Nature as destiny in 'Troilus and Criseyde.'

Jennifer R. Goodman

(1) Introduction

The interpretation of Chaucer's Troilus has always been bedeviled by the fact that it is a work of the late fourteenth century, a period whose intellectual complications baffle the modern student of literature. It is an age when the same person can appear to us to be an arch-conservative and a radical at the same time. Thomas Bradwardine, that major English thinker, affirmed the power of God's providence in the strongest Augustinian terms against contemporary "neo-Pelagians" like Gabriel Biel while cheerfully dismantling Aristotle's physics to make way for the modern science of mechanics.(1) Because Chaucer was an exceptionally well-informed writer, whose reading and travels gave him access to a wide range of old and new ideas, many of these debates found their way into his poetry. To his readers belongs the task of assessing those ideas as they appear in his works.

Yet often our perspective is so far from that of Chaucer's day that we have difficulty weighing the evidence. The familiar is much easier to grasp than the unknown. The modern reader can only with great effort avoid recreating Chaucer in his or her own image, as a modern, liberal thinker - rational, scientific, and tolerant. As sophisticated critics, on the other hand, aware of the "otherness of the past," and as medievalists alert to the foibles of humanist propaganda, we tend to overcompensate in favor of what we perceive to be the moral values of the medieval church, a much misunderstood institution too often divided against itself. In the process Troilus, continually reinterpreted, is jerked "up and down like boket in a welle," in a manner most appropriate to a Chaucerian lover.

The solution to this puzzle lies in a better understanding of the fourteenth-century mind. Surrounded by conflicting views, new and traditional, the fourteenth-century thinker had no idea which were going to win out. He made up his own mind as best he could. In the process he might well embrace ideas from more than one school of thought. The same thinker might agree with the liberals on free will and with the conservatives on the physics of motion, as I think Chaucer did. He might oppose the Lollards and the rise of parliaments, and favor equality in marriage, or the reverse. When trying to get a sense of where Chaucer stands, we need to cultivate a certain flexibility, and not assume that certain groups of ideas necessarily belong together, or that they lead logically to their historical conclusions. Whether we consider Chaucer a humanist, an early modern scientist, a feminist or male chauvinist, or a proto-Puritan predestinarian moralist, we misinterpret him by pulling him too far in our direction.

The first step to understanding the history of the ideas of Chaucer's time, and Chaucer's own thinking, may be to recognize that he and his contemporaries had the freedom to choose among the notions of their own day like a painter choosing colors from a palette. They were not locked into systems of thinking like totalitarian regimes or political parties. They were in this respect much freer thinkers than many of us are now.

In particular, to my mind, the solution to Troilus lies in a greater respect for tradition and continuity in the intellectual life of Chaucer's day. The now unfamiliar tradition of Aristotelian physics, with its emphasis on natural motion and natural place, underlies the structure of Troilus and explains the movement and interaction of the main characters. In particular, it explains Troilus's baffling soliloquy on predestination and the even more baffling happy ending with which Chaucer closes his "tragedye."

Chaucer is sometimes thought of as a "modern" because he was interested in scientific instruments. But if we consider why, he suddenly becomes less so, for his main interest was judicial astrology, not astronomical observation in anticipation of Galileo. His use of astrology in Troilus and elsewhere demonstrates that Chaucer viewed the stars as a key to the understanding of human character, as an aid to medical practice, and as a way of predicting the future - making predictions that might range from warnings of impending global or personal catastrophe to forecasts of when it is going to rain. This may not be science as we know it today, but it is well within the tradition of Aristotelian natural philosophy, the dominant tradition in Chaucer's day.

Thus the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries in many respects speak different languages. The simplest terms can generate the greatest misunderstandings. In the process of recovering a sense of the ancients' perspective on life we need to appreciate how much stronger certain words were for the ancient world than they are for modern thinkers. Even in the heyday of William of Ockham, "Nature," "Fortune," "Divine Providence," and the forces they represented were all still regarded by most thinkers as real and formidable powers, not myths, mental constructs, or conventions. We also need to understand how powerful and misleading Chaucer's terms "science" and "tragedy" have become for us today.

