Notradamus recounts how he saw the ‘movement of the heavenly procession’ as in a ‘burning mirror’. The heavens are a mirror which transmits a brilliant, incandescent light. In the astrological sky there is thus a blaze which is the very source of the oracular vision. This motif is so essential in trying to understand the encrypted tension of the astrophile and the signals which he emits to his readers in order that they should assimilate its meaning that it demands to be fundamentally linked to the rest of his thought.
As early as 1531 Simon Dubois, a printer in Alençon had already published Marguerite of Navarre's Mirror of the Sinful Soul.1 To the Mirror was added a further text, the Discord, and three Prayers.2 The fundamental question this raises is how Marguerite of Navarre understood the term ‘Mirror’ that she used in the title of her book, which she put under a Davidic sign of admission of guilt and intercession from Psalm 50 [in the Vulgate version, 51 in Protestant and Jewish enumerations]: ‘Create in me a clean heart O God’. This quotation, which opens the book, puts it in the immediate context of an urgency of something that must be accomplished: an appeal to God to pour down his Holy Spirit on the sinful soul and make known the divine Will to those who have transgressed it in ignorance.
Here we need to refer back earlier in the sixteenth century to Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples. He published his Commentaries on the Four Gospels (Commentarii initiatorii in quatuor evangelia) in 1526. In that work he dealt with the purging of the soul and its attaining of a life in conformity with that of Christ, living and dying, and rising again in Christ.3 It was a transformative moment, with the metaphor of light taking the place of darkness in an awakening in Christ. In Lefèvre d’Étaples’ Epistles and Gospels for the Fifty-Two Sundays of the Year (Epistres et evangiles pour les cinquante et deux sepmaines…à l’usage de Meaux) he had already furnished an analysis of the thirteenth Epistle of Paul to the Romans, which outlined the forthcoming ‘day of salvation’; it was time to ‘awake out of sleep’ and leave the world of death and go forth into the land of the living with the certainty that we were forgiven of our sins. The moment had come for us all, declared Lefèvre, to follow the counsel of the Apostle Paul to all the faithful: to arise in faith and hope in God ‘ablaze and ardent with his love and armed with all his mercy’.4 That moment of spiritual union would be the ultimate realization of St Paul's injunction, the restitition of the Word that was light, bringing with it the prospect of universal evangelization.5 At all events, the mirror, for Lefèvre, did not merely reflect that light; it spread it abroad, it was ‘ardent’ in the sense that it burnt with a light whose source was divine. That turned it into the ultimate paradox, a light by which we see not who we are as human beings, in our negative humanity, but we see rather a celestial, shining, blinding light, one which blocks out our vision of ourselves. Thus it is God who, by closing the shutters on our sight by the light of his Revelation, grants sight to those who, by the light of his Revelation, have faith in his love.
There was a tradition of the mirror as a metaphor in the context of a time which evangelists hoped was newly open to Christ's will. It is possible that Nostradamus played with the ambiguity between the mirror as a prophetic vision received through the heavens, and the mirror as simply the metaphor for the interiorization of the Word of God. It would be possible to read the quatrains as mimetic of the divine Word. It is otherwise evident that the mirror is, following on from a medieval tradition, a metaphor, distributing light, radiating a transcendent truth, otherwise invisible to man, who does not know how to see it.6 Renja Salminien points out that, in a letter of 11 November 1521 to Marguerite of Navarre, Guillaume Briçonnet (her spiritual counsellor) drew to her attention a specular Christ, who ‘[…] is a pearl and living precious stone, specular, a spotless mirror before whom nothing lies hidden. For He sees all, and whomsoever presents themselves before it will find himself in it; whosover presents himself before the mirror of divine goodness, chastened and quickened by His love, will be loved in return’.7 ‘Mirror’ can also carry the meaning of a universal knowledge, an all-embracing radiance which makes possible the grasping of a transcendence beyond the strict constaints of a language that was incapable of establishing a relationship with God.8 ‘Mirror’ also carries a Biblical connotation, one developed in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, cited by Marguerite of Navarre herself, and evoking very significantly a veiled, specular ‘enigmatic’ wisdom. In the Second Epistle to the Corinthians (2 Cor. 13:12), the faithful are invited to reflect upon, or contemplate God's glory as in a mirror, ‘with open face beholding as a glass’ and thus to allow themselves to be transformed by the image which they contemplate.9 This would mean ultimately taking on the form of Christ implied in the theme of the mirror. Whoever looks into the mirror becomes someone other than they are, becomes united with the Other, but without being able really to see because it is in a moment of blinding radiance that sight comes to them.
