Having offered above Derek Pearsall’s outline of the story Langland tells in the final version of his work, I set out here with Passus XX. This passus culminates in the powerful and complex oration of Jesus Christ as he liberates enslaved human beings from the prison house of hell. We are given a glimpse of immense divine power:
“A spirit speketh to Helle and bit to vnspere the yates:
Attolite portas, &c.”
A vois loude in that liht to Lucifer saide,
“Principes of this place, prest vndo this gates
For here a cometh with croune, the kynge of all glorie!”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“Dukes of this demme place, anoen vndoth this yates
That Crist may come in, the kynges sone of heuene!”
And with that breth helle braek, with alle Belialles barres;
For eny wey or warde, wyde open the yates.
(XX.270–73, 362–65)1
———
[“A spirit speaks to hell and bids the gates be opened.”
Lift up your gates.
A loud voice within that light said to Lucifer:
“Princepes of this place, quickly undo these gates,
For he comes here with crown, the king of all glory!”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“Dukes of this dim place, undo these gates now
That Christ may come in, the son of heaven’s king.”
And with that breath hell with all of Belial’s bars broke;
Despite all prevention, the gates were wide open.]
The creatures’ technologies of war and fortifications disintegrate in the “breth” of the word spoken in Jesus. But the words themselves concentrate not on power but on the divine thirst to save humans, on the ties that bind Jesus to his brethren, the mercy of his kingly power determined to be kind to his kin (XX.403–44).2 Unlike so many theologians of the later Middle Ages and the Reformation, Langland constantly disciplined his writing about divine power by the Christocentric narratives of the New Testament.3 In his theological paradigms it is impossible to entertain many of the speculations about God’s power encouraged by the fascination with God’s potentia absoluta among the moderni. For example: that God could order Christians to kill innocent people; that because God creates creatures out of an untrammeled will he can do whatever he likes with them, so that if somebody always loves God and does all the works God demands, God can annihilate such a loving person or damn him eternally without any injustice; that God can deceive the faithful and could have deceived Christ, causing him to deceive his disciples concerning the future.4 Langland gestures toward such theological discourses at least twice in Piers Plowman. At one point he is considering contemporary discussions of the Trinity at feasts of the wealthy:
Nowe is the manere at the mete when munstrals ben stille
The lewed ayen the lered the holy lore to dispute,
And tellen of the trinite how two slowe the thridde
And brynge forth ballede resones, taken Bernard to witnesse
And putten forth presumpcioun to preue the sothe
Thus they dreuele at the deyes the deite to know
And gnawen god with gorge when here gottes fullen.
(XI.33–39)
———
[Now is the custom at meals, when the minstrels are silent,
The ignorant take on the learned to debate holy doctrine,
And talk about the Trinity how two killed the third
And bring forth flimsy arguments, take Bernard to witness,
And put forth a presumption to prove the truth.
Thus they drivel on the dais, the deity to know,
And chomp on God in their throats when their guts fill up.]
The laicization of theology here involves a parodic imitation of the church’s theologians in their Latin academies. Parodic, yes; but also, distinctly, imitation. For what Langland has identified is the way philosophical theology in the modern university produced an immense discourse on the relations and processions of the Trinity which not only sidelined the narratives of scripture but was a committedly antinarrative genre.5 True enough, this genre comprised theologians whose apprenticeship involved both commenting on the Sentences and commenting on scripture as conventionally read in the Catholic Church.6 But such training legitimated the development of theology (around the Sentences) in which the doctrine of God was abstracted from scriptural stories and elaborated in the categories of Aristotelian logic, physics, and metaphysics.7 Langland evaluated the outcome in the passage quoted above. Inattention to the disciplines of relevant narratives in scripture sponsored a freewheeling discussion of God’s power and nature. He returns to his critical evaluation of modern theology in the critiques of the modern church which fostered this discourse, a critique ascribed to Liberum Arbitrium:
Freres fele tymes to the folk ther they prechen
Mouen motyues, mony tymes insolibles and falaes,
That both lewed and lered of here beleue douten.
(XVI.231–33)
———
[Many times friars when they preach to the people
Frequently raise fallacious and insoluble questions
That put both the learned and ignorant in doubt of their belief.]
In shorthand, Langland points toward the institutionalization of theology so richly illustrated by Hester Gelber in her remarkable doctoral thesis and in her more recent studies.8 The issues include Langland’s suspicion that the church now legitimizes a version of Christian theology in which the narratives and histories through which God is revealed are subordinated to modern forms of Aristotelian logic. Theologians (led by friars) are lured to invent theological truth as suprahistorical or nonhistorical, quite autonomous of the stories on which the church depends and acknowledges in the liturgy. While Langland includes disputations in an academic mode in his own work, they are subjected to the overall dialectic in which they exist, one finally shaped by Chistocentric and Pentecostal narratives. For however fragmented and paratactic Langland’s work may often feel, Langland has a story to tell, one from which his theology and ecclesiology emerges.
The Christ of Piers Plowman is the Christ whom the New Testament describes as being sent to fulfill the promises of the divine covenant with Abraham and Moses, to save sinners in the manifestation of God’s love figured by the father, the shepherd, and the woman of Luke 15. Christ’s oration in hell affirms his kindness and kinship with human beings despite their persistent rejection of God. What he says in the context is congruent with an exemplary exchange between Jesus and his disciples when they are rejected by a village of Samaritans: “And when his disciples James and John had seen this, they said: Lord wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them?” (Luke 9:54–56).9 The disciples’ model of a prophet mediating divine power is Elijah summoning fire from heaven to kill more than a hundred Samaritans in proof that he is “a man of God” (4 Kings 1:1–12). Jesus’s response reiterates a common declaration in the evangelical narrative: “the Son of man is come to save that which was lost” (Matt. 18:11; see too Luke 19:10). He is the one whom the Pharisees rebuke for keeping an open table: “This man receiveth sinners and eateth with them” (Luke 15:2). And he is the one who responds to this charge not by denial but by parable upon parable to show that this practice is itself a decisive revelation of the divine will (Luke 15:3–32). Langland himself cites one of these parables in his beautiful and moving depiction of Wille’s first conversion in the poem (V.92–101).
How then does Langland return from the emancipating power of God revealed by Christ’s acts and words in hell to the place in which he will complete his work for humanity: the present world and the church? The poet chooses to do so by way of the risen Christ’s commission to Piers the Plowman, now figuring the apostle Peter, and a representation of Pentecost with an unusual commentary on this event.
Langland ascribes his account of the risen Christ to Conscience, the figure who replaces faith as Wille’s guide at the opening of Passus XXI (XXI.9 ff.; cf. XX.6–34). The shift in guide indicates that this Conscience is one informed by faith and reflecting Wille’s move toward “scientia” (knowledge) based on faith.10 Wille begs Conscience “to kenne me the sothe” (XXI.9). What is puzzling him at this point is the relationship between the transformed figuration of “Peres the plouhman,” just before the canon of the Mass, and Jesus, whom Wille has seen jousting on the cross against the powers that bind and terrorize humanity (XXI.1–14; cf. XX.6–34a). He is puzzled about the relations between the name of Jesus and the name of Christ (XXI.15–25). Conscience explains this relation to Wille by retelling the life of Jesus with his victory over death and devil: Christus Resurgens (XXI.140–81a). Conscience’s narration also completes Wille’s long quest for Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest, those modes of virtue, by displaying them in Christological form, fulfilled in Christ. So, for example, Dowel becomes the evangelical law in which love of enemy is not a counsel of perfection but a precept of the new law initiated by Jesus Christ who makes law into gospel, a precept for all Christians to follow (XXI.108–23).11
This is the context in which Langland situates Christ’s commission to the apostle Peter. Dobest completes the activity of the risen Christ among his disciples:
And when this dede was doen, do best he thouhte
And yaf Peres pardoun and power he graunted hym,
Myhte men to assoyle of alle manere synnes,
To alle manere men mercy and foryeuenesse
In couenaunt that they come and knoleched to pay
To Peres pardoun the plouhman Redde quod debes.
Thus hath Peres power, be his pardoun payed,
To bynde and to vnbynde bothe here and elles
And assoile men of alle synnes, saue of dette one.
(XXI.182–90)
———
[And when this deed was done, he thought about Do-best
And gave Piers the power and pardon he granted
To all manner of men, mercy and forgiveness;
Gave him might to absolve men of all manner of sins
Provided they come and acknowledge they must pay
To Piers the plowman’s pardon Redde quod debes.
Thus Piers has the power, if his pardon is paid for,
To bind and unbind both here and elsewhere
And absolve men of all sins, except for their debts.]
This is Langland’s final account of what the papacy claimed as its origins. What Langland finally does with this claim is a major part of the story he will tell. At the moment, however, the apostle Peter is merged with Piers the poem’s plowman as the risen Christ gives him the power to mediate Christ’s mercy and forgiveness to “alle manere men” who fulfill the law of the gospel, the new covenant.12 Christ’s gift also resolves Wille’s puzzles about indulgences and the purchase of masses so eloquently expressed much earlier in the poem, at the end of Passus IX. To appreciate the implications of this resolution we should recall the treatment of pardon and papacy in that passus.
There, Wille had woken from his vision of an encounter between “Peres the plouhman” and a priest who “impugnede” the pardon allegedly received from Treuthe as “no pardoun” (IX. 293–352a; 289; see IX.1–292 passim). Ruminating on the issues raised in this dramatic clash, Wille interprets the priest’s judgment as congruent with his own suspicions about indulgences in the late medieval church together with the papal power they assume and papal authority.13 He suspects that virtuous practice (Dowel) far surpasses any salvific role of indulgences, or of masses purchased for the souls of the dead to ease their path through purgatory, or of pilgrimages (IX.321–24).14 But Wille wants to remain an orthodox member of the contemporary church and checks the direction of such thoughts by affirming papal power:
Yut hath the pope power pardoun to graunte
To peple withouten penaunce to passe into ioye.
(IX.325–26)
———
[Yet the pope has power to grant pardon
To people to pass without penance into joy.]
This is a strikingly unqualified affirmation of papal authority and power in the economy of salvation. It smacks of just the kind of undifferentiated claims to plenitude of papal power so extensively criticized, in different ways and to different ends, by Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham earlier in the century.15 Langland emphasizes this scope by immediately glossing the statement about the pope’s “power” to open the gate of heaven without any penitential reconciliation with God and neighbor: “Quodcumque ligaveris super terram erit ligatum in caelis” (Whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth shall be bound also in heaven) (Matt. 16:19). This comes from Jesus’s words to Peter after the apostle recognized him as “Christ, the Son of the living God” (16:16). Jesus blesses Peter and promises, “upon this rock (petram) I will build my church” (16:18). For Augustine, the rock on which the church stands came to mean Jesus Christ, the one whom Peter confessed to be “the Christ, the Son of the living God.” In his Retractions he observes that Jesus says, “Thou art Peter,” and not “Thou art the rock.” There is no commitment to any exegesis that would make the “rock” represent the Roman papacy.16 In a sermon apparently “some time between 410 and 412,” Augustine observes that Christ bestowed the name Peter on the apostle Simon to represent the church: “Because Christ, you see, is the petra or rock; Peter, or Rocky is so called from rock, not the rock from Rocky; just as Christ is not so called from Christian, but Christian from Christ.” So the rock on which Christ promises to build his church, Augustine states, is the Christological confession uttered by Peter when Christ says that he will build his church; Augustine glosses the promise: “that is, on myself, the Son of the living God . . . I will build you on me, not me on you.”17 Augustine’s exegesis was well known in the Middle Ages and found a place in Aquinas’s commentary on the Gospels.18 But papal apologists appropriated the text, set aside Augustine’s reading, and projected onto Matthew’s Gospel their own ideology. To Ockham, such late medieval exegesis was quite unwarranted and led to “many heretical absurdities” in the papalist claims. True enough, Jesus said, “whatsoever thou shall bind upon earth, it shall be bound in heaven” (Matt. 16:19). But if these words are “understood without any exception Christ would have promised blessed Peter power equal to God’s and Christ’s.” Another “heretical absurdity is that the pope could licitly and by right kill innocent people, and universally do all things contrary to divine and natural law.”19 Ockham goes on to expose the errant theory and practice of exegesis on which such papalist doxology rests.20 Into such waters Langland steps with his quotation from Matthew 16:19, “whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven” (IX.327a). But for the moment he does not explicate or unfold the sharp controversies in his church’s reception of this evangelical text. Nevertheless, he will address the substance of such conflicts toward the end of the poem, and we should not imagine that the quoted text had a consensual interpretation.21 Wille’s own position here on papal authority and power is certainly not the poem’s last word on this topic. In fact, even in Passus IX Wille’s affirmation of papal power is followed by warnings about the contemporary norms presided over and encouraged by the modern papacy. Church and pope support the aspiration of wealthy people to “purchase” the pardons and papal bulls, notes Wille, but his support for the system is troubled.22 As he considers Christ’s final judgment, his language about papal dispensations becomes dismissive. He ponders how Christ’s concern is with our daily practice and keeping of evangelical law. As for the church’s economy of salvation mediated through papal indulgences and pardons:
And how we dede day be day the doem wol reherce.
A pouheful of pardon there, ne prouinciales lettres,
Thow we be founden in the fraternite of alle fyue orders
And haue indulgences doublefold, but Dowel vs helpe
Y sette nat by pardon a pese ne nat a pye-hele!
(IX.342–46)
———
[How we led our lives here and kept his laws
And how you acted day by day the doom will recount.
A sackful of pardon there, nor provincials’ letters,
Though we be found in the fraternity of all five orders
And have doublefold indulgences, unless Do-well help us
I don’t count pardon worth a peascod or piecrust!]
One might argue that Wille’s vacillations merely reflect orthodox warnings about the abuse of indulgences. But such an argument overlooks the contested nature of the relevant network of practices, theological legitimizations, and Langland’s own intense interest in this contest. Whatever pardon Piers may have received at the opening of Passus IX and however he may have understood or misunderstood it, Langland generated dramatic, irresolvable clashes between the massive gloss on the pardon (a gloss composed by numerous voices, including Piers’s) and what turns out to be just two lines of judgment from the Athanasian Creed:
And Peres at his preyre the pardon vnfoldeth
And Y byhynde hem bothe byheld alle the bulle
In two lynes as hit lay and nat a lettre more,
And was ywryte ryhte thus in witnesse of Treuthe:
Et qui bona egerunt ibunt in vitam eternam;
Qui vero mala in ignem eternum.
“Peter!” quod the prest tho, “Y kan no pardoun fynde
Bote Dowel and haue wel and god shal haue thy soule
And do yuele and haue euele and hope thow non othere
Bote he that euele lyueth euele shal ende.”
(IX.283–92)
———
[And Piers at his request unfolds the pardon
And I behind them both beheld the entire bull
In two lines as it lay and not a letter more,
And was written exactly thus in witness of Truth:
They that have done good shall go into everlasting life;
They that have done evil into everlasting fire.
“Peter,” said the priest then, “I can find no pardon,
But only ‘Do well and have well and God shall have your soul
And do evil and have evil and expect nothing other
But he that lives evilly shall have an evil end.’”]
Disturbed by this clash, this conflict of interpretation, Wille wanders without food and without money on Malvern hills, musing on this dream (IX.293–97).23 Not until many passages later, and only after participation in the founding narratives of Christian teaching, are Wille’s puzzles over papal power and the keys to the kingdom to be resolved. For now, we are left with Piers unable to answer the priest’s charge that his alleged pardon is “no pardoun” and Wille’s ambivalence over papal claims to the powers of the keys in the economy of salvation.
The resolution will emerge during the passage in which the risen Christ gives Piers power to mediate the forgiveness flowing from Christ’s victorious battle over death and devil. This forgiveness had been manifested in his great oration during the liberation of prisoners held in hell (XXI.182–98; XX.370–475), the passage from which we set out. Conscience now tells Wille that such mediation is a gift given with a determinate condition, a divine gift that belongs to a new covenant in which law and gospel are inseparable. Wille is shown what he had forgotten and what Langland thinks the contemporary church has forgotten. Namely: Ockham was quite right to argue that Christ set clear limits to Petrine power even in its sublime origins, let alone in its modern Roman version. Furthermore, these limits mean that whatever a pope might claim, absolution will not be given by Christ unless the new covenant is fulfilled by the Christian paying back what he owes: “Redde quod debes” (Rom. 13:7; Matt. 18:28). That is to say, evangelical forgiveness is inseparable from evangelical justice. Just as Conscience had argued against Mede, it turns out that God “gyueth nothyng that si ne is the glose” (i.e., God’s gifts are always glossed by an if, a certain condition, III.329). After invoking the condition, “Redde quod debes,” Conscience reiterates that only if the person seeking forgiveness renders what is owed, enacts just restitution, does Piers have the power to pardon, to “bynde and to vnbynde” (XXI.188–90). So emphatic is Conscience about this that he reiterates the conditionality of pardon in his account of Christ’s ascension (XXI.191–98). The theological inflection here is unambiguous: Christ’s minister can declare Christ’s saving forgiveness only to those who fulfill Christ’s conditions. So Ockham was, indeed, correct in discerning determinate limits to Petrine power even if his focus was in a different sphere of conflict.24
From Passus XVIII Langland’s work had converged with the liturgy, and in Passus XXI he moves from the feast of the Ascension to Pentecost.25 As in the celebration of Easter, we see Wille, quite unusually, participating in collective worship, singing Veni creator spiritus with “many hundret” (XXI.210–11). His encounters with Abraham (Faith) and with Christ as the Samaritan had included teaching about the Trinity, teaching replete with parable and narrative, a corrective to academic approaches mentioned earlier (XVIII.181–268a; XIX.26–278). He now receives a vision of the Holy Spirit. In this vision time present is joined with time past in a way that is characteristic of the liturgy. The contemporary church, in the feast of Pentecost, remembers and identifies with the apostolic church in which Spiritus Paraclitus first appeared “to Peres and to his felawes.” Wille witnesses the presence of the Holy Spirit in the likeness of fire on all the disciples which brings them the knowledge of “alle kyne langages” (XXI.199–206; Acts 2:1–4). This vision terrifies Wille, but Conscience assures him that Spiritus Paraclitus is indeed the messenger of Christ who should be welcomed and worshipped (XXI.207–12). The hymn in which Wille joins is a prayer for the illumination of grace and bodily well-being from the “Creator Spiritus” who is called “Paraclitus.” It also includes a prayer for protection from enemies, for peace, and for knowledge of God the Father, recognition of God the Son, and belief in the Spirit of both.26 After the celebration of Pentecost, Langland gives us his model of apostolic evangelization in the formation of Christ’s church. In following this I shall focus on political and ecclesiastic implications.
From the first Pentecost the Holy Spirit, “Grace,” accompanies “Peres plouhman,” still figuring the apostle Peter, to make the church of Christ (XXI.213–335). Grace’s first advice to Piers is also advice to Conscience who is close to Piers: “And conseilede hym [Piers] and Consience the commune to sompne [summon]” (XXI.214). All are to be gathered together so as to receive the gifts of grace. Langland glosses this episode by directing his readers to Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians 12, teaching about the diversity of gifts from the one Spirit acting on the community of Christians. The Holy Spirit promises that the gifts he dispenses are sufficient treasures for a lifetime (XXI.215–18, 225–26). He thus returns to the language of Wille’s first teacher:
“When alle tresores ben tried, treuthe is the beste—
I do hit vppon Deus caritas to deme the sothe.
Hit is as derworthe a druerie as dere god hymseluen.
For who is trewe of his tonge and of his two handes
And doth the werkes therwith and wilneth no man ylle,
He is a god by the gospel and graunte may hele
And also lyk oure lord, by saynt Lukes wordes.”
(I.81–87)
———
[“When all treasures have been tested, Truth is the best—
I adduce Deus caritas, to deliver this fact.
It is as precious a prize as dear God himself.
For he who is true in his tongue and his two hands
And works that way, wishing no man evil,
Is a god, says the gospel, and grants health
And resembles our Lord, in Saint Luke’s words.”]
