Beyond Reformation?: An Essay on William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity

BEYOND REFORMATION?

An Essay on William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity

DAVID AERS

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2015 by the University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

www.undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-268-07484-5

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [email protected]

This book is dedicated to three teachers and friends:

Elizabeth Salter

Derek Pearsall

Stanley Hauerwas

Mirabile ergo mysterium Christi sedentis ad dexteram Dei: occultum est ut crederetur, subtractum est ut speraretur.

(This is a wonderful thing about the mystery of Christ’s enthronement at God’s right hand: his presence is hidden that he may be believed in and withdrawn that he may be hoped for.)

—St. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, 109.8

et certe videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate, nondum facie ad faciem. et ideo, quamdiu peregrinor abs te, mihi sum praesentior quam tibi at tamen te novi nullo modo posse violari; ego vero quibus temptationibus resistere valem quibusve non valeam, nescio.

(Without question, we see now through a mirror in an enigma, not yet face to face [1 Cor. 13:12]. For this cause, as long as I am a traveller absent from you [2 Cor. 5:6], I am more present to myself than to you. Yet I know that you cannot be in any way subjected to violence, whereas I do not know which temptations I can resist and which I cannot.)

—St. Augustine, Confessions, X.5.7

CONTENTS

Preface

Beyond Reformation? An Essay on William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

Notes

Bibliography

PREFACE

I would think that the whole Christian faith, and all Christ’s promises about the Catholic faith lasting to the end of the age, and the whole Church of God, could be preserved in a few, indeed in one.

—William of Ockham, A Letter to the Friars Minor

Because this is a somewhat idiosyncratic little book, the preface offers a brief account of some of the contexts that fostered its making and within which it ruminates. While this will not justify its existence, it suggests the kind of questions that inform the inquiry. I hope that even a very brief articulation of such questions may encourage at least some to read on who are not based in an English department and do not share (yet) my own love of Langland’s work. To help readers new to the poem I have included, at the end of the preface, Derek Pearsall’s excellent summary of the final version of Piers Plowman. This comes from his edition, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text. Throughout Beyond Reformation? I have followed quotations of Langland’s poetry with translations by George Economou. I am grateful to Derek Pearsall, George Economou, and their publishers for permission to quote from these works.¹ I hope the outline and the translations welcome new readers of the poem and nonmedievalists since this essay does raise in the margins, however tentatively, questions about cultural change and continuity from the Middle Ages to the English reformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

But the most obvious and determinate focus of this book is the greatest English poem of the Middle Ages, Piers Plowman, which according to its brilliant nineteenth-century editor, Walter Skeat, was a poem that its author kept writing and revising throughout his life. The three versions that have reached us catch this process at different stages. The outcome of modern editing has confirmed both Skeat’s picture of the process of writing and the view that it was made by one author, William Langland.² The present book addresses the work in its latest version.³ Its reading concentrates on Langland’s modes of writing, on his extraordinarily rich ecclesiastic politics, and on his account of the Christian virtues and the struggles of Conscience to discern how to go on in his often baffling culture. Langland’s complex allegory engaged with almost all the institutions and forms of his culture. In doing so it necessarily explored moral languages and principles in relation to current practices and tendencies. His vision included a strange sense that in his own historical moment some moral concepts were being transformed and some traditions he cherished were becoming unintelligible. Here he grasped subtle shifts which were hardly discernible in fourteenth-century England but would have increasing and lasting force in the future. One of the questions emerging from Langland’s explorations is hardly predictable, even hardly imaginable in terms of most versions of the Middle Ages in medieval and early modern studies. Understandably so because it concerns signs and forces of what Langland sees as de-Christianization. I will argue that, however hegemonic the hold of what Eamon Duffy calls traditional religion, the issue of de-Christianization is indeed taken up by the late fourteenth-century writer.⁴ And in pursuing it I will sometimes bring Langland into dialogue with Pope John Paul II writing in the 1990s—for the poet’s responses to the pressures that led him to such a concern have striking implications for John Paul’s ecclesiology. Langland’s responses, however idiosyncratic they may be, might even engage those who give us big stories about the relations between the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and modernity. Yet, as far as I am aware, Langland has been given no attention in the plethora of grand narratives over the past twenty-five years.⁵ If the present book were to suggest to people with serious diachronic interests that they should become careful readers of Langland it would have fulfilled a part of its purpose. It has, after all, been written in conversation with people concerned, in very different ways, to explore and write grand narratives of modernity involving the Middle Ages and what is currently widely known as the early modern period.⁶ But such conversations, however important to my own reflections, provide a mostly implicit context for what is a close reading of a late medieval text and its analysis of its own culture in light of the journey of Christ into the far country and his homecoming.

