Chapter 1

The “Enigma” of Signification in “Figurative” Language

“Charite,” quod y tho, “þat is a thyng forsothe

That maistres commenden moche. Where may hit be yfounde?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

For thogh me souhte alle þe sektes of susturne and brethurne,

And fynde hym, but figuratyfly, a ferly me thynketh;

Hic in enigmate, tunc facie ad faciem.

And so y trowe treuly, by þat me telleth of charite.”

—William Langland, Piers Plowman,

16.286–97 ~ B 15.149–64

Whoever, then, can understand the word [uerbum], not only before it sounds, but even before the images of its sound are contemplated in thought—such a word belongs to no language, that is, to none of the so-called national languages, of which ours is Latin—whoever, I say, can understand this, can already see through this mirror and in this enigma [per hoc speculum atque in hoc aenigmate] some likeness of that Word of whom it was said: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God; and the Word was God.”

—Augustine, De Trinitate, 15.10.19

This is oo maner sight of Jhesu, as I seide bifore: not as he is, but clothed undir likenesse of werkes and of wordes, per speculum in enigmate (1 Cor. 13:12), bi a myrore and likenesse, as the apostil seith.

—Walter Hilton, Scale of Perfection, 2.43.3373–74

WHAT IS THE “mirror” through which, and “enigma” in which, the likeness of God may be glimpsed?¹ What mode of perception permits such a glimpse? For fourteenth-century writers, Christ’s joint divinity and humanity situates him ideally as mediator between God and mankind. As Julian of Norwich puts it, “be [by] the endles assent of the full accord of al the Trinite, the mid person would [desires to] be ground and hede [head] of this fair kinde [human race]” (53.34–36)² The very middleness of the hypostatic union serves to point in two directions at once: toward the likeness of God in humanity and towards a glimpse of God himself. To elucidate the paradox of how the divine and the human could meet in the hypostatic union, fourteenth-century writers turn, as Capgrave did after them, to a multilayered mode of thought. In their practice, a glimpse-enabling mode of perception inevitably draws on, or even consists primarily of, what today we commonly term a “figurative” (opposed to “literal”) sense of language. While what fourteenth-century writers believed about the signifying properties of language, particularly figurative language, is worth examining more generally, their use of language is of special interest wherever they engage the conceptual challenge of the Incarnation. This chapter lays a foundation for the others by focusing on specific engagements with Middle English’s figurative potential, considered in light of Augustinian language theory, critical theories of metaphor, and present-day cognitive models for language processing.

To tease out some complications of “figurative” with respect to Incarnational thought, we might look closely at some intrinsic claims of “per speculum in ænigmate” By means of metaphor, this verse from Paul’s epistle asserts that people cannot perceive God directly in his essential nature. In 1 Cor. 13, “mirror” and “enigma” come as the culmination of a meditation on the nature of charity. Both the seeking and the finding of God’s likeness are associated here with human interrelationships in the context of Christian community: God is revealed through the charitable acts of a charitable person. 1 Cor. 13 thus plays on the perhaps counterintuitive notion that God may best be glimpsed within humanity. In Christian thought, the Pauline epistle’s glimpse of God is commonly associated with the incarnate Christ, because both 1 Cor. 13 and 1 John 4 offer teachings on charity, and the latter expressly links charity with the Incarnation.³ While nothing in 1 Cor. 13 indicates specifically that the mirror and the enigma have to do with figurative language, the writers of the epigraphs to this chapter compellingly link “per speculum in ænigmate” (“through a mirror in an enigma”) not just to the incarnate Christ, as we might expect, but also to language itself. Their interest is partly Christological and partly centered on language’s capacity to signify; in thought and in practice they engage the question of how human language can convey the ineffable. In this context, “per speculum in ænigmate” also suggests that figurative language could verge on saying what otherwise can neither be articulated fully in language nor, perhaps, comprehended in thought.

Like “per speculum in ænigmate,” “the Word made flesh” (John 1:14) stands as an intriguing case of language that aims to model a difficult, abstract concept. Beyond its theological claim about God’s relationship to humanity, its implicit claim about language is that as linguistic expression, metaphor comprises more than the sum of its parts, perhaps even more than a (probably longer) literal paraphrase. This view of the power of figurative language is shared by fourteenth-century writers. For them, metaphor, like other nonliteral language, is not primarily ornamental but, rather, fundamental to a way of understanding, and they perceive language, embodiment, and cognition as mutually interrelated. As they consider the relationship between God and humanity, they demonstrate that they recognize perception as being based in bodily existence. Intriguingly, they also appear to believe cognition to be body-based. In this narrow respect, they align with the strand of cognitive linguistics that today identifies thought as fundamentally metaphorical by nature, and with a subset of that strand that considers cognition to be shaped by the nature and capacity of the bodily mechanisms (neurons, synapses, etc.) that enable thought.⁴ Both cognitive scientists and medieval writers share an interest in the relationship of cognition to embodiment, and both find solutions not grounded in Cartesian mind/body dualism.⁵ Metaphor studies today thus both speaks to and may benefit from considering the Incarnational thought and poetical strategies of fourteenth-century writers. Whereas the present-day theory of conceptual metaphor ends up virtually doing away with the literal/figurative divide, however, medieval writers make conspicuous use of the pointing and pointed referentiality such a dichotomy can reinforce, even where they frame the dichotomy in other terms, as “bodily” and “ghostly.” For them, the referential property of language— language’s capacity to say more, off the page—becomes very much the point.

In his important statement on allegoresis in De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine situates the pointing referentiality of language in the context of sign theory, whereby “a sign is a thing which, over and above the impression it makes on the senses, causes something else to come into the mind as a consequence of itself” (2.1.1).⁶ Such otherness, brought to mind in consequence of a prompt, might well describe what we perceive as “figural” about “figurative” language. Although Augustine wrote centuries before the writers who are the subject of this study, his thought resonates particularly strongly for the topic of Incarnational poetics, since he ties signification of this pointing kind explicitly to the incarnate Word in De Trinitate and elsewhere. Julian, Hilton, and Langland are commonly believed to have been influenced by Augustine, and the ultimate stage of Augustine’s thought on language and the Logos in De Trinitate intriguingly aligns with the thought process that underlies an Incarnational poetic, a point I shall elucidate in Chapter 5. Augustine’s sense of “enigma” as a special category of allegory, a view he states in De Trinitate, therefore stands as a useful shorthand for the main issue at stake in this chapter: how language conveys complex abstract thought, especially (but not exclusively) in metaphor. To understand the nature of the Trinity, Augustine links human language to the Word of God. His technique, like the techniques of fourteenth-century writers, hinges on his ideas about how language signifies, so it is with his technique and his ideas that I begin.

Hilton’s word “Jhesu” and Augustine’s word “Word”

In his De Trinitate Augustine wants to explain the nature of the Trinity to the best of his abilities, given that it can neither be described fully nor comprehended directly in its essence. In the process, he uses the term “enigma” to link “the Word” to human cognition. As he works through his model of how the mind [mens] works, he advances human language as a useful analogy for understanding the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity. His treatise builds upon trinities he identifies in creation, the human body, and then the human mind, in order to explain the workings of the uncreated Holy Trinity. To make his analogy effective, Augustine needs to define terms in a technical way specific to his larger argument about the relationship between God and humanity. In the following two quotations, he generates a specialized sense of the word “word” (not yet of the word “Word,” although he is working towards a link between “word” and “Word”).⁷ In the portion of his argument that precedes the first quotation, he has already discussed how this “word” is not necessarily linguistic, although it may be, and not necessarily a thought expressed in language, although it may be.

Whoever, then, can understand the word [uerbum], not only before it sounds, but even before the images of its sound are contemplated in thought—such a word belongs to no language, that is, to none of the so-called national languages, of which ours is Latin—whoever, I say, can understand this, can already see through this mirror and in this enigma [per hoc speculum atque in hoc aenigmate] some likeness of that Word of whom it was said: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God; and the Word was God.” (De Trinitate 15.10.19)

Here Augustine specifies that if expressed as language, the “word” does not necessarily belong to the language of the people; in his case, Latin.⁸ This “word,” he tells us, is initially a movement within the mind towards comprehension, a movement then given shape when a person thinks, finally given a form discernible by bodily sense when a person speaks or gestures. He further explains by analogy how the Word of God took on human nature, assuming a form but not changing substance. This step, with its focus on form and substance, is crucial for the transition he wants to make from the vernacular (for Augustine, Latin) to the Logos:

Hence, the word which sounds without is a sign of the word that shines within, to which the name “word” more properly belongs. For that which is produced by the mouth of the flesh is the sound of the word, and is itself also called “word,” because that inner word assumed it in order that it might appear outwardly. For just as our word in some way becomes a bodily sound by assuming that in which it may be manifested to the senses of men, so the Word of God was made flesh by assuming that in which He might also be manifested to the senses of men. And just as our word becomes a sound and is not changed into a sound, so the Word of God indeed becomes flesh, but far be it from us that it should be changed into flesh. For by assuming it, not by being consumed in it, this word of ours becomes a sound, and that Word became flesh. (15.11.20)

Theologically, the important point here is that the Word of God did not change substantially (in essence) in the hypostatic union. Augustine’s technique of defining “word” in a narrow sense is crucial, however, to maintaining the analogy. A “word,” in Augustine’s sense, must be unchangeable and must have existed before thought, just as Augustine believes the Second Person of the Trinity is unchangeable and uncreated, and has always existed.

Augustine goes on to say that when we seek a likeness by which to see “the Word of God” “through a mirror as in an enigma,” we should look to our internal word, not to the outer word manifested through the senses.⁹ He treats “mirror” and “enigma” as he does the word “word”; they carry technical senses related to the interpretation of figurative language. For Augustine, in Paul’s “we see now through a mirror in an enigma,” the word “mirror” cues an image or likeness to be interpreted, and “enigma” cues an intense cognitive puzzle.¹⁰

Using the concept of form imposed on a word when enunciated, Augustine highlights the distinction between creator and created, begotten and made, the true language spoken by God and human languages. While his point relies on the notion that some aspect of God’s truth is innate and resides within the mind, the way he chooses to put forward his analogy reveals something of his thought about the nature of language itself. His theoretical focus, the inability of human language to express the divine in plain speech, is demonstrated in practice as well: he needs a specialized sense of the word “word” in order to say what cannot be said directly about “the Word of God.” Only the reader who understands that the word “word” is supercharged with sense will be able to glean one sense from another, through a mirror, in a trope.

