خلاصة:
For us, readers of Chaucer living in an age when appeal to religious passions and sentiments as a means for the realization of worldly objectives by some charlatans has grown significantly, reviewing the theme of religious hypocrisy treated in The Canterbury Tales can be useful in a way that it proves a helpful means for recognizing and dealing with the hypocrites. The Pardoner of the Tales is definitely and consensually the most horrible hypocrite character in English literature, and this is evident from both the narrator’s description of this character in the General Prologue and in his own self-confession in the prologue to his tale. Accordingly, the hypocrisy of the Pardoner has been a matter of debates and discussions from the very beginning of critical tradition on this character and his tale. The basic view of this critical tradition, however, is that in dealing with the hypocrisy of the Pardoner and in creating this character, Chaucer has drawn on different literary and theological sources. The first part of this study is an attempt to trace instances of the influence of Biblical definition of the word hypocrisy and biblical description of hypocrites in the character of the Pardoner. In the second part, the presence of traces of the Antichrist tradition with hypocrisy as a major attribute of the Antichrist figure will be treated in this character.
ملخص الجهاز:
ir Abstract For us, readers of Chaucer living in an age when appeal to religious passions and sentiments as a means for the realization of worldly objectives by some charlatans has grown significantly, reviewing the theme of religious hypocrisy treated in The Canterbury Tales can be useful in a way that it proves a helpful means for recognizing and dealing with the hypocrites.
I John 2:18 In Christian theology, hypocrisy has been considered as the most prominent characteristic of Antichrist and his false prophets, and as an apocalyptic theme, it constituted one of the major topics of the exegesis of the Apocalypse and literary st the great persecutor of the church and the leader of the forces of evil in the last days was a central figure in medieval a Jewish apocalyptic literature and there the fi lawless one.
Therefore, in the following paragraphs, the aim will be to show how in the description of the character of the Pardoner in The General Prologue and Chaucer uses the interpretive ideas of different exegesis on the figure of the Antichrist.
Emmerson, Herzman, and McGinn seem to be one of the first critics who, due to their expertise, have initiated a new approach to reading The Canterbury Tales in the context of apocalyptic studies and Antichrist tradition.
However, for a reader well familiar with the critical opinions on and other tales in the Canterbury Tales on the one hand, and the enlightening studies of Emmerson and McGinn and other critics in the field apocalyptic and Antichrist tradition on the other hand, there is still more to examine in reading, at least, the General Prologue and some of the Tales through this approach.