Beginning in the early French Renaissance, humanist grammarians, philosophers, and literary thinkers translated Latin works about globes into the newly emerging French vernacular language. For the first time in the history of early modern French literature, highly speculative mysticism about the nature of globes entered French poetry and prose.
French humanists who translated the works on globes by the Dominican mystic Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64) in particular transferred long-standing traditions about globes into France, particularly his late work The Bowling Game (De ludo globi, 1462), as a domain of speculation about the relation between the finite and the infinite. By tracing the globe through Nicholas’s works into the early French Renaissance, I show that early and later sixteenth-century French humanist works occupy an important but understudied place in Renaissance French literary history. In particular, I show how works by Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples (1450–1536) and Charles de Bovelles (1475–1566), as well as by Erasmus (1469–1536) and Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549), established an important period of reflection on globes that continued to exert influence on the French Renaissance literary tradition through to the later sixteenth century, as we see, for instance, in Maurice Scève’s (1501–64) Microcosme (1562).
A globe is a three-dimensional figure with a particular rotational character. The globe rotates around a potentially infinite number of different diameters, but it will remain fixed and immobile in its identity as a geometrical figure. For Nicholas of Cusa and later thinkers, this rotational character represents a variety of different ideas. For instance, the globe can potentially have an infinite number of diameters that are all different in angle, but the globe contains and unites all these potential diameters in one form that remains identical to itself. Insofar as the globe relates infinite multiplicity to unity, it represents a microcosm of the cosmos in general. Through its spherical form, the globe signifies the way divine infinity inhabits its relation to the multiplicity of finite beings in the created world. Most importantly here, mystical thinkers used the ancient figure of the infinite sphere to illustrate God’s simultaneous presence and absence in created matter. As I will show, Renaissance mystical humanists and reformers who opposed Roman Catholic church practices laid special emphasis on the idea that the globe’s rotational yet stationary character unites the finite and the infinite, and that it therefore illustrates God’s ubiquitous nature.
The ancient theological thesis concerning God’s ubiquity revolves around the problem of God’s infinity and how it can be conceptualized as an infinite totality containing all finite and created beings, but without itself being identical to those creatures. The globe’s capacity to remain identical to itself, but also to host an infinite number of possible diameters arranged along different axes, is one way the globe illustrates how God’s ubiquitous nature is paradoxical: on one hand, God is both present within the multiplicity of created natural phenomena, while on the other hand, He absolutely transcends the finite world and remains identical to Himself. How does God maintain His identity as infinite, yet contain finite beings within Himself? Is God the sum of all things in creation, or does He stand outside creation?
The figure of the globe became important in early modern French philosophical thought through the influence of Nicholas of Cusa, who was a German Roman Catholic cardinal, philosopher, mathematician, ecclesiologist, and cartographer.1 As Karsten Harries has shown, Nicholas’s ideas about globes marked a new moment in the history of medieval and early modern Aristotelian science, through its tense encounter with Ptolemaic and Hermetic cosmologies. In Harries’s view, the Copernican scientific revolution, which marked a shift from a geocentric model of the universe to a heliocentric one, had its roots in an early modern tradition that was both mystical and scientific. According to this argument, the emergence of modern scientific cosmology stemmed partly from developments in the mystical tradition as well as from innovations in modern scientific method. In particular, Harries suggests, medieval and early modern Dominican speculative theology, for which Nicholas is a monumental figure, contributed significantly to this exploration of perspective in its relation to infinity. Harries’s study clarifies the role of medieval and early modern Dominican thought about globes, perspective, and infinity in the medieval traditions preceding the development of modern cosmology in the period around 1547. Harries’s work provides an example for studying globes between the disciplinary boundaries of religion and science, and for the way early modern mystical speculation contributed to the emergence of what the seventeenth century later came to understand as modern science.
We can better understand the importance of globes for French Renaissance philosophy and literature by focusing on the way French Renaissance thinkers such as Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples and Charles de Bovelles turned to Nicholas’s philosophy in speculating about the relation between the infinite and the finite, and the globe’s potential for articulating that relation. More specifically, Lefèvre and Bovelles used Nicholas’s mystical thought to reassert the ancient doctrine about God’s lack of resemblance (nulla proportione) to finite creation.2 The mystical thesis concerning God’s simultaneous presence and absence in nature is a doctrine of “no proportion” that insists on the separation between divine and worldly powers. In this view, the infinite and the finite have no proportion with each other; they are fundamentally incommensurable. However, this thesis does not preclude—and, indeed, vigorously maintains—that the divine and the worldly do nonetheless share permeable boundaries with one another. This doctrine was transmitted through the works of Pseudo-Dionysius into those of Nicholas of Cusa, then into the French Renaissance. It was articulated through the figure of the globe, because the globe puts into question the stable identity of totalities.
In developing the doctrine of “no proportion,” Nicholas showed how the idea of nothingness serves to mediate between the finite and the infinite. Following Nicholas, Lefèvre and Bovelles used the idea of nothingness as an intermediary category between divine being and worldly finitude. Bovelles’s idea of nothingness, which the Latin language designates with the word nihilo, draws on a concept of double negation to assert the absence but also the presence of proportion between the finite and the infinite. In other words, while the doctrine of no proportion insists on God’s absence from any specific location in space and time, it does nonetheless admit the possibility that a point of contact exists between the finite and the infinite. How does this idea of nothingness relate to the globe?
