That both Dante’s Commedia and Langland’s Piers Plowman are in some sense apocalyptic poems has been noted throughout their critical traditions, because both appropriate elements from the biblical Apocalypse, the Revelation to John, and include scathing critiques of secular and ecclesiastic powers, coupled with cryptic prophecies of millennial regeneration. While much work has carefully traced these allusions and attempted to decipher their historical and spiritual significance, less attention has been paid to the formal and narrative consequences of the use of apocalypse in these two poems.1 In order to consider these literary or “authorial” aspects of apocalypse, it is useful to understand the apocalyptic text as a “fiction of judgment”: a work that claims access to divine revelation while acknowledging its status as a human artifact, and in which visions of order and meaning are presented by the author as if from a divine perspective.2 Comparing the Commedia and Piers Plowman in light of this more specifically textual definition of apocalypse makes it clear that many of the poems’ most fascinating elements stem from the poets’ engagement with the problems engendered, at the narrative level, by the exigencies of apocalyptic textuality.
Apocalypse claims to reveal that which only God can know, and thus constitutes, both eschatologically and epistemologically, a kind of oxymoron. The fiction of judgment furthermore claims to represent in human language what should, since it transcends the human order, be ineffable in its terms. As the apocalyptic author confronts the ends of human experience and the limits of human knowledge concerning those ends, she or he must therefore also face, at a very practical level, the limitations of linguistic representation. For the medieval Christian culture to which both Dante and Langland belong, the relationship of truth to textuality is particularly vexed: the status of the word is simultaneously highly suspect and absolutely enshrined. The serpent deceived humanity through language in the beginning, as the Antichrist will at the end; but the text in which these truths are inscribed comprises and constitutes “untouchable” language, guaranteed by the Incarnation of the Word in Christ and the fulfillment of the Old Testament in the New. While the Incarnation restores the possibility of human salvation and makes glimpses of it possible, it is only the return of Christ that will restore a prelapsarian epistemology. The promise of the Apocalypse is thus in part hermeneutic, and the unveiling of the meaning of that notoriously enigmatic text itself is only to be fulfilled in conjunction with the parousia. Textuality that makes claims to revelation is thus particularly problematic, and the authorizing strategies necessitated by the apocalyptic stance are typified by the frequently occurring divine command to write what has been seen—the moment in which the visionary is sanctioned and endowed with the prophetic mission. This mission is by definition a rather dangerous one, as the apocalyptic author must transmit a transcendent vision of what ought to be to a world that decidedly falls far short of that ideal.
Dante and Langland, in their respective visionary poems, demonstrate a profound awareness of these semiotic, rhetorical, and historical limits of apocalyptic textuality. They confront their readers with that awareness in self-reflexive moments in which they seem to grapple with the status of their own “makynges” (as Langland calls them) and with their roles as the makers of judging fictions. Both poets address the rhetorical question first, as they begin their journeys, and I discuss the profound differences in their styles of narrative authority in the first two sections of this essay. This analysis suggests the basic framework within which comparisons of Dante and Langland are generally placed: Dante’s arrogance is epic and his formal precision and schematic exactitude could not be more different from Langland’s associative, wandering modus operandi, which is coupled with a self-deprecatory narrative persona to produce the effect of a near-total lack of authorial control.3 But to consider these stylistic differences rhetorical is to suggest a profound reevaluation of the usual perception of Langland’s poetic talents as somehow inadequate by inserting the notion of an more intentional “inadequacy”—of poetic “failure” as rhetorical choice. It also implies, for Dante, the consideration of the context in which he wrote as crucially constraining his stylistic choices and visionary claims in their very rhetoric of unconstrained transgression.
In order to address these questions, the third, fourth, and fifth sections of the essay consider the apocalyptic culminations of the Commedia (in the Earthly Paradise cantos with which the Purgatorio concludes) and of Piers Plowman (in the last four passūs of the Vita). Here both poets engage the three-pronged issue of fallen language, biblical textuality, and incarnate Word, and thus provide the basis for a semiotic comparison that demonstrates a rather different relationship between the poets than their narrative rhetoric suggests. Here I argue that Langland’s audacity actually in many ways outstrips Dante’s, for while Dante’s apocalypse, with all its build-up, finally reveals only allegories, Langland actually shows us Christ and lets him speak—in Midlands Middle English, no less—providing a moment of “unmediated” perception of the divinity, not only for the visionary, but also for his audience. In the final section of the essay, I continue my consideration of Langland’s apocalypse into the final passus of Piers Plowman, where revelation gets clouded over again as history reasserts itself in all its unglory. Here I trace the imagery of plague in the poem in order to suggest what may be one of the differences in context that leads to the difference in apocalyptic style between Dante and Langland, at the two ends of the fourteenth century. I conclude that the repercussions of the eschatological trauma of the plague can be seen in Piers Plowman to include an epistemological aftershock that shakes the foundations of apocalyptic textuality represented by Dante’s generic apotheosis. Finally, I suggest that Dante’s text is itself conditioned by a rather different historical nexus of death and apocalypse, the pressure of which is marked, however, by its absence in the Commedia.
“It behooves you to go by another way if you would escape from this wild place,”4 the shade of Virgil tells Dante, coming to his spiritual and poetic rescue in the “selva oscura” where the action of the Commedia begins. In that dark wood, Dante has strayed from the true path—“la verace via” (Inf. 1: 12)—and found himself confronted by three feral and allegorical beasts, the last of which, a hungry wolf, has blocked his progress completely. Virgil proposes a radical, eschatological detour whose first turn is into prophecy, as he predicts the arrival of a “veltro,” a greyhound that will save Italy from the avaricious clutches of the wolf. Virgil guides the poem across an epistemological threshold with the cryptic language of that-which-shall-be-fulfilled and then links the path to that fulfillment with the “viaggio” on which he proposes to take Dante:
Ond ’io per lo tuo me’ penso e discerno
che tu mi segui, e io sarò tua guida,
e trarrotti di qui per loco etterno . . . (Inf. 1: 112–14)
Therefore I think and deem it best that you should follow me, and I will be your guide and lead you hence through an eternal place . . .
