[In the following essay, Sommers characterizes Marguerite's poetry as a delicate combination of mysticism and the instructional motif of the celestial ladder.]

“The mystic, as we have seen, makes it his life's aim to be transformed into the likeness of Him in whose image he was created. He loves to figure his path as a ladder reaching from earth to heaven, which must be climbed step by step.”

Wiliam Randolph Inge, Christian Mysticism (London: Methuen, 1948) p. 9

Reflecting her desire to understand the process of salvation and her awareness of divine mystery, Marguerite de Navarre's religious poetry can be prosaically transparent or mystically opaque. The mixture of stylistic levels that results from her attempts to communicate religious experience in its intellectual and affective totality has not often found an appreciative audience. A recent biography by Marie Cerati lauds sincerity rather than poetic skill and continues a critical tradition that is best summarized by Pierre Jourda who respected the Queen's literary ambition, but deplored her technical inadequacies.¹ Praise for her secular épîtres and the chansons spirituelles is balanced in his two-volume study of her work by a less than sympathetic reading of the Dernières Poésies and, in particular, the Miroir de l'âme pécheresse:

C'est moins un poème qu'une longue effusion, une confession où de beaux traits épars ne suffisent pas à compenser des longueurs et un bavardage parfois pénible à suivre.

(p. 380)

Recent critics—Alan Boase, Claudia Kraus, Hans Sckommodau, Robert Marichal, and Robert Cottrell—have developed a more favorable impression of Marguerite the poet. Marichal, to give but one example, finds the element of bavardage to be relatively insignificant. He recognizes the multiple intentions that complicate and enrich her verse and concludes that her esthetic demands a special adjustment from the reader:

Marguerite de Navarre a été un grand esprit, elle n'a pas été un aussi grand artiste, l'apprécier demande un effort: une grande familiarité avec la langue de son temps, et sous un rythme capricieux où l'on ne voit d'abord que maladresse, savoir découvrir une musique extrêmement sensible qui n'a rien de commun avec l'éloquence et la carrure, perpétuelle tentation, hélas, du vers français.²

Marguerite's poetic œuvre includes some important pieces inspired by the courtly love tradition—La Coche,Les Quatres dames et les quatre gentilshommes,L'Histoire des satyres et nymphes de Diane, épîtres and huitains addressed to various members of family and court—but most of her poems are religious. The Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses, the only collected edition of her verses published during her lifetime, contains an impressive number of meditations, oraisons and verse dramas. These works must, moreover, be supplemented by the religious verse included in the poésies inédites discovered and edited in recent times by Jourda, Sckommodau, Lefranc, Schneegans, Saulnier, Becker and others.³ Here as in the Marguerites, the Queen reveals a continuing interest in portraying her faith experience.⁴

This study will consider five religious poems that span Marguerite's literary career—Le Petit œuvre and Le Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne (1524-1526?), Le Miroir de l'âme pécheresse (1531), La Navire, and Les Prisons (1547-1549). These allegories, dialogues and meditative verses demonstrate the Queen's interest in generic diversity and literary technique, and they also constitute the longest and most detailed narrative explorations of her faith. Each of the five poems describes the process of conversion that leads Marguerite's narrator or persona from the abyss of sin towards mystical unity. As a group they illustrate particularly well the intense interest in the “mechanism of spiritual life” noted by W.G. Moore:

Ce qui l'intéresse en particulier, c'est ce qu'on pourrait appeler le mécanisme de la vie spirituelle. Elle est continuellement à se demander comment.⁵

