sententiae volume v

S E N T E N T I A E!e Harvard Undergraduate Journal of Medieval Studies

Volume V

2013-14

iiiii

S E N T E N T I A E

Managing EditorsDominic FerranteZachary FletcherRebecca Frankel

Ben Koerner

Cambridge

!e Harvard Book Store

A!"#$%&'()'*'#+,: Sententiae would like to thank Ivy Livingston, Sean Gilsdorf, and faculty advisors, as well as Dan Smail and the Harvard Medieval Studies Committee. !e Board extends its gratitude to everyone who submitted work for consideration to Vol. 5.

______________

Copyright 2014 Sententiae. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without express consent. !e opinions expressed are those of the contributors and are not necesscarily shared by the editorial board. !e Harvard name and/or Veritas shield are trademarks of the President and Fellows of Harvard College and are used by permission of Harvard University. !e Harvard Undergraduate Journal of Medieval Studies is proud to be a registered and o+cial student group at Harvard.

Contents

iv Editors’ Note

articles 1 !e Ruin: A Transcription and Translation of Fragments from the 10th

Century Exeter Book Owen Laub, Harvard University

6 !e Will to Charity: Movement of the Will in Piers Plowman and the Works of George Grant

Chase Padusniak, College of the Holy Cross 33 !e Sacrality of Relics and the Eucharist: Trends in Objects of Veneration Julia Tomlinson, Kenyon College

42 Conversion to Judaism During the Crusader Period:Proselytization through the Case Study of a Cairo Genizah Document Danielle Rabinowitz, Harvard University

48 Poem from the 8th century Codex Salamasianus: A Translation and Com-mentary

Zachary Fletcher, Harvard University

1iv

Laub

A Note From the Managing Editors of S!"#!"#$%!

!is journal is an a+rmation that medieval scholarship is very much alive at the undergraduate level, including here at Harvard. !e following articles treat a wide variety of subjects, eras, and nations within the medieval spec-trum. However, they are united by the knowledge that there is always more to say and discover about medieval literature, history, art, culture, and reli-gion. We hope you enjoy this 89h issue of Sententiae, and want to o:er our heartfelt thanks to all those who have made this production possible. Rebecca Frankel C%&'($)*!, %+($, -./0

Owen Laub, Harvard University

“-e Ruin”: A Transcription and Translation of Fragments from the 10th-Century Exeter Book

32

Sententiae V Laub

II. Translation

Wondrous is this stone wall broken by fate; 1a city shattered, the withering work of giants.Ruined roofs, ruined rooks,the gates gashed, rime on the limestone,the shorn storm-shelters collapsed, 5eaten in by age. Earth’s grasp holds the master masons, decomposed, disappearedin the grim grip of the earth that a hundredclans have come to know. While this wall remainedlichen-gray and red-stained, kingdom a9er kingdom 10withstood tempests. But the high wide wall has fallen.Yet the… …hewnskin on…grimly ground to dust… …she 15 …the ancient artifact …the clay crust of the earth gave waythe soul… …swi9ly devisedto bind the wall-roots in rings of wire;strong-counsel, strong-mind: a wonder together. 20Bright were the urban abodes, the many bath-houses,high and horn-strewn. !e thunderous throngs,many mead halls, days full of joy,all but for that unalterable power – fate.Slaughter spread as came the days of death – 25a death devouring all men;peons perished, defenses were deserted,the dominion decayed. Atoners fellto the earth. So the great hall was dreary,and the broad roof dripped 30blood-red tiles from its crown. A ruined mountain, it tumbledto the ground, broken. !ere, many men of yoregood in soul and adorned in magni8cent golden splendor,beaming in battle-gear and 8lled with wine, had gazed;gazed on gold, on silver, on gem-studded ornaments, 35on pearls, on opulence, on fortune itself,on that bright city and its broad domain.

I. Introduction“!e Ruin” can be found near the end of the Exeter Book, an 8th century corpus of Old English poems and riddles. Portions of the text are missing due to damage by 8re. !e author of the Exeter Book is unknown. Wrætlic is þes wealstan, wyrde gebræcon; 1burgstede burston, brosnað enta geweorc. Hrofas sind gehrorene, hreorge torras, hrungeat berofen, hrim on lime, scearde scurbeorge scorene, gedrorene, 5ældo undereotone. Eorðgrap hafað waldend wyrhtan forweorone, geleorene, heardgripe hrusan, oþ hund cnea werþeoda gewitan. O9 þæs wag gebad ræghar ond readfah rice æ9er oþrum, 10ofstonden under stormum; steap geap gedreas. Wonað giet se… ...num geheapen, fel on… grimme gegrunden… scan… …heo 15...g orþonc …ærscea9 ...g …lamrindum beag mod mo... ...yne swi9ne gebrægd hwætred in hringas, hygerof gebond weallwalan wirum wundrum togædre. 20Beorht wæron burgræced, burnsele monige, heah horngestreon, heresweg micel, meodoheall monig dreama full, oþþæt þæt onwende wyrd seo swiþe. Crungon walo wide, cwoman woldagas, 25swylt eall fornom secgrofra wera; wurdon hyra wigsteal westen staþolas, brosnade burgsteall. Betend crungon hergas to hrusan. Forþon þas hofu dreorgiað, ond þæs teaforgeapa tigelum sceadeð 30hrostbeages hrof. Hryre wong gecrong gebrocen to beorgum, þær iu beorn monig glædmod ond goldbeorht gleoma gefrætwed, wlonc ond wingal wighyrstum scan; seah on sinc, on sylfor, on searogimmas, 35on ead, on æht, on eorcanstan, on þas beorhtan burg bradan rices.

54

Sententiae V Laub

A house of stone once stood where a hot stream spewedforth a frothy spring, all circled by a wall:a bright bosom. !ere were the baths, 40hot to the core. !at was true comfort.Let those pour…hot streams over gray stonenot… …until the hot round pool 45 …there the baths were.then is… …that is a kingly thinghouse… city…

Stanhofu stodan, stream hate wearp widan wylme; weal eall befeng beorhtan bosme, þær þa baþu wæron , 40hat on hreþre. þæt wæs hyðelic. Leton þonne geotan ofer harne stan hate streamas un... ...þþæt hringmere hate 45 þær þa baþu wæron. þonne is… ...re; þæt is cynelic þing, huse… burg…

76

PadusniakSententiae V

themselves caught between “a tour on to9 tieliche ymaked”1 and “a deep dale bynethe, a dungeon therinne.”2 Yet, Piers Plowman addresses just how the will can decide not to decide in the face of “good laden with semblances of evil”3 and evil masquerading as loving goodness. In a complex world full of multifaceted problems, Langland uses an allegorical dream vision to explore how one can act skeptically and yet piously to face “the dynamo”4 without freezing when confronted with a litany of morally ambiguous options. He calls for openness and receptivity of otherness, which bear the fruit of love and good works regardless of the world’s tumult. Skepticism without torpor and thoughtful action without unthinking piety de8ne Langland’s approach. Similarly, George Grant and his contemporaries were faced with a historical moment of great peril. “Knowledge of good which we did not measure and de8ne but by which we were measured and de8ned”5 had disappeared in the face of “the project of modern reason,”6 which “sum-mons di:erent things to questioning”7 in order to gain an account of their reasons for being what they are. He lived in a world where “boredom and weariness of spirit”8 had replaced a yearning for the eternally true or the in8nitely good. His was the world of consumer goods, corporation capital-ism and nuclear arms, a world in which the push of a button could mean the annihilation of a comfortable, and yet essentially nihilistic, materialism. Grant’s day was one in which the possibility of Armageddon loomed large, yet in which, under the surface, lurked a sedated, ill-informed faith in a successful, but decidedly meaningless, liberalism. As a philosopher, Grant recognized these problems but refused simple inaction as the solution. Analogously to the poet born centuries before, he supports a return to “the

1 Langland, Piers, Prologue, l. 14.


3 Bowers, Crisis, 59.

4 Grant, George, “A Platitude,” 143.

5 Grant, George, “Faith and the Multiversity,” Technology and Justice, (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1986), 59.

6 Ibid., 37.

7 Ibid.

8 Grant, George, “In Defence of North America,” Technology and Empire, (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1969), 24.

Chase Padusniak, College of the Holy Cross

-e Will to Charity: -e Movement of the Will in ‘Piers Plowman’ and the Works of George Grant

“‘Charite,’ quod he, ‘ne cha1areth noght, ne chalangeth, ne craveth;As proud of a peny as of a pound of golde.” – Piers Plowman

“In such a situation of uncertainty, it would be lacking in courage to turn one’s face to the wall.” - George Grant

Although William Langland and George Grant lived in markedly di:erent historical moments, their approaches to the question of the human will are analogous. Separated by centuries of turmoil, change, and uproar they manage to produce distinct, and yet, similar responses to how the good life is to be willed in the face of chaos. Both poet and philosopher are faced with periods of uncertainty that present pressing metaphysical questions, especially regarding the will. As a result, their two approaches to the question of willing are illuminating in discovering how truths can be touched on regardless of historical circumstances. !eir analogous expla-nations in the face of analogous questions point to an ability to transcend simple historical moments. Langland imagines “in somer seson, when so9e was the sonne”1 “a fair feeld ful of folk…/ Of alle manere of men, the meene and the riche.”2 His dreamer, the aptly named Will, bears witness to the tumult of the day, to “japeres and jangeleres, Judas children,”3 reAecting the “world in turmoil”4 around the poet himself. In the face of plague, political intrigue and clerical corruption, familiar ideas about morality and holiness seemed inadequate. In a palpable way, Langland and his contemporaries found

1 Langland, William. Piers, Prologue, l. 1. Piers Plowman is a fourteenth-century allegorical poem attributed to William Langland,

about whom almost nothing is known. Written in Middle English, the poem is titled after the narrator and main character of the poem, who seeks to discover how to be a good Christian. The poem survives in several dozen medieval manuscripts in various states of completeness.

2 Ibid., Prologue, 17-18.

3 Ibid., Prologue, 35.

4 Bowers, John M., The Crisis of the Will in Piers Plowman, (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 1.

98

Sententiae V Padusniak

experiences of receptivity”1 in which men must try to remember what has come before, in which they listen for “intimations of deprival.”2 Only a9er the will has actively rested in its openness can it move into acts of piety and goodness. Any understanding of how these men came to such analogous conclusions about the “will to charity” across so many centuries of strife, turmoil and di:erence requires knowledge of their historical circumstanc-es. In the case of Langland, one can trace his poem’s concerns to a tension that had plagued Christianity from its very beginnings. In fact, Michael Allen Gillespie goes so far as to declare that “the origins of the medieval world can be traced to the synthesis of Christianity and pagan philosophy in the Hellenistic world of late antiquity.”3 !e attempt to bring together the revelatory nature of Christianity and the rational inquiry of philosophy was formalized in a series of councils by the early church such as Nicaea and Chalcedon. Even this coalescing of disparate ideas was temporary; revela-tion and reason continued to exist in tension and the place they le9 for the will, among other concerns, was a “continuing problem”4 for Christian thinkers. !e issue that Langland would grapple with in the fourteenth century was not a new one; it could trace its roots back to an uneasy synthesis and tension found the in very beginning of Christianity As a faith, its roots were 8rmly planted in both the philosophy of Greece and the revelatory tradition of ancient Israel; it has, from its beginnings, existed in a tension between these sources of authority and knowledge. As a result, the learned men of the fourteenth century continued to struggle with this congenital problem, even if its particulars may have di:ered from earlier attempts at synthesis. However that synthesis and the doctrines of the will that it made possible became obscured over time, resulting in the tumult that would come to de8ne the theological atmosphere of Langland’s own day. !e deposition of the last Western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was the 8nal chapter in the obfuscation of the Eastern roots of the synthesis. As the West and the East dri9ed apart in terms of hierarchy so did the West become less conscious of the Greek roots of its theological arguments. “A slim

1 Grant, George. Time as History, ed. William Christian, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 62.

2 Grant, “A Platitude,” 143.

3 Gillespie, Michael Allen. The Theological Origins of Modernity, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 19.

4 Gillespie, Theological Origins, 20.

connection to this earlier philosophical tradition”5 continued through authors like Boethius, but Aristotle and Plato increasingly became just names to the Westerners as they used the thought found in ancient works without necessarily having access to the texts themselves. !e ancient libraries had been lost and with them the books of the ancient thinkers who had shaped Christian thought; the gulf that was created was a physical one as texts were made unavailable, and a theoretical one as the depen-dence on ancient sources became less clear to Westerners. Given the situation, the synthesis of revelation and reason remained tentative, but was poised to be challenged or expanded, pending a grand historical moment: the reclamation of Aristotle’s thought. Although the sources used to bring about synthesis became increas-ingly obscure, the rediscovery of Aristotle’s works in the West provided the catalyst that would launch the debate that reached its apogee in Langland’s day. Contact with Muslim Spain and the Muslim Levant led Western thinkers to a new and reinvigorated confrontation with Aristotle. “!is led, shortly a9er the millennium, to the rise of scholasticism, which was the greatest and most comprehensive theological attempt to reconcile the philosophical and scriptural elements in Christianity.”6 !e scholastic realists, such as St. !omas Aquinas and his epigones, began to seek a new, more re8ned synthesis. Drawing on a Neo-Platonic reading of Aristotle, they regarded only universals as truly real; individuals were just speci8c instances of eternal Forms. “Within this realist ontology, nature and reason reAected one another.”7 Man had a telos, which could be understood ratio-nally through the observation and comprehension of natural phenomena. God may exist outside of his creation, but his will is analogously represent-ed in the nature he had willed. Because the creator was reAected in his creation, reason could discern, by examining nature, what was morally right and wrong, how the will should act, and more. Everything was a part of a rationally intelligible order ordained by God. And so the cosmos became the symbol of synthesis. !e God of revelation had revealed a universe through which man’s end and God’s will could be known; the tension of the ancient synthesis seemed to dissipate. And yet, “the center could not hold” as this neat order found itself collapsing, leading to the theological turmoil faced by the “fair feeld ful of folk.”8

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.


