Staging Contemplation

Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama

Eleanor Johnson

• Editore: University of Chicago Press
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226572208
• Argomento: Littérature
• Categoria: Critique littéraire

What does it mean to contemplate? In the Middle Ages, more than merely thinking with intensity, it was a religious practice entailing utter receptiveness to the divine presence. Contemplation is widely considered by scholars today to have been the highest form of devotional prayer, a rarified means of experiencing God practiced only by the most devout of monks, nuns, and mystics.
Yet, in this groundbreaking new book, Eleanor Johnson argues instead for the pervasiveness and accessibility of contemplative works to medieval audiences. By drawing together ostensibly diverse literary genres—devotional prose, allegorical poetry, cycle dramas, and morality plays— Staging Contemplation paints late Middle English contemplative writing as a broad genre that operated collectively and experientially as much as through radical individual disengagement from the world. Johnson further argues that the contemplative genre played a crucial role in the exploration of the English vernacular as a literary and theological language in the fifteenth century, tracing how these works engaged modes of disfluency—from strained syntax and aberrant grammar, to puns, slang, code-switching, and laughter—to explore the limits, norms, and potential of English as a devotional language. Full of virtuoso close readings, this book demonstrates a sustained interest in how poetic language can foster a participatory experience of likeness to God among lay and devotional audiences alike.

PART I

Participating in Time and Eternity

CHAPTER ONE

Feeling Time, Will, and Words

Vernacular Devotion in The Cloud of Unknowing

Scholarship on The Cloud of Unknowing falls into two main camps, one of which focuses on the Cloud’s contribution to early English prose, while the other examines its theory of spiritual practice.1 This bifurcation of critical attention manifests a crux in the Cloud itself—namely, how its intricate prose stylistics embody its equally intricate ideation.2 As I will show, assessing the Cloud-author’s style in direct relation to his theory of spiritual practice gets at the very core of his project: to design a work that teaches its devotional practice via a participatory sense-experience of literature. In evoking the discourse of participation, I do not mean to undercut the Cloud’s own explicit and recurrent focus on attaining union (“onhede”) with the divine as the ultimate goal of contemplative practice. Quite the contrary, in The Cloud of Unknowing, the sensory cultivation of a contemplative’s awareness of his participation in God is instrumental in his being able eventually to approach that union with God.

On its surface, The Cloud of Unknowing seems a fairly straightforward text. It is an apophatic treatise, composed around 1390. Its announced project is to explore and explain how, exactly, contemplatives can and should contemplate a God who is, by his very nature, unknowable. Indeed, the Cloud-author quickly and pervasively makes clear that the actual contemplation of God is not cognitive—in the sense of intellectually or rationally knowable—hence the work’s governing image of a cloud of “unknowing.” The Cloud-author also makes clear that, although loving affect is involved in the work of contemplation, contemplation is not purely affective. He tells us that in the highest states of contemplation, we neither know God rationally nor feel him affectively: “thou maist not see him cleerly by light of vnderstonding in thi reson, ne fele him in swetnes of loue in thin affeccion.”3 But if God is not to be fathomed rationally or felt affectively, what can we say about how we are meant to fathom God?

To get at the particular path to fathoming God, the Cloud deploys two key terms, each of which reaches toward a mode of knowing that is not quite rational, not quite affective, but something decidedly sensory. One of them, which arises in the ninth chapter, is “grope.” When talking about the nature of “contemplacion” (CU, 9.34.12), the Cloud-author says, “& loke thou have no wonder of this; for mightest thou ones se it as cleerly as thou maist bi grace com to for to grope it & feele it in this liif, thou woldest think as I say” (CU, 9.34.15–16).4 In this passage, the Cloud-author establishes something extremely important about the experiential nature of contemplation. By juxtaposing the terms “grope” and “feele,” the Cloud-author disambiguates the multivalent and oft-used term “feele,” indicating that he is not talking about an affective state of “feeling” but rather about a form of feeling that is, in some ineradicable way, sensory. We are not simply meant to feel an affective emotion of love for God; we are meant to “grope” toward God, to reach out toward him and grab onto him in a palpable way. Simultaneously, by saying “grope” rather than, for instance, “touch,” the Cloud-author calls attention to a certain sensory strain in the act of contemplation: when we need to grope for things, we need to do so because our other senses—sight, hearing, even touch itself—are in some way impaired or inadequate. We do not grope for things in bright light; we grope for them in the dark. Thus, even as the Cloud-author seems to authorize some kind of sensory, physical metaphor for understanding the nature of contemplation, he reminds his readers that the nature of sensory feeling itself in the work of contemplation is far from self-evident. Contemplation is not about seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, or tasting God in any kind of unmediated way; instead, it is about the blind and deaf reaching toward him, desperate, directionless, but whole-intentioned.

