The Critic As Artist: Lady Nature and Medieval Philosophical Psychology
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THE CRITIC AS ARTIST: LADY NATURE AND MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY IN THE COSMOGRAPHIA, THE ROMANCE OF__THE ROSE, AND THE PARLIAMENT OF FOWLS A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements £or the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio state University by William H. Nilges, B.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 1.987 Maste~'s Examinatlon Committee: Approved by Christian Zacher David 0. Frantz To Mary ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I express appreciation to Professor Christian Zacher for his editorial skills, Professor David Frantz for his flexibility, and Ms. Mary Faure for her cheerfulness on the many mornings this spring when "Defaute of slepe and hevynesse/ . sleyn my spirit of quyknesse." iii VITA November 28, 1960 Born: Lakewood, Ohio June, 1985 . B.A., The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio June, 1986 ........... M.A., The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio FIELD OF STUDY Major Field: English iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii VITA . i i i INTRODUCTION . 1 CHAPTER 1 Chartrian Epistemology, Lady Nature and Bernard's Cosmographia .... 16 CHAPTER 2 The Scholastic Approach to the Problem of Knowledge . 40 CHAPTER 3 Jean's Continuation of the Roman and Scholastic Philosophical Psychology . 59 CHAPTER 4 Ockham's Philosophical Psychology . 102 CHAPTER 5 Ockhamism and the Parliament of Fowls .. 123 CONCLUSION . 185 WORKS CITED . 192 v INTRODUCTION "The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne • • • II 1 "if thou haddest connyng for t'endite, I shal the shewe mater for to wryte." ( 11. 166-167) "And of the Craft that can and hath the myght To don by force a wight to don f olye-- D ls f igura t was she, I nyl not lye." (11. 220-222) Such references to the difficulties and dangers of crafting poems, coupled with a self-advertised ecclecticism that is pronounced even by medieval standards, have drawn contemporary readers of Chaucer's Parliament of Foules to the same conclusion: the poem presents two views of writing, one which the narrator consciously endorses and one he unconsciously exhibits as he introduces and retells his 'dream.'2 David Aers (1) contrasts the narrator's platonic belief that authoritative discourse is timeless, ideal knowledge with Chaucer's dramatization of the self-reflexivity and purely psychological status of the narrator's own supposedly authoritative poem. Judith Ferster (46) analyzes the Parliament in terms of an Augustinian theory of the will and concludes that contrary to the 1 2 narrator's belief that reading is a passive, objective activity, his poem illustrates how willful readers project themselves onto texts (46). And Lisa Kiser (Parliament 20) argues that the narrator's struggle to craft his poem illustrates that "rather than being disinterested glimpses of new or authoritative truths, poems reflect the immediate concerns of their individual creators." These critics relate the narrator's conscious attitudes toward his craft to a neoplatonic literary-philosophical tradition that implies a nativistic, rationalistic psychology.3 This psychology describes knowledge as an immutable object perceptible only through a divinely-inspired visionary faculty and suggests that readers and writers passively receive rather than actively create ideas. But the narrator's exhibited psychology undermines his spoken belief that knowledge is vouchsafed in divinely-inspired visions: his struggle to understand his "crafte" makes it clear that artistic composition entails the hard work (Kiser, Parliament 16) of creating poems from the materials of various kinds of experience. Unfortunately, this 'blysful' critical harmony does not characterize interpretations of the parliament scene itself. Conflicting opinions surround the various characters in the scene and the literary significance of 3 their discourse. Kiser (Parliament 14), Aers (13), Ferster and Leicester (30) agree that Nature and one or more of the birds who speak in the parliament enact a solution to the narrator's creative difficulties. But they differ substantially in their evaluations of Lady Nature's poetic technique and in thier opinion of which bird, if any, articulates a definitve 'sentence' regarding the eagles' disagreement over the hand of the formel. Nature is variously seen as a typically wilfull reader (Ferster 51); a poet who relies for her voice on various literary genres and attitudes (Aers 14); and an ideal poet figure comparable to those in Alain's De Planctu and Jean DeMeun's continuation of the Roman de la Rose, an artifex "whose (artistic) achievements cannot be matched by the labors of human craftsmen" (Kiser, Parliament 14; Economou 80). Opinions concerning