1110


!e synthesis of the Scholastic Realists was 8rst challenged by a secular Aristotelianism, beginning the series of events that would lead to the Ockhamist revolution and what John M. Bowers calls Langland’s “world in turmoil.”9 !e rational world of the Scholastic Realists began to unravel because they “depended on the delicate counterbalancing of Christian belief and pagan rationalism.”10 A secular Aristotelianism emerged, favoring the rationalistic side to the revelatory one, re-aggravat-ing one of Christianity’s congenital tensions. To make matters worse, commentaries on Aristotle by Muslim thinkers such as Avicenna and Averroës entered the European consciousness. !e failure of the Crusades, coupled with a general xenophobia of what was sometimes viewed as a quasi-pagan perversion of Christianity, cast suspicion on these texts and those who read them. Aristotelian philosophy came to be associated with Islam, which did not bode well for its followers. “!e Church attempted to limit what it saw as a theologically subversive development by 8at;”11 it tried to stamp out Islamic inAuence in order to defend the integrity of Christianity. As a result, some thinkers became suspicious of the Aristote-lian approach to synthesis. Little did anyone realize that such a develop-ment would spur on the revolution of the Nominalists, whose reaction to the rationalism of the Scholastics and other Aristotelians set the 8nal elements on the stage for the theological battle that loomed large in the imagined world of Piers Plowman. In a reaction to this emphasis on reason, some thinkers sought to liberate God and the mystery of existence and creation by emphasizing the radical autonomy of his will, shattering the uneasy synthesis of the Realists and opening wide the chasm of disagreement that informs Langland’s poem. In this vein, William of Ockham drew on previous proto-Nominal-ist thought to upset the Scholastic synthesis in a way that reopened and reinvigorated the question of the will for medieval Europeans. Ockham “laid out in great detail the foundations for a new metaphysics.”12 He sought to protect the autonomy of God from complete rationalization. As a result, he turned to the view that faith alone can make possible any knowl-edge close to God’s omnipotence. For him, man cannot discern this fact through any kind of reasoning or rationalization. !is position di:ers from the rationalism of the Scholastics by making God virtually unknowable.



11 Ibid,, 21.

12 Ibid., 22.

God’s will no longer seems to be something comprehensible. In his abso-lute omnipotence bounded only by logical contradiction, God appears to be capable of doing most anything. He seems so autonomous that creation itself becomes “an act of sheer grace.”13 “Every being exists only as a result of his willing it and it exists as it does and as long as it does only because he so wills it.”14 !e Nominalists, the followers of Ockham, used this position to attack even the idea that God was bounded by revelation. He could make good into evil and evil into good; “a man might be allowed to hate God, grace might bestow no merit, a man’s will by itself might determine his reward, grace and sin might exist together, and God might damn a virtuous man while saving a reprobate.”15 With reason so questioned, the Aoodgates had been opened and the immediate scene began to be set for the theoretical backdrop to Langland’s poem. By questioning reason in this way, the Nominalists helped to create the confusion and turmoil found in Langland’s imagined world in two distinct ways: they placed the will at the center of their metaphysics; and they upset a delicate synthesis, making man’s ability to reason seem nearly useless. !e latter position is not a di+cult one to imagine. Without reason as a guide to understanding, a man feels lost. !e cosmic synthesis had been brought down in the face of God’s absolutely autonomous will. Ockham e:ectively “undermined the metaphysical/theological foundations of the medieval world.”16 !e new importance of the will grew out of the demolition of the old understanding. “!e only necessary being for Ock-ham was God himself.”17 And so, every other creation is radically contin-gent upon his will, his potentia absoluta18: “the voluntas Dei became the subject of the most urgent theological discussion during the 8rst half of the fourteenth century.”19 !is discussion provides a backdrop for Piers Plow-man. !e poem deals primarily with how men should act given turmoil and confusion. As we shall see, the problem of the human will for Lang-land has its foundations in the Nominalist account of God.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.



17 Ibid.

18 Latin for “Absolute Power.”19 Latin for “God’s will.” Bowers, Crisis, 7.

1312


!e problem of a capricious god was made believable by the turmoil that occurred in the fourteenth century, lending credence to the idea of an Ockhamist deity and making the problem of the will all the more salient for Langland. God was now unknowable and possibly capricious. With the “rationalist veil [ripped] from the face of God,”20 he seemed a distant and whimsical deity who need not abide by what had been thought to be his nature. Many Nominalists were only saved from despairing by a great faith in the benevolence of God. For many, one had to have faith that he was good, despite his mysterious nature: “only unshakeable con8dence in divine benevolence saved these religious philosophers…from the despair of even trying to search a9er truth.”21 In earlier times of greater unity and prosperity such an idea would have seemed absurd. !e fourteenth cen-tury, however, saw “the Black Death, the Great Schism, and the Hundred Years War.”22 Turmoil reigned as people succumbed to what seemed a mystical disease, the Church became divided against itself, and England found itself at war for more than a century. Now, this capricious and unknowable God seemed to be real. Langland’s emphasis on turmoil in his Prologue reAects this uncertainty and disorder: “Manye ferlies han fallen in a fewe yeres. / But Holy Chirche and hii holde better togidres / !e mooste mischief on molde is mountynge up faste.”23 !e poet recognized the disorder of his own time. He saw the pain people su:ered and the theologi-cal and ecclesiastical chaos that reigned. !is consciousness of the current debate informed Langland as he explored the most central question of his century: that of the will. Although the nature of the divine will was debated furiously in the theological circles of the fourteenth century, it was the emergence of the humanist movement and its emphasis on human creativity that brought the human will to the fore. Gillespie sees Petrarch as the prototypical humanist. By putting the individual at the center of their world, the hu-manists mirrored the Ockhamist understanding of the will as autonomous. Man had his own autonomous will much as God had his own: “Like Ockham the humanists were convinced that human beings have no natural form or end.”24 With telos gone from man’s understanding of himself, the


21 Bowers, Crisis, 7-8.


23 Langland, Piers, Prologue, ll. 65-67.


human will became central to the meaning of what it meant to be human. If no logical end seems deducible, then man can will his own end. !e humanists “thus concluded that humans are characterized by their free will.”25 With this last piece in place, the problem of the will could be ap-proached as a human, as opposed to just a divine, problem. Langland’s poem explores the actions of the human will and so engages the contempo-rary Ockhamist-humanist account of autonomy without surrendering a greater perspective. His historical circumstances presented him with new and fascinating questions, questions that emerged alongside man’s new-found absolute autonomy. Langland was surrounded by this debate, one that provided a rich theological backdrop for his poem; one that opened the maw of tumult that Will saw when he 8rst “slombred into a slepyng.”26 !e intellectual turmoil that acts as a background to Piers Plowman eventually became a problem of the people, displaying why Langland has an interest in the will as something integral to everyday experience. Ock-ham and Holcot mention people becoming dissatis8ed with theologians and asking them to rationally defend their faith.27 It would seem that the common people were disturbed by the intellectual debate of the day, making a theoretical problem into a practical one. Scholastic propositions would 8lter down through parish priests and so develop into a part of everyday consciousness so that these ideas were “vulgarized”28 very quickly. A staunch faith and anti-intellectualism su+ced for many as a reaction to such mind-numbing theoretical tension. Although it took “many forms,”29 Langland shows the reader just a few, demonstrating his own familiarity with the practical dimension of these deeply intellectual issues: “Ac !eolo-gie hath tened me ten score tymes: !e moore I muse therinne, the mystier it semeth, / And the depper I devyne, the derker me it thynketh.”30 It is thought that Langland “le9 [school] early for 8nancial reasons,”31 but the fact that he received some degree of schooling means that he would have

25 Ibid.


27 Bowers, Crisis, 13

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid., 14.

30 Langland, Piers, X, ll. 182-184.


1514


had some knowledge of the contemporary debate while the poem clearly points to an understanding of its more vulgar, practical implications. !is poet was conscious of the debates that raged around him; the question of the will was not only a practical one for him but also one of great theologi-cal signi8cance that had to be addressed pragmatically. And so, Piers speaks about the will not only in order to address societal questions but also to get to the heart of the age-old question that has bothered pagans and Christians alike: “how then shall we live?” Having taken the time to examine the immense theoretical back-drop to Langland’s historical circumstances, we can see more intelligibly how Piers Plowman itself can speak about the will; 8rst and foremost, this becomes evident in the allegorical dreamer who narrates the poem, Will. !e entire poem is allegorical with characters with names like “Repentaunce,”32 “Sleuthe,”33 and “Conscience.”34 !ese characters even speak and act in ways reminiscent of the concepts they represent: “I, Sleuthe…/ Bothe Aesh and 8sh and manye other vitailles…/ Forlseuthed in my service til it myghte serve no man.”35 “Sleuthe” is a character who acts slothfully by letting foodstu:s spoil. It is true that many readers of the poem have seen “Longe Will”36 as a quasi-autobiographical version of the author himself, whose name was William.37 But this reading is not the one of interest to the problem of the will that was of such interest to Langland’s contemporaries. And so along with many other readers of the poem, I will deal with the character of “Longe Will” as representing “to some extent the faculty of the human will.”38 In this view, the Will who “shoop…into shroudes as…a sheep were”39 can be seen as a reAection of the human will as it tries to navigate the turmoil of fourteenth-century England, deciding when and how to act.

32 Langland, Piers, V, l. 443.

33 Ibid., V, l. 435.

34 Ibid., V, l. 539.

35 Ibid., V, ll. 435, 437, 439.

36 Ibid., XV, l. 152.

37 Schmidt, A.V.C., “Introduction,” The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt, 2nd ed, (London: Orion Publishing Group, 2011), xxi-xxiii.



Despite the integrality of the will to late medieval thought and the allegorical nature of Will the character, Langland imagines a dreamer who is mostly passive and who always feels the need to wait before deciding in order to demonstrate how the will itself must occasionally decide not to decide. In the 8rst passus, Will does little besides question “Holi Chirche”40 about his dream and what is happening in it. We are mostly presented with little more than attempts by “Holi Chirche” to explain the tower and the dungeon and their signi8cance to the folk in the 8eld. !is allegorical 8gure tries to explain the “personal, social, and historical disorders of…[the] day”41 “in terms of the biblical narrative.”42 But she ultimately runs away, leading him to continue to ask questions of the other allegorical 8gures he meets, relaying what they say to the reader. !e second major movement of the poem, the so-called Vita de Dowel, involves a misguided search for a person named Dowel, resulting in a whirlwind of characters who blend together into the “most confused portion”43 of the poem. Will is lectured to by characters such as “Wit,”44 “Dame Studie”45 and “Scripture.”46 In fact, Will does not do much besides ask a few questions and listen to long responses to his questions for the vast majority of the poem. Given this role, it seems that Will is a passive character whose primary role is that of listener, even to the point of becoming lost in a dynamo of advice, much as Langland seems to have felt the people were confused by and lost in the turmoil of the contemporary debate about the will and God. As Bowers puts it, he is “a man named Will who postpones intellectual decisions, delays his a+rmation of faith, and neglects good works until he can be absolutely sure what ‘Dowel’ means.”47 For this poet in the face of constant movement and chaos in lived existence, the will, like the dreamer, must

40 Ibid., I, l. 75.

41 Kee, James, “The Political Realm After Christ: Langland’s Search for a Just Order in Piers Plowman,” unpublished paper given to author, 3.

42 Ibid.

43 Murtaugh, Daniel Maher, Piers Plowman and the Image of God, (Gainseville: The University Presses of Florida, 1978) 63.

