After months of reflection, in which there were days spent juggling between things making sense, and making no sense at all, how unsettling it was to arrive at the conclusion that the text was trying to tell the reader that he was meant not to ponder it, not to understand it. The thought emerged that Nostradamus’ writings are about the thought of the unthinkable. It was Nostradamus himself, in fact, who led me to that conviction, pointing the way to it through signals, reminders and warnings that stand out in his writing as signposts to those who are unwilling, or who refuse, to understand that the real truth for us humans is to understand our own ignorance, our inability to comprehend. I have already highlighted certain passages whose sense is to say to us that there is no sense. But to pursue that further, I begin with a quatrain that, over and above its anecdotal, perhaps moralizing, literary quality, explicitly and particularly evokes certain dangers that arise from the overweening curiosity that impels man to want to know what ought to be kept secret from him. For Nostradamus, this impia curiositas is the seat of all human wickedness. His Prophecies set out to be more than a match for it through the game of irresolution and unthinkableness that they invite the reader to participate in:1
Beneath the mistled oak by lightning struck,
Not far from there is hidden the treasure,
Which countless centuries ago had been grappled together,
Who finds it will die, blinded by the lock-spring.
A possible decoding of this quatrain, one that does not fall into the trap of over-extrapolating its meaning, would go as follows: under the oak tree covered with mistletoe and struck by lightning, not far off, is buried in the ground the treasure that was garnered many centuries ago.2 Whoever finds it will have their eye plucked out by the spring on the lock of the hidden coffer, seemingly, when it is forced open, or perhaps when the lock is broken. Mistletoe is the symbol of eternity and fecundity, whilst the oak signifies the power of God. The uncovered treasure is thus not a cache of gold or precious jewels. The passage is not so much about the frenetic avarice of the person who stumbles upon it, and who immediately meets his just reward, as about a kind of foolish profanation of God's glory.
My sense here was that it was essential to transcend the reading of this text as an anecdote with a moral for those who seek earthly riches. For it is knowledge, not riches, that the man who tries to force open the coffer is trying to appropriate. His eye is gouged out by the spring on the lock of the coffer containing the treasure. As Andrea Alciato wrote, the shadow cast by the branches of the oak tree is divine goodness, the message of divine Truth. The treasure symbolizes the Gospels, given freely to humankind in an act of Divine love. So Nostradamus wants allegorically to signify to us that, in the face of the Word of God, mankind should not imagine that he knows all that there is to know about divine Truth, and should not try to gain access to what it all means by force. The danger is that he will come to believe in himself, and to rely on his own capacities to understand things when, in reality, he is ineluctably separated from God by the burden of sin which he carries. God punishes this presumption and, in this quatrain, the person who is blinded is a warning to those who seek to perceive more than they should. The Word of God gives him the wherewithal to see, if only his own cupidity did not prevent him from doing so, that the true treasure lies in Heaven, and in the mystery of the Redemption. Or perhaps Nostradamus wants to signify that whoever wants to see is, in reality, blind. In the Epistle of Paul to the Colossians, Christ is the mystery of God, in which ‘is hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’, i.e. faith.3 In the Gospel according to Matthew, treasure stored up on earth is destroyed by moth and rust, or it is stolen by thieves.4 Treasure in heaven, however, is something else entirely: ‘There where thy treasure is, there is thy heart also’. So the plucked-out eye of the treasure-seeker signifies his choice of that dark path which leads mankind to trespass into the terrain of the wisdom of God which passes all understanding: ‘The eye is the light of the body. If thine eye is bright, then thy body will be enlightened; but if thine eye is dim, then thy body will remain in darkness’.
