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History and Action in Patience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Jay Schleusener
Jay Schleusener*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill.
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Abstract

The idea of the possibilities of human action in the Middle English Patience rests on a strictly providential view of history. Jonah's mission to the Ninevites is part of a larger scheme, invisible to him, in which he has little confidence. The irony of the prophet's failure to understand or trust God's moral and historical purposes is deepened by the fact that he is a figure of Christ. Jonah's blindness to God's immediate purpose—salvation for the Ninevites—is foolish, but his ignorance of his own typological significance is inevitable, for that significance cannot be realized until the incarnation of Christ. Thus patience, the virtue in which Jonah fails so badly, is not simply a dull acquiescence in present necessity, but a sure faith in an eternal order not merely obscure but unimagined except by God. A brief reading of the poem shows that the contours of this faith are defined by those three of God's attributes which characterize the moral quality of events in the world he orders: his power, justice, and mercy.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 86 , Issue 5 , October 1971 , pp. 959 - 965
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1971

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References

Notes

Note 1 in page 964 Here and in much of what follows I have drastically simplified a variety of complex views, but if it avoids misrepresentation, this rudimentary treatment will serve my purpose.

Note 2 in page 964 St. Augustine, The City of God, Bk. xiv, Ch. xxvii, in Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, ed. W. J. Oates, ii (New York: Random, 1948), 273.

Note 3 in page 964 “… neither did any future event escape God's fore-knowledge, nor did His foreknowledge compel any one to sin.” —Augustine, Bk. xiv, Ch. xxvii.

Note 4 in page 965 History and Eschatology (New York: Harper, 1956), p. 2.

Note 5 in page 965 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956), p. 46.

Note 6 in page 965 Patience, ed. J. J. Anderson (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1969), l. 128. Quoted throughout.

Note 7 in page 965 Collingwood, p. 53.

Note 8 in page 965 Anderson offers the following paraphrase of ll. 51–56: “Or if my liege lord pleased to command me to go to Rome on his errand, what would grumbling achieve for me except to invite more trouble ? It would be too good to be true if he did not compel me (to go), in spite of my objections, and then I must endure misery and displeasure for a reward, who ought to have bowed to his bidding according to the terms of my hire.” The lines are difficult, but I do not believe that Anderson or either of the previous editors has solved all of the syntactical problems. Emendation may be the only answer.

Note 9 in page 965 He is, in fact, the only figure of Christ besides Adam mentioned in the New Testament, and the only one identified by Christ himself (Matt, xii.39).

Note 10 in page 965 Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian, 1959), p. 59.

Note 11 in page 965 A. C. Spearing, “Patience and the Gawain-Poet,” Anglia, 84 (1966), 305–29.

Note 12 in page 965 P. 320.

Note 13 in page 965 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Scribners, 1952), p. 133.

Note 14 in page 965 A passage from Augustine's Confessions might be taken as an appropriate comment on Jonah's flight and on the divine attributes of power, justice, and mercy: “Let the wicked in their restlessness go from Thee and flee away. Yet Thou dost see them, cleaving through their darkness. And all the universe is beautiful about them, but they are vile…. Where indeed did they flee to when they fled from Thy face? Or where dost Thou not find them? The truth is that they fled, that they might not see Thee who sawest them. And so with eyes blinded they stumbled against Thee—for Thou dost not desert any of the things that Thou hast made—they stumbled against Thee in their injustice and justly suffered, since they had withdrawn from Thy mercy and stumbled against Thy justice and fallen headlong upon Thy wrath. Plainly they do not know that Thou art everywhere whom no place compasses in, and that Thou alone art ever present even to those that go furthest from Thee.”—Bk. v, Ch. ii, trans. F. J. Sheed (New York: Sheed& Ward, 1942).

Note 16 in page 965 There is something of a tradition behind this example of God's power. Augustine compares it to the story of Orion of Methymna, who was “thrown overboard from a ship, then taken up on a dolphin's back and brought to shore.” Our account of Jonah the Prophet is more incredible. It is more incredible because more wonderful. It is more wonderful because it reveals greater power.“ Bk. i, Ch. xiv.

Note 16 in page 965 According to Beryl Smalley, in The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1952), p. 210, the question whether Jonah lied in foretelling a destruction which did not come about is traditional. Its locus classicus is, I think, to be found in Augustine's Sermo ccclxi, Cap. xxi (Patrologia Latina, 39: 1610–11), where he asks, “Sed quid dicemus? quia Propheta mentitus est?” He answers with the suggestion that understood spiritually, the sinful Nineveh was destroyed—through conversion. The initial pronouncements on true and false prophecy may be found in Deuteronomy xviii and Jeremiah xxiii.21–40.

Note 17 in page 965 Charles Moorman's view in “The Role of the Narrator in Patience,” MP, 61 (1964), 92.