44 Langland, Piers, IX, l. 1.

45 Ibid., X, l. 1.

46 Ibid., XI, l. 1.


1716


occasionally decide to not decide. Langland’s notion that the will can be active in its inaction is cen-tered in the volitional theory of Jean Buridan, demonstrating how the contemporary debate further inAuenced his response to the question of the will. Buridan was an “eminent Paris philosopher”48 who was inAuenced by the “indi:erence theory” of Dons Scotus, which stated that “the will was able to suspend judgment.”49 Buridan posited that “the decision of the will to suspend its own operation can only be the result of volition, [so] the will demonstrates the soul’s absolute freedom to avoid all coercion from outside.”50 He called this ability of the will to act in conAicting ways, to act to do something, nothing, or its own opposite, libertas oppositionis.51 !is idea of an autonomous will as put forth by Buridan is exactly what Langland propagates by having Will the Dreamer misguidedly seek Dowel and remain passive in his confusion. !e dreamer recalls the priest’s contending that “Dowel indulgences passed,”52 meaning that good is more important than “the pardon of Sent Petres cherche.”53 Will, however, takes Dowel to be a person and decides to seek the man named Dowel: “!us yrobed in russet I romed aboute / Al somer seson for to seke Dowel.”54 !is event leads him to the confusing whirlwind of character discussed above, paralyzing him with complete inaction. In fact, the quest becomes so disorienting that the dreamer hands himself over to the forces of fortune, feeling as if he will never 8nd Dowel: “For I was ravysshed right there – for Fortune me fette.”55 Although he eventually escapes Fortune’s grasp, Will only falls to Fortune because of the turmoil of the world around him. He cannot act because he does not know how to act; he cannot decide, so he decides not to decide. Buridan’s theological concept is reAected in just this confused inaction. Langland uses this allegorized 8gure and his misunder-

48 Ibid., 58.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid., 59.

51 Ibid. Also, the Latin means “freedom of opposition.”

52 Langland, Piers, VII, l. 170.

53 Ibid., VII, l. 173.

54 Ibid., VIII, ll. 1-2.

55 Ibid., XI, l. 7.

stood quest, which is itself a reAection of the will’s confusion, to explore how men may, when faced with the turmoil of “Middelerthe,”56 act by remaining passive, to examine the right place of the will in relation to passive stillness in the face of the world’s confused dynamism. Will the Dreamer eventually manages to come out of his confusion, demonstrating how the will can move from passivity to activity in Lang-land’s view. Toward the end of the Vita de Dowel, Will meets a series of characters such as “Ymaginatif ”57 and “Pacience,”58 who begin to guide him out of his confusion. It is Anima, however, whom he meets in Passus XV that fully brings the will from passive inaction toward charity. Anima is the soul in its wholeness and represents the coming together of the various parts of the soul; he is an ordering that brings cohesion to the confused search of the will for Dowel: “Called am I Anima; / And whan I wilne and wolde, Animus ich hatte; / And for that I kan and knowe, called am I Mens.”59 Anima makes it clear that one cannot come to charity without knowing Piers Plowman, giving Will his 8rst true understanding of how he should act.60 “His fragmented psyche, it seems, is beginning to recover a measure of integrity.”61 Given Anima’s suggestion that charity is the correct volitional end, Langland argues that the Will must be open, passive and receptive, allow-ing it to move toward the act of charity in the face of circumstantial tur-moil. !e dreamer was confused and sought Dowel as a person and not as an idea, but he was mostly passive. !is willingness helped him to listen to Anima who then helped him to understand what charity is and how to actualize it. Pacience and Anima punctuate their arguments with the words “pacientes vincunt.”62 Patience is the key to the will’s victory in the world. One must decide not to decide until one knows what to do; receptivity and passive openness are the keys to ordering oneself, just as Anima is correctly ordered, so as to pursue charity. Will must modify his questioning ap-

56 Ibid., XI, l. 9.

57 Ibid., XIII, l. 1.

58 Ibid., XIII, l. 51.

59 Ibid, XV, ll. 23-25.

60 Kee, “Langland’s Search,” 7.

61 Ibid.

62 Langland, Piers, XV, l. 597. The Latin means “patience overcomes.”

1918


proach and become a true listener. He had asked so much in his attempt to 8nd Dowel, but was misguided. Now with Anima, his confusion ends because he becomes a listener completely. He has always been largely passive, but he was not always open. Free of his desire to know and under-stand, now open and receptive to what his soul, his Anima, has to say, Will begins to become active in charity. He comes to know that charity is Piers Plowman not from a desire to know, but from openness to knowing: “[‘]Alle the sciences under sonne and alle the sotile cra9es / I wolde I knewe and kouthe kyndely in myn herte!’ / ‘!an artow inpar8t,’ quod he, ‘And oon of Prides knyghtes!”63 Anima warns Will against wanting to know, claiming that the desire to know runs the risk of conAating creature with creator.64 One must always remember revelation’s proper place in true knowing. Instead of self-destructively seeking answers, the will is to be still and passive, to be open and receptive. Piers Plowman most forcefully demonstrates what charity is by retelling a version of Christ’s Harrowing of Hell. Passus XVIII concentrates primarily on this extra-biblical event and its signi8cance for Will, who has turned from hungry questioning to reverent openness. It depicts a 8gure “oon semblable to the Samaritan, and somdeel to Piers the Plowman,”65 who turns out to be “Jesus of his gentries wol juste in Piers armes.”66 So Jesus is shown as a fusion of Piers and the Good Samaritan draped in Piers’s tabard. !e passus then proceeds to tell the story of Christ’s cruci8x-ion and Harrowing of Hell: “‘Consummatum est,’ quod Crist, and comsede for to swoune, / Pitousliche and pale as a prison that deieth / !e lord of lif and of light tho leide his eighen togidres.”67 By dramatizing the moment of the Cruci8xion, Will is moved to see Christ as the absolute emblem of charity. An image he had seen and heard about time and time again is given new life by his openness to its essential meaning, that of the charity of the cross, that is the willing death of the Christ. Charity is only compre-hensible to him in this act, the supreme act of love itself. A description of Christ’s Harrowing of Hell follows, reinforcing the power of charity as the quintessential element of Jesus’ mission: “Was nevere were in this world, ne wikkednesse so kene, / !at Love, and hym liste, to laughynge ne brought, /

63 Ibid., XV, ll. 48-50.

64 Kee, “Langland’s Search,” 7.

65 Langland, Piers, XVIII, l. 10.

66 Ibid., XVIII, l. 22.

67 Ibid., XVIII, ll. 57-59.

And Pees, through pacience, alle periles stopped.”68 It is patient love that conquers all; it is receptivity to the act of charity found in the Cruci8xion story that allows Will to see with new eyes something that he had been told about his entire life. Only this new openness to Christ’s intrinsically chari-table will awakes Will to “call…Kytte and my wif and Calote my doghter”69 for a renewed faith in the power of their lord’s charitable mission. By showing Conscience seeking Piers Plowman, the attack on the Barn of Unity at the end of the poem reinforces Langland’s belief that Buridan’s violitional ideas lead to a charitable will. !e 8nal passus deals predominantly with an attack on Unity, where many characters have taken refuge from an attack by the Antichrist and his minions. In the end, Con-science Aees Unity because Flattery has made Contrition no longer sorry for his sins; he decides to seek Piers Plowman in an attempt to gain victory over the Antichrist: “‘By Crist!’ quod Conscience tho, ‘I wole bicome a pilgrim, / And walken as wide as the world lasteth, / To seken Piers the Plowman.”70 It is essential that Conscience is the one who seeks out Piers Plowman, whom Anima had said was the one through whom one comes to know charity: “Petrus, id est, Christus.”71 Conscience repeatedly cries out for the need to 8nd Piers until the dreamer, or man’s will, awakes: “And siththe he grade a9er Grace, til I gan awake.”72 Read allegorically, con-science is to direct human willing toward charitable action. So a9er the period of passive openness that Will has experienced, he is actively sup-posed to act charitably. !e human will is to do the same. It must be open to the world, not be prideful and forget its place as a creature. Man must be receptive to discerning what charity is and how it is to be enacted. A9er deciding not to decide, the will can bear the fruit of charity by letting man’s conscience direct it. As the dreamer awakes to the cry of conscience, so must man’s will pursue what is good and charitable. So must human beings will to charity in the face of historical disaster and societal turmoil. !is emphasis on passivity leaves Langland’s approach open to sloth, a problem that medieval thinkers took incredibly seriously given the sin’s

68 Ibid., XVIII, ll. 415-417.

69 Ibid., XVIII, l. 428.

70 Ibid., XX, ll. 381-383.

71 Ibid., XV, l. 257.

72 Ibid., XX, l. 387.

2120


vast array of possible manifestations.73 Any contemporary examination of his response to the question of the will must be examined now with equal vigor. Langland himself is very concerned with the sin of sloth, reAecting the feelings of his contemporaries. Sloth has a seventy-8ve line long confes-sion in Passus V74 and is the most prominent character in each of the sequences involving the Seven Deadly Sins, so much so that Sloth becomes a “8erce warrior”75 who is a large part of the assault on Unity. In this vein, Sloth is of the utmost importance to the writer of Piers Plowman; it is not a sin that he takes lightly, especially in terms of the historical and contempo-rary debate surrounding the issue.76 Given how much Langland fears the sin of sloth, it is unlikely that his proposed response to the question of the will would risk slothfulness. As previously stated, Jean Buridan argued for the active, non-movement of the will.77 Sloth involves a lack of volition, a completely unmoved will. Langland’s solution requires the will to will its own stillness, not to despair in the face of chaos and thereby be unmoved. !is poet does not propose laziness, but receptivity. He turns from the possibility of sloth by requiring the will to move itself into stillness. Despite the seeming possibility of sloth in Langland’s response to the question of volition, he de9ly avoids the possibility by appropriating the ideas of Jean Buridan. By placing an emphasis on revelation, Langland also skillfully avoids another charge: the excesses of the Baconian epistemology that would later concern Grant. Ockham’s Nominalism would later inAuence the Baconian position, which underlies most modern scienti8c understanding. Lang-land’s wrestling with Ockhamist thought le9 him open to the same excesses Grant would say Bacon unleashed. !e fact that Anima tells Will that to desire to know all things is a grave sin that denies one true knowledge of charity makes such excess impossible: “For swich a lust and likyng Lucifer fel from hevene… / ‘It were ayeins kynde,’ quod he, ‘and alle kynnes reson /


74 Ibid., 83.

75 Ibid., 92.

76 Ibid., 62.

77 Ibid., 59.

!at any creature sholde konne alle, except Crist oone.”78 Only Christ can know all naturally; faith and revelation, which come from openness, must de8ne man’s stance toward knowledge. Athough Langland appropriates and examines ideas from Ockhamism to examine the contemporary problem of the will, he uses a Christian humility to avoid the possible excesses of which Grant accuses Baconian epistemology. And so, Langland proposes a nuanced and dynamic solution to an age-old, complex problem. He takes his historical moment and gleans from its concerns, problems and debates an eternal truth: that the Christian must demonstrate receptivity in his willing, that to will for the Christian must occasionally mean to will not and that through this openness one seeks Piers Plowman. He avoids becoming a humanist and placing empha-sis on man as a creative being, refusing to blur the line between the crea-ture and the creator. Yet he also does not fall back entirely on an older Scholastic understanding of the world as an ordered whole in which chaos is ephemeral. It is not an easy solution, nor is Langland so haughty as to assume that there is a simple answer to a complex question. But by realiz-ing this and accepting openness as a tentative solution, he gives the Chris-tian a timeless compass with which to navigate the stormy currents of history. William Langland’s understanding of the question of the will is mirrored in that of George Grantwhich while analogous, is a product of entirely di:erent historical circumstances. !e debate about volition evolved over the centuries between their two lives. Human understanding of the will developed between the two men’s lives, a:ecting how Grant viewed the issue. He was a Canadian who saw his people’s history as being integrally linked to an English liberal tradition arising from the meeting of Calvinism with the tabula rasa of the New World: “there was in the theol-ogy of the Calvinist Protestants a positive element which made it immense-ly open to the empiricism and utilitarianism in the English edition of the new sciences.”79 Grant quotes Ernst Troeltsch with regard to the Protestant predisposition to view “divine activity…[as] mere will-acts, connected by no inner necessity and no metaphysical unity of substance.”80 Such an understanding tends toward autonomous willing in the physical world by human beings. For the Calvinist, God’s will is inscrutable but all things that are, are contingent upon this unknowable will. As reAections of God, human beings would also be capable of this autonomous willing, though it

78 Langland, Piers, XV, ll. 51-53.

79 Grant, “In Defence of North America,” 21.

80 Ibid.

2322


may not a:ect their salvation. !is penchant for willing was integral to North Americans in their “primal…meeting of the alien.”81 !ey could will a new life onto the indi:erent nature of North America. For Grant, this uninhibited willing is central to understanding how modern men, espe-cially in North America as the symbolic and real apex of modern thought, view volition. Due to this new understanding meeting a blank slate open to uninhibited, autonomous manipulation, it was a new age for human under-standing of volitional action, “a break in Europe – a turning away from the Greeks in the name of what was found in the Bible.”82 But this new understanding of willing was not without predecessors that provide a link between Langland and Grant. According to Grant, science, Protestantism and capitalism are all linked by a Baconian episte-mology: “more fundamental than the practical connections between capitalism, the parliamentary party, and Protestantism, lies the fact that the refugee Protestant theologians from the continent espoused so immedi-ately the Baconian account of science.”83 Bacon’s ideas were heavily inAu-enced by those of the Nominalists such as William of Ockham, whose ideas were an integral part of Langland’s response to the question of volition: “both the theologians and the scientists wished to free the minds of men from the formulations of mediaeval Aristotelianism.”84 Bacon is identi8ed with his “nominalist predecessors”85 in his rejection of Scholastic under-standings of nature and man’s ability to will onto natural phenomena. Just as Ockham inAuenced Langland and the debate surrounding the will in Piers Plowman, so did the Nominalist-inAuenced Baconians and their followers inAuence how Grant saw modern volitional action. !is philoso-pher deals with the apogee of the problem and the paradigm that Langland confronted. As a result, the temporal and paradigmatic di:erences in their historical moments do not mean that their approaches are opposed, or even not analogous. !e common historical thread between the poet and the philoso-pher led Grant to see the will as creating meaning, betraying how the latter man was dealing with a fundamentally di:erent historical problem. Leo

