"A Wholly Vicious Man": Chaucer's Pardoner (The Canterbury Tales Part 2)

On our second episode for Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, we take a deep look at a character that scholars have called "pre-Shakespearean" in his psychological roundness and complexity: The Pardoner.

Additional music: Timbre Milton Intro Remix

Transcript

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, and welcome to the Classic English Literature Podcast, where I take a historical, philosophical, and quite personal look at the greatest hits of English lit.

This is our second episode on the Canterbury Tales and for this show we’ll do a deep dive into one of Chaucer’s most fascinating characters: the Pardoner.  In the Middle Ages, a pardoner was an unordained cleric – that is, a minor Church official who could not perform the sacraments like a priest – and he was charged with the distribution of pardons, also known as indulgences, which could allow a soul, after death, to avoid or at least diminish the punishments of Purgatory.  What’s Purgatory, some may ask.  Well, let’s do a quick and dirty on one’s post-vitality options according to Mother Church.

When one shuffles off this mortal coil, one has three possible destinations: 1) if you’re super good, you go to heaven, where all is sunshine and rainbows and you can listen to beautiful people playing harp music. 2) if you’re super bad, you go to hell, where all is fire and fury and you are forced to listen to ukulele music.  3) But most of us are decent enough folks, not perfect, and so can be spared an eternity of twee strumming but must have our souls purged clean before we rise to heaven.  This could take millenia.  That moral dry-cleaners is called Purgatory.  Now, Purgatory sucks – it’s just like hell, but it has an exit.  So you want to get to that exit as soon  as possible, long before “Tiptoe through the Tulips” lodges itself irrevocably in your brain.

The more Catholic among may wish me to point out that there was a fourth option for some departed souls and that was Limbo – a special place in the afterlife for the souls of unbaptized babies.  They couldn’t go to Hell because they’d not committed any sins, but they couldn’t go to Heaven either because they carried the stain of original sin, when Adam and Eve did a bit of ill-advised produce poaching.  As a footnote, though, Limbo was shut down in 1992, completely dropped from the official catechism.  So, space for lease!  A cozy afterlife fixer-upper.  Contact Augustine of Hippo and Associates to schedule a viewing.

So pardoners distributed indulgences, or pardons, that could relieve the suffering soul – a commuted sentence, as it were. Technically, pardons were not for sale – they were to be issued as kind of a “thank you” gift for a free will donation to the Church.  And it was best if the pardon wasn’t for you, but you generously passed it on to someone else.  You can see how this system was ripe for corruption and why, some 120 years after Chaucer, Martin Luther set up a howl about it and invented all the Protestants.

Anyway, our man is the last pilgrim introduced in the General Prologue, and here’s what faithful Chaucer Pilgrim has to say about him:

