Abstract
In this final chapter, Will learns that only love can navigate him safely through Need’s demands. The wisdom and/or folly of the lessons imparted reveal a newly integrated understanding of what constitutes love. The import of Will’s cognitive search lies not so much in defining the intellect’s or charity’s bounds, but in the movement between them. While the natural tendency of reason is to divide and distinguish, Will must prioritize his ability to enact that knowledge founded upon love. Kynde’s pronouncement that Will should learn to love emphasizes the fact that charity perfects the human mode of cognition. As the foundation of Christian faith, charity transforms secular crafts and vocations into spiritually worthy pursuits. His journey both affirms the constructive capabilities of the intellect and yet denies the intellect’s ability to grasp divine truths absolutely and to attain final stability. As the dynamic interaction between the intellect and the will is continually moving, it both explains and validates the inconclusive ending of Will’s search for truth.
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Notes
- 1.
White, Nature and Salvation, 89–111.
- 2.
Scotus, Questions on the Metaphysics IX, q. 15; Wolter, On the Will, 149.
- 3.
Carruthers, Search for St. Truth, 165.
- 4.
White, Nature and Salvation, 55–9; Anne Middleton examines the relationship between lived “experience” with the challenges inherent within natural life, see “Narration and Invention,” 91–122.
- 5.
Clopper, “Songes of Rechelesnesse,” 298.
- 6.
Although Zeeman does not address the voluntarism implicit in Kynde’s succeeding injunction, she studies this figure as representing “Langland’s belief in God’s commitment to human beings’ natural capacity ‘to do what is in them’” (“Condition of Kynde, 1).
- 7.
Scotus, Ordinatio IV, d. 49; Wolter, On the Will, 158.
- 8.
Scotus, Rep. Par. II, d. 6, q. 2, n. 10.
- 9.
Scotus, Rep. Par. III, d. 27, q. un.
- 10.
Scotus, Ordinatio III, d. 29; Wolter, On the Will, 292.
- 11.
Scotus, Rep. Par. IV, d. 39, q. 4, n. 2.
- 12.
David Lawton notes that any reading which downplays this intellectually and most “demanding third of the poem” suffers from its own density (“The Subject of Piers Plowman,” 2). Zeeman observes that these repetitions are the means by which the text inculcates psychological states and modifies desires, the staggered momentum of this journey actually evolves into a dynamic cycle of learning (Discourse of Desire, 263–83).
- 13.
Because this conversation with Imagynatyf revolves around the danger of seeking “the whyes,” Kynde is particularly well-suited to guide Will beyond any cognitive or emotional barriers impeding him (B.12.216).Verse
Verse Ac Kynde knoweth the cause himself, no creature ellis. He is the pies patron and putteth it in hir ere That there the thorn is thikkest to buylden and brede. And Kynde kenned the pecok to cauken in swich a kynde. (B.12.225–8)
- 14.
Thomas Aquinas exemplifies this position when he asserts that all creatures are naturally drawn to love God:
Now to love God above all things is natural to man and to every nature, not only rational but irrational, and even to inanimate nature according to the manner of love which can belong to each creature. And the reason of this is that it is natural to all to seek and love things according as stated in Physics ii, 8. Now it is manifest that the good of the part is for the good of the whole; hence everything, by its natural appetite and love, loves its own proper good on account of the common good of the whole universe, which is God (ST I-II, q. 109, a. 3).
- 15.
John Duns Scotus, The Examined Report of the Paris Lecture: Reportatio 1-A, vol. 1, d. 1, part II, q. 1, eds. Allan B. Wolter and Oleg V. Bychkov (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 2004), 96–7.
- 16.
Ockham, Quaest. Variae, q. 8 (OTh VIII, 410).
- 17.
Ockham, Sent. IV, q. 16 (OTh VII, 351).
- 18.
Ockham, Quod. III, q. 14 (OTh IX, 255–6).
- 19.
For a detailed argument advocating how these events and previous ones urge a reformist agenda in a bid for the Franciscans to return to their initial foundation, see Clopper, “Songes of Rechelesnesse,” 27–104.
- 20.
