The prophet is one who introduces his fellow humans to the vision of the beginning and of the end, the alpha and the omega, in a temporality which is hurtling towards the end of a cycle of time in order to recommence another in refound purity. It is not the future in this base world that he wants us truly to be apprised of, but Love, the all-powerful redeemer Christ. For Nostradamus’ reader, faced with the spiral of evil, He must be the sole refuge and ultimate bulwark against becoming mired in the lures of human misery. Human contingency comes face to face with eternity. What Nostradamus wants to keep on saying is that human life, both in its particularities and in general, is the present danger to man, a reflection of the evil in him, life which is nothing but evil and calamity. To be conscious of that fact is to realize that human life is not simply the life of the detached soul, abandoned in faith to Christ. It is to commit oneself to start out on the road of occult philosophy, occult in the sense that each one of us possesses it in ourselves, secretly, and in the sense too that we cannot all measure up to it, since it is accessible only to those who can become conscious of their nothingness. It is occult because Christ is hidden in the very progression of the quatrains, and that experience must emerge into the consciousness of he or she who does not abandon himself or herself to being frightened off, to panic, to those who do not let themselves be seduced by the superficiality of the words and by the horror which they recount, by the appearance that they present.
We are here confronted by one of those semiotic and heuristic games which humanists loved to play on each another. As André Chastel has put it, in relation to the Michelangelo frescoes in the Sistine Chapel:1
Like Signorelli in 1500, he [Michelangelo] holds aloft the spectacle of the End above an anxious generation. But … the emphasis is on both the universality of the tragedy – whence the ‘cosmic’ structure of the painting – but also on the particular movements of the soul – whose every aspect is painted, from enrapture to ecstasy. The architectural array of the Sistine Chapel evaporates. The images are projected into an empty space with no depth. They are taken up in a vast encircling vortex whose centre is Christ. The movement has imperative force, taking on the elemental form of a whirling gust of wind. Its irresistible whirling carries huge masses along with it, which have the appearance of being still heavier because of their bright colours and simple contrasts of the fresco.
The prophetic quatrains open out onto a vista of what is absent in them, but which is to be seen in Michelangelo's Last Judgement: ‘the motif of ascent, the sense of weightlessness, takes on a completely poetic value. It crescendoes to a fortissimo, as in a chorale reaching its full volume. To the left, a human being is escaping from the evil forces which are to be seen sheltering in the central cavern at the bottom of the fresco…’.
To return to the rhythm of outlining Nostradamian discourse, the year 1562 captures one's attention, the governing motif being that of panic. Nostradamus, in other words, no longer limits himself to describing a world in the past, present and future, in which miseries and deaths abound. Instead he also announces a desolation which is at hand:2
Repentine panic will, upon a sudden, come and surround men, who will not know the cause for such panic, such that it will excite them to foul deeds, and such will be the emotion and tumult that some will set on and infect the others and then, before Spring is at an end, there will be seen various terrible great portents in the sky and comets, and flaming torches and flying objects in the air, and there will be an earthquake, and waters will begin, at the end of Spring, to drench …
There is a sort of apocalyptic repetition here, which has no other outlet than the reiteration of miseries and death in the summer, hot fevers, raids by barbaresque pirates that will cause such panic, day and night, that ‘father and mothers will leave children in their beds and cradles and leave them for dead in order not to become prey to, and fall into the hands of, inhuman Barbarians’. Then, over and above the conflict between rich and poor, there will be shortages of food, conspiracies, and inflamed skies, for ‘from the Arabian coat there will blow a mistral so warm, so keen, so inflamed, that it will shrivel up and burn everything it finds which is green and neat above the ground, and whatsoever ventures out of the shadows to encounter the heat of the sun will find itself parched and burnt, and there will be many and various revenge attacks and there will be many long-rancouring feuds that will set fire to people's houses.’
Then will come a difficult Autumn of 1562, for everyone will be in uproar for no apparent reason, and the temples will be struck by lightning whilst they will be subject to pillage and despoiling ‘from within’. The ‘temple-goers’ will go timidly about for fear that their own goods and wealth will be despoiled, and in grave danger for their own wellbeing, such that many of these God-fearing folk will be obliged, lest they fall into the hands of their adversaries, to take up exile from their own lands and country, so as not to become prey to those who care nothing for their sect and religion’. In the assemblies of the Church it will be impossible to reach an agreement. Faced with this accumulation of ills, Nostradamus says that he delivers it ‘all into the infinite power of God the Creator to whom I pray that he may pacify and bind up the malice of the inhabitants on this earth and that it may please him to bring them to peace and concord in the holy religion of early Christianity’. And during the winter, amongst various catastrophic happenings – torrential rains, seas overwhelming the land, rivers overflowing their banks, huge snowfalls and ice, the deaths of cattle – there will be the profanation of temples dedicated to the worship of God by the spilling of human blood.3 In the winter of 1562–3, writers, physicians and all those who follow ‘the profession of Mercury’ (newsletter writers?) will find themselves in conflict with the ‘Jovialists’. In the face of all these calamities, says Nostradamus, we must ‘deliver everything up into the hands of the Lord our God, and not be content to rely on what humans say. For they are all liars, and it is the Lord alone who knows everything, who has made heaven and earth, and it is to Him that we should turn to for everything’. Soli Deo, God Alone, as always!
A comparison with Dante allows us to appreciate better the significance of the stepping up of this rhetorical tone of panic, and particularly that part of the Divine Comedy which describes going into the Inferno (Hell) and the horrors and fright of its nine circles. The Inferno does not merely send us back to a topography of retribution, beginning in limbo and culminating at the centre of the earth where Lucifer crushes Judas, Cassius and Brutus with his teeth. It does not merely send us back to consider the typology of sins committed against God, for it is the danger that comes from within ourselves which is central, and cruelty, as perceived by Dante, is the potential for evil that he knows is harboured in himself, as in every living creature:4
In the midway of this our mortal life,
I found me in a gloomy wood, astray
Gone from the path direct: and e’en to tell,
It were no easy task, how savage wild
That forest, how robust and rough its growth,
Which to remember only, my dismay
Renews, in bitterness not far from death.
Like Dante, Nostradamus is writing what is perhaps a prolongation to the Bible. Unlike him, he does not go into the netherworld beyond the tomb. He has no reason to do so, for the world beyond the grave lies before him, in the heart of each man and woman, projected, as it were, into this ‘theatre of the world’ (theatrum mundi).5 He thus constructs a kind of theologico-cosmographical dictionary in which the defined but flexible time-frames of past, present and future become blurred. We might even go so far as to imagine that each quatrain could be seen as a kind of Dante-esque inferno in which the same sins make their appearance and in which the reader ends up feeling, as with Virgil and Dante, pursued by devils. The external world lies about us, dissolved by the very fact that it no longer is anything other than the reiteration of differences and multiplications. The ‘heavy masses’ which weigh upon the quatrains, as in Dante's Inferno, are in ourselves, as are also the ‘unfortunate events’ that are there depicted. Nostradamus does not so much depict mankind, held in time and space under a sword of malediction, as portray the human soul, how it is, and the sin and evil to which it tends to subject itself. And this human soul lives in the darkness because it appears to ignore God. Hence God's anger, ever stronger and more assertive as the years go by. It is logical that the longer time passes, the denser becomes the eschatological underpinning for Nostradamus’ representation. The astrologer sharpens the image of evil because he reckons that humanity is heading for the worst and that God can but make more manifest his wrath. For Nostradamus, Virgil plays the role of a leading thinker in a way which is highly explicit, not only in the exclamations he uses to convey the horror that one ought to feel before the signs of divine retribution, but also in the amplified hellification of human existence. Did Nostradamus not admit to prefering the Paduan Virgil to Homer?
The Almanac for 1563, drafted at a moment when everything was poised to break up in the French kingdom, presents a sequence of catastrophes and dangers for everyone, a ‘great panic’. There is not a moment of respite or interruption to the cycle of anguish which the stars hold in store for us. The time of troubles is not held in suspense at any moment but proceeds as in a continuous litany, poetic in its morbid intensity. The infinity of Evil takes over all that is finite, forever invaded by the actions of Evil, and what man is educated into. Whenever what is ‘Good’ is evoked, it is only so that it becomes immediately transposed into something ‘bad’. October 1563 is said to be the ‘month of woes so countless you doubt’. On 5 October there will be the destruction of building, on 6 October the ‘court closed’, on 8 October a day ‘horrible to relate’ (horrendum dictu), on 14 October ‘O what desolation’, on 17 October the destruction of a town, etc. For November, the prediction is for war to begin all over again.
To accentuate the tension, the astrologer lets what is not said do the work for him, claiming that it is impracticable for him to write it down, and that he cannot delve to the bottom of all that he has read in the stars, that he has not the capacity to do so: ‘And when it comes to the present year, when Sulla and Marius seem to have come back to life, there will be such frights and trouble that, when it weighs them up the pen shrinks back so as not to put into writing what the stars predict will happen, in wars more feral than human, in famine, plague, and unannounced, sudden invasions’.6 The universe is always and ever more frightful, the central thrust being the exclusion of humanity, the dehumanizing of mankind, in the accomplishment of which, through distress and death, through the violence of civil wars that replicate the civil wars of republican Rome, mankind becomes lost in the incessant stream of troubles which assail it, and of which it is the progenitor. Or, rather, it is a world which is on the point of being lost. Nostradamian astrology, enjoined on him in the light of what the skies foretell but through Biblical pronouncement, amplifies his eschatological orientation by the prefiguring of a dénouement to the infernal rhythm of which it is the end-point. Nostradamus, for his own part, allows the reader to partake of his own recoil before what the stars make him compute. He puts himself forth in the panic-ridden and pain-wracked posture of the one who knows, and who exclaims: ‘Horresco … I am terrified!’
Prophetic writing, in this particular formulation, thus becomes more than anything else, harrowing, a writing distressed by distress. The astrologer says explicitly that he feels a kind of revulsion towards what he decrypts, and invites the reader to join him at the very moment of his own rising despair ‘for that total mortality which is approaching and looming large, and from which there will be no refuge. Restat adhuc cælum (what rests but heaven)’.7 He cites Virgil's Aeneid (Book 2):
And between these horrid and more than foolish adventures, Qui erit talia fando temperet a lacrymis? (Who cannot relate such woes without shedding a tear?) at this hour which is the hour just after midnight on 20 March 1562 which is when this present calculation was made. I am in two minds, certainly, as to whether to give it all up. Yet having calculated a great deal, night and day, I cannot persuade myself otherwise than that the iron centuries are returned with a vengeance, and that we shall be plunged into great chaos, and the end of the world, if end there can be to the things that have begun, quia Finis ab origine pendet (‘because our End is but the pendant of our beginning’).8
Death is inscribed into the very fact of being born, a variable of the revolud fatum. Everything which is, is destined no longer to be. The tragedy in the world is explained by the planetary dominance of Saturn, and if Nostradamus acknowledged that he prophesied but ‘woes’ (something that his opponents accused him of), this was not because of his imagination; it was because such desolation happens as a ‘punishment’ and that the world is destined to slip downwards, in a life-cycle that had begun when it was born, towards an end-point which had been written into its very existence.
There is urgency in Nostradamus’ concern to transmit his insights into this end-time, because it might come soon. ‘O the piteous tragedy which is being readied for us, the like of which has never been seen, and never recounted by any of the notable histories of the past! If God does not send us some good angel to save us I think we are approaching our latter days …’. One year stands out in the linearity of human time for which the signs mark it out as horrible. Recalling perhaps the dramatic events predicted by Johannes Lichtenberger,9 Nostradamus thenceforth predicts 1567 as a year for a series of remarkable happenings such that, after having invoked God's mercy, his writing becomes invested with, or carried away by, a phraseology that paraphrases the Apocalypse. Here and there, he throws out fragments of phrases that recall the predictions of the evangelists: in April ‘an infinite number of people will be drowned, dead, submerged in the water, and the earth will let them perish … For the great and huge killings that will be carried out the earth will have its fill, [and] the air and sky will be corrupted’. It will be a time of wrath against sinful man in the stars, the wrath of God for which the astrologer is the messenger: ‘Unless we do not stop these evil and iniquitous enterprises I am much afraid that we are not far off that great chaos and the end of this miserable world’.
In 1565, when an ominous Prognostication ou Revolution, Avec les Presages was published, there was further confirmation that portents had apppeared ‘not long back’ similar to those which had preceded the destruction of Jerusalem.10 Nostradamus warned that, in the course of the month of October an uprising would occur during a sermon, ‘arms at the ready, struck down dead, those captured to die’ whilst, on Thursday 22 November there would be a ‘throng of people’ and ‘there will be bloodshed’.
The crucial turning point, announced at various moments, in the year 1567 was pushed back by one year in the last text attributable to Nostradamus, printed towards 1566, shortly before or after his death, the Prophetie merveilleuse commençant ceste presente année et dure jusqes en l’An de grand mortalité, que l’on dira M. D. LXVIII. An de Bissexte. One can detect some evolution in the astrologer's imaginary here, a reflection of a progression in his thought processes which, at first sight, seem to be stuck in their catastrophist rhetoric. The evolution concerns the cyclical conception of time, which was inherited from ancient astrology. The stars have been placed in the sky by God so that man can measure the days and years, and thus the passage of time. But they serve a double function because, in the Biblical prophetic revelations of Luke 21, Joel 3, Isaiah 13 and Jeremiah 23, it is the Sun, the Moon and the stars that will mark the appearance of the last days. Nostradamus’ prophetic voice becomes, at this moment in 1566, transmuted into an explicit Biblically-based appeal to conversion and penitence. Because his science of the heavens has forewarned him of the divine will, Nostradamus is driven to speak out directly on God's behalf, ‘at whose instigation I beg each and every one to heed: for the principles of these signs have already been made manifest, now appear, and will make their appearance known, as we shall see hereafter’. This is an important point because something about the cryptic nature of the astrologer's writings is revealed, as though he had come to perceive its limits in a realm more carried away by the conflicts between mutually exclusive confessions than by the desire for Gospel-conversion, as though he sought to appeal to a readership that might be more receptive to the possibilities of grasping his Gospel message.
The world was at a tipping-point, ready to cross the eschatological threshold in order to come to its end (conclusio temporum). The conjunction of Saturn and Venus on 1 August 1565 will, above all, cause a renewed schism in the Church which, as in the years 1561 and 1562, will manifest itself in the ruination of numerous churches and monasteries, in wars and terrible casualties, a prediction which densifies still further the sense of impending doom and impels Nostradamus to berate his contemporaries:
I am bound to conclude, from these above-mentioned years, and from the afflictions, which are referred to in the Book of Revelation of St John in Apocalypse 16, that the Apocalypse is fast approaching, and as a result the [second] coming of the Son of God, to judge the living and the dead, as the One whom the Father has made the Judge of it, because there is no excepting of persons, for He will render to each according to what he has done, good or ill. And by that must every sinner sigh and cry […] in abomination and embarrassment for his own iniquities.
The appeal that he makes here is absolutely fundamental, for it confirms the aspect of conversion in the astrophile's discourse. It becomes fully sacral and goes somewhat further perhaps in that direction than in the preceding almanacs, prognostications, or in the Prophecies. He then evokes the startling intrusion of iconoclastic activity by the heretics and refers to Daniel: ‘which is a presage for us (principally because of the execrable heretical blasphemies that reign in their hearts) of the greatest woes and tribulations that are to come upon Christian earth, and that were ever to be seen since the creation of the world. For the abomination and desolation of sacred places, as predicted by the Prophet Daniel 9 is now so great among all human people that it is not possible to say more…’.11
As the progression of time is accomplished and the years are picked off one by one, so the dark despair of what is to become deepens, as though the uncertainties of the present day are reflected in Nostradamus’ prophetic voice, which itself can do no more than predispose its hearers to live in anticipation of a paroxystic time of instability and attack. The reiteration in his discourse makes its mark, even though Nostradamus leaves to God, the wielder of almighty power, the absolute authority to change the course of things. God, the ‘sole Moderator of this vast machine’,12 Seneca's Deus temperans (temperate God), but also the God whose image is in the universe, i.e. ‘in its immeasurable bounty’, and it is to Him that we should pray without ceasing. Biblically, following St Paul, ‘God is in all’.13 It is by His will alone that there will come about ‘the sudden turnaround in fragile fortune’. God is also, as the corpus of Hermetic writings recalled, the ‘great governor of the world, astrologically speaking, Time's maker, the great Spirit of the heavens’.14 This is a God for whom the ‘superior celestial bodies’ are under His power (in the Neoplatonic perspective) and who reigns and rules over living creatures in the ‘inferior world’. This is a God who is all and can all, to whom the astrophile, at the end of his prognostication for 1562, where he marked out the dire future which he saw in the stars, closed his vision with an appeal to the reader: ‘We must remit it all to the Lord God and not stop with what men say.15 For they are all liars and it is only the Lord who knows everything and who has made heaven and earth, and it is to Him that we must address everything’. To name the divine Being is, for Nostradamus, a way of placing the soul on a course, defined originally in terms of a literary, or poetic, technique. It starts with the poetics of multiple negative elements, which break out in ‘catastrophic events’, and leads on up to recognizing the One, the sole power of mercy and love, the Lord who, from all eternity, knows all, and can do all, and in whom we must place all our faith in his bountiful mercy. It is a poetics of paradox, of absolute opposites, pitching sinful man, important in the face of God on the one hand, and a God who is ‘All’ on the other. It is a muse of internal withdrawal, in which man comes face to face within himself to God, but a poetics that demands signs of what is going on in the world.
The paradox is thus that man needs to come to accept his own weakness in order to have strength. The consciousness of weakness must enable the Christian to surmount his own intelligence, to get the other side of this initial death which marks out his being both superficially and deep within. In the eyes of the French chancellor, Michel de L’Hospital, whom we have to cite at this point, all the epistemology of self has to end up accepting its own foolishness. That sense of self has to be unhappy in the sense that it becomes aware that the human soul is born in the shadow of unhappiness. From that it follows that human thought must be paradoxical, and that it is only when it is intrinsically so that it finds itself moving towards a truly existential self-awareness.16 Here, too, it is helpful to go back to Erasmus and Thomas More to understand the genesis of such a step, one which appears to have been intrinsic to Gospel evangelism, and to lead to a systemic deconstruction of established beliefs, and to make it open to a sort of relativism.17 First appearances are dangerous, Christ is paradox, and those who live in faith must always distrust the obvious fact, the accepted verities, and never let themselves remain satisfied with what is understood only on the surface. To live in faith is to go beyond the critique of the notion of a doxa which emanated from the fragments of Heraclitus or Cicero's Paradoxes of the Stoics (Paradoxa Stoicorum). It is to have assimilated the notion of the Sacrifice of the Cross expressed in the words of St Paul, citing Isaiah, as the para-doxal and paradoxical act of divine folly, wiser beyond the wisdom of man (1 Cor. 1:19): ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.’ In this light, if Christ is paradox, to be oneself living in the paradox is to be one with Christ, which is what Justification by Faith implies and turns into a living belief. Before the emergence of Cartesian doubt there was what Michel Simonin termed the ‘age of paradox’ which went alongside the religious quest of those in France who, like Michel de l’Hospital18 or, a little later, Michel de Montaigne,19 remained within the Catholic Church, but put themselves at its margins.20 ‘Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men’ [1 Cor. 1:25). The practice of this sort of paradoxical intelligence offers a kind of autonomy to the conscience, since it requires a split regard of oneself, perpetually critical, always having to look at oneself under the gaze of Christ, and his refusal of everything that smacked of established facts, preconceived truths, or certainties that one had convinced oneself of.21
It is precisely by making man come face to face with these ‘marvellous happenings’ (res mirabiles) that God tells him of his evil and makes him know that he is headed in the near future towards that same destiny. These ‘marvellous happenings’ play an essential role in Nostradamian cogito.22