for enigma, see Cook, Enigmas and Riddles, 191–96. The sibyl herself utters “riddling prophecies” (West’s translation of “arcana fata” at 6.72 and “ambages” at 6.99, pp. 134–35). Augustine would thus imply both the similarity that reading is a path of ascent to freedom and the contrast that it is accessible to more than just heroes. See also Augustine, De Trinitate 15.27 on enigma, “ut . . . nos exerceret,” and First Catechetical Instruction 9.13. 68. DDC 3.34.49, 4.6.9, 4.8.22, where he goes so far as to call the work of interpretation a means of grace for those who do it right. 69. DDC 2.6.8, trans. Green, 63: “Sed quare suavius videam quam si nulla de divinis libris talis similitudo promeretur, cum res eadem sit eademque cognitio, difficile est dicere et alia quaestio est. Nunc tamen nemo ambigit et per similitudines libentius quaeque cognosci et cum aliqua difficultate quaesita multo gratius inveniri.” See also DDC 4.7.15. 70. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 146, 12; CCSL 40, 2130–31. This passage is cited by Boccaccio, Genealogy 14.12 (trans. Osgood, Boccaccio on Poetry, 60–61) and Wyclif, De veritate Sacrae Scripturae, 1:60–61. See Périn, “Saint Augustin,” who finds seven, closely related functions of allegory and obscurity and cites further texts from Augustine, notably Contra mendacium 10.24. 71. DDC 1.38.42, trans. Green, 53: “Aeternum autem ardentius diligitur adeptum quam desideratum.” At 3.9–13 he introduces his discussion of this hermeneutic by ascribing to it the power to liberate both Jews and Gentiles from slavery to idolatry of things not taken as signs. See also De Trinitate 15.51. 72. Dante’s Paradiso is perhaps the fullest expression of such an experience of love; see, e.g., canto 10, lines 82–90. Moevs has expressed such an aesthetic criterion of truth with respect to Dante (Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy, 60, 185). Wyclif, after quoting the passage from DDC 1.38.42 just cited, seems to project

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such a criterion (rather than a post-Reformation idea of doctrinal content) under the name of “faith, whose own proof exceeds that of a dialectical argument” (On the Truth, trans. Levy, 117–18). 73. See, e.g., Gregory the Great, preface to his exposition of the Song of Songs (PL 79.471–73), epistle to Leander IV attached as preface to his Moralia, and Pastoral Care 3.24; Peter Abelard, prologue to Sic et Non (MLTC, 87); Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs 1.3.5 (trans. Walsh, 3–4); Alexander of Hales, Summa theologica, 1.4.1 (MLTC, 214–15); Bonaventure, Breviloquium, prol.4 (MLTC, 233–34). For discussion and further references, see EM 2/2, 169f. 74. Hugh of St. Victor, De modo dicendi et meditandi 8, PL 176.879: “Meditatio est assidua ac sagax retractatio cogitationis, aliquid obscurum explicare nitens, vel scrutans penetrare occultum.” Trans. Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 124. 75. See Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, chap. 4, and MLTC, 200–203. 76. See, e.g., ST I–II.67.5, II-II.5.1. 77. Breviloquium, prol.5 (trans. MLTC, 235–36). Note that love for Bonaventure includes knowledge; see question 3 of the prologue to his commentary on Lombard’s Sentences (trans. MLTC, 226–28). 78. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 125. 79. Henry of Ghent, Sum of Ordinary Questions, art. 14, q. 1, trans. in MLTC, 251–56. See Minnis, “Medium and Message,” 231–32. Henry’s general discussion of the uses of obscurity, drawn largely from Augustine, synthesizes the tradition up to the late thirteenth century. Enigma also cuts across late medieval distinctions of scriptural sense (as opposed to mode) because it is associated both with allegory, which was sometimes used to refer to all of the spiritual senses and sometimes to one of them specifically, and with parable, which came to be considered part of the literal sense. 80. DDC 4.15.32. 81. DDC 4.19.38, 4.15.32. See J. Murphy, Rhetoric, 62, 282, and Auerbach, “Sermo humilis,” in Literary Language. 82. DDC 3.10.15, trans. Green, 149: “Non autem praecipit scriptura nisi caritatem, nec culpat nisi cupiditatem, et eo modo informat mores hominum.” Augustine first states this principle at the end of his discussion in book 1 of what is to be enjoyed and what is to be used: “The chief purpose of all that we have been saying in our discussion of things is to make it understood that the fulfillment and end of the law and all the divine scriptures is to love the thing which must be enjoyed and the thing which together with us can enjoy that thing” (i.e., God and neighbor). DDC 1.35.39, trans. Green, 49: “Omnium igitur quae dicta sunt ex quo de rebus tractamus haec summa est, ut intellegatur legis et omnium

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divinarum scripturarum plenitudo et finis esse dilectio rei quo fruendum est et rei quae nobiscum ea re frui potest.” See also First Catechetical Instruction 2.4– 4.8. For a later echo, see Bonaventure, De reductione artium ad theologiam, trans. Healy, 26. 83. Forshall and Madden, Holy Bible, 44. 84. R. Williams, “Language, Reality and Desire,” 148. On exercise of the soul as the primary goal of Augustine’s own exegesis and theological writing in De Trinitate, see Emery, “Trinitarian Theology,” 12–17. 85. DDC 1.36.40, trans. Green, 49: “Quisquis igitur scripturas divinas vel quamlibet earum partem intellexisse sibi videtur, ita ut eo intellectu non aedificet istam geminam caritatem dei proximi, nondum intellexit.” D. W. Robertson Jr.’s mistranslation of this sentence (pointed out to me by H. A. Kelly) treats love as merely an idea in scripture, not a reality developed in the reader through understanding scripture: “Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of our neighbor does not understand it at all” (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, 30). See DDC 1.37.41–1.38.42 and 3.10.14– 15; Babcock, “Caritas and Signification”; and Stock, Augustine the Reader, 185, 195. For further testimony to the late medieval authority of this starting point for exegetical theory, see, e.g., Henry of Ghent, Sum of Ordinary Questions, art. 16, q. 3.6 (in MLTC, 257–58); Nicholas of Lyra, first prologue to Literal Postills on the Bible, PL 113.27A; and Wyclif, De veritate Sacrae Scripturae, 1:24, 28, 50, 117. 86. The classic work on influence is Courcelle, Confessions. Linda Olson provides evidence of wide knowledge of Confessions while showing an example of how closely it was read in “Reading Augustine’s Confessiones.” Courtenay points out that Richard Fitzralph describes a conversion experience he underwent during his time at the papal court in Avignon (ca. 1337–43) “in language taken from Augustine’s Confessions,” which includes reference to scripture as a mirror (School and Scholars, 320–21, cited in translation in Pantin, English Church, 132–33). The story of Augustine’s life is the longest one in the immensely popular Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine (cap. 124; trans. Ryan, 2.116–32), and it quotes the Confessions often. 87. James J. O’Donnell, a recent editor of the Confessions, notes that, while its prose style needs more attention, “the standard studies show that the rhythms of the Confessions conform neither to the quantitative nor to the accentual patterns preferred by ancient and medieval writers, and do not very closely resemble those of Augustine’s own other works. Recent studies of late antique prose rhythm confirm that uniqueness without approaching the mystery any more closely” (1:lxiiin126 with references).

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88. In the commentary that accompanies his edition, O’Donnell repeatedly points to the unity of the two parts of the Confessions as a hermeneutic project; see, e.g., 1:xxxvii. For an account of the Confessions that attends to Augustine’s consideration of language, see the three-volume commentary by Vaught, Journey toward God, Encounters with God, and Access to God. 89. On the importance of the inward turn in Augustine, see C. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 127–42, and, with more attention to its hermeneutic dimension, Turner, Darkness of God, 50–73. 90. Augustine, Confessions 3.6.11, trans. Chadwick, 43: “Offendi illam mulierem audacem, inopem prudentiae, aenigma Salomonis, sedentem super sellam in foribus et dicentem, ‘Panes occultos libenter edite, et aquam dulcem furtivam bibite.’ Quae me seduxit, quia invenit foris habitantem in oculo carnis meae et talia ruminantem apud me qualia per illum vorassem.” He cites the same “aenigma” elsewhere in a general warning against those who claim to offer secrets “that are forbidden to be spoken or believed openly in the church” (Tractates on the Gospel of John 97.2). Subsequent citations of the Confessions are to O’Donnell’s edition by division numbers and Chadwick’s translation by page number and are given parenthetically in the text. 91. See Struck, Birth of the Symbol, 104–7, 198–201, and elsewhere on the esoteric tendencies of the interpretive tradition. 92. In a veiled reference to the Parable of the Prodigal Son, he likens pagan literature to husks that he was feeding to pigs but unable to eat himself. Even traditional allegorical interpretation of classical literature, evoked by the term husks (siliquae) from the parable, at least sought a kernel of deeper meaning within the shell of the poem’s literal sense. Stock describes the Confessions as “a Virgilian retelling of the parable of the prodigal son” (Augustine the Reader, 3). See also DDC 3.7.11. 93. “Rem non compertam superbis neque nudatam pueris, sed incessu humilem, successu excelsam et velatam mysteriis.” On Augustine’s use of the term mysterium, see O’Donnell’s note at 13.24.35. Stroumsa argues for a shift, accomplished above all by Augustine, from an esoteric notion of hidden secrets to a more mystical idea of mysterious meaning (Hidden Wisdom, 132–68). The image of veiling here perhaps implies the language commonly used by exegetes for mysteries from the Old Testament that are revealed in the New. 94. See Girard, Antonello, and de Castro Rocha, Evolution and Conversion, 61; Graham, “St. Augustine’s Novelistic Conversion”; Palaver, René Girard’s Mimetic Theory, 88–93, 222–23; and Warren, “Augustine’s Pears.” 95. Confessions 2.6.14. The two kinds of mimetic desire are similar to what Girard calls external and internal mediation (Deceit, Desire, 9). Note, however, that whereas Girard finds external, nonconflictual mediation to be typical of

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situations in which the subject and the mediator are different enough in status to prevent direct rivalry and internal, rivalrous mediation to be typical of situations in which they are the same or close in status, Augustine’s example reverses this pattern because he is in rivalry not with his peers but with God. 96. See above, chapter 2, the section “Anthropology.” 97. Confessions 5.14.24, trans. Chadwick, 88: “maxime audito uno atque altero et saepius aenigmate soluto de scriptis veteribus, ubi, cum ad litteram acciperem, occidebar.” Ambrose refers several times in various works to “the enigmas of the prophets,” e.g., De Isaac vel anima 4.33, Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam 1.42, Epistolae 2.3, 71.5, De Cain et Abel 1.6.24; a more programmatic statement at De Abraham 2.1.1, introducing a defense of spiritual interpretation with the words “ut animam legentis pertranseat ad revelanda propheticarum scripturarum aenigmata,” comes closest to Augustine’s use of the term (all in PL 14). Courcelle’s controversial attempt to identify which sermons Augustine heard at this time includes among them De Isaac vel anima and Expositio . . . Lucam (Recherches, 98–132; summarized in O’Donnell’s notes, 2:325, questioned by P. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 86n5). 98. Confessions 6.3.4, trans. Chadwick, 93: “quamquam quomodo se haberet spiritalis substantia, ne quidem tenuiter atque in aenigmate suspicabar.” 99. Confessions 8.1.1, trans. Chadwick, 133: “Inhaeserant praecordiis meis verba tua, et undique circumvallabar abs te. De vita tua aeterna certus eram, quamvis eam in aenigmate et quasi per speculum videram; dubitatio tamen omnis de incorruptibili substantia, quod ab illa esset omnis substantia, ablata mihi erat, nec certior de te sed stabilior in te esse cupiebam.” Note how this quotation of 1 Cor. 13:12 places decided emphasis on “in aenigmate” by transposing the verse and qualifying only “per speculum” as metaphorical, “quasi.” 100. O’Donnell’s introduction to his commentary on book 8 shows that its whole narrative is shaped by sequential references to the book of Romans that apply it to Augustine’s life. Similarly, O’Donnell’s introduction to book 9 points out the extended contemplation of Psalm 4 as a pattern for his whole conversion story, typical of what the Confessions does in reading scripture and experience side by side. O’Donnell further notes (3:91ff, the “Excursus on Psalm 4” preceding his commentary on this section) that “little in ancient literature at all resembles the account of a sustained act of reading in 9.4.8–11,” and that it occurs “at almost the exact mid-point of the Confessions (counting pages, lines, or words).” 101. O’Donnell suggests calling the whole experience an audition rather than a vision, Confessions, 3:128, 133. See also his notes on 10.27.38, the corresponding moment of reversal from activity to passivity in that book’s ascent, where hearing is also put before seeing and the other senses (3:198). Using verbal rather than visual metaphors distinguishes this ascent from what he had found

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in Neoplatonism and makes it a cardinal example of Augustine’s epistemology of the Word, worked out most fully in De Trinitate 15 and The Teacher (trans. Burleigh in Augustine, Earlier Writings). 102. Confessions 9.10.25, trans. Ryan, 222: “et loquatur ipse solus non per ea sed per se ipsum, ut audiamus verbum eius, non per linguam carnis neque per vocem angeli nec per sonitum nubis nec per aenigma similitudinis, sed ipsum quem in his amamus, ipsum sine his audiamus (sicut nunc extendimus nos et rapida cogitatione attingimus aeternam sapientiam super omnia manentem), si continuetur hoc et subtrahantur aliae visiones longe imparis generis et haec una rapiat et absorbeat et recondat in interiora gaudia spectatorem suum, ut talis sit sempiterna vita quale fuit hoc momentum intellegentiae cui suspiravimus, nonne hoc est: ‘intra in gaudium domini tui’?” 103. Turner makes a similar point from Confessions 10.12.19 (Darkness of God, 62–63). Augustine reflects on the inadequacy of words to express the flash of insight in First Catechetical Instruction 2.3–4, citing 1 Cor. 13:12 on the limits of present knowledge. 104. Louth, Origins, 136. 105. On the passage “from narratio to enarratio,” see Vance, Mervelous Signals, 6. As O’Donnell explains (Confessions, 3:151), “What Augustine learned to do at Ostia, he now does, in writing this text. This is no longer an account of something that happened somewhere else some time ago; the text itself becomes the ascent. The text no longer narrates mystical experience, it becomes itself a mystical experience (for Augustine; it will further become in books 11–13 a mystical experience for the reader as well).” Would Augustine have condoned giving his own text the same kind of attention as the Bible? The main difference between reading scripture and other texts for Augustine is not how they should engage the reader, or even the eschatological hope for revelation through them, but simply that in reading other texts charity also requires that we be ready to correct them and forgive their faults. Augustine surrenders his texts to charitable reading by which his own errors will be corrected and forgiven and his texts will take on whatever authority they deserve (Ep. 27.4; PL 33, 109). The authority of his texts lies in the community that reads them well, just as the Confessions shows the transcendent authority of scripture to be realized in community. 106. On the structure of books 11–13, see O’Donnell’s commentary, 3:250–52. 107. Confessions 11.22.28, trans. Chadwick, 236: “Exarsit animus meus nosse istuc implicatissimum aenigma. ” 108. Confessions 11.28.38. See Vance, Mervelous Signals, chap. 2. The experience of time points to eternity as much by negation as by analogy, but this tension is already implicit in aporias between the enigma and common sense (see Jordan, “Words and Word,” 191ff).

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109. See de Margerie, Introduction to the History, 47–88. 110. Confessions 12.13.16, trans. Chadwick, 253: “Sic interim sentio propter illud caelum caeli, caelum intellectuale, ubi est intellectus nosse simul, non ex parte, non in aenigmate, non per speculum, sed ex toto, in manifestione, facie ad faciem; non modo hoc, modo illud, sed quod dictum est nosse simul sine ulla vicissitudine temporum.” The interlinear gloss “manifeste” for “facie ad faciem” in the Ordinary Gloss perhaps derives from “in manifestione” here. Note also Augustine’s clear handling of riddle and mirror as two separate metaphors, with “in aenigmate” perhaps receiving emphasis from their transposed order. 111. Confessions 13.24.37, trans. Chadwick, 296: “multis modis intellegere quod obscure uno modo enuntiatum legerimus.” 112. Confessions 13.15.18, trans. Chadwick, 283: “Vident enim faciem tuam semper, et ibi legunt sine syllabis temporum quid velit aeterna voluntas tua. Legunt eligunt et diligunt; semper legunt et numquam praeterit quod legunt. Eligendo enim et diligendo legunt ipsam incommutabilitatem consilii tui. Non clauditur codex eorum nec plicatur liber eorum, quia tu ipse illis hoc es et es in aeternum.” 113. Cf. Cicero’s assertion, through the voice of the Stoic speaker Balbus in On the Nature of the Gods, that “true religion is selective [from e-ligere], diligent [di-ligere], and demands understanding [intel-legere]” (Struck, Birth of the Symbol, 117). Augustine rethinks these separate religious virtues as a process in which understanding and will cooperate in the single, all-encompassing act of love. 114. Confessions 13.15.18, trans Chadwick, 284: “Quod nunc in aenigmate nubium et per speculum caeli, non sicuti est, apparet nobis, quia et nos quamvis filio tuo dilecti sumus, nondum apparuit quod erimus. Attendit per retia carnis et blanditus est et inflammavit, et currimus post odorem eius. Sed cum apparuerit, similes ei erimus, quoniam videbimus eum sicuti est. Sicuti est, domine, videre nostrum, quod nondum est nobis.” Cf. Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s use of cloud imagery above. The link, which Augustine was fond of, between 1 John 3:2 and 1 Cor. 13:12 captures the essential connection between finding the truth behind the text and becoming like it (ed. O’Donnell, 3:375). See, with the same eschatology in view, De Trinitate 1.16–17, 12.22; The City of God 22.29; The Spirit and the Letter 22.37–23.38; Enarrationes in Psalmos 97.3; and especially Tractates on the Gospel of John 101.5 and 102.3, which link enigma with longing for what we will see. Lombard makes this connection under Augustine’s name in his gloss on 1 Cor. 13:10–13 (PL 191, 1662). See also Stock, Augustine the Reader, 16–17. 115. Langland uses an image similar to Augustine’s interpretation of the firmament in the allegory of church history that makes up the center of his second-to-last dream. The roof of the barn that Grace builds in order to store the

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Notes to Pages 204–206

grain that Piers has grown with the tools of scriptural interpretation is itself made of “Holy Writ” (B.19.328/C.21.329). 116. Confessions 13.15.16: “Namque ipsa eorum morte solidamentum auctoritatis in eloquiis tuis per eos editis sublimiter extenditur super omnia quae subter sunt, quod, cum hic viverent, non ita sublimiter extentum erat. Nondum sicut pellem caelum extenderas, nondum mortis eorum famam usquequaque dilataveras.” Trans. Chadwick, 282–83: “Indeed, by the very fact of their death the solid authority of your utterances published by them is in a sublime way ‘stretched out’ over everything inferior. While they were alive on earth, it was not stretched out to express this supreme authority. You had not ‘stretched out the heaven like a skin,’ you had not diffused everywhere the renown of their death.” 117. Carruthers, Book of Memory, 213. See also Zeeman, “Piers Plowman,” 205–6. Larry Scanlon argues more broadly that, in the ancient world, the Christian church’s authority gains autonomy because it is fundamentally textual rather than political. It has been based from the start, in the teaching of Jesus and Paul, on an exegetical program of figural reading that “constitutes a text which continually transcends its own textuality, a signifier grounded on the endless possibilities of signification” (Narrative, Authority, 47). 118. Confessions 13.5.6; trans. Chadwick, 276: “Ecce apparet mihi in aenigmate trinitas quod es, deus meus.” 119. Augustine, Of True Religion 51.100, trans. Burleigh, Earlier Writings, 276. 120. Smalley, in her pioneering book Study of the Bible, is frank about being primarily interested in what would be considered scholarship in a modern sense, that is, the aspects of interpretation that fulfill modern canons of accuracy. Hence she emphasizes one sort of attention paid to the literal sense of scripture that was in fact only part of a varied and flexible array of approaches to what the medieval exegetes construed as literal senses. Henri de Lubac’s Exégèse médiévale places such developments in a much wider survey, and his commitments lead him to emphasize that the goal of exegesis, spiritual conversion, remained the same even while scholarship advanced. On Smalley’s later qualifications of her study of the literal sense, see Hazard, Literal Sense, 5–7. For an overview of later medieval exegesis that finds room for the views of both Smalley and de Lubac within an emphasis on the literal sense of scripture that found it as worthy of interpretive erudition as the spiritual senses, see Minnis, “Quadruplex Sensus.” 121. Ocker, Biblical Poetics, 149–79; quotation from 161. This hermeneutic is echoed in Hoccleve’s appeal to a “communynge” between author and reader as “the beste assay” of his authority (Complaint and Dialogue, line 217, ed. Burrow, 19). 122. Simpson, “Piers Plowman,” 108.

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123. Zeeman also gives a good overview of the importance of these values and practices, “Piers Plowman,” 109–27. 124. Both of the major medieval authorities on dreams, Augustine and Macrobius, associate the most common kind of significant dream with enigma through their common need for interpretation. Augustine provided an important way of thinking about dreams in a discussion of three kinds of vision: corporeal (regular eyesight), spiritual, and intellectual, in ascending order of rationality. Dreams are a kind of spiritual vision that can be either true or false and that requires interpretation, whereas intellectual vision is always true and is simply understood or not. Spiritual vision, even that of John in the Apocalypse, is “per speculum in aenigmate,” while intellectual vision, for which the paradigm is Paul’s rapture into the third heaven, is “facie ad faciem” (Augustine, Literal Meaning of Genesis 12.11, 18, and 26–28). John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, an important conduit of classical and patristic dream theory to the later Middle Ages, also uses the term enigma in its more pointed reflections on the interpretation of dreams. After alluding to Augustine’s distinction of spiritual and intellectual vision, John gives the standard classification of five kinds of dreams from Macrobius’s commentary on Cicero’s dream of Scipio. Between two inferior types that result from disorders of body or mind and are meaningless and two superior types that give clear revelation is the somnium proper, which is valuable but requires interpretation. John adds that this kind, “which stretches before the body of truth a veil, as it were, of figures,” is what God mostly employs. He then cautions would-be interpreters: “As the work of artists who imitate nature is surpassed by the works of nature herself, so the significance of events, which is much more intricate than the meaning conveyed by words, requires much shrewdness for the interpretation of dreams and the unveiling of riddles and figures” (Policraticus 2.15–16, trans. Pike, in Frivolities of Courtiers, 81 (modified); ed. Keats-Rohan, Policratus, 99: “mediam quae corpori veritatis quasi velum figuratum oppandit diligentius exequitur. Est itaque tam ad interpretationem somniorum quam ad revelationem aenigmatum et figurarum sollerter attendenda rerum significatio, quae tanto multiplicior est quam vocum quanto ab operibus naturae opera vincuntur artificis imitantis naturam”). The link between dreams and enigma is quite direct in the Middle English poem King Horn, where Horn’s queen has a dream that he later turns into a riddle (lines 657–68, 1133–54 in Sands, Middle English Verse Romances). Kruger’s Dreaming in the Middle Ages emphasizes the importance of what he calls the doubleness and middleness of dreams and connects this type of dream in particular to literary dream-fictions such as The Romance of the Rose, Chaucer’s dream poems, and Piers Plowman. 125. C.11.148 and 151. In B.10.118, Dame Study cites Augustine as an authority, and he is cited several times in later visions in both versions.

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Notes to Pages 207–209

126. On the rhetorical implications of Augustine’s discussion in De Trinitate, see Cook, Enigmas and Riddles, 39–42. On the theological implications of his discussion of enigma in De Trinitate, see chapter 1 above. 127. B.10.455/C.11.292 (where it is within the inner dream), my translation. On this misquotation, see Benson, “Augustinian Irony.” 128. Confessions, 8.8.19, ed. O’Donnell; trans. Ryan, 195. The version of Augustine’s sentence in a gloss of Hugh of St. Cher cited by Judson Boyce Allen is closer to Langland’s and also omits “sine corde” (“Langland’s Reading and Writing,” 344–45). 129. On Augustine’s innovations and influence in connecting the ancient project of self-knowledge with reading and writing, see Stock, After Augustine, 8–23. 130. While these structural parallels have not to my knowledge been noted, Wittig discusses some parallels to books 7 and 8 of the Confessions in “Piers Plowman B,” 232–34 and 247–48. See also Zeeman, “Piers Plowman,” 188, 238, 241. Middleton suggests parallels between the Confessions and Piers Plowman as “reading lesson” (“Piers Plowman, the Monsters,” 108). 131. B.11.13–15/C.11.174–6. In Confessions 3.8.16, Augustine cites this verse as identifying “the chief kinds of wickedness.” It is worth noting too the precedent of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, in which the narrator undergoes therapeutic dialogue with a personification representing classical learning. The dialogue with Lady Philosophy includes an inset passage in which she speaks in the voice of Fortune, and it is Fortune that carries Langland’s dreamer into the inner dream, which is set within a sequence of rather Boethian dialogues with learned authorities. 132. Steiner’s analysis of this section finds in it “a literacy that enacts rather than declaims” but argues that “it takes its conceptual form from legal documents and the bureaucratic activities that produce them” (Documentary Culture, 148). This apparent alternative to Augustinian spiritual reading as a model is nonetheless in continuity with it for Langland, just as for Augustine himself there is continuity between his work as a teacher of rhetoric and as a bishop. Zeeman, in her reading of the inner dream as an intersection of Langland’s “kynde” and “clergie,” emphasizes “kynde,” knowledge gained through the natural world, whereas I emphasize “clergie,” or textually mediated knowledge, but our readings can complement one another. Zeeman also points out that the dreamer’s attack on Christian learning before the inner dream proceeds primarily by flattening out its enigmas (“Piers Plowman,” 201–44). 133. See Confessions 10.3.4. 134. This is another signature passage that, like the one in the fifth vision (see above, Introduction, and below, chapter 6, the section “Langland’s Poetic

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Exegesis”), sets up a self-reflexive consideration of Langland’s poetics. See Middleton, “William Langland’s ‘Kynde Name.’” Mention of a mirror here is, at least in retrospect, an allusion to 1 Cor. 13:12 that begins a program of poetic exegesis of 1 Cor. 13, which will unfold over the following two visions (see chapter 6, the section “Langland’s Poetic Exegesis”). 135. On the theological significance of the dreamer’s response to Scripture here, see Simpson, “Piers Plowman,” 108–10, and Reform and Cultural Revolution, 354–56; and Aers, Sanctifying Signs, 39–41. 136. Prov. 1:6, Ez. 17:2, Hab. 2:6, and the version of Ps. 48:5 translated from Hebrew: “Inclino ad parabulam aurem meum; aperiam in cithara enigma meum.” Augustine’s commentary on this last verse, though it uses the version from the Septuagint with “propositio” instead of “enigma,” nonetheless explains why the psalmist speaks of parables by referring to 1 Cor. 13:12 and defining an enigma as an obscure parable, just as he elsewhere defined it as an obscure allegory (e.g., Enarrationes in Psalmos 48.5; CCSL 38, 554). See also similar definitions in Hugh of St. Cher on Ecclus. 47:17 and Ez. 17:2. The classic case was not one of the parables of Jesus but the parable, also often called a fable, told by Joatham in Judges 9:8–15 of the trees choosing a king among themselves. See MLTC, 209–10, and the excerpts there from Conrad of Hirsau’s Dialogue on the Authors, 48; Alexander’s Sum of Theology, 222; Henry of Ghent’s Sum of Ordinary Questions, 262–64; Pierre Bersuire’s Moral Reduction; and Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Gentile Gods, 424 and 438. See also Nicholas of Lyra’s treatment in Turner, Eros and Allegory, 106–7, 391, 393, and Hermann of Schildesche’s in Ocker, Biblical Poetics, 95. Wyclif cites the parable from Judges in order to refute the charge that “both testaments clearly contain enigmatic and parabolic parts . . . which are sufficiently false” (On the Truth, trans. Levy, 73). Bonaventure links the discursive modes of the books of Solomon to stages of maturity, so that Proverbs, for the immature, is written “in parables and openly”; Ecclesiastes, for the mature, “openly and in his own words”; Song of Songs, for the perfect, “in parables and in hidden ways” (Commentary on Ecclesiastes, trans. Karris, 91). 137. On the general notion of a parabolic sense in late medieval exegesis, see Ocker, Biblical Poetics, 142–49. 138. On both allegorical interpretation of biblical narratives and poetic composition of allegorical narratives that gave little regard to enigmatic capacities of significance, see Aers, “Piers Plowman,” 15–49. 139. B.11.127–36/C.12.63–72. The appearance of Reason and Conscience here recalls their roles in the first vision and, in the C text, makes an even stronger connection to the life of the dreamer because of their part in calling the dreamer to account in the waking section added between the first and second visions.

