Langland is exploring a form of cultural revolution in which he believed himself to be immersed. He has just dramatized processes of de-Christianization engulfing those who are Christians. Think of the following: the people collectively reject the body of Christ; they reject Christ’s forgiveness with its covenant; the brewer rejects the infused cardinal virtues and so their author, the Holy Spirit; the lord transforms the meaning of the virtues given by the Holy Spirit into antithetical forces; the king incorporates the language of the eucharistic sacrament and the infused cardinal virtues into alien, antagonistic practices under a new Constantinianism. Writing at the end of the twentieth century, Pope John Paul II puts very well what Langland was envisioning:
Dechristianization, which weighs heavily upon entire peoples and communities once rich in faith and Christian life, involves not only the loss of faith or in any event its becoming irrelevant for everyday life, but also, and of necessity, a decline or obscuring of the moral sense. This comes about both as a result of a loss of awareness of the originality of Gospel morality and as a result of an eclipse of fundamental principles and ethical values themselves.179
John Paul II reflects on the ways that Christians are caught up in such cultural processes: “In a widely dechristianized culture, the criteria employed by believers themselves in making judgments and decisions often appear extraneous or even contrary to those of the Gospel” (par. 88). Langland himself, writing in the later fourteenth century, is representing what he imagines as just such a moment—one that includes its own grounds for the pope’s lament that “amid today’s growing secularism” many people, including Christians, “think and live ‘as if God did not exist’” (par. 88).
Near the beginning of his own work, Langland showed a figure descending from Treuthe to complain that people in the contemporary world are utterly circumscribed by the social “mase” they inhabit:
The moste party of this peple that passeth on this erthe,
Haue thei worschip in this world thei wilneth no bettere.
(I.7–8)
———
[Most of the people that pass through this earth
Are satisfied with success in this world.]
The heavenly speaker tells Wille that modern Christians have set aside the tradition of the faith and the teleology these traditions inculcate: “Of othere heuene then here thei halde no tale” (The only heaven they think of is here) (I.9). The speaker turns out to be “Holy Churche” (I.72). I shall return to this juxtaposition of the modern pope and the medieval writer toward the end of this essay, but for the moment it suffices to recall Holy Church’s judgment in relation to the situation Langland has unfolded in Passus XXI. Both are congruent with what John Paul II called “growing secularism” (par. 88). No wonder that despite his encounters with Christ, the joys of Easter, and the promises of Pentecost, Langland represents the figure of the poet writing his vision with a heavy spirit (XXI.481; XXII.1–3).
For what us aLangland has just shown bout cultural transformation, political power, and the language of the virtues belongs to a history which was to trouble even Thomas Hobbes. Unhinged from their cultural role in building a virtuous community, the cardinal virtues now name practices that had been traditionally understood as vices, forms of life inimical to human flourishing. So, as we have just observed, Langland displayed the virtue fortitude (courage) as the name for a lord’s violent exploitation of tenants, the virtue of justice as the name for voracious tyranny. There is a rhetorical term for such redescriptions: paradiastole. It has been illuminatingly studied by Quentin Skinner in his work on Hobbes. He shows that paradiastole was a technique in forensic speech designed to redescribe an adversary’s claims to virtues such as justice in terms of adjacent vices.180 But its cultural implications were not lost on historians and moralists. In his Bellum Catalinae, Sallust has Cato complain that “we have lost the true name of things. It is due to the fact that the squandering of other people’s goods is nowadays called liberality, while audacity in wrong-doing is called courage” (8). Milton’s Satan is a virtuoso in this particular form of paradiastolic speech as he lays claim to “courage” in Paradise Lost I–II, V–VI. Seneca too complained that we name our vices as virtues while “evil things present themselves to us in the guise of virtues” (11). In his account of paradiastole, Skinner argues that it was put to “increasingly provocative uses” in the sixteenth century (28). He offers copious and thoroughly engaging examples of such uses, none of which are actually more “provocative” than Langland’s. Skinner also gives nice examples of objections against paradiastolic rhetoric and ethics by those he calls “conservative moralists” (28–31). It is in this context that he sets Hobbes’s sustained and “systematic critique of paradiastole” (31). Skinner follows this critique through Hobbes’s works to Leviathan (1651). There the fifteenth chapter is notable for the even greater pessimism with which he confronts “the dangers of using the device” (37). Writing after the civil wars, Hobbes brooded on the fragility of the polity, the malleability of moral language, and the material interests shaping scriptural hermeneutics. He saw good reason to maintain his voluntarism and argue that “private appetite is the measure of Good and Evil,” a situation that can easily reduce us to what he considered to be the state of nature, the war of all upon all, the condition of “mere Nature” (37; see Leviathan chaps. 15 and 13). Skinner demonstrates that while Hobbes was “deeply troubled by the dangers of paradiastole,” he insisted that “all existing attempts to neutralize the threat have fallen far short of the mark” (46).181
We can leave Hobbes at this point because his responses to political and linguistic forces he found anarchic and terrifying are not Langland’s. Nor is his version of the “state of nature,” the human person, and Christian faith within shouting distance of Langland’s.182 His attempts to invent some kind of discursive stability through a putatively geometric model of rationality together with his voluntarism, nominalism, and absolute centralization of power in the lay sovereign, including power over scriptural interpretation, are solutions to religious conflicts and civil disorder utterly alien to Langland. Perhaps, though, in some respects they are less alien to Marsilius of Padua and some aspects of fourteenth-century philosophical theology.183
Despite obvious theological and ethical disparities between Langland and Hobbes, following Skinner may help us see how Langland has introduced paradiastolic speech to identify a profound challenge to Christian-Aristotelian ethics and its language of the virtues. Skinner unfolds a history whose relevance seems not to have been noticed by those who write on Langland and the later Middle Ages, or by those who tell grand narratives of the intellectual and cultural history of modernity. Yet in the gripping episodes which conclude Passus XXI, continued into Passus XXII, Langland discloses the significance of tendencies he discerned in his culture by dramatizing paradiastolic speech and ascribing it to the lay ruling elites. This classical discourse is open to a different rhetorical tradition, that of biblical prophecy. So Isaiah hears God object to what sounds very like the paradiastolic language of Langland’s lord and his king in Passus XXI: “Woe to you that call evil good, and good evil: that put darkness for light, and light for darkness: that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter” (Isa. 5:20). But this does not lead into the specificity of Langland’s dramatization of the lay elites and the tradition of the virtues quite as illuminatingly, I think, as does the classical material Skinner discusses.
Indeed, in the poem’s final passus, Langland suggests how no way emerges to “neutralize” (in Skinner’s vocabulary) the paradiastolic subversion of the virtues and the language in which we learn them. This passus actually begins without any recognition of Christian resources for resisting such subversion as we encounter the simulacrum of another cardinal virtue: Temperance in the guise of “Nede.” In such contexts Wille’s misery is completely understandable (XXI.481; XXII.1–50). His hunger is as spiritual as it is carnal (XXII.1–3). Besides witnessing the triumph of paradiastolic speech in those who govern society, the “lewed vicory” had observed the same triumph “among the peple.” For he, like Langland, discerned the way Spiritus prudencie (the cardinal virtue of prudence given by the Holy Spirit) had become the term for describing what was traditionally known as the vice of “gyle” (XXI.455–58; cf. II.179–96). This perversion, the priest rightly observes, is bound up with the way “the comune” now prioritizes the making of profits, “wynnynge,” over pursuing justice and rationality as defined by Christian tradition (XXI.451–53). Furthermore, Wille has also witnessed the whole community refusing to receive the Eucharist, “bred yblessed and godes body therunder” (XXI.385, 391–402). In his need he now encounters a personification named Nede (XXI.4–50). This figure has proved to be among the most enigmatic in the poem. Some scholars intepret him as a representative of Langland’s theology of poverty and need; others see him as a harbinger of Antichrist.184 Having addressed Langland’s theology of poverty elsewhere at length, here I wish to concentrate on Nede’s teachings on the cardinal virtues, especially the one with which he claims identification, “Spiritus temperancie,” the infused virtue of temperance.185
Nede directs the wretched Wille to the vision of the previous passus. He also asks why Wille has not excused his form of life by invoking Spiritus temperancie, just as the tyrannical king and others had excused theirs by invoking cardinal virtues in their self-legitimation (XXII.4–9). He does not offer any overt criticism of the turn to paradiastolic speech in these precedents. So R.M. Adams responds to Nede’s invocation of such antecedents as having “something like the quality of the proverbial dead mackerel in the moonlight: it both shines and stinks.”186 Even if one were to hear irony in Nede’s voice, the invocation does not sound good. Nor can it be much help to Wille who has not been challenged to justify himself or his life in the vision to which Nede refers. He had certainly been challenged many passus and many years before. In Passus V he had encountered Reason and Conscience as he wrote satirical poetry in London, wandering in remembrance and eschewing manual labor as befitted a literate clerical person. Reason and Conscience had questioned him sharply about his way of life and its place in the community. Wille had defended his nomadic life, pointing out that he begged his daily bread “Withoute bagge or botel,” in return offering prayers (V.10–52). He separates himself from those who begged until their bags were crammed full, a group fiercely attacked in Piers Plowman (Prol. 42; IX.98–104, 153–75). He thus also separates himself from friars whose mendicancy was, as Langland maintained, dialectically united with a massive accumulation of material and political resources. But despite this restraint, this apparent practice of temperance governed by his daily need, Wille’s self-justification was rejected by Reason and Conscience. They were troubled by the unanswerability of Wille’s life to any traditional vocation in the community (V.12–21, 26–34, 89–91).187 And with good reason, as it turns out. For in the community founded by the Holy Spirit in Passus XXI there are apparently no mendicant vocations.188 Grasping the objections of Reason and Conscience (which are emphatically not those of people trying to impose the Statute of Laborers on lewed working people), Wille had abandoned his self-justifications. In a deeply moving prayer of hope and faith (theological virtues encountered again in Passus XVIII and XIX), he repeated and followed the directions of his inner teacher “to the kyrke” (V.92–108). But in Passus XXII Nede is trying to persuade Wille that had he invoked the virtue of temperance he would have seen he needed no such conversion, no such repenting prayer for God’s grace to redeem wasted time so that “all tymes of my tyme to profit shal turne” (V.93–101). Nede is also oblivious of Wille’s recent encounter with Christ (XIX–XX) and the Holy Spirit (XXI). His rhetoric, directed against Reason and Conscience in Passus V, encourages us to ask what even constitutes the virtue of temperance in Nede’s discourse.
Nede understands Temperance in only one way: as a guide to those living by the conventional medieval teaching that in extreme need all things become common goods.189 Guided by Spiritus temperancie, the needy “hath no lawe no neuere shale falle in dette” (XXII.10). So this cardinal virtue, like the others reconfigured in paradiastolic speech, becomes a means to set aside “the obligation of ‘redde quod debes,’ the doctrine of restitution,” proclaimed by the risen Christ.190 His claim is akin to the king’s at the end of Passus XXI. The king could boldly receive Communion because he is convinced he never borrows but only takes whatever he wants and that such tyrannical dominion is legitimate, indeed, is justice (XXI.465–76).
It is helpful to recollect Aquinas’s explanation of Christian teaching invoked by Nede, including the doctrine of temperance. Aquinas explains why everything became common in states of urgent need during his study of justice in the Summa Theologiae. Obligations to the poor and needy are a matter of natural law (“ex naturali jure”).191 Instead of “no lawe” (XXII.10), instead of setting temperance over the other virtues (XXII.23–34), Aquinas would encourage Wille to reflect on Nede’s proposals in the light of justice and the particularities of his situation. This is what Reason and Conscience did with such delicacy and force in Passus V. As for the virtue temperance: Aquinas makes it very clear that temperance is not a virtue exclusively, or even primarily, concerned with the destitute. It is a virtue ordering our concupiscent appetites, our natural desires for the great pleasures of sex, food, and drink, with right reason. Temperance especially orders our sensual, tactile pleasures toward our true flourishing, but it also concerns all the needs we have in living a good life as embodied beings. In fact, Aquinas includes a substantial study of sexuality, virginity, and marriage in his account of temperance.192 Turning back to the brief description of the infused virtue of temperance in Passus XXI, we find that it was given as a means of ordering our “kynde” in our relations to goods, wealth, language, clothing, and provocations from other people (XXI.281–88). There is no suggestion that this virtue flourishes only, or even especially, among the mendicant poor.193
The comparison with Aquinas helps one grasp the peculiarities in Nede’s version of Temperance. Langland is showing us a transformation of another cardinal virtue as it is unhinged from the contexts established by Grace and Piers: the making of a Christian community of mutual love with resources flowing from the person and work of Christ (XXI.289, 319–34). We should also recall Aquinas explaining how without the presence of prudence (the cardinal virtue perfecting reason) we will simply lack temperance (ST II-II.141.1, ad 2). Furthermore, he explains that in any ranking of the cardinal virtues, temperance is below prudence and justice and fortitude. This is because prudence perfects reason, whereas the other cardinal virtues perfect the appetite powers (insofar as these participate in reason). Justice is in the will (the rational appetite) and so approaches nearer reason than temperance and fortitude, which are, respectively, in the concupiscible and irascible part of the soul (ST I-II.61.1, resp.).194 Nede’s version of Temperance is an utterly diminished travesty of the virtue we find in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, Aquinas, book II of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (or Comus). Such diminishment contributes to Langland’s explorations of the possibility that the modern church might have become a polity unable to provide contexts in which the gifts of Grace in the cardinal virtues are intelligible to Christians. Paradiastolic speech is a particularly overt symptom of this, but, as Nede illustrates, the discursive consequences also have subtler manifestations.195
After Nede’s rebukes, Wille falls asleep to receive the work’s final vision (XXII.51–386). Immediately he sees Antichrist attacking the field so recently cultivated by Piers with the gifts and guidance of the Holy Spirit. In human form, Antichrist uproots their plants and cultivates human needs (XXII.52–57). This profound image encourages us to think of the malleability of needs and the way that in the culture represented by Mede (II–IV) they can tend to infinity. Aquinas describes this with great lucidity in his account of market relations, trade, and the pursuit of accumulating profit. Immersion in a culture driven to pursue exchange not to provide the necessities of life for the community but for financial gain (“propter lucrum”) will make its subjects develop a boundless desire for wealth which tends to the infinite (“quae terminum nescit, sed in infinitum tendit” [ST II-II.77.4, resp.]). In multiplying our so-called nedes (XXII.55), Antichrist teaches us to forget the word enough. This is the modern form of what is called “the world” by the “pris neet [prize ox] of Peres plouh, passynge alle othere” (XXI.262–66), the evangelist John. For example, he ascribes to Christ the following language: “If the world [mundus] hate you, know ye that it hath hated me before you” (John 15:18); “I am not of the world” (non sum de hoc mundo) (John 8:23); “I pray not for the world” (non pro mundo rogo) (John 17:9).196 And in what were read as his epistles he wrote against the love of “the world” (1 John 2:15). Yet in the Prologue to Piers Plowman we were told that the poet’s vision is “Of alle manere men, the mene [poor] and the riche, / Worchyng [working] and wandryng as this world ascuth [asks us]” (Prol. 20–21). In John’s context this is a troubling observation, but it will take the whole poem to unfold it in light of the divine vision of love. “Deus caritas” (God is love), observes Holy Church in the next passus (I.82), quoting John, who also wrote, “For God so loved the world as to give his only begotten son” (sic enim Deus dilexit mundum, ut filium suum unigenitum daret) (John 3:16). While he affirms this, John commented on Antichrist as one “who denieth that Jesus is the Christ” and “denieth the Father and the Son,” one who “dissolveth Jesus” (qui solvit Iesum) (1 John 2:22, 4:3). Such certainly is Antichrist’s aim in Piers Plowman.197 In the face of the “world” and Antichrist, one might expect Christians to deploy the resources poured into the church by Christ and the Holy Spirit with Piers as Grace’s “plouhman my procuratour [agent] and my reue” (XXI.256). One certainly wonders what might be the outcome of Conscience’s erring attempt to turn the church into a fortress, how “inside” and “outside” might have to be reconfigured against that model. But whatever Langland does with these issues, one might expect some staging of an allegorical battle.198
Under the sign of Antichrist and the contemporary world, Langland pours forth visions of rampant individualism, desperate hedonism, panic, and the complete abandonment of Christian narratives so recently and so powerfully dramatized (XVIII–XXI). The risen Christ spoke some words that were traditionally taken to promise the church’s indefectibility: “behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world” (ecce vobiscum sum omnibus diebus usque ad consummationem saeculi) (Matt. 28:20). How does Langland envisage the life of this promise under Antichrist’s attack?
In one perspective, the whole poem has been an exploration of this question, from the Prologue on. But now the inquiry is taken up in circumstances that seem distinctly unpropitious. As Antichrist’s forces attempt to uproot “the crop of treuthe” (XXII.53–55), we are forced to reconsider a crucial part of the model of the church as a fortress designed by Kynde Wit and Conscience. It turns out that the language of “within” and “without,” of defended castle and external threat, is misleading. What had been imagined as “within” is now shown to be also and simultaneously “without” (XXII.58–73). Langland names certain groups of Antichrist’s energetic followers: friars, monks, a hedonistic lord, and a king (XXII.58–73). But this is only the beginning of Langland’s final representations of the church under the actions of “a fals fende Auntecrist” (XXII.64). So it would be premature to determine the relations between this vision and the earlier commentaries on the contemporary church by Reason (V.140–79) and by Liberum Arbitrium (XVI–XVII). Premature to determine the scope and force of Christ’s promise of the church’s indefectibility. For Passus XXII evolves in a series of attacks in which the constitution of Antichrist’s army is gradually unfolded by the seven capital sins. Now they are no longer distracted by being drawn toward repentance as in Passus VI–VII. But despite their apparent triumph over “all folke” formed in the modern church (XXII.64), they meet with some opposition. This is once again led by Conscience. Piers and the Holy Spirit who had been so present in the making of the apostolic church in Passus XXI continue to be absent. Nor is there any talk of a legitimate vicar to stand for Piers in the contemporary church.199 On this sequence I now want to concentrate.
Langland sets it in postplague England where “fewe” seemed to survive the Black Death and its return in 1361 (XXII.110: well over 40 percent of the people died during the plague of 1349).200 Conscience had expected such terror to induce conversion, but this is another of his errors and one I shall address below (section XI). For the moment suffice it to note that the response to the massive rates of mortality from the plague is not conversion but a desperately hedonistic turn to the goods of fortune. This recapitulates on a collective scale the earlier story of Wille’s own renunciation of moral questions in despair and his own collapse into hedonism, ravished by Fortune “into the lond of longyng and loue” (XI.164–85; XXII.110–20, 143–55). As he moves to the collective scale, Langland is drawing traditional accounts of sin toward the figuration of a society experiencing de-Christianization. And if medieval society was a Christian society, the one so powerfully described in Duffy’s account of what he calls “traditional religion” in The Stripping of the Altars, de-Christianization of society will be within the church, even if it is a fortress church. If so, some reconfigurations of church and world will belong to such a process. In dramatizing ruminations in this domain, Langland makes a significant move as he considers the part of Antichrist’s forces led by Covetyse (XXII.121–42).201
In the earlier sequence of the seven mortal sins, Langland had paid great attention to Covetyse as he explored the pervasiveness of commercial practices that were considered vicious in traditional Christian ethics (VI.196–307). Although Covetyse found the language of restitution unintelligible (VI.234–38), he was led by Repentance at least to identify his involvement in usury as sin (VI.239–307). But in Antichrist’s army there is no glimmer of sin and no will to repent. On the contrary, there is a total commitment to overwhelm “Conscience and cardinal vertues,” to deploy all the guile and deceit of the market, all the tricks of language, “glosynges and gabbynges,” all that was traditionally known as avarice, greed, and simony. So it is especially striking that Langland locates the hierarchy of the contemporary church in this very part of the army assaulting “al the crop of treuthe” (XXII.53–57). “Simony” is the name for the commodification of spiritual gifts, for the establishment of a financial market in the offices and powers of the church. Widely attacked and much lamented in medieval culture, it represents the union of the contemporary “world” with the church, the church with the “world.”202 Here, woven into this union, legitimizing this union, Langland places the pope and the prelates of the modern church. The pope joins with Simony to make prelates and to make them “holde with Auntecrist” (XXII.127–28).
