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... HISTORY AND

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A)3STRACT /

CI1ris tian tradition views his tory as a vector, 'of which

the beginning and end points are known. Autonomous ev~nts

which occur betwean these po~nts are considefed as furtber adumbrations of the divine plan. History, then. is a dis-

course' between G~d and man, in which God more and more reveals /

his Providence. Christian sign theory, based on St. Paul and

developed by St. Augustine, reduced all

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RESUME

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L'histoire est vue par le tradition chrtienne comme tant " un vecteur, dont les deux bouts sont connus. Tout vneme~t

autonome qui a lieu entre ces deux bouts est considr d'tre un

lment de l'esquisse du dessein div~n. Donc l'histoire -est le discours qui se tient entre Dieu et l'h~mme, dans lequel Dieu r-

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v1e de plus en p1ns sa Providence. La thorie chrtienne des - //

signes, fonde par St. Paul et 'dv1oppe par St . Augustin, con-

vertit tout signe en signe verbal, et par cbnsquent elle tend , '" ...... . ~

cette conception par 'son insistence que l'on ne connait Dieu que

par le fait de participer au: discours de thophnie et d'interpr-

tation, qui es t ve'rbal. L' homme, du 1 fait qu'il es t serr par le

temps, peut connatre le Verbe ternel seulement par moyen de , >

son approximation temporelle, qui est le narratif. 1

Ces suppositions au sujet de l'histoire et de'l',pist,mologie ont fait l'univers mental qui anime ';r.'roilus and Criseyde. 1 Les

personnages du pome russissent au fur et mesure qu'ils vivent

dans le temps et continuent l'acte narratif en tant qu'interprtes

dUldessein divin. L'chec de telui qui ne vit pas dans le temps

ni ne construtt.pas d'explication provisoire de ce qui se passe

e~t un rtablissement de la Chute d'Adam, o l'on maintient qu'on peut',exister, 'comme Dieu, immuable et ternel. Mais mme ceux qui

1 font des narrati~s sont exclus de l'histoire chrtienne qui en-cadre tout, et sont par consquent,incapables d'orienter leurs

interprtations vers le vritable objet de la cognition: Dieu.

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TABLE 1 OF CONTENTS \1

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Preface. .... -v>

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f Chapter One. The Frame of History. l I~ ~ 1 , . ~ \ \ Chapter Two. The Narrative Act. 14 . ' A. Di~c~rsive Form. '17

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B. Medi~'val Sign Theory. 22 Il

Chapter Three. 1

Literary Consequences of Christian Hi~toric~sm and Epistemplogy. 34

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A. Ris t'ory an~ Allegory. 3'5 B. Troilus and Criseyda-. 38

t 1 / Chapter Four. .The Text of the Troilus: .52

A. Troilus. 53

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f B. Criseyde. 75 -/ C. Pandarus and Diomed'e. 86

, D. Narrator and Audience. .93

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Bibliography . 103""

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PREFACE.

In beginning to study the works of Gebffrey ,Chaucer l was ,

l' greatly impressed bi D, W. Robertson' s ~ Preface to- Chaucer, and

remairr so. Yet'I realized that Robertson's approach, whieh is 1

'sa lucid' and brings so much learnine ta bear in, cons l.dering the /

1

poetry, ,is virtually impossible to duplica te. One would have. to

spend a lifetime s tudying iispects of medieval ci vilization, as

Professor Robertson has, to read Chaucer so fully tthough ~

RoDrtson is sometimes over-systematic in his critieism). It be-came clear to me that as a student new to Chaucer l am not able

,

to work fruitfully through specifie medieval image systems, ar-\

tistie conventions or social organisms to reach the poem's specif-

ic meanings for a fourteenth-century audience. Instead'I have

sought out broad issues which represented habits of mind probal11y ( shar~d by Chaucer and his audience. This approach through lIa tti-,

tudes, rather than specifie articles of faith," as Susanne K. \

Langer puts it" Jl1ay permit one, even the, noyice, to make som

sense of this difficult work. , ,

A great advantage, l believe, of the pproa~h through cul-1

'tu~al assumpt~ons as'broad as tiistory anr epistmology is that the intention of the author is not the issue. One seeks to dis-

cover net. what Chaucer meant (a quixotic adventure at best) but rather what his, audience, inhabitnts ef one mental universe,

,would understand through such assumptions,.

l gladly aCknowledge, my:debt to Professer Michael Bristol

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of McGill University, in whose seminars the idea for this

thesis was born. l owe thank$, too, to Professor David Williams of McGill , for his 'criticism "and gui~nc~ in the writing 9f thi:~ thesis J and to Bruce Greenfield', a fellow

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s,tudent, for many hours of conyersa~ion w~ichifelped greatly

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interpretation of the Troilus. '" ' , J; ,

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CHAPTER ONE

THE FRAME OF HISTORY

Another of the king's chief men, assenting ta his persuasive and prudent words, im-mediately added:. "Thus, 0 king [Edwin, of the Angles], the present'life of men on earth, in comparisbn with that time'which is unknown to us, appears to me to be as if, when you are sitting at supper with your ealdormen and thegns in the winter-time, and a fire iS'lighted in the midst and the hall warmed, but everywhere outside the storms of wintry,rain and s~ow are raging, a,sparrow should come'qnd f1y rapidly through the hall, coming in at one door, and immeqiately out at the other. Whilst it is inside, it is not touched by ~he storm of winter, but ye~, that tiny space of calm gone in a moment, from winter at once returning to winter, it is lost to your sight-. Thus this life of men appears for a little while; but of what is ta follow, or of what went before, we are entirely ignorant. Hence, if this

'new teaching brings grter certainty, i t seems fit to be followed." The res t of the nobles and king's,counsellors, by di-vine inspiration, spoke tQ the~ ,same effect.

from Bede's Ecclesiastical l History of the Ehglish Nation

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In The Tjlree Temptations Donald R. Howard speaks of 1

Chaucer 1 s Troilus and .Criseyde as a poem in which "the ". , .

Chris tian narrator addre'sses his Christian audience. ,,2

The way that Troilus 1 c'rifeYde,l Pandarus and Diomede face . .

liistory', interpret its permutations, and face the' future will

be assessed, then, by that audience in terrns of the Chris-o

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tian view of ,historYi in terms, that i8, of the characters'

acceptnce pf and compliance with what Auerbach caUs.

Judaeo-Christianity's. "on~ 'concept of universal history

and its interpretation,,3 whic'h excludes aIl other views . .,..

Chauer' s pagan story clearly was wri tten in anticipation

of such assessment: this is the basis of the poem's irony,

and in the last analysis, it 'is the ground of its meaning.

Mircea El'iade nten'ded The My th of the Eternal Return4

as an introduction to a philosophy of his tory, and i-t is

aIs such that l refer to it 'in order -to sketch Judaeo-

Christian assumptions about the ~atu~e of h~story and its

'interpretation. In this work Eliade distinguishes archaic

traditional man from modern man on the basis of their very

differ;nt approahes to events in history. In Mimesis

Erich Auerbach considers Biblical historicism by examin-

ing the literary text, and thereby.develops the striking

argument' that the Jucl.aeo-Christian concept of history

necessarily -- tyrannically -- obliges the believer to

endlessly interpret autonomous events in the light of

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revealed truths. in order that rtheir meanngs, thus deci-

phered, might be shown to fit into the frame story of

Fall and Redem~~ion. ., 1

Eliade and Auerbach, speaking respectively as phil-, ,

osopher of history and literary- critic, provide terms by

which may' be exam:ned the,\istorical ironies of Tr~ilus and Criseyde, and the difficulties its characters e~-

'perience in conceiving even their individual histories.

History, in the Judaeo-Christian world," is seen

as "a sUG,cession of even~s that are irreversible, up-forese~able, possessed of autonomous value .,,5 Wes tern cultureoassumes this view of history' to be natural,

even obvious; on the contrary, it represents a decisive

, metaphysical reorie~jltion. It i8 this coneption of t

time as continuou8,i as opposed to cyclical, whi'ch --,' . MLrcea Eliade P?ints out. in The My th of ~ Eternal'

Return as distinguishing historical civili~ations from

archaic ,ones. - These are two distinct positions:

the one traditional, adumbrated>(with-out ever ha~ng been' clear1y for~ulated) in a1l primitive cultures, that of cyc-l1cal time, period~cally regenerating

nitself ad infinitun1; the other modern, that ofrinite time" a fragment (though itself also cyclical) between two a-temporal eternities. 6 .

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Time, then, for mod'e~"JIlan, is limi ted, and the' aven ts " which fil! it unique: "possessed of autonomous value. II

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Events o~re no longer seen as', endless rep~titions of /

eternal archety.pe,s. Modem man values what archic

man fears: , , - .

