MIND, BODY, SOUL, AND SELF IN THE ALFREDIAN TRANSLATIONS

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

by Hilary E. Fox

Thomas N. Hall, Director

Graduate Program in English Notre Dame, Indiana November 2011

UMI Number: 3496531

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 Copyright 2011 Hilary E. Fox

MIND, BODY, SOUL, AND SELF IN THE ALFREDIAN TRANSLATIONS

Abstract by Hilary E. Fox

This dissertation examines how the texts associated with the translation program of King Alfred the Great of Wessex (d. 899) engaged with the interrelationship of mind, body, soul, and selfhood. While the authenticity and composition of the Alfredian corpus is currently under contention, these translations share an approach that I call Alfredian; that is, regardless of who authored or authorized them, they possess common ways of describing mental and interior spaces and their relationship to the individual. I argue that, whether or not they emerged from Alfreds court, these translations demonstrate a shared scholarly preoccupation, a school of understanding evident in the texts elaboration of vocabularies and metaphors of interiority and epistemology. This language articulates relationships between mind, soul, and body that have ramifications for our own understanding of the constitution of different forms of identity and a developing notion of a self; the language and metaphors employed by the translators allow us access to the various methods by which the Anglo-Saxons conceptualized a complex set of interactions that were not always described or thought of in specific, unchangeable ways. Rather, the

Hilary E Fox self was understood not as a stable, fully-knowable entity, but rather one that was in a constant state of flux and negotiation, and through the process of self-scrutiny or examination refiguring its relationships between itself, the physical world, and the divine. The first two chapters set out the intellectual background of the translations. The last three chapters set out discussions of the Alfredian texts that read them as texts concerned with the fashioning of a form of selfhood. Chapter Three focuses on the role the body plays in the translations of the Boethius and Soliloquies, with reference to the complicated relationship that obtains between it and the mind that is supposed to harness its desires. In Chapter Four, I explore how two terms, ingeanc and inneweard mod, associate the mind with interior space, and how the metaphor MIND AS HOUSE articulates the construction of that interiority. The fifth chapter turns to a consideration of selfgovernance and the relationship between bodily states, the social individual, and the private self.

For my parents.

ii

CONTENTS

Abbreviations and Short Titles ............................................................................................v Citations and Orthographical Conventions ....................................................................... vii Acknowledgments............................................................................................................ viii Chapter 1: The Alfredian Canon and Anglo-Saxon Selves .................................................1 1.1 The Alfredian Corpus: Traditional Views .........................................................8 1.1.1 The Matter of the Canon: Identifying the Alfredian Corpus ............12 1.1.2 What, Then, Is Alfredian? .............................................................22 1.2 Medieval Selves: Toward Alfredian Self-(sylf?)hood ..................................26 1.2.1 The Incorporated Self versus the Individual .................................31 1.3 Outline of the Project .......................................................................................36 Chapter 2: The Embodied Mind and Soul in Classical and Early Medieval Thought .......43 2.1 Mind, Soul, and Body from Ancient Greece to the Patristics ..............44 2.1.1 The Presocratics ....................................................................45 2.1.2 Plato ......................................................................................50 2.1.3 Roman Stoicism ....................................................................53 2.1.4 Early Christianity ..................................................................56 2.2 Alcuin of York .....................................................................................66 2.3 Embodiment in the Early Middle Ages: Theorizing Medieval Culture ....................................................................................................................68 2.4 Mind, Body, Soul, and Self: Phenomenology and Conceptual Metaphor ....................................................................................................78 2.5 Conceptual Metaphor: Language and Access to Knowledge ..............81 2.6 Anglo-Saxon Psychologies and Conceptual Metaphor........................85 Chapter 3: Alfredian Metamorphoses: Body, Metaphor, and Narrative in the Boethius and Soliloquies ................................................................................................................92 3.1 The Sawl-lic Duality and the Properties of the Body ..........................96 3.1.1 The Qualities of the Body in the Boethius ..........................104 3.2 The Mind Is A Body: Metaphorical Schema For Understanding How the Mind Works .......................................................................................108 3.3. Transformations: Body Matching Soul .............................................117 3.3.1 Odysseus and Circe ............................................................121 3.4 Impairment: The Disabled or Diminished Body and the Mind .........132 iii

3.4.1 Double Blindness and Mental Handicap.............................133 3.4.2 Disability and Inability to Obtain True Felicity..................140 3.4.3 Medicine and Rumination: Digesting Psychotherapy.........141 3.5 Knowledge and the Resurrected Body in the Soliloquies ..................146 3.6 Conclusions ........................................................................................157 Chapter 4: Inner Space in the Alfredian Translations ......................................................159 4.1 The Language of the Interior .............................................................160 4.1.1 Radical Reflexivity: The Turn Inwards ..............................162 4.2 Dimensionality in the Alfredian Translations ....................................167 4.3 The Mind as Constructed Dwelling ...................................................181 4.4 Conclusions ........................................................................................191 Chapter 5: Self-Governance, Memory, and the Social Self .............................................195 5.1 Narrative and the Ethics of Self-Care ................................................199 5.2 Interpretation and Exemplary Narrative ............................................213 5.3 Knowledge and Self-Rule in the Boethius .........................................220 5.3.1 The Work of Interpretation: Unpacking the Liberius Exemplum .....................................................................................229 5.3.2 The Rex insipiens and the Negative Exemplum ..................237 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................243 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................253

iv

ABBREVIATIONS AND SHORT TITLES

ASE ASPR

Anglo-Saxon England George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds., The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 6 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931-53). Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine, eds., The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethiuss De Consolatione Philosophiae, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis Corpus Christianorum Series Latina Boethius, Philosophiae Consolatio, ed. Ludwig Bieler, CCSL 94 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1957). Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum Angus Cameron, Ashley Crandell Amos, and Antonette diPaolo Healey, eds., Dictionary of Old English: A-F (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2003) http://tapor.library.utoronto.ca.proxy.library.nd.edu/doe/ (accessed January-December 2010). Gregory the Great, Dialogi, ed. A. de Vog, 3 vols., SC 251, 260, 265 (Paris: Les ditions du Cerf, 1978-80). Hecht, Hermann, ed., Bischof Wrferths von Worcester bersetzung der Dialoge Gregors des Grossen, 2 vols. (Leipzig: 1900-7). References are to page and line number.

Boethius

CCCM CCSL Consolatio CSASE CSEL DOE

Dialogi Dialogues

Fontes

Fontes Anglo-Saxonici: World Wide Web Register, ed. Fontes Anglo-Saxonici Project. http://fontes.english.ox.ac.uk/ (accessed January 2009) Henry Sweet, ed., King Alfred's West-Saxon Version of Gregory's Pastoral Care, 2 vols., EETS 45, 50 (London: Oxford University Press, 1871-73). References are to page and line number. Journal of English and Germanic Philology Meters of Boethius, in Godden and Irvine, eds., The Old English Boethius. Cited by meter number and lineation. Notes and Queries Neuphilologische Mitteilungen Old English Newsletter Gregory the Great, Regula Pastoralis, ed. Bruno Judic, Floribert Rommel, and Charles Morel, 2 vols., SC 381-82 (Paris: ditions du Cerf, 1992). J.P. Migne, ed., Patrologia Latina, 221 vols. (Paris, 1844-64). Sources chrtiennes Carolin Schreiber, ed., King Alfreds Old English Translation of Pope Gregory the Greats Regula pastoralis and Its Cultural Context: A Study and Partial Edition According to All Surviving Manuscripts Based on Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 12 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2003). Augustine, Soliloquiorum libri duo, De inmortalitate animae, De quantitate animae, ed. Wolfgang Hrmann, CSEL 89 (Vienna: Tempsky, 1986). Citations are to book and section number. Thomas A. Carnicelli, ed., King Alfred's Version of St. Augustine's Soliloquies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969). Citations are to page and line number.

Hierdeboc

JEGP Meter N&Q NM OEN Pastoralis

PL SC Schreiber

Soliloquia

Soliloquies

vi

CITATIONS AND ORTHOGRAPHICAL CONVENTIONS

Except where otherwise noted, all translations of foreign-language texts are my own. Citations to the Latin Bible are taken from Robert Weber, Bonifatius Fischer, et al., eds., Biblia Sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem, 4th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994). English translations of the Vulgate are taken from The Holy Bible: Douay-Rheims Version (Baltimore, 1899; repr. Rockford, IL: TAN Books, 2000). In quoting Latin texts, I have standardized spelling to u and i to represent both consonantal and vocalic u and i. Greek texts are transliterated according to a single convention throughout. Accordingly, orthography in some Greek and Latin texts may have been changed from the printed editions.

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

but, it seems to me, if you are too unwell, then you cant write it all, and even if you were completely well, it would be best for you if you had a secret place empty of distractions, and a few familiar and clever people with you, who will not hinder you in the least but help you in your work. (Soliloquies 49.17-21) Throughout my career, I have been very fortunate to have, not a few, but many familiar and clever people who have helped me on the way. I would like to thank first my advisor, Tom Hall, for his unending encouragementand unending bibliography, good humor, and support in the past several years, and especially for his enthusiasm and love of Anglo-Saxon studies, which has reminded me of my own. Both Katherine Zieman and Leslie Lockett put me on to the theoretical framework I use in my dissertation, and Leslie very kindly forwarded me an advance version of a chapter on Alfred from her book; Katherines generosity with her time and expertise has helped me come to grips with the complexities of Foucault and Ricoeur, both of whom become important later in my work. In the English Department and Medieval Institute at Notre Dame, my friends and colleagues gave me feedback and insight in our seminar groups as the dissertation moved through various stages of thought and finally into reality. Thanks also are due to Katherine OBrien OKeeffe, whose class on identity and agency in the Old English Boethius provided first the paper and then the general topic that eventually became my dissertation, and to Paul Szarmach, whose conversations with me on the project have viii

given me valuable direction. I must also thank my good friends and colleagues Karrie Fuller, Megan Hall, Amanda Madden and Theresa O'Byrne, who have lent supportive and tolerant ears to me in the past several years. My project has been generously funded by both the Notre Dame First Year Writing Program, which provided a writing fellowship for the 2009-10 academic year, and the joint support of the Mellon Foundation and American Council of Learned Societies, who awarded me a Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2010-11. Both these sources have allowed me, insofar as these things are possible, to complete my work, and I thank both of them for their support and confidence in what follows. The generosity of Notre Dames English Department, the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, and the Graduate Student Union allowed me to present portions of my work publicly at numerous venues. None of this would have been possible without the love and support of my parents, Steve and Kristina Fox. I cant begin to say how much their encouragement, in this endeavor and over the past eleven years, means to me. My aunt and uncle, Jeanne and Thomas Strining, very kindly opened their home to me when I transferred to the University of Rochester; the second home they gave me has in turn given me so many opportunities. Without my cousin, Julie Desmarteau, this dissertation may well not exist; it was her support, advice, and example that prompted me to change my major, transfer, and begin a new career as an English student and medievalist. And, of course, many thanks to Finn.

Hilary E. Fox ix

CHAPTER 1: THE ALFREDIAN CANON AND ANGLO-SAXON SELVES

While this dissertation examines texts written over a thousand years ago, I would like to begin with a brief discussion of a more contemporary work, Louise Glcks 2006 poem Prism. In Prism, Glck explores the strained, reluctant relationship between the flesh and the mind, between the demands placed on the female body and the yearning toward an autonomous interiority. Glcks narrator, who fights to preserve the priority of her self against the intruding rituals of womanhood and expectation, poses the selfs central dilemma as a riddle: 17. The self ended and the world began. They were of equal size, commensurate, one mirrored the other. 18. The riddle was: why couldnt we live in the mind? The answer was: the barrier of the earth intervened.1 Prism takes as one of its running themes the boundary between the individual and the world, a boundary effaced by the fact that the self and world are of equal size, /

Louise Glck, Averno (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2006), 26.

commensurate and mirrors of each other. In contradistinction to philosophies and epistemologies that forsake the world and instead attempt to turn to the purely conceptual or ideal, Glck insists on the barrier of the earth, which places itself between the mind and transcendence: even if we seek to live in the mind, flesh, the fact of our embodiment, makes such a life impossible. Much of Western philosophy, from the Pre-Socratics down through (and beyond) the phenomenologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have, in their various ways, sought to come to an accommodation between the mind, the body to which it is fastened, and the world in which both participate. The barrier of earth runs back through much of the history of Western thought on the mind, to Platos Cratylus and Gorgias and Aristotle's Fragment 60; the uncomfortable pun on Greek soma (body) and sma (grave) inaugurated a tradition that has tended to see the body as the tomb or prison of the soul, as in the Depression-era gospel song Ill Fly Away, in which the soul, like a bird, escapes from the prison bars of the world and takes flight to eternal joy. The narrator of Prism, like her philosophical forebears, struggles with an existence in which the self, even as it attempts to disengage from the demands of convention and narrative, inevitably finds itself drawn back to earth, to a biography whose events are constituted by the action that takes place in the body. In addressing the mirroring, commensurate entities that are self and world, Glcks work picks up one of the long-running threads in the complicated tapestry that is Western philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, and theology: the more-orless continual inquiry into what is now called the mind/body problem. I use mind/body problem not in the Cartesian sensethat is, asking how a completely incorporeal mind can be housed in and use the physical bodybut rather in the sense of 2

what the mind and body are, and how their different natures are unified to create a fleshly, thinking being. To some extent, Western philosophical traditions have always understood mind and body as different things. The difference is not necessarily between incorporeal or corporeal, but at times between how entities of differing types of material (for example, fire and earth, or air and earth) could not only co-exist, but form one cohesive being called human. Moreover, the human body and its attendant soul also formed the microcosm, the mirror in miniature of the universe; like the created world, the microcosm is itself characterized by structure, order, and harmony.2 The multiplicity of theories developed, abandoned, and rediscovered over the course of history have sought to explain the respective natures of soul and body, their relationship to each other, and how care or neglect of one affects the well-being of the other. Whether recognizing it as a barrier of earth, or arguing, as Philolaus did in the fourth century BCE, that the soul is the bodys prisoner, Western attitudes toward the body have, historically, been uneasy. Anglo-Saxon writers (including the translators of the texts to be discussed in this dissertation) characterized the body and world as the carcern, literally the prison house, from which the soul would eventually escape on its way to eternityhowever, there is also the promise, guaranteed by the Gospels and buttressed by hundreds of years of exegetical writing, that the body and soul are restored to each other at the end of time. Thus, for all that unease, these traditions also acknowledge the important fact that a living human is constituted by an embodied rational mind, and that the body itself is central not only to species identity, but to

The word kosmos literally means order; see Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, Henry Stuart Jones, and Roderick McKenzie, A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), s.v. kosmos.

individual identity as well. That is, perhaps, the simplest statement of human identity that can be offered from the classical and early medieval philosophers whose work forms the background against which I set my discussion of embodiment in early English writing. This dissertation considers the difficult relationship between body and soul more closely in the Old English translations traditionally associated with the reign of King Alfred the Great of Wessex (r. 871-899).3 The translations of Gregory the Greats Dialogi and Cura pastoralis, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethiuss Consolatio philosophiae, and the Soliloquia of Augustine of Hippo collectively represent the earliest extant vernacular translation project known to the West, as well Englishs first substantial foray into the realms of theology, philosophy, ethics, and history. What makes this particular group of texts particularly intriguing is not only its relative age, but the hypothesized circumstances of its production and the scope of work it sought to tackle. As AngloSaxonists well know, according to the preface to the Pastoral Care, in the late ninth century, King Alfred instituted his project to translate those books most necessary for all men to know, for the sake of furnishing competent clerics for English churches and educating the scions of noble families;4 this ambitious project, already (possibly)

Other texts associated with Alfreds program of education and translation include the Old English translations of Bedes Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, Orosiuss Historia contra paganis and prose translations of the first fifty Psalms and the gospels; for their place in the canon, see Janet Bately, The Alfredian Canon Revisited: One Hundred Years On, in Alfred the Great: Papers from the EleventhCentenary Conferences, ed. Timothy Reuter (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 107-20. Bately holds that the Old English Bede, Orosius, and the Dialogues of Wrferth are only Alfredian in the sense that their composition can reasonably be considered to have been undertaken during Alfreds reign (109). Fory me ync betre, gif iow sw ync, t we eac sum bec, a e niedbeearfosta sien eallum monnum to wiotonne, t we a on t geiode wenden e we ealle gecnawan mgen [Therefore it seems better to me that, if it seems so to you, we also take some books, of those which are most necessary for all men to know, and translate them into that language which we well know] (Hierdeboc Preface, ll. 47-49).
4

complicated by the perilous state of Latinate learning in England, faced the additional and significantdifficulty of being unable to resort to a sophisticated, philosophicallyoriented vernacular vocabulary that could handle the nuances of the Latin texts of interest to Alfred and his circle.5 Despite the lack of precedent for the translators work and the shortage of tools at hand, the topics with which the Anglo-Saxon translators engaged were among the most complex that Latin philosophy and theology had to offer: the search for wisdom, the nature of humanity, memory and the recovery of self-identityand, in addition to theology and philosophy (as in the Consolatio), brief lessons on geography, astronomy, classical literature, and history. Given the relatively thin linguistic resources on which these translators relied, the Old English translations represent not only one of the first known attempts to bring Latin intellectual discourse into the vernacular, but also demonstrate the richness of the linguistic and interpretive resources Anglo-Saxon scholars could bring to bear on such challenging texts as the Consolatio and Soliloquia.6

Nicole Guenther Discenza, The Kings English: Strategies of Translation in the Old English Boethius (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2005), 13-14. The West Saxon texts pre-dating Alfreds reign run more toward glosses, wills, and legal codes. However, Mercian texts from the ninth century include a slightly wider range of prose works, including apocrypha, hagiography, catalogues of marvels, medical texts, and homilies; see Janet M. Bately, Old English Prose before and during the Reign of Alfred, ASE 17 (1988): 93-138, at 93-98. For discussion of a possibly Mercian intellectual context for the translations, see Rudolf Vleeskruyer, ed., The Life of St. Chad: An Old English Homily (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1953), 61 for his contention that there was a significantly large tradition of pre -Alfredian English prose, and Stanley B. Greenfield and Daniel G. Calder, A New Critical History of Old English Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 38-39. Worcesters contributions to the preAlfredian and Alfredian intellectual milieu are discussed in Christine B. Thijs, Levels of Learning in Anglo-Saxon Worcester: The Evidence Re-Assessed, Leeds Studies in English n.s. 36 (2005): 105-31. Bately, Old English Prose, 93 offers a salutary warning against assuming that the Anglo Saxons lacked competency in Latin writing. The argument has been made that Alfred is prone to exaggeration in making his claims as to his fellow West-Saxons deficiency when it came to literate, Latinate reading and writing; see Jennifer Morrish, King Alfreds Letter as a Source on Learning in England in the Ninth Century, in Studies in Earlier Old English Prose: Sixteen Original Contributions, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), pp. 87-108, at 87 and 107 and C.P. Wormald, The Uses
6

This dissertation considers the interrelationships of mind, soul, and body in a set of Old English translations traditionally associated with the reign of King Alfred the Great of Wessex (r. 871-899). While Anglo-Saxonists have become interested in questions of what Antonina Harbus terms mentalities, that is Anglo-Saxon ideas about the mind and the self, how these two entities interact in the individual person, the bulk of their interest has been devoted to poetry, as well as to the rich, complex vocabularies deployed by both Old English poetry to conceptualize the mind and its operations, and consequently to those works most often associated with Anglo-Saxon introspection, The Wanderer and The Seafarer. My project here seeks to address two related gaps: first, the role, or roles, of the body in determining both personal and human identity in early medieval England; and second, how philosophies of the individualwhat we might call a precursor of a modern notion of selfcan exist comfortably alongside the philosophies of power (or philosophies of subject-formation, in the political sense) so often seen to be the main concern of Alfredian prose. In doing the latter, my work also seeks to move beyond the discussions of canonicity and identity that are traditionally associated with scholarship on the Alfredian corpus, and to examine other ways in which this set of remarkable texts may be conceptually related. In doing the former, it engages with historiographies and literary histories of the self or individual which have, on the whole, elided early English vernacular literature in their discussions.

of Literacy in Anglo-Saxon England and Its Neighbours, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 15th ser. 27 (1977): 91-114.

The existence of the individual was predicated on the possession of a body (corpus, lic) that was specifically fitted to its soul (anima, sawl) and that, for all its weakness and perishability, was guaranteed to be reconstituted and rejoined with its soul at the end of time. Beyond its eschatological promise, however, the body was that thing which was in the world, not only of it, but the device with which the soul experienced sensation and exercised its propensity to virtue. The translator of the Boethius, who knew well the importance of good tola to work in the world, might have agreed with Marcel Mausss assessment that the body is the first and most natural instrument7even as he, like so many of his contemporaries, expressed reservations about the bodys capacities, and its role in determining the nature and permanence of human identity. Moreover, the body provided an important reference pointone of the very fewfor discussions about the mind and soul, and the experiential aspects of human spiritual life that evaded direct discussion. While most discussions of the Alfredian corpus (and the Alfredian corpus) focus on the governing of that body, and the training of that mind, for the ends of the state, this dissertation seeks to explore ways in which the body, and the mind and soul it was home to, stood in for concerns that were not strictly political, and that even on occasions could resist its politicization. Thus, while one of the major concerns of this work is the translations use of metaphor, I set to the side discussions of metaphors of regnal authority in favor of metaphors and narratives of transformation and change, and the search for permanence while housed in mutable flesh.

Marcel Mauss, Sociology and Psychology: Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Routledge, 1950; repr. 1979), 104.

Although my major project is to explore how the Old English Dialogues, Pastoralis, Boethius, and Soliloquies conceptualized relationships between mind, body, soul, and self from a stance that does not explicitly associate them with the direct authorization or involvement of Alfred the Great, it nonetheless relies on scholarship that has accepted Alfreds involvement. In a sense, I am asking questions about identity in two ways: first, how can we identify a text as Alfredian (common attribution, manuscript transmission, shared vocabulary, shared theology); and second, how do Alfredian texts conceptualize different forms of identity? I would like to turn first to the Alfredian corpus, and ask, in light of recent scholarship, what the term Alfredian has traditionally meant, and what it might now mean. I will then take up some of the history of scholarship on the medieval self and individual, and then lay out a plan for investigating how the Alfredian individual might have been understood.

1.1 The Alfredian Corpus: Traditional Views Because of the translations traditional association with Alfred the Great, scholarship has, until recently, approached these texts from three directions: the political and intellectual contexts of late ninth-century Wessex; the theories of and approaches to translation (hwilum word be wordum, hwilum andgit of andgiete, as Alfreds prefatory letter to the Hierdeboc says) across the corpus; and the nature of the affiliation the texts have with Alfred, whether they were translated by him personally, undertaken by him in conjunction with a circle of advisors, executed by a group of scholars by his orders but without his immediate personal involvement, oras has been most recently suggested 8

entirely independent of Alfreds authority but still seeking to claim it.8 To a certain extent, none of these questions can be divorced from each other, dependent as they all are on the implication of the translations in the early literary history of English, and the close relationships that obtain between, for example, social or political goals and translation practice, and between royal authority striving to gain legitimacy as intellectual authority and the deployment of the vernacular in the development of national identity.9

I will discuss the most recent state of the debate with reference to dating and attribution in the following pages. For Alfreds translation theory, see among others, Janet Bately, The Literary Prose of Alfreds Reign: Translation or Transformation? Toller Lecture (London, 1980; repr. OEN Subsidia 10 [1984]), pp. 10-13; Robert Stanton, The (M)other Tongue: Translation Theory and Old English, in Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeanette Beer (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), pp. 33-46 and the chapter on King Alfred and Early English Translation, in his The Culture of Translation in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), pp. 55-100; Kathleen Davis, The Performance of Translation Theory in King Alfreds National Literary Program, in Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon: Essays on Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor of Whitney F. Bolton, ed. Robert Boenig and Kathleen Davis (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000), pp. 149-70; Christine Thijs, Early Old English Translation: Practice before Theory? Neophilologus 91 (2007): 14973, in which Thijs argues that the approach to translation across the Alfredian corpus is text -specific, not dependent on any single theoretical stancethat the theories guiding the translations were, in some cases, ad hoc. Particular strategies of translation in the Boethius and Soliloquies will be discussed as they come up. This is the position taken by Discenza in The Kings English, when she observes that Alfreds strategic translation methods served first to authorize writer and text. The authority of a warrio r-king did not automatically translate into authority in the role of philosopher-translator (13). The same can be said of David Pratt, who examines the translations as instantiations of Alfreds authority, an authority derived from his association with Solomonic kingship, which wedded royal power to wisdom; see The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For the deployment of the translations in the education of the aristocracy, see Paul Anthony Booth, Ki ng Alfred versus Beowulf: The Re-education of the Anglo-Saxon Aristocracy, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 79 (1997): 41-66; Conrad Leyser, Vulnerability and Power: The Early Christian Rhetoric of Masculine Authority, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 83 (1998): 159-73; Gernot R. Wieland, Ge mid wige ge mid wisdome: Alfreds Double -Edged Sword, in From Arabye to Engelond: Medieval Studies in Honour of Mahmoud Manzalaoui on His 75 th Birthday, ed. A.E. Christa Canitz and Gernot R. Wieland (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1999), pp. 217-28; David A. Lopez, Translation and Tradition: Reading the Consolation of Philosophy through King Alfreds Boethius, in The Politics of Translation in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Renate BlumenfeldKosinski, Luise von Flotow, and Daniel Russell (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2001), pp. 69-84; Nicole Guenther Discenza, Alfreds Verse Preface to the Pastoral Care and the Chain of Authority, Neophilologus 85 (2001): 625-33 and Wealth and Wisdom: Symbolic Capital and the Ruler in the Translational Program of Alfred the Great, Exemplaria 13 (2001): 433-67; Ross Smythe, King Alfreds Translations: Authorial Integrity and the Integrity of Author ity, Quaestio Insularis 4 (2003): 98-114; Antonina Harbus, Metaphors of Authority in Alfreds Prefaces, Neophilologus 91 (2007): 717-27; Janet
9

With respect to the translation-adaptation hybrids of the Boethius and Soliloquies in particular, much scholarship has also concentrated on working out the sources that conditioned the translators interpretations and free re-workings of their Latin exemplars.10 One motive for some of this work is rehabilitative in nature, an ongoing project to rescue the translations from the charges of sloppiness, intellectual laxity, and insufficiency that have dogged them in some scholarship.11 Much of it, though, has been

L. Nelson, Knowledge and Power in Earlier Medieval Europe, Quaestio Insularis 8 (2008): 1-18 for the interrelationship of knowledge (both sapientia and scientia) in Carolingian Francia and Alfredian Wessex, as well as Nicole Guenther Discenza, Alfred the Great and the Anonymous Prose Proem to the Boethius, JEGP 107 (2008): 57-76. The (auto-)biographical nature of the translations is explored in Susan Irvine, Ulysses and Circe in King Alfreds Boethius: A Classical Myth Transformed, in Studies in English Language and Literature: Doubt Wisely. Papers in Honour of E.G. Stanley , ed. M.J. Toswell and E.M. Tyler (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 387-401; David Pratt, The Illnesses of King Alfred the Great, ASE 30 (2001): 39-90; John Lance Griffith, Tasking the Translator: A Dialogue between King Alfred and Walter Benjamin, Medieval and Early Modern English Studies 16 (2008): 1-18. One of the perpetual difficulties with the Boethius is the relationship between it and the body of commentary that had accumulated around the Consolatio by the mid-ninth century. The two main groups of commentaries, the Remigian and St. Gall, have not yet been fully edited; however, the consensus is that the Boethius owes little of its material from them. For discussion of the Boethius and the commentary tradition see, among others: Dorothy Whitelock, The Prose of Alfreds Reign, in Continuations and Beginnings: Studies in Old English Literature, ed. Eric G. Stanley (London: Nelson, 1966), pp. 67-103, at 82-83; Diane K. Bolton, The Study of the Consolation of Philosophy in Anglo-Saxon England, Archives dhistoire doctrinale et littraire du Moyen Age 44 (1978): 33-78; Joseph S. Wittig, King Alfreds Boethius and Its Latin Sources: A Reconsideration, ASE 11 (1982): 157-98; Paul E. Szarmach, building on Wittigs work, argues for the independence and elusiveness of the translations in Alfred, Alcuin, and the Soul, in Boenig and Davis, Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon, pp. 127-39, at 139, n. 40; Discenza, The Kings English, 131-36 summarizes the state of the scholarship. Currently, The Boethius Project, under the direction of Malcolm Godden, Rohini Jayatilaka and Rosalind Love, is in the process of preparing editions of Anglo-Saxon commentaries. The most recent discussion on the state of scholarship is Godden and Irvine, ed., Boethius, 1.54-58. Davis, The Performance of Translation Theory, pp. 150-51 takes issue with understandings of Alfreds meaning in his prose Preface to the Hierdeboc, arguing that instead of Alfred apologizing for any deficiency in his comprehension of those books niedbeearfosta to witonne, the Preface is a statement of Alfreds intention to interpret the text in the best way possible. See also J.C. Frakes, The Fate of Fortune in the Early Middle Ages: The Boethian Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 81-122. However, Alfred P. Smyth sees the departure of the Boethius from the Consolatio as a failure of understanding on Alfreds part, an inability to cope with philosophical discussion (Alfred the Great [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995], 580); the argument is perhaps obliquely referred to in Szarmach, Alfred, Alcuin, and the Soul, when he remarks that explanations of failure are always unsatisfactory because they imply a certain laziness on the part of the explicator for, after all, such explanations become an easy way out of any and all difficulties (131).
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directed at teasing out the intellectual traditions that lie behind the translations, traditions that are, prima facie, Augustinian and Gregorian in nature, but which also passed through the filters of Carolingian ecclesiasts such as Alcuin and reached the translators libraries with an accretion of commentary and modification. In the case of the Boethius, Whitney Bolton has argued that the Old English text should be understood not as primarily Boethian in its intellectual preoccupations and philosophical orientation, but Alcuinian, with a pedagogical and political turn that distinguished the Boethius from the Consolatios more abstract, speculative, and detached philosophy.12 Following the 2009 publication of the new edition of the Boethius, the Boethius Project, under the direction of Malcolm Godden and Rosalind Love, has been working out the complicated textual histories of the early Continental and Insular commentaries on the Consolatio, but at the moment the sourcing of the Boethius itself remains vexed.13 The sources of the Soliloquies have been, in part, compiled and worked out by Carnicelli, but on the whole both it and the Boethius have escaped discussion outside the realm of source work and

Whitney Bolton, How Boethian Is Alfreds Boethius? in Szarmach, Studies in Earlier Old English Prose, pp. 153-68, at 161. See also Paul E. Szarmach, Alfreds Boethius and the Four Cardinal Virtues, in Alfred the Wise: Studies in Honour of Janet Bately on the Occasion of Her Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Jane Roberts, Janet L. Nelson and Malcolm Godden (Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 223-35 and Alfred, Alcuin, and the Soul, n. 10 above. The glosses discussed by Joseph Wittig in The Remigian Glosses on Boethiuss Consolatio Philosophiae in Context, in Source of Wisdom: Old English and Early Medieval Latin Studies in Honour of Thomas D. Hill, ed. Charles D. Wright, Frederick M. Biggs, and Thomas N. Hall (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 168-200, at 178 suggest Alcuins influence as well. See Section 1.1.2 below for a discussion of Malcolm Goddens arguments as to the dating and authorship of the Boethius. His arguments have implications for the authorship of the Meters and the Soliloquies.
13

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the relationships the texts bore to Alfreds wider interests in consolidating both political and intellectual authority.14 While (as I will discuss below) I am setting discussions of Alfreds involvement, whatever the nature of that involvement may be, to the side, the present work relies heavily on one of the major points of agreement that runs through previous discussions of the Alfredian translations: that the translator (or translators) knew what he was doing, and that the choices madeto translate hwilum word be wordum, hwilum andgit of andgieteare to be understood as conscious decisions, decisions that were made in the executions of both the more faithful translations of the Dialogues and Pastoralis and the translation/commentary-hybrids that are the Boethius and Soliloquies. The hybridity of the Boethius and Soliloquies makes them particularly rich texts to mine for descriptions of body, mind, and self that are not taken from their putative sources. Two points before laying out the methodology and plan of the project: the contentious issue of Alfreds association with the translations; and what, in light of recent scholarship, it might mean to be Alfredian.

1.1.1 The Matter of the Canon: Identifying the Alfredian Corpus The twentieth century (to say nothing of the twenty-first) has seen a radical shift in scholarly assessments of the Alfredian canon. In part, these reassessments are due to

Outside of Carnicellis 1969 edition, the only sustained attempt to trace the sources of the Soliloquies was the Fontes Anglo-Saxonici project, which has since been abandoned. The question of sources is especially relevant to Soliloquies Book Three, which advertises itself as being another Augustinian work, the De uidendo deo (Epistula 147), but is in fact an almost completely original composition interpolating a bit of Augustine, but also a significant amount of (modified) Gregorian and Julian eschatology. See Malcolm Godden, Text and Eschatology in Book III of the Old English Soliloquies, Anglia 121 (2003): 192-205.

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work done on the linguistic and stylistic particulars of the texts, as well as the reconsideration of how modern scholarship conceptualizes medieval theories of authorship and attribution, kingship, and history. As a result, the translations attributed to Alfred by William of Malmesburythe Boethius, Hierdeboc, Orosius, Bede, and the Psalms, with a translation of the Dialogi outsourced to Wrferth of Merciahave had their status as Alfredian texts contested and, in some cases, removed or modified. The only text to be added to the canon that went unmentioned by Asser and William is the translation of Augustines Soliloquies.15 Several reasons can, and have been, marshaled against the argument that the entirety of the corpus was translated by one man, and/or Alfred in particular: first, the range of translation habits that separates, for example, the relatively straightforward rendering of the Pastoral Care from the adaptive, much looser Boethius; second, the stylistic data which (while it cannot identify an author) distinguishes the Bede, Orosius, and perhaps the Psalms from the Pastoral Care and the Dialogues; third, Alfreds illhealth and already rather jam-packed schedule; and fourth, Alfreds late-starting education. In the Vita, Asser does not mention Alfreds translation projects, only his

Both William and Asser also discuss Alfreds Enchiridion, a handbook said by Asser to contain translations of the psalms and other Scriptural passages, hymns, and possibly quotations from patristic writers or other authorities; see Williams Gesta regum Anglorum, ed. and trans. R.A.B. Mynors, R.M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 192-93 and Assers Vita Alfredi in Alfred P. Smyth, The Medieval Life of King Alfred the Great: A Translation and Commentary on the Text Attributed to Asser (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 42-43. Further, the thirteenth-century Middle English poems The Proverbs of King Alfred and the Owl and the Nightingale both attribute various maxims to Alfred, englene derling (Englands darling) and englene frowere (Englands comfort); see O. Arngart, ed., The Proverbs of Alfred, 2 vols. (Lund: Hkan Ohlssons Boktryckeri, 1955) and Neil Cartlidge, ed. and trans., The Owl and the Nightingale: Text and Translation (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2001). For the reception of Alfred in the later Middle Ages, see Simon Keynes, The Cult of King Alfred the Great, ASE 28 (1999): 225-356 and Robert Allen Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005), especially Remembering Alfred in the Twelfth Century, 11-53.

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eager acquisition of knowledge and his collaboration with Asser in the compilation of his handbook.16 Of the texts accepted as members of the canon, only the Pastoral Care, Boethius (both the prose and prosimetrum versions), and Soliloquies internally identify themselves as texts translated by Alfred; consequently, in most cases, association with Alfred has been inferred based on other textual features, or accepted by tradition.17 The famous prose preface to the Pastoral Care, and its verse counterpart, attribute the act of translation to the king, as do the prose and verse introductions to the Boethius, but such attributions do not appear elsewhere. The first part of the preface to the Soliloquies has gone missing; Alfred is named in the closing paragraph of Book Three, in the sense that the third book is composed of a cwidas e lfred kining als of re bec de uidendo deo [the sayings which King Alfred took from the book De uidendo Deo] (97.17-18).18 Of the remaining texts, only the Dialogues invokes Alfred as its patron or commissioner, under whose auspices Bishop Wrferth executed the translation. Work by Whitelock and Bately has removed the translations of Bedes Historia ecclesiastica and Orosiuss Historia aduersus paganos from the Alfredian canon on dialectal and stylistic grounds.19 More recently, Michael Treschow, in collaboration with Paramjit S. Gill and

16 17

Asser, Vita Alfredi, in Smyth, King Alfred the Great, 50-51.

The translator of the Orosius expanded Orosiuss information on the North by including the report now known as The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan. Ohthere, a Norwegian, and Wulfstan, probably himself an Anglo-Saxon, had visited Alfreds court. Alfred, apparently impressed, had scribes copy down their narratives. The beginning of the Soliloquies is manifestly incomplete, with no firmly-identified subject behind the anonymous first-person voice that announces Gaderode me onne kigclas, and stuansceaftas, and locsceaftas and hylfa to lcum ara tola, e ic mid wircan cue [Then (I) gathered for myself the beams and props and crossbeams and handles as all the material with which I knew to work] (47.1-2).
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Tim B. Swartz, has used statistical analysis of the texts stylometrics to argue, contra Bately and Patrick ONeill, that the fifty prose Psalms should not be considered part of Alfreds corpus, either.20 Sifting through the translations to determine canonicity has, at times, obscured larger questions of authorship and authorial identity. When Treschow, in describing the removal of Bede and Orosius from Alfreds publication list, remarks that Alfred no longer gets credit for translating the Historia ecclesiastica and the Historia aduersus paganos, there is no real attempt to further discuss what Alfred is getting credit for. That is, attempts to attribute texts to Alfred have tended to ignore investigating the role Alfred played in the translations (de facto assuming that Alfred had sole responsibility for their production); moreover, they have not, generally speaking, sought to explore why Alfred occupies such a central position in the origin of the translations. As Bately has noted, lexical studies cannot put a name on a text if no name is provided.21 Consequently, newer work has moved away from the question of attribution and toward a

For the Historia ecclesiastica, see Dorothy Whitelock, The Prose of Alfreds Reign, in Continuations and Beginnings, ed. E.G. Stanley (London: Nelson, 1966), pp. 67-103; for Orosius, see Janet Bately, ed., The Old English Orosius, EETS s.s. 6 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), lxxiii-xciii, particularly lxxxvi-lxxxix for Batelys analysis of the association of the Orosius with Alfreds program, and see now Janet Bately and Anton Englert, eds., Ohtheres Voyages: A Late Ninth Century Account of Voyages along the Coasts of Norway and Denmark and Its Cultural Contexts (Roskilde: Viking Ship Museum, 2007). A more detailed discussion of the critical background and more extensive analysis of the translations can be found in Michael Treschow, Paramjit Gill, and Tim B. Swartz, King Alfreds Scholarly Writings and the Authorship of the First Fifty Prose Psalms, Heroic Age 12 (2009) <http://www.mun.ca/mst/heroicage/issues/12/treschowgillswartz.php> (accessed September 24, 2009). The technical details underlying the results, and the statistical method, can be found in Paramjit S. Gill, Tim B. Swartz, and Michael Treschow, A Stylometric Analysis of King Alfreds Literary Works, Journal of Applied Statistics 34 (2007): 1251-58. Janet Bately, Lexical Evidence for the Authorship of the Prose Psalms in the Paris Psalter, ASE 10 (1982): 69-95, at 95.
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reconsideration of other ways in which Alfred might be connected to the translations, whether he (as in the case of the Dialogues) commissioned the texts, took an active role in supervising their production, or even contributed to the process without translating them entirely as his own.22 Work done in the past decade has, overall, tended to distance Alfred from the works usually attributed to him, whether by giving him credit for patronage or interested (but not direct) participation or by, in some cases, removing him from the scene entirely. In the words of Treschow, Gill, and Swartz, The legendary sage depicted by the Anglo-Normans is not quite the historical Alfred that we understand today. We still, of course, tend to see him as a scholarly ruler, though the question arises whether that image might be too good be true. Should we believe that Alfred, amidst all his efforts and troubles, actually labored through any translation at all? Is this propaganda playing to our wishful thinking?23 Treschow et al. call into question the line of argument accepted unquestioningly by, among others, Patrick Wormald, who sees no good reason to doubt that the four books

Asser prefaces his own entry to Alfreds circle by mentioning the cadre of scholars who worked in the royal court, including Wrferth, bishop of Worcester, his student Peter, Plegmund of Canterbury, thelstan, Wrwulf, and others (Smyth, The Medieval Life of King Alfred the Great, 36-40 and 42-43). In the Gesta, William emphasizes that Alfreds work was not undertaken alone, but rather with the aid of his circle: Nichil in ista uel aliis interpretationibus ex suo dicere, sed omnia a spectabilibus uiris Pleimundo archiepiscopo, Asserione episcopo, Grimbaldo et Iohanne presbiteris hausisse [Nothing, he adds, in this or the other translations is said on his own responsibility, but he has derived everything from men of high reputation, Archbishop Plegmund, Bishop Asser, and the priests Grimbald and John] ( Gesta, 194-95). Ealdorman thelweard, whose Chronicon (written c. 998) was known to William, celebrates Alfred as a skilled translator, who translated unknown numbers of books from Latin to English ita uarie, ita propime (with such variety and richness) for the edification of both scholars and the unlearned; see A. Campbell, ed. and trans., The Chronicle of thelweard (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1962), 51-52. The range of texts traditionally associated with Alfred, encompassing national ( Bede) and world (Orosius) history, along with philosophy, theology, natural history (the Boethius, Soliloquies, and Dialogues) and manuals for ecclesiastical leadership (Hierdeboc), would certainly represent the variety celebrated by thelweard.
23

22

Treschow, Gill, and Swartz, King Alfreds Scholarly Writings, p. 2.

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that stand in [Alfreds] name, plus one other, were in a real sense composed by him.24 Wormald, though, admits of larger possibilities than Alfreds exclusive authorship, suggesting that the translations were carried out under Alfreds patronage, by scholars such as Asser, Plegmund, Grimbald, John, and Wrferth, who formed a circle of intellectuals who advised and educated the king, but whose work nonetheless bear[s] the impress of a single, royal, mind.25 The royal mind, then, could directly compose the translations or else bear the responsibility of production in some other way; regardless of the mind or minds who executed them, the translations all work together as part of a larger program that tied education and vernacularity specifically and exclusively to Alfreds political agenda. Wormalds broad application of the concept of auctorauthor or authorizerin part addresses long-standing questions about the relationship between Alfred and the translations, given the curious silence of his biographer on the subject, and Assers admission that Alfred came to learning late in life.26 In this same vein, David Pratts extensive study of the relationship between the development of the translations and the

Patrick Wormald, Alfred the Great, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1.718-23, at 19.
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Wormald, Alfred the Great, 1.721.

For Alfreds educational attainments and writing, see, among others, Kenneth Sisam, The Publication of King Alfreds Pastoral Care, in his Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 140-47; Janet Bately, The Literary Prose of King Alfreds Reign: Translation or Transformation?, 7; Allen J. Frantzen, King Alfred (Boston: Twayne, 1986), 1; Smyth, Alfred the Great, 229. Richard W. Clement, The Production of the Pastoral Care: King Alfred and His Helpers, in Szarmach, Studies in Earlier Old English Prose, pp. 129-52 explores the role of Alfreds circle in the execution of the translations.

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development of an Alfredian ethic of kingship takes as its starting point the presumed controlling presence of Alfreds mind and interests behind the canon. However, in a series of recent publications, Malcolm Godden has worked to dispel lingering myths of attribution surrounding Alfred and his role in the translations. Noting the problems surrounding surviving manuscript evidence, which preserves only late copies of the translations, Godden interrogates the consensus view that Alfred bore the primary responsibility for the translations, specifically asking why scholars, over a thousand years after thelweards attribution of the translations to the king, have not been willing to more closely examine evidence that could be taken to challenge Alfreds status as auctor.27 The problem, he writes, does not necessarily lie in depriving AngloSaxon scholarship of one of its precious few named authors, but rather the questions of education, literacy, and culture that arise when the translations are removed from their historical relationship to Alfred and instead examined in the broader, more general context of the Anglo-Saxon period.28 Moreover, stripping the descriptive term Alfredian from the translations, Godden argues, opens up new avenues of interpretation that are not tied to Alfreds political and social goals: As long as we believe that the king wrote the texts or controlled their composition that will strongly influence the way we read them and the kinds of meanings and emphases and points of view we are prepared to recognize in them. The belief in the kings personal authorship makes us too inclined to interpret everything in

thelweards reliability is uncertain. As a kinsman of Alfred (he was the great -great grandson of thelred of Wessex, Alfreds brother), he may have had insider information regarding Alfreds intellectual activities; however, he may also have been interested in promoting the cult of early West-Saxon educational and intellectual projects and their legacies, particularly Alfreds.
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Malcolm Godden, Did King Alfred Write Anything? Medium vum 76 (2001): 1-23, at 18.

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terms of a royalist, authority-centred position and to miss much that is critical and subversive of authority.29 Godden accepts that the Dialogues were likely, following the attribution in the preface and Assers testimony, composed under Alfreds orders, along with the Hierdeboc. Most of Goddens interests, for purposes of modern scholarship, lie in reconsidering the dating and authorial attribution of the Boethius and Soliloquies, as the much more complicated attitudes toward kingship and authority voiced in these translations seem to remove them from an immediately royal purview. As an alternative to the traditionally-accepted compositional order of the Dialogues, Pastoralis, Boethius, and Soliloquies, he suggests that the preface and text of the Hierdeboc were composed with Alfreds authorization, as is probably the case with the Dialogues; on the other hand, the Boethius and Soliloquies both post-date his rule, with the Boethius composed either late in Alfreds reign or shortly after (and before c. 950), and the Soliloquies significantly later, possibly as late as the eleventh century.30

Godden, Did King Alfred Write Anything? 18. Godden also explores the problematic shift in the attitudes toward kingship and thegnship expressed by the first-person figures in the Boethius and Soliloquies, which to him suggest not a royal mind behind the text, but a noble one that is attempting to come to grips with its position in the natural and political order; see his The Player King: Identification and Self-Representation in Alfreds Writings, in Reuter, Alfred the Great, pp. 137-50. Did King Alfred Write Anything? pp. 17-18. For the dating of the Boethius, see Godden and Irvine, eds., Boethius 1.140-46. Godden and Irvine accept the prose Boethius as the source for the Meters, with a similar date range, between 890 and 950, noting that the Meters may more properly belong to the early tenth century. See also his The Alfredian Project and Its Aftermath: Rethinking the Literary History of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries, Proceeedings of the British Academy 162 (2009): 93-122. Leslie Lockett, in her Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010) argues that Alfreds educational profile was not unique, and gives the example of the monk-priest, such as Dunstant or thelwold, whose education would have been equal to the ta sk of producing the translation of the Soliloquies (360-73).
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Goddens relocating of the translations from the last years of Alfreds reign to various dates spread throughout (and beyond) the Anglo-Saxon period could potentially account for the distribution of the manuscript evidence. Aside from two early copies of the Hierdeboc, no surviving manuscript of the translations dates to earlier than the midtenth century.31 The earliest surviving copy of the Boethius, the prosimetrum version surviving in the damaged London, British Library, Cotton Otho A.vi, dates to the middle of the tenth century (and is the manuscript that serves as Goddens terminus ad quem for dating the composition of the Boethius), while the earliest surviving copy of the Dialogues is the tenth-century Canterbury Cathedral Library Additional 25, and the only complete witness to the Soliloquies in a twelfth-century manuscript now part of British Library, Cotton Vitellius A. xv.32 Given the irregularity of surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts in the recordwhich is certainly characteristic of the late ninth and early

Schreiber, King Alfreds Translation of the Regula pastoralis, 51-62. The two manuscripts datable to 890-896 are BL Cotton Tiberius B. xi/Kassel, Gesamthochschulbibliothek 4 MS theol. 131 and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Hatton 20. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 12 was copied in the second half of the tenth century, while Cambridge, Trinity College R.5.22 (717), British Library, Cotton Otho B. ii and Otho B. x, and Cambridge, Cambridge University Library Ii. 2.4 date from the late tenth through late eleventh centuries. For the Boethius, see Godden and Irvine, eds., Boethius 1.12-13 and 22. The prose version found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 180 dates to the end of the eleventh century or the early twelfth. In his edition of the Dialogues, Hecht dates Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 322 to the second half of the eleventh century; of the two other versions, British Library Cotton Otho C. i (eleventh century) is incomplete, and Bodleian Library, Hatton 76, a revision, dates to the eleventh century as well ( Dialogues, 18-26). The Soliloquies survives in toto only in the Southwick Codex, written in the first half of the twelfth century (Soliloquies, 3-4). A fragmentary translation, from Augustines opening prayer, survives in B ritish Library Cotton Tiberius A. iii, a manuscript of the mid-eleventh century. For the edition and translation, see Paul E. Szarmach, Alfreds Soliloquies in London, BL, Cotton Tiberius A. iii (art. 9g, fols. 50v-51v), in Latin Learning and English Lore: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for Michael Lapidge, ed. Katherine OBrien OKeeffe and Andy Orchard (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), pp. 153 -79. Other versions of Augustines prayer are found in abbreviated forms elsewhere, including an Alcuinian florilegium; see David Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 312-13.
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tenth centuriesrelying on the manuscript evidence to support an argument against Alfreds authorship or authorization of the translations may be unwise.33 However, Goddens suggestion that scholarship should detach the translations from their putative authorizing figure is one that, I believe, has merit, and the possibility of offering up readings that are not necessarily subversive of royal authority so much as complementary to it. That is, instead of reading the translations as primarily concerned with inculcating the ethics necessary to the production of the ideal subject (although that is certainly part of their project), I want to explore the possibilities that the texts have to be read as guides to individual life: to the description of different experiences of the body and how those experiences impinge on the mind, the locus of stability within the mind itself, and the work of memory recovery that forms an essential technology of self-care and self-recovery. It is the common concern with the body, self-care and languagethe care of the body, the languages that utilize the body in discussions of the activities of the interior lifethat suggest one way of reading these four texts, particularly the Boethius and Soliloquies, together.

Uncharacteristically, Godden fails to note the existence of Cotton Tiberius A. iii in Did King Alfred Write Anything? While the relocation of the earliest Old English witness to the Soliloquies to the eleventh century does not of course bring it appreciably closer to Alfreds direct authorization, it does point to an interest in Augustinian interiority that is roughly contemporary with the resurgence of interest in Augustines personal meditative writings on the Continent. In his study of the manuscript, Szarmach speculates that the production of Cotton Tiberius A. iii may have been related to the Augustinianism of Anselm of Canterbury, who supported the dissemination of the devotional -meditative text in the vernacular for the salvation of souls (Alfreds Soliloquies in London, BL, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, p. 163).

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1.1.2 What, Then, Is Alfredian? Whether the manuscripts represent later attestations of ninth-century originals or texts that post-date Alfreds rule, the manuscript evidence suggests two divergent hypotheses that still have Alfred at the core: first, that the translations were executed in some part through Alfreds agency (as translator or authorizer); and second, that the translators worked independently of Alfred but wanted these texts to be associated with himthat they wanted his imprimatur, so to speak. As my discussion above suggests, work on Alfred in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has not unquestioningly accepted the claims to authorial responsibility put forward by thelweard and William. Instead, scholarship has opened up new avenues of exploration, moving from purely historical considerations to related questions of, for example, vernacular education, social practice as evident in translation practice, and Anglo-Saxon polity in general. In a similar vein, I take as a basic principle for this study a slightly modified version of Goddens challenge to discard Alfred as the controlling mind behind the canon and instead to investigate the texts independently of royalist concerns: I want to examine these texts as Alfredianthat is, not necessarily as products specifically and only of Alfred and/or his court (that is, their composition dating only to c. 890-899), but as texts that participate in, as it were, a school of thought, a history of ideas that were, throughout and beyond the Anglo-Saxon period, associated with Alfred. Participation in this tradition can be hypothesized based on general observations of the Dialogues, Hierdeboc, Boethius, and Soliloquies, as well as the history of the texts manuscript transmission and Alfreds reputation following his death.

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Looking at the four texts selected for discussion here, there are affinities both obvious and subtle. The Dialogues and Hierdeboc share an ultimate author in Gregory the Great. Of the four texts, three (Dialogues, Boethius, and Soliloquies) are composed in dialogue form; the Boethius and Soliloquies both go to additional effort to emphasize the occasionally frustrated, occasionally colloquial exchanges between their interlocutors.34 Both the Hierdeboc and the Boethius are interested in questions of ethics and the duties of the clerical and secular rector. For three of its four books, the Dialogues is mostly a collection of miracula told by Gregory to his follower Petrus Diaconus; the fourth book, however, turns to the major theme toward which Gregorys stories have been building: the proof of the souls immortality, and its promised life after death; this is also the preoccupation of Book Three in the Soliloquies, in which Gesceadwisnes reassures Agustinus as to the immortality of his mind and soul.35 One of the major changes made to the Boethius was to swap the philosophical language of the Consolatio for a theological language that more closely matched that of the Dialogues and Hierdeboc; the same changes can also be detected in the Soliloquies, which abandoned Neoplatonic

Ruth Waterhouse, Tone in Alfreds Version of Augustines Soliloquies, in Szarmach, Studies in Earlier Old English Prose, pp. 49-59. The announcement is made in one of Wrferths few interpolations, the preface to Book Four: Her aspringe seo feore y re hluttran burnan of am mue s elan lareowes, of re am e yrste and lyste magon drincan and gecnawan, t s mannes sawl ne fre na y gemete e oera nytena fter am gedale s lichaman [Here springs the fourth torrent of the clear river from the mouth of the noble teacher (i.e. Gregory), from which those who thirst and long for it may drink and know, that the soul of men does not fare in the same way as other beasts after parting from the body] ( Dialogues 260.1-4). For the innovation of the Soliloquies regarding the assertion of the co-immortality of mind (mod) and soul (sawol), see Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies, 325-30.
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abstractions in favor of dogmatic assertions.36 Lastly, the Boethius and Soliloquies especially share close thematic links, concerned as they are with self-knowledge, love, knowledge of God, and the translinguistic experience of the visio Dei. While the Soliloquiesabandoned after two books by a frustrated Augustinedoes not immediately seem like one of those books an Anglo-Saxon absolutely needed to know, it offers an early view of Augustinian interiority, stripped of the extensive biographical materials that would have made the Confessions (assuming the translator had access to it) much more challenging. Further, the dialogue between a personified authority figure (Philosophia, Ratio) and a despondent mind struggling towards understanding (Boethius, Augustine) also links the two at the level of genreand, perhaps, Boethius himself took Augustine for his model. E.T. Silk and Anna Crabbe have both suggested that Augustine was crucial to the concept of the Consolatio.37 There are certainly compelling links at the level of genre as well as material, given that both are struggles toward understanding that

Discenza, The Kings English 38-39: The Boethius fits into this program neatly with its story of an individual reconciling his own fortunes with a broader perspective and the theme of free will, largely untreated by the other works in the program. The Soliloquies would later provide abstract arguments for the immortality of the soul and mind, placing the journey of the individual soul into an eschatological context. Throughout the Meters, the Neoplatonic law of the Consolatio is reinterpreted as Biblical law; the order of the classical cosmos that Boethius borrows from Platos Timaeus becomes the guide or lawbook that guides the soul back to the divine; see Karmen Lenz, Images of Psychic Landscape in the Meters of King Alfreds Froferboc (Ph.D diss.: University of New Mexico, 2004), 77. For the Soliloquies, see Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies, 336. A link between the Consolatio and Augustines two dialogues De magistro and Soliloquia was first proposed by E.T. Silk, Boethiuss Consolatio Philosophiae as a Sequel to Augustines Dialogues and Soliloquia, Harvard Theological Review 32 (1939): 19-39; see also Anna Crabbe, Literary Design in the De consolatione Philosophiae, in Boethius: His Life, Thought and Influence, ed. Margaret Gibson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), pp. 237-74, at 241. Seth Lerer, Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in The Consolation of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) proposes the De magistro and Soliloquia as generic models for the Consolatio (47); in the case of the Soliloquia, Augustines selfconscious creation of the interior dialogue (the Soliloquia are set within Augustines own wondering, confused mind) as a new literary genre could also have appealed to Boethius in the early stages of conceptualizing the Consolatio (51).
37

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come out of grief, and this understanding is intimately related to Neoplatonic anamnesis, the recovery of prior, now-forgotten memory.38 Moreover, the distribution of surviving manuscripts, and the afterlife of the translations in other texts, could be taken to suggest that the Anglo-Saxons (and the later English) had an abiding interest not only in Alfred and his program of vernacular education as a historical phenomenon, but in continuing a line of investigation and thought opened up by the Hierdeboc and Dialogues. Several copies of the translations can be dated to the years before or during the Benedictine Reform, which also saw the further development of interest in Anglo-Saxon poetics, prose composition, and translation.39 The translation program itself is cited by lfric as the precedent and inspiration for his own vernacular homiletic projects in his First Series of Catholic Homilies.40 The sole complete manuscript of the Soliloquies belongs to a transitional period that saw the resurgence of interest in Anglo-Saxon kingship (it is nearly contemporary with Williams Chronicle) and interest in Alfred in particular as a figure of

Szarmach, Alfreds Soliloquies in London, BL, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, p. 162. Heinric h Stirnimann, Grund und Grnder des Alls: Augustins Gebet in den Selbstgesprchen (Freiburg: Universittsverlag, 1992), 28-33 discusses the echoes of Augustines opening prayer in the Soliloquia to Consolatio 3.m.9, O qui perpetua, or the so-called Timaean Hymn. For the tradition of Latin glossing and textual history lying behind the Benedictine Reform, see Mechthild Gretsch, The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform , CSASE 25 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). lfric writes that his Catholic Homilies were in part inspired by the need for vernacular theological writing to counteract what he saw as intellectual vacuity in England; except for a handful of Latinate scholars and am bocum e lfred cyning snoterlice awende of ledene on englisc [those books which King Alfred wisely translated from Latin into English]; Catholic Homilies: The First Series, ed. Peter Clemoes, EETS s.s. 17 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997], Preface ll. 48-56), the state of learning in England was, at least in lfrics opinion, lamentable. He makes use of the Alcuinian concepts of the soul in the Christmas Homily (LS, B1.3.2) and De auguriis (LS, B1.3.18) in his Lives of Saints, and also mentions the translations of Bede and the Dialogues elsewhere (for discussion, see Boethius 1.207-9).
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royal authority and wisdom in early Middle English texts. The Boethius was also in use well after its putative translator had died; the Latin commentary on the Consolatio by Nicholas Trevet, written c. 1300, is clearly influenced by the Boethius, which Trevet cites on several occasions.41 Consequently, when I say that a text is Alfredian, I mean not to attribute the text to Alfred, but rather to a school of thought that considered itself to be participating in traditions of vernacular learning and to be partaking of the authority of Alfred of Wessex. For the purposes of the present discussion, Alfred as authorizer of these texts is of secondary importance; instead of focusing on the figure of the king as textual authority, I would like to focus on the common methods Alfredian texts use to structure subjectivity, and begin the movement toward what we might today call the self. Beyond the fragmentary and problematic manuscript evidence, textual evidence suggests that these translations are all Alfredian in that they deploy linguistic and translation strategies that conceptualize the mind and body in similar ways, with similar implications for a common tradition of Anglo-Saxon intellectual, epistemological, and social theories.