The four great mendicant orders in the Middle Ages, as recognized by the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, were the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans), the Friars Minor (the Franciscans), the Carmelites, and the Hermits of St. Augustine. This scene addresses only the first two, particularly in reference to their founder’s holiness.
- 21.
Bullarum Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum, vol. 8, eds. Thomas Ripoll and Antonin Bremond (Rome, 1729–1740), 768.
- 22.
Lives of the Brethren of the Order of Preachers: 1206–1259, ed. Bede Jarrett (London: Blackfriars Publications, 1955), 150.
- 23.
Not all Piers’ scholars perceive this portrayal as ultimately affirming their religious merit. See Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism; Szyttia, Antifraternal Tradition.
- 24.
Historically, the Franciscans had already been given permission to acquire those possessions necessary for living by John XXII in his bull Ad conditorem canonum posted on December 8, 1322. For an examination of this and the other bulls put forth by John XII, see John Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order from its Origins to the Year 1517 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 307–30. Need contends that mendicants should forgo any kind of endowment for it interferes with the original spirit of their rule.
- 25.
Thomas of Celano, Lives of St. Francis, 1.17, trans. Placid Hermann in Saint Francis of Assisi: Omnibus of Sources, vol. 1, Marion A. Habig, ed. (Quincy, IL: Franciscan Press, 1991), 266–7.
- 26.
Sacrum Commercium, Saint Francis of Assisi: Omnibus of Sources, vol. 2, ed. Marion A Habig (Quincy, IL: Franciscan Press, 1991), 1592.
- 27.
Ibid., 1594.
- 28.
Jill Mann stresses that Need’s role incorporates a divine element in its natural principle. This incorporation empowers Need’s observations concerning the distinction between friars and laity. She writes, “The ius necessitatis has its roots not in human disposition, but in divine ordinance. The role of need can be understood only in relation to a larger conception of the place of human beings in the natural world and the laws that are, as it were, built into it” (“The Nature of Need,” 13).
- 29.
Rule of 1221, ch.9 in Saint Francis of Assisi: Omnibus of Sources, vol. 1, Marion A. Habig, ed. (Quincy, IL: Franciscan Press, 1991), 40. In the revised Rule of 1223, Chapter 6, which was written by a committee of friars as opposed to Francis himself, the wording is even more affective and emphatic. “And they should have no hesitation in making known their needs to one another. For if a mother loves and cares for her child in the flesh, a friar should certainly love and care for his spiritual brother all the more tenderly” (Ibid., 61–2).
- 30.
This particular phrasing calls to mind Bonaventure’s biographical description of Francis’s love for poverty. “Whenever he had the opportunity, he went begging on the principal feasts of the year; as he remarked, the words of the Psalmist, “Man should eat the food of angels” (Ps 77, 25) are fulfilled in the God’s poor, because the bread of angels is that which has been begged for love of God and given at the inspiration of the angels, and gathered from door to door by holy poverty” (Major Life of St. Francis in Saint Francis of Assisi: Omnibus of Sources, 685).
- 31.
While this argument interprets the final allegorical figures as proffering determinate, sound counsel for Will to heed, it does not negate other, seemingly opposing, interpretations. Kathleen Hewett-Smith perceives these figures as advertising an “allegorical instability that results from the pressures of circumstantial history upon faith…[and] the de-stabilization of allegory provoked by Nede is, finally, a means of redeeming the mode, of providing significance within the epistemological void constitutive of allegorical discourse” (“Nede ne hath no lawe,” 233). Both Hewett-Smith and myself, though approaching the problem from different vantage points, believe that the final passus offers a means for Will to regenerate his means of ascertaining the “treuthe” he seeks.
- 32.
Rule of 1223, ch.10 in Saint Francis of Assisi: Omnibus of Sources, vol. 1, ed. Marion A. Habig (Quincy, IL: Franciscan Press, 1991), 63–4. In the Rule of 1221, Chapter 11, he also warns his fellow friars to avoid disputes or indulging in verbose debates. He takes pride in the simplicity of their order which makes “no claim to learning” (Testament of St. Francis in Saint Francis of Assisi: Omnibus of Sources, 68).
- 33.
Peter Lombard, Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, ed. Ignatius Brady (Grottaferrata/Romae: Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1971): bk. II, dist. 39; Timothy Potts, “Conscience,” The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, eds. Norman Kretzmann et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 689.
