Dr.

Robert Hickson

16 May 2013 Saint John Nepomuk Saint Simon Stock Saint Brendan the Navigator

G.K. Chesterton in Praise of Chaucer

Epigraphs: I should be quite content if this tribute only bore the title of The Praise of Chaucer. (G.K. Chesterton, Chaucer (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), pp. 910) But this...is...the...main truth about Chaucer....Chaucer was a poet who came at the end of the medieval age and order....Chaucer was the final fruit and inheritor of that order. And he was much more sane and cheerful and normal than most of the later writers. He was less delirious than Shakespeare, less harsh than Milton, less embittered than Swift....[T]here was a balanced philosophy in medieval times; and some very unbalanced philosophies in later times....Now I will here advance the thesis that this cheerfulness or sanity [of Chaucer] came from theology. I say deliberately, not religion, but theology. It was not his theology: it was the theology at the back of the philosophy at the back of his mind. (G.K. Chesterton, Chaucer, pp. 11-12, and 278emphases in the original) He [Chaucer] is a poet because he sings; because he opens his lungs and liberates his soul by a resounding and rhythmic utterance, the expression of love or admiration.... But what is he admiring [here in singing his guileless ABC Poem]?.... He is singing to the singer of the Magnificat . (G.K. Chesterton, Chaucer, p. 122my emphasis added) But there is more in it than that; for man lives by his devouring appetite for morality. The chivalric romance does really represent the Christian conception of life, which is at once a Quest, a Test, and an Adventure . And the decorative [chivalrous] allegories...were once alive like a dance with the balanced morality of the Middle Ages....[T]hat its Christ was shared by God and Man; that its government was shared by God and Caesar: that its philosophers made a bridge between faith and reason, between freedom and fatalism; and that its moralists warned men alike against presumption and despair. (G.K. Chesterton, Chaucer, pp. 157 and 288my emphasis added)

[It is] the chief idea of my life. ...That is the idea of taking things with gratitude, and not taking things for granted ....I never saw the two sides of this single truth stated together anywhere, until I happened to open the Penny Catechism and read the words, The two sins against hope are presumption and despair. (G.K. Chesterton, The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1936), pp. 341-342my emphasis added) To sum up; the reality of things, the mutability of things, the diversity of things, and all other such things that can be attributed to [created] things [e.g., deceitfulness], is followed by the medieval philosopher [Saint Thomas Aquinas], without losing touch with the original point [and purpose] of the reality....even the doubts and difficulties about reality have driven him to believe in more reality than less. The deceitfulness of things which has so sad an effect on so many sages, has almost a contrary effect on this sage. If things [created things] deceive us, it is by being more real than they seem . As ends in themselves they always deceive us; but as things tending to a greater end, they are even more real than we think them. If they seem to have a relative reality (so to speak) it is because they are potential and not actual ; they are unfulfilled, like packets of seeds or boxes of fireworks. They have in them to be more real than they are. And there is an upper world of what the Schoolman called Fruition, or Fulfillment, in which all this relative relativity becomes actuality. (G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York: Image BooksDoubleday, 1956first published in 1933), pp. 179-180)

In 1932, four years before his death and only ten years after his having entered the Catholic Church, G.K. Chesterton wrote a vivid and capacious book on the medieval Catholic poet, Geoffrey Chaucer (d.1400). With his characteristic modesty, his book was simply entitled Chaucer.1 (One year later, Chesterton would also publish his even more profound book on Saint Thomas Aquinas (d.1274), 2 and once more it flowed forth in the radiant fullness of his gratitude, and imparted the enlargement that comes from his own uniquely winsome Faith.) Our beloved Chesterton certainly considered himself a Chaucerian, in contradistinction to the more plentiful group of avid Shakespeareans, and he especially saw in Geoffrey Chaucer a largeness and largesse, along with a humble and forgiving humor which not only marked the modulated tones of his literature, but also conveyed the substance and those large and moving ideas that were so deeply rooted in his Catholic Faith. It was a theological Faith which was formed, in part,
1 G.K.Chesterton, Chaucer (London: Faber & Faber, 1932), 302 pages. All references to this text will henceforth be in parentheses in the main body of this essay. 2 G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York: DoubledayImage Books, 1956), first published in 1933.

