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Medieval Debates of Body and SoulAuthor(s): Michel-André BossySource: Comparative Literature, Vol. 28, No. 2, (Spring, 1976), pp. 144-163Published by: University of OregonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1769656Accessed: 01/07/2008 15:04

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MICHEL-ANDRi BOSSY

Medieval Debates

of Body and Soul

ATIN AND VERNACULAR medieval literature abounds in verse debates. The variety of these works is as striking as their

multitude: they interweave a large number of topics, oratorical tech- niques, dialogue patterns, verse forms, and narrative frames. It is customary to classify them into thematic groups: for instance, knight and cleric, wine and water, winter and summer, and body and soul. Such a classification provides useful reference categories, but it does not yield a rigorous taxonomy. When looked at in detail, a given group of debates will seem more a flexible configuration of works than a fixed literary genus. Besides, many interconnections can be found between works ostensibly belonging to separate groups and often these inter- connections illuminate a particular debate more vividly than do the common denominators of its specific group.

This study deals with the rich scale of the largest of these thematic groups, that of body and soul debates. My purpose is twofold. First, I wish to show that these debates must be read as contrasting individual works. Second, I wish to illustrate how other works, not normally included in this group of medieval debates, have interesting and unex- pected affinities with the group. What criticism there is has mostly over- looked both these points. Even the scholar who has surveyed body and soul debates most thoroughly, T. Batiouchkof, has slighted the dramatic suppleness and individuality of the works in order to pigeonhole them in a rigid stemma.1 The one heartening escape from such critical

1 "Le Debat de l'ame et du corps," Romania, 20 (1891), 1-55 and 513-78. For information about Latin debates see Hans Walther, Das Streitgedicht in der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur latein- ischen Philologie des Mittelalters, V, 2 (Munich, 1920), 63-68 and F. J. E. Raby, A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), II, 229-303. A useful precis of romance body and soul debates has been put together by Cesare Segre in Grundriss 144

MEDIEVAL DEBATES

narrowness is Robert Ackerman's sensitive and very informative study of the Middle English Desputisoun bitwen the Bodi and the Soule.'

My point of departure will be a simple general distinction. Body and soul debates can be thematically divided into two categories: either the Soul argues with the Body from a position of moral superiority or it shares guilt with the Body (and often deserves more blame). I shall discuss in detail one example from each category before widening my survey. The examples I have chosen are not the most typical or repre- sentative (no such models exist) but seem to me the most interesting in regard to forensic dialogue.

Foremost among debates between a guilty Soul and Body is a work in Goliardic verse, unconvincingly attributed to Robert Grosseteste, the Dialogus inter corpus et anitnam, which is generally referred to as the Visio Philiberti.3 It had a very wide diffusion: 132 manuscripts are extant.4 It also influenced many vernacular debates, notably The Despu- tisoun bitwen the Bodi and the Soule. The Visio's underpinning is a folk belief that the souls of deceased sinners are released from their torments in hell on Saturday night and haunt their place of death until cockcrow. This recalls the Ghost's predicament in Hamlet, "Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night, / And for the day confin'd to fast in fires" (I.v. 10-11), although Shakespeare turns the weekly cycle into a daily one. The dialogue in the Visio takes place on one of the Soul's furloughs away from hell. It is framed by a dream that comes to the narrator after an exhausting vigil. (The texts with the incipit "Vir quidam exstiterat dudum heremita" preface the dream itself by identifying

der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters, ed. Hans Robert Jauss and Erich K6hler (Heidelberg: Winter, 1968 onward), VI/1, 74-78, and VI/2, 119-21. See also Eleanor Kellogg Heningham, An Early Latin Debate of Body and Soul (Menasha, Wis., 1939) ; Erik von Kraemer, Dos versiones castellanas de la dis- puta del alma y el cuerpo del siglo XIV, Memoires de la Societe Neophilologique, XVIII (Helsinki, 1956); Ole Widding and Hans Bekker-Nielsen, "A Debate of the Body and the Soul in Old Norse Literature, MS, 21 (1959), 272-89; and Mariantonia Liborio, "JUna versione picarda inedita della 'Visio Philiberti,"' CN, 33 (1973), 105-45.

2 "The Debate of the Body and the Soul and Parochial Christianity," Speculum, 37 (1962), 541-65. Ackerman's treatment of the literary and religious background of body and soul debates is excellent. I do not share, however, his rather negative evaluation of the Visio Philiberti.

3 There are two major versions of the Visio. The one with the incipit "Noctis sub silentio tempore brumali" has the larger number of manuscripts and is the one I shall examine here, using Thomas Wright's edition in The Latin Poems Com- monly Attributed to Walter Mapes (London, 1841), pp. 95-106. The other major version of the Visio begins "Vir quidatn exstiterat dudum heremita" and has been edited by Edelstand du Meril in Poesies populaires anterieures au XIIe sitcle (Paris, 1843), pp. 217-30. The second version has a longer narrative introduction and a somewhat different conclusion. The dialogue is also slightly different and generally less clear and consistent than the first version's.

4Walther, Das Streitgedicht, pp. 69 and 211-14.

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

the narrator as a princely hermit, Philibertus.) In the introduction the narrator establishes the situation in simple and direct terms. The debate, however, consists of ample and elaborate verbal displays. The struggle is an artful minuet of feints, assaults, and withdrawals, which finally takes a surprising turn and calls itself into question, as we shall see.