In composing narratives that trace the Christian's progress towards union with God Marguerite is not, of course, venturing into unexplored territory. Generations of religious writers had left itineraries. Augustine outlined his spiritual conversion in the Confessions which remained a basic text for both medieval and Renaissance readers. Medieval Platonists combined allegorical verse with various readings of the Timaeus. In Bernard Silvestris' De Mundi Universitate Natura ascends towards those celestial realms where Genius joins form to matter. Alain de Lille allows Prudentia to journey towards God in his Anticlaudianus, and this tradition of mystical, yet cosmological narrative culminates in Dante whom Marguerite imitates and cites with great respect in both the Petit œuvre and Les Prisons.⁶ Tradition, however, also offered Marguerite other sources of inspiration. Lefèvre d'Etaples, her protégé, was intensely interested in the visionary and speculative theology of the Middle Ages and published mystical texts of Ruysbroeck, Raymond Lull, Elizabeth of Schönau and Hildegard of Bingen, and it is likely that Marguerite had read the personal and affective Miroir des simples âmes of Marguerite Porète.⁷ A review of spiritual literature published during the sixteenth-century shows, moreover, that her contemporaries maintained an interest in spiritual texts that prescribed a regimen of prayers and contemplative techniques designed to lead through clearly-defined stages of mystical progression. Augustine, whose works were readily available, described a modest ladder of love with seven steps in the De Quantitate Animae.⁸ Richard of Saint Victor provided instructions for the contemplative in the Benjamin Major and the Benjamin Minor and displays in detail the medieval tendency to divide spiritual progression into stages involving parallel series of three and seven.⁹ More elaborate steps and instructions could be found in new editions of Bonaventure's De septem gradibus contemplationis (Opuscula, Paris: 1505, 13, 17), Gerard Zerbolt's De spiritualibus ascenscionibus (Paris: Gilles de Gourmont, ca. 1507), Joannis Climacus' sixth-century Scala paradisi (Milan: 1506; Cologne: 1540) and Jean Mombaer's more contemporary Rosetum (Paris: 1510).

Marguerite may have known some of these complicated models of mystical ascent, but for the basic structure of her poems, however, she turns to a simple, tertiary progression—purgatio, illuminatio, perfectio—that was familiar to members of her own milieu and to the evangelical community that would presumably provide her readers.¹⁰ Guillaume Briçonnet, Marguerite's correspondant and spiritual mentor during the 1520's and a major influence on both the form and content of her writing, links the three stages with comprehension of Biblical material in his letters:

Aussy il n'est que une doctrine evangelique qui se communicque aux uns comme lait et aux aultres comme viande solide et aux aultres en sublimité de doctrine, selon qu'ilz sont capables d'eau de purgacion ou de illuminacion ou de perfection.¹¹

In another letter dated November 22, 1521, playing upon Marguerite's reference to herself as “doublement malade”, he develops an allegorical narrative in which the definition of the purgatio-perfectio ascent is broadened through association with specific forms of metaphysical malady:

Des deux maladies que dessus la premiere est purgatrice, la seconde illuminative; elle allume la chandelle de congnoissance, dont venoit le bien perdu, pour le sercher. Il y en a une troiziesme qui est perficiente: après le Seigneur trouve ou qu'il a trouvé l'esgarée ame, lors elle tumbe en une langueur sy sollicité(e) et soigneuse qu'elle devient percluze, destituée de toutes operations, fors celles que le doux Seigneur faict en elle, vivant en luy, et luy en elle. La malladie est perpetuelle et ne se peult guerir.

(I, 74)

Briçonnet provides a general understanding of the triple ascent pattern. It is clear that the individual depends upon grace, that purgatio is an initial stage linked with purification, repentance, and reform, that illuminatio has to do with a higher degree of spiritual insight and that perfectio is a stage beyond that, a level that Briçonnet's emotionally-charged language equates with celestial bliss or prolonged mystical rapture. Briconnet's concept of the triple way undoubtedly derives from his reading of spiritual masters of the Middle Ages. Dionysius evokes the threefold path in the Celestial Hierarchies where it represents stages of mystical initiation that correspond to the purgative, illuminative, and perfective action of the Deity disseminated through the angelical and ecclesiastical hierarchies. Yet another description of the triple way, and one which will be more relevant to Marguerite's earlier ladder-poems, occurs in the De triplici via of Bonaventure.

