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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 70-11,365
CROSBY, Virginia, 1917-
AGRIPPA D'AUBIGNlH'S LES TRAGIQUES: THE
CONQUEST OF PROFANED TIME. iPortions of Text
in French],
University of Southern California, Ph.D., 1969
Language and Literature, general
University Microfilms, A X E R O X Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan
© Virginia Crosby 1970
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
AGRIPPA D'AUBIGNfi’S LES TRAGIQUES:
THE CONQUEST OF PROFANED TIME
by .
Virginia Crosby
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
UNIVERSITY O F SO U T H E R N C ALIFO RNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 9 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, written by
........ .y.irgiaia...Sr.o.s.^...........
under the direction of hex... Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by The Gradu
ate School, in partial fulfillment of require
ments of the degree of
D O C TO R OF P H IL O S O P H Y
Date AususJm1969.
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
..
_ y__ _ Chairman
^ ( U k '...
..
I” */-*-
. . . 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:6
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 0 Time.
Milton, On Time
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'AUBIGNfi'S WAY OF KNOWING:
THE PROPHETIC STANCE ......................... 118
2. D' AUBIGNlD' S WAY OF KNOWING:
CLEANLINESS AND FILTH ......................... 172
CONCLUSION.............................................. 214
BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................ 219
iii
INTRODUCTION
La voici l'heureuse journee
Que Dieu a faite a plein^desir,
Par nous soit joye demenee
Et prenons en elle plaisir!
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.
10ctober 20, 1587. Armand Garnier, 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-
tiquite a encore quelque plus severe Capitaine, Dieu vous
gard cestuy-lal" Quoted by Garnier, ibid., p. 355.
3
He died two days later, on May 9, 1630; he was
1
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 standsj a treacherous seductress, a
"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
0
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. Garnier, ibid., Ill, 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,
1620. 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 realite qui le repousse et 1'attire." Genies de
France, Editions de la Baconniere (Neuchatel, 1942), p. 77.
5
The "Dalide" in question refers to Henry of
Navarre's mistress, Gabrielle d'Estrees, who influenced his
abjuration of Protestantism. In d'Aubigne’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'Aubigne, Les Tragiques, critical edition by A.
Garnier and J. Plattard, Societe des textes frangais
modernes (4 vols.; Paris, 1962). All quotations from the
Tragiques refer to this edition.
6 o '
Garnier, Agrippa d'Aubigne, III, 179.
3
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,
g
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'Aubigne 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.
g
In the "Avis aux lecteurs" of the Tragiques, the
poet complains: "Nous sommes ennuyes de livres qui^enseig-
nent, donnez-nous en pour esmouvoir, en un siecle ou tout
zele chrestien est peri, ou la difference du vray et du
mensonge est comme abolie." D'Aubigne, Les Tragiques, I, 3.
9
D'Aubigne 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. Garnier,
Agrippa d'Aubigne, II, 181-82.
unaware of the effect he was producing; since childhood he
had been mindful of his talents as a persuasive orator,1^
and his actions frequently showed a Gascon penchant for the
dramatic.11 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'Aubigne'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'Aubigne was alert to the hidden yet vigilant
presence of an etre interieur, the guardian of truth. He
says, in the preface to the Tragiques;
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'Aubigne 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.
Garnier quotes these incidents from d'Aubigne's Memoires,
ibid., pp. 49-50, 52, and in his preface calls him an
"orateur ne," p. iv.
11D'Aubigne 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'Aubigne'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.
5
13
Car je la trouve dans le creux
Du logis de soi tenebreux,
Logis esleu pour ma demeure,
Ou mon ame veut que je meure,
Furieuse de sainct amour.
(Pref., 127-29, 131-32)
For d'Aubigne, 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 ’Aubigne'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 verite.
14
. My italics.
^As a military man of his times, d'Aubigne 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'Aubigne (Paris, 1931), p. 121.
However, he confesses in Vengeances: "Je me suis pleu au
fer, David m'est un exemple / Que qui yerse le sang ne bas-
tit pas le temple" (122-23). The first part of Vengeances
is an account of his youthful sins (23-140).
"^Jean Calvin, Institution de la religion chres-
tienne, ed. Jean-Daniel Benoit (4 vols.; Paris, 1957), I, 50.
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
+ 18
a soul transported} d'Aubigne 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 integre,
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 litteraire, X
(1958), 48.
18Ibid. 19Ibid., p. 47.
20
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
celeste." Garnier, Agrippa d'Aubigne, III, 179.
7
Change-moy, refay-moy, exerce ta pitie,
Rens-moy mort en ce monde, oste la mauvaistie
Qui possede a son gre ma jeunesse premiere;
Lors je songeray songe & verray ta lumiere.
(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, l'ame s'enfuit, et reprenant son lieu
Exstatique se pasme au giron de son Dieu.
(Jugement, 1215-18)
21
Carl G. Jung, Psyche and Symbol, trans. Cary
Baynes and F. C. R. Hull, ed. Violet de Laszlo, Doubleday
Anchor Original (New York, 1958), p. 182.
22
Revelation i:16.
23
Jung, Psyche 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'Aubigne. 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'Aubigne'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
24
Henry A. Sauerwein, Agrippa d'Aubigne's "Les Tra-
gigues": A Study in Structure and Poetic Method (Baltimore,
1953), p. 20. Richard L. Regosin also points out that
d'Aubigne is striving to restore order by poetically de
stroying the monde a 1'envers that he is presenting and re
placing it with the Kingdom of Heaven. "Agrippa d'Aubigne’s
Les Tragigues; 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.
96
A. Cavens, Agrippa d'Aubigne, l'homme et 1'oeuvre
(Brussels, 1949), p. 21.
9
27
and psychologically akin to the "forthtellers" of the Old
Testament. Considering the task that stretches ahead of
him, he says: "La ou estoyent les feux des prophetes plus
vieux, / Je tends comme je puis le cordeau de mes yeux"
(Miseres, 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'a te louer ne soit
abondonnee / La plume que je tiens, puis que tu l'as donnee"
(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 Pleiade
tradition: "Je sens ravir dedans les cieux / Mon ame aussi
bien que mes yeux" (Pref., 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 Cesar d ’une vaine terreur.
(Miseres, 5-9)
27
Theophile James Meek, Hebrew Origins (New York,
1960) . According to Meek, the most popular word for pro
phet, n5bx', did not mean one who foretold the future, but
one who spoke forth the word of God. Pp. 150-51.
10
For d'Aubigne, 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 action.29
This was d'Aubigne'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 l'heureuse journee, ... ." 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, 1962), p. 12.
11
of Agrippa d'Aubigne'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'Aubigne, 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'Aubigne 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.31
D'Aubigne'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
31
In the second canto, Princes, the poet invokes
truth in terms of the Biblical story.
"Preste-moi, verite ta pastorale fonde,
"Que j'enfonce dedans la pierre la plus ronde
"Que je pourrai choisir, & que ce caillou rond
"Du vice-Goliath s'enchasse dans le front."
(45-48)
In La Chambre doree he identifies further with David, ex
horting the "stupides endormis" to listen to David's harp
as it takes pver 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'Aubigne'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 Godj 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'Aubigne* 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 ’Aubigne 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).
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).
16
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
38
their death is seen in terms of fertility or sterility.
A 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 a 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 (Miseres, 97-130). As for her cities:
Ses villes sont charongne, & ses plus cheres vies,
Et le sue & la force en ont este ravies;
Les pais ruinez sont membres retranchez
Dont le corps sechera, puis qu’ils sont assechez.
(605-08)
38
The poetic convention of flowering and withering
acquires a psycho-physical dimension in d’Aubigne'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 l'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 verse;
La chaux vive dont fut 1'edifice enlace,
Qui blanchit ces tombeaux & les salles si belles,
C'est le meslange cher de nos tristes moelles.
(La Chambre doree, 179-86)
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'Aubigne 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 male virtues mixed with artistic expression,
40
the Bible rubbed shoulders with Rabelais, and loyalty to
king and country mingled with preoccupations regarding
39 *
Garnier, Agrippa d'Aubigne, I, vi.
^Jacques Bailbe places d'Aubigne among the "admira-
teurs fervents" of Rabelais, and points out that the influ
ence of the latter has been indicated by Pierre Viliey and
Lazare Sainean. Jacques Bailbe, "Rabelais et Aubigne,"
Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, XXI (1959), 381.
18
41
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'Aubigne
remains an isole, both in his party, where his intransi-
- 44
gence earned him the nickname of le bouc du desert, and
41
"The Memoires 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.