, And the ,crucial differency between the man of archaic civi1izations and modern, historical man lies in the incrasing value the latter gives to historical

'events, that is, to the "novelties" , that, for t~aditional man, represen~ed

~ther meaningless conjunctures or in-fractions of norms (pence "fau1ts," ''sins," and so on) and that, as such, r~quired to be expe11ed (abolished) period.iJc~ly. 7, -~

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Tne "new" idea o.f the singularity of event~ means that 1

v time is pot only irreversi,ble, but that i t a160 ha~. a

directi.ori. Jacques Maritain dills i t "vectorial. ,,8

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The prophets of Isr~el p~ovided "vetorial time"w;ith

a mean,ing: . li

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.. nQt~s that this rejection of periodic reg~neration none-,,1 ~ ~fli ,

theless indicates "an antihistoric attitude "JI and repre-0" :,. ......

sent's a new way to cope wi th what he c"a11s "the terror of

history" :

The irreversibi1ity of historical events and of time is compensated by the limi-t?tion of history to time ... in the Messianic conception history mus t be toleratecl because i t has an eschato- ' logical function,. but it can be t;:oler-ated only because it is known that,' one day or nother, it will cease .11 '

/ The Old Testament stories clai~ ,to prese~t the his-

tory of the world from Creation to the, Last D.ays, while

focusing"specifically on- the relation of the Hebrew .

people' to their one God. In Mimesis, Erich ~t{t:~~bach points out tha~ although the Old Testament comprises three genres ("legend, qistorical reporting, and inter-preti ve his torical. theolo~y"l2), the t~ne and structure of most stories cnfirm that it i8 concei:ved as a work

of historicalre~rtirig. The stories of the Old Testa-ment are too confused to be legend/:

The his~orical event which we witness, or learn from the testamony of chose who witnessed it, runs much more variously, contradictorily, and confusediy. . . . Legend arranges' its material" in a simple and straight-for-ward way; it detaches it from its contemporary historical context, 50 that the latter will not confuse iti i t knows only cle.rly outlined men who act from few and simple motives and the' continuity of whose feelings

. and actions remains uninterrupted-. r3

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We read the stories of biblical characters,then, not

as legends, but as histories of persona'lit~es: 14 These ./

personalities are formed by God; they change; their mo-/

tives are, db~cure, even contradictory. Yet they remain recognizab1e as individuals because of t~e presence bf

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their past: "A1though they are nearly a1ways caught

upon an event en&agi~g aJl-their facilities, theyare

not so entirely immersed in its present that they do " /

not remain continually consGious 'of what has happened . . 15

to them earlier and elsewhere" Readers of Old Testa:.

ment narrative then, like its characters, are obliged

to pay close attention to history. ,~~/..- "

,Though the Old Testament i9 s tructurally ~ess

unified than the work of Homer, fo~_exampleJ its world-view is nonetheless consistent, not chaotic:

the various-' c~~ponents aIl belong to one concept of universal history and its interpretation. If certain elements survived which did not lmmediately ,fit in, i.nterpretation took care of them; and so the reader is at every moment aware of the universa,l re1igio-his-torical perspective which gives the individua1 stories their general me~ning and purpose.16

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The hi'story presented .by the Old Testament is' 'unique in

- that it leave,s largely open~the time joining' Creation and the fulfilling of the/Covenant: the ends of his-

tory,.not its me ans , are known. -This :J'one 'con~ept of .. .,

universal history and its interpretation" imposes upon

believers the effort to force aIl events into its frame,

to read aIl event,S as elements in the adumbration of the -,-

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divine plan. The claim to truth of the Old Testament, as / -

Auerbach points out, "forces it to a cons tant interpreti ve

change in its own content. H17 SO 'history has a: meaning: it /

leads to the salvation of the chosen people. The~efore, "in-

terpretation in a determined direction becomes a general method

. of comprehe~ding r~ality. ,,18 The events in the sequence of time from the beginning to tlfe Las t Days are part not only of

f a yector of temporali ty. but -- more important -- of a vector

of cognition. They mus't be inte~preted so as to conform to the kno,wn ends of his tory; they mus t be gi ven vaiue wi thin the

frame of orthodox belief, that by their accumulation the be-..,

liever i5 propelled ineluctably across the threshold of time

and into the bosom of the Lord. .

As the political an~ social realities grew ever more

different from those depic:ted in the Old Testament, ~he effort

o{-int~rpretation required new ingenuity, for it w?siessential \"

that the- frame story, the known ends of history, not be compro-

mised by novelty. Interpretation managed to assimilate events . .

intoJ~he meaningful flow of ti~e without great difficulty until ;:. ?'''

history' 5 most ~ingular event, the Incarnation. The Hessiah .... -

awaited by the Jws had arrived, many believed, and though he . (

opened., the ~tes of Heaven by hi,s suffering. and death, and thus .... ~ ,

made immediate individual salvation possible, he did not then /

complete history and save mankind. A new way of readi~g _,' S.crfptu:t;"e -- as weIl as new/ accounts of the life of God as man

were needed to exp Iain the actions of the Hord made flesh 1 and ~

to pr,oj ect a new vision into the future. The early Chris tians

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rose to this challenge: "Paul and the Church Fathers rein ter-

preted the entire Jewish tradition as a succession of figures ~ V

prognosticating -the ,appearance of Chri~t.,,19 The fact of the 1

. " Incarnation, the manifes tation crf Gad not through a sign but in

fact" in the form of a man, completely reoriented the Scriptural

tradition. Eliade quotes Hend-Charles 'Puech. on this subject: r

liA straight line traces the course of humanity from initiaLE-al-l---to final Redemption. 'And the

__ ~ __ --------m~this history is unique, because the Incarnation is a unique fact. . . . C.hrist died for our sins once only, once for aIl (hapax, ' ephapax 1 semel), i t is not an event subj ect to repetition, which can be reproduced several times (p.ollakis). The d~\relopment of his tory is thus governed. and oriented by a unique fact 1 a fact that stands entirely alone. Consequent-ly the destiny of aIl mankind, togeth~r with the individual destiny of each one of US , are both likewise played out once, once for aIl, in a concrete and irreplaeeable time which is that j of h~story and life, "20 1 \

The certainty and catholicity of renewal through Christ, as 1

expressed in the New Testament accounts, reminds believers I "

"that suffering is never final; that death ,is always followed , - 1

by resurrection; tha~ every defeat is annulled and transcended by the final victory. ,,21 . But this transcendence of, earth1y de-

feat is predicated on belief in a God of ~alvation, as Eliade points out:

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Basically, the horizon of archetypes and'repeti-tion cannot be transcended with impunity unless we acc~pt/a philosophy pf freedom that does not exclude God." And indeed this proved to be tr'ue -when the horiz0n of archetypes and repetition was transcended, for the first time, by Judaeo-Chris tian:i....sID , which introduced a new category into religlous experience: the category of faith. It must not be forgotten that:, if Abraham' s faith can be defJ.ned as "for Gad e.very- . thin'g is possible," the faith of Christi'anity , implies that everything i8 lso'possible for

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man. . .. Fai th, in this context, as in wany others, means absolute emancipation from any kind of natural "law" and hence the l' highest freedo~ that man can imagine: free-dom to intervene even in the ontological constitution of the universe. 22

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Jacques Maritain says that the freedom of the Christian' is, in

fact, a freedom from .the regimen of the Old Law, whose moral

precepts nonetheless remain.binding. The New Law, he say~, /

limi ts ceremonial observances while requiring "puri ty in the . t 1 t f h' 1,,23' h ~ . h .' ln erna ae sot e sou t at lS, lt puts new emp aSl~ on

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the individual 's responsibility for his own salvation, _But the

evangelical tradition implies that the stte of grace is attain-

able byanyone at any moment; thus

for him who shares in this etern'l nunc of' the reign of God, history ceases as totally as i t does for the man of the archaic cultures, who abolishes it perioditally. Consequently,

f~r.the hristian too, history can be regener~ ated, by and throueh each individual believer, even before the Saviour 1 s second coming", \olhen ' it will utterly cease for aIl Creation~L4

Therefore, despite the opposition of early Christian thinkers,

by the Hiddle Ages "the eschatological conception (in its two .

essential moments: the creation and the end of the world), r [was] complemented by the theory of cyclic unulatidn that ex-

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plains the period{c return of. event~. ,,25 This cyclic element .

of vectorial time, obvious in the natural world, is acknowledeed

in the Christian liturgical year, which is based upon a represen-

tation of the events af Christ's life. Nevertheless, the key

to being a Christian is free fond complete acceptance.of ,the

paradigm of renewal, as expressed most fully in the Bible's

accounts of unive'ysal history, from Genesis to Apocalypse. Any

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individual renewal is s,ubordin"te, to this frame., and must find ,

its place within it. Faith is the conditio sine gua'!!2Q. of the " Chris~ian; his sal vation turns on his belief, not his understand-

ing. Anselm t s formulation, Fides quaerens in tell~cturn, makes ,

elear the absolute primaey, in the ord~r of ognition, of faith

. Gdf h dl. ln 0 as'guarantor 0 t e para 19m.