Dante will be led on a tour of the eternal fires of hell and the temporary ones of purgatory, and then, with another guide, he will ascend among the blessed in heaven. In the one hundred cantos that follow this introductory précis, Dante sustains a supreme fiction, “recording” the disposition of the damned and the saved with a precision of biographical and taxonomical detail that allowed the identification of the souls of and by Dante’s contemporaries, and the legacy of which was a late medieval otherworld that often looked remarkably like the poet’s own.5
The authority claimed by and granted to Dante is extraordinary, as is his audacity, for the poet repeatedly transgresses the limits inscribed by the biblical apocalypse tradition. In this tradition, Paul “knows not” the details of his revelatory raptus and cannot repeat in human speech the arcana verba he has heard (2 Cor. 12: 1–4). John witnesses the parousia and the raising of the dead, but when the books of judgment are opened he does not tell us what was written therein (Apoc. 20: 11–15). Dante, however, describes precisely the mechanisms of his bodily passage through the realms of the still disembodied souls, as well as the divine initiation and justification of his journey. And if, for example, when Beatrice tells him that he must write exactly what he has seen and heard for the sake of the world that lives badly (Purg. 32: 103: “in pro del mondo che mal vive”), part of what he records is a dark narration (Purg. 33:46: “narrazion buia”) he claims not to understand, nevertheless these arcana verba are (at least putatively) inscribed verbatim in his poem. And while John cannot tell us the judgments recorded in the apocalyptic books, Dante actually claims that divine judgment is inscribed in his book.6
Dante’s is the paradigmatic fiction of judgment, in which divine and authorial perspectives (judgment and fiction) are almost seamlessly interwoven.7 The eschatological vision Dante presents is embodied in a text the structural perfection of which further undergirds the poet’s assertion of the literal, revealed truth of his sacrato poema, whose inexorable teleology culminates with the beatific vision he claims to have been granted.8 Dante, in other words, goes all the way, and the egregiousness of his experience—as well as the absolute novelty of his poetic recording of it—is emphasized throughout the poem. Dante writes that, when Virgil proposed this “altro viaggio,” he balked, comparing his imminent journey to those of Aeneas and Paul and protesting his unworthiness; but the comparison and Virgil’s response serve in fact to emphasize Dante’s chosenness and to suggest (as the “veltro” prophecy does) that Dante’s journey has a purpose of profound significance, not only for himself. Dante is aware of the transgressions in which he is involved and incorporates that awareness in a rhetoric of humility that narratively serves to elicit responses that further authorize his undertaking.
Ma io, perché venirvi? o chi ’I concede?
Io non Enea, io non Paulo sono;
me degno a ciò né io né altri ‘I crede.
Per che, se del venire io m’abbandono,
temo che la venuta non sia folle. (Inf. 2: 31–35)
But I, why do I come there? And who allows it? I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul; of this neither I nor others think me worthy. Wherefore, if I yield and come, I fear that the coming may be folly.
“And I dreamt a marvelous dream,” the voice of Langland’s narrative alter ego, Will, reports, framing his vision across the limits of consciousness, but not necessarily of truth, in the oneiric realm.9 In the B version of the poem, the dream places Will “in a wilderness, I could not tell where”—an allusion to the same allegorical space Dante describes as a “selva oscura,” that is, a place in which one becomes lost. Will is not directly confronted by threatening beasts, however; instead, he sees a broad landscape. On a hill to the east is a tower, and in “a deep dale bynethe, a dongeon” yawns darkly. In the C-text, the wilderness is gone and the authorial voice immediately glosses the allegorical landmarks: the tower is Truth, while the dungeon contains Death.
In different ways, then, both the B and C versions suggest that what Will is seeing is a realm not unlike Dante’s, where salvation and damnation define both space and time. But what Will then sees, on which the rest of the Prologue is focused, is what lies between the eschatological and epistemological poles of the Dungeon of Death and the Tower of Truth. It is a “fair feeld ful of folk,” containing “alle manere of men . . . / Werchynge and wandrynge as the world asketh” (Prol. 17–19).10 Langland shows us not the otherworld but this world, vividly, in all its chaos and corruption, as Dante does only indirectly, through his dialogues with those for whom this life is already over and whose choice of truth or death has already been made. Langland’s field full of folk—his subject and his audience—is as yet unjudged; it still lives what Beatrice, Dante’s second guide, calls “[il] viver ch’è un correre a la morte”: the life that is a running toward death (Purg. 33:54). Langland’s first guide, a linen-clad lady who descends from the tower and later identifies herself as Holy Church, similarly points out to Will:
The mooste partie of this peple that passeth on this erthe
Have thei worship in this world, thei wilne no bettre;
Of oother hevene than here hold thei no tale. (B. 1: 7–9)
Most people who pass through this world wish for nothing better than worldly success: the only heaven they think about is on earth.
Will, as he tends to do throughout the poem, asks for an explanation: “Mercy, madame, what may this be to mene?” (1: 11). And, characteristically, the explanation he gets, lengthy and theologically sound as it is, does not exactly answer his question. Holy Church tells him unequivocally that “Treuthe is the beste” (1: 85, 135), but when Will says she must teach him more specifically how he can know truth, she calls him a fool, says his wits are dull, and gives him still more examples and explanations of truth and the “trewe,” the very proliferation of which seems to undercut the clear, unified monolith Will seems to think truth should be. He then tries a different tack, asking Holy Church to tell him how he can know the false. And thus begins Will’s epistemological pilgrimage, in the course of which he will seek truth—the three-part path to salvation also known in the poem as “do-well,” “do-bet,” and “do-best”—and will hear “of other heaven than here” many different tales.11
A fundamental difference thus emerges between the two poems: Dante presents himself as a chosen visionary to whom is revealed—and explained—the disposition of the souls after death, and to whom the dos and don’ts of salvation are thus rather specifically shown, without his really asking (indeed, he protests his unworthiness). Will, on the other hand, is constantly demanding examples and explanations, actively seeking answers from an ever-proliferating network of “authorities,” who certainly do not give one the sense of doctrinal reliability that Dante’s interlocutors exude, if only because their versions never quite match up.12 And the eschatological closure that is the precondition (or pretext) of Dante’s vision is wholly absent from Langland’s, in which everything still seems to be in process—including the poem itself, with its multiple versions, meandering, associative style, and repeated resistance to closure.13 Will is shown actively in search of meaning, which proves always multiple and elusive, while Dante has meaning thrust upon him in its most absolute, ultimate form. For Dante the doors of apocalyptic understanding are flung open, while Will beats against them with his head and with his pen. And while Dante is, throughout the Commedia, sanctioned and encouraged in his pilgrimage and his poetic project, Will is repeatedly challenged and discouraged; Dante is given divine commands to write, while Will is told that he is wasting his time.
