The Fellowship of the Beatific Vision

Chaucer on Overcoming Tyranny and Becoming Ourselves

Klassen

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498283694
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer asks a basic human question: How do we overcome tyranny? His answer goes to the heart of a revolutionary way of thinking about the very end of human existence and the nature of created being. His answer, declared performatively over the course of a symbolic pilgrimage, urges the view that humanity has an intrinsic need of grace in order to be itself. In portraying this outlook, Chaucer contributes to what has been called the "palaeo-Christian" understanding of creaturely freedom. Paradoxically, genuine freedom grows out of the dependency of all things upon God.In imaginatively inhabiting this view of reality, Chaucer aligns himself with that other great poet-theologian of the Middle Ages, Dante. Both are true Christian humanists. They recognize in art a fragile opportunity: not to reduce reality to a set of dogmatic propositions but to participate in an ever-deepening mystery. Chaucer effectively calls all would-be members of the pilgrim fellowship that is the church to behave as artists, interpretively responding to God in the finitude of their existence together.

Part I

Pilgrimage and the Beatific Vision

1

The Coherence of Creation in the Word: The Nature of Pilgrimage and the Opening Sentences of The Canterbury Tales

Introduction

In two beautifully crafted sentences, Chaucer introduces the motif that theologically governs The Canterbury Tales: a pilgrimage in spring from Southwark, just outside of London on the south side of the Thames, to Canterbury, some sixty miles and perhaps a three or four day ride away to the south and east. Symbolic of the journey heavenward, pilgrimage gives The Canterbury Tales a teleological and eschatological dimension. The opening sentences performatively embody the implications of orientation towards the beatific vision, or a sacramental ontology. They draw the audience and reader into a deep, playful, resonant, and ultimately ecstatic engagement of the text and the activity, pilgrimage, at hand. They encourage an immersive and full embracing of material reality through personification and imaginative indwelling. Such giving of oneself to the poetry fosters appreciation of the dense possibilities for wordplay that take one further into the word or phrase at hand. The whole becomes a resonating chamber revealing a relationality of word with word and sentence with sentence, the natural with the supernatural, and the impersonal with the personal. Stability is constantly being exceeded or transcended, then recovered, dependent on following, obedience, and sacrifice.

Both as a Christian symbol with profoundly theological possibilities attached to it and as a resource for poetic, rhetorical indwelling, pilgrimage invites reflection on what eschatological desire can mean. Specifically, orientation to the beatific vision puts pressure on the mythological and relatively modern notion of a “pure nature.” Eschatological desire entails that all of nature has a yearning for a supernatural end and is consequently more itself the more it is in God. This paradox allows one to enjoy the rich ambiguity of The Canterbury Tales’ opening sentences in a deeply satisfying way. Chaucer’s fascination with the rhythms and the disturbances of life in this world, so much in evidence in these lines, depends upon the symbolism of pilgrimage. To anticipate the argument of later chapters, one cannot appreciate Chaucer’s handling of the problem of tyranny as a Christian poet without a recognition of the paradox involved here: for Chaucer, this way of thinking about all of reality is illustrated especially well in social terms. The messiness of enduring human relations, as the opposite of tyranny and in the overarching context of pilgrimage, reveals the freedom of all of creation generated by its dependency upon a Word from God. Humanity, taken as a whole, is more itself the more it is in God. A theology of its intrinsic need of grace is in keeping with the Christian claim that the incarnation declares the absolute worth of the material and the contingent as having its being in the divine Word; and that redeemed humanity, the image of God restored to it by the work of Christ, anticipates return to God and participation in the divine life.

The Symbolism of Pilgrimage

The first and most important thing to be said about the pilgrimage motif in The Canterbury Tales is that it applies to the fellowship conceived as the church, the people of God, or redeemed humanity, a community that takes shape around the person of Christ and the paschal mystery.39 The second is that the world of The Canterbury Tales is the world conceived in these terms. It is the world of redeemed humanity as it trundles through space and time towards its final destination, which is the vision of God. In it, the Host occupies an inscrutable position not unlike that of Tom Bombadil in The Lord of the Rings. A church canon and his yeoman overtake the fellowship, the latter to join it as another tale-teller, the former to flee as a malevolent would-be suppressor of stories.40 Apart from them, there is nobody else, except in stories that belong to the pilgrim tellers, figures who are therefore somehow assimilated to the world of the fellowship through them. One might call this mediation the result of the priesthood of all believers.41 Through his covenant with his people, God intends to bless all the nations and the whole of creation as well. At any rate, on the level of the actual pilgrimage, which is the world of the story, there is only redeemed humanity. The audience or the reader travels with Chaucer through the imagination, exploring this pilgrimage world with his guidance and also with the freedom to discover there whatever there is to be discovered.

Pilgrimage involves physical movement through space to a destination meant in some way to represent a heavenly arrival or the promise of salvation, the beatific vision. In Diana Webb’s succinct definition, the medieval practice involves “a physical action undertaken with a religious purpose.”42 Valerie Allen highlights the teleological nature of such action: “Christian pilgrimage is conventionally allegorized as a linear, forward, teleological progress toward a final destination.”43 Donald Howard stresses the point that, even though the ritual inevitably involved a return journey, pilgrimage is regarded narratively in the Middle Ages as a one-way trip that mirrors the journey of life.44

The final destination is often allegorized as a city. Chaucer emphasizes this end when he has the Parson refer to “Jerusalem celestial” in the prologue to the final tale:

“And Jhesu for his grace wit me sende	“And Jesus for his grace send me wit
To shewe yow the wey in this viage	To show you the way in this trip
Of thilke parfit glorious pilgrymage	Of that perfect glorious pilgrimage
That highte Jerusalem celestial.”	To that place called celestial Jerusalem.”

(10.48–51) 45

As Mark Allen and John Fisher note in their edition of The Tales, “This allusion to Revelation 21.2 lends a clear allegorical dimension to the journey to Canterbury.”46 The Parson’s words reinforce the sense of coming to the end of a one-way pilgrimage in the Host’s declaration just before he turns to the Parson to ask for a tale:

“Now lakketh us no tales mo than oon.	“Now we are lacking no tales more than one.
Fulfilled is my sentence and my decree.”	Fulfilled is my requirement and my decree.”

(10.16–17)

As the fellowship approaches its destination, the Host see...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: Pilgrimage and the Beatific Vision
• Part Two: Past and Present
• Part Three: Becoming Ourselves as Artists
• Conclusion
• Bibliography