The Bible's claim to truth, then, as Auerbach points out,

is absolute:

it is tyrannical - - it exeludes aIl other claims. The' world of the Scripture-'stories is not satisfied with claiming to be a his-torically true reality - - it insists that it is the only real world, is destined for autocracy. AlI oth~r seenes, issues and ordinanees have no right' to appear indepen-dently of it , and i~ is promised that aIl of them, the history of aIl mankind, will be given their due place within its frame, 'will be subordinatd to it. . . . . . . . ~. .. . .. . . ..

Far from seeking, like Hower, merely to make Us fqrget our reality for a few'hours, it seeks' to overcome our reali ty: w are to fit our own life into its _''lorld, feel our-selves to be ,elemeuts in its structure of universal history.l6

The b~li~ver, therefore, must coneur that the story of this , /

world 'is the story of sin and redemption, and accept the

Bible' s implici t argument that a11 stories,' whatever" they are

about, are finally about renewal. As members of a self-con-

scious community, Christians, are obliged to take an intense in-

teres t in' his tory, ;in accounting for change in t,he linear pro-

,gression from Fall to Judgement. As indiv{duals, they are bound by:the unique fact of the Incarrtation to imitate Christ, for if

history is to make sense, their lives as Christians must mak~

sense.

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This discussion of the frame of history began with the , \

well-knm.m, sparrow simile from Bede' s account of the cbnversion

of Edwin. lt is eloquent testimon~ in support of Eliade's argu-

ment that the Judaeo-Christian tradition removed "the terror f

historytl by making time finite and by giving history a meaning. , ,

,

Man's' ignorance of the "w;inter at once returning to winter" 1 that encloses our lives was ended by his acceptance of ~he b~b-

lical frame story. GtVen hope for renewal beyond time, the , .

believer tyrned ta the crucial task of understanding the meaning / .

of his life in terms of revealed history. In ,accepting the frame, , ,

one was obliged ta live 'in time, not to refuse it, as Maritain /

points out: /

No'doubt, to absent oneself from history is to seek dea1:h. . . we must nei tn~r cop':tain nor feel guilty if history works against us: it;, will not vanquish our Gad, and escape His pur-~ses, either of mercy or of justice. The

~ief thing, from the ~oint of view of exis-tence in history, is not to succeed; success ~ never eT1.dures. Rather,J' it is to have been there, to have6been present, ana that rs-ineffaceable. Z

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A Christian's lifetime should be, then, a vector of cognition.

Fully present in time, he should gro~ toward knowledge of God through his ~understanding of the meaning of universal history and of his own life.' And by a constant effort of interpretation,

, 'j .,~ h~ should learn more and more profoundly the truth of the con-

gruence of aIL stories in the par~digm of renewal.

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/ NOTES

.1 Bede, Ecclesiastica1 History of the Eng1ish People, in

Dorothy White1ock, ed., English Historica1 Douments, vol. 1

(London ;-1955), Book II J chap. 13 , p. 617. 2 Donald R. Howard, The Three Temptations (Princeton:

l ' Prin'ceton Univ. Press,_ 1966), p. 146.

3 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis; .The Representation of Reality

in Western Literature, trans. W!llard R. Trask (Princetqn: /

Princeton Univ. Press, 1953), p. 17. ' 4, Mircea Eliade, The My'th of the Eternai Return.: 2!." Cosmos

o ~ ,

and History, trans. v-li11ard R. Trask (Princetbn: Princeton .u~iv. Press, ).954). ~

5 Ibid. , p. ~5. 6 Ibid. 1 p.' 112. 7 Ibid. , p. 154. . ,

8 Jacques ,M,aritain, "On the Phi1osophy of His'tory, Jo~eph W . .

Evans, ed. (New York: Scribner 1 s, 1957), l'. 36. C> "

9 E1i~de , p. ',110: .- / '" 10 Ibid. , 106. 1 p. 11 Ibid. , p. 111. 1.2 Auerbach', 'p. 21". 13 Ibid. , p. 19. 14 ;rb'id. , 18. , / p. 15 ,.-' , Ibid. , p. 12 16' bid.', p . 17

" 17 Ibid. , P: 16 ,/

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22 Ibid. , P',. 160-1. 23 J:{aritain, pp. 84'-5 .

2~ Eliade, pp;, 129-30. .

25 IHtd. p. 144.

26 Auerbach" pp. 14;15. 1

27 Ma,ritain, P', 59.

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CHAPTER !WO

THE NARRATIVE ACT

14

For sarasenes han somwhat . semyng to owre bileue, For thei,loue and bile~e . in, per~one almighty; And we, lred and lewede . in on god bileueth. Ac one Makorneth, a man. in rnysbileue , Broughte ,sarasenes of _Surre . and se in what rnanere. This Makometh was a crystene man . and for he moste

noughte be a pope, . In-to Surre he soughte . and thorw his soil'wittes Daunted a dowue . and day and nyghte hir feddej The corne that she cropped . he cas te i t in his' e"re. And if he among the poeple preched ',' or in places

corne 1 " Thanne wholde the coluer corne . to the clerkes ere,

,Menynge as after rn~et . thus Makometh hir enchaunted, A[ndJ dide folke thanne falle on knees . for he swore

in his precpynge, . 1 That the coluer that come so . tome fram god of heuene

'. As messager to Makometh . men forto teche.-And thus thorw wyles of his wi tte . 'and a whyte dowue, Makometh in mysbileue . men and women broughte, That lered there and lewed y~t . lyuen ~n his lawes.

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The Christian participates in "one concept of uni-1

versal histry and its interpretation" which provides ft

frame in which he must attempt to make sense of events. 1

The constant effort of interpretation required of him

presupposes an 'ef,ficient means of coping with the

chaos of information presented' to his senses, a method

for abstracting the salient forms of events in order .

that their congruence or inconguence with other eve~ts be recognized, ,and finally, that their meaning in the

vector of time be unders tood. Susanne K. Langer deal~ /

with the problem of extracting forrn,from chaos in her

study of symbolic 'modes and epis temology, Phi16s ophy . ' ,

'in ~. New Key. 2, which willbe discussed in the first part of this chapter. In phis\ work Langer draw~ ,a , distinction between discursive, and nondiscursive or

.

presentational form V?hich helps clarify a crucial

issue in ~roi1us and Criseyde ;,' Chaucer ~s character-

ization of th four central characters through their

approaches to epistemology and narrative, and his

implicit c'titicism of these approaches by their con,

trast with the attitudes of his,Christian stoDyteller.

Langer provides a vocabulary to distinguish symbolic

modes' as discursive' or pres entational. and this dis-

1 tinction is central to the qustion of narrative in the

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The second part of this chqpter will be devoted to

a v~ry brief discussion of "the Rredominant epistemological

perspective in Chaucer' s time, the theory of~ signs firs"t formulated by Saint ~ugustin,e. The approach of Augus ...

\ '

tine and his successors to language 'and their under-, -

standing of the capacity of words to signify are not at ,

allodisharmonious wi th Langer 1 s views, and in lI1any re-

spects the theor~es of these thinkers complement one -

~ another. Langer 1 s distinction of discursive and pre-,

sentatienal form, fer example, was anticipated by

Augustine 'g discu~sion of music 1 and by his view that the beatific vision is beyond discourse (though it _ is reached ,thr9ugh discourse). Langer, then,provides

1 _

a vocabulary for considering the Troilus i Augus-

tine and his successors, ai distussed in Marcii L. Colish' s The Mirror of Language, 3 , provide

~to~ical validation of such an approach to Chaucer,

and demonstrate how --this verbal epistemology is fl ex-

pressed in, the c9ntext of",and in harmony witSi Chris-- /

tian doctrine. ,v

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A. Discursive Form. 1

The pr1mary distinction Susanne K. Langer draws in the'

"theory; of mind,,4 she pr~serts .in Philosophy in ~ ~ Key s that of discursive'and presentational form:

The sym~olic ma.terials given' td our senses, the Gestalten or fundamental perc,eptual forms which invite us to construe the pandemonium of sheer impression into a world of "things and '6ccasions, belong to the "lpres~ntati.onall1-

'order. They furnish the elementa;y apstrac-tions in terms10f which ordinary sense-exper-ience is unders tood. This kind of 'unders tand-

'ing is directly reflected in the pattern" of physical reaqtion, impulse and instinct. 5

.. '

The.' ~ind' s symbolizing functi~n 1 the process by which "the .

pandemonium of sheer impression'~, is resolved into more sophis-

ticated abstractions which require more somplex responses, is

the basis of human mental life. 1 As tanger puts it, "Abstractive

seeing is the foundat,ion of' our rationality."