Why does Langland present this extraordinarily provocative alliance of the pope, the alleged successor of Peter, the modern Piers, with Antichrist? Langland’s answer is specific. Pope and prelates nowadays belong to networks in which covetousness and simony are so normalized that any challenge to them is construed as an attack on the very identity of the church. Nor were such construals by the hierarchy and its defenders mistaken. For the church was inextricably bound up with these networks and the interests they form. That is, at least, the direction in which Langland’s judgment was confirmed by the hierarchy’s own insistence that challengers to its “temperaltees” (XXII.128), its temporal possessions and the political force that went with these, were heretics. The defense of ecclesial temporalities was thus unequivocally assumed by the current guardians of the church’s identity to be a core component of the faith. Such assumptions were evident in the earliest papal attacks on Wyclif’s teaching (1377), before he had formulated eucharistic heresies, as well as in the later Blackfriars Council (1382). One of the propositions condemned as heretical at Blackfriars was the argument that “it is contrary to holy scripture that ecclesiastical ministers may not have temporal possessions.”203 So there can be no doubt that both the papacy and the leaders of the English church in Langland’s time were adamant that defending the material foundations of the church as a major landholder and political power was essential to the defense of Christian faith and the church of Christ. It is this identification of faith, church, and the maintenance of temporal power in the contemporary social formation that Langland sees as a mark of Antichrist.
The heavenly figure who discloses herself as Holy Churche (I.72) had complained that Mede is as familiar in “the popes palays” as she herself (II.4–24). Many strands in the poem’s early passus confirm this judgment as they display the church’s permeation by the forces of the market, from the commodification of sacraments and Christ’s pardon to the interpretation of scripture and clerical education.204 These highly critical strands certainly belonged to a reformist agenda that was a distinct and permanent part of orthodox ecclesial traditions, as I observed in the preface to this book. But in identifying the contemporary church’s commitment to “temperaltees” with Antichrist and in identifying the contemporary papacy and prelates with Antichrist, Langland goes beyond the boundaries of orthodox reformism.205 The removal of material and temporal power from the church, together with its legitimizing theology, would have transformed the late medieval church, its hierarchy, its priesthood, and clerical relations with the laity, including those such as Hawisia Mone, Walter Brut, and the priest William White (burned to death in 1428).206 Such a transformation would have entailed what James Simpson calls “cultural revolution.” But in no way would such a reformation beyond orthodox reformation have required distinctively Lutheran inflections of the theology of justification.207
Perhaps, however, any such move beyond reformism must have depended on a Wycliffite ideology and merged with it. Fine scholarship by Pamela Gradon and Anne Hudson has given us some of the most nuanced and learned accounts we have of this difficult question insofar as it concerns Langland.208 Certainly Langland has both Reason and Liberum Arbitrium develop extensive critiques of the modern church earlier in the poem. These include moments that by the late 1370s and 1380s would smack of Wycliffite ideology (XVI.242–85; XVII.51–64, 73–124, 204–38). In preaching “tofore al the reume [realm]” (V.114), Reason turns to religious orders. He combines traditional satire on their luxurious material life and their aristocratic haughtiness with the threat of expropriation by “the kyng and his consayl” (V.143–72a). Later Liberum Arbitrium recalls the donation of Constantine touched on in the preface in discussing the term Constantinian Christianity:
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)
———
[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.”]
In the preface I commented on Langland’s understanding of Constantinianism and its subordination of church to contemporary political power, with Christian teaching becoming the ideological cement of the current social formation. But Liberum Arbitrium does not leave matters with the angel’s lament about such poison. He calls for “medecyne” to counteract the “venym” of “possession” in the church. This medicine is to be the disendowment of the church by lay elites:
Taketh here londes, ye lordes, and lat hem lyue by dymes
Yf the kynges coueyte in Cristes pees to lyuene.
For if possession be poysen and inparfit hem make,
The heuedes of holy churche and tho that ben vnder hem,
Hit were charite to deschargen hem for holy churche sake
And purge hem of the olde poysen ar more perel falle.
For were presthode more parfyte, that is, the pope formost
That with moneye maynteyneth men to werre vppon cristene—
Ayen the lore of oure lord as seynt Luk witnesseth,
Michi vindictam, &c.—
His preyeres with his pacience to pees sholde brynge
Alle londes into loue and that in lytel tyme;
The pope with alle prestes pax vobis sholde make.
(XVII.227–38)
———
[Take their lands, you lords, and let them live by tithes
If the kings desire to live in Christ’s peace.
For if possession is poison and makes them imperfect,
The heads and their subordinates of Holy Church,
It would be charity to relieve them for Holy Church’s sake
And purge them of the old poison before the peril grows.
For were the priesthood more perfect, that is, first of all the pope
Who maintains men with money to war upon Christians
Against our Lord’s teaching as Saint Luke testifies;
Vengeance belongeth to me,
His prayers with his patience should bring to peace
All lands into love and that in little time;
The pope should make pax vobis with all priests.]
In her essay “Langland and the Ideology of Dissent,” Pamela Gradon composed an intellectual history offering a meticulous set of cautions to the propensity in commentary on Langland to bring many of his views under the alleged influence of Wyclif.209 Gradon does some important decoupling of Langland and Wyclif based in broad knowledge of Christian traditions. But in her analysis of the proposal for disendowment quoted above, she concludes that Langland “echoes” Wyclif’s position condemned by the pope in 1377.210 Given the centrality in Wyclif’s ecclesiology of his demand that lay elites use their material powers to disendow the church, this conclusion is plausible. But it is worth recalling that in the 1350s the authorities of Oxford University were complaining about a scholar who “at the devil’s own prompting publicly determined in the schools against the possessions of the church, damnably asserting to be lawful for founders of churches to take away goods dedicated to God and the church on account of the abuses of clerics, and to transfer and apply them directly to seculars and knights.”211 Margaret Aston traces such views, certainly beyond reformation acceptable to the church, from the 1350s to the “Lollard disendowment bill,” probably proposed in 1410 (49–56). She finds that the mixture of politics (financing the long war with France; heavy taxation; popular opposition to taxation, most powerfully embodied in the great rising of summer 1381) and religion was “not initially altered by Wyclif’s contribution” to the arguments about the church’s temporalities. She finds that at least one of the heresies and errors condemned at the Blackfriars Council in May 1382 was a very familiar “heresy”: “That temporal lords may at will take away temporal goods from habitually offending churchmen” (52). Langland’s Liberum Arbitrium was clearly drawing on the same traditions as Wyclif in the same political contexts and offering exactly the same material payoffs to lay elites and king: “Taketh here londes, ye lordes.” Yet Liberum Arbitrium strikingly claims that such action will be shaped by the theological virtue of charity, that is, a virtue infused by God and leading the graced person to God, a goal far in excess of our nature.212
And it is this understanding of charity as demanding the disendowment of the church by the lay sword which marks a distinctive convergence with Wyclif’s theology.213 But if, as Gradon says, Liberum Arbitrium “echoes” Wyclif in this domain of reformist ideology, can such charity be the same virtue unfolded later with such extraordinary scope from the tree of Charity in Passus XVIII, through the lives of Christ, including his manifestation as the Samaritan, into the great oration on human salvation and divine love in the harrowing of hell (XIX–XX)? One might assume that this must be so, especially given Liberum Arbitrium’s authority as “Cristes creature” well known in “Cristes court” (XVI.167–68), the one who guides Wille to the tree of Charity, “Cristes oure fode” (XVIII.14). Yet Liberum Arbitrium had also explained to Wille that “holy churche” must be understood as “Charite.” This charity, to which I shall return, is “Lif in loue,” making a “loue-knotte of leute and of lele byleue” (love knot of loyalty and true belief) (XVII.125–29). Such a model of charity, Christian faith, and church does not map very congruently onto the Wycliffite one of armed and coercive reformation by an elite of lay Christians against many groups of fellow Christians. After all, Christian ethics, at least for Langland in this most Christocentric of poems, will have to be disciplined by the visions of Christ’s practice in the Incarnation and his evangelical precepts. How do we see him in the armed elite, a chivalric knight?
We see him as an extraordinary, corrective parody of such a figure in Passus XIX–XXI. He appears as the Samaritan of Luke 10:25–37 sitting on a mule and riding swiftly to joust in Jerusalem. Langland defers the joust for a dazzling passus in which he narrates the story of the Samaritan rescuing Semyvief, the half-alive figure of humanity assaulted and abandoned in the wilderness. In this narration he incorporates its rich tradition of allegory, exploring central themes of the theology of divine grace, sacraments, church, and human agency.214 After this the Samaritan teaches Wille about faith in the Trinity, to which Wille has been sharply dismissive, and explains how the only sin against the Holy Spirit, the only sin that will alienate humans from divine love, is “unkyndenesse” (XIX.80–334). On Palm Sunday Wille receives a vision which elaborates the figure of Christ as Charity the Samaritan knight riding barefoot on an ass to joust in Jerusalem. With Faith’s help he learns that Jesus will joust to free humanity. But his armaments consist not of the signs of knightly power but only the “armes” of the agriculturalist Piers, “humana natura,” human nature in its utter vulnerability and fragility (XX.1–25). So Langland moves to the narratives of crucifixion and the triumphant liberation of imprisoned humanity from hell by Christ revealed in his divine life. Appropriately enough, it is in hell that we encounter the technologies of the contemporary elites’ forms of war, demonic technologies whose final end is figured in the confrontation with the light and voice of Christ (Passus XX). Once more, on Easter Sunday during Mass, Wille has a vision of Christ as crucified conqueror, still in the “armes” of the plowman but now “so blody” and with Christ’s own “croes” (XXII.1–14).215
These figurations and narratives of Christ together with their theological ethics belong to a composition of Charity which takes us beyond the Constantinian reform of the church produced by Wyclif and Liberum Arbitrium. Invoking the armed lay power to reform the church in an act of coercion and describing this act as the theological virtue of “charity” is gradually placed as quite inadequate to Langland’s theology and its unfolding of the virtues centered on Christ. This critical placing of Liberum Arbitrium’s version of reformation finally includes another dimension, a simpler but forceful one. The end of Passus XXI and much of Passus XXII display the lay elites (lords, king, knights) as part of the church’s troubles rather than a medium for the kind of reformation for which Liberum Arbitrium would hope. So it will turn out, as we follow Langland’s explorations, that the distinctly Wycliffite moment of reform in Passus XVII will be superseded. It belongs to the dialectical processes that constitute Piers Plowman and has to be interpreted as such. And perhaps I should venture a comment on this characteristic dialectic, one which introduces, explores, and situates Wycliffite ideology of disendowment by the armed elite.
In a rather rough nutshell: Langland creates a dialectic which is rooted in a logic of disputation, of restless argument. Multimodal, dramatic, lyrical, and adventurous, it moves by exploring a range of positions and their consequences. This process draws readers into all the moments that constitute it while simultaneously demanding that we do not isolate the particular moment from the wider process. This is a dialectic of minute particular and totality. Contexts are crucial. True enough, in such a long poem often committed to disrupting narratives (until they center on Christ) we are often tempted to extract a moment and substitute this for the wider process in which it lives. This is a particularly strong temptation in Piers Plowman because some of the moments are dramatized so powerfully, expressed in such vigorous rhetoric, that they may seem to claim a certain autonomy. So, for example, some readers have been tempted to read the pardon of Passus IX (or its earlier version in B VII) in isolation from the long exploration of sin with human and divine agency in the soteriological narratives of Passus XVIII–XXI. Or some have been tempted to take Trajan’s self-description as Langland’s view on the salvation of non-Christians, isolating it from the carefully corrective elaborations in Passus XVII and Christ’s own ecstatic but nuanced oration on salvation in Passus XX, in the harrowing of hell. Or some have been tempted to produce unqualifiedly Franciscan readings of the poem, even construing the author as a Franciscan apologist, by abstracting the work’s Franciscan moments from their dialectical contexts.216 In Langland’s distinctive dialectical form, critically explored and superseded moments are not simply abandoned to be forgotten. For they too, in their very supersession, remain constitutive of the total dialectical movement. Langland’s characteristic way of foreshadowing and echoing, of juxtaposing and recollecting episodes, has been exquisitely described by Elizabeth Salter.217 These ways belong to a dialectic in which superseded stages are recognized as such and raised to a higher form which enfolds and illuminates what it supersedes. Does Langland’s dialectic have a teleology? Yes, most certainly. It is the divine vision glimpsed in the encounters with Christ and the Holy Spirit, glimpsed too in the tree of Charity and by Abraham (Faith) and Moses (Hope).
While any account of Langland’s extraordinarily dynamic, adventurous dialectic will be schematic and itself always in need of supersession, I hope that the “bittere bark” I have offered (XII.145–48) may help us see how the work treats the moment in which Liberum Arbitrium advocates coercive disendowment of the church by powerful lords and lay sovereigns.
Certainly the moment is one of prophetic wrath against the modern church for its immersion in the modern world. And it seems appropriate that such wrath should generate an idea of reform which converges with that increasingly wrathful reformer, John Wyclif. Yet while accepting the account of this convergence in work by Gradon and Scase, I think that even here we need to note some important differences. For Wyclif elaborates an exorbitance of monarchic power with a commitment to the centralization of power and law. The expropriating king is God’s vicar; it is he who allegedly bears the image of Christ’s divinity while the priest (“sacerdos”) bears the image of Christ’s humanity.218 In light of this monarchic ideology, with the king appointing priests, it is hardly surprising that Wyclif should become a hero in the mythology of the magisterial reformation in sixteenth-century England, the morning star (“stella matutina”) who anticipated the new enlightenment.219 Henry VIII’s proclamation of himself as supreme head of the church, displacing the pope, his dissolution of religious orders, his appropriation of their extensive material resources, and his making of a monarchic church—all this was foreshadowed in Wyclif’s political theology.220 And perhaps this is how Robert Crowley read Piers Plowman as he decided to publish it in the reign of Edward VI. He aligns the work with “John Wicklefe, who also in those dayes translated the holy Bible.” He celebrates its prophecy concerning “the suppression of Abbayes,” now fulfilled by “the iuste iudgment of god, whoe wyll not suffer abomination to raigne unpunished,” and he picks out the passage we have been considering, observing that “possession poysoned the church.” Perhaps most significantly he fails to discern Langland’s critical display of paradiastolic speech by the lord and king at the end of Passus XXI. If the poem was to be appropriated by the magisterial reformation, Langland’s own complex dialectic would have to be ignored. Then one could simply identify the author with the call to lay elites: “Taketh here londes, ye lordes” (XVII.227). And with the “morning star” of the English Reformation.221
And yet in the final two passus of the poem Langland presents a vision of contemporary Christianity which supersedes Liberum Arbitrium’s medicine for curing the church from Constantinian poison.222 What Gordon Leff wrote about Wyclif’s plan for “the spiritual regeneration of the church” is congruent with Liberum Arbitrium: “By making its implementation depend upon the lay power he turned an indefinite aspiration into an immediate programme: in place of the prophetic expectations of the Franciscan Spirituals and Joachists, which he explicitly rejected, he put political action.”223 But from the close of Passus XXI to the end of Passus XXII, Langland makes it remorselessly clear that the political agents imagined by Liberum Arbitrium, with their paradiastolic version of cardinal virtues and lust for dominion (XXI.459–76), share the same ideological and material commitments as the papacy, prelates, and friars now so unequivocally aligned with Antichrist. In Passus XXII those figuring forth the lay powers continue to fight against Conscience’s correct understanding of the virtues (XXII.69–73). They also advocate the corrosive individualism which Chaucer’s Arcite sees as normative in courtly life and its forms of competition. Arcite reminds his cousin Palamon that promises of fraternal solidarity simply dissolve in the face of competition:
And therfore, at the kynges court, my brother,
Ech man for hymself, ther is noon oother.
(Knight’s Tale, CT I.1181–82)
Of course, Arcite is a worshipper of pagan gods, especially Mars, but through him Chaucer is certainly ruminating on contemporary court culture and ethics.224 Langland’s lord belongs to the community of Christians, members of the body of Christ, but his assumptions are the same as Arcite’s: “vch lyf kepe his owene” (XXII.90–92). Langland also chooses to emphasize that in the king’s court, at his council, Conscience is beaten (“knokked”) by the forces of covetousness: good faith is expelled and falsity triumphs. Simultaneously in the center of justice, “Westmunstre halle,” wit and wisdom are overwhelmed by “many a brihte noble.” Covetousness, capital sin, controls the commanding heights of lay power and justice. Inevitably in such a society, the powers of commodification, here represented by Simony, “jogged til a justice and iustede in his ere / And ouertulde al his treuthe with ‘Taek this on amendement’” (jogged towards a justice and jousted in his ear / And tilted over his integrity with “Take this to make things right”) (XXII.129–35). Skeat’s comment on this figure is as memorable as it is perspicuous: “Simony runs a tilt at the justice’s ear, and by a crafty whisper of a bribe overturns all his ideas of truth and justice. He accompanies this offer of money with the words—‘take this [deed, and at the same time this money] on amendment’; meaning, ‘surely you can amend this.’” Skeat also picks out the way “jogged” alludes both to riding at a leisurely pace, to joust with the justice, and to nudging someone.225 The specifically ecclesiastical courts, represented by “the Arches,” are transformed by the same forces so that the sacrament of marriage, like the sacrament of penance, becomes a commodity. Once this sacrament, the union of Christ and the church, becomes fully subject to market exchanges, the church makes divorce possible (XXII.136–39). Just as merchants and their confessors can no longer discern usury from licit profit (XXI.349–50), once divorce is as buyable as marriage discerning licit from illicit marriage will become a difficult business. This all, of course, belongs to Langland’s extended figuration of the Pentecostal community becoming the polity in which the forces of Mede threatened to become as dominant as they were pervasive (Prol.; Passus II–III). But in the earlier passus there seemed a possibility that Conscience and Reason might instigate a reformation from above, a reformation led by the Crown with Conscience and Reason drawing Christians to conversion initiated in the sacrament of penance (IV–VI). Later on, as I have discussed, this reformation from above was transformed in Liberum Arbitrium’s Constantinian cure of Constantinian poison, a cure which identified the church as the source of “omne malum” (all evil) (XVI.273–85; XVII.125–238).
But toward the work’s ending it is made clear that what had been envisaged as agencies of reform in the polity, the elites and the institutions they deploy, can no longer be considered in this light. Even less can they be represented as Liberum Arbitrium and Wyclif had done: agencies of evangelical reformation and cultural revolution in the church. Conscience’s cry that he now falls because of imperfect priests and prelates confirms Liberum Arbitrium’s ascription of major responsibility for the current condition of Christianity in England to the clergy (XXI.228–29; XVI.231–85). But his call to lords and king as agents of charitable, coercive reformation has now been decisively superseded. It remains in the work as a memory of a very plausible delusion, itself the product of top-down fantasies of reformation. Ideologies of magisterial reformation, whether in Wycliffite or sixteenth-century England’s version, are utterly discredited. Their analogy might be the Leninist vanguard party: a recipe for deceit, the legitimization of endless violence against unreformed elements, and the centralization of cultural capital in the revolutionary elite. Conscience spoke truthfully in Passus IV when he told the reforming king to set aside a top-down coercive model. In its place he evoked one dependent on “the comune help” together with the assent of “alle youre lege leders [liege-men]” (IV.176–78). Out of this model comes the understanding that reformation without conversion in the community will come to no good end. Hence the turn to the collective sacrament of penance led by Repentaunce (VI.1–2).226 Whatever failures emerge from this attempt, we have to remember that it gathers a community praying to Christ and the Virgin Mary for “grace to go to Treuthe,” drawn by Hope’s horn, “Deus tu conuersus uiuificabis nos” (O God, you will turn and bring us to life) sounding words of divine blessing, “Beati quorum remisse sunt iniquitates et quorum tecta sunt peccata” (Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered), accompanied by the communion of saints singing, “Homines et iumenta saluabis; quemadmodum multiplicasti misericordiam tuam, deus” (Men and beasts thou wilt preserve, O Lord: O how hast thou multiplied thy mercy, O God) (VII.151–57).227 This attempt to achieve a nonviolent reformation is a good outcome to Repentaunce’s prayer to Christ for grace to amend our “mysdedes” and for “mercy to vs alle.” Repentaunce’s beautiful prayer enfolds a version of salvation history: from God’s goodness in creation through the fall transformed into “felix culpa” (happy fault) through divine love reconciling the world to God in Christ (Incarnation, Crucifixion, harrowing of hell, Resurrection) and joining God to humanity (VII.119–50). This is the disclosure of an ontology of peace in the history of the Son of God and humankind.
