Mankynde and the Iconography of Spiritual Thinking
Donald Beecher, Carleton University
The anonymous morality play Mankynde may well have been "the most indisputably popular play of the fifteenth century" (Bevington 46) and thus by implication one of the most accessible. In the words of Richard Axton it was "highly sophisticated `folk drama'" (199), full of the farce and knock about, the devils, tricks, and tumbling, that linked the work to the mumming traditions and Shrovetide plays which were, by this time, in states of mutual contaminatio. Tityvillus makes his grand entry only after a collection has been taken up by the players, a character pleasing to the audience as a witty wiseacre who occupies a vague territory between the devil and a mental quirk. For the literal minded he is simply the trickster troublemaker, but for those with a more clerical fetch, he is the invisible voice that whispers confounding evidence to the wavering mind. For, in effect, the play is a sermon disguised as farce in which the character Mankynde is up against all the temptations of the world, no matter how folksy and engaging they are in their manifestations as festive buffoons at the local tavern. These disruptive anti-heroes of the folk may mock and make light of all the didactic intentions, but Mercy insists with his high seriousness. Moreover, Tityvillus has the uncanny capacity, according to an established convention, to become invisible to the protagonist while remaining visible to the audience. The effect is to interiorize his voice, making it a part of Mankynde's own thoughts. By such means, matters take a more subtle turn. The effect is of a man lost in his own thoughts, and of a play that has no other action than the deliberations of a tortured mind.
By dint of the characters' names, the play sets up allegorical resonances--a double mimetic field in a single set of referents. Each character is himself and the generic category of himself: Mankynde and all of mankind; Mischief and all possible mischief. In this transparent way the characters become ideas, or better, personified forces in the struggle for the human soul in the great Christian scheme of salvation and damnation. The play remains opaque, as all troping schemes must be where readers are obliged on their own to leap from register to register, but like an onion skin, it is only one cell thick. Mankynde is, in this regard, a relatively closed hermeneutic operation. The interface between name and essence is intended to eliminate the openness of mere symbol in the interests of didactic clarity.
Yet in this primitive sense, allegory barely lives up to its name, meaning "other speaking," because the abstract level of references is so rigorously controlled. Nevertheless, there is the riddle of kinetic development, which is the plot with its dynamic movement of conflict and resolution, shaped in such ways as to suggest parallel actions at more abstract levels. "Narrative," then, in relation to nomenclature, becomes emblematic--itself a pattern of the generic profile of temptation, fall, and rescue. Yet the riddle element so far is minimal, for all of the conditions of the trope are built into the episodes themselves, and into the Christian cultural values that surround the play. Fletcher, at this juncture moves on to myth and to the psychoanalytic analogues buried in the double referentialities of allegory through which man's obsessions, anxieties, and compulsive rituals receive implicit profiling (279ff). But the Freudian bent does not quite fit the more cognitive dilemmas of Mankynde. Riddle-like for him are the mechanics of thinking itself that accompany the alterations to his spiritual state. The language of allegory becomes less closed as a hermeneutic system not as an entry into myth, but as an entry into the nature of volition in relation to the ethos of spirituality.
Cognitively speaking, the "meaning otherwise" of allegory entails rather complex reactions at the level of analogy--that survival capacity by which we rapidly identify each new perception according to its differences and similarities with what we already know. Allegory entails a constant perception of analogies, not only synchronically between a thing and its essence, but diachronically between narrative patterns and the unfolding of ideas. In allegory, action itself seeks to become icon in the form of emblematic sequences. The prodigal son is a type in himself and in his identifying action. But in moral allegory, the troping mind may be doubly solicited by the kinetic symbolism of the plot as it relates not only to generic actions common to the human condition, but to thought, volition, and act in the protagonist--traits so iterative in nature as to replicate certain archetypes of human conduct. Resolving that mystery through pictographic intimations may prove to be the ultimate force of allegory as a literary mode.
