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 of idealism and all theories of divine causation.

The Chartrians and to a lesser extent the scholastics posited an emanational cosmos in which knowledge is a series of hierarchically descending radiations from

Godhead. Ockham asserted that divine wisdom is beyond man's ken, that man can understand only physical cause and effect, and that all natural knowledge is created in individual human minds out of concepts generated from intuitive experience. This epistemology exploded the scholastic metaphysical impulse. It also militated against the unification of all intellectual disciplines under the rubric of theology. The sciences were free to evolve into increasingly distinct fields of enquiry operating according to the scientific principle of physical cause and effect; the philosopher, instead of examining the structure of the cosmos, turned his attention to the structure of the organ that creates

ideas about that cosmos, the human mind. Concepts of nature thus became increasingly fragmented into 8 theological, mechanical and psychological considerations of physical reality, rendering archaic the versions of nature found in earlier poems.

Given his broad exposure to continental and insular literature and philosophy, Chaucer was certain to have been sensitive to the evolution of Lady Nature as he created his version of the goddess.2 The distinction between the via antiqua (Thomistic thought) and the via moderna (Ockhamism) was a philosophical commonplace

(Eldredge 106) in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, and Chaucer knew intimately many of the philosophical and literary texts that inform Chartrian and scholastic thought, including the Somnium, the

Consolation of Philosophy and the Plaint. In the Legend

of Good Women he refers to Aristotle's Ethics, an

important scholastic document, and he had translated a

substantial portion of the Roman. The literary and

philosophical sophistication he exhibits throughout his

work, combined with his familiarity with these texts,

make it dangerous, I think, to draw a simple distinction

between authoritative or neoplatonic and

anti-authoritative or modern discourse when discussing

the views of poetic making in the Parliament. Equally

dangerous is the temptation, however irresistible, to

define either the narrator's ideas regarding poetry or

his version of Nature in terms of Alain's or Jean's 9 version of her and the epistemologies she implies.

Rather, ln assessing the Parliament it ls, I think, necessary to take into account account the three-part literary and philosophical evolution of Lady Nature and medieval epistemology outlined above.

Proposal

This essay was originally intended to describe the epistemology implicit in the Parliament, in terms of

Ockhamist philosophy. But as I investigated the sources of Chaucer's Lady Nature, it became clear almost immediately that I could not hope to understand

Chaucer's poem apart from the neoplatonic and scholastic philosophy and literature that influenced his version of the goddess. Moreover, although I was convinced that

Ockhamist thought informed the poem, since Ockham developed his theory of knowledge in reaction to the

Aristotelian necessitarianism of Albert Magnus and the scholastics, it was clear that elucidating Chaucer's

Ockhamist leanings would require contrasting elements of the Parliament with comparable elements in earlier dream visions, such as the Plaint and the Roman. As

Aristotle points out in the Ethics and Chaucer suggests in the Parliament, often the first step toward positive identification consists of determining what something is not. The strategy of this essay is therefore to compare 10 and contrast Chartrlan, scholastic, and Ockhamlst thought as it applies to the evolution of Lady Nature.

Chapter one summarizes the Chartrian approach to the problem of knowledge and analyzes its crystallization in Bernard's Cosmographia, a creation epic featuring the first fully-developed poetic representation of Lady

Nature. This chapter describes the philosophical, theological and literary circumstances that inspired the

Chartrian theophanic view of nature and, through

Bernard's poem, it also suggests Chartrian poetic theory.

Chapter two contrasts Thomas' modified idealism and his theory of the soul with Chartrian philosophical psychology; this analysis is followed in chapter three by a scholastic philosophical explication of Jean's continuation of the Roman, in which many of the dichotomies that charactize Chaucer's work are in place.

Jean relativizes conflicts between traditional authority and contemporary authority, between textual and actual experience, and between platonic (old) and scholastic

(new) views of writing by opposing a series of poet

figures, including Raison, Nature and Genius, each of which embodies a theory of knowledge available to the

thirteenth-century philosopher or poet. This chapter

will suggest that Jean consciously used his version of

Lady Nature and her poet-priest Genius to represent 11 loosely the two aspects of the soul described by the scholastics, the possible and the active intellects.

These characters and the epistemology they represent critique the Chartrian epistemology Raison embodies and suggest an alternative to neoplatonic theories of poetic making.

Chapters four and five discuss Ockhamist philosophical psychology and Ockhamist-inspired poetry as a reaction to earlier theories of cognition. Chapter

four summarizes Ockham's theory of knowledge, comparing and contrasting it with Aquinas' Aristotelian

epistemology. Chapter five describes how the Parliament dramatizes, through the narrator's struggles to revise

his concept of secular love and poetic making, the

psychological implications of Ockhamist philosophy and

at the same time critiques Chartrian epistemology and

the poetic theory implicit in the Roman. The dichotomy

between old and new cognitive theory found in Jean's

poem is a structural element of Chaucer's as well,

although in a more psychologically realistic way. The

narrator, versed in twelfth and thirteenth-century

literature, tries to comprehend his 'crafte' in terms of

an outmoded, restrictive, and inaccurate epistemology.

But instead of introducing an authoritative knower, such

as Bernard's Noys or Jean's Genius, to describe

authoritatively how poets work, Chaucer intentionally 12 withdraws himself from the action and compels the reader to 'create' from his experience of reading the

Parliament his own self-reflexive understanding of how poetry and ideas come into being.

This three-part philosophical and literary investigation of medieval cognitive theory as embodied in dream vision poetry featuring Lady Nature will provide an historical context in which to analyze the

Parliament. The most important aspect of this analysis is the development of philosophical psychology in the

Middle Ages. As the desire to describe reality metaphysically gave way to more scientific concerns, philosophers turned increasingly to psychological issues. Even so, before Ockham turned entirely from

Aristotelian necessitarianism, it was left to poets to explore the psychological implications of philosophical thought. Nature, created to link the abstract with the mundane and to unite several disciplines, was the perfect vehicle through which to effect this exploration. Existing, like man, on the borderline between the divine and the mundane, Nature came to embody, informally, contemporary philosophical psychology.

Chaucer's Lady Nature, like her predecessors, embodies a variety of psychological concerns that were new to the fourteenth century, as well as several that 13 earlier poets had addressed. By considering both the intellectual forces that shaped earlier versions of the goddess and fourteenth-century philosophy, it will be possible to distinguish philosophical and literary aspects of Chaucer's character that separate it from earlier characters, in terms of the philosophy that motivated and described these points of separation,

Ockhamism. An historical-philosophical approach to Lady

Nature will also allow us to speculate on Chaucer's use of an important Chartrian and scholastic figure, Genius.

Although Genius does not appear uncloaked in the

Parliament, several clues suggest his presence, although in a submerged form, in the parliament scene. This figure's evolution from nativistic knowledge into an ideal poet and then a cognitive mechanism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we will see, makes him a critical factor for charting the parameters of Chaucer's poetic theory in the Parliament.

Most important, such analyses of Chaucer's revision of earlier characters associated with epistemological theories will provide insight into Chaucer's poetics.

The Parliament, situated between the -- for Chaucer -­ traditional Book of the Duchess and more radical House of Fame, presents a narrator in transition from the

forms and practices of continental dream vision to a more thoroughgoing realism, between the Garden of Love 14 and an ordinary garden behind the house of rumor. A large part of the mature Chaucerian realism is wrapped up in the dynamics of storytelling, an interest that is with Chaucer from the start of his career but which became increasingly grounded in the actual experience of increasingly complex and unique psychologies as his career progressed. Lady Nature, traditionally an ideal mind operating with ideal forms, provided the perfect vehicle through which Chaucer could announce his departure from neoplatonic and Aristotelian cognitive theory. For the background necessary to understand the significance of this departure, we turn now to Chartrian thought and the poetry of Bernard. 15

NOTES

1 Parliament of Fowls, 11. 1-2. All citations of the Parliament are taken from The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. John Fisher (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977).

2 For a discussion of the sources of the Parliament see William Edward Farnham, The Sources of Chaucer's Parlement of Foules (Baltimore, 1917); and B.A. Windeatt, Chaucer's Dream Poetry: Sources and Analogues (Cambridge: Rowman & Littlefield, 1982) 73 - 120.

3 Aers (1-4) argues that Chaucer critiques a neoplatonic epistemology implicit in the Somnium; Ferster (48-50) is concerned with Augustian/neoplatonic will theory as it relates to hermeneutics. CHAPTER I

CHARTRIAN EPISTEMOLOGY, LADY NATURE AND BERNARD'S COSMOGRAPHIA

God turne us every dreme to goode, For hyt is wonder, be the roode, To my wytte, what causeth swevenes, Eyther on morwes or on evenes (House of Fame, 11. 1-4)

Chartrian and Scholastic Epistemology

The Chartrian and scholastic responses to the

problem of knowledge differ as much as the nee-platonic and Aristotelian corpora that informed them. In the

tenth-through-twelfth centuries the Chartrians, inspired

by neo-platonic texts, rejected the earlier christian

view of nature and adopted a vision of it as a

divinely-ordered cosmic principle whose harmonious

structural principles man could -- and should -- strive

to discern through the trivium and quadrivium. To the

extent that this view rejected the suspicion and mystery

attached to earlier, predominately mystical and

suspicious attitudes concerning nature, Chartrian

neoplatonism was a valuable "halfway house between the

exigetical studies of the old thought and the

full-fledge natural theology of the thirteenth century"

16 17

(Leff, Thought 115). But in their desire to trace natural phenomena to an archetypal source, the

Chartrians overlooked the structure of human thought in favor of the metaphysical patterns of the divine mind.

This belief in a direct rapport between ideas in the cosmos and the human intellect led them to ignore psychological processes; moreover, their fundamentally theological evaluation of natural phenomena worked against autonomization of the sciences, all of which were believed to fall, finally, under the under the rubric of theology.

Aristotelianism undermined the Chartrian approach to knowledge. It supplied thirteenth-century philosophers and poets with the analysis of the structure and constituents of being that platonism lacked (Leff, Thought 115). It also gave them a new respect for perceptible reality as prerequiste for all natural knowledge. Investigations of the relationships between physical (rather than cosmic) phenomena gained new status, such that thirteenth-century scientific concerns -- as witnessed by the study of optics -- were for the first time addressed in non-theological terms.

The Chartrians had described the sciences and the arts as handmaidens of theology and had sought to unify them

under a Christianized platonic proto-metaphysics

(Wiesphall 216). Aquinas, in contrast, not only argued 18 that philosophy could not supply evidence for metaphysical speculation (Coppleston 182), he also maintained that the study of physics and natural philosophy precedes metaphysics (Coppleston 183).

This focus on increasingly autonomous branches of study laid the groundwork for the fourteenth-century development of a variety of primitive observational methods. Aquinas and the scholastics had a much greater appreciation than the Chartrians of scientific studies;

they recognized that philosophy, theology and science,

while directed to the common end of revealing divine

truths, have their own procedures. Theology, Aquinas

argued, "appeals to the scriptures and to conciliar

definitions; but in philosophy or natural science the

appeal to authority is the weakest argument" (Coppleston

183). This development of proto-science, of tools for

understanding natural phenomena terms of their own logic

rather than theologic or the pressupositions of a

platonic world view, extended to psychology. Robinson

(152) notes that the scholastic concern with the mental

processes through which the mind derives ideas from

perceptual information required "not only the pure and

factual status of sensation but also the need for a

physiological mechanism by which the senses inform the

intellect."

The Chartrlans and the scholastics differed 19 fundamentally in their approaches to the problem of knowledge. A nativistic psychology and a strict idealism characterize the Chartrian approach; the scholastic approach entails a modified idealism in which new value

is placed upon sensory information and cognitive mechanisms. As suggested in the introduction, these philosophical differences led to substantively differrlng views of philosophical and literary concepts of nature as well. The remainder of this chapter will explore the Chartrian concept of nature through an analysis of Chartrian thought, followed by an explication of Bernard's Cosmographia.

The Chartrian Approach to the Problem of Knowledge

The Chartrians lacked a system of thought, whether

philosophical, scientific or theological, that would

permit them to develop and articulate their ideas

coherently and systematically. In the twelfth century,

Steenberghen (41) explains, not only did Augustinian

philosophy or theology not exist as an integrated whole,

but " ... the philosophical elements which nourished

intellectual life were much less homogeneous than they

were in the thought of st. Augustine himself." Not

until the thirteenth century, with the emergence of the

university as center of intellectual investigation and

the simultaneous development of scholastic metaphysics, 20 would a comprehensive philosophy come into being. For these reasons, the Chartrians virtually invented medieval theology and, through a neoplatonic literary-philosophical tradition, defined many of the philosophical questions that characterize medieval philosophy (Chenu, 323 ff.).

By far the most influential text within this tradition was Chalcidius' partial translation of

Plato's Timaeus. According to Wetherbee this emanational account of the cosmos supplied the

Chartrians with the bases of their integrated vision of creation, including a belief that the universe is a unified whole, or cosmos; that it is a copy of an ideal exemplar; and that its creation is an expresssion of the goodness of its creator (Wetherbee, Cosmographia 30).

Early Chartrian thinkers described Plato's cosmos in terms compatible with Christian mythography. They associated the unmoved mover of the Timmaeus with God, its eternal exemplars with the wisdom of the trinity, and Plato's world soul with the goodness of the Creator.

Later Chartrlan thinkers, most notably William of

Conches, even went so far as to equate the platonic triad of the good, the logos and the world soul with the

Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit respectively (Leff,

Thought 120). Such explicit equations were discouraged for their pantheistic tendency to bring god, in the form 21 of the Holy spirit/world soul, into nature. But so pervasive was this infusion of neoplatonism into

Chartrian thought that from the later tenth through the twelfth century" ... all knowledge and literature was assumed to imply a platonic cosmological setting"

(Wetherbee, Platonism 29).

The Chartrian solution to the problem of knowledge was, in modern parlance, nativistic and rationalistic.

Ideas were thought to be divinely implanted in the soul

before it descended to the sublunar sphere to be wedded with corrupt matter. Cognition, therefore, involved the

intuition of archetypal ideas: through introspection and

rational enquiry man attempted to pierce the confusion

of perceptual information and perceive in the soul the

lineaments of these ideas. This rationalistic theory of

knowledge suggested the possibility of direct knowledge

of God, i.e., direct rapport between the mind and

extramental reality. It was predicated on a belief in a

transcendant, immutable order as the source of all

reality and on the doctrine of participat~on, which

defines all beings beneath God as derivative, dependent

realities whose ontological value results from the

degree to which they participate in the perfection of

the first principle, God (Steenberghen 13). This last

doctrine is particularly important to Chartrian

epistemology, for it made reality correspond to ideas in 22 the mind of God. These ideas, in turn, were thought to be separate from matter, immaterial existants with ontological status.

The philosophers of this period in general and the

Chartrians in particular conceived of the process of knowing as an uncovering of pre-formed, eternal wisdom rather than the subjective shaping of individual conceptual knowledge. Anselm (1033-1109) argued that human ideas were adequate evidence of their existence as eternal ideas, the penultimate source of physical reality and human thought. The early Chartrian Adelhard argued that the senses are fallible; they express, he claimed, only opinions regarding physical existants, the dim reflections of universal ideas (Leff, Thought,

116-117). These universal ideas, he concluded, can be seen in their true purity only when freed from imagination; thus, the greater a man's insight, the greater his ability to look beyond the individual and observable fact to the divine intellect. Gilbert

(1076-1154), another Chartrian philosopher, argued that

individuals are the embodiment of forms or essences, and that these forms, like the forms of nature, can be traced back to the divine idea in God (Coppleston

90-91).

Not all Chartrian philosophers and poets were this extreme in their neo-platonism. But like Adelard and 23

Gilbert, they uniformly considered cognition and abstraction as the recognition of pre-existent inner realities. As a result of this belief, they tended to reify knowledge in ideals or archetypes which they then located in the macrocomos, or the immutable, superlunar realm which emanates from the divine mind, as an expression of the creator's love. The macrocosmos, as described in the Timmaeus, is a purely ideatic, cosmic space ordered according to perfect mathematic principles that harmoniously encode the mysteries of the universe.

Below the macrocosmos is the microcosmos, which emanates from the world soul and from lower cosmic powers. This area of the cosmos was thought to begin at the sublunar sphere. The realm of mutability and imperfection, the microcosmos is nevertheless a reflection, however dim, of the divine mind.

Man, too, was thought to be a microcosm: his physical nature was constituted of the same elements and subject to the same physical laws as nature, and his soul (mind) differed from the platonic world soul only ln its liability to sensory confusion. His affinity with the macrocosmos, explains Economou (83), made him

capable of interpreting and understanding the natural and the moral order of a universe which, like its transcendent model, is a single, harmonious whole, a sensible, concrete world that participates in the divine reality which gave it being. The nature of the cosmos reveals the nature of man; to know the macrocosm is to know the 24

microcosm, man, in whom the immense unity of all things was knitted up together . man who stands at the paradoxical borderline of matter and spirit.

This belief in the correspondence between human and divine intelligence was the basis of the Chartrian concept of theophanic vision. The ninth-century philosopher and a precursor of the Chartrians, John

Scotus, defined theophania as the divine order of created nature (Leff 62-72). As it was fully developed, theophania referred to a way of knowing God, perfected in the afterlife, which on earth is instigated by grace and effected through the recognition and contemplation of the "transcendent meaning of the divine order of nature" (Economou 96). Theologically speaking, theophany allows man to emulate his pre-fallen condition through reason and return to the state of grace that means salvation. This restoration, notes Economou, entails a double movement, a rediscovery of the divine likeness within and a sense of participation in the harmony of the cosmos (Econcomou 98).

Wetherbee (Platonism 14) explains that the concept of nature that arose from this theophanic world view was

imaginative and literary. In an emanationist cosmos, concepts such as the world soul or nature, by virtue of

having derived from a greater intelligence, are

themselves cosmically autonomous and intelligent beings.

These beings, the Chartrians anthropomorphically 25 concluded, engage in intellectual processes that are not alien to human cognition, just more refined. To understand how the Chartrians conceived of Nature, an ideal 'knower,' it is therefore helpful first to consider how they viewed the human aquisition of knowledge, as revealed in their organization of the intellectual disciplines. We have already seen that the

Chartrians grouped the sciences around theology. They actively sought to unify all intellectual disciplines in this way because they believed that theology was a dim reflection of the original philosophy of contemplation and grateful prayer, a philosophy that enabled pre-fallen man to see clearly the macrocosmic order in the physical world and in his own soul and which is succesively perfected in the hierarchy of intellectual beings inhabiting the cosmos. Among men, this true philosophy has been "· broken into disciplines whose coherence is imperfectly understood and is liable to sophistry" (Wetherbee, Cosmographia 29-31). As Wiesphal explains, these disciplines were arranged according to

Isadore's Etymologie Libri XX. Composed in the seventh century, this work was the standard educational

reference in the middle ages. Isodore, following Plato,

Aristotle and Boethius, divides philosophy into physics,

ethics and logic. Physics, or natural philosophy, is in

turn divided into the subjects of the quadrivium, 26 arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy (Wiesheipl

212).

The Chartrians had trouble with Isodore's division of knowledge and especially with the Isodorian concept of natural philosophy because they lacked the

Aristotelian corpus that influenced the Etymologie as well as any works on natural science, metaphysics and ethics. Because of these deficiencies, Isodore's classification of the sciences "had little significance and no practical value for (Chartrian) teachers of the arts" (Wiesheipl 213). So not only was their model for understanding natural philosophy (and nature) essentially speculative, but their inability coherently to understand that model left them little alternative but to turn to speculative fields of study in assessing the physical world. 'Science' consisted of that which could be described in terms of the seven liberal arts. A student therefore approached the study of nature through the trivium (grammar, dialectics, rhetoric) and the quadrivium, followed by the contemplation of the Bible and the fathers. The object of such an education was not to understand man and his environment in terms of

physical cause and effect but but to understand them in

theologically, that is, speculatively and imaginatively.

As Wetherbee (Platonism 14) explains, the Chartrians developed "a new recognition of the nature and value of 27

imaginative literature .as a source of knowledge about

God and man." This perspective lent itself naturally to

a concept of nature, not as a detached object of

' empirical study but as an anthropomorphic, integrated

being embodying macrocosmic knowledge perfected.

Nature as a Literary Figure

Although the Chartrians are to be credited with the

invention of the literary character Lady Nature, this

character emerged from a long line of

philosophico-literary figures who occupied the gap

between universal and individual knowledge and between

the macro and the microcosmos. Lewis, in The Discarded

Image (66), claims that her origin is Macrobius'

commentary on the Somnium Scipionis:

When mens contemplates her divine parent she percieves the full lkeness of her author; but when she looks back at things behind her, she creates out of herself Anima, or soul . Unlike the Christian trinity, mens becomes less divine by creating, declines into creation only because she turns her gaze away from her origin and looks forward . . As long as Anima fixes her attention on mens she puts on the nature of mens; but gradually, as her contemplation withdraws, she degenerates to the making of bodies. That is how Nature comes into existence.

The world soul in Chalcidius' partial translation of the

Timaeus also mediates between the divine and physical

realms, imprinting individuated matter with archetypal

images. It was out of such figures that Chartrian Nature

evolved. As noted above, the Chartrians initially 28 equated Plato's nous (the world soul) with the Holy

Spirit, in an attempt to reconcile Christianity with

Platonism. When this approach was branded heretical in the early eleventh century (Leff, Thought 120-121), however, a gap opened in the Christian neoplatonic cosmos where the Holy Spirit had once been. There arose a need in the Chartrian mythography for a figure, not a member of the trinity, to fill the functions of the platonic world soul. Wetherbee traces the evolution of this figure, from its origin as the igneous vigor, the source of vitality and intelligence of heavenly bodies and perpetual generator of earthly life, to its emergence in the eleventh century as a strictly cosmological principle, autonomous in its sphere, responsible for all creation in the universe, called nature (Wetherbee, Platonism 10).

The vehicle whereby divine live imparts to creation the power of reproduction and self-sustenance, Nature, distinct now from the Holy Spirit and the World-Soul both, became what was thought to be a created spirit that acted exclusively as an intermediary between the divine and the physical worlds, joining form with matter, idea with body. Diffused in the firmament throughout the stars, in the sublunary world through the elements, Nature was identified with the creation and preservation of life as well as with the order and the 29

obedience of creation to cosmic law (Economou 70-95).

The Chartrian poets explored affinities between Nature's and man's creative powers by personifying this spirit as

Lady Nature, a goddess existing, like man, on the

paradoxical borderline between matter and spirit. To

understand how Lady Nature was used to dramatize

fully-developed Chartrian epistemology, we turn now to

Bernard's Cosmographia, which "crystallizes in poetic

language" the fundamentals of Chartrian thought

(Silverstein 92).

The Cosmographia

The Cosmographia consists of two books, the

macrocosmos and the microcosmos. In book one Nature

supplicates Noys (world soul) on behalf of Hyle (primal

matter), who had begged to be liberated from confusing

suspension between good and evil and to come into being

through the infusion of the divine essence. Nature asks

Noys to create a sublunar sphere, a mi er ocosmos

mirroring the perfection of the macrocosmos. Noys

responds by "summoning his imaginative powers" and,

reflecting inwardly on the divine ideas, forming the

earth and animal and vegetable life. At the end of book

one Noys orders Nature to embark on a cosmic journey

whose purpose is to create man by joining his soul,

created by Urania (divine reason) in the outermost

regions of the macrocomos, and his body, created by 30

Physis (practical wisdom) on earth. Nature obediently travels to Urania's sphere, where she observes the souls of humankind awaiting their descent to sublunar existence. She and Urania then travel downward through the cosmos to earth, a journey during which Urania instructs Nature on the order of and the intelligences in -- the celestial spheres. on earth the pair finds Physis, who fashions man's body. In the last chapters Nature joins body and soul; the poem concludes with an analysis of human physiology and psychology.

Bernard's treatment of the problem of knowledge is platonic. In book one he describes a universe highly reminiscent of the Timaeus and Macrobius' commentary on the Sominium Scipionis, comparing the cosmos to a living mind and invoking Macrobius' golden chain metaphor

(Bernardus 88-89). The narrator, interrupting his account of Noy's creation of the earth, unequivocally describes an emanationist universe: "For anything which

ls brought forth to assume the mode of being proper to

its kind," he proclaims, "derives the causes and nature

of its substantial existence from the celestial sphere, as though from a life-giving god" (Bernardus 86). Later

in the same chapter he underscores the ontological

status of ideal knowledge, claiming, "From the

intellectual universe the sensible universe was born,

perfect from perfect" (Bernardus 90). 31 The psychology that flows from this ~~~anized ' neoplatonic concept of the cosmos is, predictably, nativistic and rationalistic. As in the Timmaeus, souls are eternal and pre-existent: they imbibe knowledge as they descend through the celestial spheres toward earth.