The power of understanding symbols, i.e. of regarding everything about a sense-datum as irrelevant except a certain form that it,...em-bodies, is the most characteristic menbal trait of mankind. It issues in an uncnscious, spontaneous process of abstraction, which goes on aIl the time in the human mind: a pr0cess

, of recogni-t-ing.-the oncept /in ~y configuration siven to experience, and forming a conception ac:ordngly . 6

L'anguage is J a symbolic mode by which abstracted forms are ,

expressedi it is "primarily a vbcal actualization bf the tendet).cy J 1

to see reality symbolically, ,,7 writes Langer. The motive of ver-. ...

bal symbolism' is "the trans formation of experience into concepts, 8

not the elaboration of signaIs and symptoms." To put it anothel) \

way, the essence of Ianguaee is "the formulation and expression

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of conlePtions~rat~er.t~an ~he (the essence of pantomjpe).,,9

communication of natural wants

/' . But ~he'nature of l~nguage imposes an order on :oneptian

which is not evidentr./rt experie-nce ,- Far removed from the chaos

of sense-dat,a, La~ger no~es, "worqs.have a linear, discrete,

successi ve order"lO which rnus't be respected if they are to bear

their"symbolic burderr: / ('

J,

As, it is, hlwever,' aIl language has a forro (. which requires us to string out our ideas ~ even though their objects rest one with~ the other; as pieces of clothing that are actual~y wom one over th.e other have ta be ... strung side by' side' on, the clothesline, This property of verbal -s.ymbolism i8 known' as discursive~ess; by reason of it, only thoughts wh~ can be ,arranged in this peculiar order can be' spoken at 'aIl; any

"idea which does not lend itself to this "proj ~ct['on" is in~ffab1e, incommunicable by rneans of words,ll

, / . , Syntactic convention fS weIl as vocabulary has an important raIe

. \ . tn the expression of conceptions. Langer pmplifies this idea:

Grammatical structure, then, is a further' source ot .significance. c ~;e cannot ca11 i t" a syrnbol, sinee,it is not even a termj but it has a symbo1ic mission. It tis togeth~r severai symbols, each with at least a frag-mentary connotation of its own, to make one cornpiex term, whose meanine is a special con-stellation of aIl the connotations invol ved., What the specia~ cons te1lation is', de'pends on, the syntactica1 relations within the com-plex symbol, or proposition.12

, Discursive rorrn, th en , depends for mening not only on the sense

of ~he individua~ elements, the words, but on their arder and 'connection -~ the s~tax of the proposition.

/ 1

The tyranny.of syntax and temporal order over the most im-. 1.,\--.- r- ~ .,. 0

synlbolic mode us.ed by/man is sd per~asiveJ and ,so early ,

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'~ccepted as normal, that our perceptions themselves are often '-.

controlled and limit~d by the conventions of distursive forro:

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Word and conceptIon become fused i~ th~t early period wherein both grow up toge~her,

'50 that even in later life they are hard to ~ separate. In a sense, language is cO'n;e p- . tion, and conception i8 the frame of p rcep-

,tion; or, as Sapir ~h;\~ put' i t, "Language is heuristic , , . in"fbat its forms prede/termine for us certain modes of observation a~d inter-pretation, , . " While it my be looke upon as. a symbolic sys tem which reporta, or refers or otherwise substitutes for direct e~perien,ce it does not as a matter of actual behavior

, 1

stand apart from or run parallel to direct ~xperience but completely iriterpenetrates with it. ThLs is indieated by the widespread ,feel-ing, particularly among primitive people, of that virtual identity or close correspondence oE word and thine which lends to the [agie of spells" . . . Many lovers of natu}:'e, or in-stance, do not feel that they are .tru y in touch wi'tlT it until' they have mas terejd the . names.of ,a great ~arty flowers and trees. as though ehe primary world of reality ere a verb~l one and as though one eould n t get close to D'ature unless one first mas ered the terminology which somehow magically it."13 . '

Behaving, then, "as thouglt the primary \-1Orld' 0 reality were a

"

. verbal one." we are sa d,6pendent on l'anguage t at we seldom rec-/

ognize its control ~f our' perception; ind~ed; accept - .

its limitiJ'lg frame and the mental habits it: i though,

.verbal conventions were part of the .order of ature. 'Langer 1

. quotes Bertrand Russell (in Philosophy) on th' s issue: "Our con-fidence in language is due to the fact that .. '. shares the

structure of tjle .physical world,' and therefo e can express that structu;e. ,,14 -But Langer refuses the idea "

symbolism is discur~ive,,15 by dis.tin,guishin

and present~tional form: .' f

articulate

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Languge in the strict sense is essentially discursive; it has permanent units of mean-' ing which are combinable'into larger units; it has fixed equivalences that make~efini-. tion and translation possible; its connota-tions are general, 50 that it rquires non-verbal acts, like pointing, loking., or -em-phatic vcice-inflections, to assign specifie denotations to its terms. In aIl these sali-ent characters it differs [rom wordless sym-bol'isffi, which is non-discursive and untra1'\s-

'latable, does net al~ow of definitions within its own system,_ and_c~not directly convey gnerali ties . The meailings gi ven through ~ languag' are successiyely u~derstood, and gathered into a whole'by the process ealled discoursej the meanin s of aIl other symbolic elements that compose a larger, articulate symbol are uDderstood only through the mean~ -'ing of the whole, thro gh their relations with-in the total st,ructure. Their very function- ./ in& as symbols depends u~he fact 'that they ar aIl involved in a simult~eous, integral presentation. This kind of sem ntic may be . called "preshtational symbolism " to charac-terize its essential distinction rom diseur-s ive symbolism, or" "language" prop r .16 .

The issue of time, then, is crucial: the "su}cessive'lY under-stoad" meanings of discursive form have diff{~ent symbolic ca-pabilities than the "simultaneous, integral pte~ntation" of nondiscllrs~ ve form, as Langer points out, \)

.. ' .-Yvisual forms are not, discursive. 'They do not present their consti tuen,ts successively,

but simultaneously, so the r~tions' determining a visual structure are grasp'a in one act of vision. Their complexity, consequently, is not :

limi~ed, as the complexity of discourse is limited, . by what th mind can retain from the beei~ping of ~n apperceptive act to the end of it. of course such a restriction on discourse sets bounds to the' complexity of speakable ideas .. . But the symbolism furnished by lUr purely

sensQry appreciation, of forms is a non-tifs curs ive smbolism, peculiarly '-lell suited to the expression o ideas that defy linguistics "projecton. "17

Another key issue in this distinction of discursive and

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/ presenatioml~ symbolism is ,that of t;e-ference, wheth~r th~ object is referred to generally or specifically. -Langer says that

verbal symbolisI'l, unl'ike the non-discursive kinds " has primarily' a eeneral reference. \ . . In ,the non-d;iscursive mode that speaks dlrectly to sense, hpwever, there is no '$' intrinsic generality. lt is first and fore-mast a direct~re~entation of an individual obj ect .18 ' 1. discursive syrnbolism is always general, and- requires application ,to the concrete da tum, whereas non-dis cursi ve syrnbolisrn 1:s specifie, is the "given" itself, and invites' us to read the more general meaning out of ~ the case .19

The problern of conceiving the ineffable, however, remains. Sinc

our habits of conception are so utterly dependent on l,anguge, 'we a:re virtually obliged to stick with di~course if we are to clarify

1

the ineffable obj ects which we ~ay know through presentational form. As Langer not~s, "Non-dis,cursive symb6ls cannot be defined i,n terms ,,Qf others, as disc~rsive symbols can. ,,20 Metaphor, then, is /the only tool we have to describe the ineffable, however im-

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precisely,-for we are locked in time and therfore bound to the '. " time-art~of diseo~rse. We are d~pendent ~n language, on discur-

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sive fopm, in order to conceive and communicate the meanings of

events in time. But "interpretatiort in a determined direct;ion," 1

the Christiin' s "general. method of compr.ehending rea~ity, ,,21 in-sists that history is continuous, and ~hat any interpretive

eh~nge in any autonornous event neeessitates an inte~pretive ,

change in aIl history. Langer -- from her phi~osophicaL, not ...

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theological, point'of view -- agrees that o~r underst~ng~ng of past, present ~nd future events must acknowl~dge their essential

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interrelation: "Our response ,to. a sign becomes, in its turn,

the sigu of a new situation; the meaning of the firs t sign,

having been 'cashed in ,_' has become a context for th~ next sign. ,,22 Participation in the discourse of the Chrl:'st-i~~

-vecto~ of cognition, which leads finally to the beatific vision ,

(af~esentational form beyond time), requires ,that one consider aIl history ,to be an irrevoca~ly linked whole, in which each

. ; / event is the context of 1tS successor. Therefore" thr __ ough the

time-art of discourse, one mUst seek to understand his own ex-

p~rienc~'in time as continuo~s -- a vector directed toward God. ','

B. Medieval Sign Theor~.

-

In The,Mirror ~ Language Marcja L.Colish argues that for almost a thousand years, from the Fathers to W~lliam of Ockham,

Western Christendom constituted a' uniform mental environment.

"This ,mental universe," she writes, "embodied certain standard

preconceptions about the nature of reality, which in turn ent~il--. !

ed standard preconceptions about the nature and rne,thodology 'of /' \ 23 knowledge." IWhile Old Testament ~lture had'provided techni-

ques for scriptural 'exegesis and for the interpretation of his-

torical events as theophanies, it.was inadequate to explain his-'

tory's mO,st singular event, the Incarnation. The exegetical . ,

tradition was' completely reoriented as a result. The doctrine

of, Jlte Incarnation, says Colish, "supplied medieval th,inker.s

'with strong motive for a sign the ory conceived in expressly

verbal terms!"

