God’s Patients: Chaucer, Agency, and the Nature of Laws

By John Bugbee

God’s Patients approaches some of Chaucer’s most challenging poems with two philosophical questions in mind: How does action relate to passion, to being-acted-on? And what does it mean to submit one’s will to a law? Responding to critics (Jill Mann, Mark Miller) who have pointed out the subtlety of Chaucer’s approach to such fundamentals of ethics, John Bugbee seeks the source of the subtlety and argues that much of it is ready to hand in a tradition of religious (and what we would today call “mystical”) writing that shaped the poet’s thought. Bugbee considers the Clerk’s, Man of Law’s, Knight’s, Franklin’s, Physician’s, and Second Nun’s Tales in juxtaposition with an excellent informant on a major stream of medieval religious culture, Bernard of Clairvaux, whose works lay out ethical ideas closely matching those detectable beneath the surface of the poems. While some of the positions that emerge—most spectacularly the notion that the highest states of human being are ones in which activity and passivity cannot be disentangled—are anathema to much modern ethical thought, God’s Patients provides evidence that they were relatively common in the Middle Ages. The book offers striking new readings of Chaucer’s poems; it proposes a nuanced hermeneutical approach that should prove fruitful in reading a number of other high- and late-medieval works; and, by showing how assumptions about its two fundamental questions have shifted since Chaucer’s time, it provides a powerful new way of thinking about the transition between the Middle Ages and modernity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Dec 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9780268104481

John Bugbee

John Bugbee has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Texas, and Mount St. Mary's University (Maryland). He is currently a visiting scholar in English at the University of Virginia.

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God’s Patients

God’s Patients

Chaucer, Agency, and the Nature of Laws

JOHN BUGBEE

————————————————————————————————

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2019 by the University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bugbee, John, 1970– author.

Title: God’s patients : Chaucer, agency, and the nature of laws / John Bugbee.

Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018052876 (print) | LCCN 2018052958 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268104474 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268104481 (epub) | ISBN 9780268104450 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 026810445X (hardback : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Chaucer, Geoffrey, –1400—Criticism and interpretation.

Classification: LCC PR1924 (ebook) | LCC PR1924 .B777 2018 (print) | DDC 821/.1—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052876

∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

(Permanence of Paper).

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

parentibus meis

sine quibus non

The destine, ministre general,

That executeth in the world over al

The purveiaunce that God hath seyn biforn,

So strong it is that, though the world had sworn

The contrarie of a thing by ye or nay,

Yet somtyme it shal fallen on a day

That falleth nat eft withinne a thousand yere.

—Knight’s Tale, 1663–69

The world can only be consistent without God.

—Thomas Merton, To Each His Darkness

Contents

Preface: A Foretaste of Two Philosophical Themes

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Passion as Theme and Method

PART 1

ACTION AND PASSION

chapter one

Concerned with Constancy: The Clerk’s and Man of Law’s Tales

chapter two

Hermeneutical Interlude: Chaucer, Gadamer, Boethius

chapter three

Bernard and Chaucer on Action and Passion

appendix to chapter three

Bernard, C. W. Bynum, and the Deep Roots of Paradox

chapter four

Holy Anomaly: The Second Nun’s Tale and Active Sanctity

PART 2

WILL AND LAW

chapter five

Law Gone Wrong: The Franklin’s and Physician’s Tales

chapter six

Bernard, Chaucer, and Life with the Law

chapter seven

Conclusion: The Union of the Themes and Its Implications

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

A Foretaste of Two Philosophical Themes

PART 1

ACTION AND PASSION

In 1958, dissatisfied with the cursory treatment his masterpiece Mimesis gave to the poorest of the [literary] periods, the early Middle Ages, Erich Auerbach published a kind of fragmentary supplement to the studies in the earlier book.¹ It involved him in telling once again the story of sermo humilis, a peculiar merger of the most sublime subject-matters with the humblest forms of speech, which developed in Western literature, according to Auerbach, under the influence of the Christian Gospels. In the course of the retelling he found it useful to insert a ten-page excursus on a related historical phenomenon he calls gloria passionis—the paradoxical concept, deeply rooted in Christianity but largely foreign to the Greco-Roman component of Europe’s cultural origins, that suffering might somehow be celebrated, might even be a moment of great triumph. The word suffering here has the double meaning that is now familiar in English only from obsolete turns of phrase like suffer the children, but that stands out clearly in the Latin passio: to suffer can be to undergo pain, but also to undergo anything at all—to permit or allow an action to happen, or merely to be on the receiving end of it. The idea of glorying in suffering, on Auerbach’s account, was just as much a surprise under this wider meaning as under the narrow one: if it was odd to celebrate the experience of pain and defeat, it was also, and perhaps more fundamentally, odd to celebrate the experience of being-acted-on, of undergoing action, in a culture whose common sense generally suggested that it was better to do than to be done unto.

