Chaucer (1340-1400)
Presented on: Tuesday, August 16, 1983
Presented by: Roger Weir
The date is August the 16th, 1983. This is the 11th lecture in a series of lectures by Roger, where on the 14th century, the mystic century tonight's lecture is entitled Chaucer who lived 1340 to 1400 Canterbury tales as a pilgrimage cycle. Mr. Mr. Where we'll begin in just a minute,
We're going to come into, we're going to come into the view hopefully to the same conditions which obtain momentarily. And that is the press of humanity, the voices of humanity and the press of them. How, if we listen with a inner ear, the multiplicity of the conversations of mankind forum, a backdrop known psychologically as a white sound so that the field of humanity has a buzz of activity about it, much like the insects in the field, or like a flock of birds. And one could imagine with a flock of several hundred dissimilar birds, what cacophony one would hear the same true of insects. The same is true of man. And in the 14th century, without the distractions that we have, this cacophony of mankind was addressed summarily as an evil, as a worldliness, which was to the shunned.
If one were to address the inner pilgrimage of the spirit, to the higher realms, so that in the 14th century, the stereotype was to seek God in quietness and rejection of the world. And we have gone by an enormous excursion from Rumi and some of the beginnings of a civilization that reached its culmination. Largely in Dante. We have come by the German and English mistakes through a back way through the high mountain regions, where there are very few roads and fewer passes by the pinnacles of mystical literature. We've been above treeline as it were for months.
And now we are going to come into view of a verdant Valley, a Greenland. We're going to come into view of the cacophony of mankind again, and it's difficult for us momentarily coming off the streets of Los Angeles to transpose ourselves back 600 years to the conditions obtaining there. But if you've been coming through consistently to the lecture series and have been listening to the tapes and familiarizing yourself with the tone, I think it might be successful tonight to present Chaucer with his fair field full of folk. As a combination of the mystical voice of the 14th century, he is almost never seen this way.
And in fact, in many modern additions of Chaucer, they leave out some of the most important of Charles there's Canterbury tales to quote economize on space. But what it really is, is an embarrassment for the modern literary mind, steeped on an insipid criticism from an ignorant academia that has no real understanding of spiritual life or liveliness. In fact, two very important additions of Chaucer leave out the culmination of his greatest work, the last tale, the Parson's tale, and the only explanation for this to a conscientious reader to someone informed of the great literary tradition and mystical background is that were living in a century of such degradation.
That one of the masterworks of the English language is it is as serious as leaving off the spires of shark cathedral and a photograph of it. And in a way, the combination of the Canterbury jails and the great sermon on the seven deadly sins by Chaucer in the Parson's tale, here's the key to the entire structure of his work. And of course, understanding the structure in terms of a Gothic edifice, we are able to appreciate finally, the religious magnificence of Chaucer's spirit. He alone of all the great figures of the 14th century mistakes with the possible exception of Dante turned toward man, instead of turning away from man to understand the highest spiritual possibilities available in the cosmos and this turning towards man, this acceptance of the cacophony of the myriad voices of man as a kind of a spiritual music makes Chaucer even 600 years later. One of the few great individuals in world art who chose to go the way of the world and what is exceptional about him is that he was so successful in this endeavor to find in the Welter of mankind, a whole pattern of divinity that way are largely faced with the difficulties of the literary critics of our time, who consider the spiritual elements in Chaucer to be dumb additions, probably Le added on by imitators. After the fact now Chaucer is extremely difficult to approach in the way in which we have.
One has to go through not only the flamboyance of Richard Raul, the fires of love, the mending of life. We had to go through the ladder of perfection, Walter Hilton, and the difficulties of acclimating ourselves to an insightful structure, which for many of us is almost synonymous with an author Tarion church structure, as it would appear today. But we found in Walter Hilton that in the ladder of perfection, there was a mystic inner core, which literally turned the world inside out so that the skeleton of the structure of the world was put on the outside and made into a discipline and an aesthetic mode. So that in this inverted form, man could, by going into himself, come on the outside of the skeletal structure of his discipline and realized that what might be coterminous with his inside would be the entire hierarchical cosmos without that is to say a view similar to that held by analytical psychology in our day that the underside of the archetypical collective unconscious life of man is the universe itself, that our insides flow freely with no barrier to the vast universe that we find surrounding us.
