The Errors of Good Men: Hamartia in Two Middle English Poems

At the beginning of the Middle Ages, the late Roman philoso­pher Boethius asked a rhetorical question to which no Aris­totelian scholar would assent: “What else is the cry of tragedy but a lament that happy states are overthrown by the indiscriminate blows of fortune?”^[1] Near the end of that period, one of Boethius’s most famous translators added to that passage a gloss which simply confirms the misstatement: “Tragedye is to seyn a dite [story] of a prosperite for a tyme, that endeth in wrecchidnesse.”^[2] In the intervening nine hundred years, Averroes, who transmitted the Poetics to medieval scholars, distorted Aristotle’s statements about tragedy to fit the Boethian misdefinition.^[3] And concerning poetics in general, an Italian contemporary of Chaucer invoked Aristotle’s name to support the decidedly un-Aris­totelian conclusion “that not merely is poetry theology but that theology is poetry.”^[4] To a student of the Poetics, medi­eval literary criticism looks initially like a collective missing of the mark.

Therefore, the most prudent procedure for anyone reading medieval literature, as well as the most charitable one, may be to ignore all Aristotelian principles—all, that is, except induction. That procedure has been widely followed and has led to excellent studies of medieval poetry. For the medievalist to disregard Aristotelian theory seems all the more sensible when we recall that only the most garbled ver­sion of the Poetics achieved general currency in medieval Europe.^[5] On the other hand, such considerations of pru­dence cannot satisfy a reader who discerns universal validity both in medieval literature and in the principles of the Poetics. Aristotle claims to be treating “poetic science itself and its species,” not just one kind of poetry, and Chaucer claims to have written “tragedye” in a classical tradition.^[6] To concede that the two writers are mutually irrelevant is to disallow the claims to universal truth of one or both. I make no such concession: I believe that there must be some common· ground between great literary theory and great poetry.

This essay will seek that common ground by reexamining Aristotelian and medieval uses of human error in serious lit­erature. I will begin by discussing references to “missing the mark” in medieval discourses on conduct. That discus­sion will specify, not deny, the differences between medieval and Aristotelian ideas. I will go on, however, to consider the role of hamartia in tragedy and then to propose similari­ties between Aristotelian theory and the practice of two great Middle English poets: Chaucer and the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 

The comparison of Aristotle’s literary theory and medi­eval Iiterary practice depends on two assumptions. First, Aristotelian tragedies do not always end in disaster; indeed, the best kind of tragic plot is for Aristotle the one in which the hamartia is recognized in time to be corrected (Poetics, 1454a2-9). Second, Aristotle’s theory of hamartia can be applied to non-dramatic literature. That assumption finds considerably less support in the Poetics than does my first one, since hamartia appears there as a component of tragedy and tragedy must be “performed and not produced through narration” (Poetics, 1449b26-27). Aristotle does stipulate, however, that the essential elements of the tragic plot appear also in a nondramatic genre, the epic (Poetics, 1459b8-11). He states also that the effect of a tragic plot ought to obtain even when the events are heard rather than seen on stage (Poetics, 1453b3-6). Since my concern is initially with an element of plot and later with tragic effects, I will regard Aristotle’s statement as license for applying the theory of hamartia, mutatis mutandis, to narrative poetry.

As a metaphoric term for error, hamartia (“a missing of the mark”) corresponds to words in other languages-­ including error itself, which is derived from errare, “to wander, lose one’s way, stray.” Like error, hamartia sug­gests that mistaken behavior is essentially misdirection. The relevance of hamartia to medieval thought is thus not far to seek, for in the Middle Ages misdirection was not only an implicit definition of mistaken action, but also a common explicit one. Boethius tells us that the natural and proper direction of all human activity is toward the· “true good,” or beatitudo, for whose sake men seek wealth, honors, power, glory, and pleasure (Consolation of Philosophy, III, Prose 2 and 3). But beatitudo is to be found only in God, who is the origin of all things, thus the highest good, thus ipsa beatitudo (III, Prose 10). In seeking happiness elsewhere than in God, men wander from the true course: “For man’s mind, though the memory of it is clouded, yet does seek again its proper good, but like a drunken man cannot find by what path it may return home.” ^[7]

