Twentieth Day of Lent: The Siege of Holy Church

As Will awakes at the beginning of Passus XXII he finds himself heavy of heart and, more than that, hungry.  Need appears to him and asks why he does not simply steal something if he has no money to buy food.  So long as it is done with Temperance (one of the virtues Piers sowed for the Church), says Need, it cannot be unlawful, right?

            “When Need had lectured me thus, at once I fell asleep

            And dreamed most marvelously that in the form of a man

            Antichrist came then and all the crop of Truth

            Turned upside-down in a moment and upturned the roots

            And made falsehood sprout and spread and prosper the needs of men.”

Antichrist gathers an army to besiege the Church, with Pride-of-Life (1 John 2:16) as his captain.  Conscience cries out to Nature to defend the Church, for the love of Piers the Plowman, and Nature sends down plagues on Antichrist’s legions, dispersing them for a little while.  But once the plagues cease, Pride-of-Life renews the siege with his son and daughter-in-law, Sloth and Despair.  When Old Age is sent out against him, however, Pride-of-Life flees to Medicine, and, finding no cure there for Old Age, he flees to the town of Revelry, still pursued by his mortality.

As Old Age pursues Pride-of-Life, he accidentally steps on Will’s head, rendering him bald; then, when Will foolishly curses him for this, he strikes him also with bad hearing, loss of his teeth, and other maladies.  Will then sees Nature and Death approaching him and pleads with Nature that he be avenged on Old Age and delivered from his condition.  Nature replies:

             ““If you will be avenged, go unto the Church

             And abide there ever till I send for you.

             And see to it you learn some craft before you there arrive.”

             “Counsel me, Nature,” said I, “What craft is best to learn?”

             “Learn to love,” said Nature, “And lay all else aside.”

             “How then will I make money, for clothing and for food?”

             “If you love truly, you shall never lack

             Neither clothes nor worldly food while your life lasts.””

Following Nature’s advice, Will makes his way to the Church, where Conscience is still valiantly organizing his defense against the legions of Antichrist.  A new assault is made by a force of hypocritical and corrupt clergy, who wound many and are almost able to bring down the Church.  Penance is able to heal the wounded, but his treatments are so painful that many refuse to take them, leading those around him to convince Conscience to bring in another doctor they know of, Flattery the Friar.  Although Peace objects, Flattery is allowed into the castle:  his treatments relieve the wounded of their pains, but leave them so drugged that they are unable to contribute anything to the defense effort.  As Pride-of-Life and Sloth prepare for a final assault, Conscience declares that he must go in search of Piers the Plowman, who is now the only one who can deliver the Church.  As Conscience sets out on this quest, crying for the help of Grace, Will awakes and the poem ends.

Passus XXII, like Passus XXI yesterday, returns to many of the themes from the early part of the poem, but casts them in a new light.  Here again we meet with the corrupting influence of sin on human society and especially the destructive power of corruption within the Church.  And here, at the end of his poem, Langland does not seem much more optimistic about eradicating these vices from our human life than he did at the beginning.  In many ways, the end of the poem is discouraging, since, despite Christ’s triumph over death in Passus XX and the work of  Grace and Piers to found the Church in Passus XXI, that Church seems about to fall, betrayed from within by hypocrisy and beset from without by sin, at the end of Passus XXII.  And it can be easy to be just as pessimistic today about the prospects of the Church as it was for Langland in the 1300s; some people make quite a pastime of it.

The end of the poem is not really all despair, however, because in the long journey we have taken with Will the dreamer, the nature of the problems the church faces have been clarified, even if no cure-all has been given to us.  Christ himself has shown us that “Dowel” is not some abstract idea: it is his own life, which he shares with us through the Church.  And likewise in this last passus of the poem we see that all the manifold social ills and sins the poem has so often dwelt upon are not just “things that happen” or “part of human nature” (in fact Nature fights against them!), as we often like to think.  Rather, they are the concerted efforts of the enemies of Christ (led by Antichrist, a word which just means “one who is against Christ”) to destroy the life that he has given to the world in his Church.  Injustice and sin are not so much problems to be solved as enemies to be defeated.

So the poem really prepares us to see the problems of the world and the sins of our soul with new and better eyes more than it gives a solution to them.  Langland gives us the hard and demanding treatments of Penance and not the easy (but deceptive) cures of Flattery.  In a way, by not giving us any resolution at the end, he asks us to read his poem again, now that we’ve finished it.  Which, as we enter into this second half of Lent, is exactly what we’ll do.

“Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power.  Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.  For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.  Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and, having done everything, to stand firm.”  (Ephesians 5:10-13)