Axim In The Pardoner's Tale

An exemplum is a story (or parable) told to illustrate a point. How does The Pardoner’s Tale illustrate the axiom “Money is the root of all evil?”

In almost every literary piece an anecdote that illustrates a moral point can be found one way or another. In The Pardoner’s Tale Geoffrey Chaucer uses the axiom “Money is the root of all evil.”
Chaucer while describing the characters deliberately leaves the pardoner to last he places him at the very bottom of humanity because he uses the church and his so called holy relics to profit personally. The Pardoner's 'hair as yellow as wax, hanging down smoothly like a hank of flax,' (general prologue 693) implies his lack of man hood and impotence. This is further emphasized through the description of him having a high pitched goat like voice,

Additionally, Chaucer judges him to be gelding, or a mare symbolizing femininity. Chaucer’s depicts the pardoner as a would be conman who pulls the confidence man; “introduce yourself as a con man then get someone to give you their wallet” (moseley, 1987). The pardoner is forthcoming in saying how he uses his skills as a preacher to dupe people out of their money preying on their vulnerability’s to finance his own greed of money. The preacher who preaches only because of his desire for money, always preaches on the text that ‘The love of money is the root of all evil'! The Pardoner uses his sermons in order to gain the money that he himself so wickedly lusts after “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows”. (Timothy 6:10). In the eighth circle of Dante’s Inferno resides the fraudulent, this is the circle just above the treachery, those sinners guilty of simony who make a