It does so, through structural similarities, to two different but interrelated concepts, both of which pertain to the globe. First, as Pierre Magnard has shown, the word nihilo etymologically refers to the same root word and concept that underlies the traditional allegorical figures of the kernel and the shell, the marrow and the bone: it signifies the husk surrounding a kernel, which itself refers to the vital force or energy of life. This association between the word nihilo and the idea of the kernel had already been well established in the medieval Dominican mystical thought. Second, Bovelles uses this idea to assert that the movement from the shell to the kernel must continue beyond the kernel itself, through a process of double negation leading to divine unity.
The figure of the globe relates to the traditional figure for allegorical interpretation known as the kernel and the shell. In medieval allegorical practices, both the kernel and shell and the figure of the globe share the implicit semantic oppositions of finitude versus infinity, and of visibility versus invisibility. Both figures serve in responding to a question that each period in intellectual and literary history faces: How does the sacred relate to the profane, the infinite to the finite, the natural to the metaphysical? In attempting to answer these questions, Lefèvre and Bovelles do not separate logical and mystical discourses; they use logical language in combination with rhetorical tropes to signify the simultaneous presence and absence of Christian mysteries within the created world. By fusing the logical and the mystical, Lefèvre and Bovelles choose to model themselves on Nicholas because his thought provides them with solutions to this question concerning the finite and its relation to the infinite.
The idea that the globe is a totality within itself is central to the way French sixteenth-century French humanists used Nicholas of Cusa. His work represents an important threshold onto modern (Copernican) cosmology and speculation on globes, as well as a major influence in early French Renaissance philosophical and literary thought. In the tradition that extends from Pseudo-Dionysian mysticism to Nicholas of Cusa and the French Renaissance, God is defined as ubiquitous; his mode of immanence in the finite world is without any proportion to the mode in which human reason operates. Human reason measures, but God is without measurement; the infinite and the finite thus inhabit each other like missed occasions, worlds disjointed yet also mutually related.
Globes and Bowling, Christian-Style
Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, France’s greatest (but unsung) sixteenth-century philosopher, university, and church reformer, worked in collaboration with the French humanist circle known as the Groupe de Meaux, which included Bovelles. Humanists such as Lefèvre d’Etaples perceived little discord between this Christian Neoplatonic tradition and the teachings of the Roman Catholicism in the early Renaissance. Pseudo-Dionysian mystical theology reentered France in the Renaissance in 1499 at the very same moment as Nicholas’s works appeared; Lefèvre d’Etaples published the former’s complete works in 1499 and again in 1515, along with the first edition of Nicholas’s complete works in 1514. The Groupe de Meaux has received less scholarly attention in the United States than it has in France, despite the fact that it has generated some of the twentieth-century’s best Renaissance scholarship, primarily in Belgium, France, Switzerland, and the Franco-Germanic borders of the latter country. Lefèvre, a third-generation Parisian humanist, pursued reforms of the University of Paris and the Roman Church contemporaneously with Martin Luther’s (1483–1546) reforms in Germany, and he lived one generation before that of John Calvin.
In his mystical treatise On Nothingness, Bovelles clarifies important conceptual underpinnings of Lefèvre’s works. Bovelles crystallizes the problems concerning space and time that are implicit in theological reflections on the notion of totality. He follows the conventional Neoplatonic view that the soul moves through contemplation beyond the order of the sensible (aesthesis and beauty) and of multiplicity toward the Good, passing thereafter into a totality (totum) that stands in dialectical opposition to nothingness (nihil, nichil). As Pierre Magnard has shown, Bovelles responds to the problem of God’s ubiquity with the idea that a circle can have no fixed center and cannot provide the stability needed to explain cosmic revolutions. Only from the point of view of God’s infinite equality can such a stable and fixed point of reference be gained. Following Cusan mysticism, Bovelles adopts the point of view that infinity is paradoxically the totality of nontotalizable beings. Each being exists in irreducible difference in the sphere of the finite, but this does not exclude a relation to the sphere of divine totality.
For Lefèvre and Bovelles, the relation between the finite and the infinite occurs through the idea of nothingness, because the latter is the source of the created universe. That is, God does not create finite beings out of himself, but rather ex nihilo, out of nothing. Nothingness is thus the proximate source for created being, while God is its ultimate source. The difficulties involved in translating the word nihil (nothing, rien) stem in part from its various, indeed vegetal connotations: the nihil can signify the tegument or the germ containing the vital principle. It therefore necessarily associates with the traditional figures of allegory such as the kernel and the shell, the marrow and the bone. Nothingness belongs to a group of figures, both logical and rhetorical, that illustrate how spiritual truths become intelligible within the world of human understanding. The geometrical figure of the globe, in its pedagogical capacity to relate speculative intuitions, intersects with the traditional (exegetical and literary) figure of the kernel and shell.
