Heretics and Heroes

by Thomas Cahill

  Did any of these men know one another? We just don’t know. But the encounter I would most like to find a record of was the one that might have transpired between Loyola and François Rabelais, both of whom may have been at the college in the late 1520s. Though we have no record of Rabelais’s attendance, his passing description of the place in his great satire Gargantua gives us certainty that he knew the college well. He begins mildly by calling Montaigu a pouillerie, a louse house, then goes on: “Better treated are galley slaves among the Moors and Tartars, murderers along Death Row, most certainly your domestic dogs, than are the poor devils who must reside in this college! And if I were king of Paris, the devil take me if I did not set the place on fire and roast both the principal and the regents, these men who permit such inhumanity to be practiced before their eyes.”

  The speaker is Rabelais’s character Ponocrates, a typical Renaissance humanist with a spanking new Greek name, a man brimming with openness and fresh theories. He is tutor to the enormous giant Gargantua, who while at Montaigu was first assigned a far more old-fashioned sort of tutor, one Tubal Holofernes, who had Gargantua spend all his time memorizing—first the alphabet, then simple propositions—then reading very old and dusty commentaries. Despite this initial course of study, no correction was made to Gargantua’s foul and dismaying personal habits, such as standing on the heights of the Cathédrale de Notre Dame, pulling out his gigantic penis, and urinating on the pious crowds milling below, drowning “two hundred sixty thousand four hundred eighteen, not counting women and children,” as Rabelais recounts in the mock-heroic style of an ancient classic.

  In the character of Ponocrates, Rabelais is alluding to the prejudice of the humanists against the medieval period that had preceded them. Medieval students, who had no printing presses, were largely confined to memorizing their paucity of revered texts. (Every student seems to have been forced to memorize, for instance, the rather leaden Sentences of Peter Lombard, a revered doctrinal standard by a twelfth-century bishop of Paris.) But the new humanists were far more free and wide-ranging in their reading, far more catholic in their literary tastes, and far more refined in their personal habits. They would certainly not urinate on anyone.

  And while it is clear that Rabelais loathed the accommodations at Montaigu as distressingly medieval, it is not so clear that he gives unalloyed approval to the humanists. Au fond, Rabelais is a skeptic about his own time as well as about times past and a skeptic about all worldviews, whether ancient or up to date. As he claims on the epigraph page of Gargantua:

  Amis lecteurs qui ce livre lisez,

  Dépouillez-vous de toute affection,

  Et le lisant ne vous scandalisez.

  Il ne contient mal ni infection.

  Vrai est qu’ici peu de perfection

  Vous apprendrez, si non en cas de rire:

  Autre argument ne peut mon cœur élire.

  Voyant le deuil, qui vous mine et consomme,

  Mieux est de rire que de larmes écrire.

  Pour ce que rire est le propre de l’homme.

  Dear readers, who this book may read,

  Let ev’ry worry slip away.

  There’s neither scandal here, nor creed,

  Nor any illness to allay.

  It’s true there’s no perfection here

  For you to note—except for laughs,

  Which are my only theme, I fear.

  So, noting the gloom each reader mostly quaffs:

  It’s best of laughter, not of tears, to sing,

  For laughter is the proper human thing.

  These few lines are full of graceful allusions to then-contemporary matters. The great university, like the cosmopolitan city itself, was electric with contrasting currents of opinion. Erasmus’s texts were bestsellers everywhere, familiar even to those who disapproved of them. Luther’s views were already well known, as was the dedicated opposition. The old-style scholars were still fighting their rearguard action against the humanists. Everywhere, obedience and conformity battled free thinking and innovation. Scientists were beginning to murmur that the cosmos might be quite different from what everyone had previously supposed. There was almost no intellectual or spiritual proposition that was not up for grabs.

  Into such an atmosphere, Rabelais’s dismissal of “perfection”—an obsession of both pious churchmen and Neoplatonists in their different ways—in favor of laughter, as the only sure human thing, represented for many thoughtful readers a fresh if startling way out of an ever-expanding series of heavy intellectual imponderables. Evelyn Waugh once remarked astutely that no literary form ages as quickly as humor. So it is still surprising to the Rabelaisian reader in our present moment that one continues to find humor in episode after episode, tickling one’s sensibility with surprise and delight.

