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  • Aristotelian Luminescence, Thomistic Charity: Vision, Reflection, and Self-Love in Pearl
  • Josephine Bloomfield

THE fourteenth-century anonymous poem Pearl is deeply saturated with mirror-like reflection and other suggestions of incomplete or inadequate vision. Like Paul—but without his consciousness—the Dreamer in the poem sees through a glass darkly: he looks at the Pearl Maiden and the other artifacts of his dream, but he gains only partial knowledge, never achieving union with the Maiden, or even clarity about what he is seeing when he sees her. His dream itself is a type of mirror, by virtue of giving access to spiritual truth that he cannot see in the material world, but it requires both reflection in the contemplative sense and self-reflection to yield up meaning. The Maiden within the dream offers him kinds of mirrors—among them the Bible and Christ—and the architecture of the poem gives him a mirror of water in the stream that lies between him and the Maiden, between him and the holy city, reflecting them back to him, but he fails to be able to see what the reflections offer him.

Or so I read the poem, at least, but in fact the poet never uses the word “mirror” in the poem, and the two times he uses the word “glass” it means just that—something one can see through and not something that reflects (lines 114, 1025).1 And yet, the poem seems to me to be filled with specularity and to derive much of its force and energy from its drive to reflection, directed both at the Dreamer within the poem and at the poem’s audience. In this essay I would like to consider the Pearl [End Page 165] poet’s audience(s) and explore their potential for familiarity with the tropes of reflection, trying to determine what they would have entered the poem already understanding about the mirrors and the seeing that seem to permeate the poem. Here, among other things, I want to discuss mirrors in the Pearl poet’s time; medieval pearl lore; Aristotelian optics in the fourteenth century; and the medieval eye—particularly as understood by Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas—as negotiator between body and mind, between exterior and interior worlds, between seeing and loving God, to consider how the Pearl audience(s) might have made sense of what they saw and heard in the poem. I am most interested in how they might have received and construed the female body of the visible but enigmatic Pearl Maiden, the multiply reflecting pearls that construct and surround her, and the artifice of the poem itself, a structure that seems almost endlessly reflective and reflecting, both visually and aurally.

The pearl, unlike other gems, is not a mineral; it is organic, the product of a living organism. It is built in layers, making it, when it finally disintegrates, rather like an onion unfolding. Each of the layers is very thin and also translucent, so when light hits a pearl, it penetrates a number of the layers, giving the particular kind of reflection that we call the pearl’s luster. Because the pearl’s surface is round, it acts as a convex mirror, reflecting light so that the luster appears to emanate from within the pearl.2 Perhaps because historically the most lustrous of pearls have been found in waters in the East, gemologists refer to a pearl’s luster as its “orient.”3 Our poet actually mentions pearls of the Orient in the first stanza of the poem as the standard against which he is measuring the perfection of his lost pearl (“Oute of oryent, I hardyly saye, / Ne proued I neuer her precios pere”), and again in the seventh stanza, where the [End Page 166] ground under his feet in his vision is made up of “precious perlez of oryente” (82).4

The pearl is different from its fellow gems in other ways too. It is formed by a seed that is planted into a closed and difficult-to-penetrate vessel; the shell has to be pried open to get the gem out. Both the shell and the pearl are made from the same...

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