Kynde cam aftur with many kyne sores,
As pokkes and pestilences, and moche peple shente;
So Kynde thorw corupcions kulde fol mony.
Deth cam dryuyng aftur and al to duste paschte
Kynges and knyhtes, caysers and popes.
Lered ne lewed he left no man stande
That he hitte euene, that euere stured aftur. (C.22: 97–103)
Nature followed with a host of cruel diseases, slaughtering thousands with foul contagions, and sweeping all before him with his plagues and poxes. Then Death came dashing after, crushing to powder both kings and knights, emperors and pontiffs. He left none standing, priest or layman, but hit so squarely that they never stirred again.
This Langlandian danse macabre inscribes the indiscriminateness of death. It is a social equalizer, but from a moral perspective Kynde’s assaults are essentially ineffectual, for when, at Conscience’s pleading, Kynde ceases from his attacks, “to se the peple amende,” Fortune, Lechery, and Covetyse immediately take hold among “tho fewe that were alyue” (C.22: 109–10) and they gather a new army to continue Antichrist’s assault. If one assumes these references to large-scale death and disease refer to the events of the Black Death (as most readers of the poem do), then the paradox of the plague seems, in Langland’s eyes, to be that while it is indeed meaningful—an event of divine retribution (as Reason had asserted at C.5: 115, when he “preuede that this pestelences was for puyre synne”)—it is not seen as meaningful by most of those who survive it, or rather its meaning is perverted so that they interpret it as a judgment that has spared them and so licensed their licentiousness.25
Langland’s epistemological and eschatological position seems to stem from the historical circumstance of a society that has been given a sign, the fulminating judgment of the plague, but has failed utterly to glean its significance. Indeed, that the entire apparatus of salvation represented by Holy Church has been undermined in the wake of the plague has been asserted throughout the poem, from the Prologue’s recounting of the parsons and priests who complain to their bishops “That hire parisshes weren povere sith the pestilence tyme” (B. Prol: 84) and abandon them to live in more profitable London, to Dame Study’s long diatribe against those friars who speculate and preach in ignorance, with cataclysmic results:
Freres and faytours haen founde vp suche questions
To plese with proude men senes this pestelences,
And prechyng at seynt Poules for puyr enuye of clerkes,
That folk is not ferme in the faith ne fre of here godes
Ne sory for here synnes; so ys pruyde enhanced
In religion and in al the reume amonges riche and pore
That preyeres haen no power this pestilences to lette.
For god is deef nowadayes and deyneth vs nat to here
And gode men for oure gultes he al togrynt to deth. (C.11: 54–62)
Since the Plague, Friars and other impostors have thought up theological questions just to please the proud. And they preach at St. Paul’s out of sheer envy of the clergy, so that folk are no longer confirmed in the faith, or taught to be charitable with their goods and sorry for their sins. Not only in the Religious Orders, but among rich and poor throughout the whole realm, pride has spread so much that all our prayers are powerless to stop the pestilence. [For God is deaf nowadays and does not deign to hear us, and for our guilt he grinds good men to death].
The disastrous repercussions of the friar’s pride and greed become the focus of the final passus of Piers Plowman, as one such friar talks his way into Unity, promising he can heal Contrition, who has been wounded by Hypocrisy in the psychomachic battle that conflates the imagery of plague with that of war. Conscience explains that the parson has given Contrition plasters for his sores that are too slow and painful, and the friar instead sells him a plaster and some prayers “for a litel suluer” (C.22: 367). The result of the friar’s commodification of salvation is that Contrition forgets to cry for his sins and, comforted by the friar’s flattery, he leaves Unity, making true penance, and therefore salvation, impossible. The sins attack Unity once more, but the friar has so “enchaunted” its inhabitants with his “dwale” (opiate) that there is no one left to help Conscience defend it, and so he declares he will set out on a pilgrimage to find Piers Plowman, who will destroy pride and give the friars a “fyndynge”—a provision for their livelihood—so they will no longer destroy salvation by claiming to sell it independently of true penance. In his last words, Conscience calls again on Kynde to avenge him and help him until Piers can be found. The implication is that the cycles of plague that rent the social and moral fabric of late fourteenth-century England will continue to “grind good men to death” until Conscience and Piers together can recall to the inhabitants of Unity how they may be heard by a God who is for the time being deaf to their imprecations.
This is, of course, what Langland tries to do in and through his poem, just as Dante must write “in pro del mondo che mal vive.” It is also the message of Langland’s prophecies; ambiguous as they may be in their specifics, they all foretell a period of disaster. Dante’s prophecies rather suggest an imminent redemption in which he and his poem play an important part. Langland makes no such presumption at the apocalyptic level Dante reaches, but rather seems to intend his text as an edifying guide to the perplexed that acknowledges its inability to rise above that perplexity. The book of divine order from which Dante claims to copy is closed to Langland, who can only show its perverted paraphrasing by the multitude of voices he dreams, and for whom the only unequivocal truth is in the transcendence of the Word made Flesh. While Dante’s revelation in the Earthly Paradise takes him beyond apocalypse to the promise of the beatific vision, Langland’s revelation of Christ leads only to the disintegration that goes on and on in the anticipation of apocalypse.
