God’s Patients

John Bugbee

Description

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.

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 – though arguments for that claim will appear also, especially in the last two chapters below. 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 most readily understood as issuing from beyond the human; and 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 One 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 One, are detailed expositions of the same ideal of conduct as it appears in theological ideas with which Chaucer certainly had contact, 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 concidentia 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 five 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 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 one; 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.”

(excerpted from introduction)

Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

Preface – A Foretaste of Two Philosophical Themes

Introduction – Passion as Theme and Method

Part 1. Action and Passion

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

2. Hermeneutical Interlude: Chaucer, Gadamer, Boethius

3. Bernard and Chaucer on Action and Passion

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

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

Part 2. Will and Law

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

6. Bernard, Chaucer, and Life with the Law

7. Conclusion: The Union of the Themes and Its Implications

Bibliography

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Theology
• Literary Criticism
• Medieval
• Edad Media
• Middle Ages
• The Canterbury Tales
• Christianity
• History
• Geoffrey Chaucer

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 30 décembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268104481
• Langue: English

Extrait

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
A CTION AND P ASSION
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
W ILL AND L AW
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 A CTION AND P ASSION
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