In the first round the Soul launches a long declamation, stocked with homiletic motifs. Ironical questions generate rambling (though vivid) comparisons of the Body's former honors and joys with its present misery:

Ubi nunc sunt praedia quae tu congregasti? celsaque palatia, turres quas fundasti? gemmae, torques, anuli, quos digitos portasti ? et nummorum copia quam nimis amasti? Quo sunt lectisternia maximi decoris ? vestes mutatoriae varii coloris?

(Lines 42-47)

(Where now are the estates that you gathered? the lofty palaces and towers you built? The gems, the necklaces, the rings you used to wear on your fingers? And the multitude of coins you loved so much ? Where are the bedclothes of enormous worth? Those often changed attires of different colors?)

The Soul alternately stirs up regrets (in set pieces like the ubi sunt

passage above) and hurls blustering complaints, such as this one:

Ego quae tam nobilis fueram creata, ad similitudinem Domini formata, et ab omni crimine baptismo mundata, iterum criminibus sic sum denigrata per te, caro misera, sumque reprobata. Vere possum dicere, heu quod fui nata ! utinam ex utero fuissem translata protinus ad tumulum! et sic liberata a poena tartarea mihi jam parata.

(Lines 25-33)

(I who was created so noble, shaped in the Lord's likeness, and cleansed of all guilt by baptism, am thus again blackened by guilt and thanks to you, wretched Flesh, I am a reprobate. Truly I can say: Alas that I was born I If only I had been taken straight from the womb to the grave and thus freed from the infernal pun- ishment now prepared for me!)

The Soul has an excellent repertory of rhetorical devices. For instance, like the Ghost in Hamlet (I.v.13-22), it avails itself of what Curtius calls the "inexpressibility topos" so as to inspire awe about its torments without actually painting their "eternal blazon":

In poenis miserrima sum et semper ero I omnes linguae saeculi non dicerent pro vero unam poenam minimam quam infelix fero...

(Lines 38-40)

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MEDIEVAL DEBATES

(Most wretchedly in pains I must be, now and always! All the tongues in the world could not truly relate the least of the pains my unfortunate self endures ... )

In answer to the Soul's eighty lines of epideictic. prancing, the Body lays out a judicious argument. The exordium is a logical statement of purpose which affords strong contrast to the Soul's disorderly bluster:

Esne meus spiritus, qui sic loquebaris ? non sunt vera penitus omnia quae faris; jam probabo plenius argumentis claris quod in parte vera sunt, in parte nugaris.

(Lines 97-100)

(Is that you, my Spirit, speaking in this way? All the things you're saying are not completely true. Now, let me fully prove with clear arguments how they are partly true and partly nonsense.)

As can be guessed from this exordium, the first step of the argument will be concessive. Rhetorically, an initial concession can betoken reason- ableness, a willingness to look at both sides of the question. It can also signal an enigma and whet the listener's curiosity. The Body makes the most of both effects:

Feci te multociens, fateor, errare, a bonis operibus saepe declinare; sed si caro faciat animam peccare quandoque, non mirum est, audi, dicam quare.

(Lines 101-104)

(Many times, I admit, I made you go astray and often avoid good deeds. But if the Flesh caused the Soul to sin now and then, it's not surprising. Listen, I'11 tell you why.)

The demonstration rests on a shrewdly described causal chain:

Mundus et daemonium legem sanxire mutuam, fraudis ad consortium carnem trahentes fatuam, eorumque blanditiis caro seducit animam, quam a virtutum culmine trahit ad partem infimam, quae statim carnem sequitur ut bos ductus ad victimam.

(Lines 105-109)

(The world and the devil ordained a mutual law, drawing the foolish Flesh into a partnership of deceit, and with their blandishments the Flesh seduced the Soul, which it dragged from the summit of virtues down to the lowest depth, and the Soul promptly followed the Flesh like an ox that is led to sacrifice.)

In other words, the Body alleges that it served as a mere intermediary between an overwhelming evil alliance and an all too compliant Soul. The comparison of the Soul to an ox is a deft taunt, for a protest against it would only accentuate the Body's next remark, the one in which it will play its trump card:

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Sed, sicut jam dixeras, Deus te creavit, et bonam et nobilem, sensuque dotavit, et ad suam speciem pariter formavit, et ut ancilla fierem tibi me donavit.

(Lines 110-113)

(But, as you've already said, God created you both good and noble, and He endowed you with sense, and besides shaped you in His likeness, and He gave me to you as maidservant.)

The maneuver is delightfully sly: three lines parodying the Soul's lamentation (lines 25-26), then in slips the trump, with its scathing irony: one of God's favors to the Soul was authority over the Body. The Body smugly devotes the remainder of its speech to amplifying this point with sarcastic questioning (which gives the Soul a taste of its own medicine) and loud claims of innocence.

The Body's attack forces the Soul to adopt a cooler forensic approach. Replacing some epideictic bluster with deliberative prudence, it meets the Body's wily concession with one of its own:

Attamen in pluribus recte respondisti. Illud esse consonum scio veritati, obesse debueram tuae voluntati ...

(Lines 145-147)

(But still you answered correctly in several respects. This observation agrees with truth, I know: I should have opposed your will ... )

Like the Body the Soul carefully hones the concession into an offensive weapon:

Sed scio me culpabilem, nam in hoc erravi, quod, cum essem domina, te non refrenavi; sed, quia me deceperas fraude tam suavi, credo quod deliqueras culpa magis gravi.

(Lines 159-162)

(But I know I'm guilty, for I made the mistake of not restraining you while I was your mistress; but since you've tricked me with such honeyed deceit, I believe you've committed a greater fault.)