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140. R. Bradley, “Backgrounds of the Title Speculum,” complicates this picture considerably. 141. Bartholomaeus, On the Properties of Things, ed. Seymour et al., 41. On this enterprise, which Trevisa calls “one long game,” see above, Introduction. Mark Hazard helpfully situates Bartholomaeus’s project within mendicant Scholasticism in Literal Sense, 3. A precursor to late medieval encyclopedic thinking, the sixth-century Institutiones of Cassiodorus, concludes by explaining, on the authority of Augustine, that secular writings are valuable for the sake of understanding scripture so that all things may be referred to the glory of their Creator (trans. Jones, Introduction, 205). 142. On medieval gem lore, see G. Murphy, Gemstone of Paradise, 41–67. Cf. Bede’s similar interpretation of the symbolism of gold and silver in his example of enigma above. 143. See Davlin, Game of Heuene, 52–54. The term subcreator comes from Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories.” 144. See Davlin’s discussion of this passage in Game of Heuene, 82–83; also Kaske, “Langland’s Walnut-Simile.” D. W. Robertson uses a selection of shelland-kernel images from Christian interpreters through the twelfth century in “Some Medieval Literary Terminology.” David Aers, “Piers Plowman,” 53–70, shows how limiting the shell-and-kernel model often was when the kernel was seen as an abstract, doctrinal statement that could be read off from the images that make the shell. This process could have some rhetorical use, but even more when, either in scripture or in literature, the kernel of spiritual meaning and the literal sense that points to it are both seen as inexhaustible. On the more sophisticated treatment of the literal sense of the Bible in the later Middle Ages, see Ocker, Biblical Poetics, 78–111, 142–49, 179–83; also Evans, Language and Logic [Road to Reformation], 39–50; EM, 2/2:263f, 344f; MLTC, 203–7. The dynamics of medieval exegesis of the literal sense as interpreted by de Lubac are well captured by the theologian John Milbank: “For allegory to work and be renewed we are always returned to the literal—just as, for the mystical path to be taken, we are always returned to the social, political, and ecclesial. In the literal resides the springs of spiritual plenitude, even though there is no exigency for the latter, just as the supernatural always eventuates as the fulfillment of the natural” (Suspended Middle, 58). 145. While I agree with Rogers that Piers Plowman is a poem about interpretation, I am suggesting that enigma is not just one interpretive framework among others, but a name for the poem’s metahermeneutic (Interpretation in “Piers Plowman,” 210–11). It points to a third alternative other than simple hermeneutic closure and complete openness.

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146. On Augustine as the progenitor of a similar double narration in what Girard calls novels of conversion, see “Conversion in Literature.” Girard includes Dante’s Commedia in this lineage. 147. B.11.268a/C.12.155a, translation from Schmidt’s note in the paralleltext edition. On this quotation, see Lawler, “Langland Versificator,” 67. Recalling Alexander’s definition of enigma invites a connection between the playful poor and wonder provoked by riddles that implies a hopeful poverty of understanding. 148. See Simpson, “Piers Plowman,” 110–13. In the late Middle Ages, this story would have been most familiar from legends of St. Gregory the Great, as in the Legenda aurea. Dante alludes to it at Purgatorio 10.75 and includes Trajan among the saved in Paradiso 20. 149. Akbari, in “Non-Christians,” reviews previous work on Trajan and finds him to be an important instance of Langland’s method of opening up multiple perspectives in order to engage readers in a process of inner reform. Pearsall’s discussion in “Idea of Universal Salvation,” 263–66, similarly affirms my argument that Langland’s rhetorical strategy works to keep the interpretive process open. The case of Trajan, as interpreted by Ymaginatif, is part of Adams’s influential argument for Langland’s semi-Pelagianism (“Piers’s Pardon,” 390–94), but what he calls Ymaginatif ’s “synergistic theory” (394) fits better with a theology of participation; see below, chapter 6, the section “Salvation as Participation in Kynde.” 150. On the assignment of this speech, see Rogers, Interpretation in “Piers Plowman,” 223–26. In the C text, most of this speech is assigned retrospectively at C.13.129 to Rechelesnesse, so that Trajan gets only thirteen lines, though the transition between speakers is not marked when it happens. The revision weakens my point here somewhat, but giving this exegetical section to the personification of a suspect aspect of the dreamer makes it still an adventurous representation of interpretive community. In either case, we might think of how Augustine represents important scriptural truths coming to him through “some books of the Platonists” in Confessions 7. 151. Davlin treats these final lines from Ymaginatif at length in Game of Heuene, 73–80. See also above, chapter 3, the section “Contest and Dialogue in Piers Plowman.” 152. See Simpson, “Piers Plowman,” 120–22; Zeeman, “Piers Plowman,” 245–57. Ymaginatif ’s analogy to sitting at different places of honor at a feast (B.12.197–200/C.14.137–40) becomes the opening image of Conscience’s dinner in the fourth vision. 153. Joseph Wittig’s understanding of Ymaginatif links him to the theology of participation through Victorine spirituality, particularly as expressed in Richard of St. Victor’s Benjamin minor (“Piers Plowman B,” 264–79). Kaulbach,

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Imaginative Prophecy, argues for understanding Ymaginatif by reference to more advanced texts, but, as Middleton points out, these views need not be at odds “if what is at issue is the general form and poetics of the enterprise itself, rather than, as in most critical discussion of Vision Three, the intellectual lineages of its lore” (“Piers Plowman, the Monsters,” 105). 154. Hanna, “Langland’s Ymaginatif,” 88–89. Hanna’s argument tends to make sharp distinctions between rational and affective discourses and between the necessary didacticism of clerical knowledge and the looser play of more elementary knowledge, and to place Ymaginatif on the latter side in each case. Though Hanna perhaps also implies the possibility that Ymaginatif can mediate these distinctions, I would emphasize it. 155. Faral, Arts póetiques, 65. Noted in Schmidt’s parallel-text edition, 2:624; see chapter 3 above, the section “Contest and Dialogue in Piers Plowman.” 156. For an example of Ymaginatif ’s enigmatic reading of the natural world in combination with an analogy from legal procedure, see Van Dussen, “Parsing the Peacock.” 157. Gower, Confessio amantis, bk. 1, lines 3069–70; ed. Peck, 1:143. 158. See Harter, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Faith, and Epilogue below. CHAPTER 5.

Enigmatic Authority

1. Copeland, “Rhetoric.” 2. Similar to this distinction between enigmatic and didactic are the distinctions made, with regard to Piers Plowman, by Aers between the “disclosure model” and the “picture model” (“Piers Plowman,” 13, credited to theologian I. T. Ramsey) and by Carruthers between obscuritas and pictura (“Allegory without the Teeth”). For Frye, self-commentary is the basis of allegory in general: “We have actual allegory when a poet explicitly indicates the relationship of his images to examples and precepts, and so tries to indicate how a commentary on him should proceed” (Anatomy of Criticism, 90). From this definition he develops a “sliding scale” of varieties (91), the two ends of which are much like what I call didactic and esoteric. The most applicable term for the didactic from among the seven species of allegory in Donatus would be proverb (paroemia). Also relevant, however, would be the next category after allegory, where Donatus categorizes under the concept of simile (homoeosis) the figures of icon, parable, and exemplum (paradigma). 3. Struck, Birth of the Symbol, 64–71. 4. See Confessions 3.4.7–3.5.11 and chapter 4 above.

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5. The contrast between didactic and esoteric authority on one hand and enigmatic on the other is much like the contrast drawn by Bakhtin between authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse. Indeed, his larger idea of dialogic texts that become internally persuasive corresponds closely to the interpretive process that arises from and constitutes the enigmatic. Yet because enigmatic authority maintains a close connection with a prior, external, revealed word, it compares rather to the coincidence of the authoritative and internally persuasive that Bakhtin holds out as a possibility (“Discourse in the Novel” in Dialogic Imagination, 342). Bakhtin himself, however, classifies “the poetics of Augustine, the poetics of the medieval church,” among those committed to unitary language rather than dialogue (271). 6. For William, Hugh, and Thomas, see chapter 1 above. For Aldhelm, see chapter 2. 7. Auerbach, Mimesis, 155. 8. See Rider, “Perpetual Enigma”; Huot, “Unspeakable Horror”; Zeeman, “Tales of Piers,” Pickens, Perceval and Gawain. 9. See Aers, Sanctifying Signs, 41–42 and 48, on the Emmaus story as a paradigm of the simultaneous presence/absence of Christ that pervades Piers Plowman. 10. Coghill, in a classic essay, not only prefers the term enigmatic to describe the pardon but argues, in effect, that the first one to read the pardon as an enigma in need of interpretation was Langland himself, whose years of rumination on this episode as he had written it in the A text were responsible for the B text revisions and extension (“Pardon of Piers Plowman”). Some of the most enigmatic passages that occur earlier in the B text, such as the Plant of Peace, are not in the A text, so that, under the usual theory of the order of the A and B texts, they could be seen as an effort to cultivate the enigmatic mode further in B. 11. Gower’s Mirour is edited by Macaulay in Complete Works, vol. 1. Macaulay assigns its composition to approximately 1376–79, based mainly on the poem’s apparent references to contemporary events (xlii–xliii). Fisher comments, “All that the dates indicate is that Gower was at work on the poem from before 1376 until after 1378” ( John Gower, 95). Many of the same comparisons could be made between Piers Plowman and Gower’s other early long work, the Vox clamantis. Aers has contrasted book 1 of the Vox with Piers with regard to their handling of ideology in “Representations,” 345–48, and Community, Gender, 31–35. 12. Gower, Mirour, lines 27479–80, ed. Van Baak: “As lays pour enformacioun, / Et a les clercs pour remembrance.” Gower’s crowning achievement, the Confessio amantis, would handle the scheme of the seven deadly sins much

468

Notes to Pages 226–231

more engagingly, and in English, no doubt owing to the influence of both Langland and Chaucer. 13. Gower, Complete Works, 1:xlvii, liii. Pantin gives an overview of didactic religious literature in England in English Church, 189–243. On its impact, see Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 53–87. Fisher surveys it as background to Gower’s works in John Gower, 137–47. On the literature of social satire, see Mann, Chaucer. 14. Speculum Christiani, ed. Holmstedt, 60. There are nearly fifty surviving manuscripts of this anonymous work, all of which mix parts in Latin and English, except for one that is all in English (xv–xviii). Commenting on Aldhelm’s consistent use of prosopopoeia in all of his riddles, Peter Dale Scott writes: “It is from Aldhelm’s precedent that the Enigmata of Boniface will, for the first time, let the Virtues and Vices compete in speeches alone, thus creating a precedent in turn for the Conflictus Virtutem et Vitiorum of Ambrosius Autpert, and for all subsequent debates” (“Rhetorical and Symbolic Ambiguity,” 128). Among the English poems mixed with Latin prose items in ms. Harley 7322, which Furnivall dates from the late fourteenth century, are several riddling verses on vices and virtues, though only one of them, on pride, uses prosopopoeia (Furnivall, Political, Religious and Love Poems, 263; see above, chapter 2, the section “Collecting Middle English Riddles”). 15. On mimetic desire in Augustine, see above, chapter 4, the section “Enigma in Augustine’s Confessions.” 16. Bowers, Crisis of Will, 88 and passim. See also Kirk, Dream Thought, 67–68. 17. In C, Robert the Robber is moved to the section on Coveitise, where theft would fit if it were classified as one of the seven sins, as part of C’s wholesale rearrangement of B’s material on the sins. 18. Elizabeth Kirk explains the typological significance here: “Finally, a robber is the scriptural prototype of all repentant and forgiven sinners and epitomizes the incommensurability between the standards by which God saves man and the norms of ordinary human justice” (Dream Thought, 63). The dreamer cites the case of Dysmas as an example of mercy at A.11.279–86/B.10.413–20/ C.11.255–63, and Imaginatif responds at B.12.191–215/C.14.131–55 (see Schmidt’s notes to C.6.315–29 in his parallel-text edition, 2:534–35). 19. The friars of A.9/B.8/C.10 are similarly esoteric in their confident possession of knowledge that they seem to consider complete but the poem finds lacking. Perhaps the poem’s most developed portrayal of the temptation to esotericism is the doctor of divinity at the banquet of Conscience in B.13/C.15 (see above, chapter 3). 20. For the mnemonic view, see Carruthers, “Allegory without the Teeth.” For the incoherent view, see Kasten, In Search, 129–35.

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21. Simpson, “Piers Plowman,” 62. See Burrow, “Action.” 22. See Hewett-Smith, “Allegory on the Half-Acre”; Cole, “Trifunctionality,” 8–13. 23. Crassons, Claims of Poverty, 32. 24. See Schmidt’s notes to his parallel-text edition, 2:559–60; also Bennett’s edition, 214–15; Bloomfield, “Piers Plowman,” 212n43; and H. Bradley, “Some Cruces,” 340–42. Passus A.7 ends with the reference to Saturn; the riddling prophecies are added in B. C.8.346–53 replaces B’s riddling prophecies with different ones that are equally unsolved and makes other alterations to this passage, but its overall impact remains the same. 25. On Conscience’s riddling prophecy, see above chapter 2. 26. See D. W. Robertson and Huppé, “Piers Plowman,” 94, on the priest’s literal-mindedness. 27. The Athanasian Creed was recited at prime in the medieval English liturgy, where it was called, not a creed or a symbol, but rather a psalm or a treatise (H. Kelly, Canon Law, 20–21). The allusion to B.7.109 at line 655 of Mum and the Sothsegger indicates that the author of that poem read this scene as a rejection of the priest’s authority (see Barr, Piers Plowman Tradition, note to line 655 on p. 322). 28. Lawler, “Pardon Formula.” 29. Minnis, “Piers’s Protean Pardon.” 30. Frank, “Pardon Scene,” 323. Burrow extends the point: “Langland’s fear, as so often, is that the external form or institution—even though it is acceptable in itself—may come to usurp the place of the inner spiritual reality” (“Action,” 260). 31. Woolf notes in passing, and without citation, “In the act of tearing there may well be, as one critic has already suggested, an allusion to the rending of the veil of the temple” (“Tearing of the Pardon,” 74). The only critic I have found to whom she could be referring is Lawlor, who suggested in an article that “it is not fanciful to suppose that the archetype here pressing upon the poet is that rending of the veil of the Temple which marked forever the end of the Old Covenant and the inception of the New. Consummatum est: the Christian’s Saviour had fulfilled the Law; the reign of Grace was begun” (“‘Piers Plowman,’” 456). Lawlor omitted this suggestion when he included much material from this article in his later book “Piers Plowman.” Goldsmith mentions this allusion in a list of possibilities (Figure of Piers Plowman, 45). Mann lists “the rending of the temple veil” among the “typological overtones of Piers’s gesture” (“Allegory and Piers Plowman,” 77). Kirk, Dream Thought, 82–94, calls the pardon an enigma and interprets the episode as a dramatic representation of the transition from life under the law to life under grace, the same transition marked by the tearing of the veil, though she does not mention that possible allusion.

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Notes to Pages 235–236

32. Matt. 27:50–51: “Jesus autem iterum clamans voce magna emisit spiritum. Et ecce velum templi scissum est in duas partes a summo usque deorsum. Et terra mota est et petrae scissae sunt.” 33. Instead of “atweyne,” more mss. of the A text read “assondir,” the reading accepted both by Kane for his A text and by Kane and Donaldson for their B text. Presumably because the B mss. are unanimous in reading “atweyne,” however, Schmidt accepts this reading for both B and A. Even if we follow the logic that the B readings are later and therefore show scribal changes, however, this testimony to early reception could lend support to this allusion. In the narration of Christ’s death later in the poem, the rending of the veil seems to be the only accompanying sign from the Gospels that is lacking. I propose, however, that “wal” in B.18.61 and C.20.61 refers punningly to both the veil and the temple wall. The C text, generally quite close to B in this passus, here expands one line to three, as if to clarify the reference: “The wal of the temple to-cleyef evene al in two peces, / The hard roch al to-roef, and riht derk nyht hit semede. / The erthe to-quasche and quoek as hit quyk were” (C.20.61–63). The detail added in C of splitting in two pieces fits the description of the tearing of the temple veil in all three Gospels that mention it, and comparison of C’s three lines to Matt. 27:51, the only Gospel to mention the earthquake, shows a close fit with the whole sequence of events if “wal” refers to the veil. The MED, s.v. “veil,” records “wal” as a variant spelling, although none of the editions of Piers Plowman record any manuscript variation in the spelling of “wal” here. Schmidt suggests in his parallel-text edition, 2:684, that Langland “creatively (mis)read velum templi ‘the veil of the Temple’ as vallum templi ‘rampart, wall’” and that “the splitting of the Temple wall (fulfilling Christ’s words at [C.]18.160 and verbally recalled by the revision to-cleve at [C.20.]112) is here perhaps meant to be associated with Moses’ breaking of the Tablets of the Law.” It is somehow attractive to see Langland explaining in C the double meaning of “wal” already present in B that could help explain the significance of the pardon tearing that he nonetheless decided to omit. 34. Lawler suggests a link between the priest and the Gospels’ scribes and Pharisees in “Pardon Formula,” 139. 35. Carruthers, “Piers Plowman.” Both Piers and Moses act out of anger that is “occasioned by the misguided and stupid religious counsel of a trusted priest,” as Carruthers puts it, and in both cases “Destruction of the written words in no way negates or rejects the promises contained in them” (10). See also her Search for St. Truth, 68–80. Meroney seems to have been the first to hint at the connection to Moses in “Life and Death.” 36. Biblia Latina . . . editio princeps, ed. Froelich, Matthew ad loc.: “Et ecce velum templi. Ut arca testamenti et omnia sacramenta legis quae tegebantur ap-

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pareant, et ad gentes transeant. Josephus ait virtutes angelicas praesides quondam templi tunc pariter conclamasse: Transeamus de his sedibus. Velum quod dicebatur exterius: quia nunc ex parte videmus: cum autem venerit quod perfectus est, tunc velum interius dirumpetur.” 37. Jerome takes this reference to Josephus from Eusebius’s Chronicle; see the note to his commentary on Matthew, PL 26.213. The wording in the Gloss comes from the commentary on Matthew attributed to Bede, perhaps by way of Rabanus Maurus (PL 92.125, 107.1143–44). This story from Josephus remains part of the chronicle tradition as well, e.g., in Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale, lib. 7, cap. 45 (included in Speculum quadruplex). This negative aspect of the Passion as bringing to end the “fraunchyse” of the Jews is affirmed at B.18.92–109a/C.20.95–112a. 38. Epistle 120, PL 22.992: “Deinde juxta anagogen dicendum est, quod inclamante Jesu, et emittente spiritum, velum Templi scissum sit in duas partes a summo usque deorsum: et omnia Legis sint revelata mysteria; ut quae prius recondita tenebantur, universis gentibus proderentur. In duas autem partes, in vetus et novum Testamentum; et a summo usque deorsum, ab initio mundi, quando homo conditus est, et reliqua quae facta sunt in medio, sacra narrat historia, usque ad consummationem mundi. Et quaerendum, quod velum Templi scissum sit, exterius, an interius? Mihi videtur in passione Domini illud velum esse conscissum, quod in tabernaculo, et in Templo foris positum fuerat; et appellabatur exterius: quia ‘nunc ex parte videmus, et ex parte cognoscimus. Cum autem venerit quod perfectum est,’ tunc et velum interius dirumpendum est: ut omnia quae, nunc nobis abscondita sunt, domus Dei sacramenta, videamus. Videamus quid significent duo Cherubim, quid Oraculum, quid vas aureum, in quo manna reconditum fuit. ‘Nunc enim per speculum videmus in aenigmate’: et cum historiae nobis velum scissum sit, ut ingrediamur atrium Dei, tamen secreta eius et universa mysteria, quae in coelesti Jerusalem clausa retinentur, scire non possumus.” Note that Jerome’s quotation of 1 Cor. 13:9 differs from the Vulgate, which reads, “ex parte enim cognoscimus et ex parte prophetamus.” The change to “nunc videmus” already anticipates his later quotation from verse 12 of the same chapter; the same alteration, which we might see as contamination of one verse by a more familiar one three verses later, also made it into the Ordinary Gloss on the tearing of the veil, quoted above. Hugh of St. Cher cites Jerome’s commentary, with brief quotation, in his postill on Luke 23:45. Hugh then adds: “Mystice ergo veli exterioris scissio est aenigmaticae cognitionis evacuatio, quae fit in morte justorum, qui transeunt ad gloriam. 1 Cor. cap. 13[:10]. Cum venerit, quod perfectum est, evacuabitur, quod ex parte est” (Opera omnia, ad loc.; According to the mystical sense, therefore, the tearing of the outer veil is the doing away of enigmatic understanding, which happens at the death

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Notes to Pages 237–239

of the righteous, who cross over to glory. “When that which is perfect is come, that which is in part will be done away”). Thus Hugh makes more explicit a progressive dynamic of interpretation implicit in Jerome: that the mystical sense of the tearing of the outer veil is the same as the sense that Jerome finds allegorically, but also by comparison more literally, in the anticipated tearing of the inner veil. Jerome is drawing on Origen’s commentary on Matthew (PG 13.1790), which Aquinas quotes in his Catena aurea on Matt. 27:51. Nicholas of Lyra’s literal postill on this verse indicates that there was some controversy over which veil was torn. Those who said the inner veil apparently gave it the same significance that Origen and Jerome found in the outer veil; Nicholas of Lyra comes down on Origen’s side (Biblia sacra, ad loc.). Peter Riga incorporates the same two-veil reading into his Aurora, lines 2765–72 (ed. Beichner, 530). Hugh’s postill on Luke 23:45 goes on to suggest several interpretations of the veil being torn in two parts, one of which is worth quoting in connection with Piers’s pardon a pena et a culpa: “Utrumque dividitur in duas partes, idest, in culpam, et in poenam. Culpa nostra fuit, Christus poenam sustinuit” (Alternatively, it is divided in two parts, that is, in guilt and in pain. The guilt was ours; Christ bore the pain). Finally, though I am not necessarily arguing for Jerome’s passage as a source, note that Langland quotes from other letters by Jerome at B.7.84a, B.14.144a, and, by way of Peter the Cantor’s Verbum abbreviatum, B.15.342a. 39. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, in Index Thomisticus, ed. Busa, suppl., 5:224. See also ST I-II.103.3. The precise boundaries of what does and does not remain enigmatic vary with the commentator. Whereas Origen and Jerome hope for answers in heaven to the true spiritual meaning of what was in the Holy of Holies, Aquinas proposes them with aplomb (ST I–II.102.4). Yet he is quite clear that our current state is such that our knowledge of the things of faith remains enigmatic; that, for instance, is why we need sacraments even after the coming of Christ (ST III.61.4.reply1). Bernard of Clairvaux, however, uses the image of the torn veil for a stark, dyadic contrast of letter and spirit: “When the veil of the letter that kills has been rent asunder by the death of the crucified Word, the Church, led by the spirit of liberty, penetrates to His secrets” (Sermones super Cantica Canticorum 14.4, quoted in Mann, “Allegory and Piers Plowman,” 77). 40. ST I.1.10. 41. This is the understanding worked out in great detail by de Lubac in EM. See above, chapter 1. 42. In this respect the allusion complements Steiner’s persuasive reading of the tearing as referring literally to the tearing of a chirograph that authenticated it, as well as anagogically to the separation of the good from the evil at the Last Judgment (Documentary Culture, 135–41). Yet where she emphasizes that docu-

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mentary culture provided the ground for confidence in what the documents in Langland’s poem represent, I would emphasize rather that documentary culture provided vivid sources of signs ready to be made into enigmas. 43. This point is similar to Woolf ’s subtle and forceful argument that the pardon becomes a pardon only when Piers tears it (“Tearing of the Pardon”). 44. Steiner also suggests this allusion to the fraction, but with somewhat different significance (Documentary Culture, 138). 45. Luke 24:35, “in fractione panis”; see also vv. 30–31. The Emmaus road story of Christ being recognized in breaking the bread is referred to in B.11.230– 40/C.12.121–32 as an example of Christ known in the guise of the poor. The C revision adds, at 12.120a, immediately before the reference to the Emmaus story, a quotation of the text of the pardon, which supports the allusion to the Emmaus story there and perhaps, though C lacks the tearing of the pardon, an allusion to the fraction in B. 46. This view bears comparison with the “reformist” reading of Piers Plowman offered by Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 343–70. 47. See Steinmair-Pösel, “Original Sin,” and Belangia, “Metaphysical Desire.” 48. See Augustine, City of God 15.5, and Dante, Purgatorio 15, discussed further below in chapter 7. 49. Girard, I See Satan Fall, 7–18. The verb coveite is used for the last of the Ten Commandments in the commentary attributed to Richard Rolle and in Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale (MED, s.v. “coveiten”; Canterbury Tales 10.843). 50. See chapter 3 above on Theodulus and chapter 7 below on Virgil (the section “Enigma, Pastoral, and Apocalypse”). 51. Allen takes Hugh of St. Cher’s gloss on this verse to be the key to how Langland composed this whole passage of Piers as a sort of poetic distinctio on detractors (“Langland’s Reading and Writing”). 52. See Gower’s Mirour de l’omme on detraction, 2641–52. 53. In addition to the Ordinary Gloss, see the standard psalter commentary by Peter Lombard known as the Magna glossatura, cited to this effect by D. W. Robertson and Huppé, Piers Plowman, 94. Going to the gloss on this verse is encouraged later in the poem when Ymaginatif quotes it and adds, “The glose graunteth upon that vers a greet mede to truthe” (B.12.291). See Adams’s discussion of this and the other verses cited in this passage, “Piers’s Pardon,” 407–11; his larger argument about Langland’s theology will be considered below in chapter 6 (in the section “Salvation as Participation in Kynde”). 54. Dunning (“Piers Plowman,” 117) notes that the whole psalm “is said by Aquinas to be spoken ‘in persona Christi.’” Dunning adds incorrectly that Aquinas reads Christ as speaking Ps. 22 “de sua tribulatione multa”; this describes