Each of the writers who are the primary subjects of my investigation similarly uses language on occasion in a technical and specialized way, sometimes drawing from a word’s polysemous nature, sometimes investing words, phrases, or images with context-specific meaning. This process is characteristic of most writing, of course, and in particular of poetry. Nevertheless, the concept of the Incarnation, having human form as an important focus, invites and even necessitates special formal awareness, of which this is one example. Insofar as Augustine capitalizes on both linguistic and rhetorical form to make his analogy, his strategy proved a useful model for later writers interested in the Incarnation.

In Book I of The Scale of Perfection, for instance, Hilton chooses the word “Jhesu” instead of the word “word,” but for a similar purpose in that he wants to define the word “Jhesu” not in its ordinary sense but in a way specific to the new devotion to the Holy Name, which he is promoting here.¹¹ Note that Hilton has imitated Augustine’s technique and even some of his wording, as he insists on what sort of word he does not mean:

I schal telle oon [one] word for alle whiche thou schalt seke, desire, and fynde, for in that word is al that thou hast loste. This word is Jhesu. I mene not oonli this word Jhesu peynted upon the wal, or writen bi letres on the book, or fourmed bi lippes in soun of the mouthe, or feyned in the herte bi traveil [work] of mynde; for on this maner wise may a man oute of charité fynde hym. But I mene Jhesu Crist, that blissid persoone, God and man, son of Marie, that glorious virgyne, that is al goodnesse, endelees wisdom, love, and swettenesse, thi joie, thi worschipe, and thyn ai [ever] lastynge blisse, thi God, thi Lord, and thy savacioun. (1.46.1314–21)

In his reiterated insistence that he means not the word spelled out on a wall¹² or in a book, not formed by the lips in sound of the mouth, not fantasized internally by the work of thought, Hilton reveals his indebtedness to Augustine’s concept of the word behind the word.¹³ While Hilton’s ultimate tenor, like Augustine’s, is the Second Person incarnate, Hilton is not so interested as Augustine was in investigating the cognitive dimensions of language; rather, he wants to tie Augustinian language theory to a particular and relatively new devotion (the Holy Name). Like Augustine, Hilton does want to differentiate between human language and the Logos. At the same time, he draws an analogy between the English word “Jhesu” and God’s language of love: the meditational practice of focusing on the Holy Name is intended to entice the devout into a more intimate relationship with God.

Just as Augustine had, Hilton sets up this passage by situating it in the context of the mirror and enigma of 1 Cor. 13. However, the search for Jesus within the self comes within Hilton’s larger project to enable a devout individual “to recovere agen his worthynesse, and reforme in him the ymage of the Trinité” (1.45.1277–78). That link between “image” and “re-form” might in itself be enough to evoke the concept of humanity being made in God’s likeness (Gen. 5:1, the Old Testament passage to which 1 Cor. 13 alludes). Hilton goes further, though, by asserting that while no one may regain the state of innocence that the Fall of Adam and Eve destroyed forever, still, “though we myghten nevere geete it here fulli, yit we schulde desire that we myght recovere here lyvand [while living] a figure and a likenesse of that dignité, that oure soule myght be reformed, as it were in a schadewe, bi grace to the ymage of the Trinité” (1.45.1283–86). The reference to “figure” and “likeness” works like the “mirror” and “enigma” of 1 Cor. 13, here signaling a lived state that can be similar to but not fully the essence of a (now lost) state of innocence. “Shadow,” on the other hand, sets up a reference Hilton completes much later, in Scale 2, when he refers to the hypostatic union as a shadow; for Hilton, “shadow” is an Incarnational reference.¹⁴ So in Hilton’s view, the likeness of God lost in the Fall appears to be tantalizingly similar to the Incarnate Word, meditation on whom can enable the re-forming of the soul. Further, Hilton draws on the larger context of 1 Cor. 13 in a way Augustine does not, by noting that the manner of sight he advocates is tied to charity. The word painted on the wall, written in a book, formed by lips, thought in the heart—all these, he says, may be found by those who are “oute of charité.” While Hilton’s focus on reforming the self might seem to isolate devotion into a private exercise, his attention to the prevalent theme of 1 Cor. 13 (what charity is and how to practice it) reveals that the search for Jesus in the self is also a search for Jesus in humanity.

Given that Augustine’s word “word” appears to be an intellectual ancestor for the mode of thought I describe in this book, we can expect the “enigma” of Incarnational poetics to be expressed occasionally in specialized language such as Hilton uses, and to have a strong focus on words as signs that point deliberately and conspicuously to a reality beyond themselves. Further, such an “enigma” is likely to be found not only in the sense of the words themselves (their meanings) but also in the way in which an Incarnational poetic is expressed, in metaphor or figurative language that similarly indicates some “otherness” beyond its obvious sense, such as in 1 Cor. 13 and John 1:14. As such, it represents an intriguing example of the supereffable.

I wish to linger here for a moment over both the concept of otherness in language and the Pauline notion of charity as an aid to finding a likeness of God in humanity, in order to look in close detail at how Langland works through and reworks his understanding of the two. Otherness and likeness are interwoven in a most interesting way in the first epigraph to this chapter, Will’s search for charity in passus 16 of Piers Plowman. This passage highlights the act of seeking a glimpse of God (a theological problem) through and by means of thought expressed in language—in, that is, self-consciously formalistic language (a rhetorical or poetical problem). By the prominent yet somewhat enigmatic use of the word “figuratively” (l. 296), the passage also demonstrates language pointing to something beyond itself, something to be sought (a linguistic and a philosophical problem). In this context, the intriguing word “figuratively” encodes the expectation that the sought thing cannot be comprehended fully at once in its own nature but must be understood by means of something-it-isn’t, expressed in language-it-isn’t—perhaps in and through time as a series of something-it-isn’ts, the “eddying back of sense” of an Incarnational poetic, as I shall discuss in Chapter 5. My focus here is on how Langland experiments with the way in which language signifies, as he ponders a glimpse of God through the absence or presence of Christ’s face.

Langland’s “figuratyfly”

Did Langland invent the vernacular English word “figuratively”? If he did, what did he mean by it? In Latin, of course, the adjectival form had been used to describe figural (as opposed to literal) language,¹⁵ and certainly “figure” had been around in Middle English as a noun for quite some time, in a number of senses. They included, for example, “a written character,” whether mathematical, alphabetical, or numerical;¹⁶ the typological sense of “prefiguration” or “foreshadowing,” needed for the exegetical method used to connect the Old with the New Testament by reading events in Christ’s life as “antitypes” that “fulfill” their corresponding “types” in Old Testament history;¹⁷ and three senses that are particularly important to medieval theories of cognition: “shape, form, appearance,” “representation, image, likeness,” and “form as opposed to matter; abstract form, concept.” One sense with special focus on linguistic expression itself, “a parable, a comparison or metaphor,” appears to have been under development in Langland’s day, together with its adjectival and adverbial forms (figurative/figural, figuratively/figurally), meaning “allegorical, metaphoric, figurative, symbolic” and “in a figurative manner.” Readers of Chaucer may remember the General Prologue’s strongly approving portrait of the Parson, who preaches from scripture: “And this figure he added eek [also] therto, / That if gold ruste, what shal iren [iron] do?”¹⁸ The particular “figure” he adds to scripture is, of course, a metaphor.

While Augustine had maintained a distinction between the phrases “per speculum” and “in ænigmate” from 1 Cor. 13:12, in the C-text of Piers Plowman Langland intriguingly appears to draw both into this one word, “figuratively.”¹⁹ What he means by that word, however, is open to some debate. The passage as it appears in C is substantially different from the comparable passage in B.²⁰ Those differences show Langland actively thinking about the nature of figurative language as well as about charity, and doing so not only in the abstract but more particularly in the context of fourteenth-century England and its vernacular. Body and language are linked in “figuratyfly,” via 1 Cor. 13. It would be useful, then, to consider the B passage together with C.

In B, part of the Pauline text is in English (“per speculum,” written as “in a Mirour”) and the rest in Latin:

. . . in a Mirour:

Hic in enigmate, tunc facie ad faciem. (B.15.162–62a)

C retains the same Latin line but offers a different translation of “per speculum”:

And fynde hym, but figuratyfly . . . :

Hic in enigmate, tunc facie ad faciem. (16.296–96a)

“Mirour” in B is a direct translation from the Latin “speculum”; “figuratyfly” in C, however, results in a more challenging reading of 1 Cor. 13, collapsing into one word both mirror and enigma. Although “figuratyfly” here must surely emphasize a difference between that which is sought and that which is found, the word sustains more than one possible interpretation. On the one hand, “figuratyfly” points towards the linguistic puzzle of figurative language, or of typology: “And find him (i.e., Christ) but only in the form of a figure,” that is to say, in some conceptual, nonmaterial, form, or “in enigmate,” specifically opposed to “facie ad faciem (face to face), in the flesh. On the other, “figuratyfly” also suggests the materiality of the mirror (“speculum”) of 1 Cor. 13:12, a mirror being that in which one sees one’s “figure,” the face in particular. As Will looks for Christ and sees a reflection of his own humanity, Langland skillfully renders in one word both the notion of one’s own (human, fleshly) form as seen in a mirror and the pointing otherness of language: form and format coincide in “figuratyfly.” In both versions, to be sure, the general gist of the passage is similar. Will is complaining that even those in religious orders, those who, above all others, should lead lives patterned after Christ’s and so should be the best examples of charity—even they do not practice charity as they ought to (or, perhaps, at all). While this general sense is clear, the two versions approach the message with differing resonances. The question remains, when Will says “figuratyfly,” how much is this passage about language?

In C, Will is talking to Liberum Arbitrium (Anima, in B) about seeking Charity (Christ, in B):

“Charite,” quod y tho, “þat is a thyng forsothe

That maistres commenden moche. Where may hit be yfounde?