That the characters in Mankynde bear referential names permits the creation of mind boxes composed of common denominators from which inferences can be made--which is the forte of allegory--namely those who create mischief, those who follow the fashions, and at other levels those who represent the theological principle of a second chance, manifesting God's tolerance for mankind's fickle nature. Mercy is a faithful friend and the personified imminence of God's grace as a renewable mental option. Troping Mercy up to his higher mimetic level is to conceptualize through action the greatest mystery in the contract of salvation. As for Mischief the troublemaker and Tityvillus the imp of dropped syllables in the recitation of the holy texts, the play ostensibly reduces them to mere revellers and pranksters who would cut into Mankynde's work-week. Yet they are shadows of forgotten meanings. Their nuances are capturable only through their iconic actions.
As for the narrative, it is but an anecdote of village life, its terms intimately familiar to the first audiences of this play in the villages of East Anglia. The plowing gets difficult, weeds spring up, a shovel is lost, praying becomes boring, at which point Mankynde the plowman in God's great vineyard alters his will, determining to play rather than to work. Inside this vignette of agricultural apostasy is a tranche de vie in the affective and spiritual life of Christian. Mankynde, too, is a prodigal who wanders into town, his mind devoid of spiritual purpose, only to find despair and then the mercy that will induce him to return to spiritual labor. There is now a double order of action, literal and symbolic, and arguably a third, which is the rising and falling levels of spirituality that, in the Christian world order, become the quintessential common denominators of the human condition. That the didactic playwright has now completed his sermon, finding in the conditions of village life, events that profile man's temptation, fall, and penitence, is hardly news. But if temptation itself is a cognitive process, does the play not also reach after icons of mind, seeking through the dynamics of narrative to profile spiritualized thinking? Are the moving pictures of allegory through which the playwright expresses temptation and recovery not also pictures of the volitional modes of mind which alone establish states of belief and states of spiritual lassitude that lead to despair?
Integral to that emblemizing of experience both as doing and naming is the process of thinking insofar as salvation and damnation, for mankind, are ultimately cognitive rather than performative states. Even in pre-Marlovian drama, there are intimations of "other speaking" as a language of the mind; allegory may ultimately have its raison d'ˆtre as an indirect discourse anatomizing spiritual cognition. Tityvillus proposes no objects of desire; he is merely the agent of distraction, a demon of random and irrelevant reflections, of alternating phantasms, of options discovered as by-products of consciousness itself--a very particular manifestation of the daemonic subhero that rises up against the hero (Fletcher 35ff). It is not surprising that his archetypal gesture is to whisper at ears. The temptations of the mind are directly insinuating, waiting for no preludes in social ritual. They are as fast as inflection and as long-lasting as innuendo. Tityvillus is a folk figure with his own repertory of knavery, but the end of his antics is to create in the mind of his victims an autonomous revision of thought paradigms that destroys a state of spiritualized will, replacing it with lassitude and indifference. The demon of dropped syllables has thereby been further allegorized into the demon of consciousness jags whereby mankind abandons his spiritual athleticism.
The motive for allegory can then be explained in the following terms. Man is himself a living allegory. Each deed of daily life has potential implications for the soul as judged against a moralized scale of conduct. At the immediate social mimetic level he lives out his life of obedience, lapsing from grace, and recovery through penitence and renewed piety. In trivial details of choice for good or for evil there is the high drama of the perseverance of the soul, the hope of redemption, the spiritualized consciousness and the fallen mind. Mercy and Tityvillus are but agents--personifications of these transactions up and down the spiritual scale. The mind itself, constantly under probative scrutiny, is suspended moment by moment between redemption and damnation. The most terrifying element in the entire scenario is the Tityvillus factor--the sin which is inherent to the mind itself, and for which there are no other names.
The life of Christian may be constructed as mere obedience, as it is in the play of Mankynde. Yet even the simplest forms of obedience are manifestations of an inward grace maintained only through the fixing of mental states. These were conditions familiar to mystics and theologians. Beginning with St. Paul, the spiritual life was framed as a race in which one removed excess clothing, or as a battle that required the protection of God's armor. Our demons have always been those alien features, projected as agents, that haunt, compel, pervert, betray, or divert the consciousness from the steady pursuit of approved intentions. The earliest forms of Christian allegory are battle scenes between the conflicting desires of the flesh and the soul. Fletcher discusses the psychomachia as foundational to allegorical thinking (22). Consciousness itself becomes moralized in the process, down to the spiritualizing of the bulletin board, or homunculus of the brain, that prioritizes the neuron firings competing for attention. If the mind knows itself through constant consultation of opposites and liminals, which it does, then randomness leading to dissident and subversive thinking is the beginning of sin. Tityvillus is the demon of the crossroad between the sacred and the profane. In this way, the mind becomes its own cognitive trickster, conditioned by emotions, mind states, attention and distraction, energy and fatigue.
