It is sometimes necessary to indulge in the besetting sin of over-interpretation. The complex linguistic field of Renaissance writing – enriched by Neopythagoranism, Neoplatonism, the influence of Galenist medical ideas, by prisca theologia, not to mention the Kabbalah or the via negativa – almost obliges us to do so.
The art historian Edgar Wind has written about how, for example, Pico della Mirandola in his On the Dignity of Man (De hominis dignitate, 1486) emphasized that mankind, by virtue of its mutability, had received the power to ‘transform himself into whatever he chooses in order to become the mirror of the universe’. Proteus could signify mankind, were it not that ‘in his adventurous quest for the transformation of the self, man explores the universe as if he were exploring himself. And the further man explores, through metaphors like that of Proteus, the more he discovers that the various phrases of his existence are translatable from one to the other; for they all reflect the ultimate Oneness of which they manifest particular facets’. Man has within himself the notion of transcendence, and thus of the unity of the world. Pico della Mirandola refers to this connection of the many to the One in his Conclusions (Conclusiones … de modo intelligendi hymnos Orphei): ‘Who knows not how to entice Pan, moves closer to Proteus in vain’. The contradiction between sensing Oneness but yet belonging to the particular is ontological for human beings; it is how they find their place in the world, and discover their own identity. So, for Pico della Mirandola and other philosophers of the Renaissance, there was a ‘law of auto-contrariness, which is also a law of auto-transcendence’.1 The most evocative of mythological figures in this context is that of Hermes, the god of eloquence who, in Achille Bocchi's book of emblems is portrayed with a finger over his lips, calling for silence. Other representations of the gods manifest a similar ambiguity – for example Apollo, god of the poetic transe, also inspires the poetic Muse, and thus verse metre; he serves to counterbalance Diana, chaste, frigid, as changeable as the moon which she incarnates. Dionysus’ extravagances are held in check on Mount Parnassus by sober Apollo. Unity is achieved in multiplicity, and multiplicity itself, in all its dissonances, is constructed out of the consonance which is the principal element of unity.
The discursive framework which results from this creates a necessary but complex exegesis. The gods are hybrid, infinitely so since each one is in relationship to the other, so this framework opens up similarly to a myriad of possibilities. Edgar Wind shows how the resulting ‘mystical images inhabit an intermediary stage’ between the additional ‘complexity’ above, and the supplementary ‘explanation’ beneath. They are never definite, in the sense of a proposition on a precise point that can be read straightforwardly, any more than they are definite in the sense that the mystic Absolute dissolves all the definition in them. These images keep the mind, rather, in a state of permanent incertitude, offering the paradox of an ‘inherent transcendence’. They constantly imply more than they say. ‘Every image tends to beget another’ in a sort of luxuriant exuberance resulting from the fact that it is a short-hand for something else, and therefore possesses an extrapolatory dynamic.2
What Nostradamus is trying to tell us, then, is relevant to a time in which he feels himself to be encircled by barbarians, just like the flatbread-making inhabitants of Picrochole, to a time when civil tensions and blood-curdling fantasies are on the ascendant in France as a result of its religious divisions. He is trying, perhaps, to say that we ought to live together, perpetuating the possibilities of accord, one with another, despite these hatreds; or, at the very least, to persuade men and women of good will to agree to an order of silence, one with another, thereby detaching them from the mounting contentions, and preserving them from the ills that will result. Nourishment involves feeding the body; but it also means tending to the soul's needs, nourishing its appetite for wisdom over and above the likes and dislikes of worldly passions, perpetuating its desire to express itself and its yearning to assimilate eternally that the Spirit ‘quickens’, and that, to be in the Spirit is to be in a linguistic universe apart, inhabited by secret hieroglyphs and the prisca theologia.