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Notes to Pages 246–250

Ps. 21, “Deus Deus meus quare dereliquisti me.” Thomas’s first sentence on Ps. 22 reads, “Psalmista supra in persona Christi de sua tribulatione multa; hic autem dicit de remedio quo in ea sustentatur.” Aquinas offers several readings of “umbra mortis,” including “facta haereticorum portantium in se imaginem diaboli” (Opera omnia, 14:225–26; deeds of heretics who carry in themselves images of the devil). There is also the possibility, if the tearing of the pardon refers to the tearing of the temple veil, that Piers/Langland is associating “umbre mortis” with the darkening of the sun during the Passion, though I have not found any commentaries that make this direct association. 55. “Fooles” in line 125 and “fowels” in line 129 are both puns that refer to Luke 12:24, “Consider the ravens, for they sow not, neither do they reap, neither have they storehouse nor barn, and God feedeth them.” The instruction to “be not solicitous” in line 127, quoted from Matt. 6:25, is closely paralleled in Luke 12:22, which follows the parable of the rich man whom God calls a fool for deciding to build bigger barns (verse 20). The density of punning and allusion here, enigmatic in itself, joins two kinds of parabolic discourse that read figural significance in the world, one in human scenarios and one in the natural world. 56. On Abstynence the Abbesse, see Tarvers, “Abbess’s ABC.” 57. Matt. 25:40, “Amen dico vobis, quamdiu fecistis uni de his fratribus meis minimis, mihi fecistis.” Matt. 25:46 reads, “Et ibunt hii in supplicium aeternum iusti autem invitam aeternam” (And these shall go into everlasting punishment; but the just, into life everlasting). 58. See Aers, Community, Gender, 54. 59. The remainder of his speech develops this theme, with digressions. He concludes at B.11.317–18, “This lokynge on lewed preestes hath doon me lepe from poverte— / The which I preise, ther pacience is, moore parfit than richesse.” A similar point of view is articulated more fully in the third vision of the C text by Rechelesnesse. Much of the fourth vision also provides a sort of gloss on the pardon episode, e.g., B.14.34–34a, 189–201, 258–59, and C.16.97–98. 60. B.19.183–88/C.21.183–88. See Simpson, “Piers Plowman,” 68–77, on how this passage places on a surer footing the theological use of economic language that begins but proves inadequate in the second vision. For the language of redemption and ransom, see, e.g., B.16.253–69 and B.18.149a, 351–54/ C.20.151a, 393–96. Positive use of economic language is all the more remarkable in light of the poem’s consistent criticism of the church’s economic entanglements. 61. B.6.267–73/C.8.290–96 and, e.g., B.16.103–18/C.18.138–49, B.17.92–98/C.19.84–90, B.18.152–56/C.20.154–59. 62. The role of Piers in the later dreams is largely the same in the C text as in B, with the major exception of the inner dream of the Tree of Charity. Here

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C perhaps removes Piers in part because he was too much the object, rather than model, of the dreamer’s desire and functioned too much like institutional authorities that seek “maistrie” (B.16.52, attributed in C.18.52 to Liberum Arbitrium and thus referring more clearly to self-mastery). 63. Pearsall gives an overview of these issues in his revised edition of the C text (7–10). Hudson, “Langland and Lollardy?,” emphasizes the remaining room for uncertainty. Schmidt reasserts the mainstream arguments for dating the B text just before 1381 and the C text several years afterward in the introduction to his parallel-text edition, 2:278–81. 64. On the rebels’ violence and their references to Piers the Plowman, see above, chapter 2, the section “The Letters of John Ball.” On the relation between Piers Plowman and events of 1381, see Justice, Writing and Rebellion. 65. See, among others, Pearsall, “Lunatyk Lollares”; Aers, Sanctifying Signs, 103–16; Middleton, “Acts of Vagrancy”; Hanna, “‘Absent’ Pardon-Tearing.” 66. Pearsall’s notes to C.9.73–83 cite Geoffrey Shepherd’s statement that this is the earliest text in English “which conveys the felt and inner bitterness of poverty” (“Poverty in Piers Plowman,” 172). 67. See Crassons, Claims of Poverty, 74–75. 68. Cole, Literature and Heresy, 25–71. See also Crassons, Claims of Poverty, 75–80, who argues that “the semantic range of the word ‘loller’ and the range of the signs of poverty ultimately pose deep hermeneutic challenges to readers and almsgivers alike” (80). 69. Cole, Literature and Heresy, 62. 70. See above, chapter 3, the section “Reading Like a Fool.” 71. Middleton uses this phrase in suggestively connecting C.5.1–108 to the dialogue with Need in B.20.1–50 (“Acts of Vagrancy,” 272). 72. On the connections between minstrels, hermits, beggars, and the dreamer in the C text, see Hanna, “Will’s Work,” 44–53, and Pearsall’s introduction to his new annotated edition, 24–25). 73. Donaldson, “Piers Plowman,” 136–55. Clopper gives a more programmatically Franciscan cast to an interpretation of the pardon tearing and its replacement by the additions to C.9 in Songes of Rechelesnesse, 181–217. He sees the “lynatyk lollares” as “deliberately . . . enigmatic” (204) and argues that Piers does not function according to a simple medieval theory of allegory (216); the multiple meanings Clopper finds in him, including his connection to the “lynatyk lollares” and his enrichment by application to contemporary history, make him a prime example of what I am identifying as enigmatic allegory. Aers argues against a strongly Franciscan reading of the lunatic lollers but finds them no less mysterious (Sanctifying Signs, 112–13). 74. Cole, Literature and Heresy, 60–70.

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Notes to Pages 256–263

75. It might also be seen as a replacement for the waking scene between the fourth and fifth visions in the B text, which represents the narrator as a fool and an outcast. See Gruenler, “How to Read,” 625–29. 76. Middleton, “Acts of Vagrancy,” 288. She also uses variations on the term enigma to characterize the basis of this passage’s claims at 256, 263–66, 270–71, 275, and 279, though without reference to its medieval senses. 77. See Cole, Literature and Heresy, 66–70. 78. See above, chapter 4, the section “Theological Rhetoric in Langland’s First Inner Dream.” 79. Crassons, Claims of Poverty, 22, 37–38, 48, 53, 66–67, 73–74. 80. Middleton, “Acts of Vagrancy,” 250. Middleton notes that Nicholas of Lyra’s expansion of the Ordinary Gloss on this parable “somewhat plaintively explains the necessarily enigmatic aspect of a parable” (307n52; the term enigma in this instance is hers, not his). 81. For medieval interpretations of the parable that see either the steward himself or the goods he manages as reason, see Wailes, Medieval Allegories, 249– 50. These do not fit Langland’s use neatly but perhaps guided his adaptation of it to an allegory of interior dialogue. 82. On these lines and their scriptural allusions, see Economou, “SelfConsciousness,” 193–96. 83. See especially 23–47 on the Parable of the Sower in Mark. 84. Kermode’s larger argument seems to embrace literature’s capacity to affirm something like what I am calling the enigmatic, both in texts and in reality. “The Sower” informs Rechelesnesse’s argument for patient poverty at C.12.179– 205. Rechelesnesse makes more direct use of the Parable of the Rich Fool at C.12.212–20. Aers argues that the poem later moves beyond the apparent embrace of the injunction to material poverty voiced by Rechelesnesse, Sanctifying Signs, 99–156 (on Rechelesnesse, see 119–22). See also Crassons, Claims of Poverty, 41–47, on Rechelesnesse as an intermediate stage in Langland’s exploration of the hermeneutic challenges of poverty. 85. Pearsall captures another aspect of this horizontal dimension of participation in commenting on the “tortured progress towards understanding” that is “the dominant structure of the poem”: “It is the poem’s great source of power, since it enforces participation rather than mere acquiescence” (introduction to Piers Plowman, 15). 86. The addition of Rechelesnesse in the C-text third vision perhaps indicates a shift in the trajectory of the dreamer required by the addition of the waking scene before the second vision. Opposition to learning perhaps had to be reassigned away from the narrator, who now in C has been more strongly characterized in a way that puts him in harmony with Reason. While Rechelesnesse models a perspective that comes with a strong desire and includes a strong com-

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ponent of the enigmatic, he is a temporary, heuristic figure of something that will be integrated into a more comprehensive stance later. This removes the dreamer from a strong position of rivalry with others in the third vision. The same goal would also account for the deletion in C of the dreamer’s strongest challenge to his interlocutors, opposing scripture with “Contra” (B.10.343). Though the dreamer still challenges the authority of some of the poem’s figures, notably the doctor of divinity at the banquet of Conscience, these conflicts are resolved by means of enigma into nonrivalrous, nonpossessive desire. 87. Joseph, in particular, is a victim of mimetic rivalry and scapegoating. See Girard in I See Satan Fall, 107–20, and “Myth of Oedipus.” 88. For suggestive considerations of Langland’s hopes for the church along these lines, see Aers, chapter 2 of Sanctifying Signs and Beyond Reformation; Schmidt, “Unity, Unanimity”; and Simpson, “Political Forms and Institutions.” 89. See James Alison on what he calls “the intelligence of the victim” ( Joy of Being Wrong, 77–83). 90. Ralph Hanna’s argument for hearing the voice of the narrator in the passages about “lynatyk lollares” added to C.9 leads him to see the narrator as model there too, with Piers turned briefly, and perhaps playfully, into his follower (“‘Absent’ Pardon-Tearing,” 461). 91. The form of the riddling dialogue thus leads to an account of the form of Piers Plowman similar to Middleton’s argument in “Narration” that it is made up of episodes of dispute between “two rival standards of didactic adequacy, method, and use” (106) aligned, broadly, with common experience and clerical authority. The pardon scene is paradigmatic in ending with Piers’s shift “from present authority to absent object of desire” (109). Whereas Middleton emphasizes the poem’s pattern of disavowing “didactic claims” (119) in favor of cautious assertions of fiction making, I am emphasizing a conversion to the enigmatic authority of infinite and immanent mystery, but both views share a commitment to participation in an open work of interpretation. 92. For the legacy of this form, see Balint, Ordering Chaos. 93. Pearl moves from the finite to the infinite most powerfully through the mathematical symbolism that is explicit in its description of heaven and implicit in the complexities of its poetic form. Its twelve-line stanzas are linked by repeating words and phrases into groups of five, for a total of twenty groups that are in turn concatenated, with the last stanza linking back around to the first. Structurally, then, the poem turns itself into one great circle made up of smaller ones, like a string of pearls. A circle is a symbol of infinity, and the poem further imagines the movement from the finite to the infinite, as well as the distance between them, through a mathematical riddle concealed in its construction. In a time when solid geometry was the summit of mathematical knowledge, the numbers five, twelve, and twenty would likely bring to mind, for anyone who had studied

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the arts curriculum, a dodecahedron, one of the five regular or Platonic solids and the only one constructed of pentagons. Each face of a dodecahedron has five sides, there are twelve faces, and these faces meet at twenty vertices or corners. One might also think of an icosahedron, which is a reflex of a dodecahedron and serves the point equally well: twenty triangular faces that meet at twelve vertices, each of which joins five faces and five edges. Either one is an image of completeness and perfection, but a countable and measurable perfection, in contrast to the endless perfection symbolized by the spherical pearl. Condren, to whom I owe the basic insight into the mathematics of Pearl, emphasizes the connection between the pentagon and the golden ratio designated by modern mathematicians as phi and also associated with the extension of the finite to toward infinity. His Numerical Universe pursues much further mathematical analysis of Pearl and the other poems that survive in the same manuscript. The relationship between ancient and medieval number symbolism and verbal enigmas deserves further exploration. The Platonic concept of participation (methexis) in forms is, according to Aristotle, a renaming of the Pythagorian teaching that all things exist by imitation (mimesis) of numbers (Metaphysics 1.6). See Albertson, Mathematical Theologies, especially 260 on “mathematical concepts as aenigmata” in Nicholas of Cusa. 94. See the commentary by Fein with her edition in Moral Love Songs, 32–56. 95. Girard discusses a particular sort of conversion he finds in literary works beginning with Don Quixote that involves the protagonist’s recognition of having been caught in mimetic rivalry, and he connects this to biographical evidence of conversions on the part of authors (Deceit, Desire, 290–314, and “Conversion in Literature”). Our knowledge of Langland’s biography does not allow such a reading of Piers Plowman, but it is tempting to see the conversion of Piers as reflecting a conversion on the part of the author, the result of which is also reflected in the C-text autobiography. It is worth noting that both continuations of the text, from Z to A and from A to B, pick up from a point where first Piers and then the dreamer have become locked in mimetic rivalry and continue by narrating a sort of conversion on the part of each.

C H A P T E R 6 . Enigma and Participation in Langland’s Fifth Vision and Julian’s Revelation

1. MED, s.v. “theologie.” 2. See Schmidt’s note to C.2.116–54 in his parallel-text edition, 2:494, citing Bennett’s edition.

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3. At B.10.197/A.11.149, Dame Study refers to “Theologie” as an authority placed in opposition to Cato, perhaps contrasting the two ends of the curriculum, basic and advanced. Two other early, canceled (or spurious) passages mention Theology: in A.12.9 he is “tened” by the dreamer, and, at line 18 he is aligned with Holy Church; at Z.2.169 (not paralleled in A, B, or C), it is Theology who is “tened” by Mede’s retinue at the king’s court. 4. B.7.115. This line is part of the omitted pardon-tearing section in the C text, which merely says that they “jangled” (9.292). 5. Perhaps cultures shaped more by orality tend to draw distinctions of agency less sharply (see Ong, Orality and Literacy, 45–46, and Barfield, Saving the Appearances, 40–45), but even then different kinds of agency are likely to be seen in competition. 6. I am indebted for this phrasing to James Alison; see especially Jesus the Forgiving Victim. See also McCabe, God Matters, 10–24. 7. On the Confessions, see above, chapter 4. 8. Tanner, God and Creation, 126. Tanner identifies two principal “features of modern inquiry” that would develop, though they are not yet fully in evidence in the fourteenth century: “(1) its emphasis on the referential adequacy of discourse; and (2) its tendency to reify the distinctions of abstract analysis” (155). 9. Courtenay, Schools and Scholars, 239. 10. Ibid., 199–200. 11. Courtenay writes, “Resolving ambiguity was the motive that lay behind the preoccupation with supposition and sophisms, just as it produced the expression de virtute sermonis to clarify the distinction between literal and intended meanings of terms or expressions” (ibid., 238). He notes an instance in which Adam Wodeham, who often followed Ockham, reviewed Ockham’s position on an issue alongside others, “pointing out that ‘either-or’ formulations did not reflect reality” (288). For a wider perspective framed in terms of “a general shift toward empirical, or positivist, ways of thinking” (38), see Morrison, “I Am You,” 37–40. In Medieval Crossover, Newman deploys a different but related sense of both-and thinking, based on paradox rather than participation, that she derives from Catherine Brown’s Contrary Things. 12. The great example of a theology of participation expressed in Scholastic, logical form is that of Aquinas, as discussed above in chapter 1. Yet the form of his writing may help account for that fact that the importance of participation was long neglected in the reception of his theology and needed to be recovered over the past century. 13. For overviews of nominalist theology and its importance for late medieval and early modern thought, see, with further references in each case, Courtenay, Schools and Scholars, 171–324; Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 38–41,

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122–24, 174–78; Catto, “Currents of Religious Thought,” 50–58; Bauerschmidt, Julian of Norwich, 23–31; Gregory, Unintended Reformation, 34–38; Boersma, Heavenly Participation, 68–83; Pabst, Metaphysics, 272–301. On precursors to Duns Scotus and Ockham in Islamic philosophy and Scholastic thought, see Pabst, Metaphysics, 155–200. On Henry of Ghent (1217–93), see Luscombe, Medieval Thought, 122–23. 14. See Cross, Duns Scotus, 89; Catto, “Currents of Religious Thought,” 52–53; Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 123–24; Luscombe, Medieval Thought, 125–27. 15. This case is forcefully made by Pickstock, After Writing, 121–35. 16. McGinn dates the increasing emphasis on visionary experience to shortly after 1200 and discusses other historical contexts for it in Flowering of Mysticism, 25–30. 17. Courtenay, Schools and Scholars, 212. 18. Tanner, God and Creation, 133. 19. Ibid., 134. 20. Ibid., 135–37, 154–60. Cf. Courtenay, Schools and Scholars, 294–97; Aers, Salvation and Sin, 34–42. 21. Courtenay, Schools and Scholars, 322. 22. Aers, Salvation and Sin, 55–81. 23. Courtenay, Schools and Scholars, 240. 24. Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 179. See Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie, 231–35. 25. On the effects of these and other controversies, see Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion. She notes, for example, the “anti-institutional” orientation of reformist apocalypticism (47), not to be confused with the pro-institutionalism of the Gregorian Reform, which had its own, traditional apocalypticism. 26. See Boersma, Heavenly Participation, 52–67. 27. Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 167–78. For a similar argument for the social and political consequences of fourteenth-century theology, see Pickstock, After Writing, 135–58. Pabst, Metaphysics, shows the larger political consequences of nominalism’s affirmation of the metaphysical priority of individuals over against the priority of relations in a theology of participation. 28. Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 135, italics in original. 29. On liturgical agency, see Pickstock, After Writing, 198–213. Congar distinguishes, with regard to later tendencies in scriptural interpretation, between a Catholic orientation toward plenitude and a Protestant one toward purity (Tradition and Traditions, 152–53); such a contrast can be seen already between older and newer theological idioms in the later Middle Ages.

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30. See Courtenay, Schools and Scholars, 378–80. He observes, “If there are any contemporary philosophical or theological influences, therefore, of the late fourteenth-century schools on the language and content of English literature, they should probably be sought in realism, simplified logic, and practical theology, not in the direction of Ockham or nominalism” (379). 31. See below, chapter 7, the section “The Final Visions of Piers Plowman.” 32. The C text omits the scene of waking and falling asleep again that clearly marks the end of the fourth vision and the beginning of the fifth in B, but the shift in content is sharp enough, and close enough to B, that it is convenient to follow the same numbering of visions in both. 33. On kinds of biblical commentary in Piers Plowman, see Davlin, “Piers Plowman.” 34. Ricoeur borrows the term enigma-expression from Ivan Almeida and gives as an example the phrase “the kingdom of God” as it is used in the synoptic gospels (“Bible and Imagination”). 35. Thus, when Schmidt in the notes to his parallel-text edition frequently calls a pun “Platonic,” a better (though admittedly ambiguous) term would be enigmatic. While medieval etymology looks to modern eyes like random play with resemblances of sounds that now and then hits on a derivation supportable by historical linguistics, it was taken by medieval authors as a means of unlocking real and significant relations between things, an approach grounded ultimately in seeing language itself as, though at some remove, a divinely created thing. See ME, 3:20–22; Ohly, Sensus Spiritualis, 1–30. 36. For a recent overview, see W. Wright, “Patristic Exegetical Theory.” 37. This image of horizontal and vertical axes is used by Auerbach in “Figura.” See also Charity, Events and Their Afterlife. 38. On Nicholas and Eckhart, see Levering, Participatory Biblical Exegesis, 40–42. Failure of participation will lead somewhat later to a sense that reading must be either an active human work or passive dependence on the divine and thus to an opposition between a humanistic hermeneutic of rational scholarship and a more mystical dependence on inspired, spiritual reading; see Shuger, Habits of Thought, 41–44, 64–67. 39. C.14.83a/B.12.139a, “Sapiencia huius mundi stulticia est apud Deum.” On Ymaginatif, see above, chapter 4, the section “Theological Rhetoric in Langland’s First Inner Dream.” 40. “Si linguis hominum loquar et angelorum, caritatem autem non habeam, factus sum velut aes sonans aut cymbalum tinniens.” In the B text, the odd detail that Anima (the name for the dreamer’s interlocuter changed to Liberum Arbitrium in C) lacks tongue and teeth might be the first hint of a reference to this verse along with verse 8, which says that “tongues shall cease.” This image

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Notes to Pages 290–291

might have been suggested by the Ordinary Gloss, which comments on “caritas” in verse 1: “qua potest carere omnibus linguis loquens” (Biblia Latina, ed. Froelich; “by which one is able to be articulate without any tongue”). See also Lawler, “Langland Translating,” 65–66, and this riddle from Alcuin: “A person I didn’t know spoke to me without tongue or voice, who never was before nor ever will be, and whom I didn’t hear or know” (Bayless, “Alcuin’s Disputatio Pippini,” 176; the answer, also relevant here, is a man in a dream). 41. 1 Cor. 13:2: “And if I should have prophecy and should know all mysteries, and all knowledge, and if I should have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.” Meroney’s “Life and Death” briefly sketches several of these links between 1 Corinthians 13 and passus B.15/C.16. Liberum Arbitrium’s rebuke might have been suggested by the Ordinary Gloss on “noverim mysteria”: “Ut et Judas cum apostolis: et diabolus: qui (ut Ezechiel dicit) mysteria divina novit” (Biblia Latina, ed. Froelich; As also Judas with the apostles; and the demons, who [as Ezekiel says] know divine mysteries). The source of this gloss, the commentary attributed to Ambrose, specifies the reference as Ezek. 28:13, a verse about the prince of Tyre’s pride in his wisdom that was commonly understood to refer to the devil. Liberum Arbitrium cites instead a compressed paraphrase of a similar passage, Is. 14:13–14, that was also taken to describe the devil’s proud ambition. See the note on B.1.119 in Alford, “Piers Plowman”: A Guide to the Quotations, 35. On the Ezekiel reference, see PL 17.265, also transmitted by Rabanus Maurus, PL 112.118. 42. C.16.229, changed from “materes unmesurables to tellen of the Trinite” in B.15.71, perhaps because contemplation of the Trinity will play an important role later in this vision. 43. Biblia Latina, ed. Froelich: “Ut scribe et Pharisei, unde: ‘Vos habetis clavem scientiae, sed nec intratis, nec alios intrare sinitis’” (Like the scribes and Pharisees, whence: “You yourselves have the key of knowledge, but neither enter, nor allow others to enter”). This quotation is garbled from either Matt. 23:13 or Luke 11:52, and the surrounding context of Christ’s attack on the hypocrisy of Jewish intellectuals contains many of the details in C.16.264–70/B.15.111–16: snakes (Matt. 23:33), sepulchres and dishes whited on the outside but foul within (Matt. 23:25–28, Luke 11:39, perhaps confusing calicis, “of the cup,” with calcis, “of lime”), and fine words and clothes (Matt. 23:5, 7, 14, Luke 11:43). On further sources here, see Lawler, “Langland Translating,” 61–65. Also, C.16.281– 83 echoes 1 Cor. 13:3 on those who give their goods, and even their bodies, without charity, though it is rather about how their goods will be wasted after they die. C deletes here an odd line from B about how good people mourn the loss of “goode meteyyeveres” (B.15.147), who call to mind the same verse even more by being both generous and dead. Indeed, the term meteyyveres, first at-

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tested here (OED, s.v. “meat-giver,” “a giver of food, hospitable person”; MED, s.v. “mete-yevere”), perhaps combines both giving food to the poor and giving one’s own body to be burned. If so, however, Anima seems to miss St. Paul’s point that even good deeds require charity as their motive. 44. In “Desire and the Scriptural Text,” 227, Simpson offers a sketch of Langland’s narrator’s growth as a reader of scripture over the course of the poem: “From passively receiving texts mediated by the institution of the Church” in passus 1, “Will passes to an academic, rational deployment of scripture” in much of the long third vision. “And from here he moves (after a period of profound and radical disillusionment with scriptural reading) to an affective, dynamic, and sophisticated practice of biblical reflection.” 45. On this passage, see Aers, “Piers Plowman,” 68–69, and Cervone, Poetics of the Incarnation, 26–31. 46. See Steven Justice on a similar use of various genres moving toward imitation of the Bible itself in the first two visions of the poem, “Genres of Piers Plowman.” 47. See Lawler, “Langland Translating,” 69–71. Liberum Arbitrium’s first lines here, that “Charite is a childische thyng, as Holy Churche witnesseth—Nisi efficiamini sicut parvuli” (C.16.296), quoting Matt. 18:3, “Unless you be converted, and become as little children,” are at odds with Paul’s comparison between the coming of perfection and putting away childish things. The next line in B, omitted in C, shows the influence of Paul’s verse at the same time that it accomplishes a deft resolution between the two by distinguishing what is imperfect in children from what is exemplary: “Withouten fauntelte or folie a fre liberal wille” (B.15.150). Charity is a childish freedom and generosity without childishness or folly. Langland here condenses into one line a discussion he might have found pursued at length in Hugh of St. Cher’s moral postill on the Pauline verse, which lists thirteen negative characteristics of immaturity before concluding briefly with a few positive references to being like children, including Matt. 18:3 (Opera omnia, 7:fol. 111r.; Nicholas de Gorran’s postill on 1 Cor. 13:11, from later in the thirteenth century, is similar to Hugh’s, including the reference to Matt. 18:3). A number of Hugh’s scriptural citations on the negative side connect children and fools. 48. Simpson has pointed to Augustine’s De Trinitate as the likely source for the startling Latin attribution to Piers of the divine ability to read people’s thoughts. In book 15, after defining the term enigma according to grammar as an obscure allegory, and on his way to advancing the inner, mental word as the best enigma of the Trinity, Augustine quotes two verses that resemble Langland’s quotation, Matt. 9:4 and Luke 5:22, as scriptural basis for the notion that thought is a kind of inner word. See also Simpson’s comments on the following

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lines in the B text, which include the riddling alteration of 1 Cor. 10:4 to “Petrus, id est, Christus” (“‘Et Vidit Deus Cogitaciones Eorum’”). 49. Though the Lacanian ontology of lack is rather incompatible with the view given here, Murtaugh’s approach to history as the Real in both Lacan and Langland is an especially relevant and insightful part of his “As Myself in a Mirour” (360–61). 50. On the importance of the narrative constructed on the triad of faith, hope, and love in relation to the triads of Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest and faith, works, and learning, see Coghill, “Pardon of Piers Plowman,” 185–88. 51. See Dell’Olio, Foundations of Moral Selfhood, 65–73. 52. The C text does not indicate that the dreamer falls asleep at the beginning of the Tree of Charity passage as the B text does, but it does have him wake up at the same place where the inner dream ends in B and again at the end of the fifth vision. Thus it is usual to consider the Tree of Charity passage as the first part of an inner dream in C as it is in B. 53. Langland’s development of this structure seems to have been shaped also by the liturgy. Scholars have noted that the narrative of these three encounters has a basis in the liturgical readings for Lent, which thus anticipate the explicit references to the Holy Week liturgy in the narrative of the Passion in the sixth vision. The fifth vision’s earlier engagement with 1 Cor. 13 extends this liturgical sequence back to the Sunday before Lent (Quinquagesima), for which this chapter was the epistle reading. Like the Eucharist, the liturgy stands behind Langland’s poem as a model of an enigmatic text both in need of interpretation itself and capable of interpreting present reality. Various plausible explanations have been offered for the links between Abraham and faith, between the one who carries the law and hope, and between the Good Samaritan and charity (see D. W. Robertson and Huppé, Scriptural Tradition, 198–204; Bloomfield, “Piers Plowman,” 216n69; B. Smith, Traditional Imagery, 81–86; St.-Jacques, “Liturgical Associations,” 219–20; Ames, Fulfillment of the Scriptures, 178; Vaughan, “Liturgical Perspectives,” 107–17; Bays, “Removable Feasts,” 165–232; and the notes by Pearsall and Schmidt in their editions). This narrative structure may also have some basis in the Ordinary Gloss on 1 Cor. 13:7, “Omnia suffert, omnia credit, omnia sperat, omnia sustinet.” Based on a sermon attributed to Augustine (PL 39.1952–56) excerpted by Rabanus Maurus in his commentary on this verse (PL 112.121–24), the Gloss (Biblia Latina, ed. Froelich) contains the essential skeleton of Langland’s plan. The gloss on “omnia suffert,” which refers to Noah, begins a step earlier in salvation history than Langland and is not relevant, though this is the only part of the verse added in the C text at 17.5a. On “omnia credit,” the action of faith, the Gloss reads, “Quod veritas suadet, ut in Abraham apparuit.” On “omnia sperat” it reads, “Sic in patribus, id est in populo Israel appa-

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ruit, qui sperabant habere quod promittebat Deus.” On “omnia sustinet” it reads, “In capite, id est, in Christo, qui patienter expectavit gloriam resurrectionis et ascensionis.” A retelling of Christ’s victorious suffering is, of course, the destination of Langland’s scheme, after his variation on the parable of the Good Samaritan, which also involves suffering. Unlike other explanations, this one finds the basic structure in one place. In particular, it explains why Spes is never explicitly called Moses (unlike Faith, who is called Abraham), only said to have “Moyses maundement” (C.19.62/B.17.61). All the critics listed above assume that he is Moses and seek to explain the connection between Moses and hope. Rather, Spes calls himself a spy, linking him to the spies sent in Numbers to survey the promised land, an equally likely and more general association with the reference in the gloss on 1 Cor. 13:7 to Israelites hoping in what God promised (though the poem no doubt has Moses, sender of the spies, in mind as well; see St.-Jacques, “Langland’s ‘Spes’ the Spy”). 54. Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 482. 55. C.18.127/B.16.93, quoting Gal. 4:4 and/or Fortunatus’s “Pange lingua” (see Schmidt’s note). 56. Adams, “Piers’s Pardon.” On this article, its influence, and the range of positions on Langland’s theology, see Aers, Salvation and Sin, 84–85 and references. See also Adams’s survey of scholarship in “Langland’s Theology.” 57. For instance, Adams uses the language of different kinds of merit according to God’s acceptatio under the distinction of absolute and ordained power that was argued by Scotus and refined by Ockham (“Piers’s Pardon,” 374–77). Simpson prefers this approach to Langland’s theology of salvation in his “Piers Plowman.” Tanner shows that the traditional Scholastic distinction between merit de condigno and merit de congruo, as found in Aquinas, “was a way of considering the same human action performed on the basis of created grace under two different aspects—from the side of human agency on the one hand and divine agency on the other” (God and Creation, 140). In the view that became prevalent with Ockham and his followers, the two kinds of merit are distinct realities because “God and humans operate with a parity of status within the same causal order, each contributing its necessary but separately insufficient share in the cooperative venture whereby humans gain salvation” (141). The poetics of Piers Plowman, rather than placing divine and human agency on the same level in which each contributes a share of merit, imagines what Aers calls the “double agency” of God and humanity in which each is fully at work (Salvation and Sin, 15, 20, 95–96). Aers links this term appropriately to Augustinian theology. The term itself was popularized by Farrer; see Faith and Speculation, 61–67. 58. Adams, “Piers’s Pardon,” 370.

