Poetics of the Incarnation

Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love

Cristina Maria Cervone

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780812244519, 9780812244519
• eBook ISBN: 9780812207477
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Gospel of John describes the Incarnation of Christ as "the Word made flesh"—an intriguing phrase that uses the logic of metaphor but is not traditionally understood as merely symbolic. Thus the conceptual puzzle of the Incarnation also draws attention to language and form: what is the Word; how is it related to language; how can the Word become flesh? Such theological questions haunt the material imagery engaged by medieval writers, the structural forms that give their writing shape, and even their ideas about language itself. In Poetics of the Incarnation, Cristina Maria Cervone examines the work of fourteenth-century writers who, rather than approaching the mystery of the Incarnation through affective identification with the Passion, elected to ponder the intellectual implications of the Incarnation in poetical and rhetorical forms. Cervone argues that a poetics of the Incarnation becomes the grounds for working through the philosophical and theological implications of language, at a point in time when Middle English was emerging as a legitimate, if contested, medium for theological expression.In brief lyrics and complex narratives, late medieval English writers including William Langland, Julian of Norwich, Walter Hilton, and the anonymous author of the Charters of Christ took the relationship between God and humanity as a jumping-off point for their meditations on the nature of language and thought, the elision between the concrete and the abstract, the complex relationship between acting and being, the work done by poetry itself in and through time, and the meaning latent within poetical forms. Where Passion-devoted writing would focus on the vulnerability and suffering of the fleshly body, these texts took imaginative leaps, such as when they depict the body of Christ as a lily or the written word. Their Incarnational poetics repeatedly call attention to the fact that, in theology as in poetics, form matters.

Chapter 1

The “Enigma” of Signification in “Figurative” Language

“Charite,” quod y tho, “þat is a thyng forsothe

That maistres commenden moche. Where may hit be yfounde?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

For thogh me souhte alle þe sektes of susturne and brethurne,

And fynde hym, but figuratyfly, a ferly me thynketh;

Hic in enigmate, tunc facie ad faciem.

And so y trowe treuly, by þat me telleth of charite.”

—William Langland, Piers Plowman,

16.286–97 ~ B 15.149–64

Whoever, then, can understand the word [uerbum], not only before it sounds, but even before the images of its sound are contemplated in thought—such a word belongs to no language, that is, to none of the so-called national languages, of which ours is Latin—whoever, I say, can understand this, can already see through this mirror and in this enigma [per hoc speculum atque in hoc aenigmate] some likeness of that Word of whom it was said: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God; and the Word was God.”

—Augustine, De Trinitate, 15.10.19

This is oo maner sight of Jhesu, as I seide bifore: not as he is, but clothed undir likenesse of werkes and of wordes, per speculum in enigmate (1 Cor. 13:12), bi a myrore and likenesse, as the apostil seith.

—Walter Hilton, Scale of Perfection, 2.43.3373–74

WHAT IS THE “mirror” through which, and “enigma” in which, the likeness of God may be glimpsed?¹ What mode of perception permits such a glimpse? For fourteenth-century writers, Christ’s joint divinity and humanity situates him ideally as mediator between God and mankind. As Julian of Norwich puts it, “be [by] the endles assent of the full accord of al the Trinite, the mid person would [desires to] be ground and hede [head] of this fair kinde [human race]” (53.34–36)² The very middleness of the hypostatic union serves to point in two directions at once: toward the likeness of God in humanity and towards a glimpse of God himself. To elucidate the paradox of how the divine and the human could meet in the hypostatic union, fourteenth-century writers turn, as Capgrave did after them, to a multilayered mode of thought. In their practice, a glimpse-enabling mode of perception inevitably draws on, or even consists primarily of, what today we commonly term a “figurative” (opposed to “literal”) sense of language. While what fourteenth-century writers believed about the signifying properties of language, particularly figurative language, is worth examining more generally, their use of language is of special interest wherever they engage the conceptual challenge of the Incarnation. This chapter lays a foundation for the others by focusing on specific engagements with Middle English’s figurative potential, considered in light of Augustinian language theory, critical theories of metaphor, and present-day cognitive models for language processing.