Nostradamus would seem, therefore, to be a Christian who uses the hidden language in nature, and who uses the techniques of deep learning to express what is beyond expression, rather in the manner of The Dream of Poliphilio (Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1467), a text that Nostradamus knew, and whose French translator Jean Martin observed that ‘this fiction conceals many rich things, which it is not permitted to reveal’.3 For Nostradamus, the act of writing is a total semiological act, which calls for the reader's commitment, for a conversion to the perception that what is said is not what there is to learn, and that one must give up the Letter to know what the Spirit is. But the problem with Nostradamus is that the hieroglyphically-encoded style of writing that he uses, a style with affinities to the mysteries of Creation, is deflected by his strategy of smoke and mirrors, one that aims to keep the meaning hidden from base and leaden minds. So the left-over meaning is not where one might expect to find it. That is a point to which we shall return. If Nostradamus speaks in riddles it is not in order to entice his readers into a puzzle, inviting them to decipher the enigmas in the Prophecies. Rather, it is to tell them that they are incapable of deciphering them on their own account. It is to point out to them their inaptitude to know anything but the ineffability of the divine Word. For us human beings, there is no truth but God; the trap is to believe that, by our own means, we can unravel the mystery of Creation, whose secrets belong only to God and which reside in his Truth. Nostradamian discourse is thus tied up with a pure language, that of God, ‘maker’ of the earth, with the divine Word into which the Christian should abandon himself, rather than clutch onto his self-love, which will only convince him of his own, indelibly sinful, creaturely aptitudes.
The act of writing is thus a way of transcending meaning, an act which seeks to covenant the reader to a bond of attachment to the principles of keeping silence, maintaining peace, and upholding the primacy of the life within, in the face of the world and its temptations. Fool's wisdom is finite; true wisdom implies infinity, an encounter with a God who is everything and nothing at one and the same time. To know that knowledge is indeterminacy, a movement from the infinite to the One who is Infinity, is to reach the signpost in man ‘of the divine origin of the soul’, which points towards the mysteries of faith. That is a citation from the crucial analysis of Jan Miernowski: ‘Presented as a separate or distinct category, the “self” is nothing. Conversion is, above all, a recognition of the ontological reality of things. That is why it is a liberation. The “self” cannot be incarcerated. It cannot be encircled, because it is nothing. The only thing that can be held to ransom is “presumption and a man's desire” [as Marguerite de Navarre put it], a sort of existence of course, illusory, but sufficient to encapture the “self”.’ From that it follows that this presumption exists in literality, in the ensnaring verbalization of language. Miernowski continues: ‘Human “words”, the denotative terms we use, are not names, for something which is nominal must represent something which exists for us. Rather, undermined by this nothingness, human language is but an absence, in the same way that evil is but a lack of good, and death is but a lack of life’.4 We shall come to recognize that what Nostradamus’ Prophecies hold in store for us is the sense of God's omnipotence. We shall come to perceive that this is what Nostradamus is trying to tell us through the succession of words that make up the quatrains, each charged with an inexorable weight of non-sense.
So, the quatrains are a learning lesson, each of them expressing the impotence of mankind to penetrate to the particular or general revelation which it encapsulates, each of them, on the contrary, expressing the holding back of the word, that silence which alone allows the Christian to hear God's call. Needless to say, Nostradamus says none of this explicitly. His almanacs, prognostications and Prophecies leave it to the reader to come to that realization, offering a spiritual exegesis which confronts the reader with his own sinfulness. Nostradamus was, of course, by no means alone in this. Marguerite of Navarre, her mentor Guillaume Briçonnet, Rabelais, Maurice Scève, and many others as well, shared various games of language involving embodied and implied relationships between author and reader. In his verse-translation of the first three books of Ovid's Metamorphoses (1556), Barthélémy Aneau remarked that the truth must remain secret, just as Nostradamus had in a work published the year previously. As Aneau put it, the truth must remain hidden, it should not be opened to those of ‘clumsy and profane understanding’, but reserved for ‘refined and divine minds’. For Aneau, ‘what is most difficult, is most rare’. Like Nostradamus, he starts from the proposition that what is said is not what is meant, and that the reader must hold himself in readiness for the Divine, seeking to comprehend what is not literally comprehensible, open to accepting aporia itself.