Bonaventure does not describe steps of initiation as much as specific exercises that will allow the Christian soul to achieve the virtues and mental attitudes appropriate for each spiritual level. Influenced by the scholastic penchant for numerical classification, Bonaventure associates each stage of his triple way with forms of prayer, meditation, and contemplation and with a specific faculty of the soul. Purgatio is governed by conscience, illuminatio by intellect, and perfectio by wisdom. Goals for each of the three levels include peace of mind, truth and love. Purgative meditation is characterized initially by painful reflection on sin, death, and the day of judgment, but it ends in joyful reconciliation with Christ. The illuminative way encourages meditation upon the passion, the favors God has granted, and the promise of eternal reward, but it also inspires fervent imitation of Christ. Perfectio facilitates contemplation of the beauty and mercy of God and leaves the soul burning with love for the Celestial Spouse.

At least in her early poems, Marguerite conforms to the tertiary progression evoked by Briçonnet and Bonaventure. Her persona quite clearly experiences a spiritual initiation and progress along the mystical way, but that progress is associated with specific forms of prayer, meditation, and contemplation. Unlike the Franciscan, who establishes an authoritative distance between himself and his readers, however, Marguerite creates lyrical personae whose intimate dialogues with God lead the reader into the text. Her spiritual progression also incorporates elements that do not belong to the Bonaventuran system. Three of the poems focus on domestic relationships. Her eight-year-old niece Charlotte is the authoritative figure in the Dialogue, the late François I^er addresses his sister in the Navire, and the third book of Les Prisons describes the edifying deaths of various relatives including Louise de Savoie and Marguerite's first husband Charles d'Alençon. Given the deep love that bound her to mother and brother and that is expressed so poignantly in her correspondance, much of her praise is undoubtedly sincere, but intense love of family was often in conflict with the Christian insistence on exclusive love of God. Marguerite, therefore, places family love in the shadowy realm at the foot of the ladder along with excessive veneration of the courtly lady. It is not carnal in the sense that it involves physical passion, it is carnal because it endows the loved one with a value and importance apart from God. Charlotte reproaches Marguerite for her grief:

Cessez le pleur de desolation
Qui procède de la chair et du sang,
Où trop avez mys vostre affection.

(88-90).¹²

François I^er is similarly disturbed by his sister's unrestrained mourning and reminds her that the virtues and talents she so regrets were all gifts of God. It is the Deity more than the individual who merits love and praise:

Mon bras fut fort, soubtenu de sa dextre:
Bref, je estois tel, sage, puissant et beau,
Qu'il luy plaisoit par sa grace en moy estre.

(Navire, 841-843)¹³

Marguerite's adaptation of the Bonaventuran progression requires that she ascend from excessive love of niece and brother to pure love of God. With regard to Charlotte she struggles to overcome the tension between the flesh with its continuous flow of tears and the spirit which rejoices in the salvation of her niece. In the Navire she rises above selfish love of her brother and waits eagerly for the moment when death will admit her to the celestial bergerie.

The stages of the triple way provide an intellectual background for Marguerite's five ladder-poems, but they do not preclude shifts in philosophical emphasis and poetic form or determine the textual divisions of her works. The Petit œuvre adheres very closely to the Bonaventuran pattern, and the persona experiences the purgative emotions cited in the De Triplici Via as well as the illuminative focus on the crucifixion and the imitatio Christi. The Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne begins with consolatory verses in which Charlotte assures Marguerite that death has brought her salvation. The purgatio-perfectio sequence appears in the ensuing discussion where it is far less detailed than in the Petit œuvre and combined with the solafideism that is to be a consistent feature of Marguerite's subsequent poetry. La Navire is a purgative and illuminative poem with the unitive phase emerging in François' discussion of his place in paradise and in the final promises to his sister. In the Miroir the purgative phase is reduced, but there is elaborate depiction of some aspects of illuminatio and of the union with God that occurs through faith. In Les Prisons the allegorical narrative achieves such complexity, the interplay of Petrarchan and Neoplatonic themes such importance, that the Bonaventuran triad with its three stages and its linking with Scriptural reading finds complete expression only in Book III.

