Chaucer's Pardoner
We just attended the annual
Princeton Alumni Day, which provides the opportunity to see numerous old
students and colleagues, to listen to some very impressive lectures, to try my
best to down a tasteless cold salmon cutlet, and to attend the very moving
annual Memorial Service. By the mournful
logic of life its long list of the “remembered” includes each year more and
more old friends. That is simply another
implication of growing old.
I discovered myself succumbing to petty
annoyance over one small feature of the chapel ceremony, which involved the
usual amount of standing to sing hymns, sitting to listen to readings and
uplifting pronouncements, and so forth.
The instructions printed in the program read as follows: “Stand as able.” Now I am very familiar with this instruction
from my own parish church, where it seems to have achieved a liturgical
significance on a par with the Sursum
corda. In fact I anticipate soon
hearing the instruction, “Lift up your hearts—as able.” The invitation is
of course kindly meant, even if it is also a self-uplifting demonstration of
the sensitivity of the inviter. But it
is also rather inane. If you are in fact
not able to do something, you do not
need to be told to do it only if you can.
And should you for some reason in fact be unable to do something, an
instruction of this sort, far from assuaging your inability, seems rather to
draw attention to it. I doubt that any
priest would say “Contemplate our beautiful east window—unless, of course, you
are blind.” Or how about “Please join in
the reading of the psalm—if literate?” I didn’t pay much attention to any of this
until about a year ago when, in a period of infirmity, I considered it a pretty
good trick getting to church at all, and I didn’t enjoy being admonished to a
lot of gratuitous verticality contingent upon my ability. So, you seminary professors of pastoral
theology, just saying.
However, instead of griping about
so minor an inconvenience, and one (as I say) so well intentioned, I should be
seeking solace from history. When it
comes to the clerical manipulation of a congregation the place to look is the
medieval Church, and particularly of course to Chaucer’s version thereof. Chaucer’s Pardoner is distinctly not well
intentioned, but he certainly knows how to capture his audience.
The office of Pardoner no longer
exists in any church so far as I know, but it was an important and quite
lucrative one in the penitential economy of late medieval Catholicism. Pardoners played no small part in the initial
financing of the biggest church building in Christendom, the Basilica of St.
Peter in Rome. They also played a role,
of course, in provoking the Protestant Reformation, as famously illustrated by
Martin Luther’s blistering criticisms of the operations of the Dominican
Pardoner, Johann Tetzel. A pardon was an actual written document
attesting that its owner had been relieved of the temporal punishments that
would otherwise attend forgiven sins. A
penitent could not buy absolution of
sin. Penance was a sacrament, and a
commercial arrangement of that sort would be the horrible sin of simony. But having received sacramental absolution by
proper priestly authority, a penitent could indeed buy a piece of paper
attesting to the fact of absolution and promising relief from attendant
temporal punishment. You may regard this
as a distinction without a difference. I
would characterize it as one of the more blatantly cruel victories of the letter
over the spirit that have characterized most periods of Christian institutional
history—but let it pass.
In my youth there was a radio
evangelist who broadcast on a very powerful transmitter located in someplace
called Del Rio, Texas. You could hear him
as you drove late at night through a swath of the southern tier that went at
least from Atlanta to Bristow, California.
This guy was about as “hands on” as you can be over the invisible
airwaves. As he approached the final
paroxysm of his financial appeal he thus instructed his fascinated auditors: “Put your haaaands on the raaaadio!” Only God knows how many car crashes that preacher-man
was responsible for. Chaucer’s Pardoner
was a worthy predecessor. This “noble
ecclesiastic”, the poet tells us, was without a peer. There was not another to match his cupidinous
expertise in all of England. His fellow
pilgrim the Friar is expert at extorting pennies from poor widows, but even his
prowess falls short of the Pardoner’s.
The Pardoner, an utter materialist, works through a collection of
dubious material props, which he passes off as holy relics. These include a piece of the sail from
Peter’s boat, a pillow-case said to be the veil of the Blessed Virgin, a gaudily decorated cross, and a
glass box full of pig’s bones. In the
“hands on” category he also has a magic mitten,
the sacred origins of which we are not told, but the material effects of which
are rather sensational. “He that his hand will put in this mitayn, He shall
have multiplying of his grain.” A bumper
crop is certain, that is, so long as he be sure to make a financial offering to
the Pardoner at the same time.
But the magic mitten has one
limitation. Unfortunately it can do
nothing for people secretly guilty of horrible sins, and it is particularly
counter-indicated for women who have been unfaithful to their husbands. This limitation is regrettable, but it need
not long delay the Pardoner’s sermon.
In the midst of his homily he pauses long enough to invite the
congregants to come forward, put their hands momentarily into the mitten, and
put a few coins into his own purse.
“This won’t take long,” he says in effect. “You notorious sinners and adulterers can
just sit there patiently for a minute.
I’ll soon get back to my regular sermon.” You might paraphrase his spiel as follows:
Please come forward as able. The Pardoner calls this maneuver a gaude—a stunt, trick, or jape—and allows
that he has made at least a hundred marks from it during the course of his
brilliant career. In England the mark
was not a coin, but a measure of weight, roughly half a pound of precious
metal. The Pardoner could extort from
poor peasants more money in a single day than a parish priest could take in in
two months.
