SOURCE: “Friendship and the Adversarial Rhetoric of Humanism,” in Common Knowledge, Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1994, pp. 40-53.

[In the essay below, Langer considers the friendship between Pantagruel and Panurge in light of the competing intellectual beliefs of the time.]

At the conclusion of the war against the Dipsodes and the giants, the hero of Rabelais' Pantagruel faces his Mohammedan counterpart, Loupgarou, the incarnation of Plautus' phrase, homo homini lupus [man is a wolf to man], a figure of hatred and cruelty among human beings.¹ Pantagruel, the Christian humanist giant, finds himself in dire straits, his weapon, a ship's mast, shattered by Loupgarou's enchanted mace. In desperation he calls out to his friend, “Ha, Panurge, où es-tu?”, an appeal reminiscent of Christ's words, “My God, my God, why have you deserted me?” (Mark 15:34).² Pantagruel's cry for help is in fact doubly reminiscent of Christ's words (pronounced in Aramaic, lama sabachthani), as the Hebrew lamah hazabtani is used earlier in the book by a lady friend of Pantagruel's. The giant left her abruptly to go off to war, and she sends him a ring containing a false diamond and the engraved Hebrew phrase. Wily and polyglot, Panurge translates the phrase and finds the solution to the rebus: “Dy, amant faulx, pourquoy me as tu laissée?” [Say, false lover, why have you abandoned me?]³ The phrase indicates the insufficiency of love between men and women: men are always ready to embark on epic voyages and desert their ladies. In this earlier episode, Pantagruel certainly was no homo homini deus, no god to his fellow creature.

But Pantagruel and Panurge are friends, as distinct from lovers, and the mark of friendship would surely be the sacrifice of one for the other. Rabelais is careful to set up their relation as friendship. When they first meet, Pantagruel announces to Panurge, “By my faith, I have already conceived such a love for you that, if you agree, you will never leave my company, and you and I will be a new pair of friends, such as Aeneas and Achates.”⁴ Epic friends prove their friendship in battle; when one cries out for help, the other rushes to stand by his side. Lucian's Toxaris, a dialogue compiling examples of Greek and Scythian friends and their self-sacrifice in peace and war, was a favorite sixteenth-century sourcebook of epic friendship, and Rabelais was an avid reader of Lucian.

Another avid reader of Lucian was Erasmus. In the opening section of his Adagia, we find, among a series of phrases on friendship, the two adages most relevant to Pantagruel's desperate situation: on the one hand, “man is a wolf to man” (1.1.70); on the other, “man is a god to man” (1.1.69). Since Loupgarou is obviously the former, should not Panurge be the latter? In his commentary on homo homini deus, Erasmus catalogues instances in which the ancients conferred the name of “god” on someone or something that preserved them “in desperate and involved situations, or in deadly peril.”⁵ Erasmus condemns as disgusting flattery the use of “God” by Christians to designate other mortal men, even in jest, and allows its use only when it is clear that the term is part of a saying carefully attributed to the Greeks (“but I might almost say, as the Greeks do,” etc.).

In fact, Pantagruel never gets to use Plautus' adage, even under the guise of Erasmus' prudent presentation, since Panurge fails to help his friend in his moment of greatest need. Upon hearing Pantagruel's cry, Panurge makes what would be easy to interpret as an ironic remark: “Par Dieu! ilz se feront mal, qui ne les despartira.” [By God! they will hurt each other if one doesn’t separate them, 156.] Panurge does not attempt to intervene, however, and it is Carpalim, another of Pantagruel's companions, but not his chosen friend, who wants to help. It is clear that Panurge is in no mood to provide the sort of sacrifice that the rhetoric of friendship would demand of him. This particular failing of Panurge as friend, manifestly set up in the novel, announces the cowardly and indecisive character traits that Panurge will show especially in later books, the Tiers livre and the Quart livre, and confirms some suspicions the reader may have had about Panurge all along.

Pantagruel, however, does not have these suspicions. His choice of Panurge as friend for eternity is never in doubt; his generosity toward his friend is in no proportion to the (lack of) merit Panurge continues to prove. Although Panurge is often useful to the giant, he is essentially a voyou, a good-for-nothing out for cheap thrills. Pantagruel's friendship with Panurge presents, then, a real problem, which the epic combat with Loupgarou only highlights. Their friendship is also paradigmatic, in the sense that unequal literary relationships, such as those of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Dom Juan and Sganarelle, Jacques and his Master, refer in some way to the problem of Pantagruel and Panurge.

The issue is not merely one of literary types. It involves the ways in which relationships can be explained or motivated. It also involves the question of whether one ought to motivate, provide reasons for, the love of one human being for another. In Rabelais' time, these questions involved competing discourses that were, finally, inadequate to the literary representation of Pantagruel's friendship. Rabelais' representation unwittingly offered an antitheoretical move beyond the disputes concerning friendship that divided humanism and scholasticism in the early sixteenth century.

What are the possibilities for understanding Pantagruel's excessive love of Panurge?