^In the "Avis aux lecteurs," speaking of himself in
the third person, d'Aubigne 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'Aubigne, I, 32-33, 64. Marcel Raymond mentions
the influence of Lucan, Juvenal,^Seneca and Tacitus in
L'Influence de Ronsard sur la poesie frangaise (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 Memoires
that "Aubigne toujours choisi entre les trois ou quatre, qui
s’affrontoyent sur le tapis aux deputes du Roy, fit
plusieurs traicts qui envenimerent 1'esprit de son Maistre,
et plus encor toute la Cour contre luy ... Enfin toutes les
aigreurs et duretez de^l'Assemblee luy furent imputees, et
pour cela il fut appele le Bouc du Desert, 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
46
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
47
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
48
the poem. Henri Weber devotes a chapter to d'Aubigne'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'Aubigne, II, 117. The first (1616) edition of the
Tragiques appeared under the anonymous authorship of L. B.
D. D.; apparently d'Aubigne considered the appelation of
bouc emissaire most fitting.
45
Raymond stresses that d'Aubigne's work is under the
command of "une exigence personnelle," Genies, p. 78, and
that he neither follows the Pleiade nor announces Classi
cism. L*Influence de Ronsard, Part II, 326.
^Jean Trenel, L'Element bibligue dans 1'oeuvre
poetlque d'Agrippa d'Aubigne (Paris, 1904).
47
Sauerwein, D'Aubigne'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.
Henri Weber, La Creation poetique 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-literal 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
spirit, are inseparable.^^
Prom 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 structure,
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'Aubigne's "Les Tragigues":
A Study of the Barogue Style in Poetry, Yale Romantic
Studies, Second Series (New Haven, 1951), p. 3.
53
According to his Memoires, he read Hebrew as well
as he did French by the time he was thirteen and went to
Geneva to study. Garnier, 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 devorant, & apres 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
All 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 a!nd
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
lanque francoyse, ed. Henri Chamard, Societe des textes
frangais 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,
5 6
"a Jewish nucleus in Christian guise." That 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 isole, is the
56David 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,
24
goal of this study. We will start with a look at the
Erkenntnisprobiem in the Renaissance and in the work of the
Pleiade in order to examine the interplay between world,
intellect and vision— physiological and poetic: the "image
58
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 Garnier. 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'Aubigne is less Baroque than Bibli
cal; his are the eyes of the prophet who has a "world in
59
his conscience"; with "l'oeil de l’ame" (Pref., 348),
58
Ernest Hans Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study
in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York,
1960), 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
1
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
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 prive de la fonction de^l'irreel est un
nevrose." Georges Canguilhem, "Sur une epistemologie con-
cordataire," pp. 3-12 in Hommage a Gaston Bachelard, by
Georges Canguilhem, et al. (Paris, 1957), p. 9.
26
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 onotion [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
4
it differently; yet humanists, writers, and artists were
Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages,
Doubleday Anchor Books (New York, 1954), p. 152.
^Ibid., p. 151.
^Etienne Gilson maintains that "en dehors de cette
cause de changement qui reside dans 1'esprit, il y en a une
autre qui reside dans les choses. Non moins profondement
et radicalement que la pensee dont il depend, 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
0
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 wag, as Gustave Cohen has pointed out, "le plus
grec des poetes de France." Ronsard, sa vie et son oeuvre
(Paris, 1932), p. 275.
0
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 depouille.^
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 l'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 Morgay and Armand
Muller, La Renaissance (Paris, 1960), pp. 203, 206-08.
7
Pierre,de Ronsard, Oeuvres completes, ed. Paul Lau-
monier, Societe des textes frangais modernes (17 vols.j
Paris, 1924- ), I, 164, 11. 29-32. Unless otherwise
stated, all citations will be taken from this edition.
Q
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
9XV, 252, 11. 417-25.
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 ordonee
Au Ciel, j'acompliray, ga-bas la destinee
Qu'il vous pleut me vers^r, bonne ou mauvaise, alors
Que mon ame immortelle entra dedans mon c o r p s .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 mortality?^ This 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
Pleiade 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 l'Autonne, XII, 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, poete lyrique, 3rd ed., rev.
and corr., (Paris, 1932), pp. 560-66.
14Le Chat, XV, 39, 11. 1-10.
15 « •
Albert-Marie Schmidt, La Poesie scientifique en
France au seizieme 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 a demener les pas,
Ne l'eau rongearde ou des freres la rage
L'injuriant ne ruront point a bas:
Tousjours tousjours, sans que jamais je meure
Je volerai tout vif par l'univers,
Eternizant les champs ou je demeure
De mon renom engresses & couvers.l®
Struggling with the problem of double vision— his
awareness of God's eye as well as his own— the Pleiade 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
16A 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 Pleiade 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
20
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
Morgayj La Renaissance, pp. 198-99, 203-05. Also,
Henri Weber, La Creation poetigue, 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
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
^ Qde a Bertran Berger, I, 139, 11. 11-12.
22
Morgay, La Renaissance, p. 52. A.-M. Schmidt
speaks of Ronsard's conformity with the syncretic tendencies
of Ficino in La Poesie scientifique, p. 79.
23
"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.
24 + *
Henry Weber, la Creation poetlque, 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
20
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 livres
"Or*, si quelqu'un apres me vient blasmer de quoy
"Je ne suis plus si grave en mes vers que j'estoy
"A mon commencement, quand l'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)
26 ^
La Creation poetique, 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
En fin, quand tout ce qui est en 1'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 revoque en ce souverain un, qui est sur
toute essence, Chose, que la grande et celeste
Venus accomplit par Amour, c'est a dire, par un
fervent, et incomparable desir, que l'Ame ainsi
eslevee a de jouir de la divine et eternelle
beaute.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
31 « •
quality instead. 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 Poetique":
"1'intelligence des mysteres, et secrets des religions sous
Bacchus. ... ravissement.de prophetie 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 Poetique, ed.
Silvio F. Baridon (Geneva, 1950), p. 17.
29Ibid., p. 20.
29Ernst 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 prpcess 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
Theologie.allegoricque, pour faire entrer au
cerveau des hommes grossiers par fables plaisantes
& colorees les secretz qu'ilz ne pouvoyent com-
prendre quand trop ouvertement on leur descouvroit
la verite.33
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.34 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.
33Abbrege de l'Art Poetique, 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 poetique (1565), Ronsard admonishes the would-be
poet to be reverent toward these daughters of Jupiter,
35
"c'est a 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
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 1'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 a devenir le Dieu unique, le dieu qui, se
confondant plus ou moins avec l'Eternite, loi du ciel, et
ie Ciel lui-meme, regulateur du monde, assure l'ordre et la
conservation de ce dernier grace a 1'Ether, feu mediateur,
feu intelligent, feu maitre des sentences." La Poesie
scientifique, p. 75.
^See the Hymne de 11 Autonne. XII, 49, 11. 61-68.
41
aux hommes ses mysteres / S’ils ne sont vertueux, devots &
solitaires," adding that Euterpe has advised him to live
37
"dans les hoys pour la Muse et pour toy." In the Abbrege
de l'Art poetique, the program outlined for the poetic as
pirant is quite specifics
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, renfrogne,
ne chagrins mais anime 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
trainantes a 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
37Ibid.. 47, 50, 11. 25-26, 76.
38XIV, 5, 11. 39-45.
39
Responce aux Injures et Calomnies, XI, 161, 1. 896.
40
"La liberte, pour Ronsard, ... consiste en la
fureur." A.-M. Schmidt, La Poesie scientifique, p. 91.
. /v iir U ilV . .
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
41
Ficino's concept; Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos,
p. 64. Jean Festugiere says that, though much of Ronsard1s
verse goes counter to Platonism, he is at times "le plus
fidele disciple de Ficin en France au XVIe siecle." La
Philosophie de 1'amour de Marsile Ficin (Paris, 1941),
p. 139.
^ La Salade (1569), Ode a 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 Theleme 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 l'aele bien empanee"; in the Piscours a Salm.
Macrin, he asks:
"La felicite 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 pres de la flamme divine,
"Ou le flambeau d'Amour est allume,
"Mon sainct dezir sainctement emplume
"Jusq’au tiers ciel d'un prin-vol m'achemine."
Joachim Du Bellay, Oeuvres poetigues, 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 amhrosie,
Nous elevons au ciel l'humaine fantasie,
Portes dedans ton char, & d'homes vicieux,
Purges de ta liqueur osons monter aus cieus,
Et du grand Jupiter nous assoir a la table.45
In the later Hymne de l'Eternite, the divine fire carries
his soul upward to "decouvrir les secretz de Nature & des
46
Cieux." 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, demeure sur la terre
Dans l'humaine prison, qui 1'Esprit nous enserre,
Le tenant engourdy d'un sommeil ocieux
II faut le delier, & l'envoyer aux cieux:
II me plaist en vivant de voir souz moy les nues,
Et presser de mes pas les espaules cheniies
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, 47
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
45VI, 190, 11. 277-81. 46VIII, 246, 1. 3.