In the B-text, for example, Ymaginatif—the personification of one of the mind’s creative faculties—menacingly (and rather paradoxically) counsels Will to abandon his creative efforts:
Amende thee while thow myght; thow hast ben warned ofte
With poustees of pestilences, with poverte and with angres
. . .
And thow medlest thee with makynges—and myghtest go seye thi Sauter,
And bidde for hem that yyveth thee breed; for ther are bokes ynowe
To telle men what Dowel is . . . (B.12: 10–18)
So mend your ways now, while you are still able. Often enough you have been warned by outbreaks of Plague, by poverty, and by many afflictions. . . . Yet for all this, you do nothing, but play about with poetry when you might be saying your Psalter and praying for those who give you your daily bread! Are there not enough books already, to expound Do-well. . . ?
In both the Commedia and Piers Plowman, a complex constellation of concerns is introduced by an allegorical recapitulation of biblical history from Genesis to Apocalypse. In the Commedia, this takes place explicitly in the Terrestrial Paradise, where the human root was innocent (Purg. 28: 142). In Piers Plowman, too, there is God’s garden, where a magnificent tree grows bearing a fruit called Charity. When Dante wakes in his Eden, after passing through the final fire of purgatory, Virgil promises him that here he shall eat of a marvelous fruit:
Quel dolce pome che per tanti rami
cercando va la cura de’ mortali,
oggi porrà in pace le tue fami. (Purg. 27: 115–17)
That sweet fruit which the care of mortals goes seeking on so many branches, this day shall give your hungerings peace.
When Will sees the Tree of Charity, he asks his guide (who in the B-text is Piers himself and in C is Liberum Arbitrium) to shake down some of the fruit, wanting to “assaien what savour it hadde” (B. 16: 74). It was of course precisely this action—characterized by Dante as Eve’s refusal to remain under any veil (Purg. 29: 27)—that caused the biblical banishment from Eden, with which the problems of eschatology, epistemology, and textuality all (from a medieval Christian perspective) began. Accordingly, death, history, and language are central themes in the final cantos of the Purgatorio, and in the allegorically parallel last four passūs of Piers Plowman,14 in both of which schemes of salvation history frame a revelation that undoes the Fall and apocalyptically links alpha and omega, the beginning and the end, while at the same time crucially involving the poet pilgrims themselves and the status of their texts.
Langland focuses first on the eschatological implications of the Fall, for when the ripe fruit falls for Will, the Devil snatches it away, “And made of holy men his hoord in Limbo Inferni” (B.16: 84); the fruit includes “Adam and Abraham and Ysaye the prophete, / Sampson and Samuel and Seint Johan the Baptist” (16: 81–82), who, despite their holiness, must dwell in hell because they lived before Christ. The historical aspect is developed, with all its typological force, as the kidnapping of the prophets and patriarchs begets the Incarnation. Old Law and New Law overlap when Abraham and Moses appear as Faith and Charity with their own two versions of “do-well” that gloss the retelling of the life of Christ from the Annunciation to the betrayal by Judas. Abraham expounds the mystery of the Trinity to the dreamer while also recapitulating the highlights of his role in Genesis and asserting his eschatological task as the keeper of the souls “Lollynge in my lappe, til swich a lord us fecche” (16: 269). It is typical of Piers Plowman that allegory proliferates in this nonlinear way, and it is no wonder Will gets confused when Moses appears, as Spes, in search of Christ, who must seal the text of the commandments Moses carries, which are not the ten we expect but the simple twofold mandate: “Dilige deum et proximum tuum” (from, e.g., Matt. 22). Will thus reaches another epistemological impasse, for Abraham’s version of the path to salvation was to believe firmly in the triune deity:
“Youre wordes arn wonderfulle,” quod I tho. “Which of yow is trewest,
And lelest to leve on for lif and for soule?” (B.17: 25–26)
“Your words astound me” I said. “How can I tell which of you to believe—which of you to trust to save one’s soul?”
The problem of apparently competing doctrinal authorities is resolved, at least rhetorically, by the Samaritan whom the dreamer next encounters, who tells Will that both Abraham and Moses are correct, although they have both failed to help the stricken man the Samaritan has succored on the side of the road. The Samaritan explains:
May no medicyne under molde the man to heele brynge—
Neither Feith ne fyn Hope, so festered be hise woundes,
Withouten the blood of a barn born of a mayde. (B.17: 93–95)
No medicine on earth, not even Faith and Hope, can heal that man; his wounds are so festered. The only cure is the blood of a child born of a virgin.
The inexorable logic of redemption demands the sacrifice of the incarnate God, which Will indeed witnesses in his next dream. It begins with the singing of the “Hosanna” that accompanied Christ’s entry into Jerusalem (Matt. 21: 9), which Dante also hears in his Eden.
In the Commedia’s Earthly Paradise, the “osanna” accompanies a phantasmagoric procession replete with apocalyptic allusions, and its Christological associations are amplified by the cry of one hundred angels who emerge from the chariot at the center of the procession:
Quali i beati al novissimo bando
surgeran presti ognun di sua caverna,
la revestita voce alleluiando,
cotali in su la divina basterna
si levar cento, ad vocem tanti senis,
ministri e messagier di vita etterna.
Tutti dicean: “Benedictus qui venis” . . . (Purg. 30: 13–19)
As the blessed at the last Trump will rise ready each from his tomb, singing Hallelujah with reclad voice, so upon the divine chariot, ad vocem tanti senis, rose up a hundred ministers and messengers of life eternal, who all cried “Benedictus qui venis”. . .