Before delving into the intellectual discourses available to Rabelais, a first solution might be to locate the giant's generosity in the social relationship implied by Pantagruel's status as the sovereign and Panurge as the vassal, his inferior. In this sense, Pantagruel's liberalitas is simply the product of nostalgia for feudal ways: the generosity of the lord is a natural feature of his social status, and is exercised irrespective of friendship toward anyone in particular. As the very exclusivity and excess of the friendship between Pantagruel and his vassal suggest, however, the feudal bond is insufficient to motivate their attachment. In addition, in the instance already cited, the vassal has failed to perform the essential feudal function of military succor to his lord, and so is less than deserving of his generosity. But clearly more is at play.

CHARITY

The selflessness with which Pantagruel apparently loves an undeserving companion seems to link him to a discourse of charity that was familiar to Rabelais, an evangelical humanist. This discourse constituted a key element of the Christian humanist reaction to the perceived irrelevance of scholastic theology. In a famous annotation of 1 Tim. 1:6-7 (on vaniloquium), Erasmus enumerates scurrilous distinctions and questions debated by the scholastics, and in a typical and dramatic way dismisses centuries of scholastic theology. He concludes:

Life is short; and to lead a Christian life is an arduous task. Putting trifles aside, then, let us concentrate most of all on those matters which Christ wanted us to know, which the apostles proclaimed, which emphasize charity, a pure heart, a good conscience, and a faith not vain; which Paul calls the sole end and consummation of the entire Law.⁶

Charity is at the heart of the urgent tasks in a Christian life, and scholastic quibbling will only take time away from those tasks. The relationship of charity (“Dilige proximum tuum sicut teipsum”) is indeed one of gratuitous love, in the sense that no return is expected from the gift of love. Commenting on this precept in his Paraphrases on the New Testament, Erasmus emphasizes the gratuitousness of charity. When you love yourself, you do not require a return⁷—and since, according to the New Testament commandment, you should love another as yourself, you cannot require a return of your love. In fact, loving someone only if he or she loves you back is against the spirit of charity that commands love of friends and enemies alike.⁸

The inclusiveness of charity poses a problem for the understanding of Pantagruel's love, however, since the latter is exclusive. In his commentary on the adage homo homini deus, Erasmus points out the inclusiveness of Pauline charity: “Paul, though, places the height of virtue in charity; but charity which consists in doing the greatest good to the greatest number” (114).⁹ In addition, charity is always exercised toward fellow creatures as a step toward God, the ultimate object of the creature's love.¹⁰ It is therefore unclear to what extent charity is ultimately gratuitous, given that charity toward other creatures can reap great benefits from God. Erasmus expresses this underlying, discreet calculus in commenting on Luke 6:35 (“Date mutuum nihil inde sperantes” [Lend not hoping for a return]):

Do good also to those who will not do you good in return, or will pay for good with evil. If your loan is given in this spirit, even if nothing should be given back to you, nevertheless you will enjoy helping your neighbor. And there is no danger that your goods should be lost to you, since God will most richly pay back a reward.¹¹

In spite of a rhetoric of gratuitousness, evangelical charity institutes human relationships that point to God as the ultimate motivation, the true end and reward.

FRIENDSHIP

The exclusive generosity of the giant's love takes us away from charity and brings us closer to the classical discourse of friendship, a discourse that pervaded moral philosophy in early modern Europe, and provided many commonplaces for humanist epideictic rhetoric.¹² The sources for the rhetoric of friendship were available in various editions and translations from the late fifteenth century onwards: Books 8 and 9 of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Cicero's Laelius de amicitia, Plato's Lysis, Lucian's Toxaris, Seneca's De beneficiis and his letters, Plutarch's Moralia, Valerius Maximus' Facta et dicta memorabilia, and Diogenes Laertius' Lives. This last work was an especially fruitful source for commonplaces, as Diogenes compiled sayings from philosophers' writings, some of which concern friendship, such as Aristotle's definition of friends: “one soul living in two bodies” (5.20). This moral philosophy was presented in the form of compendia of sayings or ideas, of contemporary treatises or dialogues on friendship, and in dedicatory pieces or prefaces. Phrases from classical authors are often found side by side with quotations from patristic literature (especially from Augustine and Lactantius). The Middle Ages produced two widely known treatises on friendship: Aelred of Riévaux's De spirituali amicitia and Peter of Blois' De amicitia christiana et de dilectione Dei et proximi. The Old Testament furnished commonplaces as well, with the example of Jonathan and David (1 Sam. 18:1, 18:3, 20:17) often quoted. Erasmus himself compares the Christian precept of charity to classical friendship, in his adage Amicitia aequalitas. Amicus alter ipse (1.1.2), as does the first translator into French of Cicero's treatise on friendship, Jean Collin.¹³ The commonplace literature of friendship was in a way the site of humanist nostalgia for the times when men could be true friends, when interest and ulterior motives did not cloud human relationships.

Although the variety of sources makes for a heterogeneous picture, there is a broad consensus in this literature: in spite of doubts here and there (especially in Plato), friendship generally requires a resemblance in the friends. Friendship generally is impossible among the unjust. Friendship generally has as its aim the exercise of virtue, especially in the civic sphere. On the surface, not one of these conditions is fulfilled by the friendship between Pantagruel and Panurge. The giant is very different from his unreliable friend; Panurge is rather uncharitable, even as he seems to require charity from Pantagruel; Panurge, even given his friendship with Pantagruel, hardly excels in virtuous civic involvement (proposing, for instance, the building of walls around the city of Paris out of female genitalia and monks' erect penises).

