SOURCE: “Gargantua,” in The Rabelaisian Mythologies, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996, pp. 69-102.

[In the excerpt that follows, Gauna explores the classical influences on the prologue and Abbey of Theleme passage in Gargantua.]

There is no doubt that Rabelais wished the appellation of mythologies Pantagruelicques to cover his second chronicle as well as the others, despite the absence in it of both Pantagruel and Panurge, for the author refers back to his first book in the first chapter of this one, and was surely as much as the printer responsible for the title page of the second edition (the page is lacking in the only example of the first edition), which describes the Gargantua as a livre plein de pantagruelisme. Nevertheless the second book is in some wise set apart by that absence: the sense of tension between the one and the many, the philosopher and the sophist, the attraction and the dangers of the Platonic worldview, are, if not missing, then very much less prominent than they will become in the subsequent books or than they were in the first. Moreover, while there is doubtless still much scope for critical interpretation in the Gargantua, its general import is on the whole much clearer than that of the other books, with the notable exceptions of the prologue and parts of the episode of Theleme. This is because rather than deal with the hidden depths of the individual soul or the complexities of its relationship with the divine, the other sections of this book address primarily the relative clarities of public life: education, kingship, and the prosecution of a just war.

Gargantua, however, is even more evidently and consistently than Pantagruel the work of a learned humanist: appeal to classical and biblical authority lies thickly on most pages. Nevertheless, the import of most of the allusions is not in the least obscure. The book also is perhaps the most obviously religiously orthodox of the chronicles, consistently purveying the kind of fervent yet tolerant and humane Erasmian evangelical Christianity with which the work of scholars like Febvre, Saulnier, and Screech has ensured that the name of Rabelais is now mainly associated. In spite of the use in the prologue of the Sileni Alcibiadis topos from the Symposium, largely via the Erasmian essay on the adage, and despite Screech's assertion that from the outset Rabelais places his novel under the aegis of the divine Plato, there is less Platonism, as distinct from simple reverence for the name of Plato, in this book than in any of his other ones: this is the case even with the episode of Theleme, as we shall see, where the inspiration, although classical, is preponderantly Stoic rather than Platonic. The commentary on the Gargantua that follows here is concerned in detail only with those parts of it where there seems to me some remaining obscurity that reference to classical sources may help to remove: the poème liminaire, the prologue, a few minor details from the Education and the Picrocholine War, and the central passage of the Abbey of Theleme.

THE “POEME LIMINAIRE”

This little poem is so short that it may conveniently be quoted in full:

Amis lecteurs, qui ce livre lisez,
Despoûillez vous de toute affection,
Et, le lisants, ne vous scandalizez:
Il ne contient mal ne infection.
Vray est qu’icy peu de perfection
Vous apprendrez, si non en cas de rire;
Aultre argument ne peut mon cueur elire
Voiant le deuil qui vous mine et consomme:
Mieulx est de ris que de larmes escrire,
Pource que rire est le propre de l’homme.
[Friends and readers who read this book
Strip away all your passionate emotion
And in reading it, do not be scandalized:
It contains neither evil nor infection.
It is true that little that is perfect
Will you learn here, except in the case of laughter:
No other argument suggests itself to my heart
Seeing the sorrow which undermines and consumes you.
It is better to write of laughter than of tears
Because laughter is the faculty unique to man.]

The Aristotelian maxim was celebrated enough to be used by sixteenth-century theoreticians of comedy, in particular by Joubert. It is, of course, particularly apposite to Rabelais's purpose in that as an author writing under a Christian dispensation, and who was intent on putting across his ideas about religion and other aspects of life governed by religion in a comic framework, he could defend himself against the traditional Christian distrust of laughter by appealing to the authority of the one classical philosopher the Church had made particularly her own. The first four lines, however, are equally worthy of attention.

Readers are there urged to strip away all affection—that is, adfectio, passion, prejudice, trouble in the soul: the word is typical of Stoic usage, and it is an appeal to Stoic serenity of soul at least as much as it is to simple impartiality. They are also enjoined that if they read on with that serenity, there will be no chance of them finding anything which will be a scandalon, a stumbling block in the New Testament (and especially Pauline) meaning of something that will disturb the faith of the believer in Christ—an accusation that Rabelais knew full well would fall upon him, as of course it did, from both sides of the religious divide. It is especially tempting to imagine that Calvin may have been making ironic reference to the specific exculpation of this ad lectorem when including Rabelais's works among the targets of his treatise warning the faithful to beware of scandales. The bringing together of Stoic serenity, Pauline Christianity, and the justification of laughter as a cathartic remedy for sorrow is a pretty good encapsulation of the “Pantagruelism” of this book.

THE PROLOGUE

The prologue to Gargantua is among the best-known passages of all French literature, due primarily to its celebrated reference to the essential message of the book as its substantificque mouelle. It also is one of the most controversial, owing to the immediately subsequent apparent denial of the existence of such a message in the condemnation of the allegorizers of Homer, who himself had no idea of what subsequent exegetes would read into his stories. Obviously, this question is bound to be a kind of critical touchstone. The “friends of the One” in this matter—the seekers after meaning, the critics with a historical or philosophical method—will tend to give critical priority to the first formulation, the formalists/structuralists/deconstructionists/lovers of the Many, to the second. Contrast the interpretation of a historically orientated critic—say, Screech—who glosses over the condemnation of the allegorizers of Homer in a couple of sentences, with the capital importance of that condemnation for moderate deconstructionists like Cave, or Jerome Schwartz, who bases his whole exegesis of the prologue upon it. In the same way Rabelais himself, while no doubt persuaded that he is simply observing physiological fact, chooses his scientific orientations with regard solely to his philosophical options, passing over or pouring scorn upon any data that happen to conflict with them: thus Galen's theory that sperm is manufactured in the testicles rather than in the brain is savagely satirized because it seems to indicate that nature places no value on individual spirituality, which Rabelais prizes, and much on blind survival of the species, which he deplores. Not a lot has changed in the way our personal options influence our thinking, and it behooves the reader to be aware of the critic's orientation. Taking as its starting point Rabelais's description of his books as mythologies, this study makes the assumption that they convey messages, some of which it tries to elucidate while not losing sight of the rhetorical rather than discursive nature of philosophical myth.

Alcofrybas opens the second prologue as he did the first one, with an apostrophe to his readers, but this time his form of address is rather less conventionally polite: the “trèsillustres et trèschevalereux champions, gentilz hommes et aultres” [most illustrious and chivalrous champions, noblemen and others] of the first prologue have become “Beuveurs trèsillustres, et vous, Verolés trèsprecieux” [Most illustrious drinkers, and you, most precious poxy ones] to whom the author insistently and exclusively addresses himself: “car à vous, non à aultres, sont dediez mes escriptz” [for to you, and to no others, are my writings dedicated]. It must be acknowledged that this is an unconventional opening to a captatio benevolentiae, and it is seized on by Schwartz, who sees it as setting up at the outset “a disjunction between the burlesque fictive readers addressed by Alcofrybas and empirical readers outside the text,” a strategy designed to disorient and confuse the empirical reader, who is thus bound to “assume metaphorically the socially marginal fictional status—as drunk and syphilitic—that is the only one the text makes available” (IIR, 43). This strategy works via the grotesquely ironic connections between the drunken fictitious readers and the drinkers of the Symposium, and between the fictitious syphilitics and the speeches in praise of Eros that form the matter of that dialogue.

It is worth following out the prologue according to Schwartz's ingenious deconstructive reading here, since it is an excellent example of its genre. In the key example of the Sileni Alcibiadis story from the Symposium, largely calqued on the Erasmian treatment in the Adagia, Socrates is supposedly described in terms that emphasize especially the duplicity of his irony. After having proposed Socrates as moral exemplar, Alcofrybas gives his interpretation of the Silenus story: the box is similar to his book. However, he then backs this up with two proverbs “which impute other motives to this discrepancy between container and contained.” These are l’habit ne faict point le moine” [the habit does not make the monk] and “tel est vestu de cappe Hispanole, qui en son courage nullement affiert à Hispane” [some wear Spanish capes who have far from Spanish courage]. They reverse the aim of the Silenus metaphor: the image is of an admirable outer shell and an inner worthlessness. “In its addresses to a fictitious reader, whose proverbial expressions are inversions of the Silenus image with which the prologue began, the text thus begins to undermine its own rhetorical authority” (IIR 44).