We should bear in mind that Marguerite of Navarre gives her work the title ‘Mirror’ within this Paulinian framework of reference, but carrying also a reference to Nicolas of Cusa. The Mirror is truly an enigma in the sense that, although it serves as a tool of understanding to his readers, it only does so in the sure and certain knowledge that it will surpass all our understanding because it does not reveal everything of itself. As Nicolas of Cusa put it: ‘I will furnish a mirror and an enigma, with which the feeblest spirit will easily find its way into the furthest regions of what can be known’.10 The Mirror of the Sinful Soul sought to be, thus, a text initiating the reader into an ineffable love of God, shaped by the motif of a blindingly bright light, reflecting back to him the transcendence which is not his. The ultimate point of the text can be nothing but an enigma, something inexpressible, which descends from the very Godhead because it is impossible for sinful humans to penetrate further than that by their own means, and because the secrets of divine counsel must remain with God. It is this divine ineffability which sends back the message of what it is to be human, and what the human being owes to God. So, there is an ‘enigma of the sinful soul’, or rather, the objective of Marguerite of Navarre's writing is to transport the soul of the reader towards this enigma in order that it be resolved with the aid of God alone. To know God is to know that there is a secret in that knowledge, a mystery which is always and ever the mystery of faith. This is Nicolas of Cusa's hidden God, who is to be understand ‘in a state of secrecy and silence’.
It seems to me that Marguerite of Navarre's point of departure is reproduced in the unfolding of Nostradamus’ quatrains. The turning of prophetic wisdom into an enigma was a device to express the passage of the Christian from obscurity into light, from death into life. The enigma obliged him to pass through a sequence of doubt, a process of discernment that there is no certainty beyond that of Redemption for those who trust not in themselves but in Christ. Each quatrain can be read as a dazzling fragment of a mirror for the sinful soul, and that serves to confirm our initial reading of them, following Nostradamus’ imagery. Furthermore, by means of Marguerite of Navarre it is no doubt possible to glimpse what the gift of prophecy claimed by Nostradamus was: the gift of light, reflecting what could not be reflected, which propels the astrologer therefore into an utterance in enigmas, ‘cloudy’ because human language is itself deconstructed by being the diction imposed by God to convey the secrets of nature throughout time and space. This was the diction of the Logos, with the added topos of antinomy – of night becoming the moment of light, and of light signifying the possibility of not seeing oneself because that was the way to see and speak the Truth. Nostradamus’ discourse takes on, therefore, a further configuration. It is a specular light, one which entitles him to speak in enigmas, and it is synonymous with divine grace, freely received by human beings who look at the world and seek confidently for God in it, and encounter a revelation which is the Word of God. The encrypted nature of Nostradamus’ writing is therefore crucial, the encryption of an evangelism in which the stars illuminate the astrologer's soul with their message, which is none other that that of the Living Word. It is the encrypting of a hidden conscience.