There is, however, at the heart of friendship “theory” a reflection on the gratuitousness of human relationships—the notion of beneficium, the service or favor one performs for a friend—that will lead closer to the literary representation of friendship. Seneca provides the most extensive analysis of these services, and insists that a true favor is one that is performed without hope of a return or of interest: demus beneficia, non feneremus [let us give favors and not lend with interest].¹⁴ The most virtuous favor is one in which neither interest nor principal is expected in return.¹⁵ In fact, the scandalous behavior of Panurge is the best guarantee of the beneficium offered through Pantagruel's love, as the giant can assume that his favors will not be returned. This logical reduction of the virtuous favor points to a profound incompatibility between the economic analysis of friendship and the civic and ethical intentions that motivate its praise. The most generous act is also the one that is least likely to produce ethical results. Seneca senses the dangers of what we may call sophistic analysis, and requires in the beneficium a proportionality: the favor has to be adapted to the character of the person who performs it, who receives it, and to the circumstances and intentions surrounding it.¹⁶ It is important to exclude prodigality, largitio; generosity must be neither absent nor excessive.¹⁷ In the evolution of Rabelais' books, this sense of measure is progressively lost: generosity is practiced on a literally gigantic scale. Pantagruel assigns to his friend Panurge the revenue of the (fictive) domain of Salmigondin, which amounts to fantastic annual sums, and which his friend proceeds to squander on banquets and prostitutes, prompting a dispute between the friends at the beginning of the Tiers livre. Although through analysis of the beneficium the classical account of friendship comes close to providing a model for the literary unequal pair, there is in Pantagruel yet more at play.¹⁸

ENJOYMENT AND USE

We can also understand Rabelais' unreasonableness, his gratuitousness, in light of the (nominalist) late scholastic tradition, given that we find among many late scholastics an emphasis on the willful-conventional aspect of human and divine relations. Pantagruel's love for Panurge seems unconditional in a profound sense; neither virtue nor pleasure nor even usefulness are motivations for his friendship. In fact, Rabelais appears to make certain that we exclude these motivations. The exclusion of all ends external to the person who is the object of love forms part of the scholastic concept of the love of God, although the history of this particular notion goes back much further. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle proposes the following criterion in distinguishing the good:

Now we call that which is in itself worthy of pursuit ｛τò καθ' αυτò διωκτòν｝ more complete than that which is worthy of pursuit for the sake of something else, and that which is never desirable for the sake of something else more complete than the things that are desirable both in themselves and for the sake of that other thing, and therefore we call complete without qualification that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else ｛τò καθ' αυτò αιρετòν αει μηδεποτε δι' αγγο｝.¹⁹

The greatest good, that which is to be desired for itself, is most strongly defined in negative terms: it is that which is not desired in view of anything else. This negative definition seems to be inextricably bound to the notion of what an object of love is in itself, and will be reflected in the literary representation of friendship.²⁰ The criterion proposed by Aristotle is the basis for the distinction explained by Saint Augustine between the love of the creature for God and the love a creature holds for other creatures, including itself. The love for God should be “enjoyment” [fruitio], whereas the love for another creature should be “use” [usus].

Before Augustine proposes this distinction, in his De doctrina christiana, he introduces a more fundamental distinction concerning the possible objects of learning, things and signs. In the realm of things, two sorts of relationships prevail:

Some things are to be enjoyed, others to be used, and there are others which are enjoyed and used. Those things which are to be enjoyed make us blessed. Those things which are to be used help and, as it were, sustain us as we move toward blessedness in order that we may gain and cling to those things which make us blessed. If we who enjoy and use things, being placed in the midst of things of both kinds, wish to enjoy those things which should be used, our course will be impeded and sometimes deflected.²¹

Following, we find a second, lapidary distinction between enjoyment and use that would be invoked by all scholastic theologians who would comment on the question: “To enjoy something is to cling to it with love for its own sake. To use something, however, is to employ it in obtaining that which you love, provided that it is worthy of love.”²²

These definitions did a lot of work throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, especially the words propter seipsam [for its own sake] and the final si tamen amandum est [provided that it is worthy of love]. The relationship of use always supposes a third term, a final end or object external to the relationship between user and used. Use in Augustine is full of ethical connotations and problems, too, as these sentences suggest. Use as such is not bad, if the final object is worthy of one's desire. If, presumably, the final object of a relationship of use (say, money or physical pleasure) is not worthy of one's efforts, then, given Augustine's formulation, one should not use objects (and especially not persons) to obtain these other unworthy things. But one should not, strictly speaking, enjoy human beings, either, for they are to be loved as a step toward God, not for themselves.²³ Only God is to be enjoyed.²⁴ All human relationships, if not practiced in view of the final object of love, God, are profoundly problematic; in fact, they can be nothing but problematic, given the double bind imposed by the dialectic between use and enjoyment on the one hand, and the exclusive definition of the object worthy of love, on the other. This Augustinian distinction is the basis for an important analysis in the beginning of Peter Lombard's Sentences (dist I c 1-3), a textbook of the mid-twelfth century that had enormous influence in the shaping of scholastic theology. Commentators on the first book of the Sentences discuss Augustine's distinction, and discuss whether some object other than God can and should be enjoyed. By the time Rabelais, who was trained as a Franciscan, writes his novels, the distinction has become more subtle and has engendered subdistinctions. Here is the way Ockham presents the distinction:

Enjoyment is twofold, ordinate and inordinate. Ordinate enjoyment is when the object most worthy of love is loved in the most worthy way. Inordinate enjoyment is when an object is loved in the most worthy way and for its own sake, but which should be loved less and for the sake of something else. But ordinate enjoyment is twofold: when an object completely satisfies the will it is called the enjoyment of the blessed ｛fruitio patriae｝; when an object does not satisfy completely, but permits along with it, also naturally, anxiety and sadness, it is called enjoyment of the way ｛fruitio viae, in the sense of the Christian wayfarer, the viator｝.²⁵

The creature can thus love another creature for its own sake [propter se], without that object of love being summe diligendum, most worthy of love. This enjoyment is, however, distinct from the enjoyment of God (the object most worthy of love) by the wayfarer not yet in the presence of his object of love, the fruitio viae. It is also distinct from the highest type of enjoyment, which is that of the saved [the beati], the fruitio patriae. Enjoyment is above all conceived as a satisfaction of the will.²⁶ These precise distinctions are to be found in Renaissance dictionaries of theology (Johannes Altensteig in 1517, Erasmus Sarcerius in 1546) and in the commentaries of the University of Paris theologians (such as John Major in 1519). The Augustinian distinction between use and enjoyment (without its scholastic subdistinctions) is found in humanist writings as well, from Lorenzo Valla to Erasmus himself.²⁷

But what does it mean to love someone absolutely [summe diligere] for his own sake [propter seipsum]? The conceptual paradoxes of this sort of love are revealed especially when God is the object of love. For how can the creature love God for his own sake? In fact, loving God because of the rewards he may be capable of giving, such as salvation, is not acceptable, for in that case one would be using him: “We say that we enjoy something that we love for its own sake, such as God is to be loved. For God is not to be loved because of benefits or salvation, but for his own sake.”²⁸ On the one hand, it is obvious that God is the object most worthy of love; on the other, that this very worthiness makes it difficult to conceive of the proper way of loving him, except in negative terms. For his worthiness as object of love is constituted precisely by the creature's conceiving of his all-goodness and promise of salvation, which, however, cannot be the basis of the creature's love for him. Empirically speaking, the demonstration of God's lack of reward for the creature's love seems the best measure of that love, for then it is not exercised as a relationship of use. It is in the very “unreasonableness” and gratuitousness of the creature's love that this love proves itself enjoyment.

God is, of course, summe diligendus, and, for humanists and scholastics alike, reliable and good. Yet the negative conditions for the highest sort of love prepare the way for the relationship between human beings who are not summe diligendi, but, by the very fact of their imperfection, objects to be loved for their own sake. This seems to be the case with the heroes in Pantagruel, who, in their inequality and difference from each other, are a constant demonstration of a relationship that must derive from something other than use. The most obvious instance is the scene I invoked at the beginning of this essay, in which Panurge fails to come to the aid of his giant friend and which, in spite of this failing, does not diminish their friendship. In this sense, their relationship in the moments of its uselessness is an enactment of enjoyment of the other, and an implicit divinisation of the other, in the very love “for his own sake.”

Yet theoretically this should not be the case. Evangelical humanism is clear about condemning what does not have God as its final cause: we remember that Erasmus clearly admonished Christians not to use the saying homo homini deus. He also recommends, in the Enchiridion, relationships of use in the dealings of men with each other; these relationships should all have God as their end. Scholasticism, on the other hand, by introducing those “sophistic” subtleties (or quaestiunculae, to use Erasmus' dismissive term) that we have just rehearsed, allows greater freedom of intellectual movement in the understanding of human relationships. Although, theoretically, enjoyment of an object other than the worthiest [fruitio inordinata] is always inferior to enjoyment of the highest object [fruitio ordinata], the subjective and practical criteria of enjoyment are such that the will may be completely satisfied by love of an object other than God. Hence it may be difficult to distinguish between the two kinds of enjoyment on subjective grounds. This is the import of what Ockham appears to be saying when he concludes that one cannot rationally demonstrate that the will cannot be entirely satisfied by an object other than God [“Dico quod non potest naturaliter demonstrari quod voluntas non potest satiari nec quietari in aliquo citra Deum”].²⁹ A love propter se, for his own sake, of another creature—that is, an object inherently imperfect—cannot be excluded. This concession is, of course, far from saying that human beings should enjoy each other, nor is the statement in Ockham a product of, say, empirical psychological observation. Rather, its formulation of rational uncertainty is part of the nominalist emphasis on the covenantal, freely willed order that God has established in his relationship with his creatures. This emphasis underlines the contingent (as against the necessary) nature of the created world, and thus reduces possibilities in some non-theological areas for rational demonstration. The concession, on the part of Ockham, of the possibility of entire enjoyment of another creature, was part of what Christian humanists tended to find abhorrent in and symptomatic of the scholastics' sinful “curiosity.”³⁰

Within the radical formula propter seipsum, for his own sake, we find at the same time the condition for individuality and the possibilities for its representation. When Pantagruel loves Panurge for the sake of Panurge, what does he love? We have seen that, in the deliberate absence of coherent motivation, the question can no longer be posed, as any answer to the question is a deformation of his love. Similarly, asking what one loves when one loves God, in the terms set up, cannot have a coherent answer, as the answer would return the lover to a relationship of use. So Panurge as an individual object of love is individual precisely because there are no prior constraints on his character or behavior: in spite of aspects of his personality that have literary antecedents, he is not a coherent, virtuous, or nonvirtuous persona in the classical sense.