47Ibid., 150, 11. 1-10.
45
cosmology), who has a body of air or of fire, and is capa-
48
ble of flying between earth and the heavens:
Le jour que je fu ne, 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.
II me haussa le cueur, haussa la fantasie,
M'inspirant dedans l'ame un don de Poesie,
Que Dieu n'a concede qu'a 1'esprit agite
Des poignans aiguillons de sa divinite.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.50
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
48
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.
49XII, 46-47, 11. 1-12.
50
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
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 Abbrege: "Tout ainsi que le but de
l'orateur est de persuader, ainsi celuy de Poete est
d'imiter, inventer, & representer les choses qui sont, qui
peuvent estre, ou que les anciens ont estime comme
53
veritables." Seven years later, in the first preface to
the Franciade (1572), the imitation of things as they
actually are is compared with feigning: "[Le Poete] qui
escrit les choses comme elles sont ne merite tant que celuy
“’■'-Dagobert Frey, Gotik und Renaissance als Grund-
lagen der Modernen Weltanschauung (Augsburg, 1929), p. 8.
52
La Creation poetigue, I, 160.
53XIV, 13, 11. 176-79.
47
qui les feint et se recule le plus qu'il luy est possible
54
de l'historien." Finally, in the last preface to the
Franciade, vraisemblance and feindre are associated: "[Le
Poete] a pour maxime tresnecessaire en son art, de ne
suivre jamais pas a pas la verite, 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
5 6
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.
55
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, elements
Je veus brusler pour m'en voler aux cieux,
Tout l'imparfait de ceste escorce humaine,
M'eternisant, comme le filz d'Alcmene,
Qui tout en feu s'assit entre les Dieux.
0 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 la hault ^g
L'aultre beaulte dont la tienne est venue.
59
In the Ode a Cassandre, the morning rose, by analogy, is
identified with the recalcitrant young girlj 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.
58IV, 134-35, 11. 1-4, 9-14. 59V, 196-97.
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
6 0
eternal constellations. In 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
■ 6 X
coup vivement s'eslanga / 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
60I, 257-59.
^VIII, 67, 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
g 2
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-
6 3
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 a
Cassandre, which identifies the rose with the girl in the
first verse, cannot do without the comme:
Cueilles, cueilles votre jeunesse
Comme a cette fleur, la vieillesse
Fera ternir votre beaute.64
Comme opens the third sonnet in the sequence, Sur la mort
de Marie: "Comme on voit sur la branche au mois de May la
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
C. O
Whether or not mythology was misused or overused
is beside the point here.
6 3
Cohen discusses the question of Ronsard's failure
to "discover" the metaphor. Ronsard, pp. 242-43.
64V, 191, 11. 16-18. 65XVII, 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 he maintained. It is this reciprocal
66
relationship that interests the poetj space takes on dra
matic possibilities as the field of interaction.
Since the Pleiade 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
66
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-
07
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
08
set piaces 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
0 7
Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature
and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness, Dutton
Everyman Paperback (New York, 1961), p. 72.
08
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
69
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
70
delirium, he asks of Bacchus, "Pere, ou me traines-tu?"
However, as Cohen points out, after 1555 "l'ivresse antique,
les fumees du delire bachique se dissipent. Plus de 'for-
71
cenement’; ... ." 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:
... a nul des vieux antiques,
Larron, je ne devray mes chansons poetiques,
Car, il me plaist pour toy de faire icy ramer
Mes propres avirons de sur ma propre mer, 72
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
69IV, 135, 1.12; III, 54, 11.1-4; I, 161, 11. 25-28.
79I, 65-66, 11. 1-10 and L'Hinne de Bacus, VI, 185,
1. 179.
71Ronsard, p. 166. 72VIII, 164, 11. 35-39.
54
73
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 ...
r 1 74
[lej premier cheinon de la cheine qui pend," 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 influences 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 Astress "Ronsard a toujours reduit au
corps et au temperament le champ d'action de la fatalite
^ y0
astrologique, reservant ainsi le libre arbitre humain."
Cassirer, referring to Ficino, has pointed out that,
under the astrological system, man was subject to the three
73VII, 324, 1. 178.
74Hymne du Ciel, VIII, 147, 1. 88; 148, 1. 104.
73Les 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
78
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
+ 80
Nymphes & les Fees / Danser desoubs la Lune ... ," in
habitants of the cosmological structure in which he so
79
Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, pp. 23-24.
^Hymne de l'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 recit
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 Poesie scientifique, pp. 78-80.
Henri Busson also speaks of Ronsard's credulity regarding
these sublunar creatures in Le Rationalisme dans la lit-
terature francalse de la Renaissance (1533-1601) (Paris,
1957), pp. 378-79.
Hymne de 1'Autonne, XII, 47, 1. 16.
83Ibid., 1. 14.
58
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'a l'homme estoit nye
D'aller au Ciel, disposte, a delie
Loing, hors du corps, nostre Arne emprisonnee,
Car en dressant de nostre Ame les yeux,
Haute, s'attache aux merveilles des Cieux,
Vaguant par tout, & sans estre lassee
Tout l'Univers discourt en sa pensee,
Et seulle peut des astres s'alier
Osant de DIEU la nature espier.®^
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:
8^Hymne de la Philosophie, VIII, 92, 11. 107-10.
85Ibid., 86, 11. 21-30.
QC
Hymne de la Justice, 42-72. See also note 61.
87
This is reminiscent of Plato's "little pegs" in
the Timaeus. Plato, Dialogues, III, 358.
59
Sa douce force vagabonde
Le bien heura d'un dous repos,
Elle fit bas tumber la terre,
Et tournoier l’eau qui la serre
De ses bras vagues & dispos.
Du soleil alongea les yeus
En forme de fleches volantes,
Et d'ordre fit dancer aus Cieus
Le bal des estoilles coulantes.88
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 Destinees,"
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 embrassat sa femme."
As Eros 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
O Q
III, 6, 11. 52-60.
QQ
VIII, 153, 11. 72-84; 154, 11. 89-92.
90XII, 32, 11. 98-99.
60
between the organic and the abstract, by investing abstract
ideas with "a sensuous, tangible, and, for the most part,
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 Pleiade. 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 poet
the experience
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.
92VIII, 125, 11. 201-02.
61
The psychological dramas
the would-be knower the knower & the known to be known
the subject the ego'” " ' " " " ' the object
The aesthetic drama;
the would-be knower
the subject
the knowing
the work
to be known
the object
the human
poet poem
Denouement;
Man poem poet
the divine
immortality
The examples given that involve the self or ego
do not express the conscious thought of the Pleiade,
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
Pleiade'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
62
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 Pleiade'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
95
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.
95Ibid., 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
imagination— as well as the poet's success in satisfying
the demands of his aesthetic credo. An illustration both
of 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
97 • • -
Henri Weber, La Creation poetique, II, 737.
98
Individual and Cosmos, p. 123.
99 -
Henri Weber, La Creation poetique, 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, Prophetes, Devins, Sybilles, Inter-
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,"'*'*"1 ^
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. Abbrege, 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 l’homme est malheureux qui au monde se fie I
0 Dieux, que veritable est la philosophie,
Qui dit que toute chose a la fin perira,
Et qu'en changeant de forme une autre vestira.
La matiere demeure, et la forme se perd.102
On the other hand, the natural world was viewed in terms of
its erotic and generative purpose— as in the Hymne de l'Este
— 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
102
Elegie XXIV, Floyd Gray, Antholoqie de la poesie
francaise du XVIe siecle (New York, 1967), p. 254, 11. 61-
64, 68.
66
103
itself." In the first ode A la Fontaine Bellerie, the
spring, cherished by the "nymphes," is a source of inspira
tion, the eternal spirit of his ancestral lands, a point de
repere between his physical identity and his existence as a
poet:
Sus ton bord je me repose,
Et la oisif je compose
Cache sous tes saules vers
Je ne sgai quoi, qui ta gloire
Envoira par l'univers,
Commandant a la memoire ,_.
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.
104I, 204, 11. 15-21.
■^^For a clear discussion of "sweetness" in Pleiade
poetics and the question of le doux et 1'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 hautesse" 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 El eerie a Robert de la Have (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 ou il peut atteindre?
Tout n'est que vanite & pure vanite.
Furthermore (and this is the third circumstance), nature is
a relentless wheel:
106
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.