Accentuating this image of the blind contemplative groping after God, the Cloud deploys a much fuller and more pervasive set of phrases for how one contemplates God, each of which denotes a compromised kind of sensation: “nakid entent,” “blynde beholding,” “blynde steryng,” and just plain “blynde.” Very early on, then, the Cloud indicates that the effort to contemplate God does not involve seeing but rather a kind of unseeing, and that that unseeing has to do with an intention that is stripped down to its essential character: “For at the first tyme when thou dost it, thou fyndest bot a derknes, & as it were a cloude of unknowyng, thou wost never what, savyng that thou felist in thi wille a nakid entent vnto God” (CU, 3.16–17.19–20, 1–2). This naked intention toward God, much like the image of blind groping, is a state that is not quite affective but is instead a kind of sensation that is determined and delimited by will, by the feelable intention of the contemplative to strain and reach toward God, however blindly and unsurely. Indeed, according to the Cloud, “the substaunce of this werke is not elles bot a nakid entente directe unto God for him-self” (CU, 24.58.15–16); thus, the would-be contemplative is advised, “Be blynde in this tyme, & schere awey covetyse of knowyng, for it wil more let thee than help thee. It suffisith inowgh unto thee that thou fele thee steryd likyngly with a thing thou wost never what, ellys that in thi steryng thou have no specyal thought of any thing under God, & that thin entent be nakidly directe unto God” (CU, 34.70.17–22). Thus, the Cloud correlates the idea of blindness—of attenuated bodily sensation—with the feeling of being stirred toward the contemplation of God, and it correlates that paradoxical state of stirring sensation with the idea of directed, naked intention.

Going further, lest we think that the striving, groping, naked reaching toward God is entirely unphysical, the Cloud later uses an image of wrestling to characterize it: “For I telle thee trewly that I had lever be so nowhere bodely, wrastlyng with that blynde nought, than to be so grete a lorde” (CU, 68.122.2–4). Despite its expressed aversion to physicality in the work of spiritual contemplation, in The Cloud of Unknowing, as in the actual cloud of unknowing that it imagines, the metaphorics of contemplation remain physical, sensory: contemplation denotes a groping, grasping, blind, desperate wrestle with the “blynde nought” that encases and constitutes true understanding. Despite the text’s explicit warnings against bodiliness, against reliance on sight, there remains an acknowledgement that contemplation seems to require some kind of sensory engagement, a sensation that is not one of the bodily senses in its normal application but instead a feeling that calls the contemplative to reach out toward God blindly and nakedly, groping and wrestling with only his bare intention. The Cloud’s paradoxical theory seems to be that contemplation requires at once an annihilation of the standard bodily senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, but that it also engenders or requires some emergent new sense, capable of groping and wrestling blindly toward God.5 This sense is what The Cloud of Unknowing aims to cultivate in its readership.

After all, the Cloud-author is careful to remind his readers time and again that the text of the Cloud itself is geared not only to explain but also actually to enact some small part of the work of contemplation itself. He tells his audience that he presents his book to them, “So that thou mayst conceyve here by theese wordes sumwhat . . . that in this werk men schul use no menes, ne yit men mowe not com therto with menes” (CU, 34.71.6–8). There is no “mene,” no intermediary or middleman, in the work of contemplation; and yet, the Cloud itself is somehow designed to help the reader “conceyve” the work of contemplation. Toward the end of the book, the Cloud-author returns to this theme of textual embodiment, saying, “Alle thoo that redyn or heren the mater of this book be red or spokin, & in this redyng or hering think it good & likyng thing, ben never the rather clepid of God to worche in this werk, only for this likyng steryng that thei fele in the tyme of this redyng” (CU, 75.130–31.24, 1–3). The “tyme of this redyng” is meant to convey to a reader a desire to “worche in this werk” of groping toward God. The book itself, as this chapter will detail further, is designed and styled to invite a reader into the contemplative act, to inspire an initiatory “steryng” in them that will help awaken them to the “blynde steryng” they are ultimately meant to feel toward God. Indeed, through its artful prose style, the Cloud creates for its readership a sensory simulacrum of the experience of spiritual contemplation itself, so that the work becomes not only a macrocosmic description but also a microcosmic initiation of spiritual work. As will become clear, the Cloud-author finds in the particular formal properties of his contemplative prose style a sensory experience that is uniquely appropriate to the work of contemplative devotion—a sensory experience that cognitively conveys the “groping” toward an understanding of God. Indeed, even though the actual work of contemplation—the striving toward and into the cloud of unknowing itself—is, as its name implies, non- or even anticognitive, the enacting of that work in the literary field of the text is decidedly cognitive, because it is decidedly sensory.