The symmetrical construction of the antithesis (sed ... quod ... / sed ... quod . . . ) pretends to articulate a reasonable compromise. How- ever, the second half of the sentence takes back everything the first half conceded, thereby opening the way for a dozen lines of stiff but

even-tempered denunciation. (The Soul has learned its lesson: caustic detachment tends to be more devastating than billingsgate.)

The Body lets the Soul briefly fancy that it has victory in its grasp. Bursting into tears, the Body adopts a humble tone. It acknowledges its former folly and rejoices that its eyes have been opened. Moreover, in a seemingly conciliatory frame of mind, it proposes a compromise:

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MEDIEVAL DEBATES

Ambo, dico, possumus adeo culpari: et debemus utique, sed non culpa pari: tibi culpa gravior debet imputari, multis rationibus potest hoc probari.

(Lines 187-190)

(Both of us, I say, can be blamed and are bound to be, anyway. But not for equal faults: yours must be censured as the heavier one-that can be proved by many reasons.)

The impudent reversal of attitude settles the score nicely, echoing the Soul's words (line 162) and repaying its loaded antithesis-with interest. Then, as promised, come the probing reasons: a list of the God-given mental faculties that the Soul has misused. With paradoxical wit the Body thus buttresses its case by eulogizing the Soul's attributes.

The Body could let matters rest here. Instead, it becomes carried away by paradox, declaring that it can perform nothing unless the Soul hlas prompted the act:

Dic mihi, si noveris, argumento claro, exeunte spiritu a carne quid sit caro? movetne se postea cito, sive raro? videtne? vel loquitur? . . .

(Lines 204-207)

(Tell me, if you know, in a clear argument: What does the Flesh amount to when the Spirit leaves it? Does it move soon afterwards? Or does it seldom move? Does it see? Or does it speak ... )

Although this last remark ("vel loquitur?") slips out casually, its effect is startling. Here is a paradox that shifts the perspective of the entire debate. One becomes aware that two narrative postulates were established in the narrative introduction: (1) souls can converse with their corpses on Saturday nights, (2) a narrator's discourse (the dreamer's tale) can transmit objectively-that is, transparently-two autonomous discourses. By spelling out that it is absurd to imagine that a corpse can speak at all, the verbal drama now makes both postulates seem tenuous.

The entire debate takes on a contrived appearance. The narrator's intervention in the Body's monologue just before it denied that it could speak of its own accord now appears very pointed. So does, in the following speech, the Soul's wish to be annihilated (which far surpasses the despair of its earlier wish never to have been born):

O felix conditio pecorum brutorum I Cadunt cum corporibus spiritus eorum ...

(Lines 227-228)

((O fortunate is the condition of wild beasts! Their spirits perish with their bodies... )

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How could such total despair be reconciled with its earlier forensic playfulness?

More surprisingly yet, the Body discredits itself as an independent speaker. Having gained the upper hand in the debate, it suddenly throws its advantage away by asking the Soul preposterous questions. The gesture, a foolish grasping at straws which grotesquely counter- points the Soul's despair, is not consistent with the Body's earlier wit:

Dic, si [apud inferos] quid nobilibus parcatur personis, illis qui dum vixerant sedebant in thronis? si sit illis aliqua spes redemptionis, pro nummis et praediis, caeterisque donis?

(Lines 235-238)

(Tell me, are noble persons-those who sat on thrones during life-spared somewhat [in hell] ? Is there any hope of ransom for them, by means of money, estates, and various gifts?)

Like the lines that a ventriloquist "feeds" his puppet, the Body's foolish questions set up the Soul's final homily concerning the extra punish- ment awaiting those of high estate in hell. Deliberately, I think, the debate finally presents itself less as a disputation between separate speakers than as a dialogue-in-monologue. The warring verbal con- structs become joined by one underlying discourse.

Yet as the verbal battle fades away, sacrificial violence flares up: devils drag the Soul off and subject it to a long, keenly depicted series of torments. The finale pretends to exhibit ecphrastically the "eternal blazon" which, according to the Soul, all the tongues in the world could not put into words (lines 38-40). In fact, the torture scene is only intended as a metaphorical approximation of hell's torments. The catalog of tortures has a comical undertone, which brings notice to the paradox that the more the devils tear apart the Soul, the less a disjunc- tion between Soul and Body can be narratively maintained. Just as the Body depended on the Soul for speaking, so here the Soul requires an ersatz body for experiencing torments. (To be precise, it will need this manikin only for an interim: on doomsday the real Body will join it in hell.) Thus, the ecphrasis calls the narrative postulates once again into question.

The epilogue sets them permanently aside. The entire vision is bracketed as fiction by the narrator's awakening-a familiar topos put to effective use. The fright that startles the narrator out of his sleep emblemizes the power retained by the discourse even after its com- ponents (the debate and the torture scene) have disclosed their ficti- tiousness. Indeed, because they are fictitious, they become signs point- ing to matters exceeding the compass of human discourse. The games

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of wit and verbal skill having dissolved, the narrator falls to his prayers: seria per-as well as post-ludos.

The thematic converse of the Visio Philiberti can be found in the Al tercacio carnis et spiritus ("O Caro, cara vilitas"), where the Spirit's case (though not its forensic ability) dwarfs that of the Flesh.5 Here the final outcome is evident almost from the start; yet the dialogue develops into a suspenseful contest. If the opponents are less equally matched than in the Visio, they are also less intertwined. No complicity binds them: they defend clearly distinct moral outlooks. So, even though their dialogue is restricted to nine short speeches (each a nine-line stanza), the struggle has sharpness and scope. Whereas the Visio renders expansively the inner scrimmage of a divided self, the Alter- cacio renders concisely a battle between essential components of human nature, locking two distinct discourses in conflict.