the birds-poets in the parliment scene are equally mixed. Kiser argues that the tercels, by virtue of their earnestness and their willingness "to serve their sovereign lady faithfully and to argue their case laboriously throughout the daytime hours" are "analogues to the narrator in his role as the writer/suitor of this art" (Parliament 15-16); Leicester (18) maintains that the turtle's counsel of self-limitation is closest to Nature's 'sentence'; and Aers (13), dismissing all of the birds as candidates for laureate, claims that "the 4 participants in the Parliament manifest no self-reflexivity in their disourse nor any self-conciousness about its grounds in particular interests and egotism." These differing opinions of Nature and the birds indicate the lack of attention contemporary critics, when assessing Chaucer's version of Lady Nature, pay to the evolution of this goddess in medieval love vision poetry. This ls not the f lrst time a plea for a more sophisticated historical analysis of Lady Nature has been entered. Aers (1), for instance, complains that Leicester fails to bring sufficient historical accuracy to his analysis of the Parliament. But Aers himself restricts his discussion of the Lady Nature's history to Alain's Plaint of Nature, written over two hundred years before Chaucer's poem. And except for Ferster, who invokes what had in the late fourteenth century become outmoded Augustinian philosophy, no one has suggested how Chaucer's goddess and her parliament a philsophical-literary colloquy reflects fourteenth century philosophical concerns. The evolution of Lady Nature from the twelfth through the fourteenth century is germane to the Parliament because she was created to do what Chaucer's narrator struggles but fails to do in his poem: bridge the gap between universal knowledge and the individual 5 human mind through poetry. Robinson notes {150) that this gap constituted the central philosophical problem of the middle ages, the problem of knowledge, which originated in a section of Boethius' commentary on the Isagoge of Porphyry. Boethius quotes Porphyry as asking whether species and genus exist apart from the human mind and in individual physical examples or whether they have reality only in concpts {Coppleston 54). From this dichotomy the medievals created a controversy that spawned questions concerning whether people know God per se or conceptually, the relationship between individual minds and divine knowledge, and the process by which knowledge is acquired. The Chartrian poets created Lady Nature to answer these and other questions concerning the structure of the cosmos and methods for perceiving that structure. She was seen as an autonomous cosmic spirit, an ideal creative agent, and an intermediary between the divine and the physical realms who was responsible for transmitting archetypal knowledge into the sublunar sphere. Bernard and Alain were especially interested in the difficulties platonic poets faced in identifying and articulate ideal knowledge, and they used Nature to "dramatize the complexities of the human psyche among the deceptions of the material world" {Wetherbee, Platonism 189). Through Nature the Chartrians were also 6 able to link Christian dogma with the emanational cosmos and rationalistic philosophy they had inherited from texts such as the Timaeus and the Somnium Scipionis. out of these purposes arose a literary character whose actions and field of activity articulated more eloguently and completely than had any of the Chartrian philosophers the mature body of Chartrian thought: Lady Nature, part psychological, part philosophical, part theological and part scientific, embodied twelfth-century thought and the processes through which that thought was believed to have come into being. The importation into the West of Aristotelian philosophy profoundly changed thirteenth-century ideas of nature and Lady Nature. The scholastics replaced Chartrian rationalism with modified idealism. Ideas, for the Chartrians autonomous entities that exist before and apart from matter, were for the scholastics principles which coexist with matter, as the act of form. This ontological shift led the scholastics to conclude that "nothing is in the intellect which was not first in the senses" (Robinson 154), a sentiment that encouraged a new respect for the role of the individual intellect in the discovery of universal knowledge and an increasingly secular and quasi-scientific view of nature and natural phenomena. Literary conceptions of nature reflected these changes. DeMeun's continuation of the Roman de la 7 ~, for instance, portrays Lady Nature less as an authority in the entire range of human knowledge (especially theology and metaphysics) than it does a specialist in philosophical psychology and natural science. Ockham inspired an even more empirical and specialized concept of nature. He began by rejecting all forms