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The Beginning of the Way

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2024

Conrad Pepler O.P.
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Extract

Is there be any need to defend the introduction of William Langland into a treatise on English mysticism and the spiritual life we may refer the reader to Christopher Dawson’s brilliant essay in The English Way. “This popular tradition of English religion’, he writes of Fox, Bunyan and Blake, ‘which was divorced from Catholic unity and even from the national unity after the 17th century already exists in its purest and most unadulterated form in the work of Langland. He shows us what English religion might have been if it had not been broken by schism and narrowed by sectarianism and heresy’. And again: ‘Langland embodies the spiritual unity of the English people at the very moment when religion in England stood at the parting of the ways’. Piers Plowman, the virile and powerful poem of the English people, provides a solid basis for a truly English type of spirituality.

Type
Research Article
Information
Life of the Spirit , Volume 1 , Issue 4 , October 1946 , pp. 101 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © 1964 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 The three stages or lives are outlined in Passus ix, 224 (p. 111).

NOTE: All references are to the modernised version: The Vision of Piers Plowman by William Langland newly rendered into English by Henry W. Wills (London, Sheed and Ward, 1938). This edition has the advantage, for our purposes, of being easily readable without losisg too much of the power of the original, and also of combining the variant versions so that confusion in reference is avoided.