As Nature approaches Urania's throne at the outermost limit of the macrocosmos, she therefore finds multitudinous souls awaiting their descent to the sublunar sphere. "The nativity of creatures," Urania later tells Nature, "is celebrated in the divine mind first" {Bernardus 69). Urania also points out that divine wisdom, which becomes the object of man's earthly search for knowledge, makes possible concord between flesh and spirit, and that man's soul, created according to an archetypal pattern, will return to its home among the stars after death. The impact of this emanational cosmology upon Bernard's epistemology is to make man's cognitive task "to 'turn back' and contemplate his divine origin" {Flew 96). So although Bernard recognizes the value of the senses and of practical knowledge through Physis, even these ways of knowing are finally subservient and function in subordination to contemplative and reflective 'sciences,' such as astrology, mythography and encyclopedism, embodied in

Nous and Urania.

In chapter fourteen Bernard describes the 32 composition and functions of the human soul, the medieval equivalent of the mind. Bernard situates the soul, itself a microcosmic mirror of the macrocosm, in the skull (Bernard 121), which consists of three chambers: the frontal, middle and rear, containing the ingenium, ratio and memoria respectively (Bernard 122).

This tripartite division of the faculties of the mind is intended to recall the Christian and the neo-platonic trinities, as is evident in the analagies between the functions of each faculty and Endelechia (a lower form of Noys), Nature and Physis. Throughout this chapter

Bernardus suggests parallels between the macrocosmos and man by associating various functions of these three faculties with the activities of various macrocosmic figures.

Wetherbee (Platonism 94) loosely associates

Bernard's use of the ingenium with poetic imagination.

It is the power which percieves things immediately and which generates from the material of the memoria images of things past. Because it is closely related to the imagination, the ingenium is susceptible to fantasies and dreams; however, when inspired by the ratio, it is divinely imaginative and is capable of perceiving divine ideas. Its creative potential is evident in Book One, when Noys summons his "imaginative" powers to order the cosmos, and in Book Two, when 33

Nature, the intermediary between Physis (memoria) and

Endelechia (ratio), joins the body provided by the former and the soul provided by the latter. As philosophy would become increasingly secular in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the ingenium first evolved into a function (rather than a faculty) of the soul and then into a cognitive process.

The rear chamber of the soul contains the memoria, or memory, which is situated apart from the ingenium,

"lest, dwelling at the threshold of perception, it is troubled by a continual invasion of images" (Bernardus )

-- images, it should be added, that in this neoplatonic cosmology are viewed as a distraction from the source of all true ideas, the ratio. Situated between the potentially dangerous ingenium and the potentially confusing memoria, the ratio, inborn divine wisdom, imposes judgement on both. The ratio is inspired by cosmic knowledge, in the form of the genii, as souls descend through the cosmos. These genii, associated with the transmission of divine wisdom into the physical sphere, appear three times in the poem, once in book one and twice in book two. In the outermost sphere of the cosmos Nature sees "Usiarch," who was ''that Genius devoted to the art and off ice of delineating and giving shape to the form of things" (Bernardus 96). These forms are the secondary forms, or the forms intermediary 34 between the Ideas and the actual physical forms of earthly life; they suggest the intermediary function of the genii and the soul -- between the ideal and physical worlds.

In the microcosmos there are physical and psychological genii: the first reside in the testes, where "They fight unconquered against death with their life-giving weapons, renew our nature, and perpetuate our kind" (Bernardus 126). Psychologically, the genii are the mythopoetic embodiment of the nativistic knowledge of God that permeates each soul as it descends earthward and guides that soul toward right action during life (Bernardus 102). In this capacity, the genii also may be seen as the crux of the Chartrian solution to the problem of knowledge; for they are the vehicle of contact between man's present state and the source of original perfection, or as Wetherbee (Cosmographia

107) notes the unconsciously heeded governing principles of natural virtue. In Book One Bernard describes the archetypal origin of the genii, as Urania and Nature travel through the sphere of the sun, which symbolizes the divine intelligence itself: "Eternal wisdom has appointed ... Genii to adorn and govern the universe. The sun (World Soul) is the most powerful and brilliant of these. . (It is) the mind of the universe, the spark of perception in creatures 35

{It) impenetrates all creation with radiance and warmth."

The genii are particularly important to Bernard's epistemology and to the history of philosophical psychology because they were from the first associated with the office of the secondary forms. In Bernard, the soul, like Nature herself, is inspired by the genii and therefore mediates between the visible world and the intelligible archetype; for the soul, like Nature, can take cognizance of both spheres {Flew 254). But since the quality of this ideal knowledge is ontological -­ the Ideas reside eternally in the divine mind -- and not epistemological, these "sparks of perception" represent static, ideatic knowledge, not cognitive processes, as will Genius in the Roman. The sun is the source of all true knowledge, the creator of ideas, and precedes humankind. Bernard is therefore concerned with the activity of this perfect mind to the virtual exlusion of human psychology, especially the psychological processes by which abstract knowledge is created.

Nature

Nature serves three functions in the Cosmographia, all related, and plays essentially the same role in the macrocosmos and microcosmos -- intermediary between the divine and the physical realms although in much different ways. In the microcosmos she physically unites 36 the soul Urania provides and Physis models; she also conserves the order of the universe in the sublunar sphere and presides over generation (Badel 43). Her macrocosmic role is deeply concerned with epistemological, creative matters that are analagous to the basic concerns of the Chartrian poet striving for theophanic vision. Like the Chartrians, where macrocosmic knowledge is concerned Nature is a mere student, and she resorts to the same astrological and

literary speculations to understand metaphysial reality.

As Noys summons his creative faculty to create the earth, for instance, Nature reverts to the true

Chartrian philosophy of prayer and introspection in

order to process the experience. Badel (44) compares

her to a poet " . . qui cherche soi voie au niveau de

la conceptualization."

In Book Two of the Cosmograghia parallels between

Nature's struggle to unite the body and soul of man

according to divine principles and the Chartrian

poet/philosopher's attempt to discover and articulate

universal knowledge through a limited intelligence

become even more pronounced. Having descended to the

earth, Urania and Nature first stop in Graunison, a

place of physical perfection ordered according to the

divine forms. In this ideal garden -- which by DeMeun's

time would come to symbolize literature itself they 37 find Physis, practical wisdom, seated with Theory and

Practice, his daughters. The trio of Urania, Physis, and

Nature, representative of the three faculties of the soul (ratio, memoria, and ingenium respectively), are then inspired by a radiation of divine wisdom, in the form of Noys. This cosmic power explains to his subordinates that man will bridge the spiritual and the physical worlds, and provides them with the tools they will need to make man. To Physis, he gives the book of memory; to Urania, the mirror of Providence; and to

Nature, the table of destiny. Physis and Urania supply body and soul, respectively; and with great effort,

Nature, like the ingenium (or the poetic imagination) inspired by ratio, succesfully integrates the two, just as Bernard, in completing his poem, attempts to integrate the macrocosmos and the microcosmos, classical and Christian mythography, and ideal and individual knowledge.

Conclusion

Bernard's Cosmographia set the stage for future dramatizations of philosophical psychology. In particular, three elements of his poem and the

Chartrian response to the problem of knowledge were to loom large in thirteenth and fourteenth century responses to the discrepancy between universal knowledge and the individual mind. Nature, especially in her 38 function as a literary creatrix, was to remain an ideal poet in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and her activities also embodied contemporary philosophical responses to the problem of knowledge. Wetherbee notes that Bernard's poem "summarizes more completely than philosophy itself the implication of the study of nature in the twelfth-century schools" (Cosmographia 55).

Although philosophy, theology and literature were to become increasingly distinct in the remainder of the

Middle Ages, the increasingly literary psychological figure of Nature never lost original ties with both.

The genii, too, would remain a critical aspect of later dramatizations of philosophical psychology, although we will see them became singular and evolved from a characterization of ideal knowledge itself into an ideal function of the soul and, ultimately, one of many individual poetic imaginations. Graunison, the ideal garden, is the third element of the Cosmographia that appears in both DeMeun's and Chaucer's poems; in the following chapters we will trace its evolution from a place of physical perfection into a mental landscape dramatizing individual poetic imagination.

Through the Cosmographia, Bernard, like the poets who were later to partake in the literary tradition he originated in the West, also suggested the limits of the 39 philosophical psychology of his period even as he dramatized its strengths. The greatest weakness of an emanational psychology is its reliance for explanations of even 'scientific' truths upon increasingly higher levels of abstractions. The doctrine of participation that characterizes platonism shrouds human intellectual activity in divine mystery. In Bernard this mystery is evident in the obscure creative processes in which characters such as Noys, Endelechia, Urania, Physis and even Nature. Badel (41) explains,

Elle (Nature) s'opere dans une certaine obscurite. Elle passe par les canaux de l'imagination (inspiration, songe, "merveille") ou du desir (les deux genii). Les genii sont done lies a ce qui est corporel en l'homme, mortel, opaque.

Nature and the genii are Bernard's personification of ideal creativity, yet their association with macrocosmic processes make their creative activities opaque.

Bernard, unable in fact to transcend his own

intellectual activities, must therefore resort to obscure explanations for the activities of Nays, for

instance, or the psychological processes through which men acquire divine wisdom. In chapter two we will explore the development in the thirteenth century of explanations for human psychological activity as articulated in Thomistic philosophy. CHAPTER II

THE SCHOLASTIC APPROACH TO THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE

Al f ounde they Daunger for a tyme a lord Yet Pitee, thurgh his stronge gentil myght, Forgaf, and made Mercy passen Ryght, Thurgh Innocence and ruled Curtesye. But I ne clepe nat innocence folye, Ne fals pitee, for vertu is the mene, As Etik seith--in swich maner I mene. And thus thise foweles, voide of al malice, Accorden to love, and laften vice Of hate, and songen alle of oon acorde 'Welcome, somer, oure governour and lorde.' (Legend of Good Women 11. 160-9}

In the thirteenth century Aristotelian philosophy and Arabic science found their way into the West in wholesale quantity. As a result, the traditional approach to the problem of knowledge, articulated by the

Chartrians and crystallized in the poetry of Bernard, underwent radical change (Steenberghen 4 2) • The

Chartrians accorded ontological status to ideas and based their philosophical psychology on man's life-long struggle to look within himself and back into his past to discern a dim recollection of ideal truth. This view derived from a Platonic corpus whose tenents included an absolute distinction between ideals and matter, which was thought to have value only insofar as it reveals the

"suprafactual order and design of the universe"

40 41

(Robinson 150). In contrast, the scholastics were modified idealists: they believed that man could discern

"eternal law," but only through principles which, unlike

Chartrian ideals, inhered in and were considered inseparable from matter. To understand the psychological ramifications of scholastic ontology, we will in this chapter examine Thomistic epistemology.

The unique relationship Aquinas and many other scholastics posited between principle and matter was inspired by the Aristotelian theory of hylomorphism, a metaphysical doctrine which claimed that natural objects are composed of matter and form. This was a central doctrine of Aristotle's Phvsics ~nd Metaphysics (Flew

146), works which reached the West in the first half of the thirteenth century and became the point of departure for Aquinas' thought. Hylomorphism differs from neoplatonic explanations of the relationship between matter and form in its insistence that being does not reside ultimately in divine ideas but instead consists of potency and act, form and matter, which are inextricably bound together in physical forms. For

Aquinas as for Aristotle, principles are the ultimate object of the intellect but are not, like Chartrian ideas, independent spiritual substances. And existence, for Bernard a function of the degree to which a mind reflects divine knowledge, is for Thomas based entirely 42 on the symbiosis between potency and act (Leff 217).

Essence, he argued, does not exist apart from, much less preexist, existence: although the distinction between the two in the body is real, they indistinguishable metaphysical components (Flew 17). Consequently, without a body the soul cannot exist, unlike the souls awaiting descent to the sublunar sphere in book one of the

Cosmosgraphia.

The scholastic switch to a hylomorphic ontology altered substantially the popular view of philosophical psychology, and especially of the problem of knowledge.

If the scholastics still envisioned a discernable cosmic hierarchy, they claimed that finite being and therefore the knowledge available to finite beings derives from an inseparable combination of potency and act. The primary object of man's intellect, therefore, became physical existence. Gone were nativistic truths implanted in preexistent souls, because the soul was no longer believed to exist apart from the body. Aquinas founded all intelligibility on being rather than essence. He argued that the soul was initially a capacity for knowing, not a divinely-endowed "trinity" of psychological organs. Gone too was the Chartrian belief that true philosophy consists of grateful prayer and

introspection: the hylomorphic nature of the soul made human knowledge accessible only through experience, the 43 primary source of which is sense experience (Coppleston

184). Rational knowledge, said Aquinas, extends only as far as it can be illuminated by sensory experience; and although it isn't limited to the material world for its field of possible experience, the primary object of the intellect is material world (Coppleston 184). The mind's knowledge even of spiritual things, he continued, depends on the extent to which material things reveal themselves to the mind as dependent upon that with transcends them (Coppleston 184).

The Scholastic Theory of Knowledge

Thomas' Aristotelianism led him to dispense with the Augustinian hierarchy of souls, intellectual, animal, and vegetable; it also led him away from the

Chartrian tripartite division of the soul into the ratio, ingenium and memoria, as well as their cosmic counterparts. Instead, "against theological opposition

Aquinas insisted that the rational soul is the only substantial form of the human body" (Flew 18). Man, he insisted, does not have three souls or three compartments within one soul; and the soul does not possess independent spiritual being, as in Bernard.

Animals have sensitive souls, humans rational souls; but each man has only one soul, the principle of life and form of the body that transforms potentiality (matter) into actuality (principle) and is responsible for 44 reproduction, sensation, and all intellectual activities

(Coppleston 187). The significance of this theory of the soul vis a vis Chartrian epistemology is profound. No longer does the soul possess independent spiritual being, with its own spiritual form, matter and knowledge -- as in Bernard. As the form of the body, the soul depends on the body for its experience and knowledge as well as its existence. It does not preexist the body but co-exists with it; consequently, it is from the particulars of sense that man's rational soul abstracts so-called unviversal knowledge (Robinson 152).

The path for direct divine illumination, such as the

Chartrian theophany, was closed.

Aquinas identified five functions of the soul,

"which are distinguished according as the operation of the soul transcends the operation of the the coporeal nature in various ways; for the whole corporeal nature

is subject to the soul, and is related to it as matter and instrument" (Aquinas 733). He orders these functions

according to the universiality of their objects, "for

the higher a power is, the more univeral is the object

to which it extends." All living things share the

appetitive function of the soul, which refers to an

object extrinsic to the body, "because wherever there ls

sense there is also appetite" (Aquinas 733). The lowest

of the remaining four powers is the vegetative, which 45 acts only on the body to which the soul is united, as in digestion and other bodily functions. The sensitive power seeks as its object the "less common sensible body"; and the locomotive power refers the soul

"to something extrinsic as to the term of its operation and movement." At the top of this hierarchy is the intellectual power of the soul, which attains to the

"most common object, universal being" (Aquinas 734)

The two principle powers of the soul, for Aquinas, are the intellect and the will. Aquinas' theory of the will, according to Flew (18) "one of the most easily comprehensible and permanently valuable features of his philosophy," is not pertinent to this essay. Instead we will concentrate on his theory of the intellect, especially as it relates to his model for the aquisition of "universal" knowledge. Thomas conceived of the

intellect as the capacity to think, to acquire, possess and exercise concepts and beliefs (Flew 18); he described its operation in terms highly reminiscent of

Aristotle's active and potential intellects. The agens possibilis (possible intellect) is the power to store

ideas, an interior sense faculty that provides objects

for the intellect to contemplate and modify. These

objects are not platonic ideas; they are instead

responses to physical stimuli, in Aquinas' terminology

phantasms, the images that perception makes of objects 46

(152 Robinson).

The possible intellect distinguishes Thomistic from

Chartrian philosophy because its mediation, in the form of phantasms, between a perception and the actual object of perception makes impossible any direct rapport between the mind and extramental reality. Since the senses can respond only to matter and not to principles per se, man does not "know" to what the senses actually respond. In fact, argued Aquinas, it is impossible for human intellect to understand anything actually, except by turning it into phantasms (Leff 223). Unlike Gerbert, for instance, who insisted that any conceivable idea must exist, Aquinas suggested that no human thought corresponds exactly to reality -- a belief that produced a new skepticism regarding man's ability to conceive universal knoweldge. This concentration on the

relationship between individual minds and sensible

reality also led to a proto-empirical view of

epistemology. Robinson observes that "throughout the

thirteenth century the guiding maxim, nothing is in the

intellect which was not first in the senses, remained,

and to this extent scholastic applied psychology was

empirical" (154).

The agens intellectus (active intellect), the power

to acquire ideas by operating on sense experience,

worked in conjunction with the agens posslbllis to 47 produce understanding. For Aristotlte an interior light,

in Thomas' philosophy the active intellect is God in man, the mysterious power that abstracts the form of a

thing from its attributes:

In the soul is some power derived from a higher intellect, whereby it is able to illumine the phantasms . This intellect .. by lighting up phantasms makes them to be actually intelligible. (Aquinas 733)

In this schema, man is "last in a spiritual hierarchy

passing from angel to angel the active intellect, the

faintest glimmer of God's illumination" (Leff 223). As

in the Chartrian cosmos, knowledge flows hierarchically

from God through the farthest reaches of the

macrocosmos. At times, in fact, Aquinas' description of

the source of intellectual understanding sounds

neoplatonic. "Above the intellectual soul of man," he

writes in the Summa Theologica, "we must . suppose a

superior intellect, from which the soul acquires the

power of understanding. For what is . . moveable .

and ... imperfect, always requires the pre-existence of

something essentially . immovable and perfect. II

(Aquinas 734). The Thomistic macrocosmos is, like its

Chartrian counterpart, emanational: the unmoved mover,

God, is the source of all knowledge. In their desire to

emulate him, all beings, angelic and earthly, strive to

attain the highest possible level of divine 48 understanding.

This affinity with Chartrian thought is just one example of the sometimes ignored fact that Aquinas did not break entirely from Chartrian thought anymore than

Aristotle broke entirely from Platonic thought. Like the

Chartrians, Thomas described a hierarchical and orderly cosmos. God presides over this cosmos as pure act; finite beings, made imperfect by their mixture of matter and form, exist on the lowest rung of the celestial

"ladder" descending earthward through the spheres. This strong metaphysical impulse also affects Thomas' epistemology. As Leff explains, since in the scholastic cosmos God moves his creatures from potentiality to actuality, man's being is analagous to God's and must therefore be the result of archetypes which He has of them (Leff, Thought 220). Drawn to its logical conclusion, then, Thomistic philosophical psychology, like its Chartrian precursor, does not describe universal knowledge as the created product of explicable psychological processes -- as Ockham will do in the fourteenth century. Instead of focusing on how the mind forms principles, Aquinas, arguing that knowledge in principle is extramental and immutable, did not discuss how concepts such as "universal" knowledge are constructed by the human mind; instead, he began with created truths, principles, which are mysteriously 49 recognized by the inscrutable active intellect.

In spite of its affinities with neoplatonic thought, Thomistic epistemology differs substantially from Chartrlan epistemology. To begin with, the object of the active intellect, the forms of material beings, are not, like Chartrian ideas, the idea from which matter derives but are instead inherent in matter as a principle. Man's understanding is not spontaneously

·directed toward God or essential knowledge by nativistic truths but ls instead dependent upon the abstraction of

forms from individual material things to reach

intelligible knowledge (Leff 222). Since Aquinas describes the process through which men discern

"universal" knowledge from sensory experience, rather

than attributing this process to the inspiration of a

pre-existent ratio, his philosophical psychology is

cognitive, not rationalistic (Robinson, 150). Knowledge

is at least initially conveyed by the senses rather than

by reason analyzing experience (Robinson 10). Aquinas

viewed reason as a mere faculty of the soul, and truth

as a property of things toward which the intellect

moves.

This movement toward truth constitutes a relatively

sophisticated theory of concept formation. The soul,

Aquinas maintained, receives images of sensible objects

through the possible intellect. Once the mind 50 experiences concrete causal relations between these images it forms abstract ideas about causality, in the form of universal propositions, concluding that these come into existence through the agency of an external cause (Coppleston 184). This is opposed to the platonic belief that truths are locked within human consciousness at birth and must only be recalled by the conceiving mind. In place of this strict nativism Aquinas held that universal knowledge originated in an undrstanding of mundane cause and effect. Coppleston explains (184):

Once the mind has had experience of concrete causal relations in the world about it and has formed the abstract ideas of cause . it sees a connection between a thing's coming to be and its being caused. It can thus come to enunciate universally and necessarily tre propositions . . And it is then able to transcend the visible world, ·in the sense . . that it can relate the objects of sense experience to that which transcends sense experience.

Aquinas' epistemology is based on physical-psychological causation; but, as this quote indicates, it also allows for the possibility of ideal knowledge. The possible intellect operates according physical causation, but the active intellect, explains Thomas, disengages phantasms of all individual properties and so renders them

intelligible as universal principles (Robinson 152).

Like platonic ideas, principles have ontological status; however, they do not inhere in nature as pre-existing, autonomous forms but are in fact inseparable from 51 nature. Two important consequences flowed from this essentially cognitive epistemology. First, man's nature prevents him from direct contact with God or absolute knowledge. Second, the cooperation of the imagination,

in the form of the possible intellect, became necessary

for the acquisition and exercise of intellectual ideas

(Flew 17).

Nature and Natural Law

Thomas' view of nature is much less unified than

that of his predecessors. As we saw in chapter one, the

Chartrians viewed nature as an integrated, autonomous,

cosmic spirit that exemplifies man's potential for

virtue, creativity and "scientific" investigation

within the branches of natural philosophy described in

the quadrivium. According to this view of nature, which

retained currency well into the thirteenth century, "the

classification of the sciences corresponds to the

hierarchy of forms in nature" (Weisheipl 237). But "In

the view of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas,"

each science is granted autonomy within its own field of inquiry; particular sciences are not absorbed into more unviersal sciences, such as metaphysics; and all the mathematical sciences are considered subordinate to natural philosophy . (Weisheipl 237)

In the thirteenth century, mathematics, a science that

for the for the Chartrians was the "key which unlocks

both nature and metaphysics," became increasingly 52 distant from all aspects of philosophy save natural

philosophy. This science, in turn, became increasingly

secular, anticipating its fourteenth-century evolution

into kinematics, dynamics and classical mechanics.

In separating ethics, natural philosophy and

theology along these lines, Aquinas also distinguished

various ways of conceiving of natural law. For example,

where the Chartrians could in the same breath discuss

natural ethical and scientific law, Thomas argued that

when the term 'natural law' applied, for instance, to

the force that causes stones to fall earthward, it was

used analogically (Coppleston 190):

As far as Aquinas is concerned, it should be clear that the term 'natural law' . has not got the same sense as 'law of nature' when the law of gravitiation, for example, is described as a law of nature or a natural law. If we talk about irrational things obeying a natural law, the word 'law'. is used analogically. For he regards law as a rule conceived by reason and promulgated with a view to the common good.

This view of natural law is radically unlike the

Chartrian view that such laws are not formed in the

mind, or conceived, but instead are discerned in a soul,

containing nativistic truths. In place of such truths,

Aquinas insisted that at birth man has certain basic

tendencies or inclinations, grounded in his nature

(Coppleston 190). By reflecting on these tendencies as

they manifest in experience of material life, reason can

deduce precepts which can be used to deduce more 53 particular precepts. Natural law as it applies to ethics is the totality of moral precepts promulgated by human reason as the result of reflection on the nature of man in society, not on a transcendent ethical order such as that described in the Cosmographia. Three implications of Aquinas' view of nature distinguish it from the Chartrian view. First, Aquinas demands much closer scrutiny of the physical world than did the Chartrians. Second, the correspondence between

the human and divine mind is for Thomas incomplete.

According to the Chartrian concept of theophanic vision,

man's soul contains a reflection, however dim, of divine

wisdom itself. Thomas, in contrast, held that

correspondence between the human and divine mind is not

ideatic, i.e., that the mind does not contain at birth a

reflection of divine wisdom but instead contains the

capacity to perceive eternal law in principle. It is

this Thomistic explanation of the capacity for knowing,

finally, that constitutes the critical difference between the Chartrian and Scholastic concepts of nature

and of the mind. For ideas of nature and the various ways in which men conceive of nature (mechanically, theologically, philosophically) grew increasingly

distinct in the thirteenth century. At the same time,

it became more and more apparent that nature was not a superfactual order but the product of various methods 54 for investigating the physical and psychical worlds.

Once wisdom and visionary power began to lose their theological, absolutist edge, philosophers and proto-scientists were increasingly free to explore the shape of the human mind and the natural world per se, as well as to distinquish human thought processes and natural knowledge from the operation of the divine mind and supernatural knowledge.