For Marguerite, moreover, the ladder is both an intellectual structure to guide the reader of her verse narratives and a topos. The ladder-as-topos makes an appearance in the Dialogue as Marguerite reflects upon the death of little Charlotte:

Bref, si Dieu est seul de sa créature
Du tout aymé, l'on ayme nulle chose,
Sinon d'autant qu'elle est de luy figure,
Voyant en eulx sa grâce y estre enclose,
Faisant de tout ce que l'on voit eschelle,
Tousjours montanz sans y faire grand pose.

(769-774)

Marguerite deals here with the relationship between the soul and the created world, reproducing elements of Christian Platonism. Since the visible world can be decoded only by a spiritual vision that depends on grace, however, she owes less to the Ficinian concept of a ladder of love that begins with the contemplation of beautiful bodies and leads rationally to contemplation of things celestial than she does to medieval sources of Neoplatonism like Augustine, pseudo-Dionysius, Bonaventure. The latter's Itinerarius mentis in Deum illustrates the relationship between Marguerite's development of the ladder-topos and medieval tradition. Citing Dionysius, Bonaventure emphasizes the importance of spiritual preparation for the soul in search of God:

Denis, in his Mystical Theology, intending to enlighten us in regard to mystical ecstasy, names prayer as the first condition. So let us pray and say to the Lord our God: Teach me, O Lord, your way, that I may walk in Your truth; direct my heart that I may fear Your name.¹⁴

Only after this discussion of prayer does he introduce the ladder:

In our present condition the created universe itself is a ladder leading toward God. Some created things are His traces; others, His image; some of them are material, others spiritual; some temporal, others everlasting; thus, some are outside us, and some within.

(pp. 9-10)¹⁵

Marguerite agrees with Bonaventure on the importance of prayer as preparation for religious insight. She would also agree that the spiritually enlightened soul can find traces of divine intelligence and goodness in the external world but, although she evokes a typically Bonaventuran ladder in the Dialogue, she rarely takes an interest in what is “outside us”. The Dialogue turns away from “ce que l'on voit” to consider the interior landscape of the soul.

In the Navire Marguerite presents other expressions of the ladder-topos. She plants the foot of the cross-ladder in the realm of carnal values, directing the reader's attention relentlessly upwards and reflecting a Plato-Pauline distinction between body and soul:

Qui vit en chair, il vit en une abysme
De tout peché, demeurant en l'eschelle
Tousjours au pied, sans regarder la cime.

(328-330)

She then develops the topos of the cross-as-ladder and with it, the emphasis on patient suffering and imitatio Christi that dominated the Petit œuvre:

Or prent sa croix pour faire ung eschaffaut
De terre au ciel, et aussy pour destruire
Ton ennemy qui est cruel et cault.

(862-864)¹⁶

Whether it occurs as a topos within the work or appears as a series of steps that structure the progress of the soul towards unio, the ladder represents Marguerite's enduring fascination with spiritual ascent. Fascination is, nevertheless, compatible with variation. As we have seen, ladder topoi range from contemplation of order and harmony in the cosmos to reflection of Christ's redeeming death on the cross. Marguerite may adhere closely to the Bonaventuran triple way or combine it with a more flexible ascent pattern that stresses fides and caritas. Modifications of the ascent pattern necessarily affect the formal structure of the narrative because faith and love coexist and reinforce one another in a way that makes it difficult to portray spiritual progression as a series of stages that occur in logical sequence.

Since even a slight shift in Marguerite's understanding of spiritual progression results in a variation of literary structure and language, study of the ladder-poems leads ultimately to a dual perspective. As Marguerite the mystic strives for more adequate expression of religious experience, Marguerite the writer “ascends” towards more complex forms of expression and textual organization. In the Petit œuvre, which begins our study, she directs her affective piety towards the cross and combines the influence of the imitatio Christi with that of Dante¹⁷.

Notes

1. Marie Cerati, Marguerite de Navarre (Paris: Sorbier, 1981), Pierre Jourda, Marguerite d'Angoulême: étude biographique et littéraire (Paris: Champion, 1930).

2. La Coche (Geneva: Droz) p. 1-2.

3. For a complete listing of both modern and Renaissance editions, consult H.P. Clive, Marguerite de Navarre, An Annotated Bibliography (London: Grant and Cutler, 1983).