Holy Church, for she is the teacher here, offers an extremely condensed introduction to a Christian language for evoking the commitment of divine love (“Deus caritas,” or God is charity, 1 John 4:7–19) to draw humans into the divine life. Constant acts informed by truth create dispositions of the will which transform the human into “a god.” The human creature becomes “lyke our Lord,” becomes “a god” but not God. Holy Church goes on to associate this teaching with an exquisitely beautiful lyric on how “Treuthe” teaches that “love” is the “salue” (ointment, healing remedy) given to humankind. It is “the plonte of pees, most precious of vertues,” brought into human lives through the incarnation of God (I.146–67). As St. Augustine preached to his congregation one Christmas day, “Today Truth has sprung from the earth (Ps. 85:11); Christ has been born from the flesh . . . in order to make gods of those who were merely human, one who was God made himself human; without forfeiting what he was, he wished to become what he himself had made. He himself made what he would become, because what he did was add man to God, not lose God in man.”27 Thus Langland’s Holy Church and thus Augustine. But Holy Church’s answers to Wille’s question (“How Y may saue my soule,” I.80), a question so dazzling in its excess of meanings, included a gesture toward “werkes,” toward truthful action with one’s “two handes.” And this raised, but set aside, a question taken up time and again throughout Piers Plowman and now at Pentecost. Namely, what kind of community is constituted by the gifts of grace, the gifts that flow from the Incarnation?
In answering this question we should begin by noting how the grace given by the Holy Spirit is both communitarian and individual. It enables each person to be self-guided in a relative autonomy. Grace “yaf vch man a grace to gye with hymsuluen” (gave each man a grace to guide himself with) (XXI.227). This unequivocal affirmation of gifts that sustain individual choice and responsibility is combined with a focus on the range of gifts needed to sustain the Pentecostal polity. Langland’s interpretation of St. Paul’s “divisiones gratiarum” (diversities of graces) is striking. For he introduces a range of human labor that is both outside Paul’s attention and belongs specifically to Langland’s own world. His aim is to show how the gifts of grace can sustain a social formation in which practices that have been displayed in the poem as inclining their agents to habitual sin can be ordered to virtue. Let us consider some of his examples.
From the Prologue through to the confessions of capital sins (Passus VII) Langland represents contemporary England as a culture in which relations between humans as well as between humans and God are being deformed by commodification, by selling and buying. Law, marriage, the exegesis of scripture, and the sacrament of penance are all assimilated to the kind of production and exchange encouraged by market relations where traditional virtues and their language become unintelligible (Prol.; II–IV; VI–VII). But in the Pentecostal polity Grace teaches members of the polity trade (“craft”) with the requisite skill in buying and selling to gain their livelihood (XXI.234–35). Earlier in Piers Plowman lawyers represented the total subjection of God’s gifts of language, the word, into words spoken only for material profit in a culture where Mede organizes all aspects of the law (Prol. 160–66; III.450–51; III–IV passim). At that stage Conscience’s frustration drew him into a fantasia composed in an apocalyptic mode where he envisaged the revolutionary transformation of law into manual labor (III.452). Revolution, distinctly, rather than an ameliorative process of reforms. But in the Pentecostal community Grace bestows “wyt with words” and enables lawyers to earn their livelihood “with Trouthe” (XXI.229–31). Perhaps Langland is imagining the fusion of gospel and law within contemporary divisions of labor. Lawyers formed in Christian virtues earn their livelihood by using their special gifts to facilitate among their neighbors the union of justice and mercy, truth and peace, fulfilling the promise of the new covenant (see XX.459–75). Certainly Grace’s Pentecostal gifts produce a realm of manual labor free from the conflicts around the Statute of Laborers, work disciplines, and the price of labor in the communal pleasures of the pub (XXI.236–39; cf. Passus VIII).28 As Langland composes his vision of Pentecostal, liturgical time, he has moved from Acts 2:1–4 to late fourteenth-century England. His development of Paul’s instruction on “spiritual things” (de spiritualibus) addresses modes of production and subsistence set aside in 1 Corinthians 12.
One of the most startling gifts of the Holy Spirit is the gift of grace-formed violence directed to remedy the unjust actions of “false men.” Grace enables and guides some people to ride out and recover what had been unjustly seized:
And somme to ryde and rekeuere that vnrihtfulliche was wonne:
He wissede men wynne hit ayeyn thorw wihtnesse of handes
And fechen hit fro false men with Foleuiles lawes.
(XXI.245–47)
———
[And some to ride and recover what was unrightfully gained;
He showed men strong-armed ways to win it back
And take it from false men with vigilante law.]
Grace must envisage a more effective version of the courteous knight who had promised Piers to help his agrarian labor by enforcing labor discipline, including the Statute of Laborers (VIII.19–34, 324–38). Called upon by Piers to subject the laborers who insist on working as they will rather than at Piers’s commands, the knight had threatened to “bete” them according to “the lawe” and put them “in stokkes” (VIII.149–63). This law is the Statute, with its coercive enforcement, passed by parliament to hold down wages to pre-plague levels and passed especially for the benefit of employers against the interests of laborers, in particular landless laborers utterly dependent on selling their labor. The “werkemen” curse the king who assented to the legislation and “alle the kynges justices” who tried to enforce it and impose penalties on those who persisted (VIII.337–38). But in Passus VIII the knight’s threats and the labor laws are treated with contempt. Both prove totally ineffectual.29 Grace thus seems to offer a more forceful agency of just coercions in the Pentecostal community but also one that is directed to obtaining restitution from “false men” who had wrongfully taken materials from their neighbors and refused to render what they owed according to Christ’s own law (XXI.186–87, 191–98). This remedial coercion is a fascinating perspective on Langland’s Pentecostal politics, one perhaps made more tricky by the citation of the Folvilles.
For this name conjured up the role of violence that could be practiced by local groups of gentry in late medieval England.30 We encountered something that looked a little like the historical Folvilles in Passus IV. There a member of the armed elites carries out a series of violent acts against local people to strengthen his own dominion and wealth. Langland names him “Wrong” and his victim is called “Pees” (IV.45–65). Wrong is supported by Mede who seeks to compensate Peace so richly that he will withdraw his complaint and prevent the subjection of Wrong to royal justice administered from Westminster (IV.66–98). Without any ambiguity, Langland is exemplifying such violence and Mede’s corruption of restitution as acts against Reason, Conscience, and Justice (IV.99–161). So despite some possible cultural memories of the historical “Foleuiles” that might associate them with Wrong and Mede, when the Holy Spirit advocates “Foleuiles Lawes” for the Pentecostal polity, he intends them to organize action against figures represented by Wrong. However tricky the allusion, Grace is asserting the sanctification of some forms of violence committed to the restitution of unjustly appropriated goods. It is committed only to that remedial activity and holds no legitimation for self-serving deployments of force (“Wrong”).
Christians often appealed to Paul’s letter to the Romans when thinking about the justification for force in the polity. There Paul accepted the sword as a power given to the higher powers (“potestatibus sublimioribus”) by God (Rom. 13:1–8). Obedience was thus a matter not merely of necessity, but for conscience (“propter conscientiam”).31 Langland does not invoke this text in his own sanctification of coercive restitution against “false men.” But he does quote from this chapter (Rom. 13). He reiterates the demand he ascribes to the risen Christ, the demand that conditions the forgiveness Christ mediates through Piers: “Reddite omnibus debita” (Render to all their due) (Rom. 13:7). Folville’s laws and the Pauline citation give an extremely unusual edge to the feast of Pentecost. But it is an eloquent reflection of Langland’s conviction that even the Pentecostal community will include armed people to recover what has been taken “vnrihtfulliche” (XXI.245–47). Pentecost does not restore all Christians to the state of innocence, despite the pouring forth of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. But Grace’s limitation of coercion to such restitution of just relationship will come to seem a paradise in comparison to post-Pentecostal lay elites and their versions of justice and legitimate use of force.
The Pentecostal community is also granted a version of artisanal work which would, in Langland’s culture, have entailed a revolution in social relations. Instead of competition, hierarchy, and hostility between different groups of artisans competing in the market, the Holy Spirit generates relations of Christian fraternity and humility (XXI.252–55).32 Langland’s assimilation of Paul’s Corinthian letter to his own Pentecostal contexts is subtle. Perhaps most important to his vision is that Paul taught the church in Corinth to have a thoroughly egalitarian way of perceiving the diversities of the Spirit’s gifts. This helps Langland compose a distinctively antihierarchical version of the church, therefore one at odds with the late medieval church. Using the body analogically, Paul writes that those who seem “more feeble members of the body are more necessary” and that those conventionally considered “less honourable members of the body, about these we put more abundant honours.” Even so, God’s gifts and our celebration of them are ordered so that “there might be no schism [scisma] in the body; but the members might be mutually one for another [pro invicem sollicita sint membra]” (1 Cor. 12:22–27). In the previous chapter Paul had rebuked this church for their “schisms” (scissuras) as for the way rampant individualism and division of status are displayed, even when all meet to celebrate the Lord’s Supper (11:18–22). Such assumptions, however habitual, are evidence that the Corinthian Christians forgot what Jesus said to his disciples at supper on the night he was betrayed: “as often as you shall eat this bread and drink the chalice, you shall shew the death of the Lord, until he come. Therefore, whosoever shall eat this bread, or drink the chalice of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and of the blood of the Lord[,] . . . not discerning the body of the Lord” (11:26–29). Discerning the body of Christ must include discerning how all gathered together are “members of the body, whereas they are many, yet are one body: so also is Christ. For in one Spirit we are all baptized into one body” (12:12–13). This is what Langland recapitulates and applies to contemporary social relations. To discern the body in this way is to free perception from the norms of hierarchy and status. From freed perception Grace will enable egalitarian relations suited to a Pentecostal polity. To oppose this will be a mark of communities in which the body is not discerned: “he that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh judgment to himself, not discerning the body of the Lord” (11:29). In Langland’s church the body of Christ habitually worked to sacralize the very sharp sense of hierarchy naturalized in its society.33
As one ponders the theology and politics of Langland’s passage one comes to its version of priesthood. In the medieval church the characteristic definition of what constitutes a priest was his consecration of the wafer and the wine on the altar of the Mass into the body and blood of Christ, the Galilean body. Through the priest’s actions, in Thomas Aquinas’s memorable terms, Christ would be present: “not only the flesh, but the whole body of Christ, that is, the bones and nerves and all the rest” (non solum caro, sed totum corpus Christi, idest ossa et nervi et alia huiusmodi) (ST III.76.1, resp. and ad 2). This teaching had become so central in the late medieval church that those who rejected it were judged to be heretics and from 1401, in England, risked being burned to death.34 Yet, in this context, the Holy Spirit’s declaration about priesthood is striking. It is far from the customary exaltation of priesthood over laity, an elevation that was theological, liturgical, judicial, cultural, and plainly embodied in the spaces of the church building. The Holy Spirit presents the grace of priesthood in this way:
Som wyes he yaf wyt with wordes to shewe,
To wynne with treuthe that the world asketh,
As prechours and prestes and prentises of lawe:
They leely to lyue bi labour of tonge
And bi wit to wissen othere as grace hem wolde teche.
(XXI.229–33)
———
[Some men he gave intelligence as a way with words,
To earn with truth what the world asks us,
And preachers and priests and apprentices at law:
They to live loyally by labor of tongue
And by intelligence to train others as Grace would teach them.]
Here Langland’s modus loquendi concerning the priesthood seems quite remarkable in the context of the normative discourses of his church. As Aquinas taught, theology is inextricably bound up with its forms of language, the modi loquendi.35 And Langland sets priests on even ground with apprentices of law and with all whose livelihood comes from truthful uses of intellect and language. Rather than being identified as consecrators of the Eucharist and placed in an exalted segregated station, appropriate to those who handle Christ’s body, they are linked by alliteration with preachers as well as with “prentises of lawe.” Of course, those who spoke for the medieval church, before as well as after Wyclif, had insisted that only priests in their parishes and those licensed by the local bishop could preach licitly.36 But the Holy Spirit knows nothing about such hierarchies and boundaries. Indeed, he chooses not to give any warrant for any kind of sacerdotal supremicism in the Pentecostal community. On the contrary, the creation in which the gifts of intellect and language are bestowed on the priesthood seems more congruent with the missionary church of martyrs held up as a model by Liberum Arbitrium earlier in the poem. And he had advocated this model as a far more faithful witness to Christ than the one offered by the contemporary church and its leadership (XVI.242–XVII.320, esp. XVII.214–91a). As for the identity of that speaker: he is “Cristes creature” and “in Cristes court yknowe wel and of his kynne a party” (“I am Christ’s creature . . . and a member of his family, / And well known in Christ’s court and to Christians in many a place”) (XVI.165–78).
Furthermore, Holy Spirit’s donations include some conspicuous absences. Conspicuous, that is, in the contexts of the late medieval church so relentlessly criticized by Langland. Holy Spirit apparently knows nothing about Franciscan claims to have discovered and chosen the status of perfection, the life of absolute poverty initiated by the sixth angel of the Apocalypse.37 He simply ignores these conventional and grandiloquent claims together with the intense, protracted battles they had caused in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century church. Holy Spirit actually seems to know nothing about friars who, according to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, have displaced the world of elves and fairies:
As thikke as motes in the sonne-beem,
Blessynge halles, chambres, kichenes, boures,
Citees, burghes, castels, hye toures,
Thropes, bernes, shipnes, dayeryes—
This maketh that ther ben no fayeryes.
For ther as wont to walken was an elf
Ther walketh now the lymytour hymself.
(Wife of Bath’s Tale, CT III.868–74; trans. 299–300)38
———
[As thick as motes that speckle a sun-beam,
Blessing the halls, the chambers, kitchens, bowers,
Cities and boroughs, castles, courts and towers,
Thorpes, barns and stables, outhouses and dairies,
And that’s the reason why there are no fairies.
Wherever there was wont to walk an elf
To-day there walks the holy friar himself.]
Like Chaucer, Langland’s Conscience remarks on the immense number of friars in the modern church, complaining that they have multiplied “out of nombre,” becoming a figure of hell which also is “withoute nombre” (XXII.253–72). Despite this strong post-Pentecostal presence, Holy Spirit does not include any mendicant way of life as an object of his grace or part of the Pentecostal community. Given the poem’s focus on mendicant orders and the role played by friars in the final passus, this judgment is hardly surprising: but it is, nevertheless, replete with significance.39 Nor does Holy Spirit mention his founding of monasteries, that religious order so severely attacked earlier in Reason’s sermon (V.146–79). But, in contrast, he does say that he has inspired some Christians to live in poverty, patience, praying “for alle cristene” and longing to leave this world (XXI.248–49). These people are certainly not mobile, mendicant, preaching friars involved in administering the sacrament of penance. Perhaps Carthusian monks devoted to contemplation, devotional writing, and prayer might be included in this group, but the latter sounds very like the institutionally detached contemplatives so warmly praised by Langland in his Prologue. These were described as “ankeres and eremites that holdeth hem in here selles, / Coueyten noght in contreys to cayren aboute” (Prol. 30–31).40 Liberum Arbitrium also held up such Christians and their detachment from the church’s most prominent institutions as models of sanctity:
Holy writ witnesseth ther were suche eremytes,
Solitarie by hemsulue in here selles lyuede
Withoute borwynge or beggynge bote of god one,
Excepte that Egide a hynde other-while
To his selle selde cam and soffred be mylked.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Y can nat rykene hem riht now ne reherse here names
That lyueden thus for oure lordes loue monye longe yeres
Withoute borwynge or beggynge, or the boek lyeth,
And woneden in wildernesses amonges wilde bestes.
(XVII.6–10, 25–28)
———
[Holy writ testifies there were such hermits,
Solitaries, living by themselves in their cells
Without borrowing or begging but from God only,
Except that to Giles’ cell from time to time a doe
Came, though not often, and let herself be milked.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I cannot count them right now or rehearse their names
Who lived thus many long years for our Lord’s love
Without borrowing or begging, or the book lies,
And dwelled in the wilderness among wild beasts.]
This perspective, no encouragement to contemporary friars or landholding monasteries, is now shown to be Pentecostal. While observing this, we should also note that in Passus XXI Holy Spirit does not create a new hierarchy in which “such eremytes” constitute the status of supreme perfection claimed by friars and carefully explained by Thomas Aquinas.41
Perhaps even more important is the absence of any mention of a pope in the Pentecostal community. Holy Spirit seems to pour his sanctifying gifts to priests, preachers, apprentices of law, contemplatives, astronomers, philosophers, manual laborers, traders, and armed groups responsible for the enforcement of justice against those who steal. But in this rich and idiosyncratic reading of Paul’s instructions to the church in Corinth (1 Cor. 12) the Holy Spirit does not mention any unique vicar of Christ, any head of the church under Christ, any ecclesiastic leader bearing a plenitude of power and coercive jurisdiction in alleged succession to the apostle Peter. One can bring out the force of Langland’s choices by thinking of two places in which Aquinas, the common doctor of the Catholic Church, addresses the Pauline text cited by Langland. Discussing the diversity of offices in the church (in the Summa Theologiae), he emphasizes that they must be ordered and all confusion avoided in diverse offices, status, and ranks. Yes, as Paul said, the members should be mutually careful for each other. And this needs hierarchy. In the commentary on Paul’s letter to the Corinthians ascribed to Aquinas, he discusses 1 Corinthians 12 at length. Its approach is very different from Langland’s. Characteristic of this is Aquinas’s reading of Paul’s images of head and feet as prelates and their subordinates. When Aquinas glosses Paul’s statement about the necessity of members who seem more feeble (1 Cor. 12:22) he thinks of agricultural workers: they are lowly but necessary to enable social life. This is, of course, a commonplace of medieval discourse about estates and hierarchy but neither exactly Paul’s preoccupation nor the focus of Holy Spirit in Langland’s account. But perhaps most illuminating in the present context is Aquinas’s response to Paul’s wish to avoid “schism in the body” (schisma in corpore) by encouraging mutual solidarity among Christians (12:25–27). Aquinas takes this as a discussion of the church’s peace and introduces comment on the governance of the church (prelates, archdeacons, parish priests). When there is no governor (“gubernator”) the people fall (quoting Prov. 11:14). If we turn back to the treatment of schism in the Summa Theologiae, we find Aquinas maintaining that it involves not holding fast to the head from which the body is nourished (citing Col. 2:19). This head is Christ whose surrogate in the church is the pope (“cuius vicem in Ecclesia gerit summus Pontifex”). So schism is the rejection of papal supremacy (“schismatici dicuntur, qui subesse renuunt summo Pontifici”).42 It is worth recalling here that when he addressed heresy in the Summa Theologiae he had similarly placed the authenticity of the universal church in the pope (ST II-II.11.2, ad 3). Langland is choosing to set aside such approaches as he figures the founding of the church.
They are, however, a central strand of orthodox ecclesiology in the Middle Ages and the increasing centralization of papal power and its monarchic form. The ideology of this form achieves particularly clear articulation in Boniface VIII’s bull Unam Sanctam (1302). Having stipulated that outside the church there is no remission of sins nor salvation, it affirms that this church has one body and one head, namely Christ and Christ’s vicar Peter, together with Peter’s successors. The pope declared that the church has two swords in her power, one “spiritual,” the other “temporal.” Boniface VIII insists that “he who denies that the temporal sword is in the power of Peter, misunderstands the words of the Lord, ‘Put up thy sword into thy sheath’ [John 28:11]. Both are in the power of the Church, the spiritual sword and the material.” The latter is to be wielded by lay powers at the church’s command. Whoever resists papal power resists the ordinance of God while “it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff.”43 This political theology was bound up with Neoplatonic metaphysics and the ecclesial model of Pseudo-Dionysius. Such a combination had been common in orthodox formulations of hierarchy, authority, and obedience in the church. Perhaps it remains so in the theologians of so-called Radical Orthodoxy. But lay sovereigns like Edward I of England and Philip IV of France did not subject their own power to its scheme. And Langland’s Pentecostal politics, with its own version of Peter, goes sharply against its grain. In fact, Langland’s vision of the Holy Spirit’s formation of Christian community and church rejects a papal and hierocratic model. The commentary I offer below on Langland’s history of the church in Passus XXI–XXII will unfold this view of his political theology. He was not without company, and I will also consider some of his affinities with Ockham and Wyclif.
But the reading offered above with the comments from Aquinas and from Unam Sanctam demand a return to Langland’s Piers. What exactly is his role in the Pentecostal community, and what are the implications of this role for the papacy in the late medieval church?