(2) Natural Philosophy and the Rise of "Science"

Readers of Chaucer have resisted his interest in natural philosophy for a long time. Yet what is most distinctive about Chaucer as a poet is not his courtliness, which he shared with much courtlier contemporaries like Machaut and Froissart, nor his "bourgeois sensibility," nor even his Italian travels. It is his perspective as a natural philosopher, the earlier term which better describes Chaucer than the anachronistic "scientist," with its suggestion of lab coats and test tubes. No other English poet of his day seems to be as devoted a student of natural philosophy as the author-translator of the Treatise on the Astrolabe and perhaps of The Equatorie of the Planetis as well, works that establish him as an active amateur astrologer and a pioneer in the field of technical writing. Elsewhere the poet of the Canterbury Tales displays an equally keen interest in the natures of plants and animals, perhaps not unexpected from the Clerk of the King's Works and Deputy Forester of North Petherton. He seems just as fascinated by medicine, alchemy, and acoustics. All of this places considerable demands on the Chaucerian scholar of the 1990s. Chaucer's serious intellectual interests in the natural philosophy of Aristotle and his successors challenge us to rediscover the thought behind the scientific world of the Middle Ages. Meeting the challenge brings with it many rewards, perhaps not the least among them a clearer understanding of Chaucer's mind and art.

In spite of the pioneering work of Curry, North, Price, and others? the scientific Chaucer has failed to excite the interest of most Chaucerians, perhaps because few of us appreciate or are able to comprehend the post-Newtonian science of our own day, any more than many contemporary scientists appreciate or comprehend Chaucer, who might not have appreciated modern science either. We expect medieval natural philosophy to be a similar animal. Thanks to the compartmentalization of knowledge in the present-day university, the students of science and the humanities have been alienated from one another to an extent that would baffle the mind of the fourteenth century.

The classic studies of Chaucer's science have laid the groundwork, without question, but most of us have failed to build on it. Yet more of medieval natural philosophy remains in our outlook than most contemporary scientists tend to imagine. This paper, the opening statement of a larger program of study, will go on to suggest several ways in which an understanding of the basic principles of medieval natural philosophy can illuminate Chaucer's poetry, Troilus in particular.

Chaucer was without question more deeply learned in the principles of ancient and medieval natural philosophy than most of his modern students. Like Anne Astell, I believe that greater emphasis does need to be placed on the intellectual world of the fourteenth century as a source of new light on Chaucer's works. However, I would like to place the emphasis here on the major underlying principles that differentiate ancient and medieval natural philosophy from modern science, rather than on technical practices. In a way, the Treatise on the Astrolabe and The Equatorie of the Planetis complicate our efforts to understand Chaucer's attitude to the natural world. They focus our attention on that dimension of Chaucer's natural philosophy that seems most akin to modern science, with its emphasis on measurement, mathematical calculations, and observation. In this respect they accord with the movement away from Aristotle and towards the modern science of mechanics pioneered by Chaucer's compatriots Grosseteste, Swineshead, and Bradwardine, who set the latest trends in fourteenth-century English physics. In Chaucer's day, his astrological treatises would have been understood as technical manuals, not works of science at all, since they do not trace phenomena to first principles.(3) The two treatises also distract us from the underlying principles of Chaucer's thought about the universe, which differ vastly from the principles of the post-Newtonian scientist. These underlying ideas, particularly the major Aristotelian concepts of "natural motion," and "natural place," play an important structural role in Chaucer's Troilus.

(3) Natural Motion, Natural Place, and Nature as Destiny

The Eagle's lecture on the physics of sound in the House of Fame begins with the most basic tenet of pre-Newtonian cosmology, the Aristotelian theory that everything is drawn by nature to its proper location in the universe.(4)

Geffrey, thou wost ryght wel this, That every kyndely thyng that is Hath a kyndely stede ther he May best in hyt conserved be; Unto which place every thyng Thorgh his kyndely enclynyng Moveth for to come to Whan that hyt is awey therfro . . . (HF II.729-36)

The ultimate source of the idea of natural place in the western philosophic tradition may be Aristotle's Physics ([208.sup.b]8f.): ". . . the movements of the simple natural bodies (fire, earth, and so on) show not only that there is such a thing as place, but also that it has a certain power. For unless prevented from doing so, each of them moves to its own place, which may be either above or below where it was" (Aristotle 78). This concept was so essential to ancient thought about the nature of the universe that it appeared not only in the works of Aristotle and his Greek and Roman followers (including Boethius and Dante, who are generally assumed to be Chaucer's immediate sources), but also in tractate Avot 4:3 of the Talmud. "Despise no one, for there is no man who does not have his hour and nothing that does not have its place."(5)

For the modern scientist, the idea that everything moves towards its "natural place" was seen as a roadblock that prevented intellectual advancement for centuries. Lawrence E. Goodman's historical introduction to his and William Warner's Dynamics, their 1963 textbook, gives a lucid account of this problem from the modern civil engineer's viewpoint:

No understanding of mechanics comparable to Archimedes' grasp of statics was achieved for almost sixteen hundred years. We can only conjecture why this long hiatus should have obtained. It has been attributed to the fact that the Roman economy was a slave economy. Many of the Roman wars were simply large-scale slave raids. The feudal economy that followed was based on the labor of the serf, whose condition was scarcely better. Partly, too, progress was retarded by the fact that, among Greek thinkers, it was the great logician Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), rather than Archimedes, whose work was accepted by the schoolmen of the early Middle Ages. In natural science Aristotle's primary interest lay in biology; he was led to identify motion with growth and change generally. Every body had a "natural" place in the universe. Motion toward this position was "natural" and would persist; other motion was "unnatural" or "violent" and would decay. These ideas did not promote the development of mechanics. (Goodman and Warner 2)

Certainly by Chaucer's day Aristotle's biological approach to the subject of movement had already come to be questioned, though never altogether discarded, by several generations of English thinkers, including Robert Grosseteste (1175-1253), Roger Bacon (1214-94), John Duns Scotus (1266-1308), William of Ockham (c. 1290-1350), and the early fourteenth-century Merton College mathematicians led by Thomas Bradwardine (1290-1349) and Richard Swineshead (fellow of Merton College ca. 1340 to at least 1355.)(6) But the rise of the modern science of mechanics, of which they were early pioneers, has made the very idea of "natural motion" or "natural place" look quaint and obsolete. We conceive of motion today largely in terms of mechanics and mechanical devices that transport us from place to place violently and in defiance of nature, the descendants of the magic horse of the Squire's Tale. Biological motion continues to pervade the universe, just as it did in Aristotle's day, but we recognize it less and less as a distinct form of motion at all.(7)

The mechanistic view of the universe propagated by modern science tends to distract us from the idea of nature and natural motion still prevalent in Chaucer's world. Yet I would reply to Robert Jordan's Chaucer and the Shape of Creation: The Aesthetic Possibilities of Inorganic Structure that organic as well as inorganic structures are needed to make sense of Chaucer, and indeed of much other medieval art and literature as well. As their forms and the language used to describe them suggest, cathedrals themselves were modeled on botanical forms like groves of trees, foliage and roses. The world of living things ultimately gave shape to ancient and medieval thought about the nature of life, and gave form to the art that imitated that natural world.(8)

Chaucer's work makes it clear that the Aristotelian stress on natural motion remained profoundly attractive to him, as it still is to artists and philosophers today. The double meaning of "kynde" in Middle English, as both "natural" and "benevolent," may be one source of the attraction. Nature, for Chaucer, is "kind," not "red in tooth and claw," as Tennyson imagined in the wake of Darwin. The repetition of "kyndely" throughout the Eagle's speech - "kyndely thyng," "kyndely stede," "kyndely enclynyng" - gives an impression of natural pleasure and gentleness inherent in the Aristotelian system. The eagle enlivens this pleasant theoretical discussion with the hair-raising example in which he hints he might drop his human freight in order to show that heavy things naturally tend to fall, a simple example widespread in the literature of natural philosophy.(9)

