Alfred's epistemological metaphors: Eagan modes and scip modes

Anglo-Saxon England

Volumn 35, Issue , 2006, Pages 179-217

  Wilcox, Miranda ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60949586635     PISSN: 14740532     EISSN: 14740532     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0263675106000093     Document Type: Review

References (88)

1. The degree to which Alfred participated himself in the work of translation has been debated, but most scholars conclude that Alfred probably had a significant supervisory and motivating role, For the latest views on Alfred's canon and authorship, see J. Bately, 'The Alfredian Canon Revisited: One Hundred Years On', Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conference, ed. T. Reuter (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 107-20, at 109-11
2. For a summary of the authorship debate, see G. Waite, Old English Prose Translations of King Alfred's Reign, Annotated Bibliographies of Old and Middle Eng. Lit. 6 (Cambridge, 2000), 17-18
3. A comprehensive study of Alfred's understanding of psychology has yet to be written. M. Godden was the first to address Alfred's psychology in the groundbreaking study, 'Anglo-Saxons on the Mind', Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes, ed. M. Lapidge and H. Gneuss (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 271-98, esp. 274-7
4. Most scholars follow D. Whitelock's conclusion in 'The Prose of Alfred's Reign', Continuations and Beginnings, ed. E. G. Stanley (London, 1966), pp. 67-103, at 76-7, that Alfred first translated the Pastoral Care and probably, but not certainly, produced the Consolation of Philosophy before the Soliloquies. In the present study, the development of the two metaphors supports this conclusion; but it is less clear where the translation of the Paris Psalter fits into the progression. Eagan modes replaces oculi in Psalm XIII.8 and XVI.10 in the Paris Psalter, see King Alfred's Old English Prose Translation of the First Fifty Psalms, ed. P. P. O'Neill, Med. Acad. Books 104 (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 112, 115. The "presence of eagan modes in the Paris Psalter strengthens the argument in favour of Alfred's authorship and also indicates Alfred's level of confidence as a translator: he was not daunted by the sacrosanct nature of the scriptural text
5. R. R. Verbrugge, 'Transformations in Knowing: a Realist View of Metaphor', Cognition and Figurative Language, ed. R. P. Honeck and R. R. Hoffman (Hillsdale, NJ, 1980), pp. 87-125, at 88. Origen explains this view in Commentarium in Canticum canticorum 2.6 (ed. L. Brésard and H. Crouzel with M. Borret, Sources chrétiennes 375 (Paris, 1991), 94)
6. For a summary of the widespread ancient conception of internal senses modelled on exter-nal senses, see D. Chidester, Word and Light: Seeing, Hearing, and Religious Discourse (Urbana, 1992), p. 8
7. H. A. Wolfson, 'The Internal Senses in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew Philosophic Texts', Harvard Theol. Rev. 28 (1935), 69-132
8. and K. Rahner, 'La doctrine des "sens spirituels" au moyen-age, en particulier chez Saint Bonaventure', Revue d'ascétique et de mystique 14 (1933), 263-99
9. See N. Yu, 'Chinese Metaphors of Thinking', Cognitive Ling. 14 (2003), 141-65
10. G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, 'Why Cognitive Linguistics Requires Embodied Realism', Cognitive Ling. 13 (2002), 243-63, at 255-6
11. E. Sweetser, From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 23-48
12. and S. Ono, 'The Old English Verbs of Knowing', On Early English Syntax and Vocabulary (Tokyo, 1989), pp. 139-67, at 139
13. M. Johnson, The Body in the Mind: the Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago, 1987), pp. 108-9
14. Chidester, Word and Light, pp. 4-6
