Excerpt of Versions of Election

VERSIONS of E L E C T I O N From Langland and Aquinas to Calvin and Milton

D AV I D A E R S

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu Copyright Š 2020 by the University of Notre Dame All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data to come

CONTENTS

Preface ix chapter one “Predestinaet” or “Prescit”: Langland’s Treatment of Election in Piers Plowman (C-text) 1 c h a p t e r t wo Wille Returns “to scole”: Later Medieval Theologians on Predestination and Reprobation 000 chapter three Crossing a Great Divide?

Calvinistic Revolution and the Ecclesia Anglicana 000 chapter four Conversion in Arthur Dent’s The Plaine Man’s Path-way to Heaven 000 chapter five John Milton: Versions of Divine Election, Predestination, and Reprobation 000 Appendix 000 Notes 000 Bibliography 000 Index 000

PREFACE

Narrative history of a certain kind turns out to be the basic and essential genre for the characterization of human actions.

—Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue And it is perhaps the principal task of the political and moral theorist to enable rational agents to learn from the social and cultural tradition that they inherit, while becoming able to put in question that particular tradition’s distortions and errors, and so, often enough, engaging in a quarrel with some dominant forms of their own political and moral culture.

—Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity

This book emerged from a web of substantial questions that have long preoccupied me, ones that cross habitual divisions between the study of literature, theology, ethics, and politics. They also cross the divisions between medieval and early modern studies, between the Catholic Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation, divisions firmly institutionalized in modern universities. So it is inevitable that Versions of Election should be both cross-disciplinary and diachronic. This may make it seem of a kind with the recent grand narratives of modernity, narratives in which the Middle Ages play an important role, albeit often a fabular one.1 Yet it is no such thing, nor is it a historical survey of doctrinal topics. It does not even always follow the time of chronometers (see the relationship between chapters 1 and 2, for example). And it certainly has no encyclopedic aspirations. What is it then, and why does it study the texts on which it concentrates in the way it does? ix

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As the title indicates, this book is an exploration of some (not all) versions of predestination and reprobation in Christian traditions of the Middle Ages and the Reformation. It considers some medieval versions composed by well-known writers (Aquinas, for example) and some by far less well known ones (Bromyard, for example). It also studies some early modern versions generated within predominately Calvinist traditions. But which versions? And why are these particular versions discussed, given the plethora of relevant materials? After all, the topic was routinely addressed by most medieval theologians since their apprenticeship involved commenting on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, a text that offered an eclectic but recognizably Augustinian account of the subject (chapter 2). Nor was interest in this topic confined to medieval universities, as we shall see (chapters 1 and 2). In the Reformation issues of predestination and reprobation became central, especially within Calvinist churches (chapters 3 and 4). The issues generated an immense range of writing in a wide range of genres: doctrinal treatises, contemplative writing, pastoral work, sermons, poems, and Protestant accounts of a person’s spiritual life.

From this cornucopia accumulated across five hundred years of Christian writing I have chosen to explore a few versions that embody the strikingly different paradigms of election and reprobation generated within Christian tradition. The medieval versions I discuss help one see how the late medieval church could make and live with doctrinal diversity, conflict, and fragmentation in this important area. By the end of the Middle Ages we find that the church included paradigms that were unequivocally anti-Augustinian alongside paradigms that were hyperAugustinian (proposing unambiguous forms of double predestination) together with those representing a Thomist form of Augustinianism (chapter 2). Such was the complex legacy of the medieval church to the Reformation. The second half of the book (chapters 3–5) addresses what the Reformation did with this legacy, especially in predominantly Calvinist churches.

But my aim is not merely to observe the presence of such variety, perhaps writing an extensive footnote to James Halverson’s fine work, Peter Aureol on Predestination (see chapter 2). For in this study I am also exploring just how Christian tradition is made, unmade, and remade.

I am fascinated by its complex modes and paths; its forms of memory,

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amnesia, and often gross misrepresentation of other participants in the tradition; its losses and recoveries of past arguments. To follow a tradition is to elucidate its ways of responding to changing circumstances.

