[In the essay below, Defaux maintains that in the battle between humanism and scholasticism in the sixteenth century, Rabelais was the most powerful and effective advocate for humanism.]

“Cy n’entrez pas, hypocrites, bigotz,
Vieux matagotz, marmiteux, boursouflez,
Torcoulx, badaux, plus que n’estoient les Gotz
Ni Ostrogotz, precurseurs des magotz,
Haires, cagotz, caffars empantouflez …”

Rabelais, Gargantua

“Pourveu que cettuy cy frappe, il ne luy
chaut combien il se descouvre.”

Montaigne, Essais, III, 8

Fundamentally, the form taken by the sixteenth-century “querelle des Anciens et des Modernes,”¹ that is the struggle we have all heard about between humanism on one side and scholasticism on the other, is that of a “Battle of the Arts.” It focuses primarily on language and the relative role and importance of the artes sermocinales of the trivium, Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic, in the curriculum. As such, it is indeed an old quarrel, a quarrel already flourishing in medieval universities before the middle of the thirteenth century, when Henri d’Andeli wrote his witty Bataille des VII ars.² We might say that the cultural revolution which characterizes both the Italian and the Northern Renaissance is a kind of reversed Battle of the VII arts. What Henri d’Andely describes to us in his book is the crushing victory of the invincible Parisian champion, Lady Logic, over Dame Grammar, crestfallen champion of the university of Orléans. It is this glorious victory which we find for example proudly expressed in the “Tractatus primus” of Petrus Hispanus's vastly influential Summulœ Logicales toward the middle of the thirteenth century: Dialectica est ars artium, scientia scientiarum, ad omnium methodorum principia viam habens. […] Et ideo in acquisitione omnium aliarum scientiarum Dialectica debet esse prior. [“Dialectic is the art of arts and the scienceof sciences, the art having access to the principles of all other disciplines. […] Accordingly, in the acquisition of all disciplines, Dialectic must come first”].³ The main characteristic of this powerful tradition is that it relies heavily on Aristotelian dialectic and philosophy for its concepts as well as its methodology, and that it does not hesitate to use both of them in matters of biblical exegesis and Christian doctrine. Its audacity in the domain of speculative theology is so great, and its rationalism and intellectualism so fundamentally arrogant, says Lorenzo Valla, that pagan philosophy has been finally granted complete dominance over the “intelligence of faith.”⁴ The scholastic theologians are of such temerity and presumption, deplores H. C. Agrippa in his De incertitudine, that they may only be compared to those giants of ancient mythology who, in their blind arrogance, wanted to overcome Jupiter and lay their hands on his celestial kingdom. “They prefer the schools of philosophers to the Church of Christ and attach more or equal importance to their own opinions than to the Holy Word.” [tam temerarii gigantes […] quanta etiam temeritas, quanta arrogans prœsumptio, Philosophorum scholas prœferre Ecclesiœ Christi, opinionesque hominum prœponere, aut adœquare verbo Dei].⁵

It is the same blindness and arrogance which the humanists find in the deliberate obscurity of the language used by those so-called guardians of the “Christian mystery.” They have in fact, claims Vives in his Adversus Pseudodialecticos, created a language within the language, a kind of private idiom that nobody understands but them. They have painstakingly invented for themselves certain meanings of words “contrary to all civilized custom and usage” [contra omnem hominum consuetudinem et usum];⁶ and the jargon they have coined, while pretending to be Latin, has absolutely nothing to do with it. It is this very jargon that, in his Conclusiones nongentœ of 1486, Pico della Mirandola calls the norma dicendi parisiensis, or the celebratissimorum Parisiensium disputatorum dicendi genus;⁷ it is also this “Parisian style” that he so eloquently defends in one of his letters against the criticisms of his friend the humanist Ermolao Barbaro.⁸ And it is to satirize and deride this very hermetic and obscure “style” that, in chapter VI of his Pantagruel, Rabelais introduces us to the “devilish language” [“diable de languaige”] of his escholier Limousin—himself defined as “some sort of heretic”—and that the said escholier, through his meeting with the giant, finally learns to “speak naturally” [“parler naturellement”]. “Seigneur,” says one of his men to Pantagruel, “sans doubte ce guallant veult contrefaire la langue des Parisians; mais il ne faict que escorcher le latin, et cuide ainsi pindariser, et luy semble bien qu’il est quelque grand orateur en françoys, parce qu’il dedaigne l’usance commun de parler.”⁹ [“My Lord, this fop is trying to counterfeit the language of the Parisians; but he does nothing but flay Latin, and thinks he is Pindarizing this way; and it really seems to him that he is some great orator in French, because he disdains the common way of speaking.”]

I think it would be a costly mistake to take the humanists at their own word, accept what they say without further examination, and from that assume the barbarity and obsolescence of medieval education. We are not here simply to repeat and endorse the beliefs and prejudices of the humanists, but to evaluate them for what they are, in a critical way. As readers of Erasmus, Vives or Rabelais, we undoubtedly have the right to have a good laugh at those scholastic magistri, and to ridicule their “garrulous ignorance and invincible loquacity” [garrula quœdam imperitia, et loquacitas invicta], their “coarseness,” “grossness,” “vulgarity” [rusticitas] or “detestable barbarism” [fœda barbaries].¹⁰ As intellectual historians or literary critics however, it is our responsibility to realize that laughter, and especially satirical laughter, rarely represents a sufficient and legitimate answer to the problems we examine. It is certainly not because Erasmus and Rabelais are piling up illos veteres libros of medieval auctores for the mere pleasure of making fun of them—Alexander, Grœcisma, Ebrardus, Modista, Breviloquum, Compost, Mammotreptus [sic], Catholicon, Donatus, Florista, Facetus, Alanus in Parabolis, Joannis Garlandini disticha, De moribus in mensa servandis, Quid est, Dormi secure, Supplementum, Passavantus cum commento, De modis significandi, etc¹¹—that we necessarily have to follow them without even having taken the elementary precaution of looking at those very books ourselves.¹² Nor is it because Rabelais, in his famous Catalog of the Library of Saint Victor, attributes a Demodo faciendi boudinos to John Major, a De differentiis soupparum to Thomas Bricot, a De optimitate triparum to Noël Beda, a De modo cacandi to Tarteret, or an Ars honestle petandi in societate to Magioster Ortunius Gratisu of Cpologne,¹³ that Major, Bricot, Beda, Tartaret,Ortuinus Gratius and the other scholastic dialecticians or theologians who appear side by side with them in this list were necessarily all not respectable scholars, philosophers, thinkers and writers in their own right, but unredeemable simpletons, archetypal blockheads or mega morons, who—and here I quote Vives again¹⁴—“should either be forced to devote themselves to other and better disciplines, or be expelled by public edict as corrupters of both character and learning” [aut cogi ut aliis melioribus se se dederent disciplinis, aut edicto publico expelli tamquam corruptores et morum et eruditionis].

