In order to trace out further the Renaissance symbolic codes which pervade the dynamics of Nostradamian writing, I want to begin with Cynthia Skenazi's analysis of Maurice Scève's Desire (Délie, 1544) and Microcosm (Microcosme, 1562). She invites us to go beyond a Petrarchan and Platonic reading to the background in the Pauline Epistles. Desire, to take the first work, is presented as perfused by a spiritual tension whose vectors are Conversion, Endeavour, Faith, Hope, and Charity. Worldly love (i.e. physical attraction) is a kind of death which hides within it the death to self which leads to Redemption in Christ. The language it uses for loving and religious sensibility is interchangeable, and words carry false and hidden meanings in Desire, an imitation of Christ which is lived out in the desire to live in and through a loved one, which is seen as dying to one's own self.1 In the second work, Microcosm, the initial act of Creation is depicted as a projection of luminous energy from which the universe is born. God is thus pure light, it being from God alone that the sphere of the universe emanates and spreads forth.2
And the beauty of Desire merely reflects this absolute light, diffused by an essence that is nothing other than itself, potentially infinite. It is just as the sun rises that the amorous poet abandons his sombre nocturnal musing and sees what he discerns as being his life, the luminous light which his eyes retain and diffuse through him even when the sun is no longer shining. Desire herself is also light; and she lights up the one who sees her: ‘And thou, from whom I always derive light and life’.3 Desire can thus also be in her beauty, a source of conversion; and the poem then evokes a mystic experience of sacred love. But, even more, this inter-crossing is instructive about what comes close to the pulse of Nostradamus’ imaginary: sacred and profane love, Christ and profane writing.4
There arose in the middle of the sixteenth century a different kind of poetry among those poets who envisaged a ‘God All in All’, at once point and centre, in Whom is inscribed the circle, a divinity carrying the marks of Neopythagorean and Neoplatonic thought. In the cognitive system devised by Proclus, the centre-point is the cause of the circle, and the circle is ‘that which is caused by it’, whilst (for Plotinus) ‘the centre-point is father to the circle’.5 For these Renaissance poets, poetry had a duty to be, as Georges Poulet put it, ‘energistic’ (‘énergétiste’):6
A poetry which reproduces the movement of the spirit out of which mental constructs teem one after another in the same way as physical manifestations emerge successively in response to the action of the creative or emanating power of God. Thus the movement of poetic thought is identical to movement in nature, for they both have the same origins. Nature, and verse which sings its praises, develop from the same point of departure, and follow the same lines. Cosmic genesis, and poetic genesis, have the same principle and the same development.
Nostradamus’ God All in All is a God who is All, principle, beginning, middle and end, and the words of the quatrains have to pour out like the universe comes forth from its original point, in an irradiated blaze, for in infinity, every point is a centre, and every microcosm is a macrocosm, and the signifying disorder of the words, and the sense that they could carry endless meanings, serves only but to manifest the ‘All in All’. From the occult alone can emerge transparency, just as profane literature can be a way of signifying the Sacred.
So, having reached this point in my research, I must now ask myself directly the question which, up to this point, has been skirted round. Is not the divine ‘revealed inspiration’, which Nostradamus alludes to more than once and which he asserts is the hallmark of his heuristic approach, and whose meaning he conveys to his readers, the Word of God, which he presents as nourishing his vocation as a Seer, and duplicates metaphorically? Is not this the point from which it all comes, and to which it all returns? Is it not that Word which, by a mirror-effect, allows him to understand these endless motions in the heavens? Is it not through the same influx of the Word that he composed these ‘prophetic books each containing 100 quatrains of astronomical predictions…’ which ‘are perpetual prophecies from now until the year 3797’?7 The Word is presented as the ‘supernatural light’ which comes down from above to enlighten the understanding of the person whose ‘long and melancholy inspiration’ predisposes him to reveal it, and to prophesy, i.e. predict, ‘the doctrine of the stars’.8 We should perhaps imagine that Nostradamus saw the Word of God veiled behind the words he used and their literal meaning. He seems to have encrypted an evangelist epistemology into his ‘Preface’: ‘which is to say, what he [the inspired Prophet] predicts is true and of celestial origin: and this light and tender flame is most efficacious and sublime …’. As I have already noted, the word ‘efficacious’, which he used to describe the ethereal flame, is precisely the term used in the Epistle to the Hebrews to describe the divine Word and its purifying effect, that ‘true Light, which lighteth every man which cometh into the world’ (John: 1:9). When Jesus healed the man blind from birth, he proclaimed that he was the ‘light of the world’ (John 9:5) while, at the moment of Christ's transfiguration, ‘his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light’ (Matthew 17:2).