That common sense has a long history. One critic of modern times suggests that it makes its literary debut in the eighth book of the Odyssey, where Odysseus entreats the poet Demodocus to follow his lay of the actions and sufferings of the Achaeans under the walls of Troy with an account of the successful end of the affair; the reason for the entreaty, according to Georgia Ronan Crampton, is that Odysseus is the hero of the latter story, and is indulging his human preference for being an agent rather than a patient.² Another modern voice tells us that the same prejudice haunts theory at the other end of Western literature’s twenty-seven-hundred-year span: one of Jill Mann’s major works aims to correct the trouble that she says feminist literary critics, in particular, have had in reading Chaucer, because they too simply assume that action and passion are clearly divided and that action is always the desirable one of the pair.³

Auerbach’s short excursus gives samples of the opposition to this common sense from across the history of Christian theological writing, and also samples of some secular poets apparently influenced by that opposition. Arriving in the high Middle Ages, he illustrates by recourse to a suitably paradoxical (and appealingly gnomic) quotation from one of the twelfth century’s best-known religious writers, Bernard of Clairvaux, who asserts in a sermon On the Passion of the Lord that Jesus both had in life a passive action, and underwent in death an active passion, while he worked salvation in the midst of the earth.⁴ The last clause is, like so much in Bernard, a close paraphrase of scripture (Psalm 73 [74]:12), perhaps intended to suggest that both Christ’s three-year active ministry and his three-day passion and death—both in the middle of the earth, in very different senses—contributed to working our salvation. But it is the provocative assertion that Christ’s actions were somehow passive and his Passion somehow active that interests Auerbach. It suggests not only that it is possible and sometimes even needful to seek out passivity, but also that the relations between passivity and activity can become surprisingly tangled, so tangled that we may not be able to classify a particular human being’s connection to a particular event as belonging unambiguously to either category.

Bernard’s own interest in the question was by no means fleeting, as anyone who reads the remainder of the sermon will see. Practically all of its concluding quarter is arranged as a series of active-and-passive parallels: Father Adam left behind him two things, labor and sorrow—labor in action, sorrow in passion. Christ takes these two things into his hands—or rather hands himself over into their hands. He makes it possible to follow him through his fortitude (i.e., action) and through his similitude (to us, namely his susceptibility to suffering). We must direct our actions to justice and order our passions for the sake of justice. And so on. The two sentences that immediately follow Auerbach’s lapidary find contain a particularly concrete development of the active-passive theme:

For which reason I will be mindful, as long as I exist, of those labors which [Christ] bore in preaching, those exhaustions in running to and fro, those temptations in fasting, those sleepless nights in praying, those tears in suffering with others. I will also call to mind his pains, clamorous revilings, spittings, cuffings, derisive gestures, upbraidings, nails, and things similar to these, which passed through him and came to pass against him in great abundance. ( SBO 5:64)⁵

There is a division here that a quick reading might overlook but that is hard to miss in the context of the sermon: the first sentence deals primarily with what Christ did, the second with what was done to him. There is also a second subtlety: no sooner does Bernard create this division with his syntax than he muddies it with his choice of words. Christ bore his own labors—with a Latin word (pertulit) we could just as well translate suffered. His tears, listed among the actions, occur on the occasion of compatiendum—suffering-with. As for the passing-throughand-against-him of his sufferings, this attempts to render an unusual and difficult phrase centered on the word transire, a creature of very many meanings. It is suggestive for Bernard’s use of it that it can also take the essentially passive meaning to be transformed, and that Bernard in fact uses it that way a few sentences later. The final clause could therefore mean that Christ’s tribulations, spittings, upbraidings and the rest were quite abundantly transformed through and around him—giving his Passion a quite immediate active sense.⁶

It is a pity that Auerbach does not quote those two sentences: if he had, some stray late-medievalist reading the essay might have noticed that they had previously been borrowed by another attentive reader interested in human agency. Here is the Parson’s Tale:

As seith Seint Bernard, Whil that I lyve I shal have remembrance of the travailles that oure Lord Crist suffred in prechyng: / his werynesse in travaillyng, his temptaciouns whan he fasted, his longe wakynges whan he preyde, his teeres whan that he weep for pitee of good peple, / the wo and the shame and the filthe that men seyden to him, of the foule spittyng that men spitte in his face, of the bufettes that men yaven him, of the foule mowes, and of the repreves that men to hym seyden, / of the nayles with whiche he was nayled to the croys, and of al the remenant of his passioun that he suffred for my synnes, and no thyng for his gilt. (256–59)

The quotation is not a casual aside. It appears near the beginning of the tale, when Chaucer has just introduced the fifth of six reasons that oghte moeve a man to contricioun, the state that a large part of the Parson’s Tale aims to produce. The structure of six reasons for contrition, like most of the beginning of the tale, appears to be translated somewhat loosely from a widely distributed thirteenth-century penitential manual, variously called Summa de poenitentia or Summa casuum poenitentiae, by the Dominican Raymund of Pennaforte. This fifth reason, however—remembrance of the passioun that oure Lord Jhesu Crist suffred for oure synnes (255)—does not come from Pennaforte, and it is the only one of the six wholly lacking there.⁷ It is a substantial insertion, occupying twenty-eight of the tale’s long lines, and the quotation from Bernard (also lacking in Pennaforte) serves as a kind of centerpiece: it comes immediately at the start of the insertion, and later lines (269–73) appear to return to items from Bernard’s lists to add details and implications.

We cannot, of course, be sure that Chaucer was not working from some yet-undiscovered missing link, perhaps a French translation of Pennaforte, that already made the insertion. But—to quote the editors of the Riverside Chaucer (956B)—it is equally possible to think that Chaucer himself made a purposeful compilation and translation from divers sources. The possibility alone is enough to justify our attention. If the insertion is Chaucer’s own, it means that, working for once in a patently theological vein, he saw fit to add the suffering of God to a list of the most important things for ordinary people to meditate upon. And it demonstrates his above-mentioned interest in the way strict separations between action and passion often collapse, because it also means that he chose to lead off his consideration of God’s suffering with a quotation falling just one sentence away from, and continuing the thought of, the most concentrated statement one could find of a certain divine scrambling of the categories of action and passion.⁸

PART 2

WILL AND LAW

Biheste is dette, reads a well-known line from the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, offering to listeners real and fictional a fruitful way to think about promises: they are debts held by the person to whom the promise is made. The surrounding lines extend the idea a bit with a number of redescriptions of the pilgrims’ promise to tell stories: it is a forward or agreement (34, 40); it is now the devoir of each pilgrim (38); and it is the lawe that each pilgrim gives to all the others, which the giver also should fulfill (43–44). All these things, these expectations facing Chaucer’s pilgrims, are debts.