by such other classic Catholic writers as Boethius, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Dante, and Petrarch: some of whom he had actually translated; and all of whom he had closely studied and savored. Chesterton entitled Chapter I of his 1932 book explicitly, The Greatness of Chaucer, in which he unfolds the meaning of true greatness. Moreover, in his final chapter, Chapter IXThe Moral of the Story, he returns to the seeming paradox of Chaucer in all his uncommon variety. That is to say, how does one account for the fidelity, attractive integrity, and steadfastness of Chaucer amidst the manifold turbulence of his times, especially given that the Anti-Medievalists think him to have lived and walked about alive in a merely barbarous or bigoted or benighted epoch. (277) In other words, amidst the purported obscurantisms and superstitions of an asphyxiatingly constricted Christendom. In partial response to such reductive, or unbalanced and inordinately prejudicial views, Chesterton notes, by way of contrast and counterpoint, some prominent and indisputable things about the character of Chaucer and the pervasive tone of his writings: We know, to mention one thing out of a thousand, the gentleness of his controversial manner; the way in which he feels confident that a light touch will tell; his assumption that his companions [on the Canterbury Pilgrimage], gentle and simple, will understand each other. We know that men do not write like that, in an age when nobody could understand them. We know his bottomless bonhomie and good temper; as of one who had never been tortured to exasperation by an alien world . We know his levity; the way in which he can flit from flower to flower even in the garden of heathenism; obviously without panic about the possibilities of heresy . We know his soaring hilarity [cheerfulness of spirit] and high spirits ; never stronger than in his old age and comparative poverty, when he began to sing of the April day when men took the [Pilgrims] road of Kent to Canterbury. We know that he did not come out of a dark and twisted superstition or a debased social slavery; and it only remains for us to ask what it did come from. (277my emphasis added) Chesterton is convinced that Chaucers richly and deeply formed Theological Faith sustained him, despite the admitted fact that External ecclesiasticism had indeed so far degenerated in Chaucers day. (283my emphasis added) For the best theology of the timeand Chaucers own special quest and attainmentaimed at a certain equilibrium, achieved by giving so much weight to one thing and so much less or more to another thing. (283) Concerning the nature of the thing

defended, it was certainly true that that thing was a poised and proportionate thing, thrashed out by the comparison of many thoughts; not a single thing or a simple thing, in the sense of the isolation of one thought. (283) Though Chaucer might well have received this culture in a fragmentary way, he received enough of its fragments to be filled with its fulness. (283) Moreover, says Chesterton from his sympathetic heart: He was full enough of that fulness not to let his own thought be merely fragmentary; in the sense of thinking one fragment of truth as good as the whole. Still less did he think, as does the true heretic, that a fragment of truth is better than the whole. (283) Indeed, Chaucer was the final fruit and inheritor of that [fulness and spacious] order (12) and yet Chaucer lived at the most complicated and entangled transitional time of European history, and drew on the traditions of about four European literatures [Latin, French, Italian, and English] instead of one. (28) We must therefore respect and allow for this central and civilized character [quality] in the medieval poet; for the fact that he knew his philosophy; [and] that he thought about his theology; (28) and we must also realize what Chaucer shares with all the great ancient poets especially one character: (28) The greatest poets of the world have a certain serenity, because they have not bothered to invent a small philosophy, but have rather inherited a large philosophy. It is, nine times out of ten, a philosophy which very great men share with very ordinary men.... The greatness of Homer consists in the fact that he could make men feel, what they were already quite ready to think, that life is a strange mystery in which a hero may err and another hero may fail....Every man who has tried to keep a good thing going...sounds the depths of his own soul when he hears that rolling line [of Hector to his wife Andromache holding their little son], which can only be rendered [from the original Greek] so feebly, For truly in my heart and soul I know that Troy will fall. (29-30my emphasis added) Chesterton added: Theories grow stale; but things continue to be fresh. And, according to the ancient conception of his function, the poet was concerned with things: with the tears of things, as in the great lament of Virgil [ sunt lacrimae rerum, mentem mortalia tangunt]; with the delight in [and gratitude for] the great number [and diversity] of things...; with thanks for things, as in the Franciscan Canticle of the Sun or the Benedicite Omnia Opera [a Song of Creation, also a Liturgical Canticle]. That behind these things there are certain 4

