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The 16th century
Language and learning in 16th-century Europe
The
cultural field linking the Middle Ages and the early
modern period is vast and complex in every sense.
Chronologically, there is no simple or single break
across the turn of the century, though there is
indeed among many writers of the period the sense of
a cultural rebirth, or Renaissance. The term, first
used during the 18th century, was given currency in
the 19th century by Jacob Burckhardt and Jules
Michelet, who used it to describe what they
perceived as a movement representing a clean break
with the medieval past and inaugurating the forms
and values of modern European secular and
progressive nation-states. But the turn to antiquity
was already visible in France in the 12th century,
and echoes of Classical literature and traces of
Latinizing style are present again from the mid-15th
century in the work of the Grands Rhétoriqueurs
(poets such as Guillaume Crétin, Octovien de
Saint-Gellais, Jean Marot, Jean Bouchet, and Jean
Lemaire de Belges), better known for their
commitment to formal play, rhyme games, and
allegorizing, in the medieval tradition. Writing
inspired by the medieval tradition continued to be
produced well into the 16th century. Old and New
Testaments of the Christian Bible were as much a
sourcebook as any Latin or Greek text, especially
with the new impetus provided by the Catholic
Reformation. Writers were certainly grouping in new
ways around their patron courts, and their writing
was becoming attached to the defense of particular
positions within the nascent nation-state. Themes
and forms would mutate within the developing
context, but the processes making the literature of
early modern France are characterized by struggle
rather than by any clear moment of change.
Many of the thinkers and writers of the 16th
century belong to Europe as a whole as much as to a
particular nation. Many still wrote and thought in
Latin, and neo-Latin literature continued to thrive.
Even those who preferred the vernacular, however,
saw themselves as heirs and contributors to a
European as much as a local inheritance. Erasmus,
though born in Rotterdam, Holland, lived in France,
England, and Switzerland. The assignment of Jean
Lemaire de Belges to a particular country is equally
difficult, for he was a Walloon who wrote in French
and traveled among various courts. During this
period writers made many journeys, either by choice
or by necessity. François Rabelais, Joachim du
Bellay, and Michel de Montaigne all made the trip
from France to Italy. Clément Marot died in Turin,
and Marc-Antoine de Muret, after a long exile, died
in Rome. This was a time of intensive and varied
cultural exchanges, which focused on, for example,
the crossroads city of Lyon, turned as much toward
Italy as toward Paris, or on the courts of a
succession of great royal patrons, such as
Marguerite de Navarre (Margaret of Angoulême), in
Béarn, and Charles IX, in Paris. The craving for new
knowledge was fueled by the books coming off the
recently developed printing press, both original
works and the great texts newly come into
translation that were to form the mind and manners
of the cultured European: the Bible (available in
full for the first time in 1530, in the translation
by Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples); Baldassare
Castiglione’s Il cortegiano (Book of the Courtier),
translated into French by Jacques Colin in 1537; and
Plutarch’s Bioi paralleloi (Parallel Lives),
translated by Jacques Amyot in 1559. Martin Luther’s
writings helped spread the ideas of the Protestant
Reformation swiftly through France from 1519 onward.
In 1536 the first version of the refugee John
Calvin’s study of Christianity was distributed from
Basel; by the early 1540s Calvin was finally settled
in Geneva, with the resources of Geneva’s publishing
trade at his disposal to disseminate the French
version of his work. The classical texts of
Renaissance humanism moved with equal speed,
disseminating across Europe the Neoplatonism of
Marsilio Ficino and the morality of
Plutarch and
Seneca, along with the poetic forms of
Ovid and
Horace.
Jean
Lemaire de Belges
born c. 1473, Bavai, Hainaut [now in
Belgium]
died c. 1525
Walloon poet, historian, and pamphleteer
who, writing in French, was the last and
one of the best of the school of poetic
rhétoriqueurs (“rhetoricians”) and the
chief forerunner, both in style and in
thought, of the Renaissance humanists in
France and Flanders.
Lemaire led a wandering life in the
service of various princes and was often
at the court of Margaret of Austria, the
regent of the Netherlands; he was her
librarian at Malines. An innovator of
wide intellectual curiosity, he had a
sense of literary beauty that set his
works apart from those of his
contemporaries. Most of his poems are
occasional pieces in memory of a prince.
His Épitres de l’amant vert (1505;
“Letters of a Green Lover”) contains two
charming and witty letters in light
verse describing the grief of Margaret
of Austria’s parrot during her
mistress’s absence. Lemaire traveled in
Italy and was an admirer of Italian
culture. His La Concorde des deux
langages (“The Harmony of the Two
Languages,” after 1510; modern ed. 1947)
attempts to reconcile the influence of
the Italian Renaissance with French
tradition. His most extensive work is
Les Illustrations de Gaule et
singularitéz de Troye (1511, 1512, 1513;
“Illustrations of Gaul and Peculiarities
of Troy”), a legendary prose romance
published in three books; it
demonstrates an exuberant imagination
and a modern appreciation of classical
antiquity
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Marc-Antoine de Muret
born April 12, 1526, Muret, near
Limoges, France
died June 4, 1585, Rome [Italy]
French humanist and classical
scholar, celebrated for the elegance of
his Latin prose style.
From age 18 Muret taught classics at
various schools; Michel de Montaigne was
among his pupils. During the 1540s his
play Julius Caesar, written in Latin,
was performed; it is the first tragedy
on a secular theme known to have been
written in France. In the early 1550s he
lectured on philosophy and civil law in
Paris. He became intimate with the poets
of La Pléiade, and in 1553 he published
a commentary on Pierre de Ronsard’s Les
Amours. Juvenilia, a collection of
Muret’s own poems, many of them on
erotic themes, was published at about
the same time. In 1554, after being
condemned for sodomy and heresy, Muret
fled to Italy, settling in Rome in 1563.
His lectures at the University of Rome
earned him a European reputation. He
entered holy orders in 1576.
Muret was a good textual critic; his
Variae lectiones contains annotations
and expositions of many passages from
ancient authors. He also wrote
commentaries on works by Cicero,
Catullus, Tacitus, Plato, and Aristotle.
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Jacques Amyot
born Oct. 30, 1513, Melun, near
Paris, France
died Feb. 6, 1593, Auxerre
French bishop and classical scholar
famous for his translation of Plutarch’s
Lives (Les Vies des hommes illustres
Grecs et Romains, 1559), which became a
major influence in shaping the
Renaissance concept of the tragic hero.
Amyot was educated at the University
of Paris and at Bourges, where he became
professor of Latin and Greek and
translated Heliodorus’ Aethiopica. For
this King Francis I gave him the abbey
of Bellozane and commissioned him to
complete his translation of Plutarch’s
Lives, on which he had been engaged for
some time. He went to Rome to study the
Vatican text of Plutarch’s Bioi
paralleloi (Parallel Lives). On his
return to France he was appointed tutor
to the sons of Henry II. Both favoured
him on accession, making him grand
almoner and, in 1570, bishop of Auxerre,
where he spent the rest of his life.
Amyot translated seven books of the
Bibliotheca historica of Diodorus
Siculus in 1554, the Daphnis and Chloé
of Longus in 1559, and the Moralia of
Plutarch in 1572, as well as the Lives.
Amyot’s Vies was an important
contribution to the development of
Renaissance humanism in France and
England, and Plutarch was an ideal
choice because he presented the moral
hero as an individual rather than in
abstract, didactic terms. Moreover,
Amyot supplied his readers with a sense
of identification with the past and the
writers of many generations with
characters and situations to build upon.
He also gave the French an example of
simple and pure style; Montaigne
observed that without Amyot’s Vies, no
one would have known how to write. The
work was translated into English by Sir
Thomas North (1579); this rendition was
the source for William Shakespeare’s
Roman plays.
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John
Calvin
French theologian
French Jean Calvin, or Cauvin
born July 10, 1509, Noyon, Picardy, France
died May 27, 1564, Geneva, Switz.
Main
theologian and ecclesiastical statesman. He was the leading
French Protestant Reformer and the most important figure in the
second generation of the Protestant Reformation. His
interpretation of Christianity, advanced above all in his
Institutio Christianae religionis (1536 but elaborated in later
editions; Institutes of the Christian Religion), and the
institutional and social patterns he worked out for Geneva
deeply influenced Protestantism elsewhere in Europe and in North
America. The Calvinist form of Protestantism is widely thought
to have had a major impact on the formation of the modern world.
This article deals with the man and his achievements. For a
further treatment of Calvinism, see Calvinism and Protestantism.
Life and works
Calvin was of middle-class parents. His father, a lay
administrator in the service of the local bishop, sent him to
the University of Paris in 1523 to be educated for the
priesthood but later decided that he should be a lawyer; from
1528 to 1531, therefore, Calvin studied in the law schools of
Orléans and Bourges. He then returned to Paris. During these
years he was also exposed to Renaissance humanism, influenced by
Erasmus and Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, which constituted the
radical student movement of the time. This movement, which
antedates the Reformation, aimed to reform church and society on
the model of both classical and Christian antiquity, to be
established by a return to the Bible studied in its original
languages. It left an indelible mark on Calvin. Under its
influence he studied Greek and Hebrew as well as Latin, the
three languages of ancient Christian discourse, in preparation
for serious study of the Scriptures. It also intensified his
interest in the classics; his first publication (1532) was a
commentary on Seneca’s essay on clemency. But the movement,
above all, emphasized salvation of individuals by grace rather
than good works and ceremonies.
Calvin’s Paris years came to an abrupt end late in 1533. Because
the government became less tolerant of this reform movement,
Calvin, who had collaborated in the preparation of a strong
statement of theological principles for a public address
delivered by Nicolas Cop, rector of the university, found it
prudent to leave Paris. Eventually he made his way to Basel,
then Protestant but tolerant of religious variety. Up to that
point, however, there is little evidence of Calvin’s conversion
to Protestantism, an event difficult to date because it was
probably gradual. His beliefs before his flight to Switzerland
were probably not incompatible with Roman Catholic orthodoxy.
But they underwent a change when he began to study theology
intensively in Basel. Probably in part to clarify his own
beliefs, he began to write. He began with a preface to a French
translation of the Bible by his cousin Pierre Olivétan and then
undertook what became the first edition of the Institutes, his
masterwork, which, in its successive revisions, became the
single most important statement of Protestant belief. Calvin
published later editions in both Latin and French, containing
elaborated and in a few cases revised teachings and replies to
his critics. The final versions appeared in 1559 and 1560. The
Institutes also reflected the findings of Calvin’s massive
biblical commentaries, which, presented extemporaneously in
Latin as lectures to ministerial candidates from many countries,
make up the largest proportion of his works. In addition he
wrote many theological and polemical treatises.
The 1536 Institutes had given Calvin some reputation among
Protestant leaders. Therefore, on discovering that Calvin was
spending a night in Geneva late in 1536, the Reformer and
preacher Guillaume Farel, then struggling to plant Protestantism
in that town, persuaded him to remain to help in this work. The
Reformation was in trouble in Geneva, a town of about 10,000
where Protestantism had only the shallowest of roots. Other
towns in the region, initially ruled by their prince-bishops,
had successfully won self-government much earlier, but Geneva
had lagged behind in this process largely because its
prince-bishop was supported by the neighbouring duke of Savoy.
There had been iconoclastic riots in Geneva in the mid-1520s,
but these had negligible theological foundations. Protestantism
had been imposed on religiously unawakened Geneva chiefly as the
price of military aid from Protestant Bern. The limited
enthusiasm of Geneva for Protestantism, reflected by a
resistance to religious and moral reform, continued almost until
Calvin’s death. The resistance was all the more serious because
the town council in Geneva, as in other Protestant towns,
exercised ultimate control over the church and the ministers,
all French refugees. The main issue was the right of
excommunication, which the ministers regarded as essential to
their authority but which the council refused to concede. The
uncompromising attitudes of Calvin and Farel finally resulted in
their expulsion from Geneva in May 1538.
Calvin found refuge for the next three years in the German
Protestant city of Strasbourg, where he was pastor of a church
for French-speaking refugees and also lectured on the Bible;
there he published his commentary on the Letter of Paul to the
Romans. There too, in 1540, he married Idelette de Bure, the
widow of a man he had converted from Anabaptism. Although none
of their children survived infancy, their marital relationship
proved to be extremely warm. During his Strasbourg years Calvin
also learned much about the administration of an urban church
from Martin Bucer, its chief pastor. Meanwhile Calvin’s
attendance at various international religious conferences made
him acquainted with other Protestant leaders and gave him
experience in debating with Roman Catholic theologians.
Henceforth he was a major figure in international Protestantism.
In September 1541 Calvin was invited back to Geneva, where the
Protestant revolution, without strong leadership, had become
increasingly insecure. Because he was now in a much stronger
position, the town council in November enacted his
Ecclesiastical Ordinances, which provided for the religious
education of the townspeople, especially children, and
instituted Calvin’s conception of church order. It also
established four groups of church officers: pastors and teachers
to preach and explain the Scriptures, elders representing the
congregation to administer the church, and deacons to attend to
its charitable responsibilities. In addition it set up a
consistory of pastors and elders to make all aspects of Genevan
life conform to God’s law. It undertook a wide range of
disciplinary actions covering everything from the abolition of
Roman Catholic “superstition” to the enforcement of sexual
morality, the regulation of taverns, and measures against
dancing, gambling, and swearing. These measures were resented by
a significant element of the population, and the arrival of
increasing numbers of French religious refugees in Geneva was a
further cause of native discontent. These tensions, as well as
the persecution of Calvin’s followers in France, help to explain
the trial and burning of Michael Servetus, a Spanish theologian
preaching and publishing unorthodox beliefs. When Servetus
unexpectedly arrived in Geneva in 1553, both sides felt the need
to demonstrate their zeal for orthodoxy. Calvin was responsible
for Servetus’ arrest and conviction, though he had preferred a
less brutal form of execution.
The struggle over control of Geneva lasted until May 1555, when
Calvin finally prevailed and could devote himself more
wholeheartedly to other matters. He had constantly to watch the
international scene and to keep his Protestant allies in a
common front. Toward this end he engaged in a massive
correspondence with political and religious leaders throughout
Protestant Europe. He also continued his commentaries on
Scripture, working through the whole New Testament except the
Revelation to John and most of the Old Testament. Many of these
commentaries were promptly published, often with dedications to
such European rulers as Queen Elizabeth, though Calvin had too
little time to do much of the editorial work himself. Committees
of amanuenses took down what he said, prepared a master copy,
and then presented it to Calvin for approval. During this period
Calvin also established the Genevan Academy to train students in
humanist learning in preparation for the ministry and positions
of secular leadership. He also performed a wide range of
pastoral duties, preaching regularly and often, doing numerous
weddings and baptisms, and giving spiritual advice. Worn out by
so many responsibilities and suffering from a multitude of
ailments, he died in 1564.
Personality
Unlike Martin Luther, Calvin was a reticent man; he rarely
expressed himself in the first person singular. This reticence
has contributed to his reputation as cold, intellectual, and
humanly unapproachable. His thought, from this perspective, has
been interpreted as abstract and concerned with timeless issues
rather than as the response of a sensitive human being to the
needs of a particular historical situation. Those who knew him,
however, perceived him differently, remarking on his talent for
friendship but also on his hot temper. Moreover, the intensity
of his grief on the death of his wife, as well as his empathic
reading of many passages in Scripture, revealed a large capacity
for feeling.
Calvin’s facade of impersonality can now be understood as
concealing an unusually high level of anxiety about the world
around him, about the adequacy of his own efforts to deal with
its needs, and about human salvation, notably including his own.
He believed that every Christian—and he certainly included
himself—suffers from terrible bouts of doubt. From this
perspective the need for control both of oneself and the
environment, often discerned in Calvinists, can be understood as
a function of Calvin’s own anxiety.
Calvin’s anxiety found expression in two metaphors for the human
condition that appear again and again in his writings: as an
abyss in which human beings have lost their way and as a
labyrinth from which they cannot escape. Calvinism as a body of
thought must be understood as the product of Calvin’s effort to
escape from the terrors conveyed by these metaphors.
Intellectual formation
Historians are generally agreed that Calvin is to be
understood primarily as a Renaissance humanist who aimed to
apply the novelties of humanism to recover a biblical
understanding of Christianity. Thus he sought to appeal
rhetorically to the human heart rather than to compel agreement,
in the traditional manner of systematic theologians, by
demonstrating dogmatic truths. His chief enemies, indeed, were
the systematic theologians of his own time, the Scholastics,
both because they relied too much on human reason rather than
the Bible and because their teachings were lifeless and
irrelevant to a world in desperate need. Calvin’s humanism meant
first that he thought of himself as a biblical theologian in
accordance with the Reformation slogan scriptura sola. He was
prepared to follow Scripture even when it surpassed the limits
of human understanding, trusting to the Holy Spirit to inspire
faith in its promises. Like other humanists, he was also deeply
concerned to remedy the evils of his own time; and here too he
found guidance in Scripture. Its teachings could not be
presented as a set of timeless abstractions but had to be
brought to life by adapting them to the understanding of
contemporaries according to the rhetorical principle of
decorum—i.e., suitability to time, place, and audience.
Calvin’s humanism influenced his thought in two other basic
ways. For one, he shared with earlier Renaissance humanists an
essentially biblical conception of the human personality,
comprehending it not as a hierarchy of faculties ruled by reason
but as a mysterious unity in which what is primary is not what
is highest but what is central: the heart. This conception
assigned more importance to will and feelings than to the
intellect, and it also gave new dignity to the body. For this
reason Calvin rejected the ascetic disregard of the body’s needs
that was often prominent in medieval spirituality. Implicit in
this particular rejection of the traditional hierarchy of
faculties in the personality, however, was a radical rejection
of the traditional belief that hierarchy was the basis of all
order. For Calvin, instead, the only foundation for order in
human affairs was utility. Among its other consequences this
position undermined the traditional one subordinating women to
men. Calvin believed that, for practical reasons, it may be
necessary for some to command and others to obey, but it could
no longer be argued that women must naturally be subordinated to
men. This helps to explain the rejection in Geneva of the double
standard in sexual morality.
