VOICY NOUVELLE JOYE

Marguerite de Navarre’s verse has generally been viewed as the poor relation of her Heptaméron, more honored for its good intentions than for the quality of its poetic voice or its intellectual power. Jourda’s assessment that her poetry reveals a “regrettable insouciance de l’esthétique,” chiefly because she was “trop amateur et trop indifférent(e) aux questions de l’art” (483) has for too long justified the subjugation of conceptual issues to questions of form—a singularly inappropriate approach to a poet whose very ethos lies in setting aside the formal structures of “the things of this world,” and whose poetic voice is characterized by the personal urgency and intimacy of her religious enthusiam.^[1]

I recently had occasion to reflect on both the inadequacy and the tenacity of Jourda’s judgment when preparing a contribution for a volume of essays on the theme of Fortune in Renaissance literature (Lloyd-Jones 411–26). I propose here to take this question a step further, and to develop some of those specific spiritual and theological aspects of Marguerite’s understanding and exploitation of the Fortune topos, focusing more precisely on her development of such antitheses as time and timelessness, earthly mutability and divine permanence, incoherence and pattern, chaos and the divine plan, utterance and silence, in order to situate Marguerite’s poetic thought in the broader context of evangelical Humanism.^[2]

Conventionally, of course, poetic tradition has seen in the Latin Fortuna an embodiment of the incoherent and chaotic forces that shape human existence. The two principal medieval thinkers to present what we might term a positive view of Fortune, Boethius and Dante, do so precisely in order to stress the opportunity (for Boethius) or the necessity (in Dante’s case) for humanity to hope. The pagan Boethius stresses that since Fortune’s behavior conforms to no discernible plan, our capacity for hope can never be denied, since unknowable outcomes justify in themselves neither confidence nor despair, and thereby warrant our free choice to be hopeful (II.2.9–14). Similarly, the Christian Dante argues that, since Fortune is in fact an agent of God’s will, our sense of her incoherence merely reveals mankind’s incapacity to grasp the divine plan; our only recourse is to have faith in the ultimate goodness of God’s purposes (Inferno: VII.67–96). Whether Fortune is portrayed in Marguerite’s poetry as the executrix of God’s purposes, however, or whether—to the extent that such a figure encourages belief in a universe where outcomes are not pre-ordained—she is more naturally allied to the notion of free-will than to any variety of determinism, it is striking that Marguerite consistently invokes the goddess in order to refute her power over us. She does so, in a word, in order to destroy Fortune’s credibility, even to set in doubt not only her power but her very existence. And it is in her rejection of all the understandings embodied in the conventional poetic treatment of the idea that we find one of Marguerite’s most powerful declarations of faith and hope, and hear her evangelical voice in all its poetic force.

Among Marguerite’s most striking poems in this regard is the vast and visionary Les Prisons. In the course of the third book, the narrator develops by means of a lengthy allegory the account of his efforts to liberate himself from the prison of human science, the essential characteristic of which is its uncertainty. (It should be noted here that, in almost all of Marguerite’s verse, the poetic voice is in the masculine: the significance of the major exception to this usage, in L’Umbre, will be discussed later.) The pillars of the prison of human knowledge are made of such disciplines as poetry, law, mathematics, the liberal arts and medicine, all so full of contradictory impulses and tensions:

Cette science voire est bien si hardie

Qu’elle pretend faire mutation

Du mal en bien, et la complexion

Du tout changer par purger et nourrir,

En le saulvant du tout, fors de mourir. (134–38)

Other pillars are constructed of books of philosophy and history, and the contemplation of this sum of human wisdom leads the narrator to draw an important conclusion:

Les faictz passez à les veoir font entendre

Qu’on ne se doit à la fortune attendre,

Ny son esprit en ce monde arrester,

Mais à vertu recevoir l’apprester;

Que l’on ne doit en la prosperité

Se resjouyr, ny en l’adversité

Desesperer, prenant l’exemple à ceulx

Qui aux vertuz n’ont esté paresseux,

A ceulx aussi que l’on a veu tumber

Pour se laisser aux vices succumber.

