The Pilgrimage In Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

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Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is the story of 29 pilgrims and their own pilgrimage. Whether it's religious or for personal gain each pilgrim take a grueling pilgrimage. A religious pilgrimage is a journey of spiritual significance and is usually taken to a shrine or a location of importance to one’s belief. In The Canterbury Tales several characters are introduced such as the Pardoner,Wife of Bath and the Friar. Chaucer creates the characters to be hypocritical as their actions aren’t that of religious figures. Robert Boeing in “The Pardoner,his Prologue, and His Tale” says “Hypocrites are like fake beggars who, when they have noticed someone coming, move their lips in pretended holiness, in order to receive something from the passersby, …show more content…
Before his own individual tale he tells the others and confesses to his appalling ways about his greed for money. The Pardoner explains to the pilgrims that his method in preaching is always using the text “Radix malorum est cupiditas” meaning “greed is the root of all evil.”In the Pardoner’s Tale it begins with three men at the bar drunk. These three men find wealth and promise not to let money get in their way. The wealth was then divided between the two leaving the other with nothing who takes it upon himself to go an apothecary to kill the others.The Pardoner is portrayed to be extremely religious as he memorizes verses of the Bible and is willing to share with those who seek God’s word. The Pardoner charges others to relieve and relinquish their sins. It is hypocritical of the Pardoner to charge others for God’s work but base his sermons off that greed is the root of all evil. The moral he tells is the exact opposite of what he does and follows. In his essay “The Pardoner, his Prologue, and his Tale” Robert Boeing writes,
He is a confidence man operating a game that still flourishes — manipulating people's religious gullibility, their shame, greed, superstition, etc. Like many others after him, he uses a real rhetorical gift to "stir the people to devotion" so that they will give their pennies, and "namely unto me," as he says. …show more content…
Through the character’s behavior and through the religious pilgrimages that are being taken. The way the characters are seen it points to a bigger picture of how Chaucer in reality feels about church. Based on the characters one would believe that Chaucer was critical and wanted to point to the wrongs and inadequacies of the church.Chaucer doesn’t believe for the characters to be liars but does perceive them to be corrupt for their wrong doings. All of the religious figures in The Canterbury Tales represent was initially expected from them how the Pardoner was expected to deliver God’s word and not steal from those. All of The Canterbury Tales is about religion as each character is on a religious pilgrimage to Canterbury to visit the most holy place in England during this time
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