Note 412 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

To infer real devotion on his part from his sympathetic account of the good parson, or from the dubious Retractation appended to the Tales, is as unwarrantable as is the notion, dating from the Reformation period, that he was a Wicliffite.412 Even if the Retractation be of his writing, under pressure in old age, it points to a previous indifferentism; and from the great mass of his work there can be drawn only the inference that he is essentially non-religious in temper and habit of mind. But he is no disputant, no propagandist, whether on ecclesiastical or on intellectual grounds; and after his day there is social retrogression and literary relapse in England for two centuries. That there was some practical rationalism in his day, however, we gather from the Vision of Piers Ploughman, by the contemporary poet Langland (fl. 1360–90), where there is a vivid account of the habit among anti-clerical laymen of arguing against the doctrine of original sin and the entailment of Adam’s offence on the whole human race.413 To this way of thinking Chaucer probably gave a stimulus by his translation of the De Consolatione Philosophiae of Boethius, where is cited the “not unskilful” dilemma: “If God is, whence come wicked things? And if God is not, whence come good things?”414 The stress of the problem is hard upon theism; and to ponder it was to resent the doctrine of inherited guilt. The Church had, in fact, visibly turned this dogma to its own ends, insisting on the universal need of ghostly help even as it repelled the doctrine of unalterable predestination. In both cases, of course, the matter was settled by Scripture and authority; and Langland’s reply to the heretics is mere angry dogmatism.