1.2 Medieval Selves: Toward Alfredian Self-(sylf?)hood During the course of remarks given to a recent conference on medieval and early modern theorizations of interiority, Paul Strohm commented that intellectual histories of selfhood tend to describe the interior, isolate self as having been discovered, as though

Brian Donaghey, Nicholas Trevets Use of King Alfreds Translation of Boethius, and the Dating of His Commentary, in The Medieval Boethius: Studies in the Vernacular Translations of De consolatione philosophiae, ed. Alastair J. Minnis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 131; Boethus1.212-14.

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philosophers had excavated the self from beneath the detritus of the non-selfhood of previous ages.42 In the same way that discussion of the Alfredian canon has been driven by its identification with a particular ruler, discussion of the medieval self has for some time been driven by responses to historiographies and anthropologies that have seen the Middle Ages as the age of the non-individual, in which individual or particular identity was subsumed beneath identities that tied the individual into a collective. The paradigmatic statement comes from Jacob Burckhardt in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy: In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousnessthat which was turned within as that which was turned withoutlay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, though which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporationonly through some general category.43 Burckhardts assertion that the group (for example, the gens or familia) was the only meaningful locus of identity was particularly influential in sociological and anthropological studies. In her review of the sparse literature on medieval selfhood, Antonina Harbus notes that, on the occasions when pre-Modern conceptions of the self are examined, it is frequently for the purpose of demonstrating the developing biography of modern ideas about human identity and subjectivity, emerging social behavior, or our

42

Paul Strohm, Keynote Address (lecture, University of California, Irvine, CA, January 21,

2011). Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 98.
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superior awareness of the self today;44 statements by, among others, Roy F. Baumeister, Frank Johnson, and Peter Smith and Michael Bond all recapitulate two assumptions: that medieval identity was indissolubly corporate in nature, or that all medievals thought the same way about the self, regardless of time and place.45 Ronald Ganze, in his 2005 dissertation, also remarks on the pervasiveness of the myth of the medieval monomind, and his own project, like Harbuss, is engaged with taking apart Burckhardtian and other post-Renaissance historiographies that generalize medieval identities as groupbased.46 Reactions to Burckhardtian attitudes toward the Middle Ages have taken issue both with generalizations out of ignorance and with the assumption that the individual (whatever that is) either did not exist or existed in a sort of dreamy half-life. Almost overwhelmingly, reactions have come from scholars of the high and late Middle Ages; scholars working in the 1970s argued that, rather than looking to the Renaissance for the fashioning of the individual, the twelfth century provided the earliest evidence for a body

Antonina Harbus, The Medieval Concept of the Self in Anglo -Saxon England, Self and Identity 1 (2002): 77-97, at 79. She reviews modern literature on the medieval self at 78-81. In two separate places, for example, Baumeister reiterates his belief that self-knowledge was not a pressing issue for medieval thinkers: late medieval awareness of selfhood was crude by modern standards, suggesting that self-knowledge was not regarded as an important problem (How the Self Became a Problem: A Psychological Review of Historical Evidence, Psychological Review 52 [1987]: 163-76) and notions of selfhood in the Middle Ages in the West may have been far more collective than they are now (The Self and Society: Changes, Problems, and Opportunities, in Self and Identity: Fundamental Issues, ed. Richard D. Ashmore and Lee Jussim [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997], pp. 191-217); both qtd. in Harbus, The Medieval Concept of the Self in Anglo-Saxon England, 79. Ronald Ganze, Conceptions of the Self in Augustine, King Alfred, and Anglo -Saxon England (Ph.D dissertation: University of Oregon, 2004), 18-29. See also his more recent The Medieval Sense of Self, in Misconceptions about the Middle Ages, ed. Stephen J. Harris and Bryon Lee Grigsby (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 102-16 for criticism of modern attitudes towards pre-Cartesian theorizations of selfhood.
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of literature actively interested in the exploration of the single, unique person, and that, in fact, this interest provided the motivation for the composition of theological, philosophical, and literary works.47 In the twelfth century, the individual became the organizing principle of literature, in contrast to the early Middle Ages, which remained wedded to collective identity; this attitude is particularly clear in Norman Cantors The Meaning of the Middle Ages, which considers group and typological thought to have been characteristic of pre-twelfth century literature, while a sort of proto-humanism can be detected in the years of and following the twelfth-century renaissance.48 Linked to the twelfth century is the development of vernacular literature, not only in terms of the size of the corpus (admittedly considerable compared to pre-1050 vernacular literature, which is constituted mostly of Old English and Irish), but also the vernacular as a vehicle as a literary language of self-expression, in contrast to learned, Latinate discourse.49 The individual, then, is a product of romance, and romance in turn generated continuing interest in the priority of individual self-exploration over corporate identities.

The assignation of self to the Renaissance is, of course, argued in Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Greenblatt sees the Renaissance as initiating the view of identity as something that is both individual and manipulablesomething that, rather than being assigned or static, could be manipulated (3). See also Sarah Spence, Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 13. Norman F. Cantor, The Meaning of the Middle Ages (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1973). A major disadvantage, Cantor writes of the early Middle Ages, was a weak sense of individual personality. Human complexity was ignored, and people were defined by their status instead of their individual characteristics (163), and again, In the twelfth century there emerged a new consciousness of the self and recognition of the importance and distinctiveness of the individual, marking a significant departure from the group and typological thought of the early Middle Ages. Men began to develop a sense of individual reality and to appreciate the dignity and worth of individual human personality (203).
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Spence, Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century, 2.

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Interest in the twelfth-century individual as a product of vernacular literature has typically ignored Anglo-Saxon evidence altogether. In The Discovery of the Individual: 1050-1200, Colin Morris looks primarily to Continental Latin sources, not at the body of Insular literature, including Anglo-Latin and Old English, for evidence of continuity with the classical period.50 The flowering of romance literature, as explored by Richard W. Southern and Robert Hanning, was impelled by, among other things, a new desire on the part of literate men and women to understand themselves as single, unique personsas what we would call individuals, over and against the abstractions of high medieval Latin theology.51 Vernacularity remains the touchstone for Sarah Spence, who argues that the vernacular of the twelfth century is distinguishable from its antecedents in that the twelfth-century vernacular, as represented by the troubadour lyrics, are the first instantiation of a subjective stance that hovers between the subjective and objective worlds, but adduces no evidence from Anglo-Saxon traditions.52

Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual: 1050-1200 (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1972), 33. Robert W. Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 1. Also Richard William Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953). In addition to vernacular romance, Southern points to the acquisition of scientific, medical, and philosophical writings from the East, and their concomitant embrace and development in the universities as sources for a developing appreciating of the individual (220-21). Related to the development of the individual and the reintroduction of Greek and Eastern sciences of cognition is the fact that modern scholarship on medieval cognitive science, in both philosophy and medicine, centers primarily on GrecoRoman sources and their later development by scholastic thinkers; see, for example, E. Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1975); Simon Kemp, Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996); Heather Webb, The Medieval Heart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
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Spence, Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century, 12.

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1.2.1 The Incorporated Self versus the Individual In 1980, Caroline Walker Bynum argued that responses to Burckhardtian assumptions regarding medieval identity formations (or lack of such formations; the corollary assumption seems to be that, because the primacy or centrality group identities were taken a priori, there was not much theorizing about them) had, in their efforts to disprove faulty arguments, sacrificed the exploration of medieval corporate identities. Thinkers of the twelfth century did not emphasise the individual personality at the expense of corporate awareness, she wrote, Rather it was characterized by the discovery of the group and the outer man as well as by the discovery of the inner landscape and of the self.53 The scholarly pendulum, then, had swung too far in one direction; instead of positing theologies, philosophies, or literatures that were wholly devoted to the exploration or celebration of the individualthe Middle Ages, after all, did not have a cult of the self as, say, nineteenth-century America didBynum argues that such theologies, philosophies, and literatures were invested in exploring the complexities of the inner life as it related to other individuals, corporate life, and so on. Conceptualizing the twelfth century as a time when the individual could be viewed as an individual because of his or her place within larger collectives is a particularly apropos compromise position. Bruce Holsinger and Rachel Fulton, in History in the Comic Mode, point to the work of Bynum and David Wallace (the latter in Chaucerian Polity) as important for developing understandings of how certain types of

Caroline Walker Bynum, Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual? Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31 (1980): 1-17, at 3. Bynums contentions that discussions of high medieval individuality should be replaced with discussions of the self will be explored below, and are relevant to establishing the terminology deployed by my own work.

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individualism, subjectivity, self-consciousness, and so on are undeniably perceptible in medieval culture, just as crucial to our understanding of these types must be the processes, institutions, associations, and roles that enable their emergence.54 In other words, what is at issue for Bynum, Holsinger, and Fulton is the identification of types or forms of self-exploration that are contextualized and given meaning by the development of the communities out of which they come. These communities can be defined in a number of ways, not only in terms of general political affiliations, but specific and localized habits of reading, interests in specific objects or texts, or veneration of particular saints.55 Because the inner man (homo interior) is defined in part by the activities he practices and his relationship to others in his community (homo exterior), the self is, at least in part, relational; that is, the self, at the same time that it is private and interior, also receives its shape from the connections it has with other selves. Revising either/or approaches to medieval selfhood also required a shift in terminology. Instead of employing individual, Bynum suggested the use of self to describe the homo interior explored by medieval thinkers; medieval writers were not interested in the individuum (a term that existed only in the realm of dialectic), but rather how a person should reflect on, assess, and consider seipsum or, if they were AngloSaxon, him sylf.56 Following Bynums suggestion, I give this caveat: as numerous

Bruce W. Holsinger and Rachel Fulton, Introduction: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person, in History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person , ed. Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 1-14, at 4.
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Holsinger and Fulton, Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person, p. 6.

Ipse/ipsum and sylf are not substantives, but rather reflexive and emphatic pronouns. See the discussion in Stanley B. Greenfield, Min, Sylf, and Dramatic Voices in The Wanderer and The Seafarer,

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scholars have warned, I do not take the Old English word sylfwhich appears frequently in the Alfredian corpusas synonymous with a self as our array of modern definitions attempt to describe it. Rather, I adopt the term because of its convenient closeness to Old English, and for its reflexive properties, as when, in the Boethius, Wisdom asks Mod hwer u wistest hwt u self wre [if you know what you yourself are] (5.70-71). Instead of arguing for a precise equivalence between self and sylf, or individual and sylf, I use self as a way to think about how the translators of the Alfred texts thought about the ways in which the individual is constituted by both body and soul, how language structures the self and how the self thinks about the world, its own being, and God, and how basic metaphors condition narratives that eventually allow the self to come to a better understanding of what it is. Consequently, none of this is to say that, because they had no specific referent for self or employed the term individual in the way that moderns do, the Anglo-Saxons (or any medieval writer) had absolutely no concept of the singular, discrete subject. As Troels Engberg-Pedersen has written about classical Greek philosophers and personhood, it would be a mistake to assume that because a terminology shared between ancient philosophical Greek and modern English (or French or German) does not exist, so too an ancient Greek concept of the person did not exist. Rather, such a concept must be adduced through an examination of practices and systems of thought

JEGP 68 (1969): 212-20 and John C. Pope, Dramatic Voices in The Wanderer and The Seafarer, in Franciplegius: Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honor of Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr., ed. Jess B. Bessinger and R.P. Creed (New York: New York University Press, 1965), pp. 164-93, and the problem of whether sylf should be taken as reflexive pronoun, marker of a separate consciousness or subjectivity, or a hybrid of both. For a discussion of the linguistic history, see also Ekkehard Knig and Letitia Vezzosi, On the Historical Development of Attributive Intensifiers, in Language and Text: Current Perspectives on English and Germanic Historical Linguistics and Philology , ed. Andrew James Johnson, Ferdinand von Mengden, and Stefan Thim (Heidelberg: Winter, 2006), pp. 151-68.

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that are concerned with the production and care of a particular entitya human being (anthrpos)as the Greeks understood it.57 Bynums argument was anticipated, although not elucidated as such, by Robert Hanning, who saw the impulse behind vernacular literature being not only the description or celebration of the individual, but the individual in a relative sense: This impulse to understand individuals as [single, unique persons] operated in three distinguishable but not totally distinct areas: the individual in relation to his own makeup and character; the individual in relation to his social and institutional environment; the individual in relation to his God.58 Hannings triad of individual and forms of relativity is, oddly enough, one of the driving preoccupations of the Alfredian corpus I want to examine. For example, the Hierdeboc is concerned with the balance of individual need and public duty, and the Boethius is a program of self-recovery and spiritual quest set against its protagonists biography and life in the world. The Soliloquies is also engaged in the same project as the Boethius, broadly speaking, but self-exploration and revelation also rely on the support and of Agustinuss community: a cw [Gesceadwisnes]: befste hit onne bocstafum and awrit hit, ac me inc ath eah, t u si to unhal t u ne mage hit all awritan; and eah u all hal were, u beorftest t u hfdest digle stoge and manne lces ores inges, and fawa cue men and creftige mid e, e nan wiht ne amyrdan, ac fultmoden to inum crefte. (49.17-21) [Then Reason said, Entrust it (your memory) to letters and write it down. But it seems to me that you are too weak to write it all, and even if you were completely

Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Stoic Philosophy and the Concept of the Person, in The Person and the Human Mind: Issues in Ancient and Modern Philosophy , ed. Christopher Gill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 109-35, at 109-10. Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance, 1. Hanning argues that the twelfth century provided a respite from the barbarian invasions and economic instability that character ized the early Middle Ages (1-2). See also Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 20-36.
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healthy, it is necessary that you should have a private place and leisure from everything else, and have a few familiar and skillful men with you, none of whom will hinder but will be helpful to your craft.] In the Latin, there is no mention of anything like the feawa cue men and creftige who could serve as amanuenses or advisors to prop up Agustinuss limited mental and physical faculties in the service of recording his memories; instead, Reason merely remarks that Augustine ought to write down his thoughts (Ergo, scribendum est), and says of the activity of writing Nec ista dictari debent; nam solitudinem meram desiderant [These things should not be dictated (to others), for they require utter privacy] (Soliloquia 1.13-14). In the Soliloquia, the process of committing memory to the page is purely textual; while thwarted by Agustinuss own solitude and lack of free time, the Soliloquies also understands the recording of memory as a community efforteven though, as Agustinus despairingly says to Gesceadwisnes, leisure, company, and a room of his own are denied to him (Soliloquies 50.1-2). Following Bynum, when I speak of individual persons as the topics of the Alfredian translations, I employ the term self. Two reasons govern my approach. First, I believe there is evidence in the Alfredian translations for understanding the self/individual in the sense argued for by Bynum and Hanning, as an entity that recognizes both its separateness from and its dependence on chains of association that run between it, other selves, and larger social structures. Second, subjecteven when taken in the postmodern sense, as that thing which is produced, controlled, or defined by discourserides uncomfortably close to the political subject, a concept that I want to, for the moment, set aside. Finally, in speaking of the Alfredian self, I do not intend to posit a precise equivalence between Anglo-Saxon conceptualizations of selfhood and a self as a 35

modern might describe it, as an ego that is autonomous and unitary, marked off distinctly from everything else,59 but instead an entity that is relational or negotiated as it moves between considering itself and its innate knowledge, its social relations, and its quest for God.

1.3 Outline of the Project As a focal point of discussion, this dissertation will examine the ways in which the translators of an Alfredian circle engaged with the problematic interrelationship of mind, body, soul, and selfhood. It will also explore the resources available to the AngloSaxon translators in approaching their texts, not only the resources of their own language, but those inherited from the Latin traditions of exegesis and commentary to which they saw themselves as heirs. While the authenticity and composition of the Alfredian corpus is currently under contention, the Dialogues, Hierdeboc, the Boethius, and the Soliloquies share an approach to describing mental and interior spaces and their relationship to the individual, all conditioned by certain ways that Anglo-Saxons, in or beyond Alfreds time and sphere of influence, had of conceptualizing the world. I argue that, whether or not they emerged from Alfreds court, these translations demonstrate a shared scholarly preoccupation, or school of understanding, that can be accessed via analyzing their elaboration of vocabularies and metaphors of interiority, the relationship they articulate between the mind, soul, and body, and how this relationship has important ramifications

Sigmund Freud, speaking of the deceptive stability of the ego, in Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey with introduction by Louis Menand (1961; repr. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 28.

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for our own understanding of what constituted different forms of identity and a developing notion of a self. Recent research on the Alfredian texts has focused not only on the makeup of the canon, but also on the ways in which vernacularity engages with its Latin sources and what these methods can tell us about the social, political, and intellectual contexts that shaped the translations. Such research has explored the extent to which Alfreds translation program, and the texts associated with it, sought not only to reflect the interests and prior knowledge of their readers, but to advocate and, indeed, construct, certain forms of political and social structures and relationships. Although the past few years have seen the nature of the Alfredian canon called into question, scholars have also begun to investigate the metaphors, images, and language that register both common language and common interests among the texts, with important consequences for scholarships current understanding of various aspects of Alfredian prose, from translation practice to political theories as they developed during Alfreds rule. This dissertation will bring discussions of the relationships between translation and social practices together with current investigations of the cognitive structuring of language in other Old English texts to examine the ways in which the translations envision the individual as a human being, a thinking as well as a political or social entity, and the language they use to structure that individual. As the foregoing discussion of the Alfredian canon shows, the best that can be said is that scholars have commonly agreed that a corpus of translations attributable exclusively to the intellectual efforts of the historical Alfred is unlikely. Beyond that, the degree of Alfreds involvement in the translations remains in doubtand, as Godden and 37

Irvines work on the Boethius demonstrates, the degree to which the translations can be associated with the years of Alfreds reign remains contested. The paucity of manuscript evidence and its distribution across almost three hundred years of linguistic variation, does not seem capable of settling the question of which translations Alfred can be associated with, whether as patron, supervisor, or translator. Moreover, the medieval tradition of celebrating Alfreds role as a major intellectual figure who brought the spoils of Latin scholarship to English shores, and whose wisdom was highly quotable in vernacular proverbs, almost hopelessly obscures a clear view of Alfreds actual involvement. The purpose of this dissertation is not to defend Alfred from his detractors, nor to preserve the integrity of the Alfredian corpus from further modification. Rather, it is to suggest that what is meant by Alfredian bears more exploration. One way a text can (or could) be Alfredian is by its attribution to Alfredalthough we have seen such attribution is deeply problematic and cannot, given the extant evidence, be resolved. What I am interested in is not the question of attribution of these translations to Alfred or a proxy such as a commissioned translator; as Bately points out, no evidence in the texts can definitively put a name to the individual(s) responsible for the words on the parchment. One argument is that attribution really doesnt matter, except to our own peace of mind; what matters is that medieval English writers such as thelweard and William saw Alfred, along with Latin authors such as Bede, Alcuin, and Aldhelm, as a central figure in insular scholarship. The objection to this isin addition to charges of sloppiness and possessing a cavalier approach to the subjectthat such an approach

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dodges the issue, although there is something to be said for a better understanding of, say, how post-Conquest writers viewed their pre-Conquest roots. In a move away from prior scholarship on the translations, their authorization, and their attribution, I would like to suspend inquiry into Alfred qua author or authorizer and instead open an investigation of what, beyond language, style, and translation habit, makes a text Alfredian. Some work thus far has argued that the corpus is united conceptually, usually around the political and social goals of Alfreds educational program; for example, David Pratts extensive study The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great argues that the translations all serve as vehicles for a distinctively Alfredian polity and an epistemology that was tied closely to Alfreds vision of the ideal political order. Miranda Wilcoxs exploration of the epistemological metaphor of illumination is not only predicated on the presumed existence of a coherent Alfredian corpus, but argues that the development of such metaphors can be used to postulate the order in which the texts were translated.60 Further, despite his critique of the canonwhich is, in part, an argument against a unifying political agenda suggested by PrattGodden acknowledges that the Boethius and Soliloquies demonstrate affinities in subject matter, lexicon, and style that cannot be explained by chance.61 One of the common interests that unite the

Miranda Wilcox, Alfreds Epistemological Metaphors: eagan modes and scip modes, ASE 35 (2006): 179-217. Wilcox traces the development of these metaphors through the Hierdeboc, Boethius, Meters of Boethius, and the Soliloquies. Godden, Did King Alfred Write Anything?, p. 17. Godden and Irvine admit that it is impossible to resist the conclusion that both [the Boethius and Soliloquies] are by the same author (Boethius, 1.136). The first scholar to introduce the possibility that the Boethius and Soliloquies have the same mind behind them was F.G. Hubbard, The Relation of the Blooms of King Alfred to the Anglo-Saxon Translation of Boethius, MLN 9 (1894): 161-71. The evidence adduced is both lexical and thematic. For myself, I believe that, even if the same translator did not have a hand in both texts, the translator of the
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Dialogues, Hierdeboc, Boethius, and Soliloquies is a running preoccupation with understanding the self, not only in its interior life, but with reference to its work and life in the world, and its longed-for involution in the divine. While modern philosophers see the mind/body problem as arising from Descartes proposition of mind/body dualism in the cogito, it is possible to discern an abiding interest in the relationship between the soul and body from the antique through the medieval period, an understanding that the soul was, somehow, materially different from the body it inhabited.62 Medieval writers further complicated the picture by adding mens, mind, which originally served to distinguish the human soul from the animating force that belonged to animals, the souls highest principle which embraced a variety of cognitive faculties. Despite the modern tendency to view Anglo-Saxon writing as divorced from larger traditions of philosophical thought, the translations demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of mind/body theory; the roots of their attitudes toward man (homo) as soul (anima) and body (corpus, caro) lie in classical philosophy as mediated by early Christian theological philosophy. They can also be fruitfully discussed through the critical lenses provided by the phenomenological theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the cognitive linguistics of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, reviewed in the second chapter, which argue for the body as the substratum of epistemology and human knowledge. While the Anglo-Saxons would, in the end, have disagreed with Merleau-

Soliloquies was intimately familiar with the Boethius, and saw the two texts as mutually complementary in their interests. For a discussion of the problem of defining incorporealis, and how the immaterial soul might govern the material body, see Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies, 233-80, and 294 for Alcuin specifically.
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Ponty, Lakoff, and Johnson, they nonetheless recognizedin very similar waysthe necessity of the body for the acquisition of knowledge. The bodys necessity to the human was somewhat troublesome: on one hand, the body provides the best medium through which to understand the soul; on the other, the body was distressingly changeable. Chapter Three focuses on the use of the body in the translations, attending to the complicated relationship that obtains between it and the mind that is supposed to harness its desires, and to narratives that use bodily change to index mental states. I then move on to introduce the role the body plays in forming the major epistemological metaphors that run throughout the Alfredian corpus. It provides the basis for the next two chapters, in which I utilize cognitive linguistics to explore Anglo-Saxon ideas of private or interior mental space. In Chapter Four, I examine how the translators associate the mind not only with interior space in general (what is called interiority), but with a constructed space that possesses order and dimensionality. These relationships exist within the mind itself, as well as between the mind, wisdom, and the divine; the latter relationships, between the self and Other, are conceptualized spatially as well, and are in some cases understood as social space shared by individuals. Thus, the interior of the mind is private, but the result of its self-reflection is conceptualized as taking place with reference and relevance to political and social spaces, and to the physical world. Consequently, the Alfredian individual is, to some extent, constantly involved in the world. According to the seventh-century encyclopedist Isidore of Seville, memoria derives from mens, mind, itself the mediator between the material and immaterial worlds. In the final chapter, I turn from cognitive linguistics to the role of narrative in the 41

translations, in an attempt to go beyond constructions of the political or social subject, and to turn toward a preliminary consideration of a self. I examine the role of the numerous exempla in the translations, particularly the Boethius, as texts that provide models or paradigms for ways in which readers can consider themselves as selves equally invested in the production of a stable interior self and the exercise of the selfs virtue in the world. In this sense, the Anglo-Saxon self is not only the product of philosophical introspectionthat is, it is not wholly private and interiorbut the agent of ethical activity, with roles and expectations it must realize in the social sphere.

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CHAPTER 2: THE EMBODIED MIND AND SOUL IN CLASSICAL AND EARLY MEDIEVAL THOUGHT

Despite their relegation to the edges of histories of ideas on philosophies of mind and body, the Anglo-Saxons of the late ninth and tenth centuries (to say nothing of the eleventh) were heirs to an extensive tradition of thought that was concerned with minds, bodies, souls, and the relationships that obtained between them. While their debts to the past are never explicitly acknowledged, and while in some cases the ultimate source of their thought has been received at a third or fourth remove, the translators and their work do not merely sit on the banks of the rivers of knowledge from which they sought to drink; it is possible, given the confidence modern scholars have detected in the texts, the translators considered themselves to be fully engaged with their auctores, contributing to and augmenting their wisdom, and making it more widely accessible to an audience far removed from the sophisticated Christianity-infused rhetoric of Cassiacum or the prison cells of Italy. Moreover, the translators did not come to their work empty-handed. The Boethius, with its modulation of and occasional departure from its Latin source, could be said to reflect the state of Alcuinian scholarship on the Consolatio as it stood at the time of its composition, and (at least so far as scholarship can tell at this point) owed very little

43

to the body of commentary accumulating around the Consolatio.1 Much the same could be said for the Soliloquies, which seems to have been an object of interest in AngloSaxon England at some time before the twelfth century became interested in Augustines introspective theologies.2 The purpose of this chapter is to sketch out the history of ideas surrounding mind, body, and soul in which the translations participate, and then to move on to the theoretical framework that will help to direct my argument. I rely primarily upon the linguistic and narratological theories derived from the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which considers the body, and the specificity of each particular body, to be the foundation or substratum of knowledge that can be held about the world. While the Anglo-Saxons and their Latin predecessors would not have agreed with Merleau-Ponty in
1

As Joseph Wittig notes, the St. Gall Anonymous and Remigian commentaries are not commentaries as such, but rather glosses or working notes (Remigian Glosses on Boethiuss Consolatio Philosophiae, p. 173). By around 925 there were numerous commentaries in circulation, including one by John Eriugena, one by Lupus of Ferrires on the metra, and one by Bovo of Corvey (d. 916) on Consolatio 3.m.9. Unlike other commentators (and unlike the Anglo-Saxons, who seem to silently edit out objectionable content), Bovo looks with obvious suspicion on the un-Christian sections of 3.m.9. For comparativist approaches to the commentary traditions, see Virginia Brown, Lupus of Ferrires on the Metres of Boethius, in Latin Script and Letters A.D. 400-900: Festschrift Presented to Ludwig Bieler on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday, ed. John J. O'Meara and Bernd Naumann (Leiden: Brill, 1976), pp. 6379; Giulio D'Onofrio, Giovanni Scoto e Remigio di Auxerre: a proposito di alcuni commenti altomedievali a Boezio, Studia Medievali 3rd ser. 22 (1981): 587-693; Tams Krath, Quaedam catholicae fidei contraria: The Platonic Tradition in the Early Medieval Commentaries and Translations of Metre III.9 of Boethiuss Consolatio philosophiae, in What Does It Mean?, ed. Kathleen E. Dubs (Pilicsaba: Pzmny Pter Catholic University, 2004), pp. 57-77; Wayne J. Hankey, Self and Cosmos in Becoming Deiform: Neoplatonic Paradigms for Reform by Self-Knowledge from Augustine to Aquinas, in Reforming Church before Modernity: Patterns, Problems and Approaches, ed. Christopher M. Bellitto and Louis I. Hamilton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 39-60; Adrian Papahagi, The Transmission of Boethiuss De consolatione Philosophiae in the Carolingian Age, Medium vum 78 (2009): 1-15. R.W. Chambers, On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and his School, EETS 191A (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), xc-xciv. There is a fairly consistent interest in Augustine and his theology in England: Alfred and lfric were both interested in Augustine; so was Anselm of Canterbury, a devoted Augustinian. For the development of interest in the Confessiones during the later Anglo-Saxon and Norman period, see Teresa Webber, The Diffusion of Augustines Confessions in England during the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, in The Cloister and the World: Essays in Honour of Barbara Harvey, ed. John Blair and Brian Golding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 29-45.
2

44

toto, they nonetheless acknowledged that being in the world, and being human (with all being human entails), required the possession of a body. Put briefly, early Western Christianity, for all its anxieties about the body, nonetheless considered the nature of the human person to be embodied. While the fourth chapter will turn inward, in search of a place where the body does not impinge on the mind and soul, the third chapter explores the role of the body in the translations, both as a body and as a conceptual field that is applied to attempts to understand the loss and reacquisition of identity.

2.1 Mind, Soul, and Body: from Ancient Greece to the Patristics The roots of Western philosophy lie deep in early Greek attempts at a unified cosmology, a theory of everything that could account for the diverse phenomena of the world in an orderly, harmonious way. Prior to Plato and Aristotle, whose work jointly dominated medieval thought on the makeup and nature of the human, the Greeks already had a significant tradition of thought on the composition of soul and body; after them, the Latin West picked up their theories and passed them on to, respectively, the early Christian Neoplatonists and (after a period of obscurity) the Scholastics. Aristotle sits slightly to the side of this discussion; Plato, by far the more influential of the two during the early Middle Ages, is the subject of attention here. Before turning to him, I will sketch some of the background to his own thought, drawing out some of the ideas that, despite time and change, remained in Platos own theories and ultimately find their ways to Anglo-Saxon England.

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2.1.1 The Presocratics: An Overview Human souls and bodies, far from being materially extraordinary, were composed of the same elements that made up the rest of the universe.3 Thus, for most Presocratic philosophers, to speak of the structure of body and soul, and structure of the kosmos, was almost to speak of the same thing. The word logoswhich would, much later, be incorporated into Christian Neoplatonismoriginally meant, like Latin ratio, the principle of order, harmony, and balance that could find parallels in the structuring of human thought.4 (Pythagoras, for example, discussed the harmonia of opposite elements in the cosmos [e.g. the balancing of fire and water, or earth and air], as well as the harmonia of the soul in its body.) Presocratic philosophers were not unified in their approaches to descriptions of mind, soul, and body, despite assertions that they are generally materialist in their approaches: for example, Heraclitus believed that everliving and all-controlling fire was the substance of both the cosmos and the individual life-force or psych; Anaximenes held that it was air;5 atomists such as Democritus considered the soul to be completely material and perishable, made of atoms as all things are, but differently constituted from the body, as well as being dependent on the body for its shape.6 Each individual being, both its body and the force animating it, was tied to the

M.R. Wright, Presocratic Cosmologies, in The Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy, ed. Patricia Curd and Daniel W. Graham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 413-33, at 413.
4 5 6

Edward Hussey, The Presocratics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1972), 1. Wright, Presocratic Cosmologies, p. 416.

Gregory Vlastos, Ethics and Physics in Democritus, in Studies in Presocratic Philosophy, ed. R.E. Allen and David J. Furley, vol. 2 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 381-408, at 396. The souls aptitude for the body remains in Plotinus, Ennead 4.3.20 (see discussion below), and remains current through the Scholastics; one point of agreement between Thomistic Aristotelianism and his

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wider world; each human is, for Democritus, a microcosm (nthropos mikrs ksmos) that possesses its own grouping of atoms that comprise a working and functional whole.7 Various philosophical schools treated the makeup of the soul and mind (if the mind was addressed; see Anaxagoras below) differently, and some schools found more influence than others, particularly in the development of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies that were, to varying extents, employed by early Christian writers. From the fragments and testimonia of his thought in other works, we know that Pythagoras (c. 575 495 BCE) held the psych to be immortal, and capable of experiencing transmigration; the goal of existence is to purify the psych enough that further detours through corporeal bodies are unnecessary, allowing the soul unification with the divine principle.8 The philosopher Philolaus, a Pythagorean disciple, took the arguments one step further and suggested that the soul was functionally imprisoned in the body as a punishment of some kind and that it had been buried in the body as in a tomb; the image is picked up in Platos Phaedo (82c) and Cratylus (400c).9 The claim

conservative Neoplatonist opponents was the necessity of the union of body and soul in constituting personhood; Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 228-29.
7 8

Wright, Presocratic Cosmologies, p. 428 and 432, n.75.

Shirley Darcus Sullivan, Psychological and Ethical Ideas: What Early Greeks Say (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1995), 106-10. Robin Waterfield, trans., The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and Sophists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 97. In Cratylus, there is a pun in the original Greek, which English cannot translate: the body (soma) is the grave (soma) of the soul. Pierre Courcelle discusses the tradition in Connais-toi toi-mme: De Socrate Saint Bernard (Paris: tudes Augustiniennes, 1974), 325-414.The image of the body as tomb had a long afterlife in Greek thought; in addition to its description in the Phaedo and Cratylus, discussed above, the prison of the soul is variously designated as the body, the sensual pleasures or passions, the material world or the goods of Fortune or the devil. In Christian vocabulary, new senses were added to the preceding ones: the corruption of the flesh, the temptations, the habit of sinning, or original sin (378).
9

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that the soul is immortal is preserved in the dicta recorded by Porphyry in his Life of Pythagoras.10 Aristotles De anima, the source of some Pythagorean testimonia, mentions the belief in the soul as a kind of attunement (harmonia), on the grounds that attunement is a mixture and compound of opposites, and the body is made up of opposites.11 Despite his formulation of a doctrine of soul that would ultimately end up being appealing and pertinent, Christian intellectuals did not seem to associate him with the metaphysics of the soul, but rather with the fusion of mathematics and musical theory. His contributions to both fields were transmitted to the early medieval world through Nicomachus, Apuleius, and Boethius (who himself derived some of his De musica from Nicomachuss work) insisted on mathematics as the basis not only for the other three scientific fields of the quadriviumgeometry, music, and astronomybut also laid the foundation for understanding the divine mathematics of the universe.12 However, the key components of Pythagorass doctrines of the soul, specifically its ability to leave the body at death, its immortality, and its possession of faculties complementary to the body make their way into the early Middle Ages through Plato and his commentators, and through the commentaries, into Christian exegesis. Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (c. 500 c. 430 BCE) contributed the concepts of the ingredients of the cosmos and the Mind (Nous) or rational faculty responsible for

10 11 12

Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 98-99. Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 112.

Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier, Measuring Heaven: Pythagoras and His Influence on Thought and Art in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), 63.

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separating and then ordering them.13 All of what we know of his philosophy is found either in fragments or in mentions in other works; his thought appears in Plato and Aristotle as a starting point for interrogations of the ends (telos) for which the universe was created in the Phaedo, and for the establishment of distinctions between the concepts of soul and Nous in the De anima, respectively.14 For Anaxagoras, Nous stands separate from the material it manipulates; further, it is not only a cause, in the sense that it makes things happen (in this case, the mixing and unmixing of cosmic ingredients), but it is also intellective, with the ability to know and to decide, and this is why the universe is not random and chaotic, but rather an ordered and intelligible thing.15 Nous, like the logos of Heraclitus, is both an attribute of each individual being (everything possesses nous; in some accounts, Anaxagoras is said to grant nous to animals and plants as the cause of its structure and development)16 and the ordered cosmos; as said, in an era in which such words as reason and rationality as mental powers did not yet have currency, ancient philosophers deployed the same vocabularies of structure to talk about the purposive, self-aware mind and the patterns that could be observed in the orbits of the stars and planets.17

Patricia Curd, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, Fragments and Testimonia: A Text and Translation with Notes and Essays, Phoenix Presocratics 5 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 141-42.
14 15 16

13

Curd, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, 192. Curd, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, 194.

Patricia Curd, Anaxagoras and the Theory of Everything, in Curd and Graham, The Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy, pp. 230-49, at 238. Anthony A. Long, Ancient Philosophys Hardest Question: What to Make of Oneself? Representations 74 (2001): 19-36, at 26-27.
17

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Democritus the atomist (c. 460 c. 370 BCE) insisted that systems of medicine should take the soul into account, for the perfection of the soul puts right the faults of the body.18 His insistence was grounded in a non-dualist view of the soul, which saw the soul as the responsible agent (in that it has the power to move the body, and so effect change in the world) but nonetheless relies on the body for its coherence; Democritus did not treat the body, as the Platonists did, as a corporeal nuisance and distraction.19 Democrituss materialism held that the soul is composed of soul-atoms, interleaved, as it were, through the atoms of the body. The soul possesses the ability to think, perceive, and sense the world, and to initiate motion in the body; whether or not it possesses mind, or self-awareness and powers of intellection is uncertain, given the fragmentary state of Democrituss surviving work.20 Despite his rejection of an incorporeal soul and any meaningful afterlife as such, his insistence on moderation in habits and a balanced life for the benefit of the soul and the achievement of good cheer (euthymia) has strong resonances in Socratic and Sophist philosophies, as well as in the Epicureans; his injunction Souls moved out of large intervals are neither well settled nor in good cheer. So you should pay attention to what is possible and be content with what is present,

18 19 20

Vlastos, Ethics and Physics in Democritus, p. 382. Vlastos, Ethics and Physics in Democritus, p. 397.

Cristopher C.W. Taylor, Democritus and Lucretius on Death and Dying, in Democritus: Science, the Arts, and the Care of the Soul. Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Democritus (Paris, 18-20 September 2003), ed. Aldo Brancacci and Pierre-Marie Morel (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), pp. 77-86, at 77. Taylor argues that most evidence points toward Democritus making no distinction between the mind/rational parts of the soul and the non-rational part(s); however, fragments of his work in pseudo-Plutarchs Epitome suggest that he not only distinguished the intellect from the non-rational soul, but located it either in the chest or the brain, viewpoints held by the Epicureans and Platonists, respectively (pp. 77-78). Other materialists who viewed the soul as a thing of composite nature that exists as a substratum underlying a variety of powers or faculties (dunameis) are Chrysippus and Zeno; see Margaret E. Reesor, The Nature of Man in Early Stoic Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1989), 140-41.

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paying little heed to and not dwelling in thought on what is envied or marveled at would not be entirely out of place in traditional interpretations of Boethian resignation.21 Like other Presocratics, Democrituss physical theories cannot be divorced from his ethics: teaching the soul to change for the good, and to effect change in nature, produces order and justice in the world.22

2.1.2 Plato While Presocratic philosophy differed in many respects from that of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and much of their work remained lost to the West until the later Middle Ages and into the modern period, their arguments nonetheless informed the philosophy that early medieval writers eventually adopted. Plato and Aristotle both responded to Presocratic theories on the relationships that obtained between mind and body, as these theories were relevant not only to questions of what constituted living or human beings, but to larger ontological questions regarding the origin and existence of both material and immaterial things, and to questions of such concepts as true happiness and its pursuit. Thus, questions of minds and bodies were questions, differently asked, about the nature of the universe as a whole, both in terms of the order of the world (whether internal or external) and how that order has come to be what it is. Platos work presents the soul/body relationship in multiple ways, shifting across all of his dialogues; thus, it is difficult to say if there is a specific, singular theory of mind

21 22

James Warren, The Presocratics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 172. Vlastos, Ethics and Physics in Democritus, pp. 397 -98.

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and body that Plato developed, although it is clear that his Christian inheritors were concerned only with his doctrine of the immateriality of the soul and the materiality of the body.23 In general, Plato was a dualist, accepting that the body and soul were of fundamentally different natures that nonetheless interacted to form a human being. The Socrates of the dialogues often popularizes other or older doctrines of body and soul, doctrines that are at times not out of place in early Christian thought. The body as the prison of the soul is not original to Plato; in the Cratylus, Socrates references the Orphic poets when he etymologizes soma (body) from szein (to save), approving that etymology over soma < sma (grave).24 Similarly, in the Phaedo, Socrates articulates a theory of mind-body as one in which purposiveness, the need to work toward an end, is not a physical drive, but a mental one; the mind orders the body into the states or positions necessary to accomplish its ends.25 Platos apparent rejection of the body obscures other aspects of his thought that relied on body-based metaphors to conceptualize the soul and its operations. In the Timaeus, the immortal part of the soul is found in the head, the lower parts in the breast, or else the belly; John M. Rist even uses the word materializes to describe the parts of the soul, and suggests that modern metaphors that localize thought in either the heart or

Paul S. MacDonald, History of the Concept of Mind: Speculations about Soul, Mind and Spirit from Homer to Hume (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 37. David Sedley, Platos Cratylus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 97. Socrates also accepts soma < szein in the Phaedo (82c). The Phaedo (82e) reiterates Socrates understanding of the body as the souls prison, when Simmias refers to death as the soul slipping from the chains of the body; Courcelle discusses the image in Connais-toi toi-mme, at 325 and 381. Karl Popper, The World of Parmenides: Essays on the Presocratic Enlightenment (New York: Routledge, 1998), 243.
25 24

23

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head, while not specifically relevant to Plato, stem from his anatomizing and localizing of the soul.26 In the Charmides, the entire person is a body and soul, and the body is necessary to the constitution of the person: we cannot cut away the body, and the body is also dependent on the soul for both its life and health.27 Even in texts where the soul is Platos ostensible concern, he is interested in how the soul functions while it is an embodied entity (as in the Timaeus), and how its various faculties are related to the fact of its embodiment.28 In the Timaeus, the body is fashioned as part of a training regimen for the mind, enabling the latter to rule the former so that a man might fulfill his nature as a rational being.29 The Phaedrus, with its famous image of the two horses guided by their driver (245ff), is based on Platos tripartite soul in the Republic: the soul, with its division into the rational (logistikon), spirited (thumoeides) and desirous (epithumtikon) faculties, is a soul that desires knowledge and control even as it has immediate, bodily concernsin other words, its embodiment necessitates its possession of tendencies that are not linked to the acquisition of knowledge or the pursuit

John M. Rist, Plato Says We Have Tripartite Souls. If Hes Right, What Can We Do about It? in Sophies Maietores: Chercheurs de Sagesse: Hommage Jean Ppin, ed. M.-O. Goulet-Gaz, G. Madec, and D. OBrien (Paris: Augustiniennes, 1992), pp. 103 -24. MacDonald, History of the Concept of Mind, 39. In the Gorgias, the pair, body and soul (duoi pragmatoin) places the soul and body on equal footing, although the soul is in charge of the body; Socrates here is also concerned with the mutual well-being of the body (which is fostered by exercise and medicine) and the soul (which is nourished by knowledge of law and justice), and he discusses the various techniques for both physical and mental self-improvement (42).
28 29 27

26

Sara Byers, Augustine on the Divided Self, Augustinian Studies 38 (2007): 105-18, at 110.

Karen L. King, The Secret Revelation of John (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 210.

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of truth.30 The trifunctional soul in the Timaeus also possesses its own anatomy, diffused as it is through the body and responsible for the bodys various functions.31

2.1.3 Roman Stoicism Antique Stoicism was based on earlier Greek theories of the human as a psychosomatic whole, theories which also posited close interrelationships between branches of learning such as psychology, philosophy, and ethics.32 Earlier formulations of Stoicism, particularly by Epictetus, posited two kinds of selves, which are both involved in the moral life of the individual: the first self is one aspect of the mind that is shaped with the goal of the improvement of moral choice (proairesis), while the second, the part that does the shaping, is the embodied self, in the words of Richard Sorabji, the self that commits itself to remembering, answering and asking questions, and engaging in other exercises that are directed to the acquisition of moral or ethical knowledge.33 The Romans who inherited and expanded on Greek Stoic doctrine also saw the life of the person as individual and embodied; the numerous therapies (some of which will be discussed in Chapter Three and Chapter Five) recommended by Seneca and Cicero all stressed the importance of attending to the physical, as well as mental,

MacDonald, History of the Concept of Mind, 47. The division of the soul into the rational, spirited, and desirous is crucial for Augustine; it is also the ultimate so urce of Alcuins trintary soul in De animae ratione.
31 32

30

King, The Secret Gospel of John, 211; MacDonald, History of the Concept of Mind, 77-78.

Christopher Gill, Naturalistic Psychology in Galen and Stoicism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 182. Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 246.
33

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dimensions of the selfto bodily health (diet, sleep, exercise) as well as to proper comportment. In terms of government, both the rule of others and the rule of oneself, Stoic paideia provided a system of education through which the upper classesthe principesestablished the guidelines for courtesy, self-control, and benevolent authority that were supposed to define relationships among the elite.34 The terms of selfgovernance, the rules by which the elite governed their relations between themselves and other people, were based on a sort of bodily knowledge that shaped individual experience.35 Unlike Platonic psychologies that viewed the divide between mans animal nature (the impulses toward anger and desire) and his rational nature as a fundamental split, Stoic psychologies offered a unitary psycheno multiple selves that compete against each other, but rather a single self that is divided amongst multiple, competing desires for happiness.36 The techniques deployed by educators and philosophers eventually became the tools of Christian psychology, which began to turn to a unitary or single mind that found itself subject to competing impulses that originated within it as a result of its own nature. Thus, the mind is not, as it were, multiple minds, but a single mind possessed of multiple faculties, the predecessor of Augustines psychological theory of una mens, una substantiaone mind, one substance.37

Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 4. Jennifer A. Glancy, Corporal Knowledge: Early Christian Bodies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 11-12. Byers, Augustine and the Divided Self, 107; see also Brad Inwood, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 5.
37 36 35

34

Byers, Augustine and the Divided Self, 108

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Fundamentally, ancient philosophy viewed the human being as a composite creature, a psychosomatic whole consisting of a material or immaterial soul that was, whole or in part, rational, and a wholly material body. The relationships that existed between soul and body varied across and within philosophies, but common to almost all of them, from materialism to Platonism to Stoicism, was the belief that the body and soul were interdependent, and that the cultivation of one entailed the cultivation of the other. Anthony Longs synopsis of Greek and Latin philosophies of soul and body concludes that, We are taken to be composite creatures, embodied souls or minds, and what we make of ourselves depends crucially on how we negotiate this complex structure. The body, so the theory goes, gets its life from our souls, and since our souls give us our identity as sentient and purposive beings, whatever is good or bad for our souls is better or worse than anything that merely benefits or harms our bodies.38 For classical writers and their inheritors, questions of what we make of ourselves as human beings (how we understand what humanity is) and what we make of ourselves as individuals (what we become) cannot be separated from questions of soul, mind, and body; as such, systems of ethics and natural philosophy borrowed from each other extensively. Natural and social order were seen as reflecting each other, and the place of the human in nature and the place of the individual in society were pretty much analogous.

38

Long, Ancient Philosophys Hardest Question, 21.

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2.1.4 Early Christianity Ultimately, the problem of the body was never satisfactorily resolved in ancient philosophy; neither the body as the real and singular basis of our humanity (that is, the possession of the body as the criterion for being a human being) nor the body purely as Platonic appearance provided an adequate account for the integrative experience of body and soul.39 As Christianity spread throughout the West, philosophers-turnedtheologians began the process of attempting to reconcile the profusion of classical descriptions of body and soul with Christian doctrine. The working-out of orthodox thought during Christianitys first five hundred years involved the eventual rejection of gnostic doctrines against the body and material creation, and a move toward the acceptance of a physical body and incorporeal soul as the essential requirements of the human. Tertullian, consciously rejecting Gnostic and extremely dualist heresies that sought to denigrate the flesh, pointed to the necessity of Christs Incarnation in human salvation.40 Augustines own rejection of Manicheism, as demonstrated in his refutation in De Genesi contra Manicheos, deployed creation as evidence of Gods essential goodness, and argued that material creation, possessed of being, order, and harmony, was essentially good and could, if viewed correctly, lead the soul to God.41 The human, as a psychosomatic unity, was charged with the unusual (and demanding) task of negotiating the material and the immaterial, with the soul, as a thing having a propriety

39 40

Margaret Ruth Miles, Augustine on the Body (Ann Arbor, MI: Scholars Press, 1979), 79.

Gedaliahu G. Stroumsa, Caro salutis cardo: Shaping the Person in Early Christian Thought, History of Religions 30 (1990): 25-50, at 34-35. Marcia L. Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 41.
41

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to the body (in the words of Nemesius, c. 390), at times controlling and sometimes being controlled by the flesh in which it resided.42 Generally speaking, early Christian writers maintained the Neoplatonic equivalence between material creation and the human soul: both were rational, ordered, harmonious things shaped by a being that was rational and orderly, the Deus artifex.43 The image of God as craftsman has its roots in Platos Timaeus, in which the dialogues eponymous character, himself a skilled geometer, describes the Theos using such terms as dmiourgos and poits, and argues that he patterned the physical world on the exemplar (paradeigma) of the eternal.44 Platos precise proportions of the universe, and its mirroring in the human soul, entered the Latin West and Anglo-Saxon England through the commentaries of Chalcidius, Proclus, Plotinus, and Porphyry, and became treated both as a matter of theology and, as in the case of Boethiuss influential De institutione musica, a branch of quadrivial philosophy.45 Other early Christian writers picked up the

Adam G. Cooper, Life in the Flesh: An Anti-Gnostic Spiritual Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 72-73. Ernst Robert Curtius provides a brief treatment of the Deus artifex figure in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. Trask (1953; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 544-46. A more recent discussion, with reference to the relationship between the human and divine creator in medieval and modern art theory is Eyolf strem, Deus artifex and homo creator: Art between the Human and the Divine, in Creations: Medieval Rituals, the Arts and the Concept of Creation , ed. Sven Rune Havsteen et al. (Turnhout: Brepols 2007), pp. 15-48. Plato, Timaeus, ed. Albert Rivaud, Platon: uvres compltes, vol. 10 (Paris, 1970). Tn men ou poin tn ka adnaton legein tde d oun plin episkepteon per auton, pros pteron ton paradeigmton o tektainmenos autn [But the father and maker of all this universe is past finding out, and even if we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible. This question, however, we must ask about the world. Which of the patterns had the artificer in view when he made it the pattern of the unchangeable or of that which is created?] (28c). Boethius also draws the same connection in De arithmetica, in which he remarks, Est autem quaedam in hac re profunda et miranda speculatio et, ut ait Nicomachus, enmousotaton theorema proficiens et ad Platonicam in Timaeo animae generationem et ad armonicae disciplinae [In this matter (mathematics), there is an important and marvelous concept, enmousotaton theorema, as Nicomachus says,
45 44 43

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image: in the Institutions (c. 543), Cassiodorus discusses pagan philosophers who, Iovem suum in operibus propriis geometrizare testantur [attest that Jupiter geometrized in his own works] and sees nothing wrong in appropriating that image for Christian divinity: Quod si uero Creatori et omnipotenti Domino salubriter applicetur, potest haec sententia forsitan conuenire ueritati geometrizat enim, si fas est dicere, sanctas Trinitas [Therefore if it (geometrizare) can be profitably applied to the Creator and omnipotent Lord, perhaps this (pagan) argument can be brought into line with the truth, for the Holy Trinity, if it can be said, geometrizes].46 In the same way that he measured material things, God measured out the human being; not only did he create the soul ad imaginem suam, but the composition of the human from material and spirit was something that struck early Latin writers as distinctly miraculous. For Lactantius, writing in the mid third century, the Deus artifex, or artifex noster (Platos poitn kai patera) is an important figure; God has shaped man ore sublimi, statu recto figuratos, ad contemplationem coeli et notitiam Dei excitauerit [of sublime speech, upright figure, aroused to the contemplation of the sky and the knowledge of God] (De ira Dei 20.10).47

contributing both to the Platonic generation of the soul in the Timaeus and to the study of harmony] (2.2.47); De arithmetica, ed. Henry Oosthaut and John Schilling, CCSL 94A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999). Boethius as a dual-interactionist will be discussed in Chapter Four. Cassiodorus, Institutiones diuinarum et saecularum litterarum, ed. and trans. Wulfgang Brsgens, 2 vols. (Freiburg: Herder, 2003), 2.5.11. For Cassiodorusand for almost every other medieval author--Gods artisanship, and mans corresponding capability for virtue, form a bridge between the human and the divine; Lenz, Images of Psychic Landscape, 99. Lactantius, De opificio Dei, ed. S. Brandt, 2 vols., CSEL 27 (Vienna: Tempsky, 1893). The title, The Workmanship of God, immediately sets out Lactantiuss interest in God as a workman. In Old English glosses, opifex is glossed as crftca or wyrhta, maker (DOE, s.v. crftca). Deus artifex occurs three times in the work, each time in conjunction with a description of the human form that Lactantius seems to find particularly intriguing or miraculous: in the first, human sense and reason (Chapter Two), the eye and ear (Chapter Eight), and how the voice is created from breath (Chapter Fifteen). For De ira Dei, see C. Ingremeau, ed., De ira Dei, SC 289 (Paris: ditions du Cerf, 1982).
47 46

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In the Diuinae institutiones, Deus, uniuersi artifex has created the world as a device (machinatus), a grand contraption which runs diuina et admirabili ratione.48 It is in this spirit that Boethiuss contemporary Sidonius Apollinaris, in his letter to Philagrius (Epistola 7), explains how the composition of our substance by God (substantiam nostram compotem) stands in a specific relationship to that of animals with respect to the rational mind, and the Carolingian Lupus of Ferrires writes of the Deus artifiex, who hominem ex anima compegit et corpore [has composed man from soul and body].49 Christian commentators on Plato were important transmitters of Platonic doctrine. Plotinus (d. 250) was particularly anxious about the immortality of the soul, attached as it was to a perishable body, and went after Stoic and Epicurean doctrines which presented the soul as material in addition to the body; the body might be the source of particularity or individuality, but the soulwhich Plotinus insisted had to be immortalconnected the human with the eternal as it strove towards understanding.50 However, he also saw the possession of a body as necessary for the soul to achieve its full potential and symmetry within the scope of the cosmos, the felix culpa that is necessary to the divine economy.51 His student, Porphyry, defined their friendship in terms of their

Lactantius, Diuinae institutiones, ed. S. Brandt, CSEL 19 (Vienna: Tempsky, 1890), p. 117. The De opificio, De ira, and De origine erroris (Institutiones 2.5); other examples appear elsewhere in the Institutiones, including at 1.6 (24) as the aedificator mundi et artifex rerum and 6.21 (562) as mentis et uocis et linguae artifex. For Lupus of Ferrires, see Liber de tribus quaestionibus, PL 119.619-48; for Sidonius, see Epistolae, PL 58.583. Pauliina Remes, Plotinus on Self: The Philosophy of the We (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 27-29.
51 50 49

48

Miles, Augustine on the Body, -83.

