This is a book about a lost ideal. It is about a group of people who believed not only that a simultaneously passive-and-active state is possible, but that it is necessary. Not always in the sense of logical or factual necessity, of being unavoidable – though arguments for that claim will appear also, especially in the last two chapters below. Even more clearly, though, the group held a passive-and-active state to be what we might call morally necessary: required, that is, if a human is to be (and do) the best she or he possibly can. So far from finding the passive-and-active state an inferior one or a compromise tainted by its passive elements, they understood it as the pinnacle of human existence.
The main title of this book indicates the kind of passivity that they had primarily in mind: passivity, or receptivity, before a divine will. Thus the philosophical question of action and passion appeared for them as the more particular, and more theological, question of the relations between an active human will and a divine will that was most readily understood as issuing from beyond the human; and the possibility of combining action with passion in the aforesaid “ideal” meant acting with an agency or a power that was simultaneously one’s own and also, somehow, God’s. Part One of this book is an attempt to encounter that ideal in situ. First of all in Chaucer’s poems: especially in the Man of Law’s Tale, which seems to me a powerful embodiment of the ideal; in the Clerk’s, where the treatment of human and divine agency at first looks similar but emerges, on closer reading, as sharply opposed; and in the Second Nun’s, where the ideal is conspicuous by what is, given the hagiographical context, its nearly inexplicable absence. Situated among those efforts, also in Part One, are detailed expositions of the same ideal of conduct as it appears in theological ideas with which Chaucer certainly had contact, drawn primarily though not exclusively from the writing of Bernard of Clairvaux. The second part of the book then takes up what is, on the face of it, a second question, connected to a different dyad: the question of the relationship between a human will and any law (in the broad sense described in the Preface) that lays claim to govern it. Here too the investigation turns up a possibility that is surprising or impossible at first look, but that, it will emerge, was once asserted as an ideal of human conduct; and once again it is a kind of concidentia oppositorum, the possibility of a law that acts rather like a will, and of a will that loves, and in some way becomes one with, a law. Here the main Tales considered, the Franklin’s and Physician’s, put the ideal on display almost entirely by negation, showing wills in fierce competition with (and misunderstanding of) the relevant laws; but they do so, chapter five will argue, in ways that prod the reader into thinking about the better relationships with law that should have been. The following chapter goes on to propose that better relationships should involve not only the ability to break bad laws (as Chaucer’s characters fail to do) but to affirm, love, and ultimately merge with good ones – again drawing on theological writers to show that such an ideal was concretely recommended in the “real world” and is not just a figment of a fevered reader’s brain. Once again Bernard of Clairvaux serves, for reasons considered later in this chapter, as the leading source.
That brief sketch has not yet explained why it is possible to speak of one ideal rather than two. The most adequate explanation I can offer does not appear here, but arises across the course of the seven chapters that follow – where it becomes steadily more clear that the two themes are linked by bonds difficult to dissolve, so that the answers a given author formulates for one set of questions will virtually dictate his or her responses to the other set, and so that what first appears as two separate ideals increasingly seems a unified stance. Because that stance is best understood by beginning with the two ostensibly separate questions – and because those questions are best encountered as they are concretely embodied in medieval literature and theology – the chapters to follow are written in a bottom-up style, plunging into the poetry in one chapter and the theology in the next, and usually advancing general claims only as they emerge from those close readings. Thus it is entirely possible to begin reading where the author began writing, with chapter one; and readers eager to get their hands into the literary and theological soil that makes up the bulk of the book are heartily encouraged to do just that, saving the rest of this Introduction for later. Its chief remaining task is to offer a sort of warrant for the book’s overarching method: for the usefulness and validity of having a look at the Canterbury Tales through the lenses of these two philosophical themes, and alongside these medieval theological writers. For some readers it will be enough to think of the method as hypothetico-deductive, of its warrant as a simple matter of consequent justification: accept provisionally the possibility that using these lenses and reading these fellow-travelers will be a fruitful thing to do, and dive in; the ensuing journey should, I hope, both repay and justify the initial trust. But readers who would like a longer look under the hood, with more advance explanation, can find it by reading on here, where three sections of explicit methodological reflection (and one taking note of related studies) will follow a slightly more expansive attempt to introduce the contemplative ideal and its “lostness.”
(excerpted from introduction)
