Love and Reason in Gower's "Confessio Amantis."
- Author/Editor
- Yoshida, Shingo.
- Title
- Love and Reason in Gower's "Confessio Amantis."
- Published
- Yoshida, Shingo. "Love and Reason in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Eibungaku kenkyu Studies in English Literature [Japan] 42 (1965): 1-11.
- Review
- In Japanese, with the author's summary in English: "Gower is thoroughly 'moral Gower' as Chaucer calls him, as is demonstrated evidently by his views of the world, the society, and man in the M'irour de l'Omme,' the 'Vox Clamantis,' and the 'Confessio Amantis.' In the 'Confessio Amantis' his subject is love, but he does not treat it in itself as Chaucer does, but in indivisible relationship to the Seven Deadly Sins in the Christian ethics, with his immovable faith in the human duty of avoiding vices and following virtues as his premise. So far as the love of the Lover, the hero of the 'Confessio Amantis,' is concerned, Gower is a courtly love poet following the tradition of Guillaume de Lorris, the author of the former part of the 'Roman de la Rose.' The Lover is endued with all the possible conventions of courtly love. And yet Gower does not end with being a courtly love poet. He grasps the problem of love as the conflict between 'will,' 'hope,' or 'nature' (or 'Kinde') and 'resoun,' 'wit,' or 'wisdom,' that is, as the 'hertes contek,' the psychomachia, of passion vs. reason, and regards love as the usurpation of supremacy from reason by passion. In looking upon love as natural, and exhorting us to the subordination of passion to reason, he belongs to the pedigree of the naturalistic interpretation of love by Jean de Meun, the author of the latter part of the 'Roman de la Rose.' Gower's conclusion in the epilogue of the 'Confessio Amantis' is the renunciation of love--an insight into the death of love due to age and time, an elegy of the mutability of life--and at the same time the recovery of reason. In being the abandonment of passionate love and a conversion to divine love, it is in the tradition of medieval Catholicism. Gower thinks of love as the antagonism of passion against reason, insists on the subordination of passion to reason, and finally renounces love. It means that he follows the medieval orthodox of Christian humanism, and that his "reason" is that of Christian humanism, as is the case with Milton, the earnest believer in "rational liberty." Christian humanism is the fusion of faith and reason, regarding reason--originally classical and pagan, and later Christianized--as the divine nature in a human being, the quintessence of human nature, and calling it 'right reason,' 'recta ratio' as the intellectual and par excellence moral function, the principle of right thinking and right doing. It should be added that Gower believes in the traditional view of the cosmos as the scene of a divine order, the so-called 'chain of being,' which is at the bottom of Christian humanism. From the point of view of the opposition of passion to reason centering along the medieval tradition of love continuing from the courtly love of the later Middle Ages to the romantic love of the Renaissance, Chaucer is 'truly human,' a humanist in its modern sense, in that he is a poet of both courtly love and realistic love, depicting human passion as it is, and never preaching the subordination of passion to reason, while Gower offers resistance to that tradition, believing in reason and renouncing the passion of love." [John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.]
- Date
- 1965
- Gower Subjects
- Backgrounds and General Criticism
Confessio Amantis