The Consolation of Philosophy is only implicitly a Chris­tian work, although it was fundamental to much Christian thought in the Middle Ages.  Boethius emphasizes the corre­lation of misdirection and unhappiness, not of misdirection and evil, because the problem he addresses is the apparent disproportion between right conduct and prosperity. A more explicitly Christian use of the metaphor of misdirection can be found in the work of St. Augustine. His “our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee” is a lyric expression of ideas like Boethius’s, and he uses those ideas in explaining both unhappiness and evil: “Wherever the soul of man turns, unless towards God, it cleaves to sorrow”; “With Thee our good ever lives, and when we are averted from Thee we are perverted.”^[8] In The City of God, Augustine succinctly defines the moral life in terms of the soul’s direction: “The right will is, therefore, well-directed love, and the wrong will is ill-directed love.”^[9] His formulation is basic to much medieval philosophy, including that which influences the serious poets. Dante, for instance, writes of wandering from the true road and following the pull of gravity down to the goal of perverted desire, the goal toward which mon­strous evil is drawn” like an arrow from a string.”^[10] But Dante’s ultimate goal is God; guided by reason and revela­tion, he attains a realm whose inhabitants fix “sight and love all on one mark.”^[11]

The two quotations from Dante are particularly helpful for my investigation, for they employ the same metaphor as ‘does hamartia, rather than the commoner image of true and deviant roads. In echoing Aristotle’s terminology, however, Dante also shows us how greatly the medieval concept of misdirection differs from the Aristotelian one. The medieval “mark” is unitary and unchanging—is, in fact, “the one” (Consolation of Philosophy, III, Prose 11). It has been revealed to all in Christ. Deviations from it are attributable to sin—if not to the particular sin of the agent, “then to the generic sin inherited from Adam, whose original missing of the mark introduced error into all our actions. For Augus­tine and his fellow Christians, therefore, all deviation is moral deviation. In the New Testament, hamartia is in fact the usual word for sin. In contrast, Aristotelian hamartia is the missing not of a single good but of various goals, for in both ethical and aesthetic discourse, Aristotle regards the ends of action as immediate instead of ultimate. Although he names happiness as the goal of all human action, he declines to identify that goal with a single idea of “the good”; he writes, “even if there is some one good which is universally predicable of goods or is capable of separate and indepen­dent existence, clearly it could not be achieved or attained by man; but we are now seeking something attainable.”^[12] His search for “something attainable” ends in a definition of the general goal of action as “the intermediate,” whose nature must be specified with reference to individual cases (Nicoma­chean Ethics, 11, 6 and 7). Thus, Aristotle regards moral virtue as a disposition, acquired by habit, to choose the mean, rather than as a radical orientation of the will (11, 1 and 6). Accordingly, he concludes that a virtuous person may commit a particular error without moral culpability. If it results from ignorance of particular circumstances, harmful action is not committed voluntarily and is not blameworthy (III, 1). Such involuntary error is hamartema.^[13]

Aristotle does discuss morally culpable misdirection: he says that “ignorance” may be culpable if it involves “mis­taken purpose” or “ignorance of the universal” (Ill, 1)—that is, the kind of error which Boethius, Augustine, and Dante discuss. But he distinguishes such adikemata from hamartemata, and in the Poetics, he recommends only the latter for the plots of tragedies.^[14] A blameworthy error cannot produce tragic effects: if it results in good fortune, the plot will not be humane; if the result is bad fortune, the plot will not arouse pity and fear. Thus, tragedy should hinge not on badness or wickedness but on some hamartia (Poetics, 1453a8-10). Together, the passages from the Nicomachean Ethics and that from the Poetics demonstrate that error resulting from “mistaken purpose or ignorance of universals” is unsuitable for the plots of tragedies.

At this point it appears that a medievalist should indeed consult the Poetics, for Aristotle’s recommendations seem to define medieval aesthetics by contrast. Assuming that medi­eval poets generally accept the Boethian and Augustinian idea of misdirection, we may construct the following hypothesis. Error in medieval literature will be “wrong will” or misdirected love. Catastrophes and recognitions will follow from such error, as from the hamartia of Greek tragedy. The resulting plots will not be tragic, however; that is, they will not achieve a catharsis of pity and fear, since their catastrophes or near-catastrophes will be deserved. Perhaps medieval plots will provide moral instruc­tion instead of catharsis, as would the poetry recommended by Plato for his republic.

