SOURCE: “Poetic Fury and Prophetic Fury,” in Renaissance Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2, June, 1989, pp. 106-14.

[In the following essay, Britnell probes the connection between poetic and prophetic inspiration, using Ronsard as a principal example.]

In the Renaissance the poet's claim to divine inspiration was usually made in the context of Plato's four divine furies—poetry, the mysteries, prophecy, love. In this paper I shall look at certain aspects of the relationship between poetic fury and just one of the other forms of fury, prophecy. These two modes of inspiration are linked by the fact that in both cases the inspired person must express his inspiration in the form of verbal communication. Apollo, the god of prophecy, is also the patron of the Muses.

For both classical and later writers wishing to describe inspiration as divine fury, it was always rather easier to deal with prophecy than with poetry. Any discussion of the nature of poetry has to resolve a tension between technique and inspiration—between form and content, rhetoric and cognitive function. No such tension arises in the case of prophecy. The prophet proclaims the message he has been given by supernatural revelation; he is passing on otherwise unknowable knowledge.

For classical writers, prophecy suggested a range of activity reaching down from oracles to diviners. The example par excellence of prophetic fury was the Pythia at Delphi, who was so spectacularly overtaken by the god. Clearly highlighted in descriptions of the Pythia are the elements of alienation from normal mental processes, possession by a god and the imparting of otherwise inaccessible knowledge, but in an enigmatic guise.¹ Here is a recipe for prophetic fury. It should be noted, incidentally, that this knowledge is not necessarily a programme for the future: the prophet speaks out for the god, and may merely give advice and directions.²

The theory of the four furies is attractive to Renaissance Neoplatonic thought; it provides one of the connections between different levels of the spiritual hierarchy and one of the ways in which the human spirit is put in touch with the divine. When Ficino was commenting on Plato's description of the four furies in the Ion, he presented them as being in themselves a hierarchy of means by which the soul could be turned from diversity and disorder towards a unified state of adoration of God. In this hierarchy, poetic fury held the lowliest position; it was the first rung of the ladder, serving to induce harmony in the soul. The ladder ascends through mysteries and then prophecy to attain the pinnacle with love.³ However, when commenting on the Phaedrus, Ficino admitted a wider scope for poetry by saying that it accompanied the other furies, because no man possessed by furor is content with ordinary speech.⁴

From the point of view of Renaissance poets, poetic fury was a dignifying notion, asserting their divine inspiration. But this dignity was lessened if its only function was to produce harmony. And so, as has been amply demonstrated by scholars, Pléiade poets did not on the whole exploit Ficino's hierarchy.⁵ They preferred a higher view of poetic fury which sees it primarily as a means by which hidden universal truths are communicated to mankind through the intermediacy of the poet. Plato himself offers good authority for such a view, for in the Ion he illuminates the way in which God uses poets as ministers by comparing them to diviners and prophets: in all these cases, he says, God takes away their own minds in order that they shall utter words which are actually the words of God to men.⁶ In this case it is of course quite difficult to make a distinction between prophetic and poetic fury, particularly when prophecy is not necessarily prediction. And indeed, poets are not concerned to make a clear distinction between prophecy and poetry; rather they exploit the similarity by using prophetic fury to serve as an illustrative figure, a means of understanding their high concept of poetic fury. This is particularly true of Ronsard, to whom I will return. Du Bellay is using the figure as a simile in Regrets VII when his loss of poetic fury is compared to the Prophetess who ceases to feel the god and suddenly falls silent.⁷

The use of this figure presupposes that prophetic fury is more readily comprehensible to the reader and that it has a certain prestige. This brings us to the question of just how the Platonic theory of divine fury was syncretized with Christianity. The associations of the word prophète for a sixteenth-century reader would not instantly be oracles and diviners; rather they would be the prophets of the Old Testament, warning of God's wrath and foretelling the coming of Christ. Or they might be Christian prophets, above all St John on Patmos. Prophecy in Christian terms means announcing God's truth by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. In Christian terms too it does not necessarily involve foretelling the future: thus a preacher who expounds God's word should be inspired by the spirit of prophecy.⁸

Through-going Neoplatonists and occultists simply merge the pagan and the Christian, seeking thereby to justify their thought system. Old Testament prophets march through Cornelius Agrippa's chapters on fury.⁹ But what significance do such Christian associations of prophecy have for Pléiade poets laying claim to poetic fury? If prophetic fury is used to illustrate, explain and give prestige to poetic fury, then the Christian associations could be valuable. Richard Le Blanc in his translation of the Ion was happy enough to equate `fureur poetique' with `grace divine', without which no good works are possible.¹⁰

Ronsard is particularly interesting with regard to this question. His is the dominant voice in asserting the inspired nature of poetry and the descent of poetry from its origins with poet-theologians, like Orpheus. He is also the most consistent connector of prophecy and poetry. As Françoise Joukovsky has shown, very important in this connection is the figure of the sibyl.¹¹

Sibyls appear in ancient literature as wise women foretelling the future. The priestess at Delphi was not a sibyl, but she may help to condition the most influential literary picture of a sibyl, which is that of the sixth book of the Aeneid. The Sibyl of Cumae leads Aeneas to her cave. `Suddenly her countenance and her colour changed and her hair fell in disarray … Her bursting heart was wild and mad; she appeared taller and spoke in no mortal tones, for the God was nearer …' Later `the prophetess … ran furious riot in the cave, as if in hope of casting the God's power from her brain. Yet all the more did he torment her … crushed her and shaped her to his will.' Finally `such were the words of mystery and dread which the Cumaean Sibyl spoke from her shrine; the cavern made her voice a roar as she uttered truth wrapped in obscurity … [At last] the frenzy passed and the mad mouth was still …'¹² Clearly we have here with Virgil's sibyl one of the most picturesque accounts available of possession by divine fury; Landino's commentary introduces at this point an explanation of all four furies,¹³ and certainly this description of prophetic fury conditions Ronsard's account of his experience of poetic fury in his poem “La Lyre” addressed to Jean de Belot:¹⁴

J'attends venir (certes je n'en ments point)
Cette fureur qui la Sybile espoint:
Mais aussi tost que par long intervalle
Dedans mon coeur du Ciel elle devalle,
Colere, ardent, furieux, agité,
Je tramble tout soubz la divinité.

(67-72)

And then, after the image of the torrential river rushing down from the mountains:

Ainsi je cours de course desbridée,
Quand la fureur en moy s'est desbordée
Sans craindre rien, sans raison, ny conseil.

(85-7)

Plainly here Ronsard is using the classical picture of prophetic inspiration to illuminate the concept of poetic inspiration. Here the sibyl is a very classical one. But Virgil himself was a major factor in the Christian prestige of the sibyl, because in the Fourth Eclogue, when he speaks of the return of the golden age with the birth of a baby, he calls it `the last era in the Cumean song'.¹⁵ For those who were to take the eclogue as referring to the birth of Christ, this confirmed the belief that the birth had been prophesied by the Cumean sibyl and by other sibyls.¹⁶ In Virgil's time a considerable body of apocalyptic and messianic writing was circulating in the Empire under the name of the sibyl.¹⁷ These and later texts were wrongly dated by early Christian writers; hence the conviction that a number of pagan prophetesses, some of great antiquity, had prophesied the coming of Christ. This belief was accepted throughout the middle ages. The prominence of sibyls increased in the early Renaissance; sibyls appear in religious art.¹⁸ Often they balance the Old Testament prophets. In France the sibyls are found in carvings in churches, in woodcuts in Books of Hours and as characters in mystery plays. They get into lists of famous women.¹⁹ They are in short by far the most accessible and popular manifestation of the prisca theologia.