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Medieval Christians believed that Christ the Word was"God's perfect e~pression of Himsetf to man. .1.:";. Previously vitiated by' sin, the human mind could now come to a ~nowledge of God in Christi and the human faculty of~speech could now participate in the Incarnation'by helping to spread the Word to the world. Hedieval thinkers thus stressed verbal signs as the primary media of religious knowledge because they saw in Christ th~ Word the medi ator between God and man. 24

In her examination of "how medieval men actually t-hought that

symbols worked in the acquisition and transmission of knowledge,,,25 , .

Colish studies four thinker~, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and - l ' 26

Dante, who produced "different yet reciprocal expressions" of \~~

the same epistemology through the different modes of the trivium

(respectively, rhetoric, grammar, dialecti, and a poetics n-ceived in rhetorical terms):27

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Their basic s,imilarities derive :trom the fact that they possess a common core of Christian ideas on the ways in which man may know God by faith, per spe'culum in aenigmate. A{l of them believe that religious'knowledge is al-ways mediated through Christ the Word in this life. AlI four combine this belief with a verbal species of sign theory derived f~om28 classical ant~quity by way of the triviuID.

/

The verbal epistemology 'o( Western Christendom, its "ment!!l ", "

uni verse, 1. was first a~d mos t notab ly formulated by Augus tin~. 1....

ln' hi,s Confessions Augustine d.escri~es the cogni.fi~, experience underlying-his conversion. It was, says Coli.sh:~ ,-,'

through speech -- literally, the words of Scrip-ture, and figuratively, the eloquence of.moral xa~ple -- that he grasped a distinctive method-ology of knowledge 1 which he saw.'as a corollary of the distinctive doctrinal cont~~t and system' of values of the Christian fafth .

.

Converted through speech, Augustine in his Confessions evaluates

his former attit~de and the events of his lif~, and,lIinterprets, , /

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his moral and intellectual failing~ in terms of the misusJ of _ his li~1guis tic facul ties. ,,30 In his autobiography, in fact-,

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Augustine "generally regards . /

his former attit~de towarg language /

as perverse, since he had priented his eloquence to a variety , /

of selfish goals and had detached it from the cognition of,real--ity.,,31 His epistemology is founded on this idea of cognition

through speech. .. ,

Having co~cluded that false speech was the pource of his failings, Augustine proceeded in 'Confessions and in 'his oth~r

works to analyze the nature and p,roper' function of language in

the light of Christian doctrine. Faith, the nexus of Christian -"

-"

life, posits that \there is an "objective order of being pr{or ,

to the subjective order of knowing.,,32 Therefore, since God is the' prime example-of pure Being, he himself is "the guarantee,

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his/view, tpat the-knowledge of God is 1.earned in time and is accessible to the mind thereafter through the'memory, and the Platonic view, that truth preexists in the mind from e-terni ty and is made present to the mind through dilectically aroused reminiScence .36

1

2S

Reception.of faith, then, y an historical event; :'the knowledge of God requires the use Qf memory because it is a know-ledge 1earned as the truth at a ,particu~ar point in t~me. ,,17

1 Significantly, while speaking_ of words as time-related signs

1 and faith aS.an historical event, Augu~tine a1so stresses th~ unit y of aIl time. People con~eive of time as divided because

/ of th nature of their language:

As children in grannnar s'chool, they are taught that there' are three tenses of the verb, past, present, and-future. As a result, they assume'uncritically that time itself is likewise tripartite. Actua1ly, observes Augustipe, aIl time is reducible to the present. The past, he says, is the soulls present remembrance; the present is the soulls present attention; and the future i~ the soul l s present ex- -pectation~ Since -this is true for ~en, he

. concludes, i t should not be so difficu1t to appreciate the ~dea of the eternal present when, it cornes to God. 38

..

The chief cons~quence of this analysis of time is that it irre-

vocably binds past and future to the present, thereby integrating --'

lII!o considered experience and thoughtful anticipation to the task of

dealing,effective(y with present concerns. Language in its proper function, then, is fla medium of

truth. 'It should be used to deepen one,' S own knowledge of

reali ty and a150 for the ins tr\lction of others. (,139 The -goal of

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26

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language is to project men beyond_ their indirect discourse w~th gGod in time by preparfng them for the beatific vision~ ,

Augustine pr.ojected a redeemed rhetoric as the outcome of a revealed wisdom. On the

'basis of this theqry, a twofold linguistic transformation was in order: the faculty of human speech was tq be recast as a Pauline mirror, faithfully mediating,God to man in the

./ presen t life; and, t'he aeencies appointed for ~he translation of man's partial knowledge by faith into his complete knowledge of God by direct vision were to be redenined as modes

of'v~rbal expressian,40 In considering the mediation of language', however,

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27

uS,e language well.-that one 1earns to direct it toward the true /

object o{ c~gnition 1 God. This conviction -- 'that linguistic ".

abilities are necessary"to deepen one's knowledge of Gad -- i8

evidenced throughout the Middle Ag~s by the emphasis in educatio~

on the verbal skills ~ as taught in the modes of the tr.ivtum. , ,

Proper speech not on1y directs the believer toward Gad; but it

allows him to parti.cipate more fully in the ecanomy of the

Redemption by giving him the means ta spread the Word to the

world.,

Augustine 's' medieval successors, who considered his author-If

i~y ta be',.second on1y to that of the Bible, retaineq his verbal epistemology, but recast it in terms which suited the specifie

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, / , ' " By Anselm' s t~m~, the eleventh century', concerns pf the-ir ,times.

Augustinian sign theory had become "t~e imp,licit and unquest'ioned ambience in which religiaus epis temalogy was ca~cei ved. ,,44 A;nselm,

,

translating the argument to th~ mode a~ grannnar. stresses the pri-

mary p'osi tian of fai th in the vector of cogni tian bhrough 'his

formula Fides quarens intel1ectum. Clish spmmarizes his view:

In short,' says Anselm, if one wishes ta know Gad, one must first believe. Onoe firmly graunded in faith, the believer may investi-gate his beliefs with the greatest possible rigori but this questioning is designed.ta explicate the rectitude of his belief9~ not ta es tablish them in the firs t' place" 4.J

. ,

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Anselm" 5 attempts to define Gad conscientious 1y and faith~ully are therefore not quixotic:

.

Gad is ineffable, Anselm agreesj yet we must speak about Him in arder ta know Him and ta 1 love Him. And, by extensiQn, we must also speak about Gad in arder .to inspire this knowledge and love in others. 46 '

I~

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28 , v

In the thirteenth c~ntury, in the face of a new emphasis /

on ,logic and empiricism, ,Thomas AquinaS' extended Augus tine' s ver- ~

bal theory to declare that not only 'God, but also his creation, . .

8,}"e proper obj ectJ of s tudy. Aquinas interprets Augus tine' s theory.

"so as to stress iaeas, and 'to. sorne extent the created universe, , ".

as the principl' signa Dei. ,.47 Aquinas hold;::; that knowledge Qf , the "natural world leads to a ciearer ~nowledge of God:

As an empiricist and as a firm supPQrter of the idea that causes and effects'resemble each other, Thomas is philosophically certain that the world resembles Gad, its frst cause. This belief is basic to his view that the world can provide man with information 'about God through a posteriori reasoning. As Christian, Thomas takes seriously-St. Paul's

, assertion that the invisible things" of God 'can be seen through the visible thi~gs of His Creation. 48 , ~

-(Significantly, Aqulnas also notes that "man' s cognitive pmY'ers . . are affected by his moral status. ,,49)

The high medieval extensions of Augustine's epist~mology to

nature constitute a major divrgence from Augustine himself, ,who "diQ not intend his linguistic epistemology' to b~ either a general

\ 50 theory of s igns or a general theory of knm.,l~dge. Il In the main f'

, ,

,however, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas-would agree with this

precis of their'shared epistemology: ,

"

Q

words May represent existing things truly, if partially, and they function either indicatively or commemoratively in the subject's mind, de-pending on his previou~ relationship to the ob-ject. .Al though seen as an epistemological ne-cessity, verbal signs are never held to be cog-nitive in the first instance. They must be energized by the action of God in the mind of the knower in order for them to con duce to the knowledge of their signifi~ata. These conditions obtain whether the sl1bject be an :ln'fidel ttloving from unbelief to faith or a belieyer whose faith is deepening into an understanding of what he be l,ieves . 51

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divinely-sent bird (which' they thought they witnessed) than \

Mahomet' s verbal, interpretat~on' of some revelation in pr!!senta-. tional form -- a vision, perhaps. Believing that a dove can

speak Goa's words to man eliminates, as it were\ the fallible

'middle;man: /' the prophet who must in'terpret nondisc.ur~ive q

theophanies. Discourse, then, was the preferred symboli~ mode

of the Middie Ages, for it was thougl)t to -be the form in" which /

revealed truth ould'-most dire~tly and with l.east distortion

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be communica:ed by one man to others. '.~ " '

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NOTES

1 William Langland, The Vision of William Concerning

Piers the Plowman (B text) , ed. Walter W,. Skeat (London: Early English Text Society, 1869), Passus XV, 11. 383-.403.

