In the year 1858 in the town of Lourdes
France, a fourteen-year-old girl Bernadette Sobirous purportedly saw a
miraculous apparition of the Virgin Mary. Four years later, Pope Pius IX
approved the miracle. Since this event, millions have traveled to Lourdes in
order to bathe in the miraculous waters and be cured. Naturally, the Church has
kept strict records of visitors since 1858 and has discovered 60 cases of
pilgrims to Lourdes whose recoveries after the fact cannot be explained by
science and thus must be deemed miraculous. These cases seemed to provide proof
to the church that the waters were in fact miraculous. However, the scientist
Carl Sagan did extensive research on this phenomenon and found that the rate of
spontaneous, inexplicable remission of disease in the general public is in fact
higher than in those who have made the pilgrimage to Lourdes. Lawrence Krauss
added, “Thus, if you bathe in the Lourdes
waters, you apparently have a smaller likelihood of being spontaneously cured
than others who have not. However, if you are one of the faithful and go to
Lourdes, and later your disease goes into remission, there is no way I, or
anyone else, will be likely to convince you it was just a coincidence” (LA
Times). It was precisely this type of belief that Chaucer satirizes in “The
Pardoner’s Tale”. Like the Church in both Chaucer’s time and modernity, the
Pardoner is both enigmatic and paradoxical; he is surrounded with so much irony
and ambiguity that the reader is confused by the morals of the character even
at the end of the tale. The Pardoner is at once a pardoner and repenter, an
epitome and antithesis of morality. Yet, the startling fact is that the
Pardonor readily admits his faults and underlying motive, “that he means to
have money, wool, cheese, and wheat” (Chaucer 244). The Pardoner never attempts
to act dignified and noble noting, “And thus I preach against the very vice I
make my living out of- avarice” (Chaucer 244). Chaucer depicts the Pardoner as a brutally honest man with
many vices who is not himself intrinsically evil, but rather part of a much
larger immoral organization, the Church.
From the beginning of the Pardoner’s
Tale, Chaucer makes it clear that the object of his satire is the church rather
than the Pardonor. While the Pardoner is not by any means a model of morality,
Chaucer shows that the Church facilitates a system in which men of distasteful
values can seem powerful and holy. In the first paragraph of the prologue, the
Pardoner makes his motive and tactics clear to his listeners,
“My
Lords,” he said, “in churches where I preach
I
cultivate a haughty kind of speech
And
Ring it out as roundly as a bell;
I’ve
got it all by heart, the tale I tell.
I
have a text, it always is the same
And
always has been, since I learnt the game,
Old
as the hills and fresher than the grass,
Radix Malorum est cupiditas” (Chaucer
241).
The
Pardoner willingly admits that his tales and preaching are all just a ploy to
obtain money. The Pardoner even accepts that he suffers from those very vices
he preaches against, mainly that greed, and specifically his greed for money,
is the root of all evil. Yet, the Pardoner says that his disingenuity is a part
of a much larger conspiracy, which he calls, “the game” (Chaucer 241). His,
“haughty kind of speech” (Chaucer 241), and tale which “is always the same”
(Chaucer 241), show the emptiness of the Pardoner’s message. And yet, he is
rich; the Pardoner recognizes that the best way for him to fulfill his want of
money is through the church. The Pardonor notes that through the church he
sells bones as holy relics and will take money even off the poorest of the
poor. Some scholars even posit that even more irony is present in the story
because the Pardoner is gay (JSTOR). Scholars point to the prologue of the
Canterbury Tales in which the narrator states, “He had a small voice a goat has
got…I judge he was a gelding or a mare” (Chaucer 21). These lines even further
show that the Pardoner most likely did not believe in what he was preaching or
what he stood for. In this way, Chaucer portrays the Pardoner as a brutally
honest man with conspicuous faults caught up in the much larger, hypocritical,
secretive, and inconspicuously unholy game that is the church and religion in
the fifteenth century.
Chaucer’s
satire of the church is most likely a result of Chaucer living in
pre-reformation era. Chaucer was very much alive in the era of indulgences and
sacraments. For Chaucer, the Pardoner is simply a foil to which to compare the
Church. Even though the Pardoner is a character ridiculous in his morality, his
disingenuity seems minor in comparison to the church’s power to sway the people’s
minds, just as they do today with the waters of Lourdes. Chaucer’s story
maintains pertinence today as many continue to use the powers of religion and
the church for the purposes of money and greed. The religious charlatans today
bring to mind those of old and remind the public of the power of supernatural
beliefs to change opinions, governments, economies, and lives. As indulges
regain prominence in the church (Time), one cannot help but think of the
Pardoner of Chaucer’s time who said the right things, told the right tales, and
preached the right message but deep down was nothing more than a charlatan
using supernatural beliefs for greed.
Works Cited:
Krauss, Lawrence, Ph.D. "Pope John Paul II and the Trouble
with Miracles." Los Angeles Times [Los
Angeles] 7 July 2013: n. pag. Print.
Vitello, Paul. "For Catholics, a Door to Absolution Is Reopened." The New York Times [New York] 9
Feb. 2009: n. pag. Print.
Rochman, Bonnie. "Why Catholic Indulgences Are Making a Comeback." Time Magazine 22 Feb. 2009: n.
pag. Print.
Besserman, Lawrence and Storm, Melvin. “Chaucer's Pardoner.” PMLA. Vol. 98, No. 3 (May, 1983)pp. 405-406. Modern Language Association. http://www.jstor.org/stable/462279.
pag. Print
Mitchell, Charles. “The Moral Superiority of Chaucer’s Pardonor.” College English May. 1966, pp. 437-444. National Council of English Teachers
pag. Print
