Jonathan Morton, The ‘Roman de la Rose’ in its Philosophical Context: Art, Nature, and Ethics. Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. ix + 204 pp. ISBN 970-0-19-881666-9. £60.00, cloth.

Jonathan Morton has offered a wonderfully nuanced reading of aspects of one of the most appealing, compelling, infuriating and unforgettable poems produced in the Middle Ages, the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun – Jean being the contributor who raised the poem to heights of philosophical sophistication and poetical innovation rarely, if ever, paralleled.[1] The obvious comparison is, of course, with Dante, but one can hardly say that the Comedy is obsessed ‘with its own unreliability’, or that ‘no wholly stable or consistent truth’ is ‘allowed to emerge’ therein (1). If Dante is one of the most explicitly opinionated of all medieval vernacular writers, Jean de Meun is one of the most elusive, withheld and self-erasing. (Geoffrey Chaucer learned a lot from Jean; in many ways they were kindred spirits.) 

This erudite book ‘argues for the poem as philosophically significant in its own right, with the aim of showing its importance for a history of the reception of Aristotle in the Middle Ages that incorporates literature as well as philosophy’ (5). It is unclear where Jean de Meun had studied (the belief that he was a master of arts at the University of Paris lacks contemporary substantiation), but Parisian philosophy permeates his poem. Therefore Morton feels (quite rightly, I believe) justified in reading it in the context of the Parisian condemnations of 1270 and 1277, as promulgated by Etienne Temper, Bishop of Paris and one-time Chancellor of the university, which have widely been construed as attempts to firmly subject Aristotelian philosophy to the judgments of Christian belief. One caveat, as freely admitted by Morton: the completion of the Rose by Jean de Meun may predate 1277. However, it may nevertheless be read as a response to the fraught academic disputes of the day, and hence (representatively at least) as a response to Bishop Tempier, understood as the embodiment of certain major intellectual restrictions. Tempier campaigned for what Morton calls ‘sincerity’ in the use of philosophical doctrine (truth being single and indivisible, with every statement needing to be true not just according to philosophy but also according to Catholic faith). Jean de Meun’s apparent resistance to the Bishop’s approach, and some of his pronouncements in particular, were based on that ‘delightfully insincere enunciation of immoral teaching’ that the French poet ‘first learned from Ovid’ (25). 

Several kinds of ‘insincerity’, then, come together in the poem and mutually reinforce each other. Already problematised by the fictional framework of the dream-narrative and the suspicion in which dream experience was held (particularly after Aristotle), the Rose is inhabited with authority-figures who make pronouncements of a kind which often are revealed as suspect or at least as highly questionable. Here Jean de Meun was influenced by the most ambiguously authoritative of all the grammar school ‘set texts’ read in the Middle Ages, the works of Ovid, particularly the Ars amatoria, which taught the art of seduction, a pseudo-science which Jean is ostentatiously following in his narrative of a lover’s pursuit of a virgin rose. Ovid was singled out for censure in the Paris condemnations, together with his great medieval successor, Andreas Capellanus; Morton is confident that Jean de Meun knew Andreas’s De amore. Morton certainly does not see Jean as being in the business of issuing direct and specific challenges to Tempier’s authority; when he speaks of Genius as an anti-Tempier he is, for the most part, not thinking of content but rather of methodology (the assertion of indeterminacy in opposition to what is here seen – fairly if somewhat reductively – as the Bishop’s desire to have scholars say precisely and clearly what they mean and what they believe). 

Here it may be noted that a lot of the authority-bending, selective quotation and source manipulation practised in the Rose is, at bottom, quite typical (though here manifest in extreme forms) of scholastic debating technique in general; no schoolman was constricted by the principle of ‘sincerity’ as he laid out various possible arguments, before proceeding to the final determinatio where he identified and affirmed his own position. ‘Sincerity’ came late in the game, otherwise the game simply could not have been played. This principle is bigger and broader than Tempier’s specific concern to deny the status of philosophical truths which run contrary to Christian belief; the entire scholastic debating system involved bringing together contrary positions and letting them fight it out. With certain obvious restraints, of course; no Tempier figure was needed to enforce the self-policing that habitually went on in scholastic thought (particularly following the Paris condemnations). Further, despite its frequent radicalism, the Rose is not a total intellectual free-for-all, as Morton will acknowledge later. 

Chapters 2 through 4 offer a rich analysis of the Rose’s exploration of the relationship between nature and art. Here Morton shows how Jean viewed twelfth-century Neoplatonic ideas of Nature through the filter of subsequent Aristotelianism, to posit a relationship between sexual generation and artistic production. The two most duplicitous figures in the poem, La Vieille (inherited from Ovid) and Faux Semblant (basically the deceitful friar of estates satire) are given wider significance as exemplifications of that duplicity which characterises human society in general, and features in hermeneutic activity as much as in the pursuit of love. (However, Morton optimistically sees in the Rose the belief that art can encourage resistance to, as well as promote, that duplicity.) Attempts to imagine a world prior to the establishment of this state of affairs – a Golden Age – are shown up as ‘imperfect and compromised allegories of our accession to the human condition’, due to ‘the studied imprecision of the allegorical method’ (90) itself, an imprecision which Jean makes no attempt to resolve. 