Ich haue yleued in londone monye longe 3eres

And fonde y neuere in faith, as freres hit precheth,

Charite þat chargeth nauht ne chyt thow me greue hym,

As poul in his pistul of hym bereth wittenesse:

Non inflatur, non est Ambiciosa.

I knewe neuere, by Crist, clerk noþer lewed

That he ne askede aftur his and oþerewhiles coueytede

Thyng that nedede hym nauhte and nyme hit yf a myhte.

For thogh me souhte alle þe sektes of susturne and brethurne

And fynde hym, but figuratyfly, a ferly me thynketh:

Hic in enigmate, tunc facie ad faciem.

And so y trowe treuly, by þat me telleth of charite.” (16.286–97)

“‘Charity,’ I said then, ‘is a thing, truly, that learned men commend highly. Where may it be found? I have lived in London many long years, and I never found, truly [or, with regard to faith], as friars preach it: charity [i.e., a charitable man], who takes no notice, nor quarrels, though people grieve him, as Paul in his epistle of him [i.e., charity] bears witness: ‘is not puffed up, is not ambitious’ [1 Cor. 13:4–5]. I never knew, by Christ, cleric or unlearned person who did not demand his own [material goods] and sometimes coveted a thing that he did not need, and take it, if he might! For although one might scrutinize all humanity/ all the religious orders of sisters and of brothers and encounter him only figuratively, a wonder I think it; ‘now in an enigma, then face to face’ [1 Cor. 13:12]. And so I believe truly, according to what people say about Charity.”

Will is complaining about his contemporaries’ failure to live without consistently putting their own material needs ahead of those of others. In particular, his complaint addresses what he perceives as clerical hypocrisy. “Secte,” a complicated word in Piers Plowman, in this context embraces the religious orders (“alle þe sektes of susturne and brethurne”): Will’s focus is on clerics. In its sense of “a group of followers,” “secte” has affinities with the verb “sechen,” “to follow,” here additionally rendered in “souhte”: those in religious orders “follow” Christ in a special way—or so they ought.²¹ According to Will’s complaint, neither charity in its abstract nature nor an example of a charitable person is to be found among the religious other than “figuratively,” and that is a particular wonderment (“ferly”) because among Christ’s followers is precisely where one would expect to find the best exemplar of charity, perhaps even Christ himself.²² So there is a satirical and pejorative tone to “figuratively” here: we expect something more like charity than we actually get, Will feels.²³

“Figuratively” correlates aptly with the Pauline text that follows it on line 16.296a in two ways: first, taking “enigma” in Augustine’s sense as “an allegory that is particularly difficult to interpret,” “figuratyfly” highlights allegoresis, or reading for a figurative sense: the clergy are not following Christ’s life to the letter, as it were, as they would do if they interpreted the “text” of his life, or scripture, correctly. Second, taking “figure” in its sense of “human form,” in particular the face, “figuratyfly” anticipates the “face to face” meeting in heaven. Lingering behind both aspects of “figure,” in the shadow, as it might be, is a sense of Christ in the flesh, someone whose body can be followed, or whose face was once seen by his followers, whose face will be seen again (and on that day it would be better for you if you had followed him closely while you could).²⁴

The face of Christ is even more conspicuous by its absence in the B-text, where “in a mirror” is as close as Will has come, he tells us, to seeing Christ. Here it is important to note that this time Will is more specifically looking for a charitable man than for the abstract quality of charity. Toward the end of the B-text passage, Will changes the nature of his search: instead of seeking the charitable man alone, he seeks to see Christ in his companions (though in one sense, this is simply another way of saying the same thing). What he sees is like himself “in a mirror”:

“What is charite?” quod I þo. “a childissh þyng,” he seide:
“Nisi efficiamini sicut paruuli non intrabitis in regnum celorum?’25
Wiþouten fauntelte or folie a fre liberal wille.”	childishness; foolishness;generous
“Where sholde men fynde swich a frend wiþ so fre an herte?	generous
I haue lyued in londe,” quod I, “my name is longe wille,	lived
And fond I neuere ful charite, bifore ne bihynde.	found; complete
Men beþ merciable to mendinaunt3 and to poore,	are; mendicants
And wollen lene þer þei leue lelly to ben paied.	give where they expect honestly
Ac charite þat Poul preiseþ best, and moost plesaunt to oure Saueour—
Non inflatur, non est ambiciosa, non querit que sua sunt—26
I sei3 nevere swich a man, so me god helpe,	saw; such
That he ne wolde aske after his, and ouþerwhile coueite	would not; other times
Thyng þat neded hym nojt and nyme it if he my3te.	he did not need; take it
Clerkes kenne me þat crist is in alle places;	clerics teach
Ac I sei3 hym neuere sooþly but as myself in a Mirour:	saw; truly
Hic in enigmate, tunc facie ad faciem.
And so I trowe trewely, by þat men telleth of charite,	believe
It is no3t chaumpions fight ne chaffare as I trowe.” (B.15.149–64)	business

With the example of charity to mendicants and the poor and the reference to “chaffare” (“exchange, trade”), what sounds like a satirical twist (“wollen lene þer þei leue lelly to ben paied,” “will give [only] where they believe justly to be [re]paid”) merely plays out, rather literally, 1 Cor. 13:3 (“if I should distribute all my goods to feed the poor . . . and have not charity”).

In this B passage, with the famous “signature” in line 152,²⁷ Langland appears to be less ambitious about what he can accomplish than in the corresponding C passage. Its most challenging moment occurs in the analogue to C’s “figuratyfly”: “Ac I sei3 hym neuere sooþly but as myself in a Mirour.” One way to read this line results in a solipsistic Will gazing, solitary, at himself. Line 152, with its focus on Will himself, perhaps reinforces this reading. More probably, however, the sentence carries the implication that a mirror reflects imperfectly, as a medieval mirror (possibly metal instead of glass) might do: “but I never saw him [Christ] truly, except as [I see] myself in a mirour.”²⁸ Here in B, the possibility of seeing Christ in another person seems more solid than it does in C’s roundabout phrasing. The failure of that search is all the more stark when the lack of Christ’s face here (“Ac I sei3 hym nevere sooþly”) is immediately contrasted with the promised sight in heaven (“tunc facie ad faciem”). By comparing B and C, we can see that Langland was thinking through ways of juxtaposing two failures, one (in B) that scripture leads us to expect (human limitations prevent us from perceiving as God does) and the other (in C) a surprise (the clergy—and indeed every other person Will knows—are not charitable). In both cases, his chosen means of putting these two points across draws attention to Christ’s face, even though the material face is absent, as well as to “enigma.” C’s “figuratyfly” seems the more striking when considered in conjunction with B’s “in a mirour”; Langland quite deliberately puts the focus on language’s signifying nature in C, a point that emerges more clearly when one reads C just after having read B.

Language, embodiment, cognition: all are linked inseparably in Langland’s use of “figuratively.” Like the mirror and enigma of 1 Cor. 13, “figuratively” is not so much ambiguous as it is overloaded with meaning. This raises the question: could Langland have achieved the same effect in other words? Is figuration ornamental and thus extralinguistic, or is it fundamental to language (or, possibly, to thought)? The answer is not inconsequential for medieval writers who find an extra level of complexity in paradox of the sort expressed in “the Word was made flesh,” in part because divinity and humanity are analogously compressed, or coalesced, or expressed in the hypostatic union. For medieval writers, one aspect of the issue can be framed in practical terms: if God’s language of love finds expression in the Incarnation, how can poets then write, as nearly as possible, in the likeness of God’s language? Because they write only infrequently in theoretical terms about their strategies, to elucidate their thought about the signifying potential of metaphor it will be helpful to look first at a range of ways metaphor has been theorized more recently. In particular, we should consider two questions at length: first, can metaphor and other tropes convey meaning that cannot be paraphrased? Second, is a meaningful distinction to be made between “literal” and “figurative” language?

Metaphor: Ornamental or Fundamental?

Metaphor lies in a contested area of linguistics (or, depending on one’s taxonomies, rhetoric). Up to the present day, even what a metaphor is has generated considerable debate. According to a long-lived way of thinking about metaphor that dates back to Aristotle, metaphor, like figurative language more generally, is an ornamental aspect of style. “Say it more plainly,” “Be more direct”: these sorts of responses to metaphor suggest a mindset in which supereffability would be considered poetical, at best, and superfluous, at worst. At the opposite pole, increasing numbers of cognitive theorists assert that metaphor is fundamental to thought, not an “add-on” to language. My intent here is first to lay out the nature of that debate, then to consider where fourteenth-century writers stand relative to these arguments.

Most people recognize some sort of distinction between the uses of flew in the following sentences:

The crow flew across the field.

The boy flew across the field.

Most are likely to agree that the first instance uses the literal sense of the word, and the second a figurative. How do we recognize the difference, however, when the structure of these sentences is virtually identical? The answer must lie in what we know about crows and boys relative to the verb, “to fly.” We bring to a linguistic situation something of our knowledge of the world and apply that knowledge in differentiating between the senses, literal and figurative.²⁹

To approach this issue from another angle, suppose I announce that “Richard is a lion.”³⁰ How would you decide whether or not the sentence contains a metaphor, given that I might be talking about a person or, perhaps, an animal? The sentence as applied to a tawny big cat includes precisely the same words, in the same sequence, as the sentence as applied to a human king of England. Probabilities come into play: without further context, most people would read the sentence as figurative in part because I have used a rather common metaphor, in part because Richard is an unusual name for an animal, and in part, perhaps, because real lions are less frequently a topic of conversation in most settings than are people. Context does make a difference: if “Richard is a lion” and we know Richard to be the king of England, to have hands and feet rather than four paws, to speak rather than roar, we are likely to reject the notion that he is a tawny big cat and cast about for some other way to make sense of the word “lion,” probably, in this instance, by associations we are accustomed to make between lions and courage, lions and pride, lions and ferocity, lions and royalty, perhaps even lions and England.

