[In the essay below, Marshall contends that Rabelais's allegorical treatment of Papimania in the Quart Livrereveals his loyalty to the Catholic church while supporting reform of its perceived injustices and corruption.]

In the epic journey undertaken by Pantagruel, Friar John, Panurge and their companions, there is a group of islands visited after the encounter with the Sea Monster, the Physetère, which, by the contrasts made between them, appear to deal with the religious divisions of the time. First there are the Sausage nations: the “Suysses […] que le bon Rabelais a surnommez Saulcisses”,¹ which by their generic designation are Reformers; the French Sausages, Andouilles, being Calvinists, the German Boudins, being Lutheran, and the Saulcissons Montigènes, Vaudois. This identification is strengthened by reference to the Reformers' rejection of the Lenten fast epitomized by a tutelary deity which is a flying pig, crying Mardigras and dropping mustard from the sky. They are paired as mortal adversaries, with the hypocritical Lenten Observance, Quaresmeprenant whom Pantagruel shuns and condemns as contrary to nature (QL, XXXII, 11. 66ff). The piquant details of these two episodes serve to place the elements of the section in context but they are not the subject of this article.²

Our interest lies in the last pair, the Papefigues—those who thumb their noses at the Pope (QL, XL V-XL VII) and their rivals and conquerors the Papimanes, those who adulate, or rather worship the Pope (QL, XL VIII-LIV). So prima facie a Pro-Pope and an Anti-Pope faction but just who these are will have to be determined.

The visit to the island of Papimania is drawing to a close in chapter LIV of the Quart Livre. The banquet in honour of the visitors has reached the fruit course:

En fin de table Homenaz nous donna grand nombre de grosses et belles poyres, disant: “Tenez, amis: poires sont singulieres, lesquelles ailleurs ne trouverez. Non toute terre porte tout. Indie seule porte le noir ebene. En Sabée provient le bon encent. En l’isle de Lemnos, la terre Sphragitide. En ceste isle seule naissent ces belles poires. Faictez en, si bon vous semble, pepinieres en vos pays.

—Comment, demanda Pantagruel, les nommez-vous? Elles me semblent tresbonnes, et de bonne eau. Si on les cuisoit en casserons par quartiers avecques un peu de vin et de sucre, je pense que seroit viande tressalubre tant es malades comme es sains.

—Non aultrement, respondit Homenaz. Nous sommes simples gens, puys qu’il plaist à Dieu. Et appellons les figues figues, les prunes prunes, et les poires poires.

—Vrayement, dist Pantagruel, quand je seray en mon mesnaige (ce sera, si Dieu plaist, bien toust), j’en affieray et hanteray en mon jardin de Touraine sus la rive de Loyre, et seront dictes poires de bon Christian. Car oncques ne veiz Christians meilleurs que sont ces bons Papimanes.

The fruit offered are pears; they are the exclusive product of that land; they have no name; Pantagruel considers them health-giving to both sick and well; he names them Bon chretien pears, “For never did I see Christians better than these good Papimanians.” Each island on the Quest receives its word of approval or condemnation, implicit or explicit, from the good Giant. The praise given here is more outspoken and unequivocal than any other island on the quest has earned.

And yet none of the islands on which the company lands³ is subjected to such savage satire directed against so many aspects of its customs as this one. How can we reconcile the unequivocal praise given to Bishop Homenaz in the scene above with the pungent criticism in the rest of the incident? To complicate in the short term and yet ultimately bring clarity to this question there is a Lutheran pamphlet, published in 1545 in Wittenberg which Professor Screech has very kindly drawn to my attention: Wider das Bapstum zu Rom vom Teuffel gestifft, Wittenberg, 1545 durch Hans Lufft.⁴

Luther questions the Pope's authority to distort Christian doctrine on the basis of texts which he does not understand and, with the Decretals as his instrument, to impose heretical doctrines on the Church. The Pope claims as Vicar of Christ on Earth to be Deus in terris, particularly in the matter of binding and loosing; of saving and damning. This authority is used to drain Christianity of wealth for the benefit of Rome. He (the Pope) holds Christian beliefs as fabulis et ineptiis and Christians as stupid, credulous and easily fooled. Bon Christian is a term of mockery in papal circles.⁵ The content of the pamphlet resembles that of many others hurled by the Reformers at the Pope's head. Many of the same criticisms are voiced by Rabelais in this episode, in particular “Comment, par les vertus des Decretales, est l’or subtilement tiré de France en Rome”. As Professor Screech says: “Les Décrétales sont un contr’évangile; Rabelais met dans la bouche d’Homenaz un éloge satirique de toutes les institutions de la chrétienté, qui dérivent, selon lui de cette source impure.”⁶