Schwartz then addresses the clear and “pivotal” instruction to the reader:

Et, posé le cas qu’au sens literal vous trouvez matieres assez joyeuses et bien correspondentes au nom, toutesfois pas demourer là ne fault, comme au chant des Sirenes, ains à plus hault sens interpreter ce que par adventure cuidiez dict en guayeté de cueur.

(Prologue, 55-59)

[And, supposing you find in the literal sense fine jolly matter, just as the title states, you must not however stop there as if stopped by the Sirens’ singing, but interpret in a higher sense what you may think was said in a frivolous spirit.]

Not a lot that is deconstructive can be done with this command, qualified as “the point which he seems to be making in all seriousness—that everything in his book, even the comic material, is to be given a more than literal sense.” Nevertheless, obviously frivolous comic passages and names are quoted to show the unsatisfactory nature of such a proclamation, in support. It is first alleged that Alcofrybas is “alluding to the allegorical interpretation of the Homeric epic … a tradition employed in the late medieval period and into the early sixteenth century to justify secular or even licentious elements in a text by the supposed ‘moelle’ of a higher allegorical sense” (IIR 45).

Nevertheless, “After this apparent invitation to the empirical reader to read Gargantua in the tradition of allegorical interpretation, the narrator will, however, undermine his own authority in the next pivotal passage in the prologue, where Alcofrybas openly mocks the tradition of Christian allegorizing of pagan texts”: there follows the quotation of the paragraph in which it is denied that Homer had any idea of what his interpreters would have him say. This passage of the text is taken quite straight: no irony is supposed here. After a good deal of material reinforcing this view, the conclusion is that the text of the prologue “proceeds deliberately to subvert its own coherence, preferring to confuse and disorient the reader than to convey strictly coherent messages.”

Difficult, then, to imagine what on earth Rabelais meant when, as a happy and successful old author, he called his books mythologies, claiming that through them he could afford for the sick soul such healing and relieving power as his exercise of medicine vouchsafed to the sick body. The doctor who confuses and disorients his patient with no medical aim is unworthy of his calling, and if we are to take Rabelais's logotherapeutic claims at all seriously, it follows that we shall have to assume that if indeed he seeks to confuse and disorient, such a process will not be gratuitous.

Returning to the form of address to the readers, Rabelais surely thought it appropriate, for he chose to use it again almost word for word—“Beuveurs trèsillustres. et vous Goutteux trèsprecieux”—in the prologue of the Tiers Livre, the matter of whose comedy is patently philosophical even if, as Schwartz maintains, any definite signification of such comedy will with the connivance of the author be rendered inconclusive “by virtue of the signifier's power to mock and refuse the apparent signified.” Why should he deem it so appropriate? At least three constructive as opposed to deconstructive reasons suggest themselves. First, it fits in pretty well with Alcofrybas's jolly persona: affectionate insult is a universal token of intimacy that, when used appositely, reinforces friendly bonding, gives no offense, and certainly does not disorient. Second and alternatively, the doctor and Platonist Rabelais is about to compare his method of composition with that of vinosus Homerus; moreover, as a doctor he will have viewed wine as a civilizing, convivial, and health-giving beverage that heightened the admixture of the fiery element, and, given the otherwise often unpalatable and dangerous composition of Renaissance drinking water, must have both made a pleasure of basic necessity and reduced morbidity to the extent of saving countless lives, while cathartic laughter and philosophy would afford much comfort to the poxy, at least during the long remission periods characteristic of their disease. Third, it a contention, which following pages will attempt to justify, that Rabelais the logotherapist is very much concerned with promoting the supreme medical virtues of sωφροsυνη, temperance, and the μετριον or μεsον, measure, in the interest of the correct balance of humors of the body and desires in the soul—and for the Renaissance doctor, of the two the soul was by far the most important. Drinking can be abused, like anything else, but:

Where could we find cheap and very innocent testing and training of the qualities of character, if not in the merry touchstone of wine: what pleasure could be more fitting, if a little care be taken in its use?

Thus Plato in the Laws (649D-E): and as for syphilis, in the absence of any theory of the microbial origin of this or any disease it was pretty universally thought that the pox originated from repeated overindulgence in venery: moderation, although no cure, was a good medical prophylactic. It is worth noting here that the formula occurs a third time to inaugurate the prologue to the 1548 Quart Livre, where Rabelais also makes the longest and most explicit of his claims for the medical purpose and value of his books. Finally, in the Charmides Plato has Socrates affirm that he learned from a physician of the Thracian god-king Zamolxis that

all good and evil, whether in the body or in human nature, originates, as he [sc. Zamolxis] declared, in the soul; that is the first thing. And the cure, my dear youth, has to be effected by the use of certain charms, and these charms are fair words; and by them temperance is implanted in the soul, and where temperance is, there health is speedily imparted, not only to the head but to the whole body.

(156E-157A)

The Rabelaisian mythologies are the medical charms consisting of fair words that, if properly understood and acted upon, will cure the soul first, and consequently the body, of that intemperance of which gross drunkenness and sexual excess are the coarsest symptoms.

Rabelais's use of Alcibiades’ image of Socrates as a Silenus box has been interpreted well enough by Screech and others to need little comment here, except on Schwartz and Rigolot's contention that the use of l’habit ne faict point le moyne and tel vestu de cappe Hispanole are inversions of the Silenus image and deconstruction of the idioms of French by which the text “begins to undermine its own rhetorical authority.” About this two observations may be made. First, both proverbial locutions mean “it pays to distrust first appearances,” are part of the general Renaissance obsession with the topos of the mask and the face, être and paraître, and have long lost what negative value they may ever have had. Second, Rabelais was no lover either of monks or of Spaniards, and not being either one would for him have carried positive value! It is worth noting, too, that Rabelais's original adaptation of the Platonic and Erasmian Silenus statuette opening to reveal a figurine representing a god to an apothecary's box containing a precious drug is strictly consistent with his logotherapeutic pretensions.

Comparing one's book to a Socratic Silenus box is putting a pretty high value on it: there is no instance of Rabelais using Socrates’ name in anything but basically serious and highly positive contexts. Erasmus—who was far more chary about many aspects of the Platonic tradition than was Rabelais—had said that he almost felt he could say “Saint Socrates, pray for us,” and it is banal to remark that Socrates, for any humanist, was the greatest of pagan moral exemplars. It is therefore quite misleading to state, as does Schwartz, that by the end of the invitation to the readers to look beyond the literal meaning and interpret in a more elevated way what first seemed merely light-hearted, “thus far Rabelais's narrator has simply implied that the fictive reader should look for an ironic doubleness in his book, a mixture of the comic and the serious, and perhaps, too, the dissimulating tactics of a Socrates.” As if Alcibiades was praising Socrates because he was a Silenus, and not explaining that he was in love with Socrates in spite of his ugliness because he was a soul worth loving for his strength and heroism, or as if Erasmus was near to praying to him because of his irony! Of course he was ironic, and so is Rabelais: but that is an accessory, not an essential, attribute; it is a technique of his philosophical rhetoric, a means to an end.

The following two paragraphs, in which Rabelais runs together Plato, Plutarch, a couple of Latin proverbs, and a great deal of original verve to form the celebrated passage of the substantificque mouelle are another perfectly clear instruction from Alcofrybas to look for the meaning of what he now calls his “Pythagorean symbols.” In his essay in the adage Pythagorae symbolae—quoted by Screech in the TLF edition—Erasmus tells us how to look at such symbols and what we would discern them to be if we followed his instructions: if we explore the allegory [si quis allegoriam eruat], we will see nothing else but a precept teaching us how to live well [nihil aliud esse quam recte vivendi praecepta]. We are then informed by Alcofrybas in a far from obviously serious tone—rather, in the inflated language of the fairground huckster—of the holy and terrible mysteries the book contains concerning religion, politics, and family life: “tant en ce qui concerne nostre religion que aussi l’estat politicq et vie oeconomicque” [concerning our religion as much as political and private life].