great truths; and those so unhappy as not to believe in these truths may of course call them theories....The coming of the Christian cosmic conception made a vast difference; the Christian poet [like Chaucer] had a more vivid hope than the pagan poet. Even when he was sometimes more stern, he was always less sad....And because they [those poets like the vivid-souled Christian poet] continue their heroic task, the world, after every epoch of doubt and despair, always grows green [and fresh] again. (31-32my emphasis) Chesterton was always shocked by ingratitude, especially by what sometimes seems a sheer incapacity to thank those who have given us everything. (14) For he says concerning Gods Largesse and Gift of Creation and thus of our actual and potential (but always contingent) Createdness that: There is at the back of our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than an abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthanking . For he who has realized this reality [of createdness] knows that it does outweigh...all lesser regrets or arguments for negation, and that under all our grumblings there is a subconscious substance of gratitude . That light of the positive is the business of the poets , because they see all things in the light of it more than do other men. Chaucer was a child of the light....He was the immediate heir of something like what Catholics call Primitive Revelation; that glimpse that was given of the world when God saw that it was good....These things belong to the same world of wonder as the primary wonder at the very existence of the world....Creation was the greatest of all Revolutions....[Yet] it is only rarely that we realize...the primeval duty of Praise. (36-37my emphasis added) In this context, it is now perhaps also more vividly true for us to realize that, Yet, as a fact of literary history, Chaucer [in his own poetic creation] was one of the most original men who ever lived. There had never been anything like the lively realism of the ride to Canterbury [his The Canterbury Tales] done or dreamed of in our literature before. He is not only the father of all our poets, but the grandfather of all our million novelists3....When we have this actual originality, and added to it this graceful tone of gratitude and even humility, we have the presence of something which I venture to call great. There is something in the medieval poet that can only be conveyed by the medieval
3 Earlier in the book, Chesterton said: I mean by the novel the narrative that is not primarily an anecdote or an allegory, but is valued because of the almost accidental variety of actual human characters . The Prologue to The Canterbury Tales is the Prologue to Modern Fiction. It is the preface to Don Quixote. (15my emphasis added)

word Largesse [generosity, graciousness, magnanimity]; that he is too hearty and expansive to conceal the [gratefully dependent] connexion between himself and his masters and models.... This is the sort of cool and contented character that looks much less original than it is. A man must have a balance of rather extraordinary talents, and even rather extraordinary virtues, in order to seem so ordinary. As they say of St. Peters at Rome, it is so well proportioned that it looks almost small....But it [this form of Sacred Architecture] is in fact very large; and there is nothing larger in its way [analogously] than the spirit of Chaucer, with its confession of pleasure [praise, delight] and its unconsciousness of power. (34-35my emphasis added) Speaking of how charmingly Chaucer presents himself as a ridiculed pilgrim astride a diminutive horse in his own pilgrimage, and also as an incompetently dull teller of tales of prose and verse in his own very vivid Canterbury Talese.g., as when the poet [himself] is [shown to be] the only man who knows no poetry! (22)Chesterton then more searchingly says of this light touch of irony, as follows, and very profoundly: But the irony is wider and even deeper than that. There is some hint of those huge and abysmal ideas of which the poets are half-conscious when they write; the primal and elemental ideas connected with the very nature of creation and reality. It has something in it of the philosophy of a phenomenal world, and all that was meant by those sages, by no means pessimists, who have said that we are in a world of shadows. Chaucer has made a world of his own shadows, and, when he is on a certain plane, finds himself equally shadowy. It has in it all the mystery of the relation of the maker with things made . There falls on it from afar even some dark ray of the irony of God , who was mocked when He entered His own world, and killed when He came among His creatures. (22my emphasis added) After his own stunning insight in this poetic context and with his own mirthful hint of laughter in the grand style, (22) Chesterton draws us further to a befitting admiration of Geoffrey Chaucer: It is the presence of such things behind the seeming simplicity of the fourteenth-century poet, which constitutes what I mean here by the greatness of Chaucer. He was a man much less commonplace than he appeared; I think than he deliberately appeared. (22my emphasis added) Such was his gracious modesty, such was his deep humility of spiritand of his steadfast character in uprooted and subversive times. (The ill effects of the 1348-1349 Black Plague, to include depopulation, usurpation, despair and reckless abandon, were still to be seen and adequately addressed, also spiritually.)

