3 - Incarnational Making in Vox Clamantis II

Summary

GOWER's ORIGINAL PROLOGUE TO Vox Clamantis, Book II, is suffused with meditations on the nature of poetic making. Throughout, he interrogates the ways in which human artistic production functions: in the context of past writers, Christian and pagan, within the shifting relationship between matter and form, and, most critically, in light of the generative activity of God qua Creator. Critical reception of the poem by modern scholars takes up these same questions, but with significant emphasis on the first and the second. In particular, Gower's use of Ovid in Vox, but most especially in the Visio, has produced arguments that demonstrate the ways in which Ovidian allusion becomes both a method for negotiating the distance between pagan otherness and Christian history, and for establishing a poetic voice that speaks through a mode of political complaint and counsel. The third question, however, that of the relationship between the human artistic and the divine Creator, has received little to no attention. Indeed, near the end of R.F. Yeager's contribution to the Routledge Research Companion to John Gower, entitled “Gower's Religions,” he notes, “Gower's religious thought … is wide-ranging, and … in its several dimensions very little explored.” This essay takes up one of these less-explored dimensions of Gower's religious writing, his discussion of Incarnation and idolatry in Book II of Vox Clamantis, to demonstrate how deeply Gower's poetics in the poem are governed by the relationship he constructs between Christian access to the divine and the forms through which human artistic production is (or should be) governed.

We begin from Yeager's own claim, that “Reason… is the yardstick by which Gower measured most events and human behaviors. It guides his understanding of the law and social policy, and… assists his definition of the nature of the holy.” However, we argue that this ratio is paired with ars as the two fundamental ways in which human beings operate, at least in Gower's Christianized Aristotelianism. Gower is working from the primary division that Aristotle makes between human beings and animals: “Alia quidem igitur ymaginationibus et memoriis vivunt, experimenti autem parum participant; hominum autem genus arte et rationibus” [Indeed other [animals] therefore live by imagination and memory, though they participate little in experience; however, human kind [lives] by art and reasoning].