Steps XVIII & XIX
Summary
In Will’s sixth dream he witnesses Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, his Passion, and his Crucifixion. A great light appears in front of Hell. The sisters Mercy, Truth, Justice, and Peace disagree about whether Christ’s sacrifice is enough to release souls from Hell. The figure of Book appears, insisting that it will suffice. The Lord destroys the bars of hell, chains the devil, leaves the demons arguing, and releases the souls of the righteous. The four sisters rejoice. Will wakes up and tells his wife and daughter to go to church. In his seventh dream Will sees Christ embodied as Piers the Plowman carrying his cross. Conscience tells Will that Jesus is a conqueror, and, in the form of Do-best, has given Piers the power to pardon Christians who pay their debts. Will kneels and sees the Holy Spirit. Grace distributes the gifts of human skills and Church doctrine. While Piers is sowing the Cardinal Virtues in his field, he is attacked by Pride’s army. Conscience calls upon Christians to band together as a community, but some refuse.
Will meets Need, who argues that bodily need is more important than the Cardinal Virtues, as long as Temperance is respected. Will sleeps again. In his last dream he sees the advent of the Antichrist with the Seven Deadly Sins. Nature, Old Age, and Death brush against him. A false friar is admitted to the Church of Unity, despite the efforts of Conscience and Contrition. Conscience sets out to seek the help of Piers the Plowman and to find proper work for the friars. Will awakes.
Analysis
Step XVIII begins by describing Will’s appearance, which symbolizes his spiritual development from the beginning of the poem. He has become less worldly as he becomes closer to Christ: “In a woolen shift with no shirt and no shoes.” Will sleeps during Holy Week, which is the end of Lent through Palm Sunday. Will’s vision begins on Palm Sunday, the Sunday before Easter, which commemorates Jesus Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. With the flexibility of dream logic he describes Christ as “a man like the Samaritan, reminding me of Piers.” Jesus has come to fight the devil in a jousting competition for the fruit of the tree of Piers Plowman, stollen in Step XV. It turns out that Jesus Christ is jousting as Piers Plowman: “This gentleman Jesus will joust in Piers’ arms, In his helmet and armor called human shape. He’ll appear in the coat of Piers the Plowman Lest the consummate deity of Christ be discovered.” The poem doesn’t describe the metaphorical joust. Instead Will witnesses the events of the Passion—the period from Palm Sunday through Christ’s death on Good Friday. These events include the trial before Pilate, the Crucifixion and Death, blind Longinus and his spear, the Debate of the Four Daughters of God, and the Harrowing of Hell. The poem reaches its climax in Step XVIII, when Will dreams of the terrifying and triumphant Harrowing of Hell. This is the moment between Christ’s Crucifixion and his Resurrection, when Christ descended into Hell to bring salvation to the souls of the penitent, releasing them from the devil’s captivity. Note that the devil, Satan, and Lucifer are all separate characters, as was common in literature at the time. Medieval works in Middle English such as Piers Plowman contain the most fully developed passages about the Harrowing of Hell in English Literature.
In Step XIX Will falls asleep during Easter Mass and dreams of the Crucifixion. In his dream-vision Jesus Christ, carrying his cross, and Piers the plowman are one. Conscience explains to Will that Jesus is called Christ because that means “conqueror.” (Peter Sutton notes that “‘Christ’ comes from a Greek word meaning ‘anointed.’ Conquerors are anointed when they are crowned”). Conscience goes on to explain that Christ became Do-best through his self-sacrifice, the ultimate example of a good work.
As Do-best, Christ grants Piers Plowman the power of pardon to those who pay their debts (which harkens back to the scene in Step VII). The line “Piers then had power/To bind and unbind on earth and in heaven” comes from Matthew 16:19, when Jesus tells Peter, “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in Heaven.” At this moment Piers the Plowman becomes Peter, whom Christ designated to found the Church.
Jesus Christ is then resurrected, ascending to Heaven. The poem turns to the formation of the Church. Will kneels and witnesses the Pentecost. This is when the Holy Ghost, also called Grace, descends upon the apostles, who are figured as Piers and his followers. Grace warns Conscience, Piers, and the other Christian faithful of the imminent arrival of the army of the Antichrist. She gives them gifts, which are various vocations, to help them fight. The gifts she grants to Piers Plowman all related to an analogy of the Church as a farm. The oxen represent the gospels and the horses represent the Fathers of the Western Church. The seeds Piers must plow symbolize the Cardinal Virtues: prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude. The harrows represent the Old and New Testaments that will help cultivate these seeds. When Piers asks Grace for timber to build the Barn of Unity, she gives him Christ’s cross and Mercy, Passion, and Holy Writ as building materials.
Pride, personified, then gathers a gang of neer-do-wells, including Presumption and Spreader-of-rumors, to disrupt Pier’s production of the Cardinal Virtues, to “bite at their roots.” This phrase recalls the symbol of the tree earlier in the poem, which represents Christendom, and the rotting roots which symbolize the corrupt clergy. Thus Pride’s first tactic is to infiltrate and corrupt the clergy. Conscience calls on the folk to “gather together in Unity for good,” to resist Pride, to fortify the Church, and to pay their debts before receiving communion. A series of characters then refuse to listen to Conscience, from every estate of Medieval society: a brewer from the peasantry, a priest (who complains of the unfair impropriety of the Pope and cardinals), a lord from the nobility, and a king. The poem is equally scathing to all classes, as everyone ignores their consciences and abandons the true work of Christianity for their own sinful self interest.
