“charity … rejoices with the truth,” 1 Cor 13:6. poore herte: “Blessed are the poor in spirit” 5:3, “Blessed are the clean of heart,” 5:7; pacience of tonge: see mylde speche above, and “Charity is patient,” 1 Cor 13:4. Not that L had his bible open; rather the Sermon on the Mount distills the essence of Christ’s message of patience and love, as Patience here is trying to do also.
Of course all the phrases, especially parfit truþe, can describe Christ himself (“Est Christus perfecta veritas,” Hildegard, Scivias, Ed. Führkötter and Carlevaris 1978:470), as, in B’s next line, can Charite þe chief, (“caput Christus” Eph 4:15), and chaumbrere for god hymselue, a good metaphor for the Son. In short, the answer to Actyf’s question in B, “Where does Charity live?,” is Christ. As with Charity in passus 16, and as also with the Samaritan in passus 17, and since God is love (“Deus caritas est,” 1 John 4:8, 16), L’s representations of Charity always end up as virtual representations of Christ. See the notes to 16.285–374a (B.15.149–268), 16.286–87 (B.15.148–51), 16.286–97 (B.15.149–64). Even C’s new version of B.14.101, charite, chaumpion chief of all vertues, though it seems not to refer to Christ since he is not a virtue, may summon up in our minds Conscience’s phrase to Will when the crucifixion is over, “Crist with his croes, conquerour of Cristene” (21.14, B 19.14). And cf. Prudentius, Hamartigenia 31, where God is called “virtutum sublime caput” the sublime chief of the virtues (PL 59.1014).
Clopper 1997:243 sees a progression in 15.273: “meekness (Dowel), mildness of speech (Dobet), and men of one will (Dobest), and it is this latter status that constitutes the highest form of Charity, that is, ‘perfect patience’ that is patience in poverty.” I don’t see it.
276 pore pacient, 277 pouerte and pacience (B.14.102 paciente pouerte): Patience makes explicit here what he has been implying, e.g., at 256 (“care for no corn ne for cloth ne for drynke”), that the full meaning of patience is patience in the face of poverty. See Cato’s dictum, Paupertatis onus pacienter ferre memento, cited at C.8.336a (B.6.315), in C not long after the moving account of “oure neyhebores … pore folk in cotes,” whose patience is evident though the word is not used. The two terms are then first joined in English by Scripture at B.10.346, and appear together repeatedly in B.11–14 and C.12–16, very often, as in the long encomium of patient poverty in passus 12 (B.11), offering Christ as the model. Though there is some fluctuation, some willingness to regard poverty as itself enough for salvation (see Lawler 2000: 144), the deep subject is not poverty alone or patience alone, but patient poverty.
277–78 (B.14.102–3) Where … resonablelyche to spene: Though B.14.102 quod Haukyn disappears in C, the speaker of this question is still clearly Actyf. Presumably he asks it not out of neutral curiosity but out of self-interest: he regards himself as having earned his wealth rightfully and as spending it reasonably, and so thinks he can be saved without becoming poor and patient. That would at least partly explain his tears at the end of the B passus—he is like the rich young man in Matt 19:22 who “went away sad” after Jesus told him to sell all and give it to the poor. He has moved by the end from the complacency, or at least hopefulness, implicit in this question to a conviction of guilt. Line 278 (B.14.103) seems to translate Ecclus 31.8, “Beatus dives qui inventus est sine macula”: see 16.358–59a (B.15.233–34a)n below.