But what makes the pamphlet interesting is the term Bon Christian which is reiterated in that form several times in Luther's German document and preserved in the same form in the Latin translation. It is clear that Rabelais has picked this term out here for special prominence, indeed as the key term in the final episode of the Papimania visit. Rabelais had an intimate knowledge of the Pope's Rome, better no doubt than Luther's. The pamphlet, at least in its Latin form, if not in the German, was probably accessible to him; and even if it were not, the practice which Luther alleges would have been known to him from the source. So its use here would seem to be a deliberate reference to the usage of the Curia. But does it have in Rabelais the pejorative connotation which the Lutheran pamphlet attributes to it? Saulnier suggests that it does:

[…] toute l’harmonie du monde, suivant les vues papimaniques, peut se définir sommairement par une hiérarchie de trois classes. Au sommet, l’autorité pontificale. En bas, les “bons chrétiens”, les poires. Ce sont les bigots fanatisés et consentants, et singulièrement le gouvernement de la France. Tout le chapitre consacré aux “poires de bon chrétien” […] est pour le dire […] Ces “poires de bon christian” sont faites pour être mangées par Homenaz et les siens.⁷

Or is Rabelais, through Pantagruel, expressing genuine approval of Homenaz's domain? It must be noted that he has the Bishop “call figs figs and a spade a spade” as Erasmus's Adage has it.⁸ And when Homenaz claims “Nous sommes simples gens, puys qu’il plaist à Dieu”—again in the words of the adage, “simplici & rusticana utens veritate”—is Rabelais not asserting that in this situation there are none of those rhetorical tricks which distort the truth: “figurae quaedam, quibus fit, ut turpia honeste, aspera mollita, superba modeste, mordacia blande dicuntur”? Is he not saying that like its subject, the language used to describe Homenaz is to be taken at face value? If this is so, then how are we to reconcile the satirical and laudatory sides of this story? How are we to take the Bons Christians of Homenaz's country, as a sincere evaluation or as an ironic papal sneer at the Evangelicals?

Among many brilliantly funny episodes in the Chronicles, the Papimania visit is one of the best. An obsessive, idolatrous veneration of the Pope is introduced at the outset in Ch. XL VIII. The first words spoken by the inhabitants to the newcomers is the reiterated question, “Have you seen him?” “Who?” “The one, the Unique”. “We don’t understand these terms, please explain.” “He who is, have you seen him?”. The single-minded preoccupation with the Pope blinds them to the need for any further explanation. But the reference to the Book of Exodus and God's self-given name I AM gives Pantagruel the clue that they are talking about God, and produces the clarification that the God referred to is not the one who rules over the heavens, but the other one; the God on earth, Dieu en terre, Deus in terris, namely the Pope.

As the commentaries tell us, the phrase is common in the polemical literature of the period; it occurs for example in the pamphlet referred to by Screech. It is at the centre of the controversy over papal authority. To one faction the Pope is the Vicar of Christ on earth, the successor to St. Peter, to whom all power is given to bind or to loose, and who is consequently set above all temporal rulers and over all laws. He is “God on earth”. To others, the King, and particularly the King of France, is set in his place by God and exercises divine authority over his subjects, subject himself to no other temporal human authority, least of all that of the Pope. A third view sees Christ as the Head of the Church, directing it through the hearts of the faithful without the need for an intermediary, the papal authority being therefore an unnecessary and unjustifiable imposition. The instruments of the papal authority are the Decretals. The Papimania episode is about papal authority, and ridicules by a reductio ad absurdum the Decretals and the practices which they authorize or require. There is no doubt about that.

The episode satirizes more than just the Decretals. Homenaz the bishop comes to greet the travellers, mounted on a bridleless mule, decked in green and accompanied by a procession; that is, he apes the triumphal entry of christ into Jerusalem—ridiculous in its absurd presumption and, on further reflection we see implied the role of the priest in the mass, enacting Christ's presence for the faithful (an issue of which we in our time are particularly aware because of the controversy about women priests, who are supposed, by reason of their sex, to be unable to reenact authentically the actions of the Last Supper). The Decretals are suspended as an object of veneration over the door of the Church. We and the travellers are asked to believe that as the Ten Commandments were written by the finger of God, so the Decretals were written by an angel; this obvious nonsense is compounded by Homenaz the Bishop who then associates these “miracles” with all the myths of antiquity about objects transmitted directly from the Gods to men, underlining the naïve credulity necessary to believe in any of them. Then, with great ceremony, as a special favour to those who have actually seen a Pope, or three of them as Panurge claims, after due rituals he undoes thirty-two locks and fourteen padlocks, puts a wet sack over his head, draws back a crimson curtain and reveals another divine artefact, the portrait of the archetype of a Pope, which as Marichal points out bears a close resemblance to a picture of Christ, supposedly of divine origin, which is kept in comparable conditions in St Peter's in Rome.⁹ The satire is obvious, pungent and very funny.