To tease out some complications of “figurative” with respect to Incarnational thought, we might look closely at some intrinsic claims of “per speculum in ænigmate” By means of metaphor, this verse from Paul’s epistle asserts that people cannot perceive God directly in his essential nature. In 1 Cor. 13, “mirror” and “enigma” come as the culmination of a meditation on the nature of charity. Both the seeking and the finding of God’s likeness are associated here with human interrelationships in the context of Christian community: God is revealed through the charitable acts of a charitable person. 1 Cor. 13 thus plays on the perhaps counterintuitive notion that God may best be glimpsed within humanity. In Christian thought, the Pauline epistle’s glimpse of God is commonly associated with the incarnate Christ, because both 1 Cor. 13 and 1 John 4 offer teachings on charity, and the latter expressly links charity with the Incarnation.³ While nothing in 1 Cor. 13 indicates specifically that the mirror and the enigma have to do with figurative language, the writers of the epigraphs to this chapter compellingly link “per speculum in ænigmate” (“through a mirror in an enigma”) not just to the incarnate Christ, as we might expect, but also to language itself. Their interest is partly Christological and partly centered on language’s capacity to signify; in thought and in practice they engage the question of how human language can convey the ineffable. In this context, “per speculum in ænigmate” also suggests that figurative language could verge on saying what otherwise can neither be articulated fully in language nor, perhaps, comprehended in thought.

Like “per speculum in ænigmate,” “the Word made flesh” (John 1:14) stands as an intriguing case of language that aims to model a difficult, abstract concept. Beyond its theological claim about God’s relationship to humanity, its implicit claim about language is that as linguistic expression, metaphor comprises more than the sum of its parts, perhaps even more than a (probably longer) literal paraphrase. This view of the power of figurative language is shared by fourteenth-century writers. For them, metaphor, like other nonliteral language, is not primarily ornamental but, rather, fundamental to a way of understanding, and they perceive language, embodiment, and cognition as mutually interrelated. As they consider the relationship between God and humanity, they demonstrate that they recognize perception as being based in bodily existence. Intriguingly, they also appear to believe cognition to be body-based. In this narrow respect, they align with the strand of cognitive linguistics that today identifies thought as fundamentally metaphorical by nature, and with a subset of that strand that considers cognition to be shaped by the nature and capacity of the bodily mechanisms (neurons, synapses, etc.) that enable thought.⁴ Both cognitive scientists and medieval writers share an interest in the relationship of cognition to embodiment, and both find solutions not grounded in Cartesian mind/body dualism.⁵ Metaphor studies today thus both speaks to and may benefit from considering the Incarnational thought and poetical strategies of fourteenth-century writers. Whereas the present-day theory of conceptual metaphor ends up virtually doing away with the literal/figurative divide, however, medieval writers make conspicuous use of the pointing and pointed referentiality such a dichotomy can reinforce, even where they frame the dichotomy in other terms, as “bodily” and “ghostly.” For them, the referential property of language— language’s capacity to say more, off the page—becomes very much the point.

In his important statement on allegoresis in De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine situates the pointing referentiality of language in the context of sign theory, whereby “a sign is a thing which, over and above the impression it makes on the senses, causes something else to come into the mind as a consequence of itself” (2.1.1).⁶ Such otherness, brought to mind in consequence of a prompt, might well describe what we perceive as “figural” about “figurative” language. Although Augustine wrote centuries before the writers who are the subject of this study, his thought resonates particularly strongly for the topic of Incarnational poetics, since he ties signification of this pointing kind explicitly to the incarnate Word in De Trinitate and elsewhere. Julian, Hilton, and Langland are commonly believed to have been influenced by Augustine, and the ultimate stage of Augustine’s thought on language and the Logos in De Trinitate intriguingly aligns with the thought process that underlies an Incarnational poetic, a point I shall elucidate in Chapter 5. Augustine’s sense of “enigma” as a special category of allegory, a view he states in De Trinitate, therefore stands as a useful shorthand for the main issue at stake in this chapter: how language conveys complex abstract thought, especially (but not exclusively) in metaphor. To understand the nature of the Trinity, Augustine links human language to the Word of God. His technique, like the techniques of fourteenth-century writers, hinges on his ideas about how language signifies, so it is with his technique and his ideas that I begin.

Hilton’s word “Jhesu” and Augustine’s word “Word”

In his De Trinitate Augustine wants to explain the nature of the Trinity to the best of his abilities, given that it can neither be described fully nor comprehended directly in its essence. In the process, he uses the term “enigma” to link “the Word” to human cognition. As he works through his model of how the mind [mens] works, he advances human language as a useful analogy for understanding the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity. His treatise builds upon trinities he identifies in creation, the human body, and then the human mind, in order to explain the workings of the uncreated Holy Trinity. To make his analogy effective, Augustine needs to define terms in a technical way specific to his larger argument about the relationship between God and humanity. In the following two quotations, he generates a specialized sense of the word “word” (not yet of the word “Word,” although he is working towards a link between “word” and “Word”).⁷ In the portion of his argument that precedes the first quotation, he has already discussed how this “word” is not necessarily linguistic, although it may be, and not necessarily a thought expressed in language, although it may be.

