The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought

MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE, PART II

MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE is entirely as striking a presence in history, and absence from history, as Jean Cauvin. When she is mentioned at all it is usually as the great patroness of letters and learning in the early French Renaissance, and the great protector of the early Reformation in France. These things by themselves should be more than sufficient to merit interest and respectful attention, one would think. She also wrote, poetry, plays, and fiction, all of them in French, which was only then emerging as a literary language. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, in its 1910 edition, speculates that her reputation fell victim to the prejudice against women of letters. Presumably her fame would have been greater if she had done less to deserve it.

(Her name is problematic also. Historians and reference books often call her Marguerite d’Angoulême, her name by birth, rather than Marguerite de Navarre, her name from her second marriage, to the titular king of Navarre. Navarre is and was in northern Spain, and while Marguerite was queen of Navarre her court was at Pau, in southern France. Her status seems to have been notional, almost fanciful, though because of her royal birth, her power was very real. I think she may have found a sort of metaphysical humor in her situation. The speaker in her poetry often refers to herself as Rien, Nothing, which I take to be a play on the title Royne, as they spelled it in those days. She chose the king of Navarre over far more advantageous offers of marriage. She is a witty-looking woman, to whom Rabelais dedicated the fourth book of Pantagruel with an absurd little poem.)

With the distinguished exception of the doctors of the Sorbonne, who paid her first book of poetry the compliment of scrutinizing it for heretical ideas, theologians seem never to consider that her writings might have theological content, let alone that her influence on theology could have extended beyond her interventions on behalf of imperiled dissenting preachers. Her religious poems and plays, when they are discussed at all, have been regarded as mere mystical pietism. She lived in the great age of mystical piety, the age of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross among so many others. But her poems are treated as mere effusions, or as Catholicism or Protestantism set to rhyme, statements of possibly momentary allegiance to doctrines formulated by others, containing nothing of her own religious thought or religious experience.

So far as I have discovered, available information about her involvement with the Reformation in France is sketchy and oblique, but not inconsistent with her having played a very decisive role in its emergence. At the time of the publication of her first book of poems, in 1530, Protestants were still called “Lutherans.” Cauvin had published only a commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, a fine piece of scholarship in which he presumed to differ with the great Erasmus, but which showed no indication of the course his life was to take. At the time of the persecutions in Paris — set off by the so-called Affair of the Placards, when leaflets derogating the Mass appeared all over Paris, one even in the king’s bedchamber — Cauvin made his way to Nérac in Angoulême, to the court of Marguerite, already the first recourse of dissenters needing shelter.

I have never read that they were acquaintances, nor even found speculation about whether or not they were, nothing except a comment in an old French encyclopedia that the two had met frequently in Paris before he came to Nérac. Cauvin was the brilliant student of humanists like the German Lutheran Melchior Wollmar, whom Marguerite brought to the university at Bourges and who taught him Greek there. It seems impossible that she could have been unaware of him. Cauvin’s close friend in Paris, Nicolas Cop, was the son of her brother’s physician. Her valet de chambre, the poet Clément Marot, was forced to leave Paris when Cop and Cauvin were, apparently made suspect by the same associations. It is hard to imagine how these lives were lived. But it is clearly true that Marguerite surrounded herself with intellectual and literary people whom Cauvin also would have known, and that she was devoted to encouraging just such gifts as he had displayed. He has been without honor in his own country for a long time now, and perhaps it has seemed ungallant to historians to associate him with this amiable queen. But in fact the world she created around herself created him. And perhaps it is true to say she created him.

It seems to be assumed that Cauvin became acquainted at Nérac with Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, the old priest and humanist who had been Marguerite’s tutor in her childhood, and that he may have “converted” Cauvin to the Reform cause, though he himself never underwent any such conversion. There is no reason to look for one decisive influence. Cauvin’s friend and cousin, Pierre Robert — called Olivetan, which means Midnight Oil — had by this time made a translation of the Bible into French, and was involved in the movement. Cauvin does seem to have been strongly affected by his stay at Nérac, given direction by it, but this need not be interpreted as meaning he underwent a conversion there, especially since he says nothing to encourage the idea that he did. He went from there to the du Tillet household, where he availed himself of their library, and from there to Basel, where he wrote the first version of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, giving distinctive form and expression to a Protestant movement that was French and non-Lutheran. None of this is inconsistent with Marguerite’s having recruited this promising and sympathetic young humanist to be the formulator of a distinctive French Protestantism, nor is the fact that after the publication of the Institutes he went to the court of her niece in Italy, Renée de Ferrara.