In fact, the attempt to impose spiritual and moral reformation by violence is among the strands of medieval Christianity that Langland addresses. This tradition tended to represent itself as mirroring God’s ways. For example, early in Piers Plowman Langland shows a natural power of the soul, Reason, dressed “ryht as a pope” and preaching to the realm of England. He recalls the great plague of 1348–49, with its successors and a famously destructive tempest of January 1362.228 Plague and tempest, he asserts, were “for puyre synne.” In the storm, trees “were poffed [puffed] to the erthe” as symbols of the Last Judgment. Plague and tempest are presented as encouragement that “we sholde do the bettere” (V.111–22). As Pearsall notes, “The orthodox ecclesiastical view was that such disasters were God’s punishment of man’s wickedness.”229 The idea was that we will do “bettere” if we are terrorized, and the assumption was that this idea was shared by God. So God is rather like a murderous version of the grammar teacher Studie (XI.120–21). Such thinking undoubtedly represents a prominent strand in some conventional Christian images of God and discipline. But it is far closer to Blake’s Urizen or his Nobodaddy than to the Samaritan figuring the Son of God in Passus XIX or to the theology of Christ’s oration on divine love and identification with humankind in Passus XX. And what, after all, is Langland’s consummating image of what it is to “do the bettere”? It is Christ’s ministry as healer and liberator of suffering humanity (XXI.124–39). Even if Reason, dressed up as a pope, forgets this, forgets the life of Christ in his zeal to frighten people into doing “bettere,” Langland gives the reader of his complete work no reason to follow such a reason.
Yet its model of reformation, by means of fear and coercion, is a prominent presence in the tradition Langland inherited, as Pearsall states. Indeed, in section III above, I considered some of Langland’s reflections on this in his dramatization of the conflicts in Piers’s “half-aker” (Passus VIII). The context of that discussion was the limitations of Piers’s “olde” plow in the light of Pentecostal politics and his “newe” plow together with the implications of these figurations for the church. What I want to recall from that discussion is the language in which Piers seeks to impose coercive jurisdiction on behalf of governing elites (Statute of Laborers, knight, king, “kynges justices”).230 Reformation has to be imposed on those who resist it, violence directed against them for charity’s sake: “‘Y preye the,’ quod Perus tho, ‘pur charite, sire Hunger, / Awreke [avenge] me of this wastors” (VIII.169–70). This model of coercive reformation as charity is akin to the one projected by Liberum Arbitrium (XVII) and the wrathful Wyclif. The poet vividly evokes the charity in the forces Piers has invoked: Hunger “boffatede the Bretoner aboute the chekes / That a lokede lyke a lanterne al his lyf aftur, / And beet hem so bothe he barste ner her gottes” (battered the Breton about the cheeks / So that he looked like a lantern the rest of his life, / And he so beat both of them up he nearly busted their guts) (VIII.173–75). But as we followed this narrative in section III, we saw how Piers repents this mode of reformation, determining that it is incompatible with discipleship of Christ, the revelation and embodiment of Charity (VIII.211–18). Langland has Piers recognize that the will cannot be converted by violence and fear. Instead of a top-down model of coercive reformation, Christian politics should be informed by this perception: “hit are my blody bretherne, for god bouhte [bought] vs alle” (VIII.216). A perception confirmed in Christ’s great oration from hell as he himself declares his identity with humankind: “we beth brethrene of o [one] bloed” (XX.417–18). Charity, then, involves the love of enemies (Matt. 5:38–48).
In such a light has Langland illuminated the reformation politics of Liberum Arbitrium and its rhetoric of charity. None of this undermines the force of Liberum Arbitrium’s critique of the contemporary practices he addresses, or of his objection to the pope for maintaining “werre [war] vppon cristene” (XVII.233–35). The problem is the failure to grasp the forms and consequences of violence in his own model of reformation. They too, as history would disclose, entail “werre vppon cristene,” and war in the name of charity.
The next moment in which Langland explores this cluster of theological and political issues is in the poem’s final passus. It involves another example of an erring conscience. Once more we see an authoritative figure confronting apparently vicious practices among Christians. The figure is Conscience, “goddes clerk and his notarie,” an act, in Langland’s view, of Liberum Arbitrium (XVI.192–94; see 165–201). What he confronts is the turning of “alle folke” to “Auntecrist” (XXII.51–73), that is, a massive de-Christianization within the overtly Christian community. Conscience responds by calling the tiny remnant of those who defied Antichrist and his army. These are known as “foles” (1 Cor. 1:22–29), and Conscience invites them to join him in fortress Unity. At the same time, he invokes “Kynde” to defend the “foles” from Antichrist, for love of Piers the Plowman (XXII.74–79). There may be confusion in Conscience’s invocation commensurate with the complex ambiguities in the word kynde. When Wit talked to Wille in Passus X, he took “Kynde” to designate the “Creatour” of all, one who loves every human soul “ylyke to hymsulve” (X.128–82). Elsewhere kynde often means what in modern English would be termed “natural,” expressing a distinction from “supernatural” fundamental in St. Thomas’s Summa Theologiae.231 It was in this sense that we encountered Kynde Wit in section VII. There I discussed how Kynde Wit teaches Conscience to transform the open evangelical church of the Holy Spirit into a putatively defensible fortress (XXI.360–63). In this sense of kynde, it becomes easy to occlude the Christological dimensions gradually woven by Langland into the word as he discloses the transformation of humankind enabled by the kindness of divine love in the incarnation of Christ (XIX.48–336; XX.270a–475).232
Who or what Conscience intends to invoke by calling on “kynde” is not made clear in his brief statement. But the contexts should at least make us surprised that his invocation is unformed by the concentration on Charity, Christ, Trinity, and Holy Spirit from Passus XVIII–XXI. Is his attempt to defend the remnant of Christ’s disciples being affected by the forces of de-Christianization he opposes? Is the culture of de-Christianization overwhelming his judgment? After all, in the earlier figurations of Conscience, Langland has him talking as a Nicene Christian on the Trinity and on the incarnation of God (III.344–62, 394–406a). More recently Conscience explained the relations between Christ and Piers and followed this with an extended account of the life and name of Christ (XXI.2–197), recognized the Holy Spirit at Pentecost (as Wille could not), and became constable of the church (XXI.198–212; XXII.214). In these contexts, and now with apparent catastrophe overwhelming Christian communities, it is striking that Conscience fails to pray to Christ whose work he had expounded so recently. While noticing what Conscience fails to do here is part of understanding his journey into error, we are not given enough to be confident about the dispositions ascribed to him at this point.
Nevertheless, by their fruits shall you know them, so let us consider the response to Conscience’s invocation of Kynde. The “kynde” that hears and identifies with Conscience comes out of the planets bringing fevers, heart diseases, boils, tumors, madness, and other “foule eveles,” including poxes and plague, which bring immediate death to many people (XXII.80–87, 97–105). This is the Saturn of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale rather than the benevolent Nature of his Parliament of Fowls. Saturn was the planetary god responsible for resolving conflicts over sexual passions and the lust for dominion on earth and in the heavens. In Chaucer’s tale, he celebrates his might in a poetry of grim power:
“My cours, that hath so wyde for to turne,
Hath moore power than woot any man.
Myn is the drenchyng in the see so wan;
Myn is the prison in the derke cote;
Myn is the stranglyng and hangyng by the throte,
The murmure and the cherles rebellyng,
The groynynge, and the pryvee empoysonyng;
I do vengeance and pleyn correccioun,
Whil I dwelle in the signe of the leoun.
Myn is the ruyne of the hye halles,
The fallynge of the toures and of the walles
Upon the mynour or the carpenter.
I slow Sampsoun, shakynge the piler;
And myne be the maladyes colde,
The derke tresons, and the castes olde;
My lookyng is the fader of pestilence.”
(Knight’s Tale, CT I.2454–69; trans. 85)
———
[“My heavenly orbit marks so wide a pattern
It has more power than anyone can know;
In the wan sea I drown and overthrow,
Mine is the prisoner in the darkling pit,
Mine are both neck and noose that strangles it,
Mine the rebellion of the serfs astir,
The murmurings, the privy poisoner;
And I do vengeance, I send punishment,
And when I am in Leo it is sent.
Mine is the ruin of the lofty hall,
The falling down of tower and of wall
On carpenter and mason, I their killer.
’Twas I slew Samson when he shook the pillar;
Mine are the maladies that kill with cold,
The dark deceits, the strategems of old;
A look from me will father pestilence.”]
Chaucer clashes this vision against the Neoplatonizing political theology of the Athenian ruler, Theseus. He does so as part of a profound exploration of political theologies and the emergence of theodicies much earlier than is habitually assumed in works of historical theology.233 But what is Langland doing with his own display of Saturnine “kynde” descending from the planets?
He is reflecting on Conscience’s tendencies to err and their potential consequences. The tricky relations between Conscience’s invocation of Kynde and the horrible suffering this seems to unleash may be illuminated by Conscience’s final observations in the poem. Responding to the consequences of another error he had made, Conscience begs Kynde to avenge him against those who argue against him (XXII.384). Conscience is again frustrated and angry, passion catalyzed by opposition from Christians within fortress Unity. Piers himself, in the labor disputes discussed above, had similarly expressed a wish to be avenged on those who resisted his jurisdiction (VIII.169–70). He had summoned Hunger as a punitive and disciplinary agent: Conscience summons an even more ferocious force. Like Piers he assumes that people can be terrorized into virtuous reformation.234 But as in Passus VIII, Langland displays the distressing mistake in this conventional assumption. The outcome he depicts is not repentance and virtue but panic and rampant individualism. Conscience wonders whether those attacked by diseases, age, and death will be compelled to convert “and be parfyt cristene” (XXII.88–108). So he asks Kynde to halt his assault. This too recapitulates Piers’s plea to the punitive force he had called. But there is now a crucial difference. Piers’s plea was accompanied by profound, Christological reflections: those who oppose him are recognized as his brethren in Christ’s blood, “for god bouhte vs alle” (VIII.213–18). There can be no separation of Christian ethics from the theology of redemption through Christ’s reconciling work. Conscience, however, offers no such reflections.
But once Kynde’s attack ceases, Langland gives his own response to Conscience’s musings about the relations between terror and conversion to “parfyt cristene.” The people turn from panic to a committed hedonism (XXII.110–20, 143–60, 169–82). To them “holinesse” is now just a joke, “a jape” (XXII.145). This recapitulates in a collective mode Wille’s earlier path from a despairing abandonment of his search for the virtues to a desperate hedonism in “the lond of longyng” (XI.160–98; Luke 15:13). Once again Langland demonstrates his conviction that the will cannot be converted by force. Conscience still does not recognize this reality. Instead he again invokes terror to convert the de-Christianizing people, summoning Elde and Death (XXII.165–98). Yet once more Langland shows the responses generated by the “fere” alone:
And Lyf fley for fere to Fisyk aftur helpe
And bisouhte hym of socour and of his salue hadde
And gaef hym goelde goed woen that gladde here hertes
And they gyuen hym agayne a glasene houe.
Lyf leuede that lechecraft lette sholde Elde
And dryue awey Deth with dyaes and drogges.
(XXII.169–74)
———
[And Life fled out of fear to Physic for help
And asked him for relief, and had some of his remedy
And gave him a good deal of gold, which gladdened his heart,
And was given in return a cure made of first class quackery.
Life believed medicine would delay Old Age
And drive away Death with prescriptions and drugs.]
People respond to such fear with the habits they already have. Instead of Christ and his sacramental legacy, they seek physicians whose salvation belongs to the market economy. These experts foster the fantasy that their “salve,” their medicines, can set aside old age and death. Yet Christ as Samaritan had offered a very different model of healing when he rescued Semyvief, the half-alive man found in “a wide wildernesse where theues hadde ybounde” him (XIX.53–58). There Christ had eased the victim’s wounds with wine, oil, and bandages and carried him to the church of the new covenant where he left resources for “his medicyne.” The Samaritan explains that the wounds of Semyvief, the figure representing humanity, can only be healed by Christ’s blood in the sacraments received in faith (XIX.48–95).235 But while this central episode is recalled in the poet’s narrative, it is simply forgotten by all the participants in Passus XXII, forgotten not only by a de-Christianizing people but also by Conscience, the constable of the contemporary church. For unlike Piers, Conscience seems still drawn to the most conventional ideas of control and reformation, ideas he seems unable to subject to Christological correction. Piers remembered, and this memory gave him distance from the immediate conflict with the laborers’ subversion of his intentions. The plowman’s memory was informed by the life of Christ, and this presence turned him from righteous indignation to identification with the laborers in Christ: conversion.
Had Conscience remembered as Piers had done, he too might have repented of his own wrath. Perhaps he might have recollected a passage from Ockham’s Breviloquium. There Ockham writes of Christ:
When his disciples James and John wished to punish with death the contempt the Samaritans had shown to Christ by refusing to receive them, he rebuked them: “Do you not know of what spirit you are? The Son of Man did not come to destroy lives, but to save” (Luke 9:55). This is as if to say, “Though this contempt deserves death yet I will not inflict it; for I have not come, as passible and mortal man, to take away bodily life for any contempt or crime, but to give life.” Hence also he visibly revived three dead persons, but did not punish any criminal with death or loss of limb.236
Jesus’s disciples had not suggested summoning diseases and plagues from the planets, but they had offered something very similar: “Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” (Luke 9:54). So Conscience is reiterating the kind of ethos unequivocally rejected by Christ. He is also rehearsing the conventional view proclaimed by his close ally Reason in Passus V, one I considered earlier, namely, that a good prologue to a “sarmon” on reformation is to claim that the suffering caused by plague and tempest are simply punishment “fore pure synne” and a wonderful inspiration for individual and collective conversion (V.114–200). Some of the consequences of this version of seeking “Seynt Treuthe in sauacioun of youre soules” include advocacy of such violence as beating recalcitrant wives and beating those who resist so that they “be parfyt cristene” (XXII.108). This may be one of the violent outcomes of Reason and Conscience reflecting on Christ’s gospel, perhaps a familiar enough one in Christian tradition. It was not Ockham’s, and it was opposed by Walter Brut, by some of the Norfolk and Suffolk Wycliffites persecuted by the church’s authorities in 1428–31, and in the 1395 Wycliffite presentation to Parliament.237 More important in the present context, the model of reformation assumed here by Conscience and Reason is placed and superseded in Langland’s Christocentric work.
Does Wille’s own encounter with Elde and the approach of Death contradict the foregoing argument? Is Wille not finally converted by Elde’s attack on his body and the fear of Death (XXII.183–216)? This passage is Langland’s account of “the gifts reserved for age,” the account ascribed to “some dead master” in T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding. There the teacher warns the poet of “the cold friction of expiring sense / Without enchantment” and “the rending pain of re-enactment” disclosing hidden motives.238 Langland’s writing about Wille’s encounter with Elde lacks Eliot’s haunting interiority, but it is far from being a simple exemplum of conversion by terror. What Pearsall calls “this strange and marvelous interlude” includes a complex mixture of registers very far removed from terror, even in its unflinching acknowledgment of loss upon loss:
And of the wo that Y was ynne my wyf hadde reuthe
And wesched wel witterly that Y were in heuene.
For the lyme that she loued me fore and leef was to fele
A nyhtes, nameliche, when we naked were,
Y ne myhte in none manere maken hit at here wille,
So Elde and [s]he hit hadde forbete.
(XXII.193–98)239
———
[And my wife took pity on the fix I was in
And sincerely wished that I was in heaven.
For the limb she loved me for and enjoyed feeling up
(Especially at night when we were both naked),
I could in no way make it do her pleasure,
So had she and Old Age beaten it down.]
There is no trace here of the conventional obsession with the sinfulness of marital sexuality enjoyed without the intention of procreation or by a spouse’s demand to pay the debt of sexual union. No trace of anxiety, let alone guilt, at the prospect of a hostile judgment by a god who allegedly shared the punitive obsessions of Roman and Protestant churches with the too ardent lover of her or his spouse. In this tradition, those so described were castigated as adulterers, a tradition affirmed by Chaucer’s Parson. He declares that if a married couple “assemble oonly for amorous love” they commit “deedly synne” (Parson’s Tale, CT X.942). He complains that many married Christians do not believe this, since they think that whatever “likerousnesse” (lustfulness) spouses enact together is not sin. But this is “fals”: “a man may sleen [slay] hymself with his owene knyf, and make hymselve dronken of his owene tonne [barrel]” (X.858). In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin continues this teaching, albeit less graphically.240 Langland’s writing about zestful marital sexuality and its termination goes against the grain of such traditions of Christian teaching with their inability to envisage a union of affection, love, and sexual delight as part of the sacrament of marriage. Langland’s writing in the passage is playful, even tender, and it evokes a transformation of dominant teaching and its assumptions. There is acknowledgment of loss but no denigration of what is lost (contrast Chaucer’s Reeve, CT I.3864–82, 3886–98).
Wille’s responses are very different from those around him because he has been on a pilgrimage of continual conversion, cultivating habits to resist the de-Christianization led by Antichrist. True enough, his journey involved wrath, despair, and a fall “into the lond of longyng” under the enchantments of the lust of the flesh (XI.160–85). He is always prepared to argue with anyone, whether Liberum Arbitrium or Abraham or Moses or Christ the Samaritan, and over anything, including orthodox teaching of the Trinity (which he had dismissed) and the names of Jesus.241 But the process of disputation is as integral to his conversions (plural) as it is to Langland’s dialectical work. We can think back to the early and profoundly moving conversion in Passus V. There Wille confesses, and not to any priest, how he has wasted God’s gifts of time, but now infused with the theological virtue of hope, he prays for divine grace:
So hope Y to haue of hym that is almyghty
A gobet of his grace and bigynne a tyme
That alle tymes of my tyme to profit shal turne.
(V.99–101)
———
[So I hope to have from him that is almighty
A mouthful of his grace, and begin a time
That all times of my time shall turn to profit.]
Immediately after this, he goes to the church to worship God and kneels before the cross in penitential tears praying the “pater-noster” (V.102–8). Not only are there other moments of conversion, but his troubled search for the virtues has brought him to visions of charity, Abraham, Moses, Christ, and the Holy Spirit (XVIII–XXI). So when he is encompassed by the forces of de-Christianization and the apostasy of the church’s hierarchy, religious orders, and people he has habits and resources which encourage choice against assimilation by such forces—acquired and infused habits. There is no way in which Langland implies that Wille’s ability so to choose and the habits with which he chooses are the product of fear.
But does he not fear death? He certainly does (XXII.200). Is this not culpable? No. Human beings naturally fear death and turn from the loss of bodily life. Even Jesus Christ in the garden of Gethsemane shows fear, thus manifesting his full humanity. This is carefully explained by St. Thomas Aquinas in his treatise on Christ in the third part of the Summa Theologiae.242 In his own “drade,” Wille does not react with the panic and blankness overwhelming those around him. He calls on Kynde to deliver him from care and asks to be avenged on the forces dismembering his body, if that is Kynde’s will (XXII.199–203). Who is this Kynde addressed by Wille, and what relation has he to the malevolent Saturnine forces Conscience summoned from the planets? And how does Wille’s request to be avenged relate to Conscience’s a few lines earlier and to Piers’s in Passus VIII? I will first consider the question about Kynde.
Unlike the version of Kynde emerging from Conscience’s invocation, this figure does not bring violence against anyone. He commands Wille to stay in “Vnite” till Kynde sends for him. Wille has expressed a desire for death, as well as fear (XXII.203, 200). But Kynde calls for patience and a further commitment to learning, whatever Wille’s age and whatever the proximity of death: “‘Lerne to loue,’ quod Kynde, ‘and leef [leave] all othere [set aside any other ‘craft’]’” (XXII.208). As for the means of subsistence, Kynde’s answer echoes that of Christ’s teaching against being “solicitous for your life, what you shall eat, nor for your body, what you shall put on” (Matt. 6:25; see 6:24–34). He tells Wille, “And thow loue lelly, lacke shal the neuere / Wede ne worldly mete while thy lif lasteth” (If you love loyally, you’ll never lack / Clothes or earthly food as long as you live) (XXII.210–11). Wille accepts this counsel because it belongs to a long process of conversion upon conversion and a longing which included visions of Christ and the Holy Spirit. This process informs his obedience and gives him access to the “carte hihte [called] Cristendoem” which is composed by Grace to bring home “Peres sheves” (XXI.330–31; cf. XXII.212–13). So I am arguing that Wille’s long and often erring apprenticeship in the resources of Christian narratives and virtues, an apprenticeship drawn by God’s grace disclosed in Christ, has prepared him to invoke Kynde who is “Creatour,” “Fader and formour of al that forth groweth, / The which is god grettest, bygynnynge hadde he neure / Lord of lyf and of lyht, of lisse and of payne” (Father and former of all that grows forth, / Who is greatest God, who never had beginning, / Lord of life and of light, of bliss and of pain) (X.152–55). Such was the answer Wille had received from Wit when he asked what “kynne thyng is Kynde?” (X.151). His will has been formed in the process that is the poem drawing him to his encounter with the persons of the Trinity: Christ, Holy Spirit, Father.