The figure of the globe, and thus those of the kernel-shell and center-periphery, can serve as a strong point of strong comparisons between the works of different European humanist movements, without remaining confined by the notion of national boundaries. For sixteenth-century studies specifically, there exists little probing research on the relations among the literary works of Nicholas, Erasmus, and Marguerite de Navarre. One may say this has already been well studied (Bedouelle, Heller). But with the exception of studies by such critics as Christian Belin, Robert Cottrell, Dominique de Courcelles, Gary Ferguson, Jan Miernowski, Margaret M. Philipps, and Paula Sommers, French studies has by and large remained mostly silent on the importance of negative theology for early modern French literary and intellectual thought, despite the fact that it has played centrally in recent postwar French philosophical and aesthetic inquiry. One may cite Henri Busson’s earlier and well-known studies of the opposition between rationalism and irrationalism in early modern French literature, but overall the mystical tradition has been more extensively studied in Spanish and seventeenth-century Jesuit spirituality.3
That deconstruction provides important inroads into sixteenth-century rhetorical and theological culture is no surprise. Derrida’s treatment of the kernel-shell structure (Me-Psychoanalysis; The Ear of the Other) clarifies a great deal about the similarities between humanisms across periods of history, within the opposition of rationalism to irrationalism. The general tendency within contemporary scholarship in the United States away from critical theory and the sixteenth century’s religious heritage has largely sidestepped the place of mysticism in twentieth-century French intellectual thought. But mysticism has become relevant as scholarly narratives about the place of religion in literary studies becomes redefined in light of shifting disciplinary trends that accompany shifting global cultures and boundaries. Both Heidegger and Derrida, like several generations of philosophers before them, had addressed the opposition of logic and mysticism. Both in Heidegger’s early and later periods, particularly in his essays after the 1950s, one finds modern reformulations of the central philosophical problems informing Cusan and Montaignian writings.
In his later essays, Heidegger studies humanism partly in connection with the word occasion, as I will discuss further. For Heidegger, the word and its various forms derive from the Latin translation of the ancient Greek term referring to the act of human creation as letting “what is not yet present arrive into presencing.” “Accordingly,” Heidegger writes, acts of creation “are unifiedly ruled over by a bringing that brings what presences into appearance.”4 Heidegger’s observation that it is imperative to think of human creativity “in its full scope” as a “bursting open belonging to bringing-forth” goes far in enabling us to understand fundamental structures in sixteenth-century French spiritual literature. Heidegger developed his understanding of occasioning and letting-be (gelassenheit) in large part from his readings of medieval mysticism. Through the occasioning that “lets be,” Heidegger asserts, man is appropriated and drawn out of his essence in ek-stasy, rendering him free in his dignity. Heidegger’s use of freedom is informed by Meister Eckhart’s use of freedom, which was transferred into the French (affranchi, “liberated”) vernacular poetic tradition by the well-known fourteenth-century mystic named Marguerite Porete (d. 1310).
French humanists in the sixteenth century reinvigorated this fusion between mystical and lyrical discourses. Marguerite de Navarre’s Les prisons, a sixteenth-century mystical text inspired in part by Porete’s medieval mystical lyrics, can and has to some extent been situated in the Eckhartian tradition of feminine mystical writings. Certain governing mystical tropes in Eckhart’s, Nicholas’s, Lefèvre’s and Bovelle’s mystical discourses (tout/rien, loin/près) resurface both in Marguerite de Navarre’s and Heidegger’s works. The French Renaissance and Heideggerian notions of ek-stasy—as a state of freedom in which the human soul incarnates a pure nothingness (Latin nihilo), thus creating a vacuous space within the human persona that becomes open to radical alterity—pertain both the doctrine of “no proportion” and to the idea of nothingness as a kernel-shell structure.
The idea that the soul’s spiritual progression can be described in logical, mystical, or lyrical terms was fundamental to early French humanism. In the Renaissance mystical tradition, growing out of the medieval traditions that came before them, the human soul embodies a radical concept of the nihil. Both Marguerite de Navarre and Heidegger turned to this medieval mysticism to formulate a language common to poetry, prose, and philosophy. Interpreted through the idea of double negation, the globe describes a relation leading from the periphery (or circumference) to the center, but then leads from the idea of the center to a recognition that God’s infinite perfection is nonlocalizable. From the point of view of human understanding and its limits, God’s presence within creation is a decentered one. This recognition takes place through the aporetic experience of ek-stasy—defined here simply as a “change of place.” This movement toward a finite center that, from the point of view of infinity, is not a center, and where the human persona recognizes that it cannot itself appropriate divine infinity, leads outside oneself from the order of the profane world into that of the sacred, through a process of transformation and translation. This motion is a form of estrangement from self that takes place through a process of “occasioning,” as I will discuss in more detail. It would seem that the kernel-shell structure, as one of the most ancient variants on the idea of the globe, recurs with the advent of each new humanist movement.
The relative historical silence in comparative scholarship between Marguerite de Navarre and Erasmus points to the limits circumscribing twentieth-century models of literary-historical analysis and their cloistering behind historical categories of reading. Only one unanswered letter exists to indicate how Marguerite de Navarre and Erasmus regarded each other and conceived of their humanist initiatives respectively; as a result of this, there have been, historically speaking, few comparative studies of their works. But a vast amount of literary material could and has begun to be submitted to comparison through prose, poetic, and comparative analyses. The figure of the globe, in its relation to the doctrine of “no proportion,” informs the works of such authors as Marguerite de Navarre and Erasmus, offering an example for ways to pursue literary history across these bodies of literary and philosophical thought.
While Nicholas of Cusa used the globe to explain the doctrine of “no proportion,” thereby establishing a model that Lefèvre, Bovelles, and Marguerite de Navarre drew upon, other humanists outside of France used the figure of the globe in different ways. Erasmus and other Northern humanists around the Rhine Valley opted for other types of globe-figures, such as Erasmus’s use of concentric circles to describe Christ as the “aim” of Christian life in his manual for Christian living, entitled the Enchiridion Milites Christiani (1503). The globe is a ground for humanist debate and argumentation and therefore provides a reference point for mapping the way European humanists adopted opposing critical postures towards religion, society, and literature. The globe or sphere, studied as both a philosophical and a rhetorical signifier, serves as an organizing schema for humanist argumentation, where differences in perspective derive from diverse modes of inquiry into religious and cosmological thought.