  Rabelais was to a large extent l’homme essentiel de son âge, the knowing, smiling observer of all the follies of his time, but also a participant in the intellectual and emotional crosscurrents of his moment on this earth. No one knows for sure when he was born, sometime between 1483 and 1494, probably somewhere in the vineyard-rich Loire Valley. His father was a lawyer. Rabelais would be a priest, leaving one order, the Franciscans, because they disapproved violently of his learning Greek, and joining the more intellectually respectable Benedictines. Like Erasmus, Rabelais did not feel restricted to the cloister: he lived in many parts of France, studying at Paris, where he sired two children, then at Poitiers, then at Montpellier, earning multiple degrees including that of medical doctor, practicing medicine at Lyon, then at Metz, serving in later life as parish priest of several northern French towns, and finally dying at Paris in 1553.

  Rabelais’s books were condemned more than once by the starchy Sorbonne, leading college of the University of Paris; these condemnations automatically carried the threat of his being burned at the stake as a heretic. One authoritative body or another was forever banning one or all of his titles, and even the national Parlement found time to suspend the sale of his fourth book. Such reverses sent our author into hiding on more than one occasion, as far as French-speaking Metz, which was then not part of French territory but a free imperial city. (In her last days, Queen Marie Antoinette would vainly hope to reach the safety of Metz.) But Rabelais was also fortunate enough to attract the patronage of powerful readers, such as Jean Cardinal du Bellay and the French monarch, Francis I. Du Bellay even managed to obtain a papal dispensation legitimizing Rabelais’s beloved children.15

  Like Thomas More, Rabelais thought in terms of a utopia, a place that would be better than any society yet known. Rabelais’s utopia was a monastery, the Abbey of Thélème, founded by Gargantua. The giant, once he had improved his personal habits and gained sufficient education, turned into a speculative—as well as a practical—philosopher who meditated on the subject of which sort of society would spur men to act honestly and nobly and which sort would push them to baser actions. Gargantua (and Rabelais) believed firmly that the best sort of society was not one centered on “laws, statutes, or rules,” but one in which people could live “according to their own free will and pleasure,” rising “when they thought good,” eating, drinking, working, and sleeping “when they had a mind to it.” For these Rabelaisian monks, “en leur règle n’était que cette clause: fais ce que voudras” (“there was but one sentence in their entire rule: do what you like”). Since detailed rules mandating the traditions and styles of monks, friars, and nuns of the various religious orders were taken with high seriousness, Rabelais’s single rule-less rule was received by many as insulting levity.

  Though much more loosey-goosey than Luther ever thought to be, Rabelais would have made sense to Luther, since the absolute freedom at the heart of Christian life was central to the thought of both men. And though there is no suggestion in the historical record that Rabelais ever considered joining the Lutherans (how or where would he have managed that?), the freedom of his meditations suggests that he knew quite well what Paul and Luther were talking about and was
in basic agreement with them. No doubt many of Rabelais’s more disapproving readers also saw the connection, which is what impelled them to seek sanctions against him and his outrageous satires.

  This doctor-priest-father-comedian who dared lift the curtain of silent censorship to show us the weaknesses of society, education, and religion belongs to that small circle of the greatest European writers, the ones we still read both for pleasure and for wisdom. He’s right up there with Dante and Boccaccio before him, with Cervantes and Shakespeare soon after him. Whether he is being merely entertaining (“A mother-in-law dies only when another devil is needed in Hell”) or bolstering one’s courage on an extreme occasion (“Tell the truth and shame the devil”), he is always surprising, revelatory, and truthful. Not for nothing did Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio proclaim him “the greatest writer in the French language.”

  Rabelais’s last will and testament was brief, a satirical version of the typical saint’s testament: “I have nothing, I owe a great deal, and the rest I leave to the poor.” His last words—the authenticity of which, like his will, is disputed, though not by me—were these: “Je m’en vais chercher un grand Peut-être. Tirez le rideau; la farce est jouée” (“I go to seek a great Perhaps. Ring down the curtain; the farce is finished”). Protestant Catholic, humanistic medieval, he was a skeptic to the end, but always a joyful one. Perhaps his most profound advice is to be found in the large block letters he appended to the poetic epigraph with which Gargantua begins:

  VIVEZ JOYEUX.