I have recalled that background in order to underline just how familiar and meaningful the sibyl was to Ronsard's readers. As well as exploiting the sibyl as she appears in the Aeneid, Ronsard also sometimes expresses the analogy between sibyls and Old Testament prophets.²⁰ He links them, for example, in both the “Hymne de la Justice” and in “Le Chat.” They have less prestige in “Le Chat,”²¹ where they figure in a double descending hierarchy: men, women, animals—prophets of God, pagan sibyls, animals as means of augury. We start with prophets, evoked in a vocabulary at home in Christianity:

Or come on voit qu'entre les homes naissent
Miracles grands, des Prophetes qui laissent
Un tesmoignage à la posterité
Qu'ilz ont vescu pleins de divinité

(43-6)

We then move on to sibyls—in a rather backhand version of the `de claris feminis' motif:

Et come on voit naistre ici des Sybilles
Par les troupeaux des femmes inutiles:

(47-8)

Finally we pass to animals, which, Ronsard says, are also able to indicate the future to us out of the Father's goodness. Thus the concept of augury by animals is acclimatized into a Christian world view:

Ainsi voit-on, prophetes de nos maux,
Et de noz biens, naistre des animaux,
Qui le futur par signes nous predisent,
Et les mortels enseignent et avisent.
Ainsi le veult ce grand Pere de tous
Qui de sa grace a tousjours soing de nous.

(49-54)

In the “Hymne de la Justice,” however, the sibyls play a more dignified role.²² Jupiter is told by `Themis la devine' that, rather than destroy the human race, he must save it:

Il faut pour la sauver que, de grace, illumines
De ton esprit les coeurs des Sybilles devines,
Des Prophetes aussi, qui seront tes prescheurs,
Et, sans egard d'aucun, blasmeront les pecheurs,
Pour reprendre en ton Nom de tous hommes le vice
Attendant le retour de ta fille justice …

(367-72)

The vocabulary is laden with Christian connotations—`prescheurs' rhyming with `pecheurs', the prophet given the Judaeo-Christian role of preaching and reproving vice; the sense of `grâce' is ambiguous in such a context.²³ Here the mention of the sibyls serves as a transition from the paganizing fable which has gone before to a suggestion of the Christian reading of this fable.

Now of course one of the prime texts concerning the four furies is the “Ode à Michel de l'Hospital,”²⁴ on the face of it a wholly pagan fiction. Although the full set of four furies is mentioned, the furies of poetry and prophecy are predominant and are very strongly linked. The little Muses ask to be given

La tourbe des Chantres divins,
Les Poëtes, et les Devins
Et les Prophetes en partage.

(350-2)

Their father Jupiter promises them that as well as `science' they shall have his `saincte fureur' (407-8); Jupiter will inspire Apollo, Apollo will inspire the Muses, and they, by Apollo's power, will enrapture `les Poëtes saincts', who in their turn `raviront la tourbe estonnée' (413-20)—thus suggesting a route by which knowledge of the divine is communicated to humanity.

So when the Muses begin to shoot their subtle flames, with whom do they begin?

Du premier coup ont agité
Le cuoeur prophette des Sybilles,
Epoinct de leur divinité:

(528-30)

The sibyls sing the future, but with great obscurity. Next mentioned are the ancient oracles, written in verse; then diviners, and next, their disciples, `les Poëtes divins', the poet-theologians. After these `Poëtes sainctz' come the `vieux Poëtes humains' and then the `prophetes Romains'—meaning here Latin poets. In other words, a descending, degenerating hierarchy. The reason for putting the sibyls at the top of a hierarchy of classical prophets would seem to be because of their Christian associations. So again, they can point the reader towards a Christian reading of the pagan fable. This is something which Ronsard did overtly in the Abbregé de l'art poétique, in which he describes the Muses as the daughters of Jupiter—`c'est à dire de Dieu'.<sup>25</sup> Having made this identification, he then proceeds to outline a similar history of poetry: the first divine poets wrote their `Theologie allegorique' because of their contact with `Oracles, Prophetes, Devins, Sybilles, Interpretes de songes'—all of whom come within the ambit of prophetic fury.

