Confronting Venus: Classical Pagans and Their Christian Readers in John Gower's Confessio Amantis

At the end of John Gower's Confessio Amantis, the lover Amans, who turns out to be Gower himself, is forced to abandon his devotion to Venus and love in favor of a life of Christian prayer. The topos of a Christian author turning away from erotic pagan pursuits can be traced from Augustine's Confessions to the ending of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. Yet the impetus for "Gower"'s turn to Christianity is surprising: instead of "Gower" rejecting Venus, Venus rejects him.¹ While "Gower" accepts her decision, he repeatedly attests that his conversion to a Christian life is less a free choice than a forced exile (8.2962-70, 8.2882-88).² Considering that the Confessio is largely devoted to ethics and self-governance, for the poem's ending to render virtuous Christian behavior not a choice but a necessity is surprising.³ Furthermore, Venus, a female pagan associated with concupiscence, seems a particularly unlikely candidate to dictate ethical behavior to a Christian man. Why would Gower risk undermining his poem's ethical program when it would seem far simpler to make the authorial persona reject Venus?

I interpret this ending as the culmination of a complex set of meditations on how medieval Christian authors and readers might interpret the classical pagan past. One of the largest repositories of classical legend in late medieval English literature, the Confessio Amantis depicts classical pagans as lovers, leaders, and benighted idol-worshippers, and alternately praises and blames them for their actions and beliefs. Many studies of the Confessio have focused on Gower's adaptation of his pagan stories, considering both how Gower the author arranges his source materials and how the Confessio invites readers to reflect ethically on the applicability of these stories to their own lives. In both cases, critics afford agency to the author and the reader, while the classical sources serve as building blocks for the readerly or authorial work to be performed. I argue that Gower does not merely make use of classical source materials in the Confessio but also ponders the limits of their usability. Specifically, Gower constructs elaborate organizational frameworks to guide readers through the complexity of the classical past even as his poem manifests a pervasive concern that classical personages and legends will evade these frameworks. The encounter between Gower's persona and Venus at the end of the poem constitutes Gower's most radical response to the challenges posed by classical antiquity. Here Gower departs from the predominating view of pagans in the Confessio as individuals capable of and subject to the same ethical standards as Christians. Venus introduces a new perspective in which pagan and Christian are discrete identities that afford different ways of viewing the world, rendering the project of ethical education either unnecessary (Christians practice Christian ethics as an inescapable part of their identity) or impossible (pagans are not Christians and thus cannot be subject to Christian ethics).

This essay demonstrates that ethical reflection in the Confessio is tied up with historical reflection: that is, in order to make ethical use of classical pagans, the author or reader must construct histories that characterize the relationship between medieval Christians and their pagan predecessors in terms of continuity and inclusion, on the one hand, and severance and exclusion, on the other. Both types of history appear in the Confessio, and they coexist in a dialectic relationship that is best described by Monika Otter's comment regarding late medieval historiography: "A narrative asserting historical continuity would not be needed unless other cultural and psychological factors suggested the opposite; conversely, a narrative about disruption and historical loss presupposes a desire for continuity."⁴ The historical rupture created by Venus's exile of "Gower" is necessitated by a "desire for continuity" with classical antiquity that I chart throughout the Confessio. By tracing various formulations of history as they are connected to the ethical agenda of the poem, we see that the Confessio is not only metaethical, as recent critics have argued, but also metahistorical, engaging with the motivations and desires that...