This brings me to the second question, which concerns the language of vengeance in Wille’s invocation. It is significantly different from that of Conscience or the early Piers. For Wille does not seek vengeance against any other human being seen as an impediment to his projects of reform. He, tentatively, requests vengeance against the forces under which his body is disintegrating. Nor does Kynde simply reject the language: instead he tells Wille that if he wants such vengeance he is to go into “Vnite” and learn to love while he awaits Kynde’s call (XXII.204–8). Furthermore, through a glass darkly, in an enigma, Wille’s prayer for this vengeance, together with Kynde’s response, hints at the resurrection of the body and its glorified reunion with the soul.243
It seems worth offering some brief comments on the available paths Langland did not take in his sense of an ending. Talk of harvest in the context of Antichrist would have drawn many late medieval writers to concretize their narratives with some specific predictions about historical stages and persons. These could certainly involve convictions about imminent reformation. Such tendencies had been initiated and encouraged by Joachite treatments of the Apocalypse, with their rejection of Augustinian exegesis and their understanding of the millennium. Chapter 20 of the Apocalypse envisions the devil being bound for a thousand years during which the saints reign with Christ; after this Satan is loosed out of his prison for “a little time” (20:1–7). He seduces the nations, persecutes the camp of the saints and the beloved city: “And there came down fire from God out of heaven, and devoured” the nations whereupon the devil is cast into the pool of fire and brimstone (20:8–9). In the City of God, Augustine had explicitly opposed readings of this chapter by those he calls “Chiliasts” (in Greek) and “Millenarians” (in Latin, miliarios).244 Despite some exegetical complexity and alternative interpretations, Augustine unequivocally determines that the thousand-year reign of the saints with Christ refers to the historical period initiated by Christ’s redeeming work in the Incarnation, the work of binding the strong man (Matt. 12:29). This is the historical form of his kingdom or the kingdom of heaven (“regnum eius regnumve caelorum”), the church militant (City of God XX.7, 9). It includes the souls of the pious dead who are remembered at the sacrament of the altar and are not separated from the body of Christ, the church (XX.9). The brief release of Satan after the thousand years will be the last persecution immediately before the final Judgment. Inflicted by Antichrist, it will last for three years and six months (City of God XX.11, 13; Apoc. 12:6, 13:5; Dan. 12:7). This attack does not impede the reign of the saints with Christ (XX.13). Augustine’s “Millenarians” included those who thought they could calculate the date of the imminent millennium, but Augustine dismissed such exegesis as ridiculous fables (“ridiculas fabulas,” XX.7).245
Joachite exegesis and theology of history set aside Augustine’s account of the thousand years and opened it out into a wide range of prophetic and millenarian visions looking toward the third status, that of the Holy Spirit.246 Let us briefly recall some typical outcomes of this late medieval tradition, the path Langland did not take. Joachim himself had used his complex concordances and typologies to give him confidence about the unfolding of divine providence in sometimes striking detail. He declared that the emperor Henry IV was an Antichrist, the Saracens the sixth head of the red dragon of the Apocalypse, and the great Antichrist the seventh head who would emerge from a sect of heretics.247 Characteristic Joachite modes are cultivated by the French Franciscan Jean de Roquetaillade (Johannes de Rupescissa).248 His writings are inspired by what Marjorie Reeves nicely describes as “his own role as the interpreter of the cosmic future” in a divine gift to “uncover those secret things hidden” in the prophecies of scripture. He was convinced that “after great tribulations and several Antichrists the world would reach the Age of Blessedness, the apotheosis of history.” Although Reeves finds that he does use “Joachim’s concept of the third status” for this age, he “more often speaks in terms of the millennium,” a literal thousand years of peace.249 Characteristic of such schemes is a “political programme of Last Things,” and once again it is the mode, and its contrasts to Langland’s dialetical thinking and sense of an ending, that interests me.250
In Roquetaillade’s vision, one finds a concretization of persons and stages in world history as it enters its millennial stage. For example, Antichrist was born in 1337, is now rising (1349–66), and will reign from 1366 to 1370. His destruction in 1370 will bring in the millennium, which will last until the arrival of Gog in 2370. The root of contemporary evil is in Frederic II, a poisonous heretic from whom would come Louis of Sicily, the future Antichristus magnus. The emperor who had protected William of Ockham, Louis of Bavaria, had prefigured Louis of Sicily as Antichrisus mysticus. The Jews will worship the great Antichrist Louis of Sicily. But Roquetaillade’s nation, France, will oppose Antichrist (a nice contrast with Langland’s few “foles” to whom I shall return). In fact, the French are the great opponents of Antichrist, and in France the true pope will be protected. In the final battle the king of France, true pope, and rigorous Franciscans will triumph. The Holy Spirit will abound, “Antichrist will be destroyed and the whole world will submit in peace to the Vicar of Christ.” In different works there are different details, so in the Liber Secretorum eventuum the English and Antichrist fight against the French. In this work Christ himself would strike down Antichrist around 1370, although the millennium would not begin until 1415. While in the slightly later Vade mecum in tribulatione the Western Antichrist would appear between 1362 and 1370, a new Nero, and the third status of the world would begin with the angelic pope and the king of France as Roman emperor who would destroy the tyrannical power of Mohammed. Reeves is right to describe Roquetaillade’s prophecies as “Francophile,” just as across the channel the makings of God into an Englishman were under way.251 But neither in mode nor in ideology was this Langland’s way. Nor his sense of endings.
There is, however, an earlier moment in Piers Plowman where Langland places a medley of such traditions and their rhetoric in an oration by Conscience. In light of the preceding analysis, I want to consider this moment and its relations to the poem’s political ideology. It emerges during Conscience’s struggles against the manifold forces of Mede which pervade and shape contemporary society. At this early stage of the poem (Passus II–IV), Conscience foreshadows Liberum Arbitrium’s assumptions that necessary reformation of the polity will be top-down, depending entirely on the lay sovereign. With the help of Reason, he intends to persuade the king to enact the reformation by rejecting Mede rather than by trying to harness her to Conscience.252 He tries to show the sovereign that Mede is a dangerous ally who destroys kings. To demonstrate this he takes a story from scripture. In chapter 15 of the first Book of Kings (also known as the first Book of Samuel) we meet the account of Saul and the Amelakites. Conscience claims that King Saul spared the Amelakite king (Agag) and the best livestock and garments “for Mede” (III.410). Because of “that synne,” Saul and his son died, God bestowing the kingdom on his “knave,” the shepherd David (III.407–42). Conscience reiterates that Saul’s motive was “mede” and that God hated Saul because the king “coveytede” Amelakite possessions and was “overcome thorw coveytise of mede” (III.417–32). So, once again, Mede destroys kings. The passus ends with Conscience rightly objecting to Mede’s exegesis of scripture: she misconstrues a passage from Proverbs to support her own practices (III.484–500). However, this exchange on the politics of exegesis does not leave Conscience unscathed. For Conscience has just done the same thing with scripture as has Mede, namely, misconstrued the text to serve his own polemical interests. Scripture makes it clear that the issue between God and Saul is not “mede” or “coveytise of mede” (1 Kings 15:1–35). It is, rather, obedience to God’s commands. Saul has been told to destroy all Amelakites and their possessions. But while he destroyed all the “common people” and everything that was “vile and good for nothing,” he and his own people spared Agag and the best possessions. He did not do this for “mede.” He did so to offer “a holocaust to the Lord”: “the people spared the best of the sheep and the herds that they might be sacrificed to the Lord” (15:12, 15). God, however, objects that whatever Saul’s motives, he “hath not executed my commandments” (5:1). Samuel conveys this word to Saul, who insists that he has acted according to the “voice of the Lord.” Samuel informs him that God desires not holocausts but “rather that the voice of the Lord should be obeyed.” It is better “to hearken rather than to offer the fat of rams” (15:15–22). So that is the moral of the story. Saul’s “sin” is disobedience to a highly specific command of God, and for that disobedience he is overthrown (15:22–24). Neither “mede” nor “coveytise” comes between Saul and God.253 Obedience to God’s revealed will is, of course, a central topic in Christian teaching. Aquinas devotes articles to it in the Summa Theologiae and twice deploys Conscience’s own text in his explication of obedience.254 It is relevant to the understanding of faith and is a central virtue in accounts of Christ’s redemption of humanity: “He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross” (Phil. 2:8).255 But Conscience sets aside the crucial theological directions of the text he misconstrues to fit his immediate struggle with Mede, even as he attacks the latter for doing the same. Treating scripture as if it has a wax nose is thus among the errors of Conscience, and it is from here he shifts into a mode which is millenarian, once more drawing on some fragments of scripture (III.437–83).
And once more we need to recall the preceding contexts. Conscience has been trying to reform a polity pervaded by Mede in which traditional virtues and distinctions are dissolved while even the sacrament of penance is commodified. In his attempt to persuade the king to impose the reformation he demands, Conscience appropriated the story of Saul and Agag. Now it emerges that the violent resolution to this narrative draws him on. The captured Amelakite king, Agag, was hewed “in pieces” by the prophet Samuel (1 Kings 15:33). Conscience picks this out along with the overthrow of Saul, for his “mede,” and God’s substitution of David. Exultantly Conscience moves from this violent moment to a millennial world in which Mede will have been liquidated. Indeed, any opponents to his reforms will be dealt with just as Agag who was butchered by Samuel. A new David will become world ruler and one Christian king will look after us all (“o cristene kyng kepe vs echone,” III.442). Reform over the rule of Mede and over injustice will be secured. Love and Conscience will effect a revolutionary transformation of ecclesiastical, legal, and political forms. Any who resist this millennial peace, when swords are beaten into plowshares, will be executed. Jews will rejoice that Moses or the Messiah has come as the prophecy of Isaiah 2:2–5 is fulfilled. Conscience is confident that there will be a centralization of justice. The parcelization of sovereignty and law typical of most medieval social formations will be ended by some unspecified revolutionary agent: “Al shal be but o court and o buyrne [man] be iustice” (III.473–75). Will this “buyrne” be Samuel, the hewer of Agag into pieces? Perhaps, for Conscience has warned that in this millennium “riht as Agag hadde happe shal somme: / Samuel shal sle hym” (III.439–40). Peace, nonviolence, unchallenged centralization without militarization (swords into plowshares, no more wars, III.461a, 477a). Yet simultaneously Conscience affirms some remarkable continuities with contemporary England. The death penalty will be retained (III.458–62, 467, 477). The medieval church seems to survive in a recognizable form, since Conscience proclaims that priests and parsons will perform the current liturgy properly. No longer will they go hunting or hawking: if they do some anonymous authority will deprive them of their livelihood and perhaps kill them (III.464–68). In culmination to such an uninhibited revel in contradictions, the passage concludes with a portentous riddle promising the conversion of Jews and Saracens to Christianity. This issue is explored at some length by Liberum Arbitrium in Passus XVII, an exploration which takes seriously the need for the Christian church to abandon its commitments to war and return to the model offered by the martyr church, a model discussed earlier in this book. Conscience’s riddle simply evades such issues. Scholars who claim to crack the code of the riddle from conventional grammar books and substitute a simple paraphrasable content simply miss the point of such riddling in this poem. The rhetoric is designed to suggest profundities and secrets revealed to the special one who speaks. Shakespeare was to display such rhetoric with characteristic critical force in Owen Glendower and later in Gloucester.256 Langland’s dramatic exploration of such voices is closer to Shakespeare’s than to that of Jean of Roquetaillade or Joachim. In the overall processes that constitute his work, the apocalyptic and millennial foray by Conscience could, at the most charitable, be seen in some lines of T.S. Eliot in response to his own examination of apocalyptic rhetoric and modes:
That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings.
(East Coker, pt. 2, in Four Quartets)
But because this is one of the passages that has elicited most discussion among those seeking to draw the poet into affinity with Joachite prophecy and millenarianism, I will add a few more observations on it. Because the question concerns the kind of reformist Langland was, it belongs to the present study. As I have made clear in my discussion, placing that in the context of Joachite prophecy, Conscience is made to exhibit a millenarian vision that could have been stimulated by Joachite traditions, although non-Joachite apocalypticism was hardly rare in the later Middle Ages.257 But this passage belongs to a dialectical process in which it is an exploratory moment, criticized and superseded. Its grounding in wrath at the resistance to his project of reform has been made clear, nicely symptomatized in the identification with Samuel chopping the enemy Agag into pieces. His apocalyptic mode generates the anti-Augustinian version of the millennium as an imminent eschatological peace within history, one governed by the kind of world emperor (“o cristene kyng”) whom Jean de Roquetaillade expected to come from his own nation, the French.258 The promise of such a Christian ruler dissolves the Christocentric liturgical context of Isaiah 2:2–5 (the first week of Advent), as does the retention of the death penalty for those deemed to transgress peace, including priests who go hawking or hunting.259 The millennial eschatology here is actually shown to have displaced the Word made flesh, crucified and resurrected. It has displaced the work of Christ and the distinctly Christian virtues flowing from that work. However remote Joachim’s eschatology may have been from versions cultivated by his admirers such as Gerardo of Borgo San Domino or Jean de Roquetaillade, it compromised, in the words of Henri de Lubac, “la pleine suffisance de Jésus-Christ.”260 It is such tendencies in medieval eschatology that Langland is exploring in Conscience’s oration. By ascribing it to Conscience, he associates this millenarianism with a reforming zeal whose longings and frustrations are part of Piers Plowman. But as we have already seen, and as St. Thomas so carefully taught, Conscience is not infallible, and here he errs both in his version of the millennium and, especially, in the displacement of Christology I have just identified. This displacement will be beautifully corrected, at length, from Passus XVIII to XXI.
There is just one more observation I want to make about Conscience’s millenarian fable. It is derived from that teacher we met misleading him in Passus XXI: Kynde Wit. He declares: “I, Conscience, knowe this, for Kynde Wit me tauhte” (III.437; cf. XXI.360). Kynde Wit has taught him to expect a millennium in which Reason (his colleague in Passus IV and V) will govern the polity (III.437–42). I have already discussed some ecclesial errors into which Kynde Wit will lead Conscience much later. There I focused on the consequences of mistaken trust in a purely natural power when the supernatural ends of humanity are at issue. As Aquinas observes, humans could achieve the good proportionate to their divinely given nature while in their unfallen state, but even then they could not reach the good surpassing that nature. In the fallen state we cannot even achieve the good proportionate to our nature, though we can do such good things as build houses, plant vineyards, and play cricket. So in both unfallen and fallen states, humans need a divine gift to help their natural powers if they are to will, know, and do the supernatural good bringing them to supernatural happiness, an end quite out of proportion to our nature.261 These basic distinctions in Aquinas and in many strands of Christianity are congruent with Langland’s theology, congruence powerfully illustrated in the narrative of Semyuief and the Samaritan who figures Christ (XIX.48–171).262 And let us also remember Christ’s warning that if Kynde Wit is given credence beyond his sphere of competence, he is likely to draw Wille into heresy and should be resisted (XIX.108–232). We, however, are neither locked into Conscience’s millenarian moment under the guidance of Kynde Wit nor fixed into the rhetorical mode Conscience embraces in that moment. For we have to read it as a moment in a long, dialectical work. This means we must take seriously the disparities between the extraordinarily rich, sustained Christology and Trinitarian theology of Passus XVII–XXI together with the absence of such a focus in Conscience’s millenarian passage. This absence, together with the complete absence of the relevant scriptural narratives and liturgy shaping Passus XVIII–XXI, encourages an incoherent political theology and equally incoherent representations of agency. So Langland’s approach to Christian eschatology had more in common with Robert Holcot’s comments in his widely read lectures on the Book of Wisdom than with Joachite traditions and millenarians.263 Lecture 58 sets out from Wisdom 5:1: “Then shall the just stand with great constancy against those that have afflicted them, and taken away their labours.” Holcot considers those who discuss the coming of Antichrist, Paul’s “man of sin” (2 Thess. 2:3). Against modern predictions of eschatological events, Holcot insists that the advent of Christ is of uncertain time. Holcot is familiar with those late medieval anti-Augustinian traditions forecasting the coming millennium, and he observes that around the coming of Antichrist modern prophets have been led astray, seduced.264 In taking this position, Holcot, like John Wyclif writing soon after him, was accepting the explicit teaching of the risen Christ: “It is not for you to know the times or moments [tempora vel momenta], which the Father hath put in his own power” (Acts 1:7).265 This statement confirmed another, equally clear statement during his ministry: “But of that day and hour no one knoweth; no, not the angels of heaven, but the Father alone” (Matt. 24:36). This was not persuasive to those whose prophetic confidence had been inflated by Joachite exegesis and millenarianism. But, as I noted earlier, this was a familiar enough path that Langland chose not to take with its identification of times, moments, and historical agents. Like Ockham, his suspicion that the hierarchy of the modern church had become assimilated to the forces of Antichrist is independent of Joachism. In his late work On the Power of Emperors and Popes, Ockham aligned the pope with Antichrist (chap. 27). But Brian Tierney, in his commentary on Ockham’s ecclesiology, rightly remarks that this argument bore “no traces of Joachimite fantasy.”266 No more did Langland’s.
Also like Ockham, Langland has transformed traditional confidence in the indefectibility of the church. He did so to fit the ecclesiology emerging from his corrosive dialectical exploration of the modern church and its contrast with the church of the martyrs. The canonical text in the church’s doctrine of indefectibility was the promise of the risen Christ to his disciples: “behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world” (ecce ego vobiscum sum omnibus diebus, usque ad consummationem saeculi) (Matt. 28:20). Here I think it helpful to recall some reflections by Ockham. Christ’s promise, he argued, offers absolutely no warrant for the hierarchy’s claims to authority and its confidence in its own inerrancy. Famously enough, he came to the view that Christ’s promise means that some Christian somewhere will always hold the truth disclosed in Christ even if the church’s hierarchy (including the pope, of course) and most members of the church were to become heretics and apostates. As he wrote to his fellow Franciscans, now conforming to a pope Ockham judged to be a heretic, in the spring of 1334:
I would think that the whole Christian faith, and all Christ’s promise about the Catholic faith lasting to the end of the age, and the whole Church of God, could be preferred in a few, indeed in one; and I would judge that all other Christians erred against the Catholic faith, on the example of the prophet Elias, who, though he believed that he was God’s only worshipper left [3 Kings 19:10], nevertheless did not at all desert the true faith: though I do not doubt that in fact many “thousands of men” and women “have by no means bent the knee” of their faith before Baal [19:18].267
Later, in the unfinished part 3 of his massive Dialogue, he returns to this question. The dialogue’s “master” quotes Christ’s promise, “I am with you all days, until the end of the world [Matt. 28:20],” and comments thus:
Because of this it is not at all to be feared that because of the wickedness of one head there will ever be a general corruption or infection of all Christians, because such a corruption of Christians would conflict with the promise of Christ; but an almost general corruption of Christians would in no way conflict with that promise. Christ’s promise would stand if, under one perverted or infected head of all Christians, all were infected except two or three.268
And in the next book of the same part, he writes:
The law of eternal salvation given by Christ would not be in vain even if the great part of the faithful—indeed all except a very few, or except one—erred, not damnably but detestably, about it, even about an understanding necessary to salvation; nor would the law have been given in vain even if all Christians except a few or one erred about it damnably, because the whole Christian faith could be perceived in one alone (as during the three days [Good Friday to Easter Sunday] the whole faith remained in the mother of our Redeemer alone).269
Ockham has absolutely no doubt that true faith disclosed by Christ could survive among a very few dissenters. As Brian Tierney said, “In Ockham’s ecclesiology, the individual dissenter might well constitute the one true church.”270
This view comes close to John Milton’s theology of dissent and its ecclesiology so beautifully figured through the angel Abdiel in Paradise Lost, through the figure of the poet himself, and through the just individuals and tiny groups of faithful in the last two books of the poem. Or, also beautifully figured in his words published in the face of the restoration of the monarchy and persecuting Church of England at the close of the second (April 1660) edition of The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth:
Thus much I should perhaps have said though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones, and had none to cry to, but with the prophet, “O earth, earth, earth!” [Jer. 22:29] to tell the very soil itself what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to. Nay, though what I have spoke should happen (which Thou suffer not, who didst create mankind free, nor Thou next, who didst redeem us from being servants of men!) to be the last words of our expiring liberty.271
Because of the understandable presence of Wyclif in commentaries on Langland, I should make it quite clear that the ecclesiology of Ockham and Milton, however different, both centralize versions of evangelical liberty, and both are far removed from Wyclif’s in at least one crucial respect which is also relevant to Langland. Wyclif was sure that the true church was composed only of the predestined: ecclesia predestinatorum, congregatio omnium predestinatorum. Indeed, nobody could claim to be a member of the true church, clergy, or laity without being known as predestinate. However, he also agreed with traditional Catholic instruction that nobody knows whether they are predestinate (or reprobate) without a special revelation. This was hardly a coherent set of ideas on which to ground the kind of ecclesial polity Wyclif projected.272 And it as alien to Ockham’s account of the true church as it is to Milton’s and Langland’s.
