The Friar’s Tale and Divine Justice: The Reality and the Fiction of Righteous Anger

《化緣修士的故事》與神的正義：正當憤怒的真相與虛構

化緣修士的故事是架構在坎特貝里朝聖及朝聖者同伴關係的背景上，其故事及結果為我們提供了一個模式，即：在喬叟敘事中，地獄與天神憤怒的邏輯，在人世中是如何發揮作用—或甚至在大體上如何失去了作用。對於喬叟來說，在區分究竟是為神的正義還是為復仇私利而行事的這件議題上，要比對但丁來的更加棘手。我認為喬叟在化緣修士的故事中重探此一議題，並在此巧妙地評論但丁於《地獄》一書中對憤怒的處理。為了挑戰湯馬斯正義之怒的觀念，並且展現人類（例如化緣修士及但丁）的激情盛怒是如何與其理性憤怒和神的正義等二者抽象理念糾結，喬叟刻意模糊了人類實現願望，神的正義，及理想忍耐等三種敘事形式之間的界線。這提醒了我們，喬叟之所以對於地獄、正義、及神怒等敘事方式所衍生之問題產生興趣，並非全在於他對敘述結構學、詩學、或神學之間所產生的某種抽象理論而感到興趣，而是由於喬叟對於憤怒，在道德層面上，對個人和社會的關係所產生的影響有興趣。喬叟的矛盾，突顯了蘊含於中世紀晚期哲學與神學中，令人又愛又恨的人類憤怒特質所引發的焦慮。而這樣矛盾的特質，更成為文藝復興初期作家的一個主要研究課題，也使喬叟作品成為聯繫文藝復興以及中世紀晚期文學風格的橋樑。

Set within the context of the Canterbury pilgrimage and the pilgrim fellowship, the Friar’s tale and its aftermath provide us with a model of how, in Chaucer’s narratives, the logic of hell and divine anger work—or largely fail to work—when applied in the human world. More so than for Dante, identifying the line between serving divine justice and serving vengeful self-interest is problematic for Chaucer. This is a problem that, I argue, we find Chaucer revisiting in the Friar’s tale. Subtly commenting on Dante’s treatment of anger in the Inferno, Chaucer intentionally blurs the line between narratives of human wish-fulfillment, narratives of divine justice, and narratives of ideal patience in order to challenge the Thomist concept of just anger and expose the way in which the human passions of individuals like the Friar (and Dante) become entangled in their narratives of abstract ideals such as rational anger and divine justice. We are reminded that Chaucer’s interest in the problems generated by narratives of hell, justice, and divine anger stems not solely from some abstract interest in narratology or poetics or theology, but from an ethical interest in the impact anger has on the individual and on social relations. Chaucer’s ambivalence underscores for us the anxiety in late medieval philosophy and theology raised by that quality of human anger which made it at once attractive and repulsive, and which would make it a principle subject for the writers of the emerging Renaissance: an age to which Chaucer’s writings serve as a bridge from the late medieval world.