We have here, it seems to me, hints of the relational calculus of ends and means coming to its logical endpoint, and producing at this endpoint a representation of the individual as simply that which is, prior to its signification. This issue of individuality returns us to the Augustinian distinction between things and signs, which precedes the explanation of use and enjoyment in the De doctrina christiana (1.2.2). Signs are always signs of something, otherwise they would not be signs. Things can be signs of something else, or they can just be things. Things as “mere” things, and thus not as signs of something else, are more apt to be enjoyed, in that the very relationship of enjoyment supposes its end in the thing itself, not in that to which it points, refers, leads. Seen from this perspective, the relationship of one creature and another, propter seipsum, is based on the assumption that the creature loved is loved not as a sign but as a thing, and in this instance a radically individual thing. A sign, by contrast, is always there propter aliquid, for the sake of something else, that which it signifies.

The enjoyment that is friendship leads us, then, to the issue of individuality, and this both in a nominalist logical sense (our categorization of things is not inherent to the things themselves), and in an ethical sense (the most godlike relationship to another is as a radical individual, not as a member of a group, or as producing our own interest). Rabelais' novels display “thingness”: precisely and perhaps paradoxically because Panurge is not a consistent sign of something else, Pantagruel can love him for his own sake. The “thingness” of Panurge is the very stuff of his literary representation, and, in its resistance to use and motivation, that representation is also the basis for an ethic incarnated by Pantagruel, and only imperfectly given in the intellectual discourses of Rabelais' time.

For, in concluding, we cannot avoid the historical issue that arises out of the polemical nature of the intellectual context and the intentions of the author. Rabelais' text is overtly antischolastic, Erasmian, Christian comedy. A small but representative instance of Rabelais' attitude towards scholasticism should suffice. In Erasmus' note to the “idle speculation” [vaniloquium] of the doctors of the law (1 Tim. 1:6-7), he scornfully associates scholastic theologia with the Greek mataiologia, foolish, idle talk. Rabelais, in one of numerous instances of antischolastic satire, takes up the same joke in Gargantua. The child Gargantua has spent his time being tutored by dusty scholastics, Thubal Holoferne and Jobelin Bridé. His father does not see any progress in the child; a friend of Gargantua's father proposes a disputation between Gargantua and one of his pages, an angelic little boy with a perfect Ciceronian humanist education. The terms Rabelais chooses recall Erasmus' mockery and indicate Rabelais' dismissal of scholastic theology as silly, anachronistic talk: “voyons, si bon vous semble, quelle différence y a entre le sçavoir de vos resveurs mateologiens du temps jadis et les jeunes gens de maintenant” [let us see, if you wish, what difference there is between the knowledge of your crazy dreamers of yesteryear and the young people of today].³¹ The humanist youth goes on to trounce Gargantua, who ends up “weeping like a cow.” The contrast could not be more stark between the unwieldy, stupid scholastic and the graceful, angelic humanist. This and many other presentations of scholastics and scholasticism in Rabelais' works leave no doubt of the author's intentions.

As we have seen, though, it is scholasticism that provides the most intricate reading of human gratuitous love, and it is that reading that most closely accounts for this central feature of Rabelais' own literary world. Theoretical polemics clouded an understanding of human individuality emerging in imaginative accounts of human experience in the early modern period. Our own tendency to focus on the ideological polarities of the Renaissance is perhaps a reenactment of the humanists' blindness to their imaginative practice. Which is not to say that this practice is independent of conscious intellectual choices and programs, but that the practice is at the same time more synthetic and more daring than the antithetical structure of much intellectual life in the early modern period seems to allow.