Ockham offers a cogent account of why all Christians (women and men, lay and ordained) have an individual responsibility to examine the doctrinal claims of the hierarchy, what Catholics now know as their “magisterium,” and to evaluate them. After all, Christ’s truth may reside, as we saw, not in the papacy or episcopacy but in a small group of dissenters or in one layperson, such as Piers, in Passus VII (182–291). Paul’s instructions to test all things (“omnia autem probate” [1 Thess. 5:21]) could, according to Conscience in his polemics against Mede, be abused (III.489–95). What couldn’t? But in his Breviloquium Ockham says that this text applies to all Christians. It means that when teachers propagate Christian doctrine with the mystical sense of scripture, all Christians must “test, examine and probe to determine whether it is true or false, heretical or Catholic, or in the middle, neither Catholic nor heretical.”273 Ockham considers the question, “who is to judge whether the pope’s assertion is true or false, Catholic or heretical?” The answer is that any Christian who knows the truth, whether “with certainty” or “by faith alone” or “by evident argument” or by “certain experience, if it can be known that way.”274 He stresses that “every Christian” must evaluate every papal claim about Christian doctrine. If anyone discovers that the pope errs in his construal of scripture, even in matters of apparently little importance to eternal salvation, then the Christian is obliged to judge the pope and oppose him. Sometimes the pope may make determinations of such complexity that only “experts” can know them to be erroneous or heretical. When this happens, the experts (theologians trained in the universities) must expose the pope’s errors and resist his authority. But sometimes papal heresy is “so obvious even to the simple that even the simple should judge that he errs.”275 Even without touching on Ockham’s often innovative and moving reflections on the evangelical liberty of all Christians, including liberty in the face of the church’s hierarchy, it should be clear that his ecclesiology and ideas of hermeneutic authority presented a challenge to contemporary forms of ecclesiastical authority and order that went beyond any reformation within contemporary paradigms of orthodoxy.
The same should be said of Langland’s ecclesiology as it emerges through a dialectical criticism sustained through the final stages of his work. He too finally located the indefectibility of Christ’s church in a tiny dissident minority. This is the remnant, the group known as “foles.” They alone resist the de-Christianizing forces of Antichrist which had assimilated the hierarchy of the church, including, explicitly, pope and cardinals together with religious orders and most laypeople from the king and lords to the brewer. Given the collective rejection of Christ’s covenant and Holy Communion, participation in the body of Christ, this is perhaps not astonishing (XXI.381–402). One could recall Paul’s letter to the Romans: “And Isaias crieth out concerning Israel: If the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, a remnant [reliquiae] shall be saved. . . . And as Isaias foretold: Unless the Lord of Sabaoth had left us a seed, we had been made as Sodom, and we had been like Gomorrha” (Rom. 9:27, 29; see Isa. 10:22, 1:9). Or in Isaiah’s words: “For if thy people, O Israel, shall be as the sand of the sea, a remnant of them shall be converted [reliquiae convertentur ex eo]” (Isa. 10:22). Langland’s “foles” pose the question of the remnant. As Augustine observed while preaching on Psalm 73, “We must try to understand here what the prophets meant when they said that a remnant shall be saved [Reliquiae salvae fient].”276 For Augustine the whole of Psalm 73 is the voice of the remnant, while the promise of the psalm looks toward Christ in John 1:7: “the law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” However unpalatable to those wanting Langland to remain within the paradigms of orthodox medieval reformation, his remnant stands in the face of the Roman Church with its pope at Rome or Avignon. Let us recall the realities he envisions:
Freres folewed that fende for he yaf hem copes
And religious reuerensed hym and rongen here belles
And al the couent cam to welcome a tyraunt
And alle hise as wel as hym, saue onelich foles;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Symonye hym suede to assaile Consience
And presed on the pope and prelates thei made
To holde with Auntecrist, here temperaltees to saue.
(XXII.58–61, 126–28)
———
[Friars followed that fiend, for he gave them cloaks,
And religious orders reverenced him and rang their bells
And all the convent came to welcome a tyrant
And all his followers with him, with the sole exception of fools;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Simony pushed him to assail Conscience
And pressed on the pope that they make prelates
Teamed up with Antichrist, to save their temporalities.]
We should not turn Langland’s vision away from his continuing attention to the late medieval church: hierarchy and people are aligned with Antichrist. Christ’s promise of the indefectibility of his disciples is honored in the remnant, the fools (“foles”) who correctly identify the forces they encounter. In these circumstances we should also take seriously the fact that Wille, now one of the fools, has an exchange with the divine teacher of love, Kynde, which takes place without any form of ecclesiastic mediation. Such too had been his long exchange with Christ the Samaritan, as were Julian of Norwich’s contemporary visions and dialogues with Christ. After he has heard Kynde’s reiteration of his love command, he answers the call to the “craft” of love before roaming through contrition and confession into Unity (XXII.212–13). Contrition requires no priestly presence, and none is mentioned. Does confession entail sacerdotal mediation? Late medieval orthodoxy maintained that in an emergency this was not necessary, but there must be the intention to perform sacerdotal confession.277 Does Wille have such an intention? None is expressed. Perhaps he remembers his wretched experience with his own friar confessor (XII.13–36).
Be that as it may, this silence over intent is not insignificant in a context where the assertion or denial of the need for individual confession to a priest had become a contested area. Typical of this was the fifth heresy itemized in the Blackfriars Condemnations of 1382, namely, that if one was duly contrite all external confession was superfluous or useless.278 William Thorpe gives an example of the conviction that if one wanted to make confession a layperson was perfectly well qualified to receive it, while sacerdotal confession was superfluous. In accord with earlier norms in the church, Thorpe stressed that only God can forgive our sins. If someone wills to repent, God will move her or him to recollect relevant sins inspiring sorrow, while the Holy Spirit will inspire the penitent with “a good wil and a fervent desir” to live well. God will illumine the contrite person with heavenly grace and confidence in God’s mercy. Thorpe actually finds any claims that priests can “asoyle” (absolve) sins blasphemous, since, as we saw, God alone can absolve people of sin. Such blasphemy, he rightly indicates, is a medieval invention. As for confession, Thorpe transforms it into voluntary counseling for troubled people. The counselor can be any virtuous person, priest, or “secular man.” Christ Jesus, he tells his archbishop, who had just threatened to have him burned to death as a Wycliffite heretic, died to make humans free (“fre”), whereas the modern church enslaves people by threatening them with damnation unless they obey the excessive “ordynaunces” it invented.279
As for Wille, he certainly journeys through contrition and confession in response to Kynde’s counsel. But I see no reason to transgress Langland’s silence concerning Wille’s intentions here and to ascribe to him the search for a priestly confessor. He belongs to a small group of resistant, dissident fools. He is in the position of the earliest Christians or modern Lollards: a tiny minority. The Constantinian church is withering away and its hierarchy is quite irrelevant now to these fools. And soon Langland will give us his final, devastating dramatization of the sacrament of penance in the contemporary church. This powerful episode gives Wille and his fellow travelers good reason for eschewing the institutionalization of confession. As we shall see.
Before that, Langland returns to Conscience’s battle with the seven deadly sins (XXII.217 ff.; cf. XXII.69 ff.). Here priests do play a prominent role. They are agents in the forces of Antichrist. Once more they seek to undermine “goddes clerk and his notarie,” Conscience (XVI.192). They display the same contempt for Conscience manifested by the brewer as they combine overwhelming love of money with a love of “goed ale” and blasphemous oaths (XXII.218–27; XXI.396–408). Conscience now makes an extraordinary confession in an extraordinary moment of recognition:
Consience cryede, “Helpe, Clergie, or Y falle
Thorw inparfit prestes and prelates of holy churche!”
(XXII.228–29)
———
[Conscience cried out, “Help, Clergy, before I fall
Through imperfect priests and prelates of Holy Church!”]
Although these two lines confirm what Langland has already shown us about the composition of Antichrist’s army, the significance of this kind of reiteration is striking.280 For once again the passage emphasizes the scope of Langland’s critical vision of the contemporary church, one that includes all forms of priesthood at all levels of the hierarchy together with the laity. Furthermore, the lines recall Conscience’s somewhat smug dismissal of the skills provided by “clergie” to Christians, a dismissal he now seems to regret without actually acknowledging his own role in producing the absence of adequate learning among “prestes and prelates” (XV.175–84).281
Conscience’s cry to Clergie for help is now met with extremely harsh irony. Answering to the call for priests with “clergie,” Christian learning, come representatives from what have been revealed to be the forces of Antichrist: friars. “Freres,” Langland had written, “foloewed that fende for he yaf hem copes” (XXII.230). The accumulation of “copes” symbolizes one of the poem’s central ironies in its treatment of friars and the church’s institutions. Let us recall that through the friars the church (led by the thirteenth-century papacy) had institutionalized a life of absolute poverty with mendicancy in a state of perfection which imitated the form of life allegedly followed by Jesus Christ. But the institutionalization had unintended consequences which Langland’s work pursues in detail. Elsewhere I have followed Langland’s dialectical critique of Franciscan ideology, and here it suffices to identify just one strand of his exploration.282 The institutionalization of poverty, of need, leads to the accumulation of papal privileges, power, and wealth. Much conventional antimendicant writing, from William of St. Amour and Jean de Meun, subjects this split to a moral attack: hypocrisy.283 Langland of course includes this but in a wider context. The friars are not simply vicious Christians, hypocrites, but are also seen as those who are the product of institutional factors. The church, or rather the papacy, determined to institutionalize holy detachment from worldly goods in friars. But such institutionalization necessarily led to palpable attachment to material goods. The friars’ “copes” represent the reification of the state of collective voluntary poverty, their covering.
At first, Conscience rejects the friars’ offer “to helpe” because he discerns their inadequacy as confessors following the demands of the new covenant.284 It is appropriate that the personification Nede supports Conscience’s initial rejection of the friars by identifying their need as one for material goods distorting their relations with penitents who come to them as confessors. He observes the consequences of their apparent poverty, their official lack of “patrimonye,” that is, a regular form of livelihood. Their institutionalized mendicancy draws them to flatter those they absolve, directing their ministry to the rich who will provide them with a good (material) life (XXII.232–41). Despite the different inflections, Chaucer uses the same models in his figuration of the friar in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales:
Ful wel biloved and famulier was he
With frankeleyns over al in his contree,
And eek with worthy wommen of the toun;
For he hadde power of confessioun,
As seyde hymself, moore than a curat,
For of his ordre he was licenciat
Ful swetely herde he confessioun,
And plesaunt was his absolucioun:
He was an esy man to yeve penaunce,
Ther as he wiste to have a good pitaunce.
For unto a povre ordre for to yive
Is signe that a man is wel yshryve;
For if he yaf, he dorste make avaunt,
He wiste that a man was repentaunt;
For many a man so hard is of his herte,
He may nat wepe, althogh hym soore smerte.
(General Prologue, CT I.215–30; trans. 25)285
———
[Highly beloved and intimate was he
With County folk within his boundary,
And city dames of honour and possessions;
For he was qualified to hear confessions,
Or so he said, with more than priestly scope;
He had a special licence from the Pope.
Sweetly he heard his penitents at shrift
With pleasant absolution, for a gift.
He was an easy man in penance-giving
Where he could hope to make a decent living;
It’s a sure sign whenever gifts are given
To a poor Order that a man’s well shriven,
And should he give enough he knew in verity
The penitent repented in sincerity.
For many a fellow is so hard of heart
He cannot weep, for all his inward smart.]
Here too the ideology of mendicant poverty generates material needs which are fulfilled around the sacrament of penance, itself a commodity in a society where “al is for to selle” (Wife of Bath’s Prologue, CT III.414). Chaucer and Langland are exploring some of the same processes in the ecclesial polity they inhabit and using some of the same traditions of discourse to do so. Their modes, of course, differ and so, perhaps, do the outcomes.
Nede’s advice to Conscience is that those who embrace what Aquinas and convention called a state of perfection (“status perfectionis”) in a life of individual and collective poverty should be made to turn the formalism of their life into reality.286 Since they claim to have chosen the “chele and cheytyftee” (cold and misery) of poverty, let them “chewe as thei chose.” As Nede says this, we will remember Langland’s own powerful representation of those whose poverty is not a privileged, freely chosen form but a devastating daily reality (IX.70–97). Like his author, Nede opposes the friars’ appropriation of the “cure of soules” which belongs to parish priests, an opposition which is also opposition to papal privileges. In their claims to the state of perfection in absolute poverty, let them “lyue by angeles fode” (XXII.237–41).
In the face of this profoundly antiformalist irony, Conscience laughs (XXII.242). But laughter can be an impediment to careful reflection, and so it proves to be here. For Conscience immediately reverses his decision to turn away friars and instead welcomes them: “welcome be ye alle / To Vnite and holi churche” (XXII.242–43). This is the beginning of his final and most catastrophic error. The constable of the church, still without Piers, decides to welcome a group he has just seen in the vanguard of Antichrist’s army. Has he become like the blind leading the blind toward the ditch of de-Christianization (Matt. 15:14)? Perhaps part of the problem is that he has yet once more taken “kynde wit” as his teacher in his rumination on friars (XXII.268). As we have already been shown, a natural power unaided by divine grace is likely to generate errors when it determines issues related to humans’ supernatural end, to salvation in Christ. Be that as it may, Conscience at first seeks to mitigate his error by inviting friars to reform their practices and to limit their numbers, just as kings limit the number of those receiving “wages” in war (XXII.245–72). Without strenuous allegorization, a model of reform drawn from contemporary organizations of war profits may not be the most propitious model for those who claim to be in a state of perfection. Such profits, after all, have already been associated with Mede in an earlier argument before the king whom she advises not to appoint Conscience as constable (III.232–57). But whatever difficulties may lie in this model, Langland’s own dialectical exploration of mendicant orders and Franciscan ideology presses beyond Conscience’s welcome to the friars and his suggestions for their reformation. Here he is moving in the same direction as John Wyclif. In De Blasphemia (1381), Wyclif notes that the Franciscans’ only foundation (“fundamentum”) is a papal determination and that they should no longer exist.287 Conscience, however, still assumes that a reformation of the friars is possible. So he invokes “Frere Fraunceys and Domynyk” as models of holiness and instructs contemporary friars to live “aftur youre reule” (XXII.246–52). Nevertheless, he also proposes a reform that actually contradicts Franciscan espousal of poverty and voluntary mendicancy as essential elements in their embrace of perfection. This reform is presented quite blandly: friars should accept food, clothing, and other resources so that they lack nothing (“yow shal no thyng lakke,” XXII.248–49). The blandness reflects Conscience’s failure to grasp the ideological and historical identity of mendicant orders, especially Franciscan traditions. At this stage he does not grasp how his proposal subverts their distinctive identity and their sense of superiority to monks in the ladder of holy poverty. He is unaware that his reform would reduce friars to the same state of life as monks or even parish priests. It would be transformation, root and branch. As yet, Conscience neither realizes this nor does he realize the need for such a transformation. But the extended engagement he is about to have with friars will educate him and he will return to his proposal. But with understanding of its ramifications.
Meanwhile, Langland forces Conscience and his readers to witness the disastrous consequences of this invitation to the friars. First of all, we are shown the resistance to the idea that friars should abandon their leading role in late medieval universities together with their ambition to appropriate the parish priests’ cure of souls and its material foundations. In both spheres of ambition, Langland ascribes the mendicants’ motives to the deadly sin of envy (XXII.273–96).288 Momentarily, Conscience seems to rescind his invitation to the friars, turning instead to the parish priest they seek to displace in the confessional. The parish priest administers a “scharp salve,” demanding that “Peres pardon were ypayd, redde quod debes [pay what you owe]” (XXII.304–8, XXI.182–94). Conscience too had tried this in the previous passus only to be confronted by a rebellion culminating in the people’s rejection of Christ’s covenant and the Lord’s Supper (XXI.381–408). Christians wanted the sacraments but without any change in their lives. So penance would remain merely formal. Such was the outcome of the institutionalization of mandatory annual penance and Eucharist that emerged from the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 (“Omnis utriusque sexus”).289 And Langland’s return to this scene in Passus XXII confirms this nexus. Once again the people reject the evangelical law (“redde quod debes”) and demand the replacement of the parish priest by a confessor “that softer couthe plastre,” one who would make penance a more pleasant experience (XXII.309–15). Perhaps the people, like the reader, recall Mede’s confessor in Passus III (38–67). Perhaps penance should be displaced by therapy for gratifying the client who, after all, pays for the commodity. The friars seem able and willing to offer such a service. One of these friars is named “frere Flatrere” (XXII.315).
Conscience remembers Piers’s legacy from Christ. Forgiveness demands that the person to be forgiven change his or her life and tries to restore the broken bonds of community (XXII.318–21). But yet once more Conscience displays marked instability. Despite his memory of Christ and Piers, he immediately reverses his decision:
“Y may wel soffre,” sayde Consience, “sennes ye desiren,
That frere Flaterare be fet and fisyk yow seke.”
(XXII.322–23)
———
[“I may as well agree,” said Conscience, “since you desire it,
That Friar Flatterer be fetched and treat you sick.”]
A few lines earlier, Nede had reminded Conscience that because the friars identify themselves as truly poor, in the Franciscans’ case lacking any civil rights to the property they held, friars “flatere, to fare wel, folk that ben riche” (XXII.234–35), as we saw in the confession of Mede (III.38–74a). Conscience is told the name of the friar who wishes to displace the parish priest: “frere Flaterere.” But he has become such a poor reader of the allegory he inhabits that he cannot grasp the significance of a personification whose meaning is written all over its face. Nor can he heed the explicit warnings he has been given (XXII.234–35, 315, 323). So we are being shown a church under the leadership of constable Conscience stumbling from error to error and quite forgetful of the central Christian narratives (XVIII–XXI), a church with Piers long since absent and a hierarchy aligned with the forces of Antichrist. If Conscience is “the site of truth,” Langland is showing how vulnerable and fragile God’s precious gift may be when immersed in a cultural revolution involving de-Christianizing powers.290 He makes his final error in defense of the institutionalization of penance in what he thinks is Christ’s church. Unfolding this final error will bring to a close Langland’s dialectical exploration of this sacrament and the church in which it had been central and made mandatory since 1215.
But first Langland displays, yet once more, the full participation of lay elites in the church’s assimilation to the world that runs after Antichrist. For the last time he confirms how deluded was the Wycliffite idea, grasped by Liberum Arbitrium, that lay elites would be appropriate agents of reform. This confirmation is replete with significance for the magisterial reformation of the sixteenth century. Once Conscience has assented to set aside Christ’s own demands to the pardon he brings humanity, the friar receives the enthusiastic support of the lay elite. A lord sends a letter to the bishop, who assents to the arrangement whereby the friar appropriates confessional work and income of the parish (XXII.324–29). The coziness between lay lord and bishop is grounded in the material realities of Langland’s church. Many benefices were the property of lords and of lordly ecclesiastics, making parish priests their employees while they themselves extracted substantial proportions of parishioners’ compulsory tithes given to support the parish ministry.291 And of course bishops and abbots were grandees in the House of Lords. No wonder that the only bishop who opposed Henry’s appropriation of the church was Bishop Fisher of Rochester, the martyr St. John Fisher in Catholic tradition.
Yet despite the agreements between constable Conscience, lay lords, and bishops, Langland figures one final source of opposition. He personifies Peace as the porter who asks the friar’s name. Hitherto known as Friar Flatterer, the religious mendicant now names himself in even more sinister and famous terms. He declares the identity Conscience has conspicuously failed to discern. The friar’s fraternal companion (“his felawe”) names him “sire Penetrans-domos.” As all commentators note, this name is a traditional component of antimendicant discourse taken from St. Paul: “For of these sort are they who creep into houses [ex his enim sunt qui penetrant domos] and lead captive silly women laden with sins” (2 Tim. 3:6).292 In this tradition, a profound allegorical dimension was found in “houses” (domos): both the material house from which mendicants extracted their material needs and the inner house which was “groped” by confessors. Both Langland (XXII.383) and Chaucer use this word to describe the search of mendicant confessors. Chaucer deploys it in his brilliant story of the groping friar told by his summoner (CT III.1918–41, 1948–73, 2121–55). There the friar’s creeping into houses and consciences leads him to grope a pseudopenitent’s “towel” (anus) in search of material profits, hidden treasures. He is rewarded with a very material parody of the voice of the spirit that “breathed where he will and thou hearest his voice” (John 3:8). Langland’s inflection of “penetrans domos” (they creep into houses), is, however, set in a rather different context, mode of writing, and theological focus. Langland’s Peace recognizes the tradition to which “sire Penetrans-domos” belongs. Unlike Conscience, he can still read allegory. So he wants to turn him away. But he cannot act against constable Conscience whose courteous spokesman, “Hend-speche,” commands Peace to welcome Friar Flatterer, the self-declared “sire Penetrans-domos,” together with “his felawe.” These mendicant confessors will convert sinners who will then kiss Conscience (XXII.348–53). The latter reiterates his welcome to the friars, those warriors of Antichrist and the modern papacy, while now condemning the parish priest who had tried to administer penance according to evangelical demands (XXII.348–61). In doing so, of course, Conscience condemns his own earlier attempt to persuade Christians to follow the commands of Christ to pay to Piers Plowman’s pardon from Christ, “Redde quod debes” (XXII.381–95). So Langland discloses that the conscience of the church is being assimilated by forces whose goal is to subvert the gifts of Christ and the Holy Spirit, to invert the crop of truth and make “fals spryng” (XXII.53–57; XXI.335–40). In this moment, Conscience lacks any perception of his errors and their consequences. Perhaps being constable of the Constantinian church makes even “goddes clerk” (XVI.192) forget what he once knew so well and could once articulate so eloquently.
