Beyond Reformation? An Essay on William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity by David Aers (review)

In this fine, provocative essay David Aers extends his previous studies of Piers Plowman to explore Langland’s attitudes toward the theological and social issues of his time as set out in the final version of the poem, the C-text, and reflects on their relevance to current concerns. He believes that those writing “grand narratives” of the history of religious movements need to take fuller account of the poem, which addresses a very modern topic, the dechristianization of society. Aers argues that explorations of Langland’s position have been so concerned to demonstrate that he was not a Wycliffite, as he was painted at the Reformation, that they have overlooked his very unorthodox views. Wyclif’s solution to the corruption of the Church is voiced in the poem by Liberum Arbitrium reflecting on the Donation of Constantine, by which, it was supposed, the Church was endowed with material possessions, with disastrous results. Liberum Arbitrium proposes the transfer of ecclesiastical possessions to the Crown. This vast addition to the king’s powers is not Langland’s solution, though sixteenth-century readers marked out the passage as a prognosis of what was to come, for the proposal is superseded by the narrative of the last part of the poem. To appreciate this we need to grasp Langland’s method of argument, which Aers describes very well as “a dialectic which is rooted in a logic of disputation.” He continues: “It moves by expressing a range of positions and their consequences. … Superseded moments are not simply abandoned to be forgotten. For they too, in their very supersession, remain constitutive of the total dialectical moment” (pp. 98-99).

This insight helps to evaluate one of the key figures in the two final sections of the poem. Conscience seems at first to be a trustworthy guide, set up by the Holy Spirit (“Grace”) to lead the Pentecostal Church, called Unity, before Grace and Piers Plowman set out as pilgrims to evangelize “wyde as the world is.” When first Pride and then Antichrist attack the Church, Conscience commits a series of terrible errors. He urges the people to stay inside Unity and build fortifications, not realizing the presence of the enemy within. The problem of the erring conscience in a dechristianized society was addressed in 1993 by Pope John-Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor, where the faithful are advised to rely on the truth of “the Church and her Magisterium,” advice, Aers argues, diametrically opposed to Langland’s views. By the end of the poem Piers and Grace have left the institutional Church and Conscience sets off in search of them; for Langland, it seems, the Church is indeed “beyond reformation,” and the true Christians are those few “fools” who are left to fight Antichrist. Aers sees similarities with the theology of Ockham maintaining that “the pope is not Christ’s vicar in any temporal matters whatever” (p. 30).

Aers’s dialectic resembles that of Langland himself, progressing through seventeen numbered sections in which arguments are recapitulated and quotations repeated in different contexts. Some of the disadvantages of this to-ing and fro-ing would have been minimized by providing fuller summaries of the action of the last two passus of the poem for those less familiar with Langland, since Aers aims to widen the readership of Piers Plowman. If he succeeds he will have performed a useful service.