Contractual obligation, however, is not the only familiar phenomenon that Chaucer’s contemporaries would have heard described in the language of dette. The religious tradition they knew best used the word in its most famous prayer to draw attention to a different kind of binding and loosing. Dismiss for us our debts just as we too have dismissed [debts] for our debtors, reads Matthew’s version of the Pater noster, and the verses that follow the prayer make clear what kind of debt is primarily intended: For if you dismiss for people their sins, says Jesus, your heavenly father will dismiss for you your offenses; but if you do not dismiss [them] for people, neither will your father dismiss your sins. For a very long time, it seems, one of the traditions that shaped Europe has suggested that there is something about the result of sin that is like the result of a contract—some sort of implied ought in the world that waits, burdensome, until it is satisfied or dismissed.⁹

And there is yet a third fundamental realm where Western culture applies the notion of debt metaphorically—indeed dead-metaphorically, so that even those who use the relevant words generally overlook what they once meant. In the study of formal logic there appear lawes of another sort: conditional statements that tell what consequence attends on a set of circumstances. If A, then B is a form of thought of extremely wide application: it is, for instance, the form most usually imagined for the laws of nature sought by the high-modern natural sciences. Grammarians and logicians have a specialized vocabulary for the parts of the conditional: A, the antecedent or protasis, implies B, the consequent or apodosis. The etymologies contain the information we want. A protasis is, literally, a prearrangement, sharing a root with syntax and taxonomy; in practice it was once the offer made in a contract: I will serve you for seven years, say. The apodosis is, just as literally, a givingaway or giving back: You will give me your daughter in marriage. Our very language suggests that every conditional statement is a kind of contract, described originally in the concrete vocabulary of exchange, and therefore having something in common with bihest, with forward, with (human) law, and apparently with sin. These forms have enough in common, in fact, to make it useful to group them under a single general concept of law—placing the word in italics, when necessary, to distinguish the general concept from the particular examples of it (the positive law of the courts, the physical law of the scientists, the natural law of moral theology) that bear the same name.

The idea of considering all these logical and metaphysical structures under the same general category will show itself fruitful below, especially in part 2, but it does not originate with me. It can be found in numerous parts of the literary and philosophical landscape: for example, in an essay on law by Owen Barfield, who informs the reader that the nature of law, as law, is the same, whether it be moral, or logical, or municipal.¹⁰ For a medieval instance, we have this voucher from Thomist commentator Cornelius Ernst: ‘Law’ for St. Thomas bears a wider range of senses than we ordinarily allow it; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we do not try to unify the different senses of the word as St. Thomas did, but are content to let it have its discriminated senses in contexts felt to be simply diverse.¹¹ But probably the most thorough attempt to think about law-in-general, and certainly the attempt that most deeply underlies this book, appears in the work of philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who saw the kind of regularity here called law (which he most often called simply thirdness, sometimes representation) as an enduring feature of reality, one of three fundamental categories into which both thought and nature are divided.¹²

What could such abstract maneuvering possibly have to do with us—that is, with a pending investigation into the categories of action and passion (and their muddying) in a medieval poet? It is one of the tasks of the book to demonstrate, across the length of its whole argument, that the answer is nearly everything. The connection starts with a simple question about law. Most, if not all, sorts of law—physical, moral, juridical—are things with which a human will can come into very intimate contact. How does that contact proceed? What is, and what should be, the relationship between a human will and a law that claims to bind it?

This is merely a slightly more abstract form of a question whose concrete varieties will be abundantly familiar to readers of medieval literature: How should human wills react to oaths? To contracts? To the edicts of political authorities? The Franklin’s and the Physician’s tales entirely revolve around such questions, and so many more of Chaucer’s poems involve them as a major component (the Wife of Bath’s, Friar’s, Summoner’s, Shipman’s, and Pardoner’s tales at the very least) as to suggest a poet no less interested in these questions than in questions about action and passion. If we extend the list a bit and notice that the Clerk’s and Knight’s tales too are deeply concerned with the fulfillment or nonfulfillment of promises, we may begin to suspect that the two groups of questions are connected. This should be no surprise, as both themes concern the confrontation between a human will and some more or less external reality: one asks how my will should interact with a law, while the other, the question of passion and action, usually concerns how my will should interact with the will of another. As the two questions develop, each in its own part of the book, they will show increasing similarity and increasing interrelatedness, and it will become more and more plausible that a given thinker’s answer to one question will also indicate his or her answer to the other. By the concluding chapter, it will be possible to add to that inductive evidence some deductive reasons that make the correlation appear not fortuitous, but necessary—thus suggesting that the two questions are, at some deep level, one.

Why such an abstract preamble to a book on Chaucer? Because the book’s wager is that close attention to the two sets of questions just described will change how we think—not only about the particular poems considered below, nor even only about Chaucer’s corpus as a whole, but about nearly all the best-known literature of the high and late Middle Ages. That is partly because the questions are so pervasive, but also because the standard answers given to them have changed drastically in the centuries since Chaucer, so drastically that the responses that leap out, over and over, from both the poetic and theological writings of the earlier age strike many modern hearers as simple nonsense, if indeed they are able to register that anything is being said at all. But the wide agreement that this book tries to document among the responses of the earlier age suggests that to many, and probably most, Europeans of the time they were not nonsense, but common sense. Quite probably they were, like the very different common sense of our age, accepted so automatically that a person holding them would frequently be unaware of what he or she held. Such fundamental beliefs are, however, far from ineffective: and one effect of our own has often been to render incomprehensible, repulsive, or simply boring the writings that another age found full of life and insight.