15. See also the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. V, ed. G. Friedrich, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, 1967), pp. 319-24
16. Aristotle, De sensu and De memoria, trans. G. R. T. Ross (New York, 1973), pp. 5-9
17. For Plotinu's visual model of cognition, see A. H. Armstrong, The Architecture of the Intelligible Universe in the Philosophy of Plotinus (Amsterdam, 1967) pp. 49, 83-97
18. and R. Ferweda, La signification des images et des metaphores dans la pensée de Plotin (Groningen, 1965), pp. 120-9
19. S. MacDonald, 'Illumination', Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. Craig (London, 1998), pp. 698-700
20. E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask (Princeton, 1953), p. 136. For the durability of the 'mind's eye' metaphor in modern conceptualizations of mental activity, see Z. W. Pylyshyn, 'What the Mind's Eye Tells the Mind's Brain: a Critique of Mental Imagery', Psychological Bull. 80 (1973), 1-24, and C. Collins, The Poetics of the Mind's Eye-Literature and the Psychology of Imagination (Philadelphia, 1991)
21. For Philo, see D. Chidester, Word and Light, pp. 30-43. For Origen, see K. Rahner, 'Lé début d'une doctrine des cinq sens spirituels chez Origène', Revue d'ascétique et de mystique 13 (1932), 113-45
22. Origen discussed the inner senses in De principiis I.1.9.298-314 (ed. H. Crouzel and M. Simonetti, Sources chrétiennes 252, 253 (Paris, 1978), pp. 108-10)
23. Commentarium in Canticum canticorum II.9.12 (ed. L. Brésard and H. Crouzel with M. Borret, p. 442)
24. Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago, 2002), pp. 4-9
25. Searches on the CLCT Library of Latin Texts: http://www.clt.brepolis.net/ (Turnhout, 2002), accessed 2002-5, reveal countless occurrences of visual metaphors in patristic texts
26. T. F. X. Noble, The Vocabulary of Vision and Worship in the Early Carolingian Period', Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Papers from 'Verbal and Pictorial Imaging: Representing and Accessing Experience of the Invisible: 400-1000' (Utrecht, 11-13 December 2003), ed. G. de Nie, K. F. Morrison, H. L. Kessler and M. Mostert (Turnhout, 2004), pp. 215-39
27. For visual metaphors in earlier Gaul, see G. de Nie, Word, Image and Experience: Dynamics of Miracle and Self-Perception in Sixth-Century Gaul (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 67-122
28. Bede uses oculi mentis twenty-four times in his corpus. For Alcuin, see T. F. X. Noble, 'Vocabulary of Vision', pp. 219-20
29. C. J. Kay, 'Metaphors We Live By: Pathways Between Old and Modern English', Essays on Anglo-Saxon and Related Themes in Memory of Lynne Grundy, ed. J. Roberts and J. Nelson (London, 2000), pp. 272-85, at 283
30. 'Saint Apollinaris', Ælfric's Lives of Saints, ed. W. W. Skeat, EETS 76, 82, 94, 114 (London, 1881-1900), I.472-86, lines 47-8
31. 'Mary of Egypt', in Ælfric's Lives of Saints, II.2-52.424
32. and The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts, ed. D. G. Scragg, EETS 300 (Oxford, 1992), 4.133
33. A. Sheppard, 'Plato and the Neoplatonists', Platonism and the English Imagination, ed. A. Baldwin and S. Hutton (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 3-18, at 10-11
34. R. Frank, 'Old English Ancor "anchor": Transformation of a Latin Loanword', Germanic Texts and Latin Models: Medieval Reconstructions, ed. K. E. Olsen, A. Harbus and T. Hofstra (Leuven, 2001), pp. 7-27, at 8
35. See also J. Pépin, 'A propos du symbolisme de la mer chez Platon et dans le néoplatonisme', Association Guillaume Budé. Actes du Congrès de Tours et de Poitiers (3-9 septembre. 1953) (Paris, 1954), pp. 257-9
36. and Homer's Ancient Readers: the Hermeneutics of Greek Epic's Earliest Exegetes, ed. R. Lamberton and J. J. Keaney (Princeton, 1992), pp. 44-5, 127-33