For me, to attempt a close reading of this utterly gripping work is crucial even if this creates obstacles for even composing a grand narrative. Close reading: I have tried to remember Thomas Aquinas’s admonition that ex modo loquendi datur nobis doctrina, that the teaching we receive is inextricably bound up with the mode in which it is composed. He makes this remark in a commentary on the Pater Noster, but we find similar urgings in the Summa Theologiae. We must, he says, attend not only to what is signified but also to the modus significandi. Failure to do this can lead to serious theological error, something St. Thomas finds illustrated in Joachim of Fiore’s teaching on the Trinity.⁷ This guideline is especially important in a study which finally argues that there is an intimacy between Langland’s ecclesiology and the forms of writing he pursues. Commenting on the Book of Job, Aquinas takes great care to distinguish the work’s different voices, since truth may shine forth from debating back and forth.⁸ I shall try to follow his admirable example as I read Piers Plowman. For in this essay I address a work that is dazzlingly polyvocal, multigeneric, and dialectical.⁹

I am also trying to understand Langland’s own inventive, sometimes thoroughly idiosyncratic engagements with the Christian traditions he inherited, ones that included but were certainly not circumscribed by Eamon Duffy’s traditional religion in England. As Alasdair MacIntyre observes in After Virtue, All reasoning takes place within the context of some traditional mode of thought, transcending through criticism and invention the limitations of what had hitherto been reasoned in that tradition: this is as true of modern physics as of medieval logic. It is true, moreover, that when a tradition is in good order it is always partially constituted by an argument about the goods the pursuit of which gives to that tradition its particular point and purpose. If it is flourishing, a tradition will embody continuities of conflict. Indeed, a living tradition is a historically extended, socially embodied argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition.¹⁰ Langland himself certainly found deep-cutting disagreements, some of them seemingly irresolvable, in the contemporary form of his tradition.¹¹ Whether he considered this part of a tradition in good order and whether he himself thought some contemporary disagreements irresolvable are questions informing the inquiry of this book. Whatever the answer to these questions, such are the terms in which I approach the relations between late medieval Christianity and the Reformation, an approach that seems taught by Piers Plowman.

Perhaps two phrases in this book’s title need some comment: Beyond Reformation and Constantinian Christianity. First, a few points about reform in the Middle Ages.¹² In A Secular Age Charles Taylor noted that ideologies of reform, commitments to reform the church and individual Christians, were a constitutive part of medieval and early modern Christianity. He named this the Reform Master Narrative.¹³ Such commitment could take many forms and have very different sources. Reform could be initiated by ecclesiastic authorities. It could be initiated by agents outside the hierarchy and then embraced and ordered by the hierarchy. Sometimes it emerged among clergy and laity in ways that the authorities of the church would not tolerate, let alone assimilate. When this happened intransigent reformers were classified as heretics and persecuted by the church. Those classified as heretics were judged to have gone beyond legitimate reform, to be acting outside its paradigms and acting defiantly. In the Summa Theologiae St. Thomas maintains that such Christians should be separated from the church by excommunication and then killed (per mortem a mundo excludi).¹⁴ Of course, nobody judged as a heretic freely described themselves in this language. On the contrary, they tended, in the later Middle Ages, to see themselves as disciples of Christ seeking to reform the modern church to the practices of the early church.¹⁵ They too came from dynamics of reform intrinsic to Christianity. This fact highlights one peculiar feature in Eamon Duffy’s wonderful depiction of traditional religion in the later Middle Ages and its violent destruction in the sixteenth century. The dynamic I am discussing seems unknown to his Middle Ages. Of course nobody can write about very many aspects of a culture even in as massive a book as Duffy’s, especially when offering the kind of detail and attention so impressively displayed in The Stripping of the Altars. But Duffy’s traditional religion of the later Middle Ages seems timeless except in the sacred times of the liturgy and the time of the parishioners who performed it. Only with the attack on the people’s church led by a coterie of evangelicals around Henry VIII and Edward VI do we suddenly encounter political agency and events in a restless, conflicted process of reformation, iconoclasm, and centralizing innovation.¹⁶ In James Simpson’s monumental study of English literary history and the complex history of freedoms from 1350 to 1547, the processes that comprise the stripping of Duffy’s title are described as cultural revolution and sharply contrasted with the kind of reform intrinsic to medieval culture, including its literary forms. The latter is celebrated as both freedom and creativity, in contrast to the revolution of those who came to be called Protestants. For this fine literary historian, Langland is an admirable model of medieval reform as against (prophetically against, in Simpson’s view) the sixteenth-century revolution.¹⁷ Neither Duffy nor Simpson, with their very different archives and disciplinary training, can find any spiritual, theological, and political vitality among any Wycliffites (also known as Lollards). None of us can, of course, approach all the writers and historical subjects we encounter with one love. But these Christians elicit nothing but condescension and scorn from Eamon Duffy.¹⁸ Whether Langland shared the dispositions of Simpson or Duffy toward such Christians passing beyond reformation acceptable to traditional authorities remains a question that this book addresses. For one of its central questions is whether Langland himself goes beyond reformation in his ecclesiology and political theory. The answer that emerges is that he did indeed do so but in a somewhat enigmatic ecclesiology for fools.