Second, Calvin’s utilitarianism, as well as his understanding of
the human personality as both less and more than intellectual,
was also reflected in deep reservations about the capacity of
human beings for anything but practical knowledge. The notion
that they can know anything absolutely, as God knows, so to
speak, seemed to him highly presumptuous. This conviction helps
to explain his reliance on the Bible. Calvin believed that human
beings have access to the saving truths of religion only insofar
as God has revealed them in Scripture. But revealed truths were
not given to satisfy human curiosity but were limited to meeting
the most urgent and practical needs of human existence, above
all for salvation. This emphasis on practicality reflects a
basic conviction of Renaissance humanism: the superiority of an
active earthly life devoted to meeting practical needs to a life
of contemplation. Calvin’s conviction that every occupation in
society is a “calling” on the part of God himself sanctified
this conception. Calvin thus spelled out the theological
implications of Renaissance humanism in various ways.
But Calvin was not purely a Renaissance humanist. The culture of
the 16th century was peculiarly eclectic, and, like other
thinkers of his time, Calvin had inherited a set of contrary
tendencies, which he uneasily combined with his humanism. He was
an unsystematic thinker not only because he was a humanist but
also because 16th-century thinkers lacked the historical
perspective that would have enabled them to sort out the diverse
materials in their culture. Thus, even as he emphasized the
heart, Calvin continued also to think of the human personality
in traditional terms as a hierarchy of faculties ruled by
reason. He sometimes attributed a large place to reason even in
religion and emphasized the importance of rational control over
the passions and the body. The persistence of these traditional
attitudes in Calvin’s thought, however, helps to explain its
broad appeal; they were reassuring to conservatives.
Theology
Calvin has often been seen as little more than a
systematizer of the more creative insights of Luther. He
followed Luther on many points: on original sin, Scripture, the
absolute dependence of human beings on divine grace, and
justification by faith alone. But Calvin’s differences with
Luther are of major significance, even though some were largely
matters of emphasis. Calvin was thus perhaps more impressed than
Luther by God’s transcendence and by his control over the world;
Calvin emphasized God’s power and glory, whereas Luther often
thought of God as the babe in the manger, here among human
beings. Contrary to a general impression, Calvin’s understanding
of predestination was also virtually identical with Luther’s
(and indeed is close to that of Thomas Aquinas); and, although
Calvin may have stated it more emphatically, the issue itself is
not of central importance to his theology. He considered it a
great mystery, to be approached with fear and trembling and only
in the context of faith. Seen in this way, predestination seemed
to him a comforting doctrine; it meant that salvation would be
taken care of by a loving and utterly reliable God.
But in major respects Calvin departed from Luther. In some ways
Calvin was more radical. Though he agreed with Luther on the
real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, he understood this in
a completely spiritual sense. But most of his differences
suggest that he was closer to the old church than was Luther, as
in his ecclesiology, which recognized the institutional church
in this world, as Luther did not, as the true church. He was
also more traditional in his clericalism; his belief in the
authority of clergy over laity was hardly consistent with
Luther’s stress on the priesthood of all believers. He insisted,
too, on the necessity of a holy life, at least as a sign of
genuine election. Even more significant, especially for
Calvinism as a historical force, was Calvin’s attitude toward
the world. Luther had regarded this world and its institutions
as incorrigible and was prepared to leave them to the Devil, a
far more important figure in his spiritual universe than in
Calvin’s. But for Calvin this world was created by God and still
belonged to him. It was still potentially Christ’s kingdom, and
every Christian was obligated to struggle to make it so in
reality by bringing it under God’s law.
Spirituality
Calvin’s reservations about the capacities of the human mind
and his insistence that Christians exert themselves to bring the
world under the rule of Christ suggest that it is less
instructive to approach his thought as a theology to be
comprehended by the mind than as a set of principles for the
Christian life—in short, as spirituality. His spirituality
begins with the conviction that human beings do not so much
“know” God as “experience” him indirectly, through his mighty
acts and works in the world, as they experience but can hardly
be said to know thunder, one of Calvin’s favourite metaphors for
religious experience. Such experience of God gives them
confidence in his power and stimulates them to praise and
worship him.
At the same time that Calvin stressed God’s power, he also
depicted God as a loving father. Indeed, although Calvinism is
often considered one of the most patriarchal forms of
Christianity, Calvin recognized that God is commonly experienced
as a mother. He denounced those who represent God as dreadful;
God for him is “mild, kind, gentle, and compassionate.” Human
beings can never praise him properly, Calvin declared, “until he
wins us by the sweetness of his goodness.” That God loves and
cares for his human creatures was, for Calvin, what
distinguished his doctrine of providence from that of the
Stoics.
Calvin’s understanding of Christianity is thus in many ways
gentler than has been commonly supposed. This is also shown in
his understanding of original sin. Although he insisted on the
“total depravity” of human nature after the Fall, he did not
mean by this that there is nothing good left in human beings but
rather that there is no agency within the personality left
untouched by the Fall on which to depend for salvation. The
intention of the doctrine is practical: to reinforce dependence
on Christ and the free grace of God. In fact, unlike some of his
followers, Calvin believed in the survival after the Fall,
however weak, of the original marks of God’s image, in which
human beings were created. “It is always necessary to come back
to this,” he declared, “that God never created a man on whom he
did not imprint his image.” At times, to be sure, Calvin’s
denunciations of sin give a very different impression. But it
should be kept in mind that as a humanist and a rhetorician
Calvin was less concerned to be theologically precise than to
impress his audience with the need to repent of its sins.
The problem posed by sin was, for Calvin, not that it had
destroyed the spiritual potentialities of human beings but
rather that human beings had lost their ability to use their
potentialities. Through the Fall they had been alienated from
God, who is the source of all power, energy, warmth, and
vitality. Sin, on the contrary, had exposed the human race to
death, the negation of God’s life-giving powers. Human beings
thus experience the effects of sin as drowsiness when they
should be alert, as apathy when they should feel concern, as
sloth when they should be diligent, as coldness when they should
be warm, as weakness when they need strength. Thus also, since
the Devil, who seeks to drain human beings of their God-given
spirituality, tries to lull them to sleep, God must employ
various stratagems to awaken them. This helps to explain the
troubles that afflict the elect: God threatens, chastises, and
compels them to remember him by making their lives go badly.
The effect of sin also prevents human beings from reacting with
appropriate wonder to the marvels of the world. The failure of
spirituality is the primary obstacle to an affective knowledge
that, unlike mere intellectual apprehension, can move the whole
personality. Calvin attached particular importance to the way in
which sin deadens the feelings, but spiritual knowledge renews
the connection, broken by sin, between knowledge, feeling, and
action. Thus God’s spirit, in all its manifestations, is the
power of life. Calvin’s understanding of sin is closely related
to his humanistic emphasis on activity.
As his emphasis on sanctification for the individual believer
and on reconquering the world for Christ implies, Calvin’s
spirituality also included a strong sense of history, which he
perceived as a process in which God’s purposes are progressively
realized. Therefore, the central elements of the Gospel—the
Incarnation and Atonement, the grace available through them, the
gift of faith by which human beings are enabled to accept this
grace for themselves, and the sanctification that
results—together describe objectively how human beings are
enabled, step by step, to recover their original relationship
with God and regain the energy coming from it. Calvin described
this as a “quickening” that, in effect, brings the believer back
from death to life and makes possible the most strenuous
exertion in God’s service.
Calvin exploited two traditional metaphors for the life of a
Christian. Living in an unusually militant age, he drew on the
familiar idea of the believer’s life as a ceaseless,
quasi-military struggle against the powers of evil both within
the self and in the world. The Christian, in this conception,
must struggle against his own wicked impulses, against the
majority of the human race on behalf of the Gospel, and
ultimately against the Devil. Paradoxically, however, Christian
warfare consists less in inflicting wounds on others than in
suffering the effects of sin patiently, that is, by bearing the
cross. In Calvin’s thought the metaphor for the Christian life
as conflict thus takes on the added meaning of acquiescence in
suffering. The disasters that afflict human existence, though
punishments for the wicked, are an education for the believer;
they strengthen faith, develop humility, purge wickedness, and
compel him to keep alert and look to God for help.
The second traditional metaphor for the Christian life employed
by Calvin, that of a journey or pilgrimage—i.e., of a movement
toward a goal—equally implied activity. “Our life is like a
journey,” Calvin asserted; yet “it is not God’s will that we
should march along casually as we please, but he sets the goal
before us, and also directs us on the right way to it.” This way
is also a struggle because no one moves easily forward and most
are so weak that, “wavering and limping and even creeping along
the ground, they move at a feeble pace.” Yet with God’s help
everyone can daily make some advance, however slight. Notable in
this conception is a single-mindedness often associated with
Calvinism: Christians must look straight ahead to the goal and
be distracted by nothing, looking neither to the right nor left.
Calvin allows them to love the good things in this life, but
only within limits.
Thus the Christian life is a strenuous progress in holiness,
which, through the constant effort of the individual to make the
whole world obedient to God, will also be reflected in the
progressive sanctification of the world. These processes,
however, will never be completed in this life. For Calvin even
the most developed Christian in this world is like an
adolescent, yearning to grow into, though still far from, the
full stature of Christ. But, Calvin assured his followers, “each
day in some degree our purity will increase and our corruption
be cleansed as long as we live in the world,” and “the more we
increase in knowledge, the more should we increase in love.”
Meanwhile the faithful experience a vision, always more clear,
of “God’s face, peaceful and calm and gracious toward us.” So
the spiritual life, for Calvin as for many before him,
culminates in the vision of God.
Assessment
Calvin’s influence has persisted not only in the Reformed
churches of France, Germany, Scotland, the Netherlands, and
Hungary but also in the Church of England, where Calvin was long
at least as highly regarded as among those Puritans who
separated from the Anglican establishment. The latter organized
their own churches, Presbyterian or Congregational, which
brought Calvinism to North America. Even today these churches,
along with the originally German Evangelical and Reformed
Church, recall Calvin as their founding father. Eventually
Calvinist theology was also widely accepted by major groups of
Baptists; and even Unitarianism, which broke away from the
Calvinist churches of New England in the 18th century, reflected
the more rational impulses in Calvin’s theology. More recently
Protestant interest in the social implications of the Gospel and
Protestant neo-orthodoxy, as represented by Karl Barth, Emil
Brunner, and Reinhold Niebuhr, reflects the continuing influence
of John Calvin.
Calvin’s larger influence over the development of modern Western
civilization has been variously assessed. The controversial
“Weber thesis” attributed the rise of modern capitalism largely
to Puritanism, but neither Max Weber, in his famous essay of
1904, “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus”
(The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism), nor the
great economic historian Richard Henry Tawney, in Religion and
the Rise of Capitalism (1926), implicated Calvin himself in this
development. Much the same thing can be said about efforts to
link Calvinism to the rise of modern science; although Puritans
were prominent in the scientific movement of 17th-century
England, Calvin himself was indifferent to the science of his
own day. A somewhat better case can be made for Calvin’s
influence on political theory. His own political instincts were
highly conservative, and he preached the submission of private
persons to all legitimate authority. But, like Italian
humanists, he personally preferred a republic to a monarchy. In
confronting the problem posed by rulers who actively opposed the
spread of the Gospel, he advanced a theory of resistance, kept
alive by his followers, according to which lesser magistrates
might legitimately rebel against kings. Unlike most of his
contemporaries, furthermore, Calvin included among the proper
responsibilities of states not only the maintenance of public
order but also a positive concern for the general welfare of
society.
Calvinism has a place, therefore, in the development of liberal
political thought. Calvin’s major and most durable influence,
nevertheless, has been religious. From his time to the present
Calvinism has meant a peculiar seriousness about Christianity
and its ethical implications.
William J. Bouwsma
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The elevation of the French language
Latin
remained important as the language of diplomats,
theologians, philosophers, and jurists; though the
Edict of Villers-Cotterêts (1539), requiring
judgments in the law courts to be given solely in
French, marked a turning point. Erasmus polemicized
in Latin with the Sorbonne or with Luther. Calvin
used Latin to write the first version of his
Christianae Religionis Institutio (1536; definitive
Latin version, 1559; Institutes of the Christian
Religion). Petrus Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée) created
a sensation when, after earlier writings in Latin,
he produced his Dialectique (1555; “Dialectics”),
the first major philosophical work in French. In
1562 his Gramère (“Grammar”) was a significant
contribution to a host of new studies produced in
the midcentury of the vocabulary and syntax of
French. At the same time, the poets began to declare
their mission to work, through their writing, for
the elevation of the national language. Thomas
Sébillet, a humanist of the school of Clément Marot,
who also looked back to the later Middle Ages,
produced his Art poétique français (“The Art of
French Poetry”) in 1548. It was overshadowed in the
following year by Joachim du Bellay’s Deffence et
illustration de la langue francoyse (1549; The
Defence and Illustration of the French Language),
which came to be considered as a manifesto by the
group of young poets known as the Pléiade (Pierre de
Ronsard, du Bellay, Jean Dorat, Jean-Antoine de
Baïf, Rémy Belleau, Étienne Jodelle, and
Pontus de
Tyard), who were totally committed to the new
learning in its classical forms, and who attached
themselves to the service of the Valois court. As
the century drew to its close, the great political
thinker Jean Bodin, the first theorist who sought to
define the powers and the limits of sovereignty,
published in French his Six livres de la République
(1576; The Six Books of a Commonweale). The Latin
version of the work followed 10 years later.
Petrus Ramus
born 1515, Cuts, Picardy, Fr.
died Aug. 26, 1572, Paris
French philosopher, logician, and
rhetorician.
Educated at Cuts and later at the
Collège de Navarre, in Paris, Ramus
became master of arts in 1536. He taught
a reformed version of Aristotelian logic
at the Collège du Mans, in Paris, and at
the Collège de l’Ave Maria, where he
worked with Audomarus Talaeus (Omer
Talon). Talaeus, under Ramus’ influence,
reformed Ciceronian rhetoric upon the
principles applied by Ramus to the
rearrangement of Aristotle’s Organon.
These innovations so provoked the
orthodox Aristotelian philosophers at
the University of Paris that they
induced Francis I in 1544 to suppress
Ramus’ works on the reformed logic and
forbid him to teach that subject.
Cardinal Charles de Lorraine used his
influence with Henry II to have the ban
against Ramus lifted (1547), and in 1551
Ramus was appointed regius professor of
philosophy and eloquence at the Collège
de France. About 1561 he was converted
to Protestantism, and the last years of
his life were marked by mounting
persecution from his academic and
ecclesiastical enemies. He was murdered
by hired assassins two days after the
outbreak of the Massacre of St.
Bartholomew’s Day.
Ramus, identifying logic with
dialectic, neglected the traditional
role that logic played as a method of
inquiry and emphasized instead the
equally traditional view that logic is
the method of disputation, its two parts
being invention, the process of
discovering proofs in support of the
thesis, and disposition, which taught
how the materials of invention should be
arranged.
Ramus’ logic had an enormous vogue in
Europe during the 16th and 17th
centuries. He was a prolific writer;
among his most celebrated works are
Dialecticae partitiones (1543),
Aristotelicae animadversiones (1543),
Dialectique (1555), and Dialecticae
libri duo (1556).
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Joachim du Bellay
born c. 1522, Liré, Fr.
died Jan. 1, 1560, Paris
French poet, leader with Pierre de
Ronsard of the literary group known as
La Pléiade. Du Bellay is the author of
the Pléiade’s manifesto, La Défense et
illustration de la langue française (The
Defence & Illustration of the French
Language).
Du Bellay was born into a noble
family of the Loire River valley, and he
studied law and the humanities in
Poitiers and Paris. He published The
Defence & Illustration of the French
Language in 1549. In it he asserted that
French is capable of producing a modern
literature equal in quality and
expressiveness to that of ancient Greece
and Rome. He argued that French writers
should look not only to Classical texts
but also to contemporary Italy for
literary models. In 1549–50 du Bellay
published his first sonnets, inspired by
the Italian poet Petrarch.
In 1553 he went with his cousin Jean
du Bellay, a prominent cardinal and
diplomat, on a mission to Rome. By this
time Joachim du Bellay had started to
write on religious themes, but his
experience of court life in the Vatican
seems to have disillusioned him. He
turned instead to meditations on the
vanished glories of ancient Rome in the
Antiquités de Rome and to melancholy
satire in his finest work, the Regrets
(both published after his return to
France in 1558).
Throughout his life du Bellay
suffered ill health and intermittent
deafness. His portraits show a withdrawn
and austere figure and reinforce the
impression of a man totally dedicated to
his art. He had a sincere affection for
his country and determined that it
should have a literature to rival that
of any other nation. He introduced new
literary forms into French, with the
first book of odes and the first of love
sonnets in the language. Abroad, he
influenced the English lyric poets of
the 16th century, and some of his work
was translated by Edmund Spenser in
Complaints . . . (1591).
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Jean Dorat
born 1508, Le Dorat, near Limoges,
Fr.
died Nov. 1, 1588, Paris
French humanist, a brilliant Hellenist,
one of the poets of the Pléiade, and
their mentor for many years.
Dorat belonged to a noble family;
after studying at the Collège de
Limoges, he became tutor to the pages of
Francis I. He tutored Jean-Antoine de
Baïf, whose father he succeeded as
director of the Collège de Coqueret.
There, besides Baïf, his pupils included
Pierre de Ronsard, Rémy Belleau, and
Pontus de Tyard. Joachim du Bellay was
added to this group by Ronsard, and
these five young poets, along with and
under the direction of Dorat, formed a
society for the reform of French
language and literature. They increased
their number to seven with the dramatist
Étienne Jodelle and named themselves La
Pléiade, in emulation of the seven Greek
poets of Alexandria. The election of
Dorat as their president proved his
personal influence, but as a writer of
French verse he is the least important
of the seven.
Dorat stimulated his students to
intensive study of Greek and Latin
poetry, while he himself wrote
incessantly in both languages. He is
said to have composed more than 15,000
Greek and Latin verses.
His influence and fame as a scholar
extended to England, Italy, and Germany.
