The doctor goes first (119–26, B.13.112–19)
122 (B.13.115) ʒe deuynours: Lawton in Alford 1988:238 marks a triple pun in “diviner”: doctor of divinity, quack, and over-imbiber (one who speaks de vino).
123–26a “Y haue yseide … vocabitur” (B.13.116–18a “Dowel … celorum”): Since the speaker is a doctor himself, his definition of Dowel seems self-serving, and reminiscent of the Minorites in passus 10 who said, “Dowel lives with us.” The definition of a dobet seems likewise self-serving, since one meaning of That trauayleth to teche oþere can be “One who travels to teach others” (OED, s.v. travail, v. 5), i.e., a member of the Order of Preachers. And it is hard to see why to do as one teaches is “best,” instead of a minimal expectation. To be sure, he is quoting Jesus, who said (line 126a, B.13.118a, which rightly appears inside the quotation marks—the doctor himself cites his source), “Whosoever shall do and teach (the commandments), the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 5:19). In context, however, Jesus is not contrasting teaching to doing, but rather contrasting breaking the commandments, and teaching others to break them, to keeping them and teaching others to keep them. Thus the doctor has quoted scripture to his purpose rather than with full justice. He has come up with a neat schema to answer the progression of the adverbs rather than a genuinely useful progression: he is too taken with the neatness of do, teach, do-and-teach.
On the other hand, the doctor’s words could be applied to the difference between a theology teacher in a school and a parish priest: the latter is a teacher who is out in the world doing. (L sometimes uses “teacher” to mean “parish priest”; see 15.242 [B.15.89–90]n and Lawler 2006:86.) From this angle there is a modesty in what he says. See Pearsall’s good note; like Skeat he finds the doctor’s remarks correct but inadequate; and see Lawler 1995:90–91. Schmidt: “The text was earlier cited by Scripture at A.11.196a in defining Dobest as ‘a bishop’s peer’; but the Doctor … more probably means learned Mendicants like himself than the episcopal order as a whole.”
Why has L changed the Vulgate future perfect fecerit (like docuerit) to the present facit? Apparently to give greater emphasis to doing over teaching: in the phrase “he who does and shall have taught,” the teaching is made to seem remote. The effect is a little like what we are told of Chaucer’s Parson (A497): “First he wroghte, and afterward he taughte.”
Clergie is next (127–36, B.13.119–33)
128–36 “Haue me excused … founde” (B.13.120–30 “I haue seuene sones … Plowman”): The gist of Clergie’s reply is clear enough, and essentially the same in both versions, though C erases various puzzles in B. Perhaps following the lead of Study, he declines to engage in a scholastic disputation outside of school; one feels that he is counteracting the complacent certitude of the other cleric present, the doctor, with modesty. His assertion—echoing 12.92–95 (B.11.171–73)—that Piers has impugned the sciences in favor of love and reduced all texts to two is surely a reference to Jesus’s reply to the doctor of the law who asked, “Which is the great commandment of the law?” Jesus too quoted two texts, love God and love your neighbor, Deuteronomy 6.5 and Leviticus 19.18, and said, “On these two commandments dependeth the whole law and the prophets” (Matt 22:40). See Middleton 1972:179. Jesus set the law at a sop (B.13.125), reducing it to two rules, presumably to the chagrin of the Pharisee who questioned him, whose doctorate is devalued; the phrase applies to our doctor as well, with the added sting of the food-image in at a sop: the rich meal that presumably he thought his status deserved becomes itself a mere sop. As for Domine, quis habitabit (Ps 14), see Middleton 1972:179–80 on the importance of its “infinite” pronoun quis. As she shows, verses 1–5 of this major psalm are all relevant; however, most pointed of all is presumably verse 3, “qui non … fecit proximo suo malum” (nor hath done evil to his neighbour), since it is the equivalent of the second great commandment of the law, love thy neighbor (see B.3.234–45, 9.46–50 [B.7.47–52a, A.8.49–54] for other applications of this psalm to love of neighbor; in the latter passage, it is used to satirize lawyers, as if L thought of it in general as an anti-intellectual text). Verse 3 has just been quoted, all too baldly and flippantly, by the doctor; Clergie restores it to its proper context.
Though the B version thus refers to love of both God and neighbor, C makes that clearer by citing the whole phrase from Matthew, dilige deum et proximum, rather than B’s brief lemma Dilige deum. The formula crops up in numerous places in the poem, above all as the wording of Moses’s maundement in passus 19 (B.17); see 19.14, 17 (B.17.13, 16)n. A passage that Clergie does not quote, but which may well be in L’s mind since it defines Dowel clearly in terms of loving one’s neighbor, is James 2:8, “Si tamen legem perficitis regalem secundum scripturas, ‘Diliges proximum tuum sicut te ipsum,’ bene facitis” (If then you fulfill the royal law according to the scriptures, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” you do well.)
Since Clergie’s seven sons in B are replaced in C by the phrase in scole, they are clearly the seven liberal arts, as Crowley asserted long ago (see Skeat). The Castel/Ther þe lord of lif wonyeþ, and where they seruen, is then presumably Theology, the queen of the disciplines, who will leren hem what is dowel: moral theology refines the ethical ideas encountered in the study of the liberal arts. L may have in mind the seven sons of Japheth or Job or Tobias, or Ruth 4:15, where Naomi is assured that Ruth’s son Obed “is much better to thee than if thou hadst seven sons.” He recasts B.10.155, where Scripture is “sib to þe seuen artʒ”, and B.9.1–24, the castle of Anima. The father with seven sons is a folktale and romance motif, Stith Thompson, Motif Index 251.6.3 (also 252.3 seven daughters). The whole little allegory suggests what Clergie goes on to say, that learning must submit to the law of love; the seven arts are in the process of learning that; eventually Clergie hopes to see them agree with him (122: “until I see that they and I agree”). Middleton 1972:172 says, “Without Piers’s ‘text,’ Clergie’s seven sons cannot define Dowel.” However, Middleton also makes clear that it is precisely through grammar, the first of the arts, and the “grounde of al” in the deeper sense that it represents unchanging truths about the nature of our relation to each other and to the world, that Clergie is able to explain the Infinite, i.e., non-finite, imperfect, insubstantial status of Dowel and Dobet. “Dowel, the object of the search, turns out to be itself an ‘infinite,’ a seeker after its own perfection” (188). For a full exposition of B.13.128–30, read Middleton; in a nutshell, they mean “Dowel and Dobet, both infinitives in their grammatical form and so non-finite, imperfect, and meaningless by themselves, are therefore expressions of the ever-seeking nature of our life: we seek perfection and completion in Dobest, which is the perfect love expressed in the two ‘infinite’ injunctions of Jesus. Virtue is endless, but in the end if you have done your best you will be saved.” Note that Clergie, in looking forward to when he will reach agreement with his sons, is himself also a seeker, a model of the interpretation of the moral life that he propounds. However, for all the disclaimers about learning in his reply, he still manages to be obscurely clerical, so that Conscience’s remark at B.13.131, which means, “I don’t really follow you, but I trust Piers,” is apt.
As Middleton grants, “The C-revision, by simplifying or removing