In their efforts to dismantle what they themselves call the scholastic “citadel of ignorance” [arcem ignorantiæ],¹⁵ Renaissance humanists use an overall strategy which certainly deserves consideration. They all see and define themselves as fighters engaged in a kind of holy war. For example, in the Proemium to the first book of his De vero falsoque bono, Valla introduces himself to his reader as a young David, fighting “in Christ's honor, under the shield of faith and with the sword that is the word of God;” and at the beginning of his second book, he likewise compares the rhetorical order, the ordo and dispositio of his discourse, to that of an army masterfully deployed on the battlefield, and disposed by its commander “according to the location, the occasion, and the condition of the enemy” [et pro loco, pro tempore, pro conditione hostium aciem instruat].¹⁶ Budé is so profoundly and passionately devoted to the cause of bonæ litteræ that he speaks of the Ancients and of those who defend them as other Herculeses, incomparable “heroes of the nation of Letters” [heroes quidam nationis literariæ].¹⁷ And when, in his carnavalesque Gargantua, Rabelais decides to annihilate symbolically the Goths, Ostrogoths, Cagots and Matagots of the old world, he creates Frère Jean, themartial anti-monk, and puts in his hand the “baston de la croix” [“staff of the Cross”]. Nothing, in fact, could be more justified than these warlike metaphors and allegories.¹⁸ Indeed, the issue at hand, the crux of the matter, is simply to know who, in the end, is going to be heard and followed; who is going to win. Indeed, the game that is played there between the scholastics and the humanists is a game of wits and power, that is a game that cannot be played alone; a game whose basic rule and principle is that the Ancients need the Moderns as badly as the Moderns need them; or to put it another way, that the same could not exist without the other; that, just as there can be no other without the same, there likewise can be no same without the other. Each one of the decisions the humanists take, each move they make, is precisely determined and dictated by the very nature of the opposition they wish to destroy. It is not an exaggeration, I believe, to say that they are what the others make them out to be. The terrain they want to conquer and occupy is simply the very terrain that the others, the scholastics, have, for whatever reason, left unconquered and unoccupied. Their noble ideology and spiritual values, their moral slogans, the truth they brandish and proudly wave like a banner in the wind, everything they say or do, is nothing but the direct consequence of a cause located outside of them—this cause being, as Valla understood it so well, the very existence, composition, disposition and configuration of their adversaries. Strictly speaking, the sacred principles guiding them in their choices, the irreproachable reasons justifying and dignifying their action to the world, are at least as much in themselves by-products, epiphenomena, as they are phenomena. Just because they have to fight for it, the truth, in their hands, cannot remain purely an end in itself, it also becomes unavoidably a means to an end, a means of proclaiming their difference and defining their identity, of saying: ‘I am here, I exist, I am right and I want to be heard.’ Each time we read their books today, enlightened as we are by what is happening in the world around us, the same question cannot help but come up in our mind: why did they really say what they said, why did they do what they did? Was it simply because they sincerely believed in their cause—and they did, no doubt about that; or was it also because, given the nature of the opposing forces, the strengths and weaknesses of each side, and the motives in play, they could not speak otherwise?

It is fascinating to see for example how, and with what insistence and determination, Valla, Erasmus, Budé and the others promote in their writings the first two artes de sermone, grammar and rhetoric. Clearly, they have the best reasons in the world for doing so. Latinitas in general and the usus communis loquendi in particular are certainly a worthy cause in sixteenth-century Europe. After all, as imperfect as it may be, language exists primarily to be understood. Its main raison d’être undoubtedly resides in the possibility it gives us to understand each other a little better. Whether we like it or not, it is, as Montaigne puts it,¹⁹ the only “truchement” [“interpreter”] of our soul, the only “instrument” we have at our disposal to communicate our thoughts and feelings and make them known to the world. And as such, it certainly deserves all the attention it can get. Verba have a history of their own, they have their etymology and their meaning, and it is only through them that we have access to res, that we are able to understand, to learn, and to know. Consequently, nothing could make more sense, nothing could be more legitimate, than granting precedence to grammar and rhetoric over all the other disciplines of the cursus studiorum—all the more so becausethis cursus studiorum is devoted to and structured almost exclusively at the time by the study of human (and humane) letters; because in fact there is at the time no other science than the “science of letters” [scientia litterarum]. As the humanists constantly remind us, the solidity of the whole encyclopædia of learning depends on the mastery with which we handle those two artes sermocinales. Both are the key, the corner stone of the circular and harmonious edifice that Budé, in his De studio, calls the chorus or orbis disciplinarum. Without them, no life of the mind, no science, no knowledge would even be conceivable, let alone possible. This is why Valla and Erasmus recommend so forcefully a pedagogical reform that would substitute the study of languages and “human letters,” the study of texts, for that of Aristotelian logic and philosophy: because grammar, grammar conceived not only as a set of normative rules, but as a science of language, as a philology, a grammatology, is unquestionably, in the humanist perspective, disciplinarum omnium fundamentum,²⁰ the “foundation of all disciplines.”

All this being said, and eloquently said, the fact remains, however, that we, as readers, are never permitted to lose sight of the strategic and polemical component which, concurrently with the ideological one, structures this type of epideictic and forensic discourse. We are in fact witnessing something that looks exactly like a premeditated and systematic enterprise of dismantling the opponent's positions. As we have just said, for the medieval schoolman, reader of Petrus Hispanus, the “art of arts and science of sciences” was Aristotelian logic and dialectic. For the sixteenth-century grammaticus, reader of Quintilian, it will consequently be grammar, a grammar whose domain has been so widely expanded that it now includes rhetoric and the whole spectrum of studia literarum. The scholastic theologian borrowed the tools and concepts of his inquiry from Aristotelian logic, metaphysics and ethics. The humanist theologian not only excludes pagan philosophy from his study of the sacred Word, butalso declares war—see for example Valla—on all forms of philosophical speculation. His sources are not “scholastic,” but “classical” and “patristic.” He no longer finds his inspiration and methodology in Boethius, Petrus Lombardus or Thomas Aquinas—all nimis philosophiæ amatores—but in Saint Paul and Saint John. In more ways than one, we could say that he moves from a theory to a practice of language, and from verba to res. Since the medieval theologian had no quarrel with the Vulgate and was extremely respectful of everything that had to do with tradition and auctoritas, the humanist exegete will use his knowledge of Greek, and in some rare instances his knowledge of Hebrew, to emend the text of the Vulgate, undermine the concept of human auctoritas, and propose a reform of the ecclesiological tradition.

The conclusion that can be drawn from these few observations is quite a simple one. It amounts to saying that if we decide to look at the sixteenth-century “quarrel” in a more objective, more balanced and more critical perspective, listening for example to the orthodox theologian Martin Dorp as much as we spontaneously listen to Lorenzo Valla, Erasmus or Thomas More, things begin to change, they take on a different look and a new shape. What finally slowly emerges, what comes to light, is the definite possibility of a radical questioning, of what we might call a systematic and thorough deconstruction. The humanist credo easily reveals the weaknesses and contradictions on which it is built. Its belligerent stance and overall strategy jeopardize its credibility to a considerable extent. Its truth and values are more a means to an end than an end in themselves. By way of consequence, the so-called quarrel itself, the quarrel as we usually see and read it, does not bear scrutiny. The clear-cut opposition which is its very raison d’être and which strictly speaking defines it, the reassuring and handy polarity we all know, Renaissance / Middle Ages, humanism / scholasticism, light / darkness, knowledge / ignorance, reason / superstition, Greek and Latin civilization / Gothic barbarity, becomes suddenly problematic, more and more suspect, and so untenable that it eventually collapses under our very eyes like a house of cards. What we are dealing with here is not at all, in fact, a static set of binary oppositions, a series of antitheses, but a kind of agonistic drama, a play and a game at the same time, an interaction of conflicting forces, a dialectical process in which each contestant exists only in and through his relation to the other. And what is true of this sixteenth-century quarrel is equally true of any quarrel of this sort. All intellectual and ideological quarrels are myths that we fabricate to justify our needs and greeds, a kind of noble and elegant attire, a costume we put on before going on stage and under which we try to dissimulate our various appetites, our thirst for power and glory, the desire we have to exist and to be recognized.