Dante cites this last phrase from the same triumphal moment in the Gospel of Matthew (21: 9), where it typologically heralds the eschatological event to which the resurrected “ministers and messengers of eternal life” also allude—for Christ’s entry into Jerusalem preceding his Passion is analagous to his Second Coming, as bridegroom of the heavenly Jerusalem (Apoc. 21: 9). This eschatological dimension is less explicitly present in Langland’s use of the allusions because he is indeed retelling the story of the life of Christ and has now come to the episode of his Passion—his death. But for both Dante and Langland, the transcendence of death is at the heart of these sections of their poems. And it is also linked, in the Edenic contexts, to the transcendence of language and of history, whose postlapsarian inadequacies parallel those of the rendered-mortal body. Apocalypse undoes Genesis in that humanity regains its immortality, language becomes immediate, literal, and transparent, and history becomes, as it were, immaterial. Langland figures the first transformation in its most literal—that is, historical—sense, precisely by retelling the story of Christ’s death and resurrection. For Dante, however, all this apocalyptic expectation leads not to the revelation of Christ—a Christ who actually speaks, and whose words are recorded, in Piers Plowman—but to the revelation of Beatrice, Dante’s most allegorical figure. Dante transforms history into allegory, as textual apocalypse inevitably does, moving into a prophetic mode that exploits the seemingly immediate language of images while acknowledging the “narrazion buia” their representation actually represents.
Dante’s Eden, “la divina foresta spessa e viva” (Purg. 28: 2), serves as the stage on which an allegorical pageant appears, led by what at first appear to Dante as seven golden trees. These in fact turn out to be seven gold candelabra, which are followed by a retinue of twenty-four “elders” and four winged beasts, images that draw upon the iconographic literacy of medieval readers for a portentous, prophetic effect. But the images Dante inscribes, like the credos espoused by Abraham and Moses in Langland’s garden, call into question the epistemological relationship between Old and New Testaments, as well as the epistemological status of Dante’s own vision. In an address to the reader on the subject of the four winged beasts, Dante recalls the biblical intertexts of his vision and their discrepancies, while simultaneously authorizing his own text:
A descriver lor forme più non spargo
rime, lettor; ch’altra spesa mi stringe,
tanto che a questa non posso esser largo;
ma leggi Ezechiel, che li dipinge
come li vide da la fredda parte
venir con vento e con nube e con igne;
e quali troverai ne le sue carte
tali eran quivi, salvo ch’a le penne
Giovanni è meco e da lui si diparte. (Purg. 29: 97–105)
To describe their forms, reader, I do not lay out more rhymes, for other spending constrains me so that I cannot be lavish in this; but read Ezekiel who depicts them as he saw them come from the cold parts, with wind and cloud and fire; and such as you shall find them on his pages, such were they here, except that, as to the wings, John is with me, and differs from him.
The truth of Ezekiel’s and John’s visions of the four beasts is not undermined by the differences between them—they are, in a sense, synoptic. And while Dante’s assertion of his agreement with John on the fact that the beasts each have six wings suggests the stronger truth-value of the New Testament version, it more importantly serves to vouch for the authenticity of Dante’s own vision, which is thus understood to be another version of this same truth.
Langland seems to promise a similarly transcendent epistemology in the passus that constitutes the poem’s most literal apocalypse, in which Christ himself appears and Will witnesses his Passion—the death of the Word made Flesh, with which Death is conquered and the Devil is made to relinquish the stolen fruit of (pre-Christian) Charity. Langland retells the story of the Passion primarily as told in the gospel according to Matthew, but drawing also on the other synoptic gospels and on the apocryphal gospel of Nicodemus, the primary medieval source for the legend of the Harrowing of Hell. For once, Langland is engaged in a synthetic, rather than a dispersive, narrative project, bringing together these different (but equally true) versions of the Truth and giving them one voice in his text—or rather, uncharacteristically silencing the voices whose versions of reality compete everywhere else in the poem—for Will actually sees Jesus being tried and condemned and nailed on the cross, and he describes it literally. It is as if he were describing the images along the stages of the cross painted around the apses and naves of some medieval churches, just as Dante describes the apocalyptic images familiar from the mosaics of early Christian ecclesiastical decoration. Both Dante and Langland thus draw upon visual imagery and its description to compensate for the overload of signification these moments represent. But while for Dante these images, for all their biblical pedigree, remain veiled in allegorical configurations that demand exegesis (a demand the critical tradition from its earliest representatives eagerly obliged),15 for Langland they constitute the literal truth of the Word and do not require explanation but rather only typological fulfillment.
After Dante has witnessed the apocalyptically charged pageant and the resurrection of his “Word” (Beatrice, whose Christological significance is elaborated in the Vita Nuova), the central element in the procession, the chariot that bore her to him, now becomes the focus of attention as it undergoes a series of allegorically allusive metamorphoses.16 The carro is invaded by a fox, assaulted by an eagle, and then becomes the seven-headed dragon of Apocalypse, ridden by the equally familiar meretrix, who is, however, accompanied, kissed, and beaten by a novel giant who then drags the dragon and its rider into another selva. When this apocalyptic pastiche has finally come to an end, Beatrice suggests that in witnessing it Dante has reached a new moral and poetic level at which he can cast off fear and shame “sì che non parli più com’ om che sogna” (Purg. 33: 33: “so that you may no more speak like one who is dreaming”). An epistemological hierarchy is implied by Beatrice’s words, telling him he can transcend even the visionary mode of John, another dreamer of some of Dante’s images, who was seen “dormendo, con la faccia arguta” (29:144: “asleep, with keen visage”) at the end of the parade of biblical books in the first, more allegorically obvious, part of the Earthly Paradise procession. Beatrice seems to acknowledge that the meaning of the latter part of the spectacle is somewhat less self-evident, for she provides an explanation, in language, of the images. But this exegesis, rather than enlightening, actually culminates with the infamous “enigma forte” (33:50) of the Commedia’s second major prophecy:
. . . io veggio certamente, e però il narro
. . . un cinquecento dieci e cinque,
messo di Dio . . . (Purg. 33: 40, 43–44)
. . . for I see surely, and therefore I tell of it. . . a Five Hundred, Ten, and Five, sent by God. . .