With Chaucer specifically in mind, Chesterton affirms that A great poet as such, deals with eternal things (35) and Morals themselves are eternal things, though the particular political immorality of the moment [or the age] is not eternal, (36) and Chaucer was certainly not indifferent to morals, (36) but, on the contrary, eloquently revelatory of hypocrisy, pretentiousness, and turpitude. Moreover, in Chaucer there is no pretense of being a prophet instead of a poet, (32) and there is no shadow of shame of being a traditionalist. (32) And, indeed: One of the most attractive elements in the curiously attractive personality of Chaucer is exactly that; that he is not only negatively without pretentiousness, but he is positively full of warm acknowledgement and admiration of his models. He is as awakening as a cool wind on a hot day, because he breathes forth something that has fallen into great neglect in our time [circa 1932], something that very seldom stirs the stuffy atmosphere of self-satisfaction or self-worship. And that is gratitude or the theory of thanks. He was a great poet of gratitude ; he was grateful to God; but he was also grateful to Gower [his rather solemn contemporary and one of Chaucers models]. He was grateful to the everlasting Romance of the Rose [and the metaphor of Briar Rose]; he was still more grateful to Ovid and grateful to Virgil and grateful to Petrarch and Boccaccio. (32-33my emphasis added) As Chesterton elsewhere earlier and often said, first in 1908 in Orthodoxy, as it appears, The test of all happiness is gratitude . (And it also seems to the current writer that one cannot be genuinely, much less fully, grateful without humility; and gratitude itself is a very gracious way to grow in humility.) Moreover, as Chesterton (with his profound wit and insight) later also added in Orthodoxy: Without humility you cant enjoy anythingeven pride. With this kind of prompt and deep dispositiongratitude and humilityin his own heart and character, Chesterton could likewise discover it trustworthily in Chaucers own life and writings, especially from Chestertons own wiser and more fertile Catholic vantage point in 1932. Furthermore, in conveying the light touch of Chaucer, Chesterton also had a light touch. For, example, when speaking of the sympathy a number of peoplesuch as a great lord like John of Gaunt (57)first had for the dissident John Wycliffe and his New Movement of rather rebellious Lollard followers, Chesterton says:

John of Gaunt was one of those aristocrats who have too much activity for their intelligence; and, being rather stupid, probably prided himself on being broadminded. It is said that he felt a faint coolness creeping over his sympathy with the New Movement, when the peasants in revolt [the Lollards] took care to burn down his own palace. (57) After quoting a condescending and somewhat depreciative scholar who concluded that he [Chaucer] must have passed through a period of intense devotion, more especially to the Virgin Mary (121) and, indeed, that is possible (122), Chesterton deftly and politely responds (in light of his own love of Mary), as follows: It is [possible]. It does occur from time to time. I do not quite understand why Chaucer must have passed through this fit of devotion; as if he had Mariolatry like the measles. Even an amateur who has encountered the malady may be allowed to testify that it does not usually visit its victim for a brief period: it is generally chronic and (in some sad cases I have known) quite incurable. And as Chaucers work, practically beginning with translations [and transformations] like the ABC [his gracious abecedarian poem singing to the singer of the Magnificat (122)], practically ends with the almost excessive devotionalism of the Parsons Tale [at the end of The Canterbury Tales], and has any number of devotional declarations scattered between the two, I cannot understand why his very normal [Catholic] European religion should only be allowed to him during one peculiar period of delirium . (121 my emphasis) Chesterton then makes a small addition before quoting a few lines from Chaucers Marian ABC Verse. He says that the point that concerns us here is that Chaucer wrote a poem as well as a translation. (121) Moreover, It is a poetical poem, not because of its relation to the original, but because of its relation to its subject [the Blessed Mother]. It is full of lines that have a large and liberal majesty, because they are filled with the greatness of the occasion: Glorious maid and mother, which that never were bitter, neither in the earth nor seaO very light of eyen [eyes] that ben blind, O very lust [desire, pleasure] of labour and distressAnd [thou] bringest him out of the crooked street; whoso thee loveth, he shall not love in vain . (121my emphasis added) Such is but a glimpse of Chaucers singing to the singer of the Magnificat. (122) In his deeply reflective chapter on The Religion of Chaucer (Chapter IX, the books penultimate chapter), Chesterton characteristically says, and in a passage worthy of a full quotation: 8