If there is truly an encrypted message it would have to be picked up here, in Nostradamus’ evangelist inclination to disguise the fact that the origins and object of astrological clairvoyance is the Logos. The heavens which he spent the time perusing during his nocturnal vigils take on their full sense in the light of the Word of God, and thus of the Holy Spirit, which is the source and impulse to intelligibility, that being probably a conjuncture with Neoplatonic thought. In fact, the flame of the soul of the world (anima mundi) turns astrological predictions into the expression of an external light coming to possess someone so that they are illuminated ‘by the angelic spirit’ and can prophesy by ‘astronomical administration’. The divine flame thus participates in the soul of the world. It stirs up ‘his fantasy with various nocturnal visions’ as much as it incites prophecies ‘during the certainty of day’.
We should recall what was said in a letter that Marguerite of Navarre (then Marguerite of Alençon) received in September 1521 from her spiritual counsellor, Guillaume Briçonnet. After writing to her about the ‘arid and dry’ state of the Church, he went on to say: ‘Alas, Madam, I only observe a noxious insensitivity in this world; most Christians are like a statue or image of Jesust Christ that one puts up in a church which, devoid of sense, sees, hears, says, tastes and smells nothing, and yet it carries the name and likeness of Christ’.9 A few months later, on 22 December 1521, Briçonnet wrote that the decay of the Church was the result of the lack of the Gospel. The reserves of charity, nourished by ministers of the Gospel, had been used up. Christians were cold-hearted to one another. In his view, it was urgent to set alight the ‘delicious fire’ which purges souls and fills them with illumination, an ‘all consuming yet unscorching fire, which quickens as it consumes, a fire that cannot itself be extinguished yet which does not burn everything, a fire which is cognizant of all yet without cognizance, a fire which is everywhere visible yet remains invisible’.10 In this letter, Briçonnet emphasizes that this fire is the ‘sublimity’ of the spiritual fire of Jesus Christ come down to earth, Christ who lives in and through his Gospel.
This sublimity, which has nothing to do with demonic possession or crude Gospel enthusiasm, applied to the astronomical sky. It permitted Nostradamus, at the very moment when he sat down to write to his son, to write that he discovered ‘by my [calculation of] revolutions, in accordance with the inspiration that has been revealed to me, how the sword of death now threatens us with plague, with war more horrible than any seen in three generations, and with famine, a sword that shall come down on earth and shall oft return, for the stars are in harmony with the revolution’.11 Nostradamus mimics the Biblical language of God's wrath when He says that he will descend with a rod of iron to chastise the unjust and punish the wicked for their iniquities. And the mercy of our Lord shall not have had time to work its effect, he tells his son, before ‘most of my Prophecies shall be accomplished and fulfilled in due revolution’. This vision of a God of anger is that of Psalm 89, predicting that if his ‘sons’ set aside his Law, profane his precepts, and disobey his commandments, then the Lord would ‘visit their transgressions with the rod, and their iniquity with stripes’ (Psalm 89: 32). It is a vision of a God who punishes those who speak ill of Him, and those who distort His will by their words. It is also a picture of a time overwhelmed by ‘terrible storms’ during which God reiterates His resolve not to spare those who profane his Covenant. Thus will the blind and deaf have their senses restored, thus will ignorance be overcome. We should remember that this Psalm was one of the great wellsprings of evangelist hope in France, and of its attendant watchful and waiting piety. That was what encouraged the faithful to sing the praises of Jehovah, crushing and overwhelming his adversaries, and it enabled them to accept persecution, waiting for the moment of eschatological revelation:12
How long, Lord? wilt thou hide thyself for ever? shall thy wrath burn like fire? Remember how short my time is: wherefore hast thou made all men in vain? What man is he that liveth, and shall not see death? shall he deliver his soul from the hand of the grave? Selah. Lord, where are thy former loving kindnesses, which thou swarest unto David in thy truth?
Over and beyond the atrocities and the carnage, Nostradamus’ mimetic word proclaimed itself as a diction of hope, because it sought to carry whoever received it aright towards the Good News of the Gospel. All that is in a logic which is encrypted, however, because the stars are an encryption of the Gospel, and because the God who is All, is One. In that encrypted thought, Nostradamus proceeds, by an overarching logic, to a hermeneutics of totality.