Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem Troilus and Criseyde takes readers on a journey from “wo to wele, and after out of joie,” depicting the Trojan prince Troilus’s union with and betrayal by his beloved Criseyde.1 But having illuminated the beauty, bliss, and pain of human love, Chaucer’s tale seems to abruptly and mysteriously conclude with a contemptus mundi exhortation that negates the value of all earthly desires. This apparently contradictory moral makes Chaucer’s message about human love very difficult to identify. Some critics, such as Helen Phillips, point to the length and complexity of the narrative as reasons to embrace the story and ignore the moral.2 Others, such as D. W. Robertson, believe that the contemptus mundi moral is implicitly present from the beginning and thus discard the narrative.3 Still others, such as E. Talbot Donaldson, attest to both the beauty of the earthly love depicted and its flaws in comparison to divine love, proposing that Chaucer wanted to leave readers with the tension between the two.4 I agree that the opposing story and moral are equally persuasive; however, I do not believe that Chaucer wholly abandons readers to grapple with this conflict. Instead, he takes a step toward resolving it by following these two opposing views of love with a more integrated one that affirms the goodness of human love and its ability to serve as a bridge by which man can reach the divine. This is the perspective Chaucer read in Dante’s Divine Comedy, and he creates this resolution through allusions to Dante in the final stanza. In particular, he uses the Dantean images of God as a bond circumscribing all things and Mary as mediatrix of divine grace, both of which are also echoes of Troilus’s prayer and song in Book III. The manner in which these Dante references link Book III and the end of Book V reveals how the divine dimension and potential of human love discovered by the pagan Troilus are ultimately affirmed and brought to fulfillment by Christianity.
Beginning in Book III, Chaucer frames Troilus’s understanding of love in terms of cosmic love, a medieval philosophical idea that is not only compatible with the pagan beliefs of Troilus but also with the Christianity of Chaucer’s audience. This idea is explored primarily in Canticus Troili, the hymn of praise Troilus sings after he consummates his relationship with Criseyde. Troilus initially invokes “Love,” a name he formerly used to denote Cupid, the pagan deity, but now uses to describe a cosmic force that governs the universe.5 He describes “Love” as a great bond that encircles the globe like a “bridel”6 and holds all of nature together: “That elementz that ben so discordable / Holden a bond perpetuely durynge.”7 Troilus further credits “Love” with exerting this same binding power on humanity. Love “knetteth lawe of compaignie,”8 and “with an holsom alliaunce / Halt peples joined.”9 This new characterization of “Love” not as a deity but as a cosmic, beneficial force suggests Troilus’s shift away from his distinctively pagan understanding. This shift becomes much more apparent in the song’s final stanza, which Troilus begins with a surprising invocation: “So wolde God, that auctour is of kynde / That with his bond Love of his virtue liste / To cerclen hertes alle and faste bynde.”10 Troilus’s description of God as “auctour” of all things suggests a remarkably monotheistic perspective.11 It is unclear whether “[God’s] bond Love” refers to love as an abstract power of God or as a deity acting as an agent of God, but both meanings indicate that love itself now has a divine quality because it is the primary instrument of an all-powerful God.12 Ultimately, Canticus Troili reveals that Troilus’s understanding of love has moved beyond an exclusively pagan perspective and taken a step toward Christianity: he recognizes that the love he shares with Criseyde participates in the divine love that unifies the universe.
Troilus’s increasingly Christian understanding of love becomes even clearer when Canticus Troili is compared to its source, a poem near the end of Book II of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Chaucer preserved much of the original metrum but made two crucial changes. The most apparent of these was his addition of the final stanza, which has no equivalent in the Consolation. With this new stanza, Canticus Troili concludes with a prayer invoking a Christian-sounding God and characterizing love as a divine bond, both significant changes from Boethius’s purely philosophical poem. The deliberate addition of this religious context reveals Chaucer’s intent to portray Troilus’s movement toward a Christian understanding of love. Chaucer’s second major change further accomplishes this purpose when Troilus affirms and emphasizes human participation in divine, cosmic love. While Boethius only briefly mentions human love, Troilus makes it the focus of his first stanza and then concludes by expressing hope that even human “hertes colde” might be incorporated into love’s bond.13 Notably, Troilus’s final assertion of confidence that humans may participate in divine love replaces a Boethian conclusion of near-opposing sentiment: “O! weleful were mankinde, yif thilke Love that governeth hevene governed youre corages!”14 Chaucer scholar Barry Windeatt also emphasizes the importance of this final alteration: “In that Chaucer absorbs almost every detail of the Boethian poem, it is all the more striking that the song avoids Philosophy’s climactic final lament that such an informing, cosmic sense of love does not govern the human heart, presumably because in Troilus’s view it does.”15 Ultimately, the way in which Chaucer employs and alters his Boethian source gives further evidence of Troilus’s apprehension that his love of Criseyde participates in the sacred bond of an all-powerful God.
