Langland’s Narrative Christology.

B.18 resolves the Christological problems of divine intervention inherent in the Pardon scene by a “re-solution” of conceptual theology in narrative presentation based on a complex concatenation of images. WL’s portrayal of Holy Week represents the events as witnessed and interpreted, communicated through juxtapositions of different kinds of discourse; as a result we come to comprehend the Passion through a heuristic process. Peace asserts (18.218-25) that God in effect acquires a new mode of awareness through the Incarnation and Passion; as such, a more intimate collaboration is suggested than in the image of Christ’s jousting in Piers’s armor. The atonement in the Pardon scene is represented through a charter or deed sent from God in a unilateral action in which Christ makes himself into a document, but by picturing Christ’s humana natura as acquired through the collaboration of a working man in a fight WL presents a notion of the Incarnation as a joint action of God and man.