At about the same time, Marguerite sent her protégé Clément Marot to shelter with her niece. Although Marot had been arrested twice for heresy (and abjured it once) he was popular and influential as a secular poet, until 1539, when he published rhymed and metrical translations of the first thirty psalms. These were set to music, and swept France, and became the hymns of the churches in Geneva, greatly enriching and advancing Reform worship, and music itself, or so I have read, because it developed to accommodate the great expressiveness of congregational singing. (Such passion surrounds this history that more than usual caution is called for in accepting such judgments — one French authority has said that no matter what contemporaries may have thought, these translations of the psalms were “one of the most lamentable abortions to have been recorded in literary history.”)

Music to be sung by the congregation had already become important among the Lutherans. Marguerite tried her hand at religious lyrics set to popular tunes, which were published in a little book titled Chansons Spirituelles, an allusion to Paul’s encouraging the Christians at Ephesus to sing “hymns and psalms and spiritual songs.” Cauvin himself attempted translations of the psalms that would be suitable for singing. Marot’s translations were immediately embraced by Cauvin in preference to his own, and became as definitive of Calvinism in their way as the Institutes. Marot went to Geneva for refuge when his book of psalms was condemned as heretical by the Sorbonne, but stayed there only briefly and died the next year in Turin.

Marguerite’s importance as a literary patroness cannot have been accidental. Either she chose very gifted writers to be her protégés, or her influence was considerable enough to establish those she favored as the dominant writers of the period. The first seems more probable, since her choices were in no sense obvious or safe, the most famous of them being the heretical defrocked monk and general scapegrace François Rabelais. She could not prevent another of them, Étienne Dolet, from being burned at the stake. She favored those who wrote in French, Rabelais being an early master of the language. Marot, in his later poetry and his psalms, is said to have turned French poetry toward a “modern” vernacular simplicity, relative to prevailing conventions. She encouraged Lefèvre d’Étaples to make a translation of the New Testament into French from the Latin of Jerome. And, of course, she also wrote poetry in French, in a style that might well be seen as modern, like Marot’s, though in anticipation of him, if it were not read as lady’s poetry and therefore as all she asked of herself, or the best she could do. Emily Dickinson comes to mind.

Marguerite wrote poems and plays, almost all on religious subjects, and she wrote The Heptameron, a collection of short stories modeled on Boccaccio’s Decameron. The seventy stories of her collection, like the one hundred of his, are narratives of profane love, many of them crude and anticlerical. To a modern reader, The Heptameron seems rather startling beside the rest of her work. But Boccaccio produced rarefied religious writing also. It seems to have been true of medieval Europe that these two poles of experience could coexist in one sensibility, as a cycle of sin and repentance, perhaps. Then, too, marriage among the aristocracy was made to suit calculations of power and diplomatic advantage, and to produce heirs. It is no great surprise that they regarded it casually or cynically or as a kind of captivity, or that infidelity was acceptable in the circles The Heptameron represents.

Cauvin invented modern marriage, if that is what he did, by basing his vision of it on the Old Testament use of the metaphor of married love to describe the covenant relationship between God and Israel, in which adultery is idolatry and apostasy, and faithfulness is joy and salvation. He was married for nine years, very happily, to Idelette de Bure, a widow with two children. His only child died within days of its birth, and he outlived Idelette by twenty-five years. Throughout his life the idea of marriage seems only to have been more cherished by him. In the enormous positive significance he attached to it, he set himself apart from the religious tradition which idealized virginity and celibacy, and also from the humanist embrace of the sensuality of courtly and pagan literature (which was, nevertheless, published in Geneva, during Cauvin’s prominence there). Perhaps he was fascinated with marriage in part because it integrated these extremes. It is the strongest impulse of his thought to reject polarities. This enshrining of marriage is seen as narrowness in Cauvin, as Puritanism. But perhaps it should be seen as the solution to a problem Marguerite would have acknowledged. In The Heptameron, a fictional party of stranded aristocratic travelers tell stories to pass the time. The ladies in the company are better and brighter than the men, but the tales are so often brutal and charmless, to the detriment of women, that the world they describe seems like a world well lost. The book was not published until nine years after the queen’s death.