  LIVE JOYOUSLY.

  On reflection, I realize that Rabelais and Loyola could not have met; for if they had, and had Loyola grasped what Rabelais was about, he would have killed the Frenchman. Allow me to explain; but first allow me to defend the appropriateness of Rabelais’s appearance in a chapter of “northern images.”

  France itself is uncomfortable inside the appellation “northern.” True, it is named for the Franks, a Germanic tribe once led by Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor, and the Franks were (and are) at least as German as they are French. The French Normans were of course originally the Northmen or Vikings—and therefore northerners in the extreme. And the Burgundians, once subjects in the ancient kingdom of Burgundy, were descended from an eastern Germanic tribe. But France also contains within its borders the Celtic tribes of ancient Gaul and modern Brittany and even the peculiar Basques of Aquitania. In southern France, one often feels one is among Italians, rather than among Germans or Celts, for the ancient Greco-Roman influence continues to wax strong along the length of France’s Mediterranean coast and often much farther inland. Indeed, France, a historic crossroads, harbors and harbored—even prior to its recent acceptance of Africans, Asians, and Eastern Europeans—more ethnic diversity than any other country in Europe. That Rabelais was a northerner is unremarkable; far more important is that his native tongue was French. The language itself, not one’s ethnicity, is the great unifier, even if its patois can sometimes seem innumerable. So, France is unique, neither northern nor southern, or rather both northern and southern, European and, to some extent, transnational. The welcome it gave to the Italian Renaissance was warm, celebratory, even—as Rabelais and others prove—original.

  So where does Ignatius Loyola fit in? He was a Basque, not a French Basque but a Spanish Basque. We might say that the only reason for including him here is that, like Rabelais, he spent time in Paris at the Collège de Montaigu, becoming eventually a graduate of the University of Paris. He left Spain to study in Paris because in Spain he was repeatedly hounded by the malignant forces of the Spanish Inquisition. He wanted a degree but feared that if he remained where he was he would earn nothing better than a prison term. But this Parisian student could hardly have been more different from Père Rabelais.

  Born to a family of petty chieftains, most likely in the autumn of 1491, he was christened not Ignatius but Inigo, a similar-sounding but different name. The Loyolas were a difficult bunch, well known in their neighborhood for their vanity, pugnacity, and insistence on the perquisites of their position. “The Loyolas,” commented one chronicler, “were one of the most disastrous families our country had to endure, one of those Basque families that bore a coat of arms16 over its main doorway, the better to justify the misdeeds that were the tissue and pattern of its life.”

  Inigo’s father was typical of his line, avid for status and riches, as were Inigo’s six older brothers. His mother, who had also borne three daughters (as well as four other children who perished in infancy), died either giving birth to Inigo or soon thereafter. The child grew up in a seriously macho household, among males for whom sexual conquest was secondary only to physical combat and military glory. Though we have an abundance of Inigo’s writings, they all date from later periods. There is good reason to assume that in his early years his literacy was rudimentary and confined to Spanish. There is also reason to suspect that some of the evidence for his youthful misdeeds—multiple and brief sexual relationships with young women of various classes, even the murder of a priest—may have been expunged from the historical record by loyal associates at a later date, once he had attained a reputation not for belligerency but for sanctity. At any rate, long before Inigo was known for his holiness, he was known to be “very careful of his personal appearance, anxious to please the fair sex, daring in affairs of gallantry, punctilious about his honor” and fearing “nothing. Holding cheap his own life and that of others, he was ready for all exploits,” according to Paul Dudon, his French biographer. His height, somewhat less than five feet, may also have had some influence on Inigo’s outsized aggressiveness.

  Inigo’s Rubicon was called Pamplona, capital of the tiny kingdom of Navarre and long a source of contention between the French monarchy and the “Spanish” Hapsburgs as they vied for European hegemony. Young Charles, the Hapsburg who was king of Spain (though himself more a Fleming with French leanings than anything else), had recently been elected Holy Roman Emperor (see this page and following), which was insupportable to Francis I, the new French king. To have Charles to Francis’s south as king of Spain was bad enough, but to have to endure this boy king as emperor was just too much. Francis had to push back.

