 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Say It With Poetry, Chaucer and Langland. I'm intrigued by the slogan, Say It With Flowers, which has been used in advertising for florists and as the title of a 1934 British film, because it seems to me the range of things one can say with flowers is really pretty small. Beyond I love you, I'm sorry, and I bear you seething resentment and happen to know that you're allergic to flowers, nothing much leaves to mind. But I like the idea of saying things in an unexpected way. The mafiosi in the godfather, who deliver messages in the form of a horse's head or a package of dead fish. Or the Roman gods, who made their will known through the movement of birds and the behavior of sacred chickens. We tend to avoid such flights of fancy when it comes to philosophy, expecting philosophical ideas to be expressed straightforwardly in treatises and other didactic texts full of arguments. But a glance through history shows that philosophy has often travelled in other guises, and in particular in works that can be described as literature. From Plato's Dialogues and the Upanishads to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the novels of Iris Murdoch, there have been works that could as naturally be studied in literature departments as in philosophy departments. We're already familiar with this phenomenon in the medieval period, having explored the philosophical ideas of Dante and before him allegorical works like The Romance of the Rose and Alan of Lille's Lament of Nature. At the very least, we can look to literature to learn about the wider cultural impact of philosophy as it was being pursued in the rarefied context of the schools and universities. We might ask more from literature though. Couldn't a novel, play, or poem express philosophical ideas in an original way, even a way that a treatise or textbook cannot? In this episode we're going to test that hypothesis by looking at two literary authors of the late 14th century, both of whom wrote in Middle English. The more famous of the two is Geoffrey Chaucer, who hardly needs me to introduce him. He is author of The Canterbury Tales, in which a group of pilgrims compete to win a free meal by telling a series of stories. Chaucer wrote a number of other works as well, including A Romance Called Troilus and Criseyde. The second author is William Langland, who wrote a long and complicated poem called Piers Plowman. It recounts a series of dreams in which a narrator meets a sequence of speechifying allegorical characters. That narrative frame is thus reminiscent of The Romance of the Rose, but Piers Plowman devotes itself to more exalted concerns than the eroticism of Jean de Meun. The central character, named Will, quests after spiritual improvement, trying to understand what it means to do well, do better, and do best. We have good reason to think that these two poets may be philosophically rewarding. In the 14th century, England has emerged as a major force in scholastic thought, thanks to the work done at Oxford and London Greyfriars, and the mystically oriented English writings we've just looked at in the last episode were produced around the time of Chaucer and Langland. Furthermore, we know that both of them were acquainted with philosophical literature, at least to some extent. Chaucer translated Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy into English, and both he and Langland allude to the schoolmen with mendicant friars and the so-called clerks featuring frequently in their writings. In fact, one of the stories in The Canterbury Tales is even narrated by such a clerk, and in the prologue to that tale he is said to study about some sophism, a sign that we are dealing here with a trained scholastic. As for Langland, given his evidently wide reading, it's been argued that he himself was trained in the liberal arts at Oxford, though training at a cathedral school may be more plausible. Accordingly, there is a long-standing tradition of reading both men within a philosophical frame. This is especially true of Chaucer. Already his contemporary Thomas Usk called him the noble philosophical poet in English, while his 15th century editor, William Caxton, spoke of him as a noble and great philosopher. Modern-day scholars have made similar suggestions, detecting traces of voluntarism and nominalism in The Canterbury Tales and other Chaucerian works. It's been proposed that one of the avian characters in his early Parliament of Fowls represents a voluntarist outlook on the will, when a female eagle rejects the rational advice offered by nature herself regarding the choosing of a mate. The thoughts of a knight in another work, the Book of the Duchess, are supposedly a portrayal of the abstractive processes of cognition we know from Occam's Philosophy of Mind. Chaucer's portrayal of irreducibly individual characters, as in the famous prologue of The Canterbury Tales where we meet the various pilgrims, has even been deemed to evince a nominalist devotion to particulars over universal types. A domineering husband in one of the tales has been compared to the god of the voluntarists, who wields absolute power in the face of which we can only be passively obedient. His long-suffering wife even seems, at one point, to think that her husband's inscrutable will makes things right or wrong, as in Scotus's Divine Command Theory of Ethics. That last suggestion is a bit more attractive than some of the others, since it concerns the tale told by the aforementioned clerk, the one who is said to trade insophisms. There is also evidence internal to The Canterbury Tales that Chaucer knew about voluntarism. He mentions Thomas Bradwardine in the Nun's Priest's Tale, and in the Man of Law's Tale ascribes to the clerks a rather nifty summary of the voluntarist idea that God's will is unknowable. Often, as the clerks know, Christ does something for a purpose utterly obscure to the wit of humankind which cannot know his prudent providence due to our ignorance. Indeed, if we are going to credit Chaucer with a serious interest in any philosophical question, it would be divine providence. Remember that he translated Boethius's Consolation, which contains a classic treatment of the issue. Any skepticism that Chaucer would have carried over this material into a literary context can be answered by turning to his