Such a mode of elucidation must attend to the minute particulars of specific texts, including their images, allegories, and grammar. Where appropriate, it may consider the transformation of one image or allegory across time and in differing contexts. For example, throughout the book I consider several responses to Paul’s recollection of a text that ascribes to God hatred and love of unborn people (Rom. 9:11–14); I also return at various points to the strikingly different treatments by several authors of Jesus’s comparison of himself to a hen who desired to gather her chickens under her wings but was rejected by them (Matt. 23:37: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!”). In addition to providing an illuminating lens through which the ethical and theological implications of differing models of election become sharply apparent, the various responses to the latter passage that I consider here also inspired the choice of cover image to the present volume. I am grateful to Lindsey Larre for suggesting this illustration from a fifteenth-century French manuscript of a mother hen collecting her chickens, Christ-like, under her protective wings. That this image of mercy was not the only interpretation of this passage available to writers in the seventeenth century becomes a telling indication of the chasm between Calvinist versions of predestination and reprobation and traditional exegesis, as chapter 3 will show.

In pursuing this inquiry it has become clear that one must not assume that tradition is unidirectional. It has also become clear to me that even those who most vehemently deny their participation in human traditions, a distinctive feature of many writers throughout the Reformation, often turn out to be recovering strands of the very traditions they reject. This is especially striking when such rejection is combined with blazing confidence that their own position depends solely on scripture and spirit. John Milton, the poet, revolutionary, and theologian, came to exemplify this paradox in some especially fascinating ways (chapter 5), but the paradox was common enough in the Reformation. How could it not be when the makers of the Reformation belonged to a living

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tradition that enabled distinctively Christian lives, disputes, and reformations across time and across diverse communities and polities.

Not even John Henry Cardinal Newman in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine has illuminated this subject better than Alasdair MacIntyre did many years ago in After Virtue.

A living tradition then is an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument in part about the goods which constituted that tradition. Within a tradition the pursuit of goods extends through many generations. Hence the individual’s search for his or her good is generally and characteristically conducted within a context defined by traditions of which the individual’s life is part, and this is true both of those goods which are internal to practices and of the goals of a single life. Once again the narrative phenomenon of embedding is crucial: the history of a practice in our time is generally and characteristically embedded in and made intelligible in terms of the larger and longer history of the tradition through which the practice in its present form was conveyed to us; the history of each of our own lives is generally and characteristically embedded in and made intelligible in terms of the larger and longer histories of a number of traditions. I have to say ‘generally and characteristically’ rather than ‘always’, for traditions decay, disintegrate and disappear.2 It is true enough that, as I have acknowledged, unlike MacIntyre I am only exploring one aspect of a particular “living tradition” and its “historically extended, socially embodied argument.” But versions of predestination and reprobation were neither marginal nor esoteric subjects without existential and political relevance.

Teaching about predestination and reprobation informed the versions of the God worshipped by Christians. Inevitably this had major consequences for Christian ethics and politics. If, as the Augustinian tradition claimed, God hated and reprobated some unborn people (such as Esau) while he loved and predestined others to eternal beatitude (such as Jacob), how, without sinking into a marsh of double-think and doubletalk, could Christians make sense of scriptural assertions that “God is

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love” (1 John 4:8, 16) and God is just (“are not my ways right [aequae]?”

[Ezek. 18:29]), one who proclaims, “I am the Lord that exercises mercy, and judgement, and justice [sum Dominus qui facio misericordiam, et judicium, et justitiam]” ( Jer. 9:24)? Furthermore, Jesus plainly told his disciples to imitate God the father: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matt. 5:18); or, “Be ye therefore merciful [misericordes], as your Father also is merciful [misericors]” (Luke 6:36). How would Augustinian traditions of predestination and reprobation affect the language and understanding of liberum arbitrium (free decision) or voluntas (will), the source of love? How would it affect understanding of the human virtues that are intimately bound up with models of divine and human agency? The versions of predestination studied in this book display some of the ways in which the immense force of Augustine’s teaching in this area was accepted, elaborated, or resisted. They have also enabled me to follow the consequences particular versions could have for people’s understanding of social relations in a Christian polity, whether town or village or parish. This is why I devote a chapter to Arthur Dent’s immensely popular Calvinist dialogue, The Plaine Man’s Path-way to Heaven: wherein every man may clearly see whether he shall be saved or damned (chapter 4). Here we can follow the social and political ramifications of this tradition of election in the specific situations of early seventeenth-century England.