The image of love as a bond is echoed in the final stanza of Troilus and Criseyde, a passage that affirms Troilus’s earlier insight and fulfills it in explicitly Christian terms. In his concluding prayer to the Trinity, the narrator describes the Triune God as “Uncircumscript, and al maist circumscrive.”16 While the word “circumscrive” was never used by Troilus,17 this image of encirclement still has a close parallel in Canticus Troili when Troilus prays that God’s binding love would “cerclen hertes alle.”18 Just as Troilus uses the image of an all-circumscribing bond to describe cosmic love, so the narrator now uses the same image to describe God; thus, Chaucer finally reveals that God himself is the love that binds the universe. In part, this Christian revelation that God is an all-unifying love confirms Troilus’s intuition that love is a divine bond and that therefore all acts of love have a sacred quality. In so doing, Chaucer demonstrates that Christianity affirms the jubilant celebration of human love presented through Troilus and Criseyde’s union in Book III, in which “An intensely human and immediate joy [was] perceived within…the characters’ discussion of a love comprehended as the supreme principle and order of [the] universe.”19 Troilus’s pagan intuitions are not only affirmed, but also fulfilled in light of Divine Revelation. Chaucer reveals that Christianity elevates human love even beyond Troilus’s imaginings. If God is the love that binds all things—including humanity—then the love between humans is a partaking in divine love and in the life of God himself. By creating this link between the cosmic visions of love in Book III and Book V, Chaucer ultimately justifies the joy of human love and shows that this love not only allows man to share in a divine “principle and order,” but in the life of the divine person himself.20
Chaucer’s use of circumscribing imagery to describe divine, cosmic love bears a close resemblance to imagery found in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Chaucer’s narrator finally identifies cosmic love with God himself, and Dante similarly depicts God as the love that binds all things. When gazing upon the Trinity, Dante describes: “I saw contained, / by love into a single volume bound…substances, accidents, and the interplay between them.”21 Dante uses similar imagery again when he describes the Trinity as three interconnected circles of light. However, in this image, Dante overtly emphasizes human incorporation into the all-encompassing Love that is God, stating that this triad of circles seemed “within itself and in its very color / to be painted with [man’s] likeness.”22 Chaucer’s imagery suggests a similar understanding of human participation in God’s all-encompassing love. Furthermore, Chaucer specifically affirms the divine element in embodied human love through the poem’s final and most direct Dante allusion. The first three lines of the concluding prayer to the Trinity who “al maist circumscrive” is a translation of a hymn of praise sung by sanctified souls in Paradiso 14.23 Immediately afterward, however, these souls describe how they will be able to love God and participate in his love even more fully when they receive their resurrected bodies. When they are again embodied, the souls’ light, which “answers to their ardor… shall increase, / the light that makes [them] fit to see Him.”24 By placing this revelation in the context of the preceding prayer to an all-encompassing God, Dante implies that humanity not only participates in divine love, but that human love as it is physically expressed does so in a particularly important way. Even if Chaucer’s readers had no knowledge of the Divine Comedy, the presence of these allusions that link Book III and V demonstrates Chaucer’s desire to echo this Dantean belief in the spiritual worth of embodied human love.