Since I. A. Richards introduced them in 1936, the terms “tenor” and “vehicle” have provided a useful means to talk about what happens, technically, in a metaphor such as this one. In Richards’s terms, “lion” is the vehicle (word that does the pointing) that carries the tenor (“other sense,” not directly on the page) of “courage,” or “pride,” or “ferocity,” or “royalty,” or a combination of these and other possible meanings. In this model, the metaphor “Richard is a lion” carries a sense other than what it “literally” says, pointing to a meaning, or range of “figurative” meanings, other than “tawny big cat.” According to Richards, the juncture of tenor and vehicle in a metaphor says something that a literal paraphrase does not; metaphor therefore has a cognitive component in addition to its linguistic ones, and that cognitive outcome results from a “figural” reading.³¹

Under such a definition of metaphor, is it possible that metaphors can signify differently, not just in various contexts but also in diverse modes of thought? The special juncture of theological, philosophical, psychological, linguistic, and semantic issues brought together in “the Word made flesh” makes writers interested in Incarnation theology a particularly appealing source for study of metaphor. Obviously, they can draw on established traditions that offer technical expressions or methods of meditation, but is there more to their language than that? Do writers who seek to express the supereffable use metaphor in the same way as those who have more mundane things to say? In his sensitive and nuanced study of how the English mystics, including Julian, Hilton, and the Cloud-author, use language, Wolfgang Riehle asserts that metaphor, in mystical tradition, operates differently from ordinary linguistic metaphor in taking into account Origen’s theorizing of “spiritual senses” analogous to the bodily senses:

. . . English texts are continuing a trend which has a long tradition in Latin mysticism, which indeed goes back to Origen who developed the theological doctrine of the spiritual senses, and who seems to have held that man does not merely possess physical sense organs but spiritual ones as well. . . . If the mystics now frequently use the language of earthly sense perceptions in a spiritual meaning when relating their personal experiences, then it would be wrong, as we have already indicated, to understand and assess this language simply as the use of metaphor in the normal sense of the term, for this is no mere makeshift language but rather one in which the mystical experience itself takes place. In theological terms the “spiritual senses” are not just five powers permanently residing in the soul—by analogy with the physical senses—but are temporary spiritual acts, ultimately effected by divine grace. In these acts it seems to the soul that it is experiencing a supernatural object which reveals itself as if it were present in some concrete manner. Hence this spiritual sense perception can certainly become similar to that of the physical senses, and therefore the language which expresses such experiences is something rather different than mere metaphor.³² (emphasis mine)

Riehle’s implication is that metaphor’s cognitive outcomes can be contingent on the frame of mind or practice of a writer or a reader. “This is no mere makeshift language but rather one in which the mystical experience itself takes place,” Riehle says, indicating, it would seem, that mystical experience and language are linked, or, to put it another way, individuals can experience mystical union with God as metaphorical language. Is Riehle right to think that “the language which expresses such experiences is something rather different than mere metaphor”? The answer will lie in what one thinks metaphor is, or does. Under a theory in which metaphor is thought to be ornamental, “mystical” metaphor could perhaps have a different outcome from “ordinary” metaphor, but it seems it would have to be, in reality, something other than metaphor. The mildly pejorative “mere makeshift language” Riehle applies to metaphor suggests he is thinking in these terms. Riehle’s point of view is especially interesting when considered alongside the Richards model, however. If meaning is added in the interaction between tenor and vehicle, is “mystical” language fundamentally different from other language? Does it not have the “literal” and “figurative” senses important for Richards’s model? Certainly it may make use of technical components ordinary discourse does not— one might need to define the word “word,” for instance, or “spiritual senses” (as Riehle acknowledges Origen did)—but such an option is available to all writers, not just to mystics. In fact, fourteenth-century English writers who were not themselves mystics helped to create the availability in English of precisely this sort of theological discourse. Nevertheless, both Hilton and Julian talk about a bodily/spiritual dichotomy similar to the one Riehle describes, one surely derived from Origen’s “spiritual senses.” While in some ways the dualism it offers appears likely to align with the literal/figurative divide, in fact the bodily/spiritual dichotomy is not entirely compatible with the literal/figurative model. In addition, the bodily/spiritual dichotomy is of particular interest for Incarnational poetics, because, unlike the literal/figurative model, it is based in embodied experience, and it also is not grounded in the Cartesian mind/body dualism. While the notion that metaphor might have a theological dimension may seem like a conceptual add-on to language to many (though not all) moderns, the notion was entirely commonplace in the Middle Ages. Before looking more closely at the bodily/spiritual dichotomy, however, it is important to understand certain complications of the literal/figurative divide on which Richards’s model of metaphor depends. This brings us to the second of the two questions I posed just before this section: is a meaningful distinction to be made between “literal” and “figurative” language?

The Problem of the Literal Sense

A major, ongoing problem with thinking about language as having literal and figurative senses has been to define those senses. A second problem is that we still do not know how we recognize a difference between figurative and literal uses of language. In my example of “Richard is a lion,” I considered a figurative sense only after I rejected a literal sense: Richard is not a tawny big cat; therefore, I need to find another way to make sense of the sentence. This “literal-first” model of cognition has a long history. In Book 3 of On Rhetoric, for instance, Aristotle classified metaphor as an aspect of style; in his view it is important, therefore, that the comparison be fitting and proportionate. Judgment of those qualities depends on evaluation of the literal sense, which must be readily observed: “One should speak both epithets and metaphors that are appropriate, and this will be from an analogy. If not, the expression seems inappropriate because opposites are most evident when side-by-side each other” (On Rhetoric 3.2.9). While Aristotle’s attention here is less on the figurative sense per se than on the nature of the comparison put into play, he goes on to demonstrate that suitable metaphors draw on apt comparisons. Later he notes that the value of metaphor comes in its invoking a new idea (most obvious when the “opposites” are yoked together), and its success depends on the swiftness and clarity with which it puts that idea across:

To learn easily is naturally pleasant to all people, and words signify something, so whatever words create knowledge in us are the pleasantest. . . . Metaphor most brings about learning; for when he calls old age “stubble,” he creates understanding and knowledge through the genus, since both old age and stubble are species of the genus of things that have lost their bloom. . . . Those things are necessarily urbane, both in lexis and in enthymemes, which create quick learning in our minds. That is why superficial enthymemes are not popular with audiences (by superficial I mean those that are altogether clear and which there is no need to ponder), nor are those which, when stated, are unintelligible, but those are popular of which there is either immediate understanding when they are spoken, even if that was not previously existing, or the thought follows soon after; for then some kind of learning takes place, but in neither of the other cases. (On Rhetoric 3.10.2–4)

So it is the “riddle” aspect of a metaphor (Augustine’s “enigma”) that makes it so useful for conveying that new idea, but that new idea comes about because of the swift comparison we make between two known things whose literal sense we process to arrive at the aptness of the comparison (On Rhetoric 3.2.12: “metaphors are made like riddles”). According to Aristotle, good metaphors are didactic in that we learn from them, and pleasurable in that what we learn is expressed in a new way we grasp readily because of the apt comparison. All this depends on immediate recognition of the literal sense, then quick recognition of the figurative sense.

Such a “literal-first” model would seem to render “figurative” problematic at the expense of “literal”; it presumes we recognize “literal” when we see it, and that “literal” is the normative mode for interpretation. Why use “figurative” when you could use “literal”? An extension of that way of thinking pushes towards “figurative is ornamental.” This view of language was certainly available to fourteenth-century writers. Chaucer, for instance, makes use of it in his House of Fame, where figuration appears as an ornamental form of language, an instance of high style:

Telle me this now feythfully,

Have y not preved thus symply,

Without any subtilite

Of speche, or gret prolixite

Of termes of philosophie,

Of figures of poetrie,

Or colours of rethorike? (House of Fame, ll. 853–59)

Chaucer more directly associates figuration with high rhetorical style when the Host admonishes, in the Clerk’s Prologue:

Telle us som murie thyng of aventures.	pleasant
Youre termes, youre colours, and youre figures,
Keepe hem in stoor til so be ye endite	store; until the time when
Heigh style, as whan that men to kynges write.
Speketh so pleyn at this tyme, we yow preye,
That we may understonde what ye seye. (Clerk’s Prologue, ll. 15–20)

In these examples, figurative language is ornamental but not simply ornamental; it carries social and class implications embedded in hierarchy. It tends to privilege learning and, perhaps, masks deception. These examples in isolation do something of a disservice to Chaucer, of course, whose imaginative and playful verse betrays a highly nuanced celebration of language’s capacity to signify simultaneously in more than one direction; they do, however, demonstrate that Chaucer was willing to use the literal/figurative model for satirical purposes. In this passage, the Host articulates the very requests to which I referred at the beginning of this section: “say it plainly”; “be direct.” Don’t speak like a poet, or an academic! Although writers easily intoxicated by language may find it difficult to bear in mind, we all know someone who has little patience with metaphor and is apt to sound very much like the Host.