In imitating Boccaccio, Marguerite was turning to a writer who died more than 120 years before she was born. And she was identifying herself with the old vernacular literary culture of southern France and northern Spain and Italy. From childhood, she was instructed in Spanish and Italian, as well as Latin and some Greek and Hebrew, so this literature would have been very available to her. Before Boccaccio, there was Petrarch, and before him, Dante, who makes a place in hell for the pope who called down Crusader armies from the north to extirpate the culture of the Cathar heretics and the troubadour poets, centered in the region of France which came to be called Languedoc. Religious dissent and vernacular literature were powerfully associated in French history, and extraordinary piety was associated with the celebration of courtly life and profane love. If one may judge from Marguerite’s writing, and from the writing she encouraged, it was the disrupted culture of southern Europe, not the forgotten culture of antiquity, that she most hoped to see renascent. This includes the translation of the New Testament she commissioned from Lefèvre d’Étaples — vernacular New Testaments (the language of the region, Occitan, was closer to Spanish than to French) were at the center of Cathar piety.

If France was feeling the stimulus of the Lutheran movement, as the disorders and persecutions make clear, and elements of Catharism were still abroad, as Cauvin’s mention of them proves, then problems might be anticipated from the fact that the Cathars really were heretics. That word must have been used very loosely — Ignatius of Loyola was a student in Paris when Cauvin was, having come there to escape repeated arrest for heresy in Spain, and Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross also underwent painful scrutiny. French Waldensians, English Lollards, Bohemian Hussites were all condemned and suppressed as heretics, and, when one looks at whatever remains in the way of evidence about their beliefs, they are precursors of the Reformation, neither more nor less. But there was an exotic element in Cathar doctrine, a departure much more profound than disputes about the authority of the institutional church or the nature of the priesthood or even about the Eucharist. They believed in a good or “true” God, and in a false and evil god, who created the world. They believed that those who belonged to the true God could be perfect, and that those who were initiated into their clergy must be perfect, or their administration of the Cathar sacraments was of no effect.

Catharism is traceable to a Bulgarian named Bogomil, whose teachings spread to Bosnia and were carried by missionaries across the Adriatic to France and Italy. Its adherents are said to have believed, like Servetus, that the Old Testament was essentially the chronicle of the evil god, though their texts quote the Old Testament frequently and respectfully. They are said also to have believed in the reincarnation of souls, leading finally to the perfection and salvation of all of them. This seems actually to obviate the dualism of the orthodox understanding, which would leave Satan everlastingly in possession of some fair part, at least, of humankind. (Interestingly, Cauvin’s account of hell does not mention Satan. But this is a merely technical solution to the problem.) To propose an alternative scheme of salvation, however, as both the Bogomils and Cathars did, is to depart very essentially from the broadest Christian tradition. In a daunting, and rare, display of like-mindedness, the Eastern church destroyed the Bogomils in its territories at the same time and by the same means that the Cathars were destroyed in western Europe.

Catharism seems to have flourished for about two centuries, and to have enjoyed the respect of those it did not convert, who were always the great majority. Its clergy, male and female equally and indifferently, were chosen out of the general Cathar population as people who lived godly lives, and were instructed and initiated as “good people” or “good Christians.” History and their detractors call them “Perfecti.” These people lived in the world, but as ascetics, refusing meat and wine and other comforts and luxuries. They wandered and preached, barefoot and simply clothed, always carrying their Bibles. When Rome first began to try to deal with the heresy, delegations were sent to preach to the people and to debate with the Perfecti, but without success because of their opponents’ great mastery of Scripture. They had no churches, no images or symbols of any kind, no hierarchy. They were completely nonviolent, laying great stress on the love of enemies. They absolutely refused to take oaths. For a long time they were resolutely defended, and rarely betrayed, by people who were not themselves Cathars.