The Spirit instigates the debate with hortatory epideixis. Its speech proceeds slowly through puns and alliteration, arriving finally at a

metaphoric commonplace:

... ad semitas iusticie gressus torpentes applica, linque post tergum lubrica, vt sis ouis dominica

(Lines 6-9)

( ... steer your listless steps to the paths of justice, leave the slippery ways behind you, so as to be one of the Lord's sheep.)

Even a reader who deemed the general drift of the Spirit's homily admirable would not be much stimulated by its cliche figurative style. Even he, therefore, would have to be convertly beguiled by the Flesh's vigorously plainspoken retort:

Stultum est visibilibus nondum uisa preponere et pro spiritualibus carnalia contempnere et solita relinquere; trita curruntur libere, non trita in periculum; ergo complectar seculum, quod cernitur ad oculum.

(Lines 10-18)

(It is foolish to prefer things never seen to visible ones, and to disdain carnal things in favor of spiritual ones, and to give up what is customary. Over trodden ways one runs freely, over those untrodden dangerously. Therefore I'll embrace the world that we see.)

5 Das Streitgedicht, pp. 215-16.

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

The Flesh answers the Spirit's harangue with simple deliberative argumentation. The aphoristic turn it gives to a small piece of common sense has limpid appeal. The fit between tenor and vehicle in its metaphor is tighter and smoother than in the Spirit's. (It is amusing to think that the effect of the trita is much less trite than that of the senmitae iusticie.)

The Flesh's rejoinder shakes up the Spirit. Gone are the affected flourishes (except for a pun, lines 23-34), as it speaks a second time:

Vnius puncti gaudia tantopere desideras, sed quam longa miseria sequatur, non consideras; si mecum hec deliberas, a tormentis te liberas, que seruantur carnalibus; non uiuent in celestibus, qui fauent tuis moribus.

(Lines 19-27)

(How earnestly you desire joy that lasts a single speck of time! But what long misery will follow, that you don't think of. If you deliberate this thing with me, you can free yourself from the torments that are in store for carnal sinners. They don't live in heaven, those who favor your way of living.)

One notes that the Spirit first states its argument (fleeting pleasure isn't worth eternal pain), then tries to catch the Flesh's attention (you had better listen to this!). For rhetorical effectiveness the order should be reversed, of course. Particularly clumsy is the interpolation "si mecum deliberas." On the face of it, the Spirit is trying either to strike a deliberative pose matching the Flesh's or to arouse the Flesh's curi- osity by implying that there is more to this than meets the eye. But all the interpolation accomplishes is to draw attention to the simplicity of the argument that precedes it. What deliberation can such a simple point possibly require? In short, the speech seems haltingly improvised.

Now it is the Flesh's turn to elaborate an ornate periodic speech. It shifts from a spare deliberative style to an ampler evocative one:

In antiqua congerie dum deus mundum conderet et ex rudi materie ordinatus subsisteret, flores et fructus pareret, pisces et aues gigneret nutu creantis domini, hoc dubitandus nemini totum subegit homini.

(Lines 28-36)

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(When God built the world in the midst of old chaos and it stood forth all ordered out of rough matter, when flowers and fruits appeared, when fishes and birds came into being at a nod of the Lord-let no one doubt it !-He subordinated all of Creation to man.)

Like the Spirit's first speech this stanza assembles many clauses into a single period, but unlike that first speech it generates suspense out of the periodic structure, only driving the argument home with the very last word. The skillfulness of the construction shows up in many details. For instance, the speech does not begin with the conjunction dum (when) but with the modifier word group "in antiqua congerie." This sets a syntactic perspective that recapitulates Creation: it starts in chaos (congerie), focuses on God's intervention ("dum deus . ..), follows the transformation of crude matter into order ("ex rudi ma- terie ..."), and synecdochically sums up the beginning of life (plants, fruits, fish, and birds-as in Genesis 1.12 and 21). The dum introducing deus mediates between the locative in and the transformative ex. More- over, dum orders the structure of the sentence, subordinating all the clauses of the first seven lines.

One must also notice the pivotal function of the penultimate line: "hoc dubitandus nemini." The neuter demonstrative pronoun hoc, coming as it does after a long series of subordinate clauses, signals rhe- torically the appearance of the main clause. At the same time it defers that clause syntactically by opening a parenthetical remark. The gerun- dive dubitandus counters the motif of God's assenting nod and induces a tension which the negative indirect object nemini allays. But nemini creates a new tension by echoing domini. The annominatio intimates that although God has created a multitude of things (evoked by the preceding synecdoches), He is still alone. The antithesis implicit in domini-nemini is aptly bridged by homini, the word that completes the entire argument. The stanza is thus a masterly demonstration of epi- deictic oratory-the high point of the poem, in fact.

The Spirit immediately questions the sincerity of this oratory. The tactic is forensically shrewd, but the Spirit fails to use it effectively. The objection is only followed up by unfocused rebukes, vague allusions to the Flesh's greed and disobedience. Once again the Spirit's discourse falls short of the goal, allowing the Flesh to deflect the shot with ease. It brazens the accusation of greed by claiming that it cannot refuse God's gifts: "nam munera repellere / est largitorem spernere" ("since to refuse the gifts means spurning the donor," lines 53-54). Its tone becomes flippantly colloquial: "Quid loqueris de licito? / Consilium das temere" ("What are you talking about lawfulness for? You hand your advice out rashly," lines 51-52).