37. H. Rahner, Greek Myths and Christian Mystery, trans. B. Battershaw (New York, 1963), pp. 328-53
38. and Symbole der Kirche. Die Ekklesiologie der Väter (Salzburg, 1964), pp. 239-564
39. See also Curtius, European Literature, trans. Trask, p. 130
40. See P. Dronke and U. Dronke, Growth of Literature: the Sea and the God of the Sea (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 10-11
41. See J. Vickery, 'Some Hypotheses Concerning The Seafarer, Lines 1-47', ASNSL 219 (1982), 57-77, at 57-8
42. Dyas, 'Land and Sea in the Pilgrim Life: the Seafarer and the Old English Exodus', ELN 35.2 (1997), 1-9
43. M. Godden, 'The Psyche and the Self: Some Issues in Beowulf', Studies in Middle English Language and Literature: Proceedings of the Vth International Conference of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature, ed. J. L. Chamosa and T. Guzmán (León, 1997), pp. 49-67, at 60
44. and R. Frank, 'Old English ancor', pp. 11-12. For Alfred and Gregory, see table 2
45. S. C. Kessler, 'Gregory the Great: a Figure of Tradition and Transition in Church Exegesis', Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: the History of Interpretation, vol. 1, part 2, ed. M. Sæbø, C. Brekelmans and M. Haran (Göttingen, 2000), pp. 135-45
46. C. Straw, Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 21, 54
47. See also G. R. Evans, The Thought of Gregory the Great (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 28-45
48. and G. A. Zinn, 'Exegesis and Spirituality in the Writings of Gregory the Great', Gregory the Great: a Symposium, ed. J. Cavadini (Notre Dame, IN, 1995), pp. 168-80
49. For Alfred's personal experience with ships, see E. Gifford and J. Gifford, 'Alfred's New Longships', Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conference, ed. T. Reuter (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 281-9
50. and M. J. Swanton, 'King Alfred's Ships: Text and Context,' ASE 28 (1999), 1-22
51. In 'Old English Prose,' p. 127, Bately discusses this images as an example of Alfred's tendency freely to amplify and enlarge Gregory's Latin. In 'The Anglo-Saxon Mind: Metaphor and Common-Sense Psychology in Old English literature' (unpubl. PhD dissertation, Univ. of Toronto, 1998), p. 161
52. G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Philosophy of the Flesh (New York, 1999), pp. 61-5, explain that schemata are not 'just plans for conceptualizing past experiences: some schemata are plans of a sort for interacting with objects and persons. They give expectations and anticipations that influence our interactions with our environment.'
53. A. Baldwin, 'Introduction', Platonism and the English Imagination, pp. 21-6, at 23
54. For a discussion of eagan modes in the Consolation of Philosophy, see N. G. Discenza, The King's English: Strategies of Translation in the Old English Boethius (Ithaca, 2005) pp. 100-1
55. See P. Szarmach, 'Editions of Alfred: the Wages of Un-influence', Early Medieval English Texts and Interpretations: Studies presented to Donald Scragg, ed. E. Treharne and S. Rosser (Tempe, 2002), pp. 135-49, at 138-9
56. K. Sisam, 'The Authorship of the Verse Translation of Boethius's Metra', in his Studies in the Histoty of Old English Literature (Oxford, 1953), pp. 293-7, ended most of the debate regarding Alfred's authorship of the Metres
57. Also see A. Metcalfe, 'On the Authorship and Originality of the Meters of Boethius', NM 71 (1970), 185-7
58. and B. Griffiths, Alfred's Metres, pp. 35-45, for a summary of the authorship debate. Bately summarized the conclusions in 'The Alfredian Canon Revisited', p. 112: 'the most recent investigations into the language of the verse metres seem to me to show that there is nothing to indicate that Alfred could not have been responsible for the versification, not that there is good evidence to assume that he was.'
