Rabelais’s first work in the vernacular, The Horrendous and Dreadful Deeds and Acts of Prowess Performed by the Renowned Pantagruel, King of the Dipsodes, Son of the Great Giant Gargantua, Recently Composed by Master Alcofrybas Nasier—or simply Pantagruel, as it came to be known—seems at first glance to inhabit a world far removed from that of Erasmus. Its characters (giants and tricksters), its genre (burlesque, chivalric epic and fabliau), its themes (drinking and fighting), style (rambunctious and ribald), even its typeface (Gothic bastard) are all ostentatiously medieval and popular. But the book also contains strong hints of an Erasmian orientation. One is found in the famous letter sent by Gargantua to his son Pantagruel, who is far from home studying in Paris (chapter 8). The letter is written in a conspicuously decorous style, replete with long Ciceronian periods and learned allusions. It contains the most explicit description in French of the opposition between the calamitous “dark ages” brought about by the “Goths” who invaded the Roman Empire and destroyed all literature and learning, and the modern age of the Renaissance in which all ancient disciplines, works, and languages—not only the humanistic “three languages” (Greek, Latin, Hebrew) but also Aramaic—have been restored to their former honor and luster. And it exhorts Pantagruel to master completely all of these languages, works, and disciplines, so as to become a veritable “abyss of learning,” a gigantic embodiment of Renaissance humanism itself. One detail that makes this vision of the Renaissance recognizably Erasmian is the fact that in a review of “all disciplines,” theology is replaced by daily reading of the Bible in its original languages. Another is that the stated purpose of all this study is not erudition for its own sake but an exemplary moral life and a perfectly just and peaceful reign under the future king of Utopia. Not only does Gargantua’s program of study correspond exactly to those spelled out in Erasmus’s various works on pedagogy, but it establishes Pantagruel as Erasmus’s ideal Christian prince as set forth in De principis christiani.
Another Erasmian passage is the prayer uttered by Pantagruel in the last moments before his decisive single combat with the cannibal giant Loup Garou (Werewolf), champion of the usurping tyrant, King Anarche. In this prayer the hero states that his war against the Dipsodes is not an imperialist war of aggression but a purely defensive war, necessary to preserve home and homeland against an unprovoked and treacherous invasion. God himself, says Pantagruel, strictly forbids all other kinds of war, even wars undertaken for the defense of the true religion, since faith is the business and the prerogative of God alone, requiring no helping hand from humans except in the form of confessions of faith and preaching of the Word. The irenism of this statement is purely Erasmian. In many places and in many manners Erasmus stated and restated that war and Christianity are mutually exclusive. Not only wars between Christian nations but wars against non-Christian infidels are strictly forbidden.
Several details confirm the Erasmianism of this passage, too. One is Pantagruel’s explicit statement that his “total faith and hope are in [God] alone,” an infallible indicator of evangelism and an implicit rejection of all works (vows, masses, pilgrimages) and intermediaries (saints, priests, monks). Another is the vow with which Pantagruel ends his prayer. Erasmus often condemned vows to saints as a form of idolatry and paganism. Pantagruel’s vow is something entirely different. “If Thou art pleased to come to my aid,” he says, speaking directly to God, “I vow to Thee that throughout all lands, both in this country of Utopia and others, where I have power and authority, I will have Thy Gospel preached pure, simple, and entire, so that the abuses of a bunch of hypocrites and false prophets, who, by human institutions and depraved inventions, have envenomed the whole world, will be driven forth from around me.” The “human institutions” that Pantagruel vows to abolish (constitutions humaines in French) are precisely those constitutiones humanae that Erasmus never tired of condemning as “abuses” and “depraved inventions” that had so completely corrupted the Church: pilgrimages, vows, the cult of saints, Lenten fasting, monastic orders, liturgical hours and prayers, the Mass—so many abrogations of Christian liberty and of Christ’s New Law of love, invented by the “hypocrites” (priests and popish “papelars”) and “false prophets” (theologians). In place of all these Pantagruel will restore the text of the Gospel by having it read, preached, and explained in its entirety as a coherent whole (entièrement), free of interpolations and extraneous interpretations (simplement), and purged of all articles of faith invented by scholastic theology (purement), in the original text as it has been established by humanist philology. Pantagruel’s vow is answered by a heavenly voice saying: “Do this and you shall vanquish.”
