But “The Spirit breatheth where he will” (Spiritus ubi vult spirat (John 3:8), and in Passus XXI he builds “an hous” for Piers to put crops in but then disappears: he “wente / As wyde as the world is,” taking Piers with him (XXI.317–33). So Piers’s appearances cannot be institutionalized, cannot be guaranteed by human agents. He is with the Holy Spirit. In Langland’s theology, Piers’s absences disclose a dialectic of absence and presence beyond the control of humans, even if those humans are Christians in search of Treuthe, in search of Christ. Conscience grasps this in his final cry for the Holy Spirit and prayer for finding Piers as he becomes a pilgrim to go “as wyde as the world renneth” (XXII.380–86). He grasps and now represents the antiformalism, the iconoclasm at the heart of Langland’s image making.360 His dialectical literary modes and their ecclesiological outcome are inseparable. In his ecclesiology, so I have argued, we see not only the end of Constantine Christianity, but the withering away of its sustaining practices.

The third question I wish to address in the final part of this book is the following: what is the relation between the figure of Holy Church in Passus I and II, a figure who appeared earlier in this essay, and the vision of the late medieval church from Passus XXI.335 through XXII.379? Let us return to the “louely lady of lere [face] in lynnene yclothed” who appears to Wille in Passus I, names him, and asks him if he is asleep (I.3–5). Langland identifies the figure as descending from God whose will she mediates (I.3–67, 81–204). Frightened and dazzled, Wille cannot recognize her. So she discloses herself: “Holy Churche Y am” (I.72). Derek Pearsall and other annotators provide ample discussion of antecedents for this figuration.361 Langland’s ascription of heavenly authority to this figure is unequivocal, and she instructs Wille in a wide range of literary modes, including an exquisitely beautiful lyric on the divine love manifest in the Incarnation (I.146–70).362 She explains to Wille that although he fails to recognize her, she is the church into which he has been baptized and made a “fre man” (I.72–75). She is thus a figure of the church proclaimed in the Nicene Creed, the “holy Catholic and apostolic Church.”363 Far from being immersed in the fabrics of the world’s markets and lust for dominion, she descends from heaven to ask Wille if he has noticed the processes of de-Christianization already hinted at in the Prologue:

Wille, slepestou? seestow this peple,

Hou bisy thei ben aboute the mase?

The moste party of this peple that passeth on this erthe,

Haue thei worschip in this world thei wilneth no bettere;

Of othere heuene then here thei halde no tale.

(I.5–9)

———

[Are you asleep, Will? See these people,

How busily they move about the maze?

Most of the people that pass through this earth

Are satisfied with success in this world;

The only heaven they think of is here.]

And to these processes the Prologue had shown the contemporary church belonged. But not at all as a critical presence. On the contrary, already we have seen how cardinals “preseumen in hemself a pope to make,” how friars appropriate scripture “for profyt of the wombe,” how secular clergy serve lay elites in their thoroughly material interests, how the sacrament of reconciliation is commodified, how what Langland confidently judges as idolatry is normalized in England’s parishes (Prol. 136, 56–61, 62, 66–67, 95–124). Far from identifying with this church, Holy Church is made sharply distinct and laments the way Mede’s forces pervade it, while Mede herself is now an intimate in the pope’s palace (II.1–24). The figure from heaven tells Wille that he should go to the gospel (I.44). She does not send him to a priest or any other authority in the contemporary church. As soon as Wille grasps who is instructing him, he responds appropriately: “Y knelede on my knees and criede here of grace / And preyede here pitously to preye for me to amende” (I fell to my knees and cried to her for grace / And begged her to take pity and pray I improve) (I.76–77).364 She is indeed the true church, the “lemman” (lover) of Treuthe (II.20), the one whose evangelical knowledge elicits from Wille two pleas that are central to Langland’s exploration of Christian’s life in his own historical moment: a plea for appropriate faith in Christ and a plea to learn how he may save his soul (I.78–80).

After she has reminded Wille of God’s supernatural ends for humanity and the way opened out by divine love, that “plonte [plant] of pees, most precious of vertues” (I.146–54), she makes us look once more at Mede’s hegemony in the modern church. After that she commends Wille to Christ and leaves him, “lyggynge as aslepe” (lying as if asleep) (II.1–56). Never again does she appear. She is thus the work’s first example of a revelatory gift. The presence of such gifts is soon withdrawn, leaving the recipient with an absence. But in such moments, in such gifts revelation creates its subjects. The ensuing absence fosters, as Augustine and Langland both taught, memory and faith. But because God’s free grace creates free subjects, recipients of such gifts may meet their withdrawal with amnesia and denial. We are shown plenty of that in Passus XXI and XXII. And Holy Church in Passus I and II is like the risen and ascended Christ, like the apparently absent Holy Spirit and Piers. She escapes the control of those she emancipates (“fre man the made” [I.72–73]). She calls and draws Wille, but, like Piers, she cannot be turned into a human institution where her presence can be controlled, guaranteed. She belongs to a work in which the unveiling presence of divine visions is inextricably bound up with absence and hiddenness.365