Nicholas, Erasmus, and Marguerite de Navarre all draw, for example, on the ancient treatise written by and named after a reputed mage of antiquity named Hermes Trismegistus. This treatise bears directly upon the figure of the globe and was one of the Renaissance’s primary sources for its speculation about globes. The ancient Greek name given to this mage was itself a translation; it derived from the name for the Egyptian God Thoth. This Egyptian name was translated in this way because both figures had associations with knowledge and magic. While the English translation of the name is Hermes Trismegistus, in Roman it is Mercury. Another Northern European Humanist, Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516), also uses the figure of Hermes Trismegistus, just as does Marguerite de Navarre in her poem entitled Les prisons (1547), drawing on the figure of the infinite sphere with its center nowhere. Where that corpus of occult texts that we call the Corpus Hermeticum traveled, so too traveled the figure of the infinite globe with all its various associations.
By studying the migration of globe imagery from ancient hermetic texts into those of the Renaissance, one can furthermore arrive at a better understanding of the way ancient texts and discursive practices inform those of the Renaissance. The figure of the infinite sphere accompanies Erasmus’s and Marguerite de Navarre’s description of Christ as cure and thus as an anti-Thoth, stemming both out of their readings in Plato’s Phaedrus and occult texts. In the Phaedrus, Erasmus found a model for conceptualizing Christ as the center of a set of concentric circles, representing him as the goal (Latin scopus) of all Christian life because He is the only legitimate doctor (Latin Pharmaceus, Medicus) capable of treating the human disease of presumptiveness afflicting secular society. Renaissance Evangelical humanists who explored this occult background associated with Thoth insisted on his connection with the figure of the circle and the sphere. However, in Christian-humanist discourse, Christ replaces the occultist concept of the circle or infinite sphere’s center. In this view, secular learning represents the outer circumference of a circle whose central point resides in Christ’s self-sacrificial gesture, a fundamentally important act of self-negation referring to God’s infinite wisdom. Erasmus represents Christ as the center of a set of circles because the latter is the ultimate foundation and goal for all forms of human inquiry. Erasmus invested his literary works with figures belonging to the Corpus Hermeticum and conceived of globes in ways that would, as Karsten Harries has shown, remain operative—or transversalized, as De Certeau has suggested—through the development of modern Copernican theories about globes.
Nicholas’s De ludo globi exercised a particularly important influence on French Evangelical and humanist reformers in the sixteenth century. It espouses what we might call global thought explained through the metaphor of bowling—or, better, hyperbowling. In this treatise, Nicholas offers extensive theoretical and literary perspectives on globes and their importance for conceiving how the sacred relates to the profane. Through the influence of early French humanist thinkers (Catholic and Reformed) such as Bovelles (Guillaume Briçonnet, Lefèvre d’Etaples, Josse Clichtove, Guillaume Budé, Guillaume Farel, and others), Marguerite de Navarre became aware of the sphere as a symbol between competing cosmologies, ancient and new. She, too, would assert the fundamental incommensurability and discontinuity of the finite and infinite worlds.
Marguerite de Navarre’s well-known spiritual correspondence with the Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet rearticulates Nicholas’s figure of the globe to address changes within Renaissance French spiritual devotion. This marked the first major appearance of the globe in sixteenth-century French vernacular. The bishop writes that God “is the beginning, middle and end of all things. In him are all things, outside him there is nothing; center and circumference of all, he is the only truth and from that we have all science and because he is all things, in having him we have all things.”5 This conception of God as containing all being in Himself—in contrast with the nothingness of finite creation, as conceived independently from divine being—gained renewed favor among early sixteenth-century French reformers, because it allowed them to challenge the notion that the Roman Catholic Church was the center of ecclesiastical and spiritual authority. It would equally contribute, in that ecclesiastical line of thought, in defining the center of the French church, as various reformed groups continued to splinter off from Roman Catholicism throughout the sixteenth century.
Like other sixteenth-century French humanists, Briçonnet and Marguerite de Navarre interpreted the image of the infinite sphere in Evangelical terms, through Saint Paul’s opposition of spirit and body, asserting that the true Christian embodies the figure of the sphere by freeing himself from worldly, carnal sins. Briçonnet writes,
If the perfectly round and spherical wheel intersected with the perfectly flat earth, it would be in continual and perfect movement and would only contact it at an invisible point of intersection. Such must be the soul, entirely celestial and spherical; and if at times the wheel comes into a rut by its adhesion to the body, which are carnal desires, it must not stop there, but must promptly run by elevation of the spirit.6
For both the Bishop and Marguerite de Navarre, mystical experience defies linguistic-rational concepts because it passes beyond the boundaries of human intelligibility and worldly spatio-temporal arrangement. The soul crosses the border separating aesthetically sensible forms and into its origins in a dynamic relation with infinity. Nicholas uses the sphere to assert the simultaneous presence and absence of God; for French Evangelists, this doctrine signals the need for humankind to avoid overinvesting in corporeal existence and material values. By annihilating one’s bodies through internal action, and conforming oneself to the profane world’s radical lack of, yet dependence on Divine being, one becomes a vessel capable of receiving Divine Being from its very source and origin, not through the mediation of worldly ecclesiastical institutions.