In the picture thus created, Rabelais himself acquires a renewed importance and exemplarity. This importance and exemplarity are above all due to the exhilarating and vibrant violence of his satire, and to the remarkable depth and acuity of his critical intelligence. Where Valla, Erasmus, More, Vives or Agrippa do their best to explain why they deride and condemn, try to justify their attitude by philosophical, ethical or religious arguments, and have sometimes a tendency to weaken their demonstration through the abundance and minute profusion of their analysis, Rabelais pulls no punches. He hits hard, and he generally aims for the heart. It is not that he refuses to argue, or that the idea of entering a dispute in utramque partem frightens him. On the contrary, he is quite able, like the great Pico, or the great Thomas More, to make a show of his dialectical or oratorical skills—as great and accomplished an orator in his vernacular as Christophe de Longueil, Etienne Dolet or Guillaume Budé in their Latin and Greek. But his real talents, his truly outstanding achievements, the things that really make him what he is, that is unique, priceless, irreplaceable, are to be found elsewhere, in the domain of what Quintilian and all rhetors call the genus demonstrativum.²¹ Rabelais's favorite weapon, his most offensive one, is in fact vituperatio, vituperatio in all its possible guises and forms, fromthe endless string of insults, to invective, via malediction and diatribe, or even, when wrath and hatred really inspire him, anathema and fulmination. With him, laughter, satirical laughter, is at once a cleansing and a homeopathic process. He treats evil with evil, answers vulgarity with vulgarity—usually a greater one—and never hesitates to shit and piss on [“conchier,” “compisser”] those who, because they have personally attacked him or viciously calumniated his writings, are by way of consequence automatically categorized as filth, garbage and excrement, brutally cursed as maniacal, demoniacal and rabid “Cagotz, Burgotz” and “Matagotz,” “Botineurs” and “Papelars,” “Imposteurs,” “Misantropes” and “Agelastes,” “Briffaulx, Caphars, Chattemites, Canibales, et aultres monstres difformes et contrefaicts en despit de nature” [“and other monsters deformed and misshapen in despite of Nature”].²² In this domain, his violence, and the sheer pleasure, the raw, intense jubilation he feels at biting, spitting his own venon and inflicting pain, are absolutely unmatched. Nobody, I believe, has ever unleashed as fiercely as he the magical energy, the rhythm and power, which are embedded in language. When Rabelais lets loose, when he joyfully abandons himself to his demons, what we hear is pure incantation. Words in his mouth are not words anymore. They explode like grenades. Underhis pen, the doctors of the Sorbonne, the venerable Theologians of the University of Paris, undergo every imaginable alteration and degradation. When they are not yelled at and vilified as “Goths and Barbarians,” “Sarrabovites, Cagots, Escargots, Hypocrites, Cafards, Frappars, Botineurs,” scourged as “Sophistes, Sorbillans, Sorbonagres, Sorbonigenes, Sorbonicoles, Sorboniformes, Sorbonisecques, Niborcisans, Borsonisans, Saniborsans,”²³ Rabelais inscribes them in his book of infamy, pins them up on the great gate of the Abbaye of Thélème and, when he does not kindly provide them with the rope at the end of which they will soon hang, he sends them directly to Hell. “Arriere mastins! Hors de la quariere, hors de mon soleil, cahuaille au Diable! Venez vous icy culletans articular mon vin et compisser mon tonneau? Voyez cy le baston que Diogenes par testament ordonna estre pres luy posé apres sa mort pour chasser et esrener ces larves bestuaires et mastins cerbericques. Pourtant arriere, cagotz! Aux ouailles, mastins! Hors d’icy, caphars, de par le Diable hay! Estes vous encore là? Je renonce ma part de Papimanie, si je vous happe. Gzzz. gzzz. gzzz. Davant davant! Iront ilz? Jamais ne puissiez vous fianter que à sanglades d’estrivieres, jamais pisser que à l’estrapade, jamais eschauffer que à coups de baston!” [“Back off, you scum! Get out of my way, get out of my sight and out of my sun, you hooded devils! You dragged your ass here to screw up my wine and piss in my barrel, did you? Look, here is the stick that Diogenes ordered in his will to be placed next to him after his death to clobber and drive away these coffin-haunting spooks and Cerberian curs. Out of here, you hypocrites! Get back to your sheep, you dogs! in the name of the Devil, out! Are you still here? I give up my share of Papimania, if I get my hands on you. Grr. Grrr. Grrrr! Out of here, move it! Won’t they get out of here? May you never be able to take a shit without being whipped, never piss without being strung up, never get aroused without a good beating!”]²⁴ Nothing more than this deserves to be called a “cri,” a cri that comes directly from the guts:

Cy n’entrez pas, hypocrites, bigotz,
Vieux matagotz, marmiteux, boursouflez,
Torcoulx, badaux, plus que n’estoient les Gotz
Ni Ostrogotz, precurseurs des magotz,
Haires, cagotz, caffars empantouflez,
Gueux mitouflez, frapars escorniflez,
Befflez, enflez, fagoteurs de tabus:
Tirez ailleurs pour vendre vos abus.(25)

The medieval commentators of the Bible like Nicolas of Lyra had not hesitated to identify the Barbaric invaders of the fifth century, the Goths, Ostrogoths, Wisigoths, conquerors and last predators of the Roman Empire, with the enemies of God symbolized in Ezekiel, 38-39 and in Apocalypse, 20:7-8, by Gog, and Magog. Rabelais exploits here this tenuous identification to the fullest. His personal enemies, the Gotz, Ostrogotz, bigotz, magotz, matagotz, cagotz, etc., all those he hates so intensely, the scholastic “theologastres,” the monks, the priests and the warlike popes, all the Pharisees, sophists and impostors who are sitting in Moses's chair, are also God's eschatological archenemies. He does not need another argument to buttress the “demonstration” he is making. This one is strong and convincing enough to satisfy him.

What Rabelais's crude and powerful rhetorical strategies help us see clearly here, what he lays bare for us, is the fundamental mechanism at work in any ideological and cultural “quarrel” of this sort, that is the brutal violence, the inaugural and founding gesture of rejection around which the agon is built, and to which it owes its very existence. Simply put, Rabelais re-enacts in his fiction what we might call an internal Western version of the drama of “Ethnocentricity” such as it is for example so eloquently presented to us by Claude Lévi-Strauss at the end of the second book of his Structural Anthropology.²⁶ In the history of mankind, says Lévi-Strauss, cultural diversity has always been perceived not as the natural phenomenon it unquestionably is, but as “a sort of monstrosity or scandal.” When brought face to face with the other, man's first reaction is generally one of repulsion, indignation and denial. His most common attitude consists of “the pure and simple repudiation” of all cultural forms which differ from his own. Obviously, Rabelais and his fellow humanists do just that. They reactivate the fundamental prejudice of Classical Antiquity according to which, culturally speaking, the world was clearly and naturally divided between the Greek (or the Greco-Roman) on one side, and the Barbarian on the other. Only my culture is really a culture; the culture of the other is not, has never been, and never will be one. In his Moria, Erasmus makes fun of the Italian humanists's propensity to believe, just because they prided themselves on their mastery of literature and eloquence, that “they alone, of all mortals, were not barbarians” [quod soli mortalium barbari non sint].²⁷ If Rabelais teaches us something in his writings, it is that this laughable buteminently useful cultural arrogance spread north all over Europe and blurred the vision and judgment of the French sixteenth-century humanists as well. In his De studio of 1532, Budé, looking back at what we still today call the “Middle Ages,” ascertains that those infelicitous times brought such devastation and misery with them as to totally destroy all forms of literary life and all possibility of any significant intellectual achievement on this earth. [At multorum sæculorum infelicitas, quæ rei literariæ calamitosam vastitatem importaverat, nihil non aliquando tolerabile facit.]²⁸ Those centuries, he says, were centuries during which letters and eloquence fell into the dark and dense silence of oblivion; during which mortals themselves, overwhelmed by all sorts of disasters and calamities—Budé goes as far as speaking of a “great flood,” diluvium—had to live in the impenetrable and Cimmerian darkness of ignorance. And we find exactly the same kind of apocalyptic statements in the letter written the same year by Gargantua to his son Pantagruel; so much the same, in fact, that Rabelais seems to have been satisfied with merely translating word for word Budé's ornate latin prose in his vernacular: “le temps,” says Gargantua, evoking the past, “le temps estoit encores tenebreux et sentant l’infelicité et la calamité des Goths, qui avoient mis à destruction toute bonne literature.” [“The time was still dark, and smacked of the infelicity and calamity ofthe Goths, who had brought all good literature to destruction”].²⁹ Clearly, for Budé and Rabelais, the other, l’autre, is exactly what he already was for the Greek in ancient times, a Barbarian, a Goth, a Magot, a Cannibal, somebody, or rather something—and here I am quoting Rabelais again³⁰—that “hates” and “flees the company of men,” has the “face of a dog,” and “barks instead of laughing.” In so doing, they all fall prey to Lévi-Strauss's devastating indictment. By placing the scholastic ages not only outside civilization, outside humanity and culture, but also outside nature itself, by seeing them as “savage,” “Gothic” and “barbaric,” the only thing they achieve, without even realizing it, is to show that they are nothing but “savages,” “Goths” and “Barbarians” themselves. As Lévi-Strauss puts it, “le Barbare, c’est d’abord l’homme qui croit à la barbarie”³¹—“the Barbarian is first of all the man who believes in barbarity,” the one who believes that mankind, culture, civilization, stop at the frontiers of his tribe.

