The Art of Meditation and the French Renaissance Love Lyric: The Poetics of Introspection in Maurice Scève's Délie, objet de plus haulte vertu (1544) 9781442697560

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THE ART OF MEDITATION AND THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE LOVE LYRIC

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MICHAEL J. GIORDANO

The Art of Meditation and the French Renaissance Love Lyric The Poetics of Introspection in Maurice Scève’s Délie, object de plus haulte vertu (1544)

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2010 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9946-4

Printed on acid-free paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Giordano, Michael The art of meditation and the French Renaissance love lyric : the poetics of introspection in Maurice Scève’s Délie, object de plus haulte vertu (1544) / Michael J. Giordano. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9946-4 1. Scève, Maurice, 16th cent. Délie. 2. Scève, Maurice, 16th cent. – Criticism and interpretation. 3. Meditation in literature. 4. Introspection in literature. 5. Love poetry, French – History and criticism. I. Title. PQ1705.S5A6 2010

841c.3

C2009-904781-0

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

To Caroline and Chris

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Contents

List of Figures

ix

Abbreviations

xi

Preface

xv

Acknowledgments

xxiii

1 Two Models of Meditation for Délie: Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises and Augustine’s Confessions 3 2 Meditative Praxis and the Tensions of Transvaluation 3 Lyric Dispossession and the Powers of Enigma 4 The Triple Way 5 Via purgativa

159

257 266

6 Via illuminativa 7 Via unitiva

77

328

412

8 Conclusion 532 Appendix 1 Joannes Mauburnus, Scala Meditatoria Appendix 2 Augustine, Confessions, X: 30

541

542

Appendix 3 Intersections of Illustrations and Dizains: Translation of Mottoes 544

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Contents

Notes

549

Bibliography Index

659

619

Figures

Figures from Délie are taken from the 1544 edition held by the Bodleian Library, Douce S 35. Figure 1 ‘La Vipere qui se tue,’ from Scève, 111.

24

Figure 2 ‘Le Chamoys et les chiens,’ from Scève, 199.

124

Figure 3 ‘La Lune à deux croiscentz,’ from Scève, 11.

207

Figure 4 Rectangular Figure with Hieroglyphic Symbols, from Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1499, p. 6v). 234 Figure 5 ‘Le Tumbeau et les chandeliers,’ from Scève, 203. Figure 6 ‘Le Basilisque, et le Miroir,’ from Scève, 87. Figure 7 ‘L’Asne au Molin,’ from Scève, 143.

520

269

245

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Abbreviations

A

BHR Cis.

CisP

Commentarium

Commentary

Conf.

ConfPC Cotgrave

Exercitia Spiritualia, Ignatius of Loyola, Textus Autographus. c. 1538. In Sancti Ignatii De Loyola: Exercitia Spiritualia. Ed. Joseph Calveras and Cándido Dalmases. 1969. Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, Vol. 100. Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu. Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance. García Ximenes De Cisneros. 1856. Exercitatorium Spirituale. Ratisbon: Sumptus Fecit Georgius Josephus Manz. Exercitatorium Spirituale. Trans. E. Allison. Peers. 1929. Book of Exercises for the Spiritual Life Written in theYear 1500. Monastery of Montserrat. Marsile Ficin: Commentaire sur le banquet de Platon. Latin text of Marsilio Ficino’s Commentarium. Ed. and trans. into French by Raymond Marcel. 1956. Paris: Belles Lettres. Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love. Trans. Sears Jayne. 1985. Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications. Augustine, Confessions. Latin edition by James J. O’Donnell. 3 vols. 1992. The first volume gives the text of the Confessions. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Saint Augustine: Confessions. Trans. R.S. PineCoffin. 1961. New York: Barnes & Noble. A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues 1611, by Randle Cotgrave. Facsimile. 1968. Menston, England: The Scolar Press.

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Abbreviations

D DA

DS

Ebreo Enneads

Huguet

Kristeller

Philosophy of Love

PL R or Rime

Saulnier SE

SEM

Dizain Sperone Speroni, Dialogo D’Amore. Italian text with French translation by Claude Gruget. 1998. Dialogue traittant d’Amour & Jalousie. Introduction et commentaire, Pierre Martin. Poitiers: la licorne. Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique: doctrine et histoire. Ed. Marcel Viller et al. 1937–94. 16 vols. Paris: Beauchesne. Leone Ebreo Dialoghi D’Amore. Ed. Santino Caramella. 1929. Bari: Laterza & Figli. Plotinus, Enneads with Porphyry on Plotinus. 7 vols. Trans. A.H. Armstrong. 1966–88. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dictionnaire de la langue française du seizième siècle. Ed. Edmond Huguet. 7 vols. 1925–67. Paris: Champion-Didier. Unless otherwise indicated, Paul Oskar Kristeller. 1943. The Philosophyof Marsilio Ficino. Trans. Virginia Conant. New York: Columbia University Press. Translation of Ebreo’s Dialoghi as The Philosophy of Love by F. Friedeberg-Seeley and Jean H. Barnes. Intro. Cecil Roth. 1937. London: The Socino Press. Patrologiae cursus completus. Series Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne. 1884–1904. 221 vols. Paris: J.-P. Migne. Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The ‘Rime Sparse’ and Other Lyrics. Trans. and ed. Robert M. Durling. 1976. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Unless otherwise indicated, V.-L. Saulnier. 1948a. Maurice Scève. 2 vols. Paris: Klincksieck. John van Ruusbroec, The Spiritual Espousals and Other Works. Intro. and trans. James A. Wiseman. Preface by Louis Dupré. 1985. New York: Paulist Press. Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Trans. Anthony Mottola. Intro. Robert W. Gleason. 1964. Garden City, NY: Image.

Abbreviations xiii

Summa

Tervarent

Tyard

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae. 1964–6. 60 vols. New York: Blackfriars in conjunction with McGraw-Hill Book Company. Guy de Tervarent, Attributs et symboles dans l’art profane. 1997. 2e édition fondue et corrigée. Geneva: Droz. Pontus de Tyard: Oeuvres: Le solitaire premier. 1950. Ed. Silvo E. Baridon. Geneva: Droz.

The edition of the Vulgate that I have used is Biblia sacra: iuxta vulgatam versionem. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1984. Abbreviations are used for each book cited plus chapter and verse. The English translation of the Bible here used is The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha. Revised Standard Version, ed. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

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Preface

At their core most amatory lyrics involve a triple relation among lover, the beloved, and the meaning of love. Whether the poet-lover is a man or a woman, poetic discourse generally takes the form of interior monologue that may be intermingled with direct or indirect address to the beloved. Since the overwhelming quality of lyric voice is personal introspection, the question placed before the reader is, How does the poem formally function like a meditation? This problem is inextricably connected with a second question, namely, What values and ideals are represented by the triple relation among the lover, the beloved, and the terms of love? The answers to these questions would constitute a formal theory of amatory meditation. This study will show that the French Renaissance love lyric as illustrated by Maurice Scève’s Délie, object de plus haulte vertu (1544) adopts many of the formal procedures associated with religious introspection practised by Augustine, Bonaventure, and the predecessors of Ignatius of Loyola known as the the Devotio moderna. It is also permeated with the spirit of German and Dutch mysticism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries whose popularity in the French Renaissance is reflected in the work of Lefèvre d’Étaples. These streams of meditation themselves draw inspiration from Plato, Plotinus, and Pseudo-Dionysius, and extend their tributaries into the systemization of prayer culminating in García de Cisneros’s Exercitatorium spirituale and Loyola’s Exercitia spiritualia. The French Renaissance is the epoch par excellence of poetry, a great deal of it lyric in nature, and so it provides an excellent test of this thesis. In addition to Scève, one has only to think of Clément Marot, Marguerite de Navarre, Louise Labé, Pernette du Guillet, Joachim Du Bellay, and Pierre de Ronsard. However, while medieval modes of introspection

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offered the Renaissance writer a rhetorical modus operandi for structuring thought, values are in flux and contention. In the early years of the sixteenth century France experiences the revival of antiquity, the upheaval of religious reform, and the emergence of the scientific revolution. Noël Beda, syndic of the Sorbonne, detested Lefèvre d’Étaples calling him a ‘humanista theologizans,’ and though this epithet was meant as a criticism, it well epitomizes the humanist ideal of wedding philology with religious renewal.1 Compounding the tensions between the sacred and the profane is the fact that no rhetorical scheme is value neutral. While the Renaissance writer could adapt Bonaventure’s rhetoric of spiritual progress consisting of purification, illumination, and loving union, this triplici via, whether one wished it or not, was strongly associated with the Trinity. Finally, one must appreciate a third problem concomitant with adopting such a rhetorical method of spiritual improvement, namely, that it remained for the French Renaissance writer, as it did for Dante and Petrarch, to translate what each of these three terms meant in his/her particular nexus of transvaluations. Looking at matters from a different angle, the exploration of introspection in Délie derived from religious sources has the advantage of showing the work’s contrasts with medieval values by virtue of Scève’s humanist transformations of hierarchies and traditions. Délie is precariously situated between the Christian meditative tradition and the revival of antiquity. In proposing a religious basis for this study, I contest the premises of three important and influential critics. In an article titled ‘Poètes lyonnais du XVIe siècle,’ Albert-Marie Schmidt maintained that Délie is ‘l’un des recueils les moins chrétiens du XVIe siècle’ (1967, 187). In a similar vein, V.-L. Saulnier wrote that Scève’s Psalms represent ‘la seule trace d’une préoccupation religieuse précise, dans l’oeuvre de Scève, avant le Microcosme’ (Saulnier 1:379). One can agree with Dorothy Gabe Coleman that ‘the tradition that Scève was working in was broadly the GraecoRoman one ... ’ if this statement is not categorically exclusive (1975, 19). In contrast with these studies I join the company of more recent scholarship that has opened religious vitas on Délie such as those by Cynthia Skenazi, Gérard Defaux, Lance Donaldson-Evans, and François Rigolot who themselves renew the work of Albert Béguin, Enzo Giudici, and Paul Ardouin in linking Scève with sacred traditions.2 However, the greater part of Scève scholarship in the twentieth century and the opening of the twenty-first emphasizes or primarily focuses on non-religious areas of investigation. These include books of criticism such as the magisterial study by V.-L. Saulnier, followed by those of Henri Weber, Alfred Glauser,

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Hans Staub, Jacqueline Risset, Dorothy Gabe Coleman, Doranne Fenoaltea, Jerry Nash, Marcel Tetel, Deborah Lesko Baker, JoAnn DellaNeva, Nancy Frelick, James Helgeson, and Thomas Hunkeler. In 2006 Cécile Alduy produced a single-volume bibliography on Scève. Instructive essays have also appeared on mannerism (Thomas Greene), time and microcosm (Georges Poulet), psychology and sexuality (Robert Cottrell, Gregory de Rocher, Lawrence Kritzman), Petrarchism and Scève (Kenneth Cool, Terence Cave, Cécile Alduy), printing, music, and versification (Edwin Duval), representation (Armine Kotin Mortimer), rhetoric (Francis Goyet), language and philosophy (Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani), cartography (Tom Conley), and Laura’s tomb (Daniel Maira).3 Even though the trajectory of my study takes a religious direction, I have nonetheless tried to find balance by pointing out that one of Délie’s greatest tensions is the uncomfortable position taken by the poetlover between the sacred and the secular. In particular, there is aspiration to unite with the Divinity that runs parallel with the desire for human self-sufficiency, and while their concurrent contradictions create trials that heighten the poet-lover’s powers, one is never certain even in the final poem whether the rousing flight from mortality is natural or supernatural mysticism. It is important to make terminological distinctions. Whereas the word ‘meditative’ can be predicated of religious and non-religious discourse, the term ‘devotional’ generally applies to the former. In an eclectic text such as Délie it is much more prudent for the critic to use the expression ‘meditative,’ since the author’s objects of introspection can be both sacred and profane. In classical and Christian religions the meanings of the words ‘prayer,’ ‘meditation,’ and ‘contemplation’ depend entirely on their historical contexts. For purposes of this study there are some guidelines to bear in mind. During the last quarter of the twelfth century Guigo II in his Scala Claustralium, also known as the Scala Paradisi, formulated a ladder of spiritual exercises consisting of lectio divina, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio. The significance of this work is that it encapsulates the core of systematic prayer that evolved from the Middle Ages to the Devotio moderna to Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises. The first activity designated listening to or reading from sacred scripture, the second probing and analysing religious truths, the third desiring God with the heart through affective prayer, and the last, savouring the joys of holy fruits. In chapter XI Guigo describes meditatio as mastication, rumination, and nourishment of the soul, and in the next chapter he makes clear that the four rungs of spiritual enrichment are interlocking activities: ‘Reading apart from medi-

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tation is dry; meditation without reading is subject to error; prayer without meditation is lukewarm; meditation without prayer is barren; fervent prayer leads to contemplation; contemplation apart from prayer is either a very rare or a miraculous thing.’4 My references to meditation in Délie should be placed against the backdrop of Guigo’s Scala, but some qualifications must be kept in mind. I do hold that the central spiritual activity in Délie is meditation, the discursive act whereby the intellect attracted to Délie’s virtues is moved to articulate categories and divisions, causes and effects, and sound out their relation to immortality and divinity. I put special emphasis on the Ignatian method of imaginary vision nurtured and developed by the triple movement of memory, understanding, and affective response. This ideal scheme of interior mastery is tested by Augustinian pragmatics, which itself questions the efficacy of the three powers even as it advances the meditation. Also, I will point out the difference between Ignatian contemplation as the composition of place and Thomistic contemplation defined as simplex intuitus veritas,5 which, while not divorced from reasoning, is spiritually superior and accompanied by reverence and admiration. In privileged moments of Délie Scève’s persona lifts the entire movement of meditation to what Jean Gerson termed mystical theology – ‘knowledge of God by experience, arrived at through the embrace of unifying love.’6 Any study of Délie must inevitably reflect Scève’s two outstanding achievements in literary history. First, he is considered to have written the first French canzoniere in the manner of Petrarch’s Rime. Second, he is also credited with being the first French writer of imprese and indeed the only sixteenth-century author to use them in a serious, sustained work on love. In various ways each chapter of this book will integrate these facts into the discussion, but my emphasis will be on the poetry of meditation. Each chapter of this book is intended to present an essential feature of Scève’s poetry of meditation. Chapter 1 is titled ‘Two Models of Meditation for Délie: Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises and Augustine’s Confessions.’ The aim of this chapter is to derive two models of meditation from Ignatius and Augustine respectively that provide structures for understanding introspection in Délie. The tradition of meditation uniting Joannes Mauburnus and Ignatius of Loyola provides an ideal model of introspection that combines visualization with exercises of memory, understanding, and will. The second model makes the historical assumption that Scève adopted from Petrarch Augustinian principles of self-examination. That is, Scève’s persona deploys a set of introspective practices found in the Confessions that allow him to challenge the powers of the soul as-

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sumed effective in the Ignatian scheme. In this way, the dizain is viewed as the ground of an agon where praxis measures itself against the ideal. By ‘model’ I mean a textual extrapolation from the works of Augustine and Ignatius presented as an abstract system of relations that provides the basic structures and functions of their respective meditative procedures. To these models I will compare and contrast Délie, thereby offering an intertextual basis for analysis. Chapter 2 titled ‘Meditative Praxis and the Tensions of Transvaluation’ has as its goal to show how the simultaneous interaction of Augustinian pragmatics and the Ignatian deployment of the three powers contend with one another as practice to ideal intention. The agon so produced not only tests the effectiveness of this twofold model but also brings to light irreducibly contentious values that struggle for supremacy. In addition, the chapter will demonstrate Scève’s unique gift for conciseness by analysing how he contracts the Ignatian meditative scheme and condenses it in the impresa proper. The last part of chapter 2 concerns Délie’s versification, which adds to the useful commentaries of McFarlane, Goyet, Duval, Cave, and Audly from the perspective of the poetry of meditation.7 Chapter 3 titled ‘Lyric Dispossession and the Powers of Enigma’ studies the ineffable and the unknowable as common preoccupations of Scève, Augustine, and Petrarch in the religious register. Just as Augustine probes the Trinity with Paul’s epistemology of per speculum in enigmate, so the poet-lover finds that ‘Vexation ... brings understanding’ (D 94, v. 10). Heir to such works as Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) and Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica (1505), which stimulate the reader’s curiosity to discover veiled or esoteric knowledge, Scève continues this tradition by exploiting the enigmatic quality of the impresa to forge a poetic language out of inexpressibility. Chapter 4 titled ‘The Triple Way’ serves as an introductory pivot to the last three parts of the book. Against and by means of adversity and vice, the poet-lover exercises what is known in the Christian tradition as the Triple Way, which reached its apex in Bonaventure’s De triplici via.8 This method of spiritual improvement consists of purificatio, illuminatio, and perfectio conceived as successive or simultaneous acts of the soul seeking purification, illumination, and perfective union with the Divine. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 form a triptych treating respectively purification, illumination, and loving union. Each of these chapters has an analytical dimension examining major characteristics of Délie’s Triple Way and a linear component charting the poet-lover’s principal changes in spiritual progress. In conclusion, Délie’s poet-lover leaves the reader with an intractable but inspiring paradox. Straddling the human and the divine without reducing himself to either, he foretells

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the expansion of humanity’s powers through the vision of the mystical astronomer. A Word on Method and Terminology Since imitation of time-honoured models was the dominant ars poetica of Scève’s era, I have chosen to base my method primarily on intertextuality, paying heed to Julia Kristeva’s observation that ‘every text takes shape as a mosaic of citations, every text is the absorption and transformation of other texts.’9 However, to make comprehensible Scève’s transformation of his predecessors I also offer historical clarifications by contrasting canonical religious texts with Scève’s humanist adaptations. Second, it is customary when speaking of Petrarchan discourse to refer to the lover as unrequited. However, it is clear in Délie that while the beloved refuses her sexual favours to the lover,10 or sometimes withholds approval of his conduct or denies him social amenities, there is a spiritual level at which the speaker feels that his devotion is reciprocated. In dizain 49 when considering Délie as his ‘highest perfection’ (ce degré supreme, v. 5), he avows as if transported by this thought, ‘So much was the flame in us two reciprocal/ That my fire shines when hers clearly appears to me’ (Tant fut la flamme en nous reciproque,/Que mon feu luict, quand le sien clair m’appert, vv. 7–8). A third matter is the attribution of speech. In using the words ‘speaker,’ ‘poet,’ ‘lover,’ or ‘poet-lover’ I am referring to Scève’s persona and not to Scève himself. The identification of these multiple roles is justified by the introductory huitain (‘A sa Délie’) where the writer of the work (‘ceste Oeuvre’ v. 4) alludes to himself as lover wishing to describe his ‘deaths’ and travail: ‘Mais bien les mortz, qu’en moy tu renovelles/Je t’ay voulu en ceste Oeuvre descrire’ (vv. 3–4). Of course, biographical and historical facts can be and frequently are transported into the fictional realm such as the political poems and Scève’s impresa ‘Souffrir non souffrir’ placed below the dedicatory poem. However, extra-textual referents are always transformed by poetic contexts. When I use the name Scève, I am referring to the author of Délie exercising certain talents of composition to achieve certain effects. It is important to remain alert to what is meant in each instance of discourse by the word ‘je’ because of the fluidity, dissociation, or multiplication of roles connoted by that pronoun in context. Fourth, when I use the expression amour courtois, I do not intend to resolve the controversies concerning the origin of the phenomenon or the meaning of the phrase (Boase 1977, Bumke 2000). Rather, I wish to single out one of the codes of amour courtois, namely, that the lover’s patient service to the

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will of the beloved should be sexually rewarded according to an implied or explicit agreement. My use of the words ‘emblematics’ and ‘emblematization’ is not restricted to emblems per se but extends to imprese and blasons as well. I generally provide English translations of Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish texts, except in the case where the context of my argument makes the quotation clear. Finally, I beg the reader’s patience in following rather extensive analyses of certain poems. Since I am addressing ‘the art of meditation’ in poetry, it is necessary to pursue the complexity and richness that Scève sets before us.

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Acknowledgments

It is a delight to thank many colleagues, students, and institutions that have stimulated my thinking and kept me on the rails, and it would have been impossible to realize the project without the spirit of exchange that makes us a community of scholars. First, I would like to express my profoundest thanks to Wayne State University which has generously provided the major funding for this book, and particularly the Vice President’s Office for Research, The College of Arts and Sciences, the Provost and the Department of Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. I am also grateful to Wayne State University for two sabbaticals that enabled me to write without interruption and to travel to research sites, especially the Bibliothèque Nationale where I was able to examine the original versions of Délie. To Walter Edwards, Director of the University’s Humanities Center, I offer my deep gratitude for a Faculty Fellowship and invitations to address friends of the Renaissance on Alciato. Robert Holley of Wayne State University’s Library and Information Science Program has been the exemplar of vigilance in tracking and ordering key sources for my research, and my treks to the Special Collections Department of the University of Michigan have always been rewarded with the most alert assistance and courtesy. I am particularly pleased to express my appreciation to Carla Zecher and the friendly, expert staff of the Newberry Library’s Center for Renaissance Studies as well as to David Weston and his knowledgeable associates at the University of Glasgow’s Special Collections Department where I was able to examine numerous sources on devotional emblematics housed in the Stirling Maxwell Collection. I also offer my most sincere thanks to Stephen Rawles and Alison Adams for hosting my visit to Glasgow and for their invitation to speak on nominalism and the blason. My debt is great to Alison Saunders who shared her extensive knowl-

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edge on emblematics by reading and improving earlier drafts of this project, and I am equally indebted to Armine Kotin Mortimer for offering invaluable insights and recommendations on the first four chapters. It would be unthinkable of me to write about St Augustine without the advice of Brian Stock who read chapters 2 and 3 on models of meditation, and offered sharp, cogent observations concerning the development of religious introspection. I am inspired by the knowledge of Rebecca Garber who generously clarified passages from Meister Eckhart and who made available to me a rare edition of Mechthild of Hackeborn’s Liber specialis gratiae. Anne-Elisabeth Spica did me the kindness of offering me a copy of her dissertation just after defence, which was published in 1996 under the title Symbolique humaniste et emblématique: l’évolution et les genres (1570–1700), and her work has provided one of the very best theoretical foundations for emblematics. Brian Davies answered a key question about whether there are secular equivalents to the theological virtues in Thomistic theology, and Lloyd P. Gerson and John Bussanich were very helpful in differentiating the concept of Christian creation from the effulgence of the Plotinian One. Joel Itzkowitz, Kathleen McNamee, and Kenneth Walters, my colleagues in Greek and Latin, have never failed to help me nuance the meanings of classical texts, and I am also grateful to Michele Valerie Ronnick for clarifying some of the verbal structures of Augustine’s Confessions. I extend my heartfelt thanks to Raffaele DeBenedictis for helping me decipher some lines from Pietro Bembo’s Gli Asolani. Scève is a writer keenly aware of logical articulations and just as ready to obscure or erase them in order to achieve certain effects of chiaroscuro, melancholy, and dissociation. I am better able to make these distinctions thanks to my colleague Susan Vineberg who verified my analyses of syllogisms embedded in certain dizains. For two years, Charles Stivale generously invited me to join his faculty-student seminar on Gilles Deleuze’s works, particularly Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque, and this has been one of my most rewarding if not exacting activities, enabling me to sharpen my philosophic understanding of Deleuze, baroque, and mannerism. Throughout the years devoted to this research I have greatly benefited from exchanges with Deborah Lesko Baker, Liana Cheney, Robert Cottrell, Denis Drysdall, JoAnn DellaNeva, Mark Ferguson, Nancy Frelick, Caroline Giordano, Agnès Bruslé-Guiderdoni, William Lovallo, Daniel Russell, and Cynthia Skenazi. My critical vision has increased in depth and breadth thanks to dialogue and collaboration with Tom Conley. With superior computer skills and unflagging sympathy, my colleague Louise Speed has many times rescued me from the shoals of shipwreck,

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and without her assistance, formatting the manuscript would have been quite a conundrum. The deep well of inexhaustible patience best symbolizes the devotion of Eileen Finn who read the manuscript in its entirety and corrected faults of mechanics. Andrea diTommaso is my colleague most responsible for keeping the Renaissance alive for me on a daily basis through spirited dialogue, research, and presentations. Finally, I would like to thank Armand Renaud who introduced me to Scève during my graduate student days. I can now report that the game is worth the candle. I would like to offer my deep gratitude to the scholarly publishing staff at University of Toronto Press. Suzanne Rancourt, Senior Humanities Editor, saw the merit of my work and encouraged me to submit this project to the Press, and Barbara Porter, Associate Managing Editor, responded faithfully and patiently to my many inquiries on scholarly format rules. Miriam Skey did highly perceptive and painstaking work editing the entire manuscript with an amazing range of knowledge assuring me that the study could not have been in better hands. Finally I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers whose understanding of the issues was insightful, dialogic, and comprehensive and whose recommendations laid the groundwork for future projects. I take full responsibility for any shortcomings or errors. I wish to thank the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, for permission to reproduce six illustrations from the original 1544 Lyon edition of Délie as well as the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York for allowing me to include Joannes Mauburnus’s ‘Scala Meditatoria’ (Zwolle, 1494). Permission from Special Collections Department of the University of Michigan Libraries enabled me to use its copy of Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499), and thanks to Librairie Droz I have been able to reproduce a number of poems from Délie, object de haulte vertu (Geneva, 2004). For the English translations of Délie I have used with modifications the dissertation of Ronald Hallett titled ‘A Translation, with Introduction and Notes, of the “Délie” of Maurice Scève’ (Penn State University, 1973). Parts of articles that I had previously published appear in this book. They are ‘Reading Délie: Dialectic and Sequence,’ Symposium 34 (1980): 155–67; ‘Scève’s Imprese: Typology and Functions,’ Romanic Review 73 (1982): 13–32; ‘Aphasia, Surrogate Discourse, and Scève’s Délie,’ Language and Style 16.3 (1983): 262–83.

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THE ART OF MEDITATION AND THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE LOVE LYRIC

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1 Two Models of Meditation for Délie: Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises and Augustine’s Confessions

The Sacred and the Profane in Délie While it is true that the early modern period is marked by a surge of humanistic activity, it is also true that it produced dramatic religious reform and spiritual renewal. On the one hand, these concurrent forces could be at odds and generate conflict. For instance, neo-Stoicism stressed confidence in the self-sufficiency of human capacities, while Calvinism emphasized utter dependence on grace. Similarly, while humanist publishers and printers sought to make the Bible available in vernacular translations, the Sorbonne scholastics condemned this practice (Jeanneret 1969, 18). On the other hand, the sacred and the profane, the religious and the secular, were not always nor necessarily opposed.1 Indeed, in many cases, the two poles could be reconciled or found to be mutually supportive. This may be seen in the Christian humanism of Cusa or Erasmus, in the Christianizing of pagan authors such as Ficino’s work on Plato and Plotinus, or the fideism of Montaigne where Pyrrhonist scepticism prepares the way to faith. With regard to mythology, we know that Boccaccio, in his Genealogia deorum, allegorized the pagan gods according to Christian symbolism (Seznec 1972, 222–3). Thanks to the patristic legacy, the early church adopted and adapted much of Roman civilization. In fact, the classical heritage was often integrated into the spiritual life. Augustine, a fountain of religious inspiration for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, was deeply indebted to the philosophic concepts of Plotinus as well as to the rhetorical and ethical teachings of Latin authors, especially Cicero (Chadwick 1986, 1–37; Marrou 1949). An important distinction to make among works uniting the sacred and the profane is that frequently, the profane is used to support religious

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The Art of Meditation and the French Renaissance Love Lyric

ends. This is the case, for example, in Cusa’s De docta ignorantia where mathematics is used to elucidate a concept of God based on the coincidentia oppositorum.2 However, in Délie, one will observe the opposite objective. Here Scève assimilates concepts and practices associated with religion to explore and ennoble human love. At first glance, infusing a woman named after a Greek goddess with Christian spirituality may appear to be Christianizing the pagan gods or creating a poetics of idolatry (Defaux, 1993). However, the former is false because there is very lttle evidence of a systematic and sustained one-toone allegory between a given classical myth and its putative Christian counterpart as in the early fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé.3 Rather, Scève gives free rein to juxtaposing mythology with Christian allusion without synthesizing them into a coherent religious translatio or doctrine. Nor is the author’s persona idolatrous in the sense that he is a Christian who expressly adores a pagan goddess or a mere mortal in conscious violation of the first commandment. On the contrary, the poet-lover’s major objective is to develop and nuance his religious receptivity not to adhere to a dogma or anguish over the violation of doctrinal interdictions. His quest is to widen and deepen his awareness of the divine in a variety of spiritual phenomena regardless of the mix of Judaeo-Christian and classical notions that people the work. Perhaps the suspicions about Scève’s being idolatrous could be lessened by changing perspective and posing the question, How could Augustine justify incorporating into the heart of his Christianity so many concepts from the pagan Plotinus (Rist, 1994)? That Délie is both a human being and a pagan goddess symbolizes and mythifies the straddling of the human and the divine to test the limits and potential of humanity’s aspirations. These include the rediscovery of the divine in the human. The Augustinian emphasis on the weakness of the human spirit in dire need of grace and Ockhamist nominalism which split faith and reason – both of these currents were challenged by thinkers such as Nicholas of Cusa and Pico della Mirandola by emphasizing strong continuities between the human and the divine, reason and religion, rationalism and mysticism. Scève is much in line with this ethos. It is important to realize that the Renaissance sought to explore an enhanced and elevated sense of human potential and dignity which included an everexpanding consciousness of the divine. Henry VIII, Luther, and Calvin certainly wounded the ‘sacerdotal sovereignty’ of the Roman church (Levi 2002, 1–17), but that should not lead to the conclusion that Scève’s period was less inclined to cultivate its religious sensibilities. On the contrary, the author finds quite paradoxically that human love itself awakens a yearning

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for transcendence, which though not formally theological, inspires a range of religious responses as uplifting as they are problematic. In Délie, Scève’s persona replaces Christ with Délie, a pagan goddess in whom he invests the symbolism of humanity’s boundless promise. Proceeding existentially from his human épreuve with the woman, the poet-lover becomes acutely conscious of the sacred in the human through a highly syncretic, individual, and painful transvaluation that is irreducible to an all-encompassing credo. Petrarch is Scève’s model, but the imitator inverts his ‘Thuscan Apollo’ (D 417, v. 6) in at least one substantial way. While a self-accusing Petrarch struggled with his Augustinian side for loving Laura all too humanly to the point of idolatry, Scève’s persona cannot but celebrate that human nature itself bears marks of the divine. Under the force of Délie’s virtue penetrating his soul, the poet-lover declares that like Glaucus he is transformed into God: ‘Qui de Glaucus jà me transforme en Dieu’ (D 437, v. 10). That impulse may not be orthodox Christianity, but by virtue of the lover’s honesty in searching for sources of the divine, it would be highly reductive to call it idolatry. By no means does the divine-in-the-human make the poet-lover’s lot comfortable. In fact, it is destabilizing because the desire that calls him to the transcendent is deflected and dispersed by obstacles and incompletion, though they become the adversities that spur him on. Internal and External Reasons for Studying Délie’s Religious Dimension Though Scève’s work as a whole does not primarily aim to elaborate a system of religious doctrine, it nevertheless projects a vision of the world that perceives the divine in the human through a syncretic combination of pagan and Christian, profane and sacred sensibilities.4 The celebrated twenty-second dizain of Délie expresses the beloved as the dea triformis of Hecaté, Diana, and Luna. The entire work is permeated with references to the various forces unleashed by different sides of the triune divinity: suffering, wandering, death (Proserpina), aspiration, ecstasy, changeability, illusion (Diana/Daphne), the anima mundi of both the cosmos and the lover (Luna).5 Moreover, Délie presents the reader with an intermingling of biblical and pagan beliefs. For example, dizain 165 connotes a parallel between Pandora’s vengeance and Old Testament punishment when the lover’s audacity incurs a fate similar to that of ‘Dathan’ and ‘Abiron’ (v. 10) who were swallowed up by the earth. Another mixture of the sacred and the profane in connection with Délie’s divinity is recounted in dizain 278

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where she is celebrated both as ‘Parolle saincte’ (v. 6) and ‘le Phoenix de nostre aage’ (v. 10). On the other hand (as shall be seen in more detail), the poetic sequence is pervaded with Judaeo-Christian imagery from biblical and ecclesiastical sources. The fourteenth impresa pictures the ‘Tour Babel,’ and dizain 254, associating Délie’s religious qualities with Marguerite de Navarre, celebrates her as an incarnation of ‘Faith,’ ‘Hope,’ and ‘Charity.’ Other poems refer to All Soul’s Day, purgatory, and holy pilgrimages (dizains 125, 241, 242 respectively),6 and the last emblesme, entitled ‘Le Tumbeau et les chandeliers,’ shows a coffin whose pall is decorated with a cross. Finally, toward the close of Délie, there is a group of poems inspired from Sperone Speroni’s Dialogo d’Amore that makes reference to or develops religious subjects: Dizain

436 – The lover is mystically changed ‘en Dieu.’ 441 – He sees himself as minister of God’s will. 442 – He considers questions of theodicy and faith. 443 – To look directly at the divine would blind the lover. 445 – Love is the emanation of God’s will. 446 – The speaker meditates on eschatology and immortality.7

A second reason for viewing religious rhetoric as a model for Délie is historical. In Devotional Poetry In France: c.1570–1613, Terence Cave has written that ‘the psalm-paraphrases of Marot, the work of Rabelais, and perhaps the Délie of Scève can in their different ways be seen as complementary to Marguerite’s [de Navarre’s] conception of a literature based on meditation and self-knowledge’ (1969, 294). Whoever reads Délie reads introspection, meditation, and self-scrutiny. The predominantly inward search for wisdom characterizing Délie coupled with its reference to the divine corresponds historically to the Erasmian call for interior religious renewal (as opposed to formulaic and mechanical ritual) that gained currency in early sixteenth-century France. As Cave has pointed out, the cultural climate in France during the first half of the century was propitious to the spiritual rejuvenation and the cross-fertilization between religious and profane literature (1969, 294–5). This stress on spiritual reflection and interior renewal is seen in the evangelical humanism of Lefèvre d’Étaples, whose work was inspired by the Devotio moderna and Florentine Neoplatonism. Also, Jean Dagens in his Bibliographie chronologique de la littérature de spiritualité et de ses sources: 1501–1610 notes that Lefèvre’s works figure prominently in France along with those of Erasmus, the Flemish and Rhineland mystics, the Patristics, and Denis the Carthusian.8

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Similarly, Clément Marot’s Trente Psaumes (1541) set the standard for his contemporaries in the art of biblical paraphrase that culminated in the 1562 Marot-Bèze Psalter (Jeanneret 1969, 51–128). The use of literature for self-knowledge based on religious meditation is effectively illustrated by the work of Marguerite de Navarre who synthesized Pauline faith and Neoplatonic love (Cottrell 1986, 46–7). Rabelais, making symbolic use of satire, summons deep reflection through his mordant criticisms of the arrogance, ignorance, and superstitious beliefs within the church, and calls on readers to renew their faith through sacred scripture and the Erasmian philosophy of Christ (Defaux 1997, 16, 18, 20). Moreover, the popularity of the puys at Dieppe, Caen, and Rouen produced highly moving Marian poetry such as that of Dom Nicole Lescarre, Nicole Le Vestu, and Jehan Couppel. These devotional works utilized symbols having echoes in Délie dealing with the ‘Cedrus exaltata’ (D 372, v. 1), the ‘Pure licorne’ (impresa 1), and the ‘Vierge au Serpent’ that suggests Délie as the ‘Basilisque’ in the first dizain (v. 4) (Defaux, 2001, 692). Finally, we should recall that in the 1541 publication of the Institution chrétienne, Calvin, like Marguerite and Marot, exploited the potential of literary aesthetics and the vernacular to encourage religious devotion predicated on biblical reflection (Bouwsma 1988, 113–27). Délie is a text characterized by the tension between supreme self-awareness and thwarted intention, the result being severe scepticsm regarding the efficacy of the will. Though Scève’s persona does not directly explore the place of volition in the context of predestination and divine election, there are contemporary literary works that take up this question. In his study concentrating on the relations between French Renaissance religious writing and Marguerite de Navarre’s devotional work, Gary Ferguson finds two types of tone stressing either theological doctrine or individual spirituality (1992, ix–xix, 7–8). In Jean Bouchet’s Triumphes de la noble et amoureuse dame, dogma predominates through the allegory of religious life as a pilgrimage to salvation – a historical-liturgical itinerary guided by church ministration and the sacraments. On the other hand, the Recueil Jehan Marot de Caen accentuates the intimate dialogue of the soul standing naked before God imploring the gift of grace as the certain cure for its sinful nature. Another thread in religious poetry identified by Ferguson is a preoccupation with soteriological issues surrounding the question of justification.9 Poems such as Jean de Castel’s Mirouer des pecheurs et pecheresses evoke the danse macabre in order to persuade its readers that, in spite of the threat of eternal damnation, salvation is open to all who actively cooperate with God’s grace. However, in the Epistre d’ung Pecheur

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à Jésus Christ by Victor Brodeau, there is the atmosphere of a personal crisis where ‘the individual suffers suspended in a post-lapsarian yet prebaptismal state of limbo, in which grace is not assured and only condemnation under the Law is certain’ (Ferguson 1992, 6). A third observation made by Ferguson is the acute dilemma given distinctive formulation by Marguerite de Navarre concerning the psychological bind of synergism.10 In such works as Le Miroir de l’ame pecheresse, the queen is not as much preoccupied with whether she is one of the elect as with the theological paradox that the soul cannot achieve salvation by itself, nor can it without itself. As Ferguson points out, Erasmus encapsulates this religious dilemma in De Libero Arbitrio when saying of free will, ‘nec interim nihil agit nostra voluntas.’ This statement in turn echoes the Augustinian dictum, ‘Qui fecit te sine te, non justificat te sine te’ (quoted from Ferguson 1992, 56). Reflected in these soteriological problems is a parallel phenomenon in Délie. Mirroring the uncertainties of justification in the religious realm is the poet-lover’s preoccupation with constant setbacks of the will and frustrated volition. Just as the speaker’s hyper self-consciousness cannot guarantee the satisfaction of desire, so Reformist devotional discourse can be supremely aware of the uncertainty of election. Délie has a mystical dimension that will be fully taken up in chapter 7. Suffice it to say that in addition to the works previously mentioned are the prolific editions of Lefèvre d’Étaples, which created an intellectual climate conducive to Scève’s contemplative mentality. These include the Corpus Dionysiacum (1499), Books I and II of Raymond Lull’s Liber contemplationis in Deum (1505), John van Ruusbroec’s De ornatu spiritualium nuptiarum (1512), editions of Hugh and Richard of Saint Victor (1506, 1510 respectively), and Lefèvre’s courageous sponsorship in 1513 of medieval women mystics: Elizabeth of Schönau’s Visiones, Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias, and Mechthild of Hackeborn’s Liber specialis gratiae.11 Religious literature reaches Scève’s era from other avenues as well. As literary historians have pointed out, the author of Délie is the inheritor of three generations of Rhétoriqueur poetry as seen from his allegorical eclogue Arion (1536) and from certain poems of his canzioniere.12 The Rhétoriqueurs could combine linguistic experimentation with religious themes. For example, Molinet’s ‘Oroison sur Maria’ constitutes a verbal tour de force of onomastics where an acrostic litany is used to endow each letter of the Virgin’s name with sacred properties (Rigolot 1977, 35–6). However, it would be false to imply that Rhétoriqueur poetry is exclusively linguistic gymnastics. In Lemaire de Belges, we find a poet inaugurating the French Renaissance who blends poetry with sacred and profane

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themes. The Petit Livret Sommaire is a compilation of poems not only of this author but also of Ovid, Virgil, and Seneca, which is set in the framework of the Song of Songs that lends an air of Christian mysticism to the collection. As Michael Randall has argued, Lemaire, like Molinet, wrote Marian poems to plumb the possibilities of voicing the ineffable by testing the powers of analogy. One piece titled Une Oroisan composée par Jehan Le Maire de ladicte ville de Vallenciennes summons its poetic force to contemplate the divine only to reach an epistemological impasse ‘before the unsurpassable and unattainable quality of the Virgin’ (Randall 1995, 74–5). Also, the Rhétoriqueurs can be counted among those using poetry in the service of religious reform. Jean Bouchet’s Deploration de l’eglise militante and Pierre Gringore’s Heures de nostre dame have in common severe criticism of ecclesiastical corruption, decadence, and preoccupation with temporal power (Ferguson 1992, 79, 186). The surge of humanism and the revival of antiquity – distinctive marks of the Renaissance – should not be understood as putting an end to scholasticism. Quite the contrary. For example, Thomas de Vio (Cardinal Cajetan), one of the most influential figures of his era, propelled a great revival of Thomism in the sixteenth century in his commentaries on St Thomas’s Summa Theologiae (1508–18). Partly as a result of Pomponazzi’s rejection of the Averroists and St Thomas’s philosophy on the separability of soul and body, the dependence of the soul on the body, and the immortal existence of the soul, there arose a rebirth of Christian philosophy known as the ‘Second Scholastic.’ Cajetan may be seen as an early, important force in this movement, especially remembered for his concepts on analogy, but also for his On Being and Essence and his commentaries on Aristotle’s Organon, On the Soul, and Metaphysics. More directly affecting Scève from Aristotelian and scholastic sources is Gregor Reisch’s widely circulated encyclopedic work, Margarita philosophica (first published in 1503), in which one can see reflected the former’s penchant for definition, syllogism, faculty psychology, and philosophic music.13 Délie’s scholastic heritage, the syllogism, and its use of analogy will be taken up in chapter 6.14 The use of literature for religious reform and spiritual renewal is part of a much larger historical context of changing conditions in early modern France where a multiplicity of forces was challenging dominant hierarchies. This is especially true of the religious arena where attempts to reform the church led to repression and sociopolitical strife in spite of Francis I’s policy of tolerance and the best efforts of the Du Bellays to avoid a schism (Screech 1979, 178–80). In 1533 Noël Béda, syndic of the Sorbonne, moved to censure under suspicion of her-

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esy Marguerite d’Angoulême’s Le Mirroir de l’ame pecheresse (Tournon, Bideaux, and Moreau 1991, 60). While Francis I could reverse this attack against his sister’s evangelical work, he could no longer remain tolerant of religious reform after l’affaire des placards. In October 1534, Zwinglian posters denouncing the ‘idolatry of the Mass’ were scattered on the streets and crossroads of Paris, and the public reaction to this propaganda assault was marked by profound shock and scandal (Screech 1979, 202). This act perpetrated by the Sacramentarians was not only considered sacrilegious, but also seditious because it threatened the very socio-political structure of France (Tournon1991, 60). A second affaire des placards on the night of 13– 14 January 1535 caused Francis to turn volte-face against acts he suspected as heretical, which only intensified the atmosphere of repression and persecution (Screech 1979, 201–3). Not only did the king order all printing to cease, but he also led a national act of atonement through the Paris streets to Notre-Dame. In 1545, an edict of Parlement made official the ‘Catalogue’ of censured books (Tournon 1991, 61–4). In the midst of these upheavals, the moderate evangelical reforms of Briçonnet were halted and, emblematic of the air of danger, Etienne Dolet, one of the leading French humanists, was burned alive for having edited heretical works (ibid.). At the same time that religious tensions were fomenting in early modern France, there were a number of humanist, intellectual mysticisms that also provide contexts for understanding Scève’s spiritual sensibility. Most of these concepts were theocentric and had their roots in the medieval period. First, the Florentine Academy came into possession of the Corpus Hermeticum that awakened interest in a prisca theologia that provided the foundation for religions existing before Christianity, but contemporaneous with the Old Testament (Yates 1964, 12–17). Second, there was a revival of Raymond Lull who, basing himself on Saint Augustine and Dionysius the Areopagite, used the geometrical forms of the circle, square, and triangle in a combinatory art used to investigate the Trinitarian nature of the world (Yates 1966, 198). Also, the publication of Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica in 1505 kindled interest in hieroglyphic signs as a privileged language that used certain figures (thought to be ideographs) to give direct, non-discursive access to divine mysteries. Moreover, there were three philosophers of Neoplatonic outlook who, like Scève, had recourse to the concept of the microcosm. They are Nicholas Cusanus (1401–64), Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), and Charles de Bovelles (1479–1553). In particular, Cusanus’s views concerning God as the coincidentia oppositorium mirror the triune nature of Délie as the perpetrator of suffering and the agent of deliverance. In addition, his concept of the individual human as a

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microcosm having a complicatio (enfolding) of virtual powers and an explicatio (unfolding)15 of actualized creativity reflect the capacity of Délie’s poet-lover to draw self-realization from the interior powers of meditation. Finally, in his love for mathematical symbolism, Cusanus’s work foresees the popularity of Pythagoreanism in the sixteenth century, which also tied number to poetry, cosmology, science, and mystical theology.16 The paucity of biographical facts on Scève precludes the possibility of a thorough examination of his religious background. However, the scant information presently at hand and the inferences derived from it encourage such an inquiry. A document discovered by Saulnier attests that Scève was ‘clericus Lugdunensis’ – that he had taken minor orders and was probably first tonsured in 1508 at the age of seven. As confirmed by the same document, we know that Scève requested and was granted the priory of SaintJean sur Saint-Maurice in the Lyon diocese. This was a Benedictine priory, which was responsible to the abbey of Saint-Michel de Cluse. Though there is no reason to suppose that Scève ever resided there, this information provides an explanation for why he never married (Saulnier 1950, 14– 19). In 1542, the Frenchman published two psalms translated into French (26 and 83) for a collection edited by Etienne Dolet titled Trente Psalmes du royal prophète David, which were reedited in 1550 and 1557.17 Five years after the translations first appeared, Scève provided an opening sonnet for two of Marguerite d’Angoulême’s religious works, the Marguerites de la marguerite des princesses and the Suyte des Marguerites de la marguerite des princesses.18 Finally, Scève’s last major work was the biblical epic Microcosme (1562), an encyclopedic poem of 3,003 alexandrins celebrating the Christian humanist view of humanity as the redeemed Adam capable of perpetually regenerating his earthly and spiritual condition.19 The city of Lyon during Scève’s time was highly receptive to new ideas and open to such syncretic works as Délie. This is due in no small measure to its soaring commercial prosperity that contributed to its cosmopolitan ambiance. Part of its economic growth was due to the solid footing of its silk-weaving industry and to the migration of Florentine bankers and German printers. Moreover, its status as a trading centre was enhanced thanks to royal permission to renew the fairs with tax exemption and to the free circulation of monies of all countries. Lyon’s governmental sites of power – the city council and the archbishop (‘Primate of the Gauls’) – made it relatively autonomous vis-à-vis the centralizing forces of king, Parlement, and the Sorbonne. Also, the Scève family, having performed public service for generations, was highly respected in Lyon, and Maurice maintained or even enhanced this reputation. He was a respected member of ‘So-

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dalitium Lugdunense,’ including Bourbon, Visagier, and Ducher, a friend of Dolet and Tyard, admired by such visitors as Charles de Sainte Marthe, and regarded as having daunting knowledge by Charles Fontaine.20 Gérard Defaux’s pronouncement that Délie is idolatrous21 would have to be measured by contemporary public reaction to Scève’s Délie after its publication in 1544. In fact, there was no sign whatsoever that the author was held in anything but the highest esteem by the Lyonnais, especially since city authorities chose him to direct the pageantry and parade of Henri II’s 1548 entrée royale.22 Needless to say, the republication of Délie in 1564, without any substantive change in content, but with fresh woodcuts, only redounds to the continued popularity of Délie. In the context of French literary history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the terms ‘meditation’ and ‘devotion’ are usually associated with the religious writers of the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. Such a period extends from 1570 to 1613 and includes such authors as D’Aubigné, Du Bartas, Sponde, Chassignet, Favre, Desportes, François de Sales, and La Ceppède. However, it is necessary to recall that there had already been immense religious activity in the direction of systematic meditation and spiritual reform in Western Europe from the Middle Ages to Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. This movement had considerable effect on the early French Renaissance. Such historians as Pierre Pourrat, Etienne Gilson, and the team headed by Louis Bouyer have addressed themselves to the properly religious issues of this evolution, while Louis Martz and Terence Cave have developed rich connections between the devotional tradition and the poetry of England and France respectively. Barbara Lewalski has more recently studied the Protestant trajectory of meditative prayer that both interacts with Catholic reforms and develops its own system of poetics.23 It is even more imperative to remember this history upon encountering such judgments as those of Schmidt and Saulnier, who tend to overemphasize the secularizing influences of humanism on the early French Renaissance in general and on Scève in particular. As Gérard Defaux states, the Renaissance bears witness to a renewal of forces, religious and profane, that existed concurrently and exerted reciprocal influence: Et s’il est en revanche légitime, à propos de la Renaissance, d’invoquer le double patronage de Platon et de Cicéron ... de dire qu’elle se caractérise à la fois par une culture à dominante oratoire et par la redécouverte de l’antquité païenne, il demeure néanmoins que l’Humanisme de cette époque est aussi bien chétien que païen, qu’il plonge ses racines dans les traités mystiques de

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pseudo-Denys l’Aréopagite et de Nicolas de Cues, que l’Évangélisme, celui d’Érasme et de Rabelais, comme celui du groupe de Meaux – Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, Guillaume Briçonnet, Gérard Roussel, Marguerite de Navarre, Clément Marot, etc. – retrouve tout naturellement, pour les propager jusqu’à Montaigne, le scepticsme et et l’anti-intellectualisme profonds du De imitatione Christi liber ... (1997a, 15) [On the other hand, if it is legitimate, regarding the Renaissance, to invoke the double patronage of Plato and Cicero ... [and] to say that it is characterized at the same time by a culture predominately oratorical and by the rediscovery of pagan antiquity, it remains nevertheless true that the humanism of this epoch is as Christian as pagan, that it sinks its roots in the mystical treatises of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and of Nicholas of Cusa, that the evangelism of Erasmus, of Rabelais, and the group of Meaux – Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, Guillaume Briçonnet, Gérard Roussel, Marguerite de Navarre, Clément Marot – rediscovers quite naturally, up to Montaigne, the profound scepticism and anti-intellectualism of the Imitatione Christi liber ...]

In studying Scève’s spirituality, the path followed here is based largely on religion and particularly on methods of introspection. In short, upon completing both an internal and external study of Délie, it is valid and useful to see the work as appropriating religious forms of meditation for humanist goals. Meditative discourse is at the heart of Délie and gives a precise description of the dizain and its structure of enunciation. By studying key meditative works as intertexts within the history of European spirituality, it will be seen that an important dimension of Délie’s poetry is based on three models. The first model, which constitutes a method of systematic prayer, is bequeathed to the Renaissance from the Devotio moderna to García de Cisneros and Ignatius of Loyola. In the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius synthesized his predecessors’ work into a structure composed of a composition of place followed by acts of memory, understanding, and will. Though the Exercises were printed in 1548, similar methods had already been published by Joannes Mauburnus in 1491, and Ignatius was already administering the Exercises during his study in Paris (1528–35).24 The second model derives from Saint Augustine’s works, particularly the Confessions, which sets the standard for the practice of introspection. It consists of an exercitatio animi reenacting a moral dilemma through the triple relation of lover, the beloved (God), and the bonds that unite them. It would take a book to show what Scève took from Augustine through

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Petrarch, but in this study, I will move in relatively direct fashion between Augustine and Scève carefully noting their differences and similarities. The third model, which will be discussed in the last three chapters, organizes Délie as a whole through the tripartite method of spiritual progress consisting of the via purgativa, the via illuminativa, and the via unitiva. This ‘triple way’ had solid roots in classical philosophy and Christian spirituality that extended from Plato to Pseudo-Dionysius, from Bonaventure to Cisneros, and from the Renaissance to the Catholic Reformation, as represented by the popularity of Luis de Grenada’s Libro de la oración y meditación (1554–6) and the Guía de Pecadores (1556). The Renaissance’s reawakening to antiquity cannot be separated from devotional rejuvenation, and therefore, considering the religious tone of Délie, it will be profitable to examine the ways in which techniques of meditation, derived from sacred sources, organize Scève’s response to the divine. Intertextual Religious Models of Meditation in Délie Though this method hinges on structures of rhetoric uniting Ignatius, Scève, and Augustine, it is appropriate at this stage to focus on historical contexts that will sharpen such comparisons. It will be important to state the historical filiations of these three writers and also closely examine their intertextual relations. Such models will provide the basis for identifying rhetorical analogues for Délie as well as distinctions between Scève and his predecessors. Ignatius began writing the Spiritual Exercises in 1522 and by 1533 he was in Paris already training directors to administer them. Though the Exercises were published in 1548, Ignatius finished his last substantial revisions in Rome between 1539 and 1541.25 Thanks to the punctilious editorial work of Joseph Calveras and Cándido Dalmases, we know that there was first a ‘textus autographus’ in Spanish (c. 1538) which in 1541 was translated into Latin called the ‘Versio prima.’ A third text called the ‘Versio Vulgata’ using elegant, classical Latin was submitted to the Holy See in 1547 and approved by Paul III in 1548 (A, 95–135). George E. Ganss, who recently edited an English version of the Exercises, says that ‘most modern scholars think that the [Spanish] Autograph ... best reproduces Ignatius’s thought and its nuances.’26 For this reason, I have used the Spanish autograph. It must not be forgotten that the Spiritual Exercises were the culmination of a long process of systematizing prayer dating from the Middle Ages.27 To be sure, Ignatius had a genius for the practical, but his methods owed

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a great deal to his predecessors. This is true of his famous ‘composition of place’ as well as his tripartite meditative technique exercising memory, intellect, and will. In the context of systematic prayer, such a meditative pattern may be traced to the Devotio moderna. The Brothers of the Common Life sought to deemphasize, if not bypass, the fierce debates of Thomistic scholastics and Ockhamist nominalists whose disputes threatened the very coherence of religious belief. Such figures as Gerald Groote, Thomas à Kempis, and John Standonck, inspired by the Flemish and German mystics, advocated the cultivation of personal, interior prayer in conjunction with evangelistic piety. One consequence of this devotional orientation was to stress methodical reflection in order to exercise and discipline the three powers of the soul. During the latter part of the fifteenth century, Wessel Gansfort, a member of the Brethren of the Common Life at Windesheim, produced a Scala Meditationis that has been recognized as one of the first and great prototypes of systematic prayer.28 Gansfort’s Scala was reproduced by Joannes Mauburnus’s Rosetum exercitiorum spiritualium et sacrarum meditationum (Zwolle, 1494) whose commentary provided an extensive theory of meditation.29 In 1510 Josse Bade republished the Rosetum in Paris partly because Lefèvre d’Étaples held the work in high esteem and personally recommended it to Bade who included new material written by Mauburnus in the last days of his life. Between the Zwolle and Paris editions, Jakob von Pfortzheim published the Rosetum in Basel in 1504.30 Eugene Rice points out that that the Rosetum was an important link between the Devotio moderna and Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises (Rice 1971, 100). The Rosetum is composed of a series of treatises and spiritual ladders each of which served as a practical guide for ordering the spiritual life, both in its interior and exterior dimensions.31 In Mauburnus’s Scala Meditatoria, there are three divisions – ‘Gradus Processorii, & mentis,’ ‘Gradus Processorii, & iudicii aut intellectus,’ and ‘Gradus Processorii amoris voluntatis & affectus’ – that correspond to the steps of memory, understanding, and affective response in Ignatius. The influence of the Windesheim congregation reached out to the secular clergy and the laity and spread rapidly throughout Europe, especially to Germany and Switzerland and then to France and Spain. It became the bridge between the Devotio moderna and Loyola through García de Cisneros’s Ejercitatorio de la vida espiritual (Montserrat, 1500).32 This work was the most comprehensive method of systematic prayer hitherto found and contributed to the rejuvenation of inward prayer. It also developed methods of enhancing the three powers of the soul in conjunction with its ascent through

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the three ways: purgative, unitive, and illuminative (Pourrat, 3:18–22). Such reforms in methodical prayer confirmed even more the authority of Bonaventure’s De triplici via and Augustine’s De Trinitate upon which they were based. As for Ignatius’s composition of place, there are abundant antecedents. In the fourteenth century, Ludolph the Carthusian composed the Vita Christi, which was widely read and strongly influential. A homiletic narrative with mosaic-like descriptions, this work had special appeal in its capacity to transform theological abstractions into visually concrete scenarios and these into religious fervour. Not only are readers asked to contemplate the life of Christ as if the events were taking place before their eyes, but they are also directed to take part in various episodes – the Nativity, the Passion – as if they were actual participants wishing joy to the Virgin Mother, conversing with the Saviour, and escorting the apostles. Ludolph termed the process of dramatic visualization of the Gospels recordatio and the concomitant evocation of emotion compassio.33 Even before Ludolph, Pseudo-Bonaventure had taught the method of imaginative and affective contemplation in his Meditationes vitae Christi. In the Netherlands, Gerald Zerbolt, also of the Windesheim congregation and disciple of its cofounder Gerald Groote, theorized in his De reformatione virium animae that original sin, which turned us from rectitude and spiritual improvement, could be overcome through a practical method of graded exercises. This spiritual ascension, aimed to attain charity and purity of heart, also makes use of the composition of place, an example of which is his glorification of the heavens: ‘De gaudiis supercaelestibus, imaginare locum illum per imaginarias similitudines a sanctis pro nostra capacitate inventas.’34 In the fifteenth century, Louis Barbo (d. 1443), an Italian Benedictine reformer, compiled Modus meditandi et orandi in which he recommended a hierarchy of three types of prayer – vocal, meditative, contemplative – whose description constantly invokes the finge te videre (imagine you see). Just as Windesheim influenced Barbo, so did the latter’s reforming efforts reach García de Cisneros.35 Another predecessor of Ignatius, Joannes Mauburnus, also required a composition of place. In his Rosetum he directs that the meditator see an imaginary site of religious reflection. On scenes from the life of Christ, Mauburnus advises: ‘ut scilicet homo ea ante mentis oculos ponat et quasi Domino haec vel illa agenti aut patienti assisteret sic se great. Et semper mox ut senserit mentem distrahi sensus velle evagari, ad ista se convertat, et imaginariis quibusdam oculis his intendat’ (187) (to this end let the meditator place them [scenes of Christ] before the eyes of his soul, let him

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bear himself as if he were taking part in the action, in the suffering of the Lord. As soon as he feels his mind distracted, his senses dissipating, let him come to these points and consider them with the eyes of the imagination – translation mine). In the spirit of Ignatian pictorial imagination, but different in method, is Mauburnus’s chiropsalterium or psalmodic hand, which serves the ars memorativa. The palm of the left hand is pictured with words written on various parts economically reminding the meditator of key prayers and dogmas regulating the spiritual life (Rosetum, 167). Another procedure is to have the meditator recite one or two lines of poetry used as a visual/verbal mnemonics to concretize and digest a sacramental truth. In the ‘Scala communionis’ of the Rosetum, there are seven acts performed through verse of a highly pictorial nature that enable the meditator to prepare the heart for communion: Corda para, serves, resera, stabilito, Iesu da, Erige vel scindas, his septem corda perornes. [Prepare your hearts, preserve, open, lean on, give to Jesus, Raise or rend, seven ways of adorning your hearts to perfection.] (Rosetum, 205, translation mine)

Visual techniques of devotion, prayer, and meditation are ubiquitous in the sixteenth century. One of the most illustrious exponents of this approach is Erasmus. His stress on renewing interior spirituality by means of piety (as opposed to exterior ritual) enriched the ars moriendi tradition through such works as De praeparatione ad mortem (1533). Its appeal to the intellect to detach itself from the transient and worldly phenomena of life coupled with the visual drama of deathbed scenes, made it comparable in success to the popular Imitatione Christi. Among its arsenal of strategies is the psychological spectacle of tense stichomythic debates between Satan and the expiring person in which every seemingly irrefutable argument of temptation is parried by the feeble but resilient soul. In this respect, Erasmus foresees Ignatius both in regard to the composition of place and the dramatization of moral struggle. Scève’s Contraction of Meditative Models: Ignatius and Mauburnus If the practical genius of Loyola enabled him to contract the models of Gansfort and Mauburnus, then Scève compressed these meditative structures even more into the poetic concision of the illustrated dizain. The

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meditative structure of Délie’s dizains bears strikingly close analogies with practices adopted by Loyola in the Spiritual Exercises, which themselves are adaptations of previous works. For this reason, it will be instructive to use the Exercises and their intertexts as analogues to which Délie may be profitably compared. What Scève and Ignatius have in common is a rhetorical structure combining techniques of visualization with a tripartite meditative movement appealing to memory, understanding, and will. Délie and the Spiritual Exercises of Loyola share the common method of patterning meditation by means of the visual. Whereas Scève composes a poetic sequence conditioned by the impresa, Ignatius designs a religious handbook around the composición viendo el lugar.36 A second priority comes to reinforce the first. This involves the placement of the visual and the capacity of textual positioning to condition the dispositio. Though the composition of place had precedents well before the Autograph, Loyola is the first to make the composition a prelude to the meditation as a whole.37 Typically, Ignatius fixes the exercitant’s attention on a place of spiritual significance – a temple, the upper room of the Last Supper, the Garden of Eden – which determines the content of the meditative movement and guides the acts of spiritual improvement. Like the Ignatian composition, Délie’s illustrations condense and set the pattern for the subsequent verbal structures. That is, there is an alluring connection between the picture and the subsequent gloss dizain to which it allusively refers. It will be necessary first to review Ignatian rhetoric and then to move to Scève. At the heart of Ignatian meditative technique is the tripartite directive addressed to the exercitant to focus on the three parts of the soul: memory, understanding, and the will. Corresponding to these three powers are three meditative movements summoning the imagination in conjunction with recollection, reason, and the emotions. The meditator’s triple task respectively is to compose the topic, to analyse it, and to respond to it through affective prayer. For example, the First Exercise of the First Week directs that ‘The first point will be to recall to memory the first sin, which was that of the angels, then to apply the understanding by considering this sin in detail, then the will by seeking to remember and understand all, so that I may be the more ashamed and confounded when I compare the one sin of the angels with the many that I have committed.’38 In the initial step, Ignatius directs that the person meditating39 compose the subject matter by making an imaginary composition of place. This is an appeal to the exercitant’s imagination to create a visualization of the religious topic. In effect it is dramatic memory in which one sees the reconstituted object. In the first prelude of the First Week, Ignatius stipulates:

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‘The first prelude is a mental image of the place. It should be noted at this point that when the meditation or contemplation is on a visible object, for example, contemplating Christ our Lord during His life on earth, the image will consist of seeing with the mind’s eye the physical place where the object that we wish to contemplate is present.’40 This composition of place may take a variety of forms depending on the degree to which the meditator participates in the subject. In the example above, the exercitant imagines himself/herself present in the very spot where the event occurs. In other compositions, the meditator is fully engaged in the scene as an actor-participant in the religious drama. However, Ignatian meditation may merge both types of composition. In the Second Contemplation of the Second Week centred on the Nativity, Ignatius writes: ‘The first point is to see the persons: our Lady and St Joseph, the servant girl, and the child Jesus after his birth. I will become a poor, miserable, and unworthy slave looking upon them, and ministering to their needs, as though I were present there.’41 Having focused on the object of meditation, the meditator is then enjoined to exercise intellect and will. Though Ignatius aims to combine the three powers into a simultaneous expression of the soul, he characteristically indicates their order and function. Thus, the understanding is invoked after the composition, and its role is to draw out and to analyse the religious implications of the scene. As Ignatius notes, ‘The understanding is likewise to be used in considering the subject matter in greater detail,’42 and this is accomplished by instructing the exercitant to dwell on a series of ‘points.’ In effect, these points divide and subdivide the composition into religious inferences derived from the imaginary picture. In the Second Exercise of the first week, the retreatant reviews his/her sins in the ‘places’ of family and society. The subsequent five ‘points’ are made successively to increase the exercitant’s humility in comparison with the angels, the saints, and God’s justice and omnipotence (SEM, 57). Depending on the rhetorical purpose and content of the meditation, the third movement functions to arouse the meditator’s emotions that appropriately respond to the composition and analysis. Affective expression should grow naturally out of detailed reflection on the scene with the aim of embracing the religious truth under consideration. Typically, there is a moving vocative addressed to God, Christ, or Our Lady culminating the meditation. Ignatius gives some examples of a variety of colloquies: The colloquy is made properly by speaking as one friend speaks to another, or as a servant speaks to his master, now asking some favor, now accusing

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The Art of Meditation and the French Renaissance Love Lyric oneself for some wrong deed, or again, making known his affairs to Him and seeking His advice concerning them.43

The three meditative steps prescribed by Ignatius are the more economical synthesis of an arsenal of categories and spiritual ladders established by centuries of cross-fertilization between spiritual reform, rhetoric, and dialectic. Therefore, in order to make precise the meditative rhetoric in Scève’s Délie, it will be essential to refer to the Rosetum to tease out what is implicit in the Spiritual Exercises. To assist the reader in following my references to Mauburnus, the Scala Meditatoria is reproduced in Appendix 1. Let us now move to Délie and examine its meditative structures in relation to its religious antecedents. On the surface level of the work, one first encounters its meditative atmosphere through the reverential voice of the poet-lover who describes the beloved as divine. That is, meditation unfolds through the speaker’s voice whose deification of the woman and evocation of religious symbolism lends Délie its distinctively meditative tone: Toutes les fois qu’en mon entendement Ton nom divin par la memoire passe, L’Esprit ravy d’un si doulx sentement, En aultre vie, et plus doulce trespasse: Tes doigtz tirantz non le doulx son des cordes, Mais des haultz cieulx l’Angelique harmonie, Tiennent encor en telle symphonie, Et tellement les oreilles concordes, Que paix, et guerre ensemble tu accordes En ce concent, que lors je concevoys: Car du plaisir, qu’avecques toy j’avoys, Comme le vent se joue avec la flamme, L’esprit divin de ta celeste voix Soubdain m’estainct, et plus soubdain m’enflamme. Authorité de sa grave presence En membres apte à tout divin ouvrage, Vienne ouyr ceste, et ces dictz desplier, Parolle saincte en toute esjouissance, En qui Nature a mis pour sa plaisance Tout le parfaict de son divin ouvrage,

(D 168, vv. 1–4)

(D 196)

(D 219, vv. 1–2)

Two Models of Meditation for Délie Et tellement, certes, qu’à sa naissance Renovella le Phoenix de nostre aage.

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(D 278, vv. 5–10)

En son habit tant humainement cointe, En son humain tant divinement sage, En son divin tant à vertu conjoincte, En sa vertu immortel personnage.

(D 281, vv. 1–4)

Je sens en moy la vilté de la crainte Movoir l’horreur à mon indignité Parqui la voix m’est en la bouche estaincte Devant les piedz de ta divinité.

(D 381, vv. 1–4)

Et contemplant sa face à mon dommage, L’oeil, et le sens peu à peu me deffault, Et me pers tout en sa divine image. [Each time that memory carries Your divine name into my understanding My spirit, astonished at feeling such sweet confusion, Crosses over to another, sweeter life.] [Your fingers, plucking not sweet sound from the strings, But angelic harmony from the high heavens, Continue still in such symphony, And hold my ears in such accord with its harmony, That you bring into accord peace and war In this harmony that I then conceived. For with the pleasure that I had with you, As the wind plays with the flame, The divine spirit of your celestial voice At once extinguishes me and more suddenly still enflames.] [The authority of her dignified presence, In all respects suited for any divine work,] [Come listen to this one and hear her sayings explain The holy word in complete rejoicing. She is the one in whom Nature has put, for its own pleasure, All the perfection of its divine work,

(D 397, vv. 8–10)

(D 168, vv. 1–4)

(D 196)

(D 219, vv. 1–2)

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The Art of Meditation and the French Renaissance Love Lyric So that at her birth The Phoenix of our age was reborn.]

(D 278, vv. 5–10)

[In her manner she is so humanly graceful, In her humanity so divinely wise, In her divinity so joined to virtue, In her virtue immortal.]

(D 281, vv. 1–4.)

[I feel the vileness of fear arousing Horror in me at my own unworthiness, Wherefore is my voice extinguished in my mouth Before the feet of your divinity.]

(D 381, vv. 1–4)

[And from contemplating her face to my detriment, My eye and faculties of perception little by little fail me, And I lose myself utterly in her divine image.]

(D 397, vv. 8–10]

This religious tone is enhanced by biblical, Christian, and ecclesiastical imagery scattered throughout the work. In dizain 10 the lover’s bittersweet experience makes him taste gall as if it were ‘Manne’ (v. 10), and in dizain 166, the pure whiteness of the woman’s hands puts even the Queen of Sheba (‘Sabée,’ v. 10) to shame. In order to convey the monumental but ultimately self-defeating effort of bending Délie’s will, the fourteenth impresa is entitled ‘Tour Babel.’ Its motto reads, ‘Contre le ciel nul ne peult.’ Two dizains, 241 and 242, offer a diptych in which the lover’s unanswered prayers are contrasted with those of the ‘Pellerins’ (D 241, v. 1) and ‘Peuple devotieux’ (D 242, v. 1) who successfully pray to the ‘Sainctz piteux’ (D 241, v. 4) and the ‘Ciel amyable’ (D 242, v. 5). In dizain 125 the speaker’s psychological state ‘un Purgatoire excede’ (v. 10), and therefore, the dead commemorated on All Souls Day are more ‘bienheureux’ (v. 7). Some of the historical poems are also coloured with a devout or reverential tone. Pope Clement VII’s arrival in Marseille (D 28, v. 10) is associated with chastity, and in another place, the poet-lover’s living martyrdom is compared to that of Thomas More (D147, v. 10). The speaker has such great admiration for the virtue of Marguerite de Navarre that she is praised as an embodiment of ‘Foy,’ ‘Esperance,’ and ‘Charité’ (D 254, vv. 1, 2, 4). One of Scève’s most successful and dramatic images surges at the conclusion of dizain 143. Here Délie’s astounding regenerative power is envisaged in biblical terms. Bearing the same miraculous efficacy as Moses’s

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bronze serpent hoisted on a pole, she instantaneously heals those who look upon her (v. 10). It is Délie’s reverential tone and relation with the divine that make religious models more appropriate for analysis than non-religious ones focusing primarily on rhetoric and dialectic such as Agricola’s De inventione dialectica.44 In such texts as Délie where the object of communication is not only love of the woman but also love of the divine in humanity, the phatic function of communication will be paramount. This function is best defined by Malinowski as a ‘type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words’; it is also seen by Jakobson as a message ‘primarily serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication.’45 The aim of the phatic function is to establish contact between sender and receiver and to affirm solidarity in the fact that they share the same communicative network. Negatively understood, this function does not send a particular message, but rather confirms that one is taking part in the same circuit and code. Such a function is dominant in rituals, ceremonies, speeches, and celebrations or in any situation in which one affirms one’s bonds with another or with a group. It is therefore particularly significant in Délie, which is both an ongoing dialogue of love and a love of that which is divine God-like in human beings. One cannot understand Scève’s meditative techniques without first giving a description of his imprese, which make strong claims on the reader’s attention and memory. Because of Délie’s fifty illustrations, Scève has been regarded by literary history as the first French writer of imprese and the only sixteenth-century poet to incorporate them into a serious work on love. Though the ‘Privilege’ of Délie makes reference to its woodcuts as ‘Emblesmes,’ it is now generally accepted, thanks largely to the work of Dorothy Gabe Colemen, that these pictures are ‘imprese amorose,’ except for the very last cut which is strictly speaking an emblem.46 There are fifty woodcuts in all and they figure prominently in the dispositio of Délie. After a liminary huitain and five dizains there is a woodcut heading each of forty-nine novenary groups and the final three dizains giving a total of 450 poems. While problems of historical evolution and national difference prevent us from offering a definition of the impresa that would be true in all cases, one can generalize from countless examples and say that it is the symbolical representation of the thoughts, emotions, or situations of an individual through the interaction of a picture and motto that reciprocally but obliquely interpret one another. The picture, called the corps is the

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Image Not Available

Figure 1 ‘La Vipere qui se tue,’ from Scève, 111.

metaphor’s vehicle while the motto or âme is the tenor.47 The link between the two components is purposely indirect, making the impresa difficult but legible, elliptical but ultimately accessible. Though both the impresa and the emblem are in the same literary family, the former conveys the attitudes of an individual while the latter communicates commonplace wisdom having a didactic goal. In Délie it is through the illustrations’ visual effects that the tripartite meditative movement unfolds. The twenty-seventh impresa and its companion poem offer a good illustration of how Scève assimilates and adapts the meditative model. The picture entitled ‘La Vipere qui se tue’ shows a viper curling backward over its young surrounded by the legend, ‘Pour te donner vie ie me donne mort’ (figure 1). It is followed by dizain 240: Ma voulenté reduicte au doulx servage Du hault vouloir de ton commandement, Trouve le joug, à tous aultres saulvage, Le Paradis de son contentement.

Two Models of Meditation for Délie Pource asservit ce peu d’entendement Affin que Fame au Temps imperieuse, Maulgré Fortune, et force injurieuse, Puisse monstrer servitude non faincte, Me donnant mort sainctement glorieuse, Te donner vie immortellement saincte.

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(D 240)

[My will, reduced to the sweet servitude Of the noble desire of your command, Finds the yoke, to all others harsh, To be the Paradise of its contentment. For this it enslaves this little understanding, So that Fame, having authority over Time, In spite of Fortune and injurious force, Can show unfeigned servitude, Giving me holily glorious death, To give you immortally holy life.]

Just as the prelude of Ignatian meditation begins with a composition of place, so does Scève begin with a pictura. In like manner the tone of the poem is religious. The lover’s relation to the beloved is one of servant to goddess in which his will (‘voulenté,’ v. 1) is bound to her ‘commandement’ so that he may know ‘Le Paradis de son contentement’ (v. 4). Just as his unwavering devotion will bring him ‘mort sainctement glorieuse,’ so will it bring Délie ‘vie immortellement saincte’ (vv. 9–10). It is Scève’s impresa that functions as Mauburnus’s ‘Modus recolligendi’ by first fixing concentration so as to both delimit the field of attention (‘Quid cogitandum’) and to exclude what is not necessary (‘Excussio’). From a visual perspective this delimitation/exclusion is first connoted by the ostentatious frame surrounding the illustration proper whose borders take the geometrical shape of a lozenge. The formal framing effect foregrounds two messages: (1) that what is depicted is a significant object of introspection, and (2), that it is meant for scrutiny and study. The way it continues to reinforce concentration differs from religious compositions. As Roland Barthes has analysed in Sade, Fourier, Loyola, Ignatius’s composiciones viendo el lugar are views rather than visions (1971, 60). They are first described in their literal sense and, at this stage, they provide little difficulty of understanding before they are allegorized into theological symbols: a temple, a mountain, a warrior camp, a garden, or a sepulchre. The same is true for the scenes in Ludolph’s Vita Christi. For instance,

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the Carthusian directs the reader to ‘be present at [the] Nativity and Circumcision like a good foster parent with Joseph. Go with the Magi to Bethlehem, and worship with them the infant king’ (Conway 1976, 126). On the other hand, even at the literal level, Délie demands much greater mental effort in concentration because Scève is adapting meditation to the more allusive impresa. There is a superpositioning of traditional meditative procedures and impresa conventions in which Scève intertwines the former with the latter. As such, the rhetoric of the impresa turns meditation towards its own rules. That is, the impresa becomes a strategy to allure the reader through the puzzling play between its pictorial and verbal components. According to the rules of this genre, the impresa and ipso facto Délie cannot be read without difficulty48 in order to draw the reader into an intriguing process of revealing through concealing. It is the impresa that begins the ‘Modus recolligendi,’ and its meditative task requires that our concentration be maintained through a twofold decipherment. First, what is the relation between the picture and its motto? Then, what is the connection between this illustrated metaphor and the subsequent dizain? While Ignatius’s composition of place is direct, Scève’s impresa is oblique. Loyola overdetermines his message by what Barthes has called ‘discernement’ and ‘discretio,’ two operations that heighten clarity, articulation, and categorical homogeneity (1971, 58). Délie underdetermines the meaning of the visible by adhering to the genre rules of the impresa, which demand indirection. But this very obliquity guarantees concentration by repaying discipline with wisdom and intellectual pleasure. To return to the twenty-seventh illustration, ‘La Vipere qui se tue,’ the reader must solve the problem of relating the scene of the snake coiling backward over its young to the motto, ‘Pour te donner vie je me donne mort.’ In what way does this relate to the lover’s state? As Emanuele Tesauro will say in codifying the impresa, one will find that it ‘holds the mind somewhat suspended and astonished.’49 Through Pliny the Elder primarily but also through Horapollo and Valeriano, the reader will find that vipers were thought to be born by eating their way through the womb, thereby killing their mother.50 Thus, through the impresa the speaker proclaims that he sacrifices his own life in order to confer life on his beloved. The pictorial aspect of the impresa captures Ignatian dramatic memory because the poet-lover sees himself symbolized by the viper. The viper is an illustrated similitude that contains in kernel the logic of sacrifice that is developed in the poem proper. Mauburnus calls this ‘explanatio,’ whose function he gives by the word ‘illustratio,’ that is, ‘to make clear.’ As Pierre

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Debongnie states of the Scala, this meditative step ‘enlumine le mystère et ses qualités par l’application des figures, l’exposition des prophéties, l’ajustement des comparaisons et des paraboles’ (1927, 212). Through the visual similitude, he observes himself in a subject-matter place or topos (sacrifice) and occupies a physical space, stage, scene, or setting. The reader, in turn, becomes a coparticipant in this specularity as s/he deciphers the symbolism. Since in Délie there is a superpositioning of the rhetoric of the impresa with that of meditation, one sees that memory and composition of place are fused in the impresa. The iterative aspect of the motto, ‘Pour te donner vie je me donne mort,’ as well as the frozen action of the picture, create both a summary of experience and a gnomic declaration. Through the deciphering process required by the genre rules of the impresa, the reader discovers the relation between picture and motto (the self-sacrifice of the lover) and now must seize its development throughout the accompanying dizain. In meditative terms this is the stage of commemoratio, the threshold where memory presents the complex of associations spawned by the image to greater consideration by the intellect. In Mauburnus or Ignatius, the relations between the object of memory and its intellectual implications are explicitly teased out, so to speak, by the guidance of directives. However, in the Scevian meditative impresa, the reader’s attention is fixed by solving a problem whose solution can only be found in the allusive links between the pictorial similitude of the composition and the companion dizain. The poem thus develops the analytic stage of meditation by using the explanatio of the composition and extending it, as in a meditative tractatio, to other considerations. In Ignatian terms the composition is being developed into ‘points’ by searching out causes, effects, properties, and truths. In Scevian terms, the second stanza reflects on the first as if detailing or explaining what is implicit in memory’s proposing the subject. Penetrating deeper into the image of the viper (‘consideratio’), one sees a cyclical process of life and death where death is envisaged as a regeneration of life. In terms of the visual, this cycle is symbolized by the coiling of the snake backward assisting her newborn who will emerge at her fatal expense. As such, the dizain is a meditation on one of the most significant lessons of the work signalled in the liminary huitain where the poet-lover announces to Délie that he will describe ‘les mortz qu’en toy tu renovelles’ (v. 3). Attention to the verb renovelles shows that death, understood psychologically, will be a positive transformation continually renewed. There are many traditions – Petrarchan, Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Christian51

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– in which death engenders spiritual regeneration, but as seen in the Pliny borrowing, Scève places a slightly higher stress on the natural world. The poem fuses the understanding and the will in order to complete the meditative reenactment begun in the composition that exchanges death for life. Moving from the impresa to the dizain demands conquering the indirection of Scève’s language. However, the ethics of Délie require readers to exercise every effort in textual understanding in order to earn their part of virtue. In the quatrain the lover analyses and celebrates the paradox that binding his will to the ‘hault vouloir de ton commandement’ (v. 2) brings him ‘Le Paradis de son contentement’ (v. 4). In meditative terms this is the holocaustum that is felt or tasted (gustatio) as ‘doulx servage’ (v. 1) This is related to the impresa. Délie is both the cause of the lover’s suffering and the principle of his deliverance. She is part of the dea triformis who, like Proserpina, brings him death or, like Luna, inspires aspiration to virtue. In this context the impresa bears another meaning. The name Proserpina is derived from serpere or proserpere which, according to Tervarent, signifies ‘avancer comme un serpent’ (400). In other words, the serpent in the impresa is an iconographical association with the hell brought by Proserpina. Connoted by this symbolism is the notion that the lover’s deaths are psychological in nature inflicted by the infernal goddess who makes him wander, err, and lose himself in the tortuous trials of dispossession. However, the lover’s embracing of ‘servitude’ (v. 8) testifies to a moment of hard won spiritual progress when he is able to assimilate the depredations of Hecate to the higher goals of Luna. In this sense it is one of the conversions of death into life marking a pattern of moral oscillations throughout the sequence. In dizain 3, for example, the lover views servitude as ravished liberty; then in dizain 103 as a necessary but voluntary self-abdication to achieve ‘vivre plus heureux’ (v. 4); and in a third and triumphant time, it is perceived as a proud victory of complete self-giving: ‘Car en vainquant tumber dessoubz sa main,/M’a esté voye, et veue, et puis victoire’ (D 139, vv. 9–10). Thus, dizain 240 represents a momentary high point of improvement with respect to ‘servitude’ (v. 8) in a process unfolding in vicissitudes. Continuing the meditative step of invoking the entendement, the second stanza provides the cause of the lover’s ‘contentement.’ His pleasure derives from the ‘Fame’ (v. 6) that will triumph over the perdition of ‘Temps imperieuse’ (v. 6) including ‘Fortune, et force injurieuse’ (v. 7). In giving an estimation of the worth of his object, the poet-lover exercises what Mauburnus calls ‘Dijudicatio’: ‘Est qua pro dignitate sua suscepta res aestimatur’ (see Appendix 1). However, it is problematic, to say the least,

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whether ‘Fame’ (v. 6) is meant primarily to have secular or religious significance. On the one hand, it suggests a reversal of Petrarch’s Trionfo del Tempo where time conquers fame. Here the natural world gives testimony through the viper’s sacrifice that ‘Fame’ (v. 6) vanquishes time.52 On the other hand, ‘Fame’ (v. 6) has religious connotations since the viper’s act of giving her life to her children is implicitly connected with the sense of ‘holy’ martyrdom celebrated in the last two lines of the poem. If ‘Fame’ is connected to the ‘Dijudicatio,’ so is gloire. There are a number of senses in which the poet-lover invokes glory, and they also mix the secular with the sacred. Homer and Pindar both considered glory as a celestial gift that the poet confers on his subject, and here the speaker grants immortality to the beloved: ‘Te donner vie immortellement saincte’ (v. 10). The glory that the poet merits is the immortality of his love, and the poetry in which he praises it will resist all depredations. This last sense of glory recalls Du Bellay’s rousing exhortation in the Défense: ‘espère le fruit de ton labeur de l’incorruptible et non envieuse Postérité: c’est la Gloire, seule echelle, par les degrez de la quele les mortelz d’un pié léger montent au Ciel et se font compaignons des Dieux.’53 In the amour courtois tradition, the poem makes reference to the glory of obedience, loving service, sacrifice, and death. The Gospel of John does likewise in a passage that predicts life in death at the moment of Christ’s passion: ‘And Jesus answered them [Philip and Andrew], “The hour has come for the son of man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit”’ (12:23–4). [Iesus autem respondit eis dicens venit hora ut clarificetur54 Filius hominis/Amen amen dico vobis nisi granum frumenti cadens in terram mortuum fuerit ipsum solum manet si autem mortuum fuerit multum fructum adfert.] Just as the seed gives life by dying, just as the viper’s death bears progeny, so the poet-lover sacrifices for his participation in the divinity. Of course, gloire also implies public display, which is why the poet-lover insists that his service is open for all to see: ‘Maulgré Fortune, et force injurieuse,/Puisse monstrer servitude non faincte’ (vv. 7–8). The words ‘force injurieuse’ include (but are not limited to) the calumnies cast at the lover out of envy,55 and his confession of transparency and sincerity (‘non faincte’) is meant to convince the beloved that he will be true unto death in spite of injurious accusations. His expression ‘servitude non faincte’ conveys a sentiment frequently found in the love lyric. However, given the religious tone of the dizain, it is an echo of 1 Timothy 1:3–5 where Paul emphasizes serving God with a good conscience and faith unfeigned (‘fide non ficta,’ v. 5).56

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Immortality is conveyed not only by the verbal content of the device but also by the completed circle created by the viper’s coiling over its newborn. Consistent with the notion that ‘Fame’ (v. 6) vanquishes ‘Temps’ (v. 6), we could consider Scève’s impresa as a victorious response to its Egyptian predecessor, which Ficino judged to be an exemplary image of time. This is the hieroglyph of a serpent holding its tail in its mouth, symbolizing that time produces and consumes itself in a self-engendering and endless cycle.57 Stately and prayerful, Scève’s poem is not only in Mauburnus’s terms a holocaustum, but also by the words ‘saincte’ (v. 10) and ‘sainctement’ (v. 9) a consecration of his ‘servage’ (v. 1) transformed into immortal fame. Converting monologue to dialogue, the end of the poem conforms to Mauburnus’s final meditative movement, the ‘Gradus Processorii amoris voluntatis & affectus.’ Responding to Délie’s ‘hault vouloir,’ the lover renounces his freedom, converts death to life, and confers immortality on the beloved. Achieving unity in love through reciprocity and exchange, this poem is also one of the rare moments in Délie where it is the poet-lover who is the agent of power and transformation. Even more, he confers immortality on the beloved through his own immortal sacrifice. The concluding lines of the poem intone Mauburnus’s confidentia and are expressed by the figure of paranomasia: ‘Me donnant mort sainctement glorieuse,/Te donner vie immortellement saincte’ (vv. 9–10). Both the figure and the verbal structure develop the paradoxical exchange as an unending reenactment. This resembles the notion of an endless cycle depicted in the impresa by the coiled viper. Similar sounds bring into reverential reciprocity states that would have been contradictory at the literal level. Death becomes life, glorious death becomes immortality, and both reversals are holy and blessed. Ideal Meditation and Pragmatic Context A solid basis for the study of the poetics of meditation should include a model of ideal introspection and a model of practice. Since the Spiritual Exercises offer a pattern for perfection, they fulfil the first requirement. The enunciative structure of Ignatius’s handbook is that of a series of directives given to a spiritual director who in turn adapts Loyola’s prescriptions to the needs of the exercitants. Thus, as a text, the Exercises are an ideal model of a meditative program. The work’s injunctions urging the director to wall off all possibilities of distraction and weakness are highly military in tone. The meditative ‘I’ within the tripartite Ignatian

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structure is so tightly constituted by the directives, rules, and reviews that it becomes the quintessential product of Loyola’s regulations. One cannot fail to notice that the Spiritual Exercises are an enforcer of Christomorphic specularity closely controlling their reader. As Barthes has observed, the meditator’s ‘I’ assumes a ‘plasticité ... absolue’ such that ‘il n’est plus que le verbe qui soutient et justifie la scène’ (1971, 69). The composition of place is the discipline that imposes the optical focus of concentration, channelling the three powers through discrete steps of prelude, points, additional directives, notes, and response. Reinforcing this, the spiritual director immerses the exercitant in the application of senses that are themselves imperatives. The contemplation on hell in exercise 5 of the First Week orders the exercitant ‘To see in imagination the great fires ... to hear the wailing ... to smell the smoke ... to taste bitter things ... with the sense of touch to feel how the flames surround and burn souls.’58 Even if the composition of place and the application of the senses were absent from Ignatian meditation, there would remain the dominant discipline of an abstract visual scheme channelling the reader’s responses because Ignatian injunctives are communicated through highly diagrammatic and spatial directives. Loyola’s master image is that of a tabular chart of combinations and permutations, or from the perspective of discipline, a container within which there are highly articulated, complex hierarchies and boundaries used to distribute and conduct thought. In Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault Pierre Hadot notes that the requisite condition of spiritual exercise is that discourse should be ‘linked to an existential context, to a concrete praxis’ in which ‘one plunges into the completely other, this discovery of an unknown dimension of existence’ (1995, 26, 28). An effective model of meditative practice based on Hadot’s criteria would be Augustine’s Confessions. His work offers a life in praxis, no less ordered to the three powers than the Spiritual Exercises, but highly aware of what can go wrong in attempting to discipline one’s thoughts and acts. A theoretical model of meditation that is complete would make provision for both an explicit deployment of the Ignatian tripartite scheme and the struggle sprung by Augustine’s interior dialogue. The agon makes meditation a personal act, because through the trials of a unique individual (Augustine), it holds up a mirror to another human being (the reader) also in combat for his/ her soul. In virtue of the implicit freedom required by the soul’s volonté, a complete meditative model would also necessitate a practice, unfolding within a structure, which would allow the ‘I’ to be both self-directive and susceptible to error. It is important to explore how meditation could be

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set in motion by a second model, operating within the Ignatian tripartite scheme, that would offer a praxis of introspection. In this way theoretical discipline would be confronted by practice in which the meditator would ‘take upon himself the risk of ... radical transformation’ (Hadot 1995, 31). This would allow the reader to witness and participate in introspection as a more fallible process where the meditator may overstep borders, conflate boundaries, or lose the sense of order altogether. What accounts for the ‘I’ who, without explicit guidance, is left to his/her own devices in the vast possibilities of confusion and error, as well as of discovery and epiphany? For such a pragmatics of meditation, one would seek what Brian Stock calls a ‘dynamics of recollection’ (1996, 216). For this, I turn to Augustine.59 Historical Situation of Augustine in the Renaissance Relative to Délie Augustine, Petrarch, and Scève It is true that Augustine himself was weary of system building, fearing that it would devolve into abstractions that could detract from an individual’s personal experience in finding his/her own way to God.60 In fact, the unique story of his spiritual journey charted in the Confessions in lyrical Latin was one of the attractions that his writing held for the Renaissance. Despite Augustine’s scepticism about becoming too systematic, the Renaissance nevertheless saw his life and works as models. According to John Monfasani, Augustine ‘was the most printed patristic author of the early Renaissance.’61 A few important points de repère will help to set Augustine within certain intellectual currents of the Renaissance. Petrarch is one of the most influential figures among those who created humanist ideals out of the encounter with Augustine. Having reached the summit of Mount Ventoux, the Italian poet, ever carrying his personal copy of the Confessions, opened it to a passage that served as a motto for Renaissance humanist individuality: ‘men go about wondering at the heights of mountains and the great waves of the sea and wide flowing rivers and girdle of the ocean and the wheeling of the stars – and to themselves give no heed.’62 Petrarch’s greatest gift to posterity, his Rime sparse, pervaded with Augustinian metaphysics and psychology, used the saint’s theology as the sting of conscience that ironically brought out the modern experiences of self-estrangement and fragmentation as well as the aspirations to human perfection. The alliance of Erasmus with Augustine marked the continuation and

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consolidation of Christian humanism whose early representative was Nicholas of Cusa. Also, Erasmus’s ten-volume edition of Augustine’s Opera contributed to a period called the ‘patristic renaissance.’63 Erasmus’s practice of invoking De Doctrina Christiana to legitimize the use of classical knowledge in order to study sacred scripture followed Petrarch’s lead and was continued through John Colet, Peter Schade, Mattheus Adrianus, and Guillaume Budé. The Doctrina was also the source of authority on grace and predestination for such Catholic theologians as Girolamo Seripando, Michael Baius, and Cornelius Jansen. In 1501 Thomas Moore lectured in London on The City of God and Juan Luis Vivès, in his De tradendis disciplinis, recommended De Civitate Dei for reading, though he was critical of Augustine’s style (Monfasani 1999, 1:156). Augustine was also assimilated into Neoplatonic humanism in Ficino’s Theologia Platonica with regard to the concepts of the soul’s unrest, divine illumination of the soul, and love as a personal encounter that naturally tends toward a return to God (Kristeller 1956, 368). Particularly in France, Josse Bade carefully produced the Opuscula divi Augustini in 1502 and the Liber Epistolarum beati Augustini in 1515. As Robert Cottrell has demonstrated, Marguerite de Navarre published devotional poety of a Neoplatonic cast imbued with Augustinian concepts during the 1530s and 1540s (1986, 11–19). Later in the sixteenth century, Tommaso Campanella found in Augustine a philosophically solid source to refute scepticism of self-awareness and to advocate the innate consciousness of God. Finally, Augustine’s impact on the Reformation was so wide and deep that Calvin could say of him: ‘As for St. Augustine, he agrees so well with us in everything and everywhere, that if I had to write a confession upon this matter it would be enough for me to compose it from evidence drawn from his books.’64 From a humanist standpoint, Calvin accomplished for France what Augustine did for Christianity as a whole, namely, amalgamating ancient letters and theology in order to produce France’s own Christian eloquence, the Institutions. When tangible points of contact between Scève and Augustine are sought, they are discovered in Scève’s master model, Petrarch. In fact, a line of filiation can be adumbrated from Augustine to Petrarch to the author of Délie. In the De Otio religioso Petrarch vows, ‘I am undertaking to follow him [Augustine],’ while in dizain 388 of Délie, the poet-lover indicates his emulation of the Italian by calling him ‘ce Thuscan Apollo.’65 Of course, that Scève imitates Petrarch does not by itself constitute a link between the writer of Délie and the author of the Confessions. It is true that Petrarch appropriates and alters Augustine for his humanistic purposes as

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can be seen from the Secretum and the Familiares. It is also the case that Scève changes his Petrarchan intertext by dispensing with a chronological confessional narrative to emphasize the paradigmatic qualities of poetry.66 However, the ways in which Petrarch and Scève transform their models do not vitiate the fact that both have concrete connections with Augustine. Such convergences are readily identified when conceived as common intertextual topoi and introspective methods rather than identical values. The first and most obvious convergence is that all three writers launch their works with the image of error tied to the wayward youth wandering without direction. The first three books of the Confessions spawn a family of metaphors around the notion of errancy as moral error beginning with the fateful recollection of Confessions I:13 where Augustine, speaking of his early education, confesses, ‘I was obliged to memorize the wanderings of a hero named Aeneas, while in the meantime I failed to remember my own erratic ways’ (quam illae quibus tenere cogebar Aeneae nescio cuius errores, oblitus errorum meorum).67 Also, in III:6, the young Augustine laments his distance from the Lord by saying, ‘I was wandering far from you’ (et longe peregrinabar abs te), and in X:5, he comes to understand that ‘as long as I am a wanderer away from Thee, I am more present to myself than to Thee’ (quamdiu peregrinor abs te, mihi sum praesentior quam tibi).68 Moving to Petrarch’s Rime, one sees that in the very first poem, the lover echoes Augustine’s words with similar images of straying and dispersion: ‘Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono/di quel sospiri ond’io nudriva ‘l core/in sul mio primo giovenile errore’ (vv. 1–3).69 Similarly, Petrarch’s persona in the Secretum, Franciscus, declares to his alter ego, Augustinus: ‘as often as I read the book of your Confessions … I seem to be hearing the story of my own self, the story not of another’s wandering, but of my own.’70 Likewise, Scève gives prominence to such metaphors by dedicating the first two lines of the first dizain to the description of his persona as a gallivanting youth wandering about passionately but aimlessly: ‘L’Oeil trop ardent en mes jeunes erreurs/Girouettoit, mal cault, à l’impourveue’ (vv. 1–2). Commenting on this dizain, Coleman asserts, ‘The word [‘erreurs’] has no moral or theological meaning’ (1975, 25). This statement is false. In the first line, the lover criticizes his roving eye as ‘trop ardent’ (v. 1) and continues with other judgments of disapproval such as ‘imprudent’ (mal cault, v. 2), and ‘without purpose’ (à l’impourveue, v. 2). Even before the first dizain, in the liminary huitain, Scève’s persona had used the phrase ‘Mainte erreur’ (v. 6) in order to highlight the range of meanings on which he would eventually elaborate in the poetic sequence as a whole. The poet-lover will invoke this word a num-

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ber of times, sometimes referring to Hecate’s labyrinthine punishments (D 22, v. 1), sometimes alluding to his contravention of the beloved’s will (D 62, v. 2), and other times viewing his ‘erreur si grande’ in a theodical context as the cause of God’s sanctions bitterly felt (D 442, v. 3). Wandering leads to snares and traps, which are also central topoi common to the three writers. Augustine sets a pattern for both the psychological problem and shared imagery in the notion of misdirected and misguided love. As Sara Sturm-Maddox has observed, ‘Augustine had repeatedly described as visco the impediments to the soul’s ascent towards God’ (1985, 96). To support her point, she refers the reader to the saint’s repeated use of this figure in his commentary on Psalm 103 where he speaks of the free and unfettered wings ‘nulla visco obligatas’ of souls guided by charity and faith.71 In the Confessions, one of Augustine’s most prominent figures of speech centres around the related idea of self-entrapment – a notion which, if it had a motto, would be, ‘I had no liking for the safe path without pitfalls’ (III:1).72 This tendency to self-subversion is the intersection of numerous passages made visual by such evocations as ‘trap,’ ‘snare,’ ‘prisoner,’ and ‘snag,’ and are appropriately summed up by his question: ‘Was there any place where I could not be a prey to myself?’ (IV:7).73 Petrarch also has recourse to this imagery in connection with the deceptions of meretricious beauty and the duplicity of the senses. In fact, forms of the verb invescare are scattered throughout the Rime.74 In poem 99 Petrarch’s persona likens ‘this mortal life’ to a meadow whose flowers and grass attract the eyes only ‘to enlime our souls more deeply’ (è per lassar più l’animo invescato, v. 8).75 In Rime 142 even the laurel, symbolic of nature and glory, draws the lover into time’s inexorable vicissitudes and must be abandoned for a higher purpose: ‘I made ready to flee the enlimed branches/as soon as I began to see the light’ (fuggir disposi gl’invescati rami/tosto ch’i’ ’ncominciai di veder lume, vv. 29–30). The Italian furnishes a very direct link to Scève in Rime 257 by showing how Laura’s bel viso stuns the lover and captures his heart ‘like a young bird on a limed branch’ (v. 8).76 For the poet-lover in Délie, the upsurge of false hope is caused by the ‘doulce face’ (D 105, v. 9) of the beloved which is compared to a trap of glue highlighted by impresa 12 entitled ‘L’oyseau au glus.’ Here one sees two birds in flight above some vegetation one of which cannot free itself from lime-coated plants. The motto reads, ‘Ou moins crains plus suis pris.’ Returning to this image in dizain 276, the lover sees that he has overestimated the promises of espoir to such an extent that he cannot extricate himself from sticky desire: ‘Et d’un desir si glueux abuser, /Que ne povons de luy nous dessaisir’ (vv. 5–6). The snares of self-entrapment constitute

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one of the major problems in Délie. However, unlike his emblematic contemporaries, Scève welcomes adversity as a way to study the bafflement of the will and places as much value on brute efficacy as on moral content. A third point of convergence between Scève and Augustine through Petrarch is the obsessive concentration on the imago of the beloved. As Sturm-Maddox notes, this fixation is ‘an extreme manifestation of that activity known to Augustine and other patristic writers as delectatio cogitationis, the pleasurable meditation on the image of an object of desire’ (1985, 105). In De Vera Religione, Augustine identifies ‘phantasmata’ as vestiges or images of corporal things imprinted on the soul by way of the senses,77 and, in De Trinitate he elaborates an ethics and epistemology of the relation between sensation and image (XI:5:8). In the later work Augustine warns against the effects of idolatry and self-deception when the will misuses memory’s power in retrieving or inventing images.78 Petrarch’s persona in the Secretum, alluding to De Vera Religione, refers to ‘the epidemic of phantasms’ that deflects the soul from its ascent to God (Sturm-Maddox 1985, 105). This becomes the crisis in the Rime where from the time of the momentous innamoramento, the haunting dominance of the woman’s image threatens to displace the primacy of God. In Rime 96 the lover sees Laura’s lovely, smiling face painted in his breast wherever he looks: ‘Ma ‘l bel viso leggiardo che depinto/porto nel petto et veggio ove ch’io miri’ (vv. 5–6). Unable to heed Augustine’s cautions, the lover deliberately nourishes himself on imaginative deceptions of the woman fashioned by his own soul: ‘sento Amor sì da presso/che del suo proprio error l’alma s’appaga; in tante parti et sì bella la veggio/che se l’error durasse, altro non cheggio’ (R 129:36–9). [I feel Love so close by that my soul is satisfied by its own deception; in so many places and so beautiful I see her, that, if the deception should last, I ask for no more.] When this topos of memory seized by the image of the beloved appears in Délie, the ethics of memory shift Platonic considerations to evaluation of the potential and effectiveness of human capacities. Like Petrarch’s persona in the Rime, Scève’s poet-lover sees the woman everywhere: ‘Tes beaulx yeulx clers fouldroyamment luisantz/Furent object à mes pensers unique’ (D 212, vv. 1–2). [Your bright eyes, dazzling in their beauty,/Became my thought’s sole object.] However, as the adverb ‘fouldroyamment’ indicates, Scève’s beloved has a strikingly aggressive gaze whose invasiveness through memory threatens to distort and dissociate the proper functioning of the human powers. Thus, the lover’s struggle is seen as the beloved’s haunting presence that disorients lucidity and volition. In dizain 46 he attempts in vain to counteract his will’s inability to flee Délie’s hold: ‘A quelle fin

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mon vain vouloir propose/De m’esloingner de ce, qui plus me suyt?’ (vv. 5–6). [To what end does my vain will propose/To remove me far from that which follows me the more?] In another poem, dizain 143, memory is identified as central to thought but constantly fixes on the illusions of sensuality: ‘Le souvenir, ame de ma pensée,/Me ravit tant en son illusif songe’ (vv. 1–2). [Remembrance, the soul of thought,/Enchants me so in its illusive dream.] The lover finds that only the vigilant exercise of more intellectual powers can rout and cure the deception with the certainty of biblical faith: ‘En mon penser soubdain il [l’esprit] te regarde,/Comme au desert son Serpent eslevé’ (vv. 9–10). [In my thought [my spirit] suddenly looks at you,/As at its Serpent held up in the desert.] In a fourth point of convergence, Scève and Petrarch intersect with Augustine through the problems of ineffability. All three writers grapple with the difficulties of expressing the object of divine love that defies the resources of speech. However, the logic of this dilemma is different in each case. At the outset of the Confessions Augustine proclaims, ‘You are my God, my Life, my holy Delight, but is this enough to say of you? Can any man say enough when he speaks of you? Yet woe betide those who are silent about you! For even those who are most gifted with speech cannot find words to describe you’ (I:4).79 It was Augustine’s view that humanity can partially overcome its fall from grace through the Incarnation which enables the soul to glimpse the eternal Godhead ‘per aenigma similitudinis’ – that is, by the veiled figures of biblical wisdom. However, even this type of redeemed speech is pervaded with the limitations of space and time – a ‘tongue of the flesh’ – that remove us from the Word in whom expression and existence are simultaneous (Cottrell 1986, 16–18). Nevertheless, in the Confessions, Augustine bears witness to having achieved a momentary high point of communication with God through rapt silence in which every earthly medium is effaced, thereby allowing him to become ‘entranced and absorbed’ in a momentary vision of the Divinity (IX:10).80 Moving to Petrarch, one notices that the question of ineffability is largely negotiated in human terms. As Kenneth Cool has said of the Italian: It is his poetry, which will become the standard-bearer of an awakening artistic consciousness no longer tied to the universal analogies. In his hands, writing becomes the self-conscious act of an individual artist and not the seemingly impersonal transcription of the book of the world. His poetry represents an aesthetic ordering of an imaginary realm through the evocative power of his own words, rather than a selfless imitation of the divine creation by proxy. (1979, 194–5)

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Consequently, Petrarch’s lament over the inadequacies of language81 is seen to arise not out of the fall from grace but from the personal deficiencies of the poet to measure up to the laurels of human achievement. Furthermore, the object of love is split between the human and terrestrial Laura, and the very praise of her celestial qualities is expressed in human terms (Cool 1979, 196–7). As Robert Durling has found, Petrarch took from Augustine the notion that time-bound beings are inevitably subject to dispersal and fragmentation, but he sought to collect and integrate the pieces not in rapt silence but in a creative enterprise that is ‘relative, temporary, threatened’ (Petrarch 1976, 26). In Délie Scève’s persona, like Augustine, experiences a chasm between the intention to speak of the divine and the speech act that would be commensurate with that desire. Words are extinguished stillborn before the immensity of this task that only exacerbates the lover’s feelings of unworthiness: Je sens en moy la vilté de la crainte Movoir l’horreur à mon indignité Parqui la voix m’est en la bouche estaincte Devant les pieds de ta divinité.

(D 381, vv. 1–4)

Unlike Augustine who seeks mystical silence, the poet-lover asserts that refraining from speaking about Délie would be tantamount to extirpating the very life of his soul: ‘Car, me taisant de toy on me verroit/Oster l’esprit de ma vie à ma vie’ (D 119, vv. 9–10). [For, in being silent about you, I would be/Removing from my life its very spirit.] However, like Petrarch, Scève’s persona, while affirming the transcendent nature of Délie, orients his speech debilities to the earthly level by locating the source of his dilemma in the deficiencies of his human capacities: ‘L’Esprit vouloit, mais la bouche ne peut/Prendre congé, et te dire à Dieu, Dame’ (D 364, vv. 1–2). [My Spirit so desired, but my mouth could not/Take leave and bid you adieu, Lady.] In the context of ineffability, Scève’s difference from his Italian master concerns the way that he treats the fragmented and incomplete nature of experience. Analysing the phenomenon of dispersion in Scève and Petrarch, JoAnn DellaNeva makes an observation about the use of the Daphne and the Laurel myth that can be generalized to Délie: Scève, then, narrates the complete story of the Daphne myth, but in a fragmentary way. He shreds the Ovidian text – his own as well as Petrarch’s model – into distinct pieces and scatters them in a prescribed sequence at strategic

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points in his Délie. This fragmentation and dispersion of the Daphne myth indicate to the reader that Scève is unwilling to repeat Ovid’s – or Petrarch’s – account of that story in its entirety. (1983, 70)

The very style of Délie is legendary for its obscurity, a textual fact that daunted Scève’s contemporaries such as Charles Fontaine, Peletier Du Mans, and Joachim Du Bellay. (I will give greater development to this point in chapter 3.) A great deal of this problem is due precisely to Scève’s avoidance of transitions within and among dizains, a feature that forces the reader to interpolate the missing components. So pervasive is this difficulty that Pascal Quignard has described it as ‘l’impossibilité de la nomination.’82 What Scève’s poet-lover cannot name is transferred to the reader in gaps, discontinuities and dispersions that make us share on the stylistic level the poet-lover’s struggle with blunted speech. While Augustine attempts to shed language itself to accede to the Word of eternal silence,83 and although Petrarch strokes the lyre of dolcezza and facilità converting speechlessness into mellifluous music, Scève seeks to compensate for ineffability through human empathy. A fifth touchstone to Scève through Petrarch’s encounter with Augustine is not a common intertextual topic but a fundamental approach to self-knowledge. This is interiority (Tripet 1967). In particular, it is memory that becomes the privileged power of the soul that is summoned to gather and evaluate dissociated and fragmented experiences scattered by the discontinuities of time. In all three writers, memory functions through meditation to explore the triple relation between lover, beloved, and the content of their love. As Durling has shown, Petrarch’s metaphysics are conditioned by Augustinian formulations (18–26). Thus, the journey through memory offers the poet the opportunity of collecting the mutable and fleeing remnants of fleshy time in a reenactment of an experience that gives momentary integration and spiritual direction to the lover. Not only in the Secretum but also in the Rime sparse, Petrarch’s examination of conscience brings him to a quest for the eternal that, only through grace, can reverse the soul’s tendency toward nothingness. This ‘spiraling downward’ is termed habitus ad nihilium84 by Augustine. Through the poetic introspection of Rime 191 Petrarch’s persona focuses on the divinity mirrored by Laura to glimpse transcendent beatitude and to revel in the joys of the spiritual senses: Sì come eterna vita è veder Dio né più si brama né brama più lice,

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The Art of Meditation and the French Renaissance Love Lyric così me, Donna, il voi veder felice fa in questo breve et fraile viver mio. Né voi stessa com’or bella vid’io giamai, se vero al cor l’occhio ridice, dolce del mio penser ora beatrice che vince ogni alta speme, ogni desio! Et se non fusse il suo fuggir sì ratto, più non demanderei; ché s’alcun vive sol d’odore et tal fama fede acquista, alcun d’acqua o di foco, e ‘l gusto e ‘l tatto acquetan cose d’ogni dolzor prive, i’ perché non de la vostra alma vista?

(R 191)

[As it is eternal life to see God, nor can one desire more, nor is it right to desire more, so, Lady, seeing you makes me happy in this short and frail life of mine. Nor have I ever seen you as beautiful as you are at this hour, if my eye tells my heart the truth, oh sweet hour that makes blessed my thoughts, that surpasses every high hope, every desire! And if its fleeing were not so swift I would ask no more, for if some live only on odours, and the fame of it is believed, and some on water or on fire, satisfying their taste and touch, with things that lack all sweetness, why should I not live on the life-giving sight of you?]

The strongest intertextual bond that Scève inherits from Petrarch through Augustine is that knowledge is the product of interiority where primacy is placed on the power of memory. In fact, Délie’s psychological anatomy makes mémoire virtually consubstantial with understanding (entendement), since in Scève’s concept of the mind, memory is the soul of thought: ‘Le souvenir, ame de ma pensee’ (D 143, v. 1).85 However, unlike

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the Confessions, one does not find in Délie an Inner Master of truth,86 the infusion of supernatural grace, or a formal overarching religious dogma to chart the lover’s spiritual quest. Rather, there is a dynamic reciprocity between the woman’s vertu and the lover’s introspection that energizes the latter’s religious awareness. This mutuality is expressed by a syncretic combination of elements deriving from Petrarchan, Neoplatonic, classical, biblical, and Christian components that focus on the potential of the human powers. Yet, Augustine and Scève summon strikingly similar terms to give voice to the interior source of life. In the Confessions, Augustine says to God, ‘Tu autem eras interior intimo meo’ (You were deeper than the most intimate part of myself, III:6),87 and in Délie, the lover reveals to the woman: Mais ta Vertu aux Graces non diforme Te rend en moy si representative, Et en mon coeur si bien à toy conforme Que plus, que moy, tu t’y trouverois vive.

(D 229, vv. 7–10)

[But your virtue, not unlike that of the Graces, Makes so perfect a likeness of you in me And in my heart so consonant with you That you would find yourself more alive in it than I.]

As in Petrarch and Augustine, memory in Délie stands in a triple relation between lover and beloved in which the former seeks to convert the thirst for love into spiritual wisdom. However, Augustine remains the model for both writers in regard to the systematic organization of selfreflection that activates a meditative praxis involving specular drama, time, and the reach for transcendence. The organization of the Scevian dizain, its emblematics, and its very lyric mode are introspective methods of selfknowledge and reordering of self. It is to Augustine that I now turn to formulate the model of meditative praxis. Augustine and the Pragmatics of Meditation: The Derivation of a Model Just as a model for Délie’s meditative structure can be drawn from the Spiritual Exercises, so can a useful model of its meditative practice be extrapolated from the Confessions. Praxis may be considered as the functional procedures used to realize a repertoire of needs.88 In order to bring

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out the relevant features of Augustine’s introspective method, it is necessary to situate them in the context of his exemplary meditative writing, the Confessions. Therefore, in this section, I will provide key criteria pertaining to Augustine’s work in order to background the ways in which Délie compares and contrasts with this model. Then, in the following section, I will derive from an analysis of Book X, chapter 30, the meditative practices used in Délie. To the extent that the Confessions aim to transform and reconstruct the ethical self, they not only represent a religious conversion but also accomplish and perform it. The various senses of ‘confession’ identify and nuance the spiritual acts carried out by Augustine. First, as Solignac has seen, ‘Confession ... signifie donc aveu et louange; aveu des péchés commis, louange de la miséricorde et des grandeurs de Dieu’ (1962, 10). [Confession therefore signifies owning up to and praise, avowal of sins committed, praise of God’s mercy and grandeur.] In regard to the notion of avowal, the Confessions functions as the sinner’s self-accusation and purification before God effecting a ‘turning about of the heart, a purging of the inner eye.’89 As a conversion confessio is also self-discovery and transformation between the young man and the bishop bridged by the mystical beatitude Augustine shared with Monica at her death (Brown 1967, 164). History shows that the Confessions was intended as an apostolic event that would culminate in the edification and conversion of its readers (O’Connell 1969, 7). Finally, the Confessions not only bear witness to faith in scripture but also nourish Augustine with a foretaste of that ‘rest’ (quies) in God for which he continually longed (ibid., 7–8). Augustine gives semiotic and epistemological primacy to verbal language.90 When one considers all types of signs, words are the most universally useful and necessary. Natural and conventional signs can be translated verbally, but words cannot be described with equal accuracy by other kinds of signs. It is therefore possible to reduce signification in general to verbal signification. Marcia Colish points out that by construing all signs as linguistic, Augustine ‘makes it possible for himself to interpret all cognitive intermediaries between God and man as modes of verbal expression’ (1968, 44). Verbal signification goes to the heart of Augustine’s act of epistemological and moral redemption. According to Augustine, the world exists through the Divine Word and it is to this Word that we wish to return.91 However, while the Divine Logos is eternal, human signification is bound to time, matter, and change. Yet, in virtue of the Incarnation, knowledge of God is possible through ‘redeemed speech,’92 an inner regression from

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written to spoken words to memoria and the Interior Teacher (Gilson 1960, 103–5). For Augustine memoria is not only a reserve of past images, a ‘stomach for the mind’: ‘nimirum ergo memoria quasi venter est animi.’93 It is both a place and a faculty. In Book X of the Confessions the scope of memory is widened to include truths of reason, of self, and of God, as well as knowledge of values. Marcus aptly says, ‘It is, in effect, identified with all the latent potentialities of the mind for knowledge.’94 Tied to memory is the useful etymology furnished by Augustine that since his thoughts are dispersed, to think is cogitare, to assemble or collect one’s thoughts.95 The act of redeemed speech seeking divine illumination is a spiritual ascent from the body to the soul, from the particular to the universal, whose aim is to unite the mens, memoria, and voluntas with the Divine Exemplar. This ascent is carried out by an exercitatio animi96 through prayer, scripture, Christian conversation, and meditation. To stress both the difficulty and the method of deciphering the Word through the signs of reincarnated speech, Augustine uses the phrases ‘per aenigma similitudinis’ or ‘per speculum in aenigmate.’97 If the final chapters of the Confessions commence a prayerful exegesis of the Bible, it is to signify that Augustine, having purified memory through interior speech, could now return to the ineffable Word of his origins in Genesis.98 Délie is not a confessional narrative in the sense of a highly articulated chronological development that we find in the first nine books of the Confessions or in the line of temporal references in Petrarch’s Rime.99 It is rather an introspective self-examination carried out in the present where certain problems are continually reconsidered and redigested. Yet, Délie is very much like those parts of the Confessions where Augustine similarly turns time to the present in order to conduct a sustained self-examination in the here and now.100 It is on this type of discourse that I would like to concentrate. After the death of Monica in Book IX, the last four books of the Confessions (X–XIII) halt the chronological autobiography to dwell on the ‘now’ (‘adhuc’)101 of self-examination. In this second part of the Confessions Augustine shifts time from a retrospective account of his conversion to essentially four acts conducted in the present of discourse – the analysis of memory, the confession of sins, the meditation on time, and the exegesis of Genesis. It is in this second part of the Confessions that Augustine aims to accomplish two fundamental acts. He first undertakes to confess ‘not what I was, but what I am now,’102 intending to abandon idols and to intensify self-purification. However, no sooner does he profess to say who

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he is, than he begins a regression in memory that would efface the self to permit an indwelling of the Divine Logos. Book X inaugurates the voiding of Augustine’s empirical, temporal self so that through the exegesis of Genesis, he may discover the Word inhabiting and speaking through him: ‘O Lord, perfect your work in me. Open to me the pages of your book. Your voice is my joy.’103 In his informative chapter ‘The Evolution of Meditation,’ Michel Beaujour comments on the key relation between memory and rhetoric in Book X. He notes that in the passage from confession to loss of self, ‘Augustine the rhetorician, at the very moment when he scuttles pagan rhetoric to found a Christian rhetoric centered on the divine word and the allocution to God, is prompted to employ one of rhetoric’s parts, memory, in order to discover God in the depths of the evacuated, lost or, at least, sacrificed Self.’104 But what precisely are the rhetorical procedures of meditative memory that actualize redeemed speech? To answer this question, I turn to the confession of Book X, chapter 30 centring on sexual dreams. (The Latin text is given in Appendix 2.) It is truly your command that I should be continent and restrain myself from gratification of corrupt nature, gratification of the eye, the empty pomp of living.105 You commanded me not to commit fornication, and though you did not forbid me to marry, you counseled me to take a better course. You gave me the grace and I did your bidding, even before I became a minister of your Sacrament. But in my memory, of which I have said much, the images of things imprinted upon it by my former habits still linger on. When I am awake they obtrude themselves upon me, though with little strength. But when I dream, they not only give me pleasure but are very much like acquiescence in the act. The power which these illusory images have over my soul and body is so great that what is no more than a vision can influence me in sleep in a way that the reality cannot do when I am awake. Surely it cannot be that when I am asleep I am not myself, O Lord my God? And yet the moment when I pass from wakefullness to sleep, or return again from sleep to wakefulness, marks a great difference in me. During sleep where is my reason which, when I am awake, resists such suggestions and remains firm and undismayed even in face of the realities themselves? Is it sealed off when I close my eyes? Does it fall asleep with the senses of the body? And why is it that even in sleep I often resist the attractions of these images, for I remember my chaste resolutions and abide by them and give no consent to temptations of this sort? Yet the difference between waking and sleeping is so great that even when, during my sleep, it happens otherwise, I return to a clear conscience when I wake and realize that, because of this difference, I was not responsible

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for the act, although I am sorry that by some means or other it happens to me. The power of your hand, O God Almighty, is indeed great enough to cure all the diseases of my soul. By granting me more abundant grace you can even quench the fire of sensuality which provokes me in my sleep. More and more, O Lord, you will increase your gifts in me, so that my soul may follow me to you, freed from the concupiscence which binds it, and rebel no more against itself. By your grace it will no longer commit in sleep these shameful, unclean acts inspired by sensual images, which lead to the pollution of the body: it will not so much as consent to them. For to you, the Almighty, who are powerful enough to carry out your purpose beyond all our hopes and dreams,106 it is no great task to prescribe that no temptation of this kind, even such slight temptations as can be checked by the least act of will, should arouse pleasure in me, even in sleep, provided that my dispositions are chaste. This you can do for me at any time of life, even in the prime of manhood. But now I make this confession to my good Lord, declaring how I am still troubled by this kind of evil. With awe in my heart I rejoice107 in your gifts, yet I grieve for my deficiencies, trusting that you will perfect your mercies in me until I reach the fullness of your peace, which I shall enjoy with you in soul and body, when death is swallowed up in victory.108

Augustine’s introspection may be defined in rhetorical terms as the lover’s109 interior quest for wisdom culminating in the discovery of the ideal beloved, which is God. Taking the form of meditative self-examination, it is conducted in a circuit of interior monologue110 addressed directly to God and indirectly to the overhearing auditor/reader. Augustine is united to both by grace and charity. Through an inner regression of memory the exemplary lover stages a theatre of the mind where through dramatic self-analysis, he reconstitutes a particular moral problem for imminent resolution. Envisaging the moral problem as an agon, the lover observes that ‘there are two wills in us’111 whose struggle must be overcome through a progressive spiritual purification. In this respect, the agon is an interior contention of opposing forces that seeks resolution. Through the pressure of meditative rhetoric the lover thinks proleptically, toward the future, aiming not only liberation from struggle, but most importantly, union with its transcendent source of attraction. Pressed by the urgency of aspiration and guided by the Inner Master, the soul discovers and returns to its Light and Life. Albeit concise, this may serve as a description of Augustine’s procedures, the individual terms of which now call for considerable unpacking. The philosophy of mind has traditionally divided its object into two

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categories: introvert and extravert. According to Anthony Kenny, ‘introvert philosophers believe that the way to understand the nature of the human mind is to look within oneself and pay close attention to the phenomenon of introspective consciousness’ (2005, 214). This is the position of Augustine who ties knowledge to love and seeks the source of both in interiority.112 What are the components of this turning inward to the soul? Commenting on this point, Charles Taylor explains the essence of this turning inward to the soul by observing that Augustine inaugurates the stance of ‘radical reflexivity’ by adopting ‘the first-person standpoint.’113 This means that knowledge is self-knowledge in two fundamental senses. It is the ‘I’ that makes experience its own, such that it becomes the agent or the self-directing force of its existence. Taylor explains: In our normal dealings with things, we disregard the dimension of experience and focus on the things experienced. But we can turn and make this our object of attention, become aware of awareness, try to experience our experiencing, focus on the way the world is for us. This is what I call taking a stance of radical reflexivity or adopting the first-person standpoint. (1989, 130)

This reflexive agency derives the criteria of knowledge from its own soul by meditating not on the world but on its own powers of self-reflection. For Augustine this fundamental orientation to knowledge is not selfsufficiency, but the beginning of a quest for the source of these criteria by an inner regression through memoria. As Taylor puts it, ‘By going inward, I am drawn upward’ (ibid.,134). Present unto itself, the soul seeks and finds the truth within itself guided by the light of the Inner Master. This is the second dimension of Augustine’s interiorism the content of which is identified by A.C. Pegis: There is the explicit interiorism born of Christian wisdom, based on the primacy and the dynamism of supernatural faith and love. Out of its very nature this interiorism impels the soul towards the vision of God ... But there is also in Augustinianism the implicit but equally real Plotinian interiorism, born of a Platonic metaphysics and a Platonic conception of man and intended as a method by means of which the soul may discover its own divinity as well as its divine prerogatives.114

The communicative circuit of this prayer consists of Augustine’s dialogue with God, which prompts interior dialogue in the form of selfexamination. This second dialogue embedded in the first allows Augustine

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to turn questions inward to test his own powers of understanding: ‘During sleep where is my reason which, when I am awake, resists such suggestions and remains firm and undismayed even in the face of the realities themselves?’ As if more and more consternated by the unanswerability of his self-directed questions, Augustine feels increasingly alone in distress, and thus, the interior dialogue appears as a kind of soliloquy. The Latin word soliloquium can be parsed into solus (‘alone’) and loquor (‘speak’). Commenting on his Soliloquies, Augustine defines this form of speech as follows: ‘I asked myself questions and I replied to myself, as if we were two, reason and I, whereas I was of course just one.’115 As Pierre Courcelle notes about Augustine’s meditations in the Confessions, ‘Par une sorte de dédoublement de personnalité, le monologue intérieur est souvent décrit comme un dialogue’ (1968, 292). [By a kind of splitting in two of the personality, interior monologue is often described as a dialogue. – translation mine.] There are many functions for the dilation between direct dialogue with God and soliloquy, and one of the principal aims is to gauge what Augustine can only achieve by grace and what he can apprehend by his human powers. Also, the dédoublement offered by soliloquy is both a bane and a benefit. Testing whether he is one or many affords Augustine self-knowledge, but the act of analysis engenders an abyme of specularity that appears to swarm over and overwhelm synthesis. The systematic can be treacherous. These cognitive and linguistic paradoxes are none other than epistemological and metaphysical problems that meditation seeks to penetrate. In this scheme rhetoric is turned inward as interior persuasion from its customary address to an outside audience. As Michel Beaujour notes, ‘Meditation is built upon the parts of rhetoric which, having been turned away from their civic, political, and collective purposes, undergo a metamorphosis – from now on, the topics of invention and memory serve as a matrix for a discourse that is oriented toward knowing the speaker’s “interiority”’ (1991, 58). Yet, this interior dialogue is carried out in relation to the ultimate addressee, God, who acts as judge to a confessing Augustine.116 Augustine had already made clear this judicial role in X:5 when saying, ‘It is you, O Lord, who judge me’ [Tu enim, domine, diiudicas me].117 Finally, in the course of his interior dialogue with self and God, Augustine adds a silent, third interlocutor who is united with him in charity: ‘the believers among men ... all who are my fellows in your kingdom and all who accompany me on this pilgrimage.’118 Love is communicated as a triple relation between lover, love, and beloved, the attraction of which is propelled by Christian Platonism. Taking the Confessions as a whole, one finds that Augustine strives with the great-

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est rational rigour to distinguish and ascend the various grades of beauty from its starting point in the soul through the rationes aeternae to the maker of all things and the ‘source of all life.’119 In psychological terms love is passionate intellection seeking sapientia over scientia, caritas over dilectio and cupiditas. Its goal is to orient the will to distinguish between end and means in order to embrace the only love that cannot be satiated: But what do I love when I love my God? Not material beauty or beauty of a temporal order; not the brilliance of earthly light, so welcome to our eyes; not the sweet melody of harmony and song; not the fragrance of flowers, perfumes, and spices; not manna or honey; not limbs such as the body delights to embrace. It is not these that I love when I love my God. And yet, when I love him, it is true that I love a light of a certain kind, a voice, a perfume, a food, an embrace; but they are of the kind that I love in my inner self, when my soul is bathed in light that is not bound in space; when it listens to sound that never dies away; when it breathes fragrance that is not borne away on the wind; when it clings to an embrace from which it is not severed by fulfillment of desire. This is what I love when I love my God.120

The major role of interior monologue is to orient memory to time.121 Memory must somehow unite the fragmentary and dispersed character of temporal experience into a functioning whole. For this reason we must first familiarize ourselves with Augustine’s concept of time. In Book XI, chapter 14 of the Confessions he asks himself the question, ‘What, then, is time?’ (quid est ergo tempus?).122 After having confronted numerous philosophic aporias, he concludes that it is a ‘distention of the soul’ (distentio animi).123 A question concerning the ontology of time leads to a conclusion about how time is internalized. As Genevieve Lloyd concludes: ‘The shift that Augustine has made is from seeing consciousness as in time to seeing time as in consciousness.’124 The mind is stretched, so to speak, in three directions. As Augustine observes, the mind performs three functions – expectation (‘expectat’), attention (‘attendit’), and memory (‘meminit’).125 In other words, the future that the mind expects passes through the present to which it attends, into the past, which it remembers. Though these are three distinct activities, there is continuity through them because of the persistence of attentio. That is, the active mind sustains coherence through the action of attention which relegates the future to the past: ‘All the while the man’s attentive mind, which is present, is relegating (‘traicit’) the future to the past. The past increases in proportion as the future diminishes, until the future is entirely absorbed and the whole becomes past.’126

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In virtue of this abiding attentio there is thus a present of the past, a present of the present, and a present of the future.127 This ‘distentio animi’ may be examined from the perspective of enunciation. The speaker divides himself into the narrator and the protagonist, the former being the overarching consciousness that organizes, observes, and judges the latter’s struggle to conversion. Thus, in an extended act of attention, the narrator takes an omniscient view of the three presents by reconstituting the protagonist’s past, submitting the protagonist to moral evaluation, and projecting his future. To the extent that Augustine seeks the rewards of the beatific vision, the narrator reaches beyond time within time to contemplate his victory over physical and spiritual death. In coordinating these three presents the narrator rhetorically achieves simultaneity of knowing analogous to the all-encompassing, eternal view of the divinity (Lloyd 1999, 42). One will find that for each of these three presents of time, there is a corresponding meditative rhetoric that directs introspection. The most important technique is to use memory to unite the present of the past to the present of the present. In tactical terms the objective of meditation is the performative act of reconstituting and breaking a moral impasse that has come to challenge the ideal relation between the lover (Augustine) and the beloved (God). This challenge typically takes the form of intellectual analysis punctuated by dilemmas and prayers for divine assistance. In order to broach such an activity, Augustine must reconstitute the conflict. He must perform the rhetorical act of remembering or ‘collating’ the problem in order to present it for analysis by using memoria in the service of ratio and voluntas. Meditative memory is a simultaneous activity summoning the other two powers for immanent self-examination. As Brian Stock has noted, ‘Augustine believes that the combined effort of willing, collecting, and thinking provides an etymological link between the verbs cogo (I compel), colligo (I collect), and cogito (I think)’ (1996, 219). This type of memory I term the reconstituting memory. It is the act of reenacting or holding a state, process, or event before the critical eye of introspection. The speaker divides himself into narrator and protagonist, the former being the overarching consciousness that organizes, observes, and judges the latter’s struggle to conversion. In terms of enunciation, the narrator, in an extended act of attention, takes an omniscient view of the three presents by reconstituting the protagonist’s past, submitting it to present analysis, and projecting its future. The reconstituting memory tends to move retrospective memory – memory of the past as past – to the hic et nunc of self-examination. In the

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passage under study, retrospective memory is indicated at the outset of the chapter where Augustine, now in his mid-forties, is reviewing his past as an unbaptized Catholic living in concubinage and contrasting it with his present as a bishop. In all likelihood he refused marriage with another woman in Milan (385–6) in favour of celibacy. The chapter thus opens some fifteen years later with Augustine confessing that in celibacy he has chosen a superior life.128 It is truly your command that I should be continent and restrain myself from gratification of corrupt nature gratification of the eye, the empty pomp of living. You commanded me not to commit fornication, and though you did not forbid me to marry, you counseled me to take a better course. You gave me the grace and I did your bidding, even before I became a minister of your sacrament.129

The reconstituting memory moves such retrospective memories into the present of the present. This Augustine does by using rhetoric to create an agon – the concept of contention or wrestling found in ancient Greek culture, especially in the Platonic dialogues, Pindar, the Homeric epics, comedy, city-state assembly debates, and sporting events (MacIntyre 1984, 135–8). Certainly, his practice of thinking in dramatically opposed ways is related to his early belief in Manicheism. In temporal terms the present of the past now merges with the present of the present in which the reconstituted problem is analysed as a struggle.130 The self that judges is haunted by the fact that the object self is of two contradictory impulses – one that seeks the Word and another that resists and rebels against itself. The terminology of agonal strife is rhetorically effective in sharpening the interior debate and in pressing for comprehension and resolution. The agon is related to the content of love, and in this regard, Augustine’s principal complaint involves issues surrounding determinism and freedom. Specifically, he is perplexed that while awake he can control the effects of concupiscence, but when dreaming he cannot: ‘The power which these illusory images have over my soul and my body is so great that what is no more than a vision can influence me in sleep in a way that the reality cannot do when I am awake.’131 Augustine prefigures Freud to the extent that he explores how the titanic struggles between flesh and spirit affect the states of dreaming and wakefulness. The power of memory that bears the positive functions of identity and recollection can also become an insidious temptation that makes his converted self regress to his lustful youth: ‘But in my memory of which I have said much, the images

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of things imprinted upon it by my former habits still linger on.’132 This brings about a second conflict bearing on identity. There is self-deception in the ‘illusory images’ conveyed by memory that causes Augustine to question the coherence of his being: ‘Surely it cannot be that when I am asleep I am not myself, O Lord my God?’133 In this dissociation, his rational faculties seem inconsistent or intermittently inoperative. He assumes that the continuity of personal life requires some degree of rational endurance (manentia),134 but he also asks himself: ‘Does it [ratio] fall asleep with the senses of the body?’ The sleeping state itself is inconsistent, since he sometimes feels ‘acquiescence in the act,’ but other times, ‘I often resist the attractions of these images, for I remember my chaste resolutions and abide by them ...’135 Augustine’s considerable lucidity only heightens the rift between reason and volition. The more he examines these perplexities, the less he is able to explain them; the more he invokes his will, the less he finds it effective. Moreover, though Augustine realizes that he is not responsible for these states (‘nos non fecisse’), his regret (‘I am sorry’)136 shows that he cannot overcome the complicity that he feels with these falsely seductive images: ‘They not only give me pleasure but are very much like acquiescence in the act.’137 In her study titled Le Rêve dans la vie et la pensée de Saint Augustin Martine Dulaey underscores the fact that the saint’s reflections on dreams are integral to his thought because they are related to interiority: ‘la réflexion sur le rêve n’est pas chez Augustin, une annexe ... Elle s’intègre dans l’ensemble de sa pensé ... comprendre le fonctionnement de l’esprit humain, c’est pénétrer plus avant dans cet espace intérieur où l’homme trouve Dieu’ (1973, 227). [In Augustine, reflection on dreams is not a mere accessory ... It is integrated into the whole of his thought ... to understand the operation of the human mind is to penetrate deeper into this interior space where man finds God – translation mine.] In this theatre of the mind meditation contracts Augustine’s life and makes it converge on the question of his culpability in sexual dreams. Without violating his anti-Pelagian stance against the presumptions of self-sufficiency, Augustine uses memoria and ratio to push the question of his moral responsibility to its absolute human limit. That is, he undertakes to interrogate his soul on every suspicion of complicity. Gareth B. Matthews has examined the philosophic implications of this passage, and my analysis follows the general lines of his discussion (2005, 65–75). The metaphysical problem suggested by Augustine is that of the solipsist who may wonder if he/she exists beyond a world of dreams. However, there are also pressing moral problems concerning the degree of responsibility

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in a dream. First, Augustine may entertain the possibility that his dream self is not really himself: ‘Surely it cannot be that when I am asleep I am not myself, O Lord my God?’ But he appears to reject the supposition that the dream state cannot be related to his ‘real’ self when he avows regret for the dream: ‘I was not responsible for the act, although I am sorry that this by some means or other is happening to me.’ Second, Augustine being an intentionalist in ethics feels guilty of lending himself to his erotic dreams: ‘But when I dream, they [erotic images] not only give me pleasure but are very much like acquiescence in the act.’ Given this feeling of ‘acquiescence’ it is logical that Augustine feels regret. As Martine Dulaey shows, Augustine uses dreams as indices of culpability or weakness in other related areas.138 In the passage under study, Augustine suspects that the intractability of sexual dreams suggests that his conversion and vow of chastity are flawed: ‘the images of things imprinted on it [my memory] by my former habits still linger on.’ Moreover, by finding himself so decidedly different in dreams, he wonders about his true character: ‘Surely it cannot be that when I am asleep I am not myself.’ Also, as philosophic studies note, Augustine feels blameworthy because he has not extirpated his ‘former habits’ or sufficiently checked such phantasmata while awake. Such tendencies in wakefulness, if not sufficiently resisted, carry moral responsibility in dreams. As a result, Augustine questions whether he has turned completely toward God and feels guilty about what William Mann calls ‘fantasy consent,’139 which is indicated by his admission that he feels some sort of consent, inclination, or agreement (‘ad consensionem factumque simillimum’) with his lascivious dreams. Augustine’s third consideration is whether he has any power over himself in his dream state, for this may mitigate his responsibility: ‘The power which these illusory images have over my soul and my body is so great that what is no more than a vision can influence me in sleep in a way that the reality cannot do when I am awake.’ Augustine’s answer to any abdication of responsibility even in illusory dreams is quite qualified and conditioned by his Pelagian ghosts. He can resist the rebellion of his sensual dreams only by the increase of God’s grace: ‘The power of your hand, O God Almighty, is indeed great enough to cure all the diseases of my soul ... More and more, O Lord, you will increase your gifts in me, so that my soul may follow me to you, freed from the concupiscence which binds it ... ’ Augustine is an exacting selfinquisitor hoping that meditation will help him not only to refrain from sinful deeds in his dreams but even to refuse consent in that state. In all, he charges introspection with the task of discovering what is humanly possible for self-mastery and what is required of grace.

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Not only does the reconstituting memory create an agon or interior struggle but also a communication network conducted through dramatic self-analysis. To the extent that this kind of memory is a synthesis of the past experience, it telescopes a moral dilemma and sets the stage for interior dialogue. This theatre of the mind is a self-directed communication circuit in which Augustine divides himself into the self who judges (resembling a metalanguage) and the self who is judged (object language) standing before the moral exigencies of God and the public. In this regard introspection bears a judicial function. In X:1 Augustine states that he is confessing in his heart to God and in his writings to witnesses. In X:4 he confesses before God and those whom he has been commanded to serve. Finally, in XI:1 he decides that he is confessing to help himself and his reader love God. The general response that Augustine receives from his meditative dialogue is a deepening of the continuous process of conversion, which in Book X centres on comprehending the memory and purifying the senses. Drama is an introspective method that has performative goals, for it is through redeemed speech that Augustine may complete a number of spiritual acts – purification, praise, thanksgiving, biblical exegesis – essential to conversion and union with the Divine Word. In this chapter the metaself puts its soul under scrutiny as to its susceptibility to lust. Typical of Augustine, this leads to a limitless abyme of self-reflexivity and self-mirroring where the protagonist who judges subdivides himself into convert, priest, meditator, the soul resisting temptation, theologian, philosopher, sleeper, dreamer, prayerful supplicant, and prophet. One of the complicating features of this self-mirroring abyme that explains its profundity is that the very powers of the soul (memoria, ratio, voluntas) that deploy the meditation are themselves the objects of study. The reconstituting memory marshals rhetoric of urgency, spontaneity, and immediacy, which heightens the tensions both of self-interrogation and the will to resolution. These are no doubt aesthetic qualities, but as rhetoric they act as spurs to change and conversion. If at the level of drama there is a self who judges and a self who is judged, these correspond in the temporal arena to the present of the reconstituting memory that puts under study the present of a reenacted moral dilemma. In the Confessions both Augustine and the reader are thrust into the sweep of pressing questions, intractable paradoxes, and urgent moral imperatives. This is due to a rhetoric that intensifies the tension between two presents: the iteration of past dilemmas submitted to the instantaneousness of present analysis. Meditation is forged out of indispensable linguistic tools making use of the innumerable resources of the present tense and the linguistic category

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of aspect. Aspect is the character of verbs manifested as states, actions, processes, and events, which Bernard Comrie defines as ‘different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation’ (1976, 3). In other words, meditative discourse nuances the character of verbs through such distinctions as duration, iteration, frequency, instantaneousness, or initiation.140 Returning to the chapter under study, the reader will see that the following quotations are instructive in tracing the movement from retrospective to reconstituting memory which in turn offers iterated experiences to the present of self-judgment. But in my memory, of which I have said much, the images of things imprinted upon it by my former habits still linger on ... 141 [sed adhuc vivunt in memoria mea, de qua multa locutes sum, talium rerum imagines, quas ibi consuetudo mea fixit ... ]142

The emphasis on ‘fixit,’ conjugated in the perfect tense, underlines the fact that Augustine’s past sexual habits (‘consuetudo mea’) are still firmly rooted in his memory. In fact, the choice of this verb with its connotations of ‘imprinted,’ ‘affixed,’ or ‘immovable,’ contains the germ of the dilemma. The ever-present effects of ‘concupiscentia’ rend his conscience by the opposing tugs of determinism and freedom. From this point the temporal dimension of this reenactment will take place in the spontaneous psychological present. Grammatically, it utilizes the iterative present to relate a repeated, involuntary process of the mind: When I am awake they [sensual images] obtrude themselves upon me, though with little strength. But when I dream, they not only give me pleasure but are very much like acquiescence in the act.143 [et occursantur mihi vigilanti quidem carentes viribus, in somnis autem non solum usque ad delectationem sed etiam usque ad consensionem factumque simillimum.]144

This iteration of reconstituted experience, taking place within an ongoing dialogue with God, is interpenetrated with pressing questions and analyses that heighten the quest for understanding and control. Surely it cannot be that when I am asleep I am not myself, O Lord my God? And yet the moment when I pass from wakefulness to sleep, or return again

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from sleep to wakefulness, marks a great difference in me. During sleep where is my reason which, when I am awake, resists such suggestions and remains firm and undismayed even in the face of the realities themselves? ... Does it fall asleep with the senses of the body?145 [numquid tunc ego non sum, domine deus meus? et tamen tantum interest inter me ipsum et me ipsum intra momentum quo hinc ad soporem transeo vel huc inde retranseo... numquid sopitur cum sensibus corporis?]146

The reconstituting memory therefore uses a constant dialectic between iteration which recollects the structure of the dilemma and analytic instantaneousness where ratio attempts to solve the problem. Characteristically sceptical without foreclosing on resolution, Augustine’s dialectic between iteration and immediate analysis only intensifies the dilemma by engendering more questions. Raised to the pitch of an unfathomable aporia, Augustine’s self-interrogation has been termed ‘the hydra of skepticism’ where chopping off the head of one problem only leads to the regeneration of more questions (Ricoeur 1984, 6). Yet, this a rhetorical effect that Augustine turns on himself where the pressures of pressing questions reach such a level of dramatic intensity that he craves a resolution through an act of the voluntas. In this regard Augustine makes meditation press him forward into the anticipation not only of resolution but also of participation in the Divine Word. The reader must observe the overarching use of time in the Confessions. The movement of Book X, chapter 30, is in the image of the Confessions as a whole. That is, memory in meditation is oriented to time. The first nine books of the Confessions constitute a retrospective autobiography and thereby enable Augustine to confess ‘what I once was’ (X:3). By contrast Book X stresses ‘what I am now’147 and thereby corresponds to the present. It does so religiously by the examination of conscience148 and philosophically by the analysis of self as memory.149 Finally, not only the future but the glimpse of immortal transcendence is recounted in the remaining books of the Confessions. In Book XI there is a philosophic analysis of time that contrasts the human distentio animi with the eternity of the Verbum. In Books XII and XIII Augustine engages in a searching exegesis of sacred scripture, most notably of Genesis. As Vance observes, ‘Having found in himself the interior Word, which is ultimately transverbal, but having also accepted the incarnation of Christ, The Word made flesh, Augustine can now orient himself in good conscience toward that Text where the Word stands partially revealed to men in the flesh’ (Vance 1973b, 24).

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Just as the first nine books of the Confessions depict the autobiographical account of Augustine’s past, so the beginning of Book X, chapter 30 starts with a flashback of his life in concubinage. Just as Book X focuses on the double present of the examination of conscience and the discovery of the divine in memory,150 so chapter 30 enacts in the present a progressive self-purification through the analysis of erotic dreams. Finally, the Confessions concludes with books that are oriented to the future inasmuch as they show Augustine plumbing the nature of eternity and already tasting the Trinity151 through his exegesis of scripture. This overall design mirrors chapter 30’s final movement of hope152 and anticipation where Augustine uses scripture to project not only expectation of divine assistance for his weaknesses but also, expectation of his eternal reward beyond death. The reconstituting memory is therefore proleptic153 to the extent that meditation is mental repetition in anticipation of spiritual improvement. Thus, the final function of Augustinian introspection is to direct the dynamics of time as a drama of constraint and liberation. Putting it differently, meditation is a future-oriented act attempting self-mastery. This is indicated by the three uses of psychological time. In the first two stages where retrospective memory merges with the present of self-analysis, introspection becomes a convenient telescoping technique that contracts time to a single point where one’s entire moral life is compressed and judged within moments. This is the moment of the agon, of wrestling with spiritual problems, where memoria reconstitutes for ratio the obstacles to progress. In this stage time is oriented to the meditator. It is absorbed, so to speak, by the meditator’s quandaries. In the second stage, this very contraction can produce a revelatory insight that is so spiritually liberating that it expands time into anticipating the future or into a glimpse of transcendence beyond time itself. This is the moment of voluntas where through imitation, praise, and celebration of the Word, time is oriented to the Almighty. In the passage under study, there are three distinct movements of time. The first movement is a retroactive compression involving a comparison between Augustine’s pre-converted state of concubinage and his new chaste life: ‘It is truly your command that I should be continent ... I became a minister of your sacrament.’ The second is a further contraction into the analysis of sensuality: ‘But in my memory ... the images of things imprinted upon it ... still linger on ... although I am sorry.’ The third is a rhetorically expansive vision of the future beyond time where Augustine foresees the spiritual victory of death: ‘The power of your hand, O God Almighty, is indeed great enough ... when death is swallowed up in victory.’154

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The temporal itinerary related in these three sections is in effect a progressive purification or a dematerializing of self, which is accompanied by a spiritualizing of time beyond time itself. In rhetorical terms this spiritual process corresponds to the verbal contraction and expansion of time as Augustine moves from the review of his youth, to the analysis of sensuality in sleep, to the resurrection of the body. Let us retrace the steps of this purification process. In the first section, Book IV, Augustine had already associated the flesh with the mutability of temporality.155 Thus, from the viewpoint of introspection this section of chapter 30 reveals an Augustine seeking both to purify himself of his sensuality and to secure a more stable identity in time as a celibate bishop. In short, he ties his spiritual cleansing to a temporal one by cleansing himself from the flux and mutability of his youth. In the second section the rhetoric of reflection transfers Augustine from diachronic to synchronic analysis. Since Augustine is now analysing his struggle with sensual dreams, he inevitably invokes the powers of reason that intellectualize and therefore make more abstract the terms of his struggle – the contrasts among wakefulness, sleep, and dreams; the discontinuity of self; the difference between culpability and responsibility, reality and deception, both voluntary and involuntary. Understood Platonically, the intellect is summoned to separate the general156 from the particular and to distill the invariable from the changeable. As time becomes more analytic, more simultaneous, more bound to invariable law, the soul becomes more intellectually purified, and time itself becomes more analogous with eternity. In the third section Augustine’s colloquy with God increases in fervour with the expectation of receiving more abundant grace that will deliver him from his trial. The scriptural quotations interpolated into Augustine’s prayer allow him to participate in Incarnational life as a transverbal bridge between the temporal and the eternal (Colish 1968, 34–5). Culminating in chapter 30, surging in the very last line, is an image from Corinthians (15:54) proclaiming that ‘death is swallowed up in victory.’ It expresses the confidence that in the resurrection of the dead, the perishable will become imperishable, the physical body will become a spiritual body, and mortal nature will become immortal. In summary, we see that for each problem besieging Augustine there is a meditative function. First, there is the metaphysical conundrum of a divided self that makes him wonder if he is a different entity in dreams than in wakefulness. This is a variation on the pervasive feeling of mutability. To this difficulty he responds by creating a reconstituting memory that has

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two roles. It recollects him in time by the three presents in which he confirms a continuing self through his conversion, his dream conflict, and his projection of eternal reward. Also, the reconstituting memory recollects him in space as an essentially rational being joined to the Divinity through his soul. The reconstituting memory performs these functions by the hyper self-consciousness afforded by dramatic analysis where Augustine continually reverts to his metaself to oversee a dispersion of object-selves. Here the word ‘oversee’ means that the metaself assigns problems to moral and theological criteria that unite the memories of the past with the expectations of the future. Thus, Augustine refers his dilemma of continence to his vow of chastity and to the hope of grace through divine assistance. On the psychological side, Augustine is most conscious of the deterministic forces that commandeer his will and resolution. To this he responds with what Taylor calls ‘radical reflexivity’ (1989, 130), which, in terms of the rhetoric of introspection, means that his autobiography is a spiritual act from the first-person standpoint in which he takes possession of his being to reorder his soul in conformity with an eschatological plan. There is also the determinism of inertia that may blunt tangible steps toward conversion, and, in the case of sexual fantasies in dreams, of the intractability that may preempt counter measures. This purely human problem of weight, recidivism, and unremitting temptation is addressed by the rhetoric of urgency that thrusts Augustine forward under the whip of unrelenting questions in need of imminent resolution. Through a strategy of verbal aspect, iteration is subsumed by instantaneousness that creates a dramatic plot of the young convert-turned-bishop whose pressing and sole cure for the enigmas of sexual dreams is a supplication for immediate grace. The theological problem of culpability assigns its meditative task to the drama of judgment. Augustine seeks to convince God in charity and his public in fraternal love that his examination of conscience has achieved the limits of consistency relative to his vow ‘to make known ... what I am now’ (X:3). The judicial atmosphere is seen in the saint’s attempt to persuade the Almighty, himself, and his public that he has done his utmost to reach the absolute threshold of critical reflection and moral compliance. Just as God commanded ‘continence,’ so Augustine takes a vow of chastity and refuses marriage. Just as the Lord counselled him to take on holy orders, so Augustine becomes ‘a minister of your sacrament.’ Two other thresholds of conscience avowed by Augustine allow him to make acts of humility and faith. They are the unfathomable difference between waking and sleeping and his utter contingency and need for grace. If Augustine, master of rhetoric, turns his forensic powers on himself,157 his principal

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aim is to demonstrate that he has thoroughly interrogated his conscience on every conceivable flaw. Consequently, he judges himself blameless for his dreams (‘I was not responsible for the act’) only after descending into memory to investigate potential complicity from other angles, such as his character, habits, state of conversion, vow of chastity, and vigilance against concupiscence. Reflecting the importance accorded to the three powers of the soul, and, ipso facto, to the Trinity, the conclusions of Augustine’s meditations generally summon a response from the will, or emotions, to what has been remembered and analysed. These are not prescribed by a director but flow from the inner, subjective logic of a given meditation. Sometimes, such concluding moments express utter contingency: ‘For I should not even exist if it were not by your gift’ (I:20, 40, ConfPC). Other times they well up in faith and confidence: ‘And in you we are remade and find true strength’ (V:1, 91, ConfPC). In X:6, Augustine examines precisely what gives him life and concludes in an expression of grateful love: ‘And I know that my soul is the better part of me, because it animates the whole of my body. It gives it life, and this is something that no body can give to another body. But God is even more. He is the Life of the life of my soul.’158 These responses to memoria and ratio are frequently the result of attempting to resolve a question or break an impasse. Consequently, they are oriented to the future, and constitute the last of Augustine’s meditative traits under discussion. Returning to X:30, we find Augustine in doubt as to whether he can ever eradicate these ‘illusory images’ that pose such a threat to his salvation. In response to this scepticism, meditative rhetoric provides an eschatological bridge between confession and eternal reward. Introspection is oriented to the future because it is driven by hope. Time in this local meditation is shaped in the image of the entire conversion process. First, mirroring Books I–IX, Augustine begins his reflections in chapter X:30 by collecting himself in the empirical experiences of retrospective memory. Second, with the analyses of his dream state he turns time into a synchronic phenomenon by seeking laws, regularities, and reasons that would explain the systematic discrepancies between waking and sleeping. Not only does this synchrony mirror Books X and XII in their meditations on the structures of memory and time, but more importantly it presages the escape from mutability into eternity by the search for the general. Third, as thought becomes more abstract simultaneously with the confession of sensual dreams, there is a purification that allows Augustine to anticipate his unending union with the Lord. Concluding his meditation with the

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scriptural vision of his salvation, ‘when death is swallowed up in victory,’ he foresees the transverbal bridge of Book XIII that by studying Genesis will allow him to cross over to the life of the Divine Word. Using spatial metaphors for temporal coordinates, Augustine’s meditative contraction of time in chapter 30 is transformed into an expansive vision of hope into the future and beyond. Pragmatics of Meditation in Délie Given the reverential tone of Délie, its attraction to what is divine in love, its passionate intellectuality as well as its dissociation of the human faculties, the interior struggles it enacts between flesh and spirit, deception and self-knowledge – these traits suggest that it bears close analogies with the Confessions as a practice of introspection. Indeed, it is possible to extrapolate from Augustine’s method those rhetorical principles that also function in Scève’s work. Let us first summarize these convergences. The point of departure is that both writers have recourse to interiority as a basis for knowledge. In reviewing the two definitions of interiority given above by Pegis, we will find that Scève’s persona has a predilection for the second sense of this term, namely, the Platonic position that the seeds of the divine are planted in the human. Other similarities may be observed. Memory reconstitutes a dilemma that is presented to ratio for analysis and to voluntas for emotional response. Regarding the communication circuit of introspection, meditation is situated in a dual dialogue where the lover’s address to the ideal beloved embeds various levels of self-directed dialogue. Here the meditator is a lover who turns rhetoric inward to selfpersuasion while maintaining a lyrical colloquy with the ideal beloved. In the case of Augustine this is God, while in Scève it is Délie. The reader/ auditor is a third receiver indirectly addressed as an overhearer who takes spiritual sustenance by empathizing with the lover’s trials. Meditation is a theatre of the mind which through dramatic self-analysis reconstitutes a particular moral agon for imminent resolution. Like Augustine, the poetlover’s meditation has performative goals centring on self-knowledge and moral improvement in relation to an ethical ideal. In this sense the dizain may be seen as a dramatic act where the metaself of the poet-lover examines the object- self in relation to the demands of vertu. One of the advantages of reflecting Scève through Augustine is that both push self-consciousness to extremes where the faculties that underpin thought become themselves the objects of scrutiny. This limitless reflexivity is performed by the reconstituting memory, which for Scève as for Augustine, bears three functions.

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First, it shifts memory to a synchronic collation of past experience so that it can be examined by the understanding. Second, it stresses the immediacy of the épreuve through aspectual strategies of the present tense. Finally, it compresses the subject of meditation to a single issue that is contracted into the infiniment petit. In these three functions, one sees Augustine’s formulation of time as an experience having a present of the past, a present of the present, and a present of the future. The immense effort to hold up a problem to thought and to precipitate a clash of warring terms leads either to moral resolution, to sharpened understanding of the dilemma, or to praise and celebration of the beloved. Viewing Augustine as an analogue for Délie’s meditative procedures also provides the benefit of contrast. When religious rhetoric operates in a largely humanist text such as Scève’s, it points to differences in values between the medieval and early modern perspectives. Now we may move to Délie in order to see the extent to which a typical dizain is organized according to Augustine’s introspective practice. The rhetorical principles of meditation used in Délie are crucial for any fundamental understanding of the text. In examining the work from this perspective it should be borne in mind that Augustine’s meditative pragmatics provide a model for two important types of dizains. On the one hand, there are those that heighten struggle where the poet-lover endeavours to fathom and break a moral impasse. On the other hand, there are dizains with the opposite tone that praise Délie, celebrate union with the beloved, or revel in the transporting and transforming effects of her virtue. Poems of the second type, though marshalling many of the Confessions meditative practices analysed above, emphasize the final movement of Augustinian introspection dealing with the transcendence of temporal/spatial limitations. The next chapter will deal more with this second form. The poetry that stresses meditative conflict will now be examined. Analysis As in religious meditation, Scève’s introspective method is an exercitatio animi designed to reawaken the soul and to exercise its powers to the fullest in pursuit of vertu. An important manifestation of vertu is found in dizain 143 which utilizes dramatic self-analysis to put its ethical principle into act. By the biblical image concluding the dizain, Scève retrospectively casts a religious light on the meditation. He also shares with Augustine a preoccupation with the interaction between physical and spiritual, determinism and freedom:

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The Art of Meditation and the French Renaissance Love Lyric Le souvenir, ame de ma pensée, Me ravit tant en son illusif songe, Que, n’en estant la memoyre offensée, Je me nourris de si doulce mensonge. Or quand l’ardeur, qui pour elle me ronge, Contre l’esprit sommeillant se hazarde, Soubdainement qu’il s’en peult donner garde, Ou qu’il se sent de ses flammes grevé, En mon penser soubdain il te regarde, Comme au desert son Serpent eslevé.

(D 143)

[Remembrance, the soul of my thought, Enchants me so in its illusive dream That, memory not being offended by it, I nourish myself with a so sweet lie. Now when passion, which because of memory gnaws at me, Battles against my sleeping spirit, when it can defend against it, Or when it feels itself burnt by its flames, In my thought suddenly looks at you, As its Serpent held up in the desert.]

This poem may best be approached by first encapsulating its principal meditative components; this will subsequently receive more detailed analysis. In dizain 143 the reconstituting memory organizes a circuit of meditation similar in structure to Augustinian introspection but different in value. The poet-lover replaces Augustine, and Délie replaces God. In the Confessions there is judiciary function of meditation in the sense that the meditator judges himself according to some moral criteria. Augustine assesses himself by the Lord’s supernatural standards of charity and grace. On the other hand, the poet-lover occupies an ambivalent zone where religious allusion is used to mark the instantaneousness of Délie’s curative force on his human operations. In other words, we find a paradox in which he uses biblical imagery and calls upon Délie’s divine force to remedy his human understanding and to grasp her true image. In Délie and the Confessions both lovers are turned from their aims by sensual deception and by its fragmentation of the soul into separate, mutually adversarial functions. In Délie, this is best indicated by interior monologue where the poet-lover directs memory to reanimate and reexamine the warring forces of his being. While Augustine explicitly uses questions to spur selfknowledge, the poet-lover uses the specular double of narrative drama.

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That is, his reconstituting memory reenacts a meditative agon where the soul is divided into contending roles. As in Augustine, meditative rhetoric in Délie is primarily turned inward toward restoring the soul’s lucidity, and therefore produces a dédoublement in which interior dialogue with the self is guided by a simultaneous colloquy with the beloved. Délie is the constant addressee, whether tacit or direct, in his meditations. This is indicated foremost by the liminary poem which governs the entire work, where the lover vows: ‘les mortz, qu’en moy tu renovelles/Je t’ay voulu en cest Oeuvre descrire’ (vv. 3–4). In dizain 143 it is shown by the invocation of Délie as ‘te’ precisely when memory’s thought strikes up her true image: ‘En mon penser soubdain il te regarde’ (v. 9). Finally, as in Augustine, the reader of Délie is an overhearer of moral aspiration and an indirect participant in its struggle. While Augustine’s auditor/reader is bound to the Confessions as a fraternal soul in charity, Scève’s reader is brought into Délie as an empathetic observer of the poet-lover’s trials. That is, there is a moral ratio established between the lover’s struggle with vertu and the reader’s grappling with a challenging text.159 Meditative rhetoric has a different aim for Scève than for Augustine. In Délie’s structure of the human mind there is no Interior Teacher or Inner Master as there is in Augustine, that through supernatural illumination enables one to partake in the Divine Word. Rather, the ‘ame’ (v. 1) and ‘esprit’ (v. 6) in Délie have decidedly human goals. The most distinctive of these operations is to maintain vigilance against the bodily and imaginative forces that threaten to disrupt the entendement or la volonté libre.160 In Scève as in Augustine, the memory is virtually synonymous with pensée. This is particularly clear in dizain 143 where ‘Le souvenir’ is called ‘ame de ma pensée.’ While the aim of rhetoric in the Confessions is to use memory to discover the Divine Light in its subsistent truth (Gilson 1960, 104), its aim in Délie is to use memory to enhance human equilibrium between the mind and the body. Memory when functioning properly guards against the power of fantaisie and the sens to destabilize this theoretical balance. In Délie it is interior dialogue that sets meditation in movement by creating the reconstituting memory. As it does in Augustine, it invokes the present of the present, since this memory function both structures the moral dilemma and deploys the interior struggle. Different from Augustine is that in Délie, the very outset of the meditation is launched in medias res and therefore the present of the past is immediately subsumed into the present of the present. Overseeing the entire meditation, the reconstituting memory enacts a moral agon and assigns roles to the contending faculties. Its first function is to exercise an interior conflict, an agon of the soul.

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Dizain 143 stages through memory the mutually antagonistic effects of Délie as the perpetrator of suffering and the agent of deliverance. This dual effect is a metaphysical constant of the poet-lover’s experience. In what Saulnier has termed Délie’s ‘anatomie psychologique,’ he demonstrates that the poet-lover identifies ‘memoyre’ (v. 3) by metonymy with ‘souvenir’ (v. 1) as the ‘ame de ma pensée’ (v. 1).161 It has as function to animate consciousness but can also be complicit with error. Given the fact that the ‘memoyre’ (v. 3) is the soul of thought, its adverse effects remain torturously constant. Thus, in this dizain the very power that ignites awareness displaces the poet-lover in the deception of a sweet lie (‘doulce mensonge,’ v. 4). No reflective process can begin without the ‘souvenir’ (v. 1), for it is the ‘ame de ma pensée’ (v. 1). While it is the point of departure for selfreflection, it also permits an ‘illusif songe’ (v. 2) to turn the lover from higher moral awareness effected by ‘l’esprit’ (v. 6). Thus, the reconstituting memory recollects a persistent dilemma bearing on memory itself, and it is in such procedures that meditation becomes an abyme of self-observation. The second role of the reconstituting memory is dramatic self-analysis. In this poem it functions in the quatrain to study the snares of sensuality. Since the reconstituting memory functions through internal dialogue as the meta memory, its role for understanding is to reenact a sublevel of object memories. The reconstituting memory, playing the role of detached moral observer, sees that ‘Le souvenir’ (v. 1) beguiles the object self into a meretricious dream or ‘illusif songe’ (v. 2). This ‘songe’ marks a second and inferior zone of consciousness inhabiting the object self that, though passive, is riveted on its own theatre of sensuality. The adjective ‘illusif’ suggests that while some dreams may be true, this one is false. Unaware of his solipsistic deception, he is swept away by his sensual phantasm (‘Le souvenir ... me ravit,’ vv. 1–2) which degrades and distorts Délie’s being. What he does not see is perceived by the moral observer who can only watch. What does the lucid moralist see? Taking Latin into account, ‘ravit’ connotes the idea of being plundered, commandeered, and raped. This combination of blind passion and helpless lucidity is intensified by the fourth verse. The voluptuous dream or ‘doulce mensonge’ (v. 4) with which the dreamer nourishes himself becomes the poison of ‘ardeur’ (v. 5). The irony of self-deception is compounded by certain hints of the presence/absence phenomenon which Saulnier has called ‘tourment de la mémoire.’162 Both ‘ravit’ (v. 2) and ‘nourris’ (v. 4) imply the plenitude of pleasure, but the semantic connotations of their objects, ‘songe’ (v. 2) and ‘mensonge’ (v. 4), revert to a sense of emptiness and perversion. Much of the force of dramatic self-analysis is propelled by the rhetoric

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of urgency, immediacy, and spontaneity. This is the third function of the reconstituting memory, which must be considered in relation to dramatic self-analysis. As observed in Augustine, though rhetoric traditionally aims to persuade an audience in the civic or political arena, it can also in certain genres as meditation be directed toward the self. The meditator can exert pressure on his own being to make his dilemma acutely felt and in need of imminent resolution. In dizain 143 two methods of achieving this interior imperative are the dramatic use of narrative and the verbal category of aspect. Aspect is a rubric of linguistics concerned with the character of verbs as states, processes, or events. In meditation the poet-lover applies to himself rhetoric of urgency created by the dramatic tension between two figures of aspect. These are iteration and instantaneity. With admirable conciseness, Scève so fashions his verbal rhetoric as to make these two aspects overlap. In dizain 143 the reconstituting memory reenacts in the present a single dramatic instance of a repetitive dilemma centred on self-deception. The iterative aspect of verbs marks this sensual illusion as a continually occurring, intractable problem. Yet, the immediacy of analysing and studying this dilemma exerts pressure on the poet-lover to break the impasse. In dramatic terms the dilemma is unfolding simultaneously with its narration, for the self that judges associated with the immediacy of observation is yet unable to dissuade the self that is judged associated with iteration. As in Augustine, memory is not only recalling a fact but also attempting a moral performative in the hic et nunc of self-examination. In other words, the meta self is endeavouring through the pressures of self-observation to turn an iteration of entrapment into an instantaneous event of moral liberation. Though the tension-ridden play between immediacy and iteration occurs simultaneously, two paraphrases are here given in English to capture the unique sense of the first and the second. In the second paraphrase I have added underlined markers to illustrate the point about iteration. Remembrance, soul of thought, Ravishes me so in its illusive dream, That memory, not being offended by it, I nourish myself with a sweet lie. Remembrance, soul of thought, Continuously ravishes me so in its illusive dream, That memory, not being offended by it, I constantly nourish myself with a sweet lie.

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These two figures of aspect create the rhetorical effect of acute dramatic irony that presses the metaself to define the conflict in the sharpest terms. Memory through iteration and immediacy presses ratio to activate, so to speak, the severest tension in order to ready volontas for interior war, and if possible, for a favourable resolution. The poet-lover’s most effective rhetorical tool for this act of understanding is dramatic irony. Ratio takes the form of a tense, taut irony and pushes it to the breaking point in order to press the will into action. In the quatrain there are three such points of pressure. First, the adjective ‘illusif’ in the lines ‘Le souvenir, ame de ma pensée,/Me ravit tant en son illusif songe’ (vv. 1–2) shows that self-deception is simultaneous with selfknowledge and that heightened awareness of the problem is powerless to dispel the false dream. In meditation it is the function of poetry to act as an instrument of knowledge by simulating and studying the unique, concrete, indexical163 aspects of the dilemma. Thus, in verse 1 (‘Le souvenir, ame de ma pensée’) the apposition connotes that the very soul of the soul, here the alluring memory, is inhabited by treachery. This is in contrast to dizain 333 where Délie’s soul, the ‘centre heureux’ (v. 1) is immune from such vulnerabilities. Similarly, the rhyme of ‘songe’ (v. 2) with ‘mensonge’ (v. 4) dramatizes by nearly identical spelling and sound how the dream becomes indistinguishable from the lie. A second pressure point of irony activated by the reconstituting memory is that the lover is complicit with the lie even in the dream and that there is a perverse agency cooperating with the deterministic fixation of memory. This is indicated by the pronoun ‘Je’ in ‘Je me nourris de si doulce mensonge’ (v. 4) where, paradoxically, the whole active being takes on a willing passivity. In this ironic ontology the ‘Je’ representing the whole active self connives with the passivity of multiple, dissociated selves: ‘Le souvenir’ (v. 1) ‘ame’ (v. 1) ‘pensée’ (v. 1) and ‘memoyre’ (v. 3). Finally, meditative rhetoric applies a third pressure to understanding. The iteration of sensual dreams instantaneously reconstituted through the metaself’s memory suggests that the very act of self-study creates a vicious circle. Iteration marking an intractable habit is a double-edged sword. The desire to know by simulating the fantasy through memoria and ratio is so overwhelming that it reanimates the powers of ‘songe’ to steal the lover’s being: ‘Me ravit.’ In line 2 the metaself is totally aware of its self-deception, for the adjective ‘illusif’ indicates moral knowledge of an unalterable seduction. This will to knowledge only displaces the lover yet again into the ‘doulce mensonge’ of line 4. These pressure points exercised by meditative rhetoric serve to make

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knowledge of the dilemma so acute that they push voluntas to broach a resolution. Such are the effects of iteration. Supreme lucidity stands helpless before the fixation on fantasy, agency connives with determinism, and reason itself reactivates and thereby reperpetrates the dilemma. Rhetoric redounds upon the self to persuade the poet-lover to precipitate a struggle and an outcome. In this rhetorical pressure there is a certain element of volition expressed by the reconstituting memory, which structures and sets the rhetorical system in motion. On the other hand, once engaged, the disputing roles are pressed by rhetoric itself to conclude an act of self-understanding or self-modification. In the Confessions this urgency is seen in the relentless interior dialogue that lurches between unabated self-interrogation and acute supplications for divine assistance. In Délie dramatic self-analysis will take many forms, but in dizain 143, the rhetorical pressure is exerted by a micro-narrative of interior war. It is in the logic of meditative rhetoric to exploit narrative to perform a change of state. This pressure is made tense and suspenseful by Scève’s particular type of drama that creates an omniscient self-spectator unable to master events that he is fully able to comprehend and deploy. In the second stanza the reconstituting memory stages a dramatic narrative taking the form of a battle between two conflicting personifications, one called ‘ardeur’ (v. 4) and the other ‘l’esprit’ (v. 6). This is, in Augustine’s terminology, the present of the present, where iteration changes to event. The first indication of this counterattack is that the metaself takes on more distance from its object-self, for ratio detaches itself somewhat from the gripping hold of fantasy to stage the reenactment of liberation. In other words, reason now focuses on and enacts the mechanism of deliverance. In the fifth line (‘Or quand l’ardeur, qui pour elle me ronge’) the use of the conjunction ‘quand’ reveals greater separation from the tyrannical iteration of the quatrain. This is the incipient stage of higher consciousness and more active reasoning. This conjunction meaning au moment où indicates the additional work of ratio putting under scrutiny the circumstances of a repetitive temporal/causal interaction. Passion habitually preys on, corrodes, eats away, or gnaws on the poet-lover and thereby scorches sleeping ‘esprit’ into awakening and taking up a defensive position. Let us continue to study this meditative micronarrative. As Saulnier has shown, ‘esprit’ (v. 6) is synonymous with soul: ‘Son pouvoir distinctif semble bien être l’’intention’ (c’est-à-dire, l’attention, l’effort tendu), qui l’oppose aux pouvoirs essentiellement capricieux du corps et du coeur.’164 However, in this poem, the ‘esprit’ is ‘sommeillant’

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(v. 6). For the moment it has neglected its responsibility toward effort. The martial connotation of ‘s’en peult donner garde’ (v. 7) implies the need for perpetual vigilance, and ‘esprit,’ once awakened ‘soubdainement’ (v. 6), looks at the ‘penser’ (v. 9), which is now reflecting the spiritual side of ‘souvenir’ (v. 1). Here one notices two developments which affect meditative effort. The substantivised infinitive ‘penser’ (v. 9) of the second verse suggests constant activity (‘my thinking’) as opposed to the static nominal ‘pensée’ (‘my thought’) in the first line. More significantly, ‘Le souvenir’ (v. 1) has shown itself to be successively the stagnation of reflection and the redemption from sensual fantasy. In its negative capacity the ‘souvenir’ (v. 1) offers up the seductive ‘songe’ (v. 2) to the ‘memoyre’ (v. 3), which fixes on it rather than presenting it to the ‘esprit’ (v. 6) for judgment. When ‘ardeur’ (v. 5) is too intense, it becomes corrosive and poisonous (‘l’ardeur ... me ronge,’ v. 5) and ventures an attack on ‘l’esprit’ (v. 6). Thus, the speaker is split between lucid observer and dreamer-lover, active moralist and passive sensualist, moral idealist and hapless witness. The lucid self-observer uses personification to submit the faculties and feelings of the lover to close study: ‘ame,’ ‘pensée,’ ‘memoyre,’ ‘ardeur,’ ‘esprit,’ and ‘penser.’ This manner of deploying the self, the most striking trait of the poem, is an indication of the complexity of the part/whole relation. Meditation seeks mastery by analysing the conflicting parts, but this very attempt to atomize understanding only exacerbates the extent to which dissociation disperses the self. It may be observed from this examination of ‘songe’ that the theatre of meditation encompasses a speaker/audience relation as well. What the dreamer-lover cannot see, his self-deception, is clearly seen by the lucid moralist who cannot intervene. The reader-as-audience is in the same position as the lucid moralist, knowledgeable but powerless to change the course of events. Through such dramatic irony the meditation heightens the reader’s attention and solicits moral involvement. This is a prefiguration of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue technique, one whose theatrical sharpening of the conflict precipitates a gesture of resolution. From the viewpoint of the ideal moralist this battle is necessary for selfunderstanding and moral improvement. From the perspective of the reader-as-spectator, this dramatic irony teaches a moral lesson. Once awakened, the spirit counterattacks by focusing on ‘penser’ (v. 9), which in its turn reveals the true and healing image of Délie. What is the lesson? The ‘souvenir’ which began the chain of events has conflicting consequences. The experience of the women is hazardous, for the narrator’s concentration on sensuality or on a fictitious image of the beloved

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(‘doulce mensonge,’ v. 4) preempts reflection and effort, and therefore, aspiration to a higher consciousness. It is through the mediation of ‘esprit’ (v. 6) and the more accurate mirroring power of ‘penser’ (v. 9) that the redemptive consciousness rises and routs the false image. As in Augustine’s Confessions, the fourth function of the reconstituting memory is that from the outset it repeats experience in anticipation of moral liberation. The rhetoric of the reconstituting memory is proleptic, since dramatic narrative presses the poet-lover not only to extricate himself from his dilemma but also to glimpse the transcendent. As in Augustine’s temporal schema, this is the present of the future. Not only does dramatic self-analysis lead him to a spiritual cure for corrosive sensuality and to a more intellectual vision of the beloved, it also teaches the poet-lover how to make a distinction between deceptive idols and true presence, a recognition165 that is rewarded by the beloved’s transcendent healing powers. There is another intertextual link with Augustine’s meditative method. Just as Augustine’s conversion allows the Lord to speak through his Confessions, so the poet-lover turns to the Bible to allow Délie to speak through his poetry. The force of his imagery may be gauged by the startling pointe that concludes the meditation: ‘En mon penser soubdain il te regarde,/ Comme au desert son Serpent eslevé’ (vv. 9–10). As in Augustine where soliloquy cedes to direct dialogue with God to importune the Almighty for grace, Scève’s persona breaks off his interior monologue and switches to dialogue with Délie (v. 9) precisely at the point where cognitive effort immediately gives way to the true image of the beloved. In this anticipation of moral improvement the distinctive dimension that Scève brings to the meditative tradition is the power of his visual poetry. It is visual because like the composition of place, it offers a dramatic stage on which the poet-lover may enact his own moral dilemma. It is poetic because it is precisely the penetrating conceits of metaphoric analogies that act as instruments of knowledge. Both the visual and the poetic are fused in the culmination of the meditation that brings forth a surprising symbol from the Old Testament. In Numbers 21:6–9 it is recounted that Jehovah sent a plague of venomous serpents upon the Israelites to punish them for blasphemy. As a result they begged Moses to intercede for them, and at the directions of the Lord, he created a fiery, brazen serpent which was hoisted on a pole. All those who had been bitten by the serpents and gazed upon the fiery serpent were miraculously healed.166 By a process of retrospective illumination this visual symbol unknots the moral agon by reversing the previous images of seduction into the healing image of Délie. By a rhetoric of retroactive emblematics this sym-

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bol converts the duplicitous idols of sensuality into a glimpse of the true and restorative vision of the beloved. The dense analogies concentrated in the brazen serpent are conducive to meditation since they challenge both the poet-lover and the reader to seek and recover those principles that restore moral equilibrium. What are these analogies? Like the serpent that is capable of poisoning and healing, Délie is the pharmakon, who through memory may both corrode and cure. In this sense the restorative effect of the ‘Serpent’ in the last line heals the ‘ardeur ... qui me ronge’ of the fifth line. Whatever effect the poet-lover receives from the beloved depends on his use of ‘Le souvenir’ (v. 1), which may either stunt the faculties or elevate them. Commenting on Ficino’s Commentary, Panofsky offers a suggestive explanation for the paradoxical effects of ‘souvenir’: Love is always a desire (‘desiderio’), but not every desire is love. When unrelated to the cognitive powers, the desire remains a mere natural urge like the blind force which causes the plants to grow or the stone to fall. Only when desire, directed by the ‘virtù cognitive,’ becomes conscious of an ultimate goal does it deserve the name of love. (1962, 141–2)

That the flame of aspiration kills the flames of sensuality is connoted by the fiery ‘Serpent eslevé’167 of the conclusion, which extinguishes the lover’s oppressive ‘flammes’ of the eighth verse. When fixing solely on the physical side of the woman, the lover is like the Israelites who faithlessly blaspheme their source of life. The word ‘desert’ in the final line also makes fruitful analogies spring to mind. The wandering of the Israelites in the desert figures the erreurs of the poet-lover lost in his ‘illusif songe’ (v. 2) as well as his ‘doulce mensonge’ (v. 4) – both trial and punishment for rebellion against the women’s moral rigour. In a similar fashion, the word ‘eslevé’ (v. 10) of the pointe evokes a system of low and high imagery. The imagery of the lower level begins in line 6, where the ‘esprit’ is sleeping. In the next line, challenged by ardeur, it rouses itself up and stands on guard. Then the more active ‘penser’ fixes esprit’s gaze (‘il te regarde,’ v. 9) on the ‘Serpent eslevé’ (v. 10), which allows the beloved to work her miracles on the lover. Like the biblical account, dizain 143 shows a definite reciprocal relation between effort and reward. To be cured of poison, the Israelites had to prove their faith by looking at the bronze serpent. Similarly, the poet-lover must move from a state of sensual passivity to intellectual activity, for only after the esprit focuses on penser does the beloved’s image surge as the efficacious antidote. One of the most significant aspects of Scève’s mechanism of intro-

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spection is the highly oblique rhetorical relation between the metaself that reconstitutes the conflict and the object-self that directly undergoes the conflict. The essence of the problem centres on volition. The metaself, though lucid and imperturbable, is nonetheless unable directly to intervene on behalf of its embattled object-self whose plight it can only observe. There is striking dissociation here. The metaself appears to be merely the container of contending forces providing an interior field of battle that it otherwise cannot influence. It is the object-self, it would seem, that directly engages the agon. In dizain 143 its putative function is to alert sleeping ‘esprit’ (v. 6) to turn ‘souvenir’ (v. 1) from the illusive seduction of ‘songe’ (v. 2) and focus it on memory’s true and healing sight of Délie. Yet, close examination of the meditation shows that this saving act is not due to a pure, elicited act of the will. Rather, the entire psychological apparatus of the object-self seems to be governed by reflex action, shock, and mechanical reaction. Like Augustine, Scève’s poet-lover scrutinizes the unmasterable obstacles to volition. However, not only does the poetlover examine what the human faculties cannot do without an effective central agency, but also and ironically, what they can do, almost by reflex, to effect a favourable outcome. In this battle the offensive is taken by ‘ardeur’ (v. 5) which chances (‘se hazarde,’ v. 6) an attack on sleeping mind (‘Contre l’esprit sommeillant,’ v. 6). In spite of the fact that the function of the esprit is to reflect selfconsciously and to transmit the orders of reason to the senses and body,168 its initial state is that of sleep. It is passive, dormant, and unconscious of the looming threat. Then suddenly (‘Soubdainement,’ v. 7), that is, without warning and unaware, it reacts. Yet, this reaction is not instantaneous but rather takes place as soon as it can defend itself (‘Soubdainement qu’il s’en peult donner garde’). There is a time lag between unanticipated warning and preparedness as if the shock had temporarily immobilized defensive activity. Verse 8 further qualifies the typically reactive and involuntary warning system. The esprit is literally jarred to work when it feels itself burnt by ardeur’s flames: ‘Ou qu’il se sent de ses flammes grevé’ (v. 8). That is, it is passive not active. It receives its warning from sensation (‘se sent,’ v. 8), not from thought. Moreover, the danger signal has to be sufficiently strong to alert esprit into its defensive position. It must be set off by ‘flammes’ (v. 8) and they must have such force as to oppress and burn (‘grevé,’ v. 8)169 the esprit into movement. Finally, in verse 9, the esprit performs its defensive act by looking at the true image of Délie in the activity of thought. Yet, even this higher awareness of the beloved comes about by reflex action, as if the shock of attack had to be met by the shock

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of recognition. This is suggested by the second use of the word ‘soubdain’ (v. 9) which connotes that esprit’s act of focusing on penser’s true image of Délie is an automatic response to the scorching flames of ardeur: ‘En mon penser soubdain il te regarde’ (v. 9). There is certainly a measure of conscious effort exercised by the esprit. However, the concluding line of the meditation shows that the decisive change in the poet-lover is brought about by the miraculous restorative power of the beloved: ‘Comme au desert son Serpent eslevé’ (v. 10). Alarmed into gazing at penser, the esprit is frozen and jolted at the sudden sight of what cures and elevates. To what should the reader attribute this change in the poet-lover? The metaself that reconstitutes the dramatic agon distances itself at such a remove from the meditative process that there is a gap between agency and effect. Imperturbable and omniscient but unable directly to intervene in its object-self’s deception, it can only witness its divided self break into separately contending faculties. In turn, these faculties themselves appear disconnected from their own respective agencies, for the lover is first mesmerized by a seductive illusion, then burned by ardeur, jarred into selfdefence, then frozen and transfixed by the miraculous sight of the serpent. In comparison, Augustine’s faculties may be rebellious and disrupted, but his overseeing reconstituting memory never detaches or dissociates itself from directly participating in moral struggle as it does in Délie. If in dizain 143 as a whole there is deeply seated alienation in self-deception, there is an equally pervasive disjunction between the metaself’s absence of volition and the object-self’s decisive battle – a battle which itself is carried to resolution by a staccato-like and agitated discontinuity effected somewhat by will but mostly by reflex and miracle. The dissociation between parts and whole, agency and effect is compounded by the relation between the natural and the divine. In regard to the movement from human to divine in the poem, at least this much is clear. The first nine verses of the meditation are pervaded with purely natural, psychological, cerebral, analytical analyses making self-sufficient appeal to ratio. Yet, suddenly and unexpectedly in the very last verse, it is the miraculous efficacy of the view of the serpent that instantaneously heals the poet-lover. As opposed to Augustine who constantly appeals for divine assistance throughout his meditation, the poet-lover in Délie shows an abrupt discontinuity between rational and religious sensibilities. Rather than interpenetrating and complementing one another as they do in Augustine, the first brusquely cedes to the second. At this important juncture in the meditation, the reader is pressed with the most significant questions. Does the miracle somehow derive immanently from a high state of

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human consciousness? Or does human effort (‘penser,’ v. 9) happen upon or cooperate with a source beyond its powers? It would seem that the second alternative is true, but in this poem the role of agency is ambiguous. My words ‘happen upon’ suggest that the poet-lover in dizain 143 is drawn into similar circumstances as the youth of dizain 1 who by a chance encounter with Délie suddenly if not traumatically comprehends and accepts her stalking transformative powers. On the other hand my words ‘cooperate with a source beyond its own powers’ imply greater agency on the part of the lover to the degree that he is the conductor of a chain of psychological events leading to a miraculous cure. If the poet-lover’s will is in any sense a helper in realizing this miraculous change, it must be observed that it steers the movements of interiority by most indirect and oblique logic. The self-observing metaself, though incapable of directly changing the course of events, crafts a meditative rhetoric that allows Delie’s power to act on his object-self. Supremely lucid and self-conscious but unable directly to deliver himself from his dilemma, the metaself forges a meditative practice in which rhetoric itself compensates for the deficiencies of willing. This force, similar to that of Augustine’s procedures, is the pressure of rhetoric.170 It is the creation of the agon that guarantees a struggle, the power of aspect that demands instantaneous relief from intractable iterations, the force of narrative which presses for a change of state and moves iteration to event, and the dramatic charge of emblematic religious imagery that provokes the wisdom to understand and to undo the hold of selfdeception. These rhetorical pressures put into motion the dynamics of interiority. While it is the miraculous curative power of the woman (‘son Serpent eslevé,’ v. 10) that routs the false image and restores the true one, it seems that her intervention could not have come about without the lover’s increased meditative effort that preceded it. This higher meditative aspiration increases the intellectual effort of ‘penser’ (v. 9), which allows ‘esprit’ (v. 6) to mirror the real image of the beloved. One might interpret this as an ascending movement, whether voluntary or not, in which the work of reason (penser) awakens the higher power of the mind (‘esprit’) to recognize the most superior of the intellectual virtues. Then, suddenly, the miracle occurs. In other words, the self-reflexive nature of thought sets off the reactive mechanisms of cognitive vigilance. This is marked by the adverb ‘Soubdainement’ (v. 7) which has a definite Platonic ring. In the Symposium, Diotima reaches a crescendo in a realization similar to Scève’s persona when she says, ‘Whoever has been initiated so far in the mysteries

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of Love and has viewed all these aspects of the beautiful in due succession, is at last drawing near the final revelation. And now Socrates, there bursts upon (‘exaiphnes’) him that wondrous vision which is the very soul of the beauty he has toiled so long for’ (210e–11a). The Jowett translation reads, ‘when he comes to that end will suddenly perceive ...’ (stress mine).171 In the case of Augustine’s meditative procedures, the performative power of willing must be supplemented by a call for grace. This allows hope to cast in confidentia an expansive view of the future where death will be swallowed up in eternal victory. In Délie, the poet-lover shores up volition by calling not upon grace but upon meditative effort and the force of rhetorical pressure. Only this more active aspiration can materialize the beloved’s healing powers. These act not in an eternal, transcendent framework of religious redemption, but momentarily, through a human struggle seeking to purify memory and restore lucidity. Yet, this very human act, seemingly without transition, leaps to an image of the divine (v. 10). Usefulness of Meditational Models Augustine and Ignatius offer prototypical intertexts through which one may appreciate Délie’s meditative organization. We can better grasp the utility of these concepts if we view Ignatian meditation as a rhetorical structure and Augustinian meditation as a rhetorical practice. Ultimately, I have proceeded on the premise that deriving structure from Ignatius and praxis from Augustine would yield an effective economy of methodological concepts appropriate to Délie. Systematic meditation such as that developed by the Devotia moderna and crystallized by Ignatius furnishes a tripartite structure of recollection, analysis, and affective response governed by the visual composition de lieu. This composition has the double priority of establishing both the content of the meditation and the order of its procedure. In Délie the Ignatian framework is best seen in the relation obtaining between the impresa and its companion poem. In such dizains as 240 the device entitled ‘La Vipere qui se tue’ illustrates the notion of regeneration through death. This imaginary composition pervades the companion poem as it is channelled through analysis and emotions, first as a holocaustum and then as a confidentia of the poet-lover’s paradoxical triumph over time through death. Augustinian meditation provides a pragmatics that animates the functional requirements of the Ignatian tripartite scheme. With respect to the Ignatian composition of place, the reconstituting memory in specular fashion galvanizes a particular moral problem and assigns specific roles

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to the self that becomes an actor in its own dilemma. In other words, the composition of place may be envisaged as a locus of visual memory whose particular context is determined and enacted by the reconstituting memory. In the second Ignatian prescription to exercise the entendement dramatic self-analysis sets a spiritual agon in motion that rhetorically pressures self-knowledge not only with respect to the dilemma but also to the soul’s very powers. That is, the analytic part of meditation is metacritical even as it confronts a specific moral perplexity. Finally, Ignatian meditation requires the will to respond to the subject matter digested by the understanding. In Augustinian practice, the volonté may be temporarily rebuffed, but ultimately in dialectical fashion, the infiniment petit of introspection discovers and embraces a spiritual principle having transcendent promise. As already seen, Scève’s dizain 143 adopts Augustinian practice by staging a theatre of the mind. The paradoxical effect of the beloved’s influence as the perpetrator of suffering and the agent of redemption is reconstituted as an épreuve between the physical and the spiritual, necessity and freedom, and the double effect of memory, both deceptive and salvific. Adding to and complementing meditative practice is the role of the impresa. As we have seen in dizain 240 the device has the power to create a momentary enigma, which enhances concentration in memory and self-understanding in analysis. In structural/spatial terms the emblematic enigma may be viewed as a potential arsenal of concepts. In practice its natural propensity to create ellipses instead of smooth transitions brings to meditation first a tautness, then a spring-like uncoiling that dynamically moves introspection towards resolution. Understood as a meditative effect such emblematic indirection and its uncoiling effect provoke the faculty of understanding. This entire process may occur retroactively in such dizains as 143 where in the last line the image of the brazen serpent casts its elliptical vision backwards over the entire poem. The meditative conclusion awakens the knowledge that the brazen serpent is a kind of pharmakon, both fatal and curative. This image appears so suddenly and indirectly that the reader/meditator is first puzzled, and then challenged to relate its pertinence retrospectively to the entire meditative drama. In religious meditation proper, whether it be that of Augustine or Ignatius, there is a triple relation between lover, beloved, and the bonds of love where the beloved is envisaged in figura Christi who is tied to the lover by grace. Délie is written on the palimpsest of religious meditation, but it humanizes this schema by replacing Christ with Délie172 and by viewing the woman’s exemplary virtue as a catalyst of human potential. In consequence, Scevian interiority is rhetorically similar to, but philosophically

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different from religious introspection. This is true in two respects. First, while both use analogous rhetorical structures and practices to exercise the virtues of the soul and to strike the proper equilibrium between it and the body, Délie turns the powers of the soul to immanent ends even as it recognizes the religious aspects of aspiration. We have seen this in dizain 240 where the word ‘holy’ (‘saincte,’ v. 10) is associated with the human acts of the speaker’s sacrifice and the perduranceof his poetry. Second, Scevian meditation transfers the feelings associated with divine transcendence to hallowing the refinement and growth of the human powers. This is dramatized in dizain 143 where it is difficult to imagine that the poet-lover’s miraculous cure surging up at the end of the poem could have come about without the nine lines of cogitative effort that preceded it. When examining meditative structure and practice simultaneously within the same dizain, what do they teach us about Délie? What is the significance of the visual/verbal interaction? What concepts do they yield about form, function, and value within the work itself? How does meditation relate Délie to the broader background of changing historical paradigms? These questions are the hinges of a diptych turning to the next chapter dealing with meditative praxis.

2 Meditative Praxis and the Tensions of Transvaluation

The two models of meditative rhetoric examined separately function together as complementary features of a single unit. It is now necessary to explore their simultaneous use and to focus on how Augustinian dramatic self-analysis operates with the Ignatian tripartite structure. This objective will show that meditative form is the organizing principle for a variety of dizains, some celebratory in tone, others agonistic, and still others intermingling these voices. Also, having explained in chapter I that certain dizains are modelled on the impresa, I would like to extend my analysis of the device by illustrating its similarity to Ignatian rhetoric. One will see that Scève presages the explicitly religious use of emblematic forms in Counter-Reformation and classical works. Finally, since Délie brings rhetoric associated with religion to bear on its humanist outlook, this will afford a good opportunity to observe certain tensions and tests of values. Combined Use of the Two Models The Tensions of Transvaluation: Secular Prayer or Religious Humanism? Let us return to device 27/dizain 240 to examine how Scève uses meditation to infuse his humanism with religious fervour. From the viewpoint of tone dizain 240 stands out as an adaptation of meditative techniques that produce the voice of prayerful harmony. In effect, it lends sacred sentiment to a celebration of human love predicated on sacrifice. As we recall, the title of device 27 is ‘La Vipere qui se tue’ and heads dizain 240: Ma voulenté reduicte au doulx servage Du hault vouloir de ton commandement,

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(D 240)

To summarize the Ignatian/Mauburnian structure of this poem, it should be remembered that the device, picturing a viper coiled over its young, serves as the composition of place. It reveals that, in the poetlover’s pursuit of Délie, he exchanges life for death. This lesson is communicated to the woman as a prayer of celebration. The understanding (‘ce peu d’entendement,’ v. 5) makes use of the tractatio by developing the central notion that the lover’s ‘doulx servage’ to Délie (v. 1) will assure his fame by outlasting time and fortune. Such holy servitude, a series of deaths in life, is a holocaustum to the extent that his ‘voulenté’ (v. 1) is reduced to the ‘vouloir’ of her ‘commandement’ (v. 2). In the final, affective movement we see that through this sacrifice ‘Fame’ (v. 6) will grant the beloved immortality and the lover glorious death. It is within this structure that the poem unfolds as a secular prayer, or rather, as the celebration of ‘Fame’ (v. 6) within a spiritual framework. Both a love poem and a prayer, the dizain raises the phatic function to primary importance. Rhetorical praxis taken from Augustine unfolds within the Ignatian structure to reveal the tensions that arise in Scève’s intermingling of the sacred and the secular. What adds to the difficulty of understanding the mix of secular and sacred in this poem is that it is in close proxmity to dizains that precede and follow it that have unmistakeably religious themes. In dizain 238 the lover has retreated to the Isle Barbe to contemplate the beloved’s cruelty, and as Defaux has pointed out, the Isle was a pilgrimage site and a locus for religious feasts.1 Following dizain 240 are dizains 241 and 242 which make mention respectively of the lover’s admiration for the ‘Pellerins’ (v. 1) and the ‘Peuple devotieux’ (v. 1) whose prayers have been answered by the intervention of the saints. In Augustine the third function of the reconstituting memory is its capacity to direct the dynamics of time as a drama of constraint and liberation. Meditation contracts time to a single point where the entire significance of one’s life may be compressed into a moment of self-evaluation. The triple bond between lover (Augustine), the beloved (God), and their spiritual

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communion is evaluated in its totality in a single moment of meditation. This very compression then swells into an expansion of time inasmuch as it purviews the past, present, and future, and dialectically, sounds the possibilities of transcendence. In this movement the agon has been sublimated as part of the recognition that one’s devotion merits immortal reward. It is at the very end of his meditation that Augustine, quoting Corinthians, proclaims and projects that ‘death is swallowed up in victory.’ Dizain 240 is a prayer of love recited in the Augustinian rhetorical framework. In this poetic meditation its reverential tone is especially heard in the holocaustum of the first quatrain. One of the essential psychological components of prayer is the recognition of obedience. Here the lover celebrates these acts as the submission of his will to the ‘hault vouloir de ton commandement’ (v. 2). Though this holocaustum has been a ‘servage’ (v. 1) and a ‘joug’ (v. 3) it is felt as ‘Le Paradis de son contentement’ (v. 4). One will recognize a process of conversion in this celebration. Through the device (‘La Vipere qui se tue’) we observe the cycle of converting death into life. The expression of conversion follows Augustine’s use of time in which the reconstituting memory converges the entire past experience of the poet-lover into the present moment of meditation. In the immanence of self-evaluation where the past merges with the present, time is condensed in the first line of the poem as a paradoxical state: ‘Ma voulenté reduicte au doulx servage.’ The word ‘servage’ (v. 1) is the recalling and recollecting of a series of trials that are now celebrated as a conversion of death into life. In other words, ‘servage’ is here made sacred as part of ‘les morts qu’en moy tu renovelles’ of Délie’s liminary poem. Previous to dizain 240, there were a number of ‘morts’ or psychological épreuves connected with ‘servitude’ such as ravished liberty (D 3), frustration in failing to escape love (D 46), sexual restraint and obedience (dizains 103/123), and bodily depredations brought on by suffering (D 125). Thus, dizain 240 is a high point of spiritual attainment where self-regeneration from death is revered as faithfulness to Délie’s ‘commandement’ (v. 2). Just as Augustine infuses scripture into his prayers, so the poet-lover cites the beloved’s words when invoking ‘ton commandement’ (v. 2). By using the word ‘commandement,’ the speaker is not only quoting Délie, but referring to her as a source of holy words. As God speaks through Augustine’s voice, so the beloved speaks through that of the poet-lover. Thus dizain 240 is the ‘scriptural’ link to dizain 278 where the poet honours Délie’s ‘dictz’ as ‘Parolle saincte’ (v. 6). In this poem the poet-lover proclaims that the beloved’s very words are inseparable from his own work as ‘Tout le parfaict de son divin ouvrage’ (v. 8). These sacred words within

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the divine work are valuable precisely because they can teach the world ‘Comment du Corps l’Ame on peult deslyer’ (v. 5). In the next two verses of dizain 240 the speaker’s spiritual renewal is transformed into a more secular conversion. Yet, the poem maintains its religious tone. While the poet-lover has transmuted death into life through ‘servitude’ (v. 8) this very sacrifice serves another goal. That is ‘Fame’ (v. 6). His love has been so exemplary that he will achieve renown. In contrast to the lover’s affirmation of an earthly reward, Augustine directs that in prayer, God alone should be desired: ‘Nolite aliquid a Deo quaerere; nisi Deum. Gratis amate, se solum ab illo desiderate.’2 Yet, the religious tone is at least partly justified by the fact that for the lover, Délie intensifies his awareness of the divine and his resolve to sacrifice in order to deepen his encounter with the woman who incarnates it. Of course, it would be naive to believe that the ‘it’ for which he sacrifices is purified of lascivious intent. If his sense of amour courtois is tinged with cupidity, it also bears the marks of religious sensibility. Such are his very mixed motives. Seeking to consecrate his devotion, the poet-lover attempts to find analogies that would translate the sacred into the human. In the last four lines of the poem the lover claims transcendence for his amatory devotion in terms that are usually reserved for religious spirituality. It is ‘Fame’ (v. 6) that confers glory on the poet-lover’s death and guarantees Délie’s immortality. Though this is a purely human value, the words ‘saincte’ (v. 10) and ‘sainctement’ (v. 9) state this process to be sacred. Having a religious charge, these words correspond to the association of Délie as a divinity proclaimed throughout the poetic sequence. Yet, by stressing purely human accomplishment such as ‘Fame,’ the meditative implication is that a spiritually transcendent character is attributed to a properly human activity. What is the significance of this problem? It will not do to say that by using these words, Scève is merely adopting the conventions of the love lyric as it evolved from the troubadours to courtly love through the dolce stil nuovo of Dante to the Rime of Petrarch. This is circular reasoning, a tautology, that only restates history rather than answering the question. The significance of this problem lies elsewhere. First, it signals what semioticians term ‘transvaluation’ – a testing and repositioning of values.3 Scève is challenging the medieval hierarchy that would emphasize the fallen nature of humanity in need of redemption. In contrast to this medieval view, the poetic meditation, without denying the divine, unabashedly celebrates the dignity of human aspiration, and in this particular case, love and art. Second, in order to elevate the status of human endeavour, Scève ritualizes this transvaluation, makes it a ceremonial

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act, by revering human accomplishment with the rhetoric of properly religious meditation. This is not idolatry but a divided but parallel celebration where the secular and sacred can make their claims to immortality without being united. In lines 5–10 the reader encounters the second phase of Augustinian meditation where the contraction of time leads to a psychological expansion of time. The poet-lover’s sublimation of sacrifice confidentially swells into the expectation of immortality. The poetic prayer now performs a third transformation of love in which ‘Fame’ (v. 6) associated with the lover’s steadfastness, conquers not only ‘Temps’ (v. 1) but also ‘Fortune, et force injurieuse’ (v. 7). The humanistic character of love’s persistence through time is guaranteed not by grace, but by public recognition and praise. ‘Fame’ (v. 6) will show that ‘servitude’ (v. 8) is ‘non faincte’ (v. 8), and its honesty will guarantee the lover glorious death and the beloved immortal life. From a pictorial point of view it is important to note that the poetic prayer imitates the device as an icon of reciprocity. The interaction of verbal and visual poetry in meditation offers introspective nourishment to the poet-lover and to the reader alike who internalize the substance of reflection. In the impresa, the circular form of the viper coiling over her young confers a sense of continual cycle where her death gives birth to her newborn. This exchange of death for life occurs in the poem as well. The beloved’s moral rectitude incites the lover to ‘doulx servage’ (v. 1) and in turn, his ‘Fame’ (v. 6) brings immortality to the beloved. There is another shade of meaning suggested by the impresa. Just as the viper, dying, gives birth to her children, so does the poet-lover, singing his sacrifice, give birth to his literary progeny. In either case, fame naturalizes the religious palimpsest upon which the poet-lover has written his glory. In this regard the poem as a whole is in the image of its concluding paronomasia: ‘Me donnant mort sainctement glorieuse,/Te donner vie immortellement saincte’ (vv. 9–10). The lover’s death in line 9 brings the beloved’s life in line 10, a reversal that is mirrored in each parallel segment of these contrasting lines: ‘Me’/‘Te’ – ‘mort’/‘vie’ – ‘sainctement’/‘immortellement’ – ‘glorieuse’/‘saincte.’ This contrasting exchange radiates throughout the entire poetic meditation and may best be appreciated in the dual structure of the rhyme scheme. As Henri Morier observes of the Scevian dizain, ‘Sa structure est du type oppositif: l’ordre de la répétition est symétriquement inversé, mais les timbres des strophes changent, comme si l’objet A, réfléchi dans une eau calme, y modifiait son coloris en B’ (1144). Thus, the following pattern is observed:

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A B ab abb//ccd cd where the sacrifice of A is converted into the rewards of B, and the rewards of B themselves are complementing contrasts, cd. Finally, this figure of harmonious, circular reciprocity is most decisively registered in the interaction between the Ignatian meditative structure and the Augustinian practice of prayer. The ideal deployment of the three powers in the Ignatian scheme is fulfilled by the successful meditative praxis of Augustinian introspection. That is, the realization of prayerful aspiration fullfils the expectations of memory, intelligence, and will. Virtue as active force is commensurate with virtue as potential force. The three transformations that take place in the meditation – conversion of sacrifice into ‘doulx servage’ (v. 1), its metamorphosis into ‘Fame’ (v. 6), the projection of Fame into immortality – become ideal realizations of the human faculties. This is especially true in the last two culminating lines of the poem where the will, expressing confident celebration, uses both the present participle and the infinitive form of donner to mark the work of ‘Fame’ as a never-ending cycle. A contrast between Augustine and Scève points to the change in meditative values. In the Confessions there is the triple bond uniting the lover (the one who confesses), the beloved (God), and their supernatural ties (conversion/salvation). In this dizain the poet-lover converts death into life as a human sacrifice of obedience to the beloved in order to make sacred his fame and her immortality. While Augustine’s immortality is the transcendent pleasure of the beatific vision, Délie’s immortality is the vanquishing of time through the lover’s fame. While God bestows transcendence on Augustine through grace, it is the poet-lover who lends Délie immortality through the virtues of exemplary love. Memory in Augustine leads to the discovery of the divine through the human soul. Memory in Scève is a self-making that develops the human powers through the reconstitution of a trial which here resolves into immortality won by sacrifice. Thus, the secular and the sacred are not fully integrated and neither can one be assimilated into the other. Immortality is something contingent on human fame and glory, but it is also the reward of knowing that loving union, being ‘saincte’ (v. 10), participates in divinity. Chaos and Order Such moments of prayerful poise, though typical of Délie, are intermittent and rare. More frequent is the tone of struggle as exemplified by device

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14/dizain 123. Like the previous poem, this impresa/dizain complex uses religious atmosphere to communicate the force of Délie’s moral authority. However, at a deeper level, it intensifies the humanization of the religious by subjecting both the sacred and the profane to the poet-lover’s will. Here the complex mix of values will be explained in a biblical theme illustrating the punishment of pride. In Ignatian terms the poet-lover’s thought processes are deployed and structured by a three-part dispositio using the device as the imaginary composition of place. It is out of the device’s picture and motto that the poem forms its imaginary composition. Beginning with the illustration entitled ‘Tour Babel,’ a mammoth tower is seen with gradually diminishing stories climbing toward the heavens.4 To represent its enormity, it is made to dwarf two tall pyramidal structures set at its flanks on hills in the background. Had the ‘Tour Babel’ not been in the picture, these monument-like edifices would have dominated the landscape. The picture surrounded by the motto, ‘Contre le ciel nul ne peult,’ precedes the following poem: Vaincre elle sçait hommes par sa valeur, Et par son sens l’oultrageuse Fortune: Et toutesfoys ne peult à mon malheur Remedier, se voyant opportune Pour bienheurer trop plus grand’ infortune, Laissant mon cas suspendre à nonchaloir. Mais si des Cieulx pour me faire douloir, A tous benigne, à moy est inhumaine, De quoy me sert mon obstiné vouloir? Contre le Ciel ne vault deffence humaine.

(D 123)

[She can vanquish men because of her great value, And outrageous Fortune with her intelligence, And still she cannot remedy my misfortune. Although she is suited To cure much greater misfortune, Still she leaves my case neglectfully suspended. But if it is to make me suffer at heaven’s hands That she is benign to all while inhuman to me, What serves my obstinate will? Against heaven human interdiction has no force.]

The lesson of the device is inspired by Genesis 11:1–9, and the last line of the dizain closely resembles Petrarch’s teaching ‘ché ’ncontre’l Ciel

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non val difesa umana’ (R 270, v. 79) [for no human defence avails against heaven]. To visualize the dynamics of meditation, one might say that the IgnatianMauburnian scheme is a vertical deployment of the composition and the three powers of the soul, and that cutting across this structure is Augustinian praxis, which at its core is an agonistic interior debate. First, let us delineate this vertical structure in dizain 123. The device serves as the composition of place and acts through the imaginative memory as a pictorial condensation of the lover’s conundrum. As indicated by the ‘Tour Babel,’ overweening pride or overstepping boundaries will inevitably be punished by heaven. However, in itself the composition/device requires additional penetration by the understanding to make its implications explicit. This is the role of the entendement used in the dizain, which acts to redouble comprehension and penetrate the lover’s moral impasse. Though Délie is all-powerful and can vanquish men and Fortune, she is nevertheless unable to relieve the lover’s suffering: ‘Et toutesfoys ne peult à mon malheur/ Remedier ...’ (vv. 3–4). In courtly love codes ‘Remédier’ suggests that the speaker wants, but has been unable to bend, the beloved’s virtue. Operating as a device, the composition’s significance to this quandary unfolds as the meditation develops. The picture and motto of the ‘Tour Babel’ suggest that the lover’s question is as presumptuous as the Israelites’ tower was insolent. Just as the poet-lover is perplexed, so the reader’s attention is fixed by the step-by-step revelation of the picture’s pertinence. Then comes the clinching movement of the volonté stated in gnomic fashion by the last line: ‘Contre le Ciel ne vault deffence humaine.’ This is the commendatio in which the speaker recognizes that his fate is in the hands of the beloved, and since it bears virtually the same words and warning as the composition, it completes the circle of meditation as difficult resignation. What has been pictured, then masticated, is finally affirmed. Within this vertical deployment of the self, Augustinian dramatic selfanalysis plays out the desire for mastery and self-understanding amid contending beliefs. The usefulness of Augustine for studying Scève is that he models meditation as a dynamic praxis among love, the lover, and the beloved in relation to the divine. In Délie, as in the Confessions, meditation has a performative dimension since, by precipitating a problem for imminent resolution, it sets in motion acts of self-evaluation that may confront or break an impasse and may direct a course of conduct. Through the reconstituting memory, the speaker splits himself in two as metaself and object-self, accuser of Délie and victim of unrequited love, judge of values and jury of accusation.

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In dizain 123 the agon revolves around problems of injustice reconstituted by the lover’s metaself. The first problem is that of power. Délie’s value and intelligence are so great that they can ‘vaincre’ (v. 1) both men and outrageous fortune. Yet, she cannot (‘ne peult,’ v. 3) cure the lover’s ‘malheur’ (v. 3). The second problem concerns the beloved’s goodness. Délie is ‘benigne’ (v. 8) to all save the poet-lover to whom she is ‘inhumaine’ (v. 8). The third problem concerns Délie’s knowledge, for since her ‘sens’ (v. 2, intelligence, reason) can outwit Fortune, how can she fail to understand her poet-lover? The fourth problem redounds to the coherence of the lover’s will. If Délie is both powerful and good but refuses to be so to the poet-lover, then ‘De quoy me sert mon obstiné vouloir?’ (v. 9). Behind these problems is seen a Renaissance reformulation of the paradoxes of evil summarized by Epicurus and assimilated by the JudaeoChristian ethos of a monotheistic Divinity. In this philosophic quaestio there is an attempt to fathom the simultaneous existence of evil and the omnipotence and unlimited goodness of God. If God is all-powerful, then he must be able to prevent evil. If he is all-good, then he must want to prevent evil. But since evil exists, God must not be either all-powerful or all-good.5 The use of the meditative method enables the poet-lover to put under scrutiny and untie the tangled knots of opposing and complicated values that prevent him from winning Délie’s love. One of the ways in which he conflates values (which hinder his spiritual progress) is that he makes the courtly bonds that bind him to the beloved analogous to the relation between justice and God. This breeds contradiction. First, he mixes the Old Testament interdiction against pride with the standards of amour courtois. Within the courtly love framework he laments that the woman leaves ‘mon cas suspendre à nonchaloir’ (v. 6) with the words ‘cas suspendre’ having legal and sexual overtones.6 Since Délie can conquer men and Fortune but cannot ‘Remedier’ (v. 4) his misfortune, the speaker not only questions her power but also her goodness, for she refuses to requite his devotion and is therefore ‘inhumaine’ (v. 8). The value that contradicts courtly love is the Old Testament lesson of divine punishment for pride. However, the rebuff which the lover incurs can also be understood from another perspective by recourse to nominalist notions developed through the debates of medieval scholastics. According to William of Ockham, there are certain acts that God has forbidden through his potentia ordinata whereby the Lord has established a definite moral code. However, through his potentia absoluta God could

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have established another moral order and also, at any time, could have ordered acts that he had actually forbidden. As long as God is first and foremost considered free to exercise his will as he wishes, then he has no obligation to adhere to any existent rule, law, or expectation.7 The poetlover is caught between the anthropomorphic sense of justice dependent on various types of ordained codes or institutional practices such as amour courtois and the more fedeistic meaning of divine justice based on submission to absolute power. We can follow this by reference to the poem. In the sizain the poet-lover takes the offensive. Basing himself on potentia ordinata, he questions why the woman can ‘vaincre’ (v. 1) men and fortune but not remedy his ill. In the last line, he turns defensive as spurned lover and concedes that he cannot withstand the chastisement of the heavens: ‘Contre le Ciel ne vault deffence humaine’ (v. 10). Therefore in the sizain, the poet-lover advocates a theodicy founded on courtly love, but in the quatrain it is the brute force of divine wrath that checks his sexual aggression. It is implied by the poem that, against the absolute power of God (or the gods as reflected in Délie), the poet-lover likens himself to the builders of the ‘Tour Babel,’ which in the mythological register would be the Giants’ revolt against Olympus or even Prometheus’s rebellion for humanity (D 77). The word ‘Babel’ in Hebrew means ‘Gate of God,’8 suggesting the symbolic prohibitions of physical access to Délie and emulation of God. In either case, the poet-lover adumbrates a defiance whose sole ground is the efficacy of force. Straddling biblical wisdom, amour courtois, nominalist theodicy, and pure force, the poet-lover also injects pagan values. First, he pits Diana against Venus. In the first line he alludes to the chaste but fierce goddess by saying ‘Vaincre elle sçait hommes par sa valeur.’ He thereby introduces the feelings of being forced into forbearance by forging the image of Délie as an avenging Diana. Second, while he recoils at the threat of biblical wrath, the speaker has great admiration for Délie as the woman-goddess who can quite simply exercise brute power in overcoming ‘oultrageuse Fortune’ (v. 2). Strictly speaking, pagan Fortune is a completely different metaphysical standard than divine volition in the Judaic or Christian traditions, but the poet-lover craves the efficacy to somehow direct both. Here the text suggests an association with Scève’s publisher’s devise, ‘Adversis duro,’ to the extent that the poet-lover would like to construe his travails as the opportunity to emulate Délie in mastering Fortune.9 This point allows us to see another inflection of values. For certain writers of antiquity such as Pliny the Elder, an antinomy existed between fortune and virtue. However, Renaissance thinkers attempted to synthesize them. For instance, Cartari10

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held that the wise and strong could become the artisans of their fate, using fortune to their best advantage. This is the poet-lover’s goal. A final confrontation between opposing values is whether the poetlover primarily respects Délie’s authority, and ipso facto, that of the divinity, as moral content or brute force. He is engaged in a struggle of two wills, his ‘obstiné vouloir’ (v. 9, meaning ‘passions brulantes,’ D 309, v. 2) and that of heaven mirrored by the device’s motto: ‘Contre le Ciel ne vault deffence humaine’ (v. 10). It would seem that power is his aim. The irony of his meditation is that it guides him to a conclusion rebarbative to his wishes. In the sizain after wrestling with Délie’s prohibitions, it is clear that he wills what the beloved refuses. In the quatrain after questioning the usefulness of his persistence (‘mon obstiné vouloir,’ v. 9), he acknowledges but does not want the very order of things that proclaims God’s indefeasible power. In other words, if he had the force to defend himself against ‘le Ciel’ (v. 10) and possess the woman, he would have done so. It may be concluded that the speaker is more preoccupied with the sanctions of morality, the power of punishment, than with the principles of conduct. He realizes that the law is enforced by fiat, a fact whose keen understanding is diametrically opposed to his will but whose conclusion he recognizes as painfully true. Meditation, in the process of concluding truthfully, widens the gap between cognition and volition. In dizain 123 the relation between the side-by-side placement of relatively autonomous values and their spatial containment may be pictured in terms of mannerist painting. In this type of scene the various planes or clusters of activity are juxtaposed and dissociated rather than united by the continuity of an organic principle. Actions, states, or events remain indirectly related by contrasts, parallel asymmetries, or loose associations.11 In dizain 123 a similar phenomenon may be observed. The lover’s introspection bears the paradox of being framed by disciplined meditation, but its content is obliquely related as a dissociated juxtaposition of values – courtly love, pagan and Christian theodicy, biblical wisdom, classical wisdom (hubris/Diana), and humanist attitudes toward adversity. The tripartite sequence of visual memory, understanding, and will unfolding in the device/dizain provides a meditative space that constantly refers these values to the brute force of divine wrath. For example, memory relates the composition’s ‘Tour Babel’ to divine retribution, understanding ties the lover’s plaint to a powerful Diana who is powerless to cure him, and the will links its own powerlessness to the divine interdiction that thwarts passion. Just as in the image of the ‘Tour Babel’ where the scattering of peoples all over the world is ultimately attributed to divine retribu-

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tion, so in dizain 123 the dissociation and dispersion of values is ultimately tied to the sanctions of Délie’s moral rectitude. Therefore, both the device and the tripartite structure function as spatial magnets which give order to the potentially centrifugal emotions of frustration and anger. Within this structure, Augustinian praxis brings these problems into a controlled clash of opposing values. While the lover appeals to disparate and sometimes contradictory values, meditative rhetoric nonetheless guides him to resign himself to Délie’s pouvoir absolu. The speaker’s particular use of methodical introspection has the effect of humanizing moral reflection. This is true not only because the aspect of the ‘Tour Babel’ that subtends the lesson is brute power, and not only because the poet-lover ultimately submits the mix of values to any expediency that will reap carnal reward, but because, as in dizain 143, the technè of rhetorical pressures themselves check the excesses of desire even as they give rise to their ambitions. It is dangerous to generalize about Délie on the evidence of one poem, since the text uses variation of perspectives many of which are opposites. For that reason a brief inspection of dizain 442 is in order to examine the lover’s treatment of theodicy in which he accords more emphasis to the moral content of force than to the force of content. Like dizain 123, dizain 442 also raises the issue of divine justice and is inspired from Sperone Speroni’s Dialogo D’Amore (DA, 104): Pourroit donc bien (non que je le demande) Un Dieu causer ce vivre tant amer? Tant de travaulx en une erreur si grande, Où nous vivons librement pour aymer? O ce seroit grandement blasphemer Contre les Dieux, pur intellect des Cieulx. Amour si sainct, et non poinct vicieux, Du temps nous poulse à eternité telle, Que de la Terre au Ciel delicieux Nous oste à Mort pour la vie immortelle. [Could a God, then (not that I would Request it) cause this so bitter way of life? So much suffering dissipated in such a great error, Whereas we live freely in order to love? O, that would be great blasphemy Against the Gods, the pure intellect of the Heavens.

(D 442)

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Love, so holy and in no way imperfect, So drives us on from time to time into eternity, That it takes us from Earth to delightful Heaven, And exchanges Death for immortal life.]

The speaker does not directly answer his reticent question about whether a God could cause such a bitter ‘erreur’ (v. 3) as a result of love. Rather, he affirms on the basis of faith that this would be blasphemy (‘blasphemer,’ v. 5), that love impels us (‘nous,’ v. 8) to God (‘Ciel,’ v. 9) bringing us to eternal life (‘vie immortelle,’ v. 10). The split between the question based on the anthropomorphic view that good is rewarded and evil is punished, and the response that one should trust in God even in moments of tragedy, is a reflection mirroring the the Book of Job. In the debate between Job and his ‘comforters,’ both of whom use the anthropomorphic logic of reward and retribution, the latter can only accuse Job of some ostensible iniquity, and Job can only protest his innocence, but not without profoundly questioning the Lord’s justice: ‘Today also my complaint is bitter, his hand is heavy in spite of my groaning,/Oh, that I knew where I might find him,/that I might come even to his seat!/I would lay my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments./I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me./Would he contend with me in the greatness of his power?/No; he would give heed to me’ (23: 2–6) [nunc quoque in amaritudine est sermo meus et manus plagae meae adgravata est super gemitum meum/quis mihi tribuat et cognoscam et inveniam illum et veniam usque ad solium eius/ponam coram eo iudicium et os meum replebo increpationibus/ut sciam verba quae mihi respondeat et intellegam quid loquatur mihi/nolo multa fortitudine contendat mecum nec magnitudinis mole me premat. 23:2–6]. In chapter 38 toward the end of the work, the Lord finally answers Job, but instead of giving him reasons for his suffering, he asserts his almighty power as Creator, thereby overwhelming Job with his grandeur. ‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding’ (38:4) [ubi eras quando ponebam fundamenta terrae indica mihi si habes intelligentiam. 38:4]. Then Job answers, ‘I know that thou canst do all things, and that no purpose of thine can be thwarted ... therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes’ (42:2; 42:6) [scio quia omnia potes et nulla te latet cogitatio ... idcirco ipse me reprehendo et ago paenitentiam in favilla et cinere (42:2; 42:6)]. While dizain 442 is a borrowing from Speroni, it is interesting to note that whereas Scève’s poet-lover supplies no middle term in the argument’s

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movement, naming the cause of evil, Speroni’s interlocuter Molza does. He concludes in Augustinian terms that evil is the result of our own errors and faults: tullia: Deh, può egli essere, che uno iddio sia cagione di tanti errori, e di tanti mali, in quanti noi incorriamo in amare? molza: Gli errori e i mali nascono da noi soli. (DA, 104)

Thus, the meditative dynamics of dizain 442 clearly unfold against well contextualzed and coherent backdrops consisting of biblical wisdom and the philosophic dialogues of Speroni. Though the poet-lover refuses to give an anthropomorphic cause for suffering, he places himself squarely in the Book of Job. Unlike dizain 123, there is more balance between the divine justification of suffering and the brute fact of force where the rationale is clearly an act of enlightened faith. Having elicited the authority of the ‘pur intellect des Cieulx’ (v. 6), the poet-lover suggests two Platonic reasons for his conclusion. From Plotinus there is the notion that Nous, the Intellect, is quite different from reason to the extent that it sees things, not discursively, but ‘all at once and as a whole’ (Blumenthal 1996, 93). This is one explanation why the poet-lover accuses doubters of divine justice of ‘blasphemer’ (v. 5), since they lack the wholeness of vision. The second derives from Ficino, who in virtually equating love and God, cannot by faith see true amor as anything but just and virtuous when pursued honestly: ‘Nam decoris, honestis, divinis affectibus nec nimium nec satis umquam possumus indulgere. Hinc efficitur ut omnis amor honestus sit, et omnis amator iustus. Pulcher enim est omnis atque decorus, et decorum proprie diligit.’12 This second point corresponds to the acts of thanksgiving that the speaker makes in recognizing the Divinity’s active benevolence and love: ‘Amour si sainct, et non poinct vicieux,/Du temps nous poulse à eternité’ (vv. 7–8). The contrast between dizains 123 and 442, as well as that between 143 and 240, show that the poet-lover is exploring a whole range of responses of how inherently human questions about love redound to exploring the divine. The Imprese as Compressions of the Composition and the Three Powers To this point in the chapter it has been shown that the impresa acts as a composition of place in the overall meditative relation between the device and its gloss poem. Two other points relative to meditative structure will

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be developed. First, even though the device functions as a composition for a contiguous dizain, it is also a compact and condensed visualization of the entire three-part meditative scheme. The traditional ladder of meditative ascent is adapted to the expression of dense nodal points of fused experience that the lover parses and analyses on a microcosmic scale. Second, after having explained this homology between the device and the three powers, it will be demonstrated (pages 104–36) that even though a given poem in Délie is not directly preceded by an impresa, it is nevertheless modelled on the tripartite meditative organization foregrounded by the devices. This way of organizing the chapter is predicated on the assumption that after showing that the components of meditation are configured in the impresa, it will more readily be seen that dizains not headed by a device nonetheless employ pictorial procedures and a rhetoric of introspection that are formally meditative. Certain imprese of Délie are structurally analogous to the Ignatian tripartite meditative scheme. From a methodological perspective this point can best be made by recourse to the concept of diagrammatic iconicity. According to C.S. Peirce, an icon is ‘a sign which stands for something merely because it resembles it.’ Icons which ‘represent in relations ... the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts, are diagrams.’13 Thus, as signs of similarity, icons signify not only by images but also through similarity of structural homologies or abstract relations. Examples of this type of iconicity would be maps, algebraic formulas, logical graphs, and the like which function through analogies of parts and rules. When we examine a visual icon like an impresa in relation to meditation, the irony for diagrammatic iconicity is that the abstract relations have to be identified before we can appreciate the more concrete, physical qualities of comparison. In an impresa it is conventional in criticism to consider the picture as the ‘corps’ of the sign and the motto as the ‘âme,’ and together they form the microcosm of a human being. In the second half of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century, emblematic practice became codified. Some impresa theoreticians such as Paolo Giovio and François d’Amboise saw the soul as entirely contained in the motto (Russell, 1985, 41). Others such as Henry Etienne found the soul in the resemblance between the motto and the figure (Russell 1985, 43–4). In either case the relation between the picture and the motto yielded the specific attitude or outlook of a particular individual. Ignatian introspection likewise theorizes meditation as discourse structured like a human being – ‘âme’ and ‘corps.’ In the Spiritual Exercises the directives call for a successive unfold-

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ing of the three powers of the soul – the memory, followed or accompanied by movements of the entendement, and the emotions or volonté. The human body is signified through the application of the senses, especially through the visual composition. In practice these three powers emerge simultaneously, with physical prominence given to the composition. Hence, a device bears in theory the same components as a meditation and also gives relief to the pictorial as a significant spur to concentration and reflection. In the case of Délie this structural homology between the device and the meditation is even stronger considering its allusions to religion and the divinization of the beloved. It must be understood that the meditative method bears a relation to both the poet-lover and the reader. The former uses systematic introspection as an instrument de connaissance, while the latter through response is bound by Délie’s ethics to untie the difficulties of deciphering the device. That is, the reader must find the metaphorical ground joining figure and motto that is veiled by the indirection and ellipticity characteristic of imprese. In this way the work of vertu becomes a shared and mutual endeavour. The reader must bear in mind that behind the compression of the tripartite meditative structure within the device unfold the dynamics of Augustinian practice. The first device in Délie, titled ‘La femme et la Lycorne,’ pictures a wounded unicorn with its head in the lap of a woman seated against a tree trunk with some leafing branches. The motto surrounding the scene reads, ‘Pour le veoir je pers la vie.’ I accept McFarlane’s editorial suggestion that ‘le’ should be corrected to ‘te.’14 In that case the reading of the devise is, ‘Pour te veoir je pers la vie.’ The picture-motto combination creates an illustrated metaphor in which the reader must discover the ground of similarity between the vehicle (body/picture) and the tenor (soul/motto). What does the device signify? In the Middle Ages the core of the unicorn myth was that the fabulous animal, being so strong and ferocious, could be neither caught nor tamed. However, since the unicorn was noted for its attraction to virgins, hunters placed a young maiden in his haunts. When the unicorn saw the maiden, it ran toward her, lay down at her feet, and rested his head in her lap. Unsuspecting and vulnerable, the unicorn was trapped and killed.15 In the device the poet-lover is the speaker of the motto. In effect, the motto motivates those aspects of the legend in the picture that pertain to the lover’s psychological state after having encountered the virtuous beloved. Two important meanings emerge: (1) Given the emphasis on the eyes in the motto, the myth calls up the Petrarchan

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innamoramento in which the lover’s immediate attraction to the beauty and the virtue of the beloved paralyse and enslave him. (2) Also strongly connoted are the Petrarchan death-in-life state or the Neoplatonic death of unrequited love. In order to make the analogy between meditation and impresa explicit, one must note that the picture and motto serve more than one function. The Scevian device is a condensation of the Ignatian tripartite meditative pattern. However, since it is a visual/verbal compression of that pattern, it may be better described as a fusion of both the composition of place and the three powers. If there be any primacy given to sequence or successiveness in reading the impresa, it is the visual element which, because it dominates perception, should be decoded first. Therefore, the discussion for each device here studied will begin with the ‘corps.’ The ‘corps’ of the device is homologous with the composition of place to the degree that it evokes a scene that visualizes, spatializes, and focuses on the subject matter of introspection. It also fulfils the Ignatian directive, ‘I will see myself as ... ,’16 meaning that the meditator will see him/herself as an actor in the composition. The motto itself reinforces this specularity by using the verb ‘veoir,’ as if seeing were living, knowing, and dying: ‘Pour te veoir je pers la vie.’ From the viewpoint of meditative memory the freezing of the scene or its snapshot quality selects and abstracts from the past a repetitive psychological state for self-study. The reflexive, dramatic aspect of imaginative memory is that the je of the motto sees itself as the unicorn in the picture. It fulfils the Ignatian requirement of specularity, of finding images to mirror the interior life that is evident in Ignatius’s directive, ‘To place before the mind’s eye’17 the object of meditation. The role of the entendement in meditation is prescribed by the genre rules of the device which require a deciphering of the relation of similarity between the motto and the picture. In this stage of meditation according to Ignatius, ‘the understanding is likewise to be used in considering the subject matter in greater detail.’18 The core meanings of the motto-picture interaction converging on the Petrarchan innamoramento and the Neoplatonic death of unrequited love have already been pointed out. But the inferences that are triggered by the picture/motto relation are numerous and penetrate into the mix of emotions characteristic of the poet-lover’s experience. The joy, innocence, and youth of the poet-lover are parallel to the purity and strength of the unicorn (Coleman 1981, 8). Also, if one takes the maiden as a symbol of chastity, the impresa thereby fuses the virginity and erotic power of Diana who conquers the lover and ties him in a tangle of sensuality and purity. The leafing trunk supporting the maiden is

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also a condensation of connotations suggesting enduring virtue, wisdom, and joys of the mind.19 Being syncretistic, Scève mingles the sacred and the profane. Therefore, it should not be surprising that suggested throughout the previously mentioned symbols is the Christian allegorization of the myth that makes the unicorn Christ and the maiden Mary, the Virgin Mother (Jung 1968b, 444). The myth is therefore the nodal point of the spirit become flesh as well as the cycle of human and spiritual life and death. The third homology between the meditative structure and the device is the role of the volonté that responds to the composition and the analysis by making affective the images and the reasons of the first two parts. The will’s embracing of spiritual truth is conceived as the strongest bond of love. For Ignatius one important form of this studied affectivity occurs through ‘colloquy’ since direct address to the divine is the most personal and voluntary expression of spiritual union. In the first impresa this affective gesture is found principally but not exclusively in the motto: ‘Pour te veoir, je pers la vie’ (stress mine). However, Scève’s use of the affective dimension of meditation is complicated, and while he does follow Ignatius in evoking the emotions, there is a difference in his attitude toward the will. While Ignatius views his entire meditative exercise as an effective combination of voluntary effort and powerful rhetoric,20 Scève alters this model by evoking how love subjugates the will. He seems even more determined than his master Petrarch to study the effects of power in themselves rather than closely tying power to a moral or religious scheme. Without denying the divine, and indeed, while invoking Délie’s divinity, Scève contextualizes power as the self’s varying degree of control in the face of insuperable force or pain and pleasure. In the first impresa the poetlover recounted how the sight of the beloved toppled his identity and inflicted self-alienation. In acknowledging his new state of death-in-life and submission to Délie’s power, he invokes Mauburnus’s holocaustum. This is not fully a permissio because it is imposed on him by love, but there is a degree of volition in his desire to study the passions and to manoeuver for a favorable outcome. In a related impresa a similar attitude is seen toward the will. The twentysixth device is titled ‘La Lycorne qui se voit.’ A unicorn, upon seeing its reflection in the water, responds with horror, ‘De moy je m’espovante.’ This is a meditative monologue not a colloquy. As suggested by myths from Pulci and Ovid, the lover’s very vision of the beloved is impudence against Diana who transforms the lover into the more passive and docile unicorn (Coleman 1981, 51). Such drastic changes, when seen by the lover through

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the mirror afforded by meditation, result in utter bewilderment and selfestrangement. Again the Scevian impresa both parallels and departs from the Spiritual Exercises. On the one hand, it performs Ignatius’s directive that ‘the will [be] employed in giving expression to the affections.’21 On the other hand, volition is overwrought by the unexpected transformations brought by love but reasserts control through the reconstituting powers of the meditative procedures themselves. A second but different example continues to show that the impresa is a contraction of the Ignatian tripartite structure. Studying the impresa as a meditative instrument de connaissance, one will find another extremely important class of devices identified with ‘antiperistase’ (dizain 293). Its significance is not only that it is a major psychological dilemma for the poet-lover, but also that it acts as an ars memorativa for the reader. Here I will examine the first function. There are at least eight devices in this class (numbers 4, 12, 18, 35, 40, 47, 48, 49) and, as a distinct psychological dilemma they correspond to such dizains as 43, 46, 120, 215, 289, 293, 317, 320, 333, and 352. Typical of this class of devices is impresa 35 titled ‘L’Asne au Molin.’ In the picture is seen a blindfolded donkey walking an endless circle turning the upper stone of a mill. Surrounding the scene is the legend, ‘Fuyant peine travail me suyt.’ Henri Weber defines ‘antiperistase’ as ‘l’opposition de deux contraires dont chacun renforce l’autre par contraste’ (1948, 11). In terms of meditation the composition of place sets ‘before the mind’s eye’ the speaker’s self-perpetuating dilemma that attempting to flee the pain of love only exacerbates his travail. That the poet-lover sees himself in the image is indicated by the ‘me’ in the clause ‘travail me suyt.’ The scene is one of the many in Délie that may be defined as the ‘still-moment topos’ (Steiner 1982, 41). That is, by freezing action at a certain key moment, one can infer what occurs both before and after the suspended moment. The archetypal illustration of this topos is the statue or painting of the Greek discus thrower where all the energy of the action is concentrated at one point in time.22 However, while the intent of the discus thrower is to dramatize the dynamic character of action, Délie’s device plays on its visual intertext by studying the circle as the stasis of mobile immobility. I will return to this point when broaching the affective side of ‘antiperistase.’ The second stage of meditation exercises the intellect. If the ‘soul’ of meditation is considered to be the similarity captured between the motto and the picture, then there are three levels of reflection. The first is to see the relation as the pain caused by an external agent such as the beloved. In

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that case the speaker calculates that love requires nothing less than blind obedience to the point of servility. But the picture-motto relation also reflects the speaker’s awareness of self-inflicted perplexity. This is the notion that fleeing love is just as vexatious and impossible as maintaining love in hope. The final level of intellection is highly self-reflexive. In the very act of meditative analysis the speaker comprehends something self-delusive about self-scrutiny itself. Through the meta-language that meditation affords, he captures the self-deception involved in analysis itself where introspection only multiplies by infinity additional dilemmas. Thus, in the never-ending circle of the donkey the poet-lover sees the vicious circle of obsessional thinking, and in the blindfold worn by the donkey, he takes cognizance of a self-entrapment that he appears unable to halt. The third dimension of meditation is to arouse and express the affections that correspond to the mémoire and entendement. It is bafflement that overcomes the will since the donkey’s countereffort to flee the vicious circle only perpetuates his treadmill movement. In his theory of the circle the architect Palladio considered this geometric figure to represent positive infinity, since it has neither beginning nor end (Wittkower 1971, 23). We have also seen how the still-moment topos in the figure of the Greek discus thrower aims to capture the explosive act of unleashing power. In contrast to these two intertexts Scève’s ‘L’Asne au Molin’ studies the antidynamic stasis of negative infinity where the ineluctable repetition of the animal’s circuit blocks the aim, release, and dynamic discharge of energy. A third example of how an impresa condenses the meditative structure is based on the class of devices illustrating adoration of the beloved. This tone appears in devices 2, 3, and 16 – a tone which is taken up by such dizains as 1, 2, 11, 23, 44, 124, 127, 208, 259, 284, 319, 407, 435, and 449. In Ignatian terms this kind of impresa mirrors meditation in spiritual consolation when ‘the soul is aroused by an interior movement which causes it to be inflamed with love,’23 and it ‘seek[s] nothing but the greatest praise and glory of God our Lord.’24 In Délie one of the best examples of this class is the third device entitled ‘La Lampe et l’Idole.’ Reflecting the Ignatian composición de lugar, it places ‘before the mind’s eye’25 the lover’s meditative act of adoring the beloved. The impresa shows a man standing on a pedestal holding a stick contemplating a large flame blazing from a lamp. Indeed, the very posture of contemplation acts as a self-reflexive sign pointing to the poet-lover’s affirmation of meditation as an instrument of introspection. The stick is neither a caduceus nor a thyrsus, but rather appears to be a staff or rod. The lamp is antique in decor, and considering its climbing flames, is much

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greater in size than the man. The entire scene is surrounded by the legend, ‘Pour te adorer je vis.’ Here the lover sees himself in the picture as the man who is called ‘l’Idole’ which connotes two qualities. First, as Charlotte Melançon has shown, the man’s body is black and abstract, reminiscent of a silhouette. The word ‘Idole’ in the sixteenth century could mean ‘fantôme, apparence vaine, ombre,’26 – a notion that corresponds well with the poetlover’s feelings stated in dizain 376, ‘Tu es le Corps, Dame, et je suis ton umbre’ (v. 1). The second attribute of the man, according to Coleman is that he is ‘living but petrified into an idol or statue’ (Coleman 1981, 11) implying that the man’s adoration is transfixed by the lasting effects of the innamoramento. The flame is Délie, the fire of love, while the lamp is all that conveys love’s ardour and upholds it as an exemplar. The staff and rod have rich iconographical associations because they symbolize travel and quest, much like a pilgrim’s staff.27 They also lend a narrative dimension to the picture depicting the poet-lover’s pursuit of Délie as his life and light. The second component of meditation is to exercise the understanding where the meditator, by dividing the composition into introspective ‘points,’ analyses the figure and draws out its implications. In effect, the device fuses such points in symbols created by the interaction of image and motto. The richest point centres around the staff’s relation to the flaming lamp. Since the ‘Idole’ bears a staff, the scene as a whole suggests that the lover has made a pilgrimage in quest of his eternal flame. The religious atmosphere is heightened by the motto, ‘Pour te adorer je vis,’ which evokes a prayerful tone of worship. Having found the unique source of clarity and strength, the lover’s contemplative gaze seeks identification with and guidance from the source of light. The device absorbs, as it were, related themes located in other parts of Délie. Such epiphanic moments recounted in the third device contrast with a different experience of pilgrimages described elsewhere. In dizain 241 the lover is among ‘Pellerins’ (v. 1) but unlike them, his vows of love remain unheard. In the very next poem the lover is again ‘En ce sainct lieu’ among the ‘Peuple devotieux’ (v. 1), but he considers them more fortunate because his prayers only produce plaints and tears. Thus, the contrasts set in motion by the lover’s staff in the third device produce oscillating experiences of love that are figured narratively as the emotional undulations of a pilgrimage, a quest, or a holy journey. The meditative work of understanding is spurred by metonymy from the word ‘Idole’ to the image of flames burning in the lamp. In effect, this continues the motif of quest but in a different register. The lover in contemplation views himself as an ‘Idole.’ Though this idea is also predicated of Délie in the first dizain of the work, here in the third device it clearly

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symbolizes the lover. When forms of idole appear elsewhere in Délie, they are associated with deception (dizain 3) or with dissolving deception (dizain 297). This is no small matter, since it pertains to epistemological vision. The words idée or idea come from the Greek to see and are often tied to eidolon or visible image. The Platonic tradition distinguished eidos from eidolon by thinking of the former as supersensible reality while the latter was considered its sensible likeness. Thus the very notion of idea is imbricated with physical vision.28 In Délie the pilgrim-lover must somehow follow a visible light that also mirrors the ideal, a goal he achieves in the concluding dizain which retroactively summons the picture of impresa 3: ‘Flamme si saincte en son cler durera/Tousjours luysante en publique apparence’ (vv. 1–2). To attain this clarity the lover had testified in the work’s first poem to a purification of love through the ‘flammes’ of his ‘Epigrammes’ – a quest that is everywhere challenged, such as in dizain 143 where the sensual, corrosive ‘flammes’ ignite the ‘penser’ of higher cognition. Continuing to conceive of the device as prodding meditative work of understanding and intelligence, one sees that the staff of the third impresa suggests a link to dizain 143. This poem concludes dramatically with the image of the brazen serpent that Moses hoisted on a pole, returning to the family of images associated with the staff. In keeping with the logic of dizain 143, the figure of Moses’s staff assimilates to Délie the patriarch’s divine power to punish and heal as well as the authority to sanction true images and to destroy idols.29 Furthermore, while the staff of the device is not a caduceus, it acquires associations with the ‘Serpent eslevé’ of dizain 143 in virtue of its pole-like form. This type of staff formed by a coiled serpent is an apposite composition of place both for poem 143 and for Délie as a whole. Symbolizing the unity of opposites, it projects a direction that must necessarily take twists and turns, a labyrinthine ‘longissima via’ in quest of the inaccessible (Jung 1968b, 6). This is the background that must be borne in mind when examining the device in terms of its third meditative function – that of exercising the will and kindling the emotions in ways that befit the object of introspection. The device’s motto expresses adoration, ‘Pour te adorer je vis,’ since Délie is the lover’s light and life who guides and sustains him. However, there is an element not only of identification but also of emulation30 in the poetlover’s contemplation of the flame. The spirit of Ignatian, or for that matter, of orthodox Christian prayer, is characterized by one’s contingency in subservience to the hierarchy of creator and creature. In the ‘Principal and Foundation’ of the Spiritual Exercises we read: ‘Man is created to praise,

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reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul ... Therefore we must make ourselves indifferent to all created things.’31 Unlike this irreversible contingency in Ignatius, the poet-lover views his dependence as an épreuve to be overcome by imitating that power in the woman that he so much adores. In dizain 313, which develops the image of the flame, the poet-lover states that Délie’s ‘sainct feu’ (v. 3) is transferred to his very heart which in turn inspires lofty desires publicly viewed: Grace, et Vertu en mon coeur enflammerent Si haultz desirs, et si pudiquement, Qu’en un sainct feu ensemble ilz s’allumerent, Pour estre veu de tous publiquement.

(D 313, vv. 1–4)

[Grace and Virtue ignited in my heart Such lofty desires and with such modesty, That together they blazed into a holy fire To be seen by all publicly]

In the Commentary Ficino states that the lover, attracted by resemblance to the beloved, carves out an image of her in his soul: ‘Likeness generates love. Likeness is a certain nature which is the same in several things ... There is also the fact that the lover engraves the figure of the beloved on his own soul.’32 Returning to the device under discussion, one sees that the picture appears to stress this very point of imitating or emulating the woman’s virtue. It does so by metonymically linking the figure’s staff, the symbol of the pilgrim’s quest for virtue, with the intense concentration of his eyes on the rising flame. In this way, the affective component of meditation fuses the picture, memory, and understanding by the resolve to pursue virtue as pilgrimage, quest, and spiritual way suggested by Bonaventure’s De triplici via: purification, understanding, and union. Tensions and Continuities in Scève’s Emblematic Meditation Scheme Just as the impresa can compress the three powers of the soul into a condensed form of meditation, so can its evocative power spur the reader on to an appreciation of other tensions in Délie as a whole. We have just seen in the device titled ‘La Lampe et l’Idole’ a type of emulative adoration proclaimed in the device’s motto, ‘Pour te adorer je vis.’ What precisely is the

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content of that emulation? It would seem that it is Délie’s power to affect and control all above and below her. In dizain 2, her stunning perfection seizes the admiration of the heavens themselves which in turn is imitated by the lover whose soul immediately adores her (‘au premier oeil mon ame l’adora,’ v. 8). The poet-lover registers this effect of power by writing that the heavens depart from self-contemplation to admire Délie’s perfection. Le Naturant par ses haultes Idées Rendit de soy la Nature admirable. Par les vertus de sa vertu guidées S’esvertua en oeuvre esmerveillable. Car de tout bien, voyre es Dieux desirable, Parfeit un corps en sa parfection, Mouvant aux Cielx telle admiration, Qu’ au premier oeil mon ame l’adora, Comme de tous la delectation, Et de moy seul fatale Pandora.

( D 2, vv. 1–8)

[The Creator, with his lofty Ideas, Made Nature miraculous in her own right, With the guided virtues of His virtue He undertook a marvellous work. For from every good truly desirable to the Gods She created a perfect body, Exciting such admiration in the Heavens That at first sight my soul adored it As everyone’s delight, But for me alone fatal Pandora.]

Is this the idolatry of power? The poet-lover provides at least as many reasons for denying this as for accepting it. If he writes that the creator is moved by his own creatures to admire his work, is this idolatry? Certainly the hyperbole that the very heavens were moved to admiration would suggest not only that Délie has in some sense power over God but also, that the poet-lover himself desires similar efficacy. Yet, such statements are not necessarily indicative of idolatry. In Genesis, the narrator does not exaggerate the power of the created or its creatures by having the creator marvel at his own handiwork. Rather, God’s very creation brings him satisfaction and delight. After God made ‘the beasts of the earth’ the narrator

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says, ‘And God saw that it was good’ [et vidit Deus quod esset bonum, 1:24]. Also, after making ‘man in our image,’ the narrator in Genesis comments, ‘And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good’ [viditique Deus cunta quae fecit et erant valde bona, 1:31]. When in Book XIII of the Confessions Augustine performs an exegesis of such passages, he views God’s turning toward his own creation and pronouncing it ‘good’ as the creator’s appreciation for the wholeness of beauty. In this sense, creation has a reflexive effect on the creator: ‘Scripture tells us seven times that you saw that what you had made was good, and when you looked for the eighth time and saw the whole of your creation, we are told that you found it not only good but very good, for you saw all at once as one whole. Each separate work was good, but when they were all seen as one, they were not merely good; they were very good’ (XIII:28).33 Thus, in dizain 2 the heavens’ admiration for Délie provoked by her perfection is not necessarily an indication of the poet-lover’s idolatry of power. Délie is the idea that the lesser heavens reflect and adore. However, it would be prudent to admit that the poet-lover’s admiration of the woman’s power to turn the eyes of the very heavens is more of a temptation, especially since, in stunning fashion, as if to check himself, he recoils at the fact that God’s admirable prodigy is really his ‘seule fatale Pandora’ (v. 10). The lover’s tendency to highlight his emulation of the woman’s power through his own adoration of her efficacy is seen in other device/dizain complexes. In epigram15 the beloved’s virtue will ‘esbranler’ (v. 4) the world to moral improvement and subdue Leviathan (‘ce grand Monstre abatu,’ v. 7) to worship at her feet: ‘T’adorera soubz tes piedz combatu’ (v. 9). In a similar register the speaker in dizain 182 reasons by analogy that Délie’s virtues, like Medusa’s capacity to petrify those who look on her, will submit the world to her power: ‘Il fauldra donc, que soubz le tien povoir/Ce Monde voyse en admiration’ (vv. 9–10). Words that connote combat, physical power, and overwhelming control over the cosmos figure strongly in dizain 124. Délie’s rays of pure gold ‘de ce Monde adorez’ not only make Apollo cower behind clouds, but vanquish the snow from the heights, just as day blots out the clear night: ‘Mais ton tainct frais vainct la neige des cieulx,/Comme le jour la clere nuict efface’ (vv. 9–10). Returning to the third device, one can now see that its affective meditative object is an emulative adoration of Délie’s efficacy. If it is through his role as lover that the speaker aspires to this power, then it is through his role as poet that the speaker realizes this emulation. This he accomplishes by becoming the

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living expression of the beloved’s force, by the capacity of his Orphic lyre to lift the woman from oblivion and forever sustain her memory: ‘mon Orphée haultement anobly,/Maulgré la Mort, tire son Euridice/Hors des Enfers de l’eternel obly’ (D 445, vv. 8–10). From a historical perspective, Scève’s devices underscore the humanist conviction that there is continuity between profane and sacred love, a tradition that goes back at least to Plato and Plotinus. In spite of the tensions between the two types of love, and they are great in Scève, the lesson of Délie is that awareness of the sacred is a natural consequence of grappling with the challenges to the cardinal virtues. This is a teaching that extends well into the seventeenth century, and it can be seen in the ease with which such writers as Vaenius could make so many emblematic parallels between the erotic love of his Amorum emblemata (1608) and his subsequent religious work, the Amoris divini emblemata (1615). As Alison Saunders points out, ‘In, for example, Invia amanti nulla est via, Anima is depicted rowing towards Amor divinus, using her quiver as a raft and her bow as an oar, in precisely the way that Cupid had been shown rowing towards the lady in the similarly entitled erotic love emblem, Via nulla est invia amori’ (2000, 185–6). In the Amoris divini, Vaenius emphasizes that the goal of this dangerous passage is ‘Dieu,’ yet the means and method are virtually the same as in the Amorum emblemata. The link between Scève and Vaenius in regard to the emblematic treatment of profane and sacred love can be made more explicit by their common treatment of the heliotrope.34 The sixteenth device of Délie entitled ‘La Cycorée’ bears the motto, ‘En tous lieux je te suis.’ The connection between the motto and pictura involves Ovid’s story of Clytie, reworked by Speroni and Ruscelli among many others,35 concerning the nymph spurned by Apollo. In spite of the sun god’s cruel rejection, Clytie faithfully gazed on his daily journey while pining away. Perpetually watching the sun, she grew roots and was changed into a heliotrope, teaching the lesson of steadfast faithfulness to one’s source of nourishment and existence. As Paulette Choné has shown, Scève’s device depicts soin or solicitude, since the flower, bending right to follow the course of the sun, implores union with its source of life and light. Choné aptly entitles her article ‘La Prière de l’héliotrope,’36 and, as I see it, this is a perfect way to express that the divine emerges through the human. In a similar fashion Vaenius’s Amoris divini shows an emblem titled ‘Superna respicit.’ In the foreground, Amor divinus facing the reader is sitting beside his beloved on the side of an elevated path with his right arm around her waist, while Anima’s head is turned around captivated by the bursting light of the sun behind and above her. At the same time, the

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left index finger of Amor divinus is pointing to the sunflower which is bending backwards toward the sun. The symbolism of this scene is that there is a ladder of aspiration where, just as nature instinctively follows the sun, so the lover feels urged to pursue the beloved, and the couple to ascend by love the road to the divine. In addition to solicitude, the verb respicere, meaning ‘to look back’ and ‘to look behind,’ implies the deep need for an almost instinctive contemplation of those things upon which we depend.37 In the ‘prayer of the sunflower,’ the two authors paint a perfect humanist depiction of religious aspiration compressed in emblematic microcosm showing the continuity of profane and sacred love. Both Scève and Vaenius emblematically capture an important lesson about the nature of religious contemplation. As indicated by the bending of the sunflower toward the sun, contemplation is not a totally passive enjoyment of intellectual pleasure. On the contrary, as in Plotinus, it is an active creator of self-realization that strives to enhance the soul’s powers. In III. 8. 8 of the Enneads, the author teaches: ‘But, as contemplation ascends from nature to soul, and soul to the intellect, and the contemplations become always more intimate, and united to the contemplators, and in the soul of the good and wise man the objects known tend to become identical with the knowing subject, since they are pressing on towards intellect, it is clear that in intellect both are one.’ The same can be said of Scève’s and Vaenius’s depictions of contemplation, whose emblematic ethos is actively to pursue and enhance the spiritual life by devoted responsiveness to the source of creation. It is a climb up many stages implying neither quietism nor paralysing fixation. While it is true that some degree of passivity is required for the patient and well focused gathering of self, the greater requirement is incessant responsiveness to the creator that internalizes and cultivates gifts (grades) of being. This is well captured by the motto of Scève’s persona: ‘En tous lieux je te suis.’ These examples show the capacity of emblematics to mirror the most complex emotions and tensions of the meditative process. That Scève’s humanist devices theoretically incorporate the principal components of religious meditation is borne out not only by the first French book of sacred emblematics, Emblesmes, ou devises chrestiennes by Georgette de Montenay, but also by the immense use that the Jesuits and other religious orders will make of the impresa and the emblème.38 As indicated by the enormous project of Paolo Aresi’s Imprese Sacre, con triplicati discorsi illustrate ed arricchite (1613 and 1615), the concetto of a device could, through the infinitely small space of visual poetry, mirror the infinite grandeur of the Divine Word. One of the most influential sacred em-

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blem books of the Counter-Reformation was the 1624 work Pia Desideria by Hermann Hugo. By its use of preludes, considerations, and emotions, it was highly effective in orienting the soul’s three powers to the central theological activities of penitence, sanctification, and love of the divine.39 Perhaps the most conspicuous collection of sacred emblems and devices will be contained in the Imago primi saeculi produced by the Jesuits of the Flemish-Belgian province in 1640 intended to display the victories of Ignatius and the glory of God. The German Jesuit Jacob Masen will use the term ‘Iconomystica’ in 1649 to refer to the science of pictures, especially emblems and devices that could profitably teach religious lessons (Praz 1964, 173). In 1654 Vincenzo Ricci will publish the Sacre Imprese devoted to meditation and preaching on the saints, and with similar objectives, Casmirus Füesslin will offer his Theatrum Gloriae Sanctorum in 1696.40 From a historical perspective it is clear that well before the iconographical innovations of seventeenth-century religious institutions, Scève foresaw the potential of the humanist impresa to be transformed into a captivating method of spiritual introspection. However, in Délie his far greater concern was to forge an emblematic style that utilized the meditative tradition in order to hallow and ennoble the infinite promise of the human capacities. Meditation on Nature Having seen that the devices are a compact condensation of the threefold meditative structure, the reader will now more readily appreciate that individual dizains not directly preceded by an impresa are nevertheless modelled on its meditative organization. Scève accomplishes this by integrating the formal meditative scheme into the verbal emblem containing both Ignatian and Augustinian dimensions. Specifically, these verbal pictures are the setting sun (dizain 175), the Grim Reaper (dizain 71), and Blind Cupid (dizain 136). Like the devices that immediately precede a meditative dizain, these pictorial images add an emblematic dimension to methodical reflection. They function in ways similar to the poetic structures analysed in chapter 1 which, though not literally imprese, are nevertheless modelled on emblematic poetics. That is, each is a detachable unit constituting a verbal picture that individualizes a moral lesson expressed in paroemic discourse. However, while in the first chapter I emphasized the study of emblematic discourse, here I will continue to tease out the dynamics of meditation and the values that they reveal in Délie. Dizain 175 makes a good point of reference. It shows how Scève ful-

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filled the pictorial role of meditation by positioning the visual structure in the opening lines of the poem. It also points out that the author uses methodical introspection to provoke wonder concerning the spectrum of cosmological phenomena from moral viewpoints that are not exclusively supernatural, but that nevertheless provoke questions about transience and transcendence: Voy le jour cler ruyner en tenebres, Où son bienfaict sa clarté perpetue: Joyeulx effectz finissent en funebres, Soit que plaisir contre ennuy s’esvertue. Toute hautesse est soubdain abatue, De noz deduitz tant foible est le donneur. Et se crestantz les arbres, leur honneur, Legere gloire, en fin en terre tumbe, Où ton hault bien aura seul ce bon heur De verdoyer sur ta fameuse tombe.

(D 175)

[See the bright day spoil into darkness, Whereas its light preserves its benefit; Joyous deeds end with a dirge Though pleasure do its utmost against trouble. All greatness is abruptly brought down, So feeble is the giver of our pleasures. And though the trees grow tall and green with leaves, their honour, Insignificant glory, finally falls to earth, Whereas your lofty good alone will have the fortune To remain eternally verdant on your famous tomb.]

The principal meditative transformation in this poem is that Scève humanizes methodical reflection by replacing religious symbolism with moral symbolism. The contemplation of nature, of day and night, is now the framework for this moral evaluation of life and death, grandeur and fall, permanence and change, transience and immortality. This dizain qualifies as a meditative poem since it inspires systematic reflection on the meaning of existence and the animating principle of the cosmos. In this poem it is the primordial forces of nature and not God (in the orthodox Christian sense) that produce the motions, colours, and rhythms of life. Upon additional analysis, the reader will discover another

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cause that is neutrally called ‘le donneur’ (v. 6) who/which, though weak, brings pleasure. This ‘donneur’ of nature replaces associated concepts in medieval spirituality. For instance, in his Lettre d’or the twelfth century, Benedictine-turned-Cistercian Guillaume De Saint-Thierry writes that uplifting thoughts concerning the contemplation of charity are a gift (don) of the Holy Spirit, not the self-sufficient power of humanity: ‘Toutefois, cette manière de penser à propos de Dieu ne dépend pas du vouloir du penseur, mais du bon plaisir du donateur: pour parler clair, elle se produit quand l’Esprit Saint, qui souffle où il veut, quand il veut, comme il veut et pour qui il veut, envoie son souffle dans ce sens’41 (stress mine). Returning to dizain 175, we notice that, with the mention of ‘soudain’ (v. 5), there is the imposition of blind fate, which topples the height of human and natural activities. Finally, in the last two verses we see a dramatic and positive reversal. After lamenting the vicissitudes of nature, pleasure, and glory, especially grieving their fall, the poet-lover moves to praise Délie, precisely because she is the one exception that transcends the evanescence of nature, society, and ‘le donneur’ (v. 6). This poem is meditative not only because of its pensive focus on metaphysical and moral issues, but also because of its expression of these beliefs as a methodical progression of vision, thought, and emotion. Just as the impresa simultaneously incorporates the Ignatian meditative structure, so this dizain merges composition of place, intellection, and affectivity. In an overview of this meditative structure we see that the first two lines of the poem, accentuated by a colon, function as the composition of place. By the imperative ‘voy’ (v. 1) the poet-lover directs both Délie and the reader to observe and to contemplate a scene of nature, the sunset. It is a call to observe because the speaker enjoins us to study the empirical world of nature, and a call to contemplate because he invites us to behold the moral significance of its laws.42 Given this relation between nature and its ethical import, the composition signals that it is an allegory requiring the transposition of the character and events of nature to the ethical domain of human life. Consequently, there is an intellectual demand to see through natural phenomena in order to grasp their moral symbolism. In this poem sunset is the natural symbol and the meditative matrix of universal decline. The work of the intellect combines with the picture to forge a triple rhetoric of consideratio, attentio, and explanatio. These are Mauburnus’s terms for three acts that may be summarized as (1) penetration and interpretation, (2) prolonged consideration by fastening, fixing, and holding attention to ‘drive home’ the idea, and (3) illustration of the subject and its qualities through figures, comparisons, and prophetic vision. Ac-

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companying this intellectual work is the predominant affective response (quaerela) where in plaintive fashion, the heart deplores the languishing devolution of nature. However, toward the end of the poetic meditation a striking emotional turnabout takes place, the confidentia, in which Délie is proclaimed as the sole force to persist beyond cosmic transience. It will be necessary to look at these meditative components more closely and then, to consider the problems they raise. To picture, to hold before the mind, to see oneself in the cosmic drama – these are the roles carried out by the composition of place opening the poem. It is the pictorial dimension that accomplishes the work of attentio. Here the composition exploits one of Scève’s stylistic strengths, the use of chiaroscuro which operates as the principal application of the senses.43 This clair-obscur is the painterly equivalent of the mixed effects of sunset which moves the intellect to tie nature to moral allegory. Physically, the light spoils into darkness, and though its gradual disappearance perpetuates glow and shimmer, it is finally eclipsed by night. Similarly, the ekphrasis44 of sunset is interwoven with words having a moral charge. In the first two lines the setting sun is envisaged as an inherent despoiling and fading (‘ruyner,’ v. 1) of ‘le jour cler’ (v. 1), rather than a dualistic combat of supernatural powers such as God and Satan. The deep darkness of ‘tenebres’ (v. 1) thickens its obscurity over twilight in spite of day’s doomed tendency to prolong its ‘bienfaict’ (v. 2). The vertical imagery maintains the upward and downward gaze of Augustinian introspection but replaces Neoplatonism with naturalism. Day’s dimming light is perpetuated (‘perpetue,’ v. 2) by its innate momentum rather than by Divine Providence. In the next two lines the degradation from light to darkness and from good to evil is more explicitly transferred to the human level where the reader/meditator subtly becomes a participant in a view of the world as a fall. Again we see the Augustinian meditative trait, the dramatization of a moral agon. As if ethically self-determined, pleasure (‘plaisir,’ v. 4) perseveres to its utmost (‘s’esvertue,’ v. 4) against ‘ennuy’ (v. 4) and the approaching shadows of death. Unlike Augustine’s attitude toward pleasure, here pleasure is a valorized vital force that acts for itself as its own end. The alliterative aphorism of the third verse – ‘Joyeulx effectz finissent en funebres’ – has the lugubrious intimation of tragedy for the struggle brings no permanent reversal, redemption, or resurrection from the dead. If the quatrain constitutes the composition of place, then the opening line of the sizain serves to gloss the picture with the allegorical significance of the scene: ‘Toute hautesse est soubdain abatue.’ It therefore punctuates the intellectual dimension of meditation. In fact, the relation between

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the visual figure of sunset and the moral gloss is closely analogous to emblematic discourse where a pictorial illustration is clinched by a gnomic comment. Without suggesting that Scève was a scrupulous adherent of emblematic rules and theoretical prescriptions, we nevertheless notice that dizain 175 shows the continuity of emblematic writing in Délie from the devices proper to poems that are not directly preceded by an impresa. It is instructive to view the connection between the chiaroscuro of sunset and its didactic comment as a device used in the service of meditation. As already pointed out, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theoreticians see the impresa as a ‘Metaphore de proportion’ whose ‘Corps’ (the picture) and ‘Ame’ (the motto) reciprocally interpret and reveal a concept that operates as the ground of the metaphor (Russell 1985, 39–46). In terms of meditation the three powers are merged throughout the poem, but there is nonetheless a rhetorical emphasis given to each of them in relation to the components of the impresa. Thus, the sunset is not only the ‘corps’ of the device but also the composition of place. In turn, the gnomic fifth line is not only the ‘âme’ of the device but also the trigger of meditative intellectual activity. How? In interaction with the composition it reinforces or overdetermines the triple Mauburnian procedure of attentio, consideratio, and explanatio. Functioning as the motto/âme of a device and as the meditative spur to understanding, verse 5 emblematizes sunset to deliver a philosophical message: ‘Toute hautesse est soubdain abatue.’ The lesson is that there is an inevitable and irreversible destruction of people and things at their peak of maturity. It is here that consideratio penetrates the significance of sunset. In addition, the word ‘soubdain’ demonstrates the prophetic insight of the motto. In spite of the sunset’s predictable course, each day auguring decline and death, it is nonetheless surprising or shocking when at full bloom someone or something is struck down. Also, the word ‘hautesse’ is a fitting component for a didactic motto since it broadens the scope of generality to include all that is implied in the composition of a sunset – both things and people, nature and society, active and passive pleasures. The noun ‘hautesse’ sensitizes the reader to the poet-lover’s ethos. Though the word may at first sight suggest either pagan hubris or Christian pride (the ‘Tour Babel’), it is not pejorative,45 for the ‘greatness’ that it names is an inevitable result of natural order and not divine punishment for violating an interdiction. In considering the role of intelligence in meditation, one can better appreciate one of Scève’s contributions to the poetics of meditation. His metaphysics of vision aims to capture the character or law of a process.

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Negatively expressed, Scève undertakes not to seize movement per se, nor structure per se, but rather the regularity in a process or the process of a regularity.46 In this poem, as in many others, it is a transitional phenomenon that is studied (sunset with its philosophical implications), and it is essayed by emblematization. As Simonides of Ceos might say, the act of emblematizing creates a ‘speaking picture’47 that sets before the reader/ viewer both the simultaneity of space and the successiveness of temporality. As already stated, certain Mauburnian meditative procedures are interwoven with emblematization precisely to grasp the in-between of process and structure. For example, attentio (holding the object in place) and consideratio (penetrating its significance) are fused in the infinitive ‘ruyner’ (v. 1) which, between a noun and a verb, apprehends sunset as an inherent dispossession and depredation of ‘le jour cler’ (v. 1). Scevian emblematization freezes and characterizes process by seeking some regularity in becoming. Thus, ‘ruyner’ (v. 1) – this degradation and destitution of being – is modified by ‘en tenebres’ (v. 1) and ‘en funebres’ (v. 3), and through ‘en’ suggests both the act of transformation and the state that characterizes this change. At the same time this visual component of the device performs the explanatio, which gives colour to reflection and provides prophetic vision to change. Prophecy here means not only seeing the future, but also seeing behind appearances. Given the stately rhythm of the composition of place, ‘tenebres’ (v. 1) and ‘funebres’ (v. 3) imply that nature itself, not formal religious ritual, is conducting its own obsequies through the declining movement of sunset. In cosmic procession it undergoes its own implacable mourning. Emblematization in Délie is an instrument of thought as much as a figure of speech in aesthetic expression. As in the work as a whole, it pervades this dizain. The fifth line is pivotal because, while serving as a motto to what precedes it (the setting sun), it also functions as a motto for what follows: ‘Et se crestantz les arbres, leur honneur,/Legere gloire, en fin en terre tumbe’ (vv. 7–8). The dirge of decline now refers to a new composition of place, this time the season of autumn, where the leaves that had just flowered in summer are now tumbling from the trees as a metaphor of humanity’s fallen glory. This second ekphrasis is a symbol of sic transit gloria mundi. In terms of intertextuality, it is a variation of emblematic practice where the allegorical lesson precedes the visual description. An example of this is found in Le Fevre’s 1536 French translation of Alciato’s emblem ‘In avaros’ where the moral lesson is made to introduce the figure of a mule laden with riches (Saunders 1988, 146). In a similar fashion Corrozet’s 1544 Hecatomgraphie makes the title of the emblem provide the moral of its

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subsequent picture whose wisdom is further explained in the verse commentary after the scene.48 Returning to dizain 175, we see that, relative to the opening of the poem, the moral of line 5 points backwards, and relative to the figure of falling leaves, it points forwards. Being both retrospective and proleptic with respect to its visual referents, it fulfils three meditative roles bearing on attentio and consideratio. First, it enhances attentio by distending memory, as Augustine would say, in order to grasp the world as a whole through the condensation and concentration afforded by the contiguous scenes of sunset and autumn. From the viewpoint of consideratio, its dual scope of reference widens the range of forces affected by the process of decline to include universally not only nature and pleasure, but also human endeavour, glory, and the feeble ‘donneur’ (v. 6). Finally, it bears witness again to the poet-lover’s use of emblematization as a meditative quest to examine the regularities of becoming. This third function, because it is central to Délie, deserves separate attention. Scève is the philosopher of the transitional. This is true in two senses. First, as I have already noted, he studies phenomena as a species of what is regular in process. Second, he also examines the contrast between two contiguous states. In verses 7–8, the present participle ‘se crestantz’ functions in a similar way as ‘ruyner’ (v. 1) in that both stress the objectification of nature as a moral allegory. The poet-meditator endeavours to find generality in transformation both at the physical and moral level. Thus, ‘se crestantz’ (v. 7, cresting) is the state of an action as well as the action of a state. Its present participle indicates both the state (the summit or highest or best of its kind), and the verb (the process of fully maturing and achieving the height of efficacy). Yet, the cresting trees are but the prelude and the transition to their fall. (This is the course both of the physical world and of the social world that here pursue not sanctity but pleasure and public acclaim.) The three nouns in apposition to ‘se crestantz’ (‘les arbres, leur honneur,/Legere gloire,’ vv. 7–8), though substantives, are marked by syntax as a process. Through the rhetoric of an ascending gradatio, they signal completion and accomplishment. At the same time their high point is their incipient decline, a falling gradation, as suggested by the seventh verse’s termination with ‘honneur’ as well as by the eighth line’s beginning with ‘Legere,’ showing the fragility of glory. The reader sees the leaves between state and process in the transition between the turn of their height and of their falling to the ground: ‘en fin en terre tumbe’ (v. 8). This mournful, elegiac ruminatio appears to conclude the moral allegory. In the absence of God or the gods, it is this falling glory that presides at the return of all things to the earth. The lesson is that there is a natural tendency in the physical and human world to perish.

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The funeral song of universal degradation and decline does not, however, terminate the meditation. In dialectical fashion the reader meets the third stage of Ignatian procedure when, in the final two lines, there springs the confidentia celebrating that Délie’s virtue (‘hault bien,’ v. 9) will be the sole exception to nature’s course. In terms of meditative procedure the Augustinian practice arises whereby an interior problem contracted and dramatized leads to an expansive feeling of liberation: Délie’s virtue will ‘verdoyer sur [sa] fameuse tombe’ (v. 10). Just as the speaker breaks free of allegory into symbol, so Délie’s moral force, energy, and power will prevail forever over the transience of nature. The movement from allegory to symbol corresponds to the change from what Ignatius calls ‘desolation’ to ‘spiritual consolation.’ The former is ‘darkness of the soul, turmoil of the mind, inclination to low and earthly things’ while the latter signifies ‘any interior joy’ of the soul.49 In the last two lines of the meditation the poet-lover moves to ‘consolation,’ but the last line is a complex nexus of emotions. First, from the viewpoint of transcendence the ‘tombe’ (v. 10) indicates that Délie will one day die, but the perpetual greening of her tomb predicts the lasting effect of her virtue. Second, strictly speaking, it is not the poet-lover who overcomes death but Délie. In the entire poem, there are two predominant tenses. First, there is the iterative present of nature’s course that the speaker inhabits ipso facto. The other is the future tense (‘ton hault bien aura seul ce bon heur,’ v. 9) that is reserved only for the beloved. Thus, the speaker remains imprisoned by the first and excluded by the second. Yet, in the last two lines he transforms himself into a prophet whose role and vision enable him, while moving in time, to stand above its depredations. However triumphant may appear the meditative lesson concluding the poem, the visual image of life growing ever green on a famous tomb submerges rather than resolves problems. From a theoretical perspective the ideal outcome of meditative effort should be a degree of mastery, unity, and harmony with respect to the self, the beloved, and the world. Yet, in dizain 175, introspection strikes up ambivalence between self-sufficiency and contingency. It is through his own agency that the poet-lover confers upon himself the authority of prophet, an act which implies great efficacy – to predict Délie’s perdurance in time, to implicate himself in this projection, and thereby to overcome the lesson of universal decline. Yet, in spite of his prophetic power, he nevertheless straddles a precarious middle position between witness of the world that perishes and aspirant to Délie’s power and endurance. In like fashion the woman also occupies an ambivalent ground between autonomy and dependence. On the one hand, her ‘hault bien’ (v. 9) ensures that she will forever flourish through passing

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time. Yet, her temporal persistence is contingent on the world’s continued admiration of her virtue displayed on her ‘fameuse tombe’ (v. 10). Délie may be superior to the world, but her continued presence depends on renown. Finally, another tension is seen in the poet-lover when one assesses his prophetic vision in relation to the world as a whole. In a certain sense a picture of disproportion and dissociation emerges. Once the force of the poem’s final line hits home, the world appears secondary to Délie’s exceptionalism. So high on a pedestal does the poet-lover place individuality, that the world’s most prominent function is to join him in the encomium of only a single and singular being – Délie. For Augustine, it is to make use an end in itself.50 Such a perspective causes the reader to see that the subjectivity of the poet-lover’s introspection aggrandizes her status compared to that of the world, and his status as prophet of her destiny. This is true even though in this poem he neither escapes nature’s transience nor gains the woman’s power. Even in the swelling emotion of prophecy he stands mid-way between human perdition and pursuit of Délie’s virtue. Thus, in dizain 175 the poet-lover begins reflection as a moral meditation on universal decline and ends on a wish for self-sufficiency. The poet-lover as prophet, though imprisoned by the natural cycle and incommensurate with Délie’s virtue, regains indirect power by foretelling that the beloved’s ever-green renown will negate the ashes of her tomb. This conclusion mirrors the climax of Augustine’s meditation in Book X to the extent that systematic reflection culminates in prophetic statements, praise of the beloved, and hope in a saving principle. Yet, it turns this structure to humanist ends. Just as prayerful language hallows the human in dizain 240, so in dizain 175 do we see a mirror reversal where the natural processes secularize the spiritual. These two poems are mutually significant because they reciprocally situate Délie’s values between the secular and the divine. The green of Délie’s ‘fameuse tombe’ (v. 10) recalling the ‘verdoyante escorce’ (v. 9) of dizain 407, will be a constant protection and fertile ground of perpetually new life (Staub 1967, 59). In addition, there is a second prediction where the prophet/moralist foresees his own everlasting persistence. The colour green redounds to the speaker himself in his identification with the poetic laurel of Petrarch, his ‘Tuscan Apollo’ whose old age will be forever green to all eternity: ‘ce Thuscan Apollo sa jeunesse/Si bien forma, qu’à jamais sa vieillesse/Verdoyer à toute eternité’ (D 417, vv. 6–8). As in dizain 175 the poet-lover uses a symbol from nature (‘Verdoyer,’ v. 10) to predict the triumph over nature (the process of aging), thereby finding an equivalent in the natural world that would parallel the eternity of the divinity. Both predictions eschew transcendent reli-

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gious expression from either Judaeo-Christian or pagan religious sources. There is no hint either of the biblical prophets, the Orphic seers, or the Latin vates.51 The negation of limitations is expressed on a human scale by such words as ‘fameuse’ (v. 10) and ‘verdoyer’ (v. 10) which, substituting for sacramental ritual, convert physical death into literary life. In textual terms these prophecies prefigure the concluding poem of Délie. Only in this dizain does the travail of poet and lover merge (in Petrarchan terms) with the verdant immortality of the beloved: ‘Nostre Genevre ainsi doncques vivra/Non offensé d’aulcun mortel Letharge’ (vv. 9–10).52 If Scevian introspection is written through the intertext of religious meditation, then in this dizain poetry inspired by the beloved replaces prayer inspired by the Almighty. But what are the tangible artistic and aesthetic effects by which in praising the beloved the lover-poet as prophet regains power? Through a process of reverse emblematics his poetic vision inverts nothing less than the picture of universal, human transience. In her article ‘Petrarchan Peregrinations in Scève’s Délie’ JoAnn DellaNeva perceptively relates the last image of Délie’s ever-greening tomb to Scève’s reputed discovery of Laura’s tomb in Avignon in 1533.53 In 1545 Jean de Tournes published an Italian edition of Petrarch’s poetry which he dedicated to Scève, and in his preface, he gave a report of the circumstances of the French’s author’s find in the chapel of Ste Croix located in the convent of St Francis. Regardless of the veracity of De Tournes’s account, the putative archaeological treasure drew enthusiastic responses from Italian and French literati who made pilgrimages to Avignon and who were inspired to compose their own epitaphs. The king himself, Francis I, visited the site and was moved to participate in this solemn, cultural ritual by composing his own epitaph. In the light of these events, Délie’s perpetually flourishing tomb concluding dizain 175 is rich in symbolism. From a meditative perspective, it allows Scève’s persona to suggest various acts of rebirth and regeneration. Not only is Maurice the the successor to Francesco, drawing new ‘French’ life from the Italian’s celebrated posterity, but he is also able to associate himself with the ‘miracle’ of resurrecting Laura and Délie from the dead according to his own mythic imaginaire. Given the macabre greening of Délie’s tomb he could perpetuate life through death, where like so many other meditations, eros emerges from thanatos. It is precisely through the aesthetic effects of the poet-lover’s poetic vision that an artistic act brings spiritual consolation to the waning of time and glory. The sunset and the falling foliage of the dizain’s first eight lines emblematically allegorize the metaphysical sensation of universal decline.

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This is followed by the stunning contrast in the last two lines that pictorially extol the sole exception to the world that perishes – Délie’s verdant persistence beyond the grave. Though the fading of sunset and the ever-green continuity of Délie mark radically different psychological and philosophical worlds, the pictorial aesthetic of the final two lines depends entirely on the contrasting emblematic description of the first eight lines. In a reverse but similar manner, even though the poem owes its success precisely to the difference between the sunset and Délie, the qualities of the woman’s preexcellence can only be imagined by a second, retroactive reading of the poem. At that point, the reader is asked to imagine and develop the beloved’s preeminent durability by systematically transforming the negativity of the sunset in the first stanza into the verdant growth in the conclusion. This retroactive reading accomplishes an act of consolation and confidence in the poetic sphere that occurs in the properly religious domain. In this second reading virtually every word in the last two lines inverts the original matrix54 of desolation in the first stanza. This is accomplished by the perpetual action of ‘verdoyer’ (v. 10) which reverses the somber colours of the sunset and by the ascending imagery of ‘hault bien’ (v. 9) which turns falling into rising. Instead of the moral of sic transit gloria mundi applying to the ‘Legere gloire’ (v. 8) the reader sees in Délie the glory and the honour of virtue. In place of the morose sunset obscuring the ‘bienfaict’ (v. 2) of the clear day, the woman is seen as the rising sun of ‘Joyeux effectz’ (v. 3). Rather than the iterative present of dissipating pleasure (v. 5), the reader witnesses the future (‘aura,’ v. 9) of ever-growing fame (v. 10). Délie is also an exception to blind fate that undercuts greatness (v. 5), for her perpetual force is guaranteed by ‘bon heur’ (v. 9). The shadows of dusk, the brown of autumn, and the black of night and death are counteracted by the constant activity of ‘verdoyer’ (v. 10). Replacing the impersonal and anonymous scene of degradation is the personal vision of the lover-prophet witnessing the ascension of ‘ton hault bien’ (v. 9). While the speaker cannot change the implacable metaphysics of universal decline, the literary act of reverse emblematics brings both artistic efficacy and the accompanying satisfaction of sharing the woman’s force. In regard to his own moral aspiration, his vision puts him neither in desolation nor on transcendent heights, but rather in the consolation between dawn and sunrise. Taking into account the sequence as a whole, dizain 175 enacts on its own the movement from death to life concluding Délie. In the last illustration titled ‘Le Tumbeau & les chandeliers,’ the emblem of the poetlover’s coffin leads to the final dizain where the strife of amorous war is

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predicted to flourish for eternity like Petrarch’s laurel. It is the word ‘juniper’ (‘Genevre,’ v. 10) that links dizain 449 to Délie’s ever-verdant tomb in dizain 175, and in this way, there is another form of reverse emblematics which reads backwards from the end of the work to the middle signalling Délie’s aesthetics of renewal. The religious quality of this regeneration has been observed by Donaldson-Evans who notes that functions of juniper in the Old Testament included using it as incense to purify the air to keep away demons at the moment of death. Finally, he says, ‘In Christian lore a juniper tree is reputed to have saved Jesus’s life on the Flight to Egypt, when his capture by Herod was thwarted by Mary’s hiding him in a juniper brush.’55 The Debate: Mind and Will, Life, and Death A poem with a much different meditative texture is dizain 71 patterned by an interior débat. As Joukovsky reminds us its theme takes up a line from Petrarch’s Rime 358: ‘Dunque vien, Morte, il tuo venir m’è caro’ (v. 8).56 The dizain is particularly instructive in showing the capacity of pictorial and diagrammatic structures to order the disorder that erupts when facing the question of viewing physical death as an escape from the painful psychological experience of death-in-life. On the surface the dizain is testimony to the lover’s complete obedience to the will of his ‘Dame.’ Yet, it is more deeply a confrontation with the problem of creating freedom within a framework that is largely ruled by necessity. Typographically, the poem is one block without indentations suggesting solidity, permanence, and internal consistency. However, this physical feature betrays a meditative struggle that seeks to keep the speaker’s being from dispersing. The specific problem on which the poet meditates is unrequited love. According to Ficino’s De Amore, There are two kinds of love: one love is simple, the other reciprocal. Simple love is where the beloved one does not love the lover. There the lover is completely dead. For he neither lives in himself ... nor does he live in his beloved, since he is rejected by him. Where, then, does he live? ... he who loves another, but is not loved by the other, lives nowhere. Therefore, the unloved lover is completely dead. Nor will he ever revive unless indignation should ever revive him.57

In dizain 71 the poet-lover divides himself in two where ‘fol’ (v. 3) debates with ‘Mort’ (v. 1) to release him from this death-in-life:

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Si en ton lieu j’estois, ô doulce Mort, Tu ne serois de ta faulx dessaisie, O fol, l’esprit de ta vie est jà mort. Comment? je vois. Ta force elle a saisie. Je parle aumoins. Ce n’est que phrenesie. Vivray je donc tousjours? Non: lon termine Ailleurs ta fin. Et où? Plus n’examine, Car tu vivras sans Coeur, sans Corps, sans Ame, En ceste mort plus, que vie, benigne. Puis que tel est le vouloir de ta Dame.

(D 71)

[If I were in your place, O sweet Death, You would not be deprived of your scythe, O fool, the spirit of your life has already died. How? I see. She has taken away your strength. I speak at least. It is only madness. Will I always live thus? No, your end Finishes elsewhere. And where? Examine no more. For you will live without Heart, without Body, without Soul, In this death more benevolent than life. Because such is the will of your Lady.]