In 1556 he was appointed professor of
Greek at the Collège Royal, a post that
he held until he retired in 1567. He
published a collection of the best of
his Greek and Latin verse in 1586.
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Jean-Antoine de
Baïf
born 1532, Venice [Italy]
died October 1589, Paris, France
most learned of the seven French
poets who constituted the group known as
La Pléiade.
Baïf received a classical education and
in 1547 went with Pierre de Ronsard to
study under Jean Dorat at the Collège de
Coqueret, Paris, where they planned,
with Joachim du Bellay, to transform
French poetry by imitating the ancients
and the Italians. To this program Baïf
contributed two collections of
Petrarchan sonnets and Epicurean lyrics,
Les Amours de Méline (1552) and L’Amour
de Francine (1555). In 1567 Le Brave, ou
Taillebras, Baïf’s lively adaptation of
Plautus’ Miles gloriosus, was played at
court and published.
Baïf—who was the natural son of
Lazare de Baïf, humanist and
diplomat—enjoyed royal favour and
received pensions and benefices from
Charles IX and Henry III. His Euvres en
rime (1573; “Works in Rhyme”) reveal
great erudition: Greek (especially
Alexandrian), Latin, neo-Latin, and
Italian models are imitated for
mythological poems, eclogues, epigrams,
and sonnets. His verse translations
include Terence’s Eunuchus and
Sophocles’ Antigone.
Baïf was a versatile, inventive poet
and experimenter who, for example,
invented and made use of a system of
phonetic spelling. With the musician
Thibault de Courville, Baïf founded a
short-lived Academy of Poetry and of
Music in order to promote certain
Platonic theories on the union of poetry
and music. His metrical inventions
included a vers baïfin, a verse of 15
syllables. His theories were exemplified
in Etrénes de poezie fransoèze en vers
mezurés (1574; “Gifts of French Poetry
in Quantitative Verse”) and in his
little songs, Chansonnettes mesurées
(1586), with music written by Jacques
Mauduit. His Mimes, enseignements et
proverbes (1576; “Mimes, Lessons, and
Proverbs”) is considered to be his most
original work.
Baïf was a personal poet whose gifts
were inferior to his genius for
invention of form and language; but he
had a talent for vivid, realistic
description, particularly in scenes of
country life and in satire.
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Rémy Belleau
born 1528, Nogent-le-Rotrou, near
Chartres, France
died March 6, 1577, Paris
Renaissance scholar and poet who
wrote highly polished portraits known as
miniatures. He was a member of the group
called La Pléiade, a literary circle
that sought to enrich French literature
by reviving classical tradition.
A contemporary of the poet Pierre de
Ronsard at the Collège de Cocqueret,
Belleau at first gained the patronage of
the Abbé Chretophle de Choiseul and
later of Charles IX and Henry III, who
made him secretary of the king’s
chamber. He took part in a campaign
against Naples in 1557 and from about
1563 lived at Joinville as tutor and
counselor to the Guises, a powerful
Catholic family. Living at the Château
de Guise inspired Belleau to write La
Bergerie (1565–72; “The Shepherd’s
Song”), a collection of pastoral odes,
sonnets, hymns, and amorous verse.
Belleau’s detailed descriptions of
nature and works of art earned him a
reputation as a miniaturist in poetry
and prompted Ronsard to characterize him
as a “painter of nature.” His other
poetic works include didactic verse; Les
Amours et nouveaux échanges des pierres
précieuses (1576), a commentary on
exotic stones and their inherent secret
virtues written in the tradition of the
medieval lapidaries; and La Reconnue
(1577; “The Rediscovered Daughter”), a
comedy in verse based on Plautus’
Casina. His erudite translations of
Anacreon’s Odes (1556) won him the
seventh seat or “star” in the
constellation of La Pléiade, a name the
group adopted in imitation of a group of
eminent Greek poets of about 250 bc.
Belleau’s collected works were edited by
A. Gouverneur and published in 1867.
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Pontus de
Tyard
born c. 1522, Bissy-sur-Fley,
Burgundy, Fr.
died Sept. 23, 1605, Bragny-sur-Saône
Burgundian poet and member of the
literary circle known as La Pléiade who
was a forthright theorist and a
popularizer of Renaissance learning for
the elite.
Tyard was seigneur (lord) of
Bissy-sur-Fley and an associate of the
Lyonese poets, especially Maurice Scève.
In 1551 he translated León Hebreo’s
Dialoghi di amore (“Dialogues of Love”),
the breviary of 16th-century philosophic
lovers. His poetry collection Erreurs
amoureuses (1549; “Mistakes in Love”),
which include one of the first French
sonnet sequences, also revived the
sestina in France. The Erreurs was
augmented in successive editions, as was
his important prose work, Discours
philosophiques (“Philosophical
Discourses”), a Neoplatonic
encyclopaedia finally completed in 1587.
Its first treatise, the Solitaire
premier (1552), complements Joachim du
Bellay’s Défense et illustration de la
langue française (1549), which expounded
the theories on poetic diction and
language reform of La Pléiade. In 1578
Tyard was given the bishopric of
Chalon-sur-Saône, from which he retired
in 1594.
In his enthusiasm for enriching the
French language and adapting classical
imagery and genre, Tyard shared the
contempt for the masses felt by his
associates. In the Solitaire premier he
praised those poets who decorated their
verse so richly with the ornaments of
antiquity that the ignorant could not
comprehend them. He remarked that the
purpose of the poet is not to be
understood by nor to lower himself to
accommodate a popular audience still
fond of medieval genres. It was this
hauteur and this sense of mission
without contact beyond the protective
society of the court that caused La
Pléiade to shine so briefly and to
become within a generation as dead as
the Greek poets from whom they took
their name.
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Jean Bodin
born 1530, Angers, France
died June 1596, Laon
French political philosopher whose
exposition of the principles of stable
government was widely influential in
Europe at a time when medieval systems
were giving way to centralized states.
He is widely credited with introducing
the concept of sovereignty into legal
and political thought.
In 1551 Bodin went to the University
of Toulouse to study civil law. He
remained there as a student and later as
a teacher until 1561, when he abandoned
the teaching of law for its practice and
returned to Paris as avocat du roi
(French: “king’s advocate”) just as the
civil wars between Roman Catholics and
Huguenots were beginning. In 1571 he
entered the household of the king’s
brother, François, duc d’Alençon, as
master of requests and councillor. He
appeared only once on the public scene,
as deputy of the third estate for
Vermandois at the Estates-General of
Blois in 1576. His uninterested conduct
on that occasion lost him royal favour.
He opposed the projected resumption of
war on the Huguenots in favour of
negotiation, and he also opposed the
suggested alienation, or sale, of royal
domains by Henry III as damaging to the
monarchy. When the duc d’Alençon died in
1583, Bodin retired to Laon as
procurateur to the presidial court. He
remained there until his death from the
plague 13 years later.
Bodin’s principal writing, The Six
Bookes of a Commonweale (1576), won him
immediate fame and was influential in
western Europe into the 17th century.
The bitter experience of civil war and
its attendant anarchy in France had
turned Bodin’s attention to the problem
of how to secure order and authority.
Bodin thought that the secret lay in
recognition of the sovereignty of the
state and argued that the distinctive
mark of the state is supreme power. This
power is unique; absolute, in that no
limits of time or competence can be
placed upon it; and self-subsisting, in
that it does not depend for its validity
on the consent of the subject. Bodin
assumed that governments command by
divine right because government is
instituted by providence for the
well-being of humanity. Government
consists essentially of the power to
command, as expressed in the making of
laws. In a well-ordered state, this
power is exercised subject to the
principles of divine and natural law; in
other words, the Ten Commandments are
enforced, and certain fundamental
rights, chiefly liberty and property,
are extended to those governed. But
should these conditions be violated, the
sovereign still commands and may not be
resisted by his subjects, whose whole
duty is obedience to their ruler. Bodin
distinguished only three types of
political systems—monarchy, aristocracy,
and democracy—according to whether
sovereign power rests in one person, in
a minority, or in a majority. Bodin
himself preferred a monarchy that was
kept informed of the peoples’ needs by a
parliament or representative assembly.
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Major authors and influences
Poetry
The art of Clément Marot, at least at the beginning
of his career, took its inspiration and the forms to
express it from the Grands Rhétoriqueurs, as in the
allegorical poem “Le Temple de Cupidon” (“The Temple
of Cupid”). But aspects of humanism in his culture,
life at court (a protégé of Marguerite de Navarre
throughout his life, he succeeded his father as
valet de chambre to Francis I in 1527), and, above
all, the events of his day gave his works a new
dimension. Practitioner of a wide range of
forms—including the medieval fixed forms of the
ballade and the rondeau, chansons, blasons (poems
employing descriptive details to praise or to
satirize), and elegies—Marot preferred the epistle
for its freedom of style and the epigram for its
vivacity. With the epistle he reached the summit of
the highly subtle art by which he defined himself, a
poet of the court and also a Protestant, aspiring to
a pure and simple happiness of true religious faith.
He wrote his allegorical satire on justice, L’Enfer
(“Hell”), in 1526 after his brief imprisonment on
charges of violating Lenten regulations, and he fled
into exile in 1534 to avoid persecution after the
Affaire des Placards (in which placards attacking
the Mass appeared in several cities and on the
king’s bedchamber door). His return to Paris in 1537
made him no more prudent; he continued his
translations of the Psalms, a brilliant literary
achievement, publishing the first collection in
1539. Marot’s translation, continued by the
Calvinist theologian Theodore Beza, became the
Huguenot psalter.
While Marot was translating the Psalms, other
poets were engaged with a different kind of
mysticism. In Lyon an important group including
Maurice Scève, Pernette du Guillet, and Louise Labé
were writing Neoplatonist and Petrarchan love
poetry, highly stylized in form, in which desire for
an earthly Beauty inflames the poet with an
inspirational frenzy that elevates his creative
powers and draws him toward the spiritual Beauty,
Truth, and Knowledge that she mirrors. In her Euvres
(1555; Louise Labé’s Complete Works), Labé presents
a collection of elegies, sonnets, and prose
reversing the usual gender perspective and summoning
other women to follow her example in search of
poetic fame. The love poetry of the Pléiade is in
similar mode, as reflected in the sonnet cycles of
Joachim du Bellay (L’Olive, 1549) and
Pierre de
Ronsard (from Les
Amours [1552] to the Sonnets pour Hélène [1578,
1584, 1587; Eng. trans. Sonnets pour Hélène]) and in
the metrical experiments of Baïf. It is more varied
in its inspirations and in its technique;
Ronsard,
for example, uses a wide range of Classical models
to write poems in different registers to different
mistress-figures, and he often brings more sensuous
variations to the stylized motifs. There is also a
conscious foregrounding of a more worldly dimension,
especially in
Ronsard. The desire for fame, the
recognition of one’s creative genius by
contemporaries and posterity, merges with the
aspiration to possess the mistress and the divine
Truth she represents.
The themes and modes of Pléiade poetry, however,
ranged wider than love, even the love that presides
over the life of the entire cosmos, as sung by
Jacques Peletier in L’Amour des amours (1555; “The
Love of Loves”).
Ronsard’s poetic debut, the first
four books of his Odes (1550), mixed politics and
the pastoral, celebrating in Pindaric mode the great
men and women of Henry II’s court—both politicians
and poets—and turning to
Horace and Anacreon for
models to evoke the natural beauties of the
landscape of a peaceful and idyllic France. Du
Bellay’s sonnet collection, Les Regrets (1558),
combines satire and pastoral to depict the
corruption of society in Rome, to which diplomatic
duties had exiled him, and to express his yearning
for the beauty and peace of his native Anjou. A
“scientific” and philosophical poetry appeared,
taking many forms—not least the hymn, reinvented by
Ronsard (Les Hymnes, 1555–56). In drama,
Étienne
Jodelle revived the themes and forms of Classical
tragedy. Whatever form inspiration took—love,
nature, knowledge—Art dominated them all. Refining
the forms elaborated by fellow-craftsmen from the
high ages of human art, the poet demonstrated his
ability to match the creative powers that move the
cosmos.
When the civil wars broke out in 1562, the
Pléiade was on the side of the great Catholic
families who occupied the throne.
Ronsard eloquently
defended the cause of Catholic reform against the
Protestant Reformers and their aristocratic allies
in his Discours (1562–63). Not all the members of
the Pléiade, however, were as absolute against the
Protestant enemy, especially as the century advanced
and the atrocities increased. In the massacre that
began on St. Bartholomew’s Day (August 24/25, 1572),
some 3,000 Huguenots in Paris alone were murdered by
Catholics on the rampage. The plays of Robert
Garnier frequently took subjects of biblical as well
as humanist inspiration that reflected the pain of
all those caught in the violence of the times (Les
Juifves, 1583).
The warrior-poet of Protestantism,
Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné, represented the perfect
synthesis of humanism and Calvinism. He studied to
perfection the three traditional languages, Latin,
Greek, and Hebrew; and he was familiar with modern
languages, especially Italian. In his youth, between
1571 and 1573, he wrote love poetry modeled on
Petrarch. His master poem, Les Tragiques, composed
for the most part at the end of the century but not
published until 1616, is a visionary, apocalyptic
account of the civil conflict from the perspective
of the Protestant Reformers.
Clément Marot
born 1496?, Cahors, Fr.
died September 1544, Turin, Savoy [now
in Italy]
one of the greatest poets of the
French Renaissance, whose use of the
forms and imagery of Latin poetry had
marked influence on the style of his
successors. His father, Jean, was a poet
and held a post at the court of Anne de
Bretagne and later served Francis I.
In 1514 Marot became page to Nicolas de
Neufville, seigneur de Villeroi,
secretary to the king. Wishing to follow
in his father’s footsteps by obtaining a
place as court poet, he entered the
service of Margaret of Angoulême, sister
of Francis I and later queen of Navarre.
On his father’s death, he became valet
de chambre to Francis I, a post he held,
except for his years of exile (1534–36),
until 1542.
Marot was arrested in 1526 for
defying Lenten abstinence regulations,
behaviour that put him under suspicion
of being a Lutheran. A short
imprisonment inspired some of his
best-known works, especially “L’Enfer”
(“The Inferno”), an allegorical satire
on justice, and an epistle to his friend
Lyon Jamet (1526). In 1527 he was again
imprisoned, this time for attacking a
prison guard and freeing a prisoner; an
epistle, addressed to the king and
begging for his deliverance, won his
release. In 1531 Marot was again
arrested for eating meat during Lent,
but this time he avoided imprisonment.
By 1530, in any event, his fame had
become firmly established, and his many
poems seem to have enjoyed a wide
circulation.
After the Affaire des Placards, when
placards attacking the Mass were posted
in the major cities and on the door of
the king’s bedchamber (1534), Marot fled
to Navarre, where he was protected by
Margaret. When persecution of the
Protestants increased, he again fled,
this time to the court of Renée de
France in Ferrara, Italy. Marot
subsequently returned to Paris in 1537
after Francis I had stopped the
persecutions.
When he was not engaged in writing
the official poems that his duties at
the French court compelled him to write,
Marot spent most of his time translating
the Psalms; a first edition of some of
these appeared in 1539, the Trente
Pseaulmes de Davíd in 1542. These
translations were notable for their
sober and solemn musicality. Their
condemnation by the Sorbonne caused
Marot to go into exile again. But they
were greatly admired by John Calvin, who
gave Marot sanctuary in Geneva. Marot’s
behaviour became unacceptable in that
strict and sober city, however, and he
was forced to return to Italy.
Although Marot’s early poems were
composed entirely in the style of the
late medieval poets known as
rhétoriqueurs, he soon abandoned the
established genres of that school as
well as its conceits, its didactic use
of allegory, and its complicated
versification. Instead, his knowledge of
the Latin classics and his contacts with
Italian literary forms enabled him to
learn to imitate the styles and themes
of antiquity. He introduced the elegy,
the eclogue, the epigram, the
epithalamium (nuptial poem), and the
one-stanza Italian satiric strambotto
(French estrabot) into French poetry,
and he was one of the first French poets
to attempt the Petrarchan sonnet form.
His epigrams and epistolary poems
(épîtres), in particular, display those
qualities of wit, intellectual
refinement, and sincerity and
naturalness that were to characterize
the French use of these genres for the
next two centuries. He was also a master
of the chant royal and infused some
Horatian wit into the old forms of the
ballade and the rondeau.
Marot attempted to create new or to
improve existing lyrical forms,
composing chansons and cantiques and
originating the blason (1536), a satiric
verse describing, as a rule, some aspect
of the female body in minute detail. The
blason found immediate popularity and
was so widely imitated that it was
possible to publish an anthology in
1555. Marot translated Catullus, Virgil,
and Ovid and edited the works of
François Villon and the Roman de la
rose. He added grace, elegance, and
personal warmth to French light verse.
Much of his achievement was temporarily
eclipsed by La Pléiade, a group of poets
who dominated the literary scene for a
period shortly after his death. But the
influence of Marot was evident in
England among the Elizabethans, notably
Edmund Spenser, and was revived in
France in the 17th century.
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Maurice Scève
born c. 1501, Lyon, France
died 1560/64?, Lyon
French poet who was considered great
in his own day, then long neglected.
Reinstated by 20th-century critics and
poets, chiefly for his poem cycle,
Délie, Scève has often been described as
the leader of the Lyonese school of
writers (including Pernette du Guillet
and Louise Labé), although there is no
evidence of an organized school. Lyon,
on the trade route between northern and
southern Europe, was a centre of
humanism, and Scève first achieved fame
in 1533 by his “discovery” of the tomb
of Petrarch’s Laura at Avignon and again
in 1536 with his Blason du sourcil
(“Description of an Eyebrow”), adjudged
the best entry in a poetic competition
held at Ferrara. This poem was later
published in the anthology Les Blasons
du corps féminin (“Descriptions of the
Feminine Body”), often reprinted between
1537 and 1550.
Scève’s Délie, objet de plus haute
vertu (1544; “Délie, Object of Highest
Virtue”) is a poetic cycle of 449 highly
organized decasyllabic 10-line stanzas
(dizains), rich in imagery and Platonic
and Petrarchan in theme and style.
