God's Patients

John Bugbee's ambitious monograph sets out to restore a more authentic reading to a specific set of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The study works toward this goal by recovering a “lost ideal,” a set of assumptions regarding individual agency and philosophical realism that Bugbee sees shaping Chaucer's tales “at a deep level” (pp. 5, 11). For the most widespread and accessible articulation of these theological commonplaces, Bugbee turns to Bernard of Clairvaux to explicate two concepts: cooperative action and the “gentle” application of the law. This approach first examines the cooperation between the human subject and God in bringing about individual salvation. That is, human salvation (or any other human activity) is achieved neither by individual efforts alone nor solely by God's munificent power. Instead, it requires an exchange of efforts that is flexible and responsive to fluctuating circumstances, wherein activity is also simultaneously passive and the passive requires exerted activity. (Bugbee frequently labels the passive as “passion,” relying on an archaic meaning of “passive” but taking advantage of the energy implied in Present-Day English “passion.”)Alongside this topic, Bugbee later argues for a return to a realist understanding of law, which he very broadly identifies as the “logical and metaphysical structures” that mediate contact between “nearly everything” and anything else (pp. xiv-xv). Neither rigid nor antinomian, these gentle understandings of law resist reduction to either/or choices, allowing instead a framework that promotes cooperative agency. Thus, cooperative agency and gentle laws are two sides of the same coin. Where one is, according to Bugbee, there the other shall be. This standard of cooperation and gentleness becomes for Bugbee the means for measuring Chaucer's approval of the behavior of (primarily female) characters in six tales: The Clerk's Tale, The Man of Law's Tale, The Knight's Tale, The Second Nun's Tale, The Franklin's Tale, and The Physician's Tale. His ultimate goal of “producing readings that are more fruitful and . . . more true than those currently available” relies on applying this singular standard to medieval and modern texts alike (p. 36).Through extensive comparisons to sources for The Clerk's Tale, Bugbee finds evidence that Chaucer did not intend for long-suffering Griselda to be an admired model for either wives or the Christian soul. Instead, he argues, Chaucer transformed Griselda into a “negative exemplum” of false patience. By promising to be a “mere extension of Walter's will,” and then by attempting to keep that promise, she abnegates all responsibility for her situation (p. 67). Her efforts to imitate a false ideal prevent her from turning to God for support or recognizing her bad oath as not binding.Contrary to the tradition of dismissing Custance as a passive victim in The Man of Law's Tale, Bugbee argues that using the yardstick of cooperative agency allows us to see Custance as more involved in her survival than previously allowed. She not only actively turns to providence for support, but also rejects a rigid adherence to what he broadly identifies as law: “any formal pattern that claims to guide . . . the behavior of material realities” (p. 220). Unlike Griselda, she makes no overriding oaths; each surrender of her will to providential design is an independent action. She and her husband Alla are channels for divine activity. At the same time, the tale illustrates the deleterious consequences of perceiving the law as rigid. Such thinking encourages evil characters (such as the Sowltaness, Alla's mother, and the treacherous knight) to believe there is an indissoluble link between their actions and the desired results. They are unable to imagine how other people and events can interfere with plans and stymie desires.In Bugbee's reading of The Second Nun's Tale, St. Cecilia represents the opposite of Griselda. The martyr actively pursues her own goals without any apparent humility or reliance on providence. Neither her ability to convert nor her eventual martyrdom evidences divine-human cooperation, unlike versions of the saint in Chaucer's sources and in stark contrast to the Virgin Mary, whose humble service is invoked in the tale's prologue (perhaps as a late addition by Chaucer in order to point readers toward a better interpretation of this zealous saint.)Another negative example comes in The Franklin's Tale, where Dorigen's irrational adherence to her rash oath shows the danger of expecting “a strict and absolute fulfillment of law” (p. 220). The tale opens with what appears to be a mode of marital cooperation almost so unimaginable to Dorigen that she caps their agreement with a promise to obey him in everything. It does not occur to her to break her otherwise invalid oath to Aurelius, leading her to see her options as only suicide or adultery.In The Physician's Tale, Virginius (the father of the victim) is