Regarding this singular hyperbole it has been suggested that Alcofrybas is alluding to the tradition of allegorizing Homer that had been used for centuries to justify secular or even licentious elements in a text by their supposed kernel of a higher allegorical sense.¹ However, this seems unlikely, since the reference to Homeric exegesis comes in the next development, not this one. Moreover, in an allusion to Erasmus's adage Rabelais speaks of his stories as Pythagorean symbols, which Erasmus tells us are really hints on how to live the good life. Finally, Gargantua does indeed contain sections dealing with education, kingship, and the preparation for a happy and blessed family life, in all of which religion plays a large part, to say nothing of the second enigma, which contains explicit encouragement for the persecuted evangelicals. As for the hyperbolically arch tone, we may note that in his book Rabelais is going to say some very pointed and dangerous things about his enemies, and if he does not start blurring the picture a little, the censors are going to take a fine toothcomb to his text from the very beginning. You could not in an obviously serious manner proclaim you were going to say important things about religion—which would be evangelical and therefore very perilous things—and not expect very big and very rapid trouble, and Rabelais was not a foolish man.

The tracks are covered more effectively, of course, in the following section, and there is no denying that it is apparently a pivotal passage, as Schwartz claims—although it is always amusing to see the deconstructors accepting the meaning of conveniently selected passages at face value. In it, Alcofrybas openly mocks the tradition of Christian allegorizing of pagan texts.” Well, yes: of pagan allegorizing of such texts, too. The interpretation of this part of the prologue is crucial enough to warrant fairly lengthy quotation and translation:

Croiez vous en vostre foy qu’onques Homere, escrivent l’Iliade et Odyssée, pensast es allegories desquelles de luy ont beluté Plutarche, Heraclides Ponticq, Eustatie, Phornute, et ce que d’iceulx Politian a desrobé? Si le croiez, vous n’approchez ne de pieds ne de mains à mon opinion, qui decrete icelles aussi peu avoir esté songez d’Homere que d’Ovide en ses Metamorphoses les sacremens de l’Evangile, lesquelz un Frere Lubin, vray croquelardon, s’est efforcé demonstrer, si d’adventure il rencontroit gens aussi folz que luy, et (comme dict le proverbe) couvercle digne du chaudron.

(Prologue, 87-97)

[Do you genuinely believe that when he composed the Iliad and Odyssey Homer ever thought of the allegories that Plutarch, Heraclides Ponticus, Eustathius, and Phornutus winkled out of him?² If you do believe it, you are nowhere near my own opinion, which is firmly that these allegories were as little dreamed of by Homer as Ovid in his Metamorphoses dreamed of the mysteries of the Gospel, which one Friar Randy,³ a real bacon-muncher, tried to demonstrate he did, hoping that he might chance to convince people as crazy as himself and find proper lids for his saucepan, as the proverb says.]

So there is actually no reference at all to Christian allegorizing of Homer, but of Ovid—although that hardly removes the contradiction. Alcofrybas continues, this time with genuine obscurity:

Si ne le croiez, quelle cause est, pourquoy autant n’en ferez de ces joyeuses et nouvelles chronicques, combien que, les dictant, n’y pensasse en plus que vous, qui par adventure beviez comme moy? Car, à la composition de ce livre seigneurial, je ne perdiz ny emploiay oncques plus, ny aultre temps que celluy qui estoit estably à prendre ma refection corporelle, sçavoir est, beuvant et mangeant. Aussi est la juste heure d’escrire ces hautes matieres et sciences profundes, comme bien faire sçavoit Homere, paragon de tous philologes, et Ennie, pere des poëtes Latins, ainsi que tesmoigne Horate, quoy qu’un malautru ait dict que ses carmes sentoyent plus le vin que l’huile.

(Prologue, 98-110)

The obscurity lies in the sense of the first three lines: how may the apparent meaning of the two conditional clauses be reconciled with the concessive? It is obvious that “if you do not believe it, why don’t you do the same—that is, discount any allegorical intention—with these joyous new chronicles, even though while dictating them I gave no more thought to the process than did you, who may well have been drinking at the time, like me?” is incoherent. Schwartz gives a little history of the difficulty, which translators have generally fudged by sacrificing the concessive sense of combien que, before adopting the solution formulated by André Gendre (IIR 47-48). This is to construe the equivocal autant in a different way, so that the sense comes across as “if you do not believe it for Homer, is that any reason why you should not do the same thing—that is, believe it—in my case?” The translation would now read:

[If you do not believe it, is that any reason for you not to do so in the case of these joyous new chronicles, even though while dictating them I gave no more thought to it than did you, who may well have been drinking at the time, like me? For I lost no more time at all over the writing of this lordly book than that which I set aside for my bodily sustenance—for eating and drinking. Moreover, that is the right time for writing about elevated matters and deep knowledge, as Homer, the greatest of all philologers, knew and did so well, and Ennius, the father of Latin poets, too—although some bumpkin said that his poems smelt of the wine bottle rather than of the lamp.]

This seems about the best that can be done, but it still remains doubtful and it is probably prudent not to base interpretations too firmly on it. Schwartz concludes thereby that Rabelais/Alcofrybas “distinguishes between allegory, on the one hand, as an inbuilt structure of authorial intention, an element of writing (allegoresis), and on the other hand, allegory as a form of reading or of glossing that is independent of allegoresis.” Rabelais would then be attacking the systematic fourfold method of interpretation typical of the late Middle Ages and “applied with relentless rigidity in, for example, the preface to Roman de la Rose,” because “it makes no provision for a method of reading that would place the reader in the position of an active participant.” Now leaving aside the fact that the preface cited, while it gives a fourfold interpretation, by no means distinguishes between the allegorical layers—the usual hierarchy is literal, allegorical, moral/tropological, anagogical—one may go along with this, up to a point.⁴

We have seen in some detail what Rabelais says: he personally condemns overelaborate interpretations of Homer that Homer would never have thought of, uses that example to attack Lavin's version of the Ovide moralisé, and—probably—says that the reader can think what he likes about a book that was tossed off casually between mouthfuls of food and swigs of wine, like Homer's and Ennius's. The comparison of himself with Homer and interpretation of his book with Homeric interpretation is insistent.

Homer is an author of fiction and a prime source of myth, and myths as understood by Plato and Platonists are much vaguer things than medieval allegories: in the terms of Dante's classification, they lend themselves rather to the higher and less precise layers of interpretation—moral, which aimed at the inculcation of a general ethical attitude, and anagogical, which led the reader upward by modifying his spirit in a mystical and unanalyzable way. The Middle Platonist Plutarch is a major source for Rabelais, who exploits details from his essays in often startlingly original ways in his later books, and who almost always mentions him as a positive authority: his inclusion in this list is fairly surprising, although to some extent justified objectively. Plutarch is prolix on the art of hermeneutics, and one of his best-known works is on how to read the poets: Quomodo adolescens poetas audire debeat. It is very unlikely indeed that Rabelais was not familiar with it, and if he was familiar with it, inconceivable that he did not have it in mind at this point, for in it Plutarch has a good deal to say about the interpretation of Homer.

Especially, he attacks the interpretation of those who interpret the Homeric stories of the gods in a forced and “allegorical” manner—he probably means the Stoics, whose hermeneutics he attacks specifically in another essay. The main failing of such exegesis, he says, is to do violence to the text, subverting its sense by ignoring the hints given by the author himself. Homer himself reveals what he means to the attentive reader: interpretation is the business of the reader and the poet. The first things to look for in an apparently obscure passage are the interpretive keys that may be given by the author: “Homer has best employed this method: for he in advance discredits the mean and calls our attention to the good in what is said.” Above all, then, are to be rejected those interpretations which Homer never dreamed of: the interpretation of the author requires active cooperation from the reader, but according to instructions that the author himself—not a Stoic exegete, nor, a fortiori, a Frere Lubin—will have placed in the text. The tales of the poets are not allegories to be interpreted according to any rigid scheme originating outside the text, but myths aiming to teach philosophical and ethical lessons in a nondiscursive way:

Philosophers indeed teach and admonish using examples drawn from established data: poets do this by themselves inventing things and by speaking in myths.

(20B-C)

By speaking in myths: μνθoλoγoυντεs, literally by mythologizing. I think Rabelais had this passage precisely in mind when he called his books mythologies. As for Plutarch's respect for his own instructions, it is at the very least inconsistent: an invitation, indeed, to hoist him with his own petard while using it to blow one's own opponents out of the water.