279–16.157 (B.14.104–322) ʒe? quis est ille? … what pouerte was to mene: Patience preaches to Actyf and Will on patient poverty, in answer to Actyf’s question whether patient poverty pleases God more than wealth justly and reasonably spent. In general the ideas on poverty are similar to those expressed in passūs 12 and 13 (B.11). His sermon has three large parts. The first (279–16.42, B.14.104–201), the most direct answer to Actyf’s question, argues, roughly along the lines of Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount, that the rich are likely to go to hell when they die because they have had their heaven here, the poor to heaven because their life has been hell—though near the end of the part it becomes a prayer to God to save the poor rather than an assertion that he will, and a prayer as well that God will haue ruþe on þise riche men (B.14.168), or that he will make vs alle meke (C.16.23). In the second part (16.43–113, B.14.202–273) Patience extends this point by arguing that the poor do not commit the deadly sins, moving toward the end to a reassertion of their claim to heaven, and then to special praise for voluntary poverty; in the third (114–57, B.14.274–322) he replies to Actyf’s request for a definition of poverty with a series of oxymoronic Latin phrases. Aers 2004 and Clopper 1990 have called Patience’s ideas Franciscan, but it seems to me that in expression and detail the sermon is sui generis, in its sympathy for the poor it is in tune with the psalms and the Gospels, and in its preference for poverty over wealth it is aligned very well with Seneca and Jerome as cited by Peter the Chanter in his chapter on poverty—except that it reports achingly on how painful it is to be poor in a way that Seneca never gets down to.
279–16.21 ʒe? quis est ille? … some pore and ryche (B 14.104–65 Ye? quis est ille? … defaute): At the base of the passage, beside the Beatitudes and Matthew’s story of the rich young man, is Matthew’s parable of the talents (25:14–30; cf. B.6.238–46, A.7.222–30), with its reckoning; see Maillet’s deep discussion of all the threads in the poem and in the bible that relate to what she calls “gestion des biens confiées,” management of the goods we are trusted with, 2014:117–30.
The first place in the poem where the idea comes up that the poor deserve heaven because they are so miserable here, though not with the financial term “allowance,” is in the C version of the pardon scene, in the long sentence C.9.176–87: as for the poor who take their mischiefs meekly, “For loue of here lowe hertes oure lord hath hem ygraunted/Here penaunce and here purgatorie vppon this puyre erthe/And pardon with the plouhman A pena & a culpa.” The basis is Luke 6:20–21, “Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now, for you shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now, for you shall laugh,” along with verse 24, “But woe to you that are rich, for you have your consolation.” This saying is not in any other Gospel. Dives and Lazarus, Luke 16:19–31, that favorite story of L’s, alluded to here at 299 (B.14.123), is another major source, and especially verse 25, “And Abraham said to him, ‘Son, remember that thou didst receive good things in thy lifetime, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented.’” See too the long sermon against riches in Luke 12:13–34, and Ps 71:13, “He shall save the souls of the poor.”
The financial contrast here between the arrerage of the rich and the allouaunce that the poor can expect recalls Recklessness’s similar contrast of reeves and controllers to servants at 11.296–98 (reeves and clerks B 10.476–77). Cf. also Scripture at B.10.344–48 (A.11.229–31; not in C), 12.62–71 (on a churl who makes a charter), 12.194–209 (mourning into mirth, sorrow into solace), 9.270–77 (on shepherds/pastors), and 16.3–21 (B.14.134–67) and n. Cf. Alford, Gloss., s.v. allowaunce, allowen, arrerage, disallowen. The issue in all these places is also entrance into heaven, the financial terms being clearly figurative. In the present passage, their figurative nature is clear in the B version but initially obscured in C because line 284 seems literal on first reading; but the lines that follow show that in fact it is figurative.
In all the earlier places L assumes that responsible underlings will cheat their masters and so come up short when rendering accounts; here he seems to assume similarly that the rich will inevitably incur debts. But since the “allowance” or credit toward eternal joy that the poor claim (286) is based simply on their lack of joy here, clearly the arrears the rich will find themselves in as they reckon their accounts before death is also an arrears of joy, not of money: they will owe God joy since they had so much here, and will have to pay it back either in purgatory (if they’re lucky) or hell (where they will keep on paying forever) (305). However, Patience is not quite saying that the
