"Don't Blame Me": The Metaethics of a Chaucerian Apology

Of all the norms for moral speech available to the Middle Ages and invoked by Chaucer's narratives, the Bible is the most formidable. As Lawrence Besserman's catalogue of Chaucer's biblical allusions shows, Chaucer's works are suffused with Scripture, ¹ a fact elaborated by exegetical criticism into an ideology: according to such exegetes as D. W. Robertson and Bernard Huppé, Chaucer not only used Bibletalk; he invested it with a moral authority that rubs off onto his own texts, even the slippery language of fabliau. ² If we were to accept this view (although the neo-Robertsonians will not follow me here), Chaucer's handling of Scripture might be compared to its use by Wyclif's disciples, the Lollards, who seem to have regarded the Bible as an ethical lexicon, a sure verbal standard for moral discourse in English. ³

Against the exegetical view, however, I would argue that many of Chaucer's scriptural usages point up his frustration with the inadequacy of the Bible as an ethical lexicon. I was warned during my Jesuit schooldays to stay away from the Bible because one could not get a "coherent" ethical system from it. Nor, given the Bible's stylistic vagaries and occasionally salacious content, can one get a workable moral vocabulary. At points in the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer seems to be subjecting biblical language to critical analysis as an ethical discourse. This analysis, I believe, has often gone unremarked because it operates beneath an ironic or parodic tone. The notion of Chaucerian irony is, of course, a critical commonplace. But, in my view, the philosophical subtlety that Chaucer's irony can cloak routinely escapes attention. Derek Pearsall observes in his biography of the poet that Chaucer's chief theme, like Milton's, is human free will or moral choice. ⁴ I would amplify this point and argue that the free choices that command Chaucer's interest, at least in the Canterbury Tales, are those that involve how people decide, in language, to represent their behavior both to themselves and to others. Such choices contemporary philosophers distinguish from normative ethics and term metaethics, since they do not concern matters of prescription and proscription—although they might lead to moralisms—but rather the verbal content and essential nature of moral language itself. ⁵

To illustrate, I want to concentrate on an important biblical allusion that Besserman's catalogue and the exegetes overlook, one that occurs toward the close of the famous apology prefaced to the Miller's Tale. I do not intend merely to annotate the allusion—a practice Ralph Hanna aptly describes as "dissipat[ing] complex interrelationships" in Chaucer's texts ⁶ —but to suggest how the biblical reference magnifies certain dissonances in Chaucer's use of moral language precisely at that point in Fragment I of the Canterbury Tales when Chaucer appears to drop his narratorial mask and to use ethical discourse most directly. The famous apology reads:

For Goddes love, demeth nat that I seye
Of yvel entente, but for I moot reherce
Hir tales alle, be they bettre or werse,
Or elles falsen som of my mateere.
And therfore, whoso list it nat yheere,
Turne over the leef and chese another tale;
For he shal fynde ynowe, grete and smale,
Of storial thyng that toucheth gentillesse,
And eek moralitee and hoolynesse.
Blameth nat me if that ye chese amys.

(I 3172-81) ⁷

Much has been written about these lines: how in them Chaucer lets slip his persona, acknowledging himself as author of his text, a written rather than oral production; how they may, like the General Prologue apology, draw on the close of Boccaccio's Decameron, a possible Chaucerian source; and how their tongue-in-cheek quality arouses rather than dampens interest in the antics that follow. ⁸ Most recently, Hanna himself has argued that the apology is a sophisticated "act of literary misprision," an exclusionary gesture...