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Agrippa d'Aubigne's "Les Tragiques": The conquest of profaned time

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Agrippa d'Aubigne's "Les Tragiques": The conquest of profaned time

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Content AGRIPPA D’AUBIGNÉ* S LES TRAGIQUES U - THE CONQUEST OF PROFANED TIME by Virginia Crosby "I A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (French) August 1969 UMI Number: DP28423 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI DP28423 Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106 -1346 © Virginia Crosby 1970 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90007 PLD, F <nc> T'/iw dissertatiouj w ritten by ....... .Y.lxgi3 ila...Qr.9.sbj:............. under the direction of hox.... Dissertation C om mittee, and approved by a ll its members, has been presented to and accepted by The G ra d u ate School, in p a rtia l fu lfillm e n t of require ments of the degree of D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y ' ’ .'Tn Dean D a te... DISSERTATION COMMITTEE .. _ ^ _ Chairman ... j / . . . . and it shall come to pass, when thou art come thither to the city, that thou shalt meet a band of prophets coming down from the high place with a psaltery, and a timbrel, and a pipe, and a harp, before them; and they will be prophesying; and the Spirit of Jehovah will come mightily upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man. I Samuel x;5 When once our heav'nly-guided soul shall clime. Then all This Earthy grossness quit. Attir’d with Stars, we shall for ever sit. Triumphing over Death, and Change, and thee O Time Milton, On Time 11 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .......................................... 1 PART I 1. THE PROBLEM OF KNOWING: DEPENDENCE ON A NEXUS...........................26 2. THE PROBLEM OF KNOWING : KNOWLEDGE AS DRAMATIC ENCOUNTER................75 PART II 1. D ’AUBIGNÉ’S WAY OF KNOWING; THE PROPHETIC STANCE ........................ 118 2. D’AUBIGNÉ’S WAY OF KNOWING ; CLEANLINESS AND FILTH ........................ 172 CONCLUSION .......................... ........ 214 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................219 111 INTRODUCTION La voici l'heureuse journée Que Dieu a faite à plein^désir. Par nous soit joye démenée Et prenons en elle plaisir 1 Psalms cxviii: 24 In several camps at Coutras, Huguenot soldiers on their knees welcomed the October day by giving thanks to God and singing out a proclamation of his everlasting grace and triumph before going into battle against the Duke of . Joyeuse.^ The Protestant forces were led by the King of Navarre; and with King Henry rode his severest of critics ^ 2 and most loyal of subjects, Theodore Agrippa d'Aubigne. Forty-three years later, verse 24 of the hymn of Coutras echoed from the latter's death-bed, as joyously spoken by the exiled old veteran as it had once been sung, and with 3 as much certainty of final victory. ^October 20, 1587. Armand Gamier, Agrippa d*Aubigne et le parti protestant (3 vols.; Paris, 1928), I, 374-376, 2 " D'Aubigne equated criticism with loyalty ; bruised feelings and quarrels figured in the relationship of the two men. Henry's feelings are best summed up by this salu tation from a meeting in July, 1586; "Dieu vous gard, Sertorius, Manlius Torquatus, le vieux Caton, et si 1'an tiquité a encore quelque plus sévère Capitaine, Dieu vous gard cestuy-là 1 " Quoted by Gamier, ibid. , p, 355. 3 He died two days later, on May 9, 1630; he was 2 . For Agrippa d 'Aubigne the man, for the Christian soldier and poet, life had been a jousting ground where death was both the scorned enemy in the lists and the be- 4 loved sitting in the stands; a treacherous seductress, a 5 "Dalide fine," whose embrace could destroy a man's soul, yet also the bride whose kiss promised eternal life. At the time of his dying, any ambivalent attitudes that might remain were once more being resolved; life was again being affirmed by this intransigent and vigorous old man who could still spit half-way across his room.^ Death could be welcomed head-on, for time had been vanquished; human events and the course of history had been reintegrated for judgment into a poetically created cosmos of spiritual reality and seventy-eight years old. The verse of the Psalm in ques tion is from the version of Clement Marot with music by Lois Bourgeois'. Gamier, ibid., III, 179, D'Aubigne had fled to Geneva following the failure of the nobles' upris ing against Luynes and the debacle of Ponts-de-Ce, August 7, 1520. Furthermore, the first two volumes of his Histoire Universelle had been condemned. Ibid., pp, 71-88. ^Marcel^Raymond points out that death for^d'Aubigne is "une réalité qui le repousse et l'attire," Génies de France, Editions de la Baconniêre (Neuchâtel, 1942), p. 77". 5 The "Dalide" in question refers to Henry of Navarre's mistress, Gabrielle d'Estrées, who influenced his abjuration of Protestantism. In d'Aubigné's Calvinist eyes, she was partially responsible for the death of his soul. See the Preface, 313-318 and the footnote to line 315 : Agrippa d'Aubigné, Les Tragiques, critical edition by A, Gamier and J* Plattard, Société des textes français modernes (4 vols,; Paris, 1962), All quotations from the Tragiques refer to this edition, ^Gamier, Agrippa d'Aubigné, III, 179. duration, the dying French Reformation and the pendus 7 d 'Amboise ransomed by a life in which art and human will had been zealously fused by faith and action, and wherein God’s will had indeed been his pleasure. If the Tragiques, which constitute such a great part of the ransom money, were largely inspired by a fanatic's need to proselytize, by a poet's desire to "esmouvoir,and by a soldier's 9 frustration at defeat, at the same time their composition was a means of giving unity and justification to his life, a way also to intellectual and sensual knowledge of God, Thus, for him, his own death was but a rite de passage in which art was to be transformed into reality. To our more sentimental yet emotionally dryer age, the recitation of a joyous Psalm at the approach of death might appear to smack of bravache or of uneasy self- consciousness, Indeed, d'Aubigné was not a man to be 7 Passing through Amboise on his way to Paris with his father in 1560, the eight-year-old boy saw the remains of some of his father's fellow religionnaires who had been involved in the unsuccessful Amboise conspiracy against the Guises. Agrippa’s father had him swear to avenge their martyrdom. Ibid,, I, 34, 8 In the "Avis aux lepteurs" of the Tragiques, the poet complains: "Nous sommes ennuyés de livres qui^enseig nent, donnez-nous en pour esmouvoir, en un siècle ou tout zèle chrestien est péri, où la difference du vray et du mensonge est comme abolie,'.’ D'Aubigné, Les Tragiques, I, 3 ^ - J | 0 D'Aubigné himself says he began composing his poem after being wounded in the defeat at Castel-Jaloux, 1577* First published in 1616, the Tragiques were written, in their primary form, between 1577 and 1589* Gamier, Agrippa d'Aubigne, II, 181-82, 4 , unaware of the effect he was producing; since childhood he had been mindful of his talents as a persuasive orator, and his actions frequently showed a Gascon penchant for the dramatic,However, role-playing was not offset from reality in his case; as the rather worn Renaissance concept would have it, theater and life were one, thought and action coalesced— as did action and feeling. This raises the ques tion of self-consciousness, or rather the question of the particular sort of self-awareness that was d'Aubigné's as a militant Huguenot and as a man keenly aware both of time and 12 of his times, with their sense of "urgency and action," A Calvinist versed in the art of the daily examen de conscience, d'Aubigné was alert to the hidden yet vigilant presence of an être intérieur, the guardian of truth. He says, in the preface to the Tragiques ; 10 Having fled Paris with his master, Beroald, in 1562, d'Aubigne and his party spent some days at Montargis under the protection of the Duchess of Ferrara, Young d'Aubigné spent three days speaking to the duchess "sur le mespris de la mort," At another time his "harangue" was so pathetic that he dissuaded his father from punishing him. Gamier quotes these incidents from d'Aubigné's Mémoires, ibid,, pp. 49-50, 52, and in his preface calls him an "orateur né," p, iv, ^^D'Aubigné was from Saintonge, but Gascon influence was strong by virtue of geographical proximity and his as sociation with the house of Navarre, See also d'Aubigné's Aventures du Baron de Faeneste (1617-1630), 12 John C, Lapp, The Universe of Pontus de Tyard; a critical edition of L'Univers (New York, 1950), p, xi, 13 Car je la trouve dans le creux Du logis de soi tenebreux,^^ Logis esleu pour ma demeure, OÙ mon ame veut que je meure. Furieuse de sainct amour. (Préf., 127-29, 131-32) For d'Aubigné, this area of the psyche— distinct from the soul— was a battleground, a place of shadows, and possibly the repository of much repressed material from the pas sionate and more pitiless side of his nature.Yet, as the refuge of truth, a place of self-confrontation, it was also a source of comfort, of illumination, of self- knowledge . The lines quoted above illustrate two contradictory impulses of d'Aubigné's that his life and work strove to conciliate: one, the active, energetic tracking down of truth, i.e., knowledge of God and knowledge of self, for, says Calvin, "en cognoissant Dieu, chacun de nous aussi se 16 cognoisse," indeed the two are "choses coniointes"; the ^^"La" = la vérité. 14 My italics. ^^As a military man of his times, d'Aubigné accepted ruse and cruelty as a necessity, even a privilege, of war. Jean Plattard, Une Figure de premier plan dans nos lettres de la Renaissance: Agrippa d'Aubigné (Paris, 1931), p. 121. However, he confesses in Vengeances : "Je me suis pieu au fer, David m'est un exemple / Que qui verse le sang ne bas- tit pas le temple" (122-23). The first part of Vengeances is an account of his youthful sins (23-140). 16 Jean Calvin, Institution de la religion chres- tienne, ed. Jean-Daniel Benoit (4 vols.; Paris, 1957), I, 50. ■ 6 , other, the yearning for death that annihilates space, time, and the self, and by which the soul is reborn into rapturous 17 contemplation of the Infinite* An "ame ,** furieuse" is a soul transported; d'Aubigné chafes at human limitations#^^ But if we see the poet highly conscious of the self, we do not see him bending clinically over it; he shows none of the microscopic curiosity or detached observation that fasci- 19 nates Montaigne* Though he longs for the immediate vision of God, the warrior that he is welcomes the active struggle between the Adam-man and his higher nature, between the 20 lure of the flesh-pots and the hunger for celestial bread. His spirit bears a strong resemblance to that of a Cornelian .hero striving for the self-unification of 1'homme intègre, for a fusion of the person and the persona, of the inner ideal and outer expression, and at the same time, influenced by the Calvinist doctrine of the nothingness of man alone, praying mightily for the ultimate integrity of transforma tion# In Vengeances, the sixth canto of the Tragiques, he implores God : 17 Albert-Marie Schmidt, "Remarques sur les deux derniers livres des Tragiques, ' * L'Information littéraire, X (1958), 48# p, 47. In a letter written by his widow (and second wife) to the family in France, she quotes him as saying: "M'amie, laisse moy aller en pais, je veus aller manger du pain céleste#" Garnier, Agrippa d'Aubigné, III, 179# Change-moy, refay-moy, exerce ta pitié, Rens-moy mort en ce monde, oste la mauvaistié Qui possédé à son gré ma jeunesse premiere; Lors je songeray songe & verray ta lumière. (35-38) In the seventh and last canto the wish is realized; the poet achieves victory over self and victory over past defeats, the shattering events of the civil wars. Con fronted by the irreversibility of human time and events, the poet’s word, like the alchemical sword, "kills and vi- 21 vifies." Like the sword issuing from the mouth of the 22 Son of Man, the poet’s word is the means of transforming 23 "the vital spirit in man into the Divine" and the time that destroys into eternity. By exposing the recent past and man's actions in history to the glare of divine purpose and duration, all illusion is stripped away, the march of the elect foreshadowed, and the Adam-man destroyed by the final leap into the lap of God: Mes sens n'ont plus de sens, 1'esprit de moy s'envole. Le coeur ravi se taist, ma bouche est sans parole: Tout meurt, 1'ame s'enfuit, et reprenant son lieu Exstatique se pasme au giron de son Dieu. (Jugement, 1215-18} 21 Cari G. Jung, Psyché and Symbol, trans. Cary Baynes and F. C. R. Hull, ed. Violet de Laszlo, Doubleday Anchor Original (New York, 1958), p. 182. ^^Revelation i: 16. 2 3 Jung, Psyché and Symbol, p. 182. ' ^ 24 Knowing and being become one ; the "poetic victory" over self and events in time is complete. Firm in the hope of election, his own action in time can be significant for a Calvinist as a sign of that elec tion, just as God's continuous activity in history is a sign of his providential though predestined plan for man kind. A strong sense of individualism and the drive to im pose himself on events and the outer world were very present in d'Aubigné. In his case, however, the daemonic cult of virtu did not follow the Machiavellian-inspired mystique which allowed for boldly setting oneself "above all ethical 25 and religious traditions." Rather was it subsumed in the form of God's prophet and avenger; God himself had told him to "employer ton bras droict aux vengeances de Dieu" (Fers, 1420). D'Aubigné's kinship to the Biblical prophets is consistently recognized; Cavens says that he has a soul which harks back to Joshua;indeed, he is both spiritually Henry A. Sauerwein, Agrippa d'Aubigné's "Les Tra giques" : A Study in Structure and Poetic Method (Baltimore, 1953), p. 20. Richard L. Regosin also points out that d'Aubigné is striving to restore order by poetically de stroying the monde à 1'envers that he is presenting and re placing it with the Kingdom of Heaven. "Agrippa d'Aubigné's Les Tragiques : Protestant Apocalypse and Divine Tragedy " (Johns Hopkins University, 1965), pp. 195-96. 25 Alfred von Martin, Sociology of the Renaissance (New York, 1963), p. 15. ^^A. Cavens, Agrippa d'Aubigné, l'homme et 1'oeuvre (Brussels, 1949), p. 21. 27 and psychologically akin to the "forthtellers" of the Old Testament. Considering the task that stretches ahead of him, he says: "La où estoyent les feux des prophètes plus vieux, / Je tends comme je puis le cordeau de mes yeux" (Misères, 27-28). Like the prophets of old, his soul is engaged in a dialogue with God, a conversation which is re ported at intervals throughout the seven cantos; his means of expression is God-given: "Ailleurs qu'à te louer ne soit abondonnee / La plume que je tiens, puis que tu l'as donnée" (53-54), It is with this pen that he will rescue the "cap tive Eglise" (14), for his words are a reality that can make things happen, the uniting element between thought and ac tion. His concept of divine inspiration that lifts the soul up to its original heavenly home is within the Pléiade tradition : "Je sens ravir dedans les cieux / Mon ame aussi bien que mes yeux" (Préf., 187-88), but the dynamic and de structive force he attributes to his words goes somewhat beyond it. Comparing himself to Hannibal about to attack Rome he says : Mon courage de feu, mon humeur aigre & forte Au travers des sept monts faict breche au lieu de porte. Je brise les rochers & le respect d’erreur Qui fit douter César d'une vaine terreur, (Misères, 5-9) 27 Théophile James Meek, Hebrew Origins (New York, 1960), According to Meek, the most popular word for pro phet, nâbî’, did not mean one who foretold the future, but one who spoke forth the word of God, Pp. 150-51, 10 For d'Àubigné, as for the prophets, the word is alive with power because "it is born within the self of the speaker, and bears within it the vitality and the power of the speaker, * . . [it] calls to action"; it is also the meeting 28 ground of the thinking and the acting self* Outlining the current contrast of Greek and Hebrew thought, James Barr notes that the distinction of subject and object is felt to be a product of the static and abstract tendencies of Greek thought. It arises from the abstraction from action and movement in order to think * The contem plative approach means the dissociation of the mind from involvement in action. In Hebrew thought the thinking subject is the acting person, and there is no expression of a relationship between subject and object in thought which is other than that between subject and object in a c t i o n *29 This was d'Aubigné's goal as a man and as a poet. However much he was aware of being an object from the standpoint of God's divine syntax, he functioned as subject-object within his own * The poet-prophet's divinely inspired word was the creating expression of this three-way relationship* "La voici 1'heureuse journée, .,* * " The Psalmist's verse, linking as it does action to repose, the temporal to the spiritual, the limited to the infinite, is at the core 28 James Muilenburg, The Way of Israel; Biblical Faith and Ethics, Harper Torchbooks (New York, 1965), pp* 31-32, 29 James Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford, 196 2), p, 12. 11 of Agrippa d'Aubigné's life and poetic thought. It is a summing up of his faith and of his way of experiencing reality. It is the catalyst that can turn defeat into vic tory, death into life, and reveal history simultaneously in terms of its immediate as well as its ultimate significance. The verse is also a symbol in capsule form of the thought guiding this paper : that d'Aubigné, man and poet, lived simultaneously and most consciously on two time-levels : the time of man and the time of God; the time of the created and the time of the creator. As I have seen, inspiration has transported his soul and his eyes to heaven; it is from this vantage point that he observes the actions of past and present and future struggles. This is no dream, however; throughout the work he insists on what he sees and has seen; his visionary ex perience, like that of the old prophets, is a "real, in- 30 effable experience of the mind." And, we would add, of the senses. A prophetic stance is required to straddle the irreconcilable distance between that which actively was, that which is actively becoming, and that which Is; it re quires a visionary to fuse the spiritual and the sensual in concrete images that become the terms of essential moral value, the expression of God's judgment and will. That d'Aubigné achieves this highly effective kind of simulta- 30 ■ Meek, Hebrew Origins, p. 153. 12 neity in the Tragiques is due not only to the epic quality of his subject matter, nor to the satirical spirit of his purpose, nor yet entirely to the all-pervasive influence of the Bible, but rather to that certain aspect of his thought which is Hebraic in structure, in the way in which it con nects with reality, and which makes his identification with the Psalmist much more than a mere convention or affecta- tion D'Aubigné's poetic statements and judgments, like those of the prophets, stem less from the logical than from the psychological field: a logos-system, the Hellenic- Christian and Hellenized-Judaic thought system that was dominant in Renaissance thinking, sees the world as a pat tern, a harmonious and orderly pattern because it is go verned by reason, as man conforms to reason * With logos as ^^In the second canto. Princes, the poet invokes truth in terms of the Biblical story# "Preste-moi, vérité ta pastorale fonde, "Que j'enfonce dedans la pierre la plus ronde "Que je pourrai choisir, & que ce caillou rond "Du Vice-Goliath s'enchâsse dans le front#" (45-48) In La Chambre dorée he identifies further with David, ex horting the "stupides endormis" to listen to David's harp as it takes over his voice (1006-09); this is followed by a frequently free paraphrase of Psalm Iviii # Sixteenth- century Biblical scholarship made no distinction between the Psalms; all were thought to have been written by David; nor did they recognize the diverse authorship of other books of the Bible, such as Isaiah— nor do I, by the same token# To make any such distinctions is immaterial to the purpose of this study# 13 his guide, man in such a system seeks the general, the time less, and laws that are immutable* The starting point is 32 the idea rather than experience* In a psychologically oriented system, the starting point is experience, action, encounter; the human drama of history which is conflict be tween men, and conflict between man and God* Logistic thought, seeking out relationships, develops discursively in space, Psychological thought, being highly dependent upon the body and upon the senses, is created by a dialectic between body-states and the impact of external events upon consciousness, upon memory, upon the inner psychic life in general * Where the logistic field is space-oriented, the psychological field is time-oriented and multi-layered (in the temporal sense), condensing, as it does, memory of the past and future projections with the immediate yet ever- changing moment, thereby preserving the identity of the self along with the creation of change * This subjective, or psychic time, is not spatial content, but dynamic con tent, existing both as a constantly Becoming and a contin uous I Am; it is a happening that effaces the importance of time segments in favor of the whole. There is no chronological sequence to the Tragiques, and yet, as recent criticism emphasizes, there is 32 The concept of the distinctive thought-systems is taken from Harold Fisch, Jerusalem and Albion; The Hebraic Factor in Seventeenth-Century Literature (London, 1964), pp* 69-70* 14 progression and psychological unity in what appears to be a 33 highly disorganized work* One very important element of - this psychological unity is created by the working of the Hebraic factor in d'Aubigné's thought, the factor whose reality is time, the field of action for the God of history* To the Old Testament Hebrew, history is God's gift 34 to his people* It is a continuation of Genesis, a con tinuous creation in which man and God work together. As 35 one of the chosen, and by virtue of the Covenant, man is in partnership with a God who, though transcendent, is con stantly active in human affairs. In his highly subjective 36 world, the old Hebrew listens with attentive heart for the command of God; here he enters into the dialogue with God that keeps him entire * Even for Job, refusing to re nounce his integrity (ii: 9-10), the remembered words of the God who has abandoned him are his nourishment (xxiii;12)* As long as man's actions and words are judged righteous, he 33 Sauerwein, for instance, stresses the psychological unity of the work* D'Aubigné's "Les Tragiques", p* 14. 34 . ' Muilenburg, Way of Israel, p * 44* 35 "And I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God" (Exodus vi; 7)* All Biblical citations are from the American Standard edition (1901), as being^the most literal in translation to the Hebrew— that d'Aubigné read— and the closest to the Vulgate, which he used along with the Geneva Bible of 1588* See the critical apparatus of the Tragiques, I, 24* 36 "Know therefore this day, and lay it to thy heart, that Jehovah he is God" (Deuteronomy iv: 39)* 15 is fulfilling his contract with God, he is choosing what is life-producing, he is choosing life for himself and his 37 seed, he is choosing continuation in the Man-God-Nature relationship— the ultimate reality. Thus is accentuated the close interaction between life, time, and individual action; and we see how, in Old Testament literature, God's judgment, the moral factor, interiorizes these individual actions performed in successive moments and makes them his torically meaningful. With this lack of distinction between thought, word, and action, the subjective world of the Hebrew is intensely real and expresses itself in concrete and physiological terms that, upon examination, are re vealed to be images of psychological states. Since God gave history to his people, and since psychic time is composed of the event and the judgment upon it, the partnership of God and man can be said to be time- creating— with time continuously emerging as human act and divine judgment meet in a synthesized flow* It is the moment of contact, however, that decides whether the act is viable or not * This point of contact is the source of much of the imagery in the Old Testament, as it is the source of much of the imagery in the Tragiques. A verbal movement and rhythm are put in motion whose images, uniting the sensual 37 "I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse, therefore choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed" (Deuteronomy xxx;19), : 15 to the sublime, are either dynamically destructive or dyna mically creative and life-restoring. They are destructive whenever the word or deed, however successful in fact, goes counter to God’s ultimate judgment; they are creative when ever the word or deed, however doomed historically, is in agreement with God's ultimate judgment. In the poet's vision, in his moral and psychological landscape, the basic image is corporeal— that of struggling and dying organisms; the eschatological significance of their death is seen in terms of fertility or sterility, Â martyr named Marie, who is to be buried alive, envisions this death as a sowing: "Terre, tu es legere & plus douce que miel, Saincte terre, tu es le droict chemin du ciel," Ainsi la noire mort donna la claire vie, Et le ciel fut conquis par la terre à Marie, (Feux, 539-42) France, however, a country turned against itself, is seen as a mother whose milk is wasted by the struggle of her in fant sons (Misères, 97-130), As for her cities: Ses villes sont charongne, & ses plus cheres vies. Et le suc S c la force en ont esté ravies; Les pars ruinez sont membres retranchez Dont le corps sechera, puis qu’ils sont assechez, (505-08) The poetic convention of flowering and withering acquires a psycho-physical dimension in d’Aubigné's work by virtue of its Biblical association with righteousness and unrighteousness. 17 ,Not only living things but institutions are dying, dead, or dismembered bodies. Justice serves death, not life* The Palais de justice glitters like gold; however, Dieu trouva I'estoffe & les durs fondemens Et la pierre commune a ces fiers bastimens D'os, de testes de morts ; au mortier execrable Les cendres des bruslez avoyent servi de sable. L'eau qui les destrempoit estoit du sang versé; La chaux vive dont fut 1'edifice enlacé. Qui blanchit ces tombeaux & les salles si belles. C'est le meslange cher de nos tristes moelles, (La Chambre dorée, 179-85) The categories of fertility and sterility can be further developed into health and decay, vitiation and vitality, cleanliness and filth, the harmonious functioning of nature being entirely dependent on the harmony of relationship be tween man and God, In every sense d’Aubigné was a man of his era : the educated warrior, the conscientious landholder, the noble- 39 man humanist, "un homme universel ou peu s'en faut"; a man in whom maie virtues mixed with artistic expression, the Bible rubbed shoulders with Rabelais,and loyalty to king and country mingled with preoccupations regarding 39 # Garnier, Agrippa d'Aubigné, I, vi, Jacques Bailbé places d'Aubigné among the "admira teurs fervents" of Rabelais, and points out that the influ ence of theflatter has been indicated by Pierre Villey and Lazare Sainéan, Jacques Bailbé, "Rabelais et Aubigné," Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, XXI (1959), 381* 18 religious freedom and republicanism»"^^ He was a self- 42 proclaimed emulator of Ronsard, and in the poetry of his youth. Le Printemps, he petrarchized with the best of them, bringing, however, a force and a passion to the conventional imagery that was distinctly his own* He loved the classical authors; he knew Greek, had read some Plato, and his debt to Tacitus, to Juvenal, to Lucan, 43 among others, has been commented upon; yet d'Aubigné remains an isolé, both in his party, where his intransi gence earned him the nickname of le bouc du desert,and "The Mémoires of the Huguenot soldier, poet and historian * # * are full of republican sentiments, as, for example, * » * 'The power of the king proceeds from the people*'" Preserved Smith, The Social Background of the Reformation, Collier Books (New York, 1962), p. 140* 42 In the "Avis aux lecteurs," speaking of himself in the third person, d'Aubigné says that he esteemed "le bon homme Ronsard *** pardessus son siecle en sa profession." I, 7* ^^Between the ages of four and eight he learned Greek, Latin, and Hebrew with tutors at home; he admits, however, that his Greek showed some weakness * Garnier, Agrippa d'Aubigné, I, 32-33, 64* Marcel Raymond mentions the influence of Lucan, Juvenal, Seneca and Tacitus in L'Influence de Ronsard sur la poésie française (1550-1585), 2nd edition (Geneva, 1965), Part II,, 322» See also the critical apparatus of the Tragiques* 44 His intransigence earned him this nickname^at the Protestant Assembly of 1596-1598, He says in his Mémoires that "Aubigne toujours choisi entre les trois ou quatre, qui s'affrontoyent sur le tapis aux députés du Roy, fit plusieurs traicts qui envenimèrent l'esprit de son Maistre, et plus encor toute la Cour contre luy * * * Enfin toutes les aigreurs et duretez de^1'Assemblée luy furent imputées, et pour cela il fut appelé le Bouc du Désert, pource que tous deschargeoyent leur hayne sur luy*" Quoted by Garnier, 19 45 ' as a poet# His debt to the Bible has been acknowledged by critics too numerous to mention, and documented in the critical apparatus of the Garnier-Plattard edition of the 45 Tragiques and by Trenel# But, as Sauerwein points out, 'Trenel*s compilation of borrowings and combinations remains just that; he makes no attempt to interpret the Biblical elements #^^ Nor does Sauerwein himself ; though, concerned as he is with the Bible as a source of traditional stylistic devices, he is alert to possible Biblical derivations within the poem# Henri Weber devotes a chapter to d'Aubigné's 49 Biblical style, but his particular interest in the Bible as a source of poetic and narrative material does not take him very far beyond this framework# Throughout the section Agrippa d'Aubigné, II, 117# The first (1616) edition of the Tragiques appeared under the anonymous authorship of L# B* D# D .; apparently d'Aubigné considered the appelation of bouc émissaire most fitting# 45 Raymond stresses that d'Aubigné's work is under the command of "une exigence personnelle," Génies, p# 78, and that he neither follows the Pléiade nor announces Classi cism# L'Influence de Ronsard, Part II, 326# Jean Trenel, L*Element biblique dans 1'oeuvre poétique d'Agrippa d'Aubigné (Paris, 1904)* Sauerwein, D'Aubigné's "Les Tragiques", p# 6# 48 He believes that every aspect of the physical, as isolated by Imbrie Buffum's study, "must be studied both in terms of specific function within the poem, and in the light of possible Biblical derivation#" ibid#, p# 17# Sauerwein does not himself pursue this line of investigation, however# 4 9 ^ Henri Weber, La Creation poétique au XVIe siecle en France (2 vols#; Paris, 1955), II, 705-15# 20 devoted to d'Aubigne, Weber frequently underscores the Biblical influence from the standpoint of prophetic influ ence, language, imagery, vision, etc#; such comments are scattered, however, and are not studied from within the Biblical context or in terms of Hebraic thought and theo logy* The concern in this paper is not in the formal or stylistic connections that exist between the Old Testament and the Tragiques, but rather in the connection that exists functionally, that can be found in the epistemological and psychological ground that the two works share in common* This can be seen in d’Aubigne*s work despite the heavy ad mixture and contemporary overlay of classical culture; it is possible to define, to isolate, and to find in Hebraism the fundamental and pivotal force on which the action of the poem depends and which provides its life-center. Sauerwein approaches this idea with his concept of a literal and supra-1itérai line of development whose fusion creates the 50 poetic entity; however, he does not relate this concept to its Hebraic background * To do so extends the range of, and gives direction to, d'Aubigne's affective use of certain 51 "favorite words," for example, by showing them to be ac tive in time : the poem's time » the subjective time of the ^^Sauerwein, D'Aubigne*s "Les Tragiques", pp. 22-23. 51 The expression is Sauerwein's. As he himself states, however, he has taken^it from an article of Hermann Gmelin that isolates d'Aubigne*s "Lieblingsworte" as an important element of the poem* Ibid,, pp. 7-9. 21 poet, and the time of the reader, all of which is the time of the God of history. This approach, I feel, has greater psychological validity since I am concerned with a man whose total dedication to church and party and whose totally .uncompromising attitude show a driving hunger for certitude, for absolutes and wholes, and a complete refusal of an ab straction or any sort of relativity. D'Aubigne*s verbal expression serves the man as well as the poet. Whatever poetic method he employed cannot be viewed apart from the motivations and needs of the man; pen and sword, style and 52 spirit, are inseparable. From his earliest childhood, Bible readings were bound to his daily life; furthermore, his knowledge of 53 Hebrew enabled him to read the Bible in the original. Not only the Biblical ; images but Hebraic thought stjructure, semantic values, and concept of reality became part of the formation of his mind, coloring the way in which it saw and apprehended reality. As indicated above, there were also psychological factors at work which made d'Aubigne*s mind a fertile seed-bed for Hebraic concepts, with the emphasis they placed on history, on action and justice, on wholeness 52 Imbrie Buffum, Agrippa d'Aubigné's "Les Tragiques" A Study of the Barogue Style in Poetry, Yale Romantic Studies, Second Series (New Haven, 1951), p. 3. ^^According to his Mémoires, he read Hebrew as well as he did French by the time he was thirteen and went to Geneva to study. Gamier, Agrippa d'Aubigne, I, 64.. 22 of the personality, on consistency and natural and moral order. D'Aubigne can be said to have fulfilled Du Bellay's innutrition metaphor concerning the Romans whom the latter shows as immitant les meilleurs aucteurs Grecz, se transformant en eux, les dévorant, & après les avoir bien digerez, les convertissant en sang & nouriture, se proposant, chacun selon son naturel & 1'argument qu'il vouloit elire, le meilleur aucteur, dont ilz observoient di ligemment toutes les plus rares & exquises vertuz, & icelles comme grephes*54 Ail we need do to apply this declaration to d'Aubigne is substitute Hebrew for Greek. However, d'Aubigne's conver sion of Hebrew expression into his very own flesh and blood--and for him the image is apt indeed— resulted in more than an embellishment to language. Any attempt to separate Greek from Hebrew thought obviously has many pitfalls. I am not contending that the division is always and necessarily precise, nor that there is a neat and categorical division in d'Aubigne's mind be tween Hebrew and Greek culture, between the Old and the New Testament, nor that the one has any kind of value precedence 55 over the other, nor even that Hebrew thought is something 54 Joachim Du Bellay, La Deffence et Illustration de langue francoyse, ed* Henri Chamard, Société des textes français modernes (Paris, 1948), pp. 42-43, 11. 4-11# 55 John T. McNeill quotes Calvin as asserting "the superior excellence of the New Testament over the Old." The History and Character of Calvinism, A Galaxy Book (New York, 1967), p. 213. 23 pure and isolated. My concern is in the existence of a fundamental, an evident and, at times, dominant strain in the poem's eschatological movement. Though the apocalyptic ' vision of the seventh canto is the crowning element, the Hebraic influence is still present in the last moment of mystic union in which the tension between the Calvinist- Christian and Israelite aspects of d'Aubigne,'s thinking is resolved. Furthermore, some scholars find in the Book of Revelation, on which d'Aubigne draws so heavily in Jugement, "a Jewish nucleus in Christian guiseThat Old Testa ment influence is fundamental, if not predominant, can be seen in the critical apparatus of the Garnier-Plattard edi tion; the number of direct and evocative references to the Old Testament are, by my count, more than double the number of those to the New in the first six cantos. Even in the seventh. Jugement, where the Book of Revelation is second to Psalms as a main source, references to the Old Testament 57 still slightly exceed those to the New. To search out the Hebraic factor in d'Aubigne's dense poetic landscape, to discover the distinctive role it plays in his concept of reality, to show it as a skeleton-key to the question of why he is an isolé, is the ^^David Syme Russell, The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic; 200BC-AD100 (London, 1964), p. 35. 57 , In the Preface and first six cantos, the number of allusions to the Old Testament; 567* To the New Testament: 226. In Jugement, OT: 77; NT: 70. I 24 goal of this study. We will start with a look at the Erkenntnisproblem in the Renaissance and in^the work of the Pléiade in order to examine the interplay between world, intellect and vision— physiological and poetic : the "image on the mind" and the "image on the retina.After deter mining what the Hebraic view of reality is, in general, I will show how this concept emerges from the writings of the major prophets in order to evaluate its influence and func tion in the Tragiques and to examine its dramatic basis and dialectical tension as a distinguishing factor between d'Aubigne and his aesthetic mentor, Ronsard, as well as be tween d'Aubigne and Du Bartas and Robert Gamier. Finally, I will relate these generalized concepts to their specific expression in images that are fundamental to the Israelite's emphasis on life as communion and relationship, that serve as vehicles for bringing this outer and inner event into a single focus, into a revelatory vision. The vision of d'Aubigné is less Baroque than Bibli cal; his are the eyes of the prophet who has a "world in his conscience"; with "I'oeil de I’ame" (Préf., 348), 58 Ernest Hans Gombrich, Art and Illusion : A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York, 1950), p. 66. 