Modern critics have congratulated Chaucer, or congratulated themselves, on the fact that he was so enlightened a reformer as to satirize the Monk [Hubert] and the Friar. Curiously enough, they have neglected to notice what he satirized them for. Rather simple things of this sort do often get overlooked. And the simple truth is that Chaucer satirizes the Monk for not being sufficiently Monastic....In the whole of his satirical sketch of the Monk, the point is, not that the Monk is sunk in monkish superstitions, but simply that the Monk is not monkish enough....[A]ll of Chaucers denunciation is directed not so much against a monk, as at a runaway monk; and that not because he is a monk but because he is a runaway. He jeers at him for coming out of the cloister and partaking of the pleasures of the world. He [Chaucer] jeers at him in his own jovial and even genial fashion; making up an imaginary defense for the monk which is full of a hearty hatred for work and the bother of reading books [hence, even Saint Benedicts Lectio Divina!]. Why, he asks, should the jolly fellow do any work at all? Why should he work with his hands, because St. Augustine believed in the Dignity of Labour? Let St. Augustine work, if he wants to. But this breezy outburst [in Chaucers inimitable style] certainly cannot be taken seriously as an attack on monasticism, unless it is to be taken seriously as an attack on manual labour, or labour of any sort. There are doubtless modern critics who are capable of taking that or anything else seriously. To those troubled by the divine disturbance of humour, it will be obvious that Chaucer is simply chaffing a monk for his cheek in not being a monk at all. (253-254my emphasis added) With a twist of his quaint humour, (254) Chaucer also has the notorious and uproarious Wife of Bathdear Lady Alice, who has already buried four husbands (254)explain, and in strictly orthodox terms, (254) the normal vocation of Marriage and the exceptional vocation of Virginity! (254) However, as the lustful Wife of Bath explains, on the whole Virginity is not her vocation! (254) Chesterton, while likely laughing aloud himself, then also says: Here again, if this were a joke against anything, it would not be a joke against the Virgin [or the Virgin Mary] but a joke against the Wife; or at any rate against the Wife of Bath....[Likewise] he [Chaucer himself] no more dreamed of suggesting that there ought to be no Monasticism [hence Virginity] than that there ought to be no Marriage. He was bred in the bone and blood of a whole living society, of which one was as much an organic part as the other. He might, like many another medieval writer, deal rather scandalously with the scandal of monks or nuns who broke their vows. He would never, like a modern writer, think it scandalous that they kept their vows. (254-255) In addition to Chaucers permeating emphasis on fidelity, and his lament over the lack of steadfastness,4 Chesterton will emphatically have us know, as well, that
4 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer (Edited by John H. Fisher) (New Yotk: Holt,