4. She has left such a detailed record of her faith that Hanna Hone Leckman has assessed her mysticism in terms of the criteria provided by William James in her recent dissertation, Mysticism in the Poetry of Marguerite de Navarre Washington: Catholic University of America, 1982.

5. W.G. Moore, La Réforme allemande et la littérature française (Strasbourg: Faculté des lettres, 1930) p. 191.

6. For a discussion of the medieval literary narrative, see Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century (Princeton University Press, 1971).

7. Jean Dagens in “Le Miroir des simples âmes et Marguerite de Navarre”, in La Mystique rhénane (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963) pp. 281-289, argues convincingly that Porète is the feminine mystic mentioned in Les Prisons, III, 1315-1316. Robert Cottrell discusses her influence briefly in The Grammar of Silence; A Reading of Marguerite de Navarre's Poetry (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1986), pp. 299-303. Leckman provides further discussion of Marguerite's poetry and medieval mysticism ranging from the Brothers of the Common Life to the libertins spirituels in Mysticism and the Poetry of Marguerite de Navarre.

8. The complete works of Augustine were published in a nine-volume edition at Bâle in 1506. A later edition appeared in Paris in 1515, and there was also the Erasmus-Froben edition in 10 volumes, Bâle: 1528-1529. Editions of individual works appeared frequently throughout the century

9. Opera, Venice, 1506. His predecessor and fellow Victorine Hughes de Saint Victor was also available to Renaissance readers.

10. The basic stages of the triple way antedate Christianity and can be found, according to some scholars, in Platonic and Neoplatonic theories of contemplation. Ray C. Petry provides some basic information in Late Medieval Mysticism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1957). Also helpful are general articles on Plato, Plotinus and Dionysius in the Dictionnaire de spiritualité, éd. Viller-Val, Paris: 1953.

11. Guillaume Briçonnet, Marguerite d'Angoulême, Correspondance ed. Christine Martineau and Michel Veissière (Geneva: Droz, 1975) Vol. 1, 88. Briçonnet's influence on Marguerite has been widely discussed. A select bibliography would include Cottrell, The Grammar of Silence, Christine Martineau and Christian Grouselle, “La Source première et directe du Dialogue: la lettre de Guillaume Briçonnet à Marguerite de Navarre, du 15 septembre 1524, BHR 32 (1970), 559-577 and Fritz Neubert, “Zur Problematic der Briefe der Margarete von Navarra”, Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 79 (1963), 117-172.

12. Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne, ed. Pierre Jourda, La Revue du Seizième Siècle 13 (1926). All quotations are taken from this edition.

13. La Navire, ed. Robert Marichal (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1956). All further references are to this edition.

14. “The Journey of the Mind to God” in The Works of Bonaventure, trans. José de Vinck (Patterson, New Jersey: Saint Anthony Guild Press, 1960) I, p. 9.—Ideo Dionysius in libro de Mystica Theologia, volens nos instruere ad excessus mentales, primo praemittit orationem. Oremus igitur et dicamus ad Dominum Deum nostrum; “Deduc me Domine, in via tua, et ingrediar in veritate tua; laetetur cor meum, ut timeat nomen tuum”. Opera Omnia, Quarrachi: Collegii S. Bonaventurae 1962. All Latin references to Bonaventure will come from this edition.

15. Cum enim secundum statum conditionis nostrae ipsa rerum universitas sit scala ad ascendum in Deum; et in rebus quaedam sint vestigium, quaedam imago, quaedam corporalia, quaedam spiritualia, quaedam temporalia, quaedam aeterna, ac per hoc quaedam extra nos, quaedam intra nos. Opera Omnia, p. 297.

16. A parallel passage occurs in the Oraison de l'âme fidèle (Marguerites, ed. F. Frank, Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1873, vol. 1, p. 129):

    O Christe en croix, tu es la vrai eschelle
    Par qui le Ciel se ravist et eschelle …

17. I am grateful to Professor Donald M. Gilman for his comments on this chapter, to Professor M. Bonner Mitchell for his review of the entire manuscript and to the Research Council of the University of Missouri for financial support.