The ideas and images of infinite spheres that Briçonnet translated into French vernacular continued to influence Marguerite de Navarre’s spiritual writings through the end of her life. For example, in her monumental poem entitled Les prisons (1547), she draws on the image of the globe to articulate a conception of narrative order and its potential for expressing divine perfection and infinity (l. 795). In Les prisons, Marguerite de Navarre conceives of spatial order and arrangement in poetry in terms of hierarchical organization of sacred (biblical) and profane learning (liberal arts, including cosmography). The organization of the secular liberal arts is compared to an architectural structure that is composed of secular truths that imprison the soul. This architectural edifice, organized according to the laws and the logic of the Old Testament—as viewed from a Renaissance, Christian-Evangelical point of view—crumbles upon the revelation of God’s identity as an infinite Being in the New Testament. This revelation brings about a recognition of the profane world’s spiritual indigence and nothingness. Worldly order and identity show themselves to depend entirely on God’s transcendent perfection. This order and identity are abandoned (délaissé) through the soul’s sacrifice of worldly attachments.
In Les prisons, the soul ventures through various levels of learning in the liberal arts, ultimately receiving a sacred revelation from a spiritual master about God’s identity, conceived as a perfectly self-referential Being that englobes all worldly and secular order:
The poem recounts how the identity of God’s essence, as self-subsistent, is disclosed through a revelation that He cannot be situated in the spatio-temporal world known to human intelligence. Only the Holy Spirit’s manifestation in the form of light and fire can dispense the truth:
Les prisons suggests that the sphere serves as a devotional model: by confessing one’s nonbeing through comparison with God’s infinite being, the poet enacts a form of sacrifice. In other words, the poet pays tribute to God through the (Evangelical) abandonment of all human claims to divine perfection. Through this hyperbolic act of self-abasement, the poet transfers all honor to God alone. This sacrifice prepares the way for the manifestation of God’s infinity within poetic structure, thus demystifying the world of finite, human understanding. Through the negation of the liberal arts as a secular structure, the poem occasions a metaphorically described infusion of life-giving grace through the revelation of the burning bush.
The clarity and power of transmission that are associated with Holy Spirit are described as a source of poetic clarity as well. Appearing in the form of fire (Marguerite, Les prisons, III, l. 685), the Holy Spirit communicates God’s infinite nature by way of the human eye. The human eye represents a corporeal, material globe capable of comprehending God’s infinity, conceived as a purely spiritual globe that is made manifest through the medium of the Holy Spirit’s fiery appearance. The human eye is a sphere that marks a point of contact between the sacred and the profane; it represents a diaphanous region of the body because the eye’s pupil represents a worldly globe (as evidenced in the definitions of the globe provided by the OED) that mirrors divine perfection through its perception of the world’s indigence. The eye as sphere represents a potential site for the transmission of infinite truths by virtue of its participation in the same igneous forces as fire.7 The human soul can be moved and touched by the Divine because, like the furthest depth and center of the human eye, its abandonment of all pride allows it to move beyond the negation of worldly order to become a radical embodiment of the nothingness from which God first created the world ex nihilo. By first negating the body, the soul comes to recognize its total dependence on divine being. Through this confession alone can it recognize Him as the ultimate cause of all worldly motion and order. This marks the passage from the corporeal eye to the eye of the soul; from the order of figuration and spatiality to that of infinite spiritual truths.
Globes, on Occasion
This tradition of sixteenth-century reflection on the nature of human imperfection and finitude provides a context for understanding the Marguerite de Navarre’s secular fiction, as we see in the case of the tenth story of the Heptaméron. It has long been established that the genre of the nouvelle, through the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, dealt with subject matter that was often—and traditionally—referred to with the generic words cas or aventures. The word occasion has etymological roots in cas, which derives from the Latin word cadere, to fall down, to decline, to come under, and to be separate from. In a separate but related philosophical context, Heidegger once wrote, “Causa, casus, belongs to the verb cadere, ‘to fall,’ and means that which brings it about that something falls out as a result in such and such a way.”8 We may add that the word occasio in Latin means literally a falling out, a happening. The word aventure signified at least two important ideas during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: first, it was generically used to refer to events that have happened, and second, it was also used refer to chance and fortune. In Marguerite de Navarre’s nouvelles, both the word occasion and the word aventure have close associations with the understanding of literature as a discursive opposition between totality and particularity.
The nouvelle, as a secular genre, is concerned with the representation of events, or occasions, that appear to be chance-occurrences insofar as they are attributed to the force of Fortuna. The status of these chance occurrences becomes partly determined through their signifying relation to an indeterminate notion of futurity.9 In this way, the nouvelle challenges the idea of divine totality as presiding over every point in created space and time, or at least the human capacity to comprehend that totality. The nouvelle as a genre is arguably structured around problems of contingency, or Fortuna, and marks a shift into a worldview where God’s providential ubiquity is a fundamental problem. The word aventure has, throughout the French literary tradition, always enjoyed a close relation to the ideas of approach, passage, and futurity; that is, to the verb venir, and by extension to the idea of the avènement, but neither in a strictly theological nor a strictly profane sense.
Paul Ricoeur’s narratological theory according to which the possibility of representing a contingent event always depends on a discursive play of opposites helps explain the status of events in the genre of the nouvelle.10 A contingent event in Ricoeur’s view can appear contingent only if it breaks with a previously established sequential, causal order. Narrative establishes a set of interpretive horizons that are built around the causal ordering of a plot, while the contingent event detaches itself from that established causal order. However, for Ricoeur, the contingent event can only become an integral part of a narrative when understood after the fact, once it is transfigured through the construction of a retrograde point of view. This construction of retrograde perspective allows narrative to assimilate that which first appears contingent into a causal order, which then transfigures contingency into necessity. This perspective, which enables the creation of narrative necessity, proceeds from a conception of temporal totality that manifests itself once a narrative has reached its end, its limit, its term. In this view, narrative necessity transforms physical contingency—which is the opposite of physical necessity—into narrative contingency. But for Ricoeur, contingency here depends on narrative necessity, on totality. In other words, the interplay of the necessary and the contingent constitutes the discursive framework for the representation of fortuitous events.
