A Company on the Road to Canterbury
The premise of The Canterbury Tales is simple and, on the surface, almost incidental: a group of strangers, thrown together at an inn outside London, agree to travel together to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, and to pass the time by telling stories. The Host proposes a prize – a free dinner, paid for by the others – for whoever tells the best tale. From this premise Chaucer builds a portrait gallery of late-medieval English society: a Knight, a Prioress, a Miller, a Wife of Bath, a Pardoner, a Parson, and dozens more, each given a voice, a tale, and a set of motives that the General Prologue sketches with unsparing precision.
What is easy to miss, because the storytelling competition so dominates the foreground, is the frame itself. These people are not merely traveling; they are on pilgrimage, to a shrine, for reasons that – whatever else might be said about any individual pilgrim's sincerity – the poem never treats as fictional or merely conventional. The destination is real. The pilgrimage is the occasion for everything else in the poem, including the parts of the poem that seem to have forgotten it entirely.
What the Pardoner's Tale Reveals
The Pardoner is, by his own admission in his Prologue, a fraud: he sells indulgences and relics he knows to be worthless, preaches against the very greed that drives him, and tells his audience plainly that his sermons are performances designed to extract money, not to save souls. His recurring text – radix malorum est Cupiditas, “greed is the root of evils” – is a true sentence preached by a man who embodies the sin it names.
And yet the tale the Pardoner tells, about three revelers whose greed leads each to murder the others over a stash of gold, is one of the most morally serious narratives in the entire collection – constructed with the skill of a man who, whatever his own corruption, understands exactly what he is talking about. The poem does not resolve this. The Pardoner remains a fraud; his tale remains true. Chaucer asks the reader to hold both of these at once, without collapsing either into the other.
Genesis 3 and the Destination That Remains
Genesis 3 narrates the entry of exactly this kind of gap into human experience – a gap between what a person says, believes, or is supposed to represent, and what that person actually does. Adam and Eve do not stop being made in the image of God when they eat the fruit; the rupture does not erase the original design, it estranges the creature from it. Every pilgrim on the road to Canterbury, however corrupt, remains a creature on pilgrimage – the category has not been revoked, even where the conduct has long since abandoned it.
A revolutionary reading of The Canterbury Tales might treat the pilgrimage frame as a hollow convention – an excuse for the real content of the poem, which is the comedy and satire of its individual tales, with the shrine itself an afterthought the poem never bothers to return to (the journey back from Canterbury, notably, is never written). But the poem's persistent moral seriousness – its refusal to let the Pardoner's fraudulence cancel the truth of his tale, its inclusion of a Parson whose tale is a genuine treatise on penitence, placed last, as though it were where the journey was always heading – suggests something else. The destination has not been abandoned by the poem, even by the pilgrims who have abandoned it in their hearts. Genesis 3:15 names the reason a destination can survive the unworthiness of every traveler toward it: the promise was never contingent on the pilgrims' worthiness in the first place, but on the one toward whom, however badly, they are still moving.