What, in their blindness, Rabelais and his contemporary Budé also help us understand is the dialectical process at work in the agon, the fact that this agon is essentially a rapport de forces, and not at all that set of static binary oppositions both of them—like all those of the same ilk and ideological persuasion—would like us to believe it is. The fundamental gesture we just described has clearly a double purpose. On the one hand, it is meant to repudiate and degrade the other, to make him look like some “monster of Antiphysis” (Quart Livre, XXXII). On the other hand, and concurrently, it is meant to establish on unshakable ground the unquestionable cultural superiority of the one who makes it. What I do when I reject the other, when I bring him down to the level of pure animality, is perhaps less expressing my contempt for him than the love, the deep and absolute love, I have always felt for myself and for those of my kind. It is mainly to look taller and stronger than I really am that I belittle and disparage the other with such brutality. His ugliness makes me look all the more handsome; and his crass ignorance and abysmal stupidity add fresh luster to my own superior learning and intelligence. How could we, us, readers of Rabelais, hesitate, if only for a second, between the “children of Beauty and Harmony” on one side, and those of “Amodunt and Discord” on the other, especially since the former's main raison d’être—they look exactly like us, and are made just the way we are—is clearly to offer us an idealized and flattering representation of ourselves, a comforting proof of our own normality? But, by the same token, how could we not see, when reading Pantagruel's enlightening “apologue,”³² that this idealized and flattering representation of ourselves owes, at least in part, its very existence andmeaning to the ugliness of Antipysis's progeny? And that vice versa Antiphysis's progeny would not be what it is—that is, properly monstrous, offensively ugly—without the harmonious Beauty of Physis's fortunate children? How could we not see that each one of them is essentially nothing but the perfectly reversed image of the other? The mirroring effect, in fact, is inescapable. It is inscribed in the text in the most unequivocal way. Neither Physis nor Antiphysis have either an identity, or an independent life of their own. Like the enemy brothers of the Greek myth, they need each other in order to exist. It is in fact the other which makes them what they are. But, unlike Etéocle and Polynice, what brings them together, what sets one against the other, what puts the game of mimetic desire in motion, is not their uncanny likeness, but their difference, not their resemblance, but their absolute dissemblance, the fact that one—Antiphysis—because she lacks everything, because she also comes second and not first, is doomed to “envy” and imitate the other perpetually:

Je vous en diray, respondit Pantagruel, ce que j’en ay leu parmy les apologues antiques. Physis (c’est Nature) en sa premiere portée enfanta Beaulté et Harmonie sans copulation charnelle: comme de soy mesmes est grandement feconde et fertile. Antiphysie, laquelle de tout temps est partie adverse de nature, incontinent eut envie sus cestuy tant beau et honorable enfantement: et au rebours enfanta Amodunt et Discordance par copulation de Tellumon. Ilz avoient la teste sphærique et ronde entierement, comme un ballon: non doulcement comprimée des deux coustez, comme est la forme humaine. Les aureilles avoient hault enlevées, grandes comme aureilles d’asne; les oeilz hors la teste, fichez sus des os semblables aux talons, sans sourcilles, durs comme sont ceulx des Cancres: les pieds ronds comme pelottes, les braz et mains tournez en arriere vers les espaules. Et cheminoient sus leurs teste, continuellement faisant la roue, cul sus teste, les pieds contremont …

[I’ll tell you, replied Pantagruel, what I have read about them in old stories. Physis (that's Nature) in her first brood bore Beauty and Harmony without carnal copulation, since of herself she is richly fecund and fertile. Antiphysis, who from all time has been the party adverse to Nature, was immediately envious over so fair and honorable a delivery, and contrarywise, gave birth to Amodunt and Discord by copulation with Tellumon. They had heads which were spherical and completely round, like a balloon, not gently compressed on each side, as the human shape is. Their ears were raised up high, big as donkey's ears; their eyes, sticking out of their heads, on bones like heel bones, without eyebrows, as hard as Crabs' eyes; their feet round as balls of wool; arms and hands turned around backwards toward the shoulders; and they traveled on their heads, doing continuous cartwheels, head over heels, with their legs in the air …]³³

If Rabelais's motives for borrowing this story from Calcagnini are quite obvious, what he finally achieves in telling it is perhaps more than what he had initially planned. At the mid-point of his book, just before the epiphanic and highly symbolical moment of Pantagruel's fight against the monstrous “Physeter”—new “Diable Sathanas,” other “Leviathan,” and patent incarnation of the Antichrist—he introduces this “apologue antique” in his fiction to make us understand where the “maniacal Pistols, the demoniacal Calvins, impostors of Geneva, the rabid Putherbeuses,” in short all his personal enemies, come from. They are all, as we have already seen, grotesque and ugly children of Antiphysis, “monstres difformes et contrefaictz en despit de Nature.” But, all things considered—and here certainly lies the part of the story Rabelais would have preferred not to tell—as grotesque and as repulsive as they may be, Rabelais's children of Antiphysis have a lot in common with the humanists themselves. First, they occupy in fiction a position strangely similar to the one Renaissance humanists occupy in history. Just as in history the scholastics have definite precedence over their humanist opponents—for the good reason that they appeared on stage long before them—in Pantagruel's apologue Physis has likewise a definite advantage over her antagonist. She is the one who, having been given everything, necessarily transforms the other—her “partie adverse”—into a creature of resentment and envy, a creature of greed.Second, and by way of consequence, the roles played by the humanists and the children of Antiphysis in their respective universes are likewise strangely similar. Both are condemned to be intruders, trouble-makers, eternal opponents. The fact that Physis acted first, made the first move, places the one who comes after in a position where the only thing she can do is simply to react. Antiphysis does not play the leading role in the show, but she in fact transforms it. If Physis could, that is if her authority were not challenged, she would offer us a dazzling but somewhat monotonous “grand spectacle.” Antiphysis's intrusion metamorphoses this “grand spectacle,” this medieval pageantry, into a kind of Elizabethan drama. Finally, the children of Antiphysis in Pantagruel's “apologue” and the Renaissance humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, probably because of the similarity existing between the roles both are invited to play on stage, have recourse in their acting—in their agon—to the same type of strategy. That of the children of Antiphysis is clearly one born out of necessity and despair, out of the fact that Physis's presence seems to condemn them indefinitely to playing the supporting role. The only possible choice they have is to try to steal the show, to make spectators believe in the superiority of their performance. From the moment her children are born, Antiphysis's only concern is to “praise their shape,” to convince the world around her that this shape, as grotesque and monstrous as it may seem, is in reality “more beautiful and attractive that that of the children of Physis,” to try to “prove” and to “demonstrate,”³⁴ against all odds, that her own children are the normal ones, when the others are not. Here again, the passage is so rich that it deserves to be quoted in full:

Et cheminoient sus leurs testes, continuellement faisant la roue, cul sus teste, les pieds contremont. Et (comme vous sçavez que es Cingesses semblent leurs petits Cinges plus beaulx que chose du monde) Antiphysie louoit et s’efforçoit prouver que la forme de ses enfans plus belle estoit et advenente que des enfans de Physis: disant que ainsi avoir les pieds et teste sphæriques, et ainsi cheminer circulairement en rouant, estoit la forme competente et perfaicte alleure retirante à quelque portion de divinité: par laquelle les cieulx et toutes choses eternelles sont ainsi contournées. Avoir les pieds en l’air, la teste en bas, estoit imitation du createur de l’univers: veu que les cheveulx sont en l’home comme racines, les jambes comme rameaux. Car les arbres plus commodement sont en terre fichées sus leurs racines que ne seroient sus leurs rameaux. Par ceste demonstration alleguant que trop mieulx et plus aptement estoient ses enfans comme une arbre droicte, que ceulx de Physis: les quelz estoient comme une arbre renversée. Quant est des braz et des mains, prouvoit que plus raisonnablement estoient tournez vers les espaules, parce que ceste partie du corps ne doibvoit estre sans defenses:

attendu que le davant estoit competentement muny par les dens, des quelles la persone peut, non seulement user en maschant, sans l’ayde des mains, mais aussi s’en defendre contre les choses nuisantes. Ainsi, par le tesmoignage et astipulation des bestes brutes, tiroit tous les folz et insensez en sa sentence, et estoit en admiration à toutes gens escervelez et desguarniz de bon jugement et sens commun. Depuys elle engendra les Matagotz, Cagotz et Papelars …