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59. Ibid., 394; OED, s.v. “synergy” (sense 1, entry updated March 2014). Simpson moves in a similar direction with his suggestion of “negotiated atonement” (Reform and Cultural Revolution, 354) and the possibility of reconciliation achieved by “joint initiative” (355), for which the church (360) and the sacraments (362) are both means. 60. Adams, “Piers’s Pardon,” 417. 61. MED, s.v. “kinde,” noun sense 1a (out of fifteen senses distinguished). To translate “kynde knowing” as “natural knowledge” risks reading into it the strong separation between natural and supernatural that arises with nominalism. Coleman, for instance, reads the term this way as part of an attempt to find the ideas of the moderni in Langland but largely misses how he uses the resources of the vernacular to respond to them (“Piers Plowman,” 45–49, and Medieval Readers and Writers, 238, 242). She recognizes, nonetheless, that Langland’s final position affirms “the necessity of deeds and divine grace working in concord” (Medieval Readers and Writers, 252). 62. Mann gives an analysis of B.16–17 that chimes well with mine of C.18– 19 as part of her compelling demonstration that Langland’s “disparate allegorical modes . . . all activate the latent potentialities in the ordinary structures of language” (“Allegory and Piers Plowman,” 65, 71–76). The grammatical analogy based on the distinction between “relacioun rect” and “indirect” added to the first vision in the C text is even more self-reflexive in its use of language to convey participation in “kynde” (C.3.332–405a). Though full explication would require a separate study, I would suggest that “relacioun rect” expresses a participatory view of divine and human agency while “indirect” expresses a view of human and divine agency in competition and rivalry. For a similar view expressed in different terms, see Murtaugh, “Piers Plowman,” 44–50. 63. The parallel passage in B.16.4–17, Anima’s description of the Tree of Charity before the inner dream begins, allegorizes it in terms of a list of Christian virtues without Trinitarian significance. The Trinitarian analogy does not begin in B until the inner dream’s description of the props that hold up the tree. Thus this new passage in C can be seen as an introduction to the whole series of Trinitarian analogies. Behind tree imagery for the Trinity lies John 15, Christ’s teaching that he is the vine and his father the “agricola” who tends it, a passage that comes between his two promises to send the Paraclete and that is thus part of one of the most important Trinitarian sections in scripture. On the enigmatic resonances of “Trew-love” here, see Cervone, “Langland and the Truelove Tradition.” 64. See in particular De Trinitate 15.18–20, which follows immediately from Augustine’s discussion of the verses in which Jesus saw people’s thoughts, quoted by Langland at C.16.338a/B.15.200a.

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65. Adams, “Piers’s Pardon,” 384. 66. Tavormina, Kindly Similitude, 137–38. 67. See the thorough illumination in ibid., 150–63. 68. See Traugott Lawler’s note on C.18.238 in his forthcoming volume in the Penn Commentary (vol. 3) and Tavormina, Kindly Similitude, 161n 90 and 91 on dice, though she connects them rather with divination. 69. Adams, “Piers’s Pardon,” 395. 70. Galloway, “Intellectual Pregnancy,” 139–44. Whereas Galloway emphasizes the “juxtaposition” of mental and physical conceptions, the metaphysics of participation would see them rather as continuous. Thus whereas Galloway positions Langland’s “feminized” epistemology over against the patriarchal one descending from Augustine, I would suggest that Langland corrects Augustine’s prejudices in order to extend shared principles. 71. On Langland’s handling of temporality in the fifth vision, see Cervone, Poetics of the Incarnation, 126–38. Her sense of the plenitude of experience that emerges from Langland’s “poetics of the Incarnation” is comparable to the theology of participation. 72. Augustine, De Trinitate 15.50, trans. Hill, 434–35. 73. Aers, Salvation and Sin, 88–107. 74. Quotation from Rubin, Corpus Christi, 1, which explores the multiplicity of meaning, both diverse and unified, that grew around the Eucharist, especially in the later Middle Ages. On evidence from medieval art for connections between the Eucharist and 1 Cor. 13:12, see Kessler, “Speculum,” 12–13, 33–34, 36. 75. Ancrene Riwle, ed. and trans. Ackerman and Dahood, 67, translation altered from “darkly.” Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, 13: “Concede, quesumus, omnipotens Deus, ut quem enigmatice et sub aliena spetie cernimus quo sacramentaliter cibamut in terris, fatie ad fatiem eum videamus.” Millett’s notes, drawing on the work of E. J. Dobson, suggest that the source of this passage is a rare post-Communion prayer, but the parallels given do not contain the reference to 1 Cor. 13:12. William of Nassington’s widely circulated mid-fourteenth-century Speculum vitae similarly links the Eucharist and 1 Cor. 13:12 in a way that implies that the Eucharistic body is the prime figurative vision of Christ available in this life that anticipates the vision “face to face” or “proprely” in heaven (lines 805–12). For a wide-ranging study of the Eucharist in what she calls the “spiritual arts” of the Middle Ages that touches at various point on its enigmatic nature, see Astell, Eating Beauty. On the terms mystery and sacrament, see de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, especially chap. 2. 76. St.-Jacques, “Good Samaritan,” 315. 77. Mann, Langland and Allegory, 13.

488

Notes to Pages 306–311

78. See Schmidt’s note to his parallel-text edition. 79. See Rubin, Corpus Christi, 108–22, 135–39, 308–10. 80. Notes to his Parallel-Text Edition. 81. See St.-Jacques, “Langland’s Christus Medicus Image.” 82. See Mann, “Eating and Drinking”; Schmidt, “‘Elementary’ Images.” 83. The violence of didactic or esoteric authority is an aspect of the church’s “assimilation to the earthly city” that Aers sees represented earlier in the poem and corrected in this and the following visions (Salvation and Sin, 107). 84. See Garrison’s summary of the development of Eucharistic theology and lay devotion in “Mediated Piety,” 899–908. 85. For the full verse, see above, chapter 2, the section “Collecting Middle English Riddles.” 86. Mannyng, Handlyng Synne, lines 10523–714. Mannyng’s own understanding and strategies in Handlyng Synne, as shown by Garrison, avoid mere didacticism or the esotericism of privileging visions and miracles in preference for a more enigmatic approach through the tension of presence and distance in the experience of the average lay person (“Mediated Piety,” 909–22). Another sign of the esoteric tendency is the origin of the play-magic words “hocus pocus” from the words in the liturgy taken to mark the moment when transubstantiation occurred. 87. See above, chapter 1. 88. De Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 51–52. 89. This is a simplification of the arguments worked out in great detail in de Lubac’s Corpus Mysticum. On this change and its consequences, see also Pickstock, After Writing, 158–66. 90. Garrison, “Failed Signification,” 111, 107. At the end of the seventh vision, Garrison points out, representatives of the field full of folk, by refusing a spiritual reading of their lives, refuse the barn of Unity (116–23). 91. Aers has argued the relevance of 1 Cor. 11:20–30 and its concern with not discerning the sacramental signs to Langland’s general treatment of the Eucharist and finds an allusion to it at C.11.40–53 (Sanctifying Signs 39, 42, 50). 92. See Leff, Dissolution, 135–44. 93. Would such a claim be acceptable to a medieval theologian? Most likely not, but Hugh’s work is interestingly ambiguous. His most basic instruction on reading scripture would seem to reserve for it such power: “The subject matter of all other writings consists of the works of creation; the subject matter of the divine scriptures consists in the works of restoration” (trans. Rorem, Hugh of St. Victor, 19). Yet the Didascalicon suggests that “this, then, is what the arts are concerned with, this is what they intend, namely, to restore within us the divine likeness” (trans. Taylor, 61).

Notes to Pages 312–315

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94. See Julian of Norwich, [Long Text] 1.1–5, ed. Watson and Jenkins, Writings, there titled A Revelation of Love. Further citations will be from this edition, indicated by chapter and line numbers, and given parenthetically in the text. 95. Newman, “Redeeming the Time,” 31. On p. 2, Newman summarizes previous general comparisons of Langland and Julian, citing Schmidt, “Langland and the Mystical Tradition,” Watson, “Conceptions of the Word” and “Visions of Inclusion,” and Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy, 271–72. See also Windeatt, “Art of Mystical Loving.” 96. Newman, “Redeeming the Time,” 13. 97. Watson, “Trinitarian Hermeneutic,” 99, quoted in Bauerschmidt, Julian of Norwich, 48. 98. Newman, “Redeeming the Time,” 8. 99. Watson, “Conceptions of the Word,” 114. The same article considers the potential of the vernacular in The Prickynge of Love, Pore Caitif, and Book to a Mother. The Scale of Perfection by Walter Hilton discusses the importance of the enigmatic in contemplation, but in a purely instructive fashion (e.g., bk. 1, chap. 9). On The Cloud of Unknowing and other works attributed to the same author as well as the work of Richard Rolle and The Prick of Conscience, see above, chapter 1. 100. This date, February 1393, provides the only firm date before which the short text must have been finished, and after which the long text must have been finished. Most scholars have dated the short text soon after she received the showings and the long text soon after the further revelation in 1393. Colledge and Walsh, previous editors of both versions, argue that the long text was already under way following another revelation in 1388 ( Julian of Norwich, Book of Showings, 1:19, 24–25). Watson argues for dating the short text closer to 1388 and the long text in the fifteenth century (“Composition”). See also Lynn Staley’s responses to Watson’s dating in Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy, 111–12, 126f. 101. See Staley, Powers of the Holy, 139. Newman has suggested that the parable and the discussions that follow it were added in a third stage of revision, after she had revised and expanded her treatment of each of the sixteen showings in a second stage (“Redeeming the Time,” 16–24). 102. See Rolf, Julian’s Gospel, 480–82. Denise Baker’s study of the patterns of Julian’s revisions concludes, “Through the recursive interlace structure of her long text, Julian engages her audience in a meditative procedure that forces them to comprehend for themselves the unity in diversity of the showings” ( Julian of Norwich’s “Showings,” 163). 103. See 9.24–26 (corresponding to short text 7.1–4), and 73.1–6.

490

Notes to Pages 315–320

104. Both of these aspects of interpretation of 1 Cor. 13:12 are expressed again at 62.18–22. Julian’s qualification that “thus may no man se God and live after” indicates that she is also thinking of Ex. 33:20, where God says Moses may not see his face, and thus likely also Ex. 33:11, which says that God spoke to Moses “facie ad faciem.” Julian’s passage summarizes, in a way, the Pauline and Augustinian interpretation of those texts. 105. Her use of the five senses here recalls, among many other instances of what became the contemplative topos of the spiritual senses, the famous passage in Augustine’s Confessions beginning “Late have I loved you . . .” (10.27.38, trans. Chadwick, 201). 106. Julian of Norwich, Book of Showings, ed. Colledge and Walsh, 513n2; see also 134. OED, s.v. “mystic.” 107. See Staley in Aers and Staley, The Powers of the Holy, 161. Le Goff defines an exemplum as “a brief narrative presented as truthful (that is, historical) and used in discourse (usually a sermon) to convince listeners by offering them a salutary lesson” (“Time of the Exemplum,” 78). 108. Schmidt, “Langland and the Mystical Tradition,” 32–33; Turner, Julian of Norwich, 126–27. 109. Watson, “Trinitarian Hermeneutic,” 78. 110. At 46.14 she calls them “two manner of beholdinges,” which might be translated as “interpretations” to capture the double sense of a conclusion and the mode of arriving at it. On the contrast between two “domes” in the context of Julian’s response to church teaching, see Watson, “Visions of Inclusion,” 161– 65. At 167–68, Watson suggests that her contrast might have been suggested by the distinction in Latin theology between potentia absoluta and ordinata, but notes that her higher judgment of God’s freedom is still “in harmony with” what is ordained. Thus the higher judgment could be seen as what I would call an alternate, enigmatic reading of what has been ordained. 111. McGinn gives a thorough account of Julian’s theology with reference to previous scholarship, Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 425–70. See also Bauerschmidt’s use of Balthasar’s “theo-drama” to explain the difference between Julian’s theology and that of the nominalists ( Julian of Norwich, 162–73). For a different view, see Aers, Salvation and Sin, 133–71. 112. Bauerschmidt is most attentive to the theological implications of both form and content in Julian of Norwich, 125–190. See also Turner, Julian of Norwich, 115–28; D. Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings, chap. 4; R. Bradley, Julian’s Way, 98–134; Nuth, Wisdom’s Daughter, 27–34. 113. Bauerschmidt adverts to the “theo-drama” of Hans Urs von Balthasar in order to understand Julian’s parable in a way that goes beyond static allegory, and the concept of drama better captures its grappling with the temporality of

Notes to Pages 321–325

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history while also implying its endless interpretability: “What we have therefore in the example of the lord and servant is not simply an illustration that can be left behind once we have discerned its meaning. This certainly was not how Julian understood it; in fact, she returned again and again, almost obsessively, to the concrete details of the example, attending to them, ruminating over them, as if to discern the meaning revealed in each particular. Within the drama of the lord and servant Julian must discern, in an always provisional manner, the cosmic drama in which sinful humanity is brought to dwell within the Trinitarian heart of God by participation in God’s compassion. . . . There is a continuity between our participation in Christ’s body on earth and our participation in the life of God in heaven; the indwelling of Christ in our sensuality is a foretaste of our full and final participation in the trinitarian economy of the gift” ( Julian of Norwich, 183, 186). 114. See also Bauerschmidt, Julian of Norwich, 59–60 and 182, on how Julian implies a theology of participation through her use of the word kynde; 34 on her “participatory model of knowing”; and 144–53 on “substance” and “sensuality.” White finds Langland’s treatment of “kynde” comparable to Julian’s (Nature and Salvation, 114). See also Turner, Julian of Norwich, 171–80, on the roots of Julian’s idea of “substance” in “Christianized Platonism.” Though Turner does not use the term participation here, it fits the shared idea he describes. He uses participation on p. 23 to refer to something more like the contemplative union I have distinguished as active or conscious participation, rather than in the Christian Platonic sense that would make it equivalent to Julian’s “substance.” 115. See also 55.18–19, 57.12–14, 58.25–27, 59.17–31, 62.10–11. 116. Compare 58.15–57 with Piers Plowman C.18.215–39/B.16.202–24. 117. Milbank offers a more conceptual summary of Julian’s teaching: “God does not forgive, since he cannot be offended, but only continues to give, despite our rejection of his gift” (Being Reconciled, 60; see also 61–62). 118. MED, s.v. “kindel (n.),” “kindelen (v.(1)),” “kindelen (v.(2)).” 119. See Soskice, Kindness of God, 125–56, comparing Julian to Augustine’s De Trinitate. The coming of Christ as Word is equally important to the Confessions, though developed primarily through a narrative of reading (see above, chapter 4). 120. Watson, “Trinitarian Hermeneutic,” 80–81, quotation from 81, italics in original. 121. Newman, “Redeeming the Time,” 8. 122. See Cervone, Poetics of the Incarnation, 138–55. 123. These references are noted by neither Colledge and Walsh nor Watson and Jenkins. Colledge and Walsh do, however, spot an allusion to 1 Cor. 13:12 at the end of chapter 37 (p. 444 of their edition). 1 Cor. 13:10 and 12 are perhaps

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Notes to Pages 326–335

evoked in references to the contrast between partial knowledge now and full knowledge then at 61.4, 62.21–22, 83.17–19, and 85.8–10. See Cervone, Poetics of the Incarnation, 142. 124. Hanna, “Emendations,” 191. 125. Newman compares Julian’s servant and Piers as “transtemporal” figures (“Redeeming the Time,” 24) and notes previous connections between the two by Aers (in Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy, 95, with the larger suggestion that Piers Plowman “seems to me to have been put to brilliant use by Julian in chapter 51”), Hanna (“Emendations,” 191), and Watson and Jenkins in their notes to Julian’s Revelation (Julian of Norwich, Writings, 282). Bauerschmidt’s analysis of the political implications of Julian’s handling of the relation between the lord and the servant as an alternative (“the mystical body politic of Christ”) to both feudalism and the modern individualistic autonomy that springs from nominalism could also apply, mutatis mutandis, to Piers (Julian of Norwich, 173–90). CHAPTER 7.

Games of Heaven, Games of Earth

1. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games, 4. The following paragraphs owe much to this book. 2. Chaucer, House of Fame, line 2158, ed. Havely. Subsequent citations to this work are taken from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. 3. See Middleton, “Two Infinites.” 4. Chaucer, “Boece” 2.pr7.112, ed. Hanna and Lawler, 419. 5. Chaucer, “Boece” 5.pr6.99–120, ed. Hanna and Lawler, 467. 6. See O’Loughlin, Garlands of Repose, 29–58. On the definition of pastoral, see Cooper, Pastoral, 2, and Alpers, What Is Pastoral?, 22. 7. See the opening of Eclogues 1, 5, and 7 as well as the parallel of Theodulus, Eclogue, line 285 (in Bernard of Utrecht, Commentum in Theodulum, ed. Huygens) to Eclogues 3.57 and 7.55. R. P. H. Green catalogs Theodulus’s allusions to the Eclogues in support of his claim that “no poem in the large class of Latin poems in which a pastoral framework is made the vehicle for a debate takes more care in recreating the Vergilian milieu than the Ecloga Theoduli” (“Genesis,” 51). 8. Theodulus, Eclogue, lines 28–29, trans. Thomson and Perraud, Ten Latin Schooltexts, 127: “Nam sufficit hora diei, / ut tua iam nostro postponas seria ludo.” 9. Virgil, Eclogues 1.5–9, trans. Day Lewis, 3: “O Meliboee, deus nobis haec otia fecit. / Namque erit ille mihi semper deus, illius aram / saepe tener nostris ab ovilibus imbuet agnus. / Ille meas errare boves, ut cernis, et ipsum /

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ludere quae vellem calamo permisit agresti.” The allusion to Eclogues 7.17 is even closer: “posthabui tamen illorum mea seria ludo.” 10. Theodulus, Eclogue, line 11. See Virgil, Eclogues 8.4. The motif of singing that makes a river stand still occurs also in the fourth of the little-known twelfth-century eclogues of Martius Valerius, line 21 (see Cooper, Pastoral, 21), and in Dante’s first eclogue, line 23, where it is joined to the irenic images of lions becoming no longer fierce and the mountain bending down to offer its foliage (Wicksteed and Gardner, Dante and Giovanni del Virgilio, 155). 11. Theodulus, Eclogue, line 36, trans. Thomson and Perraud, Ten Latin Schooltexts, 127: “Sol augeat, obsecro, tempus.” 12. Theodulus, Eclogue, line 172, trans. Thomson and Perraud, Ten Latin Schooltexts, 134: “Quae sanctae fidei sunt praemia, discite cuncti.” 13. Segal, “Vergil’s Caelatum Opus,” 295. 14. Martius Valerius (see note 10 above) picks up on the same pattern when he ends the singing match in his third eclogue with an exchange of riddles (Valerio, Bucoliche, ed. Munari). Philip Sidney ends an exchange of insults between singing shepherds in one of the Second Eclogues of the old Arcadia with riddles (see Considine, “Two Riddles”), and Alexander Pope ends “Spring,” the first of his Pastorals, with an exchange of riddles. 15. Comparetti, Vergil, 117. 16. Fulgentius, Expositio Virgilianae continentiae, trans. Hardison, Medieval Literary Criticism, 69. 17. Comparetti, Vergil, 56. 18. It is interesting to note that later medieval development of the eclogue as a genre by writers such as John of Garland and Petrarch tended to make it more allegorical, and more obscurely so, as if to join pastoral play and hermeneutic play even more closely (Cooper, Pastoral, 36–37). The pastoral mode has been an important passage in poetic careers modeled on Virgil’s, as seen in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, Milton’s Lycidas, or Pope’s Pastorals, and I would suggest that its emphasis on the enigmatic as a feature of literary play provided a conduit for the spread of this emphasis. 19. Virgil, Eclogues 3.104–7, trans. Guy Lee, 53: “D: Dic quibus in terris (et eris mihi magnus Apollo) / tris pateat caeli spatium non amplius ulnas. M: Dic quibus in terris inscripti nomina regum / nascantur flores, et Phyllida solus habeto.” 20. Segal, “Vergil’s Caelatum Opus,” 298. See Wormell, “Riddles.” Clausen, Commentary on Virgil, 116–17, summarizes other solutions given for the first riddle, including two from Servius that would have been available to medieval scholars.

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Notes to Pages 337–339

21. Segal, “Vergil’s Caelatum Opus,” 298–99, 301–2. Currie’s argument that the riddles help relate the third eclogue to Roman comic drama does not contradict Segal’s reading but rather underscores that the riddles and pastoral in general remain playful even at their most serious (“Third Eclogue”). 22. Virgil, Eclogues, line 111, “claudite iam rivos, pueri; sat prata biberunt”; trans. Day Lewis, 17. See Segal, “Vergil’s Caelatum Opus,” 302–3. 23. Bernard’s heading for his commentary on Alithia’s riddle is “Enigma sumptum de Virgilio.” Asking why Alithia poses a riddle, when truth ought to be open, he says that the real question is whether the technique is borrowed from Virgil or from scripture, where there is always more to be discovered. Though heretics use obscurity and mislead, he continues, scripture lays bare the more difficult with the difficult, which is why Augustine urges Christians to learn dialectic and the other arts. The relevant section reads, “Quaeritur cur enigma proposuerit Alithia Pseusti, cum veritas patens esse debeat (unde et proverbium est: Qui verum dicit non laborat, sed qui volunt dicere mendacium), aut cur de sacris non sit sumptum scripturis, cum plura ibi reperiri possint. Quod ideo factum putamus, ne in hoc artis vel scripturae genere debilior videretur: heretici enim, qui de veritatis tramite recedere volunt, obscura suis in disputationibus inducunt ut a via subductos iugulent ex inproviso et ad inconveniens deducant. Huiusmodi a peritis in utraque scriptura est resistendum et difficilibus difficiora opponenda; quare dialecticam et ceteras artes legere catholicos iubet Augustinus” (Bernard of Utrecht, Commentum in Theodolum, ed. Huygens, 129–30). 24. Alison, Raising Abel. Alison sees the “eschatological imagination” of the New Testament as “nothing other than the subversion from within of the apocalyptic imagination” (125, italics in original). 25. McGinn, Visions of the End, xvi. 26. Ibid., 8–9. 27. Costa, Irenic Apocalypse, 3. 28. The two most influential authors for late medieval apocalypticism, Augustine of Hippo and Joachim of Fiore, are often seen as representing opposing stances (Emmerson and Herzman, Apocalyptic Imagination, 2–7). Augustine is sometimes considered antiapocalyptic because, in his mature work, he resists attempts to assign specific historical referents to apocalyptic texts. To those who try to calculate the number of years between Christ’s ascension and his second coming, he says, “comes the command, ‘Relax your fingers, give them a rest’” (City of God 18.53, trans. Bettenson, 838). Yet he proceeds, in his final four books on The City of God, “to discuss the appointed ends of the two cities, the earthly and the heavenly,” in order to distinguish true hope from “hollow realities” (19.1, trans. Bettenson, 843). Augustine’s usual interpretive practice with apocalyptic texts is to emphasize central doctrines while noting scripture’s use of obscurity to

Notes to Pages 339–343

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provoke salutary effort, as he does throughout his exegesis, and to avoid controversial applications to specific historical events. The twelfth-century abbot Joachim, on the other hand, is the most prominent example of an increasing later medieval trend toward apocalyptic interpretations of contemporary events. His works elaborate complex systems of correspondences that include events not only of the Old and New Testaments but also of the recent past and the future. How far Joachim can be seen as an orthodox practitioner of allegorical exegesis remains controversial. For de Lubac, he stays focused too much on external events rather than their meaning: “Whence the primary interest that he accords to questions of chronology. . . . Whence the idea of discovering a secret or deciphering a riddle is substituted for the idea of going deeper into a mystery” (ME, 3:343). Joachim’s esoteric brand of apocalypticism proved intensely divisive, as esoteric teachings often do. 29. Cooper, Pastoral, 91–92. See also Kolve, Play Called Corpus Christi, 151–74. Pastoral’s combination of low style and high subject might be seen as parallel to the idea of the sermo humilis that Auerbach traces in Literary Language, 25–81. 30. Cooper, Pastoral, 96. 31. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Romance of the Rose, trans. Horgan, 307. Subsequent citations are to this translation unless otherwise noted and are cited in the text parenthetically by page number. 32. ST II–II.168.2. On play, see above, Introduction. 33. The spring of Love is described at lines 1553–68, on which see Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject, 297–98. 34. The flock follows the Lamb “not in a crowd, but in a scattered company” (Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Romance of the Rose, trans. Dahlberg, 328), perhaps because finite games unify crowds over against each other or a scapegoat, whereas infinite games allow the freedom of play with others as individuals. 35. A famous controversy around the turn of the fifteenth century over whether the Romance’s literary devices succeed in turning its various potential offenses to morally acceptable meaning includes comparisons between understanding that text and understanding theological mysteries. Pierre Col cites a sermon of his correspondent, Jean Gerson, in which Gerson cites 1 Cor. 13:12 with reference to the Trinity in order to suggest that the same applies to one of the speeches in the Romance (Hicks, Débat, 92). 36. Dante, Paradiso 33.145, trans. Kirkpatrick. Subsequent citations of the Paradiso are to Kirkpatrick’s edition and are given parenthetically in the text by canto and line number(s).