Something like the following, I suggest, is the import of Rabelais's discourse in this most controversial of prologues: “It is always necessary to look beyond appearance to find reality: so it is with my writings: I am a very major author and I have important things to say about all the main facets of human life, which since I am a poet and since it is sometimes dangerous to say them openly, I must perforce often convey obliquely: but do not attempt to constrain my meaning by adopting rigid and far-fetched hermeneutical systems, and above all, if you would understand what I have to say, listen to me and not to those who would ignore the indications that I myself will give you in my own book.”

THE OPENING CHAPTERS

For the expected genealogy of Gargantua the reader is simply redirected to the Pantagruel: the author then moves from satire on the genealogical pretensions of the nobility to a compressed account of the translatio imperii theory, according to which legitimacy passes from the Assyrians down through Byzantium to the French—and not, of course, to Charles V, contrary to his claims—and thence to another ironic dig at the various theories of the origins of nobility before setting up, via a return to Gargantua's genealogy and an attack on the Sorbonne for condemning it, the introduction of the first enigma of the book. It is possible to see this first chapter either as straight-forward royalist propaganda or as an ironic subversion of any claims to the legitimacy of earthly power, including François I's.⁵ I think Rabelais certainly casts a quizzical eye on the institution of nobility: such questioning was fairly commonplace. It is far from inconceivable that the translatio imperii schema should also have ironical overtones: one thinks of the way du Bellay openly twits the grandiose pretensions of Ronsard's Franciade in sonnet 23 of the Regrets.

As for the fanfreluches antidotées, it must in all honesty be said that no one understands them, nor has an adequate reason to account for their inclusion. Screech admits as much in his edition, while noting that certain lines seem evidently to refer to the pope, and opines that the whole thing may satirize Charles V. Schwartz remarks that “the propaganda aspect recedes into the background as the play of signifiers emerges at the surface of the text.” Guy Demerson opines that while the words themselves are full of monsters and obscenities, we seem to catch hints of the shadowy presence of the pope and the emperor, and that the chapter is designed to thwart any overbold exegesis.⁶

Screech further remarks, “We can be reasonably certain that the fanfreluches were not all that obscure for the readers of the time.” I think it quite possible that they were totally impenetrable for them as for us, and deliberately so. While the French Renaissance delighted in enigmas and anagrams, most of them are not all that difficult to solve, and contemporaries were in fact remarkably bad at solving them: no one noticed the very obvious and quite incendiary anagrams of the Cymbalum Mundi's dedication—which give “doubting Thomas to Peter the believer”!—until Eloi Johanneau called attention to them centuries later. I suggest as a possibility that this insoluble enigma is there above all as a counterweight to the very soluble one with which the book ends, and whose last lines certainly contain dangerous material quite unacceptable to the religious authorities and, be it said, maybe to the political ones too, insofar as they offer comfort to the victims of the purge consequent on the affaire des placards: the first reading of the not always very bright censorship may well not have bothered too much with a second enigma, having spent fruitless time making nothing whatsoever of the first.⁷

Gargantua's miraculous birth and near elephantine gestation period of eleven months have been elegantly and convincingly interpreted by Screech as a evangelical satire of the Sorbonne's idea of faith—which we have already seen Rabelais parodying mercilessly in the prologue to Pantagruel. This reading has been recently questioned by Schwartz's deconstructive approach.

I do not believe, for reasons that will be fully set out in dealing with the Tiers Livre, that Rabelais is, as Screech affirms with reference to this chapter, a “full Christian sceptic much earlier than scholarship normally allows such a philosophy to flourish.” Rabelais's attitude here has very little to do with the anti-intellectualistic Christian use of ancient skepticism characteristic of Gianfrancesco Pico, Francisco Sanches, and—ambivalently—Montaigne. It is moderately characteristic of quite another, Erasmian, Christian skepticism, with a small s, in that word's meaning not of doubt regarding any logical or sensory proof, but of doubt regarding whatever is not susceptible of reasonable or sensory proof—always excepting what is contained in the Gospels. Rabelais's gist, again, is something like this: “The Sorbonne makes money out of unreasonable and unbiblical tall stories like Purgatory, while justifying itself with a warped and cynical version of Gregory the Great's dictum that faith has no merit where sustained by reason. I, on the contrary, say that you should not believe unlikely tales like Purgatory or modern miracles attributed to relics, since God has provided no justification for them in His Word, which we are alone obliged to believe, and since they are also thoroughly objectionable to God-given reason.”

The chapters dealing with Gargantua's emblematic device and with the heraldic signification of the colors blue and white have been extensively analyzed by the critical literature. The device's motto is very typical of Ficinian Platonism as expressed in the Commentary on the Symposium, with its seemingly willful assimilation of wholly exclusive Platonic Eros in its most earthbound manifestations to universal and undifferentiated Pauline agape, refusing even to consider the physical and emotional sexual connotations, or even the comedy, of the Platonic Aristophanes' myth. Schwartz, whose examination of the Renaissance history of the myth is extensive and interesting, concludes from Rabelais's alteration of the position of the original's heads that the subversively coarsened image ironically subverts the unjustifiably spiritualized motto (IIR 59-65). He may be right: I would add that in any event the Androgyne exemplifies an aspect of life well understood by Plato, but in which Rabelais seems to have had little genuine interest. Nowhere does he show any sympathy either for the absolute exclusivity or for the kind of emotional and spiritual content inherent in the lust for physical union of those deeply in love, which is what the Platonic Aristophanes' funny and profound myth is talking about.

.....

THE ABBEY OF THELEME

The description of the abbey occupies six chapters of the editio princeps. The episode is almost entirely serious, and in the chapter containing the versified inscription on the abbey's great gate, grimly so: comic writing is limited precisely to two satirical puns made by Frere Jan in the first chapter. Its sustainedly serious tone, its lack of narrative incident, and the absence of any of the principal characters—even the monk, after the first chapter—make it seem ill-integrated into the picaresque comic structure of the book as a whole, despite the obvious care taken in the often highly wrought descriptions. Manifestly, the thing is a myth, important enough to the author for him to shatter the artistic unity of his book in order to include it: but it is a myth about whose import there is little critical agreement. Screech sees in it the synthesis of a Platonic alliance between goodness and beauty, and the traditional Christian idea of synderesis, the joint contribution to our salvation of God's grace and that part of the human will which was not corrupted at the Fall: in the TLF edition he also suggests the influence of the famous Lutheran paradox of the free man subject to none under God and the servant of all for love of Christ. Other interpretations are legion. Thus Per Nykrog, basing himself on the biblical sense of the Greek θελημα, considers that the message is that the desires of the good are naturally in harmony with the desires of God; Michaël Baraz sees echoes of the Platonic elitism of the Republic's guardians; and Jerome Schwartz opines that it owes much to St. Augustine's ideal of universal charity before suggesting that the author deconstructs his own message by the exaggeration of its anti-monastic detail and the stress on the passage of time.⁸

Theleme, Tελημα; Nykrog is certainly right to pay close attention to the word, for it must surely symbolize in some basic way the ideal of Frere Jan's abbey. It is rare in classical Greek, where it signifies the appetitive will: desire, even, sometimes sexual. It is frequent in the Bible, especially in the Septuagint, expressing the will of God: it is the word translated as voluntas, will, occurring in the Lord's Prayer. Nykrog suggests that it is deliberately chosen to convey divine will because as opposed to other words available—βονλε, in particular—it stresses the unforced and natural force of God's will as “une émanation de son Etre, et non pas le résultat d’une réflexion,” and as such opposed rather than allied to self-control. This is a highly doubtful proposition: while it is true that βονλε has the specific meaning of counsel, and specifically the counsel of the Athenian Senate, its root meaning is “what is wanted.” Much work has been done on the distinction between the root verbs εθελω and βουλομαι, and the truth appears to be that they are used to express much the same meanings. In most authors where they both occur, they are used interchangeably, although the fashion for the one or the other varies over time: εθελω predominates in Homer, βουλομαι from the time of Herodotus to the end of the classical period, θελω then making a comeback. Moreover, if the Septuagint uses θελειν for God's will, it would seem to stress unbending resolution rather than any other nuance. As for the rigid opposition between θελημα as irrational desire and βονλε as rational decision, it is simply untenable: one has only to think of Kinesias in the Lysistrata (934), driven frantic by unaccustomed frustration of his overdeveloped sexual drive and finally howling at his wife's insistence on an unending succession of preliminary niceties—βινειν βουλομαι! [I want to fuck!]