So that man has a phenomenon. He has a conundrum and the paradox until we realize the wholeness of the flow that goes through the individual and in the 14th century, in the mystical traditions of Germany and of England, one of the disciplined ways by which this could be shown to you, demonstrated to you, the demonstrate to view was to turn you inside out to turn you a Ray from the world and change your inner structure. And of course, when this happens, as we saw in the cloud of unknowing, we come into the limitation of what we may delineate in terms of structure and form. And so we come immediately into the experience of a paradox by extending the range, the limitation, as they would have said in the 14th century, by extending the range and limitation of the divine province of man through this technique of turning him inside out, we immediately come upon the unknown. And we realize that unless we have the courage of the heart to move suspended in this blank, unknown in this EBIS, which the egotistical standpoint, the world standpoint could so easily see as a demonic call nothingness as an Abacus to be shunned at all costs. We saw the cloud of unknowing that great discipline of the spiritual courage to engender, not only the ascent into the crowd of unknowing, but to engender on our own a cloud below us to cut off the world itself.
And then we came to Julian of Norwich, the revelations of divine law, where in a feminine, universal consciousness and archetypal experience, we saw a parallel to the great apocalypse of st. John that man's nature reveals itself and a torrential purgation a penitence of the worldly coordinates. Even those which he styled transcendent become of very little use and are literally burnt up by the realization of the utter holiness of the, all, all of this was happening at the time of Chaucer. And yet almost every study of Chaucer ignores the great mystical tradition seeks only to identify ribald stories of Boccaccio, ribald stories of offered. And we have enormously learned tomes, which are excellent in their own, right. I have here one of the most famous my hands published by the university of Chicago, press the sources and analogs of Chaucer's Canterbury tales, 700 and some pages.
You don't find the cloud of unknowing. You don't find the revelations of divine loan. You don't find the ladder of perfection. The fire of love, the mending of life. The difficulty is that this approach to Chaucer is so forbidding because it requires of us something which we have by now learn to accept at least partially. And that is a sense of commitment in ourselves to what used to be called the serious call, the serious call George Herbert, a great mystical poet of the 17th century wrote a poem called the call. Ray Vaughan Williams sent it to music in the 1920s or thirties. Oh my Lord. My love my life. And in that single phrase and phasing, you see the transition from the Lord as an object to a process of love and interpenetration to a quality of existence life. Oh my Lord, my love my life and this telescoped phasing, which was given to us in such poignancy with Walter Helton and the anonymous author of the cloud of unknowing and mother Julian suddenly comes to us, turned right side back. The whole discipline is put back into a natural perspective. Again is seen as man with his insides inside and his outsides outside.
And yet it's in such masterful hands in Chaucer that he is able to present to us an incredible array of mankind leading us by what we thought were in our ignorance, secular images of man to a combination of a dissertation on the seven deadly sins and the four barriers that forbid man, from accomplishing an equilibrium. What are those barriers at the very end of the Canterbury tales? One of them is shame. One of them, oddly enough is hope. One of them is despair. And when we take ourselves to the very culmination, which we will get to later on, we find Charleston giving us the most incredible view in the Parson's tale at the end, summing it up. He says there are four things which disturb penitence penitence is that inner quality of equilibrium, which we've been approaching from the spiritual pinnacles, mystical writing,
Shame, hope desperation, and the fourth one, one that we're all familiar with in our time dread, dread the sickness unto death anxiety raised to the drowning level. You know, you can carry a neurotic anxiety around with you, but you can't carry dread around with you. You have anxiety, but dread has you. This pinnacle in Chaucer is so difficult to approach from the normal critical vein. That is all but ignored. And so we have wonderful guides to Chaucer's pronunciation. We have sources and analogs of his tail. We have wonderful university additions of the individual tails and they have at times wonderful introductions. This one quotation from Carlton Brown, 1935 and this edition of the partner's tale. And he tells us to handle a work of art and spa in the spirit of pedantry isn't impertinence, if not a desecration and no author, less deserves to suffer the indignity than Chaucer who wrote his Canterbury tales with no thought that they would be studied as linguistic exercises in the partner's tale.
