by John Gardner
As me mettë; but thus hyt fil. [dreamed]
Ryght thus me mette, as I yow tellë,
That in the castell ther was a bellë,
As hyt haddë smyten hourës twelvë.— [struck]
Therwyth I awook myselvë
And fond me lyinge in my bed,
And the book that I haddë red…
By the time he began on the Book of the Duchess, Chaucer had a master’s command of the “colors of rhetoric”—those figures such as hyperbole, metaphor, verbal repetition, and so on, that make poetic suggestion possible. He had translated at least one, and probably several, stylistically and philosophically difficult poems and had steeped himself in Latin and French poetry, so that he could twist allusions with effortless cunning, much as T. S. Eliot twists allusions, and could elaborate a poetic structure more intricate and rich in symbolic implication than anything written in English since Beowulf.
Just how much Chaucer really knew about matters other than ars poetica has been endlessly debated by modern scholars, though none of his contemporaries seem to have had doubts. For all the debate, the question can be answered simply: he knew enough to be a serious medieval “philosophical” poet; in other words, he knew a great deal. Unfortunately, this simple answer requires some explaining, and though the explanation may take us far afield, it is one over which we must pause at least briefly. It will provide a clearer sense of Chaucer’s intellectual habits and interests, and it will provide the only kind of argument available in support of the tradition that Chaucer shows in his work effects of an Oxford education.
In the Middle Ages people took it for granted that the very best poetry is metaphysical; that is, the poet sought to understand and express man’s nature, his place in the universe, his meaning. As in medieval philosophy and political theory—as in metaphysical speculation in any age, and as in all great poetry—this meant what is now sometimes casually dismissed as “argument by analogy.” If we understand the exact relationship between gold and lead, between Christ and the Virgin, so this argument runs, we can determine the proper relationship between, say, a king and his subjects. (The medieval English political theorist Henry Bracton argues his “king’s pleasure” principle from the status of the Virgin.)
Though not much favored by modern logicians—rightly enough, from a certain point of view—argument by analogy is as much the method of our most serious modern novelists and some of our most penetrating recent philosophers (for instance, Alfred North Whitehead) as it was of Geoffrey Chaucer or the ancient Chinese. It begins—to take a simple but not facetious example—in the intuition that if a drop of water, a planet, and the universe all tend to circularity, then they are in some respect inherently the same, and that ultimately all that exists may be the same. Compare Boethius’ notion of “love” as the world’s unique principle, a natural law in the same class as the Newtonian laws of thermodynamics but broader in its sphere of operation, drawing sparks toward the sky, odd numbers toward even, waves toward shore, or the spirit of man toward its maker; or compare the Oriental “unique principle” of yin and yang. Medieval thinkers assumed that the way to truth was through metaphor, that is, through a search for the essence of the world’s relationships. To a serious medieval poet, it was not enough simply to state what one believes about a given situation, as Robert Frost might do; one must discover an essentially analogous situation and expose the identical process of decline or growth (or whatever) in operation there, as T. S. Eliot liked to do. Thus Chaucer, in the Prologue to the Second Nun’s Tale, uses language drawn from alchemy to speak to the purifying powers of sainthood. Though not obvious at a glance to the modern reader, the following lines imply a comparison between heaven, the Philosopher’s Stone, and the saintly life:
And right so as thisë philosophrës writë
That hevene is swift and round and eek brennyngë, [also]
Right so was fairë Cecilië the whitë [St. Cecilia]
Ful swift and bisy evere in good werkyngë,
And round and hool in good perseverynge,
And brennynge evere in charité ful brightë.
When Chaucer tells, later in the poem, of the martyrdom of St. Cecile, he compares her to the Philosopher’s Stone burning in its alembic or, as some English alchemistical treatises say, “house”:
And he weex wrooth, and bad men sholde hir ledë
Hom til hir hous, and “In hirë hous,” quod he, [grew angry…bade]
“Brenne hire right in a bath of flambës redë.“
And as he bad, right so was doon the dedë.… [deed]
No one need know all medieval arts and sciences to understand and enjoy Chaucer’s poetry, since there as in the Bible (at least as the wiser Church Fathers read it) nothing is revealed obscurely in one place that is not revealed plainly in another; but it is important—aesthetically as well as philosophically—to know that, for Chaucer, all the universe is connected, blood-related.
Whatever objections we may have to argument by analogy, we still use it, as Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out, whenever we speak of “mental circuits” as if the mind were a switchboard or “channels of thought” or “rivers of feeling” as if wisdom were a sea we might arrive at like stout Cortez. But we use the method ineptly, from a medieval point of view. We have nonce metaphors, but no totally organizing system. We focus on individuals, ignoring universals. Medieval and ancient philosophy, on the other hand, untouched by the thought of Descartes and Leibnitz, was holistic. Take an example: whereas modern Western medicine examines the patient’s area of pain and ignores the rest of the universe, medieval and (in some cases) ancient medicine considered the position of the stars and planets, the patient’s life-long diet, his physiognomy, his family relationships, sometimes the entrails of a freshly killed goat. Whereas the Western doctor cuts out as much as practicable of the patient’s diseased liver, the medieval doctor, convinced that the microcosm (man) and the macrocosm (the universe) are intimately related, would as part of his cure cast an “image,” a small model of the zodiac in which each stone or metal is designed to attract the healing power or inhibit the destructiveness of a particular planet, and (in addition to prescribing drugs) would determine which of the four humors—blood, phlegm, choler (yellow bile), and melancholy (black bile)—was the source of the problem and how the patient’s diet should be altered.* Though Chaucer scoffs at the Physician in the Canterbury Tales for such faults as greed and self-righteousness, he is perfectly serious in his praise of the Physician’s techniques of cure—
For be was grounded in astronomyë.
He kepte his pacient a ful greet deel
In hourës by his magyk natureel.
Wel koude he fortunen the ascendent
Of his ymages for his pacient.
He knew the cause of everich maladyë,
Were it of hoot, or coold, or moyste, or dryë,
And wherë they engendred, and of what humour.
He was a verray, parfit praktisour:
The cause yknowe, and of his harm the rootë,
Anon he yaf the sikë man his bootë. [cure]
Given the holistic premise of his age, Chaucer felt he had no choice, if he wished to be a first-rate poet, but to pursue by whatever means available what we might call, loosely, metaphysics, the interrelationship of form and matter, higher and lower living orders (from worms to angels or Platonic spirits), geometry, numerology, astrology, alchemy, the philosophy of music, and so on—in other words, the university matter of the so-called quadrivium. His writing shows that he did just this and did it well, for his own purpose, not as a specialist in each discipline, but as a poet seeking grist for his mill. Chaucer was no professor of mathematics (if the last page of the Equatory of the Planets is Chaucer’s work, as it may well be, he was capable of amazing blunders), but he was usually an excellent amateur mathematician, no mere reckoner of sums but a man who understood the mystical properties of numbers and geometrical forms as they were brought down from Pythagoras, Plato, and Aris
totle by Macrobius, Boethius, and others, and applied to physics, optics, and so forth (in ways we need not pause here to detail) by men like Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon—understood them well enough that he could without heavyhandedness manipulate numerology in his prose and verse, reinforcing ideas, deepening symbolic structures, instructing and delighting by his dazzling plays of wit.
He eventually came to know enough alchemy that he could load his Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale not only with the language of alchemists but also with the emotions such men went through—fiery curiosity, ambition, rage and frustration, despair—and beyond all that, knew enough alchemy that he could rightly interpret the difficult alchemistical text which closes the poem. These were, as we’ve said, not pseudo-sciences in Chaucer’s day, though they involved what we now would call magic; nor were all their practitioners such bunkum artists as we encounter in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale. At best, mathematicians and alchemists—“philosophers”—were diligent theoretical and practical scientists struggling to unlock nature’s secrets. In their own view and Chaucer’s, a bad man might seek knowledge for personal gain, but good men sought it for its usefulness and interest. The good deserved respect, especially at Oxford, where occult studies had a noble tradition going back at least to Roger Bacon, whose later name as a great magician derived mainly from his original, from our point of view far-fetched, speculations in astrology and alchemy.