Under the literal/figurative model, however, even determining the literal sense is surprisingly problematical. This is an intensely important, if counterintuitive, point. In the example of “Richard is a lion,” “lion” as a vehicle pointed to a whole range of tenors. However, multiplicity of meaning does not lie solely within the figurative sense: for example, how do we determine the literal sense of the sentence, “Richard is a lion,” even when we know Richard is a tawny big cat? As a signifier, “lion” can point to more than one meaning even on a literal level: emphatically a singular example of the species, for instance (“Richard is a lion [not several lions]”), or a male of the species (“Richard is a lion [not a lioness]”). Moreover, many words also have literal meanings that could as easily be defined as figurative, depending on the taxonomy we establish for a word’s definition.³³

To take one fourteenth-century example, what is “the literal sense” of Julian’s famous assertion that she sees God “in a point”?: “And after this I saw God in a poynte, that is to sey, in myn vnderstondyng, be which sight I saw that he is in al things” (11.4–5). “Poynte” here is sometimes translated as “an instant,” an [immediate] point in time; that, of course, is a real possibility, and could be considered a literal sense.³⁴ By contrast, the MED cites “I saw God in a poynte” as an example under 3c, “a geometric point,” rather than under 4a, “a brief period of time,” where “in a point” is also defined as “in an instant.”³⁵ Julian has been describing, in a rich and ambiguous series of images, what God looks like to her. Yet, her further explanation (“that is to sey”) moves in the direction of a spatial distinction, “in myn vnderstondyng.”³⁶ Does she mean, “within the limits of my capacity to understand, I saw God in an instant,” or does she mean, “I saw God in a ‘poynte,’ and that ‘poynte’ is [spatially] in my understanding”? This reading draws on the intimacy of interiority in a way that “in an instant” does not. The spatial dimension is reinforced by her further description of the lesson of her vision, that “he is in al things,” which prompts an analogy between the spatial qualities of “in” understanding and “in” things. Where is “in myn vnderstondyng”? Within her mind? Does “myn vnderstondyng” denote a specific, if in this case internalized, location, a point at the center of the self? To put that another way, are conceptual locations necessarily figurative ones? Or, to go in a different direction, is Julian’s “poynte” closer to “a critical or decisive moment or situation, a crisis” (MED 5a), or even a “state of being, condition, situation, disposition” (MED 10a) (“I’ve come to the point where I feel it is useless to go on”; “I am put to a poynt þat pouerte hatte [is called]”³⁷)? Julian has certainly “come to the point” where she understands something about God that she did not understand before; however we translate “poynte,” this, surely, is true. Is that condition of being (“come to a point”) a figurative sense based on “time” or “place” or a literal sense in its own right? One delight of language is that several, or indeed all, of these definitions may be simultaneously true. The word “point” is certainly polysemous, and a skillful writer, such as Julian, can readily take advantage of the malleable quality of the literal sense.

The problem of recognizing “the literal sense” is real, then, although often overlooked, and was established well before Julian wrote about seeing God “in a poynte.” Multiple signification can be as much a characteristic of the literal level as it is of the figurative, as was acknowledged by scholastic philosophers and theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas and Nicholas of Lyre, in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries after the rediscovery of Aristotle.³⁸ In De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine similarly noted the figurative potential of the literal sense, although he believed it to be distinguishable from figurative language, which he describes as enigmatical (allegorical).³⁹

That figurative potential in the literal sense is of real interest to fourteenth-century writers, who exploit it for poetical, theological, and philosophical effect, as Julian’s “poynte” and Langland’s “figuratyfly” demonstrate. It is also of interest to present-day cognitive linguists, who have done away with the literal/figurative divide by asserting that metaphor is fundamental to cognition, using “conceptual metaphor,” or “the embodied mind theory of metaphor,” as theorized by George Lakoff and others. In their view, metaphor is primarily a cognitive function and only secondarily a linguistic one. According to this model, people think in metaphorical terms; all thought is metaphorical in nature. Behind any particular linguistic expression of a metaphor, then, lies a root version of the metaphor, a “conceptual metaphor.” In this theory, embodiment is directly responsible for the cognitive processes that interpret language as meaning something other than what it appears to say directly, because “there are important links between people’s recurring bodily experiences, their metaphorical projections of these image schema to better structure many abstract concepts, and the language used to talk about these concepts.”⁴⁰ Because such a view of language processing denies a disjunction in levels of meaning, it also implicitly denies the notion that figuration is mere ornament. Although I have not seen this acknowledged directly by cognitive linguists, if figuration is fundamental to thought, there can be no meaningful literal/figurative divide.⁴¹

Linguists phrase conceptual metaphors as a simple declarative sentence, usually of the “A is B” type, and set them off typographically for ready recognition. As an example of a conceptual metaphor, consider how common it is in English to use the verb that describes the sensory perception of sight as a verb describing cognitive perception: “I see what you mean,” or “in my view,” or, possibly, “I saw God in a poynte,” or “I sei3 hym neuere sooþly but as myself in a Mirour.” Eve Sweetser has argued that the conceptual metaphor UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING, a subset of the more general conceptual metaphor THE MIND IS THE BODY, explains the semantic shift from the sense “see” to “know” across diverse Indo-European languages where diachronic linguistics can supply no such relation, but where the root metaphor UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING is a shared feature of Indo-European conceptual systems.⁴²

Conceptual metaphor also expands the range of metaphor itself. Aristotle’s model draws together two somewhat-like, somewhat-unlike things in a comparison that could be phrased in a literal fashion. The Richards model retains the quality of language pointing to something other than itself that we saw in Augustine’s sign theory. By admitting that meaning is gained in bringing tenor and vehicle together, the model widens the scope of what metaphor is and does, opening the door to a cognitive component to metaphor. Conceptual metaphor vastly expands what counts as metaphor: if we think metaphorically, everything we think is grounded in root metaphors. So metaphor means something fundamentally different to Lakoff, it would seem, from what it does to Riehle, for instance. Riehle’s view aligns well, however, with another branch of metaphor studies, epitomized by John Searle’s use of speech act theory, that takes an entirely different tack by situating metaphor’s meaning in its use. Like Lakoff’s conceptual metaphor approach, this school of thought is inherently antithetical to the literal versus figurative dichotomy.⁴³

I have explained that metaphor can be thought of as an ornamental feature of language or a fundamental aspect of thought, that both “literal” and “figurative” are problematically polyvalent, and that the theory of conceptual metaphor appears to be incompatible with the literal/figurative duality. I deferred considering the dichotomy Julian and Hilton use in place of literal and figurative when they talk about the problem of signification, “bodily” (material) versus “ghostly” (spiritual) sight or understanding. To clarify the distinction between the two dichotomies, bodily/ghostly and literal/figurative, it is useful to begin with some examples that do not explicitly address the paradox of the Incarnation.

“A ghostly conseyte of a bodely thing”: The Material/Spiritual Divide and the Hermeneutics of Christ’s Body

Julian and Hilton repeatedly warn their readers that the two modes of understanding, “bodily” and “ghostly,” must be kept distinct. In their view, embodied creatures can only speak or write about spiritual concepts in terms analogous to embodied experience. Given the proper mindset, however, that bodily constriction can be transcended, at least in part. As the author of The Cloud of Unknowing puts it:

For þof al þat a þing be neuer so goostly in itself, neuerþeles 3it 3if it schal be spoken of, siþen [because] it so is þat speche is a bodely werk wrou3t [fashioned] wiþ þe tonge, þe whiche is an instrument of þe body, it behoueþ [behooves] alweis be spoken in bodely wordes. Bot what þerof? Schal it þerfore be taken & conceyuid [conceived] bodely? Nay, bot goostly.⁴⁴

No matter how ethereal a thing is in its essential nature, the Cloud-author says, it can only be spoken of with the bodily organ he has earlier called the “blabryng fleschely tonge” (26.37).⁴⁵ Words are bodily in that they are fashioned by embodied creatures and enunciated by means of body parts (rather than in pre-thought, as in Augustine’s “word”). However, the Cloud-author admonishes, they should not be understood to signify only in a body-focused, material fashion. He goes on to describe fantasy, the product of the imagination working without the aid of grace or reason, as “nou3t [nothing] elles bot a bodely conseyte [“conceit,” conception] of a goostly þing, or elles a goostly conseyte of a bodely þing” (65.28–30).⁴⁶ The error of fantasy, as he sees it, is contingent on misreading in either direction: bodily as ghostly or ghostly as bodily.

While bodily does not necessarily equate to literal nor ghostly to figurative, like the literal/figurative duality, the bodily/ghostly one implies a default position. The two-directional chiasm of the Cloud-author’s phrasing is exceptional; habitually, Julian, Hilton, and the Cloud-author warn their readers only that they should not interpret as “bodily” what is meant “ghostly,” but not the reverse. When they do, they are concerned primarily with the danger that they will be misunderstood and their contemplative readers will fall into error as a result. At the same time, interestingly, they reveal in part what they think about cognitive processing of language. As in the literal-first theory of metaphor, there is a presumed default; by analogy, we might call it “bodily-first.”

Because of that bodily-first default, the bodily/ghostly dichotomy allows for specially suitable alignment of the material with the immaterial in a way the abstract concepts of “literal” and “figurative” do not. For instance, when Julian stops to explain the nature of the weeping of a soul in chapter seventy-two, she ties that interpretation directly to the bodily/ghostly dichotomy rather than the literal/figurative one:

therefore it is that I sey we may never stinten [stop] of moning [moaning] ne of wepyng. This weping meneth not al in poryng out of teares by our bodily eye, but also to more gostly vnderstondyng; for the kindly desire of our soule is so gret and so onmesurable [immeasurable] that if it were goven us to our solace and to our comfort al the noblyth that ever God made in hevyn and in erth, and we saw not the fair blisfull chere of hymselfe, yet we shuld not stynten of moning [refrain from moaning] ne of gostly weping, that is to sey, of peynfull longing, till whan we sen verily the faire blisfull chere of our maker. (72.43–52, emphasis mine)

In this case, the probable influence of Origen’s “spiritual senses” seems more apparent than in the example from the Cloud-author. Julian generates a concrete image of a physical sensation her readers will have experienced in their own bodies, only to renounce the materiality of that sensation by saying, “do not cry only with your body, cry also in an analogous way in the immaterial sensation of your soul.” The technique is similar to the inevitable duality generated by a warning such as “don’t think of an elephant!”—and there he is, an imagined elephant alongside the imaginary space in which no imagined elephant should exist. Note that I can think of no way to express the simultaneous existence of these two thoughts (elephant and no-elephant) except in spatial or temporal terms— one “alongside” the other or “simultaneous” to another, a point to which I shall return.⁴⁷ Julian’s use of metaphor is especially skillful here, since the bodily practice of weeping is also appropriate to the spiritual one she advocates.