59. G. O'Daly, The Poetry of Boethius (Chapel Hill, 1991), p. 109, 'The "sea", therefore, of these lines, while it may be influenced by Neoplatonic symbolism, is a metaphor at the moral, rather than the metaphysical end of the spectrum, as is the image of darkness ... The sea which engulfs the mind is here not so much the material universe in itself, as the anxiety that derives from preoccupation with material concerns.' See also pp. 107-12
60. O'Daly, Poetry of Boethius, p. 136
61. Consolation of Philosophy 6.14.17-18, 'So does the darkness from your distress now resist my light-filled teachings.' I use gedrefednesse following the Old English Online Corpus (http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/ (Toronto, 2004), accessed on 24 March 2005, rather than Sedgefield's gedrefed nesse in the Consolation of Philosophy
62. Metres 5.38-40, 'therefore the mind is always greatly bound by disturbance'
63. My interpretation of Alfred's use of metaphor is influenced by the discussion of conceptual metaphor in Johnson, Body in the Mind, pp. 109-26
64. see also A. Collins and D Gentner, 'How People Construct Mental Models', Cultural Models in Language and Thought, ed. D. Holland and N. Quinn (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 243-65, at 247-8
65. and C. Cacciari, 'Why Do We Speak Metaphorically? Reflections on the Functions of Metaphor in Discourse and Reasoning', Figurative Language and Thought, ed. A. N. Katz, C. Cacciari, R. W. Gibbs, Jr, and M. Turner (Oxford, 1998), pp. 119-57, at 139
66. For a negative view of Alfred's metaphoric imagery, see M. McC. Gatch, 'Unity in King Alfred's Version of Augustine's Soliloquia: Some Suggestions on its Rationale and Unity', Studies in Earlier Old English Prose, ed. P. Szarmach (Albany, 1986), pp. 17-45, at 31-3
67. and R. Waterhouse, 'Tone in King Alfred's Version of Augustine's Soliloquies', Studies in Earlier Old English Poetry, pp. 47-85, at 79
68. For a positive view, see S. Hitch, 'Alfred's Cræft: Imagery in Alfred's Version of Augustine's Soliloquies', Jnl Department of Eng. [University of Calcutta] 22 (1986-7), 130-17
69. M. Miles, 'Vision: the Eye and the Body and the Eye of the Mind in Saint Augustine's De trinitate and Confessions', Jnl of Religion 63 (1983), 125-42, at 142
70. R. Nash, 'Some Philosophic Sources of Augustine's Illumination Theory,' Augustinian Stud. 2 (1971), 47-66
71. See also C. Ando, 'Augustine on Language,' Revue des Études Augustiniennes 40 (1994), 45-78, at 75
72. R. Nash, Light of the Mind: St. Augustine's Theory of Knowledge (Lexington, KY, 1969), pp. 9-10
73. See also Nash, 'Some Philosophic Sources', p. 56
74. and G. O'Daly, Augustine's Philosophy of the Mind (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 162-216
75. and Nash, The Light of the Mind. See also Ando, 'Augustine on Language', p. 56
76. In De consolatione Philosophiae V.pr4.73-4 (ed. Bieler, p. 98), Boethius identifies four levels of understanding: sensus, the perception of material shapes; imaginatio, the perception of shapes removed from matter; discursive ratio; and intellegentia, or the perception of intelligible Forms. Alfred translated sensus as ongit, imaginatio as rædels, ratio as gesceadwisness, and intellegentia as gewis andgit in Consolation of Philosophy 145.29-32 and skipped the remainder of Boethius's explanation of the four faculties and the following metre (V.m4), full of Stoic epistemological images, before he resumed translating again at V.pr5.11. See also Godden, 'Anglo-Saxons on the Mind', p. 276
77. D. Nikulin, Matter, Imagination and Geometry: Ontology, Natural Philosophy and Mathematics in Plotinus, Proculus, and Descartes (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 130, 183-7, 230-54. Nikulin describes how 'only an imaginable extended thing - in particular, a geometrical object - can be constructed or reconstructed by and within the finite mind' by the movement of imagination and discursive reason (p. 245)
78. See also Watson, Soliloquies, pp. 172-3
79. and H. Rondet, 'Le symbolisme de la mer chez saint Augustin', Augustinus magister, 2 vols. (Paris, 1954) II.691-711
80. See also O'Daly, Augustine's Philosophy of the Mind, pp. 80-105
81. and Nash, Light of the Mind, pp. 39-59
82. See M. R. Godden, 'The Sources of Soliloquies (Cameron C.B.9.4)', Fontes Anglo-Saxonici: World Wide Web Register. http://fontes.english.ox.ac.uk/ (Oxford, 2001), accessed October 2004
83. Soliloquies 1.62.4: 'Reason, in addition to other virtues.'
84. Hitch, 'Alfred's Cræft', 142
85. Collins and Gentner, 'How People Construct Mental Models', p. 248
86. See also Frank, 'Old English ancor', pp. 108-10
87. Miles, 'Vision', p. 127. Miles explains (p. 128) the order of action in the ray theory as, first, the viewer must initiate vision with concentration and focus; secondly, the viewer, object, and power of the will are united in the act of vision; thirdly, the soul's will provides the energy to initiate vision and retain a memory of the image
88. Johnson, Body in the Mind, p. 112