59 Referring indirectly to the Hebrews, Thorlief Boman says that this state of mind is that of men who live "from the psychical impressions that the external world makes upon [them]." Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek, trans. Jules L. Moreau (Philadelphia, 1960), p. 137. 25 he sees both the physical and the psychological landscape alive with directed divine activity. As a Calvinist, he would possess the Ultimate Reality that reduces the pheno menal world to smoke and illusion, that destroys the time of Satan, the time of the lie. As a prophetic poet imbued with the knowledge and the feelings of the Old Testament, d’Aubigne would transform the conquest of profaned time into a human and sensually alive experience. PART I THE PROBLEM OF KNOWING: DEPENDENCE ON A NEXUS Poetry that aims at autonomy, that aspires to give transparency to life and meaning to man's cosmic setting, depends on the sensible world for its raw materials and on the invisible world as the source of the living energy that sustains it. Such a poetic vision risks being seriously 9 diminished in a dualist-dominated culture when the symbols that link the two realms atrophy, when the content of the form becomes sclerotic. Myth, ritual, and symbols fuse the immanent and the transcendent in the marriage between heaven and earth that man attempts to perform and are, for him, a means of ex periencing the unknown in his unending effort to keep reality entire, to prevent its fragmentation. When the function of the unreal is denied him, he tends to become, as Canguilhem says, a neurotic,^ a thing-oriented creature "L'homme privé de la fonction de ^1'irréel est un névrosé." Georges Canguilhem, "Sur une épistémologie con cordataire," pp. 3-12 in Hommage à Gaston Bachelard, by Georges Canguilhem, et al. (Paris, 1957), p. 9. 26 27 dependent on sensual stimuli, emotionalism, and form-encrus ted ceremonies to compensate for the split between act and idea, between function and meaning* The danger was inherent in medieval theology* Though it violently opposed the Manichaean belief that reality was a battlefield between the two opposing but equal forces of good and evil, it was nonetheless haunted by the division of the two, as exemplified by the ceaseless struggle for man's soul* Furthermore, the early penetration of Platonic, or neo-Platonic, thought into the Judaeo-Christian fabric, the concept of two worlds, the qualitative separation of mind and matter, of body and soul, had established a dualist and potentially anti-poetic climate that the twelfth-century Renaissance and the Aristotelian revival perceptibly affected but could not entirely dispel * In the fifteenth century in France, Villon was the rare example of a poet who sensed how to exploit the con flict between actuality and ideal, between man and the world; he was at least intuitively aware of the new posture of the individualized self, cast out from its unity with the total personality and thus from its unity with duration* In the main, however, most of the French fifteenth century, dominated by the nominalist triumph, was characterized by a "failure of nerve," by the inner disintegration of institu tions and the religious life* As the spiritual distance widened between the sensible and the invisible, as the ' 28 social distance grew between system and human need, as the aesthetic distance yawned ever wider between form and con tent, outer trappings and the embellishments of etiquette, rules and formulae strove to fill the essential void. The attention of the stranded self, increasingly aware of its isolation, was fixed on the physical reality, on the weight of objects that had intruded upon its field of awareness; the sense of mystery was replaced by religious dread. The increasing tendency to visualize sacred concepts divorced feeling from the human experience ; attached to the hard, 2 externalized form of the image, feeling gave way to an ex cess of emotion as the idea of the experience replaced the experience itself. Death loomed ever more menacing and "living emotion [stiffened] amid the abused imagery of 3 skeleton and worms." With the advent of the new humanism at the end of the century, there developed a more positive view of the physical world that had intruded itself in new ways upon man's consciousness. The world was different, and man saw it differently ;^ yet humanists, writers, and artists were o Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, Doubleday Anchor Books (New York, 1954), p. 152. ^ Ibid., p. 151. 4 Etienne Gilson maintains that "en dehors de cette cause de changement qui réside dans l'esprit, il y en a une autre qui réside dans les choses. Non moins profondément et radicalement que la pensée dont il dépend, l'univers auquel elle s'applique change d'aspect et [sic] comme de 29 : confident that their new learning and vision would revita lize the old system, that they could forge new links be tween the visible and invisible worlds that would maintain the vitality of each while restoring the unity of harmony. The considerable achievement of French sixteenth- ' 5 century poetry, as shown by the Pleiade, reveals to what extent the attitude toward the meaningfulness and function of the sensible world had changed. The physical world had become the starting point for the attainment of self- knowledge and self-realization, as well as knowledge of ultimate reality, wisdom, and virtue. This would seem to be at least a partial and poetic triumph of Aristotelianism at a time when it was under attack.^ It was, of course, the contenu." La Philosophie au Moyen Age : des origines pa- tristigues a la fin du XlVe siecle, 2nd ed. rev* (Paris, 1962), p. 757. ^Because of the discrepancy between the meaning of the name and the rather slippery historical facts, I am not attempting any definition of the Pleiade, nor is it rele vant to this study; I am using the term to refer to a group of coeval poets between 1549 and about 1580 who were ron- sardisants and who, despite their great individual diver sity, shared common ideals, "prejudices," and "enthusiams." (For a clear mise au point of the question, see Robert J. Clements, Critical Theory and Practice of the Pleiade, Harvard Studies in Romance Languages, XVIII |_Cambridge, 1942], pp. 256-58.) It is Ronsard himself who will serve as our main source of reference, not only because he was the acknowledged leader of the poetic revolution, but be cause he was, as Gustave Cohen has pointed out, "le plus grec des poetes de France." Ronsard, sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris, 1932), p. 275. 6 Notably the attack led by Ramus that began in 1544 and lasted for several years. Other opponents of the "new" 30 result of numerous intellectual and aesthetic currents, not the least of which were Florentine syncretism, which posi ted participation between the transcendent and the sensible,; and the poets' own humanist-inspired hunger for nourishment , from the classical past. Ronsard confesses his eclecticism in the ode, A sa lire : Pour te monter de cordes, & d'un fust. Voire d'un son qui naturel te fust. Je pillai Thebe', & saccagai la Pouille T'enrichissant de leur belle dépouillé.^ Though he is referring here to Pindar and Horace, the same could be said of his culling from philosophic thought. In the Ion, Socrates refers to the inspired lyric poet as a bee, "for [he] is a light and winged and holy thing,and the exordium of Ronsard's Hylas combines both the action of selecting varied materials and the concept of nourishment in the classical image: Mon Passerat, je resemble a 1'Abeille Qui va cueillant tantost la fleur vermeille, Tantost la jaune : errant de pre en pre Aristotle as explained by Vicomercato and Pierre Galland were Postel and Calvin. See Raoul Morçay and Armand Müller, La Renaissance (Paris, 1960), pp. 203, 206-08. 7 > Pierre^de Ronsard, Oeuvres completes, ed. Paul Lau- monier. Société des textes français modernes (17 vols.; Paris, 1924- ), I, 164, 11. 29-32. Unless otherwise stated, all citations will be taken from this edition, ®Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 3rd ed., rev. and corr. (London% Oxford University Press, 1892), I, 502. 31 Voile en la part qui luy vient a gre. Contre l’Hyver amassant force vivres* Ainsy courant & fueilletant mes livres. J’amasse, trie & choisis le plus beau. Qu’en cent couleurs je peints en un tableau, Tantost en 1’autre : ...9 Owing so much to so many, the poet of the Pleiade sought above all to discover and reveal harmony: musical harmony of sound and rhythm, harmony of form, harmony of thought and language; harmony of truth and appearance. The scope of Ronsard’s work, from the amatory-aesthetic to the metaphysic-scientific, enables us to see how the heritage of a dualist inclination was brought into at least partial unity by the poet’s aesthetics and by man’s changing per spective* According to his philosophy or beliefs, he might or might not think of himself as being under the rule of a transcendent power, but he was keenly conscious of an im manent one * Nature in all her forceful and physical par ticularity had intruded upon man's consciousness, most notably upon his field of vision; hers was the reality with which he wanted to make contact, the book whose signs had to be correctly read if man were to know himself. As yet unable to read them in terms of nature's own principles, the poet, in general, read them as divine ; sometimes, as in Ronsard's case, in terms of man's total dependence on astral destiny as part of the natural order and as a law of ^XV, 252, 11. 417-25. ---- 1 32 ’ the universe: Je vous salue. Enfants de la premiere nuit. Heureux Astres divins par qui tout se conduit; Pendant que vous tournez vostre dance ordonée Au Ciel, j’acompliray, çà-bas la destinee Qu’il vous pleut me verser, bonne ou mauvaise, alors Que mon ame immortelle entra dedans mon corps.10 Then again, he saw in Nature secret and sympathetic corres pondences at work connecting his life to her dynamic forces for, to take Ronsard again as an example, had not Euterpe baptized him nine times in a fountain to rid him of the limitations of mortalityThis figurative ceremonial consecrated the poet's newly recognized and God-given right to extend his own possibilities. Attuned to man’s emergent need to dominate his world by his action, the Pléiade poets strove to overcome the isolation and mor tality of the self, to integrate the organic with perfec tion, to understand change and mortality as proof of the 12 permanent, as in Ronsard's Hymne de la Mort, with its Epicurean view of nature’s reassembling and reusing what is dissolved at death : ^^Hymne des Astres, VIII, 160-61, 11» 251-56, ^^Hymne de I'Autonne, XÎI, 48-49, 11» 50-53. 12 Speaking of Vitruvius, Sir Kenneth Clark emphasizes the importance to Renaissance thought of the discovery that the model of a man could fit into the perfect geometric forms : the square and the circle, thus founding a measur able relationship between the organic and the geometrically absolute. The Nude : A Study in Ideal Form, Bollingen Series, XXXV (New York, 1956), p> 15 » 33 Ce qui fut se refaict, tout coulle comme une eau, Et rien dessous le Ciel ne se void de nouveau: Mais la forme se change en une autre nouvelle. Et ce changement la, VIVRE au monde s'appelle, Et MOURIR, quand la forme en une autre s’en va. Or, confounding, as he and his congeners frequently did, World-Soul with God, Ronsard saw the world as a living organism held in concordant motion by the Soul’s adhesion and energy: Dieu est par tout, par tout se mesle Dieu, Commencement, la fin, & le millieu De ce qui vit, & dont l'Ame est enclose Par tout, & tient en vigueur toute chose Come nostre Ame infuse dans noz corps. Ja des longtemps les membres seroient morts De ce grand Tout, si cette Ame divine Ne se mesloit par toute la Machine, Luy donnant vie & force & mouvement: Car de tout estre elle est commencement. St. Francis, as someone has remarked, removed the taint of sin from nature; the Pleiade went further and gave it a poetic justification, for it is nature that is the "ordonnatrice" of the World-Soul and the generative force 15 of the universe. By the combined and conscious working of senses and intellect, the poet sought to expose the in visible world of nature's activity, to give Being existence VIII, 178, 11. 325-29.^ For Ronsard's Epicureanism, see Paul Laumonier, Ronsard, poète lyrique, 3rd éd., rev. and corr., (Paris, 1932), pp. 560-66. Chat, XV, 39, 11. 1-10. 15 ' Albert-Marie^Schmidt, La Poesie scientifique en France au seizième siecle (Paris, 1938), pp. 87-88. ' 34 by revealing its operative substance, and to convert man's mortality into something as lasting by means of form : Plus dur que fer, j'ai fini mon ouvrage. Que l’an dispost à demener les pas, Ne l'eau rongearde ou des freres la rage L'injuriant ne ruront point à bas : Tousjours tousjours, sans que jamais je meure Je volerai tout vif par 1'univers, Eternizant les champs où je demeure De mon renom engrosses & couvers. Struggling with the problem of double vision— his awareness of God's eye as well as his own--the Pléiade poet sought new, yet already existent, ways of bringing the two 17 into focus. His aim was not to enthrone physical reality, nor to deny it, but rather to triumph over it by uniting the sensible--and the sensual--to the Beautiful, or by re turning to "the mythical, the elementary, the dithyrambic, 18 * the Heraclean." In the antique authors, even in the con ventional conceits and Petrarchisms of love poetry, the Sa Muse, II, 152, 11. 1-4, 9-12. 17 "Already existent" because, though the poet sought to tread "unknown" paths, or fly heavenward by a "new" route, he thought of doing so by finding original ideas in memory or through inspiration, not by creating them ex nihilo. For a discussion of the semantic development of invention and its various meanings in the sixteenth century, see Grahame Castor's Pléiade Poetics : A Study in Sixteenth- Century Thought and Terminology (Cambridge, 1964), Chapters 8-12. 18 The phrase is Johan Huizinga's in reference to the Renaissance’s triumph over realism. Men and Ideas, trans. James S. Holmes and Hans van Marie, Meridian Books (New York, 1959), p. 308. ! 35 poet found the means to universalize his affective relation ship with human and physical reality by associating his emo tions and their rhythm with the movement of the world, be it the world of myth or the world of natural phenomena. Imitation of the classical and Italian writers provided a frame and a stimulus for his thought and imagery; his own self-imposed theories gave him a model for a language that was still self-conscious, still tentative in its vocabulary and form, and a poetic vision still lacking in metaphorical suppleness. But, the neo-Platonic theories of love and of poetic fury, as seen through Ficino’s commentaries, pro vided a link both to the absolutely beautiful and the dyna mically elemental* The revived and usually hybrid Platonism that influ enced in varying degrees the poets of the Pleiade was shaped for the most part by Ficino and the Florentine 19 Academy* From this they took the spiritually (and socially) oriented doctrine of physical beauty as the starting point for the soul’s Eros-borne upward flight to the divine, and the doctrine of poetic fury which enables the poet to break through the confines of the self, to overcome the obstacles of time and of mystery, for he is 19 Morçay, La Renaissance, pp. 198-99, 203-05* Also, Henri Weber, La Creation poétique, I, 18-21 * 20 See the fourth book of Baldassare Castiglione’s II Cortegiano. This work was translated into French in 1537- 1538. 36 ' " ... le trafiqueur des Muses, / Et de leurs biens, maistres 21 du tens." Furthermore, whether of Paduan or of Florentine bent, the humanist-trained mind in general looked toward the point where differences were reconciled, seeking the basic and profound order that would unify all thought— Christian, 22 classical. Oriental or Jewish — as well as the vibrant harmony of which the realm of nature was the dynamic expres sion . Aesthetics, like natural magic, became not only a way of attaining knowledge, but a means of realizing this uni versal concord; and the poet conceived of himself as a soli tary and divinely elected mediator between two worlds, while his poem became an immortal hyphen connecting the sensible 23 to the intelligible. Though their soaring aspirations were only partially fulfilled, the highest expression of the poetic ideal of Ronsard and the Pleiade is found in their exaltation of the 24 self-sufficiency of poetry as a way of knowing. What they planted often bore only purely decorative flowers, although many-hued and delicately scented, but much of it— usually ^^Ode a Bertran Berger, I, 139, 11. 11-12. 22 Morçay, La Renaissance, p. 52. A.-M* Schmidt speaks of Ronsard's conformity with the syncretic tendencies of Ficino in La Poesie scientifigue, p. 79, 2 3 "Poetry is not simply an optional extra, . . . . Poetry, in fact, has an essential part to play in the rela tions between body and soul." Castor, Poetics, p. 31. ^^Henry Weber, la Creation poétique, p. 36. 37^ the unanthologized longer pieces— was grave in aim and in 25 tone, and was rooted in a fundamentally religious and ora cular attitude that aspired to reveal the inscrutable and divine forces at work in nature and human life * This knowledge, clothed in the trappings of myth, legend, or fable, was then bodied forth in a plastic representation of that reality from which, as Henri Weber says, the poet had 25 drawn the most intense sensations. Pontus de Tyard, his gaze fixed steadily on Ficino, supplied the Pleiade poetics with a "complete metaphysical 27 justification." In his discussion of the divine fury in the Solitaire Premier (1552), poetry is but the first of four degrees which progressively raise the soul to the 25 Grave has the meaning of sublime. In the Continua tion des Amours (1555), Ronsard complains in the opening sonnet to Pontus de Tyard that, though he used to be accused of obscurity, he is now criticized for speaking "trop basse ment." VII, 115-16, In the same edition he writes, in A son livre: "Or’, si quelqu'un après me vient blasmer de quoy "Je ne suis plus si grave en mes vers que j'estoy "A mon commencement, quand 1'humeur Pindarique "Enfloit empoulement ma bouche magnifique, "Dy luy que les amours ne souspirent pas "D'un vers hautement grave, ains d'un beau stille bas." (324, 11. 169-74) Création poétique, I, 125. 27 Castor, Poetics, p. 195. Tyard's metaphysical and strong Platonic orientation is partially explained by his Lyonese background and his earlier association with the poets of that city. 38 ' One : 28 En fin, quand tout ce qui est en l'essence et en la nature de l'Ame, est fait un, il faut (pour revenir a la source de son origine) que soudain elle se révoqué en ce souverain un, qui est sur toute essence. Chose, que la grande et celeste Venus accomplit par Amour, c'est à dire, par un fervent, et incomparable désir, que l'Ame ainsi eslevêe a de jouir de la divine et eternelle beauté.29 Through his connection with the soul, God, in Ficino's thought, is "tied to subjectivity"; man's striving toward him through love is matched by his "counterstriving" toward 30 man, a crucial step in the internalization process where by the creative force, or genius, will cease to be an "attendant daemon" exterior to the poet, and become a mental quality instead7^ The Pleiade was not yet ready to take this step. However, as indicated in the above excerpt, the 28 The other three sorts of divine fury that can raise the soul are, in ascending order after "la fureur Poétique"; "1'intelligence des mystères, et secrets des religions sous Bacchus. ... ravissement,de prophétie et vaticination, ou divination sous Apollon: ... la violence de 1'amoureuse affection sous Amour, et Venus." Pontus de Tyard, Solitaire Premier ou Discours des Muses et de la fureur Poétique, ed. Silvio F, Baridon (Geneva, 1950), p. 17. 2 9 ^ Ibid., p. 20. 30 ■ Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi, Harper Torch- books (New York, 1964), pp. 132-33. 31 Clive Staples Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Intro duction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, 1964), p. 215. He is speaking of the "great process of Internalisation." 39 , theological viewpoint that, throughout the Middle Ages, held pulchrum attached to bonum and art to theology, was now 32 loosened, allowing pulchrum to shift closer to verum* Beauty acquired virtue, and poetry assumed a theological function, as, Ronsard remarks, it once had in the days of Orpheus and of Homer : Car la Poesie n’estoit au premier aage qu'une Théologie,allegoricque, pour faire entrer au cerveau des hommes grossiers par fables plaisantes & colorées les secretz qu'ilz ne pouvoyent com prendre quand trop ouvertement on leur descouvroit la vérité. Ronsard went much further than did Tyard in extolling the self-sufficiency of poetry and of the poet * He not only varied the order of the four furies, but made the poetic all-inclusive, submitting the four of them to the empire of the Muses. More interested in the soul's action in the discovery and shaping of the poem than in its salvation, Ronsard was less abstract, less obscure, and more dramatic in his thinking than Tyard. He was consistently fascinated by the poet's role, his own personal involvement in the poetic adventure; more intrigued by a cosmos alive from top to bottom with daemonic and hypostatized forces and by his own emotional voyage through a synthesized universe 32 Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, p. 163. ^^Abbreqe de l'Art Poétique, XIV, 4, 11. 15-19 34 Castor, Poetics, pp. 196-97. 40 composed of real, or merely possible, experiences shot through with the dream, the sublimity, and the erotic exu berance of classical culture. Ronsard was also more pre occupied than Tyard in the preparation of the soul for in spiration, for the descent of the Muses. In the Abbrege de l'Art poétique (1565), Ronsard admonishes the would-be poet to be reverent toward these daughters of Jupiter, "o'est à dire de Dieu." Through their mediation the poet reaches the divine and hidden source of the true to which the uncommon, the inspired, have always turned, at the risk _ n T . 36 of public censure. This mythological theory of inspiration represents it as a force coming from outside the poet, who must take certain physical and spiritual precautions, freeing himself of non-poetic influences, before his soul can be ravished by the divine furor: actual detachment from the world of men, a mental or spiritual turning away from mundane mat ters in order to draw closer to the elemental, the natural, and a draining off of destructive emotions. In the Hymne de I'Autonne, the poet says that " ... Dieu ne communique XIV, 4, 11. 12-13. A.-M. Schmidt points out that in Ronsard's cosmology, influenced as it is by Marulle, "Jupiter tend à devenir le Dieu unique, le dieu qui, se confondant plus ou moins avec 1'Eternité, loi du ciel, et le Ciel lui-même, régulateur du monde, assure l'ordre et la conservation de ce dernier grâce à 1'Ether, feu médiateur, feu intelligent, feu maître des semences." La Poésie scientifique, p. 75. ^^See the Hymne de I'Autonne. XII, 49, 11. 61-68. 41^ aux hommes ses mystères / S'ils ne sont vertueux, dévots & solitaires," adding that Euterpe has advised him to live 37 u "dans les boys pour la Muse et pour toy." In the Abbrege de l'Art poétique, the program outlined for the poetic as pirant is quite specific: Or, pour ce que les Muses ne veulent loger en une ame, si elle n'est bonne, saincte, & vertueuse, tu seras de bonne nature, non meschant, renfrogné, ne chagrin : mais animé d'un gentil esprit, ne laisseras rien entrer en ton entendement qui ne soit sur-humain & divin. Tu auras en premier lieu les conceptions hautes, grandes, belles, & non traînantes à terre,38 Thus the poet sought to prepare himself, by action and by will-power, for the gift of that "gentille & docte 39 40 frenaisie" that gave him his liberty by submitting his mental faculties to a higher power, enabling him both to span and encompass the distance between body and soul, the present and eternity, opinion and truth, appearance and idea* No longer statically placed in the physical struc ture of the universe, the poet stood turned toward the world of nature, but independently apart from it— his soul at the mid-point between the sensible and the , 47, 50, 11. 25-26, 76. ^®XIV, 5, 11. 39-45. 39 Responce aux Injures et Calomnies, XI, 161, 1* 896 ^^"La liberté, pour Ronsard, .*. consiste en la fureur*" A ,-M. Schmidt, La Poésie scientifique, p. 91, 42 ' 41 intelligible. Sensually, if not always joyfully, dedicated to the objective reality of physical existence, the poet saw in ,nature a means of self-expression; he sought to know nature’s world, to dominate and surpass this physical world by the dynamic action of the mind upon the object of its attention and its subsequent development, through inspira tion, into intellectual vision. In this vision, things of the world, whether a head of lettuce, a rose, or the 42 heavenly planets, adhere to the human and concrete, but, through abstraction, or association with the non-finite, open onto wider, more generalized vistas framed by intel lectual and ethical concepts. Physical reality, then, be comes the property of the mind and a way to knowledge ; aesthetics is tied to philosophy and epistemology. The proliferation, the density and the weight of physical reality that fills fifteenth-century Flemish paintings,, that Villon would like to give away in his Lais and Testa ment, that even, at times, seems to oppress the insatiable 43 Rabelais, has been internalized and given both a human Ficino's concept; Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, p. 64. Jean Festugiere says that, though much of Ronsard's verse goes counter to Platonism, he is at times "le plus fidèle disciple de Ficin en France au X V I G siècle." La Philosophie de l’amour de Marsile Ficin (Paris, 1941), p. 139. ^^La Salade (1569), Ode à Cassandre (1553), Hymne des Astres (1555). 43 I am thinking in particular of the artificial 43 and a universal significance without loss of concrete ob jective form. The relationship of the intelligible to the sensible is established largely by spatial concepts; the poetic content encompasses the finite world of man and the limitless space of the divine, the moment of the poet and the relentless eternity of a fecund nature by opening up ways of communication between the two. First, however, the poet has to be changed, trans formed by exterior aids that enable him to partake of both the visible and invisible realms. Beauty can cause the soul to grow wings, virtue becomes a ladder to the sky, 44 fire is a purifying and upward-bearing force. In escapist serenity of Thélème and Pantagruel's growing re flective detachment in the Quart Livre. 44 In Sonnet CXIII, Du Bellay speaks to his soul, who has "au dos I'aele bien empanêe"; in the Discours à Salm. Macrin, he asks : "La félicité non faulse, "L'eschelle qui nous surhaulse "Par degrez jusques aux cieux, "N'est-ce pas la vertu seule, "Qui nous tire de la gueule "De l'Orque avaricieux?" As for "burning," they all do, as a matter of course, but in the following example from Du Bellay, he is both winged and feeling the draft from the fires of love : "Quand je suis près de la flamme divine, "Ou le flambeau d 'Amour est allumé, "Mon sainct dezir sainctement emplumé "Jusq'au tiers ciel d'un prin-vol m'achemine." Joachim Du Bellay, Oeuvres poétiques, ed. Henri Chamard (6 vols.; Paris, 1908-1931), I, 122, 1. 8; IV, 145, 11. 13- 18; I, 143, 11. 1-4. 44 Ronsard's Hinne de Bacus, it is the god's fertility, his gift of wine that stimulates man to transcend his limita tions : Par toi, Pere, charges de ta douce ambrosie. Nous elevons au ciel 1'humaine fantasie. Portés dedans ton char, & d'homes vicieux. Purges de ta liqueur osons monter aus cieus. Et du grand Jupiter nous assoir à la t a b l e *45 In the later Hymne de 1'Eternité, the divine fire carries his soul upward to "découvrir les secretz de Nature & des 46 deux," In the Hymne des Astres, the poet's mind, with a more self-willed movement, takes on human form, enabling him to travel from earth to sky to Firmament: C'est trop long temps, Mellin, demeuré sur la terre Dans 1'humaine prison, qui l'Esprit nous enserre. Le tenant engourdy d'un sommeil ocieux il faut le delïer, & l'envoyer aux deux: il me plaist eri vivant de voir souz moy les nues. Et presser de mes pas les espaules chenues D'Atlas le porte-ciel, il me plaist de courir Jusques au Firmament, & les secretz ouvrir (S’il m'est ainsi permis) des Astres admirables, Et chanter leurs regardz de noz destins coupables. However, the basic requirement for any afflatus is the di vine gift, the innate quality that supplies the desire, the will, and the ability to rise above the purely human* Ronsard explains this by the image of his guiding daemon, a creature of the air (the middle zone of the Aristotelian ^^VI, 190, 11. 277-81. ^^VIII, 246, 1* 3. 7 ■ ' Ibid*, 150, 11. 1-10. 45 cosmology), who has a body of air or of fire, and is capa- ble of flying between earth and the heavens : Le jour que je fu né, le Daimon qui preside Aux Muses me servit en ce Monde de guide. M'anima d'un esprit gaillard & vigoreux. Et me fist de science & d 'honneur amoureux. En lieu des grands thresors & de richesses veines Qui aveuglent les yeux des personnes humaines. Me donna pour partage une fureur d'esprit. Et l'art de bien coucher ma verve par escrit. Il me haussa le cueur, haussa la fantasie, M'inspirant dedans l'ame un don de Poésie, Que Dieu n'a concédé qu'à l'esprit agité Des poignans aiguillons de sa divinité.49 Standing open to the world of physical experience, the poet not only internalizes objective reality, as I have mentioned earlier, but makes it available to the self; ^ for the only way the self can know itself is through the external and, conversely,•the only way for the self to know the external is by making it a reality of the mind. Therefore, a representation of reality connects the self with the physical universe and becomes a way of realizing that relationship. Frey has said, speaking of the artists of the Italian Renaissance, "Die Kunst ist als reine Anschauung Erkenntnismittel geworden: Darstellen heisst 4 8 See Les Daimons for God's structuring of the uni verse, how he populated the different layers and, most par ticularly, the position, substance, and function given to the daemons. VIII, 115-39. 4 g . XII, 46-47, 11. 1-12. Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, p. 112. ; 46 ! Erkennen. Die Kunst wird zur Wissenschaft," adding that the epistemological significance of the theory lies not so much, in the establishment of the existing objective form as in the grounding of the visual image in formal accuracy; "erst; damit wird das Verhaltnis des subjektiven Bildeindruckes 51 zur objektiven Form eindeutig bestimmt." To imitate na ture, then, establishes the necessity for understanding her laws through self-involvement in the concrete phenomenon by means of vision and an intellect seeking to establish the proper measurements for relationships between things, and for the constant movement from potentiality to act. According to Henri Weber, truth of representation for the sixteenth century was faithfulness to the changing 52 appearances of the world. Ronsard’s Aristotelian leaning is apparent in the Abbregé: "Tout ainsi que le but de l'orateur est de persuader, ainsi celuy de Poëte est d'imiter, inventer, & représenter les choses qui sont, qui peuvent estre, ou que les anciens ont estimé comme 53 véritables." Seven years later, in the first preface to the Franciade (1572), the imitation of things as they actually are is compared with feigning : "[Le Poëte] qui escrit les choses comme elles sont ne mérité tant que celuy ^^Dagobert Frey, Gotik und Renaissance als Grund- laqen der Modernen Weltanschauung (Augsburg, 1929), p. 8. ^^La Création poétique, I, 160. ^^XIV, 13, 11. 176-79. 47 qui les feint et se recule le plus qu'il luy est possible 54 d e l ' h i s t o r i e n . " Finally, in the last preface to the Franciade, vraisemblance and feindre are associated: "j_Le Poëte] a pour maxime tresnecessaire en son art, de ne suivre jamais pas à pas la vérité, mais la vray-semblance, 55 & le possible *" The proper use of feigning, then, in volved the cloaking of reality with the artifice and fable of external action that would not extend beyond the bounds of the possible; on the other hand, feigning, in the oracu lar and Christian tradition, implied obscurity, a veiling of truth in a way that would reveal nature's deeper spiri tual significance, the harmony of her laws, or her basic and rational connection with man. As a consequence of this valid ambition to give more density or layers of meaning to the work, a distance was created by giving the concrete point of departure a subjective or abstract referend by way of the innate Idea (should the poem have a Platonic orienta tion) , by abstraction, or by analogy— but rarely by way of 56 the symbol. Medieval symbolism, which had increasingly tended to give reality and importance to the sign at the expense of the referend, was part of that heritage they were wilfully and consciously attempting to eschew. 54 XVI, 4. c c Preface first published in the 1587 (posthumous) edition; XVI, 336, 56 Cohen, Ronsard, p. 278, 48 So far as the apprehension of the Idea is concerned, : Platonism plays a relatively small and distorted role in 57 Ronsard's verse. However, like Du Bellay in 1'Olive, he could occasionally, in the early poetry, be inspired by Petrarchism, when playing the lover, and rise to the appre hension of the innate Idea, In the following sonnet from Les Amours (1552), physical beauty is the stimulus, and fire is the connecting, or catalytic, element: Je veus brusler pour m'en voler aux cieux. Tout 1'imparfait de ceste escorce humaine, M'eternisant, comme le filz d'Alcméne, Qui tout en feu s'assit entre les Dieux, O saincte brazier, o feu chastement beau. Las, brusle moy d'un si chaste flambeau Qu'abandonant ma despouille cognue. Net, libre, & nud, je vole d'un plein sault, Oultre le ciel, pour adorer là hault L’aultre beaulté dont la tienne est venue, 59 In the Ode a Cassandre, the morning rose, by analogy, is identified with the recalcitrant young girl; then the action of "maratre Nature" on the rose is generalized to a univer sal natural law (abstraction), and Cassandre is finally, and prophetically, pictured in her ultimate human mortality (analogy and abstraction)* In A son lict, the power of sexual love makes man the equal of the gods* Ronsard's 57 "Ronsard, , . , is as ready as ever to distort Platonistic themes to his own ends *" Robert Valentine Merrill with Robert J, Clements, Platonism in French Renaissance Poetry (New York, 1957), p, 56, 58 59 IV, 134-35, 11. 1-4, 9-14, V, 196-97, i 49 amorous activities are equated, by analogy, with the divine raptures of Mars and Venus, his bed humourously elevated to the heavens as being worthy to take its place among the eternal constellationsIn the Hymne de la Justice, Ronsard posits an abstraction. Justice, as an attribute of the Cardinal of Lorraine; personifying this absolute, he traces her career on earth, dramatizing the contrast be tween the ideal and the deformed copy made by men until the advent of the Cardinal and his king, whereupon, with a sudden and unconsciously comical gesture "Justice tout d’un 61 coup vivement s'eslança / Dedans ton corps, Prelat." Thus the celestial and the mortal meet and, in true Renais sance spirit, knowledge of the ideal is tied to ethics* However, this last example indicates how the representation of human involvement with the invisible in terms of inter mediaries and of space to be traversed interfered with a more direct metaphorical fusion of dissimilars. Mythology, on the other hand, was an ideal vehicle for a dynamic union between the human world and the supra-natural, permitting each to be understood in terms of the other’s qualities and 257-59. 57, 11, 429-30. We cannot help but conclude that the Cardinal must have been bowled over. The image is a good example of the problems attendant upon putting in tellectual or psychological concepts into visual form; once more, knowledge of psychological change and development is seen as closing a distance between the sensible and the intelligible * 50 each to be equally substantial,^^ The gods incorporate as well as bridge the human and the divine, and the allegorical figures perform this func tion between the human and intellectual realms, incorpora ting both abstract thought and thought-in-action. It is rare in Ronsard, however, outside the rigidly controlled and condensed sonnet form, to find both qualities, the ab stract and the concrete, locked into one image,One may suggest the other, but they are either juxtaposed compara tively or treated as a progression * Even the Ode à Cassandre, which identifies the rose with the girl in the first verse, cannot do without the comme : Cueilles, cueilles vôtre jeunesse Comme à cette fleur, la vieillesse Fera ternir vôtre b e a u t é .^4 Comme opens the third sonnet in the sequence, Sur la mort de Marie: "Comme on voit sur la branche au mois de May la 65 rose," This comparative approach maintains a distance between the two domains, a space which is part of the poet's way of looking at reality. Mind and matter, though no longer absolute polarities, are relatively opposed and ^^Whether or not mythology was misused or overused is beside the point here, ^^Cohen discusses the question of Ronsard's failure to "discover" the metaphor, Ronsard, pp. 242-43. 197, 11. 16-18, ^^XVII, 125, 1, 1, 51^ must keep their identities, just as creator and created, ,the self and the cosmos, must remain separate yet linked if their function is to be maintained. It is this reciprocal 66 relationship that interests the poet; space takes on dra matic possibilities as the field of interaction. Since the Pléiade was part of a highly mobile age that saw reality as experience and man’s relationship to his world as a heroic call to action, it seems reasonable that epistemological aspiration and poetic theory and prac tice should be conceived in terms of movement through space. This does not, however, constitute a break with the past, but rather a confirmation of a long tradition. Our Greek heritage gives the highest value to abstract, concep tual thought whose processes turn on space-defining con cepts: the question of form, of cause-and-effect relation ships, of transcendence, of immanence, and, most particu larly, of Being itself— if one accepts the premise that space-concept develops from a point. Thought is a develop ing movement that strives to return to the static "point," and reason, moving upward toward knowledge, gives height an ethical value. The intellectual space of the scholastic is a solid structure of categories, by way of which reason pro gresses with dialectical and logical precision. On the Ernst Cassirer makes this point in discussing the importance of Pico's Oration on the Dignity of Man to the Renaissance's concept of knowledge. Individual and Cosmos, p* 86. 