Piers Ploughman & Medieval Christian Morality

When you read critical introductions to the fourteenth-century allegory, Piers Ploughman, you might very nearly  be convinced that you’re about to read a work ethically and metaphysically ahead of its time. The fourteenth-century allegory by a William Langland (about whom we know predictably little) is pegged, by most who write of it, as an indictment of ecclesiastical corruption. And that indeed it surely is – as fierce and unforgiving an indictment as one is likely to find at that time and in this form. But heed must be paid to not endow the work with humanistic and liberal connotations it doesn’t, in fact, possess.

 In all important respects, the work is, philosophically – or, more precisely, theologically – very squarely of its time. Though he attacks the Church for having lost its way, Langland takes great pains to defend its original, neglected purpose: to serve as the vessel for the Christian god on Earth. In Langland’s vision for a Christian Utopia, human greed is the enemy, not the underlying ethical and metaphysical notions corrupted by it. As we shall see, these latter principles remains very much unassailed.

Piers Ploughman, or Visio Willelmi de Petro Ploughman (William’s visions of Piers Ploughman) chronicles a series of mystical dreams of the protagonist, Will - usually seen as an alter-ego of the author. One fine day, Will retreats to a meadow and falls asleep. There, he dreams seven times, each time conjuring up theologically rich visions of heaven and hell, avaricious monks and corrupt kings, and other implicit and explicit images of good and evil very salient for Langland’s time.

The fourteenth century was an era of significant political turmoil and social change in English history, and so the time was, all things considered, ripe for a Piers Ploughman. The old feudal aristocracies had collapsed and, thanks to innovations in secular education, commoners were slowly beginning to elevate themselves out of near-total ignorance. Having been rocked, a century earlier, by a cataclysmic plague that had wiped out half their population, the lower classes were ill-fed and felt neglected by those under whose care they lived and worked. Lustful, simonious clerics were no longer able to keep their indiscretions from public knowledge, and respect for papal authority was markedly on the wane.

The vitriol Langland spews on Church corruption doubtless echoes popular sentiment, as does the contempt he expresses for incompetent political leaders. But to conclude, from this, that Langland was a protoliberal hero, a prescient voice for enlightened principles and individual rights, is, I believe, to grossly misread the text. We shall now see why.

In the poem’s prolouge – Will’s first vision – Langland’s anger against monastic corruption is immediate apparent:

 And further, I saw all four schools of friars

Preaching to people to make a fat profit,

Construing the Gospel to suit themselves,

Giving it meanings to go with their greed

And clad in unclerical clothes that matched.

Will has fallen asleep and ‘woken’ to find himself in the middle of a peculiar scene. He’s in a beautiful meadow from which can be seen a curious tower perched atop a distant mountain. In the opposite direction, there is a dungeon, dubbed the ‘Castle of Care’. Gathered in the meadow, between tower and dungeon, are multitudes of people representing a cross-section of humanity.

Someone who’s described by the poet as a ‘boastful blatherer’ suddenly shouts out:

 “Though a king is rex because rex means ruler,

Sine justitia [without justice] the title’s not true.”

To our enlightened ears, this may sound like a remarkably modern apology for the rule of law, and yet we are quickly discouraged from imposing any anachronistically liberal interpretations. The ‘blatherer’, we learn, is merely repeating, in his own rather slipshod manner, a message just proclaimed from on high by one of god’s angels:

“O Princes, be pious in justitia and just,

For justitia principis [justice in principle] is pietas in practice

And sow the seed that you seek to reap,

For justice stripped bare rebounds in judgement

Pietas sown is pietas received!”

This is not ‘justice’ as Locke or Mill would later intend it. It is a thoroughly Christian conception of the term, having a lot more to do more with religious duty (pietas) than humanistic notions of individual rights and liberties. It is the god’s justice, not man’s.

Then, in the poem’s first Passus (or section), the Holy Church appears to Piers in the form of a womanly apparition. But she is not the earthly Church Langland denounces, the one corrupted by man’s vices. She’s the Church as she ideally should be, ever faithful to her original mission; a sort of platonically ideal Church that inhabits, not this realm, but another. To use the Augustinian distinction, she is the heavenly Church of the City of God, rather than the City of Man.

 When Will asks her to explain how he might save his soul, she defends this heavenly Church’s creed, the creed of Christian truth and love (charity):

 “When all treasures are tried,” she said, “Truth is the best,

For God is charity, as the Gospel agrees.”

And provides only a thinly veiled condemnation of its earthly counterpart:

“For David in his day, when he dubbed his knights,

Had them swear on their swords to serve the Truth

…letting neither love nor money delude them—

And knights who lapse should lose their knighthood.”

Further on, she explains the significance of the distant Tower:    

“In the tower on the toft,” she said, “lives Truth,

Who wishes you to follow the way of his word;

He’s the father of faith, he formed you all.”

And of the ominous dungeon in the opposite direction:

 “That place,” she declared, “is the Castle of Care.

If you set foot inside you’ll be sorry you were born        

For the house is the realm of a wretch called Wrong

The father of falsehood who founded and built it.”

The Tower and the Dungeon, here, are symbols for the two diametrically opposed states of the human soul: spirit and flesh, light and dark, good and evil. They are also symbols for heaven and hell. The tower is the dwelling place of god, with whom the idea of truth was, to the medieval, entirely synonymous. The father of falsehood here is, intuitably, the devil. And it is only fitting that he should be known thus, considering he is, in every respect, the very antithesis of Christ, the one and only path to truth. For the medieval, he who strayed from God strayed also from truth to falsehood, from light to darkness.

