Piers Plowman and the Tradition of the Medieval Life of Christ

This study compares Langland's fourteenth-century allegory with a form of contemplative literature widespread and influential in his period but little known today. Lives of Christ were written by members of every religious Order, and the Franciscans especially produced a rich variety of them as their penitential and scholarly missions required. As a result, the life of Christ literature from the late Middle Ages includes—in Latin and in the major European vernaculars—encyclopedias, theological treatises, expanded Gospel harmonies, popular narratives and dramas, and guides to contemplation such as pseudo-Bonaventura's Meditationes Vitae Christi. Although their literary history remains unrecorded, one can see that these works share a basic form reflecting the Christological orientation of their history and theology; and that most of them—and the most important of them— employ the Franciscan "poetic" of presenting spiritual ideas in the carnal, affective medium of imaginative vision. My comparison of Piers Plowman with this tradition indicates Langland's crucial indebtedness to it. The dreamer-narrator of Piers Plowman has as his ultimate and saving experience a meditation on the life of Christ; this experience controls the poem's major structures, clarifies its verbal ambiguity, and establishes" its ironic perspective on the hero's earlier state and on his society. Studieses of Piers Plowman have strained to reconcile its structures, promising order and lucidity, and its actual verbal ambiguity. Therefore I begin by analyzing its structures in relation to that of the life of Christ. Chapter I briefly characterizes the structure of the life of Christ as a history of the Age of Grace (from Incarnation to Last Judgment) and as a process of descent to carnality and ascent to spiritual bliss; it urges that such apocalyptic features as the coming of Antichrist and personal tribulations belong within this process of the life of Christ. The chapter then considers the structure of Piers Plowman. Its eight dream visions and two inner dreams arrange themselves symmetrically: those that precede the vita Christi (Passus XVI to XX) and those that constitute it balance perfectly. The poem's structure of Visio and Vita reflects this two-part action as well as the thematic link of vision and the life of Christ. Its structure of Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest conforms with similar triadic progressions in The Cloud of Unknowing. Bonaventura's Lignum Vitae. Jacapone da Todi's Lauda LXXX, and the Meditationes Vitae Christi; its ultimate reference is a progression of Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest in the life of Christ narrated by Conscience (Passus XIX). In sum, the three major structures of Piers Plowman indicate the life of Christ. In Chapter II, I compare actual lives of Christ and such key features of Piers Plowman as the Tree of Charity, the alternation of vision and commentary, the dialectical argument of Passus XVIII, and the apocalyptic mode. Avoiding the chronology and inclusiveness of the Gospel harmony, Langland treats Christ's human life according to the mystical theology of Bonaventura's Lignum Vitae. and he further intellectualizes this process by his sophisticated theological dialectic. He describes Christ's divine life and the mystery of the Incarnation in the Tree of Charity; Christ's Glorification and coming Judgment he alludes to in Conscience's life of Christ, in the vision of the Holy Spirit, and in the vision of Antichrist. He makes the mystery of the Passion conventionally cardinal, hence the high style and grand argument of Passus XVIII. I conclude that Will's vision of the life of Christ owes much to the Franciscan concept of "meditation on humanity," but that its dense dialectic is more typical of Dominican than of Franciscan literary expression. In Chapter III, I take up the problem of verbal ambiguity. I find that those ideas which most vex Will by their multisemous nature--Truth, Dowel, Love, Life, Kynde, and so on—are ultimately defined as names of Christ. Such social types as the king, priest, Doctor of Divinity, and Lady Mede (munus) are ultimately satirized by their nominal identity but real unlikeness to Christ. The contradictions amongst the Four Daughters of God are resolved when it is shown that Mercy, Truth, Righteousness, and Peace are all names and real qualities of Christ. Chapter III argues that Langland was the unique poet who dramatized the nominalist crisis of his day by emphasis on the instability and obscurity of words; and that he intended to refute nominalism by demonstrating that an.-Augustinian reality of names did reside in Christ, whose life manifested a process of perfect truth, love, and virtue. Such demonstration depended on the tradition of the late medieval life of Christ.