To enter wholly into the imaginative framework of a chosen period, that is the historian's great utopian illusion. We all know it as historians, though we do not always care to admit to it. It is a utopian illusion because the past, whatever else it is, is a no man's land, lost to us forever, so numerous and opaque are the screens between it and the present day. We should shelter no illusions about the historical aporia that this leaves us in, but we should not give up entirely. And hence the postulate that the Renaissance dialectic between the finite and the Infinite offers historians the possibility of a hermeneutics of a virtual reality which, it too, leads to a relative aporia, and, perhaps, to an over-interpretation resulting from its semiological superabundance.
In the case of Nostradamus, the reader finds himself pitched into a hermeneutics which is nothing other than a virtual reality. In his On Learned Ignorance (c.1440), Nicolas of Cusa had emphasized that metaphorical variety and richness were essential to the worship of an ineffable God: ‘All these names’, he said, referring to the various words used by pagans to describe the divine
develop an aspect of what is enveloped in the unique and ineffable name (God); and since that given name is infinite, it envelopes in it, in infinite number, all the names attributed to particular perfections. This is why the aspects are rightly so numerous, since they can never be so many or so great that there cannot be more, and greater, because the relationship between each aspect (of the godhead) and the ineffable (godhead itself) is as between the finite and the infinite.5
He who knows, is he who has been led to recognize that he does not, and cannot, know absolutely. At that moment, he is free. He is returned to a state of Christian liberty, and has reconnected with the time of Adam and Eve when mankind spoke one common language, that of God, and lived in communion with nature, which spoke that same language (before the ancient Egyptians represented it in hieroglyphs). Nostradamus invites his reader to go beyond the evidently disquieting and destabilizing effect of significations (i.e. words and symbols), to throw off the fiction of their legibility, to abandon their ambiguity, to reject their perplexing polysemy, and immerse himself in the one and only true language, which is the Word of God, the Logos, Word of the One, made manifest in many.
So, if the Prophecies defy all attempts at linear and univocal interpretation, it is not primarily because they are designed to pose questions, but more because they are deliberately constructed to strip away the reader's illusion that there should be any such unique signification at all, to persuade him or her to emancipate himself from signs whose meaning belongs to God alone. That is why they are signs charged with hermeneutic hyperabundance. The Prophecies are designed to put the spotlight on convincing the Christian of his un-knowing, giving him the insight that there is no meaning beyond the Logos and that this meaning has to be worked at and lived from within, in the form of a life-giving nourishment, a banquet of words which can only be shared among men of true faith, of true humanity. The Prophecies set out to destabilize the reading, and thus cognitive, processes – in just the same way as Rabelais does. The Nostradamian enigma, over and beyond the multiplicity of metaphors and implied significations in his writing, is to offer the reader a hyper-metaphor of the powerlessness of human knowledge to achieve the finitude of wisdom. The enigma provides the means by which the reader can be introduced into a process of symbolization, since God is enigma, at once point and centre, presence and absence, finity and infinity. It is by means of this constant mobility, achieved by cumulative effect, that the reader gets the idea implanted in his mind that it introduces him into a meditation on God's power, allowing himself to be guided by the almighty power of the Ineffable.
In that way, Nostradamus places himself indirectly in the tradition of Cornelius Agrippa's Discourse on the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Sciences. He is in continuity with the latter in its denunciation of the presumptuousness of the various scientific disciplines to offer anything more than artificial and fictive knowledge. Nostradamus is an exponent of hermeneutic instability, an exponent of the hermeneutics of vacuity to the extent that the precise object of his predictions is to expose the vanitas of human aspirations for what it is. Nostradamus would not be the first to go down this road, a path carrying signposts that lead everywhere but to the place indicated by the signs themselves, a path along which the sign-writer constructs his own misleading signs. He does not quite go as far as Rabelais’ ‘wild semiotics’.6 Rabelais, after all, had no compunction in constructing ‘a world which embodied the chimeras of an imagination run riot’, which would turn into a parallel universe undermining his own constructs. It is possibly the case that there are some parallels to be drawn between Rabelais’ Quart Livre and Nostradamus’ Prophecies, between the latter's troubled world of misfortune and misadventures, and the disturbing oddness of the universe as perceived by Rabelais’ giants. In the pages of Rabelais, Quaresme Prenant and the Andouilles take part in a seemingly deliberate attempt to deconstruct what allegorical sense we can make of it all, ending up ‘letting our anxieties and pent-up desires run rampant’ in a transformation of our primary cognitive faculties into the ‘impenetrable terrain of fantasmagora’.