It will be noticed that in these accounts of the history of poetry, Ronsard, while ignoring the hierarchy of the four furies as described by Ficino, does draw upon another hierarchy in which poetry is not paramount. It is consistently shown as secondary to prophecy. However, as he uses it, this hierarchy does in fact function to the greater glory of poetry, because in the wake of prophecy poetry is revealing divine secrets, and the prophecy in whose steps she follows is imbued with weighty Christian connotations.

It seems that the parallel between prophetic and poetic fury is facilitated by a concept of prophecy which stresses the speaking forth of divine truth rather than foretelling the future. It is true that the parallel between the sibyls and the Old Testament prophets must rest on the prediction of the birth of Christ, but quite often the predictive side of prophecy is understated by poets who are using this comparative figure.²⁶ However, it is the predictive aspect of prophecy which everyone is really interested in, and for most people, then as now, this must have been the prime sense of the word. It is not surprising, then, that this more exciting aspect of prophecy should also have been claimed for the inspired poet, as it was for example by Amadis Jamyn who, when speaking of prophetic and poetic fury, claimed that Ronsard had made true predictions about the religious wars.²⁷

I have been considering so far practising poets who illustrate and dignify their concept of poetic fury with reference to prophecy. I should like to conclude this paper with a brief reference to the reverse case. What about practising prophets? According to Christian belief the spirit of true prophecy comes from God, and it is a dangerous thing to claim that God has revealed the future to you, as the career of Postel and even more of Savonarola demonstrates. In France in the middle of the sixteenth century there was a foreteller of the future who cut himself off, both in the form and the content of his prophecy, from the medieval eschatological tradition which both Savonarola and Postel could be seen to be cultivating.²⁸ This prophet looked instead to a range of Renaissance occult sources of knowledge for his authority. I refer of course to Nostradamus, who abandoned narrative as a form for prophecy, espousing instead enigmatic verse.²⁹ What did he claim as the source of his knowledge? It would have been both dangerous and rather alien to his style to claim the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And he was above all an astrologer. But clearly he wished to lay claim not only to astrological science but also to some sort of divine inspiration. To suggest the latter he intermingles in the preface to his first collection a Christian vocabulary with the terminology of Neoplatonism and of occult philosophy which provided the theoretical basis for the concept of divine fury. Even as he denies being inspired by a `bacchante fureur' he suggests this context, as also with the Latin sentence: `Soli numine divino afflati praesagiunt et spiritu prophetico particularia.'³⁰ And he goes on to say: `Quant aux occultes vaticinations qu'on vient à recevoir par le subtil esprit de feu'—reminiscent of the Muse's subtle flames in Ronsard's ode—`… tout procedoit de la puissance divine du grand Dieu eternel, de qui toute bonté procede.'³¹ To Henri II in 1558 he says, `à un tresprudent, à un tressage Prince, j'ay consacré mes nocturnes & prophetiques supputations, composees plustost d'un naturel instinct: accompagné d'une fureur poëtique, que par reigle de poësie,—& la pluspart composé & accordé à la calculation Astronomique.'³² So here, by a pleasing reversal, as prophetic fury has served to enhance the prestige of poetry, poetic fury is one of the factors suggested by the prophet as a source of his prophetic pronouncements. He makes the same suggestion in one of his letters.³³ Nostradamus is claiming to be more than just an astrologer; by exploiting what was as he wrote a very fashionable concept, he suggests a form of divine inspiration which has been integrated into contemporary patterns of thought and has a certain prestige, but which avoids the dangerous claim of direct revelation from the Holy Spirit.