Nostradamus is surely seeking here to replay the human drama of original sin in the Garden of Eden within the contemporary context of the theological debates of the Protestant Reformation of his day. Has he not transposed the fig tree into a sacred oak, and Adam and Eve's apple into a hidden coffer, the serpent becoming a spring that plucks out the eye of whoever believes that they can, with their own capacities alone, determine the secrets of divine knowledge? Such secrets belong to Christ alone and, consequently, sinful man can only acquire them by the prime gift of divine mercy. Nostradamus’ artfulness is, thus, his way of constructing a parable, one that takes the Bible as its model, in order to enable the reader to understand that there is such a thing as vain curiosity. Faced with the secrets of faith, the only possible response is one of learned ignorance in which the Creator is told by the one whom He has created, feeling himself a nobody by comparison, that He is all in all. This, in fact, is prefigured in the ‘Preface’ to the quatrains that Nostradamus addressed to his son César. There he invites the reader to consider that:5
nothing can come to pass without Him, whose power and goodness is so great to his creatures that even if He remains withdrawn into Himself, one and indivisible, nonetheless to each according to its proper shape and genius this prophetic heat and power visits us like as the rays of the sun whose influence works upon bodies elementary and non-elementary.
Nostradamus then returns to the fact that human beings cannot, by their own individual natural faculties of comprehension, or through the bent of their own ingenuity ‘know anything about the dark secrets of God the Creator, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, &c.’6
Nostradamus seems to repeat this Biblical warning in various different ways – as, for example, in the quatrain in which the remains of one of the triumvirs are discovered by someone who was searching for the ‘enigmatic treasure’ in the bowels of the earth.7 As a result there will be no peace for the surrounding inhabitants as they in turn try their hand at excavating marble and ‘metallic lead’ in search of the treasure too. Digging into the hardest of substances, the unexcavatable, is another way of emphasizing that they were digging in vain, foolishly imagining that they could lay their hands on God's inaccessible secrets, the divine mystery, and therefore laying bare their own narcissism (‘philautie’). The passage is a further reminder of the Gospel of St Matthew's counter-paradigm to the insanity that drives people to live only for the riches of this world. ‘The kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; that which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that hath, and buyeth the field’.8 The true treasure lies within, in faith in Christ and His redemption of us, acquired when ‘the reproach of Christ’ becomes ‘greater riches’ for us ‘than the treasures in Egypt’, Gospel treasure that can only be ours through sacrificing what is our essential presumptuousness.9 Our desire to know everything is immensely dangerous, and Nostradamus repeats that message in another register through his vision of someone who discovers earthenware pots among ancient monuments:10
The false one shall expose the topography,
Earthenware pots shall be opened at ancient sites:
Polluting sect, fake philosophy:
Black mistaken for white, brand-new for old.
It results in the spread of a far-fetched philosophy and false ideas.
Pierre de Ronsard compared revealing to ‘common people’ the sacred mysteries to opening up a bouquet of flowers to the open air. Its perfume wafts away on the first hint of a breeze.11 Those locked away in (significantly) a coffer keep, in his poetic imagination, their perfume for longer. In the topographic quatrain, Nostradamus is perhaps offering an alternative to the allegory that Jacobo Sadoleto had forged in his Phaedre, or in Praise of Philosophy (Phaedrus siue de laudibus philosophi, 1538) in which God knowingly and intentionally hides from mankind certain secrets in nature and in the heavens. In this allegory, the philosopher Thalès falls into a well because he persisted in walking around whilst studying the heavens above, thus punishing him for wanting to see what was indiscernible.12 It is difficult not to see a connection here with an event predicted in Nostradamus’ Almanac for the year 1554. A ‘learned man’ will walk along the banks of the river Hister (the Danube) in the moon's last quarter in November. The earth will suddenly give way under him and he will be engulfed by the water, symbolizing no doubt that even the most accomplished human knowledge is as nothing besides the forces of nature, the works of God and God himself.13 Science is ignorance, and it inflates (inflat) the self-worth of whoever imagines that he has it. Nature is there to remind him (as in the case of the lock-spring) that the more one believes one can know, the more one is blind to the truth and incapable of conceiving of what is true.
Nostradamus’ exposure of the quest for hidden treasure for the sake of gain perhaps resolves a persistent enigma that runs through all his prophetic writing. It may well be that his prophetic discourse is intentionally placed centre-stage, with the ambiguities integral to the enigmatic character of the prophecies at the periphery, in order to make the reader aware of his or her own irredeemable weakness of understanding. It is possible that Nostradamus’ way of writing intentionally undermines its own meaning, and that his prophetic imagination is consciously setting out to mark out the path that we should follow as Christians, one that signifies that we should find out for ourselves our own incompetence, and know for ourselves how little able we are to attain real knowledge. Was this not Nostradamus’ way of leading the reader towards the realization of his own incapacity, so that she or he can comprehend better that the treasure is not to be found in being tempted to find the answers? Does not the true treasure lie elsewhere, in the apprehension that nothing makes any sense in human terms, and in the authentic realization that the only Truth lies in the mystery of faith in Christ, and in an ‘enigmatic knowledge’ which is the negation of itself? Various signs on earth and in the heavens might well symbolize this necessary form of negation, this denial of self. Inundation by water is one of them, as in this quatrain:14
Bridge and mills in December overturned,
So high shall flood the Garonne:
Walls, buildings Toulouse upturned,
It will not be recognizable as mother city.
The walls and buildings in Toulouse will be destroyed beyond recall, and their own city will no longer be recognizable to them. The flooding of the River Garonne is, of course, a divine warning and a call to penitence; but to the degree that human beings lose their bearings, and the past becomes eradicated, it also perhaps symbolizes the necessity to obliterate all human knowledge before such penitence can take place. True knowledge may be not to believe that one knows anything, the acceptance of one's misapprehension. For is not a sign from God itself an allegory of the vanity of such signs, itself a vanitas vanitatum?
There are other signs of this tension. Hidden treasure is a recurrent theme in Nostradamus’ writing and it always has a similar meaning, depicting a humanity that cannot shake off the lure of gold. At Toulouse, not far from Belvezer, whilst digging a deep well at the ‘palais d’espectacle’, buried treasure is discovered. Everyone desperately digs down for two miles around it, and close to the Bazacle (the mill on the river Garonne).15 It is as though they were looking in the earth for the wrong thing, seeking the Letter when they should be looking for the Spirit. This is another example of his way of writing in parables, authenticating the folly of those who believe that the will of God can be interpreted in the Flesh when it is only to be found in the Spirit. Erasmus had declared the same thing when he said that it was hardly prudent for humans to speak of the sublime mysteries of the divine nature. In any event, it was not permitted to just anyone, to say it in whatever words, to whomever and whenever.16 In a quatrain of a similar kind, Nostradamus attests to the danger of accessing a hidden object or restricted place:17
He who opens the new-found trove
And cannot promptly lock it up again,
Evil shall befall him, nor will he find out
If it is better to be a Breton or Norman king.
Ill-will befall him and he will never know if it is better to be king of Brittany rather than king of Normandy, i.e. if it is better to be nothing here, rather than nothing there, better to live or not live. It is as though he is saying that hell beckons for those who have not understood that Christ has come to help humankind move from the carnal to the spiritual, and that to approach the sacred mysteries without the aid of Christ is to disappear into nothingness, death.
Let us briefly take stock. Nostradamus is a prophet in what he says it is to be a human being. He says it repeatedly, pressing against the limits of our comprehension and into the realms of the absurd, that the presumption of human knowledge is a danger. Human beings have a duty towards God, which is not to persist stubbornly in going beyond what is possible, and that God has forever hidden those things from us that we are not capable of receiving from Him. Nostradamus’ writing is, in a way, tautologous. Its opacity serves to symbolize the obscurity of whoever reads it aright, the obscurity of a human being, condemned to sin and death, incapable on his own of knowing God. Uncertainty nurtures his writing because, as Nostradamus says on the first page of his ‘Preface’ to his son César, we must be aware that ‘all human ventures come to an uncertain end’.18 The Prophecies are a lesson in human weakness and inadequacy, in themselves and in their enigmatic expression. Whosoever believes that he can understand purely on his own initiative the divine mysteries will lose his bearings, become blind to God, and run the gamut of divine justice. Those who imagine that they can achieve their own salvation by their prayers alone seem also destined to fail. This is what this carefully constructed quatrain seems to be saying:19
Through the abundance of tears shed
From high to low, from low to the highest above,
Too great a faith by jest life lost:
To die of thirst from surfeit of mistake.
Through manifold tears shed high and low, life will be lost because of an excessive faith in oneself. The tears, an acknowledgement of presumption and folly, put heaven and earth, spiritual and corporeal existence, on the same plane – because they go ‘from low to the highest above’. They meet with death, for people will die of thirst ‘from surfeit of mistake’. There is no salvation in penitential rituals, which are vain. In the gargantuan universe of François Rabelais, the drought that precedes the birth of Pantagruel is the aridity of a world deprived of the Word of God. Processions, prayers and penitential rituals are all that is on offer to slake their thirst, and they cannot serve the turn. The quatrain is a parable about the illusory belief that prayers and penitential acts will bring them to salvation whilst, in reality, they are part and parcel of a confidence in one's own self, and a presumption that God can be experienced in the flesh. ‘To die’, here, means ‘to die to God’. The ‘thirst’ in question is surely that for the Gospel, superior to all human works, without which we shall surely die spiritually. Without wanting to extrapolate too far, I would argue that Nostradamus is placing himself in an Erasmian tradition, one in which Erasmus exalts Christ and denies human prudence and wisdom:20
And Christ himself, that he might the better relieve this folly, being the wisdom of the Father, yet in some manner became a fool when taking upon him the nature of man, he was found in shape as a man; as in like manner he was made sin that he might heal sinners. Nor did he work this cure any other way than by the foolishness of the cross and a company of fat apostles, not much better, to whom also he carefully recommended folly but gave them a caution against wisdom and drew them together by the example of little children, lilies, mustard-seed, and sparrows, things senseless and inconsiderable, living only by the dictates of nature and without either craft or care. Besides, when he forbade them to be troubled about what they should say before governors and straightly charged them not to inquire after times and seasons, to wit, that they might not trust to their own wisdom but wholly depend on him. And to the same purpose is it that that great Architect of the World, God, gave man an injunction against his eating of the Tree of Knowledge, as if knowledge were the bane of happiness; according to which also, St. Paul disallows it as puffing up and destructive; whence also St. Bernard seems in my opinion to follow when he interprets that mountain whereon Lucifer had fixed his habitation to be the mountain of knowledge.
It is worth emphasizing here that Erasmus sees Christ as a healer and a physician and that the Nostradamus whom I have depicted uses his utterances as a physick to cure human beings of their pride, and to liberate them from themselves.
Our lack of wisdom, taken on, accepted, modelled on Christ's teachings, is the condition for attaining divine mercy. It is poles apart, for Erasmus, from ceremonial religion and the practices of bodily privation, night-watches, ‘tears’, ‘ordeals’, ‘privations’ and ‘scourges’ by which some people imagine that they will gain it because they think they know what God wants. True piety is simplicity, the innocence of the soul abounding in faith and hope of salvation. Here is Erasmus, once more, in his Apology on ‘In the Beginning was the Word’ (Apologia de ‘In principio erat sermo’):21
But a fuller knowledge of the divine nature is reserved for a time in the future to those who on this earth have, by the piety of their innocent lives, purified the gaze of their comprehension. ‘No one knows the Father as He really is except the Son and everyone to whom the Son has chosen to reveal Him.’ And so to search out knowledge of the nature of God by human reasoning is recklessness; to speak of the things that cannot be set out in words is madness; to define them is sacrilege. But if it is granted to behold any part of these things, simple faith grasps it more truly than do the resources of human wisdom. And in order to achieve eternal salvation it is enough for now to believe about God those things that he himself has openly made known about himself in the Holy Scriptures, to disciples chosen for that purpose and inspired by His spirit. God revealed himself through Christ, whilst He was on earth, and its meaning was then unveiled to those specially chosen disciples by means of the Holy Spirit. To believe in these truths with a simple faith is the philosophy of Christ. To venerate them with a pure heart is true religion.
Human ignorance is at the heart of the philosophy of Christ. It is what Erasmus sees Christ as asking of us.
Staying with the same theme, our attention shifts now from Erasmus to Cornelius Agrippa and the chapter ‘C’ of his On the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Sciences (De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum (1525)). There, after demonstrating the vanity of scholastic, interpretative and prophetic theologies, the author turns to the subject of God's Word, true theology being what is written in the Holy Scriptures. Interestingly, from our point of view, the theme of buried treasure once more comes to the surface:22
Ye have now heard how doubtful, how uncertain, how ambiguous all the Sciences are, and how, for any thing in them contained, we are generally ignorant where the Truth rests, even in Divinity it self, unless we could finde out any person who had the Key of Knowledge and Wisdom: for the Armory of Truth is lockt and concealed under divers Mysteries; and the way shut up from wise and holy men, by which we might enter into so great and incomprehensible a Treasury. Now this Key is nothing else but the Word of God: This onely discerneth the force and vertue of all sorts of words, and what Disputes proceed meerly from the Cunning of Sophistry, which discovers not the Truth, not onely a meer shadow thereof …
The Word, in all its force and irrepressible majesty, is the one and only ‘fountain of truth’. Before and beyond lie the lies and sin of human kind – history, arithmetic, geometry, music, astrology, medicine, philosophy, and theology. The physician whom Rabelais knows as Her Trippa is the person who has learnt everything, and knows it all. But it is all vanity, for he has learnt nothing, and knows nothing, for knowledge is to be found elsewhere than in human learning. The Word of God is ‘the rule, the goal, the target to aim for’ for those who seek not to be disappointed, not to err.23 Those who think that they are wise, live in the moment; when they die, their knowledge dies with them. The Word of God, however, is eternal, not the preserve of theologians but accessible to ‘each and every one’ of us, so that we all have it in our hearts every day of our lives. There is a contradiction between Christ and human knowledge, or at least the pretense to possessing such knowledge, and that pretense lies (in Agrippa's and Nostradamus’ view) at the roots of the upheavals in Christianity. Agrippa laid out how the dramatic events occurring around him were the result of pretensions to knowledge, which in turn created dogmatic obstinacy in people, which in turn made them deaf and blind to the Truth. This was especially since they never stopped erecting their own version of truth: ‘They are so held up on, attached to, and proud of their own interpretations that they refuse to give way to the truth, and refuse to accept it as such unless it is proved by demonstrations and dialectic deductions. They make fun of, and even despise, whatever they cannot understand, or make out by their own ingenuity and skill’.24 Their knowledge is hollow because Christ has hidden his Truth from the prudent and wise. He has reserved it for those, cleansed of ‘all the mire of scientific knowledge’, whose minds are like blank paper, the humble and poor in spirit who will inherit the Kingdom, the ‘asses’ to whom the parables, paradoxes and ‘things sealed away under many seals’ are as clear as day.25 Nostradamus, after all, proclaimed his predictions to be ‘clearer than the day’.26
Before digging deeper into the implications of the prudence which stops us from being seduced by the ‘eternal, invisible and spiritual realities’, a detour is necessary, it seems to me, into the singular opacity of Nostradamus’ own religious thought. This opacity becomes more evident as his predictions bring him success. There were those who understood what Nostradamus was about – like the Lyonnais humanist Jean de Vauzelles, whom he terms his ‘brother and the best Friend that I have in the world, a Knight of true zeal’ because he had penetrated to what was beneath the ‘obscure and covert words’. But there were also all those who became his followers, those who tried to made sense of what he was saying by presupposing that there was an underlying literality to those self-same words. The astrologer no doubt regarded them with ambivalence, for he had emphasized that his utterances were not addressed to lesser spirits. The latter were, perhaps, about to hoist Nostradamus by his own petard!