J. ALLAN MITCHELL
ROMANCING
ETHICS IN BOETHIUS, CHAUCER, AND LEVINAS:
FORTUNE, MORAL LUCK, AND EROTIC ADVENTURE
FORTUNE
HAS LONG BEEN TREATED as an inconsequential cliché, an ideological concealment,
or a negative theology whenever it appears in medieval literature. Rarely is it
taken seriously on its own terms to signify something genuinely fortuitous or
aleatory, even though poets and their fictional creations in courtly lyrics and
romances typically understood the figure in just this way. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus
and Criseyde (c. 1382-86) is representative. Fortune propels the narrative
forward—the story of love won and lost is roughly analogous to a revolution of
the Wheel of Fortune—and gives shape not only to the outcome of the affair but
also to its ethical and political. Moreover, the characters depend upon such
reversals of fortune. Pandarus, with his infectious optimism and fraternal
affection, effectively consoles Troilus by assuring him of the mutability of
Fortune, “That, as hire joies moten overgon,/So mote hire sorwes passen
everechon” (1.846-7). Chaucer
added such passages to the materials he found in in Boccaccio’s Filostrato,
amplifying and enriching the original Italian love story and raising the stakes
on the moral and metaphysical issues involved. Pandarus’s sentiment, present
in all kinds of medieval courtly literature, attests to love’s dependency on
Fortune, and Troilus’s sorrow does turn to joy when he consummates the affair
about half way through the romance, though his weal proves as transitory as his
initial woe. Although it is possible to take this tragic conclusion as proof
that fortune has no merits at all, why should Troilus not have hoped for a
fortuitous and durable end to his affair? Or rather, what else can a lover do
but hope for the good fortune of reciprocal affection and lasting fidelity? Love
relationships are a form of risk. That is the expert instruction provided by
Love in the Roman de la Rose, by Dame
Esperance in Machaut’s Remede de Fortune,
and by Fiammetta’s nurse in Boccaccio’s Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta. It is also an argument that medieval
love poets and preceptors routinely adapted for their own purposes from
Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy.
The phenomenon of erotic love, habitually described in the romance tradition as
an aventure (a synonym for fortune in the works of Chaucer), is presented as a
sort of volatile contingency outside the control of any individual.
Chaucer completed his English translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy at about the same time that he began
working on Troilus and Criseyde. But
while the fourteenth-century poet obviously took great interest in the
philosophical consolation provided by Boethius, questions remain about what
exactly he saw in Boethius’s treatment of fortune. Boethius of course
undertook the original theological negation of the concept (rendering Fortune
into an anamorphic image of
I will attempt to reopen this question by bringing Emmanuel Levinas’s Time
and the Other to bear on Troilus and
Criseyde, for Levinas seems keenly interested in the way something like
amatory fortune makes ethics possible, and he appeals to medieval ideas and
activities—investiture, adventure, and courtly love quest —to figure the
ethical relation, though to my knowledge his medievalism has not yet been
noticed. Relating Chaucer to Levinas—despite their different temperaments and
everything else that distinguishes the medieval poet from the modern
philosopher—thus stands both to illuminate the ethics of medieval romance and
test the medievalism of the modern theorist. Both writers—as against certain
programmatic readings of Boethius’s Consolation—appear
to elaborate the possibility of ethics as radical passivity before fortune and
future contingency: a passivity that resembles a kind of courtship, given its
demanding waiting period and uncertain end, its privileging of heteronomy over
the autonomy of the self, its disavowal of self-sufficiency, and its subjection
of self to the other. In their treatment of the fortuitous both writers also
give priority to moral integrity over autonomy and agency. The analogies of
course will only stretch so far, and in conclusion I express some reservations
about any system of ethics that mortgages its future on romantic love. But
Levinas at least helps us see that there may be reasons for wishing to restore
“fortune” to our otherwise disenchanted postmodern critical vocabulary. I
hope thereby to contribute to the recently recovered sense of the ethical role
and importance of contingency for medieval discourses of various.
Mala Fortuna
Boethian philosophy is often adduced to discredit the commonsense identity of
the good life and good fortune, and the Consolation
of Philosophy has sometimes been taken as the inflexible measure against
which deviations of character and conduct are to be judged in Troilus
and Criseyde—rather than as a source of one or more philosophical
positions with which Chaucer engaged in dialogue. But
Boethius is himself ambiguous and contradictory, deviating from one line of
argument to follow another, contradicting or redefining his terms of reference
through dialogue, and raising doubts about various conclusions he has reached in
the person of Lady Philosophy. And
in any case we should not expect the philosophical consolation to remain
unchallenged when brought into contact with the particular case of romantic love
rather than (as in the Consolation)
state persecution, however alike prison experience and love-longing were thought
to be in medieval love poetry. Comparison
between the two sorts of “fortune” brings out important differences. In an
extremely suggestive remark attributed to Lady Philosophy, Boethius writes:
“ultimus tamen vitae dies mors quaedam fortunae est etiam manentis”
(2pr3.48-50), or in the rather more pithy translation of Chaucer, “the end of
life is a maner deth to Fortune” (Boece 2pr3.87-8). The
idea of fortune’s demise is emphatically a prisoner’s—and not a
lover’s—consolation. Indeed, it is a grave and powerful philosophical axiom
in the original context of the Consolation, holding out the promise of the end of undeserved
suffering for the political prisoner. But the sentiment becomes problematic in
the context of romantic love, for as soon as one approaches the philosophical
consolation from its vantage point (mindful of what one doesn’t want to lose
rather than of what one desires to escape), the question becomes who wants it to
end? If life and fortune are coterminous, so are love and fortune, and love can
seem to make life worth living. We might conclude from any number of medieval
examples of sentimental love, then, that rumors of the death of Fortune are
greatly exaggerated. Repositioned this way, Boethius’s judgment about the end
of life reads more like a concession to the importance and indeed
indispensability of fortune—newly identified with human flourishing—than an
expression of its irrelevance or triviality.