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Notes to Pages 343–347

37. Dante, Purgatorio 15.3, trans. Durling, Divine Comedy. Subsequent quotations from this work are to this translation unless otherwise noted, and citations are given parenthetically in the text by canto and line number(s). The word for “plays” here is scherza, which has the connotation of joking around. 38. Purgatorio 15 twice refers to mirrors, which, along with the description of the Good as ineffable, seems to echo 1 Cor. 13:12. 39. Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision, 223. 40. Augustine, City of God 15.5, trans. Philip Levine, 4:429. 41. See Cook, Enigmas and Riddles, 36, on association of aenigma and ambages in Quintilian. 42. Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision, 222. See also Moevs, Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy, 100: “The name Beatrice thus denotes for Dante the self-revelation (as personal experience) of Being itself, the subject of all experience: beauty is the self-revelation of the infinite in the particular, of the ground of being through the forms the qualify it.” On the aesthetics of the infinite, see D. Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, especially 251 on creation as play. 43. Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision, 228. 44. Dante, Paradiso 28.126, trans. Kirkpatrick, “Angelici ludi.” This refers specifically to the lowest of the nine orders of angels but also serves as a summary of the whole description of the orders or, perhaps, an indication of play as a sort of interface between the earthly and the heavenly at the lowest heavenly order. 45. Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision, 231–32. 46. On angels and participation, see above, Introduction, on Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomaeus’s On the Properties of Things. 47. Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision, 226. The word used for child here, semplicetto, evokes simplicity as a theological attribute proper only to God, so that “the epithet of the soul’s simplicity suggests the substantial likeness between the soul and God” (228). Mazzotta’s use of the word substantial here appropriately calls to mind Julian of Norwich’s treatment of the union in substance between God and the soul. 48. Ibid., 227. 49. See ibid., 233. 50. In line 88, “your way” points most directly to the reference in the previous stanza to “the school you have followed” (85–86), taken by most to mean philosophy. Even if this could mean something more specific, as suggested by John A. Scott (“Beatrice’s Reproaches in Eden”), the generality of the reference broadens it to the whole earthly realm. 51. Freccero, Dante, the chapter “Medusa,” 119–35. 52. Costa discusses Dante’s use of pastoral and self-consciousness about interpretation to reshape the apocalyptic in the earthly paradise in Irenic Apocalypse, 40–83.

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53. Giovanni del Virgilio, in the letter to Dante that provoked in response an exchange of eclogues, implied a comparison between the Commedia and riddles by saying that Davus (a bungling slave in a play by Terence) will sooner solve the riddles of the Sphinx than the vulgar understand some aspects, at least, of Dante’s poem (Wicksteed and Gardner, Dante and Giovanni del Virgilio, 147). Could a connection between riddling and pastoral have been in Dante’s mind when he chose to respond in that form to Giovanni’s challenge to write in more serious Latin about the weighty events of their time, presumably something epic or tragic? It is worth noting that Dante’s use of the name Mopsus to address Giovanni in his eclogues might allude playfully not only to the character from Virgil’s fifth eclogue but to the Mopsus mentioned in Theodulus, who won a contest with his fellow Ionian soothsayer Calchas to say how many apples were on a certain tree (Theodulus, Eclogue, ed. Thomson and Perraud, Ten Latin Schooltexts, 143 and n). 54. See chapter 1 above, the section “The Enigma of the Word in Augustine’s De Trinitate.” 55. Richard of St. Victor, Benjamin minor, chap. 72, trans. Zinn, The Twelve Patriarchs, 129–30. This treatise is also called The Twelve Patriarchs and On the Preparation of the Soul for Contemplation. Singleton has argued for the importance of the Benjamin minor here ( Journey to Beatrice, 111–12), and Kirkpatrick cites it as Dante’s probable source in his commentary (Dante, Purgatorio, ed. Kirkpatrick, 462–63). See also Gardner, Dante and the Mystics, 270–71. Dante says of Richard, “In contemplation he was more than man” (Paradiso 10.131), and the letter to Can Grande attributed to Dante refers to his work “De contemplatione,” which is usually taken to mean the Benjamin major but could just as well refer to the Benjamin minor too. On the general relevance of both works to Dante’s treatment of contemplation, see Moevs, Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy, 64–65. Augustine, in one of several similar discussions of Leah and Rachel, cites 1 Cor. 13:12 just before linking them to what he calls the active and contemplative virtues (De consensu Evangelistarum 1.8, first cited in connection with this passage by Tommaseo in 1837 according to the Dartmouth Dante Project, ed. Hollander et al.). For further, complementary layers of meaning in this dream and Dante’s sense of the polysemy of dreams, see Baranski, “Dante’s Three Reflective Dreams.” 56. Cook, Enigmas and Riddles, 92–109. Cook also discusses the images of mirroring that pervade the earthly paradise, particularly because of its rivers, and the playful handling here of scripture as enigma. 57. DDC 1.38.42. 58. Adding to these Richard Kay’s suggestion based on Gratian’s Distinctio XV, which establishes the authority of scripture and early church councils over that of papal decrees (“Dante’s Razor”), risks reducing interpretation to the

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Notes to Pages 350–355

assertion of a prior hermeneutic, but this hermeneutic is only the one that Dante shows is endlessly fruitful while simultaneously clothing his own authority in that of orthodoxy. 59. Papka considers the difference between their narrators in “Limits of Apocalypse.” 60. Tolmie’s Wittgensteinian readings of apocalypticism and language games in Piers Plowman reach a strikingly similar view of how its poetry works, even though they view it through a lens quite different from the medieval poetics of enigma (see “Langland, Wittgenstein, and the End of Language” and “Langland, Wittgenstein, and the Language Game”). 61. On enigma-expressions see above, chapter 6, the section “Langland’s Poetic Exegesis.” 62. Mazzotta’s understanding of Dante’s allegory as a poetics of the desert sets out well its theological and philosophical underpinnings, and also Dante’s awareness of the ever-present possibility of error, which opens “a double reading of the poem” (Dante, Poet of the Desert, 269) and brings his allegory closer to the enigmatic at all points. The image of the knot is Dante’s from Paradiso 33.91, discussed by Mazzotta at 257–58. 63. Lewis, Allegory of Love, 161. 64. See Little, Transforming Work, 28–36, and Barney, “Plowshare of the Tongue.” The reference to the shepherds of the Nativity at C.14.84–98 uses the pastoral to defend Wille’s own work as a poet. 65. See chapter 5, the section “The Authority of Piers the Plowman,” and also chapter 2, the section “Conscience’s Apocalyptic Riddle.” 66. On chiastic structure in Piers Plowman, see McDermott, “Practices of Satisfaction,” 175–85. McDermott analyzes passūs B.18–19/C.20–21 as a chiastic structure centered on the waking scene between them, but my analysis of B.18/C.20 is compatible with this as the inverse of its first half. 67. See Waldron, “Langland’s Originality.” 68. Barr has shown how Latin quotations, from both scripture and the liturgy, are integrated into passus B.18 with a syntactic, metrical, and dramatic seamlessness that is exceptional even for Langland (“Use of Latin Quotations”). 69. For Langland’s use of the motif of the devil’s rights in a way that denies that the devil had any right to humanity, see Waldron, “Langland’s Originality,” 80; Marx, Devil’s Rights, 112; Pearsall, “Necessity of Difference,” 155. 70. See St.-Jacques, “Langland’s Bells.” For an argument connecting the sixth vision to the liturgy of the Easter Vigil, see Bays, “Removable Feasts,” 242–73. 71. See Vaughan, “Liturgical Perspectives.” On possible liturgical sources, see St.-Jacques, “Langland’s Christ-Knight.”

Notes to Pages 355–357

499

72. Trans. from Schmidt’s note to C.20.451/B.18.406, “Culpat caro, purgat caro, regnat deus dei caro,” from the fifth-century Ambrosian hymn “Aeterne rex altissime.” On the importance of Latin hymns as a source for the poetics of enigma, though he does not use that term, see Ong, “Wit and Mystery.” 73. See Guardini, Spirit of the Liturgy, the chapter “The Playfulness of the Liturgy,” 61–72. The C text adds a more comically playful note in a new passage at the beginning of the Harrowing section, perhaps inspired by the Corpus Christi plays, in which the devils try to block the light of Christ from shining through the gates of hell. 74. This is the culmination of recurring references to play throughout the poem. In the prologue, playing was what diligent plowmen did “ful selde” (C.pr.22/ B.pr.20/A.pr.20), but in Conscience’s utopian prophecy, plowing and other manual labor become play, just as praying becomes a kind of hunting (C.3.461/B.3.309). Will saw the “lazar” in Abraham’s bosom “with patriarkes and profetes pleynge togyderes” (C.18.273/B.16.256; see also A.8.12). Will offers the playing of the saints, somewhat halfheartedly, as a defense of his own poetry in B.12.23–24, lines omitted in C but perhaps somewhat replaced by the “lynatyk lollares” added to the pardon passus in the C text, where they are said “to profecye of the peple, pleyinge, as hit were” (C.9.114; see chapter 5, the section “C-Text Enigmas I”). In the seventh vision, those with the virtue of fortitude remain merry despite their sufferings and “plede al with pacience and Parce michi domine” (C.21.296, “Spare me Lord,” quoting Job 7:16), which perhaps puns on plead and played. Though Schmidt renders the verb in the B version of this line plete (B.19.297), all but one of the B manuscripts read pleieth, followed by Kane and Donaldson in their edition (19.295). 75. Citing this connection, Vaughan, “Liturgical Perspectives,” argues that the liturgy in general is an important source of paradox in the speeches of Mercy and Peace. 76. ST III.1.2. On the importance of the aesthetic idea of convenientia for Aquinas’s understanding of the Incarnation, and hence the Atonement, see Milbank, Being Reconciled, 65. A. Baker applies this notion to a broader account in “Convenient Redemption.” 77. C.20.238–9/B.18.229–30. See Barney, Penn Commentary, 54–55. 78. C.20.165, 269/B.18.162, 260. A poetics and ethics of improvisation follow from the basic call to keep reading, expecting to find more significance even in what one has read before. See McDermott, “‘Beatus qui verba vertit in opera.’” For the idea of ethics as improvisation, see Wells, Improvisation. 79. Among many possible sources for this principle, Barney suggests that a passage near the end of The Romance of the Rose “provides so close a parallel as to seem a direct source” (Penn Commentary, 52).

500

Notes to Pages 358–362

80. Bernard McGinn discusses the similar implications of Julian’s teaching about the grounding of human “substance” in the Second Person of the Trinity and its similarities with the teachings of continental mystics in Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 447–48. For a similar conception developed from the theological metaphysics of Aquinas, see Milbank, Being Reconciled, 64–74. 81. See Aers, “Visionary Eschatology,” 9, and Galloway, “Intellectual Pregnancy,” 144. 82. Pearsall, “Necessity of Difference,” 165. On Julian, see above, chapter 6. The comparison with Julian also provides an approach to maintaining that Peace’s speech does not deny the doctrine of divine impassibility, as Pearsall seems to concede that it does. 83. Pearsall, “Idea of Universal Salvation,” 275–76. Pearsall’s article provides a good account of the whole speech with reference to Langland’s overall treatment of salvation and to previous scholarship. See also Watson, “Visions of Inclusion,” 157–60. 84. See Mann, “Eating and Drinking,” and Schmidt, “Langland’s Structural Imagery.” 85. Warner has recently argued from manuscript evidence that the sixth vision was in fact the end of the poem in its B version and that the final two visions (B passūs 19 and 20, which are almost identical to C passūs 21 and 22) were added to B manuscripts from the C version. See his Lost History. 86. See Barney, Penn Commentary, 7–8. 87. Pearsall notes in his edition that this likely represents seeing the consecrated host at the moment of elevation, which was the most common way layfolk participated in Communion. The ambiguity of whether he is seeing Piers or Christ parallels the riddle-like prayer for use at the elevation, “Hyt semes quite, and is red” (see chapter 2, the section “Collecting Middle English Riddles”), as well as the basic doctrine of the Eucharistic elements and various miracle stories associated with the Eucharist. See Rubin, Corpus Christi. 88. On the importance of enigma within Langland’s use of apocalypse, see Adams, “Some Versions of Apocalypse,” 223. 89. McDermott, “‘Beatus Qui Verba Vertit in Opera,’” reads the Pentecost scene as an example of Langland’s use of “literary-liturgical invention” (193) as a means to free participation in salvation history for himself and his audience. McDermott also helpfully contrasts this ethics of invention through tropological interpretation, which does not involve competition between model and copy, both to the competitive rhetoric of translation derived from classical sources that Copeland finds active in the Middle Ages, and to Derrida’s account of literary ethics that requires violence against any law. 90. Adams, “Piers’s Pardon,” 404, treats “Redde quod debes” as a semiPelagian condition to be fulfilled. Coleman argues in “Piers Plowman” “that the

Notes to Pages 363–370

501

meaning of redde quod debes in Langland’s poem owes much to the modern interpretation of the ethical injunction facere quod in se est” (41, italics in original), though she finds more in Langland than a strictly semi-Pelagian understanding. For further support for the view of “Redde quod debes” taken here, see the review of scholarship in Barney, Penn Commentary, 129–31. 91. Matt. 18:28. Raymond St.-Jacques points out that this verse is part of the Gospel lesson for the twenty-second Sunday after the feast of the Holy Trinity and that two of the standard liturgical commentators on it, Rupert of Deutz and William Durand, find in it the importance of forgiveness for the sake of church unity (“Conscience’s Final Pilgrimage,” 382). 92. On this passage, see Aers, “Visionary Eschatology,” 11, and Beyond Reformation, 64–82. 93. See above chapter 6, the section “The Loss of Participation.” 94. For a similar view, see Hewett-Smith, “‘Nede Ne Hath No Lawe.’” 95. McDermott has shown in “Practices of Satisfaction” that the poem’s final visions also set up the narrator/poet’s work of writing as participation in the work of redemption by conceiving it through the sacrament of penance. 96. Grady reviews the dating of both in “Chaucer Reading Langland,” 6–9. The dating of The House of Fame is perhaps less certain than he implies; see Minnis, Scattergood, and Smith, Shorter Poems, 167–71, which nonetheless sticks with 1379–80. Warner raises important doubts about whether Chaucer knew the B text of Piers Plowman in the course of his larger argument, based on evidence of the circulation of early manuscripts, that it is much more likely that he knew the A text (Lost History, 7–10). If Chaucer knew only the A text, it would weaken my suggestions for how Chaucer might be responding to Langland but not the interpretive value of comparing their works, which is my focus. 97. Grady, “Chaucer Reading Langland,” 9, 20. On what she calls the House of Fame’s “obliquely Langlandian style” (341), see Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, 151 and 341–48. 98. Minnis, Scattergood, and Smith, Shorter Poems, 183. 99. Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid, 20, 18. 100. John of Salisbury, Policratus 2.16, 2.17, trans. Pike, Frivolities of Courtiers, 81, 85; ed. Keats-Rohan, 99, 103: “tam ad interpretationem somniorum quam ad revelationem enigmatum et figurarum . . . ut in lucem proderet enigmata somniorum et Domine dictante umbras discuteret figurarum.” 101. On biblical references in The House of Fame, see Havely’s edition, 24. Havely also notes in his commentary on lines 1–2 the unusual appeals to God both there and at several other points in the poem. 102. Holthausen, “Chaucer and Theodulus,” proposes the influence of Theodulus on how Chaucer handles a few pagan stories in The House of Fame.

502

Notes to Pages 371–374

103. See above, Introduction and chapters 4 (the section “Theological Rhetoric in Langland’s First Inner Dream”), and 6 (the section “Langland’s Poetic Exegesis”). On Langland’s signatures in general, see Middleton, “William Langland’s ‘Kynde Name.’” 104. See Minnis et al., Shorter Poems, 201–3. Dante’s eagle, the avatar of St. Lucy lifting the pilgrim up the mountain, has been given various interpretations. 105. Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, 229. Something similar could be said of commentaries on Ovid, in which the hermeneutic applied, as in the case of Bersuire’s Ovid Moralisee, closely imitate biblical exegesis. Bersuire even lists enigmas as a feature of the Metamorphoses. On imaginative engagement with classical texts, see Gillespie, “From the Twelfth Century,” 186–206. At 204 he quotes Bersuire: “Fables, enigmas, and poems must for the most part be used so that some moral sense may be drawn out from them and so that even that very falsity may be forced to serve truth” (taken from “Selections from De formis figurisque deorum,” trans. Reynolds, 63). Discussions of Dante’s Commedia and The Romance of the Rose were beginning to extend to them the same status. Zink finds in medieval literature the creation of a sense of enigmas in prior texts that continues in modernity (Enchantment, 14). 106. Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, 223. 107. James Simpson comes to a similar conclusion from a quite different angle: “A commitment to Ovidian elegy recasts the entire European tradition in this poem, just as it produces a renewed understanding of what ‘history’ means. Sympathy for history’s victims, who are usually women, by a poet who is not himself Cupid’s victim serves to reformulate the very notion of history and remembrance” (Reform and Cultural Revolution, 167). For Simpson, such Chaucerian “formal disjunction implies a decentering of discursive power” (122), a conclusion compatible with the notion of enigmatic authority developed here. 108. Cooper treats Chaucer’s refusal of apocalypticism in relation to Dante in “Four Last Things.” 109. B.18.396a/C.20.438a. Goldsmith (Figure of Piers Plowman, 97n4) notes that Gregory the Great links 2 Cor. 12:4 with 1 Cor. 13:12 in his Moralia (PL 76, 630, on Job 39:29). 110. The allusion is suggested by Clemen, Chaucer’s Early Poetry, 97. 111. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, apparently the first to have noted this parallel, discusses it further in Books under Suspicion, 343–44. Warner questions whether it is an allusion and suggests possible common influences in Lost History, 8–9. 112. This line of thinking took off with Eldredge, “Chaucer’s Hous of Fame,” and Delany, Chaucer’s “House of Fame.” Watts and Utz, “Nominalist Perspectives,” review scholarship through the early 1990s on Chaucer’s work in general as either parodying nominalism (on which see chapter 6 above, the section “The Loss of Participation”) or embracing a “literary nominalism.”

Notes to Pages 375–381

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113. Chaucer, “Boece” 4.m1, ed. Hanna and Lawler, 441. See also Chaucer, House of Fame, ed. Havely, 25 and notes to line 907. 114. Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, 242. 115. Doob, Idea of the Labyrinth, 307–39. 116. Minnis suggests the usefulness of Bakhtin’s thought for understanding The House of Fame in Shorter Poems, 222–23. 117. Gellrich makes a similar argument for locating authority in the text itself in Idea of the Book, 196–99. 118. See Mann, Chaucer, 208–12, and Cooper, “Langland’s and Chaucer’s Prologues.” 119. On the dreams in Troilus, see Kolve, Telling Images, 1–27. 120. Greenberg, “Dorigen as Enigma,” grounds the notion of the enigmatic in Macherey’s materialist theory of the Real rather than in Christian theology, but to similar enough effect as to make it imaginable that the challenges to social order she finds in the tale could be received within a Christian perspective. 121. On Dante’s nonviolent embrace of his own martyrdom, and an interpretation inspired in other ways by Girard, see Quinones, Foundation Sacrifice. On Chaucer, see Gruenler, “Desire, Violence,” 50–51. See also Hanna’s provocative argument that Langland’s revisions to the second vision of the C text, orienting it more toward his depiction of himself in the narrator and the narrator in the lunatic lollers, show the influence of Chaucer’s early dream visions (“‘Absent’ Pardon-Tearing,” 464). 122. For example, the “solutions” to Elgar’s Enigma Variations are people, whom he indicated by their initials. 123. Dupré’s discussion of early modern Christian humanists, particularly Nicholas of Cusa and authors who articulate what Dupré calls a “provisional synthesis,” gives later, more explicit examples of connecting heavenly and earthly infinities that he considers a sort of road not taken after the Middle Ages (Passage to Modernity, 167–248). On Cusa, see also Luscombe, Medieval Thought, 173– 78, and Albertson, Mathematical Theologies, especially 260–67. Enigma remains important in these cases as a term, but I have not tried to pursue it with any thoroughness beyond the fourteenth century.

EPILOGUE

1. See Blumenberg, Legitimacy; Dupré, Passage to Modernity; Pickstock, After Writing, 121–66; C. Taylor, Secular Age, 97–98; Gregory, Unintended Reformation, 35–41; Pabst, Metaphysics, 277–303. Though they do not all talk about this as the decline of participation, they are compatible with this way of talking about the changes in theology.

504

Notes to Pages 382–383

2. C. Taylor, Secular Age, 98. 3. The language of consciousness in this sentence derives particularly from Barfield, History in English Words and Saving the Appearances. 4. Huizinga puts this in terms of play: “Civilization as a whole becomes more serious—law and war, commerce, technics and science lose touch with play; and even ritual, once the field par excellence for its expression, seems to share the process of dissociation. Finally only poetry remains as the stronghold of living and noble play” (Homo Ludens, 134). 5. Austen, Emma, vol. I, chap. ix. But see Heydt-Stevenson, “Games, Riddles and Charades,” for a suggestive account of the significance of the enigmatic in Austen’s novel and in novels more generally. 6. See Wilbur, “Persistence of Riddles,” 38, who goes on to give a compelling account of the importance of the enigmatic in later poetry. 7. A Google Ngram, which displays the frequency of words in the Google database of printed works, shows a steadily rising line for the frequency of enigmatic from 1800 to 2000. The frequency of perspicuous, a word that labels an opposite quality and has a similar overall frequency and range of reference to literary and other matters, shows the opposite change, starting in 1800 at the level enigmatic achieves in 2000 and declining to where enigmatic starts in 1800, with the two lines crossing neatly midway, just before 1900. While this is a crude measure, it suggests an overall shift of interest or value from being perspicuous to being enigmatic. 8. Fuller, Who Is Ozymandias?, 42. See also Welsh, Roots of Lyric, 25–46, and Cook, Enigmas and Riddles, who quotes Mallarmé: “One must always have enigma [énigme] in poetry; this is the aim of literature” (123). 9. The connection between these two planes is precisely Bauerschmidt’s argument in Julian of Norwich. In the case of the Pearl poet, I would argue that the same author’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight explores the enigmatic on a horizontal plane as a counterpart to Pearl ’s vertical emphasis. 10. Donne’s expressions in Satire 3 and Holy Sonnet 18 of how his religious explorations carry him beyond denominational controversy also make clear the new challenges to the vertical dimension of enigma after the Reformation. For a provocative account of participation in Donne, see Morrison, “I Am You,” 5–8, 14, 16, 43–68. 11. On participation in Coleridge, see Harter, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Faith. To add a single example of what could be many, Friedrich von Schlegel’s influential definition of irony and his discussion of romantic poetry are close to the poetics of enigma (see Habib, History of Literary Criticism, 413–14). 12. This is the kind of unintended consequence Gregory means by “the unintended reformation” in his book of that title.

Notes to Pages 383–385

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13. Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change.” 14. See Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion. 15. Girard first makes this case in Things Hidden. He also finds the beginnings of a similar critique in classical Greek tragedy (Violence and the Sacred ) and Eastern religious texts (Sacrifice). See Cowdell, René Girard. 16. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 342–46. 17. Auerbach, Mimesis, 202.

