“Vidimus enim stellam eius in oriente et venimus adorare eum”: Attending to the Sign in a Late Medieval English Sermon on the Epiphany

This paper will examine one view of attention (attentio) in late medieval England, taking as its case study the second sermon of early fourteenth-century Franciscan friar-poet William Herebert, whose exegetical and poetical works survive in London, British Library, MS Add. 46919 (comp. 1314). This sermon on Matthew 2:2, likely preached in Oxford, begins by collaborating with Augustine’s De doctrina christiana, the Pseudo-Boethius’ De disciplina scolarium, and Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalion to present a Epiphanic theory of attentio. Because, Herebert suggests, 1) attentio is that which enables a person to serve God, and 2) “no one can come to the Father except through [Jesus]” (John 14:6), 3) attentio is a contemplative mediator and so immanently Christological. Paradoxically, attentio through Christ is both the means and the end of the Magi’s expedition. Herebert tracks the verbal logic of his thema to the virtues Augustine ascribes to good teachers—attention (attentio), good will (beniuolentia), and docility (docilitas). To come (venire), he says, is a sign of docilitas, and to adore (adorare) is a sign of beniuolentia, implying that to see (videre)—the prior condition of “coming to adore”—is a sign of attentio. Sight, he says later, is the “more fixed of the senses” and thus most qualified to instantiate the Epiphanic by way of attentio: “because of the fixedness of sight,” he says, “Jesus tells us, ‘We speak what we know, and we testify to what we have seen’” (John 3:11). As such, he reads the act of seeing as a sign of attentio and attentio as a sign of the Epiphanic object (stella), just as the Epiphanic object is a sign of the incarnate Word. Collapsing the middle terms, Herebert finds that attentio is a sign of Jesus Christ: eucharistically, attending to the sign transforms it into the signified. I will bring this contemplative theory of attention—a “way” to Christ, who is himself a “way” to God—to bear on one of Herebert’s extant Middle English Marian lyrics, which also survives in London, British Library, MS Add. 46919.

  Herebert relates the phenomenon of the Epiphany to the final “rung” of a systematic twelfth-century monastic theory of reading and composition, the scala claustralium, which saw a particular uptake in homiletic and mystical materials of fourteenth-century England, which delineated a four-step program beginning with the reading and memorization of scripture (lectio) and resulting in the possibility of temporary (re)union with God (contemplatio) in the image of the experience of rapture, a structure related to, but left hitherto unarticulated by, Neoplatonic thought. Necessary to this final rung—not really a “step” at all, but rather a predicament dependent on the sudden incursion of the grace of God—are the intermediary processes of meditatio (meditation/memorization) and oratio (prayer/composition). First described at length by twelfth-century Carthusian Guigo II in a treatise on prayer, which he calls the scala claustralium, or “ladder of monks,” this divine procedure qua de terra in coelum sublevantur (“by which we are raised from earth into heaven”) involves this program of four steps, or “rungs”: lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio. In his treatise, Guigo adapts a process first described half a century prior by Hugh of Saint Victor in his Didascalicon (c. 1127), whose version includes an additional penultimate step—operatio. He explains that quod oratio quaerit, contemplatio invenit (“what oratio seeks, contemplatio finds”).

  Herebert cites precisely this passage in a footnote to his sermon on the Epiphany. He first calls upon Augustine’s disambiguation of the three types of vision—corporalis, ymaginaria, and intellectualis—to claim that the Magi’s vision at Epiphany is an exemplar of uisio intelligencie, which itself is “born by nature, raised by faith, informed by Scripture, suspended by contemplation, illustrated by prophecy, and absorbed by rapture” (per naturam innate, per fidem subleuate, per Scripturam informate, per contemplationem suspense, per prophetiam illustrate, et per raptum absorpte). The Magi had access to these qualities, he says, to which not just the clergy but all religious people “should strive” because “in contemplation there is admiration, dilation, alienation, and restoration” (quia in contemplatione est admiratio, dilatatio, alienatio, et refectio)—a citation from Bonaventure’s Collationes in Hexameron (c. 1273). He goes on to cite Hugh of Saint Victor’s Didascalion to bid himself and his congregation to remember that contemplatio is preceded by lectio, meditatio, oratio, and operatio. The mystical program of the scala claustralium taught that to speak like God is to achieve the state of contemplatio—in short, to effect the eradication of your own “I” through a process of reading, memorization, and composition and therein become subsumed by the voice of God (and thereby God himself), just like the loaflike accident becomes the eucharistic substance over the course of its liturgical consecration, another language-based process of sacramentalization. The incarnation, as signified by the Epiphany, Herebert reminds us, is also a kind of contemplatio—a sublunary encounter with God—and a kind of sacrament, a literalization of the “Word.” We learn from Herebert’s citational matrix that it is attentio that makes possible the strategy of the scala, and thus the possibility of effecting contemplatio.

Like the rest of Herebert’s works, “Þou wommon boute uére” (hereafter DIMEV 5865) has given rise to little critical treatment. Unlike most of his other devotional lyrics, DIMEV 5865 is not a vernacular translation of Latin hymn; rather, it seems to be Herebert’s own composition. Concerned with the incarnational logic by which Jesus Christ was clad in the flesh of man, DIMEV 5865 figures the relationship between the “I”-speaker and Jesus as one literally “bound up” in the same flesh—it’s his own flesh, Herebert’s “I”-penitent says, with which Mary clothed Jesus when she birthed him. Herebert says that it is attentio that allows us to inhabit a text’s pronominal situation and thus its poetical logic: if you can say the words of Matthew 2:2, for instance, he says at the beginning of his sermon, casting yourself in the position of that first person plural, venimus adorare eum, you are exhibiting the virtue of attentio.