That hypothesis can be tested against two of the best long narrative poems in Middle English: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Each of those poems is an imitation of a single action; the first issues in a kind of recognition following a reversal, the second simply in a reversal. If the reversals result from misdirected love and are just punishments, my hypothesis will be confirmed.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is based on what folk­lorists call a “beheading game.” During the Christmas fes­tivities at Arthur’s court, a large green man accoutred like a knight demands that someone behead him and then submit to the same treatment a year later. After Sir Gawain accepts the demand, the Green Knight miraculously survives the beheading and rides off. A year later, Gawain sets out to keep his part of the bargain, bearing on his shield the pen­tangle, symbol of the highest Christian and chivalric integ­rity. He happens upon the castle of Sir Bercilak, who wel­comes him heartily and assures him of help in finding the Green Knight on the appointed day. In the meantime, Ber­cilak playfully initiates an “exchange-of-winnings game”: on each of three days he will bring Gawain his prey from the hunt, and Gawain must yield in exchange anything he attains while resting in the castle. On each of the three days Ber­cilak’s wife comes to Gawain’s bedchamber and flirts openly with him, but he accepts only a few kisses which he faithfully “returns” to Bercilak. On the third day, however, Gawain withholds something: a green belt which the lady has given him with the promise that it can magically protect its wearer’s life. The next morning, wearing the belt but frightened anyway, Gawain meets the Green Knight, who takes two mighty swings at him with an axe but misses. On the third stroke he wounds Gawain slightly. Laughing, the Green Knight reveals himself as Sir Bercilak and explains the three strokes as judgments for the three days of testing. The wound corresponded to Gawain’s retention of the green belt: “But here you fell short a little, sir, and were wanting in fidelity; but that was for the sake of no intricate artifact, nor for courtship neither, but because you loved your life; the less I blame you.”^[15]

If we can imagine Aristotle reading about green knights and magical beheadings, we can speculate that the most interesting part of the plot for him might have been Gawain’s initial ignorance that Sir Bercilak is the Green Knight. Ignorance of identity is the kind of hamartia which Aristotle mentions most often, both in the Poetics and in the Nicoma­chean Ethics. But neither the poet, Bercilak, nor Gawain himself attributes Gawain’s error to his ignorance of Berci­lak’s identity. His error is that he conceals the belt from Bercilak, and it would have been as grave an error had Bercilak not been the Green Knight; it is not a mistake with regard to identity but a mistake with regard to moral princi­ples. Thus, Gawain accuses himself of cowardice and cove­tousness. The second of those accusations has puzzled many readers, for the poet and Bercilak assure us that Gawain did not covet the belt as a material object (2037-42 and 2367). David Farley Hills argues, however, that “covetousness” can be used both in a narrow sense for material greed and in a wider sense for “an inordinate love of anything other than God” or “any turning away from God’s love.” Hills con­cludes that, in concealing the girdle to save his life, Gawain places “his love for himself above his love for truth and therefore God.”^[16] His “avarice” and his “cowardice” can be regarded as fundamentally the same sin: misdirected love.

If that is true, Gawain deserves the neck wound and the simultaneous blow to his reputation. He freely acknowl­edges the justice of his punishment: as Hans Schnyder has observed, “his allusion to Adam, Samson, Solomon and David in lines 2415-2419 reveals that he sees his personal experience in the castle as part of the universal story of the human fall.”^[17] The green belts which Arthur’s courtiers don in imitation of Gawain at the end of the poem may indicate their participation in his sin; Schnyder argues that, at the poem’s opening, their self-love has made them boastful and self-indulgent.^[18] Depending on whether or not we see Gawain’s wound, his wearing of the belt, and his self-accu­sation as adequate atonement for misdirected love, we can see the poem as his complete or incomplete spiritual educa­tion.^[19] In either case, the reader achieves “a fresh realiza­tion of man’s sinfulness,”^[20] and the poem seems to be not tragic but didactic.

Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde has a more obvious claim than Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to be called a tragedy, for the poet gives it that name himself, and the plot fits the popular definition of tragedy by ending in sad­ness. On the other hand, Chaucer’s poem is also more obvi­ously concerned with misdirected love; my hypothesis pre­dicts that it will not be tragic in Aristotle’s sense.