This poem owes its schematic configuration and pictorial imagery to the superposing of the débat genre (practiced by Neo-Petrarchan writers)58 and that of meditation. Its Ignatian structure is clearly articulated by a vertical threefold pattern, which organizes the interior debate. In the first two verses the image of the Grim Reaper serves as the meditative composition. According to Panofsky, this iconographical figure also connotes Chronos/ Saturn who communicates time as a cruel and destructive attrition (1962, 69–93). The composition is surprising because ‘Mort’ (v. 1) appears without his scythe. This is to show his interlocutor, ‘fol’ (v. 3) that he refuses to relieve his suffering by inflicting physical death. The second or analysis section of the meditation is a five-line tractate composed of rapid-fire stichomythic exchanges between the besieged lover and imperious Death. Refusing the desperate supplications of his interlocutor, the tyrannical and omniscient Chronos argues that the lover is already dead (death-in-life), defeats each of his counterarguments, and overrules any further inquiry about the time and the place of his physical death. In the three lines concluding the meditation, the response of the will is elicited through what Mauburnus terms the permissio. Here the lover is forced to cede all author-

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ity and power to Death who in turn acts as the porte-parole of the woman. Demanding unquestioned obedience to the beloved, Death issues both an order and a prediction to the lover that he must live ‘sans Coeur, sans Corps, sans Ame’ (v. 8) because ‘tel est le vouloir de ta Dame’ (v. 10). Against this vertical deployment of the three powers cut the horizontal traits of Augustinian interior debate in the form of question and answer. In the triple relation between love, lover, and beloved, what is paramount in this poem is the poet-lover’s inward struggle with the temptation to escape pain through physical death. Thus, the debate is a wrenching meditation that challenges the spiritual aim of pursuing the beloved’s vertu. Through dramatic self-analysis the reconstituting memory forges an agon of selfinterrogation pitting life against death, freedom against necessity, while searching for the relevance of cognition to volition. Memory is proleptic to the extent that it precipitates a dilemma and while attempting to resolve the impasse, puts the very human powers it uses under critical scrutiny. This procedure is closely analogous to that of Augustine who thinks in philosophic questions and whose relation to the divine is communicated through questions, whether they be formal inquiries or eruptions in selfdialogue. Not only the Confessions but also the Soliloquies59 are marked by this trait which makes them a fitting analogue for this dizain. Like Augustine, the poet-lover of Délie seeks the interiority of meditation in order to organize his dilemma and like Augustine in his Soliloquies patterns this turning inward by an allegorical débat. In the case of the Soliloquies, Augustine pits himself against ‘Ratio.’60 In Délie the poet-lover assumes the warring personae of ‘Mort’ (v. 1) against ‘fol’ (v. 3). There are strategic advantages of using allegory as an instrument of interior debate. Among the most prominent is to make the self the activator of the terms of struggle and in this way, what is passively experienced may now be more actively directed. In other words, it permits a self-directed fashioning of the agon.61 From this general strategy there are other introspective gains. For the speaker in Délie, allegory facilitates the generalizing of argumentation, so that control over the understanding of the dilemma may be enhanced. Thus, the poet-lover’s allegory makes use of metaphysical statements (‘O fol, l’esprit de ta vie est jà mort,’ v. 3), ethical imperatives (‘Car tu vivras sans Coeur, sans Corps, sans Ame,/... Puis que tel est le vouloir de ta Dame,’ vv. 8–10), and psychological changes of perspectives to teach that even in life there are many forms of death: ‘Comment? je vois. Ta force elle a saisie./Je parle aumoins. Ce n’est que phrenesie,’ vv. 4–5). By allegorizing his turmoil the poet-lover attempts to own and govern experience by actively subjecting the dilemma to his

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own strategies of self-dramatization. In systematic fashion the poet-lover brings these methods to bear in each of the three movements of memory, understanding, and will. The reconstituting memory, which reenacts both sides of the dilemma, has two fundamental tactics. In order to become the active self-director of the problem and to regain more effective agency, it attempts to invest itself with Délie’s omnipotence and unperturbable character. In this way the reconstituting memory can itself create the figure of Mort (v. 1) which, as the porte-parole of the beloved, is able to simulate her very power. A second strategy used by the reconstituting memory to mitigate or to self-direct the woman’s cruel blunting of the lover’s will is to heighten and expand the use of rationality in order to master the content of the problem. Facing the pressing need to break the impasse, memory combines with intellect to achieve such overwhelming understanding and critical distance that it appears autonomous and superhuman. In this poem Mort (v. 1) seems so lucid and prescient that it can allude to the time and the place of ‘fol’’s physical death (vv. 6–7). The reconstituting memory, like a metalanguage, creates the personae of ‘Mort’ and ‘fol’ to self-direct its future, comprehend its psychological state, and relieve its suffering. However, in this poem meditation, which offers the possibility of mitigating the dilemma, only exacerbates its effects. First, what is the position of the imaginative memory illustrated by the composition? It is an in-between existence subject to the disorienting influence of Hecate. This reveals the difficulties of self-direction. ‘Fol’’s apparently decisive appeal to ‘Mort’ not to spare him from death is grammatically conveyed as a conditional or hypothetical statement (‘Si,’ v. 1). Then while in the first two lines ‘fol’ asks Mort not to spare him, the latter refuses the former’s wish. Thus, at the outset there is a precarious tension in which life (‘fol’) seeks death but death reinstates life. Further, a grammatical inconsistency comes to reinforce this instability. When the lover addresses ‘Mort’ in line 2, instead of continuing the si clause with the normal grammatical parallelism, ‘Je ne serois ... ’ (stress mine), he substitutes ‘Tu’: ‘Si en ton lieu j’estois, ô doulce Mort,/Tu ne serois de ta faulx dessaisie.’ The lover as ‘fol’ can neither assert himself as himself nor expel Death’s irreversible position to let him live. In fact, this grammatical inconsistency reveals ‘fol’’s hesitation. While taking the initiative and beginning the si clause with the request not to be spared, ‘fol’’s switching of pronouns in effect cedes power to ‘Mort.’ Another ambivalence is seen in syntax and word choice. In the second line, ‘fol’ tells ‘Mort,’ ‘Tu ne serois de ta faulx dessaisie.’ Instead of saying directly, ‘I want to die,’

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he uses a passive, impersonal statement, ‘You would not be deprived of your scythe.’ He therefore greatly lessens the wish to perish by implying that Death has somehow been prevented from performing its fatal task. Thus, ‘fol’ who is barely alive wishing for death in fact resists the feelings of self-extinction. For purposes of analysis and not for poetic eloquence one might translate the double negation of ne and des of ‘dessaisie’ as: ‘If I were in your place, o sweet Death,/You would not be unseized of your scythe.’ The use of the double negative suggests the state of non-death, a psychological ambivalence that is neither death nor life. So extremely oblique and indirect is this ambivalence that it verges on dénégation.62 It produces a vicious circle where the force of one emotion (death) engenders its opposite (life), both of which are bound to continual reversibility. No wonder the poet-lover makes prominent the word for scythe, since the play on ‘faulx’ (v. 2) always falsifies any univocal understanding of death. The machinery of meditative allegorization also aims to sharpen and enhance intellectual understanding. This is the second phase of meditation extending from line 3 to 7. Why is it that ‘Mort’ serves as the overpowering force of the debate, and why is it closely identified with the persuasive powers of the entendement? In Délie nothing challenges the drive of volition to control all events more than the threat of death. If in the debate ‘Mort’ is closely associated with omniscience, then it is the poet-lover’s tactic to self-direct its threat by displacing death’s power to destroy to the more manageable power to comprehend. So successful is the poet-lover’s capacity to redirect the power of death into the power of rationality that it appears split off from the self as a separate, autonomous entity. Ratiocination removes the lover so far from frustration and effect that it appears to direct the self outside of the self. This may been seen in the personification of ‘Mort,’ which takes on such distance that it appears rhetorically as a separate and exterior presence. It seems outside of the lover initially in verse 1 due to the physical connotations of the word ‘place’: ‘Si en ton lieu j’estois, ô doulce Mort’ (stress mine). It appears separate and above ‘fol’ by its omniscient ability to foresee the time and place of physical death: ‘ ... lon termine/Ailleurs ta fin ... ’ (vv. 6–7, stress mine). But the obsessive drive to stand above and beyond death only expands and intensifies consciousness of painful conundrums. This is the boomerang effect of intellection in the debate proper and is reminiscent of the aporias Augustine confronts in his analytic agon. First, ‘fol’ who initially desired death and then was told that he is already spiritually dead, now protests that he does exist. To counter this argument ‘Mort’ must inevitably ambiguate and divide himself by explaining to ‘fol’ that death is not

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a total annihilation but a persistence without body, soul, or feeling (v. 7). Through this revelation ‘fol’ is forced to discover that he is merely an unsubstantial and spiritless remnant: ‘Comment? je vois ... /Je parle aumoins’ (vv. 4–5). From ‘fol’’s perspective this is the very state from which he had sought deliverance at the outset of the meditation: ‘ô doulce Mort’ (v. 1). But ‘Mort’, insisting that he prove his point and win the debate against its hapless adversary, must summon irrefutable reasons whose virtual effect is to void ‘fol’’s very being. The épreuve with the woman has killed his ‘esprit’ (v. 3), seized his ‘force’ (v. 4), ruined communication (‘phrenesie,’ v. 5), and promises only an indefinite repetition of the same: ‘Vivray je donc tousjours? Non: lon termine/Ailleurs ta fin. Et où? Plus n’examine’ (vv. 6–7). So powerful is the desire of intellection to hold frustration at bay that it produces a discourse verging on contradiction. So convincing are ‘Mort’ and ‘fol’ in appearing as separate, individual beings that it may temporarily be forgotten that this débat is a dédoublement, and that intellection (as represented by ‘Mort’) is theoretically prey to the same debilities as those of ‘fol.’ Psychologists have termed this extreme splitting ‘fractionation.’63 However, ‘Mort’ seeks to persuade both the reader and himself that he can be self-sufficient by completely dissociating himself from affect. He accomplishes this positively by the prosopopée of his omniscient, imperious voice and negatively by shifting all complaint to ‘fol.’ Added to this, ‘Mort’ flexes his muscles by using his power to name his interlocutor as ‘fol,’ who is doubly foolish because he does not realize that love is a kind of madness,64 and that there are many kinds of death. This spontaneous Cratylism exploits deprecation to keep Death at a distance. To understand how radical this self-partitioning is in the poet-lover and to appreciate what an oxymoron his thinking has become, the reader must change perspectives and see that the debilities of ‘fol’ apply to the lover as a whole. There is first an oxymoron of speech. To persuade himself of his invincible imperturability and commanding oversight, the lover through ‘Mort’ attests to verbal impotence without the slightest sign of debility: ‘Je parle aumoins. Ce n’est que phrenesie’ (v. 5). The very word that avows the chaos of speech is also a metacommunicational self-diagnosis, since ‘phrenesie’ denotes a medical délire.65 Second, there is an oxymoron of vision. Although the most spiritual of the senses – vision – has been stolen, the lover so clearly and insightfully sees this loss that in the guise of ‘Mort’ he easily unmasks ‘fol’’s illusions: ‘Comment? je vois. Ta force elle a saisie’ (v. 4). (Here the pun on ‘see’ – ‘vois,’ v. 4 – is used to emphasize the difference between physical and spiritual seeing.) The word ‘force’ (v. 4) leads to the third oxymoron. Huguet informs us that this word is virtu-

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ally synonymous with vertu (Huguet, vol. 7). This compounds the lover’s astoundingly dissociated discourse. Intelligence claims a metalanguage so indomitable that it can confess the woman’s violent seizure of his ‘force’ (v. 4) with complete impassivity: ‘Ta force elle a saisie’ (v. 4). The word ‘dessaisie’ in verse 2 is associated with Death but with the kind that refuses physical extinction. In summary, speech, vision, and force are vitiated in spite of their eloquence, insight, and power. This ironic rhetoric that powerfully observes its own powerlessness makes self-reference the object of introspection even though the very content of that reference is removed. Why? These separate contradictions are explainable by a primary association and that is to invest Death with the greatest powers of intellection. To keep the fear of death at bay, the lover uses intellection to stand above this threat by his exercise of omniscience and prescience which invest him with a Godlike quality. He assumes knowledge so high that the power of intellection may reduce, contradict, and deny the power of physical death and its psychological manifestations undermining speech, vision, and virtue. Death itself is the motivating principle for life, and these two poles are bound in dialectical adversity to provoke new strategies for existence. This gives understanding to Délie’s liminary huitain where the lover states his aim to describe to the woman ‘les mortz, qu’en moy tu renovelles’ (v. 3). Before moving to the final introspective movement focusing on the will, it is necessary to evaluate the relation between meditation and spatialization. A significant aspect of ‘fol’’s apprehension concerning physical death is his compulsive attempt to fix or find a locus and a time for the allconsuming moment. Thus, a significant tension in the debate centres on questions that visually contain and therefore govern the dreaded event. In the very first line of the dizain ‘fol’ expresses his psychological preoccupations spatially by speaking of point of view as if it were a place (‘lieu’). He has decided that now is the time for extinction, and endeavours to persuade ‘Mort’ to change his mind and not to spare him: ‘Si en ton lieu j’estois, ô doulce Mort,/Tu ne serois de ta faulx dessaisie’ (vv. 1–2). After being rebuffed by ‘Mort,’ he contemplates the analogous fear that his death-in-life will last forever. Then he asks, ‘Vivray je donc tousjours?’ (v. 6). To a question requiring a temporal answer, Death replies with a spatial/ physical response: ‘Non: lon termine/Ailleurs ta fin’ (vv. 6–7). Immediately ‘fol’ wishes to gain ‘Mort’s’ omniscience or precognition by inquiring, ‘Et où?’ Death does not say and imperiously orders a cessation to all questions (‘Plus n’examine,’ v. 7) leaving ‘fol’ to see himself ‘En ceste mort plus, que vie, benigne’ (v. 9). The sought-for locus that would somehow

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situate the self is virtually voided by the indefinite ‘ailleurs’ (v. 7) an empty embrayeur seeking a context, an anticipation practically negated. From an intertextual point of view the reader of Scève is assisted in understanding the metapsychological basis of spatializing the death-in-life emotion by referring to Ficino’s Commentary. Here the Italian theoretician conceptualizes the lover’s soul as being ‘Without a home’ (‘Sine domicilio,’ VI:9). Without a home. The soul itself is the home of human thought; the spirit is the home of the soul; and the body is the home of the spirit. There are three inhabitants; there are three homes. Giving up its natural home, each of these inhabitants goes into exile. For every thought is devoted not to the discipline and tranquility of its own soul, but to the service of the man beloved. And the soul abandons the service of its own body and spirit and tries to leap across into the body of the beloved. But while the soul is hurrying elsewhere, the spirit, which is the chariot of the soul, is also flying out elsewhere, in sighing. And thus thought leaves his home ... The first departure is accompanied by madness of thought and restlessness; the second, by weakness and fear of death; and the third, by nervousness, trembling, and sighing. On this account love is deprived of its own Lares, its natural seat, and its hoped-for rest.66

The reader may conceive dizain 71 as the poet-lover’s concerted attempt to re-collect his exiled and divided being through techniques of visualization and spatialization. In other words, he must convert a nowhere into an introspective place. In the Confessions in Book X on memory, Augustine testifies to a similar need that prefigures both Petrarch and Scève when he says to God: ‘But in all the regions where I thread my way, seeking your guidance, only in you do I find a safe haven for my mind, a gathering place for my scattered parts, where no portion of me can depart from you.’67 Figuring prominently in this task is the machinery of meditation grappling with the dictates of the divine beloved. The diagrammatic design of reflection may be envisaged as taking the shape of a vertical line horizontally intersected in three places. This allows a systematic examination of each of the three parts of the soul. The vertical Ignatian axis is the successive deployment of imaginative memory in the composition of place (vv. 1–2), intelligence in the debate proper (vv. 4–7), and the will in the command concluding the poem (vv. 8–10). Cutting across each articulation of the soul is the Augustinian dramatic self-analysis, which allegorizes the dilemmas confronting memory, understanding, and will. This process of spatializing and visualizing interior conflict gives tes-

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timony to the poet-lover’s power of conciseness to condense the entire problem in the composition of place that displays the iconography of the ‘faulx dessaisie’ (v. 2). As pointed out above, the composition is a kind of dénégation which allows ‘fol’ to undo his request for physical death by imagining ‘Mort’ as deprived of his scythe. The ‘faulx dessaisie’ (v. 2, punning on faux) allows ‘fol’ to see physical death as a welcome relief from the psychological torment of death-in-life but also permits him to keep the threat of physical death at bay since ‘Mort’ is seen unarmed. It is a metaphysical nowhere whose very indetermination offers psychological shelter as well as disorientation. The Augustinian allegorization of the conflict continues to exploit its advantages. Foremost is its capacity to create a microdrama, which is superposed over the Ignatian tripartite schema. In and of itself the Ignatian pattern disciplines the faculties to order the conflict systematically and to engage the will in resolution. Working across this vertical dispositio is the horizontal unfolding of a microplot conducted by the allegorized debate. If the outcome of the exchange is indecisive and painful for ‘fol,’ then dramatic self-analysis has the advantage of reinforcing the Ignatian tendency toward containment and closure by reducing the warring elements to antagonist (‘fol’) and protagonist (‘Mort’) and by precipitating their clash. Negative personifications (‘ ... tu vivras sans Coeur, sans Corps, sans Ame,’ v. 8) gather intellectually what has vanished metaphysically, while prosopopée provides an imperious face (‘Mort’) for the invisible force of necessity. Spatially speaking, the allegorized microdrama assigns a place, position, and figure to an otherwise displaced and dissociated being, and delineates a plot and a course of action in compensation for the wandering experience of nowhere reminiscent of Hecate. While meditative spatialization has its benefits, it also multiplies the problems. By so closely identifying the capacity to master the self with the capacity to intellectualize, the poet-lover only widens the gap between understanding and necessity. Each allegorized expansion of the inward debate, while enhancing cognitive control, further voids the lover’s being. Caught in an obsessive trap, he finds that the only way to extricate himself is to pose more questions – a putative release that only exacerbates the vicious circle: Comment? je vois. Ta force elle a saisie. Je parle aumoins. Ce n’est que phrenesie. Vivray je donc tousjours? Non: lon termine Ailleurs ta fin. Et où? Plus n’examine.

(vv. 4–7)

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Figure 2 ‘Le Chamoys et les chiens,’ from Scève, 199.

Meditative spatialization in which the nowhere of self-absence is transformed into the arena of self-mastery becomes a torturing constriction. It is surely no coincidence that this predicament of self-entrapment is the most frequent subject of Délie’s imprese. The device, being the visual equivalent of the human being – body and soul – reverts to spatial containment and visualization for self-expression. In this regard, it is structurally and functionally like the Ignatian tripartite schema of the human soul, which also situates self-mastery in pictorial and diagrammatic thought processes. One of the best depictions of the lover’s impasse in dizain 71 is the forty-ninth device entitled ‘Le Chamoys et les chiens’ (figure 2). Here a chamois pursued by dogs seeks shelter on the top of a peak from which there is no escape. Surrounded by his fatal pursuers, he utters ‘Me sauluant je m’enclos.’ This is very much the poet-lover’s predicament in dizain 71 until he moves to the final stage of meditation eliciting the will. As in religious meditation, the last part of the dizain concludes the introspective allegory by summoning the will to respond to the memory (the pictorial composition of the Grim Reaper) and to the intellect (the

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debate between ‘fol’ and ‘Mort’). Both in religious meditation and in its more humanized transformation in Délie the lover examines his soul in relation to the exigencies of the divine. The principal difference between this poem and Augustine’s colloquy with the Almighty in the Confessions is that while the latter concludes self-examination by the call for divine assistance (grace), the Scevian poet-lover longs for self-sufficiency. Another difference is that while Augustine’s aspiration finds its meaning and term in the divine, the Scevian persona sees that through his experience with the beloved he may enhance his own human powers. His aim is to use introspection to transform powerlessness into power by reconceiving in human terms the value of suffering. However, whatever the poet-lover’s desire for self-sufficiency may be, it is also intertwined with dependence and necessity. First, the way that ‘Mort’ appropriates power is to become the voice of the beloved. Yet, he does not seek to be the empty conduit of the beloved’s power. Rather, he invokes a more self-generated force through his own verbal enforcement of her moral imperative to ‘fol’: ‘Car tu vivras sans Coeur, sans Corps, sans Ame, .../Puis que tel est le vouloir de ta Dame’ (vv. 8–10). The efficacy wielded by ‘Mort’ is not only the ability to order ‘fol’ and to predict his future but, by these very acts, to self-direct its own shadowy persistence through time. Second, close observation will show that though ‘Mort’ speaks on behalf of the beloved, it is not specifically the woman’s power that is relayed through Death. Rather, it is the ability of ‘Mort’ to turn ‘fol’’s three privations – ‘sans Coeur, sans Corps, sans Ame’ (vv. 8–10) – into a form of self-determination. The critic may be tempted to call this gesture obedience to the beloved. But since ‘fol’’s future is virtually dictated by his ‘Dame’ through ‘Mort,’ what could obedience possibly mean without freedom? The specific nature of this transmutation is not so much a matter of choosing freely between two alternatives (physical as opposed to spiritual death), since the prescriptive tone of the order suggests the imposition of necessity, spiritual death. It is a matter of the lover’s capacity to change focus or to assert the positive side of an intractable dilemma – a reorientation that in the debate is indicated by ‘Mort’s’ defeat of ‘fol.’ In that change Death asserts the positive side of privation – ‘le bien de mon mal (D 65) – which here is expressed as ‘ceste mort plus, que vie, benigne’ (v. 9, stress mine). Death is more ‘benevolent’ or ‘favourable’ than life, because love with death is better than life without love. The philosophic implications of dizain 71 are well formulated in the Commentary (VI:10), where it is explained that though the unrequited lover is a ‘lost soul,’ s/he neverthe-

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less ‘cannot live without the beloved, who, with wonderful enticements, steals you from yourself, who claims all of you for himself/herself.’68 In this poem ‘Mort’ dominates the intellectual and volitional side of the debate because, forever in paradoxical straits, the poet-lover gives assent to the necessity of death-in-love. Through this recognition the performative potential of meditation is realized by the spontaneous act of conferring value on the positive side of a dialectic that can never be wholly converted into either ‘le bien’ or ‘le mal.’ Prayerful Celebration: The Lover between the Terrestrial and the Celestial The next poem, dizain 136, utilizes the religious tone of petitionary and celebratory prayer within the tripartite schema as a means of affirming the human bonds of love. Interpenetrating this relation are three other levels. The prayer is addressed to ‘Dieu aveuglé’ (v. 5) and consequently it will be important to delve into its metaphysical status. To what or to whom is the poet-lover addressing himself? The ‘Dieu aveuglé’ is also the emblematic picture that serves as a visual composition of place by focusing the meditation on the problems of necessity. Also, the poetic prayer is an autobiographical expression, since literary history has found that dizain 136 is Scève’s answer to épigramme 13 of Pernette du Guillet’s Rymes. How therefore does Scève knit Pernette’s poem into the fabric of his amatory prayer? In other words, what is the relation between meditative prayer and their dialogue on love? Finally, this dizain, in appearance quite clear and direct, is actually the nodal point of metaphysical tensions between Scève’s manifest religious sensibility and his secularizing humanism. L’heur de nostre heur enflambant le desir Unit double ame en un mesme povoir: L’une mourant vit du doulx desplaisir, Que l’autre vive a fait mort recevoir. Dieu aveuglé tu nous as fait avoir Sans aultrement ensemble consentir, Et posseder, sans nous en repentir, Le bien du mal en effect desirable: Fais que puissions aussi long temps sentir Si doulx mourir en vie respirable. [The happiness of our happiness, enflaming desire,

(D 136)

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Unites a double soul in one and the same force. The one, dying, takes life from the sweet torment Which brings death to the other, living soul. Blinded God, you made us have, Without our agreeing in some other way, And possess, without repenting, The good of that desirable evil. Let us now experience, for as long a time, Such sweet dying in breathing life.]

The poem is a meditative prayer. Though distinctions are made between prayer and meditation in the study of spirituality, prayer is the more general term designating the lifting of the heart and mind in dialogue with the divine, while meditation is a kind of prayer that seeks deeper knowledge and sustained analysis on a single aspect of belief. A good illustration of this difference is Book X of the Confessions where Augustine’s difficulties in probing into the nature of memory are channelled through an ongoing colloquy with God punctuated with questions and petitions. Thus, this dizain qualifies as a meditative prayer because it offers an explicit colloquy with ‘Dieu aveuglé’ (v. 5) while at the same time, it analyses the philosophic terms of the lovers’ spiritual bond. The poem’s Ignatian structure emphasizes the merging of the soul’s three powers even as it gives clear rhetorical indications as to what faculty dominates a particular section. The first two lines, set off by a colon, mark the composition, which is an abstract yet passionate proposing of the subject matter. Rather than immediately appealing to vision, memory simply encapsulates the Neoplatonic paradox in which the ‘mesme povoir’ (v. 2) of reciprocal love unites the lovers in a ‘double ame’ (v. 2). The visual appeal of this poem – the iconography of ‘Dieu aveuglé – centres around the petitionary prayer of the sizain. As the proposal uses memory to activate introspection, it simultaneously engages the entendement and the volonté. Union and ardour are evoked by the collective adjective ‘nostre heur’ (v. 1) as well as by the continual action of happiness ‘enflambant le desir’ (v. 1). Analysis has already begun at the outset with the use of the third person definition of the paradox that bears the logical compression of a proposition: ‘Unit double ame en un mesme povoir’ (v. 2). In fact, the first two lines act as a meditative premise from which subsequent reflection will draw its analytic and amorous deductions. In lines 3 and 4 intellection is emphasized by a consideratio formulated as the paradox of reciprocal love. Typical of Scève, the consideratio is itself condensed into

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a compact formula that requires considerable intellectual unpacking. In a useful paraphrase of these verses McFarlane gives: ‘The one soul, dying, lives on through this sweet torment, which makes the other soul, living, become the victim of death’ (1966 edition of Délie, 411). In line 5 the work of understanding merges with the apostrophe to ‘Dieu aveuglé’ (v. 5) which functions as the colloquy. It is here that the meditation strikes up vision, which focuses on the iconography of Blind Cupid. The dialogue of lines 5–8 is both a celebration and a continued analysis of the good fortune and propitious effects brought about by the god. Concluding the prayer is both an optio (wish) and an oratio (petition) that the couple, joined in ‘Si doulx mourir’ (v. 10) may continue to feel the benefits of love for the rest of their life: ‘en vie respirable’ (v. 10). In dizain 136 the poet-lover aims to accomplish the double performative of making an act of love in which two lovers become one and implore the God of Love to grant that this state be permanent. However difficult this aspiration may be, fraught with metaphysical and logical tensions, the lover uses poetry to ritualize this specular drama, moving from solemn celebration of ‘doulx desplaisir’ (v. 3) to fervent entreaty that this paradox be everlasting. In this respect, the poem mirrors Augustinian practice, which contracts time to the present single moment of analysis and then expands time into a vision of spiritual hope. In the relation between love, lover, and beloved, the performative aspect of meditation in the first quatrain is the act of using poetry to ritualize and solemnize the experience of amatory union. Here the love lexicon has a distinctly philosophic tenor. The present participle construction of ‘enflambant le desir’ (v. 1) marks a continuous and growing expansion of desire which is enacted by a corresponding expansion of philosophic terms amorously deduced from the densely phrased ‘mesme povoir’ (v. 2): ‘L’une mourant vit du doulx desplaisir,/Qui l’autre vive a fait mort recevoir’ (vv. 3–4). In the Commentary Ficino explains that when love is reciprocated, two souls are exchanged such that the death of losing one’s soul becomes rebirth upon receiving the beloved’s soul. This mystical, logicdefying principle of spiritual exchange had even Ficino perplexed: ‘How they receive each other I do not understand. For he who does not have himself will much less possess another.’69 Yet, the Italian theoretician recoups and adds: ‘each has himself and has the other. Certainly, this one has himself, but in that one. That one also possesses himself, but in this one. Certainly while I love you loving me, I find myself in you thinking about me, and I recover myself, lost by myself through my own negligence, in you, preserving me. You do the same in me.’70 In similar fashion Augus-

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tine, finding that certain spiritual truths defy the intellect, recommends thinking ‘per speculum in aenigmate’ (Colish 1968, 26). That is, to grasp a puzzling concept, one should invent a difficult figure of speech to mirror and fathom the challenging idea. For Augustine, as for Scève, the nexus of a central concept is densely fused into an intellectual paradox. Tying and untying the enigma is to love and be loved in return. This is characteristic of Délie as a whole, especially its emblematic conceits, but in dizain 136 the speaker uses the oxymoron ‘doulx desplaisir’ (v. 3) to fire his thought. Thus, the lover’s particular but distinctive offering of devotion is to animate love by the challenge of philosophic understanding. This act is ritualized as an unceasing iteration of reciprocity – a reciprocity that mirrors the ever-growing flame of love as a philosophic propagation in terms drawn from the unity of ‘mesme povoir’ (v. 2). It is the unity of the lovers that is most pronounced. No longer are there obstacles between them. Rather, ‘moi’ and ‘toi’ are welded into the bond of ‘nostre heur’ (v. 1), the common possession of which is underlined by the genitive ‘L’heur de nostre heur.’ The terms of that exchange are worded symmetrically, which heightens their equality and communion. However, the very traits that mark the lovers’ union presage a problem of agency. It is not strictly speaking the lovers who perform the exchange of souls but an impersonal process in which they participate. The lover’s use of the third person throughout the quatrain for subjects and objects (‘L’heur de nostre heur enflambant le desir,’ v. 1) shows that love is experienced as an objectified force as well as a personal choice. It is not the lovers as persons who inflame desire but impersonal powers and operations who fortuitously blend souls: ‘L’une mourant vit du doulx desplaisir,/Qui l’autre vive a fait mort recevoir’ (vv. 3–4). It is more precise to say that the souls undergo, feel, and celebrate an activity through which they are propitiously borne. This will be one of the issues addressed by the colloquy of thanksgiving in the sizain. In meditative practice the trajectory of love typically rises to an act of the will seeking colloquy with the divine. It is in the sizain that the lover makes a petition to ‘Dieu aveuglé’ (v. 5) that his wish for life-long ‘doulx mourir’ (v. 10) with the beloved may be fulfilled. This is the poet-lover’s second meditative performative. Analogous to a composition of place, it is entirely centred around the visual activity of fixing attention on Blind Cupid and drawing from this image the implications of his encounter with love. What could it mean to pray to love? The possible responses to this question were given by Plotinus (Enneads 3.5.1) who pondered whether love ‘is a god or a spirit or an affection of the

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soul.’ First, in terms of the visual, Renaissance iconography portrayed love as Blind Cupid, the popular garzone or putto, nude with wings and arrows, sometimes bearing a torch. However, we are not to take Cupid’s function in Délie as purely ornamental when studying an age that allegorized his blindfold as blind passion, his arrows as love’s wounds, his wings as volatile instability, his childlike appearance as youthful naivety, and his nudity as vulnerability (Panofsky 1962, 95–128). In philosophic terms, what does the meditative act of the will seek to invoke in addressing ‘Dieu aveuglé’ (v. 5)? Unlike Plotinus, Ficino’s answer is not a disjunctive either/or between divine and human, spiritual and physical love. In the Commentary, Cupid is the angel/demon – a force that runs the entire gamut of being, the ‘perpetual knot and binder of the universe,’71 the up and down movement between mens, anima, natura and materia. So he is in dizain 136. The torch quia inflammat, associated with the iconography of Cupid, is translated as the lovers’ ceaseless reciprocity of intellect and will uniting the whole of experience in the cycle of ‘L’heur ... enflambant le desir’ (v. 1). As seen in Augustine, at a given point in meditative practice any one of the three powers of the soul may dominate a given discursive moment as it embraces the other two. In the sizain, it is the will that acts foremost, but it turns its association with the entendement to an examination of necessity versus agency. The vocative ‘Dieu aveuglé’ (v. 5) signals that the poet-lover now incorporates the divine into the bond of love through acts of petition and celebration. To what particular aspect of love does the speaker address himself? Blind Cupid is expressed not as dieu aveugle but as ‘Dieu aveuglé.’ Through its past participle form the phrase stresses the blindness of love. This celebratory act of mutual intellectual activity now pursues, retraces, and reconstitutes the causes of love as a fortuitous meeting with fate. Classical writers such as Propertius use such phrases as caecus amor to suggest that love does not see its deeds in the physical or mental sense, or that love is incapable of being seen (it is hidden or secret), or that love is a force that prevents the mind from seeing (Panofsky 1962, 109). Arousing the will, lines 5–7 of the colloquy gratefully celebrate the accomplishments, not of Christian Providence, but of propitious blind necessity. There is a meditation in a meditation, a brief but telling resistance against necessity which, though unconquered, may be construed in a more favourable light. At the end of line 5, precisely where the reader expects the causative faire construction to name the direct object it governs, there is a syntactic suspension of two lines before reaching the complement, ‘Le bien du mal’ (v. 8). It is as if the poet-lover were attempting a gesture of autonomy before arriving at the inevitable acknowledgment of necessity.

Meditative Praxis and the Tensions of Transvaluation Dieu aveuglé tu nous as fait avoir Sans aultrement ensemble consentir, Et posseder, sans nous en repentir, Le bien du mal en effect desirable:

131

(vv. 5–8)

Negation is a vital aspect of Délie poetics and in this instance it may be seen as a meditative quaerela (complaint) or a thanksgiving expressed negatively. Describing the conditions in which ‘Dieu aveuglé’ (v. 5) has ruled his happy fate, the speaker defines its propitious force by how it has overruled his freedom. Recognizing the effect of fortuitous constraint in love, lines 6–7 (‘Dieu aveuglé, tu nous as fait avoir/Sans aultrement ensemble consentir’) bear the meaning of ‘Blinded God, you made us have/Without our reaching agreement in some other way ... ’ If the same line is looked at positively, then it indirectly says that Dieu’s action of making the couple fall in love is just as acceptable as if they had done so autonomously and freely. What are those possibilities of freedom? ‘Aultrement’ (v. 6) implies the possibility of including more than one road to love; ‘ensemble’ (v. 6) suggests the possibility of mutual participation in agreement; and ‘consentir’ (v. 6) connotes that there may be consent to love that is mutually independent and agreeable. The outcome of necessitated love is just as acceptable as the outcome by unconditioned freedom provided assent be accorded to the outcome. Line 7 in conjunction with the causative faire of line 5 presents more ironies. These lines may be translated as ‘Blinded God, you made us have .../And possess, without repenting ... ’ Platonic language never tires of using forms of the verb ‘to possess.’ In line 7 the infinitive ‘posseder’ ambiguously straddles the positive sense of ‘to have control over’ and the more deterministic sense of ‘to be the bearer of something given or imposed upon.’ It points to the speaker’s awareness that there is self-determination even within the process of necessity. This concept is vital to understanding Délie. The infinitive structure ‘sans nous en repentir’ (v. 7) means ‘without repenting.’ If it is not governed by causative faire, then it states that even though love was brought by ‘Dieu aveuglé’ (v. 5), the lovers nevertheless accept love without repentance, regret, or reservation. (The verb se repentir has moral overtones, quite possibly because Pernette, though in love with Scève, was married.) In other words, it suggests the principle that one is free to alter one’s beliefs or feelings within the necessitated state. Why is the meditative ‘complaint’ that resists necessity inverted as an act of thanksgiving? It is because the poet-lover is honouring through the celebratory function of meditation the ruling force of his existence, ‘Le bien du mal’ (v. 8). The ‘Dieu aveuglé’ (v. 5) symbolizing the paradoxically posi-

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tive and negative effect of love as necessity is but one manifestation in Délie of ‘Le bien du mal’ (v. 8) that pervades the speaker’s experience. In terms of the tradition of meditation, this experience replaces the figure of Christ and invests in Délie herself a pagan primordiality that itself is honoured by religious rhetoric. More general than any other ontological phenomenon in Délie, it is the poet-lover’s recognition of a metaphysical order where the negative pole of being is not only in opposition to the positive but constitutes the very means of fulfilling it. In dizain 136, it is manifested as the Neoplatonic paradox of ‘doulx desplaisir’ (v. 3) where in the exchange of souls, loss is simultaneously gain. But in Délie, ‘Le bien du mal’ (or its opposite ‘Le mal de mon bien,’ D 65) is generalized beyond any particular order of belief. In another Platonic context it appears as the necessary frustration preparing the way to androgyny: ‘bien qu’espoir de l’attente me frustre,/Point ne m’est grief en aultruy me chercher’ (dizain 271, vv. 9–10). As already seen in dizain 143, it is also shown in a biblical context where the ‘Serpent eslevé’ (v. 10) both punishes and heals. It is frequently expressed in dizains of courtly love where it is a rationale for service: ‘Heureux service en libre servitude’ (dizain 12, v. 7). It acts in the physical world as ‘doulce antiperistase’ (dizain 293, v. 10)72 and may be seen in several imprese mottoes having the form, ‘Fuyant peine travail me suyt’ (no. 35). It is also met in the numerous explicit and implicit references to the exegi monumentum: ... mon travail sans cesser angoissant, Et tressuant à si haulte victoyre, Augmente à deux double loyer croissant, A moy merite, à toy louange, et gloire.

(D 249, vv. 7–10)

[... that my ceaselessly anguishing suffering, And my striving for such a noble victory Increase in both of us a double reward, increasing In me merit, in you praise and glory.]

Finally, ‘Le bien du mal’ (v. 8) is invested with particular force and intention in the poet-lover’s motto, ‘Souffrir non souffrir.’ Far from passive, this prayer celebrating ‘doulx desplaisir’ (v. 3) as a manifestation of ‘Le bien du mal’ (v. 8) constitutes a double and reciprocal performative of the will. As an act of thanksgiving, the lovers, while celebrating favourable necessity, are eliciting their own wills in sanctioning and accepting the rule of ‘Dieu aveuglé’ (v. 5). Also, since within the very contingency of necessity, the lovers have the freedom to valorize either the

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bien or the mal of an otherwise intractable law, they choose to affirm the positive side of the paradox. It is central to the most profound meaning of Délie that the self makes itself in its choice to adopt or reject the positive aspect of an inherently volatile and reversible metaphysical dialectic: ‘Je me recrée au mal, où je m’ennuye’ (‘I recreate myself in the affliction in which I suffer,’ D 409, v. 8). In the eighth verse, the speaker continues to stress the positive effects of necessity. He deems love ‘en effect desirable’ which means ‘by the manner in which it affects us’ (Roubichou-Stretz 1973, 54). In other words, necessity has effects which are conducive to love that cannot be predicted, and in this sense, the lovers find freedom and opportunity. Also, the able of ‘desirable’ (v. 8) denotes ‘qui peut être’ implying that desire can have some unconstrained possibilities. Thus, while ‘Dieu aveuglé’ (v. 5) is the ultimate cause of the couple’s love, they nevertheless reclaim a certain subjective capacity to realize all the active possibilities of love’s good effects. The word ‘desirable’ (v. 8) is pivotal in leading to the final and most forceful act of the will. In the last two lines the poet-lover directly addresses ‘Dieu aveuglé’ (v. 5) as the cause of a union (‘nous,’ v. 5) that lifts desire to aspiration. In Mauburnus’s terms this act is double, both an optio which is a passionate wish, and an oratio which is an earnest and resolute petition. The poet-lover entreats ‘Dieu aveuglé’ that they ‘long temps sentir/Si doulx mourir en vie respirable’ (vv. 9–10). The nature of this enactment is particularly suitable to ‘Le bien du mal’ (v. 8) as an amatory dialectic because the oratio acknowledges the constraints of freedom while the optio unleashes all the forces (vertu) of desire and effort. Thus, wish and petition mirror the inherent paradox of ‘Le bien du mal’ (v. 8) as well as its positive promise. Augustine’s example teaches that once a problem has been thoroughly fleshed out on the microcosmic level of meditation, the will moves to the macrocosmic vision of transcendence. While dizain 136 concludes on an optimistic note by foreseeing the unceasing enjoyment of reciprocal love, it does not affirm supernatural transcendence. It is here that the tensions between Scève’s religious sensibility and his secular humanism reach their peak. The optio insists on human fulfilment, but it maintains its religious tone by creating a dialogue between Scève and Pernette Du Guillet. Pernette’s épigramme 13 that provides Scève’s intertext is as follows: L’heur de mon mal, enflammant le desir Feit distiller deux cueurs en un debvoir: Dont l’un est vif pour le doulx desplaisir

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Qui faict que Mort tient l’autre en son pouvoir. Dieu aveuglé, tu nous as faict avoir Du bien le mal en effect honorable: Fais donc aussi, que nous puissions avoir En nos espritz contentement durable!

(Rymes, 13)73

[The happiness of my pain, enflaming desire, Distilled two hearts in one duty: In which one remains alive for the sweet torment, That makes Death hold the other in its power. Blinded Love, you made us have The evil of the good in effect honourable: Therefore, act so that we may have In our souls lasting contentment!]

Pernette’s last line emphasizes the indefinite persistence of ‘espritz’ (v. 8 – ‘souls’ or ‘minds’), whereas the end of Scève’s dizain stresses the timebound (‘long temps,’ v. 9) nature of love as something almost physiological: ‘vie respirable’ (v. 10). If there are logical and metaphysical tensions in Scève’s response to Pernette’s épigramme, it is because he is using meditation in a dialectical fashion by both emulating Pernette’s intellectual terms of love, and deemphasizing suggestions of supernatural transcendence. The poet-lover embraces Pernette by embracing the Neoplatonic notion of the mutual exchange of life and death. He also reciprocates Pernette’s meditative dialogue by poetically expanding the meaning ‘enflambant le desir’ (v. 1) in philosophic terms. This double performative realizes the ideal teleology of meditation because the lover’s celebration is not only interiorized in the imagination but also lived in the concrete as an exchange of poems. In Neoplatonic terminology it is an act of amitié, recalling Héroet’s Parfaicte Amye.74 Scève’s response to Pernette strains this union to the extent that he changes Pernette’s spiritual discourse into a more terrestrial one. While Pernette concludes her huitain with Fais donc aussi, que nous puissions avoir En noz espritz contentement durable!

(vv. 7–8)

Scève concludes his dizain with Fais que puissions aussi long temps sentir Si doulx mourir en vie respirable.

(vv. 9–10)

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By using ‘en vie respirable’ (v. 10) Scève deemphasizes spiritual transcendence implied either in Pernette’s last line or in his own Neoplatonic quatrain. According to Ficino, the reciprocal exchange of souls ideally leads to a spiritual ascension from admiring the beauty of the soul to spiritual immortality in contemplation of the ‘Splendor Divini Vultus.’75 In the dizain the quatrain celebrates the Neoplatonic paradox that through the exchange of souls the lovers may presage a glimpse of immortality in the mutual appreciation of one another’s spiritual beauty. As Ficino states, ‘Homo est Ipsa Anima, et Anima est Immortalis’ (Man is the Soul Itself, and the Soul is Immortal).76 However, in spite of the Neoplatonic appeal to spirituality and immortality in the quatrain, Scève’s meditative crescendo at the end envisions love as a purely human aspiration: ‘en vie respirable’ (v. 10). Most ironically, the poet-lover places his union with Délie in two worlds simultaneously – Neoplatonic and purely terrestrial. The logical if not emotive tensions reach their peak in the last line when the process of ‘sweet dying,’ associated with Neoplatonic mysticism in the quatrain, unfolds ‘en vie respirable’ (v. 10). In effect, the speaker has construed the spiritual activity of exchanging souls as a continuous process in human time: ‘Si doulx mourir en vie respirable’ (v. 10). It is a triumph of meditative rhetoric that the form of the meditative prayer unfolds seamlessly in spite of the philosophic rift. In retrospect the reader might wonder if in the quatrain, the poet-lover has honoured the exchange of souls as a purely psychological rather than supernatural phenomenon, or if Scève’s persona is alluding to the epiphenominalism of Pomponazzi, who maintained that the human soul in its rational and sensitive operations depends on the body, and though non-corporal, does not survive death.77 At any rate, in spite of the dissociation between rhetoric and philosophy, love and belief, human time and spiritual transcendence, meditative rhetoric proceeds unperturbed in celebrating the lovers’ poetic affinities, their emotional bond, and their common intellectual orientation to existence. Notwithstanding these tensions, what is common to both the human and the transcendent world, either in Pernette’s huitain or in Scève’s dizain, is the irreducible bien du mal. In Scève’s poem it becomes the wish of a petitionary prayer to sustain in human time a form of this paradoxical condition reverently called ‘Si doulx mourir’ (v. 10). If the poet-lover deemphasizes supernatural transcendence, then the grammar of the infinitif substantivé nevertheless endlessly extends time in human terms. According to Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, this infinitive form has the rhetorical effect of removing temporal limits in order to infinitize a process: ‘l’infinitif dit l’infinitisation du procès’ (1994, 157). In this view of the future, ‘Si

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doulx mourir’ (v. 10), more than just a familiar paradox of love, invokes Délie’s philosophic outlook of incessantly realizing the potential force of vertu not only within but by means of the spur of obstacle and absence. If the ethos of the meditative finale is not that of the Neoplatonic quatrain, then it nevertheless converts the spiritual transcendence of those lines into an analogous but human transcendence. It is precisely in such conversions that one discovers the meaning of Délie’s meditative and religious sensibility. Délie enacts a human drama of love within a religious atmosphere. The suffix able of ‘respirable’ (v. 10) rhymes with ‘desirable’ (v. 8) to project the infinite potential that love can realize in largely terrestrial terms. Versification and Meditation Historians of French versification have long recognized that the Petrarchan dizain, practised by Scève and Marguerite de Navarre, had deep roots in the medieval ballade, especially the grande ballade.78 As already seen in dizain 240, the rhyme scheme has an oppositional structure in which the order of repetition is symmetrically reversed: A B ababb // ccdcd There is a rhyme of two quintils where the second (B) recalls the first (A) in reverse order. Of this pattern Henri Morier observes: ‘l’ordre de la répétition est symétriquement inversé, mais les timbres des strophes changent, comme si l’objet A, réfléchi dans une eau calme, y modifiait son coloris en B’ (1961, 1044–5). In 1548 Thomas Sébillet said: ‘Le dizain est l’épigramme aujourd’huy estimé premier, et de plus grande perfection ... c’est le plus communément usurpé dés savans’ (1988, 110). With regard to metrics Scève uses the décasyllabe, a very old form dating to the eleventhcentury work, Vie de saint Alexis. By the time of the chanson de geste and hagiographical poetry the décasyllable was so well established that it became known as ‘le vers commun’ (Aquien 1990, 28). It remained the preferred lyric stanza until it was dethroned by its triumphant competitor, the alexandrin (Deloffre 1973, 60–2). Thus, Scève uses the dizain carré, ten syllables matching ten lines, and it may therefore be characterized as an isometric form. This symmetry, which fascinates modern readers, also captured Sébillet’s imagination, since perfection for him has mathematical significance: ‘le nombre de dis, est nombre plein et consommé, si nous croions aus Arithmeticiens ou pource que la matiere prise pour

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l’épigramme, y est plus parfaitement déduite, et le son de la ryme entrelassé y rend plus parfaite modulation’ (1988, 110). Scève’s versification may also be defined by what it did not embrace. Though Délie is France’s first canzoniere, Scève adopts neither the sonnet nor the poetic variety of the Rime which included madrigals, chansons, or sestinas. Except for the introductory huitain, all the work’s 449 dizains maintain the same isometric/isostrophic form whose disciplined symmetry extends to its rhyme. In his Éléments de métrique française, Jean Mazaleyrat characterizes the nature of the dizain by reference to Scève’s Délie: that is, the dizain constitutes a ‘structure sévère et accordée à la méditation tendue de la Délie’ (1974, 96). These meditative marks of versification can be seen in dizain 312: Que je m’ennuye en la certaineté Sur l’incertain d’un tel facheux suspend! Voire trop plus, qu’en la soubdaineté, Où le hazard de tout mon bien depent. Mais que me vault si le Coeur se repent? Regret du temps prodiguement usé L’oppresse plus que cest espoir rusé, Qui le moleste, et à fin le poursuyt. Bref quand j’ay bien de moymesme abusé, Je fuis la peine, et le travail me suyt.

(1A) (2B) (3A) (4B) (5B) (6C) (7C) (8D) (9C) (10D)

[How weary I become in the certainty Of the uncertainty of such an irksome irresolution! Much more so than when governed by that suddenness of decision With which chance determines my fate. But what good does it do for my Heart to repent? Regret of time wastefully consumed Oppresses it more than this crafty hope Which molests it and pursues it forever and ever. In brief, when I have well deluded myself, I flee pain but suffering follows after.]

By its indentations the poem clearly articulates the exercise of the three powers. In lines 1–4 the speaker’s mémoire recapitulates love’s frustrations as paradoxes of psychological suspension. He is certain only of his uncertainty, a perpetual movement in place that is exacerbated by sudden turns of chance that dominate his fate. In lines 5–8 his entendement engages this

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dilemma by considering an option of psychological escape: ‘Mais que me vault si le Coeur se repent?’ (v. 5). But this quaestio as a rhetorical question already knows the paralysing answer before the act of analysis is broached: it would be better to connive with deceitful hope than to oppress the heart with the avowal of wasted time. Finally, the volonté responds to the amatory bind presented by the intelligence in the form of a vers-sentence that constricts and constrains the will by its very gnomic concision: ‘Je fuis la peine, et le travail me suyt’ (v. 10). The rhyme scheme is key to understanding how versification articulates the poet-lover’s most recurrent meditative dilemma. Shaped like a return in reverse order (ABABB/CCDCD), it is a perfect icon of antiperistasis typifying the poet-lover’s meditation in desolation where attempts to unravel or flee the problem only reinforce the futility of attempted escape. In dizain 312 it is given visual emphasis by the accompanying impresa, ‘L’Asne au Molin.’ Here a blindfolded donkey turns the upper stone of a mill in never-ending circles surrounded by the motto, ‘Fuyant peine travail me suyt.’ In the motto’s rhetoric, this paradox is shaped by the figure of chiasmus whose four grammatical components are verbal form + noun + noun + verb. This schema, ABBA, adumbrates the rhyme pattern of the poem as a whole, which itself mimes the donkey’s circular treadmill in the impresa: The attempt to flee (AB) only reinstates the same paralysis (BA). In addition to structuring the meditative form of content, versification also reinforces the introspective form of expression. Another way of understanding the rhyme scheme as a systematic reversal is that it functions in tandem with the three powers of the soul as an instrument of specular review. The rhyme scheme as a whole moves backward in order to move forward. In the first quintil (ABABB), the repetition of three B rhymes suggests difficulty in advancing to C, while the C and D rhymes of the second quintil (CCDCD) only unfold by imitating the first quintil. There is a kind of mobile immobility imitating the frustrations of reflection, the viscous cycle of the treadmill encountered by the soul’s three powers. Since the rhyme, structured by a mirror of symmetrical reversal, may initially suggest static if not stagnant poetic organization, it is, quite to the contrary, the index of a dynamic meditative effort to change where all avenues of self-modification remain blocked. In lines 1–4 memory reconstitutes a persistent dilemma whose repetitious nature is imitated by the return of AB in verses 3 and 4. The ‘certaineté’ (1A) of uncertainty only leads to ‘suspend’ (2B), whose sounds are echoed by the ‘soubdaineté’ (3A) of chance on which the lover’s good ‘depent’ (4B). Then in 5B, acting as a pivot, the entendement analyses the problem into an agon of two contending options which begin the second quintil. Just

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as the second quintil is a return in reverse to the first, so the lover’s two alternatives reinstate the problem of uncertainty in a new emotional timbre. This is the economy of pain where deluded hope, though it molests the lover, is preferable to confessing a prodigal delusion. At first glance 5B, giving way to a new rhyme in 6C, raises hope of escape through the analytic consideratio that creates the agon. Taking the step to 6C only resumes a dispirited return to the first four lines in opposite order. Thus, if the heart should repent, then this would arouse regret of time wastefully ‘usé’ (6C), which would inflict more pain than hope ‘rusé’ (7C), even though hope molests the heart in continual pursuit ‘poursuyt’ (8D). The phrase ‘espoir rusé’ (v. 7) provides the rationale for seeing the rhyme as a chiasmatic trope of illusion. Reverse symmetry gives the impression of a decisive turn of events, but like expectations dashed this structure only mirrors the deceptions of love. The last two verses seal this realization. The verb ‘poursuyt’ (v. 8) begins a new rhyme only to find itself caught inextricably in the third meditative movement of the volonté. The specularity offered to the will by memory and understanding makes permanent the poem’s reverse returns by engraving them into an emblematic versmaxime. The lover, doubling back to the donkey’s blind obedience depicted in the device, hardens his experience into a law of self-deceit: ‘Bref quand j’ay bien de moymesme abusé, (9C)/Je fuis la peine, et le travail me suyt’ (10D). Thus, the acts of intelligence and will (CCD/CD) return in reverse to the futility of escaping obsessive memory [ABAB/B(pivot)]. This same rhyme scheme can be marshalled for meditation in positive tones where the mirror reversal corresponds to an ascent in lucidity dramatized by a narrative turn of self-determination: L’Aulbe estaingnoit Estoilles à foison, Tirant le jour des regions infimes, Quand Apollo montant sur l’Orison Des montz cornuz doroit les haultes cymes. Lors du profond des tenebreux Abysmes, Où mon penser par ses fascheux ennuyz Me fait souvent perçer les longues nuictz, Je revoquay à moy l’ame ravie: Qui, dessechant mes larmoyantz conduictz, Me feit cler veoir le Soleil de ma vie.

(1A) (2B) (3A) (4B) (5B) (6C) (7C) (8D) (9C) (10D)

[Dawn was extinguishing Stars in great numbers, Drawing the day from the low regions, As Apollo, rising at the Horizon

(D 79)

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Gilded the high peaks of the horned mountains. Then from the depths of the shadowy Abysses, In which my thought makes me often pierce The long nights with its wearied grief, I recalled to myself my ravished soul Which, drying up my tears, Made me clearly see the Sun of my life.]

The matrix of this poem is the recovery of the beloved’s true image rescued from the abyss of sensual abduction. Particularly suitable to this theme is the same ballade rhyme pattern that emphasizes return as reversal. This poem uses dialectic more narratively than dizain 312 to convey the decisive changes that the poet-lover makes in elevating his soul from the confusion of night to the resurrection of day. In order to communicate the dynamism of this movement, there is but one period in the meditation, a punctuation strategy that allows its 4 + 6 metric rhythm to gain momentum and to carry the narrative to its triumphant conclusion. This period demarcates lines 1–4 where memory opens its view through a composition of place. Its function is to depict a cosmological spectrum of lights where the clair-obscur of dawn draws the yellow and gold of sunrise from the impenetrable abyss of night. In spite of its multifarious transitions, nature is shown to progress in orderly fashion, drawing its light (1A) from its depths (2B), rising from dusk to day (3A) over lowlands and mountains (4B). This movement of nature, steadily and slowly drawing itself up from night, is effectively communicated by the rime croisée where the first light of ‘L’Aulbe’ lifts itself up (1A2B) to grow into ‘Apollo’ rising above the heights (3A–4B). In lines 1–4 the harmonious order and the self-determined character of dawn and sunrise allow the meditator to posit an ideal pattern of natural order for reflection and imitation. The regularity of movement given by the rime croisée is further reinforced by syntactical parallels that suggest the reverse symmetry of the poem as a whole. That is, as the sun rises in the natural world, so the light of Délie grows in the lover’s heart. Shaping these effects is the dynamic grammar that is distributed through chiasmatic structures: Line 1 2 3 4

Verbal Form A imperfect (‘estaingnoit’) B present participle (‘Tirant’) B present participle (‘montant’) A imperfect (‘doroit’)

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Again grammatical chiasmus complements versification, since it presages the entire rhyme of the meditation, which takes the figure of a schéma inversé en miroir. In short, it foresees in ideal form a return to sunrise both in the natural world and in the lover’s being. As in dizain 312, the third rhyme in B is pivotal, but here it stresses a saving synchrony between the poet-lover and nature, not a chute into the clutches of dilemma. Thus, the rime plate of 4B/5B offers a harmonious transition (‘Lors’), if 5B is understood as a movement in reverse back to the morning’s sunburst, for it begins a trajectory from the lover’s interior darkness to the heights of moral clarity. It is precisely at 5B where the speaker uses similitude to guide the entendement. Nature’s self-redeeming dawn provides the lover with parallel inspiration to raise himself out of the ‘profond des tenebreux Abysmes’ (v. 5). The repossession of the woman’s true meaning is conceived as a return simultaneous with nature’s growing light. Emphasizing this parallelism is the second quintil, which, through distinct movements of the entendement and the volonté, heightens the sense of recovery by reverting to the example of nature. Just as the ABABB rhymes of the composition mark the drawing of light from shadows, so the CCDCD rhymes reflect the lover’s virtue as a recalling of his soul from distortion and multiplicity. In 6C understanding moves to self-change, for thought is expressed actively as an infinitive – the thinking (‘penser’) that pierces the long nights of wearied grief (7C). This dawning to agency energizes the speaker to unite his dissociated faculties into a wholly formed ‘Je’ that reintegrates his soul to his being: ‘Je revoquay à moy l’ame ravie:’ (8D). The colon after ‘ravie’ clearly marks a last stage where the volonté registers a purgative sentiment (‘dessechant mes larmoyants conduictz’ 9C), thereby clearing the lover’s horizon for the sight of his one true light: ‘Me feit cler veoir le Soleil de ma vie’ (10D). Dizain 79’s meditative poetics can be appreciated even more when it is analysed it as a strophe composée. According to Mazaleyrat, a stanza is ‘composée’ not only because it contains at least two rhyming systems but also because its versification may contrast with other stylistic ensembles: ‘On notera donc, outre le groupement des vers en strophes simples, l’existence de systèmes composés, dont on observera la relation avec l’ordonnance stylistique de l’ensemble.’79 Thus, dizain 79 is composé because of ‘deux groupements symétriques, donc à schémas inversés, autour d’un noyau central formé par le redoublement plat des deux dominantes (BB/CC), selon la formule d’ensemble a B a B B / C C d C d.’80 Due to this recurrent rhyme scheme and to the isometric quality of the Scevian poem as a decasyllabic dizain, it seems that symmetry dominates the strophic

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structure. However true this may be for its rhyme and isometric organization, other stylistic components come to trouble this virtually invariable pattern. As Aquien notes of Délie, while symmetry is dominant at these levels, one nevertheless observes ‘dissymétrie dans l’organisation syntaxique’ (1990, 101). Her observation accords well with that of Francis Goyet, who in studying Délie’s versification in relation to the Grands Rhétoriqueurs, holds that Scève’s distinction was to inject great variability into the dizain de ballade.81 In dizain 79, such dynamic antiparallelisms are best seen in the sequence of verbal forms that punctuate dramatic interior changes. In line 5 one notices that there is neither verb nor subject, this absence being the syntactic correlate to the poet-lover’s sense of chaos, dissolution, and dispersion of night’s ‘tenebreux Abysmes.’ There is an anticipation of movement in the prepositional phrase ‘Lors du profond’ (5B) that corresponds to an incipient lifting of self from the depths of dark dissipation. In the next line the verbal form is the substantified infinitive ‘penser’ that begins, properly speaking, an unlimited intellectual effort, but without immediate direction or orientation. Using causative faire, line 7 firmly registers a turnabout prodded by thought’s active thinking, a movement from down to up that ‘Me fait souvent perçer les longues nuictz’ (stress mine). Line 8 is one of the most decisive pivots in Délie best captured by Thomas Greene’s statement that iteration turns to event (1972, 75). That is, the seemingly inescapable habits of blinding sensuality, frequently recorded in the iterative, now cede to an elicited act of the will. This is expressed with rare conclusiveness and clarity by the passé défini: ‘Je revoquay à moy l’ame ravie ...’ (8D). In the following verse a contrasting verbal form, the present participle expression ‘dessechant mes larmoyantz conduictz’ (9C), signals the sustaining power of virtue both as lucidity and purification. Augmenting its force and building to its rousing conclusion, the final line remobilizes the earlier causative faire structure. However, instead of using the present iterative, it changes to the past definite to show the absolute reversal from obscurity to clarity, from wandering to fixed attention: ‘Me feit cler veoir le Soleil de ma vie’ (10D). Thus, to reflect the dynamics of emotional dispersion and return to light, the Scevian meditative poem may construct a système composé – asymmetrical grammar and verbal variety that contrast with the inverted mirror scheme of the rhyme. As we have seen from Mazaleyrat’s definition, the Scevian dizain is both a single poetic unit and a strophe composée, a self-standing decasyllabic dizain and a two-part stanza composed of two structures mirroring one another inversely. Sébillet also noted that the organization of Délie’s

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dizains possess a dual character. On the one hand, he observes the sense of wholeness when he says ‘le son de la ryme entrelassée y rend plus parfaicte modulation’ (110). On the other hand, he stresses the dizain as a composite form whose beginning and ending deploy two different rimes croisées centred by two rime plates: ‘Entend donc que réguliérement au dizain lés 4 premiers vers croisent, et lés 4 derniers: ainsy deus en restent a asseoir, dont le cinquiéme symbolise en ryme platte avec le quart, et le siziéme pareillement, comme tu peus voir en ce dizain pris de la Délie de Scéve [302], et en tous lés autres dont ell’est pleine’ (110–11). The observations by Sébillet and Mazaleyrat, noting that the Scevian dizain is both a single unit and a two-part stanza, suggest that Scevian versification offers the speaker a useful meditative tool and an expressive device to reflect one of the most prominent pyschological features of the work: the dissociation of faculties and the consolidation of reconstituting memory, the double phenomenon of dispersion and agglomeration, the all-knowing consciousness able to oversee but unable to control. Dizain 118 is a particularly thorny poem, but it nevertheless offers a telling example of the resources of meditative versification which conform to the observations of Sébillet and Mazaleyrat: Le hault penser de mes frailes desirs Me chatouilloit à plus haulte entreprise, Me desrobant moy mesme à mes plaisirs, Pour destourner la memoire surprise Du bien, auquel l’Ame demoura prise: Dont, comme neige au Soleil, je me fondz Et mes souspirs dès leurs centres profondz Si haultement eslevent leurs voix vives, Que plongeant l’Ame, et la memoire au fondz, Tout je m’abysme aux oblieuses rives.

(1A) (2B) (3A) (4B) (5B) (6C) (7C) (8D) (9C) (10D)

[Great dwelling upon my frail desires has Whipped me to greater endeavour, And stripped me of my pleasures In order to turn my oppressed memory From the aim to which my Soul remained loyal. Thus, like snow in the Sun, I melt, And my sighs, from their deep centres, Raise their clamouring voices so high That, Soul and memory plunging to the depths, I am completely engulfed by the forgetful shores.]

(D 118)

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A paraphrase of lines 1–5 is: ‘The noble aspiration of my frail desires incited me to higher things, hiding me from my pleasures, because they were trying to divert my captive memory from the higher good to which my Soul remained spellbound.’ Even this paraphrase requires supplemental explanation, and greater clarity can be gained by backtracking to the first four lines of dizain 46 where Scève provides the meanings of key psychological terms: Si le desir, image de la chose, Que plus on ayme, est du coeur le miroir, Qui tousjours fait par memoire apparoir Celle, où l’esprit de ma vie repose,

(D 46, vv. 1–4)

[If desire, the image of the thing That one loves the most, is the mirror of the heart, Which always causes by memory to appear She in whom the spirit of my life reposes,]

In dizain 118, the essence of the meditative problem is that in Scève’s psychological system consciousness, memory, and thought are necessarily mediated through sensation which is produced by the coeur. Being the way to knowledge, the coeur is also the seat of affectivity, passion, and desire.82 In dizain 46, desire is the mirror of the heart and also must act through memory in order to make its object appear. Thus, consciousness, thought, and aspiration must necessarily take a risky route, since they are highly susceptible to deceptive fantaisies, disorienting pleasures, and usurpations capable of stealing the franc-arbitre. Returning to dizain 118, the reader bears witness to the stealth of treacherous thieves. The act of spiritual aspiration must necessarily channel itself through frail desires (v. 1). Supremely knowledgeable of the potential for pleasure to turn higher love from its goal, thought attempts to hold pleasure at bay by hiding it from impressionistic memory (vv. 2–4). In dizain 143 ‘le souvenir’ is the ‘ame de ma pensée’ (v. 1), and therefore in dizain 118, since the memory is captive (‘surprise,’ 4B) by the image of the good, the Soul remains similarly taken (‘prise,’ 5B). However, in line 6 at the very moment when the memory is ‘surprised’ by the higher good and when the soul remains ‘prise’ by its noble object (vv. 4–5), this fixity of gaze fails to guard against the silent subversions of ‘frailes desirs’ (1A). The unity of ‘le hault penser’ (1A) now dissipates like melting snow (v. 6), and the oneness of vision is overwhelmed by the plurality of pleasure,

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‘mes souspirs dès leurs centres profondz’ (v. 7). The hault in ‘hault penser’ (1A) and ‘haulte entreprise’ (2B) is travestied through the subsequent adverb ‘haultement’ (8D) describing the fleshy voices of sensual sighs that mark the heights of sexual ecstasy (v. 8). In this complicated psychological world of inverted mirrors, illusions, and reversals, where pleasure insinuates itself into aspiration, it is seen that up means down. The only time that the lover is ‘whole and entire’ is when all his being sinks and dissolves into the oblivion of Lethe: ‘Tout je m’abysme aux oblieuses rives’ (v. 10). How do these points relate to meditative versification? In introspective terms, the poet-lover uses versification in tandem with the reconstituting memory to order consciousness to understand the complexity of love’s subversions. As already shown, the rhyme scheme is a diagram of the one and the many. Though the dizain is a unit, it is also a composite of two quintils that reflect one another in reverse. This fact corresponds to the paradoxical nature of poetic voice when the sense of unity is given by the metavoice who is reciting the fragmentation and the dissolution of his object-self. The composite aspect of the poem, indicated by the disposition of inverted rhymes, clearly demarcates the lover’s two object-selves. In verses 1–5 he admirably focuses on the higher good and fends off the distractions of pleasure, but exactly at the beginning of the second quintil (v. 6), he plunges into the drowning waters of sensuality. In 1505, one of Bembo’s observations on the behaviour of love could serve as the motto of this meditation: ‘from the first desire ... a thousand are born.’83 The composite nature of versification also schematizes the poem’s greatest irony. In the first quintil there is every indication that the lover’s moral and psychic energies are consolidating a unified focus on ‘plus haulte entreprise’ (2B). Yet, contrary to the observations of certain editors, there is no Je that unifies these energies into a central agent (McFarlane 1966 edition, 405). Rather, it is personified, semiautonomous powers floating together in loose association, such as ‘Le hault penser’ (1A), ‘frailes desirs’ (1A), ‘plus haulte entreprise’ (2B), ‘le bien’ (5B), ‘la memoire’ (4B), and ‘l’Ame’ (5B). Whatever the suggestions of the two uses of me (vv. 2–3), these pronouns do not so much connote unified agency but, referred to in the third person, they are the lover-as-object swept into the impersonal processes dictated by his dissociated faculties. With outrageous irony however, ‘je’ (6C) does appear at the start of the second quintil at the very moment when the lover starts to dissolve: ‘ ... comme neige au Soleil, je me fondz’ (6C). Finally, the only sign that the entirety of the lover is present unto discourse, and that he has some degree of agency, arrives in the last line when he disappears into oblivion: ‘Tout je m’abysme aux oblieuses

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rives’ (stress mine). Generally speaking, the composite nature of semantic and syntactic features of the Scevian dizain mirror the riskiness of the agon. Dizain 118 announces the struggle in the first line with the word ‘entreprise’ which implies undertaking something bold and risky (as does the word impresa) – a contest already begun in medias res before our eyes with no indication of outcome. The resources of lyric meditation provide the lover with the rhetorical tools to grasp a third set of relations. On the one hand, the rhyme scheme provides a stabilizing and unifying framework that complements the reconstituting memory which impassively recollects and deploys the factious faculties. Here we return to Sébillet’s judgment that the sense of perfection of the dizain carré is enhanced by the two rimes croisées beginning and ending the poem and separated at the centre by two rimes plates. To be precise, he says, ‘le son de la ryme entrelassée y rend plus parfaite modulation’ (1988, 110). This modulation of rhymes may be schematized as abab/bc/cdcd where the bookend deployment of interlacing rhymes is firmly centred by the successive rimes plates. Let us explain. The inverted nature of the two quintils facilitates comprehending the two extremes of dissociation: fixity and dispersion. In the first quintil, there is a fixity of gaze that, in its magnetized concentration on protecting the memoire (4B) and beholding the bien (5B), still cannot halt the insinuations of pleasure. Certainly the rhymes and assonances of /i/ in the first quintil stress this sense of frozen captivation, especially at the rime plate: ‘desirs’ (1A), ‘entreprise’ (2B), ‘plaisirs’ (3A), ‘surprise’ (4B), ‘prise’ (5B). The problem is that Scève’s imaginaire of virtue imbricates the moral and the sensual, which is why ‘Le hault penser’ (1A) incites or tickles (‘chatouilloit,’ 2B) movement to higher goals. However, the second quintil cedes to the opposite extreme of disintegration where the poet-lover sees himself as melting snow dispersing into multiple centres of sexual pleasure and dissolving in the abyss of the indeterminate. Especially telling are the rhymes in /õ/ – ‘fondz’ (6C), ‘profondz’ (7C), ‘fondz’ (9C), interspersed with ‘vives’ (8D) and ‘rives’ (10D) – that simulate the sinking cries of this formless mix of eros and thanatos. The extreme shift from fixity to dispersion occurring precisely at the centre of the poem is such a swift reversal that it is barely noticeable. Consistent with mannerist art, the rapidity of the psychological change appears not to be prepared by psychological transitions. This is certainly the expression of the surreptitious subversion of pleasure. Structurally, this glissement is partially due to the central rimes plates (surprise–4B/ prise–5B/fondz–6C/profondz–7C), which though breaking a regularity

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between 5B and 6C also cover this change by their underlying pattern of repetition: 2 + 2 = 4B5B/6C7C. This is a figural reflection of the silent and imperceptible onset of melting snow, which in turn provides a finely calibrated symbol for the blindness of vigilance on the part of the object-self. However, the reconstituting memory signals a self who, from the outset of the poem, knows the outcome, since the dizain begins in the imparfait and passé simple. This incommensurability of the two selves is redressed toward the end of the sequence when what Augustine calls the present of the present corresponds with the presents of the past and future.84 A formal connection between song and meditative versification can be teased out by reference to Edwin Duval’s article titled ‘From the Chanson parisienne to Scève’s French Canzoniere: Lyric Form and Logical Structure of the Dizain’ (1994). According to Duval, the dizain is both historically and structurally a musical, not a prosodic form based on the ballade strophe. It consists of two distinct parts in which a single melody or theme is sung twice in succession ending in a final or semifinal cadence followed by a second part that contrasts sharply with the first part in theme or melody and ends with a strong final cadence. The author adds that not only the dizain but also the huitain, sonnet, douzain, and vingtain bear this ‘deep structure’ (ibid., 73) of repeated, parallel couplets followed by a pause and a volta into a contrasting theme. Duval adduces his evidence from the fact that about six of Scève’s dizains were set to music according to this thematic AAB dispositio and also by the examination of the similarity between this properly lyrical structure and a number of Scève’s dizains. One such poem is dizain 93: Theme A A B

Oeil Aquilin, qui tant osas souffrir Les rayz aiguz de celle clarté saincte, A qui Amour vaincu se vint offrir, Donc de ses traictz tu la veis toute ceinte, N’aperçoys tu, que de tes maulx enceinte, Elle te fait tant de larmes pleuvoir? Vueillent les Cieulx par un bening debvoir, Tes pleurs si grandz si largement deduire, Qu’elle les voye en un ruisseau movoir, Qui, murmurant, mes peines puisse dire.

[Eagle’s eye, you who so dared to bear The sharp rays of this saintly brightness,

Rhyme (1A) (2B) (3A) (4B) (5B) (6C) (7C) (8D) (9C) (10D)

(D 93)

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To whom Cupid, vanquished, came to offer himself, Wherefore with his darts you saw her all girt, Do you not see that, girt with your wounds, She makes you rain so many tears? Would that the Heavens, by benevolent duty, Would gather your great tears so amply That she would see them running in a stream Which, murmuring, would speak of my woes.]

In its deepest sense the poem centres around the spiritual theme that the poet-lover must purify his vision in order to gain access to his deepest love. By his apostrophe to ‘Oeil Aquilin’ (1A) the lover implicitly likens his boldness at beholding Délie to the eagle’s ability to look at the sun without being blinded. However, unlike the bird’s powerful sight, the speaker’s eyes are pierced by ‘les rayz aiguz de celle clarté saincte’ (v. 2). This ‘saintly brightness’ is the beloved-as-splendour whose shafts of light are likened to Love’s arrows with which she is girted. In line 5, the beloved is again described as girted (‘enceinte’), this time with the lover’s wounds, suggesting that Diana,85 the chaste huntress, is sporting his pains like booty. In fact, the sight of the beloved’s brilliance has shattered his sight and reduced him to tears. The hapless lover utters a prayer to the heavens to mediate for him, requesting the gods to gather his unspeakable tears into a flowing stream to solicit the beloved’s pity (vv. 7–10). In the Neoplatonic terms of Ficino, the lesson is that access to the pure light of God is always mediated by some virtue, and the attempt to view this light directly in this life is unbearable and undoable (Commentary, VI:13). Duval explains Scève’s adaption of the ballade strophe to this poetic composition in the following manner: ... a reader sensitive to the force of lyric form will readily see that the parallel couplets (‘Oeil Aquilin, qui ... A qui ... ’) consist entirely of a prolonged vocative, roughly paraphrasable as: ‘O eagle!’, while the B section consists of two complete, logically related sentences addressed to the eagle. To this grammatical shift corresponds a more substantial one. At the volta a new paradox is introduced that will be systematically exploited to the end: that of the eagle-eyed eagle’s tears (‘larmes,’ ‘pleurs’). Whereas the couplets establish only that the eagle has dared to gaze on the poet’s lady, the rest of the epigram develops the unfortunate consequences of his act, as well as the poet’s reaction to those consequences, all in a continuous direct address to the eagle that was invoked in the couplets: ‘N’aperçoy tu ...? Vueillent les Cieulx ... Tes Pleurs ... deduire!’ (Duval 1994, 81–2)

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Thus, according to Duval’s schema, theme A is contained in lines 1–2 forming the first couplet, and a repetition of this theme (A) is found in lines 3–4 composing the second couplet. The volta, occurring in line 5, begins a second theme (B) related to the new paradox of the eagle’s tears, which extends to the end of the dizain. Thanks to this analysis it can be seen how Scève’s meditative dynamics exploit the thematic dispositio of the ballade strophe. First, the volta marking the change from theme A to theme B responds very well to the contradictory experiences of the lover, the intellectual conundrums, and the defeats of desire. Second, Scève uses the dizain to expand the B theme which provides the second half of what Mazaleyrat has termed the schéma inversé en miroir. In this case the B theme provides a Platonic return to the heavens through a process of purifying spiritual sight. Now to the first point regarding introspective dialectics. Theme A in lines 1–2, describing the ‘Oeil Aquilin’ constitutes the composition of place where the poet-lover figures the eagle’s vision as a bold if not risky ideal of contemplative power. It is an emblematic simile of an audacious specular model, a test of vision, so to speak, where the poet-lover implicitly compares his sight to the eagle’s imperturbable acuity. In her critical edition of Délie Françoise Joukovsky notes that ‘Le poète s’adresse à ses propres yeux, qui ont osé supporter la clarté de la dame’ (1996 edition, 254). Even at this initial stage of visual aspiration the speaker is somewhat tentative about his powers being commensurate with the ideal of the eagle’s dauntless sight. As in the blasons anatomiques, the poet-lover aprostrophizes the bodily component (‘Oeil Aquilin’), thereby detaching the part from the addresser and the addressee as if it were an objectively separate entity. Ambiguity then arises about what this eye refers to. Are the poet’s eyes really like those of the eagle? Is the eagle really indomitable before the sun? Are even the eagle’s eyes burnt to ashes before something higher than the sun, namely Délie’s ‘clarté saincte’ (v. 2)? At the very outset, these problems signal uncertainty over whether the powerful model will fit the ill-prepared suitor. The poem is a meditation that endeavours to answer these questions. In fact, the second pictorial simile, that of Diana, the chaste huntress, brings the entendement to bear in confirming the troubling boldness of that ideal. This corresponds to Duval’s repetition of theme A in lines 3–4, for the dangers of the sun’s rays are now paralleled to the fatal arrows worn by the goddess for whom even the intrepid eagle becomes sacred offering (‘se vint offrir,’ v. 3). In verses 5–6 Diana wears the lover’s wounds like game in her belt: ‘N’aperçoys tu, que de tes maulx enceinte, /Elle te fait tant de larmes pleuvoir?’ This meditative quaestio, as Mauburnus

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would call it, is the key moment of understanding that provides the volta, as Duval terms it, to a new introspective movement. Given the striking image of the eagle in tears, the lover’s audacity is justly measured; he now abandons ambition for humility. The last four lines develop this moral and thematic volta as a prayer of pity, marking the final stage of meditation involving the volonté. No longer seeking the eagle’s aggressive gaze but still turned skyward the poet-lover voices a supplication (optio) to ‘les Cieulx’ (v. 1) to gather his tears into a murmuring stream the better to move Délie to compassion. The second point related to versification is that Scève treats the volta of theme B not as a categorical opposite of theme A but as an inverted return to the initial problem that functions like counterrepetition. What is distinctively Scevian in the development of the lyric is chiasmatic reversal where the turn in theme, image, or rhyme retraces its steps in parallel opposition creating strong effects of reflection and self-consciousness. This may be called variously the reflux of the soul, the specular activity of the mind, retrospective emblematics, or the antiphon of the song. Among the important functions served by such organization are inward self-mastery and the Platonic notion of return to the source. In dizain 93 Duval’s theme B, the striking notion of ‘the eagle-eyed eagle’s tears’ (81) is indeed a turn in the poem but one that nevertheless mirrors in reverse theme A centred on the ‘Oeil Aquilin.’ Let us concentrate on thematic alternation, rhyme, and image. As noticed in the previous two poems, the line serving as the pivot to theme B is verse 5, which immediately precedes the second half of the chiasmatic rhyme reversal, thus: 1A2B3A4B/5B/6C7C8D9C10D. We should not expect to find exact, reverse symmetry between this rhyme scheme and the relations of images, but certain semantic and figural returns-in-reverse are prominent. Significant in this regard are images of the circle and its attendant symbolisms. The eye as reflexivity conditions all the subsequent images of contrastive return in versification and theme. Thus, in theme A, the ascending vision of the ‘Oeil Aquilin’ (v. 1), symbolizing the lover’s audacity, is revisited in theme B but inverted by the descending rain of tears. In theme A the beloved is ‘toute ceinte’ (4B) which rhymes with ‘saincte’ (2B) since it symbolizes chastity. However, the lover’s designs on the beloved are reversed in the same terms, because in theme B Diana is sporting the lover’s pains in her belt, ‘de tes maulx enceinte’ (5B). Also, the lover entreats ‘les Cieulx’ (7C) in theme B in order to redress the pain of the ‘Oeil Aquelin’ (1A) in theme A. This attempt to rectify imperfect vision ties ‘the Heavens’ (7C) to another circular symbol, to the Platonic associations of ceint, whose vari-

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ous meanings are scattered throughout Délie. Among such notions are the planetary or cosmological band of virtues, particularly the celestial chords of music that in this dizain the lover sees in ‘les Cieulx’ (7C).86 Chastened sight cedes to sound, for the piercing cries and the endless tears caused by shafts of light in theme A are converted into the mellifluous murmur of running streams in theme B. One can understand why Duval likens the Scevian dizain to the ballade strophe, since the poet-lover confides in the power of harmonies in order to regain the beloved’s eyes: ‘Qu’elle les voye en un ruisseau movoir,/Qui, murmurant, mes peines puisse dire’ (vv. 9–10, stress mine). Therefore, Scève’s use of the B theme in the ballade is not a break from the A theme, but rather an inverted return to that theme, an oppositional reversion 87 which is mirrored in the rhyme scheme. The meditative advantages of this versification strategy is to enhance self-consciousness to the greatest degree, functioning like a limitless enfolding of light and virtue. The depth of Scève’s specularity is striking when one considers that his mirrors are introspective tools which, like the ‘Oeil Aquilin’ (v. 1), use ambiguity as critical reflections to multiply differences in the same. If this is the logic of versification, then it also corresponds to the logic of philosophic love as a return through which the purificatory virtues of moderation reverse the descent into overestimation. The emblem and symbol of this logic is the weeping eagle. The meditative moral, essential to Plato and to contemporary Neoplatonists such as Ficino, is that the unprepared eye ‘cannot bear to look at the light itself as its source.’88 But it only learns this by looking back. Versification and Contemplation: The Ideal Symbolism of the Scevian Dizain Let us return to Sébillet to see the connections he makes between perfection and the dizain: ‘Le dizain est l’épigramme aujourd’huy estimé premier, et de plus grande perfection ... pourceque le nombre de dis, est nombre plein et consommé, si nous croions aux Arithmeticiens’ (Sébillet 1988, 110) [Today the dizain is the epigram held in the highest esteem and considered of the highest perfection ... because the number ten, to believe the Arithmeticians, is full and complete]. That Sébillet is alluding to the Pythagorean tradition is made clear from his ‘Premier Livre de l’Art Poetique’ where he describes poets as ‘children of the Gods’ (9–10) because of ‘quelque don divin, et céleste prérogative, laquèle est clérement montrée par lés nombres dont les Poétes mesurent leurs carmes, la perfec-

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tion et divinité desquelz et soutient et entretient l’admirable machine de cest univers, et tout ce qu’elle clost et contient’89 [because of some divine gift, and celestial prerogative, which is clearly shown by the numbers with which the Poets measure their songs, the perfection and divinity of which support and maintain the admirable machine of this universe, and everything that it closes and contains]. According to Vincent F. Hopper, ‘the originality of the Pythagorean treatment of number lay in the enunciation of two fundamental principles: the exaltation of the decad as containing all numbers and therefore all things, and the geometric conception of mathematics’ (1938, 34). In Touches of Sweet Harmony S.K. Heninger, Jr. shows that Pythagoras’s biographers, commentators, and disciples such as Porphyry, Plutarch, and Theon of Smyrna considered the decad ‘the number of perfection’ (1974, 152–3, 206). David Fideler makes the valuable distinction that ‘the Pythagoreans did not see One as a number at all, but as the principle underlying number, which is to say that numbers – especially the first ten – may be considered as manifestations of diversity in a unified continuum’ (Fideler, in Guthrie 1988, 21). According to Plutarch’s understanding of Plato’s Timaeus, God is a spiritual geometer who produces a soul that orders otherwise primordial matter by giving it form and shape (Heninger 1974, 207). Thus, the godhead produces an anima mundi through a quaternion which acts as a matrix of infinite combinatorials whose limit is 10. The primordial figures are point, line, surface, and solid which correspond to the fundamental numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, whose sum is 10. However, though the decad is finite, reflecting the oneness of the world soul or monad, it possesses the unlimited potential to recreate and reshape the world as a continuous vivifying force. Theon assigned fundamental independence to the decad and to the tetractys and enumerated 10 categories of being in a way that became fashionable in the Renaissance (ibid., 152–3, 196). In addition to the classifications already noted, he inclcuded simple bodies (fire, air, water, earth), shapes of simple bodies (pyramid, octahedron, isosahedron, cube), seasons of the year, and the ages of man (infancy, youth, manhood, old age). Thus, the Pythagorean decad can be seen not only as the symbol of perfect being, but also as the generative matrix providing the principles and concepts of the sensible world (ibid., 76–7). The dizain therefore bears rich symbolism in virtue of its relation to Pythagorean and Platonic metaphysics. With regard to introspection, the dizain is an object to contemplate for both the reader and Scève’s poetlover. In the Republic Plato teaches that those fit for ruling should ‘turn upward the vision of their souls and fix their gaze on that which sheds light on all’ (VII:540a). In the Summa Theologiae, Saint Thomas provides

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extensive historical reviews of the term contemplatio as well as useful definitions and distinctions through Dionysius and Richard of Saint Victor. One of his own formulations is that contemplation is ‘a simple gaze upon a truth’ (simplicem intuitum veritatis)90 which is superior to discursive reasoning and accompanied by admiration. He also recommends the notion of Richard of Saint Victor that ‘contemplation is the soul’s penetrating an easy gaze on things perceived’ (Summa vol. 46, 2a 2ae, 180, 3). What are the specific symbolic meanings to be contemplated in the dizain? The dizain is number in the Pythagorean sense which, according to Heninger, is ‘a form determined by an arrangement of points’ (1974, 71). In Scève’s case this is the square. In and of itself the dizain is a static and stable figure of unity, pattern, and stability. In the Pythagorean sense determined by number, it is unity understood as a compound or in Heninger’s words, a ‘unity simultaneous with diversity’ (ibid., 84). However, in Délie, one is also invited to contemplate its ideal function. Literary history records that the originality of Délie resides in its versification, since, unlike the variety of Petrarch’s Rime, it is (excepting the introductory huitain) entirely composed of dizains.Therefore, the reader is beckoned to behold its ideal role which for 449 times attempts to draw unity from multeity, pattern from praxis, the same from the different. The dizain accomplishes this function in two senses. First, its unity in diversity can be seen as an encyclopedic spirit gleaning from the multitude of phenomena certain recognizable objects of institutionalized knowledge. Here it is not a matter of applied numbers but of aspiration to relate experience to general or universal forms of understanding. In Scève, erudition is compressed into poetry having encyclopedic depth and breadth microcosmically condensed in the dizain – the centre and point of intellection. Thus, for example, simultaneous contrariety is expressed through physics in the word ‘antiperistase’ (D 292, v. 10), Délie’s beauty of proportion is conceived architecturally as the ‘Colomne de ma vie’ (D 418, v. 10), and the herbal antidote to love’s wounds is ‘dictamnum’ (D 422, v. 1). The dizain has also reflected cosmology, referring to earth as ‘la Machine ronde’ (D 53, v. 1), to the moon as the ‘Basse Planete’ (D 282, v. 1), to the heights of vision as ‘le hault ciel Empirée’ (D 4, v. 1). The four elements are constantly invoked, frequently as contentious adversaries, such as ‘le feu, et l’eau’ (D 447, v. 3), and the dizain is often the matrix of other basic figures such as ‘une Piramide’ ( D 408, v. 4), an ‘arc’ (D 25, v. 9), an ‘oblique’ (D 349, v. 8), a ‘centre’ (D 330, v. 1), a ‘carré’ (D 418, v. 1), and a moving figure of Cupid’s ‘whirling’ arrows: ‘Pyrouettant sur moy ses fallebourdes’ (D 137, v. 4). The lover calculates his fate by astrological coordinates (‘Procyon,’

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D 62, v. 1), distils his emotions through alchemy (‘L’Alembic,’ device 23), registers his depths of venomous pain physiologically (‘au profonds Puys,’ D 42, v. 8), measures his enduring fidelity by the ‘waterclock’ (‘Clepsidre,’ D 119, v. 6), sees his congelation as specific mineral (‘sel Agringentin,’ D 373, v. 1), and reckons Délie’s absence by Platonic physics (‘un Siecle Platonique,’ D 367, v. 1). The second ideal function of the dizain is to provide a pattern for the poet-lover’s various introspective methods. This is another sphere of contemplation. The Scevian poem, being a dizain carré, establishes perfect equality between the number of lines and the number of syllables – a 10:10 ratio for the whole and the part, lines and syllables. This design of self-imitating perfection offers itself to the speaker as a goal of spiritual commensurability. The question posed throughout Délie is whether the content of dissociated experience can ever be resolved into the forms of perfect virtue. Therefore, the ideal of the dizain as numerical perfection is the standard for superimposed introspective models. Just as Augustine seeks to unify experience through a concept of time having three presents, thereby merging time with the eternal, so the poet-lover wishes to participate in relatively timeless paradigms by converging past, present, and future into the immediacy of meditative forms. Just as Ignatius folds the three powers into a fully integrated composition of place, itself the point of physical and spiritual unity, so the lover attempts a convergence of memory, intellect, and will through emblematization. Finally, since the dizain takes part in Pythagorean number, it is changeless and permanent. The lover’s meditative correlate to this is the imperturbable organizing consciousness of the Augustinian reconstituting memory that oversees all events, whatever their consequences. In fact, Augustine himself affirms that ‘a square stands firm on any side’ (Hopper 1938, 80). The dizain can also be contemplated as a hieroglyph understood in the Renaissance context of an ideograph revealing a profound insight into the essence of an object that can be spontaneously known through divine inspiration. As recalled, the dizain, reflecting the decad, is not only the perfect number but also in relation to the Pythagorean geometric notion of number, it participates in the quaternion as a perfect square. To see the square and to note the versification is to experience the dizain as a purely self-reflexive form in its simultaneity of perception and intellection. In his book La Versification the French linguist Pierre Guiraud describes versification as ‘L’hypostase de la forme,’ and concurs with Paul Valéry that, unlike prose, which is transitive and oriented to its informational content, versification is a ‘proportion sensible à l’oreille’ and therefore possesses

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‘une valeur intrinsèque absolue’ (1978, 51–2). In the contemplative sense Scève exploits the perfect iconicity of versification by transforming it into metaphysical hypostatization, an increasingly revelatory relay of three mirrors from poetic measurement to symbolic number to hieroglyphic wisdom inspired by Pythagorean thought. To find some approximation between intellectual vision and the woman’s beauty, the poet-lover expresses a wish to be even more than Argus – all eyes: ‘Que ne suis donc plus, qu’Argus, tout en yeulx?’ (D 290, v. 10). Certainly this desire to make sight all-powerful is quite in keeping with the Renaissance hieroglyphic ideal to achieve spontaneous, intuitive knowledge through contemplation of an objectified, pictorial idea (Iversen 1961, 46, 64). It is the chiastic nature of Délie’s predominant rhyme scheme that reveals a gesture of omniscience. In this schéma inversé en miroir through its two quintils (ABABB/CCDCD) the dizain invariably conserves the past as it moves by proleptic repetition to the future. Moving forward only by return, it preserves the totality of the past through its ten-line quest for perfect virtue where the second quintil is already prefigured in the first. In other words, meditative versification repeats by inversion in anticipation of consequence. This is true for meditative dizains of any character, whether they emphasize painful paradoxes such as dizain 312 emblematized by the mobile stasis of the treadmill, or whether they emphasize the triumph of aspiration, such as dizain 79 where narrative drama converts the abyss of night into the resurrection of day. Finally, the poet-lover’s desire to enhance intellectual sight connects hieroglyphic epistemology with Pythagorean metaphysics. That is, the lover’s deepseated impulse to possess comprehensive vision through the economy of verification corresponds with the Pythagorean ideal of order as limit (peras) through which the diversity and multiplicity of experience (the unlimited or the apeiron) can be generated and understood through a finite set of elements.91 Conclusion: Ontology of Le Bien du Mal We may now ask, how does the use of meditation as a model for studying Délie enhance our understanding of the work? As a method of selfknowledge, meditation offers the poet-lover and the reader a structure of introspection and a dynamic practice of self-reflection modelled by Ignatius and by Augustine respectively. Since by Délie’s very title, the beloved is ‘l’object de plus haulte vertu,’ both structure and practice are deployed in the poet-lover’s effort to emulate and possess the woman’s power. In

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order to assimilate her force, the poet-lover challenges himself through a deliberate trial which is given shape and movement through the meditative method. The Augustinian practice of dramatic self-analysis reconstitutes an agon or a set of obstacles sprung by Délie which divide the meditator into sharply contending roles that attempt to break an impasse. This wilful contention precipitated by the reconstituting memory systematically unfolds through the Ignatian dispositio of composition of place, analysis, and emotional response which in metaphysical terms correspond to the soul’s faculties of memory, intelligence, and will. With respect to the poetlover, the interaction between Augustinian meditative practice and Ignatian structure creates a test that measures the efficacy of practical virtue confronted with its ideal outcome of self-mastery. That is, the deployment of the three powers presupposes that the soul is potentially effective in achieving its aims; but Délie-as-agon constantly develops and appraises this potential whose limits and realization become a quest for self-understanding. At the most abstract level the Pythagorean symbolism of the dizain’s structure of versification offers the greatest test in suggesting that the community of the lover and the beloved may forge intellection from perception, paradigm from time, and unity from multiplicity. Emblematic discourse in the form of the impresa both complements and transforms the tradition of meditative rhetoric. The rhetorical philosophy of the device, corresponding to the practice of appealing to the eye in religious meditation, is that the intelligible is best apprehended through the visual. The impresa not only articulates the larger dispositio of Délie with its fifty pictures appearing among its forty-nine poetic novenary groups, it also enhances meditative rhetoric in the relation between a given poem and its dizain-glose. Its transformation of the meditative tradition is to marshal the deliberate difficulty of the device to enhance concentration, attention, and resolution. From the viewpoint of response, emblematic discourse also commits the reader to an ethics of intellectual difficulty which correlated to the poet-lover’s épreuve becomes the reader’s realization of ‘vertu.’ Moreover, the device not only provides a composition of place for the accompanying dizain, it also encapsulates in isolation the tripartite meditative components and thereby conditions the reader to recognize the meditative structure of poems that themselves begin with visual images. Last, the impresa which gives form and intelligibility to thought, is used by Délie to provide a space for gathering the displaced and dispersed being of the poet-lover. As examined in dizain 71 the lover is exiled from the self in the unrepresentable in-between of life and death. If in Ficino’s words he is ‘sine domicilio,’ then emblematic meditation provides a body/ soul surrogate or a textual locus to negotiate grim necessity.

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Délie adopts meditative rhetoric associated with religion in order to enhance humanist optimism embodied in a pagan goddess. However, the pagan goddess herself, both human and divine, reveals religious dimensions in quite human aspirations, especially in love. While living in times marked by burgeoning naturalism, Scève calls upon the sacred rhetoric of both Christianity and antiquity in order to return with new poetic vigor to the ancient thought of Plato and Plotinus to hold that the human capacities can ignite a spark of the divine. Scève has clearly chosen an uncomfortable lot for his poet-lover who straddles the sacred and the profane, the mystical and the natural. Dizain 240 uses the tripartite Ignatian structure and the religious lexicon to hallow three secular conversions: the transformation of courtly love sacrifice into ‘doulx servage’ (v. 1), the poet-lover’s elevation of sacrifice into ‘Fame’ (v. 6), and by this act, his power to confer immortality to the beloved. Just the same, these conversions mirror the properly religious ones of surrender to the divine, consecration of renunciation to his goddess, and confidence in spiritual reward. Meditative rhetoric reveals that even in its most triumphant moments, Délie will bear witness to a problematic relation between freedom and necessity. Analysis of dizain 143 has shown that though the poet-lover’s metaself cannot directly free its object-self from the snares of deception, it obliquely supplements blunted volition by the rhetoric of meditation, which in turn allows Délie’s power to restore his moral equilibrium. Not entirely self-sufficient, his introspection is nonetheless the vital force that actualizes Délie’s potential within him, as Augustine’s inner regression into memory allows him to discover his own links to divinity. Just as Adam in Scève’s biblical epic Microcosme becomes the relatively self-reliant homo faber ‘Infatigable ... et riche en ses outils’ (v. 191),92 so Délie’s poet-lover develops his own method of meditative rhetoric to tap the woman’s power within him. Finally, the meditative model gives insight into what vertu means in Délie. Since the text often situates vertu within the context of freedom vs necessity, it is useful to rejoin this meaning within that framework. There is the regnum gratiae and the regnum naturae. In the first order, the terms freedom and necessity are viewed as antinomies. For example, Augustine maintains that in the context of divine power, humans are utterly unable to avoid sin by their own will and therefore necessarily require grace to be saved. In the second order, freedom and necessity are viewed as a correlation where, according to Cassirer, science and art ‘conceive of the law to which they are subject more and more as the expression of their essential freedom’ (1963, 143). This may be seen in Leonardo’s Trattato della pittura where he celebrates necessity as capturing the physical laws of

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nature through the certezza of mathematics (ibid., 154). Elsewhere Leonardo digresses from his scientific observations to rejoice over the unspeakable wonders of scientific necessity: ‘O marvellous Necessity, thou with supreme reason constrainest all effects to be direct result of their causes, and by a supreme and irrevocable law every natural action obeys thee by the shortest possible process! ... O mighty process! What talent can avail to penetrate a nature such as this? What tongue will it be that can unfold so great a wonder? Verily none! This it is that guides the human discourse to the considering of divine things.’93 In Délie, the poet-lover’s experience with freedom/necessity through the inescapable le bien du mal/le mal du bien is neither wholly an antinomy nor wholly a positive correlation. If the courtly love manifestation of this paradox is taken as ‘doulx servage’ (D 240, v. 1), then there is a dialectic involved in which the negative pole is not only opposed to the positive but is also the very means of fulfilling it. From this aboriginal paradox, the poet-lover confronts the challenge of converting obstacle and lack into realization and growth of the human powers. To call this gesture a decidedly existential act is to stress that the poet-lover does not so much discover the logos as he creates himself phoenix-like from the ashes of struggle. In this respect, he differs from Augustine’s effort to find his ultimate principles. In asking how to discover the Lord, and whether or not it is through memory, he uses forms of the verb invenire (to find): ‘Ubi ergo te inveni, ut discerem te? Neque enim iam eras in memoria mea, priusquam te discerem. Ubi ergo te inveni ut discerem te, nisi in te supra me?’94 On the other hand, for Scève’s poet-lover, it is more a matter of making than finding but a making that, while not fully integrating the divinity, appears inspired by the divinity to realize his human powers. Religious sensibility is summoned to hallow the positive side of a volatile and reversible dialectic – the primordial and irreducible condition out of which the poet-lover makes himself.

3 Lyric Dispossession and the Powers of Enigma

Eloquent Aphasia Poetry is the expression to which one resorts when overwhelmed by something ‘beyond words.’ Two human encounters that defy the powers of expression to match desire and word are love and God. In Délie emblematics and meditation intersect with the problem of ineffability. Central to the textual logic of the work is the poet-lover’s plaint of blunted or severed speech which he sees as an epistemological and communicative failure to make expression commensurate with desire. The speaker is both poet and lover, but the former cannot summon language that satisfies the latter’s need to name the woman, to describe his ‘mal,’ and to convince her of his worthiness. However, a mythic mediation, dispersed in fragments throughout Délie, provides the speaker with a poetics for approximating his lament. This is the melancholic tale of Philomela and Procne, which first appears in dizain 31 and then reappears in poems 238, 255, 342, and 358. Just as Philomela, whose tongue was cut out, devises a surrogate form of expression to communicate with her compassionate sister Procne, so the frustrated speaker seeks to circumvent direct speech by a highly oblique but alluring language that simulates his grief to an empathetic listener. Emblematic discourse is an important textual site for this compensatory language, since through the difficulty of the impresa, the speaker can write around his ‘mal’ and transfer the task of naming to the reader. From a critical angle, this way of viewing the work has the advantage of uniting the reader’s response to Délie, as an obscure poetic sequence, to the internal demands of its textual problematics. Also, since ineffability is caused by the speaker’s inability to fathom the divine, particularly to reconcile his Promethean will to self-sufficiency with his avowals of utter contingency, it is appropriate to place his verbal perplexities within one of the religious

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models. For this chapter that model will be Augustine. Finally, if the poetlover displaces his problem of ineffability to the reader through emblematic discourse, then the latter must approach the text as a form of impresa writing. Unravelling the text is to speak with and for the poet-lover who ceaselessly motivates his reader by the eloquent ellipses between pictures and words. Contemporary Responses To Délie: The Relation of Reception to Poetics Throughout Délie the speaker laments his inability to name his suffering, to convince the woman to return his love, and to forge a poetic language adequate to desire. Sometimes ineffability will be the result of the poetlover’s mystical transport in which elation ravishes his speech. Other times he may fault poetry itself as inherently deficient. More subjectively, he may perceive the beloved as having cruelly broken her end of the communication circuit, or he might be swamped by self-accusations of unworthiness. Falling into insignificance before the excellence of Délie or frozen at the prospect of emitting an effective speech act, he confesses: Je sens en moy la vilté de la crainte Movoir l’horreur à mon indignité Parqui la voix m’est en la bouche estaincte Devant les piedz de ta divinité.

(D 381, vv. 1–4)

Tant me fut lors cruellement piteuse L’affection, qui en moy s’estendit, Que quand la voix hardie, et puis honteuse Voulut respondre, un seul mot ne rendit: Mais, seulement souspirant, attendit,

(D 130, vv. 1–5)

[I feel the vileness of fear arousing Horror in me at my own unworthiness, Wherefore is my voice extinguished in my mouth Before the feet of your divinity] [So much was the passion that spread in me Cruelly pitiful then That when its voice, at first bold and then shameful, Wanted to answer, it answered not a single word,

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But only sighing, it waited Until it was asked: to what do you think to attain?]

However, it is not only the poet-lover whose speech and understanding are blocked in the encounter with Délie. In complementary fashion Scève’s very contemporaries found his own writing difficult to comprehend – a fact that is amply recorded in their complaints of the author’s insuperable obscurity. One of Scève’s admirers and closest friends, Pontus de Tyard, reports that a would-be reader of Délie, upon scanning a single verse, dropped the book before reaching the second line (Tyard, 68). Other writers echo similar criticisms. Thomas Sébillet records that the envieux of Scève found him hermetic and elliptical, forcing them to ‘ignorer bonne part de la conception de l’autheur’ (1988, 32–3). Charles Fontaine, deploring the poet’s recondite diction, avowed to Scève, ‘Tes vers .../requierent un docteur’ (Parturier 1961, xxxi). Du Bellay believed that the text would be no more clear ‘aux plus Sçavans, comme aux plus Ignares’ (2001, 124). Jacques Peletier Du Mans composed a poem entitled ‘A un Poete escrivant obscurement’ which combines denunciation and sarcastic advice: Tes vers obscurs donnent à maintz espriz En les lisant, fascherie & torment: Pource qu’on croit que tu les as escriz Pour parapres y faire le comment, Ou bien affin, & je ne say s’on ment, Qu’en eux ne soit ta pensee choisie: Or s’il y a fruit en ta Poesie, On le deust lire à clair sans commentaire: Mais si tu veux cacher ta fantaisie, Il ne faudroit seulement que te taire. (quoted from Parturier 1961, xxxi–xxxii) [Your obscure verses give surprise to many, Grief, vexation, and torment in their reading: Because people believe that you have written them To make affected flourishes and defy comprehension, Or (and I know not if they lie) so that In them your thoughts might not be chosen. But if there is fruit in your Poetry, One ought to read clearly without commentary: But if you wish to hide your fancy, It would only be necessary to be quiet.]

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To be sure, Scève was greatly admired as well, particularly by Pernette du Guillet and the cénacle of Pontus de Tyard composed of Guillaume des Autelz, Claude de Taillemont, Philibert Bugnyon, and Claude de Pontoux (Parturier 1961, xxxvi, n. 1). What is interesting about their encomia of Scève is that they tended to praise him for precisely the characteristics that brought him criticism. In his Solitaire premier ou Discours des Muses et de la Fureur poétique (1552) Pontus de Tyard presents himself as the defender of difficult poetry by alluding to arguments found in Plato’s Phaedrus.1 l’intention du bon Poëte n’est de non estre entendu, ny aussi de se baisser et accommoder à la vilté du vulgaire (duquel ils sont le chef) pour n’attendre autre jugement de ses oeuvres que celuy, qui naistroit d’une tant lourde cognoissance. Aussi n’est ce en si sterile terroir qu’il desire semer la semence qui luy rapporte loüange. Bien desireroit-il que ces chassieux (mais aveugles) eussent la veüe bonne, et peussent cognoistre que ce qu’ils cherchent sous nom de facilité, n’est rien moins que facilité. (Tyard, 67) [the intention of the good Poet is not to be not understood, nor to lower himself to accommodate the baseness of the vulgar (of whom they are the leader) and expect no other judgment of his works than that which derives from a sottish and dull familiarity. It is not in the sterile soil that he wishes to sow the seeds that bring him praise. Rather he would desire that these blear-eyed (but blind) persons might have the right kind of vision and know that, what they seek under the name of facility, is only facility.]2

These incontestable responses to Délie’s difficulty, either as pervasive obscurity or as hermetic wisdom, should not be considered diametrically opposed positions. On the contrary, they should be synthesized to account for the work as a type of eloquent speechlessness. François Rigolot has teased out the various onomastic traditions that are useful in understanding Délie’s challenging discourses (Rigolot 1977, 11–24). The ancient theories of the Cabala and Gnostic exegesis, Cratylism and Platonic mysticism, medieval practices centring around the figura etymologica and onomastica sacra, the Rhétoriqueurs’ arithmosophie figurative, Renaissance Neoplatonism and anagrammatical practices – these are very illuminating observations on what I would term langue in Saussure’s sense of the word.3 However, within the context of Délie’s problematics of poetic speech, there is another dimension that requires more development at the level of parole.4 This is the particular ways in which Délie as a text defines its

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own expressive problems and potential solutions.5 Citing examples of the inexpressibility topos in Délie as well as the reception of the work by contemporaries would substantially serve understanding of the work to relate reception to textual logic. Addressing this relation would answer the question of how problems of reading Délie are correlated with the poet-lover’s plaint of ineffability. In more functional terms this requires examining the imprese and the poems modelled on them in the context of textual difficulty.6 The Unknowable and the Ineffable One of the most important functions of Délie’s imprese is to provide a semiotic site for enacting the poet-lover’s difficulties with poetic speech. A return to the fourteenth picture and its companion dizain offers a good starting point for studying this problem. Entitled ‘Tour Babel,’ the picture shows human figures fleeing an immense tower which is surrounded by the motto, ‘Contre le ciel nul ne peult.’ As already seen in chapter 2 the accompanying poem alludes to an analogy founded on the biblical lesson of overweening pride. Just as the sons of Noah, in reaching for the heavens, were punished for daring to overreach their power, so the poet-lover, in attempting to bend the woman’s moral rigour, is rebuffed by her indomitable virtue. As this theme is progressively developed in the companion dizain, the reader notes that the lover experiences the woman’s rectitude as divine retribution inflicted on his frustrated will. Facing the inexorable logic of his situation, the speaker concludes that no human effort can defend against nor overcome the beloved’s superhuman power. Mais si des Cieulx pour me faire douloir, A tous benigne, à moy est inhumaine, De quoy me sert mon obstiné vouloir? Contre le Ciel ne vault deffence humaine.

(D 123, vv. 7–10)

Since readers are asked to place this dizain in the context of its companion impresa, they would logically link the powerlessness inflicted by unrequited love with an important aspect of the biblical story. This is the confusion of languages that the Lord perpetrated on the Hebrews for their audacity. As Claude-Gilbert Dubois has demonstrated, this is one of the myths of fallen speech to which sixteenth-century writers referred in explaining the multiplicity of languages in the world (1970, 20). The confusion of tongues, portrayed in the impresa by the human figures running

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from the Tower, scattered the once united people all over the world. Thus, in Délie the Babel episode is extended to the metaphysics of speech. Just as Adam’s ancestors were dispersed throughout the world for overextending their reach, so lover’s words are scattered in confusion throughout the poetic sequence for attempting to express the ineffable. The theme of the dispersion of language is linked not only to the Bible but also to Scève’s master model, Petrarch. Honoured in D 417 as ‘ce Thuscan Apollo,’7 the Italian also explored the phenomenon of tacens vocem habet which is connoted by the title of his lyric Rime sparse: Scattered Rhymes. To be precise, Petrarch provided an intertext for Scève whose speaker laments the debilities inflicted by unrequited love on speech and sight: Veggio senza occhi, et non ò lingua et grido, et bramo di perir et cheggio aita, et ò in odio me stesso et amo altrui.

(R 134, vv. 8–10)

[I see without eyes and I have no tongue and yet cry out; and I wish to perish and I ask for help; and I hate myself and love another.]

In addition, Petrarch intertwines the ineffable with the religious when his lyric persona complains of speechlessness before the indescribable divine light of the beloved’s eyes: Né giamai lingua umana contar poria quel che le due divine luci sentir mi fanno

(R 72, vv. 10–12)

[Nor could any human tongue relate what the two divine lights make me feel]

In the above poem Petrarch’s persona blames his inexpressibility on the inherent deficiencies of human speech faced with the numinous power of Laura’s supernatural gaze. In other poems, he implies that there are two languages, the preverbal emotion of the heart and the language of poetic speech in which the latter is never commensurate with the former: ‘Così potess’ io ben chiudere in versi/i miei pensier comme nel cor gli chiudo,/ ch’animo al mondo non fu mai sì crudo/ch’ i’ non facessi per pietà dolersi’

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(R 95, 1–4). [If I could as well enclose my thoughts in verses/as I enclose them in my heart,/there is no soul in the world so cruel/that I would not make it grieve for pity.] Reprimanding his ungrateful tongue (‘ingrata lingua’), the lover upbraids his faculties for their failure to fulfil poetic aspiration and ambition. The written indices of tears and sighs serve as unworthy surrogates for a poetry that strives for adequacy with desire: Perch’ io t’abbia guardata di menzogna a mio podere et onorato assai, ingrata lingua, già però non m’ài renduto onor, ma fatto ira et vergogna; ché quanto più ‘l tuo aiuto mi bisogna per dimandar mercede, allor ti stai sempre più fredda, et se parole fai son imperfette et quasi d’uom che sogna! Lagrime triste, et voi tutte le notti m’accompagnate ov’ io vorrei star solo, poi fuggite dinanzi a la mia pace! Et voi, sì pronti a darmi angoscia et duolo, sospiri, allor traete lenti et rotti! Solo la vista mia del cor non tace. [Although I have kept you from lying, as far as I could and paid you, ungrateful tongue, still you have not brought me honour but shame and anger; for, the more I need your help to ask for mercy, the colder and colder you stay, and if you say any words they are broken and like those of a man dreaming! Sad tears, you also every night accompany me, when I wish to be alone, and then you flee when my peace comes! And you, sighs, so ready to give me anguish and sorrow,

(R 49)

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Then you move slowly and broken! Only my eyes are not silent about my heart.]

In reading Délie, one will meet many of Petrarch’s traits regarding the indescribable. However, the major difference between the two is that while Petrarch makes speechlessness a secondary consideration, Scève places this problem at the centre of Délie. Petrarch provides Scève with certain paradigms, a substance of content, which the latter exploits to forge a new form of content. The underlying system of relations in Délie is similar to but different from those of the Rime sparse. Petrarch thematizes ineffability but does not radically question his power to communicate. In a thorough study on ineffability in Petrarch and Scève, Kenneth Cool concludes, ‘even where it seems most certainly to fail, Petrarch’s poetry curiously succeeds’ (Cool 1979, 196). For Petrarch the significant themes are permanence vs metamorphosis, determinism vs freedom, and the powers of desire vs the deceptions of desire. However, Scève’s poetic persona places in doubt the very possibility of adequately communicating these problems, where the significant questions centre around the lover’s verbal powerlessness and the text’s stylistic force. Dizain 291, one of Délie’s portrait poems, seeks to plumb the limits of representation by establishing an analogy between painters and writers: Le Painctre peult de la neige depaindre La blancheur telle, à peu près, qu’on peult veoir: Mais il ne sçait à la froideur attaindre, Et moins la faire à l’oeil appercevoir. Ce me seroit moymesmes decevoir, Et grandement me pourroit lon reprendre, Si je taschois à te faire comprendre Ce mal, qui peult, voyre l’Ame opprimer, Que d’un object, comme peste, on voit prendre, Qui mieulx se sent, qu’on ne peult exprimer. [The Painter is able to depict the whiteness Of the snow just as, or nearly so, one sees it. But he cannot attain to coldness, And even less make it appear to the eye. I would deceive myself And could be greatly chided Were I to try to make you understand,

(D 291)

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This sickness, which can oppress the very Soul truly, That is seen, like the plague to take a victim Who feels it better than can be expressed.]

The painter succeeds in depicting the whiteness of snow but cannot represent its coldness. In a similar manner the poet can bring forth the visible (such as Délie’s ‘blancheur,’ v. 2), but he cannot convey the illness (‘Ce mal,’ v. 8) that attacks the very core of his soul. To attempt to achieve this impossibility would only result in deceiving himself (‘decevoir,’ v. 5) as well as the beloved. Through an implied comparison, the ‘froideur’ (v. 3) of the snowy landscape is associated with the woman’s coldness, symbolic of unreturned love, which oppresses the lover’s spirit and mutes effective speech. In a solid study on the dilemmas of representation in Délie, Armine Kotin Mortimer draws out the terms of this ineffability (1994). The poetlover ‘can only feel this ill’ but cannot make expression equal to feeling (ibid., 63). She adds that the dizain’s rhymes concretize and nuance these dilemmas: – visual representation (‘depaindre,’ v. 1) falls short of communicating feeling (‘attaindre,’ v. 3), – visible language (‘appercevoir,’ v. 4) is a kind of deception (‘decevoir,’ v. 5), – and the pangs of oppression (‘opprimer,’ v. 8) overwhelm the powers of expression (‘exprimer,’ v. 10) (ibid., 63) Kotin Mortimer continues her analysis by moving from external to internal sight. This allows her to capture the paradoxes of the poet-lover’s ‘lucidity’ – his very insight into the problems of the ineffable (ibid., 64). First, there is the moral irony that the poet-lover must dare deception and self-deception even to broach the subject, since in the movement from feeling to poetic mediation, he must somehow make his ‘mal’ expressible – an act that he theoretically cannot perform. Also, Kotin Mortimer points out the poet-lover’s paradox that suppressing his desire to make expression equal to feeling only exacerbates his ill. Citing the last line of the dizain (‘Qui mieulx se sent, qu’on ne peult exprimer’), she observes that ‘the “mal” is all the more felt that it cannot be expressed’ (ibid., 65). Moving to a third paradox, she analyses the poet-lover’s verbal strategy of obliquity where, rather than attempting directly to represent his ‘mal,’ he reverts to expressing his own lamentation of it: ‘at the same time, the very

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existence of the poem implies that the poet succeeds better at making his “mal” felt by Délie by protesting his inability to depict it in speech’ (ibid., 65). Finally, in a most perceptive observation, Kotin Mortimer, reiterating a comment of Nancy Frelick, connects the word ‘peste’ (v. 9) in the penultimate line to the poet-lover’s concern that he might spread his contagion of confusion and deception not only to Délie but also to the reader: ‘to communicate his feeling would also be to communicate the dreaded disease’ (ibid., 64). The poet-lover’s distinction between the depiction of the external world and the completed act of art moving from conception to execution, from potentiality to actuality, can be clarified through the rhetorical difference between enargeia and energeia. Though classical writers give overlapping meanings of these terms, Jean Hagstrum has provided a useful distinction with the help of Aristotelian rhetoric: Enargeia implies the achievement in verbal discourse of a natural quality or of a pictorial quality that is highly natural. Energeia refers to the actualization of potency, the realization of capacity or capability, the achievement in art and rhetoric of the dynamic and purposive life of nature. (1958, 12)

In dizain 291 the poet-lover complains of ineffectiveness in representing interiority but not of his power to produce painterly vividness. In this regard he falls short in energeia, his capacity to actualize the communication of a specific feeling, rather than in enargeia, his ability to depict.8 An act of vivid depiction is accomplished, but it falls short of the ideal teleology of external act fulfilling interior purpose. In spite of its highly paradoxical message, dizain 291 says more directly and more generally what Délie as a whole says in fragmentary and discontinuous fashion. Rather than trying to represent, the text will seek to figure, and rather than figuring presence, it will create surrogates from absence. Unlike Petrarch, who sought to restore lost efficacy, Scève taps the force of powerlessness as an incentive to write great poetry. A true child of Renaissance optimism, Délie’s poetics of speech implies that absence itself has potency and possibility, not as once fallen and restored representation, but as the creative figuration of dispossession. Verbal destitution can unleash reserves of energy that warrant a two-part poetics based on the introspective analysis of symptoms and the development of surrogate discourses. Let us first consider the poet-lover’s meditation on his verbal insufficiencies. The lamentation of imposed silence is one of the most important signs

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of such debilities. Silence is inflicted by auditory blocks (‘ne puis d’elle un seul doulx mot ouir,’ D 92, v. 6) or by inchoate inner speech (‘mes silentes clameurs,’ D 228, v. 9). Elsewhere the dissociation between mind and will results in a kind of kinaesthetic paralysis: ‘L’Esprit vouloit, mais la bouche ne peut/Prendre congé, et te dire à Dieu, Dame’ (D 364, vv. 1–2). It is the intensity of silence that speaks for the lover. However, if silence elicits a reaction from the beloved, then it arises from her attentiveness and not from his paralanguage: ‘Je me taisois si pitoyablement,/Que ma Déesse ouyt plaindre mon taire’ (D 8, vv. 1–2). Dialogue is extinguished by the lover’s deliberate avoidance of painful encounters with Délie. Rather than confront the woman and vent his anger, he mulls in private meditation. An important function of selfreflection is proleptic repetition, a kind of counterphobic anticipation of conflict in which the lover and not the beloved controls discourse. Given these circumstances, self-mastery is tantamount to the wilful repression of pain-provoking words. In dizain 299 pleasure emerges from eschewing direct speech and immediate self-disclosure: Pour non ainsi te descouvrir soubdain L’entier effect de ce mien triste dueil, Naist le plaisir, qui se meurt par desdain, Comme au besoing n’ayant eu doulx accueil, En deffaillant la craincte, croist mon vueil, Qui de sa joye en moy se desespere.

(D 299, vv. 1–6)

[That pleasure, which is being killed by disdain, Is born because I do not disclose to you at once The full impact of my sad affliction, Just as, in dire straits, not having had sweet welcome But lacking fear, my will increases And despairs of knowing satisfaction.]

The poet-lover’s verbal distress is marked by the high degree of indexical language9 which can only signal frustration rather than summon satisfying metalingual discourse to explain it. However expressive such indexical language may be for the reader, it lacks for the poet-lover the semantic power that would equal his ‘mal’ or satisfy his desire to communicate feeling. Borrowed from centuries of Petrarchan tradition are the sighs, tears, and sobs that do not so much fulfil meaning as point to the symptoms where meaning must be inferred. Sighs (‘mes souspirs’) mime uncertainty

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and hesitation (D 344, v. 10); tears (‘pleurs’) suggest resignation to pain (D 212, v. 8); sobs (‘sanglotz’) point to regret, sorrow, or error (D 95, v. 3). In what Pascal Quignard calls ‘le baratin d’amour,’ the stymied speaker will emit sounds or plaintive noise as clues to his verbal conundrum (1974 edition of Délie, 151–80). For example, variations on the verb ‘bruire’ are alarms for fear, terror, and confusion (D 129). To simulate his ‘douleur,’ the lover assists the poet by onomatopoetic murmuring. In dizain 93 he apostrophizes his eyes: Vueillent les Cieulx par un bening debvoir, Tes pleurs si grandz si largement deduire, Qu’elle les voye en un ruisseau movoir, Qui, murmurant, mes peines puisse dire.

(D 93, vv. 7–10)

[Would that the Heavens, by benevolent duty, Gather your great tears so amply That she would see them running in a stream Which, murmuring, would speak of my woes.]

Speech breaks down because the human faculties cannot assimilate Délie’s power nor withstand her force. The result is that representation is deflected or defeated. In dizain 288 a model portrait of the woman has such an impact on the lover that his ‘esprit’ (v. 8) is forced to take leave. If such mediated signs as the colours of a painting can exert such effects, then the face-to-face encounter brought by sight would annihilate all other representation: ‘Que deviendroys je en la voyant lors vive?/Certainement je tumberois en cendre’ (vv. 9–10). In D 341 representation is inseparable from self-deception, and there occurs a sliding of the elusive referent from sight to thought to pleasure: Quasi moins vraye alors je l’apperçoy, Que la pensée à mes yeulx la presente, Si plaisamment ainsi je me deçoy, Comme si elle estoit au vray presente: Bien que par foys aulcunement je sente Estre tout vain ce, que j’ay apperceu. Ce neantmoins pour le bien jà receu, Je quiers la fin du songe, et le poursuis, Me contenant d’estre par moy deceu, Pour non m’oster du plaisir, où je suis.

(D 341)

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[When my eyes are open I see her almost less truly Than I do when my thought presents her to my eyes, So pleasantly do I thus deceive myself, As if she were truly present. Although sometimes I feel, in some way, That what I have perceived is quite vain. Nonetheless, for that good already received I seek the end of the dream and pursue it, Contenting myself with my self-deception In order not to take away present pleasure.]

Moral and epistemological factors intertwine. The lover sees the woman more truly in his ‘pensée’ (v. 2) than in her physical presence, even though it is his ‘yeulx’ (v. 2) that relay the latter to the former. Moreover, the lover willingly deceives himself since his ‘pensée’ (v. 2), though possibly ‘vain’ (v. 6) in terms of representation, is welcome because it brings ‘plaisir’ (v. 10). From the viewpoint of ends it is pleasure that is ultimately sought which is founded on thought’s predilection to change objective vision into a seductive ‘songe’ (v. 8). When representation seemingly succeeds, it raises the question of agency. In D 375 ‘la doulce, et fresche souvenance’ (v. 1) of the woman is so clearly portrayed in the lover’s heart that it depicts a likeness that appears real. Yet, the representation transferred from the innamoramento to the faithful ‘effigie’ (v. 6) is accomplished by dint of the woman’s force, such that it is received rather than produced by the lover. De toy la doulce, et fresche souvenance Du premier jour, qu’elle m’entra au coeur Avec ta haulte, et humble contenance, Et ton regard d’Amour mesme vainqueur, Y depeingnit par si vive liqueur Ton effigie au vif tant ressemblante, Que depuis l’Ame estonnée, et tremblante, De jour l’admire, et la prie sans cesse: Et sur la nuict tacite, et sommeillante, Quand tout repose, encor moins elle cesse. [The sweet and fresh memory of you, From the first day that it entered my heart With your haughty and humble countenance

(D 375)

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And your look which conquered even Cupid, In it depicted your likeness, so much like the living person, With such perfect clarity That since, my Soul, amazed and trembling During the day, admires it and ceaselessly prays to it, And during the silent and sleeping night, When everything rests, even that much less does it cease.]

The poet-lover implicitly makes a number of distinctions. Since it is the ‘regard d’Amour mesme vainqueur’ (v. 4) that commandeers his thoughts, he is but the submissive recipient of the representation. As Kotin Mortimer shows, ‘the poet receives the effigy ... as an effect of Délie’s virtues or force – her “regard,” her “contenance,” the “souvenance” coming from “toy” rather than through an action of his own’ (1994, 66–7). Who owns the ‘effigie’ (v. 6)? Who or what is the agent of representation? It does not do justice to the complexity of Délie to limit consideration of verbal inadequacy to the inaccessibility of the signified. Sometimes language works all too well as a constantive act that superbly describes the mechanism of pain but fails as a performative act10 that may bring psychic relief. Par mes souspirs Amour m’exhale l’Ame, Et par mes pleurs la noye incessamment. Puis ton regard à sa vie l’enflamme, Renovellant en moy plus puissamment. Et bien qu’ainsi elle soit plaisamment, Tousjours au Corps son tourment elle livre, Comme tous temps renaist, pour non revivre Mais pour plus tost derechef remourir: Parquoy jamais je ne me voy delivre Du mal, auquel tu me peux secourir. [With my sighs Cupid draws forth my soul And with my tears he incessantly drowns it. Then your look rekindles its life And it is renewed in me with even greater force. And although it is comfortable there, Still it delivers its torment to my body, As it is reborn each time, not to live again, But rather to die again another time.

(D 300)

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Thus never do I see myself free Of that affliction with which you can aid me.]

Here indexicality works at its peak in detailing the cause-effect relation governing the physiology of tears (vv. 1–2). In the Renaissance, tears were thought to well up from the heart and pass through the eyes from where they would fall on the chest which reactivated the cycle. The poet-lover’s sighs (‘souspirs,’ v. 1) are part of this cycle since they empty the lachrymal ducts which, abhorring a vacuum, draw the moisture back up (McFarlane edition of Délie, 456). In other words, this dizain recounts the implacable cycle of Cupid’s love attack (the innamoramento) renewing its infliction on the speaker’s ‘Ame’ (v. 1) and ‘Corps’ (v. 6). The lover concludes the poem on a gnomic paradox. One is destined to be reborn to love only to die another time. This dizain is noteworthy for the density and the high quantity of qualifying locutions composed of adverbs, conjunctions, and prepositions. As a result, the poet-lover’s power to reason and to think logically is given great relief, but this poetic effect serves to communicate one of the greater ironies of thwarted speech. Heightened awareness makes the poet-lover’s dilemma more painfully acute. Logical and metaphysical consciousness reign supreme in the speech of the poet-lover who nevertheless is reduced to the self-observing medium of contending passions. The poem’s syntactic ligatures show great consciousness of causality (‘Par mes souspirs,’ v. 1, ‘par mes pleurs,’ v. 2, ‘Parquoy,’ v. 9), of the succession of events (‘Puis,’ v. 3, ‘derechef,’ v. 8), and of degree (‘plus puissamment,’ v. 4). Highly marked is the expression of frequency (‘incessamment,’ v. 2, ‘Tousjours,’ v. 6, ‘tous temps,’ v. 7, ‘revivre,’ v. 7, ‘remourir,’ v. 8, ‘jamais ... ne,’ v. 9 – stress mine). The concessive conjunction ‘bien qu’ainsi’ (v. 5) points up a momentary contrast and change from ‘tourment’ (v. 6) only to be followed by another contrastive change of state (‘Mais,’ v. 8) that reimposes death (‘remourir,’ v. 8). Finally, the infinitive phrase ‘pour ... remourir’ (v. 8) qualifies this state as an inevitable consequence of the death-in-life cycle. The hyperarticulated syntax reveals a dilemma. Poetic speech, in spite of its precision, is superfluous because it brings no psychic relief. However, poetic speech, because of its precision, is a torture rack of affliction. There is an analogy suggested in this poem between the logical diction of poetic speech and the decorative surrounds of Délie’s imprese. The poet-lover’s recondite voice, resembling a formal address rather than lyric intimacy, stylistically parallels the ostentatious geometry of the devices’ surrounds. In both cases such language frames and foregrounds a medi-

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tative struggle. This effect is seen in a number of devices, particularly in those that depict the antiperistatic dilemma. In the fourth impresa titled ‘L’homme et le Boeuf’ a man vainly tries to hold back an ox. The motto reads, ‘Plus l’attire plus m’entraine.’ The surround that frames this scene has the geometrical shape of an ellipse. On the left and right horizontal axis are a mermaid and a merman respectively. The top vertical axis shows a male bust flanked by two birds, and the bottom vertical has stylized leaf motifs intertwined with the torsos and elongated tails of the marine figures. Both the geometric formality and the ornate patterns of the surround lend an ironic monumentality to the scenes of self-defeat that they frame. Menestrier, in his Art des Emblèmes, puts this illustration under the category of un emblème passionné which, rather than teaching a lesson, stresses the force of emotions: des emblèmes passionnez ... sont plûtost des expressions des passions & des affections de l’âme, que des enseignements. Il y en a un assez bon nombre de cette sorte, particulièrement pour exprimer la tendresse, les soins, & les empressements de l’Amour. (1684, 159) [Emblems of passion ... are expressions of the affections of the soul rather than lessons. There are quite a good number of this kind for expressing tenderness, cares, and eagerness of Love.]

Menestrier’s comments on this device capture its basic meaning (the difficulties of controlling the passions), but he uses completely different imagery than Scève, based on Plato’s proverbial chariot driver attempting to guide impetuous racing horses: Pour exprimer qu’il n’estoit plus maître de sa passion, il peignit un de ces chars des jeux Olympiques, où le cocher faisant tous ses efforts pour retenir ses chevaux quand ils sont au bout de la carrière, ne sçauroit plus les retenir dans le mouvement impetueux qu’ils on pris. (Ibid., 159) [To express that he was not the master of his passions, he painted one of those chariots of the Olympic games, where the driver, extending all his efforts to hold back his horses when they are at the winning post, did not know how to restrain them in the impetuous movement that they had taken.]

The impresa as a whole (surround and picture) creates the same effect seen in that of dizain 300, namely, that the logical framework of syntax and diction only serves to highlight the futility of volition. In the

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impresa, the ornate frames connote a monumental act of self-consciousness and analysis whose concentration and lucidity cannot overcome the self-victimization displayed in the encircled scene. In a similar fashion, the poet-lover’s detached analytical voice, his erudite lexicon and syllogistic grammar convey a prodigious effort to master the dilemma in philosophic terms. However, as in the formal picture frames, the psychic distance thus achieved cannot mitigate but can only intensify the avowals of frustration. The Religious Discourse of Ineffability: Scève and Augustine In Délie the poet-lover infuses his plaint of ineffability with religious feeling and, like sacred writers who address the indescribable, makes enigma the rhetorical generator of interiority. At the outset of this chapter, the device of the ‘Tour Babel’ was shown to suggest an analogy between the Bible and Scève’s canzoniere. Just as the descendants of Noah were dispersed throughout the world in a confusion of languages for overstepping their bounds, so the poet-lover’s words dissipate into inadequacy throughout Délie for attempting to describe the excellence of his goddess. The ineffability topos is pervaded with religious overtones: Je me taisois si pitoyablement, Que ma Déesse ouyt plaindre mon taire. Seule raison, de la Nature loy, T’a de chascun l’affection acquise, Car ta vertu de trop meilleur alloy, Qu’Or monnoyé, ny aultre chose exquise, Te veult du Ciel (ô tard) estre requise, Tant approchante est des Dieux ta coustume. Doncques en vain travailleroit ma plume Pour t’entailler à perpetuité: Mais ton sainct feu, qui à tout bien m’allume, Resplendira à la posterité. Tes doigtz tirantz non le doulx son des cordes, Mais des haultz cieulx l’Angelique harmonie, Tiennent encor en telle symphonie, Et tellement les oreilles concordes, Que paix, et guerre ensemble tu accordes En ce concent, que lors je concevoys:

(D 8, vv. 1–2)

(D 23)

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Car du plaisir, qu’avecques toy j’avoys, Comme le vent se joue avec la flamme, L’esprit divin de ta celeste voix Soubdain m’estainct, et plus soubdain m’enflamme.

(D 196)

Tout en esprit ravy sur la beaulté De nostre siecle et honneur, et merveille, Celant en soy la doulce cruaulté, Qui en mon mal si plaisamment m’esveille, Je songe et voy: et voyant m’esmerveille De ses doulx ryz, et elegantes moeurs. Les admirant si doulcement je meurs, Que plus profond à y penser je r’entre: Et y pensant mes silentes clameurs Se font ouyr et des Cieulx, et du Centre.

(D 228)

Ce n’est point cy, Pellerins, que mes voeutz Avecques vous diversement me tiennent. Car vous vouez, comme pour moy je veulx, A Sainctz piteux, qui voz desirs obtiennent. Et je m’adresse à Dieux, qui me detiennent, Comme n’ayantz mes souhaictz entenduz. Vous de voz voeutz heureusement renduz Graces rendez, vous mettantz à dancer: Et quand les miens iniquement perduz Deussent finir, sont à recommancer.

(D 241)

Je sens en moy la vilté de la crainte Movoir l’horreur à mon indignité Parqui la voix m’est en la bouche estaincte Devant les piedz de ta divinité. [I kept my silence in so pitiable a fashion That my Goddess heard my silence complain] [Reason alone, Nature’s law, Has acquired for you everyone’s admiration. For your virtue of far finer alloy Than minted Gold or other perfect thing Must be sought for (at last) in the Heavens,

(D 381, vv. 1–4)

Lyric Dispossession and the Powers of Enigma So close is your manner to that of the gods. Thus in vain would my pen work To immortalize you. But your holy fire, which lights my way to every good, Will shine out for posterity] [Your fingers, plucking not sweet sound from the strings, But angelic harmony from the high heavens, Continue still in such symphony And hold my ears in such accord with this harmony, That you bring into accord peace and war In the harmony that I then conceived. For with the pleasure that I had with you, As the wind plays with the flame, The divine spirit of your celestial voice At once extinguishes me and more suddenly still enflames.] [My mind being completely enraptured by the beauty, The honour, the marvel of our century Who hides in herself the sweet cruelty Which awakens me so complacently in evil desire, I dream and see, and seeing I wonder At her sweet laughter and elegant manners. Admiring them, I die so sweetly That I return to ponder them more profoundly, And thinking about them, my silent outcries Make themselves heard by the Heavens and the Earth.] [It is not here, Pilgrims, that my vows Hold me, and I make them for different reasons. For you make vows, as I would like to, To pitying Saints who obtain your desires. But I address myself to Gods who put me off, As if they have not heard my wishes. You, with your wishes happily granted, Render thanks, which sets you dancing. But when my entreaties, iniquitously wasted, Should be ending, they must be rebegun.] [I feel the vileness of fear arousing

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Horror in me at my own unworthiness, Wherefore is my voice extinguished in my mouth Before the feet of your divinity.]

In each of these poems the speaker hallows ineffability by suffusing it with certain emotional, aesthetic, and philosophical traits reminiscent of the religious discourse. First, the lover avows his unworthiness before the divine whose loftiness and power extinguish his very voice (D 381). Second, the lover is eclipsed and extinguished by the woman’s celestial voice (‘ta celeste voix/Soubdain m’estainct,’ D 196, vv. 9–10), which is but one manifestation of the forgetting of self recorded throughout the work. In dizain 289, for example, the speaker reveals the irony that at the height of new-found freedom, his youth gave itself entirely to Délie: ‘Me contraingnit à m’oblier moymesmes/Pour mieulx povoir d’aultruy me souvenir’ (vv. 9–10). Also, the text insists that speech is ineffective and associates this with religious sanctions (D 241). Fourth, the lover’s praise of the beloved’s divinity substitutes for the inadequacy of describing her, a modification that can only be useful by allowing Délie’s virtue to speak for itself (D 23). Also, silence is imposed not only by the intrinsic limitations of poetic speech (D 381) but also by irresistible spiritual transport (‘mes silentes clameurs,’ D 228, v. 9). Finally, one can add to these characteristics a statement that is true for Délie as a whole. If certain religious figures like Augustine are attracted to obscure biblical symbolism in order to fathom the divinity, then the poet-lover likewise reverts to his puzzling imprese and his dense mysticism to comprehend Délie. Explaining to the beloved why he names her ‘Délie,’ he says: Car je te cele en ce surnom louable, Pource qu’en moy tu luys la nuict obscure.

(D 59, vv. 9–10)

[For I conceal you in this laudable name Because in me you light up the dark night.]