There are, inevitably, some versions of election that I do not consider in detail here. One of the book’s early readers observed that the so-called radical Reformation occupies far less of the book’s attention than the magisterial one, and mused that it would have been very interesting to explore, for example, Gerard Winstanley in the contexts provided by chapter 4 and by the book as a whole. I do not demur. But while figures of “the radical Reformation” have long engaged my attention and do appear in the margins of chapter 5, to give them anything like appropriate attention is, as the reader acknowledged, the task for another book. To attempt to treat them here would have had two consequences I did not want: it would have diffused the argument I make, and it would have encouraged me to set aside my commitment to following the implications of St. Thomas’s view that “from the mode of speaking the teaching is given us.”3

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Versions of Election was written from within both a Divinity School and an English department, both at Duke University. This rather unusual context encouraged me to offer graduate classes across works of literature and theology from Anselm to Langland, from Calvin to Milton. I came to think the history of theology was impoverished by restricting itself to works of formal theology and that it should incorporate literary texts. I also came to understand a little better how a few literary works have made distinctive contributions to theology. In doing so their forms and their specific modes of writing did theological work, something we will see from reading Piers Plowman (chapter 1). In this approach theology is not treated as a background for literature, nor is literature treated as a response to a theological background. I do appreciate that this may upset the disciplinary assumptions of some, and perhaps many, scholars. But here I recall MacIntyre’s reflections on the reception of After Virtue, first published in 1981: “My thesis was deeply incompatible with the conventional academic disciplinary boundaries, boundaries which so often have the effect of compartmentalizing thought in a way that distorts or obscures key relationships, even if that entailed some large inadequacies from the standpoint of those immersed in each of the academically autonomous disciplines.”4 I quote this not because I harbor some strange delusions that my own work is even remotely comparable to MacIntyre’s extraordinary writings from 1981 to 2016. I do so because the passage identifies so lucidly contexts that remain relevant in the contemporary academy. All I would add to MacIntyre’s description of “conventional academic disciplinary boundaries” is that these include the distribution of jobs and the formation of coteries with guildlike structures largely defending synchronic and even single-author studies.

Diachronic, cross-disciplinary work necessarily crosses the boundaries of such guilds and considers their subjects from different perspectives than those shaped by synchronic and single-author institutions. It was in this context, to encourage diachronic work that also maintains commitments to analysis of specific texts, that the series called ReFormations was invented at the University of Notre Dame Press.

One text on which I focus in this book poses some quite peculiar difficulties in a work not written for the guild of Langlandians. This is the great late fourteenth-century poem known as Piers Plowman. It is a

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dazzlingly complex and profoundly dialectical work, one read quite widely in the later Middle Ages and also in the English Reformation. It is studied in the first chapter but returns at many points throughout this book. Indeed, Piers Plowman actually becomes a major source for meditation on changes and continuities between the Middle Ages and the Reformation. The chapter on Dent’s Calvinist Path-way needs to be read alongside the chapter on Piers Plowman. This is not only because the chapter makes some direct comparisons but also because Langland’s work, too, includes agrarian settings in which to explore “the plain man’s pathway to heaven.” These agrarian settings explicitly refract contemporary English politics over two hundred years apart. What difference does it make that the guide in Dent’s work has become a Calvinist minister, teaching and applying Calvinist doctrines of predestination and reprobation and displacing an agricultural laborer, the Plowman Piers?

What can be learned about Christian traditions and the lives they constitute by this displacement? In my view, we can learn some things here we are unlikely to learn in a study that is synchronic and restrictive to the archive of one academic discipline.