52 other hand, thought that seeks the direct experience of knowledge is anti-discursive. To speak of the mystical vi sion as an occurrence in inner space would be a contradic tion ; mysticism seeks an annihilation of space, an intimate contact with the "point" that results in loss of self, de- 57 siring not to "know about, but to Be," Ronsard combines attitudes from both the mystic and the conceptual thinker; the artist-poet desires the experi ence of contact with the invisible, the god-like ability of the prophet to surmount both space and time, but his vision is that of the painter, not the visionary; it stays focused on the reasoned pictorial unfolding of the action that leads up to the solution, not on the drama of contact; his mental machinery retains the stamp of conceptual thought, still holding to the "proper" use of logic whose methods were "to fit the individual objects of thought into their set places in the pre-arranged scheme." Ronsard sees inner space intellectually as the movement of reason resolv ing apparent contradictions, or discovering the universal behind the particular. He sees this space poetically as a field of action, as the uncharted boundary between Becoming and Being, a space to be repeatedly overcome, but not Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism; A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness, Dutton Everyman Paperback (New York, 1951), p. 72, ^^Castor, Poetics, p, 134. 53 destroyed. This area has function; as a mediator between man and knowledge its content is experience. In some of the foregoing excerpts, we have seen examples of Ronsard's physical mobility and assurance. He likes to fly heavenward "d’un plein sault," or fly on the wings or the wind of his words. His movement is not al ways under the direction of his will; in the ode A la Roine, the "godess" has invaded his very being, and again, in a delirium, he asks of Bacchus, "Pere, où me traines-tu?"^^ However, as Cohen points out, after 1555 "1*ivresse antique, les fumées du délire bachique se dissipent. Plus de ’for- cènement’; ... Ronsard expresses this change in a passage from the Hymne de la Mort where, in a somewhat mixed but conventional metaphor, the distance that separates him from the intelligible is that of his own poetic con sciousness and will: ... à nul des vieux antiques. Larron, je ne devray mes chansons poétiques. Car, il me plaist pour toy de faire icy ramer Mes propres avirons de sur ma propre mer, Et de voler au Ciel par une voye estrange. This shows not only Ronsard’s deeper commitment to the sin cerity that he espoused, also in 1555, in A son livre, when 1. 179. 69 IV, 135, 1.12; III, 54, 11.1-4; I, 161, 11. 25-28. 70 I, 65-66, 11. 1-10 and L'Hinne de Bacus, VI, 185, ^^Ronsard, p. 166. '^^VIII, 164, 11. 35-39. 54 he vowed to "[chanter] au vray ses passions," but also states his intention in the interest of greater realism and sincerity to break away from his loftier masters— an inten-' tion that was only partially fulfilled; he could not com pletely foreswear his beloved divinities, nor his Muse, of course * The expression of independence that is marked by the repetition of the adjective propre and by his determina tion to find an estrange— i.e., a new— way to Heaven, re ferred to in another Hymne as "de toutes choses tout ... [le] premier cheinon de la cheine qui p e n d , is a decla ration of his intellectual freedom. This does not, how ever, constitute a contradiction to Ronsard's belief in a star-determined destiny. In Les Daimons, Ronsard asso ciates temperament to planetary influence: children of the sun are loved, those born under Mars are war-like, "heureux 75 les Joviens," and so on; Laumonier adds a note to this in the Hymne des Astres: "Ronsard a toujours réduit au corps et au tempérament le champ d'action de la fatalité astrologique, réservant ainsi le libre arbitre humain Cassirer, referring to Ficino, has pointed out that, / under the astrological system, man was subject to the three- ^^VII, 324, 1* 178. ^"^Hymne du Ciel, VIII, 147, 1. 88; 148, 1. 104. ^^Les Daimons, ibid,, 125, 11 $ 191-200. 76 ' Hymne des Astres, ibid., 154, n. 2. 55 fold order of providence, fate, and nature. The first was the realm of the mind, the second, of the soul, and nature was the realm of the body. Though subject to this order, man could submit "now to one, now to the other"; this con stituted his freedom; his dignity was no longer in his 77 being, but in his creative action. The intention to make a self-determined contact either with nature or the intelligible would seem to be a fuller exploitation of the microcosm concept as developed by the Italians. In Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man, God has placed man at the center of the world so that he may sur vey all the forms of life around him and be the "free and proud shaper of his own [being]To seize and possess what he perceived with his senses, what he knew with his mind, what he experienced as a bodily entity, was an act that justified the dominion God had accorded him* Man, in the thought of the period, moved toward mind and moved toward matter; this double but simultaneous action created a special kind of space that was no longer filled with a hierarchy of qualities and values but, hav ing become more homogeneous, insured the participation of dissimilars: of man in nature, and of the sensible in the ideal. Also, distinct separation guaranteed "the 77 Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, p. 114* 78 Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, trans. A. Robert Caponigri (Chicago, 1956), p* 3. 56 79 possibility of true participation." The distance between, the subject and what he perceived was a sign of the neces sity of the object; for the poet, it was a zone de passage* In the Hymnes (1555) and after, Ronsard*s seizure of his subject is more direct; however, it is still treated as a developing action requiring the personal, the mental and psychological experience of movement through space, though, as we shall see, the poet does not always dramatize his own "flight," but incorporates the subject-object problem into the narrative body of the poem, When Ronsard's object is his own emotions, his per sonal involvement in and with the physical world, he reaches it through nature, often with the help of the daemons and "Sylvains" who inhabit the space between man and his world; he likes to linger in a landscape of grottoes, springs, and trees that cast mythological shadows, a nos talgic reminder of that time when, not yet fifteen, he would go into the dark forests "a fin de voir au soir les Nymphes & les Fées / Danser desoubs la Lune . * * , in habitants of the cosmological structure in which he so 79 Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, pp* 23-24* Q rj Hymne de 1 * Autonne, XII, 47-48, 11* 31-42* As Laumonier points out in his note 3 (p* 48) to this passage, this is not the only time Ronsard mentions his early initiation by the divinities, nor was he consistent about his age* 57 ' 81 firmly believed* In the more ambitiously ethical or epis temological poems, Ronsard's own heaven-sent divinity, that assures his inner freedom, enables him to rise "d'un esprit bouillant" to take his place amongst the gods*^^ His flight is an upward movement of the mind which spans physi cal space and conquers it* In so doing he conquers changing time as well * His gravity-defying ability (and also that of the mythological and hypostatized figures) procures for him the vantage point of a prophet, predicting "toute chose 83 avant qu'elle soit faite," and enabling him to perceive and know the working of the links that insure cosmic harmony* In the hymnes-blasons, some of these coalescent forces are shown as allegorical figures, incorporating both abstract and human qualities, free to move between the two realms, urging man to knowledge and virtue. The acquiring of this wisdom is dramatized in the central myth or récit 81 Laumonier states that the nymphs Ronsard saw danc ing in the Hymne de 1'Autonne were suggested by mist rising from the ground (ibid*, 48, n * 2). However, Ronsard was superstitious, in the sixteenth-century manner, and nature was alive with creatures and beings ; furthermore, as A*-M. Schmidt points out, he believed Nymphs were a category of those daemons to whom he assigns definite roles in the or dering of the cosmos* La Poésie scientifique, pp* 78-80* Henri Busson also speaks of Ronsard's credulity regarding these sublunar creatures in Le Rationalisme dans la lit térature française de la Renaissance (1533-1601) (Paris, 1957), pp* 378-79* Hymne de IVAutonne, XII, 47, 1* 16* . 1. 14. : as a space-conquering action, but one which preserves the identity of the subject. Philosophy, who flies to the highest, the lowest, and the most secret places of the cos- 84 mos, as if she had Mercury's wings, closes the distance between ignorance and knowledge for man by raising him heavenward: Elle [philosophie], voyant qu'à l'homme estoit nyé D'aller au Ciel, disposte, a délié. Loing, hors du corps, nostre Ame emprisonnée. Car en dressant de nostre Ame les yeux. Haute, s'attache aux merveilles des Cieux, Vaguant par tout, & sans estre lassée Tout 1'Univers discourt en sa pensée. Et seulle peut des astres s'aller Osant de DIEU la nature espïer.^^ The evil ways of men force Justice to "fly" away from them into the woods before "flying" up to her heavenly father, not to return until, as I have shown, she incorporates her- 86 self with the Cardinal of Lorraine. Peace, in the Ode au Roi, operates like a World-Soul; bringing order out of 87 chaos, she nails the four parts of the universe together, and, diffusing her own "force vagabonde" throughout the world, encircles it in her arms: ^^Hymne de la Philosophie, VIII, 92, 11. 107-10. ^^Ibid., 86, 11. 21-30. 86 Hymne de la Justice, 42-72. See also note 61. ^^This is reminiscent of Plato's "little pegs" in the Timaeus. Plato, Dialogues, III, 358, — I 59 Sa douce force vagabonde Le bien heura d'un dous repos., Elle fit bas tumber la terre. Et tournoier 1'eau qui la serre De ses bras vagues & dispos. Du soleil alongea les yeus Én forme de fléchés volantes. Et d'ordre fit dancer aus Cieus Le bal des estoilles coulantes After his victory over the Titans, Jupiter, in the Hymne des Astres, nails the wandering Stars in place (Plato's "little pegs" again), and establishes contact between them and the changing world by handing them the "fil des Destinées," giving the Stars power over nature and "toutes choses 89 nees." In another mythological setting, that of the Hymne du Printemps, the Sun is a wandering, "vagabond" lover while Spring plays the rather dubious role of go-between, beautifying Earth, and bringing back the Sun who "monta bien haut au ciel, & alongea le jour, / A fin que plus long 90 temps il embrassât sa femme." As Bros carries the soul upward, so does love of knowledge. The act of knowledge is like the act of love itself ; to grasp Reality, either as that which is reflected or as form in matter, depends on striving and fusion. Ronsard, true to the Greek ideal of the oneness of spirit and body, expresses this by attempting to show the harmony p o III, 6, 11. 52-60. °"^VIII, 153, 11. 72-84; 154, 11. 89-92. ^°XII, 32, 11. 98-99. 60 between the organic and the abstract, by investing abstract ideas with "a sensuous, tangible, and, for the most part, ■ 91 human form." In Les Daimons, part of Ronsard's argument for their existence depends on the theory of the intermediate term : "Or* deux extremitez ne sont point sans meillieu, / Et deux 92 extremitez sont les hommes & DIEU." By the same token, this prevalent attitude that necessity reaches the contin gent by way of intermediaries can be seen in the poetic structure and theory of Ronsard and the Pléiade. The sys tem of harmonic links that connect the two dissimilars in the making of the poem can be schematically represented in the following manner : The poetic life-drama : the would-be knower the experience the poet Muses, demons (Divinities [Nature Beauty (Man and the phy- [ sical world to be known the gods the cosmos the Idea the self the stimulus the sensible The epistemological drama: the would-be knower to be known the self the intelligible 91 Sir Kenneth Clark’s phrase, referring to the Greek ideal in relationship to Renaissance art. The Nude, p. 25, 92 VIII, 125, 11. 201-02. 61 The psychological drama: the would-he knower the knower & the known to he known the subject the egcT^^ the object The aesthetic drama : the would-be knower the knowing the subject the work to be known the object Denouement the human poet poem Man poem poet the divine immortality The examples given that involve the self or ego do not express the conscious thought of the Pléiade, but draw on the intellectual currents of the period. However, from these formulae we can recognize the tenacity of the habits and patterns of medieval thinking. The Pléiade's plastic imagery, the emphasis on the visual, is indicative of an effort to be free of the domination of the intellectual realm and to create a more direct bond between subject and object, but reason could not be en tirely divested of its tools. Poetry that aimed at ethi cal truth and knowledge would quite naturally, however : unconsciously, depend on a tertium quid in the uniting of disparate elements, or in moving from one category to another. This can even he observed in the formulation of the Pléiade's poetic theory; the poet - fury - inspiration; inspiration - imitation - invention; invention - imitation - the poem; the poem - the poet - Man* The theory of the tertium quid as set forth in the 93 Timaeus and universally accepted in the Middle Ages, was still operative during the Renaissance, as we have seen, and was effective at every level throughout the order of being. As man could not speak to gods except through the 94 Muses or daemons, so body and soul were thought to be joined by spirits,the senses and reason by the imagina- 96 tion, and the latter and memory by reason. The object, whether physical, spiritual, or intellectual, could not be reached without the catalyst of an intervening substance. 93 * Plato, Dialogues, III, 353* See also C. S. Lewis’ discussion of the principle of the Triad, Discarded Image, pp* 40-44. 94 Lewis, Discarded Image, p. 41* 95 ^^Ibid., p* 167. 96 Murray Wright Bundy, The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, Vol. XII, Nos* 2-3 (Urbana, 1927), p* 179* Though there is a diversity of sys tems in the so-called "faculty" psychologies, the scheme of the three internal powers— imagination, reason, memory— is "substantially true" of many prominent medieval thinkers; Avicenna, Honorius, John of Salisbury, Averroes, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon, for example. 63 The poet's divine gift assured the balanced and harmonious operation of the parts, and the control of the less reliable participants involved— i.e., body, senses, and imaginâtion--as well as the poet’s success in satisfying the demands of his aesthetic credo. An illustration both bf the universe’s dependence on a binding element as well as Ronsard’s preoccupation with harmony is found in the Ode au Roi which we mentioned earlier. Aware of the fragility 97 of harmony, the poet sought to strengthen it and recon cile man to himself by putting man and the world in balance ; this was the Orphic purpose of his art. Cassirer has stated that all the intellectual prob lems of the Renaissance "flow" toward the problem of self- 98 consciousness. Though the Pleiade poets in general exalted their individuality and were sensitive to the tur moil of the inner experience, and to the conflict between 99 that life and the disorder of historical reality, as poets, their interest in the self centered largely around the question of dynamics. They were interested in testing the self’s emotional range, its functioning as intermediary between subject and object and, in a death-defying gesture, releasing it from its purely temporal confinement. This ^^Henri Weber, La Creation poétique, II, 737 98 Individual and Cosmos, p. 123. ^^Henri Weber, La Création poétique. I, 37. 64 ■poetic lock-picking enabled the self to relate to the order of the natural world, to fit its emotions into the scheme | of things, to partake of the moral and aesthetic mission of 'antiquity, the beauty of the absolute, or the harmony of the cosmos. Given this range of movement, the poet’s self could identify with those divine poets who had spoken di rectly to "les Oracles, Prophètes, Devins, Sybilles, Inter- 100 pretes de songes *" The poets of the mid-century were less caught up by the interior drama than in the drama of their action in and upon the world, more oriented toward visualizing and identifying the self’s movement according to antiquity’s catalogue of models than toward listening to its inner dialogue# However, the self also had a contempla tive orientation * As a principle of subjectivity, it tended to be identified with the soul which, in the Hellenized Christian system, is easily diffused into mind* Since mind in its turn, slips into "the structures of existence, the poet was still partially involved in an ontological realm, his gaze ultimately fixed on the "grand Tout" wherein he sought the affinities that conciliated differences, or the contradictions that explained them. Another obstacle in the way of the self's discovery and defining of its own ^^^Ronsard is referring to such poets as Orpheus, Homer, and Hesiod. Abbregé, XIV, 5, 11. 25-26. ^^^Reinhold Niebuhr, The Self and the Dramas of History (New York, 1955), p. 82. 65 reality was the poet's rapprochement, in form and content, of the present to antiquity* His turning to fiction in stead of events— as in the disastrous example of the Franciade— tended to devaluate the historical moment, the moment of living human experience* Ronsard*s view of nature placed it both in the onto logical and the psychological fields. On the one hand, it was a source of revelation, of imagery suggesting the uni verse* s immutable forces and laws, its metaphysical func tion * In the Elegy to the Gastine forest, man's destruc tive hand drains the forest of its life's blood, silences its voice, but reveals a basic natural law as to the nature of being ; Que 1'homme est malheureux qui au monde se fiel O Dieux, que veritable est la philosophie. Qui dit que toute chose à la fin périra. Et qu'en changeant de forme une autre vestira* $ é * & - * - . » -* # • * # # » -* * * & # # # ♦ La matière demeure, et la forme se perd.^^^ On the other hand, the natural world was viewed in terms of its erotic and generative purpose--as in the Hymne de 1'Esté — or as a background against which man becomes aware of him self and of his emotions, and as "the medium through which the free creative force of man acts and becomes conscious of ^‘ ^^Elegie XXIV, Floyd Gray, Anthologie de la poésie française du XVI® siècle (New York, 1967), p. 254, 11* 61- 64, 68. 66 1 03 itself," In the first ode A la Fontaine Sellerie, the spring, cherished by the "nymphes," is a source of inspira tion, the eternal spirit of his ancestral lands, a point de repère between his physical identity and his existence as a poet ; Sus ton bord je me repose. Et là oisif je compose Caché sous tes saules vers Je ne sçai quoi, qui ta gloire Énvoira par l’univers. Commandant à la mémoire ^ Que tu vives par mes vers* His penetration of the sensible world, coupled with the maintaining of his separate identity, his ability to see the life under the "escorce," was another way by which the poet placed himself both in and beyond time, in space and beyond it• As receptor for supra-natural material, as a nexus between man and knowledge, between the invisible and the visible worlds, the poet had a psychologically dynamic con cept of his role * Yet even Ronsard’s hedonistic joy and 105 active participation in the "sweetness" of life, his pantheistic imagery and choreographic imagination cannot 103 Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, p* 67* 204, 11. 15-21. ^^^For a clear discussion of "sweetness" in Pleiade poetics and the question of le doux et l’utile, see Clements, Theory and Practice, Chapter 4, 67 overcome an immobility that lies deep at the base of the poetry of the Pleiade. Three circumstances explain this point mort ; one is the lurking preoccupation with intel lectual abstraction, with being, not becoming, with that pure Beauty or Harmony or Form that the Renaissance held to be the highest aim and resting place of the virtuous mind,^*^^ the "sainte hautes se" of the Absolute. The second is growing scepticism concerning the power of man's reason and the growth of knowledge as a result of the reli gious wars. In the Elegie à Robert de la Haye (1560), Ronsard now finds that man is "de tous les animaux le plus lourd animal." What is the point, he asks, to Vouloir parler de tout, & toutes choses veoir. Et vouloir nostre esprit par estude contraindre A monter jusqu'au ciel où il peut atteindre? Tout n'est que vanité & pure vanité. Furthermore (and this is the third circumstance), nature is a relentless wheel: In Five Questions Concerning the Mind, Ficino heads one section : "The Object and End of the Mind is Universal Truth and Goodness." Later on he states that "the inquiry of the intellect never ceases until it finds that cause of which nothing is the cause but which is it self the cause of causes." The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, John Herman Randall, Jr., et al. (Chicago, 1948), pp. 199 and 201. ^*^^Pontus de Tyard, Au Ciel, en Faveur de sa Dame, Poètes du XVIG siècle, ed, Albert-Marie Schmidt, Pléiade edition ([Paris], 1953), p. 377. 68 C'est tousjours même hyver & même renouveau, Mesme este, mesme autonne, & les mesmes années Sont tousjours pas à pas par ordre retournées.^08 A concept that confronts thought with either ultimate immobility or inevitability has a braking effect on poetry* It demands either that the poet find a new way of seizing this reality, that he find a way to penetrate the arbitrary or the static, and go beyond it to look back at his world from this vantage point, or that he stop just at the moment of reaching the absolute. The choice is between poetry as a 109 Model and poetry as Vision, The Model enables man to tidy up complexity and impose order. It converts reality into an elaborate intellectual scheme built according to scale; it is essentially descriptive in its presentation of the reasoned relationship between all the various parts of the universe. Visionary poetry, on the other hand, is a light placed on the far side of the reality that stands be tween the poem and man; its light pierces the density, illu minating the interaction of the invisible and visible worlds in the moment of happening, a light that intensifies the 316, 1» 31} 318, 11. 64-67; 319, 11. 84-86. 109 C* S* Lewis uses the term to refer to the medieval synthesis, the "Model of the Universe," that was conditioned by the medievals' "essentially bookish character," and their "intense love of system," This model must "get everything in without a clash," and afford "satisfaction to the mind," Discarded Image, pp, 11-12, We are extending the meaning to poetry that creates a neatly packaged universe, however intricately linked, that would present a world model for the intellect * 69 shadow of mystery. The Pleiade found itself in the middle between the Model and the Vision, but inclined to turn to ward the former, to revealing, by narration and description, that which gave a pattern to the cosmos, whether or not that, pattern allowed for freedom or change* The Apocalyptic vision that creates a new heaven and a new earth was not theirs* Though they had converted the physical world into a personal subjective experience, they did not do this with Being* Self-awareness did not as yet include self deification, nor had the ego fully developed its transcen dent manifestation * To sum up the major points that have been stated earlier : the reality the poet had to reach was envisioned as first existing outside himself; his senses created the bridge that put him in contact with the reality, the self confronted it, and his mind raised it to a higher spiritual or poetic level of meaning by virtue of its intellectual perception * The various steps of this operation, whether viewed psychologically or through poetic imagery, depended on a system of mediators, which not only permitted the pas sage from one state or level to another, but preserved the identity and value of the concrete and objective, as well as of the subjective and abstract * The Pleiade poet saw himself as a facteur, an in spired "maker" and intermediary between the real and the possible* In a world still dominated by the old cosmology. 70 ; by medieval faculty psychology and the concept of pleni- 110 tude, an act of personal creativity ex nihilo was incon- , ceivable. The analogical mode of thought that made man— however free— part of a natural sequence and network, that harmonized his method of thinking with the logical order of the universe, checked the possibility of creative autonomy in the world of ideas. Creation, in the sixteenth-century 112 sense, posits finding and proving laws, not making them; finding form, not imposing it; controlling the imagination by reason, not by giving it freedom to draw from its own experiences. The imagination was further hemmed in by the Pléiade's concept of the vraisemblable. In their synthesis, the encounter of the Platonic concept of art as an imitation lOgusson states that Ronsard abandoned Platonism in 1578 to lean more definitely toward materialism. Busson, Le Rationalisme, p. 380. Already in 1555, however, showing his usual eclecticism, Ronsard takes issue with Plato on the question of the full universe in Les Amours LX: "Pardonne moy, Platon, si je ne cuide "Que soubz la vouste & grande arche des dieux, "Soit hors du monde, ou au centre des lieux, "En terre, en l’eau, il n’y ayt quelque vuide." (IV, 62, 11. 1-4) And in the 1550 ode A Maistre Denis Lambin, he attacks the theory of reminiscence : "Que les formes de toutes choses "Soient, comme dit Platon, encloses "En nostre ame, & que le sçavoir "Est seulement ramentevoir; "Je ne le croi, ... " (II, 15-16, 11. 1-5) l^^Castor, Poetics, pp. 89-91, 198. 112 Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, p. 163. 71 of an imitation, with Aristotle’s dynamic— hut misunder stood— concept of the vraisemblable in art as potentiality, 113 watered down the latter to mere possibility* Ronsard is headed in the direction of giving greater self-sufficiency to poetry when he states that "1’invention n’est autre chose que le bon naturel d’une imagination concevant les Idées & formes de toutes choses,but> being dedicated to freeing poetry from its onus as a purveyor of lies, he never com pletely released the imagination from its role as the picture-making faculty * A correct interpretation of Aristotle might have resolved the problem, for then the conviction that what is potential, what is vraisemblable is of a higher order of truth than the actuality of any purely material reality would enable the imagination freely to come into new images made from its own experiencesy images which existed potentially in that experience and were awaiting discovery by some process of invention; and these would be the images which made apparent the universals through the particulars However, before man can conceive of the imagination as creating images rather than rediscovering and assembling them, that is to say, before he can put the "secondary 113 As Castor states, Aristotle's poetic theory de pends on a metaphysical framework without which it "is easily trivialised into either the representation of# what is merely possible, or the imitation of picturesque details of Nature *" Poetics, p* 60 * ^^^Abbrege, XIV, pp. 12-13, 11, 171-73. 115 Castor, Poetics, p. 182* 72 ' Imagination" to work, there is one definitive step to he taken : the recognition of a transcendent ego which supplies the self with a consciousness of durée and a potentially di vine subject* Once the self develops two foci and becomes its own subject and object, la pensée peut enfin se penser; tension is no longer merely between outer and inner forms of life, but lies instead within the inner, and between this dynamic conflict and the objective experience* In such a system there is a destructive side, as David James has pointed out;^^^ the poet's imagination "dissolves, diffuses, 117 dissipates, in order to recreate *" Man's connection with physical reality is no longer based on perception alone, but on apprehension * Reality is not merely channeled, it is neither represented nor described; it is made to happen * Thus the poet becomes a creator of reality, the acting sub ject who, in the Promethean motif, gives form to the uni verse* As was indicated in the introduction. Agrippa d'Aubigné was an ardent and devoted follower of Ronsard * Though twenty-eight years his junior, d'Aubigné's poetic consciousness was formed by the precepts of the Pléiade, As with the older poets, he faced many of the same technical 2.16 David Gwilym James, Scepticism and Poetry; An Essay on the Poetic Imagination (London, 1937}, p* 17* 117 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographie Literaria: or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions (London, 1817), I, 202* 73 difficulties: a language that was still self-conscious, the problem of sincerity versus the artificial manipulation of sanctified poetic conventions, and the theories of imitation and invention, all bristling with prescriptions and pro scriptions. Yet Marcel Raymond declares him to be "un isolé, un indépendent,V adding that not only can one not find any connections between him and the various tendencies and trends that go from Ronsard to Malherbe or Régnier, but that even his individual writings show no particular consis- 118 tency among themselves. The Tragiques, however, despite much conventional imagery (and, alas, some clumsy spots), is by its dynamically destructive tensions, its intense sub jectivity, the work of a creative and metaphoric imagination that has, in Coleridge's words, "esemplastic," or complet- 119 ing, power. D'Aubigné did not depend on the existence or the finding of a nexus to connect him to reality, or to tie together the sensible and intelligible worlds. His contact is nearly always immediate and direct; as Henri 120 Weber says, he usually eliminates the comme. His personal temperament and 1ife-experience had a great deal to do with his poetic outlook, yet the 118 L'Influence de Ronsard sur la poésie française (1550-1585), 2nd ed. (Geneva, 1965), Part II, 314. 119 Biographia Literaria, I, 195. 1 90 La Création poétique, II, 740. 74 individual differences between his works, which Raymond has mentioned, eliminates this as the dominant factor* Calvin ism, which throws man so deeply back into the self, is to be considered, of course; but I shall show that, above all, it was his subject matter, the fact that he dealt with con temporary events and placed them in the Biblical framework whose language and semantic meaning he knew and understood, that provided him with a new way of grasping reality. It was the Hebrew way of knowing which, as distinct from the Greek, eliminates all barriers between the physical and spiritual worlds by its intense subjectivity, which allowed dVÂubigne to function as "the eye and mirror of the uni verse; and, indeed, as a mirror that does not receive the images from outside but that rather shapes them in 191 itself . 121 Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, p. 92. This is what man must strive for, according to Bovillus (Charles de Bouelles) in De Sapiente (1509)* As Cassirer explains, Bovillus,made knowledge of the cosmos dependent on self- knowledge, on the Ego's "trying to draw the world into it self completely and then trying to copy it in all its forms, its 'species’." Furthermore, to resolve the opposition be tween "being-in-itself" and "being-for-itself," "the man of nature, simple homo, must become the man of art, the homo- homo; but this difference is already overcome, inasmuch as it is recognized in its necessity. Above the first two forms arises now the last and highest; the trinity homo- homo-homo, in which the opposition of potency and act, of nature and freedom, of being and consciousness, is at once encompassed and resolved." Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, pp. 91-92. Thus does man become the shaper; Prometheus comes into his own * PART THE PROBLEM OF KNOWING; KNOWLEDGE AS DRAMATIC ENCOUNTER Hebraic thought, as a cornerstone of Christianity’s foundation, was reexamined in the Renaissance Judaeo- Christian symbiosis,^ and, of course, in the exegetical methods practised by the Reformation* Thus, in a more or less coated form it constitutes part of the Pléiade’s in tellectual and humanistic background* However, what I am seeking to define and to extricate from the entanglement of influences in d’Aubigné's work is the driving force of a more basic Old Testamental form and spirit* Therefore, as a prologue to the discussion of the Renaissance reexamina tion of Hebraic thought from the standpoint of the Tragiques, it is important to bring into relief some key aspects of Hebraic thinking, not only in the light of its distinctive features and of certain particularities that I am thinking most particularly of the interest shown in the Cabala— itself an essentially Alexandrian de velopment of Jewish thought--by such people as Pico della Mirandola, Reuchlin, Colet, Jean Thenaud, Guillaume Postel, Symphorien Champier, and Pontus de Tyard. See Joseph Leon Blau's The Christian Interpretation of the Cabala in the Renaissance (New York, 1944), pp* 89-98. 75 76 are germane to d’Aubigné's epic, but by way of comparison with what was said in the preceding section concerning Ronsard and the Pleiadic approach to reality, knowledge, and the poet’s intermediate role. In order to proceed to a more methodical comparison between d’Aubigné and other poets of this period, it is first necessary to reaffirm what criticism has already established; that his poetic self-concept involved, at the deepest and most comprehensive level, the image of the pro phet who has been called, who has had God’s hand— his 2 power--laid on him, and who has been vouchsafed a vision. His themes, like theirs, center around Yahweh’s involvement 3 with the monarchy, and his message is never divorced from 4 its "original roots in concrete events." Despite the Pléiade’s influence and the numerous classical references in the best humanist tradition, despite the use of allegori cal figures, the overuse of the classical rhetorical epi thet, the strange couplings of Biblical and classical imagery,^ we would say with Trenel that "il doit à 1’écriture la meilleure part de ce qui fait sa grandeur et 2 According to Gerhard Von Rad, these forms of direct address from God were common factors in qualifying the pro phet of the eighth and seventh centuries. Old Testament Theology, trans. D. M. G. Stalker (2 vols.; New York, 1962), II, 57-60. , p. 12. ' ^Ibid., p. 35, Trenel calls attention to this. L'Elément biblique, pp. 10-11. 77 son g é n i e But, more precisely, of what does this "meilleure part" consist? Exactly what comprises the Old Testament spirit that his critics recognize as penetrating his work, as sustaining his thought, his poetic breath? As valuable as all the elucidations are that have so pains takingly examined the Tragiques' textual and stylistic debt to the Bible, it seems necessary to go farther; it seems possible to look more closely at that mass called the "Western literary tradition" in order to isolate certain of its Hebraic components that especially serve d'Aubigné's poetic creation. His conscious use of Biblical source ma terial is overwhelmingly obvious; a less conscious imitation or adaptation of both a Hebraic view of reality and means of reaching it would seem justified by his life-long intimacy with the Old Testament and its language, as well as by a spiritual and psychological identification with Hebrew poets and the theological rapprochement that the Tragiques estab lish between the Biblical past and the present. Since we are identifying d'Aubigné's way of knowing with the Hebraic, we need to begin with the latter's concept of the distance and relationship between the poet-prophet and the physical world, between the poetic word and the phenomenological event. The basis of Hebrew poetry is to be found in the 78 covenant-based Hebrew metaphysics; there is its Sitz im Leben. The two, poetry and metaphysics, are inexorably en twined and equally bound to reality and the reality of the spiritual experience, for, as Tresmontant has stated, they admit of no separation of the sensible and intelligible 7 worlds* The visible and invisible spheres were indeed distinct, yet at the same time they were both equally real and were confronted by the Old Testament Hebrew® with his entire being, not with autonomous thought.® This is, of course, a primitive or mythopoeic view of reality in which the human mind has not yet recognized its own material, nor taken back what it has created..^® Instead, for the Israelite, the self was dynamically involved in external phenomena whose causality and change were perceived as the expression of a will that had been revealed to man and from 7 Claude Tresmontant, A Study of Hebrew Thought, trans. Michael Francis Gibson (New York, 1960}, p. 62 * ®The term "Old Testament Hebrew," or "Israelite," covers not only a large time span, but a large range of functions within both the historical and the literary spec trum. My use of the term applies generally to the poets and prophets* The latter were most frequently poets, and the poets, though not of the prophetic movement, often influ enced the language and style of prophecy* This is particu larly true of the cult-hymns of the Psalms, a point made by Ronald E* Clements, Prophecy and Covenant (Naperville, 111., 1965), p. 19. 