For such reasons it might not be too much to expect that a careful encounter with these two themes could change not only how we think about medieval literature but to some extent also simply how we think. Such a thing may happen when we discover in ourselves a set of beliefs that we had not previously known were there—when an encounter with a clashing set forces us to see our own for the first time. The resulting meltdown in worldview may lead the contents of our beliefs to change; but even if it does not, it may force us to acknowledge our beliefs’ rival siblings, to recognize that ours constitute one of a range of possible responses to a question rather than simply showing forth the way things are. And even that limited change may have lasting effects on thought and action.

A thoroughgoing change in basic concepts will be more likely after a thorough engagement with the foreign world that serves as midwife; thus most of this book’s chapters are immersive studies of Chaucer’s poems and of the theological ideas most likely to have influenced him. The work is introduced, however, by a deeper look at the first of the two philosophical themes, accompanied by an initial pass at the largely forgotten set of ideas that underlies the once-standard answers to both.

Acknowledgments

A book that devotes more than half its length to something called cooperative agency would be making a strange start if it omitted mention of cooperators. That is all the more true where, as here, the book casts itself as making available knowledge that was once so commonly held as to be difficult or impossible to credit to a particular author; the writer of such a book has had as good a chance as anyone to appreciate how much he owes to those who have gone before. Many of their names he may not even know—and so much the better, if other circumstances are right, for the claim to be putting on offer material that for a long time was disseminated by the medium of a tradition.

The book does, of course, also owe its existence to a smaller number of authors whose names I do know, and a still smaller number whose writings have shaped not only the book but its author. But all those names will be easy enough to find in the notes, epigraphs, and bibliography that follow. There are also thanks to be given to institutions whose support (and patience) allowed the book to deepen its roots and grow to its present state. At various widely separated stages, the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fund, the Divinity Faculty of the University of Cambridge, Wolfson College in the same university, and the Department of English at the University of Virginia all extended aid that made the work vastly more pleasant, and the result better, than it would have been otherwise. Thanks of a different kind to the publishing house of Rowman and Littlefield, which has kindly extended permission for the reuse, in chapter 5, of material from my article "Solving Dorigen’s Trilemma: Oath and Law in the Franklin’s and Physician’s Tales," Medievalia et Humanistica 36 (2010): 49–76. Bob Banning and Alfred DeStefano did yeomen’s work on the index, copyediting, and other Last Things.

A more personal debt of gratitude extends to all the friends, colleagues, students, and mentors with whom I have discussed these ideas in person, who have suggested sources or sent me their own writings on related topics, and who have in many cases also given the great gift that every academic author hopes to receive: a careful reading. As the project has been years in the making, there is no doubt that any list I can produce will accidentally omit some of these donors; apologies all round for any such lapses. But thanks be given (in no order but the effectively random one of the alphabet) to David Aers, Jason Aleksander, DeVan Ard, Silvianne Aspray, Larry Bouchard, Daniel DeHaan, Georgianna Donavin, Robin Field, Elizabeth Fowler, Richard Firth Green, Evan King, Tom Luongo, Ryan McDermott, John Milbank, Heather Morton, Barbara Newman, Jim Nohrnberg, Peter Ochs, Sherry Reames, Elizabeth Robertson, Mark Ryan, A. C. Spearing, Zach Stone, and Robert Wilken. Many of those named may, of course, find themselves disagreeing with some of the results that follow: special thanks in those cases for the commitment to collegiality that allows the discussion to proceed with a minimum of rancor.

Finally, and perhaps most deeply of all, thanks to the pair on the receiving end of the book’s dedication, a declaration true in more ways than they are likely to have noticed.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Passion as Theme and Method

Passivity has a bad name. First of all in the usual sense of the phrase: people speak badly of it. To any reader who doubts the fact, the author would like to recommend the following exercise. Find an audience well acquainted with an admired literary character whose persona includes a sizable dose of receptivity, a capacity for listening, a willingness to change his or her actions and habits in response to facts or motives that come in from the world outside. Deliver to said audience some form of academic presentation that describes the beloved character as passive. Record the results for posterity.

Writing this book has involved many iterations of the experiment in a variety of settings, with an impressive degree of consistency among the results. One version happened, for example, at a presentation about Chaucer to the English faculty of an elite liberal arts college, from among whom a voice rose in perhaps the most insistent protest the project has generated: You cannot, said the voice, "possibly mean to call Custance [the protagonist of Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale] passive. Look at how strong she is, all that she accomplishes. This is not a passive person; you need another word." In vain did I appeal to various kinds of evidence that the power at work in Custance came to her from without, and in vain point out that the phrase repeated so often as to become almost a tagline for the poem—ay welcom be thy sonde— directly invites divine providence to take control of the situation in whatever way it chooses. On another occasion, a quite different audience—undergraduates studying Chaucer at a small Catholic college—raised what was probably the second-most-insistent protest the project has generated: they objected to the application of the same accursed word to the Virgin Mary. In vain did I point out that the tradition has nearly unanimously spoken of her receptivity, that she is everywhere associated with the virtue of humility, and that her most famous and essential utterance, her acceptance of the angelic proposal that she should become Jesus’ mother (Luke 1:38), is delivered in the passive voice—in the translation Chaucer would have known, fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum, May it be done to me according to your word.