Piling absurdity on absurdity in this and the following sections of the story, Rabelais exposes a large number of the commonplaces of criticism which reformers of every persuasion were directing at the papacy: veneration of objects, relics, unnecessary rituals, confessions, holy water, monastic institutions, indulgences, the self-indulgence of prelates, warring popes, purgatory with its devils and boiling cauldrons, and finally the financial levies made on surrounding countries, especially France, to maintain the papal institution.¹⁰ When the text of the episode is read in detail against the background of history all these criticisms and more are indubitably found in it, subtended under the primary question of papal authority and the instruments of its action, the Decretals. But it must be underlined that these are commonplaces, as a comparison with the Luther pamphlet and virtually any other reformist critique of the papacy will show. We have no difficulty agreeing with Screech when he says:

Parmi les réformateurs schismatiques de son temps, il serait difficile de trouver un auteur [i.e. Rabelais] plus fondamentalement dédaigneux des prétentions attribuées à tort où à raison, au siège de Saint Pierre.¹¹

As exposed in the Papimania episode: “La religion du Dieu en terre est une religion de farce basée sur la crédulité des hommes et défendue par des murailles de papier”.¹² But can we go as far as to say: “Le pape du Quart Livre n’est riens moins que l’Antéchrist”?¹³ Is the Pope for Rabelais the Satanic Father, Luther's Pater Satanicissimus? The episode talks, as Screech points out, about attitudes to the Pope held in distant communities. How much does it reflect Rabelais's attitude to the papacy itself?

In his remarkably documented study Marichal sees the Crise Gallicane as central to the Papimania episode as also does Saulnier. In 1551 Henry II of France was at loggerheads with the Pope on this question of papal authority. The affair was complex; Marichal explains it in detail. The question that concerns us is, “Is our episode tied to it? Is Rabelais making himself the spokesman of the King's cause here? Rabelais the Gallican?”

It is unquestionably true that our episode is full of reformist criticisms of the papacy; it is also certain that in the climate of 1551 the critique of papal authority concurs with the historical situation. But in answer to both questions it must be asserted that it is not history that gives meaning to texts; rather the opposite. The text alone is the arbiter of its own meaning and in this text there are features that lie outside, or rather beyond, the issue of papal authority, notably the attitude of Pantagruel and his retinue, the banquet and particularly the beautiful serving-girls who pour the wine—the clérices. If we are to draw conclusions from the episode these details must also be taken into account. Critics who find a polemical intention in the passage seem largely to ignore them.

It is evident that, in a coherent work as the Great Allegory is, no episode can be interpreted in isolation. Elsewhere¹⁴ it has been shown that the Chronicles are structured in clusters of episodes, linked by formal and thematic elements. Papimania is a complex nexus of such links, too massive in its ramifications to unravel here. But it is obviously and closely linked with the preceding episode, the Island of the Papefigues. those who cocked a snook at the Pope, and the relationship between the two episodes will be briefly scanned. The allegorical methods adopted by Rabelais and the symbolism which attaches to people and things are also essential keys to understanding which will need to be explored.

The Island of the Papefigues was once prosperous and free. Its people were called Gaillardetz—The Cheerful Ones. But then, visiting Papimania on the annual feast day, one of its people gave the Papal Image the fingers; in vengeance the Papimanians, driven by the fanaticism exemplified in Homenaz, overran the country, butchered the men, humiliated the women and since that time it has been poor, wretched, subject to the Papimanians and a prey to devils. The subject of the whole episode is the background to a scratching match between a farmer and a small devil to determine ownership of a field, and the outcome of that incident.

The first thing to note is that both communities, Papimanians and Papefigues, belong in the same communion; both involve ritual—exorcism in the Papefigue incident complete with priests, stoles and holy water; confession, fasts, mass and holy water in Papimania. The Papefigues are therefore not associated with the Reformers. There is little or no reference to foreign communities in the Chronicles. On Fierce Island,—L’Ile Farouche—live the French Protestants, the Andouilles, their German cousins the Boudins, and the Vaudois—the Saulcissons montigènes—and they are all derived from the Swiss whom Rabelais calls Saucisses. There is no such indication of foreignness in our two episodes. Papefigues and Papimanes are both French and not Protestant; the Papefigues fall into the Gallican camp.