As Robert Lerner has pointed out, the Black Death did not generate any real novelty in the nature (or even the amount) of apocalyptic expectation in Western Europe.26 Indeed, the chiliastic currents evident in both Dante and Langland are part of a long and steadily flowing river of millenarian tradition in early and medieval Christianity. The similarity of the poets’ diagnoses of what ails their respective societies is profound, as is their shared millennial “hope for supernaturally inspired, imminent, and sweeping this-worldly change,”27 and both poets express their apocalyptic mentalities in the prophetic moments that punctuate the Commedia and Piers Plowman. Both poets furthermore demonstrate a certain influence of Joachite ideas and the often connected concern with poverty and the mendicant orders, as well as the more specific conviction that the root of their society’s corruption lies in greed. With these elements, the apocalypses of Dante and Langland are “updated” with the concerns that mark fourteenth-century apocalypticism, much of which was generated around the internecine conflicts of the Franciscan order.28 And again, in large part, Dante and Langland share these “modernizations” of their apocalyptic material. The picture, then, in terms of ideological content, seems much as Lerner paints it—a picture of continuity between the early and late years of the fourteenth century.
Dante and Langland, however, differ crucially from most of their apocalyptic predecessors and contemporaries in that their fictions of judgment are explicitly presented as fictions, in the etymological sense of the fictio, the “made thing.” These are literary productions, rather than treatises, letters, confessions, or manifestos; they are poems, and vernacular poems at that, but it is precisely in their status as vernacular poems that the differences in their apocalypses lie. These differences, as we have seen, are manifested both rhetorically and semiotically, but their origins are fundamentally historical.
The paradox of apocalyptic textuality, of the fiction of judgment, is powerfully inscribed in Dante’s Commedia, where moments of apocalyptic rhetoric are almost invariably coupled with moments of textual self-referentiality. Dante repeatedly asserts the truth of his vision and his message and enlists the denizens of h
is otherworld to reinforce the heavenly authorization for his mission as both pilgrim and poet, and the “divine” status of his sacrato poema is further authorized by its remarkable formal harmony and complexity. But the metatextual moments, such as those in the Earthly Paradise cantos discussed above, periodically remind us of the inescapable gap between the apocalyptic vision and the apocalyptic text, between revelation and representation.
For Langland, however, the crucial gap seems to lie elsewhere: it is not so much representation that undermines revelation, but rather history itself, and the gap is not so much between the fiction and the judgment as between the judgment and the world. The nature of this gap is suggested by David Herlihy’s positing of an epistemological rupture consequent to the years of plague that separate Langland’s apocalypse from Dante’s. Herlihy argues that the result of this catastrophe was the sense that “the human intellect had not the power to penetrate the metaphysical structures of the universe”: while earlier philosophers like Aquinas (and Dante) believed a divine order both existed and could be understood by the human intellect, their late-medieval counterparts had no such confidence.29 In Piers Plowman, the plague has destroyed not only the social order but also man’s ability to understand the significance of that destruction, and that inability is reflected in—and in a sense allegorized by—the poet’s resistance to the proclamations of the fiction of judgment. When Christ appears in Passus 20, his revelation is more truly apocalyptic than anything in the Commedia, but while Dante’s poem moves teleologically to its culmination with the beatific vision, Langland’s falls back from its apocalypse to the chaos of the field full of folk, where history is still in progress and the attack of Antichrist is not the End, but just the beginning of yet another pilgrimage in search of a truth that can no longer, or not yet, be found on this earth.
A final, critical paradox suggests that just as there are specific textual repercussions of death (in the form of the plague) for Langland’s apocalypse that have generally been ignored, so too the critical tradition has generally eschewed exploring the impact of a specific historical nexus of death and apocalypse on Dante’s text. While Piers Plowman is now frequently considered in the context of the later Lollard controversies, when forms of vernacular religiosity were branded heretical around the turn of the century and well into the fifteenth, Dante’s connection to the persecution of the Spiritual Franciscans and their lay followers, which is historically so much stronger (the heresy trials were actually occurring as Dante wrote the Commedia), is only beginning to be sketched.30 Rather than undermining the view of the Commedia, of which Dantisti seem perhaps overly fond, as a poetically transcendent fiction of judgment—a view Dante himself promotes in his “sacred poem”—this context in fact suggests the historical incentive for Dante’s narrative stance as scriba dei. Because death was a real consequence of apocalyptic claims for some of Dante’s like-minded contemporaries, he had to adopt a dual rhetoric of ultimate authorization and semiotic inadequacy, so that lo fren de l’arte, “the brake of art,” stopped him just short of heresy.
While for Dante apocalyptic textuality is thus a means for transcending history, for Langland it is finally an acknowledgment of the historical impossibility of transcendence. The ways these poets perceive and represent the limits of apocalypse illuminate crucial aspects of the relationship of eschatology to epistemology and suggest how that relationship may have shifted in the course of the fourteenth century.