[Now, just as mother monkeys—as you know—think their little monkeys are the prettiest things in the world, so Antiphysis praised her children's shape and tried to prove that it was more beautiful and attractive than that of the children of Physis. A spherical head and spherical feet, she said, were the nicest possible shape; and a circular motion, like that of a cartwheel, was not only the most proper and perfect means of traveling, but smacked somewhat of the divine. For the heavens and all things eternal were made to revolve in just that way. To have one's feet in the air, and one's head down, therefore, was to imitate the creator of the universe, seeing that hair in man was like their roots, and their legs were like branches. For trees are more conveniently attached to the ground by their roots than they would be by their branches. By this demonstration she claimed that her children were far better off and far better designed than Physis's, being formed like standing trees, while her rival's offspring resembled trees upside down. As for their arms and hands, she proved that it was more reasonable to have them reversed, turned towards the shoulders, since their backs ought not to be left without defense and their fronts were sufficiently guarded by their teeth. For a man can use his teeth not only for chewing, which requires no help from his hands, but also to defend himself against harmful things. Thus by the testimony and witness of the brute beasts, she attracted every fool and madman to her side and won the admiration of every brainless idiot, of every one, indeed, who lacked good judgment and common sense. Since that time she has engendered the Matagotz, Cagotz and Papelars …]

(ibid., 391-92, l. 85-115)

What makes this “apologue” particularly significant is the fact that it clearly exposes Antiphysis's belligerent and sophistical stance. Those she finally convinces are “fools,” “madmen” and “brainless idiots” because they accept her rhetoric of reversal without looking closely and seriously at the ground on which it stands. Perhaps her greatest sophism is to be found not so much in the pure extravagance of the “demonstration” itself, but rather in the motives which apparently nurture it. The way her children are made, the spherical shape of their head and feet, “smacks somewhat of the divine.” The way they stand up, or rather stand upside down, with their “feet in the air” and their “head down,” and the way they walk, with this “circular motion” comparable to “that of a cartwheel,” are likewise “an imitation of the creator of the universe.” In a word, their countless and miraculous perfections, the fact that they alone look like “une arbre droite” [a “standing tree”], make them divine and celestial beings rather than terrestrial ones. If we were to believe what we see and hear on stage—if we were to believe it to the point of accepting it as true—nothing would look more natural and justified, nothing would in fact be less of an act than Antiphysis's acting. She would simply incarnate for us what we might call the archetypal mother. She would apparently come on stage to say what all parents—be they monkeys or humans—unavoidably end up saying. And consequently nothing could be more touching and more interesting, for us, spectators, than to witness the performance of a mother who, like all mothers, cannot help thinking that her children are the most handsome, the most intelligent and the most divine creatures in the world. But, unfortunately for Antiphysis, the overall credibility of her performance is weakened to a considerable extent by what Pantagruel tells us at the very beginning of his “apologue.” We know from the start, long before she even begins to speak, that her motherly feelings are more acted out than really felt by her; or that, if they are really felt, felt to some degree—after all, she is also a mother—they are not the only motive she has for doing what she does. We know for certain that her feelings, like the ideological component of the humanists's agonistic discourse, are no more than a means to an end—Antiphysis's end being in this particular instance to “prove” and “demonstrate” her definite superiority over her rival Physis. We know that what really drives her, what deep down inspires her falsely paradoxical line of argument, is not love—in any case, not love alone—but “envy,” pure hatred. We know that the only thing she really wants to achieve is to kick her rival off stage, to play the leading role, to convince us once and for all that she, and she alone, is the best. Less, in the end, a perfect mother than a perfect sophist, and a totally shameless counterfeiter.

Therefore, we might say that it is mainly because of its very violence, its intensity and its natural propensity for the extreme, that Rabelais's fiction is exemplary to such a degree. Its greatest virtue undoubtedly lies in its ability to make us witness the creation of the cultural myth of Renaissance humanism in its most basic form. No humanist, not even Budé, has in fact represented more vividly this myth than Rabelais himself. But, by the same token, and for the very reason that he pushes things to the limit, no one has also more lucidly “de-constructed,” “de-sedimented” the very myth he himself uses in his fiction and to whose creation he has contributed. As we have just seen, Pantagruel's “apologue” of Physis and Antiphysis is a case in point. In fact, it says it all: the agonistic structure, the cultural gesture of aggression and its hidden motives, the binary opposition Physis-Antiphysis and its mirroring effect, the dialectical process and its polemical and ideological components. Everything is there, so clearly there, in fact, that this story could and should be looked at as perfectly emblematic of the cultural phenomenon we are trying to describe. But we could invoke other passages or episodes as well. For example, at the beginning of the Fourth Book, the series of violent confrontations between Panurge and Dindenault, François Villon and Friar Estienne Tappecoue or the Lord of Basché and the “scoundrelly Chiquanous” give us invaluable indications about what we might call Rabelais's agonistic brutality. Dindenault and the shepherds who work for him are mercilessly drowned at sea with the sheep; Friar Tappecoue is literally smashed to bits and pieces by his “poultre” [“filly”], “dragged on his ass” [“traisné à l’escorche cul”] for miles, his skull bashed in and his brains trickling out, his arms, legs and bowels spread all over the bushes, hedges and ditches soaked with his blood; and Basché's servants treat the imprudent Chiquanous to such a lusty hammering with their gauntlets that“they turn one of his eyes into an egg poached in black butter, fracture eight of his ribs, break his breast-bone, crack both his shoulder-blades in four places, smash his jaw-bone in three pieces”—et le tout en riant [“and laughing all the while”].³⁵ We can also look, in chapter VIII of Pantagruel, at the letter written by Gargantua to his son, letter which encapsulates in a few pages the whole spectrum of binary oppositions through which the sixteenth-century humanists expressed their cultural credo, their optimistic and polemical stance and their unshakable certainty that their enterprise constituted indeed a “Renaissance.” In fact, Rabelais's prose in these pages is so dense and so rich, so exemplary, that intellectual historians and literary critics still consider them today as the founding text and triumphant hymn of Renaissance humanism. And rightly so. Again, everything is there, stated once and for all and in such a complete and convincing way that it was through its very mediation that nineteenth-century scholars like Jacob Burckhardt

Le temps estoit encores tenebreux et sentant l’infelicité et la calamité des Gothz, qui avoient mis à destruction toute bonne literature. Mais, par la bonté divine, la lumiere et dignité a esté de mon eage rendue es lettres, et y voy tel amendment que, de present, à difficulté seroys receu en la premiere classe des petitz grimaulx, qui, en mon eage virile, estoys (non à tord) reputé le plus sçavant du dict siecle. […] Maintenant toutes disciplines sont restituées, les langues instaurées: Grecque, sans laquelle c’est honte que une personne se die sçavant, Hebraïcque, Caldaïque, Latine. Les impressions tant elegantes et correctes en usance, qui ont esté inventées de mon eage par inspiration divine, comme à contrefil l’artillerie par suggestion diabolicque. Tout le monde est plein de gens savans, de precepteurs tres doctes, de librairies tres amples, qu’il m’est advis que, ny au temps de Platon, ny de Ciceron, ny de Papinian, n’estoit telle commodité d’estude qu’on y veoit maintenant, et ne se fauldra plus doresenavant trouver en place ny en compaignie, qui ne sera bien expoly en l’officine de Minerve.

[Indeed the time was still dark, and smacking of the infelicity and calamity of the Goths, who had brought all good literature to destruction. But, by God's goodness, in my day light and dignity have been restored to letters, and I see such improvement in these that at present I would hardly be accepted into the lowest class at school, I who, in my prime, was reputed (not wrongly) the most learned man of my century. […] Now all branches of learning are re-established, languages restored: Greek, without which it is shameful for a man to call himself learned; Hebrew, Chaldean, Latin. Elegantly printed and accurate books are now readily available, thanks to the art of printing, which was invented in my time by divine inspiration, as, conversely, was artillery thanks to the Devil's suggestion. The whole world is full of educated people, of learned teachers, of well-stocked libraries; and, in my judgment, neither in Plato's time, nor Cicero's, nor Papinian's, were there such facilities as we see now for intellectual pursuits; and henceforth no one should appear in public or in company if he is not well polished in Minerva's workshop.]