81 Ibid., 19.

82 Ibid.

83 Ibid., 20.

84 Ibid.


Strauss’s idea of the “oblivion of eternity”86 became central for Grant as it represented the intrinsic meaninglessness of modern existence. He quotes Strauss’s explanation of the term: “estrangement from man’s deepest desire and therewith from the primary issues…for attempting to be absolute sovereign, to become master of nature, to conquer chance.”87 Using this de8nition, Grant diagnoses the problem of the modern will; tying this idea to the consumerism of modern society, Grant attacks how the modern idea of autonomous action shaping an indi:erent nature has yielded a hollow existence: “when the victory over the land leaves most of us in metropoloi where the widely spread consumption vies with confusion and squalor; when the emancipation of greed turns out from its victories on this conti-nent to feed imperially on the resources of the world…[we] must not forget what was necessary and what was heroic in that conquest.”88 Because life has been shown to be, or has become, inherently meaningless, modern men must create meaning themselves. Contemporary human beings can do this act of creation precisely because they recognize themselves as totally autonomous beings who can impose their will on an indi:erent nature: “to will is to legislate; it makes something positive happen or prevents something from happening. Willing is then the expression of the responsible and independent self, distinguished from the dependent self who desires.”89 As a result, “our wills alone are able, through doing, to actualize moral good in the indi:erent world.”90 So willing becomes tied to the good and to meaning. We create meaning by the very act of willing it. !e good does not exist outside our actions: “upon the will to do has been placed the whole burden of meaning.”91 In Grant’s diagnosis of how mod-ern men think, willing is now meaning, placing him eons away from the understanding of the poet who, despite his Ockhamist-inAuenced ideas, could never have conceived of such a nihilistic world. Although Grant sees the will as creating meaning for modern men, he does not believe that the will acts completely on its own. On the con-trary, reason is integrally tied to how modern man understands volition

86 Grant, Time as History, 63.

87 Ibid.

88 Grant, “In Defence of North America,” 24, 25.


90 Ibid., 24.

91 Ibid.

2524


and meaning. Willing and reasoning are tied because reason enlightens the will. “!e will to change the world was a will to change it through the expansion of knowledge”92 and modern man has come to see reason as most manifest in “the discoveries of the sciences.”93 Science and its style of reasoning have become integrally tied to “what we think knowledge is, because it [scienti8c reasoning and its research protocols] is the e:ective condition for the realization of any knowledge.”94 As a result of this co-penetration of willing and reasoning, man believes he can will goodness based on scienti8c reasoning. Scienti8c understanding allows for willing: “!is brings together willing and reasoning, because the very act of the thinking-ego standing over the world, and representing it to himself as objects, is a stance of the will.”95 Grant’s understanding of meaning is integrally tied to man’s new scienti8c understanding of himself and the world. Given this new understanding of willing, Grant deduces that mod-ern man must view himself as working toward the future. Because meaning is not intrinsic but created by acts of the will, all meaning is in the future. Nothing in the now has an inherent meaning, but all things can be given meaning. !is conditional stance of meaning betrays the fact that man must look to the future, to what can be created, as being meaningful. Meaning is found not in how things are now, but in how they can be in the future. !is means a constant orientation to the future: “doing is in some sense always negation. It is the determination that what is present shall not be; some other state shall.”96 Willing, however, is also positive because “it strives to bring forth its own novel ‘creations.’”97 !e act of willing is thus both positive and negative, always orienting man toward what can be and not what is, denying what exists now and always seeking to create what is not. As a result, modern men, whom Grant terms “the history makers,”98 must view meaning as that which will be: “they assert that meaning is not

92 Ibid., 25.

93 Ibid.

94 Grant, George, “Research in the Humanities,” Technology and Justice, (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1986), 99.


96 Ibid., 27.

97 Ibid.

98 Ibid.

found in what is actually now present for us, but in that which we can yet bring to be.”99 In this vein, the philosopher’s understanding of willing is as something unfolding in history and which gives history its meaning. Such a view is a far cry from the emerging autonomy of the will found in Piers Plowman. Although this spirit of willing can be traced back to the theory put forth by the medieval Nominalists, Grant is concerned with such ideas in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, which he sees as the apotheosis of this spirit of modern willing. Nietzsche argues for the need for man to see beyond all historical horizons: “the historical sense shows us that all hori-zons are simply the creations of men…the historical sense teaches us that horizons are not discoveries about the nature of things; they express the values which our tortured instincts will to create.”100 Nietzsche believes that by recognizing these facts about horizons and history man would recog-nize that meaning is not in the nature of things. If everything that was thought to be in the nature of things is overcome as a horizon, it becomes increasingly apparent that no meaning can be found in the world qua world. Grant takes the example of Nietzsche’s famous exclamation that “God is dead” as a prime example of this idea: “When it is recognized that God is a horizon, He is dead, once and for all.”101 So what were thought to be morals are shown to be actually just values, ideas willed to truth in a historical moment. In this way, the will is the central aspect of modernity. All meaning is contingent upon the autonomous will of individual actors; truth itself comes to be de8ned by what man wills it to be. In this concep-tion, some men are owed nothing because they are simply objects to be willed upon: “there is nothing intrinsic in all others that puts any given limit on what we may do to them in the name of that great enterprise. Human beings are so unequal in quality that to some of them no due is owed.”102 So men can even will death upon other men if that willing means inculcating the world with the desired meaning. Most troubling for Grant is that he sees these Nietzschean ideas at work in modern society, validating the idea that Nietzsche thinks the modern experiment through to its historical conclusion. He goes so far as to say that “his opinions have 8ltered down unrecognized through lesser

99 Ibid.

100 Ibid., 40.

101 Ibid.

102 Grant, George, “Nietzsche and the Ancients,” Technology and Justice, (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1986), 94-95.

2726


minds to become the popular platitudes of the age…what he prophesied is now all around us to be easily seen.”103 Grant sees Nietzsche’s “last men” all around him in the consumeristic bourgeois sensibilities of many North Americans. !ese “last men” are people who believe themselves to be emancipated from the tenets of Christianity while refusing to throw o: its moral ideals. !ey laugh at religious belief while not realizing that they are refusing to move beyond the Christian horizon. For Nietzsche, there is no God from whom such absolute moral ideas can derive, yet the “last men” cling to ideas of equality and virtue. “!ey are the last men because they have inherited rationalism only in its last and decadent form…Christianity in its secularized form.”104 !e last men cannot despise themselves because they believe they know the truth of history, so they descend into a materi-alistic stupor. Because men are roughly equal, all men must have access to happiness, so their view of happiness is necessarily a petty one. Grant identi8es this idea with the consumerism of his day, with the “monistic vulgarity”105 of modern consumer culture. Another class of people in Nietzsche’s future will be Nihilists who act out of a spirit of revenge, but who do not pretend to secularized Christianity. On the other hand, the new rulers of the earth must be Übermenschen106 who recognize the eternal recurrence of the identical and will out of an amor fati, a love of fate. !ese men love fate in the face of their tragic existence: “For Nietzsche, the achievement of amor fati must be outside any such enfoldment. It must be willed in a world where there is no possibility of either an in8nite or 8nite transcendence of becoming or of willing.”107 Grant’s concern with the impact of Nietzsche’s ideas led him to teach Nietzsche’s thought only as an incidence of evil, allowing one to glimpse Grant’s own ideas about willing in the modern world. Taking issue with the notion of amor fati, Grant is incredulous as to the possibility of men who know their own meaninglessness and yet do not will out of the Nihilists’ spirit of revenge: “How is it possible to assert the love of fate as the height and, at the same time, the 8nality of becoming? I do not understand how anybody could love fate, unless within the details of our fates there could appear…intimations…in which our desires for good 8nd their rest and


104 Ibid., 45.

105 Grant, “In Defence of North America,” 24.

106 German for “over-men” or “men who go beyond.”107 Grant, Time as History, 54.

their ful8llment.”108 Because in such a world men could only will to revenge or gorge themselves on consumer products in a meaningless materialism, Grant believes Nietzsche to purvey evil. His justice requires that some men be owed nothing and with the possibility for any men who act out of a love of fate removed, it seems likely that some men will desire the deaths of others in the name of creating meaning. Grant then raises the question of whether this close-mindedness is opposed to philosophy: “What is to say that one should teach within the rejection of Nietzsche? Is not this the very denial of that openness to the whole which is the fundamental mark of the philosophic enterprise?”109 But Grant believes that if the practical implica-tions of his theory are the deaths of others in their meaninglessness, then he must be considered evil; his ideas must be taught only as keen foresight tinged with eternal darkness. Within this rejection of Nietzsche, Grant makes clear that he values openness as a part of man’s capability to will. Grant was a faithful, if not heterodox Christian, especially a9er he had a conversion experience in his twenties.110 He was both a philosopher and a Christian with a D. Phil in theology.111 His Christianity was an integral part of his thought, so much so that, in an early work, he wrote directly about how philosophy could not escape theism: “the study of philosophy is the analysis of the traditions of our society and the judgment of those traditions against our varying intuitions of the Perfection of God.”112 So the openness that he claimed was so important to philosophy113 was important to him also as a principle of Christianity. !is understanding of philosophy and religious belief as being integrally connected with openness at the center of the enterprise makes discerning Grant’s understanding of the will that much easier. Openness is a prerequisite to action for Grant. Much like in Buridan and the later volitional ideas of Langland, Grant believes that, at least initially, the will must decide not to decide. Man cannot act rightly, cannot will correctly, without some degree of receptivity and openness to the world and the

108 Ibid., 60.

109 Grant, “Nietzsche and the Ancients,” 91.

110 Christian, William, George Grant: A Biography, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 92.

111 Ibid., 114.

112 Ibid., 153.

113 Grant, “Nietzsche and the Ancients,” 91.

2928


mysteries or paradoxes that it might whisper into the ear of the discerning thinker. Grant draws upon the ideas of Simone Weil and his own notions about receptivity in order to form an argument against Nietzsche’s intrinsi-cally evil theory of justice, directing modern man toward actualizing goodness in the world. He quotes Weil’s de8nition of faith as a beautiful way of touching upon the eternal need for receptivity and the will to charity: “Faith is the experience that the intelligence is enlightened by love.”114 While admitting that her de8nition is shrouded in a sort of mysti-cism because of some linguistic ambiguity, he declares that this enlighten-ing involves recognizing the intrinsic beauty in otherness: “what is 8rst intended is that love is consent to the fact that there is authentic otherness.”115 A reliance on otherness is necessarily a reliance on letting others in their di:erentness come to the subject. It is not to objectify others, but to let otherness speak in all its shadowy mystery. !e end of this recognition of otherness is an un-self-serving charity. Receiving other’s beauty enlightens the intellect through love, leading to the faith to carry those acts of charity out. Because faith is dependent upon accepting otherness and being receptive to it, the Christian must make himself to open to others and then bear the fruit of charity out of that receptivity. To be open is to be open to remembrance, which is to look for “intimations of deprival”116 or ways in which we can reclaim what has been lost. As a result, the will must be open in order to remember, or at least to glean something of the light from the modern darkness. And so, for Grant, one actualizes openness in order to be able to overcome the misguided ideas of the modern era; the will to charity is the hope for the Christian in Grant’s day and always. Although Grant and Langland lived in two entirely di:erent times, they produced analogous responses to their historical problems which touch upon an eternal truth: the will to charity. Neither man claimed to have an absolute answer to the question of how men may live given the turmoil and darkness of their historical moments, but both philosopher and poet produced a nuanced response to the ultimate, and therefore very di+cult, question: how then shall we live? As Christians, they saw a recep-tive openness that bears the fruit of charity as the necessary work of the will in the world. No darkness, no matter how deep, no matter how obscur-ing, can force the Christian to despair in the face of momentary turmoil,

114 Grant, “Faith and the Multiversity,” 38.

115 Ibid.

116 Grant, “A Platitude,” 142-143.

because that sadness, that confusion, is Aeeting in the face of the eternal truth of charity. It is that childlike openness that does not o:end but that makes man unbendable in the rapids of historical time: “!ow shalt see in thiselve Truthe sitte in thyn herte / In a cheyne of charite, as thow a child were, / To su:ren hym and segge noght ayein thi sires wille.”117 If that is true, then perhaps Grant is right to declare that “it may be that at any time or place, human beings can be opened to the whole in their loving and thinking, even as its complete intelligibility eludes them.”118 Having ac-cepted our fate, our destiny, to love, we must wait in our openness to bear the fruit of charity. !is new life is not an answer to any question, but a response to a problem. Life still must be lived and modernity must still be faced, but as history will keep marching on “it is for the great thinkers and the saints to do more.”119

117 Langland, Piers, V, ll. 606-608.


119 Ibid., 69.

3130


Bibliography

Bowers, John M., 2e Crisis of Will in Piers Plowman. Washington, D.C.: !e Catholic University of America Press, 1986.