Les faictz passez sont maistres des presens. (177–87)

This last line stands almost as a motto for Marguerite’s view of the force that shapes the outcomes in our lives, for it is not simply a repudiation of the poetic figure of Fortune. There is not only a historiography but also a theology implicit in its affirmation of causality. If, however, we situate the thought that brings Marguerite to this conclusion within the free will-predestination debate that becomes increasingly central to the religious debates of her times (Erasmus’s De libero arbitrio of 1524, and Luther’s De servo arbitrio of 1525), we cannot come down firmly on either side. To the extent that such thinking can be read as placing the responsibility for outcomes on the shoulders of those who committed the acts that led to them, it might be argued that Marguerite subscribes, in passages such as this, to a certain notion of free will. The present is explained by choices made in the past, and the faithful will choose to act virtuously. On the other hand, to stress the text’s promotion of causality and the rejection of any idea that outcomes are not eternally determined, and the concomitant notion that attempts to alter them reflect no more than human vanity, is surely to move in the direction of what might be termed “Christian determinism.” Such a view, while in itself not synonymous with the doctrine of predestination, may well, however, subjugate the idea of free will to that of a pre-determining divine will. How far down this road can we go?

Among the most important pillars of this third prison we find the one made up of Theology—so many contradictory commentaries, paraphrases and explications, all characterized by the instability of the things of this world:

Leur different en herreur me tenoit,

Ung jour joyeulx, ravy jusques aux cyeulx,

L’autre damné, fascheux et soucieux. (266–68)

This essentially amounts to a rejection of the scholastic apparatus of dialectical theology, which promotes only confusion and despair, “purging and gorging;” by implication, such a passage espouses the evangelical desire to allow the sacred texts to speak for themselves—the same position that was to lead Marguerite to support the idea of translating the Psalms into the vernacular, in order that the faithful might gain unimpeded access to the Holy Word.^[3]

The narrator, however, does not immediately recognize the fallacious nature of the security provided by Theology, and begins to use what we might call the tools of the discipline to praise God. But the Almighty interrupts the poet’s discourse: it is the nature of wordly things to deceive, and God brings the poet to understand “ce cuyder vain et sot / De tout sçavoir” (201) when He demolishes the pillars of Theology with the reminder of His immutable presence (thereby echoing God’s promise to Moses: Exodus 3.14: “Dixit Deus ad Mosen: ego sum qui sum; ait sic dices filiis Israhel: qui est misit me ad vos”) “Je suys qui suys” (203). It is from this characterization of the Divine nature, at once essential and existential, that Marguerite develops her sense of God as “[la] Verité qui sçait Cuyder abattre, / Disant: Je suys,” and draws out how it is that such a God is behind the unfolding of events that we might otherwise, in the ignorance of our “cuyder,” attribute to the operation of random or undetermined forces:

Mot vertueux! O parolle gentille,

Qui par puissance ennemys faict tumber,

En relevant ceulx que voys succomber:

D’un mesme mot les faiz vivre et mourir,

Ung mesme mot peult blesser et guerir:

Ce mot: “Je suys” ung amy ressuscite,

Et l’ennemy à cruelle mort cite. (612–18)

When God speaks, it is to affirm His changeless presence in a universe in which Time does not exist; a cosmos in which sequentiality, which provides the necessarily temporal, linear distinction between cause and effect, no longer carries meaning, and in which the human mind’s need to achieve understanding through differentiation—that is, through recourse to such mechanisms as scholastic dialectic in our attempts at scientific reasoning—lapses into a meaningless play of human categories:

Je suys qui suys fin et commencement,

Le seul motif d’un chascun element,

. . .

Commencement ne fin ne s’y retrouve,

Et n’y a chose estant ou vieille ou neufve

Qui de ce rond n’ayt pris creation

Et nourriture et conservation.