AUGUSTINE’S CHALLENGE AND THE CLOUD-AUTHOR’S RESPONSE

Since the Cloud-author’s technique of spiritual practice is central to my argument, I will review how it works. As is widely known, the Cloud teaches a practice of prayer and meditation through which a spiritual practitioner can achieve union, or “onhede,” with God (CU, 8.32.15). As in many devotional works, love is the primary unitive force the Cloud describes and seeks to cultivate in its readership. This “love” entails the exertion of will—what the Cloud calls “nakid entente”—toward God.6 The Cloud-author figures this “nakid entente” as “a sharp dart of longing love,” with which one must repeatedly strike or “smyte” the “cloud of unknowing” that separates one from God.7 This “smiting” is the central activity of spiritual practice; devout “smiting” enables the spiritual practitioner to penetrate into the cloud and be absorbed up into it and into “onhede” with the divine.

The Cloud-author recognizes that the darts of “nakid entente” might prove hard to “grope,” both conceptually and in practice, so he offers up a relatively concrete meditative tactic: to “have betir holde ther-apon,” he explains, his readers should use language as a vehicle for loving will, so that the “entente” is “lappid and foulden in o worde”—namely, the word of prayer (CU, 7.28.8, 11, 10).8 It seems natural enough that readers should fold their will into prayer, but exactly how the word of prayer is rendered a suitable vehicle for their “nakid entente” is of particular significance in the Cloud. The Cloud-author urges his readers not just to pray, but specifically to “take bot a litil worde of o silable” during the time of prayer, recommending the monosyllables “God” and “love”: “& soche a worde is this worde GOD or this worde LOVE” (CU, 7.28.13–14). Readers are urged not just to utter this short word once but rather to repeat it over and over again: “fasten this worde to thin herte, so that it never go thens for thing that bifalleth. . . . With this worde thou schalt bete on this cloude & this derknes aboven thee” (CU, 7.28.15–16, 18–19). Prayer, for the Cloud-author, is neither narrative nor syntactic; instead, it is recursive and asyntactic. It is nothing more or less than the steady repetition of a single word that embodies the loving “nakid entente” that its utterer bears toward God. This mode of repetitive, self-identical, short prayer is meant to embody the “sharp darts of longing love” with which the spiritual practitioner must “smyte” and “bete” the cloud of unknowing: like tiny spearpoints of loving will, short words are sent to pierce into the cloud and produce the beginnings of a “onheed” or union between the contemplative and God.

But the connection between monosyllabic prayer and the work of spiritual devotion extends to a far deeper level of the Cloud-author’s theory, having roots in his understanding of the difference and relationship between time and eternity. That understanding, in turn, underpins his theory of how one achieves true union with God by cultivating an awareness of one’s ever-present participation in him. The Cloud-author’s understanding of time and eternity reflects his engagement with earlier theorists, and particularly with Augustine, who understands time and eternity as fundamentally different dimensions, which structure fundamentally different modes of willing, loving, and using language.

In Augustine’s view, divine eternity is uniform and unchanging, an ever-present and self-similar presence:

All your years stand together, since they endure, and your past years do not exclude the coming years, because your years do not pass away: however, all these, our years, shall be, when all of them have passed. Your years are but a day, and your day is not daily changing, but always today, because your today does not yield to tomorrow; and thus it does not succeed a yesterday. Your “today” is eternity.9

By contrast with this unchanging divine presence, human experience is fragmentary and changeful, divided into past, present, and future. Moreover, since the past has passed, and the future has not yet arrived, Augustine suggests that only the present moment of time can be said truly to exist. When he goes on to explore the nature of that “present,” he eventually concludes that the actual present moment is so fleeting that it effectively is of no duration whatsoever.10 While God’s eternal present is infinite, spanning all conceivable pasts, presents and futures, humanity’s temporal present is infinitesimal, compressed on either side by the “past” and “future,” reduced to a span too tiny to be conceived by the mind.

Despite the elusiveness of the temporal present, Augustine does recognize that time can be perceived in some manner, since the mind is able to experience duration. Augustine illustrates how the mi...