107
Pontus de Tyard, Au Ciel, en Faveur de sa Dame,
Poetes du XVIe siecle, ed. Albert-Marie Schmidt, Pleiade
edition ([Paris], 1953), p. 377.
68
C'est tousjours meme hyver & meme renouveau,
Mesme este, mesme autonne, & les mesmes annees
Sont tousjours pas a pas par ordre retournees.108
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
108X, 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 "satisfactipn to the mind."
Discarded Image, pp. Il-i2. 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
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
Pleiade's concept of the vraisemblable. In their synthesis,
the encounter of the Platonic concept of art as an imitation
^-*-^Busson 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 sgavoir
"Est seulement ramentevoir:
"Je ne le croi, ... "
(II, 15-16, 11. 1-5)
-*--^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 Idees &
114
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 experiences, 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 .115
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.
114Abbreqe. XIV, pp. 12-13, 11. 171-73.
115
Castor, Poetics, p. 182.
72
Imagination" to work, there is one definitive step to be
taken: the recognition of a transcendent ego which supplies
the self with a consciousness of duree and a potentially di
vine subject. Once the self develops two foci and becomes
its own subject and object, la pensee 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
116
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'Aubigne was an ardent and devoted follower of Ronsard.
Though twenty-eight years his junior, d'Aubigne's poetic
consciousness was formed by the precepts of the Pleiade. As
with the older poets, he faced many of the same technical
116
David Gwilym James, Scepticism and Poetry: An
Essay on the Poetic Imagination (London, 1937), p. 17.
117
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia 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
isole, un independent," 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 Regnier, but
that even his individual writings show no particular consis-
118
tency among themselves. The Traqiques, 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'Aubigne 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 life-experience had a
great deal to do with his poetic outlook, yet the
Tip
L'Influence de Ronsard sur la poesie franpaise
(1550-158571 2nd ed. (Geneva, 1965), Part II, 314.
119
Bioqraphia Literaria, I, 195.
^^La Creation poetique, 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 hack into the self, is to
he considered, of course; hut I shall show that, ahove 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
d'Aubigne 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
121
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 I
2
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 Pleiade's in
tellectual and humanistic background. However, what I am
seeking to define and to extricate from the entanglement of
influences in d'Aubigne'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
■^1 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'Aubigne'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'Aubigne 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
Pleiade'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 a
l'ecriture 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.j New York, 1962),
II, 57-60.
^Ibid., p. 12. ^Ibid., p. 35.
^Trenel calls attantion to this. L'Element biblique,
pp. 10-11.
77
* 6
son genie." 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 Traqiques' 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'Aubigne’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 Traqiques estab
lish between the Biblical past and the present. Since we
are identifying d'Aubigne'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
6Ibid., p. 13.
78
covenant-based Hebrew metaphysics; there is its Sltz 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
Q
and were confronted by the Old Testament Hebrew with his
9
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.
10Ibid., 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
"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-
15
tionship which was made particularly dramatic and intense
11Ibid., 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
16
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,
18
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
16
Modern scholarship has established "Yahweh" as the
preferred translation; the American Standard Version (1901)
of the Bible uses "Jehovah."
■^Muilenburg, Way of Israel, p. 16.
18Ibid., pp. 19-20. 19Ibid., 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 (vi:l-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
thingj 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 answers 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, but 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 iiiil4), is translated by Albright as "I
25 • ■
cause to happen what happens." Whether one accepts this
yc.
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
mentsj the historical fact was the metaphysical reality,
the grasp of which relied more on interpretation than de-
30
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 xxxiiiill.
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.31
(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 "know7
ledge." Muilenburg, Way of Israel, pp. 59-61.
32Ibid., p. 16.
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
38
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 Geniuss 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.
37
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 heams 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":40
39
J Ibid.
40 •
Boman, Hebrew Thought, p. 97.
87
For ye shall go out with joy, and he 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 G o d . 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
4^Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, II, 355.
42
Fisch, Jerusalem and Albion, p. 111.
4^Ibid., p. 112. 44Ibid., p. 69.
45Ibid., 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
48
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
46Ibid.. p. 108.
4^Niebuhr, The Self, p. 77.
48
"Then the earth shook and trembled; / The founda
tions alsq of the mountains quaked / And were shaken, be
cause he was wroth" (Psalms xviiis7). Ands "Jehovah hath
made himself known, he hath executed judgment" (Psalms ixsl6).
89
any inherent basic principle. Perceiving a close connection
between creation and God's saving history that extended and
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
50
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.
50Ibid., pp. 338-42.
" ’■''Niebuhr, The Self, p. 77.
52
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.
54
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
"^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.
55Ibid., II, 361.
56
Frankfort, Intellectual Adventure, p. 26.
91
57
potentialities within the framework of his vital rela
tionship with God.
And he 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; gg
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-
6 0
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
61
the earth reacted to the behavior of those who owned it,
so did the parts of the body, as denominations and manifes-
6 0
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":
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
I am poured out like water,
c. n
MacDonald, Philosophical Genius, p. 5.
61
Muilenburg, Way of Israel, p. 71. He quotes the
following verses from Deuterpnomy 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)
6 ?
Johannes Pedersen, Israel; Its Life and Culture
(4 vols.j London, 1926-1940), I-II, 170-76.
6 o
Muilenburg, Wav 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 xxiisl, 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
clers— 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-
65
tively. Von Rad claims that time, divorced from events,
00 67
was "quite inconceivable." This is debatable. But 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
64
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.
65
Frankfort, Intellectual Adventure, p. 23.
66
Old Testament Theology, II, 100. He points out
further that there is no word in Hebrew that corresponds
to our concept of time.
6 7
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
68
"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:l-3)
Like his metaphysics, the Old Testament Hebrew's time-sense
70
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
68
Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, II, 102.
69
Frankfort, Intellectual Adventure, pp. 23-24.
^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:l-5.)
Where the Greeks looked back to a Goiden 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
71
fIsrael's] 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 Traqiques.
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
76
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, XXIII
(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.
^Niebuhr, The Self, p. 65.
76
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, 0 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.
^Ibid. , pp. 443-46.
99
80
Creation"; as the first-created, wisdom was all-encompas-
81
sing, and could be 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-
82 83
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"
84
(xxviii) and Ecclesiastes' scepticism as to any connec-
85
tion existing between man and events in the world. At
this point, unable to penetrate nature on the basis of her
86
faith, Israel submits to the tragic sense of life. Yet
despite the problem presented by the existence of a per
sonality that could be considered not only a form by which
87
Yahweh makes himself and his will present, but a
80Ibid., p. 453. B1Ibid., p. 450.
82ibid.
o q .
Ibid., p. 447. See also Job xxviii:28:
"And unto man [GodJ said,
"Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom;
"And to depart from evil is understanding."
84
His scepticism may show an Hellenistic influence.
Pfeiffer, The Old Testament, p. 35.
P S
Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, I, 458.
86Ibid. 87Ibid.. p. 444.
100
coeternal and coequal primary reality, and thus separable
from God, despite all this, the Old Testament Hebrew's con-
88
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
tence," 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.
QQ
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
xvii:2), and the prophecy of Isaiah ii is preceded by:
"The word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah
90
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 Pleiade 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.
'c iuntiauisa*.
102
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 timej the Hebrew, dependent on the temporal,
on physical life, for the very existence of his relation
ship with Yahweh, stayed locked within the selfj 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 Pleiade poets, the Hebrew singer was inspired, under
divine protectionj 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-
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
transformation.
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:
claiming
92
This same kind of self-projection, supported
The poetic life-drama:
the would-be knower the experience to be known
man ^ man
<— God's will the poet— ^
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:
the stimulus the would-be knower to be known
.God's will
The psychological drama:
the would-be knower the knower and the known to be known
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 Pleiade, 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 himselfj 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
95
D ’Aubigne's first identification, in the poem pro
per, is with Hannibal crossing the Alps (Miseres, 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 nuict les
feux pour guides" (Miseres, 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 a 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 doree, 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 pleu 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 Papai might, it can he said of him,
as Max Weher 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 Mlseres, 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 toj it
was disobedience, a repudiation of the word. D'Aubigne's
criticism was frequently voiced as a prophecyeven 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. xx.
100,..-
Ibid., p. xxi.
' ' ' ^ ■ ' ' A s 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
104
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
106
shock, to stir his listener. Divinely 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.
103
Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, II, 272.
104Ibid., pp. 361, 412. 105Ibid., p. 350.