Certainly in his first object was the delineation of real human figures and the analysis of human character and dealing with this tale I've endeavored not to obscure or subordinate it's human interest. So we have an excellent man writing an excellent introduction. And yet, even though he has it on the tip of his tongue and in the ink of his pen, he can't make the insightful penetration of mine to understand what is the man doing in the 14th century, writing about a whole pallet of individuals. And the question has to be seen in this light, other than the possible exception of Dante. There had been no author for over a thousand years who had looked at human beings as characters, individual, that man, that woman and the specificity of Chaucer goes to such lengths that even 500 years later we read with awe his delineation of human types.
He not only describes the accrued psychological details, which we have come to expect in our time from the psychological novel experiments that Dostoevsky and Faulkner and so on, but he gives us the wonderful physiognomy and the great classical understanding. They wonderfully ribald fryer has a whitish puffy neck, and he lists quite distinctly all the better to sing these seductive songs to the young ladies in his parish. And his motto of course, is that if they're willing to pay for penance by then, they must be ready to be served and be made clean. And in fact, he made quite a lot of money by marrying off women in his, uh, limitation, as they called it. Instead of a parish, the friars had limited, the wife of bath occurs to us with the gap in her front teeth and her tales of her five husbands and how she had gone to Jerusalem three times on pilgrimages and how she really had driven the first three husbands into the ground by her in session, uh, wandering to, uh, the marriage bed then to the argumentation. And as Chaucer says, these, uh, night curtain lectures, the beds used to have the night curtains drawn around and she was very good at giving these kinds of lectures long into the night until the men passed away from sheer exhaustion. And she inheriting S state after a state was able to make more and more comfortable trips to Jerusalem.
And we, and her exquisite tale, the prologue of which is so long that finally two of the characters interrupt her. I wouldn't say, what are you doing here? You're, we've all agreed to tell tales and you're just you're going on. And on in fact he was at the interrupter, but the fryer, the fryer laughed when he heard all this now Dame quote. He so have I joy and bliss. This is a long preamble to a tale. And when the summoner heard the fryer, Gail law quote, the seminar, God's arms to a fire, well, entertain him, evermore law, good men, a fly, and also a fryer well fall and every dish. And also matter what the speaked out of perambulation what amble or trot or peas, or go sit, dial, let us start just Bart in this manner. And so the host has to interrupt this bickering of his own characters.
The author has to come in and quiet his characters down. And one is reminded of the great interrogation that Dom Miguel de Luna Muno received at the end of his exemplary novels, where there was an appendix and the central character came in to accuse him of literary murder for not continuing to write stories. And that once he had created a character, he was under obligation ethically to continue writing about the character, to continue to give him life and this way, translators characters intrude upon reality. They want to have their say and that any time when the tails are picked up, lifted off the page, by the voice, they, again, corral, is they again, push and shove, tell their tails. And one by one inter into this incredible knowledge, not quite in my lines here, we have a point from the secular critical standpoint, the Canterbury tales held in enormous esteem.
And yet one finds volumes, tomes a bickering over the fact that he never seemed to finish this. He was supposed to have 29 people and they were supposed to tell four stories. Each two on the way from London, the Tabert in two Canterbury and two on the way back, but he only wrote 23 stories. So it must be incomplete. And so they say, well, there really isn't any structure to the Canterbury tales. It's somewhat of a grab bag, an interesting collection of, uh, photographs or in the more apt, a metaphor of our day. It's a collection of cassettes. Each one telling a story. Some of them very short, some of them quite long, the Cook's tale takes a page. The Knight's tale takes 3,200 lines and the lush I grabbed bag not. So I finished work. I work in the hands of one of the consummate geniuses of language knew what he was doing, understood his time had in his mind, a circulation of meaning an architect, tonic out structure.