9 Henri Frankfort and Mrs. Henri A. Frankfort, et al., The Intellectual Adventure of Primitive Man (Chicago, 1957), p * 6 * 10 Ibid., p. 388* 79 : which he could not remain detached, for nothing stood be tween him and what was to be known* The Hebrew poet and prophet confronted no impersonal or arbitrary forces, nor the abstractions of conceptual thought; in short, not an Idea or a Law or a Category, but a personality* The 11 "Thou" that stood over against him did not have the human frailty of a Greek god, but rather conceived of his involve ment with man in terms of dedication to a long-range commit- 12 ment* Thus the economy of Hebrew monotheism enabled the Hebrew god to transcend the world of nature and Hebrew 13 thought to transcend the world of myth and enter the time- dimension by focusing on the soteriological direction of Israel's history* Though remaining essentially non-specu- 14 lative, this thought did attain to universality by virtue of its historical vision and a sense of human responsibility that eventually overarched tribal and national borders * Man and the Unseen, then, entered into a reciprocal rela tionship^^ which was made particularly dramatic and intense p. 8, 12 ' Early Hebrew belief could be called monolatrous, or classified as "theoretical monotheism"; Yahweh was the greatest, the only truly effective god, among many. "Thor oughgoing monotheism" occurs, as Meek points out, in the time of Jeremiah and Second Isaiah* Hebrew Origins, p * 227, 13 Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, II, 350, ^"^Ibid. . p, 358. ' 15 The "commitment * * * was voluntary and free *" Muilenburg, Way of Israel, p. 58* 80 by Yahweh's nature;^® transcendent, yet capable of imme diate and direct involvement, he required no Demiurge to connect him with the physical world, nor was he a point to ward which form strained for realization * The Old Testament Hebrew had no need of varying modes of cognition for knowledge of what was external to 17 him, since knowledge was experience, and behind every thing in the universe was the fact of the overwhelming per sonality of Yahweh, a personality like himself who "goes forth as a mighty man" (Isaiah xlii % 13), who addresses, commands, and questions his people,^® involving them and himself in that intimate and direct communion, that "in terior relationship" which is inherent in the meaning of 19 the Hebrew verb "to know." There was no intellectual dis tance, no spatial gap to be closed, no logically qualita tive differences to be resolved in the encounter of the human personality with the holy one, and therefore no 20 intermediaries required. Centuries later, Cusanus was to Modern scholarship has established "Yahweh” as the preferred translation; the American Standard Version (1901) of the Bible uses "Jehovah." 17 Muilenburg, Way of Israel, p. 16. ^®Ibid., pp. 19-20. ^®Ibid., p. 16. 20 Yahweh had his court and angel messengers. Isaiah, for instance, in his first prophetic trance, saw God sitting on his throne with the seraphim above him (vis 1-2). Later Jewish thought looked upon angels as intermediaries (Daniel iii: 28), but man did not often have to depend on any go- betweens to speak to God or to reach him. 81 comment on the role of distance in judgment-making; "When there is comparatively little distance from the object of enquiry back to the object regarded as certain, a judgment is easily formed; when many intermediaries are required, 21 the task becomes difficult." Looking at either object, the Old Testament Hebrew simultaneously apprehended the other, for Yahweh was both the source and the sum of know ledge, his absolute will and creative word moved and sus tained or overturned the universe; thus he was known by the active manifestation of his judgments ; Behold, Jehovah maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof. , . . The earth shall be utterly emptied, and utterly laid waste; for Jehovah hath spoken this word. (Isaiah xxiv;l, 3) Yet, on the other hand ; Thou makest the outgoings of the morning and evening to rejoice. Thou visitest the earth, and waterest it. Thou greatly enrichest it. (Psalms lxv;8-9) His freedom and creative power, then, were as total as was his action, but never undirected; direction was given by his covenant with his chosen people. In what would be a scandal to the Greek mind, says Tresmontant, Yahweh’s 21 Nicolas Cusanus, Of Learned Ignorance, trans. Fr. Germain Heron (New Haven, 1954), pp. 7-8. 82 ' active truth was constantly manifested in every particular 22 thing; looking at the particular, the Hebrew did not see beyond to a static ontological realm; he was himself in volved with the object and conceived of this relationship in terms of the everpresent, actively attentive stance of 23 Yahweh* Yahweh*s truth was in his own reliability, and he expected consistency and upright actions from the people with whom he had a legal relationship of mutual responsibi lity and obligation that was rooted in unconditioned love 24 and unconditioned freedom* In the Greek tradition, knowledge of ultimate Reality was, indeed, an inner experience, but one dependent on intellectual detachment, for the conflict was between religion and science (philosophy)* For the Hebrew, the tension was between God and man; the latter asked not "why," but "who," and listened for the answer: the Lord thy God * This personality-based concept made knowledge a highly sub jective matter; both the physical and the supra-natural were ^^Hebrew Thought, p* 64* ^®See the article "Truth" in A Theological Word Book of the Bible, ed* Alan Richardson (New York, 1957), pp * 269- 270. ^^Regarding Covenant-love, see Fisch, Jerusalem and Albion, pp* 98-99* Von Rad points out that, in some cases, freedom to take the oath or not belongs only to the superior party, but in other cases "the partners enter into the arrangement of their own free will and on equal footing*" Old Testament Theology, I, 129-130. In either event, it is a legal relationship, which is to say that it is dependent on the human one. 83 made part of the psychological field through the direct in- ; volvement of the self * Knowledge did not develop or unfold in spatial concepts, hut occurred in time, since knowing could not be dissociated from Becoming, from the Will Be. The name that God gives in answer to Moses* question, "I AM THAT I AM" (Exodus iii?14), is translated by Albright as "I 23 ' " cause to happen what happens *" Whether one accepts this 26 or the translation; "the one who loves passionately," both express the continuing and involved presence of Yahweh, the effectuating power of his word* Man's knowledge of Yahweh was based also on dialogue, on the spoken conversation that took place in the "heart," 27 the seat of knowledge * There, he listened to God, talked 28 to him, argued with him* In the final analysis, the goal of knowledge was understanding of, and obedience to, Yahweh's purpose, to his covenantal expectations and judg- 29 ments; the historical fact was the metaphysical reality, the grasp of which relied more on interpretation than de scription,®® more on subjective vision than on either visual 25 Quoted by Muilenburg* Ibid*, p* 44* ®®See Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, I, 10-11. 27 Muilenburg, Way of Israel, p* 16* 28 Exodus xxxii;11-14 and Exodus xxxiii; 11 * 29 Tresmontant, Hebrew Thought, p* 73* 30' Erich Auerbach, Mimesis; The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans* Willard Trask (New 84 or logical observation, and was founded on the fulfillment of the covenantal relationships And I will betroth thee unto me for ever; yea, I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness, and in justice, and in loving-kindness and in mercies. I will even betroth thee unto me in faithfulness; and thou shalt know Jehovah. (Hosea ii % 19-20) The realization of this relationship was envisaged dynami cally as action * However, this did not divorce it from thought, for "thought [was] related to the will," and to know something was to effectuate it by action, to have it so 32 in fact. By comparison with the Greek preoccupation of reconciling man's nature and the cosmos to rational modes of 33 thought, the Hebraic approach to the problem of knowledge was almost exclusively a psychological affair, stemming from the self's search for harmony and wholeness with na ture and history by means of its personal relationship with God. Knowledge was less often the result of intellectual or analytical comparison, than the result of psychological York, 1957), p. 19. Auerbach is comparing Biblical and Homeric styles; he sees the latter as being dependent on "externalized description." 31 My italics* The use of the marriage symbol permits the inclusion of many covenant words : "righteousness," "justice," "steadfast love," "faithfulness," and "know ledge." Muilenburg, Way of Israel, pp. 59-61. ' , p. 16V 33 • In a logos-system, "reason is the chief ground of order." Fisch, Jerusalem and Albion, p. 69* 85 ' tension and energy. Rooted in the concrete, historically and intellectually limited to the physical world,the Old Testament Hebrew was sure that the concrete world existed, and he was sure of the existence of his own ideas and emo- 35 tions as substantial signs of external forces, yet there was a primacy of the subjective in his thinking. Tresmon tant refers to his thought as "a poetic materialism or a 36 carnal idealism" to explain how the Hebrew transcends any dualist concept separating the sensible and the intelli gible* Looking at the external world, the poet casts a vi sion over it in which the concrete and his ideas about it coalesce. It is not an image of what he sees, but rather what he experiences and the ideas he knows are there at work 37 behind the picture. It is this knowledge, the poet's in terest in the idea of what he sees that can dominate what appear to be "brilliant, many-colored pictures of life." In the One Hundred and Fourth Psalm, the poet addresses In Job, the question of man's limitations is asked and answered in a way that puts the essential meaning of the universe beyond his grasp. Duncan Black MacDonald sees this denial that man can reach philosophy as a sign that he is already there* The Hebrew Philosophical Genius: A Vindica tion (New York, 1965), p. 42. 35 Henry Bamford Parkes, Gods and Men : The Origins of Western Culture, Vintage Books (New York, 1965), p. 106* Hebrew Thought, p. 47. 3 7 ' Duncan Black MacDonald, The Hebrew Literary Genius : An Interpretation (Princeton, 1933), p. 11. - 86 ' Yahweh Who coverest [himself] with light as with a garment; Who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain; Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters; Who maketh the clouds his chariot; Who walketh upon the wings of the wind, (2-3) He goes on to describe a world of active abundance, a world dependent on God’s judgments; one that grows to surpass what he can actually see ("There go the ships; / There is levia than" [26])* In this divinely installed and maintained arena, man appears briefly and colorlessly, but as a matter of fact, as one whose place is guaranteed ; "Man goeth forth unto his work / And to his labor until the evening" (23). It is, of course, a thoroughly "theologized" picture, one that emphasizes the dramatic interactivity of the secular and the sacred. What seems to be objective, what appears 39 to be "so clear-cut and bright," is the poet’s own self- expression through faith, the physical and visionary form with which he clothes his ideas, linking the invisible to the visible, and thought to fluid experience, simultaneously transforming the natural world to allow God’s power to be revealed and manifested. Or again, nature can be seen in terms of man’s human experience, and raised to the "psychic level": 3 9 ^ Ibid. 40 Boman, Hebrew Thought, p. 97 I 87 For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace; the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing; and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. (Isaiah lv;12) Man, Nature, and God were the three entities, the three realities for the Hebrew as for the Greeks, but they were conceived most particularly in dynamic terms, for "mankind and the world only had an identity in their rela- 41 tionship to God." The three spheres were bound together organically in the covenant concept by a "common purpose 42 jointly undertaken." Referring to the Jewish philosopher, Franz Rosensweig, Fisch says that Greek philosophy reduced everything to the World, to the cosmos, so that Man and God became shadows of the World— hence the Greek emphasis on order and symmetry which may be more properly predicated of the World than of Man or God.43 In a logos-system, the world follows a pattern, an "aesthe- 44 tic pattern" that nature reveals or reflects; logos is the divine reason, cosmic order, and man’s "insight" all in one; the totality of wisdom, "the beauty which lies on the coun- 45 tenance of all things." Such a concept creates a close ^^Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, II, 355. 42 Fisch, Jerusalem and Albion, p. Ill. 43 44 Ibid., p. 112. IMâ*> p. 69. 45 Ibid., p. 67. 88 correspondence between the nature of things and the nature 46 of the mind, and makes aesthetics a means to knowledge* The Hebrew poet looking at nature and the external world was not SO consistently soothed by it as was the Greek* He observed it with an eye that was equally all-inclusive, but that took in the material from a different angle. Nature was not merely a sign of the divine, nor a key to permanent laws behind the transitory, nor yet the basic ground of all existence of which history, for example, was but a dimen- 47 sion. Rather, it was a barometer of God's mobile and situational judgment, a sign of Israel’s spiritual health, the field of her great soteriological adventure, and grasped in terms of her faith; the idea of a participating nature, the image of nature in convulsion is a convention of Biblical writing.*^® Von Rad points out that Israel made no sharp distinction between nature and history and that, furthermore, our more absolute concepts of the two words do not correspond to hers* Unaware of nature's laws, Israel could only master the world "in reference to its creator and controller"; this was its sole unity— a unity derived from a fluid but absolutely posited relationship, not from ^^Ibld., p. 108. 47 Niebuhr, The Self, p. 77* 48„Th0n the earth shook and trembled; / The founda tions also of the mountains quaked / And were shaken, be cause he was wroth" (Psalms xviii: 7)* And; "Jehovah hath made himself known, he hath executed judgment" (Psalms ix; 16). 89 ' any inherent basic principle. Perceiving a close connection between creation and God's saving history that extended and i constantly sustained creation, she reduced the world from its divine status, eliminating any and all of the barriers 49 between herself and God that myth and idolatry provide, bringing the natural world and history into an existential field.Yahweh revealed himself in history, and nature was 51 subsumed under it. Subservient to God, Nature partook of the "programme of the Covenant and [was] destined, like Man, 52 to be redeemed." As for man* s position in the universe, it can be understood, in part, by the fact that there was no body-soul separation, no spirit-mind dualism as in the Pythagorean- Platonic tradition, nor was man a key or medial link in a chain of being. His selfhood and identity were guaranteed by his constant and interacting relationship with God; and, as with nature, any purposeful functioning depended on this 49 "Paradoxical as it perhaps sounds, the first and second commands of the Decalogue are also the key to Israel's understanding of the world." Von Rad, Old Testa ment Theology, II, 340. 50 Ibid., pp. 338-42. ^^Niebuhr, The Self, p. 77. 5 2 Fisch, Jerusalem and Albion, p. 112. Fisch sup ports this by Genesis ix:15-16 where, he says, nature "takes upon itself the sign of the Covenant." In a note he adds that this idea of nature’s redemption "is not always recognized by Biblical scholars otherwise alive to the im plications of Covenant theology." 90 ‘ relationship* For the Hebrew, the value of man was some what less passive than in the Judaeo-Christian development; -it lay not in contemplation but in his potentialities and in the realization of those potentialities through acts* Created from dust, the smallest, most insignificant element, 53 man as such was valueless; yet he was also theomorphic, his goal was dominion over the other forms of life and the achievement of peace, harmony, and justice on this earth* The Creation story is central to Old Testament thought,®"^ for at that moment man was thrown toward a normative future 55 that God could release at any moment, that could "break 56 into our present*" Man's worth, then, was tied to his historical role and derived from actions that depended for their validity on whether or not he had listened to God's word; for to hear was to obey, to answer was to act * Only thus, through listening and through the active response of works could he become righteous— a state of virtue that was neither static nor passive, but was conceived as the flowering, the natural, productive growth of his 5 3 Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, I, 145* 54 "In the old Cultic credo there was nothing about Creation *" Israel, according to Von Rad, was some time be fore grasping the theological connection between creation and saving history* Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, I, 136* ®®Ibid*, II, 361* 56 Frankfort, Intellectual Adventure, p* 26 * 91 57 potentialities within the framework of his vital rela tionship with God. And he [i.e., the righteous man] shall be like a tree planted by the streams of water. That bringeth forth its fruit in its season. Whose leaf also doth not wither; And whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. (Psalms i:3) In Yahweh's speeches to Job, a different picture is drawn of man's status in his relationship to nature (xxxviii- xlii). God underscores Job's lack of knowledge, his lack of creative power, his inability to control his physical environment, and his inferiority to the animal world. Yet, Job is not repudiated but preserved. Whatever shifting at titudes we observe due either to the chronological develop ment of sacred history, the emergence of various traditions, to the incursion of any outside influences, or to belief in God's absolute freedom, it remains clear that man's essen tial position and value stemmed from the fact that he was 59 needed by Yahweh, who used him to direct history. This was a life-scheme that was viable psychologically, for the self's sake, for the rich, inner life of the conscience that it cultivated, and humanistically for the role man was 57 Fisch, Jerusalem and Albion, p. 96. 58 Water, in the eyes of the Old Testament Hebrew, was considered to be "a direct and peculiar blessing of God." Ibid. 59 Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, I, 53. ---------92^ given to play in bringing harmony to his societal and worldly existence. Israel’s metaphysics were psychological— even bio- 60 logical * In this scheme, every part of man and the uni verse acted and reacted in the light of the divine encoun ter and was affected by it. From these meetings man de rived his psychological and spiritual continuance, since they spelled life, or sickness, or death. As the forces in the earth reacted to the behavior of those who owned it, so did the parts of the body, as denominations and manifes to tations of the soul, betray the psychical condition of the person involved; "thus the ways of the living God [were] understood realistically in relation to man’s psychophysical 63 life"J My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? I am poured out like water. MacDonald, Philosophical Genius, p . 5* Muilenburg, Way of Israel, p. 71. He quotes the following verses from Deuteronomy xi; "And it shall come to pass, if ye shall harken diligently unto my commandments which I command you this day, to love Jehovah your God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul, that I will give the rain of your land in its season, the former rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy grain, and thy new wine, and thine oil*" (13-14) Johannes Pedersen, Israel ; Its Life and Culture (4 vols.; London, 1926-1940), I-II, 170-76. 8 3 . Muilenburg, Way of Israel, p. 17. 93 And all my bones are out of joint; My heart is like wax; It is melted within me* My strength is dried up like a potsherd; And my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; And thou hast brought me into the dust of death. (Psalms xxii:1, 14-15) Loins are filled with anguish (Isaiah xxi: 3), hearts that do not listen to God are made fat, and ears heavy (Isaiah vi:10). Time, by its content--and this is largely how it was conceived by the Biblical writers who were not mere chroni cler s--was also a way to knowledge* It was viewed neither as an abstraction, nor as a series of quantitatively indif ferent moments, but, like space, was experienced qualita tively.®® Von Rad claims that time, divorced from events, was "quite inconceivable."®® This is debatableBut if aware of any abstract concept, the Hebrew did not make it central to time's vital function and importance. It was not an onrush of a time-stream that would bring about a The King James version reads; "It is melted in the midst of my bowels"; the American Standard version es chews such "indelicate" terms. However, exchanging one or gan for another does not significantly alter the meaning, since a part of the body, for the Israelite, represented the soul, the entire man, ®®Frankfort, Intellectual Adventure, p. 23. ®®Qld Testament Theology, II, 100. He points out further that there is no word in Hebrew that corresponds to our concept of time. ®^See James Barr, Biblical Words for Time (London, 1962), pp. 90-100. ^ , 94 realization of Yahweh's purpose or promises; rather was it "meaning-full" time that would accomplish this, time created by a series of significant events and actions that would, it was hoped, fulfill the man-God relationship. Furthermore, these actions were not projected into a future, but, given the Hebrew’s non-divisive grasp of reality, were seen as an "extension of the present*"®® Events-in-time were purpo sive, mythologically significant, since they called into 69 being the original event, and theologically significant as an expression of relationship, for time bound necessity to ethical behaviour, God’s will to man's choice, with a right time for the performance of acts; For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be bOrn, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up. (Ecclesiastes iii:1-3) Like his metaphysics, the Old Testament Hebrew's time-sense “ * 7 0 was also psychological and biological. That is to say that it was essentially rhythm, tied to the movement of living things, a pendulum swinging between God’s cosmic will and man’s responsive (or irresponsive) acts. From the ^^Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, Ii, 102. 69 ' ' Frankfort, Intellectual Adventure, pp. 23-24* 70 - Cassirer, as quoted by Frankfort, refers to the Hebrew’s view of time as biological* Ibid., p. 23. 95 poet-prophet’s standpoint, this meant a concentration of what we would call past, present and future into a thicken ing, an intensification of the Now of man's experiential involvement with God, incorporating both possibility and memory : Isaiah calls to the people to remember Abraham, not by looking back, but by looking "unto" Abraham; he re minds them of Zion, and projects justice for the future, yet this future is brought into the present, for God an nounces that his righteousness is "near," and that his "salvation is gone forth»" (Isaiah li; 1-5#) Where the Greeks looked back to a Golden Age, the Hebrew kept the past constantly before him, not as some thing lost and gone, but as a reinforcer, an ever-present reminder of his success or failure, and his hope. The role of memory was essential, for thus God's magnalia, the "saving events" and past history were actualized, were kept alive and current, cumulative reminders of "the source of - y ] _ LIsrael'sj responsibilities," guide-lines for conduct for what was yet to be done. Memory kept man oriented toward a future that was open, and whose realization depended on will— man’s and Yahweh's--and that God had never closed, even in the face of man's transgressions & The eschatological or purposive view that he cast on nature-history is a distinguishing mark of the Hebrew in 71 Muilenburg, Way of Israel, p. 41. 96 contrast to the Greeks* It is erroneous, of course, to say that the latter had no sense of history or that they found it meaningless* What they lacked was the sense of will or purpose, the ultimate meaning that locked together the in ner and outer event* History was too associated with the imperfection of change and the transitory for it to be a source of metaphysical principles, a vehicle of revelation, or representative of a totality in the process of realiza tion* Whether one considered time in the Platonic sense as the moving— -hence imperfect— shadow of eternity, or as the Aristotelian measure of movement, it was tied exclusively to the physical world; it was not a meeting ground or an actuating link between the two but was to be surmounted conceptually. A Greek thinker did not consider the future in terms of prospective possibilities; philosophy and his- 72 tory were a contradiction. The Hebrew, because of his "open future" concept and the theological framework in which history and time belonged, was forced to view events in the light of faith; his philosophy of history preceded any facts* Thus, at various times, history had to be re made, the past reinterpreted on the basis of new "saving 73 events." The significance of these remarks about time and history to poetic creation lies in the extremely 72 Karl Lowith, Meaning in History, Phoenix Books (Chicago, 1949), pp. 4-5* ^^Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, II, 360-61, 97 ' subjective approach such a viewpoint affords, the creative freedom it bestows effectively to "destroy" the historical past, to transform events, not merely by "feigning" or "in venting" in order to grasp and reveal a higher truth, but, through a change of angle, finding a new interpretation, a new truth in the event itself on the basis of maintaining the validity and viability of a cumulative and covenant- based history. This is the kind of hermeneutics, applied according to a scheme of faith, that d'Aubigne brings to 74 the historical events that lie behind the Tragigues. We have placed the logos-system of classical philo sophical thought, the awareness of a permanent, rational, structure-based existence in opposition to the Hebraic per sonality- structured system which, though finite, allowed for 75 freedom beyond structure. This does not mean, however, that Hebraic thought was ignorant of or impervious to speculation and philosophical questions,* the books of Job and of Ecclesiastes alone are proof of that. In the 74 Joseph Haroutunian points out that Calvin was aware that the prophets "wrote for their own times and situations"; that he was "interested in the way the New Testament writers applied prophecy to their own history after Christ." Calvin : Commentaries, trans. and ed. Joseph Haroutunian, The Library of Christian Classics, XKIII (London, 1958), p. 29. As something of a Hebraist and as a Calvinist, d'Aubigne sensed this essentially Hebraic con tinuity between past sacred history and current events. 75 Niebuhr, The Self, p. 65, ^^Job was written ca. 600; Ecclesiastes, ca. 150, according to Robert H. Pfeiffer, Introduction to the Old ' 98 course of his history and development, the Hebrew became in creasingly aware of reason and had to come to terms with it. This he did in the personalized form of wisdom, a woman who cries out On the top of high places by the way. Where the paths meet, she standeth; Beside the gates, at the entry of the city. At the coming in at the doors, she crieth aloud : Unto you, O men, I call; And my voice is to the sons of men. (Proverbs viii: 2-4) Hokhmah, or wisdom, at first both pragmatic and in tellectual, became increasingly theoretical after 586 B.C., 77 during the post-exilic period. The concept of wisdom as a quality found in God alone was "inherent in Yahwehism 78 from the beginning." But wisdom as a means of knowing, as speaking with her own first person authority, not to Israel, but to the individual, offering him salvation, yet stimulating a rational understanding of man and the world, 79 was new to Israel and suggestive of theological problems, namely that wisdom would "legitimatize itself straight from Testament (New York, 1941), pp. 22-23. According to Albright, the first definite signs of the "impact" of Greek thought on Hebraic emerge in the last part of the third cen tury B.C. William Foxwell Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity: Monotheism and the Historical Process, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, 1957), p. 350. ^^Pfeiffer, The Old Testament, pp. 34-35. 78 Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, I, 441-42. . pp. 443-46. 99 80 Creation"; as the first-created, wisdom was all-encompas- 81 sing, and could he conceived as a force independent of God. One solution that kept the principle of Yahweh’s ac tion in history, his history-making contact with the world from weakening, was by identifying wisdom with God's word, the active word that called man "to life and to salva tion."^^ Another, identified wisdom with fear of God, yet theoretical questions remained despite the orthodox and normative solutions : could man know the world? Could he penetrate the cosmic secrets? There was Job's "no" / \ 8 4 (xxviii) and Ecclesiastes' scepticism as to any connec- 8 5 tion existing between man and events in the world. At this point, unable to penetrate nature on the basis of her faith, Israel submits to the tragic sense of lifeYet despite the problem presented by the existence of a per sonality that could be considered not only a form by which 8 7 Yahweh makes himself and his will present, but a ^°Ibld., p. 453. ® Ibid., p. 450. ®^ibid. 8 3 - Ibid., p. 447. See also Job xxviii:28; "And unto man [God] said, "Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; "And to depart from evil is understanding," ^^’ His scepticism may show an Hellenistic influence. Pfeiffer, The Old Testament, p. 35. 85 ' Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, I, 458* ^^Ibid. ^^Ibid.. p.'444. 100 coeternal and coequal primary reality, and thus separable from God, despite all this, the Old Testament Hebrew's con cept of the personality of Yahweh withstood the strain. It did not harden into an abstract structure, but remained dynamic and personlich; while the cosmic questions and the problem of the growing distance of God were assumed by Jewish apocalyptic. The self, for the Hebrew poet, was the principle of both the subjective and the objective— it encountered no difficulty in encompassing the two, for in the Hebrew's non-dualist world all divine action— cosmic or historically actual— was truly man-oriented. Thus the self never slipped into soul or mind, and thence into the "structures of exis- 89 fence," but held firm as both the actor in, and the stage for, the dramatic encounter with God. The life of the self, entrenched as it was in the psychological domain of its re lationship with Yahweh, obviously had a highly subjective character. For the Biblical writer, the point of departure was not found in the confrontation of man and the physical world, but in his confrontation with the unseen* In and of itself, the natural world was not a means to self-knowledge as it was for classical thought and its emulators; it ac quired this significance only to the extent that it 88 MacDonald, Philosophical Genius, p. 149. 89 Niebuhr, The Self, p. 82. : 101 participated in the drama of encounter by way of the inner dialogue ; God’s word was thus heard and seen and the poet could grasp it in its immediacy* Thus does the Psalmist ask, "Let my sentence come forth from thy presence" (Psalms xviiî2), and the prophecy of Isaiah ii is preceded by: "The word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem" (1)*^^ The reality with which the poet, or poet-prophet, made contact was that of the divine will-in- action; he did not grasp it aesthetically by form, but by the proclamation of the living, the rhythmic and creative word that melded both the sensible and the idea. Earlier we have seen that Pléiade poets interiorized the physical world; the lyric emotion or religious rhapsody of the Hebrew— as we see also in d’Aubigne--took the fur ther step of internalizing the divine being> in an active rather than in a mystic context. Thus the prophet recog nized a transcendent and free divine self, which, encapsula ting time and space and modes of being, caused a welling up of dialectical tension between it and the human level of the self, and between the interior and the external worlds, between God transcendent and God within* This experience, transformed into vision, shaped reality; the idea of what he witnessed became a concrete vision in his mind that re assembled the elements of nature and of human events in an 90 My italics 102 I .attempt to pierce the mystery, to show the interpenetration of the divine and the physical* He could not take meta physical flights to higher regions, as we saw Ronsard do in ' order to get beyond the limits of the self and the imperfec-: tion of human time; the Hebrew, dependent on the temporal, on physical life, for the very existence of his relation ship with Yahweh, stayed locked within the self; therein was his great freedom* MacDonald claims that the Hebrew mind, though always subjective, could reason logically and dispassionately, but that when under the sway of intense emotion there was "no room for anything but the self swept by its own feelings 91 and rendering itself alone*" As was the classical model of the Pléiade poets, the Hebrew singer was inspired, under divine protection; but where the former reveal a world based on the beauty of rational order, the Hebrew reveals a world dependent on the word * The poet’s world, like God’s, contains within it the self of the speaker* Ronsard and his followers drew the physical world into the intellect, thereby expanding and raising the self, giving a visual pic ture of the experience that incorporated both the physical and intellectual domains yet triumphed over physical limita tions. The Hebrew projected the self’s dialogue onto the world, binding together in dramatic encounter Nature, Man, 91 Literary Genius, p. 13* : 103 ^ and God, and seeking to bring about the truth he was pro- 92 claiming* This same kind of self-projection, supported, by faith, is practised by d'Aubigne* Where, in the classi- ' cal mold, the distance to be traversed was between the par ticular and the universal, the Biblical poet was personally involved in a basic and ethical struggle, the clash between ■ good and evil, between God and idols, creation and nothing ness* A visionary, he looked at the world from the far side of reality, illuminating and interpreting the divine will at work; a creator, he altered and shaped reality according to ideas that he cast into images, and, by virtue of his own self-bearing word, he sought to make his reality happen * Like the Creation itself, poetic creation was a divine transf ormat ion * The Hebrew's— and d'Aubigne's— concept of their re lationship to the world and to ultimate reality can be re presented schematically as follows: The poetic 1ife-drama : the would-be knower the experience the poet— ^ man events (nature/history) _the poem^^ to be known <— God's will 92 Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, II, 357-58. 93 In this schema, the poem is not treated in a separate category* For the Hebrew, art and life could not The epistemological drama 104 the stimulus the would-be knower to be known the sensible— ^ the self God’s will The psy chological drama : the would-be knower the knower and the known to be known .the object the subject ^ God the ego Denouement s 94 poet- prophet, poem God History and nature, man and God, flow together; they interact simultaneously in direct encounters* Each is seen in terms of the other, and is so viewed because of the poet-prophet’s own participation, his own direct involve ment and inner dialogue with an everpresent and unceasingly active God* A triadic structure, such as we outlined for the Pléiade, is not possible, for what the poet would know is not attained through first seeking a common denominator in the middle term; what he would know is inherent in his be divorced; there was no aesthetic drama separate from life-drama * 94 In the Hebraic denouement, the human and divine planes cannot be separated* : 105 ^ experience with God. It is knowledge of God that gives the , poet his special vision of the world outside himself; it is not the other way around. Even when realistically observed, the physical world is never entirely— or for long— divorced from the operative power of the divine, for both are strug gling, are cooperating together in time ; the poet-prophet is a filter that clarifies the process. D ’Aubigne's identifications of himself with Biblical 95 figures are multiple : he is a liberating warrior, one of God's chosen, a Mosaic savior and charismatic leader dedi- 96 cated to rescuing an exiled Israel. The figures that are the most persistently evoked— directly or indirectly— are 97 those of David, shepherd-king, warrior and prophetic poet, 98 and the prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah. If one broadens D ’Aubigne's first identification, in the poem pro per, is with Hannibal crossing the Alps (Misères, 1-4), but in the Preface he fights, like David, with a slingshot; his verses are stones (157-62). In Princes, his words stone vice, personified as Goliath (45-48). 96 Like Moses, he has "de jour le pilier, de nujct les feux pour guides" (Misères, 22). Cf . Exodus xiii: 21. In Princes, he states that he has to fight the giant, tyranny, because "le doigt du grand Dieu me pousse à le combattre" (42). The finger, i.e., the power, of God has been laid on him. 97 For examples of references to David the shepherd, see the Preface, 271-76 and Feux, 381. For the warrior. La Chambre dorée, 1055-58; for the poet-prophet, ibid., 1006-09, He also identifies a flaw in his own character with a weakness in David : "Je me suis pieu au fer, David m'est un exemple / Que qui verse le sang ne bastit pas le temple" (Vengeances, 121-22). 