If we consider the genre of the nouvelle in this light, the ideas of aventure or cas derive their significance from this kind of discursive framework. Recall Hans Robert Jauss’s observation that the fundamental problem that the genre of the novella presents is how to find a norm by which to judge the central event of any given story.11 Ricoeur’s notion that narrative functions through the dialectical play of concordance and discordance—between the necessary and the contingent—helps to account for this phenomenon.
Ricoeur’s theory furthermore concurs with Barthes’s argument that retrograde determinations constitute the notion of the arbitrary in narrative. In Barthes’s view, narrative determines the nature of causes through their effects (causes par les effets); again, narrative episodes only acquire meaning from a retrograde perspective. The function of a given narrative episode in literary fiction is organized, in this view, by the way it can be interpreted in light of a story’s ending. The notion of the arbitrary in narrative, Barthes argues, is the very functionality of language itself; linguistic signs are arbitrary, and they become justified as necessary only by their discursive functions. The reversal of determination that transforms the relation between means and ends (causes et effets) into that of cause and effect is fundamental to the operation by which fiction creates illusions of causal reality, according to Barthes. Through the narrative techniques that are used to construct character motivation, retrograde determinations of necessity become possible, relegating contingency to a domain where character motivation would not be possible, or where we could not account for it. But above all, the constitution of narrative necessity depends on motive because it is required as a criterion for the determination of what “ought” to be. Motivation provides the fundamental determination allowing the moral dimension of vraisemblance, in other words the ideality of art itself, to become possible. There is, then, a close relation between motivation, decorum or vraisemblance, and the narrative transformation of contingency into necessity. Motive gives way to what Barthes calls an illusion of systematicity, in which each individual element can be morally accounted for by reference to a general body of moral laws, as so many applications of general ethical criteria to particular cases.12
This line of structuralist analysis has been revisited by Karlheinz Stierhle in both his earlier structuralist and his more recent writings. Stierhle’s work implicitly builds on Barthes’s and Ricoeur’s assertions about the nature of narrative contingency. Motivation, Barthes wrote, was introduced by Russian formalism to designate the manner in which narrative elements gain functionality. These narrative elements dissimulate themselves as causal determinations: content is not motivation, only an a posteriori justification of the form that determines it.13
In the light of these observations, consider for example the Heptaméron’s tenth story, the last nouvelle in the first journée and the way it exploits this narrative play of contingency and necessity by opposing conflicting orders of character motivation.14 Set on the border of Spain and France, the story deals with a young Spanish knight named Amadour who courts an aristocratic woman of higher social and economic rank named Floride. Because Amadour is the youngest son of a noble family, he has no inheritance. Two distinct but complementary notions of Fortuna converge here in the initial situation of the story. First, the narrator uses the rhetorical commonplace of Fortuna to describe his social standing. Second, the narrator remarks that although the goddess Fortuna left Amadour poor, that same goddess also gifted him with the virtue he needs to accomplish all his intentions. In the Heptaméron, we know, the word virtue is fundamentally gendered; in the tenth story, masculine virtue refers to Amadour’s capacity to act strategically, opportunistically, and efficaciously (particularly in war but also, by metaphorical extension, in gender relations as well) at the appropriate time—in other words, to bring his motivations to a term. Amadour’s character is thus presented as a child or product of the Goddess Fortuna: on one hand, this rhetorical commonplace informs us that he has lost social standing because he is without inheritance, while on the other hand, the reference to the goddess Fortuna signals his ability to seize opportune moments, and thereby compensate for that loss of inheritance—of value and, ultimately, of possible meaning within the story’s narrative logic itself.
Lucien Febvre’s well-known work on the Heptaméron showed long ago that the effect of this description serves to raise suspicion about the nature of Amadour’s motivations.15 Though he exhibits near-perfect constancy throughout the first half of the story, the specter of dissimulation haunts his every display of virtue. He courts Floride in the name of perfect friendship and progresses through a series of obstacles, of tests that engender faith in his moral character on the part of the other characters in the story. But the dignity of Amadour’s motivations remain questionable precisely because his character appears under the sign of fortuna, which here refers to a logic of the moment, to a logic of the occasion, that clashes fundamentally with the temporal model of steady progression that engenders ideal friendship. In the Aristotelian and Ciceronian models of friendship that constitute the Heptaméron’s intellectual-historical background, ethical problems arise when differing levels and qualities of friendships are not recognized as being different, as for example when one falsely represents hierarchically lower orders of friendship as ideal ones. The mistaking of differing orders of friendship, of temporary for permanent ones, is not necessarily deliberate: one can identify one’s own motives with those of another, only to find that one was mistaken about oneself, or for that matter, about another.
Amadour courts Floride in secret, but marries one of her confidants named Avanturade to protect his passion from public judgment and to give himself an occasion to seduce her. Amadour takes up a screen lady to shield off negative judgments of his character. In so doing, he uses courtly conventions as a shell, a mask, to provide himself assurances for the risks he is taking. Fortuna herself, in the form of a masculine determination that all means are justified by ends, provides Amadour with this pretext for courting Floride, cloaking his motives without raising suspicions. Together, Floride and Amadour agree to entertain a secretive courtly romance. However, as public suspicions begin to mount concerning Amadour’s motivations, the risks of discovery also mount, and a final sequence in the story is initiated when, at the very moment Floride is ready to accept Amadour as a “parfaict amy”—in other words, after years of trials that finally prove Amadour to be a worthy friend, an unfortunate event occurs: Avanturade, his screen lady, dies from an unfortunate occasio, a deadly fall.