106
Regarding this prophetic technique, see Von Rad,
ibid., II, 38. As for d'Aubigne, he says, in the Avis aux
lecteurs that zeal has perished, that he wants to "esmou-
voir" Cl> 3), and refers to himself as having "un esprit
igne 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
107
shadow. "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
Pleiade poets. D'Aubigne 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
* * 108
"se desnature," is a "monde a l'envers," that corre
sponds to the vision of Isaiah:
Behold, Jehovah maketh the earth empty,
and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside
* i
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:
"La ou l'effroi des braves camps, ... ," "La l'enfant
attend le soldat, ... ," "La l'enseigne volait en
vain ..." (193-216).
^^Mi seres, 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'Aubigne'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 (Miseres,
372-427); throughout the work it penetrates reality meta
phorically and substantially, as we shall see."^*"1 This
penetration, the dramatic shock of the encounter of man's
deeds and God's reaction explodes, as in the Bible, within
109
xu My italics.
^■^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'Aubigne*s "Les Tragigues",
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 devorantes (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 (Miseres, 893, 902-16).
In Numbers we find:
Whosoever toucheth a dead person, the body of a
man that hath died, and purifieth 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 doree, 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:
Terre, qui sur ton dos porte a p e i n e ' * ' ' * ' ' * ' 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'Aubigne's imagery, his grasp of reality, is pos
sibly more concrete, and certainly more fleshly, than that
of the Pleiade; his aim, however, is not to triumph over
• * • • * • • * • "A peine" = avec peine.
119
Henri Weber, in La Creation poetique, 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
Pleiade 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'Aubigne'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
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 "theologien" to Vengeances alone. Sauerwein
equates "theologien" 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 poetique, II, 611 )j this is also
the subject of Roth Grob's dissertation: "Studien zu den
Tragiques des Agrippa d'Aubigne" (Zurich, 1942). However,
neither analyzes the concrete yet unrealistic or irrational
imagery used to effect the reversal from the standpoint of
Biblical theology.
117
D'Aubigne's "Les Tragiques", pp. 202-03. He
points out also that the work "begins and ends in the
figure of God" (p. 212).
118
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 Miseres, 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 Pleiade convention,
for a new path, he races across a landscape composed of his
past poetic works to place himself squarely "La ou estoyent
les feux des prophetes 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 TT 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 cinematically 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'Aubigne is
115
his own as poet, prophet, and contemporary witness. Within
three hundred and thirty-five lines of Miseres (89-424), he
flashes from one metaphorical image of Prance 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 concepts 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 Pleiade 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'Aubigne, on the other hand, not only sees
attempting to do.
120Miseres, 97-130, 131-162, 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'Aubigne1s 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"
(Miseres, 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 a l'histoire et a la pensee hebraique
leur sens veritable, les prophetes cachaient, du
meme coup, le fragment absolu de ce sens. Ils ne
pouvaient le decouvrir qu'en eux-memes, en une ex
perience 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, Bioqraphia Literaria, I, 202.
J.P2 * '
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'Aubigne 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 liej 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
1
D'AUBIGNfi’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 l'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 prophete qui s'installe hardiment dans le mer-
veilleux Chretien." 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-
gical, 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
4
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.
4
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-
g
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.
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 Pleiade 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 Prance, 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
men."'*"'*' Ezekiel saw Israel as a peopie 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 idolators
with filth, is one that d'Aubigne will exploit to the
■^Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, II, 225.
11Ibid., p. 229. 12Ibid., p. 224.
124
fullest. France is a "terre sanguinaire" who, heedless of
God, is driven to Catholic idolatry (Miseres, 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'Aubigne1s 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
14
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.
(xxs 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" (Miseres, 804).
As for the elect, the fire lighted at the stake purifies:
"Les feux qui vous brusloyent vous ont rendu candides"
13
In Miseres, 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 (xxxviixl-
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 doree, 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)x
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 x
15Ibid., p. 222.
"^Ezekiel i:4ff., xslff.
126
Monte dessus le dos des Cherubins mouvans,
II vole droit, guinde 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 ’Aubigne 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, 0 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.
18Ibid., 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 Perigord: 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 alpne can bring,
result in an assurance that rings out through d'Aubigne's
work whenever he speaks of his co-religionaries.
^Jeremiah xx:14-18. 22Miseres, 257-60.
23Ibid., 261-66.
128
24
half-killed and left to die of their wounds. Horror and
pity turn to anger:
Mes cheveux estonnez herissent en ma testej
J'appelle Dieu pour juge, & tout haut je deteste
Les violeurs de paix, les perfides parfaicts,
Qui d'une salle cause amenent tels effects.
(Miseres, 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,
24Ibid., 367-424. 25Fers, 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'oell,
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 Traqiques.
One is the prophet's feeling for the land, his preference
26
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
Tragigues 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 (Miseres, 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" (Miseres, 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 Tragigues", 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 1'ire allumee & les verges de Dieu.
(Miseres, 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.
OQ
The Old Testament, p. 513.
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 I'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 changes en avides morsures.
(Miseres, 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 (vi:l-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 beniras;
Puante31 jusqu'au ciel, l'oeil de Dieu te deteste,
II attache a ton dos la devorante peste,
Et le glaive & la faim, dont il fera mourir
Ta jeunesse & ton nom pour tout jamais perir
30
This threat appears frequently in Jeremiah:
xiv:12, xxi:9, xxix:17, xxxii:24, xxxviii:2, etc.
^■'■"Puante" modifies "Hierusalem."
134
Sous toy, Hierusalem meurtriere, revoltee.
Hierusalem qui es Babel ensanglantee.
(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'Aubigne as he in France,
like Jeremiah in his day, witnessed the fall of his nation
to the "idolators." 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 s 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:l-2)
In his theological vision, as in Jeremiah's, the land is
"^Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, II, 147ff.
136
ravaged and devoured (i:7), even reduced to chaos (xxiv:l);
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" (lxii:ll), 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'Aubigne 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.
QQ
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-
39
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 (is 21) 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 acere 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" (16), and in conclusion:
... vous donnez tel lustre a 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
39Ibid■, p. 149.
^9The 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-
42
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 a longs traits dans leurs couppes dorees
Sue, laict, sang & sueurs des vefves esploreesj
Leur barbe s'en parfume, & aux fins du repas,
Yvres, vont degouttant cette horreur contre bas.
De si aspres forfaicts l'odeur n'est point si forte
Qu'ils ne facent dormir leur conscience morte
Sur des matras enflez du poil des orphelinsj
De ce piteux duvet leurs oreillers sont plains.
(213-20)
D'Aubigne 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)j "Deliver my
soul from the sword, / My darling from the power of the
dog" (Psalms xxii:20).
43
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 a la celeste 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
Yahweh,44 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:
45
The burden of Babylon, which Isaiah the son of
Amoz did see.
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 massS,
meaning a lifting up of the voice, or oracle, but which was
construed to mean a heavy lot.
46 -
According to Pedersen, the verb ra'a, to see,
140
Set ye up an ensign upon the bare 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:l-3)
D'Aubigne, though inspired and commanded by God, does not
transcribe any dialogues nor deliver any direct communiques
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 done" (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 Miseres, the poet, speaking of the "bande meurtriere"
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.
^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!"
Protestants, asks this question:
141
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,
II marche a 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. Relying heavily on Deuteronomy xxviii and Psalms
48
cxxxvii, d'Aubigne has God speak directly to the evildoers
and idolators, 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
Isaiahs
48
The Garnier-Plattard edition points this out in a
note to lines 223 and 264.
I -JJ, I,IIWT.V1-. ‘ >f'; I T
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*
Voici marcher de rang par la porte doree,
L'enseigne d*Israel dans le ciel arboree,
Les vainqueurs de Sion qui au prix de leur sang
Portans l'escharpe blanche ont pris le caillou blanc:
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:
Haissez les meschans, l’exil vous sera doux;
Vous estes bannis d’eux, banissez-les de vous*
Vous estes enferres* ce qui plus vous console,
L'ame, le plus de vous, ou elle veut s'envolle.
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 j s i. 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 a 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 s
Venez, race du ciel, venez esleus du Perej
Vos peches sont esteints, le Juge est vostre frere;
Venez done, 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
50
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 "l'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, o vous ames celestes;
Car vous vous referez de vos piteuses restes;
Resjouissez-vous done, corps gueris de mespris,
Heureux vous reprendrez vos plus heureux esprits.
Vous voulustes, esprits, & le ciel & l'air fendre
Pour aux corps prepares 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,
Elies 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 passion.52
(1202-03)
In d'Aubigne's vision of Judgment Day, as in Jewish apoca-
53
lyptic, time gets "stuck together"; the past, present and
51
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 lxv: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, l'ame s'enfuit, & reprenant son lieu
Extatique se pasme au giron de son Dieu.54
(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 Covenant:
For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth;
and the former things shall not be remembered,
nor come into mind.
