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

Abstract

David Aers's self-described “somewhat idiosyncratic little book” is a riveting personal exploration of Piers Plowman (C-text) that responds with depth and ingenuity to literary-historical and secularization grand narratives about late-medieval and early modern England. The organization of the book is at first mystifying, split into seventeen untitled sections, but the reader ultimately sees the logic insofar as the recursive nature of Aers's analysis demands a certain aloofness from the petri-dish of narrative detail in order to delineate patterns of topical structuring. Over the course of the study, Aers gradually tightens his focus on a semilinear network of ideas within Langland's shape-shifting poem, boldly attempting to trace and connect congealing vectors of imagined community. The mode of his argument is accretive, but reinforced by a sort of backward reading (25, 28) that recalibrates early forms and figures in light of later ones, assuming the necessity—as in scriptural exegesis—of rereading. There are few who know Piers better than Aers, and it is a thrill to move through its episodes with his expert guidance. In what follows, I will try to sketch the larger outlines of his analysis, with moments of reflection on both revelations and contradictions, taking the latter term as another way of describing the dialectical movement of progression that Aers identifies in Piers itself.As any coherent account of the poem must be, Aers's argument depends complexly on the “dialectical process” of Piers, which nonetheless has a “teleology” (99) toward Christ. Like Norm Klassen's recent study of The Canterbury Tales contends of Chaucer, drawing analogously on Dostoevsky's dialogic polyphony, so Aers says that Langland writes “multimodal, dramatic, lyrical, adventurous” poetry, which moves “by exploring a range of positions and their consequences” (98).1 Even more than Chaucer, Langland does so with particular energy and the rapid accumulation of adjacent, juxtaposed perspectives and voices. Aers's deft navigation of repeated terms in the poem presupposes an immense indexical mastery of colloquies and contexts across wide expanses of narrative, channeling streams of “sentence” as he does from the poem's conversational cataracts. In short, Aers's own method mimics Langland's, though the seventeen Passus of Beyond Reformation seem a humble deference to Langland's twenty-two.One result of this methodological mimicry is that Aers depends to a great extent on the centrifugal momentum of Langland's poem for moving his own argument along. The poem's path, of course, is jagged and rollicking, sometimes accelerating through ideational landscapes and at other times slowing for roadside (or tableside) discussions. Every good tour guide knows that pausing for a closer look is sometimes apropos. Aers does so, to the relative neglect of large swathes of Piers, at two key Passus clusters: VII–IX and XIX–XXII. These Passus provide in differing fashions sustained explorations of community formation, each deploying metaphorical imagery that develop an implicit relationship between agrarian work and Christian spirituality. In VII and XXI especially, Aers attends carefully to the contours and characteristics of Langland's imagined intentional community, devoting the substantial core of his study to the sundry figures and forces that both constitute and interrupt genuine ecclesial Christian life. Having drawn the ideal—a formidable feat in both positive allure and acute critique—Langland nonetheless obscures his nice picture with dashes of contemporary reality. He dramatizes the corruption of the Roman Church, giving it viewable form and visceral quality.For Piers is concerned, ultimately, with ecclesiology, but especially on the local level. Aers sensitively handles the English priest-poet's aching regard for the laity of parochial England, betrayed by their clergy and thus left beholden to their vices, despite a wealth of written resources to hand. Ellen Rentz's recent study on the medieval parish provides a nice contextual companion to Aers's approach in this regard.2 Langland is committed to remembering what is possible, and does so within the quite radical parameters of traditional Christian doctrine, which proclaims a God of incarnate kenosis whose affective appeal undergirds a human life of love. Rejecting arguments that would suggest Langland sympathized with Wycliffite solutions to papal abuses of power or (contra Kathryn Kerby-Fulton) Joachimite apocalypticism (see 114–22), Aers can almost be said to maneuver Piers along a narrow path through the varied heretical landscape in late medieval England. Almost, but not quite: early on in the book Aers names the third of fourteenth-century England's theological deviants as (not an influence but) an analogous voice to Langland's: William of Ockham. Ockham's later perspectives on the papacy constitute “at least one of the strands in pre-Wycliffite heterodoxy with which Langland had some affinities” (29). A familiar face for those who know Aers's Salvation and Sin, Ockham's appearance here may elicit mixed feelings among readers who are aware of his villainous role in recent secularization grand narratives, but this accords snugly with Aers's expressed desire to complicate such narratives, more on which below.The heart of Aers's book is his attention to the figure of Conscience through the two Passus clusters mentioned