Will, wandering around starving, meets the allegorical character Need in his waking life. Need insults Will, calling him a clod, and then scolds him for not taking advantage of situations to take care of his basic needs for food, clothing, and water. Need defends himself, and argues that he may ignore Conscience and the Cardinal Virtues, as long as he is temperate about it. He makes the case that bodily need is humbling, Christ-like, and brings people closer to God. Later in Step XX, he expresses his anxiety about having enough food, clothing, and shelter to Nature, who assures him ““If you love sincerely, you won’t lack/For belongings or food as long as you live.”
Will falls asleep again, and in his final dream, sees the entry of the Antichrist: “Attired like a man, overturning Truth,/Ruining the crop, ripping up the roots,/Spreading false shoots to satisfy wants/In each country he came to, cutting down Truth/And sowing deceit in its stead like a god.” Truth is a synonym for God in the poem, so in overturning him, he is acting exactly as an Anti-Christ. The references to the crop, roots, and sowing seeds continue the agricultural motifs from the previous step. He is followed immediately by friars, and then everyone else, except for the fools, the humble, the holy, and Conscience.
Conscience pleads with Nature for help to bring the folk back to the Church of Unity. Nature complies by bringing disease and Death to the folk to shock them into abandoning sin. The list of terrible ailments they suffer reminds us that Piers Plowman was written not long after the Black Death, when half of the population of England perished. The poem could be offering the hypothesis that the many sick and dead were being punished by Nature for sinning. This moment echoes the passage earlier in the poem when Piers calls in hunger to get the idlers to work. A central argument of the poem is that suffering leads to enlightenment, absolution, and virtue.
The folk call out to the Lord of Lechery and Lust (another name for the Antichrist) to save them from Death. The battle commences. On the side of Conscience fights the Cardinal Virtues, Nature, Death, Old Age, Unity, Holiness, Learning, Peace, and Courtesy. On the side of the Antichrist fights the Seven Deadly Sins, Simony, Life, Health, Comfort, Fortune, Despair, Psychic, and Hypocrisy.
Will is transformed by an encounter with Old Age, who instantly turns him bald, deaf, toothless, and impotent in a humorous passage. Fearing Death he asks Nature for help. Nature gives him the same advice that Holy Church offered him at the beginning: to love. Will knew the answer all along. By undergoing Contrition and Confession, Will is able in this final step to enter the Church of Unity.
Unity is described as “the fortress of faith,” besieged by the Seven Deadly Sins. When Conscience calls Learning for aid, friars try to come to the rescue. But Conscience doesn’t trust them. Need defends the friars, claiming that they are poor and need patrons. Conscience has some sympathy for the friars, promising them a place in the Church of Unity if they live by moderation and their Rule. He offers Saints Francis and Dominic as models who renounced worldly possessions for love. Envy, in competition with Conscience, finances the friars to learn philosophy, including “Plato and Seneca’s proposal/That all things on earth should be held in common.” To which Will argues: “But I think it is false to give folk such fancies/For God’s law on greed was given to Moses: Thou shalt not covet anything that is thy neighbor’s.” This is a political argument about whether everyone should share resources, or endure inequality without envy of those who have more.
When Hypocrisy injures hundreds in the battle, Conscience calls a doctor who prescribes penance and repayment to Piers of the debts that were due. In this metaphor, the physical represents the spiritual—disease represents sin. The “sick” sinners grumble, requesting Friar Flatterer instead. When he arrives, Courtesy lets him in. He offers to dismiss and diminish sins in exchange for payment. Contrition forgets to be sorry, replacing guilt with swift absolution, and so fails to protect the gates of Unity.
Conscience leaves the Church of Unity, which is now full of sinners receiving easy absolution from the false friar. The true Christian doctor has been turned away, as the folk rejected his medicine: penance and to pay their debts. So, in the end, the Antichrist has won the battle, and the Church has lost its conscience.
But there is hope. In a line that brings the poem full circle, to the first line when Will “went seeking wonders in the wide, wide world,” Conscience decides “I’ll become a pilgrim/And walk the whole width of this wide, wide world/To seek Piers the Plowman, who will put down Pride.” Other than seeking Piers, the second aim of Conscience’s quest is to “find work for friars who flatter out of need/And no longer know me.” This issue of need goes back to the beginning of this Step, when Will listens to the personification of need to argue for an exception to Christian virtue, as long as moderation is observed. Conscience had some empathy for the friars’ need in the middle of this Step as well, promising to shelter them in the Church if they agreed to do their work properly and live moderately.
The poem identifies the central crisis in the Church: corruption. In the end, it proposes two solutions. First, a return to humble agrarian values, represented by Piers Plowman. Second, for friars to get reacquainted with their consciences, and thus recover their true calling—the salvation of Christian souls.