Langland’s account of what follows is a quite astonishing representation of the sacrament of his church on which he had bestowed the most attention in his work. Mandatory for all Christians, it was central to the church’s version of justification and sanctification, while its refusal was conventionally represented as the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire, as Jacob’s Well delighted to witness.293 But now Langland displays the confessor turning both the sacrament of penance and masses into commodities in which Christian counsel is displaced: he “gloseth ther he shryueth” (smooth-talks his shriving) (XXII.362–68).
True enough, in one sense we have seen this all before. The poem’s Prologue and third passus were replete with images of the church’s incorporation in contemporary markets together with dramatization of the consequences. Exegesis of scripture, sacrament of penance, sacrament of orders, and sacrament of marriage were all shown in commodified forms making the church the world and the world the church. But then, as the poem began its journeys, one could imagine that we were encountering abuses which were being satirized in a familiar incitement to a traditional model of reformation. Now, however, at the poem’s ending, we are no longer invited to imagine this. Nor should we be able to imagine it. The work’s dialectic has shown, time and again, the resilience of such “abuses” and the ineffectuality of numerous attempts at reform. The processes we have been following in Passus XXI–XXII show us the making of what we encountered in the Prologue and from Passus II through Passus IX. We now see just how the Pentecostal community could become the church of those earlier passus. And we see this without any signs of any agents willing and capable of reformation. On the contrary, Langland compels us to contemplate a new vision which condenses the outcome of his dialectical exploration of the sacrament of penance in his church.
Under the ministry of the clerical elite, the sacrament is shown to dissolve contrition. The confessor “gropeth” Contrition until Contrition “hadde clene foryete to crye and to wepe / And wake for his wikkede werkes as he was woned bifore” (had clean forgotten to cry and weep / And to stay awake for his wicked deeds, as he once did). The sacrament of penance has thus become an impediment to repentance. The author’s comment is that the confessor’s therapy has drawn contrition to abandon contrition, which is the necessary “souereyne salue” (sovereign salve) for sinners seeking divine forgiveness (XXII.363–72). This observation recalls the risen Christ’s command to Piers which makes remission of sins, pardon, inseparable from repentance and conversion of life. It is congruent with Aquinas’s statement that contrition contains the whole of penance as the foundation to a building supports the whole edifice (ST III.90.3, ad 2). But Langland has an even more devastating representation of this sacrament.
Conscience calls for Contrition. He continues to assume the model of the church he accepted from Kynde Wit, a walled fortress keeping the bad people outside. So he tells Contrition to guard the gate (XXII.376). His model still seems to prevent him from recognizing that the forces of de-Christianization are within fortress church as well as in the world outside.294 Nor does he acknowledge his own errors and his role in the current disasters. An impenitent constable of the church in this situation is an especially resonant image of its state. He had commanded peace to welcome “sire Penetrans-domos,” and Peace now informs him of what he himself has failed to observe. However much he now invokes Contrition, in fact, Contrition will not come. We have been shown exactly why, and Peace now encapsulates the completion of this movement in a resonant image:
“He lyeth adreint,” saide Pees, “and so doth mony othere;
The frere with his fisyk this folk hath enchaunted
And doth men drynke dwale, that they drat no synne.”
(XXII.377–79)
———
[“He lies drowned,” said Peace, “and so do many others;
The Friar’s enchanted these people with his treatments
And gives them sleeping potions so they fear no sin.”]
The sacrament of the church so central in Langland’s work and his church has finally enchanted Christian people. The church’s elite, its magisterial teachers and ubiquitous judges in trials for heresy and inquisition, has turned the sacrament of penance into an opiate, a sleeping pill.295 The consequences are that the moral recklessness we have been witnessing now becomes a chain of habit: “they drat [fear] no synne” (XXII.379). These words conclude Langland’s dialectical exploration of the sacrament of penance in the modern church. They are his final evaluation of its teleology.
Because I am not convinced that the scope of this evaluation is adequately acknowledged in much scholarship on Piers Plowman, I will add a brief recollection of Catholic theology on the sacrament brought into such serious question. All sacraments and their salvific effects, it was agreed, flow from the passion and resurrection of Christ.296 The sacrament of penance conveys justification and sanctification to the penitent. It interweaves the virtues of justice and charity (ST III.85.1–4, 86.4 and 6). Aquinas agreed that God can pardon sins without the mediation of a priest, and God does not bind his power to sacraments in such a way that he cannot bestow their effects in another way. Nevertheless, he insists that the virtue of repentance is essential to divine forgiveness (ST III.86.2 with III.64.7, III.68.2). This accords with Langland’s depiction of Christ’s pardon (XXI.182–98). It was a commonplace in late medieval teaching in whose light we see the trajectory of the sacrament of penance in Piers Plowman. In the culmination of Langland’s dialectic, we encounter Christian tradition and its institutions participating in the forces of de-Christianization, working against the conversion which is repentance. In this last word on the sacrament of penance, all the participants are overwhelmed by amnesia. They all forget what the poem has just treated with dramatic, lyric, and theological brilliance: the redemptive reconciling work of Christ, the one who shows why Holy Church could affirm so wholeheartedly, “Deus caritas” (God is love) (I.82; 1 John 4:7–16). Conscience, “goddes clerk and his notarie” (XVI.192), must be included in this all. Not only because his errors contributed to the subversion of the church over which he is constable. But more especially because he fails to invoke, let alone apply, the visions of Christ and Trinity pervading the previous four passus (XVIII–XXI). This loss of divine vision, the forgetfulness of revealed knowledge he had recently taught Wille (XXI.1–210), is explicitly bound up with his enmeshment in the contemporary church’s version of repentance and its institutionalizations of the forms of divine grace promised by Christ. This enmeshment is the source of the difference between the Christocentric Conscience of Passus XXI and the blundering amnesiac of Passus XXII. In the former, his attention is entirely given to the visions and teaching of Christ, as befits “goddes clerk and his notarie.” From that attention he is able to interpret the “shewing” Wille has received and to teach Wille what he asks about the life of Christ. Long before this, Holy Church had lamented that contemporary people have no sense of any heaven other than this world (I.5–9).297 But now we are being forced to recognize the decisive role of the church in bringing about this very situation: “The moste party of this peple that passeth on this erthe, / Haue thei worschip in this world thei wilneth no bettere” (Most of the people that pass through this earth / Are satisfied with success in this world) (I.7–8). Langland’s obsession with the sacrament of penance comes from a profound conviction that the hope for humanity given by Christ is inextricably bound up with one precondition, namely, individual and collective acknowledgment of sin with the willingness to “pay / To Peres pardoun the plouhman Redde quod debes” (pay / To Piers the plowman’s pardon Redde quod debes), to join with Wille in confessing, “That Y haue ytynt tyme and tyme myspened” (That I have wasted time and time misspent) (XXI.182–90; V.92–101). If we will not acknowledge our error, our participation in evil, then, individually and collectively, we are truly lost. In such a choice we reject the astonishing gift in which time may be redeemed and a new beginning made possible:
So hope Y to haue of hym that is almyghty
A gobet of his grace and bigynne a tyme
That alle tymes of my tyme to profit shal turne.
(V.99–101)
———
[So I hope to have from him that is almighty
A mouthful of his grace, and begin a time
That all times of my time shall turn to profit.]
What a grisly irony that the church should develop a sacrament which enchants its members into the oblivion of such hope and the covenant to which it belongs: de-Christianization led by the church.
This returns me to my earlier mention of an encyclical by John Paul II in 1993, Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth). When one juxtaposes the modern pope and the work of the late medieval writer I have been studying, something quite unexpected emerges. I think this is worth considering briefly for what it helps bring out about Langland’s vision of church and society. To John Paul II, the modern Western world manifests “growing secularism,” with many people living and thinking “as if God did not exist,” a view very close to Holy Church’s in Piers Plowman (VS, 88; Piers Plowman I.5–9). The pope maintains that today “even the attitudes and behavior of Christians” are shaped by the “dechristianized culture” they inhabit (VS, 88). If some version of faith is affirmed, it tends to be split off from “morality” and the decisions of daily life (VS, 88, 106). Like Langland and many medieval theologians, the pope addresses the problem of an erring conscience. He writes about the way conscience can become “almost blind from being accustomed to sin” (62, drawing on St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas). Here one might think that John Paul II will produce an account of church, conscience, and people in the face of “dechristianizing” forces which will converge with Langland’s. But this does not happen, and the way it does not intrigues me. It also helps one focus on the surprising particularities of Langland’s concluding vision.
The modern pope has one major source of confidence that Langland does not share with him. John Paul maintains that in the face of the forces of “dechristianization” and “secularism,” forces able to blind conscience in “even the attitudes and behavior of Christians,” there remains “a great help for the formation of conscience” (VS, 64; see too 88 and 106). What might this be? It is “the Church and her Magisterium” (64; original emphasis). That is, the actually existing Roman Church, with its contemporary “Magisterium,” can transcend, without qualification, the forces of “dechristianization” that have, according to the pope, so thoroughly transformed Christians. John Paul continues: “In forming their consciences the Christian faithful must give careful attention to the sacred and certain teaching of the Church. For the Catholic Church [i.e., the Roman Church] is by the will of Christ the teacher of truth” (64, quoting from Dignitatis Humanae). Unerringly, it fulfills the will of Christ, however incorrigibly its members err. The Roman Church can help conscience “avoid being tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine proposed by human deceit (cf. Eph. 4:14) and helping it not to swerve from the truth about the good of man, but rather, especially in more difficult questions, to attain the truth with certainty and to abide in it” (64).
Little could be further from Langland’s vision of the Roman Church and its “magisterium.”298 Little could be more alien to the ecclesiology emerging from his great work. Nowhere does Langland even hint, let alone affirm, that the contemporary church, led by the pope in Rome (or Avignon), is “a great help for the formation of conscience.” Nowhere does he suggest it can be relied on to “attain the truth with certainty and to abide in it.” No more, of course, does the Ockham who has appeared in this essay, a theologian addressing those he was confronting as heretical popes and hierarchy. Any attempt to fit the outcomes of Langland’s exploration of his church into a modern orthodoxy (such as John Paul’s) or a late medieval orthodoxy (such as those of Langland’s Archbishop Courtenay persecuting Wyclif and his fellow travelers) will demand a reading so against the grain of the text as to make the text’s specificities quite irrelevant.299
Langland’s work shatters the Constantinian church so powerfully attacked by Liberum Arbitrium. But he refuses the solution favored by Liberum Arbitrium, Wyclif, and the magisterial reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That is, reformation under the power of lay sovereign and elites. As we have seen, this rejection follows from the poet’s ruthless display of the immersion of these elites in the paradiastolic rhetoric, practices, and lust for dominion that were so inimical to Langland’s understanding of Christian discipleship. He thus rejects another Constantinian solution to the failings of the Constantinian church identified as such by Liberum Arbitrium. He also rejects, with Liberum Arbitrium, the church’s version of mission that became Christendom, a church inextricably bound up with the structures of dominion, power, and exploitation. Such a church could present England in 1377 as the special heritage of God, the holy Israel with a king specially beloved by God, with Prince Richard “sent to England by God in the same way that God sent his only son for the redemption of the chosen people.”300 A few years later, we can see the elaboration of such ideology under Henry V when a priest represents the king as a knight sent from heaven by God to save the church and realm. God’s special grace is manifest in victorious war against the French and in his killing of Wycliffites. In his sharp sentence against these heretical Christians “by which they are given to fire and death,” Henry V is a new Joshua who has lifted the shield of faith by killing Lollards “and especially their captain [Oldcastle] who was recently burned.” In another sermon, the same priest figures church and realm as “our ship” which has been saved by Henry V.301 Such is Constantinian Christianity, and Henry V was indeed welcomed as “a new Constantine” by the church’s elite.302 In such a church secular power and the means of salvation are bound together, temporalities and spirituality interwoven. No wonder, then, that the archbishop of Canterbury, executed by the rebels in 1381, should also hold the office of chancellor, called by Wyclif the most secular office in the kingdom (“secularissimum regni officium”).303 Not surprisingly, Langland thinks that the hierarchy of the church is drawn to participate in the forces of Antichrist by its commitment to “temperaltees” (XXII.126–28).
And so, instead of a Constantinian reformation to reform a Constantinian church, Langland, like Ockham, turns to a theology of the “foles,” the fools. They constitute a tenacious opposition to the forces of Antichrist whom they discern without confusion and without terror (XXII.53–68). They understand the collusive comfort offered by the lay sovereign and royal council composed of priests and laity. Understanding it, they curse this institution at the heart of the Constantinian church. Do such fools represent any institutional solution to replace the magisterial reformation prepared by Liberum Arbitrium and John Wyclif? Certainly not. Is this a failure in Langland’s political theology and ecclesiology? Absolutely not.304 Langland deliberately eschews any institutional solution to his devastating critique of the contemporary church and the history of its making. Just as did Ockham.305
Eschewal of institutional solutions, such as reformation under Crown lords and magistrates, is a logical outcome of Langland’s work. True enough, he lacks Ockham’s innovative theology of evangelical freedom or Milton’s powerful account of Christian liberty in his De doctrina christiana (I.27). As Arthur McGrade wrote of Ockham’s appeal to “the gospel as a law of freedom [Lex evangelica est lex libertatis],” this “treatment of evangelical liberty clashes sharply with the hierocratic ideal of comprehensive direction of man’s spiritual life from above.”306 But this lack does not prevent a thorough subversion of any “hierocratic ideal” calling for “comprehensive direction of man’s spiritual life from above.” Nor has it prevented an equally thorough subversion of contemporary ecclesial institutions. As we have seen, even the sacrament of penance had first of all proved to be an inadequate means of catechetical instruction, leaving penitents completely puzzled as to how to go on with the Christian life:
Ac ther ne was wye non so wys that the way thider couthe
But blostrede forth as bestes ouer baches and hulles.
(VII.158–59)
———
[But there was no one so wise that he knew the way there,
But blundered forth like beasts over valleys and hills.]
Instead of leading to completion in the Eucharist for which it was meant to be essential preparation, it leaves its subjects blundering around, lost from “the way” (VII.158–71). And, of course, that way is Christ: “Y am via et veritas and may avauncen alle” (X.255; see John 14:6). Furthermore, Langland represents the institution of the church’s reconciliation between humanity and God as having become a sacralized commodity reconciling priests and laity to the current practices of the world’s markets. And finally, as we have just observed, the form of penance becomes a means for the complete reconciliation of penitents with their sins “for a litel sulver [silver],” an enchanting drug freeing all from any reflection on sin and its consequences (XXII.362–79). Langland’s unfolding of this sacrament characterizes his treatment of ecclesiastic forms and authority, his troubles with the historical institutionalizations of the gifts of Christ and the Holy Spirit in the Pentecostal community. Even attempts to imitate Christ’s poverty as a state of perfection culminated in an institutionalization of voluntary mendicant poverty which generated power, privilege, wealth, and dominion for friars who became a special arm of the papacy.307
In fact, Langland’s poem constantly attends to the unintended and ironic consequences of the institutions established in the Constantinian church. Everywhere he finds reified forms which are, at best, parodic simulacra of the Pentecostal church with its allegorical edifice and evangelical leaders, Holy Spirit and Piers the Plowman. These leaders, most significantly, lead by immediately absenting themselves from any determinate structures in the polity. Neither Langland’s overall vision nor the particularities of his ecclesiology give a trace of anything remotely like Pope John Paul II’s “Magisterium,” let alone his unqualified confidence in the existence of such an office and its apparently total transcendence of the “dechristianized” culture it inhabits. Indeed, nothing in Langland’s dialectic encourages us to expect any such institution and authority in this life, an institution so unscathed by its material foundations and cultural contexts. On the contrary, his restless dialectic addresses many ways in which the church’s institutions are woven into social relations of dominion, power, and temporalities. He often shows the commitment of contemporary popes and the church they lead to forces he finally evaluates as Antichrist’s. The poem constantly submits the self-descriptions and self-legitimizations of the modern church to a critical realism which is especially well suited to disclose reifications where sacralizing forms and actual practice have become split apart, often in grotesque contradictions.
This critical process is theological and literary. As St. Thomas taught, doctrine comes to us inseparable from its mode of discourse: “Notandum autem, quod ex modo loquendi datur nobis doctrina.”308 Langland’s modi loquendi encourage a searching exploration of features that to many mid-seventeenth-century English revolutionaries would be attacked as formalism. There one of the objects of scrutiny would be the magisterial reformation in the inflection it took in the Church of England (especially under Archbishop Laud and King Charles) and then among Presbyterians: “New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large.”309 What links Langland’s critical realistic dialectic with later attacks on the magisterial reformation by various Protestant groups, represented in the previous quotation by John Milton, is a refusal to accept that the outcome of the church’s history in current forms of ecclesiastic polity, doctrine, and liturgy manifests God’s will.
In Langland’s era, the kind of orthodox self-defense at issue is well illustrated in the work of a friar, Roger Dymmok’s Liber contra XII errores et hereses lollardorum.310 His defense of ecclesiastical temporalities and opulence is as unashamed as it is orthodox. Dymmok acknowledges the striking differences between the modern and the early church. The difference was used by Waldensians, Wycliffites, and others to castigate the contemporary church as a lamentable fall.311 The friar defends temporalities and dominion in the modern church as a sign of divine presence in the church’s history of increasing wealth and power. There is simply no longer any need for the old ways of apostolic poverty and purely spiritual power to pervade the church, since this would not benefit the authority and power of the church today (40–51). Dymmok’s work is an excellent example of the church’s defense of Constantinian Christianity. In fact, he explicitly celebrates the Donation of Constantine and asserts that Constantine was divinely inspired in making it (40). And now priestly power is above that of the angels, because priests consecrate the Eucharist and effect the remission of sins (54–59). Any challenge to the Roman Church, whether to its material wealth or to its sacramental doctrine, would be a challenge to lay sovereign and elites. This would herald social anarchy. Church and lay elites are bound together by God in a shared culture (90–91, 147–49, 153–54; part 10 contains a defense of Christians involved in killing, attacking strands of Christian nonviolence and pacifism in Wycliffite theology). Such Constantinian Christianity has substantial common ground with the magisterial Reformation and its attack on Anabaptists, including nonviolent Anabaptists. I think of the crucial Elizabethan Act of Supremacy, severing the English Church from Rome. It was called an act “restoring to the Crown the ancient jurisdiction” over the ecclesiastical and spiritual state. It abolished “all usurped and foreign power and authority, spiritual and temporal.” It demanded that every ecclesiastical officer and every temporal officer should declare in their “conscience” that Queen Elizabeth was “the only supreme governor of this realm . . . as well in spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes, as temporal.”312 In the 1562 (1563) Articles of Religion, Article XXXIV is devoted to the traditions of the church. These are to be determined “by common authority,” and nobody acting through “private judgement” is allowed to break such “traditions and ceremonies of the Church.” Whoever challenges such “common order” in the church simultaneously “hurteth the authority of the Magistrate.” Article XXXVII concerns “Civil Magistrates.” It is affirmed that the lay sovereign “hath the chief power in this Realm of England,” power over causes “Ecclesiastical or Civil.” I appreciate that the English sovereign displaced the pope, who now “hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England” (Article XXXVII) and proclaimed that “the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matter of Faith” (Article XIX). But it is not insignificant that Dymmok dedicates his book to the king as a new David who had been raised up by God to defend the church from heretics and heresy (5–6).313 Toward the end of section XIV above, I sampled similar sentiments in the Parliament of 1377 and in a sermon by one of Henry V’s priests. As Jeremy Catto has shown, “In all but name, more than a century before the title could be used, Henry V had begun to act as the supreme governor of the Church of England.”314 Any grand narrative that seeks to take in the later Middle Ages and the Reformation needs to address such continuities across the great divide, although most have failed to do so.315 Be that as it may, Langland’s work explores and rejects Constantinian versions of political theology and its ecclesiologies. He knows the medieval versions intimately, and in his critical responses he challenges what will become their embodiment in the magisterial Reformation.316
Langland does not quite end his work with the church’s sacrament of penance turned into the wine of delusion. He ascribes to Conscience a response. Despite the eschatological dimensions of Passus XXII, this response is quite free of the frustrated, wrathful, and utopian apocalypticism of Passus III (437–82, discussed in section XII). It is also freed from the model of the church as fortress. Instead, Conscience takes up language used to describe the evangelical work of the Holy Spirit and Piers in the Pentecostal community. He promises to become a pilgrim: “Y wol bicome a pilgrime / And wenden [walk] as wyde as the world renneth [reaches]” (XXII.380–81). This echoes the way the Holy Spirit “wente / As wyde as the world is with Peres to tulye [till] treuthe” (XXI.332–33). Conscience’s universal pilgrimage is a search for the plowman commissioned by the risen Christ and led by the Holy Spirit (XXI). There is not a whisper about the church needing a pope elected by cardinals and somehow succeeding St. Peter with Piers as the putative vicar of Christ. We have, after all, just been shown the pope alive and well but aligned with the forces of Antichrist. Ockham’s conclusion too.317
Conscience hopes that Piers the plowman might destroy Pride and end the church’s mistaken attempt to institutionalize need and absolute voluntary poverty as the supreme state of perfection (XXII.380–84).318 His search for this most elusive figure is certainly not the search for an institutional solution within a reformed hierarchical church that maintains continuities with the late medieval church. Such a comfortingly reformist solution is not Langland’s. If anything, his conclusion would encourage sympathy with Wycliffite views that after Pope Urban VI nobody should be pope, a view well enough known to be condemned as a heresy at Blackfriars in 1382.319
Conscience’s final three lines include a phrase which could be a regression to his earlier disastrous invocation of planetary powers to terrorize erring humanity into a godly life: “Now Kynde me avenge” (XXII.384). For Conscience to regress into error even as he gains new insights and sets out as a vulnerable pilgrim would not be inconsistent with the way Langland thinks. We have seen how he cultivates modes that give one few resting places, however epiphanic these may be. If Conscience is regressing, he might be identifying with biblical images of the saints carrying two-edged swords, “To execute vengeance” (Ad faciendam vindictam) among those who rebel against God (Ps. 149:7–9). We will remember how he had rather enjoyed the story of Samuel chopping Agag into pieces, an act explicitly offered as one of vengeance (III.439–40 [1 Kings 15:33]). But he may have now understood the futility and moral error in his invocation of Kynde as a planetary force which brings plagues and other diseases, nature in a thoroughly fallen world. If so, he might be invoking the figure of Kynde who has just taught Wille to continue learning how to love when Wille appealed to him for vengeance against old age and death (XXII.199–211). This final insistence echoes Holy Church’s teaching in Passus I, and Elizabeth Salter plausibly relates it to Julian of Norwich’s insistence, toward the end of her own great vision, that God’s meaning is Love, his revelation Love, and his motive in disclosing this revelation is Love, and the sole content of his teaching Love.320 “Deus caritas” (I.82). And perhaps such a reading accords better with what seems like the poem’s final figuration of conversion.