(lxv: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 a Dieu quelque chose d'une presence charnelle,
de la plenitude accueillante d'une mere ou d'une femme
aimee." La Creation poetique, II, 642.
• 55
The Calvinist considered it to be a promise of
what the New Testament was to affirm.
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.
(lxvi:22)
In Isaiah, the earth reels and is shattered (xxiv:19-20),
both heaven and earth are cleansed of evil and recreated
(lxvsl7). 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 .as 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 poictrinej
La l!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'Aubigne's vast debt to Revelation
p /•
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,
57
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
60
dependent on God's purpose. Isaiah also puts forth the
radical concept, which is woven throughout the structure of
the Tragigues, that it is Yahweh himself who will bring
about the downfall of his people while at the same time
61
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.
59Ibid., p. 162. 60Ibid., p. 160.
61Ibid., p. 154.
149
62
Isaiah: God destroys and saves at the same time.
6 3
Isaiah's basic moderation, the comforting message
that faith comes from "rest," from "quietness and in confi-
64 . . . • „
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 Tragigues 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,
62Ibid., p. 164. 63Ibid., p. 147.
CL A
"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).
65Von Rad underscores this aspect of Isaiah's pro
phecy: Old Testament Theology, II, 175.
150 ’
66
as Sauerwein has explained, used a system of cross-
references for interpretations 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'Aubigne'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'Aubigne's interwoven skein of
Biblical sources. What stands out as being inspired by
Ezekiel is d'Aubigne'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'Aubigne's feelings
and personal involvement— whether in tenderness or in
66
D'Aubigne's "Les Tragigues", 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 Tragigues
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 Tragigues 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
6 7
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
6 7
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,
1965), p. 15.
*
152
Ezekiel (ii:l-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 martyred:
Je ne t'oublieray pas, o ame bien heureusel
Je tireray ton nom de la nuict tenebreuse;
Ton martyre secret, ton exemple cache
Sera par mes escrits des ombres arrache.
(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 Piscours des Miseres 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 guels predicans, &
C. Q
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.
68
All of these poems are in vol. XI of the
Laumonier edition.
t
153
69
Du Bartas' Judit (1574) recreates the Biblical and
historical moment, but the work remains a mosaic of Hebraic
material and decor set into the matrix of the poet's own
encyclopedic and highly mythological idiom;^ in short, the
drama of Judith and Holofernes is played in a sixteenth-
century landscape. Another poet, the Catholic Garnier, 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 "tendret1 ’:
Jusques a quand, Seigneur, epandras-tu ton^ire?
Jusqu'a quand voudras-tu ton peuple aime detruire?
L'infortune Juda, que tu as tant cheri,
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.
71
Maurice Gras, Robert Garnier, son art et sa methode
(Geneva, 1965), p. 58.
^ Ibid., pp. 116-17.
*
154
Que tu as quarante ans par les deserts nourri,
Comme un enfant tendret que sa nourrice allaite,
Et ores en rigueur ta dure main la traitte?73
(1.1-6)
Further on, the introductory "Hal" is reminiscent of the
"woe," "shame," "Ah!," the "malheur a vous" that frequently
introduce the Biblicai prophetic reproach or threat:
Ha! chetive Sion, jadis si florissante,
Tu sens ores de Dieu la dextre punissante!
L'onde de Siloe court sanglante, et le mur
De ses tours est brise par les armes d'Assur.
Ton terroir plantureux n’est plus que solitude.
Tu vas languir captive en triste servitude.
(1.61-66)
D'Aubigne concludes Miseres with a prayer which also deals
with God's vengeance and also asks the question "how
long?":
"Tu vois, juste vengeur, les fleaux 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 a 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 gueris,
Qui donnes vie & mort, qui tue & qui nourris?"
(1273-76, 1289-96)
The passages quoted from Garnier rely heavily on Jeremiah,
73
Robert Garnier, Les Juifves, ed. Marcel Hervier
(Paris, 1964). All citations are taken from this edition.
155
74
Lamentations, and the Psalms; the critical apparatus of
the Garnier-Plattard edition of the Tragigues 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'Aubigne's Hebraism is less consciously
imitative, less a formula than Garnier's. He is not living
in the legendary past as Garnier 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 Fagiiet recognized, "le plus
76
actuel des hommes," with much of what we would now call
the existential outlook of the prophets. Garnier is more
77
superficially Biblical, his epic style— an oratorical
style— is noble, but does not even attempt to go beyond a
78
moralizing, sometimes moving rhetoric; d'Aubigne, like
74
See the critical apparatus of the Hervier edition.
Garnier 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.
7 6
Emile Faguet, Seizieme siecle: etudes litteraires
(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'Aubigne.
77 * -
Henri Weber, La Creation poetigue, II, 705.
78
Gras maintains that rhetoric and moralizing are
what counted with Garnier. Garnier, p. 7.
156
the Biblical writers, is more lyrical than oratorical.
Garnier'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
Tragigues 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'Aubigne'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 agez
Tombent sans nul esgard, pesle-mesle esgorgez.
Le sang, le feu, le fer coule, flambe, resonnej
On entend maint tabour, mainte trompette sonne.
Tout est jonche de morts, l'ennemy sans pitie
Meurtrist ce qu'il rencontre et le foule du pie.
(11.749-54)
In d'Aubigne's description of the St. Bartholomew massacre
there is none of Garnier'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.
79Ibid., p. 126.
157
The following excerpt, though devoid in this case of any
Biblical imagery or allusions, nevertheless illustrates one
of d'Aubigne'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 cache en l'eauj
Ses cheveux, arrestans le premier precipice,
Levent 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 aime, qui traine encor en vie,
Ce qu'attend 1'autre sein pour chere compagnie.
Aussi voy-je mener le mari condamne,
Perce de trois poignards aussi tost qu'amene,
Et puis pousse en bas, ou sa moitie pendue
Receut 1'aide de lui qu'elle avoit attendue:
Car ce corps en tombant des deux bras l'empoigna,
Avec sa douce prise accouple se baigna,
Trois cens precipites, 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’Aubigne sees the material and the spiritual as part of
the same reality. Garnier transports a story from our re
ligious heritage into the present; d'Aubigne 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 aisne Jacob, fortifie ma dextre:
Affin que ceste nuit d'une vigueur adextre
Elle puisse egorger ce prince audacieus, Q2
Qui pour te desceptrer veut escheler les cieus."
(VI.122-26)
Raymond, commenting on the distinction between d'Aubigne
and Du Bartas, says that the latter "par scrupule lit-
teraire, n'avait pas ose 'deposseder' tout a fait la
80 « •
La Creation poetique, I, 538.
81
Raymond, L'Influence de Ronsard, Part II, 289.
^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 beautes moulees
"Sur le moule plus beau des plus belles idees.'"
(135-38)
159
- 83
mythologie; d'Aubigne, lui, voit Dieu et ses Anges."
In the final analysis, it is Ronsard, the satiric
84
poet of the two Piscours, the Remonstrance, and the Res-
ponce that affords the most solid basis of comparison with
d'Aubigne. 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-
87
tionalism and both sides see red. Gustave Cohen, com
menting on the opening lines of the Continuation des Dis
cours, says:
ft 3
L'Influence de Ronsard, Part II, 325. On page 321
he states that d'Aubigne 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 exerce une influence efficace sur d'Aubigne qui ecoute
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'Aubigne, and Hugo. Ronsard, p. 188.
85
Or almost. Opinion, for instance, is born of the
union of Jupiter and Presumption. Discours des Miseres de
ce Temps, 127-36.
^Raymond, L'Influence de Ronsard, II, 380-81.
87
Cohen, Ronsard, p. 192.
160
A ces accents l'on reconnait le prototype
d'Agrippa d'Aubigne, qui n'eut pas su decrire les
Miseres de la France dans les Tragigues, si Ronsard,
qu'il connut, de son propre aveu, familierement et
qu'il connut davantage par ses ecrits, ne le lui
avait appris. Ainsi l'arme forgee par Ronsard lui
sera reprise des mains par l'adversaire pour servir
contre son propre parti.88
While we question whether or not d'Aubigne would have been
able to write Miseres 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'Aubigne? 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.
^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 Createur, 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'Aubigne's. In the prayer that
concludes the first Piscours, 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 (0 Seigneur Dieu), si les cruelz destins
Nous veullent saccager par la main des mutins,
Donne que hors des poings eschape l'alumelle
De ceux qui soutiendront la mauvaise querelle
Donne que les serpens des hideuzes Fureurs
Agitent leurs cerveaux de Paniques terreurs.