The force of this polemical atmosphere and the sense of frustration it engendered are captured by a metaphor drawn from an episode of the Odyssey, Ulysses' perilous navigation between the monster Scylla and the whirlpool of Charybdis. The metaphor was used in the mean-spirited debates of the 1520's (among Erasmus, Luther, and the University of Paris theologian Noël Béda) concerning the possibility of salvation.³² At issue was man's ability (or inability) to achieve salvation by himself, with Luther arguing the negative. Erasmus responds to Luther's radical denial of human merit by attempting to steer a middle course between the “Scylla of arrogance” and the “Charybdis of despair or indolence” [“Scylla arrogantiae … Charybdi(s) desperationis aut socordiae”].³³ Although the theological questions are, of course, extremely complex, the choice of this metaphor indicates the degree to which intellectual positions had hardened into opposing sides, and the increasing difficulty of a flexible course. In Luther's response to his Ulysses-like adversary, he characterizes Erasmus' solution as evasive and equivocal [“lubricus et flexiloquus”], and denies that there can be a middle course at all.³⁴ Luther responds to Erasmus with the proverbial “Those who try to avoid Charybdis fall into Scylla.”³⁵ In his rebuttal, Erasmus tries hard to maintain the possibility of a neither-nor solution: “And he does not sail unhappily, who holds a middle course between two opposite evils.”³⁶ When Erasmus and his fellow humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples are subsequently attacked by the scholastic Béda, Erasmus once again uses the metaphor, but now inverts the terms of the opposition: If you cannot navigate between them, the Scylla of Luther (i.e., total reliance on God's grace) is preferable to the Charybdis of the scholastics (i.e., efficaciousness of man's merit).³⁷ Béda, in turn, wonders whether one should call the ability of the creature to save itself, aided by God's grace, of all things, a Charybdis!³⁸

It is indeed ironic that two doctrines concerning man's salvation should be figured in terms of two mortal dangers. It is, however, similarly ironic that the image of the middle course, conveying human effort and resourcefulness, should be invoked by an Erasmus who, when faced with scholastic censures, would rather throw himself into the Scylla of Luther than concede the merit, however limited, that scholastics accorded to human effort. The sometimes confusing attacks and counterattacks in this polemic demonstrate the way in which intellectual discourse touching upon theological matters was clouded by polarities. Some late scholastics, in their theological refinement of Lombard's questions, and some humanists, in their scholarly practice, had arrived at a sense of human effort and relations as somehow autonomous of religious releology. But these hints are submerged in the adversarial rhetoric of the time. This should, I think, make us suspicious of analyses of culture based on intellectual polarities. It should also make us take imaginative and theoretical expressions of culture seriously, in themselves, and not simply as the reproduction of social or ideological interests. The literary world of the humanist Rabelais does intellectual work that is connected in a profound way to work done by the critics of humanism, even though, on the surface, everything seems to tell us that Rabelais' interests are incompatible with those of his apparent adversaries. For friendship in humanist writings is best understood by scholars whom no humanist could acknowledge as a friend.

Notes

1. The author wishes to thank Susan J. Erickson for her correction of and comments on this essay.

   Plautus' phrase is from his Asinaria (1. 495) and is reproduced by Erasmus in his Adagia (1.1.70) as a pendant to the phrase “man is a god to man.” On the significance of Loupgarou as an antithesis of charity, see Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais's Pantagruel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 36-40.

2. Jerusalem Bible. Quotations from Pantagruel are taken from the edition of Verdun L. Saulnier (Geneva: Droz, 1965), chap. 19 [29], 156. The numbers in brackets indicate the chapter numbers from the revised 1542 edition. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations are my own.

3. Pantagruel, chap. 15 [24], 129. See Duval, Design, 13-14.

4. “Par ma foy, je vous ay jà prins en amour si grande, que, si vous condescendez à mon vouloir, vous'ne bougerez jamais de ma compagnie, et vous et moy ferons ung nouveau per d’amytié, telle que fut entre Enée et Achates,” ibid., chap. 9, 54. See also the suggestive discussion of this encounter by Timothy Hampton, “‘Turkish Dogs’: Rabelais, Erasmus, and the Rhetoric of Alterity,” Representations 41 (1993): 58-82.

5. Erasmus, Adages, in Collected Works of Erasmus, trans. Margaret Mann Phillips (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 31:113.

6. “Breve tempus est, & arduum est negotium agere vere Christianum. Quin igitur omissis rebus supervacaneis, ea potissimum spectamus, quae Christus nos scire voluit, quae prodiderunt Apostoli, quae proprie ad charitatem faciunt, de corde puro, & conscientia bona, & fide non ficta, quam unam Paulus appellat [in 1 Tim. 1:5] finem & perfectionem totius Legis,” in Erasmus, Opera omnia (Loudun: P. Vander Aa, 1705), 6:926D n. 13. The translation is that of Craig R. Thompson, in “Better Teachers than Scotus or Aquinas,” in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Proceedings of the Southeastern Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. John L. Lievsay (Durham: Duke University Press, 1968), 2:144 n. 58.

7. “Unusquisque sibi charus est, nec aliquod a seipso praemium amoris exigit,” on Luke 6:31; quoted from Paraphrases in novum testamentum, in Erasmus, Opera omnia, 7:347E. Erasmus is borrowing this idea from Cicero (De amicitia, 21.80). I have dealt more fully with the economic aspects of gratuitous relationships in Renaissance Christian ethics in “Usus, fruitio, et l’économie de l’amitié,” forthcoming in the proceedings of a 1991 conference in Lyons, “Or, monnaie, échange dans la culture de la Renaissance” (Association d’Etudes sur la Renaissance, l’Humanisme, et la Réforme).

8. “Qui redamat amantem, non amaturus nisi redametur, is multum abest ab Evangelica charitate quae amicos pariter & inimicos complectitur,” ibid.

9. “Porro Paulus virtutem summam ad caritatem refert: caritatem autem in eo sitam, ut de quamplurimis quamoptime mereamur,” in Erasmus, Opera omnia, 2:55A.