- 34.
Potts, “Conscience,” 690. Odon Lottin examines the debates surrounding these two terms, ranging from Philip the Chancellor (1160–1236) to Henry of Ghent (1217–1293).
- 35.
See Thomas Aquinas, The Disputed Questions on Truth, vol. II, q. 16, a. 1, trans. James V. McGlynn (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1953), 306.
- 36.
Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 19, a. 5.
- 37.
Ibid. “[C]onscience is a kind of dictate of the reason (for it is an application of knowledge to action), to inquire whether the will is evil.…”
- 38.
Aquinas, ST II-II, q. 47, a. 6. Prudence “applies universal principles to the particular conclusions of practical matters. Consequently it does not belong to prudence to appoint the end to moral virtues, but only to regulate the means.”
- 39.
Aquinas, ST II-II, q. 47, a. 15.
- 40.
Ockham explores this idea in his question “Whether the Will acts Virtuously if the Intellect Errs about Its Object,” (OTh VIII, 409–50, specifically 420).
- 41.
Scotus, Ordinatio II, d. 39; Wolter, On the Will, 164.
- 42.
Scotus, Ordinatio II, d. 39; Wolter, On the Will, 165.
- 43.
Douglas C. Langston, Conscience and Other Virtues (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 59–60.
- 44.
Ockham, Quaest. Variae, q. 8, a. 1 (OTh VIII, 415).
- 45.
Ockham, Quaest. Variae, q. 8, a. 1 (OTh VIII, 418).
- 46.
Ockham, Quaest. Variae, q. 7, a. 3 (OTh VIII, 362).
- 47.
Need attempts to utilize this legal reality to comment upon an intellectual and spiritual purpose. His insistence to impose the pressures of circumstantial history upon faith results in the de-stabilization of allegory, which restricts how much Conscience can rely upon Need. While Hewett-Smith states that this de-stabilization of allegory is “a means of redeeming the mode, of providing significance within the epistemological void constitutive of allegorical discourse,” this de-stabilization can also signify how allegory adapts to different contexts (“Nede ne hath no lawe,” 233). In the case of Conscience, it is not so much a failure of the sign, but a portrayal of how he continually expands his awareness by utilizing various forms of knowing.
- 48.
Ockham, I Sent., d, 30, q. 1 (OTh IV, 290).
- 49.
This view differs from traditional scholarship which fixates upon the negative consequences of his treatment. Mary Carruthers finds little saving grace in Conscience’s thoughtfulness. “His courtesy is a distinctive handicap to him in his dealings with these friars, just as it has been a weakness in his character throughout the poem. When the friars do not behave themselves, but continue to learn sophistry and to neglect their rule, Conscience does not throw them out. Friar Flattery comes from with the “sege” of Holychurch (XX.311); the fact that he is so readily available is entirely Conscience’ fault” (Search for St. Truth, 167).f
- 50.
See Risto Saarinen, Weakness of the Will in Medieval Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 78–82.
- 51.
Ockham, Quodl. III, q. 14 (OTh IX, 256).
- 52.
Ockham, De connexione virtutum, a. 3; Wood, Ockham on the Virtues, 125.
- 53.
Ockham, De connexione virtutum, a. 1; Wood, Ockham on the Virtues, 71.
- 54.
Scotus, Opus oxoniense II, d. 42, q.2; Wolter, On the Will, 151.
- 55.
Scotus, Ordinatio III, d. 17; Wolter, On the Will, 155.
- 56.
Conscience’s ability to adapt is what makes the strictures of his allegory difficult to contain in a fixed concept. It leads Priscilla Martin to entitle her article, “Conscience: The Frustration of Allegory,” Piers Plowman: Critical Approaches, ed. S.S. Hussey (London: Methuen, 1969), 125–42. Much more recently Madeleine Kasten in her book, In Search of “Kynde Knowynge”: Piers Plowman and the Origin of Allegory (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2007) writes, “A common characteristic of the allegorical traditions discussed above [including Langland] is their insistence on a structure of multiple meaning which, like Macrobius’ somnium, calls for an additional interpretation. To capture this notion of textual stratification, many of the authors mentioned have recourse to a metaphorical veil (39).