In his vision of Pentecost Langland continues to identify the apostle Peter with Piers, his poem’s plowman and increasingly mysterious figure (cf. VIII; XV.127–49; XX.6–34; XXI.6–14; XXI.182–90). Present at the gathering of the disciples in Jerusalem “when the days of the Pentecost were accomplished” (Acts 2:1), Wille discerns Spiritus paraclitus coming “to Piers and to his felawes” (XXI.199–212). After the gift of languages to the disciples and prayer to the Holy Spirit, the latter counsels “Peres plouhman” and Conscience to gather “the commune” for the reception of gifts I have been exploring (XXI.213–18). As we have seen, the Holy Spirit dispenses his grace without any mediatorial, ministerial role being given to Piers. Before he does so, he issues a prophetic warning about the forces that have the power to crush even Conscience, informed as he is by Christian teaching. Only if Christ himself helps Conscience will this be prevented (XXI.219–20). Once again, Holy Spirit does not mention any vicar of Christ, any human being required to mediate the mediator Jesus Christ. On the contrary, those who put themselves forward as mediators formed in the modern church will turn out to be deluded:
And false profetes fele, flateres and glosares,
Shal come and be curatours ouer kynges and erles.
And thenne shal pryde be pope and prince of holy chirche,
Coueytise and vnkyndenesse cardynales hym to lede.
(XXI.221–24)
———
[And many false prophets, flatterers, and con men,
Shall come and over the souls of kings and earls have the cure.
And then pride will be pope and prince of Holy Church,
Covetousness and Unkindness cardinals to lead him.]
Coming from the Holy Spirit this is an extremely disturbing prophecy about the church and its hierarchy. The leaders of the church will be driven by the lust for dominion as the papacy becomes the embodiment of the capital sin associated with Lucifer and the transformation of heavenly angels into demons (see too I.107–14). Those responsible for electing the pope, and leading the church with him, will become subjects of covetousness and “unkyndenesse.” Covetousness was one of the capital sins which most preoccupied Langland as he traced its normalization in his culture (VI.196–397; Prol.), while unkindness was singled out by Christ the Samaritan. That figure of divine charity revealed unkindness as the one unforgivable sin, the mysterious sin against the Holy Spirit:
So is the holy gost god and grace withouten mercy
To alle vnkynde creatures, as Crist hymsulue witnesseth:
Amen dico vobis, nescio vos.
Be vnkynde to thyn emcristene and al that thow canst bidde,
Dele and do penaunce day and nyht euere
And purchase al the pardoun of Pampilon and of Rome
And indulgences ynowe, and be ingrate to thy kynde,
The holy goest hereth the nat ne helpeth the, be thow certeyne.
For vnkyndenesse quencheth hym that he can nat shine
Ne brenne ne blase clere for blowynge of vnkyndenesse.
(XIX.218–26)
———
[So is the Holy Ghost God and grace without mercy
To all unkind creatures, as Christ himself witnesses:
Amen I say to you, I know you not.
Be unkind to your fellow Christians and all that you can pray for,
Deal alms and do penance day and night forever
And buy all the pardon out of Pamplona and Rome
And indulgences enough, and be ingratis to your kind,
The Holy Ghost won’t hear you or help you, you can be sure.
For unkindness quenches him so that he can’t shine
Or burn or blaze clear because of unkindness’ blowing.]
Now the Holy Spirit is prophesying that the church, called into existence as the community of sanctification by the Holy Spirit, is to be led by those who systematically enact the sin against the Holy Spirit: unkyndenesse. It is hard to imagine any description of the church more forceful in its authority. The confidence of this judgment is indicated by Langland ascribing it to the Holy Spirit who is, in his doctrine of God, the third person of the Trinity (e.g., XIX.96–200). Nor does Langland allow readers to blunt the implication of the Holy Spirit’s prophecy of the church’s history by sliding into the pleasures of metaphysical speculation so central in the training of medieval theologians.44 Furthermore, he is about to pour immense intellectual and poetic work into showing the fulfillment of the prophecy in the final two passus of Piers Plowman, a fulfillment that forces us to read the treatment of the church from the prologue onward in its light. But before the prophecy is unfolded, Langland has more to say about Piers/Peter and his relations to the contemporary papacy.
After forming the Pentecostal polity, the Holy Spirit makes Piers his “procuratour” (agent), his “reve” and his “registere to reseyuen Redde quod debes” (XXI.258–59). This is the role given him by the risen Christ (XXI.182–90). The Holy Spirit develops this task into an extended and traditional allegorization of plowing, harrowing, and sowing seed (XXI.261–316).45 Piers is thus returned to the earlier scene in which he attempted to plow and sow the land (his “half-aker” or “croft”) to provide subsistence for the whole community (VIII.1–18). Piers had been a Christian layman of the third estate serving “Treuthe” in “alle kyne craftis” related to plowing (VII.182–99). In his representation of this service in agrarian production, Langland chose to figure forth an extraordinarily rich fable addressing agrarian conflicts and political ideology in late fourteenth-century England. As I have shown elsewhere, at the heart of the conflicts explored by Langland in Passus VIII is the Statute of Laborers, legislation passed by landholding gentry, merchants, and lawyers in parliament to hold down wages and to control the mobility of laborers seeking to benefit from the demographic collapse caused by the plague of 1348–49, which killed almost half the population. In these political struggles working people who resisted the prejudicial legislation were habitually represented by those aligned with the legislating classes as wasters, as greedy dissidents.46 It is worth noting that local justices of the peace (gentry, lawyers, sometimes judges) set wage rates for various occupations and conditions for labor discipline. Servants (laborers) had to be sworn in twice a year before village constables, and those who refused to take oaths or refused to take work at the set rates when ordered by constables to do so were prosecuted. Research by Richard Smith has shown that “there is substantial evidence to indicate that petty constables bore the bulk of the labourers resentments” against “unpopular legislation.” It was the village constables who were often the ones trying to enforce the “statuyt” opposed by the laborers in Passus VIII who curse the king and all “the kynges justices” responsible for assenting to the labor legislation (VIII.337–40).47
This is the ideological and social context in a brilliantly engaging, dialogic, and dramatic passus (VIII). Piers takes on the role of local constable trying to guarantee subsistence production on the “half-aker” (VIII.2–4) within the terms of the “statuyt” (VIII.337–40). Langland depicts Piers meeting strenuous resistance from those who had been working but consider themselves to have done enough. Piers calls on the knight, representing the dominant lay estate, to enforce labor discipline with the available means of violence—for after working the laborers withdraw to the ale house to spend their wages singing “hey trollilolly.” As the Protestant editor of Piers Plowman (1550) glossed: “Jolye workmen.”48 The knight courteously threatens to beat them “by the lawe” and set them in the stocks (VIII.122–63). The law stipulated that those who resist should be put in the stocks by lords, stewards, bailiffs, and constables or sent to the nearest jail until they submit.49 As they did in reality so in Langland’s fable the laborers resist the knight (VIII.163–66). One might well wonder what role the church plays in this conflict among its members? All it does is threaten the laborers with excommunication, which, so Piers says, they treat with contempt (VIII.159).
At this point Piers invokes the personification of Hunger to impose labor discipline and give him control over the agrarian workers, “pur charite” (for charity’s sake). Invoking the theological virtue which would be central in Passus XVII–XXII, Piers unselfconsciously calls for revenge on the disobedient. Hunger duly obliges. He batters the disobedient people into fawning obedience to Piers, their constable. This seems a more effective subjugation than any achievable by the armed ruling class. Not “Jolye workmen” now.
But Piers is not only a constable and plowman imposing one group’s version of social order (the common good) on another. He is also a devoted servant of Treuthe. A wise Christian layman, he had earlier been able to offer lost penitents a map to “the hye gate of heuene” and a vision of Grace. In this teaching we find how Treuthe guides Charity to build a church within each Christian (VII.205–69). We also find, as Elizabeth Salter has shown in an illuminating and characteristically understated essay, that this layman’s modes of talking and teaching converge with contemporary contemplatives, especially Walter Hilton and Julian of Norwich.50 So the apparent resolution of social conflicts through force and in a spirit of revenge (VIII.158, 170) cannot satisfy him. His discipleship of Christ takes him beyond the knight’s force, beyond “Foleviles laws,” and beyond his own wrath. The exercise of dominion and power, even in what the Christian takes to be a good and necessary political cause, is not tolerable. Why not? Piers gives a lucid, decisive answer:
“Meschef hit maketh they ben so meke nouthe
And for defaute this folk folweth myn hestes.
Hit is nat for loue, leue hit, thei labore thus faste
But for fere of famyen, in fayth,” sayde Peres.
“Ther is no filial loue with this folk, for al here fayre speche,
And hit are my blody bretherne, for god bouhte vs alle.
Treuthe tauhte me ones to louye hem vchone
And to helpe hem of alle thyng ay as hem nedeth.”
(VIII.211–18)
———
[“Misfortune makes them so meek now
And for want only these guys follow my orders.
It’s not for love, believe it, they labor this hard
But for fear of famine, in faith,” said Piers.
“There is no filial love in these people, for all their fair speech;
And they’re my blood brothers, for God bought us all.
Truth taught me once to love each one of them
And to help them in all things always as needed.”]
Certainly “fayre speche” toward Piers has replaced the working people’s threats and abuse (“bad hym go pisse with his plogh,” VIII.149–51; see too VIII.164–66). But as the quotation from Piers just above makes clear, their new obedience is the product of fear rather than love. This is the problem with coercive jurisdiction, one Piers had not anticipated. Most important, it goes against the grain of Christian discipleship, as Piers now recognizes. He has acted in anger, calling down punitive hunger in revenge on those who opposed his version of order and unity: “Awreke [revenge] me of this wasters, for the knyhte wil not” (VIII.170). Let us recall an evangelical text cited in the first part of this essay and compare the story of the Samaritan villagers who refuse to receive Jesus because he is going to Jerusalem. The disciples are outraged at this rejection and ask Jesus if he would like them to “command fire to come down from heaven and consume them,” in accord with what might seem good precedent from the history of Israel (4 Kings 1:10, 12; see too 2:23–24). But Jesus rebukes his disciples: “You know not of what spirit you are. The Son of man came not to destroy souls, but to save” (Luke 9:51–56). Piers now remembers the hard model he seeks to follow. To those who have rejected him he is bound in fraternal solidarity formed by Christ’s acts, not Cain’s. He confesses: They are “my blody bretherne, for god bouhte vs alle” (VIII.216). Such a moving affirmation of kinship and its sublime kindness constituted the core of the narratives of salvation as Langland so dramatically represents them (XX.403–40). As he overcomes both his wrath and his pleasure at restoring dominion with order, Piers shows the virtues of Christian discipleship, the greatest of which is charity (1 Cor. 13).
So in Passus VIII we have encountered the limits of what we will come to see as Piers’s “olde” plow, the carnal plow with which he tried to organize production in contemporary England. We have also encountered an apparently irresolvable contradiction between coercive jurisdiction and the imitation of Christ’s own kyndenesse, one which included a sacrificial kinship with humankind resulting in Christ’s affirmation, “we both brethren of o bloed” (XX.418). We must remember the details of Passus VIII and its historical allusiveness when we explore its allegorization in Passus XXI. For as medieval theologians taught, distinctly Christian allegory interprets and builds on the historical narratives while Christ alone is the hermeneutic key to scripture.51
In Passus XXI Piers at no point makes a claim to coercive jurisdiction, nor does he make the slightest move in such a direction. Coercion is left entirely in the “wihtnesse of hands” (strength of hands) of those led by Grace to recover what has been stolen, to fetch this “fro false men with Folevilles laws” (XXI.247, discussed above). We are given no indication that Piers himself has any concerns with controlling or deploying even such remedial temporal power. In no way does he give the remotest encouragement to the theory of two swords regurgitated in Unam Sanctum. On the contrary, his Christ-given “power,” confirmed by the Holy Spirit, is directed to declaring the forgiveness of sins in the covenant made by Christ and to cultivating “treuthe” in the Pentecostal polity (XXI.182–90, 258–61). Some medieval theologians construed Peter as head of the apostles and projected their own hierarchical church onto him and the apostles. And some commentators on Langland do the same, assimilating his work to such papal ideology.52 But this goes against the grain of Langland’s writing. For he could easily have supplied us with such images of Pope Piers as the head of the church deploying the kinds of dominion, temporal powers, and coercive jurisdiction intrinsic to the late medieval papacy. However, he does no such thing. In fact, if we set him in relation to the papacy of his own church, we emerge with a thoroughly critical image which aligns Langland’s views with earlier fourteenth-century works by William of Ockham, or even some moments in Marsilius of Padua, rather than with Giles of Rome, or Augustine of Ancona, or Unam Sanctam, or even Thomas Aquinas.
I am not proposing any direct influence on Langland from the brilliant and very different analysis of the contemporary papacy and Christian tradition in William of Ockham. Rather I am thinking about the scope of political theology and its stories available in the fourteenth century as Langland composed the figure of Piers and considered his relation with the modern papacy. I see no good reason to assume that his ecclesiology must be congruent with the putative norms of the late medieval church and its hierarchy. Such assumptions may have been encouraged, paradoxically and ironically, by the considerable attention given to Wycliffism over the past fifty years. As Langland differs in some decisive ways from Wyclif, as shown by Pamela Gradon and Anne Hudson, then he must be an orthodox ecclesiologist.53 But even if one, bizarrely enough, prohibited the possibility of his theological inventiveness, Langland had more options than those offered by Wyclif or by those determining orthodoxy by attacking Wyclif. It seems worth recalling at least one of the strands in pre-Wycliffite heterodoxy with which Langland had some affinities in the area now under discussion: the later work of Ockham, written after his withdrawal from obedience to the papacy and from the new leadership of his own religious order.
Ockham wrote at great length against the forms of power and jurisdiction he confronted in the fourteenth-century church. He rejected papal claims to plenitude of power that included wide temporal, secular power. He argues that Christ did not give Peter coercive jurisdiction over emperors since he himself, as incarnate, was inferior to lay judges and rulers. He liked to quote St. Bernard’s De consideratione ad Eugenium Papam, stressing that Peter lacked gold and silver (Acts 3:6), while in his temporal power the modern pope is “the successor not of Peter but of Constantine.” Ockham concurs: “From these words we gather that in abundance of riches the pope has succeeded, not blessed Peter, but Constantine. This implies that the pope is not Christ’s vicar in any temporal matters whatever.”54 Peter’s primacy among the disciples led Ockham to elaborate a vision of spiritual leadership as nondominative. In the Breviloquium (Short Discourse) of the early 1340s, he laments papal usurpation of power in “both divine and human matters” such that the claims by modern popes to “fullness of power” in “both temporal and spiritual” matters is “dangerous to the whole community of the faithful” and actually “heretical.”55 Like Langland’s Piers, “the pope is only a steward,” he is one of “the stewards [dispensatores] of God’s mysteries” (Breviloquium II.6; 1 Cor. 4:1). As Arthur McGrade shows, Christ taught “the limits of papal power according to Ockham, when He rejected a lordly (dominativum) mode of ruling consisting principally of severe physical punishment, even when it was offered Him by others. In order to show perfectly that the judgement of blood was not to be exercised either by Himself or a mortal man, or by His vicar, He was unwilling either to give sentence on the woman [taken in adultery, John 8:3–5] Himself or to commit her to another for the full measure of justice or even to say what punishment should be inflicted on this sort of woman by an appropriate judge.” In this example, Peter and all popes “were instructed not to exercise such judgement regularly, either personally or through another.”56 In the same chapter of the Breviloquium (II.19), Ockham recalls a text he often mentioned: Jesus rebuking James and John for their offer to punish those who rejected Jesus (Luke 9:55). He also quotes another he frequently invoked, one that can illuminate my reflection on Piers and his transformations between Passus VIII (where, as plowman, he deploys temporal jurisdiction) and Passus XXI (where, as plowman, merged with the apostle Peter, he does not):
“You know that the rulers of the nations lord it over them [princeps gentium dominantur eorum], and those who are greater exercise power [potestatem exercent] over them; but it will not be so among you. Whoever wishes to become greater among you, let him be your servant; and who wishes to be first among you will be your slave; as the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve” (Matt. 20:25–28). By these words Christ prohibited to all his apostles the power of world rulers. He taught explicitly, therefore, that some power is to be excepted from the words he had previously spoken to Peter, “Whatever you bind” etc. [Matt. 16:19]. (Breviloquium II.19)
This eloquent evangelical narrative is applied to limit the hierarchy’s claims to binding and loosing. In McGrade’s words, what Ockham offers “as a compelling model for the normal operation of papal government is a mild pastoral care, a ministerium which explicitly allows for acts of power but only when these are urgently necessary for the good of the church. This view stands in marked contrast with the traditional hierocratic contention that judicial power is the essence, and its exercise the glory of the papal office.”57 Indeed, in On the Power of Emperors and Popes, Ockham emphasizes how Christ has set Christians under “the law of perfect liberty, viz., the evangelical law.”58 This is a form of life which shapes all relations with authority, including the interpretation of scripture. The Christian’s freedom must not be coerced to assent to ecclesial articles of faith whose substance and warrant she or he does not see. As McGrade shows, “Ockham’s treatment of evangelical liberty clashes sharply with the hierocratic ideal of comprehensive direction of man’s spiritual life from above.”59 It is, after all, not just within the scope of all Christians to weigh and judge the determinations of the papacy; it is also their duty to oppose whatever she or he takes to be heresy. Whatever, that is, the person thinks is opposed to scripture, reason, and the tradition of the universal church, understood as all the individual faithful who have ever lived (not some corporate personage allegedly spoken for by the papacy in modern Avignon).60 In accordance with this vision of Christian life is Ockham’s unwillingness to assume the adequacy of “implicit faith” for most laypeople. On the contrary, “all believers are equal in that each Christian bears the duty of knowing explicit faith, commensurate with his status.” It is less surprising, in light of such views, that Ockham maintained women should be represented at a general council.61 Finally, in these brief remarks on an Ockhamizing option in the fourteenth century, we should note that Ockham’s critical ecclesiology is completely untouched by the kind of “dualism” intrinsic to Wyclif’s insistence that the true church is only the congregation of the predestined (whom nobody knows anyway).62 We should also note that despite his Franciscan commitments and his late identification of the current papacy with Antichrist (in On the Power of Emperors and Popes, chap. 27), there are, as Brian Tierney writes, “no traces of Joachimite fantasy” in his theology.63
It seems to me that remembering some of Ockham’s contrasts between a true, Petrine pope and the contemporary papacy with its hierocratic ecclesiology helps one grasp some of the choices Langland himself was making in his Pentecostal vision and its aftermath. The earlier narrative of agrarian production and the formation of a Christian community showed how impossible it was for Piers to join coercive jurisdiction enforcing the Statute of Laborers with Christ’s love for his “blody bretherne” (VIII.216). In the Pentecostal polity Grace commissions Piers to practice an evangelical agriculture. This involves allegorizing the earlier episode.64 Gone is the Statute of Laborers as Grace gives Piers a “newe plouh” with a team of four great oxen, the four evangelists, with John the “most gentill,” indeed the “pris neet of Peres plouh” (the prize ox of Piers’s plow) (XXI.262–73a, 426). Together with this he gives two harrows pulled by four horses. Allegorically: grace gave Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory, and Jerome to teach the faith and harrow all Holy Scripture with the Old and New Testament of the covenant. By prioritizing these gifts Langland emphasizes that scripture with patristic exegesis and patristic theology are the chief resources of the church’s mission. This may seem a traditional, uncontroversial model. After all, Aquinas had opened his Summa Theologiae by taking “sacra Scriptura” and “doctrina” as synonymous (ST I.1.2, ad 2).65 But Langland was writing in a different context, one in which the church authorities were confronting people who used this perception to drive a wedge between scripture and the authority of the contemporary church, including its authority as interpreter of scripture and judge of what constituted orthodox tradition.66 In such a context, the Holy Spirit’s decisions may have important implications for authority and hierarchy in the modern church. But any such implications will be unfolded later.
