More on the Pardoner's Tale...Prof Wenthe asked in a follow-up question to my assertion that the Pardoner is essentially offering the pilgrims a choice between despair and hope, which, however quaint an analysis, I think moves toward answering his question which was, in effect: How does the Pardoner's quandary (or contradictory personage) offer any bigger challenge to the pilgrims than they've already had?
I think the Pardoner's Prologue and Tale are the most challenging to us -and, if the Host's reaction is any indication, though he is personally attacked, one could presume to the pilgrims - is because he provokes, one can only guess with what ultimate intention, the crisis of existence when immaterial (or ultimate) truth and faith in those truths is confounded by or reduced to the material (either in language or relics). He claims, (since he is material of flesh and language and what is material corrupts the immaterial because of the material limitations of difference*) that he is corrupt, but it shouldn't surprise us or the pilgrims since they are not excluded from this predicament; we are also corrupt (we sin; we are delimited by our limited faculties in difference or separation from ultimate truth*), but since he is also a seller of pardons (or of hope, of faith) he maintains a belief, however tenuous, in the existence of immaterial truths which are worth investing in material relics. He acknowledges that material things both have and have not value and it is our decision to give or deny value thereby challenging our beliefs to be described or known to us through language (or relics). This is the ultimate problem for the believer who questions his/her beliefs. And since this is a holy pilgrimage, it is a problem for each pilgrim which questions or quytes! all of them.
*The content of this rationale utilizes however roughly the logical form of Thomas Aquinas's Being and Essence.
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In a sense, the material-spiritual dilemma you sketch here is a higher-stakes version of the letter-gloss problem that we earlier saw in the Wife of Bath's prologue. Where, finally, is truth to be located? Only in the realm of the spirit (which quickeneth), with no regard for the realm of the material, the literal letter (which killeth)? The Wife, with her insistence on the claims and functions of the body AS body, in addition to its spiritual reading, might lead us to suspect that the Pardoner's case offers another demonstration of the claims of embodiment, albeit a more pessimistic one (given his seeming eunuchry and the tormented position of the Old Man who cannot find release in the realm of the spirit and is condemned to an unending life of materiality).
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