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Presumption and Despair: The figure of Bernard in Middle English imaginative literature Adam Tyler Horn Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2021 © 2021 Adam Tyler Horn All Rights Reserved Abstract Presumption and Despair: The figure of Bernard in Middle English imaginative literature Adam Tyler Horn This dissertation pursues two distinct but parallel projects in relation to the work of Bernard of Clairvaux and Middle English imaginative literature. First, I argue for a Bernardine anagogical lens as a way to better understand the deepest theological commitments and most distinctive formal innovations of certain key Middle English literary texts, especially Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales. Second, I outline a more genealogical project, tracing the figure of Bernard as it is explicitly invoked in widely circulated Middle English works including Piers, The Parson’s Tale, and the Prick of Conscience. These two threads connect to suggest that the work of Bernard of Clairvaux can offer a new way to understand the relationship between theological and literary texts in the late Middle Ages. Because Bernard’s influence in the vernacular is as much as matter of style as of content, it requires a more capacious way of theorizing the theological implications and even motivations of literary form. The “figure of Bernard” acts as a cipher for later works to explore their deepest intellectual preoccupations, and makes it possible to trace the way they imagine the anagogical interval between the presence and absence of Christ, the over- and under-estimation of the presence of eternity in time. The Bernardine themes of “presumption” and “despair” serve as a useful shorthand for signaling this theorization, and help me to extend its application beyond texts in which Bernard is explicitly invoked—including to writers, like Chaucer and Thomas Malory, whose work is often assumed to be firmly secular. Table of Contents Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................................... ii Dedication ...................................................................................................................................... iii Introduction: A Double Glow: Bernardine style and anagogical exegesis ..................................... 1 Chapter 1: Noonday Ambivalence: Re-examining Langland’s Nede in the light of Bernardine theology ......................................................................................................................................... 16 Chapter 2: The Two Bernards: Tensions in Bernardine theology and its literary heirs ............... 75 Chapter 3: “Bernard the monk ne saugh nat all”: Chaucerian theology and the Bernardine tradition ....................................................................................................................................... 128 Chapter 4: “In good tyme”: After despair in Malory’s “Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere” .................................................................................................................................. 183 Chapter 5: Memorare .................................................................................................................. 237 Conclusion...................................................................................................................................257 References ................................................................................................................................... 263 i Acknowledgments First I should thank my dissertation committee, and especially my sponsor Eleanor Johnson. Eleanor offered more of her time and energy to this project than I had any right to expect, and made me an incomparably clearer thinker and writer over the course of almost six years of encouragement and supervision. Christopher Baswell has consistently challenged my least thorough impulses, and helped make possible a research trip that fundamentally shaped this dissertation. Patricia Dailey has suggested crucial sources for this project that I would never have got to myself, and challenged me at the start to find deeper scholarly resources for my interests. My fellow student Jeremy Stevens gave me the strength to carry on over lunch at Panda Express. I should also thank Nicolette Zeeman for helping me to begin to understand Thomas Malory, and to read and write about literature much more carefully than I was at first inclined to do. Without her supervision of the MPhil paper that became this dissertation’s fourth chapter, I would have had no idea where I was going, and even less of an idea of how to get there. I would also like to thank Robin Kirkpatrick, who taught me how to read Dante in the most generously personal learning environment I have ever encountered. Dante does not appear much in this dissertation, but the spirit of Robin’s teaching does. Lastly, I have to offer a special thanks to Nicholas Watson, my undergraduate advisor, without whom I would have never thought of attempting such a thing. Nicholas introduced me to Chaucer, Langland, and Julian of Norwich, and sent me to Bernard’s On Loving God to understand them. It is no exaggeration to say that I have spent ten years of my life pursuing these themes. Tempting as it is to conclude with a monastic “perdite vixi,” I do not feel that the time has been wasted, and I am very grateful to have been sent off in the direction of Cîteaux, by way of Canterbury. This work is the product of “sondry folk, by aventure yfalle / In felaweshipe.” ii Dedication for Steve Roberts, who took me to Gethsemani and bought me some books, and for Simonetta d’Italia-Wiener, who stopped for me. iii Not to make sense, inside the keel of sweating ribs, not to make sense but room. —Rowan Williams, “Thomas Merton: summer 1966” But what he knew by nature from eternity he learned by experience in time. (“sed quod natura sciebat ab aeterno, temporali didicit experimento”) —Bernard of Clairvaux, De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae iv Introduction A Double Glow Bernardine style and anagogical exegesis It is no less important to recall that a doctrine does not exist only where it is laid out in didactic and scholarly fashion: it is also present in actu where it inspires thought; it can be there in a much more organic and much more powerful way than in some formula whose verbal balance and clarity leave nothing to be desired. —Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis The outstanding examples of the “Cistercian school,” Étienne Gilson observed, were all “stylists”: “Brought up in the school of Cicero and St. Augustine, they have renounced everything save the art of good writing.” This applies most of all to their most famous representative. Gilson recalls that the “profound hesitation” of St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s early years was the question “whether to become a man of letters or to become a saint” (7). Ultimately, Bernard chose both. From the very beginning, when he entered the fledgling Cistercian order at Citeaux with some thirty friends and family members in tow, Bernard was already preaching and converting, learning how best to use language in the service of his new vocation. As his friend William of St. Thierry wrote in the saint’s Vita Prima, at that time Bernard “began to rejoice in the Spirit, for he was now the spiritual father of all those reborn in Christ, his own brothers, and 1 he saw clearly that the hand of the Lord was working with him. From this moment he set himself to assemble whomever he could by the force of words and began to put on the new man” (17). From the pen of William, who enlisted Bernard’s rhetorical skill in multiple theological controversies,1 the germ of this observation shines through in all its sincerity: for William, himself a gifted writer, Bernard is one who works “by the force of words,” and whose capacity to use them is second to none. “From now on,” William says, “when Bernard spoke either publicly or privately, mothers hid their sons from him, wives kept their husbands away from him, and friends fended off their friends from contact with him, because the Holy Spirit put so much power into his speech that hardly any other love could withstand its force” (19). The passion for “good writing” never left Bernard—he was composing his Sermons on the Song of Songs on his deathbed—and it left its mark on all who came into contact with him. Testaments to the power of Bernard’s rhetorical gifts echo down through the Middle Ages. Steven Botterill’s study of Bernard’s impact on Dante’s Divine Comedy, where Bernard appears to complete Dante’s journey through the heavenly spheres, provides a good introduction to the saint’s legacy in the years following his death in 1153: “if there was one factor that linked the disparate perceptions of Bernard in late medieval culture – contemplative, Mariologist, ecclesiastical reformer, theologian of grace – it was the recognition of his uniquely efficacious use of language, especially in his preaching” (41). Thomas Aquinas celebrated Bernard “for the humility of his preaching,” even if he was “reluctant to accept whole-heartedly his authority as a thinker” (30); likewise, for the Franciscan Spiritual Ubertino of Casale, “it is above all the word 1 Bernard’s disputes with Peter Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers were both instigated at William’s urging. G.R. Evans cites
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