Last Things

by Bynum, Caroline Walker; Freedman, Paul;

  Dante’s is the paradigmatic fiction of judgment, in which divine and authorial perspectives (judgment and fiction) are almost seamlessly interwoven.7 The eschatological vision Dante presents is embodied in a text the structural perfection of which further undergirds the poet’s assertion of the literal, revealed truth of his sacrato poema, whose inexorable teleology culminates with the beatific vision he claims to have been granted.8 Dante, in other words, goes all the way, and the egregiousness of his experience—as well as the absolute novelty of his poetic recording of it—is emphasized throughout the poem. Dante writes that, when Virgil proposed this “altro viaggio,” he balked, comparing his imminent journey to those of Aeneas and Paul and protesting his unworthiness; but the comparison and Virgil’s response serve in fact to emphasize Dante’s chosenness and to suggest (as the “veltro” prophecy does) that Dante’s journey has a purpose of profound significance, not only for himself. Dante is aware of the transgressions in which he is involved and incorporates that awareness in a rhetoric of humility that narratively serves to elicit responses that further authorize his undertaking.

  Ma io, perché venirvi? o chi ’I concede?

  Io non Enea, io non Paulo sono;

  me degno a ciò né io né altri ‘I crede.

  Per che, se del venire io m’abbandono,

  temo che la venuta non sia folle. (Inf. 2: 31–35)

  But I, why do I come there? And who allows it? I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul; of this neither I nor others think me worthy. Wherefore, if I yield and come, I fear that the coming may be folly.

  “And merueylousliche me mette. . .” (C. Prol. 9)

  “And I dreamt a marvelous dream,” the voice of Langland’s narrative alter ego, Will, reports, framing his vision across the limits of consciousness, but not necessarily of truth, in the oneiric realm.9 In the B version of the poem, the dream places Will “in a wilderness, I could not tell where”—an allusion to the same allegorical space Dante describes as a “selva oscura,” that is, a place in which one becomes lost. Will is not directly confronted by threatening beasts, however; instead, he sees a broad landscape. On a hill to the east is a tower, and in “a deep dale bynethe, a dongeon” yawns darkly. In the C-text, the wilderness is gone and the authorial voice immediately glosses the allegorical landmarks: the tower is Truth, while the dungeon contains Death.

  In different ways, then, both the B and C versions suggest that what Will is seeing is a realm not unlike Dante’s, where salvation and damnation define both space and time. But what Will then sees, on which the rest of the Prologue is focused, is what lies between the eschatological and epistemological poles of the Dungeon of Death and the Tower of Truth. It is a “fair feeld ful of folk,” containing “alle manere of men . . . / Werchynge and wandrynge as the world asketh” (Prol. 17–19).10 Langland shows us not the otherworld but this world, vividly, in all its chaos and corruption, as Dante does only indirectly, through his dialogues with those for whom this life is already over and whose choice of truth or death has already been made. Langland’s field full of folk—his subject and his audience—is as yet unjudged; it still lives what Beatrice, Dante’s second guide, calls “[il] viver ch’è un correre a la morte”: the life that is a running toward death (Purg. 33:54). Langland’s first guide, a linen-clad lady who descends from the tower and later identifies herself as Holy Church, similarly points out to Will:

  The mooste partie of this peple that passeth on this erthe

  Have thei worship in this world, thei wilne no bettre;

  Of oother hevene than here hold thei no tale. (B. 1: 7–9)

  Most people who pass through this world wish for nothing better than worldly success: the only heaven they think about is on earth.