“Délie” (an anagram of “L’Idée,” “The
Idea”), long thought to be an imaginary
ideal, may have been Pernette du
Guillet, whose death seems to have
partly inspired Scève’s Saulsaye,
églogue de la vie solitaire (1547;
“Willow Row, an Eclogue on the Solitary
Life”), written in retirement in the
country.
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Louise Labé
born c. 1524, Lyon, France
died 1566, Parcieux-en-Dombes
French poet, the daughter of a rope
maker (cordier).
Labé was a member of the 16th-century
Lyon school of humanist poets dominated
by Maurice Scève. Her wit, charm,
accomplishments, and the freedom she
enjoyed provoked unverifiable legends,
such as those claiming she rode to war,
was taken to dressing like a man, and
was a cultured courtesan. In 1555 she
published a book of love sonnets, which
are remarkable for their emotional
intensity and their stylistic simplicity
and which probably relate to her passion
for the poet Olivier de Magny. The same
volume also contained a prose dialogue,
Débat de Folie et d’Amour (“Debate of
Love and Folly”).
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Pierre de
Ronsard
"Poems"
Matisse’s Amours:
Illustrations of Pierre de Ronsard’s
Love Poems
born , Sept. 11, 1524, La
Possonnière, near Couture, Fr.
died Dec. 27, 1585, Saint-Cosme, near
Tours
poet, chief among the French Renaissance
group of poets known as La Pléiade.
Ronsard was a younger son of a noble
family of the county of Vendôme. He
entered the service of the royal family
as a page in 1536 and accompanied
Princess Madeleine to Edinburgh after
her marriage to James V of Scotland. On
his return to France two years later, a
court appointment or a military or
diplomatic career seemed to be open
before him, and in 1540 he accompanied
the diplomat Lazare de Baïf on a mission
to an international conference at
Haguenau in Alsace. An illness
contracted on this expedition left him
partially deaf, however, and his
ambitions were deflected to scholarship
and literature. For someone in his
position, the church provided the only
future, and he accordingly took minor
orders, which entitled him to hold
ecclesiastical benefices, though he was
never an ordained priest. A period of
enthusiastic study of the classics
followed his convalescence; during this
time he learned Greek from the brilliant
tutor Jean Dorat, read all the Greek and
Latin poetry then known, and gained some
familiarity with Italian poetry. With a
group of fellow students he formed a
literary school that came to be called
La Pléiade, in emulation of the seven
ancient Greek poets of Alexandria: its
aim was to produce French poetry that
would stand comparison with the verse of
classical antiquity.
The title of his first collection of
poems, Odes (4 books, 1550), emphasizes
that he was attempting a French
counterpart to the odes of the ancient
Roman poet Horace. In Les Amours (1552)
he also proved his skill as an exponent
of the Italian canzoniere, animating the
compliments to his beloved, entreaties,
and lamentations traditional to this
poetic form by the vehemence of his
manner and the wealth of his imagery.
Always responsive to new literary
influences, he found fresh inspiration
in the recently discovered verse of the
Greek poet Anacreon (6th century bc).
The more playful touch encouraged by
this model is to be felt in the Bocage
(“Grove”) of poetry of 1554 and in the
Meslanges (“Miscellany”) of that year,
which contain some of his most exquisite
nature poems, and in the Continuation
des amours and Nouvelles Continuations,
addressed to a country girl, Marie. In
1555 he began to write a series of long
poems, such as the “Hymne du Ciel”
(“Hymn of the Sky”), celebrating natural
phenomena, abstract ideas like death or
justice, or gods and heroes of
antiquity; these poems, published as
Hymnes (following the 3rd-century-bc
Greek poet Callimachus, who had inspired
them), contain passages of stirring
eloquence and vivid description, though
few of them can hold the modern reader’s
interest from beginning to end.
Reminiscences of his boyhood inspired
other poems, such as his “Complainte
contre fortune,” published in the second
book of the Meslanges (1559), which
contains a haunting description of his
solitary wanderings as a child in the
woods and the discovery of his poetic
vocation. This poem is also notable for
a celebrated denunciation of the
colonization of the New World, whose
people he imagined to be noble savages
living in an unspoiled state of nature
comparable to his idealized memories of
childhood.
The outbreak of the religious wars
found him committed to an extreme
royalist and Catholic position, and he
drew upon himself the hostility of the
Protestants. To this period belong the
Discours des misères de ce temps (1562;
“Discourse on the Miseries of These
Times”) and other Discours attacking his
opponents, whom he dismissed as traitors
and hypocrites with ever-increasing
bitterness. Yet he also wrote much court
poetry during this period, encouraged by
the young king Charles IX, a sincere
admirer, and, on the king’s marriage to
Elizabeth of Austria in 1571, he was
commissioned to compose verses and plan
the scheme of decorations for the state
entry through the city of Paris. If he
was by now in some sense the poet
laureate of France, he made slow
progress with La Franciade, which he
intended to be the national epic; this
somewhat halfhearted imitation of
Virgil’s great Latin epic, the Aeneid,
was abandoned after the death of Charles
IX, the four completed books being
published in 1572. After the accession
of Henry III, who did not favour Ronsard
so much, he lived in semi-retirement,
though his creativity was undiminished.
The collected edition of his works
published in 1578 included some
remarkable new works, among them the
so-called “Elegy Against the Woodcutters
of Gâtine” (“Contre les bucherons de la
forêt de Gastine”), lamenting the
destruction of the woods near his old
home; a sequel to Les Amours de Marie;
and the Sonnets pour Hélène. In the
latter, which is now perhaps the most
famous of his collections, the veteran
poet demonstrates his power to revivify
the stylized patterns of courtly love
poetry. Even in his last illness,
Ronsard still wrote verse that is
sophisticated in form and rich with
classical allusions. His posthumous
collection, Les Derniers Vers (“The
Final Verses”), poignantly expresses the
anguish of the incurable invalid in
nights spent alone in pain, longing for
sleep, watching for the dawn, and
praying for death.
Ronsard perfected the 12-syllable, or
alexandrine, line of French verse,
hitherto despised as too long and
pedestrian, and established it as the
classic medium for scathing satire,
elegiac tenderness, and tragic passion.
During his lifetime he was recognized in
France as the prince of poets and a
figure of national significance. This
prominence, scarcely paralleled until
Victor Hugo in the 19th century, faded
into relative neglect in the 17th and
18th centuries; but his reputation was
reinstated by the critic C.-A.
Sainte-Beuve, and it has remained
secure.
To the modern reader Ronsard is
perhaps most appealing when celebrating
his native countryside, reflecting on
the brevity of youth and beauty, or
voicing the various states of unrequited
love, though he is also effective when
identifying himself imaginatively with
some classical mythological character
and when expressing sentiments of fiery
patriotism or deep humanity. He was a
master of lyric themes and forms, and
his poetry remains attractive to
composers; some of his odes, such as
“Mignonne, allons voir si la rose . . .
,” were set to music repeatedly and have
become as familiar to the general public
in France as folk songs.
Annette Elizabeth Armstrong
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Jacques Peletier
born 1517, Le Mans, France
died 1582, Paris
Jacques Pelletier du Mans, also
spelled Peletier, (1517–1582) was a
humanist, poet and mathematician of the
French Renaissance.
Born at Le Mans into a bourgeois
family, he studied at the Collège de
Navarre (in Paris) where his brother
Jean was a professor of mathematics and
philosophy. He subsequently studied law
and medicine, frequented the literary
circle around Marguerite of Navarre and
from 1541-43 was secretary to René du
Bellay. In 1541 he published the first
French translation of Horace's Ars
poetica and during this period he also
published numerous scientific and
mathematical treatises.
In 1547 he pronounced a funeral
oration for Henry VIII of England and
published his first poems "Œuvres
poétiques", which included translations
from the first two cantos of Homer's
Odyssey and the first book of Virgil's
Georgics, twelve Petrarchian sonnets,
three Horacian odes and a Martial-like
epigram; this poetry collection also
included the first published poems of
Joachim Du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard
(Ronsard would include Jacques Peletier
into his list of revolutionary
contemporary poets "La Pléiade"). He
then began to frequent a humanist circle
around Théodore de Bèze, Jean Martin,
Denis Sauvage.
Jacques Pelletier tried to reform
French spelling (which in the
Renaissance had, through a misguided
attempt to model French words on their
Latin roots, acquired many
inconsistencies (see Middle French)) in
a treatise (1550) advocating a
phonetic-based spelling using new
typographic signs which Pelletier would
continue to use in all his published
works (because of this system,
"Peletier" is consistently spelled with
one "l").
After years spent in Bordeaux,
Poitiers, Piedmont (where Peletier may
have been the tutor of the son of
Maréchal de Brissac) and Lyon (where he
frequented the poets and humanists
Maurice Scève, Louise Labé, Olivier de
Magny and Pontus de Tyard). In 1555 he
published a manual of poetic
composition, "Art poétique français", a
Latin oration calling for peace from
Henry II of France and emperor Charles V
and a new collection of poetry, L'Amour
des amours (consisting of a sonnet cycle
and a series of encyclopedic poems
describing meteors, planets and the
heavens) which would influence poets
Guillaume du Bartas and Jean-Antoine de
Baïf.
His last years were spent in travels
(Savoy, Germany, Switzerland, maybe
Italy, and various regions in France)
and in publishing numerous works in
Latin on algebra, geometry and
mathematics, medicine (a refutation of
Galen, a work on the Plague). In 1572 he
was briefly director of the College of
Aquitaine (Bordeaux), but, bored by the
position, he resigned. During this
period he was friends with Michel de
Montaigne and Pierre de Brach. In 1579
he returned to Paris and was named
director of the College of Le Mans. A
final collection of poetry "Louanges"
was published in 1581.
Pelletier died at Paris in July or
August 1582.
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Etienne
Jodelle
born 1532, Paris, France
died July 1573, Paris
French dramatist and poet, one of the
seven members of the literary circle
known as La Pléiade, who applied the
aesthetic principles of the group to
drama.
Jodelle aimed at creating a classical
drama that in every respect would be
different from the moralities and
mysteries then occupying the French
stage; he succeeded in producing the
first modern French tragedy and comedy.
These plays have the reputation of being
unactable and unreadable, but they set a
new example that prepared the ground for
the great Neoclassical tragedians
Corneille and Racine. His first play,
Cléopâtre captive, a tragedy in verse,
was presented before the court at Paris
in 1553. The cast included his friends
Rémy Belleau and Jean de La Péruse.
Jodelle wrote two other plays, Eugène
(1552), a comedy, and Didon se
sacrifiant, another verse tragedy, based
on Virgil’s account of Dido.
In the prologue to Eugéne Jodelle
explained his theory of comedy. It must
deal with people of low or middle class
because, he argued, among them can be
found the crudity and ignorance that are
the stuff of comedy. Tragedy, on the
other hand, must have as its characters
kings or other nobility, like the
audiences for which it is written,
because the populace would not
understand the classical allusions of
tragedy.
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Robert
Garnier
born c. 1545, La Ferté Bernard,
France
died September 20, 1590, Le Mans
outstanding French tragic dramatist of
his time.
While a law student at Toulouse,
Garnier won two prizes in the jeux
floraux, or floral games (an annual
poetry contest held by the Académié des
Jeux Floraux). He published his first
collection of lyrical pieces (now lost),
Plaintes Amoureuses de Robert Garnier,
in 1565. After practice at the Parisian
bar he became conseiller du roi in his
native district and later lieutenant-général
criminel.
Garnier’s early plays—Porcie (1568),
Hippolyte (1573), and Cornélie (1574)—
are in the style of the Senecan school.
His next group of tragedies—Marc-Antoine
(1578), La Troade (1579), and Antigone
(1580)—show an advance in technique
beyond the plays of Étienne Jodelle,
Jacques Grévin, and his own early work,
since the rhetoric is accompanied by
some action.
In 1582 and 1583 he produced his two
masterpieces, Bradamante and Les Juifves.
In Bradamante, the first important
French tragicomedy, which alone of his
plays has no chorus, he turned from
Senecan models and sought his subject in
Ludovico Ariosto. The romantic story
becomes an effective drama in Garnier’s
hands. Although the lovers, Bradamante
and Roger, never meet on the stage, the
conflict in the mind of Roger supplies a
genuine dramatic interest. Les Juifves,
Garnier’s second great work, is the
story of the barbarous vengeance of
Nebuchadnezzar on King Zedekiah and his
children. This tragedy, almost entirely
elegiac in conception, is unified by the
personality of the prophet.
Garnier was a Roman Catholic and a
patriot: he used his tragedies to convey
moral and religious arguments to his
contemporaries, who were then suffering
in the Wars of Religion. His fine verse
reflects the influence of his friend
Pierre de Ronsard. His plays, which
contain many affecting emotional scenes,
were performed to the end of the 16th
century.
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Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné
born Feb. 8, 1552, Pons, Fr.
died April 29, 1630, Geneva
major late 16th-century poet,
renowned Huguenot captain, polemicist,
and historian of his own times. After
studies in Paris, Orléans, Geneva, and
Lyon, he joined the Huguenot forces and
served throughout the Wars of Religion
on the battlefield and in the council
chamber. He was écuyer (“master of
horse”) to Henry of Navarre. After
Henry’s accession to the French throne
as Henry IV (1589) and his abjuration of
Protestantism, Aubigné withdrew to his
estates in Poitou. Under the regency of
Marie de Médicis, his intransigence
estranged him from his Huguenot
brethren. Proscribed in 1620, he took
refuge in Geneva, where he remained
until his death. His closing years were
clouded by the disreputable conduct of
his son Constant—father of Madame de
Maintenon, second and secret wife of
Louis XIV.
Among Aubigné’s prose works, the
Confession catholique du sieur de Sancy,
first published in 1660, is a parody,
ironically dedicated to Cardinal
Duperron, of the tortuous explanations
offered by Protestants who followed
Henry IV’s example of abjuration. His
comment on life and manners ranges more
widely in the Adventures du baron de
Faeneste (1617), in which the Gascon
Faeneste represents attachment to
outward appearances (le paraître) while
honest squire Énay, embodying the
principle of true being (l’être), tries
to clear Faeneste’s mind of cant. The
Histoire universelle deals with the
period from 1553 to 1602, with an
appendix to cover the death of Henry IV
(1610); an unfinished supplement was
meant to bring the story up to 1622. The
chief interest of the Histoire lies in
its eyewitness accounts and in the
liveliness of Aubigné’s writing.
His major poem in seven cantos, the
Tragiques, begun in 1577 (published
1616), celebrates the justice of God,
who on the Day of Doom will gloriously
avenge his slaughtered saints. The
subject matter, the sectarian bias, and
the uneven composition and expression
are offset by many passages of great
poetic power, often lyrical in their
Biblical language and noble in the
despairing intensity of their invective.
The scope of the design confers epic
grandeur on the work. Modern research on
Baroque literature has awakened interest
in Aubigné’s youthful love poetry,
collected in the Printemps (1570–73,
unpublished). It remained in manuscript
until 1874. In these poems the stock
characters and phraseology, modelled on
Petrarch, are transmuted into a highly
personal style, full of tragic
resonances, by Aubigné’s characteristic
vehemence of passion and force of
imagination.
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Prose
The production of poetry in the 16th century did not
outdo the other genres in quantity. Readers turned
above all to works in prose, for accounts of
voyages, lives of saints, and collections of diverse
leçons or lectures (readings). Prose was slow in
freeing itself from the heavy yoke thrown over it by
the medieval humanists. But with Jean Lemaire de
Belges prose became eloquent, and with
François
Rabelais it became a prodigious domain of
experimentation.
Rabelais’s writing found some of its most
appreciative readers and critics in the 20th
century, not least the great Russian critic Mikhail
Bakhtin, who celebrated the revolutionary power of
Rabelais’s “carnivalesque” discourse. Humanism
rightfully claims Pantagruel (1532; Eng. trans.
Pantagruel) and Gargantua (1534; Eng. trans.
Gargantua), with their celebrated giants, feasting,
drinking, and discovering and proclaiming the new
and better ways of learning, of the conduct of war
and peace, and of the true religion, which, for
Rabelais resided in individual prayer, charity, and
the virtuous life. He called
Erasmus his spiritual
father and befriended numerous Protestants. But
uniquely, this voice of Evangelical humanism speaks
through the thundering roll of a laughter that
spares no one and nothing, keeping its best aim for
the worst, most benighted, and most grotesque
exponents of the medieval theology, scholarship,
medicine, and law that sought to stifle the emerging
individual.
Rabelais’s last three books, published
long after the first two, continue the search for
the good life: Le Tiers Livre (“The Third Book”) in
1546, Le Quart Livre (“The Fourth Book”) in 1552,
and Le Cinquième Livre (“The Fifth Book”) in 1564
(of questionable authenticity); these can be found
in English translation in The Works of
François
Rabelais (1970). The terror of cuckoldry experienced
by Pantagruel’s all-too-human companion, Panurge,
and the churchmen’s theological nitpicking over
doctrinal irrelevancies and absurdities—these are so
many examples of what Rabelais considered the absurd
but tragic way men wasted in idle discourse time
that could be spent in the search for sound
religion, good companionship, and the intoxicating
wine of the new life.
Francois
Rabelais
"Gargantua and Pantagruel"
Illustrations by Gustave Dore
Rabelais dedicated his Tiers Livre to Marguerite
de Navarre, patron of Evangelical humanist reform
and author of religious poetry. She is best known in
the modern era, however, for her Heptaméron
(published posthumously, 1558–59; The Heptameron),
modeled on
Boccaccio’s
Decameron. Marguerite’s
collection of tales held together in a narrative
frame is one of the major landmarks in the creation
of the modern French realist novel. The games of
courtly love are here played in the context of court
life while more ribald games are played by serving
men, maids, and monks, and the players’ motives and
behaviour are commented on by the courtiers, men and
women, who form the audience for the tales.
Marguerite’s language is more discreet than that of
Rabelais, but there is the same mixture of styles
and tones, seriousness and bawdy, and the same
awareness of the resources of both spirit and body.