While Julian manages to align “bodily” and “ghostly” weeping suitably, Hilton takes particular pains to explain the nonmaterial aspect of the metaphor “God is a fire,” only to introduce a new, equally material metaphor, WORDS OF SCRIPTURE UNDERSTOOD IN THEIR “GHOSTLY” SENSE ARE SAVORY FOOD. Like Julian, Hilton habitually employs the exegetical technique of explaining a text, translating Latin scriptural verses into English. He gives both versions but adjusts the English translations slightly, according to his purpose, as he goes. In the following example, he is commenting on the process of interpreting scripture, noting how scripture requires “goostli” understanding. Hilton’s means of explaining the difference between bodily and ghostly understanding intriguingly and immediately introduces further metaphor, in the word “savour”:

On the selve wise [same way] it is seid that God is fier [fire]: Deus noster ignis consumens est (Hebrews 12:29). That is: Oure Lord is fier wastande [consuming]. That is for to seyn, God is not fier elementarie, that heteth [heats] a bodi and brenneth [burns] it, but God is love and charité. For as fier wasteth al bodili thinge that mai be wasted, right so the love of God wasteth and brenneth al synne oute of the soule and maketh it clene, as fier maketh clene al manere metal. Thise wordis, and alle othere that aren spoken of oure Lord in hooli writynge bi bodili liknesse, moste nedis [necessarily] ben undirstonden goostli, ellis there is no savour in hem.

Neverthelees, the cause whi siche maner wordis aren seid of oure Lord in Holi Writ is this. For we aren so fleschli that we conne [know] not of God, ne undirstonde of Hym, but yif we bi siche [by such] wordes first ben entred in. Neverthelees, whanne the innere iye [eye] is opened thorugh grace for to han a litil sight of Jhesu, thanne schal the soule turne lightli [readily] inowgh alle sich wordes of bodili thyngis into goostli undirstondynge. (2.33.2278–89, emphasis mine)

To the “fire” of Heb. 12:29, Hilton adds a metaphor explicitly derived from the bodily experience of the senses: the “savour” of the words of scripture, with its roots in monastic lectio divina, or ruminatio, the “chewing over” of scripture in silent contemplation. Interestingly, he does not feel compelled, however, to warn against a bodily reading of “savour,” even though he is speaking just as metaphorically here as did the verse from Hebrews.

Such subtle distinctions between the dichotomies of bodily/ghostly and literal/figurative show that when Julian and Hilton talk about the signifying properties of the language they use, they do so in terms already focused on the materiality of embodied existence. When they go on to mull over the nature of the Incarnation, they are predisposed to be thinking about language, embodiment, and cognition as part of an interconnected system. Their focus on the bodily/ghostly divide draws attention to the gap between signs and their significations—at least for human language. Moreover, their language gestures at the possibility of a linguistic system (God’s language) that is more holistic than the one they know. Their efforts to stretch the sense of words, to use language flexibly and suggestively, reveal a focus on an abstract reality beyond the confines of linguistic signification. In the context of the Incarnation, the bodily/ghostly dichotomy’s distinction between materiality and spirit becomes blurred in the paradoxical jointure of humanity and divinity in the hypostatic union.

The hypostatic union’s emphasis on body and form enables a mode of thought in which language can border on the sacramental. Because the unique case of the Logos as signifier links embodiment with language in an enigmatic way, the hermeneutics of Christ’s body have historically been perceived as inherently different from hermeneutics of embodiment in general. Beginning in the eleventh century, scholastic debate eventually led to the doctrine of the Real Presence, which affirms that Christ’s body remains substantially present in the consecrated Eucharistic bread and wine. The discourse was framed, in part, in grammatical terms: could the predicate “my body” in the words of consecration, “Hoc est corpus meum,” obliterate its own subject, “this” [i.e., the bread]?⁴⁸ Real Presence also lent itself to metaphysical argument: when the priest consecrates the elements, are the bread and wine entirely replaced by the body and blood of Christ, or do they coexist with it, or are they symbols of it? Scholastic discussion of the issue drew from an Aristotelian understanding of “substance” and “accidents” that allowed the “substance” of Christ’s body to appear in the form of bread, a form that retained the bread’s “accidental” qualities. I am collapsing several centuries of Eucharistic theological controversy into simple formulations here to emphasize that the Aristotelian terms used argumentatively in this controversy informed the treatment of the Incarnation in the writings under consideration in this study, that these terms continue to influence critical perceptions of such works and related issues today, and that recognizing such underpinnings can elucidate the theological bent of such works.

In focusing on the bodily/ghostly dichotomy, then, Julian and Hilton disclose a “language of religion” importantly coalesced around embodied experience, with “bodily-first” as the default.⁴⁹ In the right context, the commonality of human experience also enables daring attempts to perceive beyond the limitations of embodied experience. In investigating the literal sense, I used the example of Julian seeing God “in a poynte” and “in my vnderstondyng,” where she describes thought or comprehension in terms of spatial orientation relative to herself. Conceptual metaphors are similarly understood to be oriented from the experience of the embodied mind. To conclude my discussion of the bodily/ ghostly aspect of medieval uses of metaphor, it is instructive to examine a single further example, one related to UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING: how may spatial metaphor be used to think about cognition? By looking at one metaphor as used by Julian, Hilton, and metaphor theorists, we may better see the ways in which fourteenth-century use of metaphor and the present day theory of conceptual metaphor coincide and differ, with respect to the nature of cognition.

“Up” and “Down”: A Spatial Example

Intriguingly, Julian uses spatial metaphor to explain the nature of the Trinity just before she warns her readers not to think about the Trinity in material, spatial terms (“don’t think of an elephant”):

Now stondith not the Son aforn the Fadir on the left syde as a laborer, but he sittith on his Fadirs ryte hand in endles rest and peace. But it is not ment that the Son syttith on the ryte hond, syde be syde, as on [one] man sittith be another in this lif; for ther is no such syttyng, as to my syte [sight], in the Trinite; but he sittith on his Fadirs ryte hand, that is to sey, in the heyest noblyth [rank] of the Fadirs ioyes. (51.322–28)

Here she wants to demonstrate the honor the Father accords the Son; she does so in spatial terms that rely on a cultural understanding of social ranking in ceremonial sitting. She creates a spatial picture analogous to embodied experience, then disrupts the picture by asserting that the Trinity does not sit side by side.⁵⁰ While here Julian is relating what she saw in vision, her method of explaining it shows not just what she saw, but also what she feels is important to stress in interpreting what she saw. In her view, we should not understand her vision by imagining bodily posture or positioning for the bodiless Trinity in the same way we would for embodied men. By saying “as to my syte,” she chooses a concrete way of saying what she perceived, a way that is oriented from embodied sensory experience. I did the same thing by saying “in her view” (in Sweetser’s mode of thought, these metaphors would be particular instances of the conceptual metaphor UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING). Positioning of time and space has no meaning with regard to an all-encompassing, ever-being God, Julian suggests. In linguistic terms, God’s deictic center, the locational and temporal origo for the speaking subject, must be everywhere, always. The Cloud-author makes a similar point by noting that, although we say that heaven is “up,” we should not physically turn our bodily eyes to the sky to see it, because “up” with regard to heaven is no earthly direction at all:

siþen [because] it so was þat Criste schul assende bodely, & þerafter sende þe Holy Goost bodely, þen it was more semely [fitting] þat it was upwardes & fro abouen, þan ouþer donwardes & fro byneþen, byhinde or before, on o [one] side or on oþer. Bot elles ne were þis semelines, him nedid [needed] neuer þe more to haue wente upwardes þen donwardes, I mene for nerenes [nearness] of þe wey. For heuen goostly is as nei3 [near] doun as up, & up as down, bihinde as before, before as behynde, on o syde as oþer. (60.22–29)⁵¹

Language that locates God in a specific time or place to the exclusion of other time or place must be processed as “ghostly”; must it also be what we might call figurative? Julian’s further explanation, akin to a “literal” development of the “figurative” use of “syde by syde,” adds a further spatial component, “in the heyest noblyth of the Fadirs ioyes.” Surprisingly, because this common way to express the extreme honor she wants to denote includes another spatial term, “highest,” her further explanation replicates exactly the sort of spatial reference she wants to correct, but, like Hilton with “savour,” she does not draw attention to this second case of “do not take in bodily terms what I mean in spiritual ones.” It is impossible to tell precisely why. On the one hand, no one could qualify every instance; that would be tedious and repetitive. On the other, if we consider “highest” in terms of literal and figurative senses instead, we are back at the problem of the literal sense: because “highest” is commonly used for hierarchical relationship, such use might seem normative or nonfigurative (as in a dead metaphor). Here is another place where the bodily/ghostly dichotomy and the literal/figurative one truly differ: while we could make a case for “highest” being either literal or figurative, in Julian’s context we could not make a case for its hierarchical usage being “bodily.” She does not want us to perceive the direction in spatial terms relative to our bodies. In a cognitive model of metaphor, the social scale implied in Julian’s spatial hierarchy makes sense, though, because it aligns with a conceptual metaphor identified by cognitive linguists as “GOOD IS UP,” wherein things associated with elevation are processed as positive.

Hilton similarly calls attention to the word “above,” which in its spiritual sense, he points out, has no spatial orientation (in its figurative sense, “above,” like “higher,” has no spatial orientation, only a hierarchical one). Like Julian, Hilton uses the bodily/ghostly dichotomy to explain how to think about God. Hilton’s argument, too, would fit comfortably in a textbook on conceptual metaphor: the orientation “above,” known from bodily experience of the world, provides the underlying conceptual metaphor that enables us to think of “above” in terms of degrees of merit. Again, the conceptual metaphor is GOOD IS UP:

Therfore ther are many men that erren [err] in undirstondynge of summe wordes that aren seid of God, for thei undirstonden hem not goostli. Hooli Writte seith that a soule that wole fynde God schal liften upward the innere iye [eye] and seke [seek] God above itsilf. Thanne summe that wolde doon aftir this seiynge [advice] undirstonden this word “aboven hemsilf,” as for higher settynge in stide [place, “stead”] and for worthiere of place, as oon element or oon planete is above anothir in settynge and in worthinesse of bodili place; but it is not so goostli. For a soule is above a bodili thynge not bi settynge of stide, but bi sutilté [lack of materiality] and worthinesse of kynde [nature]. Right so, in the selve wise, God is above alle bodili and goostli creaturis, not bi settynge of stide, but thorugh sutilté and worthinesse of his unchaungeable blissid kynde. And therfore he that wole wisili [wisely] seke God and fynden him, he schal not renne [run] oute with his thought as yif he wolde clymbe above the sunne and persen [pierce] the firmament, and imagyne the majesté as it were a light of an hundred sonnes. But he schal rathere drawe doun the sunne and al the firmament, and forgeten it and casten it binethen hym ther as he is, and setten al this and al bodili thinge also at nought [nothing], and thenken [think] thanne yif he can goostli, bothe of himsilf and of God also. And yif he doo thus, thanne seeth the soule aboven himsilf and thanne seeth it hevene. (2.33.2236–51)

