Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma: Riddles, Rhetoric, and Theology

by Curtis A. Gruenler

Overview

In this book, Curtis Gruenler proposes that the concept of the enigmatic, latent in a wide range of medieval thinking about literature, can help us better understand in medieval terms much of the era’s most enduring literature, from the riddles of the Anglo-Saxon bishop Aldhelm to the great vernacular works of Dante, Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, and, above all, Langland’s Piers Plowman. Riddles, rhetoric, and theology—the three fields of meaning of aenigma in medieval Latin—map a way of thinking about reading and writing obscure literature that was widely shared across the Middle Ages. The poetics of enigma links inquiry about language by theologians with theologically ambitious literature. Each sense of enigma brings out an aspect of this poetics. The playfulness of riddling, both oral and literate, was joined to a Christian vision of literature by Aldhelm and the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book. Defined in rhetoric as an obscure allegory, enigma was condemned by classical authorities but resurrected under the influence of Augustine as an aid to contemplation. Its theological significance follows from a favorite biblical verse among medieval theologians, “We see now through a mirror in an enigma, then face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). Along with other examples of the poetics of enigma, Piers Plowman can be seen as a culmination of centuries of reflection on the importance of obscure language for knowing and participating in endless mysteries of divinity and humanity and a bridge to the importance of the enigmatic in modern literature. This book will be especially useful for scholars and undergraduate students interested in medieval European literature, literary theory, and contemplative theology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780268101657
Publisher:	University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date:	04/30/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	636
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Curtis A. Gruenler is professor of English at Hope College.

Read an Excerpt

In modern English, one solves a riddle but contemplates an enigma. Medieval Latin aenigma, like Old English rædels, can include both senses, and the uses of obscurity in medieval traditions of riddling, rhetoric, and theology hover between, on one hand, didactic or esoteric closure and, on the other, the truly enigmatic. Play with multiple meanings can be part of either a finite game or an infinite one. In a finite game, players play to win; in an infinite game, players play to continue the playing. Solomon passes judgment; Marcolf always has another trick to play. Augustine is tempted by Manichean esotericism and willing to exclude heretics, but he embraces a spiritual rhetoric of endless yet convergent interpretation. Julian of Norwich acknowledges the church’s authoritative teaching, but she sees a higher mystery of participation in divine agency by which even sin is enfolded within the surpassing, incarnate, suffering, maternal love of Christ. The poetics of enigma invites readers into an infinite game, whether the game is literature or theology.

Middle English redels likely leaned already in the direction of modern riddle because of its common collocation with the verb reden, as when, at Conscience’s banquet in the fourth dream of Piers Plowman, Clergy asks him contemptuously if he yearns “to rede redels” (B.13.185). Rede is the Middle English form of modern read. Answering a riddle can be seen as a special sense of deciphering written signs. Both probably have roots in an older meaning, still available in Middle English, of advising or interpreting. All the senses of reading, however—solving a riddle, interpreting a dream, instructing a prince how to rule, advising a lord how to win a battle or make a good business deal—have to do with situations that could be described as finite games. Most medieval texts give laws, instructions, or advice for playing a finite game in society, one in which the object is to control the future in some way and to earn property or status. Didactic and esoteric kinds of riddling are both part of finite games. It is only when there is a different kind of text that reading becomes part of an infinite game. Such a text seeks play for its own sake and, indeed, treats everything else as play, including the finite games that take themselves more seriously.

Enigma enters English with associations that reach back to its Greek meaning through the riddle of the Sphinx, in which the finite game of answering the riddle is caught up in the larger mystery of human suffering. Above all, however, it is the theological dimension of enigma that joins it to infinite play. Theological truth, being infinite, cannot be contained within the conventional words and rules of language but must play with them in order to stretch their meaning. As a result, these conventions and the human realities to which they refer are shown to fall forever short of the sacramental meaning being revealed through them. The theology of participation implies the infinite play of anticipating and entering an encounter face to face, being transformed into the image of God “from glory to glory” (2 Cor. 3:18). Of course theology can also be harnessed to other kinds of rhetoric: didacticism coerces assent; esotericism fashions signs to justify the possession of power. The enigmatic response to these finite games, as Piers Plowman affirms in its imitation of the Gospels, is to outplay them not by beating them at their own game but by becoming vulnerable to them in order to include them in an infinite game.