Chaucer has a huge appetite for theological and ethical explanation ; he will often turn aside for them in the most casual and incongruous context. It is thoroughly typical of him that he makes the Wife of Bath [in The Canterbury Tales] pour out a torrent of turbulent, gross, and egotistical discourse, as coarse as a fishwifes [billingsgate] and as personal as a Margate landladys; and yet it feels perfectly natural that she should pause to explain the correct Catholic doctrine about Virginity. It was perfectly natural. It would not only have been perfectly natural to Chaucer. It would probably have been perfectly natural to the Wife of Bath. (259my emphasis added) Such was the real Christendom, even during its lak of steadfastnesse. Even if the morals were weak, the standard and doctrine stood strong. After presenting the very moving Tragedy of Troilus and Criseydein five disciplined books of consistent poetic stanzas and rhymeChaucer concludes his work with some comparably faithful and admonitory words. For, his little tragedy is, in effect, a postscript to the Iliad (143) of Homer but now as a somewhat Christianized story concerning the ancient Greek War with Troy and the coming Fall of Troy. (Troilus himself was the young son of Priam, who was the King of Troy and also thus the father of the valorous and noble Hector himself.) Chaucer is characteristically attentive to sexual selfishness and to the lures of false felicity and deceits of feigned love. Criseyde, for whom Chaucer has much charity, is a very active example of the abuse of free will. (143) Chaucer, says Chesterton, had a keen sense of the insecurity of the souls of others, (145) including, for sure, his own. Thus, he piercingly adds: The charity of Chaucer towards Cressida [Criseyde] is one of the most beautiful things in human literature; but its particular blend belongs to Christian literature. (144) After Troiluss gradual seduction by Criseyde (with the dark help of her uncle, Pandarus) and after Criseydes sliding heart then abandoned her vulnerable, younger Trojan lover for the sudden Diomede, the Greek warrior, Chaucer leaves us with deeply elegiac words, before leading his readers
Rinehart and Winston, 1977), p. 701 Lack of Steadfastnesse, whose poetic lyrical refrain is: That is all lost for lak of steadfastnesse. The poem is of three main stanzas, with an Envoy to King Richard II (then reigning), which ends with the couplet: Dred God [fear God], do law [justice], love trouthe and worthynesse, /And wed thy folk again to steadfastnesse. As Chesterton put it, Chaucer also said that it was disgraceful for priests and men in authority to be base and unworthy, or, as he put it in a picturesque figure, that it was horrible to see a filthy shepherd and a clean sheep. (252) That is also to say that Chaucers chastening strictures are based on the notion that a priest is not merely bad when he ought to be good, but bad because he ought to be better. In the same passage he uses another figure of speech, which is even more conclusive. If gold rust, what shall iron do? (252) Most fundamentally, And what constituted his [Chaucers] Catholicism was that he accepted the ultimate arbitration which reconciled freewill and grace, and did not exclude either . (250my emphasis added) Chesterton, referring to the joyful essence of Dante, too, speaks of the huge magnanimity of God in giving to the human spirit the one gift worth having; which is Liberty. (240my emphasis added). For, we can only render Loveto include Charityif is rendered freely, in moral freedom. So, too, with Gratitude.

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(or hearers) on to a higher standard. In Chestertons translation of Chaucers Middle English, we read: Such end hath, lo, this Troilus for love: Such end hath all his great worthiness, Such end hath all his royal estate above, Such end his lust, such end his nobleness, Such end hath all the false worlds brittleness: And thus began his loving of Cresseid As I have told; and in this wise he died. (18-19my emphasis added) (Swich fyn hath, lo, this Troylus for love; Swich fyn hath al his great worthynesse; Swich fyn hath his estat real above; Swich fyn hath his lust, swich fyn hath his noblenesse; Swich fyn hath false worldes brotelnesse! And thus began his lovyng of Criseyde, As I have told, and yn this wise he deyde.) Such is the added force of Chaucers stylistic, designedly emphatic, anaphora. Chaucers final words then come, leading us graciously unto a higher standard: O yonge, freshe folkes, he or she, In which that love up groweth with your age, Repeyreth hom fro worldly vanite, And of youre herte up casteth the visage [countenance] To thilke God that after his ymage You made; and thynketh al nys but a fayre [a Vanity Fair] This world that passeth soon as floures fayre. And loveth hym, the which that right for love Upon a cros, oure soules for to beye [redeem], First starf [died], and ros, and sit yn heaven above; For he nyl falsen no wight, dar I seye, That wole his heart al holly on hym leye. And syn he best to love is, and most meke, What needeth feyned loves for to seke?.... And to that sothefest Crist, that starf on rode [the Cross], With al myn herte of mercy ever I preye, 11

And to the Lord right thus I speke and seye:.... Us from visible and invysible foon [foes] Defend, and to thi mercy everychon So make us, Jesus, for thi mercy digne [make us worthy for Thy mercy], For love of mayde and moder thyn benigne [in and for the grateful love of Thy graciously kind Virgin Mother]. Amen.5 In contrasting Chaucer with his profound poetic, and often prophetic, contemporary, William Langland and his epic narrative poem, Piers Plowman, G.K. Chesterton shows more of his own preference and also his own heart: But Chaucer had the one thing needful; he had the frame of mind that is the ultimate result of right reason and a universal philosophy; the temper that is the flower and the fruit of all the tillage and the toil of [Catholic] moralists and theologians. He had Charity; that is the heart and not merely the mind of our ancient Christendom; and between the black robes of [the earnestly Moral] Gower and the grey gown of [the Prophetic and Ascetic] Langland, he [Chaucer] stands clothed in scarlet like all the household of love; and emblazoned with the Sacred Heart. (275)