. . .

Le cercle suys dont toute chose vient,

Le poinct où tout retourne et se mainctient.

Je suys qui suys triangle très parfait,

Le tout puyssant, saige et bon en effaict,

Qui fus, qui suys et seray à jamais,

L’eternel Dieu. (791–814)

Such an all-encompassing vision, in which outer is synthesized with inner, movement outward with centered stability, past with present with future, is the very condition of what Ferguson characterizes so succinctly as “a commitment to a particular way of reading and interpreting not only the Scriptures, but all texts, and ultimately to a world-view in which God in Christ is All in all, and all in Christ may be an allegory of the All” (222).

It is this syncretic understanding of the nature of God as both cause and effect, center-point and circumference, alpha and omega of the divine logos, that enables us to understand other references in Marguerite’s poetry to symbols of mutability, to conceptions of both randomness and causality which in our ignorance we might otherwise be tempted to characterize as inconsistencies. Thus, for example, we find in her Complainte pour un detenu prisonnier an opening declaration of the narrator’s belief in the God we have just alluded to, but the poem then goes on to evoke the apparently contradictory notion of the narrator’s having been the victim of the emblem of the chaotic and the random—i.e., Fortune:

S’il est ainsi, comme tresbien je croy,

Que sans le sceu et bon vouloir de toy,

Souverain Dieu, rien n’advient en ce Monde,

Et que les vents qui ceste Mer profonde

Font agiter sans ton veuil ne s’esmeuvent

. . .

Certes je croy que par ton mandement

Fortune a fait contre moy son effort. (62)

There is of course no doctrinal incompatibility in a deterministic affirmation of God’s causality at the same time as the poet invokes the figure of Fortune, as long as the goddess is seen as an agent, no matter how incomprehensibly so, of the Divine will, and that is no doubt what Marguerite is doing here (as indeed Boethius and Dante had done earlier). And yet, even the firmest faith can be tempted, and human error can make us literally mis-take what we observe about us, misperceiving in our weakness the signs of God’s government of the universe as evidence of the Creation’s instability: as the poet had noted in Les Prisons, God alone is

. . . l’estre, vie et mouvoir

De ce qui est si different sur terre

Que l’oeil de chair en les regardant erre,

En s’arrestant à la diversité,

Division, douleur, adversité. (1958–62)

At one moment in the Complainte, the sufferings of the protagonist (the “prisoner” of the title) are such that he exclaims:

Mais quoy? Mon Dieu, quelle est mon infortune,

Quel est le Sort de ma triste fortune?

Ha! quel ennuy, las! elle m’a gardé!

De quel aspect m’a le Ciel regardé

Quand suys yssu du ventre de ma Mere? (69)

The precise problem of attaching credence to the power of Fortune, to the notion that all is not pre-ordained by God’s will, is now clear: such a manner of seeing things sabotages our faith, for it endangers our belief in God’s omnipotence, and our ability to accept the truth of the Gospel. The Prisoner’s “spirit” immediately warns him of this:

Non, dit l’Esprit, ne croyez pas cela,

Vostre malheur ne provient pas de là.

Le Ciel n’a pas sur nous telle puissance.

C’est le Seigneur qui par sa sapience

Preuve la Foy qu’avez en sa Parole:

Contentez vous d’estre escrit en son rolle. (69)

This is a clear declaration of Marguerite’s evangelical faith, with its emphasis on the wisdom of the Divine plan, even when (indeed, perhaps especially when) it causes our suffering, and on the view of God’s purposes conceived explicitly in some cases as a means of testing our faith in the covenant of His Word, as well as the joy that the believer will feel in the conviction that he has been specially singled out (Calvin was later to say “elected” or “justified”) as the recipient of Divine grace and thereby selected for inscription on God’s roll. Such joy in fact specifically enables the believer to embrace “misfortune” and persecution as clear signs of the working out of God’s plan for him.

