Versions of Election

David Aers

Description

Concepts of predestination and reprobation were central issues in the Protestant Reformation, especially within Calvinist churches, and thus have often been studied primarily in the historical context of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Versions of Election: From Langland and Aquinas to Calvin and Milton, David Aers takes a longer view of these key issues in Christian theology. With meticulous attention to the texts of medieval and early modern theologians, poets, and popular writers, this book argues that we can understand the full complexity of the history of various teachings on the doctrine of election only through a detailed diachronic study that takes account of multiple periods and disciplines. Throughout this wide-ranging study, Aers examines how various versions of predestination and reprobation emerge and re-emerge in Christian tradition from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century. Starting with incisive readings of medieval works by figures such as William Langland, Thomas Aquinas, and Robert Holcot, and continuing on to a nuanced consideration of texts by Protestant thinkers and writers, including John Calvin, Arthur Dent, William Twisse, and John Milton (among others), Aers traces the twisting and unpredictable history of prominent versions of predestination and reprobation across the divide of the Reformation and through a wide variety of genres. In so doing, Aers offers not only a detailed study of election but also important insights into how Christian tradition is made, unmade, and remade.

Versions of Election is an original, cross-disciplinary study that touches upon the fields of literature, theology, ethics, and politics, and makes important contributions to the study of both medieval and early modern intellectual and literary history. It will appeal to academics in these fields, as well as clergy and other educated readers from a wide variety of denominations.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Calvinist
• Christian Theology
• 17th Century
• Modern
• medieval
• Philosophie et théologie
• Idioma inglés
• Idioma galés
• William Twisse
• Modern history
• Catholic Church
• Protestant Reformation
• Middle Ages
• Irish
• English
• Calvinism
• Christianity
• Réformation
• European
• Welsh
• History
• Arthur Dent
• Scottish
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Musique irlandaise
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 30 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268108670
• Langue: English

Extrait

Versions of Election
ReFormations
MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN
Series Editors:
David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, and James Simpson
RECENT TITLES IN THE SERIES
Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195–1656 (2009)
Robert W. Barrett, Jr.
The Maudlin Impression: English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, 1550–1700 (2009)
Patricia Badir
The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies,
and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700 (2010)
Nancy Bradley Warren
The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell (2012)
Lynn Staley
Miserere Mei: The Penitential Psalms in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (2012)
Clare Costley King’oo
The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution (2012)
Alice Dailey
Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Late Medieval Poetry (2013)
Katherine C. Little
Writing Faith and Telling Tales: Literature, Politics, and Religion in the Work of Thomas More (2013)
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Sebastian Sobecki
Mysticism and Reform, 1400–1750 (2015)
Sara S. Poor and Nigel Smith, eds.
The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England (2015)
Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano
Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350–1600 (2016)
Ryan McDermott
Volition’s Face: Personification and the Will in Renaissance Literature (2017)
Andrew Escobedo
Shadow and Substance: Eucharistic Controversy and English Drama
across the Reformation Divide (2017)
Jay Zysk
Queen of Heaven: The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin in
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Lilla Grindlay
Performance and Religion in Early Modern England: Stage, Cathedral, Wagon, Street (2019)
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Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play (2019)
Julie Paulson
Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Modern Eras (2019)
Nancy Bradley Warren
VERSIONS
of ELECTION

From Langland and Aquinas
to Calvin and Milton
DAVID AERS
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
Copyright © 2020 by the University of Notre Dame
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020947047
ISBN: 978-0-268-10865-6 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10866-3 (Paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10868-7 (WebPDF)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10867-0 (Epub)
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]
To Christine Derham Aers
Yet doubt not but in valley and in plain
God is as here, and will be found alike
Present, and of his presence many a sign
Still following thee, still compassing thee round
With goodness and paternal love, his face
Express, and of his steps the track divine.
—John Milton, Paradise Lost, XI.349–54
CONTENTS

Preface
CHAPTER ONE
“Predestinaet” or “Prescit”: Langland’s Treatment of
Election in Piers Plowman (C-text)
CHAPTER TWO
Wille Returns “to scole”: Late Medieval Theologians
on Predestination and Reprobation
CHAPTER THREE
Crossing a Great Divide?
Calvinistic Revolution and the Ecclesia Anglicana
CHAPTER FOUR
Conversion in Arthur Dent’s
The Plaine Man’s Path-way to Heaven
CHAPTER FIVE
John Milton: Versions of Divine Election,
Predestination, and Reprobation
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index of Biblical Citations
General Index
PREFACE