Nykrop's semantic weighting of θελημα as an emanation of God's being sounds Plotinian rather than biblical, and indeed it occurs in this sense in the Greek title of Plotinus' great essay “On free will and the will of the One”: Περι του εκονsιον και θελεματοs του ενοs, to my mind the most profound of all philosophical discussions of the problem of free will. There are interesting correspondences between the conclusions and vocabulary of that treatise and the Thelemites' rule of life which will be touched on below: it nevertheless seems very unwise to base Rabelaisian interpretation too closely on the sense of θελημα as opposed to other words for will: it is not used at all in the text of the Ennead referred to, which is concerned precisely with different types of divine and human will. Here βουληsιs occurs interchangeably with θεληsιs and τò θελειν, just as there is no perceptible difference between the verbs βουλομαι and θελω, and when Plotinus wishes to stress the freedom of the will he uses τò εκουsιον. Plotinus was available to Rabelais both in Greek and in Ficino's Latin, and it is in any event possible that the Frenchman chose the Greek word rather than voluntas or volonté because he wished to include in the name of his abbey—rather than to exclude, as Nygrop would have it—the intellectual element present in all the Greek terms conveying the idea of will, including θελημα; it is, for example, a lingustic truism to observe that the term νουs unites the notions of intellect and will. However, he surely had the New Testament's usage in mind, and what may be more genuinely significant for the interpretation of Rabelais than anything else about New Testament use of θελημα is that it occurs almost exclusively in the context of salvation: in every case save one (and that one is the highly marginal case of Rev. 4:11) it means specifically God's will to save mankind.

Frere Jan's first reaction to Gargantua's proposal to make him the abbot of his old monastery is revealing. He wanted no government of other monks:

Car comment (disoyt il) pourroys je gouverner aultruy, qui moymesmes gouverner ne sçayroys? Si vous semble que je vous aye faict et que puisse à l’advenir faire service agreable, oultroyez moy de faire une abbaye à mon devys.

(1:12-16)

[For how (said he) could I, who cannot govern myself, govern other people? If it appears to you that I have rendered you good service and can do the same in the future, allow me to found an abbey according to my own notion.]

From the outset we are placed under the aegis of the Platonic and Stoic topos concerning the self-control necessary for the king and natural to the philosopher, which has already been writ large in the preceding episode. Gargantua's reaction is to offer the monk as seat of his new abbey the pays—country, district, canton, village—of Theleme. Here we should remark that the name of the abbey is not arbitrary but according to normal practice that of the locality in which it is situated; the institution does not direct its inmates down a radically new path but exploits an already existing place, whose spirit, expressed in the name, will be congenial to the enterprise.

That enterprise is then defined by Gargantua with minimal interventions from Frere Jan and the narrator, who imperceptibly edges his characters right out of his story: there are four mentions of Gargantua and four of Frere Jan in the first chapter of the episode, after which the monk disappears entirely. Gargantua is referred to briefly once in the second and once in the penultimate chapter; that is all. Whatever this myth is about, it seems to have so little to do with the world of burlesque epic and popular comedy—of any comedy, rather—that the monk's foul-mouthed ignorance can find no place in it despite his redeeming active virtue, nor even can a giant, however philosophical, fit easily within its grave and courtly ambit.

Such smiles as there are come right at the beginning with the standing on their heads of the monastic rules of life: as ritual cleansing took place (and still does, in some Orthodox communities) if any female crossed the threshold, so will it in Theleme if a monk chances to enter. Walls are banished with a pregnant pun: murs lead to murmures, quarrels. The anti-monastery, however, is much more restrictive than its orthodox counterpart:

Item, par ce que en icelluy temps on ne mettoyt en religion des femmes si non celles qui estoient borgnes, boyteuses, bossues, laydes, defaictes, folles, insensées, maleficiées et tarées: ny les hommes, si non catarrhez, mal nez, niays et empesche de maison … fut ordonné que là ne seroient repceues si non les belles, bien formées et bien naturées; et les beaulx, bien formés, et bien naturez.

(1:43-49)

[Item: that because in that time the only women to be placed in religious orders were one-eyed, lame, hunchbacked, ugly, deformed, mad, insane, bewitched and congenitally defective, and the only men sniveling, ill-born, stupid and good for nothing … it was decreed that there should be admitted only women who were beautiful, well-formed, and of a good nature: and men who were handsome, well-formed, and of a good nature.]

So the recruits of conventional monastic institutions, made up of women too ugly and senseless to find husbands and men too unhealthy, stupid, and illborn to earn a decent living, will be replaced by the beautiful and the goodnatured. Health, intelligence, and mental equilibrium are easy positive values to understand and to insist upon, but it is worth while pausing over beauty, and more especially over the matter of good or ill birth and nature.

In the sections concerning this episode of both his book and his edition, Screech lays stress on Rabelais's “platonising concern with beauty” and “a platonic alliance of beauty with goodness,” and it is true that monks and nuns are thought of as bad and ugly, so the Thelemites are to be good and beautiful; and the inscription on the great gate excludes the corrupt in mind and body, welcoming noble knights—noble and gantilz—and high-born, beautiful, and modestly upright women:

Fleurs de beaulté à celeste visage
A droict corsaige, à maintien prude et saige
[Flowers of beauty with heavenly faces
With straight bodies, with honest and modest bearing]

“Flower of beauty” is certainly an interesting expression, for it is very precisely a Neoplatonic term, ανθοs του κάλλονs, but Plotinus applied it to the One itself, in the sense of the origin of all beauty, and not to the physical beauty of women except insofar as that may be thought, like all beauty, to exhibit the trace of its origin: as used here it seems a simple flower of rhetoric.⁹

Moreover, the abbey is certainly described as a beautiful place: an elaborate palace of the Renaissance. Rabelais surely loved beauty and richness as a man of his time, but simply to equate physical beauty and goodness is such a caricature of Platonism as not to be truly Platonic at all, and Rabelais was certainly a man who saw deeper than that: should we suppose that the young Socrates or Theaetetus were not good, even if on anti-monkish physical criteria alone they would have been refused entry to the abbey? The Greek word for beautiful also means noble, which should never be forgotten when discussing Platonic beauty: moreover, physical beauty is a good in that it partakes of the good, but it is not coterminous with beauty of soul, nor is it the good itself, although the good is beautiful. It may be thought to play some Platonic role in this episode in that in life as in the myth of the Phaedrus it excites desire in the lover of beauty, and according to Plato such desire can be harnessed to draw the soul upwards beyond the beauty of the body; but of such Platonic love there is no overt hint in Rabelais's Thelemite couples.

However, there may be other reasons why beauty is stressed in key points of the episode. First, we may note that good and beauty are nearly inseparable in the Greek mind and the Greek language. If Plotinus avoids calling the One the Beautiful, he refers to it as the flower of beauty, as we have seen, and as the essence of beauty itself: η καλλονη. The Stoic end of goods, which the Romans called the honestum, the honorable, the Greek Stoics called τò καλον, in the sense of the morally beautiful or the noble: Zeno as reported by Diogenes Laërtius identifies the good and τò καλον in a way more radical than Plato ever does. Even in Latin the honestum, Cicero's chosen translation of τò καλον, can carry overtones of physical beauty.

It is time to look a little more closely at the terminology of this key passage.

En leur reigle n’estoit que cette clause, Faictz ce que voudras, par ce que gents liberes, bien nez et bien instruictz, conversans en compaignies honestes, ont par nature un instinct et aguillon, qui tousjours les pousse à faictz vertueux et retire de vice, lequel ilz nommoient honneur. Iceulx, quand par vile subjection et contraincte sont deprimez et asserviz, detournent la noble affection, par laquelle à vertuz franchement tendoient, à deposer et enfraindre ce joug de servitude: car nous entreprenons tousjours choses defendues et couvoytons ce que nous est dénié.

(1:10-21)

[In their rule there was but this clause: Do what you will, for people who are free, wellborn and well educated, moving in honest company, have by nature an instinct and spur, which always impels them towards virtuous deeds and away from vice, and this they called honor. If such people are oppressed and enslaved by vile subjection and constraint, they divert the noble impulse that made them incline to virtue, so that it drives them to throw off and break that yoke of servitude; for we always try to do forbidden things and covet what is denied us.]