Nostradamus received favourable comments from several Pléiade poets, particularly after the death of Henri II and the outbreak of religious war, both of which they considered he had truly prophesied. Of particular interest is Ronsard again in the “Elegie à Guillaume des Autels”—written in 1560, during the lifetime of Nostradamus.³⁴ Here Ronsard reviews the possible sources of Nostradamus's knowledge, once more a descending hierarchy of possibilities: God-given frenzy, a good daimon, a bad daimon, a natural gift of communication with the celestial, a natural melancholy temperament—whatever it was, his prophecy has proved true. Let us notice exactly how Ronsard formulates the first possibility which I paraphrased as `God-given frenzy':

Ou soit que de grand Dieu l'immense eternité
Ait de Nostradamus l'entousiasme excité …

(175-6)

If we take `eternité' as being one of the attributes of God himself, precisely that which makes past, present and future all one, and if we take `entousiasme' as an inspiration or fury, this first suggestion is a perfect syncretization of Platonic prophetic fury in a contemporary Christian context. And `entousiasme' was a word which was used for poetic frenzy as well. The fact that Nostradamus couched his prophecies in enigmatic verse, specifically stressing its difficulty and his wish to veil truth from the vulgar, is yet another feature of his work that could commend him to Pléiade poets, underlining as it did the parallelism which they were so pleased to exploit between prophetic and poetic inspiration and practice.

Notes

1. See H. W. Parke and D. E. W. Wormell, The Delphic Oracle (2 vols, Oxford, 1956). Most of the picturesque descriptions are late (e.g. Lucan, Pharsalia, v. 105-97. Plutarch, De defectu oraculorum 51), but stray remarks in earlier writers establish the factors noted here. After due preparation the Pythia sat on a tripod and fell into a trance, in which state she uttered mysterious words; these utterances were in the first person, but the `I' was Apollo. Her sayings were then interpreted, in verse, by a male priest (the `prophetes').

2. H. W. Parke, Greek Oracles (London, 1967); see also E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (California, 1951), 64-101. Very often the enquirer was seeking advice on ritual purification.

3. Platonis … opera, additis Marsilii Ficini Argumentis at Commentariis (Basle, 1561), 536-7.

4. Commentaria in Platonem (Florence, 1496), r4^v: Furens autem nullus est simplici sermone contentus. Sed in clamorem prorumpit et cantus et carmina.

5. See particularly the discussion in R. V. Merrill and R. J. Clements, Platonism in French Renaissance Poetry (New York, 1957), 118-44. F. Joukovsky-Micha, Poésie et mythologie au XVI^esiècle: quelques mythes de l'inspiration chez les poètes de la Renaissance (Paris, 1969), provides a wealth of material: see especially pp. 123-85.

6. Platonis … opera, 539-40.

7. Other examples in Joukovsky-Micha, Poésie et mythologie, 132-40.

8. Prophecy as exposition of the word of God is one of the commonly accepted broad uses of the term, which can indeed be used for any supernatural illumination of the soul; see the introduction to A. Michael's article prophétie in the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, ed. Vacant, etc., XIII, cols 708-11. See also M. A. Screech, Ecstasy and the Praise of Folly (London, 1980), 214-16, 223-40.

9. De occulta philosophia (Cologne, 1533), book 3, chs 45-9, pp. cccx-cccxvi.

10. Le Dialogue de Plato, philosophie divin, intitulé Io, trans. R. le Blanc (Paris, 1546), A2^v: Et veritablement, jouxte nostre philosophie evangelique nous croyons fidelement que nul bon oeuvre peult estre faict sans le sainct esprit, qui est la grace de Dieu … Et neantmoins qu'aulcuns poetes n'ayent eu la congnoissance de Jesus Christ, vray, et seul Dieu, si est-ce toutesfoys, qu'ilz n'ont faict aulcune bonne operation sans la grace predicte …

11. Poésie et mythologie, 141-72.

12. Aeneid VI, 42-101. English translation by W. F. Jackson Knight, Penguin Classics, 1956.

13. Landino's commentary on the word furenti in line 100, in for example Virgilius cum commentariis quinque (Venice, 1499), fol. ccxix^r-v.

14. Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Laumonier (20 vols, Paris, 1914-75), XV, 19.

