Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1968 Responses to Ockhamist Theology in the Poetry of the 'Pearl'-Poet, Langland, and Chaucer. John Francis Mcnamara Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Mcnamara, John Francis, "Responses to Ockhamist Theology in the Poetry of the 'Pearl'-Poet, Langland, and Chaucer." (1968). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 1508. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/1508 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This dissertation has been microfilmed exactly as received 69-4491 McNAMARA, John Francis, 1938- RESPONSES TO OCKHAMIST THEOLOGY IN THE POETRY OF THE PEARL-POET, LANGLAND, AND 'CHAUCER. Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, Ph.D., 1968 Language and Literature, modem University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan Responses to Ockhamist Theology in the Poetry of the Pearl-poet. Langland, and Chaucer A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by John Francis McNamara B.A., Spring Hill College, 1959 M.A., Marquette University, 1963 August, 1968 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like* first of all, to thank Professor Thomas Kirby for his careful and patient guidance through the long process of writing this dissertation. Also, to Mr. Ronald Dupuis and Miss Marchlta Mauck, fellow students of the Middle Ages, I am grateful for their enthusiasm and encouragement as my "unofficial teachers." And finally, I must express my great debt to my wife Claire, whose inspiration has sustained me through many years of graduate study. ABSTRACT An important product of the nominalist-realist de­ bate of the fourteenth century was a renewed interest in the theology of grace and merit. For Ockham and his followers, since "real" knowledge of God through natural reason was im­ possible, God seemed to transcend his creation so absolutely that his ways might become incomprehensible to man. This, added to the fourteenth-century interest in voluntarism, led to the further inference that God could use his absolute power to overrule what he had ordained. Accordingly, all man could do was offer his good works to this omnipotent Judge in the hope that he might receive mercy. Some nomina­ list theologians even suggested that God could, by his abso­ lute power, elect a sinner whose merits had not been digni­ fied by sanctifying grace. To conservative followers of Augustine such as Bradwardine and Wyclif, this was rank Pela- gianism. They fought the "Modern Pelagians" so zealously that they gravitated to the opposite extreme, contending that no act could be truly meritorious without God's direct parti­ cipation through grace. Thus, while the nominalists exalted divine omnipotence in order to free man, conservative Augus- tinians used the same starting point to argue that God gave man whatever merits he might have. There is considerable evidence that the impact of this dispute was widespread, notably among the principal poets of the time. In the Cotton Nero A.x manuscript, for example, Pearl features a debate over grace and merit, with the conclusion that God elects the sinner through grace; the sinner does not elect God by his own merits. Purity balances this with a complementary doctrine, of merit, stressing man's responsibility to perform good works if he would be saved. But Patience illustrates, through the story of Jonah, how man is ultimately dependent upon God's absolute power. In Sir Gawaln and the Green Knight, a reconciliation of these doctrines crystallizes around the hero, who commits serious sin but yet is willing, finally, to cooperate with grace and reinstate himself in divine favor. Then St. Erkenwald, per­ haps by the same author, relates a legend which elsewhere in medieval poetry sanctioned man's power to appeal to God by good works alone, but which here confuses the issue by stressing man's powerlessness without divine grace. Piers Plowman treats basically the same problems in an extended dialectic in which Will, man's faculty for moral action, searches for the means to earn salvation. The doctrinal issues are defined in the Vislo, especially in the pardon scene, and the Vita dramatizes Will's efforts to learn how he may reach God in terms of grace and merit. Chaucer, unlike these other two poets, avoids the risks of their often exciting doctrinal experiments and opts rather for a moderate view of the God-man relationship. Both in Trollus and Crlseyde and several important Canterbury Tales, he expresses confidence in human nature, though stressing the need for divine providence to direct man's actions, and assures us that God will not use his absolute power to overrule or contradict the covenant with man. Chaucer's contribution to the controversy, then, was to show that there is a viable alternative between the extremes of the Ockhamists and the Augustinians, whereas many writers tended to polarize the dispute into these two positions alone. The conclusion that this dissertation seeks to support, therefore, is that this great intellectual debate was not confined to the universities or the monasteries, but stimulated the imaginations of the most distinguished poets of the time to produce some of their finest works. \ TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Is God and Man in the Fourteenth Century ........... 1 Chapter II: The Pearl" Poet ........................... 38 Chapter III: Piers Plonman................................. 83 Chapter IV: Chaucer ................................. 127 Chapter V: Conclusions, .......... ............. 17^ Bibliography ..................... 181 Appendix: A Glossary of Medieval Theological Terms . 188 Chapter I: God and Man in the Fourteenth Century Very little is now known about the development of ideas in the fourteenth century, even though an enormous amount of medieval scholarship has been accomplished in the last hundred years. Most histories of philosophy or theolo­ gy afford this period scant attention, little more than a superficial glance at this 11 intermission" between the great cultural explosions of the high Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance. The reason for this is not far to seek. Prot­ estant scholars have usually scorned the later Middle Ages, with its ecclesiastical corruptions and the decline of scho­ lastic theology, except where they could find a "forerunner" of the Reformation to come.1 Catholic philosophers, inspired by Leo X I I ^ s famous encyclical Aeteral Patrls (1879)» have concentrated awesome energy in reconstructing the system of St. Thomas Aquinas, with the result that we probably understand his works today better than his contemporaries 1For a very lucid overview of the whole historical prob­ lem of the "forerunner," see Helko A. Oberman, Forerunners the Reformation (New York, 1966), esp. pp. 3-^9• 1 did* Some scholars have also attended to St. Eonaventure, Duns Scotus and, more extensively, St. Augustine; hut the vanguard of the twentieth-century revival of Scholasticism, led hy men like Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, and O Anton Pegis, has championed St. Thomas. This has produced an extreme emphasis on the thirteenth century as a time of creative growth, the pinnacle of medieval civilization. Conversely, since the most important thinkers of the four­ teenth century criticized and eventually destroyed the syntheses of Thomas and Bonaventure, this later period has been characterized as a "decline,” promoting the disinteg­ ration of Scholasticism into endless sterile subtleties.3 In this spirit, one of our most distinguished medievalists, Etienne Gilson, has described William of Ockham as an "appr­ entice sorcerer" who unleashed vast destructive powers to corrode "the golden age of Scholasticism," without creating any positive synthesis of his own.^ Such an attitude, 2I am not minimizing the contributions of such distin­ guished thinkers as Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Blondel, Karl Rahner, or Teilhard de Chardin, but they represent reactions against the mainstream of modern Catholic thought. 3a notable exception is the great scholarship of the late Phllotheus Boehner, O.F.M., who helped to overcome our igno­ rance of Ockham in many important books and articles. See, for example, his Collected Articles on Ockham, ed. Eligius Buytaert, O.F.K. (St. Bonaventure, N. Y., 1958). A good measure of Fr. Boehner*s Influence is the remarkably know­ ledgeable and balanced account of Ockham's philosophy by Frederick Copleston, S.J., in the third volume of his History of Philosophy (Westminster, Md., 1952). ^History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (N; T. 195'5)»P."W. 3 especially since it is widespread, has fostered little interest in the problems, the controversies, the intellec­ tual concerns of the fourteenth century. Yet this very cen­ tury not only destroyed confidence in the past, but also made positive contributions of its own, not the least of which is a philosophic ground favorable to the growth of mo­ dern science. The fourteenth century also went far beyond just dissolving