To proceed still further, Marguerite of Navarre's Mirror begins with the admission of a soul abandoned in the dark, denied ‘illumination and enlightenment’, having no access to a mirror. The soul is held in chains by its own misery, forever stuck there by its concupiscence, lacking the strength on its own account to free itself or cry out for help. Light cannot enter there because of the nature of the human will, which can only bring forth sin because it is the product of human ‘pride’. It is disposed only to evil, and lives in a hell, fleeing unconsciously far from God in an effort to forget Him. The poor creature in this dark place lives ‘blind’. Marguerite of Navarre then goes on to lay out the gift of divine grace, which man cannot achieve on his own merit or by his own works, a grace which pierces the darkness. God's grace is, thus, ‘enlightenment’, and it transforms the darkness of hell into the kingdom of light, by the mirror, whose primary meaning is thus imbued in the reader's conscience. By this gift of love, forgiving us our sins, God handles our soul, says Marguerite of Navarre, like a ‘mother, a daughter, a sister, a spouse’. The enigma of the sinful soul is not to rest content in the certainty of these mutual bonds, which impel it to call upon God as ‘my Brother, Father, Child, and Husband’ in order to give God thanks and tell Him that all its faith is vested in Him. The enigma lies in the fact that the sinful soul is not satisfied with the promise of redemption, but advances towards God in love, just as God has towards mankind in the sacrifice of His son. It is a move made in confident expectation of a free remission of sins: sole fide (by faith alone); and soli Deo (by God alone).
After the soul confesses the sin which is in it and receives faith, God's love then makes it the very receptacle of Christ, and that love grows without ceasing through divine grace. God's love takes hold in a way that the soul can only accept in a restrained, measured fashion. The mirror is an enigma because anything beyond this sense of the presence of Christ in one's heart is inexpressible, and incomprehensible within the terms of language, or at least in terms which can be expressed in words. Marguerite of Navarre's Mirror thus ends logically on an ineffable note which the Prayer intones and emphasizes. To explain this ineffability of the seizing of the All over the none, she uses the metaphor of the sun. It only needs ‘one ray’ for it to render someone blind. No doubt it will seem to the eye that it has experienced the totality of the sun's light, but this is a lie, because it has been blinded by a ‘tiny ray of light’, for it is impossible for it to see ‘the entire, intense brightness’. The soul, confronted by the love of God, is in just that state. A scintilla of that love will engender a ‘fire’ of love at once immense and mild, so much so that it is impossible to put into words ‘that it is love’. Is not the topos of the flame from on high which enlightens Nostradamus, seated on his tripod, another way of saying the same thing?
By inserting into his writing the motif of the burning mirror, which is the astral sky, and that of the flame which consumes or subverts the soul, Nostradamus evidently intended to refer to the theme of God's grace freely and universally given and whose reception enables the Christian man or woman to access divine love. It is by this grace that he felt himself to be a prophet, a grace that was synonymous with faith and which allowed him to access the secrets of the universe, which are none other than the mysteries of evangelical freedom. A little further in the ‘Preface’ to César, Nostradamus makes his position clearer, declaring that he rejects magical practices and judicial astrology, and that it was not by those means that he had become a ‘videns’ (seer). What was essential in order to acquire ‘the perfect knowledge of things’ was ‘divine inspiration’, ‘seeing as all prophetic inspiration derives its prime moving principle from God the Creator, than from good fortune and nature’.11 From that, it follows that human understanding, powerless on its own to understand arcane things, can only do so ‘through the voice heard at the hem [i.e. the zodiac] by means of the slender flame, in which part future causes will happen to incline’. The ‘slender flame’ is also called the ‘expediting flame’ because it manifests ‘to our exterior senses (including our eyes) the causes of those future happenings which are bound to occur to persons engaged in prognostication’.12
If his gaze into the heavens allows him to access ‘occult philosophy’, it is because he exercises it under divine ‘inspiration’ and ‘revelation’, which gives him knowledge of what is to come, ‘precisely locating the particularity of places, attuning the places and dates to their celestial figures thanks to a virtue, a power and a divine faculty possessed of occult properties, for which the three dimensions of time are comprehended within eternity and whose revolution includes things past, present and future: quia omnia sunt nuda, et aperta, etc’.13
That latter phrase comes from St Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews (4:13): ‘All things are naked and opened unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do’, and we should pay attention to it, for the allusion is far from anodine. In the Pauline passage, it is linked to an affirmation of the Word of God as ‘quick and powerful’, ‘sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart’ (4:12). That affirmation is highly evangelist in tone.14 Luther, of course, lectured on that Epistle in 1517–18, seeing it as condemning the ‘dead works’ by which Jesus Christ purifies souls. Redemption takes place outside the sinner, and faith is confidence in God's promises, a ‘devouring fire’, and their accomplishment.15 In this context, the sacrament of ordination is, for Luther, a product of Romanists’ delusions, for Christ is the sole high priest, and needs no other intercessors (saints, or the Virgin). He is the sole, sufficient and eternal mediator: as Luther put it, ‘Yes, the word of God is living, energizing, sharper than any double-edged sword. It pierces the divide between being and breath, the joints and the marrow. It judges the intentions and desires of the heart’.