As to the phrase Constantinian Christianity in this book’s title, Langland explicitly introduces reflections on this subject. He does so in the discourse of one of the poem’s teachers, Liberum Arbitrium, Cristes creature and well known in Cristes court (XVI.167–68).¹⁹ In Passus XVII he offers a grand narrative of the church as part of his criticisms of its modern practices. In this story the donation of Constantine to the church of the fourth century was a formative disaster:

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."]

This alleged exchange between emperor and papacy initiates the endowment of the church with lands and political power. To Langland it represents the immersion of the church in the political, coercive, and economic fabric of the social world. Trying to understand this process and its modernity is part of the task Langland set himself in writing Piers Plowman. The donation is venym, poisoning those that claim Petres power because it turns Christians away from living as disciples of Christ. It directs their attention to all that is symbolized by Constantine. Christianity becomes the social cement, the political ideology of the current form of saeculum. This category, Constantinianism, became important in the work of the Mennonite theologian John Yoder. But while I hope I have learned from his writings, my own usage of the phrase Constantinian Christianity remains Langlandian rather than Mennonite.²⁰ So does my account of its ending. Hardly surprising given the intense focus of this book on Langland’s work.

One other feature of this book probably needs some explanation: the absence of chapters and chapter headings. The book is composed instead as seventeen steps or passus. These belong in what I envisage as an essay, as the work is identified in the subtitle. This seems to me the appropriate form for developing an argument around a close reading of Langland’s poem that is, I hope, driven by his own dialectic. Chapter divisions, with conventional headings, would be alien to what I am trying to do and the kind of reading I am seeking to encourage. I hope this rather unusual feature will gradually make as much sense to the reader as it does to me.

Beyond Reformation? has been written from both a Divinity School and an English department. It evolved in graduate courses predominantly located in the Divinity School of Duke University but including students from the English department concentrating on medieval and early modern studies. I am extremely grateful to all those students who have participated in the range of courses relevant to the making of this book. I am very grateful to Stanley Hauerwas for agreeing to teach with me a course on grand narratives focusing on the place and version of the Middle Ages in such stories. His theological wisdom, profound learning, and generosity have been great gifts to me since I came to Duke University. I am also grateful to Thomas Pfau, friend and colleague both in the Divinity School and the English department. I hope I have learned from extensive discussions with him about the transformation of Western culture that made the modernity that makes and unmakes us. It was a great delight to read his own extraordinary grand narrative in manuscript, now published as Minding the Modern (2013). I continue to benefit massively from sustained conversations with my friend and colleague Sarah Beckwith. These conversations have continued over many years and over most of the subjects that engage this book. My debts to her are truly immeasurable. I thank Nicky Zeeman for many discussions about Langland and some of the questions shaping this book. Her encouragement was especially important when I was wondering whether some arguments unfolding in parts of the work were becoming too strange to pursue. James Simpson has been a prominent, critical conversation partner during the making of this book. Not only through his Reform and Cultural Revolution together with his later book, Under the Hammer, but also through copious discussions as coeditor, with Sarah Beckwith, of the current series of books published by University of Notre Dame Press under the title, ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern. I thank Russ Leo for many conversations that proved relevant to this book. I have benefited from Anne Hudson’s willingness to give me nuanced and learned responses to questions about Wycliffite writing and practice. I thank Jennifer Herdt for inviting me to write on Langland and the virtues in a special issue on the virtues she edited for the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (42, no. 1 [2012]): this provided essential encouragement to writing the present book to which it has been assimilated. I wish to thank Will Revere, who has been a superb research assistant during the making of this book, someone with an exceptional grasp of current grand narratives and working across the medieval/early modern divide. I am grateful that Jessica Hines and Cullen McKenney agreed to help Will Revere in the final stages of preparing this book. I have been greatly helped by Michael Cornett, managing editor of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, who with skill and care worked on the manuscript and edited text. Once more I thank Catherine Beaver for her central role in sustaining the English department at Duke over many years. Any writer is dependent on the editor of the press who takes on her or his book, and I am truly grateful for the advice and support of Stephen Little at University of Notre Dame Press, both for this book and for the press’s series ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern, mentioned above.