The Poet

Thomas did not write specifically about the proper

function of the poet. He did, however, discuss political

theory. And since this theory revolves around the active

intellect, the limiting factor in all intellectual

activity, the psychological credentials required to

establish positive justice -- a conventional embodiment

of natural law -- in the political realm are identical

to those required to embody natural law in poetic

conventions. In his original, uncorrupted state, argued

Aquinas, men democratically chose their leaders; but

now, as a result of intellectual degeneration and

weakening of the will, man departs from the rule of

reason, necessitating absolute monarchy. For the active

intellect, God in man, does not exist to the same degree

in all souls, such that some men now have a greater

capacity for knowledge than others (Robinson 155). Those

who rule in the spiritual and secular realms ideally do 55 so on the strength of their exceptionally powerful active intellects. It is this intellectual elite that reflects on society and deduces the precepts of absolute moral and ethical law, the "participation of the eternal law in rational creatures" (Coppleston 190). From this eternal law rulers develop positive law, which clearly defines natural law and provides temporal sanctions otherwise lacking. Thus positive, conventional law is a reflection and embodiment of the immutable eternal law; and those who describe conventional law may be seen as having insight, if not into the Chartrian cosmic harmony, at least into objective, reif ied and absolute knowledge.

The power of the agens intellectus to illuminate

"eternal law" would, I think, make this faculty the deciding factor in a writer's attempts to compose poetry that accurately reflects natural law. And the fact that some men have a greater capacity for knowledge than others makes succesful 'Nature' poets arbiters of eternal law, members of a timeless literary elite capable of judging all other attempts to define nature and natural law, regardless of when a given attempt might have been written. These gifted poets, like their political and theological counterparts, deduce from experience and define absolute natural law. Because of their superior insight, they can also turn for source 56 material to earlier concepts of natural law, and judge the accuracy of these poems authoritatively. From the precepts of natural law, the poet -- again, like the legislator -- defines the conventions that will enable him to articulate, through his unique medium, his branch of positive justice, in the form of a poem. Although, like philosophers and kings, the poet can in this way form direct contact with intelligible reality or with

God (Leff, Thought 223).

Conclusion

Thomas' modified idealism offered a far more sophisticated approach to the problem of knowledge than had been taken before. His insistence on the hylomorphic status of the soul and of the relationship between mind and body translated into a faculty psychology that

rendered archaic Chartrian nativism and the tripartite division of the soul. In their place, Thomas described

the process by which the mind constructs versions of

authoritative discourse that may or may not reflect

eternal law, depending on the variable intellectual

power of the knower. In his recognition of the

experiential source of all knowledge, the creative

relationship between the knower and the known, and the

possibility of multiple versions of 'truth,' Aquinas

anticipated fourteenth-century developments in

philosophical psychology. 57

But in several respects, Aquinas' epistemology shares affinities with earlier philosophies. Among these are his belief that absolute knowledge is finally attainable, his support of a divinely-endowed intelligentsia, and his view that all knowledge falls under theological considerations:

Knowledge of God, philosophically or theologically achieved, is subordinate and teleologically oriented to, the experimental knowledge of God, knowledge by aquaintance, which is attainable, imperfectly in mystical states, perfectly in vision of God in heaven. (Coppleston 183)

Philosophy, argued Thomas, is the culminating point of reflection, and reason can apprehend basic ethical principles; but philosophy alone is limited and must be subsumed in Christian ethics. Aquinas' belief that all truly universal knowledge, however uncovered, is in the end eternally embodied in principles, diverted his attention from a truly psychological theory of concept formation.· By describing conceptual knowledge of eternal wisdom in this way, he never encountered the need to develop a theory of concept formation: a man is endowed at birth with a certain level of active intellectus, and nothing he does in his life can change this level.

Although he may gain wisdom, the power of his agens

intellectus, and presumably the precision of his acquired ideas, remains unchanged. This is why Aquinas accounts for discrepancies among conceptual perspectives 58 in terms of the imperfection of human wisdom: human knowledge is imperfect because reason is imperfectly equipped to grasp the divine essence, not because ideas are subjective, mutable created phenomena (Robinson

153). For a dramatization of these strengths and weaknesses, we turn now to an analysis of Jean DeMeun's continuation of the Roman de la Rose. CHAPTER III

JEAN'S CONTINUATION OF THE ROMAN AND SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY

For in youre court ys many a losengeour, And many a queynte totelere accusour, That tabouren in youre eres many a soun Ryght after hire ymagynacioun To have youre daliance, and for envie. (Legend of Good Women, 353-356)

The influx into the west of Arabic translations of

Aristotelian and scientific literature, the shift of scholarly activity from the neoplatonic cathedral schools to more progressive universities, and the development of scholastic philosophy reduced the themes and ideals of Chartrian thought to a marginal existence

in the thirteenth century. These changes, notes

Wetherbee (Platonism 7 ) I shifted the scale of

philosophical and social values earthward. Poetic

enquiries into ultimate reality were replaced by more

socially oriented literary investigations. "The ascent

to spiritual vision," Wetherbee explains (Platonism 7),

"becomes a less immediate concern than the need to

recover from the descensus ad infernos, the immersion of

the spirit in the chaos and duplicity of earthly life."

As the social order interposed itself between man

59 60 and the natural order, the neoplatonic assumptions about the guiding power of cosmic order were subjected to the test of worldly experience as expressed through courtly conventions and themes. The result was a hybrid of

provencal and Chartrian literary forms, in which romance assumed the "organizing structure of an imitated or

assimilated Christian cosmos" (Muscatine 16); at the

level of society, it was believed that "the order of

the court,

like that of the cosmos , is threatened ·by disruption: the formality of courtoisie is a defense against formlessness, and to stray form its precepts and obligations is to become involved in the encroaching silva, the dark wood where civilization is tested, and the ordering power of the mind menaced by psychological chaos. (Wetherbee, Platonism 126)

In chapter one we saw that it was left to the Chartrian

poets to develop proto-theology and to identify

frontiers of "scientific thought." Likewise, it was left

to late twelfth and especially thirteenth century poets

to dramatize the human mind as it sought order in the

courtly environment that had become normative. These

poets explored the implications of contemporary

philosophical psychology and social theory concerns

which we have seen distinguished Aquinas from his

predecessors (Muscatine 12-13).

The thirteenth-century literary concern with

psychology rather than metaphysics originated in courtly 61 poetry. As Robinson (160) notes, chivalry embodied thirteenth-century popular psychology, which was based

increasingly on the scholastic Aristotelianism. Kane traces the develpment of courtly poetry from the provencal love lyric through the work of French and

Anglo-Norman trouveres, Chretien de Troyes, the

Italians, Guillaume de Lorris, Jean De Meun, and

Machaut. He notices the "flaymboyant individualism" of

Provencal composers, most of whom were aware of the

"prepsterous and . . self-contradictory nature of fin

amour" (237). These poets, he continues, developed their

idiosyncratic style to express the psychological

condition of an individual poet/lover in relation to a

particular woman; they were also sensitive to the

sometimes preposterous nature of fin amour, and their

work exhibited a certain amount of literary

self-consciousness and self-criticism (242). In the

later twelfth and thirteenth-century French romances fin

amour was adapted "as the ethos of narrative," which

consisted of the ennobling force of love, the

possibility of romantic love in marriage, and a radical

interest in the mentalities of lovers. This last

interest led naturally to a concern with the mentality

of the poet. As Kessler (134) explains, "toute une

tradition de poesie amoureuse au Moyen Age, identifiat

la poesie et l'amour. C'etait une identification 62 naturelle et vivant -- !'expression de la liason etroite entre le sentiment amoureux senti et ce sentiment exprime."

"An important development of the latter half of the

(12th) century," Wetherbee notes, "is the adaptation of the materials of school-poetry to the uses of courtoisie and romance" (Platonism 126). This development is evident in Alain's De Planctu, written in the last half of the twelfth century, in which a courtly focus on psychological issues and on the association between poetic making and lovemaking coexist with an essentially

Chartrian cosmos and mythos. The subject of the De

Planctu is man's abandonnment of Natural Law; its

implicit philosophical-literary purpose is to establish an absolute, ideal standard of behavior which

incorporates sexuality and poetry. The poem traces man's

failure, through rhetoric, to understand his divinely-ordained nature. Throughout sexual and

rhetorical perversions are central metaphors for man's

fall from integrated cosmic vision.

The plot of Alain's poem follows loosely that of

the Consolation of Philosophy. The narrator, alienated

from his divine identity, has a vision of a comic

'seer,' Lady Nature. This goddess traces the failure of

man, describing the establishment of human life and his

subsequent fall from grace. Unlike Boethius' Lady 63

Philosophy, however, she.describes man's alienation from his divine source in terms of a courtly mythos not found in the Cosmographia. Venus, explains Nature, was appointed Nature's subvicar to regulate, with her husband Hymen and son Cupid, the generation of man. But

Venus· swerved from her responsibilities and committed adultery with Antigamus, to whom she bore Cupid's perverse counterpart, Jocus, the embodiment of the corruption of life and love. The second half of the poem is Genius' mythopoetic description of man's ante-peccatum sexual nature. Hymen appears with the virtues and carries Nature's summons to Genius, who excommunicates from Nature's realm the servants of post-peccatum Venus (Venus scelestis). At the end of this 'poem' the virtues throw down their torches; as they extinguish the poet awakens, having been granted a vision of man's true nature which itself vindicates the power of Genius -- and Alain's art.

The figures of Nature and Genius that emerge from this poem differ substantially f~om those in Bernard.

Badel (44) notes that "Alain de Lille bloque en un seul personnage Natura et Endelechia, voire Silva, urania et

Physis." The cosmic hierarchy in which Bernard situates

Nature is in Alain displaced by the courtly hierarchy of

Antigamus, Cupid, Venus and Jocus. Also, instead of describing in detail the macrocosmos, Alain's narrator 64 devotes much of his creative prowess to a detailed description of Nature herself, in terms of the conventional courtly description of feminine beauty

(Wetherbee, Platonism 190). Nature's proximity to the mundane affairs of fallen man, especially his poetry and their sexuality, extends her power over earthly activities. "Natura," explains Badel (44), "symbolise done desormais le systeme des causes secondes comme chez les Chartrians. Elle preside a la generation comme chez

Bernard; mais, non contente de garantir ainsi l'ordre de l'univers, el le est une force qui continue la

Creation (comme Endelechia), qui la maintient dans

l'etre et controle son analogie avec l'archetype divin."

But this increase in power over the affairs of men

came only at the expense of her power within the macrocosmos. The Chartrians, we have seen, created

Natura as a theological, literary, and scientific hybrid

that provided a nexus between primitive neoplatonic

metaphysics and a Christian cosmos. As an ideal creatrix

in this mythos, Nature sought knowledge as a

neoplatonist seeks knowledge: through contemplation of

her divine origin. Her 'poetry,' therefore, was directed

to the heavens, to contemplation of and reflection upon

a structured vision of the cosmos; and she herself was

distant, perfect, unchanging. In the thirteenth century

this view was replaced with a symbolic, anagogical and 65 then a "materialist view in which the beauty of fertility of nature were accepted as gifts which God had intended for man's enjoyment" (Wetherbee, Platonism

256). Nature, as a result, began to be seen, not as the expression of a divine order perceptible to the ratio but as an "end and means, the duties and pleasures of this life becoming in themselves an avenue of religious fulfillment" (Wetherbee, Platonism 257). In the De

Planctu this revision of Nature is not as pronounced as

it was to become in the Roman, but in the goddess' concern with post-peccatum life and poetic skills it is certainly evident, as is a growing skepticism toward the

possibility of absolute vision of any kind.

Alain's version of Genius, too, reflects the

courtly concern with psychology and creativity. In

Bernard the multiple genii served three functions: they

assigned forms to souls awaiting descent and to ideas,

they inhabited the testes, and they embodied the natural

virtue implanted in all souls. Alain, in contrast,

presents a single genius figure, Nature's poet and

priest, whom she charges with pronouncing anathema

against those who transgress her laws. Perhaps Genius'

most important role in the poem is that of poet. His

office is -- as it is Chartrian poetry associated

with the secondary forms and the transmission of divine

wisdom into the physical sphere. Unlike any of 66

Bernard's genii, none of whom speak or perform a comprehensible task, Alain's figure is presented as an individual creative mind working to represent, in a literary form (a sermon}, natural law. The reader first encounters Genius drawing in his book images of human life based on divine archetypes. This artistic sub-vicar then transmits his divine knowledge into the physical sphere, but not nativistically, as embodiments of divine truth in the human mind. He instead engages an audience in a literary production, his sermon. This sermon, not the ratio, 'contains' natural law. Genius thus inhabits the cosmos and therefore exists, finally, at a transcendent level; but he also reflects human psychological processes involved in poetic making.

Jean's Continuation of the Roman

In his continuation and revision of Guillaume's poem, Jean almost immediately plunges his narrator into a search for poetic voice. Very early in the poem the narrator complains that his recent experiences with the cruel God of Love have deprived him of the constituents of poetic vision in a scholastic epistemology, sweet speech, sweet thought and sweet sight.1 The narrator has found the God of Love's approach to love unworkable and now seeks another way to court the rose, understand his love, and construct the appropriate artistic device to move through the temple of love and realize his 67 creative potential. Before he achieves a vision of love appropriate to his purpose, however, he is forced to wander through a silva of various literary-philosophical approaches to secular love. Three characters in particular attempt to supply him with poetic vision, voice, and thought to replace the faculties he lost under the God of Love's rule: Raison, Nature and Genius.

Each of these figures is sensitive to its status as a poet working to endow the narrator with a new vision of love. Raison refers to the narrator's "disordered sight" (97,11. 110) and, as we will see, exhibits behavior suggestive of poetic activity; Nature, too, is engrossed in vision, poet and optical, and critiques

Raison's approach to knowledge; Genius, Nature's rhetor, philosopher and priest, also critiques Raision's approach to knowledge and offers to the narrator a modified version of Nature's epistemology. In fact,

Jean's entire continuation may be seen as an extended colloquy on poetic cognition. Amor, Raison and Ami successively coach the narrator in how to view and capture the rose; Nature then confers with Genius on the same topic, though in absolute and non-figurative language; Genius in turn sermonizes to Venus and her entourage; and of course throughout the poem DeMeun's narrator reminds the reader that he himself is in the

Roman writing an authoritative text on love and poetry. 68

over the last twenty years or so criticism of the second half of the Roman has focused increasingly on

Jean's interest in the psychological processes involved in writing poetry. In the sixties Muscatine explicated the poem's realistic dialogue and its mimetic and dramatic qualities, claiming that they constitute an unprecedented psychological realism (Muscatine 70).

Through the dramatic monologues of Natura, Genius and

Raison, argues Muscatine (74), Jean holds courtly views in opposition to bourgoeis realism. More recently,

Brownlee, noticing Jean's self-presentation as an author, has described how DeMeun reworks various loans from Ovid to present himself as a "new Orpheus." In his retelling of the stories of Adonis, Pygmalion and

Orpheus, argues Brownlee (203), Jean "exploits his

Ovidian subtext to effect his self-presentation as a continuer/poet figure (203)," a new and vernacular

Orpheus whose poem is "sufficiently wieghty and authoritative to qualify him as a vates" (208).

Hult (206), interested in the dynamics of revision, carefully analyzes Jean's use of a multi-referential first-person pronoun to thematize the distinction between his and Guillaume's narrative personae "as that separating direct exotic experience from the mediated work of the writer" (268). This distinction, Hult maintains, allows Jean to circumscribe Guillaume's poem 69 within his own and to play off against each other

"conflicting notions of authority in order to relativize our conception of the truth" (268). Jean's continuation, concludes Hult (269), may be viewed as a "comprehension, revision, transcendence of what had become ossified poetic tradition by mid-thirteenth-century, here typified by Guillaume." Kessler and Brownlee also examine ways in which various hermeneutical and writerly perspectives operate in the poem to introduce a more realistic and dramatic multiperspective of the narrator's quest than the traditional dream vision format, with its omniscient visionary and short-sighted protagonist, would have permitted. Kessler (137) argues that "le narrateur de Guillaume est le meme personne que le protagoniste, mais avec une perspective plus agee." And in Memisis, Brownlee (60-61; 80) extends his examination of Jean's exploration of epistemology and cognition to include hermeneutics, claiming that

Jean implicates multiple readers· in his continuation who assess the poem in terms of how accurately it reflects their concerns.

Common to these articles is a view of poetic making based upon a poet's subjective synthesis of so-called authoritative texts. Jean, they suggest, intentially draws our attention to psychological processes through which poets create their works. The effect this focus 70 has on Jean's Nature is to introduce moral and creative ambiguities into her character. The "Roman de la Rose," explains Badel (47), "n'est pas une cosmoganie comme chez Bernard, ni une restauration de la cosmologie comme chez Alain, mais la description de la vie hie et nunc." The goddess lacks the metaphysical insight of her predecessors; instead, she is a scientist, a literary scholar, a poet, and at times a mere women.

Rather than the divine object of grateful prayer, she is, finally, "l'objet d'une etude scientifique dont le

Roman de le Rose se fuit largement l'echo dans ses exposes sur les astres, les mirroirs, les songes ou les vents" (Badel 41). A mimetic character, Nature, not surprisingly, exhibits human flaws, as does her poet-priest, Genius. Perhaps the most telling of these her dependence upon the materials of courtly poetry, represented by the barons of love and their entourage, to effect the narrator's entrance into he castle of jealousy at the end of the poem.

The moral ambiguity inherent in Nature and Genius' characters has created similar ambiguity in critical evaluations of their contributions to the narrator's quest for the Rose. Some critics discount or even discard these characters' monologues. Wetherbee claims that Natura and Genius evoke no perceptible moral awakening in Amans, and that their positive implications 71 are as nearly as possible repudiated (Wetherbee,

Platonism 257-266). Flemming (194) takes a recidivist view of Nature, arguing that her separation from the traditionally authoritative Raison identifies her with

Alain's post-peccatum Venus. He maintains that Genius, in spite of his sacramental insights, represents natural concupisence (195). In sharp contrast to these negative assessments of Nature and Genius, Muscatine accuses the

Duenna of unbridled sensuality and labels Nature's and

Genius's monologues as the definitive sentence on love and orthodox theology (73).

This disparity in critical opinion suggests the possibility that Nature, Genius and Raison, like the narrator, are not intended as strictly autonomous, absolutely authoritative figures. As self-consciously

"continued" characters, these three poet-philosophers exhibit the creative self-consciousness and ecclecticism

of Jean's poem itself. Nature, for instance, runs the gamut of authoritative sources in her exposition on love and writing, from neo-platonic texts to contemporary

science. More important, she and Genius, like the

'continued' poem in which they appear, simultaneously

convey serious and parodic intentions (Hult 24). Jean's

emphasis on multiple perspectives of authoritative

discourse also draws attention to the processes through

which such discourse comes into being. The act of 72 revision thus becomes, in the Roman, almost as important as knowledge itself. Continuation, like poetic vision, involves creating new "authoritative" versions of

"truth", based on the latest technology and practical experience. DeMeun remains sensitive to the transitory quality of information in a rapidly changing world to the last lines of his poem:

Unless a better method you have learned, Employ that one you hear me now explain. If you can make the passage more at ease, Or better, or with greater subtlety, And not too much exert or tire yourself, Use your own system when you've heard my plan. (11. 278-283}

Multiple authoritative handbooks and evolving science have replaced the cosmic insight that provided the eternal supranatural truths underlying Chartrian poetry.

To understand how such handbooks are made in the Roman, as well as their value in the mundane world the poem describes, we turn now to analyses of the three poet-figures who vie for the narrator's attention in the second half of the poem, Raison, Nature and Genius.

Raison

As mentioned in the plot summary above, when the

narrator enters Jean's continuation, he has lost his vision of love and his ability to articulate it:

... 'Tis true The God of Love presented me three gifts In his great kindness, but I've lost them all: Now Sweet Speech fails; Sweet Thought avails me not; Sweet sight has left me--so may God me guard! 73

(92, 11. 40-42)

Reason appears shortly after the narrator utters these lines and asks him if he has grown tired of love. The narrator explains that the God of Love simply gave him the rules of love and fled, leaving him frustrated and in suspense over his relationship to the Rose. Reason then offers the narrator a concept of love to replace the God of Love's:

Now . . I' 11 undertake to show You all your heart is ripe to understand.

To hear me love describe now set your mind. (95, 11. 39-40; 50)

The narrator agrees that he should learn more of love and asks Raison, "I pray that you'll a definition give/That I may understand what love may mean" (97, 11.

109-110). But Raison fails to couch her advice in terms the narrator can understand and apply to his attempt to win the Rose. Initially she resorts to meaningless oxymorons to enlighten the narrator; these failing, she reveals her aff inties with neoplatonic attitudes toward secular love, advising flight from the rose and all physical love (particularly inappropriate advice in a poem as bound-up in the physical as the Roman) (97, 1.

100) . Her myopic vision of the topic she claims initially to be expert in is evident in her feeble attempt to define love:

If I know anything of love, it is Imaginary illness freely spread 74

Between two persons of opposing sex, Originating from disordered sight, Producing great desire to hug and kiss And seek enjoyment in a mutual lust. Love cares for nothing but such ardent joys, for delectation, not engendering, Is all the end of love. (p. 97, 11. 112-120)

Raison clearly knows as little about love as experienced within hetereosexual societies as the God of Love himself. Although she recognizes Nature's domain and the power of "natural" love (100, 11. 80 ff; 122, 11. 120, ff.; 133, 11. 140 ff.), she is unable to offer a workable solution to the narrator's real-world problem of understanding and articulating his love for the rose.

She is, in fact, a prude who out of distaste for physical contact between men and women will not even grant the importance of regeneration, let alone the

'prick of pleasance' that attends the act. Keeping in character, in the following section of the poem Raison contrasts youth and old age to illustrate the naive and dualistic neoplatonic thesis that "the root of all vice is lust." She then expounds friendship, the higher love, and the wheel of fortune all in strict Boethian terms, and without consideration for the narrator's needs or ability to understand.

Not surprisingly, Raison's "sermon," which "love set(s) all at naught" (p. 102) is meaningless to the narrator. In response to Raison's "old stories" the narrator complains, " 'Your words are Greek to me. In 75 language plain I Tell me how 'tis you wish that I should serve'" (123 11. 32-33). It is very easy, almost natural, to blame the narrator for his inability to understand Raison's sentence, as Flemming does. But if we consider these transactions from a scholastic point of view, suspicion falls instead on Raison. The narrator, after all, can understand love only by first experiencing or observing it within the physical realm; even ideal love exists in matter as principle. Raison, insensitive to this fact, attempts immediately to initiate the narrator into cosmic or ideal love, although it is clear that she herself does not understand the value of physical, or natural love. In fact, Raison is not an omniscient visionary but a representative of what was in Jean's day an outmoded neoplatonic approach to knowledge. She draws on an antiquated neoplatonic textual tradition, including

Boethius, Cicero and Plato (98), and poetic vision is for her a textual and introspective activity (147; 25) that recalls the neoplatonic belief that man's cognitive role is to look beyond secular, physical experience to eternal truths. Raison discusses wisdom in terms of a nativistic psychology (114) in which love is a perfect state found niether in experience nor in books but from which all lower forms of love nevertheless emanate mysteriously (115, 11. 140 ff.). 76

Raison ls in fact so f lrmly rooted in a neoplatonic textual tradition and epistemology that she has little to say about the physical, psychological and textual experiences in Guillaume's section of the poem from which the narrator, DeMeun and the reader have just emerged. Consequently, as a continuer she is a failure.

She does not follow the order of investigation that characterizes effective poetic making: comprehension, revision and only then transcendence of earlier ideas and poetry. This order, which begins in hermeneutical experience and ends in the generation of new conceptual knowledge, suggests an interdependence between a mundane

psychological cause (a poem or an experience, such as

love) and effect (a revision or an idea regarding love).

Raison, in contrast, remains true to her rationalistic motivation and begins her analysis of the narrator's

experiences with confusing, abstract investigations,

revealing her belief in divine causation. Because in her

epistemology essence precedes existence, she discourses

on 'the higher love' ( 102), 'true happiness' ( 108), and

fortune '105,' before directly addressing Guillaume's

Fairfield Park.

When Raison deigns to address the park and the

narrator's experiences in it, it is as the ambiguous

"Isle of Fortune" (125). Her fear and ignorance of

natural phenomena, including secular love, are evident 77 her description of the "grumbling and quarreling" sea, the "ambiguous forest of amazing trees" and the equally ambiguous good and evil streams that flow through the physical world (123-125). In Genius' hands this park will constitute divine revelation; but Nature sees it only as a threat to her rationalistic view of love, an ever-changing place ruled by fortune and lust. She cannot make sense of the various features of the garden because she restricts her investigation of love to neoplatonic classical texts. As Fansler notes, "the whole trend of Raison's discourse with the lover is

(to) ... despise anything Fortune can do to you" (207).

