Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma by Gruenler Curtis A.;

Author:Gruenler, Curtis A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2017-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

POETRY AND SACRAMENT

Near the end of De Trinitate, Augustine locates himself where Langland places humanity at the end of the narrative that his fifth vision spins from 1 Corinthians 13:

But you, O my soul, among all these things that I have said about that supreme trinity—and I dare not claim that any of them is worthy of this unimaginable mystery, but must rather confess that his knowledge is too wonderful for me and has been too mighty and I have not been capable of it—where do you perceive that you are among all these things, where do you lie or where do you stand until all your sicknesses are healed by him who has shown himself gracious to all your iniquities? You certainly realize that you are in that tavern to which that Samaritan brought the man he found half-dead from the many wounds inflicted on him by robbers. And yet you have seen many true things, and I do not mean with these eyes which see colored bodies, but the ones the man was praying about who said, “Let my eyes see justice.” (Ps. 17:11)72

Augustine then closes his great theological exploration with a prayer for salvation. Langland, whose climactic responses to the predicament of humanity are yet to come in the following visions, adapts the Parable of the Good Samaritan to imply, in part, the healing power of the poetry that this vision has named enigma. David Aers has shown how this episode most fully conveys Langland’s theology. It faces the effects of sin while figuring an authentically Augustinian double agency of divine grace and human free will in salvation. The remedy for semyvief, the half-dead victim in the parable, is the sacraments, which bring into the poem’s depiction of salvation an element of mediation through community that is lacking earlier in the poem.73 To Aers’s analysis of the narrative and dialectical significance of Langland’s handling of the parable, I would add the significance of its enigmatic style. Sacramental imagery here signifies not just authorized means of grace in scripture and sacrament but a sacramentalizing of all creation and any kind of human work, including poetry, as a means to greater participation. The enigmatic mode both extends this episode’s vision of how salvation is received and enacts it by the kind of attention it solicits.

The Eucharist, as noted above in chapter 1 (in the section “The Enigmatic Metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas”), was no doubt the most prevalent experience of the enigmatic in medieval life. The sacraments were the prime locus of “the interweaving of natural and supernatural with human action.”74 When the elevation of the host became the prime mode of lay participation in the Eucharist, it became even more an act of reading. In the early thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse, a strong link between the Eucharistic elements and the rhetoric of enigma concludes the section of Latin meditations for use while prostrate during the Mass: “Grant, we beseech you, almighty God, that him whom we see enigmatically and under another form, on whom we feed sacramentally on earth, we may see face to face.

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