One can imagine the blank look with which these words leave Dante, for Beatrice must assure him that events will soon make clear the meaning of her “narrazion buia,” whose darkness is perhaps also a function of its being, precisely, the narration of what she sees—it is an image, translated into words; a number that is somehow an object, a thing, and does not quite make sense linguistically. She nevertheless tells Dante that he must report what she has said: “Tu nota; e sì come da me son porte / così queste parole segna a’ vivi” (33: 52–53: “[Note this], and even as these words are uttered by me, so teach them [mark them] to those who live”). And when you write them, she adds, don’t hide what you saw happen to the plant. What he sees and what Beatrice says, the visual and the verbal signs to which Dante is being exposed and which he must somehow translate for earthly consumption, are thus confused or conflated, their epistemological relationship unclear. Indeed, as Beatrice goes on about that plant—recalling both its Edenic and its Christological significance—she sees that Dante is still quite dumbfounded, and with some annoyance she says:
Ma perch’io veggio te ne lo ’ntelletto
fatto di pietra e, impetrato, tinto,
sì che t’abbaglia il lume del mio detto,
voglio anco, e se non scritto, almen dipinto,
che ‘1 te ne porti dentro a te per quello
che si reca il bordon di palma cinto. (Purg. 33: 73–78)
But since I see you turned to stone in your mind, and stonelike, such in hue that the light of my word dazes you, I would also have you bear it away with you—and if not written, at least depicted [painted]—for the reason that the pilgrim’s staff is brought back wreathed with palm.
Dante’s incomprehension is described by Beatrice in another paradoxical conflation of visual and verbal modes of understanding—her words blind him and turn his mind stony and opaque—but her solution to his bafflement in the face of her “dark narration” is the instruction that he store her words in images “painted” in his memory as the sign of his pilgrimage. The prophetic mode of representation Dante adopts in this eschatologically charged section of his poem engages the hermeneutic of “the revelation that conceals” and demonstrates that, despite having regained Eden, he has not fully transcended the limits of his genre, in which images must stand as shorthand for the proliferating polysemy of apocalypse that appears to the human mind as a “narrazion buia.” But then, in the final moments before Dante will experience the vision of heaven, the description of which occupies the thirty-three cantos of the Paradiso, but which itself lasts only an instant, Beatrice makes him a promise:
Veramente oramai saranno nude
le mie parole, quanto converrassi
quelle scovrire a la tua vista rude. (Purg. 33: 100–102)
But [truly,] henceforth my words shall be as simple [naked] as may be needful to make them plain [reveal them] to your rude sight.
The promise of “naked words” represents the epistemological plenitude of unmediated understanding that eschatological apocalypse promises to fulfill, and in which Dante will participate by partaking of the beatific vision. The Edenic interlude, replete with the prophetic imagery of Ezekiel, John, and more contemporary apocalypticists, is thus for Dante but a step along the way to the revelation that constitutes the Paradiso. Before that revelation he must yet pass through the river Eunoe, Dante’s invented counterpart to the classical Lethe (which also flows through his Terrestrial Paradise), the waters of which, Beatrice says, will revive his stunned faculties (“la tramortita sua virtù ravviva”: Purg. 33: 129) and prepare him for the “trasumanar” (Par. 1: 70) that makes his raptus to the empyrean possible. But in an address to the reader in the final lines of the Purgatorio, Dante suggests that despite the eschatological and epistemological revelation he is about to experience, and despite Beatrice’s promise of “parole nude,” his own words continue to be bound by textual limits he describes in their most literal, physical sense:
S’io avessi, lettor, più lungo spazio
da scrivere, i’ pur cantere’ in parte
lo dolce ber che mai non m’avria sazio;
ma perché piene son tutte le carte
ordite a questa cantica seconda,
non mi lascia più ir lo fren de l’arte. (Purg. 33: 136–41)
If, reader, I had greater space for writing, I would yet partly sing the sweet draught which never would have sated me; but since all the pages ordained for this second canticle are filled, the [brake] of art lets me go no further.
Beatrice promises “parole nude” and in many ways delivers them in the Paradiso, explaining the heavenly hierarchies and the physics of immortality as unallegorically as possible; but the paradox of apocalyptic textuality is by no means resolved in the Commedia’s final cantica. It is, however, ultimately “deified” when Dante, in his concluding vision of the Trinity, sees the image of a book, the single volume in which all the universe is bound. This is the book of divine order, the book that guarantees meaning in all “ciò che per l’universo si squaderna” (Par. 33: 87: “that which is dispersed in leaves [unbound] throughout the universe”), a book whose eschatological and epistemological equivalent the Commedia itself attempts to be.17 The book is both the object and the site of beatific plenitude, but it is also, as an image of the physical book from which Dante’s lettor reads, a reminder of the distance between our words and God’s words of creation, incarnation, and judgment.
When the personification Book appears in Langland’s vision, between Christ’s death and his triumph over it, he is described as “a bolde man of speche . . . wihte two brode yes” (C.20: 240, 239: “a man with two broad, open eyes . . . who was very outspoken”).18 Like the two wheels of the chariot in Dante’s Earthly Paradise vision, these two eyes denote the Old and New Testaments—two ways of seeing what is from the Christian perspective one truth, that of the Old Law fulfilled in the New—as well as suggesting the eschatological fulfillment to which they ultimately “look.” This temporal and typological ambiguity (or polysemy) is present as Book authoritatively asserts both the promise and the threat of Christ’s resurrection, in the speech that serves as the prelude to Will’s witnessing the Harrowing of Hell.