Her neoplatonic disdain for the world of fortune also makes it impossible for her to understand the hylomorphic epistemology that informs the narrator's

psychology and the rest of the poem.

Nature is, finally, unable to offer the narrator a workable 'poem' or way of poeticizing experience to

replace those stripped from him in the first half of the

poem. " 'My lady,'" says the narrator at the end of

Raison's lesson,

I now know no more Than hitherto, that might deliver me. Contrawise, I understand no whit (Although I know the lesson all by heart, So that I can't forget it, having learned It from you) that applies in fact to me. (97, 11. 101-106)

Despite her claims to authority, Raison's vision of 78 love, because it does not apply "in fact" to love as men experience it in society, does not permit the narrator to "understand what love may mean" (97, 1. 110). And because she does not understand her actual role as textual continuer, she is trapped within a false view of her 'craft.' Thus she maligns the God of Love but does not specifically criticize any of what he told the narrator. And as· Wetherbee explains, when she tries_ to explain her own position through the myth of Saturn's castration she is incapable of interpreting her own allusions (Wetherbee, Platonism 259).

True to her Chartrian origin, she understands the world only as part of a coherent cosmos where human nature mirrors the divine order, and she sees herself as an omniscient visionary attuned to immutable truth. In

Bernard a rationalistic approach to knowledge such as

Raison's would have yielded the theophanic vision that men struggled to achieve. In DeMeun's poem, however, such vision, as Raison's inability to make theological, philosophical or literary sense of secular love makes clear, is impossible. There is, of course, great irony

in Raison's position on love: in spite of her claims to

the existence of ideal love and her arguments for an

emanational cosmos, her unsucessful groping for texts

and ideas to articulate an integrated transcendent

vision demonstrates that she is not in fact an 79 authoritative knower in the Chartrian tradition but, like DeMeun and the narrator, a "continuer" who relies for her cosmic insights on the poetic vision of other men.

Nature as Literary Visionary

Raison restricts herself to one source of information and in so doing ignores the narrator's prime objective of developing a concept of secular love that will allow him to become sexually and poetically creative. Nature, in contrast, draws from virtually every source of information available to the educated thirteenth-century mind, including the platonic corpus, classical literature, contemporary literature and science, personal experience and -- not insignificantly

-- her emotions. The notable exception to her array of sources is theology: although she undoubtedly subscribes to the anagogical view that Genius, her priest, articulates, her religious musings are restricted to references to a divine order beyond her ken. Despite

this significant limitation in her sphere of knowledge,

Nature is able to supply the narrator with images and

information that apply directly to his situation.

Genius incorporates this information into his own

continuation of Guillaume's poem, the Garden of Mirth,

and in its anagogical counter part, the Good Shepherd's

park; more importantly, Genius relies on Nature's 80 sentence to assist the narrator/lover gain entrance to the castle of jealousy and enter the temple of the Rose.

Like Raison, Nature represents a way of poeticizing experience. It is possible to understand what this approach consists of by evaluating the kinds of authority she invokes,· the way she uses them to create her own "authoritative" voice, and her level of awareness of this creative process. Her extended monologue may be divided into four distinct sections: the poet describes Nature and her relationship to art and God (339-347); Nature attends confession before

Genius nd describes the cosmos (348-385); Nature discusses optics, dreams and gentility (386-401); and

Nature absolves the heavens and viciously denounces mankind (402-408).

In the first of these sections the narrator defines

Nature and her activities in neoplatonic terms. He calls her an ideal artist, a procreatrix and the vicar of God.

She is, he continues, responsible for establishing and perpetuating divine order in the sublunar sphere (340,

1. 6 ff.). In her forge, the narrator explains, Nature strives to contravene the work of death, making bodies tirelessly, "To save the species' continuity/Against the assaults of Death, who ne'er attains/The mastery, no matter how he speeds,/So many reinforcements she creates" (339, 11. 7-10). Initially, Nature, too, 81 projects a strictly neoplatonic self image:

God honors me so much that in my ward He leaves the lovely golden chain that binds The elements, which bow before my face. To me He has entrusted everything Within those rings of Gold, and all their forms It is my duty to perpetuate. (360, 11. 64-69)

On pages 347-385 Nature describes a strictly platonic

cosmos driven by the love of the one (356, 1. 18; 75).

She seconds the ·narrator's description of her as God's

chamberlain, constable, and vicar general, and adds that

her creative function in the cosmos is to perpetuates

the physical species (357, 1.51).

But with this reference to her creative role in the

sublunar sphere DeMeun begins subtlely to divert our

attention from the cosmic concerns associated with

Chartrian Nature to thirteenth-century concerns with

poetic craftsmanship and self-knowledge. He prepares us

for this diversion a few sections earlier in the poem,

by introducing what will become a controlling and

constantly evolving metaphor for ideal creative ability,

the mirror:

Though (an act) occurred then ... It is to Him as if it were today; In plainest show it always has appeared Within the everlasting mirror clear Which none but he knows how to polish bright Without detracting somewhat from free will. This mirror is himself, whence all things spring. In this fair, shining glass, which e'er remains Within his presence, he sees every act That will occur as though it present were. (372, 11. 300-311) 82

From God's superlative creative power DeMeun descends, first to Nature's comparative and then to man's positive artistic prowess:

Of which by Art we some examples have, Though Art can never fashion forms so true. With most attentive care, upon his knees, Of Nature Art implores, demands, and prays, Like wretched mendicant, of sorry skill And strength, who struggles to pursue her ways, That she will teach him how she manages To reproduce all creatures properly In her designs, by her creative power. (342, 11. 12-20)

Except for their explicit and exclusive concern with artistic production, taken by themselves such references are not outside of what we might expect from a later

Chartrian poet.

But Jean adds to this focus on poetic making details which suggest that he will concentrate not so much on the activities of a cosmic and perfected Lady

Nature as he will upon man's frustrating attempts to

identify and describe such a being in terms of his own

poetic identity. Perhaps the first hint of this theme is

the narrator's inability -- and the ability of any human art -- to describe cosmic Nature (81 1. 121), something which the narrator of the Planctu does in great detail.

In keeping with her courtly literary and scholastic

philosophical context, with its emphasis on psychology

and poetic activity, Jean's Lady Nature ultimately

impresses the reader of the Parliament as a projection

of the thirteenth-century love poet's concerns. She 83 lacks the anagogical vision and metaphysical insight of the Chartrian Nature, deficiencies which disqualify her

for the role of theologian and, to a great extent, philosopher roles which were essential to her counterparts in Bernard and in Alain. By far her most prominent and effective role is as a poet and rhetorician, titles which the narrator repeatedly applies to her ( 336, 11. 45 ff; 368, 11. 135 ff; 377, 1.

500). Her knowledge of the natural world is limited to that available to the poet-scientist: in place of

knowledge of the spheres shes broaches contemporary

science, popular philosophical controversies, and

literary anecdotes and myths.

Although early in her monologue Nature stresses the

importance of self-knowledge and criticizes mankind for

his refusal to seek it, she herself, as she meanders

through interminable story after endless philosophical

discussion, exhibits a telling lack of professional and

private self-knowledge. Unlike the detached Raison or

even Alain's more ethereal goddess, she exhibits flawed

thinking and even personality quirks that obviously

affect her judgement. She and the narrator alike suggest

that her womanly nature clouds her judgement (347, 11.

60 ff) in such serious matters as her denouncement of

mankind (403 ff.). And although she claims theophanic

vision, her discussion of important issues such as 84 destiny and free-will, notes Fansler (210), is less than lucid:

She starts by saying that the questions of how free-will can coexist with predestination is not one suited for discussion by the laity . This discussion . forms a part of Nature's confession to Genius, the whole being an exposition of Jean de Meung's ideas of 'cosmogony, astronomy, and optics.' The poet had difficulty in explaining his views, for his mouthpiece, Nature, jumps many a question she might logically, as God's chamberlain, be able and be expected to expound to Genius. Jean attempts to present both sides of the argument, but the reasons he advances for believing in free-will are only a little less unconvincing than those against it. He virtually admits the intracacies that a full discussion of the doctrinal point would involve.

Unlike her Chartrian precursors, when it comes to describing natural activity and to representing artistically -- she faces the same limitations that affect DeMeun as he writes his continuation. Her

descriptions of the heavens, for instance, are not based

on a platonist cosmology but on densely metaphorical and

somewhat ambiguous literary language and

thirteenth-century high technology, in the form of "An

optics book by Alhazen" (383).

With this reference to optics, Jean reintroduces

and begins to reinterpret the neoplatonic mirror

metaphor describing perfect creative power. Nature had

earlier implied that man should strive to mirror

platonically the divine order, but as the poem unfolds

it becomes clear that her epistemology differs radically 85 from Raisons'. In pages 386-400 we can trace in Nature's monologue the introduction of a type of poetic vision and a critique of the platonic method that will henceforth characterizes Nature's discourse. By making

Nature an expert in optics and especially of the properties of mirrors, DeMeun metaphorically juxtaposes

the epistemology she exhibits here and later in the poem with that she earlier attributes to herself; he also

links this juxtaposition with the two gardens Genius will discuss as artistic mirrors of created existence.

Contrary to her earlier claims that artists should

strive to mirror in their work divine archetypes, in her

discussion of optics Nature focuses exclusively on the

process of visualizing sublunar existents. She begins

her lecture with a discussion of various kinds of

lenses. Some lenses, she observes, distort objects,

others multiply them; still others reverse or

foreshorten or in some other way misrepresent the object

of perception. "Some other glasses," however, "truly

show the size I Of things seen through them, if the man

who looks I Is one who can maipulate them well" (386).

Given the artistic and literary value applied to

"vision" throughout the Roman, it is not difficult to

see, especially in this last quote, that DeMeun is using

the lense emblemmatically to represent a poem and at the

same time to suggest the mediating function of the 86 scholastics' possible intellect. Some poems, such as Guillaume's and Raison's are distortions of secular love; others, Jean's foremost among them, truly represent the topic, on the strength of their writer's ability to "manipulate" the conventions of his craft.

The analogy between poems and lenses suggests differences between Nature's and Raison's epistemology.

The very existence of a mediating instrument between the object of perception and the mind runs counter to the Platonic belief that extramental reality is directly accesible to man. It also suggests the mediating activity of Aquinas' possible intellect, which, like a lense, produces phantasms of perceptual objects. Some of these phantasms reflect accurately the experience that produced them; others, however, like lenses which distort reality, present actions and ideas

in a false light:

How many times when men have been deceived By mirrors or the effect of distances Which have made things appear as they are not, They straightway to their neighbors run, and boast, Not telling truth, but lies,

There is no man Who sees so well that he may never be Deceived in vision (387, 11. 62-72)

Vision, comments such as these suggest, is mediated,

subjective and has as its primary object physical

reality. If we understand as vision poetic cognition, 87 then, Nature's discussion of optics includes some of the general concerns of scholastic philosophical psychology.

The section following the discussion of lenses critiques Chartrian epistemology. Nature moves from optics to another visionary tool, dreams, through which poets of another ilk generate the images of their works.

From the start Nature undermines the value of this non-physical, self-reflective method of understanding actual life. Dreams, she explains, afflict the sick with false images (389). "One often sees even a healthy man," Nature continues,

Who lives unwisely or whose native bent Inclines him oft to meditate too much Or to be melancholy or to fear Unreasonably, who pictures to himself Apparations numerous and strange-- Quite other than the ones we talked about When we, too briefly, of the mirrors spoke. These phantoms seem to him as good as real. (390, 11. 32-39)

Nature thus distinquishes images of reality seen through accurate "lenses," from images produced in dreams, which are never grounded in reality. The latter are bona fide images, poems, sources of information regarding the world; the former are always distorted images.

As a mode of poetic vision, dreams, reflective, introspective, and distinct from the world of actual experience, are analagous to the role of the poet in an emanational cosmology. Nature clearly separates herself from such an epistemology by maligning, along with the 88 dreams of ordinary men, a seminal neoplatonic text which

informed Chartrian thought (and describes the role of

the Chartrian poet), the Somnium Scipionis:

Some will with great devotion meditate And too much meditation makes appear Before them things of which they have but thought; But they believe they see them openly. This is but lying and deceit. Thus he Who dreams believes that he before him sees Substance spiritual, as Scipio Once dreamed that he saw Hell and Paradise And sky and air and sea and earth beneath And all the things that are contained therein. (390, 11. 40-49)

"Substance spiritual" in this context could very well

refer to the strict ontological status accorded ideas in

a neoplatonic philosophy. Poets such as Raison, who

ignore physical reality in favor of "things of which

they have but thought," engage in a false poetics that

misrepresents actual existence. This description of

deceitful dreams recalls Raison's false view of the Isle

of Fortune and portends Genius' revision of Fairfield

Park. Nature, with her insistence on perception of

"substance physical" as the starting poet for all

vision, thus suggests a modified idealism in which

principles which Genius will later articulate in

Fairfield Park -- exist within matter.

In the next section of her monologue Nature

explores the political implications of her poetic

theory, challenging the social structure and political

theory that flows from a neoplatonic philosophy: 89

If anyone should dare. to contradict What I have said, and vaunt his gentle birth And name of gentleman, declaring he Is better by nobility of race Than those who cultivate the fields, and live By their own labor, I should answer thus: That no man's gentle who is not intent On virtue . (395, 11. 1-8)

Nobility, like vision, is for Nature an active and primarily social process, not a passive and introspective one. It is a function of skill, of a man's ability to manipulate instruments, whether poems or otherwise, and cannot be transmitted nativistically from

God to man or from one generation of men to the next:

Is he a gentleman who name and praise Would have because he has inherited Nobility from others, yet has not Their merit and prowess? I say, no! (398, 120-123)

The way to nobility, as to all knowledge, is the study of life, of society. For Nature, the best source of such information are "courtesy books". Clerks see in these books the world as it is, "the wickedness of all the bad/And all the goodness of gentlemen /Who were compendiums of courtesy" (395, 11. 31-33). For nature, even men are books, compendiums. It is therefore not surprising that like DeMeun he takes a "how-to handbook" approach to knowledge. "Briefly," she says, these men

"find recorded in their books I Whatever they should follow or eschew./ ... therefore, every clerk/ Is truly

-- or should be -- a gentleman" (396, 11. 34-37). Poets 90 are not dreamers but observers and recorders of social activity, where true concepts of charity originate.

This advice is diametrically opposed to Raison's suggestion that the narrator flee social action, physical love, and even texts about love in favor of her purportedly authoritaive discourse. Nature, unlike her neoplatonic precursor, offers the narrator of the Roman an epistemology that applies to the his literary and actual context. Raison shirked her responsibility as a continuer to 'remake' earlier authoritative vision in terms of her contemporary ideas of poetic, theological and philosophical truths. Instead, she recidivistically trots out antiquated classical texts and philosophy which she cannot, however, present in a structured theological vision of reality to assist the narrator in his attempt to develop poetic vision of secular and sexual love. Nature is an effective continuer. She first clearly presents Raison's cosmos and doctrine, through her self description as neoplatonic creatrix in a Chartrian cosmos.~She then invokes, through the mirror image, a platonic epistemology. The view of her precursor circumscribed in her 'poem,' she suggests a new epsitemology analagous to scholastic philosophical psychology. She then applies this psychology to the texts and the visionary processes of her predecessor,

Raison, critiquing them in terms of her hylomorphic 91 vision, such that Raison's method of poetic enquiry is exposed as a 'dream' or 'frenzy' which distorts the reality of human sexuality. Finally, she offers alternative visionary mode, in the form of her insistence that the primary object of the intellect is the physical world, and that the poet's role is not passive and restricted to analyses of authoritaive texts but active and bound up in a variety of informational source, experience and texts included.

In one more critical respect Nature is an effective continuer: she recognizes her own limitations, and when she reaches them, she without hesitation turns the poem over to Genius, her priest. Raison repeatedly pretends to knowledge of natural law, of divine ideas, and of an authoritative epistemology that she clearly does not possess. She lacks the self-reflexivity, borrowed from courtly poetry, that attends Jean's poem. Consequently,

she is, finally, unable to relative either the content

or the form of the poetry she unquestionable accepts as

authoritative. Nature exhibits self-reflexivity in every

aspect of her monologue: as she develops it, the

metaphor of the mirror describes poetic making and

poetry as an essentially self-reflexive activity. In

keeping with her scholastic affiliation, she does of

course suggest that good poems somehow mirror reality as

it really appears. She even suggests that this reality 92 ultimately resides in a theological perspective. But never does she claim ownership of the possible intellect necessary to reveal this absolute view of reality. Her

job, clearly, is to address the issue of how visual and poetic images are generated, and to supply accurate

images to her priest, Genius.

Genius

In spite of her insight into the physiological mechanism underlying poetic cognition and her telling

critique of Raison's ineffectual epistemology, Natura

herself is limited in what she can do for narrator. She

can only produce images and distinguish real from false

vision, not interpret them in a way that is meaningful

to the narrator. She reacts, in other words, only to the

processes of generating phantasms, assessing their

accuracy relative to actual cognitive experience. But

she cannot account for their coherence except in terms

·of the instinctive desire to copulate. She is therefore

an excellent critic and encyclopedist but, finally, an

ambiguous poet. This is why Nature leaves it to her poet

-subordinate, Genius, who applies an integrating

sacramental interpretation to the narrator's textual

experiences.

As in Alain, Genius is identified with the office

of the secondary forms and is responsible for

transmitting natural law into the physical sphere. He 93 receives, as his predecessor in the De Planctu receives, images of this law from Nature. In place of Alain's cosmic kiss, however, DeMeun makes the relationship between Nature and her scribe purely theological and rhetorical. His task is to excommunicate from nature's realm

. . all those Who us withstand, and freely to absolve The valiant hearts who labor to observe Rightly the rules -found written in my book, And strongly strive to multiply the race, And give themselves to love .. (410, 11. 33-37)

Genius vocalizes the content of Nature's book through a

"continuation" of his own, a sermon to the to the barons and love and their entourage. Throughout his "tale'' or

"carol," as he several times refers to it, Genius refers repeatedly to poetic as well as sexual creativity (435;

437). Alongside traditional references to the plow and

forge he invokes literary metaphors for procreation, asking that men "write their names upon . tablets

fair" and referring to lovers as "scriveners" (414, 1.

51).

What distinguishes Genius from the poets who

precede him (Nature and Raison) are his ability to

interpret the literary work of others theologically and

suggest, not just alternate cognitive strategies, but an

alternate poem to assi5t the narrator in his pursuit of

the Rose. Early in his monologue he critiques the poetic 94 vision of those who do not "see" according to the

Thomistic process Nature describes:

When they desire to follow and observe . Orpheus, who scorned To write on tablets, plow a furrow, forge--

When they contrive such rules, they prove themselves Opposed to Nature. (416, 11. 120-125)

These references to Orpheus and to writing suggest that

Genius is here interested in poetic as well as sexual creativity. A few lines later he makes this interest explicit by raising hernemeutical issues that are thematized throughout the remainder of the poem: May those who so despise So fair a mistress that they read her rules All upside down, and will not ever hold Them right side up that they may understand Their proper sense, but when they come to read Pervert the Scripture . (416, 11. 125-130)

By introducing the authority of scripture into his array

of poetic skills, Genius suggests that unlike Nature, he

possess theological as well as "natural" authority. In

philosophical terms, he embodies the functions of both

the possible and active intellects and is therefore able

not only to assess the accuracy of poetic "pantasms" but

can discern their meaning in principle as well.

Following Jean's plan for his continuation of

Guillaume's poem, Genius begins his evaluation of

"unnatural" poetry with the "rollicking Romance of the

Rose" (422, 1. 298). This book, he explains, is an 95 affront to scripture; moreover, it contravenes Nature's notion of true courtesy books and "briefly presents" every imaginable sin to its readers -- sins which Genius then enumerates.

Having identified, described and critiqued the poetic vision he plans to revise, Genius suggests the need in his society for new Orpheii, poets to replace those responsible. for work such as Guillaume's: ".My lady has great need I Of preachers those who disobey her rules/ To chasten so that they may thenceforth keep/ her laws and spread her precepts through the earth" (423,

11. 15-18). Revealing his scholastic belief that true wisdom inheres in matter as ideatic existants, or principles, he suggests that the "sermons" such

"preachers" speak are as unchanging, autononomous and valuable as precious stones. Though at a more mundane

level than Alain's Genius, he then fulfills his traditional function as poetic role model by evaluating

Guillaume's garden of love in scholastic terms and then

offering his alternative to it, Fairfield Park.

In Bernard the garden is a platonized Eden, an

ideal sublunar physical space ordered by Physis

according to divine wisdom. Here both Fairfield Park and

the Garden of Mirth are purely literary constructs

manufactured or retold by Genius. The Garden of Mirth,

says Genius, ls comprised of "vain fables -- vain 96 imaginings --/ No stable facts, but fictions that will fade" (431, 1. 53). Fairfield Park, in contrast, is a

"marvelous tale" (434, 1. 138); of it he claims, "many will a fable hold my tale" (435), which a few pages later her refers to as "my teaching" ( 437). The difference between these poems is the difference between

Chartrian and scholastic cognitive theory.

The garden of Mirth is clearly aligned with the dreams and frenzies, such as Scipio's dream, that Nature condemns as false poetic visions. It is Genius revision of the God of Love's 'poem,' Fairfield Park, and

Raison's poem, the Isle of Fortune. It is also, as

Genius tells us, a revision of the Roman. This continuation, unlike Raison's, fulfills the criteria

Jean establishes for an accurate continuation: seeing clearly the poem in question and offering an alternative to it. Genius first reviews the actual experience of

Guillaume's narrator in the garden of love: "Let us talk

I Of all the things the Lover saw at first . . In brief I I'll summarize, omitting the details," he says

(431, 11. 14-17). He begins with what the narrator saw as he approached the walls surrounding the garden. These walls, he explains, excluded "all (things) as plainly as in fact they appear" (431, 11. 37-38) from the garden proper. On the exterior was portrayed every accurate vision of nature, from the "ocean faithfully /Portrayed 97 with all its store of things marine--" (431, 11. 26-27) to the "whole earth /With all its worldy wealth'' (431,

11. 22-23).

Excluded from the garden is the primary source of all knowledge except revelation, the physical world. The scholastics argued that nothing is in the intellect which ls not first in the senses, and Genius obviously agrees. In terms of its relation to actual experience, the Garden of Mirth falls among the Somnium and the other dreams and frenzies Nature describes. Although the Lover claims to have seen trees, beasts, and other natural beings within this garden, these things were literary illusions, "no stable facts" but deceitful fictions" (431). The wellspring of Fairfield Park, says

Genius, is a distorting "lense," such that "one who bends his head above, to see I Himself reflected there sees naught at all, / and might grow crazy with bewilderment/Because he could not recognize himself"

(433, 11. 118-121). The park and its fountain represent poetry and poetic vision that is not based on perceptual

information but seeks to describe reality apart from the context that circumscribes it.

The Good Shepherd's park reveals Genius' adherence

to a scholastic hylomorphic epistemology. In the center

of the park is the source of this "tale" and all poetic

truth, the fountain fair: 98

This fountain fair, which so much virtue has To cure, with its sweet waters, ailing sheep, Flows from a Triple Well, unfailing, clear.

'Tis its own conduit; extraneous veins It never needs. More sure than native rock, The living stream depends upon itself. (434, 11. 141-143; 156-158)

Self-regenerating, timeless and tripartite, this fountain suggests a power analagous to the divine mind of an emanative cosmos, from which flows all knowledge.

In its center is a "carbuncle" which "no wind or rains or fog" can obscure. Like sermon's delivered by Nature's poets, this jewel, yet another mirror, is more valuable than the most precious stone (435). Its most distinguishing feature, however, is its reflective quality:

It has a force So marvelous that whatsoever man Beholds it hanging there and then perceives His face reflected in the spring below Always, from whatsoever side he looks, Sees all the things contained within the park And recognizes each for what it is, And ever knows its worth. He who has seen Himself reflected there at once becomes So wise a master that he nevermore Can be deceived by aught that may occur. (436, 11. 219-229)

The carbuncle functions in the same way as Nature's

accurate lenses, or poems, making all that is seen

through it appear in its true form. The difference

between the objects of perception described by Nature

and the "things delightful, permanent, and true" Genius

refers to is that the latter are not physical objects 99 but anagogical symbols, including the trinity, the inhabitants of paradise and Christ, represented by the well, sheep and the shepherd, respectively. This symbolic, anagogical vision grounded in natural knowledge of physical forms contrasts with Raison's claims to a metaphysical, ideatic order that she nevertheless cannot describe. It also suggests the disintegration of the Chartrian metaphysical vision of the divine order in the face of the development in the thirteenth century of scientific thought. Genius, like the scholastic agens, perceives truth in principle through the images of nature supplied by the agens possibilis. The carbuncle, which reflects the true form of any natural object before it, functions in a way that is analagous to the active intellect as do poems written in the same manner that Genius writes this one.