I cannot write about Langland’s work without expressing boundless gratitude to my great teachers, Elizabeth Salter and Derek Pearsall. They directed my doctoral dissertation and continued to teach me after that in person, in friendship, and through their writings. Rereading all of Elizabeth’s work on Langland while writing the present book brought home its massive influence on me, even when I go in directions she herself would, perhaps, have criticized. To her, to Derek Pearsall, and to Stanley Hauerwas I dedicate this little book. Finally, yet again, I thank Christine Derham who continues to be my closest friend and my wife, still agreeing to negotiate that great divide constituted by the Atlantic, separating Lollard Earsham from North Carolina: For a further union, a deeper communion / Through the dark cold and empty desolation, / The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters / Of the petrel and the porpoise (T.S. Eliot, East Coker, in Four Quartets).

Outline of the Story Langland Tells in the Final Version of Piers Plowman, from Derek Pearsall, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-text (Exeter University Press, 2008), 4–6

The C version of the poem begins with a Prologue, the dreamer’s vision of the world in its corrupted state as a field full of folk, dominated by self-seeking. A Westminster interlude shows the higher levels of church and state subjected to the same turbulent misrule. In Passus I, Holy Church explains the dreamer’s vision to him, shows him how a right use of worldly goods would be in accord with God’s Law, and answers his urgent entreaty, How may I save my soul? (I.80), which in a sense initiates the whole movement of the poem, with a preliminary outline of the doctrine of Charity. But the dreamer wishes to understand more of the ways of the world, and is presented in Passus II–IV with the vision of Meed the Maid, a brilliant allegorical portrayal of the corruption of every estate and activity of society through the influence of perverted ideas of reward and of money. The king (an ideal king) wins a measure of control over Meed with the help of Conscience and Reason, whom he takes as his chief advisers, and a golden age, it seems, is about to begin. But administrative reform alone cannot bring this about: men’s hearts must be purged of sin so that they may be reformed inwardly. After offering his own confession, therefore, the dreamer shows us Reason calling on the folk to repent and to seek Truth (V). The confessions of the Seven Deadly Sins follow (VI–VII), wound up by the prayer of Repentance for general forgiveness. The people rush forth in high enthusiasm to seek for Truth, but find no way until they meet Piers Plowman, who tells them where Truth may be found (in obedience to God’s Law) and promises to lead them there when he has finished his ploughing (i.e. the well-organized Christian community must be based on a well-organized economy). All the folk, of all estates, are to help him. But not everyone works with a will: wasters and layabouts refuse to do their share and Piers has to call in Hunger to force them to work, an admission of defeat, since outward coercion is no substitute for inward and voluntary reformation. The passus (VIII) ends with Piers’s programme of reform in some disarray, but he receives in the next (IX) a pardon from Truth granted to all those who help him: its terms as they apply to all estates of society are related in detail, but it is not in the end a satisfactory answer to the quest for Truth. It promises salvation for those who do well but does not explain what doing well consists of. Piers Plowman disappears at this point, and the dreamer, pondering on his dream and on dreams in general, takes up the search for Dowel.