For the moment, Christians once plowed and harrowed by scripture and patristic exegesis are ready to receive the grain seed from the Holy Spirit. Allegorically, these graces are the infused cardinal virtues.67 Infused cardinal virtues are not different from the acquired cardinal or political virtues that could be cultivated outside the church. But they are directed to a different end. The acquired cardinal virtues enable someone to flourish as a human being and achieve an end proportionate to created nature. Infused cardinal virtues, the gift of the Holy Spirit, have an end which exceeds all proportion to our created nature and our unaided, natural abilities. Their end is the vision of God, eternal life. This end is above the nature of every creature and beyond the grasp of natural reason.68 So these infused virtues are part of the answer to the crucial question Wille had put to Holy Church so long ago: how may I save my soul? (I.79–80). Langland’s vision of Pentecostal polity thus shows how Christ’s victory over sin, death, and hell is mediated through his spirit to bring humanity to a harvest beyond the happiness of natural man in the earthly city (XXI.274–334). Characteristic of Langland’s theology of grace, humans are passive receivers of divine gifts beyond comprehension or merit and also active agents. They are figured as the earth that is plowed, harrowed, and sown with divine grain: they are also figured as eating the grain (XXI.274–316).69 Eating implies a decision to eat, and this implies the possibility of not eating: so, allegorically, grace may be resistible even when intimately offered, sown in the soul.
Such are the mysterious legacies of the Fall. Besides singing “Veni Creator Spiritus,” with its prayer for love to be poured into their hearts (“Infunde amorem cordibus”), those in Langland’s church would also know another Pentecostal hymn, “Veni Sanctus Spiritus.” In this they would confess that in the absence of the Holy Spirit humans are empty and far from harmless (“Sine tuo numine, nihil est in homine, nihil est innoxium”). So after sowing the deeds he has been given, Piers must continually cultivate love and the virtues with the harrow of old and new law as patristic teachers did. Justified by Christ, sanctified by the Holy Spirit, Pentecostal Christians remain sinners, and Langland figures this through the tough weeds that include “cammokes,” those W.W. Skeat glossed as “the rest-harrow” (short for arrest-harrow).70 These weeds spoil “the fruyt in the feld” (XXI.312–16), alluding to the fruit of the tree of Charity (XVIII.1–180). So we see how the laborers who resisted Piers and the Statute of Laborers in Passus VIII have been assimilated to the weeds which resist Piers’s evangelical work. But now the tropological dimensions of Langland’s allegory acknowledge the presence of the forces that resist divine grace in the soul. This allegory does not allow the blaming of one social group with the exonerating of others, the representation of those who resist the Statute of Laborers as sinners while not so naming those who legislate and enforce such partisan, self-serving laws in the polity. Weeds pervade the field: what makes it a Pentecostal one is the presence of the Holy Spirit with the obedient evangelist, Piers. Under their protection the grains will ripen into a bounteous crop that will need storing in a house which the Holy Spirit tells Piers to build (XXI.309–18).
Piers, the model for any prelate, disclaims the ability to construct or sustain such a house: “‘By god! Grace,’ quod Peres, ‘ye moet gyue tymber / And ordeyne that hous ar ye hennes wende’” (“‘By God! Grace,’ said Piers, ‘you must give timber / And ordain that house before you go away’”) (XXI.319–20). The figuration shows us how this evangelical leader, this Peter has absolutely no sense that he himself is the rock on whom the church is built or the rock on whom it stands. We are given no encouragement to impose a conventional papalist exegesis of “Tu est Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam” (Thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church) (Matt. 16:18). On the contrary, Langland’s figuration invites one to recollect the Augustinian tradition recapitulated by John Calvin in his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559). In this tradition we find an exegesis which is totally Christocentric. Jesus Christ is the rock on which the church is built, the chief cornerstone. Peter has just confessed that Christ is the Son of God (Matt. 16:16), and on this rock Christ builds his church. As St. Paul wrote, “other foundation no man can lay, but that which is laid; which is Christ Jesus” (1 Cor. 3:11).71 In his Retractions, we recall, Augustine mentioned Matthew 16:16, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.” He remembers earlier exegesis in which he read the rock as Peter. But since then, he observes, he has frequently taught that the rock is Peter’s Christological confession: “the rock was Christ,” writes Augustine, quoting Paul (1 Cor. 10:4).72 This is far removed from the papalist claims and metaphysics, illustrated earlier from Unam Sanctam, as it is from those displayed by Michael Wilks, such as, “The pope then is God in human form, a reincarnation of Christ.”73 Such papalism is made quite unintelligible in Langland’s work, by design.
Piers confesses in humility that far from being the rock of the church’s foundation he depends entirely on the Holy Spirit’s agency. Invited by Grace to build “that hous,” we noted how Piers demurs, “‘By god! Grace,’ quod Peres, ‘ye moet gyue tymber / And ordeyne that hous’” (XXI.317–20). The Holy Spirit does not disagree but immediately provides the church’s foundation: the signs and merciful effects of Christ’s passion (XXI.317–24). With that he gives a roof composed of Holy Scripture and names the house “Vnite, Holy Chirche an [in] Englisch” (XXI.325–28). This is the fulfillment of Love’s song after Christ’s harrowing of hell: “Ecce quam bonum et quam iocundum, &c.” (Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity) (XX.466–66a; Ps. 132:1). A song, as Augustine observed celebrating a “love and fraternal unity” (dilectio et unitas fratrum) which points to the Pentecostal community (Acts 4:32–35).74 Having built the house called “Holy Chirche,” Grace provides further mediations for bringing home the harvest: two parts of the sacrament of penance (contrition and confession), with priesthood figured as “hayward” (XXI.329–32). Appropriately enough, a “hayward” was “a manor official appointed to prevent trespass on the cultivated land by animals or persons.”75 This is an emphatically limited and humble version of priesthood but exemplifies ministry in the Pentecostal church. The figure also recalls Reason’s attempt to establish Wille’s vocation in Passus V. There his questions include one concerning Wille’s ability to act as hayward: “And kepe my corn in my croft fro pykares and theues?” (And guard my grain in the field against pilferers and thieves?) (V.12–17). Of course, at that stage of his journey, Wille could not fulfill the role of literal or figurative hayward, servant of Reason or of the Holy Spirit.
As soon as Grace has shaped the gifts of Christ’s redemptive acts into a house, the church, he sets out on an evangelical mission taking Piers with him (XXI.332–34). This gives us the divine warrant for Liberum Arbitrium’s insistence that the church should be committed to a universal, evangelical, and nonviolent mission. It should, that is, follow the church of the martyrs. This makes an eloquent contrast with the hierocratic late medieval church of immense temporal possessions and political power so fiercely criticized by Liberum Arbitrium (XVI.231–85; XVII.6–320a). Piers has primacy in the Pentecostal church, but this is a primacy without temporal jurisdiction and without worldly power. And here I need to say more about the significance of the Holy Spirit and Piers setting out from “that house Vnite, Holy Chirche an Englisch.” Leaving that house. For this is a moment replete with theological and ecclesial meaning, one closely related to the poem’s final lines when Conscience follows them. What is Langland saying through the act of the Holy Spirit drawing Piers with him? I will return to this moment on more than one occasion. But it explores what Christians might have to do, and be, if they want to continue as disciples. They can only build a Christological, spiritual house understood through allegorical imagery. So, for example, they would not build anything like the friars’ church, with its extremely costly windows where the names of wealthy donors are engraved, an imposing carnal architecture whose funding inevitably draws the church into commodification of its ministry even when that ministry claims to embody absolute poverty (III.45–76). They would not seek, with the friars, to institutionalize poverty, thus unleashing a host of ironies by which Langland, like many before him, was much engaged.76 They would not do anything that opens the path to Constantinianizing the church (XVII.208–38), to merging prelates, priests, and religious with the sources and customs of dominion: “ye leten [consider] yow alle as lordes, youre lond lyth so brode,” complains Reason (V.140–68; see too Prol. 56–94). Once the walls, not of stone, but of Christ’s passion, have been built and roofed with sacred scripture, then Christians would go. Where? Into the world, evangelizing, plowing with these “foure grete oxen” (the Gospels), four horses (the fathers), and the exegetical harrow (XXI.262–73a). They would thus become as nomadic as Piers. Or Wille! This departure of the Holy Spirit and Piers presents us with a model for detachment from formal structures. No carnal hierarchy; no political powers; no need for the so-called defense of the church by armed lay powers, whether the knight in Passus VIII or the expropriating Crown and lords in Passus XVII; no Constantinianism, whether Liberum Arbitrium’s threat or Wyclif’s anticipation of Henry VIII.77 So despite his moments of despair, despite his fall into “the Londe of longynyng” (XI.164–98), the nomadic Wille may figure forth a model for the church of Christ: a church which should travel light, as befits “pilgrims and strangers on earth” (Heb. 11:13), traveling, as Wille tells Reason he himself does, “Withoute bagge or botel” (V.52). Such a church might recall in its modes of being how “god, as the gospel saith, goth ay as the pore” (XII.101), how “oure Ioye and oure Iuel, Iesu crist of heven, / In a pouere mannes apparaille pursueth vs euere” (B XI.185–86).78 This eschews, of course, the wealth and power of institutionalized poverty. So the Holy Spirit and Piers leave before the church can develop material and formal organizations making it indistinguishable from the world, with its concentrations of power, dominion, wealth, and coercive jurisdictions. Such a setting out, a leaving, figures a revolutionary model of the church in relation to contemporary realities and conventional reformism.
Having established the Pentecostal church and corrected modern misprisions of papal power, Langland decides to initiate an exploration which addresses fundamental concerns in his great work. How did we get from Grace’s Pentecostal polity to the contemporary polity and its church? It is not, we recall, that Langland had represented the Pentecostal community as a return to the state of innocence, to Eden. It was a community for sinners redeemed by Christ and being sanctified by the Holy Spirit. It included the need for coercive restitution against “false men” who had stolen goods. Not surprisingly, it also included the need for spiritual disciplines to cultivate souls always likely to produce weeds. So Langland gives us not a narrative of fall from a sinless Eden into sinful history. Rather we witness a condensation of all the forces resisting Grace and the labors of his plowman, Piers. This happens as the Holy Spirit and Piers are pursuing the universal, evangelical mission of Christ’s church: “teach ye all nations [docete omnes gentes]. . . . Teaching them to observe whatsoever I have commanded you” (Matt. 18:19–20). This commitment takes Piers “As wyde as the world is” (XXI.332–33). It emphasizes the absence of any authoritarian plans for the church concerning dominion, control, order, and unity. Merged with St. Peter, Piers has disappeared from the church without offering any word concerning a putative successor. We are thus given no hints of any links between Piers and modern cardinals who propagate an ideology of Petrine succession and claim that they are the ones chosen to determine it. Indeed, the figure of the poet had offered this perception in the Prologue:
I parsceyued of the power that Peter hadde to kepe,
To bynde and to vnbynde, as the boke telleth,
Hou he it lefte with loue as oure lord wolde
Amonge foure virtues, most vertuous of vertues,
That cardinales ben cald and closyng-yates
Thare Crist is in kynedom to close with heuene.
Ac of the cardinales at court that caught han such a name
And power presumen in hemself a pope to make,
To haue the power that Peter hadde inpugne hem Y nelle . . .
(Prol. 128–36)
———
[Some of the power given Peter I perceived,
To bind and unbind, as the book tells us,
How he left it with love as our lord wished
Among four virtues, most virtuous of virtues,
That are called cardinal and on which the gate hinges
By which Christ in his kingdom closes off heaven.
But the cardinals at court that the name also claim
And its power presume in their choosing a pope,
That power from Peter I would never impugn . . .]
These lines anticipate the careful description of Peter’s power from the risen Christ together with its careful restriction to the reception of restitution in the mediation of divine forgiveness (XXI.182–92). Already the passage in the Prologue binds the apostolic power of binding and unbinding to love in the practice of the four cardinal virtues. As Aquinas explained, a human being is a political creature (“animal politicum”) who needs to cultivate the political or cardinal virtues to develop a flourishing life which can draw him or her toward the divine vision.79 In the Prologue there is not yet an attempt to distinguish acquired from infused virtues because the understanding of such a distinction’s force depends on the narratives of the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection in Passus XVIII–XXI. The infused virtues given by the Holy Spirit draw people to their supernatural end disclosed by Christ the mediator, “God our goal, man our way” (quo itur Deus, qua itur homo), in Augustine’s words.80 The political or cardinal virtues teach us to do well in a manner proportionate to our human nature. And in this context the writer’s attention is on the present political moment, generating the ironic play on both the words cardinals and court/caught.81 The contemporary church had produced a papal “court,” the curia, modeled on the courts of lay elites, a court displaying powers far beyond the carefully limited specificities of Piers’s power to mediate God’s reconciliation with humanity (XXI.182–90). At the court of Rome the cardinals of the church have become parodies of the cardinal virtues. They are characterized as those who have appropriated the power of making popes, an appropriation extended at the Third Lateran Council in 1179.82 Langland’s gorgeous puns mark the way cardinals at the papal “court” have “caught” the name of cardinal and “power presumen in hemself a pope to make.” The language of “caught” evokes what the speaker sees as usurpation, taking, as Bennett noted, “the name without the virtues that go with it.”83 Similarly, in describing the cardinals as those who “power presumen,” Langland indicates both their pride (presumption) and the lack of good warrant for their claims and so for a foundational practice in the church.
In his commentary on the B version of the Prologue, J.A.W. Bennett observed that this passage “probably alludes, if cryptically, to the election of an antipope in Sept[ember] 1378.”84 In both the B and C versions of the Prologue, Langland has the speaker promise not to challenge the immediate cause of this catastrophic event, the cardinals’ appropriation of electoral powers, even as he does so. In the C version, Conscience is named as the speaker and concludes this critical passage on the cardinals, papal power, and the Great Schism of 1378 by issuing a command against opposing the election of the pope: “‘Contreplede hit noght,’ quod Consience, ‘for holi kirke sake’” (“Don’t contradict it for Holy Church’s sake,” said Conscience) (Prol. 138). On many occasions in Piers Plowman Langland supports theologians’ arguments that Conscience can err, sometimes, as we shall see, in extremely serious matters. In the Prologue, however, the reader is presented with advice not only contradicted by Conscience’s own preceding criticism of the cardinal and the papal curia but also overwhelmed by current events in the church. Which election should we not oppose (“contreplede”)? After all, contested elections have now provided two popes. And soon Wille receives a vision of “Holy Churche” descending from Truth’s kingdom in which she assures him that her wealthy, amoral adversary Mede is as familiar in “the popes palays” as herself (II.5–24). This is a devastating confession from one of the poem’s most authoritative teachers, straight from “the castel,” from the tower where “Treuthe is ther-ynne” (I.3–13, 72). It casts light on the contexts of papal election alluded to a few lines earlier and on “the power that Peter hadde to kepe” (Prol. 128). In Passus XXI Langland returns to the consequences of the schism, and sustained attention is devoted to the contemporary church in the final passus. But for now I will return to the account of events after the Holy Spirit leads Piers on the mission of universal evangelization.
These events begin with a recapitulation of attacks designed to prevent and destroy the fruit of charity in Passus XVIII (28–49). Pride leads “a grete oeste” (army) to blow down, break, and bite in two the roots of the virtues cultivated by Grace and Piers in the fields of faith and in human souls (XXI.335–38). Langland is putting questions about the formation of Christian habits across time and across generations, in communities, and in individual lives. The initial attack involves pride and the malicious distortion of the gifts of language aimed at the destruction of love in the community (XXI.339–43). The adversaries of the Pentecostal polity offer a confident prophecy designed to evoke despondency and mistrust. They predict that the seeds sown by Piers, the cardinal virtues, will be lost. Far from the seeds having established the roots of good habits, the prediction is that they will prove more like those falling on the wayside where the fowls of the air devour them, or on rock where they sprang up but soon withered away for lack of moisture, or among thorns which choked them (Luke 8:4–15). We remember the “cammokes [rest-harrow/arrast-harrow] and wedes” identified by Piers as the sowed and harrowed (XXI.312–13). Through Pride’s followers, Langland offers a brilliant insight into the unmaking of the Pentecostal polity. He focuses on the ways in which practice, practical reasoning, and language are inseparably intertwined. A shift in one shifts the whole cultural configuration.
In the polity inspired by the gifts of Grace, social and political identities gave people the practices which in themselves constituted doing well. There was no need for a nomadic, deracinated figure to wander around asking what might count as “do well” and where he could find “do well.” Wille’s obsessive questioning about these virtues had finally been answered in the life of Christ (XXI.26–190) and his legacy to the Pentecostal community through the Holy Spirit. We are shown how the infused cardinal virtues kindle the acquired virtues which are, as we have seen Aquinas observing, “the political virtues.” These show us how to do well (“bene operari”) toward the whole community and to all its parts, toward each household and every single person (“aliquam singularem personam” [ST I-II.61.5, ad 4]). The Pentecostal community gives people the roles whose fulfillment would constitute doing well, a life congruent with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit’s gifts in daily practice.
But what the adversaries of this polity promise is an unmaking that will render Wille’s form of life with its continual dislocations and confusion normal rather than eccentric and aberrant. Think of merchants. Early theologians harbored suspicion and hostility toward this occupation as tending to encourage covetousness, instability, and a range of vices. By the later Middle Ages, the church, inhabiting societies replete with markets and trade, had revised its teachings so that it could acknowledge the possibility of virtuous merchants distinct from bad ones. We have seen traces of this cultural and theological story in Piers Plowman. In Passus IX it is said (by someone hard to identify) that merchants pose special problems in relation to the pardon from Truth:
Marchauntes in the margine hadde many yeres,
Ac no a pena et a culpa no Treuthe wolde hem graunte
For they holde nat here haliday as holi chirch hem hoteth
And for they swere by here soule and so god mote hem helpe
Ayen clene consience for couetyse of wynnynge.
(IX.22–26)
———
[Merchants in the margin had many years’ remission
But no pena et a culpa would Truth grant them
For they don’t hold their holidays as Holy Church commands,
And they swear by their souls and say may God help them
Against clear conscience for coveting gains.]
This traditional view that the practices internal to being a merchant inevitably generate mortal sins has been unfolded in the confession of Covetyse (VI.196–314). But immediately there is a qualifying response:
Ac vnder his secrete seal Treuthe sente hem a lettre
That bad hem bugge boldly what hem best likede
And sethe sullen hit ayeyn and saue the wynnynges,
Amende meson-dewes therwith and myseyse men fynde
And wykkede wayes with here goed amende
And brugges tobrokene by the heye wayes
Amende in som manere wyse and maydones helpe,
Pore peple bedredene and prisones in stokes
Fynde hem for godes loue and fauntkynes to scole,
Releue religion and renten hem bettere.
“And Y shal sende yow mysulue seynt Mihel myn angel
That no deuel shal yow dere ne despeyre in youre deynge
And sethe sende youre soules ther Y mysulue dwelle
And abyde ther in my blisse, body and soule for euere.”
Tho were marchauntes mury; many wopen for ioye
And preyde for Peres the plouhman that purchased hem this bulle.
(IX.27–42)
———
[But under his secret seal Truth sent them a letter
That bade them buy boldly what they liked best
And after to sell it again and save the profits
To repair hospitals and to provide for troubled men
And improve bad roads with their goods
And broken bridges on the highways
Repair in some way and to help maidens,
Poor bedridden people and prisoners in stocks
To support them for God’s love, and send children to school,
Relieve religious orders and endow them better:
“And I shall send you myself my angel Saint Michael
So that dying no devil shall hurt you or bring you to despair
And after to send your souls where I myself dwell
And abide there in my bliss, body and soul forever.”
Then the merchants were merry; many wept for joy
And prayed for Piers the plowman who obtained them this bull.]
Here is a figure of redeemed mercantilism. The practices of the occupation and its motivations—the desire to make material profit—are affirmed. Merchants can continue to buy and sell boldly. They can concentrate on making profits (“wynnynges”). But while the practices and their energetic performances are just what the church had rejected as “couetyse of wynnynge,” there is now the possibility of changed intention, of changed will informing what appear to be the very same practices. Without changing their institutional form of life merchants can now manifest the love of neighbor and love of God.