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INDEX

Abelard, Peter, 43 Abraham, 295, 303, 309, 326, 484n53 Abrahams, Roger D., 87 Acts (biblical book), 54, 144 Adam, 319–20 Eve and, 117, 204, 301 Adams, Robert, 296–97, 465n149, 485n57 Ad Herennium, 180, 184, 196, 444n18 Aers, David, 464n144, 467n11, 476n84, 485n57, 488n91 on allegory, 466n2, 475n73 on Good Samaritan Parable, 305, 306 affectus, 42–43, 57, 70 and reasoning, 45 affirmation and negation, 37, 61–62, 102, 331, 436n72 Pseudo-Dionysius and, 56, 57–58, 69, 331 agency, human and divine, 197, 294–95, 302–3 divide between, 274–75, 279–80, 296, 317, 362 as double agency in salvation, 278, 279, 299–300, 305, 485n57 relationship between, 15, 74, 281, 298 agricultural images, 351–52

Alan of Lille, 184 Anticlaudianus, 447n37 Alberg, Jeremiah, 91 Alcuin of York, 97 Disputatio, 99, 418n82, 482n40 Aldfrith of Northumbria, 103, 104–5 Aldhelm, 414n48, 447n37 biographical information, 97 riddles and riddling by, 27, 86, 96–105, 211, 415n55, 416n64 style of, 113, 468n14 works —Enigmata, 97, 98–104, 415n55 —Epistle to Acircius, 441n5 Alexander of Villedieu Doctrinale, 178–79, 191, 215, 443nn10–11, 449n48 Alison, James, 338, 494n24 Alithia’s riddle, 133–36, 141, 168, 352, 370, 494n23 Allard, Guy-H., 450n53 allegory Aers on, 466n2, 475n73 Augustine and, 72, 196, 456n92 Chaucer and, 369, 378 Dante and, 223, 343, 347, 348, 385, 498n62 Donatus on, 182, 189, 207, 466n2 enigma and, 10, 12, 17, 22, 72, 189, 207, 445n20, 475n73

555

556

Index

allegory (cont.) Hugh of St. Victor on, 48, 50, 51, 55 interpretation and, 40, 238 mentioned, 178, 238, 393n44, 404n54, 464n144 obscurity and, 443n9, 466n2 Piers Plowman and, 127, 179–80, 214, 292–94, 301, 306–7, 309, 311, 351, 364, 475n73, 486n63 Romance of the Rose and, 340–41, 342 Allen, Judson Boyce, 403n63 The Friar as Critic, 206 ambiguity, 93, 124, 152, 281, 283 Aristotle and, 185–86 enigma and, 26, 75 Ambrose (bishop of Milan), 197–98, 201, 457n97, 482n41 amplification, 184, 185, 448n43 analogy, concept, 62–63, 202, 277 Ancrene Wisse, 305 angels, 345, 496n44 Annunciation, 296, 300, 355 Anselm, 32, 72, 399n4 Anthony, Saint, 198–99 Apocalypse of St. John, 70, 338, 339, 461n124 apocalyptic and apocalypticism Augustine and, 494n28 Chaucer parody of, 373–74 Dante and, 347–48 enigma and, 120–21, 333 eschatological vs., 338, 348, 353, 494n24 esotericism and, 120–21, 243, 338–39 Joachim of Fiore and, 54, 495n28 Piers Plowman and, 122, 352, 353, 426n133 as tradition, 120–21, 333, 338, 480n25

Apollonius of Tyre, 99, 130, 419n93, 428n1 apophatic, 54, 319 aporia, 24, 25, 201, 458n108 Aquinas, Thomas. See Thomas Aquinas Aristotle, 178, 447n37, 449n48 and enigmas, 101, 185–86, 221, 417n58 on leisure, 340–41, 346, 390n13 on participation, 16, 391n26, 478n93 Thomas Aquinas and, 60, 61, 63 works —Nicomachean Ethics, 101, 340–41, 389n13 —Poetics, 185, 186 —Rhetoric, 185–86, 449n47 Arnold of Liège Alphabetum narrationum, 137 Arundel, Thomas, 383 A text (Piers Plowman), 24–25, 119 first vision, 85, 120 second vision, 225–26, 228, 233, 235, 241, 263, 264, 267, 467n110, 469n24 third vision, 174–75, 176 Athanasian Creed, 234, 239, 246, 469n27 Athenaeus, 101 Deipnosophistae, 95, 413n40 atonement, 296, 354, 486n59 Piers Plowman personification of, 107, 247, 351, 355, 357 Atto (bishop of Vercelli), 18, 393n44 Audelay, John, 142, 148, 433n37 Auerbach, Erich, 53, 223, 385 Augustine and allegory, 72, 196, 456n92 Ambrose and, 197–98, 201 appeal and influence of, 27, 75 on charity, 188–89, 194, 203

Index on 1 Corinthians 13:12, 4, 34, 188, 192, 198, 201, 204, 459n114, 497n55 on dreams, 461n124 on enigma and enigmatic, 33–37, 34, 39–40, 55, 187–88, 190, 191, 195–96, 205, 206, 207, 211–12, 452n64, 456n90 and esotericism, 221, 329 exegetical approach of, 188, 205 influence on Langland, 175, 206–7, 484n53 on interpretation, 187–91, 200–203, 205 Julian of Norwich and, 205, 312, 324, 490n105, 491n119 on knowledge, 194, 208–9 on love, 192, 193, 194, 241–42, 453n71, 454n82, 455n85 on meditation and contemplation, 37–38, 39, 199, 328 metaphors and tropes of, 16, 33, 34, 36, 37, 187, 188, 400n13, 448n41, 457n101 on mimetic desire, 196–97, 456n95 and mystery, 54, 196, 399n6, 456n93 and Neoplatonism, 178, 198, 199, 442n9, 457n101 on obscurity, 188, 193, 207 on participation, 15, 20, 33, 35, 38–39, 40, 395n54, 399n6 Pelagius and, 277, 279 on reading, 191, 194–95, 198, 199, 203, 205, 206, 208, 453n67 on rhetoric, 62, 174, 187–88, 190, 195–96, 219, 221, 449n53, 452n64 on riddles, 34, 37 and scripture, 34–35, 188, 191, 193, 196, 199, 201, 203–6, 208,

557

210, 416n63, 450n56, 455n85, 457n100, 459n114 on signs, 198, 202, 403n55 on sin, 208, 317, 462n131 on temporality, 201, 458n108 theology of Word of, 35–36, 38–39, 47, 49, 57, 67, 403n55 Thomas Aquinas and, 60, 61, 62 on Trinity, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 201, 204, 207, 296, 331 and Virgil, 36–37, 195 William of St. Thierry and, 44, 45, 46 Augustine, works The City of God, 241, 344, 347, 494n28 Confessions, 194–206 —on Bible/scripture, 29, 195, 208, 221, 450n56, 457n100 —conversion account in, 174, 198–200, 208, 214, 266, 457n100 —as hermeneutic project, 195, 456n88 —influence of, 174, 194, 455n86 —Piers Plowman parallels with, 175, 177, 207–8, 209 —on reading and contemplation, 20, 34, 187, 203, 206, 490n105, 491n119 —style of, 195, 455n87 —vision at Ostia in, 199, 200, 203, 219, 457n101, 458n105 De doctrina Christiana, 187, 221, 403n55 —exegetical and rhetorical theory of, 34, 191, 194–95, 210, 349, 449n53 —on oratory and speech, 193 —Wyclif and, 193–94, 452n62 De Trinitate, 32–41, 57, 190–91, 331, 483n48

558

Index

Augustine, works (cont.) —enigma definition in, 34, 187–88, 207 —on humanity’s predicament, 304 —on image of God in humans, 33–37, 204 —on progression from Word to life, 35–36, 296, 299 Ausonius, 94–95, 100 Austen, Jane, 382 authority control of knowledge by, 220, 221 enigmatic, 262 —Christian church and, 240–41 —institutional authority and, 222, 327 —medieval literature and, 223–24, 265–67 —Piers Plowman cultivation of, 265 esoteric and didactic, 220–22, 223, 230, 262, 272, 467n5 extrinsic view of, 74 firmament of, 204, 459n115, 460n116 horizontal and vertical dimensions of, 262 secular vs. sacred, 361, 384, 505n15 See also church authority Averroes, 186 Babylonian captivity (Avignon papacy), 26 Baker, Denise, 489n102 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 376–77, 384–85, 426n133, 467n5 on Solomon and Marcolf story, 145, 434n51 Ball, John about, 125, 250–51 letters of, 86, 124–29, 427n147 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 74, 490n113 baptism, 158, 211, 284, 306, 311

Barfield, Owen, 395n53, 504n3 Barney, Stephen A., 499n79 barn of Unity allegory, 217, 225, 249, 308, 311, 364, 488n90 Barr, Helen, 498n68 Bartholomaeus On the Properties of Things, 8–10, 19–20, 212, 394n51, 464n141 Baswell, Christopher, 372–73, 376 Bauerschmidt, Frederick Christian, 490n113, 491n14, 492n125, 504n9 Beatitudes, 166, 439n105 Bede the Venerable, 189, 308, 414nn49–50, 451n59, 471n37 Beecher, Donald, 143–44 beggars, 162, 167, 233, 251–62, 260 Bell, David N., 33, 399n6 Benedict XII ( Jacques Fournier), 190, 394n46 Benjamin, Walter, 443n9 Bernard of Clairvaux, 42, 208, 223, 472n39 Bernard of Utrecht, 135–36, 338, 430n14, 494n23 Bernard Silvestris, 184, 446n29 Bersuire, Pierre, 502n105 Bible Geneva Version of, 17 King James Version of, 16–17 Wycliffite translation of, 17, 193 See also scripture Bishop, Ian, 389n8 Bishop, Louise, 394n51 Black Death, 27, 250, 281 Blackfriars Council (1382), 256 Bland, Cynthia, 158 bloody infant story, 307, 311 Bloomfield, Morton W., 22, 23, 396n60, 425n127 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 4 Boersma, Hans, 408n127

Index Boethius Consolation of Philosophy, 265–66, 271, 368, 375, 462n131 —on infinite, 332–33 —on participation, 13–14 Bonaventure, 18, 45, 75, 319, 463n136 on enigma, 57, 66–67, 71 Hugh of St. Victor and, 65–66, 72, 408n124 mysticism of, 174, 296, 407n114 works —Breviloquium, 53, 59, 75 —Itinerarium (Journey of the Mind to God), 28, 41, 65–71, 73, 296, 331 —On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology, 72, 408n124 Boniface, 97, 414n50, 468n14 Book of Privy Counselling, 58 Boyde, Patrick, 449n48 Bradbury, Nancy Mason, 142, 143, 146, 434n51 Bradley, Henry, 426n129 Bradwardine, Thomas, 317, 398n75 De causa Dei contra Pelagium, 279 Breen, Katharine, 436n65 Bromyard, John Summa praedicantium, 425n128 Brown, Dan, 429n2 Brunetto Latini, 344 B text (Piers Plowman), 24–25, 119, 174–75 first vision, 85, 120, 123 second vision, 225–26, 228, 233, 235, 241, 263, 264, 267, 467n10, 469n24, 470n33, 474nn59–62 third vision, 174–75, 176, 179–80, 215, 461n125 fourth vision, 150, 154–63, 439n105

559

fifth vision, 288–89, 292–93, 481n32, 481n40, 482n42, 484n52, 486nn62–63 sixth vision, 499n74 Burns, Thomas A., 88, 411n13 Burrow, J. A., 469n30 candle image, 302–3, 326–27 Cannon, Christopher, 435n56, 437n80 Carruthers, Mary, 204, 395n59, 466n2, 470n35 Cassiodorus, 245, 464n141 Catherine of Siena, 74–75, 395n54 causality, 61, 280–81 Cervone, Cristina Maria, 424n115, 444n12 Chantraine, Pierre, 412n34 charity, 251–52, 286, 302 acquisitive desire vs., 242 Augustine on, 188–89, 194, 203 church and, 294, 297 Good Samaritan and, 306, 484n53 Liberum Arbitrium/dreamer dialogue on, 291–92, 293–94, 483n47 Piers Plowman personification of, 253, 292, 293–94, 301, 306 Tree of Charity episode, 263, 285, 326, 474n62, 484n52, 486n63 charms, 11, 438n92 Chartres school, 48, 446n29 Chaucer, Geoffrey dream visions by, 367–68, 378, 503n121 and enigma, 3, 4, 29, 367, 368–69, 370, 372, 373, 375, 378–79, 386 on history’s victims, 373, 502n107 on infinite, 332–33, 367 Langland influence on, 23–24, 365, 367 mentioned, 39, 118, 336, 435n61

560

Index

Chaucer, Geoffrey (cont.) and nominalism, 374, 378, 502n112 Ovid and, 368, 369 on participation, 271, 375–76 self-reflexivity in, 370–72 style and technique of, 368, 377, 378 Theodulus and, 370, 501n102 translation of Boethius by, 13–14, 332–33 Chaucer, works The Book of the Duchess, 368 The Canterbury Tales, 78, 267, 332, 378, 379 —General Prologue to, 258, 378 —Miller’s Tale, 426n133 —Nun’s Priest Tale, 183–84 —Solomon and Marcolf story and, 146, 435n56, 437n80 —The Wife of Bath’s Tale, 367 The House of Fame, 365, 366–79 —dating of, 366, 501n96 —enigmatic mode in, 29, 367, 368–69, 370, 372, 373, 378–79 —infinite games in, 331, 332–33, 367 —literary references in, 369 —literature as theme of, 332, 333, 334 —parodies in, 266, 373–74 —pastoral in, 370 —Piers Plowman compared to, 367–68, 369–70, 375 —riddling in, 266, 369, 370 —self-reflexivity in, 370–72 —structure of, 368, 437n80 —symbolism in, 370, 372–73 —theological perspective of, 374–76, 377–78 Troilus, 378 Chenu, Marie-Dominique, 40, 53, 66

chiastic structure, 175, 176, 295, 353, 498n88 children’s play, 177, 442n6 Chretien de Troyes, 21, 223 church, 274, 301 agency of, 279–80 charity and, 294, 297 as community, 263–64, 311 didacticism and, 291, 488n83 juridicization of, 275 Piers Plowman personification of, 83–85, 119–20, 151, 223, 230, 273, 297 church authority, 206, 220, 274, 281, 460n117 Dante challenge to, 74–75, 311, 364 Julian of Norwich and, 75, 317, 329 Langland challenge to, 233, 241, 316 Ockham challenge to, 274, 311 Piers Plowman portrayal of, 83–84, 119–20, 232–33, 239, 241, 245, 273–74, 282–83 scripture and, 283, 497n58 Wyclif challenge to, 274, 311 Chydenius, Johan, 404n65 Cicero, 10, 193, 196, 459n113 Hortensius, 197 rhetorical treatises by, 180–81, 444n18 Clearchus On Riddles, 95 clergy hypocrisy within, 290–91 Piers Plowman personification of, 150, 153, 154–56, 159, 160, 162–63, 206–7, 285, 330, 332 Clopper, Lawrence M., 475n73 cloud image, 430n14, 448n41 cloud of unknowing, term, 55–56 The Cloud of Unknowing, 28, 41, 56, 57–60, 70, 76, 405n85, 406n89

Index Coghill, Nevill, 24, 397n69, 467n10 cognitive theory, 15–16, 443n12 Col, Pierre, 495n35 Cole, Andrew, 252, 254, 255, 396n62 Coleman, Robert, 486n61, 500n90 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 3, 443n9 Biographia Literaria, 383 Colish, Marcia, 37 Colledge, Edmund, 315, 489n100, 491n123 Comestor, Peter Historia scholastica, 53 community, 11, 21, 210, 345, 381 church and, 263–64, 311 enigma and, 8, 21, 92, 93–94 of interpretation, 21, 202–3, 265 of reading, 21, 215, 222–23, 381 riddles and, 97, 113 complaint verses, 206–7, 425n124 Condren, Edward I., 478n93 Congar, Yves, 279, 280–81, 480n29 Conscience’s banquet, 28, 141, 149, 153–64, 165, 284, 330, 422n108, 436n72, 468n19 analogues for, 142, 165 enigmatic mode of, 131, 155, 159–60, 161, 164, 165, 166, 169 institutional authority challenged in, 28, 149, 154, 159, 160–61 list of characters in, 149–50 contemplation, 55, 76, 90, 104, 222–23 Aristotle on, 390n13 Augustine on, 37–38, 39 enigmatic and, 8, 78 Hugh of St. Victor on, 49, 51 Julian of Norwich on stages of, 45–46 reading and, 17, 28, 39, 43, 47, 58, 76, 218 riddles and, 97, 102–3, 136

561

conversion Augustine’s account of, 174, 198–200, 208, 214, 266, 457n100 authority for, 262–67, 478n95 Cook, Eleanor, 349, 415n58 Cooper, Helen, 146, 339, 340, 435n56 Copeland, Rita, 181, 220, 500n89 1 Corinthians, 102, 168, 254, 311, 319, 482n43, 488n91 1 Corinthians 13:12, 9, 10, 21, 32, 42, 78, 312, 395n58 Augustine on, 4, 34, 188, 192, 198, 201, 204, 459n114, 497n55 Bonaventure on, 41, 66–67 Dante on, 348 Julian of Norwich on, 314–15, 325, 491n123 medieval commentary on, 5, 17, 76, 238, 452n63, 487n75 Piers Plowman and, 80, 242, 284–95, 296, 463n134 Thomas Aquinas on, 60, 63, 64 translations of, 16, 83, 482n41 2 Corinthians, 374 Corpus Christi feast, 64–65, 281 Corpus Christi plays, 390n13, 440n113, 499n73 Costa, Dennis, 338–39 Courcelle, Pierre, 457n97 Courtenay, William J., 275, 455n86, 479n11, 481n30 Crassons, Kate, 232, 258–59 creation, 158, 212, 417n70, 443n12 Aldhelm on, 99, 102 divine, 184–85, 297–98 Crucifixion, 263, 353, 355–56 C text (Piers Plowman), 24–25, 163, 379, 388n1 first vision, 85, 120, 123, 425n126, 426n129

562

Index

C text (Piers Plowman) (cont.) second vision, 225–26, 228, 233, 235, 241, 246, 249–62, 263, 267, 468n17, 469n24, 470n33, 474nn59–62, 476n86 third vision, 175, 176, 213, 463n139, 465n150 fourth vision, 150, 152, 163–64, 436n71, 437n79, 438n92, 439n105, 439nn110–11 fifth vision, 282, 287, 288–89, 291, 294, 481n32, 481n40, 482n42, 484n52, 486nn62–63 sixth vision, 357, 360, 499nn73–74 Currie, MacL. H., 494n21 Cursor mundi, 408n125 Damian, Peter, 42 Dante Alighieri allegory by, 223, 343, 347, 348, 385, 498n62 critiques of church by, 74–75, 311, 364 enigma and enigmatic in, 21, 29, 53, 74–75, 219, 311, 343, 346–48, 349, 350–51, 352, 395n58 and history, 53, 385 on love, 343, 453n72 Richard of St. Victor and, 348, 497n55 riddles used by, 349, 350, 497n53 scriptural references by, 348, 374 self-reflexivity in, 370–71 and Virgil, 336, 339, 344, 346, 373, 497n53 Dante, works Commedia, 313, 342–50, 385, 502n105 —angels in, 345, 496n44 —Beatrice in, 223, 266, 345, 346–47, 349, 350, 496n42

—enigmatic mode in, 21, 29, 53, 346–47 —games in, 342–45 —Inferno, 343–44, 347, 351, 372, 374 —literary realism of, 385 —Paradiso, 18, 343, 346, 347–48, 349–51, 357, 364, 372, 374, 453n72 —pastoral play in, 347–48, 497n53 —Purgatorio, 334, 343, 344, 345–47, 350, 351, 371 —as shift toward vernacular, 72–73 Vita nuova, 343 de Lubac, Henri, 72, 404n65, 495n28 on medieval exegesis by, 285, 309, 394n52, 450n56, 460n120, 464n144 on sacraments, 309, 310 de Man, Paul, 12, 443n9 Denis. See Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite Derrida, Jacques, 500n89 Of Grammatology, 12, 390n19 Derveni papyrus, 413n44 desire, 214–15, 266 acquisitive, 241, 242, 245, 246 enigmatic and, 249, 264, 315 finite and infinite, 344–45, 366 mimetic, 91–92, 196–97, 198, 456n95 Piers Plowman character and, 248–49 spiritual, 315, 372 didactic and didacticism, 57, 114, 282, 316, 330, 466n2 Augustine and, 39–40, 221 church authority and, 291, 488n83 enigmatic and, 6, 7, 114, 466n2, 467n5 esoteric and, 54, 221–22

Index Hugh of St. Victor and, 48 rhetoric and, 308, 380 didactic texts, 136, 220–21, 230, 311 divine creation, 184–85, 297–98 divine revelation, 77, 123, 416n66 Dobson, E. J., 487n75 Donaldson, E. Talbot, 162, 255 Donatus, 27, 62, 192, 336 Ars major, 100, 177 on enigma and allegory, 182, 189, 207, 415n58, 466n2 on tropes, 177–78, 179 Donne, John, 3, 74–75, 383, 504n10 Doob, Penelope Reed, 376, 448n39 The Dream of the Rood, 107 dreams within dreams, 206 enigmas and, 213, 461n124 See also Piers Plowman dream visions Dronke, Peter, 446n29 Dundes, Alan, 87 Dunning, T. P., 473n54 Duns Scotus, John, 62, 66, 275–76, 409n1, 485n57 Dupré, Louis K., 503n123 Durand, William, 501n91 Dylan, Bob, 75 eating and drinking image, 307–8 Ecclesiastes, 8, 463n136 Eckhart, Meister, 286 eclogues, 493n18 singing in, 335, 493n10 by Theodulus, 131, 133–37, 141, 168, 244, 270, 334–38, 352, 430n11, 492n7 by Virgil, 13, 244, 334–38, 340, 371, 492n7 Economou, George D., 444n13 Eliot, T. S., 3, 385

563

Emmaus episode, 164, 224–25, 240, 473n45 Emmerson, Richard K., 122 encyclopedias, medieval, 212, 394n51 by Bartholomaeus, 8–10, 19–20, 212, 464n141 by Isidore of Seville, 103, 189, 445n25, 451n60 England, fourteenth-century social/ intellectual climate, 26–27, 272–77 enigma and enigmatic affirmation/negation interplay and, 37, 61–62, 102, 331, 436n72 Alexander of Villedieu on, 178–79, 191, 215, 443nn10–11, 449n48 allegory and, 10, 17, 22, 189, 207, 445n20 apocalyptic and, 120–21, 333 aporia and, 24, 25, 458n108 Aristotle and, 101, 221, 417n58 Augustine on, 33–37, 39–40, 55, 187–88, 190, 191, 195–96, 205, 206, 207, 211–12, 452n64, 456n90 Bonaventure on, 66–67, 69 Chaucer and, 3, 4, 29, 367, 368–69, 370, 372, 373, 375, 378–79, 386 Christ as, 7, 65 Cicero on, 180–81 Cloud of Unknowing and, 41, 56–58 cognitive theory on, 443n12 community and, 8, 21, 92, 93–94 contemplation and, 8, 78 Dante and, 21, 29, 53, 74–75, 219, 311, 343, 346–48, 349, 350–51, 352, 395n58 definitions of, 1, 3, 10, 22, 34, 177, 178–79, 183, 187–88, 189, 207, 221, 330, 396n59, 425n126, 441n5, 449n48, 483n48

564

Index

enigma and enigmatic (cont.) Derrida on, 12, 390n19 desire and, 249, 264, 315 didactic and, 6, 7, 114, 466n2, 467n5 dreams and, 213, 461n124 Eucharist and, 41, 305, 310 games and, 168, 329–32, 379 Gervais of Melkley on, 183, 447n37 grace and, 64, 77, 230 horizontal and vertical dimensions of, 263, 264, 267, 310, 342, 367, 380–81, 383, 384, 385 Hugh of St. Victor on, 47–49, 52, 192, 222, 406n88, 441n5 human finitude and, 187, 191 institutional authority and, 74–75, 222, 223–24, 316 Julian of Norwich and, 3, 24, 74–75, 271, 319–20, 323, 327 knowledge and, 5–6, 8–9, 16–17, 64, 131, 208–9, 219, 249, 315 language and, 32, 75, 213, 364–65, 366, 372 literature and, 1, 3–4, 11, 177, 223–24, 265–67, 380, 382, 383–85 mediation and, 63, 187, 213, 249 medieval exegesis on, 192–93, 210, 238, 338, 356 metaphor and, 178, 185–86, 305, 442n9 New Testament and, 285, 338 obscurity and, 10–11, 182 Old Testament and, 103, 201, 224, 237, 309 parables and, 210, 258, 261, 463n136 participation and, 5, 13–21, 26, 46, 90, 249, 271, 272, 297, 327–28, 349, 370, 381 persuasion and, 5, 10–12, 27, 80, 223, 272, 379, 385

play and, 5–10, 100, 128, 137, 169, 272, 327, 330, 331, 366 reading and, 11, 39, 173, 191, 197, 201, 204, 206, 214, 219, 246, 453n67 rhetoric and, 4, 5, 10–11, 23, 28–29, 71–72, 192, 196, 209, 213, 219, 221, 255, 272, 295, 380, 381, 438n93, 442n9, 445n20 riddles and, 4, 31, 83, 135–36, 161–62, 211–12, 247, 272, 329, 380–81 sacraments and, 308, 309 scripture and, 16–17, 31, 34–35, 100–101, 192–93, 201, 235, 237, 338, 392n36, 406n88, 416n63, 452n62, 454n79 Theodulus and, 335–36 theology and, 4, 5, 7, 71–72, 75, 90, 174, 271, 272–77, 282, 309, 380, 385 Thomas Aquinas on, 57, 61–62, 63–65, 192, 406n100 treatment of after 1800, 382, 504n7 treatment of in Middle Ages, 3–5, 11, 60, 174, 389n8, 389n12, 400n25, 441n2 Trinity and, 37–38, 303–4, 349 tropes and, 169, 188, 448n43 violence redirected by, 92, 93, 243 Virgil and, 334–38 visual arts and, 109–10 William of St. Thierry on, 44, 45 wonder and, 161–62, 191 enigma-expressions, 285, 481n34 eschatological, 373 apocalyptic vs., 338, 348, 353, 494n24 esotericism and esoteric, 6, 58, 221, 468n19, 488n86 apocalyptic and, 120–21, 243, 338–39

Index Augustine and, 221, 329 didactic and, 54, 221, 308, 338–39, 488n83 institutions and, 221–22, 467n5 Pseudo-Dionysius and, 40, 41, 405n82 rhetoric and, 308, 330, 380 riddling and, 7, 92, 411n26 William of St. Thierry and, 40–41, 45 Eucharist, 68, 183, 349 enigmatic and, 41, 305, 310 metaphoric/figurative images of, 307–8, 487n75 participation in, 20–21, 240, 395n56 penance and, 240, 362 Piers Plowman and, 306, 362, 500n87 riddle poetry on, 115, 424n113 Thomas Aquinas and, 64–65, 222, 308, 309 Euclid, 279 Evrard of Béthune Laborintus, 218, 436n70 examples (exempla) definition of, 490n107 parables and, 315–16 Exeter Book, 106–7 riddles in, 6, 97, 99, 101–2, 105–8, 113, 114, 418nn84–86, 441n5 Exodus (biblical book), 70, 490n104 “Ex vi transicionis,” 157–58 Ezekiel (biblical book), 416n66, 463n136, 482n41 Fabro, Cornelio, 400n18 face to face, 2, 44, 77, 89, 333, 393n43 Augustine on, 33–34, 37, 202 enigmas seen, 18, 32, 293, 305, 330 knowledge, 18–19, 315, 325–26, 394n46 vision, 33, 44, 314, 394n46, 487n75

565

faith knowledge and, 237, 238–39 Piers Plowman personification of, 295, 301, 303–4, 306–7, 309, 326, 484n53 three degrees of understanding, 44–45 Fall, the, 103, 106–7, 229, 319, 322–23 Fasciculus morum, 425n128 Faustus, 197, 198 felix culpa doctrine, 230 figura, 53 fish-and-river riddles, 111 Fisher, John H., 467n11 Fitzralph, Richard, 455n86 folk riddles, 4, 86, 87, 113–14, 337, 419n94, 421n108 fools of God, 168, 246 Ford, Andrew, 412n34, 413n41 forgiveness, 362–63, 501n91 form and content, 178, 183, 235, 469n30 Fortunatus, Venantius, 354–55, 415n56 fourfold scheme of exegesis, 237–38, 286, 403n63 Fournier, Jacques (Benedict XII), 190, 394n46 Fourth Lateran Council (1215), 54, 78, 188, 308 Francis, Saint, 41, 66, 70, 73, 162, 255 Franciscans, 45, 66, 255, 364, 475n73 Frank, Robert, 235 Fraser, Simon, 116 Freccero, John, 347 freedom divine, 74, 274, 277 human, 74, 274, 277, 279, 302, 346 free will, 14, 75, 278, 300, 305 Frye, Northrop, 443n9, 466n2 “Charms and Riddles,” 11, 438n92

566

Index

Fulgentius, 336 Fuller, John, 382 Fyler, John M., 368 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 12, 450n56 Galatians, 34 Galloway, Andrew, 303, 396n62, 427n137, 435n58, 487n70 on riddles, 111, 121, 157, 159 games, 9, 146–47, 340, 354–55 Dante on, 342–45 enigma and, 168, 329–32, 379 finite, 329–30, 332, 341, 342–45, 362, 364, 366, 379, 495n34 infinite, 93–94, 329–30, 331–32, 334, 342–45, 348, 362, 367, 379, 495n34 See also play Garrison, Jennifer, 310, 488n90 Gellius, Aulus, 94, 95 Genesis 1, 112, 201, 202, 208 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 212 on amplification, 184, 185, 448n43 biographical information, 183–84, 447n39, 448nn40–43 Poetria nova, 181, 183 Georges, Robert A., 87 Gerson, Jean, 190, 495n35 Gervais of Melkley, 183, 191, 446n34, 447n37, 448n43 Gillespie, Vincent, 186 Gilson, Etienne, 35 Giovanni Balbi Catholicon, 451n59 Girard, René, 385, 478n95 mimetic theory of, 24, 90–91, 197, 241, 456n95 on Oedipus, 93, 412n27 on secularism, 384, 505n15 Glossa ordinaria, 34, 236, 238 gnosis, term, 42 gnosticism, 40, 57–58, 195–96