Donne qu'en plain midy le jour leur semble trouble,
Donne que pour un coup ilz en sentent un double,
Donne que la poussiere 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 modej as such it finds no echo in the either/or
approach of d'Aubigne. 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 benirons-nous" (1284); as
162
go
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 a juger leurs miseres;
Ton oreille soit sourde en oyant leurs prieres;
Ton sein ferre soit clos aux pitiez, aux pardons;
Ta main seche, sterile aux bienfaicts & aux dons.
"Ils crachent vers la lune & les voutes celestes:
N'ont-ils plus de foudre & de feux & de pestes?
Ne partiront jamais du throsne ou tu te sieds
Et la mort & l'enfer qui dorment a tes pieds?
"Leve ton bras de fer, haste tes pieds de laine,
Venge ta patience en I'aigreur de la peine,
Frappe du ciel Babel: les cornes de son front
Desfigurent la terre & lui ostent son rondl"
(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'Aubigne 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
go ^
Sauerwein notes this distinction, D 'Aubigne's
"Les Tragigues", p. 56.
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 trone 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 evilj
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 sight! . . . that
justify the wicked for a bribe, and take away the
righteousness of the righteous from him!
(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 process 1'injustice
Est principe de droict; comme au monde a l'envers
Le vieil pere est fouette 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 a l'ancan preschez:
Si qu'au lieu de la roue, au lieu de la sentence,
La peine du forfaict se change en recompense.
(Miseres, 233-42)
165
Ronsard, in the Discours, describes the effects of the mon
ster, Opinion:
Ce monstre arme le fils contre son propre pere,
Et le frere (o malheur) arme contre son frere,
L'escollier se desbauche, & de sa faux tortue
Le laboureur fagonne une dague pointue,
Une pique guerriere il fait de son rateau
Et l'acier de son coultre il change en couteau.
Morte est 1'autorite: chacun vit a sa guise
Au vice desreigle la licence est permise,
Le desir, 1'avarice, & I'erreur incense
Ont sans-dessus-dessoubs le monde renverse.
(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 incense," 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'Aubigne resemble each
other more than either one resembles the Biblical passage;
however, d'Aubigne 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 Prance
speaks to Ronsard in a vision, complaining that the exis
tence of Geneva and her rebellious inhabitants have reduced
her to her present powerless and impoverished condition
(319-44). D'Aubigne, 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'Aubigne'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: "C1!] va 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 Tragigues, 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'Aubigne 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'Aubigne's
prophetic either/or approach from Ronsard's essential
reasonableness. The former either praises unreservedly or
excoriates mercilessly. It is impossible to imagine
d'Aubigne'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
Preface, d'Aubigne sententiously proclaims that he pities
his enemies, that upon portraying them he has " ... pour
eux gemi: / Car qui veut garder la iustice, / II 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 (Piscours, 195-96). Ronsard does
not see the Huguenots as sinners, however rebellious they
may be; to him they are "pauvres incenses" (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
Responce, 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
supplication:
... race, je te supplie,
Ne t'incense jamais apres telle folye:
En relisant ces vers, je te pry' de penser
Qu'en Saxe je l'ay veue en mes jours coxnmencer,
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 alumee,
Comme un tyzon de feu se consume en fumee.
(1167-76)
D'Aubigne 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'Aubigne 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 Miseres, d'Aubigne wilfully
94
Fisch, Jerusalem and Albion, p. 108.
170
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 Piscours nor in the earlier Hymne de la Justice (1555),
which Jean Frappier calls a "hymne theologique dans un
96
cadre humaniste." Despite its abundance of Biblical re
ferences which, again according to Frappier, "s'ajoutent
v 97
sans heurt aux sources paiennes," there is none of the
uneven illumination that is so characteristic of the Old
Testament view of reality;99 "tout y parait d'une clarte
99
egale." 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'Aubigne'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'Aubigne's Biblical variation on this theme imposes the
95
LI. 59-65.
96
"L'Inspiration biblique et theologique de Ronsard
dans 1'Hymne de la Justice," pp. 97-108 in Melanges d'his-
toire litteraire de la renaissance offerts a Henri Chamard,
by Jean Frappier, et al. (Paris, 1959), p. 104.
97Ibid., 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'Aubigne'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'Aubigne'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'Aubigne 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'Aubigne's entire dramatic sermon.
PART II
2
D'AUBIGNE'S WAY OF KNOWING:
CLEANLINESS AND FILTH
What d'Aubigne 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'Aubigne is relatively little concerned with Cal
vinist theological dogma as such in the Tragiques;1
1At 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'Aubigne 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-
3
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, |_wasj part of creation." Thus God's revela
tion to man is both subjective and objective, and this
5
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'Aubigne's "Les Tragiques", p. 13 and
note 49. One could state for d'Aubigne, as dpes 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 a la pure cognoissance de soymesme iusques
a ce qu'il ait contemple la face^de Dieu, et que du regard
d'icelle il descende a regarder a soy." Calvin, Institu
tion, I, 51.
4Edward A. Dowey, The Knowledge of God in Calvin's
Theology (New York, 1952), p. 50.
5 IbM.
174
0
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'Aubigne 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'Aubigne,
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:
" ... separe-moy de moi; / D'un salnct enthousiasme appelle
aux cieux 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 cieux
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
7
his "being alive," and life consists in knowing God, in
being in relationship with him. Now, this concept is cen
tral to d'Aubigne'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 latter'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’Aubigne 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, ... ," "0 pieges dangereux ..."
fVengeances, 737, 739]), and not as tolerant of man's
8 « -
frailty and his passions as the Israelite, d ’Aubigne 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
0
Fisch, Jerusalem and Albion, p. 94.
g
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'Aubigne's awareness of Calvin's theological tenets, we
believe Fisch's statement holds true for d'Aubigne'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
spite his identification with the chosen people.
D'Aubigne, 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 egale-
ment preschee a tout le monde, et mesme ou elle est
preschee, n'est pas egalement receue de tous, en
ceste diversite il apparoit un secret admirable du
jugement de Dieu. Car il n'y a nulle doute que
ceste variete ne serve a son bon plaisir. Or si
c'est chose evidente 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 resoudre, qu'en enseignant les fideles de
ce qu'ils doyvent tenir de 1'election et predesti
nation de Dieu.
Following the lead of Pauline theology, Calvin separates
12
covenant love and covenant obligationj 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’Aubigne 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 a 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 lasse les poings de la gent ennemie,
Noye l'ardeur des feux, seche le cours des eaux,
Emousse tous les fers, use 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 he awakened:
15
Que le doigt qui esmeut cet endormi prophete
Resveille en moy le bien qu'a demi je souhaite,
Le zele qui me fait du fer de verite
Fascher avec Sathan le fils de vanite.
(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-
16
tween God and his people." First among such words is
17
hesed, loving kindness or covenant love, which is also
15t
Jonas.
16
Muilenburg, Wav of Israel, p. 59.
17
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'Aubigne dramatically shows in a bitter struggle with the
covenant of death; the Tragiques is a battle of absolutes,
of aliness 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, Way 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
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 Traqigues empha
size the condition of the physical as a sign either of psy
chic and spiritual wholeness or of dissolutionj 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 Miseres, 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 doree 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.
22Pedersen, Israel, III-IV, 347.
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
referred to by d'Aubigne in the Tragigues, 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.
24
Sigmund Mowinckel, The Psalms in Israel's Worship,
trans. D. R. Ap-Thomas (2 vols.j 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
20
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'Aubigne relies extensively on this technique. In
Miseres, 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
doree, 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 veue;
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. 146.
^ 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 arreste
Adore en fremissant sa haute Majeste.
(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 lxxviii,
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 Tragigues, 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.
the Old Testament, it is structurally basic to the entire
work, swinging from man's earthly woes in Miseres to the
eclectic activity of God's will at work in Jugement. This
dramatic, frequently simultaneous, and vitally physical in
volvement between mutually 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'Aubigne 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'Aubigne's comment transforms this into a path to
salvation:
Vraye trace du ciel, beau tapis,^beau chemin,
A qui veut emporter la couronne a la fin:
Les pieds devienent coeur, l'ame du ciel apprise
Fait mespriser les sens, quand le ciel les mesprise.
(143-46)
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-
niere ga bas, mais princesse la haut" (215). As a prophet
and the incarnation of historical memory,^ d'Aubigne 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.
^Preface, 308. ^ Fers, 755.
Miseres, 747 and Fers, 206.