How can this be? Aquinas had answered clearly enough in the Summa Theologiae. The treatise on justice addressed contemporary forms of trade and the quest for profit. The danger of this work is that it encourages insatiable desires to accumulate material goods so that accumulation without end becomes the perverse end. However, Aquinas determines that practices aimed at profit need not generate such sinful habits. It can be directed toward benevolent activity in the community, such as helping the poor, or public benefit of providing their county’s needs, or sustaining their own households (II-II.77.4).85 This passage is reflected in the marginalia of the pardon Piers is said to receive and in a letter allegedly sent from Treuthe “vnder his secrete seal” (IX.22, 27). This tells merchants to buy “boldly” whatever they most like and then sell at a profit to be deployed in a wide range of good works in their communities (IX.27–36). This passage anticipates the Pentecostal community in Passus XXI, for there the Holy Spirit teaches some people to learn “craft and konnynge of syhte, / With sullyng and buggynge here bileue to wynne” (skill and keen sight / With buying and selling to earn thier livelihoods) (XXI.234–35).86
But soon there will be a separation between social identity and the ethical practices embodied in this identity. The adversaries predict that choices will have to be made in changed circumstances where even people with good intentions will encounter unprecedented difficulties in moral discernment. The very criteria for ethical judgment will become disputable. Let us stay with merchants. Instead of the Holy Spirit’s merchants in a community shaped by the virtues, we are promised that merchants will inhabit a social formation in which practices have become so complex that traditional discernment seems impossible:
Ne no manere marchaunt that with moneye deleth
Where he wynne with riht, with wrong or with vsure!
(XXI.349–50)
———
[Nor any manner of merchant who deals with money
Whether he earns rightly, or wrongly, or with usury.]
No longer will the occupation in which one has been apprenticed give clear guidance as to what constitutes do well. In the Pentecostal community, “sullyng and buggynge” (selling and buying) could be practiced with assurance that they belonged to a web of practices informed by Grace (XXI.234–35). No longer will this be so. The very act of dealing with money could compel one, however unwillingly, into usurious relations which could no longer be reorganized as such. In these reflections Langland was responding critically to important shifts in late medieval culture, gradual and slow but decisive changes in the history of Western culture. The relevant practices and adjustments in moral theology have been explored in some fine historical works.87 One could summarize the relevant changes to which Langland’s vision responds in some such ways as the following, crude as this is. Once upon a time, Christian theologians determined that any repayment of a loan exceeding the sum lent was a usurious transaction. Urban III had introduced to the discourse on usury another strand, Christ’s words in Luke 6:35: “lend, hoping for nothing thereby” (mutuum date nihil inde sperantes). This encouraged an analysis of usury with a focus on intention, a central concept in the medieval exploration of sin and the making of a good confession. But the revolutionary transformations of markets, exchange, and long-distance trade from the twelfth century reconfigured the contexts of borrowing and lending. It no longer made sense simply to imagine the borrower as a needy laborer or small-scale agricultural producer whose desperate needs in the face of delayed or failed produce was being exploited by cruel usurers defying obvious Christian teaching about charity. Among borrowers were powerful and wealthy merchants or landowning aristocracy seeking loans to enhance wealth, seeking credit in their own pursuit of power. These increasingly complex relations put new pressure on the church’s lawyers and theologians. Did no lenders need protection too? Should borrowers, perhaps merchants, rich knights, and kings, be free to break the terms of contracts without compensating the lender? Should the lender not be able to include in his loan compensation for profits he could himself have made by deploying the sum he lent to a wealthy client? Traditionally, of course, any such compensation had identified the transaction as usurious, as against nature, unkynde in Langland’s vocabulary, a mortal sin disqualifying the lender from Christian burial. But could one keep the traditional language concerning the wickedness of usury (think of Dante’s location of usurers, Inferno XVII) while classifying a range of practices that would once have been judged usurious (hence against nature) as licit (hence congruent with nature)?
The answer seems to have been yes. The church’s analysts would gradually designate a new range of compensations on loans as exceptions, as extrinsic titles exempt from being judged as usury. The two cases mentioned above (compensation for breach of contract and compensation for profit the lender could have made with the money he lent) were justified as damnum emergens and lucrum cessans. While one theologian might accept both as licit, another (such as Aquinas) might accept the former and reject the latter.88 So here was a classic source for the development of an increasing casuistry for the church’s experts, canon lawyers and theologians. Such casuistry would accommodate traditional moral rhetoric to enable a range of contemporary practices from which precapitalist markets and mercantilism developed, at least with hindsight, forms of credit and interest.89 Writing about a hundred years before Langland, Giles of Lessines had composed an intriguing study, De Usuris, in which he tried to clarify the emerging casuistry in this domain. A former student of Aquinas, Giles made the intention of the lender a paramount consideration. Did the person lend with the hope of profit (spes lucre)? Yet he is clear about the difficulty of judgment concerning inner states. He begins by acknowledging that in our times we hear many controversies between doctors of theology on moral issues where there is great danger to souls and especially concerning usury.90 He rehearses traditional definitions and condemnations of usury as a mortal sin against nature (“contra naturam,” chap. 4, 416). He worries, however, that nowadays certain statements by experts seem to excuse usury in some loans and contracts, opening out extremely dangerous paths for Christians, paths that seem legitimizations of covetousness. He attempts to maintain traditional accounts of usury, including those concerning the evils of selling time (which is God’s) and a focus on intentions of the lender (chaps. 5–8). Nevertheless, as Lester Little shows, in De Usuris there is a “wide range of specific credit situations that Giles proposed and treated sympathetically. In all such cases interest would be tolerable as compensation for loss but not as sought-after profit.”91 Little also discusses an early fourteenth-century tract on usury by the Franciscan theologian Alexander of Lombard. In this the Franciscan discussed “twelve major types of cases in which to accept something in return over the original amount paid out was legitimate. Then he went on to a series of cases where there was no doubt.” Where there is doubt Alexander displays conflicting opinions among experts.92
Lester Little understood such later thirteenth- and fourteenth-century developments in casuistry surrounding the ethics of usury as an attempt to accommodate tradition to “new social realities” with the aim of “giving guidance” to those trying to make their living and their profits in such realities.93 Unlike the modern historian, Langland does not seem to envisage Christian teaching, “guidance,” appropriately accommodating itself to “new social realities.” But he does seem to have seen something close to Little’s account of the late medieval changes in practice and theology. Nevertheless, from Langland’s perspectives, “the new social realities” undermine ethical understanding necessary to the cultivation of the virtues even as they dissolve the Pentecostal community of virtues. True enough, the earlier parts of his poem had shown how the virtues and vices of trade were central to modern life for Christians (Prol.; II–IV; VI). But he had tried to clarify the definition of vices in the exchange of goods and the uses of money by deploying traditional forms of satire to do so, for example, Mede and Covetousness.94 In Passus XXI, however, Langland is suggesting that what tradition had identified and satirized as aberrant had become hegemonic. If this was indeed characteristic of emerging circumstances, then the critical norms on which such satire depends would themselves become eccentric. He showed Conscience struggling against Mede’s practices and her self-legitimizing ideology (III.216–85) even as he also showed this ideology being accepted in all social groups, including “the popes palays” (II.23; see II–IV). He also showed the figure of Covetousness finding the language of restitution unintelligible (VI.233–38) even though restitution was an essential prerequisite for the sacrament of penance. But however ominous this situation, Repentance and Conscience in Passus II–VII have the necessary resources of discernment. They are not puzzled or confused over the constitution of usury, the sins of the market, and the criteria of moral judgment. Passus XXI, however, foresees a new and worse situation.
Then nobody will be able to differentiate licit forms of trade from usury. Good intentions will not be adequate. If so, what unfolds in the post-Pentecostal Christian world is something much closer to an insight offered by Aquinas in his treatise on law in the Summa Theologiae. He addressed the question of whether the natural law can be deleted from the human heart (I-II.94.6). While he answers that in one sense its fundamental principles are indelible, in another sense its precepts can be blotted out from the human heart. This can come about through vices, through bad reasoning, through depraved customs and corrupt habits. So among some people even theft and other vices “against nature” (contra naturam) are not judged to be sins. He is reminded of the situation Paul outlines in his letter to the Romans (1:24 [ST I-II.94.6, resp.]). In an earlier article he had observed that natural law may fail and be perverted through the collective habits inculcated by bad traditions. He exemplified this by the normalization of theft among the Germans even though theft is explicitly against the law of nature (“cum tamen sit expresse contra legem naturae” [I-II.94.4, resp.]). Aquinas is thinking of the pagan Germans whose customs he found in Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, book 6. But could such unnatural practices become normalized in a Christian community? Could a Christian community, with a church in its midst, generate de-Christianization?
Langland’s answer is a resonant yes, introduced by the observation on usury in Passus XXI (348–50). That which had been clearly present as against nature, as unkynde (VI.294), can no longer be discerned as such by many Christians. Natural and unnatural kind and “unkynde” begin to merge. In Langland’s theology this is a catastrophic development. For sin against kynde, against kindness, in his view, involves the special sin against the Holy Spirit. So convinced is he about this that he represents Christ himself, in the figure of the Samaritan, teaching that “unkyndenesse” is the one sin that quenches the light and fire of the Holy Spirit, the one sin that divine love will not forgive (XIX.111–232, 255–300). Whoever chooses the sin against the Holy Spirit extinguishes the torch of mercy and is left in darkness and freezing winter:
Be vnkynde to thyn emcristene and al that thow canst bidde,
Dele and do penaunce day and nyht euere
And purchase al the pardoun of Pampilon and of Rome
And indulgences ynowe, and be ingrate to thy kynde,
The holy goest hereth the nat ne helpeth the, be thow certeyne.
For vnkyndenesse quencheth hym that he can nat shine
Ne brenne ne blase clere for blowynge of vnkyndenesse.
(XIX.220–26)
———
[Be unkind to your fellow Christians and all that you can pray for,
Deal alms and do penance day and night forever
And buy all the pardon out of Pamplona and Rome
And indulgences enough, and be ingratis to your kind,
The Holy Ghost won’t hear you or help you, you can be sure.
For unkindness quenches him so that he can’t shine
Or burn or blaze clear because of unkindness’ blowing.]
Unkindness encompasses a range of acts. It includes lack of gratitude, lack of compassion (illustrated by Dives in the parable from Luke 16:19–31 related by Langland in XIX.230–54), theft, and murder (XIX.255, 261). Usury too was named as unkind in Passus VI, so we now learn that the Christian community, in its inability to recognize usury, will be unable to recognize the unkindness which is the sin against the Holy Spirit.
Emerging in this prediction is the medieval writer’s glimpse of a strange new situation. From within the Christian community itself comes the kind of de-Christianization of culture associated by Pope John Paul II with the later twentieth century in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth). He thought he had found a distinctively modern tendency. This is not “limited and occasional dissent” from Christian doctrine but “an overall and systematic calling into question of traditional moral doctrine.”95 It might seem that any link between the pope’s identification of what he calls “a new situation” (4/14) and Langland’s vision is, at best, wildly anachronistic. After all, does not Langland write from within the world of “traditional religion,” long before the “stripping of the altars” and the revolution of early modernity?96 In the familiar terms of conventional grand narratives, does he not write within the medieval world that preceded the “unintended” consequences that are said to include secularism, capitalism, the modern state, and anarchic hermeneutics?97 He did indeed. But the fact that Langland’s vision of his world may not fit the Middle Ages of Eamon Duffy, Brad Gregory, Charles Taylor, or many other tellers of grand narratives should not mean that he is compelled to sing their songs, nor that he should be ignored by the composers of grand narratives whose point of departure, that which precedes modernity, is the Middle Ages. While I shall return to such issues at the close of this book, for now I follow Langland’s vision of new challenges to the church and his highly critical account of the church’s responses.
The post-Pentecostal church is led by Conscience. This seems not to have much interested, let alone surprised, most commentators.98 But I think Langland’s choices here and their implications deserve careful scrutiny. This scrutiny will contribute greatly to our understanding of his ecclesiology and its relations to the contemporary church. Let us begin this inquiry by returning to the Pentecostal church and shifting our focus to Conscience’s presence there.
After the distribution of graces, considered earlier in this study, the Holy Spirit orders the community to crown Conscience “kyng” (XXI.252–57). What kind of figuration is this, and what kind of king? The context is one in which the poet is about to allegorize the earlier plowing episode of Passus VIII. Piers is now cultivating truth with evangelical oxen, patristic horses, and infused cardinal virtues as seeds (XXI.258–318). He watches Holy Spirit build “that hous Vnite, Holy Chirche an [in] Englich” (XXI.328), a house made from Christ’s acts of love. No sooner is this done than the Holy Spirit turns its outcome into a universal mission of evangelism: “As wyde as the world is with Peres to tulye [till] treuthe / And the londe of bileue, the lawe of holi churche” (XXI.329–34).99 In this allegory we see the making of the church that Liberum Arbitrium had held up as a model, namely, the evangelical and nonviolent church that embodied “Charite” (XVII.125), the church of the martyrs (XVII.262–320a). He had explicitly contrasted this with the modern, Constantinian church (XVII.125–38; XVI.231–85). Liberum Arbitrium’s model is akin to one we find in texts of the New Testament and early church in which Christians are envisaged as “resident aliens” or “settled migrants” in the empire who are “answerable finally to the law of another city.”100 Their task is not to provide the social cement for the empire and Roman civilization, not to become a new civic religion like that so powerfully described and analyzed in Augustine’s City of God.101 That is why Liberum Arbitrium was among those who say the donation of Constantine and all it symbolized was a disaster for the church:
Whan Constantyn of his cortesye holy kirke dowede
With londes and ledes, lordschipes and rentes,
An angel men herde an hye at Rome crye,
“Dos ecclesie this day hath ydronke venym
And tho that haen Petres power aren apoysened alle.”
(XVII.220–24)102
———
[When Constantine out of his courtesy endowed Holy Church
With lands and peoples, lordships and incomes,
Men heard on high an angel cry at Rome:
“Dos ecclesie has this day drunk venom
And poisoned are all who have Peter’s power.”]
The endowment of the church with material power (“Dos ecclesie”) is poison because it weaves the church into the very fibers and nerves of the corporal world, dissolving the critical tensions between God and mammon (“No man can serve two masters. . . . You cannot serve God and mammon” [Matt. 6:24]). Liberum Arbitrium declares that the remedy for this disaster is in the hands of the armed lay elites, the lords, and the king. Like Wyclif, he thinks a coercive act of ecclesial disendowment would be an act of charity (XVII.225–32). As all commentators note, here Liberum Arbitrium is a fellow traveler of Wyclif and his sympathizers.103 This is a moment in a complex dialectical process and, as we shall see, very far from being Langland’s last word on ecclesial reform. But it is a very forceful expression of what had become a distinctively Wycliffite proposal. What I want to emphasize here is that such a model of reformation involved an exorbitant increase in the Crown’s power and wealth. This is clearly articulated in Wyclif’s De officio regis, where the king is made supreme over the church and over the priesthood.104 It is hardly surprising that Wyclif was seen as the morning star (“stella matutina”) of the English Reformation, a reformation in which the king disendowed the church and became supreme head of a monarchic church: a form of caesaro-papism.105 Such are the range of literary, theological, and historical contexts in which I return to the question put above: when Conscience is made “kyng” what kind of figuration is this, and what kind of king is it who becomes leader of the church in Passus XXI and XXII?106 One recent glossator of the poem maintains that Conscience “is likely to suggest the secular authority in its capacity of ‘joint’ religious leader with the clergy.”107 But in Langland’s historical moment it is not at all clear what might be meant by “secular authority” which is “‘joint’ religious leader with the clergy.” Perhaps putting “joint” in scare quotes hints at some recognition that this formulation would “suggest” contentious equivocation to those puzzling over relations between lay elites and ecclesiastics in later fourteenth-century England. It may be helpful to reconsider Conscience’s role in relation to Liberum Arbitrium before addressing his form of kingship in the church of the final two passus.
According to Langland, Conscience is enfolded in Liberum Arbitrium. The poet has the latter explain the relationship to Wille: “when Y chalenge or chalenge nat, chepe [choose; buy] or refuse, / Thenne am Y Concience ycald, goddes clerk and his notarie” (XVI.191–92). So Conscience is an act of Liberum Arbitrium. The term is often translated “free will,” but this is so misleading in the culture of modern English that it is best avoided. For it risks importing a split between will and understanding in discussions of freedom, a split of immense historical significance for our understanding of humans but one that is really only identifiable in later writers.108 We need to English Liberum Arbitrium along lines that yoke freedom and decision or judgment. It is a power constitutive of our humanity, the power through which we move ourselves to act. As befits such a divine gift, “Cristes creature” (XVI.167), Liberum Arbitrium also describes himself as love, as “Amor” or “Lele Loue” (XVI.195–96). Langland’s Conscience is intimately related to him.109 We should also remember his grasp of Christology and his recognition of the Holy Spirit. This emerges after Wille invokes him to explain the contemplative vision of Christ with “Peres armes” which he has received during Mass on Easter Sunday (XXI.4–210). The allegorical modes in this part of the poem together with Langland’s insistence on drawing Conscience into such closeness with Piers, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, showing us how he is indeed “goddes clerk” (XVI.192), prevents us from fixing him as “the secular authority.”
Instead of this, let us note that the Holy Spirit has just exhorted the Pentecostal community to fraternal love and humility before he tells the people to crown Conscience king and make “Craft” (Skill) the steward who will guide the way they clothe and feed themselves (XXI.254–57). Such a command, in such a fluid figurative context, directs those who have just received the “diversities of graces” (XXI.228a) from the Holy Spirit to be ruled collectively and individually by “goddes clerk,” the intimate of Liberum Arbitrium (“in Cristes court yknowe [known] wel and of his kynne a party” [XVI.168]). He is also the explicator of Christ’s relation to Piers and of Christ’s life, the teacher of Wille and one who can recognize the Holy Spirit, “Cristes messager” come from God (XXI.207–10). Living out such acknowledgment in the Pentecostal community would be to obey the Holy Spirit and live under the rule of a Conscience formed by Christ. Such a life, in such a community, is gifted with all the resources flowing from Christ’s life mediated by the Holy Spirit and poured into “that hous Vnite, Holy Chirche an Englisch,” an allegorical process I have already discussed (XXI.258–332).
But, as I also observed, Langland makes the completion of this edification also the moment in which the Holy Spirit and Piers set out from the church in an evangelical mission as “wyde as the world is” (XXI.332–34). They pursue Liberum Arbitrium’s model of the early church. And so we reach the point with which this section began. The Holy Spirit and Piers disappear, leaving Conscience in what is now the post-Pentecostal community. We did not find out exactly how the folk responded to Grace’s command to crown Conscience king and make Craft (Skill) steward. Did they obey? If they did, could they sustain such obedience in the apparent absence of Piers and the Holy Spirit? In his study Fundamental Authority in Late Medieval English Law, Norman Doe discusses “the late medieval view of law in general as having a moral basis.” Here conscience was crucial:
Whereas reason may have been something of a technical idea of right understood largely by the common lawyers, conscience was a distinct moral force known directly, principally through the pulpit and confessional, by the ordinary citizen. Indeed, for the citizen, the psychological incentive to obey legislation was enhanced through promulgation in the counties when the authority of a statute was seen publicly to be built on conscience. Everyone knew that to offend one’s conscience would imperil the soul.110
True enough, it was assumed that “everyone” knew this. After all, we are naturally disposed by God to grasp the basic principles for leading the kind of ethical life which will enable us to flourish as humans. And we are given conscience, such a prominent figure in Piers Plowman and one so intimately related, as we have seen, to Liberum Arbitrium and Reason.111 But Langland wonders what happens to conventional teaching in contemporary Christian culture, how the people relate to the figure they have been told to crown and how Conscience will fare as “constable” of the church (XXII.214). He now explores these questions with his characteristic inventiveness in a brilliant dramatic narrative.
As soon as the Holy Spirit and Piers set out on their evangelical mission as “wyde as the world is” Conscience, Christians, and the cardinal virtues come under attack from the capital sin Pride with a “grete oeste [army]” of vices many of whom were penitents in Passus VI and VII. The aim is to destroy the Pentecostal community and the church of Christ (XXI.335–54). Conscience responds by advising Christians to go immediately into the church (“Vnite”), stay within it, and pray for peace in Piers’s “berne” (barn). He seems to experience the lack of the Holy Spirit for he is certain that without Grace’s presence Christians are not strong enough to go against Pride (XXI.355–59). So he envisages the situation of the Christian community as a siege. It is as though, in the perceived absence of the Holy Spirit, Christians should retreat into the church imagined as an edifice. It is striking that Piers has disappeared without any word of a successor. Certainly neither he nor anyone else in the Pentecostal church gave any hint of links between himself and modern cardinals who appropriate the name of the cardinal virtues he had sown and arrogate to themselves the power to make a pope (Prol. 128–36, discussed above in section V). But we remember that in the “hous” composed by the Holy Spirit Grace “made presthoed” (XXI.332). Even if there is no successor to Piers/Peter there is “presthoed.” Here, one might think, would be a source of appropriate guidance and a mediator of the sacraments flowing from Christ.
