The (Dis)Order of the Biblical Episodes in Cleanness

초록

One way of reading the biblical history as outlined in the progressive Old Testament narratives in Cleanness with stories of the Flood, of Abraham, of Lot and Sodom, and of Belshazzar is to read it as an explication of a historical process, the developing and unfolding knowledge of God that culminates in the beatific vision, the sight of God on his throne at the End. The critics who have paid attention to the arrangement of Cleanness’s Old and New Testament episodes have pointed out that the application of the historical tales of judgment in this life is illustrated by the movement of history through the ages of natural law and scriptural law, as well as through the time of grace in which judgment is at hand. The problem, which will be the main focus of my discussion, is the order of the historical tales, each of which during the Middle Ages also happened to be well-known types of the End and the Last Judgment. Our poet respects the chronology of biblical history except in his placement of the Christ’s story as it precedes the story of Babylon. This disruption led some scholars such as Morse and Stanbury to link our poet with Joachimism. However, it is my argument that Christocentric, thus, if anything, anti-Joachite view of history is at the heart of Cleanness. It is through typology that the poet points to the present age as well as the End. As the poem situates the reader in the last age before the End, in Babylon as a type, it does not claim to embrace a new prophecy. Rather the poem explodes with tensions which I find are inherent in traditional eschatology: that is, tensions felt by human beings in having to embrace spiritually the End that is supposedly already here and yet at the same time that is temporally not.