Christian, William, George Grant: A Biography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.

Gillespie, Michael Allen, 2e 2eological Origins of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Grant, George, “A Platitude.” Technology and Empire. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1969, 137-143.

Grant, George, “Faith and the Multiversity.” Technology and Justice. To-ronto: House of Anansi Press, 1986. 35-77.

Grant, George, “In Defence of North America.” Technology and Empire. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1969. 15-40.

Grant, George, “Nietzsche and the Ancients.” Technology and Justice. To-ronto: House of Anansi Press, 1986. 79-95.

Grant, George, “Research in the Humanities.” Technology and Justice. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1986. 97-102.

Grant, George, Time as History. Ed. William Christian. Toronto: Univer-sity of Toronto Press, 1995.

Kee, James, “!e Political Realm a9er Christ: Langland’s Search for a Just Order in Piers Plowman.” n.d. n.p.

Langland, William, 2e Vision of Piers Plowman. Ed. A.V.C. Schmidt. 2nd ed. London: Orion Publishing Group, 2011.

Murtaugh, Daniel Maher, Piers Plowman and the Image of God. Gaines-ville: !e University Presses of Florida, 1978.

Schmidt, A.V.C. Introduction. 2e Vision of Piers Plowman. By William Langland. 2nd ed. London: Orion Publishing Group, 2011.

3332

TomlinsonSententiae V

Julia Tomlinson, Kenyon College

-e Sacrality of Relics and the Eucharist: Trends in Objects of Veneration

!is paper will explore trends of venerated objects—speci8cally, those that are human remains—by comparing relic cults and Eucharist practices from late antiquity through the thirteenth century. By looking at the factors that de8ned a popular relic and comparing them to the theological discus-sion and regularization of the Eucharist, this paper will show that the Eucha-rist’s centrality in material devotion in this period of Western Christianity reAects the Church’s growing organization, control, and regulation of Chris-tian practices involving objects of veneration.

When I discuss “trends” in objects of veneration, I refer to the tendency in which early Christians—both clerics and laity alike—shared an interest in a certain type of object. !e value and desirability of a relic reAected the contemporary values and interests of the Christian community. As an ex-ample, I will discuss the way relics are seen by early Christians throughout Western European Medieval Christianity. Here, the di:erent “trends” refer to the changing interest towards various categories of relics such as mar-tyrs, bishops, or Roman saints. With relics, this interest changes over time depending on (as I will argue) nonreligious factors such as availability and trade.

Although relics were seen as objects of veneration starting from the ear-liest period of Christianity, trends in popular or desirable relics Auctuated throughout the Middle Ages in Western Europe. !e veneration of the relics of the saints dates back to the second century, and possibly even earlier than that.1 From this period until the fourth and 89h centuries, martyrs’ remains and related brandea (items that have come in contact with martyrs’ remains) were the standard forms of relics. !is was due to the accessibility of such relics resulting from waves of Christian persecution. An example of this is seen in the Smyrnaean letter describing St. Polycarp’s martyrdom when, fol-lowing his death in the mid second century, Christians “took up his bones which are more valuable than precious stones and 8ner than re8ned gold, and laid them in a suitable place; where the Lord will permit [them] to gath-

1 Jonathan Sumption, Pilgrimage��7RZDWD��1�-��5RZPDQ�DQG�/LWWOH¿HOG��

3534

Sententiae V Tomlinson

er [themselves] together… to celebrate the birth-day of his martyrdom.”2 Such numerous and available objects lent themselves to veneration among early Christians. In this early period of Christianity, there was no uniform attitude towards relics; in fact, there was little organization of any Christian practice. !is was due to the necessary secrecy of Christian society to avoid persecution by Roman o+cials: at this time, Christianity was illegal in the Roman Empire.3 Before the Roman Empire tolerated Christianity, such ob-jects of veneration and their associated practices were contained on a local level.

In March 313, the newly converted Emperor Constantine met with col-league and rival Licinius in Milan to issue a decree ending Christian per-secution in the Roman Empire.4 As these persecutions ended, the rates of martyrdom came to a practical standstill throughout the Empire, ceasing the Aow of martyrs’ remains for relics. Christians responded to this mainly in two ways. First, the remains and brandea of holy men became accept-able relics, resulting in objects of veneration derived from “those who lived heroic lives as friends of God rather than those who died heroic deaths.”5 !is increased the number of available relics. And second, religious 8gures of the period discovered the remains of earlier martyrs through visions and dreams. An example of this phenomenon is St. Ambrose of Milan’s dream leading him to the remains of Saints Gervasius and Protasius in 386.6 In spite of these two responses to the shortage of relics, the number of relics was still scarce when compared to the number of Christian communities. However, due to the new tolerance of Christianity, practices regarding relics could be organized more publicly, resulting in publicized relic sites and col-lected martyrologies.7 !e fast, organized growth of Christianity combined with the slow increase of relic production led to the important concept of pilgrimage in early medieval Christianity. As an example, the earliest known

2 J.B. Lightfoot, trans, The Letter of the Smyrnaeans or The Martyrdom of St. Polycarp, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/martyrdom-polycarp-lightfoot.asp.

3 Eugene A. Dooley, “Church Law on Sacred Relics” (J.C.D. diss., The Catholic Uni-versity of America, 1931).

4 Collins, Roger. Early Medieval Europe 300-1000. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

5 Patrick Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 201.

6 Ambrose of Milan: Letter XXII: The Finding of SS. Gervasius and Protasius, http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/source/ambrose-letter22.asp.

7 Dooley, “Sacred Relics”.

account of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, an anonymous itinerary starting in Bordeaux in 333, dates from this period.8

As seen in the numerous responses to the shortage of relics, Christians in this period found ways to make relics more accessible for themselves. With the legalization of Christianity came the internal regulation within the Christian community. !is was due to the ease of public practice, dis-cussion, and organization among the Christian community that came with Christianity’s legalization. Such regulation quickly included limitations and attempts at control over relics. As early as 386, the newly Christian empire regulated the trade and spread of relics, as seen in the !eodosian Code IX, xvii: “Let no one transfer an interred body to another place: let no one divide a martyr’s body: let no body be sold”.9 Similar regulations were discussed and enacted repeatedly through the Early Middle Ages by bishops such as Gregory the Great or Gregory of Tours.10 Such regulations were generally ignored as local authorities failed to enforce them. !is was sometimes due to personal disagreement with the regulations, but more o9en local pressure to resist them.11

!e next dramatic change in the trend of relics occurred in the eighth and ninth centuries during the Carolingian dynasty. Charlemagne’s dynasty is noted for its continual expansion of frontiers and conquering of neigh-boring territories, resulting to a new type of organized power in Western Medieval Europe. Due to this expansion, the Carolingian dynasty created trade routes and networks throughout modern France and Germany.12 With these new networks came a more tangible connection to Rome: as Christian ideas spread from Rome, so did Christian relics, making the relics of Ro-man saints the new and most favored category of relic.13 As a response to the expanded cult of Roman saints, combined with the new trade routes established with the Carolingian expansion, the relics trade peaked for the 8rst time. !e9 and fraud entered into the relics trade, as relics were openly displayed in churches and monasteries, thus easy to steal, and were easily faked with the use of any human remains. Responding to such phenomena, the Church reinforced prior regulations on the spread and creation of relics. For example, the Council of Mainz in 813 prohibited the translation (or re-location) of relics without the permission from the bishop, and the Synod of

8 ³7KH�$QRQ\PRXV�3LOJULP�RI�%RUGHDX[��$�'��´�/DVW�PRGL¿HG�'HFHPEHU��http://www.christusrex.org/www1/ofm/pilgr/bord/10Bord01MapEur.html.

9 Dooley, “Sacred Relics”, 23.

10 Patrick Geary, Furta Sancta. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

11 Dooley, “Sacred Relics”.

12 Collins, Roger, Early Medieval Europe 300-1000.

13 Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/martyrdom-polycarp-lightfoot.asp

http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/source/ambrose-letter22.asp


http://www.christusrex.org/www1/ofm/pilgr/bord/10Bord01MapEur.html

3736


Frankfurt in 794 stated that “no new saints might be venerated or invoked” unless allowed by the Church.14 However, laity and clerics alike generally ignored such regulations over relics. !e ambivalence towards council regu-lations demonstrates how Christians from all standings were comfortable ignoring the Christian authorities when it interfered with their local and personal practices.

When the Crusades began in the late eleventh century, the relics trade hit its second peak, this time transporting biblical and Eastern relics throughout Western Europe. !e term “Crusades” refers to the series of Christian wars spanning from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, with the primary goal of recapturing Jerusalem from the Muslims.15 Once again, the technical reali-ties of trade routes, the plundering of conquest, and the new availability of relics controlled the spread and trends throughout this wave of relic venera-tion.16 !e Papacy again tried to regulate the spread and veneration of relics brought back from the Crusades with the introduction of strict policy. One of the strongest examples is seen in Canon 62 of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which states, “…in the future old relics may not be exhibited outside of a vessel or exposed for sale. And let no one presume to venerate publicly new ones unless they have been approved by the Roman ponti:.”17 Yet even changes to ecclesiastical law had little inAuence on the trends of relics: as Sumption notes, “the multiplication of relics is remarkable, despite attempts by the Fourth Lateran Council to insist on veri8cation before acceptance.”18 Although the papacy saw itself as the universal overseer of Christians, it seems that practicing Christians regarded the cults of relics—which were fundamentally local and personal relationships with the object of venera-tion—outside of the Papacy’s control and regulation. Without local clerics’ support in enforcing regulations, the Christian authorities making such can-ons had little inAuence over the average Christian’s practices.

As seen in the examples above, trends in the relic trade depended on a complicated, circular relationship between supply and demand. In other words, Christians created cults to relics that were being distributed, and si-multaneously traders were distributing relics (authentic and otherwise) that had cult followings. In addition, the relics distributed depended on the sup-

14 Patrick Geary, Furta Sancta, 45.

15 Vauchez, André, “Crusades,” in Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, accessed online, http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780227679319.001.0001/acref-9780227679319-e-751.

16 Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages.

17 H.J. Schroeder, trans, The Canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/lateran4.asp (accessed March 13, 2013).

18 Sumption, 159-160.

ply of the relics themselves (such as the limited number of martyrs a9er the late antiquity) or the accessibility of these relics (such as trade routes created through eastward travel during the Crusades). In this, the technical realities of the relics trade, combined with trends among local Christian communi-ties, inAuenced the trends of relics more so than the ecclesiastical authori-ties’ attempts at regularization. As seen above, the Church was rather re-moved from the process of determining trends in relics, o9en “recognizing an established cult, not creating it” or failing to regulate trends established by trade.19

!e 8rst half of this paper explores the basic trends in objects of venera-tion in Christianity from late antiquity to the later Middle Ages. However, one object of veneration had a steady trend throughout this period, seem-ingly unrelated to and una:ected by the trends inAuencing relics discussed above. !e Eucharist was removed from the inAuences of availability and trade throughout this period, experiencing instead a delayed yet steady growth of popularity that eventually set it as the holiest of all objects of ven-eration. !is trend was entirely controlled by the Church. !e purpose-ful promotion of the Eucharist, resulting in its eventual overshadowing of other relics as the highest object of veneration, shows organized ecclesiasti-cal regularization and control over Christian practice throughout Medieval Western Europe.

Compared to the relics of the saints, the Eucharist is not explored as an object of veneration until the High Middle Ages. Whereas Augustine dis-cusses the theological importance of the veneration of the relics of the saints as early as the 89h century,20 the 8rst known serious theological discussion of the Eucharist is not until the ninth century by Carolingian theologians such as Pascasius or Ratramnus.21 One possible explanation for this is the relative di+culty regarding theological discussion of the Eucharist com-pared to theological discussion of relics. Relics were physically and literally the remains of saints, and easily recognized as such. Laity could easily grasp the concept, and theologians focused discussion on relics elsewhere. While discussing the veneration of relics, Augustine makes a comparison that any layperson could understand: “[f]or if the dress of a father, or his ring, or anything he wore, be precious to his children, in proportion to the love they

19 Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages, 206.

20 Augustine, The City of God I:13, in the Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=AugCity.xml&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=14&division=div2 (accessed March 13, 2013).