The poet-lover not only imbues ineffability with religious reverence but also, like sacred writers, considers enigma the rhetorical instrument best able to convey the indescribable. To understand his discourse, I will compare it with and differentiate it from that of Augustine. Augustine had no monopoly on the subject of ineffability and the unknowability of the divine. Indeed, he is in the good company of Plato, Saint Paul, the Gnostics, Dionysius, Plotinus, Proclus, Philo, Clement

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of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, Evagrius, Cassian, and many others.11 However, in relation to Délie, he has the historical claim of reaching Scève through Petrarch and the methodological similarity of situating love within the enigmas of the soul. Augustine’s theory of signs is one of the milestones in the history of semiotics, and the path it takes intersects with the difficulties of religious enigma. While Augustine nourishes his readers with a plethora of rich concepts, his interpretations of scripture beset him with numerous problems of ambiguity. Let us track some of the footsteps of his theory. In De Doctrina christiana, he states the time-honoured definition that ‘a sign is a thing which of itself makes some other thing come to mind, besides the impression that it presents to the senses.’12 There are natural signs (‘signa naturalia’) and given signs (‘signa data’). The first signify without intention (‘sine voluntate’), such as smoke indicating fire, and the second, with intention to communicate to another what one has sensed or understood: ‘Data vero signa sunt quae sibi quaeque viventia invicem dant ad demonstrandos quantum possunt motus animi sui vel sensa aut intellecta quaelibet’ (DC, 56–7). After making distinctions between signa and res, Augustine’s reading of the Old Testament moves him to concede that the things to which one refers can also signify: ‘the log which we read that Moses threw into the bitter waters to make them lose their bitter taste, or the stone which Jacob placed under his head, or the sheep which Abraham sacrificed in place of his son.’13 These are things but they are at the same time signs of other things, the first Christ’s cross, the second his firmness, the third his sacrifice. In fact, not only the Bible, but also, the whole world can be interpreted as a cipher to decode the allegory of creation. ‘By love I mean the impulse of one’s mind to enjoy God on his own account and to enjoy oneself and one’s neighbour on account of God.’14 Scriptual difficulties complicate Augustine’s semiotics, but they open the door to the distinction between literal and figurative meanings. Summarizing the reasons why passages in scripture fail to be understood, he says: ‘Their meaning may be veiled either by unknown signs or by ambiguous signs.’15 Faced with ambiguity, Augustine has recourse to what he terms ‘signa translata,’ which allow him to broach the distinction between literal and metaphorical by virtue of the concept of transposed signs: Signs are either literal or metaphorical. They are called literal when used to signify the things for which they were invented: so for example, when we say bovem, meaning the animal which we and all speakers of Latin call by that name. They are called metaphorical when the actual things which we

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signify by the particular words are used to signify something else; when, for example, we say bovem and not only interpret the two syllables to mean animal normally referred to by that name but also understand, by that animal, ‘worker in the gospel’, which is what scripture, as interpreted by the apostle Paul, means when it says, ‘You shall not muzzle the ox that treads out the grain.’ (R.P.H. Green 1995, 37–8)16

These terminological distinctions bring forth the fundamental requirement to allegorize scripture, and this secures the basis in Christian hermeneutics for the difference between ‘allegoria in factis’ and ‘allegoricia in verbis.’17 Since words can refer to facts literally and figuratively, exegesis is not only a matter of capturing tropes, but also referents of biblical history and the truths discovered in the translation from Old to New Testament. The problems of ineffability emerge from numerous examples of scriptural ambiguity. In the De Doctrina christiana, Augustine faces the question of what precisely is the criterion for differentiating the literal from the figurative, which only increases the demand for further inquiry: ‘We must first explain the way to discover whether an expression is literal or figuratve. Generally speaking, it is this: anything in the divine discourse that cannot be related either to good morals or to the true faith should be taken as figurative.’18 Reading must therefore be contextualized within the confines of dogma and faith. Yet, purely textual difficulties can block the emergence of this distinction on practical grounds. There may be problems of punctuation, inattention in pronouncing the length of syllables, or inability to grasp the context of a passage (DC, 135–9). Readers incur various types of obstacle-created silences that may be purely practical impediments or, on the other hand, the intrinsic limitations of grasping the logos in the state of human imperfection. Such halts may also signal the transition from discursive communication to mystical silence. Like the author of Délie Augustine places the ineffable in the context of a lover seeking to voice his love to his beloved. In the Confessions he views silence as both the failure of speech to achieve adequate correspondence with the Almighty and the mystical experience of rapture passing ‘beyond human language ... toward the Word’ (Cottrell 1986, 17). In a number of passages, Augustine testifies to the nothingness of words before God, the gulf between the transitory and the eternal, and the inexpressible aporias of metaphysical introspection: Can any praise be worthy of the Lord’s majesty? How magnificent his strength! How inscrutable his wisdom!19

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You are my God, my Life, my holy delight, but is this enough to say of you? Can any man say enough when he speaks of you? Yet woe betide those who are silent about you! For even those who are most gifted with speech cannot find words to describe you.20 Why do you mean so much to me? Help me to find the words to explain?21 Who can understand the omnipotent Trinity? We all speak of it, though we may not speak of it as it truly is, for rarely does a soul know what it is saying when it speaks of the Trinity.22 I confess to you, Lord, that I still do not know what time is. Yet I confess too that I do know that I am saying this in time ... How can I know this, when I do not know how to put what I know into words? I am in a sorry state, for I do not even know what I do not know!23

In his biography of Augustine, James J. O’Donnell points out that the dual and mutually reinforcing problem of unknowability and inexpressability was not a matter of detached speculation but a major roadblock to the rhetor’s deepest need to articulate the ineffable: Human words used by humans fail in the presence of the divine, he thinks, and whatever can be said is only approximation. Most human discourse fails to say anything of god at all, despite endless loquacious efforts ... For a rhetorician as polished as Augustine to admit failure in a matter of rhetoric is striking and not without significance, as most readers of Augustine would have felt. For all the clarity and definition that Augustine can give to his writing elsewhere, it cannot be without significance that at the center of his concerns lies this finally sayable Other, who eludes all his attempts to define and delimit. (2005, 292)

Still, Augustine leaves the reader with a clearly demarcated manner of dealing with this problem. We begin with Romans and Corinthians. Studying the history and meaning of silence in Augustine, Joseph Mazzeo finds that ‘a philosophical theology of silence was present in both Platonism and Christianity, and the latter began to develop it quite early. Its roots can be found in Pauline texts such as Romans 16:25–26, “the revelation of the mystery which was kept secret since the world began”’ (1964, 22). Paul is also one of the authorities who emphasized the more puzzling side of belief that can only be clarified by the gift of the Holy Spirit. In

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the following quotation his use of the word ‘then’ (‘tunc’) indicates such a state: For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. (1 Corinthians 13:12)24

In De Magistro Augustine differentiates eternal wisdom from temporal wisdom which are mediated by two kinds of verba. While temporal signs are conventional and man-made, eternal signs are inspired by the Inner Teacher and culminate in the silence of interior truth.25 As Robert Cottrell has pointed out in The Grammar of Silence (16), the indubitable nature of this inspiration is guaranteed by the Johannine logos where human speech is redeemed by the Incarnation: ‘In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God and the Word was God’ (Jn.1:1). [In principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum.] Also, the authenticity of this testimony is supported by the fact that it links the Wisdom Books and the Apocrypha with the New Testament: ‘The Word was made flesh, he lived among us, and we saw his glory’ (Jn.1:14). [Et Verbum caro factum est et habitavit in nobis et vidimus gloriam eius.] In the Enarrationes in psalmos Augustine maintains that our apprehension of God is merely ‘in aenigmate per speculum,’ that is, ‘a puzzling reflection seen through a mirror.’26 Ultimately, this imperfect speculum, however useful, incurs the intractable limitations of all time-bound and fleshy substances. As a result, affirms Augustine, we are led to the realization that God is the silence of the ineffable Word. Through his sermons Augustine explains this concept where Word and reality coincide and silence is ‘heard,’ a teaching that became the central tenet of Christian epistemology. Instructing the faithful, he says: Before you became so vividly aware of him you thought yourself able to speak about God; but now you begin to feel what he is. And you realize that what you perceive is something that cannot be spoken. But if you have discovered that the reality you encounter is beyond utterance, will you therefore fall silent, and not praise him? Will you be struck dumb and cease to praise God, and no longer give thanks to him who has willed to make himself known to you? Of course not ... Honor is due to him, reverence is owed to him ... ‘And how shall I praise him,’ you ask. The slight glimpse I can attain, a mere enigmatic reflection in a mirror [in aenigmate per speculum], even that I cannot explain, so listen to the Psalm: Shout with joy to the Lord ... other

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things can be clearly spoken about in some fashion, but he alone is inexpressible ... We can shout in exultation over the Word, but we can find no words to articulate the Word.27

Silence transcends human speech, for God is beyond words in the simultaneity of expression and existence. By the Incarnation God descended through Christ from silence to speech, and in a reverse movement we can ascend from time-enclosed speech to sempiternal silence. Returning to the Confessions, one reads that Augustine, while in Ostia with his mother Monica, caught a glimpse of this silent eternity. Crucial to this mystical voyage of spiritual interiority is the process of language shedding itself slowly in an act of self-purifying extinction. Signalling a complete ascetic journey in a matter of moments, Augustine communicates his experience as the ever-increasing silence at various levels of being, beginning with ‘the tumult of the flesh,’ proceeding to the ‘earth, water, and air,’ to the ‘heavens,’ and finally to his ‘own soul.’28 Augustine, the great Christianizer of the Platonic tradition, makes human speech both the medium to silence and the object to be dissolved, so that neither tongue of flesh, nor angel’s voice, nor veiled similitude (‘per aenigma similitudinis’) stand between him and the silent voice of ‘eternal Wisdom.’29 For Augustine enigma is not only the theoretical pivot of Christian epistemology; it is also the psychological spur to and the methodological instrument for faith that wrestles with both the unknowable and the ineffable. Knowledge of faith per speculum in aenigmate can push the intellect to approach even the most baffling concepts such as the mystery of the Trinity (Colish 1968, 49–54). What is the role of the human soul regarding the enigmas of doctrine? Since causes are similar to effects, the soul must resemble God. The most profound human enigma is that the anima is in the image of its Creator; consequently, it can be used as a signum translatum to divine wisdom.30 As Marcia Colish states, ‘Augustine thinks that the aenigma of the human soul provides the fullest knowledge of God that is available in the earthly life.’31 As a result, aenigma has practical ramifications for the rational understanding of scripture and doctrine. In reflexive fashion the soul can use its own powers to explore the analogies between its structures and the ineffable Divinity it dimly mirrors. This is why, in De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine teaches that, while faith is superior to human reason, rational tools should be used in concert with revelation to aid the mind’s understanding of church dogma (DC, 34–148). Rational inquiry spurred by puzzling theological concepts lead Augustine to analyse the role that verbal language plays (especially scripture) in

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communicating the Logos. Augustine observes that the rhetorical roots of enigma lead us back to Cicero. Ironically his replacement of pagan rhetoric with Christian eloquence may be traced to Cicero’s De Oratore (Colish 1968, 15). In this work the Roman rhetor conceptualizes aenigma as a figure of speech and a species of metaphor that Augustine would use as a symbolic language for penetrating into the mysteries of faith. Cicero explains: ‘Something resembling the real thing is taken, and the words that properly belong to it are then ... applied metaphorically to the other thing. This is a valuable stylistic ornament ... and in fact it is usually the way in which what are called riddles [‘aenigmata’] are constructed.’32 This notion of aenigma as a figure of speech was current in Late Latin literature and provided Augustine with a significant component of his theological epistemology (Colish 1968, 15). In the De Trinitate Augustine develops a theory of spiritual translation where the aenigmata of the human soul gives insight into the structure and functions of the Trinity. He describes aenigma as ‘a likeness that is obscure and difficult to perceive ... suited to lead to an understanding of God in the manner that is now possible.’33 In the Doctrina Christiana, Augustine views obscurity positively as a catalyst for exciting the desire to fathom scripture. As an illustration of the stimulation that obscurity brings through the Holy Spirit, the Doctrina Christiana offers an example of the figurative meanings which can be aroused by a difficult biblical passage from Canticles: Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes ascending from the pool, all of which give birth to twins, and there is not a sterile animal among them. [Dentes tui sicut grex detonsarum ascendens de lavacro, quae omnes geminos creant, et sterlis non est in illis.] (DC, 62–3)

Though the modern reader may very well think these are lines taken from the prose poems of Rimbaud, it is really the poetry of God taken from Canticles 4:2. The Song of Songs asks the reader to imagine a wedding ceremony where the poet-bridegroom sings a celebration of the physical beauty and the fertility of his bride. Augustine explains that the figurative passage gives him more pleasure than the literal statement. In his exegesis he treats it very much like an emblem, first by offering a challenging verbal picture and then by glossing its various components according to their theological significance:

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the Church is addressed and praised like a beautiful woman: ‘Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes ascending from the pool, all of which give birth to twins, and there is not a sterile animal among them.’ Surely one learns the same lesson as when one hears it plain without the support of imagery? And yet somehow it gives me more pleasure to contemplate holy men, when I see them as the teeth of the church tearing men away from their errors and transferring them into its body, breaking down their rawness by biting and chewing. And it is with the greatest of pleasure that I visualize the shorn ewes, their worldly burdens set aside like fleeces, ascending from the pool (baptism) and all giving birth to twins (the two commandments of love), with none of them failing to produce this holy fruit.34

One can conclude that for Augustine ineffability deepens spirituality not only by demarcating the unfathomable perfections of the divine but also by using faith’s very enigmas as epistemological tools – figurations – for adumbrating the more resistant conundrums of scripture and doctrine. In general, Augustine uses the enigma to stimulate the intellectual appetite and to motivate the journey to wisdom. Enigma polishes the intellect, produces a rare pleasure, and through obscurity, provides greater understanding and satisfaction in overcoming a problem. Délie: The Ineffable, Surrogate Languages and the Reader’s Response What does Scève have in common with Augustine in regard to the ineffable? It is useful to begin with some negative qualifications. First, the shared characteristic is not the Inner Teacher who inspires the soul through supernatural grace. Nor is it a Plotinian asceticism ascending from purification to utter simplification (abstractio) in order to achieve union with the One. In Délie the poet-lover’s struggle to communicate the ineffable leads not to a self-annihilating silence but to a perceived defeat of his capacities to represent Délie and to convince her of his worthiness. In fact, the speaker fears that to cultivate silence would remove the very spirit from his life: ‘Car, me taisant de toy on me verroit/Oster l’esprit de ma vie à ma vie’ (D 119, vv. 9–10). Nor does it derive from the ultimate purpose of developing a semiotics to find and found dogma in sacred scripture. Finally, while Augustine’s search for wisdom culminates in union with God in beatitude and joy,35 the nature of the poet-lover’s pursuit cannot be so readily formulated. While he attributes transcendental qualities to Délie,

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he emphasizes how these virtues operate in his human world – a world, however, that he continually hallows with religious reverence. What Scève most deeply shares with Augustine is to make enigma the motor of interiority. Just as the riddle of the soul is the signum translatum guiding Augustine’s intellectual journey to God, so in Délie the lover mines the perplexities of his âme to articulate the beloved. What does this mean in more tangible terms? As already seen in chapters 1 and 2, the speaker, in order to comprehend his shattering experience with Délie, deploys the tripartite method of interrogating his soul: mémoire, entendement, volonté. In this introspection, questions besiege him concerning the seductions of memory, the illusions of desire, the efficacy of will, and the dissociation between part and whole. One of the most serious of such puzzles is ineffability, a fact indirectly recorded in the response to Délie as insuperably obscure. Corresponding to this general analogy between Augustine and Scève is parallel terminology. In the Enarrationes in psalmos, the difficulties of understanding God are crystallized with the phrase ‘per speculum in aenigmata’ (37.15.46). This may be translated as ‘through an obscure mirror,’ the mirror being the clouded image of God found in the human soul. In Délie, we see a similar formulation where the poet-lover calls the woman ‘miroir de ma pensée’ (D 415) – a ‘pensée’ which is obscured by the blinding light of Délie’s radiance: ‘Car son cler jour serenant la Contrée,/En ma pensée a mys l’obscure nuict’ (D 128, vv. 9–10). Thus, the poet-lover, like Augustine, translates through his soul a defiantly obscure, mystical image of the beloved and places this quandary at the centre of his work. Enigma is not to be understood only as a problem. Like aenigma in Augustine, Délie offers not only a set of resistant questions but also a method of approaching and communicating fundamental questions of existence. Both Scève and Augustine use puzzle to fathom puzzle. By conceiving problems in highly paradoxical or oxymoronic fashion they push intellectual introspection to extremes by reformulating questions and developing new languages. However, their methods and goals are quite different. This may be shown by returning to Délie and focusing on the language forged by the poet-lover in response to the obstacles of ineffability. Approaching knowledge through enigma is the central commonality between Scève and Augustine. But there are also related challenges. Like Augustine who searched the soul to formulate the mysteries of the Trinity, the poet-lover also founds knowledge on sounding his soul, though this is done without the Interior Teacher. Like Augustine, Scève is highly conscious of the subversive and entangled nature of the human faculties, and

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this is evident in the meditations of both on dreams. For Augustine and Scève the ambiguity of self-interpretation is built into the very substance of being, a being with opposing wills, and the ambiguous polyvalence this engenders (which is not merely semantic) is inherent to the human capacities. Scève like Augustine is concerned with grasping the difference between historical event and allegorical rule. Augustine does this for the cause of scriptural exegesis. Scève is also intent on making the distinction between history and allegory but for a different purpose. As we shall seen in the analysis of dizain 330 and its accompanying device ‘La Lune en tenebres,’ Scève’s persona uncomfortably finds himself in both the free and unique act of fleeing from Délie to a place of ostensible tranquility and in the self-consenting sway of allegorical determinism. In its freezing of an act, the device is but the most obvious manifestation of this difficulty. In Délie a good understanding of the relation between the problems of poetic speech and of the reader’s response to textual difficulty can be gained by concentrating on the difficulties of naming. A theory of language disorders can translate the self-reflexive theme of verbal paralysis into a linguistic description of Scevian discourse. It can analyse the speech debilities, account for textual obscurity, and point out the discursive modifications used to regain a measure of coherence. For this reason I turn to Roman Jakobson’s work on language debilities. Before proceeding to this point, it is important to note that I do not consider the author of Délie, Maurice Scève, to have had a pathology that would have rendered him aphasic. Nor do I believe that the fictive persona he has created, the poet-lover of Délie, gives evidence of a pathology. However, I do hold that Scève has so patterned the speech of his poet-lover that the latter’s discourse imitates the verbal perplexities confronting one who is overwhelmed by a shattering realization. At the most literal level, this experience is love. At other levels vehicled by love, there are daunting epistemological, creative, and moral impasses. In these cases the problems with speech and their attempted solutions are analogous to those of aphasic disorders. The poet-lover’s difficulties of anomia, inner speech, or amnesic blocks are similar to the aphasic’s difficulties, and both must attempt to redress their ills within the shared rules and restrictions of linguistic conventions and structures. Jakobson has distinguished two principal types of disorders that depend on problems with either the paradigmatic axis of selection or the syntagmatic axis of combination. The first he terms similarity disorders; the second, contiguity disorders. One suffering from a problem with similarity has difficulty producing adequate substitutions deriving from the

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metaphoric axis: metalingual constructions, synonyms, antonyms, failure to shift from an index or icon to a corresponding verbal symbol. On the other hand, one incurring contiguity problems is perplexed by two fundamental metonymic operations: successivity which involves grammatical concatenation, and concurrence, which requires the simultaneous use of distinctive features.36 Difficulties with substitution involve decoding. Therefore, those having similarity problems with intact contexture yield to operations based on contiguity. Conversely, problems with combination are symptoms of a disruption in encoding. Disturbances of context yield to the metaphoric axis, which frees the speaker from dependence on combination.37 Dizain 46 provides us with a representative example of how a writer would construct a poem showing his persona grappling with a selection disturbance. It also demonstrates the reliance which the speaker places on the metonymic axis in order to compensate for ineffective speech. Here the poet-lover dances a periphrastic pirouette around his failure to name his ‘mal’ or the being called Délie. Si le desir, image de la chose, Que plus on ayme, est du coeur le miroir, Qui tousjours fait par memoire apparoir Celle, où l’esprit de ma vie repose, A quelle fin mon vain vouloir propose De m’esloingner de ce, qui plus me suyt? Plus fuyt le Cerf, et plus on le poursuyt, Pour mieux le rendre, aux rhetz de servitude: Plus je m’absente, et plus le mal s’ensuyt De ce doulx bien, Dieu de l’amaritude. [If desire, the image of the thing That one loves the most, is the mirror of the heart, Which always causes by memory to appear The one in whom the spirit of my life reposes, To what end does my vain will propose To remove me far from that which follows me the more? The more the Stag flees the more he is pursued, The better to put him into the nets of servitude. The more I absent myself, the more suffering follows From this sweet good, God of bitterness.]

(D 46)

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The referent of desire (‘le desir,’ v. 1) is either a deictic without a referent (‘Celle,’ ‘Ce,’ vv. 4, 6 ) or nouns that function pronominally (‘la chose,’ v. 1, ‘le miroir,’ v. 2, ‘image,’ v. 1). Though a noun, the word ‘la chose’ (v. 1) is too general to name, and the definite article ‘la’ which suggests its indexical function remains without an antecedent or an object to which to point. The hall of mirrors imagery (‘miroir,’ ‘image,’ ‘memoire,’ vv. 1–2) spins in an endless circle of anaphoric unfulfilment.38 When the reader asks such questions as ‘the image of what?’ s/he must return to ‘la chose’ (v. 1), which reiterates the same question. The precision of naming is circumvented by syntactic figures of aspect39 that surround a centre which nonetheless remains absent. In line 3, the iterative signals a cause that is seized only in process, in its hauntingly repetitive effects: ‘Qui tousjours fait par memoire apparoir.’ Similarly, the first line is effectively the beginning of a hypothetical proposition (‘Si le desir, ... ’) where logical rigour attempts to compensate for epistemological failure. The poet can reason that if desire is in the image of the thing that one loves, then one cannot flee it. However, he cannot name the thing, ‘la chose’ (v. 1). Rhetorically speaking, the stative quality of logic gives stability to the vertiginous circularity of reference: ‘desir’=‘image’=‘chose’=‘desir.’ The allusion to an absent presence is maintained through a drama of syntax. The ‘Si’ (v. 1) clause naturally calls for a grammatical suspension before the result clause. However, suspension becomes suspense since its conclusion is deferred by five lines. When the reader finally reaches the consequent or concluding half of the proposition, s/he arrives at ‘ce’ (v. 6) – another pronoun that defuses the expectation of revelation by reinstating the same enigma. Similar uses of theatricality recur in every line of the dizain. Henri Weber has complained that the concluding quatrain is useless padding that only prolongs the sizain (1955, 223–4). Yet, this apparent redundance is justified by the logic of the poem. In order to find a suitable alternative to naming, the poet-lover has switched from a predominantly indexical language to an iconic one, which itself can only mime, not explain, the futility of indices. The quick cadence and symmetrical oppositions of line 7 imitate the stag’s dilemma of flight and self-entrapment. Just as the lover’s will is baffled and frustrated by Délie, so is his desire to specify the ‘ce’ (v. 6) of the preceding stanza. Thus, the futility of intention is reflected by the ‘superfluity’ of the quatrain. However strong this iconicity may be, it is still highly indexical since ultimately the poet-lover can only point to nature to simulate his ‘mal.’ In examining this structure from the viewpoint of response, one sees that the dilemma irking the speaker

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(‘Dieu de l’amaritude,’ v. 10) becomes impatience for the reader (Weber’s reaction). In this final, stylistic modification the writer re-presents the object not by naming it but by transferring its effects to the reader. The phrase ‘Dieu de l’amaritude’ (v. 10) is in apposition to ‘ce doulx bien’ (v. 10), but this ‘sweet good,’ according to the amatory logic of the poem, has ‘le mal’ (v. 9) as an effect. By calling this endless circularity ‘Dieu de l’amaritude’ (v. 10) the poet-lover is certainly making some connection between God and bitterness. What precisely is the link? Needless to say the doux amer is Petrarchan language par excellence, but the genitive metaphor itself ‘Dieu de l’amaritude’ is not readily found in the record of literary history (and not because ‘amaritude’ replaces amertume.) In Bembo’s Asolani, Book I, the opening speech of Perottino is memorable for its embittered onslaught on love, and it is a possible model that Scève could have transformed into his dense metaphor. Perottino uses the adjective amaro and its forms approximately ten times as the effect of the God of Love where forms of deo appear eight times. Of the two strongest statements Perottino makes on bitterness and the God of Love respectively, the first is: ‘It is not possible to love without bitterness, nor does anyone ever feel or suffer bitterness in any way except through love.’40 On the cause of this effect, Perottino aggressively apostrophizes Love in accusatory fashion: ‘You nourish us on gall; you reward us with sorrow; you are the god most deadly and pernicious to our lives, and continually give us bitter proofs of your fell deity; you make us prize our sufferings; you pretend to cheer us with sad things; you terrify us at all hours with a thousand newfangled kinds of fear; you make us live in agony and guide us on the road to tragic death.’41 In responding to the concluding metaphor of dizain 46, ‘Dieu de l’amaritude’ (v. 10), the reader can feel the lover’s bitter frustration as similar to that of Perottino, but on a number of counts Scève’s poet-lover is different. By drawing the reader into a vicious circle of thwarted naming, he solicits our empathy and identification rather than imitating Bembo’s technique of making us stunned witnesses to Perottino’s silver-tongued frustration. Another difference is that the poet-lover’s powerlessness in naming is somewhat redeemed by implying that the intensity of his suffering is equal, as a negative infinity, to the God’s power to produce it: ‘Dieu de l’amaritude.’ Considering that the poet-lover will compare himself to the perpetually suffering Prometheus (D 77), there remain unsayable paradoxes concerning the power of his enduring powerlessness and his capacity to transform ‘painful’ emotion into a reflection of God or the gods. In dizain 46 the greatest efforts of logical rigour cannot solve or compen-

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sate for the enigmas of naming. Roland Barthes has defined signification as ‘une force qui tente de subjuguer d’autres forces’ whose efficacy depends on ‘son degré de systématisation’ (1970, 160). As applied to dizain 46 this is a good description of the poet-lover’s attempt to use the reasoning process in order to gain some control over his ever-disappearing referent. By consulting two works of Ramus, the Dialecticae institutiones (1543) and the Dialectique (1555),42 one can better appreciate the degree to which the poet-lover marshals his power of reasoning to gain some hold over the elusive problems of naming.43 Walter Ong has demonstrated the pervasiveness of topical logic and spatial epistemology in the early sixteenth century reaching its apogee in Petrus Ramus’s works on logic. These works are characterized by tables of bracketed categories that progressively enlarge into divisions and subdivisions, implying that the categorical disposition of terms on the page guaranteed the logical rigour of argument. A similar spatial logic can be seen in dizain 46 whose abstract terms are ordered by an expanded conditional syllogism that is broken down according to the method of the Dialectique. Here the leading premise acts as the containing category for the multiplication and deployment of subsequent dialectical terms. The poem takes the form of what Ramus calls an énonciation conditionelle44 (‘Si le desir ... ’ v. 1). Within this framework, the speaker has recourse to certain argumens that constitute the first part of dialectic: ‘les parties séparées dont toute sentence est composée.’45 For example, the cause efficiente46 is ‘desir’ (v. 1) whose effect47 is the apparition of ‘Celle’ (v. 4) that resides in the memoire (v. 3). The opposez48 are, on the one hand, ‘memoire’ (v. 3) which reflects the fatality of love, and on the other, ‘vain vouloir’ (v. 5) which never succeeds in fleeing it. The poet-lover gives a définition49 of desire which leads to the exasperating question50 of lines 5–6. Typical of Scevian epistemology, the fin51 (v. 6, resembling a final cause) is alluded to but unnamed: ‘la chose’ (v. 1). By analogy the opposition between ‘memoire’ (v. 3) and ‘vouloir’ (v. 5) is repeated in the emblem of the ‘Cerf’ (v. 7), a procedure that Ramus calls semblables.52 Finally, the definition of desire is twice distributed (distribution par les effectz),53 once in the question and again in the quatrain (‘Dieu de l’amaritude,’ v. 10). The poet-lover’s command of logic only intensifies the impossibility of fleeing what cannot be named. Like the framing effect of the fourth device, it raises the pitch of irony between cognition and volition. Naming cedes to simulating the effects of ‘Celle’ (v. 4) which can only be mimed by providing an emblem of blunted desire. The image of the wounded stag, alluding to the eighteenth device, depicts the vicious circle of bitterness

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incurred by the frustrated speaker, who is both the poet who cannot name and the lover who cannot escape ‘servitude’ (v. 8) What is epistemologically impossible for the speaker is transferred to the reader as an irritating tautology. The language of dizain 46 closely corresponds to Jakobson’s criteria for difficulties of selection. Problems with the paradigmatic axis lead to modifications on the syntagmatic level. The paucity of concrete nominals is replaced with anaphoric substitutes (‘la chose,’ v. 1) and a number of other devices (deictics, relative pronouns, verbal intensifiers, rhetorical suspensions) that form a periphrasis around the unnamed referent. Jakobson also observes that in selection problems, there is a failure ‘to shift from an index or icon to a corresponding verbal symbol’ (1956, 66). Pointing to an object or seeing a picture of it makes naming redundant or superfluous. It silences the corresponding verbal sign. In dizain 46 we see a similar problem in which the predominant use of indexical or iconic language appears to be the only possibility for expressing this ‘image de la chose’ (v. 1). Jakobson holds that the principal cause of selection disturbances is the inadequacy of the metalingual function which permits speakers to refer to their own code. Confusion or doubt in communication can be rectified ‘by replacing the questionable sign with another sign from the same linguistic code, or with a whole group of code signs’ and thus ‘the sender of the message seeks to make it more accessible for the decoder’ (ibid., 67). In the first six lines of this dizain the ostensible clarifiers of ‘desir’ (v. 1) such as ‘image’ (v. 1), ‘chose’ (v. 1), ‘Celle’ (v. 4) fill a metalingual space but fail to fulfil the metalingual function. The image of the wounded deer is not the name of the elusive referent but rather the pictorial index of its effects on the lover. Thus, there is an inherent tension between the putative metalexical replacements and their referential vagueness, between logical discourse and its failure to name, between the rhetoric of precision and the grammar of uncertainty: ‘A quelle fin mon vain vouloir propose/De m’esloingner de ce, qui plus me suyt?’ (vv. 5–6). It is clear that the poet-lover’s view of language in Délie is quite skeptical when measured against the optimism of Scève’s 1562 biblical epic titled Microcosme. In Book II of this work Adam dreams of the advancements of civilization wrought by human effort where writing is a ‘Receptacle, et tableau, ou l’imaginative/Formee se reserve en sa vertu plus vive’ (Giudici edition,1976, 200, vv. 675–6). Rather than a place of containment and depiction, writing in Délie is a constant test of language’s capacity to shore up its intractable shortcomings and to solicit the reader’s active collaboration with the speaker to encode speech.

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In this context of verbal powerlessness it is significant that Scève chooses to use imprese. Their genre rules, social presuppositions, and history of readership indicate how they can be structured to shore up the deficiencies of poetic speech. In Jakobson’s terms the difficulties of naming cede to the strategies of combination (context) which, though eliding the precise metalingual solution, nevertheless outline an approximation of the missing meaning. As a genre the impresa places an alluring burden on the addressee to solve an intellectual puzzle. It is composed of a motto and a picture that must be reciprocally interpreted through a veiled similitude. Neither the illustration alone nor the words by themselves can provide the key to their relation. They are mutually dependent and require the interpretive effort of the reader to penetrate their hidden connections. According to a well established tradition, ‘Les Devises donc que les Italiens appellent imprese, & les Latins simbola, sont composees d’un Corps et d’une Ame, le Corps est la chose peinte or gravee, l’Ame est le mot.’54 Thus, the device is an illustrated metaphor. However, unlike the emblem proper, which may be self-explanatory and didactic, the device is deliberately hermetic and personal, the former finding wisdom in common places, the latter in interpretive difficulty. If the device is a pictorial metaphor, then its deliberate obliquity places demands on the reader to find the missing ground that specifies the relation between the ‘Ame’ and the ‘Corps.’ Scève created a work in which verbal powerlessness is transformed into powerful evocation through the elliptical connections between the device’s picture and its motto – a technique that is extended to the accompanying dizain. In other words, he circumvented the act of providing clear transitions by writing around the impresa and by leaving it to the reader to join the suggested relationships. Both the enigmatic style of Scève’s discourse and its periphrastic quality are justified by the genre rules of the impresa. Though Scève is considered the first French writer of imprese, he follows Alciato’s lead in coupling picture with verse.55 Yet, unlike the Italian who systematically glossed the illustration through an accompanying epigram, Scève only alludes to the pictorial component. Therefore, the reader must confront the double obstacle of discovering a ground for the device proper and relating it to its oblique companion dizain. If Scève leaves a hiatus in the code, he nevertheless furnishes a context for the reader to interpolate the absent referential and metalinguistic terms. Normally, the addressee is a decoder. However, faced with a text that deliberately underdetermines meaning, the reader must also be an encoder speaking for and with the poet-lover. This involves two stages:

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confronting the questions posed by the device and its companion poem and filling in the missing terms of the ellipses. The first step can be likened to a signifier, the second to a signified, and together they would produce a surrogate discourse. Let us move to the first or hermeneutic stage. Impresa 37, entitled ‘La Lune en tenebres,’ pictures the moon in darkness surrounded by clouds. The motto avows, ‘Ma clarté tousiours en tenebre.’ Following the device is the companion poem, dizain 330: Au centre heureux, au coeur impenetrable A cest enfant sur tous les Dieux puissant, Ma vie entra en tel heur miserable, Que, pour jamais, de moy se bannissant, Sur son Printemps librement fleurissant Constitua en ce sainct lieu de vivre, Sans aultrement sa liberté poursuyvre Où se nourrit de pensementz funebres: Et plus ne veult le jour, mais la nuict suyvre. Car sa lumiere est tousjours en tenebres.

(D 330)

[In the happy centre, in that heart, which cannot be penetrated By that child more powerful than all the Gods, My life entered into such miserable misfortune That, banishing itself forever from me, While freely flourishing in its Springtime, It decided to live in this holy place, Without otherwise pursuing its liberty In that place where it is nourished with funeral thoughts, And no longer does it wish to follow the day, but the night instead. For her light is always in shadows.]

The reader’s first problem is to reconcile the paradoxical devise with the illustration. If the moon, consistent with traditional imagery, represents Délie, why does the motto refer to the lover? Are the shadows predicated of the lover, the beloved, or both? The second question concerns the moon shrouded by shadows. What does this symbolize? We must hypothesize that the poet-lover is stressing Délie’s conflicting roles as Hecate, goddess of the underworld, and as Luna, celestial goddess of beauty. In so doing, he alludes by metonymy to his experience of the woman as the dea triformis: Hecate (goddess with jurisdiction over the wandering souls of the dead), Diana (terrestrial goddess of chastity, the cruel virgin), and

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Luna (the moon goddess, source of light and variability). The lover rather than the woman is speaking in order to orient communication toward the emotive function56 – toward his perception of himself as the confused, self-alienated victim of the woman’s excellence. Though the impresa forces the reader to bridge the ellipsis created between the picture and the motto, the meaning that emerges is still quite underdetermined. The oracular avowal of the devise is a highly private language that the reader’s interpolations cannot easily capture. Is the speaker emphasizing his inferiority before the woman’s perfection or his despair due to unrequited love? The evocative chiaroscuro can be deciphered in terms of mythology and Petrarchan conventions, but it remains opaque in its specificity. In order to gain understanding of the device, the text asks the reader to fill in explanations from key intertexts. However, the result produces a stereotypical solution that is little better than the poet-lover’s abstract anaphoric substitutes found in dizain 46. The reader will solve one puzzle only to encounter another – a more precise content for the motto. In this circle of enigma, response, and counterenigma, the reader is made to share the dissonance of naming. Let us review this process where reception is integral to meaning. When one moves to the accompanying poem to clarify the elusive message of the device, one is again diverted by the syntax of puzzling ellipses. The poet-lover speaks in such a manner that the critical terms of selection constantly cede to what Jakobson calls ‘the escape from sameness to contiguity’ (1956, 70). For the reader this is the periphrastic discourse that obtains between the device and the dizain. The ground that I named for the device (the despair of the self-alienated lover) appears unrelated to the ‘happy centre’ (centre heureux, v. 1), the ‘impenetrable heart’ (coeur impenetrable, v. 1), ‘that child more powerful than all the Gods’ (cest enfant sur tous les Dieux puissant, v. 2), and ‘My life ... flourishing in its Springtime’ (Ma vie ... /Sur son Printemps librement fleurissant, vv. 3–5). Thus, the membership of semantic classes seems incongruous. This effect carries over to another. The reader gets mixed signals as to psychological time. The devise suggests an allegory set in an implacably permanent present (‘Ma clarté tousjours en tenebre’). Yet, by using the passé simple, the dizain alludes to a specific time (‘Ma vie entra en tel heur miserable,’ v. 3) and place (‘en ce sainct lieu,’ v. 6) in the past. This discrepancy is intensified by the ambiguity of ‘Sur son Printemps’ (v. 5). Does this phrase signal a historical account of youth or an allegorical figure of youth? The tone of the motto implies resignation, fatality, and acknowledgment of unyielding deterministic forces. However, ‘Constitua en ce

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sainct lieu de vivre’ (v. 6) means ‘My life decided to live in this holy place’ (McFarlane 1966 edition, 455, stress mine). Since the last line of the dizain alludes to the motto, one would expect the poem to be a progressive unfolding of the impresa’s meaning. However, the nine lines leading to the pointe (v. 10) constitute one long sentence, complicated by hypotactic syntax, sudden shifts of imagery, and distracting syntactic suspensions. Upon reaching the concluding line, we find that while the lover’s account is clearer, the semantics of the motto remain imprecise. The ‘Ma clarté’ of the device refers to the poet-lover. Yet, in the final line, it becomes ‘sa lumiere,’ referring to the night (‘la nuict’).57 This is a first try; now on to a second. One logical way of putting the meaning of the impresa-dizain complex into focus will prove insufficient. Since Scève is clearly in the Petrarchan tradition, then in order to solve these puzzles, the reader need only contextualize the difficulties within that tradition. While Délie does indeed draw from Petrarchan sources, an explanation of such topoi will not satisfy the need to answer more questions. The interpretive discovery of this fact plays out yet again the circle of puzzle, response, and counterpuzzle found in the impresa. Donald Stone, for example, holds that viewing the poem in the context of Petrarchan psychology could untie many of the poem’s knotty questions (1969). This includes the innamoramento (the falling in love) and its consequences. The once free youth (‘son Printemps librement fleurissant,’ v. 5) is stunned by the paralysing encounter with love (‘A cest enfant sur tous les Dieux puissant,’ v. 2). The time (‘Ma vie entra en tel heur miserable,’ v. 3) and the place (‘ce sainct lieu,’ v. 6) of this bittersweet meeting are constantly recalled, together with the sensation of death-in-life (‘de moy se bannissant,’ v. 4). From that moment, the woman becomes an idol, and the location is hallowed (‘ce sainct lieu,’ 6). Interspersed with the memory of the innamoramento is the speaker’s reflection on the ever-present imperatives of the encounter. Dramatically, the poet-lover finds it necessary to give himself over to the woman’s power (‘Ma vie .../... pour jamais, de moy se bannissant ... /Constitua en ce sainct lieu de vivre,/Sans aultrement sa liberté poursuyvre,’ vv. 3–7) in spite of her ‘coeur impenetrable’ (v. 1). Having renounced freedom in the face of unrequited love, he languishes in despair, commiserating with night’s shadows: ‘Ca sa lumiere est tousjours en tenebres’ (v. 10). This way of reading Délie makes the assumption that analysis is complete when one finds that Scève is primarily using Petrarchan topoi. As Stone asserts, this poem ‘can be explained in its entirety as a love poem,

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quite in keeping with the Petrarchan overtones of the motto’ (1969, 99). Yet, the discovery of shared topoi does not explain by itself the relation between speech disturbance and textual difficulty. If the critic attempts to unravel Scève’s involuted syntax only to reveal Petrarch, then one fails to explain the speaker’s need for and the reader’s struggle with periphrastic circumlocution. Readers of Petrarch emphasize his facilità and dolcezza, while those of Scève, his obscurity. Therefore the similarity of content will not explain the difference of style, and one will fail utterly in understanding how Scève transforms Petrarch. Reading Scève as if he were Petrarch is not so much a critical mistake as an omission – a failure to account for what is specifically Scevian in Délie’s Petrarchan poetics. Any description of that poesis must include a deeply seated scepticism played out in a meditative structure used as method of knowledge. A product of this scepticism is stylistic difficulty that displaces the plaint of ineffective speech to the reader. The form of enigmas creates a style in which the poet-lover can circumvent the problems of naming and transfer to the reader both the task of naming and a sense of its difficulty. What are the meditative traits of this poem? By evoking the cosmos with a picture of the moon and the clouded skies, by seeing in Délie one of the three forces of existence (Proserpina), by calling his youthful meeting place with the beloved ‘ce sainct lieu’ (v. 6), the speaker as lover is attempting to find his relationship within a universal pattern. He seeks to define himself with respect to the woman who is not only a reflection of the divine but who through Cupid is more powerful than all the gods: ‘A cest enfant sur tous les Dieux puissant’ (v. 2). It is on his meditative role as poet that I wish to concentrate. His task is to address the gap between desire and poetic expression set forth in dizain 291. In this respect, it is paramount to win the beloved’s attention and respect and to communicate to her as a reader58 (and ipso facto to us) the depth of melancholy and alienation which he feels. Of the three meditative powers at his disposal he primarily uses the composition of place and the poetic language of empathy. Thus, it is the third component of meditation that predominates, the affections of the volonté. These emotions are made more concrete by the application of the senses, especially vision (the chiaroscuro) and tactility (Délie’s ‘coeur impenetrable,’ v. 1). In structural terms this type of communication is organized around an elliptical syntax formed by the oblique relation between device and poem. As the reader attempts to solve certain puzzles, s/he is caught in stylistic complications that mime the terms of the messages s/he is completing. The

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reader’s analysis of enigmas forces him/her to perform selection operations for the poet-lover and to share, on the linguistic level, the dissonance that the speaker experiences in attempting to communicate his ‘mal.’ The poet-lover so patterns his language that our stylistic response furnishes him with a supplementary discourse for his problems of self-reference. The constraints of syntax establish a concrete correlation between the poet-lover’s ‘mal’ and the reader’s decipherment of textual difficulties. To illustrate this point, I will return to impresa 37 and its companion dizain. First, the highly subordinated syntax of the poem creates the sense of suspension, of false corridors, and errancy. This response corresponds to the lover’s experience of Hecate, evoked in the impresa by the moon in shadows, who puts him in limbo and makes him wander restlessly on the hither side of the Styx: ‘pour jamais, de moy se bannissant, /... Sans aultrement sa liberté poursuyvre’ (vv. 4–7). The reader must await the subject of the dizain (‘Ma vie,’ v. 3) for three lines and three pauses, and this delay is compounded by the apparent discordance of imagery between the device and the first line of the poem. Moving through the poem, we encounter the word ‘Que’ (v. 4), a circumstantial complement whose dependent clause is deferred a line. Thus, the reader must wait for the lover’s momentous decision: ‘Ma vie .../Constitua en ce sainct lieu de vivre’ (vv. 3–6). Such grammatical figures of suspension challenge memory and concentration, deflecting us from distinguishing between subordinate and main clauses, relative pronouns and their antecedents, qualifications and principal statements. This grammatical labyrinth makes one constantly verify the accuracy of various interpretations, resulting in a retroactive rather than a progressive reading. At the same time that such syntactic figures of Hecate mark the lover’s disorientation, they bewilder and perplex the reader. Second, the gaps in predication correlate with the lover’s estrangement from the beloved. As already noticed there are apparent disparities of predication between the first two lines of the poem and the device, between, for example, the ‘happy centre’ (‘centre heureux,’ v. 1) and the somber resignation of the motto, ‘Ma clarté tousjours en tenebre.’ The ‘centre heureux’ (v. 1) refers not to the poet but to the innermost part of Délie’s soul which is ‘immune to the onslaughts of Cupid’ (McFarlane 1966 edition, 455). The centre is ‘heureux’ (v. 1) because there is an abiding joy in the soul’s power to regulate passion. Thus, the relation between poem and device begins with a semantic hiatus to indicate the emotional gulf between the self-possessed Délie/Diana and the estranged lover. This gap is sensed precisely where there are disparities in the progression of topics.

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Third, the discontinuities of the dizain also correspond to the lover’s self-exile (‘de moy se bannissant,’ v. 4). To explain this point, one must put this poem into a more theoretical context. In dizain 15 the poet-lover is found inveighing against ‘l’utile’ (v. 3) – the world’s unreflective conformity to routine and the practical. Délie’s mission, he declares, is literally to shake (‘esbranler,’ v. 4) the public out of its blind conventions and to exhort it to ‘honneste estrangement’ (v. 5). If we were to accept this strategy of disconcerting the reader as a textual logic, then our pervasive experience of obscurity would be extensions of Délie’s mission to the iconic and syntactic orders of poetry. Stylistically, our ‘estrangement’ (v. 5) consists in finding and interpolating the absent words of another. The price one pays for reading Scève is to assume an alien discourse. Fourth, the chiaroscuro of style corresponds with the lover’s melancholia. As Coleman has stated of the impresa, ‘the moon in darkness would awaken for the sixteenth-century reader associations of the obscuring of the mental faculties’ (1981, 64). Rejected and displaced, the lover’s disorientation is expressed as a cloud of psychological ambivalence. This is especially true regarding the ambiguous communication of narrative time. To be specific, the lover gives the reader the sense of inhabiting two mutually dissonant worlds. The style suppresses explanation and forces us to encode the terms of this dissonance. Their apparent irreconcilability is reflected in Scève scholarship. The critic Giudici sees the phrase ‘Sur son Printemps’ (v. 5) as a chronological allusion to the poet’s youth; however, Stone views it as ‘the spirit of youth’ (1969, 100). It would be best not to prove one point by excluding the other. The language of the poem conflates history and allegory, the time of a freely vowed renunciation and a figure of insurmountable despair. This is explained by noting that the subject of the dizain, ‘Ma vie’ (v. 3) passes through both worlds. Even though the poet-lover refers to himself impersonally as the object of a process, ‘Ma vie’ (v. 3) nevertheless acts as an agent in time (‘entra,’ v. 3, ‘Constitua,’v. 6). Melancholy obfuscates the tensions in the speaker between a self-determined historical being (‘Constitua,’ v. 6) and a figuration of law (‘Ma vie,’ v. 3). The former, though giving primacy to volition, acts in time and is thus susceptible to physical death; the latter, though swept up by time, lives in the unalterable laws of nature.59 A similar blurring effect is found in tense use. The passé simple of ‘Constitua’ (v. 6) suddenly becomes an ever-present desolation: ‘Où se nourrit de pensementz funebres’ (v. 8). Such overlapping is created by an infinitive phrase (‘Sans aultrement sa liberté poursuyvre,’ v. 7) which grammatically joins a specific decision in a particular place (‘Constitua en ce sainct lieu,’ v. 6) to a

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perpetually passive present: ‘Où se nourrit de pensementz funebres’ (v. 8). Thus, the lover’s renunciation is felt as something wilful but determined. The pursuit of Luna, suggested by the device, entails the pain of Hecate. Fifth, the obscure relation between device and poem produces textual resistance – a resistance that resembles the poet-lover’s experience of Délie’s ‘coeur impenetrable’ (v. 1). In terms of the lover this resistance is both inner and outer. As the reader has already seen in dizain 299, it is the poet-lover’s fear and avoidance of direct self-disclosure – a tactic that gives him pleasure. It is also his outward resistance, his transference of verbal disturbances to the reader in the form of deliberate difficulty. Discourse is highly problematic, verging on self-contradiction. The poet-lover needs the reader insofar as the latter can provide the missing terms to an ellipsis. But as we have seen, the poet-lover must make the reader’s task difficult if he is to convey the problem of naming. If the addressee is the inscribed double of the poet-lover’s perplexities, then the speaker’s transference of verbal problems both offers and blocks decoding solutions. The textual resistance experienced in attempting to penetrate the poet-lover’s meaning is a concrete corollary to Délie’s ‘coeur impenetrable’ (v. 1). This adds a tactile sensation to the chiaroscuro. The reader may sense this double effect of being lured and rebuffed in the concluding lines of dizain 330. The poem, centred below the impresa, is ostensibly a gloss of the device. But as one progresses to the concluding lines, meaning remains clouded by abstract, paradoxical language. The devise reads,’ Ma clarté tousjours en tenebre,’ but the last line reads, ‘Car sa lumiere est tousjours en tenebres.’ The phrase ‘Ma clarté,’ associated with the poet, becomes ‘sa lumiere’ (v. 10) associated with the night. Instead of progressively clarifying the motto, the poem concludes with a conceit that forces the reader to interpret the poem as if from the start – retrospectively. Between the transparency of Petrarchan topoi (night’s consolation) and the opacity of the speaker’s private speech, there is another ellipsis that must be filled. It is in this sense that discourse lures and rebuffs its reader. Each gloss is but the entry into a new web of complications. The vagueness of dizain 330’s final three lines can be somewhat dissipated by comparing the words and phrases with their use in other poems. In line 8, the ‘pensementz funebres’ refer us back to ‘la clarté de mes desirs funebres’ of dizain 7 (v. 8), which is of itself somewhat of a problem. This context helps to explain why the lover’s thoughts are ‘death-like.’ While he surrenders his soul to the beloved, she refuses to reciprocate, leaving him without a vital principle to sustain life. Dizain 106 offers a reason why

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the lover prefers to follow ‘la nuict’ (v. 9). The night is a ‘refrigere à toute aspre tristesse’ (v. 2). In dizain 330, however, night is not so much a refuge as a masochistic identification between the lover’s plight and darkness. Just as the final lines of dizain 330 contrast ‘le jour’ (v. 9) with ‘tenebres’ (v. 10), so does dizain 129, where the speaker is ‘Tout esperdu aux tenebres d’Egypte’ (v. 10). Thus, the poet-lover tends to associate the shadows with desolation and destitution. The ‘lumiere ... en tenebres’ (v. 10) of dizain 330 refers literally to the picture of night’s moon surrounded by shadows. On a more abstract level it is tied to the speaker’s characterization of Délie as the ‘bien de mon mal’ or the ‘mal de mon bien’ (D 65, vv. 1–2). The woman is simultaneously the perpetrator of suffering and the agent of deliverance. The lover’s renunciation of ‘liberté’ (D 330, v. 7), without a mutual gesture on the woman’s part, leaves him in an uneasy ambivalence between these two extremes: ‘Car sa lumiere est tousjours en tenebres’ (v. 10). Sixth, obscurity as meaningful textual resistance can also be translated as the reader’s sense of being caught in a countercyclical movement. This parallel’s the lover’s wish that his ‘life’ (‘Ma vie,’ v. 3) no longer follow the day but pursue the night (v. 9). In terms of style, punctuation conflicts with syntax. Dizain 330 is one long sentence extending to the penultimate line. It suggests at first glance an uninterrupted micro-narrative recounting the lover’s exile. However, the involuted syntax and the labyrinth of relative clauses continually deflect and sidetrack the reader. As already seen, the poem’s puzzling pointe reinforces this sense of retroactive movement making the experience of reading feel like gears going in opposite directions. Textual difficulty foregrounds the visual over the oral and dissociates the usually close relation between sound and sense. Instead of following the poet’s voice in a sequentially progressive unfolding of meaning, the reader must constantly refocus on the dizain’s print. Continually challenged to verify sense, the reader’s attention may remain fixed on an impenetrable word or may become caught in the to-and-fro of verifying antecedents or may be suspended on a long subordinate clause. Just as the poet-lover’s voice is ravished by the sight of Délie, so the reader’s decoding of sound is momentarily severed from meaning.60 The devices illustrating Délie give the reader metacommunicational signs that such difficulties are a function of the work’s poetics. If the text requires the reader to become an encoder, and if this encoding draws the reader into the net of verbal problems, then reading is more a reflexive activity than a transitive one. One does not so much decode an objective

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message as encode the poet-lover’s dilemmas. The speaker’s complaints become our names for his debilities. In the impresa we have just examined, the shrouded moon is surrounded by the words, ‘Ma clarté tousjours en tenebre.’ If we encode with and for the speaker, then the motto becomes our plaint as well. We become writers in the instance of discourse that marks our attempt to dissipate the clouds of obscurity. Impresa 46 is entitled ‘L’Yraigne’ and depicts a spider trapped in the very web he has woven. This is an apt icon of the reader’s predicament, for s/he is also seeking issue from false corridors and complicated mazes. Device 25 (‘La Selle, et les deux hommes’) pictures a man pulling away a stool from under another man. The motto comments, ‘Facile à decevoir qui s’asseure.’ These words apply to the reader as well, for the text itself is sadistically ludic, planting discursive traps and tricks as an indirect, iconic language of empathy. In this device the face of the perpetrator turns knowingly to the reader, joining his victim’s deception to our own critical puzzlement. The dual structure of a device consisting of a pictura and motto is adapted to poems headed by a pictorial mythological periphrasis and a gnomic comment. This type of poem also provides an apposite form for displacing the problems of naming to the reader. Dizain 31 is a signal example of how visual mythological periphrasis, modelled on the impresa-dizain structure, creates an empathy of dissonance between the poet-lover and the reader through its complex use of circumlocution, indirection, and ellipsis: Les tristes Soeurs plaingnoient l’antique offense, Quand au plus doulx serain de nostre vie Desdaing s’esmeut pour honneste deffence Contre l’ardeur de nostre chaste envie: Et l’esperance en long temps poursuyvie Ne nous peut lors, tant soit peu, alleger. O vaine foy, ô croire trop leger, Qui vous reçoit se fait son mortel hoste: Pour non povoir ce malheur abreger, Qui le doulx bien de liberté nous oste. [The sad sisters were mourning the antique offence, When, in the sweetest serenity of our life, Disdain becomes aroused for the modest defence Against the ardour of our chaste wish, And the hope for a long time pursued Cannot then, no matter how little, be reduced.

(D 31)

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O vain fidelity, O too light belief, Whatever welcomes you becomes his own mortal enemy, Since he cannot then cut short this unhappiness Which takes from us the sweet good of freedom. ]

The first line, in spite of its apparent clarity, presents the reader with a triple periphrasis based on mythology. The ‘tristes Soeurs’ (v. 1) are Procne and Philomela who represent the swallow and the nightingale respectively. Therefore, the time dictated by the legend is spring or early summer. In the phrase ‘antique offence’ (v. 1) Scève allusively evokes the lurid story that sets this scene of eternal lamentation. Tereus, husband of Procne, deceived and sexually brutalized Philomela, and then cut out her tongue. In order to communicate her plight, Philomela ingeniously wove a tapestry for Procne to depict her violation. After the sisters revenged themselves on Tereus, the gods transformed the two into birds whose song symbolizes their perpetual passion and pain (Grimal 1969, 369). The opening triple periphrase is analogous to the visual dimension of a device. When one examines an impresa’s picture, a variety of meanings is awakened and held in suspension until the motto provides the key to deciphering the image. It is precisely in extending this suspension that Scève’s mythological periphrases transform the device into the more complicated form of the dizain. In a device the addressee moves directly from picture to motto in order to solve the puzzle, but Scève delays the aphoristic verse by interposing reading difficulties through his indirect references and dense symbolism. In this poem the gnomic verses are deferred to lines 7–8 in the concluding quatrain: ‘O vaine foy, ô croire trop leger,/Qui vous reçoit se fait son mortel hoste.’ In order to move from the picture of Procne and Philomela to this lesson on the bitter effects of unrequited faith, the reader must untie many knots each of which, like a device’s motto, only alludes to the pictorial periphrasis. What could the sisters’ fate have to do with serenity in line 2 (‘au plus doulx serain de nostre vie’), with disdain and its ‘honneste deffence’ in line 3? How does the ‘antique offense’ of verse 1 relate to the lovers’ ‘chaste wish’ of verse 4 and to the ‘esperance en long temps poursuyvie’ of the sizain’s ending? Just as the poet-lover is impeded in speech, so the reader encounters obstacles in decoding. Just as the lover experiences a gulf between thought and expression, so the reader is required to discover the missing terms that would join picture to aphoristic verse. If the lover’s language is burdened with hesitations and corrections, so the reader is diverted and suspended by circumlocution and perplexing symbolism. This sharing of dissonance

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is largely created by the task of deciphering such elusive symbolism. Until then, the reader with the poet-lover must remain virtually speechless like Philomena before her commiserating sister. On one level the reader must translate the graphic mythological legend into the context bearing on the lover’s conflict with Délie. This is the tension experienced between desire and restraint and the frustration brought by false hope. The spring evening and the birds’ sweet complaint point to a contemplative pause in the lovers’ relationship in which they communicate to one another the impossibility of physically consummating their passion. Lines 3 and 4 take up the carnal aspect of the legend. The lovers’ ‘ardeur’ (v. 4) is so strong that they must defend themselves against it (‘honneste deffence,’ v. 3) by mutual ‘desdaing’ (v. 3). The sexual violence of the myth figures the lovers’ sexual frustration – a self-corrosion so destructive that it becomes a ‘mortel hoste’ (v. 8). The nocturnal quiet of the lovers’ reflection contrasts with the violence of the myth as if both lover and beloved were foreseeing the catastrophic consequences of illicit desire. The myth also suggests a concrete reason for the lovers’ mutual forbearance. By forcing himself on Philomela, Tereus, husband of Procne, commits adultery. Since dizain 161 tells us that Délie is married, the lover in dizain 31 projects the commission of a similar crime. As in the myth, the lover’s ‘esperance en long temps poursuyvie’ (v. 5) of dizain 31 would, if realized, be a form of sexual violence. The restraint required to hold passion at bay becomes bitter bile, a conclusion reached in the moral of lines 7–8: ‘O vaine foy, ô croire trop leger,/Qui vous reçoit se fait son mortel hoste.’ On a second level the reader must translate the mythological periphrasis into the content relating to the lover’s complaint of blunted speech. Tereus violated Philomela, and to silence her he cut out her tongue. Thanks to her ingenuity, she wove a substitute language in the form of a tapestry that enabled her to communicate with Procne and be avenged. In a similar manner the poet-lover of Délie is shorn of his powers, especially of his capacity to achieve effective speech. Just as the sisters endure only through continual plaint, he can neither attenuate nor shorten his suffering (‘alleger’/‘abreger,’ vv. 6, 9), but only persist through his poetic lamentation. So significant is the association between the dispossession of speech with violence and the sexual frustration that the Procne/Philomela periphrasis is repeated at least four more times in Délie (D 238, 255, 342, 385). However, unlike Philomela who succeeds in communicating with Procne, the poet-lover cannot forge a discourse powerful enough to possess the beloved. Instead, he transfers the problem to the reader. By miming Philomela’s reversion to a substitute medium, Scève’s persona uses this periphrase self-reflexively to weave his own surrogate language in Délie. While not a

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solution to the problem of ineffability, he uses the impresa style to spin a web of textual difficulties that affirms his poetic power by challenging the reader to untie (‘deslyer,’ D 278, v. 4) analogous perplexities. Periphrasis is a crucial figure of speech in Délie and underlies Scève’s poetic development from blason to dizain and from blason to emblematic discourse. In the case of dizains 330 and 31, it is also used to displace the problems of poetic speech to the reader. One should finally note that the suppression of direct discourse has psychological functions that overlap with the problems of naming.61 Quintilian distinguished two uses of circumlocution: the euphemistic and the decorative.62 It is the first that bears strongly on Délie. Roland Barthes, in his article ‘L’ancienne rhétorique: Aide-mémoire,’ notes that periphrasis is ‘un détour de langage que l’on fait pour éviter une notation tabou.’63 Indeed, the central psychological factor of dizain 31 is that the lover avoids direct speech to conserve his ‘chaste envie’ (v. 4) and to bridle his welling sexual frustration. Dumarsais in his Tropes also underlines this euphemistic element by noting: ‘Souvent aussi, au lieu de se servir d’une expression qui exciteroit une image trop dure, on l’adoucit par une périphrase.’64 In dizain 31 the lover’s immediate confrontation with a prohibition is deflected by ‘honneste deffence’ (v. 3) which suppresses the straightforward expression of adultery, sexual violence, and revenge implied by the myth. Henri Morier holds that ‘l’euphémisme est parfois l’expression de la peur’ (1961, 1044). Again in dizain 31 the lover’s amitié with the beloved is protected by ‘desdaing’ (v. 3) which reroutes any speech that may stir the embers of ‘ardeur’ (v. 4). Ernst Curtius, after noting Dante’s opinion that circumlocution may be too hard to understand, observes that periphrasis ‘passes over to riddling’ (1953, 278). This is true for Délie as well. What the lover cannot say becomes what the reader must decipher. The psychological factors of self-censorship, fear, and inhibition reinforce and complicate the epistemological problems of naming. Like Procne, the reader must be a compassionate sister to Délie’s muted poet-lover. The Circulation of Reading Difficulties: From the Impresa to the Neuvaine Délie is so written that the difficulties which readers meet in individual dizains are also encountered in a series of poems. If the problems of poetic speech are transferred to the reader in the form of stylistic difficulty, then this effect is also a product of combinations of dizains. Gaps in meanings, discontinuities, elliptical jumps require continual rereadings which scatter the complications found in individual poems among a suc-

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cession of dizains. The paradigms of difficulty found between the device and its gloss poem are projected onto the syntagmatic level of sequential structure. This stylistic fact is found virtually everywhere in Délie, but it can be illustrated by examining the second novenary group of dizains headed by the second impresa titled ‘La Lune à deux croiscentz.’ Whether or not any neuvaine in the work can be considered a thematic totality, the search for connections either in the group as a whole or in clusters of poems proves most elusive. In his critical edition of Délie McFarlane observes that ‘it is impossible to regard each set of nine dizains as constituting a thematic unit, and the point is so obvious that a full-scale demonstration here would be a waste of time’ (1966, 22). The succession of topics starting with this picture and moving from poem to poem strikes the reader as both discontinuous but familiar, disparate but recognizable – thereby reevoking the sense of a seductive puzzle found in the relation between an impresa and its companion dizains: Impresa 2 A moon flanked by two crescents is surrounded by a multitude of much smaller stars, and in so doing, celebrates the beloved’s excellence. The motto reads, ‘Entre toutes une parfaicte.’ (See figure 3.) D 15 – The poet-lover criticizes the vices of his times, particularly ‘ce vil Siècle avare’ (v. 1) and predicts that the woman’s virtue will compel the serpent of iniquity to worship at her feet. D 16 – Cupid transfixes the lover’s eyes with his arrows, and the speaker prays the Petrarchan prayer to Death that he may be delivered from his trials. D 17 – The speaker testifies that his love for Délie is as inextricable as the confluence of the ‘Rhosne, et Saone’ (v. 1). D 18 – While other poets successfully sing a variety of themes and master a variety of genres, the poet-lover can only cry pity to a distant, merciless beloved. D 19 – The lover recounts the defection of the Connétable de Bourbon to the cause of Francis I’s enemies.

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Figure 3 ‘La Lune à deux croiscentz,’ from Scève, 11.

D 20 – The speaker vilifies the Connétable for his treason and accuses him of violating the laws of nature. D 21 – The poet-lover recounts the Connétable’s death in a battle immediately preceding the sack of Rome. D 22 – The lover meditates on the three psychological influences of Délie symbolized by Hecate, Diane, and Luna. D 23 – The poet-lover confesses the futility of attempting to immortalize Délie through his poetry. In this novenary group the apparent discontinuity is striking. The most conspicuous manifestation of this trait is that the poems dealing with love (dizains 15, 16, 17, 18) are broken off by the poems dealing with the Duc

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de Bourbon’s treason (dizains 19, 20, 21). These in turn are followed without transition by the resumption of amatory subjects (dizains 22 and 23). The love poems themselves, far from constituting a thematic unit, also appear disconnected and disjointed, forcing the reader to backtrack, reread, and rehypothesize their relations. For example, a poem calling on Death to release the lover from the woman’s cruelty (D 16) immediately precedes a dizain expressing one of the work’s strongest vows of fidelity (‘ferme amour,’ D 17, v. 10). Is there any connection between the two? Are they meant to convey contradictory states or to punctuate that each individual poem is a completely new beginning? Is there any logic governing the poems as a numbered series? The dizains seem to be merely juxtaposed rather than placed in some thematic sequence. To complicate matters further, the most obvious, consecutive link between poems dealing directly with love is interrupted by impresa 3 which straddles the first and second neuvaines. The last poem under impresa 2 is dizain 23 which concludes by affirming that Délie’s light will shine for all posterity: ‘Mais ton sainct feu, qui a tout bien m’allume, /Resplendira a la posterité’ (vv. 9–10). This imagery is taken up in the next poem of the next novenary group by dizain 24 and its device (‘La Lampe et l’Idole’) which collectively symbolize Délie as the guiding light. As in the complications between a device and its accompanying dizain, the reader is drawn into decoding difficulties that mime the poet-lover’s state. Readers again incur difficulties of naming. However, the problem now is to capture the obscured metaphorical grounds that may join the apparently disparate topoi of the novenary group. In addition to the sensation of fragmentation and isolation caused by the discontinuity of subjects, one may also ponder whether such ruptures are indicative of the lover’s simultaneously inhabiting dissociated worlds. In that case dizain 22 is emblematic of the paradox that the whole is merely an agglomeration of disparate parts. The lover falls under the influence of Délie, but she is multiple and different. Hecate consigns the lover to the labyrinths of limbo; Diana makes him aspire to higher spheres; Proserpina casts him into the underworld. Temporally, these worlds are first put into the future tense (‘feras,’ v. 1, ‘Amoindriras,’ ‘accroistras,’ v. 6) implying their inescapable permanence in time, but toward the end when they aggregate into ‘DELIE’ (v. 8) they are transformed into the sempiternal: ‘Celle tu fus, es et seras DELIE’ (v. 8). Does dizain 22 emblematize the neuvaine by figuring its discontinuity of topics in the dissociation of the lover’s experience of Délie? Does it simulate the dissonance of the Scev-

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ian dizain (as a fragmented but self-sufficient phenomenon) by portraying the lover’s internalization of Délie as inside and outside of time? It is into such paradoxes that successive reading leads, thereby reproducing on the syntagmatic level the stylistic and philosophic disruptions that deflect the reader in the individual dizain. Most characteristic of such stylistic difficulties are the gaps and disjunctions between one topic or image and another. However, these rifts extend to the novenary group as a whole, since they reimpose on a larger scale the ellipticity between the âme and the corps of an impresa. Also, we have seen similar ruptures in the form of seemingly incompatible predication at the outset of dizain 330. It is reasonable, therefore, to treat textual difficulty as an expansion of the logic of the device and to identify its functions. These are to create an association between the poet-lover’s ineffability and the reader’s challenge to interpret a text that resists, evades, or elides transitions. Scève so thoroughly marks his text with visual imagery that we can address these difficulties by using the pictorial components of the neuvaine as an ars memorativa. This interpretive logic is authorized not only by the internal dynamics of Délie but also by the popularity of mnemonics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Yates 1964, 82–104). Just as emblematization is fragmentation and recombination, so the text encourages the reader to reposition a picture or a moral from one dizain to another. Let us make perfectly clear the receptive process that Délie encourages. Gaps in meaning, lack of transitions, highly subordinated syntax, and ellipses between ‘emblesmes’ and their pictures interfere with paradigmatic progression, and the clash of seemingly incongruent semantic classes forces the reader to interpolate the common ground that would unite them. Like a puzzle or a mosaic that continually refigure and/or recreate their gestalt or central picture, one part of a dizain can fit into another dizain, and any given dizain can combine meanings with the parts of other poems. The same is true of one impresa and another, and the shifting of device imagery from one poem to another. Moving units of meaning in such a manner fills in the gaps of an otherwise discontinuous text, which restores the paradigmatic coherence of the work. The mobility of components need not necessarily obey the narrative law of causal sequence but rather the paradigmatic requirements of metaphor. Like the problems of naming, metonymy comes to the aid of metaphor, since finding the absent comparant or comparé of a metaphor can only occur by creating new associations of meaning transferred from other contexts. Scève’s poetics is distinctly different from that of Petrarch’s Rime, for Scève suppresses the

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development of a single narrative line in favour of examining the paradigms that may subtend any number of potential readings of Délie. Following the thrust of these observations, one can attempt to overcome elliptical and oblique discourse by the extra effort of discovering the paradigms that bring together a group of apparantly divergent poems. In other words, the reader can transpose elements not only proleptically but also retroactively. One way to relate the love poems to the historical dizains is to proceed emblematically from visual to verbal coordinates. Accordingly, let us begin with the device and the companion poem that head this novenary group. In the corps of the device, the moon is prominent among a constellation of lesser stars and ‘minor luminaries’ in order to dramatize the superiority of Délie’s moral force (McFarlane 1966 edition, 127). The dizain stresses that aspect of virtue that defeats ‘ce vil Siecle avare’ (v. 1) and ‘utile’ (v. 3) – cupidity, greed, or personal expedience – in favour of ‘honneste estrangement’ (v. 5). This is the more philosophic attitude of meditative solitude, ethical introspection, and deliberate estrangement from the practical world that may lead to ‘meilleur changement’ (v. 4). As Tervarent states, the moon symbolized the promise of the future, a meaning to which Scève gives strong moral resonance.65 The visual prominence of the device allows the reader to keep in memory the advice of its gloss dizain in order to transpose it to an apposite context of a different register. This is quite like the challenge confronting the reader of emblematic discourse, properly speaking. Such a reader may logically move from the device to the three historical dizains (19, 20, 21) which remonstrate against the Connétable de Bourbon. Angry at Francis I and Louise de Savoy for having intrigued in legal manoeuvres to obtain much of his land inheritance, the duke defected to the cause of France’s arch-enemy Charles V. In 1523, the Connétable retired to Germany to plot rebellion against the king in an alliance with Charles V and Henry VIII. Not only did he unsuccessfully attack Marseille, but he also led his Lutheran troops in a battle preliminary to the sack of Rome (1526). Bourbon was killed as he scaled the city’s walls, but his troops ravaged Rome and destroyed all in their path (Knecht 1994, 201–16, 260). As Skenazi has argued, the historical dizains have primarily an ethical objective where the ruptures in the French political order redound upon the poet-lover’s disjunctions with Délie (1992, 108). If in the impresa’s companion poem the poet-lover vaunts Délie’s virtue as a criticism of personal expedience, cupidity, and material gain, then this criterion is particularly applicable to the arraignment of the duke who

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‘Vint contre soy, son pays, son Seigneur’ (D 19, v. 10). In the device, the destruction of vice is communicated in military terms: ‘ce grand Monstre abatu .../T’adorera soubz tes pieds combatu’ (vv. 7–9). In dizain 19 the particular criticism of avidity is captured by the words ‘la greigneur’ in these lines: ‘Mais celle part, comme on dit, la greigneur,/Deceut celuy, qui pour trop s’estimer’ (vv. 8–9). The expression ‘the Lion’s share’ is meant not only as a satire of the duke’s inability to profit from his brutal path to power, but also acts as parodic rebuke that he dishonoured this noble heraldic insignia. The poet-lover is careful to nuance the causes of the Connétable’s vices. The notion that fidelity weighs the heaviest in human conduct is given prominence by the opening of dizain 17 where the confluence of the ‘Rhosne’ (v. 1) and ‘Saone’ (v. 1) mirror the ‘ferme amour’ (v. 10) of the lover and the beloved. The symbol of conjoining rivers intimates a vow, a pact, a promise – a matter of principle and commitment – which in dizain 20 is precisely the rule that the Connétable violated. Here the speaker as preacher accuses the Connétable of violating natural law: ‘Mais la Nature en son vray convertie/Tous paches sainctz oblige à reverence’ (vv. 5–6). Another indirect relation which joins the historical dizains with the love poems is the play on gold, precious metals, alloys, and colours that symbolize a range of bad and good moral conduct. In dizain 23 the poetlover praises the woman’s ‘vertu’ which is ‘de trop meilleur alloy,/Qu’Or monnoyé, ny aultre chose exquise’ (vv. 3–4). Unlike the ‘vil Siècle avare’ of dizain 15 which sees gold as cupidity, Délie’s virtue is of a completely different quality or ‘alloy’ (D 23, v. 3). The noun alloy is the key word. Derived from the nominal alliage and the verb allier,66 the term communicates the quality of combining, of uniting, of fusing which is the opposite of the Connétable’s treason who violated his ‘paches sainctz’ (D 20, v. 6), breaking with conscience, nature, and his ‘Seigneur’ (D 19, v. 10). With his death at Rome the duke’s quest for renown was justly ‘payé’ (D 21, v. 10). The poet-lover characterizes the Connétable’s futile quest for selfaggrandizement as a whirlwind of self-defeating movement, of constant geographical displacements, running here for military victory and there for personal security: Voy ce Bourbon, qui delaissant Florence, A Romme alla, à Romme desolée, Pour y purger honteusement l’offence De sa Patrie, et sa foy violée.

(D 20, vv. 7–10)

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[See this Bourbon, who is abandoning Florence, To Rome he went, to desolate Rome, To purge there shamefully the offence To his country, and his violated word of honour.] Le Cerf volant aux aboys de l’Austruche Hors de son giste esperdu s’envola: Sur le plus hault de l’Europe il se jusche Cuydant trouver seurté, et repos là

(D 21, vv. 1–4)

[The Flying Stag, hard pressed by the Ostrich, From his lair, bewildered, flew away. Upon the highest part of Europe he alights, Thinking to find security and rest there]

The word aloi is associated with allier in the sense of military alliance, and it is precisely this glue which comes unstuck for the Connétable. It is unlikely that Scève read the chansons de geste, but there are nevertheless textual parallels between lines from this dizain and the Chanson de Roland. The rhythmic repetition of ‘A Romme alla, à Romme desolee’ in a martial context suggests the cadence of the Chanson de Roland67 – an association which is used in this context to parody the duke’s military skills. Gold as a substance and a colour serves to praise Délie. Because she is ‘des Dieux’ (D 23, v. 6), she has two qualities associated with ‘raison’ (v. 1) which rank her well above her lowly, acquisitive contemporaries: undiminished and imperturbable stability and permanence. These are the binding forces of her priceless alloy that never make glory transient. Reprising the imagery of the moon68 and stars in the impresa, the poet-lover celebrates her virtue as a holy fire that will remain resplendent for posterity: ‘Mais ton sainct feu, qui à tout bien m’allume,/Resplendira à la posterité (D 23, vv. 9– 10). The apparent dissimilarity between the historical dizains and the theme of love is also bridged by the notion that virtue and vice depend on selfknowledge. Unlike the omniscient heavens illustrated by the device’s picture of the moon and stars, the poet-lover’s century is ‘aveuglé de tout sain jugement’ (D 15, v. 2). Such blindness moves the Connétable as well, since his avidity for the lion’s share of ill-begotten wealth made his hubris violate three trusts: ‘Mais celle part, comme on dit, la greigneur,/Deceut celuy, qui pour trop s’estimer/Vint contre soy, son pays, son Seigneur’ (D

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19, vv. 8–10). Just like the duke who vainly tried to arm himself against his own country (‘Osa en vain, et sans honte s’armer,’ D 19, v. 7), so the poet-lover would delude himself if he dared to entrust his own poetry with the task of immortalizing the woman: ‘Doncques en vain travailleroit ma plume/ Pour t’entailler à perpetuité’ (D 23, vv. 7–8). This association of ethics with the proper use of speech recalls dizain 291 where the poet-lover judges his attempt to verbalize adequately his ‘mal’ (v. 3) as a deception that spreads like a plague. Just as this abuse of poetic speech is like a contagion, so the broken word of the Connétable perpetrates war throughout Europe. If the reader does in fact engage in ‘honneste estrangement’ (v. 5) as prescribed by the ethics of dizain 15 – meaning the necessary effort to grasp veiled similitudes – then s/he will conclude that the device is a way of thinking and not a mere embellishment. In this novenary group, Scève uses the pictorial appeal of the impresa to challenge the reader to seize the ethical import of a character trait or line of conduct. In dizain 21, the emblematic depiction of the Connétable and of Charles V densely encapsulates Scève’s moral parody: ‘Le Cerf volant aux aboys de l’Austruche/Hors de son giste esperdu s’envola.’ Line 1 (‘Le Cerf volant’ and ‘l’Austruche’) exploits animal imagery to point out the inhumane conduct of the two belligerent leaders. Charles is epitomized by the word ‘Austruche’ (v. 1), a pun bringing together ostrich and Austria. The reader is enjoined to make a moral judgment on his actions based on the ostrich paronym. Not only does this epithet spoof Charles V’s vanity and ostentation through the bird’s feathers, but since the ostrich was considered a symbol of ‘martial ardour’ owing to its swiftness and combative nature during certain seasons,69 it also parodies the king’s avaricious need for conquest. The ostrich’s quick locomotion70 reveals another criticism of Charles, namely, his incessant and seemingly ubiquitous military manoeuvering throughout Europe. As emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and heir of the Hapsburgs, Charles V was king of Spain and the Netherlands. He also faced bringing the hundreds of independent jurisdictions in Germany under some central control. Charles’s continual flare-ups with Francis I centred on claims not only in Italy (Milan, Genoa, and Asti) but also in France (Knecht 1994, 239). The reader is challenged to draw together additional ethical conclusions based on the other device in line 1 of dizain 21. Derived from the Connétable’s armorial blason, the ‘Cerf volant’ (v. 1) pictures a bewildered Connétable as a flying stag – an image that densely packs three criticisms: the

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duke moves not of himself but ‘at the call’ (‘aux aboys,’ v. 1) of Charles V. He flies to Rome for security only to meet his death. His infamy in violating the Holy City is indicated not only in the adjective ‘notoyre’ (v. 6) but in the pun ‘volant’ (v. 1) meaning the act of stealing and plundering. By the adverb ‘insignément’ (v. 8) the poem self-reflexively points to its use of devices to disclose important moral judgments: ‘Aussi par mort precedent la victoyre/Luy fut son nom insignément playé’ (vv. 7–8). As just seen, instead of vaunting the duke’s actions, the satirical image creates a mock device, an impresa of disparagement by inverting the meliorative qualities of the Connétable’s device into pejorative ones. Finally, the parody of the duke reaffirms another ethical principle in the last ironic line serving as a pointe: ‘De foy semblable à la sienne payé.’ In the arena of moral struggle the Connétable’s own acts produce natural sanctions showing that one’s punishment is directly tied to (‘payé,’ v. 10) one’s conduct (‘avare,’ D 15, v. 1). For the reader who accepts the demand of making connections among apparently disparate topics, who does not remain tongue-tied by textual difficulty or worse, deny or ignore it, there awaits the other task of connecting the history of dizain 21 to the themes of love. In contrast to the incessant unrest, the military manoeuvres, and the dispersed energies of both Charles V and the duke of Bourbon, dizain 17 uses the movement of the Rhone and Saone to symbolize the continual confluence and the abiding union of the lover and the beloved. In addition, dizain 21 associates its emblematic imagery with love in an important device outside the second neuvaine. This point is illustrated in dizain 21, lines 7–8 where the poet-lover says of the Connétable: ‘Aussi par mort precedent la victoyre,/ Luy fut son nom insignément playé.’ The key relation in the historical context is found in the word ‘playé’ suggesting that the duke has wounded or damaged his reputation. Because the beginning of the poem describes the Connétable as a ‘Cerf’ (v. 1) the reader would at line 8 refigure him as a fleeing, wounded stag. This kaleidoscopic change in the image refers the reader to another impresa, which richly develops the amatory implications of the historical lesson. The common moral, bearing on self-deception, requires a brief explanation. This is the eighteenth device titled ‘Le Cerf.’ In this scene the reader sees a deer with an arrow in its side surrounded by the motto, ‘Fuyant ma mort j’haste ma fin.’ Just as the Connétable believed he could find security by fleeing to Rome, so the speaker accelerates his death by attempting to escape from love. This antiperistatic dilemma reaffirms the system of natural sanctions found in the historical dizains by warning against the destructive consequences of attempting to abandon

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one’s obligations. Love is a commitment to the whole paradox of le bien du mal, and the effort to escape the negative (painful) side of the dilemma only hastens self-destruction. The Connétable being ‘playé’ (D 17, v. 10) is mortally wounded not only physically but also in reputation and loyality. Exiled from France, his wound is reminiscent of the poet-lover’s ‘playe ancienne’ (v. 56) in Scève’s Blason de la gorge designating that original split in the androgyne that cleaves the wholeness of being. Returning to the picture of the device that heads this neuvaine (‘La Lune à deux croiscentz’), we see that its symbolism captures key aspects of the reading experience. The full moon is flanked by two quarter moons – on the left the waning crescent, on the right the waxing crescent. Because the moon is both one and many, full moon and various phases, it connotes the paradox of a fragmentary yet coalescent entity which is aptly figured by the dea triformis of dizain 22. This symbolizes Délie’s reading process as a whole. On the one hand, to read the work is to incur the uncompleted and disconnected discourse of the poet-lover who through his elliptical speech transfers the difficulties of naming to the reader. On the other hand, the reader reconfigures these discontinuities through the efforts of grasping the unnamed ground that rearranges dissimilar topics into new combinations. Since one of the most evident ways of reading Délie is to find the unlikely relations between visual and verbal components, the impresa both mirrors this reading process and serves as the model for deciphering its challenges. Textual Difficulty and the Reader’s Reward of ‘Vertu’: From the Imprese to Délie as a Whole The section above has shown that if readers use the motto ‘Vexation ... donne entendement’ (D 94, v. 10) as the poetics of reading Délie, they will inevitably discover that textual problems are not simply obstacles of a difficult stylist but keys to reading the entire work. The enigmatic dimension is a reflection of Délie’s act of creating a poetics of ineffability that goes to the heart of its religious sensibility. The strategy of correlating response to textual structure, however demanding, not only fulfils a bargain to undergo ‘honneste estrangement’ (D 15, v. 5), but also offers a method for reading Délie as a whole. Filling in the ellipses of disparate topoi and changing difficulty into understanding are to transmute le mal du bien into le bien du mal. The ways in which the reader converts the poet-lover’s problems of poetic speech into interpretive virtue are not simply local matters re-

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stricted to a device and its gloss poem or an impresa and its neuvaine. They are most importantly steps in emblematic reading in which the paradigmatic transposition of textual elements constitutes a kind of impresa writing. In short, the reader’s effort not only clarifies meaning but enriches it ethically and aesthetically. To make sense of poetic difficulty in Délie is to amalgamate a number of reading practices that are typical of decoding devices. There is a puzzle whose apparently disparate elements – pictorial and verbal – invite a pleasurable challenge to the solution, which discloses the moral attitude or ideal of an individual. Just as the impresa writers freely use fragmentation and variation of well-defined sign systems in unexpected ways, so the reader transposes apparently unrelated, dispersed elements into pictorial metaphors of insight. Upon accepting the work’s moral advice, the reader is rewarded with the text’s exegetical keys according to an ethos suggested by the poet-lover’s motto, ‘Souffrir non souffrir.’71 In reading Délie like an impresa, one moves from textual obstacle to empathetic discovery. Though these two moments are inextricably related as a sign to a signifier, it is the second of these two responses that I now wish to develop.The impresa models a type of reading practice that extends well beyond a given dizain-impresa complex into the work as a whole. The multiple connections made by the reader are not only a source of intellectual pleasure, but they also yield a textual pattern of moral discovery and thematic development. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debates on how to read devices, there are a variety of positions, many of which centre around the importance of the ‘body’ and the ‘soul.’ For Paolo Giovio and Adrien d’Amboise the soul was identified with the verbal component and accorded the utmost importance. Béroalde de Verville also equated the soul with the ‘parole,’ but appeared to give priority to the body since without the ‘corps,’ the motto would be unintelligible. Pierre Le Moyne and Dominique Bouhours considered the device in terms of logic as a ‘proposition figurée,’ the corps being the subject, and the âme the attribute. Henry Estienne, on the other hand, saw the soul of the device in its very meaning as inferred from the ‘ressemblance ou comparison’ with the figure (Russell 1985, 43–7). Such contemporary viewpoints show that it is quite impossible for the critic to exclude any component of the device from the range of meanings pertinent to Délie. However, with regard to Délie it is logical to view the motto as the tenor of an illustrated metaphor whose vehicle is the figure. In linguistic terms the comparé is the motto and the comparant the fig-

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ure, the former motivating the latter. What the reader must uncover is the motif or ground that reveals the solution to this interactive and obliquely structured comparison. This is largely Estienne’s position. The way in which an impresa signifies its connection to Délie as a whole is by generating two metaphorical ‘souls’: one serving as the exegetical interpretant of a specific device and its companion poem, the other linking this particular impresa-dizain complex with a thematic type extending to other parts of the work. That is, one device or dizain will be found to serve as a point of intersection of a family of related poems and imprese. This point is better seen by examining dizain 204 and its device titled ‘L’Alembic.’ Impresa 23 pictures an alembic whose triangular frame is bordered with the motto, ‘Mes pleurs mon feu decelent.’ The still is composed of a flask, a delivery spout, and a receiver. Inside the lamp is a steadily flickering tongue of fire. In keeping with Délie’s allusiveness there is no direct mention of the alembic in the companion dizain, a problem which is made more challenging because of the poet-lover’s rare recourse to alchemical imagery. The devise intones the speaker’s words that his tears betray his fire. What alchemical rationale can explain this motto? Compounding this question is verse 1 of the companion poem (‘Ce hault desir de doulce pipperie’) which conflates noble desire with sweet deception. What relation between the amatory and the alchemical levels could account for this mixture? In alchemy, distillation is the act of boiling a liquid and reconverting it into a purified form by cooling (Holmyard 1990, 277). Through this process of vaporization and condensation, one rarefies, concentrates, and produces the quintessence or the properties of the transmuted substance. Thus, the metaphorical ground uniting the figure and the motto is distillation. Just as the fire of the alembic heats water to produce its distilled form, so the lover’s ardour through his eyes brings forth tears of grief. This emblematic conceit, joining the love lyric to alchemy, developed through Petrarch, Serafino, Marot, and Pontus de Tyard.72 Its most popular example is Guillaume de la Perrière’s seventy-ninth pictura in the Theatre des bons engins which offers much more detail than Délie’s. The scene consists of blindfolded Cupid kneeling to the left of the alembic fanning flames with a pair of bellows over a heart placed inside the apparatus. However, Scève complicates this theme by suggesting a link, as yet unspecified, between the devise and the adjacent dizain. Why does the poet-lover avow, ‘My tears reveal/uncover my fire’? Why has his ‘feu’ been hidden? The solution to this problem will yield a family of associated motifs and themes centred around the matrix of concealing and revealing.

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In dizain 204, the answer to these questions is self-deception, which is revealed by the poet-lover’s tears. This is the notion that provides the metaphorical ground between the device and the dizain. Ce hault desir de doulce pipperie Me va paissant, et de promesses large Veult pallier la mince fripperie D’espoir, attente, et telle plaisant’ charge, Desquelz sur moy le maling se descharge, Ne voulant point, que je m’en apperçoyve. Et toutefois combien que je conçoyve, Que doubte en moy vacilamment chancelle, Mes pleurs, affin que je ne me deçoyve, Descouvrent lors l’ardeur, qu’en moy je cele.

(D 204)

[This noble desire fills me full Of sweet deceit, and big with promises Tries to hide the thin deception Of hope, waiting and such agreeable burdens, Which the cunning one places upon me, Not wanting me to be aware of them. And yet, although I conceive That doubt wavers in me, My tears, that I might not deceive myself, Reveal then the ardour that in myself I hide.]

Though the poet-lover makes sparing use of alchemical terminology, his explanation is nevertheless based on the premises of alchemical transmutation. Imbued with the psychology of amour courtois, the poet-lover is duped by Cupid into focusing on the physical rewards of his service rather than on its hardships. Having set aside and submerged his plight of waiting, hoping, and false promise (v. 3), he finally becomes aware of his self-deception through the alchemical conceit. In the athanor of his being an irrepressible flame fires the muffled passion of his trial which, because it can no longer be repressed, is revealed by the tears distilled through his eyes. Though the alchemical connection to love is understated, it nevertheless subtends the psychological rumination on deception. As already seen, the first verse (‘Ce hault desir de doulce pipperie’) speaks of desire as a mixed phenomenon conflating noble aspiration with the sweet lie of physical re-

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ward. Also, a second kind of mixture compounded with the first is that hope of sexual consummation is mistaken for satisfaction. The purpose of alchemical transmutation is to separate and purify the essence of a substance from its original composite in order to draw out its quintessence (Hutin 1995, 80–94). In this regard dizain 204 becomes itself a psychological alembic. The poet-lover must remove the ‘doulce pipperie’ (v. 1) from high desire – a transformation that other dizains have shown to be quite problematic. He must separate his anticipation of carnal satisfaction from his misleading hope. In dizain 143 we saw that memory was inhabited by a sweet lie (‘doulce mensonge,’ v. 4), that in dizain 150 corrosive ivy becomes part of the wall, and that in dizain 274, ‘hault desir’ (v. 5) is imbricated with fol amour. Returning to dizain 204, we see that one approach to an antidote is for the poet-lover to realize through reflection that he must switch from fixation to change, or in alchemical terms, to transmutation. That he understands his error is indicated by the present participle construction ‘de doulce pipperie/Me va paissant’ (vv. 1–2). From the verb paître meaning ‘manger sur place’ the present participle ‘paissant’ connotes that he is fixated to the point of immobility on nourishing himself with a sweet lie. Huguet gives another meaning of ‘paissant’ which is ‘rongeant’ – an idea that shows the sweet deceit to be a disguised poison eating away at the lover’s heart that must be removed by alchemical means. Second, distillation implies the process whereby one changes the nature and properties of a substance (not just its accidents) in order to effectuate the transmutation.73 That the poet-lover comprehends this requirement is indicated by the verb ‘pallier’ (v. 3) which in Latin derives from palliare meaning couvrir d’un manteau, and Huguet gives ‘présenter sous une apparence trompeuse’ (vol. 5). The lover understands that to palliate frustration is primarily a delusion as well as false medicine because it only attenuates the problem instead of delivering the remedy. However, so deeply intrinsic is the deception that even a ‘mince fripperie’ (v. 3) could disguise erroneous expectations. The noun ‘fripperie’ (v. 3) suggests both tromperie and vêtement usagé, a polyvalence connoting that even the thin clothing of deception deflects him into error. In another register Ficino also has recourse to the word ‘thin’ when explaining how easily Cupid ensnares his victim into vulgar love. Reverting to the vocabulary of physiological bewitchment, he emphasizes the speed of enchantment by stating: ‘Because blood is thin, it flees into the heart very quickly. From there, through the veins and arteries, it easily spreads throughout the body.’74 In esoteric alchemy, transmutation is understood spiritually as an il-

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lumination where one penetrates into the depths of one’s being to purify understanding into wisdom (Hutin 1995, 95–8). Thus, the flame in the alembic is a metaphor for revelation. Speaking of Paracelsus, C.G. Jung says, ‘distillation is to extract the volatile substance from the impure body. This process was a psychic as well as physical experience’ (1968a, 148). In dizain 204 the physical change from fire ( a fixed substance) to water (a volatile one)75 symbolizes the transformation from body to spirit, deception to discovery. Cunning Cupid (‘le maling,’ v. 5), distorting and blinding judgment, does not want the poet to become aware of his duplicity: ‘Ne voulant point, que je m’en apperçoyve’ (v. 6). However, a new realization occurs in the concluding quatrain that reverses the obstacles to distillation. Doubt is the healthy scepticism that displaces psychological fixation and restores movement (‘Que doubte en moy vacilamment chancelle,’ v. 8). This is a result of the higher mental energy of conceptualization (‘Et toutesfois combien que je conçoyve,’ v. 7). Since concevoir means former un concept, avoir une idée claire de, and acte de l’intelligence,76 the verb signals conditions propitious to the distillation of thought: movement from passive to active, from obscurity to light, from lower to higher faculty, from beguilement to self-disclosure: ‘Mes pleurs, affin que je ne me deçoyve,/Descouvrent lors l’ardeur, qu’en moy je cele’ (vv. 9–10). In this distillation the tears disambiguate the sweet lie from the manifest suffering, and by this clarity, have a purifying function. While the alchemical/psychological change has indeed taken place, it is not without unresolved tensions. One will note that concevoir, from the Latin concipere, has the passive meaning of recevoir.77 This sense is faithful to the complication that while the lover understands his deception, the distillation takes place by force of ‘ardeur’ (v. 10). Alchemical physiology is the principal catalyst of the change even though it is prompted by the action of higher thought. Furthermore, there are three selves embedded in the lover’s discourse that are not united into a central agency. Close attention to the quatrain shows that there is the self that doubts, the self that hides, and the metaself that takes cognizance of these divisions. It is ‘Mes pleurs’ (v. 9) as physical actions that remove deception, and this response is merely juxtaposed with the three selves. Thus, Délie provides the reader with two ‘souls’ for interpreting the device, one for the dizain/impresa proper and another for extending its symbolism to other parts of the work. The interpretive âme for the device ‘L’Alembic’ and its companion poem is the notion of alchemical distillation. For the reader who pursues Délie’s challenge there is a second ‘soul’ provided by impresa 23/dizain 204 that bears a wider relation to Délie.

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This is the theme concerned with concealing and revealing. Such an invariant core serves both the general and the particular requirements of understanding the emblematic process. It serves the general by organizing themes that relate to the work as a whole. It serves the particular because its reappearance in different contexts individuates its meaning where a new metaphorical vehicle functions to vary its tenor. In other words, the typological interpretant is the basis of emblematic fragmentation and recombination. Like an ars memorativa, it serves to multiply the interpretive possibilities of a given impresa through its metaphorical associations with a web of other devices and poems. In the following chart, I give the thematic category followed by its related devices; in parenthesis I indicate a sample of poems also bearing on the category: Revealing/The Hidden/Concealing 23 – L’Alembic – ‘Mes pleurs mon feu decelent’ 36 – Le Pot au feu – ‘Dedens je me consume’ 38 – Europa sur le boeuf – ‘A seurté va qui son faict cele’ 41 – Leda et le Cygne – ‘Cele en aultruy ce qu’en moy je descouvre’ (revealing: 95, v. 1; the hidden, 53, v. 2; concealing, 59, vv. 3, 117, 226, 299, 314, 315, 359, 361) The reader’s effort to capture the metaphorical relation between the typological category and its new vehicle in other devices and dizains will disclose the limitless variation of perspectives that the poet-lover gives to concepts, states, and moral problems. In dizain 290 the poet-lover compares himself to ‘Argus,’ suggesting that he is ‘all eyes’ (‘tout en yeulx,’ v. 10). The textual correlate to this obsession with vision is the multiplication of viewpoints cast by the emblematic process of fragmentation and recombination. Upon discovering the typological ground in a family of devices and poems, the reader can observe the range of new but related meanings spawned by their different metaphorical associations. The great irony of the ‘Argus’ comparison in relation to this family of imprese is that the ‘all eyes’ (v. 10) aspiration of the poet-lover is bound up with an epistemology that concealing is revealing or that dissimulation or deception are closely bound up with truth.78 Like device 23/impresa 204, the thirty-sixth impresa and its gloss dizain foreground the poetlover’s hidden emotional turmoil. The device, entitled ‘Le Pot au Feu,’ shows a two-handled, covered pot cooking over a brisk fire with flames shooting up the sides. Uttering the devise ‘Dedens je me consume,’ it highlights the irony that the poet-lover’s boiling ardour, known by him

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all too well, remains hidden to the world. In dizain 204 the deception was inner, and the poet deceived himself; in dizain 321 deception is outer since he deceives the world. In the former the lover’s internal gaze was deficient until corrected by the alchemical transmutation; in the latter, the beloved’s destructive gaze, acute as that of a ‘Linx’ (v. 1), routs the lover’s soul. In the first, Cupid was stealth incarnate, and the lover lent himself to Love’s dissimulation; in the second Cupid launches a direct assault, and the lover tries to flee him. If in an impresa there is intellectual wit, then a final irony strikes the reader. What should be nourishment in the cooking pot is actually corrosion. Remembering that dizain 204 has already described the lover’s ‘food’ (in the participle ‘feeding on’ – ‘paissant,’ v. 2 ), the reader can now, in dizain 321, put these ingredients into the pot. They are the burning emotions of false promise, endless waiting, and disappointed hope. The third device of this group titled ‘Europa sur le boeuf’ is based on disguise and transformation. It shows Jupiter, changed into a bull, carrying Europa off to the sea. He is at full stride accelerating into flight while she, holding her left hand on one of his horns, looks backwards with her garments fluttering in the wind. Around the picture is the motto, ‘A seurté va qui son faict cele.’ As suggested by the device the poet-lover, like Jupiter, conceals his passion to win Délie’s physical favours. The dizain stresses the amour courtois side of his motivation that ‘esperance’ (v. 6), ‘perseverance’ (v. 7), and ‘fidele asseurance’ (v. 9) will confirm his worthiness. However, the reader must make an important distinction. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Jupiter actually accomplishes his seduction where forbearance and gentleness are used in the most instrumental fashion to conceal his sexual intentions (Miller 1984 edition, 1:834–75). In Délie there is no mention of a complete physical metamorphosis or disguise. In addition, Délie’s seduction is only contemplated in an atmosphere of reverie where concealment is barely distinguished from the virtues of ‘perseverance’ (v. 7). In other words, concealment-as-virtue permeates concealment-as-seduction which spiritualizes the erotic. There are Platonic overtones. At the outset of the poem, a certain serene clarity slowly dissipates the clouds, but this very peaceful transition to brightness is described as a divestment: ‘Ainsi que l’air de nues se deuest’ (v. 1). Using the sky as a symbol of Délie’s temperament, the speaker wishes to show an all pervading ‘spirit of serenity’ (l’esprit de son serain, v. 2). Yet, Délie’s very assured tranquility also raises his hope for physical delights (‘deduytz,’ v. 8). Finally, the lover’s thoughts of Délie are characterized by a rare lucidity, limpidity, and transparence, since he can now see (better than in any ekphrasis) ‘le clair de son

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tainct souverain’ (v. 4). This very picture of unmediated beauty stimulates his musings and transports him to envisage a final scene – that of carrying Délie off to ‘bon Port’ (v. 10). However, it is precisely this self-duplicity that both fans and muffles the lover’s fire in the device already examined, ‘L’Alembic.’ The fourth picture of this group and its accompanying dizain reveal Scève at his best in exploiting the complexity of ambiguity and forcing the reader to capture the various grounds of comparison. In this way the reader speaks with and for the poet-lover. This unit, like the previous one, is based on one of the many disguises adopted by Jupiter. The impresa is titled ‘Leda et le Cygne.’ According to a popular version of the myth, the king of the gods took the form of a swan and courted Leda. She then laid two eggs that brought forth two couples, Pollux and Clytemnestra, and Helen and Castor (Grimal 1969, 255–7). In the device we see the thin neck of the swan rising between Leda’s legs. Leda is reclining on the ground with her hair swept backwards by the wind. Both Leda and Jupiter are staring into one another’s eyes as if hypnotized. Around this scene is the legend ‘Cele en aultruy ce qu’en moy je descouvre.’ The motto means that the speaker hides his love in another form just as Jupiter disguised himself as a swan. As Françoise Joukovsky has observed, Ebreo in the second of his Dialogues, mentions that the cygne’s suave song carried two qualities that can induce love: the sweetness of its words and the purity of its soul (Joukovsky 1996 edition, 349). From the accompanying dizain, one finds that concealment in this context is quite different from the other devices in this group. The twist is that the lover identifies psychologically with Leda, for he, like her, has been beguiled by Cupid (‘Amour,’ v. 2) who has slowly taken up residence in his being (‘en moy converse,’ v. 4).79 By implying that he has been enticed by ‘Amour’ (an impersonal force) and in the same fashion as Leda, Scève suggests that concealment now applies to both lover and beloved. Of course in the words ‘I cannot easily deny that Cupid ... has nourished me’ (Nier ne puis, au moins facilement,/Qu’Amour Amour ... Nourry ne m’aye, vv. 1–2), the direct object ‘me’ literally refers to the poet-lover. However, the psychological similarities of seduction suggest that their identities begin to merge because the lover has been enticed in the same manner as the beloved. Given this subtle shift in reference, the first part of the dizain can be attributed to either the man or the woman: Nier ne puis, au moins facilement, Qu’Amour de flamme estrangement diverse

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Nourry ne m’aye, et difficilement, Veu ceste cy [flamme], qui toute en moy converse.

(D 366, vv. 1–4)

[I cannot easily deny That Cupid with strangely varied flame Has nourished me and with very harsh effect, When this flame which lives completely in me is seen.]

The second unit of the poem (vv. 5–8) backtracks and recounts the origin and the development of this enticement. The flame of passion started quite inconspicuously (‘sans point de controverse,’ v. 5) but has grown so strong within the lover that it risks escaping ‘Hors du spirail’ (v. 8) of his heart. He then states that he opens the ventilator often (‘que souvent je luy ouvre,’ v. 8) in order to release his growing passion. By so doing, he risks dissipating his fire into the winds: ‘craingnant qu’esventé il ne soit’ (v. 9). To prevent the extinction of his ardour and to maintain its intensity, he must therefore hide it in the beloved. Since the beloved is the abiding abode where the lover sustains his flame, he discovers his own identity in her: ‘Je cele en toy ce, qu’en moy je descouvre’ (v. 10). This motto is very suggestive because it subtly changes the idea of concealment as dissimulation to concealment as union. Thus, the outside disguise of Jupiter turns into the inside merging of lovers. The potential weakening of the lover’s sexual potency transforms into the actual reciprocity of passionate fire. Finally, the male becomes indistinguishable from the female and the two combine into one. In this regard the poem implies that the lovers are changed into the androgyne. By discovering in himself what he hides in the woman, the lover alludes to more explicit contexts defining this androgynous union. In dizain 271 he states, ‘Je quiers en toy ce, qu’en moy j’ay plus cher/... Point ne m’est grief en aultruy me chercher’ (v. 8; v. 10). More direct still is dizain 435 where he asks the rhetorical question to Délie, ‘Ne sens je en nous parfaire, en augmentant/L’hermaphrodite, efficace amoureuse?’ (vv. 5–6). Returning to dizain 366, one sees that the lover views his fire as ‘growing,’ (‘il croissoit,’ v. 7), a notion that refers the reader to a final allusion to the androgyne in dizain 144. Here the poet-lover fuses the sexual with the philosophic in the sense of reflecting on actualizing the potential of power that affects both him and the beloved. Relating a complicated transmission of souls, the dizain states that Nature, seeing the lover’s passive body without a soul, infuses a soul into the lover. However, realizing that the lover, even with soul, lacks a sufficiently strong animating principle,

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Nature revives and revivifies his ‘ame’ (v. 8) by extending it into Délie as its highest potential: ‘En toy l’estend, comme en son plus possible’ (v. 10). In this sense hiding means that no distinction can be found between the union of the intellectual and the sexual, the lover and the beloved, nature and couple. The ‘soul’ of this family of devices and poems, centring on concealing and uncovering, is disseminated into other dizains as well. Like the varietas of subjects found in emblem books, this family of themes expands and develops into other poetic contexts, thereby spurring the reader on to continued hermeneutic discovery. Hiding and revealing are frequently a reflexive message pointing not only to a specific motif but also to the general process of reading emblematically. In dizain 59 the poet-lover explains to the woman that ‘Je te cele en ce surnom louable/Pource qu’en moy tu luys la nuict obscure’ (vv. 9–10). On the literal level this means that the speaker finds a deeply seated power in the name Délie in order to bring light into his inner night. Why the insistence on the verb celer?80 In the context of Délie as a whole these lines also suggest that the lover has deliberately concealed its meaning. While many traditions can explain his strategy, the textual logic that I am developing suggests that the speaker is challenging the reader to pursue ‘honneste estrangement’ (D 15, v. 5). One function of this is to empathize with the poet-lover’s problems of poetic speech by involving oneself in a hermeneutic of veiled similitudes. Dissipating the shadows of obscurity requires uncovering or bringing to light the array of connotations associated with the ‘surnom louable,’ – whether they be onomastic, psychological, anagrammatic, allegorical, or mythological81 – not only Diana, Hecate, and Proserpina but also Daphne, Libytina, Dictynna, Diotima, Artemis, Aphrodite, Phoebe, or Pandora.82 Now we turn to dizain 117 for further development of this impresa group. Paralleling the emblematic method of hiding and unveiling is the capacity of the speaker suddenly to reverse psychological perspectives from negative to positive. In this regard syntactic style can be so organized as to imitate the dual structure of problem and surprise found in the impresa. This is true even where there is no picture in the first part of the bipartite structure. The first two lines of dizain 117 record the complaint that Délie hides the strength of her power only to ensnare the lover into mortal confusion: ‘Pour m’enlasser en mortelles deffaictes/Tu m’afoiblis le fort de ton povoir.’ However, the next two lines provide a positive and unexpected turn-about typical of the lover’s many sublimations. Concealing (mitigating) her power to deflect the lover’s insistent devotion can be a consolation for him. ‘Soit que couvrir esperances deffaictes/Face un bien

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peu d’espoir appercevoir’ (vv. 4–5). The woman’s understated way of undoing the lover’s hope may allow even a little hope to survive. Yet, the speaker questions the cause of hope through the use of the gerund ‘couvrir.’ To paraphrase verses 4–5: ‘Though disguising (couvrir) the memory of broken hopes/May make a very little hope appear ... ’ By using the gerund form ‘couvrir’ instead of ‘tu couvres,’ the speaker indicates that the act of disguising and covering is not limited to the woman and may include a type of psychological self-concealment: his own wishful thinking. In the poet-lover’s problem with poetic speech, there is an internal measure of feeling that cannot adequately be externalized by verbal discourse. If there is Neoplatonism in the poet-lover, then it is this conviction that interior modes of self-knowledge, however intuitive or ill-defined, are superior. Moving from sight to speech, he also holds that concealment is the silence that can be more virtuous than outward communication. In good Platonic fashion this preference for the interior is upheld in the opening two lines of dizain 226 where the speaker states that the power of understanding is more efficacious than physical sight: ‘Je le conçoy en mon entendement/Plus, que par l’oeil comprendre je ne puis.’ Having expressed his philosophic preference for the internal over the external, the lover then perceives the moral superiority of silence over complaint in matters of unrequited love: ‘C’est pour monstrer que ne veulx sa vertu/Mettre en dispute à la suspition’ (vv. 9–10). Though constantly rebuffed by Délie, he hides his grievances in order to conserve the reputation of her virtue, and here we witness the stoic sense of concealment. To summarize, the indirect relation between a given impresa and the work as a whole draws the reader into deciphering two ‘souls’ or metaphorical grounds. In this last example concerning concealment and revelation, one ‘soul’ relates specifically to the relation between a device and its companion dizain; the other corresponds more generally to the entire text. By using this method, it is possible to extrapolate from Délie a typology of ‘souls’ that offers an arsenal of memory places for the whole poetic sequence. The following classification provides such a matrix. Indicated in the heading is the typological ground or thematic family, which is followed by the number of the ‘emblesme,’ its title and motto. Samples of the non-gloss dizains that share the highlighted motif are set in parentheses. (An English translation of this chart is provided in Appendix 3.) Antiperistase 4 – L’Homme et le Boeuf –‘Plus l’attire plus m’entraine’ 12 – L’oyseau au glus – ‘Ou moins crains plus suis pris’

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18 – Le Cerf – ‘Fuyant ma mort j’haste ma fin’ 35 – L’Asne au Molin – ‘Fuyant peine travail me suyt’ 40 – Le Coq qui se brusle – ‘Plus l’estains plus l’allume’ 47 – La Femme qui bat le beurre – ‘Plus l’amollis plus l’endurcis’ 48 – La Mousche – ‘Plus se hante moins s’apprivoyse’ 49 – Le Chamoys et les chiens – ‘Me sauluant je m’enclos’ (46, 120, 215, 263, 289, 293, 317, 320, 333, 352) Adoration of the Beloved 2 – La Lune à deux croiscentz – ‘Entre toutes une parfaicte’ 3 – La Lampe et L’Idole – ‘Pour te adorer je vis’ 16 – La Cycorée – ‘En tous lieux je te suis’ 28 – Le Forbisseur – ‘Mon travail donne à deux gloire’ (1, 2, 11, 23, 44, 124, 127, 208, 259, 284, 319, 407, 435, 449) Attrition 22 – Le Bateau à rames froissées – ‘Mes forces de jour en jour s’abaissent’ 29 – La Cye – ‘Force peu à peu me mine’ 32 – Le Muletier – ‘Double peine à qui pour aultruy se lasse’ (39, 99, 121, 164, 174, 260, 393) Concealment/The Hidden/Revealing 23 – L’Alembic – ‘Mes pleurs mon feu decelent’ 36 – Le Pot au feu – ‘Dedens je me consume’ 38 – Europa sur le boeuf – ‘A seurté va qui son faict cele’ 41 – Leda et le Cygne – ‘Cele en aultruy ce qu’en moy je descouvre’ (Revealing: 95; the hidden: 53; concealing: 59, 117, 226, 299, 314, 315, 359, 361) Constancy 9 – La Targue – ‘Ma fermeté me nuict’ (14, 78, 150, 415) 15 – La Girouette – ‘Mille revoltes ne m’ont encor bougé’ (17, 54, 151, 233, 247, 248, 274, 346, 426) Dispossession/Estrangement 1 – La femme et la Lycorne – ‘Pour le veoir je pers la vie’ 17 – L’Hyerre et la Muraille – ‘Pour aymer souffrir ruyne’ 21 – Le Basilisque, et le Miroir- ‘Mon regard par toy me tue’ 26 – La Lycorne qui se voit – ‘De moi je m’espouante’ 27 – La Vipere qui se tue – ‘Pour te donner vie je me donne mort’

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37 – La Lune en tenebres – ‘Ma clarté tousjours en tenebre’ (6, 164, 232, 263, 270, 278, 306, 351, 401) Exile/Exclusion 6 – La Chandelle et le Soleil – ‘A tous clarté à moy tenebres’ 19 – Acteon – ‘Fortune par les miens me chasse’ 20 – Orpheus – ‘A tous plaisir et à moy peine’ 42 – Le Vespertilon ou Chaulvesory – ‘Quand tout repose point je ne cesse’ (18, 52, 71, 98, 111, 125, 129, 161, 203, 218, 238, 241, 242, 260, 295, 324, 396, 427) Hoping for an End to Travail 7 – Narcissus – ‘Asses meurt qui en vain ayme’ (motto related: 41, 63, 91, 261, 297, 353, 442; allusions to the Narcissus myth: 141, 230, 235, 307, 335, 409, 415) 8 – La Femme qui desvuyde – ‘Apres long travail une fin’ (218, 326, 337, 412) Inescapable Cycles of Suffering 43 – L’Horloge – ‘A mon labeur jour et nuict veille’ 45 – La Lampe sur la table – ‘Le jour meurs et la nuict ars’ 50 – Le Tumbeau et les chandeliers – ‘Apres la mort ma guerre encor me suyt’ (25, 35, 68, 92, 112, 158, 167, 224, 331, 402, 403, 446) Power/Powerlessness 5 – La Lanterne – ‘Celer ne le puis’ 14 – Tour Babel – ‘Contre le ciel nul ne peult’ 44 – Le Mort ressuscitant – ‘Plus que ne puis’ (power: 109, 182, 378, 436; powerlessness: 74, 107, 197, 209, 216, 264, 291, 304, 320, 376; powerlessness as victory, 139) Prudence/Imprudence 33 – Le Chat et la ratiere – ‘La prison m’est dure encor plus liberté’ (1, 3, 6, 362, antiperistatic devices and dizains, and those of selfdeception) Rebirth 11 – Le Phenix – ‘De mort à vie’ (48, 76, 79, 278, 300, 333, 409, 446) Self-Deception/Deceit/Lucidity 24 – La Coignée, et l’Arbre – ‘Te nuisant je me dommage’

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25 – La Selle, et les deux hommes – ‘Facile à decevoir qui s’asseure’ 31 – Le Papillon et la Chandelle – ‘En ma joye douleur’ 34 – La Paon – ‘Qui bien se voit orgueil abaisse’ 46 – L’Yraigne – ‘J’ay tendu le las où je meurs’ deceit: 50; lucidity: 291; self-deception: 38, 57, 126, 143, 187, 244, 291, 297, 341, 371, 434, 437) Sweetly Ravished 39 – L’Arbalestier – ‘Plus par doulceur que par force’ (81, 136, 306, 314) The Sweetness of Travail 10 – Deux Boeufx à la Charue – ‘Doulce la peine qui est accompaignée’ (87, 174, 294, 398, 440) Welcoming Death 13 – Dido qui se brusle – ‘Doulce la mort qui de dueil me delivre’ 30 – Cleopatra et ses serpentz – ‘Assez vit qui meurt quand veult’ (45, 71, 154, 337, 446) The View from Above: Paradigmatic, Angelic Vision There are many logics according to which the emblesmes may be categorized. Yet, whatever rationale used to group them, one will find that they constitute the major paradigms of Délie. The poet-lover uses the illustrations to unite the work by calling attention to the principles that he extrapolates from his épreuve with the beloved. If, according to a wellknown anagram, Délie means L’Idée, then the device typology is the set of primary forms that the speaker infers from his experience and adopts as knowledge. The word Idée is here used as a synonym of paradigm – a set of visual patterns offering the poet-lover a moral matrix for comprehending his world. The typology of devices offers a spiritual reward both for the poetlover and the reader. Just as the lover exploits the syntactic resources of language in order to shore up deficient poetic speech, so the reader uses the combinatory capabilities of imprese to uncover major paradigms obliquely related. The reader’s act of connecting illustrations and mottoes not directly linked by textual placement with other pictures and gnomic statements elsewhere in the poetic sequence is an act of separation and recombination that multiplies paradigmatic associations. Thus, a metonymic act of repositioning facilitates the metaphoric act of enriching emblematic paradigms. Upon tapping this mosaic-like reserve of similitudes – an emi-

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nently device-like procedure – the reader finds an entirely new dimension of arrangement which frees the work’s pictorial and verbal components from the fixity of sequence, placement, and poetic plot. This is what the typology of ‘emblesmes’ teaches, a fact which gains additional support from the table of Délie’s illustration titles printed after the last dizain and separated from the poetic sequence per se. Braving the gaps of speech, the poet-lover fashions a compensatory mechanism for the work as a whole. He bridges the pitfalls of hazy or absent transitions by providing textual resources for the exchange and reconnection of visual and verbal motifs. This does not mean that there is no successivity, no plot in Délie, and that the obstacles to knowledge and communication have been vanquished. Rather, the work has another dimension which summons the combinatory axis of thought to achieve a higher paradigmatic awareness in spite of the setbacks. A number of factors in Délie have prepared the way for the creation of this deeper dimension of virtual simultaneity. Not only the pervasive, allseeing eye (‘Ceste Oeil du Monde, universal spectacle,’ D 303, v. 1), not only the powers of the hieroglyph to conjure immediate insight, but also the timeless mythologizing of emblematic forms and the use of the memory arts give the lover and the reader a view from above. Most important in this context is that Délie’s ars memorativa is really an ars combinatoria in which, like Ramon Lull’s Ars magna (1305), memory is made active, mobile, and revolving (Yates 1966, 175). The lover’s desire for simultaneous comprehension is one of the reasons why he refers to the woman or to love as angelic: Tes doigtz tirantz non le doulx son des cordes, Mais des haultz cieulx l’Angelique harmonie,

(D 196, vv. 1–2)

Qui cuyderoit du mylieu de tant d’Anges Trop plus parfaictz, que plusieurs des haultz cieulx, Amour parfaire aultrepart ses vendages,

(D 351, vv. 1–3)

Et par son tainct Angeliquement frais Rompt ceste noise à nulle aultre pareille.

(D 358, vv. 5–6)

Appercevant cest Ange en forme humaine, Qui aux plus fortz ravit le dur courage Pour le porter au gracieux domaine Du Paradis terrestre en son visage,

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Ses beaulx yeulx clers par leur privé usage Me dorent tout de leurs rayz espanduz.

(D 409, vv. 1–6)

Parfaicte fut si haulte Architecture, Où entaillant toute lineature, Y fueilla d’or à corroyes Heliques, Avec doulx traictz vivement Angeliques

(D 418, vv. 4–7)

[Your fingers, plucking not sweet sound from the strings, But Angelic harmony from the high heavens,] [Who would believe that, when among so many Angels More perfect than many of the high heavens, Cupid would make his harvest elsewhere,] [And with her Angel-fresh complexion She ends this strife which has no equal.] [When I see this Angel in human form Who ravishes the hard heart of the strongest To carry it to the gracious domain Of the earthly Paradise in her face, Her beautiful bright eyes, kindly used, Gild me utterly with their emanated rays.] [Perfect with such noble Architecture In which, carving every outline, She decorated it with leaves of gold in Spirals, With sweet, vividly angelic features]

In Ficino’s Commentary, the Angelic Mind, constituting the Archetypes, is placed right below God and above the Soul and Body. The Angelic Mind has the function of receiving and communicating intelligence throughout the metaphysical hierarchy. While the Soul is discursive and time-bound, the Angel, unconstrained by time and space, has instantaneous knowledge that is complete, continuous, and certain. The intellectual virtue of the Angel is always fully actualized and self-subsistent to the degree that it can move itself by the power of its own essence (VI:15). The angel’s power cited in dizain 196 is the simultaneity of musical harmony reminiscent of Plato’s Timaeus where the music played by Dé-

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lie unites itself to universal, planetary consonance (Skenazi 1992, 88). In dizain 351 the phrase ‘tant d’Anges’ (v. 1) derives from scholastic philosophy, which itself is indebted to Dionysius’s The Celestial Hierarchy. Why the plurality of angels? Angels have no matter, and each is distinct from the other. They are individuated as pure, spiritual species, each one uniquely perfect. This makes for the happy multiplication of pure intelligences whose number and diversity ennoble and perfect the entire universe (Gilson 1956, 165). The pointe of the poem is that, while Cupid has his choice of all these beautiful intelligences, he prefers Délie as the superior one. Dizain 409’s description of ‘ceste Ange en forme humaine’ (v. 1), alluding to the Renaissance’s naturalizing of angels, speaks of a type of angelic light (‘ses beaulx yeulx clers’ [v. 5]) explained by Ficino as revealing a ‘whole picture of the world’: The divine power, supreme over all things, as soon as the Angels and the Souls are born from Him, gently infuses into them, as His offspring, that ray of His, in which there is a fecund power of creating all things. This imprints the arrangement and order of the whole world much more exactly in these, because they are nearer to Him, than to the matter of the World. For this reason this whole picture of the world which we see shines more clearly in the Angels and the Souls ... In the Angels, these pictures are called by the Platonists Archetypes or Ideas.83

In dizain 418 the essence of the angelic is instantiated by the architectural picture of a Corinthian column, sacred to Diana, which is decorated ‘with sweet, vividly Angelic features’ (v. 7). (The association of angels with architecture can be seen in Jean de Gourmont’s painting, The Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1525.) Without denying that the ekphrasis suggests a relatively self-standing, self-sufficient, geometrically perfect archetype similar to the essence of an angel, the column is described as something being constructed, component by component (‘abacus,’ v. 1, ‘Capital,’ v. 2, ‘decorated with leaves of gold,’ v. 6, ‘sitting on a base’ v. 8, ‘upon its Plinth,’ v. 9), culminating in the poet-lover’s monument of adoration to Délie, ‘Column of my life’ (v. 10). The movement from part to whole with a motto-like conclusion has parallels with the emblem and the emblematic typology of Délie. Emblematic pictures are themselves formed by partial wholes, and the emblematic typology generates a constant creative movement of separation and recombination. Also, the building of the monument section by section suggests the angel’s function to receive and communicate archetypal knowledge.

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In dizain 358 Délie is pictured as having an ‘Angel-fresh complexion.’ It thereby refers to the enduring serenity, all-knowing peace, and the blissful self-possession of the angel as depicted by countless artists of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. There is the perfectly placid and poised messenger-angel gracefully bowing to the Virgin in Fra Angelico’s Annunciation (1430–2), the self-contented and floating ease of Blind Cupid in Sandro Botticelli’s The Spring (1481), and the ‘musician of the soul’ figures in Pietro Perugino’s Music-Making Angels (1500). This last work portrays two ecstatic angels enthralled by their own music, one playing the harp, the other the viol. In the genre of the celestial warrior-angel, there is Raphael’s Saint Michael Slaying the Dragon (1518), where the archangel’s visage is one of effortless, almost disdainful confidence. In a Byzantine mosaic of the twelfth or thirteenth century (Venice, Baslica San Marco), one sees a seraphim who, because he is closest to God, is aglow with love. His hair and six wings emit (not reflect) the colours of gold, yellow, and red, and his lower two wings are crossed in the shape of a heart. How did readers of Délie come to understand emblems and imprese as hieroglyphic symbols that in ideogrammatical fashion gave rise to the sense of spontaneous knowledge? Since 1499 they had been reading works such as Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which used hieroglyphs and archetypal monuments as secret keys to understanding the ancient and contemporary world. Since 1505, they had also been reading Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica, which kindled great interest in hieroglyphics as one of the fountains of ancient knowledge. Let us concentrate for the moment on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The first word of the title conveys the ideas of strife, love, and dream, and, in 1592, it was translated into English as The Strife of Love in a Dream.84 The Hypnerotomachia is a love story in a dream allegory where Poliphilo pursues Polia through a series of trials, including solving the enigmas and the hidden symbolism of hieroglyphs adorning hundreds of lavishly decorated structures such as temples, tombs, arches, and pyramids. The dynamics of this work are akin to those of Délie where love leads to intellectual épreuves in the form of enigmas that in each instance are first perplexing, then, upon solving, enlightening. In this dream world of esoteric symbols punctiliously inscribed into archetypal monuments and sculptures, Poliphilo and the reader enter into an aristocratic, ethereal world of marvels, wonders, and erotic mysticism that bring refined, if not alembicated knowledge of all levels of life. Among the items depicted in the Hypnerotomachia that also appear in Délie’s ekphrastic poems and illustrations are tombs, columns, temples, pyramids, scythes, whips, an

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Figure 4 Rectangular Figure with Hieroglyphic Symbols, from Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

eye, lamps, arrows, vipers, insects, Cupids, mythological characters such as Venus, and pastoral vignettes with trees, fountains, and flower gardens. The Hypnerotomachia treats the relation between symbol and interpretation in much the same way as an emblematic picture and gloss. In Scève’s work emblematic pictures are taken from every domain of life in order to challenge the reader’s intellectual perception in deciphering the link between figure and motto. This is similar to the Hypnerotomachia where a diversity of object-symbols are notched into the facing of architectural and sculptural structures. These visual symbols suspend the mind in a kind of intellectual ravishment that is finally resolved by a gloss in Latin or Greek. For example, in Book I, chapter 19, Poliphilo and reader behold a rectangular chest displaying two rows of objet-hieroglyphs that require decoding (figure 4). Reading horizontally from left to right, the first row shows ‘an eye,’ ‘two ears of wheat tied crosswise,’ ‘an antique scimitar,’ ‘two wheat-flails crossed over a circle and beribboned,’ ‘a globe,’ and ‘a rudder.’ The second row below contains ‘an ancient vase, out of which sprang an olive-branch with fruits,’ ‘a broad plate,’ ‘two ibises,’ ‘six coins in a circle,’ ‘a chapel with an open door, and an altar in the centre,’ and finally, ‘two plumblines.’ 85 Readers are challenged to decipher these symbols in rebus fashion. If at any point they wish to satisfy their curiosity they can move on to the Latin gloss etched in capital letters below the frame of the chest which contains the solution: DIVO JULIO CAESARI SEMPER AUGUSTO, TOTIUS ORBIS GUBERNATORI, OB ANIMI CLEMENTIAM, ET LIBERALITATEM, AEGYPTII COMMUNI AERE SUO EREXERE86

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[TO THE DIVINE AND EVER AUGUST JULIUS CAESAR, GOVERNOR OF THE WHOLE WORLD, FOR THE CLEMENCY AND LIBERALITY OF HIS SOUL, THE EGYPTIANS HAVE ERECTED THIS FROM THEIR PUBLIC FUNDS]87

In his very useful edition of the 1546 French translation of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by Jean Martin, Gilles Polizzi provides a note explaining the rebus’s code: The eye = God The wheat and sword = Julius Caesar The flail and circle = Forever Augustus The globe = The world The rudder = The government The Vase = The soul The birds = The Ibises The Egyptians The coins = The public funds The Temple = The sacred The plumb lines = The construction

As Polizzi makes clear, the virtues of liberality and the clemency attributed to Caesar were a common topos, an example of which is found in chapter 50 of Rabelais’s Gargantua (Colonna 1994, 450). It is from such textual conventions that sixteenth-century readers could understand Délie as a love story drawing on an array of symbols that used the play of emblematic enigmas, first to challenge the reader and then, in the manner of hieroglyphs, to give access to pictorial paradigms having the allure of angelic, mystical, instantaneous knowledge. Of course Délie makes no claim literally to have such angelic knowledge, but its very emblematic rhetoric provides a mode of discourse that is relatively free from the constraints of successivity. This point can be examined by observing the interplay between emblematic images and verbal poetry in a family of illustrations that depicts sources of light – either natural (such as the moon), man-made (candles, lamps, lanterns), or combinations of both (‘La Chandelle et le Soleil,’ no. 6). A list of imprese of light is here provided whose mottoes offer matrices for the exploration of significant textual paradigms. 2 – La Lune à deux croiscentz – ‘Entre toutes une parfaicte’ 3 – La Lampe et l’Idole – ‘Pour te adorer je vis’

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5 – La Lanterne – ‘Celer ne le puis’ 6 – La Chandelle et le Soleil – ‘A tous clarté à moy tenebres’ 16 – La Cycorée – ‘En tous lieux je te suis’ 31 – Le Papillon et la Chandelle – ‘En ma joye douleur’ 36 – Le Pot au feu – ‘Dedens je me consume’ 37 – La Lune en tenebres – ‘Ma clarté tousjours en tenebre’ 42 – Le Vespertilion ou Chaulvesory – ‘Quand tout repose point je ne cesse’ 45 – La Lampe sur la table – ‘Le jour meurs et la nuict ars’ 50 – Le Tumbeau et les chandeliers – ‘Apres la mort ma guerre encore me suyt’ This matrix provides a set of combinatory possibilities which allow the reader instantaneous transpositions from illustration to illustration, illustration to pictorial non-companion poems, illustration to highly abstract poems, mottoes to non-companion poems, and correspondences awakened by Délie to other emblematic works. Let us pursue these transpositions. Correspondences from ‘Emblesme’ to ‘Emblesme’: A Constellation of Colours and Shades The reader’s intelligence is engaged by the discovery of paradigms capable of generating meanings beyond their number. First there is picture to picture correspondence unfettered by textual placement. Thus, ‘La Lampe et l’Idole’ multiplies its meaning by reference to ‘La Lune à deux croiscentz’ and ‘La Lune en tenebres.’ These are all modes of adoration casting different symbolic lights. The ‘Idole’ is a symbol of constitution connoting the lover’s single, established, well-founded form of beauty; the full moon celebrates the illustrious, exemplary light outshining its lesser crescent moons; and the moon of light and darkness nuances the melancholia and the ambiguity induced by Délie’s powers. Continuing to examine this line of paradoxical lights, one encounters three mutually interpreting symbols. The ‘Lune à deux croiscentz,’ picturing the full moon in the centre surrounded by crescent moons, implies fixity in change. The motto of ‘La Lampe sur la table’ (‘Le jour meurs et la nuict ars’) is a witty counterpoint to the typical lamp symbolism of vigilance, since the poet-lover has no choice but to remain perpetually awake day and night in death and in ardour. Last, ‘Le Tumbeau et les chandeliers’ (‘Apres la mort ma guerre encor me suyt’) shows that death does not

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release the lover from his war in the world beyond. Finally, the deceptions of light implied by the multitude of shades (‘La Lune en tenebres’) correspond to the variety of contrasting meanings of the word ‘Idole,’ since in the sixteenth century, this word could also mean ‘fantasme’ or imaginary object. This indeed is the source of the problem in ‘Le Papillon et la Chandelle’ where the lover-as-butterfly dashes to the flame of its death. Correspondences from Devices to Non-Companion Dizains: The Meaning of Chiaroscuro Two pictures from this constellation, because of their tenebristic coloration, extend their significance to dizains not accompanied by illustrations. These are ‘La Lune en tenebre’ and ‘La Chandelle et le Soleil,’ which in different ways point to the variety of chiaroscuro. The first does so by showing shadows over light, the second by one light (the sun) obscuring another light (the candle). Between these two ‘lenses’ the lover attempts to give definition to his dreams, suffering, illusions, and sleeplessness. One principle of Scevian chiaroscuro is that a vision requires a filter, a veil, an obscurity, in order to penetrate truth. (To conceal is to reveal.) This is precisely the opposite of rectifying blindness by dissipating the shadows. The paradoxes of covering and uncovering are densely formulated in dizain 355 by analogy with the notion that the glow-worm (‘Le Vermisseau,’ v. 10) is better seen in the dark. Thus, the master image is of transparent darkness which, like the evening star or the ardour in the lover’s body, uncovers an incandescent brightness. The filter of chiaroscuro which brings knowledge is sometimes connoted as the instrument of optics. In dizain 356 it functions in the form of a lunar dawn where the moon rises at the same time as sunset. As Titan the sun descends into the breast of Terra, Cynthia the moon comes to sojourn in the shadowy night (‘La nuict tenebreuse,’ v. 4), causing a volcanic eruption of ‘flammes ardentes’ (v. 6) in the dark furnace of the lover’s heart. As JoAnn DellaNeva points out, such poetic optics which make night like day may be compared to the negative of a photograph where night is symbolized by bright hues (1983, 57). Chiaroscuro also bears on the logic of enigma as a mode of knowledge. Between Augustine and Scève there is a religious affinity for enigma that is reminiscent of Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians that ‘we see in a mirror dimly’ (13:12). While the notion of ‘aenigmata per speculum’ gives both Augustine and Scève a modus operandi for exploring the mysteries of the

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divine, there is a fundamental distinction between the two. For the former the ultimate hope is to lift the enigma in order to uncover an otherwise inaccessible truth, while for the latter it is the very covering that reveals light. This is why in dizain 59 the poet-lover confesses to having named his beloved ‘de la Lune’ (v. 5), since this type of enigma, like the impresa, can disclose only by hiding: ‘Car je te cele en ce surnom louable,/Pource qu’en moy tu luys la nuict obscure’ (vv. 9–10). A fourth function of chiaroscuro, especially marked in the device ‘La Lune en tenebres,’ is to capture the meaning of transitional phenomena. Sometimes these phenomena colour the character of absence as shown by the discontinuity of predicate classes that we have seen in dizain 330. Just as frequently, they colour the character of a movement between the start and the end of a process – an optic that is congenial to the poetlover’s sense of melancholy, since more often than not he is caught between states. This second group of phenomena constitutes a spectrum of cosmological hues that expresses the inevitable mixture that is love. Yvonne Bellenger has concisely identified these colours by title and example:88 Le glissement du jour à la nuit: ‘Quand sur la nuict le jour vient à mourir, Le soir d’icy est Aulbe à l’Antipode.’ Du matin au plein jour: ‘Quand Apollo apres l’Aulbe vermeille Pousse le bout de ses rayons dorez,’

(D 446, vv. 9–10)

(D 386, vv. 1–2)

De la nuit au matin: ‘L’Aulbe estaingnoit Estoilles à foison, Tirant le jour des regions infimes, Quand Apollo montant sur l’Orison Des montz cornuz doroit les haultes cymes.’

(D 79, vv. 1–4)

De la vêprée au soir: ‘Le Dieu Imberbe au giron de Thetys Nous fait des montz les grandz umbres descendre.’

(D 98, vv. 1–2)

[Day sliding into night: ‘When, at night, day comes to die,

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Evening here is Dawn in the Antipodes.’ ] [From morning to broad daylight: ‘When Apollo, after vermilion Dawn, Extends the end of his golden rays,’ ] [From night to morning: ‘Dawn was extinguishing Stars in great numbers, Drawing the day from the low regions, As Apollo rising at the Horizon, Gilded the high peaks of the horned mountains.’] [ From vespers to the evening: ‘The Beardless God for us makes the great shadows Descend from the mountains into the lap of Thetas.’]

As Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani has shown, the poet-lover is fascinated by the regularities in becoming in order to discover the laws of a process and the rules of a transition at the moment of change.89 Transposability of Mottoes to Non-Companion Poems The mottoes of the fifty ‘emblesmes’ function as another matrix of meanings that cuts across the text in virtually any order. They are a reserve of emblematic potential that the reader can tap in transposing them to noncompanion poems throughout the work. The separation and transposition of mottoes can enrich the meaning of pictures by comparison or contrast in an ever-circulating movement of delinking and relinking. Accordingly, the motto of the second device, ‘Entre toutes une parfaicte ‘is recalled by dizain 176 to show that the lover’s soul, in imitation of the moon’s growth to fullness, can itself renew its quest for perfection: ‘Et le parfaict de ta beaulté croissant/Dedans mon coeur tousjous renovelle’ (vv. 9–10). In dizain 72 Délie is described as ‘la superbe Machine,’ and in this context, the motto of perfection (‘Entre toutes une parfaicte’) can be related to her uniqueness as a being apart, much like the fact that each angel is a distinctly superior species: ‘Miracle seul de sa seulle beaulté’ (v. 2). The motto of device 36 (‘Dedens je me consume’) brings the sensation of boiling heat into a medical context when related to dizain 155 where the lover undergoes a paroxysmal fever hot as a furnace (‘cheminée,’ v. 5): ‘Et quand j’y pense, et le cuyde advenir,/Ma fiebvre r’entre en plus grand parocisme’

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(vv. 9–10). To emphasize the messianic power of Délie’s virtue, the lover makes clear that his motto of Délie as the guiding lamp (‘Pour te adorer je vis’) will inevitably inspire the entire world’s moral admiration: Et la Vertu par reigles non confuses Ne tend sinon à ce juste debvoir, Qui nous contraint, non seulement de veoir, Mais d’adorer toute perfection: Il fauldra donc, que soubz le tien povoir Ce Monde voyse en admiration.

(D 182, vv. 5–10)

[And Virtue, by unconfused rules, Does not otherwise lead to this just duty Which constrains me not only to see But to adore all perfection, Then this World, submitting to your power, Will have to manifest constant admiration.]

Sometimes a given motto fans out meanings that contrast strikingly with the impresa to which it was originally connected. For example, although placed under the neuvaine of ‘La Lampe et l’Idole,’ the last line of dizain 26 (‘Las toujours j’ars, et point ne me consume’) strikes up a stark difference with a related motto located some 295 poems away. This is ‘Dedens je me consume’ providing the legend for the ‘Le Pot au feu’ illustration. Thus, there is a ‘Lampe’ whose spiritual guidance burns without consuming but, in contrast, a more physical fire (‘Le Pot’) that burns and does consume. In the very next dizain (27) the self that consumes itself returns in a more positive sense as a sweet melting of tears which, in Délie’s joyful presence, gives rise to self-forgetting: ‘Un doulx obly de moy, qui me consomme’ (v. 10). In sum, that the mottoes of dizains 26 and 27 are related not to their neuvaine device but to a future impresa (no. 36) shows that through the emblematic process the text encourages a reading that would be a virtual simultaneity. The potential for motto mobility is the same as for pictorial repositioning. For example, the motto of the third device, ‘Pour te adorer je vis,’ also bears on the lover’s attraction to Délie in dizain 80. Here Délie’s brightness is figured as the lover’s lofty ideal (‘hault bien,’ D 80, v. 6), but her rays prove so bright that they dim his mental faculties: ‘Au recevoir l’aigu de tes esclairs/Tu m’offuscas et sens, et congnoissance,’ vv. 1–2). In dizain 82 the lover is again attracted to the lofty ideal epitomized by device 3, for

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it begins with the line: ‘L’ardent desir du hault bien desiré.’ Yet, in dizains 80 and 82, the lover’s feelings of devotion fall out of balance from the contemplative ideal of the third device. In dizain 80 the adoration is a painful domination (v. 5), and in dizain 82 it results in speechlessness (vv. 9–10). Used as a carrefour, the interaction of the third device’s motto with dizains 80 and 82 signals the acts of moral measurement and purification by comparison with the poised contemplative model, ‘La Lampe et l’Idole.’ Transposability of Pictures to Abstract, Non-Companion Poems with Few or No Visual Components The paradigmatic correspondences between the illustrations and the poems are another factor which lends Délie an aura of spontaneous knowledge. Characteristic of the poet-lover’s speech are lexical abstraction and a distant, recondite diction that may sometimes overtake its visual concreteness. However, Délie is so composed that its illustrations can be transposed to predominantly non-pictorial dizains for a double advantage. First, the transposability of illustrations gives an alluring tangibility to verbal intellectuality, and also, the emblematic pictures take on wider meaning by interaction with such poems. Dizain 151 is one of the poetlover’s strongest professions of fidelity to Délie, since he vows a loyalty that is exclusively and entirely pledged to the woman: Aumoins peulx tu en toy imaginer, Quelle est la foy, qu’Amour en mon coeur lye. Car, luy croissant, où il debvroit finer, Tout aultre bien pour le tien elle oblie: Ne pour espoir de mieulx, qui me supplie, Tousjours elle est plus loyalle en sa proeuve.

(D 151, vv. 1–6)

[At least you can imagine in your own mind What this faithfulness is that Love binds inside my heart. For, as love grows, where it ought to end, My faithfulness forgets all other good save yours. Nor even for the hope of spiritual perfection, which prods me on Does it forsake its loyalty to its own trial.]

While the poem has few visual elements, its expression of fidelity is perfectly illuminated by device 16 titled ‘La Cycorée,’ picturing the helio-

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trope arching upwards, reaching to the sun to be bathed in its rays. This picture concretizes the myth of Clytia whom Apollo deserted after passionately loving her. Her heart broken, she was changed into a sunflower to symbolize her unwavering devotion – a sentiment brought out in motto form by the fourth line, ‘Tout autre bien pour le tien elle oblie.’ Dizain 220 is a poem of apprehension and fear in which the lover ponders the always imminent danger that he incurs by having to deliberate under the pressures of necessity and to act while in perilous doubt. The final two lines tremble in the expectation of incurring some fatal miscalculation: ‘Las plus grand mal ne peult avoir mon bien,/Que pour ma faulte estre en un rien perdu.’ [Alas, my good can have no greater evil/Than to be lost in an instant through my own fault.] Fifty-six poems later, the reader meets the device titled ‘Le Papillon et la Chandelle,’ that which can immediately be related retrospectively to this poem, in which the love-struck butterfly is dashing into the flame that will destroy it. While in the iconographical tradition the butterfly is unaware of its tragic self-deception, the lover in Délie presages it but cannot stop it. Dizain 370 is one of the poet-lover’s bleakest avowals of despair, for it is bathed in the melancholy of dashed prospects, much as the more visual dizain 330 which precedes it. Blaming the beloved for her ‘ingratitude’ (v. 7) and feeding on his own sadness, the lover nevertheless finds himself fleeing to the yoke of servitude: ‘Dont mes espritz recouvrantz sentement,/Fuyent au joug de la grand servitude/De desespoir, Dieu d’eternel tourment’ (vv. 8–10). In device 37, ‘La Lune en tenebres,’ one finds rich visual correlates to a number of sentiments in dizain 370. Certainly the last line mentioning ‘desespoir’ picks up associations with the shadowcovered moon, and the invocation of ‘Dieu d’eternel tourment’ has theodical correlations with the cosmological scene of brightness impeded by darkness. Likewise, when the lover says in lines 3 and 4 of dizain 370, ‘Je me ruyne au penser ennuyé/Du pensement proscript de ma lyesse’ (vv. 3–4), he alludes to the ‘pensementz funebres’ (v. 8) of the thirty-seventh device’s companion poem (D 330), implying the ambiguous state of forced thinking and voluntary mortification. In dizain 227 the poet-lover begins by lamenting the inability of poetic speech to rise to the concept of eternity symbolized by Délie. Yet, at the nadir of silence the speaker decides to cite and to adore the woman’s evergrowing preeminence rather than describe it. Pour m’efforcer à degluer les yeulx De ma pensée enracinez en elle,

Lyric Dispossession and the Powers of Enigma Je m’en veux taire, et lors j’y pense mieulx Qui juge en moy ma peine estre eternelle. Parquoy ma plume au bas vol de son aele Se demettra de plus en raisonner, Aussi pour plus haultement resonner, Vueille le Temps, vueille la Fame, ou non, Sa grace asses, sans moy, luy peult donner Corps à ses faitz, et Ame à son hault nom.

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(D 227, vv. 5–10)

[To do the most to loosen the eyes Of my thought which are rooted in her, I try to be silent about her, and then think better of it, I who think my pain to be eternal. Wherefore my pen, at the lowest point in its flight, Will cease considering her. And so, to resound higher, Whether Time or Fame wish it or no, Her grace, without me, will give sufficient Body to her deeds and Soul to her lofty name.]

The lines ‘... the eyes/Of my thought which are rooted in her’ (vv. 1–2) call to mind the third illustration, ‘La Lampe et l’Idole’ which ‘resound’ (v. 7) well with the logic of this poem. In this device there is a man on a pedestal holding a staff contemplating a self-standing lamp emitting flames. Certainly this is the ‘Flamme si saincte’ (v. 1) of the last dizain. The figure’s fixed gaze on the fire, one of silent reflection, is the indexical gesture showing that he cedes absolute value to the flames which captivate him. The hypnotizing effect of the woman on the lover is shown by the fact that just as he cannot mute his silence to dim the light of eternity (D 227), neither can he avert his mesmerized eyes from the lamp in impresa 3. By using synesthésie both poem and device create silence to augment sight and light, the first to watch the woman’s flight into eternity, the second to intensify the concentration of the gaze on the lamp. Dizain 392, also on the abstract side, is a contrast between Aristotelian cosmology and Délie’s unpredictable superiority to such laws. Lines 1–4 recount contemporary medical beliefs concerning the four elements and their control over the body’s equilibrium, while lines 5–10 show Délie to be an exception to these laws: Les elementz entre eulx sont ennemys,

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Movantz tousjours continuelz discours: Et toutefois se font ensemble amys Pour composer l’union de ce corps. Mais toy contraire aux naturelz accordz, Et à tout bien, que la Nature baille, En ceste mienne immortelle bataille Tu te rens doulce, et t’appaises soubdain: Et quand la paix à nous unir travaille, Tu t’esmeulx toute en guerre, et en desdain.

(D 392)

[The elements are enemies to one another, Arousing continuous discord. And yet they befriend one another To make up the union of the body. But you, contrary to natural accords And to all good that Nature gives, When I am locked up in immortal combat, You become sweet and grow suddenly pacific. And when peace works at uniting us, You stir yourself to utter war and to disdain.]

The poem foresees the last illustration of Délie, ‘Le Tumbeau et les chandeliers’ which is surrounded by the motto, ‘Apres la mort ma guerre encor me suyt’ (figure 5). There are two candles flanking a coffin as well as an aspersorium in front of it symbolizing the idea that life is maintained by the constant but balanced opposition of the elements (fire, water, air, earth). As stated in the motto, this warring condition persists beyond death. Since the speaker in dizain 392 sees in such concordia discors his immortal battle (‘ceste mienne immortelle bataille,’ v. 7), he makes reference to a future illustration that illuminates his experience. The picture and the poem are mirror inversions of one another brought about by the poet-lover’s predilection for oppositional, paradoxical thinking. The coffin expresses immortal war by death, and the poem conceives of immortal war as life (‘la Nature baille ... ceste immortelle bataille,’ vv. 6–7). Thus, the reversibility of life and death gives the poet-lover an unending promise of cyclical continuity which vies with the beloved’s eternal qualities. This is positive transvaluation which converts pain into power and self-knowledge. Seen as the ‘negative’ of the picture, dizain 392 is advantageous to the lover in another way. As he states, the woman is contrary and superior

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Figure 5 ‘Le Tumbeau et les chandeliers,’ from Scève, 203.

to natural accords (‘Mais toy contraire aux naturelz accordz,’ v. 5) and, given the many poems that place Délie above nature, the poet-lover is disclaiming the possibility that his love for the woman is merely pantheistic. Rather, it is transcendent. Correspondences Between Délie and Other Emblematic Works: Light and Dark, Fire and Night In virtue of the popularity of other emblematic works by Horapollo, Colonna, Alciato, La Perrière, and Corrozet, the reader of Délie can make emblematic associations in a spontaneous manner by noting how contemporary works compare or contrast with Scève’s canzoniere. In that case the sense of angelic, instantaneous knowledge can be extended and enriched by casting a wider compass of associations that could redound to Délie. The emblematic process of parleying verbal and pictorial motifs into new mosaics is highly conducive to transposability. Such emblematic intertexts

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provided readers with a host of procedures, components, and themes they could imaginatively recombine, not only with written works, but also with a spectrum of media such as decoration, pedagogy, public festivals, and clothing. Here I will concentrate on written works. As understood by Plotinus, who was translated by Ficino, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, in virtue of their pictorial quality, can give instantaneous insight into the substance of things, unencumbered by discursive thinking. One Renaissance source of this belief, which was interpreted in emblematic terms, was Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica. Of course, the great interest in Egyptian antiquity was larger and wider than the Hieroglyphica per se, and explains the work’s great popularity. It is noteworthy that Délie’s references to ancient Egyptian, Roman, and biblical events provide an atmosphere conducive to its poetic variations on Horapollo’s hieroglyphs. Certainly the phoenix emblem (‘De mort à vie,’ no. 11) and the three dizains invoking the fabulous bird (48, 158, 278) contribute to this Egyptian backdrop, as well as references to the ‘tenebres d’Egypte’ (D 129), ‘Playe Egyptienne’ (D 224), the ‘Nil’ (D 283), ‘Cleopatra’ (device 30), and the allusions of these images to Exodus and Moses. In Book I of the Hieroglyphica Horapollo informs us that ‘An Opening’ was symbolized by a hare because it always keeps its eyes open.90 The sixteenth-century reader of Délie could make an immediate connection with dizain 129 where the poet-lover likens himself to ‘Le Lievre accroppy en son giste,/.../Tout esperdu aux tenebres d’Egypte’ (vv. 8, 10). Communicating timidity and vigilance-in-fear, the images also signal a guarded opening (‘son giste’) that gives the sense of imminent and pervasive peril not unlike one of Corrozet’s emblems in the Hecatomgraphie. The title of pictura 47, ‘Peril & danger de tous costez,’ is symbolized by the hare’s perpetual fear of being stalked by every predatory threat that ‘nous mettra en grand’perplexité’ (v. 18, gloss poem). Scève has forged a mystical, archetypal symbol of the lover’s fears made more acute by his solitary vulnerability in the deserted sands of time. In Book II of the Hieroglyphica, we read that the salamander symbolizes ‘A Man Burned by Fire.’ This is followed by the comment: When they wish to indicate a man burned by fire, they draw a salamander.

For the salamander destroys with each of its heads.91 Very common in the Petrarchan tradition as an image of ardour, and representative of constancy by the Church Fathers, the salamander was also the device of Francis I. Whether accompanied by its motto or not, it came

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to be associated with the king’s heroic declaration, ‘Nutrisco et extinguo,’ that is, ‘I nourish myself by fire, and I extinguish it.’ Of the many connections this device has with Délie, one of the most significant is the way dizain 199 captures the very essence of a hieroglyph understood by the Renaissance as an ideographic icon giving instantaneous resemblance with its object of thought. Sans lesion le Serpent Royal vit Dedans le chault de la flamme luisante: Et en l’ardeur, qui à toy me ravit, Tu te nourris sans offense cuisante: Et bien que soit sa qualité nuisante Tu t’y complais, comme en ta nourriture. O fusse tu par ta froide nature La Salemandre en mon feu residente: Tu y aurois delectable pasture, Et estaindrois ma passion ardente.