Genius' poem also reflects scholastic epistemology in the concept of nature it suggests. At the end of his anagogical description of ideal poetry and poetic making, Genius does what niether Raison nor Nature were able to do and offers the lover and the reader a course of theologically-grounded but pragmatic action relevant to his quest for the Rose:

That you more easily may keep in mind My teaching (for the lesson in few words Contained is that which is remembered best) Again I will repeat what you should do: Honor Dame Nature; serve her by good works. (437, 11. 270-274) 100

Genius, like Nature, advocates an active concept of love and poeticizing experience, which implies an active concept of Nature. The eithical precepts following the quote above suggest that this concpet arises from observation of actual society, as it does in a scholastic epistemology. Where Nature critiqued a platonic epistemology and posited an alternative, scholastic epistemology, Genius actually suggests an the kind of actions true nobility requires. After delineating the ethical precepts that define natural law, Genius promises that readers who follow them will

"walk in that Elysian field/ And follow in the footstepsof the Lamb I In everlasting life, and freely drink I The water of that spring which is so fair" (437,

11. 281-284). The metaphysical, mathematical order of the Chartrian cosmos has been replaced by a sacramental, metaphorical view of a divine order that is clearly beyond man's ability to grasp it per se.

The purpose of poetry has changed as well, as ls evident in Genius' exhortation to the barons of love:

What's this I pipe to you? High time it is I put my flute away. The sweetest tune Ofttimes annoys. I might keep you too long. So here I'll end my sermon. Now let's see What you will do when you have mounted high To preach a pulpit sermon o'er the breach. (438, 11. 290-295)

Unlike Raison Genius shows a sensitivity to his audience. He understands that, finally, the purpose of 101 secular love poetry is to give readers a workable concept of secular love. This is why, I think, the sexual and artistic references in this passage merge: ultimately, the line between poetry and action, between thought about sexuality, or secular love, and actual sensuality, is indistinct. This also explains why even the sexual act is at the end of the poem is described in the deliberately artificial terms of the temple, and why

Nature places so much emphasis on the potential harm of false dreams, which even healthy men often mistake for reality. Genius, unlike Raison, ls attuned to the actions involved in writing poetry and to the role imagination plays in all activities.

Of course, Genius is also like the scholastics in his idealism, however modified. He argues that Fairfield park and the temple containing the Rose mysteriously contain divine truths. The trees and brook in the park are purportedly eternal forms, and Genius does little to describe the psychological activities the carbuncle supposedly embodies. And in describing the object of his love, a real women, as a temple, the narrator ignores the dialogue between lover and beloved. For analyses of this issues, we must turn to Ockham and Chaucer. CHAPTER IV

OCKHAM'S PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY

"O Crist," thoughte I, "that art in blysse, Fro fantome and illusion He save . . . " (House of Fame, 11. 492-494)

A strong case could be made against looking in

Chaucer for traces of Ockham's thought. Besides the fifty years that separate the philosopher from the poet, the argument might go, it is always dangerous to claim that one philosopher speaks for an age. After all, the

Platonism and Aristotelian necessatarianism Ockham discarded remained a powerful influence throughout the century, especially among literati who relied on the

Chartrian and courtly textual corpora to find "matere

for to write." And Ockham's thought was branded heretical by the Church, which, however weakened by

infighting and growing nationalism, in the fourteenth century still enjoyed considerable theological and

ideological influence. Besides, to the extent that his

thought was a reaction to the thought of Duns Scotus,

Ockham's philosophy was dated and therefore at least

partially irrelevant to late fourteenth century

philosophical, let alone literary, thought (Leff,

102 103

Dissolution 55;112).

Despite these arguments, we cannot deny Ockham's pervasive influence on fourteenth-century philosophy.

Ockham stood on the borderline between an essentially cosmological and an essentially psychological view of epistemology. The Chartrians and even the scholastics had attributed to ideal knowledge ontological status because they held to theories of divine causation that allowed for direct rapport between the human and divine mind. Ockham did away with all experientially unverifiable causes and advocated an epistemological view of universal knowledge. He did not, however, make this radical break from tradition alone: in addition to

Duns Scotus, his work borrows several elements of the Aristotelian philosophy so influential in the thirteenth century. His originality, then, lay not so much in the individual components of his philosophy but in his ability to present systemtically and organically tendencies that had been developing in

isolation during the second half of the thirteenth century (Leff, Pissolution 55).

Ockham also anticipated what were to become crucial

issues -- such as the apostolic ideal and the problem of evidence in later fourteenth-century philosophy,

theology and politics (Coppleston, 142). This unique combination of eclecticism and originality is, I think, 104 primarily responsible for the magnitude of Ockham's influence on fourteenth-century thought. Ockham's philosophy shares the scholastic metaphysical impulse to address all of the increasingly distinct "sciences," philosophy, theology, ethics, and natural science included, in terms of one coherent system. At the same time, however, it breaks radically from the premises on which scholastic thought is founded. It is therefore both progressive and universal enough to have exerted a cross-curriculum influence on emerging "newe" sciences as apparently unrelated as mechanics and epistemology.

For these reasons, more than any other single philosopher, Ockham was responsible for the change in outlook that characterizes the fourteenth century (Leff,

Dissolution 55).

In terms of the problem of knowledge, this change

in outlook consisted of a shift from Thomistic modified

idealism to a philosophical psychology based on concept-formation through stimulus generalization and associationistic mechanisms (Robinson 158). In short,

Ockham made into a psychological problem the relationship between individual existence and unviversal knowledge what had been a theological and metaphysical problem. He did this by breaking from the necessitarian theology and philosophy, dictated by

Platonic and then Aristotelean philosophy, that had 105 dominated western thought up to that time. Gordon Leff

(Leff, Dissolution 57) explains that he opposed all nativism and idealism for falling to distinguish between the conceptual and the real. Abstraction, he maintained, can be known only conceptually, in the intellect. This was in contrast to Thomas, who, refusing to accept a discrepancey between the universal concepts exclusive to the intellect and individuals outside intellect, asked how an individual derived from a universal nature or essence. Ockham, in contrast, sought to explain how the intellect comes to conceptions that are not

individual. Robinson (158) explains:

Ockham was more deliberately psychological in his approach than any of his Scholastic predecessors Che) proposed specific psychological principles . and brought (them) to bear upon religiophllosophic questions. Where others had taken the truths of theology as the starting point in their exploration of human nature, Ockham chose to employ human psychological dispositions in an attempt to discern the way in which theological conceptions came into being.

Ockham's Theory of Knowledge

Ockham did not set out to develop a purely

psychological explanation of intellectual activity. He

created his philosophy for a purely theological reason:

to free God from from what he saw as the unwarranted

constraints imposed by any doctrine of eternal

archetypes, whether principles or ideas. He argued that 106 man cannot know God, essences or first principles through inner illumination, communion with divine ideas,

or familiarity with efficient causes. God, he argued,

is omnipotent and unknown to man except through purely conceptual knowledge, based excludively on experience and direct revelation. Such revelation, moreover, is beyond the scope of philosophical as well as theological

investigation. Gone is any direct recourse to the divine mind; so powerful is God in Ockham's philosophy that He can cause the physical-psychological act of judging an

object to exist, without that object really existing

(Coppleston 181). Consequently, even sensory knowledge,

for Aquinas as for Ockham the basis of all knowledge, is

contingent, and in every case but revelation man is

obligated to distinguish the act of seeing from the

judgement that the object of thought exists

extramentally. In this he was opposed to the

scholastics, who assumed "more or less direct rapport

between the mental and the real" (Leff, Dissolution 55).

Ockham's anti-necessitarianism overturned

contemporary and traditional theories of knowledge.

Where the Aristotelians and before them the

neo-platonists had held that every mental category and

distinction had its ontological counterpart as various

kinds of extramental reality, Ockham eliminated all

entities whose existence is not experimentally 107 verifiable or guaranteed by revelation (Leff,

Dissolution 55). In a world without essences or extramental ideas, existence is wholly individual; and since individual, opposed to "universal" existence, is known only by particular experience, experience replaced the scholastic ratio as the ultimate source of all natural and theological knowledge for Ockham and his successors (Leff, Dissolution 58). In one conceptual leap, Ockham redirected the metaphysical impulse that had culminated in the thirteenth century Summae from the structure of ultimate reality to the structure and process of our thought about reality.

Besides revelation, Ockham argued that all knowledge derives from instinct, physiological dispositions and intuitive knowledge, the basis of abstractive knowledge. Intuitive knowledge, argued

Ockham, is the direct awareness of an object, opposed to an understanding or judgement of it. It is knowledge of

individual objects of sense perception or of interior acts, such as will (Coppleston 241). It constitutes demonstrable evidence of the existence of contingent beings and is the foundation of all knowledge, including

experimental knowledge and universal propositions (Leff,

Thought 282). Abstractive knowledge is any knowledge in

virtue of which it cannot be known if any object exists,

that is, all knowledge excluding revelation that is not 108 intuitive knowledge. Because it is concerned with understanding rather than demonstrating truths, abstractive knowledge is by definition conceptual and judgemental (epistemological) rather than substantial or existential (ontological), and it always presupposes immediate awareness of individual objects (Leff, Thought

281) .

Ockham on Concept Formation

Because they believed that 'nothing is in the intellect that is not first in the senses,' the scholastics developed models to describe the physiological mechanism responsible for generating the images interpreted by the agens intellectus; but their modified idealism prevented them from taking the next step toward a secular philosophy of psychology, a description of concept formation. Ockham was able to take this step because he so cleanly divided natural and supernatural knowledge that he did not have to hold a theory of abstration tied to a divine final cause; moreover, by basing all universal knowledge on individual intuitive experience, he supplanted theories of abstraction tied to Thomistic principles or Chartrian essences with a theory of concept formation based wholly on the process by which individual minds create ideas from the materials of daily experience (Goddu 85;

Robinson 159). For Ockham, substances and qualities 109 alone were existential; any ideas men have about these ontological constituents are, therefore, created and

individual (Coppleston 242).

The process by which ideas are created is founded on a quality of the soul, the habitus, which Ockham defined as an acquired intellectual habit arising from repeated exposure to the same sensory impression or

interior act. A habitus "disposes a person to an action entirely similar to the ones by which the habitus is aquired" (Robinson 159; Goddu 24). Breaking from

Aristotle, who was unclear as to whether the soul at

birth is a blank slate, and from Aquinas, who argued

that man has certain basic tendencies grounded in his

nature (Robinson 159; Coppleston 191), Ockham concluded

that none of the habitus, including virtues (which he

felt were simply moral habits) are innate. The habitus

is niether a faculty of the soul nor a nativistic idea

but a mutable quality of the soul. While they remain in

the soul when a man is thinking nothing (Goddu 85),

habitus are gradual in their appearance and changeable

through disuse or conflict -- in short, they are always

and exclusively the product of experience, and are

therefore subject to change in light of new experience.

When Ockham distinguished his eight meanings of

scientia, the habitus, along with intuitive cognition

and demonstration, are classified as the three most 110 important components of knowledge (Goddu 79).

It has been noted that Ockham's theory of concept formation is similar to the modern theory of stimulus generalization. With a summary of the habitus behind us, we can begin to see the truth in this comparison by considering how concepts arise from habitus. In response to repeated intuitive cognition of a series or group of similar objects, the mind separates or isolates the common features of the objects. In this way the mind -­ not nature -- relates habitually to a number of objects that resemble each other (Robinson 159). From this process of abstractive cognition, called the natura occulta, a habitus arises and is stored in the memory.

Conceptual knowledge, the act of engaging the habitus, ls not an objectif iable portion of thought or a static product, but like the habitus is a guality of the soul.

Unlike the habitus, however, a concept does not remain in the inactive mind, because it doesn't exist apart from the active mind but is the "actual thinking itself"

(Goddu 85), the act of understanding experience.

Concepts are 'natural signs,' ontologically orior to language, that stand for the act of conceptualizing something.

The essential difference between Ockham's and earlier theories of abstraction is the difference between deduction and induction. Aquinas' physical 111 universe, for instance, ran on the assummptlons that it ls moved by an external cause, and that movement and change are the result of change from one state to another through an efficient cause (Leff, Thought 6).

For the scholastics, "to know" ls to know the divine mind, to deduce the final cause, God, from experience.

Ockham eliminated all external causes, making the object of enquiry the human rather than the divine mind:

(A) body fell not because of a separate principle which moved it to realize its nature, but by the attraction of the earth's mass. Above all, there could be no assurance that the world was finite, or that it had a governing unity, or that it was not eternal, or that there were not several worlds. All these beliefs were founded upon Aristotle's assumption that there cannot be a regression to infinity. But this was outside the range of practical experience .. (Leff, Thought 6)

Ockham argued that the physical world operates through cause and effect, so that cause cannot be inferred from effect but, given the experience of two events, so that the second does not occur without the first, and the first doesn't occur without causing the second, the observer can infer that the first is the cause of the second. As it affects abstractive knowledge, causality replaces inner illumination as the giver of natural knowledge of, for instance, law or God. Causality is not the knowledge per se, but the act of thought: just as physical cause and effect isn't a third thing distinct

from events but ls a connative term describing the 112 relationship between them (Goddu 77), intellectual cause and effect connotes the relationship between intuitive and conceptual knowledge of an object, so that the latter is impossible without the former.

Ockham's theory of causality redefined the relationship between the knower and the known. Thomas' hylomorphic ontology enabled him to replace the

Neo-Platonic emphasis on reflection and theological investigation into metaphysical first principles with an emphasis on sensory experience as a means to discerning first principles. Ockham went a step further, making similarity among intuitive impressions the basis of all conceptual and universal knowledge, and maintaining that the similarity between a concept and the object known is possible only because the object causes the concept. The principle of causality thus replaced the earlier belief that extramental universals are the source of non-intuitive knowledge. Ockham based this inductive process on the specificity of the relation between a cause and an effect and on the premise that a cause exists for every effect, and held that the foundation for abstraction is the similarity between individuals

(Goddu 85).

If a cause could not be determined for a given effect, that ls, if conceptual knowledge of a group or series of similar individuals doesn't correspond to 113 observations (intuitive knowledge) of those individuals,

Ockham concluded that the inquiring mind had failed to perceive the cause. The similarity between a group of individuals and the knower's concept of them depends entirely on the temporal and/or physical proximity of he intuitive cogiition(s) behind the abstraction (Goddu

88) and the quality of the conceiving mind (Coppleston

247). The effects of his psychological approach on the problem of knowledge are clear in Ockham's treatment of how the mind comes to universal knowledge, such as a concept of nature or God. As we've seen, an abstractive cognition forms a habitus and in this form is stored in the memory. To form a universal concept the mind can then generalize this cognition by comparing it with other similar abstractive cognitions to form a

"universal" concept representing many similar

individuals (Goddu 86). Thus universal knowledge of nature or God or virtue is merely a collection of

individually-perceived habitus. Ockham argued that faith conceives an infinitely good and powerful God whose mind and work are unknowable in their own terms to the mind

of man, and who is the ultimate source of norms rather

than subject to any "independent" norms (Coppleston

141). We have no intuitive knowledge of God; our ideas

of him are dependent on our ideas of finite things and

their qualities, so we can know him only conceptually, 114 in the form of a composite concept. This concept, not god per se, is the immediate object of our knowledge.

Ockham was not the f lrst to contend that universals are the result of intellectual abstraction of common features of individuals. He was, however, the first to assign universals conceptual status. For Aquinas,

that which was abstracted was the essence or or form of nature, freed from its material accompaniments, and which inhered in like individuals as the source of their likeness. To Ockham it was merely a likeness among similar individuals which the mind recognized in members of the same genus or species. (Leff, Dissolution 74)

Ockham made individual minds responsible for the creation of ideas of God and nature. This changed the epistemological role of the theologian. Since these men had no direct knowledge of God, their function was no longer to define God or his attributes but to concern themselves with proper ways of thinking and speaking about Him (Coppleston 249-251). As for defining the true faith, Ockham developed a democratic politics. Since supernatural knowledge ls accesible only through revelation and the Bible is the prime source of revelation within a Christian community, all believers are subject to the same law of Christ in the Bible. And since individual men are incapable of securing truly universal (i.e. supernatural) knowledge except by revelation, Ockham overturned Thomas' arguement for a political-religious monarchy, in favor of conciliar 115 government. Only when all believers assent to an article of belief, contended Ockham, can it be regarded as true faith for the universal church {Coppleston 143).

Moreover, because Christ renounced all temporalities and political power, his successors could not claim them; nor could any cleric assume the authority of imposing vows of any kind or temporal rights beyond the precepts of Christ as determined in council {Coppleston 143). In the secular sphere, the king was no more God's vicar on earth than was the pope: his rule, therefore, was subject not to natural law but to law as determined in council.

Natural Law

Ockham does not invoke a metaphysical concept of nature or natural law as does Aquinas; instead he places full responsibility for any concepts of nature, religious, ethical or scientific, on the minds concieving these concepts. In ethics, for instance, a utilitarian code of social conduct replaces the

Aristotelian notion of natural law. Since it is impossible to deduce "natural" law from innate human tendencies {which don't exist in an Ockhamist Tabula

Nuda), we have no recourse to to the precepts of an immutable, extramental natural law such as Aquinas postulates. Instead, by examining cause and effect as it operates within a particular society -- that is, by 116 gaining intuitive knowledge of our culture per se it can be seen "that certain actions are expedient, in the sense that they are harmful to man and society"

(Coppleston 254). We cannot, however, discern absolute justice or natural law except through revelation.

The total effect on nature of Ockham's epistemology was to disintegrate earlier integrated, structured visions into secular and increasingly autononomous bodies of thought. For the Chartrians an autonomous spirit, Nature is for Ockham merely a collection of habitus, a bundle of concepts, or thought acts, related to various aspects of natural existence. In the sciences, for instance, Ockham inspired the substitution of a physical for the traditional metaphysical explanation of physics. Once a largely rhetorical

"science" and the handmaiden of theology, in the fourteenth century natural philosophy spawned several proto-sciences, including mechanics, which spurred the development of the forerunner of modern scientific method, the hypothetico-deductive process, in which logical analysis was brought to bear upon nature only after recording natural events with precision. Likewise, in philosophical psychology Ockham substituted a psychological for a theological explanation of abstractive and universal knowledge.

Ockhamist Poetics 117

Although Ockham didn't discuss poetics, he did discuss the theologian's role, which, as we have seen,

is to explore the ways men think about God. Since in poetry featuring Lady Nature and Genius the role of poet and theologian are traditionally intermingled, we can get a sense of the poet's role from the theologian's. As we have seen, the theologian does not know God per se

but only a composite concept of god based, finally, on

intuitive knowledge. Since this concept, and the

psychological processes involveded in establishing it,

replace metaphysical or divine "vision" as the true

object of theological inquiry, Ockham argued that the

theologian's task is to discuss proper ways of thinking

and speaking about God. Likewise, poetic "vision,"

formerly the process of perceiving the archetypal ideal

or principle in the physical world or in other poems, is

in an Ockhamist world-view the process of exploring

concept formation -- especially as this vision applies

to dream-vision and poetry featuring Lady Nature or

Genius.

The poet writing about nature cannot possibly know

nature per se; rather, he knows various concepts of

nature, whether his own or those developed by other

poets. These concepts, as we saw in Bernard and in

DeMeun, are essentially models of ideal poetic making

that reflect the predominant philosophy of the period. 118

In an Ockhamist framework, this model would not be intended as an "ideal" that should be striven for but a description of actual human cognition, from intuitive experience to the formation of habitus and conceptual knowledge, and including the changeable nature of all conceptual knowledge. In other words, rather than dramatizing a mind struggling to attain theophanic vision-or to exploit the insight of an exceptional agens intellectus, the poet inspired by Ockham might seek instead to dramatize the attempts of a single, idiosyncratic mind, to form conceptual knowledge of how poets think.

Seen from this perspective Lady Nature's mind is not so much seen as attuned to immutable truths as it is seen as a cultural and experiential artifact, filled with habitus produced by a poet's unique intuitive experiences. Like the theologian, the poet is epistemologically estricted to conceptual knowledge of the topics he explores, such as love and God. These are acts of thought derived from experience reading experiences included. But the poet doesn't, as DeMeun suggests, contemplate texts "containing" objective, timeless ideas and then interpret them with the agens

intellectus. By demystifying cognition, Ockham also eliminated the need for an ideal "knower" such as those

featured in DeMeun and Bernard, in the characters of 119

Lady Nature and Genius.

Above all, the poet's fundamental interest is not in metaphysics or in old texts -- not, as in DeMeun, in determining "authoritative" poetic voice or definitive

"sentence" regarding love or nature. Instead, it is in the process by which authoritative concepts and

"sentence" are formed. Thus the politics of

Ockhamist-inspired poetics is democratic and counciliar;

for if all men generate conceptual knowledge in a similar manner, then it is experience and raw talent, rather than nobility or divine insight, that differentiates one poet from another. The value of any poetic treatment of secular love derives, not from the office of the speaker, but from the utility of the concept in the real world. And given Ockham's

utilitarian ethics and counciliar politics, the voices

of all poets ideally play a role in determining this

utility, because it is as impossible for one man or a

small group of men to determine universal truths

regarding nature or love as it is for one man to determine theological truths. In an Ockhamist poetic

world, the fablior is, potentially, as full of insight

as the courtly poet, and Genius would logically be

replaced by a council of poets who together determine

what is best for a particular society, based upon their

experience in that society. 120

Three further consequences flow from the unique identity of the "nature" poet in an Ockhamist thought world. First, the reader, as a "voting member" of the council of minds necessary to determine the universiallty of any concept, assumes greater responsibility than ever before for the meaning of a poem. Without a Genius figure -- let alone a divine poet such as Nature -- privy to divine truths to guide him, the reader ls required to assume ownership of any concept of love or nature he takes from a poem. Second, there is no room in Ockham for the prlmltivlstlc

Chartrian veneration of classical texts. These texts, for the Chartrians recepticles of divine truths, are for an Ockhamist archaeological documents, social artifacts that cannot be read in isolation from the minds that created them -- or the minds interpreting them. Third, since Ockham did away with distinct faculties of the soul in addition to reified knowledge (Coppleston 251), theories of characterization would change as well. In order to reflect accurately intuitive experience of the process of concept formation, they would have to be much less allegorical and much more well-rounded than Genius,

Nature and certainly characters such as Raison and Will in DeMeun -- figures which arose from the Chartrian and early scholastic adherence to idealism and to theories of the soul which describe autonomous faculties. 121

Conclusion

Ockham was almost single-handedly responsible for a series of dramatic changes in the way fourteenth-century thinkers conceptualized the human mind. He posed the problem of universal and necessary knowledge in a new way, namely, that if evidence can only be of what is known to exist immediately in intuitive knowledge and all such knowledge is contingent, how can evident knowledge give necessary knowledge? This problem led to a new emphasis on on cognitive mechanisms (Leff,

Dissolution 3) and to a new skepticism regarding the possibility of certain knowledge. This skepticism, explains Leff, was an attempt to come to terms with the absence of inner illumination (Leff, Dissolution 78).

Another way post-Ockham thinkers came to terms with the absence of illumination was to revert to purely secular explanations of natural phenomena. Nature, seen by

Ockham as a collection of habitus, was assessed quantitatively, and through direct observation, rather than metaphysically or theologically (Goddu 86).

In the face of this evolution toward autonomous

sciences and proto-psychology, however, the basic

relationship between philosophy and the poet who uses

Lady Nature remained unchanged. As we have seen, both

Bernard and DeMeun used their poems to summarize,

dramatize and critique the predominant theory of 122 knowledge of their day. In dramatizing the complexities of the human mind grappling with the realities of human love and poetic making, these poets also developed informal psychologies. In the final chapter of this essay, we will turn to yet another poet who, like his predecessors, deployed Lady Nature with an eye toward the philosophy of his day, Chaucer. CHAPTER V

OCKHAMISM AND THE PARLIAMENT OF FOWLS

"What?" quod I.--"The grete soun," Quod he, "that rumbleth up and doun In Fames Hous, full of tydynges, Bothe of feir speche and chidynges, And of fals and soth compouned. Herke wel--hyt is not rouned. (Hous of Fame, 11. 1025-30)

It is impossible to be sure if Chaucer knew

Ockham's work directly. But so great was the philosopher's impact on later fourteenth century thought that the poet a man conversant in continental and insular thought was certainly familiar with the

Ockharnisrn, even if only through the work of Strode or other thinkers Ockham inspired.l Chaucer also undoubtedly had a sophisticated sense of the evolution of the figure of Nature and of the problem of knowledge.