This passage is followed by a lengthy and extraordinari-ly violent outburst by the Prisoner’s “body”—his Chair, for we are of course in the domain of a deeply Platonist dualism—who protests that he has been unable to find a shelter against the blows of Fortune, even within the sanctuary of the Church. The protagonist’s “esprit” thus allows his “chair” to condemn itself with its own words, and finally interrupts to reaffirm the stability of divine power:

Tays toy, tays toy, ô mon Adam charnel,

Car tout cecy est fait de l’Eternel,

Lequel tousjours regist tresjustement

Tout ce qui est dedens le firmament,

Et ce qui est cy bas desssoubz la Lune.

Luy seul fait tout, n’accuse point Fortune. (73)

Not only is the sub-lunary world governed by divine providence, but the commitment to evangelical faith persuades the believer that if God has in fact caused him to be exiled from his homeland, inflicted poverty and humiliation upon him, even caused his house to burn to the ground while he was sleeping,

C’estoit à fin qu’avecques maintz travaux,

Passant à pied les montz, plaines et vaux,

A ses Esluz portasses le thresor,

Le Diamant, la riche perle et l’or,

Le don heureux de la Sainte Evangile,

Que tu avois en ton vaisseau fragile. (74)^[4]

It is also this sense of what we might term her “dynamic evangelism” that enables Marguerite to urge throughout her poetry the rejection of all that attaches us to the material world, in further response to the Platonism that suffuses her religious thought. Her Miroir de l’Ame pecheresse eloquently expresses her sense of materiality as precisely that which prevents the union of the faithful with the divine. Here again, God is portrayed as the perfect and harmonious union in which contraries and antitheses are reconciled, and Dottin (xix) has properly emphasized the evangelical and Platonist aspects of such a conception:

Encore faut-il que cette réconciliation des contraires (il s’agit du Rien humain et du Tout divin), rendue certaine par l’Incarnation, soit préparée par un long travail de l’âme. Celle-ci doit s’évertuer à détruire la part terrestre d’elle-même avant de s’élever jusqu’au “parfait désir,” car “l’homme rassasié de sa vérité et de sa justice propres n’est pas capable de la vérité et de la justice de Dieu, que seuls le vide et l’informe peuvent recevoir.”^[5]

As Marguerite insists in the Discord estant en l’homme par contrarieté de l’esperit et de la chair (appended to Le Miroir de l’Ame pecheresse), only faith—and thus, most significantly, not primarily works, or works alone—can guarantee salvation. We do not do good because, free to cause undetermined outcomes, we elect to, but because faith requires it as a condition of salvation:

L’homme est par foy faict filz du createur;

L’homme est par foy juste, sainct, bienfacteur;

L’homme est par foy remiz en innocence;

L’homme est par foy roy en Christ regnateur. (83)

Such emphasis on salvation through the efficacity of faith is inevitably a condemnation of the idea of the efficacity of works, something that would only be possible through recourse to those features of that material world which is Fortune’s only frame of reference. In any system of Christian determinism, the only real choice open to the believer is in fact the choice whether to believe, and the notion of any other kind of choice (such as the capacity to undertake good works as a means of attaining salvation) simply provokes Marguerite’s contemptuous dismissal, as she shows in Le Triomphe de l’Agneau, when she condemns one of the most outlandish errors that can be made when one argues too dogmatically in favor of free will. To propose that moral categories are essentially the consequence of our capacity for free will strikes her as plainly foolish:

C’est que pour vray il afferme et maintient

Et constamment contre equité soustient:

“Ce qui ne gist en nostre franc arbitre

De vice ou mal ne doit avoir le tiltre.”