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Straight from the court of Rome had journeyed he.Loudly he sang “Come hither, love, to me.”This pardoner had hair as yellow as wax,But lank it hung as does a strike of flax;In wisps hung down such locks as he’d on head,And with them he his shoulders overspread;But thin they dropped, and stringy, one by one.But as to hood, for sport of it, he’d none,Though it was packed in wallet all the while.It seemed to him he went in latest style,Dishevelled, save for cap, his head all bare.His wallet lay before him in his lap,Stuffed full of pardons brought from Rome all hot.A voice he had that bleated like a goat.No beard had he, nor ever should he have,For smooth his face as he’d just had a shave;I think he was a gelding or a mare.But in his craft, from Berwick unto Ware,Was no such pardoner in any place.For in his bag he had a pillowcaseThe which, he said, was Our True Lady’s veil:He said he had a piece of the very sailThat good Saint Peter had, what time he wentUpon the sea, till Jesus changed his bent.He had a latten cross set full of stones,And in a bottle had he some pig’s bones.But with these relics, when he came uponSome simple parson, then this paragonIn that one day more money stood to gainThan the poor dupe in two months could attain.And thus, with flattery and suchlike japes,He made the parson and the rest his apes.But yet, to tell the whole truth at the last,He was, in church, a fine ecclesiast.Well could he read a lesson or a story,But best of all he sang an offertory;For well he knew that when that song was sung,Then might he preach, and all with polished tongue,To win some silver, as he right well could;Therefore he sang so merrily and so loud.
So what do we know about this fella?  It’s fair to say he’s not the most handsome of men:  greasy, stringy, yellow hair and a bleating nasally voice.  Unkempt, unstylish, with his wallet on his lap (more a purse or sack, not necessarily a billfold, as we would think of it, but it does carry some of his valuables).  I’m interested in some of the figures of speech Chaucer uses to describe him: the two most striking are animal images.  The voice is like a goat – unpleasant surely, but if you recall our earlier episode about the Owl and the Nightingale, you may remember that animals had peculiar moral resonances for the medieval mind.  A goat was considered a lascivious beast whose hot blood could melt metal.  The more Biblically-minded among you may also remember that Jesus often uses goats as metaphors for the damned in the Gospels – those who are to be cast out at the end of time.  Of course, goats also lend us some features for the popular imagining of Satan: the horns, cloven hooves, vertical pupils.  So what seems a somewhat snarky commentary on the Pardoner’s voice actually carries some significant weight in the delineation of his character.
Then Chaucer Pilgrim, in noting the Pardoner’s conspicuous beardlessness, says, “I think he was a gelding or a mare.”  Horse metaphors.  But the latter is a female horse and the former a castrated horse.  What does this imply about the Pardoner?  Many have speculated. Usually, scholars argue the beardlessness and the high reedy voice indicate that the Pardoner is a eunuch, but what that signifies opens a BJ’s bulk size can of worms.  Eunuchs in the classical and medieval worlds (and I can include eastern and western Asia as well as Europe) were generally used as guards or servants as they were seen to be less threatening (a lack of virility or manliness) to the masters and mistresses.  Some devoutly religious voluntarily underwent castration to purify their souls for God and obviate the temptations of the flesh.  Not sure either of these really fit our Pardoner.  Certainly, we could argue that – in some proto-Freudian sense – being neutered feminizes the Pardoner, but should we read this as an indication of his gender or his sexuality?  That is, would the 14th century audience have read the Pardoner as now female (with the attendant libidinous nature attributed at the time to women) or is he supposed to be homosexual?  Is he what we would call intersex – perhaps not castrated but born with ambiguous genitalia? 
I’m not sure.  It’s difficult to suss out because we have very different conceptions of gender and sexuality than did our medieval forebears.  For them, sexuality was a group of actions, a behavior or activity, not an identity, so I’m wary of imputing identity issues onto a world for which they did not exist.  But I am comfortable saying that, though we might obsess over the Pardoner’s ambiguous sexuality, it may be that it’s the ambiguity that’s important rather than the sexuality.  Hang on to that thought because I’ll bring it back at the end of the episode.
Because we get the sense, don’t we, that this guy is somehow not on the level.  We certainly know he’s a fraudster – even Chaucer Pilgrim sees that, noting the pillowcase, rag, and pig bones that the Pardoner passes off as holy relics.  And he says the pardons come from Rome “all hot.”  Perhaps that means they’re fresh and new, that they’re stolen, or that they’re phony.  But Chaucer Pilgrim seems impressed by the Pardoner’s ballsiness (if you’ll excuse the ironic pun) in deceiving poor country priests and their parishes:
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In that one day more money stood to gainThan the poor dupe in two months could attain.And thus, with flattery and suchlike japes,He made the parson and the rest his apes.
To be fair, we could read the Pilgrim’s descriptors like “paragon” and “noble” ironically, but that he calls the duped believers “apes” seems to indicate a bit of scorn for the deceived.
Now here’s where things start to get really interesting.  When it’s his turn to tell a tale to the company, the Pardoner begins by offering a somewhat lengthy prologue, what scholars call a literary confession.  In it, he not only tells the pilgrims that his wares are worthless and part of a confidence trick, he tells the pilgrims how the con works!
He says he rolls into town, spreads out his relics and pardons, shows a document from the Pope attesting their authenticity (for his own protection, you see, people are likely to get violent if you seem to be conning them).  Then he describes a sheep bone, perhaps from the flock of a Biblical patriarch, that if dumped into a well will cure any sick animal that drinks from that well.  But that’s not all!  Ladies, if you make your husband soup using that well water, he will never suspect or be jealous of your wanton infidelity!  You can sleep with three priests and he won’t say a word!  Act now!  Operators are standing by!
And it’s all bovine biosolids,admits the Pardoner:
By this trick have I gained, year on year,A hundred marks since I made Pardoner.I stand like a cleric in my pulpit,And after the unlettered people sit,I preach thus as you have heard before,And tell a hundred false stories more.
Now why would he do that?  Not the grift – that’s clear: he’s in it for the money: “For my intent is only gain to win, / Not to correct them when they chance to sin.”  Why would he tell the marks how he is going to hustle them?  Some have argued that he’s drunk.  Well, he certainly has had a couple, but not enough to let his guard down.  I think there are two major reasons. 1) He is arrogant, so successful that he can’t help but let everyone know.  He reminds me of the villain in James Bond movies whose hubris compels them to describe their evil machinations just before Bond destroys them.  The Pardoner has convinced himself of his own invincibility.  2) Ironically, his admission is part of the con.  By letting the pilgrim company in on his methods, he builds trust with them.  That is, they are set apart from the bumkins he usually preys upon – they feel special, they feel more sophisticated, as if he respects their canny worldliness.  And that complacency is exactly where he strikes: “ to pleasure folk with flattery.”
Oh, but he’s not done yet, gentle listener, not by a long shot.  He’s got a sermon he preaches to get his customers primed for buying and it's based on a text from St. Paul’s first letter to Timothy 6:10: Radix malorum est cupiditas – the love of money is the root of all evil.  Yes, yes, yes – he preaches a sermon against the very sin in which he revels: greed.  The irony couldn’t be more noticeable if it painted itself blaze orange, danced the Rasputin shuffle while singing Alanis Morrissette on the White House lawn while being livestreamed on TikTok.  And he admits that, too:
And thus I preach against the very vice I make my living out of—avarice. And yet however guilty of that sinMyself, with others I have power to win Them from it, I can bring them to repent; But that is not my principal intent. Covetousness is both the root and stuff Of all I preach.
He tells everyone that hoarding money is evil and he will generously relieve them of that burden.  What a guy.
And that sermon?  It’s a story.  Technically, it’s what’s called an exemplum, which is a brief story that illustrates a moral point.  It’s like a fable.  You remember Aesop’s fables from when you were a kid, right?  Like the Tortoise and the Hare. You know, they have a race and the Hare is so hot-cocky that he figures he can take a nap and still beat the plodding Tortoise.  But the Tortoise plods along consistently and wins while the Hare is wiping the sleepy-sand from his eyes.  So the lesson: slow and steady wins the race.  An exemplum is like that, except it has human characters instead of animal ones.
Anyway, the Pardoner tells a story to illustrate the great moral truth that the love of money is the root of all evil.   But, as he begins, he posits what I think is the great philosophical question of his text:  “For though I am a wholly vicious man Don’t think I can’t tell moral tales. I can!”
Well, let’s hear this moral tale.  Are you sitting comfortably?  Then we’ll begin.