His sense of literary tradition was not likely to have been as chronologically distinct and as thematically catalogued as a modern reader's; nevertheless, on the strength of his broad exposure to continental, classical and contemporary literature, he is sure to have had a sophisticated notion of the evolution of poetry featuring Lady Nature.2 He knew the platonic corpus that

123 124

informed much of Chartrian thought and Alain's~

Planctu Naturae. He also knew well one of the central texts of the via antiqua, Aristotle's Ethics, and had translated the Roman de 1a Rose.3

The topic of the Parliament, secular love, suggests that Chaucer was sensitive to the tradition surrounding

Lady Nature as he created his own version of the

goddess. As the Cosmoqraphia and the -Roman make clear-,.

in the middle ages 'love,' secular or religious, was as much a psychological as it was a theological issue.

Platonists agreed that all virtue is based on the love and imitation of God and the love of every good through

him (De Planctu 48); and in the thirteenth-century

Aquinas claimed that love is the highest virtue. In

Chaucer's polymathic mind this topic surely conjured

many of same issues it had in Jean's and Bernard's,

poetic making and the problem of knowledge included. Add

to this explicit references to Chartrian and courtly

texts, including the Somnium, Alain's De Planctu and

Boccacio's Tseida, and implicit references to an

important part of the Aristotelian corpus that inspired

scholastic thought, the Ethics, and it becomes almost

certain that Chaucer intended his poem featuring Lady

Nature to be as much a statement on fourteenth-century

poetic theory and his view of that theory as he did a

statement regarding secular love. 125

As noted in the introduction to this essay, trends in recent criticism of the Parliament suggest that

Chaucer was in fact interested in various psychological issues as he wrote his final dream vision. Aers,

Ferster, Kiser and Liecester, among others, have outlined the poem's concern with the intellectual processes through which poets and readers use literature to form concepts, reveal attitudes toward "making," and dramatize the logic of the mind. By themselves, these essentially psychological concerns constitute the strongest evidence that Chaucer wrote the Parliament with Ockhamist thought in mind; for prior to Ockham, philosophical psychology was predicated on a belief in divine causality that restricted it to fundamentally metaphysical and theological rather than cognitive issues. Further evidence of Ockhamist influence in

Chaucer has been found or suggested in works following the Parliament. Eldredge, for example, argues that

Chaucer uses the Legend of Good Women to assess the via moderna; and Kiser argues, in terms highly suggestive of

Ockham's distinction between intuitive and abstractive knowledge, that the God of Love in the same poem represents the use of unnatural poetic forms to symbolize natural concepts.4

There are several telling similarities between the

Parliament and Ockhamist thought. The concept of 126 authority implicit in the poem, for instance, is much more democratic than that associated with earlier philosophies. In place of scholastic royal absolutism, the narrator privileges individual judgment and counciliar politics. No single authoritative figure controls the action of the poem: the narrator, no

Genius, cannot generate metaphysical insight or

penetrate a suprafactual order of reality. And Chartrian

theophanic vision is replaced by an unstructured,

fideistic view of divine truths, in the form of repeated

ambiguous references to divine bliss and angelic

harmony. These references never amount to a macrocosmic

or even a sacramental view of reality; in fact, at

critical ideological junctures the narrator finds

himself without visionary guidance. The Somnium fails to

illuminate him, Scipio disappears at the garden gate,

and when the narrator "awakens" at the end of the poem

he concludes immediately his dream has failed to provide

any insight into his writerly confusion.

In the garden Chaucer substitutes for an

authoritative visionary such as Scipio the narrator's

independent poetic imagination struggling to create

order from a welter of textual experiences. In the

parliament scene he substitutes for an authoritative

poet figure such as Genius a surprisingly democratic

parliament, presided over by an earthbound Lady Nature 127 with a laissez-faire attitude toward her charges. More so than any of the characters that participate in Jean's parliament, the birds in Chaucer's parliament scene exhibit some of the roundness of fully-developed, realistic characters. The narrator himself is a different type of character than Jean's schizophrenic narrator, whose identity shuttled among three personae, including Jean himself. Chaucer, interested in dramatizing the workings of a single mind, effectively distances himself from the narrator and eradicates himself from the poem; just as important, he avoids making the narrator a mouthpiece for any "authoritative truths." The informal descriptive psychology that results from this view of character suggests Ockham's concentration on the structure of individual human thought about reality rather than on the structure of a metaphysical system (Goddu 92).

The Parliament and the Roman

Aers and others have noticed that the narrator's view of how knowledge is created differs substantially from the epistemology suggested by his reading of the

Somnium. In lines 22-25, explains Aers, the narrator reveals his "attitude toward knowledge, cognition and authority," in an agricultural metaphor that compares the production of knowledge from old texts to the production of corn from old fields (Aers 1-2). This 128 metaphor, Aers explains, transforms "a great human task

. into a closed and purely natural cycle, with the result that (the narrator) deletes human agents, their

labor, social relations, practices through which human world becomes known (Aers 2). Chaucer, Aers continues,

undermines this view by foregrounding the role of

"individual readers in bringing 'olde bokes' into the

present, of individuals in generating "newe science"

( Aers 3) .

The question of how Chaucer might have conceived

this dichotomy has proven problematic for critics, who

either define both sides of it in terms of neoplatonic

or Augustinian thought or describe Chaucer's view of

epistemology ahistorically, in modern philosophical and

crtitical terms. But while the narrator, at least in the

first third of the poem, seems interested in developing

a metaphysical understanding of the absolute value of

love, social and sexual, it is not at all clear that his

attitude is therefore neo-platonic, authoritative or

classical. And although the insights of critics such as

Aers are extremely helpful in separating the narrator's

persona from Chaucer's, they fail to identify Chaucer's

attitude toward visionary knowledge in terms of

fourteenth-century epistemology terms that

philosophically circumscribed the ways in which it would

have been possible for him to consider psychological 129 issues.

Evidence in the poem suggests that the narrator's epistemology corresponds more closely to the via antiqua and a scholastic rather than a neoplatonic or

Augustinian approach to knowledge. In spite of his early metaphysical pretensions, for instance, the narrator clearly harbors no expectations of a Chartrian theophany, in which all of the sciences, natural philosophy and theology included, are conflated to form an ordered cosmic vision. Instead, like Genius in the

Roman, he tries from the start to develop his integrated vision of the cosmos in purely theological and literary terms. Though he alludes repeatedly to divine harmony and bliss and his reading of the Somnium implies a

Christian eschatology, the narrator cannot make these implied connections between his and the divine mind explicit. This fideistic attitude toward the possibility of divine wisdom is, I think, not so much a vestige of the fully unified, "scientific" vision of the Chartrians as it is an expression of a mind immersed in a

"DeMeunian" sacramentalism.

The narrator also resembles DeMeun's Genius in his degree of professional specialization. The Chartrians did not distinguish sharply among the sciences or among the professions associated with them: poets were at once philosophers, theologians and "scientists." To a larger 130 degree than even DeMeun's narrator, however, the narrator of the Parliament is a specialist, a poet, and he inhabits a specialized, literary thought world. From the opening reference to his "craft," to his concluding remark that he "to rede nel nat spare," he presents himself as a reader and poet, a secular craftsman who aspires to nothing beyond a literary - vision of secular love. Like Genius, Chaucer's narrator does not examine the book of nature itself for authoritative vision but privileges even over prayer the authoritative handbook, in the form of the Somnium, and a book about nature, the De Planctu, in his quest for this vision.

Structurally, too, Chaucer's poem is closer to

DeMeun than it is to Alain, the Somnium, Bernard,

Boethius or any of the other neo-platonic visionary poems. The plot of such poems generally involve an ignorant poet-narrator who is almost immediately granted a vision of nature, philosophy or some other authoritative figure. This figure vouchsafes to the narrator an absolute and ideal assessment of the cosmic value of human experience. There is no such vision granted the narrator, to whom Nature does not appear until the final section of the poem and then only as his literary abstraction of a conscious reading experience.

Rather than this neo-platonlc formula, the Parliament 131 follows generally the pattern of DeMeun's continuation of the Roman: an ignorant narrator-poet, fresh from a painful experience with the god of love (courtly literature) and in search of a poetic voice to create an authoritative handbook of love, hears from and rejects neoplatonic authority (Raison in DeMeun, Africanus in

Chaucer). He continues to search, passing through two kinds of literature or literary attitudes qua gardens supposedly representing evil and virtue. In DeMeun, these are the garden of Mirth and the Good Shepherd's park; in the Parliament, the Temple of Venus and the

Temple of Nature. Nature then appears and discusses the proper expression of secular love, and the poem ends with a convocation of various literary figures. These figures make speeches, presided over by Nature's subvicar (in the Roman Genius and in Chaucer the terslet).

The Praefatio

If in the Parliament Chaucer reacts to a scholastic epistemology embodied in the narrator, he does so from the only philosophical alternative available in his age,

Ockhamism. The key to understanding precisely how an

Ockhamist epistemology may have influenced the poem lies

in the identity of the God of Love and Cytherea. These

figures are almost impossible to pin an historical

identity to because the narrator describes them 132 elliptically and idiosyncratically. For this reason, they have inspired several critical interpretations, including true and false happiness, natural and courtly love or love poetry, and caritas and cupiditas.6

Critics often evaluate these figures by finding a literary character or idea that resembles one or both of them and then suggesting ways that Chaucer may have drawn on this idea to create his version of the God of

Love or Cytherea. Economou (129), for example, argues that Chaucer's use of the name Cytherea "is of great significance,

for he is here not simply addressing a pagan goddess but the benevolent planet of a Christianized cosmology. This heavenly 'blysful lady swete' is the powerful star of love, a heavenly body that acts as intermediary of God's decrees, and therefore a goddes of legitimate love."

Cowgill (326) takes a similar tact:

Cytherea of the east (Dante XXVII, 94-102) is here described is symbolic of love purified, the love which illuminates the soul and directs it toward the active life ....

Tempting as such interpretations are, they say little about Chaucer's (as opposed to Dante's or Alain's) characterization of Cytherea and the God of Love. It is dangerous to assume that the mere invocation of a name would have conjured in Chaucer's fourteenth-century mind

purely twelfth or even late thirteenth-century ideas.

Such evaluations also fail to account for the

possibility that Chaucer intended the God of Love and 133

Cytherea to be read as products of the narrator's

idiosyncratic mind rather than as unmediated expressions either of his own or a traditional poetic theory.

The narrator's description of love (11. 1-14) establishes a dichotomy between his stated view of knowledge and the epistemology he exhibits. He makes several comments indicating that love, for him, is a

literary concept that does not necessarily reflect actual experience of love. He admits to ignorance of

love "in dede" (1. 8), and he suggests that the God of

Love is simply a literary character restricted to the

"bakes" he reads "ful ofte" (1. 10). But other aspects

of his charactrization of the God of Love suggest that

he does not distinguish clearly between ideas and

existants with ontological status. Five lines before

identifying a textual source or in any other way

indicating that he is referring to literature, he uses a

proper noun ("Love") to symbolize his topic, suggesting

that this literary character exists beyond the texts in

which it is found. He then personifies this idea,

attributing to it "wondyrful working" Cl. 5). Lines 4-7

are a telling indication of his attitude toward his

abstrctive knowledge of love:

Al this mene I be Love that my felynge Astonyeth with his wondyrful werkynge So sore, iwis, that whan I on hym thynke, Nat wot I wel wher that I flete or synke.

The narrator considers love, the literary character, an 134 extramental, extra-textual intellectual object "on" which he can think. By referring to it with a personal pronoun ("hym"), he also attributes to it an anthropomorphic identity.

But Chaucer undermines this evaluation even as the narrator makes it. Despite the narrator's belief in the actual existence of the God of Love, it is evident in the lines quoted above that the only actualities attributable to this figure are the narrator's reactions to a reading experience. The realm in which the God of

Love operates is the narrator's emotional ("my felynge") and intellectual ( " I on hym thynke") self; moreover,

this figure does not act independently from the

narrator's act of conceiving it: only when he "thinks on

it" does the God of Love "astonish" him. We know this

character only in terms of the narrator's -- and our

reactions to a reading experience. The character itself, apart from the unspecified "myrakles" and ambiguous

"crewel yre" the narrator attributes to it, is literally

not to be found in the poem. In fact, the stanza devoted

to this "god" (11. 8-14) contains so little information

that we cannot possibly discern in it even a faint

shadow of a particular allegorical figure, textual

tradition, or a metaphysical entity.

The God of Love as a symbol of knowledge is in

essence an Ockhamist concept. We have seen that the 135 habitus produces in the knower the same sensations he felt at time of a given stimulus. As the narrator recalls his reading experience, he virtually relives the anxiety it produced. "Whan I on hym thynke," he begins, engaging the habitus produced by the act of reading,

"Nat wot I wel wher that I flete or synke." He then recalls the action that caused his pain and fear: his reading of the God cif Love's miracles and ire, to which he attributed actual existence and in response to which he feels actual psychological suffering. His recollections build to a crescendo with his final exclamation, " 'God save swich a lord!' I can no more!"

(1. 14). The reader of the Parliament, too, is drawn into reliving his own habitus relative to the God of

Love. For as he reads Chaucer's suggestive but non-descriptive characterization, he first empathizes with the narrator. Unable to find actual evidence of love's cruelty, however, he must conjure appropiate stimuli from his own store of real and vicarious experience to fill in the blanks of stanzas one and two.

The narrator's ambiguous description of love suggests that all knowledge is, as Ockham argued, based on the knower's intuitive experience. The narrator claims he has no experience in love, but he generates a concept of it neverthless -- something Ockham argued could not be done without the intuitive knowledge 136 experience alone can supply. This explains why the concept of love the narrator presents is elliptical. He can talk about his topic only from his f leld of experience. This experience, as his description of the

God of Love as a tyrant and source of physical and emotional pain suggests, is limited to social love and instinct. The narrator creates his concept of secular love from his political experience of tyranny and from his natural aversion to pain. Both positive justice and the impact of the pleasure principle on epistemolgy were critical points of departure between scholasticism and

Ockhamism, as we saw in chapter four. Universal concepts such as love or positive justice, Ockham maintained, are a bundle of related concepts derived from habitus, which in turn are based on intuitive knowledge, including physical pleasure. For this reason the narrator's claim that he ls inexperienced in actual love but can nevertheless talk about it is unfounded: concepts derive from lntuitve experience, as cause derives from effect; so his idea of love must derive from experience his experience. But like the scholastics, the narrator fails to see an existential discrepancy between concepts exclusive to the intellect and individuals outside the intellect. He consequently mistakes his ideas of love for extramental existents and projects his limited intuitive knowledge of secular love 137 onto this literary character. In dramatizing this process, Chaucer describes a physical (intuitive knowledge to conceptual knowledge) rather than a divine cause and effect.

The God of Love, from this perspective, is an act of thought, mutable and created, rather than an "ear" of literary "corn" to be transferred wholesale from one poem to the next. Where Jean found reified knowledge contained within the walls of the Garden of Mirth and before him the Chartrians found an autonomous spirit,

Chaucer seems to find in the God of Love an active thought existing solely within the narrator's imagination, as a literary abstraction arising from purely psychological responses to courtly literature.

Knowledge, this sketchy figure suggests, is not a commodity to be contained unchanged within a book or even a mind but a dialogue between writer and reader, a creative activity. And by tracing just the faintest suggestions of characters we have met in our own literary travels Chaucer engages us in this dialogue.

The Narrator's Reading of the Somnium

Olson (54-55) and Cowgill find in the narrator's reading of the Somnium traces of Aristotelian political theory from the Ethics, which influenced the Legend of

Good Women as well as the Parliament and was a central text in the scholastic tradition. Both argue that 138

Aristotle's natural law theory defines the narrator's search for a politics and a poetics to replace those with which the poem opens. For instance, Olson writes,

"Aristotle's politics was particularly helpful in that

Aristotle provided a picture of how coporate institutions could support civic chartity . The human nature of redeemed men told them to serve the commonwealth as an expression of love." But

Aristotelian natural law theory, as we saw in our look at Aristotelian-inspired scholastic ethics, promotes a modified idealism that leads in turn to a tyrannical epistemology. In the Ethics. Aristotle argues that positive justice derives from a universal natural law which is timeless and immutable. Ethics, seen from this perspective, are part natural and part conventional.

"That part which is just not by nature but merely by human ordinance is not the same everywhere, any more than constitutions are the same"; conversely, natural justice is objective and universal, existing apart from the minds conceiving it (Aristotle 164). The narrator creates out of his reading of Cicero this notion of natural law ('comoun profyt') as absolute metaphysical truths whose cause resides in the divine mind. He first describes a nativistic psychology which separates true knowledge from worldly activity:

Than bad he (Africanus) hym (Scipio) ... 139

That he ne shulde hym in the world delyte. /thanne tolde he hym, in certyn yeres space That every sterre shulde come into his place, Ther it was first, and al shulde out of mynde That in this world is don of al mankynde. (11. 64-70)

The way to put "out of mynde" worldly experience,

continues Africanus, is to "know thyself ... inmortal"

by 'working and leading' to an objective, extramental

ideal, "comoun profyt." This "inmortal" knowledge derives from man's true existence among the stars; it

is pre-existing and is distinct from wordly experience.

The epistemology the Narrator describes through his

reading of the Somnium suggests Aristotle's theory of

how postive justice come into being:

. it is from the precepts of the natural law, as from general and demonstrable principles, that the human reason meeds to proceed to the more particular determination of certain matters. These particular determinations, devised by human reason, are called human laws. (Aristotle 330)

By trying to resolve his problem through the Somnium,

the narrator, too, proceeds from the general and

absolute precepts of "natural law," his "inmortal"

knowledge, to the specific expression of the law through

conventions -- poetic conventions. His hope is that once

he has identified the objective, abstract meaning of

charity he will understand the "lower" forms of love

that emanate from it and be able to weave them into the

conventions of his craft. This view of writing makes a 140 poem not so much a dialogue between reader and writer as a container of absolute, ahistorical truths. In the

Ethics Cl53l, Aristotle explains that all positive justice derives from the principle of proportionate return, an immutable principle enshrined by the Greeks in the temple of the charities. Just as the Greeks reif ied and worshipped what was in fact a hum.an construct, proportionate return, the narrator, through the God of Love and later the temples of Venus and

Nature, repeatedly dief ies his own intellectual creations and those of his culture. Like Aristotle's principle, the concept of charity the narrator derives from the somnium is "independent of any positive legal system in relation to which answers to problems concerning everyday justice are formulated" (Leydon,

86) .

But Chaucer subtly undermines the narrator's efforts to build linguistic temples housing divine

insight. The narrator's reading of the Somnium is,

finally, disatisfying as metaphysical doctrine; for it exhibits the same epistemological deficiencies as

Aristotle doctrine of natural law. "What is by and large absent from Aristotle's views," says Leyden (86), "is any attempt to show precisely how men arrive at the

knowledge of the law of nature." Likewise, Africanus

offers the narrator no advice on the actual process of 141 creating concepts of love, poetic or otherwise. After searching vainly in books for reif ied knowledge, the narrator expresses his doubts about process:

The day gan faylen, and the derke nyght, That reveth bestes from her besynesse, Berafte me myn bok for lak of lyght, And to my bed I gan me for to dresse, Fulfyld of thought and busy hevynesse; For bothe I hadde theyng which that I nolde, And ek I ne hadde that thyng that I wolde. (11. 85-91)

For the second time in ninety lines the narrator refers to his thought. As in the metaphor comparing "newe science" with corn, he compares epistemology with a wholly natural cycle without consideration of psychological issues, and once again, the analogy does not hold. Readers, unlike beasts that work in fields, do not simply leave off their work and think nothing more of it. As the narrator's active memory of the God of

Love and his reading of the Somnium suggest, they instead engage texts in an active dialogue, creating personal concepts that later leave them "fulfyld of thought. " The narrator does not consciously recognize this hermeneutical dynamic between readers and texts, but his frustration over his inability to find in the Somnium an epistemological alternative to that implied by the God of Love is evident in the following couplet: . both I hadde the thyng which that I nolde And ek I ne hadde that thyng that I wolde. (11. 90-91) 142

Although in the Somnium he thought he had an authoritative text that would provide him with a new view of love and his art, his reading of Cicero's work has left him equally disatisfied. To the reader this dissatisfaction is not surprising; in exchanging Scipio

for the God of Love and courtly literature for this neo-platonic text, the narrator has simply traded one

fictitiously authoritative figure for another. Scipio is

not a Genius figure but Cicero's projection of his ideas about political theory and visionary knowledge. In the

narrator's retelling of the Somnium, Scipio becomes in

turn a projection of the narrator's ideas about

eschatology, political theory, love and poetic making.

The circularity of this process suggests Ockhamist

psychology. For instance, Chaucer invites an

associationistic explanation of the narrator's

psychology by cross-referencing, through repeated

references to divine bliss and hellish pain, the three

supposedly autonomous views of love (emblematically

represented by the God of Love, Scipio, and cytherea) in

the praefatio. Also, Ockham argued that even virtue is

the product of habitus and the pleasure principle, a

view Chaucer supports by basing the eschatology the

narrator creates out of his reading of Cicero on the

same pleasure principle that informed his concept of the

God of Love. Those who fail to practice common profit, 143 says Scipio, "Shul whirle aboute the'erthe alweys in peyn," (1. 80) just as the narrator does in the first stanzas of the poem. Likewise, those who obey common profit will "commoun swiftly to that place deere I That ful of blysse is and of soules cheere" (11. 76-77). This

"place," however, proves to be only the narrator's idea of heaven. Following his reading of the Somnium, the narrator invokes Cytherea. Traditionally viewed as the embodiment of divine virtue and natural law, she is in the narrator's hands simply "blysful" and "swete" (1.

113). These adjectives, like those which describe the

God of Love, refer to nothing beyond his mundane experience: just as the God of Love is based on his instinctive aversion to pain, his idea of heavenly love, symbolized by Cytherea, is based on his instinctive affinity for pleasure.

In suggesting an Ockhamist psychology in the praefatio, Chaucer makes two further loans from

Aristotle's Ethics. First, in having the narrator define the God of Love and Cytherea as absolute opposites,

Chaucer suggests Aristotle's theory of associationistic learning, which holds that that men often come to know one thing through knowledge of its opposite. The narrator's concept of divine love is clearly not a cosmic insight but his reaction to physical and psychological pain. The second loan from the Ethics is 144 more subtle. The core of the thematic discrepancy in the first part of the poem between Ockham's purely psychological the scholastics' idealistic epistemology is a built-in conflict of the Ethics. Robinson (159) explains:

Aristotle's associationistic theory of learning is similar to Ockham's notion of habitus save one important difference: Aristotle is inconsistent on whether the habitus can change with experience (Categories 8, Sb) and whether it is in inherent (Metaphysics Bk. v, 1022b).

This difference is, I think, the key to the two views of epistemology implied in the poem. On one hand is the narrator, intent on uncovering in the world around him the principles of nativistic truths; on the other is

Chaucer, intent on dramatizing the production of conceptual knowledge. Chaucer, like Ockham, is far less compromising in his empiricism than the scholastics narrator. We have seen that Jean's Nature specifically criticizes the Somnlum as an example of false sexual and poetic vision, and this criticiclsm is clearly not lost on Chaucer. The political implication of Chaucer's stance is that any concept of nature and natural law, literary or otherwise, ls tenuous and utilitarian because it ls based, finally, on habitus. Poetically,

Chaucer ls in the praefation suggesting a theory of the imagination as an active agent and a form-finding and creating power (Berthoff 28). 145

Unfortunately, the narrator doesn't understand the power of his own imagination and is therefore condemned to live trapped within it. For the only way to escape a particular concept, or thought act, is to understand the activity which gives it being, and then to change this activity a lesson Chaucer learned from the Roman. By predicating his investigation into making on the premise that ideas are real and timeless, he overlooks the activity his own and that of other poets surrounding the construction of these ideas. Like

Raison in Jean's poem he seems to think that the distinction between the concrete and the abstract is ontological, and therefore asks how individuals derive from a universal nature or essence. As the narrator enters the garden of his dream, he unwittingly dramatizes the implications of this epistemology on his attempts to research and to write the ensuing "poem," his parliament.

The Garden

The gate leading into the second section of the

Parliament, the garden, refers simultaneously to literature, the natural world, various texts, and the narrator's experiences in the praefatio. It suggests that the garden will provide literary experience through the "verse iwreten" (1. 100) on it, and it refers to the narrator as a "redere." The gate also indicates several 146 possible literary inspirations that will inform the garden. The "welle of grace" (1. 105) recalls the stream and carbuncle in Jean's Good Shepherd's Park, and the comparison of the other side of the garden to a

"sorweful were I There as the fish in prysoun is al drye" (11. 113-114) recalls the stream and mirror of

Narcissus in the Garden of Mirth. References to Dante,

Alain and Boccacio (Bennett 74) have also been found in

the gate, suggesting that the garden, like the God of

Love, symbolize the narrator's idiosyncratic and mutable

concept of literary gates and gardens rather than a

single or a conventional or a traditional garden.