Faictz ce que voudras: action follows will, which must more or less equal choice or desire. Choice sounds rational, but rational will is simply the use of discursive reason to make a choice of action that will further one's desire. However one defines will, whether as dependent on reason and effort or directly on passion, desire is the bottom line, as Plato knew so well. The philosophical question is, can we modify desire by reason? And if so, why should we, if not because we desire to do so? Plato's answer is that if we rightly analyze our desire, which is very difficult, we will see that we desire only the good, which is sometimes difficult for us to recognize but which dialectic will enable us to discern. Unhappiness and evil result from our failure to perceive it. This sort of dialectic will be the very matter of the next book: but for the moment, Rabelais is thinking along a different line.

Another Platonic influence may be present, however, in that certain features of the life prescribed by Socrates in the Republic for the guardians of the polis seem to find echoes here. While the notorious community of family relationships could not have been recommended even if Rabelais had thought it worthwile, that, along with the community of property, certainly had results akin to those achieved by Theleme. All will say together “it is well” or “it is ill,” and

They will truly deserve their name of guardians, because they do not tear the city apart by each of them calling “mine” not the same but different things, the one carrying off into his own house for himself alone whatever he can acquire from the others, the next doing the same into his own house, and by their having their own different wives and children, giving rise to private pleasures and pains; but rather, being of one single mind, they all strive for the same end and as far as possible experience the same pleasures and pains.

(464C-D)

However, while the exposition of the rule of life certainly uses a set of notions directly dependent on ancient moral philosophy, the vocabulary used is characteristic more of Stoicism than of Plato himself. The summum bonum of the Stoics was defined and discussed in a whole series of very repetitive late source texts that were almost all available and well known to the scholars of the Renaissance: of the Greeks, what there was in Diogenes Laërtius on Zeno and Epictetus; of Latin writers, especially Seneca and Cicero's philosophical dialogues. In all these the supreme good lies in acting according to nature, κατα φυsιν, secundum naturam, nature being defined as the will of God as expressed in the workings of the universe. This action is in turn accomplished by a will—in Latin, voluntas—freely choosing to harmonize itself with God's will so expressed. When it does so it will follow the dictates of reason, ratio, which means the reasoning faculty unique to man and in essence divine; if uncorrupted it will enable him to guide his will in the right way. Action thus accomplished is called virtuous, and constitutes the morally beautiful: in Latin, what is honorable, the honestum. Thus the concepts of virtus, ratio, natura, and the honestum are practically interchangeable and are commonly defined in terms of each other. What must be stressed here is the key role played by the will, volontas, in the achievement of virtue: an act not willed in the sense of freely chosen cannot by definition partake of the honestum: cannot, then, be virtuous. Conversely, what is accomplished by compulsion is bound to be vicious. The chapter on the rule of life begins by stressing that there were no laws, statutes, or rules beyond what the inmates freely wished to do: they acted scelon leur vouloir et franc arbitre [according to the free exercise of their will]. Franc arbitre, indeed, has a theological ring to it. No one ever forced them—les parforceoyt—to do anything: the stress is constant from the beginning to the end of this section. Why might this be?

The question is both put and answered for us, very precisely, by Seneca himself in a well-known letter:

Quare? Dicam quia nihil honestum est quod ab invito, quod coactum fit. Omne honestum volontarium est. Admisce illi pigritiam, querelam, tergiversationem, metum: quod habet in se optimum, perdidit, sibi placere. Non potest honestum esse, quod non est liberum: nam quod timet, servit.

(Epistulae morales, 66, 14)

[How so? I tell you: because no act is honorable that is done by an unwilling agent, that is compulsory. Every honorable act is voluntary. If it is tinged with reluctance, complaint, irresolution, or fear, it loses its own best characteristic, namely, self-approval. What is not free cannot be honorable: for fear means slavery.]

I have so far translated the honestum as “the honorable” because that is now the most commonly used equivalent: a more old-fashioned one is “moral worth.” Although those French and Italian translations of the sixteenth century that I have seen use simply l’honneste and l’onesto, I think we must see in the spur to virtue that the Thelemites, conversans en compaignies honestes … nommoient honneur, a conscious reference to the moral beauty of the Stoics, along perhaps with a thought for the Republic's precept that “knowledge acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind” (537), and an affectionate recall of the idealized feudal chivalry embodied by Grandgousier in the Picrocholine war.

Yet another pointer to the Stoic reference is the insistence on the spur: the goad, properly, un instinct et aguillon. Rather than recalling the synderesis of the Schoolmen—who were not normally inspirational for Rabelais, despite his monastic training—I think what we have here is a reference, made particularly clear by the reinforcing aguillon, to what the Latin Stoics called the impetus animi or motus animi, by which they translated the original Greek concept of the ορμή, the first instinctive impulse to self-preservation, which if uncorrupted and shaped by reason, will lead to the doing of the good. As Seneca put it:

Bonum est quod ad se impetum animi secundum naturam movet et ita demum petendum est cum coepit esse expetendum. Iam et honestum est: hoc autem est perfecte petendum.

(Epistulae morales, 118, 8)

[That is good which rouses the soul's impulse towards itself in accordance with nature, and is worth seeking only when it begins to be thoroughly worth seeking. It is by this time an honorable thing, for that is what is completely worth seeking.]

The instinct et aguillon was not enough when left to itself, though: it needed the association of honorable people—compagnies honnestes—and it needed to be bien instruict, so that it would know how to recognize the good. Stoics laid considerable stress on education; the wise man's virtue depended on his understanding. Here we are brought again back to the Greek θέλημα, for the confusion in Greek thought and vocabulary between knowing and willing is considerable and pretty nearly inextricable, and the consequent stress on the necessity for education is easily explicable: if one knows the good, one will will it, and knowing can be taught. The Roman voluntas is more an innate thing than its Greek equivalents: velle non discitur, one cannot be taught to will, says Seneca. However, that will, uneducated, remains inchoate. Seneca ends his ninetieth letter thus:

virtus non contingit animo nisi instituto et edocto et ad summum adsidua exercitatione perducto. Ad hoc quidem, sed sine hoc nascimur et in optimis quoque, antequam erudias, non virtus est. Vale.

(Epistolae morales, 90)

[virtue only occurs in a soul that has been educated and subject to discipline, and that has acquired it by continual exercise; our essence is suitable for receiving it, but we are born without it, and even the best natures in the world the raw matter of virtue is found, but not virtue itself. Farewell.]

Reference to Stoic doctrine can help us further still in understanding Theleme. The very fact that the episode turns around a paradox is significant, for of all the ancient philosophers, the Stoics were proverbially associated with the use of paradox in the illustration of their precepts, of which many were startling and apparently outrageous, such as the pleasure taken by Regulus in the pain of his hand shriveling in the flame. Relevant ones here are that the sage will subject his own will to that of others for the general good, and—important in that Theleme is a school for successful marriages—that the instinct of self preservation is extended to impel the sage to take a wife and have children by her. (That the Thelemites leave when they marry may be very simply explained by Rabelais's Christian refusal of Plato's community of wives and children: the first duty of parents is to look after their own children. Suckling them and changing their diapers—or even admitting wet-nurses—would fit ill with the Thelemites' lifestyle.) In any event, the most pertinent paradox here, I think, is that thus illustrated by Seneca in the De Beneficiis:

Hoc ex paradoxis Stoicae sectae mimime mirabile, ut fert mea opinio, aut incredibile est, enim qui libenter accepit beneficium, redidisse.

(2:26)

[Of all the paradoxes of the Stoics, this is the least strange and incredible in my opinion: that he who accepts a benefit willingly has already repaid his debt.]

A benefit is defined as an unforced, voluntary good deed bringing joy to the receiver as to the doer. Again in the same context:

Itaque negamus quemquam scire gratiam referre nisi sapientem: non magis quam beneficium dare quisquam scit nisi sapiens, hic scilicet, qui magis dato gaudet quam alius accepto. Hoc aliquis inter illa mumerat, quae videmur inopinata omnibus dicere, παραδοξα Graeci vocant.

(Epistulae morales, 81, 10)

[So we deny that anyone save the wise man knows how to return a favor; moreover, only the wise man knows how to confer a benefit: that is to say, the man who enjoys the giving more than the receiving. Now some people will think this remark to be one of those generally surprising statements that the Greeks call paradoxes.]

