Salvation and Sin: Augustine, Langland, and Fourteenth-Century Theology

PREFACE

       “That is soth,” y saide, “and so y beknowe That y haue ytynt tyme and tyme myspened; Ac ¥ut y hope, as he πat ofte hath ychaffared And ay loste and loste and at πe laste hym happed A boute such a bargayn he was πe bet euere And sette his los as a leef at the laste ende, Such a wynnyng hym warth thorw wyrdes of grace: Simile est regnum celorum thesauro abscondito in agro; Mulier que inuenit dragmam. So hope y to haue of hym πat is almyghty A gobet of his grace and bigynne a tyme That alle tymes of my tyme to profit shal turne.” “Y rede the,” quod resoun tho, “rape the to bigynne The lyf πat is louable and leele to thy soule.” “Áe! and continue,” quod Conscience, “and to πe kyrke ywende.” William Langland, Piers Plowman, V.‒ T            that is central to this book, a moment of conversion and summons into the Church. But Piers Plowman unfolds a more complicated account of the processes of conversion than the penitent Wille anticipates. He prays for the divine grace that alone can redeem time laid waste and lost. Conscience tells him that the place of beginnings to which his reason urges him is the Church in which he had already been born in baptism. In the ix lines following the epigraph Wille obeys. But gradually Langland discloses the opacity of the converted will to the introspective powers of the soul and its unacknowledged resistance to the gifts of redemption. He also discloses how the gift of God in which Wille is called to redeem the time, “πe kyrke” founded by the sublime acts of Christ and the Holy Spirit, is also historically constituted by the acts and habits of sinners (chapter ). So here the interactions of agency become extremely complex and desperately opaque to Wille as he searches for what he finds and loses, what is present and absent, revealed and hidden. Perhaps drawn on by Langland , Salvation and Sin explores different models of the mysterious relations between divine and human agency together with models of sin and its consequences. Theologies of grace, versions of Christian identity, and versions of community, especially the Church, are its pervasive concerns. I am especially interested in figurations of how God found out a remedy that would bring the long-wandering prodigal from a distant, insatiably hungry and warring land “to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” (Heb. .).1 As Shakespeare’s Isabella (in Measure for Measure ) tries to remind the godly and revolutionary judge of Vienna who has just insisted that her brother “is a forfeit of the law”: Alas, alas! Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once, And He that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy.2 About to enter the cloister, Isabella evokes an extraordinarily powerful image of salvation and the consequences of sin. In a poetry of radiant beauty she grasps how human salvation is inextricably bound up with divine patience. The divine judge, he who “is the top of judgement” (..), the lord of time, patiently took time to find a way that would be “the remedy” to sin and its catastrophic consequences. The remedy she invokes is the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ (Phil. .‒). In the face of the magistrate’s reintroduction of the death penalty for sexual unions outside marriage, she recalls the transformation of the relations between law, justice, justification, and mercy in Christ: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justi- fied by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” x Preface (Rom. .‒). Her recollection invites the human judge, Angelo, to consider the entailments of worshiping the God who enacts this humility, patience, and self-abandoning service. Angelo rejects her invitation to take the time he has been given to find out these entailments for himself and the polity he governs. In doing so he rejects an invitation to conversion . This charged scene identifies some central preoccupations in Salvation and Sin. How do the writers it studies envisage the consequences of sin, the conversion of sinners, and the resistances to conversion? Four chapters of Salvation and Sin are on fourteenth-century writers , two of whom wrote in Latin, two in English (although one of these, as the epigraph illustrates, makes...