15. Line 4: Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas.

16. See Pierre Courcelle, `Les exégèses chrétiennes de la quatrième églogue', Rev Etud Anciennes, 59 (1957), 294-319.

17. The texts were only known from fragments in early Christian writers until the discovery of a manuscript published in 1545 by Xystus Betuleius. The edition by C. Alexandre, Oracula Sibyllina (2 vols. Paris, 1841-56), contains prefaces from sixteenth-century editions. See also The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, I, ed James H. Charlesworth (London, 1983), 317-472.

18. See Emile Mâle, L'art religieux de la fin du moyen âge en France (Paris, 1908), 267-96.

19. For example in Champier, La Nef des dames vertueuses (Paris, 1515); Bouchet, Le Jugement poetic de l'honneur femenin (Poitiers, 1538).

20. See particularly L'Hercule chrestien, lines 69-106, Oeuvres, ed. cit., VIII, 211-13, for a developed treatment of the sibyls as the vehicle of a secondary revelation to the gentiles.

21. Oeuvres, ed. cit., XV, 41.

22. Oeuvres, ed. cit., VIII, 65.

23. Laumonier here gives a note saying that the sense is `de bonne grâce, de bon coeur', and in relation to Le Chat, line 54 quoted above, he suggests `par sa faveur'. But a theological dimension seems undeniable in both cases.

24. Oeuvres, ed. cit., III, 118-63.

25. Ibid. XIV, 4.

26. A good example would be Olivier de Magny's treatment of the theme in his odes on behalf of Pierre de Paschal, Odes, ed. E. Courbet (2 vols, Paris, 1876), I, 73ff, e.g. p. 106: `Les Poëtes, que Dieu fait naistre / Prophetes de sa deité, / Decouvrant par eux mille choses, / Et mille encor, et mille encloses / Au sein de la divinité.' But on the other side could be cited Ronsard's Hymne de l'automne, where the inspired poet `predit toute chose avant qu'elle soit faite' as well as knowing `la nature & les secrets des cieux' etc., (Oeuvres, ed. cit., XII, 47, ll. 13-24).

27. Amadis Jamyn, Oeuvres poétiques, Premières poésies … ed. S. M. Carrington (Geneva, 1973), Avant-chant nuptial, pp. 77-86, see lines 23-62.

28. On the medieval tradition see Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1969).

29. There is no very satisfactory edition of the Centuries; for convenience I cite from that of A. Le Pelletier (2 vols, Paris, 1867). For bibliography see C. von Klinckowström, `Die ältesten Ausgaben der “Propheties” des Nostradamus', Z Bücherfreunde (Leipzig, 1913), 361-72; also M. Chomarat, Nostradamus entre Rhône et Saône (Lyon, 1971) and Bibliographie lyonnaise des Nostradamus (Buenc, 1973). Literature on Nostradamus is notoriously unscholarly; there is useful material in E. Leoni, Nostradamus, Life and Literature (New York, 1961) and Prophecies and Enigmas of Nostradamus, trans. L. E. LeVert (New Jersey, 1979). Most welcome is Jean Dupèbe's scholarly edition of Lettres inédites (Geneva, 1983).

30. Les Oracles de Michel de Nostredame, ed. Le Pelletier. vol. II, preface dated 1555, p. 10. This is an elaboration of a sentence which concludes the first section of the pseudo-Ptolemaic Centiloquium: it is quoted as from Ptolemy by Cornelius Agrippa in his chapter De vaticinio et furore, p. cccxi: `Soli numine afflati predicunt particularia'.

31. Ibid. 12.

32. Ibid. 146.

33. Lettres, ed. Dupèbe, letter XLI, dated 1562, p. 140: `Itaque arrepto olorino calamo (anserinum enim ter recusavit), illo ipso dictante, veluti furore percitus poëtico, in tales versus proprupi …' See Dupèbe's note and his introduction, pp. 16-18.

34. Oeuvres, ed. cit., X, 358.