The underlying motif of liberty in Christ in Nostradamus’ writings is straightaway confirmed by an analysis of Quatrain 1:48.1 There it is written that twenty years of the reign of the moon have elapsed, which implies that he composed this first Century in 1553. He follows Richard Roussat, as Pierre Brind’Amour has demonstrated, in asserting that the moon will maintain its ‘reign’ over the seven thousand years of the history of the world. When the sun takes over for the ‘remaining days’, then ‘will be accomplished the fulfilment of my prophecy’. Before that happens, persecutions of the faithful will follow one after another, and that will be the sign that Christ's witness will be restored on earth. That was a uniquely evangelist theme, as Claude Blum has analysed with insight.2 We should hold in our minds also the distinctive quatrain (4:49) which evokes Christ's sacrifice, and the fact that its message was forgotten until a voice once more proclaims the revelation:3
Before the people blood will be shed,
Who from highest heaven will not come afar,
But for a long time it will be unheeded:
The spirit of one alone will come to witness to it.
What that means is that blood will be shed before the people, and this will be that of someone who is close to God, living not in the thoughts of this world here-below, but in the ‘highest heavens’, in Heaven above. Christians must be persuaded that this is the Spirit of the one true God, who comes to witness to the Truth, but spiritually, in the souls of each and every one.
If we want to know how this God speaks to us and lives in us, Nostradamus is more specific in a quatrain that underscores the prophet's commitment to a profound eucharistic piety:4
The divine word shall give the substance
Heaven and earth included, hidden in mystic fact:
Body, soul, spirit having almighty power,
Here beneath its feet as on heaven's throne.
Here we can be readily persuaded by the arguments of Pierre Brind’Amour that it is the Son of God who gives ‘substance’ to the ‘divine word’ through a ‘hidden’ mystery, the transformation of the bread and wine into the body and blood, his soul (the Holy Spirit) having power over all the earth as on ‘heaven's throne’. Christ will be the incarnation, earth and heaven being as one through the hidden treasure, the ‘fait mystique’ of the quatrain, which might be corrected to ‘lait mystique’, the pure milk of divine teaching which will then be taught to all.5 The Holy Spirit will then rule over souls and bodies, on the earth and in heaven above. It is a time of blessedness which, once more, we should not equate with millennial accomplishment, but rather with the particular motif of the mystic milk, a milk which is synonymous with the Word: ‘As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby’ (1 Peter 2:2). In his book on the Heptaméron of Marguerite of Navarre (subtitled ‘profane love; sacred love’), Lucien Febvre epitomized evangelist faith in an Erasmian fashion as a divine ‘folly’, poles apart from human wisdom.6 For Jean Morel, a printer's apprentice, the evangelist metaphor of the pure milk of the Gospel was not at all far-fetched. ‘My faith is founded on the doctrine of the prophets and apostles. I am not yet so well versed in holy scriptures, still have I been able to apprehend what is necessary for my salvation, and I let pass those parts which I find hard, until such time as it pleases God to give me the means to understand them. And thus do I drink the milk that I find in the word of the Lord’.7 Nostradamus’ ‘mystic fact’ (or milk) should perhaps be seen as the Word of God that each Christian, over and above the credal obligations and duties imposed upon him by the clerical hierarchy, or by Calvinist doctine, can freely imbibe in a fusionary tension of the earthly and the heavenly, an interiorized eschatology. The ‘milk’ in Nostradamus’ text is perhaps what the ‘wine’ is to Rabelais’ giants, a metaphor for the Logos, by which the faithful being transcends all worldly constraints to live in serenity.
One should not pin Nostradamus down to a supposed Roman Catholic orthodoxy of belief or practice, but place him in a domain which the French historian of the unconfessionalized character of its Reformation, Thierry Wanegffelen, has termed ‘the insistence on mystery’.8 The French cleric and follower of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples is a prime example of the latter, emphasizing the link between sacramental life and spiritual experience, based on an absolute reliance on the words of institution in the Eucharist. Wanegffelen goes on to say that, at the Colloquy of Poissy in 1561 (the failed attempt in the French context to find a resolution to the theological divisions produced by the Reformation), Claude d’Espence presents the same message. We must believe in the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist because, d’Espence writes, ‘the word and promise of God, on which is based our faith, makes present before our eyes the things which are promised’. This quatrain (3:2) could well be a profession of faith in this promise of the spiritual presence of Christ.
But we perhaps need to conceive Nostradamus’ faith in Christ differently. The French historian Pierre Chaunu has presented a masterly reading of Erasmus and his Manual of a Christian Soldier (Enchiridion militis christiani), a work which he regarded as key to the transformation to a religion based on meditative reading, almost ‘pietistic’ albeit ‘demanding greater powers of exegesis’. ‘There should be no mistake here’, Chaunu writes. ‘With the Enchiridion we have crossed a quiet Rubicon, we have passed from the intellectual to the practical, and it is one of the essential achievements of the sixteenth century. Through the daily meditative practice of reading the New Testament there was a real communion with Christ, a communion across space and time, experiencing the historical and cultural locus of the presence of God here with us. It is a Eucharist, only otherwise and different, but in practice as real, albeit perhaps less powerful, less immediate, less ardent and intense than communion through the host, contemplated or invested, at Corpus Christi’.9 Scripture is like the breaking of bread, it is a eucharistic presence. Erasmus’ Christian soldier receives God through it because he is nourished by it and communicates with Christ spiritually.10
Here is another Nostradamian quatrain in the same vein which, although it has sometimes been read (problematically) as referring to the Great Schism, also presents no less forthrightly this transcendant Eucharistic faith in the context of papal authority:11
By the power of the three temporal kings,
In another place will be sited the Holy See:
Where the corporal substance of the spirit
Shall be restored and received as the true see.
Here the Holy See is represented before it is re-established by three kings, perhaps the three Wise Men symbolizing, as Tertullian tells us, the three virtues of faith, hope and charity. This will be the site of the kingdom of the ‘corporeal substance of the spirit’, the Eucharist, evoking thus a faith focused on the mystery of the Redemption and Resurrection. At the heart of this prophetic universe is the Gospel. That is perhaps this ‘other place’ which will become the substitute for Rome, a place that is everywhere and nowhere, in the heart of every Christian. Is this not a place filled with the light of the Gospel, the same light that Nostradamus tells us he received from the stars in the form of a burning flame? Is this not the believer's cogito, the locale for the reign of the divine Word in every faithful Christian? In this quatrain, Nostradamus is not so much prophesying as praying that this other realm will come to pass. But it is a realm within us, the holy see in the soul of the believer, as another quatrain seems to affirm:12
The body without soul shall no longer be a sacrifice
The day of its death becomes that of its nativity,
The divine spirit will make the soul joyful,
Seeing the word in its eternity.
What this seems to want to say is that, when the body, filled with sin, ceases to be in suffering and privation of God, then the day of death will be transposed into a day of Redemption, of a new birth during which the soul will be made joyous by the Holy Spirit. So, when the old Adam in us is replaced by the new man, experiencing the quiet reward of knowing Christ through the grace that has made such a ‘new birth’ possible, the soul within will see the Word, Christ in his glorious eternity. The ‘seeing’ is important for it defines a time of interiority in which the Word is lodged in the Christian soul, leading to a ‘conformity with Christ’ (christiformitas), to use Lefèvre d’Étaples’ word for it. On the concluding page of his book on the significance of those who rejected the pressures to conforming confessional Christianity in sixteenth-century France, Thierry Wanegffelen wrote: ‘What exactly is conversion if not an irruption of the unique? And what is the unique if not God?’13 And was not persecution probably seen by Nostradamus as a necessary adjunct to conversion, as when (referring to the month of May 1554) he writes that, on the one hand there would be the gentleness of a soft breath of air, and on the other the non-gentleness of human beings, ‘very bitter, sharp and cruel’. The gentle breeze is perhaps an allegory for the mildness of the divine Word, the mildness one feels when nourished by the Word from within. All this should perhaps be regarded as in opposition to the human world, which is savage and violent, the outward and visible sign of human passions. In this perspective, Nostradamian eschatology is rooted in an Ovidian memory, perhaps to signify that whoever is prepared to contemplate Christ in his eternity will be, as it were, projected away from the foulness and frightfulness of this world, that he will overcome all fear and angst, even when faced with persecution at its worst. The ‘sweet manna’ (10:99) will come down from above for everyone, and the dogs will no longer need to keep guard of the house, for ‘in the end’ the wolf, the lion, the ox, the ass, and even the timid deer will lie down together in harmony with the ‘mastiffs’.14
Human reason, even when assisted by human senses, can but be driven (as a result of the Fall) towards errors, one after the other. It can but be misled by the false appearance of things, and when it tries to make sense of things which are not readily visible to its own eyes (impervia oculis), it is no better than a blunt instrument. The evangelist message was repeatedly to mistrust human reason and not pin one's hopes on it. What concerns God is no concern of man and his feeble faculties, which keep him rooted in the lower spheres, from which he cannot escape upon his own. Michel de L’Hospital seemed haunted by the image of his being in flight or being carried up, a metaphor for his interiorized faith, freed from its fears and worldly cares. In a paraphrase with Virgilian and Platonic echoes, he prayed to God that his spirit would be taken from his heavy body (corpore crasso), and that God would give him a ‘piercing genius (ingenium), fecund, open to all the human arts’, ‘pure’, ‘with nothing to weigh him down’ such as worldly burdens. Then, this ‘genius’, light and airborne, would be ‘taken up into the air’ (volubile) and no longer rooted to the earth. It would ascend from these lower spheres and go ever higher: ‘he will give himself up to the open heavens, and he will encircle the Sun, the Moon and the disks of the stars’.
But, to the purity of the life within, devoted to Christian life, is added the sensation that the kingdom of Christ in the Nostradamian imaginary is a kingdom of silence, deaf to the world, isolated within each believer (5:96):15
At the midst of the great world the rose,
For new facts civic bloodshed:
To tell the truth one's mouth will be closed,
When in need the awaited one will come late.
Should we consider the rose in this verse as Christ, Scripture's true rose, which Luther turned into the white rose: ‘I have been like the rose planted in Jericho, the rose white as the candour of holiness, the rose red with the shedding of his blood’.16 That same rose was glorified by St Augustine in a sermon:
And as the rose betrays its presence by its scent before one is close by it, so the blind man [of Jericho] smelt the fragrance of his divinity. There is, my brethren, yes there is in this garden of the Lord, there is not only the martyrs’ rose, but also the virgins’ lily, the spouses’ ivy and the widows’ violet. No, my beloved, there is not one state of human kind which is left in despair of his calling in life. Christ suffered for all and it is true, as Scripture has said: ‘God wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth’.17
The rose of this Nostradamian quatrain is, as it were, the message of Christ, the Revelation which arises from the midst of the world, Jerusalem, and the text seems suffused with apocalyptic resonances. The blood that will be publicly shed ‘for new facts’ should perhaps be seen as a reference to what the ‘great voice out of heaven’ declared (Rev. 21:3), proclaiming that the ‘tabernacle of God with men’ was making ‘all things new’, accomplished by the one who sits on the throne, the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. Whence the prophecy that, when the Logos is established amidst the great world, restored to men, blood would be publicly shed. Martyrdom and persecution will mark out the latter days and the return of Christ.18 The faithful will not speak out. In the sure and certain hope that the Messiah will lately come, they will hold their silence, the better to await their Saviour. That choice of silence is significant. And, on the ‘late’ coming in the quatrain, there is a resonance of St Mark's Gospel (13:35 – Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning’). The important line in this quatrain is, however ‘to tell the truth one's mouth will be closed’, which is intended to emphasize that, in the time of benediction, when Christ proclaims that He will come and live amongst us, and will wipe away all tears, it will be essential that the believer keeps silent, and does not tell out the Truth whose joys he experiences. The believer must keep their trust and hope patiently to themselves.19
One final quatrain (6:18) allows us to grasp what Nostradamus may have wanted to signify through this kingdom of the ‘Spirit’ within.20 In it he tells of an ill king who had been abandoned by his physicians, unable to offer any remedy for his illness. Then, but it is not by divine providence or Hebrew art (medicine or magic), his life will be saved. He and his progeny will be propelled to the ‘heights of power’, and ‘forgiveness will be granted to those people who yearn for Christ’. The ‘heights of power’ are life, understood in terms of salvation, and to be thought of as a grace, divine and freely given to all those who love God and tell Him of their love, putting their trust not in human means (symbolized here by the physician) but in divine mercy alone. Sola gratia, sola fide. The power of the Spirit should possibly be linked to the idea of a ‘profound and secret revelation’ expounded by Guillaume Briçonnet to Marguerite of Navarre. It was a revelation leading to an extinction of self in God and transmitted to some as milk, to others as solid meat, ‘and to others again in sublimeness of doctrine, as they are capable [of receiving it], either as waters of purgation, or of illumination, or of perfection’.21 It is the revelation of a God that the Christian believer, having journeyed in the ways of the Law, can no longer describe once he has gone beyond the terrestrial sphere and penetrated the heavenly one, being ‘outside himself’ through this ‘excellent and ravishing grace’. The Christian believer ‘will no longer be able to name [the godhead], contemplating Him in silence, his heart suffused and surpassed with love, without speaking, without contemplation, obfuscated by the shadowy light by which … his understanding is obscured, held entranced…’.
It is an apophatic via negativa which thus comes to the fore, approached through an Augustinian perspective of a humiliation of pride through enigma. Comprehension can only proceed through incomprehension, light can only shine in the darkest of darkness. That was what the Renaissance imaginary had been convinced of, through the influence of the Pseudo-Denys and his On Divine Names (De Divinis nominibus), which emphasized the supra-substantial nature and immeasurable goodness of a God whom man can not name, but to Whom all names were applicable:22
The theologians, having knowledge of this, celebrate It, both without Name and from every Name. Without name, as when they say that the Godhead Itself, in one of those mystical apparitions of the symbolical Divine manifestation, rebuked him who said, ‘What is thy name?’ and as leading him away from all knowledge of the Divine Name, said this, ‘and why dost thou ask my Name?’ and this (Name) ‘is wonderful.’ And is not this in reality the wonderful Name, that which is above every Name – the Nameless – that fixed above every name which is named, whether in this age or in that which is to come? Also, as ‘many named,’ as when they again introduce It as saying, ‘I am He, Who is – the Life – the Light – the God – the Truth.’ And when the wise of God themselves celebrate Him, as Author of all things, under many Names, from all created things – as Good – as Beautiful – as Wise – as Beloved – as God of gods – as Lord of lords – as Holy of Holies – as Eternal – as Being – as Author of Ages – as Provider of Life – as Wisdom – as Mind – as Word – as Knowing – as preeminently possessing all the treasures of all knowledge – as Power – as Powerful – as King of kings – as Ancient of days – as never growing old – and Unchangeable – as Preservation – as Righteousness – as Sanctification – as Redemption – as surpassing all things in greatness – and as in a gentle breeze. – Yea, they also say that He is in minds, and in souls, and in bodies, and in heaven and in earth, and at once, the same in the same – in the world – around the world – above the world – supercelestial, superessential, sun, star – fire – water – spirit – dew – cloud – self-hewn stone and rock – all things existing – and not one of things existing.
More simply, perhaps, we should read Nostradamus in the light of one of his acknowledged master-thinkers. Although he often followed in the footsteps of Erasmus, it was Henry Cornelius Agrippa whom he followed in many of his chosen directions. The key might well lie there. It is difficult not to make a correlation between this idea of learned ignorance being the inspiration to a return to Christ in the Scriptures, and how Agrippa interprets this as the scriptural revolution that he calls for, against the interpretative grip of the theologians, those Rabelaisian ‘mateologians’: ‘Neither is there any one who can declare the things of God, but his own Word’.23 Agrippa's starting point was the light, which (as for St Augustine) was a desire for God, going forth as the light of the world. It was Agrippa who was permeated by an immense sense of pity for the sufferings of a time which, because men thought they were wise, was tipping towards that cruelty which lay among common people, afflicting even nobles whose power is the ‘reward’ for the crime, and what makes violence triumphant.24 It was Agrippa who proclaimed the glory of a Christ who, ‘by the mouth of his silly Asses and rude Idiots, the Apostles, vanquish and put to silence all the Learned Philosophers of the Gentiles, and great Lawyers among the Jews; trampling under-foot all manner of worldly wisdom’.25 For Agrippa, the physician from Nettesheim, God desired to be served in spirit and truth: ‘For [H]e look[ed] upon the Faith, considering the inward Thoughts and Intentions of Men; the searcher of Hearts, that sees the very secrets of the Soul … there is nothing acceptable but Faith in Jesus Christ; with a perfect imitation of [H]is Charity, and an unshaken hope in [H]is Salvation and Reward’.26 Agrippa criticized those whose who had divided the Christian church and the body of Christendom over dogmatic and ritualistic issues of little importance as achieving something unworthy. What was important was the faith sustained by each Christian, in the spirit within, ‘just as our Saviour Jesus Christ reproached the Pharisees for straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel; and yet so to trouble the peace of the church risks division whose results would be more pernicious than the improvement and amendment that they promise to bring with them. The Popes would, in truth, have avoided many ills, and kept the church together and at peace if they had allowed leavened bread to the Greeks, and the cup to the Bohemians; for such things are no greater than what was permitted to the people of Norway by Pope Innocent VIII, as Volaterranus affirms, namely, to be able to administer the cup without wine’.27
The prophetic ‘astronomical quatrains’ considered in this chapter are concerned not so much with a futurology as with the problem of conscience, with its emergence in the course of a century where to believe was perilous, and to think was a risk. The ‘spirit of prophecy’ which inspired Nostradamus was a conscience in genesis, an outworking of a Christian liberty whose most evident manifestation would be the freedom accorded to word, and to the instability in what they signified. This liberty would be of the sort that could be embraced in, or resolve, the infinite secrets of an ‘occult philosophy’, or one of the possible sorts of occult philosophy. It was a liberty that refused to cede before the confessional hatreds that, on both sides, would claim God as on their side.