2 Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in . New Key: ~ Study in

the Symbolism of Reason,. Rite, and ~, 3rd ed. (Cambridge," Mass.; Harvard Univ. Press, 1957).

3 Q r ' Marcia' L. Colish, The Mirror of Language; ~ Study in.

the Medieval Theory of Knowledge (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968) .

4 -. Langer, p. ix.

5 Ibid., p. 98. '. 6 Ibid. , p. 72. 7 Ibid. , p. 109. 8 Ibid. , p. 126. 9 Ibid .-, p. 118. c!)

10 Ibid. , p. ,80.

lllbid. , ,

81-2. p. -,

l2 lbid ., pp. 67-68.

l3 Ibid ., p. l~p, from Sapir, Article "Language,' p. 157. l4I~id., p. 88, from Russell, Philosophy (New York: W.W.

Norton Ex Co. 1 1927), P; 265. /

15 Ibid. , p. 88. / <

.16 Ibid. , pp. 96-7.

17 Ibid. 1 p. 93. 1 . - . /

18 Ibid. , p. 96.

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19 Ibid.', p. 286.

20 Ibid. 1 p. 95.

21 Auerbach, p'. 16.

22 Langer, " p. 280.

2J Colish, p . 1. .

24 Ibid., p. ix..-x.

25 1bicl ." p. 'yii. ""

,

26 Ibicf. , p . l. .

21 Ibid. , . p. x.

28 Ibid. , p. 342. \.

29 Ibil. , p. 45.

30 Ibid., p. 22.

31 Ibid. , p. 33.

32Il;>id..--, p. 1. 33 Ibid. , p. 1.

~~ Ibid. , p . 59. ~

35 ):bid. , p. 76, 36 Ibid: ,

1

pp. 51-2.

1

,

37 Ibid. 1 "p. 5I. 38 Ibid. , p. 69.

,39 Ibid".' , p. 33.

40 Ibid. " pp. 19-2Q. .

41):bid. , pp. , 48-49. ," 42 -:Ibid. , p. 49.

J

Lv3 b' d '. l l," p. 57. ' 44 d 84. Ibi .~ p .

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45 1/ l ' . Ibid. ';- pp .. 122-3.

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46 Ibid. ~ p . .

47 Ibid., p. ,

48 Ibi~., pp. 49 Ibid:, p.

50 Ibid.:, "p.

51 Ibid. , p.

137.

162 215-6.

207.

67.

84.

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CHAp'TER THREE ,

/

LITERARY CONSEQUENCES Of CHRISTrAN HISTORCISU AND EPISTEMOLOGY -

l propose to consider the Christan conceptions of history

and epistemology discussed in tM- last two chapters as constitu-'

ting an outlook, "an a.tti~ude of mind rather than sp~cific arti-

"cles of faith." as ~usanne Lan~el" puts it, 1 through which Tro':- lus and Criseyde was conceive~ by ~ts author and received by its original' audience. l do npt wish to discuss Chaucer', s intention

i,n this poem. Nonetheles s, Wes tern Christendom in the ~iddle

Ages was orte "mental universe, "/according to Marcia Colish, and

thus those assumptions were the cultural context which informed J /" t _ the way Chaucer wrote his Trojan love story and the way the,. fourteenth-century audience understood it: Tha~ a shared 9ut-

.

'look existed i8 demoristrated in the text. The comments of the

narrat,or t~he audience, for example. c1early acknowledge the / poem's carefully developed incongruities anft ironies, and indi-

cate that narrfltor and 'audience share certaj.n habits of -mind --habits which the author, too, seems to shar-e, since,he in.no way

undercuts or corrects these collective assessments. , \

It is not diffieult for the modern reader to become emotion-

a11y invol'ved with 1-'rloilus as a "wronged" character, and 'thus to

turn Chaucer into a sort of romantic revolutionary. . Clearly.

however, if Christian historicism and verbal epistemology were

indeed the ,"princip les that reguilated the aet," :to paraphrase

~ Panofsky 1 2 it i8 far more likely that the dram,aticjemotional

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scheme in the Troilus is subordinatt! to the moral scheme;

that~is, that C~auce~ sou~ht -- and received -- a cognitive response ~from his audie~ce over ad emotional one.

This third chapter begins with an out~ine of'tqe key ex~getical principle of Chaucer's time, the insepar~bility of his-

tory anp allegory, and its iptplicatJons for' Trcjilus and Criseyde. Then follows an analysis of the text itself,- whieh considers how

the mental habits of historicis~ and verbal ,epistemology provide a basis for understanding each)character's relative sueeess in oeonstrueting a provisional explanation of the way things are .

. .

A. His~ory and ~llegQry.

"" In ~ Study of. the- 'Bible in the Midlle Ages Beryl Smalley describes t:;he increasing tenden.ey of ,later exegetes to seek a

-

elear understanding of the historical-literal level of Scriptur ~ \ ~''t ...

in the _~,elief that this levei is the foundati~n of all,egory --that the allegorical ~ense 01 a text' ean only be re!lch~d thr~ugh / the literaI sense. She re.fers ~n particular to the work of Hugh

, -

of St. Victor and his follow.ers on this subject: " Hugh effeeted a differen tiation between the,

three senses [literal-histerical, ~llegorieal, and tropologiealJ whieh enormously increased the dignity o~,the historieal sense. Instead of 'contrasting the lowly foundation of the 'letter' with the higher spiritual sense, he groups together the let ter and allegory, which pertain to knowledge and contrasts them with tropologyl The importance of the letter i8 constantly stressed. 3 ,

It should b_e noted that here, aeeording to Smalley, "'his t

/

36

words.,A D. W. Robertson, who is unfairly criticized, l think',

for giving/the letter short shrift in seek.ing< out. the "fruyt"

of the allegory, in ,fact defends ts significance: Condemnations . ,

- -~(e.g. "the letter killeth") "are directed again~t the letter onl'y insQfa~ as ,i t is taken wi thout the s~~i t, and not agains t I_the let~er itself.,,5 ,Hugh, too, is involved in the search,for allegorical meaning, but he has firm ideas about where that meart-

-

-ing ultimatelyr,-resides, and how i t can be reached. Smalley

quotes:

And also

"The' mystical sense is only gathered from what 'the le tter says, in the firs t place. l wonder how people have the face to boast themselves teachers of allegory" when 'they do not know the primary meaning of the letter. . Sub-tract the letter and what is left?"6

4:

. '

"We must net struggle ta read our own 'sentence' into the Scriptures, but rather to make the Jsentence' of the Scriptures ours. "7

/ . . ~

Therefore, while Hugh did not regard the let ter as a good in , ,

itself, he recognized its es~ential connection to allegory, ,

these two being the senses which pertain to knowledge rather

than virtue.

Th~ idea that alle,gory was inseparable from- the literat-his - ' torical level was widely qccepted in Chaucer's time, and this

.

approach to scriptural exegesis found its way into literary anal-- /

ysis. Robertson maintains that "the defense of poetry based on

an assumption of Scriptural al1egory" of Dant'e, Petrarch and Boc-

caccio in fact constituted a ~'connnonpiace of fourteenth-century , .

humanisme ,,8 Rob~rtson extends thi; assertion by noting that

'-

r

/

in exegetical practice a sign could be ~onsiderably extended by analoGY, so that; for example, va~ues could be"assign-ed to it which would apply either to the Church. to the individual, or to the 'afterlife. 9

This process: he claims, was not alien to ordinary men because

the logic of positing anaiogous rellms 1IIi thin the indi vidual in society, and ,1 in etern~ty is'a' fairly natural result of an ,hierarchical mode of thought which emphasizes the reality'of abstract values. The medieval mind moved easily from one reaim to another, and was quick to seize upon and elaborate analogies among them. ' It did'so, moreover, with a conviction based on faitn .10,: . ,

Donald W. Rowe specifically defends this exegetical approach

tq Troilus and Criseyde in Q'Love Q Charite 1 Contraries Harmonized in Chaucer 1 s Troilus .. He explains the significance or .,the literal--

~istorical level in the poem in this way: The history of Troy reveals both the spiritual condition and the possibil-ities of man prior to Christ and is_part of the historical\meanf by which God re-

de~ms man. The fall of Troy requires and lads to the founding of Rome both his-torically and aIlegorically.ll

Inhrendering himself insensible to time and tryine to escape his-

to~y, Troilus misses ou~ on the allegory this literal-historical

level of his own experience offers. He tries to move directIy

to all~gory, to the meaning of the world, by ignoring tke letter

that is., a-c tuaI events' in this world: an on tolog1cal dead-end, al] Hgh of. St. Victor points out. The oeher characters, who ~

. /

sensible to h~story, either don't perceive its essen~ial conti-

nuity,.or don't know how to orient their interpretations, lacking-

as the y do the Christian frame stor.y. /

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38

1

Time nd Criseyde because it

i5 through its use s architectonics and image ,

epistemological biases -and narrative abilities of the central

characters becowe clear. Chaucer underscores the importance of

time in the poem in two obvious way~: firS"t, by his use of a

dual time scheme (a pagan history told against the backdrop of the Chris tian. audience' s es chatological concep tion of time) , and

/

second, by "his care for consistency even in the min],ltiae of time. ,,12 In' this second category would faU the countless' ref-

erences to celestial movement, seasons, and aven to precisions

_of the hour. Much critical attention has been focused on time

as tbe structuring principle ~f the Troilusj most notable are the works of Sanfo'rd B. Meech and William P~ovost.13 This pap~r -will focus not on architectonies but on the ways the Christian

conception of time informs the poem' s me~ming. - ,-

The characters in Troil,Us and Criseyde are models as reha-

b~l i-table pagans insofar as they conform to Christian assumpt:ions , ~

, about epistemolpgy (that our knowledee of reaiity is always me-diated by' languag) _and the meaning of history (that aU stories. in the" last analysis, tell the Christian story of renewal). Yet

,. because the "his tory" th~t Chaucer pres-ents occurred in the pre-

./

/

./ Christian past, none of' the cha'rllcters is eilgible for initiatioQ, .