How did he come by it? How do we know it's there? May we see it? The fact is we need to review shortly Lee briefly trusters life. We don't know much about him. I think he was born in the 1340s. I think he was born in 1314. We hear a few words about him by the age of 17, 1357. He takes part in, they palace as a valet, as a young man servant, but his father, John Chaucer had been a vintner. Now wine was extremely important, especially in court life, in the England of Edward, the third and John of gaunt and Richard, the second, so that a vintner would have contacts with those sources of wine on the continent, France and Italy in particular. And so the young son Jeffrey would have been raised in a family that had international connections because he was around the court. And in fact, at a very young age already began to receive pensions Royal pensions. In fact, when he was captured at the age of 19 and France, during a battle skirmish, the French and English have always been fighting. The King of England contributed 16 pounds, a large sum in those days, he was part of Chaucer's Geoffrey Chaucer's ransom.
So I think the picture that we are to engender for ourselves is that from youth Charleston was brought up in an urbane international society, appended to the court of the Kings of England, and that he knew from an early age about the vicissitudes of humanity, he could well see around him, the grand and the grandiose and on trips outside of the palace entourage. He could very well say how the rest of the world lived, not only the other half, but all the other fractions of man. And so from a very early age, Chaucer had this intuition about the nature of man that we are varied in our costuming, in our fleshly apparatus, in our detailing of life. But that way are extraordinarily similar and a quality of presence, which we have come to understand quite distinctly is that of the Holy spirit that is to say beyond any theological argumentative structure that one could conjure up mentally, there was the fact experienced as an urbane person of great insight as a genius with language that all human beings share a quality of presence, which can be appealed to it can be educated.
It can be drawn out. It can be encouraged. And as chancellor says, one beautiful place, there are great men who lead those others to God, by their sense of fairness, by the excellence of their personality, by the grand juror of their humanity, they are not ascetics. They do not turn away from the world, but in the secret core of their understanding of the Holy spirit, they realize they can teach. Yes, but before they do, they do so that the doing of the emotion of the spiritual life is primordial. And the conveying of it is secondary in the sense that it utilizes language. And it's here at this stage that Chaucer's life and the insightful core of Chaucer's capacity merge together.
Chaucer at a very early age in his twenties was commissioned by the King of England to go to Italy, to negotiate some business. It wasn't just one. It was a diplomatic mission of some importance. Chaucer went and in fact spent a great deal of time in Florence. He went to Florence, he was in Florence seven years after Dante died. He came to Florence already having written a few poems versus an attempt at something larger called the book of the Duchess. This was 1372. It was just about the time that mother Julian was about to have her revelations, which were just the next year.
Dante impressed Chaucer by his ability to take language and raise it into a structure of meaning much like the Gothic church builders had taken stone, which was inert and had raised it up through form to cast its gloriousness into a structure of elevation and insightfulness and encouragement for man, not only to look upon stone as the bones of earth, but as the very ribs, all the divine reaching structure Dante had, in fact, insistently brought in almost an architect sensitivity towards form the idea of 33 Cantos three times over Terza Rima, three rhymes. Pro-line the idea of an introduction making a perfect 100, 100 perfect Cantos, a complete cycle.