This notion of the garden as a concept culled from

a variety of reading experiences is the logical next

step in the garden's evolution in medieval literature.

In Bernard, Graunison is an ideal physical space

reminiscent of Eden and ordered by Physis according to

ideal forms. DeMeun's thirteenth-century garden, while

ordered according to a divine pattern, is structured

sacramentally and represents ideal literature instead of

physical space. The narrator's garden, the gate

suggests, represents nothing beyond the structure of the

narrator's mind. The dichotomous metaphysical impulse

frustrated in the praefatio organizes the gate into

blissful and painful reading experiences, making the

status of this poetic vision purely psychological. The 147 archetypes found in Graunison, implies the gate, will in this garden be replaced by literary references; and

Jean's sacramentalism will be replaced with the

Ockhamistic f ideism suggested through the hazy eschatology of the praefatio.

Chaucer dramatizes the heuristics the gate suggests through the narrator's interaction with his literary alter ego, Scipio. Like his creator, Scipio believes knowledge is an object existing apart from the agents that create it. Ignoring the interactive nature of reading, he naively claims to know the narrator's mind by reading what is "writen in Chis) face . though thow telle it not to me" (11. 155-156). Then he claims the narrator will find in the garden "mater for to wryte" in the same way that a wrestling fan, though he himself "may nat stonde a pul," finds an object for his amusment at a match. This metaphor reveals the narrator's epistemology: the Chartrians claimed man's highest goal is to watch the celestial dance from its outskirts and to emulate it. Scipio -- and therefore the narrator -- also maintain that the poet's job is

passive, requiring him only to report the extramental

'action.' Unlike the Chartrians and like the

scholastics, however, the narrator finds the primary

object of the intellect in society, not the cosmos.

This difference in perspective suggests that the 148 narrator unconsciously ascribes to a hylomorphic epistemology. To extend the wrestling metaphor, where

Jean relativizes truth by pitting against each other conflicting views of reality, in the form of competing literary voices, the narrator pits against each other wrestlers that to him represent the conflicting concepts of secular love found in the texts that inform the praefatio. He distinguishes action from what he feels are the passive activities of reading and writing. Of course, the irony of this position is that even as the narrator projects his notion of the poet-as-spectator onto Scipio and into the wrestling metaphor, he himself is wrestling with a welter of his own active concepts, created through reading, to craft his poem. (In respect to his lack of creative self-consciousness, he is similar to Jean's Raison.) The wrestlers in this metaphor do not, as Scipio suggest, represent texts as events to be reported, but the two conflicting concepts of love the narrator generates in the praefatio. Like the wrestlers that symbolize them, these concepts are active, as the narrator's struggles with the God of Love and the Somnium indicate. In the wrestling match that is the Parliament. the narrator thus plays participant and spectator.

The narrator's unconscious recognition that the role Scipio describes for him ls his actual poetic role 149 surfaces in two features of the scene at the gate: his anxiety on the threshold of the garden and Scipio's disappearance as he enters it. His anxiety indicates his unconscious, or writerly, recognition that in spite of his spoken belief that knowledge is ahistorical and absolute, he is not really capable of omnisicient, sacramentally-structured poetic vision:

Right as betwlxen adamauntes two Of evene myght, a pece of yren set Ne hath no myght to meve to ne fro-- For what that on may hale, that other let-­ Ferde I, that nyste whether me was bet To entre or leve . . . (11. 148-153)

He is afraid because, in spite of his Thomistic approach to making, he is not a "Genius" and he knows it.

Scipio's disappearance a few lines later is tantamount to the dissapearance in the fourteenth century of a

faculty of the soul such as Aquinas' possible intellect, the divine interpretive ability Jean's Genius possessed

in abundance. Unendowed with such a faculty, Chaucer's

"genius" cannot distinguish by means of any objective epistemological technique one garden from the next. As an absolute indicator of the moral quality of literature the verse on the gate ls Greek to him, just as Raison's absolutism in the Roman ls Greek to the narrator of that

poem. As Aers and Kiser note, any vision vouchsafed the narrator in the garden will be the result of hard creative work (Kiser, 14; Aers 9). 150

Critics have noticed that the garden itself, in spite of its apparent dichotomies between courtly and

"natural" poetry and divine and courtly love, ls as morally ambiguous and devoid of coherent or metaphysical dogma as the gate and the praefatio (Aers 9). This does not mean either that the garden is detached from theological considerations or that Chaucer does not structure it around a systematic psychological (rather than metaphysical) theory. Ockham, it will be remembered, developed his philosophy to free ideas of

God from necessitarianism, and not necessarily to secularize epistemology. Likewise, Chaucer's poetry, despite its hesitation to invoke an absolutist theological vision of reality, repeatedly suggests that beyond our ability to conceptualize Him exists an omnipotent God and an absolute order of reality.5 In the Parliament this suggestion is evident throughout the garden, in the form of the narrator's repeated references to angelic harmony. That this order is, as

Ockham argued, unknowable as coherent natural law means that the garden does not, as Cowgill (320) claims, represent an exploration of poetic imagination relative to Aristoteliam concepts of natural law; rather, it means that natural, or divine law, is in its own terms unknowable to the human mind, making the structuring principles of the garden pschological rather than 151 theological or metaphysical. These principles are evident in the Ockhamist quality of the narrator's thought about various features of the garden. As in the praefatio, the narrator comes to "universal" knowledge only through intuitive experience. This is evident in the unique way he conceptualizes traditional symbols within his account of the dream vision garden. The woods the narrator describes, for example, do not suggest "the traditional meaning of chaotic matter which requires the ordering faculty of Nature" (Economou 132); they are simply earthbound trees onto which the narrator superimposes eternal existence, a concept that proves to be as meaningless within the context of his experience as common profit:

For overal where that I myn eyen caste Were trees clad with leves that ay shal laste, Eche in his kynde, of colour fresh and greene As emeroude, that joye was to seene. (11. 172-175)

The narrator knows these trees intellectually because he has first experienced the "joye" of seeing real trees, not because his vision gives him access to archetypal trees or divine principles inherent in trees. As the similie comparing the leaves' color to the "emeraude" indicates, the intellectual movement in this garden is from the intuitive (sight of the tree) to the abstract and artificial (the emerald symbolizing the habitus 152 formed through repeated perceptions of trees). We are here, as in the praefatlo, in a world of physical, not divine, cause and effect. The light which makes exlstants and ideas visible is psychological:

Bernard's ignoculos and Jean's carbuncle are not to be found.

The narrator's entire concept of nature and epistemology is grounded firmly in intuitive knowledge.

In his description of the garden prior to the Temple of

Venus are found, not a sacred lamb as in Demeun or gennii as in Bernard, but the fauna that populate the

English countryside, including "smale f ische lyghte I

With fynnes rede and skales sylver bryghte," "foules,"

"conyes," "squyreles" and an array of other animals (11.

183-196). Their variety and the detail with which some of these animals are described suggest that they are not representative of anything beyond the narrator's conscious impression of them in perceptual nature.

Likewise, instead of the music of the spheres, the supposedly divine harmony the narrator hears in his dream ls actually his recollection "Of lnstrumentes of strenges in acord" (1. 197) that is so "ravyshyng" that

"God / Ne herde nevere beter, as I gesse" (11.

199-200). The Chartrians' certain knowledge of the

muslca mundana is here replaced by memories of a string

quartet that "sounded simply divine." 153

One more traditional feature of medieval literary gardens, the catalogue of trees in 11. 176-182, is pertinent to an Ockhamist interpretation of the narrator's garden:

The byldere ok; and ek the hardy assh; The piler elm, the cofere unto carayne; The boxtre pipere; holm to whippes lasch; The saylynge f irre; the cipresse, deth to pleyne; The shetere ew; the asp for shaftes pleyne; The olyve of pes; and ek the dronke vyne; The victor palm; the laurer to devyne. (11. 176-182)

As Fisher notes, although such catalogues are a rhetorical convention, many of these epithets and certainly the form of each -- are original to Chaucer

(Fisher 569). Chaucer identifies each tree in terms of the use to which it is put in society. This is not an unusual way to present a tree catalogue. But the exceptionally mundane activities the narrator selects,

his identification of each tree exclusively in terms of a social activity, the dense adjective-noun or noun-

phrasal appositive syntax of each line, and the context

of this particular catalogue suggests that it symbolizes an Ockhamist universal concept.

Ockham claimed that a term is a natural sign of a

concept, an act of thought which is in every case

contextually determined, and that a universal concept is

a bundle of individual acts of thought that arises from

a synthesis of similar concepts. A socially universal 154 concept, such as postive justice, is determined by communities whose goal is to maximize utility. The content and form of the tree catalogue, I think, represents this psychological theory. Through it the universal concept, silva, is broken down into its true physical constituents, individual trees, rather than related to chaotic primal matter or a social hierarchy as in Alain and courtly poetry. These trees -- or rather the names which symbolize them represent the

individual concepts that Ockham argued inform the universal concept. And like the Ockhamist

concept-as-act, they are, at root, not presented as

objects of perception -- leaves, branches, and trunks but as the activities which give them existence within

the world of men and their understanding. The word

symbol 'ok,' for instance, represents the activity

building; 'holm,' the act of carving whips. These

activities, planing, whip-making, sailing, and the rest,

represent the habitus out of which the concept of

community, a utilitarian social body, arises.

The Temple of Brass

The same sort of epistemological revaluation

characterizes the eighty or so lines devoted to the

temple of brass and its environs. The parallel with

Corinthians 1:13 suggested by the choice of brass for

this temple rather than Boccaccio's copper, associated 155 with Venus (Fisher 570), recalls the narrator's conscious attempt in the praefatio to define secular love in absolute theological terms. This and the dichotomous structure of the garden suggest that the habitus that defined his earlier concepts of good and evil, and of poetic making, have, as Ockham held, remained in his "unconscious" soul, from which they now affect the shape of his dream.

The figures in the temple may be divided into those based directly on intuitive knowledge and unfounded poetic abstractions. The former include the women dancing outside the Temple (11. 232-235), the men who garland Priapus (11. 57-259), and the crying lovers; the latter, "Buete," "Flaterye," "Desyr" and the rest of the allegorical figures outside of the temple, Priapus, and Venus. What distinguishes the figures in the first group from those in the second is thier basis in intuitive knoweldge and their level of activity. Ockham would of course have argued that both groups derive ultimately from intuitive experience; but only the dancers, garlanders and weeping young couple exist per se within the realm of intuitive experience.

Although neither we nor the narrator have seen men place garlands on Priapus, for instance, we have seen men and we have seen garlands; therefore, these images come readily to mind, as a result of stimulus generalization. 156

For an image of Prlapus, however, we rely wholly upon the narrator's description and on our encounters with this figure in art. This distinction explains why the narrator's "characterization" of the artificial figures in and around the temple is extremely weak: he knows them only through the dim associations he is able to make between their imagined qualities and intuitive knowledge essentially unrelated to them. Cupid, Patience and the other allegorical figures are faceless, lifeless and most significantly, static. Their only ties with reality are found in their equippage (Cupid's bow, Dame

Pes' 'curtyn, Venus' jewelry, etc.) and the natural figures affiliated with each of the three groups.

Finally, like the trees in the catologue, Priapus,

Venus and the allegorical figures, themselves part of a

"universal" concept of love, are knowable only in terms of their function within the actual "society" composed of the three groups of lively figures in and around the temple. All of the action in this society involves a natural agent, an artificial object, and a medium constructed, or composed, from natural materials, either physical or psychological. Each of the groups of natural figures (agents) pays homage to an artificial figure or group of figures (artificial object) through a creative, artificial medium. The "fresche and gale" women honor

Danger, Delite and the rest of the allegorical figures 157

outside the temple with their annual dance; the men within the temple honor Priapus with garlands they have made from flowers; and the young couple supplicate Venus with their teai;s and invocations. Through this

three-part drama the narrator unconciously re-enacts his

hermeneutical and writerly experiences in the praefatio.

The beautiful and carefree dancers, their hair

dishevelled and their faces flushed, represent the

inspiration of actual feminine beauty and harmony that

is the ultimate source of all notions of heterosexual

secular love in an Ockhamist framework: Aboute that temple daundseden alswey Wemen inowe, of which some ther weere In kerteles, al dishevele wente they there; That was here offys alwey, yer by yeere. (11. 232-236)

The inspirational power of the unfounded allegorical

characters surrounding these "wemen" pale by comparison.

By pitting allegorical figures representing individual

aspects of femininity with complete and active women,

Chaucer "pits" allegory against a more realistic poetic

theory. He also plays off against each other scholastic

faculty psychology, which divided the soul into distinct

functions and posited the possibility of divine wisdom,

against an Ockhamistic psychology. These women do not

dance in harmony with the music of the spheres, but with

their feet planted firmly on the ground, according to

"here offys alwey, yer by yeere." These features of

their dance presages Nature's observations that the laws 158 governing the parliament scene are not divine precepts but "oure usage alwey, from yer to yeere" (1. 411).

Ockham, as we have seen, posited a utilitarian theory of positive justice, which he maintained is created by men as a result of actual social experience alone. By basing the women's dance on the same principle, Chaucer suggests that art designed to celebrate secular love is also based upon utilitarian custom and actual experience.

The activity of the second group of agents, the men who garland Priapus, figuratively parallels that of the narrator as he plies his "disf igurat" poetic craft in the praefatio. Like the God of Love and the literary figures outside the temple, Priapus is not grounded in

intuitive knowledge but is an icon, a product of distorted poetic vision. Thus, like them, he is static and is not described physically or psychologically. The men in the temple do not see him in the "light" of

intuitive knowledge, as they would see the "wemem" if

they stepped outside of this dark temple. Instead, they

see Priapus "In swich aray as whan the asse hym shente /

With cri by nyghte." The true objects of their poetry

are the beauty and harmony of the women they have shut

out off from their craft, but like the narrator that

they shut themselves into temples of unfounded love.

They see their ersatz inspiration, Priapus, in the 159

'darkness' of what Jean's Nature would have referred to as a distorting lense, Ovid's poem, which transforms into unrecognizable forms the actual experience of men.

To effect transformations of their own, they "decorate" this unfounded literary abstraction with natural forms, flowers, which they have crafted into natural artistic creations, garlands. I think that the individual flowers in the garland symbolize the intuitive knowledge of pain and politics the narrator attributed to the God of Love in the praefatio. The garlands themselves represent the anthropomorphic, active, universal concept of love the narrator created out of his reading experience of the

God of Love. Like the narrator, the poets in the temple enslave themselves to a reified concept of love.

The activities of the third group in the temple, the "younge folk," parallel the narrator's reading activities in the praefatio. Like the narrator, this couple suffers emotionally and make themsleves subservient to a love deity, Venus. But this diety, like the God of Love and Priapus, is nothing beyond their reaction to her. Although the narrator lingers over her gold jewelry and skimpy vail, he says nothing about the appearance or the activities of the goddess herself. And like Priapus, she reclines in darkness, unmoved and unmoving. Her true source is thus not the natural world but the stories that cover the walls of her temple, each 160 of which describes the transformation of a natural love act or realistic lover into a fictitious beast -- the same process that produced the God of Love in the

Praefatio. Like the narrator, this young and presumambly inexperienced couple has fallen prey to the vast body of literature devoted to a concept of love and a goddess based on distorted views of epistemology and of actual experience. Mistaking this concept and the artificial conventions that define it for the reality of love, they subject themselves to epistemological tyranny, in the form of a "temple" of love that supposedly houses an immutable concept of the activity they do not yet know

"in dede." Their real pain in the face of this concept, like the narrator's, is testimony to the power of the narrator's "disfigurat" craft to produce the life-like illusions such as those Nature warns against in the

Roman.

The Parliament Scene

The parliament scene begins in what appears to be truly divine "blyss." Nature, whom the narrator presents as "the vicarye of the almyghty Lord" (1. 379) and a rhetor with "esy voys" (1. 382), gathers all the birds in her domain about her on St. Valentines Day, for the purpose of pairing them off to mate. Before the festivities begin, she stipulates three customs that are the group's "usage alwey, from yer to yeere" ( 1. 411): 161 she "prikes" each fowl "with plesaunce" and insists both that the noble birds choose their mates and after them the other birds according to their social status, and that all female birds have the right to refuse a suitor.

But the parliament erupts into a shouting match when all three of the royal tersels claim the formel perched on

Nature's hand. Nature must step in to resolve the ensuing brawl among all of the birds over which tersel should marry the formel. She orders each group to elect one bird from among its ranks to "diffyne I Al here sentence" (11. 529-530). They do, but without success: the views of each class are too divergent to encompass under one "verdit" (1. 525).

Nature steps into the dispute once more, patches up the disagreement, and seconds the spokesbird's opinion that the most noble of the tersels deserves the formel.

Finally she asks the formel, who has by Nature's own edict enjoyed the power of veto from the start of this fiasco, which of the tersels she prefers. In the meantime, the remaining birds have already paired-off.

And as they prepare to leave they burst into song, a roundel; but conspicuously absent from the nuptial festivities are the formel and the eagle's, all of whom are left without mates. Given the power traditionally ascribed to Nature as pronuba and the narrator's self-advertised use of the De Planctu, in which the 162 goddess is able to bring order to her world, we cannot help but feel uncomfortable with the indecisive conclusion of Chaucer's poem. Even more disconcerting than the failure of the parliament to achieve its goal of marrying all of its participants is the narrator's inability to make heads or tails of his dream, which he abandons at the end of the poem, disprited.

The critical question in the parliament scene involves Nature's historical identity and the meaning of her failure to unite all the birds in matrimony and under a common 'sentence.' In the introduction to this essay we saw that contemporary criticism identifies her either in traditional terms, as an ideal poet and pronuba of the sort found in Alain and Jean, or in quasi-psychological terms, as a "willful" reader or an embodiment of ideas regarding nature. The Narrator is a traditionalist, and introduces his version of the goddess as if two hundred years later he can transfer, unchanged, Alain's concept of nature directly into his poem simply by stating a source (11. 316-319). The epistemology he initially associates with Alain's ideal creatrix is identical to that which he associated with the God of Love and Africanus:

And in a launde, upon an hil of floures, Was set this noble Goddesse of Nature. Of braunches were hire halles and hire boures !wrought after hire cast and hire mesure, Ne there nas foul that cometh of engendrure That they ne were prest in hire presence 163

To take hire dom and yeve hire audyence. (11. 302-308)

Although this temple, like the garlands placed on

Priapus, is constructed of concepts grounded in intuitive knowledge, Nature herself, "a queene . fayrer ... than any creature" (11. 299; 301) exists extramentally and apart from the world she purportedly creates, that is, beyond the sphere of the narrator's possible knowledge. Consequently the writerly and heuristic dialogue between the narrator and his object of poetic enquiry remains unchanged from the praefatio and the garden. Just as as he earlier substitued the tyrant God of Love for the absolutist Scipio, he now substitutes for Cicero's statesman yet another tyrant and artificial construct, "This noble empreresse" (1.

319), Lady Nature, whose "dome" he will "take" and whom he will "yeve ... audyence." Politically, at least, the narrator affiliates himself with scholastic thought as he enters the last third of the the poem.

But when the tribulations of the parliament arise, the narrator's image of Nature an ideal knower disintegrates. Her sphere of activity is far more earthbound than it is in the De Planctu. She is not part of a cosmic hierarchy of beings as is Bernard's or even

Alain's Nature, and she has no recourse to a cosmic priest such as Alain's Genius. Although the narrator calls her "the vicarye of the almyghty Lord," there is 164 no evidence that she has insight into eternal truths: her knowledge, as we will see, is restricted to instinct and political theory -- information the birds themselves possess. As Aers (10) explains, "Nature herself has very differenct attitudes and preoccupations to Alain's . Nature, with her complaints against humanity, her obsession with "unchastity" and homosexual or bisexual forms of love, (and) her careful acknowledgement of the still higher reality of the new Christian dispensation to which her own being allegedly conforms.

Chaucer's goddess exhibits purely mundane concerns.

She admit that she is distinct from reason (1. 631) (For

Plato and the Chartrians the source of all true knowledge), and her primary interests are mating, politics and rhetoric, not the cosmic order. In these respects she is closer to Jean's character than she is to Alain's. Her politics and her poetics also parallel those of Nature in the Roman. In a way that recalls

Jean's goddess' use of Genius, the narrator's Lady

Nature chooses not to speak for herself when the parliament proper begins but instead enlists the help of spokesbirds from each class to "defyne her sentence" before a group of love figures.

Her attitude toward artistic creations, suggested by her behavior toward her creative masterpiece, the formel, also belies a scholastic epistemology. Kiser 165 concludes that the formel symbolizes an ideal poem which the noble suitors, poets in their own right, "woo." If this is so, Nature -- and the Narrator -- reveal their beleif that good poetry can somehow 'contain' extramental divine truths; for she firsts refers to the formel as the embodiment "of everi vertu" (1. 1376) in scholastic terms, a natural object in which inheres truth in principle. This attitude toward 'poetry' affects Nature's and the courtly birds' dialogue with the formel. In spite of her own injunctions for common speed and her demand that potential mates have equal say regarding proposed matches, Nature ignores the formel throughout the courtly birds' prolonged bickering. Only after these members of the feathered nobility (whom

Nature, scholastic that she is, feels are the 'natural' leaders of this society) prove incapable of running a productive parliament does she permit the formel to speak. And then this supposedly perfect creation, who in the interest of common speed could and probable should have been asked to speak sooner, blithely refuses the hands of all three suitors. These actions suggests that at least to begin with Nature is a poor writer and a poor reader who, like the narrator, misconceives poetry and poetic making. She does not treat her artistic masterpiece as an expression of self and a cultural artifact that "readers" (including herself) are 166 obligated to examine, question and interact with.

Instead, she reverts to a scholastic politics in which

"authoritative" figures such as the terclet and the courtly birds attempt to 'capture' in poems of their own the virtue in her 'poem,'the formel, even before they have 'read' her.

The noble eagles share Nature's view of poetic making. They borrow the forms, diction, and themes of romance; and all three of them are aware that their pleas for the formel's hand are poetic performances. The first and noblest eagle spends three stanzas promising utter servitude and perfect fidelity to the formel, whom he has met for the very first time and of whom he asks no questions. He ends his "tale" (1. 441), as he calls

it, with a significant observation:

'And syn that hire loveth non so wel as I-­ All be she nevere of love me behette-- Than ouhte she be myn thourh hire mercy, For other bond can I non on hire knette (11.435-438)

Despite his high nobility, this bird is either unaware of or chooses to ignore Nature's command that each

female must express love for her mate before a relationship is valid. Artistically speaking, he is

unaware that an active relationship must exist between

the artist and his subject if a poem is to capture true

beauty and virtue, which are the product of experience and experience alone. His poetic attitude and activities 167 recall those of the narrator and poets in the temple of brass. He describes his love relationship with the formel in the terms that defined the narrator's fruitless relationship to the God of Love: she or rather his idea of her ls also a "sovereyne" (1. 422) who commands life or death over him (1. 420) and compels him to "lyve in payne" ( 1. 424). His promise of complete service and eternal homage recalls the servitude of the poets in the the temple of brass. Its effect is to render the formel an icon a lifeless object of worship or if she is a poem, a 'temple' of unfounded knowledge of love, which he, like the narrator, does not know "in dede." His bond of mercy, which he admits is the only bond that connects them, functions like the garlands in the temple of brass.

"Knette" in this context means 'fasten' or 'attach,' and the eagle, like the poets who in the temple unwittingly try to infuse an unfounded concept of love with life by assigning to it unrelated intuitive and conceptual knowledge (the garlands), this eagle tries unsuccessfully to describe his misconceived notion of secular love in terms of his political experience.

The remaining two eagles are also guilty of ignoring the object of their supposed love in favor of unfounded notions of loving and love poetry. The second eagle, lower in degree than the first, also promises 168 service, eternal fidelity and poetic integrity without the knowledge of experience:

'I dar seyn, if she me fynde fals, Unkynde, janglere, or· rebel in any wyse, Or jelous, do me hangen by the hals. And but I bere me in hire servyse As wel as that my wit can me suggyse, From poynt to poeynt, hyre honour for to save, Take she my lif and al the good I have!'

Like his predecessor, this poet ignores his source of inspiration in favor of his idea of it in this instance 'honour,' a concept that means nothing to anyone but him and which he seems to be more interested in saving than the formel herself. The politics of love and poetry he describes also suggest the tyranny that characterizes the narrator's relationship with the God of Love. His offer to "hangen by the hals" and surrender all possessions and his life if even once he is merely unkind or a "janglere" or rebels against her would, if he married the formel, certainly lead to the kind of isolation and pain found in the praefatio and the temple of brass. It also indicates his idealistic self-concept as a poet: he apparently styles himself as a DeMeunlan

Genius, crafting above the concerns that afflict lower class poets. His willingness to undergo such suffering for a mere word (honour) further suggests his idealism.