21 Celia Chazelle, “The Eucharist in Early Medieval Europe,” in A Companion to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages, ed. Ian Christopher Levy, Gary Macy, and Kristen Van Ausdall (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 207.

http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780227679319.001.0001/acref-9780227679319-e-751


http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/lateran4.asp


http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=AugCity.xml&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=14&division=div2



3938


bore him, with how much more reason ought we to care for the bodies of those we love, which they wore far more closely and intimately than any clothing!”22 !e Eucharist, however, was harder for theologians to discuss and for laity to understand. Ambrose of Milan notes the necessary leap of faith in his writings on the sacraments while discussing the blood of Christ: “But perhaps you say: ‘I do not see the appearance of blood.’ But it has the likeness. For just has you took on the likeness of death, so, too, you drink the likeness of precious blood…” (italics added).23 !e complex discussion of the Eucharist was made easier during the Carolingian era: as with physical objects such as relics, communication and ideas spread with Charlemagne’s expansion.

As Geary notes, in the period prior to the Carolingian dynasty, “the Eu-charist, considered a relic of Christ, was substituted for other relics when none of the latter could be found”.24 Compared to saints’ relics, the Eucharist was considered second-rate. Although theological discussion on the nature of the Eucharist began in the eighth and ninth centuries, it was not until the eleventh and twel9h centuries that theologians began to have inAuential discussions on the importance of the Eucharist as a widespread object of veneration with popularity comparable to the relics of the saints.

!is new, organized form of discussion of the Eucharist in the Christian scholarly community quickly shaped discussion of ecclesiastical law, leading to a thorough institutionalized promotion of the Eucharist as an object of veneration. By the late twel9h century, regularized ideas on the Eucharist were “disseminated through the directives (canons) decided at vast ecumen-ical councils, which were in turn applied by each and every bishop in his diocese”.25 !is systematic promotion of the Eucharist in Western Europe resulted in its widespread veneration by the end of the twel9h century. Af-ter Canon 21 of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 mandated that Chris-tians “[receive] reverently at least at Easter the sacrament of the Eucharist”, the Eucharist was set to become the most widespread venerated remains in Western European Christianity.26

22 Augustine, The City of God I:13.

23 Saint Ambrose. “The Sacraments.” In Saint Ambrose- Theological and Dogmatic Works, translated by Deferrari, Roy J., 263-329. Washington D.C.: The Catholic Uni-versity of America Press, 1963, 4.4.20.

24 Geary, 185.

25 Miri Rubin, “Popular Attitudes to the Eucharist,” in A Companion to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages, ed. Ian Christopher Levy, Gary Macy, and Kristen Van Ausdall (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 449.

26 H.J. Schroeder, trans, The Canons of the Fourth Lateran Council.

!e growth of popularity of the Eucharist as an object of venera-tion lacks the complicated balance of external factors seen with the various trends of relics throughout the Middle Ages. As explained above, the no-tions of availability and demand were not present within the distribution of the Eucharist. !e Eucharist was always readily available as it could be produced and received at any church, without the worry of fakes experi-enced with relics. And the demand of the Eucharist was entirely controlled by the Church—facing the threat of excommunication, laity and clergy hap-pily received the Eucharist as o9en as possible. In this, the Church could control the behavior of Christians in their personal practices. But another reason trends in the Eucharist lack the complicated balance of external fac-tors seen above with relics is that the Eucharist generally lacked external factors of any sort. !e Eucharist was an object of veneration tied heavily with the church—not only as an institution, but also as a physical structure and communal location. Examples of this are seen as early as the late fourth century, where a Syriac writer Ephrem of Nisibis show the connection of the Eucharist with the church itself: “[a]nd because he [Christ] loved his Church greatly he did not give her the manna of her rival; He became the Bread of Life for her to eat him.”27 Here, the Eucharist is an object of veneration that unites Christians in the physical church itself; as this source dates prior to the Church being an organized far-reaching power, Ephrem of Nisibis’ use of the term ‘Church’ most likely refers to the physical churches themselves. In comparison, relics of saints could be at sights outside of a church or mon-astery, thereby creating a community of Christians separated from a church. For example, Gregory of Tours writes that doctors would take dust from the tombs of saints to use as a medicine; here, it is clear that the object itself (the brandea) had importance distinct from its location (here, the tomb).28

In this, the interest and appreciation of the Eucharist as an object of ven-eration was in the hands of the Church itself, removed from the inAuence of trade or the laity: the Church sanctioned rules concerning the Eucha-rist, and theological debates were either ignored or incorporated into the Church’s sanctions, then trickling down to the laity. !eir organized process of featuring the Eucharist as the ideal object of veneration was a complete success, and the Church gained control over venerated objects among the laity.

27 Bynum, Caroline Walker, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, Berkeley: University of Califor-nia Press, 1987, 48.

28 Van Dam, Raymond, Saints and their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul, Princeton: Princ-eton University Press, 1993. Accessed online, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=acls;cc=acls;idno=heb01252.0001.001;q1=Christian%20saints%20--%20Cult;view=toc.

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=acls;cc=acls;idno=heb01252.0001.001;q1=Christian%20saints%20--%20Cult;view=toc



4140


Bibliography

“!e Anonymous Pilgrim of Bordeaux (333 A.D.).” Last modi8ed December 9, 1999. http://www.christusrex.org/www1/ofm/pilgr/bord/10Bord01MapEur.html.

Augustine. “City of God” Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=AugCity.xml&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=14&division=div2.

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Chazelle, Celia. “!e Eucharist in Early Medieval Europe.” In A Companion to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages, edited by Ian Christopher Levy, Gary Macy, and Kristen Van Ausdall, 205-251. Leiden: Brill, 2012.

Collins, Roger. Early Medieval Europe 300-1000. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Dooley, Eugene A. “Church Law on Sacred Relics.” J.C.D. diss., !e Catholic University of America, 1931.

Geary, Patrick. Furta Sancta. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.

----------------- Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Jordan, William Chester. Europe in the High Middle Ages. London: Penguin Books, 2002.

Lightfoot, J.B., trans. 2e Letter of the Smyrnaeans or 2e Martyrdom of St. Polycarp. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/martyrdom-polycarp-lightfoot.asp.

Rubin, Miri. “Popular Attitudes to the Eucharist.” In A Companion to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages, edited by Ian Christopher Levy, Gary Macy, and Kristen Van Ausdall 447-468. Leiden: Brill, 2012.

Saint Ambrose of Milan: Letter XXII: 2e Finding of SS. Gervasius and Protasius. http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/source/ambrose-letter22.asp.

Saint Ambrose. “!e Sacraments.” In Saint Ambrose- 2eological and Dogmatic Works, translated by Deferrari, Roy J., 263-329. Washington D.C.: !e Catholic University of America Press, 1963. Accessed online, http://

archive.org/stream/fatherso9hechur012918mbp#page/n41/mode/2up.

Schroeder, H.J., trans. 2e Canons of the Fourth Latern Council, 1215. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/lateran4.asp.

Sumption, Jonathan. Pilgrimage. Towata, N.J.: Rowman and Little8eld, 1975.

Van Dam, Raymond. Saints and their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Accessed online, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=acls;cc=acls;idno=heb01252.0001.001;q1=Christian%20saints%20--%20Cult;view=toc.

Vauchez, André. “Crusades,” in Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages. Accessed online, http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780227679319.001.0001/acref-9780227679319-e-751. Current online version 2012.















4342

Sententiae V Rabinowitz

Danielle Rabinowitz, Harvard University

Conversion to Judaism During the Crusader Period: An Exploration of Proselytization through the

Case Study of a Cairo Genizah Document

In a In a manuscript discovered in the Cairo Genizah1, the scribe Josh-uah B. Obadiah of Monieux, France, writes a letter of recommendation on behalf of the resident Jewish community for a widowed prosetlytess who su:ered substantially from an attack during the First Crusade of 1096. !e proselytess, a woman of noble birth, is said to have converted to Judaism, Aed from her hometown to Narbonne, France, and there married a Jewish man of local standing. A9er hearing that her family was in search of her, however, she again Aed to the French countryside, settling in Monieux six years prior to the Crusader attack that ravaged the village, led to the murder of her husband, and resulted in the kidnapping of her two young children, Jacob and Justa. !e woman, le9 widowed, impoverished, and unable to care for her infant child, was provided this letter in hopes that she might be able to present it to another Jewish community and be taken in there. 2 !e docu-ment serves as a clear example of the extreme persecution of Jewish com-munities of the medieval era, while at the same time raises questions about the status of the woman featured. In a period of growing anti-Semitism, the conversion of this particular woman to Judaism seems unusual; her letter of recommendation, among many other recommendation letters for proselytes

1 A massive storeroom of 300,000 Hebrew documents discovered in the Ben Ezra

Synagogue (Cairo, Egypt), dating back to the medieval era. It is against Jewish law

to dispose of documents bearing God’s name or his language, Hebrew, and these pre-

served manuscripts offer much insight into Jewish life of the period.

2 Golb, Norman. New Light on the Persecution of French Jews at Time of the First Cru-sade. Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, vol. 34, 1966.

found in the Genizah, however, provides a unique window into exploring the occurrence of conversion to Judaism by Christians in the time of the Crusades.

!e existence of Jewish proselytes in the Mediterranean world was a well-documented phenomenon in the Middle Ages. Robert Seltzer de-scribes that, in fact, “formal conversion was unquestionably a widespread practice.”3 !e 8rst clear documentation of such conversion dates back to the 7th century and is recorded in several Latin manuscripts. !e texts tell of a well-known Church o+cial in the court of Louis the Pious who converts to Judaism in the Carolingian Empire. Changing his name from Bodo to Eliezer, he is reported to have traveled from Italy to Saragosa, Spain, where he took up the study of Jewish books in 840. 4 !e reasons for his conversion are not fully understood, but they speak to an interest, from an early date, of Christians in the religion of the Old Testament. !e unearthing of myriad recommendation letters for proselytes in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo in the 19th century, and the extensive translation of these documents in the ensuing century, gave further support to the proliferation of conversions, primarily in the eleventh and twel9h centuries. 5 Due to the sheer quantity of letters of recommendation discovered, Norman Golb estimates that over 15,000 men and women converted to Judaism and Aed Christendom be-tween the years of 1000 to 1200.6

As it was a “capital crime for a Christian to convert to Judaism in Christian lands” 7 from the 4th century onwards, the impetus for such con-version has presented itself as a topic of speculation among medieval schol-ars. In light of the discovery of a wealth of materials in the Cairo Genizah centered on proselytes, understanding the “apogee”8 of such conversion between the eleventh and twel9h centuries is of particular interest. David

3 Seltzer, Robert. “A Historical Overview of Outreach and Conversion.” Journal of Jewish Communal Service. Proc. of Paul Cowan Memorial Conference on Intermar-riage, Conversion, and Outreach, City University of New York, New York City. N.p.: n.p., 1989. 230-34. Print, 231.

4 Golb, Norman. “Jewish Proselytism: A Phenomenon in the History of Medieval Eu-rope.” Proc. of The Tenth Annual Rabbi Louis Feinberg Memorial Lecture, University of Cincinnati, Ohio. N.p.: n.p., 1988. 1-49. Print.

5 Seltzer, Robert. “A Historical Overview of Outreach and Conversion.” Journal of Jewish

Communal Service. Proc. of Paul Cowan Memorial Conference on Intermarriage, Con-version, and Outreach, City University of New York, New York City. N.p.: n.p., 1989. 230-34. Print, 232.

6 Jewish Proselytism (Golb), 32.

7 Seltzer, 232


4544


Silgson suggests that “Jewish rationalism infected the reasoning minds of both priest and noble and, in some cases, led to further study, conviction and conversion.”9 Golb intuits that the theological troubles of the Christian Church and the “decline of moral disciplines in monasteries”10 prompted conversion. Judaism saw a golden age, and despite the rise in anti-Jewish sentiments across Europe, “brave non-Jews...cast their lot…knowing the os-tracism, obloquy and o9en martyrdom that awaited them.”11 Many of these valiant individuals were initially a+liated with the Church, attracted to Ju-daism through close reading of the Old Testament; others, were noblemen and women who were similarly well versed in religious texts.

!e woman of Obadiah’s description in the recommendation letter belonged to the latter category, a proselyte of wealthy origins who converted “despite easy circumstances and strong family traditions.”12 Although there is evidence in the manuscripts of the Genizah of a number of courageous women who de8ed their families and converted to Judaism, the words refer-ring to proselytes in all of the documents describe these converts as initially “uncircumcised ones.” !is very terminology underscores that the majority of converts were men; in fact, medieval scholars who have closely analyzed the contents of Genizah documents, repeatedly reference the anomalous na-ture of a woman’s departure from Christianity in a male-dominated world.13

Yet, despite the unusual circumstances surrounding the very conversion of a woman during the medieval period, the experiences of this particular French woman as a proselyte as told through her letter of recommendation are very much in line with the accounts of other proselytes who were also granted letters by various Jewish communities. Golb attributes the “prevail-ing religious conditions”14 of the region in which she lived—likely Norman-dy or England, described plainly as a “distant land”15—to be the cause of her particular discontentment toward Christianity. Although conversion meant that the woman had to Aee from her place of birth and live in constant fear of Christian authority (the reason that she later le9 Narbonne, France and

9 Eichhorn, David Max. “In the Post-Talmudic Period (David Seligson).” Conversion to Judaism: A History and Analysis. N.p.: KTAV Pub. House, 1965. 67-95. Print, 72.