Neither protestor was proposing an account that conflicted with mine of what happened to, around, and by the action of the person under discussion. The disagreements were not, in other words, fundamentally about those two persons. They were fundamentally about the word passive. To my mind this is because passivity has a bad name in a second sense also: it is a name that has gone bad, that no longer does the work it once did. In modern speech the word points not to its etymological meaning but to something else: to a stance toward the world that is diffident, washed-out, vapid, languid, effete, uncaring, apathetic (!), ineffective, and so on; the stance of one who is a victim, and perhaps, still worse, a victim somewhat responsible for his or her own victimization. It is not particularly difficult to see why partisans of a fictional (or real) character do not want to see the word applied—and, understandably, want it still less if the character is a woman. The explicit association of women with passivity and men with activity in European thought reaches back at least to the time of Aristotle, and it would be optimistic to suppose that it is no longer with us. And, of course, it is often only a small step to a further association of those two dyads with the even more fundamental one of bad and good.

But the virtually automatic reaction against passivity has some regrettable results in the linguistic, and I think also in the epistemological, sphere: for the category of passivity does have some legitimate work to do, and it need not be negative work. At least that is part of the claim that this book will make, over and over, across almost its entire length. Obviously passive, in its most etymologically grounded acceptation, means simply being on the receiving end of an action, and there is no clear and forcing reason why that reception should imply inferiority to the agent on the other end: what if the verb in question is to praise? In practice, however, ordinary language has carried the word into the character-defaming regions just mentioned. And while it is generally more interesting to argue about things than about their names, in this case there is reason to pause over a word, to regret the difficulty our languages have in hearing passive as a morally neutral descriptor.¹ Its acquisition of a negative valence has, I suspect, not happened at random; there is a pattern to it that can be understood. The feature of the word’s current meaning that makes it so unpalatable seems to be a certain implication of universality. That is, to note a person’s passivity is ordinarily to be heard to say (whether one meant to say it or not) that that unfortunate character is always and only passive. It is as if the language, or its users, have difficulty imagining a passivity that is temporary or nuanced. But of course both things are possible. Temporary is easier to see: one can clearly be on the receiving end of action at one moment and dishing it out the next, so that the word passive can describe a single event rather than a character trait. How passivity can be nuanced is more complicated and more interesting; and it is the subject of at least half of this book.

The essential idea to consider is that it may be possible not merely to be passive and then active in succession, but also to be passive and active simultaneously, even with respect to the same action. The claim may well seem nonsensical, or at least paradoxical. It will be enough at this point if the reader is willing merely to take it as a claim, or hypothesis, to be considered further. This book is meant to develop the hypothesis, in at least three ways. First, by expounding what it could possibly mean—especially by considering its appearance in two writers who have (I will argue) subscribed to particular forms of it: Geoffrey Chaucer and Bernard of Clairvaux. The book is, second, an exercise in working out the consequences of the hypothesis—what might follow if it is true, what, in particular, would change in our interpretation of Chaucer’s poems?—so that, in the hypothetico-deductive fashion characteristic of the modern natural sciences, plausible and fruitful consequences will strengthen our tendency to believe in the hypothesis that gave rise to them. A last and least mode of consideration—least prevalent, that is, in the book as a whole, but most important to spend a few moments with here—will involve some antecedent, as opposed to consequent, reasons to accept the hypothesis. These are not strong enough to force its acceptance; to say that would be to say that we could logically deduce the existence of a mixed active-and-passive state. But they may fall short of deduction and still, with luck, be strong enough to encourage the reader to have a go at the rest of the book.

What are these antecedent reasons? One set is an appeal to common human experience. Regardless of the paradoxical sound of the hypothesis when stated outright, I would wager that most readers can on reflection identify some moments in their own past that at least roughly fit what it describes. One such case in my own mind is that of a friend who, after a long spell as a monolingual English speaker, suddenly immersed himself full-time in a world that ran on a different language (Czech, as it happens; he had gone to live in Br’no). When I saw him for the first time four or five months after arrival, he commented that the best thing about learning the language had been those mysterious moments, often late at night (and possibly facilitated by inculturation into the local fondness for fermented barley and hops), when a complicated Czech sentence would come out of his mouth all in a rush, prompting in him most immediately a reaction not of pride but of shock: in his words, Whoa, where did that come from? Learning to play a musical instrument, or for that matter to ice-skate or ski, can offer similar moments. It seems to me difficult to describe the lead character in such moments as not being active: some insightful Czech sentence (or graceful glissando or impressively upright and stable passage from top to bottom of a slope) really did issue forth from his person. But at the same time the agent in such settings has a strong sense that it is in some sense not him or her that is acting; she has spoken idioms she did not know she knew, used muscles she did not know she could control; and to that degree at least she is passive before the unfolding event, receiving the sentence or the A-major run just as much as the other listeners are. And therefore it seems at least provisionally useful to describe the person as being simultaneously active and passive.

The instances of mixed passion-and-action central to this book appear in other contexts (and other centuries) and will be analyzed in quite a bit more detail; the question of their similarity to the instances just described is open for debate. But these more familiar instances may serve as at least a first approximation to what the paradox could mean; and they also offer some sense of cases in which to be passive is not to be afflicted with lassitude and weakness, but quite the reverse.²

Theological Proem: The Contemplative Ideal

This is a book about a lost ideal. It is about a group of people who believed not only that a simultaneously passive-and-active state is possible but that it is necessary. Not always in the sense of logical or factual necessity, of being unavoidable—although arguments for that claim will appear also, especially in the last two chapters. Even more clearly, though, the group held a passive-and-active state to be what we might call morally necessary: required, that is, if a human is to be (and do) the best she or he possibly can. So far from finding the passive-and-active state an inferior one or a compromise tainted by its passive elements, they understood it as the pinnacle of human existence.