The first eagle describes mercy as a bond which can be attached to someone; this poet implies that 'honour' exists indepent of the honored, and even goes so far as 169 to suggest that its value may be objectified, measured in "al the good" he has.

Although he promises a poem as short as he is young, the third eagle drones on at least as long as his predecessors, prompting a telling observation by the narrator:

And from the morwe gan this speche laste Tyl dounward drow the sunne wonder faste. (11. 488-490)

Twice before the narrator has referred to darkness and setting suns. The first reference occurs when he has completed his fruitless, scholastic reading of the

Somnum and the "derke nyght, That revethe bestes from her besynesse,/Berefte (him his) boke for lak of lyght."

(11. 85-87) The second reference is in the temple of brass, where he sees Priapus, "In swich aray as whan the asse hym shente I With cry by nighte." (11. 255-256) A few lines later he sees Venus who "on a bed of gold .

lay to reste I Tyl that the hote sunne gan to weste."

In all three of these instances, the disappearance of the light by which the business of daily -- and poetic

experience is rightfully conducted is associated with an unproductive creative experience. The courtly birds, like the poets in the temple, ply their craft 'in the dark,' that is, without understanding love or the dynamics of poetic making 'in dede.' Just as the narrator looks vainly for ahistorical truths such as 170

"common profit·~ in the poetry he reads and writes, these birds suggest that the 'poem' which inspires them contains concepts such as "mercy" and "honour." But these words, when simply attached without elaboration to the very real and complex topics of secular love, mean nothing. The eagles fail to understand the active, individual nature of conceptual knowledge, and they disregard also the socially determined and historically specific quality of knowledge. To the eagles the formel is a commodity, something to bargain for and worship, because they mistake words for the activities and beings words represent.

Nature Redefined

When the third eagle has finished, the 'lower' fowls object to the interminable "cursede pletynqe" of their supposed poetic superiors and Nature again intervenes. At this point the royal eagles' profound inability to read literary language becomes evident.

Promising to "conseyl fynde" (1. 522), Nature has each group, "by pleyn eleccioun" (1. 528), choose a spokespoet to "deffyne/Al here sentence" (1. 529-530).

This change in the political structure in the parliament from monarchy to a more counciliar rule brings with it a concommittant change in epistemology. First, the eagle's view of making is discredited. When the royal bird's spokespoet, the terslet of the falcon, uses 'batalye' 171

(1. 539) metaphorically to suggest the noble birds must somehow compete for the formel, the eagles, conditioned to think in courtly terms, assume immediately that in this context 'battle' means physical combat. The terslet reprimands them, "Ye don me wrong, my tale ls not ido" (1. 542). This insensitivity to literary context, the object of their art, and even to their own patterns of thought make the eagles incapable of creating a truly virtuous poem.

The concept of society represented by the tree catalogue in the garden was constituted of many individual, active concepts. Likewise, the birds who speak in Nature's parliament individually represent various concepts of love familiar to the Narrator.

Unlike the static and lifeless concepts found in the garden, however, these concepts are presented as they actually exist: as creative expressions of idiosyncratic minds. Compared to the other figures in the poem the birds are by far the most well-rounded. Their dialogue

is believable, and their points of view are grounded

firmly in the narrator's intuitive knowledge of society and literature. Most important, they are not merely

words to which we are left to attach associations but,

like a concept as Ockham defines it, they are active,

essentially, active thought.

The birds represent many poetic points of view 172 toward the formel qua poem. The goos, speaking for the water foules, advocates a pragmatic concept of common spede:

My wit is sharp, I love no taryinge-- I seye I rede hym, thow he were my brother, But she wol love hym, let hym love another." (11. 533-535)

Like his noble counterparts, this poet claims he has accurately "read" the formel and the situation. His advice reflects a fableor's pragmatic attitude toward creativity and lovemaking. And although "gentil foules alle" laugh, this attitude better serves the common speed of most of this society. It is not, however, the only "sentence" delivered to the parliament. In turn the "turtle true," the "doke," the "gentil tersel" and the "merlioun" all articulate the concept of love their portion of society has created to serve its ethical and poetic needs. Individually, these concepts are not especially meaningful. None of the counsels, including the pitches for patience, flexibility and celibacy, is alone an answer to this society's inability to identify the single poem that will capture, or contain, "everi vertu"; but combined and dramatized these perspectives are valuable because they they make clear the folly of such a pursuit by uncovering the social and psychological dynamics that underly the creation of all poetic concepts of virtue. The interaction of these poet-birds, from the reaction of the turtle to the 173 goose, the duck to the turtle, the terslet to the duck and the cuckoo to the terslet, is emblemmatic of both the members of a society developing a universal concept of love and of the various active concepts of love active in the narrator's mind. This interaction is based, not upon scholastic divine causation, but upon

Ockhamistic physical cause an effect. This switch is evident in the reaction of the lower classes to the eagle's poems. "How," they complain in unison, "shulde a juge eyther partie leve/ For ye or nay withouten other preve?" (11. 496-497). As the noblest eagle observes, the only cause, or bond, he can generate to capture the

formel is verbal: mercy (11. 437-438). But applied to the perfect and therefore unknowable formel this word symbolizes nothing familiar to any of the birds and certainly constitutes no evidence of his poetic virtuosity. For as the poems of the other birds make clear, all ideas of love derive, not from ultimate

truths, but from ideas of individual and social utility.

As Ferster (211) notes, the parliament scene relatives even reason, for the Chartrians and scholastics alike

the ultimate source of all truth. Consequently the concept of common prof it that emerges from the

parliament arises, not from archetypal patterns or a

'temple of the charities' such as Nature, but from

social activity, in the form of their poetic exchanges 174 regarding love, and from the instinct which compels them to act.

Finally, Nature has very little to do with the resolution of the Parliament. She supplies the catalyst of instinct and tradition, but her intrusions are

largely ineffectual or even counterproductive. The one exception is her suggestion that the formel be allowed

to speak, but this birds earlier silence, too, is

indirectly attributable to the view of poetry she originally encouraged. The reason for Nature's gradual dissappearance from the parliament is that she

represents the narrator's unconciously evolving concept

of nature. As empress of the literary colloquy Nature is emblemmatic of the narrator's universal concept of

poetic making, culled from the multiple literary and

actual experiences (or concepts) that inform the rest of

the poem and through which he attempts to order these

experiences. Her status as a universal concept explains

why she exhibits characteristics of of Chartrian,

scholastic, and Ockhamist epistemology. It also explains

why she cannot be, as the narrator claims, "right as

Aleyn in the Pleynt of Kynde/Devyseth Nature" (11.

316-317). Rather, whether he knows it or not, Lady

Nature is and can be expressive only of the narrator's

personal experience.

Most significant to the narrator's evolving concept of 175 nature in the parliament ls the goddess' absence from the roundel the wedded birds sing before their honeymoons. Rather than praising a cosmic goddess, the married birds, worship actual nature: Now welcome, somor, with they somme softe, That hast this wintres wedres overshake, And drevyne away the longe nyghtes blakel (11. 680-2)

Unlike the royal birds absent from the nuptial celebrations, the birds that sing this roundel needed no help from Nature beyond the "prick of plesaunce" and social custom to motivate their creativity. Thus, rather than a Chartrian or scholastic goddess, they praise physical nature and the actual sun. The epistemology that characterizes the parliament scene is also 'natural' in this respect. 'Natural Law' is, finally, nothing beyond the instinct that compels their creativity and the social custom that "As yer by yer was alwey hir usaunce" { 1. 674). In other words, it is niether Plato's ideal justice {Flew 252) or Aristotle's doctrine of proportionate return but as Ockham argued, is what they as a council agree it is, based on their actual experience and in reaction to the same

instinctive drives that defined the narrator's earlier misguided efforts to define it alone, authoritatively and cosmically. Chaucer thus makes explicit in the

parliament scene the epistemology the narrator exhibits

in the praefatio. 176

Conclusion

By ending the Parliament with the narrator's hasty rejection of a dream that is clearly germane to his problems, Chaucer encourages the reader to review his own experience of the dream as the most accurate

indicator of its worth. Chaucer thus eliminates entirely the traditional authoritative narrator from his dream vision, replacing it with the hermeneutical dialogue between individual readers and the text and the working model of the narrator's active mind that the Parliament

proves itself to be. The scholastic approach to poetry as 'carbuncle' whose purpose it is to reflect objective

truth is wholly discredited through the narrator's

failure. In spite of his early attempts to comprehend

divine causality, he cannot define his craft or its

subject apart from his own experience and the

conventions of his culture. His poem does not prove to

be an objective linguistic temple that houses definitive

"sentence" but is instead a living artifact of his

active mind. "Self and mind," writes Mead (206),

are social artifacts, and the constituents of the self mirror the constituents of society: thought involves incorporatinng the roles and attitudes of others and addressing oneself internally as one would address another externally.

The "dreaming" narrator uses the parliament to

incorporate, in this sense, his reading of the attitudes 177 of various love poets. In the praefatio and the garden, these lovers and poets all subscribed to platonic or scholastic ideology, and the dialogue is limited to one poetic voice at a time (the narrator or Scipio), as it is in the Roman. The narrator, in these sections of his poem, restricts his voice production to those litezary forms he believes to be authoritative. In the parliament scene, he drops these scholastic and courtly poetic modes in favor of a more holistic poetic voice which, emerges in the roundel.

The colloquy preceding the roundel is the narrator's externalization of the various poetic voices within his range of experience. These voices represent the narrator's various active concepts of love. "A whole of a play may be considered as a soliloquy by the playwright," Moffet (67) explains, who is ventriloquizing. A playwright says what he has to say not through a monologue but through a colloquy of created voices. The ensemble of these voices externalizes his mind. This kind of ventriloquizing amounts to fractioning of the total voice production of which he is capable, to breaking down his self into the many points of view, attitudes and roles which actually and potentially comprise i t .

The narrator's unconscious attempt to fraction his total voice production and, more importantly, Chaucer's obvious desire to break out of the constraints of any one genre or tradition and explore the constituents and dynamic of their source, the engaged poetic mind, is 178

what radically distinguishes the Parliament from earlier dream visions featuring Lady Nature. Genius has been

fragmented into multiple concepts; Nature is reduced to

the universal concept regarding nature generated by an

individual mind. The implications of these reductions on

readers and the mimetic quality of poetry are great.

The dramatization of psychologic in the parliament

invites the reader, who must suspend his own 'dom'

regarding the discussion, into the poem as a creator

rather than passive recipient of information; at the

same time, it places on the reader the narrator's burden

to construct from the materials of his experience

resolution of the action. For in the Parliament, as in a

play, there is no everpresent guiding voice to conduct,

play host, summarize or explain (Moffet 63). The

narrator's simple dismissal of the dream as yet another

misguided "book of love" is clearly misquided itself;

the dream ls anything but just another dream vision

poem. But Chaucer does everything possible to avoid

revealing a single, definitive interpretation of the

poem. He invites the reader into the Parliament with

promises of clear-cut answers only to question the

premises on which the pertinent are based. Where DeMeun

implied that nobility and poetic insight can be learned

from reading and studying authoritative books, then,

Chaucer examines and questions the processes through 179 which these books come into being (Fansler 210).

In dramatizing the conflict among more or less complete poetic perspective in this way Chaucer moves one step beyond DeMeun, who was satisfied to dramatize the conflict between psychological faculties and texts.

He also moves one step· closer to the poetic realism of

the Troilus and Canterbury tales, where poets are not quasi characters such as the birds but complete

personalities. This is why, I think, the formel and her suitors are in the end quietly excluded from the

parliament. As Nature's idea of a perfection alien to

real existence, the formel has no place in a parliament

whose object is to effect mundane unions: husband and

wife, upper and lower classes, poets and poetic voice.

Nature falls into the same category as her creation:

she, too, exists apart from the world of experience.

Consequently, niether Nature's wish that the noble

eagles set the example for and guide the parliament nor

the noble eagle's poetic voices are, finally, heeded by

the birds in the parliament whose interest is in actual

poetic and sexual experience. They are also excluded

from the closing roundel, which significantly omits

mention of Lady Nature in favor of a description of

actual nature.

The poem's refusal explicitly to identify even an

authoritative process of knowing -- as we have seen, 180 the Ockhamist epistemology is embedded deeply in the metaphorical structure of the Parliament flows naturally from its dramatic final section. As Moffet explains, drama is an imitation of physical and psychological action and therefore shows chatracteristics of the unabstracted phemomena it

imitates; it is, in other words, calculated to affect a spectator in much the same way a real-life drama does when he is confronted with it. Although his use of birds distances us somewhat, the narrator creates for us the

illusion of actual experience in the parliament scene by refusing to admit his voice into the dream explicitly.

Also, by using the present tense rather than reporting action in the dream vision, he invites us to respond as

participants rather than as readers or even spectators.

As a result of these tactics, just as the narrator

is split into inspiration, poet and audience in various combinations throughout the poem, so are we, as readers

without a reliable narrator-host caught in a landscape

filled with sketchy characters, forced to play many different creative roles. As we judge the ability of the

narrator and the members of the parliament to discern

and describe the dynamic between reader, writer and

text, we are also compelled to examine our own unspoken

heuristic and writerly beliefs. In the all-important

parliament scene this exploration prompts us either to 181 abandon our stereotypical notions of medieval social order and poetic theory and confront the "modern" responsibility of holding multiple perspectives in suspension so that each may be examined in its own

terms, or we succumb to the narrator's compulsion to continue seeking in books the bland confirmation of our most rigidly held ideas of the medieval poet and his

craft. 182

NOTES

1 Ockham inspired fourteenth-century theology, political theory, epistemology and science. In asserting the apostolic ideal, notes Leff (Leff Dissolution, 142), he said what Harsilius had said and what Wycliffe was to say: Christ had forgone wealth and power, making this life incumbent on his successors, including the pope, who was a man who could not work miracles, rise from the dead, or institute new sacraments. The office, in other words, does not overcome its bearer's individual human limitations. Ockham also inspired the Oxford scientists, who (Leff, Dissolution 95) detached physical theory from a metaphysical or theological framework, permitting treatment of physical problems in their own terms by specifically mathematical and physcial consideration and not as instances to illustrate metaphysical or theological consideration. Finally, after Ockham, (Leff Dissolution, 66) "The problem of evidence . . became one of the focuses fo fourteenth century philosophy and theology . . . . For virtually every thinker concerned . . . it arose within a Christian context of a contingent universe ... where experience of existence must be the foundation of evident knowledge."

2 For discussions of the contentinental influence on Chaucer, see Haldeen Braddy, "The French Influence on Chaucer," and Paul G. Ruggiers, "The Italian Influence on Chaucer," in Companion to Chaucer Studies, ed. Beryl Rowland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979) 143-160. Chaucer was likely to have been intimately familiar with the Aristoteliam corpus that informed much of Ockhamist thought, for this body of work had been in England since the mid thirteenth century. Grosseteste translated the Ethics, and the Oxford school disseminated the Aristotelian corpus (Steenberghen, 130). Some of Chaucer's familiarity with Aristotle is likely to have arisen from Ockham's extensive use of the philosopher's thought. Aristotle suggested the notion of habitus, ascribed to knowledge by association (Goddu 24) and held that moral excellence derives from pleasure and pain (Robinson 89). The Ethics partially disclaims nativistic theories of virtue (Robinson 93); and the Somnium "accounts for the phenomenon (of dreams) in terms of sensory biological processes and offers the surprisingly modern hypothesis that dreams are the result of our conscious experiences and emotions." 183

Chaucer mentions the Ethics in The Legend of Good Women and according to Olson, draws on Aristotelian politics in the Parliament.

3 Kane notes that Chaucer sensed fin amour had a history and, based on his diverse background, had a sophisticated sense of this history (238). Given his extensive background in classical and contemporary literature and, apparently, philosophy, there is, I think, little reason to doubt that Chaucer also sensed Lady Nature had a history.

4 Kiser argues that the god of love ls constructed of attributes from the natural world but ls himself unnatural (62-64); that he cannot exist outside Chaucer's dream; and that his absence from the real world casts doubt upon his ability to signify truth of any kind, showing that he is intended to stand as an example of literary abstraction (65). The God of Love, then, is a parody of the kind of poetic artifice that Chaucer wished to reject (65). By contrasting Alceste and the God of Love, Chaucer makes the serious point that poetry can convey abstraction without being unnecessarily or carelessly abstract itself (65). Poets should not mistakenly believe that truth can be conveyed through artificial constructs that have little or no reference to actual life. Instead, a poet should find within the forms of natural things the models on which to base the figures of his art (66).

5 Skepticism in Ockhamist thought ls a controversial topic. Goddu defends Ockham against accusations of· skepticism. He argues that (Goddu 90) for Ockham, induction is all-or nothing "a species of formal consequence, which unlike a syllogism requires an extrinsic medium, namely, the principle of the uniformity of the laws of nature. This is further confirmation that Ockham cannot be charged with skepticism, for this skeptical problem of induction could not even possible arise for Ockham. An experiment which would not yield a clear result would merely have indicated to Ockham that either the experiment was not sufficiently refined or that the question asked could only with great difficulty and perhaps not at all be susceptible of resolution. The notion of being satisfied with partial results or a statistically favorable outcome is completely missing." Even so, as Leff notes (Leff Dissolution, 74), Ockham "effectively brought down the metaphysical edifice which had been built upon Aristotelian logic." The result of this iconoclasm was to leave philosophers no means of distinguishing between psychological and 184 epistemological certainty, which weakened the force of natural certainty, especially as it applied to divine matters. Essential religious doctrines could no longer be established by rational means, but only accepted, if at all, by acts of faith.

6 See R.M. Lumiansky, "Chaucer's Parlement of Foules: A Philosophical Interpretation" RES, 24 (1948); Bernard Huppe and D.W. Robertson, Jr., Fruyt and Chaf: Studies in Chaucer's Allegories (Princeton, 1963) 101-148; Rhoda H. Selian, "Shades of Love in the Parlement of Foules" SN, 37 (1965) 146-60. CONCLUSION

This thesis is an essay in the truest sense, a trial balloon, an exploration, a stretching of the limits that have so far contained investigations of

Chaucer's Parliament to historically and philosophically ambiguous analyses of the epistemological issues that define the poem. Chaucer criticism has and continues to lack an historically specific psychological rather than theological or metaphysical -- theory to provide insight into the shape and processes of the narrator's active mind. Critics have suggested Ockhamist influence in other of Chaucer's poems, and they have found traces of Aristotelian, neoplatonic, and Chartrian thought in the Parliament itself. But they have traditionally shied from purely psychological and historically accurate investigations of this poem out of an exagerrated respect for twelfth-through-thirteenth-century philosophy (which, as we have seen, by and large ignores psychological issues). Or they have failed to consider the sophisticated Ockhamist psychological theory available to Chaucer or ignored fourteenth-century philosophy altogether, preferring instead to discuss the self-reflexivity and creative self-consciousness of this 185 186 poem and the rest of the Chaucer corpus almost exlusively in terms of modern heuristic or rhetorical or cognitive theory.

But by considering the narrator's experiences in the Parliament in terms of the evolution of Lady Nature and the epistemological concerns she embodied, it is possible to see in this poem the suggestion of a new direction for Chaucer criticism. For if the Parliament does dramitize an essentially Ockhamist psychology, and

if Chaucer truly sensed the roles Lady Nature, Genius and even dream vision poetry played in the development of philosophical psychology and medieval poetics, then we can see this poem as a nexus between his earlier and

later works and between "scholastic" and "Ockhamistic"

literature. The Parliament signalled Chaucer's rejection of a metaphysical for a psychological view of the human mind. By defining Nature out of the poem's conclusion, substituting for her a mundane view of nature in which cognition is based on physical cause and effect, he did away with much of earlier literary tradition: the forms

of dream vision, allegory, idealism, and the

predominantly theological epistemology common to visionary poetry. He introduced into his poetry a purely

psychological view of knowledge, of making, and dedicated the rest of his career to exploring, rather

than virture per se or truth per se, the processes 187 through which these poetic concepts arise. The House of Fame, the Troilus, and the Canterbury Tales follow the Parliament. All of these poems are radically concerned with poetic cognition, and all of them feature poets in the act of poeticizing experience. Lady Nature, in the Parliament disintegrated into the narrator's unconscious, or writerly, projection of his poetic voice, is submerged further in these later poems. The House of Fame presents a narrator who completes his investigation of making, not in a literary garden or a colloquy of underdeveloped characters such as the birds, but in the house of rumor, full of actual voices from actual, not textual figures. The "auctoritee" of Lady Nature is reduced to the as-yet-undefined man of great (poetic?) authority who appears at the end of the poem. This man, I think, represents the concept of the poet the narrator and Chaucer -- are developing to replace Lady Nature. In the House of Fame the source (intuitive knowledge) and form Ca mimetic character) is identified, but since Chaucer has yet to immerse himself fully in his version of the macrocosmos, the human mind, this figure's authority remains undefined. In this poem the split between via antiqua and moderna so important to the Parliament reamains central but is clearly being nudged offstage. In the Parliament Nature is ambiguous and finally nonessential, but she is at least flexible 188 enough to accomodate differing views of poetic making.

But in the House of Fame, the eagle is clearly a fool.

He discusses the source and amplification of sound in quasi-scientific terms but is clearly no Ockhamist: he has not got the faintest inkling of psychology, i.e., how sound, or speech (intuitive experience) becomes thought. The narrator, like Chaucer, having been freed from the desert courtly and scholastic forms, is at the end of the poem thus alone, and there is no authority to organize the house of rumor.

In the Troilus, the narrator and Chaucer do away almost entirely with all but psychological issues. The pragmatic Pandurus and idealistic Troilus

(representative of Ockhamist and scholastic perspectives of making?), like the birds in the parliament, battle it out over a "formel," Cressida. The difference is that no ideal poetic figure directs either of the male rhetoricians, and the object of their verbal creations is an acutal women, whose activities reflect ideas men

(poets) have of her and who (like poems and audiences) takes on an unpredictable life of her own. The relationship between poet, audience and text in this poem suggests an epistemology unlike that exhibited by the birds in the Parliament. For Pandurus and Troilus closely watch the actual cressida, interact with her,

"woo" her actively by establishing with her a real 189 dialogue. To be sure, each also exhibits poor reading habits; but by founding their creative activities on

intuitive experience, they enact a realistic dialogue among, poet, art and audience.

The Canterbury Tales enacts a fully-devoloped "parliament" of stories, tellers, and audiences that may best be appreciated within its evolution, beginning with the Book of the Duchess. In that poem Chaucer highlights the relationship between poets and their sources by underscoring the ways in which the narrator transforms

for his own purposes the story of Ceyx and Alcyone. In subsequent poems, this relationship is developed, until

in the Parliament Chaucer begins to account for the entire poetic triad of author, audience and text within a complex matrix of actual and textual experience. In the Troilus he deals in almost exclusively psychological

terms with this triad, but still at least ostensibly within the continental tradition and certainly within

the structure of the epic. The Canterbury Tales, their

inspiration coming from every conceivable literal and

literary source, is his fully realized vision of the

poetic mind at work. Tale, audience and text are

presented as they form and fully within the context of

their actual existence. Nature is here a miller, a wife from bath, an a knight in rusting armour. And the parliament consists, not of quasi-characters but people 190 who fart and exhibit good manners, who are morose or convivial, better and worse storytellers inhabitants, not of the literary garden but of the house of rumor.

Given this development of storytelling psychologic,

I think we would do well to revaluate both the role of

Ockhamist thought within Chaucer's period and of the overall philosophico-psychological climate in which he worked. I think we would find in the Parliament and elsewhere, not a distinction between classical and

'modern' or neoplatonic and Aristotelian, but between scholastic and Ockhamist thought. Chaucer's repeated implicit and explicit references to Aristotle and to the courtly tradition suggest his fundamental incorporation of thirteenth-century epistemology into his work; and his refusal to leave this epistemology unmolested, his persistence evaluation of it in terms of psychologic and physical causation, suggest that he found it dissatisfying. Now Chaucer was brilliant, but it is unlikely that he made this radical break from metaphysical to psychological literature beyond the pale of the political and philosophical changes that occurred throughout the century. The counciliar movement, the rejection of Aristotelianism, the birth of true mechanical science and Ockhamism all must have shaped his rebellion from earlier literary forms. We must turn our attention fully to these influencing factors and 191 especially to their conflict with the constituents of the via antiqua. Only if we can understand the points of conflict between the modern and the ancient way as

Chaucer understood them will we, in turn, understand

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