What Gargantua's letter to his son also helps us understand is that the learning process is deeply rooted in man's desire to outlive himself in a son fashioned ad imaginem & similitudinem suam [“in his own image and likeness,” Genesis 1:26]. In fact, if the whole beginning of this difficult and illuminating letter teaches us something important, it is certainly that, in their very essence, not only all cultural revolutions, but all cultures, are nothing but the direct consequence of the fears and dreams of fathers; of fathers who, because they are afraid of dying, want, “in their mortal state,” to “acquire a form of immortality” [“acquerir une espece de immortalité”], the masculine privilege of “perpetuating their name and seed” [“perpetuer son nom et sa semence”]—so that, explains Gargantua in all earnest, “by this means of seminal propagation, there remains in the children what was lost in the parents, and in the grandchildren what perished in the children, and so on in succession until the hour of the final judgment, when Jesus Christ will have restored to God the father His kingdom, peaceful, free of danger and contamination of sin.” [“Mais par ce moyen de propagation seminale demoure es enfans ce que estoit deperdu es parens, et es nepveux ce que desperissoit es enfans, et ainsi successivement jusques à l’heure du jugement final, quand Jesuchrist aura rendu à Dieu le pere son royaulme pacifique hors tout dangier et contamination de peché”] (155-57, l. 11-26). Clearly the humanist, like Narcissus, is in love with his mirrored image.What he wants is not only to contemplate this image, to be mesmerized by it, but to reproduce it, to be to himself, so to speak, his own source, his own origin. If Gargantua exhorts so eloquently his son “to employ his youth to profit well in studies and virtues,” to become “an abyss of knowledge,” [un abysme de science], it is simply because he himself wants to be absolutely certain that, when God decides to call him back to Him, when his soul departs from its “human habitation”—from his body—he shall not, as he says, be “totally dying,” but simply “passing from one place to another.” I shall not really disappear, explains the father to his son, since “in you and through you I’ll remain in my visible image in this world, living, seeing and frequenting honorable people and my friends as I used to.” [“Car quand par le plaisir de luy, qui tout regit et modere, mon ame laissera ceste habitation humaine, je ne me reputeray totallement mourir, ains passer d’un lieu en aultre, attendu que en toy et par toy, je demeure en mon image visible en ce monde, vivant, voyant, et conversant entre gens de honneur et mes amys, comme je souloys”] (157, l. 35-41).

It is precisely this belief in the father's presence in his son, in the son as the living image of the father, and this distinction between the physical generation and the spiritual one—the second being granted a much greater importance than the first—which constitutes the very foundation of humanist culture. Our true fathers are those who nourish our minds and souls, rather than those who engender our bodies. Spiritual generation is of a higher order than physical generation. All Renaissance humanists agree on that point. What really matters is not giving birth to the body—anyone can do just that—but to the mind. Budé, following Cicero, says it forcefully in his De studio. For him, to make a man, fingere hominem, is first of all to help him cultivate his intellectual and spiritual faculties, literally seed his mind, fecundate it with the “semen” of good letters. The humanist's main task, what we might call his labor of love, is mind-birth, conceptus mentium.³⁶ Like Socrates, he is an obstetrician of sorts. He does for the soul what midwives do for the body: thanks to his “maïeutic art,” he brings it to life. In his Essays, toward the end of the century, Montaigne, speaking of “the children of our mind,” will say that they are “produced by a nobler part than the body,” and “more our own.” “We are,” will he state proudly, “father and mother both in this generation” (II, 8, 400). In his fictional letter of 1532,Gargantua reminds Pantagruel that he wants him to be much more the child of his mind than the child of his body: “Parquoy,” he writes, “ainsi comme en toi demeure l’image de mon corps, si pareillement ne reluysoient les meurs de l’ame, l’on ne te jugeroit estre guarde et tresor de l’immortalité de nostre nom, et le plaisir que prendroys, ce voyant, seroit petit, considerant que la moindre partie de moy, qui est le corps, demoureroit, et la meilleure, qui est l’ame, et par laquelle demeure nostre nom en benediction entre les hommes, seroit degenerante et abastardie.” [“Wherefore, if the qualities of my soul did not likewise shine out in you since the image of my body abides in you, you would not be judged the guardian and treasure-house of the immortality of our name, and the pleasure I would take in seeing this would be small, considering that the lesser part of me, which is the body, would remain, and the better part, which is the soul, and by which our name is held in the highest esteem among men, would be bastardized and degenerate”].³⁷ And in the real letter Rabelais sends to Erasmus at the end of the same year, letter which he writes to express his gratitude and profound admiration, he addresses his illustrious correspondent as both his “father,” and “mother:” Patrem te dixi, matrem etiam dicerem, si per indulgentiam mihi id tuam liceret [“I called you ‘father,’ I would even call you ‘mother,’ if your kindness would permit me to say so”]. And he adds the following illuminating words:

Quod enim utero gerentibus usui venire quotidie experiemur, ut quos nunquam viderunt foetus alant ab aërisque ambientis incommodis tueantur, αυτο τοτο sυγ’ επαθεs, qui me tibi de facie ignotum, nomine etiam ignobilem sic educasti, sic castissimis divinæ tuæ doctrinæ uberibus usque aluisti, ut quidquid sum et valeo, tibi id uni acceptum ni feram, hominum omnium qui sunt, aut aliis erunt in annis ingratissimus sim. Salve itaque etiam atque etiam, pater amantissime, pater decusque patriæ, literarum adsertor αλεξíκακοs, veritatis propugnator invictissime.

[Experience teaches us daily that women who bear a child feed these beings they have never seen and protect them from the harmfulness of the surrounding atmosphere; the very same thing happened to you. You had never seen my face, you had not even heard my name, and you have educated me, you have ceaselessly fed me with the immaculate and rich milk of your divine wisdom. What I am, what I am worth, I owe it to you alone. If I did not let the world know this, I would be the most ingrateful of all men present and future. This is why I hail you again and again, you, most loving father, you, father and glory of your homeland, you, protector and defender of good letters, you, invicible champion of truth.]³⁸

For the humanist, then, the learning process, the process of acculturation, is clearly a family affair. Contrary to what we might believe, it does not simply involve a teacher and a student, a master and a disciple, but rather a father and his son, a son who one day will become a father. If the transmission of knowledge is thus compared with and assimilated to the spiritual and physical transmission of life, if it thus becomes the reproduction of the same by the same, it is because, like any other culture, humanist culture is a closed space—an Abbaye de Thélème. A space which the children of Antiphysis, all Barbarians, Cannibals, and Goths, will never be permitted to enter. But, those who today denounce humanism and its so-called “universal culture,” those who put it on trial, are simply repeating the same questionable gesture of aggression made by the sixteenth-century humanists against scholasticism or, one century and a half later, the tactics of Perrault in his frontal attack against Boileau and Racine. They must by now have realized the fate that is in store for them. One day, their time will come. For whatever one does, one is always either an “Ancient” for someone, or a “Modern” for someone else. And eventually the oppressed always becomes the oppressor, and the oppressor, the oppressed. These terms, in fact, have no real, no essential meaning. They are nothing but words we use to judge and condemn those who are not like us; who think and speak differently. Convenient tropes we invoke to dissimulate, as from behind a smokescreen, the pure violence of the agon.

Notes

1. As an introduction to this topic, see C. Vasoli, “La première querelle des ‘Anciens’ et des ‘Modernes’ aux origines de la Renaissance,” in Classical Influences on European Culture A.D. 1500-1700 […], ed. R. R. Bolgar (London-New York-Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 1974), 67-80. My warmest and most sincere thanks to Lance K. Donaldson-Evans and Raymond C. La Charité for their invaluable corrections and comments. Sans eulx m’estoyt le cueur failly, et restoit tarie la fontaine de mes esprits animaulx …

2. See L. J. Paetow's edition, Two Medieval Satires in the University of Paris, La bataille des VII ars of Henri d’Andeli and the Morale Scolarium of John of Garland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1927).