(D 199)

[The Royal Serpent lives without harm Inside the heat of the glittering flame, And in the ardour which draws me to you, You are nourished without being harmed by the fire. And although its essence is harmful, You delight in it, as though it were your nourishment. O would that you were by your cold nature The Salamander residing in my fire; You would have in it delectable food, And would put out my burning passion.]

The beauty of this dizain is that it assimilates its entire organization to a poetic imitation of the mythic salamander and its motto. Like the Renaissance concept of a hieroglyph, it aims to form an ideal icon by creating maximum resemblance with its object. Said differently, just as the purely pictorial hieroglyph is an icon of the reptile, so the dizain is a poetic icon of ‘Nutrisco et extinguo.’ The first line dignifies and honours the king’s invulnerability not only by its periphrasis ‘le Serpent Royal’ but also by making explicit that fire has no effect on the sovereign’s person: ‘Sans lesion.’ The second line continues to relate the salamander to the king by the double metaphor of (a) brandishing the picture of the king thriving in fire and (b) turning this triumphant picture into a gleaming banner of the

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royal flame: ‘la flamme luisante’ (v. 2). Thus, Francis himself becomes his own device by embodying his immunity to the flames. The words ‘flamme luisante’ (v. 2) are the same as those that exult the love of Délie in the work’s last dizain: ‘Flamme .../Tousjours luysante en publique apparence’ (vv. 1–2). This makes for a transition to the amatory level where the hieroglyph is used to model the description of the lover’s tensions. Continuing the concept of ‘nutrisco’ from the king’s devise, the lover states that, like the salamander, the woman nourishes herself on ardour without being harmed by fire (vv. 3–4). Lines 4 and 5 also play on the notion of ‘nutrisco’ à contrario. In dizain 330 the lover nourishes himself on his own ‘funerary thoughts’ (pensementz funebres, v. 8). Returning to dizain 199, he knows the dangers of attempting to internalize fire, and in this sense, he is the opposite of Délie who delights in nourishing herself from the flames of love: ‘Tu t’y complais, comme en ta nourriture’ (v. 6). In the final four lines the poet-lover’s words play by contrast on the second part of the device: ‘extinguo.’ In a sexual conceit, the poet wishes that the woman could become ‘La Salemandre’ (v. 8) residing in his own fire so she could by nourishing herself on his flames extinguish (‘estaindrois,’ v. 10) his burning passion. The intimate union between device and mythic salamander, the strong resemblance between the poem’s metaphors and its motto are iconized by the close union which the poet-lover seeks with the woman. For if he is the flame and she nourishes herself on his passion, then there is an unending cycle of unity. Yet, the poem ends on the death cycle of the phoenix myth for two reasons. It is the woman’s coldness (‘froide nature,’ v. 7) that consumes the lover’s flames, and consequently, the lover is destined to suffer without the invulnerability of Délie and the king. Therefore, he is closer to Horapollo (‘A man burned by fire’) than to Francis in viewing the salamander’s flames as a destruction that nourishes itself by the extinction of its victim. Among Alciato’s 212 emblems there are quite a few whose title, pictura, or subscript bears some relation to Délie, either tightly or loosely.92 Let us limit ourselves to one group. In examining Délie’s devices of chiaroscuro, light, and darkness the reader would think of Alciato’s two emblems on the Vespertilion (nos 61 and 62), both of which show a bat flying over a moonlit landscape. Scève’s forty-second device titled ‘Le Vespertilion ou Chaulvesory’ utters the motto, ‘Quand tout repose point je ne cesse.’ The pictures of the bat in Scève and Alciato overlap in their symbolism of life as a nocturnal state, and in this regard, they also correspond to Délie’s ‘La Lune en tenebres.’ Also, Réau finds that the bat is an ‘emblème de la Mélancolie parce qu’elle ne sort qu’au crépuscule (d’où son nom latin

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de vespertilio).’93 As already seen, the poet-lover’s vision captures both a morning and an evening crépuscule, which merge his psychology with cosmological colours of transition and ambivalence. Horapollo in his fifty-third hieroglyph of Book II states that the bat because of its breasts, symbolized nurturing.94 This idea corresponds to the ancient belief that bats were the only flying beasts with mammillae, and Tervarent citing Valeriano95 states that the Greeks, finding this unique, constructed a statue of Diana with numerous mammillae. In this context, there is a connection between Scève’s bat and Diana in the companion poem to ‘La Lune en tenebres’ where the poet-lover finds that in his darkest hours his soul ‘se nourrit de pensementz funebres’ (D 330, v. 8). Because the bat is half-blind in the light, it prefers the night, just as the force of Délie’s virtuous light causes the lover to seek the shelter of shadows. With respect to chiaroscuro, the bat’s lucifuga crystallizes a number of meanings in Délie. They include not only the screen over light which brings knowledge, and the transitional state of purification, but also the double effect of the pharmakon as melancholy and antidote. Most of these symbols of the Vespertilion can be inferred exclusively from Délie, but in his second bat emblem (no. 62) Alciato gives symbols of the flying mammal that the reader can profitably contrast with Délie. For example, the bat is said to symbolize philosophers (‘philosophus’) who, while they seek heavenly things (‘caelestis’), become misty-eyed (‘caligant oculis’) and see only the false (‘falsum’). Certainly the root caligo meaning fog, mist, vapour, with suggestions of darkness and dullness of the senses, has pertinence to the psychology of the poet-lover. The statement ‘sola vident’ (see only) suggests that the philosopher, with his head in the clouds, is falsely fixated on his own preoccupations, which are highly susceptible to error. At this point, we can make a transition between the philosopher’s self-absorption and the ways in which Alciato and Scève treat narcissism. As one might expect from an emblem writer and an author of devices, the former is more prone to generality while the latter prefers to individualize his persona’s circumstances. Both Scève’s seventh device (‘Narcissus’), and Alciato’s sixty-ninth emblem on philautia show the mythic figure Narcissus looking at his reflection in the water. However, Alciato devotes his subscriptio to describing the adverse effects of narcissism, while the poetlover uses the companion poem to strongly deny that he is anything like Narcissus. This is a very difficult issue for the poet-lover to resolve, but he is certainly not like Alciato’s Philosopher who sees only one thing. In fact, his very oxymoronic and paradoxical speech noted in the chiaroscuro and the light illustrations creates a built-in scepticism that eschews single-

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minded reflexivity: ‘En ma joye douleur,’ ‘Ma clarté tousjours en tenebre,’ ‘Apres la mort ma guerre encor me suyt.’ Even within the most solitary walls of meditation, there are many ‘others’ reflected in the poet-lover’s mirror. Similarly, as we shall see in chapter 5 the dispositio of Délie as a whole unfolds in cycles of opposites precisely to essay the widest spectrum of feelings and to guard against narcissistic reflexivity. Thus, if readers were to follow the poet-lover’s experience of ‘espoir’ and ‘esperance,’ they would find that it refers to self-defeating determinism (D 70), a precondition for androgynous union (D 217), a prodigally used emotion (D 426), or the requisite disposition of any good ‘aymant’ (D 430). Scanning the correspondences of light imagery between Scève’s Délie and Corrozet’s Hecatomgraphie, the reader finds very different poetic voices, the former sceptical, hermetic, and individualistic, the latter moralizing, direct, and conventional. Yet, they share a humanistic practice that alternates religious and profane themes and which individuates types of love by light and colour. The verso of Corrozet’s fifty-seventh emblem shows Cupid fanning a flaming torch before a beguiled woman. The recto is a poetic commentary explaining the emblem, which identifies three types of love: ‘le feu de courte ioye’ (v. 8) symbolized by ‘Brandons’ and ‘flambeulx’ (v. 2); ‘Vn feu nommé Ardant desir’ (v. 13) which burns everything with ‘ses flammesches’(v. 14); and the ‘feu d’amour honneste’ (v. 22) otherwise known as ‘Charité’ as defined by ‘Paul’ (vv. 23–4). Having identified Charity’s proper quality of fire, Corrozet titles the next emblem (58) ‘Foy, Charité, & Esperance,’ which explains the inextricable relations between the theological virtues. Thus, faith without works makes us dead, charity brings eternal glory through love of neighbour, and hope is the spur to ‘hardiness’ (v. 24) in pursuit of faith. In a similar way dizain 254 attaches a colour to each of the theological virtues. Pure white is ‘Foy immaculée’ (v. 1), bright green is ‘joyeuse Esperance’ (v. 2), and ardent red is ‘Charité’ (v. 4). Also like Corrozet, Scève’s persona distinguishes types of love by fire imagery. In dizain 217 ‘Amour ardent’ (spiritual love, Anteros, v. 1) is a ‘flambeau’ (v. 5) that vanquishes the lover, while ‘blindfolded Cupid’ (sexual passion, v. 1) surprises him. The first takes him with a ‘doulx feu chaste’ (v. 6), the second creates ‘un desir sans fin insatiable’ (v. 9). These fire distinctions are scattered throughout the sequence. In the thirty-sixth device (‘Le Pot au feu’) the lover states ‘Dedens je me consume’; in dizain 309, he is ‘tousjours ... en passions brulantes’ (v. 2); and in dizain 313 he likens love to a ‘saincte feu’ (v. 3). The ‘Flamme si saincte’ (v. 1) of the final dizain, most resembling Corrozet’s ‘feu d’amour honneste’ (no. 57, v. 22) is a flame that neither

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burns nor consumes those who behold it. Rather, it promises to enlighten ‘en son cler’ (v. 1), to guide as a glorious torch ‘en publicque apparence’ (v. 2), and to last forever, ‘Non offensé d’aulcun mortel Letharge’ (v. 10). The difference between Scève and Corrozet is that the latter is more dogmatic and focused on theological eschatology, such as charity’s reward of eternal glory: ‘Tout n’en vault rien si tu n’as Charité:/Car c’est la fin de la gloire aeternelle’ (no. 58, vv. 16–17). However, Scève’s vision is more geotropic. In spite of the fact that colours are treated Platonically as the three individual forms of the theological virtues, he brings their relevance to the intersection between divine and earthly governance in the person of Marguerite de Navarre, suggesting a wholly filial love between the king and his sister. While Corrozet is fixed on the firm confidence of faith, the poet-lover is agitated to discover some humanistic equivalent for persistence. Consequently, he gives testimony to Dante-like suffering to imply that there is some immortality to his own pain: ‘Las tousjours j’ars, et point ne me consume’ (D 26, v. 10). Though I have already commented on one of La Perrière’s emblems concerning fol amour and alchemy, there is another one that relates to Délie’s family of illustrations dealing with light and darkness. This time the link is with envy and médisance. In Theatre’s eighty-ninth emblem, one sees a bearded, elderly man clothed in a cinctured robe walking directly under the sun. As the gloss poem makes clear, direct sunlight overhead effaces all shadows that may obscure the man’s path. In its entirety the pictura symbolizes the protection granted by wisdom. The sun’s face with prominent eyes casts eight, thick, serpent-like rays of fire over the man’s head as well as an umbrella of numerous thin rays, representing the sky’s sheltering lights of virtue whose brilliance annuls the emotional turmoil created by others’ envy and slander. In the gloss dizain we read: ‘Si par envie advient qu’on te tempeste,/Ta grand vertu te gardera d’encombre,/Vertu reluyt à raidz, qui sont sans nombre,/Annichilant l’obscurité d’envie’ (vv. 3–6).96 On the other hand, Scève’s dizain 211 paints a picture of precisely the dangerous state which La Perriere’s emblem would guard against. Quand ignorance avec malice ensemble Sur l’innocent veulent authoriser, Toute leur force en fumée s’assemble, S’espaississant pour se immortaliser. Si foible effort ne peult scandaliser Et moins forcer l’equité de Nature. Retirez vous, Envie, et Imposture,

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Soit que le temps le vous souffre, ou le nye: Et ne chercher en elle nourriture. Car sa foy est venin à Calumnie.

(D 211)

[When ignorance and malice Attempt to gain mastery over innocence, All their force is gathered into smoke, Growing thick to immortalize yourself. Such feeble effort cannot dishonour, And even less can it violate Nature. Withdraw Envy and Deception, Whether time allows it or denies it to you. And look not for nourishment in her, For her fidelity is venom to Calumny.]

In the poet-lover’s account of slander against Délie’s fidelity, the invasive and claustrophobic darkness of calumny would certainly be a challenge to La Perrière’s umbrella of light. Rather than seeking shelter from the gathering obscurity of malice and ignorance, the poet-lover does not try to block the clouds with light; rather, he exposes their fallacy by studying the configuration and the thickness of their own darkness and deception. Ignorance and malice converge on innocence, forming a deceptive smoke screen, since they are able to assemble into a body of fumée: ‘Toute leur force en fumée s’assemble’ (v. 3). Thus, what seems insubstantial gradually thickens (‘S’espaississant,’ v. 4) into the appearance of a real substance so embodied that it could ‘se immortaliser’ (v. 4). Also, according to McFarlane, the infinitive ‘authoriser’ (v. 2) translates as ‘holding sway over, to assert oneself over,’97 and thus, by the vices of mirage or pure force, the encroachment of obscurity would finally envelop us, were it not for scandalized justice: ‘l’equité de Nature’ (v. 6). La Perrière advocates protecting oneself against moral tempests by enveloping oneself in the light of public virtue, whereas Scève flies within the clouds in order to scrutinize their ruses. Délie and the Theoreticians of the Impresa and Emblem The problems of poetic speech dramatized by Délie and centred on the imprese are the precursors of epistemological and communicative questions that will be vigorously debated by impresa theoreticians between 1555 and 1613. In various ways, Délie foresees the historical development of impresa

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theory and practice as well as Giordano Bruno’s primacy of the imagination. Scève’s use of devices for meditative purposes also presages the Counter-Reformation’s adoption of imprese for a new religious awakening. In addition to this historical connection there is another link surrounding the relation between impresa theory and the nature of representation. Preoccupied with expressing his mal, seeking an elusive signified, and persuading the beloved of his worthiness, the poet-lover of Délie seeks mediation through his impresa-like discourse. Likewise the theoreticians of the device, focusing attention on figurative expression, will sift through similar issues such as the nature of the intelligible image, the difficulties of seizing a primordial idea, and the possibilities of adumbrating concepts through the medium of the impresa. Robert Klein, Denis Drysdall, and Dorigen Caldwell have studied the philosophy of language of emblem and impresa theoreticians,98 and they make available a number of perceptive observations that I would like to turn toward Délie. Bartolomeo Taegio in Il Liceo will stress that at most one can only hope to capture the ‘image of a concept’ which is different from and occurring before its verbal or plastic expression (Klein 1979, 9). Francesco Caburacci, emphasizing the mediated nature of thought, will hold that a thoughtimage metaphorically replaces an initial concept.99 In Il Conte overo delle impresa, Torquato Tasso will find an implicit negative theology of the device in the concept of ‘dissimili similitudini.’ From Pseudo-Dionysius, he will hold that the clash of highly dissimilar terms creates symbols to provoke the mind to see beyond discursive thought.100 In Delle imprese Giulio Capaccio will underscore that only angels have direct access to universals. Indeed, to possess direct awareness of someone’s concetto would be to lay claim to ‘divine’ knowledge.101 In their questions about mediation some impresa theoreticians will go to great lengths to formalize the relations between human faculties and expressive functions. In his Settenario dell’humana riduttione Alessandro Farra, for instance, will develop analogies between the operations of the device and the human faculties: the intellect corresponds to the author’s original intention, the rational soul to the motto, the vital spirits to the relation between motto and picture, the temperament to the immediate meaning of the figure, the material body to the material design of the impresa (Klein 1979, 19). The Trattoto of Caburacci – the most consistent account of the rhetoric of devices – comments on both its dispositio and types of expression. Logically, the impresa is a form of proof structured like an enthymeme which has three modes of expression: rappresentare is a re-presentation like the function of an icon; significare designates conventional meaning such as one would

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find in single words or allegories; mostrare is a kind of rhetorical showing or persuading performed by propositions, figures, and metaphors.102 Like Alessandro Farra, Scipione Ammirato will conceive of the impresa as a kind of syllogistic demonstration. In Il Rota overo dell’impresse (1562) he will define the words of the device as ‘a major proposition’ (une proposition maggiore), the image as ‘a minor proposition’ (una minore), and the coupling together of these would produce ‘a conclusion’ (una conchiusione). The ultimate standard of validity is the reader’s act of capturing the author’s intention which is further compared to a ‘knot’ (il nodo) or a ‘hieroglyph’ (hieroglifici).103 The poetics of the impresa require difficulty. One of the most extreme advocates of this position, Stefano Guazzo (Dialoghi piacevoli), will not only promote difficulty and esotericism as marks of high social and moral ideals but also as a criticism of the emblem as a redundant sign or a failed impresa.104 With a high degree of reflexivity Délie’s problems of poetic speech incarnate many of the significant questions and formulations of the impresa treatises. In his insistence on pictorial mediation the poet-lover requires the relay of sensual figures to simulate thought and communicate his distress. In this respect, Délie dovetails with Giordano Bruno’s notion of the imagination as the most active and the most important semiotic agent capable of producing meaning from light, colour, contour, and relief.105 In addition, Cabarucci’s notion of the impresa as an enthymeme cannot but remind us of Délie’s pervasive ellipticity and periphrasitc circumlocutions. Also, in making a distinction between representation and showing, Cabarucci sheds light on Délie’s poet-lover whose major speech modification is to emphasize conative over referential discourse106 in order to transfer expressive problems to the reader. Through stylistic effects the poet-lover engages in ‘showing’ an emotion rather than representing a referent by creating an empathetic discourse of dissonance. Taegio and Capaccio, by pointing to the inaccessibility of referents, provide a theoretical frame of reference for Délie’s pervasively indexical language as seen in such dizains as ‘Si le desir, image de la chose’ (D 46). Moreover, when Capaccio views the impresa as the intellect’s ‘portrait of itself,’ it is useful to think of Délie’s devices as the reflexive eyes of the lover’s own dilemmas whose specular depth also inscribes the reader’s interpretive conundrums. By defining the impresa as a syllogism, Ammirato invites examination of Scève’s highly articulated logical progression in his dizains, which, as we shall see, need more than reason to redress the disturbance of equilibrium. As for Tasso’s ‘dissimili similitudini,’ we have already noticed how the poet-lover’s encounter with ineffability is modelled on deliberately puzzling

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discourse, true also for Augustine, which allows him to envisage love as a ‘Basilisque,’ a ‘Cye,’ or a ‘Mousche.’ Finally, the prescription for difficulty recommended by nearly every device theoretician accords not only with Scève’s implicit criticism of proverbial wisdom but also with his persona’s call for ‘honneste estrangement’ (D 15).107 Summary In his book Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation Brian Stock makes a statement about the author of Confessions that is also true of the poet-lover in Délie: ‘Augustine concludes that self-knowledge begins with the recognition of the mind’s alienation from something superior to itself’ (1996, 250). The common experience between Scève’s persona and Augustine is to envisage the superiority of the beloved in terms of unsettling enigmas that provoke estrangement and spiritual renewal. It has been the aim of this chapter to demonstrate the connection between ineffability and poetic difficulty whose theoretical starting point and textual logic is the impresa. Both the lover’s loss of a familiar self and the reader’s correlative challenge are measured by a common disturbance in thought and in feeling provoked by enigma. What are the concomitant benefits of this ordeal intertwined as it is with the countless other deaths of unrequited love? One of the poet-lover’s rewards for struggling with ineffability is human empathy. It is ironic at the very least that such a work as Délie, praised and condemned for its stylistic difficulty and recondite force, should pivot on the plaint of poetic powerlessness. Though its voice and diction may imply disdain and self-sufficiency, and though its deliberate obscurity rebuffed even erudite readers such as Du Bellay, it is a text unusually contingent on the reader’s active effort from which it derives its enduring power. Upon energizing the reader’s fullest participation through the challenge of enigma, Délie seeks to transcend the limitations of time in the world of time. If Scève replaces Christ with the symbolism of a pagan goddess in order to signify the unbounded potential of the human capacities, then the stylistic parallel to this symbolism is the power of his impresa-like discourse to involve the reader in a limitless and unceasing hermeneutic of veiled similitudes. If the value of human time is measured by the reader’s response to Délie, then this process converts time into an unending development of one’s memory, mind, and will. Moreover, this infinite enrichment of time leads to a kind of textual timelessness. As a result of pursuing the signs that transform enigma into understanding, each reader must in-

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evitably construct something like the tabular chart of imprese linkages given in this chapter. As an ars combinatoria the devices configure a matrix of relations which govern a world of ever-interrelating paradigms. Like the discovery of the idea that would unite the body and soul of a device, this array of interpretants enables the reader to unravel riddles which, though proper to the poet-lover, activate permutations of moral, philosophic, and psychological laws. That this human process is pervaded with rhetoric reminiscent of sacred literature shows that Scève is historically situated between changing paradigms. Délie bears witness to a constant invocation of the religious, which is not a complete reversion to Christ, as well as an affirmation of the human that cannot shed its attraction to the divine. Though Délie is not entirely of the supernatural order, it seeks to parallel this order by spiritually mythifying its very temporal and moral dynamics.

4 The Triple Way

Despite the range of perspectives encompassing the struggle between virtue and vice, Délie as a whole is organized around a specific meditative framework of spiritual progress that cuts across the sacred and profane and that appropriates a tradition extending from Plato and PseudoDionysius to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century meditative manuals. This is the method known in Christian spirituality as the Triple Way, consisting of purgatio, illuminatio, and perfectio. They are the virtues that counter the various manifestations of evil endured, caused, or tolerated by the lover. In positive terms these are complementary spiritual techniques that guide the soul through the vicissitudes of aspiration by refining the moral and theological virtues to subdue vice and to pursue the highest states of contemplation and mystical love. As Watrignant, Pourrat, Bouyer, Garrigou-Lagrange, and Solignac1 have collectively shown, one can trace the development of this tripartite schema to Pseudo-Dionysius, Origen, Bonaventure, the Devotio moderna, Denis the Carthusian, and the sixteenth-century systemizer of prayer, García de Cisneros. This Christian tradition is greatly indebted to Plato and Plotinus and extends well into the seventeenth century in such popular meditative treatises as Luis de Granada’s De la Oración y Meditación (1554), his Guía de pecadores (1556–7), and Luis de la Puente’s Meditaciones de los misterios de nuestra santa fe (1605). Though the organization of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises is not explicitly dependent on the Triple Way, it is nonetheless implicitly present in sections on the principal and foundation and the examination of conscience (purgative), the Christocentric emphasis on the imitation of Christ’s life (illuminative), and the celebration of the Redemption and Ascension (unitive). Also, at the outset of the Exercises Ignatius uses the words ‘illumi-

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native way’ and ‘purgative way’ in the Tenth Annotation to describe his procedures.2 Solignac has noted that ‘lorsque les premiers jésuites éprouvent le besoin de rédiger des Directoires pour une meilleure utilisation du livret ignatien, ils en vinrent très vite à claquer le développement de la retraite selon ce schéma déjà traditionnel’ (DS, vol. 16, col. 1209). As historians have demonstrated, the roots of this tradition begin with the Bible which, in diverse contexts, envisages spirituality as a road, a route, or a way moving through starts, errors, and advances in moral progress. The Hebrews’ wandering in the desert is a particularly apt symbol for the potential to either follow or stray from the road of obedience to God’s law. For example, Deuteronomy 30:15–18 teaches: If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you this day, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and ordinances, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land which you are entering to take possession of it. But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you this day, that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land which you are going over the Jordan to enter and possess.3

Historians of Christian spirituality also mark Plato and Plotinus as milestones in the development of the Triple Way. In the Laws Plato declares: ‘Now it is God who is, for you and me, of a truth the “measure of all things,” much more truly than, as they say “man”’ (IV:716c). In the Timaeus Plato holds that the rational powers naturally seek to contemplate the purely intelligible order by overcoming the appetites of the body (42b). To be deiform, to gain possession of the good and the beautiful, one must refine the intellect to pierce the veil of the sensible order to arrive at exact knowledge of timeless objects (Phaedo, 79–80b). The implication of these passages, namely, that one can ascend from the senses to the powers of the soul and finally to the archetypes, is explained by a diagram of Book VI of the Republic where such a movement is charted as an epistemological ascent. Here a vertical line is divided into four segments each of which from bottom to top signifies a level of knowledge moving upwards from conjectures (images), to beliefs (perception of objects), to understanding (science and mathematics), and last to reason which apprehends the highest forms. In Book VII this turning about or shifting of the soul from darkness to the light in this ascension is called a ‘conversion’ (521c).

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However, it is Plotinus who in the Enneads explicitly envisions such aspiration as a mystical union. Students of Plotinus characterize his notion of the soul as a ‘traveller’ reascending to the Intellect by means of dialectic and then, by a process of purification through simplification, arrives at a point of contact with the One (Rist 1967, 113). Toward the end of the Enneads this process is described as the soul’s transport around the centre of a circle which deifies: If then a soul knows itself for the rest of the time, and knows that its movement is not a straight line, except when there is a kind of break in it, but its natural movement is, as it were, in a circle around something, something not outside but a center, and the center is that from which the circle derives, then it will move around this from which it is and will depend on this, bringing itself into accord with that which all souls ought to, and the souls of the gods always do; and it is by bringing themselves into accord with it that that they are gods. (VI. 9. 8)

The earliest occurrence in Christian writing of the terms ‘purification,’ ‘illumination,’ and ‘union’ are found in the works of Pseudo-Dionysius. However, they refer not to a spiritual itinerary but to three angelic and ecclesiastical orders structured hierarchically marking three grades of participation in the Divinity. For example, in the Celestial Hierarchy various choirs of angels, such as the seraphim, cherubim, and thrones, partake of purification, illumination, and perfection, the first by lightning-flash and flame, the second by outpourings of wisdom, and the third by unwavering availability and receptivity to divine visitation.4 (While Dionysius uses the term teleiôsis for perfection, it is virtually synonymous with hènôsis or union. – Solignac, DS, vol. 16, col. 1206.) In the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy these same functions are performed by the liturgy, the clergy, and the faithful. Liturgically, baptism brings purification, the Eucharist confers illumination, and confirmation perfects the graces of baptism. Though these orders are hierarchical structures, the notion of spiritual progress is conveyed through Dionysius’s term ‘uplifting’ which is the process of transcendent love raising imperfect being to companionship with the Deity.5 Origen, who is considered one of the first scientific exegetes of the church, is also credited with developing the via triplici (Solignac, DS, cols 1204–5). He arrived at a threefold division of the spiritual life by correlating the three sciences of the Greeks (ethics, physics, and inspective contemplation) with three books of the Bible (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs). Proverbs teaches morals and the rules for conducting a

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good life. Ecclesiastes aims to treat of natural sciences and the causes of the physical world, which when evaluated, lead us to leave the frail and fleeting and embrace the invisible and eternal. After having morally purified itself and having attained proficiency in apprehending the causes of the physical world, the soul is now fit to imitate the lessons of love in the Canticle of Canticles by contemplating the Godhead. The three degrees of spiritual attainment are exemplified by three patriarchs: Abraham symbolizes morals by his heroic obedience, Isaac represents physics by his knowledge of growing crops and discovering wells, and Jacob stands for the inspective for his ladder to the heavens. In all, the summit of gnosis is the contemplation of the Trinity.6 The Triple Way is sometimes compared to or identified with ‘the three degrees.’ As Pierre Pourrat has shown, the Church Fathers, starting with Augustine and proceeding through Aquinas, graded the spiritual life empirically by distinguishing between beginner, proficient, and perfect (Mason 1961, 24–5). The thirteenth-century Carthusian Hugh of Balma in his work Viae Syon lugent directly correlated these three ‘ages’ with Dionysius’s three ways where the beginners seek to purify themselves, the proficients grow in virtue, and the perfect exercise union with God.7 Though the idea of a cheminement spirituel may be inferred from such writers as Plato, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, or Augustine, the Triple Way is explicitly expounded by Bonaventure in his influential masterpiece of mystical theology titled De triplici via. In his Introduction to the Works of Bonaventure, J. Guy Bourgerol makes the valuable distinction in observing that Whereas the Pseudo-Areopagite understands the Neoplatonic hierarchy of Plotinus in a sense that is generally static, Bonaventure’s interpretation of it is essentially dynamic. The three acts ‘no longer designate periods in the ascent of the soul, but three efforts constantly imposed on it . . . The soul is never fixed on a single way. It rises toward God amid the vicissitudes and fluctuations of life, within and without.’ (1964, 157)

Set within a Trinitarian framework, these acts are purgation, illumination, and perfect union which are performed to achieve the three respective states of peace, truth, and love. Moreover, each of these three acts should be applied successively to the three interior exercises of meditation, prayer, and contemplation. In addition, each way indissociably interacts with the others, never remaining fixed in any single state. At any given time in this dynamic movement there may be a relative predominance of one over the

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others. In Bonaventure’s method contemplation does not mean the extraordinary mystical state of direct union with God, but ‘the intellectual operation that consists in applying our spirit to the understanding of God, as much as natural power permits.’8 Thus, the aim of the Bonaventure’s opuscule is to define contemplation as part of the general and normal development of a Christian in progressive stages. In 1500 there appears the Ejercitatorio de la vida espiritual by García Ximenes de Cisneros which was historically significant in a number of areas. In his History Christian Spirituality Pierre Pourrat associates Cisneros with ‘the full growth of methodical prayer,’9 and Aimé Solignac points out that the Abbey of Montserrat ‘did the most to spread the schema of the three ways’ (DS, vol. 16, col. 1207). In addition to providing the standard directory for spiritual exercises in Spanish, Cisneros’s work was also one of the most influential in the Tridentine reform (Aumann 1985, 181). Cisneros combined impressive historical knowledge with gifts for practical organization and affective spirituality. He drew considerably on a host of sources, most notably from Bonaventure, the Devotio moderna, Ludolph the Carthusian, Richard of Saint Victor, and Jean Gerson. During Scève’s lifetime, the Triple Way was very much alive in the evangelical setting of Guillaume Briçonnet, Marguerite de Navarre, Guillaume Budé, and Lefèvre d’Étaples. Briçonnet, Marguerite’s spiritual advisor and faithful correspondent, counselled the queen to think of the Bible as the starting point for the three steps of ‘purgation,’ ‘illumination,’ and ‘perfection’ (Sommers 1989, 12). In fact, Marguerite took Briçonnet’s advice in Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse. Studying this work, Paula Sommers points out that the queen created an ascent pattern which combined ‘the steps of the triple way’ with biblical paraphrase and the sola fides perspective (1989, 47–8). Before Sommers, Robert Cottrell had demonstrated Dionysius the Areopagite’s influence on Marguerite’s religious poetry. For example, he finds in the Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne that the queen invites the exercitant to prepare for salvation ‘par tribulation,’ ‘par claire congnoissance,’ and ‘par dilection’ (1986, 51). For Budé the route to the citadel of wisdom was mapped out in De studio which marked an ‘ascensus’ guided by the triple way. Marie-Madeleine de La Garanderie calls this trajectory ‘Theologia contemplatrix’ (1995, 339). Moral preparation is a kind of washing: ‘pedes abluere atque abstergere inquinatos a luto vitae civilis & theatricae’ (ibid., 340). This is followed by a second phase that Budé calls ‘theoria’ which aims to penetrate the hidden symbols of sacred philosophy: ‘ut sese dissimulans et mire symbolica’ (ibid., 342). In humanist fashion the third step invokes the inspiration of the muses to

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climb to Mount Helicon in order to see beyond ‘philotheoria’ what exceeds the human capacities (ibid., 343). It would be difficult to find a more vigorous proponent of Dionysius than Lefèvre d’Étaples, who included the Areopagite in his popular collection of apostolic fathers titled Theologica Vivificans. The historian Karlfried Froehlich writes that the French evangelist found in Dionysius ‘the purest form of apostolic theology . . . deriving directly from Jesus, Paul, and Hierotheos, that opened up the depths of Plato to the Alexandrian philosophers as well as to the early Christian Platonists.’10 While it cannot be claimed that Scève modeled Délie on any one of these sources, it is the case that the text is a meditation on the powers of love to inspire moral and spiritual transcendence based on purification, understanding, and perfection. As such, it is logical to place Délie within this tradition. Also, many of the works that permeated Scève’s milieu, such as Petrarch’s Rime, Leon Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore, Ficino’s Commentarium and Theologica Platonica, Speroni’s Dialogo d’amore, and Héroet’s Parfaicte Amie, display objectives analagous to the Triple Way. Ficino in particular was a strong advocate for Dionysius, not only in his programmatic Theologica, but also in the Commentarium.11 Criteria for Identifying Acts of Purification, Illumination, and Union in Délie As a succession of poems Délie yields an order consisting of the alternation of the Three Ways. However, no one of the three movements of purificatio, illuminatio, and perfectio functions in mutual exclusivity. Rather, most of the time some measure of overlapping occurs. Denis the Carthusian says in his treatise, Contemplation, ‘As for these three ways, one includes and enfolds the other – to a certain degree’ (2005, 30). For the sake of analysis, one may say that where plaints of suffering dominate discourse, this may be called purification, and where a positive tone of love prevails, one may term this union. However, acts of understanding invariably pervade both of these ways, but there are certainly a great number of dizains where illumination is foregrounded and emphasized. While I will examine each of these Ways in chapters 5, 6, and 7, it is now necessary to offer criteria for identifying these acts. Purification Acts of purification dominate Délie, since it largely concerns from the poet-lover’s viewpoint the mal of suffering endured. Most prominently,

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there are myriad rebuffs of the lover’s sexual cupidity, which force him to reevaluate the basis upon which he can in any sense ‘have’ Délie. Paramount in purification is the transformation of the amour courtois code into a contemplative gaze that brings wisdom and reciprocal love. This is brilliantly broached in the first dizain, which is nothing less than a conversion experience modelled after Scève’s religious predecessors. These steps include a shattering turning point, a new vision of life as life-throughdeath, an orientation to interior knowledge, a reflux of the soul’s powers, fixity on Délie as the ‘Idole de ma vie’ (D 1, v. 10). This change can only occur through the long process of confession expressing compunction, remorse, humility, frustration, and humiliation where there is effort to come to terms with such vices as jealousy, cupidity, lassitude, fear, and despair. When the poetic vision of suffering moves from primarily registering physical expressions of pleasure and pain to the spiritual realization of the benefits of life-through-death, then the lover has reached a state of fidelity rather than one of possession. If interiority is key to meditative self understanding this can only come about through psychological solitude of a far different sort than that of Petrarch. The poet-lover’s places of refuge rarely bring him the mental tranquility that the Epicurean otium afforded Petrarch amid the consolations of nature, good friends, and inspiring books. Finally, it would be false to assume that the lover’s Neoplatonism requires him to devalue, degrade, or shed the body in order to liberate the soul. Rather in a more Christian way it is more a matter of conserving equilibrium between the two, and of seeing that his ‘Ange en forme humaine’ (D 409, v. 1) is a transfiguration of the flesh made sacred. Illumination Bonaventure’s phrase ‘The Beam of Intelligence’ (radium intelligentiae),12 denoting both rational and suprarational knowledge, is quite an apt way to describe the poet-lover’s view of intelligence as a source of inspiration that finds meaning and value in suffering (purification) and that provides the bridge of light to mystical union. Intelligence combined with perseverance is the highest value of Délie, for it construes the suffering wrought by le mal du bien to be the prima materia for conversion to le bien du mal. If we think of poetic style as a way of marking the force of one of these Three Ways, the reader of Délie will find it relatively easy to distinguish poems characterized by the pangs of suffering from those celebrating the union of love. However, since intellection is the bridge joining acts of purification with union, the emphasis of illumination over the other two powers is less apparent. The differences and distinctions among the Three Ways

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are worthwhile conserving to appreciate how the lover nuances the role of understanding in guiding purification to higher love. Intelligence is motored by mental vexation (‘vexation donne entendement,’ D 94, v. 10) as a necessary challenge incarnated in Délie to attain or surpass by emulation all standards of excellence. In a more religious vein, it is analogous to Augustine’s per speculum in aenigmata. Ultimately, death in the worst of senses, is conniving with desolation that preempts meditative exercise from engaging le mal du bien. On the local level of individual dizains, self-deception appears unshakable, an incessantly shocking absurdity that invariably trips up prudence as forewarning or foresight. From an overarching perspective, intelligence attempts to remedy this by constructing a methodus to inventory so to speak the limit contraries of experience in order to grasp the paradigms of deception as a precondition for future action. Intelligence is invoked to foster another change concerning the right use of psychological distance. In many an individual dizain the reconstituting memory stands unperturbed but seemingly unable to master or unify the dissociation of faculties that it ostensibly contains. However, when one moves to dizain 434 distance is like a ‘clarté à l’object, qu’on veult veoir’ (v. 4). Why? Because here distance is a different kind of memory, which interposes ‘raison’ (v. 3) as a guide. No longer paralysed by the battle within but commanding the heights of distilled contemplation, no longer stoic but more receptive, intelligence moves memory away from obsessive anguish to contemplated integration. Loving Union Scève’s motto, ‘Souffrir non souffrir,’ opening and closing the work specifies a logic for spiritual progress in which striving for virtue will never cease, and this is made resoundingly clear in the last dizain where the lover predicts: ‘Nostre Genevre ainsi doncques vivra/Non offensé d’aulcun mortel Letharge’ (D 449, vv. 9–10). In a sense the last poem marks a milestone rather than a closure in an effort whose movement toward perfection is inevitably characterized by oscillations and new elevations. Loving union may be measured by grades of love, qualities of light and vision, moral measurements of balance and equilibrium, or by hierarchies of power defined by Ficino, Ebreo, Tyard, and Speroni. However one approaches this question, the lover moves from part/whole dissociation to self-integration, from integration to an understanding of Délie as Diotime, from memory reenacting conflicts to one evaluating existence per se, from

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purely human love to deific love, and finally, from narcissism to reciprocal exchange where the dialectic of ‘Je-Tu’ produces an everlasting ‘nous’: ‘… la vertu … vive nous suyvra/Oultre le Ciel amplement long, et large’ (D 449, vv. 7–8). Since the tradition of the Triple Way, firmly grounded by Bonaventure and Cisneros, was regaining steam in Scève’s times and would peak in the Catholic Reformation, it is instructive to see the ways in which he adapted this tradition to his Renaissance humanism.

5 Via purgativa

Conversion Dizain 1 in conjunction with the liminary huitain is rich in meditative features characteristic of the purgative way. It is a superb example of the numinous, especially the sense of reverential awe, where the human encounter with the beloved is permeated with religious sensibility. L’Oeil trop ardent en mes jeunes erreurs Girouettoit, mal cault, à l’impourveue: Voicy (ô paour d’agreables terreurs) Mon Basilisque avec sa poingnant’ veue Perçant Corps, Coeur, et Raison despourveue, Vint penetrer en l’Ame de mon Ame. Grand fut le coup, qui sans tranchante lame Fait, que vivant le Corps, l’Esprit desvie, Piteuse hostie au conspect de toy, Dame, Constituée Idole de ma vie. [My eye, too ardent in my youthful gallivanting, Was turning round about, imprudent, without purpose, Here (O fear of pleasing terrors) My Basilisk, with its cutting sight Piercing Body, Heart, and destitute Reason, Came and penetrated to the very centre of my Soul. Great was the blow that, without cutting blade, The Body living still, kills the Spirit, Pitiful victim in your admirable presence, Lady, Fixed Idol of my life.]

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One might call dizain 1 the founding innamoramento since it recounts the poet-lover’s profound conversion to a new life. The root of the word ‘conversion’ is versio that denotes a turning. In the positive sense, the lover undergoes a regeneration, rebirth, and renewal in offering himself captive to Délie. If conversion is a versio, then it is also an aversion, which is a turning away from the past. This notion harmonizes well with the dizain’s captivating verb ‘Girouettoit’ (v. 2), which the speaker uses to epitomize his youth. Like a weather vane turning round and round without fixing its direction, the poet-lover views his past as wayward and wandering without moral orientation. That from which he turns is his ‘jeunes erreurs’ (v. 1), where the notions of error and wandering have, as already seen, intertextual connections with Petrarch and Augustine. Scève has given a moral resonance to ‘erreurs’ (v. 1) by having the lover criticize his roving eye as ‘trop ardent,’ ‘à l’impourveue,’ ‘mal cault’ (vv. 1–2), which communicate respectively the notions of excessive passion, imprudence, and lack of purpose. To highlight the importance of errancy, wandering, and recidivism in the work as a whole, Scève had already used ‘Mainte erreur’ (v. 6) in the opening huitain to describe his ‘durs Epigrammes’ (v. 6). Here ‘erreur’ (v. 6) is not only an apology for his rough and unpolished style, but also a moral characterization of losing his way in overcoming carnal love (‘Venus,’ v. 1) for spiritual love (‘Amour,’ v. 7). The fact that the poet-lover predicates his existence on revering Délie testifies to an expression of faith similar to Ignatius’s statement of purpose in the Spiritual Exercises. At the outset of the work prefacing the meditations of the First Week, he proclaims humanity’s raison d’être in a concise paragraph headed by the title ‘The Principle and Foundation.’ It states, ‘El hombre es criado para alabar, hazer reuerencia y seruir a Dios nuestra Señor y, mediante esto, salbar su ánima.’1 In similar fashion the poet-lover in Scève’s work also declares his principle and foundation when avowing that Délie is ‘Constituée Idole de ma vie’ (v. 10). The past participle connotes the idea of ‘established,’ or a state marked by ‘decision’ or ‘stability’ (McFarlane 1966 edition, 367). Let us not forget that for Cisneros, acts of faith are made in the purgative way which clears the soul of meretricious attractions by making the Lord the exclusive object of adoration. Similarly in Délie, the poet-lover’s eventful movement from aversio to conversio is marked by a dramatic change from mobility to concentration, capriciousness to commitment, frivolity to fidelity. Enhancing the religious qualities of Délie, the poet-lover elevates her to a divinity by the noun ‘Idole’ (v. 10). The Greek roots of this word, eidolon/eidos, suggest that the poet-lover wishes to give concrete shape and form to the idea of the goddess sculpted or engraved in his soul. As

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seen in his blasons, Scève has a predilection for the mannerist process of transforming ideas into the concrete forms of sculpture, architecture, or objets d’art.2 This does not violate the Old Testament interdiction against worshipping graven images. Rather, by forging such artefacts from words, Scève imitates the Neoplatonic concept of the hieroglyph by which one enjoys spontaneous knowledge of the archetypal or universal truths of existence in ideographic form. Also, by using the word ‘Idole’ (v. 10) the speaker is expressing in poetry an amalgamation of ideal beauty and religious awe that Ficino describes in the Commentary. For the Italian the translation of beauty into the form of a statue is an artistic expression of the way that lovers worship and marvel at the sight of divine splendour reflected in the beloved: ‘Hence it always happens that lovers fear and worship in some way the sight of the beloved ... the splendour of the divinity, shining in the beautiful like a statue of God, compels lovers to marvel, to be afraid, and to worship’ (stress mine).3 Another mark of the purgative way is sacrifice and suffering which, in the first dizain, are implied in the lover’s description of himself as a ‘Piteuse hostie’ (v. 9). This literally means ‘pitiful victim’ but it also connotes the Eucharist. The religious model for this striking phrase is the Passion and Death of Christ for the remission of humanity’s sins which presage the Redemption and Resurrection. Just as Christ’s trials on the cross constitute an opus redemptionis, so the lover’s painful self-sacrifices serve as oblations for union with Délie. These aspects of the first dizain develop elsewhere as the lover’s supreme offering to the woman (‘immolée offrande,’ D 163, v. 10) and the means of physical and spiritual regeneration: ‘Je me recrée au mal, où je m’ennuye’ (D 409, v. 8). The phrase ‘Piteuse hostie’ (v. 9) gains in meaning when placed in the entire verse: ‘Piteuse hostie au conspect de toy, Dame’ (v. 9). Parturier (2001 edition) notes that the construction, ‘au conspect de’ signifies en présence de which allows one to translate the line as ‘Pitiful victim in your presence, Lady.’ If we look at this profound plaint as a picture, it is hard to miss the fact that Scève has transformed the New Testament iconography of the Pietà to express the lover’s supreme surrender to the woman’s virtuous venom. Popular in European painting and sculpture from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, this scene is adapted by Scève to his poetics of suffering. However, the author severely alters the Pietà’s traditional tone by having the lover’s appeal for pity returned by indifference. Unlike Christ, who received Mary’s tears of compassion sprung spontaneously from the well of maternal identification, the lover is offered no such consolation. He can only hope to arouse pity through his

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Figure 6 ‘Le Basilisque, et le Miroir,’ from Scève, 87.

own sheer pitifulness. While the woman becomes the most intimate part of the lover’s soul, this occurs passively through his chance encounter with her magnificently deranging effects. Thus, there is spiritual estrangement deriving from transcendent love, and human alienation inflicted by solitary suffering, both of which presage the lover’s oft-repeated supplication: ‘... ne sçay que dire,/Sinon crier mercy, mercy, mercy’ (D 18, vv. 9–10). The instrument of the lover’s amorous death is the woman’s poignant and invasive glance – an action so sudden and fatal that it is compared to that of a ‘Basilisque’ (v. 4). (See figure 6.) Whether the basilisk is considered the most treacherous of serpents, a fabulous monster, or a biblical agent of evil it has accrued such weighty commentary that the critic must be particularly careful in assessing its pertinence to a given context. In early modern times the basilisk was visualized as a rooster-headed wyvern, that is, a snake with dragon-like wings and a pointed head crowned with a triple crest. As depicted in this dizain and in impresa 21, reflecting Pliny the Elder’s compilations, it could kill with its glance; but it could also

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strike another animal dead with its breath and hiss.4 However, this basiliskos or ‘little king’ of the serpents could itself be dispatched if one held up a mirror to its eyes. Moreover, it could also be killed by the weasel’s stench or a cock’s crow. In biblical writings the basilisk is associated with evil, the devil, and hell. Isaiah gives two accounts of its monstrous birth, the first of which is less obscure: ‘for from the serpent’s root will come forth an adder, and its fruit will be a flying serpent’ (14:29).5 The Book of Psalms promises that the Lord will protect the Israelites and crush all iniquity which is figured by the basilisk, serpent, and the lion: ‘You will tread on the lion and the adder, the young lion and the serpent you will trample under foot’ (90:13).6 This quotation is sometimes read typologically in French Mariolatry as the Vierge Au Serpent whose immense power could crush the dragon of hell under foot.7 In Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica, the ‘Basilisque’ symbolizes both eternity and power over life and death.8 Taking these intertexts into account, one can see that Scève has reversed the negative valences of the ‘Basilisque’ (v. 4) by transforming it into a predominately positive image while retaining some of its associations of treachery. By this procedure Scève more dramatically relates the religious significance of the fabulous serpent as part of the process of purifying vision. In this micronarrative, specularity is the instrument of spiritual recognition which functions in a way analogous to that of the killer/healer brazen serpent. In verse 1 the lover’s ‘Oeil’ is oriented outward toward the world in an indefinite, carefree roving without moral orientation, impelled by the curiosity of sensual stimulation. Suddenly, the lover is startled by an initial recognition or anagnorisis in Aristotelian terms9 when his vision is riveted and transfixed by something so fearfully marvellous that he can only register its effects: ‘Voicy (ô paour d’agreables terreurs)’ (v. 3). Movement and wandering change to fixity. The weathervane, formerly an aleatory turning, has frozen into necessity. Insouciant freedom now stolen, his ‘Oeil’ (v. 1) is captured and captivated by the invasive gaze of the woman. The lover calls it ‘Mon Basilisque’ (v. 4) – his anxiously recognized propre – which ‘inflicts’ the most significant moral reversals. Most important, the lover’s vision is turned inward from body to heart to reason, to such an extent that it is now a penetration. However, it is no longer the lover who orients his ‘Oeil’ (v. 1). Rather it is the woman who determines view and vision. The mirroring action of the mind is crucial to spiritual cleansing. The lover sees the woman’s eyes commandeering his own vision in the act of invading his very soul, thereby instilling a new transcendent sight. It is not only the potency and ownership of the gaze that is stressed through the ‘Basilisque’ (v. 4), but also the inculcation of moral vision

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brought through spiritual death. Henceforth the lover will always be ‘au conspect de toy, Dame’ (v. 9), and in this particular instance in need of healing pity. Through the bracing image of the basilisk the lover’s eyes are made purer by turning the outward inward, the multiple into the singular, mere locomotion into meaningful activity, transitive vision into reflexive, and chance into goal. The ‘Basilisque’ (v. 4) is not only the symbolic tool but the iconographic beneficiary of a redemptive transvaluation. Just as the treacherous monster dies by viewing his own reflection, so the lover incurs death by viewing himself in the salvific eyes of Délie. Thus, at the centre of the poet-lover’s conversion is an interior transformation where Délie’s gaze, fatal as that of a ‘Basilisque’ (v. 4) pierces his body, heart, and reason, and finally penetrates what he terms ‘l’Ame de mon Ame’ (v. 6). This phrase is a mystical formulation of ‘the innermost part of my soul.’ Let us recall that according to Dagens the first half of the sixteenth century in France is replete with mystical works, and that those of the German and Flemish mystics – Tauler, Ruusbroec, Harphius, and Denis the Carthusian – were particularly popular (1952, 9). Such writers struggle for words to express two fundamental notions of the soul: its summit and/or its profoundest depths. In De Trinitate Augustine reverts to visual terms and what he sees is the mind as the imago dei, remembering itself, knowing itself, and loving itself.10 In the Itinerarium mentis in Deum Bonaventure describes the deepest part of the soul as the ‘apex mentis, seu synderesis scintilla’ (the apex of the mind and the spark of synderesis).11 For Eckhart there are two important terms regarding the oneness of mystical indwelling. The first term is ‘grunt,’ translated in English as ‘ground,’ which he explains in Sermon 5B: ‘Here God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground. Here I live out of what is mine, just as God lives out of his.’12As Bernard McGinn explains, Eckhart eschews speaking of two grounds – God’s and the souls’s – since ‘they are both grounded in a fused identity’ (2001, 45). The second term, related to the first, is the ‘bürgelin’or little castle. It is what equals God in the soul to which no natural force or language can accede, the essence of the soul rather than its powers.13 Using similar terminology but defining the operations of the soul, Joannes Tauler identifies two centres of introspection: one termed the Grunt that receives and carries the imprint of God, the other called the Gamüt which responds to God and returns to its origins.14 The influential Flemish mystic John Ruusbroec, an heir of PseudoDionysius, conceives of introversion as the means by which the soul can regain its unity or ghedachte. Largely a movement of love, this operation is a reflux of the soul’s three powers (memory, intelligence, will) to what

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may be termed gront (foundation) or the eyghendoem der oraehte (source) from where they emanate for the purpose of being unified.15 This interior descent involves the three steps of active life (werkend leven), desire for God (God-begeerebd leven), and contemplative life (God schouwend leven).16 How do these points on mysticism relate to Délie? Among the attributes that the poet-lover seeks to emulate in the beloved, seen throughout the entire work, is the imperturbability of her soul and her immunity to the havoc wrought by Cupid. For example, in dizain 330 the lover addresses her as the ‘centre heureux’ (v. 1) and the ‘coeur impenetrable’ (v. 1), a self-abiding invulnerability so strong in its inaccessibility and so difficult to possess that it profoundly alienates his heart: ‘de moy se bannissant’ (v. 4). Only intermittently and ephemerally in the sequence does the lover find such a virtue in himself, ‘Où l’Ame libre en grand seurté vivoit’ (D 42, v. 6) Certainly Eckhart’s bürgelin and Ruusbroec’s ‘stability’ in contemplation parallel Delie’s unsusceptibility to human perturbation. This quality is also manifested in dizain 1 where the speaker announces that Délie is ‘Constituée Idole de ma vie’ (v. 10) which reveals the lover’s amatory imaginaire to be a fixed gaze contemplating statuesque permanence and self-sufficiency. What Ruusbroec describes as a reflux of the soul is seen in the very design of Scève’s dizains understood as flowing back to move forward, where memory is revisited by intelligence and will redounds on both to form a circle with a unifying moment such as the ‘Idole de ma vie’ (v. 10). In dramatic moments of epiphany, religious discourse can express a combination of admiration and fear at the grandeur and infinite majesty of the divine, which is characterized by wonder, awe, or astonishment. The psalter is especially eloquent in singing praise to the Almighty whose works and acts evoke amazement and trepidation. For example, Psalm 145 is a hymn describing the character of the God of Israel: ‘Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable. One generation shall laud thy works to another, and shall declare thy mighty acts. On the glorious splendour of thy majesty, and on thy wondrous works, I will meditate. Men shall proclaim the might of thy terrible acts, and I will declare thy greatness’ (Ps. 145:3–6).17 Examining this distinctive convergence of religious emotions from an analytic standpoint, Aquinas says: ‘Admiration is a type of fear which follows the knowledge of something that surpasses our powers.’18 Richard of Saint Victor produced one of the most systematic and profound theories of the affective structure of contemplation in the Middle Ages. His Benjamin major (The Mystical Arc) views

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contemplation as a state of suspended and prolonged admiration and in Book V, he singles out the emotions of wonder and apprehension aroused in the transition from meditation to contemplative ecstasy: Behold, by what stages of advancement the soul is raised up. Certainly by meditation it is raised to contemplation; by contemplation, to wonder; by wonder, to alienation of the mind.19 And, I ask, whence comes wonder, except from an unexpected and incredible manifestation? And so wonder itself has sudden light mixed with darkness, a light of vision together with remnants of incredulity and the darkness of uncertainty, so that in a marvellous manner the mind undoubtedly sees what it is scarcely able to believe.20

Such reverential emotions provide a compelling conversion setting for dizain 1. Here the speaker exhibits keen religious sensibility in his shocked response to his first encounter with the woman. As McFarlane observes in his edition, the construction ‘au conspect de toy, Dame’ (v. 9) suggests through the Latin conspicere the act of looking at the beloved with admiration and attention (1966, 367). Conveying a mixture of fear and love, the oxymoron ‘agreables terreurs’ (v. 3) registers the abrupt change from moral error to thunder-struck worship (‘Grand fut le coup,’ v. 7). The bloodless but fatal wound (‘sans tranchante lame,’ v. 7) connotes a supernatural event that marks a state of spiritual alienation (‘vivant le Corps, l’Esprit desvie,’ v. 8). In the dramatic conclusion of the poem, the lover’s avowal that Délie is ‘Constituée Idole de ma vie’ (v. 10) shows Scève at his best, moving the reader from surprise to shock in the riveting concentration of the contemplative gaze. Finally, when the very act of praise (‘Idole,’ v. 10) annihilates the lover’s self-importance (‘Piteuse hostie,’ v. 9), there is a manifestation of what Solignac terms ‘un sacrifice de louange’ characteristic of awe before the Almighty (1962, 15). A final relation between the first dizain and religious conversion is the overwhelming emphasis that both put on the life-through-death topos. Thanks to Cynthia Skenazi’s research on this topic, we know that Platonism and Neoplatonism are not the sole concepts which subtend the life-through-death mythos in Délie. Abundant references to this phenomenon are found in Christian sources such as the New Testament and in the writings of Scève’s evangelistic contemporaries such as Erasmus, Briçonnet, and Marguerite d’Angouleme (Skenazi 1992, 15–34). For example, in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, he teaches, ‘For if we have been united with

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him [Christ] in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his’ (6:5).21 To the group of writers that Skenazi identifies one can add Pseudo-Dionysius, Augustine, and Bonaventure. In the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy the author links the death of Christ entombed for three days to the spiritual initiate who, three times immersed in baptismal waters, is then resurrected into the very life of God.22 For Augustine (recalling Paul) the ‘vetus homo’ dies to sin and the worldly life and is reborn in grace as the ‘novus homo.’23 Finally, in the Triplici via Bonaventure conceives of perfect charity through a Pauline perspective where one ‘longs to die for his neighbour’s salvation.’24 The notion of rebirth through death is strongly inscribed in lines 7–8 of the initial dizain. Here the woman’s aggressive gaze strikes a blow that renders the lover’s mind lifeless while his body survives: ‘Grand fut le coup, qui sans tranchante lame/Fait, que vivant le Corps, l’Esprit desvie’ (vv. 7–8). This rupture signals the death of the lover’s past, of his ‘jeunes erreurs’ (v. 1) that dispersed and scattered his being in myriad directions like the random turning of the girouette. However, into this suspended body enters a new animating principle which, like the first reception of the Eucharist (‘hostie,’ v. 9), exchanges death for transcendent rebirth and spiritual nourishment. This is Délie whom the lover reveres as the new soul of his life – the ‘Idole de ma vie’ (v. 10). Implied in this conversion is that the death of the old life leads to a kind of ecstatic death in the new life where the lover is now ensouled by the woman-divinity. Therefore, the first dizain is the inaugural and purifying manifestation of what in the introductory huitain the lover terms ‘les mortz, qu’en moy tu renovelles’ (v. 3). In spite of the reverential tone addressed to the divine, Délie’s religious sensibility here and throughout the work is permeated with tensions. While the author follows Petrarchan conventions and makes of his persona an amant martyr, he also creates a majestically heroic figure who as a human being draws inexhaustible powers from enduring and transforming powerlessness. This can appear like philautia rather than holocaustat. For instance, the ubiquitously narcissistic eye imagery which is specular and self-reflexive, such as the roving ‘Oeil’ (v. 1) of the first dizain, ultimately redounds to the speaker’s own preoccupations as the would-be omniscient ‘Argus’ (D 290, v. 10). The paradox of powerful powerlessness is given precise figuration in dizain 77 where the lover compares his plight to Prometheus, chained to a rock on Mount Caucasus, where a vulture feeds daily on his liver. However, the poet-lover is not totally Narcissus

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(impresa 7), since he constantly encounters his other in Délie who profoundly ravishes his will and redirects his actions. Nor is he a Christian martyr because, despite Scève’s predilection for religious significance, grace and sin do not figure in Délie, and references to martyrdom in the work are not without relation to terrestrial glory (D 240). The paradox of Délie’s religious dimension is that it interprets the principle that the human is like the divine, not as an irreducible gap between creator and creature, but as an assumption of humanity’s limitless potential. Straddling the human and the divine, the work treats the likeness between God and humanity as a test of its capacity to become God-like. In spite of its plaints of powerlessness, Délie projects an ambitious goal that severely strains its ties to the medieval cornerstone virtue of humility. Yet, the road it often takes to this end is marked by another distinctively Scevian paradox – that of exploring suffering (‘Souffrir non souffrir’) as a human power, infinite in potential, whose model is Christ’s Passion and death. Hence, the reader encounters contingency and self-sufficiency at the same time. Taking these paradoxes into account one finds that in Délie, end and means appear to be at the breaking point. That is, the poet-lover constantly, almost inherently, checks excesses even as he explores the divine sparks within. Fidelity and Faith Dizain 1 showed that conversion, an act of purification, is also an act of faith, since at the moment of the innamoramento, Délie is constituted as the single and exclusive object of love. However, it must be borne in mind that for such religious writers as Aquinas, there are no secular equivalents for the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity in the strict sense of having the divinity as their aim.25 While this may be a clear distinction for theologians, it is less so for the poet-lover whose spiritual situation is between the human and the supernatural, and who more often than not mixes the secular with the sacred, frequently to hallow the dignity of human endeavour.26 A distinction may therefore be made between the purely moral virtues of fidelity, loyalty, constancy, honesty, good faith, and steadfastness, on the one hand, and on the other hand, faith in the supernatural qualities of Délie and the mystical side of the poet-lover’s experience. Sometimes the word foy (used approximately fifty-seven times) denotes the theological virtues, sometimes it denotes purely moral qualities such as fortitude, and at other times it conflates the two. However confusing this may seem, it is certainly true that religious figures such as Aquinas

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would recommend the cultivation of the moral virtues as preparation for the theological virtues, and so their mixture is not a priori indicative of conflict. Undoubtedly, Délie cherishes the notions of constancy, firmness, and stability, all of which cut across the sacred and the profane. But it is possible to nuance. The lover’s stoic counterpart to the woman’s imperturbability is given memorable depiction in the fifteenth impresa titled ‘La Girouette.’ The picture shows two faces symbolizing the wind blowing hard against a weathervane with the motto, ‘Mille revoltes ne m’ont encor bougé.’ Correcting the spinning girouette of the work’s first dizain, the device declares that in his trial (‘esproeuve,’ v. 4) the lover stands steady in spite of external storms. The key to understanding courage is that inner ‘foy’ (v. 9) is crucial in maintaining outer ‘fermeté’ (v. 4), since it enables the speaker to weather all storms. In certain dizains such as 285 the feeling of fidelity is expressed as loyalty, and this moral quality is correlated with the tactility of hardness expressed as ‘fermeté plus dure, que Dyaspre’ (v. 1). The Aristotelian relation between potentiality and actuality and the artistic notion of producing a beautiful statue (form) from the latency of material substance are correlated with the lover’s ‘roughed-out’ state of firmness (‘toute aspre,’ v. 3) and the beloved’s smoothly worked ‘foy’ (v. 5). These notions of constancy as completion and as durability are made infinite in the image of the ‘Anneau’ (D 349, v. 1). Moreover, by virtue of the ring’s intimate, physical contact with Délie, it is a venerated ‘relique’27 that (in the poetics of Scève) becomes a hieroglyph of erotic religiosity. Also, there are a number of poems in Délie which centre on calumny and backbiting that the lover contrasts with the trustworthiness of his beloved whose ‘foy’ is the ‘thresor de tes parolles’ (D 84, v. 10). The virtue of maintaining faith, keeping promises, and honouring religious and legal commitments is stated a contrario in dizain 20 where the Connétable de Bourbon’s treason violates ‘sa Patrie, et sa foy’ (v. 10). The very opposite of this vice is obedience (one of the most demanding of the speaker’s challenges) which culminates in dizain 275 in a spirit of adoration. The lover makes an offering of his very life through faith guided by reason and places it ‘aux piedz de ta haute value’ (v. 10). If there is a notion of constancy as covenant and spiritual contract, then it is particularly developed in dizains 134 and 161. In the first poem, the lover recognizes the woman’s legal commitment of body and marital fidelity (v. 5) to her husband. However, he nevertheless weighs his own ‘Sainte Union’ (v. 1) with Délie to be of greater moral value since, based on chastity and the heart, it will transcend death. That Délie’s power and omnipotence are analogous to the Almighty of Genesis is symbolized

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by the fourteenth illustration titled ‘Tour Babel.’ Just as the audacity of the Israelites was punished by the Almighty, so Délie remains unyielding and unconquerable before the lover’s presumptuous advances. A marine image gives prominence to the sentiment of security at the conclusion of dizain 339 where the lover’s hope, perseverance, and faithful confidence will finally and ultimately lead him to safe port: ‘à bon Port’ (v. 10). Dizain 17 with its rousing conclusion celebrating ‘ferme amour’ (v. 10) is one of the strongest expressions of fidelity in the sequence. As Defaux explains, Scève is here correcting Marot’s criticism of the body’s dignity by figuring the inseparability of eros and agape in the loving confluence of the ‘Rhosne, et Saone’ (v. 1).28 A second sense of faith in Délie derives from the New Testament’s exhortation to salvation and to the celebration of redemption. In Scève’s work there is a line of development having religious resonance which concerns the magnitude, ubiquity, and potency of Délie’s virtues as a deliverance from vice and a call to faith. These are usually spoken in the unitive voice. For example, the fifteenth dizain conveys these points in messianic fashion: Toy seule as fait, que ce vil Siecle avare, Et aveuglé de tout sain jugement, Contre l’utile ardemment se prepare Pour l’esbranler à meilleur changement: Et plus ne hayt l’honneste estrangement, Commençant jà à cherir la vertu. Aussi par toy ce grand Monstre abatu, Qui l’Univers de son odeur infecte, T’adorera soubz tes pieds combatu, Comme qui es entre toutes parfaicte. [You alone are the cause that this vile world, miserly And blinded from all healthy judgment, Against material gain ardently prepares itself, To move it toward betterment. So that the world no longer hates honourable meditation, Beginning already to cherish virtue. And so, because of you, this great downcast monster, That infects the universe with its odour, Overcome, will adore you at your feet, As one who is among all things perfect.]

(D 15)

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Délie alone has the saving power over humankind to correct the blind judgment of her age that would value cupidity and greed over spiritual regeneration. Here the poet-lover as prophet sees the woman preparing to exercise her divine omnipotence to shake (‘esbranler,’ v. 4) the world into contemplative solitude and meditation. She will teach her ‘Century’ (v. 1) to eschew the merely practical in favour of philosophic and religious renewal, and through her redemptive powers, she will overcome the pandemic Leviathan of vice, which will ultimately worship at her feet. Among the meanings of Leviathan is the biblical sea monster that personifies the forces of chaos. Isaiah 27:1 provides a context for Israel’s expression of faith in the creation of the world by Yahweh and the Lord’s victory over ‘the twisting serpent’ and ‘the dragon in the sea.’29 This messianic tone proclaiming and predicting the transcendent power of Délie’s virtue is a virtual credo of the poet-lover’s faith that is much repeated throughout the work as confidence, celebration, and expectation. In dizain 11 Délie’s virtues will be diffused all over the world ‘Dès l’Indien ... jusqu’au More’ (v. 10), and in dizain 135 the ‘lien’ (v. 1) binding the lover and the beloved will bring renown on earth and eternity in heaven. Echoing Paul30 and Julius Ceasar, the lover encounters life in death by being vanquished under the woman’s hand – an experience gnomically encapsulated by the tripartite formula: ‘M’ a esté voye, et veue, et puis victoire’ (D 139, v. 10). As we shall shortly see, Délie will redeem Nature’s fall into vice (D 149) and in a related expression of confidence, ‘This World’ (Ce Monde, v. 10) will inevitably remain fixed on her powers in constant ‘admiration’ (D 182, v. 10). That the lover may very well become a martyr for his faith in Délie is strongly implied by the historical poem linking the speaker’s second love to the execution of Thomas More (D 147). In a similarly eschatological vein the ‘divine presence’ (v. 9) of Délie in the lover’s heart makes him undergo the last judgment (‘l’extreme jugement,’ D 62, v. 10). Contrasting with these testimonies to ultimate sacrifice are professions of security, providence, and refuge where Délie is ‘le Cedre encontre le venin/De ce Serpent’ (D 372, vv. 1–2) as well as the ‘Myrrhe incorruptible/Contre les vers de ma mortalité’ (D 378, vv. 9–10). If there is a founding myth of amatory redemption in Délie, it is stated in dizain 149 in the form of a microepic pictorially sketched from the heavens to the mountains and finally to the lowlands. Et Helicon, ensemble et Parnasus, Hault Paradis des poetiques Muses, Se demettront en ce bas Caucasus:

Via purgativa Où de Venus les troys fainctes Meduses Par naif de tes graces infuses Confesseront (toutesfoys sans contraincte) La Deité en ton esprit empraincte, Thresor des Cieulx, qui s’en sont devestuz Pour illustrer Nature à vice astraincte, Ores embellie en tes rares vertus.

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[Both Helicon and Parnassus, The high Paradise of the poetical muses, Will descend to this low Caucasus, Where the three counterfeit Medusas of Venus, Infused with the natural character of your graces, Will admit (without being constrained to do so) to The Deity implanted in your spirit, which is The treasure of the Heavens, who stripped themselves of it, To honour Nature which had been subjected to vice, But now was made beautiful by your rare virtues.]

Let us first summarize the poem and then examine it in greater depth. The poet-lover predicts that the powers of poetry symbolized by the heights of ‘Helicon’ and ‘Parnasus’ (v. 1) will descend to the wilds of the Caucasus – a descent given connotations of ‘lowering themselves’ by the verb ‘se demettront’ (v. 3). The modus operandi of this movement is a series of relays starting with Délie who, having the ‘Deity imprinted in [her] spirit’ (v. 7) infuses her virtues into the Three Graces (v. 5). They in turn restore to Nature (‘illustrer Nature,’ v. 9) the beauty of the woman’s rare powers which had previously been subjected to vice. This dizain creates a humanist myth about the woman that parallels the life of Christ and specifically the Redemption. First, given the spiritual tone of this poem and especially the use of the future tense, the poet-lover may be viewed as a prophet predicting divine intervention into terrestrial life through the mediation of Délie. At the highest ontological point is ‘La Deité’ (v. 7) whose spirit is imprinted in Délie (‘en ton esprit empraincte,’ v. 7). In this metaphysical order there is a ‘Hault Paradis’ (v. 2) which is the sacred abode of the poetical muses who occupy the heights of ‘Helicon et Parnasus’ (v. 1). These two sites enhance the religious solemnity of the myth. The Thespians established a festival of love in Helicon; Parnasus towering over Delphi was considered by some to be the centre of the world since it was the location of Apollo’s oracle.31

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Farther down the levels of being is ‘Nature’ (v. 9) that had been subjected to vice and consequently stands in need of redemption (vv. 9–10). While the cause of this vice is not stated, the eschatological plan of salvation is foreseen in great detail by the poet-lover. Using words which suggest the Incarnation of God the Son into Christ, the speaker foresees that the Muses will descend from their summits ‘en ce bas Caucasus’ (v. 3) which is also reminiscent of the Prometheus myth (D 77). The semantic connotations of the verb ‘se demettront’ (v. 3) imply humiliation, and the Caucasus, suggesting the post-lapsarian state of earth, takes on its traditional meanings of remote, wild, and inhospitable (McFarlane 1966 edition, 415). In Scève’s mythic account the redemptive agents are ‘de Venus les troys fainctes Meduses’ (v. 4). What does this mean? In dizain 182 the speaker explains their relationship in the following way: ‘Et Graces sont de la Venus puissance, /Nous transformant plus, que milles Meduses’ (vv. 3–4). In other words, these are the Three Graces linked to Venus who as ‘Meduses’ have great powers to transform. However, in the context of dizain 149 they are ‘fainctes’ (v. 4) because by turning vice into virtue they work for good, not for evil. Paralleling the supernatural power of grace, the speaker points out that the three ‘Meduses’ are ‘infused’ (v. 5) with Délie’s ‘graces,’ which are related to poetry. Given stress and insistence in this poem is the magnanimous action of the Graces. By descending to human existence the three ‘Meduses,’ powerful though they be, have without constraint (‘sans contraincte,’ v. 6) divested themselves of their exalted state (‘qui s’en sont devestuz,’ v. 8) to accomplish their redemptive mission. By this act they show a love of humanity which parallels Christ’s Incarnation in the Word become flesh (John 1:14). That this is also an act of faith is suggested by the verb confesser conjugated in the future tense (v. 6), which nuances the Graces’ act of avowing and recognizing the truth and the commandments of the Deity. The use of the word ‘redemption’ in the New Testament has an economic meaning that repeatedly associates the sacrifice of Christ with future eschatological salvation. In Matthew 20:28 it is taught that Jesus gave his life ‘for the ransom of many.’32 In 1 Corinthians 6:20 Paul preaches, ‘You are not your own; you were bought with a price,’33 and in 1 Peter 1:18 the apostle reminds his readers, ‘You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your fathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ.’34 Also in Délie the poet-lover has recourse to economic terms by connecting the adjective rare in ‘rares vertus’ (v. 10) to the phrase ‘Thresor des Cieulx’ (v. 8) – Délie’s incalculable divine inspiration and merit passed on to the ‘Muses’ (v.

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2). The tying of economic value with divestment for the redemption of humanity is expressed in line 8 where the participle ‘devestuz’ communicates the act of stripping oneself or depriving oneself of possessions in order to make a payment: ‘Thresor des Cieulx, qui s’en sont devestuz’ (v. 8). What precisely is redeemed by this giving of self? In verses 9–10 there are three words which evoke the acts of restoring, renewing, and reconstructing Nature. First there is the infinitive ‘illustrer’ which according to Cotgrave means ‘to bring honour unto,’ as well as the verb ‘embellie’ denoting ‘to make beautiful,’ and finally the noun ‘vertus’ connoting the infusion of power, force, and energy. Clement of Alexander (c. 150–215) inaugurated the thesis that faith has logical precedence over reason but that reason could be a valuable aid in understanding faith.35 This was the basic position adopted by the Church Fathers, especially by Anselm and Augustine, who developed it for the Middle Ages. Augustine’s theology on this issue could be summed up by his teaching ‘crede, ut intelligas’ – ‘Believe that you may understand’ (Gilson 1960, 31). For his authority, Augustine cites Isaiah’s warning that ‘unless you believe, you will not understand.’36 In addition, Augustine bolstered this argument by noting that even family and society observe this precedence in the education of children. Thus, beliefs and tenets are learned first as facts and retroactively assimilated by reason which helps to penetrate their meanings and truths (ibid., 31). One side of the issue concerning the proper relation between faith and reason is pertinent to Délie’s poetic structure. As seen abundantly in dizain 1 and in many others, the reader at the outset of a poem frequently encounters the poet-lover in medias res in reaction to an event or problematic state that he attempts to comprehend retroactively in meditation. In chapter 1 this particular modification of the lover was described as techniques of readjustment and reaccommodation. The implication is that some act, event, or state precedes or preempts rational reflection, which retrospectively attempts to assimilate it by introspective methods. In dizain 1, for instance, the aggressive attack of the ‘Basilisque’ (v. 4) knifing into the lover’s body, heart, and reason overwhelms him and puts him in shock. It is only in the concluding quatrain that he recovers the significance of this eruption as the turning point in his life where he constitutes Délie as the ‘Idole de [sa] vie’ (v. 10). In good mannerist fashion it is as if there were an unpremeditated push into a vita nuova whose jarring surprise can only be understood and accepted after the fact. If such retroactive assimilation is an implicit attribute of Délie’s style, then it is made explicit if not explained in dizain 103 as a blind leap into love.

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Suyvant celuy, qui pour l’honneur se jecte, Ou pour le gaing, au peril dangereux, Je te rendy ma liberté subjecte, Pour l’affranchir en vivre plus heureux. Apres le sault je m’estonnay paoureux Du grand Chaos de si haulte entreprise, Où plus j’entray, et plus je trouvay prise L’Ame abysmée au regret qui la mord. Car tout le bien de l’heureuse surprise Me fut la peur, la douleur, et la Mort.

(D 103)

[Following the example of him who, whether for honour Or for gain, throws himself into dangerous peril, I made my liberty subject to you, To free it to a happier life. After the leap I was fearfully amazed At the great Chaos of such a lofty undertaking, In which, the further I entered, the more I found My soul, wrenched by regret, which devours it, caught. For my only good from the happy surprise Was fear, misery, and Death.]

Throughout the dizain the speaker uses metacommunication in the passé simple to explain conduct that he usually relates in the present. In other words, he is now defining in the historical past a general mechanism of his psychology inferred from repetitive behaviour. Given this opportunity to generalize, he lays out his explanation in the same order as the actual process, or rather, he enacts the order of blind faith in meditative organization. In the first four lines serving as a composition, the poet-lover pictures himself as one who, for honour or gain, throws himself into the peril of love. He has consciously and voluntarily taken the deadly risk of jumping into danger under the supposition that it would lead into a happier existence: ‘en vivre heureux’ (v. 4). There follow the second (vv. 5–8) and third steps (vv. 9–10) of analysis and affective response respectively. Lines 5–8 examine the effects of this precipitous act. In spite of his initial suspicion of the mortal risks of his action, the lover is nevertheless fearfully amazed that his lofty undertaking would invite such ‘Chaos’ (v. 6): ‘Où plus j’entray, et plus je trouvay prise/L’Ame abysmée ...’ (vv. 7–8). Finally, in lines 9–10, he evaluates and judges the entire experience ironically called ‘l’heureuse surprise’ (v. 9) whose only outcome was fear, misery, and death (v. 10).

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To understand the issues of faith, the key words are ‘se jecte’ (v. 1), ‘affranchir’ (v. 4), and ‘le sault’ (v. 5), which show the lover to have thrown himself into peril, subjected his freedom to the woman, and leaped without knowing into ‘Chaos’ (v. 6). Scève breaks with the moral logic of the emblem, where the writer teaches from title, motto, and picture, a moral principle conserved in the patrimony of common places and conventional wisdom. The author of Délie differentiates himself from this tradition in order to pursue a more inductive, personal mode of understanding. While the emblem stresses that conduct must be founded on prudent foresight to avoid moral pitfalls, the Scevian approach to morality is to seek out ethical perplexities to stimulate knowledge gained retrospectively. Thus, there is a properly religious reason for the poet-lover to assume these risks, since Délie as the reflection of divinity engages him in the challenges of spiritual wisdom. What we frequently see in the work as action in medias res, post facto awareness, or paralysing dilemmas, are amatory equivalents of the leap of faith whose initial darkness, as an unassimilated fact, changes to painful light in retrospective analysis. Some of the imprese are excellent examples of post facto understanding where an initial activity or a fact of existence is retroactively discovered to be self-defeating. Thus, in the twelfth picture, one of the two birds flying near vegetation gets caught in lime. In impresa 46 a spider inadvertently traps itself in its own web. In the forty-ninth device, a chamois, seeking protection from hunting dogs, fearfully takes refuge on the top of a peak only to find himself surrounded by his hostile pursuers. None of the foregoing points denies the central tension between faith and freedom rigorously confronted by the poet-lover. The lover’s freedom seems to be vitiated by his inability to flee from Délie (D 46) in the psychological and physical senses. The paradox is how to retain a measure of discretion and control within such a constraint, how to maintain some freedom of assent or rejection in the midst of the overwhelming powers and promises of faith. In spite of this terribly uncomfortable posture there is leeway for the lover in the very act of crafting his plaints, of arguing and dialoguing with the woman, and of attempting to convince her of his worthiness. To the degree that the innamoramento ravishes the poet-lover’s will, love appears as an irresistible gift. However, as seen in dizains 1 and 71, even in the most apparently insuperable circumstances the lover retains the power to lend himself to Délie’s force – an act of self-determination that is rewarded with the maximum of self expression and self-realization. In fact, the lover’s attitude of seeing merit and truth in this imposed state of suffering gives Délie its distinctively religious tone. Both the Gospel

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and Augustine are reflected in dizain 139 where the lover affirms that his victory has been to be vanquished by Délie: ‘Car en vainquant tumber dessoub sa main,/M’a esté voye, et veue, et puis victoire’ (vv. 9–10). Here in Scève we are quite near Augustine’s use of 1 Corinthians 15: 54–5 at the conclusion of X:30 of the Confessions where ‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’ Separation, Retreat and ‘Forgetting’ the Self In this section it will be helpful to provide clarification of the notion of ‘holy’ in the via purgativa. Historical scholarship in sacred scripture shows that this word has positive and negative meanings, the first centring on the concept of what belongs properly to God and the second designating separation from and opposition to what is profane, impure, or idolatrous. In the Old Testament the Hebrew qadosh (holy) and qodesh (holiness) refer in the positive sense to the divine in its intimate essence and transcendent otherness (‘I am God and not man, the Holy One present among you,’ Hos. 11:9) whose qualities are revered through consecrated places and objects such as ‘the Holy of Holies,’ the ‘holy house’(Temple), and ‘the holy city’ (Jerusalem).37 Old Testament sources also provide many negative senses of ‘holy’ expressed through rituals and laws forbidding defilement and transgression. In Leviticus 22:1–3 the Lord says to Moses, ‘If any one of your descendants throughout your generation approaches the holy things, which the people of Israel dedicate to the Lord, while he has an uncleanness, that person shall be cut off from my presence.’38 Thomas Aquinas who devoted extensive study to religion, worship, and virtue in the Summa, uses very similar concepts to explain holiness, and draws his examples from the New Testament. According to Aquinas, ‘sanctitas’ has a twofold signification both positive and negative. Borrowing from Origen and Isidore, he says, ‘ On the one hand it signifies purity and this signification is found in the Greek word for sanctity hagios, which means unsoiled. On the other hand, it denotes firmness and this signification corresponds to the ancient Latin usage, for sancta was applied to things sanctioned by law which were thus inviolate.’ Following this point Aquinas says, ‘The mind must be withdrawn from less perfect things, therefore, in order to be united to the supreme being ... Thus, the Epistle to the Hebrews states, Follow peace with all men, and holiness [sanctimoniam], without which no man shall see God.’39 For Délie negative definitions of ‘holy’ are particularly helpful in understanding the significance of the poet-lover’s gestures of moral purification.

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These involve the key notions mentioned above of separation, withdrawal, and retreat which penetrate virtually every level of Délie. We have already seen how important dizain 15 is to Délie in proclaiming many moral prescriptions central to the work as a whole: its call to moral improvement through estrangement, its messianic prediction that the woman’s perfection will slay Leviathan, and its condemnation of the sickly obsession with unreflective practicality and monetary riches. To these may be added Cynthia Skenazi’s observation that the poem’s eschatological tone predicting Délie’s triumph over ignorance and perversity, offers a promise of ‘pouvoir purificateur et rédempteur’ (1992, 36). Just as the dizain depicts the Virgin-warrior bringing Leviathan to submission under her feet, so the reader takes inspiration from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: ‘I would have you wise as to what is good and guileless as to what is evil; then the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet’ (16:19–20).40 In this dizain the poet-as-prophet praises Délie for preparing and exhorting humanity to deliver itself from ‘ce grand Monstre’ (v. 7) through meditative solitude in a way that he terms ‘honneste estrangement’ (v. 5). In the Vita solitaria Petrarch praises the virtues of solitude through the exemplary practices of numerous Christian and classical figures, and in Book II draws from his own life in Vaucluse the three analytic components that guide his treatise. ‘Solitude is considered threefold, if I grasp the matter rightly: that of place ... that of time ... that of the mind.’41 Even though Petrarch’s Epicurean concept of solitude is very different from the poet-lover’s austere trials, let us nevertheless accept his category of place in relation to Délie. In his dedicatory huitain to Délie the speaker makes clear that he is taking the roles of both poet and lover, and that as poet, he intends to use the lyric as the locus of expression. By convention the lyric is the site par excellence of interiority, and therefore the choice of the amatory epigram can only deepen the possibilities for inward investigation and spiritual reform. However, the poet-lover highlights his virtual identification between site and psychology by the avis that his wanderings and deaths will unfold in a certain place, ‘en si durs Epygrammes’ (v. 6) not in the physical world, but ‘en cest Oeuvre’ (v. 4). His withdrawal into the lyric as the very place of his spiritual reconstitution is not exclusively metaphorical given the fact that what follows in the text is a being forming himself quite literally in and by his own meditative poem. While it is true that the speaker makes many references to the outside world, and particularly to Lyon, these are interiorized and transformed en abyme inside what he calls his ‘instrinseque debat’ (D 423, v. 3) where, in the words of Georges Poulet, ‘toute

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activité dans le monde du poème naît et se fomente de l’intérieur’ (1967, 87). Purification is foremost this fundamental act of solitary introspection into the resources of lyric meditation where place and thought are indistinguishable. Bien qu’en ce corps mes foibles esperitz Ministres soient de l’aure de ma vie, Par eulx me sont mes sentementz periz Au doulx pourchas de liberté ravie: Et de leur queste asses mal poursuyvie Ont r’apporté l’esperance affamée Avec souspirs, qui, comme fouldre armée De feu, et vent, undoyent à grandz flotz. Mais de la part en mon coeur entamée Descend la pluye estaingnant mes sanglotz.

(D 379)

[Although my feeble vital spirits are the Ministers, in this body, of my life’s vital breath, By them are the channels of my consciousness destroyed In the sweet pursuit of ravished liberty, And from their somewhat badly followed quest They have brought back famished hope With sighs which, like lightening armed With fire and wind, billow forth great waves of flame, But from the injured region of my heart Descends the rain, extinguishing my sobs.]

The poet-lover’s despondency is due to the fact that vital spirits that give breath to life have been poisoned by the toxin of false hope. This is a meditation on psychosomatic effects drawn deeply into corridors of introspection. Lyric voice, and in particular its own figurations of itself, provides the most useful indications of meditative withdrawal into interiority – the act of thought witnessing and wrestling with its own thinking. The most obvious feature of the poem as the abode of solitude is that there are no particular indices in the dizain of time or place save the word ‘queste’ (v. 5) with the result that the descent into introspection is an expansion into higher understanding through intellectual generality. This enables the speaker to discourse abstractly, metacommunicatively through a number of fields: Galenian science (the purification of the ‘esperitz’),42 biblical history in Genesis (‘l’aure’ is the vital breath of life), scholastic divisions of

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the psychological anatomy (‘ce corps,’ ‘mes sentementz,’ ‘liberté’), traditional elements of the cosmos (fire – ‘feu,’ air – ‘vent,’ water – ‘pluye’), and the courtly love/Petrarchan components of amatory physiology (‘souspirs,’ ‘sanglotz,’ ‘estaingnant mes sanglotz’).43 In fact, temporal/spatial references are expressed with such analytic generality that they are conceptualized as patterns of paradigmatic repetition: ‘Bien qu’en ce corps mes foibles esperitz/Ministres soient de l’aure de ma vie,/ Par eulx me sont mes sentementz periz/Au doulx pourchas de liberté ravie’ (vv. 1–4). As in Mauburnus, abstract symbolization, characteristic of Scève, creates a deep density of meditative topics that enrich the descent into the mind. For example, it is gradually seen in reading the poem that the word ‘aure’ (v. 2) is the matrix of the meditation containing a treasure of polyvalent meanings relating to breath, wind, cleansing, gold, fire, love, fame, perfection, and medicine. Complementing the speaker’s inward turn to the resources of self are the textual isolation and intensity of the individual dizain where except in rare instances, the lover’s meditation contracts his entire existence to the given moment of his reflection, giving the impression that the poem begins and ends in cosmically independent moments. Just as the poet-lover isolates himself inwardly, so he textually separates himself from anterior and posterior moments, since the first line of so many poems starts in medias res. This has an analogous effect on the reader because thematic obliquity deflects one momentarily from relating the dizain serially (syntagmatically) to previous or subsequent dizains. Moreover, the poet-lover has psychologically detached himself from social contact save with Délie who herself is assimilated to his analytic mirror which reflects her otherness as the ‘queste’ (v. 5). In addition, the material and spiritual austerity of the speaker’s being is alluded to in the expression ‘l’esperance affamée’ (v. 6), for the only food in Délie is psychological or spiritual, and even in this poem it is depleted by false hope. Though the poet-lover is no anchorite or hermit and shows every sign of aristocratic comportment, including disdain, only once in the work does he eat or drink (D 423),44 not counting the two instances where he mentions the word ‘pomme,’ the first to allude to original sin (D 113, v. 2), and the second as a sexual surrogate for the woman (D 116, v. 3). Continuing with dizain 379 and in the context of material paucity, the meditative dizain is the spiritual balm for the sickness of avaricious accumulation that is condemned in dizain 15: ‘ce vil Siecle avare’ (v. 1). Scève’s contemporary Forcadel captures this form of contemptus mundi perfectly by punning: ‘Je ne me pais de l’aure populaire: Ains il me plaist à l’indocte desplaire.’45 The obverse side of acquisitiveness is the poet-lover’s philosophical attempt to reduce the plurality and

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dissociation of his complexity. This is symbolized by the typological form of the dizain as a self-contained, perfect square appearing to retract, reduce, and contain the swarming hydra of vexation.46 While purificatory withdrawal requires these structural components, it is also an act of moral reconstitution, which creates regenerative deaths in order to counter errant desires. Scevian purification consists in bodily and spiritual trials that through negative and positive means reorient desire to human equilibrium and spiritual aspiration. In this poem purification comes about through recognition that false hope has depleted and exhausted bodily and psychological forces in that the very breath of life nears extinction. However, the phenomenon of pain in Délie is not registered as the absence of equilibrium but as the active deactivation which empties or neutralizes the lover’s powers, as if body and mind had intrinsic purifying sanctions against perverted hope. It is learned in Délie that the vital spirits (‘esperitz,’ D 413, v. 10) have the function of maintaining bodily life, but in dizain 379 the impossible hope of possessing the woman drains their strength, and as in a negative chain reaction, cuts off the vital breath of life (‘l’aure,’ v. 2), destroys consciousness (‘sentementz periz,’ v. 3), ravishes liberty (‘liberté ravie,’ v. 4), and famishes hope (‘esperance affamée,’ v. 6). Since there is always a positive side to the pursuit of Délie, complete obliteration of the lover is impossible, so he now persists as the host of his own passion, deflating in ‘sighs’ (v. 7) with such billowing force as to create an apocalyptic conflagration within his being: ‘Avec souspirs, qui, comme fouldre armée/De feu, et vent, undoyent à grandz flotz’ (vv. 7–8). This fire-storm is supremely unstable, since its purificatory powers only lead to a momentary neutralization of opposite elements – fire and water – which naturally feed on volatile combat. From the very flames of his wounded heart descends a rain of tears which extinguishes the sobs of passion. Like physiological spirits imperceptibly imitating the contrary valences of Délie, the water of regretful ardor (‘sanglotz,’ v. 10) is doused by the water of healing tears (‘pluye,’ v. 10). It is the resourcefulness of lyric interiority that brings forth the concrete pain of trial and the clarity of recognition for both lover and reader. First, there are phenomena of breathing, respiration, exhaling, and inhaling. Since the vital spirits have not been purified, the very breath of life is blocked. In Scève’s lexicon certain physiological reactions are also moral indices so that the ‘sighs’ of passion and the ‘sobs’ of regret wound the heart whose fires can only be cured by the rain of tears (v. 10). A different but complementary side to the physical weakness of breathing is the moral emptiness of sighing after the woman’s corporal beauty which like the ‘es-

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perance affamée’ (v. 6) offers no salutary air to cleanse and feed the spirit. Tied to this idea is the word ‘l’aure’ (v. 2) which in punning on Petrarch’s laurel implies that the immoderate pursuit of fame creates, so to speak, fleeting air instead of vital breath.47 Second, there are also the phenomena of loss, privation, and theft, since consciousness has ‘perished’ (v. 3), freedom is ravished, and hope famished. Third, frustrated hope becomes a billowing fire storm and charges military style from inside to outside, inundating the body and breaking open the heart: ‘la part en mon coeur entamée’ (v. 9). Finally, the poem concludes at the point where tears are still in the process of extinguishing the heart’s sobs (‘estaingnant mes sanglotz,’ v. 10) in what may be called neutralizing the passions rather than completely discharging the pain. The speaker is moving to a new starting point of critical self-evaluation. This purificatory épreuve would have nothing of the transcendent were it not for the fact that Scève habitually infuses his poems with intimations of the sacred. The ‘aure de ma vie’ (v. 2), in addition to alluding to Galen and Petrarch, recalls the spiritual birth of humanity in Genesis where it is said that ‘the Lord God formed [man]of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being’ (2:7).48 The tone of this purification is confessional, since the lover feels required to admit that undue attention to the physical results in a ‘queste asses mal poursuyvie’ (v. 5). Also, the lover’s physiological reactions have spiritual correlates as they do in Cisneros’s dramatization of contrition where moral compunction produces ‘sighs,’ ‘groans,’ and ‘wailing.’49 Augustine, like the poet-lover, also bemoans the absence of hope’s promises when he asks the Lord, ‘and if we could not sob our troubles in your ear, what hope should we have left to us ... in the mourning and the tears, the wailing and the sighs?’50 Finally, the last two lines of the poem, which speak of piercing the heart, have unmistakable intertexts in the Gospel of Saint John where the evangelist, relating the final moments of Christ’s Crucifixion, tells his audience, ‘But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water’ (19:34).51 The last two lines of dizain 379 read, ‘Mais de la part en mon coeur entamée/Descend la pluye estaignant mes sanglots.’ The French word ‘la part’ means not only ‘the part but also the side,52 thereby giving in English, ‘ But from the wounded side in my heart.’ In fact, this is virtually identical to devotional prayers dedicated to what would become the official cult of the Sacred Heart – a tradition beginning in the early Middle Ages with Saints Anselm and Bernard and steadily growing through the Devotio moderna, the Jesuits, and Saint Fançois de Sales.53 This tradition transferred the symbol’s vehicle

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from the wound on the side of Christ’s body to one in his flesh-and-blood heart (‘Coeur de chair’)54 to express the profound gratitude that the Incarnation promises an ever-flowing, infinite revivification of the spiritual life. In this devotion the blood of Christ is the Redemption of the New Covenant which, in purifying the soul, symbolizes the waters of baptism which bring continuous spiritual nourishment. Hence, in dizain 379 the end of the meditation returns to the beginning, the ‘aure de ma vie’ (v. 2) enriching the physiological reference to the body with the physical realism of Christ’s heart but slowly and painfully bathing itself in the waters of spiritual regeneration. Perhaps the most stirring image of purification in this lyrical lamentation is the apocalyptic firestorm whose welling force is indicated by the length of the first sentence. The frustrations of false hope incur interior sanctions with the ferocity of military assault whose personification (‘fouldre armée,’ v. 7) recalls not only Homer’s epitome of the king of gods as ‘Zeus who hurls the thunderbolt’55 but also similar images in Isaiah and Revelations.56 In the part of the prophet’s oracle of punishment traditionally called ‘Isaiah’s Apocalypse’ directed at Judah’s untrustworthy leaders is the foreboding destruction similar to the eschatology of dizain 379: ‘You will be visited by the Lord of hosts with thunder and with earthquake and with great noise, with whirlwind and tempest, and/the flame of devouring fire’ (29:6).57 While the Bible and classical sources portray apocalyptic punishment moving externally from divinity to humanity, Scève’s eruption moves from the inside out, and though muffled in sound, the fulgurations are no less epic in vision. Because the poet-lover’s breath of life has been sapped by misdirected hope, the vital spirits are beset with impurities which debilitate body and heart (vv. 1–2). However, regret and exhaustion are expressed by outward motion as a (micro)cosmic exhalation (‘souspirs,’ v. 7) and tearing (‘la pluye,’ v. 10) having the force of an apocalyptic firestorm which begins to cleanse his being. This tearful exhalation expels all the material elements of the universe – fire (‘feu,’ v. 8), air (‘vent,’ v. 8), water (‘grandz flotz,’ v. 8), and earth (‘ce corps,’ v. 1) – not in order to condemn the physical but to expurgate its toxins and achieve symbiosis with the spiritual. Now turned toward the right goal, the lover begins to restore these elements to a salutary state as lyric introspection changes the catastrophic deluge (v. 8) into therapeutic tears curing the bleeding heart (v. 10). Thus, it is the dur Epygramme that is the substantial locus of purificatory solitude. When Petrarch’s notion of place is taken more literally as geographical separation, numerous and varied examples are found throughout Délie.

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The lover makes reference to his physical distance from Délie eighty times in 449 dizains, and these have a variety of manifestations. There are retreats to the Isle Barbe (some imposed by the beloved) and perhaps to a monastery near Mount Fourvière as well as solitary visits to the mountains, rivers, and countryside around and near Lyon. Others are separations from Délie in Lyon due to quarrels, gnawing calumnies and rumours, or her marital responsibilities. Finally, some are owing to courting other women and to a new love, but the most decisive is what Saulnier calls ‘un divorce définitif’ (1:159) unfolding from dizain 412 to the end of the work. In spite of these different forms of spatial detachment, the lover’s experience of separation shows important constants, and these may be sampled by the poems of solitude in nature. How does Scève compare to Petrarch with respect to place understood as a geographical construct? Returning to Petrarch’s De vita solitaria, one can see that the psychological and spiritual connotations of locality are substantially different from those of Scève’s Délie despite numerous superficial resemblances. For both writers moral purification does recommend separation from the city and the ‘vile herd’ (odi profanum), from amassing wealth and material riches, and from the whirlwind of practical and unreflective rituals. Like Erasmus both Scève’s persona and Petrarch advocate solitude for meditation and contemplation to pursue what is lasting through philosophical, moral, and spiritual reflection. Even though for Petrarch ‘Christ is always in all places’ (144)58 and for the poet-lover Délie is timelessly present as ‘Celle tu fus, es, et seras’ (D 22, v. 8), both poets seek privileged spaces of geographical isolation, the former in Valchiusa, the latter in the Isle Barbe. Yet there are wide differences between the Italian and the Frenchman with respect to the purification offered by solitude. Petrarch’s ideal is one of Epicurean rusticity valuing above all the otium to cultivate human selfrealization through lofty thoughts, warm friendship, and inspiring books. Admiring foremost ‘a place most propitious for freedom and peace and leisure and study and virtue,’59 Petrarch incarnates the ancient view of solitude as refuge and escape from worldly service and responsibilities as represented by the counsel of Cicero, Seneca, and Pliny the Younger, which is encapsulated in the motto otium cum litteris (Friedrich 1968, 22). The Vita solitaria lauds the examples of countless holy figures, especially Pope Celestinus who, according to Petrarch, gleefully abdicated his papacy in order to regain the freedom to resume his ascetic life.60 The main advantage of solitude for Petrarch is the leisure ‘to belong to yourself and in all seasons’ and to live ‘without annoying company, without irksome-

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ness, without anxieties.’61 However, the poet-lover in Délie is closer philosophically to the position taken by Montaigne who, in De la solitude, emphasizes certain sides of Virgil and Horace. As the author of the Essais observes: ‘Furthermore, by getting rid of the court and the market place we do not get rid of the principal worries of our life’ (1:39).62 In a subsequent passage he declares: ‘Ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and lust ... often follow us even in the cloisters and the schools of philosophy. Neither deserts, nor rocky caves, nor hairshirts, nor fastings will free us of them.’63 There is even a sense of solitude in the poet-lover that resembles Seneca’s extreme adherence to duty: ‘We do not allow ourselves to be at leisure even when we are dying.’64 By citing this passage in Petrarch on Seneca, I do not wish to imply that Scevian death is self-sacrifice to the civitas, even though Scève and his family were prominent citizens of Lyon. Rather, I am speaking about the unmitigated and unrelieved restlessness that characterizes the poet-lover’s spirituality, even in moments of contemplation. They are like Augustine’s agony over the decision to convert: ‘Where could my heart find refuge from itself? Where could I go, yet leave myself behind? Was there any place where I should not be a prey to myself?’65 Of course, Petrarch’s persona in the Rime does resemble Scève’s poet-lover in Délie, but the latter’s experience of solitude is much more anguished or as Cisneros would say, ‘asperative.’66 In an examination of Scève’s Saulsaye: Eglogue de la vie solitaire Thomas Greene judges Petrarch’s concept of spatio-temporal solitude as precisely the opposite of Scève’s, the former epitomizing the linear, successive concept of humanist time, the latter mingling into the ‘slow rhythms of solitude ... the fullness of an eternal present.’67 Though the Saulsaye was published three years after Délie, its praise of seizing permanence in the flux of time retroactively clarifies the poet-lover’s introspective process. In Délie the purification brought by geographical separation from the beloved rarely brings Petrarch’s otium or freedom because the poet in the speaker tends to absorb the features of his natural surroundings into psychological, moral, and spiritual expressions of his interior war. While solitude sometimes provides decisive moments of contemplative joy marking high points of spiritual attainment (dizains 414, 434) it is somewhat different from Petrarch’s otium because it expresses not primarily the freedom from constraints but the recognition that constraints are painfully enlightening. Most of the lover’s spatial separations from Délie bring trials into solitude that, rather than offering consolation through nature’s physical characteristics, tend to dematerialize the spatial surroundings into psychological conflict. For example, Petrarch’s Rime 259 is cited as an intertext

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of Scève’s dizain 262 to the extent that both treat of the lovers’ retreat into nature. Petrarch’s persona, much more than Scève’s, relishes the peace and the beauty of his physical surroundings and lingers over their caressing comforts: ‘le rive’ (v. 2), ‘le campagne e i boschi’ (v. 2), ‘furor del dolce aere de’ paesi toschi’ (v. 3), ‘suoi bei colli foschi’ (v. 7), ‘ancor m’avria tra’suoi bei colli foschi/Sorga, ch’ a pianger et cantar m’aita’ (vv. 8–9). In Scève’s poem the only mention of physical nature is in the first line – ‘les lieux plus solitaires’ (v. 1) – which immediately jumps by the genitive into considering love’s psychological distresses, which are seen as nature’s very attributes rather than its mere mirrors: ‘Je vois cherchant les lieux les plus solitaires/De desespoir, et d’horreur habitez’ (vv. 1–2). Scève creates a lover who prefers analysing the moral and psychological components of his struggle and as such quickly advances to knowledge by symbolization, generalization, and abstraction. Like his Italian counterpart he attempts to flee his amatory dilemmas, but unlike the Rime’s lover he does not so much reap nature’s commiseration and relief. Rather, like the Fathers of the Desert, such as Antony or Pachomius, and unlike Augustine’s joyful circle of intellectual friends in his cenobitic-like life in Cassiciacum,68 Scève’s persona finds that in ‘the most solitary places’ (v. 1) he must do battle with his demons alone. To show the purificatory effects of trials on the lover while in solitude or retreat, it is best to remember that antiperistasis pervades Délie even at the level of deep structure. Thus, when the lover seeks refuge in quieter abodes, he encounters an experience most notably intoned by the emblematic motto, ‘Fuyant peine, travail me suyt’ (no. 35). In dizains 241 and 242 he repairs to a pilgrimage site, which in view of his earlier allusion to ‘Barbare’ (D 238, v. 1) is the Isle Barbe in the Saone north of Lyon. Defaux states that ‘ce saint lieu’ (D 242, v. 1) refers to the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Martin on the Island.69 In these poems the poet-lover addresses himself in soliloquy to ‘Pellerins’ (D 241, v. 1) and ‘Peuple devotieux’ (D 242, v. 1) in order to seek consolation for his unanswered prayers. His purificatory act is also an act of the understanding because it is an avowal of desolation enlightened by the ironies of prayer. The poet-lover’s aim is to make the distinction between the pilgrims’ prayers to the Christian saints who mediate successfully for their petitioners and the pagan gods (‘Dieux,’ D 241, v. 5) charged with love who leave his entreaties ‘iniquitously wasted’ (‘iniquement perduz,’ D 241, v. 9). For the poet-lover, neither religious system answers the call of desire. Thus, his supplice is to be imprisoned by exclusion, isolation, and injustice. Nothing in human or divine communication proves effective, and thus, the poetic matrix of

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these strange poems is the absence of response in prayer. As in dizain 60 on Narcissus, no one appears to be listening to the poet-lover, and his words seem like ‘un Vent de souspirs excité’ (D 242, v. 8). His address to the pilgrims is more in the nature of a solitary monologue amid groups of travellers, or worse, an interior dialogue whose melancholic withdrawal bars exterior exchange. The speaker never directly prays to the gods or to their Christian counterparts, but confines himself to an unheard, pseudoconfession with the ‘Peuple devotieux’ (D 242, v. 1), which only intensifies the sense of hidden and unresponsive divinity. Something like the absurd inhabits his motives, since he comes to a Christian site only to confess that it cannot undo the pagan gods’ deliberate deafness. ‘Ce n’est point cy, Pellerins, que mes voeutz/Avecques vous diversement me tiennent’ (D 241, vv. 1–2). He makes palpable, concrete references to a place (‘Ce n’est point cy,’ D 241, v. 1; ‘en ce sainct lieu,’ D 242, v. 1) that is a no place – a locus that only distances him psychologically from its putative purpose. Spatiotemporal cycles are out of sync, for in the pilgrims’ dance of thanksgiving (D 241, v. 8) concluding their devotions, the poet-lover can only see the recommencement of his futile entreaties. This counter-synchronization is most evident in what may be called the inefficacy of voice. The pilgrims celebrate their happily fulfilled wishes with ‘the sounds of [their] sweet instruments’ (D 242, v. 9) while the lover’s only ‘monument’ (D 242, v. 7) is ‘a wind aroused by my sighs’ (D 242, v. 8) This wind of sighs, ironic breath of life, appears to have the positive quality of sweet persistence since it blows the sounds of musical instruments toward Lyon. But Lyon is described as ‘la double, & fameuse Cité’ (D 242, v. 10). The word ‘double’ in connection with other geographic symbols is so rich in meaning that it would take a sustained study to do it justice. Suffice it to say that Lyon is ‘double’ (v. 10) because it occupies both sides of the Soane. However, this also means that it is cut in half with the poet lover located in the very place where it is rent. Though elsewhere this double nature of Lyon mirrors the ideal love of the poet-lover and Délie honoured as the site of a marriage (D 17), it here suggests a divided and displaced heart. But these two dizains constitute a prayer a contrario since their lamentation is ultimately based on the assumption of divinity. A key to understanding the religious import of purification in this poem is the lexical stress on words of wishing and wanting especially in dizain 241: ‘mes voeutz,’ D 241, v. 1; ‘je veulx,’ v. 3, ‘vos desirs,’ v. 4 ‘mes souhaictz,’ v. 6; ‘vos voeutz,’ v. 7. In terms of his own desires, the poet-lover’s prayer has no efficacy. However, in the acute realization of rebuffed wishes, he is grappling with the true logic of Christian petitionary prayer. In the

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Summa Aquinas consolidates the teachings of tradition and revelation on prayer by stating: 1 We must pray, not in order to inform God of our needs and desires, but in order to remind ourselves that in these matters we need divine assistance. 2 ... our motive in praying is not that we may change the divine decree, but that we might obtain that which God has decreed.70 This second point is a lesson that the lover explicitly acknowledges in dizain 296 by making an act of faith: Bien qu’entre nous ne soit plus cher, que d’estre, Et tout en soy vivre amyablement, Si tens je bien, et raisonnablement, Dessoubz telz laqz ma vie estre conduicte, Voire y finir, tant honorablement Je veulx perir en si haulte poursuyte.

(D 296, vv. 5–10)

[Although nothing is held dearer in us than being And living amiably completely in oneself, Yet, I fully and reasonably intend My life to be conducted under such bonds, And even intend to finish it under them so honourably Do I wish to perish in such lofty pursuit.]

A different and more Platonic trial besieges the lover in dizain 238 where the beloved’s rejections have caused him to withdraw to the Isle Barbe to gather his spirits. From the lover’s perspective Délie’s cruelty is so strong that this retreat will restrain his violent emotions. Thinking again of the sexual brutality endured by Procne and Philomela, his hope to pacify memory has only inflamed the most shameful passions: ‘mes passions honteuses’ (v. 6): Ta cruaulté, Dame, tant seulement Ne m’à icy relegué en ceste Isle (Barbare à moy,) ains trop cruellement M’y lie, et tient si foiblement debile, Que la memoyre, asses de soy labile, Me croist sans fin mes passions honteuses: Et n’ay confort, que des Soeurs despiteuses,

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Qui, pour m’ayder, à leurs plainctes labeurent, Accompaignant ces fontaines piteuses, Qui sans cesser avec moy tousjours pleurent.

(D 238)

[Your cruelty, Lady, not only Has relegated me to this Isle (Barbarous to me) but too cruelly Ties me to it and keeps me so much enfeebled, That my memory, unreliable enough to itself, Endlessly increases my shameful passions. And my only comfort comes from the distressed sisters, Who, to aid me, labour at their plaints, Accompanying these piteous fountains Which ceaselessly weep with me.]

Through the crime of Tereus the two sisters symbolize both the poetlover’s potential aggression and his triumph over excessive passion. They serve, in a sense, as a choice between welling violence and difficult forbearance. Coming to the Isle Barbe (v. 2) on the Saone to quell his spirits, the lover finds instead that he must reckon with these dilemmas. Given the speaker’s insistence on the alienation he experiences in psychological prison (vv. 1–4), this dizain enriches the Scevian notion of ‘estrangement’ (D 15, v. 5). The lover suggests this connection in the first two lines by saying to Délie: ‘Ta cruaulté, Dame, tant seulement/Ne m’a icy relegué en ceste Isle/(Barbare a moy) ...’ (vv. 1–3).71 His feelings of unfamiliarity invite comparison with impresa 26 where a unicorn, looking at its reflection in the water, intones: ‘De moy je m’espovante.’ The spiritual antidote to this self unknown to itself is not only a Pauline effort of the will to quell the passions, but also a cognitive realization sprung by the words ‘Barbare à moy’ (v. 3). Barbare meant étranger for Greeks, Romans, and Christians. Scève uses this word to symbolize a family of concepts from Plato’s ‘bottomless abyss of unlikeness’ to Plotinus’s ‘the region of unlikeness ... the mud of darkness’ to Augustine’s ‘land where all is different.’72 Brian Stock, both paraphrasing and quoting Augustine says: ‘We are like sojourners in a foreign land, participants in a “pilgrimage of the life of the flesh,” in which “hearts” are closed off from each other ... We are estranged from our “native land” by an “ocean”: we are able to see the distant shore but unable to reach it.’73 Whatever the different philosophical nuances of these metaphors may be, they show that the poet-lover is meditating on the soul’s fall into evil – a place of dissimilarity because the lover cannot find

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in himself any likeness with the divinity, a land of exile because he has wandered far from his source of virtue, an ‘abyss’ (v. 10) because, as he notes in dizain 118, the macerations of sensual memories have swallowed him up alive: ‘Tout je m’abysme aux oublieuses rives’ (v. 10). In connection with Augustine, Stock has said that this zone of unlikeness is a ‘locality in which we have only a transient awareness of the non-transience of higher things,’74 and that this consciousness promotes the cleansing of memory. If for the poet-lover his sojourn on the Insula Barbara is a confrontation with evil, then it is also, as he says in dizain 125, his ‘Purgatoire’ (v. 10). Having lost his bearings (like Augustine), he must purify his ‘memoyre ... labile’ (v. 5) by imitating the distressed sisters whose compassionate tears are seen and heard in nearby fountains: ‘Accompaignant ces fontaines piteuses,/ Qui sans cesser avec moy tousjours pleurent’ (vv. 9–10). The Saulsaye reenacts aspects of Délie’s treatment of solitude as the opposite of Petrarch’s epicurean otium since it severely questions if not denies the salutary effects of contemplative isolation in nature. In this bucolic setting inspired by Virgil and Sannazar, the lover Philerme seeks solace from the temptation to suicide caused by Belline’s rejections. Antire, his companion and would-be comforter, seeing that seclusion has only made Philerme connive with self-destruction, tries to restore reasonableness by demystifying the putative healing effects of solitary retreat. Antire’s antidote is the recitation of a fable recounting the origin of the very willow grove to which Philerme has repaired, which is intended to convince the hapless lover to abandon his morose refuge and rejoin the world. Antire focuses the attention of Philerme by narrating a tale in which a bevy of nymphs near the Soane is attracted by the seductive flutes of satyrs who invite them to dance. However, the very enchantment of song and dance causes the beasts to drop their flutes and descend upon the nymphs like wolves ravishing sheep. The nymphs cry out for help and are saved by the god of the Saone, Arar, their honour left in tact by being suddenly transformed into the roots, trunks, and branches of weeping willows. Antire’s lesson is that Philerme will become like the lamenting and lamentable willows slowly pining away unto death without more worldly involvement. It is difficult to avoid the impression that Scève wishes to infuse the willow grove saynète with important aspects of the Tereus myth invoked in Délie’s dizain 238 set within the Isle Barbe which also deals with the poet-lover’s state of mind while in retreat. Both myths are stirred by lovers’ contemplation in isolated refuges involving seduction, deception, rape, and sudden metamorphosis. This specular doubling is itself doubled by taking Antire and Philerme as two sides of an interior debate by a single author.

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Here we have Scève’s very poesis of agony in solitude where the objects of introspection transform the balm of nature into an accusing nightmare. The mesmerizing fable bears a transitional ontology.75 Fable and reality appear to converge since Philerme’s contemplation of Antire’s tale cannot but make him reenvisage his putatively calming surroundings as the site of uncontrolled passion. It is in melancholy that the myth of Philomela is resung by the fable of the willow grove, and as in Délie, Antire’s story to Philerme functions as an unresolved and alienating confession. Having given some examples of the fact that the poet-lover brings his trials into the site of solitude and that he tends to dematerialize space by psychological and moral symbolism, I have made it clear that spatial detachment from Délie helps the lover to cultivate his judgment even while being wracked with questions. Another important manifestation of how the lover converts space into ethical judgment is his use of metaphors of measurement in such poems as dizain 423. A locus of solitude, this poem begins with the words ‘Respect du lieu’ (v. 1) with the noun ‘Respect’ connoting the Latin ‘respectus’ meaning ‘refuge’ and ‘recours’ (Joukovsky 1996 edition, 372). In a place of protection and appeal the lover takes a meditative gambol pensively noting both joy (v. 4) and pain (v. 10). Here there is consolation from a life ‘austerement humaine’ (v. 2) which suggests not only Scève’s possible clerical status76 but also his relationship with Délie that is austere. Turning the envelope inside out, the lay life of love has the ascetical qualities of the monastery. To what does the poet-lover appeal? It is measurement as seen in the expressions ‘Le Coeur sans reigle’ (The Heart without regulation, v. 6), ‘le Corps par compas’ (The Body with measure, v. 6), and by the last two lines where the speaker’s haunting troubles are gauged by his pensive steps and the studied pauses of versification: ‘Lieux escartez, lentement pas à pas/Vois mesurant, et les champs, et mes peines’ (vv. 9–10). All these concrete words create the symbolism of meditative judgment appraising the relations between inner and outer worlds, heart and body – the implied metronome that marks the swings of joy and pain giving rhythm and pattern to would-be dispersion. This is one of the very few settings in Délie reminiscent of Petrarch’s ideal of solitude. How does moral evaluation correspond to physical measurement? In Aristotle and Aquinas virtue has classically been defined in arithmetical or geometrical terms as the mean between the two extremes of excess and defect. In the Nicomachean Ethics, the former reasons as follows: In everything that is continuous and divisible it is possible to take more, less, or an equal amount, and that either in terms of the thing itself or relatively

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to us; and the equal is an intermediate between excess and defect. By the intermediate in the object I mean that which is equidistant from each of the extremes, which is one and the same for all men; by the intermediate relatively to us that which is neither too much nor too little – and this is not one, nor the same for all. (1106a25–32)

My point is not that the poet-lover seeks the Aristotelian mean, but that his references to instruments of arithmetic and geometry denote that he is making moral measurements. As we have seen in chapter 5, an overview of Délie shows that the lover balances one opposite with another, one extreme by another, as limits of what can occur in between. However, in the context of dizain 432, it is most pertinent to concentrate on the imagery of measurement as such. The lover’s ‘Respect du lieu’ (v. 1) is due to the fact that this is the site where Délie is now exercising her virtue, for the body (which includes sight, voice, and hearing) acts with moderation (‘par compas,’ v. 6), even though the heart may be ‘without regulation’ (v. 6) in desire and passion. The lover’s deliberate, ruminative steps are a corrective to the ‘erreurs’ (v. 1) of the opening dizain; the ‘compas’ (v. 6) demarcates a more steadfast road to love than the vertiginous and unpredictable turns of the girouette (D 1, v. 2). The balanced, elegiac weighing of joy and suffering is recited and paced to the to and fro of his ‘intrinsic debate’ (v. 3) that put his emotions ‘en propre domeine’ (v. 5). Yet, there is another sense of measurement indicated by this poem which points to Délie as a whole. The most important understanding of the text as a sequence is the constant effort by the lover to evaluate his pursuit of virtue by reference to his vicissitudes in purification, enlightenment, and love. In each, the lover errs in opposite fashions, thereby illustrating Aristotle’s observation that people exceed and fall short in contrary ways: ‘the extreme states are contrary both to the intermediate state and to each other’ (NE, 1108b10–15). Through the term ‘compas’ (v. 6), the speaker brings physical measurement into the soul of moral evaluation so that ironically physical separation is correlated positively with body-spirit equilibrium. These points are clarified by the fact that the pictorial conceit marshals three specific components of intellectual virtue: ‘par compas’ (v. 6) signals (a) an instrument of physical measure, (b) a method of weighing conduct, and (c) an object measured which is the virtue of moderation. Without engaging in the tedious task of examining these three elements in various poems, it is nonetheless instructive to observe the lover’s act of nuancing his aspirations to virtue through physical indices. Dizain 423 is one of three poems which connects separation from the beloved with a way of achieving

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balance. In dizain 423 his retreat is like a home or domicile because while body and heart, joy and suffering still create painful obsessions of the woman, he nevertheless finds himself ‘en propre domeine’ (v. 5). In dizain 433 the ‘sainct lieu’ (v. 2) of retreat offers physical protection from a view of the beloved that is too blinding for imperfect eyes. This need for separation as physical refuge is emphasized by the poem’s first line, ‘Je m’en esloigne, et souvent m’en absente’ (v. 1) because in the presence of Délie he cannot have ‘tant soit peu, de respect/A modestie ...’ (vv. 5–6). From the fourteenth century onwards, the word ‘modestie’ meant ‘modéré,’77 and connoted circumspection and caution with respect to the care of the self. However, by concentrating on the beloved’s ‘plaisant aspect’ (v. 4) the lover’s reason becomes so blinded (‘s’esblouissant,’ v. 4) by her daunting corporeal beauty that temperance is assaulted. Consequently, retreat is required to ease the burden on his bodily and spiritual eyes. It is clear from the Plotinian tradition to which the speaker alludes in the verb éblouir78 that bedazzled reason must rid itself of the ‘plaisante mensonge’ (v. 10) which corrupts his outer and inner vision. The third poem in this group, dizain 434, is a recalibration of vision which owes its lucidity to the realization that the distance of time enhances that of space, both of which act harmoniously in refining and sharpening the intellectual faculties. Ainsi absent la memoyre posée, Et plus tranquille, et apte à concevoir, Par la raison estant interposée, Comme clarté à l’object, qu’on veult veoir:

(D 434, vv. 1–4)

[The object being absent, the memory, settled And more tranquil and able to conceive By reason interposed Like light on the thing to be seen,]

Here Scève’s persona is at a high point of philosophic understanding by using the poetic tools of physical measurement to raise terrestrial absence to spiritual considerations. First, the mind achieves a kind of poise through the physical term ‘interposée’ (v. 3) which denotes that reason is now placed between the object of love and the faculty of memory.79 The word ‘interposée’ is a participial adjective and implies an activity of moral arbitration as opposed to a static posture. Another physical personification is ‘memoyre posée’ (v. 1) which shows that reflection is rassise – reseated and composed.

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Perhaps the most important point of dizain 434 is that the lover is metacommunicating through the act of spiritualizing distance. First, by insisting that Délie’s true being is best found in the memory mediated through reason, he suggests that philosophical introspection is the best kind of methodological distance. The second point hinges on the first, namely, that space and time are now in the realm of conceptualization, and consequently, the word ‘absent’ (v. 4), meaning the physical absence of the ‘object’ (v. 1), takes on additional resonance as the reduction of spatiotemporal obstacles to judgment. This use of memory in Scève is unlike Augustine’s supernatural, Inner Teacher, but it does resemble the passage examined in Confessions X:30 where retrospective memory, recalling the past life of sensual images, cedes to the reconstituting memory, which raises reflection to the level of intellectual knowledge by conducting an epistemological meditation on the powers of the soul. If we were to address Délie’s treatment of Petrarch’s second category of solitide, time, we would find much the same philosophic outlook as we have for space. An effective way of understanding the lover’s attitude toward time is to consider separation as the poet-lover’s act of abstracting moral and religious exempla from historical events. The best entry for this line of inquiry is to return to the political/historical dizains, but this time, to consider them as a whole and to contextualize them under the aegis of purification. These consist of approximately twenty-seven poems concerned with such subjects as the treason of the Connétable de Bourbon, the papal visit to Marseille, the French battles with Charles V, Henry VIII, invasions and truces, the martyrdom of Thomas More, the deaths of Erasmus and Budé, and associated with these, encomia of François Ier, Marguerite de Navarre, and French nationalism. As seen from the works of Thomas More and François Rabelais, the Renaissance strongly inspired the writing of utopias and of political theory such as Erasmus’s Institutio Principis Christiani, Guillaume Budé’s Institution du prince, and Bodin’s République which itself responds to Machiavelli’s Il Principe. While it is therefore not surprising that Scève the humanist should be interested in such subjects, their abrupt and scattered placement in a poetic sequence otherwise entirely devoted to love will at first strike readers as incongruous. Yet, keeping in mind that Délie is preoccupied with the refinement of virtue, one will see that the poet-lover is following the Platonic tradition of exercising what Plotinus called ‘Civic Virtues.’ In Plato’s Republic, the head of state is the philosopher king who guides political justice by the higher aims of intellectual vision, so that the state is a mirror of the individual soul striving for balance under the gov-

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ernance of reason. Plotinus assigns the civic virtues to the first step in the soul’s route to purification whose point of departure is measure: The civic virtues ... do genuinely set us in order and make us better by giving limit and measure to our desires, and putting measure into all our experience; and they abolish false opinions, by what is altogether better and by the fact of limitation, and by the exclusion of the unmeasured and indefinite in accord with their measuredness; and they are themselves limited and clearly defined. (I. 2. 2)

Within this context the poet-lover can be seen as arriving at an ethics of political principles tied to his individual values by engaging in the acts of criticizing and commending the conduct of prominent and influential contemporaries. However, the lover’s look outward to society redounds inward to the gaze of his soul, since he tends to evaluate morality in general by the virtues that guide him to Délie. The basis of his political ethics, similar to that of Plato’s Republic, is that there must be harmony among all levels of existence and that the conduct of society and state should be grounded upon the individual’s search for rationally founded equilibrium.80 Ironically, his attitude toward time and in particular toward public conduct devolves upon self-purification, which necessitates stepping outside of time. This is indicated first by the fact that the order of the historical dizains is not governed by chronology. In Gérard Genette’s terminology there is an achronic relation between histoire and discours (1972, 71–6). The earliest event to which the lover refers is the 1472 defeat of Charles the Bold in Picardy mentioned in dizain 298, while the first reference to a historical event (1523) occurs in dizain 19. The 1535 execution of Thomas More (D 147) is placed after Henry VIII’s 1542 accusations against Catherine Howard (D 85), and the Catherine Howard event is told well before Charles V’s 1539 passage through France (D 389). In 1525 the Battle of Pavia occurs (D 53), but it is related after Pope Clement VII’s 1533 visit to Marseille (D 28). In dizain 318 the reader witnesses the 1538 Treaty of Nice and in dizain 323 Francis I’s 1536 invasion of Savoy. Closing the historical poems is the 1542 siege of Landrecies where story and discourse finally converge in the penultimate dizain. However, what challenges the sense of chronological importance is the fact that 1542 had already been mentioned twice, once in relation to Catherine Howard (D 85) and again regarding James II of Scotland (D 416). Does chronology help the reader comprehend the relationships among these three events? Compounding

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the problem is that both the Howard and James II poems are followed by earlier historical occurences.81 While the lover does not invariably order events on the basis of chronological time, this does not mean that the temporal scrambling is without significance. On the contrary, such discontinuities indicate his criticism of purely human time because the ruptures in the textual narrative of events imitate the disorder of history. The second significance of chronological disruption is that the poet-lover prefers to concentrate on principles which stand above time, such as the study of human character, to cultivate his own virtue ethics. As we have already seen in the speaker’s assessment of the Connétable de Bourbon, history provides exempla, kinds of proof according to Aristotle, used to ferret out models of praise and blame.82 The criteria of these models are ultimately derived from his individual struggle in purifying love. Consequently the fullest meaning of history lies outside pure chronology in the qualitative development of the soul. This is mirrored by the textual fact that meditation on love offers the hermeneutic key to measuring the civic virtues. If bound and measure are Plotinus’s rule for civic virtue, then the poetlover’s yardstick is the comparison of the lover’s situation with historical exempla. In his book titled Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy John D. Lyons notes that the word ‘exemplum’ is ‘etymologically akin to the verb eximere, “to take out, to remove, to take away, to free, to make an exception of”’ (1989, 9). This meaning gives a rich understanding to three of Scève’s aims in the political dizains. First, the poet-lover insists on abstracting a significant virtue or characterial quality from the welter of political events; second, he encourages vigorous intellectual effort by fashioning a conceit between love and history; third, he marks the autonomy of a trait by colouring it with an emblematic epithet. These points can be examined beginning with dizain 318. In this poem the speaker’s ‘separation’ from time functions by abstracting common traits from politics and love is marked by scepticism toward outward appearances. His use of historical events as conceits for provoking moral reflection does indeed show that there are similar complexities underlying such apparent dissimilarities as the powers of Eros and the Treaty of Nice. Jà tout haultain en moy, je me paonnois De ce, qu’Amour l’avoit peu inciter: Mais seurement (à ce, que je congnois) Quand il me vint du bien feliciter,

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Et la promesse au long me reciter, Il me servit d’vn tresfaulx Truchement. Que diray donc de cest abouchement, Que Lygurie, et Provence, et Venisse Ont veu (en vain) assembler richement Espaigne, France, et Italie, à Nice?

(D 318)

[Already quite proud in my own mind I strutted like a peacock Because Cupid had been able to touch her, But surely (from what I can tell) When he came to congratulate me for this accomplishment, And to recite to me at length the promise, He served me as a very false intermediary. What will I say then of this conversation At which Liguria, Provence and Venice Saw Spain, France and Italy Assemble richly (in vain) at Nice?]

Lines 7–10 offer a compressed and laconic reference to the efforts of Pope Paul III’s initiative in 1538 to ease the strife in Europe by arranging a truce at Nice between Charles V and Francis I. Having personally mediated negotiations with the ambassadors of both sides, he finally succeeded in bringing about an apparent truce. However, his counsel and diplomacy were in vain, since neither party wanted a permanent agreement. Compounding the pope’s error was the dissimulation of both leaders who, not having seen one another at Nice, insincerely agreed to seal the pact at Aigues-Mortes by displays of affection and friendship. Three years later, war broke out again when Charles reasserted his claims on the three states of ‘Lygurie, et Provence, et Venisse’ (v. 8) which provoked new French campaigns in Italy.83 Lines 1–6 constitute a short narrative on false expectations and blinding pride appropriately captured with the verb ‘paonnois’ – ‘I was strutting like a peacock’ (v. 1). The essence of the poet-lover’s tale is that Eros (‘Amour,’ v. 2) is an unreliable counsellor who induces self-flattery and false hope. However, whatever the core idea of this dizain, the abrupt and unanticipated change from love to politics causes a constructive perplexity which compels one to discover the abstract links between the two levels. The emblematic node that captures a number of moral miscalculations is the peacock. First, it characterizes the lover. Self-assured, smug, and already triumphant that the woman has made a ‘promesse’ (v. 5), he is like

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the pope who confuses the incitements to peace with the real hope of a lasting pact. Also, the lover’s pride in his ability to impress the beloved, symbolized by the peacock’s ravishing parade of colours, is like those richly assembled diplomats (‘assembler richement,’ v. 9) whose ritualistic display unknowingly disguises an utterly vain agreement. Connected to the deceptions of such ceremonies is the tripartite enumeration of the three states and the three countries involved in the hostilities. This symmetrical roll call of combatants and diplomats in rank and file (v. 8; v. 10) is the perfect parody of the peacock’s deluded strut. Both are captivating motions devoid of efficacious acts, for all is ‘abouchement’ (v. 7). This devastating choice of words denotes ‘conversation’ (v. 7) but connotes the idea of bringing two mouths together, not for love or for honest exchange, but merely for moving mouths. In the formal recitation of terms binding the would-be peacemakers, one can see an apposite similarity to the poet-lover’s domain where Love as herald comes to recite Délie’s supposed promise to the eager lover: ‘Quand il me vint du bien feliciter,/Et la promesse au long me reciter’ (vv. 4–5). The lover’s erroneous decoding of words looms large here, just as it does in Délie as a whole. That the woman has somehow made a promise to the lover is a spurious assumption – a ‘tresfaulz Truchement’ (v. 6) which also pertains to the political world. Neither the lover nor the pope succeed in tracing back the relay of signs to a more reliable source to justify their suppositions, for the former now admits that he was ‘haultain’ (v. 1) just as the latter failed to unravel the intentions of the two absent disputants. Finally, the pretense of celebration by Charles and Francis at Aigues-Mortes is like Eros’s false greeting of congratulations to the Lover (‘... il me vint du bien feliciter,’ v. 4) – a momentary félicitations but not the felicity of ‘beatitude’ (D 305, v. 2) brought by the recognition of higher virtue. It is not only through temporal scrambling that Scève indicates his preference for paradigmatic over chronological writing and reading, but also through the multiple combinations of emblematic exempla spawned from the historical dizains which vie for the reader’s attention and stimulate the search for related models of conduct. In this regard the text emphasizes simultaneity over successivity, or rather a supression of the consecutive and a highlighting of the synchronic. If the political dizains assist the lover in measuring and setting bounds as Plotinus prescribes, then the image of the paon is surely instructive on the precautions required for knowledge, such as being wise in suppositions, prudent in reading emotions, and temperate in expectations. In this regard, it immediately refers us to impresa 34 titled ‘Le Paon’ showing a peacock spreading its ostentatious tail surrounded by

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the motto, ‘Qui bien se voit orgueil abaisse.’ Together with its companion dizain 303, it forms a pattern with the Treaty of Nice poem, not only in image but in its cautions about knowledge. Dizain 303 is a study in specularity and employs the Petrarchan topos of the jealous sun84 whose luminous eye, once encountering the divine splendour of Délie, flees in wounded pride from her miraculous countenance. The last line, echoing the emblematic motto, concludes: ‘ ... qui se veoit, l’enflé d’orgueil abaisse.’ The poet-lover gains this wisdom by using a metaphor of self-reflexivity – myriad reflections of reflections beginning with the image of the sun as ‘Cest Oeil du Monde’ (v. 1) which is revered by the upward gazing earth, sky, and seas. However, in looking at Délie the sun is brought low because it sees the ‘Graces’ (v. 5) mirrored in her eyes far better than it sees its own reflection in the human face (vv. 4–6). Its pride stung and feeling offended, the sun retreats, leaving the earth cold. What are the epistemological messages? Since the sun can only know its limits when faced with Délie, there can be no accurate assessment of lucidity without confronting a superior being. Second, just as the sun can see creation but cannot see its limits, the ability to see is not based on the external object seen, but on the more internal self-reflexive ability to measure. Thus, that a thing is seen is not to be equated with general knowledge. Third, these epistemological points would hardly be possible without the moral suppositions of temperance and prudence set into relief by the paon. Since in the Treaty of Nice dizain, the poet-lover makes much of trying to confirm his certainty of the woman’s promise – ‘Mais seurement (à ce, que je congnois),’ D 318, v. 3 – the validation of knowledge is in question. Let us apply these three points to this poem. First, because the lover is like the peacock, he must, as a prelude to knowledge, make moderation more vigilant to passion. Second, that the treaty ceremony diplays all the external, official elements displayed to seal the pact only obscures the more interior knowledge of the monarchs’ motivations and reservations. Seeing the thing is not the same as seeing well. Third, the poet-lover’s ‘Truchement’ is ‘tresfaulx’ (D 318, v. 6), because it fails to test itself against a superior awareness that would have shown the woman to be averse to lascivious cajoling. The examination of dizain 318 shows that the emblematic poetics of Délie creates a textual transposability that encourages the reader to connect a particular historical event to a moral exemplum. The image of the paon is easily detached and moved from its political context to the love poems proper and to other imprese, producing through such intellectual effort a kind of spiritual omniscience. Both the act of transposition, un-

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tied from syntagmatic constraints, and the matching of particular event to moral exemplum contribute to a paradigmatic purification which mitigates or at least resists the tugs of time. Indeed, the great majority of the historical dizains are illuminated by emblematic figures which provide the nodal points for this temporal and spiritual transformation. Scève’s moral imaginaire would encourage the reader to find an appropriate motto for this process, and I would suggest Aristotle’s dictum, reiterated by Aquinas, that with regard to virtue, ‘reason commands the appetitive principle by political rule.’85 This motto can be illustrated by examining some of the historical allusion dizains. Modo grosso, one can say that for the political dizains, this struggle in government is exemplified by Charles V and the Connétable de Bourbon on one side and François Ier and Marguerite de Navarre on the other. Given below is a sample of historical dizains headed by the emblematic or descriptive image and a concise summary of the transposition from singular event to character trait: Le Cerf volant D 21 – The Connétable’s impresa marks him negatively as a slave of cupidity and revenge running to the barks of Charles V. L’Architecteur de la Machine Ronde D 53 – As the Creator is the architect of the world, so has he created François Ier to reflect his divine plan by testing the king’s constancy and courage while held captive in Pavia. L’Aigle volant D 55 – This is a mock impresa which the poet-lover attributes to Charles V who took undignified flight from the French in a battle at Provence in 1535. This eagle ‘flys low’ and, unlike Délie’s constancy and stability, is always in frenetic movement for personal gain. Albion D 85 – ‘Albion’ signifies the white cliffs of England but symbolizes the purity and fortitude which Henry VIII should have exercised realtive to the calumnies cast at his wives. La Pomme/ Cain, Abel D 116 – The suspicious death of the Dauphin in 1536 is ultimately due to causes foregrounded by two myths. The first cause is avarice and

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greed, since the treacherous Harpies were considered the guardians of the apples of the Hesperides’ garden. The second is the unbridled desire for gain resulting in the predatory killing of an innocent (Abel) which also warns against the blood-lust of fraternal revenge. The poet-lover calls for justice; the biblical myth suggests mercy. Les flambeaux estainctz D 147 – The martyrdom of Thomas More is richly paralled with the complex dynamics of the speaker’s love. More’s death is a loss for England and for the world, but by occurring simultaneously with the poet’s rebirth in love, reflects the Pauline wisdom of faith born from death. Thus, torches extinguished are lights of inspiration through death. Anadyomène D 255 – Symbolizing the celestial Venus in love, she also represents the rule of François Ier and Marguerite de Navarre who joined together by filial affection, govern by spiritual purity emblematized by France’s ‘Lys.’Anadyomène is another name for Aphrodite whom the Greeks considered the deity of magistrates charged with ensuring civic harmony. Son mortel College D 305 – Death cuts short (‘abrege,’ v. 9) the lives of the learned (Erasmus, Budé, Lefèvre d’Etaples) as love steals freedom. Misfortune assembles all in its ‘mortel College,’ putting us between the heaveans and the earth, and troubling the connections between the sacred and profane in love and learning. Plus fixément, que les Poles des Cieulx D 416 – James V of Scotland, who visited Lyon in 1537, was a very superstitious monarch whom the lover associates with eclipses in 1544, which was also a leap year. The speaker sees some astrological omen in these events which portends the destruction of his love. In contrast to cosmological and astrological revolutions Délie remains set, fixed, and firm, ‘Plus fixément que les Poles des Cieulx’ (v. 3). This last dizain in particular underlines the poet-lover’s pursuit of

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a model of spirituality which distances him from spatio-temporal contingencies, and in the context of the historical poems shows the speaker filtering out from the complexity of experience particular exempla propitious to virtue. The notion of separation as purification provides yet another path taken by the lover to refine his soul, and that is Plato’s notion of death as the detachment of the body from the soul. The French Renaissance offered innumerable variations on this concept appearing in the works of Ficino, Marguerite de Navarre, Leone Ebreo, Antoine Héroet, and Scève’s friend Pontus de Tyard. Thanks to the work of T. Anthony Perry, we can parcel out three such manifestations appearing in Délie consisting of (1) physical death; (2) aesthetic ecstasis; and (3), the ascetic untying of soul from body (1976, 174). The first of these will be addressed in chapter 6 on the via illuminativa and the second in chapter 7 on the via unitiva. The third type of detachment may be described as untying oneself from inordinate or excessive appetitive desires that induce a forgetting of the self and an ecstatic embrace of the divine. Here the via purgativa and the via unitiva overlap. In her poem Prisons, Marguerite de Navarre calls such desires ‘lyens’86 and provides examples of the most pervasive and insidious, such as those in the historical dizains: pleasure, avarice, worldly honour, ambition, and carnal attachment. In The Heptaméron she concisely reports a sense of spiritual release from such prisons which is onomastically reflected in the title of Scève’s work: ‘une amour vicieuse de soymesme se défait, et ne peut durer en un bon cueur. Mais la vertueuse est celle qui a les lyens de soy si desliez, que lon est plus tot pris qu’on ne le peut voir.’87 As Perry states, this ‘is not the common untying of body from soul ... but rather that ascetic untying of the soul from the body’ (1976, 9). When this occurs in Délie, it becomes a kind of moral high point because both purification and mystical contemplation take place simultaneously – an unbinding leading to the forgetting of self and a dwelling within the beloved. It should not be confused with the oblivion of one sinking forever into the abyss of wanton pleasure, such as in the closing of dizain 118: ‘Tout je m’abysme aux oblieuses rives’ (v. 10). This is Plato’s ‘River of Forgetfulness, whose waters no vessel can contain,’ indicative of insatiable sensuality unchecked by measure which prevents the soul from safely traversing ‘the River of Lethe’ (Republic, X, 621a–b). Nor should this forgetfulness be mistaken for narcissism which makes the world the reflection of the mind (D 262, vv. 1–6). Rather, this forgetfulness is the mystical reward prepared by self-sacrifice which enables the lover to proclaim two devotions, one stressing perseverance, ‘Plus, que pour moy, pour toy je

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m’esvertue’ (D 325, v. 8) and the second faith, ‘Tout aultre bien pour le tien elle [la foy] oblie’ (D 151, v. 4). However, there are particular moments in Délie which testify directly to self-forgetfulness as a spiritual extasis, as in dizain 278, where the poet-lover, facing his public directly, issues a pubic annonce to partake of his ars amatoria. Inviting his listeners to read his ‘Parolle saincte’ (v. 6), he exhorts them to embrace his amatory scripture on how to ‘soy mesmes oblyer’ (v. 2) through love: Qui veult sçavoir par commune evidence Comme l’on peult soy mesmes oblyer, Et, sans mourir, prouver l’experience, Comment du Corps l’Ame on peult deslyer, Vienne ouyr ceste, et ses dictz desplier, Parolle saincte en toute esjouissance, En qui Nature a mis pour sa plaisance Tout le parfaict de son divin ouvrage, Et tellement, certes, qu’à sa naissance Renovella le Phoenix de nostre aage.

(D 278)

[Whoever wishes to be shown How one may forget oneself, And, without dying, experience death, How one can disunite the Soul from the Body, Come listen to this one and her sayings explain The holy word in complete rejoicing. She is the one in whom Nature has put, for its own pleasure, All the perfection of its divine work So that at her birth The Phoenix of our age was reborn.]