10. See on this question, Erasmus, Enchiridion militis christiani (1518), 4th canon.

11. “Benefacite etiam his, qui vel non referunt beneficium, vel beneficium maleficio pensabunt. Et dato mutuum hoc animo, ut etiam si nihil sit ad te rediturum, tamen gaudeas opitulari proximo. Nec est periculum, ne vobis pereat merces vestra, siquidem hoc copiosus praemium rependet deus,” in Paraphrases, 348.

12. Among the abundant literature, see, on classical friendship, Jean-Claude Fraisse, Philia; la notion d’amitié dans la philosophie antique (Paris: Vrin, 1984); see also Marie Aquinas McNamara, L’amitié chez Saint Augustin (Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1961); on medieval friendship between kings, the interesting piece by C. Stephen Jaeger, “L’amour des rois: structure sociale d’une forme de sensibilité aristocratique,” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 3 (May-June 1991): 547-71; Barry L. Weller, “The Rhetoric of Friendship in Montaigne's Essais,” New Literary History 9 (1977-78): 503-23; Ronald A. Sharp, Friendship and Literature: Spirit and Form (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986). On Montaigne's essay on friendship, see also my Divine and Poetic Freedom in the Renaissance: Nominalist Theology and Literature in France and Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 182-90.

13. In the preface to his Livre de amytie de Ciceron … (Paris: V. Sertenas, 1537): “Laquelle chose jay entreprise dautant plus voluntiers, pource que la matiere de ce livre est conjoincte a la loy Evangelique, laquelle est toute acomplie par dilection & amytie …” (my translation, undertaken all the more willingly, since the matter of this book is connected to the evangelical law, which is accomplished by love and friendship; no pagination).

14. De beneficiis, 1.1.9.

15. “Nunc est virtus dare beneficia non utique reditura,” De beneficiis, 1.1.12.

16. De beneficiis, 2.16.1.

17. “(Liberalitatem) nec deesse oportet nec superfluere,” De beneficiis, 1.4.2.

18. In my hasty overview of Renaissance intellectual discourses, I am neglecting two important currents in early sixteenth-century culture: Neoplatonism (Marsilio Ficino, Leone Ebreo) and the mystical tradition (e.g., Nicholas of Cusa). Neoplatonism reproduces in this instance classical accounts of friendship. In Leone Ebreo's Dialoghi d’amore (1535), the account goes something like this: If love is a desire for perfection, how can one explain the love of the more perfect for the less perfect? The answer assumes the superiority of giving over receiving—those who give favors love more perfectly than those who receive them. The inferior depends on the superior as the effect on the cause, or as the son on the father. When the superior loves the inferior, the former would like to remove the latter's imperfection so that he may be more perfect and so that they may resemble each other in their perfection. The mystical tradition, although it touches on the problem of the gratuitous through its cultivation of paradoxes, is in the end a cultivation of a translogical, silent contemplation of God, which is, I think, antithetical to the practice-oriented, thoroughly verbal and communicative fictional universe of the novel.

19. Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross and J. O. Urmson, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2:1734 (1097a 30-35).

20. On the problem in Aristotle of loving a person “for his own sake,” see Allan W. Price, Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 108-09. The solution retained by Aristotle, according to Price, is that one does love another for his or her own sake even if it is the beloved's attributes that one loves, for attributes are the product of the beloved's will. This is clearly not the case with Pantagruel and Panurge, whose relationship must be defined in a more radically abstract sense of “for his own sake.”

21. Res ergo aliae sunt quibus fruendum est, aliae quibus utendum, aliae quae fruuntur et utuntur. Illae quibus fruendum est, beatos nos faciunt. Istis quibus utendum est, tendentes ad beatitudinem adiuvamur, et quasi adminiculamur, ut ad illas quae nos beatos faciunt, pervenire, atque his inhaerere possimus. Nos vero qui fruimur et utimur, inter utrasque constituti, si eis quibus utendum est, frui voluerimus, impeditur cursus noster.” On Christian Doctrine (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 1.3.3. I have modified slightly the translation by D. W. Robertson, Jr.

22. “Frui enim est amore alicui rei inhaerere propter seipsam. Uti autem, quod in usum venerit ad id quod amas obtinendum referre, si tamen amandum est,” ibid., 1.4.4. See also his De trinitate, 9.8.13. The distinction between fruitio and usus is the key to an analogy John Freccero makes between idolatry and autoreferentiality, in “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics,” in David Quint and Patricia Parker, eds., Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 20-32. This is, I believe, a misreading of Augustine, who uses the distinction only to refer to things, as we have seen. According to Freccero, “all things are signs” (28), which is contradicted by Augustine: “non autem omnis res etiam signum est” (not every thing is also a sign), 1.2.2. For Augustine, the realm of signs is by the nature of the sign a realm of use, in the sense that a sign inherently is the sign of something else, otherwise it would not be a sign. Speaking about verbal signs, Augustine states that “nemo enim utitur verbis, nisi aliquid significanda gratis” (no one indeed uses words, except to signify something), ibid.