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discussions over the relationship between person-as-soul and the body; when Porphyry, driven to the point of suicide by his own rejection of embodied life, was in the last stages of despair, Plotinus talked him down by telling him that the impulse to free his soul of the body stemmed not from a rational condition but from a disorder of the body itself.52 Despite his own reservations about the body, Porphyry also inherited Plotinuss belief in the attraction that obtained between the soul and body, and the compulsion for souls to descend and become embodied.53 Plotinuss foundational text, the Enneads, was compiled by Porphyry, and its material disseminated through the Christian West. Augustine was the major conduit for Neoplatonic thought, although his writing significantly altered his predecessors unwilling embrace of the fact of the embodied soul. One of Augustines great frequentlyasked questions, reiterated throughout his theology, is Quid est homoWhat is man?and the answer invariably comes back as a soul and a body, or anima and either corpus or caro.54 As in the case of Plato, however, Augustines dualism is not

John Lamberton, Sweet Honey in the Rock: Pleasure, Embodiment, and Metaphor in LateAntique Platonism, in Constructions of the Classical Body, ed. James I. Porter (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 314-26, at 316-17. According to Porphyry, Plotinus himself resembled someone ashamed of being in a body, although he also objected to the strong anti -materialism of the Gnostics; pp. 112-13, qtd. at 112. Lamberton, Pleasure, Embodiment, and Metaphor in Late -Antique Platonism, p. 320. This remark does not show up in Porphyrys own philosophical writing, but his reading and commentary called De antra nympharum, on the description of the cave of the Naiads at Ithaca in Book Thirteen of the Odyssey. Porphyry also writes that the body is a garment with which the soul is invested (De antra nympharum 6). Other examples of human equals soul and body together from the Augustinian tradition, which overwhelmingly influenced early medieval conceptions of the self, include (to give but a sampling): De quantitate animae (ed. Wolfgang Hrmann, CSEL 89 [Vienna: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1986]), 1.2: sic cum quaeritur ex quibus sit homo compositus, respondere possum, ex anima et corpore [If it is ever asked from what things a man is made, I can reply, out of a soul and body]; Confessiones (ed. Luc Verheijen, CCSL 27 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1981]), 10.6: Et direxi me ad me, et dixi mihi, Tu quis es? Et
54 53

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mind/body dualism; he accepts in numerous instances the interplay between the immaterial and material, as in De Genesi ad litteram, where he posits the roles the brain plays in mediating perception, action, and memory. 55 Moreover, Augustine attacked earlier Platonists who insisted on the essential evil of the body, and even disagreed with Ambrose, who saw the body as a superb work of divine art that was still, in its postlapsarian state, the enemy of the soul,56 and a tattered garment that the true man, the

respondi, Homo. Et ecce corpus et anima in me mihi praesto sunt; unum exterius, et alterum interius [And I turned myself to myself and asked myself, What are you? And I replied, A man. And behold, the body and the soul within me are present to me, one exterior, the other interior]; the human as body and soul is also the mirror of Christ, as in Tractatus in Iohannem (ed. R. Willems, CCSL 36 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1954], 19.15.28-31): Sicut anima habens corpus, non facit duas personas, sed unum hominem; sic Verbum habens hominem, non facit duas personas, sed unum Christum. Quid est homo? Anima rationalis habens corpus. Quid est Christus? Verbum Dei habens corpus [Just as the soul possesses a body, it does not make two persons, but one man; thus the Word, having man, does not make two persons, but one Christ. What is man? A rational soul possessing a body. What is Christ? The Word of God possessing a body] and Sermones de uetere testamento (ed. C. Lambot, CCSL 41 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1961], 253.4.5): Quid est homo? Anima et caro. Quid est ergo Christus? Verbum, anima et caro. Sed qualis anima? quia pecora habent animas. Verbum, rationalis anima et caro; hoc totum Christus [What is man? Soul and flesh. What, therefore, is Christ? The Word, soul and flesh. But what sort of soul? After all, animals have souls. The Word, a rational soul, and flesh: this entirety is Christ]; Sermones de uetere testamento, 358.3: Quid est homo, nisi animal rationale factum de terra? [But what is man, unless he is a rational animal formed from the earth?]. Note also Augustines use of the flesh to constitute individuality: Enarrationes in Psalmos (ed. Eligius Dekkers et al., CCSL 40 [Turnhout : Brepols, 1956]), 131.3: Quid est homo, fratres? Caro. Et quid est alter homo? Altera caro [What is a man, brothers? Flesh. And what is another man? Other flesh]. Et quoniam corporalis motus, qui sensum sequitur, sine interuallis temporum nullus est, agere autem interualla temporum spontaneo motu nisi per adiutorium memoriae non ualemus, ideo tres tamquam uentriculi cerebri demonstrantur: unus anterior ad faciem, a quo sensus omnis; alter posterior ad ceruicem, a quo motus omnis; tertius inter utrumque, in quo memoriam uigere demonstrant, ne, cum sensum sequitur motus, non conectat homo quod faciendum est, si fuerit quod fecit oblitus [And since bodily movement, which follows upon sensation, always involves intervals of time, and since we cannot perform deliberate movements over intervals of time without the aid of memory, that is why the brain is shown to have three ventricles; one in front, at the face, from which all sensation is controlled; a second behind at the neck, from which all movement comes; the third between the two, in which they demonstrate that memory is active] (De Genesi ad litteram 7.18.24; ed. J. Zycha, CSEL 28 [Vienna: Tempsky, 1894]; trans. Edmund Hill, O.P [Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2002]). The full account is at De Genesi ad litteram 7.13.2018.24. Miles, Augustine on the Body, 87; F. Homes Dudden, The Life and Times of St. Ambrose, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 504. Also Philo Judaeus: the coat of skins worn b y Adam and Eve refer to their bodies. The soul dwells in the body as in a tomb and carries it around like a corpse, in MacDonald, History of the Concept of Mind, 93-94.
56 55

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soul, carried around with it.57 Instead of pursuing such stark dualism, Augustines anthropology went beyond the dualism of the Platonists (as well as Enlightenment dualists such as Descartes, whom Augustine is frequently seen as prefiguring) to consider the respective roles that soul and body played in the constitution of human identity. Ultimately, the souls knowledge of itself depended on its own self-awareness, an awareness which the body impededand, therefore, an awareness that required the individual to turn away from the body and to seek inward.58 Despite his constantlyevolving theology, however, the embodied soul always conceptualizes the self: the body, along with the soul, constitutes who we are.59 For Augustine, the soul is made in the image of God and can, when it turns inward to examine itself, discern its likeness to divinity. Although the soul is open to (and ideally is directed toward) God, it is also open to matter and the body to which it belongs.60 Both trichotomy (soul/mind/body) and dichotomy (soul/body) are central to Augustines thought.61 However, this is not a result

57 58

MacDonald, History of the Concept of Mind, 146.

Richard Sorabji, Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 216. Augustine distinguishes between two levels of selfawareness: nosse (implicit self-knowledge, what we might call identity, and which is possessed continuously), and cogitare, self-thought. It is the latter that the body makes difficult, while the body plays a large role in nosse. The refusal of the body in favor of the inward turn is a preoccupation of Book Fourteen in De trinitate: see 14.6.8-9, ll. 29-34, 45-50, and 55-61.
59 60

Ganze, Conceptions of the Self, 35-36.

John M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 92-95. MacDonald, History of the Concept of Mind, 148. Augustine knew Platos Republic: Hinc est quod et illi philosophi, qui ueritati propius accesserunt, iram atque libidinem uitiosas animi partes esse confessi sunt, eo quod turbide atque inordinate mouerentur ad ea etiam, quae sapientia perpetrari uetat, ac per hoc opus habere moderatrice mente atque ratione. quam partem animi tertiam uelut in arce quadam ad istas regendas perhibent conlocatam, ut illa imperante, istis seruientibus possit in homine iustitia ex omni animi parte seruari [Hence it is that even the philosophers who have approximated to the truth have avowed that anger and lust are vicious mental emotions, because, even when exercised towards objects
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of Augustines indecision on the subject, but rather his conception of the mind as one of the two aspects of the soul; the mind (mens) is the mental aspect that is rational or intellective, while in its other aspect the soul is animative (spiritus), so that we can be said to consist of a body and a mind and soul together.62 Late classical and early Christian philosophies and theologies never satisfactorily resolved the problem of body and mind. Unlike postmodern phenomenological accounts of lived experience, which invest the human body with the real principle of our existence as human beings, neither Roman philosophy nor its Christian inheritors could designate the body as that thing, and that thing alone, which constitutes the human being; however, Platonic idealism, as received by Augustine, could not provide an adequate account of the experiential integrated activity of body and soul.63 The late Roman formulations of social identity that Augustine would have inherited deployed the body as a carrier of identity, a knowledge that affected an individuals experience of being in the world and [that] shaped his or her interactions with other people no clean line divides

which wisdom does not prohibit, they are moved in an ungoverned and inordinate manner, and consequently need the regulation of mind and reason. And they assert that this third part of the mind is posted as it were in a kind of citadel, to give rule to these other parts, so that, while it rules and they serve, mans righteousness is preserved without a breach] ( De ciuitate Dei 14.19.2-6; ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb, 2 vols., CCSL 47-48 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1955]). Ira (anger) corresponds to Platos thumoeides, libido (appetite) to epithumtikon, and the rational or ruling faculty (mens imperans) to logistikon (the rational power). Peter Burnell, The Augustinian Person (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2005). Augustines doctrine of human trichotomy can be found in several places: De fide et symbolo 4.8 and 10.23, its extended treatment in Confessiones 10.6.10-10.7.11, Tractatus in Iohannem 26.2, De trinitate 12.7.12 and 15.7.11 (ed. W.J. Mountain and F. Glorie, 2 vols., CCSL 50-50A [Turnhout: Brepols, 1968]), and De ciuitate Dei 12.24. For human being as dichotomy, see De musica 6.5.12 and Epistola 3.4. For further discussion of Augustines shifting paradigms of humanity, especially his slow move toward dualism, see Vivien Law, Wisdom, Authority, and Grammar in the Seventh Century: Decoding Virgilius Marro Grammaticus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 62-63.
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Miles, Augustine on the Body, 79.

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the body as mind from the mind that reasons.64 The importance of the body to human identity, and its role in the creation of the experience and memory that the individual would take into the afterlife, meant that Augustines inclusion of the body in his definition of the human has important implications for his theology and epistemology. First, although the inner senses (sensus interioris) were superior and fitted for the contemplation of God, the employment of the bodily senses could incite the individual to such contemplation.65 Sapientia, the knowledge and love of God, also depended on the acquisition of scientia, the knowledge of creation: the believer acquires wisdom and beatitude through scientia, by virtue of the Incarnation, for Christ is our knowledge (scientia), and the same Christ is our wisdom (sapientia). He engrafts faith into us through temporal things; He shows forth the truth of eternal things. Through Him we proceed to Him; we aspire to wisdom through knowledge. But we do not depart from the one, same Christ.66 Unlike the Aristotelian or Socratic soul that was divided and struggling against itself, Augustines soul was unitary, a collection of faculties that operated in multiple

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Glancy, Corporal Knowledge, 11-12.

Eugene Vance, Seeing God: Augustine, Sensation, and the Minds Eye, in Rethinking the Medieval Senses: Heritage, Fascinations, Frames, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Andreas Kablitz, and Alison Calhoun (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 13-29, at 19 and 23. Marcia L. Colish, The Mirror of Language, 78. Scientia ergo nostra Christus est, sapientia quoque nostra idem Christus est. Ipse nobis fidem de rebus temporalibus inserit; ipse de sempiternis exhibet ueritatem. Per ipsum pergimus ad ipsum, tendimus per scientiam ad sapientiam. Ab uno tamen eodem que christo non recedimus (De trinitate 13.19.50-52; trans. Colish) For the edition, see W.J. Mountain, ed., De trinitate, CCSL 50-50A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1968). In this sense, Augustine is rather Aristotelian in his thought; Aristotles epistemology also required exploration into first causes to be grounded first in the perception and understanding of the natural world; A.P. Bos, The Soul and Its Instrumental Body: A Reinterpretation of Aristotles Philosophy of Living Nature (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 267.
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ways but that constituted una mens, a singular mind. Augustines psychologies and theologies of mind and soul are complex; the De trinitate and the Confessions both constitute his longest, most sustained engagements with the makeup of the soul, the search for self, and the search for ones affinity with the divine. These projects were not intellectual; rather, Augustines psychogogy implicated the training or ordering of the mens, with the goal of establishing its proper priorities, as the simultaneous goal of his ethical education.67 Like Augustine, Gregory the Great saw true identity as inhering in the inner man, whose faculties were (ideally) employed in the service of humanity with the end of regaining the heavenly home. For both Gregory and Augustine, the imago Dei found within the human soul was not the equation of the human soul with divinity; rather, the souls active search for good, and its journey towards identification with God, was a collaboration between the human and divine grace.68

2.2 Alcuin of York For the Anglo-Saxons, Alcuin was the primary conduit of Augustines thought on the Trinity, and the human souls likeness to it. Whitney Bolton has argued that, aside from Boethius, the most influential authority lying behind the translation of the Consolatio was Alcuin of York (d. 804), advisor to Charlemagne and one of the architects of the Carolingian Renaissance. In several articles on the relationship between

67 68

Byers, Augustine on the Divided Self, p. 113.

Marcia L. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1985), 266.

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Alcuin and the Boethius, Paul Szarmach has shown elsewhere that the Boethius translator was clearly relying on Alcuinian theology, whether directly through Alcuins writings themselves or through an Alcuinian scholia on the Consolatio.69 Whichever sources the translator had access to, Alcuin certainly knew the Consolatio, as it is quoted extensively in his De grammatica.70 Manuscript evidence strongly suggests that Alcuin found the Consolatio during his tenure on the Continent: the text would not make an appearance in England until it was translated.71 The major known text of Alcuins that influenced the Anglo-Saxons was the De animae ratione, which borrowed Augustines trinitarian concepts of the soul, but stripped them down to the simple triad of the irascibilis, concupiscibilis, et rationalis [spirited, desirous, and rational] parts of the soul; the former two, Alcuin wrote, habent nobiscum bestiae et animalia communes [beasts and other living things have in common with us], but humans alone possess wisdom; thus, his duobus, id est, concupiscentiae et irae, ratio, quae mentis propria est, imperare debet [over these two, that is, desire and

Bolton, How Boethian is King Alfreds Boethius? pp. 160-64; Szarmach, Alfred, Alcuin, and the Soul, pp. 130-31. Szarmach sees Alcuins influence operating in two places in the Boethius: first in Boethius 14.2 (Consolatio 2.pr.5), where the source is probably Alcuin and ultimately Augustinian, and more definitely at Boethius 33.215-25 (Meter 20.197-201), in which Alcuins triune soul of the De animae ratione replaces the Neoplatonic World-Soul of the Consolatio (3.m.9, 13-21). Pierre Courcelle, La Consolation de Philosophie dans la tradition littraire: antcdents et postrit de Boce (Paris: tudes Augustiniennes, 1967). For Alcuin and the Carolingian reception of the Consolatio, see particularly Alcuin et la tradition littraire du IXe au XII sile sur Philosophie, pp. 29 -66; for the De grammatica, esp. pp. 33-46. Alcuin had access to the Consolatio by 795 or 796; see Donald A. Bullough, Alcuin: Achievement and Reputation. Being Part of the Ford Lectures Delivered in Oxford in Hilary Term 1980 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 269. Papahagi, The Transmission of Boethiuss De Consolatione Philosophiae in the Carolingian Age, pp. 2-3; Bullough, Alcuin: Achievement and Reputation, 269.
71 70

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anger, reason, which is proper to the mind, must rule] (De animae ratione 3).72 As discussed earlier, the division is ultimately traceable to the tripartite soul of Platos Republic, through Augustines De ciuitate Dei. The unity of multiple aspects is borrowed by Alcuin in other texts, including In S. Iohannis Euangelium: Likewise one man is a soul and body, and one Christ is the Word and man. The soul and body are two things, but one man. The Word and man are two things, but one Christ (18.26).73 Both the body and soul participate in salvation, through the agency of Christs incarnation.74 Alcuins theory of mind and soul held, primarily, that the soul was a purely incorporeal creation that suffused the corporeal body. The souls incorporeality was tied to Alcuins larger projects as a way to demonstrate important theological truths, and to obviate the complications posed by the Platonic tradition to Christian spirituality. 75 Its

Alcuin, De animae ratione, PL 101.639-40; see Szarmach, Alfred, Alcuin, and the Soul, pp. 131-36; Malcolm Godden, Anglo -Saxons on the Mind, in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 271-98, at 271-85 for its influence on Old English, particularly on Alfred and lfric, who followed Alcuins model over Augustines. Both the prose and metrical translations of the Consolatio incorporate Alcuins tripartite theory of iracundia, concupiscentia, and ratio as components of the soul, with ratio being responsible for governing its two subordinates; see Boethius 81.16-25 and Meter 20.181b-203. Elsewhere, however, the formulation is different, i.e. Boethius 14.76-80: Hwt, ge onne eah hwthwega godcundlices on eowrre saule habba, t is andgit and gemynd and se gesceadwislica willa t hine ara twega lyste. Se e onne as reo hf, onne hf he his sceoppendes onlicnesse, swa for swa swa negu gesceaft furemest mg hiere sceppendes onlicnesse habban [Indeed, you nevertheless have something of the divine in your soul, that is perception and memory and rational will that is part of these two. He who has these three then he has his creators likeness as much as any creation can have its creators likeness]. Sicut enim unus homo anima et corpus, sic unus Christus Verbum et homo. Anima et corpus duae res sunt, sed unus homo. Verbum et homo duae res sunt, sed unus Christus ( Commentaria in S. Iohannis Euangelium, PL 100.733B-1088B, at 889). Compare De trinitate 14.2 in n. 66 above. Alcuin, Contra heresin Felicis, PL 101.85C-120A, at 93D-94A. Sed non equidem phantasia est salus nostra; neque corporis solum, sed totius hominis, animae et corporis, ueraciter salus facta est [But indeed our salvation is no empty dream, and salvation is made not for the body alone, but the whole man: soul and body] (17). 75 Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies, 290.
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incorporeality, however, did not remove it from interaction either with its body or the world: it possessed similitude with the divine by virtue of its ability to engage with the created world, particularly through the faculties of memory (memoria) and imagination (imaginatio). The souls possession of cognitive faculties assumes, then, that the soul is more or less equated with the mind or mens, that it has not only the rational, irascible, and concupiscible faculties, but the higher-order faculties that accompany reason: memory, intellection, and desire (memoria, intelligentia, uoluntas).76 The involution of the mind into the soul, and the incorporeality of both, became a keystone for the Alfredian translators handling of the world soul Consolatio 3.m.9, as well as the elucidation of doctrines of immortality that are part of the epistemological project of the Boethius and the Soliloquies, and which serve to separate them from their Latin sources.77

2.3 Embodiment in the Early Middle Ages: Theorizing Medieval Culture With the exception of materialists such as Democritus and Tertullian, classical and early Christian philosophers of mind can (generally) be considered to be dual interactionists. That is, they held that the soul or mind was differently constituted than the body, the former being incorporeal and the latter being material in nature. While the soul, with its attendant mind, was the more prized (pretiosior) of the two, the body nonetheless was integral to what it meant to be human. The body, while perishable and mutable, nonetheless was guaranteed to be reconstituted in toto and then resurrected following the

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Godden, Anglo-Saxons on the Mind, pp. 272-73. Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies, 325-30 and 359.

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Judgment, where it would experience bliss or damnation according to its owners deserts. Moreover, as will be discussed more fully in Chapters Three and Five, the body was the target of therapeutic intervention not only as the recipient of medical treatment for its own sake, but for the care of the soul housed within it. The body was also the substrate on which could be written or made evident the individuals sanctity (in the case of the wounds of the martyrs) or the individuals criminality (punishment by maiming, fasting, or other corporal discipline). While the flesh could blunt the insight of the keenest intellect, it could still, with intervention, provide signs of the mind it housed. One of the most often-repeated truisms regarding medieval thought is the assertion that medieval intellectuals, dominated as they were by a system of belief that privileged the soul over the body, had no place for the body in theology or philosophy or, if it did, such a place was irreducibly marginal, an afterthought to the elaborate systems of discourse around the soul. Like most truisms, such a statement is misleading and dangerous, marking as it does medieval thought as irretrievably other, and discouraging inquiry into the multiplicity of ways in which bodies were theorized, politicized, and socialized. Medievalists have steadily picked away at post-Cartesian assumptions concerning the medieval body and soul, pointing to the numerous competing ideologies and discourses that produced medieval bodies, and that saw them in relationships with the soul that were significantly more complex than modern assumptions of dualism have read into them. As Suzanne Lewis writes, the body hovers uncertainly in the space between pure cultural construction and lived experience: The body, Lewis says, is at the same time a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time, as well as the locus of human perception, 70

consciousness, and knowledge.78 Consequently, the body is simultaneously a cultural object, inscribed with meanings produced across a multiplicity of discourses, and the site of lived experience, the material thing itself, that does not depend on psychological coherence of identity for its existence or the stability of its form.79 On one hand, the body is affirmed as the center of identity and the thing in which personhood is invested (as in Lacan and Freud); on the other, the body has also been theorized, particularly in feminist and race theory, as the site of fragmentation, multiplicity, estrangement and abjection the product, then, of social or political discourse.80 Anthropological theories of behavior, action, and the regulation of the body have tended to see the body purely (or mostly) as the reflection of social practice. To take but two examples, Judith Butlers Bodies That Matter holds that the body is what it is because of the behaviors in which it engages, and the way in which those behaviors are talked about;81 similarly, Pierre Bourdieus

Suzanne Lewis, Introduction: Medieval Bodies Then and Now: Negotiating Problems of Ambivalence and Paradox, in Naked before God: Uncovering the Body in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Benjamin C. Withers and Jonathan Wilcox (Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press, 2003), pp. 15-28, at 19. Lewis, Medieval Bodies Then and Now, pp. 17 -18. Equation of the body with stability of identity or self is a Lacanian and Freudian invention; in Lacan, as the ego forms, the body coheres as well, while for Freud the body marks the boundary or the outline of the personThe structured wholeness of itself. See Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin, Introduction, in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 1-9, at 2.
80 79

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Lisa Sowle Cahill, Sex, Gender, and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1996), 73. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 10. Butler opens her discussion by asking if there is a way to link the question of the materiality of the body to the performativity of gender, and argues tha t categories or concepts usually linked to materiality, such as sex, are so subject to regulatory discourse that they are forcibly materialized through time; in the case of sex, it is not a simple fact or static condition of a body, but a process wher eby regulatory norms materialize sex and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of those norms (1-2).
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theories of habitus and taste argue that the body is a a social product, the only medium through which the person or individual can be apprehended.82 The normalization of the body, and the regulation of both it and its behavior, in addition to being the heart of Bourdieus habitus, lies at the center of Foucaults rgime, and thus at the center of projects that seek to deconstruct discourses of race, gender, sex, and power.83 Body as cultures artifact and body as person are, however, not inseparable; the line between metaphor/text and ways of knowing in the bodywhat is often referred to as embodimentis not always clear. Similarly, culture and nature are not mutually exclusive; that which is seen as artificial (our social and cultural structures, our personal and collective histories) cannot be wholly divorced from the biological facts of our existence.84 Like the mind/body problem Descartes bequeathed to psychology and philosophy after the eighteenth century, the nature/culture dichotomy is a reflex of nineteenth century attitudes; both modern and postmodern theories of the body, whether constructivist or phenomenological, have sought to correct Enlightenment dualisms positing of reason as abstract and universal, and its subsequent privileging of the mind over the experience of the body it inhabits.85 Similarly, medievalists have begun the process of bringing the body back into medieval studies, by exploring the methods by

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 192.
83 84

82

Cahill, Sex, Gender, and Christian Ethics, 75.

Joan L. Griscomb, On Healing the Nature/History Split, Heresies 13 (1981): 4-9; reprinted in Womens Consciousness, Womens Conscience: A Reader in Feminist Ethics , ed. Barbara Hilkert Anderson, Christine E. Gudorf, and Marry D. Pellauer (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985), pp. 85-98, at 97.
85

Cahill, Sex, Gender, and Christian Ethics, 73.

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which medieval societies thought about, constructed, and controlled the bodies they attempted to regulate, and how they conceptualized the bodys relationship to its mind, to other bodies, and its behavior in public and private life.86 The key word here, I believe, is bodies. The Middle Ages, by most academic definitions, encompass roughly a thousand years of history, movement, and change; even profoundly influential theories of body and soul were not completely nor uncritically accepted, nor were they unchanging nor empty of nuance. In their admittedly brief discussion of premodern bodies, G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter point to early Christianitys simultaneous denigration and abnegation of the flesh in its ascetic practices alongside the body-centered cults of the saints, but do not offer the suggestion that monasticisms suppression of the body and celebration of the (holy) body in the veneration of the saints also lay alongside practices that sought to harmonize the most unlikely partners (that is, body and soul) in ways that did not involve the bodys suffering or silence.87 The medieval body itself was contested by various competing groups, between physicians and priests, between the clergy and the laity, and between men and women.88 Even within discourses traditionally thought of as monolithic by post-Enlightenment thinkers, the plurality of bodies, and the ways in which those bodies are brought into being or coded by multiple social and cultural codes, there was room for

Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 21. G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, Introduction, in The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought. Clark Library Lectures, 1985-1986, ed. G.S. Rousseau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 3-44, at 20.
88 87

86

Kay and Rubin, Introduction, p. 5.

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considerable variety in approaches to the body, what it was, and what it meant. With this in mind, I would like to turn to the Alfredian corpus now, and to consider the methods the translators use to construct their bodies as loci of both personal experience and cultural production. Edward Casey, writing against the nineteenth-century habit of distancingeven polarizingnature and culture, as well as the argument that the body is only an object or product of discourse provides one way into the Anglo-Saxon body. The body, for Casey, is the agent, the pivot, the crux In the body and through itby its own unique signatureculture coalesces and comes to term. It comes into its own there.89 For Casey, the body is paradoxically the thing that lives in society and makes society possible, even as it in turn is constructed by the society or culture in which it participates. Similarly, the corpus of the Alfredian corpus lies at the center of regulatory discourses (which have a role in King Alfreds presumed educational programthe instantiation of the ideal political and social subject) that sought to control the individuals appetites, particularly for food and sex; however, it is also spoken of as having its own nature (gecynd), its own properties, and its own role in individual identity. Further, in the Alfredian translations, the body is never abnegated; while scholarship has tended to read medieval attitudes toward the body as negativethe body being implacably opposed to the soul, its superiorI believe there is room for nuance. In the translations, the body is difficult, transitory, mutable, mortal, and troubles with its manifold worries and

Edward Casey, The Ghost of Embodiment: Is the Body a Natural or a Cultural Entity? in The Incorporated Self: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Embodiment , ed. Michael ODonovan-Anderson (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), pp 23-43, at 37.

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difficulties (gedrefednys) the mind and soul that seek to contemplate God; however, as said, it also possesses its own virtues, and is not itself ever described as being positively evil. Instead, it is the other necessary half of the human being; particularly in the Soliloquies it is the guarantor of humanity and, in Heaven, the witness to perduring individual identity. Its corporeality also becomes the metaphorical basis for much of the translations discussions of identity and epistemological processes, particularly the search for and identification of the true good (so god). While patristic writers and their classical antecedents did not embrace a mindbody dualism as dualism is understood in early modern and postmodern philosophy and psychology, they were familiar with, and spent much time exploring, the problems posed by an immortal soul housed in a body made of transient and changeable flesh, and where the faculties of human intellectionunderstanding, will, reason, memory resided. Moreover, they were concerned with how the mind impinged on the body, in terms of how the latter indexed certain qualities, such as virtue or immoderation. Augustines writing on the impossibility of knowing the mind of another person, what eventually becomes the philosophical problem of other minds, invests the body with new importance; the only way for a mind to guess at the disposition of other minds is through the way the body demonstrates or gives signs of such dispositions.90 And, of

For example, De trinitate 10.9.12, 9-12: Neque sicut dicitur: Cognosce uoluntatem illius hominis, quae nobis nec ad sentiendum ullo modo nec ad intellegendum praesto est nisi corporalibus signis editis [Nor is it said, Know the will of that man, which is in no way present to us either by perception or understanding, unless by means of manifest bodily signs]; Soliloquia 13.6-7, when in response to Ratios question as to whether Augustine knows God as well as his friend Alypius, Augustine says, Qui deum ne sic quidem noui quomodo Alypium, et tamen Alypium non satis noui [I do not know God so well as I know Alypius, and I do not know Alypius well enough]. Unlike the modern formulation of the problem, which calls into question the existence of other minds (i.e., how do I know there are other

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course, the body is the thing that is most visibly in the world, the instrument with which minds interact with each other and hold genetic and social relationships. Medieval society, for all the modern assumptions of its abnegation of the body and desire to escape from the chains of corporeality, considered the body to be a locus of various practices of faith. The bodies of the saints, preserved in relics and reliquaries, bore in their incorruptibility the signs of their election; moreover, their shrines became gathering-places of the Christian community, where the faithful could not only meet but also, through the saints intercession, be the beneficiaries of miracles that cured blindness, sickness, possession, or any other physical affliction.91 The bleeding, scarred, or lacerated body of the martyr is the attestation of the martyrs faithso potent, in fact, that the martyrs will, according to Augustine, bear their wounds on their resurrected bodies for eternity (De ciuitate Dei 22.15).92 Hagiography and iconography also provided textual and imagistic lessons regarding the virtuous comportment of the body, with passions and lives of saints serving as the exempla after which the faithful were urged to strive;93 the wounds of martyred saints, as well as their own particular clothes, tokens,

minds out there like my own?), Augustine points out that we cannot know the interior life of another person except through our interpretation of physical signs.
91 92

Cooper, Life in the Flesh, 60-61.

Nescio quo autem modo sic afficimur amore martyrum beatorum, ut uelimus in illo regno in eorum corporibus uidere uulnerum cicatrices, quae pro christi nomine pertulerunt; et fortasse uidebimus [I know not how, but the love we have for the blessed martyrs allows us to desire to see the marks of the wounds which they suffered for the love of Christ, and perhaps we shall see them (in the kingdom to come)] (De ciuitate Dei 22.19.66-68). William D. McCready, Signs of Sanctity: Miracles in the Thought of Gregory the Great (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1989), 7. In the Dialogi, Peter begs Gregory to relate the lives of the saints to him, because discussing the exempla of holy people is as salutary as studying Scripture: Vellem quaerenti mihi de eis aliqua narrares, neque hac pro re interrumpere expositionis
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and other signs of their identities were the visible manifestation of their saintliness. In their pursuit of virtue, the faithful would deploy their bodies in a variety of ways, each of which was delineated by rules governing them: the proper postures for prayer, the attention to orientation, place, and gesture, the days for fasting, the performance of penance, and (at least among clergy) the execution of the liturgy were all specific bodily practices meant to aid the mind in its contemplation of the divine and the pursuit of wisdom and virtue.94 Ritual practices such as those associated with prayer, meditative reading, and the liturgy were all, of course, practices that disposed the body in the service of the soul. The body was also the recipient of the physical signs of spiritual benefits; in Tertullian, the blessings of the soulmiraculous healing, reception of membership in the community of the faithful and reaffirmation of that membershipwere imparted by physical means such as the laying-on of hands, baptism, and Communion.95 For Alcuin, our bodies must undergo the physical process of the sacrament along with our souls, in the same sorts of

studium graue uideatur, quia non dispar aedificatio oritur ex memoria uirtutum [I (Peter) wish that you would allow me to share in those things you relate, and that to interrupt your exposition (of the Scriptures) for such a matter would not seem a serious thing, because edification grows no less from the memory of virtues] (1.Prol.67). Compare Boethius, in which Wisdom alludes to the example of the martyrs as ideal pursuers of eternal life: Hwt we gewislice witon unrim ara monna e a ecan gesla sohtan nallas urh t an t hi wilnodon s lichomlican deaes ac eac manegra sarlicra wita hie gewilnodon wi an ecan life, t wran a haligan martyras [indeed, we certainly know uncounted people who sought eternal happiness, and they desired it not only through the death of the body, but they also desired many cruel torments in the name of eternal life; those were the holy martyrs] (11.89-92). Exemplarity will be discussed further in Chapter Five.
94 95

Cooper, Life in the Flesh, 10-61. Cooper, Life in the Flesh, 65.

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practices that Tertullian discusses.96 The soul, which is intended to benefit from the sacraments, thus relies on the body to receive the water of baptism, and the bread, and wine that represent the washing of the soul and its partaking in the spiritual nourishment of Christs body. In recent years, Anglo-Saxonists have begun to exploit the resources of conceptual metaphor in studies that take as their primary goals a better understanding of the complexities of Anglo-Saxon theories of psychology, identity, and epistemology. From its beginning in discussions of Anglo-Saxon emotional and cognitive life, the use of conceptual metaphor in Anglo-Saxon studies has expanded to the role of metaphor in fashioning the constructs we now refer to today as self, subject, individual, agent, and so on. To date, the bulk of work done on conceptual metaphor in Old English has focused on poetic texts, with their more immediately figurative or literary

Tria sunt in baptismatis sacramento uisibilia et tria inuisibilia. Visibilia sunt sacerdos, corpus et aqua. Inuisibilia uero, spiritus et anima et fides. Illa tria uisibilia nihil proficiunt foris, si haec tria inuisibilia non intus operantur. Sacerdos corpus aqua abluit, Spiritus sanctus animam fide iustificat. Et hoc est quod Apostolus ait: Cooperatores enim Dei sumus. Cooperatur homo Spiritui sancto in salute hominis. Sed et ipse homo, qui baptizandus est, cooperari ambobus debet in salute sua, id est, Spiritui sancto et sacerdoti, humiliter corpus praestare ad sacri mysterium lauacri, et animam uoluntarie ad catholicae fidei susceptionem [There are three visible things in the sacrament of baptism, and three invisible. The visible are the priest, body and water. The invisible are, in turn, the (Holy) Spirit and soul and faith. Those three visible things can accomplish nothing, if the three invisible things do not function within. The priest washes the body in water, the Holy Spirit justifies the soul in faith. And this is what the Apostle said: "For we are joint laborers with God." Man works together with the Holy Spirit in the salvation of the man. But that man, who has been baptized, ought both to work together for his salvation, that is, with the Holy Spirit and the priest, to humbly present the body to the mystery of the holy bath, and voluntarily submit the soul to the adoption of the catholic faith] (Epistola 36, PL 100.194-95). Also Isidore of Seville: Sed aliud est aqua sacramenti, aliud aqua, quae significat Spiritum Dei. Aqua enim sacramenti uisibilis est; aqua Spiritus inuisibilis est. Ista abluit corpus et significat quod fit in anima; per illum autem Spiritum sanctum ipsa anima mundatur et saginatur [But the water of the sacrament is one thing, and water another, which signifies the Spirit of God. For the water of the sacrament is visible; the water of the Spirit is invisible. The former washes the body, and signifies what will be in the soul; nevertheless, through the Holy Spirit the soul itself is purified and nourished] (Etymologiae 7.3.28l; ed. W.M. Lindsay, 2 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911]).

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language and appositive structure that contributes to elaborations on metaphorical speech. The next section of this chapter provides an overview of conceptual metaphor as it intersects with cognitive linguistics and literary texts, specifically with relation to the grounding of the theory of conceptual metaphor in understandings of embodiment, interiority, and their related epistemological concerns, and then moves on to review the literature in Old English and Anglo-Saxon scholarship that deploys conceptual metaphor as part of its critical project.

2.4 Mind, Body, Soul, and Self: Phenomenology and Conceptual Metaphor The death of embodiment, Edward Casey writes, was brought about by the Cartesian revolution, which divorcedor, at least, attempted to divorcemeaningful knowledge from the body, and to erase the body from epistemology.97 However, nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenology reacted against Cartesian thought and philosophies that were based on the divorce of consciousness from an embodied

Casey, The Ghost of Embodiment, p. 23. Phenomenology and other materialist philosophies grew out of the challenge Cartesian dualism posed to traditional conceptions of the natures and interactions of mind and body. Explorations of medieval mentalities have also fallen prey to assumptions of Cartesian dualism and the mind/body problem. Peter King, Why Isnt the Mind -Body Problem Medieval? in Forming the Mind: Essays on the Internal Senses and the Mind/Body Problem from Avicenna to the Medical Enlightenment, ed. Henrik Lagerlund, Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind 5 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), pp.187-205. King seems to imply that, even if the mind-body problem were at issue in Platonic philosophy and its offshoots, the problem remains fundamentally a classical one continued by other means (p. 187) in the Middle Ages. Such continuation by other means, for me, in turn implies that problems of mind and body were at issue in the Middle Ages, whether in the attempts to carry out that debate in the vernacular (as in the case of Alfred) or the lengthy and difficult logical contortions of Aquinian philosophies and metaphysics. For a position that disagrees with King, see Popper, The World of Parmenides, 226.

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subjectivity.98 Most pertinent for conceptual metaphor, which is derived from phenomenological principles, are the revisions made by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-61) to Husserl, Heidegger, and the early German phenomenologists, for whom the life of the body and its perceptive, experiential existence in the world constituted the foundation of epistemology. For Merleau-Ponty, the theory of the body is already a theory of perception; that is, the bodyspecifically, my body or your body, in all its particularity, is underneath or prior to knowledge of self, others, and the world (PP 203). In The Phenomenology of Perception, MerleauPonty argues against the detachment of mind from body (and world) prevalent in Cartesian modes of cognition and epistemology; instead, the rediscovery of the body for Merleau-Ponty, bringing the body back into the fold of philosophical discourse insists on the centrality of the body to perceiving anything: The theory of the body schema is, implicitly, a theory of perception. We have relearned to feel our body; we have found underneath the objective and detached knowledge of the body that other knowledge which we have of it in virtue of its always being with us and of the fact that we are our body. (PP 206) Merleau-Pontys theory of the body holds that we are our body (emphasis mine) because the bodyits movements, faculties, positioning in space, and so onis inescapably in the world, and forms the (unconscious) foundation for perceiving that world. The body, for Merleau-Ponty, is almost equivalent to the Cartesian cogito in its importance; however, as David Morris writes, where the cogito would close philosophical problems by having the philosophizing I certify itself from within

Thomas Busch, Existentialism: The New Philosophy, in Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts, ed. Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), pp. 30-43, at 31.

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Merleau-Ponty poses philosophys initial questionWho am I?within a body open to the world.99 The positioning of the I within a body entails a philosophy that is open to the entire range of human experience, for the body is itself acted on by biological or chemical impulses (emotion, cognition, perception), and, as postmodern theory has taught us, is also intensely politicized and socializedmade subject, in other words, to other individuals and other bodies. Thus, the I is always in and of the world; it is also always particular, for (to state the obvious) different bodies perceive the world in different ways; the sick body, for example, provides access to the world in ways significantly different from a healthy body.100 Merleau-Pontys phenomenology contributed to twentieth-century philosophys closer consideration of the role that the body and its dispositions play in constructing subjects and subjectivities, particularly in feminist and racial theoretical projects that deploy the sexed and/or racialized body as the basis for political, social, or literary critique.101 Prior to its acculturation and governmentality, however, the body is the site of

David Morris, Body, in Diprose and Reynolds, Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts, pp. 111-20, at 111. Morris, Body, p. 113. The way in which the disabled body affects perception and experience will become important for metaphors of disability in Chapter Three; the disabled or sick body forms one of the most pervasive metaphors in the Consolatio and Boethius for the mind dominated by misdirected passions. In the Soliloquia and Soliloquies, it will take the form of the pervasive Neoplatonic metaphor of blindness or impaired eyesight for the mind struggling upward to transcendent knowledge. Ann Murphy, Feminist and Race Theory, in Diprose and Reynolds, Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts, pp. 196-206. Murphy points to feminist, racial, and postcolonial theories that critique the white, male body, particularly the white, male body as the default body for philosophical inqu iry. In medieval texts, the default body (and subject) is typically male. Merleau-Pontys reassertion of the body, and the centrality of embodiment to any theory of human or self-identity, constitutes one of the basic principles underlying cultural constructionism, including feminist, queer, and postcolonial work by, among others Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray; see Casey, The Ghost of Embodiment, p. 24; it is also important to the work of Pierre Bourdieu in his work on acculturation (the habitus of the body and its relationship to class and group membership) and Foucaults reimagining of the control of bodies and the history of the
101 100

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experience and action; in Bergsons words, the orientation of our consciousness towards action appears to be the fundamental law of our physical life,102 a life that has its entailments in the body and the experience of the body. Most significantly for the present discussion is conceptual metaphors appropriation of Merleau-Pontys radicalization of the body, that is, his positioning of the body as essential to the experience that makes philosophy possible, for the underlying assumption of conceptual metaphor is that language is not only a product of embodiment but structures and limits the sorts of knowledge available to us.

2.5 Conceptual Metaphor: Language and Access to Knowledge Conceptual metaphor (also called cognitive metaphor) developed in the 1970s and 80s as a subfield in cognitive linguistics, and its theories have been applied across humanistic disciplines, including literature (to be discussed below, with reference to Anglo-Saxon studies), philosophy, and etymology. Popularized by George Lakoff and Mark Johnsons 1980 Metaphors We Live By, conceptual metaphor in literary studies has sought to understand how authors and speakers use languageand not just, as Mark Turner writes, as literary language, but as a tool of persuasion, and how their language use reveals the ways in which they and their audiences thought about and understood the

construction of the political or social subject, particularly in Discipline and Punish and Madness in Civilization (Casey, The Ghost of Embodiment, pp. 30-32).
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Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Cosimo Press, 2007), 234.

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world.103 While the stronger form of Lakoff and Johnsons theory, particularly as set forth in Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) and Johnsons The Body in the Mind (1990), holds that we cannot have access to transcendent, non-physical knowledge would not have been accepted (at least without complication) in the Middle Ages, the fundamental principles of conceptual metaphor, which understand all language as metaphorical, and metaphor as necessary to the understanding of abstractions and mental activities that are not experienced in an immediately physical way have proven important to recent work in Anglo-Saxon studies, and our developing understanding of premodern psychologies. Conceptual metaphor holds that metaphor functions as a way in which we can comprehend the concepts in one field by means of another, and that the language we use to conceptualize or categorize phenomena is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. For example, the Old English gewitt, used twelve times in the Boethius and Soliloquies and usually defined as perception or awareness is derived from Indo-European *weidand Proto-Germanic *wit, and is related to Latin uidere, to see, and other words having to do with sight and visual perception.104 Similarly, hieran can mean both to hear and to obey; like gewitt, which links sense perception with comprehension (as in our modern I see!), hieran implies that physical auditory reception should be linked with heedfulness and internal receptivity.105 That is, the internal, or mental processes

Mark Turner, Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, and Criticism (Christchurch: Cybereditions, 2000), 13-14. Calvert Watkins, ed., The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), s.v. *weid-1. Eve Sweetser, From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 43. Eva Feder Kittay, in Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) discusses the assumptions
105 104

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entailed in such phenomena as comprehension and subsequent actionobedience, for example, are consistently conceptualized in terms of the external body and the perceptive abilities of its sensorium.106 Rhetoricians and authorities considered metaphor necessary to philosophical instruction, as well as in the explication of rhetorical theories and practices on which such instruction was based. While Plato distrusted poetic language, Aristotle considered the mastery of metaphor to be a hallmark of superb composition (Poetics 1459a 5-7), and rhetoricians such as Quintilian (De institutione oratoria) and Cicero (De oratore) saw metaphor as both an ornamental and useful component in persuasion.107 Unlike some modern attitudes toward metaphor and rhetoric, which deprivilege literary language (and persuasive language) in favor of straight talk, medieval writers seem to have deployed metaphor as part of educational projects that viewed instruction as best accomplished through delight, delight that both appealed to the senses and described cognitive or spiritual actions in readily-accessible, immediate physical termsin appeals to the senses, the sensory world, the social world, and descriptions of the body.108

underpinning Aristotelian conventions of metaphor as entailing the coincidence of language and reality: distinctions in language were seen as capturing ontological distinctions. Discerning analogical uses of language can help us to discern analogical states of reality. If we can perceive the analogical relations between intelligence and sight, then we can argue that the relations between sight and body hold for relations between the intelligence and the soul (3).
106 107 108

Sweetser, From Etymology to Pragmatics, 45. Kittay, Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure , 1-2.

For rhetoric not only as persuasion but a method of community-building, see Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New York: Clarion, 1967), 214; Kittay, Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure , 1. Modern and postmodern writing and theory has taken up the cause of metaphor; in attempting to defamiliarize language, twentiethcentury theory has begun (again) to explore the relationships between meaning, knowledge, and aesthetics. As such, structuralism and formalism have, in the words of Clive Cazeaux, instituted the reclamation of

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Consequently, for Anglo-Saxons as well as their Latin sources, metaphor was not strictly ornamental, but instructive. In the same way, for conceptual metaphor theory the metaphor is not merely a literary device or a rhetorical flourish; on the contrary, it is part of both biological and cultural wiring, and while it is imaginative in its functioning (hence why it is understood as literary language), it is also deployed rationally, with discernible structures and patterns of relationships. At the center of Lakoff and Johnsons articulation of conceptual metaphor is the premise that the body and its relations to the world (to itself, other bodies and objects) provide the unconscious structure that underlies thought, reason, and language.109 Broadly speaking, conceptual metaphor is defined as the understanding of one field or concept by means of another; Lakoff and Johnsons first, and perhaps most famous, example is that of Argument Is War, in which the practice of oral or written argument is conceptualized as armed conflict, with arguments having points that need to be defended if an opponent subjects them to a counterattack. That is, actions or behaviors are partially structured, understood, performed, and talked about in terms of other actions or behaviors.110 Conceptual metaphor, however, is not random or unstructured, nor is it a purely literary conceit; instead, far from being arbitrary, [conceptual metaphor has] a basis in our physical and

metaphor as a figure that can make a positive contribution to perception and the creation of meaning (Metaphor and Continental Philosophy: From Kant to Derrida [New York: Routledge, 2007], 59). George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 3. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 5.
110 109

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cultural experience,111 in our interactions with the world, including other people, our society, and even ourselves. In part, Lakoff and Johnsons theories are biology-based, incorporating as they do theories of brain-based cognition developed in twentieth-century neuroscience, as well as Merleau-Pontys phenomenological posture that holds that the mind, the res cogitans, is inherently embodied by virtue of its presence in a body.112

2.6 Anglo-Saxon Psychologies and Conceptual Metaphor Fundamentally, the embodied mind argues against the Cartesian separation of mind and body; rather than an abstraction or an incorporeal entity that apprehends the world from without, it is deeply implicated in our bodies and our interactions with the world. The argument for the embodied mind has relevance for scholars working in premodern literatures, as (albeit slowly) scholarship has begun to look past the mind/body split that is, frequently, taken as holding true for pre-Cartesian philosophies. In light of this development, conceptual metaphor has made inroads in disciplines that are immediately relevant to Anglo-Saxon studies, particularly in philology and etymology, and in recent years it has provided a fruitful method for investigating Anglo-Saxon psychologies, particularly in the poetic texts that form the bulk of what remains of early

111 112

Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 14.

Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 3-5. Johnson elaborates on three levels of embodiment: neurophysiological (the neural basis of experience, particularly how our brains develop in response to our environments), the cognitive unconscious (the concepts that structure our thought operate automatically), and phenomenological (the felt quality of our experience, related to Merleau -Pontys goal of recovering the bodys submerged or unfelt presence in our daily lives); see Mark Johnson, Embodied Reason, in Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture , ed. Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 81-102, at 82.

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English intellectual and literary traditions. Moreover, it has been a corollary of traditional philological and comparative approaches that began the fields general, and still emerging, interest in Anglo-Saxon cognitive and emotional life.113 Two articles by Peter Clemoes in 1969 and Malcolm Godden in 1985 on the mind and thought in Old English poetry are usually taken to be the inception of what might be called Anglo-Saxon psychological study. 114 Goddens Anglo-Saxons on the Mind developed Clemoess earlier work in Mens absentia cogitans in The Seafarer and The Wanderer by positing two distinct psychological traditions present in Anglo-Saxon writing: the prose tradition (Alfred and Alcuin), which drew on patristic authorities in its construction of a unitary concept of the inner self, with the mind identified with the immortal soul and life-spirit; and the poetic tradition, which maintained that the soul and the mind were distinct entities.115 Studies drawing on Clemoes and Godden, or those which participate in the same line of inquiry, have tended to focus on poetry, with its more consciously literary languagebut also remembering that, for both classical and medieval writers, literature, and not necessarily philosophy as such, was the natural place

Etymological work in Old English includes: Javier Daz Vera, Metaphors We Learnt By,: Cultural Traditions and Metaphorical Patterns in the Old English Vocabulary of Knowledge, Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 55 (2008): 99-106, which focuses on the diachronic analysis of Mind As Body metaphors for the acquisition of knowledge, the process of learning, thinking, and recognition, in which metaphors link cognitive tasks with sensory perception. Both Magorzata Fabiszak, A Semantic Analysis of FEAR, GRIEF, and ANGER Worlds in Old English, in A Changing World of Words: Studies in English Historical Lexicology and Semantics, ed. Javier E. Daz Vera (New York: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 25574 and Caroline Gevaert, The Evolution of the Lexical and Conceptual Field of ANGER in Old and Middle English, in Daz Vera, A Changing World of Words, pp. 275-99 survey conceptual metaphors for emotional experience. Peter Clemoes, Mens absentia cogitans in The Seafarer and The Wanderer, in Medieval Literature and Civilization: Studies in Memory of G. N. Garmonsway , ed. Derek A. Pearsall and Ronald A. Waldron (London: Athlone Press, 1969), pp. 62-77; Godden, Anglo-Saxons on the Mind, pp. 271-98.
115 114

113

Godden, Anglo-Saxons on the Mind, p. 271.

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from which to begin any inquiry into the human mind and experience.116 Moreover, while they began investigating Anglo-Saxon psychologies with the experience of emotional life, scholars have begun to employ conceptual metaphor to begin investigations of the relationships that obtained between body and mind, and the implications these have for the acquisition of knowledge, self-awareness, and interior life. Eric Jagers Speech and the Chest in Old English Poetry: Orality or Pectorality? picks up on metaphors that associate the chest with individual speech acts, the faculty of speech, and the psychological functions related to the production of speech and language; these metaphors, he notes, are ingrained in Latin writing as well as Old English, and the frequency of their use in Old English poetry represents not necessarily a natural fact (that the capacity for speech is housed in the chest), but rather an extensively-deployed literary convention.117 The distinction between perceived biological reality and literary convention is explored further in a series of dissertations on Anglo-Saxon emotional life, including those by Michael Matto, Soon-Ai Low, and Leslie Lockett; Lockett in particular is interested in the disparate metaphorical systems that were used to conceptualize emotion, and which compete against each other throughout the course of the Old English literary tradition.118

116 117

Turner, Death Is the Mother of Beauty, 13.

Eric Jager, Speech and the Chest in Old English Poetry: Orality or Pectorality? Speculum 65 (1990): 845-59. Michael Matto, Containing Minds: Mind, Metaphor, and Cognition in Old English Literature, PhD diss. (New York University, 1998); Soon Ai Low, The Anglo -Saxons Mind: Metaphor and Common Sense Psychology in Old English Literature, PhD diss. (University of Toronto, 1998); Leslie Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions.
118

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More recent work on conceptual metaphor has moved toward a closer consideration of Anglo-Saxon interiority, that is, the thing modern scholars loosely refer to as the self or subject. Britt Mizes series of articles on interiority in Old English poetry have opened discussion on the role of metaphor in the literary production of the enclosed mind, and the vital role such an image plays in Anglo-Saxon understandings of the relationships between interior and exterior, as well as the private and public, that informs both, for example, Old English confessional poetry and the dissemination of knowledge by authorities. In the metaphors Mize studies, the mind is conceived of as permeable or impermeable, an enclosure whose walls may or may not permit the passage in and out of private emotion or thought, or admit (or refuse to admit) the influence of wisdom or temptation. 119 The interplay between public and private also forms the basis of discussion in Mattos True Confessions: The Seafarer and Technologies of the Sylf, in which metaphors of interiority are used to emphasize permeability, the interconnectedness between the speakers interior self, the world to which he strives to communicate his thoughts, and the influence of the world on his mental state.120 In his 2004 dissertation, Ronald Ganze has also turned toward consilience and the cognitive sciences, of which conceptual metaphor forms a part, as a method of understanding how premodern thinkersparticularly, for Ganzes discussion, Augustine and Alfred

Britt Mize, The Representation of the Mind as an Enclosure in Old English Poetry, ASE 35 (2006): 57-90. Michael Matto, True Confessions: The Seafearer and Technologies of the Sylf, JEGP 103 (2004): 156-79.
120

119

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conceptualize the souls engagement with the real, material world, and how such engagement forms a constitutive part of identity. Conceptual metaphor has allowed Anglo-Saxon scholars to capitalize on opportunities to explore the mental and emotional lives of subjects in Old English literature, and to begin working toward a picture of Anglo-Saxon identity (or identities) and selfhood that postmodern theoretical approachesand general attitudes toward premodern thoughthave, thus far, made difficult to obtain. In part, the centrality of the body to the theory of conceptual metaphorthat mental life is understood in terms of the bodyhelps avoid what OBrien OKeeffe refers to as modern face-value acceptance of the primacy of the soul (and thus, the marginalization of the body) in Anglo-Saxon thought, and the concomitant reflex of the mind/body split that informs modern commonsense understandings of human identity. 121 Moreover, a closer attention to the meaning underlying ostensibly literary or figurative language allows us to focus on the textual dimensions of the AS subject, that being who fills the position of "I" in a sentence, thus one who is a subject of and to discourse, and, at the same time, one who is also subject of and to power. 122 Similarly, metaphor provides the basis for the construction of a self that is not wholly the subject of power, in which the individual deploys literary language in his own project of self-constructionone that is not wholly produced by or in the service of the mechanisms of power that, for example, Anglo-

Katherine OBrien OKeeffe, Body and Law in Late Anglo -Saxon England, ASE 27 (1998): 209-32, at 210.
122

121

OBrien OKeeffe, Body and Law in Late Anglo-Saxon England, 210-11.

