Pearl Poet: William F. Klein's Review of Condren

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Thanks to Ian Myles Slater for pointing the way to The Medieval Review, which offers a free online review of Condren's book by William F. Klein, of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. For the ignorant among us (and that includes me), Ian helpfully adds:

For those not familiar with it, TMR, formerly Bryn Mawr Medieval Review, is "a moderated distribution list," run by and for medievalists. It offers a searchable collection of reviews going back to 1993.

I didn't know all that, but as my older brother, Pat, once remarked to me in a well-honed putdown, "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio." This applies in spades to my knowledge of Medieval numerology.

Klein's review is useful not because he shows that Condren is right or wrong, for he admits: "That his analysis is sound I cannot claim or argue. His book will have to make its own way in the world." But he is impressed enough to add: "At this point we must give Condren the benefit of our doubt." Why is Klein willing to do this? Because he believes "that Condren's study of the manuscript does in fact display a structural design that cannot be other than utterly intentional and that everyone who would like to claim knowledge of the manuscript and the poems should read his book."

I'll leave Klein's review to my readers to read, but I would like to quote here Klein's quote of Condren's own "Afterword":

The implications of the highly wrought strategy we have been discussing, in which mathematics serves as a revealing analogue to metaphysical matters, might be stated in various ways depending on the context one wishes to emphasize. To a mathematician the conversion of a measuring system based on fours into a system based on fives requires the magic of an irrational number that leads to infinity if applied repeatedly. To a medieval theologian the New Law expands and enriches the Old Law through the advent of Christ, whose teaching, if continuously applied, in turn translates the New into eternal salvation. To a poet there is little difference, for his epiphany comes in recognizing the parallel between mathematics and theology and in realizing poetry's power to make palpable what otherwise would be ineffable. Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight have a foot in both the four cornered world and the world that supersedes it. The duodecimal basis of the former, the four fitts of the latter, and the worldly concerns of both suggest the sphere of Purity and Patience. The 5 square prime number of stanzas in both Pearl and Gawain, the fifth Platonic solid suggested by the former, and the latter's pentangular emblem, five-line bob-and-wheel, and power of regeneration imply the abode of the Pearl maiden. Above it all lies the manuscript's astonishing representation of elegant coherence. The profound congruence of the universe with man's theological and moral concerns, and with all that lies on his too-much-loved earth, unfolds before us with subtle simplicity. The disciplines of the quadrivium--arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy--have been drawing their lines unwaveringly toward the judgment on which will depend the eternity, not only of the characters described in its lines, but also on every reader humbled by this manuscripts exquisite beauty. ( Edward I. Condren, The Numerical Universe of the Gawain-Pearl Poet: Beyond Phi, page 147)

This certainly demonstrates that Condren has thought long and hard about the potential implications of the numerical relationships that he believes himself to have found. If he's right, then his book is brilliant -- and the Pearl Poet even more so.

This is the sort of book that my old history of science professor John L. Heilbron would find fascinating, given his interest in the confluence of mathematical astronomy and Christian theology in the The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories.