The Wheel of Fortune
Think upon the crow - destiny, chance and providence in the story of a jealous husband.
‘Of sundry folk, by aventure yfalle, in felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle’. – Of sundry persons, who had chanced to fall in fellowship, and pilgrims were they all. (Gen Prol v25)
I came to the Canterbury Tales rather accidentally, via an app which had recorded the Tales in the original Middle English and read by the great Terry Jones of Monty Python fame. After that it was a family connection who enlightened me to just how interesting Chaucer was through the book A Poets Tale by last week’s contributor Paul Strohm. I am aware that a Scottish Catholic magazine seems rather an odd place to feature a piece of literature that does not have anything to do with Scotland and appears to have little to do with Catholic theology or doctrine – however that is completely wrong, at least on the Catholic part. Because of course Chaucer was Catholic and what you find threaded in and around all the tales are both theological and philosophical questions that are as prescient then as they are now. His characters are clearly people he had come across in some aggregated way and as such give us a fascinating window into Catholic England, and therefore I would suggest a hint at what Catholic Scotland was like pre-Reformation. In the last of our short series we will look at these questions Chaucer puts into his characters lives and stories below.
One of Chaucer’s major themes is ‘aventure’ which can be translated as chance and the role this plays in our lives and in the overall divine economy. This would be important to him because he translated a famous work – the Consolation of Philosophy that explores this concept. It was by a Roman Christian of the 4th Century called Boethius, a scholar, philosopher, and theologian during the reign of Theodoric the Ostrogoth (an Arian) in Rome whom he also acted as a minister to. In his book he is dialoguing with the imaginary figure of Philosophia – the embodiment of Philosophy, asking why he is having such a rotten time. He had fallen under suspicion of treason, was exiled and most of his wealth confiscated, including his precious library, and would eventually be brutally executed. In Book I of the Consolations he is entreating Philosophia with the question of why the wicked flourish – her rather enigmatic response: ‘Everything is strange until you know the cause’; which would appear in the Squires Tale: ‘as intensely some wonder about the cause of thunder’. However, Boethius wants to why it seems God rules nature with regularity but with humans it appears random. We know of course the cause of thunder, and we know about the laws of relativity, but we can look at the human world and ask the same sort of questions - is life just ‘joye after wo, and wo after gladnesse’ as Egeus asked in The Knights Tale? Jill Mann, in her Introduction to The Canterbury Tales writes:
‘If God is governor of the world, why does he allow fortune to hold sway, so that the innocent suffer and the guilty prosper? Lady Philosophy’s long answer to Boethius complaint ultimately rests on a discrimination between the divine and the human perspectives. Divine providence, she explains, surveys all things together in an eternal present; this eternal whole is, however, executed in the world of time by an ordinance that she calls Destiny…. God does not foresee events he merely sees them in his atemporal present, and his knowledge does not, therefore constrain human freedom to act’.
The Consolations made the ancient concept of the ‘wheel of Fortune’ famous in later mediaeval times, the Rota Fortunae –and as Lady Philosophia would say in the book – the closer you get to a wheel, the less you see it moving – as in the closer you get to God, the less you are swayed or dismayed by ‘fortune’. We are now in the field of destiny and providence which St Thomas Aquinas wrote extensively about in his Summa:
It is necessary to attribute providence to God. For all the good that is in created things has been created by God. In created things good is found not only as regards their substance, but also as regards their order towards an end and especially their last end, which is the divine goodness’. Summa Theologiae I q. 22, a. 1:
CS Lewis taking up this theme wrote that when providence is seen from below, it is destiny which is ‘merely a moving image of eternal providence’ (DI p87) and that the closer to the hub of the wheel we come, the less we are moved by destiny and more so by the hand of God. In this regard, our suffering and passions are regulated by the fact we know there is no good or bad luck only the good end of Gods plan for us and as Chaucer wrote in the Ballade of Fortune: ‘no man is wreched but himself it wene’ (reiterated by Tennyson as ‘nothing is miserable unless you think it so’.
Chaucer expertly weaved this into his Tales – with the Knights Tale he would leave unanswered the question of the so-called arbitrary nature of life, with aventure producing a good joyful end for one of the protagonists and for the other less so.
In the Manciples Tale we have a retelling of Ovid’s poem about Apollo and his wife Coronis, which we will spend a few lines looking at now to learn more about aventure.
The Tale centres around Phoebus (Apollo) who was a ‘paladin of lustiest marrow, better than anyone with a bow and arrow’. He was the greatest with lyre and harp and a voice none could surpass, and ‘renowned for bounty, chivalry and truth’. He kept a crow in a cage which had white feathers, taught it to speak and had a beautiful singing voice. He also had a wife who he ‘loved more than life’ and would do all he could to please her. But Phoebus had a problem, he was terribly jealous although thought that no man could come between him and his love who is never named or has voice in this tale. However ‘flesh pines for the new-fangled, curse upon it’ says the Manciple and the great mans wife sleeps with another, and worse, lesser man than her husband ‘not worth a gnat indeed’. Part of this story is getting at the faithlessness of men and women, how the ‘aventure’ of life gets between that which we contrive to be and that what actually happens.