At this point the poem makes a new beginning, as if to signal the movement from the outer to the inner, from the outward reform of society to the inward reform of the individual. The dreamer’s search for Dowel is first within himself (X), for the answers provided by his own intellectual faculties (Thought, Wit). These answers are not fallacious, but they are partial, and as he goes on to meet a series of personifications of learning (Study, Clergy, Scripture) the dreamer, initially stubborn and complacent, becomes increasingly bewildered (XI). The answers he receives concerning Dowel and salvation are conflicting and confusing, and he falls into a stupor of worldliness, a fast subservience to Fortune, in which his life is dreamed away. The dreamer temporarily loses his identity, his place being taken by Rechelesnesse, who solaces the gnawing of doubt with his easy answers, crude simplifications and bold disparagement of what he does not understand. Witnesses of Truth, like Trajan and Leaute, are glimpsed briefly before being submerged in the prevailing murk, and hints of understanding on the part of Rechelesnesse, as of the virtue of poverty, are swallowed in presumption and vociferous anti-clericalism. This is without doubt the most difficult and in many ways the most profound part of the poem (XII). The dreamer resumes his identity only to make a grotesque misinterpretation of the vision of Middle-Earth (XIII) that he is granted, giving continued evidence of his unredeemed pride and presumption. At last he meets Imaginatyf, the sum of all the intellect can do. Imaginatyf provides interim answers to his questions about salvation and learning as they relate to the life of Dowel, but also, more importantly, embodies the first full and explicit recognition that Dowel consists precisely in not asking the kinds of question he has been asking, but in preparing the self, through humility and patience and voluntary submission of the will to the will of God, for the admission of Charity (XIV).

In the next passus, the dreamer is given an opportunity to exercise this active virtue of patience when he is invited to the feast with the learned and gluttonous friar (XV); for the first time speculation gives way to action, and talking about doing well gives way to doing well. After a momentary intervention by Piers Plowman, an epiphany of Truth and promise of grace for the dreamer, Patience takes on the role of guide and instructs the dreamer and Activa Vita (another alter ego for the dreamer, through whom something of the life of common humanity is brought into the search for truth) in the true nature of patient poverty and the voluntary acceptance of God’s will (XV–XVI). The achievement of this understanding of God’s will is for man true freedom, and the next guide is appropriately Liberum Arbitrium (Free Will), the highest faculty of man as he lives in concord with God. Liberum Arbitrium offers the fullest understanding of true Charity that is accessible to man in his human state, unaided by grace or revelation, and shows the relation of the clergy and the Church to this true Charity (XVI–XVII). He also shows, in the vision of the Tree of Charity (XVIII), how man’s growth towards charity is thwarted by the devil’s work. Man stands in need of an act of divine grace, and the dreamer glimpses what form this will take in a brief account of the life of Christ. But before this vision of grace can be fully granted, Langland must show how the ascent of the soul to the full life of Charity in the reception of Christ re-enacts and embodies the processes of Christian history. So we return to Abraham (Faith) and Moses (Hope) and see how their partial understanding under the Old Law, of divine truth and specifically of the Trinity is to be crowned in the New Law of mercy and love as it is expounded (XIX) by the Good Samaritan (Charity), a figure who subsequently merges into Piers Plowman and into Christ.

The world and the dreamer’s soul are now prepared for the great act of divine intervention, the fulfillment of the promise of redemption, and Passus XX is devoted to an account of the Crucifixion and Harrowing of Hell. From this high climax the poem returns to a vision of the establishment of Christ’s Church on earth through the gift of grace; the dreamer, suffused with the glory of revelation, must still doggedly pursue the truth and be shown how the machinery of redemption is to operate, and how it has operated in the centuries of Christian history since the Redemption (XXI). The descent to the world of fourteenth-century England is swift, and the poem ends (XXII) with the Church of Unity besieged by the forces of Antichrist, the deadly sins, and infiltrated by the subtler temptations of the friars. The end of the poem is a resumption of the search for the true Christian life, as it is embodied in Piers Plowman.

BEYOND REFORMATION?

An Essay on William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity

I

Having offered above Derek Pearsall’s outline of the story Langland tells in the final version of his work, I set out here with Passus XX. This passus culminates in the powerful and complex oration of Jesus Christ as he liberates enslaved human beings from the prison house of hell. We are given a glimpse of immense divine power:

"A spirit speketh to Helle and bit to vnspere the yates:

Attolite portas, &c."

A vois loude in that liht to Lucifer saide,

"Principes of this place, prest vndo this gates

For here a cometh with croune, the kynge of all glorie!"

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

"Dukes of this demme place, anoen vndoth this yates

That Crist may come in, the kynges sone of heuene!"

And with that breth helle braek, with alle Belialles barres;

For eny wey or warde, wyde open the yates.

(XX.270–73, 362–65)¹

———

[A spirit speaks to hell and bids the gates be opened.

Lift up your gates.

A loud voice within that light said to Lucifer:

"Princepes of this place, quickly undo these gates,

For he comes here with crown, the king of all glory!"

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

"Dukes of this dim place, undo these gates now

That Christ may come in, the son of heaven’s king."

And with that breath hell with all of Belial’s bars broke;

Despite all prevention,