Abstract
In Versions of Election: From Langland & Aquinas to Calvin & Milton, David Aers takes a cross-disciplinary and diachronic approach to the study of Christian beliefs on predestination and reprobation during the Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation to reveal how Christian tradition is broken and remade within changing circumstances. Although A. first pauses to consider how the Augustinian paradigm of election might have contributed to Wille’s despair in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, before crossing the great divide between medieval paradigms and Calvinist traditions, A. maintains that his work is not an attempt to produce a grand historical survey. Rather, he works across time and the “habitual divisions between the study of literature, theology, ethics, and politics” to reveal how different Christian traditions are generated, and how different strands of theology are lost and recovered within “changing circumstances” (ix, xi). In Versions of Election, method is argument. A diachronic approach, A. argues, allows us to perceive “the strange mixture of revolutionary transformation and often delayed, hidden continuities that characterize traditions across time” (222).
A. brings to this study a deep knowledge of Christian exegetical traditions and his nuanced readings of the “images, allegories, and grammar” that constitute different versions of election, making the argument both rich and incisive (xi). For example, A. highlights some of the key texts that influenced various responses to an Augustinian paradigm that suggested that “God hated and reprobated some unborn people (such as Esau) while he loved and predestined others to eternal beatitude (such as Jacob)” (xii). For Thomas Aquinas, the distinction between God’s antecedent and consequent will led him to interpret 1 Tm 2:4 to mean that while God’s will is to save all, he does not actually save all. The “tragic potential” of this paradigm is realized in the double predestination model developed by Gregory of Rimini in the fourteenth century and in Calvin’s doctrine of election in the sixteenth century, in which the Jacob/Esau text returns as proof of the symmetry between election and reprobation (62). A. also shows that there were challenges to this paradigm both in the Middle Ages and the Reformation. In the fourteenth century, Holcott and Bromyard developed models of general election that interpreted 1 Tm 2:4 as an open call that humans are free to accept or reject, and in the seventeenth century, Milton rejected traditional exegesis to suggest that “all means, all, ‘including the wicked’” (197). A. observes that Milton’s model of double agency and cooperative will bears affinities with the general election paradigms of the Middle Ages. He notes that while these resemblances do not suggest direct influence, they reveal how theology may be derived from Scripture and how living traditions respond to different circumstances.
A.’s study is impressive not only for revealing such a complex trajectory, but also for his attention to the hermeneutic problems and existential anxieties that double predestination models elicited for their adherents. This focus sets his book apart from other important studies on salvation. His analysis of Robert Bolton’s account of Mr. Peacock—a Calvinist teacher who suffers terror thinking he was a hypocrite and reprobate, before receiving a revelation of his election—shows that these issues were not confined to esoteric theology. They determined how people lived and died, and the versions of God that people worshipped: whether, like Samuel Hoard, they imagined God as a hen protecting her chickens under her wing or like William Twisse, a hen pecking her young. A.’s attention to Holcott’s narrative also demonstrates how literary texts perform theological work, as the account grapples with human realities sometimes sidestepped in more formal theological writings.
Given A.’s attention to Arthur Dent’s The Plaine Man’s Path-way to Heaven, a work that offers readers “infallible signs” of reprobation and election, and because my own work looks at this (169), I noted that Lollard ideas about the true church are considered only parenthetically in the book. Although Lollard writings on salvation do not rise to the same level of panic dramatized by Langland and Calvinist writers, authors of Lollard texts including The Lantern of Light and Life of Soul were very concerned with providing readers signs to distinguish between the true church and the Antichrist’s. Such a resemblance might warrant further exploration in a future study.
Still, A.’s work is impressive for its refusal to be limited by disciplinary boundaries and for highlighting the political and ethical implications of various doctrines on election. It would make an excellent addition to graduate courses on Langland and his contemporaries and would appeal to scholars interested in Christian ethics and the religious and literary history of the Middle Ages and the early modern period.