With her fellow novelist Hélisenne de Crenne (Les
Angoysses Douloureuses qui procèdent d’amours [1538;
The Torments of Love]), Marguerite is one of the few
writers to mark the making of the new culture with a
distinctive female sensibility and voice.
In the closing years of the century,
Michel de
Montaigne continued his predecessors’ exploration of
the newly discovered realms of body and mind and of
the delights of humanist learning and language, but
he employed a very different tone and form. Engaged
in his youth in politics, war, and diplomacy
alongside his peers,
Montaigne largely withdrew from
public life in 1570 and thereafter spent much of his
time in his library, writing the works that
established him as the founder of the tradition of
self-exploration and self-writing as well as an
emblem of modern liberal individualism. The first
two volumes of his
"The Essays"
were published in
1580. A third was added in 1588, along with an
enlarged edition of the first two. When he died in
1592, he left his own copy of the
Essays, with
numerous revisions written in his own hand. This
revised text was published in 1595. The earliest
essais were to a large degree developments,
increasingly elaborate, on the themes suggested by
his extensive readings in ancient authors,
particularly Plutarch’s Lives. But as he wrote,
Montaigne became more and more his own subject,
exploring through introspection his own
experience—not just as his own but also as the
mirror of the universal human condition, a life
subject to death and defined by the relative
circumstance of historical place, moment, and
society in which it is situated. Remembering,
analyzing, imagining, considering the operations of
his intellectual faculties and his bodily functions,
observing himself sick, well, aging,
Montaigne is
especially concerned with the concept of change. He
is the writer who perhaps best represents the 16th
century’s achievement in placing the individual,
body and soul, in the flow of history. The form he
conceived to carry the results of his meditations is
perfectly adapted to this purpose. Free in form, the
sentences and paragraphs of the essai follow
seamlessly the movement of ideas, linked by their
author’s own associations and changing moods. The
language is clear, simple, and measured, giving a
calculated but effortless appearance of spontaneity,
engaging readers in a conversation that takes them
gently into the paths of self-discovery.
The legacy to posterity of this most moderate and
self-moderating of thinkers is a double one.
Montaigne’s invention and celebration of the
individual subject also contributes to the
antiauthoritarian direction of Western thought. In
the 17th century he was anathematized by
Blaise
Pascal for his “foolish” project to paint himself,
which the Jansenist saw as a challenge to the
religious values of self-abnegation and submission.
In the 18th century
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
acknowledged the influence of
Montaigne on his Les
Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1782; The Reveries
of the Solitary Walker), celebrating radical
individualism. No Western proponent of absolute
authority or order would be immune to the challenge
posed by the humanist’s discovery of the central
place of change in the affairs of men or by his
unswerving advocacy of Pyrrhonism, the skeptical
mind-set opposed to all dogmas and dismissive of all
claims by the human mind to possess absolute truth.
Corrosive and cleansing,
Montaigne’s skepticism
cleared the way for the scientific rationalism of
René Descartes and the Enlightenment.
Daniel Ménager
Jennifer Birkett
Francois
Rabelais
"Gargantua and Pantagruel"
BOOK I,
BOOK II,
BOOK III,
BOOK IV,
BOOK V
Illustrations by Gustave Dore
born c. 1494, Poitou, France
died probably April 9, 1553, Paris
pseudonym Alcofribas NasierFrench writer and priest who for
his contemporaries wasan eminent physician and humanist and
for posterity is the author of the comic masterpiece
Gargantua and Pantagruel . The four novels composing
this work are outstanding for their rich use of Renaissance
French and for their comedy, which ranges from gross
burlesque to profound satire. They exploit popular legends,
farces, and romances, as well as classical and Italian
material, but were written primarily for a court public and
a learned one. The adjective Rabelaisian applied to
scatological humour is misleading; Rabelais used scatology
aesthetically, not gratuitously, for comic condemnation. His
creative exuberance, colourful and wide-ranging vocabulary,
and literary variety continue to ensure his popularity.
Life.
Details of Rabelais's life are sparse and difficult to
interpret. He was the son of Antoine Rabelais, a rich
Touraine landowner and a prominent lawyer who deputized for
the lieutenant-général of Poitou in 1527. After
apparentlystudying law, Rabelais became a Franciscan novice
at La Baumette (1510?) and later moved to the Puy-Saint-Martin
convent at Fontenay-le-Comte in Poitou. By 1521 (perhaps
earlier) he had taken holy orders.
Rabelais early acquired a reputation for profound humanist
learning among his contemporaries, but the elements of
religious satire and scatological humour in his comic novels
eventually left him open to persecution. He depended
throughout his life on powerful political figures (Guillaume
du Bellay, Margaret of Navarre) and on high-ranking liberal
ecclesiastics (Cardinal Jean du Bellay, Bishop Geoffroy
d'Estissac, Cardinal Odet de Chatillon) for protection in
thosedangerous and intolerant times in France.
Rabelais was closely associated with Pierre Amy, a liberal
Franciscan humanist of international repute. In 1524 the
Greek books of both scholars were temporarily confiscated by
superiors of their convent, because Greek was suspect to
hyperorthodox Roman Catholics as a “heretical” language that
opened up the original New Testament to study. Rabelais then
obtained a temporary dispensation from Pope Clement VII and
was removed to the Benedictine houseof Saint-Pierre-de-Maillezais,
the prior of which was his bishop, Geoffroy d'Estissac. He
never liked his new order, however, and he later satirized
the Benedictines, although he passed lightly over Franciscan
shortcomings.
Rabelais studied medicine, probably under the aegis of the
Benedictines in their Hôtel Saint-Denis in Paris. In 1530 he
broke his vows and left the Benedictines to study medicine
at the University of Montpellier, probably with the support
of his patron, Geoffroy d'Estissac. Graduating within weeks,
he lectured on the works of distinguished ancient Greek
physicians and published his own editions of Hippocrates'
Aphorisms and Galen's Ars parva (“The Art of Raising
Children”) in 1532. As a doctor he placed great reliance on
classical authority, siding with the Platonic school of
Hippocrates but also following Galen and Avicenna. During
this period an unknown widow bore him two children (François
and Junie), who were given their father's name and were
legitimated by Pope Paul IV in 1540.
After practicing medicine briefly in Narbonne, Rabelais was
appointed physician to the hospital of Lyon, the Hôtel-Dieu,
in 1532. In the same year, he edited the medical letters of
Giovanni Manardi, a contemporary Italian physician. It was
during this period that he discovered his true talent. Fired
by the success of an anonymous popular chapbook, Les Grandes
et inestimables cronicques du grant et énorme géant
Gargantua, he published his first novel, Les horribles et
épouvantables faits et prouesses du très renommé Pantagruel,
roy des Dipsodes (1532; “The Horrible and Terrifying Deeds
and Words of the Renowned Pantagruel, King of the Dipsodes”),
under the pseudonym Alcofribas Nasier (an obvious anagram of
his real name). Pantagruel is slighter in length and
intellectual depth than his later novels,but nothing of this
quality had been seen before in French in any similar genre.
Rabelais displayed his delight in words, his profound sense
of the comedy of language itself, his mastery of comic
situation, monologue, dialogue, and action,and his genius as
a storyteller who was able to create a worldof fantasy out
of words alone. Within the framework of a mock-heroic,
chivalrous romance, he laughed at many types of sophistry,
including legal obscurantism and hermeticism, which he
nevertheless preferred to the scholasticism of the Sorbonne.
One chapter stands out for its sustained seriousness,
praising the divine gift of fertile matrimony as
acompensation for death caused by Adam's fall. Pantagruel
borrows openly from Sir Thomas More's Utopia in its
reference to the war between Pantagruel's country, Utopia,
and the Dipsodes, but it also preaches a semi-Lutheran
doctrine—that no one but God and his angels may spread
thegospel by force. Pantagruel is memorable as the book in
which Pantagruel's companion, Panurge, a cunning and witty
rogue, first appears.
Though condemned by the Sorbonne in Paris as obscene,
Pantagruel was a popular success. It was followed in 1533
bythe Pantagrueline Prognostication, a parody of the
almanacs, astrological predictions that exercised a growing
hold on the Renaissance mind. In 1534 Rabelais left the
Hôtel-Dieu to travel to Rome with the bishop of Paris, Jean
duBellay. He returned to Lyon in May of that year and
publishedan edition of Bartolomeo Marliani's description of
Rome, Topographia antiquae Romae. He returned to the
Hôtel-Dieubut left it again in February 1535, upon which the
authorities of the Lyon hospital appointed someone else to
his post.
La vie inestimable du grand Gargantua (“The Inestimable Life
of the Great Gargantua”) belongs to this period. The second
edition is dated 1535; the first edition was probably
published in 1534, though it lacks the title page in the
only known copy. In Gargantua Rabelais continues to exploit
medieval romances mock-heroically, telling of the birth,
education, and prowesses of the giant Gargantua, who is
Pantagruel's father. Much of the satire—for example, mockery
of the ignorant trivialization of the mystical cult of
emblems and of erroneous theories of heraldry—is calculated
to delight the court; much also aims at delighting the
learned reader—for example, Rabelais sides with humanist
lawyers against legal traditionalists and doctors who
accepted 11-month, or even 13-month, pregnancies.
Old-fashioned scholastic pedagogy is ridiculed and
contrasted with the humanist ideal of the Christian prince,
widely learned in art, science, and crafts and skilled in
knightly warfare. The war between Gargantua and his
neighbour, the “biliously choleric” Picrochole, is partly a
private satire of an enemy of Rabelais's father and partly a
mocking of Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor, and the
imperial design of world conquest. Gargantua commands
themilitary operations, but some of the exploits are carried
out by Frère Jean (the Benedictine). Though he is lean,
lecherous,dirty, and ignorant, Frère Jean is redeemed by his
jollity and active virtue; for his fellow monks are timorous
and idle, delighting in “vain repetitions” of prayers.
Gargantua's last major episode centres on the erection of
the Abbey of Thélème, a monastic institution that rejects
poverty, celibacy, and obedience; instead it welcomes wealth
and the well-born, praises the aristocratic life, and
rejoices in good marriages.
After Gargantua, Rabelais published nothing new for 11
years, though he prudently expurgated his two works of
overbold religious opinions. He continued as physician to
Jean du Bellay, who had become a cardinal, and his powerful
brother Guillaume, and in 1535 Rabelais accompanied the
cardinal to Rome. There he regularized his position by
making a “supplication” to the pope for his “apostasy”
(i.e., his unauthorized departure from the Benedictine
monastery); the pope issued a bull freeing Rabelais from
ecclesiastical censure and allowing him to reenter the
Benedictine order. Rabelais then arranged to enter the
Benedictine convent at Saint-Maur-les-Fossés, where Cardinal
Jean du Bellay was abbot. The convent was secularized six
months later, and Rabelais became a secular priest,
authorized to exercise his medical profession.
In May 1537 Rabelais was awarded the doctorate of medicine
of Montpellier; and he delivered, with considerable success,
a course of lectures on Hippocrates' Prognostics. Hewas at
Aigues-Mortes in July 1538 when Charles V met the French
king Francis I, but his movements are obscure until
hefollowed Guillaume du Bellay to the Piedmont in 1542.
Guillaume died in January 1543, and to Rabelais his death
meant the loss of an important patron. That same year
Geoffroy d'Estissac died as well, and Rabelais's novels were
condemned by the Sorbonne and the Parlement of Paris.
Rabelais sought protection from the French king's sister
Margaret, queen of Navarre, dedicating to her the third book
of the Gargantua-Pantagruel series, Tiers livre des faitset
dits heroiques du noble Pantagruel (1546; “Third Book of the
Heroic Deeds and Words of the Noble Pantagruel”). Despite
its royal privilege (i.e., license to print), the book
wasimmediately condemned for heresy by the Sorbonne, and
Rabelais fled to Metz (an imperial city), remaining there
until 1547.
The Tiers livre is Rabelais's most profound work.
Pantagruelhas now deepened into a Stoico-Christian inerrant
sage; Panurge, a lover of self and deluded by the devil, is
now an adept at making black seem white. Panurge hesitates:
Should he marry? Will he be cuckolded, beaten, robbed by
hiswife? He consults numerous prognostications, both good
Platonic ones and less reputable ones—all to no effect
because of his self-love. He consults a good theologian, a
Platonic doctor, and a Skeptic philosopher approved of by
the learned giants, but his problem is not treated by the
judge Bridoye, who—like Roman law in cases of extreme
perplexity—trusts in Providence and decides cases by casting
lots. Panurge trusts in no one, least of all in himself.
Itis therefore decided to consult the oracle of the Dive
Bouteille (“Sacred Bottle”), and the travelers set out for
the temple. The Tiers livre ends enigmatically with a mock
eulogy in which hemp is praised for its myriad uses.
From 1547 onward, Rabelais found protection again as
physician to Cardinal Jean du Bellay and accompanied him
toRome via Turin, Ferrara, and Bologna. Passing through
Lyon, he gave his printer his incomplete Quart livre
(“Fourth Book”), which, as printed in 1548, finishes in the
middle of a sentence but contains some of his most
delightful comic storytelling. In Rome Rabelais sent a story
to his newest protector in the Guise family, Charles of
Lorraine, 2nd Cardinal de Lorraine; the story described the
“Sciomachie” (“Simulated Battle”) organized by Cardinal Jean
to celebrate the birth of Louis of Orléans, second son of
Henry II of France.
In January 1551 the Cardinal de Guise presented him with two
benefices at Meudon and Jambet, though Rabelais never
officiated or resided there. In 1552, through the influence
of the cardinal, Rabelais was able to publish—with a new
prologue—the full Quart livre des faits etdits héroïques du
noble Pantagruel (“Fourth Book of the Heroic Deeds and Words
of the Noble Pantagruel”), his longest book. Despite its
royal privilège, this work, too, was condemned by the
Sorbonne and banned by Parlement, but Rabelais's powerful
patrons soon had the censorship lifted. In 1553 Rabelais
resigned his benefices. He died shortly thereafter and was
buried in Saint-Paul-des-Champs, Paris.
In 1562 there appeared in Lyon the Isle sonante, allegedly
by Rabelais. It was expanded in 1564 into the so-called
Cinquiesme et dernier livre (“Fifth and Last Book”). This
workis partly satirical, partly an allegory; the Sacred
Bottle—the ostensible quest of the Quart livre—is consulted,
and the heroes receive the oraculous advice: “drink”
(symbolizing wisdom?). This work cannot be by Rabelais as it
stands. Some scholars believe it to be based on his (lost)
drafts, while others deny it any authenticity whatsoever.
Gargantua and Pantagruel
Rabelais's purpose in the four books of his masterpiece
wasto entertain the cultivated reader at the expense of the
follies and exaggerations of his times. If he points
lessons, it is because his life has taught him something
about the evils of comatose monasticism, the trickery of
lawyers, the pigheaded persistence of litigants, and the
ignorance of grasping physicians. Rabelais was a friar with
unhappy memories of his monastery; his father had wasted his
moneyon lengthy litigation with a neighbour over some
trivial waterrights; and he himself was earning his living
by medicine in an age when the distinction between physician
and quack was needle-fine. Though it is an entertainment,
therefore, Gargantua and Pantagruel is also serious. Its
principal narrative is devoted to a voyage of discovery that
parodies the travelers' tales current in Rabelais's day.
Rabelais begins lightheartedly; his travelers merely set out
to discover whether Panurge will be cuckolded if he marries.
A dozen oracles have already hinted at Panurge's inevitable
fate, yet each time he has reasoned their verdict away; and
the voyage itself provides a number of amusing incidents.
Yet, like Don Quixote's, it is a fundamentally serious quest
directed toward a true goal, the discovery of the secret of
life.
Intoxication—with life, with learning, with the use and
abuse of words—is the prevailing mood of the book. Rabelais
himself provides the model of the exuberant creator. His
four books provide a cunning mosaic of scholarly, literary,
and scientific parody. One finds this in its simplest form
in the catalog of the library of St. Victor, in the list of
preposterous substantives or attributes in which Rabelais
delights, and in the inquiry by means of Virgilian lots into
thequestion of Panurge's eventual cuckoldom. But at other
times the humour is more complicated and works on several
levels. Gargantua's campaign against King Picrochole (book
1), for instance, contains personal, historical, moral, and
classical points closely interwoven. The battles are fought
inRabelais's home country, in which each hamlet is
magnifiedinto a fortified city. Moreover, they also refer to
the feud between Rabelais the elder and his neighbour. They
also comment on recent historical events involving France
and the Holy Roman Empire, however, and can even be read as
propaganda against war, or at least in favour of the more
humane conduct of hostilities. On yet another level,
Rabelais's account of this imaginary warfare can be taken as
mockery of the classical historians: Gargantua's speech to
his defeated enemy (book 1, chapter 50) echoes one put into
the mouth of the Roman emperor Trajan by Pliny the Younger.
Despite these complex levels of reference, Rabelais was not
a self-conscious writer; he made his book out of the
disorderly contents of his mind. As a result it is
ill-constructed, and the same thoughts are repeated in
Gargantua that he had already set down in Pantagruel; the
nature of an ideal education, for example, is examined in
both books. Moreover, the main action of the story, which
arises from the question of Panurge's intended marriage,
only begins in the third book. The first, Gargantua, throws
up the enormous contradiction that has made the
interpretationof Rabelais's own intellectual standpoint
almost impossible. On the one hand we have the rumbustious
festivities that celebrate the giant's peculiarly miraculous
birth and the “Rabelaisian” account of his childish habits;
and on the other a plea for an enlightened education. Again,
the brutal slaughter of the Picrocholine wars, in which
Rabelais obviously delights, is followed by the utopian
description of Thélème, the Renaissance ideal of a civilized
community. Pantagruel follows the same pattern with
variations, introducing Panurge but omitting Frère Jean, and
putting Pantagruel in the place of his father, Gargantua. In
fact the characters are not strongly individualized. They
exist only in what they say, being so many voices through
whom the author speaks. Panurge, for instance, has no
consistent nature. A resourceful and intelligent poor
scholar in Pantagruel, he becomes a credulous buffoon in the
third book and an arrant coward in the fourth.