Following the circumscribing imagery that revealed human love’s capacity to participate in the divine, the final stanza of Chaucer’s poem further ennobles human love by depicting its potential to lead lovers toward ever-fuller participation in and eventual union with God in paradise. It does so through reference to the Blessed Virgin Mary, who, as mediatrix of divine grace, sets the ultimate example of human love’s capacity to aid others in achieving salvation. The gracious love that makes Mary an ideal intercessor also makes her an ideal courtly lady; thus, in medieval times Mary was often described in the language of courtly love. Dante’s Divine Comedy participated in this tradition. In the highest sphere of heaven, Mary steps into the role of Beatrice— Dante’s former beloved—and is similarly addressed in courtly love language. Accordingly, she is extravagantly praised for her goodness: “In you clemency, in you compassion, / in you munificence, in you are joined / all virtues found in any creature.”25 Further, as with many courtly ladies, she is begged for grace and told that she is the petitioner’s only hope of salvation: “Lady…should he who longs for grace not turn to you / his longing would be doomed to wingless flight.”26 Mary does indeed grant grace out of love for Dante, which enables him to finish his ascent and finally gaze upon God. Through the example of Beatrice and the comparison of Mary to a courtly lady, Dante ultimately implies that human love—albeit that which is never sexually consummated—has value because it can be a bridge to God. Chaucer both draws on this precedent and expands it, suggesting that even erotic love has similar spiritual potential.
Dante’s use of courtly love language in his prayer to Mary enables Chaucer to readily adapt this passage to Troilus’s experience of loving Criseyde. This allusion, which takes place at the joyous pinnacle of their love in Book III, enables Chaucer to frame Criseyde as a Marian figure who acts as Troilus’s path to God. While as a pagan, Troilus could not attain the Beatific Vision, his love for Criseyde instead enables him to reach God via spiritual insight, as scholar Richard Neuse explains: “Troilus’s intensely personal feeling for Criseyde becomes… Dante-fashion, the basis for a powerful moral and philosophical vision.”27 This vision, which takes place during the consummation scene, includes an early intuition of the divine nature of love that he will later describe in Canticus Troili. He proclaims, “Benigne Love, thow holy bond of thynges.”28 Troilus’s ecstatic recognition that he participates in such a divine bond is accompanied by his realization that this sacred love is a profound gift of which he is utterly unworthy. This new understanding of love as “benigne”—a word connoting spiritual graciousness—is at the heart of Troilus’s other spiritual insight: charity.29 Troilus’s prayer began with the exclamation: “O Love, O Charite!,” a surprising invocation because “charite” is a uniquely Christian form of love.30 It is the love of God for mankind and is thus comparable to grace—divine gifts given even to the undeserving. Although he is a pa- gan, Troilus has in fact attained understanding of this form of love, as shown when he frames his address to this “Love” in the Christian language of grace: “Yet were al lost that dar I wel seyn, certes / But if thi grace passed oure desertes.”31 While Troilus, lacking Divine Revelation, could not completely identify charity with God, he has still discovered the love that is the essence of God. Chaucer scholar Winthrop Wetherbee highlights the magnitude of this insight, explaining: “In the process [of loving Criseyde], [Troilus] rises to that awareness which Chaucer must surely have felt to be the highest spiritual attainment of pagan thought, the discernment in the harmony of the universe of the operation of a love that manifests the beneficence of the Holy Spirit.”32 Some critics argue that the origin of this spiritual insight in erotic love is inherently problematic, leading Troilus to ultimately locate his greatest good in Criseyde, rather than in spiritual realities. However, through the allusion to Dante’s Marian prayer, Chaucer clearly places Criseyde in the role of Mary and compares the lovers’ union to Dante’s ascent to God. Thus, it is apparent that Criseyde is not Troilus’s greatest good but is similarly the path by which he, like Dante, progresses toward his ultimate end. Even more fundamentally, Troilus’s long-awaited union with his beloved—which forms the dramatic center of the poem—does not culminate in a song of praise to Criseyde, but with his prayer about Christian charity. Wetherbee similarly emphasizes the primacy of Troilus’s spiritual enlightenment within the narrative: “Innocence, self-abasement, and awe collaborate with a genuine Boethian intuition of the integrative power of love, and for a moment, in the stanza that marks the exact center of the poem, [Troilus’s] desire seems to have attained a spiritual fulfillment, a ‘place’ commensurate with his vision of grace.”33 As Wetherbee observes, Troilus’s fulfillment is not merely sexual, it is more profoundly and significantly a “spiritual fulfillment.”34 The experience of giving himself in sexual love to Criseyde not only leads him to realize that they participate in a divine, cosmic love, but it also enables him to glimpse the nature of the highest love—charity—as well. While as a pagan, the limitations of his insights render Troilus’s spiritual fulfillment incomplete, his mere capacity to reach them enables Chaucer to reveal the spiritual potential of even erotic love.