The main title of this book indicates the kind of passivity that they had primarily in mind: passivity, or receptivity, before a divine will. Thus the philosophical question of action and passion appeared for them as the more particular, and more theological, question of the relations between an active human will and a divine will that was understood as issuing from beyond the human self, even if discovered within it; and thus the possibility of combining action with passion in the aforesaid ideal meant acting with an agency or a power that was simultaneously one’s own and also, somehow, God’s. Part 1 of this book is an attempt to encounter that ideal in situ. First of all in Chaucer’s poems: especially in the Man of Law’s Tale, which seems to me a powerful embodiment of the ideal; in the Clerk’s, where the treatment of human and divine agency at first looks similar but emerges, on closer reading, as sharply opposed; and in the Second Nun’s, where the ideal is conspicuous by what is, given the hagiographical context, its nearly inexplicable absence. Situated among those efforts, also in part 1, are detailed expositions of the same ideal of conduct as it appears in theological ideas with which Chaucer certainly had contact, ideas here drawn primarily though not exclusively from the writing of Bernard of Clairvaux.

The second part of the book then takes up what is, on the face of it, a second question, connected to a different dyad: the question of the relationship between a human will and any law (in the broad sense described in the preface) that lays claim to govern it. Here too the investigation turns up a possibility that is surprising or impossible at first look but that, it will emerge, was once asserted as an ideal of human conduct; and once again it is a kind of coincidentia oppositorum, the possibility of a law that acts rather like a will, and of a will that loves, and in some way becomes one with, a law. Here the main tales considered, the Franklin’s and Physician’s, put the ideal on display almost entirely by negation, showing wills in fierce competition with (and misunderstanding of) the relevant laws; but they do so, chapter 5 will argue, in ways that prod the reader into thinking about the better relationships with law that should have been. The following chapter goes on to propose that better relationships should involve not only the ability to break bad laws (as Chaucer’s characters fail to do) but the ability to affirm, love, and ultimately merge with good ones—again drawing on theological writers to show that such an ideal was concretely recommended in the real world and is not just a figment of a fevered reader’s brain. Once again Bernard of Clairvaux serves, for reasons considered later in this chapter, as the leading source.

That brief sketch has not yet explained why it is possible to speak of one ideal rather than two. The most adequate explanation I can offer does not appear here, but arises across the course of the seven chapters that follow—where it becomes steadily more clear that the two themes are linked by bonds difficult to dissolve, so that the answers a given author formulates for one set of questions will virtually dictate his or her responses to the other set, and so that what first appears as two separate ideals increasingly seems a unified stance. Because that stance is best understood by beginning with the two ostensibly separate questions—and because those questions are best encountered as they are concretely embodied in medieval literature and theology—the chapters to follow are written in a bottom-up style, plunging into the poetry in one chapter and the theology in the next, and usually advancing general claims only as they emerge from those close readings. Thus it is entirely possible to begin reading where the author began writing, with chapter 1; and readers eager to get their hands into the literary and theological soil that makes up the bulk of the book are heartily encouraged to do just that, saving the rest of this introduction for later. Its chief remaining task is to offer a sort of warrant for the book’s overarching method: for the usefulness and validity of having a look at the Canterbury Tales through the lenses of these two philosophical themes, and alongside these medieval theological writers. For some readers it will be enough to think of the method as hypothetico-deductive, of its warrant as a simple matter of consequent justification: accept provisionally the possibility that using these lenses and reading these fellow travelers will be a fruitful thing to do, and dive in; the ensuing journey should, I hope, both repay and justify the initial trust. But readers who would like a longer look under the hood, with more advance explanation, can find it by reading on here, where three sections of explicit methodological reflection (and one taking note of related studies) will follow a slightly more expansive attempt to introduce the contemplative ideal and its lostness.

What more, then, can we know about this lost ideal—this notion (to approach via the action-and-passion question) of a human action so closely attuned to a divine will that it can equally well be described as divine action? First of all, we can know that the ideal comes in many varieties. In a relatively weak instance, for example, the human agent might receive from supernatural forces only the idea of the act to be performed; in a stronger case, the background conditions or the personal power necessary to carry it through; and in a still stronger case, the ability even to will to perform the act. The cases that will be most enlightening here—because furthest from the common sense of our culture—are those in which the receptivity is not like that of a quarterback who is handed the football that empowers him to complete a pass; nor even quite that of a teacher who can transmit some piece of understanding or way of life to her students only because she has previously been shaped in the same way. It is, instead, a belief that a transcendent God, transcendence notwithstanding, can somehow be present and active in me in real time, doing my deeds in such a way that I could not possibly do them without that presence—but also in such a way that they remain my acts as well as God’s.³

It has a hundred names—even counting only the ones given it in Christianity, for obvious reasons the tradition to be considered most in a book on medieval Europe. (There will be, however, occasion for brief nods to similar ideas in Judaism, Hinduism, and classical Taoism; they can certainly be found in Islam as well.) It is called mysticism. It is called acting in the Spirit. It seems to be closely tied to what the Eastern Christian churches (along with some in the Latin West) call divinization or deification or theosis. From an abstract point of view outside these traditions, it might sound oddly akin to what is called possession—except that it comes with the claim, better evaluated after the following chapters’ detailed presentation, that it does not involve the suppression or destruction of the human agent, but her or his elevation to the most fully active state possible. In this book also a variety of names will appear as we meet with the ideal from different angles. Some are borrowed from traditional sources: cooperari and cooperatio are favorites among Latin theologians, rendered here by talk of divine-human cooperation; recent theology sometimes uses double agency for the same idea. The Latin writers were in turn translating the συνεργειν (synergein) of the Greek New Testament, the root of our word synergy. A few times I have borrowed the metaphor of marriage, used in the Pauline corpus and by several Hebrew prophets, especially Hosea, to describe a divine-human relationship. I also call the active-and-passive state a contemplative ideal, because in Christian tradition the state of prayer called contemplation, involving some sort of human participation in the life of God, is frequently described as just such a combination of passion and action.⁴ A few names have been invented for this study, or rather have emerged from it, most notably conjoint action, as a general term for action in which two agents work in some sense as one.