The twentieth-century viewer is predisposed to see nature, particularly in Troilus, as unkind, to say the least.(10) Yet in its classical and medieval sense nature should not be confused with fortune, the agent of change in this mutable sublunary world, or with evil. "Fortune reigns in gifts of the world, not in the lineaments of nature," as Shakespeare observes in As You Like It (I.ii.41-42). Nature remains a power for good in Chaucer's universe, an agent of God representing the force of generation and the order of creation. Nature supplies the innate characteristics with which we are born, our distinctive selves, while fortune provides us with the external trappings of success or failure. Nature also governs "the fair chain of love" that binds the universe together, and that Troilus celebrates in his "Canticus Troili": "So wolde God, that auctour is of kynde, / That with his bond Love of his vertu liste / To cerclen hertes alle and faste bynde . . ." (III: 1765-67). This, says the narrator, is the eternal law of nature that no man may destroy (1:236-38). Nature unites Troilus and Criseyde in love, for a time, until a change of fortune forces them apart. Nature binds, fortune divides. Both are aspects of divine providence. As in the classical system, nature is uncorrupted by original sin, and identified instead with health.(11)

People, like stones, trees, rivers, and sounds, have their natural destinations. Destination is another word for destiny. To be destined, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is to be bound for a particular place.(12) This is why, rather oddly to us, perhaps, Thomas Bradwardine was a specialist in both the physics of motion and in predestination. His De causa Dei contra Pelagium of about 1344 is as important in the history of the physics of space as in the theology of predestination. It looks forward, on the one hand, to modern mechanics and our concept of outer space, and on the other to the rigid predestination of Calvin.(13)

(4) Natural Place, Natural Motion, and Nature as Destiny in Troilus

Troilus's rambling meditation on free will at the climactic moment in Book Four as he awaits his final tryst with Criseyde has long baffled students of Chaucer. When its readers have not been left wondering why Chaucer wanders off on this tangent, they have been debating among themselves as to the nature of the tragedy of Troilus. Is it a tragedy of character, or is it a tragedy of fate? In fact, the cause of his predicament is the very topic of Troilus's speech. Here, too, Aristotelian physics helps to shed light on Chaucer's view of human destiny, which is bound up in his philosophical understanding of nature and the cosmos, and which resists most current critical definitions of "tragedy."(14)

The answer to the question, as so often in Chaucer, is not either one or the other, but both. Chaucer's imagination is inclusive. To the Aristotelian natural philosopher, Troilus's story, if it is a tragedy at all, is both a tragedy of fate and a tragedy of character. It can be both because, for Chaucer, nature is destiny. The ancient natural philosopher's integrated view of the universe is the key to understanding Chaucer's vision of his poem. For Chaucer and his contemporaries, nature was the expression of divine providence, itself a divine virtue.

Troilus's speech considers whether we are free to act, or bound by fate. "For al that comth, comth by necessitee: / Thus to be lorn, it is my destinee" (IV:958-59).(15) In this celebrated speech, Troilus stares his fate in the face. His subsequent conversation with Pandarus reveals that he sees no way to keep Criseyde that will not violate the integrity of his own being. He is predestined to lose his beloved because of who he is. The only honorable way out that he can imagine at this point is death, and he considers suicide: "He was so fallen in despeir that day, / That outrely he shop hym for to deye" (IV:954-55). Pandarus and Criseyde will offer him alternatives that save him from killing himself in despair. Still, Troilus understands his own predicament here more clearly than they do. In the end an honorable death in defence of his city turns out to be the only avenue of escape consonant with his nature.

The tradition of Aristotelian natural philosophy on which Chaucer drew accepted the premise that nature was destiny. Our natures draw us to our natural destinations. These "natural places" are our destinies. According to ancient and medieval natural philosophy, the positions of the planets at birth determined a child's physiology and personal character, his or her nature. Venus was not unfavorable to Troilus at his birth, Chaucer tells us, and the Wife of Bath describes herself as a product of the planetary influences of Mars and Venus in the ascending sign of Taurus: "I folwed ay myn inclinacioun / By vertu of my constellacioun" (Canterbury Tales III:615-16).

But the planets do not predetermine actions. Within the constraints of our nature as individual creatures shaped by God we have real choices. We are less free when we follow our natures blindly, but this is a choice, if only by default. God, as our creator, knows how we will choose. But our choices are our own. They belong to the realm of freedom which God gives us along with our natures.