‘Take any bird put it in a cage and let your hearts intention then engage to foster it tenderly with food and drink, with every dainty mess that thought you can think, and keep it clean as nearly as you may, caged in a cage of gold however gay. That bird would rather twenty thousand fold be in a forest which is rough and cold, feeding on worms and other wretched trash’.
Chaucer is pointing out the all to human fascination with the new and how we pine for what we don’t have, regardless of the treasure we already hold. The tale puts into view the crow and the woman, both held in this gilded cage, by a jealous man who is used to getting his own way - having control or ‘maistyre’. The story here, as you will see, does not dwell on the sins of the woman in question but on Phoebus and his reaction, for the truth comes out via the crow, who saw the wife and her lover together, and tells Phoebus of the deed. His rage is unbounded, and he kills his wife, destroys all his musical instruments and bow and then turns his rage onto the crow. Phoebus is now fully distraught at what he has done, but like many of us, we do not like the truth, especially when it shows us at our worst, so he turns toward the crow accusing it of causing him confusion and then begins to imagine the affair never happened. In his new rage he pulls out the crow’s white feathers making him black, and curses its voice so now instead of sweet nightingale like song we are treated to a harsh clatter and then he throws the crow to the devil. Naming it ‘storm-crow’ and cursing it again as a harbinger of doom. Manciple’s solution is that we should ‘hold our tongues’ and ‘little speech, much quiet’. But Chaucer is saying something else here, that along with our lack of ability to control aventure it is also how we deal with truth, in this case specifically through language. The wife does not have a voice, the crow has his taken away because of Phoebus’ desire for control; its not just that he keeps them in their gilded cages, he doesn’t allow them agency.
We see a similar theme in the Wife of Bath’s tale where she says she was ‘beaten for a book’. She had her jaw broke and permanently made deaf in one ear because her husband would read lines from a book that retold all the wicked wife tropes. One day she had enough and tore some pages which brought his rage upon her. But Allison would challenge these words, which meant challenging St Jerome (whose musings on women were in the book) and understanding of St Paul’s to the Corinthians on woman; she first rose up and hit him back, which seemed to shock him and then once he had calmed down, in his remorse allowed her ‘maistrye’ (mastery) over the household and him. She would comically end her own tale with:
‘In perfect bliss; and may Christ Jesus send us husbands meek and young and fresh in bed, and grace to overbid them when we wed. And – Jesu- hear my prayer- cut short the lives of those who won’t be governed by their wives’.
This idea of maistyre or control runs through many of the Tales and in this we find the parallel of what Phoebus wife could not have, she was governed and so destroyed, Allison found a way to govern and lived. But this back and forth of the sexes is not God’s plan, but was exactly what God said would happen after the Fall. In Genesis 3:16 he would tell Eve, ‘Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you’. The linguistic imagery behind this is similar to the image of sin in Genesis, for it is pictured as like a rabid animal ready to pounce. This is what Chaucer is showing, the damage of sin, how through it are rage burns, and our desire for control wholly supplanting the right rule of Christ in our hearts; instead seeking to rule ourselves and then others out with the holy love of God and ‘our sweet Mother’.
Does Chaucer have a remedy for us? Is he just telling a set of tales? Chaucer is setting a mirror up us all, and in particular his society but he does want to teach us something. Chaucer’s remedy is found through the Parson who, in his tale, which is really a long sermon, deals directly with rage and by extension how we react to rota fortunae.
The Parson speaking now:
‘The sin of anger, according to the description of St Augustine is wicked desire to be avenged by word or deed. Anger according to the Philosopher is the hot blood of the man enlivened in heart, through which he wants to harm him who hates him. For certainly, the heart of man, by heating and moving of his blood, grows so troubled that he is out of all judgement of reason’.
The Parson’s then states: ‘The remedy against anger is a virtue that men call humility, that is meekness; and also another virtue that men call patience or sufferance’. One wonders at the influence here of St Thomas Aquinas in the Parsons remedy for in the Summa he would respond to the question of meekness: ‘ [It] moderates anger according to right reason, as stated in Ethic. iv, 5’; which the Parson reiterates: ‘Yes, certainly. Alas! It takes from man his wit and his reason, and all his blessed life spiritual that should guard his soul’. ‘Outrageous anger’ destroys reason and only meekness will restrain it:
‘[655] Meekness withdraws and restrains the stirrings and the moving of man’s mood in his heart, in such manner that they skip not out by anger nor by ire. Patient endurance suffers sweetly all the annoyances and the wrongs that men do to man outward. Saint Jerome says thus of meekness, that "it does nor says no harm to any person. nor for any harm that men do or say, he not become inflamed against his reason." (The Parsons Tale)
This patience endurance or sufferance, coupled with and fed by meekness may well have saved Phoebus wife, and as Chaucer is pointing out – ourselves. For the virtue of meekness has another quality – it suffers aventure well. It draws us closer to the wheel where we are less buffeted by the affects of destiny, not of course in regards all the experiences of life, but mentally and spiritually fortified against falling in rage or despair. We believe and trust in the goodness of the divine providence which provides us hope, the full biblical sense – not mere optimism, but confident expectation of the good. It may sound rather abstract all of this and far from our own everyday lives, but Chaucer had many ups and downs, just as we saw from his great influence – Boethius. One of the fruits of the Canterbury Tales is that we can explore these themes and draw from Chaucer and his influences – as well as enjoy a rather good story.
By Eric Hanna