In keeping with the dictum of St. Paul, "casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ" (Corinthians 10:5), one could posit that a fixation on the peaks and valleys of spiritualized cognition abetted by constantly excited mental states is elemental to Christian thought. In that regard, Mankynde becomes an expression of mysticism in which every man is a warrior mentality in search of spiritual homeostasis. Of necessity he finds himself enjoined by aesthetic exercises, or by the willed unknowing that keeps the mind free of temptation, just as he finds himself part of the economy of the inquisitors such as the Dominicans Kramer and Springer who, in the Malleus maleficarum, make consciousness itself a playground of demonic infiltration. Mankynde shares a common axis with saints, martyrs, and mystics.
The author of The Cloud of Unknowing, an English writer active in the late fourteenth century, espoused the via negativa, the divine state that filled in when consciousness itself could be put into neutral. He singled out the fallen imagination which never ceases "waking or sleeping, to suggest diverse ideas about the world around us" (131) such as Mankynde propounded in his belief that Mercy had turned thief and was hanged. His challenge was Pauline and cerebral: "Hate to think about anything less than God, and let nothing whatever distract you from this purpose" (68-69). Even more challenging was the reminder that heaven can be won or lost in a second through disruptive mental reorientations (56). He noticed aptly that "man's natural impulses occur one at a time," and that while God designed human nature to be in accord with the natural world, nevertheless because of his "appalling weakness and dull-wittedness" man can heed only one impulse in a hundred. It is altogether more imperative, then, that he heed the right ones. With so much systemic confusion, only the mind fixed on the right spiritual images, and principally on the image of Jesus, can hope to move toward a mystic union with the godhead. This author's analysis of the role of mind in the spiritual life is remarkably perceptive.
The via negativa of the Pseudo-Dionysius is not an easy concept for the Western mind, indisposed as it is to cognitive vacuums. The alternative is mind control through the tyranny of approved narrative, or through the sublimation of erotic drives. These were means for taking consciousness captive through strong activities that pre-empt subversive idleness, while dumbing down the physical life to vacuous labor. The late fifteenth-century schemes for mental conditioning included at least three schools: that of Ficino and the aestheticization of erotic impulses toward spiritual ends, that of meditational pictures, images, and narratives, and that of the pre-Protestant thinkers who discovered in labor the secular parallel to spiritual thinking, making work itself a form of prayer.
The Mankynde poet was not concerned with the emotionalizing of cognition through the quest for beauty, unknowing, spiritual elation, or sensations of union with the divine. He profiled only will and fatigue, making Mercy the key player in an economy of assured failure and spiritual rejuvenation. The allegorist finds no other story to fill the mind than the story of its own voiding and refilling in allegorical terms, the play serving both as an exercise and as a charm through the repetition of renewal. The story of the redeemed mind is paradoxically the story of its cyclic defections. The ultimate question is how many times the vacillating mind can presume upon the mercy of God before the Almighty weighs the credibility of penitence against sincerity. The issue is raised in Mankynde, but it is not dramatized as Marlowe does in Doctor Faustus. Despair is the mental conviction that God's mercy can be strained. For the writer of The Cloud of Unknowing, such thoughts, if suddenly quelled, are not sin for having merely captured the "natural attention," but the mind that dwells upon them enters into a state of sin (67). At that point, every other fault ensues, and the greatest of them is spiritual sloth.
If spirituality is sustained mental attention to God, then acedia becomes a sin of the mind leading to sterilitas mentis. This is the frightful demon of ennui, of noontide indifference. It is the land of Belacqua in the Inferno (IV 127), the place of those who ask, "Brother, of what avail is it to ascend?" It is the paradigm of spiritual inanition. Acedia is insidious because it has no direct external causes. Personifications follow to emblematize the besieged consciousness. Lack of intensity, misplaced desire, random reflections, forgetfulness, and disinterestedness, subjected to moral polarizing, are not otherwise easily exemplified. Demons are default mode consciousness, overcrowded neuron firings. Such is the nature of acedia. Allegory takes up the analysis by projecting the mind in terms of the kinetic icons played out in social time, the causes estimated according to their actions. Manifestations of the corrupted will themselves allegorize the preliminary condition of mind; the lapse of spiritual will is the prelude to spiritual sloth.
Scholastic thinkers had long wrestled with the condition of mental lassitude in the spiritual life, noting the relationship between distraction and depression, the emotional component of fractured will, the dryness of the soul "that leads to absolute spiritual impotence" (Kuhn 39). There is tristitia that combines nostalgia with a state of indeterminate sorrow; desidia or paralysis of the will and an inability to work; pigritia or simple idleness and sloth, and finally acidia which subsumes all of the others as spiritual torpor, the loss of all drive to actively pursue the spiritual life. These are part of Mankynde's allegorical landscape, conjoined in the laborer-protagonist who, through abandoning his plow, allegorizes his lapse of spirituality.
The kinetics of narrative are potentially doubly emblematic both of the profile of act the story epitomizes, and the profile of mind that is the inward theater of temptation extended into act. The mind itself must then vacillate between sacred and profane states, those determinants that alone distinguish between a Cain and an Abel and the acceptability of their respective sacrifices. Mappings of the mind's contribution are to be found in the seven deadly sin plays, widely known on the continent (Schade 73ff)), among them the now lost Play of Acedie mentioned in the York guild documents of 1399, and the play of Wisdom dated to 1460 wherein the mind, the will, and the understanding assume personified dramatization. The soul was repeatedly presented in a fortification besieged by other-thinking enemies.
Endemic to the allegorical mapping of mind is a sense of the hierarchy of interests and the repression of random information. Spirituality is, itself, a condition or state of mind not easily explained in abstract terms, even by modern cognitive philosophers. The very notion of mind states such as suspense or pain are not easily accounted for (Putnam 320ff). There is, moreover, the emotional coloring of cognition through limbic excitation as in the joy of knowing or being, or in existential states of sorrow. Spirituality is a state of constant selection in relation to primary principles--however these counterpoint consciousness, or condition it. Spiritualized thinking is based on the belief that control can be exercised over feelings, instincts, liminal desires, fatigue, and mental curiosity. Such an orientation is predicated on cognitive vigilance in the face of randomness and ennui, even before the naming of sin invades. Mankynde explores this phenomenon of mind, for that which is deemed sin at the instigation of New Gyse, Nought, and Now-a-days is clearly presented as secondary to the mental life.
The prospects of civilization may begin with the imposed conditionings of random thought and inherited instinct. Nor should accounts of the origins of consciousness in terms of evolutionary qualifications for survival under the conditions of our hunting and gathering ancestors be raised to denounce spiritualized thinking as contrary to the constitution of the human brain. Consciousness is, after all, the pool of accessible information about which we can be aware. But the inconstancy of attention determined by the surveillance of alternatives, identifications, advantages, and a compulsive curiosity about where we are in relation to things presents a formidable obstacle to monopolized thinking as an independent project of its own. As Stephen Stich has warned "conscious information is inferentially promiscuous" (Pinker 137). Not only what passes through consciousness is selected from among competing neuronal petitions, but also that matter achieving consciousness is made available to a large number of evaluating "agents" causing related reflections to fire in some mysteriously prioritized sequence. By this process, brain time becomes a factor, so that information appears at the cost of other information (Pinker 137). Choices are made by default, and once interest is aroused by notions gaining consciousness, those notions can dictate associations relatively beyond control within the intimacy of thought. Clearly this random scanning of consciousness in accordance with a bulletin board oriented to survival has enormous benefits to the organism, although they are adverse to single concept monopolizations of attention. One has only to think of the treatises on lovesickness that began to appear in significant numbers toward the end of the sixteenth century based on notions of preoccupying phantasms in the imagination that interfere with eating, sleeping, and finally with the entire constitution of the body leading to death to see how clearly they understood in their own terms the nature of survival in relation to an id‚e fixe.