What then are the “peculiar difficulties” I have in mind as I address Piers Plowman and give it such a prominent place in this diachronic work? In a nutshell, the difficulty is how to concentrate on its distinctive treatment of predestination and reprobation without shattering the poem’s dialectical form and crushing its dialectical and visionary processes. Hoc opus, hic labor. Langland shows through the figure of Wille (figuring both the poet and voluntas, the power of the soul) how Christian teachings about predestination and reprobation can become sources of panic and despair. And, we note, how they did so in the fourteenth century. Such teaching, Langland shows, can occlude the fact that the God Christians worship is Deus caritas: “God is charity/love” (1 John 4:8, 16; Piers Plowman I.82).5 But he also draws us into a dialectical process that leads to visions of Christ liberating humanity. These visions dissolve the terrors and perplexities that Wille had experienced in his encounters with doctrines of election. What Langland shows is that when the teaching of such doctrines becomes unmoored from Christology and the church’s liturgy the omnipotent God is likely to be experienced as arbitrary and unkind, profoundly lacking in charity: the

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antithesis of Deus caritas. Langland’s poem offers a luminous example of the unique way poetry can contribute to what has proved to be an extremely challenging area of Christian tradition.

Because Piers Plowman is exceptionally complex and little known outside medieval literary studies, I have done two things to encourage readers who have not yet read it to engage seriously with the poem.

First, whenever quotations from Piers Plowman are extended I have added a translation in modern English; second, I have included Derek Pearsall’s summary of the whole poem in its final version, the version known as the C-text, which I use in this book (for this, see the appendix). I am grateful to him and the current publishers of his edition (Liverpool University Press) for permission to quote; likewise, I thank the University of Pennsylvania Press for permission to use George Economou’s translation of Derek Pearsall’s edition. I should also probably note here one thing I do not do in my discussions of Piers Plowman or other works: I make no attempt to summarize how my readings differ from those of other laborers in the vineyard. In the notes and bibliography I try to acknowledge my debts to others in writing this particular work. But as noted above, I am engaged in a diachronic inquiry crossing many specialisms rather than making a text for a guild of Langlandians, or Thomists, or Miltonists. The consequences of this include just those spelled out by Alasdair MacIntyre in his reflections on After Virtue, quoted above. So be it.

I am very grateful for the way Duke University has facilitated my rather idiosyncratic commitments to theological and literary studies.

I am also very grateful to the graduate students in both the Divinity School and the English department who have worked with me in seminars that have crossed the division between medieval and early modern studies as well as the division between theology and literacy criticism. I am especially indebted to the superb research assistants I have had throughout the researching and writing of this book: first, Jessica Ward, now at Mercy University; then, Lindsey Larre, currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Duke University. In addition to her meticulous copyediting, I also want to thank Lindsey for suggesting the book’s title, and for reading it so closely that she followed some recurrent images into what became the

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cover for the book. I am also grateful for help received from Grace Hamman and Chandler Fry. I have learned much from ongoing conversations with Sarah Beckwith and James Simpson: my continuing debt to these extraordinarily gifted and learned scholars is boundless. I should also acknowledge that James Simpson is the person most responsible for encouraging me to pursue this inquiry when I was having acute doubts about its possibility. Both he and Sarah Beckwith have helped me understand the questions I seek to address in this book. Both James and Sarah read the manuscript with the closest engagement any writer could desire. For this, too, I am very grateful. I am also grateful to Nicky Zeeman for many conversations about Piers Plowman over many years, as well as for her always illuminating writing on the poem and its cultures of discourse. I also thank her for an exceptionally careful and helpful reading of the manuscript that became this book. I would also very much like to thank Joanna Picciotto. As an initially anonymous reviewer for the University of Notre Dame Press she provided an extraordinarily attentive and wonderfully engaged close reading. She did so not only in the areas that overlap with her own work on early modern culture, but with the whole text treated as a diachronic study of Christian tradition.

I have tried to meet some of her questions and suggestions in what follows, but her reading became a conversation drawing us beyond the scope of the present work. I am deeply grateful to her—not only for the specific commentary, but also for her commitment to a common inquiry despite theological differences. I am very glad she emerged from the reviewer’s anonymity to continue the conversation. My thinking about working across the great divide has been greatly aided by working as an editor of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, a labor continually supported by the journal’s exceptional managing editor, Michael Cornett. Once more I am grateful to the judicious editor at the University of Notre Dame Press, Stephen Little, and to Sheila Berg for her meticulous eye. Much reading for this book was done in the Rare Books Room of the University Library at Cambridge University, and I would like to thank Claire Welford-Elkin and all who work there for making it such a superb and welcoming place to study.

Finally, yet once more, I thank my closest friend and my wife, Christine Derham. To her this work is dedicated.