Whoever, then, can understand the word [uerbum], not only before it sounds, but even before the images of its sound are contemplated in thought—such a word belongs to no language, that is, to none of the so-called national languages, of which ours is Latin—whoever, I say, can understand this, can already see through this mirror and in this enigma [per hoc speculum atque in hoc aenigmate] some likeness of that Word of whom it was said: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God; and the Word was God.” (De Trinitate 15.10.19)

Here Augustine specifies that if expressed as language, the “word” does not necessarily belong to the language of the people; in his case, Latin.⁸ This “word,” he tells us, is initially a movement within the mind towards comprehension, a movement then given shape when a person thinks, finally given a form discernible by bodily sense when a person speaks or gestures. He further explains by analogy how the Word of God took on human nature, assuming a form but not changing substance. This step, with its focus on form and substance, is crucial for the transition he wants to make from the vernacular (for Augustine, Latin) to the Logos:

Hence, the word which sounds without is a sign of the word that shines within, to which the name “word” more properly belongs. For that which is produced by the mouth of the flesh is the sound of the word, and is itself also called “word,” because that inner word assumed it in order that it might appear outwardly. For just as our word in some way becomes a bodily sound by assuming that in which it may be manifested to the senses of men, so the Word of God was made flesh by assuming that in which He might also be manifested to the senses of men. And just as our word becomes a sound and is not changed into a sound, so the Word of God indeed becomes flesh, but far be it from us that it should be changed into flesh. For by assuming it, not by being consumed in it, this word of ours becomes a sound, and that Word became flesh. (15.11.20)

Theologically, the important point here is that the Word of God did not change substantially (in essence) in the hypostatic union. Augustine’s technique of defining “word” in a narrow sense is crucial, however, to maintaining the analogy. A “word,” in Augustine’s sense, must be unchangeable and must have existed before thought, just as Augustine believes the Second Person of the Trinity is unchangeable and uncreated, and has always existed.

Augustine goes on to say that when we seek a likeness by which to see “the Word of God” “through a mirror as in an enigma,” we should look to our internal word, not to the outer word manifested through the senses.⁹ He treats “mirror” and “enigma” as he does the word “word”; they carry technical senses related to the interpretation of figurative language. For Augustine, in Paul’s “we see now through a mirror in an enigma,” the word “mirror” cues an image or likeness to be interpreted, and “enigma” cues an intense cognitive puzzle.¹⁰

Using the concept of form imposed on a word when enunciated, Augustine highlights the distinction between creator and created, begotten and made, the true language spoken by God and human languages. While his point relies on the notion that some aspect of God’s truth is innate and resides within the mind, the way he chooses to put forward his analogy reveals something of his thought about the nature of language itself. His theoretical focus, the inability of human language to express the divine in plain speech, is demonstrated in practice as well: he needs a specialized sense of the word “word” in order to say what cannot be said directly about “the Word of God.” Only the reader who understands that the word “word” is supercharged with sense will be able to glean one sense from another, through a mirror, in a trope.

Each of the writers who are the primary subjects of my investigation similarly uses language on occasion in a technical and specialized way, sometimes drawing from a word’s polysemous nature, sometimes investing words, phrases, or images with context-specific meaning. This process is characteristic of most writing, of course, and in particular of poetry. Nevertheless, the concept of the Incarnation, having human form as an important focus, invites and even necessitates special formal awareness, of which this is one example. Insofar as Augustine capitalizes on both linguistic and rhetorical form to make his analogy, his strategy proved a usefu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The “Enigma” of Signification in “Figurative” Language
• Chapter 2. Elisions of Abstract and Concrete, Epitomized in a “True-love”
• Chapter 3. Agency: When Christ as “Doer” Is Also the “Love Deed”
• Chapter 4. Time in Narrative: The Teleology of History Meets the Timelessness of God “in plenitudo temporis”
• Chapter 5. “He is in the mydde point”: Poetic Deep Structure and the Frameworks of Incarnational Poetics
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Acknowledgments