  Will, as he tends to do throughout the poem, asks for an explanation: “Mercy, madame, what may this be to mene?” (1: 11). And, characteristically, the explanation he gets, lengthy and theologically sound as it is, does not exactly answer his question. Holy Church tells him unequivocally that “Treuthe is the beste” (1: 85, 135), but when Will says she must teach him more specifically how he can know truth, she calls him a fool, says his wits are dull, and gives him still more examples and explanations of truth and the “trewe,” the very proliferation of which seems to undercut the clear, unified monolith Will seems to think truth should be. He then tries a different tack, asking Holy Church to tell him how he can know the false. And thus begins Will’s epistemological pilgrimage, in the course of which he will seek truth—the three-part path to salvation also known in the poem as “do-well,” “do-bet,” and “do-best”—and will hear “of other heaven than here” many different tales.11

  A fundamental difference thus emerges between the two poems: Dante presents himself as a chosen visionary to whom is revealed—and explained—the disposition of the souls after death, and to whom the dos and don’ts of salvation are thus rather specifically shown, without his really asking (indeed, he protests his unworthiness). Will, on the other hand, is constantly demanding examples and explanations, actively seeking answers from an ever-proliferating network of “authorities,” who certainly do not give one the sense of doctrinal reliability that Dante’s interlocutors exude, if only because their versions never quite match up.12 And the eschatological closure that is the precondition (or pretext) of Dante’s vision is wholly absent from Langland’s, in which everything still seems to be in process—including the poem itself, with its multiple versions, meandering, associative style, and repeated resistance to closure.13 Will is shown actively in search of meaning, which proves always multiple and elusive, while Dante has meaning thrust upon him in its most absolute, ultimate form. For Dante the doors of apocalyptic understanding are flung open, while Will beats against them with his head and with his pen. And while Dante is, throughout the Commedia, sanctioned and encouraged in his pilgrimage and his poetic project, Will is repeatedly challenged and discouraged; Dante is given divine commands to write, while Will is told that he is wasting his time.

  In the B-text, for example, Ymaginatif—the personification of one of the mind’s creative faculties—menacingly (and rather paradoxically) counsels Will to abandon his creative efforts:

  Amende thee while thow myght; thow hast ben warned ofte

  With poustees of pestilences, with poverte and with angres

  . . .

  And thow medlest thee with makynges—and myghtest go seye thi Sauter,

  And bidde for hem that yyveth thee breed; for ther are bokes ynowe

  To telle men what Dowel is . . . (B.12: 10–18)

  So mend your ways now, while you are still able. Often enough you have been warned by outbreaks of Plague, by poverty, and by many afflictions. . . . Yet for all this, you do nothing, but play about with poetry when you might be saying your Psalter and praying for those who give you your daily bread! Are there not enough books already, to expound Do-well. . . ?

  Apocalypse in the Garden

  In both the Commedia and Piers Plowman, a complex constellation of concerns is introduced by an allegorical recapitulation of biblical history from Genesis to Apocalypse. In the Commedia, this takes place explicitly in the Terrestrial Paradise, where the human root was innocent (Purg. 28: 142). In Piers Plowman, too, there is God’s garden, where a magnificent tree grows bearing a fruit called Charity. When Dante wakes in his Eden, after passing through the final fire of purgatory, Virgil promises him that here he shall eat of a marvelous fruit:

  Quel dolce pome che per tanti rami

  cercando va la cura de’ mortali,

  oggi porrà in pace le tue fami. (Purg. 27: 115–17)

  That sweet fruit which the care of mortals goes seeking on so many branches, this day shall give your hungerings peace.

  When Will sees the Tree of Charity, he asks his guide (who in the B-text is Piers himself and in C is Liberum Arbitrium) to shake down some of the fruit, wanting to “assaien what savour it hadde” (B. 16: 74). It was of course precisely this action—characterized by Dante as Eve
’s refusal to remain under any veil (Purg. 29: 27)—that caused the biblical banishment from Eden, with which the problems of eschatology, epistemology, and textuality all (from a medieval Christian perspective) began. Accordingly, death, history, and language are central themes in the final cantos of the Purgatorio, and in the allegorically parallel last four passūs of Piers Plowman,14 in both of which schemes of salvation history frame a revelation that undoes the Fall and apocalyptically links alpha and omega, the beginning and the end, while at the same time crucially involving the poet pilgrims themselves and the status of their texts.