98 - Buffum has indicated d'Aubigne's stylistic and 106 the term "foreign conquest" to include religious wars, Italian influence and Papal might, it can be said of him, as Max Weber says of the prophets, that he "emerged * , * when foreign conquest threatened, in a time of mounting 99 insecurity and intense anxiety*" Like the prophets, d'Aubigne was a religious demagogue and pamphleteer, wil ling to place obedience to God above that to men, speaking of past glories, and, most particularly in Misères, voicing his outrage at the plight of the persecuted, "the economi cally exploited, legally oppressed * . . peasants and husbandmen * Like them, he saw injustice and persecu tion as among the greatest sins; and sin, to the Old Testa ment Hebrew, meant that God was not being listened to; it was disobedience, a repudiation of the word. D'Aubigne's 101 criticism was frequently voiced as a prophecy; even his apopheties, though not acknowledged as such, are an imitation of the Biblical technique of vaticinia post spiritual debt to Jeremiah and Isaiah, Study of the Baroque Style, p* 16, Though he does not give any breakdown, there are, respectively, forty-nine and fifty-three echoes from their works in the Tragiques, and one hundred and forty-nine from the Psalms* 99 Max Weber, Ancient Judaism, trans* and ed* Hans H . Gerth and Don Martindale, Free Press Paperback (New York, 1967), p. X X * 100- - Ibid*, p . X X I * ^^^As in his prophetic criticism of Henry IV, for example. Preface, 319-30* 107 102 eventum* For the prophets from the eighth to the sixth centuries most particularly, Yahweh's magnalia had come to a standstill; his judgments had created an abyss between the current situation and the Exodus, the covenant with 103 David, or any of the other saving events* History had to be started up again, and this required "eschatological renewal Though evoking the good old days, the pro phets nevertheless had to transform them to fit the present situation, to revitalize the past and give it a more de finitive future orientation# So they spoke of a new David, a new covenant, a new Exodus, eventually of a Messiah and, 105 peripherally, of resurrection after death# D'Aubigne conforms to this prophetic pattern * Like them he wants to shock, to stir his listenerDivinely inspired, he as sumes the voice of a new David and, in Jugement, realizes the apocalyptic vision of the triumph of the just* The poet-prophet is reshaping history according to his vision of truth and God's will * Indifferent to chronology, as 102 ■ ' D'Aubigne discusses his apopheties, and the pro phecies he considers genuine, in the Avis aux lecteurs, I, 11# ^^^Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, II, 272# 104 - 105 ■• ^Ibid* , pp# 361, 412* P* 350* ^^^Regarding this prophetic technique, see Von Rad, ibid*, II, 38* As for d ’Aubigné, he says, in the Avis aux lecteurs that zeal has perished, that he wants to "esmou- yoir" (I, 3), and refers to himself as having "un esprit igné et violent de son naturel" (p* 12)* 108 ' many Biblical writers were wont to be, he telescopes events, proceeds in bursts of vision, highlights the part that suits his purpose, ignoring the rest, or leaving it in s h a d o w . "Je voi ce que je veux,'& non ce que je puis" (Princes, 43), is his candid confession as to his method. We said earlier that nature was a book for the Pléiade poets. D'Aubigné does not read it, he witnesses it; "je voi" is a constantly recurring introduction to what he reports. He does not see nature and the world in terms of principle--divine or philosophic, nor in terms of an objec tive reality aesthetically grasped, but rather, in the He brew sense, in terms of divine judgment and action. Nature is not an intermediary, nor a force that marshalls the uni verse, maintaining order and balance. Linked to history, nature reveals; d'Aubigne sees it as transformed, as benign or menacing, according to man's actions and attitudes to ward God. The world that the poet shows us, wherein nature "se desnature," is a "monde à 1'e n v e r s , that corre sponds to the vision of Isaiah: Behold, Jehovah maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside In the Preface, he calls forth a vision of remem bered battlefields ("Je voi les places & les champs"), then chooses a succession of certain scenes to highlight for his readers, indicating, pointing to what we are to look at: "Là où 1'effroi des braves camps, ... ," "Là l'enfant attend le soldat, ... ," "Là 1'enseigne volait en vain ..." (193-216). ^^^Mi sères, 235. 109 109 down, * * . * The earth shall be utterly- emptied, and utterly laid waste; for Jehovah hath spoken this word. # . . The earth also is polluted under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, vio lated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell therein are found guilty; therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left. (xxiv;l, 3, 5-6) D'Aubigné's vision does not place both sides of the world picture in a balanced relationship to man's own cos mic position, nor is he satisfied to give abstraction a concrete and objective form* His aim is to materialize spiritual action, to make visible its movement in time and the world. The supra-natural lurks just behind the scene of even the most realistic passages, as in his description of a dying Perigord family massacred by reiters (Misères, 372-427); throughout the work it penetrates reality meta- 110 phorically and substantially, as we shall see. This penetration, the dramatic shock of the encounter of man's deeds and God's reaction explodes, as in the Bible, within 109 My italics* 110 My use of "supra-natural" and ’ ’penetration" is close in meaning to Sauerwein's "supra-literal" and "fu sion*" However, his frame of reference, like his stated interest, is structural; mine is theological * I prefer to view what he calls the fusion of the literal and supra- literal in the light of possible Biblical derivation* Sauerwein himself consistently refers to the existence of such a derivation. However, in my opinion, the Hebraic or theological point of view is essentially inseparable from the structural* See Sauerwein, D'Aubigné's "Les Tragiques", Introduction and passim. 110 an organic or biological context, in terms of health or sickness, cleanliness or filth, fertility or sterility— the negative term being associated with sin, a destruction, ac cording to the Old Testament, of man’s psychic wholeness and a failing of his relationship with God. In Vengeances, waters are made flesh and become dévorantes (300); they are turned to blood in an evocation of one of the plagues of Egypt (303), but can hear whenever God’s name is spoken (304). Catherine dei Medici is unclean and infectuous, a pestifere who traffics with the dead (Misères, 893, 902-16), In Numbers we find: Whosoever toucheth a dead person, the body of a man that hath died, and purif ieth not himself , defileth the tabernacle of Jehovah; and that soul shall be cut off from Israel : because the water for impurity was not sprinkled upon him, he shall be unclean; his uncleanness is yet upon him. (xix:13) Europe, in La Chambre dorée, is a woman whose face is blackened, dirtied by the smoke from the fires that have burned the innocent victims of Catholicism (613-14); Israel, so Amos proclaims, is a fallen, a prostrate virgin, who "shall no more rise : she is cast down upon her land; there is none to raise her up" (v : 2). Isaiah, speaking for God, predicts the sterility of waste and destruction for those who have turned from Yahweh’s law: Therefore as the tongue of fire devoureth the stubble, and as the dry grass sinketh down in Ill the flame, so shall their root be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust; .... Therefore is the anger of Jehovah kindled against his people, . . . and the mountains tremble, and fthe] dead bodies are as refuse in the midst of the streets. (v:24-25) D'Aubigne, in much the same vein, and as God's spokesman, commands the earth to react to man's corruption: 111 Terre, qui sur ton dos porte à peine nos peines. Change en cendre & en os tant de fertiles plaines. En bourbe nos gazons, nos plaisirs en horreurs. En soulfre nos guerets, en charognes nos fleurs. (Vengeances, 285-88) Ideas are not just given plastic or idealized human form 112 but are made flesh, for the Old Testament Hebrew did not 113 distinguish between intellectual and bodily functioning. The optical angle is that of the creator— not the remote abstract deity, but the transcendent yet involved anthro pomorphic God of the Hebrews, the voice within, who speaks to man as one personality to another, D'Aubigné's imagery, his grasp of reality, is pos sibly more concrete, and certainly more fleshly, than that of the Pléiade; his aim, however, is not to triumph over 111"^ peine" - avec peine. 112 • * " Henri Weber, in La Création poétique, speaks of the association in d'Aubigne of "carnal realism and moral indignation" (II, 668-71), and points to the techniques by which he makes the Biblical image even "more carnal" (p. 709). 113 Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, I, 153, ! 112 •reality by heightening its human significance in terms of the ideal or by extending its value aesthetically or intel lectually; rather is it to make reality transparent to the light of God's word, his will, and his law* The concrete and the real are not synonymous in his work, nor are they necessarily so in the more ambitious and epistemologically oriented poems of Ronsard; it is the nature of reality that is different in the works of the two poets * Whereas the Pléiade started from the natural object, or joined the in tellectually abstract to the natural via concrete imagery in order to find the links between the two spheres, d'Aubigné's point of departure is in the tension between two levels of the self--the ego and its transcendent mani festation— and in the tension between this inner dialogue and the external event* From this subjective and emotional 114 experience comes the revelation, the idea he is certain is at work, that he sees at work, within the actual * Thus the action of the supra-natural takes on concrete and physi cal form, since the poet sees it transforming nature and events ; thus the physical becomes a means of revealing moral or ethical judgments, the mirror of theological truth 115 at work in the destruction of appearances* 114 Emotional, because of the distance between what is (appearance), and what ought to be (reality). Emotion wells up to fill the space between the two* 115 Henri Weber points out that with Calvin and d'Aubigne there is a constant attempt to turn over 113 In the Avis aux lecteurs, d'Aubigne attributes the 116 adjective "théologien" to Vengeances alone* Sauerwein equates "theologian" with "sainct," and maintains— most justly in my opinion— that this "stile sainct" is not only 117 the style of the sixth canto but of the entire poem* Certainly for d'Aubigne, as for the Hebrew, there was no split between the sacred and the theological, and we would further suggest that "sainct" also implies that which triumphs over the profane, for what is holy has mana, or 118 activating power* Thus the poet-prophet's word can acti vate events in time, remaking history by means of a vision that does not deny the current actuality, but that reinter prets it so that temporal reality— past, present, or future — converges in the eternal present of the history-directed forces at work behind it and within * D'Aubigne effectuates this reinterpretation not only by images and metaphors built around the themes of destruction and of creation, but appearances (La Creation poétique, II, 611); this is also the subject of Roth Grob's dissertation : "Studien zu den Tragiques des Agrippa d'Aubigné" (Zurich, 1942). However, neither analyzes the concrete yet unrealistic or irrational imagery used to effect the reversal from the standpoint of Biblical theology* 11. ^ D'Aubigné's "Les Tragiques", pp. 202-03. He points out also that the work "begins and ends in the figure of God" (p‘ . 212)* IIP Norman H . Snaith, The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament (London, 1944), pp* 36-42. 114 by the very structure of his poem, which, by virtue of its thematic and non-chronological division and development, becomes a kind of divine summing up in the Now of Yahweh. At the beginning of Misères, d'Aubigne draws the past, the present and the future together* Perceiving the distance between where he stands as a poet of love poems and what he wants to achieve as the savior of the "captive Eglise" (14), searching, in the best Pléiade convention, for a new path, he races across a landscape composed of his past poetic works to place himself squarely "La où estoyent les feux des prophètes plus vieux" (27). This is not only a clear statement of his identification with the prophets and the identification of the Calvinist cause with Israel’s history , it also indicates a psychological center * Like a patriarch he stands in a place of divine signs that signify memory of the past, responsibility of the present, and the promise, the possibility , of the future * From there, as he says, "Je tends comme ie puis le cordeau de mes yeux" (28)* His vision is spatially as well as temporally unlimited, encompassing four T T steradians of solid angle * The poet stands in the middle of a global screen, turning his audi ence now this way, now that, to watch what he projects from 119 various optical points of view, those of God as well as 119 This was done cinematicalTy at the World's Fair in Canada, Expo 67. An article in Life magazine (Vol. LXIII, No* 2, July 14, 1967) is headed: "A Film Revolution to Blitz Man's Mind." This is precisely what d'Aubigné is 115 his own as poet, prophet, and contemporary witness* Within three hundred and thirty-five lines of Misères (89-424), he flashes from one metaphorical image of France to another in order to show her theologically, morally, historically, so- 120 ciologically, and realistically. Yet, except for the conventional image of the ship of state, there is one un derlying and controlling concept ; that of a bodily organ ism* It is in this basic and Biblical image— of an organ ism seen as dying or suffering, in parts or as a whole, as human or animal— that the physical, the psychological, and the theological are joined* The Pléiade poet was a link in nature’s chain; his vision sought out the basic elements of eternal accord be tween the abstract and the physical; he saw one in terms of the other. The vision he brought to bear upon the world of thought, and that of natural manifestations, was one of artistic contemplation; the point from which he observed, his fundamental reference point, was the archetype, the absolute, the form to be realized* His poetic world was largely one of harmonious relationships and correspondences — a harmony that he observed and described by virtue of his own mobility and transcendence, but his selfhood remained entire* D ’Aubigné, on the other hand, not only sees attempting to do. 120 Mi seres, 97-130, 131-152, 179-190, 191-366, 367-424* 116 himself acting, but is actively participating in his own work, caught up in the unfolding of the action, and direct ing it. Furthermore, he creates the illusion that there is someone there other than himself, someone outside the poem, watching and listening. As the work is the result of an inner dialogue, it is also a dialogue with his reader, with the consciences of his countrymen* It is not the external that guarantees d'Aubigné’s selfhood, but the dramatic en counter with God* The human and divine meet within the do main of the self; space, time, and worldly events coalesce in the eye of the poet as they do in the "tout-voyant" (Misères, 35), the ever watchful eye of Yahweh. This eye 121 "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, ’ ’ it creates in order to disclose the movement of mystery behind appearance, but not the mystery itself* So it was with the Old Testament prophets : En donnant à 1’histoire et à la pensée hébraïque leur sens véritable, les prophètes cachaient, du même coup, le fragment absolu de ce sens. Ils ne pouvaient le découvrir qu’en eux-mêmes, en une ex périence intime *122 Does the poet see his polemical, his theologized history as real? What is his concern about fiction or the poetic lie? He has no need to put the question, for the 121 Coleridge, Biographie Literaria, I, 202 * 12 2 - , Andre Neher, L’Essence du prophetisme (Paris, 1955), p. 282* 117 self has become disengaged from the soul as the principle of subjective individuality and is engaged in a dialogue with itself and with God. Like a prophet assuming Yahweh's wrath or weal, d’Aubigné is in direct contact with God's law and its force* He can speak only the truth, and reality and truth are one. His word destroys appearance and the lie ; and, by giving concrete, objective form to divine judgment, reveals the invisible aspect of time, the ultimate meaning of the historic event* Thus poetic crea tion, like the creation of God, becomes a saving act. PART II D ’AUBIGNÉ’S WAY OF KNOWING; THE PROPHETIC STANCE Because of his intense visionary subjectivity on the one hand, and of his theologically saturated mode of being and acting on the other, d’Aubigne stands in space-time. The center point of his vision, the ’ ’oeil de I 'ame’ ’ (Pref., 348), draws institutions, political life, and private lives into an organic unity. He stands at the spot where, with out losing their particularity, the limited and the limit less, the earthly moment and the time of judgment con verge.^ This is the prophetic center of the universe where outer event and inner purpose meet, where physical action in space coalesces with its spiritual significance in time, a meaning that gives peculiarity, not universality, to the 2 event by revealing what is happening to the psychic unity According to Raymond, ’ ’les Tragiques sont bien le langage d’un prophète qui s’installe hardiment dans le mer veilleux chrétien." L’Influence de Ronsard, Part II, 325* Yes, but the "Christian" aspect never entirely swallows up its Hebrew origins. 2 Boman points out that, in contrast to the Greeks, the Hebrews focussed attention on "the peculiarity of events." Hebrew Thought, p. 139. 118 ' 119 of man and the world* In poetic terms, he perceives event 3 and symbol simultaneously. This global vision is aetiolo- gicalj seeing the moving force of God operative behind everything; the space which d’Aubigne occupies is not empty, but full— full of the glory of God (Isaiah v;3)— -his love, his wrath, and his will. As with his models, the Biblical writers, abstrac tion is foreign to his poetic expression* Yet, how does a prophet reveal meaning? How does he make both reality transparent and the ultimate reality concrete? How does he bring God’s and man's perspective into focus? These are some of the problems that will be examined next in order to see to what extent d’Aubigne is indebted to Hebraism for their solution in the Tragiques * As I have mentioned earlier, the Old Testament aura that surrounds him does not emanate from his Biblical bor rowings and paraphrases alone ; its light is intensified assuredly by his imitation of certain Hebraic stylistic de vices such as the Hebraic genitive, and the use of parallel- istic devices such as synonymy and antithesis that can so tellingly evoke the rhythm of Hebrew poetry./^ However, we » need to look now at the procedures of prophetic discourse and see to what measure and in what manner d'Aubigne, the 3 Sauerwein, D’Aubigne's "Les Tragiques", p. 73. ^Fisch, Jerusalem and Albion, p. 40* 120 latter-day prophet, compares with the Biblical archetypes. Other than the avowed self-identification with David, the singer of cultic hymns, and with the prophets in 5 general, there is no evidence that d’Aubigne favored the style or method of any single prophet# His aim, like theirs, is to reveal the psycho-physical and spiritual ten sion in the relationship between God and man in terms of life or death. His concerns are theirs ; his message also centers around the economic life of the country, the land, the administration of justice, the dangers of unleashed power and pride^ that rebel against the life-giving word of God. Though d'Aubigne directs some of his diatribes at individuals--something that prophets rarely did, unless it 7 were against a king --he aims, as they did, at entire classes, as well as at perverted rulers. The fact that, where the three major prophets are concerned, he borrowed most heavily from Isaiah, next from Jeremiah, and then from Ezekiel, might indicate a stylistic or theological prefer ence, but it hardly seems conclusive.^ Sixteenth-century Biblical criticism was unmindful either of the question of ^See Part 1.2, notes 99-102. ^Muilenburg, Way of Israel, pp. 80-89. 7 Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, II, 73. 8 According to my count, based on the Garnier-Plattard critical apparatus, there are fifty-three echoes of Isaiah, forty-nine from Jeremiah, and twenty-three from Ezekiel. I 121 ' formal structure in prophetic discourse or of that of par ticular theological traditions; nor does d’Aubigne reveal, ! intuitively or otherwise, an awareness of any single pro phet's distinctive handling of forms, or make any attempt to imitate a particular structural pattern. Consciously or not, what he does imitate, in the Pléiade sense, is the diversity of forms found in prophetic discourse; he inter mingles drama, lyric, and epic with complaint and threat, exhortation and promise. Furthermore, if we take the Garnier-Plattard critical apparatus as a starting point, we get a mosaic of isolated Biblical quotations and overlap- 9 ping source material that, most frequently, are separated from their Biblical context and attached to a different si tuation or subject matter. Nor can we, by this approach alone, discern any clear-cut aesthetic or theological pre ference for any one prophet. It is rather a synthesis that stands revealed in the Tragiques, a synthesis created by d'Aubigne's mind and memory during years of Biblical read ing and study, in which the parts, though distinctly known, are affectively interwoven around a central concept common to each. This key concept, and the subject of d'Aubigne's prophetic sermon, which will be examined in detail later on, is that of a physical organism driving simultaneously 9 One borrowing may evoke several other writers from either the Old or the New Testament; this holds true within the Bible itself. 122 toward death and toward life, gasping for breath in its struggle between the two. Thus is the idea of the Covenant and the struggle for its realization put into action. Thus also is the paradox of God's wrath and his love, his judg ment and his saving grace tied to the physical realm# However, in the evaluation of the influence of sources on the poem, sheer weight of numbers is not en tirely without meaning, as I indicated in the Introduction when stating my premise regarding the Hebraic factor in d'Aubigne’s work. If we take a view of the poem that is simultaneously comprehensive and particularizing, if we distinguish the parts yet bind together, as did the pro phets, event, image, and theology, it becomes possible to separate a few strands from d'Aubigne's creative synthesis, These strands indicate points of similarity and difference between the poet and individual prophets which suggest a degree and quality of inclination toward each, and streng then our understanding of the extent and nature of d'Aubigne's Hebraic grasp of reality as well as his method of expressing it. All three of the major prophets, from Isaiah in the eighth century to Ezekiel, the ecstatic and fanatic prophet of the sixth century Babylonian exile, were deeply involved in the political events of their time. Called to their mission by the voice of God, their work and utterances show their concern with the sufferings of the people within a 123 historical context, which was inseparable from the theolo gical framework of doom and salvation» All three saw Israel, as d’Aubigne perceived France, as a nation in re bellion against the word of God. One distinguishing fea ture of Ezekiel’s prophecy underscored the distinction existing between the category of the holy and that of the secular.He was, according to Von Rad, more concerned, perhaps, than any of the prophets with the sense of Israel’s sin and with exposing sin's "total dominion over 11 men." Ezekiel saw Israel as a people who had defiled it self ; thus he placed the nation's sin in the sphere of the holy rather than in the secular area of moral or social 12 transgression. His vision and its expression do not re present an innovation, but rather place a particularly strong emphasis on the question of spiritual uncleanliness. God cries, "Woe to the bloody city" (xxiv:9), and then threatens : In thy filthiness is lewdness : because I have cleansed thee and thou wast not cleansed, thou shalt not be cleansed from thy filthiness any more, till I have caused my wrath toward thee to rest* (xxiv;13) An imagery that embraces blood, that associates idolaters with filth, is one that d'Aubigne will exploit to the ^^Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, II, 225» p. 229. p. 224. 124 fullest. France is a "terre sanguinaire" who, heedless of God, is driven to Catholic idolatry (Misères, 89, 690). The times themselves are foul (Princes, 117). The entire second canto is a series of actions and descriptions that emphasize the "ordures" of the nobility surrounding Henry III* Ezekiel's judgment that contact with foreign countries had lead Israel into total depravity is echoed in d'Aubigne's revulsion at the Italianate customs introduced 13 by Catherine dei Medici. Both prophet and poet are aware that their corrupt times are being consumed by the wrath of God, that his judgment is a purging. Moreover also I gave them statutes that were not good, and ordinances wherein they should not live ; and I polluted them in their own gifts ; in that they caused to pass through the fire all that openeth the womb, that I might make them desolate, to the end that they might know that I am Jehovah* (xxî 25-26) D'Aubigne also uses fire as an instrument that purges all men, saints and sinners alike ; Catherine, rod of God's anger, "[ira] en fin comme la verge au feu" (Misères, 804). As for the elect, the fire lighted at the stake purifies : "Les feux qui vous brusloyent vous ont rendu candides" 13 In Misères, he accuses Catherine of having made France the game quarry of Italy (765-66) and speaks of her Florentine ruses, murders, and poisons (955-58). He blames Italy also (and Machiavelli in particular) for the current passion for duelling (1047-48). ^^Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, II, 234. See Ezekiel xx:38, xxiv:13 * 125 (Feux, 14) since death, for the Calvinist elect, opens onto eternal life. Von Rad points out that Ezekiel was more consciously a writer than his teacher, Jeremiah, that his form is more 15 ordered, more fully developed; certainly its richly sym bolic imagery inspired d'Aubigne, and most directly at that. In Jugement (599-603) he specifically refers to Ezekiel's allegorical vision of the valley of the bones (xxxvii:1- 14), and in three of the cantos his source is Ezekiel's lu minous and winged visions of the first and tenth books. In La Chambre dorée, the falsely condemned stretch their hands toward the throne of God's glory whose corners are formed of animals, each with four faces and four wings (825-34): Effrayants animaux qui, de toutes les parts Ou en charbons de feu ils lancoyent leurs regards, Repartoyent comme esclairs sans destourner la face. Et foudroyoyent au loin sans partir d'une place. (835-38) In Feux, a sorrowing God deserts earth and returns to heaven in a flying chariot (1417). At the conclusion of the sixth canto, the wind of the vision of Ezekiel i has been combined with the cherubim of book ix as God marches toward vengeance : p. 222. ^^Ezekiel ii4ff., xilff 126 Monte dessus le dos des Chérubins mouvans. Il vole droit, guindé sur les ailes des vents. (Vengeances, 1127-28) Turning to Jeremiah, we find that the message formu la of earlier prophets has all but disappeared; there is little or no distinction between the "I" of the prophet and 17 - the "I" of God. Though it is sometimes difficult to tell whether the complaints that dominate his utterances are his or of divine origin, there is no question that it is his own voice we hear; he is the most individualistic of pro phets, the most lyric, and the most intense in his feel- 18 ings* Though filled with the independence and strength of the spiritually assured, d'Aubigné does not equal Jeremiah in personal suffering-- My anguish, my anguishI I am pained at my very heart; my heart is disquieted in me; I cannot hold my peace; because thou hast heard, O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war. (iv;19) — yet it is in his intensity, in the domain of personal in volvement with the land and its people, that the Protestant poet most resembles this Hebrew prophet. As one who was overwhelmed with anguish at what was happening to his coun try, as one who struggled inwardly between the pull of his mission and the desire to forsake it for the quiet 17 Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, II, 193* pp. 193, 195-96, 127 19 life, Jeremiah strikes a note of individualism in man’s relationship with God which a Calvinist could find particu larly meaningful. Though capable of compassion, like Jeremiah, d ’Aubigne nonetheless lacks the prophet's acute sensitivity# He does not, nor could he as one confident of his elec- 20 tion, curse the day he was born and long for death to es- 21 cape a life that seems to have lost its reason for being. However, there is no questioning the sincerity of d'Aubigne’s compassion in the scene of the "rustic" who spends each day of his "pantelante vie" in labor to be re- 22 warded only with famine and suffering; or in the picture of the old peasant who, following his plow, attempting to recultivate an already devastated land, has his hair pulled 23 out by a horseman angered at finding nothing to eat * There is one memory which overcomes him with its horror, that forces him to change the course of his narration to recount a scene he witnessed in Périgord: a family burned out by German reiters, mother, father, and babies 19 Pfeiffer, The Old Testament, p. 514» 20 Theoretically, no Calvinist could proclaim that he was predestined for election, yet Calvin's identification of his followers with the chosen people of Israel, his em phasis on the inner certitude that faith alone can bring, result in an assurance that rings out through d’Aubigné's work whenever he speaks of his co-religionaries* Jeremiah xx:14-18. ^^Misères, 257-60. ^^Ibid., 261-66. -----1 128 : 24 half-killed and left to die of their wounds. Horror and pity turn to anger: Mes cheveux estonnez hérissent en ma teste? J'appelle Dieu pour juge, & tout haut je deteste Les violeurs de paix, les perfides parfaicts. Qui d'une salle cause amènent tels effects. (Misères, 429-32) The last line, however, is anti-climactic; anger is not given a tragic dimension nor enlarged into images of vio lence or revenge, but resolves itself in an exercise of reasoning by pinpointing the correspondence that exists be tween the enemy's filthy (i.e., faulty) premise and the en suing tragic results. D'Aubigne's emotions, even when stimulated by the obsessively physical horror of the St* 25 Bartholomew massacre, never spill over, as do Jeremiah's when he cries out : Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people * (ix:1) D'Aubigne generalizes his reaction; it is Nature that can not stand the spectacle of unleashed human depravity ? dawn , trembling, ushers in the day destined to be marked in red (Fers, 770). Et le soleil voyant le spectacle nouveau A regret esleva son pasle front des ondes. ^"^Ibid., 367-424. ^^Fers, 765-962 129 Transi de se mirer en nos larmes profondes. D'y baigner ses rayons; oui, le pasle soleil Presta non le flambeau, mais la torche de l'oeil, Encor pour n'y montrer le beau de son visage Tira le voile en l'air d'un louche, espais nuage, (780-86) He brings to the description of that day when bodies clogged the Seine, the most intense visual involvement coupled with an icy detachment that accentuates the reader's awareness of the inner wrath of a man of will, of the trained soldier of Christ struggling to, keep control over too passionate a nature. Jeremiah, on the contrary, is overcome by his identification with God: Therefore I am full of the wrath of Jehovah; I am weary with holding in* (vi:11) There are two strongly stressed themes in Jeremiah's utterances that are noticeably echoed in the Tragiques * One is the prophet's feeling for the land, his preference for what is natural,and his alarm at man's willful de formation of it: For my people have committed two evils : they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water* (ii:13) Sauerwein has devoted the last chapter of his study of the ^^Pfeiffer, The Old Testament, p, 512. 130 Tragiques to the question of nature vs. "desnature"; he sees this opposition as basic to the dramatic alignment of the forces in conflict within the poem and basic also to 27 its "stile sainct." However, there is also a purely hu man side to this conflict. An active gentleman farmer, deeply attached to his property at Landes-Guinemer, the de struction of life and growth struck d'Aubigne with an im pact that went beyond angry reaction at the ravages of war to become one of compassionate mourning.for the peasants whom earth recognizes as her true children (Misères, 275- 77), Blood and filth are inimical to her; the eye of the poet becomes that of the grower in an idyllic description that shows earth as she is naturally, when cultivated by "les aimez laboureurs" (Misères, 277-90). Jeremiah also reveals his sensitivity to the land in a sorrowful and dramatic picture of his country dying in the midst of a drought : Judah mourneth, and the gates thereof languish, they sit in black upon the ground; and the cry of Jerusalem is gone up. And their nobles send their little ones to the waters : they come to the cis terns, and find no water; they return with their vessels empty; they are put to shame and confounded, and cover their heads. Because of the ground which is cracked, for that no rain hath been in the land, the plowmen are put to shame, they cover their heads. Yea, the hind also in the field calveth. D'Aubigne's "Les Tragiques", pp. 173-212. For d'Aubigne's own analysis of the various styles he used, see his "Avis aux lecteurs," Garnier-Plattard, I, 9-11. 131 and forsaketh her young, because there is no grass. And the wild asses stand on the bare heights, they pant for air like jackals; their eyes fail, because there is no herbage. (xiv: 2-6) For d'Aubigne, as for Jeremiah, such desolation is a sign of God's fury; the governing powers have become his instru ment : Les Rois, qui sont du peuple & les Rois & les peres. Du troupeau domesticq sont les loups sanguinaires; Ils sont l'ire allumée & les verges de Dieu. (Misères, 197-99) Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, a wolf of the evenings shall destroy them, a leopard shall watch against their cities ; every one that goeth out thence shall be torn to pieces ; because their transgressions are many, and their backslidings are increased. (v:6) The second element of Jeremiah's message that finds an am plified echo in d'Aubigne is the prophet's use of the macabre; according to Pfeiffer, this is unknown in litera- 28 ture before him. Jeremiah's entire world is in mourning (ix:10); he looks into the emptiness and blackness of chaos (iv:23-26); in Jeremiah we see "death, presented for the 29 first time in literature as the Grim Reaper": For death is come up into our windows, it is entered into our palaces ; to cut off the children from without, and the young men from the streets. 28 The Old Testament, p. 513. 29 Ibid. 132 * . * The dead bodies of men shall fall as dung upon the open field, and as the handful after the harvestman; and none shall gather them. (ix:21-22) Though this vision of stalking death is most frequently seen sweeping across the land, it can slip over into the humanly gruesome: And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters; and they shall eat, every one the flesh of his friend, in the siege and in the distress, wherewith their enemies, they that seek their life, shall dis tress them. (xix:9) D ’Aubigne develops this cannibalistic aspect of famine into an emotionally realistic scene in which we follow, step by step, the moves of a famished mother preparing her nursing child for slaughter, until at last Tout est trouble, confus, en 1’ame qui se trouve N ’avoir plus rien de mere, & avoir tout de louve * De sa levre ternie il sort des feux ardens. Elle n ’appreste plus les levres, mais les dents. Et des baizers changés en avides morsures* (Misères, 533-37) Here, as in certain other parts of the poem, the connection between action and theological symbolism becomes more tenu ous than in the Biblical counterpart, but it is not en tirely lost; the poet’s emphasis on the body and body parts, the lines of action he draws connecting the body with life or with death, serve to show, at any one time, the relative 133 positions of God, man, and nature* Jeremiah has a sense of dramatic tension that is more agitated, more in movement, and perhaps more sustained than what we find in Isaiah or Ezekiel, partially at least because so much of this tension, as with d ’Aubigne, is within himself as well as existing between himself and God, himself and others, God and his people. His drama, like d ’Aubigne’s, takes on epic proportions in this, God’s war with Zion (viil-6), a war whose weapons are famine, pesti- 30 lence, and the sword* In d’Aubigne’s drama, which also has both heaven and earth for its stage, God, disgusted by man, leaves the earth to return to heaven at the end of the fourth canto (1415-20), and, at the opening of the fifth, divorces himself even further from man by turning away his eyes from "la terre ennemie" (1). However, he has not put away his weapons, and in Jugement, God speaks directly, as he did through Jeremiah, to those who have rebelled against his word : Maudit sera le fruict que tu tiens en tes bras. Dieu maudira du ciel ce que tu béniras; Puantejusqu’au ciel, l’oeil de Dieu te deteste. Il attache à ton dos la dévorante peste. Et le glaive & la faim, dont il fera mourir Ta jeunesse & ton nom pour tout jamais périr ^^This threat appears frequently in Jeremiahi xivÎ12, xxi * 9, xxix:17, xxxii: 24, xxxviii * 2, etc. Puante" modifies "Hierusalem*" 134 Sous toy, Hierusalem meurtriere, revoltee* Hierusalem qui es Babel ensanglantée. (265-72) Whereas God, speaking through Jeremiah: Thus saith Jehovah of hosts : Behold, I will send upon them the sword, the famine, and the pesti lence, and will make them like vile figs, that cannot be eaten, they are so bad. And I will pursue after them with the sword, with the famine, and with the pestilence, and will deliver them to be tossed to and fro among all the kingdoms of the earth, to be an execration, and an astonish ment, and a hissing, and a reproach, among all the nations whither I have driven them* (xxix:17-18) Living in the midst of troubles, witnessing the fall and destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586, Jeremiah's gloom extends into a calamitous future that he 32 sees as present* There are few promises in Jeremiah, though, at the end, he sees a return to normalcy, for the God of wrath is also the God of love (xxxi: 2-5)* He could not, of course, have before his eyes the heavenly future which affords the Christian so much security and which, doubtless, was a consolation to d'Aubigné as he in France, like Jeremiah in his day, witnessed the fall of his nation to the "idolaters." Furthermore, the hope held out by Jeremiah for a faith of the individual heart fits smoothly into Calvinist tradition : ^^Pfeiffer, The Old Testament, p. 513* 135 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith Jehovah % I will put my law into their inward parts, and in their heart will I write it,* and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. (xxxi Î 33) Theologically and stylistically, however, Isaiah, the eighth-century prophet, represents the peak of prophe tic discourse. He is the bold innovator who, though using the old traditional ideas as his base, imaginatively re- 33 shaped and remodelled them. Each of the major prophets is, of course, strongly marked by his own style, his own religious outlook, the particular emergencies of his times, and the nature of his relationship with God; yet it is Isaiah's visionary image that seems to furnish a matrix for those who follow him. His emotions offer the broadest range, from the sharpest suffering (likened to "a woman in travail" [xxi:3]), from bitter tears (xxii:4), to the joy ful assurance of Israel redeemed and ceaselessly attended by God: Fear not, for I have redeemed thee ; I have called thee by thy name, thou art mine. When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee : when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon thee. (xliii:1-2) In his theological vision, as in Jeremiah's, the land is ^^Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, II, 147ff 136 ravaged and devoured (1:7), even reduced to chaos (xxiv:1); the children are "dashed in pieces" (xiii:16), but this most forward-looking of prophets sees the heavens and earth break forth into singing, "for Jehovah hath comforted his people, and will have compassion upon his afflicted" (xlix:13). Both Jeremiah and Ezekiel uttered a Messianic 34 message, but it was Isaiah's that offered the most pre cise prediction to the Christian of the hope that the New Testament was to realize, and "hope, for Calvin, was at the 35 heart of the Christian life *" In commenting on Isaiah's 36 promise: "Behold, thy Savior cometh" (Ixii:11), Calvin says : In short, the prophet is announcing the future day when the voice of God will resound from the rising of the sun to its setting, and will be heard not by one people but by all people.37 D'Aubigné is much less measured in his statements than is Isaiah# The latter's reproaches and diatribes are ' 38 incisive, the former's can be brutally corrosive. 