One may wonder who would willingly read, let alone in its Middle English, the final entry in the Canterbury Tales, that of the Parson, which is not a tale at all but a sermon. Its subject is penance, the why and how of it. It is relentlessly instructive, its taxonomies exhaustive. Moreover, in it there is nothing as gripping as what is contained in Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” or even close. For many the reading of it is itself penitential. It is catechetical, to be sure, but also deliberately dry, notwithstanding (or because of?) its superabundance of quotations from scholar-saints and the Bible. And it is long, in fact the longest of all the tales. Still, to the one who asks, “Who among us would willingly read it?” another might answer, “Who among us does not need to?”

It requires a full immersion by the reader for the best of reasons: something of utmost value is at stake, namely the fate of one’s immortal soul. Its concern is with one’s ability to fulfill his innate desire to love a loving God, to let Him know it, and to be worthy of His unconditional love. None of that, the Parson makes clear, need be dressed up with rhetorical colors of any kind. Citing Paul’s admonition to Timothy, he wonders why he should “sow chaf out of my fist” when he can, “at Cristes reverence/ Do you plesance levelful as I can.” He “wol nat glose,” he promises, meaning he will not speak merely to delight. Rather, he will map a road for the pilgrimage to the place that matters most, “That highte Jerusalem celestial.” It is compellingly direct.

Furthermore, here, unlike in the tales of the scoundrel-clerics the Pardoner, the Monk, and the Prioress, in the Parson’s tale there is no irony. On the contrary, the reader arriving at the Parson’s sermon-tale should be mindful of the fact that the Parson is the only pilgrim for whom the narrator has unqualified respect, even admiration: “But riche he was of holy thought and work. . . . Cristes gospel trewely wolde he teche./ Begnine he was, and wonder diligent,/ And in adversitee ful pacient.” In short, Chaucer’s Parson is no joke. Both Chaucer and the Parson mean what the Parson says.

Neither the character nor the tale arose from a vacuum. Chaucerians tell us that the pilgrims are not characters but types, and yet, though each has an antecedent and is a member of a socially defined group, none of Chaucer’s characters is merely that antecedent. Each is rather the worst, or the quirkiest, or the most interesting, or the dullest, or the most extravagant, or the most fraudulent version of that type—or, as in the case of the Parson, the best of a kind. Source-hunting for the origin of the Parson and his sermon is not my purpose, especially since the sources are many and mixed. Chaucer certainly had two Latin models for the sermon at hand, and there are interpolations from other sources as well (especially on the Seven Deadly Sins). Yet Chaucer makes this parson’s sermon whole and decisive, perhaps because he had ample precedents in Middle English.

For example, exactly contemporaneous with Chaucer’s Tales are several of the fifty-five sermons collected in Woodburn O. Ross’s Middle English Sermons (1940). These sermons are designed for specific days or feasts in the Christian calendar and, more importantly, are written in the “new style,” which unlike the older, formless, emotional style, lent itself to intellectual discussion—a fine fit for our Parson.

In these preachings (as in Chaucer), authorities both clerical (St. Bonaventure) and lay (Boethius, Cicero) are cited alongside biblical passages. Their declaimers are obsessed with sorting sins, virtues, and actions into categories and several levels of subcategories and sub-subcategories. Often, blame for sin is placed not only on individuals but also on social groups (especially corrupt churchmen) and society in general. The sufferings of Christ are identified within the context of contemporaneous social dynamics and those who typify these dynamics. The notion that Chaucer had such sermons in mind is almost impossible to resist.

Above all, the need for repentance is often the focus. For example, one reads, “But trust ye well that thou God suffer you to have your will here in this world, that he will not punish you therefore in another?” And lest at any point you think you are safely “shryven,” do not let down your guard, “But beware, the Devil will let a man be absolved and afterward will tempt a man to break his penance.” A guard against such recidivism, by the way, can be the Virgin Mary: “Our Ladie was all-way desirous to holiness. She is full gracious and full of compassion to all Cristen pepull.”

In short, these sermons, some of which Chaucer must have been aware of, possess much learning, much cogency, and, unsurprisingly, much dogma, but never insincerity. And yet though conventional, our Parson’s sermon-tale is somehow different: it is impossible to misunderstand, and therefore its universality is impossible to miss. Because of its intellectual rather than emotional appeal, it lasts. After all, emotions come and go, and, as C. S. Lewis said, “mostly they go.” It is thus handy, as a handbook is handy. Nothing in the Ross collection is comparable.