If one were to compare Calvinism to Lutheranism, one would note its absence of hierarchy, the abandonment of the idea of apostolic succession, and the fact that its clergy are, in effect, elected by the congregations they serve. Certainly Calvinism positively refused the use of images and symbols, which Lutheranism retained, though with the understanding that they were not to be objects of veneration. Its understanding of the sacraments tended to grant them a spiritual reality as opposed to the objective reality implied in Catholic transubstantiation or Lutheran consubstantiation. Calvinism emphasized preaching and almost eliminated liturgy, which remained important in Lutheranism. It had no clearly formalized relation with civil authority. It rejected the idea of free will. In all this, it departs from Lutheranism and resembles Catharism. Even the strange this-worldly asceticism always associated with Calvinists, which Cauvin seems to have epitomized but which in fact his theology does not at all require, has a Cathar feeling about it. This would perhaps account for the affinity, in fact the deep attachment, of worldly people like Marguerite de Navarre and Clément Marot to a religious movement that seems, superficially, at least, to have been of another spirit entirely.

Let us say that the grafting of certain essential Lutheran doctrines to the stock of Catharism was Marguerite’s idea. She was of Luther’s generation and attentive to his writing from the beginning. Let us say she set out to ensure that there would be a reformation in France, one that would stay within the bounds of orthodoxy, and would be aesthetically and temperamentally pleasing to the French. So she wrote and published anonymously a book of poems, Miroir de l’Âme Pécheresse — The Mirror of the Sinful Soul. (The only translation of the book into English seems to have been the prose one made in 1548 by the young princess Elizabeth Tudor as a gift for Catherine Parr, titled A Godly Medytacion of the Christen sowle concerning a love towards God and Hys Christe …) The full title of Marguerite’s first poem is “The Mirror of the Sinful Soul in which she recognizes her faults and sins — also the graces and kindnesses done her by Jesus Christ her spouse” (my translation). Of course it was entirely conventional to speak of the soul as female, as the bride of Christ — John of the Cross did, Jean Cauvin did — so there is no reason to assume that the first readers of these poems thought of the writer or even the speaker of the poems as female.

As the book first appeared, passages of Scripture which the poem interpreted were printed in French in the margins, so that the poem was in effect an interpretive gloss on texts which assert human sinfulness («Rom. vii. Peché habite en moy»), and texts which assert divine grace («Jehan iii. Car Dieu a tant aymé le monde, qu’il a donné son seul filz»). The poem is ingeniously constructed so that a series of narratives of God’s faithfulness and the soul’s infidelity — its failure as mother, paraphrasing the narrative of the judgment of Solomon; as child, paraphrasing the parable of the prodigal son — reads like the experience of a single soul, always failing and always meeting new and constant grace. The metaphor of the book as mirror was well worn by the time Marguerite took it up, but her use of it is, again, ingenious. The mirror of the soul is Scripture, the poem says, and the narratives in it are its living image, straying and restored, offending and forgiven, so that these two states are in effect simultaneous, integral. And the mirror is Christ, whose fidelity is the measure of the soul’s inevitable failure, and also of its undiminished worth. In either case, the metaphor is an allusion to the figure of the mirror in the Epistle of James, a text full of implied dualism which Marguerite seems to be reinterpreting here. The Christian soul is perfect in the sense that its imperfections are made good by God’s faithfulness and grace — and perfect in no other sense.

Cauvin will use the image of the mirror almost obsessively, in this same way, to describe a state of being that is experiential, fluid, momentary and relational, and which reveals, without in any sense limiting or becoming identical with the thing revealed. In this sense the natural world mirrors God, a human being mirrors God. The vision of the unworthy soul in an unmediated encounter with Christ, for all the world as if there were no other souls in the universe whether more or less worthy, as if there were no time, no history, certainly neither merit nor extenuation — this is the classic Calvinist posture, though it should be called Margueritist, clearly, since she described it before he did.