34- Pfeiffer, The Old Testament, pp. 510, 539. 35 Haroutunian, in the Introduction to Calvin's Commentaries, p. 49. 36 Calvin's wording; Commentaries, p# 397. The Ameri can Standard Version reads : "Behold, thy salvation cometh." 37 Calvin, Commentaries, p. 398, ^^Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, II, 147* He maintains that Isaiah's main characteristic is moderation. 137 Isaiah, profoundly aware of the historical moment, passion ately concerned with justice, and watchman of God's law, complains that the city, once faithful, has become a har lot ; where judgment and righteousness once lived, now mur derers (iî21) are lodged : Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves; every one loveth bribes, and followeth after rewards : they judge not the fatherless, neither doth the cause of the widow come unto them* ._ (i:23)^° D'Aubigne, directly addressing the princes of the French court who, because of their sinful life are also rebels against God, lashes out at their corruption, his words are a "foudre rougissant acéré de fureur" (Princes, 11)# He describes them as having "pasles fronts de chien" (14), the shamelessness that spots their hearts— their understanding (15)— is also "pasle" (15), and in conclusion t * *, vous donnez tel lustre à vos noires ordures Qu'en fascinant vos yeux elles vous semblent pures* (17-18) Isaiah also calls forth woe on those that call evil good and take darkness for light (xx:5)* In the Biblical sense, pallor indicates weakness, a loss of vitality that comes 39 Ibid*, p* 149* 40 The power to make legal decisions was in the hands of the "general body of citizens *" Ibid * 138 from falling away from God. For the Hebrew, a part of the body, its condition, expresses the psychic condition of the entire personality, for it is a revealing dimension of the 41 soul; "fronts de chien" indicates not only what is bes tial, inimical to man and contrary to his nature, but un cleanliness as well./^^ This thought is emphasized by "ordures," for filth is associated with sin and is a de- 43 filement that counteracts the psychic totality. Where justice is concerned, its practitioners in La Chambre doree have become a "gent canibale" (197) who feed on widows and orphans : Ils hument à longs traits dans leurs couppes dorees Sue, laict, sang & sueurs des vefves esplorees; Leur barbe s'en parfume, & aux fins du repas, Yvres, vont dégouttant cette horreur contre bas. De si aspres forfaicts l’odeur n'est point si forte Qu'ils ne fâcent dormir leur conscience morte Sur des matras enflez du poil des orphelins; De ce piteux duvet leurs oreillers sont plains. (213-20) D'Aubigné is less sonorously oracular than Isaiah, and, in this instance, much less condensed and much more figurative ^^Pedersen, Israel, I-II, 173. 42 . . The dog is among the unclean animals of the Old Testament. God prophesies that dogs shall eat the flesh of Jezebel (I Kings xxi;23), and the psalmist in distress cries out : "For dogs have compassed me; / A company of evil-doers have inclosed me" (Psalms xxii;16); "Deliver my soul from the sword, / My darling from the power of the dog" (Psalms xxii;20). "^^Pedersen, Israel, I-II, 482. 139 in his dramatic development of the idea; yet he retains a Biblical attitude toward concrete reality by the theologi cal implications of his imagery. D'Aubigne states that it is God who enables his voice to sound forth (Pref., 399; Fers, 1435), that the argument basic to his work comes from "Dieu mesme" (Pref., 410); though in Vengeances he implores : "Que je ne sois qu'organe à la céleste voix" (59), and in Jugement asks that God give strength to his voice (8), his contact with God in the first six cantos is not directly auditory as it is in Isaiah's case. The prophet, as a messenger of 44 Yahweh, delivers the communication he has just been vouchsafed : This is the word which Jehovah hath spoken concern ing him: The virgin daughter of Zion hath despised thee and laughed thee to scorn; the daughter of Jerusalem hath shaken her head at thee. (xxxvii: 22) Or again speaking directly for God: The burden"^^ of Babylon, which Isaiah the son of Amoz did see.46 44 As an ambassador, the prophet often delivered his message in the form it was given him, using the first per son, and introducing the message with "thus saith Yahweh," or a variant. See Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, II, 37. 45 Burden, according to the Oxford Universal Diction ary, is the Middle English translation of the Hebrew massa, meaning a lifting up of the voice, or oracle, but which was construed to mean a heavy lot. ^^According to Pedersen, the verb râ'a, to see. 140 Set ye up an ensign upon the hare mountain, lift up the voice unto them, wave the hand, that they may go into the gates of the nobles* I have commanded my consecrated ones, yea, I have called my mighty men for mine anger, even my proudly exulting ones* (xiii:1-3) D'Aubigne, though inspired and commanded by God, does not transcribe any dialogues nor deliver any direct communiqués except in Jugement, which we shall consider separately* However, there are threats and promises in the Tragiques, and these do express the divine will even if they do not clearly represent the divine word * In Princes, for example, since it is God who is pushing him into battle, the poet threatens ; "L'ennemi mourra donc" (49); God, speaking through Isaiah, expresses himself as specifically if not quite as succinctly: Therefore saith the Lord, Jehovah of hosts, the Mighty One of Israel, Ah, I will ease me of mine adversaries, and avenge me of mine enemies. (i:24) In Misères, the poet, speaking of the "bande meurtrière' 47 which, as the rod of God's anger is persecuting the applies to hearing, to touch, to the reception of mental images or impressions in general; the Israelite showed little interest in differentiating between sense modalities, Israel, I-II, 100* 47 The expression "rod of my anger" is a recurrent one in the Bible* In Isaiah x:5, it is the king of Assur; "Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, the staff in whose hand is mine indignation!" - ■ - J 141 Protestants, asks this question; Ces verges, qui sur nous s'esgayent comm' au jeu. Sales de nostre sang, vont-elles pas au feu? (1287-88) It is a question which he answers several times in the course of the work— and in the affirmative. Isaiah, in a generalized statement, threatens ; For wickedness burneth as the fire: * * * and the people are as the fuel of the fire* (ix:18-19) At the conclusion of Vengeances there is a threat preceded by "in the latter days," a Biblical formula used to intro duce either a threat or a promise : Ores aux derniers temps, & aux plus rudes jours. Il marche à la vengeance & non plus au secours * (1131-32) Here the vision is related to contemporary reality and is expressed in the present tense, yet it remains a threat nonetheless, for there is no indication, until Jugement, of any surcease in the present trials and tribulations* Fur thermore, "aux plus rudes jours" could point to a more rigorous time to come, which the poet has prophetically brought into the present. Isaiah uses the same formula to introduce a more figurative development of the same concept : 142 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the glory of Jacob shall be made thin, and the fatness of his flesh shall wax lean. (xvii; 4) We can see that there is rarely any direct one-to-one analogy between d'Aubigne and the prophet at any given point. Instead, there is a sensitive and Pleiadic pillaging and cross-pollination, as well as a fundamentally common vision. The body metaphor is lacking from the particular foregoing quotation from Vengeances> yet, as I have men tioned, the description of parts of the body as indicative of an organism's spiritual condition is an underlying con cept as basic to the Tragiques as it is to the prophets* In Jugement we hear God's own voice making the threat * Rely ing heavily on Deuteronomy xxviii and Psalms 48 cxxxvii, d'Aubigne has God speak directly to the evildoers and idolaters, excoriating them with an anathema bloodier and more despairing than anything in Isaiah (223-320). How ever, God's threat to reduce the bloodied cities to powder, the Sodoms that are "puantes de la chair, du sang de [ses] occis" (245-50), together with the earth's lament over those buried alive in her belly (791-94) and the resurrection of the dead when "la terre ouvre son sein" (665) are an echo of Isaiah: 48 The Garnier-Plattard edition points this out in a note to lines 223 and 264. 143 For behold, Jehovah cometh forth out of his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity; the earth also shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain* (xxvi % 21) Since it is the God of wrath who has been so predomi nantly featured in the first six cantos, it is understand able that the promises of the action of God's saving grace are few* Feux opens with a dramatic depiction of an accom plished promise, the arrival of the elect at the heavenly city I Voici marcher de rang par la porte doree, L'enseigne d'Israel dans le ciel arborée. Les vainqueurs de Sion qui au prix de leur sang Portans 1'escharpe blanche ont pris le caillou blancs Ouvre, Jerusalem, tes magnifiques portes; Le lion de Juda suivi de ses cohortes Veut regner, triompher & planter dedans toy L'estendart glorieux, l'auriflam de la foy* (1-8) To inculcate a contempt for death in suffering there is, further on, a promise to Protestants framed by two exhorta tions and by two other promises for the future, each intro- 49 duced by a conditional clause: Haïssez les meschans, 1'exil vous sera doux; Vous estes bannis d' eux, banissez-les de vous : ***** *. * * * • * * * * * * * * * * * **■*.*♦* Vous estes enferrés: ce qui plus vous console, L'ame, le plus de vous, où elle veut s'envoile* S'ils vous ostent vos yeux, vos esprits verront Dieu; Vostre langue s'en va: le coeur parle en son lieu* (839-40, 845-48) ^^There is an ellipsis of the in the second conditional clause * 144 In the last canto, as the dead awaiting judgment are divided into those at the left of God and those to his right, there is a more equitable division between promises and threats. Inheritors of the tradition of Zion, the Protestants will be victorious (63-68). The joy of this triumph, however, is not followed by peace, but by a threat to the enemy whom the elect will decimate in "juste ven geance" (76): Si que ton pied vainqueur tout entier baignera Dans le sang qui du meurtre à tas regorgera. Et dedans le canal de la tuerie extreme Les chiens se gorgeront du sang de leur chef mesme* (77-80) There is also God's promise to the elect, which is preceded first by an appreciation of their suffering and sacrifice and then by an exhortation : Venez, race du ciel, venez esleus du Pere; Vos péchés sont esteints, le Juge est vostre frere; Venez donc, bien-heureux, triompher pour jamais Au royaume eternel de victoire & de paix. (875-78) The balance of promises in the seventh canto (651-60; 1077- 1208) deals with the restoration of the use of the senses, and of physical and mental life for the elect. Furthermore, the bodies of the damned as well as the saved, are resurrec- 50 ted, for, argues the poet, bodies are the accomplice of ^^Here he follows Calvin's argument as given in the Institutes, III, Ch. 25. 145 ' |sin (329). Therefore, "s'ils faut les punir, ils faut qu'ils ressucitent" (336] before being judged and devoured by "1'enfer glouton" (896), and thus condemned to an eter nal life in death (961—1043). As for the elect, they are exhorted to look to the future: Resjouissez-vous done, 6 vous ames celestes; Car vous vous referez de vos piteuses restes; Resjouissez-vous donc, corps guéris de mespris. Heureux vous reprendrez vos plus heureux esprits. Vous voulustes, esprits, & le ciel & l'air fendre Pour aux corps préparés du haut du ciel descendre. Vous les cherchastes alors : ore ils vous chercheront. Ces corps par vous aimez encor vous aimeront. Vous vous fistes mortels pour vos pauvres femelles. Elles s'en vont pour vous & par vous immortelles. (651-60) In the passage beginning with line 1077, the elect are pro mised not only knowledge of God, but all human knowledge, and the perfect realization of human love and friendship and the fullest enjoyment of the five senses. However, ... estans d'actes purs, ils seront d'action Et ne pourront souffrir infirme p a s s i o n . 5 2 (1202-03) In d'Aubigné's vision of Judgment Day, as in Jewish apoca- 53 lyptic, time gets "stuck together"; the past, present and The Garnier-Plattard note to line 569 explains that the body is seen as female since it is mind, spirit, that commands. 52 This is an Aristotelian notion. See the Garnier- Plattard note to line 1202. 53 The expression is from II Enoch Ixv: 6-7, as quoted 146 future are accomplished and become the boundless now* How ever, in the last stanza, the triune aspect of time becomes identical with God and Christian eternity as the poet is overcome by his own vision. But, even within the silence of this mystical union, a human and physical quality clings to the final image which narrows the Christian soul-body dichotomy : Mes sens n’ont plus de sens, 1*esprit de moy s'envole. Le coeur ravi se taist, ma bouche est sans parole : Tout meurt, 1 *ame s'enfuit, & reprenant son lieu Extatique se pasme au giron de son D i e u . 5 4 (1215-18) A number of Isaiah's prophecies strike a Messianic or apocalyptic note* There is no clear-cut promise of re surrection or of judgment— though it was thus interpreted by Calvin in the Institutes (Chapter 25)— but rather the promise of a new earthly kingdom for man, a new saving 55 event that reaffirms his perpetuity within the Covenants For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; and the former things shall not be remembered, nor come into mind* (Ixv:17) by Russell, Jewish Apocalyptic, p. 213* 54 Henri Weber has also commented on this, remarking that his ecstasy contains "certaines indications fugitives, qui laissent à Dieu quelque chose d'une présence charnelle, de la plénitude accueillante d'une mère ou d'une femme aimée *" La Création poétique, II, 642 * ■ 5 5 ■ ' The Calvinist considered it to be a promise of what the New Testament was to affirm. 1 147 For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make, shall remain before me, saith Jehovah, so shall your seed and your name remain. (Ixvi s 22) In Isaiah, the earth reels and is shattered (xxivs19-20), both heaven and earth are cleansed of evil and recreated (Ixv;17)* We can see how strongly, in Old Testament times, the hope had developed for life after death, especially in the apocalyptic passages of Isaiah xxiv-xxvii, and, most particularly, in the following verse : Thy dead shall live ; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is a^ the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead* ^ (xxvi:19) The movement and the physical and carnal imagery inherent in this casting forth of bodies have been dramatically de veloped by d'Aubigne: La terre ouvre son sein, du ventre des tombeaux Naissent des enterres les visages nouveaux: Ici un arbre sent des bras de sa racine Grouiller un chef vivant, sortir une poictrine; Là 1! eau trouble bouillone, & puis s'esparpillant Sent en soy des cheveux & un chef s'esveillant. Comme un nageur venant du profond de son plonge * (Jugement, 665-66, 671-75) So while acknowledging d'Aubigné's vast debt to Revelation This concept of redemption and re-creation is a forerunner of what is stressed in the apocalyptic writings Russell, Jewish Apocalyptic, p* 280* : 148 for the crowning seventh canto, we should not overlook the Old Testament influence, nor the continuation and evolution of this thought in the thinking of the Jewish apocalyptics, 5 7 at least some of whose writings were known to him* Much of Isaiah’s magnetism for d’Aubigne as a Cal vinist poet would stem not only from the exactness with 58 which historical events are reflected in his oracles, but from his theology, his view of the relationship between God, man, world, and time * In Isaiah we see emerging, in prophetic discourse, the concept of a predetermined, though 59 not predestined, plan in which man is no longer viewed as self-reliant, but in need of relying on faith, and totally dependent on God’s purposeIsaiah also puts forth the radical concept, which is woven throughout the structure of the Tragiques, that it is Yahweh himself who will bring about the downfall of his people while at the same time holding to his "far-reaching" plans for Israel’s history The paradox that d’Aubigne exploits is completely stated in 57 The Garnier-Plattard edition points up allusions to material found in Esdras, Wisdom, and Judith— apocryphal books which, among others, are to be found in the Vulgate Bible * 58 Von Rad comments on the exactitude with which his torical events are reflected in Isaiah's prophecy* Old Testament Theology, II, 149* 59 60 Ibid*, p. 162. Ibid., p* 160* p. 154. Isaiahî God destroys and saves at the same time 149 : 62 Isaiah*s basic moderation,the comforting message ^ that faith comes from "rest," from "quietness and in confi dence,"^^ are not in obvious evidence in d'Aubigne’s work* Aside from moments of confessional and prayer, the war-like - tone of the soldier most frequently dominates ; the dramatic movement and physical power of the poem combine to make it a call to action which, in the final analysis, is a call to faith, to the active acceptance of truth and understanding, to the repudiation of the lie that, for the partisan poet, has corrupted the moral and social fabric* As with Isaiah, 65 everything in the Tragiques points to the future and is summed up in the Messianic message * For d'Aubigne, of course, this is the source of his consolation; helpless as a man to reverse actual events through force, as a poet he can bring God's judgment to bear on the past and bring the future into the present* CalviniStic exegesis emphasized a literal interpre tation that viewed the Bible as a total unit, as a consis tent and continuously inspired working-out of God's pur pose, directed toward a predetermined goal. Thus Calvin, p. 164. ^^Ibid., p. 147. 64 ■ "For thus said the Lord Jehovah, the Holy One of Israel, in returning and rest shall ye be saved : in quiet ness and in confidence shall be your strength" (xxx:15). 65 * Von Rad underscores this aspect of Isaiah's pro phecy: Old Testament Theology, II, 175* 150 ' as Sauerwein has explained,used a system of cross- references for interpretation : any one passage could elu- ,cidate another* It was a system that ignored, of course, any chronological development of traditions, and would tend to blur specialized distinctions between the Biblical writers in concentrating on their role in the movement to ward Christ and the gospel message. This, plus the fact that, as a poet, d'Aubigne was working with some freedom within his own mind, relying on a mixture stirred together by memory, imagination, and choice, leads me to present the distinctions and comparisons I have made as suggestive, rather than absolute. It is rare that one can assign any one of d’Aubigné's images or concepts to any one prophet without its being at least suggested by another* For the most part, conclusions must be based on degrees of emphasis and stress * From this standpoint, however, I feel that it is safe to say, in summation, that one can distinguish dis tinctive coloring amongst d'Aubigné's interwoven skein of Biblical sources * What stands out as being inspired by Ezekiel is d’Aubigné's heightened symbolism, the hallucina tory quality of his visions, his emphasis on the sacred and on pollution and sin as an affair of the individual heart * On the other hand, the intensity of d'Aubigné's feelings and personal involvement— whether in tenderness or in ^^D'Aubigné's "Les Tragiques", p* 191 151 anger— the dramatic and epic quality he gives to the con flict between the power of life and that of death, his love ■of the land and the natural, evoke the inspiration of Jeremiah, It is Isaiah, however, who emerges as the most comprehensive source ; it is he who states most clearly and primarily the driving force that lies behind election, the faith and the struggle towards life that give the Tragiques its direction. As were the prophets, d'Aubigne was granted a vision. Though it was one that called him to a poetic rather than to a full-scale prophetic mission, it was given him in order to serve God's purpose: poetry, like prophecy, speaks for the present and addresses itself to the future. In Vengeances he tells of his soul's being transported to the realm of eternity, where he sees the Tragiques unfold in tableaux across the heavenly vault (1195-1430), But it is an angel who gives him his instructions, who guides him and speaks to him* Though inspired and commanded by God and in prayerful communication with him, d'Aubigne does not engage in any overheard dialogues,He never argues with God nor accuses him of deception, as does Jeremiah (xx:7), nor does he speak of hearing his voice as do Isaiah (vi: 8-13) and Regarding one-sided communication in the Bible, Otto Eissfeldt says : "The boundary between monologue and dialogue is in fact unfixed, and prayer may often be equally well regarded as monologue or dialogue," The Old Testament; An Introduction, trans, Peter Ackroyd (New York, 1955), p. 15, 152 Ezekiel (ii: 1-8). D'Aubigne shares the loneliness of the prophets, their sense of being designated by God, but his speech remains human— and of his time. We see this most particularly in the following example, wherein it is the poet himself who, by his work, guarantees immortality to’ the martyredi Je ne t'oublieray pas, o ame bien heureuse I Je tireray ton nom de la nuict tenebreuse; Ton martyre secret, ton exemple caché Sera par mes escrits des ombres arraché. (Feux, 993-96) Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel were not only God's messen gers but also his mouthpiece; d'Aubigne confronts God face to face and, in his prophetic sermon, is God's inspired interpreter. Can it be this prophetic strain that distinguishes him from the other poets of his age? Ronsard also had oracular pretensions, and, in the Discours des Misères de ce temps (1562), the Continuation des Discours (1562), the Remonstrance au peuple de France (1562), and the Responce aux injures & calomnies, de je ne scay quels predicans, & ministres de Geneve (1563),^^ displays the same polemical purpose (from the other side of the fence) as does d'Aubigne. Yet Ronsard's tone is not Biblical, for reasons which we shall soon examine. ^^All of these poems are in vol. XI of the Laumonier edition. 153^ Du Bartas' Judit ( 1574)recreates the Biblical and historical moment, but the work remains a mosaic of Hebraic material and décor set into the matrix of the poet's own 70 encyclopedic and highly mythological idiom; in short, the . drama of Judith and Holofernes is played in a sixteenth- century landscape. Another poet, the Catholic Gamier, in his tragedy Les Juifves (1583), is, somewhat surprisingly, eminently more successful in matching Biblical history to Biblical atmosphere and tone. The framework of the tragedy 71 may still follow the Senecan model, but, as Maurice Gras points out, he avoids mythological allusions; the Bible is 72 his primary source of inspiration. In the opening mono logue of the Jeremiah-inspired prophet who is in exile at Nebuchadnezzar's court, the movement of both the verse and the emotion evokes the Biblical experience, despite the somewhat jarring note of the diminutive "tendret": Jusques à quand. Seigneur, épandras-tu ton^ire? Jusqu'à quand voudras-tu ton peuple aimé détruire? L'infortuné Juda, que tu as tant chéri. 69 According to Holmes, Judit, first published in 1574, was written between 1565 and 1572. The Works of Guillaume De Salluste Du Bartas, ed. Urban T. Holmes, Jr., et al., (3 vols.; Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1935-1940), I, 8. ^^Du Bartas' models, according to Holmes, were Homer, Virgil and Ariosto. Ibid. ^^Maurice Gras, Robert Gamier, son art et sa méthode (Geneva, 1965), p. 58. ^^Ibid., pp. 116-17. 154 Que tu as quarante ans par les déserts nourri. Comme un enfant tendret que sa nourrice allaite. Et ores en rigueur ta dure main la t r a i t t e ? ^ ^ (1.1-6) Further on, the introductory "Hal" is reminiscent of the "woe," "shame," "AhI," the "malheur à vous" that frequently introduce the Biblical prophetic reproach or threat : Hal chétive Sion, jadis si florissante. Tu sens ores de Dieu la dextre punissante 1 L'onde de Siloé court sanglante, et le mur De ses tours est brisé par les armes d'Assur. Ton terroir plantureux n'est plus que solitude. Tu vas languir captive en triste servitude. (1.61-66) D'Aubigné concludes Misères with a prayer which also deals with God's vengeance and also asks the question "how long?": "Tu vois, juste vengeur, les fléaux de ton Eglise Qui par eux mise en cendre & en masure mise A contre tout espoir son esperance en toy. Pour son retranchement le rempart de la foy. "Chastie en ta douceur, punis en ta furie L 'escapade aux agneaux, des loups la boucherie; Distingue pour les deux, comme tu l'as promis. La verge à tes enfans, la barre aux ennemis. "Veux-tu longtemps laisser en cette terre ronde Regner ton ennemi? N'es-tu Seigneur du monde. Toy, Seigneur, qui abbas, qui blesses, qui guéris. Qui donnes vie & mort, qui tue & qui nourris?" (1273-76, 1289-96) The passages quoted from Gamier rely heavily on Jeremiah, 73 Robert Gamier, Les Juifves, ed. Marcel Hervier (Paris, 1964). All citations are taken from this edition. 155 Lamentations, and the Psalms; the critical apparatus of the Garnier-Plattard edition of the Tragiques points out that the prayer quoted above— which closes Miseres--is a 75 centon of Biblical verses; yet, even despite a heightened use of antithesis and the piling up of the verbs in the next to last line, d'Aubigné's Hebraism is less consciously imitative, less a formula than Gamier's. He is not living in the legendary past as Gamier is; he does not breathe the same air as does the more orthodox writer of epic tra gedy. Both the past and the future have been interiorized, as with the old prophets, in order to give urgency to the present, and d'Aubigne is, as Faguet recognized, "le plus 76 actuel des hommes," with much of what we would now call the existential outlook of the prophets. Gamier is more 77 superficially Biblical, his epic style— an oratorical style— is noble, but does not even attempt to go beyond a moralizing, sometimes moving rhetoric;d'Aubigne, like See the critical apparatus of the Hervier edition. Gamier makes a distinction between the language of the Hebrews and the more classically inspired speech of the Babylonians. 75 See the Garnier-Plattard critical apparatus. ^^Emile Faguet, Seizième siècle : etudes littéraires (Paris, n.d.), p. 351. Though I am in agreement with this statement, I do not agree with the theory that he is sup porting: that the epic spirit was foreign to d'Aubigné. 77 Henri Weber, La Création poétique. II, 705. 78' Gras maintains that rhetoric and moralizing are .what counted with Gamier. Gamier, p. 7. _ 156 the Biblical writers, is more lyrical than oratorical. Gamier*s images flow smoothly into the narration without 79 halting it, but they are not occurring within the Bibli cal framework that joins man, God, and nature together in the conflict between the Covenant with death and the Covenant with life which is the over-riding theme of the Tragiques and which sets the basic mood. Though God’s will and might lie behind the action of Les Juifves, he is not seen as present here and now as in d ’Aubigné’s work, nor are his actions viewed in their immediacy and symbolism at one and the same time. Here is part of the scene of the fall of Jerusalem, as recounted by Amital, mother of the conquered king: Les femmes, les enfans, les hommes âgez Tombent sans nul esgard, pesle-mesle esgorgez. Le sang, le feu, le fer coule, flambe, résonne; On entend maint tabour, mainte trompette sonne. Tout est jonché de morts, 1’ennemy sans pitié Meurtrist ce qu’il rencontre et le foule du pié. (11.749-54) In d ’Aubigné’s description of the St. Bartholomew massacre there is none of Gamier ’ s classical abstractness. We are not given such a general perspective or concrete summation. The poet causes the physical horror to erupt all over again with the precise detail of things actually seen, yet we also view it in the light of its theological significance. 79 Ibid., p. 126. 157 The following excerpt, though devoid in this case of any Biblical imagery or allusions, nevertheless illustrates one of d'Aubigné's uses of the physical and the paradoxical that has roots deep within the Biblical tradition : Mais qu'est-ce que Je voy? un chef qui s' entortille. Par les volans cheveux, autour d'une cheville Du pont tragique, un mort qui semble encore beau. Bien que pasle & transi, demi caché en l'eau; Ses cheveux, arrestans le premier precipice. Lèvent le front en haut qui demande justice. Non, ce n'est pas ce poinct que le corps suspendu Par un sort bien conduict a deux jours attendu; C'est un sein bien aimé, qui traine encor én vie. Ce qu'attend l'autre sein pour chere compagnie. Aussi voy-je mener le mari condamné. Percé de trois poignards aussi tost qu'amené, Et puis poussé en bas, où sa moitié pendue Receut l'aide de lui qu'elle avoit attendue : Car ce corps en tombant.des deux bras 1'empoigna. Avec sa douce prise accouplé se baigna. Trois cens précipités, droit en la mesme place. N'ayant peu recevoir ni donner cette grace. Appren, homme de sang, & ne t'efforce point A desunir le corps que le ciel a conjoinct. (Fers, 901-20) God has exercised his will (''un sort bien conduict"), but this destruction cannot destroy his law, nor, by analogy, his promise. A man of blood (919) is unclean; alienated from God, he cannot undo God's work. There is no Biblical language in this passage, but, like the Israelite, d'Aubigné sees the material and the spiritual as part of the same reality. Gamier transports a story from our re ligious heritage into the present; d'Aubigné illuminates the present in terms of that heritage. 158 It is a process that reverses Du Bartas' technique in either Judit or La Creation du Monde wherein the Bibli cal story is overlaid with humanistic erudition and baroque encrustation. Though Du Bartas has, according to Henri 80 Weber, placed God at the center of everything, he is 81 more concerned in writing his own poetic Bible than in imitating or incorporating an Old Testament concept of reality. Judith, asking God to give her strength before decapitating Holofernes, could be speaking to the winds; God is not present. Indeed, she herself could just as easily be a pagan Amazon in Jewish clothing as she says : ''O bon Dieu, qui tou-jours a eu soin paternel De ton aisné Jacob, fortifie ma dextre; Affin que ceste nuit d'une vigueur adextre Elle puisse egorger ce prince audacieus, Qui pour te desceptrer veut escheler les cieus. ' ' (VI.122-26) Raymond, commenting on the distinction between d ’Aubigné and Du Bartas, says that the latter "par scrupule lit téraire, n'avait pas osé 'déposséder' tout à fait la 80 ^ ^ La Création poétique, I, 538. ^^Raymond, L'Influence de Ronsard, Part II, 289. 82 Du Bartas, Works, I, 120-21. In Book I, Judith, the reflection of a perfect Idea, shines like Phoebus : "'Mais Judit au milieu de la troupe reluit "Comme Phoebe par-mi les lampes de la nuit; "Car il semble que Dieu ait ses beautés moulées "Sur le moule plus beau des plus belles idées.’" (135-38) 159 mythologie; d'Aubigné, lui, voit Dieu et ses Anges. In the final analysis, it is Ronsard, the satiric 84 poet of the two Discours, the Remonstrance, and the Res ponce that affords the most solid basis of comparison with d'Aubigné. Ronsard, as I have mentioned earlier, casts the shadow of his language, of his techniques, and of his poetic concept over the poets I have discussed, yet the Ronsard of the Discours is no longer the Ronsard of the 85 Odes ; as a militant poet, he renounces mythology to be- 86 come more clearly both Christian and French; if he still clings to reason, tolerance is largely submerged; for he is writing at a time when humanism is losing ground to na tionalism and both sides see red. Gustave Cohen, com menting on the opening lines of the Continuation des Dis cours, says : Q 3 L 'Influence de Ronsard, Part II, 325. On page 321 he states that d'Aubigné admired 1'Uranie and la Judit, and that he had perhaps read the beginning of the first Semaine ; then he adds : "Mais je ne crois pas que Du Bartas ait exercé une influence efficace sur d'Aubigné qui écoute d'abord ses propres passions." 84 According to Cohen, there are only three represen tatives of satiric epic or political poetry in France: Ronsard, d'Aubigné, and Hugo. Ronsard, p. 188. ^^Or almost. Opinion, for instance, is born of the union of Jupiter and Presumption. Discours des Misères de ce Temps, 127-36. ^^Raymond, L'Influence de Ronsard, II, 380-81. 87 Cohen, Ronsard, p. 192. 160 A ces accents l'on reconnaît le prototype . d'Agrippa d'Aubigne, qui n'eût pas su décrire les Miseres de la France dans les Tragiques, si Ronsard, qu'il connut, de son propre aveu, familièrement et qu'il connut davantage par ses écrits, ne le lui avait appris. Ainsi l'arme forgée par Ronsard lui sera reprise des mains par 1'adversaire pour servir contre son propre parti.88 While we question whether or not d'Aubigné would have been able to write Misères without Ronsard to guide him, we can acknowledge their sharing a common poetic heritage, a com mon polemical purpose and method of presentation; both poets are delivering a sermon on their times. In the Hymne 89 de 1'Autonne (1564), Ronsard sees the poet gifted with prophecy ; poetic fury is not only a means to knowledge, but a means of deciphering the secrets of nature, of raising 90 the soul to God. Though, after 1567, he no longer speaks 91 of deciphering "the mysteries of the ideal world," does he yet cling to some oracular tendency? Is Ronsard the poet-preacher also the poet-prophet, as is d'Aubigné? To attempt to answer this we should first look at their view of their own--and man's— relationship with God, and then at their method of handling prophetic discourse. ^^Ibid., p. 190. 89 First published in a plaquette, Les Quatre saisons de 1'an (1563), Laumonier, XII, 46. 90 Hymne de 1'Autonne (13-24), Laumonier, XII, 47. 91 John T. Nothnagle, "Poet or Hierophant : A New View of the Poetic Furor," L'Esprit Créateur, IV (Winter, 1964), 205. ' 161 Ronsard apostrophizes God and prays to him with sin cere fervor, but his God is more distant, is appealed to more reasonably than is d'Aubigné's. In the prayer that concludes the first Discours, he asks God to enable the Queen mother (Catherine dei Medici) to bring peace. It is only failing these efforts of diplomacy that he would call down God's wrath on the enemy: Donne que mesme loy unisse noz provinces. Unissant pour jamais le vouloir de nos princes. Ou bien (O Seigneur Dieu), si les cruelz destins Nous veullent saccager par la main des mutins. Donne que hors des poings eschape 1'alumelle De ceux qui soutiendront la mauvaise querelle Donne que les serpens des hideuzes Fureurs Agitent leurs cerveaux de Paniques terreurs, bonne qu'en plain midy le jour leur semble trouble. Donne que pour un coup ilz en sentent un double. Donne que la poussière entre dedans leurs yeux: D'un esclat de tonnerre arme ta main aux cieux. Et pour punition eslance sur leur teste. Et non sur un rocher, les traiz de ta tempeste. (223-36) Though Ronsard's demand for violent intercession is Bibli cal, to appeal to reason is certainly not in the Old Testa ment vatic mode; as such it finds no echo in the either/or approach of d'Aubigné. In the final prayer of Miseres, he admits that his party and the Catholics are equal in sin, and that God, by his grace alone, decides who are his ene mies and who are his children (1277-80). However, the im plication seems clear that the Calvinists are recipients of his grace despite— or because of— the added reservation; "Quand tu nous meurtrirois, si te bénirons-nous" (1284); as 162 92 his children, they are "chastized," not "punished" (1289). In the following exhortation to God to ignore the prayers of the Catholics, we can see that his God is not just an angered magician who can create confusion, but the source and judge of all of life, of its harmony and of its bene fits : [Qu'ils] "Trouvent tes yeux fermez à juger leurs miseres; Ton oreille soit sourde en oyant leurs prières; Ton sein ferré soit clos aux pitiez, aux pardons; Ta main seche, sterile aux bienfaicts & aux dons. "Ils crachent vers la lune & les voûtes celestes: N'ont-ils plus de foudre & de feux & de pestes? Ne partiront jamais du throsne où tu te sieds Et la mort & l'enfer qui dorment.