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Saxonists usually see as operating in the Alfredian corpus.123 In resisting the temptation to reduce Anglo-Saxon and early medieval mental life to the duality of body and mind (a duality, remember, introduced by Descartes), and b y embracing what has come to be thought of as the soul/mind/body trinity, Anglo-Saxonists have begun to open up the complexities of a human identity in which the mind provided the bridge between the body and the soul residing within it. This approach also acknowledges the role of the body in biographical experiences that constituted both individuality and an integral part of the reflective process that eventually could lead to a more intimate knowledge of the divine, in whose image humanity was molded.

123

Matto, Technologies of the Sylf, 178.

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CHAPTER 3: ALFREDIAN METAMORPHOSES: BODY, METAPHOR, AND NARRATIVE IN THE BOETHIUS AND SOLILOQUIES

Broadly speaking, patristic and early medieval writersthe Anglo-Saxons among the latterinherited a system, via intermediaries such as Alcuin, of Neoplatonic soulbody dualism that continued to struggle with such issues as the immortality of the soul, the location of the thing called mind (mens) and where such phenomena as intellection, emotion, sensation, and memory were to be located. These were not trifling questions then (nor are they now), because the natures of minds, souls, and bodies impinged heavily on questions of immortality, on the existence and nature of individual identities, the permanence of an individuated self, agency, and, in Christian thought, the resurrection of the body and its reunification with the soul at the Last Judgment. In this sense, the mind-body problem was a problem on many levelsdifferently articulated, to be sure, that the problem of what the Cartesian mind has to do with neurochemical processes, but a significant problem nonetheless. While some thinkers, like Alcuin for example, dealt with how an incorporeal soul might interact with its corporeal body briefly (and in doing so raising more question than answers), the mind/body problem seemed to

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be couched more in terms of how one might affect, or reflect, the struggles of the other to attain knowledge, peace, and unification with God.1 Embodiment in the early Middle Ages is, of course, not purely a matter of philosophy as modern definitions might construe it, but lies at the nexus of philosophy, theology, law, and literature. As the discussion of early Western Christianity and its antecedents has demonstrated, the body and its habits were not merely accessories, but instead were incontestably part of what it meant to be human. The same holds for the Anglo-Saxons who translated the Consolatio and Soliloquia, as the heirs to a long and pervasive tradition that, despite its suspicion of the most immediately and disturbingly physical properties of the body (e.g. lust, desire), did not ignore the body in their accounts of personhood; rather, as Caroline Walker Bynum writes, person was not person without body, and body was the carrier or the expression (although the two are not the same thing) of what we today call identity.2 The body was thus a participant in the life of the individual, as well as the instrument by which that individual interacted with the world and exercised his virtue. The body as instrument, or possibly hindrance, appears in the preface to the Boethius, in which Alfred is presented not only as the translator of the Consolatio, but as a heroic intellectual figure who had to persist through overwhelming difficulties in order to complete his work; he translated as best he could, the preface explains, for am mistlicum and manigfealdum woruldbisgum e hine oft ger ge on mode ge on

1 2

Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies, 294.

Caroline Walker Bynum, Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 11.

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lichoman bisgodan [for the various and manifold worldly difficulties which often beset him, both in mind and in body] (Pref.4-6). The phrase ge on mode ge on lichoman points to a running preoccupation with the duality of human nature, and how the embodied quality of that nature both interferes with and yet ultimately participates in the fulfillment of the human quest for knowledge, God, and truth. Mod and Agustinus, the despairing protagonists of the Boethius and Soliloquies, also find themselves afflicted mentally and bodily: when Wisdom finds him, Mod, presented as a body, is prostrate with grief (swa niowul), and Agustinus begins the Soliloquies in a state of ill-health as well as mental paralysis, consumed with doubts (tweounga) about hwt he sylf wre (Soliloquies 48.19).3 In the Boethius and Soliloquies, the body and mind share in each others difficulties, and frequently the body is implicated in the troubles that beset the mind, clouding its vision and weighing it down as it strives toward enlightenment and the good.4 Despite such vexed attitudes toward the body, the translators of the Boethius and Soliloquies both accord the body a central place in their explications of the functions of

The Dialogues also opens with bodily pain, uncertainty, and privacy: Gregory recalls how he ws swie geswenced mid am geruxlum and unenessum sumra woruldlicra ymbhogena [was very troubled with the tumult and difficulties of many worldly preoccupations] (3.3.4). Unlike Mod and Agustinus, who are consoled by figures of authority and wisdom, Gregorys consolation is with min sunu Petrus and min se leofreta diacon, who was his constant companion to smeaunge s halgan wordes and re godcundan lare [in the contemplation of holy writ and divine teaching] (3.31-33). For example, Mod replies to Wisdoms reminder that there is a natural good within him, but he has forgotten it, by saying rest u cwde t ic hfde forgiten t gecyndelic god t ic oninnan me selfum hfde for s lichoman hefignesse [first you said that I had forgotten that innate good that I had within myself, on account of my bodys heaviness] ( Boethius 35.30-32). In the Soliloquies, Wisdom explains that the rational and immortal soul strives to know all it can, eah hyt nu myd re byrene s lichaman gehefegod sio [Although it is now weighed down with the burden of the body] (91.3).
4

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the mind and soul, and rely extensively on both metaphor and narrative in their programs of psychogogy and spiritual instruction. Moreover, particularly in the Boethius, the body is the site of instruction in self-care, as Wisdom warns Mod constantly against the evils of misdirected desires for food, drink, luxury goods, and sex; the well-being of the body, then, is intimately tied with the well-being of the mind. Indeed, while the body is frequently described as a weight that pulls down the mind (hefignes), a thing that troubles it (abysian), and an entity constantly subject to attacks and illnesses that weaken it, it is never described as being an evil in itself. Far from embracing the strong forms of duality that characterize, for example, the spirit and flesh of the Soul and Body dialogues, the Boethius and Soliloquies recognize the body as simultaneously being a gift and a necessary tool, possessed of its own merits, as well as a perilously weak and perishable thing. In addition to metaphor, both Wisdom and Gesceadwisnesparticularly Wisdomdeploy multiple exempla in which the mutable body is used to illustrate the difficult relationship that obtained between body and mind, the minds changeability and involvement in the world, and, by way of consolation, the reassurance that parts of the mind or soul remain inviolate. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the spiritual body in the Soliloquies, and the role the resurrected body plays in the acquisition of the translinguistic vision towards which Agustinus strives.5

Godden, Text and Eschatology, pp. 192-93, on the preservation of knowledge of oneself and filial relations after death, and p. 204 on the guarantee that we will know God following the Judgment; Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great, 323-24.

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3.1 The Sawl-lic Duality and the Properties of the Body The Alfredian translations of the Consolatio and Soliloquia inherited the doctrine of homo est corpus et anima from their avowed sources, as well as the extensive tradition of homiletic and exegetical works on the nature of the human being; they may also have found the doctrine in any one of the raft of commentaries on the Consolatio, although this last seems unlikely.6 The human as a composite of lic and sawl is explicitly stated at multiple points in the Boethius and Soliloquies, and forms the basis of those works explication of the relationship between the pursuit of wisdom as a spiritual practice and the exercise of that wisdom, as virtue, in the world. Throughout the Boethius, the translator returns repeatedly to man as lic-sawl composite; the impulse appears most clearly in Boethius Chapters 30 to 34 and Meter 17, in which Wisdom begins his disquisition on the dual nature of humanity, the balance of power between the rational soul and the body, and the consequences of the soul becoming subservient to the flesh it is supposed to command. The Old English texts preserve and expand on the discussion of embodiment in the Consolatio, by emphasizing the creation and generation of humanity as embodied

Augustine is, of course, a major source of the doctrine of corpus et anima; see Chapter 2, n. 54 for a list of the works in which corpus et anima appears as the species definition of the human. Isidore of Seville, who inherited (and conveniently condensed) Augustines thought, includes the following description of the human in the Etymologiae: Duplex est autem homo, interior et exterior. Inter ior homo, anima; exterior homo, corpus [Moreover, man is a duplex being, interior and exterior. The inner man is the soul; the outer man, body] (4.1.6); see also Isidores Sententiae (ed. P. Cazier, Sententiae, CCSL 111 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1998], 1.12.2a-2b): Anima hominis non est homo, sed corpus, quod ex humo factum est, id tantum homo est. Inhabitando autem in corpore anima, ex ipso participio carnis hominis nomen accepit, sicut Apostolus interiorem hominem dicit animam, non carnem, conditam esse ad De i imaginem [The soul of man is not the man, but the body, because it is made from earth (humus), is therefore the man. Moreover, with the body being inhabited by the soul, it takes the name of man from its cooperation in the flesh, just as the Apostle says that the inner man is the soul, not the flesh, as it is made in the image of God].

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souls. For example, the twenty-nine lines of Meter 17 and the prose of Boethius 30 expand considerably on the nine lines of Consolatio 3.m.6. Where the Consolatio concentrates on the role of the divine power in the generation of the world and the unification of the body with a celestial soul or mind (hic clausit membris animos celsa sede petitos; Consolatio 3.m.6, 5) as the nobile germen of the mortal race (3.m.6, 6), both the prose and poetic Old English texts add in the generation of the human race from Adam Eve, as well as the fact that all individuals, whether high or low, both come from a mother and a father. The poet of the Meters refers first to the anum twm were and wife [the two alone, man and woman] from whom the entirety of the human race springs, and continues on to say that hi eac nu get ealle gelice / on woruld cuma, wlance and heane [they also now all alike come into the world, the powerful and the weak] (Meter 17.3-6); the prose, as is usually the case, is more concise, with its ealle men hfdon gelicne fruman foram hi ealle coman of anum fder and of anre meder, and ealle hi beo gelice acennede [all men have the same origin because they all come from one father and one mother, and they are all still yet born in the same way] (Boethius 30.38-40). Wisdoms insistence that all humanity is created equal (gelice), in their descent from Adam and Eve, their own birth from human generation, and their nature as embodied souls is a salutary reminder to Boethius that, because as humanity partakes of a common nature, the evils he faces at the hands of the overproud are fundamentally empty: [God] gesceop men on eoran; gegaderode a saula and one lichoman mid his am anwealde, and ealle men gesceop emnele on re fruman gecynde ealle sint emnele gif ge willa one fruman sceaft geencan, and one scippend, and sian eowres lces acennednesse [God shaped men on earth; he united soul and body with his 97

power, and created all men equally noble in their basic nature all are equally noble if you will consider the first creation, and the creator, and after that your own birth] (Boethius 30.43-49). Those who forget the basic facts of their creation and the creator to whom they owe their existence in turn forget the essential nobility of their embodied nature, and when they forget this, they in turn lose that nobility.7 Boethius 33, the translation of Consolatio 3.m.9 (O qui perpetua), departs from Boethiuss Neoplatonic musings on the world soul in order to expatiate on the marvel of Gods ordination of the tripartite soul in the body, swa t re sawle y lsse ne bi on am lstan fingre e on eallum am lichoman [so that the soul is no less in the smallest finger than in the whole body] (Boethius 33.215-17). He returns to praise God for his mingling of the spiritual and the material, saying u drihten gegderast a hiofonlican sawla and a eorican lichoman and hi on isse worulde gemengest [you, Lord, gather the heavenly souls and the earthly bodies, and mingle them in this world] (Boethius 33.236-39).8 The overriding interest of both Boethius Chapter 33 and Meter 20

Wisdom immediately goes on to remind Boethius that, a ryhtelo bi on am mode ns on am flsce [true nobility is in the mind, not the flesh] ( Boethius 30.49-50), and not the soul; the implication may be that mod, as an aspect of the soul most closely united to the world, is being differentiated from the body that it inhabits; Wisdom is both recapitulating and anticipating arguments about the minds return journey to the patria of Heaven, and its possession of qualities that cannot be alienated from it. Moreover, it is unclear whether or not the translator makes the same distinction between lic and flsc that Isidore makes; for Isidore, caro is the material fact of the body, while the body itself is animated by the soul (Etymologiae 11.1.14-17). See discussion below. The innovation is Alcuinian, derived from De animae ratione 3 (see Chapter Two above), and has been extensively discussed. Carmen Lenz, Images of Psychic Landscape, 105 refers to these passages as the interiorization of the tripartite world-soul. For the incorporation of De animae ratione into the Boethius in the commentary traditions, see Georg Schepss, Handschriftliche Studien zu Knig Alfreds Boethius (Wrzburg 1881); Hugh Fraser Stewart, A Commentary by Remigius Autissiodorensis on the De consolatione philosophiae of Boethius, Journal of Theological Studies 17 (1916): 22-42; Brian S. Donaghey, The Sources of King Alfreds Translation of Boethiuss De Consolatione Philosophiae, Anglia 82 (1964): 23-57; Otten, Knig Alfreds Boethius (Tbingen: M. Niemeyer, 1964), 1-60; Bolton, The Study of the Consolation of Philosophy in Anglo-Saxon England, 33-78 and Remigian
8

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is the activity of the soul contemplating itself, but the soul is also capable of contemplating the created world, as it hweole gelicost, hwrfe ymbe hy selfe, / oft smeagende ymb as eorlican / drihtnes gesceafta dagum and nihtum [most like a wheel turns about itself, often contemplating the earthly creation of the Lord day and night] (Meter 20.211-13). In the prose, the language of such contemplation is ambiguous; when Wisdom says that the soul, turning beneath itself, lufa as eorlican ing and ara wundra [loves earthly things and marvels at them] (33.231-32), he can be taken to mean love of and wonderment at the miracle of the created world (including the mingling of soul and body), or else love and wonderment directed toward inappropriate things. The translation of Consolatio 3.m.9 introduces what becomes one of the controlling images of Boethius 34, the nature of the human and the blessings accorded to it; the soul-body composite also becomes, in Boethius Chapter 34, a point of contrast for the unification of all goods in the true good (that is, God), in numerous expansions on the Latin. In the first reference, Wisdom draws an analogy between the composition of man and the composition of the good. The human is a single compound entity, made of sawl and lichoma; a mans goodness, however, is completely separate from both his soul and body. Instead, goodness is extrinsic to human nature, but is assimilated into the individual by God: goodness and the self are mingled things, which a gegdra God and eft tgdre helt and gemetga [God then gathers and in turn holds and governs] (34.61-

Commentaries, pp. 381-94; Szarmach, Alfred, Alcuin, and the Soul, pp. 130 -35; Bolton, How Boethian is Alfreds Boethius? 160-61; Godden, Anglo-Saxons on the Mind, pp. 271-76.

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63).9 Later, Wisdom returns to the body as the basis of a (wrong) analogy for the anatomy of the good: unlike the way in which sawl and lichoma wyrca anne mon, and se an mon hf manig lim [soul and body make one man, and that one man has many limbs] (34.125-26), true felicity cannot be anatomized; that is, it cannot be a duality or multiplicity, because such composite structures are inherently divided and differentiate. True felicity, on the other hand, is indivisible.10 However, the metaphor of limbs making up one body is apt, in the sense that hie gewyrca nne lichoman, and eah ne bi eallunga gelice [they make one body, and nevertheless are not wholly alike] (34.14849). The natural body, then, as a union of different appendages, is the correct metaphor for true felicity, which is itself one thing but composed of a multiplicity of others, t a sien ealle an, and t an onne sie God [that all are one, and that one is God] (34.139-41). Perhaps one of the strongest statements of embodiment comes later in Boethius 34, in which Wisdom further explains the necessity of unity and the good, as well as the nature of things to preserve their existence and their own unity. The bodys mutability becomes Wisdoms touchstone for his explication of the drive of all creatures (men, animals, trees) to continue to exist whole and undivided:

Otten, Knig Alfreds Boethius, 71-86, 160-65, and 264-79. Otten argues that, in the Boethius, goodness does not inhere in the nature of fallen man; instead, goodness is granted to him through the grace of God, who, as Boethius 34 says, tgdre helt and gemetga both goodness and the humanity to which it is given in each individual. The Old English expands on a brief reference in the Latin, to the corpus beatitudinis (Consolatio 3.pr.10, 28). See Godden and Irvine, eds., Boethius, 2.392: In developing the image [the Boethius] hints at the conclusion of the argument, since the soul and the body represent not one of the limbs or goods but a higher entity to which they belong, as the five goods will be shown to belong to God.
10

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a cw he. Wast u hwt mon sie? a cw ic. Ic wat t hit is sawl and lichoma. a cw he. Hwt u wast t hit bi mon a hwile e seo sawl and se lichoma undlde beo. Ne bi hit nan mon sian hi todlde bio. Swa eac se lichoma bi lichoma a hwile e he his limu hf. Gif he onne hwylc lim forlyst, onne ne bi he eall swa he r ws. (Boethius 34.239-44) [Then he said, Do you know what a man is? And I said, I know that it is a soul and a body. Then he asked, Then you know that it is a man while the soul and the body are united. It will not be a man after they are parted. So also the body is a body while it possesses all its limbs. If it should lose some limb, then it is not entirely what it was before.] In the Consolatio, Philosophy assigns souls to all living things: Ut in animalibus, cum in unum coeunt ac permanent anima corpusque id animal uocuntur, cum uero haec unitas utriusque separatione dissoluitur interire nec iam esse animal liquet [As in animals, when the soul and body come together and remain as one, its called an animal, and when this unity is dissolved by separation on either side, it appears that the animal is dissolved] (3.pr.11, 11). The Old English translation is somewhat problematicand alarming, given that Wisdoms explanation entails the loss of species identity when soul and body are divided by death. In contrast to the Boethius, the Soliloquies is not excessively occupied with establishing the duality of body and soul; it is content to note that Cornelius Celsus says, of twam ingum we sint t we sint, t ys, of saule and of lichoman; seo sawel is gastlic and se lichaman, eordlic. ra sawle is se besta creft wisdom, and s lichaman t wyrste ing unhele [of two things we are what we are, that is, of soul and body; the soul is spiritual and the body earthly. The best virtue of the soul is wisdom, and the worst

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property of the body is weakness] (Soliloquies 75.11-14).11 Unlike the Latin, which the translator is only paraphrasing at this point, the Soliloquies is not at great pains to emphasize the essential inferiority of the body; while the body is weak and subject to illhealth (of which Agustinus complains at the beginning of Book One), it is not a definite evil. Indeed, the only explicitly negative references to the body in both the Boethius and Soliloquies come in their borrowings of the prison metaphor, in which the body incarcerates the soul.12 In the Boethius, the soul bears witness to its own virtue and does not require the praise of men fter s lichoman gedale and re sawle, for seo sawl fr swie freolice to heofonum sian heo ontiged bi and of am carcerne s lichoman onliesed bi [the soul travels freely to the heavens after it is untied and freed from the prison of the body] (Boethius 18.126-30).13 In the Soliloquies, Gesceadwisnes reminds Agustinus that it is certainly promised (gehaten butan lcum tweon) that swa swa we of isse weorulde weora and seo sawle of re carcerne g s lichaman

Nam quoniam duabus, inquit, partibus compositi sumus, ex animo scilicet et corpore, quarum prior melior, deterius corpus est, summum bonum est melioris partis optimum, summum malum autem pessimum deterioris. Est autem optimum in animo sapientia, est in corpore pessimum dolor [We are composed, (Cornelius Celsus) says, of two parts, body and soul. The first part is the be tter, the body is the worse. The highest good is what is best for the better part, and the greatest evil is what is worst in the worse part. So what is best is wisdom in the soul, and what is worst is pain in the body] ( Soliloquia 12.713). For the full tradition of thought behind the prison of the body, Courcelle, Connais-toi toi-mme, 325-414 and Chapter Two, n. 9 and n. 24 above. Compare Consolatio 2.p.7, 22-23: Sin uero bene sibi mens conscia terreno carcere resoluta caelum libera petit, nonne omne terrenum negotium spernat, quae se caelo fuens terrenis gaudet exemptam? [But if the mind remains conscious when it is freed from this earthly prison and freely seeks Heaven, will it not spurn all terrestrial affairs, for being in heaven it rejoices in its release from the things of the world?]. The Old English adds that t mod him selfum gewita bi godes willan [the mind bears witness to its own good will] (Boethius 18.133), and anticipates the concluding admonition of the work: Hebba eower mod to him mid eowrum hondum [Raise your minds up to him with your hands] ( Boethius 42.49).
13 12

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[just as we depart from this world and the soul leaves the prison of the body], we will know all that can be known, with the exception of the transcendent sight of God (93.1416). As will be seen, however, the regaining of the perfected body after the resurrection is also a guarantor of knowledge. The translators of the Boethius and Soliloquies both understood the human being as a composite creation, made of an immaterial, spiritual soul and a corporeal body. In this, they follow not only their immediate sources, but also the extensive tradition of patristic thought that considered human identity to be fundamentally embodied in nature, however vexed or difficult such embodiment might be. While saying that the human is a unity of body and soul may seem so obvious as to be not worth stating, the importance of such doctrine to thinking about what it means to be human, and where the nature of a particular identity or self may inhere, cannot be overstated.14 As seen already, humanity as an embodied soul, as well as the human body on its own, forms an important metaphor for Wisdoms discussion of the nature of true happiness: the use of the human being, as a composite unity (albeit impermanent) of body and soul, to illustrate the composite unity of true happiness, which indivisibly unites multiple kinds of goods, automatically entails the belief that the human being is constituted of that body and soul operating and existing together. The body, as one half of the soul-body unity, is, as said, a difficult object. It is not evil or bad in itself; in this, the Anglo-Saxons are very much of a piece with Augustine and Gregory, and deliberately eschew gnostic doctrines that reject the body. While

14

Law, Wisdom, Authority, and Grammar in the Seventh Century , 77.

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inferior to the mind or soul, the body has its own properties that are, in themselves, good even if they are also transient. In the Boethius, part of Wisdoms discussion is devoted to elucidating the properties of the body and the goods that it possesses (however temporarily), and in the Soliloquieswhich is considerably less interested in the body than its sister textGesceadwisnes and Agustinus both admit to the necessity of the body in learning about the world: Agustinus tells Gesceadwisnes that he learns rest myd am eagum, and syan mid am ingeance [first with the eyes, and then with the mind] (61.13-14), as the eyes see the object and bring it into his perception, or fasten the image into his mind.15 The eyes and the mind both working together is perhaps a borrowing from the Alcuins reorientation of Augustinian theories of mind, with Alcuin holding that the souls likeness to God resides in its engagement with the real material world.16 Agustinuss insistence on the cooperation of the sensorium (here, the eyes) with the mindthat both are necessarysuggests that the translator saw the body not purely as a distraction to the pursuit of knowledge, but an important tool in that pursuit.

3.1.1 The Qualities of the Body in the Boethius While the Soliloquies is tacitly concerned with the body as the companion of the soul in resurrection and its mortal inability to perceive spiritual matters, aside from deploying the body in the service of numerous exempla to prove Gesceadwisnes point it

Wilcox, Alfreds Epistemological Metaphors, pp. 206-7 ; Milton McC. Gatch, King Alfreds Version of Augustines Soliloquia: Some Suggestions on Its Rationale and Unity, in Szarmach, Studies in Earlier Old English Prose, pp. 199-236, at 229-30; Waterhouse, Tone in Alfreds Version of Augustines Soliloquies, pp. 64-65.
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15

Godden, Anglo-Saxons on the Mind, p. 273.

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is not much interested in the properties of the body as such. In the Boethius, however, the body not only functions as a sign of humanitys mental and spiritual superiority, but also possesses its own characteristics, transient as they may be, and is itself a valuable thing for its owner. The shape of the human body is in itself a good; unlike other animals, which go on all fours, fly, or crawl, the human walks upright in token that he is meant to direct his thoughts to Heaven: Ac se man ana g uprihte; t tacna t he sceal ma encan up onne nyer, i ls t mod sie niooror onne e lichoma. (Boethius 41.170-73)17 [But man alone walks upright; that signifies that he must give more thought to higher things than the lower, lest the mind be lower than the body.] The body as visible token of the superiority of mind and soul is expanded on in the Meters: Wisdom states explicitly that, by mans upright posture, is getacnod t his treowa sceal / and his modgeonc ma up onne nier / habban to heofonum, y ls he his hige wende / nier swa r nyten [is signified that his trust and his thought must be directed more up to heaven than downward, lest he turn his heart downward like a beast] (Meter 31.18-21). The bestial qualities of those who refuse to direct their energies toward true felicity is a running concern in the Boethius (for which see the discussions on

Consolatio 5.m.5, 10-11: unica gens hominum celsum leuat altius cacumen / atque leuis recto stat corpore despicitque terras [The race of men alone can raise its head high, and can stand with upright body and disdain the earth]. The image can be traced back to Ovids Metamorphoses: pronaque cum spectent animalia cetera terram, / os homini sublime dedit caelumque uidere / iussit et erectos ad sidera tollere uultus [While other animals hang their heads and gaze at the ground, he made ma n stand erect, and bid him look up to heaven, and lift his head to the stars] (ed. William S. Anderson [Leipzig: Tbner, 1993], 1.84-86).

17

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transformation below), given the close affinities between the minds of men and the minds of animals.18 Of course, the body runs a distant second to the mind and soul in terms of its virtues and powers. The body is perilously weak, able to be harmed by the tiniest insects, infected by worms ge innan ge uton and can quickly be brought near death (16.48-58); the only surefire way for one man to harm another, Wisdom argues, is in the body: On hwm mg nig man orum derian buton on his lichoman, oe eft on heora welum e ge hata gesla? [Can any man harm another in any way other than in his body, or in his possessions, which we call blessings?] (16.57-58),19 in contrast to the mind, for nan mon ne mg am gesceadwisan mode gederian, ne him gedon t hit ne sie t t hit bi [no one can harm the rational mind, nor make it happen that it is not what it is] (16.58-60). However, despite the bodys weakness and depressing propensity for sickness, it is rarely referred to as an absolute evil; even then, on the few occasions when the language is clearly negative, the translator eschews lichoman in favor of flsc, which seems to describe the body that has been seduced by the vices.20 Flsc is not a preferred Alfredian term, at least in the Boethius and Soliloquies (it appears frequently in the

The use of Alcuins tripartite soul necessarily entails a similarity with animals, as humanity shares with them the qualities of anger or arousal (iersung) and desire (wilnung) with them. In addition to his obvious knowledge of Alcuins De animae ratione, the translator of the Boethius might have thought that the Alcuinian tripartite soul was an appropriate formula to use, given that Chapters 37 and 38 are interested in the mental transformations associated with vice and following false happiness, and very consciously preserve Boethiuss Stoicist attitude toward animalistic behavior. Later, Wisdom reminds Mod that the bodys strength and beauty can be diminished by a three day fever (16.57-59). A distinction might be made between the body as a totality, the thing through which the human mind experiences the world and acts in it, and the body as a material construct that is particularly susceptible to the minds instinctive drives for food, sex, and material possessions.
20 19

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Dialogues and Hierdeboc); it is used only seven times in the Boethius, and not at all in the Soliloquies; in contrast, lichama is employed thirty-four and twenty-three times, respectively. As opposed to lichoma, the few times flsc is used seem to be negative: in Boethius, flsc is referred to as accursed in Wisdoms condemnation of lust and sexual desire: Ac e willa onne forseon gode Godes eowas, foram e in werige flsc hafa in anwald nals u his. Hu mg mon earmlicor gebron onne mon hine undereode his weregan flsce and nelle his gesceadwisan saule? [But the good servants of God will scorn you, because your accursed flesh controls you, not you it. How can one be more wretched than one who has made himself subservient to his accursed flesh, and not to his rational soul?] (32.19-23) Outside of this passage, and a few others dealing with the flsclican uneawas, the Boethius largely confines itself to discussing the body in terms that acknowledge its susceptibility to both disease and comfort, but rarely openly condemn it. Thus, the body as a construct is inferior only to the soul (although, of course, it is significantly inferior). Even though its own goods cannot be compared with the acquisition of wisdom, the anlepe crft re sawle [the unique virtue of the soul], the body nonetheless can possess things from which it can derive advantages, including its size, strength, speed, and physical beauty (32.23-33), although these are admittedly transient. The body is also superior to anything else that a man may possess, for Swa swa se heofen is betera and healicra and fgerra onne eall his innung buton monnum anum, swa is monnes lichoma betera and deorwyrra onne eall his hta [Just as the sky is superior and higher and more beautiful than all its contents except man alone, so is mans body superior to and more precious than all his possessions] (32.38-42). Although 107

the body is not inviolate in the way that the mind is, and is transient and perishable while the mind and soul are comfortingly immortal, it remains valuable in itself, cared for if not catered to. The body also provides one of the controlling metaphors that runs throughout the Boethius. As discussed above, the body-soul composite served as the basis for metaphors concerning the nature of true felicity: if one could count on the unity of the body and soul as the foundation of human nature, it would then follow that one could also trust that true felicity was a similar unity of diverse elements. More pervasively, however, the body itself, independent of its soul, was frequently used to depict the workings of the mind, as it cogitated, reflected, and remembered its way through its various difficulties to the bliss of true happiness and God.

3.2 The Mind Is A Body: Metaphorical Schema for Understanding How the Mind Works This chapter is concerned with the use of the body in the translations of the Consolatio and Soliloquia, including descriptions of and attitudes toward the body, before moving on to consider how the translators deploy it in a few body-based metaphors and extended narratives to describe the disabled or misdirected mind. In the schema The Mind Is A Body, the mind is conceptualized as a body that is capable, among other things, of seeing, touching, tasting, digesting, and manipulating ideas or abstractions (grasping them, moving them around, absorbing them), and as moving through space; in this schema, the mind can move along a path of thought; is able to see 108

when it knows something; it acquires knowledge as it chews over or ruminates on an idea and comprehends it when it digests; it can sniff out good and evil.21 Like a body, the mind is itself a container; also like a body, it is subject to various influences even as it exerts itself to remember, reason, and desire.22 Like a body, the mind can be healthy, but it can also be diseased or disabled; the metaphor for delusion or illogic as blindness is pervasive, given the terror of blindness in a culture that prizes and relies heavily on sight as its primary sense. As one example of the equation of the actions of the mind with consumption and digestion, in the Hierdeboc Gregory deploys the

Sweetser, From Etymology to Pragmatics, 43. Sweetser also notes that taste is deeply linked with our internal self, and is used to represent our personal likesour tastes. Etymologically, and significant for the translators of the Boethius and Soliloquies, sapientia and sapiens, from sapore, to taste, which is the etymology Isidore produces: Sapiens dictus a sapore; quia sicut gustus aptu s est ad discretionem saporis ciborum, sic sapiens ad dinoscentiam rerum atque causarum [Knowing, called so from sapore, because just as taste is fitted for the discernment of the taste of foods, so is the wise man fit for distinguishing things and causes] (Etymologiae 10.24). The bibliography on sense (vision most of all) as metaphor is extensive. See, among others: Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 136; David Chichester, Word and Light: Seeing, Hearing, and Religious Discourse (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Wilcox, Alfred's Epistemological Metaphors, surveys the scholarship on medieval theories of vision and cognition at pp. 180-82. Of Christianity, Ashbrook Harvey writes that the early Christian experience of the divine was fundamentally embodied: that such experiences of the divine that utilized the body further to express human-divine relation; and that understood human expectation of life to come in and through bodily sensations. In each of these areas, it was the body as a sensing and sensory entity that mattered (p. 223). Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 235-48. Recall that metaphors of mind are never consistent, and that the multiple domains of our physical selves can be mapped in multiple ways onto our cognitive life; so Sweetser, From Etymology to Pragmatics, 46. For example, the most consistent metaphorical schema for reason throughout the Alfredian corpus is Knowing Rationally Is Seeing; however, Gregorys interpretation of Cantica canticorum 7:4 effortlessly deploys the sense of smell as a metaphor for rational thought: on re Salomonnes bec e we hata Cantica Canticorum, hit is gecweden: in nosu is swelce se torr on Libano. t is t we oft gestinca mid urum nosum t we mid m eagum gesion ne magon. Mid m nosum we tosceada and tocnawa gode stencas and yfle. Hwt is elles getacnod urh a nosu buton se foreonc and sio gesceadwisnes ara godena monna? [In the book of Solomon that we call Cantica canticorum, it is said: Your nose is like the tower of Libano. That is, we often smell with our nose what we cannot see with our eyes. With our nose we distinguish and recognize good smells and bad. What else does the nose signify but the prudence and reason of good men? (Hierdeboc 433.18-435.27). Compare to Gregorys other discussion of the mind and reason, using the metaphor Mind Is A Stomach, below.
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metaphor the mind is the stomach in his explication of Solomons reference to m wundum e bio oninnan re wambe [the wound which is within the stomach]: re wambe nama getacna t mod, form swa swa sio womb gemielt one mete, swa gemielt t mod mid re gesceadwisnesse his geeahtes his sorga. Of Salomones cwidum we namon tte re wambe nama sceolde tacnian t mod, a a he cw: s monnes lif bi Godes leohtft; t Godes leohtft geondsec and geondlieht ealle a digolnesse re wambe. (Hierdeboc 293.4-11) [The name of the stomach signifies the mind, because just as the stomach digests its food, so the mind digests its sorrows with the reason of its thought. From Solomons proverb we assert that the name of the stomach signifies the mind, when he says, The life of man is Gods lantern; that Gods lantern seeks and illuminates all the secrecy of the stomach.] In the schema The Mind Is a Body > Thought Is Digestion, the stomach functions as a metaphor for the mind because both are engaged in the digesting or processing of material: the stomach digests (melts) its food, and the mind digests its worries as it contemplates them and rationally considers how to handle them. (Relatedly, in Modern English we chew on a problem.) Moreover, like the stomach, the mind is hidden beneath the exterior of the body; only God can see through the body to discern the contents of the mind. In part, metaphors that treat mind as body in Old English are based on vocabularies that conceptualized the processes associated with thought, emotion, and perception with various localities in the body. Placing emotion and cognition in the body, rather than completely in the soul (whether corporeal or incorporeal) has its roots in classical literature; both the Greek karda and the Latin cor were thought of as playing a very real and important role in human emotion, as, for example, the wellspring of the

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passions.23 The hearts position in the center of the body meant also that, in Latin traditions, it was associated not only with emotive life, but with memory (memoria) and with the spiritual world; Eric Jaegers summary of the faculties and properties ascribed to the heart, including thought, memory, mind, soul, and spirit, as well as the seat of intelligence, volition, character, and the emotions strongly suggests that the heart was, literally or metaphorically, linked with the constituent parts of individual identity.24 Jager points out that one word for the process of memory, recordare, has the heart at its roots, and from there expanded from interior memory to the formation, the recording, of written texts.25 Anglo-Saxon writers appear to have arrogated emotion and memory to the heart, or at least to the general vicinity of the breast, along with higher-order processes such as

For example, anger was associated closely with the heart in Greek and Latin literature; see William V. Harris, Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 56-57 and 68. Aristotle conceived of anger as a boiling of blood [or heat] which is about the heart. In De ira 2.19, Seneca says Opportunissima ad iracundiam feruidi animi natura est (A natural property of the fiery mind is that it is most apt to anger) because actuosus et pertinax ignis (fire is bold and recalcitrant), and passes on Aristotles location of anger in the heart, because the heart is the warmest part of the entire body. Harris remarks on the lack of distinction between metaphor and scientific statement: ... a person or some element in the person [in Greek literature] was often said to boil with anger, but Aristotle asserts, as we have seen, that a natural scientist would define anger as the boiling of blood around the heart. Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), xv. For Galen, the brain was the seat of intelligence and cognition; see Scott Manning Stevens, Sacred Heart and Secular Brain, in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe , ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 263-82, at 265-67. Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture , trans. Catherine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1961), 24-26; Jager, The Book of the Heart, xv; Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 49 and 172. Leclercqs explanation of the process of lectio and meditatio indicates the extent to which the body was implicated in learning: For the ancients, to meditate is to read a text and to learn it by heart in the fullest sense of this expression, that is, with ones whole being: with the body, since the mouth pronounced it, with the memory which fixes it, with the intelligence which understands its meaning and with the will which desir es to put it into practice (26).
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rational judgment and consideration. This tendency is perhaps most evident throughout the poetic corpus, and the rich array of kennings Anglo-Saxon poets deployed to describe the inner life of their charactersbreostcofa, breostgehygd, breostloca, and breostgeanc all appear disproportionately in poetry, and all are used in contexts ranging from the description of emotion to the isolate, interior self that contemplates, or that seeks expression in discourse.26 The poet of the Meters, for example, has Nero be micle e blira on breostcofan / onne he swylces morres mst gefremede [even happier in his breast-coffer, when he perpetrated the greatest secret crimes] (Meter 9.32-33). In rendering the Latins pectore cogitet, the Old English translator of the Regula is quite comfortable with saying that a man may on his breostum ence atte ryht sie [in his breast think that to be right] (Hierdeboc 14.83.1; Cura pastoralis 2.3.22). Other, parallel traditions placed the center of cognition in the brain. For example, Macrobiuss Somnium Scipionis places reason in the head,27 but despite the significant influence of Macrobiuss work on early medieval thought, Old English writing does not appear to have followed him; a handful of glosses translating triplex cerebrum as riefealde brgen indicate that the Anglo-Saxons had access to traditions of brain-based cognitive physiologies such as that of Augustine, who maintained that the brain possesses three ventricles, the front controlling sense perception, the rear controlling movement, and the middle ventricle either containing memory or allowing access to it and mediating

DOE, s.v. breost-. For a discussion of the poetic corpus as part of the vernacular tradition of the conception of the mind in Old English, see Goddens Anglo -Saxons on the Mind, pp. 285-98. For the mind as enclosure and an enclosed entity, see Brett Mize, The Representation of Mind as an Enclosure in Old English Poetry, 57-90.
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Kemp, Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages, 16.

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between sense and movement.28 Moreover, for Augustine the brain was where the soul interfaced with the body by means of the physical apparatus used to process sensory inputwhat we would today call the nervous system. He arrives at this conclusion by following medical authorities, conjecturing that the light and air thought to travel through the rivulets (nerves) serve as messengers between the body and the soul that guides it.29 In the same vein (so to speak), medical texts and glosses associating the brain with madness or mental disturbance make a slightly stronger case than the glosses for medical sciences knowledge of the brains role in cognition and the processing of sensory input; brgenseoc, usually taken to refer to madness, glosses Latin freneticus and is the subject of numerous entries in the Old English medical texts, suggesting that cognitive or emotional disturbances were, at least by physicians, seen as originating in the brainand, in some cases, treatment of a physical, rather than spiritual, nature could be applied.30 Despite the degree to which Anglo-Saxon poetry located the higher cognitive functions of the soul in the breast, and the degree to which this differs from somebut not alltheological and scientific traditions, the soul did not reside specifically in the head or the heart, but resided in the entirety of the body, taking on the shape of the flesh

Augustine, On the Literal Meaning of Genesis, 7.18.24: And since bodily movement, which follows upon sensation, always involves intervals of time, and since we cannot perform deliberate movements over intervals of time without the aid of memory, that is why the brain is shown to have three ventricles; one in front, at the face, from which all sensation is controlled; a second behind at the neck, from which all movement comes; the third between the two, in which they demonstrate that memory is active (Hill trans., 334-35). The cerebrum triformis is mentioned in the Lorica of Gildas; see A.B. Kuypers, ed., The Book of Cerne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902), 82-85, l. 25; the glosses in London, British Library MS Cotton Cleopatra A. iii also mention the triplex cerebrum; see W. G. Stryker, The Latin-Old English Glossary in MS. Cotton Cleopatra A.III (Ph.D. diss.: Stanford University, 1951), gloss 240.
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De Genesi ad litteram 7.13.20 (Hill trans., 333). DOE, s.v. brgenseoc.

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playing host to it. While the soul was very emphatically not material in any wayno one had seriously argued for the materiality of the soul since Tertullian, who argued in the De anima that the soul takes on the likeness of its designated body31and had no spatial existence (it is, for Augustine, mutable in time only, not in space),32 it nevertheless occupied the body in a way that was, and possibly had to be, conceptualized as spatial. One articulation of the manifold places the soul could reside is in the Prose Solomon and Saturn, which offers a vividly body-based question and response: Saga me hwar reste as mannes sawul one se lychaman slep. Ic e secge, on rim stowum heo by; on am bragene, oe on ere heortan, oe on am blode. (41.1-2)33 [(Q:) Tell me where a mans soul rests when the body sleeps. (A:) I tell you, it is in three places: in the brain, or in the heart, or in the blood.] The answer is curiously noncommittal, offering either a series of three possible locations, or suggesting that the soul occupies all these places simultaneously. (It also opens up the

J.H. Waszink, ed., Tertulliani De anima, in Tertulliani Opera. Pars II: Opera montanistica , CCSL 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1954), pp. 781-869, at 793. Sic et effugiem de sensu iam tuo concipe non aliam animae humanae deputandam prater humanam, et quidem eius corporis quod unaquaeque circumtulit [Now, according to the ability of your imagination, picture the likeness of the human soul, which ought not to be conceived of in any way other than a human likeness for that matter the likeness of the body which each (soul) carries around]. For the advantages of the purely incorporeal soul to the elucidation and affirmation of ontological and epistemological truths in Carolingian writing, see Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies, 290. Phillip Cary, Augustines Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 149. Cary translates Epistola 18.2: There is a nature mutable in space and time, namely body. And there is a nature which is not at all mutable in space, but only in time is it also mutable, namely soul. J.E. Cross and Thomas D. Hill, eds., The 'Prose Solomon and Saturn' and 'Adrian and Ritheus' (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982). The glossarial tradition, derived from Isidore and Alcuin, also insisted on the soul pervading the entire body; see Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies, 293 and Godden and Irvine, eds., Boethius 2.384-85.
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question as to where the soul spends its time when the body is awake, a question unaddressed in the dialogue.) That Solomon means the soul occupies all places simultaneously is suggested by the lyrical, almost ecstatic, celebration of the Creators might in Boethius 33 (Meter 20.176-81a; Consolatio 3.m.9), when Wisdom praises God for the marvel that is the diffusion of the soul throughout the body, singing, u eac a riefealdan sawla on gewrum limum styrest, swa t re sawle y lsse ne bi on am lstan fingre e on eallum am lichoman [You also move the threefold soul in harmonious limbs, so that the soul is no less in the smallest finger than in the entire body] (Boethius 33.215-17).34 The diffusion of the soul through the body, then, allows the mind to occupy a point balanced between the corporealthe world in which it is affected by the body and its concernsand the incorporealthe spiritual world that, according to patristic psychologies, was its birthplace and the proper focus of its attentions. The diffusion of the soul throughout the body, and the positive insistence on its union with the flesh as constituting the human, accords the body a role in how the soul itself is conceptualized and discussed, this despite the deep uncertainties clearly felt about the body. The Anglo-Saxons, like the fourth-century Greek philosopher Philolaus, were quite familiar with the image of the body as a prisonpoetically the banloca, the bonelocks, and more prosaically the carcerne, as in the Soliloquies, which reiterates the promise that butan lcum tweon, swa swa we of isse weorulde weora and seo sawle of re carcerne g s lichaman and aletan by, t we witon lces inges e we nu

The source is likely Alcuinian: De animae ratione holds that the soul is a spirit, presently whole everywhere and in every part of the body; see Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies, 293.

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wilnia to witanne [without any doubt, just as we leave this world, and the soul departs from the prison and the body is abandoned, that we will know everything which we now desire to know] (Soliloquies 93.14-16). Yet, despite the yearning to escape the body, the body is also more familiarly the lichama, the temporary home of the flesh granted to the soul, in which the soul dwells while it resides on earth. Because of its implication in both thought and emotion, the human body, while conceived of as a prison of the soul, was also tied to the definition of homo: it provided the form and material that made humans earthly and consequently mortal, but it also provided a substrate on which the soul and the mind contained within it worked in the world. Moreover, the body played a role in human identity in general and personality or individual identity in particular; because of this role, the body is guaranteed to be resurrected at the Judgment.35 However, the Boethius and Soliloquies contain conflicting accounts of the role of the body in human experience; on one hand, bodily change or transformation does not have an impact on the mind, or on ones self-knowledge, but on the other, certain dispositions of the body (such as being overindulged with food or drink) are said to have a demonstrably negative effect on the mind. Moreover, the translations include material that pull their sources away from conceptions of the self that are oriented exclusively toward transcendence, and in the direction of a self that is at least partly

As will be seen, the restoration of the body at the Last Judgment was a running concern of Augustines; it remains peripheral in the Soliloquies, but the role of the perfected body in the acquisition of transcendent wisdom is nonetheless still present.

35

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social and material, or a self whose interior derangement could have serious consequences for its social life, or even its ability to be identified as human.36 The remainder of this chapter will examine the mind-body relationship primarily in the Boethius and Soliloquies as articulated primarily through two modes of change: that of magical transformation and that of disease and impairment. Transmogrification and disability both wrought significant change on the body (to put it mildly), and both were the product of an outside or invading force, either a sorcerer (in the case of the Consolatio and Boethius, the witch Circe) or disease. Further, the disabled body especially had currency as a model for the disabled soul, the one stained with sin or the oneparticularly in the Boethius and Soliloquiesthat is incapable of properly orienting itself to God and the spiritual goods it was formed to pursue. The passages in Boethius, specifically the retelling of the story of Odysseus and Circe in Boethius 38 (Meter 26), the story of the blind and amnesiac man later in the same book, are both drawn from the original Latin exempla, with significant variations that redirect the message in subtle ways. In modifying his Latin sources, the translator behind the Boethius begins to argue not for a mind that is completely cut off or disengaged from the body to which it belongs, but rather one involved in a rather more complex relationship.

3.3 Transformations: Bodies Matching Souls In a sermon for the calends of January, Caesarius of Arles takes as his subject the homo perditus Janus, a leader and prince of pagan men (dux quidem et princeps

36

On the social self in the Soliloquies, see Ronald Ganze, Conceptions of the Self, 141, 183-84.

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hominum paganorum), and the various superstitions and rituals that clustered around him. Caesariuss treatment falls in line with the treatment of pagan religions found in sermons or other works dealing with false religions and pagan practices, including his discussion of a particular habit of Januss worshipers, whereby celebrants dressed up as animals: Some dress up in the skins of cattle, some crown themselves with the heads of beasts, rejoicing and exulting, as though they had transformed themselves into [different] kinds of wild animals, so that they did not seem to be men. From this they demonstrate and prove they do not so much have the appearance of animals as they do their sense [or perceptiveness]. For although they seek to try on the likeness of all sorts of different animals, it is nonetheless certain that within them is an animals heart, rather than its form. (Sermo 192)37 The castigation of ecstatic, bestial transformation, or the desire to transform, appears in a list of other perverse forms and monstrous shapes (formas adulteras, species monstruosas), including cross-dressing (specifically, men dressing as women, tunicis muliebribus uestiuntur). Caesariuss objections to pagan rites that involved men dressing up as lesser beings, whether beasts or women, are grounded in hierarchical systems that tied the observance of proper bodily habits such as dress and grooming to adherence to ones nature as a certain sort of being; more significantly, however, these transgressions are treated as a metamorphosis that links bodily change to a certain inner state that, so far as Caesarius is concerned, is not human. When men dress up as wild animals or women, Caesarius argues, they attempt to bring outer appearance into accord with an inner reality that establishes their voluntary debasement.

Caesarius of Arles, Sermones, ed. G. Morin, CCSL 104 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1953), p. 780. Alii uestiuntur pellibus pecudum; alii assumunt capita bestiarum, gaudentes et exsultantes, si taliter se in ferinas species transformauerint, ut homines non esse uideantur. Ex quo indicant ac probant, non tam se habitum belluinum habere, quam sensum. Nam quamuis diuersorum similitudinem animalium exprimere in se uelint; certum est tamen, in his magis cor pecudum esse, quam formam.

37

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Such an uneasy exploration of bodily transformation, however imperfect in this case, reflects Caesariuss concern with proper, i.e. Christian, systems of bodily and mental cultivation. The linkage of body and mind, and the ways in which one influences the other and the extent to which they are interdependent creations, reaches back to the arguments of Democritus; though Caesarius, like the majority of other theologians, would object strenuously to Democrituss materialist treatment of the soul (as he does to the materialism of Tertullian, for example), he nonetheless inherited a system of philosophical and ethical writing that focused on the necessity of accord between body and soul, and the adherence of that compound entity to its own nature and place in the world. The health of the body in Democritan ethics was necessary to the health of the soul, and it is linkage that pervades patristic writings on the good or fitting life, and which also makes its way into the Alfredian corpus, itself concerned with inculcating habits of moderation for the purpose of mental and spiritual well-being. The body in the Consolatio and its Old English translation is a focus of intense interest. As will be discussed in Chapter Five, the body and its habits and upkeep form part of the works encyclopedic treatment of human existence in the world; lessons on the body range from a discussion of digestion and sleep (Consolatio 3.pr.11, 76-9, elaborated in Boethius 34.302-9) to lessons on moderation and temperance in all forms of consumption (Consolatio 3.pr.7, 1-5 and Boethius 31.2-16, among others). The body and its transformation are also used, as they are in Augustines sermon on cross-dressing pagans, to illustrate graphically the loss of the identity that is proper to human beings. This identity is not, in this particular instance, personal identitythat is, the form of identity that marks each of us out as our own being (what Richard Sorabji refers to as an 119

owner of consciousness)38but rather a kind of species affiliation, that which allows an owner of consciousness to be considered human. In the Consolatio, humanity and the state of being human, is conditioned by habits of mind and the actions that result from them, as much as it is by the possession of certain identifying characteristics. Deviation from the good, identified as the pursuit of vice and general or habitual misbehavior, results in a ceasing-to-be with respect to ones ability to be identified as human: This means that anything which turns away from goodness ceases to exist, and thus that the wicked cease to be what they once were. That they used to be human is shown by the human appearance of their body which still remains. So it was by falling into wickedness that they also lost their human nature. Now, since only goodness can raise a man about the level of humankind, it necessarily follows that wickedness thrusts down to a level below mankind those whom it has dethroned from the condition of being human. (4.pr.3, 41-49)39 Wickedness, or failure to act in accordance with the good, constitutes a loss of identity, in the sense of identity as a human being: here, non-existence does not mean disappearance, but rather the effacing of agreement between physical form (the human body) and nature or condition (the rational mind, directed toward the good, housed in the human body). Consequently, as Philosophy tells Boethius, euenit igitur ut quem transformatum uitiis uideas hominem aestimare non possis [you cannot consider a man as human who has been transformed by wickedness] (4.pr.3, 49-50). Boethius eventually consents to Philosophys argument, agreeing that wicked people cannot be considered human

38 39

Sorabji, Self, 311.

Hoc igitur modo quicuid a bono deficit esse desistit. Quo fit ut mali desinant esse quod fuerant. Sed fuisse homines adhuc ipsa humani corporis reliqua species ostentat: quare uersi in malitiam humanam quoque amisere naturam. Sed cum ultra homines quemque prouehere sola probitas possit, necesse est ut quos ab humana condicione deiecit infra homines merito detr udat improbitas.

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animorum qualitate, with respect to the state of their minds, and falls into line with her assertion that people who chronically indulge in vice are to be considered more like animals than men. His agreement only comes after the story of Odysseus and Circe, and the lesson with which Philosophy invests it. The success of the story in persuading Boethius to recognize the truth of Philosophys arguments points not only to the power of narrative to inculcate difficult philosophical, abstract lessons, but also to the close correspondence late antique and medieval writers saw as obtaining between the body and the mind inhabiting iteven if the mind could preserve its integrity in the face of drastic physical alteration.

3.3.1 Ulysses and Circe In Book Ten (ll. 138 ff.) of Homers Odyssey, the sorceress Circe transforms Odysseuss companions into swine with her evil potions and spells. When the sailors arrive at her door, they are greeted by lions and wolves which fawn over them; they are, the sailors discover, not tame beasts but prior visitors who ran afoul of Circes enchantments. The horror of the scene is not the metamorphosis alone, but the sailors knowledge of it: they know who they are and they know what is happening to them, for their minds, Homer says, remained unchanged.40 The terror of such transformation

Victor Brard, ed. and trans., LOdysse, 4 vols. (1924; rpt. Paris: Socit d dition les Belles Lettres, 1968). For the translation, see Richmond Lattimore, trans., The Odyssey of Homer (New York: Harper and Row, 1967; rpt. 1999), p. 158: oi de oun men echon kephals phnn te trchas te ka demas, autr nous n empedos s to pros per [they took on the look of pigs, with the heads and voices/ and bristles of pigs, but the minds within them stayed as they had been / before] (2.65). In his version of the episode, Ovid relates the story from the point of view of Macareus, one of the sailors, who graphically describes the sensation of his own metamorphosis: (et pudet et referam) saetis horrescere coepi, / nec iam posse loqui, pro uerbis edere raucum murmur et in terram toto procumere uultu [thenI am ashamed to tell, but I will tellI began to grow rough with spiky bristles, and I could no longer speak, but instead of

40

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lies in the fact that the mindcrucially, the self-aware mindis not vested in the body, remaining unaffected but nonetheless imprisoned. Homers bifurcation of self and shape looks forward not only to later philosophys preoccupation with transformation, but to its concern with the relationships between the body and the mind. Small but significant differences in the narrative crop up across the Greek, Latin, and Old English versions. Perhaps most obviously, the Latin and Old English are highly abbreviated; they focus on the moment of transformation, setting that moment within the context of their own philosophical, rather than narrative, concerns. With respect to the transformation itself, Homer specifies that the sailors are transformed into swine; in contrast, the Consolatio and both Old English translations have the sailors metamorphosed into wolves, boars, tigers, and lions.41 Likely, this is a reflex of that earlier moment in the episode, when the sailors are greeted by wolves and lions, but it is a reflex that, as will be seen, has important interpretive repercussions in the way that Boethius and the Old English translator explicate the stories. Despite their narrative differences, however, all the texts share an insistence on the preservation of self-identity: the Greek nous, taken as meaning not merely mind, but mind with an intention or conscious intelligence, or even intelligent consciousness of self,42 is translated as mens

words came only harsh grunting noises, and I began to bow down with all my face turned to the earth] (Metamorphoses 14.279-81). For further discussion of the transformation of the Ulysses myth, see Susan Irvine, Ulysses and Circe in King Alfred's Boethius, pp. 387-401. Irvine reads Meter 26 against the background of Alfreds biography, particularly the closing lines of the meter, which discuss how the bodys weakness cannot wholly pull down the mind (Meter 26.110-19).
42 41

Popper, The World of Parmenides, 229-30.