The voices of the first two poems in Marguerite’s little volume sound not so much like confession as shocked self-recognition. Both begin abruptly, sudden cries of frustration at the subjective burden of human self-defeat. This is like the despair of the self that prepares the mystic for his or her encounter with the divine, with the important difference that this self-recognition is not the preparation, but is in fact the encounter. She says, in the words of Elizabeth Tudor’s translation, “He doth see the evil that I have, what and how much it is … And this the same unknown sight doth bring me a new desire, shewing the good that I have lost by my sin, and given me again through his grace and bounty, that which hath overcome all sin.” In the Institutes, Cauvin will likewise say, “It is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself.” The first poem differs from other mysticism also in the fact that in place of the vision of the Spouse one finds in John of the Cross, for example, there is Scripture, which for Marguerite, as later for Cauvin, is itself a visionary experience. She says, “Now, my lord, if thou be my father, may I think that I can be thy mother? Indeed I cannot well perceive how I should conceive thee that createdest me … I believe then, that hearing and reading thy words which thou hast taught and uttered by thy holy prophets, the same also which through thy true preachers, thou dost daily declare unto men, in believing it and steadfastly desiring to fulfill, I conceive thee and bear thee by love.” As Cauvin will do, Marguerite makes a great point of staying close to the text, actually setting it beside her poems. At the same time, as he will do, she evokes a sense of astonished realization, of a constant, overwhelming present moment.

The second, shorter poem in the book is titled “Discord existing in mankind on account of the contrariety of the spirit and the flesh and his peace through spiritual life, which is an annotation of the end of the seventh chapter and the beginning of the eighth, of the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans.” It is hard, though clearly possible, to overlook the theological seriousness of the writer’s intentions. In this poem, the speaker, again a universalized soul, confesses its mingled nature, the simultaneity of faith and disbelief, of love and hatred of the law, of serenity and turmoil, in an intricately rhymed paraphrase of the passage from Romans in which Paul laments: “For I allow not that whiche I do: for what I would, that do I not: but what I hate, that doe I. If I doe then that which I would not, I consent to the Law, that it is good. Now then, it is no more I, that doe it, but sinne that dwelleth in me … I finde then that when I would do good, I am thus yoked, that evill is present with me … O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death!” (Geneva Bible, Romans 7:15–17, 21, 24). This same passage is a point of departure for the first poem. Its significance for Marguerite is clearly very great indeed.

The second poem concludes that we must try to avoid sin or error, and when we fail we must turn to God’s unfailing clemency. This is the Lutheran doctrine of salvation by faith alone. The insistence on the experience of persisting sinfulness in the soul, even as the soul is the object of grace, can be considered as reinterpreting Paul’s passage to remove the implication that sin resides in the literal flesh or body, as distinct from the soul. But it also makes the point that perfection is not possible to anyone. The poem recovers the psychological, dramatic quality of Paul’s outcry, making it feel more like grief and frustration, less like philosophy or doctrine; more like a realization of inextricable complexity, less like a formula for creating ontological categories of good and evil, pure and impure. Perhaps this is the emergence of the modern self.

Cauvin’s first commentary, published in 1539, was on the Epistle to the Romans, although, as he notes in the preface, a number of commentaries had been written on it already, including a notable one by Luther. Clearly he is eager to give his own inflection to Protestant interpretation of this key text. In his gloss of the end of the seventh chapter, which he interprets as Marguerite had done years before, he concludes, “This is a suitable passage to disprove the most pernicious dogma of the Purists, (Catharorum,) which some turbulent spirits attempt to revive at the present day.” In every context in which he mentions Catharism, it is to refute its teachings about perfection. Cauvin is known not only for the doctrine of predestination but also for the doctrine of “total depravity,” a phrase so forbidding one hesitates to ponder it. In Genevan French dépraver is clearly still near its Latin root, which means “to warp” or “to distort.” The word does not have the lurid overtones it has for us. Jérôme Bolsec was banished for, among other things, having dépravé plusieurs passages de l’Éscriture pour soustenir ceste faulse et perverse doctrine — the doctrine that predestination would make God a tyrant like Jupiter. This is Cauvin’s characteristic use of the word, to refer to distortion of the meaning of a text. Corruption, in the French of the period, can mean “exhaustion” or “brokenness,” or it can be used just as we use it now when we speak of the corruption of a text.

