Shayne White Chaucer and the Seven Deadly Sins In the catholic religion the seven deadly sins: envy, pride, lust, anger, sloth, greed, and gluttony are themes that Catholics should stay away from and not abide to. In the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer the tales expose a common, universal truth which is the seven deadly sins. In the Tales the characters in the stories struggle with the temptation of not obeying the sins which incorporates and suggest why the pilgrims telling the stories are in fact on the pilgrimage.
The pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales are on a pilgrimage to Canterbury to seek spiritual renewal for the sin or sins that they have committed. In the prologue of the Tales it writes, “People long to go on pilgrimages/. . . Down to Canterbury they wend/ To seek the holy blissful martyr quick/ To give his help to them when they were sick” (1 Chaucer). The description in the quote explains that the pilgrims feel “sick” in spiritual terms and need to be renewed from the past committed sins.
Also, in the essay, Sketches of the Characters in The Canterbury Tales, written by Marchette Chite she says, “The [pilgrims] have walked out of England into immortality because they were born of a universal rather than a contemporary truth”. The quote explains that the pilgrims have gone to Canterbury because they have gotten away from a “contemporary truth” which is believed to be the seven deadly sins. Pilgrims, then have to resort to a religious quest or pilgrimage to seek out spiritual renewal to the fullest extent.
The actions of the characters in the tales suggest that the characters struggle with the temptations of the seven deadly sins just as the pilgrims have. There are many occasions in the Canterbury Tales that tell of characters committing the sins. In the Knight’s Tale it writes, “Now as he spoke, Arcite chanced to see/ This lady as she roamed there to and fro, / and at the sight, her beauty hurt him so/ That if his cousin had felt the wound before” (Chaucer 33). In the context Arcite lusts over the beauty of Emily and without purposefully try to; he commits the sin of lust.
Also, in the Knight’s Tale Theseus fills with anger towards King Creon as he slays the husbands of the women he sees while walking around the outskirts of town and he plans that, “So far as it should lie within his might, /He would take vengeance on his tyrant King/ This Creon, till the land of Greece should ring/ With how he had encountered him and served/ The monster with the death he had deserved” (Chaucer 29). Here Theseus commits the sin of anger and plans to take vengeance against Creon by killing him.
Chaucer portrays that the characters in the stories commit the sins involuntarily and do it out of high emotions. In The Mercantile Ideology in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale written by Helen Fulton she explains the ideology of the merchant by incorporating the work and how the merchants conduct their business. She writes that, “The wealthier merchants developed a unifying ideology based on the trade and the financial practices of his occupation. She also mentions that, “other critics, working within on older ideology of business ethics, condemn the merchant for practicing ‘bad business’” (Fulton 311).
Fulton then goes on to say that, “Janette Richardson [the other critic] reads the tale as a straight opposition between spiritual goodness and the evils of materialism”. And that the merchant, “has blindly accepted a worldly standard of values in place of spiritual truth; and… he is therefore doomed” (Fulton 313). Richardson explains that the merchant’s ideology is influenced by the “evils of materialism” and that the merchant has blindly accepted values of materialism and money in place of spiritual truth and is doomed for doing so.
Chaucer uses the universal truth of the seven deadly sins to incorporate the context of a pilgrimage for spiritual renewal. The actions of the characters in the Canterbury Tales tie into the reason of the pilgrimage as the pilgrimage is a result of doing the things and committing the sins that the characters did in the Tales. Chaucer shows that although we all have and will continue to commit sins spiritual renewal for those bad actions can and will be achieved in a pilgrimage.
