3 - Narrative level, personification, and character ontology in Prudentius' Psychomachia

Summary

As the first major work in the history of Western personification literature, the Psychomachia of Prudentius has had a paradoxical status. In the modern critical arena, it is recognized as the most influential source for later medieval allegories that are built upon the central notion of spiritual conflict. At the same time it is considered something of an embarrassment, because of its simple plot structure, the seeming lack of literary grace in its language, and its frequently artless purveying of doctrine. It works more like a piece of theological propaganda than a poem in the epic tradition.

More precisely, the Psychomachia has been traditionally appraised as a poetic or formal failure but as a thematic staple in Western thought. The first modern critic to pay close attention to the Psychomachia was C. S. Lewis, who relegated it to the great heap of zealous, popular doctrinal staples of the late Patristic period. For Lewis, “an anticlimax has to be faced when we reach … the Psychomachia of Prudentius. It is unworthy of the great utterances which lead up to it and explain its existence” (66). Lewis appreciates the poem from the perspective of genetic literary history: the primary value of the Psychomachia is its location as the first entry in a vertically ascending scale of allegorical works that reaches, through time, toward greater and greater aesthetic perfection. H. R. Jauss more thoroughly examined the poem's germinal influence on the new psychological apparatus of the great twelfth-century allegorical and humanistic renaissance (“Form”), while Maurice Lavarenne saw the Psychomachia as the symbolic expression of the crucial historical moments when paganism gave way to Christianity (9-10).