Chaucer ultimately affirms this potential by reintroducing the image of Mary in the poem’s final stanza. She is reintroduced specifically in her role as mediatrix of divine grace—she is the “mayde and moder” of Jesus to whom the narrator asks for intercession on behalf of himself and his readers.35 Chaucer not only represents this image of salvation achieved through the love of a woman, but he does so now in the overtly Christian and profoundly reverent context of the narrator’s prayer to the Trinity. Further, he repeats the language of spiritual growth used during the lovers’ consummation scene—love experienced through both Mary and Criseyde is “benigne,” suggesting bestowal of grace.36 Through the language of grace and Marian references that create a parallel between Book III and the final stanza, Chaucer concludes by implying that human love—including erotic love—has the potential to allow others to understand and experience divine, charitable love. Furthermore, repetition of this idea within a prayer for the reader’s salvation enables Chaucer to expand this claim and reveal that erotic love can do more than simply enable intellectual understanding or partial experience of divine love. Chaucer reminds Christian readers that they ought to celebrate the potential of human love even more than Troilus did, for such love can aid them in progressing toward perfect union with divine Love in Paradise.
If Chaucer wanted to conclude Troilus and Criseyde with a Dantean affirmation of human love, readers might question why he even included the contemptus mundi exhortation. However, this rebuke enables Chaucer to present the two predominant medieval views of love: through the narrative, he presents the courtly love tradition’s celebration of sexuality, and through the contemptus mundi passage, he presents the renunciation of pleasures often associated with Christianity. Through this comparison, readers can see the partial truth found in each perspective. Troilus and Criseyde captures the beauty of human love, while the contemptus mundi exhortation reminds readers of the fragility of earthly love in comparison to the love of God. By demonstrating the simultaneous worth and inadequacy of human love, Chaucer ultimately reveals that human love is a good ordered under divine love. This conclusion encompasses the partial truths of each perspective and yet transcends them both. As Chaucer scholar Barry Windeatt summarizes: “The ending of Troilus maintains the wisest and most generous view of human love, including more than excluding.”37 Furthermore, it is important to recognize that the only true contemptus mundi rebuke—that which unequivocally rejects all earthly things—comes in the words of the pagan Troilus after his death. Once the Christian narrator takes over in the remaining final stanzas, the contemptus mundi statements become increasingly ambivalent, and are intertwined with Christian references that actually acknowledge the value of earthy things. For example, the mention of man’s creation in the divine image affirms humanity’s intrinsic goodness. In addition, while the narrator references occasions of corrupted human love, he does so in the wider context of man’s redemption through Christ: “And loveth hym the which that right for love / Upon a crois, oure soules for to beye, / First starf and roos, and sit in hevene above.”38 Christ’s salvific act acknowledges man’s fallen state, but it simultaneously affirms that Christ loved humanity despite man’s sinfulness, himself took flesh, and through his death enabled man to participate again in his divine love. These subtle affirmations of the worth of humanity and human love pave the way for the final stanza, in which Chaucer demonstrates that human love not only participates in the divine but can draw mankind into full union with the Trinity.
Ultimately, to view Troilus and Criseyde as a sole celebration or renunciation of human love not only renders one part of the story incomprehensible, but it leaves readers who have seen both the joy and brokenness of human love deeply dissatisfied. Only the introduction of Christianity can achieve the reconciliation of divine and human love, as Dante’s Divine Comedy partially demonstrated by revealing the spiritual worth of some kinds of human love. Chaucer goes further, using the imagery of this great Christian poet to first suggest the worth of human sexual love in Book III and then affirm this worth in the overtly Christian context of Book V. Chaucer’s conclusion finally points readers toward their highest good by giving them a Dantean glimpse of the Triune God, but Chaucer simultaneously affirms that mankind need not leave human love behind to reach this divine vision. As scholar Donald Rowe notes, “When the narrator prays to [God] in the final stanza, his prayer, paradoxically, returns us to the world…It ends not with God, but with Mary, that human in whom all human goodness is united.”39 Chaucer’s poem thus concludes by directing readers toward human love as a means by which they may obtain eternal union with the God who is Love itself.