And yet instead of turning to one of the “presthoed” made by the Holy Spirit for life in the church, Conscience turns to Kynde Wit and accepts him as his teacher (XXI.360–61). In the circumstances now confronting Conscience, this is a strange and significant choice. For Kynde Wit is carefully placed in Piers Plowman. It is a natural power of the soul associated with human rationality. Holy Church, descending from the Tower of Treuthe, considers Kynde Wit an appropriate guardian and dispenser of worldly wealth (I.3–4, 51–53). But Conscience is now confronted by “principalities and power” in a struggle against “the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in high places” (Eph. 6:12). His needs will be for more help than Kynde Wit can give. And even Ymagenatyf had perceived the limitations of Kynde Wit with relevant clarity. He had warned Wille that a “kynde-witted” person cannot reach the beginning of the way to salvation through “kynde wit.” In spiritual battles, concerning our supernatural end, a “kynde-witted” person is like a blind man in worldly battles: his weapons are useless. Ymagenatyf maintains that “kynde wit” is a “chaunce,” in the sense that it depends entirely on the contingencies of the material world for its knowledge (XIV.33). It is confined to the realm of created nature. So dependence on it would lock such subjects into its realm taken as autonomous from God. As Aquinas so often argued, the end to which creatures are drawn is twofold, duplex. At the very beginning of the Summa Theologiae he tells us that God has ordained us to himself as our end, a goal which far exceeds the grasp of human reason. He quotes from Isaiah: “the eye hath not seen, O God, besides thee, what things thou hast prepared for those who love you” (64:4; see too 1 Cor. 2:9). We need to know this end so that we can order our lives to it. So it was necessary for our salvation that we should know through divine revelation what so exceeds human reason (ST I.1.1, resp.). Later, in the question on predestination, he emphasizes that we are drawn to an end which exceeds the proportion and power of created nature: eternal life which consists in the divine vision. But the end is “duplex.” And the other end is proportionate to created nature. Such an end created nature can reach by the power of its own nature (I.23.1, resp.). Later still, in the treatise on divine grace, he considers an objection to his Augustinian position. The objector maintains we can know God by kynde wit (“per cognitionem naturalem”), not turned to God as the object of beatitude and the cause of our reconciliation with God, our justification (I-II.113.4, obj. 2 and ad 2). This “duplex” pervades Aquinas’s thinking, and its reflections on the limits of kynde wit in our quest for the divine vision and salvation are congruent with Ymagenatyf’s and with Langland’s own.112
But Langland has not left our understanding of kynde wit dependent on Ymagenatyf and Aquinas. Christ, manifested in the figure of the Samaritan (Passus XIX), addresses this topic. Appropriately enough, the context of this discussion concerns human knowledge of God. Faith, embodied in Abraham, had told Wille that he follows one God in three persons. Wille is impatient with such trinitarian talk and dismisses it:
“This is myrke thyng for me,” quod Y, “and for many another,
How o lord myhte lyue o thre; Y leue hit nat,” Y sayde.
(XVIII.196–97; see 184–97)
———
[“This is a dark thing for me and for many another,
How one Lord might live in three, I don’t believe it,” I said.]
Confronted with this unequivocal rejection of Nicene Christian teaching about God (“Y leue hit nat”), faith tries to draw Wille away from this unbelief toward orthodox Christianity and its affirmation of trinitarian relations in the divine life. Faith does so by offering analogies that he believes will disclose such orthodoxy in a persuasive way (XVIII.198–238).113 In this sequence, Langland gives us a beautiful mode of faith seeking understanding:
“Muse nat to moche theron,” quod Faith, “til thow more knowe
Ac leue hit lelly al thy lyf-tyme,
That thre bilongeth to a lord that leiaunce claymeth.”
(XVIII.198–200)
———
[“Don’t muse too much on it,” said Faith, “until you know more,
But believe it loyally all of your lifetime.
Three belongs to a Lord who claims allegiance.”]
But there is no indication that Wille is persuaded by this or by the speaker’s long elaboration (see XVIII.198–238).
For his doubts about trinitarian teaching return in the ensuing conversation he has with Hope, or Moses. The latter seems to assume a monotheism that “of no trinite ne telleth ne taketh mo persones / To godhead but o god and on god almyhty” (makes no mention of Trinity and gives no more persons / To Godhead but one God and one God almighty) (XIX.29–39). Wille thinks that this version of monotheism, unlike the trinitarian one, is easy for both unlearned and learned people (XIX.42–43).114 But he cannot accept Hope’s claims that God wants us to love everyone, liars as well as honest people (XIX.44–47). Wit had long ago proclaimed the virtue of loving and helping one’s enemies, following Christ’s explicit precepts (Matt. 5:43–48; Luke 6:27–35 [X.188–89]). But Wille finds Hope’s version of this evangelical teaching unacceptable and disputes it. Indeed, he is as disputatious as he has ever been, and there is no warrant for those readings of Piers Plowman that assert a movement in the poem setting aside ratiocination and argument. The conversation between Wille, Faith, and Hope is “in the way” (XIX.48), and disputation “is the way” intrinsic to the life of Wille, the rational appetite, and to the Christian search for God: “Come then and confute me, saith the Lord” (Et venite, et arguite me, dicit Dominus). Or, “Thus saith the Lord . . . let us plead together: tell if thou has anything to justify thyself” (iudicemur simul: Narra si quid habes vt iustificeris).115 Thus, “in the way,” albeit in a “wide wildernesse” traveling with Faith and Hope, however contentiously, Wille now encounters Jesus Christ in the person of the Samaritan (XIX.48–54). So for Langland disputations, even disputation against orthodox trinitarian discourse, is not incompatible with Faith or Hope or encountering Christ.116
The new scene is a dramatization of Jesus’s parable of the good Samaritan and the half-dead man wounded and stripped by robbers (Luke 10:29–37).117 In the face of Semyvief (“semivivo relicto,” Luke 10:30), both Faith and Hope (as the priest and Levite of the parable) are terrified. Wille complains about his companions’ failure (XIX.53–82). The Samaritan defends them, explaining their limitations in the face of fallen humanity, and instructs Wille on the unique saving powers of Christ bestowed in the sacraments. Once again Wille expresses his troubles with Faith’s doctrine of a triune God and Hope’s ethics of universal love (XIX.96–107). The response of Christ in the figure of the Samaritan is as kind as it is clear. He determines that the teaching Wille has received from Faith (Abraham) and Hope (Moses) is indeed true:
“A saide soeth,” quod the Samaritaen, “and so Y rede the also.
And as Abraham the olde of o god the tauhte
Loke thow louye and bileue al thy lyf-tyme.”
(XIX.108–10)
———
[“He told the truth,” said the Samaritan, “and I advise you so, too.
And as old Abraham taught you about one God,
See you love and believe that all your life.”]
At just this point he names the objector whom Wille has been following in his rejection of Faith’s trinitarian teaching, the teaching of orthodox Nicene Christianity. The name given links this episode explicitly with Conscience’s attempt to defend the church in Passus XXI and his acceptance of a teacher named Kynde Wit:
And yf Kynde Wit carpe here-ayen or eny kyne thouhtes
Or eretikes with argumentis, thien hoend thow hem shewe.
(XIX.111–12)
———
[And if Common Sense or any kind of thoughts speak to the contrary
Or heretics with arguments, you just show them your hand.]
So the authoritative Samaritan, figuring Christ himself, teaches that Kynde Wit is the source of serious resistance to what Langland considers a truthful understanding of the triune God. Acting beyond its limits, it will generate heresy. In the earlier version of this episode (Passus XVI of the B version of Piers Plowman), the Samaritan warned Wille not only about the limits of Kynde Wit but also about Conscience:
And if Conscience carpe þerayein, or kynde wit eyþer,
Or Eretikes wiþ argumentȝ, þyn hond þow hem shewe.
(B XVII.138–39)
———
[And if Conscience complains about this, or Kynde Wit either,
Or heretics with arguments, show your hand to them.]
In this warning Conscience is associated with the limits of natural reason uninformed by the supernatural gift of faith. According to the B version of Piers Plowman, Conscience is as likely to lead one to antitrinitarian heresy as is Kynde Wit. This is particularly fascinating in relation to the defense of the church I am considering from Passus XXI: “And thenne cam Kynde Wit Consience to teche” (XXI.360; B XIX.360). It is imperative, in my view, that commentators never conflate the B version of the poem with the C version, and so one must note that the later version separates Kynde Wit from Conscience as the Samaritan warns Wille about potential sources for heresy. Nevertheless, the C version does keep the Samaritan’s luminous warning that Kynde Wit is a power who can make trouble for trinitarian Christians and so a power whose limits must be carefully respected. So in both the B and the C versions Langland has given us good warrant to recognize the risks if the church of Christ (founded by the Holy Spirit) is being led by Kynde Wit and the risks in Conscience accepting Kynde Wit as his teacher without any reservations (XXI.360). It is not, of course, that Ymagenatyf and, more authoritatively, Christ the Samaritan attack Kynde Wit as a part of the human soul, God’s own gift. The issue is the identification of its licit activities and the identification of the boundaries of its competence.
Yet Conscience quite fails even to raise such questions as he embraces Kynde Wit as his teacher. From a perspective uninformed by Langland’s dialectical work, this embrace might seem both obvious and untroubling. Conscience, like Kynde Wit, is as natural an act as synderesis is a natural disposition: gifts from God that are part of our “kynde,” what makes us distinctively human beings. As Wit had earlier said to Wille in his lecture on Christian anthropology, “lyf lyueth by inwit and leryng of Kynde,” with Kynde glossed as “Creatour,” as “fader and formour of al” (X.173, 151–55).118 So one certainly finds conscience active in non-Christians like Trajan (Passus XII) or like Judas Iscariot or Pontius Pilate. And, as Aquinas teaches, natural reason and conscience may present believing in Christ, something Christians understand as a good act necessary for salvation, as a bad action. If this happens, we are bound to obey such judgment of reason and act of conscience, according to St. Thomas (ST I-II.19.5, resp.).119 I recall such conventional puzzles in this area of theological ethics because I think Langland becomes extremely interested in one of its central topics: the sources and authority of an erring conscience. This will not be the last time he shows Conscience making an error with dismaying consequences for the church and its members. Such errors, in the contexts Langland established earlier in Passus XXI, must be characterized as Christian amnesia. For his Conscience, we will remember, recognized the relation between Christ and Piers, instructed Wille on the life and names of Christ, recognized the Holy Spirit, and was called by the Holy Spirit with Piers. Now, apparently, under the massive pressures of Pride’s assault and, perhaps crucially, split off from the absent Piers, he forgets. Langland is addressing a question Augustine put when preaching on the disciples’ ship being tossed with waves in the midst of the sea (Matt. 14:24–33). As usual, the ship figures the church, and Augustine asks his congregation, “When you are firmly settled in the Church can you experience the absence of the Lord? When can you find the Lord absent?”120 Same question; not, I think, quite the same answer.
Kynde Wit, accepted as teacher, shows Conscience how to defend the church. In his newly bestowed authority he “comaundede alle cristene peple / To deluen [dig] a dich depe aboute Vnite” so that the church will be “as hit were a pile [fortress]” (XXI.360–63). Conscience acts as Kynde Wit’s echo as he reiterates this command (XXI.365–66). Christians must dig a ditch, make a great moat, and build fortifications. This may seem a rational way of life for the church in response to the vicious forces that threaten it. Some readers may recall the very different model offered by Piers so long ago, in Passus VII. There Christians were led to “a court as cleer as the sonne,” where “The mote is of Mercy,” and where Grace will disclose “Treuthe sitte in thy sulue herte” (Truth sitting in your own heart), where Charity will make a church to nurture “alle manere folke” (VII.232–60). This recollection might arouse unease at the contrasting model generated by Kynde Wit. But perhaps, as yet, such unease will remain rather vague in the face of the people’s energetic obedience to their leaders’ command. The “house” that the Holy Spirit and Piers had left as a vulnerable barn for storing ripe corn is now, allegedly, turned into a moated fortress (cf. XXI.317–31 and 367–80). The bad are kept out while those laboring to fortify “Vnite” are kept in and sanctified by penitential discipline. Conscience is delighted at the successful enactment of Kynde Wit’s order. Triumphantly (proudly?) he declares that with such fine defenses he doesn’t care about the assaults of Pride all this Lent (XXI.381–82; cf. Piers’s satisfaction with those working in his “half-aker” at VIII.197–200). Kynde Wit’s model of a fortress church has encouraged a conviction that the major threat to Christian discipleship is from outside the church. This will prove to be a profoundly mistaken conviction, but for the moment it seems that holiness has been achieved within the fortress. Yet this apparent success encourages everyone, including Conscience, to overlook both the contrast with the missionary church of the martyrs celebrated by Liberum Arbitrium (XVII.262–320a) and with the evangelical church led by the Holy Spirit and Piers cultivating truth as “wyde as the world is,” teaching the evangelical law without boundaries, moats, or fences (XXI.332–34).121
There is a late fourteenth-century sermon by John Mirk which illuminates the contrasting ecclesial models I have been discussing. When Liberum Arbitrium wanted to illustrate a modern exemplar of the church of the martyrs, he chose St. Thomas of Canterbury, Thomas Becket (XVII.270–76). And to St. Thomas of Canterbury Mirk devotes a fascinating sermon, preached on his festival. Mirk ponders the murder of the archbishop by the Crown and lay elites. When the king’s knights come to kill St. Thomas for crossing the king’s power, the monks of Canterbury bolt the doors of the cathedral to protect the archbishop. But Thomas goes to the door, unbars it, and takes a knight by the hand, saying, “Hyt bysemeth not to maken Holy Chyrche a castel—cometh in, my chydren.” They do so, and they murder him.122 This powerful narrative not only gives a moving example of just what is entailed in Jesus’s precepts concerning love of enemy (Matt. 5:43–48). It also discloses exactly what is at issue in the error made by Kynde Wit and Conscience in displacing the evangelical model of the church of the martyrs. “Hyt bysemeth not to maken Holy Chyrche a castel—cometh in, my chydren.” Mirk and Langland’s Liberum Arbitrium both celebrate a martyr who in the midst of “vnkynde cristene in holy kirke was slawe [slain]” (XVII.275). He is, for both writers, “a forbisene,” an exemplary figure for Christians, individually and collectively. He also reminds Christians, most forcefully, that the killers are “vnkynde cristene,” classic agents of Constantinian Christianity. How appropriate, how revealing that the English sovereign who declared himself head of the English church should publicly proclaim (1538) St. Thomas of Canterbury a rebel and a traitor. Henry VIII ordered that nobody must call Thomas Becket a saint (itself now made a treasonous act) and that his name was “to be erased from all liturgical books, and his Office, antiphons, and collects to be said no more.” All images and pictures of Becket were to be disappeared.123
Although Langland never represents Conscience as a priest (in any version of the poem), Conscience offers the Eucharist to those who have built the holy fortress with their penitential labors. This act does not seem to have interested scholars, but it is as replete with significance as it is puzzling and, in the late fourteenth-century church in England, provocative:
“Cometh,” quod Consience, “ye cristene, and dyneth
That haen labored lelly al this lenten tyme.
Here is bred yblessed and godes body therunder.”
(XXI.383–85)
———
[“Come,” Conscience said, “you Christians, and eat,
Who have labored loyally all this Lenten time.
Here is a blessed bread and God’s body there-under.”]
Conscience goes on to declare that Grace gave Piers power to consecrate (“to make hit”) and people the ability “to eten hit aftur” (XXI.386–89). But Piers is absent from this eucharistic event. In fact he had been absent since his departure with the Holy Spirit on the mission of universal evangelization, absent from the project of turning the church into a fortress. So what exactly is Langland saying about the administration of the Eucharist here? What are the theological and ecclesial implications of the scene he imagines?
We have some truly outstanding studies on the practice and theology of the sacrament of the altar in the later Middle Ages.124 Given this and given my own recent contribution to this literature, it is only necessary here to recollect a few features that seem especially relevant to the present rumination on Langland’s intention in writing this passage.125 The Mass was central to Christian life in the Middle Ages. Here Jesus Christ became present on the altar in the form of bread and wine. He did so at the prayer of consecration in the canon of the Mass, and he did so in his Galilean body, “not only the flesh, but the whole body of Christ, that is, the bones and nerves and all the rest” (non solum caro, sed totum corpus Christi, id est ossa et nervi et alia hujusmodi).126 Eamon Duffy describes this event, at the heart of medieval Christianity, with eloquence and precision:
In the Mass the redemption of the world, wrought on Good Friday once and for all, was renewed and made fruitful for all who believed. Christ himself, immolated on the altar of the cross, became present on the altar of the parish church, body, soul and divinity, and his blood flowed once again, to nourish and renew Church and world. As kneeling congregations raised their eyes to see the Host held high above the priest’s head at the sacring, they were transported to Calvary itself, and gathered not only into the passion and resurrection of Christ, but into the full sweep of salvation history as a whole.127
This brings out the fact that “for most people, most of the time the Host was something to be seen, not to be consumed” (95). Eating the consecrated wafer, the body of Christ, would be reserved, for most Christians, to the Easter Eucharist (95–107). As for consecration, Aquinas makes it clear that only a duly ordained priest has the power to consecrate in Christ’s person (“in persona Christi,” ST III.82.1, resp.). Indeed, by the later Middle Ages, Duffy observes, “no layman or woman might even touch the sacred vessels with their bare hands” (110).128 However communitarian, inclusive, and committed to “corporate Christianity” with an immensely active laity, the late medieval church produced a version of the Eucharist which involved an immense affirmation and making of a quite distinctive and exclusive sacerdotal power.129 No Christian accepted as orthodox in Langland’s church would claim that the Eucharist could be, say, taken from the pyx (hung over the high altar of the church, containing the sacrament) and distributed by a layperson. But this is what Conscience does (XXI.383–85): perhaps the absent Piers had indeed left the consecrated bread in a pyx. By what warrant, under whose authority?
There certainly were Christians in Langland’s society who held views on such matters which went against the grain of current orthodoxy. Take, for example, Walter Brut, an often-brilliant theologian who was a Latinate layman first accused of heresy in the 1380s and later compelled to set down his understanding of Christian doctrine in Latin.130 During his profound and wide-ranging account, he wonders whether women can confect the body of Christ and administer the sacrament to the people (“an mulieres possint conficere corpus Christi et populo ministrare” [341]). What actually distinguishes priests from laypeople (341)? Working his way through history, theology, and ecclesiology, he concludes that he cannot think the church can licitly preclude laymen or laywomen from consecrating and administering this sacrament. He simply cannot see how the church could assume that it could compel Christ to conform his arrangements for the consecration of his body to the ordination of the Roman pope. And, after all, the church had long allowed women to administer the one sacrament it claims to be necessary for salvation, namely, baptism (346, 345).131 Or take John Wyclif: in his admirably lucid De Eucharistia (Tractatus Maior), he argues that no faithful Christian doubts that God can give a layman (“layco”) the power to consecrate the sacrament.132 Or, a little later (1428–31), Hawisia Mone of Loddon, in Norfolk: “Every man and every woman being in good lyf oute of synne is as good prest and hath as muche poar [power] of God in al thynes [things] as ony preset ordred be the pope or bishop.”133 But are we meant to see Conscience, distributing the sacrament in the absence of any priest, as a fellow traveler with Walter Brut or John Wyclif or Hawisia Mone? Is Conscience’s laicization of the Eucharist’s distribution affirmed by Langland? Is this event presented as a model for the church or only a model in the absence of Piers and any priests? In my view the passage invites such reflective questions while making sure they cannot be resolved with the resources Langland has chosen to offer at this point. However, by the time we conclude reading the final passus, a cluster of answers will be emerging. They may perhaps bring his work closer to aspects of Walter Brut’s than is generally acknowledged.