At the beginning of the story, Troilus, son of the Trojan King Priam, is not only strong and noble but also heart-whole. Then he sees Criseyde and submits instantly and completely to the “god of love,” displaying fully the tra­ditional signs of fin amour. He is saved from interminable languor by his friend Pandarus, who sensibly suggests approaching the lady. Since Pandarus is Criseyde’s uncle, he offers to plead Troilus’s case. In a series of delicate maneuvers, simultaneously comic and romantic, Pandarus brings the two together, and Criseyde accepts Troilus as her lover. For a time, they are blissfully happy. Through love, Troilus flees every vice, and he praises love as the ordering principle of the universe (Ill, 1716-1805). But “destiny” intervenes in the form of Calchas, Criseyde’s fathexr, who defected to the Greek camp at the beginning of the story and who now wants her to join him. Calchas persuades the Greeks to offer a Trojan prisoner in exchange for Criseyde, and the Trojans agree, much to the lovers’ dismay. Cri­seyde leaves only after promising Troilus that she will find a way to return. Nonetheless, she is detained in the Greek camp by physical danger, by a new suitor named Diomede, and by her own nature: she is “slydynge of corage”—that is, “unstable of heart” or “fluid of spirit” (V, 825). After a long, painful time of uncertainty, Troilus learns of her infi­delity; he is nearly devastated with grief. He vows to kill Diomede in battle, but he is himself slain by Achilles.

That Troilus’s sorrow results from some kind of mis­placement of love is, I think, a consensus among critics. Criseyde’s infidelity can be attributed to her personal weak­ness, to human imperfection generally, or to her circum­stances, but in any case she does not offer Troilus the per­fect constancy on which his happiness comes to depend. Beyond that, however, it is possible to see Troilus’s misdi­rected love in specifically Christian terms. D. W. Rob­ertson, Jr., argues that readers of Troilus and Criseyde should not simply weep over the disappointment of a romantic idealist, for Troilus’s fall is the consequence of sin. Indeed, explains Robertson, Troilus reenacts the fall of Adam and Eve, in which temptation of the senses led to cor­ruption of the lower or natural reason and then to subver­sion of the higher reason. Troilus initially responds to Cri­seyde’s beauty, then devotes himself to pursuing her, and ends in full-scale intellectual idolatry.^[21] Living before Christ, Troilus cannot see the meaning of his fall, but he is granted a partial revelation after his death. Chaucer tells us that Troilus’s soul ascended to the eighth sphere, where he looked down at earth and

lough right at the wo Of hem that wepten for his deth so faste; And dampned al oure werk that foloweth so The blynde lust, the which that may not laste, And sholden al oure herte on heven caste. (V, 1821-25)

To the Christian reader, says Robertson, Troilus’s final per­spective is available throughout the poem; Chaucer guides us toward it in various ways, particularly in his description of Troilus’s “religion of love,” a blasphemous imitation of gen­uine religion.^[22] At the end of the poem, Chaucer calls openly on all young people to “come home from worldly vanity” and cast their hearts up to God, “For he nyl falsen no wight, dar I saye” (V, 1835-45). The Christian lesson about misdirected love could hardly be more explicit. In that lesson Robertson sees the meaning of Chaucerian tragedy: to set one’s heart on fallible worldly goods is to become the “victim of [one’s] own failure.”^[23] We should feel Christian pity for anyone who errs in that way, but we cannot feel Aristotelian pity, which “concerns the underserved.”^[24] If Robertson is correct, the poem produces not catharsis but instruction.

My hypothesis appears to have been confirmed. Troilus and Criseyde and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight do indeed center on misdirected love, a kind of misdirection quite unlike hamartia. Because misdirected love is sin, the catastrophes to which it leads are deserved, and the plots of the poems are not tragic. We have seen that Aristotle regards the sort of plot which hinges on blameworthy error as inferior to the tragic plot. Apparently, the Poetics and Middle English poetry are not mutually irrelevant, but anta­gonistic.

Plausible as they are, however, those arguments have two serious flaws: selected evidence and an unfortunate corollary. First, the readings of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Troilus and Criseyde which I have cited are not universally accepted. Although the poems demonstrably con­cern misdirected love, few critics treat them as didactic; few agree with Hills and Robertson that the heroes deserve pun­ishment for sin. A minority reading may, of course, be cor­rect, but the majority deserves a hearing. A more formi­dable objection to my hypothesis is that, while it does relate the Poetics to Middle English literature, it thereby produces a dilemma. If Aristotelian aesthetics condemns the two medieval plots, the medieval poems are not of the first rank, or Aristotle is wrong, or both.