Comically enough, the colloquial style of litigation introduced by the

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Flesh has a salutary effect on the Spirit. Outrage strips it of its senten- tious stiffness and imbues it with verve:

Ad sustentandum tribui creata tibi noueris, non indulgendum luxui et ludo fede Ueneris, quam nisi tu deuoueris in inferno dampnaberis, ubi nulla redempcio, sed pro carnali gaudio eterna cruciacio.

(Lines 55-63)

(If only you had learnt that material things were created so that you could sus- tain the human race and not so that you could revel in luxury and in the games of foul Venus, whom-if you hadn't devoted yourself to her-you'd curse to hell, where there is no redemption, but eternal torture in return for carnal joy!)

The harangue is not elegant (especially in syntax), but it has the vigor and zest that the Spirit's previous speeches sadly lacked. Some of the clumsiness even sharpens the sally. The final cruciacio (torment), for example: grammatically it applies to Venus; rhetorically it designates the fate awaiting the Flesh, and the indirection accentuates the threat.

Because the Spirit has at long last focused on the Flesh's lustfulness, the Flesh is finally forced to defend its weakest side. Losing its confident tone, it endeavors to show that God by creating the two sexes sanctioned free sexual commerce. To gain victory (a victory confirmed in the tenth and final stanza by Reason's verdict), the Spirit only has to establish a distinction between legitimate coition (free of concupiscence) and lustful fornication.

The certainty of the outcome, strangely enough, is what fosters suspense in this debate. We know from the start that the Spirit's discourse, stylistically flawed though it may be, has the backing of religious doctrine. Knowing that, we wonder expectantly how the Spirit, floundering as it does, will manage to get its opponent, a rhetori- cal Proteus, into a hammerlock. The best part of the comedy is that it accomplishes the trick of losing its temper and forgetting the forensic techniques it had self-consciously tried to use. To make the comic peripeteia even more telling, the Flesh begins losing the gift of eloquence once the Spirit gives it a bit of homely tongue-lashing. The verbal comedy thus lets us perceive a familiar couple of farce figures behind the psychomachian personifications: the quick-witted rogue and the bumbling but finally triumphant worthy.

Although virtuous Soul debates are less numerous than guilty Soul debates, their spectrum is more varied, particularly with respect to dramatic situations. A few examples must be cited. A long dialogue in 154

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elegiacs, "Cogis me litem describere spiritualem," develops the debate along theological lines, making ample and often entertaining use of biblical exempla.6 Although the debaters are compared to Adam (Spirit) and Eve (Flesh), they remain highly abstract personifications and the Spirit is unassailably right throughout the debate. In "Mundi dum florem magnum mihi dantis honorem," on the contrary, the debaters are specifically human figures: a carnal and a spiritual man.7 The early Italian dialogue known as the Ritro cassinese stages a similar debate between a worldly western man and a saintly eastern visitant.8 The comedy centers on the worldly man's naive disbelief that the visitant can do without food and drink. (The visitant's outburst against his interlocutor's doubts recalls the Spirit's decisive outburst in the Alter- cacio carnis et spiritus, lines 55-63.) Finally, in some debates the strug- gle is completely internalized (like the struggle between sinful Soul and Body in the Visio). Villon's so-called Debat du cuer et du corps is in this vein.9 This ballade pits the speaker's reprobate Self (not precisely designated as his body) against the Heart, which is the voice of conscience. Villon's briskly compressed and colorful dialogue-in- monologue combines the structure of a virtuous Soul debate with ele- ments of a romance character's ratiocinatio, elements furnished by a tradition of inner monologue derived from Ovid.10

To comprehend body and soul debates one must read them as co- hesive forensic comedies. To appreciate them fully one must see how they interplay-often, in the process, reaching into other literary preserves. Let us, for the sake of brevity, restrict our attention to those poets who experimented with both categories of debates (and sometimes with other types of memento ori poems).

At the end of the thirteenth century Bonvesin da la Riva composed a series of dialogues and monologues in Italian (seven poems in one, really), in which he systematically tried out different kinds of addresses between souls and bodies."l The first part is a dialogue between God

6 A. Wilmart, "Un Grand Debat de l'ame et du corps en vers elegiaques," Studi Medievali, Nuova Serie 12 (1939), 192-209.

7 Das Streitgedicht, pp. 216-18. 8 Gianfranco Contini, ed., Poeti del Duecento, 2 vols. (Milan, 1960), I, 7-13.

For an original (but perhaps overstated) reading of the Ritmo cassinese as a debate see Leo Spitzer, "The Text and Artistic Value of the Ritmo cassinese," Romanische Literaturstudien, 1936-1956 (Tiibingen, 1959), pp. 425-63.

9 Francois Villon, (Euvres, ed. A. Longnon and L. Foulet, 4th ed. (Paris, 1932), pp. 92-94. Luigi F. Benedetto edits the text very differently, "II dialogo di Villon col suo cuore," Atti della Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, Serie II, 87 (1952-53), 267-314.

10 See Charles Muscatine, "The Emergence of Psychological Allegory in Old French Romance," PMLA, 68 (1953), 1160-82.

11 De anima curm corpore ("Quiloga incontra l'anima si parla'l Creator") in

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and the Soul, who is taught how to discipline the Body. In the second part the Soul debates with the Body, subduing it with the promise of eternal life. Next, the Heart debates with the other parts of the body (chiefly represented by the Eye) and is declared guilty of misleading the Body. In the fourth part a sinful Soul berates its Body after death but before doomsday (as it does in the Visio Philiberti). Then a virtu- ous Soul praises its Body for having enabled it to obtain salvation. The final two parts occur on doomsday: a sinful Soul and Body exchange reproaches, a virtuous Soul and Body express gratitude to each other.