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in the Consolatio, as mod and gewitt in the Boethius, and as mod and ingeanc in the Meter.43 In the Consolatio, Philosophys take on the Circe episode reinforces her premise that identity inheres not in the bodys appearance but in a persons relationship to the good and their pursuit of it, by highlighting the Greek sailors painful, continuing awareness of the fact of their transformation at Circes hands: Nothing remains whole, the voice, the body, lost. The mind alone remains unchanged to lament the terrible things it suffers. (4.m.3, 25-28)44 The reassuring conclusion Philosophy draws from this is that, for all her power, Circe and her herbs fail to transform the sailors essential natures; despite the horror of bodily alteration, Circe cannot change or pervert (uertere) what is fundamentally human about the men, and so Intus est hominum uigor / arce conditus abdita [The strength of men lies safe in a hidden place] (4.m.3, 53-54).45 The actions of others, Philosophy tells Boethius, cannot rob us of ourselves; only the more powerful poisons of vice wickedness we practice of our own willcan do that. Further, the state of the human body, whether it goes properly on two legs or walks on four and is covered in fur, says

These are, of course, not wholly unproblematic translations: mens, in the sense Boethius uses it, is perhaps generally speaking almost the same thing as nous; the Old English terms are considerably more nebulous. Et nihil manet integrum / uoce, corpore, perditis. / Sola mens stabilis super / monstra quae patitur gemit. The arca abdita is ultimately from Platos Republic; see however Augustine, De ciuitate Dei: quam partem animi tertiam uelut in arce quadam ad istas regendas perhibent conlocatam, ut illa imperante, istis seruientibus possit in homine iustitia ex omni animi parte seruari [And they assert that this third part of the mind is posted as it were in a kind of citadel, to give rule to these other parts, so that, while it rules and they serve, mans righteousness is preserved without a breach] (14.19.2-6), and Chapter Two, n. 61 above.
45 44

43

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little or nothing about the quality of mind that is considered human; the arce abdita that contains human identity, what allows the soldiers to exist as carriers of awareness, remains untouched by the bodys condition. Thus, the terror of the situation remains, in the Consolatio, invested in forced transformation at the hands of a sorceress, the inability of the sola mens to give voice to the transformation its body has endured. In the two Old English treatments of Consolatio 4.m.3, on the other hand, the body is much more deeply implicated in questions of identity. Boethius 38 offers an initially straightforward rendering of the Latin, playing upon the sailors continuing knowledge of their own identities and conditions. Despite their animalistic groans and new diet, lc wisste eah his gewit swa swa he r wisste [each knew himself just as he knew it before] (38.39-40); by stressing the preservation of self-awareness, and the grief the sailors experience, the Old English emphasizes the minds ability to remain unchanged even when the body undergoes metamorphosis, for ne mihte ara monna mod onwendan, eah hio a lichoman onwende [(Circes witchcraft) could not transform the minds of the men, although it changed their bodies] (38.42-43).46 While the sailors minds do not change because of Circes actions, the Old English implies that there is no hidden place, wholly separate from the body and its conditions; rather, the body depends on the mind in some way, and is thus in some kind of relationship with it:47

Interestingly, the translation stresses the mind, or gewit, as the active, grieving agent: t gewit was swie sorigiende for am earmum e hi drogan [The mind sorrowed greatly on account of the injuries which they suffered] (38.40-41). Discenza, The Kings English, 53. Discenza also argues that the translator reads Consolatio 4.m.3 as figuring the dependence of the mind on the body, and reconfigures the story so the audience can understand it within a more explicitly Christian framework.
47

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Eala t hit is micel crft s modes for one lichoman. Be swilcum and be swylcum u miht ongitan t se crft s lichoman bi on am mode, and tte lcum men ma deria his modes uneawas onne his lichoman mettrumnes. a uneawas s modes tio eallne one lichoman to him and s lichoman mettrumnes ne mg t mod eallunga to him getion. (Boethius 38.43-49) [That is the minds great influence over the body. By this and by other such things you can understand that the strength of the body is in the mind, and that his minds vices harm each man more greatly than his bodys weakness. The minds vices draw all the body to it, while the bodys weakness cannot wholly pull the mind to it.] Unlike the Consolatio, which posits a tenuous connection between mind and bodythe vices, the more harmful poisons detrahunt hominem sibi [drag a man from himself] nec nocentia corpi / mentis uulnere saeuiunt [do not harm the body, but cruelly wound the mind] (4.m.3, 56-59)the Boethius asserts that there is interplay between what the mind suffers and the body endures: the mind and its proclivities pull the body along and cause it harm, and conversely, what is good for the mind is good for the body. Even the body exerts some reciprocal, if weaker pull, although the emphasis for the translator is clearly on the ability of the mind and its desiresremembering, of course, that the mind is at least in part composed of willto lead the body into difficulties. The metrical translation draws a more explicitly moral connection between mind, body, and transformation in the narrative than does the prose. While the prose saves its moralizing for the explication following the narrative, the meter incorporates its moral into the description of the sailors transformations by including the reasons for which the sailors are changed into their respective forms: a e leon wron ongunnon lalice yrrenga ryn a onne hi sceoldon clipian for corre. Cnihtas wurdon, ealde ge giunge, ealle forhwerfde to sumum deore, swelcum he ror 125

on his lifdagum gelicost ws, buton am cyninge, e sio cwen lufode. (Meter 26.83-89; my emphasis) [Those who were lions began to hatefully, fiercely roar whenever they would cry out before the troop. The men, old and young, were all metamorphosed into an animal, to the one which he was most like earlier in his life, except for the king, who loved the queen.] The correlation between bodily appearance and mental quality picks up on Philosophys theory of mental transformation in Consolatio 4.pr.3, in which people who can no longer be considered human are likened to beasts; she associates besetting faults with particular animals, so habitually violent and acquisitive men are lupi similem (like wolves), a noisy and litigious man is doglike, a lazy and stupid man is an ass, and so on (4.pr.3, 4960).48 These are, as said, ways of describing certain mental states and dispositions that do not accord with the human, which illustrate and emphasize how closely humanity is connected with specific ways of thinking and behaving. Meter 26 reads the sailors transformation against this series of comparisons; the transformed body becomes a marker of a mind that paradoxically still knows itself (the sailors all know who they are and that they have been transformed) but that has become deformed by its indulgence in

The metamorphosis of the mind, and the catalogue of animals whose characteristic behaviors Philosophy sees as according with different forms of habitual wickedness, has its source in Cicero, De officiis, in which excessive vice erases the distinction between human and beast: quid enim interest utrum ex homine se conuertat quis in beluam an hominis figura immanitatem gerat beluae? [What difference is there between a person who transforms from a man into a beast, or the shape of a man bearing (within it) a beasts savagery?] (3.20.82; De officiis, ed. M. Winterbottom [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994]). Also at play may be the extensive traditions of animal tale moralizations, such as the Physiologus, and traditions of physiognomy. The image also receives scriptural ratification in Psalm 48, a condemnation of the proud and rich, who give no thought to death and destruction; in it, the proud man is compared to animals, because cum in honore esset non intellexit conparatus est iumentis insipientibus et similis factus est illis [when he was in honour did not understand; he is compared to senseless beasts, and is become like to them] (Ps. 48:13). For the influence of De officiis as well as other works on the Consolatio, see Luigi Alfonsi, Studi Boeziani, vum 25 (1951): 132-46 and 210-29, at 143-46.

48

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vice and misbehavior, its appearance brought into accord with that animal which each sailor was most like in his prior life. The transformed body as an index of interior condition, as depicted in Meter 26, points to what Caroline Walker Bynum has argued about Ovid's treatment of the Lycaon myth in the Metamorphoses: even though Lycaon (like the sailors) really transforms into a wolf, he still remains what he was before: his wolfish appetite, already his by custom and practice, stays the same, and his cruelty and bestiality are not engendered as part of his metamorphosis, but are continued in a new form.49 Similarly, the distortion of his face and body represent the corruption of the inner self, for which Lycaon, a violator of hospitality, is punished. Like Ovid, the translator of the Meters reads transformation as simultaneous bodily change and continuity of identity: the sailors still are what they once were, only with four legs instead of two. Bynum is careful not to treat Ovid's story as simple allegory; instead, her argument hinges on shape and shape-change as carriers of the story, encapsulat[ing] graphically and simultaneously the sequence, the before and after, of a self.50 While the Old English translators treatment of the Odysseus episode suggests some type of allegoresis at work, particularly in the context of mental corruption and bestiality as correlates to loss of human identity (and considering the fact that this expansion is new to the Meters), there is also the possibility for viewing the human body as a method by which certain forms of self and individual identity can be made visible. The Alfredian handling of the Greek sailors, and Bynum's insistence of shape as

49 50

Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 169. Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 181.

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the carrier of a self and its own history, can usefully be placed in contrast to a philosophy of identity that places much of its emphasis on mental states. The conclusion reached by Boethius and Philosophy by the beginning of Consolatio 4.pr.4 is that changes to the mind (i.e. redirection of the will from the true good) constitute the inability of an individual to identify himself as a human being. Thus, the mind and its activities play a major role in determining the human: in a sense, humanity does not inhere in simply being, but rather in a constant performance of certain activities and ways of thinkingi.e. acting and thinking in the pursuit of goodnessthat accord with human nature. But what about the body and other forms of identitynot only as a human being, but a being in the world? The body had roles to play. The reiterative and recursive style of the Old English makes a point of driving home the equivalence between disordered thought and disordered nature: the prose handling of Consolatio 4.pr.3 insists, over and over again, that those who give way to vice are nothing but the likeness of men, and, despite their physical appearance, that hi habba s menisces onne one betstan dl forloren and one forcuestan gehealden and habba eah mannes anlicnesse a hwile e hi libba [they have lost the best part of humanity, and chosen then worst and have the likeness of a man while they live] (Boethius 37.92-96).51 Functionally speaking, the sailors bodies carry arguments that link interior disposition (intention, however directed) with certain dispositions of the

Consolatio 4.pr.3.15: Hoc igitur modo quicquid a bono deficit esse desistit. Quo fit ut mali desinant esse quod fuerant. Sed fuisse homines adhuc ipsa humani corporis reliqua species ostentat: quare uersi in malitiam humanam quoque amisere naturam [This, anything that turns away from goodness ceases to exist. Further, that the evil will cease to be what they once were, and that they once were humans is shown by the appearance of the human body that remains, for having turned to evil they also lost their human nature].

51

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body. In the translations, the sailors metamorphoses are further implicated in their planned abandonment of Ulysses; they arent particularly interested in staying with Circe and want to go home. While I do not want to get into the ramifications of a king surrounded by unfaithful followers appearing in a translation commissioned (if not carried out) by a king, I do want to point out that the correlation of vice with mental transformation, and of mental transformation with literal physical transformation graphically represents the disordering of the individuals relationship with the social world, the failure of what Ronald Ganze refers to as the social self.52 Unlike the Latins conscious rejection of socially-determined markers of identity, the Old English texts are profoundly concerned with material and social identities, with the ways in which these identities, properly assumed, connect interior order with the orders of the world and the divine. As Peter Clemoes and Nicole Guenther Discenza have argued, interior order is mediated in the world by the exercising of crft, that is, individual skill or virtue. The cultivation of interior crft is thus expressed in its exercise in the world, in the proper ordering of a body and its activities.53 Thus, from the Old English handling of Consolatio 4.m.3, we see, one, the dramatization of the simultaneous destabilizing of interior and exterior order (the latter dependent on the former), and two, a narrative instance of a system of argument that depends on metaphors of the body to make its point. The body is a frequent point of

52 53

Ganze, Conceptions of the Self, 183-84.

Peter Clemoes, King Alfred's Debt to Vernacular Poetry: the Evidence of ellen and crft, in Words, Texts and Manuscripts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture Presented to Helmut Gneuss on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Michael Korhammer (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1992), pp. 21338; Discenza, Power, Skill, and Virtue in the Old English Boethius, ASE 26 (1997): 81-108, at 100-7.

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reference for the mind; the Odyssey passages in the Boethius build on the running correlation between bodily change and mental change. Later on in Boethius 38, the mind incapable of seeing the true good is compared to a man stricken with an inexplicable blindness or neurological disorder, which leads to amnesia and the belief that he is somehow not impaired, but in his own eyes and the eyes of others is as capable of performing his former activities as he was before (38.193-203). Paired with the sailors paradoxical awareness of their situation and their lack of awareness of their vices (and, possibly, their mistaken belief that abandoning Ulysses is an acceptable course of action), the mind is capable of shocking ignorance, figured here as mental disability or disorder; the project of the prose and the Meters, a project articulated in the translations of the Hierdeboc and Soliloquies, is the restoration of basic orders of the soul in the name of restoring bodily order as well. The cura animarum becomes part of the cura corporum in the Alfredian translations. This is not a new thought; Democritus the atomist embraced an ethical physics that privileged the place of the soul, arguing, The perfection of the soul puts right the faults of the body. But strength of body without reasoning improves the soul not one whit.54 The Anglo-Saxons were, of course, not atomists; no one had seriously argued for the materiality of the soul since Tertullian. But they were heirs to a long tradition of philosophy, morals, and ethics that saw self-formation as highly dependent on the successful negotiation of the respective needs or demands of the soul and body.55 I

54 55

Gregory Vlastos, Ethics and Physics in Democritus, p. 382. Long, Ancient Philosophys Hardest Question, 21.

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return to classical philosophy because, in their own way, the Anglo-Saxons are wrestling with the same problems as their Greek and Latin forebears. As Malcolm Godden points out, Old English follows a long line of thought that understood the human as a compositeas the prose puts it, a soul contained or trapped in a living and rational man and, nevertheless, a mortal one (Boethius 5.72-73).56 Both body and soul are necessary: once the soul departs the body, the human no longer exists qua human;57 despite this, the formation of one necessitated that of the other. Longs phrase what to make of oneself embraces two related questions: what do we make of ourselves as human beings? and what do we make of ourselves as individuals in the world? The Old English translations of the Consolatio pick up these concerns, articulating a relationship between mind and body that is tightly-knit and, to some extent, interdependent (if occasionally dysfunctional), and thus a relationship between mind and material world. They address not only the thing we call a human being, but the self in its interior and social particularity, and the ramifications of disordered desire. The translations of Consolatio 4.m.3 thus play out in narrative the argumentative concerns of the work as a whole, striving to demonstrate the extent to which personal, interior order is necessary to private and publicor interior, immaterial and exterior, materiallife.

56 57

Godden, Anglo-Saxons on the Mind, p. 277. Boethius 37.82-85; Meter 20.234-46.

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3.4 Impairment: The Disabled or Diminished Body and the Mind Frequently the Boethius and Soliloquies speak of the ways in which the body impedes the mind, clouding it and confusing it so that it cannot access all the knowledge it wants to. In some cases, this impediment is an inherent part of what it means to be an embodied soul; the body constantly harasses the mind and disturbs the clarity of its insight, simply by being the body; the translators almost despairing remark at the opening of Book Three of the Soliloquies is that t mod is mid am lichaman gehefegod and abysgod, t we ne magon myd s modes eagum nan ing geseon swylc swilc hyt is [the mind is weighed down and aggravated with the body, so that we cannot see anything with the minds eye just as it is] (92.22-93.2). At other times, though, the caving-in to the bodys demands, and through overindulgence in food, drink, and sex, the mind is even more seriously damaged, as physical desires pull it from its pursuit of the true good. For that matter, the body is, at times, deprived of agency, with the desire for all things being located in the mind itself; the adoption of the Alcuinian model of the soul, with its threefold properties of iersung (anger), wilnung (desire), and gesceadwisnes (reason) suggests that the soul was largely responsible for moderating its own impulses, with the body reaping the benefits or paying the consequences of the minds inability to moderate itself.58 That the whole, healthy, moderate body stood for a well-governed mind and a proper relationship to the world implies that a sick, impaired body stands for a mind out of order is, perhaps, too obvious. However, the extent to which the analogy is taken for

58

Godden, Anglo-Saxons on the Mind, p. 273.

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granted obscures the powerful hold illness and disorder must have exercised on medieval thinkers. One of Boethiuss favorite metaphors for the practitioner of the cura animarum is the doctor; Philosophy frequently refers to herself as the doctor who will administer a series of medicines designed to cure her patients malingering (e.g. Consolatio 1.pr.5, 3237), each medicine becoming more potent than the last as her patients tolerance increases. The healing of Boethiuss mindthat is, the removal of the irrelevancies that distract it from contemplationreorients him to the true good. In contrast, the intractably diseased are those whom Philosophy equates with equally intractable mental weakness. We have seen already that those whose desires stray in the direction of vice are compared, in the Ciceronian model, to various animals, and are said to transform into them, in mind if not in likeness; in comparison, narratives of disability in the Consolatio and Boethius not only serve to represent those whose attractions to the world have blinded them to contemplation of higher things, but those who, by extension, do not have the capacity for self-reflection.

3.4.1 Double Blindness and Mental Handicap In Chapter 38 of the Boethius, Wisdom is invested in using the sick body, or the diminished body, to articulate problems of mental limitation and lack of self-awareness. As with the transformational story of the Greek sailors and Circe that is the subject of the meter, he prefaces his narrative of disability with a comparison between the limited mind and animals: a synfullan mod (the mind of the sinful man) is blinded by evil impulses, and being unable to see the light of wisdom, him bi swa m fuglum and m diorum 133

e magon bet locian on niht onne dg [it is for him like it is for those birds and beasts which can see better at night than in daytime] (Boethius 38.178-79). After dismissing these people with some scorn, Wisdom commends Mod for being the one who can successfully look mid ore eagan on a heofonlican ing, mid ore on as eorlican [with one eye on heavenly things, and with the other, on the earthly] (38.191-93).59 Switching back to his criticism of the earth-obsessed, he continues on to provide a more detailed account that metaphorizes the misdirected mind as an impaired body: Foram wena a dysegan t lc mon sie blind swa hi sint, and t nan mon ne mge seon t hi gesion ne magon. t dysig is anliccost e sum cild sie ful hal and ful ltwe geboren, and swa fullice ionde on eallum cystum and crftum a hwile e hit on cnihthade bi; and swa for eallne one giogohad oe he wyr lces crftes medeme, and onne lytle r his midferhe weore bam eagum blind, and eac s modes eagan weoran swa ablende t he nanwhut ne gemune s e he fre r geseah oe geherde, and wene eah t he sie lces inges swa medeme swa he fre medemest wre, and wen t lcum men sie swa swa him si, and lcum men ynce swa swa him inc. (Boethius 38.193-203) [In consequence, the foolish think that each man is as blind as they are, and that no man can see that they are blind. That foolish man is most like a child who is completely healthy and perfectly formed, and flourishes in all good things and abilities [or virtues] while it is in its childhood, and so on throughout its youth, until he is proficient in every skill, and a little before middle age he becomes blind in both eyes, and also the minds eyes are made so blind that he remembers nothing of what he ever saw or heard before, and nevertheless thinks that he is just as capable of doing everything now as he was when he was most capable, and thinks that it is likewise for each man, and to each man it seems just the same as it does to him.] Perhaps one of the most strikingand, considering the context of Wisdoms irritation, oddly affectingaspects of this passage is how close it comes to articulating a

It is worth noting that Boethius does not have both his eyes turned heavenward or towards abstraction; instead, one part of him meditates on higher things while the other remains involved in the world. Wisdom does not seem to press for him to abandon looking at the world in favor of devoting himself wholly to seeking the highest felicity.

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phenomenon that we might today call a stroke, a catastrophic event resulting in a neurologic impairment that inflicts both amnesia and the inability of its victim to register his loss of both sight and hearing, and the concomitant loss of his ability to function as before. The passage expands significantly on Consolatio 4.pr.4, 96-99, which merely asks if the sight of the self-aware is in any way like the supposed sight of a blind man who has forgotten he cannot see: Quid, si quis amisso penitus uisu ipsum etiam se habuisse obliuiscitur intuitum nihilque sibi ad humanam perfectionem deesse arbitraretur, num uidentes eadem caeco putaremus? [If a man lost his sight entirely, and on top of that forgot he had ever seen, so that he believed he had lost nothing of human perfection, would we then, having sight, think the same as the blind man?]. Much of the expansion and modification is suggested by meanings latent in the Latin that are drawn out elsewhere: the translator emphasizes that the blind man was formerly a fully-developed and healthy individual (ful hal and ful ltwe geboren), but more than that was highly skilled and competent (lces crftes medeme). Further, the translator directs more intense interest into the workings of perception and the results of its impairment; the inner eyes failure to perceive the bodys handicap, figured as blindness, parallels the sudden failure of physical sight. There is a certain stress on mental and physical handicap that is lacking in the Latin, not only in the blinded physical eye/mental eye parallel, but in the translators emphatic statement of the blind mans delusion, that he believes he is just as capable as he ever waspresumably not only of seeing, but in executing the tasks which he is accustomed to engage in; in a text that makes strong arguments for the importance of work and virtue, and the role of work in the cura animarum, the blind

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mans incapacity, and his unawareness of it, resonates more strongly than Philosophys brief, hypothetical statement. The passage goes beyond the simple metaphor of the eagan modes, the eyes of the mind that is central to both the thought of Augustine and Boethius, and thus to the translator of the Boethius and Soliloquies. Vision, as the sense accorded the highest importance in the medieval hierarchy of perception, is also the sense that is most consistently used to metaphorically articulate the process by which the human mind contemplates the world of the divine and the abstract; it is with its eyes that Mod is asked to look to Heaven in the Boethius, and the eagan modes can be trained in the Soliloquies to gaze on successively brighter things until it can finally look upon the light of truth.60 The eyes, more than any other sense, mediated between the outer and the inner worlds, via the light said to pass between the eyes and the visible world and, once into the body, into the brain and thence the soul. In the drawing-out of the description of physical and mental debility in the Boethius, Wisdom argues for a stronger correspondence between the two: the inability of the blind man to see his world, and his inability to see himself that is, to perceive the state of his body as now being blindboth go together with his last failure of understanding, that is, to fail to understand that he can no longer do those things he did before, or fill his place in society as he once did.

Soliloquies 77.19-78.24 engages in a lengthy metaphor that compares relative abilities to look at the sun to relative abilities to behold the light of truth. Gesceadwisnes points out that those with weaker eyes (including, interestingly, the blind) need more training, beginning with duller objects and progressing to brighter ones, before finally attempting to look on the sun itsel f, for ac swa swa eos gesewe sunne ures lichaman agan onleoht, swa onliht se wisdom ures modes agan, t hys, ure angyt [But just as the visible sun illuminates our bodys eyes, so wisdom illuminates the eyes of our mind, that is, our percepti on (or understanding)] (78.3-5).

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Further, in Wisdoms specification that the blind man wen t lcum men sie swa swa him si, and lcum men ynce swa swa him inc [thinks that (the belief he is still fully sighted and capable) is likewise for each man, and to each man it seems just the same as it does to him] (38.202-3), we find the next consequence of mental impairment. As a necessary condition of his belief that he can still see, the stroke sufferer does not have insight into the minds of those he encounters; instead, he believes firmly that, to other people, he can see. Similarly, the mind impaired by preoccupation with the world cannot attempt to enter into the mental life of othersand, very likely, has no wish to do so. The problem of other minds is not dealt with specifically in the Boethius, although it does come up in the Soliloquies, but what does come up repeatedly is the conception of the life of the mind as being, in part, a social one, in which the mind directed to God participates in the society of the divine, and inhabits the ciuitas Dei, the city which is the souls birthright.61 In Wisdoms retelling of the story of Philosophys blind man, the Boethius constructs a metaphor of disability that has broad implications for the individuals ability to attain various forms of wisdom. While the metaphor of the eagan modes is typically used as a way of conceptualizing the faculties by which one perceives eternal truth, the

For example, Wisdom asks Mod to remember gastlice hwilces ge ferscipes u wre on inum mode and on inre gesceadwisnesse; t is t u eart an ara rihtwisena and ara ryhtwillendra. a beo re heofencundan Ierusalem burgware [such a spiritual fellowship you were [part of] in your mind, and in your reason; that is, that you are one of the righteous and those who desire properly; those are the citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem] (Boethius 5.15-19); Ac a ryhtelo bi on am mode ns on am flsce, swa swa we r sdon. Ac lc mon e allunga undereoded bi uneawum forlt his sceppend and his fruman sceaft and his elo, and onan wyr anelad ot he wyr unele [But the native land is in the mind, not in the body, just as we said before. Further, each man who is wholly subservient to his vices abandons his creator and his origin and his homeland and from there is debased until he becomes base himself] (Boethius 30.49-50).

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story of the blind man refigures it to more clearly illustrate a chain of successive failings: inability to perceive the world, inability to perceive oneself, inability to perceive others, and (by logical extension) inability to perceive God and His truths. Oddly, considering Wisdoms previous hostility toward those who willingly turn away from their proper inheritance and pursue earthly things, the tragedy of the man in the story, who does not seem to suffer this affliction for any immediately apparent reason (there is no attempt by Wisdom to give the cause of his illness and subsequent handicap), arouses pity, rather than contempt. As with the sailors and Circe, the story of the blind man also incorporates lessons on the importance of crft and capability. The child grows up to acquire skills (and it is, given the context, very likely practical skills rather than the more abstract virtues meant by crft here), which the stricken adult is no longer able to practice, even if he believes he can. Ironically, in the case of the sailors, the minds crft, or its strength, draws the body to itwhether up to Heaven or back down to the earth and distraction. Transformation of the body reflects mental reality; the body transformed to a wolf, lion, or boar fails to engage in even the most nominally human activities (eating human food, speaking articulately), never mind the more complex ones demanded by social membership in the retinue of the king or the retinue of Godto recapitulate Bynum, it has become what it already is.62 Likewise, the pairing of the disabled body and disabled

One other major modification the Old English makes to the Latin is the introduction of the sailors perfidy; Circe bewitches Ulysses into falling in love with her and the sailors (who are understandably homesick), him ne mihton leng mid gewunian, ac for hiora eardes lufan and for re wrce tihodon hine to forltenne [would not remain with (Ulysses) any longer, but because of their homesickness and their exile decided to abandon him] (38.22-27). The sailors betrayal of their king may stand in for the betrayal of God implicit in adhering to baser or illusory forms of the good.

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mind highlights the extent to which a mind incapable of pursuing its proper goals is incapable of directing the body responsible for carrying out those goals in the world. As I have discussed above, the translators expansion and modification of the Consolatio has important implications for understanding an Alfredian self distinct from that formulated by the Latin. The self in these stories is not wholly, inviolably interior and whole unto itself, neither a Cartesian self nor a Boethian self that has forsaken the world and turned permanently to contemplation. Instead, it is closely associated with the body, relying on it for expression and the exercise of its abilities. In the Circe narrative particularly, the individualized self is deprivileged; what is of central concern is not the integrity of private selfhood, but that of a more basic species identity that is defined by desiring the proper things. Human identity finds its fullest expression not in pursuit of physical pleasures, but in the harnessing of the bodys drives, the minds contemplation of itself, and its quest to more fully understand itself, its place in the world, and God. What counts in these narratives is not the existence of the self for its own sake (thus, not individualism as we might think of it), but rather the existence of a self that is capable of reflecting upon itself. Once the self begins to recognize what it is, and to know that it possesses qualities and faculties that are inalienable to it, it turns from futile and counterproductive activities and towards consideration of itself as both its own being and as a being with a place in the world and duties to perform. That recognition forms one major project of the Boethius, and perhaps a large part of the project of the translator behind it.

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3.4.2 Disability and Inability to Obtain True Felicity In his discussion of how every living being seeks true felicity, Wisdom continually asserts that each being comes to that felicity in different ways, and each has a different idea about what constitutes that felicity. In the parable of the blind man, both ocular and mental blindness are used to describe a mind that, because it does not recognize the true good, is incapable of knowing itself and thus recognizing the extent of its impairment. Wisdom returns to images of disability to describe the pursuit of the good in his parable of the sound man and the cripple, who are both attempting to travel to the same place: [G]if twegen men fundia to anre stowe and habba emnmicelne willan to to cumenne, and oer hf his fota anweald t he mg gan, swa swa eallum monnum gecynde wre t hi mihton, oer nf his fota geweald t he mge gan, and wilna eah to farenne, and ongin crypan on one ilcan weg, hwer ara twegra inc e mihtigra? (Boethius 36.107-12) [If two men travel to one place and have an equal desire to come there, and one has power of his feet that he can walk, as is natural to all men that they can, and one does not have power over his feet so that he can walk, and nonetheless desires to go, and begins to creep on the same path, which of the two seems more capable to you?] In the Consolatio, the metaphor works roughly the same way, as Philosophy poses the question as a competition between a man who elects to walk on his feet and another who elects to walk on his hands: Si quis igitur pedibus incedere ualens ambulet aliusque, cui hoc naturale pedum desit officium, manibus nitens ambulare conetur, quis horum iure ualentior existimari potest? [If, then, one man is able to go on foot and goes walking, and another for whom the natural faculty of the feet is lacking, makes use of his hands to walk, which of them may be considered more capable or more powerful?] (Consolatio 4.pr.2, 21). In the former case, the healthy, able body is the will properly directed toward 140

true felicity. In the latter, the disabled body still pursues true felicity, but in the wrong way.

3.4.3 Medicine and Rumination: Digesting Psychotherapy Like the sick or disabled body, the mind could also be healed of its infirmities through an intensive regimen of medicine in the form of philosophy, consolation, and scriptural reading. The tradition by which the cura animarum was viewed as a medicinal regimen, practiced and administered by philosophers to their ailing patients, is commonplace in classical and medieval thought.63 It is pervasive in the Consolatio (as it is in consolation literature in general); not only is Philosophy the mother who nourished Boethius with her milk (lacte) and provided food for him (alimentis), but she is also a doctor, who has come to administer medicine for the cure of her former childs grief (Consolatio 1.pr.2, 1-2). When she first approaches Boethius, it is as if approaching a man in his sickbed: Quis, inquit, has scenicas meretriculas ad hunc aegrum permisit accedere, quae dolores eius non modo nullis remediis fouerent, uerum dulcibus insuper alerent uenenis? [Who, she asked, has allowed these theatrical sluts to approach this sick man here, when they can alleviate him with no medicine, but only feed him with

For an extended discussion of psychotherapy in classical and late antique Europe, see Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). In contrast to physical pain or illness, mental health was seen as being under individual control and the individual, as an ethical being, was required to constantly seek selfimprovement; Catharine Edwards, The Suffering Body: Philosophy and Pain in Senecas Letters, in Constructions of the Classical Body, ed. James I. Porter (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 252-68, at 265. Augustine appropriates Stoic psychotherapeutic processes and adapts them for a Christian audience; see Paul R. Kolbet, Augustine and the Cure of Souls: Revising a Classical Ideal (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 201.

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sweet poisons to make him worse?] (Consolatio 1.pr.1, 25-28). The project in which Philosophy is engaged, the restoration of Boethiuss mind to the memory of true felicity and the vanity of pursuing happiness in the world, is continually referred to in therapeutic terms, as a series of medicines, beginning with gentler (lenior) treatments before progressing to the stronger (ualidior) ones (1.pr.5, 32-35). The Boethius maintains the metaphor throughout, suggesting that the metaphor was still current, and vivid, enough for the translator to preserve and build upon it.64 There is one particular point of interest, when Wisdom has pronounced himself satisfied with Mods progress thus far, and Mod has said not only is he grateful for Wisdoms instruction but anxiously wants to hear more. Wisdom, recognizing that Mod has successfully shed many of the delusions and preoccupations that have necessitated therapy in the first place, says: Ac ic e wille nu secgan hwelc se lcecrft is minre lare e u me nu bitst. He is swie biter on mue and he e tir on a rotan onne u his rast fandast; ac he weroda syan he inna and bi swie lie on am innoe and swie swete to belcettan. (22.22-26) [But I will not tell you what the medicine of my teaching is, as you have now asked me. It is very bitter in the mouth and it stings your throat when you first taste it; but once inside it becomes very gentle in the stomach and very sweet to belch up.] The Latin reads slightly differently: Philosophy tells Boethius that, now that her earlier treatments have been successful, talia sunt quippe quae restant ut degustata quidem

See, for example, Boethius 5.88-90, when Wisdom tells Mod that they have re tindran inre hle (the tinder of your health), which can be fanned to life again through proper ministration; 22.12 -13, when Mod asks to hear one lcedom (the medicine) of Wisdoms teachings, and 22.22 -26 above; 39.238-40 for God as the best healer of the soul (lce re sawle), and God as physician again at 39.299300.

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mordeant, interius autem recepta dulcescant [The treatments which remain are of such a kind that they are bitter to taste, but grow sweet within] (Consolatio 3.pr.1, 3). The Boethius expands on the metaphor by introducing the somewhat unrefined belch, an innovation which is not present in the glosses.65 The belch can be explained by the commonplace of describing the process of contemplation, particularly of the Scriptures, as ruminatio, the digestive process by which the reader internalized text, incorporated it into himself, and brought the words back up. The act of reading, equated with the activity of ruminants, meant assimilating the content of a text by means of a kind of mastication which releases its full flavor.66 Elsewhere, the Boethius refers to the same process of integration and digestion, whereby the body takes in nutrients; although waste leaves the body, his swc eah and his crft gecym lcere dre, swa swa mon melo sift [(the foods) taste and power enters into every vein, just as one sifts meal] (Boethius 34.304-5). Like the vital ingredients in food, Wisdoms medicine pervades the soul; while it is difficult going down, its aftertaste is

Godden and Irvine, eds., Boethius 2.334. One source of the addition might be Quomodo ergo iuxta qualitatem ciborum de stomacho erumpit, et uel boni, uel mali odoris flatus indicium est, ita interiores hominis cogitations uerba proferunt, et ex abundantia cordis os loquitur (Lk. 6:45) [Wherefore as a belch bursts forth from the stomach according to the quality of the food, and the significance (to health) of a flatus is according either to the sweetness or the stench of its odor, so the cogitations of the inner man bring forth words, and from the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks] (Regula monachorum 14, PL 30.365; qtd. in Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 166 and 328 n. 39). Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God , 78. See also Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 219-20. Perhaps the most famous ruminating Anglo-Saxonwho may have been the inspiration for the addition to the Boethiusis of course Caedmon, who chews over scripture and turns it into song (quasi mundum animal ruminando in carmen dulcissimum convertebat) for the edification of his brothers. See Andr Crpin, Bede and the Vernacular, in Famulus Christi: Essays in Commemoration of the Thirteenth Centenary of the Birth of the Venerable Bede, ed. Gerald Bonner (London: S.P.C.K., 1976), pp. 170-92; Philip J. West, Rumination in Bedes Account of Caedmon, Monastic Studies 12 (1976): 217-26; Gernot Wieland, Caedmon, the Clean Animal, ABR 35 (1984): 194-203; J.M. Pizarro, Poetry as Rumination: The Model for Bedes Caedmon, Neophilologus 89 (2005): 469-72.
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pleasant. Ruminatio, in addition to being a metaphor for memory and the process of memorization, also describes the process of recalling what has already been processed and internalized, bringing up the sweet taste of the scriptures (or, in this case, Wisdoms counsels) from the stomach.67 As transformative acts, both ingestion/digestion and cogitation or meditation upon a text infuse the individual with nourishment; in the same way that food provides the body with energy, the text provides the soul with edifying messages that serve as spiritual food upon which it sustains itself.68 A third interpretation of swie swete to belcettan can imply not only the process of memorialization, but the process of composition, which was intimately tied to

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Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 164-67.

The sweetness of the belch may derive from a gloss on the Consolatio that reads de ore prudentis procedit mel [from the mouth of the wise comes honey] (Godden and Irvine, eds., Boethius 2.334). Honey as rhetoric or preaching, the product of contemplation, appears in numerous texts, for example in Ambrose: ut apis illa prophetica bonos flores colligere ore consueuerit, fauos ore fingere, mella ore componere, et ex herbis suauibus ore filios legere [like the bee the prophet is accustomed to collecting with his mouth, in his mouth making honeycombs, forming honey in his mouth, and from sweet herbs reading with his mouth to his children] (Expositio in Psalmi CXVIII, ed. M. Petschenig, CSEL 62 [Vienna: Tempsky, 1913], 14.24.15); Paulinus of Aquileia opens his Contra Felicem with a tribute to his mentor, writing, factum est pabulum suauitatis eius in ore meo quasi mel dulce, et tanquam ibiflui distillantis faui mellitae suffuscae guttulae faucibus mei [The food of his sweetness was, in my mouth, made sweet as honey, and like a stream of distilled honeycomb's sweet golden droplets in my throat] (ed. D. Norberg, CCCM 95 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1990], Pref.7); Alcuin Recte per os, ex quo praedicatio emanat, hi exprimuntur, qui in lege Dei die ac nocte meditantur [Properly, through the mouth, from which preaching emanates, they are expressed, who meditate day and night on the law of God] (Commentariorum in Apocalypsin 10.10; PL 100.1143); Paschasius Radbertus: de ore prudentium mella procedunt [from the mouth of the wise comes honey] ( Expositio in Psalmum XLIV, ed. B. Paulus, CCCM 94 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1991], 1.654). The image of spiritual food ( cibus spiritalis or alimentum spiritale) is widespread; the ultimate source is probably I Cor. 10:1-4, which refers to the consumption of spiritual food and drink: et omnes in Mose baptizati sunt in nube et in mari et omnes eandem escam spiritalem manducauerunt et omnes eundem potum spiritalem biberunt [And all in Moses were baptized, in the cloud, and in the sea: And did all eat the same spiritual food, And all drank the same spiritual drink]. Ambrose describes the Eucharist as non ergo corporalis esca, sed spiritalis [not bodily food, but spiritual] (De mysteriis, ed. O. Faller, CSEL 73 [Vienna: Tempsky, 1955], 9.58). In the Concordia regularis, Benedict of Aniane advises monks to consume bodily and spiritual food alike: ut dum escas eligunt praeparare carnales, spiritaliter uerbo Dei et bonae conscientiae meditatione pascantur [that while the monks select carnal food to prepare, let them spiritually consume the word of God and the meditation of good thoughts] (ed. P. Bonnerue, CCCM 168A [Turnhout: Brepols, 1998], 71.212).

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recollection.69 Belching the medicine that Wisdom offers is a textual practice: on one hand, the reader of the Boethius takes in the text, ruminates on it, and produces it (whether by quoting or copying, or enacting the messages of the text in the world); on the other, Wisdom could also be referring to the composition of the Boethius itself, as Mod commits his search for consolation, and Wisdoms remedies, to the page. The medicine Wisdom offers is a program of psychotherapy intended to rehabilitate the disabled soul, therapies which act on the souls misguided urges and temper the body in an attempt to guide the soul back on the path to true happiness. Ultimately, true happiness is constituted by God, and the presence of God is the end toward which all creations tend (Boethius 34.331-33). For the faithful soul, to be in the presence of God and to have unmediated, transcendental knowledge of him is the reward for the efforts of meditation and contemplation in the embodied life. The acquisition of perfect knowledge of God leads to the fulfillment of the promise that the contemplative soul (and its body) moten god geseon openlice [might see God openly] (Soliloquies 93.13) following the Judgment. That is the implicit promise of the Boethius, and the explicit promise of the Soliloquies, which seeks to resolve Agustinuss besetting doubts about the relationships between body and identity, and the permanence of knowledge. In the Soliloquies, the body is in part a guarantor of revelation and the carrier of identity.

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3.5 Knowledge and the Resurrected Body in the Soliloquies The self as articulated in the Soliloquies is relational, a product of interaction between body and mind, as well as society and other bodies; as such, the study of this self should attend closely to the nature of the relationship that obtains between body, mind, and world. While I do not posit a precise equivalence, the self of the Soliloquies has affinities with selves as discussed in phenomenological accounts of subjectivity, particularly the more spiritual iterations of Heidegger. The body is more problematic for Anglo-Saxons than for phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, who sees the body as epistemologically prior to knowledge as well as morally neutral. But the body does confer individuality, and as we will see, even in the presence of transcendent knowledge that individual is not dissolved. Moreover, the self in the Soliloquies is conceptualized as a thing which possesses a narrative that it has the power to recover and to examine; the self is that kind of being which is characterized by the capacity to question itself and relate itself to its own being,70 as Paul Ricoeur understands it, and like the self of Ricoeur, the self of the Soliloquies is implicated not in a narrative that is constructed without reference to the world, but to the physical conditions of its existence. I would like to turn to the conditions of that existence now, by discussing the Soliloquies, the anxieties it voices and the reassurances it offers regarding the respective roles of the body and mind in constituting self-awareness.

Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 199.

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The Soliloquia is one of the earlier witnesses to Augustines developing thought, probably written during his retreat at his friend Verdolanuss estate by Cassiacum, near Milan, from 386 to early 387. In the Retractions, Augustine describes the Soliloquia as having been composed as two books (duo uolumina) of dialogue, written as though I were) questioning myself and replying to myself, as though we were two, Reason and I, when I was alone (Retractationes 1.4.2-3).71 Augustine initially intended the Soliloquia to run to three books, but, unable to resolve what he saw as serious shortcomings in the workwhich may have been too ambitious for a man still in the early stages of what would become a fantastically complex fusion of philosophy and theologyhe abandoned the project after finishing the second book. The Soliloquia concludes abruptly with Reason supposing that Augustine very much fears that human death, even if it does not destroy the soul, nevertheless brings with it the forgetting of everything, and of truth itself, if it [truth] has been obtained (97.15-18).72 Augustine agrees without hesitation, saying, I cant emphasize enough how much that evil should be feared, for what will eternal life be like, or what death wouldnt be preferred to it, if the soul (anima) lives as we see it living in a newborn child (leaving aside life in the womb, for I think that exists as well)? (Soliloquia 98.1-5)73

Augustine, Retractationes, ed. Almut Mutzenbecher, CCSL 57 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1984). [M]e interrogans mihi que respondens, tamquam duo essemus ratio et ego, cum solus essem. Etiamsi non interficiat animam, rerum tamen omnium et ipsius, si qua comperta fuerit, vertitatis oblivionem inferat. Non potest satis dici, quantum hoc malum metuendum sit. Qualis enim erit illa aeterna uita uel quae mors non ei praeponenda est, si sic uiuit anima, ut uidemus eam uiuere in puero mox nato? Ut de illa uita nihil dicam, quae in utero agitur; non enim puto esse nullam.
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Reason admonishes Augustine to cheer up, for God will assist us in our questioning, as we now feel certain, he who promised the greatest happiness after [life in] the body and the fullness of truth without deception. Unfortunately, the fulfillment of that divine promise is deferred to later works: Augustines final prayer, May it be done as we hope it will be done (Fiat ut speramus), had to wait for its answer after Augustine abandoned the project at the conclusion of Book Two. The problems that thwarted its author come up time and again throughout his later work, with various answers posed inamong many other placesseveral letters, and the more sophisticated Confessiones and De trinitate. The conclusion of Book Two in the Old English follows the Latin original in its broad strokes, with Augustine worrying about what his experience or understanding of the world to come will be like. Gesceadwisnes, or Reason, Ratios Anglo-Saxon sister, tells him that, if hes interested, Augustine should read the book on englisc gehaten be godes ansyne, that is, Augustines Epistula 147, known as De uidendo Deo. In the Old English, Augustine objects that he cant read that bookor, more properly, contemplate it or try to understand it. At this point, the manuscript is apparently missing material; the implication is that, in place of actually reading De uidendo Deo, Reason offers Augustine an explanation of mental life after death that includes whether or not the mind retains the things it learned while in the body, access to different types of knowledge, and when the soul is finally permitted to see God. (This is, notionally speaking, what De uidendo Deo is about, but little of that text actually present in the Old English.) Thus, while the Soliloquies proper is primarily interested epistemologywhat sort of person can seek to know himself, his soul, and God, and the ends to which this knowledge can be putthe 148

material following Book Two turns to considerations of the permanence of knowledge and awareness within the framework of Christian eschatology.74 With the immortality of the soul proven by the end of Book Two, Agustinuss overriding concern becomes whether or not knowledge perdures beyond the severing of body and soul: Nu ic gehyre t min sawel is cu and a lifa, and eall t min mod and min gescadwisnesse godra crefta gegadra t mot t mod a simle habban. And ic gehere ac t min gewit is ce. Ac me lyste gyt witan be am gewitte t ic r acsode: hweer hyt fter s lichaman gedale and are sawle weoxe e wanede; e hyt swa on stle stode, e hyt swa dyde swa hyt hr d on isse weorulde, ore hwile weoxe, ore hwile wanode. Ic wat nu t t lyf a by and t gewit. Ac ic ondrede t hyt beo on re weorulde swa hyt her by on cildum. Ne wene ic na t t lyf r beo butan gewitte e ma e hyt hr by on cildum; onne by r for lytlu wynsumnes t am lyfe. (93.21-92.2) [Now I hear that my soul is immortal and will live forever, and that my mind and my reason acquire good skills (or virtues) so that my mind may possess them forever. And I also hear that my gewitt is immortal. But I still want to know about gewitt, which I inquired about before, if it grows or diminishes after the severing of body and soul, or if it will occupy a place the way it does here in this world, at times growing, at times diminishing. I know now that life will exist forever, and gewitt. But I fear that, in the world (to come) it will be as it is here in children. I hope that the afterlife will not be without gewitt as it is here in children, for then there would be little joy in that life.] To begin with omissions, the translator sets to the side the question of life in the womb, and generalizes from the newborn child or fetus to children as a whole. Doing so shifts the focus of the passage to reinforce lessons learned and expand metaphors in the

Book Two concludes with Gesceadwisnes telling Agustinus that, if he wishes to know more about knowledge in the next world, he should consult De uidendo Deo. Agustinus, however, objects, saying me ne onhaga nu a boc eall asmaganne [Im unable to contemplate the entire book now] (92.20). At this point, the text is corrupt, with some material missing and out of order. The concluding colophon, which appears to have originally identified the origin of the material in Book Three, is also incomplete, reading Hr endia a cwidas e lfred kinig als of re bec e we hata on [] [Here ends the sayings which King Alfred took from the book which we call ()] (97.17 -18). Endter and Carnicelli supply [on] lden: de uidendo deo, and on englisc: be godes ansiene [(in) Latin, De uidendo deo, and in English, On Seeing God].

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Latin. On three occasions in the Old English, Agustinus repeats to Reason that he understands that his soul and three of its constituents, reason, mind, and gewitt (which I will temporarily leave untranslated) are all immortal, and that likewise the things he has cultivated in this lifememory, experience, and virtuewill remain as well. However, the translation expands also on what he does not know, that is, about gewitt, which I inquired about before, if it grows or diminishes after the severing of body and soul, or if it will occupy a place the way it does here in this world, at times growing, at times diminishing. The question is not an idle one, because the potential instability of gewitt in the absence of the body threatens the individuals ability to make use of the knowledge and virtues acquired by the mind, or to fully appreciate the experience of the world to come; Agustinus wonders if it is a stable entity, or if it grows (which would be good) or decreases (which would be undesirable). The focus here is on the use of gewitt here, what it is and how this word can take us closer to how the Soliloquies understands self and selfhood. Gewitt is, etymologically speaking, related to words that have to do with seeing and sense perception; in the broader Old English tradition, gewitt and the adjective gewittig are used to describe the state of being self-aware and in possession or conscious of oneself; a child at the age of discretion is said to possess gewitt, and those who are exorcised are said to be gewittig once more. In the Boethius, gewitt is understood as an inalienable property of the individual to whom it belongs; difficulties and troubles, no matter how great, Wisdom says, form sio gedrefednes mg t mod onstyrian, ac hio hit ne mg his gewittes bereafien (can rob the mind of its gewitt; Boethius 5.69-70). Elsewhere in the Soliloquies, gewitt is used to translate Latin sensus, for the senses of the 150

bodysight, taste, touch, and so forthbut the predominant meaning seems to come close to some modern definitions of self. Twice Gesceadwisnes describes the primary goal of the Soliloquies as Agustinus request, that he perceive God and know my own soul, as a desire to know, and love, inum geagenum gewitte (71.6). The translators choice to render animaat this point in Augustines career, still the undifferentiated soul, not the complex creation of De trinitateas gewitt reflects a conscious choice, a decision to understand Augustine as referring not to the immortal soul in general, but to something distinct, that may (or may not) be dependent on the body for its existence or its capabilities. Indeed, the translator separates out gewitt from the faculties of reason and the mind itself, suggesting that he understands gewitt to be different from either of these two things in some degree. I suggest that, in light of the modifications to the Latin and the discussion of life in the next world in Book Three, the gewitt at the end of Book Two is the self which is aware of the world and aware of itself and its own memories. Understanding gewitt as self or that thinking thing is borne out in Book Three of the Soliloquies, which opens with Agustinus reminding Gesceadwisnes that, now with Book Two being finished, Reason still has not fulfilled her promise to speak to him about minum gewitte. The eschatology of Book Three is, as said earlier, original to the Old English text, not so much a compilation of sayings as the colophon describes it, but the development of a coherent theology that saw the self as, first, eternal, two, capable of growth, and three, eventually re-invested in the body at the Last Judgment. Moreover, even though the body may be dissolving in the earth in the space between death and resurrection, its life and the life it shared with its former inhabitant condition the selfs experience of eternity; Gesceadwisnes tells Agustinus that even the good are not alike, 151

nis s ac na to wenanne t ealle men hbben gelicne wisdom on heofonum swa e he hr swior swinc and swior giorn wisdomes and rihtwisnesse, swa he hys r mare hft [and you shouldnt think that all men have the same wisdom in heaven for he who labors here (on earth) more greatly and industriously after wisdom and righteousness, so he will have more in heaven, and also greater honor and greater glory] (94.9-12). This reassures Agustinus, who agrees that our gewitt is becomes greatly increased following death, for we will know all that is in this world and will be, and also in that world in which [we ourselves] exist (Heaven)and this increase does not come at the expense of prior knowledge, but because of it. One of the final moves of Book Three is to reiterate that the good, like the evil, do not forget their former associations; instead they have a very strong memory of their kinsmen and friends in this worldthe retention of bodily relationships that are structured by kinship or by social affiliation.75 Unlike other formulations of heaven that stress the major activity of heaven is the contemplation of God, the social afterlife is characterized by genetic and

Godden, Text and Eschatology, 92-93. The translator inherits his idea on the preservation of the memory friends in the next world from Julian of T oledos Prognosticon, rather than from any Augustinian material: Si sepultus diues in inferno, Abraham pro fratribus orat, ut admoneantur, ne et ipsi in loca tormentorum deueniant, quo modo piorum animae, et maxime in requie constitutae, carorum superstitum creduntur sollicitudinem amisisse? [If the rich man buried in Hell prays Abraham for his brothers, that they may be warned lest they themselves come to the places of torment, how can it be supposed that the souls of the righteous, and especially those dwelling in bliss, have lost their concern for the loved ones who remain behind them?] (ed. J.N. Hillgarth, CCSL 115 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1976], 2.26; qtd. at 93). The persistence of memory beyond death reflects one of the most important theological developments in Alfredian thought: the co-immortality of the mind and soul. See Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies, 359.

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social ties that remain present to each individual.76 They also retain the memories of their experiences: And ft a rihtwisan, syan hy of isse weorulde beo, hy gemunan swie oft ger ge as godes ge s yfeles, e hy on isse weorulde hfdon, and fagenia swie swilice t hy ne forletan heora drihnes willan, nawer ne on eum ingum ne on renum, a hwile e hi on isse weorulde weron. (Soliloquies 96.1923) [And also the righteous, after they are no longer in this world, will always remember both the good and evil which they had done in this world, and will rejoice greatly that they did not abandon their lords will either in good times or in adversity while they were in this world.] The constant emphasis of being in this world reinforces the extent to which the author views physical lifethe experiences had and memories formed in itas conditioning life in the hereafter. (This also, coincidentally, informs the evil and their torments in Hell, as they are forced to relive the memories of their wickedness, and also know that they can do nothing to help their friends or kinsmen who may be following a similar path.) Consequently, far from being subsumed in the divine, the individual nature of the self persists after death; just as the soul does not forget the difficulties of its past life (Soliloquies 96.19.23) and remembers its families, it retains its knowledge of its own particularity, an essential self that transcends the material world and the forces which have shaped it, yet appears to bring along with it all those elements of its identity which social and material forces contributed in constructing.77 Because the soul brings along with it the memories of its experience in the world, and its eventually-resurrected body

Sorabji, Self, 313. Following the resurrection, Sorabji writes, The familiar range of experiences would be available to embodied persons, if that was thought appropriate, and there would be no puzzle about what kind of owner the experiences could b elong to (315).
77

76

Ganze, Conceptions of the Self, 140-41.

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will also bear the marks of its particularity, the souls engagement with the physical world is a fundamental good.78 In the same way, the social life of humans is also a good; in Augustines theology (obliquely transmitted here), individuals form associative groups both on earth and in Heaven (the patria of the soul); consequently, the individual soul in the worldor, the soul in its body in the worldconstitutes part of a collective that can, if it wishes, strive to be a moral, ordered society, and strive to be reconstituted in the world to come.79 The body and the life of the mind in the world return to prominence in Book Threes implication of the body in the attainment of transcendent knowledge. In three places, Book Three offers the reassurance that all secrets will be opened after the Judgment and the reunification of body and soul; indeed, in the space between death and rebirth to eternal life, while the gewitt may increase, so its awareness encompasses past, present, and future, it cannot stretch to encompass the divine until it has its body again. We eall witan ne magen, Agustinus tells Gesceadwisnes, r domes dge t t we witan woldan [Before Doomsday, we cannot know all that we would wish to know (94.17-18), an acknowledgment of Gesceadwisness earlier lesson that, once freed from the body we witon lces inges e we nu wilnia to witanne, and micle mare onne a ealdan men, a ealra wissestan on isse weorulde, witan mgen [we will know all that we want to know now, and much more than ancient men, the wisest of all men in the world, could know] (93.15-18). Yet revelation must wait, for, efter domes dge us ys

78 79

Godden, Anglo-Saxons on the Mind, p. 273; also Ganze,Conceptions of the Self, 102 -3. Burnell, The Augustinian Person, 183-84.

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gehaten t we moten god geseon openlice, ealne geseo swylce swylce he ys and hyne a syan cunnan swa georne swa he nu us can [after Judgment Day it is promised to us that we may see God openly, and completely, just as he is, and ever desire to know him as fully as he knows us] (93.18-20). In Gesceadwisness reassurance, the barrier of earth, of flesh, is welcomed again, as in the Book of Job, in which the scarred, outcast Job consoles himself with the knowledge that I know truly, that my redeemer lives and on the last day I will arise from the earth and I will be wrapped in my skin, and in my flesh I will see God, I myself and no other. Gewitt is that thing which acquires wisdom, and knows that it has it; it possesses the ability to see and comprehend itself in and outside its body, but also relies on the restoration of its body to become fully aware of the divine. Because of the fact that what the soul learns during its time in the body lasts and can affect how the soul spends the interim between its separation from and reunification with the body, life in the world becomes important. The Soliloquies concludes with the admonition to continue the pursuit of wisdom while in the world, for it is a swie dysig man and swie unlde e nele hys andgyt can a hwile e he on isse weorulde by, and simle wiscan and willnian t he mote cumin to am can lyfe r us nanwiht ne by dygles [very foolish and backward man who does not increase his understanding while he is in this world, and who does not always wish and desire that he arrive in eternity where nothing is hidden from us] (97.14-16). And the process of selffashioningthe action of self-fashioningtakes place in the body, the foundation on which postmortem access to knowledge, indeed, to transcendence and the ultimate goal of seeing the divine, is built.

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Philosophically, we can think of gewitt as being like Lockes conception of the self; Agustinuss struggle to figure out if it is immortal is very much in the vein of Lockes goals in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in which he seeks to investigate and come to know the nature of that thinking thing that is in us, and which we look on as ourselves.80 For Locke, the self is constituted in part by its reflexivity, or its ability to reflect on itself, the consciousness which is inseparable from thinking and essential to it. Similarly, the project of the Soliloquies, as with the Boethius, is making that thinking thing present and coming to an understanding of it, and also seeking to fashion it as perfectly as is possible in a world where the body, while important, also obstructs the mind. In the words of Gesceadwisnes: t mod is mid a lichaman gehefegod and abysgod e ma e u miht hwilum re sunnan scyman geseon onne a wolcnan sceota between hyre and e; and e heo scyne swie beorhte r er heo bi, ne furum eah er nan wolcne si betweon e and hyre, u hy ne myht ful sweotole geseon swilce swilc heo is [The mind is weighed down and troubled by the body much like when a cloud shoots between you and [the sun], and though it shines very brightly where it is, as though there is no cloud between you and it, you cannot see it as clearly it is] (92.22-93.5).

80

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, William Baynes, 1723),

269.

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3.6 Conclusions In the Boethius and Soliloquies, the body serves several functions, mostly epistemological and metaphorical in nature. Metaphors for knowledge acquisition and rationalization that are intimately grounded in and related to the physical senses form the first line of instruction for the student-figures Mod and Agustinus. The instructional value of body-based metaphors does not stop at providing simple introductions to concepts that gradually more abstract and complex, but fundamentally shape how those concepts are engaged with and interpreted. Narratives that deploy bodily transformation as method of indexing mental instability rely on the assumption that to be a human is to be an embodied being; the qualities of this embodiment, namely transience and mutability, dramatize the loss of a certain type of identity, a species identity characterized by the dominance of reason over animal drives. Similarly, metaphors of disability equate physical debility with a mind distracted by its preoccupations or misapprehensions of the good, and a related system of metaphorswhat might be named Philosophy Is Medicinetreats philosophy as a therapeutic regimen that helps the soul to regain the memories of its origins, its end, and its proper occupation of contemplating the divine within and without itself. As said, all metaphors and narratives rely implicitly on conceptual systems that employ specific understandings of the body, its nature, its qualities, and its various statesfor example, the body in pain, or the body in the act of perceiving. While this chapter has explored the embodied souls interaction with and perception of the physical world, the next chapter proposes to move inward, to consider the interior structures of the mind. Like metaphors of body, metaphors of interiority are 157

part of complex, overlapping systems of conceptualizing how the mind relates to itself, considers itself, and finally goes in search of the divine and the permanent within it.