Ainsi conclud cet ignorant cerveau,

Homme de nom, mais de sens un droit veau. (12)

The source of such an error lies in mankind’s unwillingness to adhere to the only thing that does not reflect the mutability of worldly values, the “stable et fort et veritable escrit.” This insistence on the importance of the Gospel, the “glad tidings” that generate the very meaning of the word “tÚ eÈagg°lion,” is the nexus at which philological concerns merge with the obligation to proselytize and to spread the Good Word, to comprise what we now consider as Humanist evangelism. The miraculous synthesis of “the Word made Flesh” gives expression to the sense of a God in whom all contradictions are resolved and all tensions harmonized in the divine logos. When God speaks, it is to assure us that his Word is

. . . stable,

Perpetuel et tousjours immuable,

Moy testateur par la mort le conferme;

Jurant par moy eternel, je l’afferme;

Ainsi sera par mort et par serment

Fait stable et fort le Nouveau Testament. (27)

The poem’s affirmation of the eternal stability of the divine Word then gives rise to a cosmic hymn of praise, which echoes to the sound of that millenary expression which in its very simplicity sums up the sense of God as permanence:

Quand eurent dit, pour l’oraison conclure,

Les cieux ensemble et toute creature,

A haulte vois, AINSI SOIT, respondirent,

Tant qu’aux lieux bas les Enfers l’entendirent. (49)

It is in the resonances of this Amen, affirming the triumph of what stands over what passes, of what is over what seems, that Marguerite is able to reject both the notion of Fate (symbolizing the necessity of outcomes) and of Fortune (symbolizing the happenstance of outcomes), when she writes:

Ne dites plus, ô hommes insensez,

Ne dites plus, ny en voz coeurs pensez

Que sur les cieux Necessité fatale

Tien par sur tout la dignité Royale.

. . . ny que d’elle ressort

De tous effectz l’Adventure et le Sort. (55–56)

Aventure and Sort, Fortuna and Fatum, free will and predestination—all such polarities are erased in Marguerite’s concept of a providential force that is, in its harmonious synthesis, both infinitely powerful and infinitely tender. To say that the believer is no more than the shadow of the divine creator, as she does in L’Umbre, is not simply to have recourse to a standard topos of poeticizing neo-platonism: for Marguerite, it is the only way to express her relationship with a God whose own logos is so total that the human recourse to language becomes inadequate.^[6] It is important to note that L’Umbre is, I believe, the only major poem of Marguerite’s in which the narrative voice is in the feminine, something which suggests that we are now hearing her voice at its most authentic.^[7] And Marguerite knew, as T.S. Eliot knew, that

Words move, music moves

Only in time: but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. (“Burnt Norton”)

As Cottrell has noted, Marguerite’s poetry “solemnizes timeless (and therefore silent) presence. It is a text, an unio whose ‘I am’ incarnates and celebrates, across the discontinuity of human spech, the unending and ceaselessly productive I Am” (310).^[8] Human speech can only declare that God is, for we are in fact incapable of telling how He is:

C’est le puissant, c’est le beau, c’est le sage,

Qui n’a de soy ne semblance n’ymage:

Car à soy seul non à autre ressemble. (L’Umbre 262)

This, then, is the God who can affirm, in the face of an eternally mutable materiality that can only declare what it once was, or conversely what it might yet become, but never what it is, “I am that I am,” “Je suys qui suys.” To borrow from Cottrell once more,

Marguerite’s texts are allegories of the Christian’s search for the Word, i.e., the Silence, the “Uniformity” which, Augustine said, is our native country. . . . Marguerite’s poems are also allegories of the Word’s operation in human language. . . . Seeking to recover Silence, that is to say, the primal metaphor that antedates the signifying chain of narrative time, each of Marguerite’s texts is a discourse whose structurality, or metaphoricity, holds out the promise of a final—though perpetually deferred—return to the “Absolute Perfection” of the Word. (312)