I find that dilemma so discomforting that I choose to escape it in a time-honored way: by shifting the terms of the inquiry. I propose to reexamine both hamartia and the Middle English poems in a somewhat broader perspective. I began by discussing hamartia in isolation, as a certain kind of choice with certain consequences. Such discussion is valid, but the literary critic must also consider the function of hamartia in tragedy. Aristotle begins the Poetics with a definition of tragedy as “imitation of worthy and complete action having magnitude, …achieving through pity and fear a catharsis of such affections” (1449b24-28).After extensive analysis, he decides that the catharsis can be achieved when a man “who does not differ in virtue or justice” from most men suffers misfortune “because of some mistake [hamartia]” (1453a7-10). Thus, Aristotle does not discuss hamartia as an end in itself but as the means to achieve the catharsis which defines tragedy. If we understood why a plot based on hamartia achieves catharsis, we might look for alternative means for attaining that end.

When he introduces hamartia, Aristotle has brought his investigation of catharsis to an impasse. He has said that the plot which achieves catharsis should concern a change in fortune. Then he has ruled out all the obvious kinds of change in fortune: the downfall of a very good man, the rise of a wicked man, and the downfall of a wicked man. None of those actions would be both “humane” and “fearsome and piteous” (1452b30-1453a8). The fourth possibility, the rise in fortune of a good man, is self-evidently unproductive of pity and fear. We may therefore summarize the impasse as follows: the change must be neither a just reward, a just punishment, an unjust reward, nor an unjust punishment. Indeed, since Aristotle later says that tragedy should con­cern a change to misfortune ,his impasse is even simpler: neither just nor unjust misfortune will achieve catharsis. Aristotle’s first means of ending the impasse is his definition of the tragic hero as “a man who does not differ [from us] in virtue or justice,” that is, a man whose misfortune will not be entirely just or entirely unjust. But the hero’s char­acter does not decide his moral status at a particular moment, as Kenneth Telford points out: “Since average virtue entails acts both good and bad, and since if it is evil intentions which bring misfortune on the doer the pity of the misfortune is negated, it is necessary that the reversal be due to a mistake or a ‘missing of the mark.'”^[25] Thus, the second way out of the impasse is to stipulate that, in rela­ tion to his misfortune, the hero is not entirely blameless or entirely blameworthy. He misses the mark, but he does so out of ignorance and thus, in the terms of the Nicomachean Ethics, involuntarily.

Apparently the principle of hamartia allows Aristotle to have it both ways, to call the hero’s downfall both deserved and undeserved. Some writers have found that position log­ically untenable. One of those, Jan M. Bremer, attributes Aristotle’s “inconsistency” regarding the tragic hero’s moral status to an ambivalence toward Plato’s aesthetic theory. Bremer explains that Aristotle disagrees with Plato that poets should represent deserved punishments but concurs that they should not show the ruin of excellence, which is not tragic but shocking:

On the one hand [Aristotle] maintained that the protagonist of a tragedy should be a man of excel­lence who, without any particular wickedness of his own, caused his own downfall by a mistake; on the other he followed Plato by ruling out the representa­tion of the ruin of good men. His solution, being a compromise, is more clever than coherent. … [W]hile avoiding the moralizing schema of sin and punishment he manages to make the calamity begin at home.^[26]

Aristotle calls his statement about the hero’s moral responsi­bility “something in between” the obvious alternatives (Poetics, 1453a8). If it is not only “in between” but also incoherent, as Bremer suggests, perhaps Aristotle himself is responsible for the later misunderstandings of hamartia. The notorious misidentification of hamartia as moral defect and the opposite misapprehension that tragedy is simply unmerited disaster may both be attempts to eliminate one of the contra­dictory elements in Aristotle’s deserved-but-undeserved mis­fortune.