And yut y, Boek, wol be brente bote he aryse to lyue
And comforte alle his kyn and out of care brynge
And alle the Iewene ioye vnioynen and vnlouken,
And bote they reuerense this resurexioun and the rode honoure
And bileue on a newe lawe, be ylost lyf and soule. (C.20: 264–68)
And yet I, Book, will be burnt but he rise to live and comfort all his kin and bring them out of their cares and unjoin and unlock all the joy of the Jews; And all but those who adore this resurrection and honor the cross, and believe in a new law, will lose life and soul.19
The ambiguity of Book’s words permit several readings. The conventional one has Book staking himself on the assertion that Christ will live again, and is generally linked to an anti-Semitic interpretation of the effects of Christ’s rising on the “Iewene ioye.” However, the grammatical parallelism of Book’s promises—linking the verbs arise, comfort, bring, unjoin, and unlock—may in fact undergird a reading in which the “unlocking” of the millennial promise of the Hebrew Scriptures (“the Iewene ioye”) is predicated upon “this” resurrection—a reading which could be described as “two-eyed” in its conflation of the literal with the typological. This double vision is appropriate in the context Book is introducing, for the Harrowing of Hell will show that the death of the Jewish patriarchs is not final, despite the Old Law, because of its fulfillment by the New. But as Langland transcribes the Harrowing from the gospel book into his own, these ambiguities reach a level of both epistemological and eschatological transgression, as the words of the Incarnate Word are inscribed by the poet into his text and in his own vernacular, and his book becomes a Book of apocalyptic pretensions.20
An angel threatens “Princepes of this place, prest vndo this gates” (C.20: 272) for the king of glory is on his way, while Lucifer, Satan, and Hell itself debate the eschatological question of the Devil’s right to sinners after the Fall. Christ will deny this right in his upcoming speech with an argument previewed by Satan himself in his accusation that Lucifer lied to Eve when he promised her the knowledge of good and evil:
And byhihtest here and hym aftur to knowe
As two godes, with god, bothe goed and ille.
Thus with treson and tricherie thow troyledest hem bothe
And dust hem breke here buxumnesse thorw fals bihestes . . . (C.20: 317–20)
And you promised that after they would know, as two gods, with God, both good and ill. Thus with treason and treachery you deceived them both and made them break their obedience through false promises.21
Gobelyne concurs, “We haen no trewe title to hem” (20: 324), and as the light he recognizes as God appears, Satan concludes that they have now “ylost oure lordschipe a londe and in helle” (20: 349) because of that lie. It is a lie that proves the limits of human epistemological possibility, which Christ “quytes” by stretching the previous limits of human eschatological possibility, so that, as Christ says, punning and suggesting the way his own mercy cheats death, “gyle be bigyled thorw grace at the laste” (20: 392).
Christ announces his presence in hell, body and soul, to retrieve the prophets and patriarchs who proclaimed the law he himself fulfills, an action whose justice he asserts through a series of juxtapositions that turn on the notion of Old Testament retribution—“Dentem pro dente, et oculum pro oculo” (Ex. 21: 24, C.20: 385a)—and prove that “Non veni solvere legem, sed adimplere” (Matt. 5: 17, C.20: 395a). Christ makes clear that this harrowing is the type of the resurrection of the dead, for “thenne shal y come as kynge, with croune and with angeles, / And haue out of helle alle mennes soules” (412–13), and he suggests that then, too, he will be stretching the limits of justice with his grace. Langland’s Christ thus reveals his triple typological identity, as the fulfillment of the Old Law in the New, and as promise of a final law, when he will reign on earth.22 At the same time, the legalistic maneuvers of Christ’s speech, its slippery punnings and pairings, are at once paralleled and opposed to the lies of Satan to Eve, so that Christ’s language undoes the semiotic rupture of the Fall just as Christ’s mercy undoes Satan’s treachery: “Y may do mercy of my rihtwysnesse and alle myn wordes trewe” (431).
Christ tells Satan he has no right to the just souls of the prophets and patriarchs because he got Adam and Eve not by right but by guile, the antidote to which (its complement) is the grace by which his death redeems the Fall. But Langland’s Christ goes on to suggest that his compassion for humanity, because of his own human nature, may go even further than this already generous deal:
Ac to be merciable to man thenne my kynde asketh,
For we beth brethrene of o bloed, ac nat in baptisme alle. . . .
For bloed may se bloed bothe afurst and acale
Ac bloed may nat se bloed blede, bote hym rewe.
Audivi archana verba, que non licet homini loqui.
Ac my rihtwysnesse and rihte shal regnen in helle,
And mercy al mankynde bifore me in heuene. (C.20: 417–18, 437–440)
And how can I, with my human nature, refuse men mercy on that day? For we are brothers of one blood, though we are not all of one baptism. . . . For a man may suffer his kind to go cold and hungry, but he cannot see them bleed without pitying them. And I heard secret words which it is not granted to man to utter. My righteousness and my justice shall rule over hell, and my mercy over all mankind before me in heaven.
The day of wrath might in the end be a day of mercy, Christ suggests, for all those who share the “blood” of human nature, which Christ, himself a creature of blood whose blood has been shed, cannot bear to see bleed. At this point, at the height of Langland’s revelation of the apocalyptically speaking Christ, at the point where a heterodox universalism is almost being espoused, Langland inserts the Pauline paradigm of visionary restraint and epistemological aporia. The appropriation of Paul’s words constitutes a kind of apocalyptic ellipsis, despite the fact that in some sense the transgressive words (the promise of universal salvation) have already been uttered.
This moment represents the epistemological apotheosis of the poem, when Christ speaks the “parole nude” that mark the limits of Langland’s apocalypse, which appropriately ends with the chaining of Satan—the action, in John’s Apocalypse, that signals the start of the millennium. In Langland’s text, however, it initiates the descent back into allegory after revelation, a return to the personifications framing the dramatic reenactment of the life of Christ that at first continues the sense of triumphant resolution found in the finale of the Harrowing episode, imparting a sense of closure and culmination alien to the rest of Langland’s poem. Peace and Righteousness are finally reconciled, and Truth and Love sing and play music until “the day dawned . . . That men rang to the resurreccioun” (C.20: 470–71). The eschatological context is quickly recast in its temporal form—it is the celebration of Christ’s resurrection, Easter, not the Last Judgment—“a return to time which confirms in reality the truth of his vision.”23 At the end of this passus, all the levels of Langland’s allegory are marvelously in synch, and the opening of the following passus adds a final element to the apocalyptic concordia as Langland inscribes for the first time the moment at which he not only “waked” but also “wrot what y hadde ydremed” (C.21:1).