With the loss of his screen lady, Amadour transforms and tries, unsuccessfully, to rape Floride twice. Floride resists his aggression both times; the characters then part as the story’s sequential logic closes with Amadour dying on the battlefield. The occasion of Avanturade’s fall shatters the steady progression of Amadour’s ideal friendship with Floride. Her fall is arguably the central cas, or occasion, of the story, because it disrupts the previously established narrative progression; it manifests an underlying transgressive impulse behind Amadour’s character. Avanturade’s fall may not be the cause of Amadour’s violence but it is the occasion that manifests the latent potency of Fortuna within his character. Not only does her fall and death represent the cas around which the plot turns, but her name also corresponds precisely to the conventional subject matter of the nouvelle as a genre. Recall that the word occasion also signifies the idea of distance over and against proximity: Amadour’s distance from Floride requires him to take up Avanturade as screen lady, and the occasion of her fall represents a final distancing from the two characters that unleashes the latent destructive forces in his character.
Amadour’s desire for Floride was doomed to impossibility because Fortuna, both in the sense of social rank and in the sense of virtue, condemn him to an exploitative logic of occasions that is so extreme that it finally destroys any possibility of reconciliation with the norms of courtly love and ideal friendship that were initially established by the story.
The implications of this failure to synthesize the central cas of the story are far-reaching. Unlike her theological works, which uphold an ideal of cosmological and poetic structure in unequivocal terms, the Heptaméron grapples with the finite world as place of missed occasions. I suggest that a narratological model helps account for Marguerite de Navarre’s use of the nouvelle as a genre that challenges synthesis and totality.
The emergence of modern Evangelical poetic and prosaic thought in Western Europe stems partly from this tradition concerning the lack of proportion between the finite and the infinite. Again, for this tradition, God’s transcendent essence stands not in semantic opposition to finitude, but to nothingness. Evangelical humanism exhorts Christians to contemplate the relation between shell and kernel through the idea of nothingness and its variants (nihil, nihilo, or nichil). It was, as I have shown, associated with the idea of nothingness as the absent center of creation, a place where divine energies become translated into worldly forms ex nihilo. The globe, like the figure of the shell and kernel, articulates the passage across the boundaries of the sacred and secular. This is achieved through internal action, independently from spatio-temporal forms of human action. In the way that sixteenth-century humanists used it, the word nihil refers to the envelope or shell that contains a vital principle; as a metaphor for the relation of center to circumference, the kernel-shell structure shows that the globe configures the relation between parts and wholes, the finite and the infinite.16
Notes
1. Through the influence of Italian Neoplatonism, French philosophers viewed Nicholas of Cusa as the most authoritative interpreter of the works of Pseudo-Dionysius (ca. 500). French theologians falsely believed that Pseudo-Dionysius was a disciple of Saint Paul (5–67 AD). Therefore, they believed that Nicholas’s commentary was an explanation of Christ’s mystical teachings as transmitted to Saint Paul, and from Saint Paul to Pseudo-Dionysius. As a result, French Renaissance thinkers viewed Nicholas as an authoritative commentator of Apostolic Christianity. See Nicholas of Cusa, Complete Philosophical and Theological Treatises of Nicholas of Cusa (2001); Christopher M. Bellitto, Thomas M. Izbicki, and Gerald Christianson, eds., Introducing Nicholas of Cusa: A Guide to a Renaissance Man (2004). Nicholas’s Writings on Church and Reform (2008) contains his pedagogical and philosophical treatise on globes, De ludo globi (The Bowling Game).
2. The doctrine of “no proportion” has always been at the center of debates about Western and Eastern conceptions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy and the Church’s center of authority. The doctrine has a history extending into medieval Eastern Christian and Arabic thought. First brought to the West by the ninth-century John Scotus Eriugena (815–77), who brought Pseudo-Dionysius to the Latin West, the doctrine was taken up by such medieval mystics as the fourteenth-century Spanish philosopher Raymon Lull (1232–1315). The scope of Lull’s influence on Nicholas of Cusa’s Christian philosophy and even on such later thinkers as Michel de Montaigne (1533–92; cf. Apologie de Raymond Sebond), indicates the enormity of its importance for the French literary tradition, or as we find in Flaubert’s Saint Julien l’hospitalier, for instance.
3. Marc Fumaroli accounts for the entrance of Roman classical learning into France through the migration of ancient rhetorical models from the Mediterranean into France, and into the Jesuit writings of the seventeenth century. This has led to a reawakening of rhetorical and theological approaches to Renaissance literature, as we find in Olivier Millet’s recent works on sacred rhetoric in French Reformation spirituality. Michel de Certeau’s historiographical reflections and idea concerning the “tranversal” presence of the sacred across regional scientific disciplines has been critiqued by Alain de Libera for its omission of Arabic sources in the history of Western mysticism. De Libera also critiques De Certeau’s Fable mystique for the methodological problems it reproduces in applying social-scientific methods to the question of mysticism. Cf. Alain de Libera and Frédéric Nef, “Le discours mystique,” 79–102.
4. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 10.