Playfulness seems essential to the whole genre of contemplative writing. There is a certain playfulness even in the Latin texts that theorized the enigmatic as the language of participation. In De Trinitate, Augustine tries out any number of analogies for the Trinity before coming to rest in one, the inner word, that is a sort of metasign for the games of signification by which he has approached the mystery. In both Augustine and Denis, this game is generalized into the interplay between affirmation and negation. Hugh of St. Victor, working from both, develops a Scholastic program in the Didascalicon that might also be described as rules for a game: the game of finding bounded but infinite sententia through continued return to the literal sense, whether of nature or history. Even a text as comprehensive and precise as Bonaventure’s Itinerarium plays a game of ascending perspectives and ends with a vertiginous leap toward, at the same time, both Dionysian transcendence and Franciscan meditation on the cross. Later medieval devotion to the sacraments might be seen as one culmination of such play. Transubstantiation formulates propositionally what, experientially or hermeneutically, is a kind of double vision or rapid alternation—play—between aspects of a single reality. Langland and Julian are more adventurous and explicitly riddling in their play than any of these, but no less theological or scriptural. In Piers Plowman, enigmatic play becomes the dominant mode, even the content, of the text, but still as a means of entry into the reality of participation.

The clearest indication of what kind of game a text is playing comes at the end. Both Piers Plowman and Chaucer’s House of Fame, the principal English texts of this chapter, have famously open endings. In the last line of Piers Plowman, the dreamer awakens after seeing Conscience, leader of a remnant of the true church in the poem’s eighth vision, resolve to follow Piers the Plowman and become a pilgrim. As inconclusive as this is, the moment of waking at least marks it as an ending. The last line of The House of Fame is often given ellipsis points and labeled unfinished. Yet the appearance of an unidentified “man of grete auctorite . . .” is often seen as a fit ending to a poem that raises a series of questions about literary authority but repeatedly defers answering them. Both poems make strong invitations to games that continue beyond the text. In Piers Plowman, Conscience cries out at the end for both vengeance and grace, a choice between finite and infinite games. I will argue that Piers Plowman has two enigmatic conclusions, one of fullness and one of lack, and maintains a tension between them at every level in order to project a grace beyond finite realization while remaining acutely mindful of present emptiness, need, and failure. To imagine an infinite game of grace is to hope that even failure can be turned from rupture to participation. In Chaucer’s House of Fame, the game is literature itself. Chaucer plays out and exhausts a series of finite literary games before abandoning them in pursuit of a game that will have as its object the continuation of a mode of infinite literary play that can absorb into itself every finite game. His greatest achievement of this mode will be The Canterbury Tales. One of the dilemmas in Chaucer scholarship is whether to read this human infinity as participating in an eternal one.

(Excerpted from chapter 7)

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Language for a Theology of Participation, Theory for a Poetics of Enigma

Part 1. Riddles: Enigma as Play

2. Riddling Traditions, Participatory Play, and Langland’s First Vision

3. Riddle Contests and Langland’s Fourth Vision

Part 2. Rhetoric: Enigma as Persuasion

4. Enigma in the Curriculum: Langland’s Third Vision

5. Enigmatic Authority: Langland’s Second Vision

Part 3. Theology: Enigma as Participation

6. Enigma and Participation in Langland’s Fifth Vision and Julian’s Revelation

7. Games of Heaven, Games of Earth: Ending with Enigmas

Epilogue

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

In this ambitious book, Curtis Gruenler not only offers nuanced, compelling readings of Piers Plowman but also constructs a powerful framework— the poetics of enigma and its relationship to theologies of participation— for interpreting late medieval religious literature as a whole… Gruenler’s Poetics of Enigma offers masterful readings that bring disparate episodes of the poem together in productive and unexpected ways.” —Journal of English and Germanic Philology

“A magisterial account of a heretofore unnamed poetics attuned to interpretive openness that is characteristic of much literature of the Middle Ages, particularly the work of William Langland. . . . It also makes a significant contribution to intellectual history by demonstrating the legacy of the Middle Ages to contemporary theology and to the development of what we have come to value as the literary.” —Modern Philology

“The book is beautifully organized, and the author lays out his argument clearly in every chapter. . . . [T]he brilliance of the book, however lies in the way in which the various aspects of enigma are interwoven throughout the entire study…This is a smart book with a very nuanced and sophisticated treatment of mimetic theory.” —The Bulletin of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion

“In this learned and comprehensive volume, Curtis Gruenler studies how writers from Augustine to William Langland explore ‘the value of difficult reading in education and spiritual formation.’. . . Gruenler has admirably embodied in his own writing the ideal of intellectual enquiry and community that he describes.” —The Medieval Review

“Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma crafts a lucid, learned discussion of its origins and rhetorical power to foster a kind of reading and a way of seeing reality that contrasts with the didactic maintained by institutional authority. . . .[It’s strength] is the scope of its learnedness, surveying the influences of medieval theologians and grammarians ranging form Augustine to Donatus upon dream vision poetry.” —The Review of English Studies

"Gruenler’s learned and wide-reaching study is poised to transform future readings not only of Piers Plowman, but of many other works of medieval literature. The framework he advances for identifying the poetics of enigma at work in Piers Plowman admirably addresses the way that the poem both defies and invites interpretation." —Times Literary Supplement

“Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma is a generous and wide-ranging book, which places some of the best-known writings of the Middle Ages in a new relationship to one another, and, in doing so, opens several new possibilities for the interpretation of Langland’s poem.” —Speculum