For Conscience’s final longing is for Piers the plowman, and his final cry is for Grace to whom he had once sung, with Wille, “Veni Creator Spiritus” (XXII.385–86; XXI.210). This “creator spiritus” is of course the Holy Spirit so eloquently celebrated in the discourse of Christ the Samaritan in Passus XIX. There the Holy Spirit was intimately associated with acts of kindness without which humanity cuts itself off from divine life (XIX.96–228). Perhaps Conscience’s shift from a cry to Kynde for vengeance to a cry for Grace is part of another conversion to the God who has been revealed in Christ the Samaritan and Christ’s embodiment of divine kindness in his great oration on his solidarity with humanity while emancipating humans from the prison of hell (XIX.360–475).321 This final invocation of the Holy Spirit is made with a decision to become a pilgrim. As Skeat noted, a pilgrim “determined to wander wide over the world till he shall find Piers the Plowman.”322 This description brings out some resonant ideas in the ending and the processes which precede it. Conscience’s pilgrimage entails a commitment to evangelical mobility foreshadowed by the Holy Spirit and Piers (XXI.332–33; XXII.381). Foreshadowed too by Wille who left his little cottage (“cote”) in Cornhill to become a seeking wanderer, unenclosed by walls, institutional structures, or status (V.1–108; X.1–13, 56–62; XV.1–4; XX.1–5; XXII.1–5). It is also foreshadowed in Liberum Arbitrium’s model of the church of the martyrs and his call for a nonviolent evangelical mission. This is far removed from Constantinian models, whether those of late medieval orthodoxy proclaimed by Dymmok or those of their Wycliffite adversaries and the magisterial Reformation of the sixteenth century. No need for temporalities, for dominion, for coercive jurisdiction, for a wealthy and well-fortified church. No need to take responsibility for maintaining the current regime in its structures of power and status. No need and actually no power to control the world’s competing material and political forces. No need to join with King Henry IV and Archbishop Arundel in fighting “sedition and insurrection” allegedly inseparable from Wycliffite “conventicles and confederacies.” No need to fight this threat to lay and ecclesiastical power with fire: De heretico comburendo (1401) stipulated that those the church handed to the lay power as incorrigible should be burned to death so that “such punishment may strike fear to the minds of others.”323 The few fools, the wanderers, have no fantasies of social or ecclesial control, no lust for dominion.
Indeed, we may remember Wille asking a gripping question: “What is holy churche, chere [dear] frende?” (XVII.124). The answer he receives from Liberum Arbitrium at this point has nothing to say about temporalities, power, and the need to shore up the current political regime. It is charity, a form of life shaped by love, fidelity, honest relations with others: love of God with love of neighbor (XVII.124–43). And in such a church those known as bishops will not live in palaces but be mobile teachers enchanting people to charity rather than enchanting them to reckless abandonment of Christian ethics through the sacrament of penance (XII.239–94; cf. XXII.363–79). And perhaps this lesson had continuities with the map offered by the layman Piers to the lost pilgrims in Passus VII. His ethical guidance culminated in the promise that if Grace so granted, this journey would disclose a vision of Treuthe in the searcher’s own heart where Charity will make “a churche” nurturing others (VII.254–60a). This is a church fit for fools.324
Furthermore, we should note that as Conscience abandons the role of constable to become a pilgrim who will search for Piers the plowman, his decision highlights a decisive fact that seems to have escaped his attention as he tried to rule fortress church. The fact is this: Piers has been absent from the Roman Church where he had been displaced by the pope, cardinals, religious orders, and priests following Antichrist in Passus XXII. This church had substituted the opiate of its sacrament of penance for charity and cardinal virtues. We should not mitigate Langland’s own emphasis: Piers has to be searched for beyond the actually existing papal church from which he has become absent. What are we to understand by Piers’s absence? What are we to understand by Conscience’s search and by Wille’s own hidden place with the fools (“foles”) in “Vnite” also known as “holi church” (XXII.213–16, 74–75)?
In her fine introduction to Piers Plowman, Salter discussed the “frequent vanishings and appearances[,] . . . the rapid comings and goings” of Piers the plowman, and she associated these with an increasing “revelatory capacity: his ‘materializations’ will therefore be incalculable, since they are divinely controlled and intimations of truth to the struggling dreamer.” She links this approach with one ascribed to the experience of contemplatives by Langland’s contemporary Walter Hilton: “all such feelings come to them [contemplatives] in that state as it were unwarily, for they come or they wit it [before they know it], and go from them or [before] they wit it, and they cannot come thereto again nor wit not where they should seek it . . . for they have not yet no homeliness with them, but suddenly go and suddenly come.” She sets the treatment of “Langland’s loose-woven fabric of procedures,” which offer “a way of capturing something of a kaleidoscopic vision of truth.”325 This is a fruitful figure for thinking about the dislocations of narrative in the poem and the theological models they compose. Langland’s dialectical processes continually drive the reader from anything that might seem a resting place even, or perhaps especially, from the most revealing encounters with one in whom “dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead corporally” (Col. 2:9). For Langland agrees with Augustine, who in preaching on John’s Gospel (John 14:1–3) observes that while humans live at a distance from God they are prepared for beholding the divine countenance by faith which purifies the heart (Matt. 5:8). In this situation, Augustine remarks, “Let him [Christ] remain concealed that faith may be exercised.” For this exercise is actually “the longing of love” which is the preparation of the mansion promised by Christ (John 14:1–3).326 Elizabeth Salter, Walter Hilton, and Augustine give us a language well suited to identifying a characteristic mode of writing in Piers Plowman and its theological implications. It helps us grasp the role of absence, of “vanishings” in the work and why Salter should claim for this a “revelatory capacity.” There is a further dimension here which Salter’s quotation from Hilton evokes: the searcher’s lack of control in a process constituted by gifts. Hilton remarks on the unpredictable moments of presence, “as it were unwarily,” and their equally unpredictable withdrawal. So the contemplatives “cannot come thereto again nor wit where they should seek,” a characteristic experience of Wille in Piers Plowman. Never can the human control the gift, master the presence of the divine vision. Nor, in Langland’s attention to the consequences of such a reality, will a faithful church have anything to do with projects of control and dominion.
Salter described Piers as offering “intangible leadership,” and later Anne Middleton provided a congruent observation which seems to be particularly relevant to the ending of Piers Plowman. According to Middleton, “One can never again find Piers, still less seat him securely in a position of leadership.”327 This is an excellent formulation, and I will gloss it in terms of the present study and its consideration of the ecclesiastic polity that emerges from the critical dialectic of Piers Plowman.
We cannot find Piers because through his absence Langland is teaching us something central to his understanding of authority in the church and authority of the church. Bound up with his understanding of such authority is his understanding of claims to apostolic succession in the papacy. Piers, and what he represents, is beyond us, beyond our institutions, beyond our reformations, and certainly beyond our control. The fact that some may claim the origins of the contemporary papacy are to be found in Piers and the apostolic church emerges as either a fantastical delusion or an ideology sacralizing papal power and temporalities.328 Either way, Langland casts such modern claims in the ironic light shed by the vision of Antichrist’s forces in Passus XXII, forces that include the church’s hierarchy. Piers is thus obviously and hilariously quite alien to papal elections by cardinals satirized in the Prologue and later (Prol. 128–38; XVII.233–38; XXI.413–23, 428–46a). In his presence-become-absence, he is a figure to draw readers to the Christ who appears “in Peres armes” and gave Piers power to mediate the new covenant (XX.6–25; XXI.182–90, 383–90). He works in the poem both as image maker and iconoclast. He is simultaneously mediatorial gift and one who resists reification and attachment to himself. As such, nobody can, in Middleton’s words, “seat him securely in a position of leadership.” For he resists all attempts to claim him as a figure legitimizing contemporary authority and office in the church. He is not the stuff from which “magisterium” arises, nor is he remotely a figure who would encourage such an idea, let alone its embodiment. Langland offers an unwelcome lesson to his church as well as to the magisterial Reformation where Piers Plowman was published as a herald.329 The lesson is that Christians must learn to live without any version of “magisterium” in the modern church, one that provides what Pope John Paul II describes as “certain teaching” to those blinded by “dechristianization” and a consequent “decline or obscuring of the moral sense.”330 We must abandon any assumption that we can have a securely seated authority. All condensations of authority in the ecclesial culture figured forth by Langland will only lock us into the “mase” of Mede and the amnesia lamented by Wille’s first teacher, Holy Church, before she herself becomes as absent as Piers (I.3–9; II.53–55). Perhaps even the sacrament of penance will have to lose its current institutional forms and find ones more congruent with the theology of such absences.
Let us return to the aging Wille in the poem’s ending. In obedience to a divine admonition, he remains somewhere in the church, somewhere in Unity, still seeking to learn the one “craft” absolutely necessary for human beings: “Lerne to love” (XXII.204–11). Wounded with age and threatened by death, he seems to have been ordered to follow another wounded person, Semyuief, the half-alive man rescued by Christ the Samaritan and taken into the allegorical “grange” to be healed by the Samaritan’s gifts (XIX.48–79; Luke 10:25–37). But that “grange,” shadowing forth the Pentecostal community of Passus XXI, has become the late medieval church led by those Langland aligns with Antichrist and draws “alle folke” to him (XXII.51–64). How is Wille to learn such a “craft” of love here, and from whom can he learn? The answer is twofold. First, the divine admonition he receives is independent of ecclesial mediation. Second, he will join the group of fools (“foles”) I have already discussed, that small, dissident remnant who resisted the forces of Antichrist. After this resistance, unmediated by ecclesiastics or the church, they are called by constable Conscience to stand together in unity. Totally independent of papal church and lay elites, they now seem to constitute “Vnite holi churche” (XXII.56–68, 74–77, 204–5). Furthermore, these “fools” escape classification in terms of the modern church’s fundamental and hierocratic division between clergy and laity. But whatever they are, they have received the resources to withstand the forces dominating their cultural moment and the resources to manifest the “craft” of love (XXII.61–73, 204–13). They display no residue of Constantinian Christianity and its aspirations, no signs of any papal or magisterial consolidation of hierocratic authority.
As I have argued, they represent Langland’s own eschewal of institutional solutions, an eschewal shared by the post-1328 Ockham. In Piers Plowman this is a logical conclusion of the work’s critical and realistic dialectic. A church of fools will neither have its own apparatus of violent jurisdiction nor seek to sacralize that of the king of England and his dynastic wars. Such a church will not take control for policing orthodoxy or sacralizing the current social order against, for example, the mass rising of people below the level of gentry in 1381. A church beyond Constantinianism will not be a part of the will to power that devastates the hearts of humans in the lust for dominion pervading the earthly city. To continue in this Augustinian mode: such a church will be like pilgrims in a foreign land. They make use of temporal things in their journey but are not attached to them, not trying to accumulate them. On the contrary, these pilgrims, fools indeed, will not increase the load of temporalities they carry on their way. They do indeed make use of any peace in the earthly city, but they do so as pilgrims and captives awaiting the fulfillment of the promise of redemption in Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit already given.331 Such a church points beyond orthodox medieval models of reformation and beyond the institutional networks of the late medieval church. It points toward the end of Constantinian Christianity. That church had, in its clerical and lay leadership, been discerned as participating in the forces of Antichrist.
In this vision, what becomes of the indefectibility of the church, promised by Christ (Matt. 28:20)? And what becomes of its unity (XXI.328; XXII.75, 204)? Langland’s answers to these questions are oblique but perfectly discernible. We have seen how Ockham understood the church’s indefectibility. We recall how, for example, in his letter to the Franciscans he maintained that “the whole Church of God could be preserved in a few, indeed in one.” He thinks of Elijah and reminds his readers that although it seemed that Elijah was alone there were still, hidden from the prophet’s perception, “many thousands” who have not bent the knee of faith to Baal.332 Such is the experience of the angel Abdiel in Paradise Lost (V.772–907; VI.1–55). And something like this will be the experience of each fool who chooses to resist the multitudes of those aligning themselves with Antichrist. However serious the crisis in the papal church, and both Ockham and Langland thought it extremely serious, however serious the crisis in the Reformation churches, and Milton thought them to be extremely serious, evangelical faith will be preserved and Christ’s promise kept (“behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world” [Matt. 28:20]). And so, Langland’s fools: this is one consequence of the end of Constantinian Christianity. Its end will force Christians to rethink and reimagine what “church” might be or become in such changed circumstances. Doubtless this will be confused and agonizing. As Karl Barth asked many centuries later as he reflected on the shattering of the “great Constantinian delusion”: “What can a few Christians or a pathetic group like the Christian community really accomplish with their scattered witness to Jesus Christ?” Not far from Langland’s closing questions. But then even one of the horses pulling the harrow given to Piers by Grace had declared that the church is still under construction, its dedication deferred. Thus Augustine, harrowing Psalm 29, remembering what the “Constantinian delusion” obscured.333
As for the question I posed about unity at the beginning of the previous paragraph: Langland’s work, especially its ending but certainly not only its ending, demands that the conventional models of unity will have to be rethought, reimagined, and superseded. Meeting this demand will belong to Conscience’s new search for Grace (XXII.386). Unity will have to be reconfigured against the grain of traditions shaped by Constantinian Christianity. I have illustrated those traditions mainly from later fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts. There we saw how unity entailed the church’s sacralization of the current political order, its hierarchies and wars, while the lay sovereign defended what were called the “liberties” of the church, its privilege and temporalities. The Crown’s defense of the church included its killing of those the church judged to be Christians who were its incorrigible adversaries, those judged as heretics. As an example of the celebration of the Donation of Constantine, I mentioned the work of a Dominican friar dedicated to Richard II in 1395: Dymmok’s Liber contra XII errores et hereses lollardorum. But in the days of Ockham, an English Carmelite theologian had similarly celebrated this donation and tied it in with the temporalities of the church as the most beautiful illustration of the divine blessings poured into the Constantinian church. John Baconthorpe, unlike Langland’s Liberum Arbitrium, sees no “poison” in the donation but a declaration of the way ecclesial temporalities were of divine institution. The Constantinian settlement enabled the church to surpass heresies and to establish Christian unity. In the donation and its consequences, the church “formerly poor and small like a mustard seed, grew into a great branching tree [Matt. 13:31–32] on whose boughs the pope and ecclesiastics, like birds of the air might nest.”334 With the end of Constantinian Christianity, this model of unity will cease to be hegemonic and perhaps even cease to be intelligible. At least to the “fools.”
For from the endings of Langland’s poem we can glimpse a very different model of unity. Unity now resides in the gathering of fools obedient to divine admonition and the counsel of Conscience, a thoroughly fallible conscience. As unlike the unity of a Pseudo-Dionysian and Neoplatonic metaphysical hierarchy as it is unlike the unity of papal apologists or Henry VIII, such a unity will demand individual decision and responsibility. It will entail a decision to oppose the unity composed by Antichrist’s forces. It will be a unity that from the perspective of Antichrist’s followers, with their friars, cardinals, and pope, will seem a bizarre schism, a tiny, dissident sect of fools. Antichrist is a tyrant (XXII.60), and probably such fools would come to be among those who would be “defamed” and “suspected” as making “unlawful conventicles and confederacies,” holding and exercising “schools” and informing people “to sedition and insurrection,” people who would be handed to the lay powers “to be burnt” in a public place. Thus De heretico comburendo in 1401.335 In his depiction of a few fools openly opposing the multitudes who follow Antichrist, Langland shows his agreement with Ockham’s view that “it is more commonly the multitude that is in error.” Indeed, Ockham argues that the common view “that one should not go against the multitude, smacks clearly of heresy.”336 Three centuries later John Milton, in Areopagitica, would remind readers anxious about conflicts between Christians in the 1640s, “The Christian faith . . . was once a schism.”337 Langland too was trying to develop a model of unity which would not preclude arguments and actions that challenge the reigning hegemony and consensus in the church. Unity must not be reified, fetishized as it was in so much orthodox Christian discourse of the Middle Ages and the magisterial Reformation. Elizabethan language legislating against Presbyterians or Brownists or others opposed to the current version of Constantinian Christianity echoes the repealed De heretico comburendo with an unacknowledged irony. So, for example, in 1593 an act is passed against the “perils” of disunity caused by “wicked and dangerous practices of seditious sectaries,” by those who gather together in “conventicles, or meetings under colour or pretence of any exercise of religion contrary to her majesty’s said laws and statutes.” This was directed against Protestants.338 Instead of such a model of unity, Langland’s work encourages us to unpack the language of unity to discern the practices in which it is immersed. How could this be pursued?