In learning ‘Comment du Corps l’Ame on peult deslyer’ (v. 4) the reader will also know that this untying accomplishes the fusion of souls. The artfully ambiguous grammar of the fifth line makes Délie’s words and those of the poet-lover’s canzoniere virtually identical. They produce a ‘divin ouvrage’ (v. 8) which through death, is likened to a ‘naissance’ (v. 9). The emotional climax of this jubilation is the irony that cyclical rebirth is experienced in each instance as a completely singular, unique phenomenon. However, one must be careful to nuance the tensions of the poem. While the body is separated from the soul in the mystical death of love (v. 4), the poet-lover does not mean that he abandons his body to a disincarnation

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yielding a purely dematerialized soul. Rather, the untying of the soul from the body must, according to the sense of the poem, be the purification of both body and soul. Unlike some of his Platonic predecessors such as Plotinus, Scève’s persona wishes to elevate the body as well as the soul to the mystical renewal of love. In this respect Scève is distinctly Christian, for he implies that an ascetic separation of the soul from the body leads to a transfiguration of the body, not a complete defection of the body from the soul. This is communicated through the symbol of the phoenix. On the one hand, the image of love as a phoenix denotes the supratemporal quality of resisting the depredations of time through cyclical rebirth. On the other hand, once purified by flames, love is reembodied as a concrete, particular, historical event – happening, as it were, for the first time as an original birth. That spiritual renewal includes the body is shown by another consideration. In addition to referring to Délie’s words as sacred scripture, the phrase ‘Parolle saincte’ (v. 6) also alludes to the Johannine ‘Verbum’ (1:1) from which God’s perfection is made manifest through the speech of creation. This is mirrored in the poem by the fact that Nature takes a hand in producing the divine work called Délie, as if Nature herself had the power to impart divinity: ‘Parolle saincte en toute esjouissance,/En qui Nature a mis pour sa plaisance/Tout le parfaict de son divin ouvrage’ (vv. 6–8). However, this divinity is marked by the phoenix, the transfigured body whose luminous colours are made temporal to celebrate an epoch or an ‘age’: ‘Et tellement, certes, qu’à sa naissance/Renovella le Phoenix de nostre aage’ (vv. 9–10). In this rare moment of spiritual utopia, event and paradigm are virtually commensurate, for the poet-lover testifies to a forgetful ecstasy which regenerates and uplifts the entire person. The two notions of purification that arise from the historical dizains and the phoenix poem just examined show both Scève’s penchant to nuance by opposites. Purification as separation is never a complete breaking off of body from soul or soul from body. In the political poems the abstration of a moral exemplum is instantiated by history, and in the phoenix dizain the untying of the body from the soul is but the prelude to their reunion in rebirth. In the historical dizains the form of character is stressed (but materialized by history) and in the phoenix poem there is transfigured a reembodiment of the soul (but only after ascetic trials distancing âme from corps). For what ultimate reason should the poet-lover ‘forget’ himself, ‘lose’ himself, or ‘separate’ from himself in the various senses mentioned above? As already noted in dizain 136, this refers to the Neoplatonic exchange of souls where in the Second Speech of Ficino’s Commentarium (chapter

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8) one encounters use of the words ‘forget,’ ‘give themselves up,’ ‘forget themselves,’ ‘recover myself lost,’ ‘dies in himself,’ and ‘neglects himself.’ The result of this death is resurrection in the other where, as Ficino says, ‘I am closer to you than to myself.’88 In Délie the poet-lover achieves this state a number of times where reception of the beloved is simultaneous with self-forgetting: ‘Mais quand alors je la [Délie] veulx oblier,/M’en souvenant, je m’oblie moymesmes’ (D 215, vv. 9–10). The narrator knows the difference between purgative loss such as the defeated hope of sexual satisfaction (D 174) and the loss which brings ‘never lacking good’ when contemplation supersedes perception: ‘L’oeil, et le sens peu a peu me deffault,/Et me pers tout en sa divine image’ (D 397, vv. 9–10). The positive side of this paradox finds roots in Aquinas’s ‘mutual indwelling,’89 but more descriptive for Scève is Augustine’s astounding confession to God: ‘But you were more inward than my most inward part and higher than the highest element within me.’90 Also remarkable is the similar sentiment of the poet-lover who, in dizain 229, speaks of polished mirrors as preparation for declaring that his heart is sufficiently purified to see and receive the beloved: Mais ta vertu aux Graces non diforme Te rend en moy si representative, Et en mon coeur si bien à toy conforme Que plus, que moy, tu t’y trouverois vive.

(D 229, vv. 7–10)

[But your virtue, not unlike that of the Graces, Makes so perfect a likeness of you in me And in my heart so consonant with you That you would find yourself more alive in it than I.]

Moderation of the Passions: The Case of Hope Aristotle and Aquinas held that virtue is a perfection of a power, a notion that is entirely consonant with the ethos of Délie. However, Thomas categorizes hope, not as a virtue, but as one of the irascible passions, meaning that its object is difficult to obtain. It may be defined as the desire for a future good, suggesting that something must be overcome to achieve its end. Passions in themselves, according to Aquinas, are neither virtues nor vices, but can be used in the service of either (Gilson 1956, 237–41; 284–5). Only once in Délie does the lover refer unambiguously to the theological virtues, and that occurs in dizain 254 where Marguerite de Navarre is

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honoured as the exemplary embodiement of faith, hope, and charity. In some exceptional cases where hope is bound up with the mystical side of love (such as in dizain 201) does it appear like charity. In most cases, however, such words as espoir, espérance, and espérer refer to the passions that interact with moral conscience. As a Petrarchan canzoniere Délie is predominatly concerned with unrequited love, where the lover must contend with the beloved’s many refusals. One of the principal ways in which the lover makes progress through the via purgativa is his transformation from imposed compliance with the woman’s will to active cultivation of virtue. In Délie, the lover’s experience with ‘non’ is largely the cause of the work’s deeply explored moral and psychological anthropology. In this regard, there is no better indicator of the lover’s épreuve than what Robert Cottrell has termed le Non de Vénus or what Freud called Verneinung.91 In Délie this is the lover’s struggle with hope. Gérard Defaux made an excellent observation when he said that ‘L’Espoir est en effet la force, le principe sans lequel rien de ce qui est décrit dans la Délie ne serait possible.’92 Ultimately, the speaker himself is quite aware of the importance of hope. Finally understanding that he must be discrete, wise, and parsimonious with respect to this emotion, he echoes the advice which Speroni had given in 154293 regarding prudence and hope: ‘Finalement prodigue d’esperance, /Dont estre avare est tres grande vertu’ (D 426, vv. 1–2). His hope to gain the woman’s love is blunted by her numerous rejections, but this conflict is prima materia of purification. Types of Hope It is testimony to the dominance of hope in Délie that the poet-lover should state that ‘Tout desir est dessus espoir fondé’ (D 234, v. 1), while Aquinas asserts that hope presupposes desire.94 Hope in the poet-lover’s moral universe has logical priority over desire. Throughout the work the poet-lover submits this passion to an extensive, psycho-moral examination through the intellectual virtues, considering the type of hope, its causes, its evaluation, and its sublimations. Regarding type in relation to its object, the most important of the lover’s hopes is the possession of the woman’s vertu. But what exactly does this word mean? Kristeller helps here by pointing out that a compound of Ficino’s notion of virtus is operatio and that this concept derives from Aristotle’s notion of active potency (40–2). In Délie it translates as the efficacy of power: ‘Car te voulant, tant soit peu, demonstrer/D’espoir ainsi

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envers moy accoustrée,/Non moindre gloire est à me voir oultrer,/Que te congnoistre à mon vouloir oultrée’ (D 173, vv. 7–10). Frequently, however, hope means libido (D 202) or cupiditas (D 218), but it can aspire to altruism (D 206), patience (D 430), and defeat of fear (D 362). Its philosophic apex is a lesson in Platonic wisdom (D 436) taught by the lover’s ‘sage Diotime’ (D 439), and its religious culmination is hope as a theological virtue (D 254). Causes of Hope At its highpoint the cause of hope is the deification of the lover’s soul, and in this regard hope is a mystical gift rather than a passion. In dizain 436 the woman is not only the teacher of hope but also the aggressive agent of virtue who penetrates his soul with ‘l’herbe merveilleuse’ (v. 9). Like the mythological Glaucus, signifying green, the lover is purged by Délie of his mortal nature and transformed into ‘Dieu’ (v. 10). At its lowest point the cause of hope as passion is self-deception (‘un vain umbrage,’ D 78, v. 6; ‘le confus de mes vaines merveilles,’ D 164, v. 6), but the lover is willing to connive with such chimeras, since they sometimes maintain contentment: ‘Tu m’entretiens en ce contentement/(Bien qu’il soit vain) par l’espoir, qui m’attire’ (D 248, vv. 7–8). Deborah Lesko Baker perceptively notes about the fictions of hope: ‘The contemplative powers that help the lover to label [a] menacing report a fiction (in the sense of falsehood) can only do so because they substitute opposing, positive fictions (in the sense of wishes or fantasies) which see only the reassuring side of the Beloved’s behavior’ (1986, 87). These fictions of hope get tangled in complex interactions stemming from the inability to see or control what is behind the persistence of hope. In dizain 369 the poet-lover puts his bitter melancholy under the scrutiny of multiple and sliding causes, one of which he sees as ‘perseverance’ (v. 8). Is the humoral pathology that ensures a result of stoic endurance or cloying desire? In either case, the last two words of the poem ‘ma foible esperance’ (v. 10) signalling by their position some sort of indestructible remnant, prove the bitter mix of steadfast determination and obsessive expectations. It appears then that an important cause of hope is ironically the poetlover’s fortitude in submitting it to self-analysis as part of the complicated skein of motivations. His fidelity to the intricacy of desire is well exemplified in dizain 202 where introspection revolves around the thesis question put to Cupid, ‘T’esbahys tu, ô Enfant furieux,/Si diligent la verité je tente?’ (vv. 1–2). He wants to know if Cupid is amazed that he is so hasty

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in seeking the truth where ‘verité’ includes the idea of sexual reward. In Délie such apostrophes are quite problematic, since they imply an unresolved source of agency, a determined passionate impulsion, or a free desire to pursue the woman. Adding to the psychology of the double cause is the present participle ‘l’esprouvant’ (v. 3) which would seem to verify the empirical certainty of this reward; yet, the phrase ‘experiencing it’ remains verbally governed by the domain of a question or a hypothetical contingency. What is now clear are the precise terms of a question, namely, is the lover treating sex as the fulfilment of a passion or as the verification (knowledge) of Délie’s affections? Lines 4–5 develop this exploration of the double cause, since the lover further challenges Cupid to decide if his intention is to content the curiosity of ‘ma pensée’ (v. 4) where ‘contente’ (v. 4) also includes his passion. In the next two lines the lover changes tone from ambiguity to apparent certainty when he categorically denies that the purpose of hasty advances is to shorten ‘l’attente’ (v. 5) or to deliver him from ‘espoir’ (v. 6). Soon after this another double cause emerges regarding whether his advances are impositions or invitations, since the lover affirms that just as much as he wishes to win the woman’s ‘loyalle affection’ (v. 8), he also wants to allow her ‘sa naifve, et libre intention’ (v. 10). While the results of self-analysis are inconclusive as to motivation or appear to displace the principal question, they are nevertheless ruthlessly tenacious in their fortitude. the beloved’s POTENTIA ABSOLUTA and taming of desire and hope The nominalist theology of William of Ockham makes an important distinction with respect to God’s power whereby divine omnipotence may be conceived as either potentia absoluta or potentia ordinata.95 This second power derives from the fact that God acts through an established moral code such as the Revelation, the Bible, the institution of the church, or the religious tradition. Be that as it may, says Ockham, God’s unlimited liberty justifies accepting the view that by divine fiat, he could at any time found another moral order or command what he has forbidden. In Délie it is this first power that frequently rules the lover, the woman’s potentia absoluta. Why is this so? Because the poet-lover in Délie burns in frustration that laws, rules, and conventions have been flagrantly violated, and that justice and fairness, human or divine, have been overturned at his expense. With respect to theodicy he casts doubt on the belief that God’s power is consistent with his goodness by posing the question: ‘Pourroit donc bien (non que je le demande)/Un Dieu causer ce vivre tant amer?’(D 442, vv. 1–2). The speaker also asks whether the errors of love are imposed by God in

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a cruel exercise of omnipotence to vitiate his creatures’ freedom: ‘Tant de travaulx en une erreur si grande,/Où nous vivons librement pour aymer?’ (vv. 3–4). By far the lover’s most intense outrage emerges from what he takes to be fundamental infractions of amour courtois, specifically the woman’s withholding of sexual rewards in defiance of his loyal service and sacrifices. Henri Chamard encapsulates this attitude when he says, ‘si la récompense ne doit jamais être sollicitée, elle est néanmoins toujours espérée; et c’est un dogme de ce code singulier, qu’Amour finit toujours par guerredonner au centuple ses loyaux serviteurs’ (1932, 68). Dizain 123 is a good illustration of such amorous expectations where the lover accuses the woman of breaking her contract by illegal forbearance: ‘[Délie] ne peult à mon malheur/Remedier, se voyant opportune/ Pour bienheurer trop plus grand’infortune, /Laissant mon cas suspendre à nonchaloir’ (vv. 3–6). The lover collapses his plaint into the word ‘cas’ which, in addition to its legal association, means ‘le membre viril.’96 If his case has been suspended, then it has been done so under the aegis of the Almighty’s power shown in the accompanying impresa titled ‘Tour Babel’ where Délie’s ultimate law may be read: ‘Contre le ciel nul ne peult.’ Since the beloved will not offer ‘le remede’ (D 190, v. 2) to cure his ‘bien tant esperé (D 326, v. 1) and because the lover is ‘forclos/De [sa] mercy’ (D192, vv. 8–9), it must be that an imperious and incomprehensible brute force reigns over him. In dizain 71 the necessity for unconditional obedience in the face of apparent incoherence is recognized by the lover’s alter ego who rules that ‘tel est le vouloir de ta Dame’ (v. 10). According to Hans Staub the lover sees this state of affairs as one of ‘domination’ (1967, 41) and in Joukovsky’s view, Délie is portrayed as ‘une sorte de suzeraine’ issuing absolute injunctions.97 That a fundamental order of justice has been ruptured that constantly scandalizes the lover is also indicated by his references to Délie’s betrayal, broken promises, and fractured faith, which may occur with the connivance of the gods. In dizain 50 the lover considers that Délie’s apparent ‘foy’ (v. 5) is really ‘faincte’ (v. 8) and arrives at the following conclusion: ‘Je me prometz le hault bien de mon mieulx,/Elle s’en rit, attestant les haultz Dieux:/Je voy la faincte ...’ (vv. 6–8). These breaches of justice and violations of loyalty are set in the political world better to redound upon the amatory level. In the context of the Connétable de Bourbon, treason and perjury are likened to breaking the vows of love when lovers’ pledges of fidelity frequently amount to a ‘promesse mentie’ (D 20, v. 2). Can the gods possibly hear lovers’ oaths and then laugh at such violations? ‘Peu-

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vent les Dieux ouyr Amantz jurer,/Et rire apres leur promesse mentie?’ (vv. 1–2). Certainly, the existential scandal at the inconsistency of our psychological make-up baffles the lover. While fear can propel us to safety and desire can make cowards brave, hope, on the other hand, is an insidious trickster: ‘May toy, Espoir, tu nous viens attraper,/Pour nous promettre, ou aspirer on n’ose’ (D 308, vv. 5–6). When Cupid comes to recite his ‘promesse’ (D 318, v. 5) to the lover, the god’s original optimism proves to be a ‘trefaulx Truchement’ (v. 6). Because hope promises too much (D 276) only to cause sighs and tears (D 269), the poet-lover assesses its deceptions as a grave interdiction of human law. Summoning the public as a witness to injustice and soliciting the reader’s sympathy, the lover states that if Délie cannot honour her vows, then she should cancel her claim on his life: ‘Comme tesmoing debvrois soliciter,/Qu’elle taschast par honnorable envie/De foy promise envers moy s’acquitter,/Ou canceller l’obligé de ma vie’ (D 198, vv. 7–10). The speaker’s most profound and painful protest against injustice is depicted in dizain 77 which calls on every power of being – mythical, religious, metaphysical, to see the awful evidence of his plight: Au Caucasus de mon souffrir lyé, Dedans l’Enfer de ma peine eternelle, Ce grand desir de mon bien oblyé, Comme l’Aultour de ma mort immortelle, Ronge l’esprit par une fureur telle, Que consommé d’un si ardent poursuyvre, Espoir le fait, non pour mon bien, revivre: Mais pour au mal renaistre incessamment, Affin qu’en moy ce mien malheureux vivre Prometheus tourmente innocemment. [Tied to the Caucasus of my suffering Inside the Hell of my eternal pain, This great desire for my forgotten reward, As the Author of my deathless death, Gnaws my mind with such fury That, consumed by such a hot pursuit, Hope makes it revive, not for my good, But to be incessantly reborn for my evil, So that my unhappy existence may innocently torment The Prometheus who is found in me.]

(D 77)

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The dizain is modelled on the mythological legend of Promethus (Forethought), a Titan who is punished by Zeus for having saved humanity with the gifts of fire, crafts, and arts. In Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound Prometheus is riveted to a mountain crag where each day an eagle would gnaw at his liver. Since Prometheus was immortal, his liver would daily regenerate dooming him to endless suffering. In the Hesiodic poems Zeus takes revenge on both Prometheus and the human race by sending Pandora with a box as a gift to Prometheus’s brother, Epimetheus (Afterthought).98 Lacking the sagacity of Prometheus, Epimetheus married Pandora, the first female human, who opened the box out of which all manner of human evil flew into the world. However, Delusive Hope, whom Prometheus had shut into the box, discouraged humanity from a general suicide by her lies (Graves 1968, 1:145). Also relating to hope is a line in Prometheus Bound where the crucified Titan states to the Chorus his cure for human misery: ‘I planted firmly in their hearts blind hopefulness’ (Aeschylus 1961, 28). Unlike the mythological Prometheus who was punished for revolting against the gods, the poet-lover does not attribute his affliction to rebellion, but rather to his unquenchable desire to pursue Délie. In his view it is because of ‘si ardent poursuyvre’ (v. 6) of this ideal that he is tormented ‘innocemment’ (v. 10). It is of the essence that this distinction be maintained, for the principal message of the poem is innocent suffering. The lover’s plaint is similar to that of dizain 60 where the speaker’s perplexity is set into relief. Since loving well is a kind of self-imposed death, why does Cupid exacerbate my affliction, continue to kill me, when I have faithfully ceased to love myself without any reciprocity? ‘Qu’est il besoing de plus oultre m’occire,/Veu qu’asses meurt, qui trop vainement ayme?’ (D 60, vv. 9–10). Unlike the rationalist ethos of Aeschylus who makes human tragedy clearly traceable to some particular cause such as defiance, foolishness, or miscalculation,99 the poet-lover’s resounding agony is part of a context based on the unfathomable evil of innocent suffering. Some distinctions are in order between the poet-lover, Prometheus, and the Book of Job. Unlike the Greek Titan who was punished by angry gods for his altruism, the poet-lover’s affliction is a personal matter between him and the gods. He appears egotistical and solipsistic, alone in a cosmic wilderness where only his echoes return his plaint. Yet, there is a hint that he has made himself the humanist symbol of all humanity crucified for unjust punishment in parallel with Christ’s sacrifice. In that case, he seems presumptuous. Though the poet-lover of Délie may appear less upright

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than the hero of the Book of Job, he nevertheless sounds out parallel theodical questions, especially the inevitability of innocent suffering and the trial/agon as an expansion of moral and religious consciousness. However, he will never be rewarded with the bounty of riches and happiness bestowed by God upon Job (42:10–17), and as for ‘restoration’100 there is no returning to the carefree ‘jeunes erreurs’ (D 1, v. 1) which would violate the obligation that he feels to continue his pursuit. In dizain 77 the lover regards his fate as a number of confounding contradictions. On the terrestrial level suffering (‘mon souffrir,’ v. 1) makes him die, but hope (‘Espoir,’ v. 7) gives rebirth to love, thereby perpetually renewing his agony. There is a tragic dimension to this cycle since, by the pun ‘Aultour’ (v. 4), he becomes the author of his ‘mort immortelle’ (v. 4) – the self-gnawing vulture (vautour) that corrosively feeds on himself. Added to the irony of self-torment is the fact that Prometheus’s friendship with humanity causes a chain of effects which leads to Pandora. In dizain 2 the lover recites an ecomium of adoration to Délie whose virtue mesmerizes even the gods, only to reveal in a shocking pointe that this same woman is his ‘fatale Pandora’ (v. 10). The speaker’s self-erosion is spiritual and physical. In regard to the spiritual, there is bitter irony that the lover identifies with Prometheus who, in his very name, carries the attribute of Foresight. The enormous meditative efforts to become Argus, to see everything, to make intellection commensurate with aspiration, which he believes is an expression of good faith – all these efforts now devour his mind with such fury (‘ronge l’esprit d’une fureur,’ v. 5) that he is consigned to hell for eternity (‘l’Enfer de ma peine eternelle,’ v. 2). The physical aspect of his innocent suffering is suggested by the eagle eating out his liver, since the foie was traditionally considered the seat of carnal passion101 and the vulture a symbol of concupiscence.102 As indicated by the phrase ‘mon bien oblyé’ (v. 3) he clings to the expectations of amour courtois in spite of the fact that the beloved has forgotten his service. Thus, in his eyes good reaps bad. In Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, the hero assures Zeus’s triumph over Cronus by his craft only to become the victim of the king’s ingratitude, oppression, and tyranny. These three trials figure significantly in the poet-lover’s ordeal, the first of which stings him right up to the antepenultimate dizain where the essence of social solidarity – reciprocity – is denied to him: ‘Je pleure, et ars pour ton ingratitude’ (D 447, v. 10). The second and third of Promethus’s épreuves are frequently transposed to Délie in the form of the live-to-suffer cycle, the hell on earth which is ever consuming but never relieved by death:

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Asses ne t’est d’avoir mon coeur playé, Mais tout blessé le tenir en destresse, Où tout Tyrant, fors toy, eust essayé, L’avoir vaincu, le jecter hors d’oppresse. Et tu luy as, non poinct comme Maistresse, Mais comme sien capital adversaire, Osté l’espoir à ce mal necessaire: Lequel par toy si aigrement le mord, Que se sentant forcé soubz tel Coursaire, Pour non mourir tousjours, ne crainct la Mort.

(D 311)

[T’is not enough for you to have wounded my heart, But having wounded it you must keep it in anguish Whereas any Tyrant except you would have tried, Having vanquished it, to set it free from oppression. And you have not only as its Mistress, But as its deadly adversary, Taken from it the hope necessary to this affliction Which through you so violently gnaws it That, feeling itself under the control of such a Pirate, In order not to die at any every moment, it has no fear of Death.]

The brutal crucifixion of Prometheus in Aeschylus’s tragedy by the allegorized characters of Strength and Violence makes it difficult to overlook images of Christ’s passion in Scève’s dizain. In Prometheus Bound Strength orders Hephaestus to carry out Zeus’s violent will with such commands as, ‘manacle him; Hammer with all your force, rivet him to the rock’ (Aeschylus 1961, 22). Scève has certainly written this poem on the palimpsest of Christ’s Passion and consequently associates the lover’s suffering with the paradigmatic case of the innocent scapegoat. The suffering servant of Délie hangs suspended in pain on the craggy cliffs, the ‘author’ of a sacrifice which would announce to the world the woman’s coming to slay Leviathan and to brandish the flame of virtue. As Christ looked down upon Mary, so the lover solicits Délie’s pity; as Christ felt abandoned by his Father (‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me’)103 so the speaker cries out for his estranged goddess; as the sixth hour of Christ’s crucifixion brought ‘darkness over all the land,’104 so the remote and hostile Scythian landscape serves as the lover’s hell; and as the centurion avowed, ‘Certainly this man was innocent,’105 so does the lover protest that he is tortured ‘innocemment’ (v. 10).

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There is something haughty about the lover’s identification with Prometheus, but this audacity is consistent with the Renaissance spirit to reconstruct and uplift the world from adversity whether this be through the classical res adversae or through the Fall of Humanity. Therefore, when the reader of Délie encounters the seemingly endless repetition of such terms as espoir, espérance, vertu, souffrance, travail, présence, absence, mort, vie, nature, oeil, paix, peine, temps, saint, jour, nuit, désir, aimer, mémoire, doute, divin and cieux, it should be understood that the poetlover is doing nothing less than creating, from the first dizain onward, an entire psychological and moral world, and by constantly revisiting these words, a psycho-moral anthropology. In this respect Délie is parallel to the Microcosme, but with this difference: in the latter the world the narrator describes emerges from God’s hands, while in the former, it emanates from the poet-lover’s art. Since such terms are the données through which the poet-lover pursues higher virtue, they are also the interacting constituents of a habitus out of which good habits – another name for Aristotle’s arete and Aquinas’s virtus – are endlessly cultivated. Therefore, the word espoir is one among countless passions and ethical complexities, albeit an important one, with which the lover comes to grips. In the rolling cycles of Délie’s incessant repetition of these words, each time with a different viewpoint, the vicissitudes of espoir exemplify treatment of other moral matters in the work as a whole. Hope: From Pain and Pleasure to the Theological Virtues When the lover makes a judgment about the moral status of hope, it frequently is the case that the Epicurean criterion of pleasure and pain rules as the ultimate measure of good and evil. In Délie such a judgment functions like the movement of voluntas at the concluding part of a meditation. Thus, the last line of dizain 152 makes it clear that pleasure is the moral impetus for love: ‘Quelle sera donc la delectation,/Si ainsi doulce est l’umbre de l’attente?’ (vv. 9–10). Like this sentiment dizain 99 offers an especially sense-oriented appraisal of hope which knows it as simultaneous pain and pleasure: ‘Je dy, qu’espoir est la grand prurison [itching],/ Qui nous chatouille à toute chose extreme,/Et qui noz ans use en doulce prison,/Comme un Printemps soubz la maigre Caresme’ (vv. 7–10). Since conscious hope can conjure the most satisfying of pleasures, it can be used as a yardstick to see if fantasies, such as the erotic dream, can exceed it: ‘Et en tout acte, oultre l’espoir privé’ (D 340, v. 6). In reality, however, the opposite feelings obtain when unrequited service provokes the eyes and

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heart to tears and lament: ‘Pource qu’espoir de leur bien evident,/Qui les delaisse en leurs extremitez,/Croissant le feu de mon desir ardent,/Est Calamyte à mes calamitez’ (D 190, vv. 7–10). So bitter is the attrition of unsatisfied hope that the lover paradoxically declares, ‘Mon esperance est à non esperer’ (D 70, v. 10), and so confounding and delusive is hope that it flatters itself just to make an end of it: ‘Tant que reduict en la perplexité,/ A y finir l’espoir encore se vante’ (D 231, vv. 6–8). Here the economy of goods and bads is reduced to the overwhelming emotion of frustration. Though the pain/pleasure criterion is the main moral standard for judging hope up to dizain 413, there is a sprinkling of poems appearing before this point where hope is primarily viewed as inextricably tied to the virtues with pain and pleasure being concomitants. Particulary rich in its high-mindedness is dizain 146 which focuses on the prominence of Délie’s forehead (‘ton front seigneurie,’ v. 2) – symbol of intelligence and nobility which inspires the lover not to abandon hope in mid-course. This confidence is expressed as a rhetorical question: ‘Ny pour espoir de mieulx, qui me supplie,/Si hault poursuyure en son cours cessera?’ (vv. 5–6). Even more the lover pledges himself to honour and persistence (‘Jamais tel loz son plus ne laissera,’ v. 7), to justice, temperance, and prudence in refusing to lower himself to frivolous goods (‘Pour s’amoindre à aultres biens frivoles,’ v. 8), and to the sweet wisdom of heeding Délie’s words (‘L’Ambre soeuf de ses haultes parolles,’ v. 10). An elegant expression of generosity is the New Year’s gift (étrenne, D 205) that the poet-lover offers to Délie. This dizain can be hand-picked out of the poetic sequence as a gem in its own right, and since it is a poem which stands on its own, the poetlover thereby signals that he has momentarily freed himself from those more frivolous and contingent allures in the preceding poems. Here, hope is entirely bound up with benevolence and modesty where the speaker searches for justice in the knowledge that his ‘don’ (v. 5, including Délie itself) is unequal to the woman’s high value.106 Also notable in this group of poems is dizain 326 which is the prime example of the confessional tone in the work. The speaker avows to the woman that, sick of yearning for his ‘bien tant esperé’ (v. 1), he resorted briefly to the ‘vain espoir’ (v. 4) of another woman’s charms. Not only does the lover express remorse for having offended Délie by his unworthy action, but just as importantly his torpor and sickness (‘comme un malade,’ v. 2) suggest that Nature itself had already exercised its own sanctions by sinking him into ‘perdition’ (v. 9). The implication is that this purificatory repentance, judging him ‘indigne’ (v. 10) will instil a more virtuous hope. Amid these poems the reader will encounter dizain 254, a kind of stan-

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dard-bearer piece which praises Marguerite de Navarre as the embodiment of the highest virtues. Her spiritual colours of white, green, and ardent red are the emblazoned attributes of the theological virtues: ‘Foy immaculée,’ ‘joyeuse Esperance,’and the ‘rouge ardent’ of ‘Charité’ (D 254, vv. 1–4). Self-standing as a reverential blason praising a prominent spiritual and political figure, the poem indirectly symbolizes the excellence of Délie whose power to inspire the religious spirit of her subjects proceeds from the divinity. This dizain celebrating Marguerite’s embodiment of the theological virtues is part of a diptych heralded by the preceding poem praising the ‘vertuz excellentement rares’ (D 253, v. 1) of France’s King François Ier. In this laudatory celebration, where the universe itself bows its head in reverence to the monarch’s resplendence, the lover-prophet foresees the king’s reign as already enjoying ‘Fame’ (v. 7), ‘Eternité’ (v. 8), and ‘Gloyre’ (v. 10). Thus, a configuration of symbolic 3s107 sparkles throughout these two complementary dizains: the king and his sister united in guiding France beyond the emblazoned constellations, their triumphs, their exemplification of the theological virtues, and the suggestion that they mirror the Trinity. Implied in this bond are the poetlover and Délie, chaste by implicit comparison with brother (François) and sister (Marguerite), and united in love through their spiritual connection with the royal family. The Final Struggles With Hope: The Poet-Lover’s Appraisals and Sublimations Dizain 413 is one of the most significant poems of the poetic sequence because here the poet-lover, having established critical distance from Délie, is finally in a position to evaluate his entire experience of love. The experience includes hope. Honneste ardeur en un tressainct desir, Desir honneste en une saincte ardeur, En chaste esbat, et pudique plaisir, M’ont plus donné et de fortune, et d’heur, Que l’esperance avec faincte grandeur Ne m’a ravy de liesse assouvie. Car desirant par ceste ardente envie De meriter d’estre au seul bien compris, Raison au faict me rend souffle à la vie, Vertu au sens, et vigueur aux espritz.

(D 413)

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[Honest ardour in a holy desire, Honest desire in a holy ardour In chaste frolick and modest pleasure Have given me more of fortune and happiness Than hope, with feigned grandeur, Has delighted me with sated joy. For, since I desire with this ardent longing To be worthily included in the only good, Reason gives, for the task, breath to my life, Integrity to my consciousness and vigour to my spirits.]

This is a poem of purification in which the poet-lover judges hope in the forms of libido and cupiditas to be inimical to happiness and fortune while celebrating the revitalization of the body and the soul through the trials of moral and intellectual virtue. Though the sexual hopes of amour courtois have been throughly rebuffed, he nonetheless praises his ordeal for invigorating his entire being. Looking closer at the poem, which has a confessional tone, the speaker weighs which of two contending forces, ‘Honneste ardeur’ (v. 1) or ‘liesse assouvie’ (v. 6), has been more beneficial. He chooses ‘Honneste ardeur’ for physical, moral, and spiritual reasons. When ‘Raison’ (v. 9) guides desire, it brings breath to life, energy to consciousness, and vigour to the vital spirits. In Scève’s psychological world ‘sens’ (v. 10) is the conscience alerte through which ‘Raison’ (v. 9) is able to operate. The ‘espritz’ (v. 10) as distinguished from l’esprit or the intellect are the vital spirits which keep the body functioning and which belong to the physiological order. On the moral side, the phrase ‘Honneste ardeur’ designates deference to the rules of service, which though difficult to maintain, are more rewarding than the deceptions of sensuality. This reward is precisely ‘heur’ (v. 4) – well being – which is opposed to the ‘liesse assouvie’ of hope which ravishes and plunders (‘m’a ravy,’ v. 6) his forces. Lastly, these changes have benefited the lover’s spiritual existence as well, and, as his prayerful voice indicates (‘tressainct desir’/‘une saincte ardeur,’ vv. 1–2), it has been through the crucible of holy suffering that he can be included in the highest good (‘au seul bien,’ v. 8). These sentiments cannot be reduced to any religious or profane dogma, but they suggest the poet-lover’s fundamental reawakening to the necessity of measuring and responding to every force of existence. It is tempting to interpret the lover’s bilan as a tranquil affirmation of mens sana in corpore sano hallowed by the ideal that human existence can only be perfected by encountering the divine. Indeed, this is the message with two

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qualifications. First, the end of the dizain emphasizes human well-being (physical and moral) which has been facilitated by spirituality and not vice versa. Second, since the lover’s sexual desires have never been satisfied, this sublimation causes considerable damming of emotions whose walls will shake in subsequent poems, such as 438 where he still demands rewards for his patient service: ‘Ne voy encor sortir aulcuns effectz’ (v. 4). Far from closing matters on espoir, dizain 413 is the prelude to one final problem regarding desire and hope. This tension, constant in Délie, can be epitomized by the lover’s plaint that ‘Tout temps je tumbe entre espoir, et desir’ (D 265, v. 1). In dizain 431 he again examines this tension but unequivocally resolves it in the final verse with ‘L’espoir vainquant à la fin le desir.’ What explains this change? The explanation is a temporal shift in the emphasis of desire from present satisfaction to future reward, which is intellectual and spiritual. Let us make a distinction between desire and hope with the aid of useful concepts from Ficino and Aquinas.108 Ficino, following Plato, makes desire and love virtually synonymous. Echoing Diotima in Plato’s Symposium, Ficino states that love is the child of lack (Penia) and plenty (Porus), since love implies both want and the ‘pre-tasted’ good. To clarify this notion he adds: ‘Why is love partly rich and partly poor? Because we are not accustomed to desire that which we completely possess or that which we completely lack.’109 Aquinas, after reviewing a number of seminal notions from his historical predecessors, takes the postion that, with respect to human emotions, there is an order of occurrence in which love is at the root of all passions. For our purposes, I note his hierarchy of love, desire, and hope.110 In the words of Gilson, when the intention of love ‘arouses a movement of the appetite towards a real, and not merely intentional ... such a movement is the desire that is born of love’ (1956, 272). In addition, he notes that, like desire, hope is a passion and, in fact, hope presupposes desire. It consists in the feeling that what is desired will actually occur, or, in other words, it is the ‘desire of a future good’ (ibid., 283). In what does this desire consist for the poet-lover? Conclusion: The Poet-Lover as Minister of Love Returning to Délie it may now be asked, how does the poet-lover modify desire and hope? In her comments on the last line of dizain 431 Joukovsky makes clear he is following Sperone Speroni’s counsel to turn the present inclination of rejoining Délie into the future good of contemplative memory brought by retreat: ‘L’espoir du bien futur l’emporte sur le besoin

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de se rapprocher à nouveau de la dame’ (1996 edition, 376). Given that in dizain 430 the lover had already redirected his hope ‘au bien plus que celeste’ (v. 5), this must be a contemplative virtue enjoining him to cultivate the intellect. In fact, Scève’s text is rephrasing Speroni’s advice to reorient the soul from the present to the future: ‘Giudica essere ben fatto, che l’amante da sensi all’intelletto et dal presente al futuro rivolto, mesi e viva lontano dalla cosa amata’ (ibid.). In what does this future consist? In dizain 441 the last time that hope is explicitly mentioned, the lover, consistent with the resolution to distance himself from the beloved but still bitter, observes in retrospect that his trial has served the greater good of becoming love’s minister: ‘Qui d’Amour fut par sa voulenté pere/A plus grand bien, et non à fin sinistre,/M’a reservé voulant qu’à tous appere/Que j’ay esté de son vouloir ministre’ (vv. 7–10). The italics foregrounding ‘voulenté,’111 and the use of ‘will’ three times in one stanza underline the potentia absoluta ruling the lover, but not without his assent. In that respect the frustration incurred by the lover is compensated by his fortitude that now allows him to accede to Diotime’s wisdom. The main point is that, in addition to being a lover, the speaker now considers himself to have evolved into a ‘minister’ of love, and in the context of moral and intellectual virtues he finds that, in serving Délie, he serves causes higher than his own existence. The poet-lover links past to future when he says ‘the father of Love/Has reserved me for a greater good’ (vv. 7–8). Accordingly hope can be viewed as the painful but steady improvement of the many past ‘ministrations’ for the woman where, as a student of Délie-Diotime, he has risen above cupidity, libido, and delectation. This is one of the reasons for the cyclical nature of Délie. That is, hope in dizain 441 is a return in memory to the purifications that he has undergone in order to model his future aspirations. Thus, the lover projects a horizon beyond the last poem to develop the ministrations that he has already performed. What are these roles or ministrations? In dizain 15 he is the humanist prophet exhorting the world to avoid the mercenary and to embrace higher contemplation while proclaiming Délie’s eschatology and predicting her slaying of Leviathan (impresa 2). As Prometheus, he is the suffering servant forging art from innocent torment and also the amorous psalmist singing lamentations for deliverance from unheard hopes: ‘O Dieux, ô Cieux, oyez mes douleances’ (D 70, v. 3). In dizain 278 he is the lover-touter who, in his public annonce, invites the world to read ‘Comme lon peult soy mesmes oblyer’ (v. 2), and in dizain 214 he is the poet-exegete extracting the pith of Délie’s lofty sayings (‘ses haultes sentences,’ v. 10). Solitary pilgrim of incurable distress, the

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speaker is also the impoverished mendicant (‘mendiant’) in the midst of nature’s abundance (D 236, v. 9). Not only the patriot denouncing treason in the brilliance of the king’s virtues but also the landscaper of love who paints mountains of faith and confluences of unity (D 17). He is also the unflagging captain outlasting the tempest, the moral alchemist purifying his tears of deception (impresa 23), and the astrologer of love charting his course by the sideral force of cosmic affinities (D 62). Is he not, finally, the blasonneur of virtue’s colours, the architect of virtue’s column (D 418), the Forbisseur who, in polishing his sword into the mirror of virtue, wins victory over whatever may subvert the soul’s potential (impresa 28, D 249)?

6 Via illuminativa

Traditional Concepts and Scève’s Adaptations No one better expresses the illuminative way than Bonaventure who, in the De triplici via, says, ‘After the purgative way, there comes, in the second place, the illuminative way. Here a man must learn to use the beam of intelligence’ so that it ‘sheds light upon our darkness.’1 Bonaventure inherited, formulated, and passed on concepts of spirituality which would enjoy favour in the Renaissance and popularity in the Catholic Reformation. The lineaments of Bonaventure’s via illuminativa are best outlined by reference to the Itinerarium mentis in Deum.2 This rich, compact work revolves around the self-diffusive light of the Divinity which operates through emananation, exemplarity, and consummation. Similar to Augustine, Bonaventure holds the Platonic notion that the world is a book pervaded with vestiges of the imago trinitatis which, through meditation and contemplation, can be traced back to the archetypes of the Divine Mind. In the soul’s journey the mind enjoys three types of perception. Outside itself it sees corporeal vestiges; inside itself it beholds the imago dei in the soul’s three powers; beyond itself it gazes upon the eternity of the First Principle.3 It is erroneous to think that these three visions are separate faculties of the soul. Rather, they describe three operations of the soul which are ‘interactive and simultaneous’4 by the dialectic of loving light traversing all levels of creation. The grades of this luminous fluidity pass through sensus, imaginatio, ratio, intellectus, intelligentia, and the apex mentis. Contemplation of the First Principle in ourselves by discernment is reached in intellectus, but it achieves the level of mystical theology in a suprarational dimension of intelligentia. The transcendent transitus or ‘passing over’5 to the more affective knowledge of God is the apex mentis or synderesis scintilla.6

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Consistent with twelfth-century spirituality, Bonaventure never separates knowing from loving, even at the highest point of affectivity. Nor does he separate the human from the divine because the emphasis that he places on the verbum incarnatum is the main route to the excessus mentis. This is clear from the sixth chapter of the Itinerarium where the Bonaventure switches from the objectivity of the third person to the ‘mutual intimacy’7 of the second person. Here reversion to the second person means both loving grammar and unity with Christ.8 In addition to his debt to Augustine and the Victorines, Bonaventure’s concepts concerning the via illuminativa derive from the Christian fountainhead of the Triple Way, Dionysius the Areopagite. Also known as Pseudo-Dionysius, this still unidentified figure of the fifth century invented the term‘mystical theology’ as one of the titles of four works whose influence is perennial. In both his cataphatic and apophatic systems Dionysius’s underlying assumption is that there is likeness between creator and creature and a cause and effect relation between the divine light and the attraction to it. The Triple Way is explicitly invoked in The Celestial Hierarchy and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy which centre on the notion of God as triune Thearchy. The word thearchia is a cataphatic name used to highlight the idea of a creator who is a hierarchy. Bernarad McGinn describes this concept as ‘a multiplex ordered manifestation of the divine’9 in which humanity participates by exercising the powers of purification, illumination, and perfection. As expected in Neoplatonic metaphysics these three powers are dialectically received and passed on between angels and humanity by the reciprocal lights of procession and reversion. Among angels the highest power of illumination is held by the cherubim, who have the capacity ‘to know and see God, to receive the greatest gifts of his light, to contemplate the divine splendor in primordial power, to be filled with the gifts that bring wisdom and to share these generously with subordinates as part of the beneficent outpouring of wisdom.’10 In the earthly Jerusalem of the church, image of heaven, it is the ‘priest’ who illuminates the faithful who, when enlightened, merit the name of ‘holy.’ The editors of the Blackfriars’ text of Aquinas’s Summa note that Pseudo-Dionysius did in fact speak of states of progress termed catharsis (purgation), photismos (illumination), and teleiosishenosis (union).11 Like Dionysius and Bonaventure, Augustine presents various scales of wisdom not only in the Confessions, but also in De Vera Religione, De Sermone Domini in Monte, and Doctrina Christiana (Bourke 1992, 38–9; 133–50). However, for purposes of studying Délie it is more pertinent to observe how Augustine called on intellectual enlightenment to grapple

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with two of his most personally pressing problems. The first is moral error preciptated by vice, and the second is conflict between freedom and determinism. In regard to the initial problem Augustine makes clear in the Confessions that wandering can be understood as the self-dispersion of ‘scattered parts’12 where one’s being breaks up into a multitude of vices. Augustine confesses these faults, such as the allurements of the eye, the beguilements of dream, and the inordinate pleasures of the ear and nose. However, he knew very well that, in addition to grace, the cardinal virtues could serve as antidotes. In particular the virtue of prudence proved effective in making the distinction between uti and frui, use and enjoyment. Given the fact that all that God has created is good, then moral error can in part be explained by humanity’s confusion over what should be enjoyed for the highest purposes and what should be wisely used to achieve those ends (Bourke 1992, 45). The second issue that Augustine submits to rational examination concerns determinism and freedom. The problem takes on flesh and blood in the Confessions not only in regard to Augustine’s struggle with lust but also in his dispute with Pelagius. The latter argued that if grace were the most important factor in salvation, then this would vitiate freedom of conscience which is also a gift from God. In De Libero Arbitrio Augustine submits the question of free will to formal argumentation in his dialogue with Evodius. Among the most important questions is whether God has preordained actions and salvation, which naturally devolves into the problem of whether God is responsible for evil. Evodius asks Augustine, ‘Please tell me: isn’t God the cause of evil?’13 The bishop of Hippo gives two responses. First, adherence to eternal truths, even if painful, constitutes true freedom, but one can always choose to violate them. This leads to the conclusion on metaphysical evil, namely, that it is not caused by God, but rather, by the perversity of the human will. In the Summa Theologiae Aquinas refers not to three ways but to three degrees of spiritual progress. For example, when speaking of three levels of charity, he identifies beginners (incipientes), advanced (proficientes), and perfect (perfecti). By means of an analogy he likens each of these three phases to the growth of the human body: childhood (infantilis), the stage of speaking and reasoning (quando jam incipit loqui et ratione uti), and the ability to generate new life (pubertatis) (2a 2ae, q. 24, a. 9). Later in the Summa when distinguishing the levels of offices and states in life, Aquinas holds that in any human effort one will find beginning, middle, and end: ‘In omni autem humano studio est accipere principium, medium et termi-

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num’ (2a 2ae, 183, 4). In Ia 2ae, 61, 5 Thomas cites Macrobius to deepen his historical proofs for these stages, observing that they correspond in content to three divisions of Plotinus’s scale of virtues: political virtues, purifying virtues, purified spirit, and exemplar virtues. How does Aquinas reason that four of Plotinus’s virtues can be reduced to three stages of spiritual attainment? His view is that since humanity must aspire toward divine things as much as it can, then there should be intermediate degrees between the purely human (the political virtues) and the divine (the exemplar virtues). Between these two there is a middle stage where ‘men on their way and striving toward likeness to God’ (purgatoriae) and another in which ‘those who have already achieved a likeness to God’ have risen to the ‘already purified spirit’ (purgati) (1a 2ae, 61, 4, 5). One can infer from the Summa that Aquinas situates the proficientes among those who are honing the intellectual virtues. Having made progress in purification but still striving towards perfection, they are improving prudence, understanding, science, wisdom, and art. Understanding (intellectus) concerns grasping basic principles of reasoning, and science (scientia) aims at using these principles to arrive at truth in the world, while art (ars) is right reasoning about what is to be made. The highest of the intellectual virtues is wisdom (sapientia), because it bears on last causes and the most perfect and universal objects. Thus, science depends on understanding, and understanding depends on wisdom (Gilson 1956, 259–64). Prudence consists in what Aquinas calls ‘rightness of choice’ (rectitudo electionis),14 and following Aristotle, he gives it the other name of practical wisdom because it decides on the right path to be followed. As such it governs moral virtues (temperance, justice, fortitude) because without prudentia they would be blind, perverted, or merely shrewd. When applying itself to moral questions, prudence must take the counsel of the intellectual virtues. Thus, prudence occupies a privileged position above the virtues of which it is a part, exercising judicious paths of action uniting reason and appetite. For many authors of spiritual works the ‘beam of intelligence’ used in the illuminative way invariably summons rational or cognitive power to order passions and curtail vices, and in this respect it furthers the goals of the via purgativa. However, in this schema, where intellectual remedies are administered to heal moral wounds, some authors will treat this matter as theoretical and others as practical. Among the most theoretical are the scholastics such as Aquinas who, in his exposition of the intellectual virtues, will offer a problem in intellectual terms and a solution in equally

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abstract terms. Thus, in his discussion of prudentia he makes a distinction between two types of problems: what one does and how one does it: ‘In order to perform an act well, it is not merely what a man does that matters, but also how he does it, namely, that he acts from right choice and not merely from impulse and passion’ (1a 2ae, 57, 5).15 Some of the many intellectual safeguards prudence offers against the passions are drawn from Aristotle. These are ebulia, which is good counsel; synesis, good judgment according to the laws; and gnome, good judgment in exceptional cases (1a 2ae, 57, 6). Between explations of the theoretical and practical uses of the intellect is The Twelve Partriarchs (also known as Benjamin Minor) by Richard of Saint Victor. Summarizing this book Bernard and Patricia Ferris McGinn state that ‘Richard uses the characters in the story of Jacob, whose name became Israel (“the one who sees God”), his two wives, Leah and Rachel, and the twelve sons they and their handmaids bore him, as an elaborate allegory to illustrate how the affective and intellectual powers of the soul are to be trained in the practice of virtue in order to attain contemplation.’16 Thus, The Twelve Patriarchs is both an intricate allegory and a ‘how-to’ book that vivifies the ascent of virtue through biblical drama. From the viewpoint of the intellectual powers it is Rachel who represents both ratio and studio sapientiae, for through her first son Joseph the reader arrives at the symbol of discretion about which the author says: ‘Believe me, the intellectual soul makes no more tortuous demand on itself than to preserve the right measure in all its attractions.’17 Among the practical and highly influential guides to spiritual progress are García de Cisneros’s Exercitatorium spirituale and Ignatius’s Exercitia spiritualia. As noted earlier the first is directed to monks, the second to the laity. Cisneros titled the second of three parts of his work ‘Of the Illuminative Way,’ which he describes from a variety of perspectives: This way is called Illuminative because it illuminates, kindles, and incites every man to love God.18 Thou [God] has given me a capacity for understanding and a tenacious memory.19 Thou hast given me the singular grace of meditation, and of exercising myself in things spiritual, instructing my understanding, awakening my affections, and enabling me to carry out that which I purpose.20

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Thou ... wilt give me things which are far above my comprehension.21 This way receives light from the lives of the holy Fathers, which are given us for examples that we may prudently imitate them. Likewise, it receives light from studied meditation upon the creation of all things that God has made, and from the reading of the holy Scripture, and from devout hearing of the word of God.22

Like Ignatius whom he models and prefigures, Cisneros devises a practical and systematic method for making specific vices, pitfalls, and errors amenable to the virtues of the illuminative way. One method is the discernment of spirits through self-examination that counteracts ‘negligence, concupiscence, and malice.’23 He also urges vigilance to guard against ‘bitterness ... evil suspicions, blasphemous thoughts, and malicious distractions.’24 In the context of love he exhorts the monk to collect his thoughts on the ‘favours’ granted him by God so that he ‘mayest not wander along many and divers paths.’25 On the other hand, illumination, when rightly directed, may allow the exercitant to ‘tarry lovingly’ in prayer until ‘lost in wonder.’26 Finally, like Bonaventure who in the Itinerarium envisages the soul dying into the love of God,27 Cisneros provides a model for an almost imperceptible transition from intellectual to mystical illumination. By constructing a thought-provoking metaphor based on ‘flax,’ he can bring the reader to penetrate the truths of the Pater Noster: ‘For as flax which is set in the rays of the sun first dies and afterwards catches fire, even so, and much more, is the heart set on fire by thinking upon the said meditation, and it soars aloft in God’ (128).28 Of course, Scève is a writer of the Renaissance, and it would be an artificial and myopic exercise to read him predominately as a medieval thinker. In Délie there is no original sin but human error, nor is there Augustine’s Trinity but the dea triformis derived from Virgil. Rather than Augustine’s and Bonaventure’s supernatural divine light, there is the human mind’s grappling with fragmentation and dispersion without the aid of supernatural grace. As already stated, the theological virtues are rarely invoked explicitly, and this exception is made for Marguerite and François Ier who are their greatest incarnations. Thus, we should not automatically take the words esperance, foy, and amour as theological virtues, but as emotions susceptible to refinement by the moral and intellectual powers. Having said that Délie cannot be read as an orthodox Christian allegory

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of medieval spirituality, it is also true that the work does marshal intellectual resources in the service of both purification and loving union. Like his Platonic predecessor Bonaventure, Scève’s ‘beam of intelligence,’ never separates knowing from loving. Similarly, though it may strike some critics as idolatry, the author of Délie, like the Bonaventure, cannot resist seeing the divine in the human as a calling to greater aspiration. Also, because Scève inherits strong Neoplatonic currents from the Italian dialogue tradition, he does in his own way follow Dionysius’s precedent of unleashing the dialectic of eros and knowledge motivated by attraction to the divine. In addition to dialectic, Scève’s speaker summons other tools of ratio, such as the syllogism and analogy, and does so quite extensively. While his scholastic mentality urges him to articulate his problems by such methods, he remains like Augustine and Bonaventure highly sceptical of reason’s capacity to function effectively outside the orbit of supporting virtues. Yet, here the distinction must be made that while the poet-lover seeks resemblance to Délie he does so not purely for Christian sanctity, but for the way the woman models efficacy, imperturbability, and self-sufficiency. This notion fits another of Scève’s adaptations of the Triple Way to his Renaissance outlook, namely, his use of emblematic vision as a rhetorical counterpart to angelic spontaneity. A final distinction is in order. While Cisneros and Ignatius are sensitively attuned to the ‘discernment of spirits,’29 the poet-lover transfers the Christian preoccupation of subversive forces, such as Satan, to the minute examination of the emotional demons that can destabilize the equilibrium necessary to integrate the wholeness of being, both human and divine. The greatest contribution which Scève has made to the domain of meditation is the struggle with prudentia. Having inherited from Augustine and Petrarch the intense scrutiny of error and wandering, Scève engages his speaker in one of the most searching struggles with what Aristotle and Aquinas called practical wisdom. Placing little faith in the emblematic notion of prudence as foreknowledge and avoidance, he characteristically finds himself in medias res, concentrating more on excelling in virtue rather than on making a mistake. In fact, error is a precondition for knowledge. Rather than supposing that he can circumvent or extricate himself from the traps of bitterness, suspicion, jealousy, fear, and necessity, he emphasizes a more positive ethos predicated on loving service to his ideal. In spite of the fact that Délie is not a work of orthodox Christian spirituality, it nevertheless places the reader in the uncomfortable position of recognizing that the poet-lover can make leaps from the purely human to the religious with little or no transition As seen in dizain 143 the struggle

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between deceptive dreams and rational awareness dominates the poem up to the last line when suddenly the image of the woman as the biblical brazen serpent springs up to rout the fixation on meretricious beauty. However, sometimes in Délie, especially toward the end of the sequence, there is a suave movement of scientia and sapientia which smoothly flows to the apex mentis or the synderesis scintilla marked by momentary inebriation (D 434, v. 8). Like Cisneros’s image of the soul’s heart as burning flax, the poet-lover is the emblematic butterfly dashing into the candle’s flame only to rise again as the torch which never dies.30 The Relation of Prudence to Other Moral and Intellectual Virtues: Prudentia and Error No reader of Délie can fail to see that the poet-lover constantly gets hoisted on his own petard and that from the beginning to the last part of the work, he falls victim to his own designs or becomes entrapped by false flights. The imprese speak eloquently of these errors, whether they be delusive self-assurance, such as the man who would sit on a chair only to have it pulled out from under him, the too crafty spider who spins the web of his own death, or the chamois’ attempt at rescuing himself from hunters only to find himself precariously perched on a peak encircled by dogs. It is not as if the poet-lover is unaware that pitfalls await him at every turn; rather, he is simply unable to avoid them. He knows that such boomerangs will not cease, but he is hard pressed to evade them. So ingrained is the poet-lover’s feeling of futility that the last two lines of dizain 438 express this frustration as a motto: ‘Donc en voye patente/Saulver me cuyde, et plus fort je suis pris’ (vv. 9–10). The virtue which needs rectification is that of prudence. As we have seen, Aquinas names this virtue prudentia and it has the daunting responsibility of coordinating deliberation with action, thereby serving as the lynch pin of the virtues governing intellectual and moral activity. In many respects Scève’s treatment of prudentia may be seen as assimilating to interior debate what appears in dialogue form in Speroni (Dialogo D’Amore) or in Ebreo (Dialoghi). That is, like his Italian contemporaries he submits questions of love to a rigorous interrogation linking together psychological, moral, and philosophic problems or dilemmas. Like Scève, Speroni submits to deep questioning various facets of love as a problem of the ‘mista di due contrarii’ (DA, 95). For instance, one issue debated by Gratia and Tullia is the question that if jealousy is directly proportional to the intensity of love, then would it be a sign of imperfect love if one were unfet-

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tered by it, or should one try to extirpate it? (71–4). Another interchange between the two asks if fear of loosing the beloved to another is necessarily attributable to jealousy (93–4). A third exchange poses the question of whether jealousy is more harmful when in the company of the beloved or when temporarily separated (88). Speroni’s authoritative tone and clearly formulated solutions to such questions are markedly different from those of Délie. In matters of prudence Speroni is quite confident having Tullia highly recommend foresight in all avenues of life: ‘ché al cibo, a l’oro, alla prosperità, alla adversità nostra, ai premii, alle pene, cosa mortali come noi siamo e ordinate alcune all’essere altre al bene essere all’essere altre al bene essere d’una persona o d’una città, consigliando è ben fatto di provedere.’31 However, as in other areas, Scève’s treatment of prudentia and particularly of foresight is highly critical, one that is markedly different from contemporary emblematic writers. While in his Emblesmes (1543) Gilles Corrozet with the assurance of common sense, exhorts his readers to ‘Preueoir les dangers,’32 Délie’s poet-lover takes the very opposite view of experience when in dizain 3 he concludes: ‘…l’oeil credule ignoramment meffit/Pour non preveoir à mon futur dommage’ (vv. 3–4). Scève’s persona severely criticizes that aspect of practical reason called foresight (‘providentia’) defined by Cicero as ‘the faculty by which it is seen that something is going to occur before it occurs.’33 Délie challenges the emblematic tradition not only by questioning whether serious harm can be predicted and avoided, but also by launching an inquiry into what makes attaining prudence so difficult. What is most lacking in the poet-lover is foresight, but what is most plentiful is the perseverence of intelligence to fathom the wisdom of prudence’s many challenges. The act of choosing rightly is dependent on the act of deliberation, and the lover gives primacy to the second virtue. In Délie there is a massive reconstitution of the past, a vast intellectual repetition to comprehend what happened and continues to occur in and after the first innamoramento. From this prodigious assessment unfolds a whole psychological anthropology questing after wisdom which takes the entire length of Délie to address. This is much like our twenty-first century astronomers and physicists attempting in the present to explain the present by scientifically reconstituting the conditions and results of the Big Bang. Given that virtually every dizain is an act of recollection, the text teaches the lesson that to know where I am is to know where I have been. In spite of this vast dialectic of conservation and progess, the collected wisdom of the past that would otherwise be helpful for the present and the future frequently falls back into unshakable dilemmas. It is helpful to approach the problem of prudentia in Délie by explor-

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ing its obstacles, and one of the master metaphors of adversity is erreur. Indeed, the whole sequence can be seen as an attempt to correct wandering and to discipline the mental faculties, much as Cisneros instructs his exercitants: ‘When thou goest out from Compline it behooves thee not to tarry long ... nor to wander in thought.’34 Given prominence in both the liminary huitain (‘Mainte erreur,’ v. 6) and in the first dizain (‘jeunes erreurs,’ v. 1), it reappears countless times in every conceivable context. In dizain 22 it is wandering in hell imposed by Hecate; in dizain 57 it is self-deception symbolized by Blind Man’s Bluff; in dizain 62, the ‘erreur’of Phaeton presaging a cosmological disaster (v. 2); in dizain 164, the plaything of Nature and Fortune: ‘J’errois flottant parmy ce Gouffre amer’ (v. 3). It may also be a miscalculation of ‘perseverance’ (D 369, v. 8) or a fault of jealousy (D 425). One of the gravest problems is estimating whether error is an excess of constancy or whether there can be too much love: ‘Je trouve bien, que celluy se desayme,/Qui erre en soy par trop grande constance: /Mais quelle erreur, sinon que trop il ayme?’ (vv. 8–10). Does heightened prudence for the goal of avoiding error consign one to paralysis? Quite simply Délie is a text pervaded with images, words, and themes that are synonymous with the various senses of error – being lost, deceived, sidetracked, or poorly aiming, deliberating, and choosing, or falling victim to self-deception. In dizain 382 the woman’s force puts the lover in complete physical disorientation which is described as a mirage: ‘L’heureux sejour, que derriere je laisse,/Me vient toute heure, et tousjours au devant./Que dy je vient? Mais fuyt, et si ne cesse’ (vv. 1–3). In dizain 156 he runs amok in doubt about the woman’s intentions (‘Tout hors de moy du droit je me deboute,’ v. 10), and in dizain 73 he is utterly without means to measure his passions: ‘L’affection en moy demesurée’ (v. 5). Macerations of the flesh can be invented in a delusive dream (‘Me contentant d’estre par moy deceu/Pour non m’oster du plaisir, où je suis,’ D 341, vv. 9–10), or they can encroach on their own force and drown out the mental faculties: ‘Tout je m’abysme aux oblieuses rives’ (D 118, v. 10). In dizain 129 the lover, like a hare irrevocably lost in fear, lies trembing ‘aux tenebres d’Egypte’ (v. 10), while in poems evoking Dictynna and Daphne (D 353, 102) the lover reaches for Délie only to have her disappear or be transformed. Error, however, is the effect of deeper causes which make prudence difficult to achieve, so one could multiply the examples of error by the hundreds. Its deepest root is le bien du mal of which the problems of practical wisdom are the greatest. Before directly analysing these questions, it will be useful to review the iconography of prudence.

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The poet-lover’s most important intellectual objective is to hone prudence, and he exerts immense effort in examining that aspect of prudence called deliberation.35 Most of Délie concerns the poet-lover’s search for prudentia by measuring, contrasting, balancing, weighing, sifting, mirroring, and checking his moral compass. In fact, not a few contemporary, iconographical depictions of prudence are illustrated or mentioned in the work. Two of the lover’s greatest needs are the ruler (‘reigle,’ v. 6) and the compass (‘compas,’ v. 6), named in dizain 423 as instruments to measure emotions and to rectify error. Another important iconographical figure of prudence in Délie is the mirror, for in dizain 415 the poet-lover calls the woman the ‘miroir de ma pensée’ (v. 1). Specularity pervades the entire work as the lover’s self-reflexive eye that must be purified by the women’s gaze. Another symbol of prudence used in Délie is ‘La Lampe’ which is shown in imprese 3 and 45 to convey that the speaker must keep vigilant watch on his own preparedness, even if he cannot foresee specific dangers. Also, because prudence never forgets its final ends, it is illustrated by the cercueil. Since death is the paramount preoccupation of the poet-lover, we see the cercueil in impresa 44 where a man, lifting up the lid of his coffin, is rising from the dead. It also appears in the last illustration, ‘Le Tumbeau et les chandeliers’ where it signifies that death persists in the afterlife through the continuing battle of contrary forces. In the Renaissance prudence was also figured as a sphère that could compute astrological and astronomical coordinates. In dizain 200 the ‘Globe’ (v.1), interposed between Apollo and Phoebe, causes an eclipse of the moon which lives as melancholy in the lover’s heart. Beautiful as well is the symbolic use of the globe as one of the cosmological intervals from which Délie’s virtues expand ever outwards to the stars and through the centuries (D 259, v. 2). Tervarent informs us that the most widely used image of prudence was the serpent36 which can be traced to the Gospel of Matthew where the evangelist advises the apostles: ‘Be wise as serpents, and guileless as doves’ (10:16). The poet-lover adapts this figure to his own circumstances, most notably in the brazen serpent image where wisdom requires seeing Délie as a complete being – poison and remedy. In impresa 27 (‘La vipere qui se tue’), the serpent creates a circle by coiling around itself thereby symbolizing eternity, which in Délie is the continual reciprocity between life and death. The Circle, the Compass, and the Mirror in the Movement of ‘Délie’ as a Whole: The Case of Fear and Associated Emotions In Délie’s introductory huitain the speaker (not Scève himself) makes clear that in the work that follows he takes two roles: that of a lover undergo-

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ing ‘les mortz, qu’en moy tu renovelles’ (v. 3) and that of a poet who is the author of ‘si durs Epygrammes’ (v. 6). As the author of his song the poet determines among other things how he wishes to deploy his work and the manner in which he uses dispositio as an instrument of prudence. Because prudence as foresight is so difficult to master, the poet-lover will arrange his poems by opposites or antinomies attempting through these cycles to encompass limit experiences. By opposites or antinomies, I do not mean the lover’s rupturing le bien du mal/le mal du bien, but rather his mapping out in contrastive fashion a set of related but different emotions, virtues, or vices which constitutes his world. In fact, the speaker gives the reader a key to this method when he observes that self-deceit causes him to gravitate toward the opposite of what he should really pursue: ‘O combien peult ceste vertu latente/De croire, et veoir le rebours clerement,/Tant que pour vivre en si doubteuse attente,/Je me deçoy trop vouluntairement’ (D 38, vv. 7–10). This attitude compares well with Montaigne’s scepticism in De Mesnager sa volonté that, since his desires suborn his better judgment, he tries to err on the opposite extreme: ‘Je fauldrois plustost vers l’autre extremité, tant je crains que mon desir me suborne’ (3:10).37 As with Montaigne the intractability of this problem inclines the poet-lover to be sceptical of prudence as foresight and in dizain 362, he makes his reservations explicit and strong: Ne du passé la recente memoyre, Ne du present la congneue evidence, Et du futur, aulcunesfoys notoyre, Ne peult en moy la sage providence: Car sur ma foy la paour fait residence, Paour, qu’on ne peult pour vice improperer. Car quand mon coeur pour vouloir prosperer Sur l’incertain d’ouy, ou non se boute, Tousjours espere: et le trop esperer M’esmeult souvent le vacciller du doubte. [Neither the fresh memory of the past, Nor the obvious evidence of the present, Nor the wise foresight of the sometimes Predictable future does prevail in me, For fear makes its residence in my fidelity, Fear, that be not named a vice. For when my heart, because it wishes to prosper, Confronts the uncertainty of yes or no,

(D 362)

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It always hopes, and too much hoping Moves me often to the vacillation of doubt.]

Thus, while fear may encourage doubt and false hope, it cannot be named a vice because it maintains residence in fidelity. In addition to stating this theme, the poet-lover aims his criticism of prudence at the iconographical symbolism of the three-faced head having a simultaneous knowledge of past, present, and future. This conception, traceable to Hippocrates and Diogenes Laertius and continued in the Renaissance by Valeriano and Titian,38 is substantially modified by the lover. Rather than claiming to foresee dangers, he is more intent on studying the functioning of emotions and virtues and on weighing the entire experience as an interaction of fidelity, fear, hope, and doubt. In this respect, he reflects the viewpoint of Speroni that love is a contentious ‘mista’: ‘Composta adunque una crudele e pestifera mistione di sospiri, di lagrime, di timore, di ira, di sdegno, di gelosia e finalmente d’ogni altro male che sentir soglia uno inamorato.’39 Taking these qualifications into account, the reader can nevertheless see that the lover’s scepticism prompts him to deploy his meditations by related oppositions so that if he cannot always hit the Aristotelian mean he can nevertheless circumscribe the limits. As we have seen, the lover alternately construes espoir as deception and patience, foy as credulity or ‘ferme amour’ (D 17, v. 10), and vertu as seductive pleasure and rigorous effort. He continually returns to variations of these opposites to discover the limitless factors of moral judgment. From the aforementioned iconographical review three visual figures of prudence are deeply imbedded in the organization of Délie as instruments of moral measurement. Though they overlap in practice, they are analytically helpful in picturing the lover’s rhetoric of prudence throughout the work. One is the circle understood as cycles of contrastive repetition. A second is the mirror considered as the highly self-reflexive eye which captures moral contrasts as paradigms. A third is the moral compass whose needle indicates the antipodal extremes of a given issue. In what follows I will examine contrastive repetition in regard to fear and, though I will only refer to the terms mirror, circle, and compass in the section titles, the reader should nevertheless keep these figures in mind as the lover’s tools of prudence. The Circle of Contrastive Repetition: Fearlessnes and Fear Délie’s fearlessness is the psychological mirror most conducive to the poet-lover’s examination of his own powers. Her absolute force makes her

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immune to fear, whether she be challenged by Cupid (D 67), the gods (D 88), Love, Death, or Fortune (D 107). But each of these strengths reflects the lover’s fears aroused by confronting his force with Délie’s perfections. In other words, fear provides the lover with the raw material to measure her potency and his. For example, dizain 67, where Délie fearlessly claims the power to conquer Love itself, appears like a poem of simple charm, but it is quite complicated. Out of pity for lovers Cupid buries his bow and abandons the earth. Délie and Venus, thinking that burying love is itself a pity, unearth the deadly weapon, thereby giving Cupid the means to rearm himself. Venus warns Délie that just as Cupid wounded her with love for Adonis, so Délie might fall to his fatal weapons. Scorning Venus’s warning with haughty condescension, Délie replies: ‘Car contre moy l’Archier s’est esprouvé:/Mais tout armé l’ay vaincu toute nue’ (vv. 9–10). In these two verses Délie is figured as the goddess/huntress Diana. The lover-poet, as writer of this poem, is free to fashion a scenario which dispenses power as he sees fit. Here he creates an economy of power in which every act of disarming Délie against love only invites her to grow stronger. Thus, by disinterring love, she disarms herself; by disarming herself, she encourages love to rearm; by encouraging love to rearm, she only defeats him more decisively. The lover’s fear resides in the implied question, ‘How is he to unearth his own love for Délie?’ How can he avoid this vicious circle? In the Blason de la gorge, the poet-lover will only be able to approach Délie by disarming himself. In that case, desire must be rechannelled through deference which heightens intellectual refinement but frustrates erotic desire. The opposite of this poem is dizain 327. With dizain 66 it shares the genre of an Alexandrian vignette in which Délie is figured as Diana the huntress who proclaims her ability to vanquish all without arms. In contrast to dizain 66, Diana’s fearlessness there is much more aggressive, and it is the role of prudence-as-deliberation to monitor these differences. In dizain 66 Délie takes pity on lovers because of Cupid’s burying his bow, and Venus herself is fearful that Cupid’s possible reappearance would wound her again and take Délie by surprise. However, in dizain 327 Cupid is seductively flying about Délie/Diana, ‘guettant’ (v. 4), boldy questioning her imprudence in hunting without arms: ‘Comment? Vas tu sans armes à la chasse?’ (v. 6). In dizain 66, the scene opens with an atmosphere of pity for lovers, but in dizain 327 this pity is replaced with Diana’s aggressive defiance. To Cupid’s question about why she is hunting without arms, she responds: ‘N’ay je mes yeulx, dit elle, dont je chasse/Et par lesquelz j’ay maint gibbier surpris?’ (vv. 7–8). Thus, if in dizain 67 Délie/Diana’s fearlessness is an active defence, challenging lovers to dis-

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arm by the confidence of her own self-disarming, then in dizain 327 her fearlessness is an aggressive offence, conceiving her suitors as ‘maint gibbier surpris’ (v. 8). Her weapon is precisely what Donaldson-Evans calls the ‘aggressive eye,’40 which in this case is the type of gaze shown when taking game. Flicking love’s putative potency aside, she says to Cupid: ‘Que sert ton arc, qui rien ne te pourchasse,/Veu mesmement que par eulx je t’ay pris?’ (vv. 9–10). The implications of these lines for the lover’s approach to love are quite the opposite of those in dizain 67, for the beloved’s eyes, being effortlessly potent, vanquish love itself. Here the subtext is a species of sprezzatura, almost God-like, which can kill without the slighest effort. Other exercises of prudence measure the lover’s direct fears, not Délie’s fearlessness. The speaker continually returns to judge the moral significance of a type of fear that may described as reverential. On the one hand, dizain 1 testifies to the fact, many times renewed, that fear in love (‘ô paour d’agreables terreurs,’ v. 3) is absolutely necessary to his converting to a higher ideal. This is so because complacency and wandering are overcome by awe and resolution. On the other hand, the lover’s looking upon Délie ‘sans craincte aulcune’ (D 126, v. 8) produces a frustrating illusion like Luna’s experience with Endymion (vv. 7–10). In fact, like the ‘Oyseau au glus,’ little or no fear of love lends itself to capture: ‘Où moins craingnoys, là plus tost ie fus pris’ (D 105, v. 10). In other examples, two subtle inquiries into fear caused by reverential awe bear on two different types of self-deception. One is caused by too little self-esteem and the other by too much boldness. The first is examined in dizain 373 where the lover’s crainte leads to startling psychosomatic changes which end by the congelation of his body into ‘sel Agringentin’ (v. 10). This process is started by Délie’s gaze, which, in its rigorous virtue, imposes on the lover such fearful reverence that he must avert his eyes: A son aspect mon oeil reveremment S’incline bas, tant le Coeur la revere, Et l’ayme, et craint trop perseveramment En sa rigueur benignement severe. Car en l’ardeur si fort il persevere, Qu’il se dissoult, et tout en pleurs se fond, Pleurs restagnantz en un grand lac profond, Dont descent puis ce ruisseau argentin, Qui me congele, et ainsi me confond Tout transformé en sel Agringentin.

(D 373 – stress mine)

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[At her sight my eye is reverently Lowered, so much does my Heart revere her And love her, and too constantly fear Her benignly severe harshness. For my heart perseveres so strongly in the heat, That it dissolves and melts completely into tears, Tears overflowing into a great deep lake, From which later descends this silvery stream That congeals in me and thus turns me, Quite transformed, into Agrigentine salt.]

In her critical edition of Délie Joukovsky glosses the adverb ‘perseveramment’ (v. 3) as meaning ‘avec persévérance’ (1996 edition, 410). This sense makes the key phrase ‘craint trop perseveramment’ (v. 3) rather paradoxical in that there may be a defect of virtue in excessively reverential fear. (The adverb ‘perseveramment’ is too loaded a word to have the more neutral meaning of constamment.) This excess in the heart of virtue is confirmed by the word ‘trop’ (v. 3). In support of this, it must be noted that reverence moves from the ‘oeil’ (v. 1), the more intellectual faculty which must avert its gaze in deference to the beloved’s severity, to the ‘Coeur’ (v. 2) which transforms it into ‘ardeur’ (v. 5). Looking at the beloved’s moral severity only leads to the feeling of unworthiness. However, looking away only excites the emotions even more as reverence moves to fear, and fear to ardour. Thus, excess of fearful reverence turns into its opposite, excess of passion, where another more startling transformation takes place on the lover’s body. Having melted in the fire of passion, his tears then turn him into a silvery stream and congeal him into salt. The physiology of tears is communicated through alchemical images (dissolving, mercury suggested in ‘ruisseau argentin’ [v. 8], congealing and crystallizing in salt) which culminate in a new being (Coleman 1975, 91). Insofar as this psychosomatic metamorphosis is a circle of opposites, the lesson is that the poet-lover has seized upon the law that reverential fear can slide into the athanor of passion. In the contrasting poem, dizain 107, the lover’s suffering is so intense it would seem that he is beyond fear. Having supplicated Fortune, Love, and Death itself to release him, he then approaches Délie, but with defiance rather than solicitude. Questioning her, he asks: ‘What do you fear, Lady? Make me die’ (v. 10). This is the climax of an interior débat that virtually taunts the beloved by asking her if it is out of fear that she will not grant his request.

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Fortune forte à mes voeutz tant contraire Oste moy tost du mylieu des Humains. Je ne te puis à mes faveurs attraire: Car ta Dame a ma roue entre ses mains. Et toy, Amour, qui en as tué maintz: Elle a mon arc pour nuire, et secourir. Au moins toy, Mort, vien acoup me ferir: Tu es sans Coeur, je n’ay puissance aulcune. Donc (que crains tu?) Dame, fais me mourir, Et tu vaincras, Amour, Mort, et Fortune.

(D 107)

[Mighty Fortune, you who are so contrary to my wishes, Take me quickly from the midst of Humans. I cannot influence you on my behalf, For your Lady has my wheel in her hands. And you Love, who have killed many. She has my bow to harm and to help. At least you, Death, come quickly to strike me down. You are without a heart, I have no power. Thus (what do you fear?) Lady, make me die And you will vanquish Love, Death and Fortune.]

Scève could have adapted this poem from Angeriano, but its theme was of general currency during the author’s lifetime. However, whatever it meant for Scève’s predecessors, the dizain takes on new meaning in the context of Délie. The débat engages theodical issues to the extent that the beloved’s absolute force is defied by the anthropomorphic argument that she could prove her power by overturning the refusals of Fortune, Love, and Death itself to release the lover from suffering by bringing him death. If Délie will not, what does she fear? ‘Que crains tu?’ (v. 9). By treating Délie purely like a human being, the lover challenges her divine omnipotence, not to mention her goodness and omniscience. In fact, while Ficino demarcates an upward movement to divine love from body, soul, and angel to God, the lover in dizain 107 pursues an almost parodic ascent of near blasphemy by seeking recourse not first in Délie, but in lower forms of power such as Fortune, Love, and Death. Then comes the brazen challenge. If you are really omnipotent, then you can prove it not only by conquering these three forces but by releasing me from suffering. Just as the mannerist aesthetic creates a split between content and form, putting serious issues into a tone lighter than the subject’s inherent gravitas, so the

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poet-lover sums up this parodic ascent with a witty conclusion. However, his taunting of Délie in the context of theodicy has close parallels with the Gospel of Luke. The first parallel is Satan’s temptation of Jesus during his ascetic retreat in the desert when the former says to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread’ (4:3).41 Similarly, when Jesus is brought before Caiaphas on charges of blasphemy, the chief priests and scribes command him, ‘If you are the Christ, tell us’ (22:67).42 Finally, at Jesus’s crucifixion the soldiers mock him by saying, ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself’ (23:37).43 In other poems the lover’s prudence counters the sacrilegious implications of the debate with precisely the opposite tone of humility. In dizain 62 fear of Délie’s power and justice makes the lover undergo an apocalyptic ‘extreme jugement’ (v. 10), and in dizain 381 the lover’s horror at his own unworthiness makes all speech stillborn ‘devant les pieds de ta divinité’ (v. 4). The poem which most severely criticizes defiance of God’s will is dizain 442 which, though inspired from Speroni, takes a more fideistic viewpoint. Here the lover asks himself, ‘Pourroit donc bien (non que je le demande)/Un Dieu causer ce vivre tant amer?/Tant de travaulx en une erreur si grande,/Où nous vivons librement pour aymer?’ (vv. 1–4). Speroni’s interlocutor Molza is inclined to provide a rational answer to the question by proffering the Augustinian argument that evil derives from the faults of the individual’s will: ‘Gli errori e i mali nascono da noi soli’ (DA, 104). Less inclined to reason and more inclined to lay apprehension aside by means of faith, Scève’s poet-lover answers his own question by saying, ‘O ce seroit grandement blasphemer/Contre les Dieux, pur intellect des Cieulx’ (vv. 5–6). Thus, this poem would seem to respond to the taunt of dizain 107 by holding fast to a kind of reverential interdiction, namely, that accusing God of fear is inappropriate to his incommensurability with his creatures, even the more so since on the positive side, God pushes lovers to ‘la vie immortelle’ (v. 10). The Compass: Jealousy and Fear Continuing to view refinement of prudence as cycles of contrasting repetition, we will also notice that, within these circles, the lover will proceed as if he were using a compass to demarcate the degrees of moral problems and solutions. This procedure provides moral direction and measurement to comprehend the errors of wandering and to check the susceptibility to self-deception. Since the range of problems circumscribed by fear is as integral to Délie as it is in the Petrarchan canon and the dialogue tradition,

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I will continue to examine them, but only as they encompass jealousy and its associated emotions of doubt, fear, and desire. In Speroni’s Dialogo D’Amore, translated into French in 1551 by Claude Gruget, it is clear that jealousy was an important subject for Italian and French audiences. If we envisage a compass as charting discrete degrees of difference in a specific arc of exploration, then certainly the poet-lover’s grappling with this problem is one of the subtlest in Délie. The approximately twenty dizains that deal with jealousy directly and several more that intersect with it constitute enough material for a separate study. For the poet-lover this emotion is part of a skein of passions that are mutually complicating: ‘Lors le suspect, agent de jalousie’ (D 206, v. 1); ‘De doubte, espoir, desir, et jalousie’ (D 393, v. 6); ‘Bien que je sache amour, et jalousie, /Comme fumée, et feu, esclair, et foudre,/Me tempestantz tousjours la fantaisie’ (D 425, vv. 1–3); ‘Quoy que ce soit, amour, ou jalousie …’ (D 428, v. 1). With these points in mind let us observe the lover tying and untying the knots of jealousy. The most important motive for the lover’s jealousy is that Délie is married, and in dizain 161 he visualizes to himself in anger and frustration the woman making love to her husband. Trying to protect himself against the pricks of bitterness, he invokes the amour courtois distinction between the legal union of love, enforced by human contract, and the superior union of love instituted by the Divinity (vv. 7–10). This, however, does not palliate his outrage at what he terms ‘ce lyen injuste’ (v. 7), since in his eyes Délie has severed the higher obligation. A second factor exacerbates the first. When the lover fears ‘Amour ceder à Calumnie’ (D 85, v. 10), he becomes agitated because detractors mock him behind his back for paying extravagant attention to the woman’s slightest favours (D 65). It does not help his wounded sensibility to believe that imperfect nature has made him as ugly as a crow (D 247) and that he has become a dyspeptic, jealous Vulcan. On the positive side, he is like the the ‘Forgeron’ and the ‘Forbisseur’ polishing his sword into the victory of virtue (impresa 28). Yet, unflattering resemblances dominate, such as the fact that the blacksmith was born lame and unattractive, shamefully cast out of heaven by his mother Juno, not to mention being betrayed by his unfaithful wife Venus who caroused with Mars (D 83). This mythic imaginaire of the poet-lover’s fortunes is further complicated by the fact that just as Vulcan and Venus gave birth to trouble-making Cupid, so the lover considers himself the ‘autheur de ce marrissement’ (D 369, v. 2). Thus, in a mythic sense he pictures himself as the hapless generator of war and love. The speaker gives two more reasons for his jealousy, distinct from the

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aforementioned considerations because they are not precipitated by an outward offence, such as Délie’s making love with her ‘partie’ (D 161, v. 1). Rather, they are caused by the philosophic cries of conscience. The first of these reasons is indicated by the self-observation that ‘le curieux soucy/De mon hault bien l’Ame jalouse enflamme’ (D 76, vv. 7–8). Here his ‘Ame jalouse’ is due not only to the ‘Consort’ (D 156, v. 6), but also to the fact that his soul has been taken or stolen, creating an unavoidable, interior dissention that cannot be pacified by retreat, solitude, or absence of his rival. The second, more interior jealousy, indicated by the phrase ‘deuil privé’ (D 251, v. 2) connotes the sadness caused by deprivation but more emphatically by his experiences of violated privacy. This douleur intime suffered ‘en mon particulier’ (v. 2) is the unique, not ‘commun plainct’ (v. 1) of sacrosanct individuality. It is opposed to the vile herd, to their common drive to amass exterior goods, and their refusal to seek ‘honneste estrangement’ (D 15, v. 5). In what ways does the lover counter jealousy? First, his theoretical point of departure confirmed by experience is the same as Speroni’s: ‘anzi chiunque ama perfettamente teme e onora la cosa amata (DA, 93).’44 The first condition of Speroni, that one should quest for perfect love, is fulfilled by the lover’s sensation of hermaphroditic union: ‘Ne sens je en nous parfaire, en augmentant/L’hermaphrodite, efficace amoureuse’ (D 435, vv. 5–6). The apex of the poet-lover’s desire to rise above jealousy is the entirely postive and highly balanced claim to Délie that whatever he owes to her, to her husband, to her admirers, and to himself, he has striven for magnanimity: D’un magnanime, et haultain coeur procede A tout gentil de donner en perdant: Mesme qu’alors tant tout il se possede, Que sien il est, tout aultre à soy rendant. Et tu m’as veu, jà long temps, attendant De ta pitié si commendable usure, Que sans point faire à ta vertu injure, Plus, que pour moy, pour toy je m’esvertue, Et par ce nom encor je t’en adjure, Qui en mon coeur escript te perpetue. [A magnanimous and noble heart Gives of itself to everyone of noble mind, though it loose some part in the giving,

(D 325)

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Even though it be so completely self-possessed, That it belong to none save itself, and submit all others to itself. And you have seen me waiting a long time, For a benefit from your pity so worthy That without doing injury at all to your virtue, I strive my utmost more for you than for myself. And by this name which, written in my heart, perpetuates you, I beseech it from you still.]

For Aristotle as well as for Aquinas magnanimity is the attitude of noble generosity toward others, ‘a certain greatness of soul and faculty’ which ‘seems to accompany all the excellences.’45 Honestly measured but without guile, sincerely and transparently stated but with justfiable selfinterest, the lover confesses that his guiding principle has been to strive his utmost more for Délie than for himself (v. 8). Aristotle also finds that ‘magnanimity is a mean between vanity and mean-spiritedness,’46 a distinction which describes the lover’s sentiments. Here he crafts an informal proof made up of a defintion of magnanimity (the disposition which gives of itself to everyone of noble mind, vv. 1–2), and the subsequent exemplum (vv. 5–10). The example is his own conduct that steers between his unadorned request for pity (v. 6) and his abiding patience (v. 5), which is a quality least likely to injure the beloved’s virtue (v. 7). The trait of selfpossession (‘tout il se possede,’ v. 3) may seem incompatible with nobility of heart. However, Aristotle gives two traits of the magnanimous soul which clarify this point. First, those who exhibit this virtue are motivated primarily by principle and not by opinion, since ‘the magnanimous man would consider rather what one good man thinks than many ordinary men.’47 In this sense the lover’s self-possession is to ascertain his honesty. Second, for Aristotle there is a legitimate trait of disdain in the magnanimous soul not of other people per se, but ‘of what is esteemed great contrary to reason’ (e.g., bravery disdains dangers of this kind).48 Certainly the lover’s criticism of ‘ce vil Siecle avare’ (D 15, v. 1) qualifies him for the first trait, and his decision of faith to leap into peril for love certifies the second: ‘Suyvant celuy, qui pour l’honneur se jecte,/Ou pour le gaing, au peril dangereux,/Je te rendry ma liberté subjecte,/Pour l’affranchir en vivre plus heureux’ (D 103, vv. 1–4). Finally, if for the lover the magnanimous heart loses something in the act of giving (v. 2), then it nonetheless serves the noble end of perpetuating Délie’s name which is forever inscribed in his heart (v. 10). A second set of dizains (225, 371, 425) addresses jealousy by affirm-

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ing the same principle that Shakespeare will have Cassius declare in Julius Ceasar: ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/But in ourselves’ (I.i.140–1).49 Its logical point of departure is dizain 444 whose first line ‘Nature au Ciel, non Peripatetique’ would shift the importance of world order from Aristotelian physics and astronomy (the stars) to the Platonic concept of the world soul which, gleaming from Délie’s forehead, is transferred by love to the speaker’s heart. Again it is Speroni who models this idea for Scève: ‘Ad altro cielo era volto il mio animo, che non è questa d’Aristotile.’50 The main point here is that interiority is the source of truth, and the poet-lover will inflect this notion by a syncretic combination of examination of conscience and interior debate, both of which are interpenetrated with legal and economic considerations. Prudence is the largely internal act of self-appraisal preparing a rationale for conduct. First, there is the examination of conscience, all the more religious in tone since it occurs in relation to the divinity. In dizain 371 he applies subtle discernment in retracting his denunciation of his rival and of Délie when stating the principle that neither blame nor punishment can be ascribed to persons who have no failing or have committed no offence (vv. 1–2). Rather, in the interest of justice (‘justice,’ v. 3) he must confess that it is his malice (‘malice,’ v. 4) and resentment (‘rancune,’ v. 4) that provide the basis of fault (‘coulpe,’ v. 2). He gives integrity to conscience by recognizing the negative side of this realization when he frankly admits that his great resolution to win Délie has been ‘en grand erreur’ (v. 9). Complementing this poem is dizain 425 where the lover proceeds in the same fashion, stating principle and exemplum. He confirms Speroni’s principle that love and jealousy are always a mixture (‘mista’), dissociating one’s being in the tempest of ‘fumée et feu, esclair, et fouldre’ without ever achieving resolution (vv. 1–4). In spite of his inevitable wavering he will not abandon his obligations to the truth that he must persist against this ‘Monstre terrible’ (v. 6), otherwise known as jealousy (v. 6), and locate this fault well within himself rather than in his rival: ‘Je ne me puis (pourtant) d’erreur absouldre,/Cherchant tousjours par ce Monstre terrible/De veoir en moy quelque deffault horrible/Trop plus asses, qu’en mon Rival, regner’ (vv. 5–8). Again the poet-lover exercises acute discernment when he uses the words ‘Cherchant ... par ce Monstre terrible’ (v. 6), since this is a heroic quest for lucidity prompted by perseverance (‘tousjours,’ v. 3) fighting through disorienting storms. The will to discernment is all the more courageous because in hallowed confession (‘d’erreur absouldre,’ v. 5) and even while accusing his rival, the monster that he discovers is himself: ‘Comme lon scait, qu’avecques l’impossible/J’accuse aultruy pour

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tout me condamner’ (vv. 9–10). In other poems the lover when looking into his heart sees Délie (D 46) or discovers the hermaphrodite (D 435). However in D 425 brutally honest introspection brings frightening selfcondemnation. Another reason that the lover knows that his faults are not in the stars is his identification of jealousy with ‘fantasie’ (D 425, v. 3). This word is commonly glossed as imagination, but a more precise explanation is required. According to Gregor Reisch’s Margarita philosophica in the section devoted to psychology, there are five internal senses consisting of common sense, imagination, fantasy, estimation, and memory. The imagination stores data before passing it along to fantasy, which acts to combine and divide them, yielding new images called phantasmata, having no exact counterparts in external reality.51 In dizain 153 jealous fantasy is compared to a cricket (‘Mais le grillet, jalouse fantasie,’ v. 7) whose obsessive chirping and droning create ‘all that he thinks’: ‘Qui sans cesser chante tout ce, qu’il cuyde’ (v. 7). Similar to Philomela’s plaint in dizain 31 it is a song of sorrow which has no other hope than to keep itself sweetly alive in spite of Délie’s muderous power ‘Me laisse vif à ma doulce homocide’ (v. 10). Therefore, while fantasie saps the lover by imagining fear, it retains a good because of the residual persistence of the lover’s imploring voice. That voice which is never extinguished is constantly refined by prudent estimation and careful measurement of the emotions. This idea connects with dizain 151 which, though alluding to jealousy, is primarily concerned with sifting and balancing the relative pluses and minuses of imagination, fear, and constancy. The lover calls this contentious mix ‘la peur du mal’ (v. 9), which challenges his fidelity (‘fermeté,’ v. 7). As indicated by the words that the lover addresses to Délie (‘Aumoins peulx tu en toy imaginer,’ v. 1) the meditation centres on how this faculty affects ‘foy’ (v. 2), ‘espoir’ (v. 5), and ‘fermeté’ (v. 7). Specifically weighed are the relative harms of imagined fear, which are calculated by the poem’s alembicated finale: ‘Parquoy alors que fermeté se troeuve/En celle craincte, où perte une mort livre,/Plus nuict la peur du mal à qui l’esproeuve,/Que la douleur à qui jà s’en delivre’ (vv. 7–10). That is, one suffers more harm from fear of trouble than from the grief incurred by freeing oneself from the cause of harm. Jealousy and calumny are related vices, since both are born of suspicion. They can also create a vicious circle to the degree that gossip about the beloved’s virtues and the lover’s fidelity exacerbates tacit and direct accusations which in turn require defensive measures. As a result, the lover asks what it would take for him to be relatively unfettered from such fears. His answer is in the uniquely positive dizain 225:

Via illuminativa Libre je vois, et retourne libere, Tout Asseuré, comme Cerf en campaigne, Selon qu’Amour avec moy delibere, Mesmes qu’il veoit, que Vertu m’acompaigne, Vertu heureuse, et fidele compaigne, Qui tellement me tient tout en saisine, Que quand la doubte, ou la paour sa voisine, M’accuse en rien, mon innocence jure, Que souspeçon n’a aulcune racine Là, où le vray conteste à toute injure.

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(D 225)

[Free I go, and return free, Quite assured like a Deer in the countryside, According as Cupid deliberates with me, Especially when he sees that Virtue accompanies me, Virtue, happy and faithful companion, Who holds me so completely in her possession That when doubt, or fear its neighbour Accuse me in anything, my innocence swears That suspicion has no root Where the true opposes all injustice.]

Rare indeed are such dizains. This poem is written in the typographical form of a block whose monumentality is heightened by its tone of calm self-assurance. Its structure is given architectural solidity by straightforward syntax and a simple lexicon where in classical fashion each line ends with a complete and cogent thought. Negatively speaking, its claim to innocence gains credence by the avoidance of complexity – lack of indentations, of subordinated syntax, and of density of thought. The poem constitutes the lover’s self-constructed icon to probity whose motto, as if chiselled on a façade, proclaims, ‘le vray conteste à toute injure’ (v. 10). Since the poet-lover wishes to prove by juridical means that he is innocent of calumnies, he must demonstrate that his conduct is beyond reproof because he is an eminently prudent lover who takes all precautions to act in a virtuous manner. Hence, one encounters such legal terms as ‘en saisine’ (v. 6), ‘accuse’ (v. 8), ‘mon innocence jure’ (v. 8), ‘le vray conteste’ (v. 10), and ‘à toute injure’ (v. 10). We also meet words less technically legal that nevertheless have strong judicial connotations. For example, the lover asserts that he has conscientiously carried out his responsibilities by wise deliberation (‘delibere,’ v. 3), and he begins the dizain by saying, in effect,

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‘I am free in conscience from any fear which may impeach my innocence’: ‘Libre je vois, et retourne libere’ (v. 1). An irony of this judicial setting is that the lover resorts to legal discourse in order to prove a case bearing on morality. This is consistent with his tendency to put the marriage of his beloved under the scrutiny of two standards, for as we have seen in dizain 161 he judges Délie justified by legal criteria, but not sanctioned by celestial law. However, dizain 225 brings these two domains into harmony, not conflict, by using judicial concepts to pass judgment on a case of moral justice. Even though this turns dizain 161 inside out, its integration of law and morality consolidates the lover’s claims to innocence. The substance of the lover’s defence is that he is a virtuous and particularly prudent person who so prides himself on his fidelity that he invariably takes great precautions in avoiding anything that may arouse suspicion: ‘Que souspeçon n’a aulcune racine’ (v. 9). In other words, he has cultivated foresight, but a foresight that makes the most comprehensive preparations before allowing him to venture out into the treacherous world of backbiting and calumny. This exemplary prudence is not smugness, but the more defensive posture of assuring his compliance with deliberation. This poem shows in a positive way one of the reasons why in Délie prudence as foresight is difficult to achieve. It requires extraordinary measures of preparation to oversee a field of adequate protection, and it shows the virtuous armour that the lover must wear to step out into the world. The second line stresses the importance of the virtue of deliberation, the foundation of the lover’s defence, which Aquinas defines as ‘the habit by which we weigh the options correctly.’52 In Délie options are never without losses, and every choice is subject to immediate reversibility. As in Scève, prudence as deliberation is very important to Aristotle who in the Nicomachean Ethics terms it bouleusis.53 The philosopher offers an attribute of deliberation which particularly suits the poet-lover’s circumstances: ‘Deliberation is concerned with things that happen in a certain way for the most part, but in which the event is obscure, and with things in which it is indeterminate’ (1112b). Another of the lover’s requirements for foresight is the concommitant conviction of assurance. In dizain 225 the capitalization of ‘Tout Asseuré’ (v. 2) implies that the lover has made provision against such pitfalls as false confidence (‘Facile à decevoir qui s’asseure,’ impresa 25), the undertow of jealousy (‘l’aveuglée, et doubteuse asseurance,’ D 428, v. 8), and the susceptibility of lending oneself to deception where the once confident wall of love is subverted by the corrosive ivy of intimacy (impresa 17). Also, the lover testifies that in his undertak-

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ings he is certain to consult ‘Amour’ (v. 3), the same blindfolded, aleatory force that in the work’s psychological anatomy rules the Corps (bodily senses) and the Coeur (desire). Moving to the image of the cerf, the reader may be surprised that, after reading a number of references to antiperistatic deer, the lover uses the same animal (‘Cerf en campaigne,’ v. 2) to symbolize peaceful freedom and unthreatened innocence. Among its iconographical meanings are natural prudence and vigilance. For example, Pliny holds that the deer immediately senses danger and flees with his back to the wind to avoid detection (Tervarent, 90). Another notion connoting the protection of prudence is that virtue holds the lover ‘en saisine’ (v. 6). According to McFarlane, this phrase means ‘in her possession, jurisdiction’ and is a legal term denoting the droit de seigneur to take into possession any inheritance decreed by law or testament (1966 edition, 434). Virtue’s legal protection of the lover acts like a line of defence against the plague of gossip as indicated by the subtle phrasing of line 7: ‘Que quand la doubte, ou la paour sa voisine…’ Fear is a neighbour to doubt not only in the lover’s jealousy but also in the vile social habit of calumny. On the other hand, the correct social relationship is the companionship of virtue mentioned twice – ‘fidele campaigne’ (v. 5) and ‘Virtue m’acompaigne’ (v. 4) – evoking care, guardianship, and reassurance encircling the lover like the concentric circles of virtue surrounding Délie – ‘Mille Vertus de mille aultres enceintes’ (D 127, v. 5). Also, to the extent that ‘Vertu’ (v. 4) is a companion to the lover (‘acompaigne,’ v. 4), this line by its association with dizain 419 suggests that the virtue stressed is reason. In dizain 419 the lover’s aspiration to the higher reaches of love is accompanied by reason as guide – ‘la raison de Scorte’ (v. 6). No one can accuse the lover of vice when he is accompanied by virtue and shielded from ‘souspeçon’ (v. 9), since his oath of truth recalls the promises of lovers and nobles invoked in the Connétable de Bourbon affair: ‘Tous paches sainctz oblige à reverence’ (D 20, v. 6). However, it is not legal force that ultimately justifies the lover. Rather, it is his witness to truth, an objective epistemological power, which he had earlier petitioned from Love as an aid against social malice and calumny: ‘Aydez le vray, la bonté, la droicture’ (D 210, v. 9). Thus, dizain 225 allows the reader to better appreciate that it takes nothing less than the poet-lover’s maximum effort of experience and wisdom to consolidate himself against blindness and to prepare his foresight. Behind this great effort is the perseverance connoted by the verb s’esvertuer (Ds. 2, 175, 325).

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The Mirror: Calumny, Jealousy, Time, and Proportion If the mirror is used to symbolize prudence, then Délie is the textual mirror par excellence of this virtue. Up to this point we have studied the work’s specular dimensions in the meditative modes of self-examination, in mythology (Narcissus), in the portrait poems, in the exchange of gazes between beloved and lover, in Délie’s hand and wall mirrors, in the unicorn gazing into the pond, in the basilisk’s deadly glance, in the dizain as an instantiation of perfect number, in the multiple renvois of the devices, in their function as reflexive eyes of the lover, and in the use of poetry (requiring as a genre a high degree of iconicity) to redound upon itself in abyme. There is also a syntagmatic mirroring process in Délie brought about by the high degree of repetition from dizain to dizain. These reflections in the theme of calumny can be observed by citing two or more poems concerned with backbiting, gossip, or slander. Jealousy functions in the same manner. Furthermore, jealousy and calumny mirror one another reciprocally since as we have seen they both redound to suspicion. Finally, this mirror of relations between the two (calumny and jealousy) is refracted to considerations of time, which raises its specular power to the third degree. It is this third degree that I now examine. The beginning of this thread starts in dizain 32 where the lover pleads not guilty to the slanderous remarks made about him which have gained credibility in the woman’s eyes. This is a serious issue, for the lover bases his moral worth on honesty and honour, and such lies have the effect of making him as guilty as the real sinner. To discredit such disparaging gossip he entreats the beloved to allow time to pass before judging him: ‘Soit que l’erreur me rendre autant suspect,/Que le peché de soy me justifie,/Ne debvois tu au Temps avoir respect,/Qui tousjours vit, et qui tout verifie?’ (D 32, vv. 1–4). This is a simple plea with large ramifications, since if time through human effort is a criterion of truth and human realization, then it would advocate the ideal of Adamic progress so well played out in the Microcosme. There is another level implied in the lover’s respect for time, since the way in which he describes time (‘Qui tousjours vit,’ v. 4) suggests his desire to verify truth through some criterion of immortality which is immanent. Tensions grow apace when the poet-lover relates jealousy to time in dizains 66 and 428 where the specific sense of time means time stolen. In the first poem the lover is admiring Délie’s virtues only to come to the realization that given her conspicuous superiority, other potential lovers

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will also notice her high qualities. That possibility shakes the speaker’s security: ‘Soubdain doubtay, qu’elle me pourroit nuire,/Pour estre à tous ai grand contentement’ (D 66, vv. 5–6). Of course, this fear is as avaricious as it is threatening, since the time painfully dedicated to the beloved could be completely lost with the intrusion of another: ‘Tant griefve perte est perdre promptement/Chose par temps, et par labeur acquise’ (vv. 9–10). Thus, the lover sees effort, virtue, and merit closely bound to time insofar as they are like goods that can be swept away and, practically speaking, effaced by the other. In dizain 428 we meet a similar theme provoked by jealousy in which madness and fear make the speaker imagine the scene of another lover stealing the speaker’s merit and glory: ‘Je crains tousjours par ceste phrenesie,/Qu’en effect d’elle à aultruy trop n’agrée/Chose par temps, et debvoir consacrée/A mon merite en palme de ma gloire’ (vv. 3–6). Jealousy, it seems, regards stolen time as nothing less than killing integrity, if the subjective sense of merit depends on the contingencies of perishable goods. Moral progress on the issue of time is made in dizains 211 and 219 which both concern how Délie’s powers of inspiration elicit and actualize latent virtue in the lover. In the first dizain, the speaker assumes the voice of moral authority to issue a severe imprication to Envy and Calumny in the manner of a prophet warning the malicious to fear God’s wrath or an exorcist driving out living vices. Here God is replaced by Délie: ‘Retirez vous, Envie, et Imposture,/Soit que le temps le vous souffre, ou le nye:/ Et ne cherchez en elle nourriture,/Car sa foy est venin à Calumnie’ (vv. 7–10). The speaker’s stern injunction is made even stronger by the fact that he says, ‘Withdraw Envy and Imposture, whether time allows it or denies it to you’ (v. 8), signalling that Délie’s virtues do not wait for time nor in any way depend upon it for perfect efficacy and justice. The serpent is appropriately invoked to suggest a biblical parallel pertaining to an evil like calumny – blasphemy – where the Israelites who denounced God and Moses were bitten to death by the brazen serpent. In dizain 219 the lover states that of all Délie’s virtues, the one that seduces him the most (‘incitation,’ v. 6) is her power over fortune, fortune in this case taking the forms of envy and disparagement: ‘Mais à mon bien m’est exhortation/Celle vertu, qui à elle commune,/Cherche d’oster la reputation/A l’envieuse, et maligne Fortune’ (vv. 7–10). This poem on calumny is notable in the series because it does not refer to time per se, but rather leaves the temporal domain to show how spiritual qualities alone defeat slander. On first glance this is the Stoic wisdom of self-mastery defeating fortune, but for his discipline the lover depends on Délie’s splen-

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did example of proportion, the outside reflecting the inside: ‘Authorité de sa grave presence/En membres apte à tout divin ouvrage,/Et d’elle veoir l’humaine experience,/Vigueur d’espritz, et splendor de courage’ (vv. 1–4). The lover’s whole being – body and soul – is highly attracted to the beloved’s proportionality of parts forming the whole. This is primarily but not exclusively an intellectual apprehension which counters the ‘parler du maling’ (D 210, v. 3) perverting all Nature’s order: ‘Ainsi le faulx par non punye offence/Pervertir tout l’ordre de Nature?’ (D 210, vv. 5–6). In his Dialoghi d’amore Ebreo too stesses that proportion reflects divinity and, like the poet-lover, he views proportionality as a principle of beauty in which form redresses refractory and disobedient lower powers.54 Thus, for the poet-lover calumny is a perversion of the natural order which can be reversed by the intellectual appreciation of proportionality, but unlike Ebreo he does not accuse matter, but rather embraces it as part of body/ soul harmony. In regard to proportion the mirror of prudence now must be turned to another question: Is there a ‘proportionality’ in the ethics of social speech? Let us answer this question by limiting the field to the series of dizains on calumny.55 The lover’s answer is once again weighed more by principles than by time. First, this is a question of truth as appraised by judicial means. As dizain 225 concludes, ‘... le vray conteste à toute injure’ (v. 10). From an iconographical point of view, it is not surprising that the question of calumny should be taken to court, since a long tradition from Apelles to Lucian to Renaissance figures such as Leone Battista Alberti pictures this vice as Le Mauvais Juge. The criteria of judgment and verdict should be based on Lucien’s advice that ‘one should not take delation lightly.’56 The word ‘lightly’ is precisely the key to the poet-lover’s conscience, since he aims above all to balance, weigh, and measure. In the first place vice and virtue do exist, and one should choose the latter over the former: ‘Doncques le Vice à Vertu préferé’ (D 210, v. 1). The problem is how to distinguish one from the other. Here the poet-lover is in accord with Ebreo, since the issues are better comprehended in the understanding rather than in the eye: ‘Je le conçoy en mon entendement/Plus, que par l’oeil comprendre je ne puis/Le parfaicte d’elle ...’ (D 226, vv. 1–3). In addition, the speaker shows concern over distributive justice, for the matter of false speech does harm to both the lover and the beloved. As the speaker reminds Délie, ‘Mais l’imposture, où ton croire se fie,/A faict l’offence, et toy, et moy irrite’ (D 32, vv. 5–6). This community of two, each reciprocally deserving of amatory justice, is reflected in Speroni’s advice against fear and jealousy, but the Italian emphasizes an economy of emotion: ‘Ma chiunque

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teme ove e quando egli devrebbe sperare; e diffidando di sé medesimo a guisa di prodigo dona altrui la speranza, di che è virtù l’essere avaro, già è geloso l’inamorato.’57 In the same dizain the lover implores the beloved to enforce the principle that reward and punishment should be proportionate to merit and demerit. He thinks that his culpability is slighter than her looming sanctions: ‘Parquoy, ainsi qu’à chascun son merite/Requiert esgal, et semblable guerdon,/Meritera mon leger demerite/D’estre puny d’un plus leger pardon’ (D 32, vv. 7–10). So far the reader has seen the poet-lover’s introspection mirroring and measuring various relations regarding calumny and time: respect for the passage of time as an indicator of truth, calumny viewed as time stolen and merit abolished, the poet-lover’s step outside time in seeing that the beloved’s virtue is immune to temporal contingencies. Then in a process of emulating Délie the poet-lover fashions his own timeless principle in the proportionality of speech. In the final deliberations of prudence on calumny, the poet-lover further distances himself from social malice by leaving court completely. He does this from magnanimity (which is not without some self-interest) in order to minimize any more talk about the beloved which may harm her virtue: ‘Si je m’en tais, comme je m’en suis teu,/Qui oncques n’euz de luy fruition,/C’est pour monstrer que ne veulx sa vertu/Mettre en dispute à la suspition’ (D 226, v. 7–10). Throughout Délie distorted, inappropriate, and malicious speech is associated with disease, pandemic illness, or toxin. It is related to poison distilled by an evil ‘Alembic’ (D 206, v. 9), a ‘peste’ (D 291, v. 9), or ‘maligne Fortune’ (D 219, v. 10). Seeing an inverse moral ratio between social disease and circumspection, the lover seeks not the mean, but a counterbalancing action in painful, stoic silence: ‘Je m’en veulx taire, et lors j’y pense mieulx,/Qui juge en moy ma peine estre eternelle’ (D 227, vv. 3–4). This silence exceeds his gesture to be ruled by judicial principle and proportionality, since it is a sacrifice beyond the norm to himself, Délie, and societal well-being. Of What Use Is Prudence Faced with Necessity? The most direct statement on the relation between necessity and prudence is found in dizain 220 where the lover states that he finds himself pressured to deliberate under necessity. The necessity to which he refers is the need to make resolutions when in perilous doubt which results in rushing to take risks: ‘Deliberer à la necessité/Souvent resoudre en perilleuse doubte,/M’ont tout, et tant l’esprit exercité,/Que bien avant aux hazardz je me boute’ (vv. 1–4). This is existential angst because the harassing, brute

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force of time makes him precipitate into an action without the full benefits of prudence. It provokes him to wonder whether he must foresee everything at once to stave off recurring bewilderment: ‘Ne doy je pas en tout preveoir si bien,/Que je ne soye au besoing esperdu?’ (vv. 8–9). In most cases where the consideration of necessity is primary, the speaker puts this subject into the context of love. In this case a reader of Délie may very well ask if there is in the work an unqualified assertion of freedom or free will. I am not speaking about such oxymoronic statements as ‘servitude brings me freedom.’ Rather I am referring to poems that declare the exercise of freedom in unmitigated or non-paradoxical ways. While these are extremely difficult to find, certain poems have the appearance of asserting unfettered freedom. For instance, dizain 87 approaches this mark to the extent that the speaker recounts that he freely accepted love. Yet, he is careful in wording the circumstances of his assent: ‘Ce doux grief mal tant longuement souffert/En ma pensée et au lieu le plus tendre,/De mon bon gré au travail m’a offert,/Sans contre Amour aulcunement contendre’ (vv. 1–4, stress mine). The qualifications are striking, especially the passivity. The ‘sweet painful sickness’ of suffering ‘has been offered to me’ ‘without my having fought in any way against Cupid.’ He himself does not actively choose love; rather it is Cupid who offers him this possibility. He does not consent to it or actively embrace it; rather of his own free will (‘de mon bon gré,’ v. 3) he does not in any way fight Cupid. Another poem which appears to exalt the lover’s freedom in an unqualified way is dizain 419 whose first two verses proclaim, ‘Hault est l’effect de la voulenté libre/ Et plus haultain le vouloir de franchise’ (vv. 1–2). However, close examination of these lines shows that they are expressed as impersonal truths detached from personal agency. The lover does not say that he is free. Further, in this dissociation he refers strictly speaking to the effect of free will (‘Hault est l’effect de la voulenté libre,’ v. 1), but again he does not link this effect to his own, personal agency as cause. The same split enunciation occurs in the subsequent line where the lover declares that ‘the will to freedom’ is even loftier than the effect of free will (l’effect de la voulenté libre, v. 2), but in no place in the poem does he say that he personally engages in this willingly. The entire dizain progresses in this fashion where there are analyses of powers and functions which are not the effects of the lover’s agency but of depersonalized laws. If the free acceptance of love is qualified, then the statements about being forced to love are clearly unqualified. In the lover’s eyes Délie rules by fiat, exerting her potentia absoluta over him. Dizain 71 states this unambiguously when the lover asks the Grim Reaper why he cannot be freed

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from a life ‘Sans Coeur, sans Corps, sans Ame’ (v. 8) to which Life-inDeath answers: ‘Puis que tel est le vouloir de ta Dame’ (v. 10). Nor can the speaker escape love psychologically, since as he avows in dizain 263, ‘Pourquoy fuys ainsi vainement celle,/Qui de mon ame a eu la meilleur part?/Quand m’esloingnant, tant à moy suis rebelle,/Que de moy fais, et non d’elle, depart’ (vv. 1–4). In dizain 330, another highly problematic poem, the lover does say that he freely took refuge in another geographical site, but the change of locus will not dissipate his obsessions: ‘Et plus ne veult le jour, mais la nuict suivre,/Car sa lumiere est tousjours en tenebres’ (vv. 9–10).58 If the woman holds him suspended in death-in-life (‘Me detenant, sans mourir, et sans vivre,’ D 56, v. 7), then the lover has already found within himself that ‘En sa beauté gist ma mort, et ma vie’ (D 6, v. 10). As impresa 14 proclaims in a more biblical register (‘Tour Babel’), the woman, like God, is invincible: ‘Contre le ciel ne peult.’ The gloss dizain states that it would be hubris to think that any human effort could resist Délie’s will: ‘Contre le Ciel ne vault deffence humaine’ (v. 10). In spite of this uncomfortable lot the poet-lover is wise enough to name the unbridled pleasure of youth, not as freedom but as ‘licence supreme’ (D 289, v. 7). Occasionally ‘le vouloir de franchise’ (D 419, v. 2) will ally itself with ‘la raison de Scorte’ (v. 6) to attack Cupid’s fortress, but ‘Affection’ (v. 9) will launch a counterattack and deny victory. Confessing that love has subjugated his freedom to the beloved (‘Ma liberté luy a toute asservie,’ D 6, v. 8), the speaker will continually recognize that he remains captive without the possibility of being freed: ‘Que captif suis sans eslargissement’ (D 347, v. 10). Thus, necessity gives the reader one reason (another being vice) why the lover is subject to the evils of wandering and self-deceit, since his desires are deflected by something insuperable and irresistible. It is the function of prudence in the form of practical wisdom to redress the lover’s goals. One can clarify the relation between necessity and prudence by recourse to the poet-lover’s exercise of Stoic principles. With respect to Stoicism, the speaker’s attitude must be carefully nuanced. He does not favour the type of apatheia that would suppress the emotions nor would his motto ‘Souffrir non souffrir’ recommend inner serenity or spiritual peace (euthymia). Though contorted in the paradoxes of freedom and necessity, the poet-lover is nonetheless in agreement with Ronsard’s view of Stoicism: ‘De voulloir du tout, comme les Stoïciens, derraciner hors de l’homme les passions, cela est impossible. Tant que nous aurons foye et coeur, veines, arteres et sang, nous surons des purturbations. Or, de les sçavoir bien modérer et attremper, c’est le faict et vray office des vertus moralles.’59 One

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can place Scève in Ronsard’s camp if by moderation we understand not the Aristotelian mean but the more unstable effort of checking one extreme with its opposite. Only occasionally does one see tranquillity in Délie in rare moments of equipoise such as dizain 434 where separation from the beloved allows reason to evaluate rather than reenact the frustrating struggle with the woman’s ethical rigour. An aspect of Stoicism strongly present in Délie is that prudence can function in conjunction with constraint when fortitude perseveres in mastering the inner self in spite of the outer outcome. Though I do not hold that Divine Providence is an essential aspect of Délie, it is nevertheless true that the lover’s triune goddess requires absolute obedience which is a necessary condition for the growth of virtue. Thus, there is an analogy between the poet-lover’s situation and the belief of ancient Stoics that Divine Providence has made us part of the inexorable chain of causes and effects where virtue’s role is to enhance the powers given by God to fulfil nature’s unfolding. In this case, law and freedom appear to merge. Nor would ancient Stoicism vitiate one’s individuality. Epictetus brought forth the concept of to kata prosopon or proper character in which each individual possesses the freedom and obligation to mould personality according to one’s nature.60 In Délie, this trait of character is a double act of assent and interior enrichment, which are not incompatible with the views of Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Ambrose, Augustine, Petrarch, and Erasmus.61 The Stoic principle at work is that the moral necessity imposed on the lover by Délie does not preclude his freedom to cultivate virtue within and by means of the woman’s strictures. On the contrary, constraints and obstacles rightly perceived and directed can enhance the feelings of triumph and glory: Ce lyen d’or, raiz de toy mon Soleil, Qui par le bras t’asservit Ame, et vie, Detient si fort avec la veue l’oeil, Que ma pensée il t’a toute ravie, Me demonstrant, certes, qu’il me convie A me stiller tout soubz ton habitude. Heureux service en libre servitude, Tu m’apprens donc estre trop plus de gloire, Souffrir pour une en sa mansuetude, Que d’avoir eu de toute aultre victoire. [This link of gold, ray from you my Sun, Who with your arm enslave my Soul and Life,

(D 12)

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So strongly holds my gaze That it has completely drawn my thought to you, Demonstrating to me surely that it is worthwhile For me to put myself under your tutelage. Happy service in willing servitude, You teach me thus that it is much more glorious To suffer for one in her generosity Than to have conquered any other.]

In this beautiful poem the ‘lyen d’or’ (v. 1) is a lock of the beloved’s blond hair that resembles the sun’s rays captivating the lover’s gaze. Like the circular sun that encompasses and ravishes the lover’s thoughts, the strand of golden hair binds and enslaves his soul. Playing on the intertextual image of Petrarch’s ‘noose’ (‘laccio,’ R 96, v. 4) and the bracelet of hair topos,62 the lover intensifies the sensation of sweet servitude by suggesting that Délie’s arm (‘bras,’ v. 2) seizes and steals his life. However, these constraints move him to a change of attitude whereby he finds it worthwhile to put himself under the woman’s tutelage: ‘A me stiller soubz ton habitude’ (v. 6). The infinitive ‘stiller’ connotes that the lover is being pierced with a stylus – Delie’s asperative way of habituating him to a line of acceptable conduct. In literary terms he assimilates and adopts Délie’s style, which is a new mode of living consistent with the beloved’s prison of gold. The circularity of the sun, like a ring or a curl of hair, turns in a circuit which is bounded but infinite. The asperative pain of the stylus gives way to the sweeter motto ‘Heureux service en libre servitude’ (v. 6) proclaiming that under the woman’s discipline, he benefits from her ‘mansuetude’ (v. 6) that assures him victory. The nature of this triumph is a purely moral one signified by the word ‘mansuetude’ whose sweetness and grace are one with a host of virtues such as mercy, generosity, and clemency. The poet-lover admires another Stoic trait, which in Platonism mirrors the Divinity, and that is the imperturbability of Délie. He never achieves that power but his modus operandi is to transform this model into the quest for endurance, which is not an end point of self-sufficiency but the means through which higher love is achieved. The poet-lover is not Justus Lipsius’s ideal stoic practitioner of constantia, that ‘upright and immovable mental strength, which is neither lifted up nor depressed by external or accidental circumstances.’63 At first, it would seem contradictory to say that the poet-lover does not embrace this exact model of constancy in the light of impresa 15 titled ‘La Girouette.’ The picture shows a weathervane flanked by two faces personifying winds blowing against it in opposite

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directions. The motto reads, ‘Mille revoltes ne m’ont encor bougé,’ that is, ‘a thousand turns have not yet budged me.’ In other words there is steadiness in movement, not immovable permanence. The distinction may seem overly subtle, but it is valid when one understands the difference between perfection that is conceived as faultlessness and perfection that is viewed as excellence. The immovable rock is constancy without change. However, the Girouette is constancy through change. It is the latter that better characterizes the poet-lover who perseveres through vacillations and oscillations not merely to persist but to exceed his highest attainments. Under the circumstances, the true symbol of constancy within constraints that rises above expectations is impresa 44. Titled ‘Le Mort ressuscitant,’ it shows a dead man lifting the top of his coffin with the motto, ‘Plus que ne puis,’ that is, ‘I do more than I am able.’ Keeping these Stoic principles in mind, we can examine two other examples of freedom in constraint that involve prudence. These are correction and measurement. Gestures of correction occur when the lover recognizes value in the absolute power of the woman. Necessity is no longer brute compulsion because the lover’s assent turns it into obedience and reformed desire: ‘Mon ame .../Ne se veult plus en aultre travailler’ (D 440, vv. 7, 10). According worth to necessity is also the act of recognizing the truth of all perfection instantiated in Délie’s virtue which commands the world’s admiration: ‘Et la Vertu par reigles non confuses/Ne tend à ce juste debvoir,/Qui nous contraint, non seulement de veoir,/Mais d’adorer toute parfection:/ Il fauldra, que soubz le tien povoir/Ce Monde voyse en admiration’ (D 182, vv. 5–10). The constraint of these ‘reigles non confuses’ is analogous to Augustine’s teachings in De Libero Arbitrio of submission to truth, of acceptance that ‘[God’s] will is my necessity,’64 and of the justice of conforming to right order. Augustine formulates the second point by reasoning to Evodius, ‘And if a stronger thing has control over you, its control is in accordance with proper order, [then] you cannot rightly think that so right an order is unjust.’65 From the above examples it can be seen that if there is any liberum arbitrium in prudence’s converting necessity to value, then it stems from two views of freedom. The first view derives from the tradition of Duns Scotus who stresses voluntarism and liberty of indifference to the degree that freedom would be a spontaneous act of the will. However paradoxical, such voluntarism in Délie can be seen in statements of unqualified, willing sacrifice that are found in dizains 103 and 440 respectively: ‘Je te rendy ma liberté subjecte,/Pour l’affranchir en vivre plus heureux’ (D 103,

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vv. 3–4), and ‘Mon ame .../Ne se veult plus en aultre travailler’ (D 440, vv. 7, 10). The second tributary can be traced to Boethius for whom the unfettered expression of appetite is simply a blind eruption, for as Etienne Gilson says, ‘the option of appetite is a mere blind spontaneity. What makes it free is the critique of reason which judges it, compares the various options, and declares one to be better than the others’ (1991, 312). This view of freedom is more prominent in Délie than the first, and it is characterized by acts of measurement which enable reason to enlighten the will. Most notable in this regard is the lover’s realization that service in recognizing the woman’s generosity is better than conquering any other: ‘Heureux service en libre servitude,/Tu m’apprens donc estre trop plus de gloire,/Souffrir pour une en sa mansuetude,/Que d’avoir eu de toute aultre victoire’ (D 12, vv. 7–10). The poet in the lover attempts carefully to nuance his situation, for mansuetude connotes not only sweetness, but also generous pardon, indulgence, and clemency which are more character building than amorous victories. Another measurement calls upon the lover to look for causes behind his constraints and, in searching deeply into le bien du mal, he finds a rule of moral proportion: just as his ‘sickness’ surpasses all other woes, so its cause inside perseverance exceeds all other value. That cause is Délie, acting as an interior efficient cause, which not only ennobles suffering but enhances his being: ‘Parquoi mon mal en si dure souffrance/Excede en moy moy toutes aultres douleurs,/Comme sa cause en ma perseverance/Surmonte en soy toutes haultes valeurs’ (D 234, vv. 7–10). A third type of measurement to be discussed in more detail in another section, is found in dizain 225, which begins with the line, ‘Libre je vois, et retourne libere’ (v. 1). Throughout this dizain, one learns that such an assertion of freedom can only emerge when the lover summits himself to the greatest constraints. The most conspicuous statement of this position is found in device 33 titled ‘Le chat et la ratiere.’ Here one sees a cat eyeing a rat half-emerging from a rat cage, apparently refusing to come out all the way because, as the motto concludes, ‘La prison m’est dure encore plus liberté.’ The lesson is that freedom is most assured by prudential self-constraint. This point is confirmed by returning to dizain 225 where before taking a course of action, the lover must feel ‘Tout Asseuré, comme Cerf en campaigne’ (v. 2). Then he must deliberate with blind Cupid (‘Amour,’ v. 3), and when he sets off on his path, he must have Virtue as a companion (‘Vertu ... fidele compaigne,’ v. 5). Finally, he must be beyond all suspicion where even in a jury trial, the truth of his innocence would defeat any accusation (v. 8). Measurement therefore brings understanding of intellectual benefits to

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the inevitability of pain and suffering. In Ficino, accounts of ascending the Neoplatonic ladder of being are characterized by joyous discovery and optimism, but in Scève such an ascent is pervaded with Petrarchan obstacles which move from awakening to mental anguish to the edge of death. This is the case in dizain 90 where it seems that the distinction of Délie is to make painful jolting part and parcel of the development of virtue. This mal du bien switches to its opposite upon the discovery of hitherto unknown powers in the lover: ‘Mais (si tu veulx) vertu en toy nommée,/ Agrandissant mes espritz faictz petitz,/De toy, et moy fera la renommée/ Oultrepasser et Granges, et Bethys’ (vv. 7–10). Unlike Plato who believed that he who sees the Good will surely follow it,66 the poet-lover injects a Pauline/Augustinian dimension into the process of knowing which cannot separate seeing from error. However, this enables him to move from the sensory level of experiencing pain to the intellectual level of envisaging perfect suffering: ‘Car si en rien je ne m’en souvenois,/Je ne pourrois sentir douleur parfaicte’ (D 404, vv. 9–10). The purification of seeing and reasoning announced most explicitly in dizain 424 (‘Le voyant l’oeil, aussi l’entendement,/Parfaicte au corps, et en l’ame accomplice,’ vv. 9–10) had already worked an almost voyant quality in dizain 245. Here the lover makes a claim mystical in nature about seeing Délie that distinguishes real life from real death: ‘qui la veoit sans mourir, ne vit point:/Et qui est vif sans la scavoir au Monde,/Et trop plus mort, que si Mort l’avoit point’ (vv. 8–10). If the lover’s inevitable rigours force him to find beatitude in hell (‘Aux bas Enfers trouver beatitude,’ D 3, v. 10), then the heavens through Délie will deify him: ‘Le Ciel voyant la Terre tenebreuse,/Et toute à vice alors se avilissant,/La nous transmit, du bien s’esjouissant,/Qui en faveur d’elle nous deifie’ (D 319, vv. 5–8). In Délie as a whole the lover remains highly sceptical of prudence as foresight. Yet, too much self-imposed caution would render still-born any attempt at action. On the other hand, unfettered freedom is frequently thwarted. Thus, like the rat half way in his trap and half way out, the poetlover seeks his freedom in the constrictions of paradox. Does Fidelity Erode Prudence? The answer is yes best illustrated in impresa 17 L’hyerre et la Muraille, where the wall of faithful friendship is reduced to a craggy chunk of stone by the invasion of ivy. First seen as trust, firmness, and support, the ivy is finally viewed by the lover as dependence on the beloved’s capacity to stir pleasure within him which slowly strangles him to death. Knowing

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full well that ‘fermeté est la clef de ton coeur’ (D 172, v. 10), the speaker is quite aware of the importance and risks of trust. The question of how prudence is undermined by false faith is first stated in dizain 31 as a problem of parasite and host: ‘O vaine foy, ô croire trop leger,/Qui vous reçoit se fait son mortel hoste:/Pour non povoir ce maheur abreger,/Qui le doux bien de liberté nous oste’ (vv. 7–10). Also, as already seen, to the degree that deceptive hope exacerbates improperly formed faith, one can say that prudence is also challenged by the lover’s narcissism when specularity fails to produce a true reflection as in dizain 143’s memory of an ‘illusif songe’ (v. 2). It is certainly true that the poetic voices of women writers as exemplified by Pernette du Guillet and Louise Labé give greater recognition to exchange between lovers. These writers are more generous in acknowledging the extra-mental existence of the other than the narcissistic voices of Petrarch and Scève. Yet in fairness to Délie’s speaker, one must also say that his self-absorption primarily concerns the woman’s impact on his existence and what he owes the beloved in return. The problem of prudence deceived by faith is answered in dizains stressing the value of explicit reciprocity: ‘Tant fut la flamme en nous deux reciproque,/Que mon feu luict, quand le sien clair m’appert’ (D 49, vv. 7–8). The poet-lover is guided by Neoplatonic ideas of the exchange of souls, the return to the source of love, and the androgyne. At one level altruistic reciprocity is the antidote to false trust, but there are cautions. First the lover requires that there be external indices and signs (D 193) to warrant his pursuit of the woman’s ‘foi promise’ (D 198, v. 9), and in strong moral terms before her he testifies to his own merit as being worthy of praise: ‘Chose par temps, et debvoir consacrée/A mon merite en palme de ma gloire’ (D 428, vv. 5–6). Also, there is a ring of charity in the didactic message of dizain 435 which would offer itself as a law: ‘O que doulceur à l’Amant rigoureuse/Me deust ce jour plainement asseurer/La Creature estre en soy bienheureuse,/Qui peult aultruy, tant soit peu, bienheurer’ (vv. 7–10). The most salutary notion is the exchange of je and tu into nous where both individuality and union are achieved. This occurs in dizains 17 and 136, the first showing two different rivers, the ‘Rhosne, et Saone’ (v. 1) joined at the confluence of ‘ferme amour’ (v. 10), and the second praising the lovers’ interchange that ‘Unit double ame en un mesme povoir,’ v. 2). Just as Délie saves the world from ‘ce grand Monstre abatu’ (D 15, v. 7), so the lover as Orphée draws his Euridice ‘Hors des Enfers de l’eternel obly’ (D 445, v. 10). Finally, the speaker feels his bond with Délie to be that of hermaphroditic union: ‘Ne sens je en nous parfaire, en augmentant/ L’hermaphrodite efficace amoureuse?’ (D 435, vv. 5–6). The word ‘effi-

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cace’ connotes that the lover has chosen to emphasize what Ficino called virtue’s ‘operatio’ and what Plato described as the androgyne’s ‘strength and energy’ (Symposium 190b4). This is a distinctly Scevian emphasis, no doubt the desideratum of an often thwarted lover who finally in the last dizain celebrates the harnessing of an ever-growing dialectic of Je and Tu which binds into ‘nous’ (v. 7). Prudence’s Motivators: Honesty, Good Faith, Heroic Reason In dizain 265 the exasperated poet-lover says, ‘Tout temps je tumbe entre espoir, et desir:/Tousjours je suis meslé de doubte, et crainte’ (vv. 1–2). This is a plaint which continues well into the work in poems such as dizain 431 where fear suspends him in the combat between desire and hope which concludes with ‘L’espoir vainquant à la fin desir’ (v. 10).67 The multiple problems spawned by hope continue to dizain 441, so the end of dizain 431 does not settle the matter. Because so much of the lover is dissociated, confounded, and dispersed by the contradictions of his war, prudentia may justly ask, ‘What is the core of moral being, what is the irreducible element of integrity that sustains rational action?’ The answers are honestas, fides, and ragione estraordenaria meaning respectively honour, good faith, and heroic reason. Like his predecessor Lorenzo Valla and his contemporaries such as Niccoló Machiavelli, Francesco Guicciardini, Jean Bodin, Michel de Montaigne, Scève examined the ethical opposition between honestum and utile.68 Two principal sources for this subject were Cicero and Augustine. In the De Inventione, Cicero defines ‘honestum’ as ‘anything that is sought wholly or partly for its own sake ... Everything that in this class is embraced in one meaning and under one name, virtue. Virtue may be defined as a habit of the mind in harmony with reason and the order of nature.’69 According to Cicero, an inseparable but conceptually distinct aspect of honestum is decorum. This may be described as propriety or fitness which should accompany the exercise of moral conduct in general and the cardinal virtues in particular. One who is decorus acts from a prior state of virtue (the honourable) and manifests what is suitable and appropriate to a given act ‘by the order, consistency, and self-control [s/he] imposes upon every word and deed.’70 Cicero distinguishes between honestas and utilitas, the latter meaning expedience, usefulness, or helpfulness, and in his classification of utility, he includes inanimate things (gold and silver), animate things (horses, cattle, oxen), and rational activities (worship of the gods).71 Cicero exercises the greatest efforts to avoid making honestas and utilitas antinomies, but he does main-

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tain that ‘expediency ... must be measured by moral rectitude,’ and that ‘people overturn the fundamental principles established by Nature when they divorce expedience from moral rectitude.’72 Finally, Cicero teaches in De Officiis that a mark of honestas is fides which is translated as ‘good faith.’73 This is consistency between one’s inner life and outward expressions. The practice of this virtue is the cement of human society, and it is especially important in promises, oaths, and as the very ‘foundation of justice’: ‘Fundamentum autem est iustitiae fides’ (I, VII). Augustine heavily relies on Cicero in his distinction between the honourable and the useful. In De diversis questionibus Augustine defines ‘honestum’ as ‘that which is sought for its own sake’ and opposes it to ‘utile’ which is ‘that which is directed to something else.’74 Underlying this contrast is the fundamental moral principle stated in De Libero Arbitrio in a context discussing the worthy life (honestam vitam).75 That is, one is honourable when one prefers the higher, eternal goods to the lesser, temporal goods such as riches, pleasures, physical beauty, and food and drink. Valuing temporal goods for their own sake places the useful over the honourable when it is really eternal law that should govern the order of rational action.76 Broadly speaking there are four manifestations of honestas in Délie that serve as guides and incentives for phronesis. First, the affirmation of honnêteté over utilité is explicitly invoked in a key poem of the work, dizain 15, where the poet-lover as prophet foresees Délie’s messianic mission of preparing her age to defeat Leviathan: ‘Toy seule as fait, que ce vil Siecle avare,/Et aveugle de tout sain jugement,/Contre l’utile ardemment se prepare/Pour l’esbranler à meilleur changement:/Et plus ne hayt l’honneste estrangement,/Commençant jà cheir la vertu’ (vv. 1–6, stress mine). The speaker refers to a number of principles reminiscent of Cicero and Augustine. In more adversative terms than the former, the poet-lover opposes ‘l’honneste’ (v. 5) to ‘l’utile’ (v. 3) by linking honour directly to virtue (v. 6) and by admonishing his contemporaries for their fixation on material gain. The sentiments of Augustine come to play when the poet-lover as prophet teaches that true value is cherishing virtue above greed and wordly possessions, and this can be achieved by ‘honneste estrangement’ (v. 5). This is interior improvement and enrichment through solitude, meditation, and contemplation which enables virtuous souls to calculate Délie’s moral potential. So strong is her power to transform her age that her ethical force is compared to a purificatory and apocalyptic earthquake that shakes the world to its very foundations: ‘esbranler à meilleur changement’ (v. 4).

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A second example of honestas occurs in dizain 47 where the poet-lover treats two issues dealing respectively with the lack of decorum and Augustine’s distinction between frui and uti. In a solitary monologue referring to the beloved in the third person, the speaker chides Délie for not recognizing his honest motives and sincere devotion: ‘M’eust elle dict, aumoins pour sa deffaicte,/Je crains, non toy, mais ton affection:/J’eusse creu lors estre bien satisfaicte/La mienne en elle honneste intention’ (vv. 1–4). In the poet-lover’s view, an insignificant disagreement has produced great alienation in the beloved, causing an egregious disproportion between something of no consequence (‘Pour moins, que rien,’ v. 6) and the ‘grand dissention’ (v. 5) it has caused. According to the speaker, the woman’s fault is her failure to give due consideration to his forbearance and chaste attitude which at the very least should have merited him her favour. The lack of decorum is the ‘grand dissention’ (v. 5) that Délie has unjustly caused because it fails to reciprocate his manifest respect and it punishes the whole of the lover for only a part of his behaviour. Moreover, it is imprudent of the beloved (‘mal caulte,’ v. 7) to fail to appreciate the fact that the lover’s ‘honneste intention’ (v. 4) should outweigh her suspicions. In short, the woman’s conduct, being self-interested, does not fit the situation. In this subtle meditation, the poet-lover’s reproach is suffused with expressions of unselfish love, which no doubt increase in proportion to the beloved’s distance. In lines 7–10, he refers to Augustine’s sentiments when he makes the beloved see that, given his honour, her prudence would have resulted in the ‘fruition’ (v. 8) of love beyond ‘Ambition’ (v. 10): ‘Faulte je dy, d’avoir esté mal caulte/A recevoir du bien fruition,/Qui nous eust faictz aller la teste haulte/Trop plus haultains, que n’est l’Ambition.’ In De Doctrina christiana (I:3), Augustine makes clear that honestum designates things that should be enjoyed (frui) for their own sake, while utile refers to things that are directed to something else. The poet-lover is in effect making the argument that his ‘honneste intention’ (v. 4) shows that he loves Délie for herself and not as a means (utile) for satisfying cupidity. Had Délie trusted him more, they could have together brought higher love to fruition (‘fruition,’ v. 8) with heads held high (‘la teste haulte,’ v. 9) beyond the summits of ‘Ambition’ (v. 10). The wisdom of honestas as the pursuit of virtue for its own sake is shown in another important poem, dizain 413, where the poet-lover reaches a high point of well-being. In a retrospective evaluation of his entire experience with Délie, he discovers that his ‘Honest ardour’ (v. 1) has regenerated his spiritual and physical faculties to pursue the good as his exclusive goal: ‘Car desirant par ceste ardente envie,/De meriter d’estre

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au au seul bien compris,/Raison au fait me rend souffle à la vie,/Vertu au sens, et vigueur aux espritz’ (vv. 7–10). This reenergizing transformation has been accomplished by ‘Honneste ardeur’ (v. 1) which is tantamount to observing the rules of modesty and chastity which, unlike the ravishments of false hope, bring him back to himself with renewed unity and power: ‘Honneste ardeur en un tressainct desir,/Desir honneste en une saincte ardeur,/En chaste esbat, et pudique plaisir/M’ont plus donné et de fortune et d’heur,/Que l’esperance avec faincte grandeur’ (vv. 1–5). It is important to take note of the poet-lover’s moral priority. When primarily pursuing virtue, good fortune emerges as a concomitant of honestas not as its primary goal. The principal objective is higher love in conformity with temperance without which the enduring, beneficial effects that accompany this virtue would be impossible. As Cicero says, ‘Nothing can be expedient which is at the same time morally right; neither can a thing be morally right just because it is expedient, but it is expedient because it is morally right’ (On Duties, Miller translation, 391). Let us now move to the third manifestation of honestas in Délie, which in Cicero’s terminology is fides or good faith.77 While the dizzying oscillations and suspensions catalysed by fear cannot be broken (for this would be the death of le bien du mal), the lover retains his integrity by the inexorable and agonizing adherence to good faith. This is the lover’s tenacious loyalty to the truth of his condition where his acts and words make the greatest attempt to remain in agreement with belief and self-knowledge. As applied to Délie the most precise word for this virtue is honnêteté, and it is used prominently in dizain 299 as the last word of the conclusion: Pour non ainsi te descouvrir soubdain L’entier effect de ce mien triste dueil, Naist le plaisir, qui se meurt par desdain, Comme au besoing n’ayant eu doulx accueil, Et deffaillant la craincte, croist mon vueil, Qui de sa joye en moy se desespere. Donc si par toy, destinée prospsere, Le coeur craintif, (comme tu m’admonestes) Tousjours plus m’ard cependant, qu’il espere, Digne excuse est à mes erreurs honnestes. [That pleasure, which is being killed by disdain, Is born because I do not disclose to you at once The full impact of my sad affliction,

(D 299)

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Just as, in dire straits, not having had sweet welcome But lacking fear, my will increases And despairs of knowing satisfaction. Thus if, prosperous destiny, because of you My fearful heart (as you warn me) Always burns me more than it hopes, It is a worthy excuse for my honest vacillations.]

In this extremely restless poem the lover’s emotions vacillate four times, and at the end, the best that he can claim for his efforts is termed ‘erreurs honnestes’ (v. 10). What does this mean? In spite of the fact that each positive emotion falls into a negative one in a quadruple cycle of reversibility, the lover nevertheless achieves two things. First, he remains unfailingly committed to knowing the truth of these unsettling changes without lying to himself or to Délie. Second, he persists in pursuing his love no matter how tumultuous this may be to his being. Though the intellectual virtue of candour cannot undo the instabilities of emotion, it can nevertheless cast a guiding light on perseverance. In the poem the lover forthrightly avows to Délie that his delay of disclosing pain brings him pleasure, but this is killed by disdainful anger, since the beloved does not grant him good welcome. Because of this pleasure fear has diminished, which allows his freedom of spirit (‘vueil,’ v. 5) to grow only to be withered by the lack of satisfaction. While his destiny allows him to prosper even in spite of his fearful heart, it nevertheless burns more than it hopes. The poet-lover’s style here and in most of Délie is labyrinthine and complicated. However, if we view it as a distracting obscurity, it signals that the speaker is pursuing an ethics of expression which remains relentlessly faithful to following and understanding the abrupt reversals and the unexpected turns (‘erreurs,’ v. 10) of his plight. While the knot of complications grows tighter, it must be observed that it does so by trying to rectify ‘honest errors’ (v. 10). The word ‘honnestes’ implies that the vertiginous turns of vices and virtues are redeemed by a fiduciary bond forged by the lover to act in good faith with the beloved. In dizain 203 the poet-lover had already explicitly vowed this as a New Year’s resolution with full understanding of the woes it would inevitably cause: ‘Car par la foy en si saincte amour ferme/Avecques l’An mes peines recommencent’ (vv. 9–10). Returning to dizain 299, one notes that honnêteté has three auxiliary virtues. The first, alethic, insofar as the poet-lover makes a sincere and self-scouring confession that he must preempt expressions of pain to win pleasure (vv. 1–7). Second, he exercises

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fortitude, since in the virtually deterministic movement through the dire straits of unwelcome and disdain, he gives enduring assent to his complicity with his ‘destinée’ (v. 7) in spite of his timid heart (vv. 8–10). Finally, the poet-lover evinces probity which is a scrupulous if not punctilious respect for rigorous self-examination before the beloved (‘erreurs honnestes,’ v. 10). In Délie’s psychological anatomy probity is fidelity to the distinctive function of the soul (âme), which Saulnier calls ‘l’attention, l’effort tendu’ (1: 237). If fides is a type of honestas dedicated to understanding the truth of one’s condition, then we may justifiably see in the poet-lover what Ebreo in The Philosophy of Love calls ‘extraordinary reason,’ which he distinguishes from ‘ordinary reason.’78 The purpose of the latter is ‘to sustain and preserve men in the good life ... and whatever affords an obstacle to the good life of man is by this reason reprehended and rejected (Book I, 62–3). As opposed to ordinary reason which directs our attention to the fortunes of our own weal, there is extraordinary reason: ‘the purpose of extraordinary reason is attainment of the beloved; and it takes no care for the safeguarding of our own interests, but prefers before them possession of the beloved, even as the best is to be preferred to the good (ibid.). The corresponding expression of ‘heroic reason’ in Délie is given expression in the first part of dizain 151: Aumoins peulx tu en toy imaginer, Quelle est la foy, qu’Amour en mon coeur lye. Car, luy croissant, où il debvroit finer, Tout aultre bien pour le tien elle oblie: Ne pour espoir de mieulx, qui me supplie, Tousjours elle est plus loyalle en sa proeuve.

(D 151, vv. 1–6)

[At least you can imagine in your own mind What is this faithfulness that Love binds inside my heart. For as Love grows, where it ought to end, My faithfulness forgets all other good save yours. Nor even for the hope of spiritual perfection, which prods me on, Does it forsake its loyalty to its own trials.]

