Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Spiritual Ableism


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.