Troilus and Criseyde's paths diverge because, like all of creation, and like the sounds the eagle describes in the House of Fame, they have natural places to which they are drawn. Criseyde's case can be seen as the more tragic of the two if we are determined to find tragedy in a natural world that, like the world of the romance, comprises tragedy and comedy in equal measure. Troilus rises: she descends. As Chaucer describes her, she is on her way down from the beginning, when the narrator first shows her to us as, to all appearances, "an hevenyssh perfit creature, / That doun were sent in scornynge of nature" (I: 104-5). When Chaucer calls Criseyde "tendre herted, slydyng of corage," he describes her natural motion, her dynamics. That difficult word "corage" also refers to the heart as the seat of the emotions, and to valor in particular. Criseyde's courage wavers. The tender and sliding nature of her heart impels her to move in search of security. We see her react in this way at the opening of Book I, when she seeks Hector's support after her father's defection. She has lost Calchas, and is drawn to seek the protection of the chief pillar of Trojan chivalry. She literally falls at Hector's feet, almost crazy from fear and distress.(16) It is, in terms of natural motion, a dramatic entrance. When Criseyde looks in turn to her uncle Pandarus, to Troilus, and in the end to Diomede as protectors, she is only continuing along her initial trajectory.

By contrast, Troilus considers himself altogether stable, and indeed prides himself foolishly on his own absolute immobility.

So ferde it by this fierse and proude knyght: Though he a worthy kynges sone were, And wende nothing hadde had swich myght Ayeyns his wille that shuld his herte stere . . . (I:225-28)

The young Troilus glories in the idea that he is permanently fixed in his natural place. He shall not be moved - or so he thinks. The next thing he knows, he has seen Criseyde, and his mental stability as a scorner of love is a thing of the past.

Yet even in love Troilus is still Troilus: stable, responsible, fixed in his place. Indeed, he can barely move for himself to court Criseyde; he needs his go-between, Pandarus, to direct the action on his behalf. His immobility reaches its comic height when he faints by Criseyde's bed and Pandarus takes the opportunity to throw him into it. Few other romantic heroes in literature suffer the same degree of paralysis - though Hamlet, perhaps inspired by Troilus, shares this quality. When Criseyde's exchange for Antenor is decided, Troilus remains transfixed, unable to speak or act. He considers leaving, but Troy is his natural place, as his very name, Troilus, suggests. He is fated to remain a loyal Trojan knight until he dies in his city's defence. When seen as loyalty, and as concern for Criseyde's honor and emotional fragility, his immobility is admirable, though it has also been seen in other ways by his critics. Once smitten by Cupid's arrow, Troilus is steadfast in his love for Criseyde until he dies. Only after his death is he capable of motion, when he is drawn to the eighth sphere, from which he can look down and laugh at the folly of his mourners, as he once laughed at his lovesick friends. He exits, laughing to himself, guided by Mercury to whatever heavenly place is his ultimate destination. Neither Troy nor the planet earth is now his "kindely stede."

In life, neither of the lovers is able to resist the pull of their natures, "For no man may fordon the lawe of kynde" (I:238). Criseyde gravitates naturally to Troilus, pushed by Pandarus but also attracted by his stability, a quality she admires and yearns for. He is to her "a wal / Of stiel, and sheld from every displesaunce" (III:479-80). When Troilus first sees Criseyde, indeed, she appears to be stable herself, standing still by the entrance to the temple in her black widow's gown. He is attracted to her at her moment of greatest immobility. But it is also her nature to move towards her natural place, and the nature of fortune to precipitate continual movement on earth. Criseyde's wish to stay in one position is doomed to be frustrated. As Chaucer shows her wavering back and forth in argument with herself about whether to love Troilus or not, and ultimately allowing herself to be swayed by external forces - the sight of Troilus riding by, the love song, the nightingale, Pandarus and his schemes - he shows us a changeable woman. All her best resolutions "knotteles thoroughout hire herte slide" (V:769). When she promises herself that "To Diomede algate I wol be trewe," her good intentions are clear, but so is the vanity of human wishes, or resolutions. In many respects Diomede is better suited to her than Troilus ever was, yet at this point, Chaucer's disillusioned readers find it difficult to believe in either of them as true lovers. Chaucer's narrative encourages us to doubt while at the same time allowing the most idealistic of his auditors to hope against hope that Criseyde, too, as much a victim as a villainess, might have learned "trouthe" from Troilus's example and may yet find happiness.(17) Chaucer leaves Criseyde's destiny open to discussion, though one element of it is fixed: she is eternally imprisoned in her story, to be condemned by generations of readers and hearers. The fate of Criseyde the woman Chaucer leaves to our imagination.(18)

By placing so much focus throughout Troilus on the forms of motion natural to these two major characters, Chaucer directs attention to the dynamics of his plot, which he calls "litel myn tragedie," but which, like all good romances, and like nature itself, balances the tragic with a compensating element of comedy. Each of the lovers is a natural entity, a body in motion, irresistibly drawn toward some "kyndely stede," its ultimate resting place. For Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, their natures are their fates, and no being in Chaucer's universe is exempt from this law of nature. In Chaucer's view, no one can expect otherwise.

This cosmological perspective, it should be said, pervades many writers beyond Chaucer. It is a primary factor in the long, ongoing, and much misunderstood tradition of the romance. In fact, it might be argued that the "modern novel," as a Renaissance anti-romance, ties itself to the Copernican system, with its increasingly mechanical means of measuring and ordering experience, and increasingly restrictive forms of logic. It belongs to the world of modern science. The mechanics of the plot of a well-crafted novel are supposed to take precedence over the characters. Every episode needs to be logically motivated. Only amateurs, or perhaps magical realists, allow such impermissible factors as fate, the stars, God, or the idiosyncratic personalities of the characters to sway the outcome of the narrative. As in a piece bien faite, the novel's plot pushes the characters around like chess pieces. By contrast, the romance and its many descendants (some of them called novels) belong to the same ancient world as Aristotelian thought. Implausible coincidences, thematic parallels, inexorable destiny, quirks of personality, and divine or diabolical intervention are all fair game for the romancer. This could well be why romances and romancers get neither respect nor understanding from modern critics, the children of the humanists. It could also be why the romance in the form of genre fiction remains much more popular than the art novel. The pre-Newtonian cosmos retains a certain intrinsic appeal, even when we fail to recognize its relation to ancient moral philosophy. To the human eye, the universe still revolves around our planet earth; even though intellectually we claim to accept Copernicus's system, we still read our horoscopes in the newspaper (Burkhardt 51-52). The idea that human beings play an important part in a benevolently designed cosmos continues to attract us.

In the 1990s we tend to imagine pre-Newtonian natural philosophy to be altogether obsolete and irrelevant to our lives. We respond to it the way Sherlock Holmes responded to the Copernican system: "What the deuce is it to me? . . . You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work" (Conan Doyle 19). In fact, on closer inspection, medieval natural philosophy proves more psychologically satisfying and meaningful to present-day men and women and their work than most of us would suppose. Indeed, it is being accorded new respect by a wide range of thinkers, including the scientists themselves.

Far from being a sidelight of interest only to subspecialists, Chaucer's natural philosophy stands at the center of his work. Every Chaucerian needs to inform him- or herself regarding this complex field. The implications of this reorientation for Chaucer studies are considerable. We should be reading the best of the new work in the history of ideas and the history of medieval philosophy, as well as the primary documents Chaucer drew on. More than this, we should be talking to scholars active in this field, and encouraging them to help us undertake this challenge.

Earlier in this paper the discussion of natural place focused on the trajectories of the main characters, Troilus and Criseyde. The idea of natural place also makes the poem's ending understandable. In Chaucer's concluding verses, he turns from Troilus in the heavens back to his readers and advises them to look to God for true love.