In Délie, this is the high pitch of good faith (‘foy,’ v. 2) where ‘extraordinary [heroic] reason’ sees that it will ‘forget all other good save yours’ (v. 4), a perfect match for Ebreo’s definition which, for all that, does not make it perfectly comfortable for the lover. While this statement fulfils the

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conditions for Ebreo’s concept, the poet-lover’s further distinctions make clear why his act surpasses ordinary reason. Not even for the hope of better (‘mieulx,’ v. 5), which still prods him on, will he forsake his loyalty to his own trial. Here Joukovsky glosses ‘mieulx’ as ‘un autre bien’ (1996 edition, 276) while McFarlane translates it as ‘spiritual perfection’ (1966 edition, 415). Thus, the lover states that for no other hope imaginable, even the cultivation of his own betterment, will he separate himself from his trials with Délie. Is this fides or intemperance? What is notable about the fifth verse is that it is virtually identical to the fifth line of dizain 146 (except for the ‘y’ in ‘Ny’ vs ‘Ne’), which bespeaks a similar determination: ‘Ny pour espoir de mieulx, qui me supplie,/Si hault poursuyvre en son cours cessera?/Jamais tel loz son plus ne laissera,/Pour s’amoindre à aultres biens frivoles’ (vv. 5–8). Never will the poet-lover’s honour (‘loz,’ v. 7) abandon its highest good (‘son plus,’ v. 7). In sum, the poet-lover is highly sceptical of prudence as providentia, but while he cannot predict the outer order of outcomes, he can maintain his integrity and prepare himself to wrestle with refractory obstacles. Honestas is a kind of inner vigilance which at its high points in Délie inclines the lover to seek virtue for its own sake, prize moral over material goods, make actions consistent with belief, and sacrifice personal benefits for heroic fidelity to the beloved. It is what remains when all else is stripped away. Reason, Reasoning, and Prudence On the whole, the poet-lover is highly sceptical of reason, although he depends upon it to expose its own contradictions or its connivance with the very passions that he would like it to master. As Cynthia Skenazi has shown, when the poet-lover makes direct reference to ‘raison,’ he is very conscious of its limits and its subversive powers. This is particularly true in such key dizain groupings as 179–84, 388–9, and 433–5 or clusters such as 413, 419, 425, and 448. Summarizing Skenazi’s points, one can say that reason incurs four problems. First, reason and madness tend to be reversible terms, such as we find in Erasmus’s Moriae encomium, which preempt the poet-lover from achieving certainty. Second, reason is a host inhabited by passion, and consequently it is subtly appropriated by love even in its most rigorous deliberations. As Skenazi states, ‘La raison semble récuser la passion, mais en réalité, se fond sur celle-ci’ (1992, 88). Third, given the boomerang-like consequences of the lover’s actions, reason so obsessively plumbs the detours of prudence that it creates vicious circles enervating

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and disaggregating the vital spirits. Finally, one must not forget that the poet-lover displaces his difficulties with reason to games of ingenuity79 where the ludic use of paradox, wit, and enigma, popular during Scève’s time, could express itself in what Coleman has seen as the préciosité of some imprese.80 However, these games have a gravity that belies their superficial levity, for they can border on intellectual lying as in the case of the poet-lover eloquently denying the efficacy of poetic speech. What are the tools of reason with which the poet-lover summons practical action? I have partially answered this question by noting that the poetic sequence is deployed by oppositions to situate the limits and the boundaries of the lover’s war. However, because the problems of reason and reasoning are pivotal in the lover’s trajectory of moral and spiritual progress, they must be given additional treatment. ‘Raison’ in Délie has been succinctly described and defined by Saulnier with exemplary clarity: Elle peut venir inspirer l’homme: et prendre alors, pour guider les cogitations de l’Esprit, le Sens pour ministre, pour instrument fidèle ou infidèle. Mais la nourrice de l’âme peut cesser son office ... l’ennemi de la Raison, c’est Amour, ce n’est pas le Coeur. Et comme il est des coeurs sans amour (c’est le thème du libre avril), il est des esprits sans raison: c’est tout le cas de l’amant douloureux. En leur bataille, quand elle se présente, ils encombrent péniblement, et bien en vain, la Pensée de ‘mille arguments’: puisque c’est toujours l’Amour qui l’emporte, et l’esprit qui se rétracte.81

The Neoplatonic climate that Scève inhabited will give the reader a broader context for some of the uses of reason in Délie. For Ficino, reason (‘ratio’) is the middle part of the soul moving between intellect (‘mens’) above it and ‘idolum’ below it. In his view ‘ratio’ has the freedom to move up and down the chain of being performing such discursive activities as thinking, conjecturing, and solving practical problems relating to identifying substances, causes, and relations. Reason receives the universal principles from ‘mens’ and also animates the ‘idolum’ which contains the natural forces of sense perception and phantasy.82 The scholastic tradition that Scève inherited, and assimilated into parts of Ficino’s system, is also relevant to Délie. For Aquinas, reason is an intellectual virtue standing third in a hierarchy below wisdom and understanding. Reason is scientific knowledge which, in its practical form, serves as prudence. However, it is secondary to understanding, which gives immediate knowledge of first principles. The highest intellectual virtue is ‘sa-

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pientia’ which rules both reason and understanding because it seeks the truth of the last causes and the most perfect objects (Gilson 1956, 262). In Délie ‘raison’ is one of the operations of the human mind, and it therefore interacts with other psychological components. For purposes of analysing the work, one may say that reason is first a set of terms and then a connection of these terms in some logical order to form a judgment. Therefore, one may first consider the contents of the speaker’s mind as a taxonomy of terms – ideas, definitions, concepts, and abstractions – that are partially derived from the evolution of faculty psychology typical of the widely used Renaissance encyclopedia and school manual titled Margarita philosophica. Authored by the German Carthusian Gregor Reisch and published in 1503 in Freiburg, it had roots in scholastic philosophy and was, according to Saulnier, Scève’s ‘aide-mémoire’ (1: 477). In The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy Katharine Park points out that according to faculty psychology, ‘the soul [is] composed of a large number of separate faculties or powers, each directed towards a different object and responsible for a distinct operation.’83 In Reisch’s faculty psychology covering the intellective, sensitive, and vegetative soul and set out in the scholastic style of analytical division and subdivision, one will see the very mirror of Délie, whose poet-lover speaks with similar rigour of analytic articulation, definition, categorization, and subcategorization. Just as Reisch isolates faculties and functions according to category and topic, so does the poet-lover personify semiautonomous psychological structures. Several topics and terms that are addressed in Délie are also treated in the Margarita and, as in Scève’s work, classical and Christian concepts are deployed side by side: ‘ratio’ (843, 876), ‘memoria’ (945, 820), ‘voluntas’ (551, 847), ‘intellectus’ (831–2), ‘cognitio’ (834), ‘senus’ (345), ‘timor’ (935), and ‘imago’ (851). Also found are concupiscible passions (‘desiderium,’ 933, ‘amor,’ 934, ‘misericordia,’ 934, 975) and irascible passions (‘contemptus,’ 935, ‘ira,’ 934, ‘reverentia,’ 935, ‘desperatio,’ 935). In addition, there are the classical intellectual virtues such as ‘sapientia’ (947) and ‘scientia’ (937), the moral virtues such as ‘perseverantia’ (982), and the pivot between moral and intellectual virtues ‘prudentia’ (941). Finally, the theological virtues are listed and glossed (‘Fides,’ Spès,’ ‘Charitas,’ 1010) as well as others that one sees in Délie: ‘magnanimitas’ (979), ‘mansuetudo’ (997), and ‘modestia’ (1008).84 While Aristotle classified prudence as an intellectual virtue, Reisch made practical reason both an intellectual virtue in terms of its essence and a moral virtue in regard to its matter.85 No doubt these same terms per se could be found in any treatise on rational psychology. However, in what concerns ‘raison,’ it bears repeating not

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only that Reisch is one of Scève’s sources but also that both writers share the scholastic method of analysis, definition, and categorization. Given Scève’s predilection for personifying psychological structures, another important intertext of terms is the Roman de la rose. In Délie the lover’s ‘raison’ is enmeshed in the familiar set of ideas, virtues, vices, and passions bequeathed by this great medieval romance. Some of the important allegorical characters found in the Roman are also present in Délie as psychological functions: ‘Amors,’ ‘Venus,’ ‘Vertu,’ ‘Dieu,’ ‘Dangier,’ ‘Souffrance,’ ‘Raison,’ ‘Fortune,’ ‘Narcisse,’ ‘Jalousie,’ ‘Franchise,’ ‘Peur,’ ‘Peor,’ ‘Biautez,’ ‘Avarice,’ ‘Envie,’ ‘Haïne,’ ‘Leece,’ ‘Jeunesse,’ ‘Pitié,’ ‘Male Bouche,’ ‘Dieu.’86 However, while the Roman de la rose delimits these terms to specifically defined, cultural roles, Délie creates enormous polyvalence by lending its psychological structures unlimited virtualities which spawn multiple complications. One of the paradoxes of the poet-lover’s discourse is that he lays out his psychological terms in the manner of scholastic faculty psychology but a number of these terms stem from Plato or the Neoplatonic tradition: ‘Saincte Union’ (D 134, v. 1), ‘Siecle Platonique’ (D 367, v. 1), ‘L’hermaphrodite’ (D 435, v. 6), ‘sage Diotime’ (D 439, v. 9), Platonic cosmology (‘Le Naturant par ses haultes Idées,’ D 2, v. 1), ascetic untying from the body (‘soy mesmes oblyer,’ D 278, v. 2), aesthetic ecstasis (‘L’esprit ravy d’vn si doulx sentiment,’ D 168, v. 3), and divine music (‘Me ravissant ta divine harmonie,’ D 157, v. 1). At certain points rational analysis stifles spiritual ascent with ever-spawning arguments (‘Doncques apres mille travaulx, et mille .../Je n’auray eu, que mort, et vitupere,’ D 441, vv. 1, 6) or makes the memory of ascent violently painful (‘Ta beaulté fut premier, et doulx Tyrant,/Qui m’arresta treviolement,’ D 306, vv. 1–2). In Délie, when the constituent faculties of the mind confront the obstacles to love, reasoning occurs. In a philosophical sense this means that reason brings together terms to make predications and to form judgments. The properly philosophical question is ‘What modes of reason does the lover use to assess, to understand, or to plumb such encounters between the mind and its difficulties?’ One way to investigate this matter is to begin with logic where the poet-lover reverts to dialectic, syllogism, and analogy. Reasoning As Dialectic The origin of the word dialectic is the Greek dialegein meaning ‘to argue’ or ‘to converse.’ Aristotle and others often give it the sense of ‘to argue

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for a conclusion,’ or ‘to establish by argument,’ but distinguish between dialectical argument whose premises are merely reputable and demonstration (apodeixis) which are true, primary, and scientific. In Plato’s time, if not earlier, it had the more technical sense of a kind of argumentation conducted through question and answer.87 Paul Foulquié points out that the substantive lovgo~ derived from levgw gives two possible meanings: ‘parole’ or ‘discours’ and ‘raison.’88 In The Development of Logic by William and Martha Kneale the authors make clear that a definition of Plato’s notion of dialectic depends on Plato’s intellectual evolution. The authors maintain that ‘in the middle period it [dialectic] is the hypothetical method of refutation together with some mysterious positive addition, while in the later period it is the method of division and collection’ (1991, 10). Taking all of Plato’s works into account, I would agree with Kneale and Kneale’s definition of dialectic as ‘a method of argument involving refutation but leading eventually to positive results of high generality’ (1991, 9). The particular forms that dialectic has taken over history include the methods of refutation by contradiction, logical analysis of genera into species, logical reasoning or debate based on probable premises, formal logic, logical illusion when reason encounters contradiction trying to venture beyond experience, and the development of thought or reality through obstacles and sublations.89 Thus, dialectic cannot be a priori divorced from syllogistic reasoning. In so far as Délie adapts formal meditation and Platonic dialogue to its own form of interior dialogue and debate, it is helpful to remember that the poetic rhetoric of dialectic, often the vehicle for philosophical dialectic, derives in the European tradition from Catullus’s Odi et amo, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Petrarch’s Rime, who cultivated figures of paradox, oxymoron, antithesis, and contradiction (Weber 1955, 163–7). It is now appropriate to identify the forms of dialectic that animate introspection. The poet-lover’s most important finding about dialectic is that it is not only a logical method but a metaphysical reality. This is the notion derived from Heraclitus that the order of the cosmos is the union of opposites.90 For the Greek philosopher cosmological concord sustains itself through mutual tensions, such as the string of a bow or the attunement of a lyre.91 Heraclitus teaches that hot and cold, wet and dry are necessary oppositions. Without one contrary, the other would not exist, nor the cosmos: – The death of fire is birth for air, and the death of air is birth for water. – One cannot step twice into the same river. – The name of the bow is life; its work is death.

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Immortals are mortal, mortals immortal. The beginning and the end are shared in the circumference of a circle. The way up and down is one and the same. Graspings: wholes and not wholes, convergent divergent, consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one thing all.92

Studying Heraclitus’s major principles, Herbert Granger informs us that the strife of opposites makes necessary that ‘no opposite can be valued to the exclusion of its counterpart’ and in these opposing powers, connections lie unseen and obscure, ultimately relating death to life.93 Consistent with this philosophy, especially the fire/water oppositions, is the last illustration in Délie which recapitulates the work as a whole with the motto ‘Apres la mort ma guerre encor me syut,’ which is inscribed around the lover’s coffin. The gloss dizain explains the device in eminently Heracletean terms: Si tu t’enquiers pourquoy sur mon tombeau L’on auroit mys deux elementz contraires, Comme tu voys estre le feu, et l’eau Entre elementz les deux plus adversaires: Je t’advertis, qu’ilz sont tresnecessaires Pour te monstrer par signes evidentz, Que si en moy ont esté residentz Larmes et feu, bataille asprement rude: Qu’apres ma mort encores cy dedens Je pleure, et ars pour ton ingratitude.

(D 447)

[If you ask why two contrary elements, Such as fire and water, The two most opposite of elements, Will have been placed on my tomb, I will tell you that they are most essential To show you, by obvious signs, That, if tears and fire, which in a bitterly harsh battle, Have been residing in me, After my death I still weep and burn Inside here because of your ingratitude.]

Nicholas of Cusa inherited the idea of the coexistence of contraries but transformed it in both humanistic and metaphysical terms.94 As we have

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already seen, the lover progresses through his trial by means of the dialectic le bien du mal/le mal du bien where the expansion of knowledge is predicated on the challenges set before the mind through conflict, strife, and suffering. In this formula the positive term is not only opposed to the negative, but also must necessarily contend with the negative to realize itself. Cusa’s humanism is compatible with and conducive to the poetlover’s views regarding the unfolding of time. According to the German philosopher, God is the absolute maximum containing all things that he calls an enfolding (‘complicatio’). Since the individual is the microcosm of the divine, s/he cooperates with God as a second creator through the limitless unfolding (‘explicatio’) of efforts which become instruments of knowledge.95 The metaphysical dimension of Cusa which fits the dialectical thought process of the poet-lover is that, while reason depends on resolving a contradiction, one may neverthless overcome this logical problem by an intellectual synthesis that views the Divinity as the coexistence of contraries: the absolute maximum (fullness of perfection) and the absolute minimum (beyond degree). In Délie the lover engages in constant dialectical play with the concepts of maximum and minimum concerning time and space, and this dialectic is exercised to comprehend both his suffering and Délie’s nature. In dizain 114 the speaker reckons that his pain not only occupies but wears down both the vast expanse of time and the small instant of time (Coleman 1975, 108): O ans, ô moys, sepmaines, jours, et heures, O intervalle, ô minute, ô moment, Qui consumez les durtez, voire seures, Sans que l’on puisse appercevoir comment, Ne sentez-vous, que ce mien doulx tourment Vous use en moy, et vos forces deçoit?

(D 114, vv. 1–6)

[O years, O months, weeks, days and hours, O interval, O minute, O moment, You who consume life’s truly harsh cruelties Without our knowing how, Do you not know that my so sweet torment Consumes you in me and wastes your forces?]

Consumed by suffering, the lover’s suffering consumes time, giving a power of persistence described not as the Christian hell but as the exis-

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tential will to endure. If in this poem the lover understands the negative maximum (‘O ans,’ v. 1) and minimum (‘ô moment,’ v. 2) as one temporal experience, dizain 259, in praise of Délie, seizes the positive of these two extremes in spatial terms. De toute Mer tout long, et large espace, De Terre aussi tout tournoyant circuit, Des Montz tout terme en forme haulte, et basse, Tout lieu distant, du jour et de la nuict, Tout intervalle, ô qui par trop me nuyt, Seront rempliz de ta doulce rigueur.

(D 259, vv. 1–6)

[Every Sea’s length and breadth, Earth’s every perimeter, The Mountains’ every boundary, whether high or low, Every distant place, the day’s and night’s Every interval which does me such harm, Will be filled with your sweet severity.]

The lover, taking the compass in hand, views Délie as regulating both the maximum and the minimum of creation as a reflection of both her microcosmic presence as a woman and her macropresence as a goddess. Everything is ‘filled’ (v. 6) with the beloved’s sweet rigour, and literally nothing is left out, including all ‘intervalle’ (v. 5). Line 7 of this poem (‘Ainsi passant des Siecles la longueur’) gives a temporal dimension to space which mirrors the religious realm, for such figures as Augustine picture the Divinity as a perpetual and omnipresent force of order and conservation.96 The third form of dialectic practised by the poet-lover is the agon. In ancient Greek culture the word agon denoted not only athletic events and dramatized debates, but also competitive struggles in philosophical, legal, military, and public argumentation.97 As seen in chapters 1 and 2 the agon is the physics of meditative action causing a contest of moral ideas. It has many functions in Délie, the most important of which is to energize the introspective movement of memory, understanding, and will to pose a problem, sharpen its terms, and arrive at a resolution. No less important is the fact that the poet-lover uses the agonistic method to provide himself with a locus, a personal presence, and a meaningful history through which he can develop a habitus of virtue. In addition, the agon is an agent of integrity in the sense that it will not rest unless it spurs perseverance to flesh out the most intractable problems.

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As seen in dizain 143 the agon can complicate and paralyse reason by spawning ‘mille argumentz’ (D 183, v. 1). Here it is useful to make a distinction regarding polyvalence. Often Scève is compared with Mallarmé in virtue of their poetics of symbolic polyvalence. This is valid only to a certain point. While the plurality of meanings in the latter is an aesthetic replacement for the metaphysical void, in Délie the multiplication of meanings is the proliferation of faculty psychology effects endlessly generated by the war of love. This ever-burgeoning mitosis of psychological reactions is especially apparent in dizain 143 where, in the complications of love, the faculties of ‘âme’ (v. 1), ‘esprit’ (v. 6), ‘pensée’ (v. 9), and ‘memoyre’ (v. 3) generated innumerable imbalances, antagonisms, and deceptions until frozen in admiration of Délie. Mallarmé is threatened by the thought that metaphysical existence has little or no meaning, while Scève contends with overwhelming meaning.98 The fourth type of dialectic in Délie is the Platonic ascent where reason raises itself from the knowledge of the body, to the virtues of the soul, to the intellectual vision of the ideas culminating in the beatitude of God. This is a very problematic issue in the work, first because the poet-lover can sometimes attain these levels but only in highly qualified ways, and second because there is nothing like a sustained and uninterrupted progession to the divine traversing the work. If the model of ascent were that based on Plato, then this model would have certain requirements. First, Platonic dialogue is a refusal to remain at rest, and it seeks, as Paul Foulquié says, ‘un dépassement de la donnée première.’99 Unlike Aristotle’s notion of dialectic as probable knowledge and of syllogistic knowledge as validity, Platonic dialectic is continual striving for truth. Second, Platonic dialectic is kindled by contradictions which are used as instruments to higher knowledge. Third, there is both a conserving and a progressing character in Platonic dialectic where problems at a lower level are absorbed by understanding at a higher level. In other words, contradiction leads to clarity of distinction (diairesis) and vision of the whole (synopsis). At the same time, the mind comes to know the reciprocal and common determination of ideas (koinonia) and the unity of type (eide). Fourth, intermediate concepts converge to elucidate and establish intervening bonds where separates are joined (metaxy). In this stage the knowledge of separate ideas moves to the realization that one separate idea is present in another. The highest good for Plato rises above all presuppositions. It is mystical in certain respects because it achieves a level of awareness beyond the opposites of being and non-being, which I understand to be the Deiform.100

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To be precise about dialectic in Délie one must put it to the test by comparing it with the contemporary model of Ficino. While the Italian philosopher came to Christianize Plato, his methods are very similar to the Platonic schema. According to the Commentarium, the lover ascends through four gradations of beauty – from the body to the soul to the angelic mind and to the One or God: ‘A corpore in animam, ab anima in angelum, ab angelo reduict in deum’ (VI:15, p. 230). The One, being divine perfection, has no composition or parts and remains above motion and space. The angelic mind, although having a number of forms, is nevertheless exempt from motion and space. The soul participates in temporal existence and is altered by its primary operations of reason and appetite. However, it is not restricted to space. The body, however, is subject to all these limitations but is the starting point for the recognition of divine beauty (VI:15). It is the lover’s attraction to ideal beauty that draws his soul upwards through these four stages. The noble senses – the eyes and the ears – are roused by corporeal beauty. However, the love that they perceive is neither of parts nor of specific bodies, but rather of an idea of harmony that organizes the various components. From external beauty the lover is drawn still higher to supraphysical beauty which radiates invisibly from the soul. This is truth. Truth manifests itself as individual powers of the soul called virtues. Thus it is that the lover freely moves to possess the moral virtues (justice, courage, and temperance) and then the higher powers, the intellectual virtues (wisdom, knowledge, and prudence). The human soul cannot be the object of ethical finality because it is susceptible to the perturbations of the body (VI:18). The lover then rises to the contemplation of the archetypes of beauty that are immune from the temporal influences. These are contained in the Angelic Mind which is eternal and unchanging. While the Angelic Mind is not bound to place, has no divisions, and does not move in temporal progression, it does contain number. Having within itself the multitude of ideas, it is not pure and simple. It is the infinite beauty and the perfect unity of the one that the lover ultimately desires, since it is free of all material, temporal, and spatial limitation, and has no plurality (VI:17). The lover must above all be faithful to the vision of the whole, the source of beauty and love: Fons itaque totius pulchritudinis deus est. Fons ergo totius amoris est deus. Lumen preterea Solis in aqua umbra quedam est ad clarius eiusdem lumen in aere. Splendor in aere, umbra similiter ad eiusdem in igne fulgorem, fulgor in igne, umbra ad lucem Solis eodem ipso in Sole fulgentem. (VI:17)101

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As Ficino says, whoever devotes himself to the one finally recovers himself in it, returning through beatitude to his own idea through which he was created: ‘Nempe ad suam, per quam creatus est, redibit ideam’ (VI:19). Though we should not expect the poet-lover to express his ascent as a literal transposition of Plato and Ficino, the criteria just reviewed will enable the reader better to contrast Délie’s Neoplatonism with that of its predecessors. For this purpose let us examine dizain 306 whose Platonic resonance has attracted many critics, such as Festugière, Saulnier, Staub, and Roubichou-Stretz. Ta beaulté fut premier, et doulx Tyrant, Qui m’arresta tresviolentement: Ta grace apres peu à peu m’attirant, M’endormit tout en son enchantement: Dont assoupy d’un tel contentement, N’avois de toy, ny de moy cognoissance. Mais ta vertu par sa haulte puissance M’esveilla lors du sommeil paresseux, Auquel Amour par aveugle ignorance M’espovantoit de maint songe angoisseux.

(D 306)

[Your beauty was the first sweet Tyrant That arrested me with great violence, Your grace, afterwards, little by little attracting me, Lulled me completely into its enchantment, In which, dozing in complete contentment I had no knowledge of you or of myself. But your virtue with its lofty power Awakened me then from the slothful sleep In which Cupid, by blind ignorance, Terrified me with many an anxiety-laden dream.]

As a dialectical ascent the poet-lover is drawn through three distinct stages, each serving as the impetus to the next, while the highest is predicated on the first two. First, love is registered as a ‘Tyrant’ that abrupty arrests the lover’s being and fixes him on the corporeal beauty of Délie (vv. 1–2). Second, the beloved’s ‘grace’ (v. 3) slowly but surely lulls the lover into a dreamy enchantment that Hans Staub has called ‘une sorte d’heureuse somnolence’ (1967, 65). To determine what grace is, one must study the sources. Saulnier is inclined to view grace as an extension of

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physical beauty into the social realm: ‘bon accueil et bienveillance courtoise’ (1:245). However, Ficino himself sees grace as a twofold action in accordance with Thomistic principles, i.e., that beauty is a grace infused in the soul by God, but also, that a soul intrinsically has grace that mirrors God. That is, grace is a beauty infused by God, but the soul, in virtue of its own nature, prepares itself to receive grace by properly ordering its powers (Commentary, 14, 95). Be that as it may, this grace lulls the lover into a sleep (‘assoupy,’ v. 5) in which he has knowledge neither of himself nor of Délie (v. 6). In the third stage, the beloved’s ‘vertu’ (v. 7) awakens the lover from his slothful sleep (‘du sommeil paresseux,’ v. 8) in which ‘Amour’ (v. 9) had plunged him. Love here is very much like eros rather than anteros, since the lover describes it as a terrifying condition laden with many an anxiety-provoking dream (v. 10). Having reached the end of the poem, the reader may very well wonder to what stage the lover has acceeded. Certainly there is a distinct movement which conforms to Ficino’s level of virtues. Yet, the lover stresses not the types of virtues per se but their power (‘puissance,’ v. 7) without further allusion to the Angelic Mind or to God. Optimistically Festugière summarizes this poem by saying, ‘Dans ce dizain assez ferme, Scève marque avec une grande précision les diverses étapes de cette ascension ... Le poète a aimé d’abord la beauté extérieure, puis la beauté intérieure, la grâce de l’âme, enfin la Vertu même dont cette grâce était le signe: il ne la quittera plus.’102 To appreciate better how, in fact, Délie’s poet-lover differs from Festugière’s account, it will be necessary to nuance and qualify the precise characteristics of the lover’s ascent by comparing the lover’s poem to Ficino’s accounts of ascent in the Commentarium. In the poem there is discordance between the lover’s successful ascent (from body to soul to grace to virtue), and his dissociated, emotional reaction to enhanced virtue. For each positive step in the ascent, there is an even stronger, negative response to what has been gained. How does this contrast with Ficino? Outside the chapters concerning the Platonic ascension to the One, the Italian author may empathize with the trials of love, such as the cahier de doléances that he records for the newly smitten lover: ‘O cruel lot of lovers! O life more wretched than any death, unless perhaps your soul, snatched out of its own body by this violence of love ... will betake itself to the temple of the divine splendour.’103 However, in the four different modes of ascent that he gives, Ficino’s own reactions to what he speaks of are irrepressibly positive, if we take the banqueters to be his porte-parole. In speech 6, chapter 18, which bears the strongest resemblance to dizain 30, Tommaso Benci invites the guests to imagine Dotima’s address to

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Socrates in Plato’s Symposium. It is titled ‘How the Soul is Raised from the Beauty of the Body to the Beauty of God,’ which concludes with Diotima’s rousing entreaty to Socrates: ‘Therefore, I beg you, O Socrates, to love other things with a certain moderation and limit, but to love God with an infinite love, and let there be no moderation in divine love’ (VI:18).104 In speech 6, chapter 17, the speaker cannot restrain himself from revelling in the ascent, such that for each new stage there is a corresponding emotional reaction of discovery and joy: ‘The beauty of the Body you can obviously see. Do you want to see the beauty of the Soul also?’105 In VI:15, we witness an exuberant speaker exhorting the group to behold the Angelic Mind: ‘You see, then, how great and how varied are the multiplicity and compositeness in the Angel.’106 In speech 4: chapter 6, it is Cristoforo Landino who takes the floor as an optimistic teacherprophet who instructs his symposiasts by saying, ‘Certainly to know Him [God] truly in this life is completely impossible. But to love Him truly in whatever way He is known is both possible and easy.’107 My final example is taken from the opening of the same chapter which shows an expansive Cristoforo Landino appealing to his colleagues to make haste to prepare themselves to receive God: ‘Make propitious to yourselves, distinguished guests, by every kind of sacrifice, this god who, Aristophanes says, is kind to the human race above the other gods. Invoke him with pious prayers; embrace him with all your heart.’108 Unlike the discourse of Ficino’s symposiasts, where there is a correlation between the level of ascent and the positive emotional reaction, in Délie’s dizain 306 there is an opposite procedure of a negative response to an enhanced level of intellectual attainment. Beauty is a very violent tyrant (vv. 1–2). The beloved’s grace lulls the poet-lover into an enchanted sleep that deadens his self-knowledge and that of the beloved (vv. 4–6). In this sleep Love (‘Amour,’ v. 9) through its custumary blind ignorance, alienates the poet-lover with terror and fright, only to awaken him bruskly to Délie’s powerful virtue (vv. 7–10). Thus, in ascending each moral step of progress the lover falls in his emotional reaction. Second this inverse relation is compounded by the dispositio of the poem. There are, broadly speaking, two types of events in the dizain – those that mark each of the three steps of the ascent to virtue and those that mark the lover’s emotional changes and reactions to each step. Let us call the first the moral-progress event and the second the affective-reaction event. If we take the order in which the dizain presents these events, the three moral-progress events (‘beaulté,’ v. 1, ‘grace,’ v. 3, and ‘vertu,’ v. 7) are invariably accompanied by the affective-events. However, important

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distinctions are in order. Tracing the presentation of the moral-progress events, we find that the last moral-progress event is the speaker’s being awakened by ‘vertu’ (v. 7), and the last affective-reaction event is placed two lines later (vv. 9–10). Therefore, it is not the moral progress event that is given the privileged act of concluding the poem but the lover’s negative, emotional reaction to the frightening dream that had been induced by ‘Amour.’ In other words, the dizain expresses the lover’s unequal control of his being, a being that he himself divides by the antidialectical division of moral event and affective event. This refers us to Plato’s charioteer who allows the horse of appetite and fancy to dominate the horse of reason.109 Third, unlike Ficino the lover stresses necessity rather than freedom and recounts the ascent as a series of forces acting on his otherwise passive soul: beauty ‘m’arresta tresviolentement’ (vv. 1–2) and grace ‘m’attirant, /m’endormit’ (vv. 3–4). From this point the lover is ‘assoupy’ (v. 5) and awakened by virtue (‘esveilla lors du sommeil paresseux’ (v. 8) after Love terrified him (‘M’espovantoit,’ v. 10). There is simply no gesture of selfmovement, not even of ascent. While it was typical in the Renaissance to view love as a kind of mystical magnet, the lover’s passivity flatly contradicts Ficino’s prescription that reason’s distinction is freedom. For eample, Kristeller notes: In Ficino’s thought, ratio means the capacity of the soul to act in a different way, intellectually or empirically ... In contrast to other parts of the soul, it is not bound to any established order, and hence, it is the only one that is free. The peculiarity of the human Soul consists in its liberty and in the variety of its possibilities, therefore ratio is the essential and characteristic part of the soul ... (374)

As we have seen, the lover stresses not the awakening provoked by virtue, but the dream which had stolen his rationality. The reader is therefore left wondering about what conceivable role freedom may have in the unfolding of the ascent. It seems that what is left of self-determination is the sense that the poet-lover can only perform a retroactive analysis of what he could not master. That is, he analyses two necessities – the power of virtue and the force of dreams. If the lover exercises any judgment in weighing one of these imposed conditions over the other, then he does emphasizes his ‘songe’ (v. 10) at the expense of higher virtue whose positive effects (‘haulte,’ v. 7) retrospectively fade in the last two lines. Thus, the reader may ask, ‘How transitory is the moment of virtue?’ Unfortunately, critics wishing to emphasize the triumphal side of the

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movement will invert the lover’s own rhetorical procedure by favouring the moral-progress events over the affective-response events and the disturbing finale. For example, Roubichou-Stretz, who is otherwise perceptive and well informed, summarizes this poem by commenting, ‘Le dizain CCCVI retrace l’évolution de l’amour du poète suivant un schéma strictement platonicien ... [il] nous éclaire donc sur le dessein épistémologique de la Délie et nous fait prendre conscience de son itinéraire spiritual: de l’ignorance aveugle vers la conaissance de soi et de l’autre’ (1973, 84). Yet, close attention to the lover’s discourse shows that it differs substantially from Plato and Ficino in its emphasis on apparently anti-Platonic traits: necessity, automatic response, ravishing dream, and the unshakable, retroactive memory of eros’s derangements. A fourth aspect about the lover’s ascent which differs from both Plato and Ficino is that while there is much diairesis understood as distinction, there is little or no metaxy in which intermediate levels of understanding interpenetrate and mutually share levels of participation in beauty. The poet-lover evinces hyperarticulated and abrupt changes of awareness from violent wakefulness to hypnotic captivation to dreamy enchantment to an utter lack of consciousness (v. 6). These sudden changes of state are more named and analysed than synthesized into mutually cooperative transitions. Nor is the poet-lover prepared to make the passage from sleep to the higer level of virtue, since he says only that, at the next point in his consciousness, virtue ‘m’esveilla’ (v. 8). In other words, there is an obscuring of the whole, an agitated and lurching quality to his moral movement. Fifth, the lover in dizain 306 typically registers the brute power, force, and strength of Délie’s virtue as ‘haulte puissance’ (v. 7) as if efficacy and power (‘operatio’ in Ficino) were more important than the essentia of the soul. Here one must return to the first line where beauty is epitomized as a ‘doulx Tyrant’ (v. 1) whose theft is so quick that even the usually energetic agon has disappeared from discourse. The agon, which customarily provides the lover with a personal history, is elided by the impersonal force of the tyrant. Finally, while the changes that the lover undergoes are highly articulated, there is simply no synopsis, or vision of the whole. Not only is there a lack of koinonia (Pato’s notion of the common and reciprocal determination of ideas), and abrupt leaps where transitional or intermediary concepts link up (metaxy), but there is no mention or reference to the Angelic Mind or God. On the contrary, it would seem that the lover has stressed the scholastic trait of making distinctions, of seeking to analyse both his ascent and its emotional obstacles with equal doggedness, at the expense

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of synthesis. Ironically, Platonic vocabulary charts a rising fall by allowing the love of differences and analysis to give equal attention to two unequal moral values – the moral ascent and its concomitant affective problems. Compounding this is the charioteer’s unequal handling of his two horses. Instead of culminating in the high point of participation with the divine, the lover betrays a certain narcissism in concluding with a mirror of his own false mirror, a second anguished dream conjured by Love. In this ascent synthesis serves and stages analysis, and by turning the envelope inside out, inverts Platonic values by creating a fall in an ascent. Syllogistic Reasoning and Argument by Analogy The poetry of Délie often elicits comments about its striking logical articulations. It is also true that the speaker challenges his own logical assumptions in order to bring to light false premises, irreducibly mixed categories, tensions between reason and rhetoric, and quite simply the state of health of all virtues that may help or hinder reason. I do not mean to imply that Délie is merely logical argument with rhyme. That would make it very poor poetry, indeed. However, given the lover’s scepticism, it will be necessary to observe how the syllogism and argument by analogy are part of an overall rhetorical method of probing the strengths and vulnerabilities of reason. Pierre de la Ramée, Scève’s contemporary and author of Dialectique (1555), illustrated various types of syllogisms by extrapolating them from the works of Homer, Virgil, Cicero, Ovid, Juvenal, Terence, Pasquier, and Ronsard.110 I will follow the same procedure by using Délie as my literary source for examining syllogisms. In this regard, I will make a few observations about logic in Délie, focusing on dizains 234, 60, and 179. The first concerns the relation between hope and desire. Tout desir est dessus espoir fondé: Mon esperance est, certes, l’impossible, En mon concept si fermement sondé, Qu’à peine suis je en mon travail passible. Voy donc, comment il est en moy possible, Que paix se trouve avecques asseurance? Parquoy mon mal en si dure souffrance Excede en moy toutes aultres douleurs, Comme sa cause en ma perseverance Surmonte en soy toutes haultes valeurs.

(D 234)

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[All desire is based on hope. My hope is surely impossible, And has been so thoroughly investigated in my understanding That I am scarcely likely to suffer in my travail. Do you see then how I am able To find assured peace in myself? Wherefore my sickness exceeds In harsh suffering all other woes, Just as its cause inside my perseverance Surpasses in itself all noble values.]

The poem is highly articulated with the rhetoric of demonstration observable from the premise-like syntax of line 1, the words ‘certes’ (v. 2) and ‘donc’ (v. 5), the logical ligature ‘Parquoy’ (v. 7), and the logical intensifier ‘concept si fermement sondé’ (v. 3). Also, one will note the carefully drawn, four-term analogy structuring the last four lines. In addition to these surface traits it is the dispositio of the poem which outlines its syllogistic organization. Commenting on the first four lines of this dizain, Françoise Joukovsky says, ‘Ce début repose sur un syllogisme. Le désir est fondé sur l’espoir. Or mon espoir se réduit à la conscience de l’impossibilité; n’ayant pas d’espoir, je suis à peine susceptible d’éprouver du désir’ (1996 edition, 304). I would like to formalize Joukovsky’s observation in a three step movement: All desire requires hope. I have no hope. Therefore, I have no desire. This syllogism would be a fair way to formalize the poet-lover’s implied premises and conclusion in lines 1–2. The second logical articulation of this poem is based on an analogy which is an argument addressed directly to Délie. It begins with ‘Voy donc’ (v. 5) and ends with the four term analogy concluding the dizain (vv. 7–10). In this poem I will first comment on analogy and then move to syllogism. The various concepts of analogy came to modern logicians through problems encountered by the Pythagoreans, Eudoxus, and Euclid.111 The study of analogy was developed by Aristotle and became integrated into Aquinas’s theological metaphysics concerning the attributes of God. In

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the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Cajetan (Thomas de Vio) wrote a commentary on Thomas’s Summa that injected originality into natural theology by showing how analogical reasoning could avoid being equivocal when applied to God.112 Three concepts of analogy developed by Aristotle and Aquinas are particularly useful and durable. Since in Délie we are dealing with the relations between the divine and his creatures, it is appropriate to enlist Aquinas’s notions of analogy. Analogy is based on the assumption of resemblance between two or more entities, and there are three posssibilities for comparison. Meaning may be univocal (true of many in exactly the same sense), equivocal (two or more completely different senses), or analogous (that which is the same in difference, but not completely different or the same). In the Thomistic scheme there is only one-way likeness in relation to God, the creature being like the Creator but not the reverse. Aquinas distinguished three sorts of analogy.113 The first is a one-to-one relation where one thing is directly related to another, as healthy food is to a healthy person. The second is a many-to-one relation where things may not be directly related to one another, but may be variously related to a common third. Thus, the term ‘healthy’ can be predicated of a dog and food, but the dog has health in the primary sense and its food only secondarily as contributing to the dog’s health. This many-to-one relation has also been termed analogy of attribution.114 The final type of analogy is termed analogy of proportionality which is a many-to-many relation where there is no direct one-to one relation or common third, but rather a similarity of proportion between pairs of diverse things. For example, light is to vision as intellect is to truth, for by means of one kind of seeing, one comprehends another type of seeing. This may be thought of as a four-term analogy. To draw out the implications of the syllogism and to persuade Délie of the depth of his ‘mal’ (v. 7), the lover summons an analogy of proportion. This takes place in the last four lines of the poem where to paraphrase his words, he says, ‘Wherefore my harm in such harsh suffering/Exceeds in me all other pains,/Just as its cause [Délie] in my perseverance/Surpasses in itself all other high values.’ Thus, the lover has constructed a many-tomany analogy composed of four terms brought together by the notions of exceeding and surpassing. Harm (‘mal,’ v. 7) exceeds pain (‘douleurs,’ v. 8) as its cause [Délie] surpasses all other high values (‘haultes valeurs,’ v. 10). In fact, this is a six-term analogy when one considers that harm itself is stressed as a kind of suffering (‘en si dure souffrance,’ v. 7) which is compared to an interior cause as a kind of perseverance (‘en ma perseverance,’

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v. 9). Finally, in attending to the lover’s careful symmetry, the reader must take into account two more terms. The poet-lover wishes to emphasize the idea of where or locus, but in a contrastive way. The suffering which exceeds pain in himself (‘en moy,’ v. 5) is correlated to the cause [Délie] that surpasses in itself (‘en soy,’ v. 10) all other high values. What are the positive functions of syllogism and analogy? The lover’s frustration pushes him to find light in reason to explain his abyss and revaluate his standing with the beloved. The syllogism if valid is irrefutable. Quite simply, since desire requires hope, and the lover’s hope is dashed, so is desire dashed. This formulation is equivalent to the poet-lover’s emotional statement calling hope ‘l’impossible’ (v. 2). Analogy, in turn, takes up the redemptive aspect of this checkmate. This is the poet-lover’s knowledge that his suffering is proportionate to Délie’s immeasurable value. The curative power of this realization is given strength by the recourse to analogy. The positive aspect of suffering is indicated in the last part of the poem by the inspiring vision of Délie who surpasses in preeminent fashion the highest values. Thus, there are two redeeming features of the analogy. First, suffering, being commensurate with high value, is indirectly good because its cause is Délie herself. Second, the lover may be said to participate in this cause, even in the depths of rejection, because his suffering is bought about by ‘perseverance’ (v. 9). This is where the ‘en moy’ (v. 5) and ‘en soy’ (v. 10) come into play. While sharing Délie’s qualities in this painfully proportionate way by reflective value, the lover has worth because his suffering brought by this virtue exists ‘en moy’ (v. 5). Thus, if in dizain 306 dialectic sharpened the irony of a fall in a rise, then dizain 234 makes a poignant inference about a rise in a fall. To end the examination of dizain 306 would truncate the rich tensions the speaker brings out among logic, rhetoric, and emotion. First, some history is necessary to bring perspective to the poet-lover’s thinking regarding the relation between logic and rhetoric. As Walter Ong has analysed, the effect of Ramus’s work was to have ‘severed rhetoric from dialectic’ (1958, 289) by favouring topics over predication. (We have already seen this in chapter 3 in our examination of Ramus’s topical logic applied to dizain 46.) In other words, Ramus’s procedures separated Aristotle’s Topics from the Categories and the Analytics and thereby emphasized rhetoric over both dialectic and demonstration to serve pedagogy and textual criticism (Ong 1958, 106, 289). However, Aristotle himself thought in quite the opposite fashion. In the very first sentence of the Rhetoric he says, ‘Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic’ (1354a1). In fact, he held these two disciplines to be complementary for several reasons: both seek to persuade, to

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discern the real from the apparent, to discover the pertinent facts, and to distinguish the possible from the impossible. Further, rhetoric brings into its ken the tools of dialectic and demonstration, particularly in the exercise of the enthymeme.115 In the case of Délie the lover’s position, because of its inclusiveness, tends to be more Aristotelian. Rather than putting aside dialectic in favour of rhetoric, he brings into play all the knowledge at his disposal including rhetoric, topical logic, dialectic, and the syllogism. However, he is less inclined than Aristotle to unify rhetoric and logic, preferring to see in the former a way of fleshing out the emotional content of his frustration. In the poem rhetoric does claim priority since the lover quite consciously selects the terms and the premises of his syllogism. In the first verse he says, ‘Tout desir est dessus espoir fondé’ (v. 1). As already noted the priority of hope over desire is precisely the opposite from that of Aquinas for whom, in the words of Etienne Gilson, ‘hope presupposes desire’ (1956, 283). Aquinas held that the passions are divided into the concupiscible and the irascible. The second type of passion is the guardian and the defender of the first, for it seeks to clear away the obstacles to the concupiscible, whose object is directly oriented to what is agreeable. Thus, hope, an irascible passion, serves desire, a concuspiscible passion, which seeks directly to fulfil itself by pleasure (Gilson 1956, 293). However, the speaker orders his passions in the opposite fashion by syllogistic definition. There seems to be a logical and philosophic priority, so this is not merely what would be known in classical rhetoric as hysteron proteron. I use the contrast between Délie and Aquinas to strike up a distinction which can help us in understanding the principal premise of the poem. The lover, placing hope over desire, could be interpreted as taking the means for the end or the part for the whole. Yet, the poet-lover wishes to explore the consequences of this priority in a rigorous fashion. This accounts for the syllogism and for what is consequent from the demonstration. However, the dispositio of the poem, its terms, and its premises have been selected and ordered by a rhetoric which uses logic as an organon for moral and emotional introspection. The speaker arranges discourse in this way in order to ask the question, ‘Given that desire requires hope and is founded on hope, what are the consequences?’ We have seen the positive outcome of the syllogism in the form of enhanced knowledge, but rhetoric has a way of increasing psychological pain brought by the syllogism. If desire is founded on hope, and hope is impossible, then hope blocks the way to desire and induces a lack of affect, a psychological limbo. This

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is stated in verse 4 where the futilely exhaustive, intellectual examination of hope makes the lover hardly able to feel even pain: ‘Qu’à peine suis je en mon travail passible.’ The word ‘passible’ is defined as ‘susceptible d’éprouver du désir ou de la souffrance,’ and by qualifying this meaning with the adverb ‘scarcely’ (v. 4), the poet-lover confesses that he is nearly devoid of passion. The poet in the lover creates an aesthetic feeling of being virtually empty of emotion. However oxymoronic this may be, the meaning is confirmed with an earlier use of ‘passible’ (v. 4) in dizain 144 where the lover’s body as a whole is described as ‘passible’ (v. 8) until the ‘ame’ (v. 8) infuses it with power: ‘Infuse l’ame en ce mien corps passible’ (D 144, v. 8). Returning to dizain 234, one sees that not only does logic help in understanding this zombie-like state, but with the words, ‘En mon concept si fermement fondé,/Qu’à peine suis je en mon travail passible’ (vv. 3–4), it also exacerbates this state. In the rhyme scheme of the first four lines, the impossibility of desire sounded out by logic is given a sound similar to the impossibility of feeling indicated by poetic rhetoric: ‘impossible’ (v. 2) / ‘passible’ (v. 4). This is a chilling thought, but lines 1–6 of dizain 234 may be best appreciated as the poetizing of a living loss of affect. In effect, the lover says that in addition to any positive pain, he is now in the mire of insensibility. The use of rhetoric and logic continues to explore this sensation of no sensation. In lines 5–6 the lover makes an ironic inference from the beginning of the poem by asking Délie a rhetorical question: ‘Voy donc, comment il est en moy possible,/Que paix se trouve avecques asseurance?’ In other words, to describe his deadened state, he uses a figure of contradiction: ‘Do you not see what is possible? Only the impossible. For I have the assurance of no assurance and the peace of insensibility.’ Here the act of deduction, a drawing out of logical implications, increases the emptying of affect. In the last four lines of the poem one sees another use of deduction beginning with ‘Parquoy’ (v. 7). While the reasoning of verses 5–6 was retrospective in nature by examining the way that hope and desire have been affecting him, the reasoning of verses 7–10 is proleptic. This change has the function of moving knowledge forward by producing more awareness of consequences. But this is hardly a blessing for the speaker’s psychological peace of mind. To take hope over desire is to cancel desire, to make the means the end, and to create confusion about how best to relate desire to hope. This confusion is but another manifestation of what Speroni calls the ‘misto’ of love, and for the speaker, excessive hope overflows desire rendering it static and nearly insensible. It is interesting to note that while

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the speaker is successful in using words to make distinct analogies, these same words blur psychological meaning. The poet-lover artfully communicates this by conflating the meanings of words or by making them overlap so closely that psychological distinction is lost. Thus, in lines 7–8, ‘Parquoy mon mal en si dure souffrance/Excede en moy toutes aultres douleurs.’ Notice the mixture, the redundance, and the overlapping in ‘mal,’ ‘dure,’ ‘souffrance,’ and ‘toutes aultres douleurs’ wrought by an excess (‘Excede’) which is ostensibly caused by false hope. This rhetorical flood of overlapping sets has the effect of making any good reader run to the dictionary for nuance and distinction. That is precisely the poet-lover’s dilemma in attempting to sort out hope from desire, positive pain from negative, sensibility from insensibility, physical from psychological, logic from psychology. All forms of one word are close synonyms of others, and by such synonymic flooding, rhetoric makes it difficult for the reader to achieve precise understanding. Hence, the lover rhetorically poetizes on the syllogistic conclusion, ‘Is it possible to do the impossible?’ This logical aporia becomes a conundrum for poetry to articulate. What are the differences between ‘mal’ (v. 7) and ‘souffrance’ (v. 7)? Is ‘mal’ privative or actively harmful? Also, both nouns can be physical and psychological, philosophical and religious. The ‘dure’ (v. 7) modifying ‘souffrance’ (v. 7), being a specific pain (harsh), flows into another specific pain ‘douleur’ (v. 8, ache). Yet, both ‘dure’ (v. 7) and ‘douleurs’ (v. 8) run togther in their moral generality: réveiller une douleur ancienne/ la loi est dure. Even though in the logical domain the syllogism delimits possibilities and converges on a valid conclusion, even though analogy maintains clear proportions and inferences perform definite extrapolations from experience, on the psychological level the lover is ruled here by the verb ‘Excede’ (v. 8). The poem gives not a logical but a communicative paradox in which logical procedure helps to provide knowledge of indistinction and overlapping boundaries. Instead of making the expression precise, poetry artfully mimes the problem by passing the task of distinction and expression to the reader. All in all, the lover has also attained very refined wisdom in knowing what he does not know beginning with the priority assigned to hope and ending with the optimistic conviction that his suffering is proportionate to the beloved’s worth. the mixed hypothetical syllogism The mixed hypothetical syllogism was explicitly formulated in ancient times by the Stoics, and in particular by Chrysippus who developed connective logic or the use of conjunctives (Kneale and Kneale 1991, 162–3).

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One form of this type of argument has become known as modus ponens, or the rule of affirming the antecedent. It is an argument composed of a hypothetical premise, a categorical premise, and inferring a categorical proposition. Here I give an example with its logical symbolism: If it is raining, then the plants will grow. It is raining. Therefore, the plants will grow.

If P, then Q. P. Therefore Q.

Two hypothetical syllogisms can be extrapolated from dizain 60, which is the companion poem to impresa 7 titled ‘Narcissus’: Si c’est Amour, pourquoy m’occit il doncques, Qui tant aymay, et onq ne sceuz hair? Je ne m’en puis non asses esbahir, Et mesmement que ne l’offençay oncques: Mais souffre encor, sans complainctes quelconques, Qu’il me consume, ainsi qu’au feu la Cyre. Et me tuant, à vivre il me desire, Affin qu’aymant aultruy, je me desayme. Qu’est il besoin de plus oultre m’occire Veu qu’asses meurt, qui trop vainement ayme?

(D 60)

[If it is Cupid, why does he murder me then Who so much loved, and never learned to hate? I cannot wonder enough about it, And all the more since I never offended him. But I allow him without any complaint, To consume me, as fire does Wax. And killing me, he desires me to live, In order that, loving another, I cease loving myself. What need is there to further kill me, Given that he dies enough who too uselessly loves?]

In Metamorphoses Ovid recounts that Narcissus, a handsome young man, spurned the love of the nymph Echo. As a result Narcissus stirred the wrath of Eros who punished him by making him fall in love with his own reflection in a fountain. Attempting the impossible act of seizing his own reflection, he learned that his love could not be reciprocated. Painfully, he pined away in longing and was eventually transformed into the flower that bears his name.116

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The link between the poem and the Narcissus myth is not only that the dizain is a companion to the device titled ‘Narcissus,’ but also that line 6 alludes to Ovid’s Metamorphoses where the poet-lover recounts his toil in similar terms as Ovid’s account of the youth’s suffering, ‘ut intabescere flavae/igne levi cerae’ (III, vv. 487–8).117 Given that the dizain is predicated on a conditional, punctuated by ‘doncques’ in the first verse (‘If it is Love, why does he murder me then /Who so much loved, and never learned to hate?’), and that the indignant speaker raises a number of arguments defending himself and accusing ‘Amour’ (v. 1) of unjustifiable punishment, it can be seen that there are at least two mixed hypothetical syllogisms implied by the lover’s arguments: A Modus Ponens If I am innocent, then Love should not punish me. I am innocent. Therefore Love should not punish me. B Modus Ponens If I am already dead, then there is no point in trying to kill me again. I am already dead. Therefore, there is no point in trying to kill me again. Even though the dizain is punctuated with two question marks, I take these to designate two rhetorical questions which in effect conclude with two assertions: (a) ‘Given that I love and not hate, I am innocent’ (vv. 1–2); (b) ‘Since by loving in vain, I am already dead, and therefore, there is no need for Love to kill me again’ (vv. 9–10). The two syllogisms are mutually supporting which means that while they are not logically interlocked or chained they rhetorically consolidate deductive justification for the lover’s affirmation of innocence and protest against Cupid. In overview, one sees that in syllogism A the poet-lover affirms his innocence and accuses Cupid for unjustly punishing him. In syllogism B the lover moves from affirmation of innocence to condemnation by charging that Love is unfathomably wicked. The two syllogisms are the end products of inductive proof that the lover has drawn from his experience with Délie beginning with the first dizain. Rhetorically, they serve the lover’s purpose of providing a cogent summary of his position to solicit the woman’s understanding and sympathy. Delving into the nature of this proof, we will see that each major

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premise is supported by evidence arrived at inductively. In other words, the premises of syllogistic deduction may depend upon various types of induction, a point that Aristotle makes in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics: ‘There are therefore principles from which deduction proceeds, which are not reached by deduction; it is therefore by induction that they are acquired’ (VI:1139b–40). For our purposes Aristotle furnishes a useful definition of induction in Book I of Topics where he maintains that ‘induction is a passage from particulars to universals, e.g., the argument that supposing the skilled pilot is the most effective, and likewise the skilled charioteer, then in general the skilled man is the best at his particular task’ (105a–13). What is the principle subtending syllogism A, and what evidence is used to support it? Cupid is unjust based on the principle that Love kills those who act like Narcissus. This precept is founded on the Neoplatonic code that narcissism destroys true love, and it is particularly underlined in Ficino’s Commentary that explains and criticizes Narcissus’s deception: Narcissus ... is obviously young, that is, the soul of rash and inexperienced man. Does not look at his own face, that is, does not notice its own substance and character at all. But admires the reflection of it in the water and tries to embrace that; that is, the soul admires in the body, which is instable and in flux, like water, a beauty which is the shadow of the soul itself. He abandons his own beauty, but he never reaches the reflection. That is, the soul, in pursuing the body, neglects itself, but finds no gratification in the use of the body. For it does not really desire the body itself; rather, seduced, like Narcissus, by corporeal beauty, which is an image of its own beauty, it desires its own beauty. And since it never notices the fact that, while it is desiring one thing, it is pursuing another, it never satifies its desire. For this reason, melted into tears, he is destroyed.118

The lover’s position that he is not like Narcissus and that indeed he loves another is confirmed in the poem by line eight: ‘Affin qu’aymant aultruy, je me desayme.’ It is a recapitulation of his experience to this point in the poetic sequence, which stands as the inductive proof that sustains the Ficinian condemnation of Narcissus. In how many fashions has the speaker loved Délie as ‘another’ – meaning an extramental, independent person – as opposed to himself exclusively? It is the lover’s duty to know. The objective, independent, non-subjective existence of the woman as the beloved is most obviously shown in the Alexandrian vignettes (with or about Cupid) where the speaker quotes the very words of Délie. In

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dizain 5, for example, when the lover flees the woman holding Cupid’s bow in her hand, the lover quotes her, as follows: ‘Tourne, dit elle, à moy, et te despesche./Fuis tu mon arc, ou puissance, qu’il aye?’ (vv. 7–8). The lover responds, ‘Je ne fuys point, dy je, l’arc, ne la flesche:/Mais l’oeil, qui feit à mon coeur si grand’playe’ (vv. 9–10). If proof that the speaker’s love is transitive and not exclusively reflexive, then it emerges from other evidence relying on the notion that Délie is a force originating and affecting him from the outside of his being. She is an extramental fact. This is best manifested by the innamoramento of dizain 1 and its constant renewal (Ds 1, 6, 16, 24, 30, etc.), where a dramatic change from the outside world so overcomes the lover that he describes it as ‘Grand fut le coup’ (D 1, v. 7). Related to this argument that Délie is an external presence that the speaker loves is the evidence of cause and effect. The lover testifies to this phenomenon in dizain 49 when he says that his own fire shines when Délie’s fire clearly appears to him: ‘Tant fut la flamme en nous deux reciproque, /Quand mon feu luict, quand le sien clair m’appert’ (vv. 7–8). Would the lover report his jealousy of Délie’s husband to Délie herself (Ds 34, 161) and denounce others’ slander to her (D 32) if his love were fundamentally narcissistic? I think not. Unlike the poet-lover, who invariably runs into obstacles which refute his assumptions, Narcissus appears to experience no obstacles to his belief that the image he reaches for in the water is himself. As Ovid relates about Narcissus, ‘He loves an unsubstantial hope ... Unwittingly he desires himself; he praises, and is what he praises.’119 The lover also counters the charge of narcissism by moving the basis of his arguments from exteriority to interiority. Of course, this is fraught with problems, but the problems are not insuperable. The strongest argument against the lover’s refutation of narcissism is the subtle psychological observation that what he loves is his own preoccupations buried deep within his heart. The ‘other’ that he loves is his own obsession with the many dissociated and displaced parts of his own being disordered and scattered by love. However, dizain 46 had already weakened this accusation with the Neoplatonic tenet that what he loves is the true likeness of the beloved engraved in his heart that he cannot escape: ‘Si le desir, image de la chose,/ Que plus on ayme, est du coeur le miroir,/Qui tousjours fait par memoire apparoir/Celle, où l’esprit de ma vie repose ...’ (vv. 1–4). The wording of this dizain closely follows that of Ficino in the Commentarium: ‘The lover engraves the figures of the beloved on his own soul. And so the soul of the lover becomes a mirror in which the image of the beloved is reflected.’120 Hence, according to the speaker, the mirror of love is the reflection of Délie, not of his own imaginative psyche in solipsistic war with himself.

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While both Narcissus and the poet-lover are stymied by inaccessibility to love, the former has fallen in love with himself, but the latter loves another who rarely reciprocates in the ways he wishes. Also, some of the strongest metaphors of love as two separate entities flowing into union, such as the confluence of the Rhone and the Saone (D 17), are another psychological denial of narcissism. If the lover’s amatory imaginaire were overwhelmingly narcissistic, then he would not make references to reciprocity. On the contrary, dizain 40 is a beautifully visual motto testifying to mutual cooperation: ‘Aussi, ô Dieux, par effect reciproque/Je n’eusse sceu à ce bon port arriver’ (vv. 5–6). In addition, the claim that the lover is not like Narcissus is supported by another principle invoked in lines 5–8: ‘Mais souffre encor, sans complaincte quelconques,/Qu’il [Love] me consume, ainsi qu’au feu la Cyre./ Et me tuant à vivre il me desire,/Affin qu’aymant aultruy, je me desayme.’ This is the evocation of Ficino’s paradox that the one who loves another dies in himself to find life in the other. An elaboration of this point is found in the Commentary (II:8) where it is said: ‘Each man by loving gives up his own soul, and by loving in return restores the foreign soul through his own.’121 This is precisely what the lover claims that he is doing (‘Affin qu’aymant aultruy, je me desayme,’ D 60, v. 8). There is finally a metaphysical argument by which the lover refutes the accusation of narcissism. This relies on the assumption that such a divine creature as Délie must by analogy reflect divine attributes because effects resemble their causes. Here the lover shows that he is not only not narcissistic but, quite to the contrary, that he sees and loves through Délie the presence of the Divinity. Of three dizains (2, 4, 7) the first of these is most eloquent: ‘Le Naturant par ses haultes Idées/Rendit de soy la Nature admirable./Par les vertus de sa vertu guidées/S’esvertua en oeuvre esmerveillable’ (vv. 1–4). The ‘oeuvre esmerveillable’ that lifts the lover’s sight to the heavens is Délie with whom he is in no way commensurate. The syllogism is the core around which self-analysis is built. In syllogism A the lover’s implied argument is that he should not be punished because he is innocent. Though the word innocent is not used in this particular dizain, the purport of the lover’s plaint requires the reader to assume that he is making a claim of innocence. In fact, in dizain 77, dealing with a parallel problem, he will explictly state that he is an innocent Prometheus being tortured: ‘Mais pour au mal renaistre incessamment,/ Affin qu’en moy ce mien malheureux vivre/Prometheus tourmente innocemment’ (vv. 8–10). Moving back to dizain 60, one sees that the speaker is indeed making an argument for his innonence, since he insists that he

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has never offended Love (‘ne l’offençay oncques,’ v. 4), and he gives this line logical force since ‘oncques’ rhymes with ‘doncques’ (v. 1). The lover indignantly protests that love is killing him (‘m’occit,’ v. 1 / ‘m’occire,’ v. 9) where the Latin senses of occire denote ‘to slay,’ ‘to torment,’ ‘to beat to the ground.’ Therefore, not only is he innocent, but based on Neoplatonic principles he is a martyr. In the second speech of Ficino’s Commentary Giovanni Cavalcanti has severe words for those who do not reciprocate love: Each man by loving gives up his whole soul, and by loving in return restores the foreign soul through his own. Therefore, out of justice itself, whoever is loved ought to love in return. But he who does not love his lover must be held answerable for murder. No, rather a thief, murderer, desecrator. Money is possessed by the body, the body by the soul. Therefore he who steals a soul, by which the body as well as the money are possessed, steals at the same time the soul, the body, and the money. Hence it happens that like a thief, murderer, and desecrator, he is punishable by a triple death, and being completely abominable and impious, he can be killed by anyone with impunity, unless he himself should, of his own accord, carry out that law, namely, that he love his lover.122

The poet-lover’s reasoning in dizain 60 is similar. Since he has given his soul to Délie, and since she rarely reciprocates, then he is dead. Moreover, he has been murdered. Not only is he in a state of death, but he is a martyr to love. With each renewal of the innamoramento, he is struck with love for Délie only to be robbed and killed, since she does not adequately return his devotion. Hence, the lover not only expresses his indignation at Love, but indirectly turns his accusation to Délie. Besides, he intensifies the scandal of his martyrdom by testifying to his amatory honour. First, he endures this injustice stoically without complaint: ‘Mais souffre encor, sans complainctes quelconques’ (v. 5). Also, in the second line, he states in a rhetorical question that while he has so much loved, he has never learned to hate: ‘Qui tant aymay, et onq ne sceuz hair?’ (v. 2). The notion that hate is a natural concomitant of love is another Neoplatonic precept that one will see in Ficino and in Speroni (but not in Diotima’s speech in Plato’s Symposium). The Commentary says: Who would not hate the one who took his soul away from him? For as liberty is more pleasant than anything else, so servitude is more unpleasant. And so you hate and love beautiful men at the same time; you hate them as thieves

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and murderers; you are also forced to love and revere them as mirrors sparkling with the heavenly glow. What can you do, O wretch? Where to turn, you do not know; alas, O soul you do not know.123

Thus, not only is the lover innocent by the negative proof of not having offended Délie, but also by the positive proof of his living martyrdom suffered without hate or complaint. Syllogism B states that since the lover is already dead, there is no point in Love’s further killing him. The inductive roots of this syllogism arise from evidence that scandalizes justice and provokes the lover’s bewilderment, wonder, and consternation. As he says of his undeserved torture, ‘Je ne m’en puis non asses esbahir’ (v. 3). Since the lover has already shown how and why he is dead, he gives additional evidence to support the consequent of the first premise. In the Narcissus myth Echo always answers back, whereas in Délie the poet-lover never receives an answer. Similarly, while Echo cannot speak first, the poet-lover must initiate discourse, but no response to his desperate questions is forthcoming. The two question marks in the poem, especially the one concluding the dizain, frame an imposed solipsism. There is an astounding vicious circle here not lacking in irony, for the poet-lover is in a way forced to be Narcissus. In the absence of responses to his profound cri de coeur from either Délie or Love (both of whom are utterly silent), the lover must necessarily speak to himself to sustain his existence, even if it is only plaint. Just as ironic, he has become a Narcissus who in resounding silence is forced to become his own Echo. His suffering is therefore compounded by the expression of his complaint, since he receives no answer from another except the echo which returns to taunt him. Can we not hear this in the rhymes of /i:r/ which mime his cry: ‘hair’ (v. 2), ‘esbahir’ (v. 3), ‘Cyre’ (v. 6), ‘desir’ (v. 7), ‘occire’ (v. 9). The lover concludes the poem with the doleful motto: ‘Veu qu’asses meurt, qui trop vainement ayme’ (v. 10). If Délie is the poet-lover’s description of ‘les mortz, qu’en moy tu renovelles’ (liminary huitain, v. 3), then this particular mort that he must endure is the reflexivity contained in the ‘je me desayme’ (v. 8). It is this futility of having to be one’s own interlocutor, of being called upon to be self-sufficient with only insufficiency which makes Love’s continual killings such cruel overkill. It would appear that the lover has contradicted syllogism A (he is not Narcissus), but he does not because he does seek Délie as an interlocuter, but she does not respond. If one is forced to speak only with oneself, is one narcissistic? The poet-lover answers ‘no’ to this question. The role of reason in Délie is to sharpen the lover’s understanding of

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such problems, and in the case of dizain 60 he discovers a paradox of communication which involves him in narcissistic self-reference. However, this does not change the fact that ultimately he sees the beloved as his emulative model of virtue engraved in his heart and that he is not, like the mythological Narcissus, the sole object of his love. While syllogistic thinking helps the lover to crystallize the paradoxes of self-reference, supported by inductive evidence, the role of dialectic as directed by rhetoric is to oversee the entire deployment of logic between the device and the companion dizain. The lover’s insistence that he is not Narcissus takes place by using the poem as a contradiction of the picture in the impresa. The logical denial of the picture entails the use of induction and syllogism to arrive at enhanced self-understanding. Nevertheless, Deborah Lesko Baker’s Narcissus and the Lover teaches readers that a great deal of the specularity of Délie is patterned on Ovid’s Narcissus (1986, 45–72). Adding to her critical reflections, I would say that the very Neoplatonic underpinning of Délie produces the paradox that the lover is highly susceptible to much subjectivity even as the beloved remains his model. When in the Commentary Ficino declares, ‘Likeness generates love,’124 we have the nub of the problem. Up and down the chain of being from Body to Soul to Angelic Mind to God, there is an attraction to love through resemblance. For Ficino the way for the lover to avoid narcissism is to seek resemblance in higher forms of being.125 For the lover there is a fine line between seeing resemblance as a transitive activity and seeing it as a reflexive activity. When he feels his effort rejected, he searches within himself for a solution that reinstates his solipsistic dialogue. The lover resembles Délie who for him is ‘plus haulte vertu’ to the extent that he wishes to emulate her virtues, which are objective, extramental powers that overwhelm him as cause to effect. Yet, the way that he chooses to emulate or to resemble this model is through the mirror of meditation, which has the effect of creating a dizzying reflection in abyme. In dizain 271, for example, the lover concludes by saying of his relation with the beloved: ‘Point ne m’est grief en aultruy me chercher’ (v. 10). Yet, in line 8 he had already said, ‘Je quiers en toy ce, qu’en moy j’ay plus cher.’ Thus, in line 10 he makes Délie the other in which he seeks himself, but in verse 8 he seeks in the beloved what he has in himself (‘en moy’), thereby making his image of Délie devolve upon himself. However, in a vertiginously paradoxical way this is logical since the image of the beloved is engraved in his heart (D 46). This results in the type of problematic descriptions of Délie that we find in dizain 415 where the lover sees her as the ‘miroir de ma pensée’ (v. 1). A loves B, but in terms of A or B? This question is not

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easily reducible except when all dialectic perishes in the presence of Délie’s excellence: ‘Je veulx perir en si haulte poursuyte’ (D 296, v. 10). Thus, logic cannot rectify the metaphysical, communicational, and psychological paradoxes, and it tends to aggravate the passions. Yet, the two syllogisms and their supporting inductions dilate the strongest impulses of the poet-lover to remain objective, object bound, and highly focused on the criteria and reasoning of his innocence and fidelity. The third type of syllogism that I will draw from Délie is termed a disjunctive syllogism which takes the form of either/or. It appears in dizain 179 and is based on the narrator’s interior debate about whether he should follow ‘Amour’ or ‘Raison’: Amour me presse, et me force de suyvre Ce, qu’il me jure estre pour mon meilleur. Et la Raison me dit, que le poursuyvre Communement est suyvi de malheur. Celluy desjà, m’esloignant de douleur, De toy m’asseure, et ceste me desgouste, Qui jour et nuict devant les yeulx me boute Le lieu, l’honneur, et la froide saison. Dont pour t’oster, et moy, d’un si grand doubte, Fuyant l’amour, je suivray la Raison.

(D 179)

[Cupid presses me and forces me to follow What he swears to be my own best interest. And reason tells me that his pursuit Usually is followed by unhappiness. The former, leading me away from suffering, Assures me you are already mine, and the latter, Who day and night puts before my eyes My rank, my honour and the winter of my years disgusts me. Thus, to remove both you and myself from such great doubt, Fleeing Cupid, I will follow Reason.]

In the first four lines the speaker demarcates the clear-cut opposition between Cupid who presses the lover to follow his own best interests, and Reason which warns the lover that his pursuit will result in unhappiness (vv. 1–4, Part A). In the second four lines Cupid responds to Reason’s first objection by urging the lover to distance himself from suffering because

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Délie is already his. Yet, Reason responds that this is bad advice because Love has undermined and will continue to undermine the lover’s dignity by eroding – day and night, in the winter of his years – his rank, calling, and honour (vv. 5–8, Part B). In the conclusion (Part C) the lover states a criterion for his decision which was not stated in either of the first two parts of the debate: ‘pour t’oster, et moy, d’un si grand doubte (v. 9). Then with the word ‘Dont’ which has illative force, he states that he will flee Cupid and follow Reason (v. 10). This poem is structured, at least in appearance, by a disjunctive syllogism where the leading premise is a disjunction, the second being a denial of one of the alternatives, and the conclusion, the affirmation of the remaining alternative. The linguistic markers of the poem’s logical outline is given by the débat formula: ‘Amour me presse’ (v. 1) ... / ‘Et la Raison me dit’ (v. 3) ... / ‘Celluy’ (v. 5) ... / ‘et ceste’ (v. 6) ... / ‘Dont pour t’oster’ (v. 9) ... In what follows, I will give the abstract logical symbolism of the disjunctive syllogism, then the translation of the text: Either Cupid is right or Reason is right Cupid is not right Therefore Reason is right

Either P or Q Not P Therefore Q

This would symbolize the prima facie logical progression, taking the poem as a whole. However, by breaking the poem down into its three logical components, we can more closely follow the grounds of the debate moving from the first (vv. 1–4, Part A), to the second (vv. 5–8, Part B), to the conclusion part (vv. 9–10, Part C). As one looks closely at Parts A, B, and C, the logical ground of debate keeps shifting with the biggest breach occurring in Part C. In Part A, lines 1–4, the disjunctive relation between Cupid and Reason is ultimately based on the ability of Cupid or Reason to predict his happiness. Part A Either Cupid is right in assuring me of my best interests, Or Reason is right in predicting my unhappiness (‘malheur,’ v. 4).

In Part B (vv. 5–8) the ground of debate is primarily whether the poetlover can say that Délie is ‘mine’:

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Part B Either Cupid is right in assuring me that Délie is mine, Or Reason is right in predicting that love will continue to erode my happiness (‘De toy m’asseure,’ v. 6). The reader may be inclined to collapse Parts A and B into the criterion of ‘happiness.’ Though I am inclined to disagree, one will nevertheless note that Part C departs from either possibility. Part C is the conclusion of the disjunctive syllogism where the poet lover makes his choice in favour of Reason, but his reasoning process is based neither on the ground of Part A or that of Part B. Rather, it is based on the decision to ‘remove doubt’: Thus, to remove both you and myself from such great doubt, Fleeing Cupid, I will follow Reason. (vv. 9–10)

Let us be clear that the removal of doubt regarding Délie’s reciprocity is strictly speaking not the same as regaining happiness, the ground of Part A. Nor can turning away from doubt be the same as the lover’s state of thinking that Délie is ‘mine,’ the ground of Part B. Thus, in Part C the speaker lurches to a third rationale of argument not previously grounded in the preceeding two parts. Why? It appears as if the poet-lover were making a choice because existentially a choice must be made to extricate himself from further wavering and hesitating. The lover wants to be transparently clear to himself and to Délie about the fact that he has chosen Reason over Cupid, but he is not clear on why he has so chosen. Rather, he says in effect, ‘I have made my choice, and I will live by it in order to avoid any more consternation or harm.’ Yet, even though he selects Reason and flees Cupid to make doubt dissolve, doubt is very much alive in the subsequent poems of debate between Reason and Love (Ds 180–4). Doubt is not extirpated but continues full force. Another consideration is worthwile. As the reader reviews the entire span of the dizain, there are as many reasons in the poem for the lover to decide in favour of Cupid as of Reason. Hence, the conclusion in favour of Reason would appear to be arbitrary and unpersuasive. Because the poem begins with doubting both Cupid and Reason equally, and since both Cupid and Reason, in this poem as elsewhere, are vigorously challenged, how could the lover’s acceptance of Reason remove doubt? In summary, by applying reason to his dilemma, the lover’s abandonment of Cupid strains reason. It appears that the poet-lover only wishes to remove the pains of judging, rather than concluding on some consistent criterion of reason.

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One way of explaining this unexpected change of ground is to view the dizain not as a syllogism but as a dialectical movement whereby the exchange between Parts A and B leads to an impasse, leading to Part C. Having exhausted his options to lengthen the debate at line 8, the poet-lover’s exasperation forces him to jump to a new ground of argument based on the removal of doubt without explicitly preparing the reader. As a result, he leaves a logical ellipsis between the exchange of disjunctives and the conclusion. Without explicitly saying so the poet-lover may be leading the reader to assume that based on his experience of false hope, he must inevitably bring closure to this enervating debate by reverting to the conventional method of argumentation called ‘grasping the dilemma by the horns’ (Copi 1990, 260). This is more of a debating tactic than a logical procedure, but it does have logical implications. In this strategy, one attempts to show that at least one of the conditionals is false. Thus, in the saut to the conclusion the lover may be suppressing the unstated principle that in his experience, given the deceptions of unrequited love, Cupid no longer retains credibility. The speaker abruptly ceases to torture himself with doubt and leans on Reason as the better guide, however frustrating its dictates. Yet, in attempting to understand the poem’s movements dialectically, one finds it difficult to accept the assumption of a suppressed move to grasp one of the dilemma’s horns. The poem suggests logical balance by its rhetorical balance, and does not appear to be suppressing anything. The two major movements of the debate (Parts A and B) are developed quite proportionally, having relatively equal length, weight, and symmetry. At least in purely linguistic terms, the conclusion of two lines also appears proportional to the eight-line debate. Therefore, it is as difficult to posit an unspoken logical transition as it is necessary to seek one. The abrupt change of logical ground in dizain 179 is reminiscent of the procedures in Mannerist art that Wylie Sypher has characterized as ‘The Missing Link.’126 Taking Parmigianino’s Madonna dal Collo Lungo (c. 1535) as an exemple, one sees similarly brusque and unexpected changes in the treatment of space, scale, perspective, and posture. In this painting, The Virgin as Queen of Heaven sits enthroned surrounded by ecstatic angels admiring a curiously elongated Christ Child asleep on her lap. The viewer’s parcours de l’oeil is vexed by a number of abrupt and unanticipated shifts. As Sypher has observed, Parmigianino challenges perception by sudden reversals in foreground and background space, for he ‘sets three-dimensional bodies in a shallow, flat, two dimensional space.’127 Inhabiting ambiguous space, the size of the Virgin appears colossal, since she approximates the height of an immense pillar behind her. However,

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as the viewer’s eye moves to the right foreground at the foot of a colonnade s/he is surprised by the tiny figure of Saint Jerome128 unscrolling a parchment which is ostensibly his translation of the scriptures. Yet, the minute figure is not reading what he is carefully holding, even though the elongated index finger of his left hand is punctiliously pointing to a precise place (passage) on the scroll. Even more disorienting to the viewer is the fact that the figure is completely turned away from the central scene of the Madonna, transfixed by something outside the frame of the painting. Contrasting the enlarged Madonna with the diminutive Jerome, one notes that the change in scale is so extreme that the latter is thoroughly compartmentalized. Also, the perspective of the painting suddenly shifts from the enormity of the Madonna, who dominates the foreground with her reigning presence, to an immense spatial void behind her. This void is made even stranger by the pillar which stands behind the Madonna, first because one cannot say if it is positioned in front of the void or if it rises to invade it from within it, and second because the pillar is a trompe l’oeil. Viewed from top to three quarters down, it looks like a single column, but from top to the base, it is merely the first or front pillar hiding a colonnade. Bodily positions also say two opposite things at once, and one strains to bridge the visual ellipsis. At first sight the infant Jesus appears safely snuggled in the voluminous lap of the Virgin, but the Child’s left leg, placed at the edge of the Madonna’s right knee, and his hanging left arm (twisted to near dislocation) over her left knee, make the infant appear unstable and precariously close to falling. The tension grows greater when we realize that the child is asleep. While the pillars evoke the natural world of physics and geometry, the child’s graceful precariousness on the Virgin’s lap connotes another, more ethereal dimension which assures security without the laws of gravity. Similarly, the logical exploration of dizain 179 shows a lack of transition and an unsettling dissonance of reason and emotion. That is why this poem is the first of a series which focuses on the debate between Love and Reason (Ds 179–84). Throughout Délie the poet-lover has two styles of communicating transition. On the one hand, he frequently perceives a transitional phenomenon of presence as chiaroscuro, especially the overlapping of day and night symbolizing the clair-obscur of his major optic Luna/Diana. On the other hand, in dizain 179, he marks a transitional phenomenon by the very absence of transition where it is most needed. In this case, logical ligatures are elided by subtle category jumps (happiness vs doubt) which separate one criterion from another, one rationale from another. But does the poet-lover not realize this? Yes, but that leads to the knowledge of a second lack of transition where his all-knowing recon-

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stituting memory is unwilling or unable to control his endlessly splitting object selves. The category gap seen in dizain 179 is parallel to the rhetorical dispositio of Délie as a whole in which opposite, antithetical, or even antinomic positions are laid out sequentially in the sceptical move to bracket the category limits among which dilemmas can be organized. Paradigmatic limits are favoured over sequence, succession, and syntagmatic movement which might have been more conducive to logical transition. There is also a triumph over these disturbing disparities where high points of love assimilate these tensions to momentary balance. This triumph is seen in dizain 182, the summit of the Reason/Love cluster of poems, where the poetlover makes adjustments to his dilemmas in a way that reflects the overall course of Délie. Let us closely follow the steps. In dizain 179 the lover ceases to flee Love and resolves to pursue Reason. However, in the next dizain he finds that Love itself inhabits reason, disguises itself in reason, and turns him in directions precisely the opposite of reason: ‘Quand pied à pied la Raison je costoye,/Et pas à pas j’observe ses sentiers,/Elle me tourne en une mesme voye/Vers ce, que plus je fuiroys voulentiers’ (D 180, vv. 1–4). In the following dizain, Reason and Love are pictured as boxers in the lover’s brain where the agon cannot bring about a decisive victor: ‘Ouy, et non aux Caestes contendantz/Par maintz assaultz alternatifs s’assaillent:/Tous deux à fin de leur gloyre tendantz/En mon cerveau efforcément travaillent’ (vv. 1–4). If the speaker has affinities for Platonic philosophy, why should he incur so much distress when Love should be the motivator of Reason? Does not Love bind the universe together in such a way that it gives Reason a pivotal role in the ascent to virtue? In the Commentary Ficino situates Reason in the Soul below the Angelic Mind and above Opinion and the Body, ‘The Reason of the Soul is a multiplicity (of notions and arguments), mobile but ordered.’129 It would seem that dizain 182 attempts to spin out of the problems of Reason and Love by focusing moral vision on Délie alone. The poet-lover makes two adjustments. First, he moves away from debate or from the reason-passion nexus to the act of admiring the perfection of Délie’s virtues. In so doing he unifies his energies by lifting his being to the single object of contemplation. Second, his change from multiplicity to unity is made all the more riveting because he predicts that the whole world must finally join him in admiration: Et la Vertu par reigles non confuses Ne tens sinon à ce juste debvoir, Qui nous contraint, non seulement de veoir,

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Mais d’adorer toute parfection: Il faudra donc, que soubz le tien povoir Ce Monde voyse en admiration.

(D 182, vv. 5–10)

[And Virtue by unconfused rules, Does not otherwise lead to this just duty Which constrains me not only to see But to adore all perfection, Then this world, submitting to your power, Will have to manifest constant admiration.]

In summarizing the implications of the use of reason in the syllogism and analogy, we see that reasoning requires more than reason to function effectively for self-understanding. The more particular lessons are that rhetoric includes reasoning as one of its instruments of knowledge, but it rules formal reason by suspecting it, by selecting its antagonists, and by shuttling between limit opposites. However, formal reasoning is the lover’s strongest gesture to bind himself to objectivity and to strike a balance between transitive and reflexive vision. The general lesson is that the virtues must be mutually supporting in such a way that Reason gains from perseverance striving to gain a picture of the whole. From Reason to Wisdom Dizain 434 uses the entry point of reason to teach the lesson that the effective functioning of any faculty depends upon the equilibrium of a comprehensive set of components affecting the poet-lover as a whole. Taking his point of departure from Speroni, he states that separation from the beloved, a circumstantial factor, can have a salutary effect on the interaction between cognition and the passions. First I will quote the Dialogo and then the dizain: Veramente lo star lontano dalla cosa amata tanto, e non più, che l’amorosa memoria rumini il cibo che divorarono i sentimenti è all’amante non solamente occasione di farli noto il ben suo, ma dà cagione di render lui di giorno in giorno più amabile ... poco dapoi quel medesimo, dalla ragione ammonito e in sé stesso tornato, d’una in una va dimonstrando le virtù sue, cose facendo con esse loro che il senso di nuova gioia ingombrato, il divietava operare.130 Ainsi absent la memoyre posée, Et plus tranquille, et apte à concevoir,

Via illuminativa Par la raison estant interposée, Comme clarté à l’object, qu’on veult veoir: Rumine en soy, et sans se decevoir Gouste trop mieulx sa vertu, et sa grace, Que ne faisoient presentez à sa face Les sentementz de leur joye enyvrez, Qui maintenant par plus grand’efficace Sentent leur bien de leur mal delivrez.

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(D 434)

[The object being absent, the memory settled The more tranquil and able to conceive By reason, interposed Like light upon the thing to be seen, Ruminates in itself and, without deceiving itself, Enjoys her virtue and her grace much better Than did, in the presence of her face, The senses, drunk with their joy, Which now, with greater efficacy, Perceive their good separated from their evil.]

Closely following Tullia’s argument but also speaking from the crucible of experience, the poet-lover reflects on the fact that spatio-temporal separation from Délie brings a welling wave of salutary interactions between the body and the soul. Since ‘raison’ (v. 3) is interposed between the eye and the object of love, ‘memoyre’ (v. 1) is illuminated and much better capable of tasting (‘gouste,’ v. 6) the woman’s virtue and graces. From this positive development the senses profit as well by increased efficacy which enables them to perceive their deliverance from emotional saturation. Looking at matters from another perspective, one can say that the distance accorded to memory has a moderating function on the distribution, force, and balance of the lover’s powers. There is better balance because memory itself is settled (‘posée,’ v. 1), calmer (‘plus tranquille,’ v. 2) and more ‘apte à concevoir’ (v. 2). The force of the senses is now measured to their goal, for unlike previous dizains where they commandeered the lover drunk with joy (‘les sentimentz de leur joye enyvrez,’ v. 8), they now operate ‘par plus grand’efficace’ (v. 9). This is praise of ‘operatio’ in Ficino’s sense, the effective transfer from inward cause to outward manifestation, the completion of ‘to do.’ Speroni makes mention of just such a realization through the infinitive ‘operare.’ Finally, there is equable distribution of light, thanks to reason’s illumination of memory which unites the act of seeing (‘veoir,’ v. 4) and its ‘object’ (v. 4).

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This dizain is especially concerned with the factors that produce lucidity. In the second line, the infinitive ‘concevoir’ bears the Latin connotations of concipere, meaning ‘to receive,’ ‘to take in,’ and the verb can be grammatically divided into con (with) and cevoir (to see). Putting these features together, one arrives at the idea that the lover is now better able to receive Délie, since the faculties ‘see with’ one another in harmonious reciprocity. In this way deception is dispelled (‘sans se decevoir,’ v. 5). The poet-lover strongly suggests that he is studying and experiencing the ideal of what may be termed ‘bringing forth a clear concept’ which so engaged the Neoplatonists and the imprese writers. This is apparent from the enunciative unity between the metaself that observes and the object-self that is observed. For the clarity enjoyed by the object-self is ‘seen’ by the poetic style of the metaself. The labyrinths, torsions, and obliquity of past poems have momentarily disappeared in favour of evenly balanced lines, simplicity of diction, directness of address, and the grace of uninterrupted flow. The last lines of the poem do pose a question about the nature of the lover’s purification. Here the speaker joyfully experiences the liberation of his ‘sentementz’ or ‘senses’ which ‘maintenant par plus grand’efficace/ Sentent leur bien de leur mal delivrez’ (vv. 9–10). What does the past participle ‘delivrez’ (v. 10) mean? One possibility is that the lover feels that ‘bien’ (v. 10) has been separated from ‘mal’ (v. 10) in the sense that one element has been removed from the other. While this poem is certainly concerned with the purification of reason, the word ‘delivrez’ (v. 10) cannot mean ‘to remove the good from the evil.’ The total context of Délie, especially in its final illustration and dizain, does not justify such an interpretation. The last picture of the work framing the end of the sequence is titled ‘Le Tumbeau et les chandeliers,’ and it gloss poem declares that the adversative elements of fire and water will always be ‘residentz’ (D 447, v. 7) in the lover’s being, even after death. Also, the final dizain of Délie views lack and absence as the conditions which impel perpetual life: ‘Aussi je voy bien peu de difference/Entre l’ardeur, qui noz coeurs poursuyvra,/ Et la vertu, qui vive nous suyvra/Oultre le Ciel amplement long, et large’ (vv. 5–8). Since ‘ardeur’ (v. 6) is the burning for love, and since it is nearly synonymous with ‘vertu’ (v. 7), then the lover will forever be propelled by the flame of desire. Therefore, in dizain 449, what is celebrated is not bien cut away from le mal, but rather bien dialectically motivated by desire that will balance and energize the faculties and triumph over ‘mortel Letharge’ (v. 10). From the viewpoint of spiritual progress dizain 434 is a high point of illumination. The lover clearly defines his meditation as a ruminatio, since

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memory ‘rumine en soy’ (v. 5) the various delights of love. In microcosmic fashion the poet-lover scales a ladder of improvement, stepping from scientia, to intellectus, to sapientia. The speaker vaunts science because he recognizes that the data of his épreuve are amenable to comprehension by memory and reason. He also achieves intellectual clarity by the epistemological correspondence between the act of viewing and the object viewed: ‘Comme clarté à l’object qu’on veult veoir’ (v. 4). Finally, the poet-lover tastes wisdom because he knows that his very deliverance depends upon more than one virtue (‘raison,’ v. 3), or rather upon the finely calibrated reciprocity of the faculties.

7 Via unitiva

Traditional Concepts The perfective stage of the threefold way is the via unitiva in which spiritual aspiration achieves a high point of communion with the object of love. Neither a permanent state nor an uninterrupted ascent to a summit, it is rather a series of uneven peaks in the ongoing vicissitudes of moral or religious struggle. The ancient underpinnings of the perfective way can be sketched by reviewing key concepts of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. When these three philosophers are considered with their Orphic and Pythagorean predecessors, it would be appropriate to state that the Greek religious ideal was to achieve the highest vision of the Divinity. According to Plato, it is eros that initiates movement toward this end which through restless searching ascends the stages of purification (askesis, katharsis), opinion, and knowledge (doxa, episteme), and finally arrives at theoria or contemplation of the divine element in the soul (nous).1 In Greek the word theorein meant ‘to look at a spectacle,’ such as a parade or religious ceremony, and by extension ‘to meditate, reflect, or philosophize.’ The meaning of the word depends on the author studied, but linguistically it derives partly from theos (God) and partly from theamai (to gaze with wonderment).2 In Plato’s Symposium, which combines rationalism and mysticism, existence is read as an allegory of love. In the context of Plato, Bernard McGinn states that ‘theoria is the activation of the soul’s natural divinity,’3 and it is Diotima who in the Symposium delivers to the banqueteers a speech which reaches the high point of wisdom. The Mantinean woman teaches that ‘Love ... includes every kind of longing for happiness and for the good,’ and guides her listeners up ‘the heavenly ladder’ to attain the ‘wondrous vision which is the very soul of beauty.’4

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And remember, she said, that it is only when he discerns beauty itself through what makes it visible that a man will be quickened with the true, and not the seeming virtue – for it is virtue’s self that quickens him, not virtue’s semblance. And when he has brought forth and reared this pefect virtue, he shall be called the friend of god, and if ever it is given to man to put on immortality, it shall be given to him. (212a)

Aristotle, rejecting Plato’s transcendental forms and mitigating the mysticism of his teacher, held that the ‘highest excellence ... of the best thing in us [is] ... contemplation’ (NE, 1177a15–16). Aristotle’s theoria is properly an operation of the intellect which beholds, reviews, and surveys preexisting knowledge. In the Nichomachean Ethics he associates contemplation with ‘self-sufficiency,’ ‘enduringness,’ and ‘purity,’ and concludes that ‘happiness extends ... just so far as contemplation.’5 Aristotle tends to associate divinity with the intellect, and in the same work he maintains that ‘he who exercises his intellect and cultivates it seems to be both in the best state and the most dear to the gods’ (NE, 1179a23–4). Upon reaching Plotinus, who modestly considered himself a simple exegete of Plato, we find a striking innovator whose Enneads unfolds as ‘Platonism in action.’6 Adding a highly articulated mystico-religious dimension to Plato, he also claimed the originality of expounding the hypostatic procession. Unlike both Plato and Aristotle who thought that the Divine was completely unconditioned, he saw that the One did in fact have a raison d’être which is its self-creative freedom generously flowing throughout the world (Gatti 1996, 10–37). In the Enneads Plotinus takes the upward path of beauty where, ‘passing in the ascent all that is alien to the God, one sees with one’s self alone. That alone, simple, single and pure, from which all depends and to which all look and are and live and think; for it is cause of life and mind and being’ (I, 6, 7). The first explicit exponent of the Three Ways, Pseudo-Dionysius, Christianized the various traditions of Platonic ascent by assimiliating sacred scripture to the all-creative Godhead whose overflowing light shines a path of conservation, perfection, and return to his creatures. Dionysius, one of the greatest inventors of mystical theology, ascends through the heights of reason, which naturally seek and find completion in mystical union. The Areopagite envisaged God as a tri-hypostatic Unity that ‘transcendentally draws everything into its perennial embrace’ – a Thearchy that generously shares its powers throughout the celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies (Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, 161). Each hierarchy comprises the powers of purification, illumination, and perfection which create a route of departure from and reversion to the Divinity.7 In the Celestial

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Hierarchy, these powers are communicated and distributed by the angels, the most perfect of whom are the seraphim. They bear this name because they are ‘fire-makers,’ ‘carriers of warmth,’8 heavenly beings aflame with love who ‘have been directed ... not through other holy beings but directly from God himself’ (ibid., 164). In addition to his teachings on the celestial hierarchy, Pseudo-Dionysius exerted tremendous influence on Christian spirituality with his distinction between positive or cataphatic theology and negative or apophatic theology. Having just mentioned the angels as an aspect of positive theology, it is necessary to point out the apex of the negative way. In his apophatic theology Pseudo-Dionysius proceeds by negating in ascending order the highest powers that humanity can envision to arrive at a sense of God based on aphairesis, agnosia, and henosis.9 The first term designates a ‘clearing aside’ and ‘stripping away’ of all qualities that can be predicated of God, since they fail utterly in doing him justice. This movement leads to agnosia which is a state of unknowing which ‘can only be spoken about through the paradoxical assertion of contraries.’10 Such contraries are based on the visual matrix ‘seeing by unseeing,’ which arouses the language of darkness, clouds, and silence. Henosis is the ultimate goal of mystical theology and refers to what is experienced beyond both affirmation and negation, beyond mere transcendence in supereminent ways. Concluding the Mystical Theology, Pseudo-Dionysius says of the ‘Supreme Cause,’ ‘We make assertions and denials of what is next to it, but never of it, for it is both beyond every assertion, being the perfect and unique cause of all things, and by virtue of its preeminently simple and absolute nature, free of every limitation; it is also beyond every denial’ (141). In regard to Bonaventure’s De triplici via, we have already noted that the three ways of purification, illumination, and perfection cut across the three major spiritual activities of meditation, prayer, and contemplation. Purification is the expulsion of sin; illumination is the imitation of Christ; and perfection, mirroring the Canticle of Canticles, is the embrace of the Lord as Spouse. Meditation as well as reading are perfective when they attain to ‘the little flame of wisdom’11 which gathers the soul, enflames it, and lifts it to the Beloved. Prayer induces the soul to ‘reverence’ by the admiration of God’s greatness in comparison with ‘your own smallness.’12 Finally, there is the unitive summit of contemplation, a ‘rapture,’13 which draws the soul to love of the Spouse. One of Bonaventure’s major achievements is his spectrum of emotional colours which feed the spiritual senses with ‘the sweetness of love.’14 This multifaceted experience arouses the feelings of watchfulness for and expectation of the Spouse, trust and comfort, longing for the running waters, rapture in the dwelling place,

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delight in the Spouse’s overwhelming beauty, overflowing happiness, and welding intimacy. In the Exercitatorium Spirituale by García de Cisneros, Part 3 is devoted to the unitive way, which primarily aims to inspire love of the divine perfections. Here the author recapitulates his three-part plan saying, ‘In the first Way we foresake the lusts of the world; in the second, the spirit is enlightened and raised on high; in the third, it has tranquility and rest in God.’15 Cisneros’s via unitiva seeks to move the reader to the highest stage of perfection which is amor ardens or fervida dilectio achieved through contemplation where ‘the exercitant feels and loves more than he understands and sees.’16 One of the most striking characteristics of the Exercitatorium is that while it aims to cultivate interior prayer, it requires the observance of strict external rituals as preludes to prayer. Cisneros takes pains to set a delicate balance between interior and exterior to ensure a discipline that conducts the soul ‘from outward things to things which are within; from things which are low to things which are high; from things of time to things of eternity.’17 Cisneros models himself on Richard of Saint Victor, Bonaventure, and Jean Gerson, and he defines the notion of contemplation as sapientia which signifies a science of great sweetness (sapida scientia). For this reason Cisneros closely associates the perfective way with affection, desire, and appetite.18 Passing beyond discursive knowledge, these delights move the exercitant to avow: ‘My soul melted when my Beloved spoke to me.’19 Addressing a God characterized by self-sufficiency who suffices for all, Cisneros lovingly disseminates sights, scents, touches, and transports of contemplative unity throughout an eight-step movement of illumination, enkindled love, sweetness, desire, fulness, rapture, security, and repose.20 As one approaches the sixteenth century, it is the Platonic dialogue which, though not making explicit use of the Triple Way, runs parallel with the perfective stage. For example, in the Commentary o Ficino, synthesizing classical, scholastic, and Neoplatonic sources, follows his forebears in identifying three types of ascent. One is characterized by the refinement of the intellectual and moral virtues (VI:18), a second by the recognition of the grades of ontology (Body, Soul, Angel, God, VI:17–18), and a third by the increasing epistemological clarity through Body, Nature, Opinion, Reason, Mind, to the One (VII:13). These various modes of spiritual attaintment culminate in ‘the splendour of the divine countenance’ where the lover ‘considers by contemplation the face of God shining in the machine of the world’ (V:4).

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Overview of the Poet-Lover’s via unitiva Rather than adopting completely any one of the unitive methods mentioned above, the poet-lover makes syncretic use of his predecessors’ concepts and practices. In the realm of natural contemplation at the border of Aristotle’s theoria and mystical vision, we find such dizains as 412. The setting is the poet-lover’s bird’s-eye view of Lyon situated at the summit of Mont Fourvière overlooking the confluence of the Rhone and the Saone. The scene mirrored through the speaker’s eyes is an intellectual, simple, and immediate gaze at the whole of his experience after separation from Délie which appropriates the landscape as a symbol of the natural growth and development of his virtue. However, dizains such as 127 are imbued with mysticism where the poet-lover invokes Pythagorean and Orphic credos of philosophic music to spiritualize the passions in praise of Délie. This progressive transfiguration of the emotions moves from moderation to consolidation to glorification in his union with the beloved. The lover’s mystical voice also brings to crescendo the discovery of the intimate centre of the soul, reminiscent of Augustine’s ‘inmost understanding,’21Aquinas’s ‘mutual indwelling,’22 and the Rhineland mystics’ exploration of the grunt. In his Varieties of Religious Experience William James offers criteria for mysticism, some of which are enlargement, expansion, and liberation of the soul (2004, 344–5). These phenomena are found in a number of dizains that use forms of the via negativa, and they are one of the distinctive sensations of the eternal in the immanent. Of the most beautiful poems in Délie are those dealing with the spiritual union of the lover and the beloved symbolized by the ‘marriage’ of the Rhone and the Saone. These dizains (346, 364, 395) are analogous to Jan van Ruusbroec’s influential mystical treatise titled the Spiritual Espousals which implicitly regards nature as a wedding ceremony in the book of God. Not only these poems, but also the dizains inspired by Pontus de Tyard depicting ecstatic heights, show a poet-lover unwilling to follow Plato’s dictum of aesthetic ecstasis as the separation of the body from the soul. Rather, the unique aspect of Délie is that the purified body enjoys with the soul the most sumptuous fruits of mystical transport in spite of the long tradition of accounts testifying to the body’s separation from the soul in ecstasy. In the same way the celebration of virtue’s ever-expanding ascent in the last dizain describes itself as fully embodied because the poet-lover measures his transcendence in relation to human, spatial-temporal parameters. However, this is not without the poet-lover’s intimations of feeling divinity in his very humanity, of seeing in the expansion of

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virtue the infinite progress of the human capacities which parallels but is not fully integrated into supernatural life. Contemplation The via unitiva in Délie is characterized by various forms and levels of contemplation, and consequently it would be useful to define this term. According to Jordan Aumann, the Latin meaning of contemplation bears similarity to the Greek term theoria. ‘Etymologically, “contemplation” derives from templum, which referred to the space marked out by the seer with his divining rod as a location for his observations. From this root, the word came to signify the actual observation made by the sear.’23 In De vita contemplativa, Thomas Aquinas defines contemplatio as ‘a simple gaze at the truth’ (contemplatio pertinent ad ipsum simplicem intuitum veritatis, 2a2ae, 180, 3), which is distinguished from meditatio, which is ‘the process of reasoning from certain principles, which arrive at the contemplation of some truth’ (Meditatio vero pertinere videtur ad processum rationis ex principiis aliquibus pertingentibus ad veritatis alicujus contemplationem, ibid.). Seen as a quality of focus, contemplation can apprehend its object through natural or supernatural means. Thus, for Aquinas, the field of contemplation runs the gamut of aesthetics, philosophy, science, natural theology, faith, and supernatural truths afforded by the gifts of the Holy Spirit (ibid., 104). Acts of contemplation may or may not include mystical experience, and in view of the fact that Délie radiates this second dimension, a brief explanation of mysticism as a word and a concept is warranted. The widely read studies by James, Underhill, Butler, Maréchal, Inge, Bouyer, McGinn, Katz, and Fanning, mostly on Western mysticism, show that there is a daunting diversity of information and opinion on the matter.24 However, some useful points de repère emerge from this bountiful research which have earned longstanding respect because of their effectiveness in identifying mysticism’s historical roots and its constituent elements. As Inge relates, the history of the word ‘begins in close connection with the Greek mysteries. A mystic is one who has been, or is being, initiated into some esoteric knowledge of divine things, about which he must keep his mouth shut’ (4). Bouyer examined the term mystikos in the context of the early church and Church Fathers, including Dionysius the Areopagite, and found that it could have six meanings: (1) something mysterious, secret, or hidden; (2) a defiantly problematic theological problem such as thorny biblical passages or the mystery of the Trinity (for the latter, Clement of Alexandria

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used the term ‘mystical tetragram’); (3) spiritual versus carnal; (4) knowledge of divine realities through the life of Christ; (5) worship in spirit as opposed to empty external ritual; (6) a characterization of the sacraments, especially the Eucharist.25 These meanings should be distinguished from the more encompassing one of private, extraordinary experience transcending the self; certainly, the most frequently invoked definition in this regard was given by the fifteenth-century theologian and chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson: ‘Mystical theology is knowledge of God by experience, arrived at through the embrace of unifying love.’26 In addition to its succintness this definition has the advantage of being recognized by the most diverse audiences. A final, very important distinction should be made between, on the one hand, Plato and Plotinus,27 who believed that direct contact with the Divinity could be achieved in this life naturally, and on theother hand, Aquinas who insisted that there can be ‘no immediate experience of God here below.’28 Contemplation of Nature in Délie: Dizain 412 In Délie the poet-lover frequently summons pictorial contemplation in the natural setting to gain a bird’s-eye view of his experience and to intensify his love. In terms of spiritual progress, what is the function of such contemplation? Many poems at the level of purification and illumination dramatize memory as reliving a dilemma that divides the speaker into an abyme of dissociated and warring functions. Thus, in dizain 143 ‘le souvenir’ (v. 1) is living through an interior war where, through the personification of emotions and faculties, it spawns adversative subpersonae: the lascivious dreamer and the awakened spirit, the clandestine tempter and the vigilant soul, the corrosive poisoner and the healing brazen serpent. It is the function of contemplation to move memory one level from the self that relives the problem to the higher and more distant vantage point of the self that comprehensively reviews, evaluates, and corrects a multitude of relived antagonisms. The second goal of contemplation is to unify the speaker into one positive voice which harmonizes the metaself with its object-selves. These two functions combine to raise the unifed speaker to greater love for the woman’s exemplary virtues. Because it inaugurates a series of poems at the end of Délie which lift memory to retrospective overviews of the lover’s experiences as a whole, it is appropriate to begin a discussion of the role of contemplation with dizain 412. The reader encounters the poet-lover at the height of Mont

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Fourvière, collecting his powers in a moment of poise to reassess his épreuve with the beloved. Captivated by the serenity of the skies, he wonders how often he has been drawn by his feelings to leave the active life for the contemplative one. Mont costoyant le Fleuve, et la Cité, Perdant ma veue en longue prospective, Combien m’as tu, mais combien incité A vivre en toy vie contemplative? Où toutefoys mon coeur par oeuvre active Avec les yeulx leve au Ciel la pensée Hors de soucy d’ire, et dueil dispensée Pour admirer la paix, qui me tesmoigne Celle vertu lassus recompensée, Qui du Vulgaire, au moins ce peu, m’esloigne.

(D 412)

[Mount bordering the River and the City, With view stretching far beyond my gaze, How much have you incited me To live in you a contemplative life? Whereas my heart, working actively, Raises to the Heavens, along with my eyes, my thought, (Away from anger and relieved from sorrow,) To admire that peace which bears witness to That virtue rewarded in Heaven, Which removes me, at least in this little, from the Herd.]

The lover’s gaze bears the hallmarks of natural contemplation. In psychological terms it is a beholding of the maturation of virtue in relative rest and tranquility, recollecting in stative terms the past, the present, and the future. His vision is better termed contemplation than meditation because, while discursive reason is successive, the poet-lover creates, through the summit of Mount Fourvière, the gaze of simultaneity. In other words, the spatialization of the lover’s situation at Mont Fourvière standing above the city of Lyon at the confluence of the Rhone and the Saone captures in one picture the vicissitudes of his experience which had otherwise been expressed through the sequence of poems. Unfettered from hypersubordinated syntax which creates labyrinths of analytic qualifications, dizain 412 deftly elides the sense of movement through the use of pictorial symbolism. Aquinas, in addition to his own definition of contemplation as

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‘simplicem intuitum veritatis’ recommends Richard of St Victor’s as well: ‘perspicax et liber contuitus animi in res perspiciendas’ (the souls’ penetrating and easy gaze on things perceived, 2a2ae, 180, 1). In Délie the lover performs this act through his picture of Mount Fourvière in its ascents and descents along with the confluence of the Rhone and Saone. This captures in one glance the rises and falls along with the meetings and the separations of the poet-lover’s encounter with Délie. Through contemplation the poet-lover spatializes time which enables him in the present to review past depredations and to project future prospects. Climbing to the summit of a mountain entails challenges and triumphs, faltering and progress. The lover’s will to see angelically, however, is the product of perseverance, which he expresses by another rhetorical technique of simultaneity, the substantivizing of action. This can be seen in his phrase ‘par oeuvre active’ (v. 5). For the speaker it does not suffice to wish for the intellectual benefits of solitude, as he does in lines 1–4. Rather, contemplatio requires effort before and within this state. There will never be quietism in Scève. To communicate this paradox of movement in rest, the speaker makes the praxis of seeing simultaneous with the thing seen, such that the process and the product are vitually concurrent. Note that the poet lover does not use such verbalized forms as travailler to convey his attainment. Rather, he collectivizes the total effort with the positive noun oeuvre, implying an accomplished work of art and a religious deed. This should make clear that the phrase ‘par oeuvre active’ (v. 5) does not at all mean ‘the active life,’ as some commentators suppose. To be precise, the word ‘active’ denotes the directive force of virtue inherent in contemplation itself embracing its goal. Jan van Ruusbroec’s Spiritual Espousals eloquently expresses this point by saying that rest and activity are mutually enhancing: ‘An interior person [contemplative person] possesses his life in these two ways, that is, in rest and in activity, and in each he is whole and undivided, for he is completely in God when he blissfully rests and completely in himself when he actively loves.’ Evelyn Underhill characterizes this receptive dynamism as ‘restful fruition’ and ‘active love.’29 After Ruusbroec, García de Cisneros would have a similar view of effort in contemplation. Substantially modelling his notion of contemplation on Jean Gerson’s Montaigne de Contemplation, he exhorts the exercitant to limitless perseverance in saying, ‘not to go forward in the path of God is to turn backward.’30 Before them Plotinus had taught that ‘contemplation and vision have no limits’ (3.8.5), and Bonaventure, when speaking about contemplation in the Unitive Way, sees it as a limitless seeking where ‘desire must inflame you.’31

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Thus, ‘oeuvre active’ (v. 5) gives energy and trajectory to contemplation, since by the heart’s impluse it lifts to heaven (‘au Ciel,’ v. 6) not the act of thinking, but thought itself (‘la pensée,’ v. 6), and by so doing sets itself apart from care, anger, and grief. Special attention should be paid to the fact that it is the speaker’s ‘coeur’ (v. 5) which is the major impetus of the contemplation. This is entirely consistent with the widely accepted viewpoint echoed by Gerson that contemplation is ‘the embrace of unifying love,’ a feeling that the poet-lover nurtures by overlooking the marriage between the Rhone and the Saone. Thanks to the emblem of the mountain, the reader sees the concurrent appearance of past purifications and future spiritual enhancements, up and down, at the same time: ‘Avec les yeulx leve au Ciel la pensée/Hors de soucy d’ire, et dueil dispensée’ (vv. 6–7). What were these angers and sorrows? Let us first attend to the lover’s freeing himself from the downward direction of the mountain, which symbolizes the past trials that he has incurred. This begins in line 7 where he evokes previously stated ills also drawn in geographical, vertical images. For example, in dizain 111 the poet-lover’s incessant ‘soucys’ (v. 4) made him fume in his own ‘Montgibel’ (v. 10). As for ‘ire’ (v. 7), the poet-lover had already chafed at the irony that while the ‘Rhosne, en fureur, et grand’ire’ (D 396, v. 5) runs down from the cold Alps into the warming embrace of the Saone, his service to Délie has merited neither peace nor rest. Third, there is the matter of ‘dueil’ (D 412, v. 7). What melancholy is he surpassing? In dizain 280, his energy sapping, death-in-life made him cry out for the insensibilty of limbo: ‘Que ne suis donc en mes Limbes sans dueil/Comme sans joye, ou bien vivre insensible?’ (vv. 1–2). His reasoning is that since waiting for Délie to requite his love has made him entirely contingent (‘Voulant de toy dependre,’ v. 3), he feels as if he were already in limbo. Limbus, meaning border, is the state or place at the edge of hell between the beatific vision and eternal punishment. It was thought that limbo provided an abode for the unbaptized (limbus puerorum) and for the pre-Christian just (limbus patrum). However, to the poet-lover, the monstrous injustice is that he has not been accorded the neutral state of non-suffering allowed by limbo, even though he feels limbo-like effects. While Mount Fourvière is the summit of contemplative knowledge, the lover in dizain 280 exists in no place fully, neither in heaven nor hell nor purgatory nor limbo, because, suspended in false hope, he attempts to do the impossible: ‘Je veux resoudre en mon faict l’impossible’ (v. 4). The last psychological correlate to the mountain’s downward slope is the lover’s feeling of solitude in having distanced himself from urban Lyon, ‘au moins ce peu’ (v. 10) which unbinds him from

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past complaints of the ‘Vulgaire’ (v. 10) – ‘the mercantile care of the plebs, the merchants, the illiterate, and the ambitious’ (Coleman 1975, 190). Now let us move to spiritual ascent and the elevation of aspiration. If an icon is a sign in which form resembles content, then the verticality of typography, strophic symmetry, and imagery of the poem corresponds in perfect harmony with ascending aspiration. Similar to the building of the triumphal column in dizain 418, the Mount Fourvière poem is constituted by one, non-indented typographical block whose syntactic and semantic thrust upward after a moment of separation from cares, anger, and melancholy, takes hold precisely at the midpoint of the dizain (v. 5) where the lover’s ‘oeuvre active’ (v. 5) lifts thought to heaven to receive its rewards of peace. When he speaks of ‘Celle vertu lassus recompensée’ (v. 9), his intellectual vision signals that he has by-passed the lures of amour courtois to enjoy the natural growth and development of virtue in an integrated and complete vision. This consists of the immediate apprehension of heaven’s symbolism captured in ‘pensée’ (v. 6) and the onset of admiration (‘admirer,’ v. 8) which pursue wider expanses: ‘perdant ma veue en longue prospective’ (v. 2). What Kristeller says of Ficino’s notion of reward is also true of dizain 412: ‘Future reward and punishment are nothing but the direct continuation and increase of virtue and vice, and are related to them as the fruit is related to the soul’ (360). Next, there is the lover’s upward beholding, similar to what Bonaventure calls ‘the gaze of admiration,’ an enjoyment of the immense consolation of peace32 which is right at the border of intellectus and mystica, the human mind and the suprarational lights. In the poem the sentiment of peace is described as liberation. This is first signified by the decisive phrase ‘de ... dueil dispensée’ (v. 7) which shows that thought itself (‘pensée,’ v. 6) is freed from, spared, and most important, dispensed from melancholy. This last sense of exemption implies that ‘dueil’ (v. 7) is so intrinsic and ever-present that its removal requires religious or legal permission. This freedom from treacherous passion leading to elevated spirituality plays perfectly into the fact that in the majority of poems the speaker is a disincarnated je. Either in purification or in illumination, references to bodily anatomy, except to the eyes, are highly limited. Rather, the speaker frequently expresses his body in the abstract, such as le corps, with very little specificity in physical traits, in physiognomy, or in aesthetics, except his implicit comparison of himself with ‘laidz Corbeaux’ (D 247, v. 9). What remains of the body are its psychological effects communicated as abstract personifications of the passions (désir, affection, amour, coeur). In dizain 412 this effect of a speaking consciousness without reference to specific

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body parts, allows the poet-lover immediately and completely to absorb himself into the symbol of the mountain which itself in the abstract is spiritual elevation. The body is transferred to and recaptured in the symbol of the mountain which conserves both physical and spiritual sight. The speaker’s second sensation of freedom is expressed by his Petrarchan scorn of the vile herd, ‘Qui du Vulgaire, aumoins ce peu, m’esloigne’ (v. 10). Such ‘freedom from’ statements are defined in relation to obstacles, but this second distancing from the utile in the last line of the poem comes to harass and threaten the poet-lover’s brief flight. In other words, the irascible emotions of defence (refuge) seek to protect the concupiscient passions of love (enjoyment), but in so doing, impinge on the positive feeling of self-realization and the enlargement of virtue. The poet-lover’s contemplation at the summit of Mount Fourvière yields striking parallelisms with and differences from Petrarch’s famous ‘Ascent of Mont Ventoux.’ Making ample use of geography to symbolize the turning of ‘his inner eye towards himself,’ the Italian’s arduous climb is undertaken in Malucène and culminates in a panoramic view of the mountains of Lyon to the right, the sea near Marseille to the left, and the Rhone River ‘directly under our eyes.’33 Like the vicissitudes of Scève’s persona Petrarch’s scaling of the rocky mountain incurs a ‘wandering through the valleys,’ a ‘detour,’ ‘a perplexing error,’ and a ‘stumbling into larger difficulties.’34 Yet, he is guided at night by the moon which ‘offered her friendly service to the wanderers.’35 Also like Délie Petrarch yearns for angelic vision where the desire to see instantaneously would immediately provide the desired object. Lamenting the successivity of human locomotion, he thinks to himself: ‘I wonder whether it ought not to be much easier to accomplish what can be done by means of the agile and immortal mind without any local motion “in the twinkling of the trembling eye.”’36 This ascent is an allegory of conversion modelled on Augustine and pervaded with scripture, ‘proceeding from virtue to virtue with exalted steps.’37 It moves methodically ‘to the height of human contemplation’38 which overlooks the pilgrimage from ambition and base passion to ‘The One, The Good, the True, the stably Abiding.’39 As for the differences between dizain 412 and Petrarch’s ascent, only one point will be considered. Petrarch is highly conscious of chronology. He names the place and the date of his climb (Malaucène, April 26)40 and provides a step by step plot of his journey in a letter to his father. This includes the recruitment of his brother for the trip, the chance meeting with the seer-like aged shepherd who maps his intinerary, his relation to historical figures such as Philip of Macedon, and the review of key events

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in his life: ‘This day marks the completion of the tenth year since you gave up the studies of your boyhood and left Bologna, O immortal God, O immutable wisdom!’41 However, the poet-lover in Délie only dimly refers to chronology which itself is subject to scrambling in order to sweep events into the timeless paradigms of the life of the soul. His working of time is an attempt to deal with the paradoxes of death. If he were to chart Délie as a well-plotted story, closely tied to chronological, linear time, then this would bring relief from suffering but terminate in the oblivion of death. On the other hand, paradigmatic time, unfolding in cycles of repetition, has the advantage of holding death at bay, but also the disadvantage of infinitely prolonging the suffering of warring faculties. Somehow the poetlover wishes immortality in life, an immanent transcendence set endlessly across the expanse of skies. Mystical Contemplation: Spiritualizing the Passions Returning to the end of dizain 412 one sees that the speaker’s contemplation from Mount Fourvière is encroached on by thoughts of Lyon’s ‘Vulgaire’ (v. 10) and that the city from which he has momentarily escaped now appears to surround and invade his consciousness. Thus, while physical distance was somewhat of a palliative, psychological distance is somewhat diminished. Can any of the poet-lover’s contemplations be untroubled or wholly positive? The answer is yes, but rarely, especially in regard to moments when Orphism and Pythagoreanism are used to elevate the faculties by imbuing philosophy with the sensation of mystical harmony and expansion. Treatment of this issue needs to be placed in the context of a recurrent vexation registered by the poet-lover. This is the necessity of judging whether the emotions produced within and by the exercise of virtue are legitimate or subversive. In Délie one of the fundamental problems is the relation between vertu and passion because the first, which moderates the second, may create harmful pleasure in the exercise of its powers. What is the difference between unruly delight and moral enjoyment? Another way of phrasing this point is to ask the question: assuming there has been success in purification and illumination, how are passions transformed and uplifted into the unitive way? This question may be framed with two viewpoints developed by Aquinas. First, the passions are the matter on which the virtues are exercised.42 Yet, the distinction between matter (passions) and method of tempering them (virtue) requires delicate calibration. This is reflected in a second

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point made by Aquinas which springs from his question, ‘Can there be Moral Virtue without the Passions?’ His answer, citing Aristotle, is no: ‘No man is just who rejoices not in just deeds And joy is a passion. So then justice cannot be without passion. Still less the other virtues’ (1a2ae. 59, 5). Montaigne goes a step farther in favour of virtue’s delights when in rebuffing the Stoic view that it is ‘rugged and laborious,’ proclaims, ‘Whatever they say, in virtue itself the ultimate goal we aim at is voluptuousness.’43 This is a problem plaguing the poet-lover. In dizain 150 one sees that the chiasmus structuring the first two lines conflate goodness, virtue, and sensuality: ‘Or sa bonté par vertu attractive,/Ou sa vertu par attrayant bonté.’ Accompanying the poem is the device titled ‘L’hyerre et la Muraille’ whose motto intones, ‘Pour aymer souffre ruyne,’ confessing the deception that too much trust can become a slowly corrosive naivety. In a more intellectual, distant, and contemplative mode the lover observes that the virtuous striving against obstacles can be as pleasurable as the natural rhythms of day resisting night which attemps to maintain its joy through the encroaching dusk: ‘Voy le jour cler ruyner en tenebres,/Où son bienfaict sa clarté perpetue:/Joyeux effectz finissent en funebres,/Soit que plaisir contre ennuy s’esvertue’ (D 175, vv. 1–4). Again there is a more painful deception associated with this problem in dizain 274 where the lover’s self-analysis leads to the shocking lesson of fol amour. The beloved’s beauty is implicitly compared to her virtues which, though they excel her in attraction, only spur the lover like an unbridled horse into runaway disasters: ‘Et tant dur est le mors de ta beaulté/(Combien encor que tes vertus l’excellent)/Que sans en rien craindre ta cruaulté/Je cours soubdain, où mes tourmentz m’appellent’ (vv. 7–10). In dizains characterized by increasing enjoyment of harmony between passion and virtue, the poet-lover seems to be following Ficino’s advice supported by Augustine and Aquinas that virtue is ordered love. In the Commentary Ficino says, ‘He who properly uses love certainly praises the form of the body, but through that contemplates the higher beauty of the Soul, the Mind, and God, and admires and loves that more strongly’ (II:7).44 Aquinas, citing Aristotle, asserts that ‘the passions are neither virtues nor vices,’ and then refers to Augustine’s distinction between frui and uti: ‘If the will is perverse, the movements, namely of the passions, will be perverse also; but if the will is upright, not only are the passions blameless, but also, truly praiseworthy’ (91).45 One of the poems which achieves a momentary peak of joy in celebrating virtue’s harmonious effects on the passions is dizain 127. Here the poet-lover assimilates the wisdom of his

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predecessors, but achieves a distinctive swell of emotion by quantifying and spatializing the unlimited growth of virtue. L’esprit, qui fait tous tes membres movoir Au doulx concent de tes qualitez sainctes, A eu du Ciel ce tant heureux povoir D’enrichir l’Ame, où Graces tiennent ceintes Mille Vertus de mille aultres enceintes, Comme tes faictz font au monde apparoistre. Si transparent m’estoit son chaste cloistre Pour reverer si grand’ divinité, Je verrois l’Ame, ensemble et le Corps croistre, Avant leur temps, en leur eternité.

(D 127)

[Your spirit, which causes all your members to move To the sweet harmony of your holy qualities, Received from Heaven this so happy power To enrich your soul where Graces hold girded A thousand virtues encircled by a thousand others, Of which your deeds make proof in the world. If its chaste cloister were transparent to me, Allowing me to revere such great divinity, I would see your Soul and Body together grow, Before their time, into their eternity.]

In this poem the two implicit principles guiding virtue and passion are the purificatory benefits of moderation (vv. 1–6) and the infnite growth of love (vv. 7–10). Though together these precepts may seem emotionally contradictory, they are quite compatible with the double movement of self-mastery and spiritual transport of the Platonic and Christian traditions. As Ficino teaches through the persona of Diotima: ‘Therefore I beg you, O Socrates, to love other things with a certain moderation and limit, but to love God with an infinite love, and let there be no moderation in divine love.’46 Therefore, to the question, what are the duties of the virtues with respect to the passions which accompany them and on which they operate, Délie’s answer is that they temper the passions of the soul and prepare the way to a visionary elevation of the spiritual senses. It is a matter of refining the passions, not of retreating to impassivity. Through the act of contemplation the lover comes to laud Délie by performing certain acts that distil the passions into the higher sensations of

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‘doulx concent’ (v. 2), ‘heureux povoir’ (v. 3), ‘enrichir l’Ame’ (v. 4), ‘reverer si grand’ divinité’ (v. 8), and ‘croistre,/Avant leur temps’ (vv. 9–10). Thus, spiritualizing the passions means having them participate in the Divinity. We can be precise about the particular roles that the virtues play in refining the lover’s passions and vision. They are (1) to lead and direct, (2) to harmonize, moderate, and calm, (3) to unify, protect and strengthen, and (4) to glorify, revere, and aspire beyond time. First: to lead and direct the passions. The directive force of the woman’s excellence is motored by the mind (‘L’esprit,’ v. 1) which not only animates her powers, but assures the justice of a proportionate distribution of virtues throughout her being (‘qui fait tous tes membres movoir,’ v. 1). Passion is channelled by the mind, as opposed to the representation in the ivy emblem where it is beguiled by affection. As Aquinas notes, ‘The direction of virtue ... begins in the reason and terminates in the appetite inasmuch as the latter is under the influence of reason’ (1a2ae. 59, 1).47 Typical of Scevian poetic vision, this dizain, evoking an orderly development of ‘esprit’ (v. 1), ‘membres’ (v. 1), ‘Ciel’ (v. 3), ‘Graces’ (v. 4), ‘Vertus’ (v. 5), ‘divinité’ (v. 8), ‘Ame’ (v. 9), ‘Corps’ (v. 9), ‘temps’ (v. 10), and ‘eternité’ (v. 10), is a microanthropology centrred around the microcosm that is Délie. In this way the poet-lover conceives of ‘esprit’ (v. 1) as an aboriginal force which creates cosmic order – a notion which is rooted in Plato’s Timaeus: ‘the creation of this world is the combined work of necessity and Mind. Mind, the ruling power, persuaded necessity to bring the greater part of created things to perfection, and thus and after this manner in the beginning, through necessity made subject to reason, this universe was created’ (47e–48a). Another directive energy of the mind is its inclination to grace. The ‘esprit’ (v. 1) is guided to the ‘Graces’ of the woman (v. 4) whose enduring beauties conduct the ‘esprit’ to the ‘Vertus’ (v. 5). For Ficino, also in a cosmological framework, the word ‘grace’ has the connotation of ‘provocation,’ which pushes the focus to ‘knowledge, shapes, and sounds’: ‘Therefore we rightly say that love pertains only to knowledge, shapes, and sounds. And therefore only that grace which is found in these three, virtue of the soul, shape, and sound, because it greatly provokes the soul, is called kallos, that is a provocation, from kaleo, which means “I provoke.” But kallos in Greek means pulchritudo in Latin.’48 Second: to harmonize, moderate and calm the passions. The word ‘concent’ (v. 2), a term favoured by Scève, gives testimony to the efficacy of harmony in governing passion. As a term of music philosophy, the concept of harmony moves from Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato, to Plutarch, Boethius, and Augustine, from the medieval period to Ficino and

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Gregor Reisch, to Franchinus Gaffurius, and to Scève and the Pléiade via Pontus de Tyard.49 One of Pythagoras’s disciples, Alcmaeon of Croton, is cited in Aristotle’s Metaphysics as having provided a table of ten opposites teaching ‘that contraries are the principles of things’ (986b3–4) and that the harmony of the universe, starting with the heavens, is based on ‘a musical scale’ (986a2). Also, Alcmaeon was the first to define health as ‘the harmonious mixture of the qualities,’50 which had an inestimable effect on Hippocratic medicine. In addition, Orpheus himself is invoked many times in Délie, most conspicuously in the twentieth impresa, where he is charming animals surrounding him and captivated by his lyric music. This is the antidote to the cricket’s perpetual grinding (‘le grillet, jalouse fantasie,’ D 153, v. 7), the musical correlate to the beckoning of false and fugacious hope which interrupts and agitates the lover’s sleep. Yet, Orpheus calms and enchants the natural world with music which dissipates discord by radiating unity throughout the soul’s parts and powers. Ficino, quoting Orpheus, concludes that rightly governed love brings mastery and peace: ‘Hence, Orpheus: “You alone, O Love, rule the reins of all these things.”’51 In dizain 127 the Scevian meditative tool of the agon, once bringing struggle betweeen disorderly passions and vigilant virtues, is resolved into ‘heureux povoir’ (v. 3). Among other elevating forces, this ‘povoir’ connotes the harmonious chant (‘concent,’ v. 2) which animates not only the ‘esprit’ (v. 1) but also the vital spirits whose role is to invigorate the ‘Ame’ and ‘Corps’ (v. 9). Third: to unify, protect, and strenghen the passions. Not only is Délie united by the action of ‘esprit’ (v. 1), but also by the Graces that ‘tiennent ceintes/Mille Vertus de mille aultres enceintes’ (vv. 4–5). The words ‘ceintes’ and ‘enceintes,’ related to ‘concent,’ refer to the view shared by Pythagoras and Plato that the heavenly spheres encircle the skies at fixed measures, intervals, and proportions, and by this means the Creator of the World-Soul brings form and concord to disorder and dissonance (Timaeus, 69b–c). For Pythagoras the human soul is a microcosm of creation, the midpoint between time and eternity, humanity and divinity. When the poet-lover in Délie contemplates the woman, who is girded and girdled by ‘Mille Vertus’ (v. 5), he sees that she preeminently bears the powers of the divinity about her soul. From the point of view of Pythagorean philosophy, this means that the symphonia of encircling harmonies, radiating such moral virtues as temperance and courage, has the protective roles of maintaining measure and of resisting disproportion.52 These virtues with which Délie is ‘ceinte’ (v. 4) are the balm which purifies their opposites. When the lover uses ‘ceinte’ in relation to the hunting accoutrement worn

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by Diana (D 131, v. 1), he means that he has been wounded by cold arrows and darts which draw tears from his heart. The cure is the healing action brought by the spheres of courage and temperance, the first to strengthen him through a gauntlet of rejections, the second to moderate sexual desire. The words ‘concent’ (v. 2) and ‘ceintes’ (v. 4) also depict the bounded, circumscribed view of symphonia taught by Pythagoras and communicated by his follower Philolaus to posterity through Plato, Aristotle, and Diogenes Laertius. Philolaus, the first to write a book on the beliefs of Pythagoras, recorded that ‘the world’s being is the harmonious compound of Unlimited and Limiting principles; such is the totality of the world and all it contains.’53 In the context of Pythagorean cosmogony the circular containment of virtuous harmony which characterizes Délie’s perfection mirrors the belief in two form-creating principles, that of the Limit (peras) or the definite boundaries which structure the Unlimited (apeiron) associated with infinite divisibility.54 The ‘fitting togther’55 of these two elements produces universal unity which through local variables accounts for variety. As noted before in sections on versification, the poet-lover imitates these two primordial, mathematical principles, through the Pythagorean perfect number ten which gives shape, number, and meditative discipline to his struggle. Of course there can be tensions in this ‘fitting together.’ In the context of harmonie, I do agree with Helgeson that the word ‘ceinte’ in Délie bears tensions between ‘le discours sublimant’ and ‘un discours érotique’ between ‘contrainte’ and ‘le discours de l’idéal’ (2001, 77–9). However, in rare cases of mystical transport, such as in dizain 127, these dissonances are overcome. The words ‘ceintes’ and ‘enceintes,’ aspects of peras, describe Délie’s encirclement which does not constrain, but actualizes and enhances the virtues. This results in the lover’s expansive gaze on Délie’s ever-growing powers of ‘Ame’ and ‘Corps’ (v. 9). The ring of ‘Mille Vertus’ (v. 5) surrounding the beloved has the active function of strengthening her moral constitution which the poet-lover admires because of its power to ‘enrichir l’Ame’ (v. 4). Through the action of the ‘Ciel’ (v. 3), the virtues radiate invigorating, fortifying, and nurturing forces to the woman’s body and soul, and she in turn spreads them throughout the world and expands them beyond time (vv. 7–10). In the Commentary Ficino also views the cosmos as concentric circles whose centre is God who irradiates the seven gifts of the seven planets. Are not these gifts seen as the virtues embodied by Délie that the lover emulates? ‘Saturn gives contemplation, Jupiter enables governing, Mars passes on greatness of the soul, the Sun and stars clarify the senses and opinion, Ve-

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nus inspires love, Mercury promotes skill in speaking, and Luna encourages procreation.’56 Fourth: to glorify, revere, and aspire beyond time. The poet-lover bears witness to Délie’s glory by saying, ‘Comme tes faictz font au monde apparoistre’ (v. 6). This manner of praising the woman is worded as an objective testimony to her deeds (‘faictz’), for Délie is the mediatrix of divine virtue visible to the entire world (‘au monde’). The poet-lover, however in awe, views these deeds as an incontrovertible fact and proof of her beatitude. There is science to his testimony gained in the contemplative light of her virtues (‘apparoistre’) – a type of glory reminiscent of the First Letter of John where it is said, ‘We know that when He appears we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is’ (3:2).57 Reverence is praise before the astounding presence of beauty, and it is the aim of the lover to testify to and share in the cosmological significance of Délie’s acts as represented by her effects on his own uplifted spirit. In the poem as a whole the ontological movement of powers envisaged spatially is a geotropic radiation of heavenly forces to Délie, which is imitated by the virtues encircling the beloved, witnessed by the world, and completed by the glorified return to the divinity. However, the movement of the passions per se is not an undulation but a progressive swelling. This is quite unlike the hyper-subordinated syntax of such dizains as 330 where Hecate’s dark, labyrinthine corridors lose the lover in wandering conundrums. Rather, there is progressive elevation from animation of the mind, to harmony and nurturing of the virtues, to glorification and transfiguration. The last four lines of the poem are visionary, and they are based on a condition which would give extraordinary powers of prophecy to the poet-lover. If the poet-lover could see into the soul of Délie’s ‘chaste cloistre’ (v.7), the embodiment of her most inviolable holiness, then he would have access to the Divinity and would see Délie’s body and soul grow before their time into eternity. The expression ‘Avant leur temps’ (v. 10) suggests that Délie’s body and soul will grow into their eternity before old age or death. Thus, there is no discontinuity in either the speaker’s vision of the ascent or in Délie’s infinite growth, between life and death, time and eternity, earth and unbounded expanse. This idea is parallel to the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary who was taken body and soul into heaven. However, there are useful distinctions to make between this dizain and church teaching. While Mary’s assumption occurred at the end of her life, Délie moves directly to heaven, body and soul ‘Before their time’ (v. 10), that is, before the end of her life.58 Another observation is

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in order regarding the poet-lover’s vision bordering on the miraculous. There is no qualitative change in the nature of Délie’s growth from earth to the heavens; on the contrary, her exalted expansion appears uninterrupted and natural as indicated by the verb ‘croistre’ (v. 9). Commenting on this verb, Defaux believes that it is taken from Mariolatry bearing the sense of an ‘inépuisable fécondité.’59 Unlike the Assumption of Mary, who was assumed or taken into heaven, Délie’s ascent is active, a growth (‘croistre,’ v. 9). This is another example of the poet-lover’s attempt to view terrestrial existence developing quite naturally into something infinite, analogous to the divine but not totally supernatural. There is another religious implication in these lines. The poet-lover’s vision of the beloved’s ‘chaste cloistre’ (v. 7) is predicated on a prayerful optio. First of all, the phrase ‘chaste cloister’ (also seen in Petrarch’s ‘tuo virginal chiostro,’ and Bembo’s ‘verginal chiostro’)60 alludes to the Old Testament Hebrew term Kabôd whose rich meanings include the Tabernacle, the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy of Holies, and the permanent abiding place of the Lord. Second, the phrase ‘Si transparent’ (v. 7), indicative of the growing purification and lucidity of the lover’s eyes, suggests the Transfiguration of Christ, where Délie’s divine glory shines through her humanity. In theological terms the Transfiguration is distinct from the Resurrection of the Body, since it is but the prelude to the dies irae of the Last Judgment and to the supreme glory of the reembodied soul in the midst of beatitude. Always fearful of death, the poet-lover elides this threat and replaces it with a more acceptable disquiet – the awe of mystical vision which is the enduring and redemptive act of ‘reverer si grand’ divinité’ (v. 8). The reverence inspired by the ‘chaste cloistre’ (v. 7), not without sexual implications, is caused by the awe of divine self-disclosure. While the ‘Resurrection of the Body’ has its term in the glorification of God, the poet-lover between heaven and earth sees no such limit. Notice in the rhyme of lines 7 and 9 that ‘cloistre’ (v. 7) is followed by ‘croistre’ (v. 9). Rather than witnessing the end point of fulfilment, the poet-lover projects an infinite expansion of virtue beyond space and time – a kind of ‘eternité’ (v. 10) in human aspiration. Mysticism and the Intimate Centre There is a divine nucleus that functions as a point of contact between humanity and the divinity by which the soul is nourished and elevated to consummate loving union. Chapter 5 on purification already mentioned how mystical terminology can clarify what Délie’s poet-lover means in his conversion by the expression ‘Ame de mon Ame’ (D 1, v. 6). To com-

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municate the profoundest dimensions of the soul, Bonaventure used the metaphors ‘apex mentis’ and ‘synderesis scintilla’ – the apex of the mind and the spark of conscience. After him Eckhart referred to the ‘ground of the soul’ (Grund Der Seele) as well as to the ‘bürgelin’ (little castle), while Tauler employed a similar metaphor but in a different mystical sense – ‘Grunt’ (‘fundamental,’ ‘reason,’ ‘bottom of the heart,’ ‘undifferentiated unity’).61 Ruusbroec developed the ideas of regaining unity in ‘ghedachte’ and in the reflux of the soul’s powers in eyghendoem der oraehte. However, it remains to define the terms, metaphors, and symbols that Délie’s poet-lover creates in order to describe his deepest experiences with the divine. The mystical poems I discuss below deal respectively with the lover’s centre as the indwelling of Délie and as the bond of spiritual marriage. Bearing witness to some of the highest states of loving union with the beloved, they rise above, not without challenge, other subversive experiences of the centre dealing with narcissism and the ravishing paralysis of lust. As we have already seen the first of these problems is dramatically recounted in dizain 118 where the sighs of wanton pleasure express the lover’s multiple centres that mix Thanatos with Eros: ‘Et mes souspirs dès leurs centres profondz/Si haultement eslevent leurs voix vives,/Que plongeant l’Ame, et la memoire au fondz,/Tout je m’abysme aux oblieuses rives,’ vv. 7–10). As for narcissism, the philautia of self-projection haunts the lover in the mirror poems, where Délie is the lover’s ‘miroir de ma pensée’ (D 412, v. 1). This also occurs in the the fountain motifs where the identity of the beloved’s image redounds to the lover’s heart (D 307, v. 7) and in the portrait pieces where Délie’s surpassing image becomes the lover’s ineffable mal (D 291). In the realm of mystical experience one finds the paradox that the most intimate experience of self is that of the spiritual other. One comes closest to oneself when one feels the intimacy of the divine, for the most radically personal presence of one’s identity, of one’s most secret and private fulfilment, is the discovery that the soul is the abode of God. In the Confessions Augustine’s memory of his past achieves a high point of understanding and love when in his heart he etches the following avowal to God: ‘Yet, you were deeper than my inmost understanding and higher than the topmost height that I could reach.’62 In the Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, Jan van Ruusbroec puts the matter in similar terms when in Book II he reflects on interiority in spiritual enlightenment: ‘God is more interior to us than we are to ourselves, and his interior urging and working within us, whether done naturally or supernaturally, is nearer and more intimate to us than are our own works.’63 In a related but different image of the

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mystical centre Plotinus had concluded the Enneads with a comparison of the One and the soul to two lovers where there is blending and touching of the converging centres of circles: ‘So then the seer does not see and does not distinguish and does not imagine two, but it is as if he had become someone else and he is not himself and does not count as his own there, but has come to belong to that and so is one, having joined, as it were, centre to centre. For here too when the centres have come together they are one, having joined, as it were, centre to centre’ (VI, 9, 10).64 The poet-lover in Délie reaches transport with similar imagery of the circle when he proclaims to the beloved: Dens son poly ce tien Cristal opaque, Luisant, et cler, par opposition Te reçoit toute, et puis son lustre vacque A te monstrer en sa reflexion. Tu y peulx veoir (sans leur parfection) Tes mouvementz, ta couleur, et ta forme. Mais ta Vertu aux Graces non diforme Te rend en moy si representative Et en mon coeur si bien à toy conforme Que plus, que moy, tu t’y trouverois vive.

(D 229)

[In its polished surface your opaque Crystal, Shining and clear, in its opacity Receives you totally and then its lustre is diligent In showing you in its reflection. You can see there (without their perfection) Your movements, and your colour and your form. But your virtue, not unlike that of the Graces, Makes so perfect a likeness of you in me And in my heart so consonant with you That you would find yourself more alive in it than I.]

In Augustine, Ruusbroec, and the poet-lover, there is the paradox that the greatest intimacy with oneself is the discovery of the divine overtaking the heart. However, while Augustine and Ruusbroec express this joyful displacement in terms of spatial proximity, the poet-lover conveys it in metaphors of consonance, conformity, and receptivity: ‘But your Virtue, not unlike that of the Graces/Makes so perfect a likeness of you in me/ And in my heart so consonant with you/That you would find yourself

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more alive in it than I’ (vv. 7–10). In the poem as a whole the movement to complete intimacy unfolds in three stages based on the fidelity of representation.65 In the first stage (vv. 1–4) the speaker lovingly admires that when Délie looks in the ‘Cristal opaque’ (v. 1), the polished mirror receives her shining image totally and clearly, showing consonance between the reflector and the object reflected. In this case it is between the woman’s beauty and the receptive glass. The speaker is an onlooker using this scene to measure whether his own faculties can equal or surpass the lucid receptivity of the faithful glass. Here the mirror is the symbol of mind and perception (esprit and sens in Scève’s vocabularly), yet in line 9, the lover finally has recourse to his own heart (‘mon coeur’) to judge which power has more efficacy. Until that point he scrutinizes the mirror’s capacity to take possession of the beloved’s presence vive. Important in his gaze is the observation that the mirror’s ‘lustre vacque/A te monstrer en sa reflexion’ (vv. 3–4). Through the Latin derivation of ‘lustre’ (lustrare), the lover refers to both purification and illumination. The meaning of ‘vacque’ (s’emploie à) is rich in connotations. Derived from the Latin vacare (to be empty, to be free from anything), it connotes an active receptivity in which the clarity of the mirror is so pure that it makes itself attentive and diligent in apprehending the beloved’s reflection. The Platonic resonances of lines 5 and 6 redound to the poet-lover’s problems of representation when experiencing the joyful alienation of self brought by intimacy with the divine. He deems that the ‘Cristal’ (v. 1) falls short in its powers, since it can only capture imperfectly (‘sans leur parfection,’ v. 5) an appearance of the beloved’s qualities, and these properties are only physical: ‘mouvements’ ‘couleur,’ ‘forme’ (v. 6). This sentiment derives from the ineffability topos not only in sacred discourse, but also in Plato. In the Cratylus Socrates poses a rhetorical question to his interlocutor: ‘Do you not perceive that images are very far from having qualities, which are the exact counterpart of the realities which they represent?’ (432d). In these two verses Scève is raising two questions about the effectiveness of the poet-lover’s gaze. First, is the mirror sufficient to capture Délie’s preeminent presence? The second concerns the Graces which will be called upon in line 7. What is the role of the Graces in instilling the immediacy of divine presence? In general, the Graces exist to attract us to beauty, and the mirror fully reflects the woman’s allure – her ‘mouvements,’ ‘couleur,’ and ‘forme’ (v. 6). The mirror’s reflection, though effective in showing these perceptual qualities, is in the poet’s eyes These two questions lift the lover to the second stage of introspection by collectively asking what is needed to improve his vision of beauty.