11 Eichorn, 72.


13 Roth, Norman. “Conversion to Judaism.” Medieval Jewish Civilization: An Encyclo-pedia. 2003. Print, 200.


15 Golb, Norman. New Light on the Persecution of French Jews at Time of the First Crusade. Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, vol. 34, 1966. Line 15, Manuscript.

sought refuge in the countryside), the appeal of doing so also lay in the un-derstanding that Jewish communities were obligated to take in proselytes as commanded in the Bible. !e lead-in to her letter of recommendation points to the notion of obligatory reception, stating that “Ye shall love the stranger, for strangers [were ye in the land of Egypt] (Deuteronomy, 10.19).” !e placement of the biblical phrase at the beginning of the letter makes the messages it bears all the more compelling—but also highlights the wariness with which Jewish communities viewed proselytes “amidst the pressures of such a hostile environment.”16

In fact, the large number of pogroms17 in Western Europe, coupled with the frequent discrimination Jews faced in Christian lands, o9en forced proselytes to wander from community to community. As is the case in the French woman’s tale, the small village of Moneuix, France faced massive devastation in the wake of a pogrom during the First Crusade. In the a9er-math, the woman was le9 poverty stricken, “in thirst and nakedness, lack-ing all provisions,”18 and the Jewish community itself was majorly reduced, remaining only “a few from many.”19 Given this letter on behalf of those still alive, she departed from this particular community in hopes that she could temporarily settle in another Jewish community nearby. !e discovery of the woman’s letter in the Genizah speaks to her ultimate arrival in the Aour-ishing Jewish community of Cairo, a safe haven for Christian proselytes who, in Muslim lands, were no longer burdened by Christian authority. Her advent in Egypt reAects a fate similar to that of many other converts, as dem-onstrated by the large number of recommendation letters uncovered in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo.

!e extensive analysis by scholars of the memoirs and recommenda-tion letter of another proselyte found in the Genizah, further supports the normalcy of the French woman’s account. Obadiah the proselyte, born Jo-hannes of Dreux, hailed from Oppido Lucano in Southern Italy. Of a promi-nent Christian family in the region, Obadiah was considered a learned in-dividual who was a “serious student of Christianity and the Scriptures.”20

16 Eichorn, 72.

17 Violent attacks on Jewish communities that often resulted in mass murder and de-

struction

18 New Light on the Persecution of French Jews at Time of the First Crusade (Golb),

Line 20-Manuscript.


Line 10-Manuscript.

20 Golb, Norman. “The Autograph Memoirs of Obadiah the Proselyte and Epistle of Barukh B.

Isaac of Aleppo.” Proc. of Convegno Internazionale Di Studi, Oppido Lucano (Basili-cata). N.p.: n.p., 2004. 1-19. Print.

4746


In his memoirs, he writes of a prophecy that came to him in a dream that served as the impetus for his decision to convert to Judaism. Although Oba-diah’s conversion took place in 1102, a few years a9er the First Crusade and the conversion of the French woman of note to Judaism, he similarly Aees from his place of birth, seeking refuge in a host of Jewish communities. Even though Obadiah initially ventures further eastward than the woman, 8rst settling in Aleppo (Syria), followed by Palestine and Iraq, he eventually lands in Cairo, a common point of arrival for a large number of proselytes of the era, the French woman among them. In addition, he is also granted a letter of recommendation from a Jewish community, in this case cra9ed by Rabbi Barukh b. Isaac, head of a prominent Talmudic academy in Aleppo. !e construction of the letter itself mirrors exactly the construction of the letter presented to the French woman on behalf of the Jews of Monieux, pointing to the frequency with which such letters were written. Barukh devotes the 8rst half of the letter to addressing directly the recipient Jewish commu-nity, citing biblical passages that highlight the necessity of hospitality even amid widespread su:ering of the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean world. !en, he transitions into the addressing of the bearer of the epistyle itself, Obadiah, whom he describes as a “man of a great family.”21 !is phras-ing is parallel to that of the phrasing in the woman’s letter, in which she is described as having gone “forth from the house of her father from great wealth.”22 !is similarity in descriptions of the origins of the two converts is signi8cant, as it con8rms that this genre of recommendation letter was well established and widely utilized by Jewish communities across Western Europe and into the East.

!us, although the recommendation letter for the French proselytess is deemed atypical in some respects, a comparative analysis of the manu-script with that of the memoirs and letter written for the proselyte Obadiah (Johannes of Dreux), reveals extensive overlap between the experiences and journeys of these two proselytes. In addition, the similarity of format of their recommendation letters, coupled with the ultimate discovery of these two letters among many other documents about proselytes in the same geo-graphic location, bears wider signi8cance. It exposes the frequency with which Jewish communities ranging from Western Europe to the Middle East cra9ed letters on behalf of Christian converts, the commonality of eastern migration of these proselytes, and the overall widespread nature of conver-sion to Judaism by Christians in the midst of the Crusades.

21 Epistle of Barukh B. Isaac of Aleppo (Golb), Line 46-manuscript.


Line 16-Manuscript.

Bibliography

Eichhorn, David Max. “In the Post-Talmudic Period (David Seligson).” Con-version to Judaism: A History and Analysis. N.p.: KTAV Pub. House, 1965. 67-95. Print.

Golb, Norman. “Jewish Proselytism: A Phenomenon in the History of Medi-eval Europe.” Proc. of !e Tenth Annual Rabbi Louis Feinberg Memorial Lecture, University of Cincinnati, Ohio. N.p.: n.p., 1988. 1-49. Print.

----------- New Light on the Persecution of French Jews at Time of the First Crusade. Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, vol. 34, 1966.

-------------“!e Autograph Memoirs of Obadiah the Proselyte and Epistle of Barukh B. Isaac of Aleppo.” Proc. of Convegno Internazionale Di Studi, Oppido Lucano (Basilicata). N.p.: n.p., 2004. 1-19. Print.

Roth, Norman. “Conversion to Judaism.” Medieval Jewish Civilization: An Encyclopedia. 2003. Print.

Seltzer, Robert. “A Historical Overview of Outreach and Conversion.” Jour-nal of Jewish Communal Service. Proc. of Paul Cowan Memorial Con-ference on Intermarriage, Conversion, and Outreach, City University of New York, New York City. N.p.: n.p., 1989. 230-34. Print.

4948

Sententiae V Fletcher

Zachary Fletcher, Harvard College

Excerpt from the 8th-century Codex Salamasianus: Epistula. Amans amanti.Candida sidereis ardescunt lumina Aammis 1fundunt colla rosas et cedit crinibus aurummellea purpureum depromunt ora ruboremlacteaque admixtus sublimat pectora sanguisac totus tibi servit honos formaque dearum 5fulges et Venerem caelesti corpore uincisargutae stant facta manus digitisque tenellisSerica 8la trahens pretioso in stamine ludisplanta decens nescit modicos calcare lapilloset dura laedi scelus est uestigia terra 10ipsa tuos cum ferre uelis per lilia gressusnullos interimes leviori pondere Aores.guttura nunc aliae magnis monilibus ornentaut gemmas aptent capiti: tu sola placerevel spoliata potes. nulli laudabile totum est: 15in te cuncta probet, si quisquam cernere possit.Sirenum cantus et dulcia plectra !aliaead uocem tacuisse rear, qua mella propagasdulcia et in miseros telum iacularis amoris 19et grave vulnus alis nullo sanabile ferro. 22*Langueo, de8cio, marcesco, punior, uror 20aestuo, suspiro, pereo, debellor, anhelo, 21sed tua labra meo saevum de corde doloremdepellant morbumque animae medicaminis huiuscura fuget, ne tanta putres violentia nervos 25dissecet atque tua moriar pro crimine causa.sed si hoc grande putas, saltem concede precantiut iam defunctum niveis ambire lacertisdigneris vitamque mihi post fata reducas.

A Translation and CommentaryLetter. A lover to [his] beloved.Your white eyes blaze with star-like Aames, 1Your neck pours out roses, and gold comes from your hair, Your honeyed face produces a purple blush,And your blood mixed together raises up your milky breast, And all honor serves you, and with the beauty of the goddesses 5You gleam and conquer Venus with your heavenly body.!e deeds of your cunning hand stand 8rm, and you,Dragging Chinese threads with your tender 8ngers, play on the precious warp.Your becoming heel is unacquainted with treading upon small pebbles,And it is a crime for your feet to be hurt by the hard ground; 10Although you want to bring your steps through the lilies themselves,You will kill no Aowers with your light weight.Now, let other women adorn their throats with large necklaces,Or let them fasten gems to their heads: You aloneCan please me, even if you’ve been plundered;in no person are all aspects praiseworthy. 15But if there is anyone who can discern everything in you, let him approve of what he sees. I would imagine that the songs of the Sirens and !alia’s sweet pluckingsWould have become silent at the sound of your voice, by which you issue forth sweet Honey and hurl the spear of love against miserable men, 19And by which you nourish a serious wound that is curable by no sword. 22I languish, I weaken, I wither, I am punished, I am burned, 20I seethe, I sigh, I die, I am vanquished, I gasp, 21But may your lips remove the savage grief from my heart,And may the cure of this remedy chase away the illness in my soul,Lest such great violence dismember my rotting nerves, 25And lest I die on your account, with my death becoming your guilt.But if you consider this a large thing, at least yield to me, I who am begging you to think me, already dead, worthy of surrounding with your snow-white arms,And to lead life back to me a9er my death.

*D.R. Shackleton Bailey, editor of the volume in which this poem appears, believes (correctly, it seems) that lines 20-22, as preserved in the Codex, are wrongly sequenced. He thus replaces ll. 20, 21 and 22 with ll. 22, 20 and 21, respectively.

5150


CommentaryAmong the objectives of this poem’s author is to depict the dualistic nature of the condition of the lover (amans) – that is, the simultaneous pleasure and su:ering that comprise his romantic feelings – in a way that resonates with an audience that understands and appreciates Roman classical literary convention. As the following analysis will show, this duality of the lover’s condition is presented through certain structural and thematic material that contemporary readers would recognize from previous literature, such as Ovid (A. 1st centuries BC/AD). Furthermore, an equally salient objective of Amans amanti is to encapsulate the dual nature of the beloved (amanti), the person being addressed, as it is discerned by the lover – he conceives of her as both a human and a goddess, and this is clear from the words he uses to address her. In sum, the author’s overarching artistic objective in this epistula (i.e., in this so-called “letter” from him to his beloved) is to control, by means of these distinctly dualistic frameworks, how the lover portrays his beloved and is himself portrayed.

!e dualistic nature of the lover in Amans amanti is conveyed through the bi-partite structure of the poem itself. It has two distinct, roughly equal parts: the 8rst sixteen lines, and the remaining thirteen lines. !e former half is the embodiment of a positive attitude on the lover’s part, while the latter half portrays a very di:erent attitude – one of urgency, desperation and outright negativity. !ese attitudes are clearly conveyed through the poet’s diction.

As for the 8rst half of the poem, this comprises an overtly complemen-tary description of the beloved’s physical attributes. According to the lover, her eyes are bright (candida... lumina, 1), and other regions attached to her head are described as releasing roses (fundunt colla rosas, 2) and gold (cedit crinibus aurum, 2), both precious objects that are highly sought a9er. He uses adjectives referring to sweet foods like milk and honey to describe her breast and mouth, respectively (mellea... ora... lacteaque... pectora, 3-4). She is described as being skilled with her hands, speci8cally in weaving (argutae stant facta manus... pretioso in stamine ludis, 7-8). Since she does not walk on even small rocks (planta decens nescit modicos calcare lapillos / et dura... terra, 9-10), the lover implies that her feet are without blemish. She is said to be so light as to not even crush Aowers when she treads on them (ipsa... nul-los interimes leviori pondere Aores, 11-12), which may either be interpreted literally as a Aattering comment about her weight, or simply as a 8gurative illustration of her supposed daintiness.

!e lover then notes how his beloved does not need to rely on jewelry to be beautiful, unlike other women who apparently do (guttura nunc aliae magnis monilibus ornent...: tu sola placere vel spoliata potes, 13-15). !is positively-minded half of the poem closes with a reference to the beloved’s

overall perfection: “If there is anyone who can discern everything in you, let him approve of what he sees” (in te cuncta probet, si quisquam cernere possit, 16).

But in the latter half of the poem, the lover’s attitude changes from posi-tively laudatory to negatively disturbed. Starting immediately in line 17, he says that his beloved would be able to silence even the songs of the Sirens and of !alia, a poetic Muse (Sirenum cantus et dulcia plectra !aliae / ad vocem tacuisse rear, 17-18). !e emphatic placement of Sirenum cantus at the beginning of line 17 signi8es the 8rm boundary between these two very di:erent sections of the poem, given the negative connotations that the Si-rens carry in Roman literature: a9er all, they were not simply dangerous, but mortiferous. !e beloved is then compared to a seductive trickster not unlike a Siren, in that she “issue[s] forth sweet honey” (mella propagas dul-cia, 18- 19) while simultaneously inAicting and maintaining a deliberate, incurable wound against her victims (et in miseros telum iacularis amoris... vulnus alis nullo sanabile ferro, 19-22), the implication being that the lover is one of these victims.