Hilton’s particular way of explaining the metaphor sounds closer to analogy or even simile than what most people are likely to think of as metaphor, at least, the sort of metaphor definable by tenor and vehicle.⁵² Analogy makes particular sense in cases where a writer wants to liken a bodily sensation, experience, or orientation, to a spiritual equivalent; Augustine used the same technique in De Trinitate, for the same reason. As with Julian’s passage, here, too, “above” connotes a social hierarchy, as Hilton notes before correcting that reading in order to offer a spiritual meaning. The hierarchy is to be found not in social, physical positioning, but in “kynde,” the nature of the soul (in the first example) and the nature of God (in the second).⁵³

The medieval writers who are the subject of this study are of one mind in thinking that cognition is molded by sensory perception. Since they are not primarily interested in the nature of cognition, however, they strive for something more than that, something beyond that. Thinking back to Riehle’s explanation of why mystical language is not the same as “mere metaphor,” in Riehle’s terms the bodily/ghostly divide I have been tracking resides in sensory experience rather than in language. That makes mystical experience sound like the “ghostly” analogue to embodied conceptual metaphor, on the one hand. On the other hand, expressing the mystical experience in language offers a challenge similar to that of expressing the metaphor-that-is-not-to-be-considered-a-metaphor, “the Word made Flesh.”

To a modern sensibility, Julian’s and Hilton’s examples of bodily orientation might sound as if they are addressed to a simple-minded reader, who—as more advanced, more complex-thinkers realize—needs the most rudimentary guidance to follow what ought to be obvious to the plainest intelligence. While Julian’s prose is simple on the surface, however, her ideas are challenging in their complexity, and the further one reads, the more clear it becomes that the sort of warnings Julian and Hilton offer are well worth having. Such is the case when Julian aims to explain the nature of the connection between God and humanity, for which the mediating hypostatic union is a crucial element. In a theologically complex manner through largely straightforward syntax, Julian engages perplexing questions related to 1 Cor. 13, with which this chapter began: how can mankind be made in the image of God? Wherein does likeness reside? To answer these questions, Julian structures her argument to place the hermeneutics of Christ’s body in the center. Hers is a philosophically informed, heightened version of the bodily/ghostly dichotomy for perception, but in this case she treats ontology, the very existence of God in his own nature. While my previous examples from medieval writers have been isolated snippets of arguments primarily about something other than language or Incarnation, Julian needs the technical tools of Augustine’s “enigma” to work towards an answer that expresses the unusual quality of the hypostatic union, the nature of which is precisely the point. She does so by means of the technical terms, “substance” and “sensuality.”

Substance and Sensuality in Julian’s A Revelation of Love

Julian deliberates over the concepts of “substance” and “sensuality” as she examines how Christ mediates between God and humanity. Her treatment of the issue is rooted in Augustinian ideas that underlie the concept of “enigma.” Augustine introduces the same terms, substance and sensuality, in De Trinitate at the point in Book 12 where he distinguishes between the higher and lower reason in the soul. The terms were subsequently picked up by other theologians and commentators throughout the Middle Ages, including, among others, Hilton, her contemporary.⁵⁴ Although theories abound to explain how Julian might have learned something about Augustine’s thought, the question of whether or not she knew his theology, or indeed could have read his works herself, remains unresolved. While she uses his terms “substance” and “sensuality” and appears to draw on Augustine’s arguments about them, she means something slightly different by these terms from what Augustine did. In her thought, “substance” and “sensuality” place the hypostatic union centrally as a pivot or midpoint of her argument about how humanity is made in the likeness of God.

Augustine proposes interrelated trinities to explain how the human mind works. In his model, one of these trinities consists of higher reason, lower reason, and will or desire. The lower reason functions as a helpmate or assistant to the higher reason in much the same way, Augustine says, as woman was created helpmate for man. Lower reason, he asserts, governs temporal events associated with the active life, including, among others, information channeled to the mind by the senses. The senses themselves have their own, sensual, trinities. While Augustine refers to soul, his primary interest is in how the human mind functions, not in distinguishing between body and soul. “Sensual,” referring to lower reason, does not mean “bodily” except in the limited sense of that part of the mind which receives bodily sensations. The sensations themselves are bodily; the lower reason is not.

In Julian’s discourse, “sensuality” appears to signify something other than one aspect of the mind, sensuality being what Christ transforms to bring about salvation: “And like as we were like made to the Trinite in our first makyng, our maker would that we should be like Iesus Criste our saviour, in hevyn without ende, be the vertue of our geynmakyng” (10.54–56). Julian’s characteristic sensitivity to the polysemy of words is evident here: redemption is both a “gain” for humanity and an “again,” a remaking within humanity. As “geynmaking,” redemption is a restoration in which something is added. Christ’s taking on humanity through the Incarnation enables this redemption, as she makes clear later in her example of the lord and the servant, where Christ and Adam each stand in the same place as servant. In Julian’s view, sensuality—that which is transformed— appears to be humanity’s bodily nature, or, perhaps, fallen nature; sensuality already seems a step closer to bodiliness than it was in Augustine’s usage.⁵⁵ Given that Aristotle was rediscovered in the time between when Augustine wrote in the fourth century and Julian in the fourteenth, her nuancing of the terms perhaps indicates her indebtedness to scholastic philosophy as well as to Augustine.

Could Julian’s substance and sensuality then equate to the more familiar dichotomy of soul and body? This seems unlikely, in part because she uses the terms “soul” and “body” elsewhere and could readily have used them here. She also does not seem to equate “substance” and “sensuality” with the higher and lower parts of the soul, as Augustine had done, despite her confusing wording in chapter fifty-five (“and these ii partes were in Criste, the heyer and the lower, which is but on [one] soule. The heyer [higher] part was on in peace with God in full ioy and bliss; the lower partie, which is sensualite, suffrid for the salvacion of mankynd” [55.52–55]). Here “which is but on soule” appears to refer to Christ, in whom the higher and lower parts, substance and sensuality, are united. In Julian’s thinking, that union in Christ positions him, crucially, as mediator for humankind, because she views human substance as united to God in its creation and sensuality as united to God not in its initial creation but through the Incarnation.⁵⁶ Since the soul is made by God from nothing that is made, the soul is united to God in its creation. The body, however, is not united to God in its creation because it is made from the already created earth. Instead, the body is united to God through the Second Person of the Trinity in the Incarnation. The enclosing of man in God takes place in the process of Creation, while the enclosing of God in man is comprehended in the Incarnation. The distinction is important for her Incarnation-centered theology, in which Christ is the crucial midpoint.

Elsewhere, Julian continues to distinguish between substance and sensuality as she works through her understanding of how God knew and loved mankind from the beginning, without ever ceasing to love, “for er that he mad [made] us he lovid us; and whan we were made we lovid hym” (53.37–38). According to Julian, the differences among unmade, made from nought, and made from something previously made help in thinking about distinctions among God, the soul, and the body. United from the beginning in love, God and man’s soul (but not body) are as close as may be:

And thus I vnderstond that mannys soule is made of nought [nothing], that is to sey, it is made, but of nought that is made, as thus: whan God shuld make mans body he tooke the slyppe of erth, which is a matter medlid [mingled] and gaderid of [ gathered from] all bodily things, and therof he made mannys bodye; but to the makyng of manys soule he wold take ryte nought, but made it. And thus is the kynd [nature] made rytefully onyd [united, “one-ed”] to the maker, which is substantial kynd onmade: that is, God. And therefore it is that ther may, ne shall, be ryte nowte [nothing] atwix God and mannys soule. (53.42–50)

Because man’s soul is made from nothing that is made, the soul is united by its nature as substance to God, who is himself unmade. God and the soul both are substance, but God is unmade while the soul is made, although from nothing that is made. The body is also made, from something already made, the slip of the earth. So by nature man’s soul is as close as may be to God. The quality of substance, made or unmade, in both the soul and God is the key to understanding the doubled indwelling of God in the soul and the soul in God:

Our soule is made to be Gods wonyng [dwelling] place, and the wonyng place of the soule is God, which is onmade [not created]. And hey [high] vnderstondyng it is inwardly to sen and to knowen that God which is our maker wonyth in our soule; and an heyer vnderstondyng it is inwardly to sen and to knowen our soule, that is made, wonyth in Gods substance; of which substance, God, we arn that we arn. And I saw no difference atwix God and our substance, but as it were al God, and yet myn vnderstondyng toke that our substance is in God: that is to sey, that God is God, and our substance is a creture in God . . . (54.13–22)

When Julian calls “our substance” “a creture in God,” she points to the created nature of the soul.⁵⁷ Here, as she does elsewhere, Julian repeatedly uses the actual word “soule” interchangeably for “substance” when speaking of man. When speaking of God, she uses the generative “substance,” of course, because the Trinity technically does not have a distinct soul, though the Trinity is, as Julian might say, “very substance” or the true substance, the fullest expression of substance.⁵⁸ So, too, when she earlier explains how “prayer onyth the soule to God,” she notes that “thow the soule be ever lyke to God in kynde and substance, restorid be grace, it is often onlyke in condition be synne on manys partye” (43.4–6). Because of the manner of its creation, the soul is like God in its nature and its quality as substance, restored by grace, but is unlike in the condition of man’s sin.

When Julian uses the words “substance” and “sensuality,” then, she indicates that she is thinking philosophically about the relationship between God and man, as Augustine did when he used the word “word.” Perhaps in using these terms with such precision she indicates a stylistic indebtedness to Augustine, as Hilton did with his use of the word “Jhesu.” When her focus is not on the nature of this relationship, however, she speaks plainly of body and soul.⁵⁹ By making this distinction between the technical “substance” and “sensuality” and the more common terms “soul” and “body,” she is able to talk about the unity between enwrapments of the Trinity and man without the distraction of the notion, commonly discussed in her day, of a disunity or conflict between body and soul. In questing after the way in which men and women are made in the image of God, she takes on larger questions about what it means to be human.

