Beyond Reformation?

David Aers

Description

In Beyond Reformation? An Essay on William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity, David Aers presents a sustained and profound close reading of the final version of William Langland’s Piers Plowman, the most searching Christian poem of the Middle Ages in English. His reading, most unusually, seeks to explore the relations of Langland's poem to both medieval and early modern reformations together with the ending of Constantinian Christianity.

Aers concentrates on Langland’s extraordinarily rich ecclesiastic politics and on his account of Christian virtues and the struggles of Conscience to discern how to go on in his often baffling culture. The poem’s complex allegory engages with most institutions and forms of life. In doing so, it explores moral languages and their relations to current practices and social tendencies. Langland’s vision conveys a strange sense that in his historical moment some moral concepts were being transformed and some traditions the author cherished were becoming unintelligible. Beyond Reformation? seeks to show how Langland grasped subtle shifts that were difficult to discern in the fourteenth century but were to become forces with a powerful future in shaping Western Christianity.

The essay form that Aers has chosen for his book contributes to the effectiveness of the argument he develops in tandem with the structure of Langland’s poem: he sustains and tests his argument in a series of steps or “passus,” a Langlandian mode of proceeding. His essay unfolds an argument about medieval and early modern forms of Constantinian Christianity and reformation, and the way in which Langland's own vision of a secularizing, de-Christianizing late medieval church draws him toward the idea of a church of “fools,” beyond papacy, priesthood, hierarchy, and institutions. For Aers, Langland opens up serious diachronic issues concerning Christianity and culture. His essay includes a brief summary of the poem and modern translations alongside the original medieval English. It will challenge specialists on Langland's poem and supply valuable resources of thought for anyone who continues to struggle with the church of today.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Medieval
• Pedro el Labrador
• Inglés medio
• Edad Media
• Langland
• Piers Plowman
• Middle English
• Middle Ages
• Christianity
• Poetry
• History

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268158002
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

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 Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aers, David. Beyond reformation? : an essay on William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the end of Constantinian Christianity / David Aers. pages  cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-268-02046-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-268-02046-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Langland, William, 1330?–1400? Piers Plowman.  2. Christian poetry, English (Middle)—History and criticism.  3. Literature and society—England—History—To 1500.  4. Religious thought—Middle Ages, 600–1500.  5. Religion and culture.  I. Title. PR2015.A38  2015 821'.1—dc23 2015032655 ∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. -->
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 [e-mail]
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 Index -->
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