Spelling it out very simply, the good man pushes the concept that it is better to give than to receive one stage further: given that by giving one accomplishes a better action than by receiving, it is better to receive joyfully—that is, to give one's fellowman the opportunity to give, and thus to accomplish a virtuous action and to feel the accompanying happiness—than it is to give, and thus to take that satisfaction for oneself. When the Thelemites' total liberty of choice results in everyone spontaneously doing what the first person to speak suggests, we must understand that what they are all doing is accomplishing what we might call the Stoic “second-order virtue” which consists in allowing each other the opportunity to accomplish something virtuous, and hence pleasurable. A similar conception of mutual gratification certainly underlies the most poignant passages of Montaigne's De l’Amitié, and seems to me to be an enduring component of the deepest kind of human love.

Overlapping with this nexus of Stoic notions are the central tenets on free will expressed by Plotinus in Ennead 6:8: namely, that the only true freedom is the knowledge of the good, which is inseparable from the desire for it: nothing borne towards the good can be under compulsion, and desire for the good may be termed voluntary. However, a key question remains: why then should some people know naturally, and hence desire, what is good, and others be entirely deceived, so that they will and accomplish what is evil? The answer suggested by Rabelais, in this episode at least, is too pessimistic and elitist to be Plotinian and is certainly the reverse of the facile optimism about the perfectibility of human nature that many critics have seen in Theleme's rule of life. It is because they are well born: bien nez.

The meaning of this term has nothing to do with social rank except insofar as rank may be deemed to reflect a good disposition. The literal Greek equivalent is ευγενήs, which implies either aristocratic lineage or an innate disposition toward the good, or both. [b.gamma ]ενναιοs, which carries an etymological reference to birth, means simply “innately noble” (it must be borne in mind that the noble, the beautiful, and the good are intimately connected and sometimes cognate notions not just for Plato but for any ancient Greek). The Latin equivalent of ευγενήs, bene natus, is first recorded applied to fertile fields, as can also be the Greek word, and the standard usage seems to have the meaning of a nature tending spontaneously toward the good. In a.d. 250 St. Ennodius uses it along with religiosus, apparently in the same sense, and when Dante composed the Commedia in the thirteenth century, he regularly used the terms mal nato and ben nato in a very strong sense indeed. The damned souls subject to the terrible punishments meted out by Minos are qualified collectively as l’anima mal nata, while both Dante and the inmates of Paradise are called ben nati. This meaning betrays considerable, even heretical, theological fatalism at the level of popular usage; it is seemingly assumed by the poet, for Beatrice proclaims that her blessed state is God's handiwork, not hers:

Io son fatta da Dio, sua mercè, tale
che la vostra miseria non mi tange

(Inferno 1:91-92)

[I am made by God, and I thank him for it, in such wise
that your wretchedness does not touch me]

she says to Virgil, the good pagan deprived of the beatific vision eternally and through no fault of his own. Piccarda, another of the blessed, is called ben creata, which puts the responsibility squarely on the potter rather than the vessel he has made to honor, as here, or to dishonor (Paradiso 3:37).

In Rabelais's time and in his language, Calvin, faced with his own particular theological imperative of consigning to eternal torment non-Calvinists who happen to be naturally good people, ties himself into extraordinary dialectical knots while nevertheless offering a perfect dictionary definition of the meaning of our term:

Au reste, c’est bien la plus certaine et facile solution, de dire que telles vertus ne sont pas communes à la nature, mais sont grâces spéciales du Seigneur, qu’il distribue même aux méchants, selon la manière et mesure que bon luy semble. Pour cette cause, en notre langage vulgaire nous ne laissons point de dire que l’un est bien né et l’autre mal né, l’un de bonne nature et l’autre mauvaise; et néanmoins nous ne laissons point d’enclore l’un et l’autre sous la condition universelle de la corruption humaine, mais nous signifions quelle grâce Dieu a donnée particulièrement à l’un, qu’il a dénié à l’autre.

(Institution, 2:3)

[Moreover, it is surely the easiest and most certain solution to say that such virtues are not common to human nature but are special graces of the Lord, which he distributes even among the wicked, as and how it seems good to him. Hence in our vernacular we are accustomed to say that the one is wellborn and the other ill-born, the one of a good nature and the other of a bad; and nevertheless we continue to include the one and the other within the universal condition of human corruption, but we mean to indicate which grace God has given particularly to the one, and which he has withheld from the other.]

Now this sort of fatalism may seem to conflict with the Stoic doctrine of the universality of the instinct to self-preservation, which, rightly educated, would produce the virtuous soul of the sage, and of course the conflict is real, theoretically speaking. Nevertheless Stoicism is a philosophy conceived to help people preserve self-control and serenity in the midst of evil times, and in practical discussion the Stoics admitted the existence of individuals whose natures appeared so incurably perverted that nothing could be done with them. They are inherently unable to do the good: indeed, they will distort objects, possibilities, or actions that may be neutral or even predisposed to the encouragement of virtue in such a manner as to produce only evil. Seneca thus compares them to the sick stomach that corrupts good food, turning it into poison:

Ideo nemo illi potest (sc. beneficium malo dare) quia quicquid ad illum pervenit, pravo uso corrumpitur. Quemadmodum stomachus morbo vitiatus et colligens bilem, quoscumque accepit cibos, mutat et omne alimentum in causam doloris trahit, ita animus aeger, quicquid illi commiseris, id onus suum et perniciosem et occasionem miseriae faci … Ergo nihil potest ad malos pervenire quod prosit, immo nihil quod non noceat; quaecumque enim illis contigerunt, in natuream suam vertunt et extra speciosa profuturaque, si meliora darentur, illis pestifera sunt. Ideo nec beneficium dare non possunt, quoniam nemo potest, quod non habet, dare; hic bene faciendi voluntate caret.

(De Beneficiis 5:12.5-7)

[Therefore, no one can do good to him (sc., the evil man), for whatever good reaches him is vitiated by his evil use of it. Just as the stomach, when it is impaired by disease, gathers bile and, changing all the food that it receives, turns every sort of sustenance into a source of pain, so, in the case of the perverse mind, whatever you entrust to it becomes a source of disaster and wretchedness. … Therefore nothing that would be to them good can come to evil men—indeed, nothing would not do them harm. For whatever good falls to their lot, they change into their own nature, and seemingly attractive gifts that would be beneficial if given to a better man become baneful to them. Nor, therefore, are they able to give a benefit, since no man can give what he does not have: such a man lacks the will to do the good.]

We can see clearly why such insistence is laid, both in the initial chapter and more brutally in the inscription on the great gate, on the absolute necessity of keeping such people—the mal nez—out of Theleme. They will corrupt all they touch, and the abbey is restricted to the uncorrupted. It is in no sense a proclamation of the general perfectibility of human nature; quite the reverse, in that only the bien nez—the vessels made to honor, the sheep and not the goats—may pass its portals. It is in that very fundamental sense that the episode is elitist.

THE FINAL ENIGMA

The import of Rabelais's manipulation of Saint-Gellais's allegorical description of a game of “real” tennis is not in serious doubt. It seems established that the additions enable the solution of the riddle to be read as an apocalyptic encouragement to the persecuted faithful after the affaire des placards, reminding them in precisely biblical language of the joys of paradise awaiting those who perservere unto the end, and evoking the confusion and conflagration of the last days. Frere Jan's contrary interpretation—which is the genuine solution of the original enigma—is simply a faux-fuyant providing at least some cover after Gargantua's authoritative and explicit exegesis. Jerome Schwartz, however, provides a deconstructive alternative, maintaining that Frere Jan's contribution “deflates the whole idea of an altior sensus” and “empties the allegory of meaning and thus destroys allegory through an ironic collapse of the allegorical elements … Rabelais contradicts his own prologue, gives us an example of the very kind of allegory he had condemned, and which seems convincing, then seemingly destroys that interpretation with a burlesque parody.” Rabelais is attacking “the notion of allegory as a mode which points to meanings outside, or other than, the literary work itself” (IIR 87-89).

This wholly typical insistence upon the absolute autonomy of the text, reduced to the play of “signifiers” floating free of any bound “signified,” let alone historical referent, is particularly inappropriate to a passage like this one, and it is worth pausing over because in it the nihilistic and sophistical antecedents of deconstructional method show through with singular clarity. The salient feature of the discourse to which extratextual meaning is being denied by the critic is, incontrovertibly, the following.