  Inigo was then a retainer of the duke of Najera, whose job it was to defend Pamplona against the French, which in the event proved an impossible task. As one Spanish contingent after another opted for surrender against superior French arms, Inigo and some of his fellow hidalgos fought mindlessly on, unwilling to be thought chickenhearted, and Inigo eventually became the leader of the much-reduced Spanish force. A cannonball put an end to his bravery, hitting Loyola in the leg, crushing the shinbones just beneath the knee and wounding his other leg as well. Two surgeries were performed, one by Inigo’s French captors (who treated Inigo “with great kindliness and courtesy,” as he would later admit), a second surgery after he had been borne, on a litter and in excruciating pain, across the countryside and back to the castle of the Loyolas. For neither operation could anesthesia be administered: it would not be used effectively till the mid-nineteenth century. According to the patient, speaking of himself in the third person, “he uttered no word, nor gave any sign of pain other than clenching his fists.”

  What a guy. He even insisted on a third surgery to remove an unsightly bump beneath his knee—a surgery performed against the advice of his doctors, who warned him the pain would be so great that the surgery would not be worth it. But Inigo had no intention of appearing before his fellow courtiers and lady friends with any but the shapely legs he had formerly sported.

  The surgery, however, failed to achieve its goal. During his months of painful bedridden convalescence, Inigo came to realize that he could never again present himself as the romantic figure he had previously imagined himself to be. He would limp and walk with difficulty on unequal legs for the remainder of his life, nor would he ever again display those legs in fashionable hose and tight boots. The peacock had lost his plumage—or, to put it in the jargon of W. W. Meissner, a psychoa
nalyst, priest, and biographer, this “phallic narcissist” found himself in a “severe regressive crisis” that battered his former self-esteem. Fearful of losing his mind with idleness, the fallen man of action called for romances to read, the only literature he had previously cared for. There were none to be found in the castle, indeed no books of any kind—the Loyolas were not readers—except for two that his pious sister-in-law Magdalena was able to scare up. So Inigo set himself the task of reading Spanish translations of a lengthy Life of Jesus by the fourteenth-century monk Ludolph of Saxony, a sort of summa of all that was then known about the gospels, and the Flos Sanctorum (The Best of the Saints), a traditional collection of saints’ biographies. Inigo’s reading would show the phallic narcissist a way out of his dilemma: the way of the swashbuckling hidalgo having been taken from him, he would instead follow Christ and become a distinguished saint.

  In short order, the suddenly religious young man, still in his twenties, was spending whole nights in prayer, practicing hideously extreme penances, denying himself every pleasure (except the pleasure of his revivified ego), and readying himself for life as “the Pilgrim,” which he now called himself. Once he was mobile, the Pilgrim set off on a pilgrimage—to the shrine of Mary, mother of Jesus, at Monserrat in the mountains northwest of Barcelona—but not before committing himself to a vow of chastity, since he was “more afraid of being overcome by the sin of the flesh than by any other burden.” Much later in life, he would even cover up a picture of Mary in his prayerbook because the image reminded him too much of his (too-much?) beloved sister-in-law.

  Though it was perfectly appropriate for a saint to walk with a limp, the elegantly attired Inigo covered this first leg of his pilgrimage by mule. Along his route Inigo fell into conversation with another traveler, also riding a mule. The man was “a Moor,” that is, a North African Muslim, of whom there were many in Spain. Their conversation soon “turned to Our Lady,” the Pilgrim informs us. “The Moor admitted that the Virgin had conceived without man’s aid but could not believe that she remained a virgin after once having given birth.” The Pilgrim attempted to refute the Moor’s arguments but could not; and then the Moor took off and “was soon lost to view.” The indignant Inigo resolved to follow him and “give him a taste of my dagger for what he had said.” But because Inigo was slightly unsure as to whether this was the right response, he allowed his mule to decide whether they would keep to the main highway or take the side road that would lead them to the Moor. Thanks to the mule, the Moor’s life was spared. It seems unlikely that the voluble Rabelais would have been so lucky.