In Cauvin’s mind, the mirror is by far the dominant metaphor for perception and also for Creation, so distortion would be a natural extension of the metaphor, especially in a time when the art of making glass mirrors was newly recovered and flaws and distortions would have been inevitable. Yet it is also true that, in its essence, experience is a text he reads. That is why the very textuality of Scripture gives it such authority, and why his scholarly struggles with the flaws in the text, the mistranslations and scribal errors and forced interpretations, are identical in his understanding with the problem of discovering and establishing truth — a thing which he is too good a scholar to imagine can ever really be achieved. It is strikingly true of Cauvin that his sense of things is overwhelmingly visual and cerebral, that the other senses do not interest him. Ignatius, in his meditation on hell, wishes “with the sense of smell to perceive the smoke, the sulphur, the filth, and corruption.” Cauvin says, “[B]ecause no description can deal adequately with the gravity of God’s vengeance against the wicked, their torments and tortures are figuratively expressed to us by physical things, that is, by darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Hell is “to be cut off from all fellowship with God.” Making perception and understanding the primary locus of reality rescues the world and the flesh from dualism, whether Cathar or Augustinian. They are rescued from the opprobrium of existing in a state of opposition to the soul because they are addressed to and exist for the soul, for perception and understanding. Marguerite anticipates him in this. Her modern self has no grounds for rejecting or despising what is, therefore, the modern world.

The consequences of the sharp correction against dualism in these two poems of Marguerite’s are notable. Luther seems to have been entirely at ease with the devil, allowing him a very great place in theology and in life. But in Marguerite’s poems, though they are both about sin and fallenness, there is no Satan, no tempter, no adversary, no external source of evil at all. In the first lines of the title poem, the soul cries out for a hell infernal enough to punish a tenth of its sins, a startling assertion of the primacy of subjective experience, over against the claims of the actual terrors of an objectively existing hell. By contrast, Ignatius of Loyola begs for “a deep sense of the pain which the lost suffer, that if because of my faults I forget the love of the eternal Lord, at least the fear of these punishments will keep me from falling into sin.” There is frustration, astonishment, and grief in the voices of Marguerite’s poems, but no fear or suspense, because there is nothing external to the soul but the Lord, whose grace need not be doubted. There is, in effect, only one narrative, always complete, irrespective of any particular sin or error. In this, Marguerite anticipates Cauvin, who believes in eternal reprobation, but who never seems to allow himself to imagine it. She may also anticipate the sect called the Libertines, who taught, according to Cauvin, that devils are “nothing but evil inspirations,” a view he denounced. Nevertheless he mentions Satan rarely, preferring, as Marguerite does, to ponder discords within the soul, and he gives short shrift to hell — one long paragraph in the fifteen hundred pages of the final version of the Institutes. This is not how he is thought of. Whether his tradition parted with him in these matters or whether it also has been misinterpreted or misrepresented, he did not encourage any special interest in damnation.

Finally, in her book about the sinful soul, Marguerite mentions Eve twice, once in passing and once because her name occurs in the prayer Salve Regina, which she translates into French, with Christ as mediator in place of Mary, conforming the prayer to Lutheran or Protestant teaching. Eve has no special role in the Fall, no special weakness to predispose her to it, no special liabilities as a consequence of it — fallenness as a parable of gender is not in any way touched upon. The soul who speaks could be, humanly speaking, male or female, Adam or Eve. In the whole of the Institutes, Cauvin will not mention Eve once, even in passing. As a consequence, the thought that women carry any special burden of guilt or sinfulness cannot even arise, nor can the thought that sin bears any special relation to sexuality. This permits Cauvin to speak as he does of marriage, and it is one reason for the high status women have traditionally enjoyed in Calvinist cultures.

The profound isolation of the soul, which seems so fearful to those to whom it does not seem true, so daunting to those for whom it is not exhilarating, is fully present in Marguerite’s poems years before the word “Calvinism” would be uttered. It is an aspect of the doctrine attributed to John Calvin which is supposed to reflect the contemptible harshness of his disposition. But what if he learned it from the earthy, worldly, indulgent sister of the king? One need imagine no more than that some Paris acquaintance lent him her book. Considering her prominence among literary and intellectual people, the life-and-death importance to the Reform movement of her active sympathy, the boldness of the publication then of poetry based on translation of Scripture into French, the startling response of the Sorbonne — surely The Sinful Soul would have been read with great interest. One account of the events that forced Cauvin to leave Paris was that he may have helped Nicolas Cop write a lecture which defended the book.