It would be wise to begin from the assumption that none of these labels is adequate to its intended object, and that short attempts at description like the ones a few paragraphs above also fall short. In fact, just about all the numerous descriptions with which one might experiment seem in danger of misleading in one way or another—not entirely surprisingly, given the nature of the object being hunted. This difficulty does not mean, however, that it is impossible to say anything useful about the ideal, nor that the writers who hold to it have no way of distinguishing what they find to be good and bad, accurate and inaccurate, representations of it. In other words, the apparent impossibility of producing a definition to an arbitrary degree of clarity and determinateness does not imply that anything goes. This book, accordingly, aims for a via media. There are certainly many places where it brings to light (usually from within one of Chaucer’s created worlds) a way of action that does not match the ideal, thus demonstrating that the ideal is precise enough to have boundaries. On the other hand, in recognition of the occasional usefulness of imprecision, I have allowed myself more flexibility with terms than would be helpful in, say, a book of formal logic, or even in a full-length history of mysticism.⁵

Thus for the ideal itself, at least in first approximation. But I have also called it a lost ideal. The cooperative or contemplative ideal under discussion seems to have been, during a long period in the history of the West, an intellectual commonplace so widely accepted that many writers simply assumed it rather than arguing for it; but that period has not persisted into the present. Confronted by such an apparently stark reversal, one can hardly help wanting to know more about what, precisely, the loss of the ideal consists in, and if possible about what caused it. These questions, especially the latter, involve stepping from the relatively stable ground of literary and doctrinal study to the somewhat more dangerous terrain of intellectual history. And clearly they are questions large enough to require a book-length study themselves. Nonetheless, because this book opens onto, and is to some extent inspired by, the question of what has changed and why, there should be space for at least a few gestures toward answers—some here, and a few more in the book’s closing pages.

The most basic suggestion as to what has changed begins from the observation, made several times in what follows, that the intended object or audience of the cooperative ideal was frequently everyone—or at least everyone who has entered on the way called Christianity. The notion that it is somehow possible to join one’s will to a divine will was not, for example, consistently reserved to Christ alone; nor, as far as one can judge from the writings used as evidence here, to an elite corps of saints or spiritual adepts; nor even to monks, nuns, and other explicitly professed religious. It was often discussed in terms suggesting that the writer thinks of it as the requisite way to salvation, if not salvation’s very definition. Thus the notion at one time appeared, or at least hovered in the background, wherever there was thinking about the relationship between creator and creation, or about the final goal of human life, or about the nature of human action at its best—which is to say that, at least in medieval Europe, it appeared almost everywhere.

There seem to be two reasons that this is no longer so clearly the case. The first is the extremely obvious one that European culture is no longer predominantly Christian—at least in the simple sense that it is no longer true, as it was in the high and late Middle Ages, that the majority of the population, including a majority of those whom a cursory glance would identify as political and economic elites, profess the religion. A portion of the change has gone in the direction of other world religions, most of which have some sympathy with something like this cooperative ideal; but much more of it has gone in the direction of a worldview that sees very little of the real in God-talk, and therefore finds talk of salvation or a creator, let alone talk of divinehuman cooperation, at best metaphorical and at worst meaningless or even pernicious.

More interesting, though much harder to handle competently in a short space, is another reason for the ideal’s loss, one that has happened within the Christian tradition itself. Here it is not so much a matter of the ideal’s total disappearance as of its sequestration. In our time mysticism, if we may thus label a concern with the possibility of union with God, is often thought of, even among practitioners of traditional religions, as a specialized area of interest, the territory of those few people possessed of a special call to it. But this is a more or less recent development; indeed even the isolation of that meaning of the word is a relatively recent development, one which by and large had not yet taken place in the centuries this book will study. In those centuries the word mystical—that is, Latin mysticus and its vernacular equivalents—did exist, but still referred primarily, as it had for ancient Christians, to a way of reading texts, namely by seeking one of the spiritual senses rather than remaining only with the literal.⁶ The absence (or in any event the scarcity) of the modern meaning does not, of course, indicate that the ideas of divine-human union and cooperation were themselves absent; below we will see many premodern examples, some medieval, some as old as the New Testament, some still older. The case was more likely quite the reverse: that sense of the word was not much needed, not because its object was nowhere, but because it was almost everywhere. Where there is little notion of some other branch of Christianity that is not (what we would call) mystical, there is little need for a special word or concept for the branch that is. Thus the invention of something called mysticism as a mysterious, potentially dangerous, and largely optional subphenomenon reserved for an elite seems—again with the caveat that much historical work would be necessary for confirmation—to be roughly coterminous with a loss of power and general currency on the part of mystical ideas. This withdrawal, moreover, appears to be more or less contemporary with the transition between the periods we call medieval and modern: to give it a good wide margin, let us say that before 1250 the ideal of divine-human cooperation is still in full flower, and before 1400 it is still the frequent victor among a few competitors; while after, say, 1600 it seems to be losing ground rapidly, having to fight for a hearing outside protected religious contexts.⁷

At any rate, whatever the source and the details of the ideal’s loss, the fact is that a way of thinking once pervasive and familiar has ceased to be so. It is a fact of great immediate relevance for the understanding of medieval literature, and of Chaucer in particular. The reason, of course, is first of all that Chaucer’s works are shaped at a deep level by the presence of the ideal—or so it will be a major task of this book to demonstrate, by an argument that stretches across nearly its whole length. But equally important is a look at what has happened on the other side of the change: for the mere fact of being modern means that modern critics by and large have not been shaped by ideas of divine-human cooperation. A challenging clash of presuppositions follows, and the result has often been the production of wildly disparate ideas about Chaucer’s characters, because a reader who has no notion of the possibility of an action that is simultaneously human and divine (or who has encountered the possibility but rejected it) will, on reading of an action intended to be just that, tend to classify it as one or the other. By the end of chapter 1 some real-world cases will have begun to appear: critics who treat the combined action-and-passion of Custance in the Man of Law’s Tale, for instance, as a matter either of her own uncomplicated activity (and so speak of her self-reliance) or of pure passivity in the face of others’ agency (and so speak of her masochism).

