We live in apocalyptic times. But, for a chilling sense that the end is at hand, one cannot beat the Middle Ages. So when I reflect on “the burdens of church history” as a medievalist, I find it bracing to ponder some ways that the era's most thoughtful prophetic writers brooded on church history. They were at least as concerned as we about complicity in an institution they saw as compromised at best, and at worst, in the service of Antichrist. St. Hildegard (1098–1179), though orthodox enough to have been declared a Doctor of the Church in 2012, wrote scathing letters to the most powerful prelates of her day and preached sermons against their negligence. No less scathing was William Langland (fl. 1365–1385), author of the sprawling allegorical vision of Piers Plowman. Langland decided to revise his poem after its prophecies about the dispossession of clergy played a role in the Great Rising of 1381, in which the archbishop of Canterbury was murdered. Wisely, he concealed his identity; we know his name almost by accident.

Church membership was not optional in the Middle Ages, and the idea of being “spiritual but not religious” would have made as much sense as being pope but not Catholic. Langland's poem ends when Conscience, disheartened to see the prophecy about Antichrist fulfilled, leaves the barn called “Unity Holy Church” and resolves to “become a pilgrim, / And walk as wide as the world reaches / To seek Piers the Plowman.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Piers is the poet's figure of Christ in the guise of an ordinary peasant. The notion that he might more easily be found outside the church than in it is meant to be shocking. But Langland, unlike his allegorical persona, could not simply walk out of the barn of Unity to follow his conscience—unless he wanted to become a heretic with a price on his head. As for Hildegard, she would spend much of her final year (at 81) under interdict for refusing to obey her bishop, who had commanded her to perform an act she considered sacrilege.Footnote ⁵⁵ For both visionary prophets, loyalty to the church coincided with grave misgivings about its present and future state.Footnote ⁵⁶

Prophecy and church history may be odd bedfellows, but the prophet is in one sense a historian of the future. For Christians, church history entails a prophetic dimension because this institution, flawed like any other, has a future but, in principle, no end. The church is the only human institution that is an article of faith: “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic,” though it may also be divided, schismatic, sinful, corrupt, exclusionist, self-absorbed, and triumphalist. It is in view of this duality that visionary prophets challenge us. (My “us” designates all who are, for better and worse, complicit in whatever we mean by “church”).Footnote ⁵⁷ Like C. Vann Woodward writing The Burden of Southern History for his fellow Southerners, a church historian writing in the church will be clear-eyed but hardly neutral—valuing Christian ideals while deploring the church's failures to live up to them, cherishing signs of grace, cringing at signs of abuse—because this history matters in a deeply personal way. American slavery matters more to a historian from Alabama than to one from Taiwan, though both condemn it. In the same way, “the burdens of church history” fall more heavily on those who have cast their lot with the church. Purely institutional history cannot encompass this theological vision of the church's doubleness. Prophets, however, have more sweeping vision. Not only do they set their idealized past against a background of present struggle or dark foreboding; they also strive to understand what all that sound and fury signifies in light of the ultimate vision: “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”Footnote ⁵⁸

For Hildegard, the city and the bride are living symbols, themselves to be read historically. They are in fact the dominant symbols of her great illuminated summa, the Scivias (Scito vias Domini, “know the ways of the Lord”). In Book II, Ecclesia towers visually and metaphorically above all else, a woman of mythic stature:

Painted in shimmering gold leaf, this regal Ecclesia is an image of the Church Triumphant, her maternal and virginal body figuring the sacraments. Her womb (doubling as St. Peter's fishnet) continually gives birth to the newly baptized. In confirmation, she leans against an enormous, phallic tower that emits golden flames—the gifts of the Holy Spirit. To depict the Eucharist, she stands beside the cross with a chalice to collect the blood from Christ's side, which she then offers as a priest at the altar. Colossal flames shoot from her heart as she receives the vows of monks and virgins, which Hildegard viewed as sacramental. But in all her epiphanies, history dogs Ecclesia's steps. In the image of confirmation, for example, the confirmands do not stand meekly in place but roam hither and yon, let themselves be blown astray, and even assault their mother's head with swords.Footnote ⁶⁰

