God's Patients: Chaucer, Agency, and the Nature of Laws by John Bugbee (review)

God's Patients: Chaucer, Agency, and the Nature of Laws brings two of the greatest writers of the Middle Ages—Bernard of Clairvaux and Geoffrey Chaucer—into meaningful dialogue for the first time. While John Bug-bee stops short of claiming Bernard's direct influence on Chaucer (despite the fact that the twelfth-century mystic is referenced by Chaucer ten times), he makes a powerful argument for the poet's far-reaching, nuanced adoption of a spiritual model that Bernard had helped to embed in medieval culture—a model of what Bugbee calls "conjoint" or "cooperative" agency. The human will moved by this ideal finds that patient and watchful submission to God's will mysteriously leads it to conform freely to God's providential plan; for such a will, passivity, or more accurately "receptivity," mysteriously becomes an opportunity for collaborative action with God.

Bugbee develops this idea via a structure of argument that itself mirrors the dialogue he is tracing in Chaucer's poetry between the human and the divine, moving smoothly back and forth between theory and doctrine (both medieval and modern), between concepts of will and of law, and interleaving new readings of Chaucer that grow in persuasiveness as the reader's appreciation of the ideal of shared agency deepens. Bugbee's writing is beautifully crafted on the sentence level as well as in its overall structure of argumentation. The book begins in Chapter 1 on the ground in the poetry, with a comparison of Griselda and Custance—two Chaucerian women who are often read as alike in their submissiveness—revealing Griselda's will to be forced, even mechanical, as she "continually promises for the future what she continually fails to achieve in the present" (67). Custance, in contrast, refrains from oaths in the style of Griselda, demonstrating what Bugbee calls "drift as mastery" (79). Drawing on Chaucer's small changes in his sources, Bugbee demonstrates that one character serves as a negative example of purposeless abjection while the other inspires human imitation by making herself a willing channel for the divine, establishing patience as strength.

In Chapter 2, we learn that "conjoint agency" informs a mode of reading appropriate to medieval texts as well as a style of spiritual patience. Following Hans-Georg Gadamer's typology of reading stances, which arrays Enlightenment, Romantic, and historicist methodologies against an ideal of "dialogic" reading, Bugbee suggests that a mere suspension of disbelief is insufficient for full apprehension of a work of art with spiritual aspirations. The reader must engage in a "dialogue of presuppositions" (103) within which she risks genuine persuasion and change. This might be understood as reading like Custance rather than like another unsuccessful Chaucerian interpreter discussed here: Theseus in The Knight's Tale. Constrained within a limited, pagan world, Theseus admirably opens himself to experience, but when life delivers repeated disappointment and frustration he remains unable to internalize its lesson—that, absent a Christian God, he lacks the unilateral power to halt the interruptions of chance. The reader is now in a position to see the importance of Bernard's understanding of agency, which stipulates that the human will is both active and passive in its receptiveness to the divine. Bugbee elaborates on this mystical "theory of action" (127) in Chapter 3, citing extensively from Bernard's doctrinal treatises.

In the typology that emerges, Theseus, Griselda, and Custance differ according to how perfectly they subordinate their wills to God. Partly because the first two have bound themselves to earthly masters, Custance alone engages in spiritually "conjoint agency." But what of other Chaucerian characters who clearly seek to perform God's will? What of the "holy anomaly" St. Cecilia, in The Second Nun's Tale, with her "fiercely independent agency" (157)? In Chapter 4, Bugbee acknowledges that there is nothing "cooperative" or "conjoint" about Chaucer's Cecilia. Indeed, Chaucer has manipulated both the hagiographic genre and...