And yet for Chaucer in his twenties who had already begun to feel the stirrings of the capacities of language secondary source, though, it was secondary only to that ineffable spiritual presence, which man has secondary, but for all intents and purposes. So prime orginally important, but language began to have for him the shimmering quality of spiritual building capacity, but like the Gothic builders, he for what, for what they use of marbles for what the use of tiles for went the use of beautiful grained woods. He went to the basic natural building block of stone. And so trousers language has not the seat quality of some great court poet, but it has the homeliness of some massive Gothic cathedral builder who is taking bare stone because it's the structure he wants to be experienced and not the elegance of the material because he's dealing with man, he's dealing with human character. And so he wants a language which is earthy, full resonant, capable of exploring many Cuban types, capable of drawing out the breadboard in bed sense of humanity that all human beings share.
But by stacking it up in a certain form, by leveling out the, in consistencies of the material itself, raising the homeliness of stone into a cathedral, raising the homeliness of natural language almost without metaphor into the Canterbury tales. And it's difficult for us from a secular nitpicking, critical academic mind to appreciate the cathedral likes structure of the Canterbury tales, because it is a spiritual experience and not a literary one Chaucer takes us just as the builders will take us through the great rise of the structure of the tails themselves. Now the inner penetration of the stories coming together. But when he has built the structure, he fills it with light rather than going on and making a coupla on top of the structure. So belt, so that the final tail, the end, the capstone of the Canterbury tales is a portrait of a human being who is self-effacing, who would have been a mistake, except for his understanding in Charleston, light of the importance of staying among men, that there need to be those spiritual masters who live among the people who are so close to them, that they're even confused with them often, even our scene, just to be going on pilgrimages with the group and yet unmistakably, when they tell their tale, when they speak their piece, it is not the content.
So much of what they say. It is not the charming fiction. It's not the beautiful tale, but it's the opening up of the whole structure to the penetration of light of an other worldliness, which has come into play here. And that's the key, that's the key to the, the structure all through the 1370s, Chaucer kept rising in capacity from the age of 30 to the age of 40, almost every year. We see Chaucer being given more money, more pensions, more responsibilities, and writing more. He became, in fact, one of the wealthier individuals in London, he was given a series of apartments above all gate in London, very close to the Royal, um, uh, Buckingham palace area. He was friendly with the cane to such an extent that he was often sent abroad to France or Flanders or Italy on very delicate matters of, uh, international diplomacy and Chaucer Rose to the point whereby the 1380s in his forties. He was in fact, one of the most powerful men in England. He had the King's ear. He had a command of the language second to none. He had the ability to understand man of the universal genius.
It is then at this point in his life that a series of events as so often happen, conspired to produce a crimp in this wonderful pair of DC called continuity. There was a revolt against the King and for a year or two Chaucer was forced into exile. He went up to Kent, his wife died. He found himself penniless. He found himself without his home. He found himself facing the uncertainties of life and a project, which he had just begun the year before in a great enthrallment with an idea that perhaps he could paint a portrait picture, not of just a person, but of humanity, of mankind as a whole had begun its first experiments in a work called the legend of good women.
And the year before this crimp in his life, he had begun. In fact, he had written a prologue and nine tails dealing with historical women. Well, not so much historical women, but women who were archetypal, there was Medea. There was Cleopatra. There was this [inaudible], there were a number of women from classical antiquity, from Orville and other sources. And what Charleston was doing and the legend of good women was starting to paint their portraits and put the portraits together. So that one had the sense of a picture gallery then came the crim, then came the poverty. The death of his wife, Philippa had been married for 20 years, nearly and Charleston is set down the legend of good women left it unfinished. And in 1387 began writing the Canterbury tales and then the Canterbury tales. He took those static portraits and gave them such depth. As he began writing the tails.
He appropriated the Knight's tale, which he had written before and restructured it somewhat. And he saw that with this poignancy of human character, focusing upon the transcendent Gothic cathedral qualities of man's story, he could link these stories together, not just by a mechanical means of prologues, which interpenetrated, but by a Mobius strip type form where the interpenetration of story after story began to make a mosaic of what mankind might look like if we took the salient human types of any given time period, that if men, as a phenomenon were universal, a complete cross section at any time in history should give us a pretty good idea of what we are and the effervescent wholeness, the colorfulness of all of our capacities. And so Chaucer took a cross section. Yes, but it was more like an architect taking the radius of a circle. And once having that, encouraging us to see that just by extending that radius and the wonderfully time-honored position of rotating from the known generating into the unknown. Please turn your cassette now. And we'll commence playing again on the other side, after a brief pause.