Ecclesia's last appearance is not sacramental but apocalyptic. Earlier she lacked feet and legs because her story was unfinished; a symbolic figure can be “read” from the top down to denote successive phases of history.Footnote ⁶¹ So when the bottom half of Ecclesia's body is finally revealed, we get a shock. Her abdomen is scaly, her thighs livid with bruises, her legs bloody—and in her vagina appears a monstrous head with gnashing teeth, its ears raised like an erect penis. Suddenly the head crashes to earth along with “a great heap of shit,” violently shaking the woman's body. This obscene scenario depicts the birth of Antichrist, Ecclesia's own son. Her squamous belly foretells a future age preceding that calamity, when the church will be blemished with “fornication and murder and rapine.” Beneath (and thus after) the site of the monstrous birth, Ecclesia's bruised, bloody legs indicate persecutions and martyrdoms to come. These mysteries have been revealed, a divine voice tells Hildegard, because “now the world is in the seventh epoch, approaching the end of time.” The prophets and teachers of the faith have finished their work, but today their “mighty books . . . go unread from shameful apathy, and the food of life . . . cools to tepidity.”Footnote ⁶² More startling than the specific prophecies is the composite figure of Ecclesia, both radiant queen and deformed mother of Antichrist. Mutatis mutandis, she might recall Benjamin's Angel of History. Mesmerized by the calamities he has witnessed, “the angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future.”Footnote ⁶³ Unlike Benjamin's apocalyptic angel, however, Ecclesia does find her way back to paradise. “And lo, the feet of . . . the woman glow white, shining with a splendor greater than the sun's,” for after Antichrist is defeated, the renewed Ecclesia will “surpass all the beauty of the glories of earth.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Hildegard's alternate image of the church resonates more with Langland. This is the building she calls “the edifice of salvation.” Like the truncated woman who stands “balanced on her womb,” the cosmic building raised in Book III of the Scivias is unfinished, a perpetual construction site, whose capstone will be laid only at the end of time. Langland also adopted the image of a building, but as a man of the people, his vision is humbler. In a novel gloss on the twelve-gated city of Revelation, Langland's church is nothing more than Piers Plowman's barn. Grace gives him timber from the wood of the cross and mixes mortar with Christ's blood:

Built to gather in the sheaves of virtue, Piers' barn is promptly attacked by Pride and his army, so Conscience fortifies it with a moat of penance. Soon enough, however, people return to their accustomed sins, prompting a desperate Conscience to invoke the power of Kind (God in the guise of vengeful Nature) to hold them in check:

First a barn, then a fort, Unity Holy Church now fills a new function as a hospital for sinners, physically and morally sick unto death. So Conscience invites Dr. Shrift (Confession), but the patients find his salves too biting, his physic too harsh. Unable to bear such remedies, they demand more compassionate care. Thus it is that Friar Flatterer, admitted by the kind-hearted porter Peace, infiltrates Unity and drugs Contrition, leaving him in a dreamy narcotic stupor. With Piers' barn now defenseless against Pride's army, Conscience abandons his post in despair, as we have seen, and departs on his pilgrimage.

As an allegory of church history, this is clear enough. First, the church is no resplendent cathedral, just a barn of wattle and daub. Yet, with firm foundations and a watertight roof, it is built in hopes of a rich harvest. But the workforce is fickle; little can be expected from laborers like Tom Two-Tongue and Sir Love-to-Live-in-Lechery. Thus the church deteriorates over time (radically telescoped in Langland's vision) from a fellowship committed to love and justice into a barely defensible fortress, trying to hold its own against much stronger forces hell-bent on subverting it. Losing that struggle, it makes its last stand as a hospital. Perhaps Christians, having failed as virtuous workers and valiant warriors, can still be saved in their last hour as penitent sinners? But when that enterprise fails too, even Conscience defects—and as for Piers/Christ, he is nowhere to be found. Unlike Hildegard's apocalypse, Langland's has no happy ending. While his poem includes moments of glowing optimism, he tellingly ends not with the victory of Easter but that of Hypocrisy and Death.

Now today's historians are unlikely to revert to this mode of doing church history. Nor should we; with good reason we have become skeptical of “grand narratives.” Nevertheless, without a larger vision of the Church—Church with a capital C—we may be in danger of forgetting why its history matters at all. At the very least, these medieval prophetic visions will not let us forget “the pleasures and pains,” as Laurie Maffly-Kipp puts it, “that inevitably arise from life in community.”Footnote ⁶⁷