O yonge, fresshe folkes, he or she, In which that love up groweth with youre age, Repeyreth horn fro worldly vanyte, And of youre herte up casteth the visage To thilke God that after his ymage Yow made, and thynketh al nys but a faire, This world that passeth soone as floures faire. (V:1835-41)

The poet rejects the ancient world with scorn. He commends his book to his philosophical and moral friends Ralph Strode and John Gower for correction, and his final words are a prayer to the Trinity, "for love of mayde and moder thyn benigne," to defend us from visible and invisible enemies and make us worthy of divine mercy. It is an appealing touch, to this reader, that the poet includes his audience in his prayer. However, many other students of the poem have found these verses distasteful. The modern humanist critique of this lovely section has been that it jars against the paganism of the main body of the poem and spoils the entire tragedy, or that it is a disappointing return to medieval convention and orthodox Christianity. Yet it is altogether in harmony with the poem as a whole in terms of natural philosophy, and in harmony with Chaucer's practice in concluding the Canterbury Tales by leading his readers by example from the universe of his fiction to that of reality.(19)

In the Jewish tradition, the concept of natural place appears, rather startlingly, at the beginning of the Passover Seder, in the introduction to the story of the Four Sons. There God is addressed as "the Place, blessed be He," "ha-Maqom barukh hu" ("Blessed be the Omnipresent" is the rather less than adequate English translation of this phrase). Nahum N. Glatzer explains this term, which occurs as early as the Mishnah, by citing Genesis Rabbah LXVIII.9: "He is the Place of the world and the world is not His place" (Glatzer 25). The Jew prays to God as the place to which we all are drawn by nature. The image of the virtuous soul rising or being drawn upward through the spheres to God, best known to us from Dante's Paradiso, but also familiar to readers of Troilus, is based on this same philosophical idea.(20) So is another of Chaucer's favorite themes, that this world is not the true home of the human spirit: "Her is noon hoom, her his but wildernesse" ("Truth" 17). Our true place is elsewhere. Seeing God as the natural place and ultimate destiny of creatures made in his image is all the reader needs to make sense of the conclusion of Chaucer's poem. Troilus's soul rises to the eighth sphere, and in his final stanzas Chaucer points himself and his readers in the same direction, towards the God who will never betray those who love him.

Notes

My thanks to my father Lawrence E. Goodman, James Record Professor of Civil Engineering emeritus of the University of Minnesota, and to Dr. Jeffrey L. Wollock, Research Director of the Solidarity Foundation, New York City, for inspiration, help, and kindness in the production of this essay. Thanks too to Bill Nelles for his patience and encouragement, without which this paper would not exist, to Larry D. Benson and Dan Donoghue for the chance to present it to the Harvard Doctoral Seminar in Old and Middle English, and to Wayne Storey for inviting me to present the new and improved version at Fordham University.

1 For Bradwardine's physics, see Grant, Much Ado 135-44. See Bloomfield 83-84 on Bradwardine's role in the fourteenth-century quarrel over future contingents and its application to Chaucer, and, for a contrasting view and Biel's contribution, Pearsall 28-29. Additional discussions of Chaucer and nominalism occur in Sheila Delany, Chaucer's House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism and Richard Utz, Literarischer Nominalismus im Spatmittelalter and Literary Nominalism and the Theory of Rereading Late Medieval Texts.

2 See Walter Clyde Curry, Chaucer and the Medieval Sciences, J. D. North, Chaucer's Universe, Derek J. Price, The Equatorie of the Planetis (with a linguistic analysis by R. M. Wilson), and, most recently, Anne W. Astell, Chaucer's World of Learning.

3 In the Astrolabe Chaucer apparently never got to the parts he promises in the introduction: the fourth part in which he planned to discuss the theory of causes and of planetary motion, and the fifth on the theory of astrology.

4 Aristotle ([254.sub.b]34f.) 197:

We said that in some cases movement by an external agent is unnatural movement, but there are other cases which we still need to consider, and to contrast with these because their motion is natural . . . . I am thinking of things such as light objects and heavy objects, because although it takes force to move them in the opposite direction, they move naturally to their proper places; heavy things naturally move downwards and light things naturally move upwards.

See the note to Chaucer's House of Fame, II:734 (Benson 983) for further references to Augustine, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, Dante, and the Roman de la Rose, many of which Chaucer probably drew upon. All of the citations of Chaucer's text in this paper are taken from Benson, The Riverside Chaucer.

5 My thanks to Rabbi Judy Abrams (of the Talmudic internet web site "Maqom") for her help in interpreting this passage.

6 Marshall Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages, Ch. 7. For more on Bradwardine and his importance in describing motion in mathematical terms, see Grant, Foundations 87, 122-24, 148-49, 151, 175.