Once, in Flanders, there were three young men who loved sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, speed, weed, and birth control.  Party boys.  “Rioters”, the Pardoner calls them.  On a Sunday morning, well before Mass, these rioters are hammered in a bar and they hear the ringing of a death bell.  “What’s that noise?” asks one.  The tavern boy and the publican say that a friend of the rioters has been taken by Death (which they mean as a personification of plague), but the rioters are too wasted to navigate  the nuances of figurative speech.  They take the explanation literally as vow to kill Death:
Hold up your hands, like me, and we’ll be brothersIn this affair, and each defend the others, And we will kill this traitor Death, I say! Away with him as he has made away With all our friends.
I’d like to pause here to consider this oath.  Yes, juvenescent enthusiasm, a sense of invincibility and immortality, a pledge to ride or die.  Fine.  The grandiosity and self-assurance of youth!  But how drunk must you be to honestly think you can kill death?  What are they drinking: Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters?  If anyone knows, please send a case of it here to me at the Clubhouse.  Slainte.
Right, so having pledged themselves to defeat Death, the young rioters head out of the village.  Shortly, they come upon a frail and wizened old man, creeping along, calling out to Mother Nature to take his life.  The rioters immediately begin to mock him for his miserable frailty and accuse him of being Death’s lookout.  “Where can we find Death?” they demand of him.  Answer made he:”turn up this crooked way Towards that grove, I left him there today Under a tree, and there you’ll find him waiting.”
When the young men arrive at the tree, they find eight bushels of gold coins!  The quest for Death is immediately tabled and they begin to sort ways of getting the gold back to town.  They can’t do it during daylight because someone will see them, take them for thieves, and hang them.  Best do it at night.  But that’s a long way away and I’m hungry.  Right then, you go into town and get some food.  We’ll stay here and guard the gold.  Good idea.
Now, while the youngest heads in for beer and tacos, the other two start thinking arithmetically: half a heap of gold is bigger than a third of a heap of gold.  Let’s kill him when he comes back!  Good idea.
Ironically, Junior is thinking along similar proportional lines: a whole heap of gold is three times bigger than a third of a heap of gold.  I’ll buy poison and put it in their wine.  Good idea.
You can see how this plays out, can’t you?  Junior comes back and gets shanked by the other two.  Since killing people is thirsty work, the other two drink the poisoned wine and die.  Did they find death under the tree?  You betcha.  Ergo: the love of money is the root of all evil.  Prosecution rests, m’lud.
Seems a good story for the Pardoner to tell, right?  It’s certainly designed to part fools from their money, and few of us, I think, would dispute the basic rightness of its premise: greed is, with apologies to Gordon Gekko, not good.
But there are some complications in this story.  I don’t think I really have to dwell upon the dual ironies of the rioters searching for Death and unexpectedly finding it, nor the slap-you-round-the-chops blatancy of the avaricious Pardoner preaching against avarice.  They’ll play their part.
The first thing I’m interested in is the tale’s vision of immortality, of life without death.  The rioters, on hearing of the death of their friend, do not mourn, but get angry and foolishly assume that revenge is the best solution: “If we can only catch him, Death is dead!”  What would a world without death comprise?  They never pause to consider it.  If they were better read, they might consider the Greek myths of Sisyphus, who chained up Death, or Tithonus, who asked for everlasting life but neglected to ask for everlasting youth.  He becomes a cicada, incidentally, I think.
Which leads me to the old man in the tale.  He’s interesting because he serves no purpose to the plot of the tale.  He doesn’t need to be there to get the rioters from the village to the grove of gold.  Chaucer could easily have had the rioters stumble upon the gold in their quest and needn’t have bothered writing the 63 lines of iambic pentameter in which he appears.  So why did he?
First, the old man is the embodiment of what the rioters rashly seek: he is unable to die.  He has been cursed and must wander the earth
Because I never yet have found, Though I have walked to India, searching round Village and city on my pilgrimage, One who would change his youth to have my age. And so my age is mine and must be still Upon me, for such time as God may will. “Not even Death, alas, will take my life; So, like a wretched prisoner at strife Within himself, I walk alone and wait About the earth, which is my mother’s gate, Knock-knocking with my staff from night to noon And crying, ‘Mother, open to me soon! Look at me, mother, won’t you let me in? See how I wither, flesh and blood and skin! Alas! When will these bones be laid to rest? Mother, I would exchange—for that were best— The wardrobe in my chamber, standing there So long, for yours! Aye, for a shirt of hair To wrap me in!’ She has refused her grace, Whence comes the pallor of my withered face.