Because sense impressions have priority, for the most part, in activating consciousness, it is reasonable to conjoin spirituality to the pantheistic and cosmological, so that primary perception becomes simultaneously a form a worship, on the assumption that identification is a form of praise. The identification of the self as the thinking agent is also conditional upon the assumption of responsibility, so that being, thinking, and moral reflection are one. Emotion can also be employed as both an ambient cause and an enjoyed by-product of spiritualized cognition, though emotion is an imperfect marker of continuity because it is chemically fixed to its own regulatory or parasympathetic systems. Emotionlessness is the normal state of the organism that is not under external threat. Hence the constant allegorization of man as the creature of war, combat, vigilance, and spiritualized fear. In that effort, the motive to narrative is clear. Narratives are archetypalized as prolonged chains of attention-getting circumstances based on agon and confrontation--on conflict and resolution--as part of the war of the soul against inherent entropy. If hyperexcitation is the spiritual norm, there can be little doubt why acedia was the greatest challenge--the torpor of Mankynde convinced of the fruitlessness of his labor.
The ear-whispering Tityvillus, reiterated in Milton's Satan who speaks into the ear of Eve in a dream, points to a last condition in the cognitive wars, namely the matter of opposites as a precondition to understanding. The mind measures good in relation to evil, God in relation to not-God. What the mind would eschew it must constantly recreate in the imagination, thereby becoming its own tempter. In the words of Mark Turner, "a concept does not have hard edges. If we think of a concept as an activated set of links in a pattern, then different links in the pattern will have different degrees of strength, and there will be no clear boundary to how strong any link must be to qualify as belonging to the pattern" (45). That is to say, the mind creates kaleidoscopic patterns and relationships, all of them constantly subject to exploratory classification and reclassification. This is yet another manifestation of mental promiscuousness--the merely imagined possibility that Mercy is a thief confirmed by rumors that he has been apprehended, condemned, and hanged. The mind, in its solipsistic predicament, insists upon knowing by travelling precisely where it would not go. There is hardly anything new in this, except that it is hard wired into the brain.
My argument has been that allegory serves the morality plays not merely as a means for making static identifications between characters and their motivating essences, but as kinetic patterns of action simultaneously emblematizing both the contours of moral conduct in social terms, and the human will at work in relation to moralized options. It brings the plot of salvation down to the plot of village labor and rustic holiday, much in the ways of the Wakefield Master who had a particular genius for seeing the local in the biblical and closing that gap through parody or juxtaposition. The question is whether we can, within that kinetic emblemizing, include the cognitive processes synonymous with the mimetic order in reference to the moral order? In this way the mind itself is anatomized while the man of solitude and labor confronts mockers, goodfellows, diabolical pranksters, and personified forms of worldliness. To be sure, as a didactic ploy, there is value in illustrating the whole economy of sin and salvation at these low mimetic levels. But if sin is ultimately a matter of volition, then action is by definition cognitive, and allegory must also profile the solipsistic consciousness. Through allegory, spiritual thinking and spiritual states become part of the patterning. Mankynde thereby becomes a distinct contribution, at a distinct moment in the history of ideas, to the popular enquiry into the nature of mind.
Given the nature of consciousness as a continuous competition among neuron clusters for actualization, there can be no surprise that allegory itself is about accidents, deceptions, misinformation, confusion, wrong inferences relating both to volition and to mind states. The Tityvillus factor is composed of demonic lies, pranks, playful thievery, but in effect these are but personifications of suppressions, fade outs, new foregroundings, attention fixations, and attention deficits. He is the agent of excitatory and inhibiting networks, the uninvited policeman at intersections who in turn directs both path making (kyndling) and memory. This is the factor in the mind that listens to dreams, pains, and appetites. Mercy, otherwise, has no role to play in recalling desired orientations, in reassuring the mind that fatigue, despair, and misinformation are not permanent states, and that the mind can recover itself.