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Adaptation, Autobiography, and Divine Passibility in Patience

Neophilologus volume 106, pages 669–681 (2022)Cite this article

Abstract

This article examines the use of autobiography and adaption to shape reader reception in the Middle English poem Patience. Eleanor Johnson has shown the importance of autobiography in the practice of Middle English authors seeking ethical transformation in their audiences. The exemplar for this approach, The Consolation of Philosophy, serves as a model for the didactic aims of Patience. The poem’s prologue features a suffering narrator who has resigned himself to “pacience” as an inescapable “poynt” (l. 1). He hears a sermon, however, on the Beatitudes that describes patience as a happy state of emotional control where one “con her hert stere” (l. 27). The narrator then compares his situation to Jonah, whose story he proceeds to tell. Through the comparison, the poet makes the story of Jonah more immediate for his audience. Similarly, the poem adapts the Vulgate’s depiction of God to make him a familiar and accessible character. God speaks about his relationship to Nineveh in the language of craft, pregnancy, and child-raising. Although the depiction is at odds with scholastic theology, the God of Patience is a passible figure who suffers the existence of evil and describes his emotions in bodily language. God’s practice of patience not only makes it a “nobel poynt” (l. 531), but one that is accessible to passible humans. Happiness, which in medieval ethics is achieved by aligning one’s perspective with universal truths and with God, is now possible in patience. The epilogue shows the narrator embracing patience, modeling ideal ethical transformation for the reader.

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Notes

  1. For an excellent summary of vernacular theology since Watson’s inaugural article, see Gillespie (2007).

  2. See Caws (1985) and Willis (2017). Frame theory in literature traces back to the work of sociologist Goffman (1974).

  3. Cf. Johnson’s (2013) statement that “[M]y own analysis understands the concept of ‘ethics’ to encompass both the inward-focused and the outward-focused modes of right behavior, both the personally salvific and the prosocial…the poets whose works ‘pertain to ethics’ are often thinking first about the transformation of the human soul towards God” (p. 3).

  4. All quotations from Patience are from the fifth edition by Andrew & Waldron (2010). All translations into modern English are my own.

  5. Davis (1991) has perceptively noted that “[T]he Pearl-Poet is fascinated by the acts of teaching and learning, the roads by which ones arrives at understanding…[Patience] is a case study in teaching and learning” (p. 268). Whereas Davis focuses on the way Jonah learns, I argue that the poet’s pedagogical interests are displayed in the way the narrator learns.

  6. See also Stokes (1984, pp. 355–356).

  7. See for example Hatt (2015), who uses the prologue of Patience to argue that the poet was a cleric in an ecclesiastical household who traveled to Italy (227–231).

  8. The relationship between the dreamer in Pearl and the poet demonstrates a similar ambiguity. Cf. Spearing (1970, pp. 128–129).

  9. Moorman (1963), for example, argues that the poverty has to be spiritual (pp. 92–93). Anderson (1966) argues for the opposite, identifying material poverty (p. 284).

  10. For a discussion of the hardship of a journey to Rome, see Hatt (2015, pp. 227–228).

  11. Scholars have tended to pay more attention to the negative example of patience rather than the positive one. E.g. Moorman (1963, pp. 91, 94).

  12. Schleusener (1971), examining Jonah’s description of God during the storm, calls attention to the way that Patience depicts God as “deus artifex” (p. 962). The depiction of God as craftsperson and maker is likely a reflection by the poet on his own poetic craft. See also the use of the jeweler imagery in Pearl for a similar working out of the relationship between human craft, poetry, and God’s making.

  13. sōre denotes both bodily pain and mental pain, i.e.“suffering, sorrow, grief” (MED).

  14. For more on the depiction of God as mother see Spearing (1999). This section of the poem has similarities to Julian of Norwich’s description of God as mother, especially God the Son, in chapters LVIII through LXI of Revelations of Divine Love.

  15. [That in one of them that is the female there is as it were the material cause that passively suffers, and in the male is the formal cause and principle activity. Therefore…Aristotle says that…Of the male comes the cause of motion as regards the shape; the female is, as it were, the matter, from the mixing of which comes the creature.] Translation mine.

  16. According to Spearing (1999), the narrator may be drawing this imagery from Matthew 23 where Jesus mourns over Jerusalem (p. 308). “Hierusalem Hierusalem quae occidis prophetas et lapidas eos qui ad te missi sunt quotiens volui congregare filios tuos quemadmodum gallina congregat pullos suos sub alas et noluisti” (Vulgate, Matt. 23:37). Curiously, the words belong to Jesus, not God. This borrowing from the New Testament fits with the narrator’s portrayal of God in Patience in a human, Christ-like manner. See also Hosea 11:1–10 for similar parental imagery in the Old Testament.

  17. The original audience of the poem would of course recognize the deeper irony in Jonah’s fear with its allusion to Jesus’s passion and crucifixion.

  18. The narrator does add a handful of allusion to the life of Jesus in his retelling of the story of Jonah, most conspicuously Jonah’s fear of crucifixion by the Ninevites in lines 95–96. Andrew (1973) has an excellent survey of the allusions.

  19. In On the Properties of Things it is the female material cause that “suffriþ” the male formal cause. The narrator seems to draw on traditional female attributes in order to make God a more affective and patient figure. See the earlier discussion on the relationship between patience and sufferance.

  20. malīce n. “(f) severity in punishing; harshness in taxation” (MED).

  21. Here the narrator may be drawing on Romans 2:4 “an divitias bonitatis eius et patientiae et longanimitatis contemnis ignorans quoniam benignitas Dei ad paenitentiam te adducit” (Vulgate). [Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and patience and longsuffering? Knowest thou not that the benignity of God leadeth thee to penance? (DV)]. Prior (1996) identifies similar language in 2 Peter 3:9 as a possible influence (pp.144–145).

  22. See also Jonah observation of God’s “quoynt soffraunce” and “longe abydyng wyth lur [harm]” (ll. 417, 419).

  23. Sarot (1994) notes that most modern theologians have abandoned the doctrine of divine impassibility (61–62).

  24. The Pearl-Poet is not the only writer of vernacular theology to explore this idea. In Piers Plowman (Langland, 2006) the character of Reason asks, “Suffraunce is a sovereygne vertue and a swyfte venjaunce / Who suffreth more than God?…No gome, as I leve” (B.XI.379–80).

  25. Andrews (2000) notes a similar interest in clothing in the narrator’s suggestion that Jonah wash his clothes after his ejection from the fish’s belly in line 342 (p. 69).

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  1. Department of English, University of Minnesota—Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    Caleb D. Molstad

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Molstad, C.D. Adaptation, Autobiography, and Divine Passibility in Patience. Neophilologus 106, 669–681 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-022-09730-z

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Keywords

  • Pearl-Poet
  • Middle English
  • vernacular theology
  • biblical adaptation
  • literary ethics

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