He cannot die until someone willingly exchanges their youth for his age – which hardly seems likely.  Western civilization has never been noted for its respect for old age.  Indeed, one need merely flip through a magazine or TV channels to see innumerable ads for various creams, cosmetics, and moisturizers promising “age-defying” properties.  Obsessions with fitness, the mainstreaming of plastic surgery, each decade's insistence that “X is the new 20.”  Offhand dismissals like “OK, boomer.” In our youth obsessed culture, we tend to see age as only debilitation.  Hardly do we spare a thought for the wisdom and experience we gain in return for the diminution of our hipness.  We are very like the rioters mocking age in our quest to escape death.
The Old Man is a manifestation of a trope scholars call “the Wandering Jew.”  Legend has it that, as Jesus carried his cross to his execution, one of the citizens of Jerusalem mocked him, and so was cursed to wander the earth forever as his penance.  Other examples of this trope are the Flying Dutchman, Jack O’Lantern, and the Ancient Mariner.  Even more interesting than the Old Man’s desire for death is his characterization of the experience of death.  Note how he principally envisions death as burial: he knocks at Mother Earth, the ground literally, and asks to be taken in.  He calls the grave Mother Earth’s “gate” and dirt as his wardrobe.  Absent is any notion of heaven or hell, salvation, an afterlife, some vision of spiritual immortality.  Perhaps that’s the origin of his curse, an unreflecting belief in the physicalism of the universe.  Given the Pardoner’s rather callous disregard for his Church’s teaching on the afterlife (from which, remember, he is able to make a living), Chaucer may be layering up the ironies.
But I’d like to return to an irony that the Pardoner tries to demystify at the start of his tale: his positing that even though he is an evil man, he can tell a good story.  I really wonder about that.  Is a good story – and here I mean good as in morally upright – still good if it’s used for evil purposes?  That is, do the intentions of the teller have any effect on the morality of the tale?  If we accept that greed is generally considered a capital B capital T Bad Thing, then instruction against greed must be a Good Thing (with appropriate capitals).  But if a Good Thing is used to do a Bad Thing, is the Good Thing’s goodness at all affected? 
One might say, “No, not at all.  The moral purview of a text remains unchanged regardless of who uses the text.  In and of itself, the text is moral.  What may be immoral are the purposes to which the text is put, but that’s a different thing.”  This implies that language is an autonomous tool – it says what it says according to cultural linguistic conventions – but how what it says is used is beyond “meaningness” of the words.
Yeah, I’m sympathetic to that.  But others reply that language, as an invention by people, can never be completely separated from its use by people: what it is and what it does are two densely integrated things.  If I make a comment about your sweater and it hurts your feelings – even if I had no intention to hurt your feelings the fact is, your feelings were hurt.  The language insulted you, and therefore the language was an insult.  You get what I mean?
I don’t have a resolution to this conundrum because I’m not nearly as smart as all of the philosophers and philologists who have failed in their attempts, too.  But I do think it worth puzzling over.  The Declaration of Independence – a bedrock statement of American values – asserts that “all men are created equal.”  But those words were written by a slaveowner, so are they valid?  How do we deal with the speech or art of those we find morally reprehensible?  Is there difficulty now in listening to the music of Michael Jackson or the comedy of Bill Cosby?  Watching the films of Woody Allen or Mel Gibson?  The paintings of Gaugin or Wagner’s operas?  What is the relationship between the speaker and the spoken?
It’s easy to say that well, the Pardoner is just a hypocrite and we’re supposed to nod knowingly at Chaucer’s satiric rendering of the Church’s hypocrisy.  The Pardoner is undeniably antisocial, perhaps sociopathic.  In a time of plague, millions dying all around, he callously exploits people’s fear of damnation for his own pleasure.  He commoditizes their faith and sells shabby replicas of it back to the desperate and bereaved.  But is he a hypocrite?  I’m not so sure.  Certainly, he preaches one thing while doing another – textbook definition of hypocrisy.  Yet, he’s also intimately upfront about his own selfish motives – he tells you he’s about to con you, that this is all a load of cobblers.  So is he honest?  Well, I’d hardly call him that. 
No, our fascination with the Pardoner lies in his ability to defy our moral categories: whenever we try to define him, we end up with absurdities: an honest hypocrite, a truthful liar.  Like his ambiguous sexuality we talked about a little while ago, we can’t confine him.  He thwarts definition over and over again.  And he is one of the first characters in English literature to have this kind of psychological roundness, this moral complexity.  Beowulf – not a complex guy.  He’s an embodiment of all good Germanic things.  Full stop.  King Arthur – some moral quandaries, but generally a pillar of chivalric nobility.  They’re like Superman – unidimensionally good and simple.  The Pardoner – not simple, not unidimensional.  He is irreducible.
And if you think the Pardoner has layers, just wait till our next episode when we meet Alison, the Wife of Bath.  She’s got more layers than French puff pastry!
Thanks for listening in.  Please take a moment, if you would, to subscribe to and review the podcast so that others can more easily find it on their recommended lists. Please tell your friends, family, neighbors, and total strangers about our little conversations.  My hand is always open if you’d be able to send a little monetary support to help with some of the costs here at the Classic English Literature Podcast.  I’d like to send a special thanks to listener Jonas H. from Vermont.  I very much appreciate your listening to the show and thank you so much for your generous support.  Of course, thank you all for listening to and subscribing to and reviewing the show.  I wouldn’t, and couldn’t, do it without you.
Thank you sincerely.
Until next time, be well!








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