The Pardoner’s Art

The Pardoner’s art in “The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale” is that of preaching in order to gain money from his hearers. The following couplet encapsulates the paradoxical nature of his art:

Thus can I preche again that same vice

Which that I use, and that is avarice.

The Pardoner’s avarice is the fundamental fault which underpins his multi-levelled duplicity. He is a figure of hypocrisy, a personification of the liar paradox. He preaches so as to move his hearers unto salvation, yet is himself damned by the immorality of his lecherous behaviour and fraudulent abuse of his ecclesial office. His deliberate, cunning play on the multiple meanings of words in order to sell pardon is borne out through permeating themes: reducing the spiritual to the material and making fertile what is sterile. In exploring the Pardoner’s art, it becomes evident that he is conscious of the irony in the content and context of his speech. It is in exercising his art that he shows himself the true salesman whose intent in life is to make the most of the present. In accord with the medieval Christian mindset, he is not ignorant of the eternal consequences of his behaviour, nor does he lack faith in eschatological reality, but he deliberately disregards it. Christianity thus constitutes for him, a mere apparatus for his trade. This renders him all the more an ominous figure of damnation and despair.

In The Introduction, just as the Host humorously mixes up medical terms in addressing the Physician, so too does the Pardoner’s mix the spiritual with the material. The Pardoner differs, however, in his deliberate choice to do so. That the Host is constantly blaspheming renders true the Pardoner’s judgment of him later in The Epilogue as the “most envoluped in sinne” (l. 654), since blasphemy, according to his cleverly crafted sermon, “is a thing abhominable” (l.343). He is asked to provide “a merye tale” (l.25). Putting on a religious veneer, his response echoes words from the Our Father: “It shall be doon” (l.32). He is warned against telling a bawdy tale and asked to teach them a moral thing. He adheres to the first request by providing merriment to the listeners, yet the tale itself is not a merry one as it reflects the reality of his fraudulence and hypocrisy. The second request he also obeys, but duplicitously by preaching an exemplum yet interspersing his tale with bawdy references. At the outset the tale telling competition is a game of double meanings for him. It is a forum in which he displays his art, which ironically becomes the comic relief to for the pilgrims who are saddened by the Physician’s tale they have just heard. He reveals the perversity of his lecherous mind when he swears “by Saint Ronion” (l.32), which is a deliberate allusion to �runnion’, a sexual organ. That he is repeating the mistake earlier made by the Host among his bout of mixed up medical terminology is evidence of the Pardoner’s revelling in base pleasure. Subtly, he is already revealing himself, preparing us for the confession he is about to make in The Prologue. However, he cannot begin until he first has “both drinke and eten of a cake” (l.34) which is an obvious allusion to the species used in the celebration of the Eucharistic feast. Here the celestial aspect is reduced to satisfying his present carnal desire. Thus we see the Pardoner’s belief system completely devoid of a focus on eschatological reality. This foreshadows the approach he will take in his preaching.

The Prologue is in the form of a confession in which the Pardoner pardons himself. Yet it is not a confession to God, but to his fellow pilgrims in which he lays bare his faults. In this speech of self-justification he fails to gain divine justification through grace, reiterating the reduction of a spiritual benefit to an earthly one. His concern is more for how he is perceived by his human audience. That he speaks in rhyming couplets also reinforces this as it is a form which is pleasing aurally. “My theme is always oon, and evere was: Radix malorum est cupiditas” (ll.45-46) His theme is one within the context of the sermon since the exemplum revolves around a condemnation of avarice, yet it is not one since he first preaches against drunkenness, gluttony, and gambling. In another sense his theme is one in that he is always motivated by avarice, the root of all his evil doing. This highlights the Pardoner’s deliberate duplicity carried out by clever equivocations.

Before he expounds upon his methods, he wins first his audience’s sympathy by drawing their attention to the pains he takes to speak that he may be sufficiently heard. He struggles because as we recall from The General Prologue, his voice is high-pitched.