There is no need to resort to the charlatanism about Nostradamus which survives and flourishes, thanks to the internet. There is no point in bombarding the house of fools, one might say in jest, although Nostradamus himself developed his own thought around the paradigm of Christ as a godly fool. Historians, however, continue to display a marked reticence when it comes to the astrologer from Salon, probably as a result of the uncertainties and complexities of his writings, which prevent them from being integrated into the religious confrontations of the period. Generally, he is passed over in silence because it causes less trouble to consign to the dustbin of history everything that cuts across the teleology of ‘modernity’. Either that, or they consider him as a sixteenth-century marginal, a source (when evoked) whose significance is to be minimized. In a recent dictionary on the wars of religion, he gets an entry of three small columns, imprecise and schematic, which concludes on this de-historicizing note: ‘The obscurity of his quatrains will continue to furnish material for amateur prophets for a long time to come’.1 In the end, Nostradamus only seems to be a figure of interest in the history of the sixteenth century on the two occasions he meets Catherine de Médicis, or when he is appropriated, as in the First Face of Janus of Jean-Aimé de Chavigny, and transported into the fantasmagorical realm of futurology, which is where he is seen to earn his place as an object of historiographical interest.
There is a somewhat alternative trend that is discernible in the pages of the recent book (2003) by Hervé Drévillon and Pierre Lagrange, which is devoted (in an interesting and suggestive way) to the historical uses to which the Centuries have been put, rather than to locating the astrophile within the subjectivities and uncertainties of the years from 1540 to 1560.2 Nostradamus is reduced to being a mirror for his times, becomes an anticipator of later historical developments, and a catalyst for the anxieties and ruptures in the imaginary of his contemporaries, for ‘in describing the triumph of death and chaos, the rivers of blood that ran “down the public thoroughfares” he was one of the most faithful witnesses to an era traumatized by events which culminated with the massacre of Saint Bartholomew’.3 Nostradamus’ visions and nightmares become thus no more than seismic readings of shockwaves within the imaginary. I will go no further, save to point out that seeing Nostradamus as a reflection of what haunted his whole epoch also recurs in literary analyses.4 We need go no further down this retrospective road of Nostradamian genealogy; but I am minded to think along the lines of Lucien Febvre when he wrote that ‘those who only dream of repeating in dull, parrot-fashion, the same old story, never get a sense (I borrow here, conscious that I am doing so, from the words of Paul Valéry) of “this feeling of being suspended before the uncertain, which is what animates great lives”…’.5 Lucien Febvre traced out here his yearning ‘to nail this illusion, murderous in every sense of the word, which imposes on the living, the laws supposedly dictated to them by the dead’.6
The trap, in the case of Nostradamus, is thus a methodological one, and it leads inexorably towards anachronism. How are we to avoid the perils of positivism, whether those of imposing a confessional taxonomy upon Nostradamus, or those of historical marginalization and turning Nostradamus into a mirror of his times? Our hypothesis is that he was an astrologer who committed himself to a mission that was, in some way, a remedy to a period of disintegration and disorientation in perceptions of where one was, in past, present and future. Confronted by a Nostradamus who reflected back to his own era the image of its malaise, and thereby allowed them to ‘perceive’ a reality, should we return to the idea that his writing had as its latent objective to convince his contemporaries of their own incapacity to see and receive what was true? To bypass the recurring snare of anachronism, we must impose an interpretative precondition, which is not to take into consideration Nostradamus’ writings from the problematic twin-angle of its receptivity and reception, and therefore not to define it in terms of any inherent factuality, linked to the modern meaning of the term ‘prophecies’. Thus, we must engage with the possible, with an experiment that puts us in a strange place, what we might call an introspective simulation, to discover, within the language that Nostradamus uses, the creative and subjective impulses which serve to alert the reader to a divine message.