It seems to me, however, that Bremer errs in implying that Aristotle’s position is incoherent. The tragic hero’s moral status is a genuine paradox: it can be resolved. Its resolution depends on the audience’s acceptance simultaneously of two points of view, the particular and the universal. Insofar as the hero commits his error in ignorance of particular circumstances, his catastrophe is undeserved. Insofar as his action is indeed an error, a violation of uni­versal law, the catastrophe is fully deserved. Thebes deserves its plague and famine, and Oedipus deserves his suffering, because the King has committed parricide and incest; nonetheless, he is essentially innocent because he did not know whom he was killing and marrying. Thus, we feel pity and fear on his behalf, pity and fear which can be “cleansed” by our acknowledgement that his fate is just. The two points of view could not be equally valid in juris­ prudence, which demands a single judgment, or in philos­ophy, which seeks unitary principles. In poetry they not only can be simultaneously valid; they must be. The truth of poetry is accurate imitation, and the most accurate imitation of a “worthy and complete action having magnitude” must present that action in both its particular and its categorical forms. The function of hamartia in tragedy is to produce a misfortune which is just with regard to universal law but unjust with regard to particular circumstances, so that the resulting tragedy confirms both of our apparently irreconcilable convictions about the universe: that fortune operates unfairly and that justice governs our lives.

If Aristotelian hamartia functions in that way, we can seek analogues to it in the ideas of more recent theorists. H. D. F. Kitto claims that Aristotle’s idea about hamartia is based on only one extant play, Oedipus Tyrannus. The plays which we call Aristotelian tragedies should more prop­erly be called “religious drama,” according to Kitto, for they focus not on the hamartia of a character but on the “divine background.”^[27] But Kitto’s distinction is based on a misunderstanding of hamartia. He sees only half of Aristotle’s paradox, for he describes hamartia as a flaw of character which causes the hero’s downfall.^[28] Actually, in attributing the hero’s misfortune to a missing of the mark, Aristotle assumes a mark, a “world-order,” just as Kitto does. For both writers, that order is coherent and comprehensible, but it nonetheless inflicts disproportionate penalties on individuals and causes the innocent to suffer.^[29] Aristotle emphasizes the well-meaning hero’s perspective more than the universal order, perhaps in reaction against Plato’s call for didactic tragedy; conversely, Kitto emphasizes the universal order, for he is opposing “secularism.” But differences of emphasis should not obscure the similarity of Kitto’s “religious drama” and Aristotle’s tragedy of hamartia; both theories advance the same paradox concerning the justice and injustice of misfortune. Apparently, that paradox also informs the thinking of another writer whose ideas are in some ways unlike Aristotle’s; Murray Krieger writes,

For Hegel the hamartia that defines the tragic hero always arises from his exclusive identification with a single moral claim, a claim which, however just within its own sphere, is, from the point of view of a total morality—that is, the ethical substance—merely par­tial, a too-assertive particular.^[30]

Obedience to a valid but partial moral imperative is quite unlike missing the mark, of course, for the two sorts of tragic error presume different kinds of universal order. Nonetheless, they both are seen from two perspectives—a particular point of view which vindicates the suffering hero and a universal one which condemns him—and both give equal weight to the two points of view. The theories of Kitto and Hegel, depending on the same paradox as hamartia, suggest that hamartia is not the only way of achieving the effects which Aristotle found to be essential to tragedy.

That idea makes it possible at last to seek in Middle English literature an analogue to hamartia, a similarity not in the error itself but in the way the error is regarded. More specifically, we can ask whether or not the medieval heroes appear simultaneously guilty and blameless for the catastro­phes which befall or nearly befall them. I submit that Gawain and Troilus do indeed appear both guilty and blame­less: we see them from a sympathetic and exonerating point of view but also from a more detached and judgmental one. It is more natural to discuss point of view in narrative poetry than in drama, of course, because a narrator must assume some relationship or other to the action and the characters. Chaucer the narrator introduces himself as a humble servant of lovers, compassionate with them and eager to win them the compassion of others (Troilus and Criseyde, I, 15-51). In accordance with that self-characterization, he praises Troilus, expresses sympathy for him, and identifies overtly with his interests.^[31] Even his verses weep for Troi­lus’s woe (I, 7), and his pen shakes for fear (IV, 13-14). Sir Gawain is not championed by so personal a narrative voice, but his difficulties are also sympathetically described. Moreover, the sympathetic attitude expressed by his peers at Arthur’s court is endorsed by the poet’s allusions to him as “good” (e.g., in line 1926). Not until the ends of the two poems are we obliged to see the heroes as responsible for their misfortunes. Chaucer’s narrator and the Green Knight then make explicit the indictments which a dispassionate observer might have voiced earlier:

Swich fyn hath, lo, this Troilus for love!
Swich fyn hath al his grete worthynesse!
Swich fyn hath his estat real above,
Swich fyn his lust, swich fyn hath his noblesse!
Swich fyn hath false worldes brotelnesse!
(V, 1828-32)

But here you fell short a little, sir, and were wanting in fidelity….(2366)

Of course, it could be argued that, if a dispassionate observer could have condemned Gawain and Troilus earlier, the sympathetic and judgmental perspectives do not consti­tute a paradoxical judgment like that generated by Aristote­lian hamartia. Perhaps the sympathetic one is simply less valid. Arthur’s court can mistakenly admire Gawain because they share his sin, and the sympathy expressed by the two narrators can be ironic—a trap for the unwary reader and a challenge to the perceptive one. That is the view of D. W. Robertson, Jr., and others.^[32] Robertson denies the very possibility of paradoxical judgments in medieval literature, arguing that medieval values were arranged not in “dynami­cally opposed contraries” but in “quiet hierarchies.”^[33] He thus suggests that, while we may feel apprehension and compassion for Gawain and Troilus, detached judgment must clearly dominate.

Let us suppose, however, that certain readers persist in feeling pity and fear, not simply for the heroes, but also with them. Let us suppose that those readers acknowledge the errors of Gawain and Troilus and yet will not surrender their contrary feelings that Gawain is virtually perfect and that Troilus suffers innocently. Such readers can, in fact, be found in classrooms, even behind lecterns. Can their illogical responses be justified?

Certainly, such readers can argue that both heroes come as close to the mark as· any human being is likely to come. In Gawain’s case, hitting the mark would have required unflinching loyalty and superhuman courage in what seems to him a game–deadly but preposterous. Like Arthur’s court, we cannot fault him for doing much better than anyone else would have. Troilus’s idealized human love leads him to avoid the vices, to live charitably and fight unselfishly, and to see the world much as Boethius does (III, 1744-1806); the Christian love which could have perpet­uated those conditions is not possible for him. It can still be objected, however, that the highest possible virtue is not high enough: postlapsarian man, particularly pagan man, must suffer because his generic imperfection causes him to break certain laws. That his imperfection is indeed gen­eric—in other words, that original sin is original—does not exempt man from blame for his errors. Our sympathetic readers need a stronger defense.

They can find one in certain authoritative judgments expressed within the poems themselves. After pointing out Gawain’s shortcomings, the Green Knight nonetheless praises the hero in superlative terms:

In truth, you seem to me the most faultless man who ever walked; as the pearl is of greater worth than the white pea, so is Gawain, in good faith, than other fair knights.

[Sothly me thynkkez
On the fautlest freke that euer on fote yede;
As perle bi the quite pese is of prys more,
So is Gawayn, in god fayth, bi other gay knyghtez.]
(2362-65)

Troilus has no such examiner as the Green Knight, but he receives a similar commendation when Mercury guides his soul to the eighth sphere, placing him among the virtuous pagans.^[34]The justice that demands hitting an impossible mark is tempered in both poems by admiration for men who aim as high as they can. That admiration is not a mere accident in the fallible reader but is authoritatively endorsed.

It is ultimately justified, I think, by Christian theology. In another poem, the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight uses the pearl as the symbol for Christian perfection. The Green Knight’s use of the same symbol for Gawain, “the most faultless man who ever walked,” is advisedly impre­cise—an imitation of the divine mercy which makes up for man’s imperfections. The Gawain-poet imitates divine mercy in his plot as well, for Gawain is not the only one in the poem who misses the mark: the Green Knight has the ability to deliver more than a flesh wound but averts his axe (2343-44). In response to Gawain’s severe self-accusations, the Green Knight graciously laughs and “luflyly” says,

I regard it as certainly amended, the injury that had. You are so completely confessed, your faults acknowledged and have the visible penance of the point of my blade, that I hold you polished from that offense, and purified as cleanly as if you had never transgressed since you were first born.

