The Epistemological Perspective of the Pearl-Poet by Piotr Spyra (review)

Spyra's study of the four poems in the Cotton Nero A. x manuscript takes a strong position that these texts should be read as a corpus of poetry produced by a single poet, and moreover that their order in the manuscript is significant and contributes to their meaning. While dismissing as distracting and useless the search for a historical identity for the poet, Spyra nonetheless insists that behind the poems there is a "poetic consciousness" that merits our study.

For his part, Spyra argues that the manuscript serves as "something of a didactic tool … that comes with a warning" (p. 8). Central to all four poems, he claims, are the problems inherent in human knowledge; therefore, in order to grasp "the essence" of the Pearl-poet's "grand opus," we need to turn toward the theory of knowledge that informs the poetry. Spyra goes on to explain that this theory is basically Augustinian and, in addition, has much in common with that of the poet's contemporaries, the moderni, who objected to any attempt to approach the divine with human reason. Admitting that neither Augustine nor later medieval thinkers used the term "epistemology," Spyra still maintains that the problem of humanity's imperfect knowledge is a major issue for both Augustine and the Pearl-poet. Much of what Spyra draws from Augustine involves interpretation and the discussion of signification, notably in De Doctrina Christiana. The connection of interpretation to epistemology lies, according to Spyra, in Christian thinkers' focus on "problems of language and logic in describing the deity and his earthly creation" (p. 16). Spyra connects this concern with knowledge to moral issues, citing the episode in Book 3 of Confessions in which the bishop explains to Monica that Augustine's heretical and immoral condition renders it impossible for him to learn the truth of Christianity or the falsehoods of Manicheism.

Spyra points out that initially, almost without exception, critics approached each poem as a separate and discrete work, although lately there have in fact been a number of studies of the corpus as a whole, many of which Spyra draws upon. For example, Spyra includes a great deal of numerological analysis from Edward Condren's Numerical Universe of the "Gawain-Pearl" Poet: Beyond "Phi" (2002)—a study in which, without drawing Spyra's conclusions about epistemology, Condren makes a compelling (if sometimes overreaching) case for both the unity of the manuscript and the significance of its ordering of the poems. Since one could argue that manuscript order is more likely scribal than authorial, Spyra follows Condren in positing that, despite strong indications that Cotton Nero A. x is a copy, the manuscript was produced as a single piece, and we have no evidence, either way, that the scribe and poet were not the same (p. 7).

Adhering to his position that the poems should not be treated as separate units, Spyra structures his book around shared features and themes rather than studying the poems one at a time, although within a chapter he tends to take up each poem in succession. The first chapter, "Blinded by Sin, Dazzled by Light: Heaven, Earth and the Great Divide," is, as its title indicates, a discussion of the poems' various ways of representing the immense distance between humanity's flawed understanding and divine knowledge. Made most explicit in Pearl, which comes first in the manuscript, "spiritual blindness" (p. 31) not only cuts humans off from divine knowledge but also prevents them from seeing that there is a "great gulf that exists between heaven and earth" (p. 15). The human perspective, also found in Jonah, King Arthur, and others, is a matter not so much of false belief as of a failure to see the full picture.

Addressing Cleanness and Patience, which he sees in a dialogic relationship, Spyra attributes their differing views of God to the Incarnation, which allowed for the New Testament God of mercy...