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Stumbling toward God's Light:The Pearl Dreamer and the Impediments of Hierarchy Josephine Bloomfield The high medieval dream poem Pearl, considered by most critics to be a structural and literary tour de force, and ranked by many as the most sophisticated and beautifully written English poem of the Middle Ages, is narrated, paradoxically, by a Dreamer who is not sophisticated and who repeatedly fails to grasp the meaning either of the events he narrates or of the beauty that surrounds him in his dream vision. The benighted Dreamer has been the subject of numerous critical analyses over the last several decades,1 as readers have tried to make sense of the poet's intentions in giving the Dreamer the particular forms of blindness and deafness that characterize him. How, readers ask, can the audience find a way to the poet's meaning in a work where the central speaker in the poem—who is presented as a spiritual seeker—insistently refuses to learn the spiritual lessons he is offered? In this essay, rather than looking at the narrator through the interpretive model of the romance dream vision with its focus on the discourse of love, or through [End Page 390] the tropes of Augustinian or Boethian contemplation, or even through the lens of the individualism that characterizes the Lollard movement, I would like to argue that it is possible to find fresh insights into the poet's purpose in Pearl by examining more closely the social and ecclesiastical hierarchies that structure his Dreamer's world, and particularly by analyzing the Dreamer's vocabulary, his references, and his questions to the Pearl Maiden in these terms.2 Though there are numerous influential texts in the fourth-through twelfth-century development of the foundations of medieval hierarchy, here I would like to look briefly at several works that limn that development, and that in my view echo through the dramatic dialogue and setting of Pearl. While from the mid-fourth century on numerous bishops and other members of the newly legal Christian Church became interested in hierarchy for the most practical of reasons—the need to organize the Church and establish orthodox belief—one in particular, St. Jerome (347–420), wrote very extensively and powerfully on hierarchy, making it a focus of many of his polemical tracts. Though part of Jerome's focus on hierarchy was the result of a feud with his former intimate colleague Rufinus, a feud which involved Jerome's renouncing certain theological doctrines of Origen (ca. 185–254) that he and Rufinus had once shared,3 Jerome's views on hierarchy eventually permeated many of his works unconnected to this feud and entered general doctrinal discourse as his works became widespread and his theology of hierarchy became accepted as orthodox. This is the case with Jerome's most famous polemical tract, Against Jovinianus (393), where he excoriates his contemporary Jovinian for his readings of Scripture, and particularly for [End Page 391] what Jerome sees as Jovinian's mistaken readings of the letters of Paul on the issue of physical chastity. In Jerome's tract he quotes Jovinian4 as saying that "virgins, widows, and married women, who have been once passed through the laver of Christ, if they are on a par in other respects, are of equal merit."5 According to Jerome, Jovinian also adds that in his understanding of Scripture (particularly the Parable of the Vineyard, and Christ's discourse on the Judgment Day division between the sheep and the goats [Matthew 25:31–37]) "there is one reward in the kingdom of heaven for all who have kept their baptismal vow."6 To Jovinian's suggestion of such spiritual equality on earth and in heaven, in which baptism effaces the material history of the individual body, Jerome responds violently: "This," he says, "is the hissing of the old serpent; by counsel such as this the dragon drove man from Paradise."7 To counter Jovinian's statements, he devotes a significant portion of Against Jovinianus to building an argument that it is heretical to suggest that the soul's place in heaven is not tied to the body's ascetic rigor on earth; he argues...
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