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Time honored position of rotating from the known generating into the unknown, the completeness of man. And so the Canterbury tales are like the radius of the circle of wholeness and need to be understood as a matrix representing all of the important types of mankind and that given this radius, given this matrix to go on the insightful person, that individual capable of envisioning the architectonic of wholeness will rotate that radius in his capacity and his spiritual inwardness, and be able to engender for himself the pattern and the picture of man hole, man, in the likeness of the divine, each individual approximating some portion, but all together, presenting a very good image of the whole from 1387 to 1394 for seven years, Chaucer worked at the Canterbury tales, mother nature smiled on Chaucer all his life. And within a year he was made the inspector of the King's works.
He was brought back into the fold. He found himself, in fact, in charge of inspecting the palaces and the bridges of the King, the embankments of the Thames river, especially from the Walt rich to Greenwich area. And in fact, Chaucer lived most of the time from 1387 to the end of his life, uh, in the lower community of Greenwich. And one of the great ironies of history is that the line which we draw imaginatively in the time zones of the world starts with the line through Greenwich. And it's amazing. It's almost like the paradoxical tip of the hat of historical circumstance to Geoffrey Chaucer gent. The fact that that's what he had done for the spiritual understanding of man was draw some kind of reference line from which we may move with assurance and span the world, giving it order as we do so and giving ourselves a cosmopolitan orientation of the wholeness of man and the roundness of his capacity as a species wind Chaucer began working at this, they general prologue became for him the template upon which he would encourage later readers to base themselves.
And along with the tales that we have, the 23 tails, which most of them have a prologue to which links up all of the tails together and the way in which I've, uh, declaimed for you, the general prologue reaches forward in time, reaches down in space in depth and brings the entirety of the Canterbury tales into focus just as an architect's plan for a Gothic cathedral would do. And so the general prologue of the Canterbury tales should be laid out as if it were the specs, the graph before us, from which to view the structure. And in fact, he gives us all of the indications that a master genius would give us in the very beginnings of the general prologue to give us a sense of orientation because everywhere Chaucer is attentive to the organizing capacities of the heavens to instruct man for everywhere. Chaucer is a master of the astrological and the astronomical indications, and the general prologue begins with April.
He calls it in the sign of the Ram, but his year that he's talking about is beginning diametrically opposed across the astrological Zodiac because his year begins in Libra with the balance with the scales normal planting years, I Negra cultural year would begin in the spring, physiological years, begin in the winter with the winter solstice and that apifany phenomenon. What kind of year begins around Halloween and all saints stay well very, very peculiar year. The year based on the equanimity of the spirit of man crossing through the horizon, to the unknown, going underground, going into the world, they notice of man. And so by having gone underground and into the worldliness of man, it comes up to the surface in April in Aries. And the sign is around when that April with his showers suit that draw the March Heth Paris to the road and bathed every vein and such liquor of which virtue in gendered is the flower,
The SAP okay
Of the plant life of this planet, making at its crux for man the grain, which he further refines into the flour, which is baked into the bread, the staff of life and Chaucer condensing telescoping, as he does. So often all of this. And to just a few words that flick off almost as if they are colloquial, but he says that the SAP of life of this flower is the virtue like the virtue, like the verder of the plant is the virtue of man. And this is a very peculiar flower. It takes a very peculiar milling to get to, and it takes knowing how to put it together with a certain kind of water, a baptismal water, and 11 eight, which is done through a confessional motion of purgation a baking that finally leads us to that staff of life, which has always been there for a man. The third great motion, which we'll see in just a little while when Zephyrus also with his sweet breath, inspired half an every Holton Heath, the tender crops and the young son hath in the Ram has half course run and small fouls making melody in his homie. Beautiful way. He's talking about the waking up of the Dawn of a Holy year, the time of that year, when everyone begins to wake up spiritually and he says, this is about the time that people start thinking about making pilgrimages
Spring.