As I have remarked, Holy Church is the poem’s first manifestation of the forms in which revelation is received. But Piers Plowman begins after the decisive events dramatized later in the poem, the Christological, pneumatological, and ecclesial events of Passus XVIII–XXI. Out of those events came the Pentecostal community where Piers acknowledged that he himself could not build the house that the Holy Spirit desired for the crop of reconciled souls. Only the Holy Spirit, building with the legacy of Christ’s Incarnation, could do this. And so he does. But as soon as this house, called “Holy Chirche,” is built on the foundation of Christ’s Crucifixion and mercy, the Holy Spirit, with Piers, leaves (XXI.317–22). He leaves the church under the guidance of a layman, constable Conscience. In section IV of this essay I followed the story Langland unfolds, paying attention especially to its theological and ecclesial significances. Langland’s disclosure that the Holy Spirit and Piers set out from the house as soon as it was composed brings him into whispering distance of the prophecy of the church’s history told by the archangel Michael toward the end of Milton’s Paradise Lost. After the apostolic ministry:

Their doctrine and their story written left,

They die; but in their room, as they forewarn,

Wolves shall succeed for teachers, grievous wolves,

Who all the sacred mysteries of Heav’n

To their own vile advantages shall turn

Of lucre and ambition, and the truth

With superstitions and tradition taint.

(XII.506–12; see 469–551)366

However different their modes may be, Langland’s vision is as subversive of Constantinian Christianity as is Milton’s, as subversive of the magisterial forms of authority it performs. Langland’s critical dialectic has only just gotten under way when Wille receives his vision of Holy Church. But when we reflect on this episode in the poem’s totality, we see that it is a vision given to one who will join the fools (“foles”) of the version of the church emerging after Constantinianism. Its lament about the contemporary church, pervaded by Mede, contributes to the work’s disclosure of this modern church as a parodic simulacrum of the celestial figure.367 As for Wille’s perception of the celestial figure, he has done nothing to earn such a gift. On the contrary, he is rebuked for his amnesia, a fitting mark of the contemporary church introduced in the Prologue, one in which he wanders dressed up as a sheep, as a hermit “vnholy of werkes” (Prol. 1–4).368 This does sound bad, rather like one of the “grievous wolves” Milton’s archangel prophesies (see Acts 20:29), one of those false prophets in sheep’s clothing who are inwardly “ravening wolves” about whom Jesus warned his disciples (Matt. 7:15). And yet this Wille turns out to have no ambitions in or for the Constantinian church and, drawn by grace, will become, in the end, one of the post-Constantinian fools in Passus XXII.

In fact, disciples of Christ are found in all sorts of places and vocations. Agricultural laborers like Piers the Plowman (Prol. 22–24; VII.182–282); anchorites and hermits “that holdeth hem in here [their] selles” (Prol. 27–32); people scattered among poor and rich, even once, in a distant past, a friar and, once upon a time, kings and cardinals, according to Liberum Arbitrium (XVI.340–74a). These all foreshadow the fools of the poem’s ending, and all seem to practice discipleship in a manner independent of any ecclesiastic hierarchy directing their spiritual life, let alone of any identifiable magisterium deploying a legitimate coercive jurisdiction replete with worldly power.

While Langland discerns Christian discipleship in such individuals and groups, he also implies that individual spiritual disciplines, active and contemplative, guided by the Holy Spirit, may lead to the making of a church in the Christian’s heart. This church within seems happier far and more faithful than any historical institution proves to be:

And yf Grace graunte the to go in in this wyse

Thow shalt se Treuthe sitte in thy sulue herte

And solace thy soule and saue the fram payne

And charge Charite a churche to make

In thyne hole herte . . .

(VII.254–58)

———

[And if Grace grants you to go in in this way

You shall see Truth sitting in your own heart,

And solace your soul and save you from pain,

And charge Charity to build a church

In your whole heart . . .]