God Augustine on, 33–37, 188, 275 and creation, 184–85, 297–98 distinction between absolute and ordained power of, 277–78, 280, 317, 374, 381, 485n57 divine will of, 14–15, 73–74, 277–78, 285, 317–18 and history, 294, 304 humans’ relationship to, 15, 74, 212, 281, 283–84, 298, 321 image of, 33, 34, 38, 46, 67, 204, 293, 324, 330, 377 infinite personhood of, 357–58 Julian of Norwich on, 317, 323, 491n117 Kynde as personification of, 84, 184, 212, 213, 214, 297, 363 mercy of, 211, 229–30, 321 power of, 278–79, 280 Thomas Aquinas on, 61, 277–78, 356 See also agency, human and divine Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 443n9 Goldberg, Christine, 139, 161–62 Goodridge, J. F., 158 Good Samaritan Parable of, 295, 304–11, 326, 412n30, 484n53 as Piers Plowman character, 295, 302, 303–4, 306, 326 Gower, John, 218, 415n58, 428n1 Mirour de l’omme, 226, 227, 229–30, 467nn11–12 grace, 68, 247, 261, 322, 332 enigma and, 64, 77, 230 human/divine agency and, 294–95, 302, 317, 360, 363 Piers Plowman personification of, 362, 459n115 Grail stories, 21, 223, 266

Index grammar, 174, 187–88 Aristotle on, 178 rules of, 157–58, 159 theological, 186–90 tropes and, 177–80 Grammaticus, Virgilius Maro, 414n50 gravitas, 184 Great Schism (1378), 26 Green, Richard Firth, 145, 433n37 Green, R. P. H., 492n7 Greenberg, Nina Manasan, 503n120 Gregorian Reform, 280–81, 480n25 Gregory, Brad S., 504n12 Gregory the Great, 41–42, 50, 54, 72, 215, 400n25 griphus/griphos, 94–96, 114, 135, 349 Guido II The Ladder of Monks, 76, 405n87 Guillaume de Lorris, 339–40, 342 Hadrian, Abbot, 97 half-acre episode, 231–32, 233, 242–43, 245, 251, 294, 352 hand image, 303, 326–327 Hanna, Ralph, 24, 431n24, 439n111, 503n121 on Ymaginatif, 218, 466n154 Harrowing of Hell, 247, 263, 320, 353, 355–57, 367, 499n73 Christ’s sermon at, 217, 357, 359, 374 Harry Potter series, 429n2 Harwood, Britton J., 409n1 Hazard, Mark, 464n141 healing image, 307 Heidegger, Martin, 450n56 Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 411n26 Hendyng, 142 Henry of Ghent, 193, 201, 454n79 Henry of Lagenstein, 190 Herbert, George, 3, 75 heresies, 75, 280

567

Hervé of Bourg-Dieu, 17, 18 Hildegard of Bingen, 427n135 Hilton, Walter, 489n99 history, 56, 285–86, 296, 338, 490n113 allegory and, 294 Chaucer on, 373, 502n107 Dante and, 53, 385 God and Christ in, 294, 304 Hugh of St. Victor on, 50, 51–52, 53, 285 participation in, 20, 51–52 Piers Plowman reflection on, 53–54, 79–80 scripture and, 50–51, 384 victims of, 373, 502n107 Holcot, Robert, 390n13 Holsinger, Bruce, 450n56 Holthausen, F., 501n102 hope, 485n53 Piers Plowman personification of, 295, 306–7, 309 Horace Ars poetica, 181–82 horizontal and vertical dimensions, 265, 333 of enigma, 263, 264, 267, 310, 342, 367, 380–81, 383, 384, 385 of participation, 20–21, 91, 262–63, 286, 311, 381–82, 476n85 Howe, Nicholas, 415n55 Hudson, Anne, 428n152, 475n63 Hugh of St. Cher, 158, 245, 463n136, 471n38, 483n47 Hugh of St. Victor Bonaventure and, 65–66, 72, 408n124 on enigma, 47–49, 52, 192, 222, 406n88, 441n5 on history, 50, 51–52, 53, 285

568

Index

Hugh of St. Victor (cont.) influence of, 46–47, 49–50, 190, 408n124, 452n63 mysticism and, 48, 52, 54 on Pseudo-Dionysius, 54, 57 on reading, 28, 46–54, 51, 58, 192, 488n93 Scholasticism and, 40–41, 47, 52, 331 on scripture, 402n49, 406n88, 488n93 on symbols, 18, 48, 55, 404n65 works —De arca Noe morali, 55 —De grammatica, 441n5 —De sacramentis, 50, 53, 309 —Didascalicon, 28, 41, 46–54, 65, 222, 309, 331, 488n93 Huizinga, Johan, 394n49 on play, 88, 128, 389n12, 504n4 humanism, 39, 189, 451n57 human nature, 14, 321–22 Hundred Years War, 26 Hus, Jan, 75 ice riddle, 177, 179, 182, 183, 417n70, 441n5 imagination, 186, 275 Aristotle on, 185–86 Piers Plowman personification of (Ymaginatif ), 151, 152, 153, 175, 186, 210, 217–19, 263, 297, 439n102, 444n13, 465nn152–53 Incarnation, 117, 183, 201, 301, 356 Chaucer parody of, 377–78 Julian of Norwich on, 315–16, 322 Piers Plowman references to, 296, 299, 356, 358, 487n71 individuality and individualism, 66, 74–75

infinite Chaucer on, 332–33, 367 desire, 249, 344–45, 366 as earth-heaven connection, 379, 503n123 finite as different from, 363 games and play, 6, 93–94, 329–30, 331–32, 334, 335, 342–45, 348, 362, 367, 379, 495n34 knowledge of, 238–39, 357 term, 332 truth, 356, 357 interpretation, 49, 204, 224 allegory and, 40, 238 Augustine on, 187–91, 200–203, 205 community of, 21, 202–3, 265 as game, 8, 86, 94 invention and, 190, 451n61 Julian of Norwich on, 45–46, 490n110 Piers Plowman as poem of, 210, 217, 464n145 of scripture, 20, 191, 224, 238, 281, 286, 394n52, 480n29 Isaiah (biblical book), 204 Iser, Wolfgang, 389n12 Isidore of Seville Etymologiae, 103, 189, 445n25, 451n60 Jean de Meun, 174, 219, 336, 369, 370 The Romance of the Rose, 334, 339–42 Jerome, 101, 236–38, 471nn37–38 Jesus Christ Augustine on, 188, 491n118 in banquet parable, 209–11, 215 body of, 20–21, 311, 487n75 Bonaventure on, 69–70 Crucifixion of, 246, 263, 264, 353, 355–56

Index disciples of, 167–68, 224–25, 240, 246, 254, 265 Emmaus story of, 164, 240, 473n45 as enigma, 7, 65 at Harrowing of Hell, 217, 353, 357, 359–60, 374 mentioned, 214, 216–17, 294, 339, 349, 358–59, 363 as Mother, 318, 323–24, 359 narrative of life, 295–96, 307 Passion narrative of, 168, 247, 249, 440n113 Piers Plowman character aligned with, 217, 224–25, 235, 240–41, 247, 264, 294 response to Satan’s temptation, 257–58 and suffering, 304, 485n53 and Trinity, 301, 355–56, 444n12, 500n80 as Word, 185, 324, 385, 491n119 Joachim of Fiore, 54, 404n70, 427n135, 494n28 John, Gospel of, 35, 70, 145, 185, 208, 440n113, 459n114, 486n63 John of Garland, 493n18 John of Gaunt, 128 John of Salisbury Policraticus, 369, 461n124 John of Trevisa. See Trevisa, John Jolles, André, 144 Joseph, biblical story of, 263, 369, 412n27 Josephus, 236, 471n37 Judges (biblical book), 93, 100, 101, 416n63, 463n136 Julian of Norwich and Augustine, 205, 312, 324, 490n105, 491n119 and church authority, 75, 317, 329 on contemplation and interpretation, 45–46, 490n110

569

on 1 Corinthians 13:12, 314–15, 325, 491n123 and enigma, 3, 24, 74–75, 271, 319–20, 323, 327 on God, 317, 321, 323, 491n117, 496n47 Langland influence on, 23–24, 272–73, 311–12, 326, 492n125 mentioned, 46, 278, 331, 417n70 parable of the lord and the servant by, 29, 273, 312, 313–28, 489nn100–102 on participation, 271, 321, 322, 323, 327, 491n114 on sensuality and substance, 314, 318–19, 321–23, 325, 359, 491n114, 500n80 on sin, 317–18, 322 theology of, 317–20, 321, 490n111, 491n113 Juster, A. M., 98 justice, 101, 120, 150, 362 mercy and, 229–30, 354 Justice, Steven, 126 Kant, Immanuel, 15 Kaske, R. E., 158, 438n92 Kaulbach, Ernest N., 465n153 Kay, Richard, 497n58 Keats, John, 3 Kelly, Douglas, 184, 448n40 Kemble, John Mitchell, 421n108 kennings, 418n84 Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, 26, 75, 396n66, 480n25 Kermode, Frank The Genesis of Secrecy, 261, 390n19, 476n84 Kings (biblical books), 100, 147, 416n66 kinship, 216–17, 323 Kirk, Elizabeth, 468n18, 469n31

570

Index

Klein, Thomas, 441n5 Knighton, Henry, 427n139 knowledge Augustine on, 33, 194, 208–9 “cloud of unknowing” and, 55–56 contest and, 94, 156 control of, 220, 221 empty, 287 enigmatic, 5–6, 8–9, 16–17, 64, 131, 208–9, 219, 249, 315 face-to-face, 18–19, 33, 315, 325–26, 394n46 faith and, 237, 238–39 Hugh of St. Victor on, 47, 49 of infinite, 238–39, 357 Julian of Norwich on, 314–15, 325–26 language and, 16, 67 mediation and, 17–19 negative theology and, 61 paradigms of, 17, 18 participation and, 16, 17, 294 Piers Plowman character’s pursuit of, 230–31, 248, 255 riddling and, 89, 90, 91–92 subjective and objective, 13, 18, 19, 89, 382, 400n18 Thomas Aquinas on, 18, 63–64, 65, 394n46 See also kynde knowing Kruger, Steven F., 461n124 kynde knowing, 83–84, 102, 151, 164, 217, 230, 297–98, 352, 405n85 Christ and, 358–59 as enigmatic expression, 85, 285 Julian of Norwich and, 321, 491n114 meaning of, 297, 375, 486n61 as participatory idea, 86, 119, 283, 298, 300–301, 409n1, 486n62 labor, 231, 243, 257–58, 302–3, 362 labyrinth, 376

Lactantius, 445n25 Langland, William Augustine influence on, 175, 206–7, 484n53 autobiographical section of Piers Plowman, 174–75, 251, 256–62, 266, 282–83, 366, 379 challenge to church authority by, 233, 241, 316 and infinite, introduction of term into English, 332 influence on Chaucer, 23–24, 365, 367 influence on Julian of Norwich, 23–24, 272–73, 311–12, 326, 492n125 Legenda aurea as model and source for, 137, 437n75 literary style of, 84, 308, 352, 410n3 poetic signature of, 2–5, 242, 396n63, 439n110 poetry of, 39, 261, 351, 498n60 and Rising of 1381, 129, 428n152 semi-Pelagianism of, 25, 398n75, 465n149 Solomon and Marcolf influence on, 142, 433n35 theology of, 25–26, 271, 273–74, 276, 297, 305, 352, 359, 386, 398n75, 479n3 use of vernacular by, 271, 272 language Augustine on, 194 enigmatic, 32, 75, 213, 364–65, 366, 372 knowledge and, 16, 67 literary, 178, 281, 292, 369, 481n30 metaphoric and allegorical, 15–16, 181, 443n9 Piers Plowman treatment of, 79, 179, 212, 213, 218

Index of precision, 18–19, 60, 72, 282, 315, 326, 343 riddles and, 12, 16, 91 See also literature; vernacular Latin, 4, 141, 281, 433n35 riddling tradition in, 94, 95, 110, 111–13, 114–15, 157, 420n97, 421n107 Lawler, Traugott, 153, 154 Lawlor, John, 469n31 Leah and Rachel story, 348–49 Leclercq, Jean, 42, 46 lectio divina, 46 Lederer, Thomas, 144 Legenda aurea, 137–38, 140–41, 425n128, 431n23, 437n75 as Langland model and source, 137, 437n75 Le Goff, Jacques, 490n107 leisure Aristotle on, 340–41, 346, 390n13 contemplative, 101, 334 idleness and, 104, 352 pastoral, 334–35, 340, 370 Leobgyda, 418n82 Levy-Bruhl, Claude, 395n53 Lewis, C. S., 352, 410n3 literal/spiritual relation, 72, 408n125 literature, 19, 332, 334, 382 enigma and, 1, 3–4, 11, 177, 223–24, 265–67, 380, 382, 383–85 language used in, 281, 481n30 Middle English, 109, 182, 271, 313 novels, 384–85 Piers Plowman impact on, 366 riddling and, 11, 86–87, 96–97, 128–29, 333 vernacular, 4, 27, 71, 282, 380 liturgy, 281, 355, 362, 484n53 lollards, 252 See also “lunatic lollers”

571

Lombard, Peter, 406n100 Magna glossatura, 473n53 Lombardo, Marco, 345–46, 496n47 Louth, Andrew, 200 love, 294, 323, 340, 359 Augustine on, 192, 193, 194, 241–42, 453n71, 454n82, 455n85 Dante on, 343, 453n72 Julian of Norwich on, 312, 323 love poetry, 114, 115, 422n110, 423n112 Luke, Gospel of, 167, 209, 260, 305–6, 440n113, 473n45, 474n55, 482n43 “lunatic lollers,” 226, 250, 252–56, 261, 262, 360, 475n73 positive notion of, 257 Lydgate, John, 142, 413n40, 435n63 Macaulay, G. C., 226, 467n11 Macrobius, 369, 461n125 Mandeville’s Travels, 221 Manichees, 40, 195–96, 198, 329 Mann, Jill, 306, 469n35, 486n62 Mannyng, Robert Handlyng Synne, 308, 488n86 Marcolf. See Solomon and Marcolf Mark, Gospel of, 145, 338, 391n19 Marsilius of Padua, 311 Martianus Capella, 442n7 mathematical metrics and symbols, 103–4, 121–22, 183, 341, 424n29, 477n93 Matthew, Gospel of, 154, 209, 246, 260, 474n55, 474n57, 482n43 Matthew of Vendôme, 446n33 Ars versificatoria, 182, 445n29, 446n30 Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 345, 496n42, 498n62 McDermott, Ryan, 451n61, 498n66, 500n89, 501n95

572

Index

McGinn, Bernard, 77, 406n89, 407n114, 500n80 mediation, 334 enigma and, 63, 187, 213, 249 knowledge and, 17–18 medieval curriculum, 173–74 medieval exegesis, 53, 206, 281, 451n57 Augustine and, 187, 188–89, 205 on 1 Corinthians 13:12, 5, 17, 76, 238, 282–95, 452n63, 487n75 de Lubac history of, 285, 309, 394n52, 450n56, 460n120, 464n144 distinctions between style and meaning in, 189–90, 193 enigmatic and, 192–93, 210, 238, 338, 356 figural interpretation by, 20, 237, 316 fourfold scheme of, 237–38, 286, 403n63 Hugh of St. Victor and, 49–50 of literal sense of scripture, 285, 460n120, 464n144 modern appreciation of, 394n52 Thomas Aquinas and, 60–61, 63, 64, 237, 238, 403n55, 472n39, 473n54 meditation, 46, 76, 77, 192, 222, 278 Augustine on, 199, 328 Hugh of St. Victor on, 49, 51 mercy divine, 211, 229 justice and, 229–30, 354 Piers Plowman personification of, 98–99, 322, 355, 356, 357 “Merlin’s Prophecy,” 118 Meroney, Howard, 470n35 metaphor, 144, 247, 345, 359–60 Augustine use of, 16, 33, 34, 36, 37, 457n101

enigma and, 178, 185–86, 305, 442n9 Gervais of Melkley on, 183, 446n34, 447n37 grammatical, 158, 159, 160, 332, 425n126 language and, 15–16, 181, 443n9 Ricoeur on, 448n43 Thomas Aquinas on, 63–64, 452n63 metaphoric images agriculture, 351–52 candle, 302–3, 326–27 cloud, 439n14, 448n41 constructing a building, 50 eating and drinking, 307–8 hand, 303, 326–327 harmony and dance, 345 healing, 307 mirror, 17–18, 19, 33, 34, 36, 37, 43, 58, 60–61, 63, 209, 393n37, 406n88, 406n100, 463n134 parenthood, 183 shepherd, 339, 347 in sixth vision, 351, 353–54 sphere, 343 thirst, 359–60 trees, 119, 300, 341, 425n125, 486n63 metaphysics, 74 of participation, 18, 63, 71–72, 104, 308, 487n70 Middleton, Anne, 257, 426n133 on Langland fiction, 22–23, 440n2, 477n91 on Piers Plowman episodes, 159, 256, 466n153, 476n80 Milbank, John, 394n52, 464n144, 491n117 Milton, John Lycidas, 493n18

Index mimetic desire, 91–92, 196–97, 198, 456n95 mimetic rivalry, 92, 241–43, 245, 477n87, 478n95 mimetic theory, 90–91, 92, 241, 243, 257 Minnis, A. J., 192, 367–68 minstrelsy, 162, 165–66, 167, 168, 179–80, 439n111 Mirk, John Festial, 137 mirror image and metaphor, 17–18, 19, 43, 58, 393n37 Augustine use of, 33, 34, 36, 37 Hugh of St.Victor use of, 17, 406n88 in Piers Plowman, 209, 463n134 Thomas Aquinas use of, 60–61, 63, 406n100 monasticism, 41–46 Montfort, Simon de, 116 More, Thomas Utopia, 427n135 Morpheus, 373 Morrison, Karl, 395n56 Moses, 235–36, 339, 470n35, 485n53 Mum and the Sothsegger, 266 Murtaugh, Daniel M., 484n49 mystery, 54–55, 310, 382–83 Augustine and, 54, 196, 399n6, 456n93 as term, 309–10 mysticism, 19, 278 Bonaventure and, 174, 296, 407n114 experience and, 73, 408n126 Hugh of St. Victor and, 48, 52, 54 medieval flowering of, 54, 57, 73, 281 new mysticism, 73 participation and, 20, 395n53 Pseudo-Dionysius and, 28, 54–55, 77

573

Nagy, Gregory, 412n34 neck-riddles, 93 negation. See affirmation and negation negative theology, 61, 405n82 Neoplatonism, 33, 56, 350 Augustine and, 178, 198, 199, 442n9, 457n101 theory of divine creation, 184–85 Thomas Aquinas and, 60, 75 New Criticism, 11 Newman, Barbara, 312, 325, 489n101, 492n125 New Testament, 4, 11, 134, 237, 238, 339 enigma in, 285, 338 Old Testament relation to, 201, 207, 238, 295 Nicholas de Gorran, 483n47 Nicholas of Cusa, 503n123 Nicholas of Lyra, 286, 393n46, 408n125, 472n38, 476n80 Hugh of St. Victor and, 452n63 Niles, John D., 107, 418n86 Noah’s ark, 51, 430n14 nominalism Chaucer and, 374, 378, 502n112 Ockham and, 276, 279 philosophical ideas of, 19, 275, 281, 492n125 theological ideas of, 18–19, 275, 277, 278, 280, 381 Numbers (biblical book), 416n66 obscurity, 10–11, 184, 220, 352, 448n41 allegory and, 443n9, 466n2 Augustine on, 188, 193, 207 difficulty vs., 184 enigma and, 10–11, 182 Ocker, Christopher, 205, 408n125, 450n57

574

Index

Ockham, William of, 66, 276, 364, 398n75, 485n57 challenge to church authority by, 274, 311 and nominalism, 276, 279 Ockham’s razor, 276–77 O’Donnell, James J., 455n87, 456n88, 457n100, 458n105 Oedipus, 92–93, 95, 141, 412n27 Old Testament, 101, 110, 134, 197, 203–4, 296, 338 allegorical and figurative interpretation of, 238, 240 enigmas and mysteries of, 103, 201, 224, 237, 309 New Testament relation to, 201, 207, 238, 295 Olson, Linda, 455n86 Ong, Walter J., 89–90 “On the Earthquake of 1382,” 122 oratory, 179–80, 181, 185, 193 Orchard, Andy, 414n48, 415nn58–59 The Orcherd of Syon (Catherine of Siena), 395n54 Origen, 472nn38–39 Ormesby Psalter, 110 Ovid, 182, 502n105 Chaucer and, 368, 369 Metamorphoses, 135 The Owl and the Nightingale, 435n56, 437n80 ownership, 113, 161 “Pange Lingua,” 354–55, 415n56 Parable of the Banquet, 215–16 Parable of the Buried Treasure, 260 Parable of the Good Samaritan, 295, 304–11, 326, 412n30, 484n53 parable of the lord and the servant, 29, 273, 312, 313–28 versions and revisions of, 489nn100–102

Parable of the Lost Coin, 260 Parable of the Pearl, 260 Parable of the Prodigal Son, 211, 215, 260, 315, 456n92 Parable of the Rich Fool, 476n84 Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, 258–59, 260–61 Parable of the Sower, 260, 261, 476n84 Parable of the Unjust Steward, 259–60, 476n80 Parable of the Wicked Servant, 363 parables, 210–12, 257 enigma and, 210, 258, 261, 463n136 etymology of, 93 examples and, 315–16 parenthood image, 183 parody, 122, 426n133 parsimony, 276–77 participation active, 14–15, 19, 38, 42–43, 51, 60, 68, 84, 273, 294, 322 affirmation/negation interplay and, 37, 39, 62, 107 Aristotle on, 16, 391n26, 478n93 Augustine on, 15, 20, 33, 35, 38–39, 40, 395n54, 399n6 in biblical narrative, 295 Boethius on, 13–14 Bonaventure on, 66, 67, 68, 69 Chaucer on, 271, 375–76 in community, 113, 222–23, 381 in the divine, 14–15, 32, 36, 39, 51, 68, 83–84, 185, 200–201, 211, 217, 230, 286, 294–304, 323, 360, 363, 375–78, 381, 486n62 enigma and, 5, 13–21, 19, 26, 46, 90, 249, 271, 272, 297, 327–28, 349, 370, 381 in Eucharist, 20–21, 240, 395n56

Index in history, 20, 51–52 horizontal dimension of, 20–21, 91, 262–63, 286, 311, 381–82, 476n85 Julian of Norwich on, 271, 321, 322, 323, 327, 491n114 knowledge and, 16, 17, 294 in kynde, 86, 119, 283, 298, 300–301, 409n1, 486n2 loss of, 74, 76, 273–82, 286, 409n1, 481n35 metaphysics of, 18, 63, 71–72, 104, 487n70 mysticism and, 20, 395n53 nurturing of, 21, 238, 241, 364 passive, 14, 322, 395n56, 409n1 Platonism on, 13, 350, 478n93 play and, 86, 87, 97, 105–8, 114, 118, 119, 126, 131, 272 political, 128 riddles and, 29, 86, 89, 105–8, 114 sacraments and, 20–21, 222–23, 240, 283, 310–11, 381, 382, 395n54 as term, 12, 13, 271, 381, 391n22, 395n54 Thomas Aquinas on, 294, 391n26, 400n18, 479n12 in Trinity, 273, 326–27 in Word made flesh, 44, 293, 377, 385 pastoral, 339, 340, 370, 493n18 Dante and, 347–48, 497n53 as literary mode, 333–34, 340 Piers Plowman and, 352, 361 Theodulus/Virgil eclogues and, 334–38 Paul, Saint, 53, 59, 374, 404n54 The Pauline Epistles, 392n36 Peacham, Henry The Garden of Eloquence, 443n11

575

Pearl, 313, 383, 504n9 enigmatic features of, 219, 266 mathematical symbolism in, 477n93 Pearsall, Derek, 24, 306, 359, 433n37, 435n61, 476n85, 500n87 pear tree episode, 197, 228 Pelagius, 277, 279, 296 See also semi-Pelagianism penance, 226, 243 sacrament of, 240, 283, 306, 362, 501n95 Pentecost scene, 362, 500n89 Perler, D., 399n11 persuasion, 29, 31, 74 enigma and, 5, 10–12, 27, 80, 223, 272, 379, 385 Peter of Blois, 158 Peter the Chanter, 190 Tractatus de tropis loquendi, 452n63 Petrarch, 493n18 Petronius Satyricon, 95 philosophy, 19, 347, 394n52 theology and, 32, 47, 60, 333 Piers Plowman Augustine’s Confessions compared to, 207–8, 209 autobiographical aspect of, 174–75, 251, 256, 282–83, 366, 379 Chaucer’s House of Fame compared to, 367–68, 369–70, 375 copyists and text of, 24, 396n66 form of, 23, 477n91 genres and, 293, 352, 396n60 literary impact of, 23, 78, 366, 396n66 poetic workings of, 351, 498n60 scholarship on, 22–23, 25–26, 396n61 sources for, 128, 437n75 structure of, 22, 175, 176, 353, 484n53, 498n88

576

Index

Piers Plowman (cont.) vernacular use in, 25, 27, 108, 282 wordplay in, 79, 284–85, 481n35 See also A text; B text; C text Piers Plowman characters and personifications Anima. See below Liberum Arbitrium Antichrist, 361, 364 Charity, 253, 292, 293–94, 301, 306 Clergy, 96, 206–7, 285 —in Conscience’s banquet, 150, 285, 330, 332 —Conscience’s riddle contest and, 153, 154–56, 159, 160, 162–63, 438n95 Conscience, 258, 260, 274, 282, 308, 361, 365 —in banquet scene, 150–51, 153, 155, 156, 162, 165, 263, 477n86 —narrator/dreamer and, 211, 262, 463n139 —as personification, 149–50, 438n90 —Piers Plowman and, 248–49, 386 —prophecy of, 28, 120–24, 232, 499n74 —See also Conscience’s banquet Dame Study, 165, 175, 206, 273, 446n33, 461n125, 479n3 Dobest, 152, 156, 159, 186, 262–63, 332, 438n90 Dobet, 152, 156, 159, 185, 262–63, 332 doctor of divinity (“maister”), 149, 150, 153–54, 155, 156, 160, 162, 164, 283, 285, 428n90, 468n19 Dowel, 152, 157, 159, 163, 168–69 —identity of, 154, 175, 185, 438n90

—quest for, 152, 175, 212, 262–63, 283 Dysmas, 228, 229, 468n18 Envy, 227–28, 242 Faith —as personification of Abraham, 295, 303, 309, 326, 484n53 —and Tree of Charity passage, 295, 301, 303–4, 306–7 Good Samaritan, 295, 302, 303–4, 306, 326 Grace, 362, 459n115 Haukyn, 164–67 Hende Speche, 364 Holy Church, 83–85, 119–20, 151, 223, 230, 273, 297 Hope, 295, 306–7, 309 Hunger, 151, 231, 232, 243 Kynde, 102, 216, 217, 301, 365, 379 —as God, 84, 184, 212, 213, 214, 297, 363 —in visions, 151, 212, 365 Lady Mede, 120, 122, 123, 151, 242, 257, 273 Liberum Arbitrium, 285, 287, 290–91, 294, 297–99, 300–301, 482n41 —as Anima in B text, 263, 284, 481n40 Mercy, 98–99, 322, 355, 356, 357 Need, 263, 365–66 Patience, 216, 263 —as personification, 150, 155, 162, 165 —riddles by, 153–57, 159–62, 165, 166–67, 284, 386 —scripture’s nourishing of, 215, 276 Peace, 245, 356, 357, 500n82 Sir Penetrans-domos, 364, 365