These two passages help us perceive even in the foolish passages a meaning that is no less Erasmian. Pantagruel does indeed “vanquish” in the end, by establishing in Utopia a new golden age of peace, love, and convivial joy. What allows him to do this, according to the logic of the narration, is precisely the humanist education that has transformed him from an uncouth and ignorant giant into a wise Solomonic and even Christ-like mediator, capable of resolving the most intractable legal cases and reconciling even the most antagonistic of litigants. Many episodes that first appeared silly or vile begin to look like oblique, good-humored expressions of something crucial to the grand arc of the plot, giving a distinctly Erasmian cast to the form as well as the ideology of the book.
Pantagruel was an instant success and a runaway best seller, to which Rabelais hastened to add a prequel (Gargantua in 1534 or 1535), and much later a sequel (Tiers Livre de Pantagruel in 1546), followed by a sequel to the sequel (Quart Livre de Pantagruel in 1552). These later books tend to be less rambunctious in form and style than the first, and much more obviously learned. The Tiers Livre, especially, is a virtual compendium of humanistic erudition and modes of expression, much of it recognizably Erasmian, all in the service of recognizably Erasmian themes. A brilliant paradoxical encomium of debts appears near the beginning, for example; an equally brilliant paradoxical encomium of a plant called “Pantagruelion” at the end; and a dense farrago of adages at the very center. The Quart Livre satirizes all the usual enemies of both humanism and humanity in the grotesque inhabitants of islands encountered during a sea voyage inspired by Lucian’s True Story. Gargantua retains much of the popular flavor of Pantagruel but offers an obviously Erasmian explanation for this un-Erasmian appearance. In the prologue the narrator presents his books as “Sileni of Alcibiades,” borrowing liberally from Erasmus’s commentary on that adage to claim—ironically?—that behind their apparent foolishness lies a precious hidden meaning: “very lofty sacraments and horrific mysteries, concerning [not only our religion but] our political state and our domestic life.” Whether we take the narrator’s claim literally or not, whether we read superficially for hilarious jokes or deeply for hidden messages, we are always led back to same negative view of the obstacles to human well-being: theologians and monks, constitutiones humanae, medieval ignorance and acedia, warmongers and egotists, violence, hatred, and entrenched orthodoxies of all kinds. Rabelais’s Erasmus is “humanistic” in the modern sense as well as the Renaissance sense of the word: concerned almost exclusively with human relations and human communities—peace, justice, and convivial joy in a redeemed and enlightened world.
Marguerite d’Angoulême was a prolific writer who published almost nothing. As a woman, as a dévote, and especially as the sister of the king of France and a duchess and queen by her marriages, she inhabited a social sphere so exclusive and so lofty that “going public” by means of the printing press was virtually unthinkable. Her works were widely circulated and read within the elite circles of royal and ducal courts, however, as large numbers of elegant surviving manuscripts attest. Paradoxically, many of these works are extremely plain and popular in genre, form, and style. Those that are more elevated are either courtly (like the unfinished Decameron published posthumously as a fragment under the spurious title Heptameron) or decidedly “medieval” (like the short,
early dream-vision titled Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne and the long, late allegory of a pilgrim’s progress titled Les prisons). None of her works is ironic. None is funny. None is learned. In all these respects, Marguerite is a very un-Erasmian writer. She was nevertheless attacked by the same enemies as Erasmus: by the zealously orthodox Béda on one side, and by the equally zealous French reformer Jean Calvin, her former protégé, on the other. To judge by their common adversaries Marguerite and Erasmus would appear to occupy the same middle ground between orthodoxy and reform, where a return to the foundational texts and principles of the primitive Church would occur within the established Church, not in opposition to it. But as Erasmus’s two unanswered letters suggest, the “common ground” defined negatively by its opponents was riven by fundamental differences of ideology, of form, and of substance.