But having raised this important issue, Langland continues with the Easter Communion offered by Conscience. It is offered without the customary elevation of the Host, and we should note that it is also offered as often as “ones in a monthe / Or as ofte as they hadden nede” (XXI.388–89), very much against the norm of Langland’s church.134 Displacing the habitual elevation and adoration of the Host, Conscience proclaims a condition to his distribution of the sacrament: people must pay to the pardon from Christ mediated by Piers, “Redde quod debes” (Pay back what you owe) (XXI.385–90). In doing so, he faithfully follows his earlier account of the condition attached to the new covenant by the risen Christ (XXI.182–87). Christ’s pardon is contingent on its recipients making restitution. They must do so because this act restores the broken bonds of charity and justice in the community. Those who want to be disciples of Christ are thus obligated to attempt the imitation of Christ’s reconciliation of law and gospel, of justice and peace in his work of divine love (XX.430–75). The response from the community of the holy fortress, in the Mass, is truly astonishing: outraged incredulity. Conscience reiterates his teaching. He aligns it with the cardinal virtues and reminds the people of the Pater Noster: “Et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris” (And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors) (XXI.391–94a; Matt. 6:9, 12). So Conscience has placed Christ’s condition for his pardon as a condition for receiving “godes body” (XXI.385). After all, this sacrament represents and creates the unity of Christians in the church, so Conscience’s counsel acknowledges that without the justice and charity of mutual restitution there is an impediment to participation in the body of Christ.135 Given that the cardinal virtues had been internalized in the Pentecostal community (eaten and sown in souls), Conscience’s expectation that his own judgment about restitution would be shared by all is hardly surprising. But the community’s rejection of his counsel is unequivocal. So once more Langland chooses to display the incompletion of a central sacrament in his church. Once again penance has not been consummated in the Eucharist, although the Eucharist was the end of all the sacraments, the spiritual food which changes humans into itself, into the divine life (ST III.73.3, resp. and ad 2, quoting Augustine, Confessions VII.10). So the immediately preceding claim to have achieved “holinesse” in this church is contradicted and treated with irony. But Langland does not leave us with this disturbing enough irony. He has one of the church’s members articulate the collective rebellion against Conscience, the cardinal virtues, and the sacrament.
The speaker is a brewer, one of the small-scale commodity producers on whose activity Langland bestowed considerable attention earlier in his work.136 The brewer proclaims his priorities and teleology: maximizing profits in his trade while vehemently rejecting the virtue of justice. He tells Conscience to be silent and ridicules talk about Spiritus iusticie, that infused cardinal virtue given by Grace and sown by Piers (XXI.274–75, 297–308). The will to silence Conscience (“hold thy tonge, Consience”) figures a will moving toward a fixed aversion from love of God and neighbor. This movement is encapsulated in the brewer’s claim that his nature (“my kynde”) is to pursue profits quite independently of the virtues and the quest for holiness (XXI.396–402). Langland is showing how practices normalized in the occupations of his culture can create a second nature that transforms one’s “kynde,” transforms a nature created in the image of God (XVIII.1–7). In such a transformation the demand for restitution becomes unintelligible. Just as it has been for Covetyse (VI.234–38). This is a collective version of what Augustine describes so powerfully in his Confessions. Our choices and acts come to bind our will in chains of habit (“consuetudo”) since habits which we do not resist become necessity, a second nature.137 Earlier I observed Aquinas’s interest in the way in which malevolent cultural habits can occlude the natural law. He maintained that a particular culture could normalize vicious acts into habits that were deemed virtuous. His example, we recall, was Germanic tribes in which theft (contrary to both natural and divine law) was normalized (ST I-II.94.4, resp.; see too I-II.94.6, resp.). Langland’s brewer apparently has no memory of Grace making a community in which forms of exchange are integrated with Christian ethics in relations of friendship rather than predatory exploitation. Nor is there any memory of the specific conditions under which merchants will receive pardon, conditions that join the pursuit of profit with its charitable distribution (IX.22–42; see similarly ST II-II.77.4). Nor is there any recollection of Jesus’s warning that covetousness and unkindness quench God’s mercy (XIX.328, 184–85, 218–19, 255–57). Yet Langland emphasizes that this process of de-Christianization is happening within the Christian community currently gathered around “bred yblessed and godes body therunder,” a process within the fortress church.
Conscience is not easily silenced, as Christian tradition always taught. He insists that the cardinal virtue of justice, dismissed by the brewer, is actually the “cheef seed that Peres sewe.” Salvation, he maintains, is impossible without a life committed to Spiritus iusticie. Furthermore, he affirms that unless people continue to eat the seeds that are the cardinal virtues, and to feed on conscience, they will be eternally lost (XXI.403–8). Having erred in his subjection to Kynde Wit’s model of the church, with its delusions concerning relations between what is within (holiness) and what is without (threat to holiness), Conscience now reaffirms the Pentecostal community. In doing so he is certainly acting as “goddess clerk and his notarie” (XVI.191–92). As for the brewer, we are not given his response to the Conscience he sought to silence. But we are being given some very disturbing answers to the question I noted at the end of section VI, namely, how the people obey the Holy Spirit’s command to crown Conscience (XXI.256). There are more disturbing answers to come.
After Conscience’s angry reply to the brewer, Langland introduces a new interlocutor (XXI.408–81). He is called a “lewed vicory,” that is, as Derek Pearsall notes, “an uneducated parish priest (i.e. lacking in Latin),” while D.W. Robertson and Bernard F. Huppé observe that he is “unlearned in the sophistry of the friars.”138 Unlike much commentary on this extraordinarily resonant figure, this observation appreciates the irony in “lewed” and its direction.139 He is “lewed,” unlearned in a range of practices in the contemporary church witheringly criticized throughout Piers Plowman: he lacks such learning just as St. Paul lacked “wisdom” in his “foolishness” (1 Cor. 1:18, 21).
His experience as a “curator of holi kirke” confirms much that Langland has just shown in the community’s rebellion against Conscience and against Christ’s refusal to split off pardon from the demands of conversion in practice. The “lewed vicory” is familiar with Christians who are ignorant of cardinal virtues and disdainfully reject Conscience (XXI.404–12). Owing to Langland’s own vision, we too are familiar with them. The priest couches his experience in a locution akin to Wille’s earlier observations on his many years in London without encountering charity among “clerk nother lewed” free from covetousness (XVI.286–97; cf. XXI.410–12). Both the “lewed” priest and Wille identify a pervasive strand in Piers Plowman: the disclosure of decisive absences of virtues that constitute distinctively Christian communities.
Having confirmed the ignorance of cardinal virtues in the parish, the priest takes up the ironic punning on “cardinal” displayed in the poem’s Prologue.140 Instead of the cardinal virtues sown in the Pentecostal church, the modern church has cardinals sent from the pope. Instead of the infused cardinal virtues given by the Holy Spirit to Piers and the community as spiritual food, contemporary cardinals are takers and consumers, not bringers of gifts. The vicar thus develops a major critical strand of Langland’s vision of the contemporary church, one designed to lay bare its material foundation and the consequence of such a foundation. We are moved from allegory and the spirit in Pentecostal agriculture to the letter and voracious carnal consumption in the hierarchy governing the church. Today’s cardinals are funded and fed by “we clerkes” who pay for the elite’s furs, for their horses’ food, and for the predators in their retinues. The laypeople provide for the clerks who are compelled to fund the hierarchy, and the “lewed” priest recounts their responses: “The contreye is the corsedore [the more cursed] that cardinals cometh ynne” (XXI.417–18). These cardinals belong to the Constantinian church so fiercely and extensively attacked by Liberum Arbitrium (“Cristes creature . . . in Cristes court yknowe wel”), to which I shall return when discussing the poem’s ending (XVI.167; XVII.200–235a). The vicar proposes a reformation of the church that would eject those exploitationary cardinals from England. As part of this reformation, they would have to remain with their financiers at the papal court in Avignon or Rome among the relics in the church to which they were affiliated: ironically, the relics of the early martyrs (XXI.419–23).
These remarks on relics, in the context of the hierarchy’s finances, relate to one of the latest passages Langland wrote. In the Prologue to the poem’s C version, he added an attack by Conscience on the sponsorship of idolatry as a component of fund-raising in contemporary churches (Prol. 95–124). The vicar’s ecclesial reformation would also involve the return of Conscience to the royal courts where he had been trying to persuade the king to expel the forces of Mede from governance of the polity at all levels (II–IV). The “lewed vicory” calls for Grace and Piers to continue the work of universal evangelization so that “all men were cristene” (XXI.424–27). He imagines Piers in the role of emperor but envisages as peculiar a form of emperor as Langland’s Christ is a peculiar kind of chivalric knight: riding an ass, bootless, without spurs or spear, and jousting on a cross while armed only with the vulnerable garment of humana natura (XX.8–25; XIX.48–52; XXI.12–14). As emperor, Piers, according to the vicar, will lead not armies but the plow of human subsistence production and of evangelical teaching. His reformist vision is modeled on the evangelical church of the martyrs celebrated by Liberum Arbitrium (XVII.262–94). No more a church fortress.141 Like his author, the priest gives attention not only to the future, but to the present church, with Piers providing the critical comparison. Here we should remember the Holy Spirit’s prophecy while founding the Pentecostal church. The pope, he warned, will become an embodiment of pride while the cardinals will lead the church with covetousness and “vnkyndenesse” (XXI.223–24). The latter is the sin against the Holy Spirit, the one sin that quenches the grace of God (XIX.153–278). The modern “lewed” priest discerns that the Holy Spirit’s prophecy concerning the cardinals has been fulfilled. He rightly contrasts the pope with Piers. For he sees that both with his literal and his allegorical plow Piers aimed to imitate the God who patiently teaches and patiently loves his enemies. Most appropriately he explicitly invokes the following evangelical text:
But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you: That you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise upon the good and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust. (Matt. 5:44–45)
Such is the divine model of unconditional generosity and loving kindness. Never unlearned about what should matter to Christians, the “lewed vicory” comments accordingly:
Ac wel worth Peres the plouhman that pursueth god in doynge,
Qui pluit super iustos et iniustos at ones
And sente the sonne to saue a corsed mannes tulthe
As brihte as to the beste man or to the beste womman.
Rihte so Peres the plouhman payneth hym to tulie
As wel for a wastour or for a wenche of the stuyves
As for hymsulue and his seruauntes, saue he is furste yserued.
(XXI.430–36; see 430–41)
———
[But well may it go for Piers the plowman who in his deeds follows God,
Who raineth upon the just and the unjust at once,
And sends the sun to save a cursed man’s crops
As brightly as to the best of men or women.
Just so Piers the plowman takes pains to raise crops
Just as much for a waster or a woman of the streets
As for himself and his servants, except he is served first.]
The “lewed” priest can recognize Christian discipleship when he encounters it. And plainly enough, this celebration of Piers includes a memory of his struggles in the field of agrarian production (see section III above). Despite his attempt to use coercive jurisdiction to enforce the Statute of Laborers, Piers had been overwhelmed by his recognition that those perceived as “wastour” or “wenche of the stuyves” are also his “blody bretherne, for god bougte vs alle” (VIII.213–28; XXI.434–36). Although the agricultural laborers threaten him violently, he acknowledges them as those whom “Treuthe tauhte me ones to louye hem vchone” (Truth taught me once to love each one of them) (VIII.211–18). However unpalatable and hard, as Wille objected on another occasion about Hope’s teaching on love (XIX.40–47), such are the demands of Christian discipleship as the vicar, like Langland, maintains.
Against these apostolic virtues the priest sets contemporary popes. These are popes devoted to deploying coercive jurisdiction. The vicar objects to the material exploitation of the church by the papacy as well as the lust for dominion informing popes (XXI.442–43). Far from being literally unlearned (“lewed”), the priest’s compressed commentary on the papacy converges with Ockham’s own identification of the papal ambitions to imperial power. The pope, he objects, “claymeth bifore the kynge to be kepare ouer cristene” (XXI.443). We recollect how Ockham had denied that Christ had given Peter, let alone modern popes, plenitude of power over temporal goods and the political order.142 The vicar considers the ways in which modern popes, antithetical to Piers, have often hired soldiers to kill fellow Christians in pursuit of their political ambitions. The papacy is immersed in habitual violence. The pope, he says, “soudeth [hires] hem that sleeth suche as he sholde saue. / . . . And counteth nat thow cristene be culde and yrobbed / And fyndeth folke to fihte and cristene bloed to spille” (And takes no account though Christians are killed and robbed / And pays people to fight and spill Christian blood) (XXI.428–29, 443–46a). The vicar is elaborating the earlier complaints of Liberum Arbitrium that the pope “with moneye maynteynneth men to werre [wage war] vppon cristene” (XVII.234). Liberum Arbitrium had combined this complaint with a forceful analysis of the determining and disastrous role of material “possession” in the governance of the modern church (XVII.220–38; XXI.428–29).143 He had proposed the disendowment of the church by lay elites as the necessary reformation, but the “lewed vicory” does not suggest this. And with very good reason gives the vision of lay elites to which the poem is moving.
Although the vicar sets aside Liberum Arbitrium’s idea of reformation by lay elites, he does allude explicitly to the Great Schism in the church from 1378. Its immediate cause was the action of the cardinals electing two popes, first Urban VI, then Clement VII.144 Once again there is nothing debilitatingly unlearned about the priest’s approach to the practices of the church in schism. He lucidly identifies the papal and ecclesial ideology legitimizing crusades against Christians aligned with the papal adversary (XXI.428–29). The ideology and practice is well exemplified by an English crusade against Christians across the channel whose allegiance was to a different pope. The “lewed” priest could be refering to the papal sponsorship of crusades against Christians that began in 1379, the year after the Great Schism. And he could be alluding to Bishop Despenser’s crusade on behalf of Urban VI in 1383.145 Whether Langland intended him to be doing the former or the latter or both has no consequences for the comments I am about to offer. For I take the English crusade led by the bishop of Norwich, Despenser, to be symptomatic of the church analyzed and attacked by both Liberum Arbitrium and the “lewed vicory.” And, for that matter, by their author, Langland.
Let us begin considering some of the theological and ecclesial dimensions of this English crusade.146 It displayed conventional doctrines of soteriology and the soteriological role of the church. Bishop Despenser had seen the possibilities of the schism to reindulge “his military tastes” manifested earlier in Italy and more recently in slaughtering agrarian workers involved in the great rising of 1381.147 In November 1378, Urban VI had already issued Nuper cum vinea, which promised indulgences to people who fought against those aligned with his rival, Clement VII. Despenser sought and was granted papal bulls (1381), “which gave him powers both to grant indulgences to those who took part in or contributed towards a crusade against the anti-pope, and to dispense clerics to take the cross,” a phrase used in that ecclesial culture without irony.148 After receiving the third bull (Dignum censemus, May 1382) empowering him to preach the crusade and act against the pope’s adversaries, he published all the bulls he had received, sent out fund-raisers, and “solemnly took the cross in St. Paul’s cathedral.”149
So the bishop now had papal authority to promise those who enlisted in the crusade plenary indulgences, a full remission of their sins. He was also licensed to promise such remission to those who paid for a particular soldier to fight in the forthcoming war and who contributed funds for hiring soldiers in general.150 Christ, we remember, “yaf Peres pardoun and power he graunted hym, / Myhte men to assoyle of alle manere synnes” (XXI.183–84). Are Bishop Henry and Pope Urban deploying the gift Christ bestowed on Piers? Within their own ideology, of course. To Langland, however, this evangelical gift was inseparable from the law of the new covenant (XXI.182–96). Neither a figure of Piers nor a priest who followed the model of the nonviolent church of the martyrs espoused by Liberum Arbitrium, the bishop of Norwich nevertheless acted with full papal support and within the conventional theology and soteriology of the late medieval church, unequivocally supported by his archbishop, William Courtenay.151
It is illuminating to observe the terms chosen by Henry Knighton, himself a religious, in his contemporary chronicle to describe the theology and politics of this English crusade.152 Knighton reports that the bishop had raised “an incalculable and unbelievably large sum of money,” while “it was believed that very many gave more than they could afford, in order to secure the benefit of absolution for themselves and their devoted friends” (ut beneficium absolucionis consequerentur pro se et suis benivolis amicis) (324/325). Knighton emphasized that this pardon was efficacious not only for the donors and their living friends but also “for their friends who had died.” Indeed, he states that the people “could not be absolved unless they contributed according to their ability and means” (aliter non absolvebantur, nisi tribuerunt secundum posse suum et facultatem suam) (324/325). This is an important observation on a line customarily taken by medieval and modern apologists, namely, that indulgences were issued only to those truly following the sacrament of penance. Knighton makes the reality of such exchanges perfectly clear: however penitent one might be for one’s sins, such indulgences were issued only to penitents who supplied funds or who were prepared to fight their fellow Christians (also known as schismatics and heretics).
Who were the priests working as confessors and financial agents for Bishop Despenser? Prominent among them were friars appointed by the bishop. Whatever the views of a parish priest, even if he were a “lewed vicory” with critical views on such crusades and their theology, he was obliged to allow Despenser’s mendicant agents to preach and to confess their parishioners. As for the friars, they were entitled to keep six pence of each pound they collected.153 Such was the complex treasury of merits allegedly entrusted by Christ to the ecclesial hierarchy for distribution to the faithful in response to their participation in the sacrament of penance and holy war.154
Knighton’s language in describing the conventional theology in these transactions is very helpful to anyone exploring Langland’s work. Knighton claims that many people paid for soldiers and archers while others joined the holy war at their own expense, and he explains why:
For the bishop had wonderful indulgences, with absolutions from punishment and from guilt [indulgencias mirabiles, cum absolucione a pena et a culpa] granted to him for the said crusade by Pope Urban VI, by whose authority both he and his agents absolved from punishment and from guilt both the living and the dead on whose behalf a sufficient contribution was made [cuius auctoritate tam mortuos quam vivos, ex quorum parte contribucio sufficiens fiebat, per se et suos commissarios a pena et culpa absolvebat].155
Indulgences assuring the recipient of pardon a pena et a culpa, remission of both punishment and guilt, now and beyond the grave, were extremely desirable, a plenary pardon indeed. Langland’s Passus IX, woven around “a pardoun a pena et a culpa” sent from Treuthe to Piers, works around the theology and practice of such claims in his church (IX.1–8). But whereas Knighton offers no critique of the “wonderful indulgences” dispensed by pope, bishop, and friar confessors, Langland’s exploration of the sacrament of penance, pardon, and indulgence unfolds across his whole work. He can certainly imagine Treuthe sending a pardon a pena et a culpa to his servant Piers struggling to discover the due relations between coercive jurisdiction and discipleship of Jesus Christ who had proclaimed a gospel of nonviolent love of enemies. But while he can imagine such a gift, he unveils this imagining in a passus which glosses the pardon with numerous voices. It also explores many topics and complex social issues before dissolving the pardon into two lines from the Athanasian Creed: “Et qui bona egerunt ibunt in vitam eternam; / Qui vero mala in ignem eternum” (And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting; and they that have done evil into everlasting fire) (IX.287–88). A priest notes that in these two lines, abstracted from their trinitarian and Christological contexts, “Y can no pardoun fynde / Bote Dowel and haue wel and god shal haue thy soule / And do yuele and haue euele and hope thow non othere / Bote he that euele lyueth euele shal ende” (I can find no pardon, / But only “Do well and have well and God shall have your soul / And do evil and have evil and expect nothing other / But he that lives evilly shall have an evil end) (IX.289–92).156
Returning from Langland’s pardon to Bishop Despenser’s, I wish to emphasize the incorporation of the crusading pardons in the sacraments (of order, of penance, and of the altar) in a complex network of political powers. So far I have discussed theological and ecclesial strands. But economic and political forces were interwoven. And this particular interweaving confronted all of Langland’s explorations of the church and Constantinian Christianity.
The processes of state formation and centralization occurred earlier in England than in continental Europe, while its forms of feudalism were “of such a kind as to enhance the prestige of the crown” and to favor “the maintenance and then the extension of royal justice and administrative authority.”157 Thus Marc Bloch wrote in his last book before being killed by the Nazis. Another peculiarity of the English, as Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer observe, was the way state formation involved the fusion of centralizing powers with “a high degree of involvement of local ruling elites in the exercise of governance,” including Parliament, the apparatus of justice, and county government.158 In this context it is not surprising that the crusade led by an English bishop could never have taken place without the consent of Crown and Parliament, both Lords and commons voting taxation to support this war-making. Contrary to Wyclif’s model of lay elites virtuously disendowing the church of temporalities in an act of armed charity, a model adapted by Liberum Arbitrium in Passus XVII, this historical event discloses the fusion of all elite and ecclesiastic hierarchies. We must ask why lay elites would consent to this crusade and contribute to its funding.