romance Troilus and Criseyde, which by the way was dedicated to a schoolman and philosopher named Ralph Strode. It contains a lengthy passage in which the hero, Troilus, reprises Boethius's presentation of the problem, namely that if God knows in advance what we will do, then we are necessitated to act as he foresees. Troilus even considers, and dismisses, a possible solution. Even if things are foreseen because they will happen, rather than happening because they are foreseen, nonetheless once foreseen they must occur since otherwise God's providence would be falsified. His worry is in keeping with other passages in the poem, which show the characters giving in to a kind of determinism. As Chaucer scholar Jill Mann has written, the lovers reinterpret previous events as part of the pattern of destiny, their significance now being established by the end that has been reached. Yet unlike Boethius himself or any number of medieval scholastics, Chaucer offers no solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge. He allows Troilus to conclude on a fatalist note, and suggests that he has included the passage simply in order to depict the heaviness of Troilus's heart and his ineffectual disputing with himself in this matter. This I think is typical of Chaucer's allusions to specific scholastic doctrines in his works. He includes them for the sake of characterization, often to underscore indecision and inaction. There is also an element of parity here. As a skeptical survey of philosophical material in Chaucer has pointed out, the Nun's Priest's Tale mentions Bradwardine, author of a vastly complex inquiry into human freedom and its place in the divinely decreed order of things, only for Chaucer to drop the subject of free will after a few paltry lines. The contrast could not be starker. But perhaps we've been going about this in the wrong way. Instead of trying to detect concrete allusions to scholastic debates in Chaucer, we might open ourselves to the aforementioned idea that his works explore genuinely philosophical topics but in a distinctively literary way. Maybe he is trying to say it with poetry. To show how this might work, let's consider the two opening stories of the Canterbury Tales, namely the Knight's Tale and the Miller's Tale. Both of them involve a beautiful woman who is pursued by more than one man, but the comparisons pretty much end there. The first tale has a classical setting, complete with pagan gods and their temples, and takes inspiration from courtly love literature with two imprisoned knights pining away for a beautiful lady they see in a garden. She does not exchange a single word with them, but manages to speak volumes with flowers. The second tale is a bawdy and comic one told by a drunken Miller, the contrast between the tales reflecting that between the social stations of the two speakers. So we are being presented here with two very different worldviews, and in particular two ways of understanding the role of desire in human life. The Knight's Tale depicts its two rival lovers as being at the mercy of their passions. They use their powers of reason only to scheme and justify why they should be the one to capture the hand of the beloved. As the narrating Knight says, love rules over them as a kind of natural law, one great enough to overwhelm any man-made law. The lovers are therefore compared to wild beasts, especially when they come to violent blows with one another for the right to wed a woman who quite literally doesn't know they exist. As a contrast case, we are offered the king Theseus. Though he is not perfectly rational, he does have something of a temper, he is largely presented as a wise and merciful monarch, embodying the medieval notion that the human ruler is a kind of vice-regent of God on earth. This is underscored in his speech, which ends the tale and which draws again on Boethius for the Aristotelian idea of God as a first mover who stands at the top of a fair chain of love binding together all things in a universe. By the end of the Knight's Tale, we might be convinced that Chaucer, like a latter-day Alan of Lille, is using poetry to convey to us his ideas about the well-ordered cosmos and about the proper role of reason in ethical action. But then we turn the page to the Miller's Tale. Here, sexual attraction does not lead to years of romantic, passionate pining, it leads to sex. Where the lady of the Knight's Tale is passive and a beautiful object of desire, the adulterous wife of the Miller's Tale acts on her own desires, in one famous scene offering her backside to a man who asks her for a kiss. The vulgarity is a rebuke to the storytelling Knight, and so is the Miller's conception of human nature. For him, passion is not a distraction from the rationality that makes us truly human. Rather, the whole point of human life is to have desires and act on them, without getting bogged down too much in thinking about what might and should be the case. This is already made clear in the prologue to this tale, when the Miller says that he prefers simply to assume that his wife is faithful to him, rather than ponder on the prospect of her possible infidelity. It's enough to appreciate the pleasures that God has given you. Or, as the Miller puts it with characteristically crude wordplay, a husband shouldn't be too inquisitive about God's private matters nor those of his wife, so long as he finds God's abundance there, he needn't worry about the rest. The vivid contrast of the Knight and the Miller is comically effective and also philosophically effective. As in a platonic dialogue, a literary frame makes it possible to offer the reader two clashing perspectives on happiness and human nature, and as with Plato, Chaucer is the author of both perspectives. This I think is one of the things that literature can do for philosophy. It can help us to inhabit more than one worldview and understand them from the inside out. As another Chaucer scholar has recently put it, for him, philosophy is more a matter of probing a difficult and evolving set of problems than it is of laying out doctrines that can neatly be summarized and classified according to schools of thought. That sentiment may also apply to William Langland and his poem Piers Plowman. It can seem to be a series of false starts, with the main character Will, is his name another allusion to Volundrism perhaps, taking sometimes contrary moral and spiritual advice from a series of allegorical characters. The social satire we found in Chaucer is present here too, with frequent criticism of the greed and immoral conduct found among the clergy. The poem makes interesting reading in light of our previous discussion of medieval economic theory since it betrays something of the same ambivalence towards money, which even appears as one of the allegorical characters. Langland allows that money has two aspects, beneficial insofar as it is given for honest work, but pernicious when it leads to usury or is heaped up without measure. In this sense, wealth can be a bar to entering heaven. He also recognizes what seems to be a higher moral law than that governing economic life insofar as the dictates of need outweigh the concerns of property. Langland's repeated attacks on the learned clerical class may suggest a certain anti-intellectualism on his part. There may be some truth to that suspicion, but he would be no ally of the miller from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Langland has the character imagination discourage Will from disparaging learning, since knowledge is akin to Christ himself and offers guidance to both the unlettered and the literate. Part of his complaint about the clerks is that these supposed scholars actually lack a firm grounding in what he calls philosophy and physic. Still, the poem warns us that too much concern with the niceties of theology can distract us from learning how to do well or do best. We are also told that we can learn truth even from the vulgar or less learned folk, and that clerks somehow seem to wind up sinning more than the unlearned. This belief in the end is of greater help to us in our spiritual goals than logic. Ultimately, the message here is one familiar from other spiritually-minded medieval authors like Bonaventure. Langland shows us the spiritual guide Piers Plowman rejecting the value of all knowledge save love. Yet as many scholars have argued, Langland used his poem as an opportunity to respond to contemporary debates among the scholastics. In particular, he seems to have been concerned with the problem of divine grace and the question whether it is in the power of humans to merit salvation. In one of the most famous scenes, Langland describes Piers Plowman receiving a kind of legal document from the character Truth, a pardon which promises redemption to all those who do good works. Piers, rather shockingly, tears up the pardon. It's a matter of debate what Langland is trying to tell us here, but one explanation has been that Langland is indicating his opposition to a tendency towards Pelagianism among 14th century scholastics. In other words, he is rejecting the notion that we can be saved merely by doing well, in the sense that good works must be rewarded by God as promised in the pardon. Rather, as voluntarists like Bradwardine argued, it lies with God alone to determine through his absolute power who will and will not be saved. Another reflection of Langland's interest in contemporary debates about grace is his engagement with the so-called problem of paganism, that is, the question whether virtuous pagans may be redeemed without having accepted Christ. In Piers Plowman, we are explicitly told that such figures as Solomon, Socrates, and Aristotle may have been damned despite their wisdom. Conversely, we learn that the Roman Emperor Trajan has been saved, despite his not having been baptized. If we are hoping for a nuanced theological explanation for this, we will be disappointed. Apart from crediting the salvation to intercession by a prayerful Pope Gregory, Langland simply appeals to the inscrutability of God's will, taking refuge in the Latin slogan Qua re placuit quia voluit, meaning, why did it please him? Because he willed it so. If this rings those voluntarist bells again, it may also be a reflection of legal practices at the time of Langland. He was well acquainted with the world of lawyers, something else that occasions some bitter critique in the poem, and may be thinking of the 14th century practice by which the king or parliament could use discretion to mitigate judgments of the common law. Yet another aspect of Piers Plowman that connects it to earlier philosophical literature is its handling of nature, which forcefully recalls the treatment of the natural world in 12th century authors like William of Conch, and especially, Alan of Lille. Langland too portrays nature as a kind of subordinate principle to God, through which divine workmanship is exercised to make humans and other creatures. Unfortunately, at least in our fallen state, we humans cannot assume that nature will suffice to make us good. Again, like Alan of Lille, Langland focuses in particular on sexual misconduct as a depressingly common feature of human life, one that our power of rationality should prevent, but does not. This idea that sin has opened up flaws within the natural order in fact explains why pagans are, with some apparently fairly arbitrary exceptions, all damned. Operating with nothing but natural reason and knowledge, the pagans could not hope to do best in the way that is possible for Christians. You may have noticed that love and sexuality have been recurring themes in the medieval texts we've considered that bring together literature with philosophy. In addition to Alan of Lille, Chaucer, and Langland, one might think of the Romance of the Rose, Dante's portrayal of Beatrice, and for that matter of the way that female mystics like Hadavich adopted the tropes of courtly love poetry. Chaucer is also one of several 14th century authors to address the question of gender explicitly in a work I haven't yet mentioned, The Legend of Good Women. These are rarely considered as central topics in medieval philosophy, but given the more open-minded approach we're taking when it comes to the question of which medieval texts may feature in the history of philosophy, we're not going to let that stop us. As we'll discover, the scholastics too have things to say about these issues, even if they aren't necessarily things we're going to be happy to hear. But I hope you will be happy to hear the next episode, which will be a wide-ranging look at concepts of gender and sexuality in the medieval age. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.