3. Petri Hispani Summulœ Logicales, cum Versorii Parisiensis expositione. Parvorum item Logicalium eidem Petro Hispano ascriptum opus, nuper in partes & capita distinctum […] (Venetiis: apvd F. Sansovinvm, MDLXVIII, Bryn Mawr College, Rare Book Room), f. 2 v: “Tractatus primus. Quid Dialectica, & eius ad cæteras artes utilitas.” Modern edition, Petri Hispani Summulœ Logicales, by I. M. Bochensky (Torino, 1947). On Aristotelian Logic and its importance in the medieval curriculum, see my Pantagruel et les Sophistes. Contribution à l’histoire de l’humanisme chrétien au XVIe siècle (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), especially 22-42 and 94-125; the excellent Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy. From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, eds. N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny and J. Pinborg (Cambridge, 1982); Philotheus B. Boehner, Medieval Logic. An Outline of Its Development from 1250 to 1400 (Manchester University Press, 1952); W. and M. Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); Joseph Mullaly, The Summulœ Logicales of Peter of Spain (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1945); Eleanor Stump, Dialectic and Its Place in the Development of Medieval Logic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). See also Aristotle, Organon, ed.-tr. Jean Tricot, 6 vols. (Paris, J. Vrin, 1936-39); Johannes Major [Mair], Quœstiones Logicales Magistri Iohannis Maiorici […] (Paris, 1528); William of Ockham, Summa Logicœ, ed. Ph. Boehner, 2 vols. (New York, 1951 and 1962); Nicolai de Orbellis, Summule philosophie rationalis: seu logica: excellentissimi artium et theologie professoris Magistri Nicolai Dorbelli: secundum doctrinam doctoris Subtilis Scoti (Basel: M. Furter, 1493); Francesco Sanchez, Il n’est science de rien. Quod nihil scitur, ed.-tr. Andrée Comparot (Paris: Klincksieck, 1984); English ed.-tr. Douglas F. S. Thomson, with Introductionby Elaine Limbrick, That Nothing is Known (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Etc. The first two treatises of the Organon, the Categoriae vel Predicamenta and the De interpretatione (or Perihermenias), with works by Porphyry (Isagoge), Boethius (In Isagogen Porphyrii commenta, In categorias Aristotelis libri IV, In librum Aristotelis de interpretatione, Introductio ad categoricos syllogismos, De syllogismis categoricis, De syllogismis hypotheticis, De differentiis topicis, De divisionibus), and Gilbert de La Porrée (De sex Principiis), form together what is known as the Logica vetus. The last four treatises of the Organon, Analytica priores and posteriores, Topica, De sophisticis elenchis, and their commentaries, form the Logica nova. Together, the Logica vetus and the Logica nova are called the Logica antiquorum. To this corpus (twelfth century) is added a seventh treatise, the Parva Logicalia of Petrus Hispanus on Proprietates terminorum (“De suppositionibus, De relativis, de ampliationibus, de appellationibus, de restrictionibus, de distributionibus”)—known as the Logica Modernorum of the so-called Terministae. Concerning those distinctions, see Juan Luis Vives, Against the Pseudodialecticians. A Humanist Attack on Medieval Logic, ed. Rita Guerlac 1979, De causis corruptarum artium, Liber tertius, Caput V, [112]-113: “et pro illa vetere divisione Logicam esse aliam de inventione, aliam de judicio, novam ipsi divisionem adduxerunt, esse logicam veterem, et logicam novam; cur ita nominetur, non magis scias dicere, quàm cur digestum novum, et digestum vetus: logicam appellant veterem (in qua de simplicibus agitur terminis, vel pronuntiatis) Prœdicabilia, Categoriœ, et de Interpretatione: logicam novam, Priora, Posteriora, Topica: tum huic addunt septimum tractatum, quem recentes adjecerunt … ”

4. On Lorenzo Valla and the “theological crisis” of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy and northern Europe, see especially Delio Cantimori, Eritici italiani del Cinquecento: Ricerche storiche (Florence, 1939); Mario Fois, Il pensiero cristiano di Lorenzo Valla […] (Rome, 1969); Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (London, 1970); Salvatore I. Camporeale, Lorenzo Valla: Umanesimo e teologia (Florence, 1972); “Da Lorenzo Valla a Tommaso Moro: lo statuto umanistico della teologia,” Memorie Domenicane, n.s. 4 (1973), 9-102; and, more recently, “Renaissance Humanism and the Origins of Humanist Theology,” in Humanity and Divinity in Renaissance and Reformation. Essays in Honor of Charles Trinkaus, eds. John W. O’Malley, Thomas M. Izbicki and Gerald Christianson (Leiden-New York: E. J. Brill 1993), 101-124 (invaluable synthesis); Guy Bedouelle, Lefèvre d’Étaples et l’intelligence des Écritures (Geneva: Droz, 1976); Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology (Toronto, 1977); Gérard Defaux, “Rabelais contre les Églises,” Études Rabelaisiennes, XXX (Geneva, 1995), 137-202.

5. Agrippa, De incertitudine, “Præfatio ad Lectorem,” f. * 8 r.

6. Vives, Adversus pseudodialecticos, [56]-57. See also [52]-53: “jam de quo quæso sermone est ista vestra dialectica? De Gallico’ne an de Hispano? an de Gothico? an de Vandalico? Nam de Latino certe non est”; [66]-67, etc.

7. Conclusiones nongentœ, in omni genere scientiarum: quas olim Io. Picus Mirandula Romœ disputandas proposuit. […] Adiectum est Panepistemon Angeli Politiani, hoc est omnium scientiarum, cum liberalium, tum mechanicarum, brevis descriptio (Nuremberg: John. Petreius, 1532), 56: “De adscriptis numero noningentis, Dialecticis, Moralibus, Physicis, Mathematicis, Metaphysicis, Theologicis, Magicis, Cabalisticis, cum suis tum sapientum Chaldæorum, Arabum, Hebræorum, Græcorum, Ægyptorum, Latinorumque placitis, disputabit publice Johannes Picus Mirandulanus, Concordiæ Comes. In quibus recitandis non Romanæ linguæ nitorem, sed celebratissimorum Parisiensium disputatorum dicendi genus est imitatus, propterea quod eo nostri temporis philosophi plerique omnes utuntur.” See also the Opera omnia Ioannis Pici, Mirandulœ Comitis, Theologorum et Philosophorum, sine controversia, principis […] (Basileæ, 1557); and my study, “Un ‘extraict de haulte mythologie’ humaniste: Pantagruel, Picus redivivus,” Études Rabelaiisiennes, XIV (Geneva, 1978), 219-64.

8. See Pico, Opera omnia, 1557, 351-358: “Eloquence must not come from the tongue, but from the heart. Muses dwell in the soul, not on the lips […] What interests us is what we write, not how we write it; or rather what interests us is that what we write be written in plain style and without any rhetorical ornament” [Non in lingua, sed in pectore Mercurium. Musas in animo & non in labris. […] Quœrimus nos quidnam scribamus, non quœrimus quomodo, imo quomodo quœrimus, ut scilicet, sine pompa & flore ulla orationis]. Or Ph. Melanchthon, Elementorum Rhetorices Libri duo: Recens regoniti ab autore […] His adiecta sunt Epistolœ contrariœ, Pici et Hermolai Barbari (Witebergæ, M. D. LXXIII), 168 ff. On this letter, see also Defaux, “Pantagruel, Picus redivivus,” 245-48. French translation and helpful commentary by A. J. Festugière, “Studia Mirandulana. La formation intellectuelle de Pic de La Mirandole,” in Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Age, 7 (1932), 160-64. English translation of Pico's, Barbaro's and Melanchthon's letters by Q. Breen, “Giovanno Pico della Mirandola. On the Conflict of Philosophy and Rhetoric,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 13 (1952), 384-426. A very illuminating “quarrel,” indeed.

9. François Rabelais. Pantagruel. Édition critique sur le texte de l’Édition publiée en 1534 à Lyon par François Juste, ed. G. Defaux, “Bibliothèque Classique,” “Le Livre de Poche” (Paris, 1994), chap. VI.

10. Vives, Adversus pseudodialecticos, [46]-47, [96]-97, [112]-113, etc.; Guillaume Budé, L’Étude des lettres. Principes pour sa juste et bonne institution. De studio litterarum recte et commode instituendo, ed.-tr. Marie-Madeleine de La Garanderie (Paris, “Les Belles Lettres,” 1988), 38-39, l. 19, 58-59, l. 341, etc.

11. I borrow this list respectively from Erasmus's Antibarbaroum Liber primus, in Opera omnia, ed. Johannes Clericus, LB IX, 1701 C, and François Rabelais, Gargantua. Édition critique sur le texte de l’édition publiée en 1535 à Lyon par François Juste, ed. G. Defaux, “Bibliothèque Classique,” “Le Livre de Poche,” (Paris, 1994), XIII, 185.