CODA In his concluding section, The Moral of the Story, Chesterton reminds us that Chaucers freshness (278) and Chivalric (and Romantic) Code demanded fidelity to the death, patience even in despair; courtesy even in combat (278). But especially, he adds, Chaucers Catholic Faith was not a stagnation but an equilibrium. (289) As a challenge, we are then told by our resilient Chesterton that: If we take three men as types; Chaucer and Thomas More and Cervantes, we shall note that they were three Catholics whose lives cover the whole story of the breakdown of Catholicism....And our first impression will be that they were all three humorists, who took things very easily, considering the dreadful days of destruction and transition in which they lived....There is something almost irresponsible in the intellectual ease with which Cervantes
5 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer, pp. 539-540my emphasis added. The FiveAct (Five-Book) Tragedy of Troylus and Criseyde is to be found in its entirety on pages 403-540. Once read, it will not be forgotten.

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feels himself free to chaff chivalry. [Indeed, he adds, Don Quixote creates a partly unjust retrospect....though Cervantes goes out of his way explain that they [the old chivalric romances] were not [rubbish]....and Cervantes...had himself lived one of the most wildly romantic lives in history! (156)].... The whole story will make no sense, unless we realize that the Catholic philosophy [the Faith and the Theology] can content a man; rather specially if the man is a philosopher; and not least if he is a laughing philosopher. (289-290my emphasis added) Going a little further now as he approaches the the end of his story, he will give us what he believes to be the moral of the story, well aware that all such speculations are conditioned by the great limitation called human life; the fact, too often forgotten, that such men [like Chaucer, More, and Cervantes] never saw the sequel we see. (204) Nor will we see certain sequels, in all likelihood. But, says Chesterton, with his own light touch of irony: The moral is, I will venture to think, that it is unwise to desert this perpetually sinking ship [of the Catholic Church and Christendom], or betray this everlastingly dying creed and culture. It had another period of final extinction at the end of the Middle Ages. It has suffered eclipse in the Enlightenment of the Age of Reason and Revolution; which in their turn begin to look as if they had seen better days....The moral is that no man should desert that [Catholic] civilization [of the Corpus Christi Mysticum, sub Gratia, stricto sensu]. It can [with its indispensable resources of Divine Grace] cure itself; but those who leave it cannot cure it... All those who broke away were centrifugal not centripetal; they went away to develop a solitary doctrine. [That is to say, instead of always seeking equilibrium, (293) and striving to find a regenerative balance and rhythm and gracious sense of proportion amongst the varied and indispensable truths that ultimately come from GodTriune and Incarnate and intimately Sacramental.] (292-293italics in the original) In honoring medieval men earlier in his book, Chesterton was especially honoring and thinking of Geoffrey Chaucer amidst his own incompleteness and fragmentation, as we must now face them with our own Faith, in our own lives and in the lives of our children. And this is what Chesterton graciously, humbly, and gratefully said, also, we hope, for our receptive instruction ad Vitam Aeternam: The men of the new [Christian] civilization were not less able to understand the civilized [pagan] poets [such as Virgil], because they had been copied. In a word, medieval men [like Chaucer] were not in the twilight; what they knew they knew.....They had read Virgil much more fully and thoroughly than we have. Anyone who doubts it may make the experiment of quoting beautiful Virgilian lines in a first-class railway carriage, full of politicians and and captains of industry. In a word, though their knowledge of civilized antiquity 13

was scrappy, ...they [the medieval men] had enough of them [the scraps] to understand what the great ancients had meant by wisdom; and, unlike some others, they had the great wisdom truly to try to be wise . (127my emphasis added) For have we not received, sub Gratia (et per Mariam), so much more? And shall we not therefore be held more accountable for the quality of our own gratitude, as well as for, God forbid, that intrinsically inescapable desolation of ingratitude? Finis

2013 Robert D. Hickson

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