  Langland focuses first on the eschatological implications of the Fall, for when the ripe fruit falls for Will, the Devil snatches it away, “And made of holy men his hoord in Limbo Inferni” (B.16: 84); the fruit includes “Adam and Abraham and Ysaye the prophete, / Sampson and Samuel and Seint Johan the Baptist” (16: 81–82), who, despite their holiness, must dwell in hell because they lived before Christ. The historical aspect is developed, with all its typological force, as the kidnapping of the prophets and patriarchs begets the Incarnation. Old Law and New Law overlap when Abraham and Moses appear as Faith and Charity with their own two versions of “do-well” that gloss the retelling of the life of Christ from the Annunciation to the betrayal by Judas. Abraham expounds the mystery of the Trinity to the dreamer while also recapitulating the highlights of his role in Genesis and asserting his eschatological task as the keeper of the souls “Lollynge in my lappe, til swich a lord us fecche” (16: 269). It is typical of Piers Plowman that allegory proliferates in this nonlinear way, and it is no wonder Will gets confused when Moses appears, as Spes, in search of Christ, who must seal the text of the commandments Moses carries, which are not the ten we expect but the simple twofold mandate: “Dilige deum et proximum tuum” (from, e.g., Matt. 22). Will thus reaches another epistemological impasse, for Abraham’s version of the path to salvation was to believe firmly in the triune deity:

  “Youre wordes arn wonderfulle,” quod I tho. “Which of yow is trewest,

  And lelest to leve on for lif and for soule?” (B.17: 25–26)

  “Your words astound me” I said. “How can I tell which of you to believe—which of you to trust to save one’s soul?”

  The problem of apparently competing doctrinal authorities is resolved, at least rhetorically, by the Samaritan whom the dreamer next encounters, who tells Will that both Abraham and Moses are correct, although they have both failed to help the stricken man the Samaritan has succored on the side of the road. The Samaritan explains:

  May no medicyne under molde the man to heele brynge—

  Neither Feith ne fyn Hope, so festered be hise woundes,

  Withouten the blood of a barn born of a mayde. (B.17: 93–95)

  No medicine on earth, not even Faith and Hope, can heal that man; his wounds are so festered. The only cure is the blood of a child born of a virgin.

  The inexorable logic of redemption demands the sacrifice of the incarnate God, which Will indeed witnesses in his next dream. It begins with the singing of the “Hosanna” that accompanied Christ’s entry into Jerusalem (Matt. 21: 9), which Dante also hears in his Eden.

  In the Commedia’s Earthly Paradise, the “osanna” accompanies a phantasmagoric procession replete with apocalyptic allusions, and its Christological associations are amplified by the cry of one hundred angels who emerge from the chariot at the center of the procession:

  Quali i beati al novissimo bando

  surgeran presti ognun di sua caverna,

  la revestita voce alleluiando,

  cotali in su la divina basterna

  si levar cento, ad vocem tanti senis,

  ministri e messagier di vita etterna.

  Tutti dicean: “Benedictus qui venis” . . . (Purg. 30: 13–19)

  As the blessed at the last Trump will rise ready each from his tomb, singing Hallelujah with reclad voice, so upon the divine chariot, ad vocem tanti senis, rose up a hundred ministers and messengers of life eternal, who all cried “Benedictus qui venis”. . .

