Authors note: This introductory assignment was completed prior to knowledge of structural / grammatical instruction for weekly blog posts, and it does contain the first person among other issues.
I found St. Anthony’s experiences to be contradictory. What is the goal of entering nature, is it an aid in finding virtue? Is nature taunting? Inspiring? Or just there? In section 20, when St. Anthony is speaking with the people who have come to see him in his mountain retreat he shares: “‘The kingdom of heaven is within you’ [Lk 17.21].” He goes on to describe that virtue comes from within through the process of encountering the natural state of the soul. Saint Anthony appears to take this quite literally, and sought asceticism for most of his life to best encounter a sense of spiritual enlightenment. Upon extracting knowledge of prayer, generosity, religious zeal, freedom from anger, etc. from his neighbors and others who followed a spiritual path, he decided to live in the desert for a time. Saint Anthony made it into the mountains where one might imagine he would commune with nature, but he lived mostly in a cave and ate primarily, if not only, bread, for six months. If virtue is something that comes forth from the soul after reaching one’s natural state, it feels counterproductive to live in a cave. The natural world is of particular focus in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales. Lines 11, 12, and then in 20 and 21 the narrator prepares to go on a pilgrimage to see the body of St. Thomas Becket while marveling that the weather and seasonal change inspires people to go on pilgrimage. A comparison of these sections of text confuse my sense of the goal of going into nature and its relationship to finding virtue. In line 11: So priketh hem nature in her corages, it seems that nature inspires “pricked” or irritated feelings, but it also encourages the journey of pilgrimage. There is also a complicated relationship with nature and finding virtue in biblical origin stories. The fruit of the tree of knowledge is one such piece. In the garden the people were allowed to eat from every tree but the tree with the knowledge of good and evil. The text goes on to say that the punishment for consuming the fruit is to “remain in the corruption of death” (Foltz 10). To remain “corrupt” from interacting with an idea that has been brought to life in a natural way does not provide images of comforting and encouraging interactions with nature, despite the fact that the goal of the story is not to speak to how one should interact with nature. I do not know what the intentions of the natural aspect of each narrative were, despite a continual tie between actions leading to or away from virtue being repeatedly tied to the natural world.
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