the one guilty of rigid thinking. He decides to kill Virginia rather than submit her to the verdict of an evil judge. It does not occur to him to refuse to turn her over. As with other tales, Bugbee shows how Chaucer changes his sources to emphasize this aspect of the tale. Because the pagan story provides so little room to deal with cooperative agency, Chaucer alludes to the story of Jephtha, where we see the dilemma of cooperative agency. Though Bugbee does not point this out, in the context of his book's argument, the story of Jephtha shows how disorienting and dangerous efforts at cooperative agency can be. Jephtha, seeing himself as cooperating with Yahweh to defeat the Ammonites, swears that in return for a victory he will sacrifice whosoever first appears on his return home. When that victim turns out to be his beloved daughter, Jephtha does not rethink either his oath or its role in cooperative agency. Indeed, as Bugbee argues, these two concepts are linked. As depicted here, however, they remind us how that delicate linkage can be twisted by complicating factors.Scaffolding these interpretations are four other chapters arguing for the validity of Bugbee's methodology. Holding together this scaffolding are two assumptions: (1) that an interpreter's best reading of a tale is the one that corresponds with Chaucer's intentions (or, as Bugbee sometimes allows, the assumptions that infused Chaucer's tale, whether or not the poet was aware of them), and (2) that these intentions or assumptions can be recovered. Assuming meaning is static, Bugbee works to remove the scrim of Protestant, Enlightenment, and other postmedieval values that distort our ability to see Chaucer's tales in the way the poet intended and in the way his audience would have understood them, two interpretations Bugbee seems to equate.Among the postmedieval values he seems most at pains to scrape away are those presented by female scholars, particularly Jill Mann, L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, and Caroline Walker Bynum (not “Walter” as listed in the bibliography). His disagreements with their interpretations are not relegated to the 116 pages of discursive endnotes where he buries his cavils with male scholars (such as Mark Miller and E. T. Donaldson). Because the female scholars provide interpretations not in line with the ones he believes Chaucer intended, Bugbee sees them as failing to engage in dialogue. Therefore, he claims, they read Chaucer in bad faith. Thus, much of chapter 2 (“Hermeneutical Interlude: Chaucer, Gadamer, Boethius”) and more subtly chapter 3 (“Bernard and Chaucer on Action and Passion”) work to establish the errancy of Mann's choice of Theseus (in The Knight's Tale) “as the highest ethical exemplar in the Canterbury collection” (p. 121), a quarrel he fortifies by rejecting her interpretive assumptions based on presentist values (her term) and recodifying her interpretive moves via Gadamer's valid but not equivalent categories. Chapter 2 also includes a three-page critique of Fradenburg's psychoanalytic readings (pp. 109–11). He devotes chapter 3’s short appendix (“Bernard, C. W. Bynum, and the Deep Roots of Paradox”) to questioning Bynum's reading of Bernard's dyads. His eagerness to dissect the failings of female scholars in the body of his chapters seems apace with his overlooking other feminist scholarship dealing with these tales. This oversight is a shame because much of this scholarship understands the tales’ female figures as traversing paradoxical positions vis-à-vis agency and the law, maneuvers that Chaucer shows repeated interest in as women manipulate to their advantage the law, its structures, and its processes. Recognizing the law's flexibility, these women in Chaucer's tales outmaneuver men bound to its rigid maintenance. Granted, a harmonization of feminist scholarship and monastic theology was not the book Bugbee set out to write. Nevertheless, much of this newer scholarship “cooperates” with his own in ways that would strengthen his position.Finally, throughout his book Bugbee expresses a desire to provide “adequate space for [Chaucer's] likely assumptions” in order to encourage readers to engage in an honest dialogue with the tales (p. 104). By the conclusion (“The Union of the Themes and Its Implications”), it has become clear that, to achieve Bugbee's desiderata fully, a reader must at least try subscribing to Bernard's “monastic theology,” thereby “allowing the Middle Ages to teach us something about ourselves” (p. 37). What this “something” might be is rather unclear. If, however, it is the model articulated by Protestant poets John Milton (“They also serve who only stand and wait,” Sonnet 19) and T. S. Eliot (“Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still,” Ash Wednesday) as well as the values associated with such non-Christian philosophies as Zen Buddhism, then it might not be as lost as Bugbee fears

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