There is a point to the hermeneutic impotence which opens up in Nostradamus’ writing – and it is probably identical to the one at work behind the scenes in Rabelais as well. Its objective is to thrust the reader back into himself, to make him aware of his own corporeality, flesh and blood bound absolutely to the negative consequences of the sin which obliges him to live in a world terrorized by his atrocities. It is this corporeality which can but persuade him that he is powerless to act in this world on his own forces, and that he must thus retreat within, and construct a world of meaning within himself. In the voyage of discovery into the cognitive self, he will discover a truth which, precisely because it eludes him, is the very Truth. That is why the language of the Prophecies, and that of Nostradamus’ almanacs and prognostications, purports to be a sacred language, a new apocalypse containing the revelation that truth is only to be found in the Holy Scriptures and in the faith that they nurture.7 It is an invitation to an instinctive reaction, and we should remember that an instinctive reaction in the Renaissance was seen as leading the creature back to the Creator, an urge to defy literal interpretations in favour of what our immediate senses taught us. Nostradamus’ prophetic discourse thus would seem to serve as a kind of absolute paradox, a total antithesis, which serves as a link to the strange language in chapters 55 and 56 of Rabelais’ Quart Livre, to the extent that the object of its enigmatic quality is to freeze our breath, turn our words into blocks of ice, stop up the language which keeps us bound to this earth in quest of a literal explanation of things, when another language, undefinable and unattainable, literally exists, as Pantagruel discerns, a language of ‘fluttering, flying, darting, and thus animated sounds’. It is an anti-language, voiceless, but a veritable language nevertheless, whose structural mobility alone leads the creature back to his Creator. Rabelais is operating, however, in a slightly different register from that of Nostradamus since he plays about so much with allegorical interpretations that any interpretative framework unravels in his endless quest to demonstrate that there are an infinite number of possible interpretations to his writing. With Nostradamus, the semiological codes that might underlie an interpretation of his prophetic writing are wiped out by the repeated and insistent elusiveness, meaning held intentionally in suspense in the surrounding denseness of enigma. What becomes evident is not the profusion of meaning, but its significant lack, one which has to be experienced and understood for what it is by the reader as a sense of liberation. To learn is to unlearn what it is to learn; to understand is to unlearn what it is to understand.
Scientia inflat (‘Knowledge Puffeth Up – 1 Cor. 8:1) – that is the axiom which we have to convince ourselves is the one by which Nostradamus operated. Through an odyssey of prophetic discourse, he leads his readers into a marked out and screened-off world of aporetic virtuality. Readers run the risk of becoming lost unless they take into account the writer's negative intentions. It is a world which has some ressemblance to Rabelais’ Isle of Ruach, whose inhabitants live off the wind as their only means of nourishment, and die with a fart as their souls leave their bodies through their ‘arse’. Nostradamus, one could say, deploys the gusts of human history in his rhetoric. That rhetoric becomes so heavily overladen that it dies on the wing, committing a sort of paradigmatic suicide. The excess of what is signified in what he writes leads in only one direction, which is a desire for aporia, a yearning to abandon one's personal cognitive pretensions, a quest for quiescence. It is only by an immense exercise of our imaginations that we can grasp the full extent of the Nostradamian project. It put the reader's sense of self into a situation of crisis in order to place him on the road towards penitence. An absence of sense leads one to the One who is Absent, into the way that St Paul envisages silence. God is silence and whoever lives in that silence is able to listen to his own soul and to make sense of the expression of God in Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians (13:12): ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly [“in an enigma”]; but then face to face’. Now we see next to nothing; then we shall see All.