The Parson begins his sermon with Jeremiah, reminding us that there are many ways to the Celestial City but only one best way: penitence. It requires our whole heart but also knowledge; we must know what penitence is, why it is so called, its ways and kinds, and the good as well as the harmful manners of it. He adduces St. Ambrose, St. Isidore, St. Gregory, and St. Augustine, showing us that authentic rejection of sin can be extravagant or calm, public or private. But none of this will matter without the heart’s contrition, the mouth’s confession, and penance.

Reference is made as well to St. John Chrysostom, the Parson explaining not only the roots and branches of grace, but its seed too—in other words, the roots and branches and seeds of the Tree of Life. From there the Parson takes us through the six motivations for contrition: shame (for one’s sin), anguish (where the Parson cites Seneca), fear of judgment (remember, in Hell we have no friends), the good (that can be done once one is shriven), remembrance (of Our Lord’s crucifixion), and hope (for forgiveness, grace, and the glory of heaven).

After the heart’s contrition comes the mouth’s confession. Here the Parson discusses venial sin, including an inventory worthy of any novelist (which, in a fashion, Chaucer was). He describes fifteen, from eating and drinking more than necessary, to not visiting the sick, promising beyond one’s power to deliver on a promise, and loving more than is reasonable. And then come the Seven Deadly Sins and their antidotes. He pays as much attention to envy as to lechery. In fact, when discussing envy, he spends many words on “backbiting,” listing five forms of it before moving on to “grumbling and irritability.”

We then learn that lechery too has five doors: the glance, the touch, language, kissing, and lechery qua lechery (the heart, mind, and imagination all lusting for the object), the antidote being marriage and reverence for one’s wife (and presumably a wife’s for her husband). As for contrition proper, there are four “disturbances”: fear, shame, desperation, and optimism(!). Here as elsewhere the devil is given his due: we must know he is at work, always and everywhere.

The Parson provides swift transitions between all these moving parts, and the prose advances quickly. He normally uses the second person, but not always. Here is a harrowing, but straight-faced, passage in the original Middle English. It is one of the few passages in which Chaucer uses the figure of accumulation in a perfectly framed periodic sentence (that is, the piling on of clauses leading up to a wallop at the very end):

No touchy, no feely, and no prisoners taken for this Parson, or for his poet.

In light of all this, the following idea is appealing: the whole of the Tales is an examination of sin “on the hoof,” so to speak, with the Parson’s sermon-tale being an expository summing up. That idea was first adumbrated by Frederick Tupper in his Chaucer and the Seven Deadly Sins (1914). Attempting a slow, steady reading of the Tales in this light makes the theory seem not only plausible, but compelling, and “reading backwards” from the sermon makes the whole come together with utter coherence, even though so many tales were left unfinished, perhaps deliberately.

Chaucer’s final dispatch at the conclusion of his book is certainly deliberate. Immediately following the Parson’s sermon, Chaucer writes, “Heere taketh the makere of this book his leve” (reminiscent of Prospero’s leave-taking and book drowning at the end of The Tempest). It is nothing less than the sort of act of contrition preached by his Parson. In fact, this finale is often labeled a “retraction.” To be sure, there is in Chaucer always some sniff of irony, and that in the service of covering the poet’s derriere, but this leave-taking is too thorough and too consonant with the Parson’s instruction not to be substantially sincere.

Thank Jesus, he instructs any reader who has found delight in the tales, but, he adds, blame him, the poet, for anything shameful, for that is owing to his “unconning,” or lack of skill. He begs that his readers pray for him, “for the mercy of God,” because, as “oure book sayeth, ‘Al thaat is writen is writen for oure doctrine,’ and that is myn entente.” He prays that Christ will have mercy on him and forgive his “gyltes, and namely my translacions and enditinges of worldy vanitees, the whiche I revoke,” and he then goes on to list almost everything he has written to that point. He beseeches the Blessed Virgin and all the angels and saints that he will be granted the grace “of verry penitence, confession, and satisfaction” so that he may be among those who “at the day of doom . . . shulle be saved.”

Who among us does not need that?