Jacopone da Todi wrote three different body and soul debates in Italian.12 "Audite una 'ntenzone ch'e 'nfra l'anema e'l corpo" (Lauda 3) is a lively quarrel between a stringent Soul and an indolent Body that balks at any suggestion of austerity. The debate interestingly snares and adapts the theme of wine and water debates. The sleight of hand illustrates the tenzone's zestful versatility: the Soul orders the Body to drink water instead of wine, but the Body refuses, claiming to suffer from dropsy. (This pretext is in itself comical because it borrows a topos traditionally belonging to the Soul: the likening of the Body's cupidity to dropsy.) 13 Slyly taking the body at its word, the Soul offers this mock compromise:

Puoie che l'acqua nocete a la tua enfermetate e lo vino noceme a la mia castitate, lassa lo vino e l'acqua per la nostra santate ...

(Lines 75-77)

(Since water is harmful to your infirmity and wine is harmful to my purity, put them both aside for the sake of our health ... )

Another dialogue, "0 corpo enfracedato, eo so l'alma dolente" (Lauda 15), takes place on doomsday and shows a sinful Soul and Body dis- cussing their imminent fate in hell. Finally, Jacopone composed a dialogue between a live man and his corpse which abounds in memento mori motifs ("Quando t'aliegre, omo de altura," Lauda 25).

Another use of the two categories of body and soul debates was devised by Philip the Chancellor (d. 1236). His Altercatio animnae et corporis conflates them, with the result that the Soul acts both as mentor and reprobate.14 The Soul and the Body each have a single two-stanza speech.

Le opere volgari di Bonvesin da la Riva, ed. Gianfranco Contini (Rome, 1941), pp. 54-76.

12 Laudi, Trattato e Detti, ed. Franca Ageno (Florence, 1953). 13 Compare, for example, the Soul's derisive comment in the debate of the

Royal MS. 7 A III: "Feruet ut intrinsecus / quilibet ydropicus." Eleanor Kellogg Heningham, An Early Latin Debate, p. 55, lines 105-106.

14 G. M. Dreves, C. Blume, and H. M. Bannister, eds., Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi, XXI (Leipzig, 1886-1922), 115-16. 156

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The Soul's speech is tortuous and strangely worded because of the daunting versification: lines of four different lengths (from four to eight syllables), with five rhymes and two rhythmical endings (ascend- ing and descending). But once puzzled out, the speech reveals a marked shift of expressive stance:

Homo natus ad laborem Tui status, tuae morem

Sortis considera Propensius, Me parcius

Querelis aspera; Quaestus ergo reprime, Ne animae, Quod misere commiseris, Quod pateris,

Miser impropera.

Me dum fecit Deus mundam, Vas infecit faex immundam,

Corrupit lutea, Desipio Nec sapio

Meum Promethea; Nil in carnis carcere Fit libere, Parit enim contagium Et vitium

Moles corporea.

(O man, born for hardship, think deliberately about the nature of your estate and your fate. Irritate me less often with complaints. Curb your gains. Do not reproach the Soul for what you have wretchedly done and uncovered.

While God made me pure, my vessel-that dirt-stained me impure. Clay cor- rupted me. I lose my wits and ignore my Prometheus. Nothing becomes free in the prison of the Flesh, for bodily bulk spawns contagion and vice.)

In the second stanza the Soul twists its sound admonishment into fool- ish incrimination. Although the tone does not change (can one even detect a tone in speech this shackled by prosody?), the Soul clearly declares its despondency and guilt. Prometheus is obviously a pagan analogue to Christ (he created man and suffered for his sake), which means that the Soul confesses having abandoned God. Furthermore, Prometheus is grandson of the Earth, Ge, so he and the Body both derive (in different senses) from clay. Since the earth imagery (faex, lutea, and even vas) helps to suggest a bond between them, the Soul seems unwittingly to expose its foolish attitude toward the Body. For if it emulated a virtuous Soul--like the one Bonvesin presents-it could find a Promethean benefactor precisely in the Body.

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Taking notice only of the Soul's second (guilty) stance, the Body depicts itself as completely blameless. It appropriates the role of a virtu- ous Soul-concluding its speech, for example, with the same metaphor of the paths of righteousness that the Spirit used in the Altercacio carnis et spiritus. But does this Body have the right to play such a virtuous role? One cannot discover the answer in the text. One cannot even know whether the Body's chastisement of the Soul for misusing reason constitutes a paradox:

In abusum rationis Vertis usum teque bonis

Privas gratuitis, Dum sensibus Assensibus

Faves illicitis ... (Lines 34-39)

(The use of reason you turn to abuse. You deprive yourself of benefits you've been freely given, favoring unlawful things with the consent of the senses.)

The Body's apparent disclaimer of responsibility for the senses is especially problematic. In a less formally constrained debate this might solidify into a touchstone that brings about a resolution, as does the paradox elicited by a similar chastisement of the Soul in the Visio Philiberti (lines 190-207). Here the paradox (if there is one) remains buried, lacking any contextual markers. Although this miniaturized debate is a tour de force, its discourse is too constricted to develop into full verbal drama.

Philip the Chancellor wrote several other two-speech debates. One of them, the Altercatio cordis et oculi, has much affinity with body and soul debates, the Heart lording it over the Eye like a sinful Soul over its Body.15 The Heart's sarcastic questioning recalls (on a reduced scale) the Soul's first speech in the Visio. Here is a sample:

Nonne fenestra diceris, Qua mors intrat ad animam?