The third and fourth books pursue the story of the inquiry
andvoyage, and in them Rabelais's invention is at its
height. The first two books contain incidents close in
feeling to the medieval fabliaux, but the third and fourth
books are rich in anew, learned humour. Rabelais was a
writer molded by one tradition, the medieval Roman Catholic,
whose sympathies lay to a greater extent with another, the
Renaissance or classical. Yet when he writes in praise of
the new humanist ideals—in the chapters on education, on the
foundation of Thélème, or in praise of drinking from the
“sacred bottle” of learning or enlightenment—he easily
becomes sententious. His head is for the new learning, while
his flesh and heart belong to the old. It is in his absurd,
earthy, and exuberant inventions, which are medieval in
spirit even when they mock at medieval acceptances, that
Rabelais is a great, entertaining, and worldly wise writer.
M.A. Screech
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Michel de
Montaigne
THE LETTERS OF MONTAIGNE
"The Essays"
BOOK THE FIRST,
BOOK THE SECOND,
BOOK THE THIRD
born Feb. 28, 1533, Chateau de Montaigne, near Bordeaux,
France
died Sept. 23, 1592, Château de Montaigne
in full Michel Eyquem de Montaigne French writer whose
Essais (Essays ) established a new literary form. In his
Essays he wrote one of the most captivating and intimate
self-portraits ever given, on apar with Augustine's and
Rousseau's.
Living, as he did, in the second half of the 16th century,
Montaigne bore witness to the decline of the intellectual
optimism that had marked the Renaissance. The sense of
immense human possibilities, stemming from the discoveries
of the New World travelers, from the rediscovery of
classical antiquity, and from the opening of scholarly
horizons through the works of the humanists, was shattered
in France when the advent of the Calvinistic Reformation was
followed closely by religious persecution and by the Wars of
Religion (1562–98). These conflicts, which tore the country
asunder, were in fact political and civil as well as
religious wars, marked by great excesses of fanaticism and
cruelty. At once deeply critical of his time and deeply
involved in its preoccupations and its struggles, Montaigne
chose to write about himself—“I am myself the matter of my
book,” he saysin his opening address to the reader—in order
to arrive at certain possible truths concerning man and the
human condition, in a period of ideological strife and
division when all possibility of truth seemed illusory and
treacherous.
Life
Born in the family domain of Château de Montaigne in
southwestern France, Michel Eyquem spent most of his life at
his château and in the city of Bordeaux, 30 miles to the
west. The family fortune had been founded in commerce by
Montaigne's great-grandfather, who acquired the estate and
the title of nobility. His grandfather and his father
expanded their activities to the realm of public service and
established the family in the noblesse de robe, the
administrative nobility of France. Montaigne's father,
PierreEyquem, served as mayor of Bordeaux.
As a young child Montaigne was tutored at home according to
his father's ideas of pedagogy, which included the creation
of a cosseted ambience of gentle encouragement and the
exclusive use of Latin, still the international language of
educated people. As a result the boy did not learn French
until he was six years old. He continued his education at
the College of Guyenne, where he found the strict discipline
abhorrent and the instruction only moderately interesting,
and eventually at the University of Toulouse, where he
studied law. Following in the public-service tradition begun
by his grandfather, he enteredin to the magistrature,
becoming a member of the Board of Excise, the new tax court
of Perigueux, and, when that body was dissolved in 1557, of
the Parliament of Bordeaux, one of the eight regional
parliaments that constituted the French Parliament, the
highest national court of justice. There, at the age of 24,
he made the acquaintance of Etienne de la Boetie, a meeting
that was one of the most significant events in Montaigne's
life. Between the slightly older La Boetie (1530–63), an
already distinguished civil servant, humanist scholar, and
writer, and Montaigne an extraordinary friendship sprang up,
based on a profound intellectual and emotional closeness and
reciprocity. In his essay “On Friendship” Montaigne wrote in
a very touching manner about his bond with La Boetie, which
he called perfect and indivisible, vastly superior to all
other human alliances. When La Boetie died of dysentery, he
left a void in Montaigne's life that no other being was ever
able to fill, and it is likely that Montaigne started on his
writing career, six years after La Boetie's death, in order
to fill the emptiness left by the loss of the irretrievable
friend.
In 1565 Montaigne was married, acting less out of love than
out of a sense of familial and social duty, to Françoise de
la Chassaigne, the daughter of one of his colleagues at the
Parliament of Bordeaux. He fathered six daughters, five of
whom died in infancy, whereas the sixth, Léonore, survived
him.
In 1569 Montaigne published his first book, a French
translation of the 15th-century Natural Theology by the
Spanish monk Raymond Sebond. He had undertaken the taskat
the request of his father, who, however, died in 1568,
before its publication, leaving to his oldest son the title
and the domain of Montaigne.
In 1570 Montaigne sold his seat in the Bordeaux Parliament,
signifying his departure from public life. After taking care
of the posthumous publication of La Boetie's works, together
with his own dedicatory letters, he retired in 1571 to the
castle of Montaigne in order to devote his time to reading,
meditating, and writing. His library, installed in the
castle's tower, became his refuge. It was in this round
room, lined with a thousand books and decorated with Greek
and Latin inscriptions, that Montaigne set out to put on
paper his essais, that is, the probings and testings of his
mind. He spent the years from 1571 to 1580 composing the
first two books of the Essays, which comprise respectively
57 and 37 chapters of greatly varying lengths; they were
published in Bordeaux in 1580.
Although most of these years were dedicated to writing,
Montaigne had to supervise the running of his estate as
well, and he was obliged to leave his retreat from time to
time, not only to travel to the court in Paris but also to
intervene as mediator in several episodes of the religious
conflicts in his region and beyond. Both the Roman Catholic
king Henry III and the Protestant king Henry of Navarre—who
as Henry IV would become king of France and convert to Roman
Catholicism—honoured and respected Montaigne, but extremists
on both sides criticized and harassed him.
After the 1580 publication, eager for new experiences and
profoundly disgusted by the state of affairs in France,
Montaigne set out to travel, and in the course of 15 months
he visited areas of France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria,
and Italy. Curious by nature, interested in the smallest
details of dailiness, geography, and regional
idiosyncrasies, Montaigne was a born traveler. He kept a
record of his trip, his Journal de voyage (not intended for
publication and not published until 1774), which is rich in
picturesque episodes, encounters, evocations, and
descriptions.
While still in Italy, in the fall of 1581, Montaigne
received the news that he had been elected to the office his
father hadheld, that of mayor of Bordeaux. Reluctant to
accept, because of the dismal political situation in France
and because of ill health (he suffered from kidney stones,
which had also plagued him on his trip), he nevertheless
assumed the position at the request of Henry III and held it
for two terms, until July 1585. While the beginning of his
tenure was relatively tranquil, his second term was marked
by an acceleration of hostilities between the warring
factions, and Montaigne played a crucial role in preserving
the equilibrium between the Catholic majority and the
important Protestant League representation in Bordeaux.
Toward the end of his term the plague broke out in Bordeaux,
soon raging out of control and killing one-third of the
population.
Montaigne resumed his literary work by embarking on the
third book of the Essays. After having been interrupted
again, by a renewed outbreak of the plague in the area that
forced Montaigne and his family to seek refuge elsewhere, by
military activity close to his estate, and by diplomatic
duties, when Catherine de Médicis appealed to his abilities
as a negotiator to mediate between herself and Henry of
Navarre—a mission that turned out to be unsuccessful—Montaigne
was able to finish the work in 1587.
The year 1588 was marked by both political and literary
events. During a trip to Paris Montaigne was twice arrested
and briefly imprisoned by members of the Protestant League
because of his loyalty to Henry III. During the same trip he
supervised the publication of the fifth edition of the
Essays, the first to contain the 13 chapters of Book III, as
well as Books I and II, enriched with many additions. He
also met Marie de Gournay, an ardent and devoted young
admirer of his writings. De Gournay, a writer herself, is
mentioned in the Essays as Montaigne's “covenant daughter”
and was to become his literary executrix. After the
assassination of Henry III in 1589, Montaigne helped to keep
Bordeaux loyal to Henry IV. He spent the last years of his
life at his château, continuing to read and to reflect and
to work on the Essays, adding new passages, which signify
not so much profound changes in his ideas as further
explorations of his thought and experience. Different
illnesses beset him during this period, and he died after an
attack of quinsy, an inflammation of the tonsils, which had
deprived him of speech. His death occurred while he was
hearing mass in hisroom.
The Essays
Montaigne saw his age as one of dissimulation, corruption,
violence, and hypocrisy, and it is therefore not surprising
that the point of departure of the Essays is situated in
negativity: the negativity of Montaigne's recognition of the
rule of appearances and of the loss of connection with the
truth of being. Montaigne's much-discussed skepticism
results from that initial negativity, as he questions the
possibility of all knowing and sees the human being as a
creature of weakness and failure, of inconstancy and
uncertainty, of incapacity and fragmentation, or, as he
wrote in the first of the essays, as “a marvelously vain,
diverse, and undulating thing.” His skepticism is reflected
in the French title of his work, Essais, or “Attempts,”
which implies not a transmission of proven knowledge or of
confident opinion but a project of trial and error, of
tentative exploration. Neither a reference to an established
genre (for Montaigne's book inaugurated the term essay for
the short prose composition treating a given subject in a
rather informal and personal manner) nor an indication of a
necessary internal unity and structure within the work, the
title indicates an intellectual attitude of questioning and
of continuous assessment.
Montaigne's skepticism does not, however, preclude a belief
in the existence of truth but rather constitutes a defense
against the danger of locating truth in false, unexamined,
and externally imposed notions. His skepticism, combined
with his desire for truth, drives him to the rejection of
commonly accepted ideas and to a profound distrust of
generalizations and abstractions; it also shows him the way
to an exploration of the only realm that promises certainty:
that of concrete phenomena and primarily the basic
phenomenon of his own body-and-mind self. This self, with
all its imperfections, constitutes the only possible site
where the search for truth can start, and it is thereason
Montaigne, from the beginning to the end of the Essays, does
not cease to affirm that “I am myself the matter of my
book.” He finds that his identity, his “master form” as he
calls it, cannot be defined in simple terms of a constant
and stable self, since it is instead a changeable
andfragmented thing, and that the valorization and
acceptance of these traits is the only guarantee of
authenticity and integrity, the only way of remaining
faithful to the truth of one's being and one's nature rather
than to alien semblances.
Yet, despite his insistence that the self guard its freedom
toward outside influences and the tyranny of imposed customs
and opinions, Montaigne believes in the value of reaching
outside the self. Indeed, throughout his writings, as he did
in his private and public life, he manifests the need to
entertain ties with the world of other people and of events.
For this necessary coming and going between the interiority
of the self and the exteriority of the world, Montaigne uses
the image of the back room: human beings have their front
room, facing the street, where they meet and interact with
others, but they need always to be able to retreat into the
back room of the most private self, where they may reaffirm
the freedom and strength of intimate identity and reflect
upon the vagaries of experience. Given that always-available
retreat, Montaigne encourages contact with others, from
which one may learn much that is useful. In order to do so,
he advocates travel, reading, especially of history books,
and conversations with friends. These friends, for Montaigne,
are necessarily men. While none can ever replace La Boetie,
it is possible to have interesting and worthwhile exchanges
with men of discernment and wit. As for his relations with
women, Montaigne wrote about them with a frankness unusual
for his time. The only uncomplicated bond is that of
marriage, which reposes, for Montaigne, on reasons of family
and posterity and in which one invests little of oneself.
Love, on the other hand, with its emotional and erotic
demands, comports the risk of enslavement and loss of
freedom. Montaigne, often designated as a misogynist, does
in fact recognize that men and women are fundamentally alike
in their fears, desires, and attempts to find and affirm
their own identity and that only custom and adherence to an
antiquated status quo establish the apparent differences
between the sexes, but he does not explore the possibility
of overcoming that fundamental separation and of
establishing an intellectual equality.
Montaigne extends his curiosity about others to the
inhabitants of the New World, with whom he had become
acquainted through his lively interest in oral and written
travel accounts and through his meeting in 1562 with three
Brazilian Indians whom the explorer Nicolas Durand de
Villegagnon had brought back to France. Giving an example of
cultural relativism and tolerance, rare in his time, he
finds these people, in their fidelity to their own nature
and in their cultural and personal dignity and sense of
beauty, greatly superior to the inhabitants of western
Europe, who in the conquests of the New World and in their
own internal wars have shown themselves to be the true
barbarians. The suffering and humiliation imposed on the New
World's natives by their conquerors provoke his indignation
and compassion.
Involvement in public service is also a part of interaction
with the world, and it should be seen as a duty to be
honourably and loyally discharged but never allowed to
become a consuming and autonomy-destroying occupation.
Montaigne applies and illustrates his ideas concerning the
independence and freedom of the self and the importance of
social and intellectual intercourse in all his writings and
in particular in his essay on the education of children.
There, aselse where, he advocates the value of concrete
experience over abstract learning and of independent
judgment over an accumulation of undigested notions
uncritically accepted from others. He also stresses,
throughout his work, the role of the body, as in his candid
descriptions of his own bodily functions and in his
extensive musings on the realities of illness, of aging, and
of death. The presence of death pervades the Essays, as
Montaigne wants to familiarize himself with the
inevitability of dying and so to rid himself of the tyranny
of fear, and he is able to accept death as part of nature's
exigencies, inherent in life's expectations and limitations.
Montaigne seems to have been a loyal if not fervent Roman
Catholic all his life, but he distrusted all human pretenses
to knowledge of a spiritual experience which is not attached
to a concretely lived reality. He declined to speculate on a
transcendence that falls beyond human ken, believing in God
but refusing to invoke him in necessarily presumptuous and
reductive ways.
Although Montaigne certainly knew the classical
philosophers, his ideas spring less out of their teaching
than out of the completely original meditation on himself,
which he extends to a description of the human being and to
an ethics of authenticity, self-acceptance, and tolerance.
The Essays are the record of his thoughts, presented not in
artificially organized stages but as they occurred and
reoccurred to him in different shapes throughout his
thinking and writing activity. They are not the record of an
intellectualevolution but of a continuous accretion, and he
insists on theimmediacy and the authenticity of their
testimony. To denote their consubstantiality with his
natural self, he describes them as his children, and, in an
image of startling and completely nonpejorative earthiness,
as the excrements of his mind. As he refuses to impose a
false unity on the spontaneous workings of his thought, so
he refuses to impose a false structure on his Essays. “As my
mind roams, so does my style,” he wrote, and the multiple
digressions, the wandering developments, the savory,
concrete vocabulary, all denote that fidelity to the
freshness and the immediacy of the living thought.
Throughout the text he sprinkles anecdotes taken from
ancient as well as contemporary authors and from popular
lore, which reinforcehis critical analysis of reality; he
also peppers his writing with quotes, yet another way of
interacting with others, that is, with the authors of the
past who surround him in his library. Neither anecdotes nor
quotes impinge upon the autonomy of his own ideas, although
they may spark or reinforce a train of thought, and they
become an integral part of the book's fabric.
Montaigne's Essays thus incorporate a profound skepticism
concerning the human being's dangerously inflated claims to
knowledge and certainty but also assert that there is no
greater achievement than the ability to accept one's being
without either contempt or illusion, in the full realization
of its limitations and its richness.
Readership
Throughout the ages the Essays have been widely and
variously read, and their readers have tended to look to
them, and into them, for answers to their own needs. Not all
his contemporaries manifested the enthusiasm of Marie de
Gournay, who fainted from excitement at her first reading.
She did recognize in the book the full force of an unusual
mind revealing itself, but most of the intellectuals of the
period preferred to find in Montaigne a safe reincarnation
of stoicism. Here started a misunderstanding that was to
last a long time, save in the case of the exceptional
reader. The Essays were to be perused as an anthology of
philosophical maxims, a repository of consecrated wisdom,
rather than as the complete expression of a highly
individual thought and experience. That Montaigne could
write about his most intimate reactions and feelings, that
he could describe his own physical appearance and
preferences, for instance, seemed shocking and irrelevant to
many, just as the apparent confusion of his writing seemed a
weakness to be deplored rather than a guarantee of
authenticity.
In the 17th century, when an educated nobility set the tone,
he was chiefly admired for his portrayal of the honnete
homme , the well-educated, nonpedantic man of manners,
asmuch at home in a salon as in his study, a gentleman of
smiling wisdom and elegant, discreet disenchantment. In the
same period, however, religious authors such as Francis of
Sales and Blaise Pascal deplored his skepticism as
anti-Christian and denounced what they interpreted as an
immoral self-absorption. In the pre-Revolutionary 18th
century the image of a dogmatically irreligious Montaigne
continued to be dominant, and Voltaire and Denis Diderot saw
in him a precursor of the free thought of the Enlightenment.
For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, however, the encounter with the
Essays was differently and fundamentally important, as he
rightly considered Montaigne the master and the model of the
self-portrait. Rousseau inaugurated the perception of the
book as the entirely personal project of a human being in
search of his identity and unafraid to talk without
dissimulation about his profound nature. In the 19th century
some of the old misunderstandings continued, but there was a
growing understanding and appreciation of Montaigne not only
as a master of ideas but also as the writer of the
particular, the individual, the intimate—the writer as
friend and familiar. Gustave Flaubert kept the Essays on his
bedside table and recognized in Montaigne an alter ego, as
would, in the 20th century, authors such as André Gide,
Michel Butor, and Roland Barthes.
The Essays were first translated into English by John Florio
in1603, and Anglophone readers have included Francis Bacon,
John Webster, William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, William
Makepeace Thackeray, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virginia Woolf,
T.S. Eliot, and Aldous Huxley.
Today Montaigne continues to be studied in all aspects of
his text by great numbers of scholars and to be read by
people from all corners of the earth. In an age that may
seemas violent and absurd as his own, his refusal of
intolerance and fanaticism and his lucid awareness of the
human potential for destruction, coupled with his belief in
the human capacity for self-assessment, honesty, and
compassion, appeal as convincingly as ever to the many who
find in him a guide and a friend.