Following on from the need to avoid anachronism one further point needs to be emphasized. The gap between literary and historical fields of inquiry is a retrospective and artificial division. There is nothing to prevent the historian from historicizing a text that belongs to the literary canon, taking on board the principle of ‘heuristic reduplication’. Georges Poulet has postulated that ‘literature’ is, above all, ‘a living, multiple, but disorganized presence, lacking only precisely that certain sense of order which it invites me to give it’.7 A ‘corpus’ of writing is, thus, ‘a melodic continuity’, an ‘internal impulse’. In this perspective, ‘criticism acts as the mimetic reduplication of an act of thinking…’. So, according to Poulet, ‘to replicate at a profound level the cogito of a writer or a philosopher, is to discover his way of feeling and thinking, to see how he brings it forth and forms it, to determine what obstacles it meets along the way; it is to construct the sense of a life which is organized on the basis of the consciousness that it has of itself […] the mental order thus created by the writer must therefore become the mental order observed in turn by the critic’.8 So, over and against the approaches to texts which set out to resolve questions of the significance of this or that passage, it should be possible to accomplish a critical ascent ‘back to a source’, what Georges Poulet calls the cogito of a writer – in our case the cogito of the author of the Prophecies – back to his consciousness of himself, always accepting that it can only be one version of the various possible readings of the interiority of someone from the past, a rationalized interpretation of it. In the Renaissance, such an exercise has to be undertaken with the presupposition that the person in question is emphatically still present in his writing despite the fact that he does not single himself out. In the Renaissance, the writer hides behind what seems to be a categoric refusal to make himself the object of thought, a refusal which, because there is a necessary link between what we include and exclude from our thought, becomes in itself a sense of consciousness of self. It is as though what one says about oneself reflects what one does not say. It is as though summoning up before one's eyes a reality, we are then told that this reality is not what it seems, that it is not ontological.
In the case of Nostradamus, however, such an experiment is not easy to conduct, for the historian comes up against the hermeticism in prophetic thought. Not only does our distance from the semiological systems of the sixteenth century magnify the range of meanings of the words themselves, but prophetic language is also based on syntactical rules and particular grammatical constructions which are designed to put in place a logical disjuncture. Nostradamus’ historical trajectory has therefore to be apprehended as an ‘oeuvre’ in the literary sense of the term, defined by Jean-Pierre Richard in 1955 as a ‘venture’ or a ‘life-work’.9 Our task is to seek humbly to rediscover the ‘fundamental intention’ behind a body of writing, its dominant project or ‘internal coherence’. ‘One perceives resonances and points of agreement between various levels of experience. There is no doubt that the act of reading involves stimulating these resonances, grasping these new interconnections and tying them together’. The act of reading means, above all, retaining the point of view of the reader, and Jean-Pierre Richard insists on that: ‘The effort involved in the act of reading cannot result, of course, in the grasping of a total truth. Each reading of a text is never other than one interpretation of it, leaving open the many others which remain possible. A life-work is just that: a corpus, open to all winds and currents, an ocean to be traversed in all directions’. That, however, is no impediment to venturing, as we must, beyond this opening up of meaning, in order to decipher the ‘obsession’ lying behind each life or work. This obsession, or myth (to be closer to historical language), is what runs beneath the surface meanderings of discourse, in and under the words themselves. Of course, it is not a matter, in this perspective, of entering into a historical critique of identification, but rather of activating what Jean Starobinski describes as this ‘participation without bounds’, which claims to arrive at ‘a forever ultimate knowledge, a viewpoint from on high in which the warmth of the human mind is transmuted into pure light’.10
What the historian needs to demonstrate, therefore, is that the various introspective simulations or critical virtualities on offer in the life-work of Nostradamus allow room for a historicization of Nostradamus which places him beyond the confessional wrangles and ruptures, or rather subverts them by warning, verse after verse, quatrain after quatrain, of a future filled with fire, blood and death. The evangelical optimism of the 1520s was reconstituted into a discourse of terror and sinfulness, designed to make people feel guilty. Or, at least that was superficially the case for, as we have already seen and will return to, the exaggeration of human evil is not the be all and end all of his writing, since Nostradamus sought, above all, and with an instrument different from the Rabelaisian laughter or the mystical introspection of Marguerite of Navarre, to counter the historical dynamic, as it seemed, which was separating sinful humanity from the God of absolute power and incommensurable love. The perspective of the literary critic thus comes to the aid of the historian, helping him to avoid anachronism and enabling him to historicize an individual, not just hypothetically, but as a symbolic set of interractions, expressing or crystalizing a critical juncture in belief at a moment in history in the sixteenth century, the period spanning the age of Erasmus and that of Montaigne.
