A century later, William Langland asserted in Piers the Plowman, his mid-fourteenth century moral allegory, that “Christians should hold their riches in common, and none covet anything for himself.” Where devotion to Mammon wrought misery and death, “Love,” Langland wrote, “is the physician of life … the direct way to Heaven.”7 Medieval millenarianism suggests that a beatific, communist promise resides at the heart of Christianity—a promise whose vindication was rooted in a metaphysics and theology of sacramental love.