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CHAPTER 4: INNER SPACE IN THE ALFREDIAN TRANSLATIONS

a eode se Wisdom near, cw Boetius, minum hreowsiendum geohte and hit swa niowoul a hwthwega up arrde. Adrigde a mines modes eagan and hit fran blium wordum hwer hit oncneowe his fostermoder. (3.9-12) [Then, said Boethius, Wisdom came near to my sorrowing thought, and drew it, thus prostrate, upward a little; then he dried the eyes of my mind and asked it with kind words if it recognized its foster-mother.] In the opening lines of the Boethius, the Old English translator radically resituates the opening tableau of the Consolatio. In the Latin text, the locus of the vision remains unclear; as Mary Carruthers points out, it is never specified whether Boethiuss eyes are opened or closed when he first sees the lady of such majestic appearance (mulier reuerendi admodum uultus; Consolatio 1.pr1, 2).1 The Old English translator removes the ambiguity, and in having Wisdom draw near to the mind itself, decisively shifts the dialogue into the interior space of the narrator and has the operations of consolation, both the preliminaries of comfort and the subsequent philosophical discourse, interact directly with the mind for the first twenty-nine chapters of the text. The dialogue is very much an interior event, a private meditation on fate, fortune, the good, and the nature of

Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 4001200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 174.

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humankind; within this contemplative space, Wisdom urges the mind to look into itself or reflect upon itself, first commanding Mod to give an account of what it is: Ac ic wolde t u sdest hwer u wistest hwt u self wre [But I wish that you say if you know what you yourself are] (5.70-71). Of course, Mod does not knowor, at least, remember the whole answerand so Wisdom and Mod together pursue the questions which involve identity not only in problems of fate and fortune, but the relationship of the human to the true good and, consequently, the divine. Ultimately, Wisdom argues, these answers are found within the self, which is an inalienable property and not subject to the whims of fate or fortune: Ic wat gif u nu hfdest fullne anweald ines selfes, onne hfdest u hwtwega on e selfum s e u nfre inum willum altan woldest, ne seo wyrd e on geniman ne mihte [I know, if you had full power over yourself, then you would have something in yourself which you would never lose by your own will, and which fortune could never rob from you] (11.62-65). The process of self-rediscovery and, finally, contemplative ascent to the divine, takes place within oneself and with ones own proper faculties; the process of contemplation is reflexive, a turn inward to a oneself. The implications this has for the expression of identity, selfhood, and personhood in the Boethius and other Alfredian texts are the concern of this chapter.

4.1 The Language of the Interior One of the predicates for our individuality is the very fact of our bodies, that they are what separate us from others, even before we take into account the multifarious meanings the body may carry as a marker of sex, class, race, and so on. We are, Lakoff 160

and Johnson write, physical beings, bounded and set off from the rest of the world by the surface of our skins, and we experience the rest of the world as outside us. Each of us is a container, with a bounding surface and an in-out orientation.2 The enclosed mind forms one of the most pervasive and central images in the body of medieval thought on the individual; its most famous and influential exponent was, of course, Augustine, whose Christian Neoplatonism inaugurated the practice of philosophical reflection as well as the almost obsessive, imaginative engagement with interior space and its riches in the Confessiones, De trinitate, and other texts. In the Mind Is A Container metaphorical schema, the mind and its contents constitute the inside space (which itself can be conceptualized in different ways), an outer space (the world, other people, any external influences or stimuli), and a boundary that is, to some extent, passible or permeable, such that the interior space of the mind can express itself in the world, or the exterior space of the world can influence the mind. Within this container are multiple objectsthoughts, ideas, emotionsthat are either kept inside (as when one keeps ones thoughts to oneself) or else are allowed to be expressed. When excited by good news, if I say I cant contain myself, I refer to an overflow of joy or exuberance, emotion that cannot be contained and that demands to be expressed. In the same way, ideas, as objects, can be moved and manipulated within that space, kept for retrieval, or formed into networks of association.3

2 3

Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 29.

Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 240 and 266. We conceptualize the mind metaphorically in terms of a container image schema defining a space that is inside the body and separate from it. Via metaphor, the mind is given an inside and an outside. The mind, as will be seen, can also have its own dimensionalityits own layers that must be peeled away.

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The inner self is the space in which Augustine and his followers, including the Anglo-Saxons, saw much of the work of self-construction taking place.4 It is also a space that is, to a certain extent, constituted by a private subjectivity, a reality that was interior as opposed to a public, exterior one.5 Within this space, the self or soul engages in cognitive tasks that will bring it to greater knowledge of both itself and God. This space, like the space of the exterior world, has numerous levelsit, like the world, operates in at least three dimensionsand permits movement within it, as the process of acquiring knowledge is often referred to as a hunt, chase, journey, cultivation, or mining.6

4.1.1

Radical Reflexivity: The Turn Inwards Charles Taylor locates the beginning of the movement into the interior self in

Plato, with Augustine standing as the figure responsible for setting interiority on the path to the Cartesian cogito, the one who introduced the inwardness of radical reflexivity and bequeathed it to the Western tradition.7 For Taylor, Augustine introduces interiority as a controlling concept in the definition of the self; the language of the interior, such as the

Phillip Cary, Augustines Invention of the Inner Self, 63-66; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 127-31.
5 6

Mize, The Representation of Mind As an Enclosure in Old English Poetry, p. 59.

In The Book of Memory, Carruthers discusses the following of vestigia (tracks) as a metaphor for the process of recollection: remembering something is following the tracks or imprints that are left in the mind by sense perception (20 and 247); the metaphor is picked up in the Boethius, which uses spyrian (or fterspyrian), to pursue or to investigate, frequently in Wisdoms reminders that many issues need deeper and closer consideration: spyrian at 18.11 with reference to the pursuit of fame ( Consolatio 2.pr.7, 2; the mention of pursuit seems to be an innovation), and fterspyrian at 13.7 (translating perspectum consideratumque; 2.pr.5, 2) and 16.51 (gif ge hit georne ymbe smeagan willa and fterspyrigan , an innovation of the translator). The cultivation of the mind is discussed with reference to uprooting the vices from the soil of the mind in Boethius 23.13 (awyrtwalian) and 27.7 (wyrtwalian).
7

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, 127 and 131.

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homo interius, qualities that are intrinsecus to the individual, the goods that lie intus, pervades his writing, and in turn pervades the work of authors running from Boethius and Gregory the Great through the Anglo-Saxons and beyond.8 What constitutes radical reflexivity is not purely a concern for oneself, but rather, it is the act of focusing on myself as an agent of experience and making this my object Radical reflexivity brings to the fore a kind of presence to oneself which is inseparable from ones being the agent of experience,9 an act Taylor sees as prefiguring Descartes inward turn to the res cogitans as the locus of identity. Such reflexivity possesses two entailments: first that, as a first-person agent, I am aware that I am sensing and thinking and because of this I become aware on my subjectivitys dependence on a superior power; and, following that, in the immediacy of my self-presence, I find Godbehind the eye, as Taylor writes. God is the goal at the end of the inward-traveling path; radical reflexivity strives to know

Taylor, Sources of the Self, 129. In early Christian authors such as Tertullian, the homo interior, or the soul, is a precise duplicate of the exterior body ( De anima 9.65). However, Martinus Victorinus specifically equates the homo interior with the interior spirit in his commentary on Ephesians: interior spiritus, id est homo interior [the interior spirit, that is, the inner man] (Commentarium in Epistula Ephesios, ed. F. Gori, 2 vols., CSEL 83 [Vienna: Tempsky,1986], 2.6.13). Augustine emphasizes the understanding that the homo interior is not meant to be understood as corporeal, in the sense that Tertullian understood the soul: deus autem in ipsis rationalis animae secretis, qui homo interior uocatur, et quaerendus et deprecandus est [Nevertheless, God is seeking and castigating those very secrets of the rational soul, which is called the inner man] (De magistro, ed. K.-D. Daur, CCSL 29 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1970], 1.45; reasserted at 12.30). The homo interior was a favorite image of Augustines; see, among others, Tractatus in Iohannem 99.4.1; Epistulae 147.18.10 and 148.5.4, and Epistula 238, in which Augustine asserts the fundamental difference between the two is quia exterior cum nuncupato corpore dicitur homo, interior autem in sola rationali anima intellegitur [because the outer, with the aforenamed body, is called "man," while the interior man is understood to be only the rational soul] ( Epistulae, ed. A. Goldbacher, CSEL 57 [Vienna: Tempsky, 1895-98], 541.19). Despite this, Augustine will conceptualize the sensory and cognitive faculties of the homo interior metaphorically, as in Sermo 6D, in which the inner man is (metaphorically) understood to have a mouth and ears ( Sermones novissimi, ed. Vingt-six sermons au peuple d'Afrique, ed. F. Dolbeau, tudes augustiniennes, Antiquit 147 [Paris: tudes augustiniennes, 1996], 461.80-82), and De trinitate 12.8.1.
9

Taylor, Sources of the Self, 131.

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God, even as God himself is the foundation of the minds subjectivity.10 The God behind the eye is not a divinity innate to the soul, as it is in Plotinus; instead, the soul seeks for that which bears its likeness, and so the interior self is the souls own inner space, a precursor to the autonomous self of Descartes, although substantially different.11 Taylors argument has been critiqued in various places. Susan Mennel argues that, in contradistinction to Taylors autonomous, stable self, what Augustine in fact discovers is not the self-present knowing subject of philosophy, but the changeable, unknowable self, deeply embedded in time and language. John Cavadini makes a similar argument, pointing out that the certainty of self-presence Taylor argues for is in fact not as certain as it seems at first blush, but rather a self that is eternally becoming as it becomes ever more aware of its nature and its identity in the endless revelation of Christs love.12 Arguing against Taylors assertion that the self is wholly interior, Wayne Hankey positions the soul on the horizon of the material and the intellectual; the soul, which participates in both intellective processes (associated with the angelic mind) and nonrational processes (associated with animals), must always place itself in relation to the material world as much as it does the divine.13 Similarly, David Peddle sees no need to

Taylor, Sources of the Self, 134-36; Burnell, The Augustinian Person, 1; Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized, 92-95. Because of the fact that I am aware of sensing and thinking, I am also aware of my body; thus, the contemplative mind is open to both God and the body in which it resides.
11 12

10

Cary, Augustines Invention of the Inner Self, 39; Ganze, Conceptions of the Self, 83.

Susan Mennel, Augustine's I: The Knowing Subject and the Self, Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 291-324, at 324; John C. Cavadini, The Darkest Enigma: Reconsidering the Self in Augustines Thought, Augustinian Studies 38 (2007): 119-32, at 132. Wayne J. Hankey, Between and Beyond Augustine and Descar tes: More than a Source of the Self, Augustinian Studies 32 (2001): 65-88, at 87; John Milbank, Sacred Triads: Augustine and the Indo European Soul, Modern Theology 13 (1997): 451-74, at 465 asserts that the self that Taylor claims
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make a sharp distinction between will and reason, with the former subsumed beneath the latter; instead, the unification of will and reason constitute an important part of the human relation to God.14 Like Hankey, Peddle argues that the created orders that are the self and nature are maintained in the vision of God; both our rational and natural interest obtain a concrete unity through grace, united as they are as parts of the divine principle.15 Such criticisms are salutary, if only to avoid falling into the trap of assuming absolute equivalence between early medieval selves and modernist or postmodernist selves. As such, I take it as read that the self (or selves) which the readers of the Alfredian corpus might have found when they turned inward were not identical to the autonomous self that is postulated by Cartesian and post-Cartesian philosophies of mind. What is salient, though, is the translations interest in exploring the life of the mind: they preserve their sources concern with knowing and caring for oneself, the mechanisms of knowledge, the restoration of memory, and the possibility of achieving transcendence (or something close to it) as the mind simultaneously travels inward and upward to realize its likeness to its creator. As the translations turn inward, they are also confronted with the fact that the mind is not automatically immediately present to itself; instead, it is absent it is a wrecca (exile), as Mod describes himself to Wisdom, and can forget what it is

Augustine is discovering is in fact the modernist self. As Hankey remarks, We should not be surprised if in the twelve hundred years between the cogito of Augustine and that of Descartes, subjectivity found and made for itself other sources, shapes, and structures (Between and Beyond Augustine and Descartes, p. 67).
14

David Peddle, Re-Sourcing Charles Taylors Augustine, Augustinian Studies 32 (2001): 207Peddle, Re-Sourcing Charles Taylors Augustine, 216-17.

17, at 209.
15

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(Boethius 5.76-78). The return to oneself forms the major part of the Boethius; the return to God is its ultimate goal, even if the text does not achieve it, while the Soliloquies holds it out as a promise that must wait for its fulfillment. In this chapter, the Alfredian translations expression of inwardness and interiority are understood to participate in the container schema, a system of terms that conceptualize mind, soul, body, and self as containers or enclosures, and such cognitive or mental properties as emotion, memory, reason, and desire as being bounded within them.16 I will conduct my discussion using ingeanc and inneweard mod, two Old English terms that can be understood as participating in image schemas that view the mind in two related ways: first, that the mind is enclosed within the body (whether in the head or the heart); and second, that the mind possesses faculties or dimensions that may or may not be consciously accessible. I focus on these because both ingeanc and inneweard mod have currency elsewhere in the Alfredian corpus; ingeanc appears frequently in the translations of Gregory the Greats Cura pastoralis and Augustines Soliloquies, and inneweard mod appears in the Hierdeboc as well as some non-Alfredian texts. As Nicole Guenther Discenza has argued, certain valences present in crucial words

The container schema and conceptual metaphor in general has been the subject of much attention in Old English literary criticism in recent years. Mattos True Confessions has already been extensively discussed above; see also Wilcox, Eagan modes and scip modes. For other studies, see Javier Enrique Daz Vera, Cultural Traditions and Metaphorical Patterns in the Vocabulary of Knowledge, 99 106; Antonina Harbus, Anglo-Saxon Mentalities and Old English Literary Studies and The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry, 11, 54, 70, 74-75, and 132-37 ; Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 55 (2007): 13-21; Leslie Lockett, Corporeality in the Psychology of the Anglo -Saxons (PhD diss.: University of Notre Dame, 2004) and her Anglo-Saxon Psychologies; Soon Ai Low, The Anglo-Saxon Mind: Metaphor and Common-Sense Psychology in Old English Literature (PhD diss.: University of Toronto, 1998); Britt Mize, The Representation of Mind as an Enclosure in Old English Poetry, pp. 5790 and Manipulations of the Mind-as-container Motif in Beowulf, Homiletic Fragment II and Alfreds Metrical Epilogue to the Pastoral Care, JEGP 107 (2008): 25-56.

16

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in the translationscrft, in her discussionachieve that valence across multiple texts, drawing on meanings or shades of meaning established in prior works and then elaborating upon them.17 Additionally, I will look to two particular metaphors for interiority and enclosure, the mind as house and as city (in both of which ingeanc figures) in all three texts, as ways of exploring not only the individuals relationship to the interior self, but also, in the Boethius and Pastoral Care, the individuals relationship with others and the world. These metaphors function intertextually, and so I will take into consideration the translators renderings of relevant passages in both the Soliloquies and the Pastoral Care. All three texts share an interest not only in the power of discernment accorded to the mindgesceadwisnes, or reason (which speaks on its own in both Boethius and the Soliloquies)but in the problems of self-identification that arise when the mind is cast into doubt over itself and its own nature.

4.2 Dimensionality in the Alfredian Translations The dimensionality suggested by inneweard mod is problematic as employed in Hierdeboc, as we will see; inneweard mod functions slightly differently in the Hierdeboc and Boethius, but its association with depth and interiority remains the same. In some cases, this inward mind is part of the mind that remains unknown to its owner, an

Nicole Guenther Discenza, Power, Skill, and Virtue in the Old English Boethius, p. 90. Wilcox, Eagan modes and scip modes, also uses the development of the metaphors of the eyes of the mind and the ship of the mind to link the Pastoral Care, Boethius, and Soliloquies (pp. 209-10). The expansive development of metaphor, is also noted in Bately, Old English Prose Before and During the Reign of Alfred, p. 27 and throughout Waterhouse, Tone in Alfreds Version of Augustines Soliloquies, pp. 63-78. As Discenza, Waterhouse and Pratt note, the metaphors deployed by Alfred serve also to instantiate social realitiesthe legitimation of authority and the kings assumption of the role of educator, for example.

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unconscious urge or desire upon which the individual acts without consciously appreciating it. In the Cura pastoralis and Hierdeboc, Gregory the Great and the translator are both concerned with differing depths of interior space, that is, the surface of the mind and its unrevealed depths. In his discussion on the suitability of aspirants for the bishopric, Gregory invokes 1 Timothy 3:1: Si quis episcopatum desiderat, bonum opus desiderat (If anyone desires the bishopric, he desires a good work), but points out that those who say they wish to do good works in their episcopacy may be fooling themselves and others.18 The Hierdeboc also makes this point, but takes the additional step of making more explicit the spatial differences between the surface layer of the mind (the conscious) and the substrata composed of less-than-selfless motivations, confusion, and self-ignorance: Ac onne he wilna to underfonne a are & one ealdordom, he enc on am oferbrdelse his modes t he sciele monig god weorc ron wyrcan, & he enc mid innewearde mode t he gierne for gilpe & for upahafenesse s folgoes, smeagea eah & eahtiga on hiera modes rinde monig god weorc to wyrcanne, ac on am pian bi oer gehyded. Ac on uteweardum his mode he lieh him selfum ymbe hine selfne bie m godum weorcum; Licet t he lufige t he ne lufa: isses middangeardes gilp he lufa, & he licett swelce he one onscunige, & hine him ondrde. (Hierdeboc 55.18-27)

Sed plerumque hi qui subire magisterium pastorale cupiunt, nonnulla quoque bona opera animo proponunt; et quamuis hoc elationis intentione appetant, operaturos tamen se magna pertractant; fitque ut aliud in imis intentio supprimat, aliud tractantis animo superficies cogitationis ostendat. Nam saepe sibi de se mens ipsa mentitur, et fingit se de bono opere amare quod non amat, de mundi autem gloria non amare quod amat: quae principari appetens, fit ad hoc pauida cum quaerit, audax cum peruenerit [But for the most part, those who desire to undertake the pastoral duty also propose several good deeds to their minds, and although they may be eager for elevation in their minds, nevertheless they occupy themselves with the great things they will do, and consequently their intention suppresses one thing in the depths of the mind, and the surface of the considering mind presents another to the soul. For frequently the mind deceives itself concerning itself, and concerning that good deed imagines itself to love what it does not love, and moreover, not to love what it loves on account of the adulation of the world: desiring to rule, it (i.e. the mind) becomes fearful when it seeks, bold when it attains (what it is seeking)] (Cura pastoralis, 1.9.3-12)

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[But when he wishes to take up these favors (or benefits) and lordship, on the surface of his mind he thinks that he must do much good work therein, and he thinks with his inward mind that he desires it on account of vainglory and for the pride of a retinue, and nevertheless contemplates and considers in the bark of his mind that he will do many good works, but in the pith the other [motive] is concealed. But in the outward part of his mind he deceives himself about himself, concerning these good deeds. He pretends that he loves what he does not love: he loves the praise of this world, and he likewise pretends that he scorns it and that he fears it.] The Old English translates the occulta cogitatione and mens superficies into the pith and bark of the mind, concretizing fairly general terms of enclosedness and openness (occulta, superficies) and in doing so giving a definite sense of the disparity between what takes place at the surface and what lies beneath. The individual becomes a site of conflicting motivations and discordant desires; the inward mind, compared to the pith of a tree, hides the true motive behind power-seeking (desire for fame) under the cover of a palatable untruth: that power allows one to do good deeds. The Old English text is unclear as to whether or not the individual is aware that this is taking place; subjectively speaking, I can offer myself any number of justifications for doing what I ought not to do (or not doing what I ought), both consciously and unconsciously. In either case, selfdeception leads inevitably to deceiving others, more or less willfully. The problem of the mind not knowing itself also appears in Old English poetic texts as well, particularly in confessional, introspective poems such as The Wanderer and The Seafarer, in which the self is at war with some aspect of the mind, cannot exercise control over it, or is unaware of unconscious urges directing its action.19 Such fragmentation lies at the heart of Alfredian philosophy, in which the mind is first

19

Godden, Anglo-Saxons on the Mind, pp. 292-95.

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estranged from itself, ignorant of what it is, and can only gradually come to a fuller understanding of itself. In the Hierdeboc, the reccere is engaged in a more or less constant struggle to refine self-knowledge, not only for his own sake, but for the sake of the souls entrusted to him.20 This uncertaintythe lack of a guarantee that one will always fully know oneselfbecomes the starting point for the central problem of the Boethius, and finds its resolution in that texts eventual conclusions. Mod, in attempting to explain himself to Wisdom, insists that he only desired earthly power in order to complete am weorce e me beboden was to wyrcanne [the work which was commanded to me to do] (17.5-6).21 After listing the necessities required by his occupation (kingship), he adds, ic wilnode weorfullice to libbanne a hwile e ic lifede, and fter minum life am monnum to lfanne e fter me wren min gemynd on godum weorccum [I desired to live honorably while I lived, and after my life to leave to the men who come after me a memory in good works] (17.26-28). Wisdom rejects this justification as an exercise in self-delusion, of precisely the kind Gregory charges episcopal aspirants with: that the mind is tormented with what it should not want, t is onne wilnung leases gilpes and unryhtes anwealdes and ungemetlices hlisan godra weorca ofer eall folc. Foram wilniga monige men anwealdes e hie woldon habban godne hlisan, eah hi unwyre sien. (18.6-9) [ that is then the desire for vainglory and unjust power and excessive praise for good deeds above all other people. Therefore many men desire power because they would have good repute, although they may be unworthy.]

To take one example: The reccere who is constantly harassed by various concerns finds his mind divided (todled) against itself (Schreiber 227.13-15 and 19-21), followed by extended discussion of the exemplum of Nebuchadnezzar (229.10-231.7). That Boethius has been enjoined (beboden) to rule is unique to the Boethius; see Godden and Irvine, eds., Boethius, 2.317, n. 17.1-8.
21

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Wisdom insists that Mod is, however unconsciously, too preoccupied with fame for good deeds; Mods relatively innocent assertion that he desired power in order to live honorably and bequeath his legacy to future generations becomes the entre to Wisdoms disquisition on the dangers of unjust or excessive power covered up by a desire to be known for doing good. This section is expanded from the Latin, in which Philosophy briefly dismisses those who want to be known for such things, in favor of expounding on the uselessness of fame (Consolatio 2.pr.7). Alfreds interest here lies not necessarily in the praestantes quidem natura mentes [certain minds made excellent by nature], that are nonetheless still imperfect enough to desire fame, but rather with those people who desire to accrue power and a good reputation under the guise of wanting to do good, although they are unworthy of such praisesuch as the dubious bishops of the Pastoral Care. Mod, Wisdom argues, has forgotten this, and the rest of the chapter is devoted to reminding Mod of how closely fame is circumscribed. In pursuing a good reputation, Mod has deserted what is most important: a crftas eowres ingeonces and eowres andgites and eowre geseadwisnesse [the virtues of your ingeonce and your perception and your reason] (18.105-6).22 The project of the Boethius, as with the Consolatio, is to reconcile the actiondoing good deedswith the proper motive. The passage from the Hierdeboc and the parallel conflict in Boethius raise the question as to whether or not one can know, or come to recall, oneself. Where the inneweard mod is a source of doubt and uncertainty in the Hierdeboc, it becomes a

22

Translating Consolatio 2.pr.7, 19, conscientiae uirtutisque.

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faculty in the Boethius, not only a site or space of the mind, but a means by which the task of self-recovery can take place. The phrase occurs four times in the text, all four times in an operative sense. At the beginning of Chapter 22 (Consolatio 3.pr.1), an enthralled Mod, enraptured by Wisdoms songs, wishes very much to hear more mid innewearde mod (22.1-3).23 After Mods subsequent plea for Wisdom to dispense more of his medicines, Wisdom agrees, remarking that, in Mods silence and attentive listening, he had perceived t u woldest mid inneweardan mode [mine lara] ongiton and smeagean [that you wished to perceive and contemplate my teachings with your inner mind] (22.19).24 Later, in Wisdoms discussion of the kernel of good in an evil person, he remarks that Mod should ongit onne mid inneweardan mode that even evil people always have some good remaining in them (38.116). The most extended discussion of inneweard mod takes place at the beginning of Chapter 35, when Wisdom begins his discourse on the search for the true good: Swa hwa swa wille dioplice spirigan mid inneweardan mode fter ryhte, and nylle t hine nig mon oe nig ing mage amerran, onginne onne secan oninnan him selfum t he r ymbuton hine sohte, and forlte unnytte ymbhogan swa he swiost mge, and gegderige to am anum, and gesecge onne his agnum mod t hit mg findan oninnan him selfum ealle a god e hit ute sec. onne mg he swie rae ongitan eall t yfel and t unnet t he r on his mode hfde; swa sweotole swa u miht a sunnan geseon, and u ongitst

Consolatio. 3.pr.1, 1-3 Iam cantum illa finiuerat, cum me audiendi auidum stupentemque arrectis adhuc auribus carminis mulcedo defixerat [Now she had finished her song, while the sweetness of her song had me, entranced and amazed and with anxious ears, desiring to hear more]. It should also be noted that the Mod-voice drops out here briefly; the ic is reinstated at Boethius 50.9 and 11, before Mod returns again at 51.10. Consolatio 3.pr.1, 9-13: Sensi, inquit, cum uerba nostra tacitus attentusque rapiebas, eumque tuae mentis habitum uel exspectaui, uel quod est uerius, ipsa perfeci [I sensed this when you, silent and attentive, hung onto my words, and I expected this attitude of your mind, or what is truer, I myself created it in you].
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in agen ingeanc t hit bi micele beortre and leohtre onne seo sunne. (35.211)25 [Whoever wishes to deeply chase after the truth by the inward mind and does not wish that any man or anything lead him astray, then he should begin to seek within himself that which he sought outside himself, and abandon useless external things as he is most able to, and gather (his thoughts)26 to himself and tell then his own mind that it can find within itself all the good things which it sought without. Then he can very swiftly perceive all the evil and all the uselessness that he had in his mind before; as clearly as you might see the sun you perceive your own ingeanc, that it is much brighter and clearer than the sun.] Inneweard mod, as said before, has a function, is the means by which mental processes are carried out. In Wisdoms song, the inward mind is a tracking tool, which allows one to chase after the tracks of truth (the Latin is uestigat, to track or follow in the tracks of an animalor the traces of memory).27 Moreover, the inward mind is the means by which one moves reflexively, from outer worries into the realm of the mind itself; here, Wisdom argues (in line with the Consolatio), upon reflection one discovers that the true good is found within the mind. The result, however, is couched subtly, but significantly, different from the Latin. The Latin meter understands what once the dark cloud of error hid to be the newly-rediscovered knowledge that the good is found in the minds

The particularly relevant passage is Consolatio 3.m.11, 1-8: Quisquis profunda mente uestigat uerum /cupitque nullis ille deuiis falli /in se reuoluat intimi lucem uisus / longosque in orbem cogat inflectens motus / animumque doceat quicquid extra molitur / suis retrusum possidere thesauris; / dudum quod atra texit erroris nubes / lucebit ipso perspicacius Phoebo [Whoever pursues the truth with searching mind and tends down no false trails revolves upon himself the light of his inward eye and, turning, brings long-ranging movements into his sphere, and teaches his heart that whatever it seeks outside itself it keeps within its own treasuries; what once the dark cloud of error hid will shine more brightly than Phoebus himself].
26 27

25

Supplied from Meter 22.12; per Godden and Irvine, eds., Boethius, 2.402, n. 35.1-8.

Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 20. Uestigat here is used in the sense of tracking down recollection, as the recovery of truth is a recovery of anamnesis, or prior memory at the close of the meter: Quodsi Platonis Musa personat uerum,/quod quisque discit immemor recordatur [And if Platos Muse proclaims the truth, one will learn what, forgotten, had been learned] ( Consolatio 3.m.11, 15-16).

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treasury. The Old English, however, argues that, once the mind sees it contains the good, it realizes how much uselessness had obsessed it, and at this point, Wisdom switches from the general he to the direct address: u ongitst in agen ingeanc [you perceive your own ingeanc] which is brighter than the sun (35.10). (The Latin remains steadfastly in the third person.) Wisdom here appeals directly to the narrator, who has by this point become ic, as though by speaking these words Wisdom can directly effect this change in perception. What becomes clear and present after the discovery of the good in oneself, and in the narrators mind in particular, is not necessarily (or just) that the good is possessed by the mind as something inalienable, but rather the mind, illuminated, becomes present for the first time to itself and its owner. At this point, it becomes useful to reincorporate Taylors radical reflexivity, for the movement into oneself involves the certainty of self-presence, the first-person standpoint which is fundamental to the search for truth.28 Radical reflexivity is predicated on the understanding that movement from the outer world to the inner world constitutes the road to truth (i.e. God); by it we come to encounter God, through a long inward path of self-contemplation and meditation, via the experience of the immediate presence of ourselves as agents in that experience.29 Meditative ascent narratives such as the Consolation and Augustines Confessiones begin with this inward movement; the ascent to God is not so much a movement up as it is a movement into the deepest recesses of

28 29

Taylor, Sources of the Self, 133. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 129-31.

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being and, from there, into increasingly general and fundamental aspects of existence.30 On the way, however, knowledge of ones interiority and interior state are required; the search for God is, in its fundamentals, also a search for self within the self, inextricably a part of the process of introspection and self-examination. In the Boethius, as well as the Soliloquies, such self-examination is aided and directed by interlocutory figures, Wisdom and Gesceadwisnesfigures that, although with their own external existence, are brought into close proximity with the mind struggling to know itself.31 The interior nature of the dialogue, as the articulation of meditation, is the process of bringing about this presence by exposing the mind and its constituent parts to analysis on the path to the divine. A significant part of Wisdoms discourse is concerned with the mind and what is wrapped up in it, and it appears that here ingeanc is meant to indicate the state of ones mind, all its components apprehended together, the entirety of the individuals interior life. The ingeanc of the Boethius is not a tool so much as it is an individual property, a location in which several faculties embracing motivation, ability, perception, imagination, learning, contemplation, and reflection (among others) are collected.32 For example, while inveighing against

For a discussion of the spatial aspects of the meditation, as well as the textuality of meditation and ascent, see Robert McMahon, Understanding the Medieval Meditative Ascent: Augustine, Anselm, Boethius, and Dante (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 13. For characteristics of the interior journey in general, see 9-13, and for the Consolatio in particular, see 211-66. See the quotation opening this chapter for the closeness of Wisdom to the suffering Mod, and below for Augustines brief uncertainty as to whether the voice speaking with him is himself or another thing altogether. Otten, Knig Alfreds Boethius, 172 refers to the ingeanc as being bound with an intentionalvoluntativen Element, or innere als den Ort der geistigen Handlungen. Schreiber, Pastoral Care, 48 gives definitions for ingeanc as 'the seat of thought, intellect, mind, heart, spirit, breast; conscience; a
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those who seek alien goods, and against Mods misguided desire for a good reputation, Wisdom levels the accusation that Mod forseo a crftas eowres ingeonces and eowres angites and eowre gesceadwisnesse [scorns the virtues of your ingeanc and your understanding and your reason] in favor of praise from strangers (18.4-6).33 As with such terms as crft, the meanings attached to ingeanc expand and develop across the Alfredian corpus, and it is useful to look at how the word is employed in both the Boethius and the Soliloquies, where it is associated with learning and understanding. In Wisdoms discussion of desire and ability as the two components necessary to obtain certain ends, the Old English alters the Latin in two places to associate desire and power (willa and anweald) with ingeanc. Wisdom tells Boethius Twa ing sindon e lces monnes ingeonc to funda, t is onne willa and anweald [There are two things which are found in each mans ingeanc, that is, desire and ability] (36.76-77), and after explicating the necessity of possessing these two properties, asks Boethius if he recalls his earlier argument, tte lces monnes ingeanc wilna to re soan gesle to cumenne [that each mans ingeanc desires to come to the true good] (36.89-90). In the Consolatio, the attribution of ability and motivation to the mind is not present; Philosophy remarks that will and power (uoluntas scilicet et potestas) are responsible for each human activity (4.pr.2, 11-12), and that the entire effort of the will (intentionem

thought, cogitation; intention, purpose. In the Cura Pastoralis, it translates intus at 39.11 and 113.1, and is found throughout the Alfredian corpus. Consolatio 3.pr.7, 56-8: Vos autem nisi ad populares auras inanesque rumores recte facere nescitis et relicta conscientiae uirtutisque praestantia de alienis praemia sermuncul is postulatis [However, you are ignorant of how to act properly unless you have the approval of popular opinion and empty rumors, and having abandoned the excellence of the knowledge of your virtue, you seek rewards from the gossiping of others].
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omnem uoluntatis humanae) moves toward happiness (4.pr.2, 23-25). The Old English modulates this by attributing motivation not to the human will (humana acting adjectivally), but to the specific ingeanc of each man, which wants, as a prerequisite of its own nature, to come to the true good, but the desires that shape what the good is (whether right or wrong) vary according to the individual. The Soliloquies are particularly helpful in discussing ingeanc as the site of perception and learning, as they begin to sketch out what Augustine returns to later in the Confessiones and De trinitate. The framing material in the translations preface and the introductory paragraph to the first book (drawn from the description of the Soliloquia in the Retractions) make it clear that the dialogue is understood as a private meditation on the nature of the self as soul, intellect, and body, a preliminary investigation of identity and the good: Agustinus, Cartaina bisceop, worhte twa bec be his agnum ingeance; a bec sint gehatene Soliloquiorum, at is, be hys modis smeaunge and tweounga, hu hys gesceadwisnes answarode hys mode onne t mod ymb hwt tweonode, oe hit hws wilnode to witanne s e hit r for sweotole ongytan ne meahte. (Soliloquies 48.13-17) [Augustine, bishop of Carthage, made two books about [or by] his own ingeanc. These books are called Soliloquies, that is, about his minds contemplation and consternation, how his reason answered his mind, when the mind doubted, or what it wanted to know, because before it could not understand clearly.] The use of be, as indicated in the translation, is problematic; it can function as a preposition with the dative to indicate agency or instrumentality (in a specific sense, authorship), or it can function adverbially with worhte, to indicate the subject of the

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text.34 Both interpretations offer rich possibilities for understanding ingeanc as the center of individual agency or ability and as the target of reflection; indeed, the genre of the text and the interior orientation of the translation allows for both possibilities to exist in the text simultaneously. Further, the Soliloquies come out ofare generated bythe give-and-take of contemplation and doubt, and the series of answers Gesceadwisnes and Augustine produce between them: they are as much authored by uncertainty and investigation as they are about it. Like the Boethius, the Soliloquies is a meditation; the Old English opens the first book with Augustine considering various things, and ealles swiust ymbe hyne sylfne, hwt he sylf wre: hwer hys mod and hys sawel deadlic were and gewitendlice [and most of all about himself, if his mind and his soul were mortal and transitory] (48.1949.1).35 His respondent is a voice which seems to come from everywhere, and which at first cannot be fixed as ic sylf e oer ing [myself or something else] (49.4-5), but which Augustine recognizes a moment later as min sceadwisnes (49.6).36 The first

34 35

DOE, s.v. be. For the instrumental see I.D.1a, and for the sense of about see I.D.1e and III.B.

The Old English expands significantly on the Latin, which reads only Volventi mihi multa ac varia mecum diu, a per multos dies sedulo quaerenti memetipsum ac bonum meum, quidve mali evitandum esset [By myself I turned over many and various things, and I had for many days been searching zealously for myself and my good, and what evil should be avoided] (Soliloquia 1.1-3). The recognition of the speaker as Reason is delayed in the Latin, until after the discussion of learning of concrete and abstract things. Further, the Latin depersonalizes ratio, while the Old English is careful to specify that Reason here is the reason of Augustines mind: Promittit enim ratio quae tecum loquitur, ita se demonstraturum Deum tuae menti, ut oculis sol demonstratur [For reason promises it, who is speaking with you, who will thus reveal God to your mind, as the sun is revealed to the eyes] ( Soliloquia 19.18-20). Cf. the Old English translation: Ac ic e meg secgan t ic eom seo gesceadwisnes ines modes, e e wisprec, and ic eom seo racu e me onhaga e to gerihtreccenne, t u gesyhst myd ines modes eagan god swa sweotole swa u nu gesyhst myd s licuman agan a sunnan [But I may tell you that I am your minds reason, who speaks with you, and I am the explanation which makes it possible for you to judge properly, so that you may see God with the eyes of your mind just as clearly as you now see the sun with your bodys eyes] (Soliloquies 64.5-8).
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book is largely taken up with issues of the differences between sensory perception and learning, and the spatial relationship between the outward senses, which can see only physical things, and the inward senses, which are responsible for apprehension of the abstract and universal, and this process receives extensive elaboration in the Old English. Agustinus tells Reason [I]c wolde witan swa be gode on minre gesceadwisnesse and on minum ingeance [I wanted to know about God in my reason and my ingeanc] in order to avoid the doubt and error which plagues him at the beginning of the treatise (58.2426). This, Reason informs him, can only be done with the ingeanc; she asks Augustine how he learns, e myd am eagum, e mid am ingeance? [with the eyes or with the ingeanc?] (61.11-12). Agustinus replies that one learns using both; the eyes see something first, bringing it into the awareness (angytte); the eye fastens the object in the ingeanc, where it is contemplated and understood by reason (61.13-17). This second step is crucial, for it is only by reason that something can be learned; it is, Agustinus says, easier to sail a ship on dry land than mid am eagum butan ara gesceadwisnesse nigne creft to geleornianne [to learn any skill with the eyes and without reason] (61.20-22).37 Knowing about the ingeanc, ones own interiority, only comes out of reflection and self-illumination, and so the process of the Soliloquies is as much about

The translator moves into another conceptual schema, A Line Of Thought Is A Path (so Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 236), in which the transition from apprehension to learning and understanding is elaborated as different phases of a journey: The traveler sails a ship over the sea, but as soon as he reaches dry land, he leaves it and sets out on foot ( Soliloquies 61.17-22). In the same way, the eyes, which receive information and impart it to the ingeanc, stop being used when the mind begins to contemplate and assimilate what it has learned. Miranda Wilcox, in Eagan modes and scip modes points to how visual and nautical metaphors were conjoined in Alfredian epistemology to develop a model of cognition based on, yet distinct from, the models provided by Latin sources (pp. 184-85).

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making the mind presentand thus, is about the mindas it is about reaching the divine. The two goals are paired together; Reason tells Augustine that she has promised two things: t u ongyte god and e silfne [that you perceive God and yourself] (70.9-10). Consequently, the Soliloquies is about the mind, in the sense that it is an inquiry into the self, and it is also by the mind, in the sense that it is the minds operation within itself that produces the text, the physical, concrete expression of interior process. The translations insistence on the interiority of learning and reflection, and, as we will see, the vexed separation of the interior life and exterior world, strongly suggests that the Old English texts are attempting to deal with complex philosophical processes by extending metaphors already implicit (or, elaborating on those already explicit) in their sources, rather than by designing a systematic vocabulary to gloss the Latin.38 The basic schema used conceptualize the mind and self sets up spatial relationships between the mind, body, and soul, and spatial relationships within the mind itself; a boundary of varying permeability and stability stands between inner (ingeanc) and outer (body) spaces, and likewise, certain parts of the mind may be within, or underneath, other parts of the mind, and thus be resistant to examination.

Discenza, The Kings English , 20-22, points to the translators fidelity in preserving and expanding on central images and metaphors in the Consolatio (where the Soliloquies follows its source, the translator has the same approach). While she examines this fidelity as part of a larger argument geared toward Alfreds attempt to make Christian exegetical imagery more accessible to a lay audience, the translators handling of the text also reflects a sustained literary interest in drawing out metaphors that are nascent or not fully developed in the source.

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4.3 The Mind as Constructed Dwelling The development of the discrete interior self, the realm of private thought and feeling that is buffered from the outside world or marked and bounded in some way has important implications for how the self is experienced. Britt Mizes recent work on the container metaphor in Old English poetry has invoked other structural images that belong to the container schema, such as the fortress, in which the walls of the building both delimit the mind and serve to guard it from external attack, such as the devils inducement to temptation (figured as arrows, for example).39 Moreover, these dwellings are often figured as constructions, assembled by the mind as it learns, remembers, and exercises virtue. Thus, two metaphors related to cognitive functions are at issue here, both relating to each other: first, Mind As Dwelling (which is itself part of the Mind Is A Container schema), subdivided into house and city, and Mental Activity Is Manipulation, in which assembling, taking apart, altering, picking up, moving, carrying, and other actions are associated with processes of thought and recollection.40 The container metaphor yields Taylors interiority and, ultimately, his concept of radical reflexivity; it also lends itself to the construction and deployment of elaborate mental architectures as tools for recall and reflection. In the translations of the Consolatio, Cura pastoralis, and Soliloquia, the Old English is particularly devoted to these

Mize, The Representation of the Mind As an Enclosure in Old English Poetry, 80 -82; the fullest treatment of the motif of the fortress of the mind or soul in the poetic corpus is in James F. Doubleday, The Allegory of the Soul as Fortress in Old English Poetry, Anglia 88 (1970): 503-8. Mize points out that, in the poetry, the diabolical attack targets the desiring, volitional part of the self, when the demon (as in Juliana and Vainglory) tempts the mind to sin. For Mental Activity Is Manipulation, see Olaf Jkel, The Metaphorical Concept of Mind: Mental activity is manipulation, in Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World, ed. John R. Taylor and Robert E. MacLaury (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995), pp.197-229, at 219-20.
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metaphors, concretizing and elaborating on the abstract cognitive processes outlined in the Latin texts, and the stuff of memory in the interest of constructing interiority. 41 The use of both metaphors bridges the three Alfredian texts at hand, expressing as they do interior space as a place constructed by the individual, by means of experience (especially by learning and education) and reflection upon that experience, but also a place from which the individual is expected to act as a responsible moral agent. Conceptualizing the mind as a dwelling-place, an edifice, or some other type of construction has affinities not only with the Biblical injunction to build ones house upon the firm rock of faith (Luke 6:46-49), but with medieval practices of reading and meditation. As Mary Carruthers has demonstrated, mnemonic practices relied heavily on metaphors of structure and organization, and one of these metaphors employed images of building as methods of illustrating the processes of both exegesis and the individuals moral development.42 The first metaphor on hand conceptualizes the mind as a house, a place built and made firm through education. In the Boethius, the clearest articulation is in the translation of Consolatio 2.m.4, 17-22, where Wisdom compares the mennisce

Other container images are found throughout the Alfredian corpus, though they will not be discussed fully. For example, in the Hierdeboc. the ingeanc is compared to a pool of water: onne drinc se lareow t wter of his agnum mere, onne he gehwirf res to his agnum ingeonce to hladenne t wter, t is to wyrceanne t t he lr [Thus the teacher drinks the water from his own pond, when he turns first to his own thought to take up that water, that is to practice that which he teaches] (Sweet ed., 373.7-9); compare the leaky vessel image in the Metrical Epilogue to the Hierdeboc, discussed in Mize, The Representation of Mind as Enclosure in Old English Poetry, where the broken vessel of a bad memory has to be mended in order to prevent the waste of the scirost wtra (pp. 74 -75). In the Soliloquies, one of the expansions of the Latin develops the memory as treasure chest; memory is, however, not capable of containing all we might entrust to it, so Gesceadwisnes urges Agustinus to write it down (49.7-18).
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Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 43-44.

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mod which is undermined and blown from its rightful place to the one with its foundations made firm in true happiness: Ac se e wille habban a ecan gesla, he sceal fleon one frecnan wlite ises middaneardes and timbrian t hus his modes on am fstan stane eametta, foram e Crist earda on re dene eadmodnesse and on am gemynde wisdomes. (12.14-18) [But he who wishes to have eternal happiness must flee the hostile face of this world and build the house of his mind on the firm rock of humility, because Christ dwells in the valley of humility and in the memory of wisdom.] The treatment of the metaphor in the Boethius is a significant expansion on the Latin meter. In his discussion, Wisdom moves back and forth between the images of housebuilding and seeking for wisdom: just as someone looking to build a sturdy house (fst hus timbrian) should not set it on a high hill or an unsteady sand dune, someone looking for divine wisdom should not do so out of pride. Wisdom then, fortuitously, combines the two metaphors: the seeker for wisdom now must be careful, Swa eac gif u wisdom timbrian wille ne sete u hine onuppan a gitsunga [So also if you wish to build wisdom do not found it upon greed], because greed, like sand, drinks in wealth until it undermines the foundations of the house (12.6-9). The Latin meter recommends building ones sedes on a firm rock, but the metaphor remains implicit, never equated directly with the mind or its acquisition and ordering of wisdom. Moreover, in the translation, the individual has a companion, Christ, dwelling with him in the safety of his home, which is constituted in part by gemynd wisdomes and in part by humility. The Latin meter is less interested in the construction of the mind by memory or wisdom as it is with the detachment of resignation: Tu conditus quieti / Felix robore ualli /Duces serenus aeuum / Ridens aetheris iras [You, settled in silence and content within the strength of your walls will 183

live your life peacefully, laughing at the fury of the skies] (Consolatio 2.m.4, 17-22). The image is at play as well in the Old English translation of the meters of the Consolation, in which the speaker asserts, Ne mg eac fira nan / wisdom timbran r r woruldgitsung / beorg oferbrde [Also, no man can build wisdom where covetousness covers over the mountain] (Meter 7.11-13). The architectural metaphor equating memory and wisdom with house-building appears in the translators preface to the Soliloquies as well, and as Scott DeGregorio notes, may have been inspired by the elaboration found in the Boethius.43 The preface employs an elaborate metaphor of woodcutting and house-building, in which the translator says he has gathered many types of trees for himself, in each of which he sees hwtwugu s e ic t ham beorfte [something of that which I needed at home] (Soliloquies 47.6), and uses them to build a fair home for himself. In his turn, he advises the one who can to go out with his wagons (wn) to collect wood and, then he mage windan manigne smicerne wah, and manig nlic hus settan, and fegerne tun timbrian,

Scott DeGregorio, Texts, Topoi and the Self: A Reading of Alfredian Spirituality, Early Medieval Europe 13 (2005): 79-96, at 85. Other sources for Alfreds house have been proposed: Carnicelli, ed., Soliloquies, 38 and 99 suggests that the biographical information supplied by Asser, that Alfred was interested in construction and building projects, informs the prefaces deployment of the building metaphor; Valerie Heuchan, Gods Co -Workers and Powerful Tools: A Study of the Sources of Alfreds Building Metaphor in his Old English Translation of Augustines Soliloquies, N&Q n.s. 54 (2007): 1-11 suggests I Cor 3:9 as a source, with Paul described as an architect upon whose foundation the future church will be constructed; Prodosh Bhattacharya, An Analogue and Probable Source for a Metaphor in Alfreds Preface to the Old English Translation of Augustines Soliloquies, N&Q n.s. 45 (1998): 161-63 proposes Hierdeboc 443.33-445.2 (Sweets lineation), in which Gregory describes cutting down wood for buildings but having to wait for the wood to cure as a metaphor for proper spiritual correction. The more direct source, it seems, would be Boethius 12.6-9: Swa eac gif u wisdom timbrian wille ne sete u hine onuppan a gitsunga, foram swa swa sigende sond one ren swylg, swa swylg seo gitsung a dreosendan wela isses middangeardes [Like wise, if you wish to build wisdom do not build it on acquisitiveness, because just as the devouring sand swallows the rain, so acquisitiveness swallows the falling wealth of this world]. The timbers of the house of wisdom would seem very likely to be the works of the authorities, fetched from the forest of patristic literature.

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and ara murge and softe mid mge on eardian ger ge wintras ge sumeras, swa swa ic nu ne gyt ne dyde [build many an elegant wall and construct many a peerless house and build a fair enclosure, and there he may dwell happily and peacefully both in winter and summer, as I have not yet done] (47.10-12). These trees and the wood are the words and texts of the patristic writers, such as Augustine, Gregory, and Jerome, whom the translator names explicitly, and manege ore halie fdras as well (47.15-16). The metaphor develops further, with the home becoming not only a place of repose, after it has been built, but a place where he may, for a time, hunt and fish, and work for the things of this world (to ere lnan hte), until that time when he bocland44 and ce yrfe urh his hlafordes miltse geearnige [he earns the title and the eternal inheritance through his lords mercy] (Soliloquies 48.4-9). The metaphor is illustrative of the totality of the act of medieval lectio, which did not stop at a simple reading of the text, but required the assimilation of the text not only into a memory structure but into the selfa transformative experience. The translators woodcutting expedition in the patristic forest is the architectural parallel of the florilegium (flos flower + legere to gather); the branches he takes away constitute the components of a structure meant to assist in meditatio as a promptbook for memory.45

Dictionary of Old English, s.v. bocland. The term is legal, indicating land that is held by written title from the king. In the metaphor of home and land ownership, the bocland here is heaven and the king is God, who has issued the charter of heaven in the Scriptures; however, the pun on boc is interesting, given the literary and meditative context of the passage, and the Boethius treatment of the mind as a psychic landscape. Christine Fell points out that bocland is the land granted by written charter as an inheritance in perpetuity, contrasted with lnland, land granted for a specific period of time; moreover, boc mediates between charter and the gospels, the word being used for both legal documents and Scripture; see Perceptions of Transience, in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1991), pp. 172-89, at 173-74.
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Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 176.

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Given the importance of meditation to the act of reading, and the treatment of meditation and composition as memorial practices, reading required a mind trained in mnemonic technique, which often meant the ability to treat memory spatially, placing memories in specific orders and relationships that allow for easy retrieval later. Medieval formulations of mnemonic techniques made heavy use of architectural images, ranging from gross structures (the construction of buildings, as here) to more fully elaborated associations with specific rooms or places in those structures and ornamentation;46 these metaphors also extended to individual invention, the construction of ones own ideas on top of the foundation laid by Scripture or other authorities.47 Thus, the house of the mind in the Soliloquies establishes the space of private meditative practice, the gathering of information (the lessons of the authorities) and ordering into a structure (the house) based on individual contemplation. Within the metaphor of memory-as-architecture come a host of elaborations, including the rooms in the house of the mind as loci of certain memories. The Old English translation of the Cura pastoralis opens with a mistranslation of Gregorys Latin, but the mistranslation is interesting because it conceptualizes the process of memorization as allocating information in a particular, privileged space, moving it (or having it rise) to a special, distinguished place. The translator picks up on Gregorys use of proximity and the deliberate ordering of information so that it may approach the mind

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Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 29-38. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 14-21.

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of the reader by topics arranged in order, as though in certain steps.48 The translator, however, wishes that the text stigge on t ingeonc s leorneres, su su on sume hldre, stpmlum near and near, ot hio fstlice gestonde on m solore s modes e hi leornige [rise in the mind of the learner, just as upon a ladder, on steps closer and closer, until it [i.e. the text] stands firmly in the solar (high hall) of the mind which learns it] (Hierdeboc 23.14-18). The placement of the Hierdeboc in the solar, or high hall, of the readers mind not only indicates proximity to the mind, but a specific relationship of the memory of the text to space, and by implication, to other memories.49 To conclude my discussion of metaphors of interiority, I would like to turn briefly to the culmination of the architecture of the mind, the city of thought where the individual dwells until he is ready to take up his responsibilities as an instructor: [S]ian he his cnihtas gelred hfde one crft s lareowdomes, he cw swaeah: Sitta eow nu giet innan ceastre, ot ge weoren fullgearwode mid m gslican crfte. onne we sitta innan ceastre, onne we us betyna binnan m locum ures modes, yls we for dolsprce to widgangule weoren. Ac eft onne we fullgearwode weora mid m godcundan crft, onne bio we of re ceastre ut afrene, t is of urum agnum ingeonce, ore men to lranne. (383.36-385.9)50

Gregory the Great, Cura Pastoralis, 124.11-12: ut ad lectoris sui animum ordinatis alligationibus quasi quibusdam passibus gradiatur. The ladder also appears in the Soliloquies, as part of an image schema that links the acquisition of knowledge to the ability to see more clearly, or more widely: as the individuals mental eyes become accustomed to beholding more knowledge, onne lytlum and lytlum s tigan near and near stpmelum, swilce he on sume hldre stige and wylle weoran uppe on sumum sclife [then little by little he will step, closer and closer by degrees, as though he steps up on a ladder and desires to come up atop a seacliff], where he will see across the whole earth and sea] (78.18-20). See Carnicelli, ed., Soliloquies, 102, n. 78.17-20. Gregory the Great, Cura pastoralis, 3.25.116-22: Vos autem sedete in ciuitate quoadusque induamini uirtute ex alto. In ciuitate quippe considemus, si intra mentium nostrarum nos claustra constringimus, ne loquendo exterius euagemur, ut cum uirtute diuina perfecte induimur, tunc quasi a nobismetipsis foras etiam alios instruentes exeamus [Nevertheless, remain in the city until you are furnished with virtue from on high. Indeed, we reside in the city, if we are enclosed within the cloister of
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[After he had taught his disciples the craft of instruction, he nevertheless said: Remain within the city, until you are fully prepared with spiritual virtue. When we sit within the city, then we shut ourselves within the locks of our mind, lest by foolish speech we begin to stray. But in turn, when we are fully prepared with divine virtue, then we will have gone out of the city, that is, from our own ingeanc, to instruct other men.] One of the corollaries to Jkels mind-as-container schema in his exploration of Mental Activity Is Manipulation is the problem container, the necessity of protecting its contents from curious intruders, its boundary present[ing] an obstacle to be overcome, a case to be penetrated and torn apart, an outer shell which in its centre embeds the essentials in which we are interested.51 (One is reminded here of The Wanderer, who must bind fast his heart.) The requirement of the student is that he remain in the city of learningthe ivory tower, if you willuntil he is completely ready to take over his apostolic duties. The ingeanc, if understood in the sense that I am advocating, is not only remaining in the mind, but remaining within a space that allows the student to transform the text, to translate it into himself, in order to prepare to enact the lessons of the text in the real world.

our own minds, lest we wander outside in order to preach, so that when we are clothed with perfect divine virtue, then we may venture out of ourselves, instructing others]. Jkel, The Metaphorical Concept of Mind, p. 220. Augustine also comments on the problem of other minds in the Soliloquies: Ac ic wilnode t ic cue hys ingeance of minum ingeance; onne wiste ic hwilce treowa he hfde wi me [But I desired that I could know his ingeanc from my ingeanc; then I would know what sort of friendship he had with me] (59.13-14). This can be done no other way than by extrapolation (via the intellect), as other minds are not immediately present to us; Mize, The Representation of Mind as Enclosure, notes the poetic expression of this in Maxims I, where each man possesses his own sundorsefa (168a), a distinct or different mind (p. 83); the problem, as the Soliloquies points out, is that we can never know the mind of even our best friend, as fully as we want, if at all: when Gesceadwisnes asks Augustine if he would want to know God as well as he knows his follower (cniht) Alyppius, Augustine replies that he would not, because Alippius me is cure onne god, and ne can ic hine eah swa georne swa ic wolde [Alippius is better-known to me than God, and I do not know him as fully as I want] (Soliloquies 58.5-12).
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Consequently, although meditation formed an important component of medieval reading practices, its social corollary was putting the lessons of that text into practice.52 The measure of individual virtue resided not in (or not exclusively in) private acts of contemplation, but in meeting the requirements of social virtue. Doing what was rightthat is, performing your particular occupation or station in lifemeant not only being a good member of society, but being a citizen of the city of God, the Christian community which derived its unity from its constituents working toward the common good (and the common God). When Mod laments the cruelty of his fate, Wisdom remarks that he has strayed much farther from his fder eele [his native home] (Boethius 5.6) than Wisdom had originally thought, and informs him that the only person responsible for exiling him is himself. Mods irrational grief is cast in terms of exile not only from a country, but a city that doubles as the city of the mind and the city of God in which Mod is (theoretically) a member: Ne sceolde e eac nan man swelces to gelefan, r u gemunan woldest hwylcra gebyrda u wre and hwylcra burgwara for worulde, oe eft gastlice hwilces geferscipes u wre on inum mode and on inre gesceadwisnesse; t is t u eart an ara rihtwisena and ara ryhtwillendra. a beo re heofencundan Ierusalem burgware. (Boethius 5.14-19)53 [Nor must any man expect such of you, if you wished to remember of what descent and what citizenship you were in the world, or on the other hand, of what

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Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 18.