Norman Housley’s answer to this question centers on the influence of merchants, “London capitalists who dominated the commons.” For these people, he argues, the wool trade with Flanders was extremely important. They could already see their profits being undermined by political conflicts in Flanders and were confident that an imminent French presence, in support of Clement VII, would be disastrous for their own economic interests.159 Margaret Aston notes the drop in wool exports “from about 18,000 sacks in 1381–2 to about 11,000 in 1382–3” and the commercial difficulties this posed to English merchants. Their fears about the French were confirmed when in 1382 “Charles VI entered Bruges and confiscated the goods of English merchants. The wool traffic at Calais ground almost to a halt.” As significant as the obvious economic interests involved in the readiness of the English to crusade in Flanders was the fact that the Commons included in their reasons for using taxes to support this enterprise a wondrously holy intention: “the salvation of Holy Church.”160 This declaration is an important witness to conventional relations between religion and politics in late medieval England. These fundamental relations are often obscured in the powerful and hugely influential work by Eamon Duffy on “traditional religion” before the Reformation stripped the altars and attacked the people’s church.161
As for the Crown, royal finances were intermeshed with those of London merchants who were funding the long dynastic conflict over French sovereignty. But with Richard II only reaching his fifteenth birthday in 1382, John of Gaunt wielded substantial influence on government and himself had a distinctive agenda. This entailed his long-term attempt to occupy the throne of Castile and León (whose title he had acquired by marriage in 1372). In early 1382 he too had gained papal bulls from Urban VI to wage a crusade against the king of Castile, who was aligned with Pope Clement VII. As Aston has observed, “Dynastic ambitions of the house of Lancaster could now plausibly be represented in new disguise—a crusade of the orthodox papacy against the schismatic ally of schismatic France.”162 So Crown and Parliament had to choose one of the two English crusades on offer, or, of course, imagine a theology in which “the salvation of Holy Church” would demand the rejection of both crusades together with their Constantinian political theology. Such a rejection, however, in that culture of discourse, would have been outside the bounds of orthodoxy led by pope, archbishop, bishops, mendicant friars/fund-raisers, Crown, and Parliament. So the balance of material and ideological forces led to a final decision in favor of the bishop’s crusade made in the spring Parliament.163 The crusade would be financed by taxation as well as by resources from the indulgences authorized by papal bulls, bishop’s ministers, and the church’s soteriology. We see an event weaving together king, lords, merchants, Commons, secular clergy, friars (as confessors, preachers, and fund-raisers), and lay Christians supporting the crusade with ideology, money, and, in some cases, their own bodies. This is just the religious and political fabric that Langland is exploring and on which the “lewed vicory” comments. Langland himself shows us how he would certainly concur with William of Ockham’s eloquent remark on the papacy: “Christ, setting Saint Peter in authority over his sheep did not say, ‘Shear my sheep and make yourselves clothes from their wool,’ or ‘Milk my sheep, and drink or eat their milk,’ nor did he say ‘Slaughter my sheep, and eat their meat,’ but: ‘Feed my sheep [John 21:17]’, that is, ‘Keep, rule, guard, and serve them, to my honour and their utility.’”164
After praying for the conversion of the church’s cardinals, the “lewed” priest concludes his powerful oration by returning to “the commune.” It was their rejection of Christ’s covenant, the Eucharist, and Conscience’s counsel on restitution as intrinsic to the new covenant which brought him into Langland’s vision. His closing observations are perfectly in accord with what Langland has shown us and with what he will show us next. In this community, says the priest, only practices that tend to “wynnynge,” to material gain, will be reckoned as cardinal virtues. So, for example, Guile is now celebrated as Spiritus prudencie (XXI.451–58). Langland is, quite brilliantly, imagining a history in which the meaning of moral concepts is transformed. This is also what he was exploring in Pride’s prophecy envisaging a culture in which nobody could discern a difference between usury and just exchange (XXI.348–50). The Christian people turn Spiritus prudencie, a cardinal virtue intrinsic to practical reasoning and given by the Holy Spirit, into worldly wisdom, guile. To them, all the beautiful cardinal virtues seem vices: “And al tho fayre vertues as vises thei semeth” (XXI.456). As the brewer’s contempt for Spiritus iusticie has so well illustrated (XXI.396–402). Langland is exploring how neither the meaning of vices and virtues nor the central concepts of Christian theology will be independent of specific social formations and the practices they elicit and normalize. Indeed, in the long run such independence would lead to the unintelligibility of inherited moral discourse. This dialectic, between ethical concepts and social practices, is one which preoccupies Langland throughout Piers Plowman. It is foregrounded with special sharpness in the last two passus of the work.
The next two speakers are laymen who further exemplify and elaborate the critique of contemporary Christian culture offered by the “lewed vicory.” They claim to speak for the infused cardinal virtues of justice and fortitude sown by Piers as the gifts of the Holy Spirit (XXI.274–75, 289–308). James Simpson comments that we are being shown “the slipperiness in the very meaning of words denoting the cardinal virtues.”165 While this is true, we are also being shown how words and versions of the virtues slip, slide, and perish because they belong to particular cultural practices and habits which themselves change, decay, and perish. Langland’s work consistently resists idealist assumptions about language and its autonomy of determinate social formations. So he now introduces a lord who maintains that the ruthlessly exploitative and violent management of his manors is conducted with “riht and resoun,” the gifts of the Holy Spirit (“Spiritus intellectus”) and the infused cardinal virtue of courage or fortitude, “Spiritus fortitudinis.” Thus:
Thenne lowh ther a lord and “Bi this lihte!” saide,
“Y halde hit riht and resoun of my reue to take
Al that myn auditour or elles my styward
Conseileth me bi here acounte and my clerkes writyng.
With Spiritus intellectus they toke the reues rolles
And with Spiritus fortitudinis fecche hit, wolle he, null he.”
(XXI.459–64)
———
[Then a lord laughed there and “By these lights!” said,
“I hold it as right and reasonable to take from my reeve
All that my auditor or else my steward
Advise me by their accounts and my clerk’s records.
With Spiritus intellectus they took the reeve’s books
And with Spiritus fortitudinis I’ll fetch it, whether he likes it or not.”]
Not for the first time in the poem, Langland’s agrarian writing addresses socially determinate conflicts and forces, even though the scale of representation is minute in comparison to Passus VIII.
The forces mediated in the quotation just above include the sharpened conflicts between lords and tenants after the great plague of 1348–49. Tenants (bond and free) as well as landless laborers sought to improve their conditions in the changed demographic circumstances while landlords resisted such attempts using both local forms of power and national legislation.166 Langland’s laughing lord refers to the former. The reeve was normally an unfree tenant of the lord who was made responsible for organizing work, labor services, and the collection of the lord’s rents and fines. As Skeat observes, the reeve’s “rolles” provided a very detailed account of receipts and expenses.167 J.L. Bolton describes such rolls as having two parts. The face of the roll “dealt with cash transactions, recording receipts from rents, fines, the sale of produce or any other source, disbursements for labour in seed corn, and the sum left which ought to be paid over.” On the back, “very detailed grain and stock returns were made, showing the quantities of crops grown, how they were disposed of, whether to the household or to the market or to another manor to pay servants in kind, the numbers of stock, how many calves or lambs had been born, how many sold and so on.”168 And of course the detail was also part of a disciplinary structure for extracting the lord’s livelihood from tenants. We have come into a country far from the Pentecostal community where the Holy Spirit made Piers “my procuratour [agent] and my reue,” responsible for receiving just restitution essential to the life of charity in the community (XXI.258–61), for a harvest rooted in Christ’s gifts (XXI.317–32). But in this distant country which we have now entered, the language is both familiar and made strange. Langland has been cultivating us to discern just how strange our daily, literal discourses may be, how we see allegorical modes and allegorical vision. The letter kills, the spirit gives life, and God sends fit ministers of the New Testament not in the letter but in the spirit (“sufficientia nostra ex Deo est: qui et idoneos nos fecit ministros novi testamenti non litterae, sed Spiritus: littera enim occidit, Spiritus autem vivificat” [2 Cor. 3:6]). “No ‘death of the soul’ is more aptly given that name than the situation in which the intelligence which is what raises the soul above the level of animals, is subjected to the flesh by following the letter [carni subicitur sequendo litteram].” It is, Augustine continues, “a miserable kind of spiritual slavery to interpret signs as things, and to be incapable of raising the mind’s eye above the physical creation so as to absorb the eternal light” (Ea demum est miserabilis animae servitus, signa pro rebus accipere et supra creaturam corpoream oculum mentis ad hauriendium aeternum lumen levare non posse).169 But in the distant country, perhaps ravished by fortune “into the land of longyng,” with the prodigal Wille (XI.164–85), we too may forget how the letter can kill, and we may forget our apprenticeship in allegorical modes of writing and hermeneutics. So one would forget the key to Christian allegory, the one who makes meaning from history and redeems time, who with “A gobet [mouthful] of his grace” can “bigynne a tyme / That alle tymes of my tyme to profit shal turne” (V.99–101).170
In the speech of the lord who speaks after the “lewed vicory,” Christian speech has been emptied of Grace’s allegory, while Christian virtues have become whatever maximizes seigneurial dominion and material profit. Clerical skills are de-Christianized and transformed into a technology for strengthening the lord’s power over tenants and resources through “my clerkes writing” (XXI.459–62). This integration of clergy with increasing levels of exploitation (“efficiency,” from the perspective of the owners) was combined with their role in composing ideological legitimizations of current structures of power and wealth in a traditional Christian vocabulary. This kind of integration was intrinsic to Christian “clerks” in the Middle Ages and the Reformation but had been sharply criticized at the beginning of the poem (Prol. 85–94). That passage reminds us of an important part of the work done by the person the lord refers to as “my styward” (XXI.461):
And summe aren as seneschalles and seruen other lordes
And ben in stede of stewardus and sitten and demen.
(Prol. 93–94)
———
[And some assist lords as seneschals
And serve as stewards and sit and judge.]
The steward held the lord’s courts, where he made judgments on tenants and laborers. Because such clerks obey the lord who employs them, their writing will not remind him that Spiritus fortitudinis had nothing to do with coercive violence and everything to do with spiritual joy and strength in the face of injustice and adversity (see this infused cardinal virtue at XXI.289–96a). Clerks who are the lay lord’s servants will not direct him to the substantial treatment of this virtue by St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae (II-II.123–38). Aquinas explains that fortitude (or courage) contributes to sustaining people in a virtuous life in the face of difficult impediments which could overwhelm their will to do well. The virtue is most perfectly displayed in the Christian martyrs, who maintain justice, truth, and the love of God in the face of persecution and death (see esp. II-II.123.1–3, 121.1, ad 3). Langland has shown us such fortitude in the death of St. Thomas of Canterbury who “Amonges vnkynde cristene in holy kirke was slawe [slain], / And alle holy kirk honoured thorw that deyng [through that dying]” (XVII.274–76). But, of course, the lord’s own genealogy is that of the knightly killers of Becket in a cultural formation where Spiritus fortitudinis was de-Christianized. Langland’s attack on such appropriation of the clergy in the Prologue has common ground with the Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards displayed during Parliament in early 1395. For there the authors described such merging of “the temporal and the spiritual” as the attempt to serve two masters (see Matt. 6:42), which begot a “hermaphrodite or ambidexter.”171
Appropriately, the lay lord in the contemporary community is followed by a king. He turns out not to be the king initially divided between Conscience and Mede in Passus II–IV, since that figure was persuaded to support attempts at reformation under the guidance of Conscience and Reason in Passus IV. On the contrary, this lay sovereign has no interest in such reformation. He chooses to follow the lord in the reinvention of the cardinal virtues. His focus is Spiritus iusticie, the seed Conscience had just described as “The cheef seed that Peres sewe [sowed],” a seed essential to justification in Christ, to the fulfillment of the new covenant, to salvation (XXI.405–6, 182–98). In the Pentecostal community we saw that this seed leads people to be “trewe / With god,” to practice justice and equity without any capitulation to the socially powerful (XXI.297–308). As Aquinas had argued, justice is the habit whereby a person with a constant and stable will renders to each person her due (“ius suum”).172 As we saw, the Christian community received this virtue from the Holy Spirit. But in and under this king, justice becomes what sustains his unqualified domination of the “commune” and “lawe.” The latter is explicitly subjected to his will (XXI.465–70). Adopting traditional organicist imagery, the sovereign represents himself as the head of the social body (“ye ben bote membres and Y aboue alle”) and also head of the law. Maintaining that whatever he wills is by that fact just, his position approaches that ascribed to Richard II when he was deposed as a tyrant in 1399.173 Reiterating his headship of the community, he adds the extraordinary claim that he is “youre alere hele,” a phrase that lays claim to healing, even salvific powers (XXI.469–71). Skeat glossed alere hele as “the health (or safety) of you all” and rightly linked this to an earlier line in the same passus where Conscience used the word hele to signify “salvation” or “spiritual health” (XXI.388).174 Langland is showing us a secular organicism which jettisons St. Paul’s attention to the basis of solidarity, of charity in mutual care: “we being many, are one bread, one body, all that partake of one bread” (1 Cor. 10:17; see too 1 Cor. 12 with XXI.227–89). The sovereign’s relations with the church are assimilated to this model of nascent absolutism. The king appropriates conventional medieval language in which the armed elite is the defender of the Constantinian church.175 Earlier in the poem, such language was used by the knight and Piers in their attempt to organize agrarian production in contemporary England (VIII.23–34). Now the king declares that he himself is “cheef helpe” of the church and its defender (XXI.467, 472). He does so without even mentioning Christ, the Holy Spirit, or Piers, without so much as a glance at the soteriological narratives of Passus XVIII–XXI. In these contexts such an omission should be particularly striking. It casts a salutary light on neo-Wycliffite models of reformation such as that put forward by Liberum Arbitrium in Passus XVII. Reformation of the church by the king and lay elites would involve the exorbitant increase in royal power, something about which Wyclif himself was perfectly happy, as would be Henry VIII.176
The king in Passus XXI identifies all extractions he makes from the community as justice: he sees himself as owing nothing to anybody. Justice is thus reduced to an act of unilateral dominion over “alle” (XXI.474). He is the embodiment of those whom Jesus commanded his disciples not to imitate, namely, the kings of the Gentiles who lord it over their people, predatory authorities called benefactors by their victims but identified as tyrants by Jesus (Matt. 20:23–28; Luke 22:24–27; Mark 10:42–45). Nowhere in Passus XXI did the Holy Spirit advocate the need of the church of Christ for such an armed, regal defender. On the contrary, the missionary church, the church of the martyrs, carried no carnal weapons and did not depend on them. Nevertheless, clothed in the language of the virtues, this king presents himself as a defender of the faith, of “holy kyrke and clerge” (XXI.467, 472). As self-proclaimed defender of the church and king of the community, he assumes that whatever he takes from church and community must manifest the infused virtue of justice, “Spiritus iusticie” (XXI.473–74). This transformation of the meaning of justice persuades him that he is never in debt to anyone. He thus considers himself exalted above his fellow Christians who pray every day, at Jesus’s instructions, “forgive us our debts [dimitte nobis debita nostra], as we also forgive our debtors” (Matt. 6:12). He does not consider that he must fulfill the condition attached by Christ to his pardon, a condition mediated by Piers: “Redde quod debes” (XXI.182–90). So he insists that he can confidently receive Holy Communion (“Y may boldely be hoseled [receive communion] for Y borwe neuere” [XXI.475]). In this almost demonic confidence, the king illustrates how someone could receive Communion “not discerning the body of the Lord” (1 Cor. 11:17–34). He has unhinged the divine gift of justice from the theological virtues, from the infused cardinal virtues, and from the narratives of redemption (XVIII–XXI). In the modern Christian community, we seem to witness either outraged rejection of “godes body” with its covenant of restitution (XXI.383–85) or proud confidence of entitlement to communion in the body of Christ.
Conscience’s response to the lay sovereign is distinctly troubled, but it is also strangely de-Christianizing. Hence it is oddly collusive with the king. This is what he says:
“In condicioun,” quod Consience, “that thou the comune defende
And rewle thy rewme in resoun as riht wol and treuthe,
Than haue thow mayst al thyn askyng as thy lawe asketh.”
(XXI.477–79)
———
[“On condition,” said Conscience, “that you protect the commonwealth
And rule your realm well with reason and truth,
Then have you all your asking just as your law asks.”]
To observe de-Christianization here, as I have just done, may seem rather hyperbolic. But the comment is made in light of Conscience’s own extensive Christological discourse earlier in the passus (XXI.1–199). There he interpreted the vision Wille received in the Mass, when “men yede [went] to offrynge,” the vision in which the bleeding Christ was manifest in “Peres armes, / His colours and his cote armure” (XXI.1–14). When asked by Wille about the relations between the names Jesus and Christ, he offered a substantial life of Christ up to his commissioning of Piers in the Resurrection and Christ’s return “at domesday” (XXI.26–198). This account was immediately followed by a vision of the Holy Spirit “to Peres and to his felawes” which Conscience interpreted for Wille (XXI.200–212). We should also recall that it is Conscience who has just been dispensing the sacrament with “godes body thereunder” (XXI.383–90). Now a cloud of forgetfulness apparently obscures these central Christian narratives, doctrines, and practices from his attention. It is as though the force of the king’s rhetoric has disoriented his knowledge. This renders him a conscientia without scientia essential to an instructor in Christian living, scientia he has displayed in Passus XXI just as in Passus III. In the present moment he is only capable of suggesting some distressingly vague mitigation to the king’s tyranny and to his perversion of ethical language, namely, that royal power should be used in reason as right and truth demand, in defense of “the comune.” But this is exactly how the king has described his practices. He did so while claiming inspiration from the teaching of Spiritus iusticie even as he discloses that the substance and teleology of the cardinal virtue has been abandoned. Conscience seems to have forgotten something else in his reply to the king. One of the qualities of Spiritus iusticie is “to correcte the kyng” if the latter does any wrong, to be a fearless judge of the powerful without any compromise (XXI.302–8). Has he also forgotten that he is “goddes clerk and his notarie” (XVI.192) rather than a mere adjunct of secular power? Apparently so. And this, Langland shows, is among the disastrous consequences of Constantinian Christianity. This showing also contributes to our growing understanding of the ironies in the neo-Wyclifite reformation of Constantinianism proposed by Liberum Arbitrium. Such a reformation, massively strengthening the centralizing power of the monarch and the wealth of lay elites, would subject church and Christian ethics even more uncritically to the new Constantine. This would move from the realm of critical speculation to historical event in sixteenth-century England, with Henry VIII, and then his daughter Elizabeth, as the new Constantine.177
Langland is also showing the difficulties encountered by Conscience in contemporary culture and its moral language. These are the difficulties Pride promised when he predicted Conscience would become unable to discern a Christian from a heathen and no merchant would be able to know whether his profits were gained with right, with wrong, or with usury (XXI.344–50). Such, in Langland’s view, is the present cultural moment as he wakes and writes his vision (XXI.481). It might seem that he is exploring questions traditionally debated by late medieval theologians addressing the conscience. For example, in the Summa Theologiae Aquinas offers extensive discussion of synderesis, conscience, erring conscience, and erring reason. The difficulties that most seem to intrigue him concern determining whether an erring conscience binds and whether an erring conscience can excuse.178 Aquinas’s teaching on whether the erring conscience or reason binds and whether such error excuses us certainly throws up fascinating cases—for example, if the erring reason or conscience dictates that belief in Christ is evil but the will nevertheless adheres to Christ according to Christian creeds. Aquinas determines that such an act is evil. This is because the will tends to Christian belief as evil, even though belief in Christ is good (ST I-II.19.5, resp.). Another example: if erring reason or conscience tells someone to have sexual union with another’s spouse and the person’s will follows this instruction, then this will is evil because such ignorance of the divine law is culpable ignorance. However, if the person’s reason or conscience errs in mistaking another’s spouse for her or his own spouse and the error arises from ignorance of circumstance, then such ignorance excuses. What seems an adulterous act in this case is not so, and the will is excused by a licitly rather than culpably ignorant reason or conscience (ST I-I.19.6, resp.). This is hardly as searching as the exploration Shakespeare gives us in Measure for Measure when Angelo goes to bed with a woman whose identity he mistakes. But one can see how such cases might be developed into more complex fables than Aquinas’s examples. Langland does not pursue these in Shakespeare’s modes, but he has composed an extraordinarily complex situation that goes beyond the bounds of Aquinas’s discussions of conscience. Let us consider this further.