Chaucer believed, as Dante did, that God’s will was shown through Nature. In “The Knight’s Tale” he dramatizes astral influences on human beings. It is Phoebus that leads Emelye to the garden to “walketh up and doun”(I. 1052 ), which starts the story of love and war. Phoebus also guides Arcite to the forest where he meets Palamon and fights with him. The characters in “The Knight’s Tale” rarely express their own will. Instead, they are conscious and accept that the seven planets control their fate: Arcite attributes his captivity to Saturnus. Astrological determinism implied in “The Knight’s Tale”, however, is limited by the existence of chance: In Chaucer’s tale the fatal reunion of Arcite and Palamon was realized by chance. Chance is a topic discussed in relation to nature and determinism.
For Aristotle, chance is an event which is not intended by any nature. Avicenna, an interpreter of Aristotelian philosophy, believed that there was no room for chance and the free will of man in the physical world. On the other hand, Thomas Aquinas regarded the indeterminism of chance as a spice of nature. Chaucer apparently follows Thomas to suggest a possibility for earthly beings to escape all-embracing determinism and partly break natural causality. Most events of “The Knight’s Tale” happen in the grove which birds and animals inhabit surrounded by various trees. Chaucer gives detailed description of earthly life in order to define human beings as a part of it. Palamon complains that while animals can fulfill their lusts human beings must abstain from them and have pain even beyond the grave. The narrator confesses he does not know where the spirit of Arcite will go. These philosophical problems are raised and left to be considered by Chaucer’s audience.