In Versions of Election, David Aers traces the contours of Christian discussions of election from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, with a particular interest in resonances between the medieval navigation of Augustinianism, on the one hand, and early-modern grappling with Calvinist theology, on the other. Across the temporal scope monograph’s analysis, Aers programmatically relies on both literary and formal theological texts. Aers thus succeeds in crafting an argument that contests many of the disciplinary divisions typical of academic research today, e.g., English vs. religion departments, medieval vs. early-modern studies. The book is admirably structured to maintain this methodological commitment. It eschews a traditional introduction and conclusion, and its chapters are markedly interdependent and resistant to being treated in isolation. While the reader accordingly must attend to the entire work to parse the force of Aers’s intervention, this decision proves to be one of the foremost strengths of the study: Versions of Election sustains a rich, textured focus on the sources, reading like an extended essay rather than a (potentially overwrought) grand narrative--a genre from which Aers explicitly distances this study (ix).
The opening chapter, “‘Predestinaet’ or ‘Prescit’: Langland’s Treatment of Election in Piers Plowman(C-text),” is the “core” of the book (51). It dives directly into the thick of Langland’s work and focuses especially on Passus XI and XII, wherein Rechelesnesse raises nettlesome questions about predestination and reprobation to the poem’s central character, Wille. In Aers’s reading, Rechelesnesse claims that the clergy are preaching a version of double predestination, the doctrinal view that God eternally and symmetrically decrees some to beatitude and some to damnation. Yet, Rechelesnesse registers some anxiety around the doctrine, noting from various scriptural passages it seems that some whose names are written in the Book of Life nevertheless become “unwriten” (16). Rechelesnesse continues to encourage Wille to ignore moral and theological virtues, insofar as the decree of election from God is arbitrary and opaque. When Wille subsequently engages with the character Scripture on the question, Aers argues that Wille has an unusually “acute, distressed, and personal response” relative to his fourteenth-century contemporaries (28), experiencing intense anxiety over how God in the evangelical parable can call many to the wedding feast, yet admit only a few. Langland sees this distress as the result of Wille’s improper thinking, attending insufficiently to Christ’s love for all and to the need for continual moral reformation during one’s life. Indeed, in Passus XX with the celebration of Easter, Aers incisively notes that the language of election and reprobation has fallen away. Langland offers a “profound challenge, as theological as it is poetic” (51) to contemporary theological accounts of election, accounts that privileged an epistemophilic need for certainty about God’s decrees.
It is these contemporary versions of election, devised in largely academic settings, that constitute the source matter for the second chapter, “Wille Returns ‘to schole’: Late Medieval Theologians on Predestination and Reprobation.” Beginning with Peter Lombard’s magisterial Sentences and following scholastic discussions until the development of various general-election theories--i.e., that God elects all of humanity even if some persons may reject that election--in the fourteenth century, Aers argues that a largely Augustinian consensus, exemplified by no less a figure than Aquinas, eventually gave way to a diversity of viewpoints on election in the later Middle Ages. As Aers readily points out, other scholars have documented this history before (notably James Halverson), yet the narrative comes into distinct focus after the sustained reading of Langland in the first chapter. Pride of place is given to the Summa Praedicantium of the Dominican John Bromyard, whose doctrine of general election, Aers suggests, offers a strikingly apt set of responses to Langland’s Wille and Rechelesnesse’s anxieties insofar as it breaks from the received Augustinianism of the earlier scholastic tradition. Aers is clearly sympathetic to the intervention of Bromyard and others, which presents a “pastoral sensibility” (87) alien to the “scole” of Wille. In contrast, more severe views of double predestination, such as that of Gregory of Rimini, were similarly being explicated more baldly in the fourteenth century than in earlier varieties of Augustinianism--an approach that Aers warns will have “consequences” in the early modern period (82).