above, especially the latter, XIX–XXII. The movement from agrarian allegory to “fortress church” in XXI–XXII constitutes for Aers the tragic example of Conscience's “Christian amnesia” (58), forgetting even what he has taught to others about love and Christ. While Aers defends Conscience's sacramental action in XXI.383–85 as a “laicization of the Eucharist's distribution,” he is open to the fact that Langland may not have approved of such laicization—is it yet another moment to be superseded by the poem's dialectical progression? The parochial community rejects it, though for the wrong reasons, refusing to make restitution—Redde quod debes—and in the voices of brewer and king asserting prerogatives of singular profit or royal privilege. And with Piers having earlier departed with the Holy Spirit, who is left to help an erring Conscience? Aers explores these quandaries in the poem with reference to scholastic questions on the moral and soteriological consequences of an erring conscience.For Aers, the primary error of Conscience after Piers's departure is the withdrawal into a “fortress church,” which evinces an ignorance of or naiveté about internal ecclesial corruption, with the infamous “Sire penetrans-domo” leading the way in the poem's final lines. And so only a tiny remnant of fools remain, migrant (but not mendicant) yet dedicated in their refusal not to do, well, lots of things (36). In articulating his version of a Langlandian ecclesiology, it is no surprise that Aers draws much from Ockham, and specifically the idea of the faithful remnant: “Ockham had absolutely no doubt that true faith disclosed by Christ could survive among a very few dissenters,” indeed, even in one single person. Differentiating Ockham's faithful remnant from Wyclif's ecclesia predestinatorum, Aers argues that Ockham “went beyond any reformation within contemporary paradigms of orthodoxy” (125), applying language used earlier to describe Langland (94). Indeed, he goes on to note that both Ockham and Langland “located the indefectibility of Christ's church in a tiny dissident minority” (125). These are the “foles” or fools referred to in XXII.61, and Aers sees them, and particularly Wille, as positively unhinged from “sacerdotal mediation” (127). While Conscience does cry for Clergy (XXII.228–29), what arrives only confirms Aers's point: corrupt “Freres.” Kynde Wit again leads Conscience astray in urging the acceptance of the friars into the fortress church, and Aers reiterates how, with only the guidance of natural faculties, Conscience's failure suggests “how vulnerable and fragile God's precious gift may be when immersed in a cultural revolution involving de-Christianizing powers” (133).Intriguingly, Aers is careful to avoid the word “secularization,” preferring instead “de-Christianization,” presumably in order to distinguish his layered analysis from the supposedly more monolithic grand narratives whose omission of Langland's text he laments. In any case, it is with his close readings of Langland's own close-readings of linguistic changes in medieval religious culture that Aers's book shines brightest. The rhetorical notion of paradiastole takes center stage as a marker in this process of change, and Aers's attention to Langland's use of this figure nicely concretizes into verbally discrete instances the latter's anxiety about the epidemic failures of ecclesial community in late-medieval England. Is the church “beyond reformation”? Aers thinks Langland thinks so.Despite the Church supposedly being “beyond reformation” (in James Simpson's sense), for Aers Conscience's decisive setting-out in the poem's final lines sounds a positive summons for a motile community, “a church fit for fools,” in which “bishops will not live in palaces but be mobile teachers enchanting people to charity” (148)—but isn't this what mendicant friars claimed to do? The absence of Piers is read, with help from Salter and Middleton, as finally revelatory of the fact that whatever reforms there are “have to be searched for beyond the actually existing papal church from which [Piers] has become absent” (148). This would mean “learn[ing] to live without any version of ‘magisterium’” and a change even in the form of sacramental penance to one “more congruent with the theology of such absences” (151). One can sympathize with the attempt here to convey the vital importance of the virtue of patience in Christian life. But to reify absence into a lingering presence seems patently Protestant (and would Aers not say Piers is a proto-Protestant text?).Having earlier differentiated Langland's ecclesiology from both the “magisterial reformers” (140) and the Catholic Magisterium, Aers approvingly cites Karl Barth and in some sense thus shows his theological cards. He ultimately opts for an image of the church as a “gathering” of individual Christians, “fools,” who strive for obedience to God and “a thoroughly fallible conscience” (154). Recalling Wyclif's recollection that “Christ was executed as a heretic,” Aers cites with affirming pathos the heretic and medieval house-church leader Hawisia Moone. Then, in answer to included questions from his colleagues at Duke, Aers quite sincerely refers to 1 Corinthians as an early church community that was also in disarray. Is Aers playing Moone to his inquisitive colleagues? In any case, Aers sees Wille ultimately trusting in the power of love to sustain a faithful remnant in a tumultuous time of western Christian history, and