Index Piers Plowman —and authority, 223, 224–32, 240, 245, 265, 273–74 —as Christ figure, 217, 224–25, 235, 240–41, 247, 264, 294 —confrontation with priest by, 231–32, 240–49 —Conscience and, 248–49, 386 —at Conscience’s banquet, 151–52, 163–64, 265 —conversion of, 265, 266, 478n95 —in final visions, 253, 365–66 —mentioned, 127, 175, 308 —as personification and representation, 224–25, 231, 249, 351 —in tearing of the pardon episode, 232–40 —and Tree of Charity episode, 300, 474n62 —Truth and, 211, 225, 264 Pride, 364 Reason, 211, 213, 258, 261, 282 —narrator’s confrontation with, 257–58, 259–60, 261–62, 366 —in waking scene, 150, 250, 265, 463n139 Rechelesnesse, 261, 474n59, 476n84, 476n86 Repentance, 227, 229, 230, 234, 357 Righteousness, 355, 356, 357 Robert the Robber, 228–29, 468n17 Scripture, 175, 206, 208, 209–11, 215 Sloth, 228 Theologie/Theology, 273–74 Thought, 152, 175, 185 Trajan, 209, 213–14, 215–17, 247, 297, 465n149, 474n59 Truth, 151, 211, 230–31, 264 —pardon from, 217, 225, 233, 283, 467n10 —in sixth vision, 356, 357

577

Wasters, 217, 231–32, 242–43, 246, 247, 248, 352 Wille/Will —apologia pro vita sua of, 259–60 —awakening of, 167, 235 —at Conscience’s banquet, 150–52, 153–55, 165, 410n2 —dream visions of, 150–51, 206, 208, 215, 365, 499n74 —as personification, 154–55, 261, 438n90 Wit, 123, 160, 165, 175, 179–80, 185, 212 Ymaginatif, 175, 217, 218, 263, 297, 439n102, 444n13 —and inner dream, 210, 217–19, 465n152 —as personification, 151, 186, 218, 465n153 —in riddling debate, 152, 153 Piers Plowman dream visions, 22 first, 83–85, 119–24, 151 second, 151, 224–67, 282–83 third, 28, 29, 150–51, 174–75, 176, 179–80, 206–19, 266, 283 fourth, 131, 149–69 fifth, 29, 273–74, 282–304, 305–11 sixth, 123, 353–61, 397n70 seventh, 361–64, 397n70 eighth, 364–66, 397n70 Piers Plowman episodes and scenes confession scene, 209, 227–31 Conscience’s banquet, 28, 141, 149–50, 153–64, 165, 284, 330, 422n108, 436n72, 468n19 Conscience’s prophecy, 28, 120–24, 232, 499n74 Emmaus story, 164, 224–25, 240, 473n45 Good Samaritan episode, 295, 304–11, 326, 412n30, 484n53

578

Index

Piers Plowman episodes and scenes (cont.) half-acre episode, 231–32, 233, 242–43, 245, 251, 294, 352 Harrowing of Hell, 217, 247, 263, 320, 353, 355–57, 359, 367, 374, 499n73 Pentecost scene, 362, 500n89 Plant of Peace, 28, 83–84, 98–99, 119–21, 124, 140, 151, 284, 299, 307, 352, 370, 467n10 tearing of the pardon, 24, 27, 225, 232–40, 243, 245, 251, 261–62, 282–83, 297, 469nn30–31, 473n43, 474n54 Tree of Charity, 248, 263, 284, 295–304, 307, 474n62, 484n52 waking scene, 150–53, 224, 226, 256, 263, 265, 476n86 piety, 106, 116, 281 affective, 45, 307, 329 Plant of Peace, 28, 117, 124, 151, 284, 370, 431n16 as challenge to church authority, 83–84, 119–20 grace and, 153, 180, 307 Incarnation encoded by, 84, 140, 299 in Langland versions, 129, 307, 467n10 pastoral image in, 351, 352 tree imagery and, 98–99, 119, 356 Tree of Charity and, 285 Plato, 13, 104, 413nn41–42 Timaeus, 95 Platonism, 5, 14, 55 play children’s, 177, 442n6 contemplative, 8, 301, 330–31, 342, 383, 390n13 Dante on, 345, 347–48, 363, 497n53

enigmatic, 5–10, 100, 128, 137, 169, 272, 327, 330, 331, 366 Huizinga on, 88, 128, 389n12, 504n4 infinite, 6, 329, 330, 335, 342, 343–44 interpretive, 113, 124, 128–29, 130, 261, 327, 342, 403n63 liturgy as, 283, 355, 362 participatory, 86, 87, 97, 105–8, 114, 118, 119, 126, 131, 272 Piers Plowman and, 179, 355–56, 499nn73–74 pursuit of knowledge and, 8–9 riddling and, 29, 84, 86, 98, 110, 147 Thomas Aquinas on, 8, 389n13 See also games pluralism, 72, 75, 76 poetry, 24, 217, 286, 403n63, 504n4 difficulty, uses in, 183–84 enigmatic, 20, 218, 418n84 function and potential of, 106, 184, 186 improvisation in, 357, 499n78 Langland’s writing of, 39, 261 love poetry, 114, 115, 422n110, 423n112 medieval treatises on, 181–82, 445n25 sacraments and, 115, 116, 304–11, 424n113 scripture and, 31, 402n49 Pope, Alexander, 493n14, 493n18 Porphyry, Optatian, 418n83 poststructuralism, 12, 36 poverty, 166–67, 280 begging and, 251–52 identification with poor, 264 Lollards and, 252, 255, 475n68 patient, 247, 259, 474n59, 476n84 spiritual and material, 150, 166, 214–15, 216, 228, 232, 246

Index praying and prayer, 70–71, 76, 314 one-syllable prayers, 58, 59 The Prick of Conscience, 78, 79, 220 Priscian Institutio grammaticae, 159, 443n10 Promptorium parvulum, 297 pronunciation, Middle English, 96, 180 “The Prophecies of John of Bridlington,” 426n129, 437n84 prophecy, 120, 121, 128, 243, 309, 352 by Conscience, 28, 120–24, 232, 499n74 “lunatic lollers” and, 254, 255 parody and, 122, 426n133 riddles and, 117, 232 in scripture, 101, 118, 416n66 visions and, 123, 427n135 prosopopoeia, 100–101, 106, 115, 227, 468n14 proverbs, 111, 466n2 riddles and, 95, 117–18 Solomon and Marcolf and, 143, 144–45, 434n43 Proverbs (biblical book), 34, 143, 416n66, 437n75 Psalms, 46, 101, 110, 158, 204, 211, 248 Psalm 22, 245–46, 473nn53–54 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (Denis), 15, 19, 54, 72, 392n27 affirmation/negation interplay in, 56, 57–58, 69, 331 esoteric and, 40, 41, 405n82 Hugh of St. Victor on, 54, 57 mysticism of, 28, 54–55, 77 on symbolism and signs, 40, 55, 57 Thomas Aquinas and, 54, 60, 61, 64 works —The Celestial Hierarchy, 54, 55 —The Divine Names, 54

579

—The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, 54 —Mystical Theology, 54, 55, 56–57, 70 Pythagoras, 101, 104, 417n68 Quintilian, 445n20, 446n30 Qur’an, 31 Rabanus Maurus, 471n37, 484n53 In honorem Sanctae Crucis, 418n83 Rabelais, François Gargantua and Pantagruel, 426n133, 430n10 reading, 76, 298 Augustine on, 191, 194–95, 198, 199, 203, 205, 206, 208, 453n67 communities of, 215, 222–23, 381 contemplative, 17, 28, 39, 43, 47, 58, 76, 218 enigmatic and, 11, 39, 173, 191, 197, 201, 204, 206, 214, 219, 246, 453n67 Hugh of St. Victor on, 28, 46–54, 51, 58, 192, 488n93 monastic, 58 riddling and, 330 of scripture, 186, 190–91, 199, 201, 274, 283, 488n93 reason Piers Plowman personification of, 150, 213, 250, 257–60, 261–62, 265, 282 will and, 278 Reformation, 189, 383, 451n57 Resurrection, 10, 50, 135, 158, 264 Piers Plowman reference to, 84, 229, 247, 264, 362 rhetoric, 173, 181, 389n12, 443n9 Augustine on, 62, 174, 187–88, 190, 195–96, 219, 221, 449n53, 452n64 Cicero and, 180–81

580

Index

rhetoric (cont.) didactic or esoteric, 308, 380 enigma and, 4, 5, 10–11, 23, 28–29, 71–72, 192, 196, 209, 213, 219, 221, 255, 272, 295, 380, 381, 438n93, 442n9, 445n20 medieval study of, 174, 180–85 riddles and, 117, 169, 420n98 theology and, 169, 190–94, 330 Rhodes, Jim, 389n12 Rich, Edmund Speculum ecclesiae, 115–16 Richard II, 26 Richard of St. Victor, 55, 72, 401n25 Benjamin minor, 348–49, 401n25, 497n55 Ricoeur, Paul, 40, 169, 448n43, 481n34 riddles and riddling Aldhelm and, 27, 86, 96–105, 211, 415n55, 416n64 Alithia’s riddle, 133–36, 141, 352, 370, 494n23 Augustine on, 34, 37 charms and, 11, 438n92 Chaucer and, 266, 369, 370 Cicero on, 180 collections of, 113–19, 422n110 community and, 97, 113 as competitive contests, 88, 90, 91, 95, 109, 130–31, 136 Conscience’s apocalyptic, 120–24 contemplation and, 97, 102–3, 136 Dante and, 349, 350, 497n53 definitions of, 83, 86, 87, 329–30 enigmatic, 4, 31, 83, 135–36, 161–62, 211–12, 247, 272, 329, 380–81 esoteric and, 7, 92, 411n26 etymology of, 94–96 in Exeter Book, 6, 97, 99, 101–2, 105–8, 113, 114, 418nn84–86, 441n5

folk riddles, 4, 86, 87, 113–14, 337, 419n94, 421n108 forms and functions of, 85–86, 88, 95, 103, 105, 109, 411n13, 417n72, 425n124 Greek words for, 16, 94–95, 412n33–34, 413n44 hiddenness in, 94, 99, 125–26, 173 ice riddles, 177, 179, 182, 183, 417n70, 441n5 John Ball letters and, 124, 126, 127–28, 427n147 knowledge and, 89, 90, 91–92 Langland and, 2–3, 261 language and, 12, 16, 91 Latin tradition of, 94, 95, 110, 111–13, 114–15, 157, 420n97, 421n107 literary, 11, 21, 86–87, 91, 96–97, 128–29, 333 neck-riddles, 93 oral, 7, 19–20, 31, 86–87, 88–90, 130–31, 422n108 participatory, 29, 86, 89, 105–8, 114 in Piers Plowman, 149–53, 153–65, 168–69, 245, 283, 352 play, games, and, 29, 84, 86, 98, 110, 147, 329–30 prophecy and, 117, 232 prosopopoeia and, 100–101, 106, 115, 227, 468n14 proverbs and, 95, 117–18 religious themes and paradoxes, 115, 424n114 rhetoric and, 117, 169, 420n98 sacrifice and, 92, 412n26 scholarship on, 87, 410n8, 411nn13–14 scripture and, 93, 100, 168 sexual, 114, 422n110 Solomon and Marcolf and, 141–49

Index solving of, 93, 113, 135, 157, 160, 429n2 St. Andrew’s legend and, 131, 137–41, 149, 154–55 Theodulus and, 133–37 Tolkien and, 131–33 traditions of, 7, 86–87, 108–13, 333, 421n108 tree riddles, 106–7, 108, 114, 115–16, 421n108 types of, 86, 410n7 Virgil and, 335–37 year-tree riddle, 113–14, 421n108 Rider, Jeff, 182 Riga, Peter, 472n38 Rising of 1381, 27, 28, 86, 124–25, 127, 128, 233 Langland and, 129, 428n152 violence of, 250–51 rivalry, 261, 265 mimetic, 92, 241–43, 245, 477n87, 478n95 Robert of Melun, 17–18 Robertson, D. W., 422n110, 451n57, 464n144 Robinson, Marilynne, 74–75 Rocca, Gregory P., 63, 405n82 Rolle, Richard, 409n138 Emendatio Vitae, 76–77 romance genre, 79, 229, 292, 348 The Romance of the Rose, 22, 334, 339–42, 499n79 commentary on, 495n35, 502n105 enigmatic motifs in, 29, 340, 342 Romans (biblical book), 60, 104, 293, 319, 457n100 Romulus and Remus, 344 Rupert of Deutz, 501n91 sacraments, 68, 331, 364–65 enigma and, 308, 309 Parable of the Good Samaritan and, 305–6, 308–9

581

participation and, 20–21, 222–23, 240, 283, 310–11, 381, 382, 395n54 of penance, 240, 283, 306, 362, 501n95 poetry and, 115, 116, 304–11, 424n113 Thomas Aquinas on, 64, 309 See also Eucharist Salvador-Bello, Mercedes, 102–3, 417n72 salvation, 296, 302, 304, 322, 341, 351, 359 Christian narrative of, 69–70, 235–36 divine/human action and, 278, 300, 305, 362 as participation in kynde, 295–304 theology of, 25, 282–83, 296–97, 485n57 Scanlon, Larry, 460n117 scapegoating, 92 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 450n56 Schmidt, A. V. C., 121–22, 164, 307, 481n35 on enigma, 166, 395n59 on Gospel parable, 152, 436n71 on Piers Plowman versions, 24–25, 397n67, 475n63 Scholasticism, 45, 60, 62, 188, 278 Hugh of St. Victor and, 40–41, 47, 52, 331 Schweitzer, Edward, 158 Scott, John A., 496n50 Scott, Peter Dale, 100, 415n59, 468n14 scripture, 53, 183, 276, 292, 369 Augustine on, 34–35, 188, 191, 193, 196, 199, 201, 203–6, 208, 210, 416n63, 450n56, 455n85, 457n100, 459n114 church authority and, 283, 497n58 enigma and, 16–17, 31, 34–35, 100–101, 192–93, 201, 235,

582

Index

scripture (cont.) 237, 338, 392n36, 406n88, 416n63, 452n62, 454n79 history and, 50–51, 384 Hugh of St. Victor on, 50, 402n49, 406n88 interpretation of, 20, 191, 224, 238, 281, 286, 394n52, 480n29 as mirror, 17, 58 Piers Plowman personification of, 175, 206, 208, 209–11, 215 poetry and, 31, 402n49 prophecy and, 101, 118, 416n66 reading of, 17, 186, 190–91, 199, 201, 274, 283, 488n93 riddling in, 93, 100, 168 tearing of the veil episode in, 235–36, 237, 238–39, 469n31, 470n33, 471n38 Thomas Aquinas on, 60–61, 63, 64, 237, 238, 403n55, 472n39, 473n54 on wisdom, 101, 416n66 See also 1 Corinthians 13:12; medieval exegesis; New Testament; Old Testament Secretum philosophorum, 110–11, 121–22, 126, 157, 222 secular and secularism, 47, 381–82, 384, 505n15 Segal, Charles Paul, 334, 337 self-reflexivity, 106, 112 in Chaucer, 370–72 in Piers Plowman, 233, 258, 486 semi-Pelagianism, 296, 317 Langland and, 25, 398n75, 465n149 See also Pelagius Senderovich, Saveliı˘, 88 sensuality, 325, 491n113 Julian of Norwich on, 314, 318, 319, 321–22, 359, 491n114 Servius, 336, 493n20

seven deadly sins, 115, 165, 226–27, 228, 242 Shakespeare, William, 382, 385 shepherds, 370, 498n64 as metaphor, 339, 347 riddling contest between, 133–34, 182, 244, 336 Sidney, Philip, 493n14 signs, 57, 63, 120, 403n55 Augustine on, 198, 202, 403n55 Bonaventure on, 67–69 See also symbols and symbolism Simpson, James, 26, 166, 231, 295, 486n59 on Chaucer poem, 502n107 on Conscience’s riddle contest, 153, 162 on dreamer/narrator, 206, 483n44 sin, 227–28, 229–30, 232, 274 Augustine on, 208, 317, 462n131 Julian of Norwich on, 317–18, 322 See also seven deadly sins Sirach (biblical book), 416n66 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 266 Skeat, Walter W., 157, 397n69 Smalley, Beryl, 460n120 Smith, Ben H., 158 Smith, D. Vance, 438n90 Solomon and Marcolf, 28, 131, 141–49, 434n51, 435n60 character representation in, 145–46, 435n57 influence on Langland of, 143, 154–55, 433n35 Piers Plowman blending of dialogue in, 154–55, 161, 165 Solomon legend, 432n29 Sophocles, 92–93 South English Legendary, 137–38, 140–41, 431n24 specialization, 72–73, 76, 78, 275, 285 Speculum Christiani, 226–27, 423n112, 468n14

Index Spenser, Edmund Shepheardes Calender, 493n18 sphere image, 343 “St. Andrew and the Three Questions,” 28, 131, 137–41, 149, 431nn23–24, 432nn25–29 as Langland source, 137, 154–55, 437n75 Statius, 344 Statute of Laborers (1388), 257, 260 Steiner, Emily, 462n132, 472n42 Stevens, Wallace, 3 St.-Jacques, Raymond, 501n91 Stock, Brian, 126 Stork, Nancy Porter, 417n72 storytelling, 160, 378 Strohm, Paul, 128 Stroumsa, Guy G., 456n93 Struck, Peter T., 178, 413n44, 417n68, 442n9 substance, 44, 198, 321, 496n47 Julian of Norwich on, 314, 318–19, 321–23, 325, 359, 491n114, 500n80 style and, 178, 182, 185–86, 277 Sudbury, Archbishop, 250–51 suffering, 304, 485n53 patient, 247, 379 Sutton-Smith, Brian The Ambiguity of Play, 7, 389n12 Swain, Barbara, 435n61 Swift, Jonathan, 382 symbols and symbolism, 18, 40, 178 in Chaucer, 370, 372–73 exclusion and decline of, 19, 394n49 Hugh of St. Victor on, 18, 48, 55, 404n65 Pseudo-Dionysius on, 40, 55, 57 See also metaphoric images; signs Symphosius, 99–100, 104, 107–8, 111, 415n58, 417n72, 419n93

583

Tanner, Kathryn, 275, 479n8, 485n57 Tavormina, Teresa, 301 Taylor, Archer, 410n7 Taylor, Charles, 381–82 Taylor, Rupert, 122 tearing of the pardon, 24, 27, 232–40, 243, 245, 251, 261–62, 469nn30–31, 473n43 meaning of pardon in, 282–83 scriptural allusion of, 238–39, 240, 246–47, 470n33, 474n54 tearing of the temple veil, 235–38, 297, 469n31, 471n38, 472n42 Piers Plowman allusion to, 238–39, 240, 246–47, 470n33, 474n54 temporality, 201–2, 285–86, 325, 458n108 Theodore, Archbishop, 97, 414n48, 416n64 Theodulus Chaucer and, 370, 501n102 commentaries on, 430n14 Dante and, 497n53 Eclogue, 131, 133–37, 244, 370, 430n11 —Alithia’s riddle in, 133–36, 141, 168, 352 —Virgil’s work as model for, 137, 334–38, 492n7 enigmatic and, 335–36 theology ambiguity in, 26 changes in writing of, 19, 71, 276–77 Chaucer and, 374–75, 377–78, 502n112 on distinction between absolute and ordained power of God, 277–78, 280, 317, 374, 381, 485n57 enigma and, 4, 5, 7, 71–72, 75, 90, 174, 271, 272–77, 282, 309, 380, 385 Hugh of St. Victor and, 47, 50

584

Index

theology (cont.) of Julian of Norwich, 317–20, 321, 490n111, 491n113 Langland and, 25–26, 271, 273–74, 276, 297, 305, 352, 359, 386, 398n75, 479n3 Latin, 21, 114, 312, 490n110 medieval curriculum in, 174, 186–90 metaphor and allegory in, 40, 63–64 modern, 73, 364 mystical, 32, 54–57, 320 negative, 61, 405n82 Neoplatonic, 60, 75, 178, 184–85, 199, 350 nominalist, 18–19, 275, 277, 278, 280, 282, 374–75, 381, 479n13 philosophy and, 32, 47, 60, 333 Piers Plowman personification of, 237–74 rhetoric and, 169, 190–94, 330 sacramental, 309, 395n56 salvation, 25, 282–83, 296–97, 485n57 as separate discipline, 60, 275–76 specialization in, 72–73, 78, 275, 285 of the Word, 35–36, 38–39, 47, 49, 57, 64, 403n55 See also medieval exegesis 1 Thessalonians, 123 thirst metaphor, 359–60 Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, 179 Thomas Aquinas on affirmation and negation, 61–62 on analogy, 62–63, 202, 277 Aristotle and, 60, 61, 63 Augustine and, 60, 61, 62 on enigma, 57, 61–62, 63–65, 192, 406n100 on Eucharist, 64, 65

on God, 61, 277–78, 356 hymns of, 64–65, 222, 308 on knowledge, 18, 63–64, 65, 394n46 on metaphor, 63–64, 452n63 mirror image used by, 60–61, 63, 406n100 Neoplatonism of, 60, 75 on participation, 294, 391n26, 400n18, 479n12 on play, 8, 389n13 Pseudo-Dionysius and, 54, 60, 61, 64 on sacraments, 64, 309 scriptural commentary by, 60–61, 63, 64, 237, 238, 403n55, 472n39, 473n54 Thomas Gallus, 57, 70 Thomas of Hales Love Rune, 266 Tolkien, J. R. R., 385 The Hobbit, 131–33, 429nn4–8 Tolmie, Sarah, 498n60 Tomasek, Tomas, 419n94 Trajan, 209, 213–14, 215–17, 247, 297, 465n149, 474n59 transubstantiation, 64, 308, 331, 488n86 tree imagery, 119, 300, 341, 425n125, 486n63 Tree of Charity, 263, 295–304, 326, 484n52 as analogy, 114, 298–99, 326, 486n63 inner dream of, 248, 284, 295–96, 307, 474n62, 484n52 Plant of Peace and, 285 tree riddles, 106–7, 108, 114, 115–16, 421n108 Trevisa, John, 8–10, 19, 212, 464n141 trickster biography (jest cycle), 144 Trinity, 14, 54, 69, 78, 112, 165, 341, 357

Index Augustine on, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 201, 204, 207, 296, 331 enigma of, 37–38, 303–4, 349 Julian of Norwich on, 319, 322–23 participation in, 273, 326–27 Second Person of, 355–56, 444n12, 500n80 Third Person of, 156 Tree of Charity passage and, 295–304, 486n63 William of St. Thierry on, 40–41, 44 tropes Augustine on, 187, 188 Geoffrey of Vinsauf on, 184, 448nn42–43 Gervais of Melkley on, 183, 446n34 grammar and, 177–79 necessary vs. ornamental, 445n20 See also metaphor; metaphoric images truth, 17, 67, 280, 356 Piers Plowman personification of, 151, 211, 217, 225, 230–31, 233, 264, 283, 356, 357, 467n10 Tupper, Frederick, Jr., 410n8, 421n108, 491n114 Tyl Eulenspiegel, 144 Tyndale, William, 16–17 understanding, three degrees of, 44–45 Uthred of Boldon, 394n46 Valerius, Martius, 493n10, 493n14 Vedas (Sanskrit), 31 vernacular, 25, 32, 79, 86 enigmatic and, 4, 45 literature and, 4, 27, 71, 72–73, 282, 380 theological writing in, 38, 313, 489n99 vertical dimension. See horizontal and vertical dimensions Victorinus, 198

585

Vincent of Beauvais Speculum doctrinale, 441n5 Speculum quadruplex, 52, 212 violence, 92, 93, 242–43, 249, 250–51 Virgil, 177, 223, 336, 369 Augustine and, 36–37, 195 Dante and, 336, 339, 344, 346, 373, 497n53 works —Aeneid, 173, 195, 336, 344, 368, 372–73 —Eclogues, 137, 244, 334–38, 340, 371, 492n7 vocation, 248, 258, 260, 282, 362 voluntarism, 73–74, 277–78 waking scene, 150–53, 224, 250, 256, 263, 265, 463n139, 476n86 autobiographical nature of, 226, 282, 366 Waldensians, 75 Walsh, James, 315, 489n100, 491n123 Walsingham, Thomas Chronica maiora, 125–27, 128 Warner, Lawrence, 397n70, 501n96 Watkins, Calvert, 412n26 Watson, Nicholas, 25, 489n100, 490n110, 492n125 on Julian of Norwich, 313, 316, 324, 492n125 on vernacular, 313, 383, 489n99 Wenzel, Siegfried, 148, 425n124 Whatley, E. Gordon, 140 White, Hugh, 409n1 will, 73–74, 278 Piers Plowman personification of, 150–55, 165, 167, 206, 208, 215, 235, 259–61, 365, 410n2, 438n90, 499n74 See also voluntarism William of Malmesbury, 97

586

Index

William of Moerbeke, 449nn48–49 William of Nassington Speculum vitae, 487n75 William of Ockham. See Ockham, William of William of St. Thierry, 40, 46, 54 affectus term used by, 42–43, 57 contemplative reading and, 43, 58 monasticism and, 41–46, 58 works —The Enigma of Faith, 28, 40–46, 222 —The Mirror of Faith, 43 William of Tyre, 142, 433n40 Williams, Rowan, 194 Williamson, Craig, 106 wisdom, 8, 56, 67–68, 165, 254, 287, 343, 349 Augustine on, 196, 199 Hugh of St. Victor on, 47, 48, 49 Piers Plowman depiction of, 154–55, 160, 165 scripture on, 101, 416n66 Solomon, Marcolf, and, 143, 144, 145–49 Thomas Aquinas on, 8, 61 Wisdom (biblical book), 103–4 wise folly, 148–49, 435nn60–62 Wittig, Joseph, 465n153 Wodeham, Adam, 479n11 Wolfram von Eschenbach, 21, 174 Parzival, 395n58, 442n5

wonder, 88, 179, 183, 449n48 charity and, 292, 293–94 enigma and, 161–62, 179, 191 Woolf, Rosemary, 469n31, 473n43 Worcester Cathedral, 109–10, 424n123 Word made flesh, 35–36, 44, 68, 293, 385 wordplay, 100, 143, 195, 244, 382 of Chaucer, 368, 378 in Piers Plowman, 117, 151, 180, 285, 353, 355, 425n126 Wordsworth, William, 15, 383 Wyclif, John, 75, 210, 252 challenge to church authority by, 274, 311 On the Truth of Holy Scripture, 190, 452n62, 453n72, 463n136 Wycliffites, 17, 127, 256 sermons by, 96, 257, 392n36 Wynnere and Wastoure, 436n65 Zeeman, Nicolette, 206, 442n9, 462n132 on poetry, 402n49, 445n25 on self-theorization in Piers Plowman, 396n63, 436n72 Zink, Michel, 502n105 Ziolkowski, Jan M., 146, 447n39 Zwingmann, W., 42–43

Curtis Gruenler is professor of English at Hope College.