Faced by such a deep and seemingly intractable interpretive divide, a reader of the poems may reasonably ask how to fix it—a demand that opens very quickly onto the theoretical question of how best to read texts written under a set of presuppositions different from one’s own. An introduction is not the place to attempt to answer such a fundamental question; it is best put aside until a hermeneutical interlude (ch. 2) can turn to it in earnest, using the chapter’s worth of concrete readings that precedes as grist for the mill of secondary reflection. Here, however, it is at least possible to answer the more limited question of what the broad shape of the inquiry will be. If our goal is greater understanding of a text with unfamiliar presuppositions, what sort of things should we look at?

A reasonable first step would seem to be learning quite a lot about the foreign presuppositions themselves, and about how they differ from the reader’s own. The interlacing of literary and theological study in what follows essentially represents a twofold approach to that learning, an approach that divides the book’s chapters rather neatly in half. The first, the fifth, and half of the fourth chapter are organized primarily around close readings of Chaucer’s poetry, often alongside close attention to his literary sources. Since the entire inquiry follows the two philosophical themes, action-and-passion and will-and-law, as its guiding threads, these literary sections also make philosophical and theological inferences, and they draw at times on primary sources from those two fields; but their main matter is Chaucer. Each such unit is then followed by another that reverses the priorities: the third, sixth, and second half of the fourth chapter all look primarily at medieval theological and philosophical sources, putting on display the parallels between what appears explicitly in that material and what has just been found present in more subterranean fashion in Chaucer’s poems. And just as the more literary chapters turn to philosophical and theological texts, so do the theological chapters frequently refer back to Chaucer’s poems to confirm or deepen the understanding of what was discovered there; the experience of reading is meant to be one of seamless flow rather than of arbitrary alternation.

Where in particular, though, should one turn in order to learn about the theological and philosophical presuppositions most likely to have shaped Chaucer’s thought? On many matters the span of possible opinion in the late fourteenth century—and for that matter throughout the Middle Ages—was wide, and any selection risks the charge of arbitrariness: even the presence of an idea in such weighty authorities as Augustine, Boethius, or Aquinas by no means ensures that a freethinking poet of many centuries later would agree.⁸ The safest and most illuminating strategy for this project has seemed to be a search for something approaching theological commonplaces of the day—ways of thought that appear to have been so pervasively present that any theologically literate layman would have found them almost impossible to avoid. I have tried to track down such commonplaces in two ways. One approach, less apparent than the other on the surface of the final product, has been a reliance on standard works of intellectual history. On the question of action and passion, for reasons laid out below, this has primarily meant historians of monastic theology like Bernard McGinn and Jean Leclercq. On will and law, I have looked to a different set of historians concerned with issues touching divine will, voluntarism, and (though the term must be handled carefully) nominalism: William Courtenay, Heiko Oberman, Francis Oakley, Berndt Hamm, and Eugenio Randi are among the leading figures there.⁹

The second and more evident approach has been to expound commonplaces of the Christian intellectual tradition directly from one or another of its best-known participants, cross-checking from time to time with other influential figures, and with secondary writings, to be sure that the ideas turned up in this way are in fact common property. And though the book draws in passing on a good number of such figures, I have chosen to rely on one more than all the rest combined—one high-medieval figure who is especially well placed to serve as something like the anthropologist’s informant who discloses information about his culture or tradition of thought. His fitness for the job is clear not just from the directness and power with which he approaches the book’s two major themes but from the authority, wide circulation, and longevity of his writings: he seems to have been read, in whole and partwise, much more widely than later figures like Thomas Bradwardine and Robert Holcot, and even more than the thinkers like Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham who come immediately to modern minds when medieval theology is mentioned. This is Bernard of Clairvaux; and though his role as a witness to major currents of Christian tradition does not begin in earnest until chapter 3, it is a role central to the book. Hence it will be worth spending a few moments here to discover why he is so well suited for it.

Method, Part 1: Why Bernard?

Having died in 1153, he seems on the face of it a strange choice. If we are seeking information about the theology of the late fourteenth century, should we not choose writers closer at hand? Bradwardine or Holcot, for example; not only did these men live closer to our target era by nearly two centuries: they were also English; they were certainly important in their time, even if studied today only by historians of theology; and at least by late in his life Chaucer had some awareness of the work of each.¹⁰ They also wrote at length on the two themes central to this book. Nonetheless, on most issues Bernard is a better choice as a representative of the theology most likely to have shaped Chaucer’s thinking at a deep level. This is true for at least two reasons.

First of all, there is the question of Bernard’s influence on the theology, and indeed the broader religious consciousness, of the late fourteenth century. He has a unique place in the culture of the high and late Middle Ages, and today’s scholars seem agreed that the practical effect of his writings there is difficult to overestimate. One need only open at random a modern biography or introduction to be regaled with statements of his impact. Bernard McGinn writes in what will doubtless remain for decades the