Nonne, quod vides, sequeris Ut bos ductus ad victimam?

Cur non saltem, quas ingeris, Sordes lavas per lacrimam?

(Lines 17-22)

(Aren't you called a window that lets death into the soul? Don't you follow what you see like an ox led to sacrifice? Why don't you at least wash with tears the filth you draw in?)

The Heart's criticism of the Eye's docility (like the Soul's criticism of the Body's in the Visio) is evidently a case of the pot calling the

5 Analecta Hymnica, XXI, 114-15. 158

MEDIEVAL DEBATES

kettle black. After all, love (of the concupiscent variety) is traditionally ascribed to the Heart's following the Eye, its subordinate, in desiring the appealing object. Ironically, the formula "sequeris / ut bos ductus ad victimam" which comes from Proverbs vii.22, is used in the Visio to mock the Soul for having blindly followed its subordinate, the Body. The Heart's criticism of the Eye's lack of tears also boomerangs. Isn't it the Heart, one asks, that is supposed to control weeping ? In this poem, as in the Altercatio animae et corporis, Philip manages to give the hierarchical underling an edge, so as to emphasize how much blame lies with its higher-up. Thus, the Eye easily defends itself, pretending (falsely, as Reason's verdict will eventually point out) to be merely an innocent messenger:

Cur damnatur apertio Corpori necessaria,

Sine cujus obsequio Cuncta languent officia?

(Lines 33-36)

(Why damn the opening so necessary to the body and without whose obedience all functions of the body languish ?)

It will be remembered that the third part of Bonvesin's body and soul series focuses on a similar debate between Heart and Eye. There too the Heart, disregarding its hierarchical status, tries to shift the blame for misleading the entire body onto the Eye. The Heart's deceit- ful maneuver fails because the other parts of the body are only too happy to pillory their exposed leader. Bonvesin parodies a fable-like type of dialogue, the Disputcatio or Dialogus membrorum, whose theme is the rebellion of assorted parts of the body against the Stomach's gastronomic monopoly.16 Now, Philip the Chancellor composed just such a Disputatio, "Inter membra singula."l7 In it the Heart plays the significant role of heroic peacemaker: its deliberative eloquence brings the rebels to reason and convinces them that the Stomach promotes general welfare. Like the cunning Eye in the Altercatio cordis et oculi it pleads for the harmony of bodily officia (functions), but unlike the Eye it does so in purely disinterested fashion.

Bonvesin and Philip both contravene the Heart as it figures in Latin and especially vernacular love-lyric. They distinctly repudiate one

16 The literary paradigm for the disputatio membrorumn dialogues is an anec- dote about Menenius Agrippa in Livy (II. 30). According to Livy, Agrippa told the fable of the Stomach and the parts of the body to halt a plebeian rebellion (Shakespeare dramatized the incident in Coriolanus, I.i.99-109). A Provencal body and soul debate also incorporates a disputatio membrorum (T. Batiouchkof, "Le Debat de l'ame et du corps," p. 539).

17Analecta Hymnica, XXI, 116-17. Philip inserts Livy's narrator in the dialogue itself: the Heart plays the role of Agrippa.

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topos: praising the Heart for being so attached to the beloved that it will remain with her when the lovers are apart because of a crusade, for example-as in Friedrich von Hausen's renowned "Mmn herze und min lip diu wellent scheiden." In his Dispttatio membrorum Philip, moreover, performs a double trick in having the Heart counterpoint both the noble Heart of love lyric and its satirical antithesis, the con- cupiscent reprobate of the Altercatio cordis (or of Bonvesin's poem). In other words, Philip wittily makes his second Heart play the part of a virtuous Soul (and, as if to stress this point, he gives it a single ally: Reason). Thus, just as he has given us two versions of the Soul (mentor and fool) in the Altercatio animae et corporis, so in the Altercatio cordis and the Disputatio membrorum he gives us two contrasting Hearts. These intertwining literary experiments illustrate the kaleidoscopic richness of medieval moral debates and adumbrate two works by a seventeenth-century master of poetical experiments.

To close this survey of contrasting body and soul debates, at least cursory attention must be paid to Andrew Marvell's accomplishment in both categories of these debates. "A Dialogue between the Soul and Body" is the subtlest of all debates between sinful Soul and Body.l8 Marvell retains important features of the medieval tradition, such as the Soul's self-pitying complaints concerning the tyranny of the Body or the paradox about the Body that is both master and slave-a relation- ship stated with perfect ambiguity:

A Body that could never rest, Since this ill Spirit it possest.

(Lines 19-20)

But his virtuosity also alters the tradition. In many of the medieval debates, for example, the Body accuses the Soul of having been an incompetent helmsman that caused its shipwreck. Here is an Old French example:

Quant en la haute mer Me deus gouerner Et moi mener al port Por moi garir de mort

18 The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. Margoliouth, P. Legouis, and E. E. Duncan-Jones, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), I, 21-23. J. B. Leishman briefly discusses the poem's connection to medieval body and soul debates (quoting, in fact, the first two stanzas of the Altercacio carnis et spiritus) : The Art of Marvell's Poetry (New York, 1968), pp. 210-12. Interesting observations on the many facets of Marvell's debate can be found in Kitty Scoular Datta, "New Light on Marvell's 'A Dialogue between the Soul and Body,"' Ren- aissance Quarterly, 22 (1969), 242-55. For general but enlightening comments on Marvell's use of debate forms, see Rosalie Colie, "My Ecchoing Song:" Andrew Marvell's Poetry of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 27-29. 160

MEDIEVAL DEBATES

En la wage parfonde Me trebuchas en l'onde.19

(On the high seas, when you should have steered me and taken me into the harbor to keep me from death in the deep waves, you capsized me in the billows.)

