ABSTRACT
Celestial love is permanent: celestial love is the truth. In the beginning, the audience is told to “Flee fro the prees, and dwelle with sothfastnesse”, or truth. In addition to being a moral virtue, truth for Geoffrey Chaucer takes on J. A. Burrow’s second sense: “true religious belief or doctrine; orthodoxy”. In addition to truth as moral virtue and as religious faith, there was another meaning for the term truth in Chaucer’s time which Burrow does not mention: “that which is true, real, or actual. The first stanza of Truth concludes with the admonition to the reader to desire no more than is good for him, and to “Ruele wel thyself that other folk canst rede”. In some ways, Truth belongs in that tradition, for the Chaucerian speaker does advise his readers to hold this world as a lesser good, and to seek instead the true and eternal love of God.