Notes
Introduction
1. “Eschatology” is a modern coinage apparently first used by Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider in 1804; medieval thinkers spoke of novissimi or res novissimae. See G. Filoramo, “Eschatology,” in Encyclopedia of the Early Church, ed. Angelo Di Bernardino, trans. Adrian Walford, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 1: 284–86.
2. Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Knopf, 1981); Oscar Cullman, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History, trans. F. Filson, 3rd ed. (London: SCM, 1962); idem, Unsterblichkeit der Seele oder Auferstehung der Toten? (Stuttgart: Kreuz, 1964); Richard Heinzmann, Die Unsterblichkeit der Seele und die Auferstehung des Leibes: eine problemgeschichtliche Untersuchung der frühscholastischen Sentenzen- und Summenliteratur von Anselm von Laon bis Wilhelm von Auxerre, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters: Texte und Untersuchungen 40, 3 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1965); Gisbert Greshake and Jacob Kremer, Resurrectio mortuorum: zum theologischen Verständnis der leiblichen Auferstehung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1986); Nikolaus Wicki, Die Lehre von der himmlischen Seligkeit in der mittelalterlichen Scholastik von Petrus Lombardus bis Thomas von Aquin, Studia Friburgensia, NF 9 (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag, 1954); Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984; original publication Paris, 1981); Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (Fairlawn, N.J.: Essential Books, 1957); Simon Tugwell, Human Immortality and the Redemption of Death (London: Temple Gate, 1990); Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). See also the collection Immortality and Resurrection: Four Essays, ed. Krister Stendhal (New York: Macmillan, 1965).
3. Bernard McGinn, The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1985); Robert Lerner, The Powers of Prophecy: The Cedar of Lebanon from the Mongol Onslaught to the Dawn of the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
4. Richard K. Emmerson, Antichrist in the Middle Ages: A Study of Medieval Apocalypticism, Art and Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981); Bernard McGinn, Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil (San Francisco: Harper, 1994); Rosemary Muir Wright, Art and Antichrist in Medieval Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); L. J. Lietaert Peerbolte, The Antecedents of Antichrist: A Traditio-Historical Study of the Earliest Christian Views on Eschatological Opponents (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996); and Curtis Bostick, The Antichrist and the Lollards: Apocalypticism in Late Medieval and Reformation England (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998).
5. Paul J. Alexander, The Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
6. The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, 3 vols. (New York: Continuum, 1998). Several of the essays in volumes 1 and 2 cover in a synthetic way the topics discussed here in more detail.
7. Richard Landes, “Lest the Millennium Be Fulfilled: Apocalyptic Expectations and the Pattern of Western Chronography, 100–800 C.E.,” in The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages, ed. Werner Verbeke et al. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1988), pp. 137–211. See also Johannes Fried, “Endzeiterwartung um die Jahrtausendwende,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 45, 2 (1989): 385–473.
8. Richard Landes, Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989–1034 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); Derk Visser, Apocalypse as Utopian Expectation (800–1500): The Apocalypse Commentary of Berengaudus of Ferrières and the Relationship Between Exegesis, Liturgy, and Iconography (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996).
9. Richard Landes, “Between Aristocracy and Heresy: Popular Participation in the Limousin Peace of God, 994–1033” in The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France Around the Year 1000, ed. Richard Landes and Thomas Head (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 184–218; idem, “La vie apostolique en Aquitaine en l’an mil: Paix de Dieu, culte des reliques, et communautés hérétiques,” Annales E. S. C. 46, 3 (1991): 573–93.
10. Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 130–34; David Burr, Olivi’s Peaceable Kingdom: A Reading of the Apocalypse Commentary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); idem, Olivi and Franciscan Poverty: The Origins of the Usus Pauper Controversy (Philadelphia: Univer
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); Eschatologie und Hussitismus, ed. Alexander Patchovsky and František Šmahel (Prague: Historisches Institut, 1996).
11. Andrew Colin Gow, The Red Jews: Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age, 1200–1600 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995).
12. See, for example, the essays collected in The “Apocalypse” in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992) as noted by Visser, Apocalypse as Utopian Expectation, pp. 2–3.
13. Frank Kermode, The Sense of Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).
14. Richard K. Emmerson and Ronald B. Herzman, The Apocalyptic Imagination in Medieval Literature, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); Katherine Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
15. Guy Lobrichon, “L’ordre de ce temps et les désordres de la fin: Apocalypse et société, du IXe à la fin du Xle siècle,” in Verbeke et al., eds., Use and Abuse of Eschatology, p. 221.
16. Ariès, Hour of Our Death; Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996); T. S. R. Boase, Death in the Middle Ages: Mortality, Judgment, and Remembrance (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972); Aron Gurevich, “Perceptions of the Individual and the Hereafter in the Middle Ages,” in Gurevich, Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages, ed. Jana Howlett (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 65–89; Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries, trans. E. Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); and H. Braet and W. Verbeke, eds., Death in the Middle Ages, Mediaevalia Lovaniensia ser. I, studia 9 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1983).
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