The only book that Marguerite voluntarily entrusted to a printer for mass reproduction and public dissemination offers the most revealing glimpse of her character as a writer. This little book, published in Alençon in 1531, contains three long poems in rhymed couplets: Le miroir de l’âme pécheresse (Mirror of the Sinful Soul), Discord estant en l’homme par contrarieté de l’esperit et de la chair (Discord between the Spirit and the Flesh), and an Oraison à nostre seigneur Jesus Christ (Prayer to Our Lord Jesus Christ). All three are intense, prayerful, first-person monologues, inspired by Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and addressed to Christ as a personal savior. The Miroir is the most characteristic. The first-person speaker is strongly marked feminine, not because it is the voice of Marguerite but because it is the prosopopoeia of an anonymous “soul,” represented as an essentially feminine thing by nature as well as by grammatical gender, whether it belongs to a man or a woman. This everyman’s soul is tormented by an agonizing awareness not only of its own innate, ineradicable sinfulness, but of its utter powerlessness to redeem itself by means of its own will and actions. It inhabits a radically Pauline world characterized by what Luther and Calvin called the “total depravity” of postlapsarian humankind. The only means to salvation is the free gift of God’s unmerited grace. Marguerite illustrates this principle by having the speaking soul pass from utter despair through hope and doubts to complete certainty of its own salvation, progressing only by acknowledging its own vileness and nothingness [rien] and thus making itself available for possession by the Everything [Tout] that is Christ’s forgiveness and love.
To this fundamentally Pauline plot Marguerite adds an intensely personal, affective dimension that is typical of all her writing. Throughout the poem the soul describes its own singular relationship to the singular person of Christ. Precisely because the soul is feminine and because Christ is masculine, this relationship is assimilated at every turn to each of four possible affective relationships between a woman and a man—daughter-father, sister-brother, mother-son, and especially wife-husband—and to a specific biblical story that functions as an analogue, a type, a precedent, and a promise. The biblical model for the wife-husband relationship is the most traditional and most easily exploited. It derives directly from the series of erotic love songs exchanged by a bridegroom and his bride in the Song of Songs, interpreted since the twelfth century as an allegorical expression of the love between Christ and the individual believer. The other biblical models are more original and require more inventive exegetical tweaking: the parable of the prodigal son for daughter and father, Miriam and Moses for sister and brother, the quarrel between two mothers adjudicated by Solomon for mother and son. All of these, interpreted allegorically, tell the story of the soul’s unworthiness repaid by Christ’s unmerited love, of the soul’s betrayal of that love repaid with Christ’s even greater love, forgiveness, and joyful reunion. The poem ends with a long, ecstatic monologue in which the soul is consumed by love and yearns for an ever more complete annihilation of its own autonomous being and complete dissolution in infinite, ineffable love of Christ.
The peculiar fusion in this poem of an austere Pauline theology of salvation, on one hand, and a personal, ecstatic, almost solipsistic love between a sinful soul and the person of Christ, on the other, results from the convergence of two independent traditions: a medieval tradition of female mysticism going back to the early thirteenth century and illustrated by figures like Marguerite Porete, Catherine of Sienna, and Marguerite’s younger contemporary, Teresa of Avila; and a theological tradition inaugurated by Paul, elaborated by Augustine, and recently made current and controversial thanks to the notorious heretical writings of Martin Luther. Marguerite knew both of these traditions well—the former through works like Porete’s Miroir des âmes simples (Mirror of Simple Souls), a major source of the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse and of many later works; the latter through Marguerite’s correspondence with Guillaume Briçonnet in the early 1520s and contraband translations of Luther’s own works.
Though strange to modern readers, this blend of female mysticism and hard-nosed Lutheranism is a defining feature of virtually all Marguerite’s writing—her allegorical monologues from the early Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne to the late Prisons; her evangelical farces from the early Malade and Inquisiteur to the late Comédie de Mont-de-Marsan; and her Chansons spirituelles, pious contrafacta composed to be sung to the tune of well-known, often risqué and even mildly obscene popular songs of the late fifteenth century.