Julian’s substance/sensuality duality provides an Incarnational counterpoint to the scholastic dichotomy of substance and accident, and to the bodily/ghostly dichotomy. Her technical discourse demonstrates her careful attention to the nuances of meaning possible when specific words are invested with narrowly defined signification. “Substance” and “sensuality” cue her epistemological discourse on created and uncreated substance, for instance, while the more general terms “body” and “soul” do not so readily highlight precisely how the hypostatic union mediates between humanity and divinity. She perceives Christ as the mediator, finding in him the unifying point that “ones” the soul to God.

Julian’s highly technical discourse might find some readers rather losing the thread of her meaning the further they read. It takes considerable attention and no small level of interest in her point to remain focused on the philosophical distinction she wants to make between substance and sensuality, particularly because she uses these terms in an idiosyncratic way without specifically defining them in advance. In this respect, we have come back around to the issue of words’ referentiality I first raised with Augustine’s sign theory, because one challenge of reading Julian’s theology on substance and sensuality is to tease out the significance of unfamiliar or novel senses of words. Here, then, is the last issue we must address to round out this chapter: if words as signs point to meaning, how do we know to what meaning they point? In psycholinguistic terms, is the processing of “sense selection” (between known meanings) different from that of “sense creation” (when we encounter new words)? How does sense selection actually work? This issue, obviously, is crucial for writers who wish to engage both sides of John 1:14, language and form. In the phrase, “the Word was made flesh,” how do we decide what “word” and “flesh” signify? In Richards’s term, what would the tenor of each be? I previously examined this issue by means of the literal and figurative senses of language, then by the bodily and ghostly. In Langland’s “figuratyfly,” for instance, or Hilton’s “savour,” the medieval writers who are the subject of this study talk about nonliteral language in ways that suggest they believe sense is added by the form in which such language is expressed. While cognitive scientists are working on this area of language processing today, the actual mechanism for sense selection is not yet understood. In particular, the literary use of nonliteral language has received little attention from cognitive scientists, who have focused instead on conversational discourse.⁶⁰ Some promising areas of research, however, have begun to suggest that the literal/figural dichotomy might not be so binary as previously thought. Polysemy might not be based on an either/or processing of thought.

Underspecification or Hypersignification: A Cognitive Model for Polysemy?

I noted earlier that in the initial chapters of her Revelation, well before the philosophical discourse on substance and sensuality, Julian introduced the notion that Christ reforms the soul in its sensuality, to achieve “our geynmaking” (10.56). I called attention to the polysemy of “geynmaking” as both a gain for humanity and an “again,” a remaking. While the word “geynmaking” is not a common one—Julian coined it for this use—given the strong parallel structure of “first makyng . . . geynmaking,” most readers will readily generate a meaning despite the word’s novelty: “And like as we were like made to the Trinite in our first makyng, our maker would that we should be like Iesus Criste our saviour, in hevyn without ende, be the vertue of our geynmakyng” (10.54–56). The pun is, perhaps, a subtle one; the cognitive priming of context (“in our first makyng”) prompts the “again” response more readily than the “gain” one. After a little more thought, though, it is not difficult to arrive at “gain,” largely because of “makyng” itself: when a maker creates well, the positive outcome is a gain. Julian’s pun, which requires her readers to engage in both sense selection and sense creation, is an excellent example of language carrying meaning that is more than the sum of its parts.

If it is true that the figurative sense is a non-normative use of language, as assumed by the “literal-first” model, then it should take longer to process the meaning of figurative language than it does nonfigurative. However, studies increasingly find no meaningful difference in at least the initial processing time for figurative versus literal senses of words.⁶¹ To account for this, Steven Frisson and Martin Pickering have advanced the “underspecification” model for sense selection.⁶² Their model explains only sense selection, not sense creation; it accounts for how we choose among meanings we have seen before, not how we make meaning for novel metaphors, for instance. According to the “underspecification” model, when a reader encounters a word whose signification is not immediately clear, where multiple senses (whether literal or figurative) are possible, the processor enables a sort of placeholder sense that accommodates all known possibilities by abstracting a sort of common denominator, until further context winnows out nonqualified meanings. As Frisson and Pickering put it, “when a word with multiple senses is encountered, there is no immediate activation of a single fully specified sense. . . . If preceding context helps determine which sense is appropriate, then the processor may home in fairly rapidly. If preceding context is neutral with respect to the different senses, then the processor may delay deciding which sense to adopt.”⁶³

So the underspecified sense is not any usual sense of the word; it is neither, for instance, “the literal” nor the most commonly encountered sense. It abstracts known senses, so it is both underdetermined and underspecified.⁶⁴ While more work remains to be done on this promising model, it attractively suggests two things: first, an explanation for the mechanism by which polysemy works so beautifully, as in Julian’s “poynte” and Langland’s “figuratyfly”; second, that writers who leave multiple possibilities simultaneously in play essentially transcribe to the page an aspect of cognitive processing we perform naturally and well. Intriguingly, if the underspecified model is correct, it aligns conceptually with the culmination of Augustine’s thinking on the word “word.” His concept of the “true word” which is “formable and not yet formed” sounds much like the underspecification model, with the added component that Augustine’s word, through the process of thought, arrives at an underlying truth present in the true language that exists, in his view, in the mind (however, Frisson and Pickering, like most scholars of cognition today, make no neo-Platonic claims about inherent truth, in thought, that aligns with the divine mind): What is that which can be a word, and, therefore, is already worthy of the name of a word? What, I say, is this word, formable and not yet formed, except something of our own mind which we cast this way and that by a kind of revolving motion, according as we think now of this and now of that thing, just as they are found, or as they occur to our mind? And it then becomes a true word when that which we cast, as I have said, by a revolving motion, arrives at that which we know, and is formed by it by taking its perfect likeness, so that as any thing is known, so it is also thought, so it is spoken in the heart, that is, without sound, without the thought of sound, such as certainly belongs to some language. (15.15.25)

What neither Augustine’s revolving of the true word nor the underspecification model accounts for is sense creation itself. This area of language processing is also not well understood. It is of special interest where the line between new senses and existing senses can be very difficult to draw, such as in polysemy or innovative metaphor. Here, as in other areas of language processing, context appears to be key, in part because readers or listeners have no advance notice about whether or not any given word or expression will be used in a novel sense; they receive and attempt to process all language as it comes.⁶⁵ Frisson and Pickering suggest that sense creation may develop out of the initial underspecified meaning.⁶⁶ Cognitive “priming” prepares a language processor to make connections between two linguistic domains; the response to a second prompt linking those two domains will be quicker than the first. For instance, one study that primed subjects to link politicians with types of ships by introducing the novel metaphor “Richard Nixon is the submarine of world leaders” indicated that these subjects were more likely to associate “Arafat” with “pirate ship” than were subjects who were not so primed.⁶⁷ Such lines of research lead to the larger claims scholars are making today about the nature of metaphor itself. Rather than thinking about associative links prompted by the semantics of polysemous words only, cognitive theorists are generating new models based on cognitive frameworks established by such priming. In this way of thinking, metaphor offers opportunities for coherence in texts. Far from being ornamental, or adding sense in a localized way, metaphor is seen as a basis for form within thought itself. To take one example, in the following description of how cognitive frameworks (here called “metaphor-based schemas”) function in language, we find that in this model, metaphor helps to contextualize relationships among cognitive domains, beyond the semantic level:

The priming results found by Allbritton et al. [“Metaphor-Based Schemas and Text Representations”] indicate that metaphor-based schemas can be used as a basis for relating and connecting pieces of information in a text representation, in a way that simple semantic associations do not account for. Thus, metaphor has been shown to be a possible source of increased coherence in text representations, by providing a means for tying together some of the ideas in a text. In this way, metaphor may play an important role in the comprehension not only of figurative language, but of discourse in general.⁶⁸

Although Allbritton’s point is not a theological one, the concept of “[relation] in a text representation” offers a tempting way to talk about “the Word made flesh.” Not everyone would agree that metaphor offers “increased coherence” over nonmetaphorical language. In any case, Albritton’s view of language has moved to the very edge of doing away with such a thing as nonmetaphorical language in the first place. The challenge of trying to understand that which cannot be expressed gains a cognitive dimension, much as Augustine had envisioned, and as fourteenth-century writers envision, although their understanding of that cognitive component carries a theological component not shared, perhaps, by modern cognitive scientists.

Several of the writers who are the subject of this study ground that seeking in the Pauline enigma that promises a future revelation of what can now be known only in part. Their search, then, finds its way through charity as expressed in 1 Cor. 13. In context, Langland’s use of “figuratively” implies a glancing blow at the friars or other clergy, who may mirror Christ as a dim reflection of divine reality, either because they are only human or because they are less devout than they ought to be. By substituting “figuratively,” which may have its own source in Augustine’s Incarnational language theory, for the more pictorial “in a mirror,” Langland points towards figural language as a key component in the search for a clear view of God. Like Langland, in the final epigraph to this chapter, Hilton specifically advocates seeking an understanding of God through the incarnate Christ: in this case, not in the flesh, standing before us, but through language (specifically here, scriptural language—the word of God), which offers one means toward understanding Christ’s humanity: “This is oo [one] maner sight of Jhesu, as I seide bifore: not as He is, but clothed undir likenesse of werkes and of wordes, per speculum in enigmate (1 Cor. 13:12), bi a myrore and likenesse, as the apostil seith” (2.43.3372–74).

How can works and words clothe “bi a myrore and likenesse”? What sort of sight is this, if one can see in this fashion? From the issue of language’s signification, we must move to the issue of concrete and abstract. Was Will looking for Charity itself or for a charitable person—any charitable person? Langland offers the simultaneous possibility of both, a simultaneity that encourages us to think separately through the ramifications of each. Whether we settle on the abstract quality or the concrete person, or hold both in mind, or enable some underspecified meaning, the ultimate tenor of that search must be contingent on what he thinks constitutes the epitome of charity, or true love.