If a man is clever and perceptive -- if he is not prone to self-delusion, if he has keen insight into himself, into others and into human nature -- then that man will have an ability to manipulate and exploit others -- that is, a consequent temptation to be villainous – that dimmer bulbs will lack. In blunt terms: knowledge is power, and power corrupts. The converse is also true: if a man is willing to commit himself to villainy, he will be more likely to discover, through exploiting them, the weaknesses, depravities and delusions with which men blind them.
The Pardoner himself is wickedly intelligent. He is a masterful rhetorician, story-teller, con-artist and student of human nature. His keen insight into human depravity is what makes him such a brilliant con. He plays on the most deep-seated insecurities of his flock when he describes the magical powers of his relics. They will cure sick livestock (livestock being the most valuable possession of the average listener, not to mention shepherds); they will prosper crops (for all the farmers in the audience). That covers the men! To the women, he offers the fantastic promise that his relics will cure their husbands of their jealousy and suspicion. This is doubly clever, in light of the Wife of Bath’s tale, because it picks up on her ideal of women empowered to cheat on doting, trusting, forgiving husbands.
‘Let maken with this water his potage,
And never shal he more his wyf mistriste,
Though he the sooth of hir defaute wiste;
Al had she taken preestes two or three.’
It’s trebly clever, actually, because the last line can be read both as sexual solicitations to the women in his flock, as well as an insult to the three priests present on the pilgrimage.
His next con is even more wickedly clever; he demonstrates how he subtly manipulates
his flock into coming forward and making offerings to his relics in order to avoid suspicion that they have committed some horrible sin.
‘If any wight be in this chirche now,
That hath doon sinne horrible, that he
Dar nat, for shame, of it y-shirven be,
Or any womman, be she yong or old,
That hath y-maad hir housbond cokewold,
Swich folk shul have no power ne no grace
To offren to my reliks in this place.’
You can just imagine all the husbands, hearing this, looking suspiciously at their wives. What wife wouldn’t go forward and make an offering? The secret behind the most insidious and successful advertising that our modern-day consumer culture has to offer is one that the Pardoner knows well: play on the audience’s insecurity. The Pardoner’s skill in this -- his villainy -- is the product of his thorough understanding of the occluded desires and fears that drive so much of human action. His villainous theatrics and his unflinching self-representation are merely different aspects of the same penetrating, cynical vision.
But does the Pardoner actually manipulate us, or the pilgrims, to the same degree that he
manipulates his flock? How far does his self-awareness extend? Does Chaucer not ironize him? Can we not “get the goods” on him? The answer, if there is one, lies where it usually does in the Canterbury Tales: in the relationship between the teller and his tale.
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to arrive at a conclusive answer. We know this much: that
Chaucer’s habit in the Tales is to use the tale to ironize (not a word! But you know what I mean) the teller, calling their self-awareness into question. We know also that the Pardoner understands the radix maxim primarily as a joke, a ploy, and a weakness in others to exploit: “The root of evil is love of earthy things, so don’t hesitate to give yours to me.” We know that the Pardoner never preaches but for compensation; we can assume that the tale he tells is a standard script from his fundraising repertoire. The objective of his sermons is to make his audience believe that they will die for their cupidity; does he believe that the moral of his tale applies to him in the same way that it applies to the three young rioters? The Pardoner may or may not believe it. If he does, he clearly doesn’t care: after his tale is over, he proceeds to the height of audacious mockery -- of himself and of the pilgrims -- by hocking his relics to the pilgrims to whom he has just revealed the entire cynical fraud.
But does Chaucer believe that the moral of the tale applies to the Pardoner? He must. As
critical as he was of ecclesiastical abuse, Chaucer was, nevertheless, Christian. As impressive and complex as it is, even the Pardoner’s self-awareness has its limits. If the relationship between the teller and his tale is consistent with the other tellers and their tales, we can assume that Chaucer is suggesting that the Pardoner quite definitely has a blind spot: the wages of his sin will be his own death, and his lack of contrition indicates that he does not perceive this.
