The Book of Genesis begins with the line “In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth.” In doing so, in the Biblical tradition, a moral code of sorts was also established in that faith in God would be rewarded while transgressions would be punished. Following Biblical teachings, Hermengild is murdered in the Law of Man’s Tale but is rewarded by her murderer’s death because of the unwavering faith of Custance.
Chaucer explores the inherent good present in devotion throughout the Man of Law’s Tale by forcing Custance into a series of tribulations from exile at sea to being the victim of a shipwreck off of the Northumberland coast. In her waylaid forced travels, Custance could have easily denounced her faith but quickly devotes herself to Christianity immediately following her rescue – “She kneleth doun and thanketh Goddes sonde; But what she was, she wolde no man seye, For foul ne fair, thogh that she sholde deye.” (185, lines 523-525). A modern reader may balk at the notion of unwavering faith in the face of near-certain injury and death given the seeming shift away from Christianity in recent years among millennials but given the central location of religion in the minds of Chaucer’s initial audience, it is fitting that Custance would pledge her faith, regardless of the outcome. In doing so, Custance recognizes the efforts of the Northumbrian constable, as akin to a literal God-send, placing her fate in the hands of Christ in the immediate aftermath of her shipwreck. Custance’s ordeal speaks to the very meaning of faith. Left to her own diminished devices and banished to foreign seas, she had no discernable choice but to leave her fate in divine hands.
But from where do this sense of faith – in Custance and in other religious believers – emerge? It may seem rudimentary but in the simplest terms, for every birth, there is a death. If we consider religion to be a journey of the soul, the Biblical moral code strengthens a believer’s sense of faith, attempting to reach Heaven rather than Hell. In Medieval Philosophy, Bruce Foltz posits that sin defiles the soul (122) and in the case of Custance, it could be thought that her immediate desire to pray following a traumatic experience of a shipwreck was an absolution of sin, or at least an attempt at absolution. Custance views her banishment to sea and subsequent shipwreck as an instance of wavering faith and immediately seeks to regain her spiritual center.
*In writing this post, I used, or at least attempted to use, the “Asking Questions and Answering Them” approach from Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric as well “Discovering the Sources of Proof” from May through textual citations to support my claims.