Rabelais and Marguerite are both called évangéliques by modern scholars, and rightly so, but they clearly represent very different strains of evangelism. Rabelais’s is Erasmian and humanistic, Marguerite’s anti-Erasmian and mystical. This difference is evident not only in what these two writers wrote, but in their manner of writing. One feature common to both is the use of familiar, popular forms and styles to express meanings that are radically new—a practice that gives rise to works that look today like strange hybrids of “medieval” and “Renaissance” characteristics. But even in this, the differences between Rabelais and Marguerite are striking, and revealing.
Marguerite’s use of popular genres and a plain style—so disconcerting at first glance in the work of such a highborn princess—is entirely consistent with her mystico-Lutheran ideology. If salvation depends not on one’s own efforts but on recognizing the worthlessness of everything one is and can do, then pretentiousness of any kind—including literary pretentiousness—can only be an obstacle to salvation. Small children, ignorant simple folk, servants, and (in Marguerite’s strongly held antifeminist view) women, are always much closer to salvation than are mature adults, learned scholars, nobles, and males, precisely because they are by nature less capable and less self-sufficient, and because they know it. Having fewer illusions of self-worth, they have fewer obstacles to overcome in recognizing their own intrinsic depravity, powerlessness, and dependency on grace. For Marguerite the princess and author, farces, popular songs, and simple, unadorned speech are signs and effects of self-abnegation and self-annihilation—efforts to achieve a kind of dégré zéro de l’écriture and a self-inflicted mort de l’auteur—which are necessary preconditions for an ecstatic union with Christ.
Rabelais’s use of popular forms and styles has a completely different function. For Rabelais, the “popular” is a lowest common social denominator, allowing for a purely human communion of all men, low and high, in which Christ’s new law of brotherly love is fully realized here on earth. It is the sign and precondition of a universal evangelical brotherhood. This social dimension of popular culture explains the many Bruegelian scenes of joyful beuveries in Rabelais—most notably in Gargantua, where we find a bibulous, rustic banquet and a convivial celebration of the anti-monk Frère Jean, and in the prologues to Rabelais’s books, where a high-spirited narrator addresses his readers familiarly, with a typically Rabelaisian mixture of popular ribaldry and learned allusions, as members of the same communion, drinkers of the same wine, sitting together around a common table. In all such scenes, wine and “bons mots” are the symbols and the efficacious agents of a nonsacramental communion of unpretent
ious fellow drinkers.
The fundamental difference between these two functions of popular culture points to two radically opposed kinds of “evangelism.” Both are biblical, both are Christ-centered, but Rabelais’s is human, social, convivial; Marguerite’s is transcendent, individualistic, and ecstatic. In this sense Rabelais and Marguerite can be said to represent two separate axes of Renaissance evangelism, corresponding to two distinct kinds of “communion”: horizontal versus vertical, human versus divine, active versus passive. Both are present in Erasmus, but there is no doubt that Rabelais’s is more typically “Erasmian”—and more consonant with Erasmus’s philosophia Christi—than Marguerite’s.
Another indication of this difference is the value attached by each of these authors to erudition. For Rabelais, as for Erasmus, humanistic learning is a gift from God, a providential means to the most desirable end of a life lived on earth in peace and harmony, in accordance with God’s purpose. For Marguerite, learning is not only unnecessary but actually harmful, constituting one of the most insidious temptations of a sinful world. It encourages the sinful illusion that by one’s own efforts one can attain a higher good, thus feeding the ego and thereby cutting oneself off permanently from grace and communion with God. Even philology, which for Erasmus is the essential key to understanding the text of the Bible, is for Marguerite a diabolical lure. In her later works she comes close to suggesting that even reading the Bible, even in translation, is unnecessary because everything it teaches can be apprehended directly from the ultimate source, so to speak, by means of an ecstatic, mystical marriage with Christ.
A History of Modern French Literature Page 8