12. Without even realizing that perhaps—see the apparently unpremeditated (and Erasmian) distinction Grœcisma/Ebrardus, which reminds us of the facetious one consciously made by Rabelais between Ovidus and Naso in his Pantagruel, Ch. I, 97, l. 71—neither Erasmus nor Rabelais themselves ever took a serious look at them.

13. Pant., VII, 143-153.

14. Vives, Adversus pseudodialecticos, [48]-49.

15. Vives, ibid.

16. Lorenzo Valla, De vero falsoque bono, ed. M. de Panizza (Bari: Adriatica, 1970); ed.-tr. M. Lorch, On Pleasure. De Voluptate (New York: Abaris Books, 1977, 50-51 (Book I), and 132-133 (Book II). See also Letizia A. Panizza, “Lorenzo Valla's De vero falsoque bono, Lactantius and Oratorical Scepticism,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 41 (1978), 76-107, and Lisa Jardine, “Lorenzo Valla and the Origins of Humanist Dialectic,” in The Skeptical Tradition, ed. M. Burnyeat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 253-286.

17. Budé, De studio, 48-51: “Tales ferme Hercules sunt, Princeps illustrissime, atque præstantissime, aut Heraclidæ certe hodie, eius philosophiæ alumni quam antiqui græci eruditionem circularem appellaverunt …”

18. See also, of course, Erasmus's Enchiridion Militis christiani, in Opera omnia, LB V. Title of Chapter I: “Vigilandum esse in vita”; of Chapter II: “De armis militiæ christianæ,” etc. Erasmus exhorts his readers to become, like Saint Paul, soldiers of Christ: “the life of mortals,” he warns them, “is nothing but a kind of unending warfare” [nil aliud esse vitam mortalium, nisi perpetuam quamdam militiam].

19. Montaigne, Essais, ed. P. Villey (Paris: PUF, 1978), II, 18, 666-67. Cf. also, I, 9, “Des menteurs,” 36: “En vérité, le mentir est un maudit vice. Nous ne sommes hommes et ne tenons les uns aux autres que par la parole” [“In truth lying is an accursed vice. We are men, and hold together, only by our word”].

20. Erasmus, Ecclesiastes, in Opera omnia, LB V, 851 B. On the importance of grammar and the grammaticus in Valla, Erasmus and Renaissance humanism, see Jacques Chomarat, Grammaire et Rhétorique chez Érasme (Paris, “Les Belles Lettres,” 1981), I, 150-264.

21. M. Fabi Qvintiliani Institutionis Oratoriæ Libri duodecim, recognovit […] M. Winterbottom, Tomus I, Libre I-VI (Oxonii, e typographeo Clarendoniano, MCMLXX) 3.4.12-16.

22. François Rabelais. Le Quart Livre. Édition critique sur le texte des éditions publiées en 1548 à Lyon par Pierre de Tours et en 1552 à Paris par Michel Fezandat, ed. G. Defaux, “Bibliothèque Classique,” “Le Livre de Poche” (Paris, 1994), chap. XXXII, 393, 1. 114-119.

23. Pantagruel, respectively 423, 1. 105-107, and 281, 1. 179-181.

24. François Rabelais. Le Tiers Livre. Édition critique sur le texte publié en 1552 à Paris par Michel Fezandat, ed. Jean Céard, “Bibliothèque Classique,” “Le Livre de Poche” (Paris, 1995), 31, l. 293-304. I thank Raymond La Charité for his translation of this passage.

25. Gargantua, 453, l. 1-8.

26. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology. Volume II, tr. Monique Layton (New York: Basic Books, 1976), Chapter XVIII, “Race and History,” 323-332.

27. Erasmus, Moriæ encomium id est Stultitiæ lavs, ed. Clarence H. Miller, in Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami. […] Ordinis quarti, Tomus tertius. Amsterdam-Oxford, MCMXXIX, 128, l. 58-66.

28. Budé, De studio, 52-53, l. 230-232.

29. Pantagruel, VIII, 159, l. 74-77. My translation. Compare this statement with Budé's, De studio, 52-53, l. 230-232: “At multorum sæculorum infelicitas, quæ rei literariæ calamitosam vastitatem importaverat, nihil non aliquando tolerabile facit.”

30. Rabelais, Quart Livre, “Briefve Declaration,” 629: “Cannibales, peuple monstrueux en Africque, ayant la face comme chiens, et abbayant en lieu de rire.”

31. Lévi-Strauss, op. cit., 330. Cf. the Erasmian adage: “Simile simili gaudet, dissimile respuit.”

32. On Rabelais's debts to Celio Calcagnini in this “apologue antique” of the Quart Livre, see especially M. A. Screech, “Celio Calcagnini and Rabelaisian Sympathy,” in Some Renaissance Studies. Selected Articles 1951-1991 […], ed. Michael J. Heath (Geneva: Droz, 1992), 278-300. And read Calcagnini's version of this “Apologus, cui titulus Gigantes”, in Cælii Calcagnini Ferrariensis Protonotarii Apostolici, Opera aliquot […] (Basileæ, Froben, M D XLIIII), 622-23: “Natura, ut est per se ferax, primo partu Decorem atque Harmoniam edidit nulla opera viri adiuta. Antiphysia vero semper naturæ adversa tam pulchrum foetum protinus invidit: usaque Tellumonis amplexu duo ex adverso monstra peperit, Amoduntem ac Discrepantiam. Si formam indicaro, excitabo risum legentibus.” Etc.

33. Quart Livre, XXXII, 391, l. 67-85. The translation is mine.

34. These words—“prouver,” “demonstration”—already appear in Calcagnini's “apologus,” 622: “Defendebat tamen (placent enim sui simijs catuli) natorum formam Antiphysia: prœstigiatorijs rationibus ostendebat capillos esse quasi hominum radices. Et si quid exempla persuadent: arbores omnes inferius radicibus, commodius & pulchrius teneri: in quarum ramusculis gemmulæ quasi oculi inhærent, quorum instar pedes gerunt divaricati. Se igitur longe potiorem imaginem eligisse quàm natura comprobabat: quom illa plantam inversam, ipsa rectam prorsam effigiarit. Addebat circularem eorum incessum habere quid divinius, quod cælorum absides æternaque omnia circumagantur. Manus etiam prudentius ad occiput verti contendebat […] Itaque ferarum testimonio ferè omnes, qua erat argutia, in sententiam suam traxerat, atque in sui admirationem excitarat … ” (my italics).

35. Quart Livre, V-VIII (Dindenault), XII-XVI (Chiquanous and Tappecoue). apprehended the past and its heritage and dutifully opposed the “darkness” of the “Middle Ages” to the “light” of the “modern era.” In the old days, when your grandfather Grandgousier was still alive, says Gargantua to his son Pantagruel, things were not as favorable for learning as they are today:

36. Budé, op. cit., 76-77, l. 645-47.

37. Pant., VIII, 157-58, l. 45-53.

38. François Rabelais, Œuvres complètes, ed. P. Jourda, “Classiques Garnier” (Paris, 1962), II, 497-98. Erasmus uses exactly the same vocabulary when speaking of his masters Rudolph Agricola and Alexander Hegius. See his adage I, I, 39, Opera omnia, LB II, 166-167, “Quid cani & balneo?”: “Itaque in hanc digressionem non temere sum expatiatus: non quo gloriose Germaniæ laudes jactarem, sed ut grati discipuli vicibus fungerer, & utriusque memoriæ debitum officium utcunque persolverem: propterea quod alteri, velut filii debeam pietatem, alteri tanquam nepotis charitatem.”-“So it was not without thought that I plunged into this digression; not to boast of the glory of Germany, but to perform the duty of a grateful pupil, and acquit myself of the debt I owe to the memory of both these men, because I owe one the loving respect of a son, and to the other the affection of a grandson.” The translation is Lisa Jardine's. See her study, “Inventing Rudolph Agricola: Cultural Transmission, Renaissance Dialectic, and the Emerging Humanities,” in The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, eds. Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 39-86. Her translation of Erasmus's adage, “What has a dog to do with a bath?”, appears in “Appendix I,” 66-68.