Tilde A. Sankovitch
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Blaise
Pascal
French philosopher and scientist
born June 19, 1623, Clermont-Ferrand, France
died August 19, 1662, Paris
Main
French mathematician, physicist, religious philosopher, and master of
prose. He laid the foundation for the modern theory of probabilities,
formulated what came to be known as Pascal’s law of pressure, and
propagated a religious doctrine that taught the experience of God
through the heart rather than through reason. The establishment of his
principle of intuitionism had an impact on such later philosophers as
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henri Bergson and also on the Existentialists.
Pascal’s life to the Port-Royal years
Pascal’s father, Étienne Pascal, was presiding judge of the tax court at
Clermont-Ferrand. His mother died in 1626, and in 1631 the family moved
to Paris. Étienne, who was respected as a mathematician, devoted himself
henceforth to the education of his children. While his sister Jacqueline
(born in 1625) figured as an infant prodigy in literary circles, Blaise
proved himself no less precocious in mathematics. In 1640 he wrote an
essay on conic sections, Essai pour les coniques, based on his study of
the now classical work of Girard Desargues on synthetic projective
geometry. The young man’s work, which was highly successful in the world
of mathematics, aroused the envy of no less a personage than the great
French Rationalist and mathematician René Descartes. Between 1642 and
1644, Pascal conceived and constructed a calculating device to help his
father—who in 1639 had been appointed intendant (local administrator) at
Rouen—in his tax computations. The machine was regarded by Pascal’s
contemporaries as his main claim to fame, and with reason, for in a
sense it was the first digital calculator since it operated by counting
integers. The significance of this contribution explains the youthful
pride that appears in his dedication of the machine to the chancellor of
France, Pierre Seguier, in 1644.
Until 1646 the Pascal family held strictly Roman Catholic principles,
though they often substituted l’honnêteté (“polite respectability”) for
inward religion. An illness of his father, however, brought Blaise into
contact with a more profound expression of religion, for he met two
disciples of the abbé de Saint-Cyran, who, as director of the convent of
Port-Royal, had brought the austere moral and theological conceptions of
Jansenism into the life and thought of the convent. Jansenism was a
17th-century form of Augustinianism in the Roman Catholic Church. It
repudiated free will, accepted predestination, and taught that divine
grace, rather than good works, was the key to salvation. The convent at
Port-Royal had become the centre for the dissemination of the doctrine.
Pascal himself was the first to feel the necessity of entirely turning
away from the world to God, and he won his family over to the spiritual
life in 1646. His letters indicate that for several years he was his
family’s spiritual adviser, but the conflict within himself—between the
world and ascetic life—was not yet resolved. Absorbed again in his
scientific interests, he tested the theories of Galileo and Evangelista
Torricelli (an Italian physicist who discovered the principle of the
barometer). To do so, he reproduced and amplified experiments on
atmospheric pressure by constructing mercury barometers and measuring
air pressure, both in Paris and on the top of a mountain overlooking
Clermont-Ferrand. These tests paved the way for further studies in
hydrodynamics and hydrostatics. While experimenting, Pascal invented the
syringe and created the hydraulic press, an instrument based upon the
principle that became known as Pascal’s law: pressure applied to a
confined liquid is transmitted undiminished through the liquid in all
directions regardless of the area to which the pressure is applied. His
publications on the problem of the vacuum (1647–48) added to his
reputation. When he fell ill from overwork, his doctors advised him to
seek distractions; but what has been described as Pascal’s “worldly
period” (1651–54) was, in fact, primarily a period of intense scientific
work, during which he composed treatises on the equilibrium of liquid
solutions, on the weight and density of air, and on the arithmetic
triangle: Traité de l’équilibre des liqueurs et de la pesanteur de la
masse de l’air (Eng. trans., The Physical Treatises of Pascal, 1937) and
also his Traité du triangle arithmétique. In the last treatise, a
fragment of the De Alea Geometriae, he laid the foundations for the
calculus of probabilities. By the end of 1653, however, he had begun to
feel religious scruples; and the “night of fire,” an intense, perhaps
mystical “conversion” that he experienced on November 23, 1654, he
believed to be the beginning of a new life. He entered Port-Royal in
January 1655, and though he never became one of the solitaires, he
thereafter wrote only at their request and never again published in his
own name. The two works for which he is chiefly known, Les Provinciales
and the Pensées, date from the years of his life spent at Port-Royal.
“Les Provinciales”
Written in defense of Antoine Arnauld, an opponent of the Jesuits and a
defender of Jansenism who was on trial before the faculty of theology in
Paris for his controversial religious works, Pascal’s 18 Lettres écrites
par Louis de Montalte à un provincialdeal with divine grace and the
ethical code of the Jesuits. They are better known as Les Provinciales.
They included a blow against the relaxed morality that the Jesuits were
said to teach and that was the weak point in their controversy with
Port-Royal; Pascal quotes freely Jesuit dialogues and discrediting
quotations from their own works, sometimes in a spirit of derision,
sometimes with indignation. In the two last letters, dealing with the
question of grace, Pascal proposed a conciliatory position that was
later to make it possible for Port-Royal to subscribe to the “Peace of
the Church,” a temporary cessation of the conflict over Jansenism, in
1668.
The Provinciales were an immediate success, and their popularity has
remained undiminished. This they owe primarily to their form, in which
for the first time bombast and tedious rhetoric are replaced by variety,
brevity, tautness, and precision of style; as Nicolas Boileau, the
founder of French literary criticism, recognized, they marked the
beginning of modern French prose. Something of their popularity,
moreover, in fashionable, Protestant, or skeptical circles, must be
attributed to the violence of their attack on the Jesuits. In England
they have been most widely read when Roman Catholicism has seemed a
threat to the Church of England. Yet they have also helped Catholicism
to rid itself of laxity; and, in 1678, Pope Innocent XI himself
condemned half of the propositions that Pascal had denounced earlier.
Thus, the Provinciales played a decisive part in promoting a return to
inner religion and helped to secure the eventual triumph of the ideas
set forth in Antoine Arnauld’s treatise De la fréquente communion
(1643), in which he protested against the idea that the profligate could
atone for continued sin by frequent communion without repentance, a
thesis that thereafter remained almost unchallengeable until the French
church felt the repercussion of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes
(which had granted religious freedom to French Protestants) in 1685.
Whereas the Jesuits seemed to represent a Counter-Reformation
predominantly concerned with orthodoxy and obedience to ecclesiastical
authority, the Provinciales advocated a more spiritual approach,
emphasizing the soul’s union with the Mystical Body of Christ through
charity.
Further, by rejecting any double standard of morality and the
distinction between counsel and precept, Pascal aligned himself with
those who believe the ideal of evangelical perfection to be inseparable
from the Christian life. Although there was nothing original in these
opinions, Pascal nevertheless stamped them with the passionate
conviction of a man in love with the absolute, of a man who saw no
salvation apart from a heartfelt desire for the truth, together with a
love of God that works continually toward destroying all self-love. For
Pascal, morality cannot be separated from spirituality. Moreover, his
own spiritual development can be traced in the Provinciales. The
religious sense in them becomes progressively refined after the first
letters, in which the tone of ridicule is smart rather than charitable.
“Pensées”
Pascal finally decided to write his work of Christian apologetics,
Apologie de la religion chrétienne, as a consequence of his meditations
on miracles and other proofs of Christianity. The work remained
unfinished at his death. Between the summers of 1657 and 1658, he put
together most of the notes and fragments that editors have published
under the inappropriate title Pensées (“Thoughts”; Eng. trans., Pensées,
1962). In the Apologie, Pascal shows the man without grace to be an
incomprehensible mixture of greatness and abjectness, incapable of truth
or of reaching the supreme good to which his nature nevertheless
aspires. A religion that accounts for these contradictions, which he
believed philosophy and worldliness fail to do, is for that very reason
“to be venerated and loved.” The indifference of the skeptic, Pascal
wrote, is to be overcome by means of the “wager”: if God does not exist,
the skeptic loses nothing by believing in him; but if he does exist, the
skeptic gains eternal life by believing in him. Pascal insists that men
must be brought to God through Jesus Christ alone, because a creature
could never know the infinite if Jesus had not descended to assume the
proportions of man’s fallen state.
The second part of the work applies the Augustinian theory of
allegorical interpretation to the biblical types (figuratifs); reviews
the rabbinical texts, the persistence of true religion, the work of
Moses, and the proofs concerning Jesus Christ’s God-like role; and,
finally, gives a picture of the primitive church and the fulfillment of
the prophecies. The Apologie (Pensées) is a treatise on spirituality.
Pascal was not interested in making converts if they were not going to
be saints.
Pascal’s apologetics, though it has stood the test of time, is
primarily addressed to individuals of his own acquaintance. To convert
his libertine friends, he looked for arguments in their favourite
authors: in Michel de Montaigne, in the Skeptic Pierre Charron, in the
Epicurean Pierre Gassendi, and in Thomas Hobbes, an English political
philosopher. For Pascal, Skepticism was but a stage. Modernist
theologians in particular have tried to make use of his main contention,
that “man is infinitely more than man,” in isolation from his other
contention, that man’s wretchedness is explicable only as the effect of
a Fall, about which a man can learn what he needs to know from history.
In so doing, they sacrifice the second part of the Apologie to the
first, keeping the philosophy while losing the exegesis. For Pascal as
for St. Paul, Jesus Christ is the second Adam, inconceivable without the
first.
Finally, too, Pascal expressly admitted that his psychological
analyses were not by themselves sufficient to exclude a “philosophy of
the absurd”; to do so, it is necessary to have recourse to the
convergence of these analyses with the “lines of fact” concerning
revelation, this convergence being too extraordinary not to appear as
the work of providence to an anguished seeker after truth (qui cherche
en gémissant).
He was next again involved in scientific work. First, the “Messieurs
de Port-Royal” themselves asked for his help in composing the Élements
de géométrie; and second, it was suggested that he should publish what
he had discovered about cycloid curves, a subject on which the greatest
mathematicians of the time had been working. Once more fame aroused in
him feelings of self-esteem; but from February 1659, illness brought him
back to his former frame of mind, and he composed the “prayer for
conversion” that the English clergymen Charles and John Wesley, who
founded the Methodist Church, were later to regard so highly. Scarcely
capable of regular work, he henceforth gave himself over to helping the
poor and to the ascetic and devotional life. He took part
intermittently, however, in the disputes to which the “Formulary”—a
document condemning five propositions of Jansenism that, at the demand
of the church authorities, had to be signed before a person could
receive the sacraments—gave rise. Finally a difference of opinion with
the theologians of Port-Royal led him to withdraw from controversy,
though he did not sever his relations with them.
Pascal died in 1662 after suffering terrible pain, probably from
carcinomatous meningitis following a malignant ulcer of the stomach. He
was assisted by a non-Jansenist parish priest.
Assessment
At once a physicist, a mathematician, an eloquent publicist in the
Provinciales, and an inspired artist in the Apologie and in his private
notes, Pascal was embarrassed by the very abundance of his talents. It
has been suggested that it was his too concrete turn of mind that
prevented his discovering the infinitesimal calculus; and in some of the
Provinciales the mysterious relations of human beings with God are
treated as if they were a geometrical problem. But these considerations
are far outweighed by the profit that he drew from the multiplicity of
his gifts; his religious writings are rigorous because of his scientific
training; and his love of the concrete emerges no less from the stream
of quotations in the Provinciales than from his determination to reject
the vigorous method of attack that he had used so effectively in his
Apologie.
Jean Orcibal
Lucien Jerphagnon
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Queen Christina of Sweden (left) and René
Descartes
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René Descartes
"DISCOURSE ON THE
METHOD OF RIGHTLY CONDUCTING THE REASON,
AND SEEKING TRUTH IN THE SCIENCES"
"SELECTIONS FROM
THE PRINCIPLES OF PHILOSOPHY"
French mathematician and philosopher
born March 31, 1596, La Haye, Touraine, France
died February 11, 1650, Stockholm, Sweden
Main
French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher. Because he
was one of the first to abandon scholastic Aristotelianism,
because he formulated the first modern version of mind-body
dualism, from which stems the mind-body problem, and because
he promoted the development of a new science grounded in
observation and experiment, he has been called the father of
modern philosophy. Applying an original system of methodical
doubt, he dismissed apparent knowledge derived from
authority, the senses, and reason and erected new epistemic
foundations on the basis of the intuition that, when he is
thinking, he exists; this he expressed in the dictum “I
think, therefore I am” (best known in its Latin formulation,
“Cogito, ergo sum,” though originally written in French, “Je
pense, donc je suis”). He developed a metaphysical dualism
that distinguishes radically between mind, the essence of
which is thinking, and matter, the essence of which is
extension in three dimensions. Descartes’s metaphysics is
rationalist, based on the postulation of innate ideas of
mind, matter, and God, but his physics and physiology, based
on sensory experience, are mechanistic and empiricist.
Early life and education
Although Descartes’s birthplace, La Haye (now Descartes),
France, is in Touraine, his family connections lie south,
across the Creuse River in Poitou, where his father,
Joachim, owned farms and houses in Châtellerault and
Poitiers. Because Joachim was a councillor in the Parlement
of Brittany in Rennes, Descartes inherited a modest rank of
nobility. Descartes’s mother died when he was one year old.
His father remarried in Rennes, leaving him in La Haye to be
raised first by his maternal grandmother and then by his
great-uncle in Châtellerault. Although the Descartes family
was Roman Catholic, the Poitou region was controlled by the
Protestant Huguenots, and Châtellerault, a Protestant
stronghold, was the site of negotiations over the Edict of
Nantes (1598), which gave Protestants freedom of worship in
France following the intermittent Wars of Religion between
Protestant and Catholic forces in France. Descartes returned
to Poitou regularly until 1628.
In 1606 Descartes was sent to the Jesuit college at La
Flèche, established in 1604 by Henry IV (reigned 1589–1610).
At La Flèche, 1,200 young men were trained for careers in
military engineering, the judiciary, and government
administration. In addition to classical studies, science,
mathematics, and metaphysics—Aristotle was taught from
scholastic commentaries—they studied acting, music, poetry,
dancing, riding, and fencing. In 1610 Descartes participated
in an imposing ceremony in which the heart of Henry IV,
whose assassination that year had destroyed the hope of
religious tolerance in France and Germany, was placed in the
cathedral at La Flèche.
In 1614 Descartes went to Poitiers, where he took a law
degree in 1616. At this time, Huguenot Poitiers was in
virtual revolt against the young King Louis XIII (reigned
1610–43). Descartes’s father probably expected him to enter
Parlement, but the minimum age for doing so was 27, and
Descartes was only 20. In 1618 he went to Breda in the
Netherlands, where he spent 15 months as an informal student
of mathematics and military architecture in the peacetime
army of the Protestant stadholder, Prince Maurice (ruled
1585–1625). In Breda, Descartes was encouraged in his
studies of science and mathematics by the physicist Isaac
Beeckman (1588–1637), for whom he wrote the Compendium of
Music (written 1618, published 1650), his first surviving
work.
Descartes spent the period 1619 to 1628 traveling in
northern and southern Europe, where, as he later explained,
he studied “the book of the world.” While in Bohemia in
1619, he invented analytic geometry, a method of solving
geometric problems algebraically and algebraic problems
geometrically. He also devised a universal method of
deductive reasoning, based on mathematics, that is
applicable to all the sciences. This method, which he later
formulated in Discourse on Method (1637) and Rules for the
Direction of the Mind (written by 1628 but not published
until 1701), consists of four rules: (1) accept nothing as
true that is not self-evident, (2) divide problems into
their simplest parts, (3) solve problems by proceeding from
simple to complex, and (4) recheck the reasoning. These
rules are a direct application of mathematical procedures.
In addition, Descartes insisted that all key notions and the
limits of each problem must be clearly defined.
Descartes also investigated reports of esoteric
knowledge, such as the claims of the practitioners of
theosophy to be able to command nature. Although
disappointed with the followers of the Catalan mystic Ramon
Llull (1232/33–1315/16) and the German alchemist Heinrich
Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535), he was
impressed by the German mathematician Johann Faulhaber
(1580–1635), a member of the mystical society of the
Rosicrucians.
Descartes shared a number of Rosicrucian goals and
habits. Like the Rosicrucians, he lived alone and in
seclusion, changed his residence often (during his 22 years
in the Netherlands, he lived in 18 different places),
practiced medicine without charge, attempted to increase
human longevity, and took an optimistic view of the capacity
of science to improve the human condition. At the end of his
life, he left a chest of personal papers (none of which has
survived) with a Rosicrucian physician—his close friend
Corneille van Hogelande, who handled his affairs in the
Netherlands. Despite these affinities, Descartes rejected
the Rosicrucians’ magical and mystical beliefs. For him,
this period was a time of hope for a revolution in science.
The English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626), in
Advancement of Learning (1605), had earlier proposed a new
science of observation and experiment to replace the
traditional Aristotelian science, as Descartes himself did
later.
In 1622 Descartes moved to Paris. There he gambled, rode,
fenced, and went to the court, concerts, and the theatre.
Among his friends were the poets Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac
(1597–1654), who dedicated his Le Socrate chrétien (1652;
“Christian Socrates”) to Descartes, and Théophile de Viau
(1590–1626), who was burned in effigy and imprisoned in 1623
for writing verses mocking religious themes. Descartes also
befriended the mathematician Claude Mydorge (1585–1647) and
Father Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), a man of universal
learning who corresponded with hundreds of scholars,
writers, mathematicians, and scientists and who became
Descartes’s main contact with the larger intellectual world.
During this time Descartes regularly hid from his friends to
work, writing treatises, now lost, on fencing and metals. He
acquired a considerable reputation long before he published
anything.
At a talk in 1628, Descartes denied the alchemist
Chandoux’s claim that probabilities are as good as
certainties in science and demonstrated his own method for
attaining certainty. The Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle
(1575–1629)—who had founded the Oratorian teaching
congregation in 1611 as a rival to the Jesuits—was present
at the talk. Many commentators speculate that Bérulle urged
Descartes to write a metaphysics based on the philosophy of
St. Augustine as a replacement for Jesuit teaching. Be that
as it may, within weeks Descartes left for the Netherlands,
which was Protestant, and—taking great precautions to
conceal his address—did not return to France for 16 years.
