Nature as destiny in 'Troilus and Criseyde.'

Style, Fall, 1997 by Jennifer R. Goodman

(1) Introduction

The interpretation of Chaucer's Troilus has always been bedeviled by the fact that it is a work of the late fourteenth century, a period whose intellectual complications baffle the modern student of literature. It is an age when the same person can appear to us to be an arch-conservative and a radical at the same time. Thomas Bradwardine, that major English thinker, affirmed the power of God's providence in the strongest Augustinian terms against contemporary "neo-Pelagians" like Gabriel Biel while cheerfully dismantling Aristotle's physics to make way for the modern science of mechanics.(1) Because Chaucer was an exceptionally well-informed writer, whose reading and travels gave him access to a wide range of old and new ideas, many of these debates found their way into his poetry. To his readers belongs the task of assessing those ideas as they appear in his works.

Yet often our perspective is so far from that of Chaucer's day that we have difficulty weighing the evidence. The familiar is much easier to grasp than the unknown. The modern reader can only with great effort avoid recreating Chaucer in his or her own image, as a modern, liberal thinker - rational, scientific, and tolerant. As sophisticated critics, on the other hand, aware of the "otherness of the past," and as medievalists alert to the foibles of humanist propaganda, we tend to overcompensate in favor of what we perceive to be the moral values of the medieval church, a much misunderstood institution too often divided against itself. In the process Troilus, continually reinterpreted, is jerked "up and down like boket in a welle," in a manner most appropriate to a Chaucerian lover.

The solution to this puzzle lies in a better understanding of the fourteenth-century mind. Surrounded by conflicting views, new and traditional, the fourteenth-century thinker had no idea which were going to win out. He made up his own mind as best he could. In the process he might well embrace ideas from more than one school of thought. The same thinker might agree with the liberals on free will and with the conservatives on the physics of motion, as I think Chaucer did. He might oppose the Lollards and the rise of parliaments, and favor equality in marriage, or the reverse. When trying to get a sense of where Chaucer stands, we need to cultivate a certain flexibility, and not assume that certain groups of ideas necessarily belong together, or that they lead logically to their historical conclusions. Whether we consider Chaucer a humanist, an early modern scientist, a feminist or male chauvinist, or a proto-Puritan predestinarian moralist, we misinterpret him by pulling him too far in our direction.

The first step to understanding the history of the ideas of Chaucer's time, and Chaucer's own thinking, may be to recognize that he and his contemporaries had the freedom to choose among the notions of their own day like a painter choosing colors from a palette. They were not locked into systems of thinking like totalitarian regimes or political parties. They were in this respect much freer thinkers than many of us are now.

In particular, to my mind, the solution to Troilus lies in a greater respect for tradition and continuity in the intellectual life of Chaucer's day. The now unfamiliar tradition of Aristotelian physics, with its emphasis on natural motion and natural place, underlies the structure of Troilus and explains the movement and interaction of the main characters. In particular, it explains Troilus's baffling soliloquy on predestination and the even more baffling happy ending with which Chaucer closes his "tragedye."

Chaucer is sometimes thought of as a "modern" because he was interested in scientific instruments. But if we consider why, he suddenly becomes less so, for his main interest was judicial astrology, not astronomical observation in anticipation of Galileo. His use of astrology in Troilus and elsewhere demonstrates that Chaucer viewed the stars as a key to the understanding of human character, as an aid to medical practice, and as a way of predicting the future - making predictions that might range from warnings of impending global or personal catastrophe to forecasts of when it is going to rain. This may not be science as we know it today, but it is well within the tradition of Aristotelian natural philosophy, the dominant tradition in Chaucer's day.

Thus the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries in many respects speak different languages. The simplest terms can generate the greatest misunderstandings. In the process of recovering a sense of the ancients' perspective on life we need to appreciate how much stronger certain words were for the ancient world than they are for modern thinkers. Even in the heyday of William of Ockham, "Nature," "Fortune," "Divine Providence," and the forces they represented were all still regarded by most thinkers as real and formidable powers, not myths, mental constructs, or conventions. We also need to understand how powerful and misleading Chaucer's terms "science" and "tragedy" have become for us today.