Chapters 5 and 6 offer much of the most original discussion in the book, comprising an analysis of the attitudes to money (especially with reference to usury) in commentaries on Aristotle’s Politics and in the Rose itself. ‘It is not often that one can identify an unambiguous position in the Rose but Guillaume’s poem suggests and Jean’s continuation repeatedly shows that true happiness cannot be obtained by money alone and that the presence of the profit motive in any activity inescapably corrupts that activity’ (111). The sterility of money (which could only beget more of itself through the unnatural practice of usury) is revealed as one of the poem’s clearest convictions, and it is quite evident that Jean was aware of the dangers inherent in the establishment of private property (generally supposed to be a distinctive historical event, following the Fall). ‘The idea that all things were common in an original state of nature’ was widespread, with a long tradition of Canon Law being in its favour, as when Hugutio of Pisa asserted that ‘By Natural Law, that is by the approval of reason, all things are common, that is they would be common if there had been no sin’, i.e. if the Fall had not occurred.[2] Jean’s address of those issues is particularly acute, though Morton is the only critic to have given them the degree of attention they deserve. Further, he links these kinds of unnaturalness with another, the sin of sodomy, which involves sexual activity without natural outcome, the production of children. The practice of celibacy is also brought under scrutiny here, within the Rose’s subversive yet ultimately inconclusive dialectic.

The concluding chapter considers the place occupied by images, both mental and material, in the closing parts of the Rose, elegantly showing how the mythological figures Narcissus and Pygmalion, along with the ‘venal Amant’, all ‘suggest the dangers of desire that depend on the delightful phantasms that we might call “idols”’ (169). Morton then sums up his view of the poem as follows: 

For all its scandal, obscenity, and uncertainty, Jean de Meun’s Rose is an ethical text, although not a moralistic one. It is informed by and conveys a set of principles rooted in an Aristotelian understanding of nature, a moral framework that is not consistently articulated even if it is implied. Instead, its presentation of human behaviour depends on the text’s characteristic indeterminacy that forces readers and audiences themselves to participate in a continual re-evaluation both of the Rose and of the shifting norms that inform their own ethical judgements. Accordingly, its agenda is no more reducible to doctrinal orthodoxy than it is to nihilistic misogyny even if it flirts at times with both. (143-4)

This is powerfully enunciated, though I for one would question whether the poem’s relationship with either ‘doctrinal orthodoxy’ or ‘nihilistic misogyny’ can be described as mere ‘flirtation’; Jean never came close to the unqualified expression of heterodoxy,[3] and in the Rose ‘misogyny’ – ‘nihilistic’ or whatever one wants to call it – is inveterate, as it is  throughout the medieval Ovidian tradition. Christine de Pizan had good cause to be angered by it. Finding the ending of the Rose abominable,[4] she complained that Jean de Meun had failed to ‘conclude in favour of the moral way of life’, but rather maligned the female sex in a work which cannot be read or quoted at the table of queens, princesses, and worthy women.[5] For Christine, the poem’s misogyny was abundantly clear, and its failure to conclude correctly (in her terms) was something to be criticised rather than savoured as an exercise in playful unreliability.

The most distinguished (in professional terms) of the Rose’s early critics, Jean Gerson, who was elected as chancellor of the University of Paris in 1395, declared that the poem ‘is rightly called a formless chaos, a Babylonian confusion, and a German broth, like Proteus changing into all his shapes’.[6] The suggestion that he was failing to appreciate its sophistication filled him with fury. It is quite ridiculous, Gerson declared, to suggest that Jean de Meun ‘wrote a great many good things, many of which are far above the general knowledge of all learned men and require, therefore, a ten-fold reading before they are understood’.[7] Bonaventure’s small book the Itinerarium mentis in Deum, which he read in a day, contains as much profound knowledge as the Rose, along with ten books like it, ‘Yet you believe us to be too brutish and too dense to be able to understand this book of yours’!  To Pierre Col’s insulting suggestion that he should read the Rose again to try to understand it, he answers: ‘Read, brother, and read again the fourth book of De doctrina christiana, for that work poses a great many more problems than your book in French (in vulgari)’.[8] Gerson was hardly sensitive to any distinction between ethics and moralism.

Where the poem’s foes saw chaos, its friends saw a clear moral end being furthered. The Col brothers believed the poem counselled against sexual immorality, and for Jean de Montreuil the ‘end’ or intended aim of the Rose is the continuation of the human race – thus he links the poem with one of its major sources, Alain de Lille’s De planctu naturae (widely held to have that same intention).[9]  In neither case, then, was ‘indeterminacy’ celebrated.  (Indeed, that term is problematic if understood as designating ‘possible meaning without limit’, for the poem works within certain parameters, as fixed by Ovidianism, dream vision convention, satiric literary theory, etc. etc. – but without being constrained by any of them, singly or collectively.) The participants in the querelle de la Rose believed they knew exactly what the poem was about (even if they totally disagreed on that meaning). ‘Poetry, always potentially mendacious, is not bound to truthfulness or even to clarity’ (5). Maybe, but its earliest readers (as much as its later ones) have held the Rose to account. The fact that those accountings have, over the centuries, often been markedly different, is proof positive of the poem’s ongoing challenge, and resistance to clear summation or reductive moralisation.

That is what Morton’s study has demonstrated so masterfully. He writes densely, with close attention being paid to detail, whilst never losing sight of the conceptual big picture; his research is highly informed, with impressive knowledge of both thirteenth-century philosophy and late-medieval poetics. On the Oxford University Press webpage advertising this book, the blurb claims that ‘The interdisciplinary approach provides a new methodology for the analysis of philosophically difficult literature’.[10] Well, yes and no. Given that the Rose is richly and irreducibly sui generis, a poetical-philosophical-theological gallimaufry with a flavour all of its own, the struggle to interpret it can hardy provide a methodology transferable to the reading of any other work. What we have here is a superb example of how to read a poem that is heavily invested in the latest philosophical debate of its day. Morton deserves considerable praise for his achievement in that area. Here, then, is a major contribution to the corpus of criticism on the Roman de la Rose, which re-energises long-established interpretive questions and shines light on areas of the poem’s convoluted, shifting meaning that have remained dark for too long .

Alastair Minnis

Yale University

Comments

• There are currently no comments

You must log in to comment.