Papimania is a blessed island—la benoiste isle des Papimanes—rich and prosperous whereas its counterpart is an isle désolée. On the island of the Papefigues, Pantagruel and his band act entirely as observers, making no comment and taking no part in the action except that Pantagruel on his departure leaves a royal gift—18,000 golden royals—in the collection box for the fabric of the church, “en contemplation de la paouvreté du peuple et calamité du lieu.” In Papimania on the other hand they participate from the outset in the action of the story; their comments on the place and the people are all good:

Home de bien, dist frere Jan […] Vous en avez parlé en bons termes et en bon Christian. Ja long temps a que n’en avions veu […] C’est belle chose rencontrer gens de bien […] Home de bien respondit Panurge […]¹⁵

and particularly Pantagruel's parting accolade with which we introduced the topic. Reciprocally Homenaz recognizes them as “vrays Christians”,¹⁶ “vous aultres gens de bien”¹⁷ and as “amis”. Pantagruel's group, by their participation and their praise, are clearly more at home with the Papimanians than in any other of their island visits. The only direct criticisms that Pantagruel makes, and they are fierce, are directed, not against the people and their ways, but against the schoolmaster who whipped his pupils so that they would remember this historic visit and Friar John who committed a blasphemy.¹⁸ Even Homenaz himself, who is shown for the most part as a pretentious fool, is treated as an Home de bien by his guests and, faced with Friar John's lust, responds wisely.¹⁹

How then can one assume an anti-papal attitude from the episode? In the contrast between the Papefigues and the Papimanes Rabelais seems firmly attached to the papal camp by the praise heaped on it by the narrator and all the chief characters of the quest. It might also be noted that the expression home de bien seems reserved exclusively for the “good” characters in Gargantua and the Great Allegory. It would need a weight of evidence to displace the term from that association here.

To explain the counterpoint of praise and criticism and make sense of the episode we need to consider the symbolism of the allegory and the wider context of the work, in particular the Prologues of the Great Allegory which state its nature and intention.

There are several interlocking systems of symbols in the Chronicles, for the most part implicit. The only set which is explicitly identified is the sexual symbolism and that, almost at the end of Rabelais's life, in the second Prologue to Book IV, 1552. The male principle is the REASON—et habet tua mentula mentem says Jupiter to Priapus.²⁰ By symmetry the female principle is the IDEA—thought, doctrine or philosophy. Couillatris, the anti-hero of the Prologue is, to translate his name exactly (you will pardon the expression; it is Rabelais's not mine) a poor little prick. He has lost his axe-head which Priapus is more than necessarily explicit in identifying as the female genitals.²¹ In the intellectual turmoil of the Renaissance and Reformation, the poor human reason has lost his IDEA, his traditional credo and begs God to restore it to him.²² In a transposition of the same trope Couillatris's alter-ego Panurge, the typical Man, has to go on a quest over the oceans of the world to decide whether to take a wife (i.e. to commit himself to a credo).

It is the female principle which we need first in our pair of episodes. The Papefigue farmer is not saved from the devil by the priests and the holy water in which he is immersed up to the nose, but by his wife who confronts the devil with her naked femininity, the inherent power of doctrine, and puts it to flight. It is the clérices, those apparently gratuitous additions to the banquet episode in Papimania, who carry the symbol and provide the answer to the paradox. They have a very close thematic connection with the story of the axe-heads in the Prologue. Their function in the narrative is to pour the wine during the banquet which they do on the command, “Clerice, esclaire ici”—“Light up here”. On the surface they are nuns: the Clarisses, founded by St Francis's soul-mate St Claire. They carry a double word-play on claire—“clear, light”—and clerc—“a cleric”—of which they are the female of the species. The spelling given by Rabelais underlines this double significance. They are, allegorically, doctrines: virgins (that is, unpromulgated doctrines), whose function is to pour out the grace of God represented by wine and so light up the scriptures and enlighten the Christian life. “Clerice, esclaire ici”. We will return to them.

The other symbolic cluster necessary for understanding here is the Giant's party. It has been shown²³ that the book Gargantua and its sequel in the Great Allegory are about the Church. What other subject was more dominant in the humanist's mind between 1530 and 1550? All the characters in Gargantua represent aspects of Church; the Giant, the collectivity of all the faithful, the Body of Christ on earth, the ideal Church. Friar John is from the outset imperfect. He represents the Church on earth, cheerfully recognizing his inadequacies, his dependence on ritual, his breviary, his earthiness and ignorance. But he has left the monastery, refusing the supersitions of the past under the influence of the Holy Spirit and, in the retinue of the Giant, has attached himself to the real Church established under the Pauline device, “Love seeks not its own”.

One remembers the battle of the Abbey, where he left his fellow monks uselessly chanting and adopted a practical faith, laying about him with the staff of the cross until the looters were driven out. Marichal on pp. 120-121, citing a fifteenth-century text which Rabelais may or may not have known, describes a distinction between the “Catholic” (i.e. worldwide) Church and the “Apostolic” Church headed by the Pope.²⁴ This distinction fits very closely with the functions of the Giant and Friar John which have been derived from the allegory: the giant, Pantagruel, the Universal Church, Friar John the Apostolic one; the one perfect, the other imperfect: “Et haec errare potest, et potuit falli et fallere, schisma et haeresim habere, etiam potest deficere.”—“And the latter can make mistakes, it has been possible for it to be misled and to mislead, to contain schisms and heresies and even to fail.”

Panurge, who is of course absent in Gargantua, is Everyman in the Great Allegory. Other members of the retinue are personified aspects of the Church: Gymnaste the theologian, Ponocrates diligence and hard work, Epistemon enlightened youth and so on.

Screech says: “La religion d’Homenaz, évêque de Papimanie, est une caricature de la religion chrétienne”²⁵ and this is so. The Pope is substituted for God, the Decretals for the bible and these substitutions are worked out in the behaviour of the Papimanians and particularly in Homenaz's commentary on the Decretals. If we are to appreciate the full import of this caricature we must study the way the real Church, that is to say Pantagruel and his retinue, in its two aspects, Catholic and Apostolic, behaves relative to its deformed counterpart. Both Pantagruel and Friar John praise Homenaz and his people, as we have seen. All the members of the party make disparaging remarks about the propositions advanced by Homenaz on the subject of the Decretals, but they do not criticize Homenaz himself. They do not need to. By a splendid irony the very presence of the vrays Christians as Homenaz calls them establishes the norm against which the institutions of the Papimanian religion show themselves up. That object of veneration, the Pope, elicits from Panurge the comment, “j’en ay veu troys, à la veue desquelz je n’ay gueres profité”.²⁶ And Pantagruel, by virtue of his size, can toy with the Holy Decretals which make his fingers tingle and give him the desire to beat a servant or two. The true Church makes the caricature evident and reduces the pretensions of Papimania to their proper dimensions. But without reproach. Not only that, and more important still, on both the Island of the Papefigues, and in Papimania, Pantagruel and his party conform to the customs of the place; holy water in the one, a low, dry mass in the other. These are, subject to correction, the only two places in the whole of the Great Allegory where the party goes into a Church and participates in its rituals. Why should this be, when those same rituals are so roundly condemned in these chapters and elsewhere in the Chronicles? The name and the person of Homenaz, the poires and the clérices are the keys to the essential meaning which the paradox of the episode is transmitting.

The person of Homenaz confirms what we have determined about the practices of the island; like Janotus de Bragmardo in Gargantua²⁷ he is pretentious, blind to the jokes the members of the party play on him, credulous, obsessive, over-emotional and stupid. Marichal, on p. 130 and elsewhere, suggests that he is drawn from Julius III. But, as we have seen, he is praised by both Pantagruel and Friar John; he is also humble—“Nous sommes simples gens, puys qu’il plaist à Dieu”, patently sincere, and, in a way proper to his episcopal office he reproves Friar John's lust for the clérices and dispenses the Holy Pears. His name decomposes into two terms Homme and Nez: Man and Nose. In allegorical terms Homme denotes the imperfection of our humanity and Nez is associated in the allegories with the male organ, i.e. with the reason, and seems to denote wisdom. So Homenaz’s name encapsulates his dual nature, human and fallible but in his ecclesiastical function, wise. The obvious comparison to be made is with Friar John himself whose imperfections are so blithely displayed in Gargantua but whose faith is real and practical, who is totally ignorant, whose bible is his breviary as Homenaz's is the Decretals but who is full of the Holy Spirit by reason of his office. Just like Homenaz, he was not then reproached for his shortcomings, even if now, in Pantagruel's presence his tendency to offend against the dignity of God is sharply rebuked.

Measured by the norm defined by Pantagruel—Ideal Universal Church—and Friar John—actual, imperfect Apostolic Church—Papefigues and Papimanes are seen as imperfect communities, the imperfections of which the True Church reveals. In the Prologues to the Tiers and Quart Livres Rabelais notes and underlines our human imperfections which, in fact, form a leitmotiv of both allegories once the theme is perceived.²⁸ We have seen the Giant and his party accept Papefigues and Papimanes on their own terms, accepting their imperfections and even participating in their rituals.

The first conclusion to be drawn from our text is that the imperfections of these two ecclesiastical communities are recognized but accepted by Rabelais. In the Prologue to the Tiers Livre he emphatically refuses a polemical role in the current disputes, being apt neither for attack nor defence. The Papimania episode makes it clear that despite its manifest faults, which Rabelais as an Evangelical is sharply aware of, it is in the traditional Church that his loyalty lies. He says as much in l. 317 of the Prologue to the Tiers Livre: “Je renonce ma part en Papimanie si je vous happe”. In this, I think, lies the significance of the pears. We note that the pears are available exclusively in Papimania as the characteristic of that place, in the same way as incense characterizes Saba. Papimania produces pears by its very nature; they are, indeed, so much in the order of things that they have no need of a name; and these can be transplanted into other regions to benefit both the sick and the healthy. Pears are a hapax in Rabelais so we have no other reference to fix the meaning and I can find no external source which suggests a symbolism in the medical field to fit the context. However, in a work which deserves to be better known, Rabelais and Christian initiation: Allegorical and Typological Motifs in the Works of Rabelais,²⁹ S. B. Bushell sees the womb as a powerful and ubiquitous symbol of baptism: “the Church gives birth to her new sons by means of her parturient organ, the baptismal font” (p. 116). He suggests, with the purpose of identifying the Dive Bouteille with a uterus, that for the doctors of the new medical science the womb was shaped like a bottle or a pear. “These works on dissection, undertaken in a spirit of scientific documentation, depict the uterus, not with its horns, by which Galen understood the Fallopian tubes, but as a hollow, pear-shaped structure.” (p. 119) Is this whatour pears symbolize? The association seems far-fetched. But it is remarkably congruous with this context. Procreation with the Andouilles is a mixed-up affair since their type, the queen Niphleseth (Niphleseth, membre viril, Hebr. Briefve Déclaration) is a woman under false pretences; the caricatural baptism by total immersion of the Papefigue farmer in the stoup of holy water was quite unavailing as you will recall. It is only in Papimania, i.e. the True Church, that true baptism can be found; it is the biblical remedy for sin/sickness and the source of Christian well-being and it can be passed on to other communities, making Bons Christians of them all. If we have identified the symbol correctly, then it is among the most recondite, very much intended for those who have ears to hear. Nonetheless there is a further confirmation that it is correct in the narrative and symbolic function of the clérices, the keystone of this episode.

Rabelais is an Evangelical; the satire of the Papimanian aberrations demonstrates that clearly, but his loyalties are nevertheless with the Church of Rome. The Papimania episode on its own states this unequivocally. Because the traditional Church is more important to him than other sectarian positions he satirizes its faults more thoroughly than the others. Here is the explanation of our paradox of praise and blame. But his loyalty is not blind. Accepting the Roman Church makes its members accomplices in the atrocities of fanaticism, so thoroughly portrayed by the type Homenaz: religious wars (the Gaillardetz in becoming Papefigues, were overrun, massacred and humiliated); inquisition, torture and execution; the callous exploitation of the poor so that the princes of the church can banquet: Papimania contains all these things, which the episode patently acknowledges. But in the final analysis the Papimania episode is not about which sectarian position to adopt, but what to do about the imperfections of the Church to which one belongs. These chapters not only pose the problems, they propose some answers as well.

Rabelais declares his loyalty to the Church but he will not join combat as his contemporaries were doing to justify it, relative to other factions, nor will he condemn the Papefigues or Andouilles for that matter. Holding up their weaknesses to scrutiny and their folly to ridicule is one thing; condemning them is another. Factionalism, which by its nature is judgemental, is explicitly condemned in the episode of the three Peters in the second Prologue to the Quart Livre (Pr. ll. 171-245). To attribute the sort of polemical attitude to him which the Luther pamphlet, for example, typifies, is to fly in the face of the poignant declaration of service outside the conflict which constitutes the essential message of the beautiful Prologue to Book III.

This is the moderation, médiocrité, that he preaches to his contemporaries in the Prologue to this book. The riotous fun with which the imperfections of the various church groups are satirized illustrates another preoccupation of the Prologues—to cure the sickness, the insanity of the world with humour, “Pource que rire est le propre de l’homme” (G. Liminary poem).

Pantagruel leaves a gift to each Island at his departure. To the Papefigues he leaves a sum for the building up of the fabric of the church. For Rabelais the word église seems predominantly reserved for the building, rather than the institution, as in these two episodes. We can see why, since the institution, in its many hypostases is represented by the characters themselves. But it is a commonplace that the material building is the outward sign of the spiritual reality. It is therefore to the spiritually destitute church of the Gallicans that provision is made for its spiritual fabric to be refurbished.

From the Papimanians he accepts the pears. To them he gives two gifts: provision for a sumptuous curtain to cover the Papal Portrait (and thus hide it better perhaps), and dowries to marry off the clérices in due course. How is it possible that such a committed Evangelical as Rabelais could accept the manifest abuses of the established Church—idolatry, indulgences, the semi-pelagianism represented by superstitious rituals, the whole catalogue of abuses which his chapter contains and which produce in a Luther a tirade of invective? The answer lies in the axe-heads of the Prologue and the clérices.

When Couillatris has lost his axe-head on which his livelihood depends (IV. Pr.), he howls to Jupiter asking for it back. Jupiter sends Mercury to offer him a choice: his own, a silver one, or a golden one. If he chooses his own, he is to be given the others. If he chooses one of the others he is to have his head cut off. He chooses his own and he is made rich as a consequence. Others, seeing this, lose axe-heads on purpose, choose the precious ones, and lose their heads. The allegorical gloss is clear. Axe-heads are “doctrines”, “philosophies of life”. In the ferment of the Renaissance people are throwing away the old, grasping for the exciting new ideas, losing their heads and doing terrible things to each other, massacres, mutilations, burnings—all the concomitants of sectarian violence which the Irish troubles in our time and latterly the agony attendant on the collapse of Jugoslavia have demonstrated. The moral of the fable is equally clear. Refuse factional strife, stick to the traditional and in due course all the new ideas will come to you. The clérices are the new, unpromulgated doctrines of the Church. Friar John, the Church on earth, lusts to deflower them now. “En ce faisant, sus elles nous hanterions des enfans de Bon Christian, et la race en nos pays multiplieroit” (LIV, ll. 37-39). We note that the birth of new Bons Christians is associated through the terms with the pears (“J’en hanteray en mon jardin de Touraine […] et seront dictes poires de bon Christian” (my italics)). He is wisely chastised by Homenaz for his impatience. Pantagruel makes provision for their legitimate fecundation in due course when the Church is ready for them, as new Christians are ushered into the life of Christ from the matrix of the True Church.

Here is Rabelais's response to the tumult of his times; this is why he accepts the manifest imperfections of the traditional Church, Papimania, even the most inhuman, at the same time as he satirizes them. In due course the purposes of God for the Church will become clear. Grace (wine) will enlighten the Christian life. “Clerice, esclaire ici.” And the doubts, and the differences, and the combats, and the injustices, and the cruelties will give way to the reign of love.

As a coda, we are now able to see the significance of the term Bon Christian. If, as Luther alleges, the expression Bon Christian was a term of contempt for the Evangelicals in the papal milieu, Rabelais, in the context of the Roman Church, has restored to it its proper value, and, Evangelical himself, has applied it to those within the heart of the tradition who despite their imperfections cling to their traditional faith, like Friar John and Homenaz.

Notes

1. QL, XXXV-XLII. Cf. J. Du Bellay, Regrets, CXXXV, and QL, XXXVIII, ll. 20-22. The edition used for the Quart Livre is that of R. Marichal, Geneva, Droz, 1945 (TLF).

2. See Florence Weinberg, “Layers of Emblematic Prose: Rabelais's Andouilles”, Sixteenth Century Journal, to appear.

3. Some visits are avoided, notably Quaresmeprenant and Chaneph, indicating perhaps that these topoi are beyond the pale. Those graced with Pantagruel's presence have at least the hope of reconciliation with the giant and with each other. Those avoided are a lost cause.

4. Also used was a translation into Latin: Luther, Martin D. Doct. trs. J. Jonam, Contra Papatura Romanum a Diablo inventum, E. Germa, Latine redditum par Justum Jonam. See also M. A. Screech, “Sagesse de Rabelais; Rabelais et les ‘bons christians’”, Introduction to Etudes Rabelaisiennes, 21, Geneva, Droz, 1988, pp. 9-15.

5. T v°: Ist auch nicht wunder / sie haltens für geucherey und lauter Narrwerck / was wir Christen gleuben / Heissen uns Bon Christian / das ist grosse Narren / die solch ding gleuben mügen.

   B r°: Der Bapst […] geschrien hat durch alle Decreten und Decretalen / er sey uber alle Concilia / uber alle welt / auch uber die Engel im Himel / Item sey Gottes Stathalter auff Erden / und ein irdischer Gott.

   Yii v°-iiir°: Weistu nicht / wer Meisen fahen wil mus ein Meisen beim pfeiffen / und wer einen Christen fahen wil / mus reden lernen wie ein Christ. Darumb müssen wir euch / Bon Christian / bey ewrem glauben ergreiffen / dabei kan man euch Deudsche Bestien halten und füren / wo und wie wir wollen / wie man die Beeren füret bei den Rinck in der Nasen / das ir uns nicht abermal uber den kopff wachset / und mit uns spielet / wie ewer vorfarn / die Gotten / Longobarden / und etlichen Keiser gethan haben / Gremmerze / Miser Asine / porlabon informatione, satanissime Pater.

6. M. A. Screech, L’Evangélisme de Rabelais: aspects de la satire religieuse au XVIe siècle, ER, II, Geneva, Droz, 1959, p. 80.

7. V. L. Saulnier, Rabelais II: Rabelais dans son enquête; Etude sur le Quart et le Cinquième Livre, Paris, Sedes, 1982, p. 105.

8. Adage II.iii.5: “Ficus ficus, ligonem ligonem vocat. Quadrat in eum, qui simplici & rusticana utens veritate, rem, ut est, narrat, nullis verborum ambagibus ac phaleris obvolvens. Sunt enim apud Rhetores figurae quaedam, quibus fit, ut turpia honeste, aspera mollita, superba modeste, mordacia blande dicuntur”.

9. R. Marichal, “Quart Livre Commentaires”, in ER, V, Geneva, Droz, 1964, pp. 116-117.

10. Ibid., p. 113.

11. Op. cit., p. 77.

12. Ibid., p. 81.

13. Ibid., p. 77.

14. F. W. Marshall, “Worrying the Bone again: the Structure and Significance of the Prologue to Gargantua”, AJFS, XXIV, 1987, pp. 3-22; “The Allegory of Rabelais' Gargantua”, AJFS, XXIV, 1987, pp. 115-154; “The Great Allegory”, AJFS, XXVI, 1989, pp. 12-51; The Water Symbol in Rabelais: A study based on the three central books, University of Waikato, 1990.

15. QL, XLIX, ll. 6-11, 56.

16. Ibid., LII, l. 84.

17. Ibid., LIII, l. 25.

18. Ibid., XLVIII, ll. 79ff; L, ll. 28ff.

19. Ibid., LIV, l. 40.

20. Ibid., Prologue, l. 186.

21. Ibid., ll. 286ff.

22. See Marshall, “Great Allegory”, pp. 16ff.

23. See note 14 above, esp. “The Allegory of Rabelais' Gargantua”.

24. De modis uniendi ac reformandi ecclesiam in concilio universali Thierry de Niem, 1410, in J. Gerson, Œuvres complètes, ed. Mgr Glorieux, Paris, Desclée, 1960, vol. 1, p. 46.

    Dic, quaeso, de qua Ecclesia intelligis, cum ille Sanctus Athanasius in Symbolo dixerit Et unam, sanctam, catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam. Si enim idem sunt catholica et apostolica Ecclesia, superfluum fuit replicare, quod per unum potuit explicare. Si vero idem non sunt, dic, quaeso, in quo differunt.

    Revera, ut bene noscis, catholica universalis Ecclesia ex variis membris unum corpus constituentibus, sive ex Graecis, Latinis et Barbaris in Christum credentibus, ex hominibus et mulieribus, ex rusticis et nobilibus, ex pauperibus et divitibus est conjuncta et nominata Cujus corporis universalis Ecclesie, caput Christus solus est. Ceteri vero, ut Papa, Cardinales et Praelati, Clerici, Reges et Principes ac plebeii, sunt membra inaequaliter disposita […].

    In ista etiam omnes fideles, in quantum fideles sunt, unum sunt in Christo, in cujus Fide non est distantia, Judaei, Graeci, Domini et servi.

    Alia vero vocata Ecclesia apostolica, particularis et privata, in catholica Ecclesia inclusa, ex Papa, Cardinalibus, Episcopis, Praelatis et viris Ecclesiasticis compagnianata. Et solet dici Ecclesia Romana, cuius caput Papa creditur; ceteri vero Ecclesiastici, tanquam membra inferiora et superiora in ea includuntur.

    Et haec errare potest, et potuit falli et fallere, schisma et haeresim habere, etiam potest deficere etc.

25. Op. cit., p. 77.

26. QL, XLVIII, ll. 37-40.

27. XVII-XIX in the Screech-Calder edition, TLF, Geneva, Droz, 1970.

28. III Pr., ed. Screech, TLF, Geneva, Droz, 1964, p. 38ff.: “S’il [Diogenes] avoit quelques imperfections, aussi avez vous, aussi avons nous. Rien n’est, sinon Dieu, perfaict.” IV Pr. ll. 492-494: “[…] humiliez vous davant sa [de Dieu] sacrée face et recongnoissez vos imperfections.”

29. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, PhD, 1979, University Microfilms International, London.