^See the Garnier-Platt.ard note to Miseres, 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'irrite contre Dieu est frappe 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-literal 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'Aubigne'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'Aubigne 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 doree, 87j
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: "0 quels coeurs tu engendresl o 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 voller
Porta le nom de Dieu & aux coeurs vint parler;
Leurs regards violens engraverent leurs zeles
Aux coeurs des assistans hors-mis des infideles.
(511-14)
The martyr, Montalchine, 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 idolators, gnash their teeth in anger and frustration
189
as they did in Old Testament times. In Vengeances alone,
for example, "qui ne fremit au son des tonnerres grondans /
Fremira quelque jour d'un grincement de dents" (71-72);
Cain 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
"l'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 Miseres, 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
36
of the word. Already, in the Old Testament, eyes reveal
37
the soul; in the lengthy presentation, in La Chambre
36
Hebrew Thought, p. 56.
37
Pedersen, Israel, I-II, 175.
190
doree, 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
- ■ 38
qualities by the emphasis d'Aubigne 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'Aubigne 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" fMiseres, 902]), and the
dead are, of course, unclean, in the Old Testament sense.
38 -
In the chapter he devotes to d'Aubigne 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.
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
40
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 a ton faux chef branslant de toutes parts,
Et, desployant en l'air ta perruque grisonne,
Les pais tous esmeus de pestes empoisonne,
Tes crins esparpillez, par charmes herissez,
Envoyent leurs esprits ou 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'Aubigne'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'Aubigne's interest in the occult, see
the article of Robert Griffin, "Agrippa d'Aubigne 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)
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 doree, 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 doree, 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 acharnes des affames mutins" (Fers, 679).
God's finger, in La Chambre doree, 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 (1129).^ The finger of God
moves and awakens those who are spiritually asleep (Ven
geances, 101) and takes revenge on those who interfere with
41
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 Tracriques, the struggle be
tween cleanliness and filth— and the associated concepts—
is the concrete expression by which d'Aubigne 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-
ing. The Old Testament is persistent m 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
AO
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.
(lxiv: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 43
diseases and there is no soundness in my flesh.
(xxxviii:3, 5, 7)
Here, spiritual weakness is linked to stench and the un
cleanliness of disease; the sick person, like the fearful,
44
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:
4^This citation is the King James version; the
American Standard Edition (1901) euphemistically uses
"loathsome" to replace "stink" in verse 5.
44
Mowinckel, The Psalms, I, 240.
45Ibid., 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 xx: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, 0 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 a ses yeux clairs estre net, pur & blanc,
N'avoir tache d'orgueil, de rapine & de sang:
Car nul n'heritera les hauts cieux desirables
Que ceux-la qui seront a ces petits semblables,
Sans fiel & sans venim; ... 47
(Vengeances, 43-47)
In Miseres, 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 sucgans 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 doree, 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]
blasphement contre Dieu" (Feux, 1367-68). Even victory at
the long drawn-out battie 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 & 1'ame empuantie
Partagerent, sortans de l'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
changees" (La Chambre doree, 93). At the Saint Bartholo
mew, the Seine
... des poisons du siecle a ses deux chantiers pleine,
Tient plus de sang que d'eau; son flot se rend caille.
(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'Aubigne 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 diedj 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:20-21)
Recalling these plagues, d'Aubigne refers to this directly
in Vengeances:
Eaux qui devinstes 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.
(xxxviii:l, 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
^Pedersen, Israel, III-IV, 620.
50
Mowinckel, The Psalms, II, 2.
! 203
them (Miseres, 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 a coups de traits de la vive lumiere,
Crever 1'enfle Pithon au creux de sa tasniere,
Je veux ouvrir au vent l'Averne vicieux,
Qui d'air empoisonne 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 "l'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-
51
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 ’Aubigne 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
51
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
finally becomes gangrenous (475-76). The Inquisition is a
Spanish poison racing throughout Europe, its servants
poison both spirit and soul (La Chambre doree, 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'Aubigne, reality, the primary meaning, and the metaphor
are fused:
Un gros de vers & de poux l'attaque & le consomme.
La terre qui eut honte esventa tous les creux
Ou elle avoit les vers, l'air lui creva les yeux;
Lui-mesme se pourrit & sa peau fut changee
En bestes, dont la chair de dessous fut mangee;
Somme, au lieu de ce corps idolatre de tous,
Demeurent ses habits un gros amas de poux,
Tout regrouille 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 wastej 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'Aubigne distinguishes between whiteness and that which is
pale. In La Chambre doree, Pity is "blanche," not pale
(55), for pallor is associated with iife-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)j whereas Fear has a "paslissante veue"
(506). In Feux, d'Aubigne 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 enfles 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 Mi seres (440) and in Fers (1292). Death
itself is seen as pallid. The tautology is apparent only;
d'Aubigne 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 l'estonne, affoiblit le plus fort,
Pour donner au meurtrier par son couteau la mort.
(Fers, 1145-48)
In the opening lines of Juqement, the poet asks God to
lodge "le pasle effroy, la damnable terreur / Dans le sein
qui te hait & qui loge l'erreur" (3-4); what God wants is
... que son image en nos coeurs soit empreinte,
Estre craint par amour & non aime par crainte;
II hait la pasle peur d'esclaves fugitifs,
II 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
Tragigues. D'Aubigne incessantly qualifies things, people,
actions, and ideas with the adjectives "loathsome," "stink-
52 ■ •
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'Aubigne 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 a 1'instant
Qu’un Roy devient infect, un flatteur quant & quant
Croist, a l'envi du mal, une orde menterie.
(157-61)
As for the king's council:
5?
Infect, puant, ord, or sale, pourri, and corrompu.
D'Aubigne'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 mesle de putains & g a r g o n s 5 3
Qui, doublans & triplans en nouvelles fagons
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 effeminite Henry
III who tries to conceal the "orde volupte" with which he
has polluted both his renown and his life (806, 808).
D'Aubigne 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 l'heberger,
N'ayant muet tesmoin de ses noires ordures
Que les impures nuicts & les couches impures.
(934-36)
And finally:
Degenere Henri, hypocrite bigot,
Qui aime moins jouer le Roy que le cagot,
Tes prestres par la rue a grands troupes conduicts
N'ont pourtant pu celer 1'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 crarcon 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'essayerent 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; " ... la mit a
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 parfume pour sa joue.
(397-98)
That which is unclean is also associated with
stench, as in the foregoing citation, and d'Aubigne 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' .
(Princes, 201-02)
Nor can the blood of murder be concealed, by artifice, by
strewing the ground with flowers, for " ... ces fleurs
secheront, & le sang recele / Sera puant au nez, non aux
yeux revele" (215-16). It is useless to try to conceal sin
"mieux vaut a descouvert monstrer 1'infection / Avec sa
puanteur & sa punition" (1093-94). D'Aubigne 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 doree, 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,
Profiterent 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 cruautes fussent ensevelies," " ..
que nos ordes vies / N'eussent empuanti le nez de l'estran-
ger!" (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 l'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 benirasj
Puante jusqu'au ciel, l'oeil de Dieu te deteste,
il attache a ton dos la devorante peste,
Et le glaive & la faim, dont il fera mourir
Ta jeunesse & ton nom pour tout jamais perir
Sous toy, Hierusalem meurtriere, revoltee,
Hierusalem qui es Babel ensanglantee.
(265-72)
The world of the Tragigues 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 a leur bon heur je rende.
II 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 "l'air corrupteur n'a plus sa corrompante
haleine" (1004). The resurrected bodies of the elect have
put on the new man:
Purs en subjects tres 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 apocalypse1
which rescues the "captive Eglise" (Miseres, 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" (Juqement, 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:ll)
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 Language 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 Pleiade 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'Aubigne recognized time itself as the
content-filled element in which the self was engaged, the
area of its meeting with God. The Pleiade 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'Aubigne, 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-
4
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
4
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
5
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.
5
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.
In L'Influence de Ronsard, Raymond says, speaking of
d 'Aubigne's works: "Autant qu'elles different de celles
d'autrui, ses productions different entre elles" (Part II,
214). Since the Hebraic factor plays such a prominent role
in distinguishing d'Aubigne from other poets of his era, it
could be that same factor which gives unity and a focal
point to all of his poetry and that would explain another
comment of Raymond's: "Aux vers de d'Aubigne, toujours
pendent quelques gouttes de sang." Genies, p. 78.
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Core Title Agrippa D'Aubigne'S Les 'Tragiques': The Conquest Of Profaned Time

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Advisor Knodel, Arthur J. (committee chair), Belle, Rene F. (committee member), Berkey, Max Leslie, Jr. (committee member), Tufte, Virginia James (committee member)

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Dmrecord 391419

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Crosby, Virginia

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA