For specialists in the field, it is no longer a matter of extensive debate. The supposition for many years has been that Nostradamus was a participant in the politico-religious controversies of his time on the Catholic side, and sometimes radically so. That was because of the way that Ronsard appropriated prophetic material from the quatrains into an eschatological dimension in his own writings, and from the evidence of Jean-Aimé de Chavigny, whose The First Face of Janus (1594) and Commentaries … on the Centuries and Prognostications (1596) appeared at the end of the sixteenth century.1 Pierre Brind’Amour regarded him as a convinced Catholic, committed to launching attacks against the Protestants.
The theme of the religious zealot was linked to that of the glorification of the French monarchy in various quatrains.2 It was, however, thrown into question a few years ago, thanks to the perspicacity of Jean Dupèbe. He published letters which seemed to show the author of the Prophecies as, on the contrary, inclined more towards the Reformed, opposed to men of violence who unleash hatred through the most Christian kingdom of France upon its ‘Christians’, or ‘adherents of the true faith’.3 Hence the notion (which, given the evidence, it is difficult to refute) that, behind Nostradamus’ mask of pretence, his thought is characterized by ‘a sort-of Lutheran-inclined’ evangelist thought, intertwined with Neoplatonism. That goes along with the diatribe which he launched against Catholic violence in 1563 in opposition to the ‘dismal counsel […] to have given free rein to brutish beasts’.4 It was of a piece with the determination with which, in Le Grand Pronostication Nouvelle avec Portenteuse prediction, pour l’An M.D.LVII., itself dedicated to Antoine de Navarre, he appeared to pour down all the worst catastrophes imaginable upon Italy. It was there, in the land of fidelity to the Papal religion par excellence, that ‘such extraordinary mutations as have never been seen or heard of before’ would occur; ‘and he who harboured great hope will be altered, transformed, frustrated and dashed by it all’.5
Nostradamus’ thought appears, however, to have been distinctly more complicated, more supple, and fluctuating. One might say that indetermination was its characteristic, not far from the ‘as many shapes as Proteus’ of Erasmus’ Adages, or More's In Praise of Folly.6 It feels as though Nostradamus was applying to himself and his beliefs the principle of mistrust in one's knowledge. In the 1558 dedicatory Epistle to the ‘invincible’ Henri II, in the course of which he declared, before ‘God and his Saints’ that there was nothing in his writings that was ‘against the true, Catholic faith’, Nostradamus attacks what he calls ‘the paganism of the new infidels’.7 There is nothing to stop us thinking that his views evolved in the light of the violence of the Calvinists in the first War of Religion. The Almanac for 1563 was more explicit in its attack on those who sought to destroy the holy Mass, ‘an edifice of Jesus Christ’ which ‘will not withstand for long’ – delusions which, Nostradamus adds, are more akin to ‘Judaism than true Christianity’! His words seem, however, to be framed in the light of his interlocutors and their religious engagements; or perhaps Nostradamus let his pen single out Catholics as the authors of atrocities in the letters found by Jean Dupèbe because they were written confidentially to Lutherans who had commissioned and paid him to produce horoscopes for them.
For there are other indications which serve to confirm the reverse proposition, namely, that during the initial outbreak of troubles, he took up an anti-Calvinist position. These indications would seem to substantiate at the very least that, at the moment of the hardening of confessional antagonism, and after a possible, transitory, toying with Lutheranism which is somewhat vague, he distanced himself from the Protestants. In the Prognostication for 1560 he launched a direct attack against a critic in Geneva, but did not trouble to include a list of saints in the almanac in question.8 By contrast, Nostradamus dedicated the Ephemerides of 1562 to Pope Pius IV (perhaps in order to procure his protection during a period when his own house was coming under direct attack from the Catholic population of Salon), praising the pontiff for his ‘good restraint and sovereign moderation’.9 A further dedication, this time of the almanac for 1563 but dated 20 July 1562 (and therefore at the height of religious violence) was to Francesco Fabrizio Serbelloni, the pope's cousin, captain and commissioner despatched to Avignon for the ‘safety’ of its habitants in the face of the Huguenot threat, and it ended with the hope that God would give Serbelloni a ‘thorough and hoped-for’ victory.10 He declared all those who practised bad astrology and proclaimed that the Holy and Apostolic See ‘would not exist in perpetuity’, were utterly deluded. In 1563, he launched a diatribe against ‘various depraved individuals’ (was it the Calvinists he had in mind?) whom he said were as much plunged into error as the Jews.11 As we saw in the last chapter, the reality is that certain Calvinists chose to attack Nostradamus’ astrology, and in an extremely negative and aggressive fashion. That they chose satire as the vehicle for their vituperation does not hide the fact that there was a theological argument underlying it all. And we cannot ignore the fact that, in his last will, he chose to be buried in the church of the Franciscan convent at Salon-de-Crau.12
At all events, Nostradamus was under fire from religious opponents who sought to discredit him in no uncertain terms. Notwithstanding all that, and taking into account these inner contradictions, which a close reading of the Centuries can only serve to reinforce, would it not be better to start from a minimalist hypothesis which attributes to Nostradamus a theocentric faith, not fully worked out because he refused to express it explicitly and thereby become attached to a norm, a faith that was perhaps ‘incomplete’ (as Thierry Wanegffelen put it)?13 It was a faith that was the outcome of the stargazing of someone who took pride in being an ‘astrophile’.14 At the same time, was it not also the outcome of a personal philosophy of divine immanence (‘God fabricating the fabric of the world’ as the almanac for 1563 said, in what was probably an allusion to the Virgin of the Cosmos (Korè Kosmou) of Hermes Trismegistus or Plato's Timaeus) and an adherence to the myth of the restoration of a hitherto ‘submerged bonæ literæ’?15 We should perhaps not, at least initially, ‘deconfessionalize’ Nostradamus so much as underline how he placed himself beyond the constraints of words, and thus dogmas, in his absolute conviction that the ‘treasure’ of the true Word must be lived in Christ-like fashion, in its own mystery which is the mystery of the living Word.16 Why should we not start from the hypothesis that it was not a matter for him of choosing between two confessions, but rather of adopting a stance which acknowledged the inexpressibility of his beliefs, and therefore an ongoing subjectivization of his faith? Had he not deliberately opted for a world of indetermination, imprecision and subjective liberty, in which the goal-posts were endlessly moving? Why should we not assume that he was able, over and beyond his slipping in to occupy the space of the competing confessional camps one after another for his own protection and in order to advance his visionary project, to place himself beyond dogmatic fixed points in a non-confessional fideism whose starting-points we somehow have to reconstruct?
In this context, the letter written by Nostradamus to the Pomeranian Lorenz Tubbe, dated 13 May 1562 is particularly worth mentioning.17 In it, he sought not so much to subscribe to the indignation expressed by his Lutheran correspondant towards the sectarian violence occuring in France at that moment, as to express his anguish in the face of Christians seeking to promote their faith by violence and persecution. By doing so, they were guided by the sinfulness inherent in their humanity, their self-love (‘philautia’) leading them to believe that they possessed the Truth, which the true worth in the Gospel would reveal to all mankind.18 For Nostradamus, evil was perhaps what came over people when they decided to impose their faith upon others by force and violence, whatever their dogmas, and the truths that they sought to defend or promote. The words which he used to describe the actions of Papists intersect with those which appear in the prophecies and almanacs to describe what was happening at that very moment: ‘untoward cruelty’, ferocious barbarity, oppression of Christians and the suffocation of liberty, houses and cities put to the torch, the deaths of women and children, and imminent civil war. There is a ‘sword’ hanging ‘over the head of the best of men’, an overwhelming pride which irritates Nemesis, who in turn threatens to rise up against it with all his destructive energy. When Nostradamus’ pen does not portray them as ‘Papist’ persecutors, he calls them true ‘Christians’.19
The letter to Lorenz Tubbe is crucial less for the evangelical sympathies that it implies than for reflecting Nostradamus’ certainty that it was the beginning of a time which would not be God's time. However much warriors might call upon the divine will, ‘we are not at the end of our travails and we have not yet plumbed the depths …’. His phrases could have been spoken by Erasmus:
Such untoward cruelty, such barbarous, secret and nocturnal ferocity provoke in me a profound indignation. You rightly evoke the presage of Adastreia to Nemesis: ‘The goddess whom one cannot escape, the daughter of Jupiter, (Juno) arrives; hark what she has done in similar circumstances; she will not spare the guilty in her pursuit. Despising all that has come to pass here below, Juno, the queen and arbitress of things, will above all be exasperated by human pride’. A sword is hanging over the head of the best of men, whilst criminals are favoured. Liberty is oppressed, religious feelings are corrupted. Laws are silenced by war, and fear reigns.
All those held suspect for their religion have taken flight to save their lives and prevent their possessions from being expropriated.
Those who remain are pursued with rage and fury. Their houses and cities are put to the torch, their women and children are not spared. I alone have remained behind, I and my family. We await the fate that God will decide for us, and for all Provence. May Christ the Almighty in his mercy give us a long-lasting peace.
Nostradamus goes on to narrate, inevitably, the violence meted out upon those suspected for ‘the Christian religion’, the threats to which he and others around him were subjected, and the activities of the murder squad of Durant de Pontevès, sieur de Flassans with, at its head, a Franciscan carrying a crucifix, in Provence in February 1562, as well as the consequences for his family of these early, blood-stained troubles. Yet what Nostradamus deemed essential was to denounce the violent state of affairs which had overcome the world in the name of God, and which proved that people had retained nothing from his decipherings of the grim presages that he had proclaimed over the previous ten years to ask God to spare them this violence, to accept that the only truth lay in God, to be aware that they are purblind, blinded when they believe that violence is a handmaid of religion.20 Nostradamus was a prophet who sought to shift the hermeneutics of the divine Will onto a plane that was far removed from that of dogma, and towards that of the divine signs of Him in the universe. Knowledge of God was thus, in his view, that of a divine word inscribed elsewhere than in the Word. In the Almanac for the year 1562 Nostradamus alludes to all the ills (‘in our martyrdom, misery, affliction and perdition’) that will befall him from his astronomical knowledge of the ‘universal heavenly machine’.
This does not stop one being able to isolate within the Nostradamian discourse, for all its ambiguities, some prophecies which take into account the dream of a universal imperium whose downfall will be marked by a threefold rupture: the defeat of the Habsburgs, the Ottomans, and the Papacy. They revolve around an emblematic figure whose name oscillates between the ‘great Cyrus’, sometimes the great ‘Chyren’ or again, ‘Ognyon’.21 At the world's helm is the great Cyrus. He will reign ‘still further’ (‘plus ultra’ being the device of Emperor Charles V, which he had made his own), farther than the columns of Hercules, in succession to the one who had been loved, feared, and held in awe (Charles V?). His glory and renown will surpass the heavens, but he will content himself with the title of ‘victor’ (conqueror).22 The great Chyren will take control of Avignon; his honeyed missives will overcome the city of Rome, full of bitterness.23 The realm of the great Selin (the Ottomans) will be conquered and taken over by the Ognyon.24 He will extend his empire over the Italies, and it will be governed by a prudent and wily person.25 Hercules will be at war with [Charles?] ‘the fifth’, again in Italy. In other words, the ‘temple’ will be thrown open by warlike means and the peace will be ended. Clement, Julius and Ascagne will beat a retreat, whilst the sword (God's sword, wielded by the king of France), the key of St Peter and the eagle will engage in unprecedented conflict.26 There will also be a Hercules who will be king of Rome and of Denmark, known as ‘guion’ by the three Gauls. He will make Italy and the Venetian lagoon tremble, and will be praised as the first among monarchs.27 After all these terrible upheavals another figure will appear. In the seventh month of the year 1997 a frighteningly large king (Saturn) will dominate the sky, who will bring back to life the great king of Angoumois (a prince of the house of Valois-Angoulême?) who, following the cycle of Mars, will inaugurate a reign of happiness.28 As against this king with multiple names and faces (Cyrus, Chyren, Ognyon) appears another person, called the Macedonian, who could be taken to be either Charles V or Philip II.29 During a time of mourning the Selin king will wage war on the ‘young’ Amathian, which is when Gaul will be in difficulty and St Peter's barque will be shipwrecked.30 Above all, he pictures a conflict with the Gallic Hercules.31 For seven years, fortune will shine on Philip, who will weaken the power of the Arabs. Then, at the meridian, he will be confounded by a ‘contrary’ affair which will turn out badly, and the young Ognyon will destroy his power.32
What Nostradamus seems to be implying is that, despite vicissitudes, there would come to pass a ‘great monarch’ who, having been consecrated, would ‘pacify the earth for many years’.33 He would become the emperor, the ‘great monarch’ of the eschaton, and he would arise from Gaul. Is this Henri II, as specialists have deduced, pointing out that the name ‘Chyren’ is an anagram of ‘Henryc’?34 Is it Henri II or another Henri, one yet to come, who would defeat the Spanish and the Turk, and go as far as Babylon?35 He would become a universal monarch in fighting the Papacy and the church hierarchy:36
The Gallic king with his Celtic right arm,
Seeing discord in the great Monarchy,
Shall make his sceptre flourish over the three parts
Against the cope of the great Hierarchy.
The prediction is repeated in the quatrain which concludes that ‘the Roman sceptre will be struck by the cock’, or the one which begins with the declamation: ‘O mighty Rome, your ruin approaches … .’.37 Alongside this should be added the quatrain depicting great upheavals when ‘all the ranks of ecclesiastical honour shall be turned into Jupiter Quirinal [‘dial quirinal’], viz. high priests of Jupiter, thereby no longer worshipping the true God. At that moment a ‘king of France’ will emerge like a warrior priest-king, who will ‘turn vulcanic’ all things ecclesiastical, i.e. consign them to the fire of Vulcan.38 The one who rough-chisels his letters (‘L’aspre par lettre’), possibly the Pope, will make such a carry-on (‘fera si horrible coche’), persecuting everyone with his ‘sharp sword’ and driving it deep into their hearts.39 Without wanting to extrapolate further on Nostradamus’ meaning, these various indications point in the direction of someone seized with a powerful anti-Roman tendency, who dreamed of a French monarch filled with the mission of bringing down the infidel Papacy and its ungodly forces. So, alongside his non-confessional fideism, there ran an exaltation of the French monarchy, accompanied by a kind of prophetic virulence, whose mission was to remake History by bringing down the established Church, stigmatized as a tyranny like that which emerges in the sub-text of his letters to his German correspondents. This is a fantasy which comes and goes, just as when Nostradamus has a vision of death when coming upon the Tiber, and when he foresees the ‘captain’ of the ship of St Peter being taken prisoner and ‘thrown into a dungeon …’.40 The messianic era of peace seems to require the humbling of the Papacy. If it was not what Nostradamus wanted, it was what he envisaged. Either way, non-confessional fideism went hand in hand with anti-Romanism!
Anna Carlstedt has spoken intriguingly of a ‘Nostradamian melancholy’ which emerges particularly in his obsession with calamity.41 Nostradamus strikes me, however, as nowhere near melancholic, not least because one of the figures with whom he most identifies himself is that of Job. The paradigm of Job is someone who refuses to submit to despair even if he cannot always understand why he has such misfortunes in life, someone who refuses to be overcome by them because he sees them as divine trials, signs from God. The trials and tribulations which engulf Nostradamus’ writing are also authentic signs from God, which is how he himself interprets them, and is bound to offer them to other good Christian people. The Catholic persecutions depicted in his letter to Lorenz Tubbe are thus one of the signs of mankind being led blindly by passion, and failing to read the intensifying numbers of signs of calamity as appeals from God to change course. And, although (as we shall see) other persecutions are set forth in the Centuries, coming implicitly from the Calvinist destroyers of images and polluters of holy shrines, they are there because, in the eyes of Nostradamus, what is evil is evil, whoever is responsible for it. And what is evil is the illusion of certainty, the antithesis of the mystery inherent in God's Word. There is no such thing as more or less evil, since it is all one. Everyone who presumes to possess the truth and who tries to impose it upon his neighbour, whether an iconoclast of images and temples, or a persecutor, burning the bodies of his enemies, each one of them is evil, and in seeking to impose his truth upon others, is engaged in evil. One should therefore read the predictions of Nostradamus as a kind of compendium of divine premonitions which mankind should heed in order to protect himself against, or heal, his own presumption, the illusion that ordinary mortals can known the Unknowable. Thus, when the Almanac for the year 1554 announces for the month of April a new moon, under which monsters, ‘both animal and human, which will presage great calamities’ will be brought forth, it is in order to affirm that, if ‘truly and profoundly interpreted’ it will be possible to ensure that the terrible events signified by the stars will not, in fact, come to pass. The astrophile speaks, therefore, God's Word, in the sense that he tells of human sinfulness in all its past and present power, and potentiality; but he does so ontologically, because (above all) it is about what is inherent in mankind. He proclaims God. It is important to dig beneath the surface texture in this categorization of the evils all around.42 The evil lies not in Catholics or Calvinists, but in their shared practices of violence and in what they reveal about our lack of awareness of ourselves in relation to God. In the wicked phantoms of cruelty and inhumanity which haunt the Nostradamian vision, we can detect the awful consequences of not accepting the limits of our human condition, when we pretend to know what God only knows, profaning the sphere of the mystery of faith and acting against God.
Prophecy is thus a form of therapy against an evil which is to be found everywhere. If, as Enea Balmas says, there was a ‘Nostradamus phenomenon’ in the middle of the sixteenth century, it lies in the hope that the astrologer wanted to convey to those who understood his language of ‘de-signification’. As Balmas put it, it is a way of thinking that seeks to ‘dominate the profound space beyond the superficial world. It is easy to smile about it; it is harder to get back to the high-tension way of thinking which reckons itself capable of stepping beyond the threshold of mystery’. The latter is nothing like the trance which takes over the warriors of God, Catholics or Huguenots, in their mutual desire to possess the Truth. It is the mystery of a divine love which transcends the natural world, the mystery of an alternate God's Word. Enea Balmas also emphasizes that, when it comes to the ways by which we conceptualize this imaginary, and undertake an analytic history of it, we have to go beyond the established categories: ‘It is essential to bring to mind the extraordinary syncretism of the Renaissance, where Aristotle and Plato rubbed shoulders with one another without demoting one another, where theology and theosophy were bed-fellows, where reason and divination went alongside one another, and where magic was seen not as a negation but as an exaltation of them both’.43
The critics of astrology, such as Nostradamus practised it, or such as his detractors said that he did, refused to conceive of the stars as a divine language. Such a basic fact was not evident, according to Nostradamus, to the French, or more broadly to Christendom and the world, not even in the case of the ‘Iliad of evils’ which he discerned in the conjunction between Saturn and Mars. So, what he had managed to write on 20 April 1561 as the opening page to the New Almanac for the year 1562 had not, he notes, been received as he had wanted it to be. Had he not proclaimed to the Pope that, through his astronomical ‘wisdom’ he had foreknowledge of ‘tumults, wars, murders, killings … and other unspeakable disasters which stand hanging, suspended by a thread, above our head …’? Had he not recalled the sins of the people, commited in the years gone by, and had he not pronounced the ‘dictum’ of Valerius Maximus: ‘Lento enim gradu ad vindictam sui divina procedit ira, tardivitatem supplicii gravitate compensat’ (The wrath of God proceeds to vengeance slowly, but it makes up for it by the weight of the slow march of the agonies in store’)?44 But he ended his dedicatory preface nevertheless with a reference to the ‘ineffable grace and goodness of the most powerful God, Creator of all things, who will not allow us to endure and suffer more than our human frailty (‘imbeccilité’) can endure’. But this ‘imbeccilité’ should perhaps be understood in an ontological sense, as the blind weakness of the human condition, and the consequence of original sin.
To put it more plainly, Nostradamus’ faith appears to be something loose, contingent and ineffable. It is something which cannot be named because his God is, no doubt, without a name, a God who speaks to him within, a God of love, no more to be situated in one confessional denomination than in any other (and that in spite of an anti-romanism that emerges here and there from time to time). The God who has no name is a God who is everywhere and nowhere, whom human beings should glorify, above all, in His mystery, and to do so without substituting themselves for Him, and without the presumption of believing in their own finite capacities. We should glorify God by faith in his gift of mercy to us, an act of folly in the world's eyes but one from which the aim is ‘beatitude’.45 The God of Nostradamus is very much that of Erasmus, the God of the philosophia Christi, the Godhead who must be worshipped from within, a worship based on the reading of the Scriptures and on prayer, the Pauline God with whom: ‘he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man’ (1 Corinthians 2:15). Timothy, one of the characters in Erasmus’ colloquy, The Godly Feast (Convivium religiosum, 1522), proclaims to Eusebius: ‘the perfect man is he who, with his bodily passions under control, is governed solely by the power of the Holy Spirit. Moreover, to compel such a man to conform to human laws is perhaps inappropriate. Instead, he should be left to His Master, by whose spirit he is led [… .] What need is there to prescribe to him who voluntarily does more than those human laws require?’46
Even astrology itself is contaminated by evil. In the Almanac which he published for the year 1566, Nostradamus says that he no longer wants to teach the knowledge of the stars to his children, even though one of them – no doubt César – seemed to him to have an aptitude in that direction. For there was such abuse on the part of astrologers that, as he had been told, the practice of astrology would soon (‘in no time at all’) be prohibited. He was no doubt alluding to those who interpreted the events in the heavens as presages of a God of anger and punishment, and who those in authority around the king thought had played a part in arousing Catholic militants by awakening their desire to eliminate the Protestants. The God of these wicked astrologers is exactly that God of violence, that God of the Last Judgement whose power is the capacity to terrorize, to the degree that it creates a massacring tension. There is good astrology, but there is also bad – the latter being that which reinforces the violent tensions among those whose desires for violence have been awoken by their confessional leanings. So it is not only theology which has the potential to be dangerous. It is a striking fact that those who criticized the astrophile from Salon were those who were the noted defenders of a traditional conception of judicial astrology.
This contingent, ineffable Nostradamus, who never says loudly and clearly what he thinks because his God resides deeply within his being, can be the historian's guide towards that interior space as we seek out what was, in the Renaissance, an evangelist cogito.