Almost immediately, however, confusion returns, first epistemologically, with Will’s inability to understand what he sees at the opening of his next dream, then eschatologically—after the allegorical narrative of the founding of Holy Church (to which Augustinian interpretation equated the millennial binding of Satan)—in the appearance of Antichrist and the descent into chaos with which Piers Plowman concludes.24 While in Passus 20 Truth can emphatically exclaim, “Trewes . . . thow tellest vs soeth, by Iesus!” (462), in Passus 21 truth has once again become fragmented and elusive, and Will’s vision is clouded and confused as he sees the figure of Piers-as-Christ:
And thenne calde y Conscience to kenne me the sothe:
“Is this Iesus the ioustare . . .
Or hit is Peres the plouhman? who paynted hym so rede?” (C.21: 9–11)
So I called to Conscience to tell me the truth about it—“Is this Jesus, the knight. . . or is it Piers the Ploughman? And who stained him so red?”
Conscience replies that they are Piers’s arms, but that it is Christ who bears them. And Will, ever the quibbler, asks why Conscience uses the name Christ when the Jews called the son of God Jesus. The discussion is markedly anticlimactic after the previous passus’s rendering of the Passion and Harrowing of Hell, in which Christ is unambiguously Christ, the text is unimpeachably true, and paradox and polysemy enable understanding rather than impede it.
The defeat of truth culminates with the arrival on the scene of Antichrist, instantly undoing the work of Piers Plowman, who had gone off, in Passus 21, to till truth throughout the world:
Auntecrist cam thenne, and al the crop of treuthe
Turned hit vp-so-down and ouertulde the rote,
And made fals sprynge and sprede and spede menne nedes;
In uch a contrey ther he cam, kutte awey treuthe
And garte gyle growe there as he a god were. (C.22: 53–57)
Antichrist. . . came . . . and overturned all the crop of Truth, tearing it up by the roots, and causing Falsehood to spring up and spread and supply all men’s needs. In every district where he came he cut down Truth, and grew Guile instead, disguised as goodness.
In the face of this epistemological debacle, Conscience calls on Kynde (Nature) for help and calls on all the people to take refuge in Unity/Holy Church, attempting, it seems, to regain the harmony signaled by Christ’s “kynde”—his assuming of human nature—and realized socially in the ecclesiastical allegory that dominates Passus 21, in which Piers heads the building of the fortress Holy Church, whose Unity must stand against the assaults of Antichrist. The people seem largely to ignore Conscience, but Kynde hears his plea. Rather than the deification of human nature exemplified and promised by Christ, however, Kynde now sends the agents of its destruction:
Kynde cam aftur with many kyne sores,
As pokkes and pestilences, and moche peple shente;
So Kynde thorw corupcions kulde fol mony.
Deth cam dryuyng aftur and al to duste paschte
Kynges and knyhtes, caysers and popes.
Lered ne lewed he left no man stande
That he hitte euene, that euere stured aftur. (C.22: 97–103)
Nature followed with a host of cruel diseases, slaughtering thousands with foul contagions, and sweeping all before him with his plagues and poxes. Then Death came dashing after, crushing to powder both kings and knights, emperors and pontiffs. He left none standing, priest or layman, but hit so squarely that they never stirred again.
This Langlandian danse macabre inscribes the indiscriminateness of death. It is a social equalizer, but from a moral perspective Kynde’s assaults are essentially ineffectual, for when, at Conscience’s pleading, Kynde ceases from his attacks, “to se the peple amende,” Fortune, Lechery, and Covetyse immediately take hold among “tho fewe that were alyue” (C.22: 109–10) and they gather a new army to continue Antichrist’s assault. If one assumes these references to large-scale death and disease refer to the events of the Black Death (as most readers of the poem do), then the paradox of the plague seems, in Langland’s eyes, to be that while it is indeed meaningful—an event of divine retribution (as Reason had asserted at C.5: 115, when he “preuede that this pestelences was for puyre synne”)—it is not seen as meaningful by most of those who survive it, or rather its meaning is perverted so that they interpret it as a judgment that has spared them and so licensed their licentiousness.25
Langland’s epistemological and eschatological position seems to stem from the historical circumstance of a society that has been given a sign, the fulminating judgment of the plague, but has failed utterly to glean its significance. Indeed, that the entire apparatus of salvation represented by Holy Church has been undermined in the wake of the plague has been asserted throughout the poem, from the Prologue’s recounting of the parsons and priests who complain to their bishops “That hire parisshes weren povere sith the pestilence tyme” (B. Prol: 84) and abandon them to live in more profitable London, to Dame Study’s long diatribe against those friars who speculate and preach in ignorance, with cataclysmic results:
Freres and faytours haen founde vp suche questions
To plese with proude men senes this pestelences,
And prechyng at seynt Poules for puyr enuye of clerkes,
That folk is not ferme in the faith ne fre of here godes
Ne sory for here synnes; so ys pruyde enhanced
In religion and in al the reume amonges riche and pore
That preyeres haen no power this pestilences to lette.
For god is deef nowadayes and deyneth vs nat to here
And gode men for oure gultes he al togrynt to deth. (C.11: 54–62)
Since the Plague, Friars and other impostors have thought up theological questions just to please the proud. And they preach at St. Paul’s out of sheer envy of the clergy, so that folk are no longer confirmed in the faith, or taught to be charitable with their goods and sorry for their sins. Not only in the Religious Orders, but among rich and poor throughout the whole realm, pride has spread so much that all our prayers are powerless to stop the pestilence. [For God is deaf nowadays and does not deign to hear us, and for our guilt he grinds good men to death].
The disastrous repercussions of the friar’s pride and greed become the focus of the final passus of Piers Plowman, as one such friar talks his way into Unity, promising he can heal Contrition, who has been wounded by Hypocrisy in the psychomachic battle that conflates the imagery of plague with that of war. Conscience explains that the parson has given Contrition plasters for his sores that are too slow and painful, and the friar instead sells him a plaster and some prayers “for a litel suluer” (C.22: 367). The result of the friar’s commodification of salvation is that Contrition forgets to cry for his sins and, comforted by the friar’s flattery, he leaves Unity, making true penance, and therefore salvation, impossible. The sins attack Unity once more, but the friar has so “enchaunted” its inhabitants with his “dwale” (opiate) that there is no one left to help Conscience defend it, and so he declares he will set out on a pilgrimage to find Piers Plowman, who will destroy pride and give the friars a “fyndynge”—a provision for their livelihood—so they will no longer destroy salvation by claiming to sell it independently of true penance. In his last words, Conscience calls again on Kynde to avenge him and help him until Piers can be found. The implication is that the cycles of plague that rent the social and moral fabric of late fourteenth-century England will continue to “grind good men to death” until Conscience and Piers together can recall to the inhabitants of Unity how they may be heard by a God who is for the time being deaf to their imprecations.
