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The Pardoner's Art

The Pardoner’s art in “The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale” is that of preaching in order to gain money from his hearers. The following couplet encapsulates the paradoxical nature of his art:
Thus can I preche again that same vice
Which that I use, and that is avarice.
The Pardoner’s avarice is the fundamental fault which underpins his multi-levelled duplicity. He is a figure of hypocrisy, a personification of the liar paradox. He preaches so as to move his hearers unto salvation, yet is himself damned by the immorality of his lecherous behaviour and fraudulent abuse of his ecclesial office. His deliberate, cunning play on the multiple meanings of words in order to sell pardon is borne out through permeating themes: reducing the spiritual to the material and making fertile what is sterile. In exploring the Pardoner’s art, it becomes evident that he is conscious of the irony in the content and context of his speech. It is in exercising his art that he shows himself the true salesman whose intent in life is to make the most of the present. In accord with the medieval Christian mindset, he is not ignorant of the eternal consequences of his behaviour, nor does he lack faith in eschatological reality, but he deliberately disregards it. Christianity thus constitutes for him, a mere apparatus for his trade. This renders him all the more an ominous figure of damnation and despair.

In The Introduction, just as the Host humorously mixes up medical terms in addressing the Physician, so too does the Pardoner’s mix the spiritual with the material. The Pardoner differs, however, in his deliberate choice to do so. That the Host is constantly blaspheming renders true the Pardoner’s judgment of him later in The Epilogue as the “most envoluped in sinne” (l. 654), since blasphemy, according to his cleverly crafted sermon, “is a thing abhominable” (l.343). He is asked to provide “a merye tale” (l.25). Putting on a religious veneer, his response echoes words from the Our Father:...