7 For a concise explanation of animate motion as understood by Aristotle, see Wollock, "Case Analysis" 14. More extensive discussion of these terms may be found in Wollock, Animate Motion, chapter 3.

8 This approach to medieval art was elaborated by John Ruskin in Seven Lamps of Architecture; its problematic implications for modern thinkers are interestingly discussed in Spretnak 146-55.

9 As applied to a person, the eagle's version of this classic example represents violent rather than natural motion. For another example in more traditional form, see Wollock, "Case Analysis" 13-14.

10 For the opposite view of "kind" and nature, see Newman 261-62. For more on nature in the Middle Ages, see Curtius, chapter 6, George Economou's The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature, and Donald Rowe's O Love, O Charite! Contraries Harmonized in Chaucer's Troilus.

11 For an overview of the meanings of "nature" in classical philosophy, see Nussbaum 29-32. For the medieval Christian, the impairment of original sin was removed by infant baptism, though theologians disagreed widely, and still disagree, as to the extent to which the unbaptized or the created universe had been affected by the fall of Adam and Eve. For an elegant brief overview of the whole system, see S. L. Bethell, The Cultural Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, Chapter Three: "Two conceptions of the universe and their significance for 'reason' and 'faith.'"

12 The OED derives "destine" from the Latin verb stare, "to stand," by way of the derivative verb destinare, "to make firm or establish." Both verbs denote stability in position. "Destination" first appears in English as "the action of destining to a particular use, purpose, or end; the fact of being destined."

13 For Bradwardine's physics, see Grant, Much Ado 13544. On Bradwardine's theology and its application to Troilus, see Pearsall 28-29.

14 See Curry, "Destiny" 129-68, Pearsall 17-29, Morton W. Bloomfield, "Distance and Predestination in Troilus and Criseyde," and, most recently, H. A. Kelly, Chaucerian Tragedy.

15 See Herndl 38-40 for a good discussion of Troilus as a "natural law tragedy." That it is also a "humanistic" tragedy seems less plausible to me. Man is not the measure of all things in Chaucer's universe; rather, the order itself is most important.

16 In Criseyde Chaucer also depicts a mental type as familiar to the ancient as to the modern student of psychology. The effects of stress factors such as fear, bereavement, or shame can be amply documented in modern psychological literature, going back as far as Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy at the beginning of the seventeenth century. For much useful background discussion of the psychology of fear as debated by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, see Nussbaum 82-89, 91-94, 103-4, 192-238, and 259-61. For Aristotle, it should be emphasized, fear can be both appropriate and rational, as it often is in the case of Criseyde. See also Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and its Commentaries for more on medieval medicine and literature from a different perspective.

17 A comic or romantic reader would argue that Diomedes' disconcerting force of character, his experience, decisiveness and the urge to win at all costs, might complement Criseyde's own intensely feminine nature, and satisfy her need for security and masculine direction better than Troilus's youth, gentleness, and concern for honor were able to do. None of Chaucer's main characters is altogether attractive or altogether unattractive; they are recognizable human personality types. Possibly Criseyde and Diomede deserve one another. Alternatively, Diomede might well become Criseyde's purgatory on earth, as the Wife of Bath was to her fourth husband (CT III:489-90). Chaucer isn't saying. The contrasting natures of Diomede and Troilus do hint at a theory of why the Greeks are going to defeat the Trojans in the end.

18 For alternative interpretations of Criseyde's character,. action, and fate, see Pearsall and Mizener's articles.

19 Curry, in "Destiny in Chaucer's Troilus," objects strenuously to the conclusion as a violation of tragic form. Newman offers a select bibliography of classic discussions of Chaucer's epilogue through 1980. Larry D. Benson's introductory note to Fragment X of the Canterbury Tales (Riverside Chaucer 22) associates the conclusions of Troilus and the Canterbury Tales.

20 See John M. Steadman, Disembodied Laughter: Troilus and the Apotheosis Tradition: A Re-examination of Narrative and Thematic Contexts, and Burkhardt 46-50 for a twelfth-century ms. image of the ascent of the soul through the spheres to God.

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