Medievalish 3.6

All's Well that Ends Well

Dear friend,

My manuscript for book number two is due August first. I am in the midst of drafting the last body chapter, leaving only the conclusion and some serious revision left. Naturally, I’ve been thinking about endings.

Historically, I have found conclusions to be either very easy, growing out of the rich compost of the last year and a half of writing and all the bits left decomposing in my mind after finishing chapters (too vivid of a metaphor?). Or—they are wretched, leaving me sweatily unsatisfied with the ongoing failure of my efforts to reach transcendence in my writing, to leave you, my dear reader, with something to grasp, to love, to take with you back into your own world, wherever you are. There is no middle ground for me as a writer.

St. Matthew perhaps facing some writing challenges, Gospels, 9th-10th century Bodleian Library, MS. Auct. D. 2. 16, fol. 28v

One of the joys of reading old books is that conventions work quite differently than ours. This is particularly true at the beginnings and ends of texts. I felt so much freedom when I first read St. Augustine of Hippo’s endings to his works.

From Confessions, a prayer for beginnings and completion:

What human can empower another human to understand these things? What angel can grant understanding to another angel? What angel to a human? Let us rather ask of you, seek in you, knock at your door. Only so will we receive, only so find, and only so will the door be opened to us. Amen.¹

In City of God, Augustine exhales the same gusty breath of relief that I had as a reader finishing his brick-like tome:

And now, as I think, I have discharged my debt, with the completion, by God’s help, of this huge work. It may be too much for some, too little for others. Of both these groups I ask forgiveness. But of those for whom it is enough I make this request: that they do not thank me, but join with me in rendering thanks to God. Amen. Amen.²

I love the graciousness and confident freedom in asking for forgiveness in what is missing from one’s own work.

As I read more and more medieval books, I still loved the different kinds of endings I encountered. From the fourteenth-century work of apophatic mysticism, Cloud of Unknowing, a direct farewell and blessing:

Farewell, spiritual friend, with God’s blessing and mine upon you! I pray Almighty God that true peace, sound counsel, and his own spiritual comfort and abundant grace may ever be with you and all his earthly lovers. Amen.³

The phrase “God’s blessing and mine” was a common send-off in medieval and early modern letters, especially between parents and children or between people dearly loved (including from Thomas More to his grown children the night before his execution, and in the sweet, sad farewell of the dreamer of Pearl to his little daughter). Though we do not even know his name, the anonymous writer has laid claim to our spiritual kinship and friendship here by our reading of his work. Isn’t it lovely to be called friend directly from someone seven hundred years ago? I feel his prayer upon me. I know we are friends in some very real but very strange sense.

Many medieval books do not end at all, but peter off into nothingness as the author never returned to them, or kept revising until they died. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales falls into this intriguing latter category. He does, however, intentionally end with something that has exasperated his readers since nearly the beginning: a retraction of the vast majority of his poetry. Riddle this one out:

Now pray I to them all that encounter this little treatise or lesson, that if there be any thing in it that appeals to them, that thereof they thank our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom proceeds all wit and goodness. And if there be anything that displease them, I pray that they attribute it to the weakness of my understanding and not to my will (I would have said it better if I had the cunning). … Wherefore I beseech you meekly, for the mercy of God, that you pray for me, that Christ would have mercy on me and forgive my faults, and namely my translations and writings of worldly vanities, the which I revoke in my retractions: Troilus & Criseyde, the House of Fame, the Book of Ladies, the Book of the Duchess, the Parliament of Fowls, the Tales of Canterbury (at least those that sow sin), the Book of the Lion, and many another book, if they are in my memories, and many a song, and many a lecherous lay, that Christ in his great mercy may forgive me the sin. But of the translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and other books of legends of saints and homilies and morality and devotion, for those I thank our Lord Jesus Christ and his blissful mother, and all the saints of heaven…⁴

This is all rather ironic, given that he didn’t really seem to try to take his works out of circulation, as far as we know. Some feel like this is mere convention, others one of Chaucer’s famous ironies, and others feel like he experienced some kind of deathbed conversion and terror that he may have led others astray. An unsolvable mystery.