- 57.
Langland defines this idea in the subsequent dialogue between Haukyn, Activa Vita and Patience in the C-text. Verse
Verse “What is parfit pacience?” quod Activa Vita. “Meeknesse and mylde speche and men of o will, The whiche wil loue lat to oure lords place, And pat is charite, chaumpion, chief of all vertues; And pat is pore pacient, alle perelees to soffre” (C.15.274–8)
- 58.
Anna Baldwin believes that this virtue also reflects much of God’s actions. “If patience in the sense of endurance was epitomized by the suffering of Christ, this patient forbearance is associated more with God the Father, countering his wrath towards his people. So Tertullian in the second century sees it as particularly needed in the world of the Old Testament, for ‘in times of past, they were wont to demand eye for eye, for Patience was not as yet’” (“Of Patience,” Apologetic and Practical Treatises. Fathers of the Church. Oxford, 1842. 335). See “Patient Politics in Piers Plowman,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 15 (2001): 100; Elizabeth D. Kirk, “Who Suffreth More than God’: Narrative Redefinition of Patience in Patience and Piers Plowman,” The Triumph of Patience, ed. Gerald J. Schifforst (Orlando: University Presses of Florida, 1978), 88–104.
- 59.
The riddles which play such an integral role in this scene have prompted much scholarly investigation. See Andrew Galloway, “The Rhetoric of Riddling in Late-Medieval England: The ‘Oxford’ Riddles, the Secretum philosophorum, and the Riddles in Piers Plowman,” Speculum 70 (1995): 68–105; E.C. Schweitzer, “Half a Laumpe Lyne in Latyne” and Patience’s Riddle in Piers Plowman,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 73 (1974): 313–27.
- 60.
See Middle English Dictionary, “kinde” n., 1–9; “kindeli” adj., 1–3.
- 61.
Tavormina, Kindly Similitude, 49. Also see Zeeman, Discourse of Desire, 157–200; David Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 43–76; Anne Middleton, “William Langland’s ‘Kynde Name’: Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late Fourteenth-Century England,” Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 15–82.
- 62.
Scotus, Reportatio I-A, vol. 2, d. 48, q. 1, p. 567.
- 63.
White, Nature and Salvation, 81.
- 64.
Harwood, Problem of Belief, 122.
- 65.
Szittya, Antifraternal Tradition, 284. Both Szittya and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton utilize William of St. Amour’s writing to contextualize the poem’s negative treatment of friars in the religious and social milieu. See Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 133–75.
- 66.
Zeeman, Medieval Discourse of Desire, 283.
- 67.
Lawton, “The Subject of Piers Plowman,” 30.
- 68.
Scotus, Reportatio 1-A, vol. 1, d. 1, part II, q. 1, a. 1, p. 98.
- 69.
Ibid., 98.
- 70.
Scotus, Reportatio 1-A, vol. 1, d. 1, part II, q. 1, a. 3, p. 101.
- 71.
Scotus, Ordinatio III, d. 27; Wolter, On the Will, 284.
- 72.
See Bonnie Kent, “Rethinking Moral Dispositions: Scotus on the Virtues,” The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus, ed. Thomas Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 352–76.
- 73.
Ockham, Quodl. III, q. 1 (OTh IX, 207–8).
- 74.
To appreciate this medieval view of the relation between the will and love, ponder a modern perspective. In Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche writes, “Today we no longer have any pity for the concept of ‘free will’: we know only too well what it really is—the foulest of all theologians’ artifices, aimed at making mankind ‘responsible’ in their sense, that is, dependent upon them. Here, I simply supply the psychology of all ‘making responsible.’ Whenever responsibilities are sought, it is usually the instinct of wanting to judge and punish which is at work. Becoming has been deprived of its innocence when any being such and such is traced back to will, to purposes, to acts of responsibility: the doctrine of the will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is, because one wanted to impute guilt.… Men were considered ‘free’ so that they might be judged and punished—so that they might become guilty: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed, and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within the consciousness” (499–500).
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Strong, D. (2017). The Continual Pursuit of Love. In: The Philosophy of Piers Plowman. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51981-4_7
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