1

through baptism. into'the Christ~n community. It is through en-

rolment iIjl the Church, as Augustine maintained, that one "gains access to a new languaee and to new modes of learning and

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1 39

'expression."l4 'Ansel;m's insistence on faith follows Augustine's

" v~ew: belief, he said, activates speech by 'letting one in on

the Christian story, which excludes aIl other storie$. tut pff f~om,belif, then~ the characters of this poem cannat' fully con-

form ta Christian assumptions, and thus cannot be successfulin

,Christian terms. As we shall see, however, Trailus' s yearning

for transcendent meaning rende~ him eligible for a kind of

"bapt;i.srn of desire'i' and the structure o"f the universe is shown

him' after death. ..

Yet Chaucer's audience knew/not only the final

"

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, ds'truction of Troy, but also Christiani ty' s eschatological con-/

()

,

cepti~ 'of time; it had" the,refpre, ao doubly. ironie perspective on the events of this tragic love story.

- The central char~cters, as l have said, have different 'Q

approaches to change~ time and, implicitly, the narrative act of

living out onels life as o~e recognizable pe~sonality. Troilus , is out o~ step with his own world (to say n~thin~,of the Christian

~

one) and i5 unab'le to tell a stofy primaril'Y because he differs ..

from his fellows,in epi~temological perspective. KnQwJeft~e cornes

'to Troilus through his'eyes, not his'ears. He leams through

the d~~ and unr.1ediated_ pres~ntational ferm, vision; Pandarus J

Criseyde and Diomede learn not -(!oll at onc'e like Troilus. but in the linear., cumulative pattern of language. They learn through

what they hear. Nonetheless, though the epistemological biaa of

these las t three would be perc~i ved by the Christian audience as

"corre-ct," none of' the charaeters i8 a 'member of an historieal

culture' (as defined by Eliade) i they, do not neces$arily percei ve o -

time as a vector moving ;rom a kno,wn beginning to a known end,

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and so do not perceive the necessioty of uniting past, present ,

and future in their discursive interpretations of their experi-

ences, aB ehall be demonBtr~ted in Chapter Four.

Change is cataclysm for ,Troilus ." 'lt is violent an'd ins tan-/ taneous". ,Love comes to Troilus as an arrow which wounds him in

~ -

the eye; . Cris~yde 's change of heart is made clear" to him when ,

he sees her broo~h on Diomede's coat of arms. For Troilus the " ,

ap'preh~sion of change, is unmediated by language. /

lIts visual

susceptibility is a sign of his social alienation. Love denoted

the visual process, like Troilus' s - "love at firs t, s igl).t" -is unmediated physical 'desire, _

1nd r~sults "at to realize in this'world a perfect love, and through it, to gain

'perfect knowledge; these can exist, Christians believe, only in

eternity. He posits his exaltation with Criseyde as a perma nt , ~

-' ,

changeless s~afe, just as he had considered his former ind' ference to love to be immutable. vfuen change cornes, as it inevi ably must,

it is catastropic: l'roilus is unable to keep his min 's eye on /

the" patterns of rene~al s~ obvtous in the natural orld, and so is ~nable to adapt. Instead he withdraws from e realm of time

i '

and mutability. H~ falls ill, or sleeps, or swoons, or goes out

of his wits. Finally he seeks death. He denies time and change ."", "

by ~e!using, quite literaIly, to be sensible to it. Troilus' , '

inabili~y'to enter~into the discourse of time prpduces his aliena-tipn. Troilus knows nothing of Chris tian teleology. He refuses

time, rfuses to pay- a~tention to events so that he. May inter-pre~ them, and as a result, in his ignorance he excludes nimself

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41 /

from ,that vec9* of cognition, that "con,tinuous procesEJ of

conversion/lB which dis!inguishes the Christian' s life. ~ . T591ius r~pudiates any relati~n but his. with Cris~yde (he

on1rses Pa~darus 's ~ervices); eut off from any' social context, . '/. ~e 1S inarticulate, even wordless. O~ necessity, then, he ele-

/~vat~s Crise~de's words to the stature of Scriptu~: Got wot, l wende, 'O/lady bright, Criseyde, That every word was gospel that 'ye 'seydel. 16 (v 1264-1265)

Troi lus' 5 wordJ.essness and his dependence on the dubious "gospels Il

of such peop,le as Criseyde and Pandarus make it impossible for 1

him to e.valuate his situation or anticipat:e future events. He

has no authority to refer to and plalnly misses the sentence of . ,:

the natural world. He awaits revelation through Criseyde!s body. 1

Having no words, Troilus cannot formulate any adequate re?ponse l '

to chang"e i he can' t" maintain the narrative cont-inuity of his

- life 1 s tliscorse. Though torturep, ,he is s trangely pass ive.

D. W". Rohertson notes that

The heroic potentialities of Troilus are undercut wherever they appear. His action on the battlefield is designed eithel"r to make an impression on Criseyde, or, later on, to seek vengeance'and self-destructLon. He has no stature as a prince fightin~ in the defence of his people, and his desire for vengeance ends in frustration. As a lover, he has to be thrown into bed by Pandarus, and his thoughts of forcibly rescuing Criseyde from the Greeks turn out to be empty dreams whih he has no power to fulfill. l7

What activity Troilus msters, then,~s i~ature or counte~ro~ 'd~tive. His 09~ession prevents not only mature love,. but also

p~dper functionin,g as a member - a prince, - of his ~ociety,. /

,

"":1, 1 l

.' , /

42

Troilus'~ earthly tragedy is not only that of failed love. but ~lso of del:ated integration.

lbe Troilus is among the first of Chaucer's exteijded uses of astrology in poetry. Of the meaning of reference to celestial.

movement, John Gardner writes that:

As Macrobius, Boethius,~ Aq'uinas and Dante - unders~ooq the cosmos, the stars' and planets

are intermediary between God and man: ,below the moon, seeming uncertainty and chaos, per-petuaI change; above tne rooon, inreasingly

clear~indications of God's fixed nature, ser-enity, and majesty: (Cf ... the "under the moon" repetitions in pearl.)lo

-

Through this image system, we can see Trbilus' problem as 'one of

forgetting that he i8 "under moon." ~is l've is.apotheosis: he . thinks of Criseyde' s ~body y "this hevene" (iii 1251) -- above the moon, hence' fixed, divine. Af.~er Criseyde leaves, Troilus

apostrophizes th~ moon, telling it his sorrow in what is evident-ly an'habitual gesture:

And every nygh t, as 'was his wone to qoone,' He stood the brighte moone to byholde, And al his sorw he to the moone tolde, And seyde, "Ywis, whan thow art horned newe, l shal be glad, if.al the world be trewe 1"

(v '647-651)

He misses, of course, -the obvious sentence of the 'moon 's cycle A

by seeing it, through his obsession, 6nly as a sign of the time

,separatine hi~ 'from Criseyde. With death, when he does literally .

slip the bonds of time, Troilus is drawn out to th~ eighth sphere above the moon, where in a "simultaneous, integral E..resentation', ,,19

,\ . - .

he lear~s the meaning of the universe: Troilus sees aIl that he

has"left, and laughs. This laughter'has a cognitive f.unction. /

"' ,

1

-

43

Troilus learns, at last, the Christian story of the unit y of

God 1 s design and .the catholiity of renewal. Troilus learns " l ', ...

this story through vision - ,but 'now, "above moon," tHis 'presn-, ,

tational, form i8 aprropriate. Troilus in death has moved beyond

time, from discourse to the Ward. , b

Troilus' l~ver, Criseyde, though she clearly follows the Christian epistemology based on dis,cll):'sive form, is not, an es~ pecially good story teller. Through the mediation of language

aurally, not visually - Criseyde learns of change, the inevitabil-

ity of which she accepts. In~fact, it. is her straightforward

lacceptance of change which leads to' charges that she is incon-- /

sistent, and ev~n unprincipled. But her attitude toward herself

and the s~tuations she finds herself in i8, on the contrary, re-

markably consistent. She's not a verylgood storyteller because

she makes no attempt ta construct a provisional explanation of

the way things are" She gets on 'with her life and doesn' t worry

about what it means. Criseyde doesn't connect her past to her

prese?t or futurej she doesn't learn from-aubhority (not even that of her own experience) ta evaluate th~ past and ~ook for-ward to the future. Criseyde is slave to the present. While

she lives in time, unlike Tro~lus; and' accepts her limitations "und~r moon;" she is unaware tha t there i8 a world "above moon"

to whic~ men aspire. Utt,erly ignorant of the imperative of story-

telling impose4 by Christian teleolog~, Crisey~e peglects the narrative continuity of her life' s discourse. Ta her mind, the

events of her life are discrete and discontinuousj'she knows nothing of the Christian assumption that ~he meaning of her life

1

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'44

must sornehow be congruent with the.' meaning of history (wht Pan'fsky caUs a '''pos tulate of 'mutuat inferabili ty,,20) .