My favorite ending belongs to Julian of Norwich, whose words manage to both comfort and throw down a stirring challenge to love. Famously, she starts her concluding chapter:

This book is begun by God’s gift and his grace, but it is not yet performed [perfected, completed, enacted] as to my sight. For charity pray we all together, with God’s working: thanking, trusting, enjoying.

She declares that after all her work interpreting, thinking, praying on the meaning of her beautiful but baffling showings, she is learning that “love is our Lord’s meaning.” If you keep looking, you will find it the same, again and again, and nothing other than love. This indeed is the beginning and the ending of all things:

And I saw full certainly in this and in all things, that before God made us he loved us, and this love was never slaked, nor never shall be. And in this love he has done all his works, and in this love he has made all things profitable to us. And in this love our life is everlasting. In our making we had beginning, but the love wherein he made us was in him from without beginning, in which love we have our beginning. And all this we shall see in God without end. Deo gratias.

If we are not growing out of this love, and concluding in this love, there is nothing.

I wondered long about why and how these almost direct addresses to readers felt so meaningful to me (except Chaucer’s, which I include just because I find it interesting!).⁵ I finally got there: it’s the upfront, unworried acknowledgement that the work of interpretation, the meaning-making dance of book and reader together, remains ongoing. Long after the book is closed and placed back onto a bookshelf, the words still may write hidden grace in a heart, or throw down an ongoing gauntlet of interpretation for wrestling, or offer secret companionship. In memory we are never individuals. Our minds are more like one-of-a-kind rooms of voices invited in for conversation by our own eyes and ears, for good and for evil. These writers all just make that understanding explicit. No wonder that Augustine spends so long on memory as a conduit of grace in Confessions.

A book’s ending is also, and always, a beginning.

What I’ve been up to this month:

• Scribbling up a storm on chastity and lust… this also means reading a lot of books with “sex” in the title and then hiding them from my young children to avoid a conversation none of us are ready for. This has been difficult for me because to my husband’s chagrin, I typically leave books strewn on every flat surface in our house (Scott, I apologize and promise that I am trying).

• Prepping for some sermons and talks coming up this summer and fall. If your church, ministry, or class would like to learn more about imagination and literature, our medieval brothers and sisters, Christian mysticism, or related topics, I’d love to chat with you about possibilities.

• Old Books with Grace is on summer hiatus! But do catch up on episodes… you can listen on your favorite podcasting platform.

What I’ve been reading this month:

• Nonfiction: I just started Matthew Milliner’s Mother of the Lamb. Already just lovely, and I’ve only read the introduction.

• Fiction: I’ve been revisiting the Emily of New Moon series by L.M. Montgomery. What fun! Almost as good as Anne.⁶

• Medieval/Medieval-adjacent: Bestiaries, on unicorns & toads in particular.

• Article: I loved Malcolm Guite’s recent story and poem for St. Columba’s feast day.

A Prayer from the Past

Today I offer a beautiful prayer from Thomas a Kempis (1380-1471), German-Dutch canon regular and author of The Imitation of Christ, found in my little purple book of prayers, Prayers Ancient & Modern (Grosset & Dunlap, 1897), compiled by Mary Tileston.

Thou Brightness of eternal glory,
Thou Comfort of the pilgrim soul,
with Thee is my tongue without voice,
and my very silence speaketh unto Thee.
Come, oh come; for without Thee
I shall have no joyful day or hour;
for Thou art my joy,
and without Thee my table is empty.
Praise and glory be unto Thee;
let my mouth, my soul, and all creatures together
praise and bless Thee.
Amen.

Peace for your June,

Grace

P.S. Medievalish is free, and I’d be delighted if you shared it with a friend!

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1. Saint Augustine, The Confessions, translated by Maria Boulding, O.S.B. (Vintage Spiritual Classics, 1998), 342.

2. Saint Augustine, City of God, translated by Henry Bettenson (Penguin Books, 2003), 1091.

3. Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing, translated by Clifton Wolters (Penguin Books, 1961), 144.

4. Translation mine. Geoffrey Chaucer, “Retraction,” The Canterbury Tales, edited by Larry Benson (Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

5. Chaucer seems to worry he has been a Pied Piper of people into hell.

6. However, rereading as an adult really brings home Dean Priest’s creepiness.