this noninstitutional, nonhierarchical “direction” he finally names as a sort of “congregationalism” (160).Aers has defended his anti-establishment reading of Piers in other works, and it is all quite well supported by selected textual evidence, but at times the theological agenda of Beyond Reformation feels a bit clunky. For instance, in remarking on the absence of a figure in Piers that unambiguously represents centralized papal power, Aers tosses a barbed comment regarding the alignment of “Neoplatonic metaphysics and the ecclesial model of Pseudo-Dionysius” in pro-papal medieval political theology: “perhaps it remains so in the theologians of the so-called Radical Orthodoxy” (22). And? The thrust wavers without further elaboration. What seems forgotten are Radical Orthodoxy's critiques of Ockham's antimetaphysical divine voluntarism (potentia absoluta), not to mention voluntarism's affinities with papal plenitude of power and its problematic legal and philosophical definitions of human being. This passing invective against recent Anglo-Catholic theologians gives way to more elegant assertions for the need to complicate recent grand narratives of secularization (48). Even here, however, in his advocacy for Ockham, Aers seems to neglect the considerable self-complication that those narratives already internally perform. Indeed, Piers (or Langland) could easily have been one of Taylor's three “conversions” at the end of A Secular Age, figures whose eclectic faith and creative lives earn Taylor's commendation as agile models of Christian spirituality in modernity. And also somewhat jarring is Aers's chronological leap to Pope John Paul II's suggestion of the usefulness of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church as a resource of moral guidance for Christians in de-Christianized times, and the derision Aers expresses for the idea. There is not sufficient clarity about the rationale for connecting Piers and the recent pontiff, and more care is needed in articulating the nature of and justification for the intended intervention.Similarly, questions emerge about Aers's unquestioning use of “Constantinian” as a label. It is within Ockham's critique of the late-medieval papacy as “the successor not of Peter but of Constantine” (30) that Aers historically situates his Yoderian moniker, “Constantinian,” the end of which the book's subtitle proclaims is somehow related to or even accomplished by Piers. With Ockham's antipapal theology close to hand, Aers locates Piers' anti-Constantinianism in one well-known passage XVII.220–224, which laments the effects of the “Donation of Constantine,” a spurious document that provided a basis for the temporal jurisdiction of the medieval papacy, but was exposed as a forgery less than a century after Langland was writing. Aers feels qualified using the label of (anti-)Constantinianism not only because of the absence of positive papal power in Langland's poem, but also because of Langland's deft rejection of Wycliffite solution to an overreaching pontiff, that of the secular rule of the church, which Aers rightly calls “a form of caesaro-papism” (50). But to let a trendy term like Constantinianism do such multiple duty feels a bit anachronistic. Neither the temporal power of the papacy nor caesaro-papism accurately designates anything like Constantine's actual relationship to the fourth-century, newly licit Christian Church, far different in its Lactantian defense of religious freedom than Theodosius's later antipagan reforms. More to the point, Aers's (and any similar) usage of “Constantinian” in scholarship on the Western Middle Ages begs the question: why not append “Pseudo” to “Constantinian”? Aers had earlier done so with “Pseudo-Dionysius,” after all, a similar case of misattribution of which the Middle Ages was unaware. Even if John XXII connected the pope's claim on temporal power to a wrongheaded imperial endowment, don't we know better? The language of our scholarship should reflect this when the Donation of Constantine is concerned, even if “Pseudo-Constantinian” is a mouthful. That would amount to a well-founded critical intervention that maintained its Hauerwasian critique of papal temporal power even while accounting for recent defenses, like Leithart's, of Constantine's ambivalences, not to mention the actual Byzantine approach to the symphonia between sacerdotal and secular power.Overall, Aers is an intentionally provocative, boundary-pushing writer, and this should be remembered. Only someone with such a depth of Langlandian knowledge could offer creative rereadings of a poem so complex and conceptually combustible. Aers's work is worth every minute of reading, especially in the field of Langland studies and medieval religious culture. At times, one feels like more questions are begged than answered, and the answers that are proposed remain couched in interventional intentions that demand expansion. This is, as I said above, a riveting and personal study, and like Langland, that great maker of poetic persons, Aers also seems to take certain theological topics quite personally. But this—I cannot stress enough—is ultimately a strength of the book: may many more studies of Langland and other medieval authors follow in its wake in which the author evinces not only razor-sharp surgical attention to language and context, but also a measure of personal commitment to forms of faith. In this Langland and Aers are doubtless, and powerfully, affiliated.