This is, of course, what Langland tries to do in and through his poem, just as Dante must write “in pro del mondo che mal vive.” It is also the message of Langland’s prophecies; ambiguous as they may be in their specifics, they all foretell a period of disaster. Dante’s prophecies rather suggest an imminent redemption in which he and his poem play an important part. Langland makes no such presumption at the apocalyptic level Dante reaches, but rather seems to intend his text as an edifying guide to the perplexed that acknowledges its inability to rise above that perplexity. The book of divine order from which Dante claims to copy is closed to Langland, who can only show its perverted paraphrasing by the multitude of voices he dreams, and for whom the only unequivocal truth is in the transcendence of the Word made Flesh. While Dante’s revelation in the Earthly Paradise takes him beyond apocalypse to the promise of the beatific vision, Langland’s revelation of Christ leads only to the disintegration that goes on and on in the anticipation of apocalypse.
As Robert Lerner has pointed out, the Black Death did not generate any real novelty in the nature (or even the amount) of apocalyptic expectation in Western Europe.26 Indeed, the chiliastic currents evident in both Dante and Langland are part of a long and steadily flowing river of millenarian tradition in early and medieval Christianity. The similarity of the poets’ diagnoses of what ails their respective societies is profound, as is their shared millennial “hope for supernaturally inspired, imminent, and sweeping this-worldly change,”27 and both poets express their apocalyptic mentalities in the prophetic moments that punctuate the Commedia and Piers Plowman. Both poets furthermore demonstrate a certain influence of Joachite ideas and the often connected concern with poverty and the mendicant orders, as well as the more specific conviction that the root of their society’s corruption lies in greed. With these elements, the apocalypses of Dante and Langland are “updated” with the concerns that mark fourteenth-century apocalypticism, much of which was generated around the internecine conflicts of the Franciscan order.28 And again, in large part, Dante and Langland share these “modernizations” of their apocalyptic material. The picture, then, in terms of ideological content, seems much as Lerner paints it—a picture of continuity between the early and late years of the fourteenth century.
Dante and Langland, however, differ crucially from most of their apocalyptic predecessors and contemporaries in that their fictions of judgment are explicitly presented as fictions, in the etymological sense of the fictio, the “made thing.” These are literary productions, rather than treatises, letters, confessions, or manifestos; they are poems, and vernacular poems at that, but it is precisely in their status as vernacular poems that the differences in their apocalypses lie. These differences, as we have seen, are manifested both rhetorically and semiotically, but their origins are fundamentally historical.
The paradox of apocalyptic textuality, of the fiction of judgment, is powerfully inscribed in Dante’s Commedia, where moments of apocalyptic rhetoric are almost invariably coupled with moments of textual self-referentiality. Dante repeatedly asserts the truth of his vision and his message and enlists the denizens of his otherworld to reinforce the heavenly authorization for his mission as both pilgrim and poet, and the “divine” status of his sacrato poema is further authorized by its remarkable formal harmony and complexity. But the metatextual moments, such as those in the Earthly Paradise cantos discussed above, periodically remind us of the inescapable gap between the apocalyptic vision and the apocalyptic text, between revelation and representation.
For Langland, however, the crucial gap seems to lie elsewhere: it is not so much representation that undermines revelation, but rather history itself, and the gap is not so much between the fiction and the judgment as between the judgment and the world. The nature of this gap is suggested by David Herlihy’s positing of an epistemological rupture consequent to the years of plague that separate Langland’s apocalypse from Dante’s. Herlihy argues that the result of this catastrophe was the sense that “the human intellect had not the power to penetrate the metaphysical structures of the universe”: while earlier philosophers like Aquinas (and Dante) believed a divine order both existed and could be understood by the human intellect, their late-medieval counterparts had no such confidence.29 In Piers Plowman, the plague has destroyed not only the social order but also man’s ability to understand the significance of that destruction, and that inability is reflected in—and in a sense allegorized by—the poet’s resistance to the proclamations of the fiction of judgment. When Christ appears in Passus 20, his revelation is more truly apocalyptic than anything in the Commedia, but while Dante’s poem moves teleologically to its culmination with the beatific vision, Langland’s falls back from its apocalypse to the chaos of the field full of folk, where history is still in progress and the attack of Antichrist is not the End, but just the beginning of yet another pilgrimage in search of a truth that can no longer, or not yet, be found on this earth.
A final, critical paradox suggests that just as there are specific textual repercussions of death (in the form of the plague) for Langland’s apocalypse that have generally been ignored, so too the critical tradition has generally eschewed exploring the impact of a specific historical nexus of death and apocalypse on Dante’s text. While Piers Plowman is now frequently considered in the context of the later Lollard controversies, when forms of vernacular religiosity were branded heretical around the turn of the century and well into the fifteenth, Dante’s connection to the persecution of the Spiritual Franciscans and their lay followers, which is historically so much stronger (the heresy trials were actually occurring as Dante wrote the Commedia), is only beginning to be sketched.30 Rather than undermining the view of the Commedia, of which Dantisti seem perhaps overly fond, as a poetically transcendent fiction of judgment—a view Dante himself promotes in his “sacred poem”—this context in fact suggests the historical incentive for Dante’s narrative stance as scriba dei. Because death was a real consequence of apocalyptic claims for some of Dante’s like-minded contemporaries, he had to adopt a dual rhetoric of ultimate authorization and semiotic inadequacy, so that lo fren de l’arte, “the brake of art,” stopped him just short of heresy.
While for Dante apocalyptic textuality is thus a means for transcending history, for Langland it is finally an acknowledgment of the historical impossibility of transcendence. The ways these poets perceive and represent the limits of apocalypse illuminate crucial aspects of the relationship of eschatology to epistemology and suggest how that relationship may have shifted in the course of the fourteenth century.