If Criseyde' is ignorant of these cultural assumptions,-her ",

-""'~ actions' do not lack consistency. "She is methodical, not wnimSl-

, ' ~,

cal, in examining her situat:i:0!l: Criseyde is no fool; she i8

uncom~ortable in the role in which Troilus casts her: she knows

"she 'os no Beatrice, that she can lead him nowhere. She' s pre-

oceupied with her own security. D.R. Howard writes that "we see

Criseyde decide to stay-with Dio~ede in the same unconscious and

fri~ghtened wa'] that she, had inclined ta Troilus. ,,21 '\ Unconscious, that is, of the full meaning of her decision; frightend by' _he~ vulnerability when bereft of the protection of a knight/lover.

~ ?> , .....

There is measure, if not Calculation, in her growing attachment

to Troilus in Book II, as the har~ator notes:

For l seY.,J:lught tl-tat she so sodeynly Yaf him nire love, but that she gan enclyne To ,like hi'm first . . . (H 673-6}5)

Her resistance to falling in love - with Oiomede as with Troilus -

is systematically.withdrawn through verbal rnediati'on. In the ~ ,

arli.~r instance. this oecurs in her ironie conversations with Pandarus; later pn, it happens in the co~rse of her discussions

-

with Oiomed~ (who can $peak for himself). In,fact, the rivaIs are quite similar men, and Criseyde objectively evaluates their social p'ositions 'and their societies' potentials ~or growth.

She' s pragmatic enough to see that Troilus is no~ quite the .

noblest Trojan - but a pretty good number tW9~ anyway:

,

MFor out and out he is the worthieste J Save only Ector. which that is the beste"

(il 739-740)

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Diomede, who appreciates her practical turn, of mind, explains

his own position ta her in simi~ar terrns: :

'V-

Ansseyde,--'-'~e it yow no j'Oie, As gentil man as any wIglir-irr-'T-rol.e.

For if my fader Tideus," he seyde 1 "Ilyved hadde, ~ch hadde ben,' er thi8j,~

,Of Calydoyn~. and Arge a king, Criseydel And so hope l that l shal ye t, iwis. Il

(v 930-935) So Criseyde finds them comparable in stature. But Diomede has

the incomparable advantage of being on the side prophesied to \

win - and besides 1 he 1 s there. Troilus unwittingly aeknowledges

that "this lady kan hi,re good" (v 1149), and though she 1 s sorry about al the trouble, she takes comfort in the one fact Troilus ignores: that "al shal passe" (v 1085). Crisyde 1 s "untrouthe"

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is rather a change of mind than a change of hear~t~; __ ~s~h~e~~~~~-----t~ without H,lus ~ons. abandon~,i;;;J,el' pas t ."hile regre tting Troil us

- pain, and so, th~ narrator says, is excusable (v 1097-1099). Pandarus has been described as an "inverted Boethius". sinee

in 'his' role\a1 go-between he'i~vokes a 1earned tradition ta set himself up as a philosopher, and advises transcendance of the

vagaries of this world. ,Pandarus freely dispenses eounsel, yet

can he1p himself no more/than can Troil, as J. A. Burrow notes:

In his owri affair (what we see of it), he behaves mu ch like'Tro~us, passing sleep-less nights and remaining fai thful despi t,e the dbduracy of his beloved. Where he is hirnself concerned, as Troilus points out in

~ spirited passage, his wisdom fail$ hirn: , , ,

ThQw koudest nevere in love thiselven wisse: How devel maistow brynge me to blisse? 22

(i 622-3) Pandarus himself provides a clue to his attitude toward this

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pas,sion: he is "hi~wixen game and '" ernest" (iii 254) in two senses - he serves as intermedia~ between Troilus'& utter ser-

t

iousness and Criseyce' s less than. total devotion, and Ife is

both sincere and amused as he performs that function. He wo-rks

/, ',irantically ,to resolve the. logistical problem, 'but once events

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, .. , 1> "f "mov~ Qut. of his contrl (when Cri.seyde i~ exchanged for Antenor) " . .. .

he i8 bloeked, ~nab le ~Lther to aet or to provide any coherent! c ,

adviee ,to Troilus. In Book'Y Pandarus gives Troil~s a bluff

reassuranee that Criseyde will return, but at the same time .,

he tries to convinee Troilus. that she is just a woman, and that he w~ll find others, and prettier, in th future. Pandarus'is

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always expedient. He attaches h~mself to no anchor of personal /'

principle or 'Pragmatism (as Troilus to his, love, Criseyde, to her" /

security) .' Panda}:us drops out of the poem as soon ~s it' s clear that Criseyde will not return. His usefulness ta Troi1us is at

an end, because he' can only talk and act, ndt' think", and so is , .

up,able to consider ,.,hat has happened and deal with it, in the

context of narrative. Before Troilus's knowledge of betrayal , .

.this glib m~nipulator is reduced, fina11y, to wordlessness . .-'/

Diomede, unlike Jroilus, can talk, an'd, elearly he tells

Criseyde a pretty convincing story ("So welhe for hymselven spak 'and seyde" - v 1033). He cQnforms to the verbal episte-mology central to this poem, and 18 aiso able tQ mus ter meaning-'

fuI activity to achieve his goals as soldier and lover. , He

speaks "for hymselven", and considers both the meaning of what

,he hears and the effect of what he says: How unlike Troilus, ,

-~ho~is virtually wordless, or C~iseyde. who talks ,to herself,

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or Pandarus,'who speaks for ot~ers. There's another"important dis tinction to make between Cr' s~d~, who "kan hire good," and \ Diomede who "~oude his good:" Criseyde exists in an, unmanageable

,

present," ~hile Diomede lives i a present he deals with by con-

sidering his pasto Diomede 10 after his narrative: he

rgards his life as a continuo s ,whole,' constr~cts provisional

explanations for the th~ngs ~th 't happ,en to him, and acts in an-, .

ticipation of the future. Yet for aIL that, he is not admirable

in the audience' s eyes because j however muh sense his' actions make in the narrow context of the Trbjan War, they do/not confor~

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to the principles of ,the Christian. Diomede' s rhetoric')is m.ani-pulative. His speech is false, 'his rhetoric unredeemed, bepause,

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-as a pagan, he can~t possibly know how to properly orient his / , 1

actions sin'ce h:e doesn' t know' the essential story of sini and re-, ,

demvtation, of death and renewal. ~

The narrator in Troilus antl Criseyde is an important charac-/

te~. He is not identical with Ghaucer th~ man, nor with Chaucer r

the author/performer of this poem. Th~ estrangement of the nar-r

rator and the author/performer ~s central to, the, pgem's ironie 1

perspective. Th~ n'~rrator here Ibo~nces his fnterpretations of-the poem's action off the much more knowing, philosophically

, clear author/prfoimr, who rep esents the lim~t consciousness of his audience - tbe highest s andards, that is, of nis com-

munit y . Donald R .. Howard point out that

The style of the Troi us is grounded in tHe counterpointing 0 two different and, &ntradictory worl'Fai1 and will not cease untJl the Judgment~ a world lost by Adam' nd saved by Christ.2~

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The narrator, then " provides this counterpoint". He holds the

work in unit y by becoming

. involved for a time in the events of the love affair and then [wi,thdrawingJ from 0 them into the present, toward the Christian, viewing the outcome as a predes.tined result of choi~e~ an~ drawing from it a Christian moral. Z ~ ,

The narrator also becomes involved in the defense of his text's

authority. This convention functions in the !roilus as yet /.

another epistemological and psycho-logical element,.in that it 1

affiI'tll& the essential continuity of pa8t and present, and thereby

asserts that the categories and values implicit here are tiweless. o

The comparative success as storytel.1ers of the characters

of the Troilus 'Can ,be judged in terms of Chretien de Troyes' ,

three elements of story: ~,matire, and conjointure ~meaning, subject, and joining). Troilus is intent on the, sens of his story,

- -

/ but refuses to pay attention. to difficul t matire. Criseyde' s

story is aIl matire - 'a11 events -