Chapter 3, “Crossing a Great Divide?: Calvinistic Revolution and the Ecclesia Anglicana,” is the study’s fulcrum between medieval sources and later English texts. Here, Aers gives close consideration to how the question of certainty as it relates to election is privileged by John Calvin in his reforming theology and how this dramatically forms “a decisive break with medieval Christianity and pastoral traditions” (111). Calvin espouses a strong form of double predestination, and Aers registers dissatisfaction with a number of alleged contradictions in Calvin’s doctrine: that between a strong divine command ethics and an abstracted vision of the divine will as well as that between the imperative for the elect to have subjective certainty in their salvation and the ubiquity of doubt and temptation in the Christian life. Calvin raises an urgent question for the faithful about whether or not their faith is authentic or merely “transitory,” ultimately lacking the gift of election (117). While Aers convincingly shows that this double bind proved troublesome to many, Calvinist and anti-Calvinist alike, his readings of Calvin would perhaps benefit from fuller engagement--e.g., much more could be said about Calvin’s distinctly pastoral motivations for emphasizing certainty and election or Calvin’s explicit differentiation of the experience of enduring and transitory faith (Institutes III.2.11-19). The latter portion of the chapter attends to the reception of Calvin’s thought in the Church of England through truly stand-out readings of Robert Bolton’s The Last Conflicts and Death of Mr Thomas Peacock; Samuel Hoard’s Gods Love to Mankind Manifested, By Disprooving his Absolute Decree for their Damnation; and William Twisse’s The Riches of God’s Love unto the Vessells of Mercy, Consistent with His Absolute Hatred or Reprobation of the Vessells of Wrath. Aers effectively traces how English writers with varying opinions of Calvin all were deeply motivated precisely by the question of election. In a manner resonant with chapter two, then, the seventeenth century sees “ideas once rejected and apparently forgotten...survive and return with new inflections as the tradition encounters different contexts” (162).
Chapter 4, “Conversion in Arthur Dent’s The Plaine Man’s Path-way to Heaven,” looks to Dent’s Calvinist dialogue to see a further development of uncertainty’s vexing presence among the elect. Aers keenly traces how Dent offers more skeptical accounts of subjective certainty than earlier Calvinists, warning that none can “certainly know in this worlde whether he shall be saved” (173) even as he insists that the elect are able to readily overcome despair. Aers effectively argues that we find here a more melancholic version of faith, wherein even the newly converted Asunetus finds himself “very sadde” (179) rather than joyful. The text vividly illustrates the tensions internal to Calvinist discourse that Aers seeks to foreground, and--in a particularly welcome bit of analysis--the text instantiates the political and cultural strife in pre-Civil War England. Indeed, Dent’s dialogue is intensely classed, primarily pitting an urban theologian against an uneducated rural layperson, and it evidences a peculiar drive within Calvinism toward hegemonic unity despite the revolutionary tradition from which it had sprung. Once again, Aers wryly notes that the Christian tradition is formed by “continually breaking, continually forgetting, continually remaking and recalling” (181).
The fifth and final chapter, “John Milton: Versions of Divine Election, Predestination, and Reprobation,” centers on the author’s De Doctrina Christiana, which comes to stand as a sort of recapitulation in miniature of the fragmentation of accounts of double predestination. Aers argues that Milton’s distinctly Protestant disdain for authority and tradition (even that of earlier Protestants, to be sure) tends toward contradiction, as in his dramatic “foregrounding of the corruptibility of the external word” (189) in favor of the internal word even as he insists on the “‘perspicuous and complete’ authority of scripture” (192). Aers turns then to Milton’s known insistence of human freedom before God and his defense of general election in explicit opposition to Calvinist double predestination; Milton’s detailed exegeses of the relevant scriptural passages (and Aers’s reading of these in turn) are a highlight of the monograph. Further, Milton argues pointedly against Calvin’s accounts of certainty and perseverance, calling for an emphasis on the decision to pursue good works rather than examining oneself for affective signs of true belief. On the other hand, Aers registers his own disappointment that “tradition and custom blocked [Milton’s] critical powers” (216) in the case of the doctrine of the atonement, in which Milton follows the magisterial reformers’ model of penal substitution. Nevertheless, this loyalty only underscores the force of Milton’s turn to a model of general election in contrast to Calvinist versions of election. In conclusion, Aers claims that it is this “occlusion and reemergence” of various views that is “representative of the vital and meandering pathways of the Christian tradition” (222).
In sum then, Versions of Election provides a diachronic account of the contested articulation, fragmentation, and rearticulation of various approaches to the problem of predestination and reprobation in the medieval and early-modern periods. Aers is a thoughtful and compelling reader of his sources, such that the narrative he provides is engrossing in its textured detail and attention to historical context. Scholars interested in the various sources he engages are commended to read this work. While at times Aers’s sympathies with his sources diverged from those of this reader (as indicated above, I think the reading of Calvin himself raises some questions), Aers’s frank appraisals of the sources were a welcome respite from either feigned neutrality or staid readings of canonical texts. Further, many of the most enticing aspects of Aers’s work are in its methodological decisions to use diverse sources across a long span of time, and these decisions invite continuing reflection. Is Aers’s model of “occlusion and reemergence” simply a series of comparative analyses, a discursive genealogy, an Idealist history, or something else entirely? This reader sees the author’s coyness as an invitation to further interdisciplinary and diachronic work, and humanistic scholars eager to pursue such studies--particularly those tying together literary and religious studies--will find much of methodological benefit here.