From this it follows that Nostradamus did not write his prophetic quatrains to announce the future, and still less to bring back the past. He formulated them to allow his readers to go beyond what was visible in the present, beyond the surface texture of the immediate, beyond the explicit in what was said, in order to experience the wisdom that was within themselves, in order then to convey it to contemporaries. The truth within the soul would be revealed through the learned interplay of language, for language connected up what could only be linked together in the very order of the unity of Creation, as willed by God. For language acted as a stimulus to the abnegation of self which was the precondition to accessing divine Truth. We should always remember that the more obscure a language was in the Renaissance, the more it was perceived as carrying a greater weight of meaning. The more it made sense, the less it signified. The more something could be expressed literally, the more we should regard it antinomically, and take its ultimate significance as the opposite. Above all, we should correlate this with the humanist preoccupation to ensure that our understanding of something necessarily requires a concomitant effort to enrich our soul, and that was not something that was within everyone's grasp. Jean Dupèbe, the literary specialist of sixteenth-century French astrology, implied just that when he wrote that it was the anima mundi, ‘the principle of unity between the forms of Creation’ which inspires the writing of the Centuries. That is what, according to Nostradamus, the human soul must encounter in order then to be in a position to rise above itself and the seeming dead weight of the consuming evil in contemporary events. But the astrophile also sought to displace his readers back to the period of the prophecies of the people of Israel to tell them that it was a period beyond time, and that such prophecies are, here and now, being accomplished. In this context, it is worth citing Rabbi André Neher, a distinguished contemporary philosopher, who writes that ‘prophecy only tangentially anticipates what is to come. Its clairvoyance is not necessarily linked to the future. It has its own, immediate valency. Its diction is not prediction …’.11 Prophecy says that which is, even when it expresses itself in the future tense. That leads us to the hypothesis that Nostradamus is speaking about what is immediately going on about him, not what is immediate to people in general, but immediate to each person who aspires to live in accordance with the wisdom of God. That immediacy is ontological, and requires the purging of one's sins. This is how Nostradamus expresses it:
O Lord God eternal, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in this nocturnal hour, and at this moment in time on Sunday 11 March 1565 [6], when the Sun makes its entrance into the first point of Aries, I make my trembling supplication unto Thee with my hands joined in prayer, to beg Thee, of Thy mercy to pardon me. Open my mind, my memory, and my understanding, so that I may faithfully expound the significations and presages of the present year 1566, in accordance with the perfect judgement of the stars. May I, through Thee, express their meaning purely and serenely, unsullied by earthly talk, my soul purged of all filth and vile sin, so that, pursuing the right path of truth I may make known publicly to the people of France what the stars foretell for the present year.
The Nostradamian cogito is that of someone who recognizes and communicates a duplicate of what he is: at once sinner and saved. It is the anthropology of the implicit in a human consciousness in which the Erasmian impulse has been active. To prophesy is to proclaim the ontology of a cogito which is centred only by its relationship to faith, in order to discharge the experience of a sacred mission of charity, exercised ‘for the common profit of mankind’. That was Erasmus’ appeal in his Manual of a Christian Soldier (1501): ‘That none should have in their sights their own interest, but that each should contribute to the common good his part of what he has received from God, such that all flows back to the source from which all comes, that is to say, the head …’.12