 She goes on to warn Piers against succumbing to the temptations of our baser natures:

Don’t trust your body for it’s taught by a tempter:

The world is wicked and will want to betray you,

And the devil and the flesh will join forces to defeat you;

Your soul understands it and says it in your heart,

And I warn you too, to be wary and aware.”

 …a passage that may well have been cut-and-pasted from Augustine’s City of God, so closely does it mirror the Church father’s entreaties against living according to the flesh.

Later during Will’s second vision, in Passus V, Reason exhorts lawgivers to seek the Truth:

And lawmen, look that you long for the Truth,

Not for gold or gifts, if you wish to please God,

For the Gospel tells you, if you take against Truth:

Amen I say to you, I know you not.

And seekers after saints in Spain and Rome

Should seek Truth instead, for Truth will save you.

And here we see the Christian form of truth, not the reason-deduced truth of Descartes, or the empirically-derived truth of Locke and co. This is the kind of truth that will save one’s soul, not enlighten the mind; the sort that will come in handy for the next life, not for this one.

In Passus XV, Will’s fifth vision, a disembodied Soul appears and describes the various aspects of himself in Augustinian terms, namedropping the Church father directly – almost to state the obvious:  

“When I flee the flesh and am free of the body,

I am silent and speechless, and known as Spirit.

Isidore and Augustine set out these aspects,

And now that you know them, you may name me as you will.”

But then, once he’s identified himself, Soul chides Will for his ungodly inquisitiveness: 

“You’re a paragon of pride,” he said, “and imperfect.

Such longing for enlightenment caused Lucifer’s fall:

I will ascend above the height of the clouds, I will be like the most High.”  

For Langland, the longing for empirical truth is prideful and ungodly. The only form truth worth pursuing was God’s; the sort that is imposed by divine will, not arrived at with the assistance of natural human reason. Any form of the latter is dangerous, for any kind of scientific inquiry will lead away from god and, therefore, to death and depredation. It was, after all, the fruit picked by Eve from the tree of knowledge that led to man’s fall in the first place. Empirical knowledge is sinful because it breaks the union with god. Adam and Eve had dwelt in blissful ignorance with god in his heavenly garden until their thirst for scientific inquiry had corrupted them, and they were ejected.

Christ, who was known by the learned of the age as the logos (a rather vague term of Pre-Socratic origin, more often than not unhelpfully translated as ‘word’), was the antidote to this heinous form of spiritual alienation. Christ the logos was nothing less than the universe’s primary ordering principle. He illuminated man’s feeble mind, allowing him to access god’s otherwise inaccessible thoughts. Since Adam’s fall, man had been burdened with the original sin of his lust for worldly, scientific knowledge, and it was only by means of the logos that man could be redeemed; only in and through Christ that he could be saved from eternal damnation.

There could exist no epistemological stance farther-removed from the contemporary empirical mindset than this.

As if to cement the point, Soul then quotes from St Bernard:

“‘Blessed is the man,’ as Saint Bernard remarked,

Who bases his works as well as his words

On construing Scripture,’ for desire for knowledge” 

Here, it is hard to imagine how Langland could not have been familiar with Thomas Aquinas:

 Those who place their faith in this truth, however, “for which the human reason offers no experimental evidence,” do not believe foolishly, as though “following artificial fables” (II Peter 1:16). For these “secrets of divine Wisdom” (Job 11:6) the divine Wisdom itself, which knows all things to the full, has deigned to reveal to men. (Summa Contra Gentiles, Ch. 6)

…and with a whole host of thinkers preceding him, for that matter, from Augustine through Anselm, who were insistent in their emphasis of the supremacy of divine revelation over human reason.

 In Passus XVIII, the work’s climax, Will finally finds resolution for his fitful quandaries. And, as scholar Peter Sutton highlights, he achieves this with the help of a very traditional set of Christian values:

The narrator… progress[es] from puzzlement to resolution, finally moving from “contrition and confession and satisfaction through patience and poverty to faith, hope and charity [and] the Cardinal Virtues.” The poem closes with a plea for society as a whole to adopt these virtues of prudence, tolerance, justice and fortitude and to follow Christ’s two great commandments, to love God and to love one’s neighbour as oneself.

All is thus well. The cardinal virtues are now reconciled and the vices have been vanquished. Order is finally restored in Will’s moral world.

As we have seen, Langland’s attack on Church corruption is one made from a firmly and indisputably theistic vantage point, not a humanistic one. He accuses the Church of having twisted religion, yes, but the religion in question remains above rebuke. In fact, the very weapon Langland wields for his admonitory purpose is Church-forged and Church-monopolised. Clergymen are found guilty of the sins of pride, covetousness and greed and so, when Langland condemns them, he does so by the very ethical standards they are meant to uphold. The ecclesiastical authorities, for Langland, stand accused of having failed at their own game, of having done wrong by their own definition.

The moral system Langland uses to judge right and wrong is thus the same as it has been for a millennium, even though its chief vessel of earthly promulgation has failed it. There is not a whiff of seventeenth-century rationalism, or nineteenth-century utilitarianism to be found on any of its pages, which, instead, are rife with references, direct and veiled, to ideals as old as Christianity itself. The falsehoods committed by the Church are denounced in the name, not of empirical inquiry or natural human reason, but of godly Christian Truth and the logos that diffuses it. This back-to-first-principles approach means that Langland’s allegorical poem is anything but ethically or metaphysically revolutionary. It is, rather, the opposite: the very essence of an apology for reactionary theological values.