Here the devout layman Piers the plowman instructs lost Christians (“A thousand of men”) who have just completed the church’s sacrament of penance and immediately lost “the way.” So much so that none of them knows how to carry on but “blostrede forth as bestes” (VII.155–60). Piers had preceded his promise of God dwelling in man with an explication of the path marked out by the Ten Commandments followed by an eloquent account of divine mercy as the “mote” (moat) of the heavenly mansion (VII.205–34). His outline of the church of God within the searching person is congruent with an earlier promise made by Holy Church. God is Love (1 John 4:8), she told Wille, and whoever seeks to embody truth in daily practice with a benevolent disposition to others gradually draws toward a convergence with divine life. In her language, a human becomes “a god by the gospel” (according to the gospel) (I.81–87).369 In neither Holy Church’s promise nor Piers’s teaching does the joyful discovery of God within the human subject imply an isolated or solipsistic individual any more than it did in Augustine’s Confessions. It is made very clear that the church within is also “to herborwe” (to provide refuge for) others, to offer nutritive communion, friendship with “alle manere folke” (VII.254–60). Furthermore, it should be recognized that such a church within is not only independent of any hierocratic institution overseeing this Christian life: it is quite antithetical to conventional hierarchies.

With this observation in mind, let us recollect a description of the church by Liberum Arbitrium. I have discussed his critique of Constantinian ecclesiology together with his ironically Constantinian proposal for reformation, a proposal finally superseded after subjection to a devastating narrative sequence in the poem’s final two passus (see the preface and sections XIV–XV above). But he also evoked a very different model of church. Wille asks him, “What is holy churche, chere [dear] frende?” (XVII.125). His answer is summed up in one word: “‘Charite,’ he said” (XVII.125). However enigmatic the reply, his gloss on it shows that such a church is far removed from the contemporary ecclesiastical polity with its material powers and hierarchies of dominion. Liberum Arbitrium has in mind not such an institution, even if reformed by an armed elite, but rather a form of life freely chosen (“liberum arbitrium” is speaking). The latter is beautifully described as a “loue-knotte” in which people hold together in “o will,” lending and selling with integrity, a memory of relations in the Pentecostal community founded by the Holy Spirit (XVII.125–29; XXI.213–61). No hierarchy and no conventional signs of divisions between laity and clergy can even be glimpsed in this model.

From Piers, Liberum Arbitrium, the celestial figure of Holy Church, and the Holy Spirit, Langland gives us hints and sketches of a church after the end of Constantinianism. These hints and sketches give us Langland’s answer to the third question I asked in this section: what are the relations between Holy Church in Passus I and II and the work’s vision of the contemporary church especially from Passus XXI.335 through XXII.379? The latter represents the contemporary Roman Church as a demonic simulacrum of the Pentecostal church of the Holy Spirit and Piers. It obstructs the visions of the risen Christ and the Holy Spirit. It dissolves the memory of doctrine taught so carefully by Christ the Samaritan and Christ the emancipatory orator in hell. It infuses Christians living in the Roman Church and obeying its mandatory sacrament of penance with an overwhelming opiate. This enchanting drug is represented by Langland as part of Antichrist’s de-Christianization of church and polity. Perhaps Langland would have read with some sympathy Karl Barth’s comments on secularization in his treatment of the doctrine of reconciliation:

Secularisation is the process by which the salt loses its savour (Matthew 5:13). It is not in any sense strange that the world is secular. This is simply to say that the world is the world. It was always secular. There is no greater error than to imagine that this was not the case in the much-vaunted Middle Ages. But when the Church becomes secular, it is the greatest conceivable misfortune both for the Church and the world. And this is what takes place when it wants to be a Church only for the world, the nation, culture or the state—a world Church, a national Church, a cultural Church, or a state Church. It then loses its specific importance and meaning; the justification for its existence.370

But instead of a Constantinian church, triumphant in its worldly achievements so lovingly celebrated by Roger Dymmok, and instead of a representation of total de-Christianization, Langland leaves us with the church of a few fools. They would doubtless agree with the teaching of Robert Holcot, that fascinating Dominican theologian who died in the great plague: “The determination of conscience is more binding than the command of a prelate.”371 Langland shows us Conscience abandoning the modern church led by pope (or popes, in the present Schism) and cardinals, searching for the absent Piers, and crying out to the Holy Spirit. As he does so, the reader should recollect the hints and sketches of very different visions of the church that have emerged in the dismantling and wreckage of the Constantinian church and its putatively Constantinian reformation. Such emerging visions eschew institutionalization. All attempts to control divine ways and gifts are abandoned. The emergent visions point toward a strange church of fools who will not be drugged into oblivion of the reconciliatory gifts of God manifested in Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the martyrs. As for Langland’s work, closing with a new pilgrimage, by one who now recognizes himself as a pilgrim and stranger (Heb. 11:13), one could well say of it what Julian says of her own Showings: “This boke is begonne by Goddys gyfte and his grace, but it is nott yet performyd as to my syght.”372