One could, for example, see the role of this model of unity in the conviction and punishment of those classified as heretics in late medieval England. Hawisia Mone, from Loddon in Norfolk, had been arrested by Bishop Alnwick of Norwich for maintaining views such as the following: “the pope of Rome is fadir Antecrist, and fals in all hys werkyng, and hath no poar [power] of God more then any other lewed [unlearned] man but if he be more holy in lyvyng . . . and he that the puple callen the pope of Roome is not pope but a fals extersioner and a deseyver of the puple.” Or this, on the sacrament of penance: “confession shuld be maad oonly to God” while “sufficient penance for all maner of synne is every persone to abstyne hym fro lyyng, bakbytyng and yuel doyng.” On the universal priesthood of believers: “every man and every woman beynng in good lyf oute of synne is as good prest and hath as much poar of God in al thynges as any prest ordred [ordained], be he pope or bisshop.” She had not only thought such things but gathered with like-minded Christians in her house in Loddon. She was forced to acknowledge practices she must now agree to abandon if she was not to be killed in the maintenance of ecclesial unity:
Y, Hawisia Moone, the wyfe of Thomas Moone of Lodne of your diocese, your subject, knowyng, felyng and undirstanyng that before this tyme Y have be right hoomly and prive with many heretikes [now forced to apply the hierarchy’s language about herself and the fellow-Christians gathered in her house], knowyng thaym for heretikes, and thaym Y have receyved and herberwed in our hous, and thaym Y have conceled, conforted, supported, maytened and favored with al my poar—whiche heretikes names be these, Sir William Whyte, Sir William Caleys, Sir Huwe Pye, Sir Thomas Pert, prestes, John Waddon, John Fowlyn, John Gray, William Everden, William Bate of Sethyng, hys wyf, William Wardon, John Pert, Edmond Archer of Lodne, Richard Belward, Nicholas Belward, Bertholomeu Monk, William Wright and many others—whiche have ofte tymes kept, holde and continued scoles of heresie yn prive chambres and prive places of oures [the home of her and her husband, Thomas], yn the whyche scoles Y have herd, conceyved, lerned and reported the errours and heresies which be writen and contened in these indentures.339
Of the people Hawisia mentions, John Waddon, Hugh Pye, and William White had already been burned to death in Norwich, and William Caleys would be burned to death in Colchester (1430). She, with her fellows, follows the church’s language, promising to return “to the oonhed of the Churche” (142). That is, to the church’s version of unity enforced by coercive jurisdiction. This included public punishments such as floggings, humiliating processions, imposed fasting, imprisonment, and, as we have noticed, fire.340 Unity, certainly, of a kind. Yet Hawisia’s own abjuration, into her persecutors’ script, does sketch a version of Christian unity, albeit one opposed to that of “the Churche of Roome,” “holy Churche” (142). It outlines the model of the church as a freely chosen gathering of Christians in the houses of particular families. Hawisia’s home becomes a place of Christian study (“scoles of heresie yn prive chambres and prive places of oures”) and the solidarity of Christian fraternity (“Y have conceled, comforted, supported, mayntened”). Here one was “right hoomly” with others. Here too women could teach and be recognized as teachers, at least in Norfolk. For example, Margery Baxter of Martham refers to Hawisia Mone as the wisest woman in teaching (“sapientissima mulier in doctrina,” 47).341 It is no coincidence that these house churches mirror accounts of house churches in the letters of St. Paul.342
Nor is it at all unjustified, in the context of the Roman Church’s model of unity and coercive jurisdiction administered through the lay power, that Wyclif should have wondered how Jesus Christ would be received in contemporary England. Suppose Christ came as a pilgrim, perhaps such as Conscience intends to be at the end of Piers Plowman; or suppose he came as an unknown prelate (“prelatus incognitus”), such as the figure of Piers for whom Conscience searches, if a “prelate” then certainly “incognitus” and a layperson, never ordained within the system of ordination maintained by the late medieval church. Suppose too that Christ behaved as he had done in his earthly life. Wyclif is sure he would be excommunicated by the Roman curia, and unless he recanted the truth he proclaimed, he would be burned to death as a heretic.343 Wyclif recalls that Christ was executed as a heretic, and he thinks it very likely that “our prelates” condemn many as heretics who in God’s judgment are nothing of the sort. In acting thus our prelates whether actually reprobates (“presciti”) or sinning mortally are the heretics. Only those who follow Christ’s law are catholic Christians, and only those who refuse to live a life trying to serve this law are heretics.344 So the currently dominant model of “unity” will have to be abandoned. It exacerbates the likelihood of scapegoating in a manner that recapitulates the politics of the Crucifixion, scapegoating evocatively analyzed by René Girard.345
But if the unity of the church is manifested by rebellious, dissenting fools, in what does it reside, and how could one recognize it? To use language from prewar congregationalism in the seventeenth century, how do we identify “Christ’s true visible political church”?346 Langland’s answer to Henry Jacob’s question is that the church is where “foles” (like Wille) are learning “to love” in obedience to divine admonition. Such a love, the poem has insisted, is inseparable from a commitment to the justice encapsulated in the demand made by Christ, “redde quod debes” (XXII.207–11; XXI.182–87). In the figure of the Samaritan, Christ had also taught that the one unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit is unkindness to one’s fellow creatures (XIX.113–230). Along with these identifiable practices of justice and charity, we will recognize the fool’s church by its opposition to the hierarchical, powerful, affluent Constantinian church so devastatingly criticized by Liberum Arbitrium and so prominent in Antichrist’s army. If neither pope nor lay sovereign is head of the church, Christ’s putative viceregent on earth, who is the head of the fools? It is Jesus Christ (Col. 1:18; Eph. 5:23), entered “into heaven itself, that he may appear now in the presence of God for us” (Heb. 9:24). The legacy of his work, Langland showed, was poured into history by the Holy Spirit in the Pentecostal community. From there, as we saw, the Holy Spirit and Piers become absent. Or, at least, their presence becomes indiscernible to Conscience and those in the church where he was constable. Piers, as I have shown with help from Elizabeth Salter and Anne Middleton, becomes a mediator of the divine vision in a manner that is antithetical to any imaginable medieval pope. It would have been easy for Langland to treat the situation in Passus XXII as one requiring the deposition of the delinquent pope (or popes, since 1378), to join in the discourses catalyzed by the Great Schism.347 We followed passages of neo-Wycliffite reformation within Langland’s work but saw this finally set aside for a range of good reasons there is no need to rehearse. As I have argued, like Ockham, Langland also eschewed any institutional solutions to his critical dialectic of the church and contemporary Christianity.
But perhaps the eschewal begets some further questions, although they may not be ones Langland articulated explicitly. Certainly Sarah Beckwith and William Revere, responding independently to my commentary in this section of the essay, have both asked tough questions which I will try to address. I do so because these are very relevant to Langland’s own explorations. How, they asked, do Langland and Aers, his admiring commentator, envisage the continuity of such a church of fools? How would one become apprenticed in the intellectual and moral habits that enable us to become flourishing human beings directed to the divine end revealed by Holy Church, Piers, and Christ? One might well remember that blissful moment on Easter Sunday when Wille called Kitte, his wife, and Calote, his daughter, to join the community, ringing bells “to the resureccioun” and the emancipation Christ has brought from sin and fear (XX.467–75). Can the group of fools in Passus XXII perform such worship, as communitarian and liturgical as it is individual and existential? Ruminating on such questions, I turn to “the church of God that is at Corinth,” the church served not by Piers but by Paul (1 Cor. 1:1–2). What a mess! Contentions, shameful litigation to pagan judges, Christians defrauding Christians, nascent antinomianism, incest, excommunication, class divisions at the heart of the Lord’s Supper (see 1 Cor.). Is Christ divided, Paul asks incredulously (1 Cor. 1:13)? Surely charity, the gifts of the Spirit, and unity go together? They do indeed. But once upon a time Paul had assumed that the unity God demanded entailed persecuting those who seemed divisive forces in the community. He had relished the killing of the rebellious fool Stephen (Acts 7:54–59). As he was to confess: “beyond measure, I persecuted the church of God and wasted it” (Gal. 1:13). But a vision of Christ in glory identifying himself not with the godly persecutors but with the persecuted forced an often agonizing transformation of his understanding of God’s always faithful but strange and unpredictable ways (Rom. 9–11). So he became a fool and an evangelist of the gospel’s foolishness to “the weak things of the world,” to “the base things of the world and the things that are contemptible.” For, so he had come to see, these “hath God chosen: and things that are not, that he might bring to nought things that are” (1 Cor. 2:14). Can such ruminations answer the kind of questions put by Sarah Beckwith and William Revere? Perhaps not, or at least not yet. For my Corinthian ruminations do remain rather far from any designs for an ecclesial polity, whether one assumed by papal apologists in the Middle Ages, by St. Thomas Aquinas, by the hierarchy of the late medieval church in England, by magisterial reformers in the sixteenth century, or by the Erastians who formed the Church of England. Langland, however, is quite clear that the fools in his final passus do not lack the memory and even the voice of divine love: “Lerne to loue” (XXII.208); “let us love one another: for charity is of God . . . God is charity” (1 John 4:7–8; quoted by Holy Church to Wille in Passus I.82). True enough, their calling and discipleship does lack the order glimpsed in the Pentecostal community, its agrarian organizations (allegorical and social) and its range of divine gifts. At least it seems to lack all this. But does such a judgment forget a strange presence in the group of fools? Wille himself, now one of the fools, asks a question which, I think, encapsulates the ones put by Beckwith and Revere: “what craft be beste to lere?” (XXII.207). What apprenticeship in the virtues do I now need? The answer, one I have just rehearsed, is too familiar for strangeness. But it may still be a frustrating one for those seeking apprenticeship in a “craft” where the very fabric that enables any sustained and orderly life seems catastrophically unwoven. Here is the familiar answer from the hidden source of life: “Lerne to loue . . . and leef all other” (XXII.208). No wonder Wille feels obliged to remind his divine teacher that he is an embodied soul, the kind which Piers Plowman was written to nourish: “How shal Y come to catel so, to clothe me and to fede?” (How shall I earn a living, to clothe and feed myself?) (XXII.209). Wille’s question pervades the poem as its author strives to discern and hold the divine vision in a time of trouble. But the answer he receives is, yet once more, as uncompromising as it is familiar: “And thow loue lelly, lack shal the neuere / Wede ne worldly mete while thy life lasteth” (If you love loyally, you’ll never lack / Clothes or earthly food as long as you live) (XXII.210–11). In its laconic way, this recapitulates central strands in Jesus’s teaching (Matt. 6:24–34; John 6:22–35; Luke 12:13–34). This is an exemplary act of trust, of faith drawn by love. Wille commits himself to follow the divine counsel even though he cannot yet see what will be the specific embodiment love could take in this unpropitious historical moment. An abandonment of received institutional forms and their hierarchies of authority (currently in the service of Antichrist) is now appropriate. And perhaps it is helpful to recall Paul’s letter to the Hebrews. Faith is celebrated as “the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things that appear not.” This virtue is shown by Abraham who “obeyed to go out into a place which he was to receive for an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he went” (Heb. 11:1, 8).
But I do want to emphasize that the last thing Langland encourages here is a reification of such a moment in salvation history. Any such reification would, without irony, seek to institutionalize a particular divine encounter into a putatively holy anarchism, a dogmatic iconoclasm abstracted from Langland’s own dialectical union of iconoclasm with image formation and veneration: “Arise and go reuerence godes resurreccioun / And crepe to the croes on knees and kusse hit for a iewel / And rightfollokest a relyk, noon richore on erthe” (Arise, and go reverence God’s resurrection, / And creep on your knees to the cross and kiss it as a jewel / And most rightfully as a relic, none richer on earth) (XX.470–72). Far from being any fantasy of institutionalized anarchism or solipsistic individualism, the moment in which fools are gathered against the late medieval church’s version of Constantinian Christianity belongs to a thoroughly particular and contingent process, one I have tried to follow in this essay. Langland has taught us not to abstract any particular moment for analysis without careful attention to its place in the totality of processes to which it belongs, a moment both constituted and constituting. The God disclosed in Langland’s poem reveals sacred narratives in the minute particulars of life just as the latter will finally become intelligible within the grandest providential narratives.
So we are not called to abstract and institutionalize the moments dramatized at the end of Passus XXII, for these belong in the dialectical processes through which the poet displays his understanding of God’s ways with humanity and humanity’s ways with God. The eschewal of institutional solutions and formations by the inspired fools in Passus XXII has thoroughly particular contexts and justifications. It belongs to the processes I have sought to follow. It does, however, have a tendency, a drawing beyond the poem’s ending, an ending, after all, which is the initiation of a search for Piers the plowman under the invocation of the Holy Spirit. My name for the direction in which Langland is moving with the “foles” and the present absences is congregationalism. Perhaps the direction is toward the kind of congregation emerging in the house church of Hawisia Mone in Loddon and reemerging during the English Reformation both in opposition to the magisterial Reformation and in opposition to the restored Roman Catholicism of Mary Tudor (1553–58).348
There are three questions I wish to address in the conclusion to this essay. The first comes from what seems a common assumption in commentaries on Piers Plowman. Am I denying that Piers the plowman finally represents the Roman Church’s theory of an unbroken succession from St. Peter to the contemporary pope elected by the church’s cardinals? The answer is unequivocal: yes, and for the reasons given above in section XVI. I have shown something very different from a display of continuity from an apostolic origin to the contemporary office of pope and its encumbents with their plenitude of power, coercive jurisdiction, and temporalities. Instead of such continuity we have found a striking emphasis on the absence of Piers, a figure now displaced in the Roman Church’s hierarchy. His absence has not been held in this church like the empty tomb, or even as an empty chair, to remind the church of its hidden source of authority “an heyh [high] vp into heuene” (XXI.191). No, on the contrary, it has been palpably filled. This Langland shows through his representations of a delinquent hierarchy whose final alignment with Antichrist is a condensed symbol of what we encountered from the Prologue and Passus II on. The ideology of Petrine succession, with its apologetics for contemporary papal power, so vehemently argued by Giles of Rome’s On Ecclesiastical Power and so profoundly assumed in Roger Dymmok’s Liber, this ideology is thoroughly discredited in Langland’s work.
The second question could be phrased like this: does the dialectic of absence and presence exemplified in Langland’s treatment of Piers have devotional implications? I think it does. Following Elizabeth Salter’s analysis of Piers, I suggested that the absences she describes so eloquently were informed by an Augustinian understanding of the way God draws humans to the divine vision. This way involves an education in faith where God seeks worshippers who acknowledge that “God is a spirit” and who worship God “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23–26). Augustine illustrated his meaning in a striking discussion of the encounter between the risen Christ and Mary Magdalene in John’s Gospel: “Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my Father” (John 20:17). This “noli me tangere” greatly troubled Margery Kempe, a classic practitioner of conventional late medieval devotion to the humanity of Christ, especially to the Passion.349 She has been contemplating the events of the Passion with her habitually detailed identification, comforting the Virgin Mary with “a good cawdel [drink]” and staying with her to the time when the resurrected Christ visits his mother. After this meeting Jesus asks his mother’s permission to visit Mary Magdalene. His encounter with Mary follows the Gospel’s narrative. In response to Jesus’s “Towche me not,” Mary replies, “A, Lord, I se wel ye wil not [do not wish] that I be so homly [familiar] wyth yow as I have ben aforn,” and Margery observes that Mary “mad hevy cher” (took on a sorrowful expression). Jesus, however, promises Mary that he will never forsake her and sends her to tell the disciples he has arisen. Margery sees Mary obey “with gret joye,” and she expresses her own “gret merveyl” at this. For, she says, had Jesus said “Towche me not” to Margery, “hir thowt sche cowde nevyr a ben mery” (she thought that she never could have been merry). Indeed, whenever she hears these words spoken in any sermon, “as sche dede many tymes, sche wept, sorwyd, and cryid as sche schulde a deyd, for lofe and desir [as if she would have died of love and desire].” This is a conventional form of devotion in Langland’s church.350
Augustine preaches on the text that troubled Margery. He sees the episode as training in how “to discern things human and divine.” When Jesus says, “Touch me not,” he is “giving a lesson in faith to the woman.” Mary had first mistaken the risen Christ for the gardener, and Augustine characteristically moves into an allegorical mode: “this gardner was sowing in her heart, and in His own garden, the grain of mustard seed.” Why does he say, “Touch me not,” and why does he say, “For I am not yet ascended to my Father”? And why did he tell the incredulous Thomas to thrust his hand into Christ’s side (John 20:27)? Augustine dismisses misogynistic exegesis and goes on to unfold the “sacred mystery” in the text. Christ is drawing disciples, like Mary, to touch him “spiritually,” to perceive his union with the Father and to set aside belief in his humanity “according to present notions,” “carnally.” For Mary, he says, was still weeping over him “as a man,” not yet believing that he is the Son of God: “‘For I am not yet ascended,’ He says, ‘to my Father’: there shalt thou touch me, when thou believest me to be God, in no wise unequal with the Father.” As for Thomas, “He saw and touched the man and acknowledged the God whom he neither saw nor touched.”351
So Jesus is teaching that his disciples will have to overcome their resistance to the forms of faith and spiritual worship now required of them by the Resurrection and Ascension. Of course, much medieval devotion, in the traditions of the Meditationes Vitae Christi, Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, and Margery Kempe’s Book, set aside such teaching and sidelined Augustinian theologies focusing on absence, on revelation that veils, and on contemplative detachment from the body in and through reflection on the Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension.352 And perhaps such setting aside was bound up with conventional teaching on transubstantiation and the multiplication of visions centered on the bleeding Christ, or parts of the bleeding Christ’s body in the Eucharist.353 The Dominican Roger Dymmok, whose defense of the English Church in 1395 has already been mentioned, exemplifies the kind of association I have in mind. In defending the church from Wycliffite criticisms, he moves from temporalities and power to the Eucharist. Dymmok affirms the church’s teaching that Christ is present in his Galilean body once the bread has been consecrated and frequently appears in the consecrated Host. He rejects arguments that Christ’s presence is figurative.354 Wyclif had maintained that Christ is indeed present in the Eucharist, really present (“realiter”). But this is a spiritual presence, not one in which communicants will eat the body of Christ with their teeth but rather with faith: one communicates, one is nurtured by Christ, but one sees through a glass darkly, figuratively (“in aenigmate” [1 Cor. 13:12]).355 Such teaching, denying that the bread’s substance ceased to exist after consecration and denying the presence of Christ’s Galilean body, was deemed heretical in the late medieval church. From 1401, persevering in such teaching was considered good reason for burning its adherents to death. Aquinas himself had, like Wyclif, affirmed Christ’s presence in the sacrament and agreed that he cannot be seen in the sacrament since he is present in the mode of substance. However, unlike Wyclif, he insisted that Christ is present 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, scilicet ossa, nervi et alia hujusmodi).356
Not only does Dymmok follow his Dominican master, as I observed, but he offers another thoroughly un-Augustinian and un-Langlandian assertion. He claims that Christ is always present in his Galilean body on the church’s altars at the consecration because he wanted his church to have his full bodily presence throughout history.357 So the lack inscribed in the strangeness of Christ’s resurrection (the disciples don’t recognize him, mistake him for the gardener or a strangely ignorant visitor to Jerusalem) and in Christ’s ascension is simply overcome. Christians always have the Galilean body of Christ. Against the grain of the evangelical texts, the Resurrection does not create something strange, in history and not in history. Nor does the Ascension. So Dymmok and his church’s orthodoxy overcome the noli me tangere, the touch me not that so perturbed Margery Kempe and troubled the conventional devotional forms she practiced so intensely. The church’s priests are entrusted by Christ with the gift of continually making Christ fully present “bones and nerves and all the rest.” Margery Kempe’s understanding of this is fully articulated by Nicholas Love in the immensely popular Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. He emphasizes that the very body seen by the disciples at the Last Supper, “with hir bodily eye,” was also the body present “vndur þat forme of brede” now displayed in the hands of the church’s priests.358 So Margery Kempe and other faithful Christians can set aside Paul’s teaching that “though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more” (si cognovimus secundum carnem Christum: sed nunc iam non novimus) (2 Cor. 5:16). But setting aside such teaching, however conventional in the dominant, pervasive forms of devotion in his church, is alien to the conclusions of Langland’s work, and, so I have argued elsewhere, to his vision of Christian life.359 Some people will receive the peculiar grace of such encounters with Christ as Wille has done (with Christ as the Samaritan or with Christ in “Peres armes” before the consecration of the bread and wine in the Mass [XIX; XXI.4–14]), or as Julian of Norwich recollects and strives to interpret in her Showings. But such encounters cannot be institutionalized. Nor can even the contexts in which such encounters might be given. We have been endowed with no such controls. The church and its hierarchy have been given no gift to control the giving of such gifts. And while Christ “yaf [gave] Peres pardoun” and promised the gift of forgiveness to those who seek to follow the demands of evangelical justice (“Redde quod debes”), Christ’s ascension is emphasized in Passus XXI: “an heyh vp into heuene / He wente, and woneth there and wol come at the laste / And rewarde hym riht wel that reddet quod debet, / Payeth parfitly as puyr treuthe wolde” (on high up into heaven / He went, and dwells there, and will come at the end / And reward him right well who reddet quod debbet [pays what one owes], / Pays perfectly as pure truth wishes) (XXI.191–94). Far from promising the kind of presence on which Margery Kempe’s devotion centers, Jesus tells his disciples, before the Crucifixion, “I will pray to the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter [Paracletum], that he may abide with you for ever.” He promises, “I will not leave you orphans” but will come to you. Not, however, to remain in the Galilean body on your altars but through the Holy Spirit for whose presence he has prayed: “the Comforter [Paraclitus] which is the Holy Ghost [Spiritus Sanctus], whom the Father will send you in my name, he shall teach you all things” (John 14:16–26). So “when the Comforter [Paraclitus] is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which procedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me” (John 15:26). And that is just what Langland dramatizes in Passus XXI, as he moves from Christ’s Ascension to Pentecost.