The Fellowship of the Beatific Vision: Chaucer on Overcoming Tyranny and Becoming Ourselves by Norm Klassen (review)

This new book on Chaucer, The Fellowship of the Beatific Vision, is rich and reflective, deploying theological perspectives in agile literary analyses that attend closely to and illumine key passages in The Canterbury Tales (CT). Nestled between a helpful introduction and a pot-stirring conclusion, this thoughtful book is organized into three main parts, not accidentally evincing a divine (trinitarian) logic in form as well as content. And, like Chaucer's CT, this logic is capacious in its benevolent embrace and portrayal of the human condition as "messier, earthier, funnier" (10) (than Dante at least–though important similarities abide). As the introduction puts it, giving a taste of the book's idiom, "[t]his present volume invites readers into the view that all of reality participates in the greater reality of God, with which it is suffused, so that orientation to the beatific vision and an interest in specificities belong together" (5). An interest in specificities, indeed–Chaucer's vivid and characteristic glimpses of the conflicted quotidian, within the tales and frame narrative, which many contemporary critics of CT read cynically, assume an endearing dignity under Klassen's sharp, far-sighted vision.

In Part 1, "Pilgrimage and the Beatific Vision," Klassen discusses the eschatological symbolism of pilgrimage as an orientation of life in its "enduring togetherness" (28) toward the heavenly Jerusalem, connecting the Chaucerian comic sense with comedy's Dantean meaning. Klassen then introduces the twentieth-century Catholic theological ressourcement, sometimes referred to as the nouvelle theologie, as a crucial informing resource for his own approach. Repudiating early modern understandings of Augustine and rereading of St. Thomas in relationship to his patristic forebears, theologians like Henri de Lubac insisted against the idea of a natura pura, contending instead that, as Aquinas had said, gratia perficit naturam, grace perfects nature, which implies that created nature only becomes itself in God. As the book puts it, "nature has an intrinsic need of grace in order to be itself" (4). There is no final separation between the natural and supernatural, and Klassen rightly affirms that a "theology of 'heavenly participation,' or sacramentalism, refuses an idolatrous self-enclosed valorization of nature. It does not denigrate enfleshment" (35). Nor does this book denigrate footnotes; Klassen draws widely from and cites contemporary theologians from Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox traditions, including John Milbank, Jens Zimmerman, Charles Taylor and John Behr, all interlocutors who enrich his nuanced approach. The remainder of Part 1 is dedicated to a close-reading of the first thirty-four lines of the General Prologue, taken as two grammatical sentences. Despite the first sentence of CT being perhaps the single most-cited (and memorized) passage in all of English literature, Klassen manages new insights by situating the "natural" human desire to go on pilgrimage (l. 11) as an image of "partycypasioun of devynyte" (from Chaucer's translation of Boethius' Consolation). Klassen then reads the voluntary social formation of the fellowship in lines 19–34 (portrayed in Caxton's woodcut print at a round table) as no less an image of Christian "participatory action" than the first lines of the General Prologue. Both natural cycles and human fellowship can be understood as instantiate forms of what Orthodox theologians like Behr (or Greek-speaking church fathers like Boethius) would call theosis, the "partaking of the divine nature" described in 2 Peter 1:4.

Part 2, "Past and Present," offers a series of related interpretations, moving from an extended reading of the Knight's Tale and Miller's Prologue to a focus on women overcoming forms of tyrannical domination in three tales–the Clerk's, the Physician's, and the Second Nun's. First, Klassen sees in the Knight's Tale a connection between "the question of [overcoming] tyranny, the limitations of pagan answers to answer it, and what it looks like to belong to an imaginative community grounded in hope" (70...