He continues by describing in 8rst-person verbs the pain he feels as a di-rect consequence, it seems, of his being wounded by his beloved (Langueo... anhelo, 20-21). !e mood of this half of the poem is further darkened by references to serious illness and death; the lover suddenly pleads for his be-loved to cure him of his love-induced sickness (sed tua labra meo saevum de corde dolorem / depellant morbumque... cura fuget, 22-24), apparently identifying her as his savior despite having earlier labeled her as the very cause of this aEiction. In fact, he implies that she is the only one who will prevent his physical being from coming apart (ne tanta putres violentia ner-vos / dissecet, 25-26), and that if she withholds her aid, she will have to live with the guilt of having caused his death (atque tua moriar pro crimine causa, 26).

!e eeriness is enhanced further when the lover concedes that his own demise is indeed possible (saltem concede precanti / ut iam defunctum niveis ambire lacertis / digneris, 27-29), and yet that his beloved is still capa-ble of resurrecting him from the dead (vitamque mihi post fata reducas, 30). Even with the hope of new life mentioned here, this is still a morbid ending, creating a 8tting closure to the poem given the preceding thirteen lines of relative bitterness. Overall, the picture created by this framework indicates that the lover, in his current state, is racked by conAicting emotions: one the one hand, delight in his beloved’s physical and personal qualities; on the other hand, downright terror at the desperation she has caused him to feel, which he fears will imminently destroy him. !e lover’s outlook can thus be considered a dual structure with two opposite poles, positive and negative.

5352


Such a structure has a precedent in earlier Latin literature that would have arguably been recognized by most contemporary readers in the eighth century AD. Such recognition would have given Amans amanti more legiti-macy as a poem operating within the con8nes of a high-brow literary con-vention. !is direct parallel of the positive-negative dual structure can be found in a work of Ovid, speci8cally in the 8rst part of Polyphemus’ speech to Galatea in Book !irteen of the Metamorphoses. But even putting struc-ture aside, Amans amanti is similar to its Ovidian counterpart in a few ways. Firstly, both poems have a similar point of view: although Ovid’s is a mono-logue and Amans amanti is an epistula, both poems are communicated by a lover-character addressing his beloved. Secondly, the poems are both elegiac in content, but not written in elegiac verse; rather, they are both written in the meter of epic, dactylic hexameter. Of course, these similarities do not singlehandedly make Amans amanti a conscious derivative of Ovidian po-etry, since there are many other non-Ovidian love poems written from a lover’s point of view. But the fact that, as explained below, a positive-nega-tive framework is present in the beginning of Polyphemus’ speech may be a more meaningful similarity.

!e 8rst nine lines of Polyphemus’ speech consist of a positive descrip-tion of Galatea, likening her to various items in nature using comparative adjectives. While the comparative quality of the adjectives clearly constitutes a di:erence with Amans amanti (which only makes use of positive adjec-tives), “candida” in line 1 may be a direct and deliberate echo of “candidior” in Ov. Met. xiii.789, not only considering their identical position at the be-ginning of the lover’s speech, but also because they are words characterizing the beloved’s beauty as “white,” which has connotations not only of visual purity but also of moral goodness1. Polyphemus continues in a similar fash-ion through these nine lines, calling Galatea “more Aowery than the mead-ows, taller than the long alder tree...” (Aoridior pratis, longa procerior alno, 790), making several more nature-focused comparisons2 up until line 797 (et, si non fugias, riguo formosior horto, “And, if you don’t Aee, [you’re] more beautiful than a well-watered garden”).

At this point, the tone of Polyphemus’ address takes a sudden dark turn: for the remaining ten lines of the paragraph, the comparative adjectives,

1 see TLL s.v. candidus 244.43 “benevolus, bonus, simplex, sincerus.”

2 One of these comparisons, mollior... lacte coacto (“softer... than coagulated milk”) may itself be related to the milk-related description in Amans amanti (lacteaque... sanguis, ��WKRXJK�WKLV�LV�PRUH�OLNHO\�D�FRLQFLGHQFH��JLYHQ�WKDW�3RO\SKHPXV�LV�UHIHUULQJ�VSHFL¿-cally to cheese.

while remaining nature-focused, switch from having positive connotations to negative ones. Among other comparisons, he describes “the same Galatea [as] more savage than unconquered heifers” (saevior indomitis eadem Galatea iuuencis, 798), “more deceiving than the waves” (fallacior undis, 799) and “more bitter than 8re” (acrior igne, 800). By calling her “more un-responsive than the open seas” (surdior aequoribus, 804), he accuses her of being unsympathetic to his plight as an unrequited lover. In this part of the speech, Polyphemus evidently expresses his frustration with being in love with someone who is simultaneously causing him great pain; this is a thematic similarity to the lover’s situation in Amans amanti. Also, just as Galatea is described as “more violent than a river” (violentior amne, 801) from Polyphemus’ point of view, the lover in Amans amanti su:ers the “vio-lentia” (25) of his desperate passion for his beloved. Especially given this semantic connection (deliberate or not) between the two negative halves of these poems, there seems to be both a structural and sentimental a+nity between these two works whereby the speaker – whether it is Polyphemus or the lover in Amans amanti – praises his beloved, only to immediately cast her in a negative light as a cause of distress. Even though it seems Ovid wrote his Metamorphoses several hundred years before Amans amanti was composed, the positive-negative dual structure is something that the two poems hold in common.

Even given this connection, the question of whether a contemporary reader of Amans amanti would therefore call it “Ovidian” or even “Poly-phemean” is di+cult to answer. In fact, it is likely that readers would see nothing particularly “Polyphemean” about Amans amanti, but would rather identify more of a link between the su:ering lover and other similar charac-ters in Roman literature, even in literature without an explicit positive-neg-ative dual structure3. However, one thing is certain: Structural and thematic a+nity between Amans amanti, Polyphemus’s speech and (thematically, if not structurally) other literary works suggests that the author of Amans amanti was consciously attempting to convey the dualistic nature of the lover’s spiritual condition in a way that would make sense to an audience steeped in literature by great Roman authors like Ovid, who used such

3 For instance, when the lover in Amans amanti implies that his beloved’s withholding of help would lead to his death, saying, “May I not die on your account, with my death becom-ing your guilt” (atque tua... causa, 26), for a contemporary reader this may have brought to mind other characters in Roman tradition who ascribe their deaths to their beloved, such as Dido in another epistula (Ovid’s Heroides vii) when she says, “You’ll be said to have been the reason for my destruction” (tu... leti causa ferere mei, Ov. Her. vii.64). Likewise, Dido’s bitter remark “That place, my heart, contains savage Cupid’s wound” (mea... pectora... ille locus saevi vulnus Amoris habet, Ov. Her. vii.189-190) bears a thematic similarity to when the lover in Amans amanti notes how his beloved has wounded him (and other “miserable men”) with “the spear of love” (et in miseros telum iacularis amoris, 19).

5554


tactics as the positive-negative dual framework for the sake of eloquence and artistic e:ectiveness. In this way, the author of Amans amanti raises the degree of legitimacy which the audience ascribes to the lover-protagonist of his poem. Arguably, any audience is more apt to take a literary character seriously if that character’s plight is communicated in a way that culturally resonates with them and with which they can identify.

But while this positive-negative dual framework exists as a way of in-terpreting the portrayal of the “amans,” another duality can be extrapolated from this poem that deals with the portrayal of the “amanti,” the beloved.

Speci8cally, this other dual structure serves to aggrandize the beloved to a super-human status by representing her as both a person and a goddess. For example, the lover’s physical description of his beloved includes parts of her anatomy that, while clearly belonging to a human body, are depicted as having heavenly qualities. Her “eyes blaze with star- like Aames” (sidereis ardescunt lumina Aammis, 1), and the idea that roses and gold spring forth from her person (fundunt... aurum, 2) is physically impossible, and if not an indication of divinity, is simply a metaphor for her extraordinary beauty. In line 10, the harming of her feet by rough terrain (dura laedi... vestigia terra) is called “a sin” (scelus), as if a crime against the gods; and yet the fact that it is possible for her feet to be harmed brings attention to her vulnerable, and therefore mortal, status.

In line 15, the lover says “In no person are all aspects praiseworthy” (nulli laudabile totum est), implying that his beloved, a human being, falls short of perfection despite being divinely beautiful. But a jarring antithesis is created here because of the following line, which seems to contradict line 15: “But if there is anyone who can discern everything in you, let him approve of what he sees” (in te cuncta... possit, 16). Here, the lover implies that she, unlike anybody else, is someone whose every aspect is praiseworthy, which raises her beyond the status of a normal, imperfect human being. Amans amanti closes with the lover overtly using language of prayer, addressing his beloved as a goddess who has power over life and death: “... At least yield to me, I who am begging you / To think me, already dead, worthy of sur-rounding with your snow-white arms, / And to lead life back to me a9er my death” (saltem... reducas, 27-29). Within this passage, note especially the words “concede” (“yield, concede” [27]), “precanti” (“to [me] begging, pray-ing” [27]) and “digneris” (“that you think [me] worthy, condescend” [28]), all of which have strong connotations of a human being appealing to a deity for help.

!e instances discussed thus far are general compared to other instances in the poem in which the lover goes so far as to compare his mortal beloved to speci8c divine beings in the Roman pantheon, either by name or by im-plication. What the lover says in lines 5 and 6 needs almost no explanation:

“With the beauty of the goddesses / You gleam and conquer Venus with your heavenly body” (formaque dearum / fulges et Venerem caelesti corpore vin-cis). But Venus is not the only Roman goddess that this woman supplants in her lover’s praises. When she is described as “dragging Chinese threads with tender 8ngers, play[ing] on the precious warp” (digitisque tenellis / Serica 8la trahens pretioso in stamine ludis, 7-8), this may literally refer to her skill at weaving silk (as mentioned before), or it could be doubly understood as a reference to the Fates, in which case the beloved is being likened to one of the goddesses who controls people’s lives.

Another bold comparison is made in lines 17 through 20, where the beloved is not only said to induce silence from the Sirens and even from one of the Muses (Sirenum cantus... rear, 17-18), but also to operate with the sovereignty and e+cacy of Love the deity, “hurl[ing] the weapon of love against miserable men / And nurtur[ing] a serious wound that is curable by no sword” (et in miseros telum iacularis amoris / et grave vulnus alis nullo sanabile ferro, 19-22). !is woman is therefore being described throughout the course of this poem as several Roman deities, and yet she is also the lover’s earthly object of a:ection.

From the above examples, it is clear that a dualistic structure (which here can be termed “mortal-divine”) is used to inform the beloved’s por-trayal in Amans amanti, just as a positive-negative dual framework plays the same role for the lover himself. !rough the mortal-divine framework, the beloved is depicted by her lover as someone who, despite being a woman, has divine qualities just like a deity in the Roman pantheon. Likewise, the positive-negative framework characterizes the lover as someone at the ab-solute height of lovesickness. From looking at the original Latin text and (in the case of the positive-negative framework) seeing how earlier works inform it, the existence of these characterizations is clear and supportable, but can modern readers discover why the author, whoever he was, chose to characterize the “amans” and the “amanti” in these ways? Exactly why were these his artistic objectives, and what purpose does the poem itself serve?

One can only speculate on these points, but if the Europeans of 89een hundred years ago were human beings, this means they had roughly the same feelings and inclinations as modern people. Perhaps the composer of Amans amanti really was in love with someone, in which case the “amans” was not a character, but an extension of the author himself. !is person may have been su:ering from extreme lovesickness, and may have decided that writing down his feelings would help him cope with them. Perhaps he even hoped that his beloved would someday read the poem. But a more likely situ-ation is that a person in medieval Europe – perhaps a working poet, a monk or a student – composed Amans amanti as a meticulously constructed liter-ary exercise, as a gi9 for a friend, as a job for a client, or even as a commodity

5756


to be sold to lovesick teenagers aiming to woo the girl down the street with cheap, ready-made verse in the style of the ancient poets. It is possible that the author was happy with his poem, and just as possible that he thought nothing of it. Chances are he met a violent end at a relatively young age, like many in the ancient world did, and that we will never know who he was. But someone thought it necessary to preserve Amans amanti, albeit with some lines carelessly switched around (the order of which is thankfully restored here, courtesy of D.R. Shackleton Bailey). It is from ancient works like these that modern humans can know with certainty that their distant ancestors were just as human as they are now.

Bibliography

Knox, P. E. (1995): Ovid: Heroides: Select Epistles, Cambridge Univ. Press.

Shackleton Bailey, D. R. (1982): Anthologia Latina. Vol. 1: Carmina in codicibus scripta, Stutgardiae.

Tarrant, R. J. (2004): P. Ovidi Nasonis Metamorphoses: recognovit brevique adnotatione critica instruxit R. J. Tarrant, Oxford Univ. Press.

!esaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL) Online. <www.degruyter.com>.

sententiae volume v

Documents

e board

e opinions

harvard universitye

iiiiis e n t e n t

harvard university6

harvard university1ivlauba

e sacrality of relics

e thunderous throngs