Marvell twists the topos around and inserts it in the Soul's diatribe against the Body's endurance:

Constrain'd not only to indure Diseases, but whats worse, the Cure: And ready oft the Port to gain, Am Shipwrackt into Health again.

(Lines 27-30)

As we saw in the Visio Philiberti, the iconography of the Soul's suffer- ing requires that it still possess (metaphorically) a body after death. Marvell brilliantly also puts things the other way around, expressing the Body's suffering in terms of spiritual ills:

But Physick yet could never reach The Maladies Thou me dost teach; Whom first the Cramp of Hope does Tear: And then the Palsie Shakes of Fear. The Pestilence of Love does heat: Or hatred's hidden Ulcer eat.

(Lines 31-36)

This Body may have the same languid hypochondria as the Body in Jacopone's Lauda 3, but it expresses it in vigorous conceits that subvert the Spirit's figurative stock-in-trade. (Note, for example, how the Anchor of Hope becomes the Cramp of Hope by means of etymology: both Greek ankyra and Germanic krampe mean hook.) The dialogue continually inverts conventions and refracts the debate tradition with a literary signature characteristic of Marvell.

In "A Dialogue between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure" Marvell offers his version of a virtuous Soul debate.20 Though he substitutes Pleasure for the Body, this new personification is clearly associated with the bodily senses (eulogized in its first five speeches) and the Body's traditional compulsions-desire for beauty, wealth, and glory (eulogized in three more speeches). The only addition to the medieval Body's traits is thirst for knowledge, the subject of Pleasure's final speech.

In most debates of this kind the role of instigator belongs to the

19 Un Sanedi par nuit, ed. Hermann Varnhagen, Erianger Beitrdge zur englischen Philologie, 1 (1889), 113-96, p. 170, MS. P, lines 803-808. For another good example see the Royal MS debate: Eleanor Kellogg Heningham, An Early Latin Debate, pp. 73-74, lines 1849-1871. T. Batiouchkof comments on this topos, "Le Debat de l'ame et du corps," pp. 537-38n.

20 The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, pp. 9-12. 161

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Soul. Marvell gives it to Pleasure. Its discourse, totaling almost twice as many lines as the Soul's, is laden with images and motifs that diffuse sensual connotations. This, for example, is the enticement to the sense of touch:

On these downy Pillows lye, Whose soft Plumes will thither fly: On these Roses strow'd so plain Lest one Leaf thy Side should strain.

(Lines 19-22)

Single couplets suffice the Soul for crushing each of Pleasure's speeches (except the one tempting the ear, which requires a two-couplet retort). The couplets-virtually mottos for an emblem book-strip the images and motifs tendered by Pleasure of their sensual connotations and restructure them into stern aphorisms:

My gentler Rest is on a Thought Conscious of doing what I ought.

(Lines 23-24)

The struggle with connotations develops into an uneven, yet dramatic, battle of discourses: the Soul's speech craft shatters Pleasure's sybaritic epideixis and recasts it into moral deliberation.

The counterpoint with the "Dialogue between the Soul and Body" is unmistakable.21 The Resolved Soul's finely executed triumph fits the definition of spiritual discipline that the Body gives:

So Architects do square and hew, Green Trees that in the Forest grew.

In this couplet the Body means to describe how its sinful Soul builds it up for sin, even though the Soul has clearly shown itself too fitful for such determined craftsmanship. Consequently, the Body finally seems to point to the virtuous Resolved Soul, while Pleasure misjudging its interlocutor, seems to address the sinful Soul. The counterpoint cul- minates in an antithesis of structure. Engrossed in self-pity, the sinful Soul and Body argue past each other. Only the reader's assessment of the stalemate gives the debate a resolution in the form of a tertium

quid. Pleasure and the Resolved Soul, on the other hand, engage in a fruitful dialectic, although Pleasure does so unwittingly (hardly antici- pating that, far from winning the rounds it instigates, it will become

21 Rosalie Colie explains how the "Dialogue between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure" also counterpoints several other poems, e.g., "On a Drop of Dew," "The Coronet," and "Clorinda and Damon" ("My Ecchoing Song," pp. 27- 29). She argues that Marvell's lyrics can be arranged "in various relevant groups" and that they "continually and quite properly insist on being shifted from one category to another" (p. 15), points similar to the ones I am trying to make about medieval debates. 162

MEDIEVAL DEBATES

Created into moral metaphors). The Soul's spiritual resolve reveals itself in the aesthetic power of its discourse. The poem's prologue had directed it to

. . shew that Nature wants an Art To conquer one resolved Heart.

(Lines 9-10)

In Philip the Chancellor's Disputatio membrorun the Heart ends the rebellion by oratorical means: In Marvell's dialogues the Soul as "one resolved Heart" ends the disorder of inner as well as outer nature by the agency of art.

Marvell's dialogues are mutually serviceable, each enriching the other. Their relationship to the medieval corpus of body and soul debates is similar: in exploiting the medieval resources they make the earlier poems appear richer than one might have suspected. They endow a medieval literary game with superb Renaissance variations that help us sense its poignancy and wit. Marvell may have seen the struggle of body and soul in a newer light (influenced, for example, by the human- ists' interpretations of Aristotle's De anima and Plutarch's Moralia), yet for him as for his medieval predecessors the struggle was a harrow- ing drama best viewed with comic fortitude.

Brown University

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