[I halde hit hardily hole, the harme that I hade. Thou art confessed so clene, beknowen of thy mysses, And hatz the penaunce apert of the poynt of myn egge, I haIde the polysed of that plyght, and pured as clene As thou hadez neuer forfeted sythen thou watz fyrst borne …. ] (2390-94)

There is, of course, a precedent for a judge’s missing the mark: “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us” (Titus 3:5). The precedent must not be regarded as an operative principle, for we cannot say that Gawain and Troilus are, in fact, absolved of sin by God’s mercy. For a poet to present a fallible character as the recipient of divine mercy would be presumptuous—or comic, as in the German story whose spectacularly, unrepentantly adulterous protagonist is defended by the Lord on the grounds that He died to save sinners.^[35] Critics have argued about the state of Gawain’s soul as he leaves Bercilak’s castle, the validity of his “confession” before the Green Knight, and the meaning of Troilus’s assignment to the eighth sphere, but I doubt that such arguments can be settled because I doubt that the poets meant to define their heroes’ eschatological status. We can safely say only that both poets assume the possibility of mercy—of salvation for virtuous pagans and of extenuation for the good man who falls short of perfection—and that they treat their heroes’ errors in accordance with that possibility. Their fictional judgments on Gawain and Troilus are clear­ sighted but compassionate.  So are their judgments on humankind generally: Chaucer ends his poem not with a stern warning against misdirected love but with a prayer for mercy towards all of us, who know more than Troilus did about the proper goal of love but who, like Troilus, cannot hit the mark by our own efforts.

The Middle English poets’ simultaneous condemnation and exaltation of their heroes—a literary version of the Christian paradox of justice and mercy—corresponds to the paradox generated by hamartia. The Aristotelian tragic hero violates universal law but can be exonerated from a human perspective, and since Aristotle’s ethical judgments are indeed made from a human perspective, the hero is in error but not blameworthy. His suffering is both undeserved and deserved, productive of pity and fear, which are cleansed by understanding and acceptance. Christian judgments are not made simply from a human perspective; the medieval hero’s misdirection of will is a violation of divine law and is thus both erroneous and blameworthy. But the Aristotelian paradox is paralleled in Middle English literature by the com­plexity of the divine law itself. Unlike Oedipus, Gawain and Troilus are governed not merely by law but also by law­ givers who can act compassionately, in imitation of the omni­potent lawgiver. In short, the exoneration which Aristotle’s hero earns from his peers is granted to the medieval hero by the same “world order” which condemns him. Therefore, our pity and fear on behalf of the fallen hero, which are disal­lowed by the justice of his downfall, are also validated—we might say redeemed—by the authoritative mercy which exten­uates that downfall. The simultaneous negation and valida­tion of human sympathy is the medieval equivalent of catharsis.

Catharsis is by no means the function of all serious medieval literature. A great deal of that literature is alle­gory, and most allegory calls for intellectual rather than emotional response. In the greatest of allegories, Dante must leave behind the pity and fear which he initially feels for Hell’s inhabitants so that he may come to rest at last in the divine will. Dante reaches a realm in which there is no reason for pity and fear because errant man has received the highest gift of divine mercy: the ability to hit the mark at last. Thus, the most serious and finest of medieval poems is not tragic but comic. But Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Troilus and Criseyde are not visions of eternal reality; they are imitations of temporal existence. Despite the God­-like serenity of the Green Knight’s judgment, Gawain’s expe­rience does not seem comic to him, and therefore, it is not wholly comic for us; in Larry D. Benson’s words, the poem is “both a tragic romance with the sad moral that perfection is beyond our grasp and an unromantic comedy with the happy point that if a man aims high enough he can come as near perfection as this world allows.”^[36] Troilus and Criseyde produces a similarly complex effect. It might be a divine comedy if it left us in the eighth sphere with Troilus’s soul, laughing at human pain; instead, we rejoin the troubled nar­rator and the friends of Troilus who “wepten for his deth so faste.”^[37] Our compassionate and fearful response misses Dante’s “mark,” which is serene acceptance of divine justice, but it must nonetheless be aroused—and endorsed—by the Christian poet who wishes to imitate human action. In showing us, the errors of men better than we are, the Middle English poems show us also the unlikelihood of our avoiding humiliation and suffering. In that way, they are like Oedipus Rex, the story of unquestionably erroneous and disastrous actions which we can imagine ourselves imitating in similar circumstances. Like Oedipus Rex, the stories of Gawain and Troilus acknowledge the justice of the resultant suffering. But again, like Oedipus, they simultaneously validate our sense that the heroes do not deserve to suffer. An admirer of Aristotelian tragedy can thus, in good conscience, admit at least two Middle English poems to the highest order of mimesis.