Consolatio 1.pr.5, 12-7: An ignoras illam tuae ciuitatis antiquissimam legem, qua sanctum est ei ius exulare non esse quisquis in ea sedem fundare maluerit? Nam qui uallo eius ac munimine continetur, nulls metus est ne exul esse mereatur. At quisquis eam inhabitare uelle desierit, pariter desinit etiam mereri [Certainly you cant be ignorant of the most ancient law of your city, by which it was decreed that anyone who had wished to settle there could not be exiled? For anyone who is settled within her walls and safeguards need have no fear that he will merit banishment, but whoever wishes to depart, has thereby ceased to deserve it].

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kind of spiritual community you were in your mind and in your reason; that is, you are one of the righteous; they are the citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem.] Contrasting Mods lineage as a member of the Roman aristocracy to his membership in the community of the just, Wisdom emphasizes that Mods status as a member of the city of God relies on the condition of his mind and reason; to abandon these, Wisdom argues, is to exile oneself from citizenship. Coupled with this self-exile is self-forgetting; Wisdom has come in search of the faculty by which Mod is capable of understanding, his gewit (Boethius 5.32), and which must be recovered over the course of the dialogue. The recovery of self-knowledgethe knowledge, in other words, of Mods nature and his place within the natural and divine worldsrequires the simultaneous recovery and application of reason, and ends in simultaneous restoration to the individual identity and the identification of Boethius as a member of the ciuitas Dei. Being a member of the city of the world and the city of God requires action in keeping with the station and responsibilities invested in the individual from birth. As we have seen, self-knowledge is required before the self can be performed, and this selfknowledge is aided by contemplation and memorialization of textual authority. Further, knowledge of the tools required to be effective in ones calling means devoting oneself to study before going out in the world. The extensive discussion of meditative constructions above argues for the way in which this was likely done; DeGregorio, for example, has proposed that the Soliloquies and Boethius reflect the translators interest in what might be called practical spirituality, with texts serving as the foundations not only for

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contemplation but for action.54 The transformative power of texts, once integrated into oneselfonce they are fabricated into structures of either memory or inventionlies in how it is put into practice. Both the ruler and the bishops-to-be must eventually leave their minds houses and go out into the world, prepared for their tasks by interpolating the messages of texts within themselves. In his preface to the Soliloquies, the translator wryly remarks that he hopes other men will be able to enjoy the restfulness of contemplation, as he has not yet been able to. However, the crft of thought requires implementation as the crftas both of the virtues and of particular vocational skills; as both Peter Clemoes and Nicole Discenza have demonstrated, one necessary component of crft is its practice, both toward union with the divine (Clemoes) and as the kind of Christian ethics enjoined by Gregory the Great.55

4.4 Conclusions In Book One of the Soliloquies, Gesceadwisnes chastises Agustinus for trying to run before he can walk, for in attempting to know himself and God, he is attempting to learn the creft ealra crefta, the skill of all skills (69.9-10). The impatience of the student

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De Gregorio, Texts, Topoi, and the Self, 81-82.

For the moral valence of crft, see Peter Clemoes, King Alfreds Debt to Vernacular Poetry: The Evidence of Ellen and Crft, pp. 213-38. For its social implications, both ethical and political, in Alfreds work, see Discenza, Power, Skill, and Virtue in the Old English Boethius, pp. 100-7. Discenza also explores the implications of Gregorys social ethics in the practice of Anglo -Saxon rulership in The Influence of Gregory the Great on the Alfredian Social Imaginary, in Rome and the North: The Early Reception of Gregory the Great in Germanic Europe, ed. Rolf H. Bremmer Jr., Kees Dekker, and David F. Johnson (Paris: Peeters, 2001), pp. 67-81. The duty of the ruler to behave correctly is linked inextricably with the cura animae; the successful maintenance of the mind and soul is necessary for the ruler to rule properly. This lesson, although applied to Alfreds conception for a new Angl o-Saxon kingship, can also be understood to apply to any reader who happens to rule, whether religious or lay, given the link established between self-rule, rule of the people, and instruction (pp. 77-78).

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crops up later; when Gesceadwisnes wants to knock off for the night, Agustinus insists on continuing the discussion (78.23-26).56 The attainment of the art of all arts, despite Augustines eagerness, is drawn out over many necessary stages, or ascends up many steps to the pinnacle of revelation. Conceptual metaphor, extensively developed in the translations, serves not only as rhetorical scenery, but as device that both eases the readers path and profoundly informs the way in which the reader comes to understand and visualize the tools of epistemology: the mind, perception, knowledge, memory, and so forth. The Alfredian translations expand the container schema in two related ways: first by dividing the mind into distinct regions or spaces which may or may not be accessible to the self; and second, by constructing the enclosure of the mind in order to facilitate the acquisition of wisdom in the service of coming to a better knowledge of oneself and God. While leaving the question of Alfreds authorship or authorization to the side, the development of metaphors and structures of interiority across the Pastoral Care, Boethius, and Soliloquies suggest that, if not a common hand, then a common thought guided their production. The consistency with which these metaphors develop across the texts further suggests that the mind or minds behind them shared an understanding of the interiority of the mind, the structure of the mind, and the necessity of the inward turn when contemplating knowledge (scientia or sapientia) or

The Old English appears to be missing, or to misunderstand, an indicator in the Soliloquia, that the dialogue here breaks off and continues et alio die (Soliloquia 36.18); when Gesceadwisnes says they will pick up the discussion to -morgen where they left off, Agustinus says, nese, la, nese. Ac ic e bydde eadmodlice, t e huru ne reote, ne u a sprece r ne forlt [no, oh, no. I humbly ask that you will not tire, nor that you leave off your lesson here] ( Soliloquies 78.25-26).

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contemplating oneself in order to recover an identity that has been fragmented or temporarily forgotten. All three translations accept some of the same premises regarding the problem of self-knowledge: that the mind or self can doubt itself and that parts of the mind are obscured from its own sight, but also reassuringly, that there are parts of the mind or oneself that cannot be taken away, that there is always something there, deep inside the mind, that can be recovered. Lastly, the texts common insistence on care of the self, as a prerequisite for the care of others, ties the cultivation of interior space to wider civic and social duties, whether those are clerical or lay. The ways in which the Alfredian translations develop the metaphors present in their sources suggest that the process of metaphoric expansion is involved in establishing relationships between the interior and exterior worlds, as well as relationships between elements of the mind, and the ways in which these relationships are expressed have a significant impact on how Anglo-Saxons conceptualized the mind and the self. Crft mediates between the private self and the public self; it is the means by which one comes to reflect on and know oneself (the craft of all crafts), and then becomes the means by which that newly-rediscovered identity is defined in the worldand this is the seat of agency in medieval society.57 The exploration of inner space, as I have attempted to demonstrate through my analysis of inneweard mod, ingeanc, and metaphors of architecture and enclosure, had profound importance for the Anglo-Saxons; the way in which they developed and elaborated on the sophisticated philosophical and theological

Timothy J. Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 3. For Greek and Latin concepts of agency and their relation to the will, see 241-42; for the Latin (and particularly Stoic) traditions of the self and society, see 120-39.

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language in their sources suggest that they grasped that the dialogues of the Consolation and the Soliloquies were interior events, and were carefulor possibly enthusiasticin translating that interiority into their own language. The result is a rich, complex understanding of the life of the mind and the interior world as, in some ways, separate from the outer world yet is inextricably connected with it in others. Does this constitute Anglo-Saxon selfhood? In our modern or post-modern sense of an entity wholly interior and unified, no. In the container schema of the Alfredian translations, reflection on the text and reflexion into oneself, reading the text, understanding and interpolating itis the prerequisite not only for contemplation, but for ethical growth; the first-person experience of ones own interiority paves the way for unification with the divine, but also resituates one in ones proper place in the world. The constant work of self-reflection, moreover, suggests that the recovery of the self is never done; until the Day of Judgment, when the sight of God is finally allowed to believers, the best one can do is work and wait. In the meantime, the effort to know and to be oneself is a work-in-progress, a continual mediation between the interior self and the world it experiences.

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CHAPTER 5: GOVERNANCE, MEMORY, AND THE SOCIAL SELF

In the preface to the Soliloquies, the speaker writes movingly of his desire to establish a place of serenity, where he might be able to spend his days murge and softe [happily and peacefully] (47.10-11). The pressures of the world prevent him from doing so, even though his instructor, who had introduced him to the pleasures of learning, did so in order that he softor eardian mge ger ge on isum lnan stoclife be is wge a hwile e ic on isse weorulde beo, ge eac on am ecan hame e he us gehaten hef [may live more happily both in this temporary roadside dwelling while I am in this world, and also in the eternal home which he has promised to us] (47.12-14). The path along which the speakers (metaphorical) house lies is the path that takes the Christian pilgrim from this world to the next; paradoxically, he asks both that he be given a stable dwelling in this transitory world and that God mine modes eagan to am ongelihte t ic mage rihtne weig aredian to am ecan hame, and to am ecan are, and to are ecan reste e us gehaten is [illuminate my eyes that I may take the straight way to the eternal home, and to eternal grace, and to the eternal rest which is promised to us] (48.1-2). The speakers wistfulness, his longing for a place of quiet and retreat, and eventual abandonment of the world, can be read as an expression of the classical otium, the Stoics cultivated dislike of the hurly-burly of the political and social life. Yet, despite his desire for the private life, 195

the speaker has found himself thrust out of the nest, so to speak; the way he can live murge and softe is, if not in seclusion, then in his approach to how he lives the life forced upon him, and how he negotiates the disparate needs of his body, mind, and soul. The Anglo-Saxons who produced the Alfredian corpus inherited a multiplicity of philosophical and theological traditions surrounding body and soul, including a complex body of classical thought filtered through the lens of the patristics. Generally, these traditions all acknowledged that the human being was constituted by the union of a physical body and an immaterial soul that (for the most part) had vivicatory, memorial, emotive, and rational functions, among much else. The doctrines represented by the caro et anima duality (some of which enfolded mens, the rational mind, within anima) explicitly recognized the necessity of embodiment as part of human nature: to be a human was to be embodied, both in the fallen here-and-now and in the purified flesh of the world to come. Despite the conflicting, and conflicted, attitudes early Christian writers had regarding the body, fundamentally it was indispensable to the individuation of each person, the ego ipse that persisted even when the blessed soul was granted transcendent knowledge, for, as Gregory the Great wrote, Nam quomodo est uera resurrectio, si uera esse non poterit caro? [for in what way is it true resurrection, if it cannot be real flesh?].1

Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, ed. Marcus Adriaen, CCSL 143-143B (Turnhout: Brepols, 1979-81), 14.55.106. Gregorys explication of Job 19:25 -27 in the Moralia emphasizes the importance attached to the resurrection of the body as body, as flesh, not the resurrection of the body in any other form: Sed si in aereo corpore surrexero, iam ego non ero qui resurgo [But if I will rise up in an aerial body, then I will not be the one who arises]. Gregory here is arguing against Eutychius of Constantinople, who held that the resurrected body would be different in substance, airy or untouchable ( impalpabile aereque). The problem Gregory has with this is plain, that is, a body that is not like his own, that is airy in substance does not constitute him, Nam quomodo est uera resurrectio, si uera esse non poterit caro? [for in what way is it true resurrection, if it cannot be real flesh?]. Rather, Gregory argues that while resurrected flesh is purified in the resurrection (erit corpus nostrum subtile), that purification or sublimity is strictly an effect or

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As the past three chapters have discussed, the Anglo-Saxon acknowledgment of embodiment, inherited from their knowledge of earlier writers and developed in their own writing, resulted in the deployment of body-based metaphors that assisted in the exploration of how the mind functioned, and to some extent formed an understanding of the mind as being situated at the nexus of corporeality and immateriality. Metaphors that drew equivalencies between mental and bodily functions, and which viewed the mind as a multilayered or sedimented thing that had to be mined or excavated, that had a multiplicity of interior spaces within itself, were applied to cognitive or meta-cognitive processes such as memory and memorialization, self-reflection, and self-assessment. In particular, the process of introspection, or radical reflexivitythe turning-back into oneselfformed important projects of the Alfredian corpus, particularly those of the Soliloquies and the Boethius. In the case of the Hierdeboc, metaphors of interiority also formed part of Gregorys (and the translators) interest in making sure those who put themselves forward as candidates for the priesthood or clerical leadership were aware of their own motives, and were intellectually and spiritually qualified for the task of spiritual governance. As such, an Alfredian self is an entity in the process of constant negotiation and inquiry: between body and soul, desire and restraint, impulse and reason, of ostensible motives and hidden ones. It is that thing which can reflect on and evaluate itself and come to know itself, or that which can be brought to such an action. Unlike modern formulations of the self that stress insularity, privacy, and immediacy (the

consequence of spiritual power, but the body remains solid and touchable because of its nature (sed palpabile per veritatem naturae).

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individual or the ego against which Freud argues), the Alfredian self is, or can be, fragmented and concealed; the task of the individual is to recover, as much as possible, that concealed self, and restore it to wholeness. Moreover, such a task is not purely abstract in conception or orientationit is not what we might today call merely a philosophical exercisebut inherently ethical, with important implications for how the self lives in this world and the next. As such, to speak of the self as being in the constant process of negotiation between soul/body, inner/outer, private/public, or personal/social lives is not to speak of movement between binaries that are irreducibly disconnected, but rather to move across a spectrum and to find a balance between such polarities. The goal of self-formation, then, is to enable the individual to best perform such negotiation between competingor complementarydemands. This chapter turns toward a closer consideration of how processes of selfexamination were enabled, particularly through the deployment of exemplary narratives meant to re-form and govern unstable selves. As such, it investigates the ethics of reading, how the individual might look to textual precedent as a guide to the ethical practices that, in part, governed self-reformation. I will also attend more closely to some of the social dimensions of the Alfredian self, and how the exempla deployed in the Boethius (among other texts) sought to instantiate a social self that was, at times, opposed to or in tension with secular power. In doing so, I hope to elucidate the relationship between ethical modes of literary interpretation, self-care and exemplarity, the relationships between the Boethius and Carolingian tracts on self-governance and metaphors of power, and then finally, the ethical imperatives of literary interpretation and the role of reading in the restoration of memory, and thus of the self. 198

5.1 Narrative and the Ethics of Self-care Narrative, whether reading it, listening to it, it or composing it, provided one way by which self-recovery could be begun. The meta-narratives of the Dialogues and Boethius, in which are embedded numerous exempla, metaphors, proverbs, and sayings (bisene), are themselves narratives of self-recovery, that provide patterns of dialogue and interaction that could be used to effect the readers own. For that matter, all three of the Alfredian dialogues begin with pain, privacy, and silence; the possibility of healing and restoration opens up only when the interlocutor arrives. The Dialogues opens with Gregory, tormented by the difficulties of worldly preoccupations, having sought a place apart, re deoglan stowe seo is re gnornunge freond, foron mon symle mg his sares and his unrihtes mst geencan, gif he bi ana on deogolnesse [Then a secret place pleased me which is the friend of the sorrowful, because one can always contemplate his sorrow and his shortcomings, if he is alone in secrecy] (3.10-16). As his numerous difficulties pile up before the eyes of his heart, Gregory says, ic st a r swie geswenced and lange swigende [I sat there greatly troubled and long-silent] (3.2425).2 In the Boethius, the mind of the imprisoned philosopher, overcome with grief, nanre frofre beinnan am carcerne ne gemunde, ac he gefeoll niwol ofdune on a flor

Secretum locum petii amicum moeroris, ubi omne quod de mea mihi occupatione displicebat, se patenter ostenderet, et cuncta quae infligere dolorem consueuerant, congesta ante oculos licenter uenirent. Ibi itaque cum afflictus ualde et diu tacitus sederem, dilectissimus filius meus Petrus diaconus adfuit, mihi a primaeuo iuuentutis flore amicitiis familiariter obstrictus, atque ad sacri uerbi indagationem socius [I sought a secret place, the friend of the sorrowful, where all which dissatisfied me concerning my work clearly showed itself, and all things which typically inflicted sorrow on me without restraint came in and crowded before my eyes. And then, while I was sitting, greatly afflicted and silent all day, there came to me my most beloved son, Peter the deacon, who was bound to me with friendly love from the first flower of his youth, and a companion in the contemplation of the sacred Word] ( Dialogi 1.1-8).

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and hine astrehte swie unrot, and ormod hine selfne ongan wepan [remembered no comfort in that prison, but fell down on the floor and, deeply unhappy, prostrated himself and sorrowing began to lament for himself] (1.28-30); the words that Boethius speaks to give vent to his loss, are spoken entirely to himself.3 Despite the advice of Gesceadwisnes that Agustinus have digele stowe and manne lces ores inges [a secret place and leisure from everything], along with fwa cue men and creftige e nan wiht ne amyrdan, ac fultmoden to inum crefte [a few familiar, intelligent men who will in no way hinder, but help you in your virtue] (Soliloquies 49.19-22), Agustinus laments that he has none of these: ne one menne, ne oera manna fultum, ne swa dygela stowe t me to swilcum weorce onhagie [not leisure, nor the help of other men, nor a secret place that is appropriate to me for such work (that is, the work of writing down his memory)] (50.1-2).4 Of the three, only Gregory finds a human interlocutor in his friend and student Paul the deacon, whose series of questions provides Gregory with the opportunity to discuss the lives of the saints and the patterns of virtue they provide for contemporary Christians. Boethius and Agustinus, in contrast, must turn to Wisdom and Reason as their interlocutors; for Boethius, the process of consolation is purely interior (remembering

The translations handling of the Latin may also reinforce Boethiuss isolation. In the Latin, Boethius is attended by the Muses, who inspire him to compose laments ( Consolatio 1.pr.1, 23-25); in the Old English, Boethius is tormented by the presence of worldly sorrows, rather than figures of (questionable) inspiration. Because of the forgetfulness they induce, Wisdom demands that they leave: Gewita nu awirgede woruldsorga of mines egenes mode foram ge sind a mstan sceaan [Now leave my thegns mind, accursed worldly sorrow, because you are the greatest harm] (3.8 -9). The opening of the Soliloquies is a significant expansion on the Latin; in the Soliloquia, Ratio asks, Sed quid agis, quod ualetudo tua scribendi laborem recusat? Nec ista dictari debent; nam solitudinem meram desiderant [But what will you do, if your strength forbids the labor of writing? Those things ought not be dictated, for they desire strict solitude] (3.12-14), to which Augustine replies, Verum dicis. Itaque prorsus nescio quid agam [You speak truly. And thus I do not know what I ought to do] (3.15).
4

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that Wisdom draws near to the mind),5 while for Agustinus it is somewhat more uncertain, as the voice of Gesceadwisnes is sum ing, ic nat hwt, hweer e ic sylf e oer ing, ne t nat, hwer hit ws innan me e utan [something, I know not what whether it was myself or something elsenor did I know if it was within me or outside of me] (49.4-5). The voice, which Agustinus immediately recognizes as min sceadwisnes, is not only his personal possessionthe faculty of the soul that makes him humanbut it is also the diuina ratio, the governing principle (lex diuina) of creation.6 The goal of Wisdom and Gesceadwisnes is to lead Mod/Boethius and Agustinus back to truths about themselves that they have forgotten. In his opening remarks to Mod, Wisdom remarks, ic wat t u hfst ara wpna to hrae forgiten e ic e r sealde [I know that you have too quickly forgotten the weapons which I gave to you before] (3.5-6) when he sees Mod overcome by worldly sorrows. Likewise, Agustinus admits to Gesceadwisnes that the labor (geswinc) of learning to perceive and understand those things he loves is not the difficulty, but rather his doubts (tweonung) over his ability to do so (Soliloquies 64.2-3). In this sense, the pain under which both men suffer is the pain not

5 6

See Chapter Four, pp. 166-67.

Paul Strohm explores the liminal position of conscientia in Conscience: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), as a voice that speaks both within and without the self, and holds the self to certain moral or ethical standards accepted by the community ( con + scientia, literally common knowledge; Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, eds., A Latin Dictionary [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1879], s.v. conscientia). By the time of the Confessiones, however, conscientia is the voice intus, of the inner man, who interrogates Augustine about his refusal to convert: Et uenerat dies, quo nudarer mihi et increparet in me conscientia mea: ubi est lingua? nempe tu dicebas propter incertum uerum nolle te abicere sarcinam uanitatis Ita rodebar intus et confundebar pudore horribili uehemente r, cum ponticianus talia loqueretur [But the day had dawned when I was stripped naked in my own eyes and my conscience challenged me within: Where is your ready tongue now? You have been professing yourself reluctant to throw off your load of illusion be cause truth was uncertain My conscience gnawed away at me in this fashion, and I was fiercely shamed and flung into hideous confusion] ( Confessiones 8.7.29-32; for the translation, see The Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding, O.S.B. (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1998], 160).

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only of grief, but the grief caused by a failure of memory. In the opening chapter of the Boethius, Boethius is swie unrot, and ormod [deeply sad and unhappy] (1.29-30); when Wisdom asks Mod to tell him if he knows hwelces endes lc angin wilnige [what end each beginning seeks], Mod replies unhappily, Ic gemunde geo ac me hf eos gnornung re gemynde benumen [I used to remember, but this grief has robbed me of the memory] (5.63-65). While forgetfulness engenders sorrow (and possibly despair), the ability to rememberto excavate knowledge from within oneselfconstitutes the beginning of the possibility of consolation: Wisdom tells Mod, Foram seo gedrefednes mg t mod onstyrian ac heo hit ne mg his gewittes bereafien [For difficulty may disturb the mind, but it cannot rob the mind of its awareness] (5.69-70), and that awareness, or ability to be aware, is one mstan dl re tyndran inre hle [the greatest part of the tinder of your healing] (5.88-89).7 The image of the philosopher, or philosophy, as the medicus, who provides healing to the soul as the doctor provides healing to his patient, was of course a widespread metaphor in classical philosophy, a metaphor Boethius employs with considerable familiarity and skill. Metaphors that played on images of medicine, therapy, and healing did more than conceptualize the sick mind as a body in need of treatment; rather, they bridged the gap between philosophical reason as abstraction and philosophical ethics as a set of guidelines by which individual actionthat is, conduct or

Wisdom instructs Mod to thank God because he e gefultumade t ic in gewit mid ealle ne forlet [he comforted you because I did not wholly leave your awareness] (5.87 -88); here, gewitt seems to function in the same way as gewitt at Soliloquies 91.24-92.2 (see Chapter Four, pp. 146-53 above for discussion). Gewitt is apparently translating natura in the Consolatio, another interesting interpretive move: Sed sospitatis auctori grates quod te nondum totum natura destituit [But thank the author of health that nature has not wholly deserted you] (1.pr.6, 43-44).

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behaviorcould be governed. In The Therapy of Desire, Martha Nussbaum argues that the techn of philosophyits insistence on logical rigor, reasoning, and precision in terminology and definitionis not deployed in the service of intellectualism or abstraction, but the improvement and flourishing of human life.8 Fundamentally, the medical model of philosophy assumed that ethical truth could not be found out there: it is in and of our human lives As in the case of health, what we are looking for is something that we are trying to bring about in human life, something essentially practical, whose point is living and living well.9 The ability to live the vita bona, from an ethical standpoint, was an ongoing antidote to psychic pain, and the quest for that life entailed the acquisition of the ability to use philosophy to heal ones self. In the case of the Soliloquies, the vita bona is the controlling theme of the Proem to the Soliloquies, whose author reads and gathers the knowledge of the patristics in order that he can live murge and softe [happily and quietly] (47.11); the irony, of course, is that the author has found that his ability to avoid the worldto adopt the classical position of otium for the politically- or socially-engaged lifedoes not exist. The implication, however, is that he will have the opportunity for such a life in re ecan rest in the life to come (48.2) because of his efforts at study and self-cultivation. The creation and deployment of narrative played a central role in self-care or selftreatment, as the psychic corollary to the treatment of disease or pain. When speaking of

Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, 15. The philosopher-doctor, and the healing properties of wisdom, are ancient images, reaching back to the Greek writer Heraclitus; for the medical model in early Greek writing, see W. Jaeger, Aristotles Use of Medicine as Model of Method in His Ethics, Journal of Hellenistic Studies 77 (1957): 54-61.
9

Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, 21.

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the experience of bodily pain, modern theorists have written of pains ability to unmake the self, and the corresponding ability of medicine to re-create the self by crafting, as Helen King writes, a narrative representation of illness, from diagnosis through cure.10 In classical writing, however, bodily pain could serve, literally and metaphorically, as an aid to self-knowledge. When a philosopher is faced with pain, the internalization of pain becomes a route to philosophical progress as pain is challenged and overcome.11 And, of course, the suffering, diseased, or wounded body is the image par excellence of the mind in need of the ministrations of philosophy; the analogy not only operates generally, but specifically, as the diagnosis and treatment of the problem is tailored to the needs of the individual.12 Once the diagnosis is made, the cure, the re-constitution of the self, comes through narrative, through the recounting and enumeration of the pains or difficulties that beset the mind; healing is achieved, or at least worked toward, through the continuous processes of self-assessment and self-improvement.13 As part of this

Helen King, Chronic Pain and the Creation of Narrative, in Porter, Constructions of the Classical Body, pp. 269-86, at 271. For the cultural construction and uses of pain, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), who writes on the failure of language when confronted with chronic pain, and the creative forces that can be brought to bear on the problem of re-establishing the self in the face of pain; see also Byron Good, A Body in Painthe Making of a World of Chronic Pain, in Pain as Human Experience, ed. M.J. DelVecchio Good, P.E. Brodwin, B. J. Good, and A. Kleinman, et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 29-48 and David B. Morris, The Culture of Pain (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
11 12

10

Catharine Edwards, Philosophy and Pain in Senecas Letters, p. 253.

Edwards, Philosophy and Pain in Senecas Letters, p. 257. In the Consolatio, Philosophy recommends her own custom-made course of treatment, beginning with gentler medicines before moving on to more potent ones. Such an approach may also inform the pragmatics of confession and advice-giving in Gregorys Cura Pastoralis, which relies on the priests ability to discern the temperament of his spiritual patient and adapt his manner of admonishment accordingly.
13

Edwards, Philosophy and Pain in Senecas Letters, pp. 253-54.

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process, the protagonists of the Soliloquies and Boethius are asked to excavate forgotten truths from their memories: rather than learning new information, Wisdom and Gesceadwisnes ask their students to recover previously learned knowledge of essentials such as the possession of an immortal, rational soul, the nature of free will, and the absolute power of God. Such recovery is on occasion prompted by narratives that serve to illustrate basic principles, as well as patterns of behavior that shape the ethical aspects of the protagonists life. Memory as a component of consolation is crucial to Boethius and Soliloquies; the goal is not education in the sense of introducing the reader to new knowledge, but rather the recovery of truths lost to the forgetfulness induced by grief or the preoccupations of worldly life.14 Moreover, in such texts as the Boethius, Stoicism is filtered and wedded to Christian values that tie soteriology to philosophy and ethics. Like that of the classical world, the philosophy of the Boethius (as well as the Hierdeboc and the Dialogues, and the Soliloquies to an extent) is ethical in orientation: self-examination and evaluation is not theoretical or purely private, but has a practical dimension, geared toward living well in a difficult world and attaining peaceand ones true homein Heaven. The peregrinationes of the elegiac figures in Old English poetry and the self in the Boethius have the same destination, and broadly similar methods of getting there; to the poetic reflections of the wanderer and seafarer, however, the Boethius adds an ethical dimension that makes salvation not only the reception of Gods grace, but the active participation of

This is not to say that such education was out of the question; the Boethius, as Discenza has argued, very likely had as a corollary goal the introduction of its audience to basic information that comprised the bulk of the liberal artsnot only to theology and philosophy, but astronomy and the other natural sciences, as well as classical literature and rhetoric (The Kings English, 15-22).

14

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a rational and ethical agent. In consolatory texts such as the Consolatio and Soliloquia, such an agent had to be formed (or reformed, as the case may be), through a rigorous program of philosophical and theological instruction. In this sense, the Consolatio and the Soliloquia can be understood as confessional textsor texts that proceed as confessionalsthat have as their goal not necessarily the correction of sin qua sin, but the reformation or reorientation of the individual through the re-discovery of lost truths. Such truths are of course spiritual, in the sense that they restore the soul to better knowledge of itself and God, but they also have a real-world value in their ability to recommend ideal conduct. The Consolatio especially is preoccupied with the reassessment of the self, of ones beliefs and values; the assuaging of Boethiuss grief comes as Philosophy re-educates him on how to perceive properly the nature of misfortune and the ideal methods of enduring it.15 The Soliloquia is consolatory in the sense that Ratio, like Philosophia, has to soothe Augustines grief by persuading him to recall lost truths about his own self and nature, truths he already knows but has come to doubt or to forget altogether; much of this truth is doctrinal truth, contained in the Scriptures and authorities to whom Augustine is indebted. Both texts, as Katherine Proppe writes of the Consolatio, proceed as confessional[s] and catechism[s],16 in which the confessional figures of Boethius and Augustine admit errors of thought and habitof forgetfulness, which leads to griefand receive the correction of the

John Marenbon, Boethius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 97; Catherine E. Lglu and Stephen J. Milner, Introduction: Encountering Consolation, in The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Catherine E. Lglu and Stephen J. Milner (New York: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 1-20, at 6.
16

15

Katherine Proppe, King Alfreds Consolation of Philosophy, NM 74 (1973): 635-48, at 638.

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instructional figures of Philosophia and Ratio, who provide them with better ways of understanding themselves and their lives, and set them on the path to enlightenment. In addition to restoring memory, the narratives of confession, as well as the narratives deployed by Philosophy/Wisdom and Ratio/Gesceadwisnes, serve to help redefine Boethius and Augustine, and (especially in the case of Boethius) re-orient them ethically. The concluding matter of the Consolatio and Boethius, roughly corresponding to the end of Books Four and Five and Chapters 40 to 42, has to do with the processes and choices involved in the pursuit of the vita bona, which is itself tied intimately to the quest for divine truth; freedom, which is given only to men (or, in the Boethius, to men and angels), comes with the corollary that i maran e hi heora mod near godcundum ingum lta, and habba s i lssan frydom e hi heora modes willan near isse woruldare lta [(they have more freedom) the more they bring their minds nearer to divine things, and have less freedom when they bring the will of their mind nearer to worldly goods] (40.113-16). Voluntary subservience to vice (uneawum, 40.117), the sorts of behaviors Wisdom castigates in Chapter 38, is not only misbehavior, it is misdirected behavior, because it turns the mind and the soul away from virtue and thus from God.17 To be rational and discerning, then, also entails acting with rationality and discernment, the manifestation of ones inner disposition in the world. Further, in the Boethius, the attainment of private enlightenment also came with the injunction to use such knowledge for the benefit of humanity: whereas Lady Philosophy explicitly rejects

See Chapter Three, pp. 120-32 above for the discussion of the Ulysses narrative and Wisdoms reproofs against excessive devotion to the flesh and its luxuries.

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the world (and, possibly, the ability of philosophy to work for the public good), Wisdom informs Mod that he must, after rising high above the tempests of the world and acquiring the help of the servants of Wisdom (wisdomas and crftas and soe welan), return again for godra manna earfe [for the need of good men] (7.95 and 100-5).18 Briefly, much the same can be said about the Hierdeboc and the Dialogues. In the latter, Gregorys avowed goal is not only to comfort himself with tales of holy men and women, but to model the virtuous behaviorand demonstrate the rewards of such behaviorfor laypeople.19 Peter, on whom devolves the role of questioner, stands in for the wider community, who may sooner be taught by narrative example than doctrine: as Peter says, there are many men e a gebysnunga godra wera swyor onne a lare onla [whom the labors of good men incite (to virtue), rather than instruction] (Dialogues 8.11-13). Likewise, the Hierdeboc not only functions as a guide to assessing aspirants to clerical office, and as a guide to the proper spiritual governance of the flock,

The corresponding passage is adapted from Consolatio 2.pr.2, 9-10, but seems to stand in opposition to Boethiuss claim that the use of philosophy to better the world has failed; see Godden and Irvine, Boethius 2.281-82, and Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great, 285. Later, Wisdom states that, should Boethius attain a vision of Heaven, he would say to himself Nelle ic nu nfre heonan [I do not ever want to leave here], but nonetheless (Wisdom says), gif e fre gewyr t u wilt oe most eft fandian ara iostra isse worulde [if it ever happens to you that you wish or must in turn seek the shadows of this world], he will fully comprehend the uselessness of secular power (36.60-64; my emphasis). The same implication, that the philosopher may be compelled to return to the world against his will, is present in the metrical translation as well; see Meter 24.55-57. The Latin meter to which it corresponds does not include the injunction or compulsion to return: Quodsi terrarum placeat tibi / noctem relictam uisere, / quos miseri toruos populi timent / cernes tyrannos exsules [And if it pleases you to seek once more the night you left behind, the tyrants whom the wretched people fear you will realize are exiles bereft of home] (4.m.1, 27-30). Kees Dekker, King Alfreds Translation of Gregorys Dialogi: Tales for the Unlearned?, in Bremmer, Dekker, and Johnson, Rome and the North, pp. 27-49, at 32-35; Macready, Signs of Sanctity, 86. Dekker points to the related projects of the Cura pastoralis and the Dialogi: the former explores the cognitive aspects of church governancethe education and mental habits to be cultivated by candidates for pastoral dutieswhile the latter lays out what Dekker calls the attitudinal aspects, or the inspiration for the virtuous conduct expected first of clergy and then of the laity (pp. 48-49).
19

18

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but it also advances the argument that the ideal ruler, whether clerical or secular, is the ruler who embraces the duties of his office as part of the virtuous practice of his rule.20 The social aspect of the Alfredian texts insists on a connection between the theoria of philosophy and the ethic of it: the latter without the former was impossible, but the former without the latter was empty. Consequently, the community that gathered around philosophythat learned it, was formed by it, and taught it in turnwas a community devoted to an interpretive practice that was both theoretical and practical. As Brian Stock argues in Augustine the Reader, the charitable trust that obtains between author and audience in Augustines confessional literature can be described as a community around a text: it is interpretive in formation and behavioural in possibilities.21 The concern of the Confessiones in particular, Stock writes, was ethical before it was literary, and it was literary only in combination with ethics.22 Compositional and interpretive communities were, for Augustine, organized along ethical lines; the writing of texts and their reception brought together teachers and learners, the latter of whom could become teachers in their turn; the communitys goal was not only learning the proper way to read texts, but by learning to read properly, learn to live properly as well.23 In the Dialogues, Gregorys relationship with Peter, dialogic in nature

20 21

Discenza, The Influence of Gregory the Great on the Alfredian Social Imaginary, p. 81.

Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 215.
22 23

Stock, Augustine the Reader, 17.

Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, ed. J. Martin, CCSL 32 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1962). Porro si et credit et diligit, bene agendo et praeceptis morum bonorum obtemperando efficit, ut etiam speret se ad id quod diligit esse uenturum. Itaque tria haec sunt, quibus et scientia omnis et prophetia militat, fides, spes, charitas [If he both believes and loves, then through good words and close attention to the precepts of

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and predicated on the teacher-student dynamic (as well as the friendship between the two men), allows Gregory to regain the knowledge that the difficulties of his political life have caused him to forget; he also reminds Peter that the textuality of present-day Christianity owes much to oral traditions of instruction, in which the evangelists Mark and Luke writon t godspel nals t hi hit gesawon, ac hi hit geleornodon, swa hi hit gehyrdon of Petres mue and of Paules re apostola [wrote the gospel no less from what they saw than how they learned it, as they heard it from the mouths of the apostles Peter and Paul] (Dialogues 8.32-9.4). The prefaces to the Hierdeboc and Soliloquies also stress the relationship between instruction and the production of text: Plegmund, Asser, and Grimbald all collaborate in the instruction that gives rise to the Hierdeboc, while the nameless teacher of the Soliloquies, who is referred to only as se e me lrde, am se wudu licode, is presumably the one who introduced the author to the forest of patristic learning. In turn, the text is disseminated to the readers of these texts, to those e maga si and manigne wn hbbe [who are capable and who have many wagons] (Soliloquies 47.6-7) and can go timbering in the forest of learning for themselves.24 The taking-home of wood as a metaphor for both memorial and interpretive practice further implies an ethical bent to literary analysis: in the Soliloquies, the houses constructed by good readingthat is, the reading of Scriptures and the patristicsare

good morals, he then hopes that he may attain that which he loves. And thus these are the three things which all knowledge and all prophecy must serve: faith, hope, and love] (1.37). The author of the Soliloquies, like Alfred in the Hierdeboc, frames this as an injunction, saying ic lre [I instruct] all those who are capable of learning to learn. DeGregorios analysis of the preface explores the individuality of Alfreds ethics of reading; see Texts, Topoi and the Self, 79-82. The metaphor of house building is discussed in Chapter Four, pp. 180-85 above.
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also houses that enable comfortable living both in this world and the ecan hame promised by Augustine and Gregory (47.11-14). The plurality of houses envisioned by the translator, the manig nlic hus and fegerne tun, not only suggests the private practice of reading as the edification of the soul (as well as the commitment of text to memory), but a sort of collective arrangement or social space constructed by common engagement with a community of texts and readers.25 Moreover, within these spaces, the individual mote hwilum ar-on gerestan, and huntigan, and fuglian, and fiscian, and his on gehwilce wisan to ere lnan tilian [might at times rest therein, and hunt, and fowl, and fish, and in each way work the borrowed land] (48.7-9), suggesting that these societies or houses of learning not only provided rest, but the opportunity to engage in constructive labor.26 Such labor might include the acquisition of texts and, as I hope to suggest, their interpretation and application. Interpretation and application of textual lessons formed one aspect of what Michel Foucault would refer to as technologies of the self. Foucaults charting of the development of a hermeneutics of the self explores the ways in which such technologies permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain

Boswell-Toller, s.v. tun. The word tun denotes a space of enclosed land in its simplest sense; it can also be taken to mean the collection of houses and their inhabitants within such an enclosure. For books as places for people to unite and form communities, as well as the role of dialogue in instruction, see Seth Lerer, Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon England (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 83 and 95-96. The mention of hunting, fowling, and fishing is sometimes taken to refer to the past-times that would be familiar to an aristocratic audience. However, they may also relate to metaphors that conceptualize the acquisition of knowledge as a pursuit or a hunt; the example is sug gested by spirigan mid innewearde mode at Boethius 35.2-11 (Chapter Four, pp. 166-72 above), where spirian (translating uestigare, to follow in the tracks of a thing) is used to describe the search for and recovery of knowledge. Tilian also suggests not so much leisure as rigorous or directed effort at obtaining a goal; Boswell-Toller, s.v. tilian.
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number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.27 For Foucault, the self-care of early Christianity ultimately involved a renunciation of the self, either through ascetic practice or through confession, in which disclosure of the selfones sins, vagaries, and misdeedsis a simultaneous disavowal, the culmination of a process of ruthless self-examination and self-publication.28 Where Foucault may fall short is his failure to examine the fusion of Stoic philosophical approaches to self-care to Christian confessorial practice and soteriology: if the Boethius, Christianized as it is, seeks to reject self in favor of transcendence, its insistence on return to earth and embodied life, and its constantly iterated programs of self-assessment and self-governance, acknowledges that ones ability to break with a former self is limited. Rather than suggest that self-governance leads to the severing of oneself from the world, I would like to suggest that the self-care of the Boethius reflects the extent to which the text recognizes the importance of mediating between inner and outer lives, and how the interior disposition of the former must be reflected, or realized, in the latter. One of the methods by which these lives could be connected is the interpretation and application of narrative, particularly those meant to provide examples of virtue and correct behavior.

Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 18. Foucault, Technologies of the Self, 43 and 48. The role of confession in self-formation (and selfabnegation) is also explored by Matto, Technologies of the Sylf (see Chapter Two, p. 87 above).
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5.2 Interpretation and Exemplary Narrative Augustines extremely influential De doctrina Christiana laid out the ethical framework upon which responsible interpretation was hung. While the goal was, of course, the interpretation of Scripture, Augustine drafted classical fable, mythology, and philosophy into the service of divine knowledge.29 In Book Two of De doctrina, Augustine outlines the various tools by which understanding the Scriptures can be augmented (solid knowledge of Greek or Hebrew, grammatical knowledge, and rhetorical knowledge among others): among these are the classics of antique literature and philosophy. While he is suspicious of the superstition in Greco-Roman myths, Augustine allows their necessity, subject to certain restrictions: But indeed, every good and true Christian ought to understand that wherever truth may be discovered it belongs to the Lord; and when, recognizing and acknowledging it, even in their sacred writing [i.e. the pagans], let him reject the figments of superstition.30 The Platonists are singled out for special treatment; despite their paganism, Augustine insists on the inclusion of their philosophy in the interpretation of Scripture, for Those who are called

The De doctrina Christiana was one of the most popular teaching texts of the early Middle Ages; Isidore and Bede, as well as their Carolingian inheritors, made extensive use of it in a variety of contexts. Eileen C. Sweeny points out that the encyclopedic nature of De doctrinawhich touches on the uses of the liberal arts, astronomy, the mechanical or material arts, and the classics opens up the entirety of the world, and the field of human knowledge, to the practice of reading and interpretation: the world, in essence, becomes a text which must be read (responsibly, of course); see Hugh of St. Victor: The Augustinian Tradition of Sacred and Secular Reading, in Reading and Wisdom: The De doctrina Christiana of Augustine in the Middle Ages, ed. Edward D. English (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), pp. 61-83. The interrelationship of the liberal arts and Scriptural reading is also important for Alcuins educational projects; see Mary Alberi, The Better Paths of Wisdom: Alcuins Monastic True Philosophy and the Worldly Court, Speculum 76 (2001): 896-910. Imo uero quisquis bonus uerusque christianus est, Domini sui esse intelligat, ubicumque inuenerit ueritatem, quam confitens et agnoscens, etiam in litteris sacris superstitiosa figmenta repudiet (2.18).
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philosophers, if they perchance have said anything that is truthful and can be accommodated to our faith (especially the Platonists), we are not only not to spurn it, but to reclaim it for our use from those who possess it unlawfully.31 He was not the first patristic author to suggest that the classics had their appropriate place in a Christian literary ethic. Jerome, who was deeply uncertain about the role of pagan lore in Christian learning, nonetheless believed that appropriate reading strategies that functioned as a sort of cosmetic surgery that could turn a pagan beauty (the myth) into an Israelite (Christian truth); Basilius highlighted the educational value of pagan literature by comparing the process of exploiting it to the activity of bees, who choose only those flowers and parts of plants that will bring them profit.32 On the other hand, authors such as Gregory the Great and Gregory of Tours expressed deep uncertainty regarding how fables and packs of lies ought to be handled even in the service of much more important (and truthful) texts. Gregory the Great, in a letter to Bishop Desiderius of Vienne, expressed horror that the bishop was teaching grammar to the members of his fraternityand, moreover, that he was suspected of applying himself to foolishness and

Philosophi autem qui uocantur, si qua forte uera et fidei nostrae accommodata dixerunt, maxime Platonici, non solum formidanda non sunt, sed ab eis etiam tanquam iniustis possessoribus in usum nostrum uindicanda (2.40.60). Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth: Classical Mythology and Its Interpretations in Medieval French Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 1. For general studies of mythography and the reception of myth in the Middle Ages, see also Jean Ppin, Mythe et allegorie: Les origines grecques et les contestations judo-chrtiennes (Paris: tudes Augustiniennes, 1976); G.L. Ellspermann, The Attitude of Early Christian Latin Writers toward Pagan Literature and Learning (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1949); Paule Demats, Fabula: Trois tudes de mythographie antique et mdival (Geneva: Droz, 1973); Jane Chance, ed., The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1990), and her two-volume study on the topic, Medieval Mythography (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1994).
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secular literature (nugis et saecularibus litteris) and that any future allegations of such practices would be acted upon accordingly.33 In the preface to his Liber miraculorum, Gregory of Tours quotes Jerome on the urgent need for Christians to abandon the practice of reading classical authors, for it does not behoove us to recall false fables, or to follow the wisdom of philosophers inimical to God, lest God taking notice, we be liable to eternal punishment.34 In place of classical pagan fabulae, the lives of the saints and martyrs furnished examples that not only demonstrated virtuous behavior for the faithful, but explicitly connected that behavior with reward in the coming life. By the Carolingian period, authors were more or less in line with Augustines thinking on how classical material ought to be handled in the context of Christian education. The inclusion of the De doctrina in numerous class textbooks and florilegia meant that classical philosophies and mythologiesappropriately interpreted and handled with relation to Scriptureformed a core part of the interpretive apparatus with which a Carolingian student was equipped to read and interpret sacred texts.35 Other late

Gregory the Great, Epistola 34 ad Desiderium, in Registrum epistularum, ed. D. Norberg, CCSL 140A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1982), 11.34.4. After opening pleasantries, Gregory gets to the point: Sed post hoc peruenit ad nos, quod sine uerecundia memorare non possumus, fraternitatem tuam grammaticam quibusdam exponere [But after (the news of the well -being of your bishopric) reached us, what we cannot recall without shame, that your fraternity expounds grammar to certain persons]. Part of Gregorys charge seems to include the performance of secular Latin songs; he asks Desiderius to consider quam graue nefandumque sit episcopis canere quod nec laico [how serious and unfitting it is for a bishop to sing what a layman ought not]. There seems to be some sort of relationship between G regorys demand for Desiderius to stop mucking about with pagan nonsense and Alcuins famous demand to Higbald of Lindisfarne, on hearing of monks having Germanic epics for their reading in the refectory, Quid Inieldus cum Christo? Quoted in Paul J. Archambault, Gregory of Tours and the Classical Tradition, in The Classics in the Middle Ages: Papers of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. Aldo S. Bernardo and Saul Levin (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1990), pp. 25-34, at 29. Thomas L. Amos, Augustine and the Education of the Early Medieval Preacher, in Reading and Wisdom, pp. 23-40. The De doctrina was also part of texts that were themselves read widely in
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Latin writers inherited by the Carolingians, such as Solinus, Isidore, the Vatican Mythographer, Servius, and Lactantius (whose Carmen de phoenice is the primary source for the Old English Phoenix) also incorporated mythology, whether incidentally or as controlling subject matter, into their encyclopedias, compilations, and commentaries.36 The Consolatio itself was a major source both of Greco-Roman mythology and history, and the glosses that accumulated around its mythological narratives reflect the extent to which the original Latin sources had been modified by Christian encyclopedists and interpreters. To read a myth was not to read only the myth, but also to read the history of interpretation that informed its transmission; in the case of the Consolatio, the material reality of the text meant that previous interpretationsin the form of glosses, explications, and moralistic interpretationsinevitably accompanied the readers experience of the work.37 Despite the authority the Consolatio provided, in terms of the acceptability of using myths to expound on important philosophical themes, the Anglo-Saxons who translated the Boethius display typical Gregorian hesitance about the value of pagan stories in the pursuit of truth. Chapter 35, which is primarily concerned with learning to look inward for innate goodness and truth, includes also the ealde lease spell of Jupiter overthrowing Saturn and the giants warring against Heaven, as a warning against the

Carolingian Europe, including the Institutes of Cassiodorus and Isidores Etymologiae, as well as Bedes Expositio in Apocalypsis and Hrabanus Maurus De institutione clericorum. Janet Bately, Those Books That Are Most Necessary for All Men to Know: The Classics and Late Ninth-Century England, a Reappraisal, in The Classics in the Middle Ages, pp. 45-78, at 48. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth, 1; for the Consolatio glosses treatment of myth, see Bolton, Remigian Commentaries, pp. 45-46.
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prideful defiance of Gods will, paired alongside the sospell of Nimrod and the Tower of Babylon (35.117-40). A little later, Wisdom reminds Boethius that the stories which she has told him throughout their discussion serve a specific pedagogical function, and must be understood in particular ways: eah we nu scylon manega and mistlice bisna and bispell reccan, eah hanga ure mode ealne weg on am e we fterspiria. Ne fo we na on a bisena and on bispell for ara leasana spella lufana, ac foram e we woldan mid gebeacnian a sofstnesse, and woldon t hit wurde to nytte am geherendon. (35.185-89) [Although we may now relate many and various examples and sayings, nevertheless our mind remains always on that which we pursue. We do not enjoy the examples and sayings on account of the love of false tales, but because we want to signify righteousness by them, and desire that it be useful to the hearer.] The concern over usefulness echoes Augustines concern in De doctrina over the distinction between use and enjoyment: that one not enjoy something, in this case a pagan story, for its own sake, but rather put it to some good work.38 Wisdom acknowledges the possible proliferation of storiesand, this late in the game, the many and various narratives he has already toldbut warns Boethius that the mind must continually keep before it the true object of its search. Exempla could provide aid in that search by providing handy, and adaptable, illustrations of correct action, or (as in the case of the tale of Ulysses and Circe), a dramatizing of abstract discussion. However, the exemplum should be suited to its purpose, and not be thrown in willy-nilly: Ic gemunde nu rihte s wisan Platones lara suma, hu he cw t se mon e bispell secgan wolde, ne sceolde fon on to ungelic bispell re sprce e he

So also Hrabanus Maurus, De clericorum institutione, which borrowed and adapted from De doctrina; as quoted in Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth, 2: In the same way, if, when we read the pagan poets, [or] when books of secular wisdom come into our hands, we discover in them something that is useful, we have to turn it into our dogma; if there is something superfluous about idols, love or the cares for this world, we have to erase it (3.18).

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onne sprecan wolde. (35.190-92) [I now correctly remember a teaching of the wise Plato, how he said that a man who wishes to give an example should not choose an example unlike the lesson which he wishes to tell.] The translator argues that the decision to insert exempla into texts must always keep in mind the objective of the lesson. Narrative, in taking a back seat to instruction, had therefore to be tailored to the goal the instructor sought, and such tailoring required a certain amount of interpretation and evaluation. Interpretive practices that had ethical goals in mind formed the basis not only for exegesis, but for the tradition of exemplary narrative, in which storieswhether Christian or pagan, historical or fictionalserved to introduce readers to the possibility of personal change. One of the vehicles through which such improvementand in the case of the Boethius, specifically selfimprovementis made possible is the numerous exempla the Boethius, and its source, deploy. The exempluma (usually) short narrative told to illustrate a moral or ethical pointhad a well-established history in the Christian West by the Anglo-Saxon period and throughout the Middle Ages. Exempla were not static narratives; rather, they were an almost infinitely flexible device, able to stretch to accommodate almost any meaning a writer or reader wished to invest it with. Such flexibility allowed the creation of a corpus of moralized or moralizing literature, embracing commentaries on classical poetry, bestiaries, homilies, and incidental incorporations of illustrative tales in longer works such as the Consolatio. Although modern readers take a dim view of such literature, as Mary Carruthers and J. Allan Mitchell have argued, such works were composed not necessarily for preaching, but as part of a hermeneutic exercise meant to transform the

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reader in some way.39 Ideally, this transformation would be not only moral, but ethical; that is, the realization of the text in the world. It is in the exemplum that we find illustrations of ethical principles, where we recognize what we should be doing40or, perhaps, should not be doing. The exemplary narrative takes its strength and authority from its expectation that readers can be persuaded to act according to its prescripts, to emulate the protagonists moral success, or avoid his or her moral failure. It persuades by conveying a sense of communal identity with its moral lesson.41 As a story, the exemplum is intimately related to the premise behind Benjamins The Storyteller, in which all stories bear the trace of earlier communicative goals, and the art of storytelling is the art of exchanging experience, the popular exercise of practical wisdom.42 The exemplum is, as Paul Ricoeur writes of narrative in general, the first laboratory of moral judgment, where the reciprocal constitution of action and self is played out and made available for assessment; because of this, Ricoeur writes, there is no ethically neutral narrative. Literature is a vast laboratory in which we experiment with estimations, evaluations, and judgments of approval and condemnation through which narrativity

For Carrutherss extensive discussion of memory, ethics, and medieval reading practices see The Book of Memory, esp. 156-88 on memory and the ethics of reading , and The Craft of Thought; J. Allan Mitchell, Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), esp. 121. J. Allen Mitchell, Gower for Example: Confessio Amantis and the Ethics of Exemplarity, Exemplaria 16 (2004): 203-34, at 207 n. 9. Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 35. Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller, trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 89-103); qtd. In Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 163-64.
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serves as a propaedeutic to ethics.43 That is, because the ethical freight of the text had to be picked up by the reader, the exemplum is free to assume different meanings, depending on the need of the text in which it is employed. In the exempla discussed below, the ethical thrust of the narrative focuses on self-governance and its relationship to ethical behavior, as well as to virtuous self-formation. In particular, I look at the exempla that oppose the virtuous counselor to the wicked tyrant, in order to elucidate the simultaneously interior and exterior nature of virtue (as well as vice), as well as to provide examples of how the narratives condense the vast body of knowledge and philosophical demands of the Boethius at large.

