Rypon recommends that the heat of anger be tempered with fear. “When anyone is frightened, his heart grows cold, and the natural cause is because when anyone is frightened, the heat around the heart in part is dispersed and when one of its adversaries has receded, the remainder follows.” 49 However, the effects of this fear, a good fear of God and mindfulness of Christ’s passion, are also aided by the “virtue of patience.” From Lanfranc, we recall that fear and wrath are opposite passions to be manipulated depending on the patient’s needs during the healing process.
Patience is by far the most common antidote to wrath in medieval texts. In the Middle English poem Patience, the eponymous virtue allows people to “stere” their hearts in the face of adversity. 50 This quality is recommended in contrast with the negative exemplum of Jonah, in which the over-powering storm symbolizes the chaos and irrationality of Jonah’s anger at God’s tests. Just as Jonah fails to “stere” his heart, so the ship cannot be steered. Elsewhere, patience is used figuratively as a remedy for wrath. For example, in the Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, Nicholas Love explains that Christ was “made medicyne of man” and that there is no “wrath bot þat it may be heled throw his pacience.” 51
However, patience bears a more material relation to illness in both spiritual and medical texts. Illness is one of the many causes of wrath identified in pastoral texts, which thus recommend cultivating the virtue of patience to both counter the sin and help suffer the disease well. After describing the sin of ira, the author of Fasciculus Morum counsels patience in situations that might trigger the sin: adversity caused by enemies, correction from our superiors, the loss of goods and suffering due to infirmity. Regarding illness, the author discusses the spiritual function of disease as a blessing in that it offers a punishment on earth that is lesser than eternal damnation, as well as encouraging contemplation of the temporality of human life. 52 Likewise, Peraldus counsels meekness to repress the inner motion toward anger and foster patience, helping sufferers to bear external hardships that arouse anger. As we recall from Chap. 2, medieval surgeons also encourage patience as part of material healing. Spiritual fortitude and the willingness to suffer facilitate healing. Physiologically, weak hearts impede healing. However, it is unclear whether the fortitude recommended in medical texts is physical or mental, secular or spiritual. Certainly, patience heals and a lack of patience sustains suffering.
Given this rich tradition of the embodiment of wrath in pastoral, medical, and theological literature, we might expect the portrayal of Wrath in Piers Plowman at least to rival that of Envy. Yet in the procession of the vices, Wrath is one of the least “embodied” vices. Unlike the other sins, he names himself—“I am Wrathe”—and initially presents himself as one who incites wrath in others rather than one afflicted by wrath. Therefore, whereas we see Envy’s body “to-bollen for wrathe,” we do not see Wrath’s swollen body. 53 There are some scant physiognomic references to his “white eighen,” downward pointing nose and “nekke hangyng.” However, this information pales in comparison with the details of Envy’s self-consumption, wind, and heart disease. 54
Wrath details his actions rather than his body, showing how he ravages others. He first presents himself as a gardener who grafts lies upon mendicants and chaplains to please the gentry. The “fruyt” of these plants is that confessants turn to friars rather than their parish priests, who in turn denounce mendicants from their pulpits. Next, Wrath is a cook who serves up gossip in the abbey’s kitchen: “of wikked words … hire wortes [cooked greens] made.” 55
Briefly, Wrath turns to consider his own body. He does not like to stay at the monastery, because the monks can offer only humble fish and weak ale. However, when the wine comes out, Wrath cannot contain himself. Medical texts warn that the choleric may be more combative and vicious after wine, and Langland’s Wrath certainly is. 56 After his binge, he has “a flux of a foul mouth wel five dayes after.” 57 Flux, or diarrhea, and vomiting are associated with excess cholera. As previously noted, wrath was thought to cause continual fever. The afflicted vomit up their excess choleric humor. 58 Langland’s Wrath spews up choler in the form of evil words. In this portrait, he is both wrath the passion, reacting to and in this case creating sense impressions that stimulate others to anger, and the wrathful sinner whose actions are deliberate and willed. The passion is thus contiguous, or vicina, to the vice, each facilitating the other in a single body.
The overwhelmingly consistent and persistent embodiment of anger in terms of heat has generated considerable discussion among modern conceptual metaphor theorists, who have even drawn on medieval theories of anger and embodiment. Linguists have debated the origin of anger metaphors: whether the hotness of anger is indeed a universal, physiological experience or whether it merely reflects a premodern medical tradition that roots the cause of anger in the physically hot choleric humor. 59 Regardless of the origins of the modern imagery and phenomenology of wrath, medieval writers were certainly aware of the physiological and psychological entanglements of wrath, grappling with the particularly close relationship of wrath the sin and wrath the passion.
Notes
1.In Summa de vitiis, Peraldus notably positions wrath last in his treatment of the vices, which are then followed by the peccata linguae [sins of the tongue].
2.Thomas of Chobham, Summa Confessorum, p. 414.
3.Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth, p. 43.
4.Parts of this chapter occur in Virginia Langum, “Sacred and Secular Wrath in Medieval English Sources,” in The Sacred and the Secular in Medieval Healing: Sites, Objects, and Texts, eds. Barbara Bowers and Linda Migl Keyser (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), pp. 13–25.
5.Young, p. 171.
6. Jacob’s Well, p. 91.
7.Lester K. Little, “Anger in Monastic Curses,” in Anger’s Past: the Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. Barbara Rosenwein (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 9–35 (p. 14); Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices, p. 1–3.
8.Gower, Confessio Amantis, Vol. 2, Book 3, line 10.
9.Ibid., Vol. 2, Book 3, lines 116–22.
10. The Book of Vices and Virtues, p. 25.
11.Ibid., p. 25.
12.Gower, Mirour de l’Omme, p. 74.
13.See Johnson, “A Fifteenth-Century Sermon Enacts the Seven Deadly Sins,” p. 121; BL MS. Harley 2391, f. 140r.
14.“Templum Domini,” lines 593–4.
15. Fasciculus Morum, p. 119.
16.John Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS e.s. 77 (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1899), lines 15623, 15625.
17.Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions, p. 274.
18.Peter of Limoges, The Moral Treatise on the Eye, p. 82.
19. A Late Fifteenth-Century Dominical Cycle, Vol. 2, pp. 362–3.
20.Ibid., p. 363. Palsy also punishes the wrathful in Prick of Conscience. Prick of Conscience, p. 82.
21.Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II–II, q. 158, art. 8.
22.Ibid., II–I, q. 48, art. 3.
23.Pecock, The Folewer to the Donet, p. 96.
24.Ibid., p. 109.
25.Ibid., p. 110.
26.Ibid., p. 112.
27.Lanfranc, Science of Chirurgie, p. 17.
28. Liber de Diversis Medicinis, ed. Margaret Sinclair Ogden, EETS o.s. 207 (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 61.
29.Lanfranc, Science of Chirurgie, p. 65.
30.Ibid., p. 318.
31. Gouernayle of Helthe (London: Caxton, 1490), 2v.
32.Knuuttila, “Medieval Theories of the Passions of the Soul,” p. 57.
33.Phillippa Maddern, Violence and Social Order: East Anglia 1422–1442 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 80. Thorough discussions of positive anger are found in Anger’s Past, ed. Rosenwein.
34.Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II–I, q. 46, art. 2.
35. The Doctrinal of Sapience, ed. Joseph Gallagher (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1993), p. 120. The printer Will
iam Caxton translated Le Doctrinal de Sapience into English in 1489.
36. On the Properties of Things, Vol. 1, p. 128.
37. Jacob’s Well, pp. 99–100.
38. On the Properties of Things, Vol. 1, p. 140.
39.“Chirurgie de 1392,” p. 170. Several medieval proverbs associate the wrathful with bestiality, loss of reason, and generally “wodeschip.” These proverbs and popular examples are catalogued in Maddern, Violence and Social Order, p. 96.
40.Lydgate, Pilgrimage, lines 15633–16634.
41.Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 183–5. For cultural and literary representations of gender and anger, see Richard. E. Barton, “Gendering Anger: Ira, Furor and Discourses of Masculinity and Power in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” in In the Garden of Evil, ed. Newhauser, pp. 371–92. In the early modern period, however, medical writers used humoral theory to distinguish between choleric, masculine wrath and phlegmatic, feminine anger. See Gwynne Kennedy, Just Anger: Representing Women’s Anger in Early Modern England (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), pp. 7–8.
42.Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 36–76, 81. On the distinction of female anger, see also Kristi Gourlay, “A Pugnacious Pagan Princess: Aggressive Female Anger and Violence in Fierabras,” in The Representation of Women’s Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, ed. Lisa Perfetti (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), pp. 133–163.
43.Carrera, “Anger and the Mind-Body Connection,” p. 108.
44. The Trotula: an English Translation of the Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine, ed. and trans. Monica H. Green (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 66. The Trotula is found in both Latin and Middle English translations in medieval England.
45.Ibid., p.79.
46. A Late Fifteenth-Century Dominical Sermon Cycle, Vol. 2, p. 268. The homilist makes this point again, p. 314.
47.Chaucer, “Parson’s Tale,” in Riverside Chaucer, X.655.
48. The Doctrinal of Sapience, p. 122.
49.Rypon, RY51B, ed. Johnson, forthcoming.
50.“Patience,” in The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1987), line 27.
51.Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. Michael G. Sargent (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2004), p. 9. There are 71 extant manuscripts of this text.
52. Fasciculus Morum, pp. 140–142.
53.Langland, Piers Plowman, V.8.
54.Both pale eyes and eyes rolled back in anger so as to appear “white” are associated with the wrathful in physiognomic literature. In Secretum secretorum, for example, pale eyes “sheweth vn-pacient and mensleers” and “eyen whirlyng aboute sheweth impacientis without pité.” Secretum Secretorum: Nine English Versions, ed. M. A. Manzalaoui, EETS o.s. 276 (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 96–7.
55.Langland, Piers Plowman, V.160.
56.“Chirurgie of 1392,” p. 170.
57.Langland, Piers Plowman, V.177.
58. On the Properties of Things, Vol. 1, p. 390.
59.For historicist perspectives on this issue, see Dirk Geeraerts and Stefan Grondelaers, “Looking Back at Anger: Cultural Traditions and Metaphorical Patterns,” in Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World, ed. John R. Taylor and Robert E. Maclaury (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995), pp. 153–179 and Dirk Geeraerts and C. Gevaert, “Hearts and Angry Minds in Old English,” in Culture and Language: Looking for the Mind Inside the Body (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter), pp. 319–347. For more universalist and cross-cultural approaches, see George Lakoff and Zoltan Kövecses, “The Cognitive Model of Anger Inherent in American English,” in Cultural Models in Language and Thought, ed. Dorothy Holland and Naomi Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 195–221 and Zoltan Kövecses, “Anger: Its Language, Conceptualization, and Physiology in Light of Cross-Cultural Evidence,” in Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World, ed. John R. Taylor and Robert E. MacLaury (Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995), pp. 181–196. More recent developments in cognitive linguistics address a tension between the universality of the body and variation within culture. See, Zoltan Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
© The Author(s) 2016
Virginia LangumMedicine and the Seven Deadly Sins in Late Medieval Literature and CultureThe New Middle Ages10.1057/978-1-137-44990-0_6
6. Avarice
Virginia Langum1
(1)Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
What motivates avarice? Is it a sin of the spirit or of the flesh? From the days of the early Church, thinkers were perplexed as to the motivation of avarice. Saint John Chrysostom (d. 407), for example, writes that physicians understood the origins of lust and wrath in the “temperament of the flesh,” yet had not found a physiological origin for avarice. 1 Aquinas includes avarice among the spiritual sins, although its object is fleshly or worldly. As he explains, “carnal pleasures are those which are consummated in the carnal senses.” Examples are “pleasures of the table and sexual pleasures.” Spiritual pleasures, however, are “consummated in the mere apprehension of the soul … the avaricious man takes pleasure in the consideration of himself as a possessor of riches. Therefore avarice is a spiritual sin.” 2 Nonetheless, “by reason of its object it is a mean between purely spiritual sins, which seek spiritual pleasure,” that is, pride, “and purely carnal sins, which seek a purely bodily pleasure in respect of a bodily object.” 3 Fittingly, Alexander of Hales positions avarice as a sin of anima, with avarice corresponding to the concupiscible power of the soul. 4 Likewise, in schemes ordering the virtues and vices, avarice hovers between the sins of the spirit and the sins of the body. 5 It alone occupies the category of the world in the scheme of the three temptations comprising devil, world, and flesh. There are some exceptions, however, to the typical Gregorian order; for example, Richard Lavynham’s Litil Tretys promotes avarice to second in the order of the sins. 6
As for species of avarice, three closely related and sometimes interchangeable concepts predominate in discussions of the sin: avarice, covetousness, and greed. Whereas greed can describe any immoderate desire—for possessions, food, sex—avarice here relates to worldly possessions. Avarice and covetousness are often used interchangeably in medieval pastoral texts. However, some writers distinguish them. Chaucer’s Parson plainly states that avarice is a vicious desire to keep what one has and covetousness is a vicious desire to obtain what one does not have: “coueitise is for to coueite swiche thynges as thow hast nat, and auarice is for to withholde and kepe swiche thynges as thow hast with oute rightful nede.” 7 Yet this distinction does not always hold. Other pastoral writers offer a biological distinction between avarice and covetousness that will be covered later in the chapter. Of the other, more specific species of avarice, Gregory lists proditio [treachery], fraus [fraud], fallacia [fallacia], periuria [perjury], inquietudo [restlessness], uiolentiae [violence], and contra misericordiam obdurationes cordis [unmerciful hardening of the heart]. 8
Metaphorical Avarice
Perhaps of all the sins, avarice has the most persistent symbolic association with a particular disease: dropsy. Dropsy was an ancient and medieval disease thought to cause extreme thirst. Modern medicine now considers dropsy (usually referred to as water retention or edema) as a symptom, not a disease. According to older medical ideas drinking only aggravated the thirst caused by dropsy. Contrary to later medieval and modern medicine, earlier medieval medicine held that water retention was cured by abstinence from drinking. It was also associated with painful swelling under the skin and bad breath. 9
Dropsy’s symbolic unity is easily grasped, as dropsy tortures its victims with an unquenchable thirst. Although
the association is old—it is found in the late fourth-century writings of Saint Augustine, for example—the image acquires greater currency in the later Middle Ages. Despite developments in later medieval medicine suggesting that the thirsty person should drink, later medieval moralists stuck with the earlier medical cure of abstinence for didactic purposes. 10 Greed and dropsy are paired in countless sermons and treatises on the vices. In particular, homilists gloss the dropsical man healed by Christ in the Bible as representing “covetose pepill.” 11
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