Doctrinally, however, Marguerite’s poetry never seems to take the final step toward embracing what was to become the Calvinist notion of salvation through predestination: at the same time, her contempt for earthly values invalidates any thought of salvation through the efficacity of works. It is not justification through works, but justification through faith that ensures salvation for Marguerite, and this is of course the very essence of evangelical Humanist thought. Neither rigorously deterministic, like the doctrine of predestination, nor completely open-ended, like the doctrine of free will (for our choice to believe in a God such as Marguerite’s is still dependent on the prior gift of grace from an infinitely merciful Providence), the platonizing evangelism of the French Renaissance, syncretic in its inspiration, was of necessity a conciliatory theology transcending the antithetical frames of reference of the merely human. This was precisely what Ficino had earlier noted in his commentary on Plato’s Philebus:

The soul hurries toward its end in order to find rest in the act itself of the reason. The angel clings to its end in order to find rest in the motionless act of the intelligence. Finally God Himself is act and rest and the end itself of all things.^[9]

It is this sense of God that ultimately allows a rapturous Marguerite to welcome the obliteration of the Self in the embrace of the All:

O que ce m’est grand plaisir de rien estre,

Et que d’estre toute à mon amy et maistre!

. . .

[Que] mon Rien est par son Tout honoré,

Et son Tout est par mon Rien adoré. (L’Umbre 263–65)

And it is indeed the sense of God the Changeless Changer that inspires the evangelical voice in Marguerite’s poetry to proclaim, with vigor and beauty, the “glad tidings” of the believer’s redemption:

L’hyver plein de froid et de pleurs

Est passé, tremblant et glacé;

L’esté plein de verdure et fleurs

Nous vient plus beau que l’an passé.

Or chacun le voye:

Voicy nouvelle joye.

Transience turns into miraculous transmutation, in keep-ing with the eternally unalterable covenant between Creator and Created:

Mort et Péché plus ne luy nuist;

Il est content dans le Puissant,

Vérité, Vie, et Voye:

Voicy nouvelle joye. (Chansons Spirituelles 8: 26–28)

References

Biblia sacra vulgata. Ed. Bonifacius Fischer OSB et al. Stuttgart: Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1969.

Boethius. Philosophiae Consolatio. Ed. Karl Büchner. Heidelberg: C. Winter Verlag, 1947.

Congar, Yves. “Langage des Spirituels et langage des Théologiens.” La Mystique Rhénane: Colloque de Strasbourg, 1961. Paris: P.U.F., 1963. 15–43.

Cottrell, Robert. The Grammar of Silence: A Reading of Marguerite de Navarre’s Poetry. Washington, DC: The Catholic U of America P, 1986.

Dante Alighieri. Inferno, in La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata: edizione nazionale. Ed. Giorgio Petrocchi. Turin: Einaudi, 1975.

Eliot, Thomas S. “Burnt Norton.” Four Quartets. London: Faber and Faber, 1949. 13–20.

Erasmus, Desiderius. “De libero arbitrio.” Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation. Ed. and trans. E. Gordon Rupp and Philip S. Watson. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1959. 33–97.

Ferguson, Gary. Mirroring Belief: Marguerite de Navarre’s Devotional Poetry. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP (for the University of Durham), 1992.

Ficino, Marsilio. Marsilio Ficino: The “Philebus” Commentary. Ed. and trans. Michael J. B. Allen. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: U of California P, 1975.

Harmon, William. “T.S. Eliot’s Raids on the Inarticulate.” PMLA 91 (1976): 450–59.

Heller, Henry. “Marguerite of Navarre and the Reformers of Meaux.” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 32 (1971): 271–310.

Jourda, Pierre. “Marguerite de Navarre.” Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises. Ed. Georges Grente. Paris: Champion, 1951. 482–84.

Lloyd-Jones, Kenneth. “La Fortune dans la poésie de Marguerite de Navarre.” Il Tema della Fortuna nella Letteratura Francese e Italiana del Rinascimento: Studi in memoria di Enzo Giudici. Ed. Enea Balmas. Florence: Leo Olschki, 1990. 411–26.