23. “For it is commanded to us that we should love one another, but it is to be asked whether man is to be loved by man for his own sake or for the sake of something else. If for his own sake, we enjoy him; if for the sake of something else, we use him. But I think that man is to be loved for the sake of something else. In that which is to be loved for its own sake the blessed life resides; and if we do not have it for the present, the hope for it now consoles us. But ‘cursed be the man that trusteth in man’,” 1.22.20.

24. “The things which are to be enjoyed are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit …” (1.5.5), since God is “thought of in such a way that the thought seeks to attain something than which there is nothing better or more sublime,” 1.7.7.

25. “Fruitio est duplex, scilicet ordinata et inordinata. Fruitio ordinata est illa quando aliquid summe diligendum summe diligitur. Fruitio inordinata est illa qua summe diligitur et propter se quod minus et propter aliud est diligendum. Sed fruitio ordinata est duplex, quia quaedam est quietans simpliciter voluntatem, qualis dicitur esse fruitio patriae; alia non simpliciter quietat, sed permittit secum, etiam naturaliter, anxietatem et tristitiam, qualis est fruitio viae.” William of Ockham, Ordinatio, I qu 4 (“Whether only God should be the object of enjoyment”), in his Opera theologica, ed. Gedeon Gal and Stephan Brown (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: Franciscan Institute, 1967), 2:431. My translation.

26. “Frui itaque est amore alicui inhaerere propter se, sed ad solam voluntatem pertinet alicui inhaerere per amorem,” according to Johannes Altensteig, in his useful dictionary of scholastic theology first published in 1517, the Lexicon theologicum (rev. ed., 1617, by Johannes Tytz; repr., Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1974), 351. In his definition, Altensteig refers to Gabriel Biel.

27. See the discussion of Valla in Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (London: Constable, 1970), 1:114-16, 138-40. Erasmus uses the distinction in his Enchiridion militis christiani, 4th canon.

28. “Dicimus nos ea re frui quam diligimus propter se, sicut est Deus ｛diligendus｝. Unde Deus non est diligendus propter beneficia vel propter beatitudinem, sed propter se.” Altensteig, Lexicon theologicum, 351.

29. Ordinatio, I qu 4 art 1, 434. See also Gordon Leff, William Ockham: The Metamorphosis of Scholastic Discourse (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975), 418; Arthur S. McGrade, “Ockham on Enjoyment: Towards an Understanding of Fourteenth-Century Philosophy and Psychology,” Review of Metaphysics 34 (1981): 706-28. I am grateful to William J. Courtenay for directing me to this source and for his having pointed out the relevance of the use/enjoyment distinction.

30. On this theme of humanist polemics, see the work of Gérard Defaux on Rabelais, especially Pantagruel et les sophistes: Contribution à l’histoire de l’humanisme chrétien au XVIe siècle (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1973), and Le curieux, le glorieux, et la sagesse du monde: L’exemple de Panurge (Ulysse, Démosthène, Empédocle) (Lexington: French Forum, 1985). Bakhtin's work, often brilliant as imaginative criticism, is not a reliable guide to the intellectual context and import of Rabelais' books. Amidst the large amount of work on the relationship between humanism and scholasticism, see Trinkaus, In Our Image; John F. D’Amico, “Humanism and Pre-Reformation Theology,” in Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, ed. Albert Rabil, Jr. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 3:349-79; Alan Perreiah, “Humanistic Critiques of Scholastic Dialectic,” “The Sixteenth Century Journal 13 (1982): 3-22. The accusation of “curiosity” levelled against theologians by ecclesiastical reformers is not unique to the humanists, as we see in Gerson's Contra curiositatem studentium of 1402.

31. Quoted from Gargantua (1534?), ed. M. A. Screech and Ruth Calder (Geneva: Droz, 1970), chap. 14, 100. See also the note by Screech on this passage.

32. See, on the debate between Erasmus and Luther, Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Rhetoric and Reform: Erasmus' Civil Dispute with Luther (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); on Erasmian prudence, see Victoria Kahn, “Stultitia and Diatribe: Erasmus' Praise of Prudence,” German Quarterly 55 (1982): 349-69.

33. De libero arbitrio diatribe (1524); from Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, trans. and ed. E. Gordon Rupp et al. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), 96.

34. In Luther, De servo arbitrio (1552); see Luther and Erasmus, 103, 115.

35. Luther and Erasmus, 311. Erasmus cites and comments upon this proverb in his Adagia (1.5.4).

36. “Nec infeliciter navigat, qui inter duo diversa mala medium cursum tenet.” Hyperaspistes, Book 1, in Opera omnia, 10:1258A. My translation.

37. In his Supputatio errorum in censuris Natalis Bedae (1527) in Opera omnia, 9:568C: “Qui medium cursum tenet, incolumis est, sed si deflectendum est, tutius est incidere in Scyllam Lutheranicam, quam in Beddae Charybdim.”

38. In his Apologia Natalis Bedae, theologi, adversus clandestinos lutheranos (Paris: J. Badius, 1529), f. 62v: “Perpende lector, an Charybdis debeat dici hominibus contestari quod ad aeternam felicitatem nemo adultus perveniet, nisi per opera iustitiae quae humanis suis viribus dei gratia adiutis ipse fecerit.” Béda, however, typically goes on to equate Erasmus' solution to Luther's Scylla.