5. “Est de tout commancement, moien et fin. En luy tout, hors luy rien; centre et circumference de tout, il est la seulle verité et par ce de luy toute science et puisque il est tout, en l’ayant l’on a tout.” This is, as Cappello has shown in her article “Cusano, Briçonnet e Margherita di Navarra” (106), a direct imitation of Nicholas of Cusa, who writes, “God is the beginning, the middle, and the end of all things, the center and circumference of all, so that God alone is to be sought in all things, for apart from God all are nothing. If God alone is possessed, all things are possessed, for God is all things.” Nicholas of Cusa, “On Learned Ignorance,” 168.
6. My translation. “Sy la roué parfaictement ronde et sphericque, trouvoit la terre parfaictement plaine, seroit en continuel et parfaict mouvement perpetual et ne la toucheroit que en ung point invisible. Telle doibt estre l’ame, toute celeste et sphereicque; et sy quelque fois la roué vient en une ornière par adhesion du corps, qui sont les desirs charnels, n’y doibt arrester, ains promptement courir par elevacion de l’esperit.” Cited in Cappello, 107. Cf. Nicholas of Cusa: “Ideo non est possibile etiuam perfectissimam spheream de a in c per praecisam rectam pergere: esto etiam quod pavimentum sit perfectissime planum et globus rotundissimus. Nam talis globus non tangereret placiniciem nisi in atomo . . . Pervete igitur rotundus cum eius summum sit etiuam imum et sit atomus: postquam incepti moveri, quantum in se est, numquam cessabit cum varie se habere nequeat . . . Ideo spherea in plana et aequali superficie semper aequaliter habens: semel mota semper moveretur.” De ludo globi (Paris 1514, f. 154v). Cited in Cappello, 107.
7. “Very gently then the All-Powerful / who straight to the heart through the eye suddenly / Strikes mine at the furthest depths of the center.” “Tresdoulcement adonques le Puyssant / Qui droit au cueur par l’oeil tout soudain entre / Frappe le myen au plus profond du centre.” Les prisons, III, l.485–87; my translation. On the notion of the diaphanous nature of vision, as a site for the transmission of intelligible realities and its associations with the igneous in the context of mystical theories of self-negation, see Anca Vasiliu, Du diaphane, 1997).
8. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 7.
9. Cf. Roger Dubuis, Les cent nouvelles nouvelles et la tradition de la nouvelle en France au moyen âge (1973).
10. Paul Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre (1990).
11. R. Jauss, “Une approche médiévale” (1984).
12. Roland Barthes, “Le discours de l’histoire” (1967).
13. Karlheinz Stierle, “Three Moments in the Crisis of Exemplarity: Boccaccio-Petrarch, Montaigne, and Cervantes” (1998). Taking up Barthes’s reference to Cervantes—that is, Don Quixote’s madness—as an example of early modern narratological divergences from strictly logical, linear narratives, Stierhle argues that Cervantes and the genre of the novella exploit the tension between exemplarity and contingency, of “moral reflection” and “particular case.” The power of fortuna, as contingency, “brings forth the specific particularity of each novella.” Because there is an ambiguity between contingency and necessity, the exemplary status of each story is put into question: “The exemplum seems to move in an essential time where all time-aspects are controlled and functionalized by a dominating conceptual structure. In the novella time becomes a primary structure.”
14. Marguerite de Navarre, Heptaméron.
15. Lucien Febvre, Amour sacré, amour profane: Autour de l’Heptaméron.
16. Cf. Maurice Scève, Microcosme (1547): “Dieu, qui trine en un fus, triple es, et trois seras / Et, comme tes Eleus nous eterniseras, de ton divin Esprit enflame mon courage / pour descrire ton Homme, et louër ton ouvrage, / Ouvrage vrayement Chef d’eouvre de ta main: / A ton image fait et divin, et humain. / Premier en son Rien clos se celoit en son Tout, / Commencement de soy sans principe, et sans bout, / Inconnu, fors à soy, par soy, en soy enclose: / Masse de Deïté en soymesme amassee, / Sans lieu, et sans espace en terme compassee, / Qui ailleurs ne se peut, qu’en son proper tenir / Sans aucun tems prescript, passé, ou avenir, / Le present seulement continuant present / Son estre de Jeuness, et de vieillesse exempt: / Essence pleine en soy d’infinité latente, / Qui seule en soy se plait, et seule se contente / Non agente, impassible, immuable, invisible / Dans son Eternité, comme incomprehensible, / Et qui de soy en soy estant sa jouïssance / Consistoit en Bonté, Sapience, et Puissance.” Maurice Scève, Microcosme (1974), ll. 1–22. [God, who was three in one, you are triune, and triune and you shall be / And, as you shall eternalize us as your Elected ones, inflame my courage with your divine Spirit, / To describe your Man, and praise your creation, / Creation that is truly a Master piece of your hand: / In your image made both divine, and human. / At first enclosed in its Nothingness it hid in its Totality, / A beginning in itself without beginning, and without end, / Unknown, except to itself, by itself, in itself enclosed: / Mass of Deity in itself amassed, / Without place, and without space in any limits contained, / Who elsewhere could not be, except in its own holding / Without any time prescribed, passed, or future, / The present only continuing present / Its being from youthfulness, and old age exempt: / Essence full in itself with latent infinity, / Who alone in itself pleases itself, and alone contents itself / Not acting, unmoved, immutable, invisible / In its Eternity, in its way incomprehensible, / And who from itself in itself being its delectation / Consisted in Goodness, Wisdom, and Power (translated by Jacob Vance).]