The author has seen fit to twist an elaborately harmless riddle in order to include comment on the pain, exile, imprisonment, blood, scorched flesh, and execution of a not inconsiderable number of his contemporaries, some of whom were certainly his friends, and in so doing has increased significantly the physical risk to his own person. To do such a thing gratuitously, or for the mere pleasure of leading his readers up the garden path, would be the action either of a man both masochistic and wantonly suicidal, or of one who had taken leave of his senses, and it is entirely obvious that Rabelais was neither of these.

The above statement is true both as a logical tautology and empirically and inductively, in the same way that it is true to say that fire burns and that incarceration and torture, other things being equal, are to be avoided. When authors are prepared to lay their lives on the line in order to be heard, to gainsay the existence of authorial voice is to condemn as deluded all those who have ever died or made sacrifices for any cause at all. It is wholly inapposite to deny extratextual validity to inclusions such as the one at issue, since given its nature and consequences, to do so is tantamount to saying “What is truth?” not just with Derrida and de Man in the senior common room, but with jesting Pilate and vengeful Callicles in the jeu mortel where life and death turn on their words.

Notes

1. In his deconstructive analysis of the prologue, Schwartz limits his treatment of this famous positive statement to seven lines out of eight and a half pages. Irony and Ideology, 42.

2. Beluté = sieved out of: replaced in later editions by calfreté = caulked up, squeezed into, doubled over with.

3. Frère Lubin: comic name associated with randy friars, made famous by a satirical poem by Marot: here Rabelais means the Dominican Pierre Lavin.

4. Regarding this passage Schwartz, quoting Cave who maintained that the Gargantua prologue “institutes a perpetual suspension of judgment on the allegorical question,” goes on to proclaim that it “moves from an invitation to read allegorically to a subversion of allegory, which is not a denial but a paradox, both contesting and affirming the reader's privilege to allegorize even when such allegorizing would not be supported by authorial intention.” Duval, on the other hand, accepts the sense proposed by Gendre, while seeing in Rabelais's adoption of the Horatian tags about the wine-swilling Homer and Ennius a proclamation that the altior sensus of his book was the result not of thought but of divine—here, Bacchic—inspiration, and that the reader should indeed look for it. Schwartz, Irony and Ideology, 42-50; André Gendre, “Le prologue de ‘Pantagrue,’ le prologue de ‘Gargantua’: Examen comparatif,” RHLF 74 (1974): 3-19; Cave, Cornucopian Text, 111.

5. These are the positions of Schwartz and Screech, respectively.

6. Schwartz, Irony and Ideology, 42-50; Guy Demerson, François Rabelais (Paris: Fayard, 1991), 44.

7. For a discussion of the Cymbalum's anagram, see Max Gauna, Upwellings: First Expressions of Unbelief in the Printed Literature of the French Renaissance (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992), 117, 160.

8. Per Nykrog, “Thélème, Panurge, et la dive bouteille,” RHLF 65 (1965): 385-97; Baraz, Rabelais et la joie de la liberté,” 250-54; Schwartz, Irony and Ideology, 72.

9. Plotinus, Enneads 6.7.32; on this expression, see J. M. Rist, Plotinus: The Road to Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 59.

Bibliography

Works of Rabelais

Reference is made to the following editions:

Pantagruel. Edited by V. L. Saulnier. TLF Series. Geneva: Droz, 1965.

Gargantua. Edited by M. A. Screech. TLF Series. Geneva: Droz, 1970.

Le Tiers Livre. Edited by M. A. Screech. TLF Series. Geneva: Droz, 1964

Le Quart Livre. Edited by R. Marichal. TLF Series. Geneva: Droz, 1947.

Oeuvres. Edited by A. Lefranc, J. Boulanger, H. Clouzot, P. Dorveaux, J. Plattard, and L. Sainéan. Vols. 1-5. Paris: Champion, 1911, 1913, 1922, 1931. Vol. 6. Geneva: Droz, 1955. Generally known, and referred to in the text, as the Critical Edition.

Oeuvres Complètes. 2 vols. Edited by Pierre Jourda. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1962.

The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Translated by J. M. Cohen. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955.

Classical Authors

These are referred to and cited in the editions of the Loeb Classical Library unless otherwise specified.

Aristophanes. Lysistrata.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics.

Augustine. De Civitate Dei.

Aulus Gellius. Noctes Atticae.

Cicero. Academica, De Divinatione, De Fato, De Natura Deorum, Somnium Scipionis.

Diogenes Laërtius. Lives of the Philosophers.

Dionysius the Areopagite. Oeuvres Complètes (in French and Greek). Translated by M. de Gandillac. Paris: Aubier, 1943.

Epictetus. The Discourses as reported by Arrian, Manual, and Fragments. The Discourses of Epictetus. with the Encheiridion and Fragments. Translated by George Lang. London: George Bell and Sons, 1877.

Epicurus. The Extant Remains. Text with critical apparatus, translation, and notes by C. A. Bailey. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926.

Horace. Opera.

Iamblichus. De Mysteriis as Les Mystères d’Egypte, Greek and French. Paris: Belles Lettres, 1966.

Lucian. Works.

Lucretius. De Rerum Naturae.

Macrobius. In Somnium Scipionis. Edited by J. Willis. Leipzig: Teubner, 1963.

Marcus Aurelius. Pensées. Edited by A. I. Traunoy. Paris: Presses Universitaries de France, 1944.

Ovid. Fasti and Metamorphoses.

———. La Bible des Poetes de Ovide Methamorphose. Translatee de latin en Francoys. Paris: Philippe Le Noir, 1531.

Plato. Dialogues and Letters.

———. The Dialogues of Plato. Translated by B. Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875.

———. Divini Platonis opera omnia quae extant. Marsilio Flcino interprete. Frankfurt: Marnium and Aubrii, 1602.

Pliny. Historia Naturalis.

Plotinus. Enneads; Ennéades (in Greek and French). Paris: Bude, 1968.

———. Plotini … de rebus philosophicis libri LIIII in Enneades sex distributi a M. Ficino e Graeca in Latinam versi et ab eodem commentaria illustrati. Basle, 1540.

Plutarch. Lives and Moralia.

———. Les Oeuvres Morales et Meslées. Translated by J. Amyot. Paris: M. de Vascosan, 1575.

Proclus. Elements of Theology. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1963.

———. Theologie Platonicienne (in Greek and French). Paris: Budé, 1968.

Seneca. Moral Essays and Epistulae Morales.

Sextus Empiricus. Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Hypotyposes)

———. Against the Professors (Adversus Mathematicos).

Authors to 1800

Erasmus, Desiderius. Opera. Lugduni Batavorum: Petrus van der Aa, 1703-6.

Estienne, Henri. L’Apologie pour Herodote. Geneva, 1566.

Ficino, Marsilio. Commentaire sur le Banquet de Platon ou de l’amour. Edited by Raymond Marcel. Paris: Belles Lettres, 1956.

Authors from 1800

Baraz, Michaël. Rabelais et la joie de la liberté. Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1983

Cave, Terence. The Cornucopian Text. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.

Demerson, Guy. François Rabelais. Paris: Fayard, 1991.

Gauna, Max. The Dissident Montaigne. New York: Peter Lang, 1990.

———. Upwellings: First Expressions of Unbelief in the Prlnted Literature of the French Renaissance. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992.

Gendre, André. “Le prologue de ‘Pantagruel,’ le prologue de ‘Gargantu.’ Examen comparatif,” RHLF 74 (1974): 3-19.

Nykrog, Per. “Thélème, Panurge, et la dive bouteille.” RHLF 65 (1965): 385-97.

Rigolot, François. Les langages de Rabelais. Etudes Rabelaisiennes 10. Geneva: Droz, 1972

———. “Rabelais et la scolastique: une affaire de canards (Gargantua 12).” In Rabelais's Incomparable Book: Essays on his Art, edited by Raymond La Charité, 102-23. Lexington, Ky.: French Forum 1986.

Rist, M. J. Plotinus: The Road to Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967

———. Stoic Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Schwartz, Jerome. Irony and Ideology in Rabelais. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Screech, M. A. L’Evangelisme de Rabelais. Aspects de la satire religieuse au XVI^e siècle. Etudes Rabelaisiennes 2. Geneva: Droz, 1959.

———. “The meaning of Thaumaste (A Double-Edged Satire of the Sorbonne and of the Prisca Theologia of Cabbalistic Humanists.” BHR 22 (1960): 62-72.

———. Rabelais. London: Duckworth, 1979.