The Poetics of Alchemical Engagement: The Allegorical Journey to God in Ripley and Norton after ...

321 Pages·2014·2.26 MB·English

The Poetics of Alchemical Engagement:

The Allegorical Journey to God in Ripley and Norton after Chaucer

Marcelle Muasher Khoury
Charlottesville, VA

B.A., American University of Beirut, 1970
M.A., American University of Beirut, 1973
Ph.D., University of Virginia, 2014

A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty
of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of English
University of Virginia
May 2014
The Poetics of Alchemical Engagement:
The Allegorical Journey to God in Ripley and Norton After Chaucer

Marcelle Muasher Khoury
© Copyright by
Marcelle Muasher Khoury
All Rights Reserved
May 2014
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Abstract

Both fifteenth-century alchemical poets, George Ripley and Thomas Norton,
perceived themselves to be “Chaucerian” in far deeper ways than has been recognized.
They perceived their own work, like Chaucer’s, to join author, reader and pilgrim on an
essentially hermeneutical journey to Wisdom, and shared with him a deep concern with
the human condition of fragmentation and infinite deferral, which they understood
Chaucer to relegate to the interpreter’s confinement within the natural (sensible and
semantic) mode of perception. They likewise perceived themselves to share with him the
Boethian belief that this condition can and should be overcome through the hermeneutical
pilgrim’s “hevy[ng] up the heved,” or “heav[ing] up the head,” and “entencioun” to ryght
“heye thinges” (Boece V, m. 4.35-37), ultimately beyond the entire ontological structure
of the Cosmos. The “Philosopher’s Stone” was an expression of the resultant entity. Like
Chaucer, they consciously sought to harmonize with the Christian faith the natural
philosophy that was absorbed into Western Europe through the Late Medieval translation
movement. Rather than focusing on their weaknesses and failures, I seek first to
understand and appreciate what each of them tried to do. The features they perceive
themselves to share with Chaucer can bring attention to structures and meanings in
Chaucer that have so far eluded scholars, and can therefore provide new tools for future
studies on Chaucer.
The first and introductory chapter presents a general picture of the problem that
the “Philosopher’s Stone” fundamentally sought to address. I argue that late medieval
Christian thinkers, including Chaucer, were deeply concerned with the problem of
fragmentation and deferral that temporal infinity presented since the Pre-Socratic natural
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philosophers. They were deeply concerned with what it was that made entitihood,
personhood, or meaning possible within a matrix of infinite temporality and absolute
relativity. They proposed the Incarnation as the agency through which the contemplative
or hermeneutical pilgrim could constitute his being into an indestructible whole. Ripley
and Norton belonged to that same quest, and framed it as a quest for the “Philosopher’s
Stone” which “For of this world . . . is called the sement” (Compound, V.20.1).
The second chapter argues that Ripley textualizes the alchemical operation. He
shifts the alchemist’s search for the “seeds” of the divine act of creation hidden in the
matter of Nature, to a hermeneutical search into the matter of his own text. He hides
these seeds in his Compound—which is also his Stone—and teaches his reader to
recuperate them through a hermeneutical exercise in which the reader learns to
epistemologically “separate” the matter of the text, into its ontological parts and to
similarly re-“conjoin” them. Ripley contrasts this epistemological activity of the genuine
alchemical philosopher and artist to that of the false “philosophers” who “separate” and
re-“conjoin” their matter merely sensibly and semantically, and whom Ripley treats with
“Chaucerian” satire. By means of this hermeneutical process, Ripley guides his reader to
intellectually enact and internalize the entire ontological structure of the universe, exceed
it, pass through death and into a deified and resurrected Philosopher’s Stone, microcosm,
and embodiment of the Compound itself, jointly ‘created’ by the author, reader, God and
nature.
The third chapter explores some of the similarities and differences between the
two late medieval contemplative journeys to Wisdom and union with God, the Christian
and the alchemical as they are represented by Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum
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and Ripley’s Compound of Alchemy respectively. I argue that Ripley’s alchemical
journey exhibits a shift towards the reification of language and the human mind.
In the fourth chapter I demonstrate Thomas Norton’s similar “Chaucerian”
concern with the human condition of deferral, and similar relegation of this condition to
the confinement of the individual’s mind within the natural and spatio-temporal mode of
perception. I argue that Norton presents his “Ordinall” as a healing unifier which lifts the
reader’s intentionality towards divine truth, and helps him to turn his mind into a
microcosmic opus that aligns all the operations contributing to human being—in both
their Ancient and Christian trajectories—into a single trajectory. These operations
include the labor of the human artist, the cycles of nature, the life of the English body-
politic, the sacred History of Creation from beginning to end, and the Church liturgy
centered on the Incarnation or the “leap” of the Word as the agency that makes possible
one’s temporal yet transformative journey to microcosmic existence.
In the fifth chapter I shift attention to the Ancient Greek philosophical roots of
alchemy and explore them, especially the Pre-Socratic problematization of infinity and
the consequent search for indestructible entitihood, in order to build an understanding of
the cyclical trajectory of exitus and reditus from and back to a cosmic “One,” which
underlies the alchemical operation, and consequently an understanding of the conflicts
Norton had to overcome in order to combine the Ancient trajectory with the Christian
one. I argue that Norton was aware of and concerned about the radical differences
between these two trajectories, the former of “generation” and the latter of “creation.”
Whether or not he was successful, Norton, I argue, tried to fit the former cosmic
trajectory within the latter and wider one which contained the cosmos between a
beginning ontologically prior to it and an end similarly beyond it.
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Contents

Abstract .............................................................................................................................................. i
Contents ........................................................................................................................................... iv
List of Abbreviations ....................................................................................................................... vi
Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... vii
Introductory Chapter ......................................................................................................................... 1
What was Chaucerian About Chaucer? ............................................................................................ 1
Chaucerianism and the Philosopher’s Stone ......................................................................... 1
The Ancient Problem of Infinity and its Medieval Solution............................................... 14
The Problem and its Solution in The Clerk’s Tale .............................................................. 33
Ripley, Norton and The Canon Yeoman’s Tale .................................................................. 47
Chapter Two.................................................................................................................................... 62
Allegory and Allegoresis in Ripley’s Compound ........................................................................... 62
The Compound’s Hermeneutical role in the Alchemical Literary Tradition ...................... 67
Philosopher’s Stone and reader: Opus and “Childe” ......................................................... 93
The Compound’s Non-Immersive text .............................................................................. 100
Isis and the “Well Conceaved Fruit” ................................................................................ 108
The Four Elements and the Knitting Motif ....................................................................... 129
Chapter Three................................................................................................................................ 145
The Pilgrim as Living Allegory: Ripley and Bonaventure ........................................................... 145
Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis in Deum ..................................................................... 149
The Compound’s Reified Journey .................................................................................... 167
The Stone’s liminal experience and ‘passage’ through death ........................................... 186
Recapitulations .................................................................................................................. 191
Chapter Four ................................................................................................................................. 196
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The Beginning, the End, and the “Meen Space” (Part I): Thomas Norton’s Ordinal ................... 196
Poetics of the Incarnation.................................................................................................. 202
Deferral, the “Ordinal” and the King ................................................................................ 210
“Alteration,” “Generation,” “Creation” ............................................................................ 229
The Pre-Socratic Trajectory .............................................................................................. 238
Chapter Five .................................................................................................................................. 256
The Beginning, the End, and the “Meen Space” (Part I): “Generation” within Liminal
Boundaries .................................................................................................................................... 256
Containing Generation Within Creation ........................................................................... 256
“Lerne this latyne”: The Christian Trajectory .................................................................. 263
The Five Concords ............................................................................................................ 282
Appendix ....................................................................................................................................... 294
Works Cited .................................................................................................................................. 295
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List of Abbreviations

CCEL Christian Classics Ethereal Library

Cl.T Clerk’s Tale

Conf. Confessions

CYT Canon Yeoman’s Tale

KT Knight’s Tale

Met Metaphysics

MLT Man of Law’s Tale

On Gen. On Generation and Corruption

SCG Summa Contra Gentiles

ST The Summa Theologica
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Acknowledgements

There are more parties than I can mention, to whom I am indebted for making this
dissertation possible. First and foremost, I have deep gratitude for my adviser Professor
Bruce Holsinger, whose guidance has helped discipline my argument while at the same
time freeing it from needless inhibition. His enthusiastic encouragement and his kind
patience with the great passion I have had, and continue to have, towards my topic, have
made this dissertation possible, and are gifts that will always remain with me. The
freedom he gave me to explore and experiment, while at the same time providing me with
unfailing guidance, has been invaluable in furnishing me with a solid foundation for the
further projects to which I so look forward. His instantaneous and unfailing response to
my manuscript submissions, under all circumstances, such as while he was away from
Charlottesville, and even while on the road, leaves me short of words with which I can
adequately express my deep gratitude. Any missteps that remain, or flaws of any sort, are
entirely my own.
I also owe to Bruce Holsinger many thanks together with Professors A. C.
Spearing, Elizabeth Fowler, and Peter Baker for guiding me to George Ripley and
Thomas Norton whom I had never heard of before. I initially wanted to write my entire
dissertation on Chaucer, and was distraught when I met with rejection. Ripley and Norton
seemed at once dull and inscrutable, as though speaking in another planetary language,
while seeming too simplistic at the same time. But once I began to understand these two
poets—which was after much research and great effort—I found them to be truly
exciting, highly knowledgeable, shrewed and complex thinkers, and I ended up feeling
very fortunate to have had the benefit of such good advice. Both of these fifteenth-
century alchemical poets drew on a very wide and rich range of mythical, philosophical,