Kindly Similitude: Langland's Matrimonial Trinity

Abstract

Commenting on Abraham's comparison of the Trinity to marriage in the C text of Piers Plowman, W. W. Skeat observed that Augustine had disapproved of the simile in the De trinitate. The most recent edition of the C text points out the same discrepancy between Abraham's simile and the De trinitate and suggests that Langland uses the simile to indicate Abraham's limited understanding.' Such comments imply that Langland was not being strictly orthodox in composing that passage of Abraham's speech. They tacitly assume that Augustine's position on the simile was well known, that it was the only position available, and that it brooked no modification. Because Langland uses the simile only in the C text, and perhaps because of Skeat's somewhat disparaging gloss, students of Piers have not looked very closely at these assumptions or at the passage. Yet there were quite respectable and familiar precedents for connecting the Trinity and marriage, in sources other than the De trinitate. Furthermore, a closer reading of the passage reveals its genuine poetic strengths, as a carefully developed analogy with important thematic and structural functions in the poem. It is the purpose of this essay to point out some of those precedents and to demonstrate those strengths. The De trinitate was indeed the most widely known work on the Trinity in the Middle Ages; its major ideas even reached popular audiences in vernacular treatises and sermons.2 However, the warning against the marital metaphor for the Trinity was not heeded as fully as Langland's editors suggest. While orthodox medieval writers did not claim that marriage was the image of the triune God in man, they did associate marriage with the Trinity, quite specifically and at times rather intimately. Sometime before 1135, for example, the school at Laon produced a short treatise on marriage, beginning In coniugio figura et uestigium trinitatis multipliciter inuenitur, and going on to explain the multiple traces of the Trinity in human marriage.3 From the twelfth century on, in England and much of France, the liturgy for the sacrament of matrimony used the Mass of the Trinity as the nuptial mass. By the thirteenth or fourteenth century, over an even wider area, the medieval bridegroom placed the wedding ring on the bride's hand by setting it