à tes pieds? "Leve ton bras de fer, haste tes pieds de laine. Venge ta patience en 1'aigreur de la peine. Frappe du ciel Babel: les cornes de son front Desfigurent la terre & lui ostent son rond 1" (1361-64; 1373-80) Ronsard's God is more of a mental entity than a personality. The Biblically inspired allusion to darkness at noon, the plea for the divine wrath to fall directly on the sinners rather than on the rocks, appears vitiated by the referen ces to "cruels destins"; these would seem to indicate a force outside of and separate from God. D'Aubigné demands God's direct and personal intervention and a total destruc tion of the enemy. Though we do not hear any response from God, the assurance of a divine presence is emphasized by 92 Sauerwein notes this distinction, D 'Aubigne's "Les Tragiques!', p. 56. 163 ' the poet’s use of emblematic symbols: God’s eyes, his ear, his bosom, his hand, are physical signs of his omniscience, his omnipresence, and power. D ’Aubigne achieves the con creteness of Biblical dramatic action with the Bible’s ab sence of realism; his images are physically representative of a theological fact. The series of punishments Ronsard calls down are also seen in prismatic flashes, but are more simply and realistically represented: a hand letting fall the blade, eyes blinded by dust, minds agitated in panic, yet the pictures lack both symbolic force, physical move ment, and true concrete detail. They suggest motion, they are not in motion; God’s presence is suggested, he is not there. Where Ronsard’s exhortations remain tentative and within the potential, d'Aubigne, by piling up symbols of power and action, visualizes the passage from potential to act. D'Aubigne speaks more intimately with God, and, with the familiarity of a prophet of old, even scolds him for 93 being so slow-footed. For Ronsard, the situation has na tional implications; d ’Aubigne, once more in the prophetic spirit, extends them to the universal : the entire world is disfigured, God’s strength alone can sweep away the uni versally deforming effect of evil. 93 In fairness, it must be pointed out that Ronsard criticizes God for being so patient in the Remonstrance. Of what use, he asks, are lightning and thunder if he is not going to use them to burn the earth? Then he adds : "Es tu dedans un trône assis sans rien faire?" (9-16). ' 164 : Prophetic discourse, as I mentioned earlier, is made up of many forms. In their sermons, both Ronsard and d'Aubigne incorporate in varying degree a diversity of these forms: lyric passages, autobiographical material, hymns, reproaches, threats, exhortations, promises, and so on. However, one form that is clearly dominant in the work of both poets as well as in those of the major prophets, is the reproach. One such reproach, taken from Isaiah, is voiced fairly typically as a literal complaint of the re versal of natural reality through sin, self-deception, and injustice : Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for dark ness ; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter I Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sightI . . . that justify the wicked for a bribe, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from himI (v:20-21, 23) D'Aubigne dramatizes this idea, giving it a more figurative development: Le sage justicier est traine au supplice. Le mal-faicteur luy faict son procès; 1'injustice Est principe de droict; comme au monde à 1'envers Le vieil pere est fouetté de son enfant pervers; Celuy qui en la paix cachoit son brigandage De peur d'estre puni, estalle son pillage Au son de la trompette, au plus fort des marchez Son meurtre et son butin sont à 1'ancan preschez: Si qu’au lieu de la rouë, au lieu de la sentence. La peine du forfaict se change en recompense. (Misères, 233-42) 165 Ronsard, in the Discours, describes the effects of the mon ster, Opinion: Ce monstre arme le fils contre son propre père. Et le frere (ô malheur) arme contre son frere, L'escollier se desbauche, & de sa faux tortue Le laboureur façonne une dague pointue. Une pique guerriere il fait de son rateau Et l'acier de son coultre il change en couteau. Morte est 1'autorité : chacun vit à sa guise Au vice desreiglé la licence est permise. Le désir, 1'avarice, & 1'erreur incensé Ont sans-dessus-dessoubs le monde renversé. (159-60, 171-78) Here action is sacrificed to description; the laborer turn ing his tools into weapons, a reversal of Isaiah's admoni tion in his second chapter, is not set in a scene of drama tic conflict; what Ronsard emphasizes here, as elsewhere, is that lack of reason, "erreur incensé," lies behind the topsy-turvy world of the civil wars. There is no explicit drama in the foregoing citation from Isaiah; indeed, it would almost seem that Ronsard and d'Aubigné resemble each other more than either one resembles the Biblical passage ; however, d'Aubigné is aware of the movement and drama im plicit in Biblical expression. It is this that he draws on to give his action a dialectical tension and physical weight that Ronsard lacks. In the Continuation, a haggard and tattered France speaks to Ronsard in a vision, complaining that the exis tence of Geneva and her rebellious inhabitants have reduced 166 her to her present powerless and impoverished condition (319-44). D'Aubigné, though equally addicted to prosopo poeia, does not engage in discourse; his France is less hu man but more physical, her body a battlefield quite li terally torn apart by the quarrels of a Jacob and an Esau. Ronsard's monster. Opinion, born of Presumption, is seduc tively beautiful of face, though her legs are of wool and cotton to muffle her steps ; the horror she causes has an intellectual basis : there is nothing but wind and smoke in her head, and she is swollen with error (Discours, 127-48). D'Aubigné's poetically and physically misbegotten giant of Miseres is a personification of the medieval analogy be tween the human body and social classes or institutions; however, he manages to give the giant some substance and dramatic action : va de braves mots les hauts cieux outrageants" (136). It is not a deficiency of reason that has produced this monster; his physical system is sick and heavily infected. Within the religious context that con trols the Tragiques, disease has spiritual and psychic overtones; it is the carnal manifestation of sin and of alienation from God. It is not wrong thinking that dis torts nature, but the sinfulness of the self, of the per sonality in its relationship with God. Both Ronsard and d'Aubigné deal with the prophetic subjects of justice, of the land, and of power and pride; both address themselves to rulers, to leaders, and to 167 ' various classes of people, yet how different is d'Aubigné’s: prophetic either/or approach from Ronsard's essential reasonableness. The former either praises unreservedly or excoriates mercilessly. It is impossible to imagine d'Aubigné's calling his enemy his friend, as Ronsard does in his appeal to de Beze (Continuation, 141), or asking him politely to listen to him as he appeals to his reason (95- 98), or stating that there are good people among those on the opposite side (Remonstrance, 642-45) and that it is not Calvin he blames but his doctrine (Responce, 712). In his Préface, d'Aubigné sententiously proclaims that he pities his enemies, that upon portraying them he has " ... pour eux gemi: / Car qui veut garder la iustice, / Il faut hayr distinctement / Non la personne, mais le vice" (379-83). However, having once voiced this high-minded precept, he ignores it completely for the remainder of the work. Ronsard's poetry, even when wearing polemical dress, re mains logos-based; as always he seeks to find the way to harmony. For him, there is no elect; God is the father of us all (Remonstrance, 1-12); the authority of reason has been destroyed by force (Discours, 195-96). Ronsard does not see the Huguenots as sinners, however rebellious they may be; to him they are "pauvres incensés" (Continuation, 33), though he can use stronger language and compare them to vipers who poison the people with their venom (91, 209, 357). He speaks with some acrimony in the Responce as he 168 defends himself against the libels he claims they have showered on him; his satire takes on more bite; he warns the people to flee the beast "escumant, & bavant" (135-41). Yet,' however genuine his sincerity, it remains evident that his literary devices are means of persuasion; they do not, as they do with d'Aubigne, acquire the additional dimension of becoming a means of revelation. D'Aubigne, in his confessional in Vengeances (99-140), reviews his past in the light of his sins, in terms of his vain attempts to turn away from God. Ronsard, in the Responcé, when he speaks of himself, is not confessional but autobiographical, simply defending his day-to-day behavior as poet and prelate (507-600). These autobiographical re marks lead up to the satiric conclusion that, where behavior is concerned, he is delighted to find himself in such good company as that of the Queen mother and Henry of Navarre (1136, 1139); furthermore, he declares with divine certitude that, since his critics are so preoccupied with him. ... je suis seul vostre estude. Vous estes tout yssus de la grandeur de moy. Vous estes mes sujets, & je suis vostre loy. (1036-38) Ronsard refers to his rebuttal— however ironically— as a "douce responce" (1120), and, in the very last lines of the poem, makes a final appeal to the future race of Huguenots, should the sect endure. His position is one of reasonable 169 supplication : ... race, je te supplie. Ne t'incense jamais après telle folye: En relisant ces vers, je te pry* de penser Qu'en Saxe je 1’ay veue en mes jours commencer. Non comme Christ la sienne, ains par force & puissance Desoubs un Apostat elle prit sa naissance; Le feu, le sang, le fer en sont le fondement. Dieu vueille que la fin en arrive autrement. Et que le grand flambeau de la guerre alumée, Comme un tyzon de feu se consume en fumée. (1167-76) D'Aubigné also speaks of fire, iron, blood, and the self- consumation of evil; but his allusions are not only part of the general literary tradition, he is consciously aware of their living roots in the Weltanschauung of the Old Testa ment . He never for a moment considers that error could en dure as a result of free will; nor could he appeal to the enemy to reflect, to think, to look at the facts. The prob lems d'Aubigné faces are not rooted in logic or understand ing, nor is it a question of creating harmony out of dis harmony by reason. The struggle rages between man's ac tions and God's judgment, between his blessing and his curse. A logos-based outlook confronts the invisible but intelligible Being; a covenant-based vision leads to an inner and emotional encounter with the power of transcen- 94 dent otherness. At the beginning of Misères, d’Aubigné wilfully 94 Fisch, Jerusalem and Albion, p. 108. : ■ i 7 o ' ! frees himself from the Greek concept of poetry, from the clarity and order and brilliance that such a model 95 implies. Ronsard never entirely turned aside from this ideal, neither in a Christian and "theological" work like the Discours nor in the earlier Hymne de la Justice (1555), which Jean Frappier calls a "hymne théologique dans un 96 cadre humaniste." Despite its abundance of Biblical re ferences which, again according to Frappier, "s'ajoutent sans heurt aux sources païennes,there is none of the uneven illumination that is so characteristic of the Old Testament view of reality;"tout y paraît d'une clarté > 9 9 égalé." Tension, in Ronsard's poetry, can develop be tween the known and the unknown, the visible and the in visible, between conflicts of human emotions and human wills; d'Aubigné's tension stems from the struggle of wholeness versus chaos, of life versus death. The thought and self-concept of humanist man moved toward the inscru table by way of the outer, the natural, the concrete world; d'Aubigné's Biblical variation on this theme imposes the 95 LI. 59-65. ^^"L'Inspiration biblique et théologique de Ronsard dans l'Hymne de la Justice," pp. 97-108 in Mélanges d'his toire littéraire de la renaissance offerts à Henri Chamard, by Jean Frappier, et al. (Paris, 1959), p. 104. 97 Ibid., p. 98. 98 Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 19. 99 Frappier, "L*Inspiration biblique," p. 97. 171 ' self, the recipient of the divine word, on the outer world in a prophetic movement of revelation. The distance is closed between man's actions and their meaning in God's scheme of things; space is swallowed up by time. In examining d'Aubigné's ties with the major pro phets, we have seen that he shares with them a fundamental theological framework and a view of the relationship of man, God and nature as dependent on a covenant, though this rap port does not always emerge from a one-to-one correspon dence between ideas, treatment, language, or situation at any single given time. Nonetheless, the prophetic outlook is clearly identifiable, even though it is diffused throughout the poetic work and elusively resists hard and fast categorizing. There is one aspect of d'Aubigné's pre sentation that can be solidly and demonstrably anchored to a concept that is fundamental to all of the Old Testament, and especially to the major prophets. This connection is in the use d'Aubigné makes of bodily attributes--cleanli ness and filth, sickness and health— as an indication of the soul's cleaving to or falling away from God, and as a sign of God's judgment. The idea of the relationship of psychic to physical health, of the organism to God's cove nant, not only strengthens the analogy between Calvinist France and Israel, it is the vehicle that carries d'Aubigné's entire dramatic sermon. PART II D ’AUBIGNÉ'S WAY OF KNOWING: CLEANLINESS AND FILTH What d'Aubigné wants to know and to make known is time, in the combined sense of its historical and soterio- logical content; his method is grounded in Hebraism. For the Israelite, man's life in the historical or secular sphere, and his life in the soteriological sphere of the holy, meet in his physical actions and in his corporeal manifestations. Whence the importance of the physical as well as the ethical in maintaining all relationships ac cording to their nature, relationships which, for the Hebrew, are always a confrontation with creation, with life, with God, maintained and regulated by the Covenant. The self involved is not the objective man only, but the inner self as well, inseparable and indivisible from the outer. D'Aubigné is relatively little concerned with Cal vinist theological dogma as such in the Tragiques;^ ^At times he even veers away from it completely, as in the metaphysical digression in Jugement (361-542) in which he explores the question of immortality in the thought of classical philosophers, including Hermes Trismegistus. 172 173 furthermore, the poet borrowed less from Calvin than from 2 their common source: the Bible. We must ask, however, .if, as a Calvinist poet, there are for d'Aubigné any irre concilable differences between his Hebraism and his Calvin ism. I have mentioned earlier that valid knowledge for the Calvinist was knowledge of God and of the self, both inex tricably interwoven and predicated, ultimately, upon a de scent into oneself^ where weakness and helplessness con front absolute power. This face-to-face meeting was, for the Hebrew, an encounter with creation; it was, as Dowey points out, not a mere looking out to nature from the in side : "man himself, including his inner mental life, his subjectivity, [was] part of creation. Thus God's revela tion to man is both subjective and objective, and this simultaneous "doubleness,this weaving together of psycho logical life, nature, and history as areas of God's revela tion, is in agreement with Old Testament thought; the will 2 Sauerwein, D'Aubigné's "Les Tragiques", p. 13 and note 49. One could state for d'Aubigné, as does McNeill for Calvin, that the Scriptures were both his "guide, . . . and arsenal." Calvinism, p. 203. 3 "D'aultre part, c'est chose notoire que l'homme ne parvient iamais à la pure cognoissance de soymesme iusques à ce qu'il ait contemplé la face de Dieu, et que du regard d'icelle il descende a regarder à soy." Calvin, Institu tion, I, 51. 4 Edward A. Dowey, The Knowledge of God in Calvin's Theology (New York, 1952), p. 50. ^Ibid. 174 of the inscrutable is the ultimate reality.^ But where Calvin sought intellectual certitude in all matters— in cluding the question of the limitations of man’s knowledge of God's will--d'Àubigné reveals a certain poetic indepen dence in circumventing such limitations; and here again he shows a bond between himself and the Hebrew writers : he creates the emotional experience of God's blessing, or of his curse; intellectual knowledge gives way to a sensual revelation of God's will at work in history. The Biblical method of explaining the divine in human terms is one he borrows, as he clearly explains in Fers, to justify a para bolical comparison between God and a king: " ... comme il est permis aux tesmoignages saincts / Comprendre le celeste aux termes des humains" (19-20), By the same token, he ex tends this type of comparison to the physical realm itself, seeing in its condition, its wholeness or its profanation, an accurate reflection of God's judgment. His poetic vi sion concretizes spiritual dynamics and converts the essen tially static quality inherent in the Calvinist belief in predetermined judgment into a dialectical tension between the creative force of salvation and the eroding action of corruption. The Israelite was a stranger to dualism; d’Aubigné, however, faithfully separates body and soul--at least where ^Arthur Dakin, Calvinism (Philadelphia, 1946), p. 24. 175 he and the elect are concerned. In Vengeances, he prays: " ... sépare-moy de moi; / D'un sainct enthousiasme appelle aux deux mon ame" (56-57); and, in Feux, he stresses, the comforting message that destruction of the body does not annihilate the soul, as a martyr waits calmly for his soul to leave his "happy," though tortured, body (597-98). As for Satan's slaves, the body may be entire, but the soul has been broached (837); yet more frequently, such a cor ruption of soul is shown by the corporeal state, as is the case with the rulers in Princes, where the physical be speaks the total personality : En vain, tous contristez, vous levez vers les deux Vos yeux, car ce ne sont que d 'impudiques yeux; Cette langue qui prie est sallie en ordures. Les mains que vous joignez ce sont des mains impures. (415-18) Christian and Calvinist that he is, he also envisions the body as the Old Adam, the source of evil and accomplice of sin, which, as such, must appear with the soul for final judgment (Jugement, 327-40); and, since both are either saved or damned, a unity is restored, one way or the other. In the Old Testament sense, soul is man in his activity, in y his "being alive," and life consists in knowing God, in being in relationship with him. Now, this concept is cen tral to d’Aubigné's thoughts. It does not contradict 7 Theodorus C. Vriezen, An Outline of Old Testament Theology (Boston, 1960), p. 202. 176 Calvinism, even though in the letter's theology the God of history has been overshadowed by the God of redemption, and the drama of creation and the realization of man's poten tial has given ground to salvation and predestination. However, d'Aubigné does not present an extreme Calvinist polarization of God and man; he stays rooted in history and shows God both transcendent and at work in history. For the most part, his poetic imagery speaks for the total psycho-physical organism; and corruption, when it strikes, is totally destructive of the organic whole. Though at war with the Flesh and the Devil ("Fuyez, triomphes vains, la richesse & la gloire, ... ," "Ô pieges dangereux ..." rVengeances, 737, 739]), and not as tolerant of man's frailty and his passions as the Israelite,^ d'Aubigné does not divest himself of love of the natural world. The mark of the Psalmist and the prophets is too strong, his contact 9 with the Bible too personal and poetically imaginative for him to turn away entirely from a recognition of the physi cal as a valued part of reality. The appearance of the Q Fisch, Jerusalem and Albion, p. 94. ^Ibid., p. 104. Speaking of the English "Puritan hero," he says that the forces that directed them were not "nourished by theology. They were nourished by something much more potent, namely the direct, unmeditated imagina tive contact with the English Bible." Without minimizing d'Aubigné's awareness of Calvin's theological tenets, we believe Fisch's statement holds true for d'Aubigné's con tact with the Hebrew and Olivetan Bibles, as well as with the Vulgate. ' 177 elements at the Last Judgment asking why man has defiled and polluted them, seems almost like a prelude to their participating also in the return to existence and to a relationship with God (Jugement, 770-94). Though the poet follows the book of Revelation in showing the passing away of heaven and earth, their death is one of carnal and human agony (913-31). "Covenant" is not a word that Calvin uses often, de- 10 spite his identification with the chosen people. D'Aubigné, by my count, speaks of it twice. In Feux, he refers to the "alliance saincte" (1403), and in Vengeances, he mentions the "chere alliance" (325). Calvin begins a chapter of the Institutes with the following: Or ce que 1'alliance de vie n'est pas égale ment preschée à tout le monde, et mesme où elle est . preschée, n'est pas également receue de tous, en ceste diversité il apparoit un secret admirable du jugement de Dieu. Car il n'y a nulle doute que ceste variété ne serve à son bon plaisir. Or si c'est chose évidente que cela se fait par le vou loir de Dieu, que le salut soit offert aux uns, et les autres en soyent forclos, de cela sortent grandes et hautes questions, lesquelles ne se peuvent autrement résoudre, qu'en enseignant les fidèles de ce qu'ils doyvent tenir de 1'élection et prédesti nation de Dieu.11 Following the lead of Pauline theology, Calvin separates 12 covenant love and covenant obligation; Hebrew zeal, which ^^Fisch points this out. Ibid., p. 106 ^^Calvin, Institution, III, 404-05. 12 Fisch, Jerusalem and Albion, p. 99, 178 ' stresses the ethical importance of man's worldly activities and works, is linked to Greek dualism; and righteousness is . manifested by self-conquest, not by the full flowering of 13 man’s potentialities in the social realm. Hope of elec tion and reliance on faith, which, practically and psycho logically, stimulated the Calvinist to wordly endeavor and equated success with God's grace, polarized the worldly and the spiritual and further minimized the importance of works 14 as stressed by the Israelite. In the works of the eighth-century prophets, however, the meaning of zeal or righteousness comes closer to the Calvinist reading, since it tends toward salvation, toward religious firmness and ardor, as in Isaiah: And he put on righteousness as a breastplate, and a helmet of salvation upon his head; and he put on garments of vengeance for clothing, and was clad with zeal as a mantle. (lix:17) It is in the sense of religious ardor that d'Aubigné uses the word. Addressing an English martyr, he reminds him of his promise to hold high his arms while burning, " ... si du feu la puissance / Faisoit place à ton zele & a ta sou venance" (Feux, 129-30). And again in the same canto : 13 "A righteousness unrelated to action would have been meaningless to the ancient Hebrew." Ibid., p. 96. ^"^Ibid. , pp. 103-06. 179 Mais quoy? des saincts tesmoins la constance affermie Avoit lassé les poings de la gent ennemie. Noyé l'ardeur des feux, séché le cours des eaux. Emoussé tous les fers, usé tous les cordeaux. Quand des autels de Dieu 1'inextinguible zele Mit en feu l'estomac de maint & maint fidele. (1097-1102) In Vengeances, he prays for his zeal to be awakened: 15 Que le doigt qui esmeut cet endormi prophète Resveille en moy le bien qu'à demi je souhaite. Le zele qui me fait du fer de vérité Fascher avec Sathan le fils de vanité. (101-04) The righteous man, for the Calvinist as well as for the Hebrew, is the faithful one : Behold, his soul is puffed up, it is not upright in him; but the righteous shall live by his faith. (Habakkuk ii: 4) Here again, the correct use of existence is to be found in the quality of a relationship. Muilenburg shows that "the ethical terminology of the Old Testament is derived in large' part from the covenant relationship. In almost every in stance it is a terminology signifying a relationship be tween God and his people.First among such words is 17 hesed, loving kindness or covenant love, which is also Jonas. ^^Muilenburg, Way of Israel, p. 59. 1 V Fisch, Jerusalem and Albion, p. 98. 180 associated in meaning with steadfastness, fidelity, and 18 grace. It is hesed that binds men to each other, to the 19 world, and to God; "rooted in natural relationships," and,. as a close Old Testament equivalent of grace, it is a part of that "covenant of life" of which Calvin speaks and which d'Aubigné dramatically shows in a bitter struggle with the covenant of death; the Tragiques is a battle of absolutes, of allness against nothingness. The poet sees and understands God's ways in terms of man's psychological life; his inner posture determines his actions. Since knowledge is relationship with the holy-- the wholly other— it can not be acquired by reason; it is 20 not conceptual, or ontological, but existential. The artistic expression of such a personal and subjective truth is neither inspired by a discerptive vision nor dependent on discursive modes, but rather seeks out symbols that will reveal an existential principle of unity between the outer 21 and inner worlds, between the sacred and the secular — symbols that do not explain this relationship, but activate it and place the poet in immediate communion with the 18 Muilenburg, Wav of Israel, p. 59. 19 Fisch, Jerusalem and Albion, p. 98. 20 Vriezen, Old Testament Theology, p. 129. 21 Fisch sets this as the goal of such Protestant writers as Hall, Marvell, or Vaughan. Jerusalem and Albion, p.55. 181 r living God and a responsive world. No links are necessary since the two realms open one onto the other. This exis tential principle is found in the image of the living or ganism, the image of the totality fighting against that which would diminish its life-force. The Tragiques empha size the condition of the physical as a sign either of psy chic and spiritual wholeness or of dissolution; this is the light that the poet throws onto his country’s battle between life and death. The actions occur in biological time whose content is examined largely in its own terms, for the universe is not an established, harmonious cosmos but a susceptible physical creation. In Misères, the French people and the economic, social, and moral life of the country are seen in terms of flesh torn apart by the destruction of civil war. In Princes, the political organism--i,e., the rulers— is de caying from self-deception, sexual perversion, and unlimi ted and unnatural license. La Chambre dorée is a hall of justice built out of the decomposed remains of the dead, where corrupt justice feeds on the flesh of the innocent. In Feux, the physical agonies of Protestant martyrs are off set by God’s providential plan for eternal life; burning flesh becomes a sacrifice rising heavenward, a sanctified 22 offering that strengthens the relationship of God to man. 22 Pedersen, Israel, III-IV, 347. 182 Fers shows Satan's activity among men in terms of death from war and massacre, whereas Vengeances, with the his torical perspective of a prophetic sermon, is a picture of God at work in history, permanently cutting off the sinful from participation in the Covenant, viewed in Christian terms as eternal life, as an eternal relationship with God. The last vision. Jugement, resolves the life-death conflict; the bodies of the damned are doomed to an eternal separa tion from God, whereas the bodies of the elect, in keeping with ideas common both to some forms of Jewish apocalyptic and Christianity, are resurrected, struggling up out of the earth and the seas to participate in the final purification that will return them to existence, that is to say, to a relationship with God. In the Psalms, the book of the Bible most frequently 23 referred to by d ’Aubigné in the Tragiques, one can find the complete expression of the spiritual framework of the poem. Though the Psalmists lack the intense moral indigna tion or "ethical passion" of the prophets, as Mowinckel claims, they do contain "practically all the single fea- 24 tures of the prophets’ conception of God." Whether in Psalms of lamentation or of thanksgiving, of cursing or of 23 By our count, the Garnier-Plattard critical appa ratus notes eighty-one echoes. ^^Sigmund Mowinckel, The Psalms in Israel's Worship, trans. D. R. Ap-Thomas (2 vols.; New York, 1962), I, 105. 183 blessing, the emphasis is on the opposition of absolutes, on the contrast between man's impotence and God's enduring strength, on man's utter dependence and God's holy and un bounded power. The swinging back and forth between human 25 frailty and "Divine Energy" is characteristic of Hebrew literature in general and is a form of parallelism which Moulton refers to as a "pendulum of movement"; it is a means of bringing different phases of time and of divine and human action into a related focus. D ’Aubigné relies extensively on this technique. In Misères, the contrast is made between the healthy and pro ductively alive France of old and the barren France of war time whose people have been run to earth; even their 27 breasts smell of hunger (304). After a scene in heaven in which martyrs are presented to him, God, in La Chambre dorée, looks down in anger at the mighty forces of earth which are stunned into silence and utter helplessness: Tout s'enfuit, tout s'estonne, & gemit a sa veuë; Les Rois espouvantez laissent choir, paslissans. De leurs sanglantes mains les sceptres rougissans; La mer fuit & ne peut trouver une cachette Devant les yeux de Dieu; les vents n'ont de retraitte 25 Moulton, Literary Study of the Bible, p. 145. ^^Ibid., pp. 145-48. 27 For the Israelite, breasts are associated with God's blessing; Russell, Jewish Apocalyptic, p. 144; that which is barren or sterile reflects his curse. 184 Pour parer ses fureurs : l'univers arresté Adore en frémissant sa haute Majesté. (146-52) In Fers, Satan— hardly an Old Testament personage— attempts to bargain with God who knows that, in any event, the devil can only claim those souls that have been predestined be- 28 fore birth to perdition. He therefore allows Satan to attempt to corrupt man, and heaven, in one violent move ment, throws the devil earthward; purity rids itself of filth, underlining the distance between the two: Le ciel pur se fendit, se fendant il eslance Cette peste du ciel aux pestes de la France. (183-84) There is a similar concept and movement in Psalms Ixxviii, which Moulton places among "the most powerful of all sacred 29 lyrics." The movement goes back and forth between divine force and man's spiritual lethargy and forgetfulness in this survey of Israel's history, until finally: He cast upon them the fierceness of his anger. Wrath, and indignation, and trouble, A band of angels of evil. (49) In the Tragiques, not only is this kind of movement to be found within the individual cantos themselves, but, as in 28 This point is made in the note to lines 177-78 in the Garnier-Plattard edition. 29 Literary Study of the Bible, p. 145. 185 ' the Old Testament, it is structurally basic to the entire work, swinging from man’s earthly woes in Misères to the eclectic activity of God's will at work in Jugement. This dramatic, frequently simultaneous, and vitally physical in volvement between mutua.lly exclusive categories (human and divine, finite and infinite, past, present, and future) is extremely shadowy, if present at all, in the works of the other poets that we have examined. D'Aubigné constantly creates a physical awareness of God as a personality in volved with other personalities; this is a Hebraism. He makes the vibrant force of the divine power felt, even when God is not specifically on stage. Leaving Jugement aside, the reader is particularly aware of this in Feux, where the poet is constantly reminding us of God's presence, his watchful eye (147, 347, 1285), his firm and powerful finger (281, 468), his comforting breast (336, 1086). Or again, he makes the holy presence and intent known by the imagistic interweaving of the divine will with the human event. Thus, a martyr walking barefoot to his execution leaves a reddened trail for those coming after him to follow; d’Aubigné’s comment transforms this into a path to salvation : Vraye trace du ciel, beau tapis, beau chemin, A qui veut emporter la couronne à la fin : Les pieds devienent coeur, 1'ame du ciel apprise Fait mespriser les sens, quand le ciel les mesprise. (143-46) - - I 186 ' This shows a Calvinist disdain for the senses by the soul; nevertheless, the metamorphoses of feet into heart, the seat of understanding, is particularly evocative of the Hebraic tendency to see the spiritual posture of the whole person— i.e., his soul— in any one part of his body. The domains of the mortal and the eternal meet in the image of the martyr, the bones of whose arms become a crown as he holds his arms over his head while burning at the stake (134), and in the picture of Jane Grey who is a "prison nière ça bas, mais princesse là haut" (215). As a prophet and the incarnation of historical memory,d'Aubigné as similates the past into the present. Henry of Navarre is 31 32 Gideon, his mother, Jeanne d'Albret, "nostre Debora," 33 Catherine dei Medici is Jezebel --a name commonly given to her, however, in the anti-Catholic literature of the times.In Vengeances, the poet, after recalling the plagues of Egypt that Moses, empowered by God, let loose on Pharoah's people (305-10), refers to various historical moments when other rulers were destroyed, actually, not 30 Tom F. Driver calls the prophets "the very embodi ment of historical memory ; for their message, from first to last, is a measurement of the present against the covenan- tal past." The Sense of History in Greek and Shakespearean Drama (New York, 1960), p. 41. ^^Préface, 308. ^^Fers, 755. ^^Misères, 747 and Fers, 206. ^^See the Garnier-Plattard note to Misères, 747. 187 symbolically, by pestilence and vermin. Thus, in his own time : Le meurtrier sent le meurtre, & le paillard attise En son sang le venin, fruict de sa paillardise: L'irrité contre Dieu est frappé de courroux; Les eslevez d 'orgueil son abbatus de poux. (1073-76) Here again the theological perspective brings the historical past and present together within a context that points up the eschatological significance of man's actions. It is in this theological perspective that we find the basic unity of the Tragiques, a perspective that brings into the foreground the relationship between God and his creation and the viability of this relationship through man's obedience, or its profanation through his sin. Sauerwein finds the poem's unity dependent upon certain emotional word-clusters, such as loup-tyrans, agneaux-les eslus; he finds that these clusters not only bring together the literal and supra-1itérai lines of development, but take on expanding meaning as the poem is read and achieve 35 full meaning at its conclusion. I find the chief prin ciple of unity in a metaphor which is used emblematically and which sustains the seven visions that make up the poem. In this metaphor both the theological and the historical, both the physical and the psychological unite. The ^^D'Aubigné's "Les Tragiques", pp. 21-24, 173-74. 188- metaphor I have in mind is the death-throes of a fleshly organism, viewed either as a whole or in terms of its parts, seen as either clean and entire, or filthy and pro faned . Throughout the work, d'Aubigné relies on various parts of the body to reveal man's spiritual condition, the health of his relationship with God. The hearts, the un derstanding and courage, of the rebels against God are "serrez" (Miseres, 36), or hardened (La Chambre dorée, 87; Vengeances, 452, 1010), or have lost God's gift of under standing (Jugement, 214); in the past, the poet's own heart was asleep (111). He is eloquent about the fortitude of English martyrs: "O quels coeurs tu engendres', ô quels coeurs tu nourris, / Isle saincte, ..." (Feux, 135-36); such hearts remain steadfast, "indomptez'.' (515) . Three martyrs have their tongues cut out; however. Chaque goutte de sang que le vent fit voiler Porta le nom de Dieu & aux coeurs vint parler; Leurs regards violens engraverent leurs zeles Aux coeurs des assistans hors-mis des infidèles. (511-14) The martyr. Montaichine, reminds the sinner that physical and spiritual courage or understanding are not synonymous : "Nous nous vantons de coeur & perdons le vray coeur" (748), Finally, in Jugement, "le coeur ravi se taist" (1216). Throughout the entire work, those who oppose the true God, the idolaters, gnash their teeth in anger and frustration 189 ; as they did in Old Testament times. In Vengeances alone, for example, "qui ne frémit au son des tonnerres grondans /, Frémira quelque jour d'un grincement de dents" (71-72); Gain gnashed his teeth at the acceptance God gave to Abel's' sacrifice (182); worldly success is the domain of darkness, of the worm (death), and "grincement de dents" (737-40); though miraculous manifestations have become fewer, the Christian will still find reason for singing, whereas "1'atheiste en grincera les dents" (765-68). In each of the first four cantos, there is one as pect of the body which is stressed with particular insis tence. In the first half of Misères, which deals so ex tensively with the sterility of the land and the destruction of its cultivators, the belly and breasts, as potential sources of life, are profaned. The mouth, lips, and tongue are spotlighted in much of Princes, in the world of rulers that is built on the lie, on what weakens man's bonds with life; for the word, in the Biblical sense, has creative power, and, as Boman says, comprises the realities of word, deed, and object. A lie, therefore, is not merely out of line with truth, it is a physical decaying and destruction 9 A of the word. Already, in the Old Testament, eyes reveal 37 the soul; in the lengthy presentation, in La Chambre ^^Hebrew Thought, p. 56. ^^Pedersen, Israel, I-II, 175. 