  Dante cites this last phrase from the same triumphal moment in the Gospel of Matthew (21: 9), where it typologically heralds the eschatological event to which the resurrected “ministers and messengers of eternal life” also allude—for Christ’s entry into Jerusalem preceding his Passion is analagous to his Second Coming, as bridegroom of the heavenly Jerusalem (Apoc. 21: 9). This eschatological dimension is less explicitly present in Langland’s use of the allusions because he is indeed retelling the story of the life of Christ and has now come to the episode of his Passion—his death. But for both Dante and Langland, the transcendence of death is at the heart of these sections of their poems. And it is also linked, in the Edenic contexts, to the transcendence of language and of history, whose postlapsarian inadequacies parallel those of the rendered-mortal body. Apocalypse undoes Genesis in that humanity regains its immortality, language becomes immediate, literal, and transparent, and history becomes, as it were, immaterial. Langland figures the first transformation in its most literal—that is, historical—sense, precisely by retelling the story of Christ’s death and resurrection. For Dante, however, all this apocalyptic expectation leads not to the revelation of Christ—a Christ who actually speaks, and whose words are recorded, in Piers Plowman—but to the revelation of Beatrice, Dante’s most allegorical figure. Dante transforms history into allegory, as textual apocalypse inevitably does, moving into a prophetic mode that exploits the seemingly immediate language of images while acknowledging the “narrazion buia” their representation actually represents.

  Dante’s Eden, “la divina foresta spessa e viva” (Purg. 28: 2), serves as the stage on which an allegorical pageant appears, led by what at first appear to Dante as seven golden trees. These in fact turn out to be seven gold candelabra, which are followed by a retinue of twenty-four “elders” and four winged beasts, images that draw upon the iconographic literacy of medieval readers for a portentous, prophetic effect. But the images Dante inscribes, like the credos espoused by Abraham and Moses in Langland’s garden, call into question the epistemological relationship between Old and New Testaments, as well as the epistemological status of Dante’s own vision. In an address to the reader on the subject of the four winged beasts, Dante recalls the biblical intertexts of his vision and their discrepancies, while simultaneously authorizing his own text:

  A descriver lor forme più non spargo

  rime, lettor; ch’altra spesa mi stringe,

  tanto che a questa non posso esser largo;

  ma leggi Ezechiel, che li dipinge

  come li vide da la fredda parte

  venir con vento e con nube e con igne;

  e quali troverai ne le sue carte

  tali eran quivi, salvo ch’a le penne

  Giovanni è meco e da lui si diparte. (Purg. 29: 97–105)

  To describe their forms, reader, I do not lay out more rhymes, for other spending constrains me so that I cannot be lavish in this; but read Ezekiel who depicts them as he saw them come from the cold parts, with wind and cloud and fire; and such as you shall find them on his pages, such were they here, except that, as to the wings, John is with me, and differs from him.

  The truth of Ezekiel’s and John’s visions of the four beasts is not undermined by the differences between them—they are, in a sense, synoptic. And while Dante’s assertion of his agreement with John on the fact that the beasts each have six wings suggests the stronger truth-value of the New Testament version, it more importantly serves to vouch for the authenticity of Dante’s own vision, which is thus understood to be another version of this same truth.

  Langland seems to promise a similarly transcendent epistemology in the passus that constitutes the poem’s most literal apocalypse, in which Christ himself appears and Will witnesses his Passion—the death of the Word made Flesh, with which Death is conquered and the Devil is made to relinquish the stolen fruit of (pre-Christian) Charity. Langland retells the story of the Passion primarily as tol
d in the gospel according to Matthew, but drawing also on the other synoptic gospels and on the apocryphal gospel of Nicodemus, the primary medieval source for the legend of the Harrowing of Hell. For once, Langland is engaged in a synthetic, rather than a dispersive, narrative project, bringing together these different (but equally true) versions of the Truth and giving them one voice in his text—or rather, uncharacteristically silencing the voices whose versions of reality compete everywhere else in the poem—for Will actually sees Jesus being tried and condemned and nailed on the cross, and he describes it literally. It is as if he were describing the images along the stages of the cross painted around the apses and naves of some medieval churches, just as Dante describes the apocalyptic images familiar from the mosaics of early Christian ecclesiastical decoration. Both Dante and Langland thus draw upon visual imagery and its description to compensate for the overload of signification these moments represent. But while for Dante these images, for all their biblical pedigree, remain veiled in allegorical configurations that demand exegesis (a demand the critical tradition from its earliest representatives eagerly obliged),15 for Langland they constitute the literal truth of the Word and do not require explanation but rather only typological fulfillment.