Norm Klassen
Norm Klassen is an associate professor of English at St. Jerome's University in Waterloo, Ont. He is the author of Chaucer on Love, Knowledge, and Sight, and is currently completing a translation of Peter Martyr's In Epistolam S. Pauli Apostoli ad Romanos... Commentarii 10-16, a 16th century commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans.
Bio last updated April 30th, 2018.
Articles by Norm Klassen
Art by the Word
By Norm Klassen
August 1, 2016
The Canterbury Tales is a pilgrimage, of course, but St. Jerome's University professor Norm Klassen concludes it is equally an homage to art that calls us to live beautiful lives, taking care to define beauty with reference to Christ.
"Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one / When they combine and mingle, bring / A strong regard and awe" – writing in the same Christian tradition as Chaucer, Herbert combines "sentence" (here, "doctrine") with "difference" (here "life") In a chiasmic X structure, Chaucer then flips the order, going from unity to difference in the following couplet: "And alle acorden as in hire sentence" repeats the emphasis on unity from the previous line, while the subsequent line affirms difference Chaucer adheres to the principle that the different Gospel writers bear witness to the same truth in their own unique way and imitates this reconciliation of unity and difference In this way, through interpretive, obedient responsiveness to God, the person (and, for Chaucer, more typically, the community) reconciles the unity of truth and the difference (or uniqueness) of historical being The essence of living life as an artist is to allow the revelatory fullness of Christ to shine forth in the particularities of one's own existence
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A Pilgrimage of Conversation
Norm Klassen
April 1, 2015
April, Geoffrey Chaucer assured us, is the surest month. Convivium contributor Norm Klassen argues the poet's immortal Canterbury Tales are a timely way to be with the Word on the Christian journey
In the prologue to The Second Nun's Tale, the last story in which a woman speaks in The Canterbury Tales, the nun invokes Mary's help to tell her story with words taken from the climactic canto of Dante's Paradiso The capacity to see both unity and Chaucer's humorous interest in all the details of o...