Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 9 Number 3, December 2008
___________________________________________________________________
Bryan, Jennifer. Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England. Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4048-1. 270 Pages. $49.95 £32.50.
Reviewed by
La Sierra University, Riverside, CA, USA.
Bryan’s book is important for readers interested in consciousness generally, and especially consciousness in English literature from 1350 to 1550. During this period literacy and the vernacular are on the rise, and increasingly women as well as men, many of them lay folk, constituted the audience of writers or works such as Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Piers Ploughman, John Lydgate, the Talkynge of the Love of God, Thomas Hoccleve, and the Cloud of Unknowing.
The texts Bryan examines serve as guides for self-improvement. Over and over they advise readers to see themselves. The image of the mirror is especially important. One gains authentic insight by gazing on the reflected image of God in oneself. Most of these texts reflect St. Augustine’s strategy of seeing the self in dialogue with God. He contrasts the perfection of God with his own imperfections. For Hilton this was a difficult task, for one is cut off from God through sin. Augustine’s trinity of memory, will, and understanding should help, but the task is difficult since sin hides the self deep in the soul. Piers in Piers Ploughman comes to see himself in the image of Christ, and yet Christ is and is not Piers. Lydgate remembers seeing the image of Christ as a defeated, broken man when he himself was a boy, and as a splendid conqueror when he becomes old. So how does Lady Memory help Lydgate connect the disparate figures? Can one rely on memory or is one bound to a false self? Lydgate’s desire to reach authentic self-consciousness is difficult. To achieve it he proceeds by a painful process of seeing and writing.
Passion meditation, in which one focuses on the gruesome details of the crucifixion, is an important meditative genre in this period. Horrible as such meditation is for readers in our own day, it forms a mirror through which late medieval readers come to see how they are like and unlike Christ. The fourteenth century Talkynge of the Love of God cites a prayer of the eleventh century Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm of Bec. The prayer contrasts the horrors of the speaker’s sin with the beauty of Christ. Unable to help himself, he appeals to the saints who will remember him. But the Talkynge itself concentrates more on the horrible self the author comes to see as he gazes on the suffering Christ than on the redemption the wounds promise.
These passion texts lead medieval readers to a desire for personal growth, and they help us to understand the excessive outbursts of a Margery of Kempe who is given to disruptive outburst of tears during church services and who adores the feet of Jesus, perhaps like Mary Magdalene. They assume that one’s soul will not be impressed with an image simply by seeing it. Fear and desire must concentrate that image so that it becomes engraved in memory. But the instance of Margery Kempe raises the question of what is genuine self-seeking and what mere self-absorption.
Vernacular devotion to the Passion also influences Julian, though her tone is more genial. She sees herself in the wounds of Christ and gains insight not through great personal labor, such as we find in the other texts, but from inspiration. Her visions are based on three kinds of knowing that partially betray Augustinian influence—the knowledge of God, the knowledge of herself as she is “’in kynde and in grace,’” and the knowledge of her own sin and weakness. In addition Julian reflects an interest in others. Her visions are meant for everyone and not for herself alone.
Bryan concludes by discussing Thomas Hoccleve’s secular and devotional work. Coming at the end of period about which Bryan writes, Hoccleve is important because he takes private and devotional strategies and applies them to social and political concerns. In his confessional works Hoccleve humorously exhibits his hard-to-know heart as a mirror for his patrons. For this favor he asks them to remember him financially. But he also feels genuine religious emotion. In his “Complaint of the Virgin” he borrows from the planctus Mariae to show the inconsolable grief of Mary, betrayed by God and forsaken even by her Son. Instead of limiting himself to subjective grief, he allows Mary to become so emptied of herself that she becomes an exemplary voice for the public as she transfers her own relation to Christ with onlookers at the crucifixion.
I am especially moved by Bryan’s discussion of the Cloud of Unknowing, a work that lies outside the book’s focus on seeing. The Cloud focuses not on seeing and knowing but on not-seeing and not-knowing. In part this is because this work addresses not the readers of the other works Bryan examine, populated often by people in active life who desire something less than the highest rungs of contemplation, but rather readers who desire to achieve the heights of contemplation. Such readers are usually monastic. Seeing, knowing, and language itself only hinder this audience. Not-seeing and not-knowing are pre-requisites for mystical union with God. Pure blindness is essential.
The book suggests alternative paths for late medieval readers. Will their path to self-knowledge lie through an Augustinian-like confession of ignorance and a hard push along the path of self-discipline and education? Or will they rather humbly recognize that language, even the English language of which they are growing increasingly fond and that is displacing Latin and French, is itself built on silence and returns to silence, that no language can probe the deepest secrets of their hearts?
What are we to make of this book? Augustinian-like seeing and self-understanding have been important not only in theology or religious devotion, but also in writing and psychology. It is central to most current projects for achieving authentic self-consciousness. Memory, will, and understanding are ways we use to understand ourselves and the world. We gain insight through the verbal mirrors texts provide us. But the Cloud reminds us that sometimes we learn more from those moments of stillness and silence that precede imagination. In such times, like little children, we rest in the blindness of no-thought and no-sight as we patiently await inspiration.