5.3 Knowledge and Self-rule in the Boethius The word anweald in the Boethius possesses a multiplicity of meanings; while the general sense is of power or authority, the type of power denoted shifts between that exercised in the world and that exercised within the self. Anweald belongs to the list of the five good things Wisdom enumerates, along with weorscip, formrnes, genyht, and blis (or, alternately, wela and willa), and which he interrogates as part of his inquiry into the nature of the true good. It very often refers to worldly or secular power, the authority of kings, as in much of the discussion of Boethius 16 and 17, in which Wisdom is interested in exploring the problems of power and its possession. True power, according to Wisdom, is cultivated first within, and then acquired without: he who desires fullice anweald, complete or perfect power, sceal tiligan rest t he hbbe anweald his
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agenes modes [must first work so that he has power over his own mind], by preventing himself from becoming enslaved to vice (29.77-80). Moving even more fully within the self, Wisdom asserts that anwealdperhaps as capability or facultyis necessary for any man to do anything: Twa ing sindon e lces monnes ingeonc to funda, t is onne willa and andweald [There are two things which are found in the mind of every man, that is, desire and ability] (36.76-77). Wisdom is primarily interested in the ability to find, and obtain, true happiness; in this sense, interior power which is properly directed will allow the good person access to more power than the wickedest tyrant (36.60-73). For the aristocratic Mod, the possession of anweald means the possession of worldly power, power over himself, and power to achieve true happiness. The first, in Wisdoms understanding of what constitutes true, or effective, power, is strongly conditioned on possession of the second and third. In the early stages of their discussion, Wisdom and Mod engage in a critique of Mods relationship to the political office he holds; the misdirected nature of his desire to rule wellthe desire for postmortem praise, rather than the desire to exercise his wisdom as suchforms one of the bases for Wisdoms castigations of Mods forgetfulness. As a prolegomenon to this discussion, Wisdom points out that power qua power is not good, for it comes to bad men (who abuse it) as easily as it comes to good; a man does not arrive at virtue and moderation because of his power (rice)rather, he acquires because of his virtue and moderation (16.28-30). Because power in and of itself cannot improve a man, Wisdom says, the preferable strategy is to improve ones mind: i ne bi nan mon for his anwealde na e betere, ac for his crftum he bi god gif he god bi, and for his crftum he bi anwealdes weore gif he his weore bi. Leornia foram wisdom, and onne ge hine geleornod habban ne forhogia hine 221

onne. onne secge ic eow buton lcum tweon t ge magon urh hine becuman to anwealde eah ge no s anwealdes ne wilnigan. (Boethius 16.31-36) [Thus, no man is any better on account of his power, but he is good because of his virtue, if he is good, and because of his virtues he is worthy of power if he is worthy of it. Therefore, acquire wisdom, and when you have gotten it do not scorn it. Then I say to you, without any doubt, that you may come to power through it although you do not desire power.] As Godden and Irvine note, Wisdoms declaration that the acquisition of wisdom leads in turn to the acquisition of power (even undesired power), is somewhat remarkable in light of the fact that the protagonist, a man who has spent his life acquiring knowledge, is now in the most powerless position conceivable.44 There is no clear precedent for the passage in the Consolatio; instead, Godden and Irvine hypothesize that Wisdoms equation of knowledge and power derives from traditions of sapiential kingship, in which royal authority is enhanced or made legitimate by the pursuit of divine wisdom.45 Pratt sees the passage as a fusion of Gregorian and Solomonic traditions of kingship, in which the pursuit of wisdom, as the highest crft, signals ones deservingness of power and ability to direct it properly.46 The passage, to emphasize its point that power does not necessarily

Godden and Irvine, eds., Boethius 2.309. There is also the fact of Boethiuss biography: he was born into the ruling class, with the expectation that he would attain prominence in public office. See n. 1 above. The relevant passage is probably Wisdom 7:11, when Solomon, speaking of Wisdom, says uenerunt autem mihi omnia bona pariter cum illa et innumerabilis honestas per manus illius [Now all good things came to me together with (Wisdom), and innumerable riches through her hands]. There is also, perhaps, a hint of Gregorian reluctance in the compulsion of the wise man, in spite of his desire otherwise, to accept political power: Plerique, ait sanctus Heronimus, ad sacerdotium erecti quando plus pro animi humilitate repugnant, tanto magis in se omni studio concitant, eoque digniores fiunt quo se fatentur indignos; et hoc merito [St. Jerome says of those who are promoted to a sacred office that the more they resist it because of their humility of spirit, the more they arouse themselves to every exertion and become the worthier in proportion as they declare their own unworthiness] (Bertram Colgrave, The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great [Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas, 1968; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], 86-89).
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correlate to goodness, is bracketed by several examples of grossly undeserving men who have attained the pinnacle of authority: Theodoric and Nero are both considered to be the wyrrestan men (16.8-11) despite their high office, as well as the proud Tarquin who is stripped of his kingship (16.16-18), and later the examples of the tyrant who torments Liberius and the tyrants Bosiris and Regulus (16.60-83), who end up stripped of their power.47 Numerous other passages in the Boethius draw on the figure of the rex iniustus, the unjust king whose depravity serves to destroy others as well as himself, and whose example demonstrates the extent to which the failure of self-governance in a ruler could result in disaster for those who displease him, as well as innocent bystanders. In this sense, the Boethius is critical of kingship and royal authority, as Godden suggests in Did King Alfred Write Anything?;48 the tyrantwhom Wisdom refers to as an ofermod cyning or unriht cyningoften takes out his (impotent) fury on his counselors, whose wisdom and probity, even if temporarily defeated by their brutal murder, win out when the counselors are celebrated for their virtue in the face of cruelty. However, the Boethiuseven if it is skeptical of royal authority as suchis more just as concerned with the abuse of a good thing and turning it to evil. It is at this point that the Boethius contests royal authority: the subversion of secular power is perhaps not so much

The example of Liberius, which will be discussed more fully later, corresponds to Consolatio 2.pr.6, 23-38 and the tale of the tyrant Neararchus. The tyrant is similarly unnamed in the Latin. Godden, Did King Alfred Write Anything? p. 18. The other criticisms Wisdom levels at royal power have to do with the inability of worldly sovereignty to secure happiness, as well as the fact that profoundly unworthy individuals (such as Nero and the other tyrants who appear throughout) can acquire it but are not automatically the better for having it.
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subversion as control, with authors of ethical texts (or texts that can be read as ethical guides, such as the Consolatio and Boethius) placing checks on the unrestrained and potentially damaging exercise of absolute authority. For the Carolingians, and later for the Anglo-Saxons, sapiential kingship could be tied not only to the general exercise of virtueand particularly to the set of virtues (patientia, clementia, fortitudo, iustitia, temperantia, and so on) that defined ideal kingly behaviorbut also to learning and the acquisition of wisdom, as well as the promotion of intellectual pursuits in his kingdom at large.49 The kings personal pursuit of wisdom, particularly divine wisdomthat of the Scriptures and perhaps the fatherswas a sign of his election, a property of the ideal king, or rex pacificus, whose rule would benefit and strengthen his people. Charlemagne was praised by Alcuin and later biographers for his devotion to learning, as well as his interest in reviving Latin intellectual culture.50 In his letter to Offa of Mercia, Alcuin advises Offa that, in addition to the usual virtues practiced by a king, the desire to read (intentio lectionis) was one of the many honors albeit more spiritual than mostthat decorated the Mercian king:

Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great, 270-80 discusses the nature of sapiential kingship in West Francia as derived from glosses on the Consolatio, as well as the application of the Consolatio to theories of power. Einhards Vita Karoli praises Charlemagne for his devotion to the liberal arts, as well as his piety: Artes liberales studiosissime coluit, earumque doctores plurimum veneratus magnis adficiebat honoribus [He most zealously cultivated the liberal arts, and rewarded those who taught them with great honors] (ed. G. Waitz, MGH s.s. rer. Ger. 25 [Hanover, 1911], p. 30). Moreover, Einhard also cites him for his work on the improvement of the liturgy: Legendi atque psallendi disciplinam diligentissime emendauit. Erat enim utriusque admodum eruditus, quamquam ipse nec publice legeret nec nisi submissim et in commune cantaret [He also most diligently reformed the discipline of reading and psalmody, for he was very skilled in both, although he did not read nor sing publicly, except in a low voice and with other people] (p. 31).
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It pleases me greatly, how much you have the desire to read, that the light of wisdom may shine in your kingdom, as it is extinguished in many places. You are the ornament of Britain, the trumpet of preaching, the sword against its enemies, the shield against its foes.51 Alcuins reference to Offas preaching may indicate the role the kings scholarly rectitude played in setting an example for his followers: even if they themselves were not lettered, the kings subjects took their lessontheir sermon, as it werefrom the kings upright behavior.52 Hrabanus Maurus, writing to Louis of Francia, admonished his royal correspondent to devote himself to the study of divine wisdom before all other things (ante omnia semper studium sit tibi ad discendam sapientiam diuinam), for the benefit of both himself and his subjects; doing so, Hrabanus writes, will allow Louis to rule and lead his people in the path of truth (regere et in uiam ueritatis ducere conaris).53 The list of Carolingian authors writing to kings and aristocrats, adjuring them to, if not abandon the things of this world, then recognize the priority of divinely-ordained

Et ualde mihi placet, quod tantum habetis intentionem lectionis, ut lumen sapientiae luceat in regno uestro, quod multis modo extinguitur in locis. Vos estis decus Britanniae, tuba praedicationis, gladius contra hostes, scutum contra inimicos (Epistola XLIX ad Offam, PL 100., at 214A-B). Although I have translated lectio as read, Alcuin may also be referring to Offas intention to listen to readings of holy scripture, the lectio that was characteristic of liturgical practice. In his De uirtitibus et uitiis, Alcuin extols the reading of Scripture as the cognitio beatitudinis, the recognition of blessedness, for Labor honestus est lectionis studium, et multum ad emundationem animae proficit. Sicut enim ex carnalibus escis alitur caro, ita ex diuinis eloquiis interior homo nutritur et pascitur, sicut Psalmista ait: Quam dulcia faucicibus meis eloquia tua, Domine! super mel et fauum ori meo [The study of reading is an honorable task, and adds much to the improvement of the soul. For as the flesh is nourished by dishes of meat, so the interior man is nourished ad fed by divine eloquence, as the Psalmist says: How sweet are thy words to my palate! more than honey to my mouth!] (ch. 5; PL 101.614C-38D, at 616D-17A). For discssion of the reading-asnourishment metaphor, see Chapter Three, n. pp. 141-44. Gerd Althoff, Ira regis: A History of Royal Anger, in Angers Past: The Social Uses of An Emotion in The Middle Ages, ed. Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 59-74, at 66. Hrabanus Maurus, De uniuerso, PL 111.12B. The De uniuerso is not so much a speculum principum as it is an encylopedic exegesis on the mystical significance of the created world. However, Hrabanuss opening remarks to Louis suggest that it was also in the princes best (spiritual) interests to examine the world in similar ways.
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intellectual pursuits, is quite lengthy. Multiple writers called their patrons to the path of truth: Cathulf to Charlemagne (Epistola, c. 770), Alcuin to Wido of Brittany (De uirtutibus et uitiis, c. 795), Offa, Charlemagne and others, Smaragdus of San-Mihiel to Louis the Pious (Via regia, 813), John of Orlans to Pippin of Aquitaine (De institutione regia, 831), and Sedulius Scottus to Lothar II (De rectoribus christianis, c. 850), all drew on, even as they developed, traditions that emphasized the relationship between wisdom, self-rule, and the rule of the state.54 The roots of the Carolingian speculum principis lie deep in both Scriptural and classical traditions; sapiential texts such as the Book of Wisdom, in which Solomonthe prototypical wise kingextols wisdom above earthly honors, and the secondhand reception of Platonic educational ideals, were combined to generate forms of kingship that stressed self-governance, and the role of knowledge in such governance, as the predicate to true or legitimate political authority.55 As Stuart

The bibliography on the Carolingian speculum is vast. See, among others, Hans Hubert Anton, Frstenspiegel und Herrscherethos in der Karolingerzeit, Bonner Historische Forschungen 32 (Bonn: Rhrscheid, 1968); Luned Mair Davies, Sedulius Scottus: Liber de rectoribus Christianis, a Carolingian or Hibernian Mirror for Princes, Studia Celtica, 26-27 (1993): 34-50; Matthias Becher, Eid und Herrschaft: Untersuchungen zum Herrscherethos Karls des Groen , Vortrge und Untersuchungen 39 (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1993); Marta Cristiani, Ego sapientia, habito in consilio, Proverbia VIII, 1216 nella teologia politica carolingia, in Consilium: Teorie e pratiche del consigliare nella cultura medievale, ed. Carla Casagrande, Chiara Crisciani and Silvana Vecchio (Florence: SISMEL, 2004), pp. 125-38; Rob Meens, Politics, Mirrors of Princes, and the Bible: Sins, Kings and the Well-Being of the Realm, Early Medieval Europe 7 (1998): 345-57; Hans-Werner Goetz, Selbstdisziplin als mittelalterliche Herrschertugend, in Vorstellungsgeschichte: Gesammelte Schriften zu Wahrnehmungen, Deutungen und Vorstellungen im Mittelalter, ed. Anna Aurast, Simon Elling, Bele Freudenberg, Anja Lutz, and Steffen Patzold (Bochum: Winkler, 2007), pp. 329-51. For the Prouerbia Graecorum, a collection of sayings which influenced Sedulius Scottus and Asser, see Charles D. Wright, The Prouerbia Grecorum, the Norman Anonymous, and the Early Medieval Ideology of Kingship,in Insignis Sophiae Arcator: Essays in Honour of Michael W. Herren on His 65th Birthday, ed. Gernot R. Wieland, Carin Ruff, and Ross G. Arthur (Turnholt: Brepols, 2006), pp. 193-215 and Michael Lapidge, Assers Reading, in Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conference, ed. Timothy Reuter (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 27-46, at 42-43. Augustine, De ciuitate Dei 5.24 provides one of the earliest explicitly Christian articulations of the rex iustus. Peaceful kings are happy not because they are powerful or rule a peaceful realm, but because they rule justly (iuste imperant), are not excessively prideful but remember they are men (se homines esse
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Airlie and David Pratt have written, the association of wisdom, learning, and kingship provided models for the fusion of political and intellectual authority: knowledge, quite literally, was power.56 Fundamentally, the aristocrats virtue and wisdom was a public, not merely private, performance: if a blessed man is one who studies the scripture, Alcuin says to Wido of Brittany, ille beatissimus est, qui diuinas Scripturas legens, uerba uertit in opera [he is most bessed, who, reading the divine Scriptures, turns words into deeds] (De uirtutibus et uitiis, ch. 5).57 The aristocrat served as the exemplum which modeled those virtues God expects of all individuals, but it was further expected that the aristocrats self-governance resulted in tangible benefits to the realm: the good king, particularly the self-consciously wise good king, guaranteed a felix populus, in addition to

meminerunt) in the face of praise, if they rule for Gods sake and not their own, if they are slow to punish and swift to pardon (si tardius uindicant, facile ignoscunt), and malunt cupiditatibus prauiis quam quibuslibet gentibus imperare et si haec omnia faciunt non propter ardorem inanis gloriae, sed propter caritatem felicitatis aeternae; si pro suis peccatis humilitatis et miserationis et orationis sacrificium Deo suo uero immolare non neglegunt [if they would rather govern wicked desires than any nation a t all; and if they do these things not through any desire for useless glory, but for the love of eternal bliss, and if they do not neglect to offer to their true God, on account of their sins, the sacrifices of humility, contrition, and prayer]. The pursuit of virtue for the sake of eternal reward, as opposed to the praise of men, is one thing Wisdom admonishes Mod for failing to do; see Chapter Four, pp. 168-74 for discussion. The notion is also Gregorian; see Discenza, The Influence of Gregory the Great on the Alfredian Social Imaginary, pp. 6782, and Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great, p. 285. Stuart Airlie, The Palace of Memory: The Carolingian Court as Political Centre, in Courts and Regions in Medieval Europe, ed. Sarah Rees Jones, Richard Marks, and A.J. Minnis (York: York Medieval Press, 2007), pp. 1-20; Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great, 288-90. The tension between private and public life runs throughout, for example, Einhards Vita Karoli and Assers Vita Alfredi; in biographies such as that of Gerald of Aurillac by Odo of Cluny, there is often an anxious balance between the pious, aristocratic laypersons desire for retirement and the exigencies of politics and the world; see, for example, Janet Nelson, Monks, Secular Men and Masculinity, c. 900, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. D.M. Hadley (London and New York: Longman, 1999), pp. 120-43.
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his own happiness.58 It may be that Mods desire in Boethius 17 isat least as he understands itto serve as such an example: by living well in this life, he not only leads by example but leaves one for those coming after in the gemynd on godum worcum [memory in good works] (17.26-28) that future generations will have of him. Like its predecessors in the speculum principis tradition, the Boethius is as concerned with the public man as it is with the private. The need to possess the tools of the trade necessary to govern exists in a delicate balance with the potential for aristocratic acquisitiveness and greed against which Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon clerics inveighed. In the Boethius, self-care involves the prioritizing of self-evaluation as the root of ethically-informed behavior: rigorous self-examination and self-awareness, frequently pressed upon Mod throughout the text, is the beginning of virtuous action. The obverse of this is, naturally, the assertion that blindness to ones motivations gives rise to immoral or unethical behavior. At the same time, its exempla (particularly that of Liberius, discussion of which follows) are rooted in the understanding that philosophical introspection had to be balanced with the demands of publicand publicly masculine patterns of behavior, and that to fail at introspection carried with it consequences both personal and social.

Alcuin, Epistola CCXXIX ad Carolum Magnum, PL 100.364C-68B. borrows heavily from Platonic ideals of the philosopher-king for his image of the happy state: Felix populus qui a sapiente et pio regitur principe; sicut in illo Platonico legito prouerbio, dicentis: Felicia esse regna, si philosophi, id est, amatores sapientiae regnarent, uel reges philosophiae studerent: quia nihil sapientiae in hoc mundo comparari poterit [It is a happy nation that is ruled by a wise and pious king; for, as it has been read in a saying of Plato, A kingdom is happy if philosophers (that is, lovers of wisdom) rule, or if kings st udy philosophy; because nothing in this world can be compared to wisdom] (100.364C).

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5.3.1 The Work of Interpretation: Unpacking the Liberius Exemplum Unlike Boethius, the Anglo-Saxon translator was not writing from prison; further, he was also writing for a group of people that was ostensibly very much involved (perhaps, in his view, over-involved) in the vagaries of the world. As Malcolm Godden has noted, modifications to the Latin suggest that the translation was executed for the edification of royal counselors or students who aspired to high secular office individuals who had little interest in the complete abandonment of the world.59 Such divergence from Boethiuss fatalistic disinterest is evident in the exemplum I would like to consider now, the story of the tyrant Nearchus and his nemesis, the philosopher Zeno. The story comes up as part of Wisdoms discussion of the weakness of the body compared to the mind, and the (relatively feeble) ability of one man to harm another in his body, while the mind remains invulnerable: Ne nan mon mg am gesceadwisan mode gederian, ne him gedon t hit ne sie t t hit bi. t is swie sweotol to ongitanne be sumum Romaniscum elinge se ws haten Liberius, se was to manegum witum geworht foram e he nolde meldian on his geferan e mid him sieredon ymbe one cyning e hie r mid unrihte gewunnen hfde. a he a beforan one graman cyning geld ws and he hine secgan hwt his geferan wron e mid him ymbe sieredon, a forceaw he his tungan and wearp hine rmid on t neb foran. Foram hit gewear t am wisan men com to lofe and to wyrscipe t se unrihtwisa cyning him teohhode to wite. (16.58-68)60

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Godden, Identification and Self-Representation in Alfreds Writings, pp. 137-50.

On the translation: the Consolatio does not supply the names of the king or the philosopher; the story is related elsewhere, by Diogenes Laertius. The Old English supplies the name Liberius, possibly a result of the translators misunderstanding of the adjective liberum to be a proper name. On the other hand, the translator may have been reading the passage allegorically, which would have lent him the idea to name his hero the free man, whose virtue, in allowing him access to power, is opposed toand conquersthe anonymous tyrant who is enslaved to vice. As such, referring to the protagonist as Liberius could be, rather than a mistake, a deliberate interpretive move.

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[No man can harm the rational mind, nor cause it not to be what it is. This can be understood very clearly (in the example of) a certain Roman nobleman who was called Liberius, who was condemned to many torments because he refused to give up his companions who were conspiring with him against the king who had unjustly opposed them. Then, when he was led before the king, and he [the king] ordered him to say who his allies were, the ones who were in league with him, then he bit off his tongue and threw it at the kings face. Because of this the wise man acquired praise and honor, such that the wicked king dragged him off to torture.] The exemplum reads somewhat differently in the Old English. The passage does not expand significantly on the Latin; much of the additional length is accounted for by the translators decision to repeat the mention of the co-conspirators. There are two differences, however, that I would like to draw out a little more: the Old Englishs specific interest in the rational mind and the lesson drawn from the exemplum. In the latter, where Boethius uses Zeno as the model philosopher, who turns his torment into an opportunity for virtue, the Anglo-Saxon translator gives Liberius the chance to exercise virtue and win fame and honor for doing it. The mention of lof, praise or honor, may have been meant as the carrot, the bribe to convince skeptical young noblemen that virtue had rewards other than itself. However, it also emphasizes the public nature of the virtuous act; where Boethiuss Zeno is presumably satisfied with the virtue of biting off his tongue rather than ratting out his colleagues, the Anglo-Saxons Liberius has the additional satisfaction of knowing that his virtuous act will also redound to his greater glory. The rational, inviolate mind that cannot be harmed and the public nature of virtue bookend the Anglo-Saxon exemplum as two unified halves of a wholly-realized human being. Behind these two imagesthe mind that thinks and the body that actslies one of the objectives of the Boethius, which is geared toward the recovery of that rational mind and, consequently, the recovery of the individuals ability to be and act virtuously. I want 230

first to recapitulate the nature of the gesceadwis mod, the rational mind, by discussing what sorts of things are found in the interior, and what parts of inwardness were important to the Boethius conception of what constituted fully-realized selfhood. I will then turn to a consideration of how virtue as behavior is cultivated, and how the publication of ones interiority is a necessary corollary to virtuous interiority. Last, I will discuss how the example of Liberius is not only an instance of textual transformation that is, the deliberate alteration of narrative and ethical aimbut part of the Boethius larger interest in radically transforming and re-orienting the interiority of its readers. The lessons of the Boethius begin on the inside: reflexivity in the Boethius consists in recovering truths of Mods existence: namely, properties that allow it to be a discerning and aware entityit is what allows the mind to become an agent, as we will see when we discuss the second part of the Liberius exemplum. Wisdoms urgings to selfscrutiny all have as their goal the recovery of innate properties; answers are found within a deeper, stable self, an inalienable property and not subject to the whims of fate or fortune. The self is not the bodywhich can be harmed, become ill, and otherwise be subject to the various cruelties of the worldbut rather is partially constituted by a set of interior possessions that one can never be deprived of except through ones own forgetfulness. Such properties are not only permanent, they are divine: whoever exercises the faculties of perception, memory, and rational desire also possesses likeness to God, the similitudo Dei that Augustine pursues throughout the Confessiones and De trinitate.61

Hwt, ge onne eah hwthwega godcundlices on eowerre saule habba, t is andgit and gemynd and se gesceadwislica willa t hine ara twega lyste. Se e onne as reo hf, onne hf he his sceoppendes onlicnesse, swa for swa swa negu gesceaft furemest mg hiere sceppendes onlicnesse

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Behind the gesceadwislic mod of Liberius, then, lies a set of assumptions about what the mind is, and how the mind is best actualized. The rational mind is the mind that has reflected on itself, that knows what it is and knows that one of its properties is that it is autonomous in the sense that it cannot be made subject to the power of others. Wisdoms numerous disquisitions on the nature of anweald, and who possesses the earthly semblance of it and who possesses the truth of it, make that clear. Liberius, as a wise man and philosopher, stands as the exemplum of such rationality. The reflexivity of the Boethius is, on one hand, a natural operation of the soul; on the other, it is a learned and difficult process. The natural impulse of the soul is toward contemplation and self-involvement. Like a wheel, the soul turns or revolves within itself, contemplating its own nature, a movement that is as natural and perpetual as the orbit of heaven (33.225-28). On the other hand, such contemplation does not seem to be wholly involuntary; self-reflection necessitates the rejection of the external world and its preoccupations: one has to want to do it. By actively rejecting external distractions and the uselessness that has preoccupied hima rejection that has to be willedthe individual can perceive his own ingeanchis own interiority, the disposition of his thoughts, the divinity that his mind resembles. The self is never automatically, fully aware of either itself or the full potential of its faculties; instead, these potentialities must be brought out by the exercise of reflection and memory. The soul has the kernel of reason in it, something that inheres in every individual, but the seed is latent: it requires

habban [Indeed, you have something divine in your soul, that is perception and memory and rational will that is pleased with these two things. He who has these three things has his creators likeness, as much as any creature can have its creators likeness] (14.76 -80).

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reflection and study in order to grow. The seed of memory has the potential to flower into virtue, as the self begins to recover knowledge of the things that make it humannot biographical knowledge, or knowledge of its own particularity, but the tools of reason, perception, and memory that allow it to evaluate itself insofar as it is able to do so. The second part of the exemplum of Liberius has to do with the worldly life, concerned as it is with the acquisition of praiseor specifically the virtuous behavior for which Liberius earns praise and honor. Doing virtue involved not only the simple fact of action, but the motivations that lay behind the performance. Such motivations were, by necessity, open to scrutiny. As mentioned earlier, it is possible that the Boethius modification to the Latin to have Liberius earn praise and honor instead of merely using his self-mutilation as an occasion for virtue was meant to appeal to secular readers who would either be unimpressed by virtue for its own sake, or who would have appreciated the willingness to embrace pain in the face of overwhelming odds. Alongside the more immediate appeal to the sensibilities of its readers, the exemplum of Liberius also seeks to render those readers attentum, docilem, beniuolem to additional instruction, namely the possibility that truly praiseworthy action is driven by motivations that are properly oriented. A Foucauldian reading of the Liberius exemplum and its immediate context points to the association of self-awareness with self-care, the obligation incumbent on each individual to decipher his inner thoughts, a type of self-examination advanced first by John Cassian in the fifth century, and by Gregory the Great in the sixth, in which the hermeneutics of the self takes the shape of the decipherment of inner thoughts, the implication that there is something hidden in ourselves and that we are always in a self233

illusion which hides the secret.62 Such fragmentation lies at the heart of the Boethius, in which the mind is first estranged from itself, ignorant of what it is, and can only gradually come to a fuller understanding of itself. The example of Liberius is particularly appropriate to Mods own circumstances and biography; indeed, it anticipates Mods failed attempt to make an exemplum of himself, which comes about a hundred lines later. Mods personal theory of governance has already been discussed in Chapter Four, as well as the faulty or problematic desires that impel him to rule well and live virtuously. Unlike the philosopher, who attains anweald without looking for it, Mod seems to have wanted authority for the sole purpose of not being forgotten, so that my virtues and authority should not be forgotten and concealed, because every virtue and power is soon diminished and silenced, if it is without wisdomTo say it briefly, I desired to live honorably while I lived, and after my life leave my memory in good works to the men who came after me (17.26-28). Wisdom, as said, asserts that Mods motivations are problematic, and that in his drive for praise, he has abandoned the virtues of your ingeonc and your perception and your reasonthe interior properties that make selfreflection possible.63 Unlike Liberius, then, whose fame is a sort of bonus over and above the virtue that makes it possible for him to bite off his own tongue, Mod is guilty of making fame the primary motivator of his actions. The correction of this misapprehension has to come through rigorous self-examination, the excavation of the drives and impulses that lie deep beneath the shell of his justification. Instead of chasing

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Foucault, Technologies of the Self, p. 46. Translating Consolatio 2.pr.7, 19: conscientiae uirtutisque.

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after good repute, Mod must learn to look for his reward from Godwhose opinion is, needless to say, somewhat more important. Wisdoms disquisition on the questionable good of praise is rather lengthy. By the end of it, however, Mod is ready to hear more. Wisdom remarks, Ic ongeat sona, a u swa wel swugodest and swa lustlice geherdest mine lare, t u woldest mid inneweardan mode hi ongiton and smeagean [I quickly perceived, when you kept silent and heard my teaching so happily, that you desired to perceive and contemplate it with your inward mind] (22.17-19). Wisdoms use of the inward mind, inneweard mod, suggests that Wisdoms words are acting at that deep level, down beneath the surface where Foucault argues technologies or hermeneutics of the self must dig. Rigorous selfexamination in this context, however, does not seem to lead to the self-abnegation Foucault associates with early Christian monastic or confessorial practicesthat is, the equation of disclosing the self with the selfs simultaneous dissolutionbut rather to a transformation that is closer to the Stoic antecedents that shaped much of the Consolatios own philosophy. That is, Stoic self-examination and judgment was part of a mental and physical discipline that showed the way to self-knowledge by superimposing truth about the self through memory, through memorization of codes of conduct.64 In the case of misdirected Mod, the way to self-knowledge has to be repaved with better intentions, to be guided by his effort to know himself.

Foucault, Technologies of the Self, 32-35. In the Boethius, the ethical exempla may also be geared toward forcing Mod to reconsider his motivations, which are admittedly murky; along with providing codes of behavior, they provide Mod the opportunity to assess himself and his motives, insofar as is possible.

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The example of Liberius contains, in miniature, the larger philosophical and ethical issues of the Boethius, as well as an illustration of how philosophy had as its ends deeply practical and immediate concerns: it was as much praxis, if not more so, than theoria. In Liberius, Wisdom achieves a figure whose rationality is grounded in the successful completion of a course of self-study, and whose very name demonstrates the freedom associated with the liberation of the mind from the vice that restrains it from pursuing virtue. Moreover, the infliction of pain on Liberiuss bodypain inflicted by Liberius himselfdemonstrates the extent to which the rational mind disregards the pain of the flesh, and knows it to be secondary to its own integrity. The praise Liberius achieves is not the goal toward which he strives, but rather the result of his being made into an exemplum of probity and uprightness in the face of tyrannical abuses. Mod, who still misunderstands himself, is clearly meant to take Liberius as his example, to recognize that praise should be considered a secondary good, contingent upon actions that arise from a mind that is driven first (and only) by the pursuit of virtue. There may also be a subtle reminder not to go down the path of Nearchus, Bosiris, and Regulus. The exempla of the latter two tyrantsBosiris is drowned in the Nile by Hercules and Regulus is captured by the Africans he had only just finished slaughteringfurther demonstrate the uselessness of possessing power that does not have a firm foundation in the crftas of virtue and wisdom. Taken together, the exempla of Liberius and the humiliated Bosiris and Regulus serve to introduceperhaps to sweeten the next part of Wisdoms lesson, on the fickleness of power and praise, and later, the questionable good of wealth.

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5.3.2 The Rex Insipiens and the Negative Exemplum Both the Consolatio and Boethius are infested with bad leaders, many of whom meet bad ends as the result of their behavior. The most vivid example of these is the retelling of the myth of Orpheus (Consolatio 3.m.12; Boethius 35.195-254), in which the harper encounters the souls of the damned kings on his descent into the underworld: Ixion, bound for his guilt (scilde) in attempting to rape Hera, Tantalus for ungemetlice gifre (immeasurable greed), and Tityus the giant, his liver eaten by a vulture as punishment for the rape of Leto, who is also described as king (Boethius 35.231-36).65 Others are punished while still in the flesh: Tarquin is exiled from Rome for his ofermettum (16.16-22), the bloodthirsty Bosiris is drowned in the Nile by Hercules as punishment for his indiscriminate killing of guests, and Regulus, after enslaving the conquered Africans, is enslaved by them in turn (Consolatio 2.pr.6, 10-11; Boethius 16.71-83). The death of Busiris, for that matter, proceeds as either an execution or trial by

The names of the kings, and the specification of Tantaluss sin as immeasurable greed, are derived from the glossarial tradition; see Godden and Irvine, Boethius 2.226 and Wittig, King Alfreds Boethius and Its Latin Sources: A Reconsideration, 172-74. As is sometimes the case, the Boethius expands on a rather more allusive passage in the Consolatio; the Latin meter does not mention the names of the kings or, in the case of Tantalus, clearly correlate their punishments with their crimes. The translator's mention of the helwarena, who guide Orpheus into the presence of Hades, may be intended to emphasize the Old Englishs penitential interpretation of the meter: as leasan spell lra gehwilcne man ara e wilna hell eostra to flionne and to s soan Godes liohte to cumenne, t he hine ne besio to his ealdum yfelum swa t he hi eft swa fullice fullfremme swa he hi r dyde. Foram swa hwa swa mid fullon willan his mod went to am yflum e he r forlet and hi onne fullfreme and hi him onne fullice licia, and he hi nfre forltan ne enc, onne forlyst he eall his rran god buton he hit eft gebete [This fable teaches every one of those who wishes to flee the shadows of hell and come to the light of the true God that he should not look back to his former evil ways so that he commits them as fully as he did before. Because whosoever, with his full desire, devotes his mind to the evils which he earlier abandoned and commits them and they please him completely, and he never thinks to abandon them, then he loses all his former good unless he remedy it] (35.247-54).

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ordeal: Hercules victory is awarded ryhte be Godes dome [by the just judgment of God], a detail not found in the Latin (16.78).66 Elsewhere, other authority figures are accused of excess of desire. Wisdom relates Catulluss castigation of Nonius for excessive luxury (Consolatio 3.pr.4, 2; Boethius 27.12-23), and also devotes the opening of Chapter 37 (Consolatio 4.m.2) to a discussion of the perils of indulgence. In the latter, the use of the tools of rulethe materials necessary for governancebecome the means by which self-governance fails, as the ruler perverts them, and his power to use them, from their intended purpose. Wisdom, elaborating on the Latin, describes this as a descent into impotence, even as the ruler is able to make use of his power to obtain satisfaction for imagined slights: Foram of am unmette and am ungemetlican gegerelan, of am swetmettum and of mislicum dryncum s lies onwcna sio wode rag re wrnnesse and gedref hiora mod swie swilice. onne weaxa eac a ofermetta and ungewrnes, and onne hi weora gebolgen onne wyr t mod beswungen mid am welme re hatheortnesse ot hi weora gerpte mid re unrotnesse and swa gehfte. Sian t onne gedon bi, onne ongin him leogan se tohopa re wrce, and swa hws swa his irsung wilna, onne gehet him s his reccelest. (37.15-24) [Therefore, on account of unnecessary and immoderate clothing, of delicacies and of much imbibing of alcoholic drinks the madness of wantonness awakes and troubles their minds very greatly. Then pride increases, and disquiet, and when they have swelled up then the mind becomes tormented with the surge of anger until they are captured by sorrow and thus made captive. After that happens, then

The nature of the scenario in the Old English seems to be cast as a contest of strength: Busiris intends to drown Hercules in the Nile, but Hercules was the stronger (strengra) and drowned him instead (16.77-78). The contest is reminiscent of Beowulfs battle of strength against Grendel, in which God is judged the arbiter of victory ( Beowulf ll. 442, 685-86). The gloss on which the Old English expansion appears to be based (which itself comes from Orosius) does not include the detail of divine judgment; see J. H. Brinegar, Books Most Necessary: The Literary and Cultural Context of Alfreds Boethius, Ph.D. diss. (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000), 73 and Godden and Irvine, eds., Boethius 2.31112.

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the hope of vengeance begins to deceive them, and so whatever his anger desires, then his heedlessness assures him (that it will bring it about).] The Old English, again, expands imaginatively on the Consolatio, likely drawing from Christian traditions that saw one sin as leading to another, in turn leading to another, and so on; unlike the Consolatio, which imagines lust, anger, sorrow, and hope separately tormenting weak kings, the Boethius envisions immoderate desire as giving way, successively, to further immoderation, pride, anger, and hope of vengeance.67 In the context of kings who turn against their most faithful followersNearchus, Nero, and Antoninus, who all make their advisors sufferthe mention of vengeance suggests the dangerously public ways in which royal anger, and loss of self-control, could express itself.68 The inability of bad kings to do good, their essential powerlessness, does not diminish the dangers of the abuses they perpetrate: alongside Wisdoms critique of this sort of powerless authority is an understanding of the social dangers of power gone wrong.

Godden and Irvine, eds., Boethius 2.435-36. Earlier in the passage, Wisdom expands on the imagery of the kings fine armor and regalia, an implicit criticism of the extent to which royal trappings went beyond their ostensibly utilitarian purpose. Godden and Irvine suggest that the concept of indulgence leading to lust is a commonplace in Christian teaching. The four torments all correlate rather closely with the sins that result from the failure of reason to control desire and anger in Alcuins conception of the soul: Concupiscentia data est homini ad concupiscenda quae sunt utilia, et quae sibi ad salutem proficiant sempiternam. Si uero corrumpitur, nascitur ex ea gastrimargia, fornicatio, et phylargiria. Ira data est ad uitia cohibenda, ne impiis, id est, peccatis, homo seruiat dominis, quia iuxta Domini uocem: Qui facit peccatum, seruus est peccati. Ex qua corrupta, procedit tristitia, et acedia [Desire is given to man to d esire those things which are useful, and which offer perpetual well-being to him. But if it is corrupted, from it are born gluttony, fornication, and avarice. Anger is given for the curbing of sins, lest man serve wicked masters (that is, the vices), for according to the word of the Lord: Who commits sin is the slave of sin. Once corrupted, from [anger] come worldly grief and sloth] ( De animae ratione 4). Pride, according to Alcuin, occurs when there is a failure of reason. Augustine defines anger briefly: Quid est ira? Libido uindicta [What is anger? The desire for vengeance] (Sermo 58; in Sermones de uetere testamento, p. 126).
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Thus, while Wisdoms arguments seek to diminish the importance Mod attaches to worldly power, and in doing so reorient Mods personal definitions of what constitute power or sovereignty, his employment of the exempla of bad kings also demonstrates the consequences that attached to the failure of self-control in an authority figure.69 The rex iniquus et insipiens against whom much of Wisdoms acrimony is directed is Nero, who, in his devotion to the various permutations of sin and crimeadultery, arson, murder, matricide, fratricide, among rather a lot elseembodies the danger reckless power posed to the kings dependents and his subjects, as well as the apex (or nadir) of a failure of self-care. In Boethius 28, Nero is adorned mid eallum am wlitegestum wdum and mid lces cynnes gimmum [with all the most beautiful garments and every kind of jewel], and while he apparently demonstrates largesse to his followers, because he is lces uneawes and firenlustes full [stuffed with every vice and sinful desire], his gifts do more harm than good, when they are considered by a rational man, and he himself is considered hateful and unworthy by the wise men of the world (28.2-8). Meter 15 expands significantly on Wisdoms condemnation of the king: not only is he greedy and rapacious, he is the enemy (se feond) and the most foolish of kings (cyninga dysegast), whose rule is supported by men who are scarcely less foolish (Meter 15.7-15). As the most foolish of kings, who commits his sins for unsnyttrum [for his lack of

Gregory draws a similar lesson from Nebuchadnezzar in Hierdeboc: Swaeah, eah ic nu is recce, ne tle ic na micel weorce ne ryhtne anweald, ac ic tle t hiene mon fory upahebbe on his mode; and a untrymnesse heora heortan ic wolde getrymman and gestieran re wilnunge m unmedemun [Nevertheless, although I now relate this tale, I do not blame the great work (of Babylon) nor power rightly held, but I blame the man because he was raised up in his mind, and I wish to mend the weakness of the hearts and guide the desires of the immoderate] (Schreiber, King Alfreds Old English Translation of Gregory the Greats Regula Pastoralis, 229.2-5).

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wisdom] (Meter 9.11, referring to his attempt to burn down Rome), Neros long catalogue of failings cannot be divorced from his essential stupidity: his failure to reflect on himself and control himself constitutes the core of his failure as a leader. The contests between king and counselorthe wise men (witan) of Rome and the proud Tarquin and consuls; Liberius and Nearchus, Seneca and Nero, Papinianus and Antoninusnot only serve to critique the limits of legitimate authority, but they dramatize the central conflict that lies at the heart of Mods problem by laying before him two alternative ways of behaving. The unruly king represents one possibility, the danger of the failure of self-control.70 While in the Soliloquies the king stands for the correct order of the world, and is implicitly understood as a metaphor for the relationship between the soul and God, in the Boethius the bad king illustrates the extent to which the failure of reason results in the catastrophic disorder of the self.71 On the other hand, the counselor/philosopher not only provides Boethius with examples of endurance in the face of wrongful persecution, but also serves as the representation of what the mind, ruled by reason, is capable of achieving by transcending the immediate evils of its situation and fixing its resolve on higher things. In the case of Liberius, the counselor represents what

Paul E. Szarmach, Alfreds Nero, in Source of Wisdom: Old English and Early Medieval Latin Studies in Honour of Thomas D. Hill, ed. Charles D. Wright, Frederick M. Biggs, and Thomas N. Hall (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 147-67, at 150-51. Szarmach is particularly interested in Meter 9 (Consolatio II.m.6) and its graphic depictions of the excesses of unbridled power. Waterhouse, Tone in Alfreds Version of Augustines Soliloquies, pp. 73-76. The deployment of metaphors of power, writes Waterhouse, shows [Alfreds] awareness of both sides of the lord/comitatus relationship, both in terms of how the lords message makes clear his will, and of how his good will is crucial for the dispensing of gifts, and also o f how the subordinate perceives the fortuitousness of the lords favor, but also how he can love his lord. Thus, the relationship between king and follower, and thus between God and self, is predicated on the stability of the social order, a stability which the narratives of Boethius challenge.
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Mod ought to aspire to be; by listening to and interpreting his example, Mod can better see how closely he may have come to becoming Nero-like in being blind to his own motives for obtaining and keeping power. Recalling Foucault, the central premise of Christian self-care was the perpetual, ongoing process of self-assessment, of excavating ones hidden motives and examining them for underlying sinful impulses. Alongside this approach, particularly in the case of the Boethius, are Stoic technologies of self-care, which, though primarily concerned with the soul, also saw the care of the soul as entailing a care of the body, a holistic mastery of the self. 72 The adjurations of the Boethius to the reader, particularly regarding restraint and moderation in matters of clothing, diet, and the materials of life, point to a theory of self-governance that seeks to balance the exigencies of secular lifeespecially exigencies that attached to social performances expected of the aristocracywith the need for its readers to tread the better paths of wisdom (to borrow a phrase from Mary Alberi) upward to their true home.

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Foucault, Technologies of the Self, p. 35.

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CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION

In the Dialogues, Gregory rediscovers his lost knowledge by relating examples of the saints to Peter; similarly, narrative and its exegesis pepper the Hierdeboc as a strategy by which Gregory can insist on the self-formation that was a necessary precursor to responsible pastoral work. In the Boethius, the lives of other mensome virtuous, some quite the oppositeserve as examples by which Boethius is asked to reevaluate his own life and his perception of the losses that have afflicted it. While biographical detail is not as rich in the Soliloquies, Gesceadwisnes uses Agustinuss own biographyhis relationships with friends and superiors, as well as the evaluation of his desiresto interrogate him on how he believes he might come to know himself, his own nature, and ultimately God. Evaluation of narrative in the Alfredian corpus always necessitates a corresponding internal self-evaluation, or re-evaluation of the self. Especially in the Dialogues, Hierdeboc, and Boethius, such re-evaluation is accompanied by the expectation of action in accordance with a responsible ethical agent, such as the adoption of a virtuous life, the faithful discharge of clerical duty, or the more abstruse charge to answer the godra manna earfe that is, according to Wisdom, the philosophers responsibility. Like the philosopher, who could never quite escape the world, the means 243

by which the philosopher was educatedand educated in turnmade concessions to the world and the body, even as they sought to guide the wanderer to higher truths and a more permanent spiritual home. Narrative and language indicate that, for the translators of the Alfredian texts, the self was cursive, capable of moving within, into the contemplation of a private interior, and then without, expressing itself in the wider field of public and social life. Exempla gave both the original authors and translators paradigms of behavior that were to be inculcated or avoided; the very public examples of men such as Liberius (or even Nero and Theodoric) could, and must, be taken up for consideration in private spacein the act of reflection and evaluation, or as Ricoeur puts it, the space in which a prospective ethical agent might test out possibilities for action. The commonalities between the Alfredian texts, with their similar interests in selfimprovement, ethics, and practical and affective spirituality, suggest that, even if they were not products of the same mind or same hand, their translators belonged to a textual community (to borrow Stocks phrase) that shared common goals and concerns that saw private, interior life and public, ethical life as being inextricably connected. Narrative is one of the tools with which the translators work; a consciousness of the power of metaphorical language, and the act of bringing the rich field of Latin metaphor into the vernacular, is another. Embodied language, or language that explicitly relies on the assumption that to be a human is to be embodied, provided the Alfredian translators with the ability to translate and adapt the complexities (and, in the case of the Consolatio, theological infelicities) of Latin philosophy and theology in such a way as to aid relatively unsophisticated readers. The extended metaphors in which the translators engage do not merely bring Latin abstractions down to earth; in expanding or modifying 244

metaphors, the translators created, or re-created, their own interpretation of the text. By the same token, the communities that formed around the translations were invited to engage in the same activity. The use of metaphor in the translations suggests that the translators saw metaphor not only as ornamentation, but a device that could entertain, instruct, and create meaning, a stance closer to some contemporary reformulations of theories of metaphor. Unlike a purely literary or New Critical definition of metaphor, definitions provided by poststructuralists and cognitive linguistics alike argue for the centrality of metaphor to how we experience and conceptualize the world, particularly abstractions which are not easily given to immediate physical experience. These definitions, although technically divergent from those which medieval texts provide, suggest that metaphors play an important role in the creation of meaningand, possibly, the creation or proliferation of knowledge.1 In the case of the Alfredian translations, these metaphors may have helped Anglo-Saxon readers conceptualize the relationships that obtained between the various aspects of their inner life (emotion, will, memory, reason), their identities as private and public individuals, and the world around them. The interpretation of figurative language, like the interpretation of narrative, could serve as a propaedeutic to learning, and carrying out, ethical lessonsthe lessons of the bona vita and the pursuit of private wisdom (as in the Soliloquies), the public practice of virtue (Dialogues) or still more importantly, the practices of sapiential kingship and self-governance delineated in the Boethius and Hierdeboc.

See Chapter Two, n. 108 above.

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The reliance of the translations on figurative language and narrative construct a self that is not easily reducible either to Cartesian dualism or the hazy epoch of the anteself, to which the Anglo-Saxon period has traditionally been assigned. Metaphors of interiority, such as those that conceptualize the mind as a layered or multi-dimensional construct, suggest that Anglo-Saxon authors were deeply concerned with the unknowability of the self, and working out whether or not the self could be known in its entirety; this sort of concern is, fundamentally, interior in nature. However, the translations are also deeply concerned with action and the relationship that obtained between a properly-governed mind and the individuals behavior in the world (and, in the case of kings, how that behavior affected their subjects); in this sense, the interior is inextricably connected to the exterior. And, of course, the soul that meditated on itself was simultaneously searching for knowledge of the divine, which was exterior to it. One of the most powerful images the Boethius deploys is the image of the wheel. The wheel appears on several occasions, one of the most explicit being at 33.226-27, in which the soul is created t hio sceolde ealne weg hwearfian on hire selfre, swa swa eal es rodor hwerf oe swa swa hweol onhwerf [that it must always turn in itself, just as all the heavens turn or just as a wheel revolves], as it contemplates itself, its creator, or earthly things.2 Its other significant appearance comes near the end of the text, in Wisdoms extended discussion of the nature of every unstille gesceaft (moving

The revolution of the soul is anticipated by 25.31, which stresses the permanence of the natures of all created things: lc gesceaft hwearfa on hire selfre swa swa hweol and to am heo swa hwearfa t heo eft cume r heo r ws and beo t ilce t heo r ws [each creation turns in itself just as a wheel and to which it turns so that it in turn comes to where it was before and will be the same that it was before].

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creation), which revolves around the divine cynosure. Wisdom describes God as the axle (eaxe), around which a wagon-wheel turns (39.157-60), and the spectrum of human goodness is spread out along the spokes. The passage is extensive, but a portion of it should suffice: Foram e lces spacan bi oer ende fst on re nafe, oer on re felge. Swa bi am midlestan monnum; ore hwile he smea on his mode ymb is eorlican lif, ore hwile ymb t godcundlice, swelce he locie mid ore eagan to heofonum, mid ore to eoram, swa swa s spacan stica oer ende on re felge oer on re nafe. (39.164-69) Therefore, one end of each spoke is affixed to the hub, and the other end to the rim. So it is with the men in the middle: at one time, he contemplates in his mind about this earthly life, at other times about the divine life, as if he looks with one eye to the heavens and with the other to the earth, just as the spoke sticks at one end to the hub and the other to the rim. The translator explicates the metaphor further: the best men are those closer to the hub while the weakest are consigned to the rim of the wheel (39.172); nonetheless, all are connected to God (39.173-76). Closeness to God also brings the benefits of security and stability, for the closer the individual is to the stable center, the freer from cares he is; conversely, swa hi swior asyndrode bio fram Gode, swa hi swior bio gedrefde and geswencte ger ge on mode ge on lichoman [the more greatly they are sundered from God, the more greatly they will be troubled and vexed both in mind and in body] (39.19192).This last sentenceand the trajectory of the Boethius, with Mod being brought ever closer to knowledge of the divineimplies that it is possible to move along the spoke, as the mind turns from the contemplation of earthly things to contemplating itself and then finally to contemplating God. Much of the work of the Boethius and the Soliloquies is done for the purpose of enabling such movement.

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In light of these points, I suggest that the Alfredian self was cursive, to borrow John Kenneys description, in a constant state of negotiation, at times contemplating and living in itself and, at others, the world in which it was compelled to live.3 Such a stance avoids the temptation to fall into the false assumption of soul/body dualism; likewise, it avoids making a claim on a definition of a self that is understood as purely (or largely) interior in nature, as well as unified and fully present. Instead, the Alfredian self comes much closer to simply being a thing that is aware of itself and able to consider itself and its own nature; moreover, unlike (mis-)conceptions of the early Middle Ages that view medieval minds as communal or half-aware of independent selfhood, the Anglo-Saxon conception of the self modulates between an intensely-felt and experienced interiority and a corollary responsibility as a moral agent to fulfill obligations to other individuals. In other words, interiority and exteriority depended on each other; embodied language, and its attendant delineation of the soul or mind as being like bodies or having body-like habits, bridged the gap between the private life of the mind, the body in which it lived, and its way of living in the created world. Perhaps fittingly, I conclude with a beginning, perhaps one of the most famous beginnings in medieval English literature: the preface to the translation of the Hierdeboc. It is not only the beginning of a major translation project, but the beginning of one of the

John Peter Kenney, Augustines Inner Self, Augustinian Studies 33 (2002): 79-90 and Confession and the Contemplative Self in Augustines Early Works, Augustinian Studies 38 (2007): 13346. Properly speaking, Kenney is speaking of the cursive self as Plotinian in origin: such a self has the capacity for movement that is at once moral and metaphysical, giving it the dangerous option of pressing down lower with psychic declension, or going up on high and pursuing its epistroph. So it is up to this self to decide (135). In Augustines reformulation, the cursive self is obligated to the difficult task of plumbing the mysteries of its own nature (146).

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first serious, sustained efforts of learned writing in English, the beginning of English as a language of intellectual discourse, andat least as popularly conceivedthe beginning of a national English literary identity. The prose preface to the Hierdeboc is, among other things, famous for its authors articulation of translational strategy: Alfred tells Wrferth he has translated (wendan) the Hierdeboc hwilum word be worde, hwilum andgit of andgiete [at times word for word, at times sense according to understanding] (Preface). Andgit is usually translated sense, from sensus, but may also be taken to mean understanding, or perhaps the sense according to my understanding, that is, how the text was understood through the intercession and instruction of Plegmund, Asser, and Grimbold, according to the Preface to the Hierdeboc. In the glosses, andgit will translate intellectus (DOE, s.v. andgit), and in lfrician Old English most often refers to issues of comprehension and understanding.4 The sense of a text often implies meaning, often a fixed meaning that must be elucidated through interpretation, rather than the readers sense of it; instead of unearthing or discovering a meaning that pre-exists the reader, the creation of senseas it is for Ricoeuris a dialogic effort, a conversation between the reader, the readers cultural context, and the book.5 For Alfred in the Preface, perhaps an alternative approach to discussing his translation strategy might be that he translated the Hierdeboc at times verbatim, but at others translated it in the best, most perceptive way that he could.

The sense of andgit as understanding is supported by the reuse of the phrase in the prose preface to the B-text of the Boethius. Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Mark Wallace (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1995), 139-40.
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And now the end of another beginning: the final sentence of the preface to the Boethius is both an observance of fact, in the tradition of a gnomic or proverbial statement, as well as an ethical injunction to its reader. After the prefaces author outlines Alfreds translation practice (like the Hierdeboc, translating word be worde, hwilum andgit of andgite) and explains the limitations secular life has placed upon his abilities, and asks the reader to pray for him, he finally asks that the reader not blame Alfred for any shortcomings: and nu [he] bit and for Godes naman he halsa lcne ara e as boc rdan lyste t he for hine gebidde, and him ne wite gif he hit rihtlicor ongite onne he mihte, foram e lc mon sceal be his andgites me and be his mettan sprecan t he sprec and don t t he de. (Pref.9-13) [ and now he asks and in Gods name he begs each of those who read this book that he pray for him, and not censure him if (the reader) understands it more properly than (Alfred) could, because each man must by the measure of his understanding and by his ability speak what he speaks and do what he does.] In the context of prayer and blame, the concluding observation can be taken as a statement of a commonplace, and perhaps obvious truth: that we are limited in our actions by our intellectual capabilities (or incapabilities) and talents. Elsewhere, however, the use of ones andgites m acquires ethical force: we are required, by virtue of our nature as rational and mortal beings, to devote ourselves to the pursuit of virtue and of wisdom, insofar as we are capable. The term unites the Boethius and the Soliloquies as texts that were both deeply concerned with the responsibility not only to educate oneself, but to turn education to an ethical purposeremembering that ethics and wisdom-seeking, coming to understand oneself, others, and God, were inextricably linked. Moreover, they are also texts that attend to the widely differing faculties of their audiences; implicit in the discussions of 250

andgites m is the belief that, while we are not all philosophers, we nonetheless are enjoined to pursue wisdom insofar as our different capabilities allow us. At two points in the Boethius, Wisdom reminds Mod that no one perceives the entirety of wisdom just as it is, but rather seeks to understand wisdom according to the measure of his understanding.6 The final chapter of the text opens with the reminder that, although our m is not such that it can know God fully, we sculon eah be s andgites me e he us gif fundigan, swa swa we r cwdon t mon sceolde lce ing ongitan be his andgites me [we nevertheless must inquire, with the capability to understand which he (God) gives us, just as we said earlier, that one must perceive each thing according to the ability of his understanding] (42.3-5). The discussion threatens to veer off into a disquisition on eternity and the disparate nature of temporal, immortal, and eternal things, but the concluding prayer returns the Boethius to its ethical dimension, with its injunction to hate evil and cultivate the virtues, for Ge habba micle earf t ge simle wel don [you have great need that you always do well] before the souls entrance into eternity (42.52-54). In the Soliloquies, Agustinus acknowledges that, in the course of the dialogue, it befits him to listen while Gesceadwisnes instructs, and when called upon to andsweorienne es e ic ongyte be mynes andgytes me [to answer you as I perceive it

Hu ne wast u t manig incg ne bi no ongiten swa swa hit bi ac swa swa s andgites m bi e rfter spira? Swilc is se wisdom t hine ne mg nan mon of isse worulde ongitan swilcne swilce he is, ac lc win be his andgites me t he hine wolde ongitan gif he mihte [Dont you know that there are many things which cannot be perceived as they are, but rather as the ability to understand is able to pursue it? Such is wisdom, that no one in this world can perceive it just as it is, but each hopes, by his ability to understand, that he might perceive him, if he could] (41.106-11).

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according to my ability to understand] (70.18-19).7 The improvement of andgit in the Soliloquies, as in the Boethius, is tied closely both to life in the world and life in the hereafter; not only is it a very foolish and backward who does not increase his understanding while he is in this world (97.14-15), but the wise manor the man who wishes to be wiseeven knowing that the attainment of perfect knowledge in this world is futile, fagna s e lste he ongytan mg be hys andgites me [rejoices because at least he may perceive according to the capability of his understanding] (70.2-3).8 The translations themselves may be the written evidence of the translators best ability to understand their source texts and the traditions which informed their reading; they certainly are the best record we have by which we can understand, to the best of our own abilities, the earliest English thinking about how we think.

Andgites me seems to be translating the general sense of sentio in Augustines reply: Hoc tu videris, si vel in te, vel in me aliquantum apsicere potes: ego quaerenti, si quid sentio, respondebo [You should find it, if anything in yourself or me should be detected; I will reply to your question, if I am aware of something] (Soliloquia 24.17-18). The phrase is an addition to the Latin, which is more concerned with God as both an object of knowledge (i.e. as an intelligible thing) and that which bestows knowledge or understanding (i.e. as that which makes things intelligible); see Soliloquia 24.3-6: Ergo quomodo in hoc sole tria quaedam licet animadvertere: quod est, quod fulget, quod inluminat, ita in illo secretissimo deo, quem uis intellegere, tria quaedam sunt.: quod est, quod intellegitur, et quod cetera quaedam intellegi [Take for instance our own sun, in which one can observe three things: that it is, that is shines, that it illuminates. (One can observe) these three things in that most hidden God whom you wish to know: that he is, that he is understood, and that he makes all things to be understood].
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