Chaucer must have only begun on these disciplines in the 1360’s. His philosophical stance in his 1369 or 1370 elegy for Blanche is generally Boethian: a major theme is free will as a quality of mind in a world wherein Fortune seems omnipotent; he uses, in a general way, the Boethian contrast of darkness and light (related to matter and form, or spirit) and the Boethian idea that we must work with, not against, the drive of nature; and he uses also several images drawn directly from Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. But only in poems later than the Book of the Duchess does Chaucer depend heavily on Boethian quotation and allusion, for instance, his use in the House of Fame of the Boethian idea that all existents have their natural place on a ladder running from the lowest sort of matter to the purest sort of spirit:
…every kyndëly thyng that is [natural]
Hath a kyndely stedë there he [natural place]
May best in hyt conservëd be;
Unto which place every thyng,
Thorgh his kyndëly enclynyng,
Moveth for to comë to
Whan that hyt is awey therfro.…
Astronomical and musical allusions in the Book of the Duchess are conventional, and if the poem contains alchemistical elements, scholars have found no trace of them. What the poem does contain in abundance is proof that Chaucer had been through the standard matter of the trivium and knew—like the back of his hand—the Canticle of Canticles, the Apocalypse, French poetry, and Ovid. He also knew contemporary psychology, not only dream theory but also theoretical approaches to madness and its cure (“heart-hunting” as Oxford medical men called it). In all likelihood he had only just begun his work in the mathematical and scientific fields that would be important to him later, and had not yet proceeded far into speculative philosophy. He may possibly have touched on optics as developed in the somewhat queer tradition established at Oxford a century before Chaucer by Robert Grosseteste, who studied light in simultaneously Neoplatonic and scientific ways, as “light metaphysic,” having to do with divine illumination (hence with the relation of God’s nature and man’s, with epistemology, and psychology), and as natural or secondary light (having to do with physics). In Chaucer’s thoroughly Neoplatonic elegy—Neoplatonic in that matter is informed by spirit and freedom accompanies an escape from devotion to the material—light is a central motif, and Grosseteste’s ideas could easily account for the double use of the image throughout, even, perhaps in the opening lines: “I have gret wonder, by this lyght, / How that I lyve…” But of course no medieval Christian poet needed Oxford scholarship to tell him that light could be symbolic.
Oxford was a liberal and exceedingly vital university in the fourteenth century. Partly this was an effect of its power and security, its right and its sometimes ferociously demonstrated will to rule itself; and partly it was an effect of the climate created by the bold ideas of the line of thinkers which began, in a sense, with Robert Grosseteste. Thirteenth-century Franciscans took the lead in the development of medieval thought when the Dominicans hobbled themselves, in 1286, with an obligation to defend the doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas. Grosseteste, the Franciscans’ teacher, founded a school at Oxford which Roger Bacon and others would make the most important of its day. It stood for independent judgment and firsthand knowledge, the study of languages (as we’ve seen) and physics, not merely “old authorities.”
In the Franciscan dismantling of the Thomist system, the great Duns Scotus pressed further than Grosseteste had gone. Duns Scotus was a brilliant critic of systems and was able to show that Aquinas’ harmony of revelation and philosophy was illusory. But Duns Scotus drew back from the final step, reluctant to admit a fundamental divorce between reason and faith, philosophy and religion. Then into mid-fourteenth-century Oxford came William of Ockham and the revival, or rather revision and flowering, of the old twelfth-century philosophical position known as nominalism.