"This lucid and sophisticated study of the idea of the enigma in medieval English literature is a welcome contribution to scholarship. Working deftly across medieval rhetoric, poetics, and theology, Gruenler accounts in strikingly new ways for the peculiar texture of Middle English poetry, and especially for the beautiful mystery that is William Langland's Piers Plowman." —Emily Steiner, University of Pennsylvania

"The poetics of enigma, Curtis Gruenler writes, is a poetics 'of gentle persuasion to greater participation in mysteries at once transcendent and immanent'—something this world needs more than ever. Gruenler illuminates everything from the Sphinx to the modernist mode of T. S. Eliot, but his major achievement is the revelation that Piers Plowman stands as a sort of summa aenigmatica, the exemplary text in a major tradition that remains unappreciated and understudied. One critic has written that 'startling and pleasurable recognitions that repeatedly elude argumentative formulation' are the characteristic effects of Langland’s poem; Gruenler points out that the best medieval name for this mode is enigma, and I would add that 'Piers Plowman' and the Poetics of Enigma, like its subject, is enigmatic in the best sense of the word." —Lawrence Warner, King's College London

“Immensely learned, ranging widely over classical and medieval literature and medieval theology and philosophy to bring superb new insight to Piers Plowman in particular, but also to a host of other texts. Above all, it brings out brilliantly, and not in any pietistic way, the deep Christianity of the poem, too often ignored nowadays by secularizing scholars.”—Traugott Lawler, Yale University

“This is an outstandingly cogent and informative study, lucidly analyzing medieval ideas of language, religion, and poetry through enigma while offering a solid literary and intellectual history of its topics.” —Choice

“Dr. Gruenler uses the concept of the enigmatic to present a richer understanding of medieval literature.” —Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation

“Gruenler deftly manages a vast array of sources and offers an elegant close reading [that] evokes exactly the wonder and delight that Gruenler describes as traits of medieval enigmas.” —Journal of Medieval Religious Culture

From the Publisher

A magisterial account of a heretofore unnamed poetics attuned to interpretive openness that is characteristic of much literature of the Middle Ages, particularly the work of William Langland. . . . It also makes a significant contribution to intellectual history by demonstrating the legacy of the Middle Ages to contemporary theology and to the development of what we have come to value as the literary.

Modern Philology

"This lucid and sophisticated study of the idea of the enigma in medieval English literature is a welcome contribution to scholarship. Working deftly across medieval rhetoric, poetics, and theology, Gruenler accounts in strikingly new ways for the peculiar texture of Middle English poetry, and especially for the beautiful mystery that is William Langland's Piers Plowman."

Emily Steiner

"The poetics of enigma, Curtis Gruenler writes, is a poetics 'of gentle persuasion to greater participation in mysteries at once transcendent and immanent'—something this world needs more than ever. Gruenler illuminates everything from the Sphinx to the modernist mode of T. S. Eliot, but his major achievement is the revelation that Piers Plowman stands as a sort of summa aenigmatica, the exemplary text in a major tradition that remains unappreciated and understudied. One critic has written that 'startling and pleasurable recognitions that repeatedly elude argumentative formulation' are the characteristic effects of Langland’s poem; Gruenler points out that the best medieval name for this mode is enigma, and I would add that 'Piers Plowman' and the Poetics of Enigma, like its subject, is enigmatic in the best sense of the word."

Lawrence Warner

Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma is a generous and wide-ranging book, which places some of the best-known writings of the Middle Ages in a new relationship to one another, and, in doing so, opens several new possibilities for the interpretation of Langland’s poem.

Speculum

Piers Plowman is a late 14th century narrative poem that depicts Christian character formation amidst the social concerns of medieval Catholicism. . . . Curtis A. Gruenler uses the text as a primary example to describe a theological doctrine of riddle, rhetoric, and religious imagination.

Reading Religion

Immensely learned, ranging widely over classical and medieval literature and medieval theology and philosophy to bring superb new insight to Piers Plowman in particular, but also to a host of other texts. Above all, it brings out brilliantly, and not in any pietistic way, the deep Christianity of the poem, too often ignored nowadays by secularizing scholars.

Traugott Lawler

"Gruenler’s learned and wide-reaching study is poised to transform future readings not only of Piers Plowman, but of many other works of medieval literature. The framework he advances for identifying the poetics of enigma at work in Piers Plowman admirably addresses the way that the poem both defies and invites interpretation."

Times Literary Supplement

In this ambitious book, Curtis Gruenler not only offers nuanced, compelling readings of Piers Plowman but also constructs a powerful framework— the poetics of enigma and its relationship to theologies of participation— for interpreting late medieval religious literature as a whole… Gruenler’s Poetics of Enigma offers masterful readings that bring disparate episodes of the poem together in productive and unexpected ways.

Journal of English and Germanic Philology