Returning to Marguerite of Navarre, she therefore reveals a great deal to us about Nostradamus’ unrooted state of consciousness by giving us some important clues to his Biblically-nourished imagination.16 The process of writing possessed, for her, a hidden cachet, which followed on from the heuristics of Lefèvre d’Etaples, who himself followed Guillaume Briçonnet on this point. Everything depended on how the reader ‘saw’ (i.e. approached) the text: As Lefèvre put it: ‘There is a double literal [way of] reading; one of them is illegitimate, by those whose sight is troubled, those who cannot see, who can only understand divine things carnally and physically; the other, the true way, is of those who see, who are illuminated’.17 The issue is how to arrive at this ‘understanding’ of the Scriptures, of the secrets hidden within them. He who sees, illuminated from within, is the one who has been granted this understanding. We could perhaps say that Nostradamus, by means of what he describes as the receiving of a flame, symbolized the motif of this illumination (nourished in christological references) by the Holy Spirit. But what characterizes Nostradamus’ spiritual approach is that he seems to proceed by inverting things. He is not the one who sets off in quest of the spiritual sense within God's Word, it is the Word itself which he sets out to imitate by seeking just that spiritual sense of events in the human world, of which the stars give him engimatic foresight. The result creates a sort of theopathic tension in the reader when it comes to trying to understand what he is saying. So, when Nostradamus prophesies a coming disappearance of the rainbow for the space of 40 years in a quatrain, given the evangelist context in which it is written, it is hardly possible for the reader not to see in it the disappearance of Christ himself, as foretold by Noah's Ark. This is exactly as Marguerite of Navarre had expounded in her Biblical play, ‘Comedy in the Desert’:18
The rainbow is for peace put into Heaven
Transforming into gentleness the bitter venom
Of justice and of God's wrathful sway.
Shoot, alas, Sinners, and with this bow's aid
Alone will be by it this grace conveyed;
Learn from the Eternal all this interplay.
His body is the ark that lifts you from your ill
And safely brings you ’cross the Waters still
No more submersed by fears which they impart.
It is the dove which brings the olive branch thus
A sign that love has come to dwell amongst us
To all those chosen ones whose faith is firm in heart.
So, Nostradamus writes his Prophecies, choosing to do so in an obscure and enigmatic style, not so much to predict the future as to awaken in us a consciousness of the presence of Christ around us through a knowledge of the stars which his faith allows him to have. He thus reconnects with the hidden God which he exalts and from Whom he declares himself to have received the mission of proclaiming the news of the Word. That is what he seems to want us to think in the almanac for 1566: ‘I exclude all destiny that is uncertain and inevitable, and that it is in the nature of our destiny to be carried along, but carried on by it in the world. For who can (know) heaven unless it is he who has known the gift of heaven? Moreover, the power of the divine spirit directs [the world], and by its holy breath, God respires, and governs by hidden calculation’.
It is worth repeating that everything is a matter of disjuncture and, above all, of a disparity between what is said, and the way in which it is said. Languages in the sixteenth century, despite their apparent divergences, cross and recross, combine and converge.