And man doesn't come to the point of realizing he has to make pilgrimages at his beginning. He gets there about halfway it's after the unknown portion has already been churn, the vagina, they call it the churning of the celestial ocean got to already be shook up and confused. You already have to go through all that. So by the time you realize that you've got to do something about it, you're halfway there just about the time that you think, Oh, this can't go on. That's about halfway, just as Dante in the divine comedy. He says halfway through life, et cetera. So Charles are also is giving here. He says, and small fouls making melody that sleep in all the night with open. Yay. So prick with him, nature and her courage then long and folk to go on crimp, pilgrimages and Palmyra is for, to seek and strange Strawns to Fern Hall's closed and sundry light. And especially from every Shire is in England to Canterbury. They went the Holy blissful martyr for, to seek that him half helping one day were to seek.
So they're going to Canterbury because at Canterbury is that Holy marker. The one who dies to the world to show us away. And this pilgrimage that happens, Chaucer says happens every year. It's a pilgrimage that happens in April. And that year, that begins with going down to the horizon of the earthiness. Whenever that begins for you. This other begins for you just opposite that, but Chaucer is a genius. It isn't until Shakespeare that we find anyone who is equal to them in language. And even after that, there are only a handful that can even touch him. He is marvelous. And what he is doing is giving us not only a pilgrimage, but because it's going to be a geometrical radius of the wholeness of the spirit of man, regardless of when or where it's going to be the pilgrimage, he's going to change a pilgrimage to the pilgrimage because every time the Canterbury tales is read with comprehension and lifted off the page entire and human beings experience it.
They are going to go through that pilgrimage. They're going to ride on horseback alongside this, not a collection of humanity, not even a cross section of humanity, but an archetypal radius of mankind. He is going to ride with comprehension to that only place of pilgrimage that they could ever get to. Not to Canterbury. They don't get to Canterbury. They get to the Parson's tale because the Parson's tail ends. The whole sequencing gives it the fullness, because if you can get to the Parson's tale with comprehension, you can walk in and out of Canterbury any day. Anytime that's the pilgrimage, that is the pilgrimage. And that's the place where Chaucer put an end to the work, not unfinished, but finished exactly where he wanted it to be, where secular critical academic minds can't go. They don't belong there. They don't fit. They're not at home there.
They can't see because it's beyond literary criticism. It's beyond sources and analogs. It's in a quality of religious experience, which is engendered by that outpouring of agreeing to go on the trip from oneself. Our own participation is invited at every step of the way. Chaucer is constantly opening up the line of sight directly to the core of the individuals. No matter if they're the lusty wife of bath or they're the leprosy summoner who summons people with his little ruts or they a wonderful Al chemical, uh, physician, the doctor who knows about the true gold, the whole array of mankind. Charleston was always inviting our view right into the core of who they are without shame without stint again and again and again, and then linking us with the vision of the writer himself, doing all the prologues, all of the interconnections, because this is for us to participate in.
And in fact, the best illustrations of Chaucer always show him riding with the finger pointing. It's almost on every conceivable, well done, production of Chaucer. And what he's saying, you two are on this pilgrimage. And if you are, it's going to work because there's a quality of you that is touched here, whoever you are, whatever path of life you have taken, whatever attitudes and predispositions you've engendered in your temporal form, we are opening up so many dimensions of personal qualities that you cannot help, but come into our company. And when you do, we have for you the best cathedral of all time, that experience, which your own capacity lights up, the experience of the fraternity of the most miraculous species of all man, and the likeness of the divine. Moving in tandem together internally in a radius of meaning
Whose structure is the wholeness of they all. Well, you have to go to Chaucer. Now, let me end there. There's all sorts of books. I wish to show you Chaucer. [inaudible].
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