Ockham is now remembered chiefly for the dictum known as Ockham’s razor, “Pluralites non est ponenda sine necessitate”—Multiplicity ought not be posited without necessity—a principle not in fact original with Ockham but important to the history of philosophy and the sciences, not only because it is of logical convenience (asserting that a simple explanation is logically preferable to one more complicated) but also because it turns out to be true to nature’s way of working: when a modification is needed in the process of animal evolution (for example), nature does not create from scratch but elongates, flattens, or otherwise alters cells already at work, patching and toggling, following the line of least resistance. But Ockham’s importance in his own day lay in his original speculations in political theory, where he powerfully defended civil authority against claims of temporal authority by the Pope, and in philosophy, especially psychology, metaphysics, and logic. He was the first to formulate the persuasive nominalist attack on universals, arguing that only singulars exist—particular cows or trees or men—and that the universal (e.g., the nature of man) has objective value or actual existence only as it is thought up. He argued, foreshadowing Schopenhauer, that will, not intellect, is the primary faculty of the soul, since ideas, that is, abstractions, follow naturally from perception and intuition, the fundamental forms of human knowledge; and he taught that since universals are mere concepts, there can be, between “essence” (the idea of the thing) and “existence” (the thing itself as grasped by our senses) no real distinction.
Medieval philosophy, before and after Ockham, had two main tendencies, known to the history of philosophy as “realism” and “nominalism.” The controversy arose from a passage in Boethius’ translation of Porphyry’s Introduction to the Categories of Aristotle, which treated the problem of genera and species (for example, “animals” and “horses”). The question was: (1) Do genera subsist in themselves or only in the mind? (2) If they’re subsistent, are they corporeal or incorporeal? and (3) Are they separated from sensible things or placed in them? To put this very simply, (1) Can one think of an “animal” without thinking of a horse, cat, dog, or cow? (2) If there is such an “animal,” does it have a body? and (3) If “animals” exist, do they exist by themselves or do you have to, so to speak, cut open a rhinoceros to get one out?
The realists, whose position went back to Plato, were inclined to the persuasion that behind and before my dog Fred, my horse Alexander, and my ape named Jim stands God’s idea, “animalness,” and that only God’s idea is ultimately real. The rest is, as Chaucer says, borrowing from Plato, mere “shadows passing on a wall.” According to the nominalist, on the other hand, words like “animal” (i.e., universals) are mere names we
invent to express, or abstract, the qualities we have observed in particulars. Such a view leads to an interesting problem in which Chaucer would take great delight. If ideas are abstractions from the concrete, I can neither know that my idea is “right” nor—since you too abstract from concrete particulars—can I meaningfully communicate my idea to you. (Though answered many times, this error is still around, for instance in the positivists’ claim that one man “cannot have another’s toothache.”) If all ideas are necessarily private, then all debate, all judgment must collapse to passion and opinion, so that Chaucer in the Invocation to his mock-nominalist House of Fame is quite right to bawl out, anticipating critics who dislike his poem:
And whoso thorgh presumpcion,
Or hate, or skorn, or thorgh envyë,
Despit, or jape, or vilanyë, [jape—humor]
Mysdeme hyt [i.e., my dream], pray I Jesus God
That (dreme he barefot, dreme he shod),
That every harm that any man
Hath had, syth the world began,
Befalle hym therof, or he stervë, [e’er he die]
And graunte he mote hit ful deservë,
Lo, with such a conclusion
As had of his avision [dream, vision]
Cresus, that was kyng of Lydë, [Lydia]
That high upon a gebet dydë!
This prayer shal he have of me;
I am no bet in charyté!
Though the whole “realist”-“nominalist” dispute may at first appear vain scholastic subtlety, it involves issues of the greatest speculative and practical importance. Especially in its early eleventh- and twelfth-century form, nominalism implied an anti-spiritual view of the world, whereas “realism” implies a spiritual view. More important, since Church doctrine—established over centuries by careful students of the meaning of scripture—purports to describe what is ultimately real (such actual but invisible existents as, say, the Trinity), a strictly pursued nominalism would imply that the writings of the Fathers might as well be discarded.