190 dorée, of the allegorical figures that are the attributes and qualities of injustice, they have more than physical features, outline, and weight; they are given psychical qualities by the emphasis d'Aubigné gives to their eyes,^^ The eyes of Injustice herself are not blind, they have an "esclat furieux" (240); those of Avarice are little and sunken (252); of Envy, hollow (284), whereas Hypocrisy is rheumy-eyed (318). In the Old Testament, the head is the man; it bears 39 his honor, or is covered by his crimes and receives the judgment of God: But as for them whose heart walketh after the heart of their detestable things and their abominations, I will bring their way upon their own heads, saith the Lord Jehovah. (Ezekiel xi: 21) In the chilling portrait d ’Aubigné gives of Catherine dei Medici, the person he considers to be Protestant France’s arch-enemy, the poet’s first point of concentration is her head. She associates with the dead ("La nuict elle se veautre aux hideux cimetieres" F Misères, 902]), and the dead are, of course, unclean, in the Old Testament sense. In the chapter he devotes to d’Aubigné in his study, Thomas M. Greene has remarked on the remarkable in dividuation of the eyes in the portraits. The Descent from Heaven; A Study in Epic Continuity (New Haven, 1963), p. 275. Out of the twenty-seven portraits, the eyes or "le regard" of sixteen are physically described. - 39 Pedersen, Israel, I-II, 174. 191 Catherine is a plague (889) with an infectious breath (890- 91), Though the poet gives her a mythological Medusa- or Hydra-like head, and black-magic powers,there are strong Biblical overtones in the pestilential desecration of the sacred that she represents : Mais toy qui au matin de tes cheveux espars Fais voile à ton faux chef branslant de toutes parts. Et, desployant en l'air ta perruque grisonne. Les païs tous esmeus de pestes empoisonne. Tes crins esparpillez, par charmes herissez, Envoyent leurs esprits où ils sont adressez : Par neuf fois tu secoue, & hors de chasque poincte Neuf daemons conjurez deschochent par contraincte. (827-34) As with Biblical descriptions, d'Aubigné's do not permit a full-length physical portrait to emerge, but are geared to reveal only what he considers to be central to the psycho physical personality. In Fers, Satan, the serpent, takes possession of Jezebel's head : Comme idee il gaigna 1'imagination, Du chef de Jesabel il print possession. (205-06) It is, perhaps, a coincidence, but in Jezebel's story in First and Second Kings, though she remains physically in the shadows, the one thing on which the writer throws some descriptive light is her head, and especially her eyes, in Regarding d'Aubigné's interest in the occult, see the article of Robert Griffin, "Agrippa d'Aubigné and Sixteenth-Century Occultism," Romanische Forschungen, 79. Band, 1967, 114-32. 192 ' the brief dramatic scene with Jehu before he has her killed: And when Jehu came to Jezreel, Jezebel heard of it; and she painted her eyes, and attired her head, and looked out at the window. (II Kings ix: 30) After her death, all they find to bury is her "skull, and the feet, and the palms of her hands" (35), In the Tragiques, a most prominent part is given to the hands, and, by extension, to the arms, the fingers, the nails. Of all the parts of the body, hands are the most closely associated with power, the power to bless, to give, or protect life, the power to curse and destroy it; it is the hand that works for or against God. Who shall stand in God's holy place? asks the Psalmist; and he answers: "He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart" (Psalms xxiv: 3-4). Through Isaiah, God speaks to those who worship him by ritual but not by deeds : And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you; yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood. (i:15) The hand is also, of course, the source of God’s power and of his loving-kindness; he will bring water to the wilder ness for the poor and needy and plant trees in the desert that they may see, and know, and consider, and understand together, that the hand of Jehovah hath done this, and the Holy One of Israel hath created it. (Isaiah xli: 20) i 193 ^The hands of tyrants, of France’s rulers, and those who massacre Protestants are "mains impures" (Princes, 418, 733; Vengeances, 457, 589, 1114); the hands of France’s men of law, like those of certain Roman emperors, are "fuman tes" (La Chambre dorée, 201; Vengeances, 633). In Juge ment, the hands of apostates are "inutiles," or "faynean- tes" (118, 119), whereas the hand of God, by its omnipo tence, is "espouvantable" (289), as well as "douce, docte, & puis rude" (Fers, 1389). In heaven, the martyrs are free of the "ongles des bourreaux" (La Chambre dorée, 112); the power of death is seen as "les ongles de la mort" (Feux, 859), and in the religious wars leaders are given over to the "ongles acharnés des affamés mutins" (Fers, 679). God’s finger, in La Chambre dorée, is described as that which judges then punishes (176); when he is investi gating the hall of justice "il met le doigt ... , / L’ongle dans la paroi, ... " (176-77). In Feux, his finger provides a firm grasp for dying martyrs (279) and closes their mouths and eyelids at death (1088-90); as in the Old Testament, any part of God is absolute power that cannot be subordinated to human ethics ( 1 1 2 9 ) The finger of God moves and awakens those who are spiritually asleep (Ven geances, 101) and takes revenge on those who interfere with ^^See the Garnier-Plattard note to this line. 194 his chosen people (439). In short, his watchful power is everywhere; not even Satan with all his wiles can escape it: "S'il fuit, le doigt de Dieu par tout le monde vole" (Fers, 81}. We can see, from some of the foregoing examples, that there is yet another dimension to the poet's imagery which is even more fundamentally and inclusively symbolic of the life-death drama of the work than is the body and its significant parts. In the Tragiques, the struggle be tween cleanliness and filth— and the associated concepts— is the concrete expression by which d'Aubigné encompasses the idea of the two covenants. Yahweh's covenant with the chosen was one of life; My covenant was with him of life and peace; and I gave them to him that he might fear; and he feared me, and stood in awe of my name. The law of truth was in his mouth, and unrighteousness was not found in his lips: he walked with me in peace and up rightness, and turned away from iniquity. (Malachi, ii: 5-6) In Isaiah, the scoffers that rule Jerusalem and its people have set themselves above this agreement : We have made a covenant with death, and with Sheol are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us; for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves. (xxviii:15) But God refutes this : 195^ Your covenant with death shall be annulled, and your agreement with Sheol shall not stand; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, then ye shall be trodden down by it, (18} In death, the Psalmist reminds us, there is no remembrance of God (vi:5), nor can we praise him (cxv:17), but to love God is to live (Deuteronomy xxx;16). The Israelite per ceives the man-God relationship as dependent on life; death, or whatever is associated with death, the ultimate unclean liness, is a separation from God, This remains true even in the Calvinist heaven and its vision of eternal life, for the damned die a second time (Jugement, 894), and are for ever cut off from God, whereas the elect are reborn into a second and eternal life that promises a permanent relation ship or communion (1067). Whatever moves away from God and toward death is sin. Sin diminishes the wholeness of the person, disturb ing the natural relationships which depend on cleanliness for their existence. Because it defiles, sin causes such relationships to weaken and decay; only cleanliness can keep man and the world entire, can prevent it from collaps- 42 ing. The Old Testament is persistent in stressing this as a vital part of ritual, law, and daily living. In Leviticus, for example, Aaron is told by God to "make a distinction between the holy and the common, and between ^^Pedersen, Israel, I-II, 491, 196 ! the unclean and the clean" (x:10). Job asks the question: "Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?" And answers it: "Not one" (xiv;4). The Psalmist declares that God can find none that understands him : "They are all gone aside; they are together become filthy" (xiv:3), and Isaiah reproaches Israel: For we all become as one that is unclean, and all our righteousnesses are as a polluted garment; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. (Ixiv: 6) But there is also the promise of restoring the relationship by cleansing, the promise of a better time when the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion, and shall have purged the blood of Jerusalem from the midst thereof, by the spirit of justice, and by the spirit of burning. (iv:4) The total debility of the sinner who has obscured his rela tionship with God is fully expressed by the Psalmist, speaking to Yahweh: There is no soundness in my flesh because of thine anger, neither is there any rest in my bones because of my sin. My wounds stink and are corrupt because of my foolishness. 197 For my loins are filled with a loathsome ss in my flei (xxxviii:3, 5, 7) disease: and there is no soundness in my flesh. Here, spiritual weakness is linked to stench and the un cleanliness of disease; the sick person, like the fearful, the despairing, or the apathetic, carries death with him; his illness may either be the punishment for sin or the out come of it, attacking the unrighteous, the "crooked," and 45 powerless soul; it is a spreading infection that corrupts the entire organism. The unclean, that is to say that which is displeasing to God, is also related to any irregular sexual activity, to lewdness in general ("In thy filthiness is lewdness" [Ezekiel xxiv:13]), and to blood. The connection between blood and life is clear and simple. Since life belongs to God, it is part of the realm of the sacred, a bond between that world and the human one. Since God is the source of life, whatever destroys or weakens life cuts one off from God and is a profanation. Blood is used for atonement, a ritualistic guilt-offering, but outside of this usage it defiles. The shedding of another's blood is a sin, of course : This citation is the King James version; the American Standard Edition (1901) euphemistically uses "loathsome" to replace "stink" in verse 5. /121 " ' " Mowinckel, The Psalms, I, 240. ^^Ibid., II, p. 2. 198 Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed : for in the image of God made he man. (Genesis ix:6) Thou shalt not kill. (Exodus X X : 13) To drink blood or to eat it is condemned as unclean: And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among them, that eateth any manner of blood, I will set my soul against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people. For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls : for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the life. And every soul that eateth that which dieth of it self, or that which is torn of beasts, . . . he shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even; .... But if he wash them not, nor bathe his flesh, then he shall bear his iniquity. (Leviticus xvii: 10-11,' 15-16) 46 The covenant concept that upholds all life, permeates every area of the Israelite's existence and places the em phasis on the sense of community. An image that is fre quently used to express the importance he gave to continuity and to the life-producing and sustaining force of the co venant is that of marriage: Return, O backsliding children, saith Jehovah; for I am a husband unto you: . . . and I will bring you to Zion. (Jeremiah iii: 14) 46 Pedersen, Israel, I-II, 414. 199 The maintenance of relationships according to their nature leads to experiential knowledge, the only true knowledge for the Hebrew, of God and of his will; it leads also to the promise of God's saving action. Filth, and words that express derivative or associa ted ideas— blood, physical weakness, infection— occur with obsessive regularity throughout the Tragiques. Though he is anticipating Christian rebirth, d'Aubigne's statement of what is required in order to be acceptable in God's eyes is founded on the Israelite concept of what is alien to God and to life itself : II faut à ses yeux clairs estre net, pur & blanc. N ’avoir tache d'orgueil, de rapine & de sang ; Car nul n'heritera les hauts deux desirables Que ceux-là qui seront à ces petits semblables. Sans fiel & sans venim; .... ^/ (Vengeances, 43-47) In Misères, life repudiates spilled blood and filth: "La terre n’aime pas le sang ni les ordures" (277), how- - - 48 ever, because of it, because blood calls to blood France is no longer earth but ashes (89-90); her children will have to be nourished by blood, by that which poisons and kills : 47 My italics. 48 "There is nought but swearing and breaking faith, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery; they break out, and blood toucheth blood" (Hosea iv: 2); my italics. This verse is a microscopic version of d'Aubigne's view of the France of the religious wars. 200 Or vivez de venin, sanglante geniture. Je n'ay plus que de sang pour vostre nourriture. (129-30) The earth will withhold her benediction from those who "vont sucçans le sang des nations" (308), nonetheless, ini quitous rulers find ways to suck the blood and the marrow of a ruined people (Princes, 549-50), and the men of law have become man-eating hunters who do not first kill their game : Nous avons parmi nous cette gent canibale. Qui de son vif gibier le sang tout chaud avalle. (La Chambre dorée, 197-98) Their very clothes are soaked with blood (518). Those who, like the inquisitioners, can have nothing to do with execu tions but who judge nonetheless and call for punishment, are "bourreaux ne vivans que de mort & de sang" (603), and, as for the Catholics, "yvres de sang, ... / ... [ils] blasphèment contre Dieu" (Feux, 1367-68). Even victory at the long drawn-out battle of Dreux, is drunk on blood (Fers, 373-74}. As for Charles IX and his brother, the Duke of Anjou, they are marked from birth : Leur puante charongne & I'ame empuantie Partagèrent, sortans de 1'impudique flanc. Une mer de forfaicts & un fleuve de sang. (Vengeances, 810-12) The blood of the innocent, or of the elect, on the contrary, is not a sign of death; as sacrificial blood it is "arre de 201 ' la vie, & non pas de la mort" (Vengeances, 732). Water, a source of life and an Old Testament sign of righteousness, is defiled by the spilling of so much inno cent blood : "Tu [God] vois du sang des tiens les rivieres - changées" (La Chambre dorée, 93). Àt the Saint Bartholo mew, the Seine ... des poisons du siecle à ses deux chantiers pleine. Tient plus de sang que d'eau; son flot se rend caillé. (Fers, 870-71) Like the children of Israel, " ... il faut marcher de rang / Dedans le golfe rouge & dans la mer de sang" (523- 24). D'Aubigné finds a further historical parallel to death-choked waters in Exodus, in one of the plagues that Yahweh authorizes Moses to visit upon the Egyptians: And he lifted up the rod, and smote the waters that were in the river, . . . and all the waters that were in the river were turned to blood. And the fish that were in the river died; and the river became foul, and the Egyptians could not drink the water from the river, and the blood was throughout all the land of Egypt. (vii:20-2l) Recalling these plagues, d'Aubigne refers to this directly in Vengeances : Eaux qui dèvinstes sang & changeastes de lieu. Eaux qui oyez tres-clair quand on parle de Dieu. (303-04) The God of the Old Testament hates sin because it is 202^ an enemy of life; not only is it disobedience to his will, it is offensive to his honor and "creates disaster in the 49 soul” --a disturbed relationship that can only bring fur ther disturbance in its wake. Since sin could be inferred from any disaster with which one was visited, the Israelite came more and more to make a causative connection between sickness and God.^^ In the Psalmist's laments, his illness is associated with mental anguish and social alienation; 0 Jehovah, rebuke me not in thy wrath; Neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure. There is no soundness in my flesh because of thine indignation; Neither is there any health in my bones because of my sin. For mine iniquities are gone over my head; As a heavy burden they are too heavy for me. 1 go mourning all the day long. My lovers and my friends stand aloof from my plague; And my kinsmen stand afar off. (xxxviiirl, 3-4, 6, 11) D'Aubigne's world, overflowing as it is with "charongnes" and masses of dead bodies, is also one of infection and disease. He places particular emphasis on what is conta gious, on poison that spreads throughout the body. The allegorical figures of Jacob and Esau, fighting over the body of France, are agitated by the poison that is in 49 Pedersen, Israel, III-IV, 620. 50 . - ■ Mowinckel, The Psalms, II, 2. 203 them (Misères, 113); Catherine dei Medici and the Cardinal of Lorraine are seen as "infections" (703), and are com pared to some contagious exhalation of the earth (705-07). In Princes the poet's stated purpose is to air the corrup tion, stench, and pestilence of the court, to expose it by means of the living light : Je veux à coups de traits de la vive lumière. Crever l'enflé Pithon au creux de sa tasniere. Je veux ouvrir au vent l'Àverne vicieux. Qui d'air empoisonné face noircir les cieux. Percer de ces infects les pestes & les roignes. Ouvrir les fonds hideux, les horribles charongnes Des sepulchres blanchis : ceux qui verront ceci. En bouchant les nazeaux, fronceront le sourci. (1-8) The princes are so full of vice that "I'escume de leur pus leur monte jusqu'aux yeux" (152). Poison, infection, le prosy, are other forms of contagion. "Leprosy," says Von Rad, "as the 'first-born of death' (Job xviii:13), was probably reckoned to be the most serious kind of bodily un cleanness that could happen to a man.Speaking of him self as a poet, defending both his subject matter and the pictures of horror and of carnage that express it, d'Àubigné calls those poets who at such a moment in time would write only amusing or amorous verse, "lepreux de la cervelle" (Princes, 73); as for the princes of France, "si leurs corps sont lepreux, plus lepreuses leurs ames / Usent ^^Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, I, 274. ' 204 . sans sentiment du fer et des flammes" (751-52). Under a tyrannical king, the country's wound blackens, spreads, and' I finally becomes gangrenous (475-76). The Inquisition is a Spanish poison racing throughout Europe, its servants poison both spirit and soul (La Chambre dorée, 611, 633). Satan's serfs suck poison (Feux, 836); in towns ravaged by .the civil wars the air not only stinks, it is pestilential and poisoned by death (Fers, 593-95). In this latter-day visitation of the plagues of Egypt, worms, lice, pestilence, and vermin spread through the poem as through the body. They swarm most densely in Vengeances, where the poet shows how, throughout history, God has struck down the rebellious and the tyrannical. In the death of Herod Agrippa— one of several to die from an infestation of worms or vermin— the poet's adaptation of the historical facts coincides with his theological symbolism; as so often occurs with d'Aubigné, reality, the primary meaning, and the metaphor are fused: Un gros de vers & de poux 1'attaque & le consomme. La terre qui eut honte esventa tous les creux OÙ elle avoit les vers, l'air lui creva les yeux; Lui-mesme se pourrit & sa peau fut changée En bestes, dont la chair de dessous fut mangee; Somme, au lieu de ce corps idolâtré de tous. Demeurent ses habits un gros amas de poux. Tout regrouïlle de vers; le peuple esmeu s'eslongne, On adoroit un Roy, on fuit une charongne. (490-94, 499-502) Another manifestation of the diminished or weakened 205 ' soul is pallor. In Nahum, the shield of God's might "is made red, the valiant men are in scarlet" (ii:3), in con trast to the city of Nineveh and the pallor of her inhabi tants : She is empty, and void, and waste; and the heart melteth, and the knees smite together, and anguish is in all loins, and the faces of them all are waxed pale. (10) In Jeremiah, God asks : Wherefore do I see every man with his hands on his loins, as a woman in travail, and all faces are turned into paleness? (xxx: 6} But in Isaiah he has a message of comfort: Thus saith Jehovah, who redeemed Abraham, concerning the house of Jacob: Jacob shall not now be ashamed, neither shall his face now wax pale. (xxix:22) D ’Aubigné distinguishes between whiteness and that which is pale. In La Chambre dorée, Pity is "blanche," not pale (55), for pallor is associated with life-negating states of mind. Vengeance, though black of skin, is "palissant" (331), Jealousy vacillates between being pale as death and as red as fire (334), as does Weakness who is now "blesme," now "rouge" (441); whereas Fear has a "paslissante veuë" (506). In Feux, d'Aubigné makes a striking contrast : 206 between apparent fullness and fertility and the true state of the soul in a picture of the persecutors of Protestants, .asleep and snoring "aux seins enflés de leurs pasles pu tains" (1388). Satan, when his disguise is pierced by God, becomes "blesme," his mouth grows pale (Fers, 53, 61). Hunger, joining forces with the ravagers of France, becomes "la pasle faim" in Misères (440) and in Fers (1292). Death itself is seen as pallid. The tautology is apparent only; d'Aubigné is emphasizing the essential weakness of death, as when he lauds the constancy of the "bien-heureux" "qui vous a fait tuer l'enfer & la mort blesme" (Feux, 1354), or as when he speaks of how God ... met la vie au peril plus extreme Parmi les os & nerfs de la mort pasle & blesme, Releve 1'estonné, affoiblit le plus fort. Pour donner au meurtrier par son couteau la mort. (Fers, 1145-48) In the opening lines of Jugement, the poet asks God to lodge "le pasle effroy, la damnable terreur / Dans le sein qui te hait & qui loge 1'erreur" (3-4); what God wants is ... que son image en nos coeurs soit empreinte, Estre craint par amour & non aimé par crainte; Il hait la pasle peur d'esclaves fugitifs. Il aime ses enfans amoureux & craintifs. (17-20) Strength, then, accompanies fear and love of God, it is a quality of the alert and vigilant mind, whereas weakness, inimical to life and God, defiles the soul and puts to 207 sleep the apathetic, the "pasle conscience" (Jugement, 96). The concepts associated with pallor, sickness, and with blood, are all developments that grow out of the basic tension existing between the clean and the unclean in the Old Testament, This tension is equally fundamental to the Tragiques. D'Aubigné incessantly qualifies things, people, actions, and ideas with the adjectives "loathsome," "stink ing," "filthy," "rotten," and "corrupted,thus giving an immediate judgment on the relationship of that which is qualified, to God, to life. The times themselves are loathsome or foul (Princes, 117), the sycophant poet, whom d'Aubigné disdains, dirties himself with the filth from those nobles he would flatter (89-90); such flatterers are puffed up from filth (106). The poet, associating the filth of lies to the loathsomeness of a king, wonders : Pourtant suis-je esbahi comment il se peut faire Que de vices si grands on puisse encore extraire Quelque goust pour louer, si ce n'est à l'instant Qu'un Roy devient infeçt, un flatteur quant & quant Croist, à 1'envi du mal, une orde menterie. (157-61) As for the king’s council: 52 Infect, puant, ord, or sale, pourri, and corrompu D 'Aubigné's use of ord may at times be ambiguous and can mean either what is dirty, or, in the light of its etymo logy, horridus, that which is ugly, horrid, or that causes horror. 208 C'est le conseil sacre qui la France devore: Ce conseil est meslé de putains & garçons^S Qui, doublans & triplans en nouvelles façons Leur plaisir abruti du faix de leurs ordures. Jettent sur tout conseil leurs sentences impures. (586-90) It thus follows in d'Aubigne's thought that the filth of their actions taints their pronouncements; word and action, as in the Old Testament, are undivorced. Filth and pollu tion encrust the poet's portraits of the efféminité Henry III who tries to conceal the "orde volupté" with which he has polluted both his renown and his life (806, 808). D'Aubigné recounts how this prince and his brothers used to escape the vigilance of the gentlemen of the chamber to 54 Caresser un Bathille, en son lict 1'heberger, N'ayant muet tesmoin de ses noires ordures Que les impures nuicts & les couches impures. (934-36) And finally : Dégénéré Henri, hypocrite bigot. Qui aime moins jouer le Roy que le cagot. Tes prestres par la rue à grands troupes conduicts N'ont pourtant pu celer l'ordure de tes nuicts. (985-87, 993-94) In Feux, hospital attendants attempt to seduce a 53 The Garnier-Plattard critical apparatus points out, in the note to line 587, that garçon had the same pe jorative meaning that garce acquired later on. 54 The Garnier-Plattard note to line 934 identifies "Bathille" as a Juvenalian name for a "mignon," or sodomite. : 209 Protestant child away from her faith: "S'essayèrent plon ger cette ame en leurs ordures" (1050); at her execution, Jane Grey is less apprehensive of death than of "le sale toucher d'un infame bourreau" (260). The martyrs in heaven are pure, "candides" (14), but Satan's legions are "les ordes legions d'anges noirs" (Fers, 255). Rebels against God have always been part of what is unclean; after the flood, God rained fire down on those who were brazen enough to think they could violate God's will or law: "Ils pensoyent souiller Dieu" (Vengeances, 259). The earth reacted violently to this, as did the sea; " ... là mit à la mesme heure / La mer par ses conduicts ce qu'elle avoit d'ordure" (265-66). The poet now pleads for the deluge to return, to "noyer, non pas laver, les ordures du monde" (290). Spotlighting the present with the past, d'Aubigne shows Nebuchadnezzar's punishment as a warning to rulers; his physical condition parallels what has happened to his soul : Son palais est le souil d'une puante boue. La fange est l'oreiller parfumé pour sa joue. (397-98) That which is unclean is also associated with stench, as in the foregoing citation, and d'Aubigné makes much use of puant and its derivatives. The work of the base flatterers at court will eventually horrify even them, for: 210 ... O que la playe est forte Qui mesm' empuantit le pourri qui la porte 1 (Princes, 201-02) Nor can the blood of murder be concealed, by artifice, by strewing the ground with flowers, for ’ ’ ... ces fleurs sécheront, & le sang recelé / Sera puant au nez, non aux yeux révélé" (215-16). It is useless to try to conceal sin, "mieux vaut à descouvert monstrer 1'infection / Avec sa puanteur & sa punition" (1093-94). D ’Aubigné would call down God’s wrath on the men of law who refuse to hear his word : A ce troupeau. Seigneur, qui l'oreille se bouche. Brise leurs grosses dents en leur puante bouche. (La Chambre dorée, 1031-32) The formalistic jargon for the legal procedures that have replaced justice are "des puants vocables" (926). But, the ashes of martyrs, ashes thrown to the wind. Profitèrent bien plus que le puant monceau Des charognes des grands que, morts, on imprisonne Dans un marbr’ ouvrage : ... (Feux, 68-70) "Ha'." he cries, "que nos cruautés fussent ensevelies," ’ ’ que nos ordes vies / N'eussent empuanti le nez de l'estran- gerl" (Fers, 1533, 1534-35). Paris has become a "puante Ninive" (Vengeances, 138); the times are so foul that the poet implores : 211 Empuantissez l'air, o vengeances celestes. De poisons, de venins & de volantes pestes. (277-78) The Cardinal of Lorraine is a "puant flambeau" (1042), a latter-day and metaphoric echo of the emperor. Maximien, mass murderer by edict, who became infected by vermin: Des citoyens meurtris la charongne & les corps. Empuantirent tout de l'amas de ces morts. L'air estant corrompu te corrompit ï'haleine Et le flanc respirant la vengeance inhumaine. Ta puanteur chassa tes amis ... (619-23) In Jugement, Satan's go-betweens are stinking latrines of vice, but nevertheless are welcome to keep those whom the Protestant church has repudiated, the black sheep of the flock: Vous vous esjouissez estans retraits de vices Et puants excremens: gardez nos immondices, Nos rongneuses brebis, les pestes du troupeau. Ou galles que l'Eglise arrache de sa peau, (103-06) As for Paris, God's own voice condemns her forever : Maudit sera le fruict que tu tiens en tes bras. Dieu maudira du ciel ce que tu béniras; Puante jusqu'au ciel, l'oeil de Dieu te deteste, il attache à ton dos la dévorante peste. Et le glaive & la faim, dont il fera mourir Ta jeunesse & ton nom pour tout jamais périr Sous toy, Hierusalem meurtriers, revoltee, Hierusalem qui es Babel ensanglantes. (265-72) The world of the Tragiques is polluted and corrupt. 212 yet its very horror’ can be lustral. The fires of torture purify (Feux, 14), as do the waters of the ocean, into which drain the rivers of France, running blood and charged with the bodies of the massacred. In Fers, Ocean speaks about the remains he has gathered in: "Je garderay ceux-ci, tant que Dieu me commande Que les fils du bon heur à leur bon heur je rende. Il n'y a rien d'infect, ils sont purs, ils sont nets : Voici les paremens de mes beaux cabinets. Terre qui les trahis, tu estois trop impure Pour des saincts & des purs estre la sepulture." (1525-30) Earth, for those who are not Christian— i.e., chosen— is a battleground between the pure and the impure (266); God wants man to be "net, pur & blanc" (Vengeances, 43), and, in Jugement, those whom God saves are restored to cleanli ness, to life. Clothed in white, they are washed clean by forgiveness; even "I'air corrupteur n'a plus sa corrompante haleine" (1004). The resurrected bodies of the elect have put on the new man: Purs en subjects très purs, en Dieu ils iront prendre Le voir, l'odeur, le goust, le toucher & 1'entendre. (1203-04) Thus, the poet restores the man-God relationship in physi cal as well as in spiritual terms, a relationship into which he himself enters, for all eternity, at the conclu sion of the work, participating in the "vrai repos" of death (Pref., 156) which, for the Christian, is living 213 55 knowledge of God and an affirmation of his being man. From the beginning, d'Aubigne's stated goal is the pursuit of truth (127-56); he scorns the poets who seek worldly advantages through flattery: "Des ordures des grands le poete se rend sale" (Princes, 89); such versi fiers are divorced from life: Vostre sang n'est point sang, vos coeurs ne sont point coeurs, Mesme il n'y a point d'ame en 1'ame des flatteurs. Car leur sang ne court pas, duquel la vive source Ne bransle pas pour soy, de soy ne prend sa course. (223-26) D'Aubigne’s word, like the divine, arranges and maintains all elements of his cosmic creation in their proper place and relationship. "Death and life," say Proverbs, "are in the power of the tongue" (xviii: 21). His is a "langue de flamme" (Vengeances, 58) that both vivifies and destroys. The truth he knows is of iron (103), his verse is of steel that engraves the truth for all to see (Princes, 19-20). To do this, it cuts open time in order to expose its inner content and excise the corruption by revealing the dynamics of saving history inherent in the actual event. With this revelation of divine purpose at work behind appearance, profaned time is conquered. 55 For the Calvinist, as for the Hebrew, being (man) and knowing (God) are bound together. Thomas Forsyth Torrance, Calvin's Doctrine of Man (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1957), p. 23. CONCLUSION The battle that is the Tragiques, a battle with time itself, ends in the victory of a Protestant apocalypse^ which rescues the "captive Eglise" (Misères, 14), redeeming the cause, and those who have died for it, by a prophetic vision of heavenly triumph. Yet, even in this setting, the voice of an Old Testament prophet can be heard echoing in the last words, as the poet's soul comes to rest "au giron de son Dieu" (Jugement, 1218): He will feed his flock like a shepherd. He will gather the lambs in his arm, and carry them in his b o s o m . 2 (Isaiah xl: 11) I have attempted to show that, fleshed out as it is with the classical allusions and erudition of the This is the subject of an article by Richard Regosin who views the conflict in the poem as a "cosmological strug gle between the forces of Good and Evil"; he draws parallels between the work and the Book of Revelation in terms of a sixteenth-century sermon on the Apocalypse. "D'Aubigne's Les Tragiques : A Protestant Apocalypse," Publications of the Modern Languaqe Association, LXXXI, No. 5 (1966), pp. 363-368. 2 The Garnier-Plattard note to the final line gives the Vulgate reading of the verse : "Sicut pastor gregem suum pascet; in bracchio suo congregabit agnos, et in sinu suo levabit." 214 215 contemporary poetic idiom and with Calvinist thought, the "skeleton" which supports d'Aubigne's work is Hebraic, not merely Biblical in a vague, generalized way. Hebraism is at one and the same time a way of seeing historical actions and human events objectively and a way of judging that reality in terms of the spiritual vitality of its content. The poet-prophet looks out at the world of man through a scheme of faith that enables him to illuminate the physical from the inside, thus giving transparency to the concrete by revealing the active working of the divine will. The optical angle, the psychological response, and the verbal expression are all determined by an awareness of the covenantal relationship between man, God, and nature, a relationship out of which flows the time of saving history and without which man is cut off from God, from the very source of all life. It is the Old Testament, on which d'Aubigne so heavily relied, rather than the whole Bible, that provides the reader with a hermeneutics for interpreting his poem. These principles are theological. That is to say, they are based both on the Israelite's way of knowing and rela ting to God, and on God's way with him, ways in which the human experiences the spiritual psychologically and as an integral and dynamic part of the physical elements of his existence. That d’Aubigne saw society and the natural world eschatologically and soteriologically, that his 216 vision, like the Israelite's, saw reality whole, fusing event and divine evaluation, is evident from the text of the Tragiques; the poem itself shows us how he read the Bible--I have not grafted a modern interpretation of Old • * 3 Testament theology onto d’Aubigne's work. As in the utterances of the prophets and the psalmists, observed events do not lose their concrete and physical qualities, yet they are subjectified by way of the personal and inner contact with God; thus all aspects of reality are trans formed and become a means to man’s experiential knowledge of the divine. If d’Aubigne, as a Calvinist, envisioned man as having a basic corruptness unknown to the Hebrew, if he did not interpret the covenant with life as being directed toward complete realization in this world, he nevertheless envisioned this life in terms of man’s physical as well as spiritual relationship with God, and man's actions as explanatory of the actual state of that relationship; even in heaven, where time finally comes to rest in the light and warmth of love, the poet’s vision is still oriented toward this world; he never entirely renounces the physical weight of the body, the fleshly and sensual life that is such a distinctive part of his poetic and prophetic mode 3 Fisch makes a similar statement in discussing his treatment of Hebraisms found in various seventeenth-century English writers. Jerusalem and Albion, p. 113. : 217 ! of expression. Where Ronsard and the other Pléiade poets saw the space of nature and the space of the intellect as the area of poetic possibility for the self and the poem, where they considered space as the means of overcoming the obstacles of changing time, d'Aubigné recognized time itself as the content-filled element in which the self was engaged, the area of its meeting with God. The Pléiade poet who spanned the distance between the real world of nature and the in telligible or ideal world, seeking knowledge of rational and cosmic harmony, depended on a middle term of transition or conversion from the domain of the physical to that of the intelligible. He sought to approach the supra-natural by raising the human to the highest degree. By contrast, d'Aubigné, like the Israelite, availed himself of the creativity of the excluded middle ; thus idea and experience, reality and the supra-natural, open one onto the other and are immediately known by the poet in his search for commu nication with, and experience of, the holy.^ This makes for a dialectical and inner drama in which the self acquires a transcendent form that enables it to experience both existence and being. A vision of man and God interacting in a biological Von Rad points out that the holy cannot be deduced either from human standards of value as is, or by elevating these standards to the highest degree. Old Testament Theo logy, I, 205. : 218 time that relates action to growth or decay, to cleanliness or filth, life and death experienced as man's communion with or alienation from God, are the Hebraic factors that provide d'Aubigne with his inspiration; they distinguish him from his fellow poets and give him an impressive inner and aesthetic cohesion that is entirely his own.^ For all the blood, the strips of flesh, the macabre imagery that permeate the Tragiques' epic fresco of defiled time, d'Aubigne is affirming existence; in conquering profaned time, the prize is life itself. "En tuant la mort mesme" (Fers, 102), God's champion resolves the final paradox. An examination of Le Printemps in terms of d'Aubigne's Hebraic grasp of reality could prove fruitful and at least partially explain the density of real fleshly suffering that is behind the stylish poetic conventions. 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Core Title Agrippa d'Aubigne's "Les Tragiques": The conquest of profaned time

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