ABSTRACT
In her analysis of Chaucer's underlying skepticism, Chaucer's House o f Fame: The Poetics o f Skeptical Fideism,l Sheila Delany draws connections between the English poet's juxtaposing contradictory truths and/or traditions and certain developments in late medieval philosophy which admitted the existence of contradictory truths, particularly between observed nature and God's revelation. The so-called skeptical fideists-specifically the thirteenth-century philosophers Boethius of Dacia2 and Siger of Brabant3 but also to a certain extent their predecessors like Abelard and successors like William of Ockham-held that what we would now term mutually exclusive beliefs could each be true,4 with the Church's officially recognized dogma taking precedence through a motion of faith. Thus Boethius and Siger could assert the ultimately Aristotelian "truth" of the eternal nature of the world5 while accepting concurrently and 1 Sheila Delany, Chaucer's House o f Fame: The Poetics o f Skeptical Fideism
privileging the Church’s insistence on God's initiatory act of creation. Delany sees in Chaucer's juxtaposing contradictory beliefs in The House o f Fame sympathy with this philosophical stance. Thus Aeneas can be seen in Chaucer's poem simultaneously through the lenses of Virgil's praise of him and Ovid's condemnation of his desertion of Dido,6 and both Orpheus and Homer can be seen in a positive and a negative light. Delany cites Chaucer's "God turne us every drem to goode"7 8(line 1, compare lines 57-8, " . . . the holy roode / Turne us every drem to goode!") as the fideistic solution to the co-existence of mutually contradictory truths.The purpose of my article is to extend this idea in two directions. First, I maintain that a skeptical fideistic approach is equally applicable to the Wakefield Master's Second Shepherds' P lay8 Second, I point out a corollary double-truth hypothesis in a body of work much closer to fourteenth-and fifteenth-century English thought than the speculations of two rather obscure thirteenth-century philosophers-the writings of the Middle English mystics most heavily influenced by the doubled-language theories of Pseudo-Dionysius.Near the beginning of The Second Shepherds' Play, after Coll the primus pastor has complained about the weather and the oppressive gentry who lord it over peasants like him and after the secundus pastor has complained about the weather and his masterful wife, Daw, the tertius pastor, shows up, complaining about the weather:
ffor ponder. (127-31) The accumulated woes of all three sheperds-the foul weather, the ills of an oppressive social order, domestic infelicity-amount to an implied philosophical conundrum, the existence of evil in a world created by a good God, the so-called problem of pain. Daw's solution is skeptically fideistic-may God turn all to good, doubtless a proverb but seemingly a quotation of Chaucer, the very phrase Delany highlights. There is no solution to the problem posed by the woes the shepherds endure, only an assertion that God will turn things to good. to Aristotle's eternal world, notably Averroes. See Marcia L. Colish, Medieval Foundations o f the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400-1400 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 147, 151,299.