When the soul in Marguerite’s poems calls itself Rien, it must be remembered that the imagination behind it is that of someone who enjoyed extraordinary privilege. Marguerite’s mother, Louise de Savoie, was régente of France during the childhood of her son François, and one of the great women of Europe who met in 1529 to negotiate the Paix des Dames, which brought to an end years of intractable warfare. After her brother the king was captured in a failed military venture in Italy, Marguerite herself went to Madrid to negotiate his release from prison. She spent her adult life steadily and tactfully forming the French Renaissance. That is to say, when, in the person of the soul, she renounces every claim to estimation, she is renouncing a very great deal, and that is the point. The soul participates in the nature of the eternal by putting aside the temporal, that is, everything it can know of itself. Power and erudition are of no more account than ignorance and weakness. It is only as nothing that the soul can be without limitation. Its true or essential being is in relation to God, toward whom it exists in the roles God affords to it — in Marguerite’s poem “Mirror of the Sinful Soul,” the very lofty roles of sister, mother, son, spouse. The soul is a perceiver upon whom perception is visited — “the gift whereof the virtue is unknown to my little power.” What is described is not the diminishing of the self, but an imagination of it enlarged and exalted far beyond what is within its power to imagine or to desire.

In his commentary on Genesis, Cauvin will describe heaven (which he almost never does) in these terms: “[T]he earth, with its supply of fruits for our daily nourishment, is not there set before us; but Christ offers himself unto life eternal. Nor does heaven, by the shining of the sun and the stars, enlighten our bodily eyes, but the same Christ, the Light of the World and the Sun of Righteousness, shines into our souls; neither does the air stretch out its empty space for us to breathe in, but the Spirit of God quickens us and causes us to live. There, in short, the invisible kingdom of Christ fills all things, and his spiritual grace is diffused through all.” Heaven’s essence for him is that it is inconceivable in the world’s terms, another order of experience. This is true even though his conception of this world is utterly visionary. He says that while God is not to be seen “in his unveiled essence” he “clothes himself, so to speak, in the image of the world, in which he would present himself to our contemplation … arrayed in the incomparable vesture of the heavens and the earth…” Every understanding of the self is meaningless where the whole of existence is changed beyond our ability to conceive of it, where all understanding is of the nature of revelation, that is, of perception overwhelmed. This being true, there is no meaningful distinction to be made between one soul and the next — each one is simple, absolute soul, and as if the only soul. This is heaven without hierarchy, a very revolutionary idea. It privileges anyone’s relationship with God above any other loyalty or duty.

Christ, in Marguerite’s “Mirror of the Sinful Soul,” is brother (or sister), never king: “[W]e seeing him to be called man, we are bold to call him sister and brother. Now the soul which may say of herself, that she is the sister of God, ought to have her heart assured.” She makes the perspective of the whole of humankind, without condition or distinction, one of privileged intimacy with God. Her insistence on the sinfulness of the soul as a condition of its humanity — Cauvin’s “total depravity” — and on the sins it sees in itself as archetypal rather than personal and singular, implies the equality of all souls. Cauvin could have found encouragement in her to address the king so bluntly, and to assert the divine right of the common folk to be protected against the abuses of kings.

John Calvin is said to have made the first extended use of French as a language of systematic thought, and to have impressed it with the restraint and lucidity of his style. He is said to have made French an international language because of the wide influence of his writing. What little is said of him tends almost always to ascribe to him truly epochal significance, for weal or woe, which he could not deserve if his thought and work were not more original by far than he ever claimed they were. So it is no disrespect to him to look elsewhere for the sources of his originality. If, as is often said, he was the greatest theologian of the Reformation, it is because he was not primarily a theologian, but a humanist, a man of letters, an admiring student of this world. His theology was so influential in part because he understood its implications in such broad terms. He reimagined civilization, as his spiritual progeny would do again and again. In her own way, Marguerite was at the same work sooner, through her patronage and her own writing, using books and languages to open other worlds, including the potent world of the modern vernacular.

Marguerite was born to Louise de Savoie when Louise was a girl of sixteen. At twenty, Louise was a widow with another child, a two-year-old boy, François. Learned herself, she was devoted to the education of her children. In the year of Marguerite’s birth, 1492, Spain expelled its Moors and Jews, scattering its strangest riches over Europe. There had been a great many Moors and Jews in the old kingdom of Navarre. In the time of the Albigensian crusades, troubadours had gone there for refuge. Some scholars say their art of sung poetry had first been learned from the Moors. Marguerite, as a child, learned Spanish, and a little Hebrew. Who can imagine how the things we call ideas live in the world, or how they change, or how they perish, or how they can be renewed?