Narrative history of a certain kind turns out to be the basic and
essential genre for the characterization of human actions.
—Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
And it is perhaps the principal task of the political and moral theorist
to enable rational agents to learn from the social and cultural tradition
that they inherit, while becoming able to put in question that particular
tradition’s distortions and errors, and so, often enough, engaging in a
quarrel with some dominant forms of their own political and moral culture.
—Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity
This book emerged from a web of substantial questions that have long preoccupied me, ones that cross habitual divisions between the study of literature, theology, ethics, and politics. They also cross the divisions between medieval and early modern studies, between the Catholic Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation, divisions firmly institutionalized in modern universities. So it is inevitable that Versions of Election should be both cross-disciplinary and diachronic. This may make it seem of a kind with the recent grand narratives of modernity, narratives in which the Middle Ages play an important role, albeit often a fabular one. 1 Yet it is no such thing, nor is it a historical survey of doctrinal topics. It does not even always follow the time of chronometers (see the relationship between chapters 1 and 2, for example). And it certainly has no encyclopedic aspirations. What is it then, and why does it study the texts on which it concentrates in the way it does?

As the title indicates, this book is an exploration of some (not all) versions of predestination and reprobation in Christian traditions of the Middle Ages and the Reformation. It considers some medieval versions composed by well-known writers (Aquinas, for example) and some by far less well known ones (Bromyard, for example). It also studies some early modern versions generated within predominately Calvinist traditions. But which versions? And why are these particular versions discussed, given the plethora of relevant materials? After all, the topic was routinely addressed by most medieval theologians since their apprenticeship involved commenting on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, a text that offered an eclectic but recognizably Augustinian account of the subject (chapter 2). Nor was interest in this topic confined to medieval universities, as we shall see (chapters 1 and 2). In the Reformation issues of predestination and reprobation became central, especially within Calvinist churches (chapters 3 and 4). The issues generated an immense range of writing in a wide range of genres: doctrinal treatises, contemplative writing, pastoral work, sermons, poems, and Protestant accounts of a person’s spiritual life.
From this cornucopia accumulated across five hundred years of Christian writing I have chosen to explore a few versions that embody the strikingly different paradigms of election and reprobation generated within Christian tradition. The medieval versions I discuss help one see how the late medieval church could make and live with doctrinal diversity, conflict, and fragmentation in this important area. By the end of the Middle Ages we find that the church included paradigms that were unequivocally anti-Augustinian alongside paradigms that were hyper-Augustinian (proposing unambiguous forms of double predestination) together with those representing a Thomist form of Augustinianism (chapter 2). Such was the complex legacy of the medieval church to the Reformation. The second half of the book (chapters 3–5) addresses what the Reformation did with this legacy, especially in predominantly Calvinist churches.
But my aim is not merely to observe the presence of such variety, perhaps writing an extensive footnote to James Halverson’s fine work, Peter Aureol on Predestination (see chapter 2). For in this study I am also exploring just how Christian tradition is made, unmade, and remade. I am fascinated by its complex modes and paths; its forms of memory, amnesia, and often gross misrepresentation of other participants in the tradition; its losses and recoveries of past arguments. To follow a tradition is to elucidate its ways of responding to changing circumstances. Such a mode of elucidation must attend to the minute particulars of specific texts, including their images, allegories, and grammar. Where appropriate, it may consider the transformation of one image or allegory across time and in differing contexts. For example, throughout the book I consider several responses to Paul’s recollection of a text that ascribes to God hatred and love of unborn people (Rom. 9:11–14); I also return at various points to the strikingly different treatments by several authors of Jesus’s comparison of himself to a hen who desired to gather her chickens under her wings but was rejected by them (Matt. 23:37: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!”). In addition to providing an illuminating lens through which the ethical and theological implications of differing models of election become sharply apparent, the various responses to the latter passage that I consider here also inspired the choice of cover image to the present volume. I am grateful to Lindsey Larre for suggesting this illustration from a fifteenth-century French manuscript of a mother hen collecting her chickens, Christ-like, under her protective wings. That this image of mercy was not the only interpretation of this passage available to writers in the seventeenth century becomes a telling indication of the chasm between Calvinist versions of predestination and reprobation and traditional exegesis, as chapter 3 will show.
In pursuing this inquiry it has become clear that one must not assume that tradition is unidirectional. It has also become clear to me that even those who most vehemently deny their participation in human traditions, a distinctive feature of many writers throughout the Reformation, often turn out to be recovering strands of the very traditions they reject. This is especially striking when such rejection is combined with blazing