Imagined Romes by Benson C. David;

Author:Benson, C. David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press

The Debate About Trajan’s Salvation

Critical discussion of Trajan in Piers Plowman has not focused on his Romanness, or even much on his relationship with his fellow Roman, Gregory, but rather on the theological justification for his release from hell. As early as 1924, R. W. Chambers insisted that Langland used Trajan to challenge conventional medieval church doctrine that good works alone are insufficient to secure salvation.24 Others disagreed with Chambers, among them T. P. Dunning and later Britton J. Harwood, who both argued that Trajan’s salvation is not exceptional but fully in accord with standard Catholic teaching.25 In one of the most original treatments of the whole question, “The Trouble with Trajan,” Frank Grady divides the critics who write about Trajan’s salvation, perhaps a little too neatly, into those who see it as “orthodox” and those who see it as “heterodox,” and he quotes Robert Adams as predicting that “this debate is likely to continue.”26 Adams himself had earlier attempted to transcend and reframe the debate by citing Trajan’s salvation as an example of Langland’s semi-Pelagianism, the belief, which Adams says most theologians held by the thirteenth century, that good works were meritorious, even for nonbelievers.27 Adams argues that Langland “believed fervently in man’s obligation to do his very best (facere quod in se est) and in its guaranteed complement, divine acceptation.” As proof of this, he offers Trajan’s insistence that he was freed from hell on account of his righteous deeds, rather than as a result of intercessory masses or prayers: “No episode in the poem marks Langland more clearly as a semi-Pelagian than this one.” Adams also points out that although Trajan’s good works were not enough to keep him out of hell initially, they did attract Pope Gregory’s subsequent admiration; thus his works, though not sufficient alone to achieve salvation, “were, in some sense, a cause of the mercy granted him.”28 Many subsequent discussions of Trajan, such as those by John Burrow, James Simpson, and Emily Steiner, accept, at least in general, Langland’s semi-Pelagianism, although a substantial attack on that conclusion has been made by Alastair Minnis.29

It is understandable that modern academic opinion should differ about the nature of Trajan’s salvation, because ideas about it were not fixed in the Middle Ages. Langland’s source, the Legenda aurea, concludes its account of Trajan with an extensive survey of different views of the emperor’s fate, as noted above.30 It reports that some say that Trajan was restored to life so that he could become a Christian and receive grace; others, that his punishment was only temporarily suspended; others, that he was sent to hell with the knowledge that Pope Gregory would eventually pray for his release; and still others, that even if Gregory did not actually pray for him, God often grants unexpressed wishes, though in any case Trajan was only granted relief from infernal pain, not heaven itself. Two starkly opposed views about Trajan’s salvation in the popular English universal history the Polychronicon indicate the range of late medieval opinion on the issue.

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