SOURCE: "Vernacular Style and the Word of God: The Incarnational Art of Pearl," in Ineffability: Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett. AMS Press, 1984, pp. 23-34.

In the following essay, Schotter considers the theme of Pearl to be the inadequacy of both images and human language to convey the idea of the Divine.

Any Christian visionary writer must confront the problem of how to convey the Divine in human terms. Throughout history theologians have spoken of two ways, the positive, which proposes analogies for God, and the negative, which denies that any analogies are valid. The two ways tend to work in a dialectical manner, the latter continually warning against the idolatry that the former might encourage.¹ The author of the fourteenth-century English Pearl confronts this traditional problem when he tries to convey the kingdom of heaven to his readers. His solution is to suggest it by various...