Some scholars claim that Descartes adopted Bérulle as
director of his conscience, but this is unlikely, given
Descartes’s background and beliefs (he came from a Huguenot
province, he was not a Catholic enthusiast, he had been
accused of being a Rosicrucian, and he advocated religious
tolerance and championed the use of reason).
Residence in the Netherlands
Descartes said that he went to the Netherlands to enjoy a
greater liberty than was available anywhere else and to
avoid the distractions of Paris and friends so that he could
have the leisure and solitude to think. (He had inherited
enough money and property to live independently.) The
Netherlands was a haven of tolerance, where Descartes could
be an original, independent thinker without fear of being
burned at the stake—as was the Italian philosopher Lucilio
Vanini (1585–1619) for proposing natural explanations of
miracles—or being drafted into the armies then prosecuting
the Catholic Counter-Reformation. In France, by contrast,
religious intolerance was mounting. The Jews were expelled
in 1615, and the last Protestant stronghold, La Rochelle,
was crushed—with Bérulle’s participation—only weeks before
Descartes’s departure. In 1624 the French Parlement passed a
decree forbidding criticism of Aristotle on pain of death.
Although Mersenne and the philosopher Pierre Gassendi
(1592–1655) did publish attacks on Aristotle without
suffering persecution (they were, after all, Catholic
priests), those judged to be heretics continued to be
burned, and laymen lacked church protection. In addition,
Descartes may have felt jeopardized by his friendship with
intellectual libertines such as Father Claude Picot (d.
1668), a bon vivant known as “the Atheist Priest,” with whom
he entrusted his financial affairs in France.
In 1629 Descartes went to the university at Franeker,
where he stayed with a Catholic family and wrote the first
draft of his Meditations. He matriculated at the University
of Leiden in 1630. In 1631 he visited Denmark with the
physician and alchemist Étienne de Villebressieu, who
invented siege engines, a portable bridge, and a two-wheeled
stretcher. The physician Henri Regius (1598–1679), who
taught Descartes’s views at the University of Utrecht in
1639, involved Descartes in a fierce controversy with the
Calvinist theologian Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676) that
continued for the rest of Descartes’s life. In his Letter to
Voetius of 1648, Descartes made a plea for religious
tolerance and the rights of man. Claiming to write not only
for Christians but also for Turks—meaning Muslims,
libertines, infidels, deists, and atheists—he argued that,
because Protestants and Catholics worship the same God, both
can hope for heaven. When the controversy became intense,
however, Descartes sought the protection of the French
ambassador and of his friend Constantijn Huygens
(1596–1687), secretary to the stadholder Prince Frederick
Henry (ruled 1625–47).
In 1635 Descartes’s daughter Francine was born to Helena
Jans and was baptized in the Reformed Church in Deventer.
Although Francine is typically referred to by commentators
as Descartes’s “illegitimate” daughter, her baptism is
recorded in a register for legitimate births. Her death of
scarlet fever at the age of five was the greatest sorrow of
Descartes’s life. Referring to her death, Descartes said
that he did not believe that one must refrain from tears to
prove oneself a man.
The World and Discourse on Method
In 1633, just as he was about to publish The World (1664),
Descartes learned that the Italian astronomer Galileo
Galilei (1564–1642) had been condemned in Rome for
publishing the view that the Earth revolves around the Sun.
Because this Copernican position is central to his cosmology
and physics, Descartes suppressed The World, hoping that
eventually the church would retract its condemnation.
Although Descartes feared the church, he also hoped that his
physics would one day replace that of Aristotle in church
doctrine and be taught in Catholic schools.
Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637) is one of the
first important modern philosophical works not written in
Latin. Descartes said that he wrote in French so that all
who had good sense, including women, could read his work and
learn to think for themselves. He believed that everyone
could tell true from false by the natural light of reason.
In three essays accompanying the Discourse, he illustrated
his method for utilizing reason in the search for truth in
the sciences: in Dioptrics he derived the law of refraction,
in Meteorology he explained the rainbow, and in Geometry he
gave an exposition of his analytic geometry. He also
perfected the system invented by François Viète for
representing known numerical quantities with a, b, c, … ,
unknowns with x, y, z, … , and squares, cubes, and other
powers with numerical superscripts, as in x2, x3, … , which
made algebraic calculations much easier than they had been
before.
In the Discourse he also provided a provisional moral
code (later presented as final) for use while seeking truth:
(1) obey local customs and laws, (2) make decisions on the
best evidence and then stick to them firmly as though they
were certain, (3) change desires rather than the world, and
(4) always seek truth. This code exhibits Descartes’s
prudential conservatism, decisiveness, stoicism, and
dedication. The Discourse and other works illustrate
Descartes’s conception of knowledge as being like a tree in
its interconnectedness and in the grounding provided to
higher forms of knowledge by lower or more fundamental ones.
Thus, for Descartes, metaphysics corresponds to the roots of
the tree, physics to the trunk, and medicine, mechanics, and
morals to the branches.
Meditations
In 1641 Descartes published the Meditations on First
Philosophy, in Which Is Proved the Existence of God and the
Immortality of the Soul. Written in Latin and dedicated to
the Jesuit professors at the Sorbonne in Paris, the work
includes critical responses by several eminent
thinkers—collected by Mersenne from the Jansenist
philosopher and theologian Antoine Arnauld (1612–94), the
English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and the
Epicurean atomist Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655)—as well as
Descartes’s replies. The second edition (1642) includes a
response by the Jesuit priest Pierre Bourdin (1595–1653),
who Descartes said was a fool. These objections and replies
constitute a landmark of cooperative discussion in
philosophy and science at a time when dogmatism was the
rule.
The Meditations is characterized by Descartes’s use of
methodic doubt, a systematic procedure of rejecting as
though false all types of belief in which one has ever been,
or could ever be, deceived. His arguments derive from the
skepticism of the Greek philosopher Sextus Empiricus (fl.
3rd century ad) as reflected in the work of the essayist
Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) and the Catholic theologian
Pierre Charron (1541–1603). Thus, Descartes’s apparent
knowledge based on authority is set aside, because even
experts are sometimes wrong. His beliefs from sensory
experience are declared untrustworthy, because such
experience is sometimes misleading, as when a square tower
appears round from a distance. Even his beliefs about the
objects in his immediate vicinity may be mistaken, because,
as he notes, he often has dreams about objects that do not
exist, and he has no way of knowing with certainty whether
he is dreaming or awake. Finally, his apparent knowledge of
simple and general truths of reasoning that do not depend on
sense experience—such as “2 + 3 = 5” or “a square has four
sides”—is also unreliable, because God could have made him
in such a way that, for example, he goes wrong every time he
counts. As a way of summarizing the universal doubt into
which he has fallen, Descartes supposes that an “evil genius
of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his
energies in order to deceive me.”
Although at this stage there is seemingly no belief about
which he cannot entertain doubt, Descartes finds certainty
in the intuition that, when he is thinking—even if he is
being deceived—he must exist. In the Discourse, Descartes
expresses this intuition in the dictum “I think, therefore I
am”; but because “therefore” suggests that the intuition is
an argument—though it is not—in the Meditations he says
merely, “I think, I am” (“Cogito, sum”). The cogito is a
logically self-evident truth that also gives intuitively
certain knowledge of a particular thing’s existence—that is,
one’s self. Nevertheless, it justifies accepting as certain
only the existence of the person who thinks it. If all one
ever knew for certain was that one exists, and if one
adhered to Descartes’s method of doubting all that is
uncertain, then one would be reduced to solipsism, the view
that nothing exists but one’s self and thoughts. To escape
solipsism, Descartes argues that all ideas that are as
“clear and distinct” as the cogito must be true, for, if
they were not, the cogito also, as a member of the class of
clear and distinct ideas, could be doubted. Since “I think,
I am” cannot be doubted, all clear and distinct ideas must
be true.
On the basis of clear and distinct innate ideas,
Descartes then establishes that each mind is a mental
substance and each body a part of one material substance.
The mind or soul is immortal, because it is unextended and
cannot be broken into parts, as can extended bodies.
Descartes also advances a proof for the existence of God. He
begins with the proposition that he has an innate idea of
God as a perfect being and then concludes that God
necessarily exists, because, if he did not, he would not be
perfect. This ontological argument for God’s existence,
originally due to the English logician St. Anselm of
Canterbury (1033/34–1109), is at the heart of Descartes’s
rationalism, for it establishes certain knowledge about an
existing thing solely on the basis of reasoning from innate
ideas, with no help from sensory experience. Descartes then
argues that, because God is perfect, he does not deceive
human beings; and therefore, because God leads us to believe
that the material world exists, it does exist. In this way
Descartes claims to establish metaphysical foundations for
the existence of his own mind, of God, and of the material
world.
The inherent circularity of Descartes’s reasoning was
exposed by Arnauld, whose objection has come to be known as
the Cartesian Circle. According to Descartes, God’s
existence is established by the fact that Descartes has a
clear and distinct idea of God; but the truth of Descartes’s
clear and distinct ideas are guaranteed by the fact that God
exists and is not a deceiver. Thus, in order to show that
God exists, Descartes must assume that God exists.
Physics, physiology, and morals
Descartes’s general goal was to help human beings master and
possess nature. He provided understanding of the trunk of
the tree of knowledge in The World, Dioptrics, Meteorology,
and Geometry, and he established its metaphysical roots in
the Meditations. He then spent the rest of his life working
on the branches of mechanics, medicine, and morals.
Mechanics is the basis of his physiology and medicine, which
in turn is the basis of his moral psychology. Descartes
believed that all material bodies, including the human body,
are machines that operate by mechanical principles. In his
physiological studies, he dissected animal bodies to show
how their parts move. He argued that, because animals have
no souls, they do not think or feel; thus, vivisection,
which Descartes practiced, is permitted. He also described
the circulation of the blood but came to the erroneous
conclusion that heat in the heart expands the blood, causing
its expulsion into the veins. Descartes’s L’Homme, et un
traité de la formation du foetus (Man, and a Treatise on the
Formation of the Foetus) was published in 1664.
In 1644 Descartes published Principles of Philosophy, a
compilation of his physics and metaphysics. He dedicated
this work to Princess Elizabeth (1618–79), daughter of
Elizabeth Stuart, titular queen of Bohemia, in
correspondence with whom he developed his moral philosophy.
According to Descartes, a human being is a union of mind and
body, two radically dissimilar substances that interact in
the pineal gland. He reasoned that the pineal gland must be
the uniting point because it is the only nondouble organ in
the brain, and double reports, as from two eyes, must have
one place to merge. He argued that each action on a person’s
sense organs causes subtle matter to move through tubular
nerves to the pineal gland, causing it to vibrate
distinctively. These vibrations give rise to emotions and
passions and also cause the body to act. Bodily action is
thus the final outcome of a reflex arc that begins with
external stimuli—as, for example, when a soldier sees the
enemy, feels fear, and flees. The mind cannot change bodily
reactions directly—for example, it cannot will the body to
fight—but by altering mental attitudes, it can change the
pineal vibrations from those that cause fear and fleeing to
those that cause courage and fighting.
Descartes argued further that human beings can be
conditioned by experience to have specific emotional
responses. Descartes himself, for example, had been
conditioned to be attracted to cross-eyed women because he
had loved a cross-eyed playmate as a child. When he
remembered this fact, however, he was able to rid himself of
his passion. This insight is the basis of Descartes’s
defense of free will and of the mind’s ability to control
the body. Despite such arguments, in his Passions of the
Soul (1649), which he dedicated to Queen Christina of Sweden
(reigned 1644–54), Descartes holds that most bodily actions
are determined by external material causes.
Descartes’s morality is anti-Jansenist and anti-Calvinist
in that he maintains that the grace that is necessary for
salvation can be earned and that human beings are virtuous
and able to achieve salvation when they do their best to
find and act upon the truth. His optimism about the ability
of human reason and will to find truth and reach salvation
contrasts starkly with the pessimism of the Jansenist
apologist and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–62), who
believed that salvation comes only as a gift of God’s grace.
Descartes was correctly accused of holding the view of
Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609), an anti-Calvinist Dutch
theologian, that salvation depends on free will and good
works rather than on grace. Descartes also held that, unless
people believe in God and immortality, they will see no
reason to be moral.
Free will, according to Descartes, is the sign of God in
human nature, and human beings can be praised or blamed
according to their use of it. People are good, he believed,
only to the extent that they act freely for the good of
others; such generosity is the highest virtue. Descartes was
Epicurean in his assertion that human passions are good in
themselves. He was an extreme moral optimist in his belief
that understanding of the good is automatically followed by
a desire to do the good. Moreover, because passions are
“willings” according to Descartes, to want something is the
same as to will it. Descartes was also stoic, however, in
his admonition that, rather than change the world, human
beings should control their passions.
Although Descartes wrote no political philosophy, he
approved of the admonition of Seneca (c. 4 bc–ad 65) to
acquiesce in the common order of things. He rejected the
recommendation of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) to lie to
one’s friends, because friendship is sacred and life’s
greatest joy. Human beings cannot exist alone but must be
parts of social groups, such as nations and families, and it
is better to do good for the group than for oneself.
Descartes had been a puny child with a weak chest and was
not expected to live. He therefore watched his health
carefully, becoming a virtual vegetarian. In 1639 he bragged
that he had not been sick for 19 years and that he expected
to live to 100. He told Princess Elizabeth to think of life
as a comedy; bad thoughts cause bad dreams and bodily
disorders. Because there is always more good than evil in
life, he said, one can always be content, no matter how bad
things seem. Elizabeth, inextricably involved in messy court
and family affairs, was not consoled.
In his later years Descartes said that he had once hoped
to learn to prolong life to a century or more, but he then
saw that, to achieve that goal, the work of many generations
would be required; he himself had not even learned to
prevent a fever. Thus, he said, instead of continuing to
hope for long life, he had found an easier way, namely to
love life and not to fear death. It is easy, he claimed, for
a true philosopher to die tranquilly.
Final years and heritage
In 1644, 1647, and 1648, after 16 years in the Netherlands,
Descartes returned to France for brief visits on financial
business and to oversee the translation into French of the
Principles, the Meditations, and the Objections and Replies.
(The translators were, respectively, Picot, Charles
d’Albert, duke de Luynes, and Claude Clerselier.) In 1647 he
also met with Gassendi and Hobbes, and he suggested to
Pascal the famous experiment of taking a barometer up Mount
Puy-de-Dôme to determine the influence of the weight of the
air. Picot returned with Descartes to the Netherlands for
the winter of 1647–48. During Descartes’s final stay in
Paris in 1648, the French nobility revolted against the
crown in a series of wars known as the Fronde. Descartes
left precipitously on August 17, 1648, only days before the
death of his old friend Mersenne.
Clerselier’s brother-in-law, Hector Pierre Chanut, who
was French resident in Sweden and later ambassador, helped
to procure a pension for Descartes from Louis XIV, though it
was never paid. Later, Chanut engineered an invitation for
Descartes to the court of Queen Christina, who by the close
of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) had become one of the
most important and powerful monarchs in Europe. Descartes
went reluctantly, arriving early in October 1649. He may
have gone because he needed patronage; the Fronde seemed to
have destroyed his chances in Paris, and the Calvinist
theologians were harassing him in the Netherlands.
In Sweden—where, Descartes said, in winter men’s thoughts
freeze like the water—the 22-year-old Christina perversely
made the 53-year-old Descartes rise before 5:00 am to give
her philosophy lessons, even though she knew of his habit of
lying in bed until 11 o’clock in the morning. She also is
said to have ordered him to write the verses of a ballet,
The Birth of Peace (1649), to celebrate her role in the
Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War. The
verses in fact were not written by Descartes, though he did
write the statutes for a Swedish Academy of Arts and
Sciences. While delivering these statutes to the queen at
5:00 am on February 1, 1650, he caught a chill, and he soon
developed pneumonia. He died in Stockholm on February 11.
Many pious last words have been attributed to him, but the
most trustworthy report is that of his German valet, who
said that Descartes was in a coma and died without saying
anything at all.
Descartes’s papers came into the possession of Claude
Clerselier, a pious Catholic, who began the process of
turning Descartes into a saint by cutting, adding to, and
selectively publishing his letters. This cosmetic work
culminated in 1691 in the massive biography by Father Adrien
Baillet, who was at work on a 17-volume Lives of the Saints.
Even during Descartes’s lifetime there were questions about
whether he was a Catholic apologist, primarily concerned
with supporting Christian doctrine, or an atheist, concerned
only with protecting himself with pious sentiments while
establishing a deterministic, mechanistic, and materialistic
physics.
These questions remain difficult to answer, not least
because all the papers, letters, and manuscripts available
to Clerselier and Baillet are now lost. In 1667 the Roman
Catholic church made its own decision by putting Descartes’s
works on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Latin: “Index of
Prohibited Books”) on the very day his bones were
ceremoniously placed in Sainte-Geneviève-du-Mont in Paris.
During his lifetime, Protestant ministers in the Netherlands
called Descartes a Jesuit and a papist—which is to say an
atheist. He retorted that they were intolerant, ignorant
bigots. Up to about 1930, a majority of scholars, many of
whom were religious, believed that Descartes’s major
concerns were metaphysical and religious. By the late 20th
century, however, numerous commentators had come to believe
that Descartes was a Catholic in the same way he was a
Frenchman and a royalist—that is, by birth and by
convention.
Descartes himself said that good sense is destroyed when
one thinks too much of God. He once told a German protégée,
Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–78), who was known as a
painter and a poet, that she was wasting her intellect
studying Hebrew and theology. He also was perfectly aware
of—though he tried to conceal—the atheistic potential of his
materialist physics and physiology. Descartes seemed
indifferent to the emotional depths of religion. Whereas
Pascal trembled when he looked into the infinite universe
and perceived the puniness and misery of man, Descartes
exulted in the power of human reason to understand the
cosmos and to promote happiness, and he rejected the view
that human beings are essentially miserable and sinful. He
held that it is impertinent to pray to God to change things.
Instead, when we cannot change the world, we must change
ourselves.
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