Luther, Martin. “De servo arbitrio.” Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation. Ed. and trans. E. Gordon Rupp and Philip S. Watson. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1959. 99–334.

Navarre, Marguerite de. Les Prisons. Ed. Simone Glasson. Geneva: Droz, 1978.

___. Le Miroir de l’Ame pecheresse. Ed. Joseph Allaire. Munich: Fink Verlag, 1972.

___. Chansons spirituelles. Ed. Georges Dottin. Geneva: Droz, 1971.

___. La Coche. Ed. Robert Marichal. Geneva: Droz, 1971.

___. “Complainte pour un detenu prisonnier.” Les Marguerites de la Marguerite des Princesses, III. Ed. F. Frank. Paris: Cabinet du Bibliophile, 1873. Rep. Geneva: Slatkine, 1970. 56–78.

___. “Le Triomphe de l’Agneau.” Les Marguerites de la Marguerite des Princesses, III. Ed. F. Frank. Paris: Cabinet du Bibliophile, 1873. Rep. Geneva: Slatkine, 1970. 8–56.

___. “L’Umbre.” Les Marguerites de la Marguerite des Princesses, III. Ed. F. Frank. Paris: Cabinet du Bibliophile, 1873. Rep. Geneva: Slatkine, 1970. 250–65.

Skenazi, Cynthia. “Les annotations en marge du Miroir de l’Ame pecheresse.” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 55 (1993): 255–70.

Sommers, Paula. Celestial Ladders: Readings in Marguerite de Navarre’s Poetry of Spiritual Ascent. Geneva: Droz, 1989.

^[1]Heller’s remark is far-reaching in its justification of a less formalist approach to the evaluation of Marguerite’s poetry: “Contrived beauty—convincing in itself—could offer an essentially false idea of the divinity. It is possible that this viewpoint . . . may have placed a lasting restraint on her aesthetic impulse as opposed to her wish to express her inner spiritual experience” (280–81). This approach is basic to such fine modern studies as those of Cottrell, Sommers and Ferguson.

^[2]For a detailed discussion of the reconciliation of antithetical propositions in Marguerite’s religious thought, see Heller: following in the steps of Lefèvre d’Etaples and Briçonnet, for whom “the pursuit of reason [is] antithetical to religious understanding” (278), Marguerite’s work encourages us to “recognize man’s intellectual incapacity and . . . to depend on the Gospel” (279).

^[3]In light of the great debates preoccupying the Sorbonne theologians during precisely the years in which Marguerite is writing (Norton 59 and following), namely that the problem of sacred translation is compounded by the fact that it cannot be undertaken without interpretation, thereby risking the introduction of human error into the integrity of Holy Writ, Marguerite would seem to imply here a notion of translation without hermeneutic: it would be interesting to pursue her treatment of this question further. A good starting point would be the extensive discussions of Marguerite’s sense of language to be had in both Cottrell and Ferguson.

^[4]The importance attached throughout Marguerite’s poetry to the very act, and even the duty, of evangelizing has recently been analyzed by Skenazi.

^[6]Heller’s tracing of this aspect of Marguerite’s approach to language to the writings of Briçonnet seems entirely appropriate: “Briçonnet sought to avoid the contamination of the divine essence by use of descriptive metaphors, which, since they necessarily derived from human experience, would be grossly insufficient, no matter how superlative they were” (279).

^[7]For excellent discussions of Marguerite’s poetic language as a whole, see Ferguson 135 and following, and Cottrell 195 and following.

^[8]Harmon’s commentary on Eliot’s Burnt Norton can in fact be perfectly applied to similar aspects of Marguerite’s verse:

Even when speech achieves the sublimity of poetry and passes into wordless music, there is no genuine relief from the time-bound activity. But when the articulated words and music cease to matter and become silent, then they point toward the ideal condition of peaceful stillness that they themselves cannot realize. (458)

^[9]Philebus, Appendix II, section II, 452 (English), 453 (Latin).