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In the second stage of measured consonance the speaker attempts to rise above the imperfections in the mirror by contemplating the reflective power of his own heart. He suggests that while the ‘Cristal’ (v. 1) falls short in seizing the physical aspects of the woman, his ‘coeur’ (v. 9) exceeds the mirror in capturing her superior qualities. In other words, being sufficiently purified and lucid, he is now prepared to receive the woman’s ‘Vertu’ (v. 7). The beloved’s virtue is described as not unlike the Graces (‘non diforme,’ v. 7). With this association between Délie’s virtue and the Graces the lover begins to integrate the various levels of beauty that move from mythology to Neoplatonism. In the classical context the Graces are called the Charites, handmaidens of Venus who personify charm, grace, and beauty, while bestowing intellectual, artistic, and moral gifts.66 According to Pausanias, the three Graces were depicted as a circle of three nude, intertwined women holding one another by the arms. Two of the women are seen from the front, the third from the back, thereby symbolizing the moral that a benefit conferred is twice repaid (Seznec 1972, 208–9). Their nudity signifies sincerity, purity of intention, and lack of affectation. Thus, the poet-lover invokes the mythological Graces to symbolize the active forces of receptivity and reciprocity. However, these classical definitions of the Graces are drawn into Renaissance Neoplatonism when the lover emphasizes their relation to virtue. In dizain 182 the lover lays down a hypothetical premise: ‘Mais si Raison par vray congnoissance/Admire en toy Graces du Ciel infuses:/ Et Graces sont de la Vertu puissance ...’ (vv. 1–3). This association of the Graces with the ‘Ciel’ (v. 2) links them with the spiritual qualities as expounded in Ficino and Ebreo. In the latter’s Dialoghi d’Amore, Sophia demands that Philo explain how incorporeal beauty can be attained from the beauty of ‘formal grace.’67 ‘Formal grace,’ says Philo, ‘delights and moves him who apprehends it to love; as this formal grace belongs to natural form in natural beauty so it belongs to artificial form in artificial beauty.’68 In dizain 229 formal grace is the beauty of art embodied in the ‘Cristal opaque’ (v. 1), while natural beauty is the woman’s ‘mouvements, ‘couleur,’ and ‘forme’ (v. 6). There is also, says Philo, another beauty reflecting the Creator: ‘natural things are are of the manner of artifical things: because it is clear that those forms which make natural bodies’ beauty exist with a far higher degree of beauty in the mind of the Creator ... the beauty of the whole makes each one of them [forms] beautiful, and the beauty of each is found in the whole.’69 This point helps in understanding why the poet-lover uses the phrase ‘non diforme’ (v. 7) to describe the resemblance between the Graces and the Virtues. Not only does this adjectival phrase mean ‘not unlike’ (non différent de forme), but it also suggests by word

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play ‘not deformed’ (negation of difforme) and ‘not multiplied.’ In other words the poet-lover as onlooker-contemplator now actively assimilates the movements, colours, and shapes of the mirror to a unified view of the woman. Given that the lover had tied the Graces to the ‘Ciel’ (D 182, v. 2), then it can be inferred that the Graces of Virtue attract the lover’s heart to an image more ‘representative’ of the beloved’s higher beauty (D 229, v. 8). In the third stage of ever-increasing consonance and presence the speaker’s experience of the beloved moves from reflection to living intimacy where the perfect representation of virtue (‘si representative,’ v. 8) becomes indistinguishable from the active life of the beloved working in his heart. Note the lover’s words. They are not, ‘I would find myself more alive in your heart,’ but rather, ‘You would find youself more alive in my heart than I’: ‘Que plus, que moy, tu t’y trouverois vive’ (v. 10). What does this mean? Let us observe the use of the conditional mood: ‘Que plus, que moy, tu t’y trouverois vive’ (v. 10). The lover is claiming that should the woman occupy the lover’s heart, she would feel more alive than he. This is a confession about the experience of the centre which totters between the lover’s receptivity and his narcissism. Narcissism because he is speaking for and in place of the woman through self-centered, self-proclaimed omniscience, namely, that he would know how the beloved would feel in this hypothetical comparison. Receptivity because the poet-lover affirms a greater life than his own when the woman dwells in his heart. For him this is not the Ficinian exchange of souls celebrated in dizain 136, but the energizing of his soul vivified by the example of Délie at its centre. Here the lover’s centre is not the peace of rest or the castle of invulnerability, but the apex of active receptivity attempting to go beyond the inadequacies of representation by transforming the mirror’s reflected lustre into the ripples of life. The final issue to be noted in this poetic contemplation concerns whether the lover’s deepest intimacy with the beloved has been achieved by affection or knowledge. The first stanza tends to view the mirror as the work of the mind (esprit) and of perception (sens), while toward the end of the poem the greater reception of the woman comes through the heart. In regard to Scève’s psychological anatomy Saulnier indicates that ‘le coeur ... enferme toute la spontanéité, sous son double aspect: l’affection, aspect passif de la sensibilité, l’impression subie; le désir, son aspect actif, l’appétit’ (1:236). In the context of mysticism the highest state of union has been conceived in at least three ways pertinent to our context. Thomas Gallus believed that there is a separatio or a cutting off from all knowledge before and during the ascent to the apex affectionis and to the unitio dei-

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ficans70 without the subsumption of intellectual knowledge into the affective zone. Bonaventure held that knowledge is necessary but insufficient to pass into the apex mentis, but also taught that in ‘the highest state of immediate contact with God, we will both love and know Him’ (McGinn 1998, 111). Finally, there is Gregory the Great who maintained that love itself is a form of knowing: ‘amor ipse notitia est’ (ibid., 82). It seems that the poet-lover comes closest to Bonaventure because affectivity cuts across two types of knowledge – the cognitive sharpening of amatory representation and the affective recognition of joyful intimacy. While the speaker uses the epistemological term ‘si representative’ (v. 8) to describe the enhanced presence of the beloved, this word glides easily into his experience of her as ‘vive’ (v. 10). This présence vive concludes the poem but renews his existence. As seen in the section on reason and the syllogism, the poet-lover’s coeur, at its moral best, tends to channel logical and epistemological issues into passionate virtues. In dizain 229 he follows a similar procedure, but this time in order to seek the extraordinary experience of making his soul the living centre of the divine. It must nevertheless be observed that the conditional mood of the last line (‘tu t’y trouverois,’ v. 10) means that the renewed life which the lover feels at the core of his heart is not necessarily shared by the beloved. While the lover is so conformable (‘poly,’ v. 1; ‘conforme,’ v. 9) to the beloved that he makes his heart her dwelling place, there is no guarantee that the woman will reciprocate in spite of the three Graces. Ruusbroec and the Transformation of The Spiritual Espousals in Délie A second symbol of the mystical centre used by Scève is that of spiritual betrothal. It is most prominent in dizains celebrating the confluence of the Rhone and Saone, particularly when the poet-lover makes reference to ‘le mariage excellent’ and to the rivers’ ‘nopces’ (D 395, vv. 6, 10). A religious and literary tradition having roots in the Song of Songs and the Orphic mysteries, it was carried forward to the Middle Ages by Bernard’s Sermones Super Cantica Canticorum, William of St Thierry’s Expositio super Cantica Canticorum, and Richard of Saint Victor’s Benjamin major and De Quatuor Gradibus Violentae Charitatis. In the early fourteenth century the best known of the Flemish mystics, Jan van Ruusbroec, composed one of the most influential works of affective contemplation titled The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, also translated as The Spiritual Espousals. At the end of the treatise Ruusbroec characterizes his experi-

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ence of union with the divine as a new dimension of consciousness termed ‘a blissful embrace of loving immersion’ (1985, 11). Guiding the reader through a lush forest of spiritual senses The Spiritual Espousals is divided into three books treating the active life, the interior life, and the contemplative life. Following its tripartite theoretical organization is a mystical progression consisting of (1) freeing the soul from the restlessness of the active life, so that (2) there can be a deeper unification of memory, understanding, and will, which (3) brings the contemplator into a flowing union with the divine so absorbing that the soul is unaware of any difference between itself and God.71 From the point of view of both geography and poetry, the marriage of the Rhone and Saone in Délie has the movement of conjunction and repetition. At the beginning of this fluvial procession the Rhone goes out from one large body of water (now Lake Geneva) to take its vows with the Saone at their confluence in Lyon, from where the couple flows together united into the oceanic abyss of the Mediterranean. Thus, love emerges from a wide expanse of water to take its vows in Lyon where it courses to a fathomless envelopment of unity in a larger sea: ‘N’apperçoy tu de l’Occident le Rhosne/Se destourner, et vers Midy courir,/Pour seulement se conjoindre à sa Saone/Jusqu’à leur Mer, où tous deux vont mourir?’ (D 346, vv. 7–10). The cyclical aspect of the Delian marriage is quite similar to the concept of regiratio in Ruusbroec, which goes to the essence of his sensibility. Eric Colledge explains: Ruysbroeck’s thought is something new in the West. New spiritual insights enabled him to achieve a synthesis between Augustine’s teaching on man’s reflection of the divine nature, and what he had learned from Neoplatonism, notably from Dionysius, about regiratio, the eternal cycle through which the soul moves, out from God and back into Him. Just as the stars never falter in their silent march across the heavens, just as the sea never ceases to ebb and flow, so is the soul called back again out of time in that unnameable abyss in which it will find God where it left Him, and will take its delight in Him, and sink down into Him, and to be one with Him.72

Therefore, it is appropriate to view certain dizains of Délie through the prism of The Spiritual Espousals not only because their theme is similar, but also because their view of contemplation, like the river imagery, is both rest and motion, cycle and renewal. Given the notion of regiratio, a caution and a similarity should be noted. Neither Ruusbroec nor Scève subscribe to reincarnation, in spite of the

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symbols of cyclical renewal which characterize their works. Also, Ruusbroec has been described as a ‘Phenomenologist’73 who crafted a gem of mystical descriptive psychology with wide appeal, especially in its existentially concrete and palpable yearning extending from the active to the contemplative lives. Like Scève, Ruusbroec is a passionate intellect. Pervaded with the sensuality of the Song of Songs, The Spiritual Espousals is modelled on the parable of the virgins and the arrival of the bridegroom in the Gospel of Matthew 25:6 where it is said: ‘Behold, the bridgegroom! Come out to meet him.’74 To organize his treatise Ruusbroec divides this verse into four parts, each of which provides the principal motifs for the three books on the active, the interior, and the contemplative lives. These parts are (1) See, (2) the bridegroom is coming, (3) Go out, (4) to meet him.75 Using this quadruple scheme taken from the third book, on the contemplative life, it will be helpful to see how Ruusbroec’s water imagery provides insight into the symbolism of mystical betrothal uniting the Rhone and Saone. I will centre discussion on dizain 395 and elaborate on its symbolism by examining aspects of three other espousal poems in Délie ( Ds 17, 208, 346): Ce n’est Plancus, qui la Ville estendit, La restaurant au bas de la montaigne: Mais de soymesme une part destendit Là, où Arar les piedz des deux Montz baigne: L’aultre saulta de là vers la campaigne, Et pour tesmoigne aux nopces accouroit. Celle pour veoir si la Saone couroit, S’arresta toute au son de son cours lent: Et ceste, ainsi qu’à present, adoroit Ce mariage entre eulx tant excellent. [Plancus did not extend the City, Restoring it at the base of the mountain, But one part extended of itself Where the Arar bathes the feet of the two mountains, The other part leapt from there toward the countryside And ran as a witness to the nuptials. The first, to see if the Saone were flowing, Stopped completely at the sound of its slow-moving flow. The other, as at present, adored This so excellent marriage between them.]

(D 395)

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Since we will be comparing speaking roles in Ruusbroec and Scève, it will be helpful to clarify who as dramatis personae are communicating what. Narratology makes the distinction between surface actors (characters) and deep level functions. In general, four important narrative functions are the subject, the object, helper, and contract/goal. In Ruusbroec the bridegroom is the object of love symbolizing Christ while the reader is one with the author as subject seeking communion with God. Their ultimate goal is the spiritual marriage which has three interacting components: the active, interior, and contemplative lives. The contract is spiritual marriage. However in Scève’s work, Délie replaces Christ as the object of love and takes the role of human goddess endowed with the highest moral and spiritual powers. The subject of desire is the poet-lover who through amytié wishes to emulate and possess the beloved’s virtues. In the context of the espousal dizains the helpers are friendship and fidelity and the goal is spiritual marriage.76 In narratology actors are not only characters but any medium capable of bearing one of these functions. One medium can bear multiple functions, and one function can have multiple media. In the espousal poems the subject is the lover symbolized by the Rhone; the object of love is the beloved signified by the Saone. Yet, the lover as subject, by virtue of his exemplar Délie, shares a degree of her virtues, as we have already seen in the purgative, illuminative, and unitive ways. Consequently, the Rhone as a medium can also function as the lover impelled by Délie’s power within him, and thus, to a certain extent signifies her power. The Saone is the medium that the poet-lover uses to seal the contract which is consummated at the confluence of the two rivers in Lyon. The poet-lover sees in the woman the combined force of dynamism (Rhone) and active reception (the Saone). Thus, Scève’s espousal poems change the media of Ruusbroec roles, and humanize his values, but maintain the religious atmosphere and plot of the journey: anticipation (‘See’), departure (‘the bridegroom is coming’), the trip proper (‘Go out’), and the goal of the spiritual marriage (‘to meet’). Since the ceremony of The Spiritual Espousals begins with ‘See,’ let us now turn our eyes to Délie, bearing in mind Ruusbroec’s vocabulary of interior vision which highlights vision and the visible in contemplation. Among the primary definitions of ‘See’ that he gives in Book III are ‘a state of divine contemplation and an eternal act of gazing,’ ‘a single act of seeing,’ an ‘eternal now which is ever received with new pleasure and new joy,’ ‘a way characterized by both activity and blissful enjoyment’ (SE, 151). In dizain 395 all motion is captured in a single gaze. From a bird’s-eye view the speaker’s vision seizes the permanent laws of process and cre-

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ates a rhetoric of timelessness by mythifying and ritualizing history and geography. Like the unbroken flow of rivers, ritual spatializes time by its repetitive nature and makes the now something imminent but everlasting. In the first rite, the poet-lover honours Lyon as a city of perduring value by associating it with Munatius Plancus, Julius Caesar’s governor of the city. The reference to Caesar confers on Lyon an association with the eternal city, while the present participle ‘restaurant’ (v. 2) calls attention to the rebirth of Lyon at a glorious moment in its history. Permanence in continuity on the historical level is linked to the second rite, the nuptials of the Rhone and Saone. Ruusbroec’s characterization of the ‘divine nature’ as ‘a beginning without beginning’ (SE, 149) is an apt metaphysical picture of the union of the two rivers, since their interflowing appears as something both unique and forever renewed, the constant meeting at the same point, but each time, a new convergence. Also, the panoramic view of nature’s unalterable process makes the two rivers’ conjunction appear providentially guided. Each river begins its course quite distant from the other, but then they commence a parallel movement above Lyon from where they merge and penetrate with the blessing of Mont Fourvière overseeing their love. In the spiritual marriage there are phenomena of time and motion which transcend the lover’s purgative experience of walking a treadmill depicted by device 35 titled ‘L’Asne au Molin.’ The scene shows a blindfolded donkey turning the upper stone of a mill with the motto, ‘Fuyant peine travail me suyt.’ Instead of the futility of escaping a vicious circle, the spiritual marriage converts the prison of mobile stasis into a free-flowing conjuction of ever-renewing vows. The second step of the marriage ceremony directs the contemplator to note that ‘the bridegroom is coming.’ As Ruusbroec explains in Book II on the interior life, this means that Christ ‘became a human being out of love for us ... with new gifts and graces according to the measure in which each person is able to receive them’ (SE, 47). The author then describes the démarche of the bridegroom: The coming of the Bridegroom is so fast that he has always come and is always abiding with fathomless riches and yet is personally and ceaselessly coming anew with such new resplendence that it seems as if he had never previously come. (SE, 148)

Ruusbroec’s description of the bridegroom’s pace as ‘fast’ corresponds to the poet-lover’s observation that the Rhone is so rapid that it nearly over-

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runs its course: ‘Fleuve rongeant pour t’attiltrer le nom/De la roideur en ton cours dangereuse,/Mainte Riviere augmentant ton nom,/Te fait courir mainte rive amoureuse,/Baingnant les piedz de celle terre heureuse’ (D 417, vv. 1–5).77 In dizain 395 not only is the poet-lover quickened to reach his spouse, suggested by the swift currents of the river, but in dizain 346 he fixes his attention on the imminent arrival of his bride. Here in joyful ‘amytié,’ he says to Délie: N’apperçoy tu de l’Occident le Rhosne Se destourner, et vers Midy courir, Pour seulement se conjoindre à sa Saone ... ?

(D 346, vv. 7–9)

The speaker is exhorting the woman to draw a lesson from symbolic geography, namely, that the westward direction of the Rhone from the Alps turns southward to join the Saone at Lyon. This fixing of attention to gather the powers of the soul on the object of love runs parallel to Ruusbroec’s use of the ‘three streams’ image (Book II) to symbolize the consolidation of the memory, understanding, and will in anticipation of the bridegroom (SE, 98). The marriage ceremony also requires an act of faith as well as of fidelity, and in the Espousals Ruusbroec gives firm assurance that the bridegroom ‘has always come and is always abiding with fathomless riches’ (SE, 148). In the espousal poems, the firmness of fidelity and the steadfast resolution not to lose faith are embodied in the very course of the Rhone River. After leaving the Alps it takes a determined southward direction which first overshoots Lyon, but then abruptly turns northwest back to the city to unite with the Saone. This is an excellent symbol of the lover’s wandering and imprudence, which are finally rectified by fidelity and attraction. The bond of love is also affirmed explicitly in dizain 17 when the lover declares that it would be impossible for the heart (‘coeur,’ v. 2) of the two lovers/ rivers to be separated (‘se desassemble,’ v. 2), to be diminished in ardour (‘feu,’ v. 8) or constancy (‘ma foy descroisse,’ v. 9) because they are bound together by ‘ferme amour’ (v. 10). To anticipate the arrival of the bridegroom is also to begin donning the embellishments of spiritual adornment. The word ‘adornment’ is not only part of the title of The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, but its various verbal and nominal forms cut across the three books on the active, interior, and contemplative lives. The metaphor of adornment exteriorizes the full panoply of spiritual beauty with which the contemplator must be arrayed to enter into marriage with the bridegroom. For example, at the outset of

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Book III on contemplation, Ruusbroec teaches, ‘This contemplation establishes us in a state of purity which transcends all our understanding, for it is a special adornment and heavenly crown and is, in addition, an eternal reward for all our virtues and for our entire life’ (SE,145). Another espousal poem proves an excellent example of adornment with the transposition of earthly lustre to the illustrious interiority of Délie’s virtue: Tu cours superbe, ô Rhosne, flourissant En sablon d’or, et argentines eaux: Maint fleuve gros te rend plus ravissant, Ceinte de Citez, et bordé de Chasteaulx, Te practiquant par seurs, et grandz batteaulx Pour seul te rendre en nostre Europe illustre. Mais la vertu de ma Dame te illustre Plus, qu’aultre bien, qui te face estimer. Enfle toy donc au parfait de son lustre, Car fleuve heureux plus, que toy, n’entre en Mer.

(D 208)

[You flow, O Rhone, proudly and flourishing In golden sand and silvery waters. Many great streams make you more ravishing, You who are girded with Cities and bordered by Castles, With sure and great ships using you To make you alone illustrious in our Europe. But my Lady’s virtue makes you more illustrious Than any other good that gives you value. Swell then in the perfection of her splendour, For no happier river than you reaches the sea.]

At the beginning of Book II Ruusbroec furnishes us with an intertext on adornment which offers some key analogues to dizain 208: The kingdom and eternal dwelling place of these three unities [God, nature, the soul] can also be supernaturally adorned and and possessed, first of all through the moral virtues practiced in charity in the active life. This kingdom is still more beautifully adorned and more nobly possessed when the fervent exercises of the interior life are added to the active life, and it is most nobly and blissfully adorned through a supernatural, contemplative life. (SE, 73)

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Ruusbroec is revelling in tying the beauty of the active life to the interior and contemplative lives with the metaphors of embellishment, kingdom, and nobility. Paralleling this are the first six verses of dizain 208 consisting of a poetic adornment of the Rhone whose illustrious surroundings are elevated and surpassed by ‘la vertu de ma Dame’ (v. 7). The switch of registers forces the reader to gather spiritual attributes of Délie which correspond to the riches of the Rhone in Lyon. This requires retrospective interpretation of the poem from the very end to the beginning and then integrating this retroactive reading with other related dizains. In Scève’s poem the castles bordering the Rhone connote the Kingdom of France, while the Flemish author’s account suggests the Kingdom of God. The reader of Délie may wish to join the two realms with the spiritual ‘lustre’ of the beloved (v. 9). The girding of Lyon symbolizes the orbit of virtues surrounding Délie; the castle is her morally invincible heart; and the golden sand is her value beyond ‘Or monnoyé’ or ‘aultre chose exquise’ (D 23, v. 4). Similarly, the ‘argentines eaux’ (v. 2) mirror the limpid lucidity of the woman’s reflection; her nobility mirrors that of Françoys (D 252), which raises the lover to Orphic heroism (‘Mon Orphée haultement anobly,’ D 445); and the ‘grandz batteaulx’ (v. 5) correspond to the lover’s ship (‘nef,’ D 243, v. 9) which is guided to port by the woman’s lighthouse (‘feu,’ D 243, v. 10). Just as Ruusbroec finds blissful the adornment of the interior life, so the poet-lover is enraptured with his meeting with the bride. The myriad streams and rivers emulating rays of the Rhone’s luster are ravishing (‘ravissant,’ v. 3) tributaries of Délie whose ‘bien’ surpasses all other value (D 208, v. 8). Imbued with Délie’s virtues, the lover’s heart, like the Rhone, ‘swells in the perfection of her splendour’ (v. 9) and achieves a moment of beatitude (‘fleuve heureux,’ v. 10) expanding and enlarging itself as it flows out to the Mediterranean. Now vigilant that the bridegroom is arriving, the contemplator takes the third the step in The Spiritual Espousals, which is to ‘Go out’ and actively seek the spouse’s coming. Ruusbroec says: Now in each of these comings Christ demands of us a particular way of going out of ourselves – a way of living that is in accordance with the manner of his coming. For this reason he speaks spiritually within our heart at each coming, saying, ‘Go out through your exercises and your whole life in accordance with the way in which my grace and gifts impel you.’ (SE, 77)

Returning to dizain 395, one sees that the poet-lover expresses this com-

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mand by personifying the land formations around Lyon in greeting and partaking of the rivers’ nuptials. Seeing geography as both moving and the result of movement, the poet-lover recounts two acts of the mobile terrain. First, delving into geological and political history, he states that it was not Plancus who extended the city to the base of the mountains (Fourvière and La Croix-Rousse), but that one part of the land extended itself (‘de soymesme une part destendit,’ v. 3), thereby preparing the way for the city’s restoration. He is referring to the bed of the Soane between the two mountains. Second, another part of the land leapt (‘saulta,’ v. 5) from that point to the countryside to witness the marriage of the Rhone and Saone toward the south. The first displacement was caused by the land’s wish to see if the Saone were flowing, and this it confirmed by the sound of the water’s slow moving current (vv. 7–8). The second land movement, in unbroken continuity with the present (‘ainsi qu’à present,’ v. 9), was paying adoration (‘adoroit,’ v. 9) to the excellent marriage. What is the significance of this geographical personification in terms of the call to ‘Go out’? First, the joyful animation of nature celebrating the rivers’ nuptials recalls the jubilation at the marriage feast of Cana (John 2:1–11). The land’s eager movement toward the rivers responds to a call to society to witness a sacred bond and also to share and partake in the festivities of a covenant that renews its own solidarity. As Ruusbroec says of ‘Go out,’ ‘The spirit of God urges, drives, draws, flows into and touches us’ (SE, 77). Likwise this espousal poem and the others depict dynamic movements: restoring, extending, leaping, running, coursing, water discharging into the Mediterranean. That the land’s animation is a calling to something sacred is also indicated by the lover’s observation that the ‘Arar’ (v. 4, the Saone) bathes the feet of the two mountains. This is an act of purification and regeneration ministered to the couple and to Lyon. In summary, the ‘Go out’ seals vows at all levels: the land kissing the water, the city’s reuniting of past to present, the sounds of the Saone’s quiet current responding to the eyes of the solicitous land (v. 8), the view of the mountains dignifying and adoring the rivers’ nuptials. The spiritual marriage offers the poet-lover the occasion to burst with pride at Lyon’s rejuvenation, for in dizain 208 he boasts that the Rhone flows ‘superbe’ (v. 1) and ‘flourissant’ (v. 1, ‘like Florence’?), making it illustrious throughout Europe: ‘Pour seul te rendre en nostre Europe illustre’ (v. 6). Also, in dizain 395 the mention of ‘Plancus’ (v. 1) and the ‘Arar’ (the ancient name for the Saone, v. 4) ties Lyon’s recent glory to its Roman roots, giving the city greater lustre. However, the word ‘seul’ (D 208, v. 6) cautions the reader that the force behind the bonds betrays a

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desire for self-sufficiency which creates dissonance in this feast of union. In the unitive way of the Exercitatorium Cisneros never tires of reminding the exercitant that it is God and not humanity that is self-sufficient and sufficient to all. In dialogue with the Almighty Cisneros says, ‘Thou art wholly sufficeint for me.’78 Describing God to the faithful he also insists that the Creator has ‘need of naught ... being in Himself wholly sufficient for everything.’79 The poet-lover, taking pride in his affiliation with Rome, emphasizes that Lyon extended itself by itself (‘Mais de soymesme une part destendit,’ D 395, v. 3), and by so doing, ascribes to the city alone the power to thrive and endure. The summit of Ruusbroec’s Spiritual Espousals occurs in the climax of Book III on mystical contemplation which consummates the invitation to come out ‘to meet him’ (SE, 151). Its oceanic imagery of the soul plunged into the transporting depths of regiratio, the flux and reflux of the marital giving and receiving between themselves and God, reach their non-beginning beginning in ‘the wild waves of the Sea’ (SE, 152). Now this active meeting and this loving embrace are in their ground blissful and devoid of particular form, for the fathomless, modeless being of God is so dark and so devoid of particular form that it encompasses within itself all the divine modes and the activity and properities of the Persons in the rich embrace of the essential Unity; it thereby produces a divine state of blissful enjoyment in this abyss of the ineffable. (SE, 152)

The poet-lover in Délie, though using the conciseness of the epigrammatic dizain, is no less mystically immersive than Ruusbroec when he blesses the spiritually ennobled Rhone with the wish, ‘Enfly toy donc au parfait de son [Délie’s] lustre,/Car fleuve heureux plus, que toy, n’entre en Mer’ (D 208, vv. 9–10). Even stronger is the speaker’s rhetorical question addressed to Délie in the concluding quatrain of dizain 346: N’apperçoy tu de l’Occident le Rhosne Se destourner, et vers Midy courir, Pour seulement se conjoindre à sa Saone Jusqu’à leur Mer, où tous deux vont mourir?

(D 346, vv. 7–10)

In regard to mystical affectivity in the espousal mode, the best way to understand the relations between Scève and Ruusbroec is to make distinctions. First, in both The Espousals and dizain 346 we are dealing with what the Dictionnaire de spiritualité calls la mort mystique (10:1778–91).

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At the heights of contemplation, the Flemish author says, ‘In the abyss of this darkness in which the loving spirit has died to itself, God’s revelation and eternal life have their origin’ (SE, 147). In dizain 346 the lovers conjoin at the Saone and are swept to their death united into the Mediterranean Sea. Given that dizain 208 describes nearly the same scene as welling happiness (vv. 9–10), both the poet-lover and Ruusbroec are speaking of a positive, regenerative death. Yet, the springs of life for Ruusbroec are outpourings of supernatural grace, whereas for the poet-lover mystical inspiration is tapped from the natural world. Second, both Ruusbroec and the poet-lover imply at first glance that spiritual immersion results in some type of indistinction or complete identity with the object of love. In the above two poems, the last scene is that of the lovers merging with the Mediterranean Sea. Also, Ruusbroec says that a person’s spirit ‘ceaselessly becomes the very resplendence which he receives’ (SE, 147). Jean Gerson was critical of Ruusbroec’s notion of a unity beyond distinction because it implied an ontological identity with God and an effacement of human individuality. However, as James Wiseman, Albert Deblaere, and Joseph Alaerts have shown80 there is a difference between ontology and affectivity. Ruusbroec speaks of feeling God’s presence and not assuming his identity, for as the author says, a person ‘feels and finds himself to be nothing other than the same light with which he sees’ (SE, 147). As for the poet-lover, the overwhelming impression of images of union is that they are symbols of shared experience, accord, concord, con-fluence, coupling and interpenetration, and spiritual community that makes the two lovers ‘nous’ (D 449, v. 7). This is true of the espousal poems, such as in the mention of ‘entre eulx’ (D 395, v. 10) and ‘tous deux’ (D 346, v. 10). It is also the case in the prayer dizain 136 where two souls are united in one power: ‘L’heur de nostre heur enflambant le desir/Unit double ame en un mesme povoir’ (vv. 1–2). Finally, the last poem of Délie exalts that there has been a mutual effort involving ‘noz coeurs’ (v. 6) and ‘nous’ (v. 7) in raising the torch of virtue (D 449). In the study of comparative mysticism, the final distinction necessitates inquirying into the status of the body. Ruusbroec concludes Book III by describing the heights of contemplation as ‘that modeless being which all fervent interior spirits have chosen above all things’ (SE, 152). Then he adds, ‘But if we could prepare ouselves through virtue in the ways I have shown, we would at once strip ourselves of our bodies and flow into the wild waves of the Sea, from which no creature could ever draw us back’ (ibid.). I do not infer from this that Ruusbroec implies denying the Resurrection or the Incarnation, but it is clear from his reference to shedding the

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body in mystical experience that he is quite different from the poet-lover in this matter. In Délie the lover and the beloved are portrayed as finding in nature some mystical touch with immortality which fully conserves the purified body. Some kind of physical continuity, movement, or rhythm implying the sempiternal is given concrete presence, which is not reduced to pantheism. Thus, the perpetual flowing of the Rhone and Saone has a bodily conjunction in marriage, the eternal city of Rome is given tangible renewal by Renaissance Lyon; and in the lovers’ mystical death, they remain embodied by the sea but transported by an endless enlarging and deepening of their union, an abyss of happiness, a swell of ecstasy. ‘Amplement long, et large’ (D 449, v. 8): Enlargement, Expansion, and Liberation In The Varieties of Mystical Experience William James held ‘that the feeling of enlargement, union, and emancipation’ is integral to mystical experience and that it is ‘capable of forming matrimonial alliances with material furnished by the most diverse philosophies and theologies’ (2004, 299). When one samples the writings of philosophers and theologians one sees that in spite of the differences in content the phenomenon of expansion cuts across historical and ideological lines. In Plotinus’s Enneads concerning the love of beauty, he asks, ‘How shall we travel to it, where is our way of escape?’ (I, 6, 8), and on the activity of Intellectual-Principle moved by the Good, he notes: But when a kind of warmth from thence comes upon it [the intellect], it gains strength and wakes and is truly winged; and though it is moved with passion for that which lies close by it, yet all the same it rises higher, to something greater which seems to remember. And as long as there is anything higher than that which is present to it, it naturally goes on upwards, lifted by the giver of its love. (VI, 7, 22)

In the mystical experience that Augustine shared with his mother Monica at Ostia, he describes the rise to ‘Wisdom’ as a privileged moment which at the same time was inside and outside of ordinary sense experience and rational grounding, elevating and carrying them beyond terrestrial parameters to intimate contact with the divine: As the flame of love burned stronger in us and raised us higher towards the eternal God, our thoughts ranged over the whole compass of material things

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in their various degrees up to the heavens themselves, from which the sun and the moon and the stars shine down upon the earth. Higher still we climbed, thinking and speaking all the while in wonder at all that you have made. At length we came to our own souls and passed beyond them to that place of everlasting plenty, where you feed Israel forever with the food of truth. This life is that Wisdom by which all these things that we know are made, all things that ever have been and all that are yet to be ... And while we spoke of the Eternal Wisdom, longing for it and straining for it with all the strength of our hearts, for one fleeting instant we reached out and touched it.81

Richard of Saint Victor in his exposition on contemplation titled The Mystical Ark (Benjamin Major) conceives of three modes of gazing, the first of which he terms ‘dilatio mentis.’82 As he explains, ‘That mode of contemplation which takes place by enlarging of the mind is accustomed to increase according to three stages: by art, by exercise, and by attention.’83 Pointing out what the human mind is capable of accomplishing by its own effort, he provides a symbol which communicates the scope of perspective in this stage: For we raise up a watchtower ... in order that we may be able to see for a long distance from it and to enlarge our vision in all directions. And so in these words is rightly indicated that enlarging of the mind in a watchtower of contemplation is raised up and knowledge of such an effort is acquired.84

In one of Meister Eckhart’s treatises entitled The Book of ‘Benedictus: The Book of Divine Consolation the Dominican mystic and philosopher, in one long sentence, is moved to elation in describing the receptive powers of the soul: And as the powers of the soul become more perfect and unmixed, so they apprehend more perfectly, and comprehensively whatever they apprehend, receiving it more comprehensively, having greater joy, becoming more united with what they apprehend, to the point where the highest power of the soul, bare of all things and having nothing in common with anything, receives into itself nothing less than God himself, in all the vastness and fulness of his being.85

From this sample of quotations, one sees that mystical expansion of the soul involves dilation and enlargement of the spirit, comprehensive vision of creation, elevation and expansion which surpass and exceed spatial and

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temporal boundaries, as well as privileged, immediate, and absorbing contact with the divine – all these resolving into a unified vision which is nevertheless transitory and rare. In Délie the mystical expression of enlargement is the development of and liberation from three persistent problems gnawing at the poet-lover. His love rises above the constriction, attrition, and immobility of defeated volition everywhere apparent and graphically illustrated in the imprese. Examples of thwarted action are seen in such devices as ‘L’Homme et le Boeuf’ (‘Plus l’attire plus m’entraine,’ no. 4), ‘L’Oyseau au glus’ (‘Ou moins crains plus suis pris,’ no. 12), and the sapping of energy in ‘Le Bateau à rames froissées’ (‘Mes forces de jour en jour s’abaissent,’ no. 22). Mystical enlargement of the powers also allows the poet-lover to extricate himself from the prison of iteration (‘Tousjours vivant, tousjours aussi sans vie,’ D 279, v. 10) and to bring an act to completion. We witness this in dizain 79 where the speaker recalls his soul from the abyss of nocturnal melancholy to the recognition of the light of his life: ‘Je revoquay à moy l’ame ravie:/ Qui, dessechant mes larmoyant conduictz,/Me feit cler veoir le Soleil de ma vie’ (vv. 8–10). Also, the extension of the lover’s powers to supraterrestrial realms arouses aspirations to overcome death and ineffability. In this regard the lover moves from the futility of making positive affirmations about Délie’s perfections (‘Doncques en vain travailleroit ma plume,’ D 23, v. 7) to the apophatic negation of limits where in the last dizain he foresees his love rising ‘Oultre le Ciel amplement long, et large’ (v. 8). In Délie there are two types of mystical expansiveness – one directed inward, the other outward. The first consists of an enlargement of the faculties and the spiritual senses caused by the all-absorbing, if not ecstatic, indwelling of the beloved. This occurs in such dizains as 79, 136, 157, 168, and 196. In the first of these, reminiscent of sun symbolism in Dionysius, Plotinus, and Ficino, the poet-lover is captivated by the expanding elevation of dawn which draws the entire world into its horizon. The bursting sunlight rises in synchrony with his soul awakening to the full presence of the beloved whom he proclaims ‘le Soleil de ma vie’ (D 79, v. 10). In the second type of enlargement, the poet-lover measures himself as equalling or exceeding geographical or temporal limits but his vision is dominated more by what he has surpassed than by an all-absorbing union with the beloved. This sort of transport is seen in such dizains as 11, 58, 90, 124, 135, 283, 284, 407, 446, and 449. For example, in dizain 90, there is a triple movement where the manna falling from the heavens is transformed into Délie’s expanding virtues which enlarge the lover’s faculties to the farthest points in the world.

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Let us first consider enlargement described as an inner experience: L’Aulbe estaingnoit Estoilles à foison, Tirant le jour des regions infimes, Quand Apollo montant sur l’Orison, Des montz cornuz doroit les haultes cymes. Lors du profond des tenebreux Abysmes, Où mon penser par ses fascheux ennuyz Me fait souvent perçer les longues nuictz, Je revoquay à moy l’ame ravie: Qui, dessechant mes larmoyantz conduictz, Me feit cler veoir le Soleil de ma vie.

(D 79)

[Dawn was extinguishing stars in great numbers, Drawing the day from the low regions, As Apollo, rising in the horizon, Gilded the high peaks of the horned mountains. Then from the depths of the shadowy abysses, In which my thoughts makes me often pierce The long nights with its wearied grief, I recalled to my ravished soul Which, drying up my tears, Made me clearly see the Sun of my life.]

Rather than enlargement expressed as an outward movement of evergrowing virtue scaling the infinite intervals of space and time, this dizain’s mystical expansion is directed inwards as a return to the soul. The ruling metaphor of the poem is that just as the dawn draws day from night (vv. 1–4), so the lover recalls his plundered soul from the abyss of grief to the Sun of his life (vv. 5–10). What makes this poem mystical is that the entire universe appears to participate in the same return to light that governs the lover’s soul. In microcosmic fashion the speaker’s ‘ame’ (v. 8) is the reference point for a vast metaphysical parallelism which makes the enlargement of his inner vision concurrent with the acts of the gods (‘Apollo,’ v. 3), nature’s rituals (‘L’Aulbe,’ v. 1), thought’s ascension from ‘tenebreux Abysmes’ (v. 5), and the lover’s revocation of ‘le Soleil de ma vie’ (v. 10). This is a dramatic contemplation seizing in one glance an act of resurrection shared by the sun mounting the horizon, the lover’s thought tunnelling a channel of light through nocturnal grief, and drying tears permitting the full brilliance of Délie’s beauty. The philosophic and mystical

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symbolism of this triple movement bears close resemblance to Plotinus’s anabasis – the method of ascent in the Enneads.86 For Plotinus the soul can revert to its own natural divinity by a threefold process of separation from the physical, introversion to the soul, and passage to the One. In Book I on beauty (I, 6), Plotinus teaches that the first phase consists of the double act of recognizing material beauty and leaving it to seek its higher purpose. First there are the ‘beauties in the realm of the sense, images and shadows which, so to speak, sally out and come into matter and adorn it and excite us when they appear’ (I, 6, 3). But then the soul sees ‘the beauties beyond ... we must go up to them and contemplate them and leave sense to stay down below’ (I, 6, 4). The next act is the heightening of interiority that refines the virtues of sophrosyny, courage, magnanimity, and wisdom leading to discovery of the Intellectual-Principle: ‘So the soul when it is purified becomes form and formative power, altogether bodiless and intellectual and entirely belonging to the divine’ (I, 6, 6). Third, there is the passing upwards to the One accompanied by an effusive and rapturous celebration where metaphysical penetration opens to divine delights: If anyone sees it, what passion will he feel, what longing in his desire to be united with it, what a shock of delight! ... he who has seen it glories in its beauty and is full of wonder and delight, enduring a shock which causes no hurt, loving with true passion and piercing longing. (I, 6, 7)

While there are important differences between Plotinus and Augustine, both this passage and dizain 79 follow Augustine’s introspective philosophy that ‘to go within is to go above.’87 That is, there is an enstatic stage of introversion which progresses upwards to an ecstatic discovery of God within the infinity of the soul. A second point is that, driven by eros, each stage of the soul is both a procession outwards to higher powers and a return to divine origins. The outset of dizain 79 corresponds to Plotinus’s purification of the senses, but it is not an abandonment of the senses. It is rather the cleansing of vision better to see Délie’s true value. This is played out as a cosmic drama personifed by Dawn and Apollo, and it prepares the reader for the lover’s interior striving for lucidity beginning in line 7. Plotinian undercurrents are found in the fact that the poet-lover is contemplating the orderly functioning of the world implicitly orchestrated by the World-Soul whose duty is to create and administer physical nature. In dizain 2 there is explicit mention of this process in the first two verses: ‘Le Naturant par ses haultes Idées/Rendit de soy la Nature admirable.’ However, in dizain 79, begun

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in medias res, nature itself appears as a more self-sustaining entity whose harmonious operations are the focus of the poet-lover’s contemplation. The cosmos is animated and enlarged when ‘L’Aulbe’ (v. 1) is described as extinguishing the stars in profusion, drawing up the day from the low regions (vv. 1–2). A second sweeping view is created when Apollo, rising at the horizon, is seen gilding the high peaks of the horned mountains (vv. 3–4). As Thomas Greene has shown, the double periphrasis of the dawn and the sunrise functions to display the cosmos unfolding in a dignified, formal, and stable manner.88 Here the shadows of night are separated from the rising day, and in that symbolism the poet-lover contemplates a cosmic standard against which he traces his own rise out of the shadows. In the first four lines of dizain 79 the poet-lover’s attitude is one with the World- Soul to the degree that he seizes the virtues of order, regularity, and harmony in the physical world. Without contradicting Plotinus he does differ from him in being captured and fixed by the beauty of matter, stressing its relative autonomy and lending nobility to the shadows of transitional phenomena like the dawn. Accordingly, his use of chiaroscuro in ceremonial solemnity gives positive value to matter and senses. The hallowing of cosmological ritual, like the protocols of liturgy and prayer, bespeak the honouring of nature herself. If there be purification in Scève’s openings lines, then it is not fleeing the senses. Rather, it is the lover’s contemplated admiration of natural harmony and the ritualized respect that he pays to the orderly unfolding of diurnal movements, rhythms, and colours which grant peace and light to the world. This balance and stability are seen in the verbal figures of regularity and duration, such as the iterative mood of ‘estaingnoit’ (v. 1) and ‘doroit’ (v. 4), as well as in the present participles ‘tirant’ (v. 2) and ‘montant’ (v. 3), which make this activity permanent. One distinct aspect of the poet-lover’s vision is that it is not absolute. Opposites have mutual commerce, and values are reversible. When he shows Dawn ‘tirant le jour des regions infimes’ (v. 2), he holds up as a standard the mutually cooperative contraries which synchronize the movements of day and night, dawn and sunset, heavens and shadows. For the speaker one pole cannot do without the other, and no pole is categorically exclusive. Notice that Dawn is depicted ‘drawing’ day from night, as if from a necessary source or passage. Light is not treated like an absolute against darkness, since one kind of light can, like darkness, efface another. This is suggested by the fact that day, using its own kind of effacement, requires extinguishing the last glimmer of the stars. Also, the adverb ‘à foison’ (v. 1) connotes the action of clearing out the ‘Estoilles’ (v. 1) as a

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gesture of profusive abundance, since it gives way to the all-encompassing light. Neither is up necessarily superior to down. As Apollo rises above the horizon, he spreads his golden rays downward to the mountain peaks, and as already seen, mountains themselves can only be ascended by moving against their downward slopes. They afford the incentive to effort. Since the poet-lover values the beholding of transitional phenomena, the chiaroscuro of dawn turning to sunlight means that light is always implicated with dark. For this reason, the poet-lover’s expanding vision of love does not shed its imbrication with matter but seeks to examine their complete interaction. Given the grandiose beauty of this colourful panorama, what causes the lover’s fall into ‘tenebreux Abysmes’ (v. 5)? For Plotinus the physical world is not a metaphysical evil as an ontological existent, but a lack or diminution of the Forms and a tendency to dissipate into infinite multiplicity (I, 8, 3). Though the World Soul which governs nature is immune to change, the particular soul is a traveller capable through free choice of running the gamut of existence from communion with the One, to an appreciation of the World Soul and the Intellectual Principle, to admiration of the One’s reflected beauty in another soul, to sinking in its own satisfaction and self-centredness. In short, there is nothing wrong with the material world as such; rather, it is the attitude of the particular soul toward the world which defines its moral standing. Going back to the vivid tableau opening the poem, one sees that the lover makes note of Apollo gilding ‘the high peaks of the horned mountains’: ‘Des montz cornuz doroit les haultes cymes’ (v. 4). If the poet were showing us one horn, then this could signify the purity of the unicorn first depicted in Délie in the first impresa. However, in dizain 79 there are multiple horns (‘cornuz,’ v. 4), and as such, signify the moon goddess Diana. In at least six dizains the poet-lover associates the crescent moon with nocturnal agitation (D 106), change and inconstancy (D 176), increasing and decreasing fever (D 383), or wandering: ‘Ores cornue, ores plainement ronde,/Comme on te veoit amoindrir, et recroistre,/Tu vas, Errente, environnant le Monde’ (D 295, vv. 1–3). If, as Plotinus says, the attitude of the soul makes it stray from seeking its resemblance in the One, then there is a descent into something less than the soul can ideally be: ‘But the souls of men see their images as if in the mirror of Dionysius and come to be on that level with a leap from above’ (IV, 3, 12). In Scève’s poem the enticements of the gilded horns replace Plotinus’s Dionysius, for the lover is beguiled by the gilded horns of the high tops. This attraction leads immediately to interior ‘fascheux ennuyz’ (v. 6).

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Ficino might call this a deflection from the true aspect of a person or object. In the Commentary he says, ‘Aspect we locate not in matter but in the pleasing harmony of lights, shadows, and lines’ (V:6).89 It is clear that this accounts for the lover’s descent, for he fails to capture the significance of lights, shadows, and lines in the landscape that would lift him to what governs matter. In Plotinus the World-Soul produces and guides the physical universe, but it remains detached from and unaffacted by nature’s imperfections, maintaining a constant gaze on the Intellectual Principle. On the other hand, the individual soul is ‘amphibious’ (IV, 8, 4), a restless traveller moving up and down the scale of being, capable of forging bonds with higher powers or of conniving with temptations. The poet-lover may be narcissistically seeing sensual allurement in the horned mountains, which is one of Plotinus’s explanations for the descent of the soul: ‘when it [the soul] goes towards what comes after it, it goes towards non-existence. But it does this, when it goes towards itself, for, wishing to be directed towards itself, it makes an image of itself, the non-existent, as if walking on emptiness and becoming more indefinite; and the indefinite image of this is in every way dark ... without reason and unintelligent and stands far removed from reality’ (III, 9, 3). In the case of Délie the poet-lover sees a crescent moon shaped from mountain peaks and somewhat disguised and enhanced by its gilded reflection of the sun. Since this is the last image of brightness before his sudden fall, the reader may infer that the lover has in some sense mistaken the attributes of the moon for those of the sun, the lesser form for the greater. The interior catastrophe of this error is brought to the intense scrutiny of the soul which represents the second or introspective movement of anabasis in the poem. Altering his gaze from outward panorama to interior drama, the speaker finds himself buried in and harassed by worried griefs which nonetheless labour steadfastly to dig a tunnel of light through the long, opaque nights: ‘Où mon penser par ses fascheux ennuyz/Me fait souvent perçer les longues nuictz’ (vv. 6–7). What are these ‘tenebreux Abysmes’ (v. 5), ‘fascheux ennuyz’ (v. 6), and ‘longues nuictz’ (v. 7)? The false embodiment of Délie as a deflection from the sun fills the soul with an epistemological darkness which, if vigilant, can seek a way out of what Plotinus calls ‘the soul’s descent into the body’ (IV, 8, 1). As he says, ‘the individual is of itself in a state of dissolution, always on the way to its natural terminus, demanding much irksome forethought to save it from every kind of outside assailant, always gripped by need, requiring every help against constant difficulty’ (IV, 8, 2). In dizain 79 it is suggested that the ‘regions infimes’ (v. 2) from which dawn drew its burst of light are

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now the underworld of Proserpina, thereby completing the negative turn of the love cycle from Diana and Luna to Hecate. The lover’s punishment is as vast and deep as the light of day, consigning him to a blinding, bottomless fall (‘tenebreux Abysmes,’ v. 5), an endlessly harried wandering through false corridors and disappearing escape routes (‘fascheux ennuyz,’ v. 6, ‘longues nuictz,’ v. 7). His only coordinate is his own orientation to his soul. If ‘to go within is to go above,’ then the upward direction of introspection begins with the dogged perseverance of ‘penser’ (v. 6) searching for the true image of the beloved. Like the sun’s rays slowly erasing the evening’s shadows, so the lover’s soul burrows through the night’s darkness. This act bespeaks a principle of knowing, not just a description of process. Thinking (‘penser,’ v. 6) learns not only by direct illumination but also by the indirect means of gaining knowledge of the abyss that it resists. To a certain degree this explains the value that the lover places on indirection and chiaroscuro. The ‘souvent’ in ‘Me fait souvent perçer les longues nuictz’ (v. 7) indicates that the soul makes many experimental attempts to extricate itself, and this includes the creativity of its own poetic consciousness. Also, in confronting le mal, it is better able to recognize le bien. Again Plotinus provides illuminating commentary, when in speaking of the soul’s ability to see better by antithesis and return, once having fallen, to its source of life, ‘it is possible for it to emerge again having acquired the whole story of what it saw and experienced here and learnt what it is like to be There, and by the comparison of things which are, in a way, opposite, learning, in a way more clearly, the better things’ (IV, 8, 7). For both Plotinus and Augustine introversion is also reversion and elevation. In the poem this lover accomplishes this triple act in the decisive repossession of his soul: ‘Je revoquay à moy l’ame ravie’ (v. 8). There are a number of observations to make about this line. As Greene demonstrates, the verb tenses have changed from the imperfect to the passé défini, indicating that iteration has changed into act,90 that the poet-lover is able to repossess his soul from the ravishment of alluring idols. This is a pure, unadulterated act of the will decisively stated in one verse (v. 8) and signalled by the subject pronoun ‘Je,’ who through the pronoun ‘moy’ becomes the recipient of its own agency. The will moves in unison with the enhancement of rational clarity and love. Having recalled his soul, the lover finds that his tear ducts are drying (v. 9), a development which alludes retroactively to the channels of light that had already lit a path to liberation by thought’s persistent furrowing. The sliver of light suggests the poet-lover’s

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discovery of Délie’s divinity within his soul. A similar position was theorized by Plotinus, among others, who explains: Then the soul, receiving into itself an outflow from thence, is moved and dances wildly and is all stung with longing and becomes love. Before this it is not moved even towards Intellect, for all its beauty; the beauty of the Intellect is inactive till it catches a light from the Good, and the soul by itself ‘falls flat on its back’ and is completely inactive and, though Intellect is present, is unenthusiastic about it. But when a kind of warmth from thence comes upon it, it gains strength and wakes and is truly winged ... lifted by the giver of its love. (VI, 7, 22)

In discovering the divine in himself the lover makes a return to his highest value which has the effect of elevation. If his ascent is measured by the cosmological standard of the opening four lines, then the rise of dawn becomes the spiritual symbol of the lover’s restoration to unmitigated clarity: ‘Me feit cler veoir le Soleil de ma vie’ (v. 10). Just as the gleam of dawn assumes growing spiritual significance by its metaphorical transfer to thought’s illuminated pathway, so the Sun emerges from the lover’s interior vision as an ascension to limitless, unbounded clarity. Also, inside and outside have been abolished, since the lover’s soul has transfigured the brightening cosmos into his own resurrection. In the Solitaire premier Pontus de Tyard also uses the verb revoquer, which gives the reader additional insight into its use in Délie. Tyard uses this verb in connection with the four kinds of fureur divine: ‘fureur poëtique,’ ‘l’intelligence des mysteres,’ ‘ravissement de prophetie, vaticination, ou divination souz Apollon,’ and ‘l’amoureuse affection souz Amour et Venus’ (Tyard, 17–21). In one instance that corresponds to lines 5–8 of dizain 79 he associates revoquer with the soul’s purification before ascension to ‘l’intelligence’: ‘l’Ame desja resveillée, et bien ordonnée, revoque en un ses parties et puissances ainsi escartées et diffuses tant diversement ... devant la divinité qu’elle adore’ (19). Tyard’s second use of revoquer gives us another rationale in which to understand the climax of dizain 79: En fin, quand tout ce qui est en l’essence, et en la nature de l’Ame, est fait un, il faut (pour revenir à la source de son origine) que soudain elle se revoque en ce souverain un, qui est sur toute essence, Chose, que la grande et celeste Venus accomplit par Amour, c’est à dire, par un fervent, et incomparable desir, que l’Ame ainsi eslevée a de jouir de la divine et eternelle beauté. (20, stress mine)

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That is, when all that is in the essence of the soul is made one, it must suddenly call itself back to its sovereign One in the act of enjoying divine and eternal beauty. Since in Délie the act of revocation inspires the lover to make symbols of light, it is appropriate to put the last line of dizain 79 in the context of Plotinus’s mystical apex: There one can see both him and oneself as it is right to see: the self glorified, full of intelligible light – but rather itself pure light – weightless, floating free, having become – but rather, being – a god; set on fire ... (VI, 9, 9)

Dizain 79 is a conspicuous moment of mystical attainment, putting in synchronized crescendo the rise of dawn, the liberation from blinding error, and the act of the will moving itself to cosmological and metaphysical purification, enlightenment, and unity. Let us now turn to the poems of enlargement emphasizing the outward expression of expansion which generally end with the vision of surpassing human and terrestrial limits. Par ce hault bien, qui des Cieulx plut sur toy, Tu m’excitas du sommeil de paresse: Et par celuy qu’ores je ramentoy, Tu m’endormis en mortelle destresse. Luy seul à vivre evidemment m’adresse, Et toy ma vie à mort a consommée. Mais (si tu veulx) vertu en toy nommée, Agrandissant mes espritz faitz petitz, De toy, et moy fera la renommée Oultrepasser et Ganges, et Bethys. [With this lofty good which rained upon you from the Heavens, You awakened me from sloth’s lazy slumber. But with this desire that I now recall, You lulled me into the sleep of mental anguish. This good alone clearly teaches me to live. But you have consumed my life to the very edge of death. But (if you wish) virtue named in you, Enlarging my reduced faculties, Will make your and my renown Pass beyond the Ganges and the Bethys.]

(D 90)

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A distinction must be made concerning the rhetoric of transcendence. In this poem the expansion of virtue is calculated by empirical facts and natural phenomena, that is, by geography (‘Ganges,’ ‘Bethys,’ v. 10) and human memory (‘renommée,’ v. 9). Thus, readers of Délie may hesitate in placing such transcendence wholly in the spiritual realm. In psychological terms the lover’s experience appears predominantly spatio-temporal since he measures his elevation in terms of exceeding terrestrial boundaries. However, it is imbued with religious mysticism, since he is transported to the celestial climbs by the virtue embodied in Délie’s name (‘vertu en toy nommée,’ v. 7). Though it appears that the poet-lover situates himself uneasily between naturalism and religious mysticism, it will become clearer in these sections that in such psychological enlargements he wishes to make the body share in all the fruits of mystical elevation. At the moment it is enough to note that the meeting point of the spiritual and the physical in this poem is located in the rejuvenation of the ‘espritz’ (v. 8). As already seen, these are the vital spirits, corporeal as they relate to vivifying the humours and spiritual to the extent that they are one of the soul’s functions. Another distinction should be made about the relation between the lover and Délie as they are carried together to the heavens. In dizain 79 Délie penetrates and permeates the lover’s soul as he progressively opens to her light. In dizain 90 Délie accompanies the lover into the heavens by the rewards of shared virtue (v. 9). This is what I would term a transport of accompaniment where the object of love stands beside the lover but not within him. Entry into the mystical character of this poem must necessarily proceed from the realm of melancholic shadows in a particular manifestation of mysticism called the dark night of the soul. In dizain 90 the poet-lover begins by slowly drawing himself from the torpor of inexorable vicissitudes sapping his spirit. The irony is that Délie’s own force is responsible for the ennui which enfeebles and constricts the lover’s ‘espritz’ (v. 9) to the point where they have become ‘petitz’ (v. 8). Ultimately, this is a poem which changes down to up, the dark morbidity of melancoloy to the awakening and enlarging of aspiration. ‘The dark night of the soul’ is a complex of mystical experience associated preeminently with Saint John of the Cross as well as with Henry Susso and Meister Eckhart. As Evelyn Underhill explains, it is ‘that great swing-back into darkness which usually divides the “first mystic life,” or the Illuminative Way, from the ‘second mystic life,” or the Unitive way’ (1990, 381). Its main symptom is ‘oscillation’ characterized by ‘swinging between two Worlds,’ between ‘pleasure and

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pain,’ causing ‘stagnation,’ ‘impotence,’ and the self’s ‘continued ... incompatibility with that Absolute which it has perceived.’91 In the first part of the dizain the emotional undulations are dizzying. Délie’s ‘hault bien’ (v. 1) has awakened the lover from the sleep of ‘paresse’ (v. 2), but then as his desire for a better state grows and quickens, he descends into sleepy inertia and death-like distress. In lines 5–6 the poet-lover again returns to this single good that makes him live, only to find his life consumed at the very edge of death. This ‘Entombment which precedes the Resurrection’92 is the desolation which is organic to spiritual heights, an aridity that ironically emerges from rich soil. What is crushing for the poet-lover is that his fall is due to the spiritual gifts of the beloved that rained down upon her from the heavens: ‘Par ce hault bien, qui des Cieulx plut sur toy’ (v. 1). As Defaux observes, this line is reminiscent of the manna in Exodus or the dew dropping on Gideon’s fleece which proved God’s commitment to deliverance.93 For the poet-lover the manna is too abundant and the dew too miraculous to be assimilated, but how can he rekindle his love so that he can regain receptivity to the gifts of heaven? Following the points delineated by Underhill, the ‘dark night’ is a superior form of purification, since it is a return to illumination and union rather than an absolute beginning. To regain the evanescent but superior powers of divine contact is to engage in an act of constancy and fortitude by reexerting the effort to recapture ‘the self’s old passion’ (395). This requires the ‘purification of the will or stronghold of personality, [so] that it may be merged without any reserve “in God where it was first.”’94 The last four lines of dizain 90 involve a two step movement where the poetlover first reorients his abject self to Délie’s centre by reaching out to her magnanimity. This in turn enables him to join with her in an ever-expanding growth of virtue’s horizons. What is the energizing principle which enlarges the faculties to an expansive vision above the earth and beyond it? It is the beloved’s ‘vertu en toy nommée’ (v. 7). Reminiscent of Dionynius’s Divine Names, it is the poet-lover’s renewed effort proposed to Délie (‘si tu veulx’) to realize and expand her preeminent virtues by drawing out the names and concepts of her attributes from his experience with her. This approach harks to dizain 59 where the lover had conceived of onomastics as an arsenal of possibilities hidden in the name Délie which could help him pierce the shadows of her message: ‘Car je te cele en ce surnom louable,/Pource qu’en’en moy tu luys la nuict obscure’ (vv. 9–10). This conception of exegesis, which the ancients named mysticus, is the act of seeking the inner significance of something related to salvation. It helps to understand the idea of ‘celer’ (v.

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9) by referring to Gerson’s Mountain of Contemplation, which gives a rich variety of meanings for the word ‘secret.’ It is the ‘sense of delight’ when God visits the soul ‘secretly,’ the act of God drawing the soul to himself by ‘secret inner movements without intermediary,’ the ‘secret place’ or the refuge of solitude and silence like ‘the woods,’ ‘the forest,’ ‘the deserts,’ and finally, the ‘secrecy and silence of the soul.’95 Returning to the conclusion of dizain 90, we find that the poet-lover now conceptualizes Délie negatively by describing the powers that he shares with her as beyond spatial and temporal boundaries: ‘Oultrepasser et Ganges, et Bethys’ (v. 10). However paradoxical, this is spatio-temporal enlargement motivated by moral aspiration, the power of Délie’s ‘vertu en toy nommée’ (v. 7). Délie’s name is endowed with mystical potency that contains in microcosm the vicissitudes of the dark night (Prosepina/Luna) and Gerson’s sealed secrets (celer) of privileged presence. In cases of spiritual expansion where the analogue is physical, some will be affirmations or direct comparisons, and others will be apophatic expressions negating boundaries. Although dizain 90 is an example of the second type, one will see illustrations of both in the following dizains: Quoy que du temps tout grand oultrage face, Les seches fleurs en leur ordeur vivront: Proeuve pour ceulz, qui le bien poursuyvront, De non mourir, mais de revivre encore. Ses vertus donc, qui ton corps ne suyvront, Dès l’Indien s’estendront jusqu’au More. Premier le Coeur, et puis l’Ame ceingnit En noud si doulx, et tant indissolvable, Qu’oultre le bien, qui me tient redevable, J’espereray en seure indamnité, Et preuveray par effect jà prouvable En Terre nom, au Ciel eternité. Tant de sa forme elle est moins curieuse, Quand plus par l’oeil de l’Ame elle congnoit, Que la ruyne au temps injurieuse Perdra le tout, où plus l’on s’adonnoit Doncques ainsi elle se recongnoit, Que son mortel est du vif combatu? Certes, estant ton corps foible abatu,

(D 11, vv. 5–10)

(D 135, vv. 5–10)

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Par un debvoir de voulenté libere Adoreront ta divine vertu Et Tanais, et le Nil, et l’Ibere.

(D 283)

Mansuetude en humble gravité La rend ainsi a chascun agreable, Estre privée en affabilité La fait de tous humainement aymable: Et modestie en ses faictz raisonnable Monstre, qu’en soy elle a plus, que de femme. Posterité, d’elle privée, infame, Barbares gentz du Monde divisez Oultre Thyle, et le Temps, et la Fame Alterneront ses haultz honneurs prisez.

(D 284)

En moy saisons, et aages finissantz, De jour en jour descouvrent leur fallace, Tournant les Jours, et Moys, et Ans glissantz, Rides arantz defformeront ta face. Mais ta vertu, qui par temps ne s’esface, Comme la Bise en allant acquiert force, Incessamment de plus en plus s’esforce A illustrer tes yeulx par mort terniz. Parquoy, vivant soubz verdoyante escorce, S’esgallera aux Siecles infiniz.

(D 407)

[Whatever great outrage time may do, The dry flowers in their perfume will live on, A proof for those who pursue the highest good That they will not die but come to life again. Your virtues, then, which will not follow your body, Will be diffused over the whole world.]

(D 11, vv. 5–10)

[First the Heart and then the Soul it encompassed In a knot so sweet and so indissoluable That, besides experiencing the good, which makes me beholden, I will hope in absolute security, And will experience, by proof in hand, Renown on Earth and eternity in Heaven.] (D 135, vv. 5–10)

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[She is that much less interested in her physical beauty The more she knows, by her Soul’s own eye, That decay, injurious to temporal things, Will destroy all that was most important. Does she thus realize That her mortal being is outweighed by her spiritual? Surely when your feeble body is cast down, Obeying a law of free will, The Don, the Nile and the Ebro Will adore your divine virtue.]

(D 283)

[Gentleness in humble gravity Makes her pleasing to everyone. Her kindly affability Makes her humanity likeable to all, And reasonable modesty in these traits Shows that she has more than womanly nature. Posterity, infamous because deprived of her, Barbarous people from the world scattered Beyond Thule and Time and Fame Will alternately sing her prized and lofty honours.]

(D 284)

[Seasons and ages, waning in me From day to day reveal their perfidity, As the days and Months and slipping years turn, Furrowing wrinkles will deform your face. But your virtue, which by time is not effaced, Acquires force as it goes, like the North Wind, And ceaselessly strives with greater and greater effort, To brighten your eyes dimmed by death. Thus, living under a green bark, It will be the equal of the infinite Centuries.]

(D 407)

The single poem describing direct affirmation of enlargement in this group is dizain 135, which building on the previous poem is quite subtle in its play of boundary and expansion. Using the figure of adunaton, the lover celebrates that his ‘Saincte Union’ (D 134, v. 1) cannot dissolve, since Cupid laced the knot (‘lassa,’ v. 3), fidelity completed the act of tying (‘le noua,’ v. 4), and time tightened it (‘estraingnit,’ v. 4). In line 5 the knot ap-

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pears as a ring, because Love is said to have girded the heart and soul in an indissoluble, sweet knot: ‘Premier le Coeur, et puis l’Ame ceingnit/En noud si doulx, et tant indissolvable’ (D 135, vv. 5–6). However, this figure of a finger ring which makes the bond unbreakable ironically changes to metaphors of expansion. There is an implied proportion involved between the lover’s ‘absolute security’ (v. 8) of the union and the rewards that he projects: ‘renown on Earth, and eternity in Heaven’ (v. 10). That is, the small circle of fidelity’s infinite ring will finally grow into the orbit of earth and the eternity of heaven. Thus, there are three, ever-widening concentric circles, each emanating its respective sense of infinity: the small finger ring knotting fidelity, the orbit of the earth’s renown, and the eternal bliss of the ‘Ciel’ (v. 10). In the other poems of this group the lover’s rapture is concomitant with the act of negating spatio-temporal limits to expand ever outwards into an effortless, passive, solitary joy. The use of the future tense in the conclusion of the poems, like Augustine’s introspection, opens a vision of liberation, ethereal transport, and purity. Such is dizain 11 where at the end the poet-lover is swept away by admiration at the sight of Délie’s virtues. Negating the conventional wisdom of time’s destructiveness (Tempus vincit omnia), he is one with the expansion of Délie’s virtue, providing a countermotto as his vision ascends: ‘Ses vertus donc, qui ton corps ne suyvront,/Dès l’Indien s’estendront jusqu’au More’ (vv. 9–10). Thus, instead of using toponyms as did Petrarch (‘dal mar indo al mauro,’ Rime 269, v. 4), Scève uses the names of the inhabitants to concretize the notion that Délie’s powers will be in evidence to all. In dizain 283 the poet-lover is uplifted by the realization that the woman’s spiritual value will outlast her physical beauty. Instead of negating the limits of geographical borders to capture Délie’s ever-expanding powers, the lover projects a vision in which the whole world comes to worship her virtue: ‘Par un debvoir de voulenté libere/Adoreront ta divine vertu/ Et Tanais, et le Nil, et l’Ibere’ (vv. 8–10). The visual assumption of this technique is that contraction in contemplation can be a form of expansion while concentration can offer a kind of liberation, for the legendary rivers of Asia, Africa, and Iberia, obeying an obligation of free will, will redirect their courses and flow to Délie alone. This is a very subtle use of apophatic methods. By contracting geography to focus on Délie’s preeminence, the speaker expands the power of her presence to attract the whole world. The very next dizain makes explicit the qualities which were universally admired in dizain 283 and thereby acts as an amplification of that poem. The first part is an enumeration of the woman’s social virtues (‘Mansuetude,’

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v. 1, ‘humble gravité,’ v. 1, ‘affabilité,’ v. 3, ‘modestie,’ v. 5) – all of which capture the attention of her Lyonnais world. In the second part of the poem the view of Délie’s excellent qualities enlarges ‘Oultre Thyle, et le Temps, et la Fame’ (v. 9) when the scattered peoples of the world will sing her prized and lofty honours (v. 10). This type of expansion brings unity to enlargement, since those who ultimately come to adore the woman’s triumph over time and space are described as ‘Barbares gentz du Monde divisez’ (v. 8). This is the chaos of the Tower of Babel and also of Plato’s region of dissimilarity, both of which have been rectified, purified, and unified by the sudden sight and growing value of Délie’s social virtues. Dizain 407, both affirmative and negative, is one of several poems showing that the poet-lover’s concept of virtue is closely tied to effort, energy, spatialization, and efficacy. The mystical economy of its art is threefold: more can be less, less can be more, giving can be gaining. Paradoxes rule the dizain. The habitual turning (‘tournant,’ v. 3) of seasons, ages, days, and months extends time but diminishes the body (‘defformeront ta face,’ v. 4). Although the attrition of time amounts to a dispossession, this widens the lover’s knowledge of the temporal fallacy that though he and Délie seem to persist, they are actually fading. This enhanced understanding brings a new resolution to imitate Délie in the lessons of giving, increasing, and extending energy. The precept is that every act requires supreme effort, so that the debilitating, routine turning of the seasons should be converted into the powerful force of the north wind, ceaselessly striving and driving with greater and greater force: ‘Incessamment de plus en plus s’esforce’ (v. 7). In this way Délie’s virtue will expand to equal the ‘Siecles infiniz’ (v. 10), and this enlargement will be nourished and protected by her ‘verdoyante escorce’ (v. 9). With the mention of ‘green bark’ one comes to think of chastity as the cause of this spiritual amplification, since it is tied to the mythological figure of Daphne. In great admiration of Diana, the huntress-maiden rebuffed all her suitors, even lusty Apollo, from whom she escaped by metamorphosing into a laurel. Thus, there is a principle of life in the lover’s joyful expansion that suggests a constant greening transcending the changing of seasons. It remains to ask in philosophical or religious terms what it means to expand the virtues. In the world of Délie this is no mere metaphor, but a real possibility. First of all, according to Ficino, supported by Plato and Plotinus, the ascent of the soul passes through the civic and purifying virtues up to the exemplar virtues to arrive at union with God.96 In this way the soul’s enlargement is a real participation and unity with the divine. As Kristeller says of Ficino, ‘The higest act of contemplation is not only

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the perfection of human knowledge, but the foreshadowing of a higher perception and existence’ (332).That is, mystical amplification is nothing less than the effort of the soul to become God-like. What does it mean to say, for example, that the soul is ‘evergreen’? That it is immortal. How do the virtues persist in the future life before the face of divine splendour? To a question on the duration of the moral and intellectual virtues in the next life, Aquinas, citing Augustine, says that ‘they will remain most perfectly in the blessed, inasmuch as the reason of each will be utterly right with regard to the things about him in his state of life, and his appetitive power also will be entirely moved according to the order of reason by those things.’97 While the lover may project these concepts of virtue as ideals, one will find that, for the most part, he straddles terrestrial and divine worlds, seeking to find spiritual analogies for the transports of human love. The final meaning of mystical enlargement could be titled ‘From Solipsism to Community.’ The last dizain of Délie is a poem that turns meditative vision from inward rumination to outward celebration. Drawing the microcosm and macrocosm, the speaker and Délie into the same trajectory of ever-expanding love, the poem lifts the reader’s gaze to the couple’s ascension to the heavens ‘amplement long, et large’ (v. 8). This turning of vision outwards and upwards energized by the union of two individuals scaling the heights of the heavens contrasts sharply with the poet-lover’s solipsism and narcissism. In dizain 415 he called Délie ‘le miroir de ma pensée’ (v. 10). When alone with his fantasies, the poet-lover’s sense of Délie as an extramental reality vanished into the ever-sinking abyss of pleasures (‘Tout je m’abysme aux oblieuses rives,’ D 118, v. 10), and when in solitary, masochistic melancholy, he nourished himself on morose pleasures: ‘Estant tousjours, sans m’oster, appuyé/Sur le plaisir de ma propre tristesse,/Je me ruyne au penser ennuye/Du pensement proscrit de ma lyesse’ (v. 370, vv. 1–4). Quite different is dizain 449 in which the poetlover’s vision brings the world into the beatitude of ever-expanding love not only as witness but also as partaker of joy. Who are the members of this community? First there is society that ‘en publicque apparence’ (v. 2) beholds the microcosmic love of two individuals ‘noz coeurs’ (v. 6) symbolized by the ever-shining flame of their example (‘Flame ... Tousjours luysante,’ vv. 1–2). Joining the public is the entire ‘World’ (‘ce Monde,’ v. 3), not only as contemporary witness but also as successive generations of humanity that will revere love as long as earthly life persists: ‘Tant que ce Monde en soy demeurera’ (v. 3). Just as the poet-lover wishes to make both body and soul cobeneficiaries of transport, so does he make per-

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sonified abstractions tangible participants in the elevation to the heavens. These are ‘Amour’ (v. 4), ‘ardeur’ (v. 6), and ‘vertu’ (v. 8). To appreciate the poet-lover’s reverence for the dramatis personae of his life-sustaining combat, one must spell out precisely the way in which he has gathered together persons and forms as well as the order in which he places them. In this poem, one can see the Renaissance practice of personifying abstract forms in painting, iconography, and emblematics. As in dizain 449, amour and vertu are paired and personified in emblem 90 of Gilles Corrozet’s Hecatomgraphie (1544).98 It is titled ‘Amour accompaignée de Vertu’ where the picture depicts two statues on pedestals, one of Cupid on the left facing ‘Vertu’ on the right. For our purposes, the major point is Corrozet’s stress on love and virtue joined as a couple, for though they are separate entities, they should never be apart. Corrozet emphasizes this point not only by the words of the title (‘Amour accompaignée de Vertu’) but also by referring to the couple in the gloss poem as ‘Roy’ and ‘Royne’ (vv. 7–8) and stating that the ‘Queen’ is a ‘compaigne’ (v. 9) of the ‘King.’ To further depict the unity of individuals united in the ideal of moral rectitude, Corrozet has ‘Vertu’ holding a ‘coeur’ in her hand, which is the abode or ‘hostel’ of Love (vv. 13–15). Just as the poet-lover of dizain 449 symbolizes love by the ‘Genevre’ (v. 9), so Corrozet has ‘Lady Virtue’ crown ‘Love’ with the laurel of immortality: ‘Et puis celluy, lequel elle environne/Du verd chappeau, & Laurée coronne,/Est immortel’ (vv. 16–18). These observations are not only meant to bring out the emblematic qualities of dizain 449, but also to underline Scève’s treatment of community. Of course it is not the least surprising that the tradition of the Roman de la rose that dramatized the interaction of lovers and personified abstractions should persist through the Renaissance and into Délie. Emblematics while making novel recombinations of these figures also continues the tradition of personified allegories. However, it is nevertheless striking that Scève views forms almost non-allegorically as individuated, concrete beings deserving of the same benefits of transport as the two lovers. Virtue, love, and ardour are not only signs standing in for human traits, ideas, and systems of morality, but without losing their nature as abstractions, they participate as part of the community in rising to expanding skies. These distinctions must be explained. Notice that in the second quatrain, persons (the poet-lover and Délie) and personified forms (‘ardeur,’ v. 6, and ‘vertu,’ v. 7) accompany one another. They are not merged or made composites. Also, they are companions placed in a certain order with ardour pursuing the couple’s hearts and virtue following the couple to the heavens. Flesh and blood persons (‘noz coeurs,’ v. 6) come before the form (ardeur,’ v.

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6), just as the abstraction ‘vertu’ (v. 7) pursues the soaring lovers designated by the personal pronoun ‘nous’ (v. 7). One infers from this quatrain that persons precede forms, and that the lovers remain individuals in their union. Persons maintain their individuality as a couple and when they lift themselves into the heavens, it is not in order to be indistinguishably absorbed into a transcendent One but to extend and amplify their combined powers against ‘mortel Letharge’ (v. 10). At first sight this appears like the dissociation of faculties that we have seen in dizain 143 which typifies strife. But while the multiplicity of individual faculties and forms is still present in dizain 449, there is harmonious and inseparable accompaniment. Juxtaposition rather than synthesis is still maintained, but it is valorized by the common ascent of body, soul, heart, virtue, ardour, and love, and witnessed by the public, world, and cosmos. In the Republic, Plato states that when a plurality of individuals have a common name, they also have a corresponding form or idea.99 In Neoplatonic theory, the individual lover would move from body, to soul, to angels, and to God. However, in dizain 449, there is neither synthesis of persons into abstractions nor abstractions into persons, and neither persons nor abstractions are assimilated to a transcendent One. Rather, all goods that exist rise in ceaseless expansion beyond the ample and abundant heavens termed ‘le Ciel’ (v. 8). Active Passivity Meister Eckhart preached that ‘just as there is no end to God’s gifts, there is no end to the soul’s power to receive them. As God is almighty in action, the soul is also boundless in its capacity to take, and thus it is transformed with God and in God.’100 William James used similar concepts from other sources to cite passivity as one of the important traits of mystical experience: ‘Although the oncoming of mystical states may be facilitated by preliminary voluntary operations, as by fixing attention ... when the characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance’ (James 2004, 330). This is in accord with Plotinus’s views: for him, at the highest level of union with the One, there is a suddenness of vision that can only be attained by receptive passivity: ‘so one must not chase after it, but wait quietly till it appears, preparing oneself to contemplate it, as the eye awaits the rising of the sun’ (Enneads, V, 5, 8). Underhill while agreeing that passivity is an essential psychological trait of mysticism, takes issue with James for slighting the intense ‘creative action’ which occurs in receving the divine: ‘It remains a paradox of the mystics that the passivity at which they appear to aim is really a state of

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the most intense activity: more, that where it is wholly absent no great creative action can take place’ (Underhill 1990, 447). It is therefore wise to heed Underhill’s notion that the passive and the active yield a ‘synthesis’101 which allows the immanence of activity to make way for the transcendence of passivity. This means that the virtues acting through time and preparing the soul for passivity, such as courage, recollection, and art, are rewarded with a touch of eternity. Inward receptivity attunes the soul to renew itself by being ever aware of how to receive God’s gifts. Eckhart states, ‘Indeed out of his immeasurable love God has set our blessedness in suffering, in bearing rather than doing, and incomparably more in receiving than in giving. Each of his gifts only prepares us for the reception of a new gift, yea, to receive more and greater [gifts].’102 In mystical writings, one will find innumerable ways of expressing active passivity. Scève hones a particularly condensed voice using the economy of the dizain to convey what others have expounded in pages of prose. Three poems are particularly illustrative of active passivity in the mystical mode whose respective endings offer us a way to mark their differences. Dizain 144 concludes with an erotic symbol, 157 with musical rapture, and 259 with marine and sailing imagery. Let us now examine the first of these in this section: En toy je vis, où que tu sois absente: En moy je meurs, où que soye present. Tant loing sois tu, tousjours tu es presente: Pour pres, que soye, encores suis je absent. Et si nature oultragée se sent De me veoir vivre en toy trop plus, qu’en moy: Le hault povoir, qui ouvrant sans esmoy, Infuse l’ame en ce mien corps passible, La prevoyant sans son essence en soy, En toy l’estend, comme en son plus possible. [I live in you, wherever you may be, even though absent, I die in myself, wherever I may be, though present. However far you may be, you are always present. However near I may be, still I am absent. And if nature feels outraged At seeing me live more in you than in myself, The high power, which working without agitation, Infuses the soul into my passive body,

(D 144)

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Seeing that it would be without its essence in itself, Extends it into you, as its place of highest perfection.]

The mystical voice of this poem is situated between what the French call oraison de recueillement and oraison de quiétude.103 The first is the voluntary act of silent concentration which collects and gathers the powers of the soul to fix upon a single point. Meister Eckhart described this act of attention as taking place within ‘the inmost recess’ and then adds: ‘Therefore if the inward work of the soul is to be efficient, it must recall its agents and gather them in from their dispersion to one inward effort.’104 (The ‘agents’ of the soul are all outwardly directed activities, such as the diffusion of the senses that may distract one from concentrating on the soul’s essence.) In dizain 144, ‘silent prayer’ (quiétude) is the retreat to deep interiority where the poet-lover reflects on the most intimate condition of his soul. This frame of reference helps the reader to understand the poet-lover’s state of mind, particularly in the first four lines of the poem. His incantatory voice solemnly recites in studied fashion the primordial terms of his existence: the concurrence of presence and absence, life and death, closeness and distance. Between time and eternity the poet-lover uses the reconstituting memory to gather the dialectical terms of lack and love which are the laws of his existence. The first step of passivity may be termed meditative purification by attrition. Just as the terms of the lover’s prayer exhaust his comprehension of Délie, so the slow delivery of lines from his ‘passive body’ reveals emotional exhaustion (v. 8). While the beloved lives wholly in herself, the lover lives entirely in Délie, and, by avowing this contingency, he empties himself of all extraneous considerations to consider his bereft condition. This static restlessness or, what Underhill calls ‘absorbed brooding’105 is an ‘essential clearing of the ground’106 in which the will puts itself in abeyance in order to receive and give way to higher powers. As studied by historians of mysticism, recollection prepares the way to the oraison de quiétude. This means the ‘prayer of quiet’ (not quietism)107 which had roots in Dionysius the Areopagite and Meister Eckhart and would be definitively formulated and refined by Theresa of Ávila. According to Underhill, it involes two movements: ‘the aspect of deprivation, of emptiness which begins it, and the aspect of acquisition, of something found, in which it is complete’ (1990, 318). In dizain 144 these two moments are given in line 8 when the Creator (‘Le hault povoir,’ v. 7) infuses soul, animation, and virtue into the impassive body of the lover: ‘Infuse l’ame en ce mien corps passible.’ In this act of intimacy the hal-

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lowed quiet of ‘Le hault povoir’ enters the lover’s stillness, for we learn that the Creator’s infusion occurs ‘without agitation’: ‘ouvrant sans emoy’ (v. 8). The reciprocity between the active and the passive reaches its height when the Creator, exercising his prescience and omniscience, foresees that that the speaker’s soul by itself lacks essence and potency. Consequently, he extends the lover’s soul into Délie’s essence to endow it with ‘its highest perfection’: ‘La prevoyant sans son essence en soy,/En toy l’estend, comme en son plus possible’ (vv. 9–10). Thus, the lover’s plaint, centring on presence/absence, is dialectically synthesized at a higher plane, where the passivity of dispossession is transformed into the receptivity of ‘son plus possible’ (v. 10). This remarkable regeneration of life is understandable in Neoplatonic terms such as those offered by Ficino in the Commentary: ‘For after I have lost myself, if I recover myself through you, I have myself through you; if I have myself through you, I have you before and more than I have myself, and I am closer to you than to myself, since I approach myself in no other way than through you as an intermediary’ (II:8).108 The drama of passivity and reception in dizain 144 can also be enriched by comparing it with the account of creation in Scève’s Microcosme. In this work, the concepts of God and man have a decidedly Neoplatonic emphasis. Just as ‘essence’ is accentuated in dizain 144 (v. 9) as a virtual source of power, so does Scève use forms of this word in his biblical epic to describe the Creator and creation. In fact, God is the mirror opposite of the poetlover, but in terms that connote the attributes of Délie: Essence pleine en soy, d’infinité latente, Qui seule en soy se plait, et seule se contente Non agente, impassible, immuable, invisible Dans son Éternité, comme incomprehensible, (I:17–20, 1976 Giudici edition, I:17–20) [Essence in itself full, with hidden infinity, That alone by itself satisfies and fulfils itself Not an agent, impassible, immutable, invisible In its Eternity, as it is incomprehensible.] [tranlsation mine]

The Microcosme continues to provide a model for understanding dizain 144. In the epic the narrator adapts the Plotinian theory of effulguration to the more personal Judaeo-Christian metaphysics. The personal aspects of the description indicate Genesis, while such words as ‘Essence’ (I:17),

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‘Chaos’ (I:25), and ‘pures Intelligences’ (I:30) point to the more impersonal metaphysics of Plato and Plotinus. Closely examining the wording of creation in the Microcosme, one can summarize the account as follows: The Divinity through his own pleasure (‘Quand luy plut,’ I:24–5) made chaos open up in visible light: ‘Son grand Chaos s’ouvrit en visible lumiere’ (I:25). Through this light God produced the ‘Essences’ (I:29) from the act of self-contemplation which yielded the ‘pures Intelligences’ (I:30). These intellectual virtualities are described as ‘Prontes en Esprits’ (I:31), meaning that in generating souls, they are prompt in serving as God’s ‘tresobservans Ministres’ (I:32). Being ‘fideles tesmoins’ (I:35) of the Divinity’s will (‘son vouloir,’ I:32), they spread its ‘lueur nouvelle’ (I:34) to ‘Nature’ (I:38), and then to the heavens (‘les cieux,’ I:40), which, while not being of themselves capable of expanding God’s grandeur (‘non assés estendus,’ I:41) are nevertheless ‘prevus’ (I:42) to extend their order to the celestial dome (‘Et toutefois prevus pour tels leur ordre estendre,’ I:41–2). This model of creation provided by the Microcosme enables the reader to see dizain 144 as the lover’s return to a new life in passivity and reception, expressed predominately by Neoplatonic notions and secondarily by biblical concepts. The poem’s first four lines with its evocation of presence and absence, life in death, correspond to the epic’s opening of ‘grand Chaos’ (I:27) in shadowy light ‘Entenebree ainsi sous la confusion’ (I:28). In the dizain there is stylistic and philosophic insistence that one lives in the other (‘En toy je vis,’ v. 1). This is the microcosmic logic of the One played out in the Microcosme by the fact that the Essences, Intelligences, Mind, and Nature are virtually all contained in the Divinity. In the biblical epic, God is ‘impassible’ (I:19), which in the poem ressembles ‘the high power ... working without agitation’ (Le hault povoir ... ouvrant sans esmoy, v. 7). The paradoxes of active and passive in the poem are richly suggestive even as they are highly reversible. God in the Microcosme and the ‘high power working without agitation’ in the dizain are the forces in a line of causes, including Délie, that infuse soul into the poet-lover. In one sense his passivity is dependence on their emantions, but in another sense, his passivity in the frozen present of recollection reflects the timeless impassivity of the One. Neoplatonists such as Ebreo held that love binds the universe together, for the lower beings desire the higher, and the higher beings because of overflowing generosity perfect the lower.109 In dizain 144 a similar generosity devolves from Creator to Nature to lover. The speaker considers the Creator’s work (‘ouvrant,’ v. 7) something extraordinary to the degree that Nature through ‘Le hault povoir’ (v. 7) personally intercedes to re-

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vive the lover’s nearly dead body. Somewhat polyvalent, the periphrasis ‘Le hault povoir’ (v. 7) can either be the One or its offspring – the created Nature that mediates for the One. Whether by natural sympathy or by the classical deus ex machina or by the Judaeo-Christian act of miraculous intervention, Nature is so ‘oultragée’ (v. 5) to witness the lover’s plight that through the Creator’s powers, it inserts soul into his body. In the Microcosme creation is no less astounding to the narrator who, when describing the passage of ‘Esprits’ to ‘Nature,’ calls these actions ‘miraculeux faits’ (I:35). This is in spite of the fact that the infusion of life is impersonal when compared to dizain 144. To achieve higher perfection, passivity becomes reception when in the poem the lover’s motionless body quietly accepts Nature’s infusion of the soul. In the Microcosme the word ‘infuse’ is first used as an adjective to describe Nature’s animation of plant, herbs, and fruits: ‘Selon l’infuse humeur de leur seve’ (I:79). Both the Microcosme and dizain 144 make use of the verb étendre to communicate Nature’s role in generating life. In the epic the verb is mentioned twice in successive lines to describe the act of Nature extending and spreading light in its creation of the skies: ‘Du pouvoir de Nature en son oeuvre esbahie,/Bien que jusqu’adonq n’eust de son doigt precieux/L’un sur l’autre courbé, et voutoyé les cieux/Non assés estendus pour sa grandeur comprendre,/Et toutefois prevus pour tels leur ordre estendre’ (I:38–42). As Nature extends the grandeur of light into the vaulting heavens, so in dizain 144 does it extend Délie’s soul into the lover, endowing him with the utmost virtual powers: ‘En toy l’estend, comme en son plus possible’ (v. 10). In its entirety dizain 144 portrays an act of erotic mysticism where the macrocosm extends its powers to the microcosm. Eros is the motivating force behind two fundamental acts – actualizing the lover’s being and infusing potency for growth and development. However, these two acts are founded on the absolute condition of mutuality between passivity and activity. First let us consider the physical aspects of Eros. While Scève’s poem cannot be considered the highly passionate equivalent of Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa or the foreshadowing of William Blake’s ‘The Soul in the Mystical Embrace of God,’ it neverthless exhibits sensual traits which combine passivity with divine penetration.110 As will be shown, the entire poem is built on the implications of the word ‘en’ which permeate both the lover’s suspension in presence/absence and the soul’s infusion by ‘Le hault povoir’ (v. 7). First, the abeyance of action in the presence/absence meditation (vv. 1–4) and the image of infusion (vv. 5–10) imply le petit mort. Let us also note that after a moment of passionate anger (‘nature

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oultragée,’ v. 5) ‘le hault povoir’ (v. 7) infuses soul into the passive, receptive body of the lover: ‘Infuse l’ame en ce mien corps passible’ (v. 8). Also, ‘le hault povoir’ penetrates by ‘ouvrant sans emoy’ (v. 7). The adverbial phrase ‘sans emoy’ means ‘without agitation,’ ‘without effort,’ thereby suggesting mutual cooperation in giving and receiving. The present participle ‘ouvrant,’ signifying travaillant, also suggests by word play the Latin verb operor (Fr. ouvrir) as well as the noun opus, implying procreation.111 Finally, in the expression ‘En toy l’estend’ (v. 10), there is a twofold sense of deeper physical extension and the morally sublime infusion of Délie’s essence into the lover to endow him with power. To give a fuller picture of cosmic coupling, it is important to consider the psychological and spiritual senses of penetration. In dizain 144 they can all be reduced to the logic of mutuality embedded in the word en and its synonyms. The preposition/adverb ‘en’ connotes ‘within,’ ‘occupancy,’ or ‘possession.’ In lines 1–4 the meanings of ‘en’ are frought with paradox. In line 1 the lover lives ‘en’ Délie when she is absent, and in line 2, he dies ‘en’ himself when she is present. Whatever the oxymorons, being cannot be conceived without mutuality, whether positive or negative, and selfsufficiency in this dizain is entirely alien to the lover’s mentality. Beyond this point in the poem, the word ‘en’ will always suggest some kind of tacit or explicit cooperation, whether positive or negative. Lines 5–6 move from ontology to causality.112 Causality in the context of eros involves procreation, and therefore, nature moves from potency and act. What is the motive for nature’s procreative act? When the lover avows that he lives more in Délie (‘en toy,’ v. 6) than in himself (‘en moy,’ v. 6), nature is outraged at the energy-sapping excess of the lover living entirely in the beloved: ‘Et si nature oultragée se sent/De me veoir vivre en toy trop plus, qu’en moy’ (vv. 5–6). Excessive devotion en Délie evacuates the lover’s powers and makes him a passive body: ‘mien corps passible’ (v. 8). The adjective ‘passible,’ meaning ‘passive,’ ‘capable of passion,’ or ‘susceptible to receive,’ has philosophic colouring. For example, in Ficino’s theory of causality, life is sustained by changes from potency to act, requiring a passive component (the lover’s body) and an active component (the lover’s soul).113 However, in this part of the poem the lover has temporarily lost his soul. Then he is recreated, so to speak, out of nature’s empathy. Thus, in this dizain we see the mystical action of Délie as both the sapping of potency and the restorer of essence. Having established nature’s motives for procreation, the reader sees that the logic of en is given strong expression in the act of coupling. In lines 7–8, one reads: ‘Le hault povoir .../Infuse l’ame en ce mien corps passible.’

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The sense of ‘in’ appears in both ‘en’ and ‘infuse,’ the first designating receptivity and the second activity, or in other words, potentia passiva and virtus activa (Kristeller, 40). Coleman notes that according to contemporary astrological beliefs the verb ‘infuse ’ (also used in D 22, v. 7) designated the moon’s transfer of defluus to human beings, which determined their character and destiny (1975, 139). What ‘Le hault povoir’ (v. 7) infuses into the lover’s soul is its ‘essence’ (v. 9), the spiritual source of its powers. In Ficino essence is part of a causal triad consisting of essentia, virtus, and operatio (Kristeller, 130). Action does not exist in itself but through a preexisting substance called essence. Virtus is the power that communicates a quality or attribute derived from essentia, and the outward manifestation of this process is named operatio. It is important to realize that this tripartite activity is imparted by the macrocosm from ‘Le hault povoir’ (v. 7) to ‘nature’ (v. 5) and then to Délie’s soul (v. 8), such that the receptive lover comes to life within and by means of the macrocosm. From procreation Eros moves to ensure growth and development. This idea is given by the last use of en in line 10: ‘En toy l’estend, comme en son plus possible.’ Though the soul of the lover is extended into Délie, it is not the lover who is the active force, but ‘Le hault povoir’ (v. 7) who extends Délie into the lover. Thus the male, the poet-lover, is the passive recipient. Whether one considers ‘Le hault povoir’ (v. 7) the Creator, or the Creator’s intermediary, nature, it is this ‘high power’ that functions as the active cause. However, ‘Le hault povoir’ (v. 7) is sexually neutral, and Délie, the female intermediary of this power, is the regenerative force and limitless potential of the lover. It is therefore ironic at the very least that the poet-lover, by using the expression ‘En toy l’estend’ (v. 10), suggests at first glance that the woman is the passive partner. Her reception of the lover is nothing less than the apotheosis of power in the lover. In these erotic involutions the poet’s syntax and choice of words appear to conflate passivity and activity. The lover receives but views the act of infusion as his own extension into Délie. The woman gives, but her power is entirely transmitted by ‘Le hault povoir’ (v. 7). The women gives by receiving, the poet-lover receives by giving. Though Délie gives by receiving, her impassivity resembles the immovable One. Though the poet-lover receives by giving, his giving is but the receptivity to nature (v. 5) and ‘Le Hault povoir’ (v. 7). who are the efficient and final causes respectively. However one appraises these paradoxes, it remains true that Délie is the meeting point of microcosm and macrocosm, receiving the lover’s soul but actively regenerating him. The en communicates a union that is both passive and active, the virtuality of Délie’s essence in the lover’s own soul. The speaker terms it ‘son

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plus possible’ (v. 10). Throughout the work the lover makes a number of erotic allusions to the androgyne as the goal of love. First, the speaker describes it as exclusive and priceless: ‘Je quiers en toy ce, qu’en moy j’ay plus cher./Et bien qu’espoir de l’attente me frustre,/Point ne m’est grief en aultruy me chercher’ (D 271, vv. 8–10). In dizain 440 the lover’s reference to the androgyne brings emotions of peace, sweetness, and unsurpassable fulfilment. It is reminiscent of device 1 where the poet-unicorn rests on the lap of a welcoming woman: ‘Mon ame ainsi de sa paix convoyteuse/ Au doulx sejour, que tu luy peult bailler,/Se reposant sur ta doulceur honteuse/Ne se veult plus en aultre travailler’ (vv. 7–10). Before this poem and in a slightly different inflection the poet-lover had made explicit reference to the hermaphrodite but he emphasizes this union as embodying efficacy, that realization of virtue which frequently eludes him: ‘Ne sens je en nous parfaire, en augmentant/L’hermaphrodite, efficace amoureuse?’ (D 435, vv. 5–6). If nature in dizain 144 administers to the lover’s exhausted soul and if the woman in impresa 1 offers comfort and refuge to the unicorn, then there is another conserving power (‘possible,’ v. 10) of the beloved celebrated in dizain 378. It is symbolized by ‘Myrrhe’ (v. 9) signifying immortal incorruptibility. Christ’s body was dressed in this aromatic perfume in preparation for burial, and in the Renaissance Mary’s powers to resist the corrosion of original sin were compared to the substance’s capacity for imperishable preservation.114 Accordingly, the lover predicts that Délie is just such a perfume that, given to him, will negate the worms of corruption: ‘Mais toy, qui as (toy seule) le possible/De donner heur a ma fatalité,/ Tu me seras la Myrrhe incorruptible/Contre les vers de ma mortalité’ (vv. 7–10). Lastly, the symbols of one soul infused into another and of the reunification of souls in the androgyne do not fully account for the sense of open-ended potential in the phrase ‘son plus possible’ (v. 10) which, while ending the poem, foresees endless development. This is Scève par excellence in all his powerful ambiguity. As if breaking out and away from all frames of reference, the ‘plus possible’ (v. 10) has two other important meanings in Délie associated with the unlimited. First, the ‘most possible’ is the power to do the impossible, a feat that the lover attributes to the woman: ‘Mais tu sçais mieulx, qui peulx par ta grandeur/Faciliter, mesmement l’impossible’ (D 73, vv. 9–10). It is difficult to ignore the religious resonance of these lines, since they resemble a passage from the Gospel of Luke where the angel Gabriel announces to Mary, ‘For with God nothing will be impossible’ (1:37).115 Second, the phrase ‘son plus

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possible’ must at some level of analysis draw attention to the enunciative relation between the two roles of poet and lover assumed by the speaker. As the ever-active reconstituting memory, the poet is the indefatigable energy that never surrenders the raw power of maintaining meditative effort which, in spite of the undermining effects of presence/absence, rescues the lover from entropy and resurrects his spirits. That is, the play of active and passive occurs in the speaker himself, for while the lover’s body may be flaccid, the poet never ceases to convey to the lover, as spirit to receptive matter, the ongoing dynamic of the Creator’s work. The purport of the poem is entirely bound up with the paradox of receptive passivity. This paradox reaches the height of tension when we realize that the active impulse of receptivity is the poet in the lover. In different terms the microcosmic play of activity and passivity from poet to lover mirrors the macrocosmic transmission of potency where Délie and nature receive only to extend. Ecstasy Within the context of the lover’s active reception of Délie’s powers, we have seen him move from the oraison de recueillement to the oraison de quiétude culminating in the infusion of the woman’s essence into his welcoming body. The dizains of receptive passivity show that the poet-lover strives to assimilate the infused virtualities of the beloved and prepares himself to actualize them through ecstasy, the highest act of mystical attainment. Here the term ecstasis means standing outside of oneself in joyous exaltation united in the most intimate degree with the Divinity. The history of mysticism offers a stunning variety of such privileged states, each of which has a different nuance. Plato uses the expression to theion kalon,116 Plotinus, ekstasis or phyge monou pros monon,117 and Pseudo-Dionysius henosis.118 Augustine at Ostia with Monica recounts that ‘venimus in mentes nostras et transcendimus eas, ut attingeremus regionem ubertatis indeficientis.’119 Ambrose speaks of copula spiritualis120 and Cassian of excessus cordis.121 In the late sixth century Gregory the Great refers to extra mundum, extra carnem fieri.122 From the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries we walk through a particularly lush garden of religious ecstasy. Without doubt it is the Doctor of Charity, Saint Bernard, who offers the greatest variety of ecstatic experiences: excessus, rapere, stupor, speculando, transvolare, quiescentem, mente excedere, abripere, avolare, transcendere.123 Toward the end of the twelfth century, Hildegard of Bingen refers to umbra viventis lucis124 and Richard of Saint Victor

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to magnitudo admirationis and magnitudo exultationes.125 Like Bernard, Bonaventure is rich in formulations, notably the mors mystica of dying into love, and the resounding Dionysian conclusion to the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum where he invites his reader to ascend ‘ad superessentialem divinarum tenebrarum radium.’126 In the late thirteenth century Angela of Foligno utters the oxymorons ‘Et nihil omnino videt anima quod narrai possit ore nec cum corde postea; et nihil videt, et videt omnia omnino.’127 Catherine of Siena like her predecessor Angela of Foligno also reverts to highly paradoxical formulations in her Dialogue centring on the ineffability which accompanies ecstasy: ‘For the eye sees without seeing; the ear hears without hearing; the tongue speaks without speaking.’128 Also overlapping the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is Meister Eckhart who bequeathed to posterity the notions of detachment and separation (abegescheidenheit).129 His contemporary, the anchoress Margery Kempe who wrote the first autobiographical work in English, testifies to ‘a sound of music so sweet and delightful that I thought I must be in paradise.’130 At the outset of the sixteenth century in France, the supreme, mystical voice is that of Marguerite de Navarre. Living at a time when both Neoplatonism and Rhineland mysticism were popular, she advocated self-effacement in the ‘Tout-Verbe.’ This is seen in the Oraison de l’âme fidèle where union with the Creator arouses such beauty that it blots out the first form of old Adam which is the human condition without the Incarnation: ‘Mais par Amour est sy bien effacé/Et nous repaintz et couvertz de spendeur,/Que soubz beauté est Adam trespassé.’131 Plato’s notions of death provide the critic with the building blocks for analysing the representations of ecstasy in Scève’s Délie. To recall, the Phaedo defines death as ‘the release of the soul from the body’ (64c–4). However, Plato also gives other senses of death tied to ascetism, philosophy, and divine madness. In the first of these three, he says that ‘purification ... consists in separating the soul as much as possible from the body’ (67c–5). As for the second Plato maintains that ‘the philosopher’s soul is ahead of all the rest’ (65d) because ‘if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself’ (66d). In the Phaedrus Plato argues that madness, as a state where one stands outside oneself, is ‘heavensent’ (244b) and includes love, prophecy, and poetic possession, the last of which is sent by the ‘Muses’ (245a). It is in the Ion that Plato develops the artistic and musical implications of ecstasy, arguing that poetry is not the result of technè but rather of mania (divine inspiration) which takes hold of the rhapsodist whose song ‘seizes’ his listeners (534a, 536b).

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The climate in which Scève wrote his Délie was permeated with Neoplatonic works that described, portrayed, or referred to ecstasy as a kind of dying at the height of religious, amatory, philosophic, or aesthetic experiences. In addition to Ficino and Speroni, a number of other writers use this language, such as Rabelais complimenting the spirituality of Marguerite de Navarre: Esprit abstraict, ravy, et ecstatic, Qui frequentant les cieulx, ton origine, As delaissé ton hoste et domestic, Ton corps ...132

Marguerite herself moves to one of the highest states of ecstasy in her Miroir de l’ame pecheresse where in a reversal of secular values, death to the world becomes life in Christ: Amour, amour, vous avez fait l’accord, Faisant unir à la vie la mort. Mais l’union a mort a mort vivifiee. Vie mourant d’amour verifiee, Vie sans fin a fait nostre mort vive. Mort a donné à vie mort naïve. Par ceste mort, moy morte reçoy vie; Et au vivant par la mort suis ravie. En vous je vy; quand en moy je suis morte, Mort ne m’est plus que d’une prison porte. Vie, m’est mort ...133

In the Dialogo Ebreo describes contemplation as ‘a blessed death’ since a higher part of the human being, turning from the body, comes to focus on the intellect: ... when the soul comes between the body and the intellect, to wit, when it is joined in union with the intellect, it receives the whole of the intellectual light on its superior part and its inferior and corporeal part remains in darkness. The body being thus cut off from all light is bereft of life and its ties with the soul are loosed. And this is that blessed death which is brought about by the marriage of soul and intellect, and which befell our holy fathers, Moses, Aaron, and others, of whom you read in Holy Writ that they died according to the word of the Lord, with the kiss of God on their lips.134

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Antoine Héroet bases his work on an amatory logic similar to that of Ebreo, but he changes perspective. Rather than speaking about the separation of soul from body, he describes the loving reunion of souls as androgynous. However, he does refer to ecstatic death as the sudden forgetting of all other things at the moment of consummation: ‘[Quand] chascun vient à la recongnoissance/De sa moytié par longue experience,/Soubdain toute aultre alliance s’oublie/Et le vray neud deslié se relie.’135 This historical backdrop enables us the better to understand one of the functions of ecstasy in Délie. It is to find a way of dying that is also a way of renewing. What the poet-lover finds most threatening – the spectre of physical death – is also what he finds most desirable in another form – the mort mystique. Let us examine two poems where the lover brings himself to ecstatic union with the beloved: Me ravissant ta divine harmonie Souventesfois jusques aux Cieulx me tire: Dont transporté de si doulce manye Le Corps tressue en si plaisant martyre, Que plus j’escoute, et plus à soy m’attire D’un tel concent la delectation. Mais seulement celle prolation Du plus doulx nom, que proferer je t’oye, Me confont tout en si grand’passion, Que ce seule mot fait eclipser ma joye

(D 157)

Tes doigtz tirantz non le doulx son des cordes, Mais des haultz cieulx l’Angelique harmonie, Tiennent encor en telle symphonie, Et tellement les oreilles concordes, Que paix, et guerre ensemble to accordes En ce concent, que lors je concevoys: Car du plaisir, qu’avecques toy j’avoys, Comme le vent se joue avec la flamme, L’esprit divin de ta celeste voix Soubdain m’estainct, et plus soubdain m’enflamme.

(D 196)

[Your divine harmony, enrapturing me, Often times draws me to the very Heavens, Thus transposed by such sweet mania, My body transpires into such pleasing martyrdom

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That the more I listen the more Delight, with such harmony, attracts me. But only this proffering Of the sweetest name, that I hear you proffer, Confounds me completely in such great passion That this single word eclipses my joy.] [Your fingers, plucking not sweet sound from the strings, But angelic harmony from the high heavens, Continue still in such symphony And hold my ears to such accord with this harmony, That you bring into accord peace and war In this harmony that I then conceived. For with the pleasure I had with you, As the wind played with the flame, The divine spirit of your celestial voice At once extinguishes me and suddenly still enflames]

Some of the highest states of loving union in Délie are imbued with notions stemming from Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato. The first six lines of dizain 157 imply that Délie’s consummate playing of the lyre or lute produces a ‘divine harmonie’ (v. 1) which draws the poet-lover out of his body (‘si plaisant martyr,’ v. 4) and transports him to the very heavens (‘aux Cieulx me tire,’ v. 2). While this is the implied composition of place, the physical details that would have given specificity to the site or the physiognomy of Délie and the poet-lover are completely assimilated into the symbolism of philosophical and mystical music. The poetics of this dizain is that rhapsodic music can be transformed into its equivalent medium of poetic ecstasy and expands the reach of human consciousness. As William James has said in the context of mysticism, ‘Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict.’136 Philosophers, psychologists, and historians of religion make the perceptive observation that the testimony of a mystic is always mediated by a discourse no matter how unmediated and ineffable be their experiences (Katz 1992, 3–41). It therefore behooves the critic of Délie to keep in mind that the speaker is both a poet and a lover and that the role of the former is not only to forge a discourse for the latter, but also to deepen and prolong blissful contact with the divine. Thus, the poet is oriented outward to the extent that he gives public voice to the lover’s celebration of Délie, but is also focused inward to the degree that his subjective language nurtures

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and sustains contact with the Divinity. Outside and inside, public and private converge in the discourse of immediacy where poetry cultivates and nourishes the evanescent euphoria of alienation. Finally, there is another bond between the poet and Délie. Just as the woman as muscian is capable of transmitting her divine fureur to the poet, so the speaker as Orpheus reciprocates as her poetic accompanist, communing with her in what Ficino, following Plato, considered the superior form of imitation, ‘muscicam poesimque’ or ‘music-and-poetry’ (Helgeson 2001, 30). At the very outset of the dizain the poet-lover describes himself as seized and carried away by the harmony of the woman’s music, ravished by the effects of her uplifting song. As noted above, the poet creates a discourse of immediacy which attempts to prolong and deepen the lover’s mystical experience. The poetic effects of lexical selection, grammar, and imagery fulfil this goal. With the words ‘Me ravissant’ (v. 1) beginning the dizain, the poet himself is dispossessed of an introductory exordium and is forced to capture the lover in blissful transport in medias res. Beyond consciousness of past or future, beginning or end, the lover is engulfed in a moment of sweet death, suspended in a taste of eternity. Since the lover is seized by music, it is helpful to note that Ficino in his commentary on Plato’s Timaeus observes that one of the many functions of spiritus is to transfer musical harmony through air waves which excites listeners and takes complete hold of them by its marvellous pleasures (Skenazi 1994, 89). However, what seems like suspension is also elevation, for the poet’s mystical rhetoric makes both states appear simultaneous, thereby confounding spatial orientation. The technique which creates this suspension-in-elevation is the deferral of the active verb tire to the end of the second line where the ‘Me,’ once stolen (v. 1), is now drawn irresistibly to the ‘Cieulx’ (v. 2). Only retroactively is the speaker able to give an explanation of his state, as if understanding were so exceeded by rapture that it could only locate itself by reactive memory. In the second verse he is already lifted to heaven. How did he get there? His nearly timeless displacement was caused by ‘doulce manye’ (v. 3). What does this phrase mean? In his Le solitaire premier ou Prose des Muses et de la fureur poetique Pontus de Tyard’s persona Solitaire enters the home of his beloved, Pasithée, and hearing her playing the ‘Leut,’ suddenly undergoes what he later calls ‘manie’ (9). He recounts to the reader his report: ‘je me sentois ravi comme d’une celèste harmonie ... Mais (ne scay-je à quel bruit) elle [Pasithée], jettant sa veuë du costé de l’entrée, et m’appercevant tout changé de nouvel aise’ (5). Three pages later his memory recaptures the experience philosophically when in a lesson to his beloved, he gives two definitions of the word ‘fureur’:

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Mais il vous plaira entendre, Pasithée, que fureur (laquelle je difiniz avecques vous alienation d’entendement, sans adjouster ce vice de cerveau) contient souz soy deux especes d’alienations. La premiere procedant des maladies corporelles, dont vous avez parlé, et de son vray nom l’avez bien appellée follie et vice de cerveau; la seconde, estant engendrée d’une secrette puissance divine, par laquelle l’ame raisonnable est illustrée: et la nommons, fureur divine, ou, avec les Grecs Enthusiasme ... son propre est d’eslever depuis ce corps jusques aux Cieux l’ame qui des Cieux est descendue dedans ce corps.137

The poet-lover continues to savour the experience he is recounting which he now calls ‘plaisant martyre’ (v. 4). This is the ecstatic separation of his soul from his body: ‘Le Corps tressue en si plaisant martyre,/Que plus j’escoute, et plus à soy m’attire/D’un tel concent la delectation’ (vv. 4–6). Since Délie draws the lover to the heavens, the ‘plaisant martyre’ (v. 4) to which he refers is divine madness which, according to Ficino and Tyard has four degrees.138 From the ‘dons des Muses’ the soul ascends to the ‘intelligences des mystères,’ then to the ‘ravisement de prophetie,’ and finally to ‘la violence de l’amoureuse affection sous Amour et Venus’ (Tyard, 17). This last step solders unity with the One in its eternel beauty: ‘eslevée a de jouir de la divine et eternelle beauté’ (Tyard, 20). Given the word ‘concent’ (v. 6) the ascension is primarily impelled by ‘la fureur Poëtique’ (Tyard, 19), which lifts the lover out of his body and sweeps him into purificatory pleasures which chase away ‘Le Corps tressue’ (v. 4). Since Tyard closely follows Scève in this dizain,139 it is useful to cite his description of poetic madness, for he allows the reader to imagine Délie’s harmonic poesis and her effects on the lover : Et de ce faire est pour son peculier devoir la fureur Poëtique chargée, resveillant par les tons de Musique l’Ame en ce, qu’elle est endormie, et confortant par la suavité et douceur de l’harmonie la partie perturbée, puis par la diversité bien accordée des Musiciens accords chassant la dissonante discorde, et en fin reduisant le desordre en certaine egalité bien et proportionnément, et compartie par la gracieuse et grave facilité de vers compassez en curieuse observance de nombres et de mesures.140

In regard to the lover’s ‘plaisant martyre’ (v. 4) it is useful to identify similar transports recounted by Petrarch. Petrarch is too much cast as humanism’s challenger to religion, but this critical bias should be redressed by citing his mystical poems that suffuse fragmentation with unifying wonder and awe. In Rime 323, a dream vision of six marvellous scenes (including a golden-headed phoenix and a ship with ropes of silk and sails of gold), en-

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trance Petrarch’s persona, enthralled by the dramatic appearance and the sudden destruction of magnificent wonders, emerges from his trance by apostrophizing his own poetic ‘Canzon’: ‘Song, you may well say: “These six visions have given my lord a sweet desire for death.”’141 This is not only the swoon of physical death but also divine madness. Like the lover in Délie Petrarch’s persona is not merely reporting his ecstasy but also tapping his song to heighten and sustain his own poetic inspiration. As historians of mysticism have discovered, ecstasy brings ferment in separating the soul from the body. Underhill notes that ‘complete monoideism’ where intense concentration simultaneously withdraws attention from surface consciousness and fixes it exclusively on the Absolute ‘is always paid for by psycho-physical disturbances’ (Underhill 1990, 363). This explains why the lover’s body ‘sweats’ (‘Le Corps tressue en si plaisant martyre,’ v. 4), why it is ‘couvert de sueur,’ and ‘violemment agité,’ why it must ‘suer en abondance.’142 The verb ‘tressue’ (v. 4) is also used in dizain 405 in the sense of s’efforcer à without losing the connotation of sweating: ‘Que la douleur, qui en mon front se plye,/Tressue au bien trop amerement doulx’ (vv. 9–10). In analysing dizain 157 we notice that Tyard closely follows Ficino and gives reasons for the agitations which afflict the ecstatic martyr. The soul is divided into the upper and lower powers. In as much as the lower powers are preoccupied with administering to bodily needs, the upper soul remains ‘endormie’ (Tyard, 18). The result is a deleterious separation within the soul – the inferior powers being affected by perturbations, the superior by torpor. Readjusting this ‘improportionnée proportion’ requires the work of ‘la fureur Poëtique’143 which uses music to awaken the higher part and to calm the lower. (In fact, dizain 338 uses ‘tressue’ in association with the speaker’s awakening – ‘s’esveille,’ v. 8 – from dreams.) The result is a second, but uplifting separation by music which must overcome this ‘horrible discord’ by drawing both parts of the soul from their unknowingly vicious habits to a ‘doulce symphonie’ (Tyard, 18–19). The ‘tressue’ (v. 4) of the poet-lover is one of the agitations inherent in ecstasy. Catherine of Siena, the ‘Seraphic Virgin’ and ‘Doctor of the Church,’ was said to have dictated the Divina Dottrina in states of ecstasy. Referring to herself in the third person, she gives a blazing account of her thanksgiving for God’s mercy, propelled by mystical intoxication and violent love which includes the physiology of bloody sweat: The fire within that soul blazed higher and she was beside herself as if drunk, at once gloriously happy and grief-stricken. She was happy in her union with

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God, wholly submerged in his mercy and savoring his vast goodness, but to see such goodness offended brought her grief. She knew, though, that God had shown her his creatures’ sinfulness to rouse her to intensify her concern and longing. And she offered thanks to the divine majesty. As she felt her emotions so renewed in the eternal Godhead, the force of her spirit made her body break into sweat. (For her union with God was more intimate than was the union between her soul and body.) The holy fire of love grew so fierce within her that its heat made her sweat water, but it was not enough. She longed to see her body sweat blood, so she said to herself: Alas my soul! You have frittered your whole life away, and for this have all these great and small evils come upon the world and holy Church! So I want you to heal them now with a sweat of blood.144

Though Catherine is referring to her own physical sweating, it is also to be noted that references to sweating occur as a religious topos in meditation inspired by the Passion of Christ in the Mount of Olives. A moving example of ‘physiological prayer’ in literary form is contained in the influential Horologium Sapientiae (c. 1334)145 by Henry Suso, which is a visionary dialogue between Wisdom and the Disciple in settings that are permeated with religious iconography. In Book I, chapter 3, Lady Wisdom takes the voice of Christ in the first person to narrate the Agony in the Garden: ‘I went out with the eleven and made my way to the Mount of Olives, where “being in agony and having prayed for long,” and understanding what cruel kinds of torment now threatened me, “my sweat became as drops of blood trickling down upon the ground”’ (Luke 22:39–44).146 In Délie, the poet-lover is expressing emotions consistent with the physiology of mysticism – the sweating, and as we will see, the tearing apart of the body. That is not to say that work is completely pervaded by the ethos of the Middle Ages. On the contrary, the poet-lover will protest the tradition of abandoning the body in mystical ecstasy, which marks him as a figure of the Renaissance. For the moment, it will be necessary to return to Tyard to show that the poet-lover’s transport can be elucidated by reference to the Solitaire. Let us concentrate on the speaker’s use of ‘delectation’ (v. 6). In spite of such interior division, even in the midst of ecstasy, the poetlover is in Tyard’s words ‘apte à recevoir la forme, qu’elles [les Muses] impriment, c’est à dire, l’ont trouvée preparée à estre esprise de ce ravissement’ (21–2). As previously noted, the poet, as writer inspired by his muse of music, seeks to deepen and prolong his ravishment by the poetry of ‘delectation’ (v. 6). Since his sweet martyrdom will be all too transient the

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speaker is of a similar mind as Pasithée who, when sensing that Solitaire has reached the apex of his account of ascension, urges him to continue: ‘En bonne foy (dit-elle) puis que vous m’avez fait appetit de tant delicate viande, vous auriez tort de m’en donner si peu, et me laisser ainsi affamée’ (Tyard, 20). The word ‘delectation’ (v. 6) may be clarified by recourse to Cotgrave who gives ‘delight’ and ‘pleasure,’ and in the poetic context it means savouring or tasting slowly with attenion and pleasure. The medium is music, the delight is taste. In dizain 157, the aesthetics of savouring requires the prolonging of attention through syntax that makes the reader and the poet await the last word of each line to arrive at the ecstatic emotion. Thus, in line 1 we must wait after the suspension of ‘ravissant’ to find that ‘harmonie’ is the cause of the lover’s bliss. In verse 2 the lover relishes the prolongation of syllables in ‘Souventesfois’ and ‘jusques aux Cieulx’ before reaching the riveting effect of drawing and attracting – ‘me tire.’ The same movement from relishing to ravishing occurs in line 3 where the reader must ask, ‘By what is the lover transported?’ the answer to which is finally revealed in the last two words ‘doulce manye.’ This double structure of taste and climax is differently inflected in the fifth verse where what was enervating antiperistasis in other poems is now the dual activity of attentive listening and seductive magnetism: ‘Que plus j’escoute, et plus à soy m’attire’ (v. 5). This ‘concent’ (v. 6) of two, beloved and lover, musician and poet, muse and seized soul, is also intensified by the duo of rhymes. The piercing sighs of pleasure are especially apparent in the expressive prolongation of the accent tonique in /i/ and /i:r/: ‘harmonie’ (v. 1). ‘tire’ (v. 2), ‘manye’ (v. 3), ‘martyre’ (v. 4), and ‘m’attire’ (v. 5). So extended are these sounds that while they mark the end of each verse, they continue their joyous jouissance indefinitely in the lover’s ascent to the ‘Cieulx’ (v. 2). These delights are complemented by harmony of the interior parts of the poem. Particularly effective are the elevating sifflants and the lush embrace of nasal /ã/ and /zã/ in ‘ravissant’ (v. 1), ‘Souventesfois’ (v. 2), ‘Cieulx’ (v. 2), ‘transporté’ (v. 3), ‘tressue’ (v. 4), ‘plaisant’ (v. 4), and ‘concent’ (v. 6). The harmony of music and poetry can be said to reach an indissociable unity in the word that breaks the /i/-/i:r/ rhyme pattern. Towards the end of this poetic symphonie both Délie’s musical instrument and the lover’s lyric poem merge in the savouring sound of the final word of the sizain, ‘delectation’ (v. 6). Another mystical phenomenon that Scève has transformed and adapted to musico-poetic ecstasy is what historians have called transverberation. It is defined as the interaction between the mystic and the apparition of

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a religious figure such as the Virgin, an angel, or a saint that usually takes place in a familiar location. It is called ‘transverberation’ because there is communication between the two which produces ecstasy or rapturous vision (Underhill 1990, 292). Differing from the Ignatian composition of place, it is not an imagined drama created by the application of the senses but registered as a real exchange with a spiritual entity. Well before Délie Angela of Foligno made a report of a vision occurring in the Lenten season where she found herself ‘in the midst of the Trinity, in a manner higher and greater than was usual ... and continually were there given unto me gifts full of delight ... most great and unspeakable ... that verily a divine change took place in my soul, which neither saint nor angel could describe or explain.’147 Teresa of Ávila will write in her Life about an apparition that was to be made monumental by Bernini’s famous baroque sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa. In her work Teresa recounts that she was visited by a smiling cherubim who in his hands held ‘a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails. When he pulled it out, I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God.’148 The analogy between Délie and transverberation is best understood when we recall that there is at least one other poem centring on musical ecstasy which explicitly invokes angelic harmony. This is dizain 196 whose setting is the same as that of dizain 157 where Délie is ravishing the poet-lover with her angelic harmony: ‘Tes doigtz tirantz non le doulx son des cordes,/Mais des haultes cieulx l’Angelique harmonie’ (vv. 1–2). That this angelic harmony is also an apparition of Délie as an angel is reinforced by dizain 409 where the lover says of her, ‘Appercevant cest Ange en forme humaine’ (v. 1). As in dizain157 the speaker of dizain 196 interacts with Délie’s ‘symphonie’ (v. 3), not only as ecstatic lover but also as poet who through musicam poesimque deepens the dimensions of musical ecstasy. Such scenes are pervaded with the atmosphere of supernatural spiritus which animates the affinities of different levels of creation. Cornilliat states that this poem unites musica instrumentalis and harmonia mundi, for just as there are seven musical chords, there are seven virtues, seven heavens, and seven planets (1994, 545–57). In dizain 157 transverberation creates an interaction such that the duo of Délie’s music and the poet’s words lifts him ‘aux Cieulx’ (v. 2). However, in dizain 196 the esctatic power of music moves in the opposite direction. The poet uses musicam poesimque to recount how the woman draws down ‘des haultz cieulx’ (v. 2), the symphony of the angels, in order to

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reestablish harmony in his soul between ‘paix, et guerre’ (v. 5). The opposite movement of these two poems is entirely consistent not only with the poet-lover’s penchant for reversing perspectives, but also with the two ladder schemata of the angelic hierarchies. In Pseudo-Dionysius’s The Celestial Hierarchy the procession of angels is a descent from the seraphim to the angels, while in Gregory the Great’s writings, it is an ascent from the angels to the seraphim.149 In dizain 196 the poet-lover’s drawing down of the woman’s celestial voice eventually lifts him back up through the mediation of the angels into ‘L’esprit divin’ (v. 9). The connection between song and angels is explicitly made by Pseudo-Dionysius in two passages of The Celestial Hierarchy: Hence, theology has transmitted to the men of earth those hymns sung by the first ranks of the angels whose gloriously transcendent enlightenment is thereby made manifest. (Pseudo-Dionysius, 165) In my book Divine Hymns I have already explicated, to the best of my ability, the supreme praises sung by those holy intelligences which dwell beyond heaven ... For the sake of my present purpose, I will simply repeat that when the first rank has directly and properly received its due understanding of God’s word from the divine goodness itself, then it passes this on, as befits a benevolent hierarchy, to those next in line. (Pseudo-Dionysius, 166)

When considering the angelic hierarchies of Dionysius, Gregory the Great, Bonaventure, and Alan of Lille, an assignation of functions is found in which the angels proper announce messages and assist in human hardships, while the archangels serve as agents of enlightenment, revealing celestial and divine mysteries. The poet’s transverberation with Délie as ‘Angelique harmonie’ (D 196, v. 2) taps into both functions. When the speaker says, ‘Et tellement les oreilles concordes,/Que paix, et guerre ensemble tu accordes’ (vv. 4–5), he receives the protective and providential assistance of the angels. When he says, ‘En ce concent, que lors je concevoys’ (v. 6), the verbal structure ‘I then conceived’ signals the archangels’ power to quell discord and to instil harmony in the lover’s mind. The verb ‘concevoys’ (v. 6) implies that the archangels in some sense convey him to the cherubim who grant the power to know and to see the Divinity. The two steps of interior harmony and knowledge of the divine allow the poet-lover to pass to ‘L’esprit divin de ta celeste voix’ (v. 9) where seeing is achieved by hearing. However, as in dizain 157, the speaker finds that ecstasy is but an oscillation between light and extinction: ‘Soubdain m’estainct, et plus soubdain m’enflamme’ (v. 10).

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In the final four lines of dizain 157 we find that ecstasy is transient because the poet-lover cannot long endure the heightened passion (‘grand passion,’ v. 9) which overwhelms and confounds him (‘confont,’ v. 9). Consummating his love in ‘divine harmonie’ (v. 1), the speaker discovers the irony that the very hearing (‘je t’oye,’ v. 8) which ravished his soul is so intolerably overpowering that it eclipses his joy: ‘fait eclipser ma joye’ (v. 10). Because rapture is such an extraordinarily intense experience sweeping the soul from its natural, bodily home and suspending both bodily operations and those of the lower soul, seizing and lifting it to exhaustingly exhilarating bliss where life and death are simultaneous, it is also an ephemeral state that can only be momentarily maintained. However inevitable the fall, this does not discredit rapture’s value, but validates one of its most consistent traits. As William James found, ‘Mystical states cannot be sustained for long,’150 and the manifestations of these oscillations are as varied as the mystics themselves. This point deserves development before rejoining dizain 157. In the breathtaking conclusion of the Enneads Plotinus is transported by a vision of God ‘full of intelligible light ... set on fire ...’ But then, becoming apprehensive, he adds that this fire ‘seems to go out if one is weighed down again (VI, 9, 9–10). Then in jittery, almost telegraphic speech, he asks his students why one constanly falls from the apex of contemplation: ‘How is it, then, that one does not remain there?’ (VI, 9, 10). His answer is, ‘Because one has not totally come out of this world’ and gone beyond discursive reason, which he terms ‘the discourse of the soul’ (VI, 9, 9–10). Augustine, in the ecstasy at Ostia with Monica reports: ‘And while we spoke of the eternal Wisdom, longing for it and straining for it with all the strength of our hearts, for one fleeting instant we reached out and touched it. Then with a sigh, leaving our spiritual harvest bound to it, we returned to the sound of our own speech’ (IX:10).151 Gregory the Great in the Moralia on Job found from experience that ‘the mind cannot stand for long above itself.152 Bernard of Clairvaux in the Sermons on the Song of Songs suffers a ‘recoil of the soul’ after contemplation of Christ: ‘Again He comes to the soul that follows after Him with tears; He allows Himself to be regained, but not to be retained, and anon He passes away, as out of its very hands’ (Butler 1967, 106–7). In The Interior Castle (1577) Teresa of Ávila will speak of ‘a flash of lightening’ that she saw in a revelation of Christ’s ‘sacred Humanity.’ Then she points out to her sister Carmelites, ‘But you must realize that, although the soul sees this for a certain length of time, it can no more be gazing at it all the time than it could keep gazing at the sun.’153

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Tyard’s Solitaire provides the musical model for understanding the relation between ecstasy and the poet-lover’s consternation. Clarifying to Pasithée why he had undergone such estrangement when hearing her play the lute, he explains: Si toutes-fois vous jugez à ma face quelque alteration interieure, vostre coustumiere perspicacité n’a point esté deceuë: car les ordinaires pensées, qui me font tant rude et continuelle guerre, n’ont donné repos à mon esprit travaillé. tellement, que l’indisposition, laquelle vous pensez avoir cogneuë en moy, se doit plustost nommer fureur, qui vexe, et agite mon esprit, que non pas maladie, qui distempere, ou debilite ma personne.154

In other words the vexation that seized Solitaire in Pasithée’s exhilarating music is due to the very power of the ‘fureur’ that she unleashed in his soul. Like Solitaire, the poet-lover cannot withstand the overwhelming waves of sublime harmony which inundate his being. Returning to Délie, one must ask, what precisely is the cause of the lover’s ‘fall’ into unbearable excessus? It is the beloved’s voice, her words, and perhaps her chant which unsettle joy with too much joy: ‘Mais seulement celle prolation/Du plus doulx nom, que proferer je t’oye,/Me confont ...’ (D 157, vv. 6–9)? Dizain 92 tends to confirm that the sundering of hearing is caused by Délie’s words, for the poet-lover reports that her voice thunders in his soul and ravishes his auditory powers: ‘Celle, de qui la rencontre m’estonne,/ De qui la voix si fort en l’ame tonne:/Que ne puis d’elle un seul doulx mot ouir’ (vv. 4–6). If the speaker is disoriented in dizain 157, he passes on a similar vexation to the reader. What precisely is the meaning of this ‘nom’ (v. 8) which is refused to our immediate comprehension? It may very well be ami. Again Tyard is helpful here. Pasithée, encouraging Solitaire to continue his dialogue on the four fureurs, offers the reason that ‘la vive voix a trop plus d’efficace, que la lecture, tant diligente qu’elle soit’ (20). Solitaire concurs with her but adds that while voice is necessary for dialogue between ‘disciple’ and ‘precepteur,’ it is insufficient without ‘amitié’ (20–1). One can infer from this passage that Délie is uttering the word ami. Another question must be posed. Why does this offer of friendship so overtake the lover? The answer resides in the rather formal but wellchosen word ‘prolation’ (v. 7) by which the poet-lover describes the manner in which Délie offers or proffers her lyric friendship. Derived from the Latin prolatio it means a ‘bringing forward,’ ‘an extension,’ and its verbal form, prolatare, signifies ‘to enlarge,’ ‘lengthen,’ or ‘extend.’ This is momentous for the lover, since throughout the poetic sequence he craves not

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only the woman’s polite amenities, but more so, her self-initiated affection. The semantics of prolatio signals the actualization of Délie’s power celebrated in dizain 144 where Nature extends and infuses Délie’s essence into the lover’s body: ‘En toy l’estend, comme en son plus possible’ (D 144, v. 10). Yet, the poet-lover cannot assimilate the ecstasy of this overpowering combination of eros, amitié, and ‘divine harmonie’ (D 157, v. 1) which finally eclipses his joy: ‘Que ce seul mot fait eclipser ma joye’ (v. 10). However unsustainable the evanescent moment of rapture, the syntax of this last line places the word ‘joye’ in the privileged position of concluding the poem, pointing to future enrichment. Among the mystical poems of Délie expressing the aesthetic or ascetic untying of the soul from the body, dizain 168 stands out as a metacritical evaluation of ecstasy itself. As the poet-lover relives the experience of his ‘Esprit ravy’ (v. 3) he also finds it unjust that his ‘Corps’ (v. 6) should have to undergo such painful abandonment: Toutes les fois qu’en mon entendement Ton nom divin par la memoire passe, L’Esprit ravy d’un si doulx sentement, En aultre vie, et plus doulce trespasse: Alors le Coeur, qui un tel bien compasse, Laisse le Corps prest à estre enchassé: Et si bien a vers l’Ame pourchassé, Que de soy mesme, et du Corps il s’estrange. Ainsi celuy est des siens deschassé, A qui Fortune, ou heur, ou estat change.

(D 168)

[Each time that memory carries Your divine name into my understanding My spirit, astonished at feeling such sweet confusion, Crosses over to another, sweeter life, Then my Heart which strives after such a good, Leaves my body ready for its coffin, And so well has it striven towards the Soul, That it leaves both itself and its body. Thus is he driven out of his own Of whom Fortune changes either condition or state.]

It is not surprising, given the poet-lover’s penchant for specularity, that he wishes to see all things with Argus-like omniscience. Even in ecstasy

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or as a result of it, the poet-lover studies his experience. As a result, two acts of enunciation arise. One is the pleasure of aesthetic ecstasis that he feels in reliving and revelling in the sweet ravishing of his soul from his body after memory ‘hears’ the ‘nom divin’ of Délie: ‘Ton nom divin par la memoire passe,/L’Esprit ravy d’un si doulx sentement,/En aultre vie, et plus doulce trespasse’ (vv. 2–4). The second act of enunciation is to show that he is examining this experience as part of a recurrent phenomenon which, while elevating him, also betrays the body. The metalanguage of self-examination is sung as a pleasurable law of the poet-lover’s experience (‘Toutes les fois qu’en mon entendement/Ton nom divin par la memoire passe,’ vv. 1–2), which indicates that the poet-lover is seizing the occurrence of involuntary memory to study the frequency, duration, and intensity of his ravishment. As a result of self-study the lover gives signs of protesting that other faculties have deserted his body. It is not only the soul which leaves its companion but also the ‘Coeur’: ‘Alors le Coeur, qui un tel bien compasse,/Laisse le Corps prest à estre enchassé:/Et si bien a vers l’Ame pourchassé,/Que de soy mesme, et du Corps il s’estrange’ (vv. 5–8). Such lines reveal a degree of ambivalence about the consequences of untying the soul from the body. The ‘Coeur’ certainly ‘strives after such a good’ (v. 5), but it is also described as ‘leaving the body ready for its coffin’ (‘enchasé,’ v. 6). The other indication that the lover is examining his own ecstasy and criticizing its consequences is the gnomic conclusion: ‘Ainsi celuy est des siens deschassé,/A qui Fortune, ou heur, ou estat change’ (vv. 9–10). Expressed in the voice of proverbial wisdom (‘Ainsi celuy ...,’ v. 9), the poet-lover criticizes ingratitude through a lesson from social life, namely, that just as friends in changed circumstances turn on those who feed them, so the heart and soul abandon the body. This poem deserves to be placed among those of the via perfectiva because it reaches the heights of rhapsodic love. It also deserves to be placed among the poems of illumination because it seeks to understand whether the poet-lover in ecstasy integrates or disintegrates his being. This in essence is the speaker’s disturbing realization. Though ecstasy and its more abrupt form of rapture free the lover’s soul, they also do violence to his body. Though he does not say so directly, the poet-lover hints that the privilege given to the soul steals the dignity from the body whose enduring value is affirmed by Christ’s Transfiguration and the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Less doctrinaire but more existential is that the poet-lover’s sense of justice is violated. To understand his complaint one can do no better than follow Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore pertaining to the relations between the

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body, the soul, and the heart in contemplation. The principal point is that the very ecstatic state that Ebreo expounds and even lauds is precisely what the poet-lover feels as the betrayal of the heart and the abandonment of the body. In the dialogue, Philo, speaking of someone rapt in the ecstasy of contemplating what s/he loves, states that the spiritual mind ‘draws every part of the soul to itself, gathering it into one indivisible unity.’155 In matter-of-fact terms he points out to Sophia that as a result of this withdrawal and consolidation of the soul, ‘the human body then disposes only of the vital power of the heart, which, as I have told you, is the continual custodian of life.’156 The ‘vital power of the heart’ is its strategic operation as mediator between the inferior, nutritive part of the body and the superior cognitive part which is in the head. The heart is the link ‘in its position and dignity’157 between the upper and the lower part of the individual’s body. If the poet-lover of Délie is stung with the feeling of abandonnment, then it is due precisely to the mechanism of ecstasy that Ebreo here explains: It [the heart] is thus midway between the inferior and nutritive part, which is in the belly, and the superior and cognitive part, which is in the head; and by its means these two parts and faculties are linked togther in the human frame. For if the chain formed by this vital power did not exist, the mind and soul would, in the most ardent contemplation, be released from the body, and the mind would fly away from us, leaving the body bereft of soul.158

Prompted by a question from Sophia about the consequences of this flight, Philo states that the exaltation of ‘cleaving in love to the object of its desire in contemplation, might straightway leave the body devoid of life.’159 In a response that would have startled Scève’s poet-lover, Sophia says, ‘Such a death would be sweet indeed.’160 The chain of events recounted by Ebreo constitutes the drama of this dizain which is entirely dictated by the logic of the woman’s ‘nom divin’ (v. 2). The profoundest meaning of the name ‘Délie’ is to untie the lover’s soul from the numerous errors of love, where such ascetic separations lead the way to aesthetic ecstasis. Indeed, this is ecstatic rapture in Ebreo’s sense, and it is especially ravishing considering the instantaneous coordination between memory and understanding. No sooner does the beloved’s name fortuitously ‘passe’ (v. 2) through the speaker’s ‘memoire’ (v. 2) than the understanding begins ‘to gather’ (Ebreo) the soul’s higher powers. The rapidity of this consolidation is indicated by the fact that there is immediate arousal of the higher power of ‘entendement’ (v. 1) which by the

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second line is already recognizing the ‘divin’ (v. 2) in the woman’s name. Just as Ebreo finds that ‘the spiritual mind’ begins to draw the upper and lower powers into itself and away from the body, so in line 3 the lover’s ‘esprit’ is already stolen (‘ravy,’ v. 3) by the sweet transports of ecstasy (‘si doulx sentement,’ v. 3). Now the speaker is ready for the climax, the passing over into another life. Ebreo says that at this stage the soul ‘no longer exists as soul, and essence of him who loves, but as the actual form of the beloved.’161 Corresponding to this is the lover’s transitus or the passing beyond, which is expressed by the verbe ‘trespasse’ (v. 4) which also denotes ‘dies.’ Historians of Western mysticism invariably comment on the physical traits which accompany ecstasy, such as rigidity of the body and depressed breathing,162 but rare it is that either mystics or historians view the separation of the body from the soul as an offence to morality. An indication of the the poet-lover’s feeling of betrayal is that in lines 9–10 he compares the ecstatic ravages inflicted on his body with Acteon’s being torn to pieces by his own hounds. He does so not primarily to study clinical symptoms of ecstasy but to express sympathy for his dispossessed body. Remarkably, the lover’s poetry fuses three tones: the pleasure of transport, the examination of the effects of ecstasy on his heart and body, and at the end, the sorrow and pain he feels due to the abandoned body. Now that his memory, understanding, and mind have left the body, it is time for his remaining faculty, ‘Coeur’ (v. 5) also to take leave of its domicile. As Ebreo explains, the heart is the ‘custodian of life,’ and adds, ‘If the chain formed by this vital power did not exist ... the mind would fly away from us, leaving the body bereft of soul.’163 Mindful of this very dynamic but already lamenting its outcome the poet-lover first shows the ‘Coeur’ (v. 5) striving after and encircling the ‘bien’ (v. 5) of ecstasy. By turning its vital powers from the body, the heart leaves the body ready for its coffin: ‘Laisse le Corps prest à estre enchassé’ (v. 6). Quite naturally, since the Neoplatonic humanists view love as the centre of existence, there are profound effects for the heart. Having given all its power to the soul, the heart is now estranged from itself and from the body: ‘Que de soy mesme, et du corps il s’estrange’ (v. 8). Here estrangement means alienation in the modern sense of the term, not only excluded but dispossesed, and quite literally unable to recognize itself or fashion an identity. Such a state is depicted in the twenty-sixth emblem.where a unicorn, looking at its reflection in the water, utters, ‘De moy je m’espovante.’ Through the myth of Acteon, the last two lines of dizain 168 aim to arouse indignation and horror at the betrayal of the body caused by the

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ecstatic flight of the heart and the soul. While the purpose of these lines is to teach a moral lesson applicable to all, it is particularized and given dramatic appeal by its placement under the nineteenth impresa titled ‘Acteon.’ In this illustration the hunter is hunted, fleeing his own hounds, his head already changed into a stag. Sprouting antlers and looking back in fear at his own ferocious dogs, he is surrounded by the legend, ‘Fortune par les miens me chasse.’ The possessive pronoun ‘les miens’ and the direct object ‘me’ clearly show that the lesson is poignantly individualized to depict ecstasy’s ravages on the body (symbolized by Acteon) inflicted by his own faculties (the hounds). When Ebreo states that in rapture the lover ‘is in everything estranged from himself,’164 he is stating a well-known fact of ecstatic experience. The poet-lover, always sounding the depths of deeper intellectual understanding, is not content merely to report this state. He criticizes it as well by displaying the scandal of bodily dismemberment. In regard to emblematics, the motto of the illustration is particularized to the lover with the use of ‘me chasse,’ but the ending of the gloss dizain is generalized by a gnomic formula, ‘Ainsi celuy est des siens dechassé,/A qui Fortune, ou heur, ou estat change’ (vv. 9–10). Thus, one sees the individual tone of the device expressing the universality of the emblem. Is the impresa an exaggeration of what may psychologically take place in ecstasy? Apparently it is not, if we accept the reports of Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Ávila. In the Divine Dialogue Catherine speaks of her body being ‘tutto stracciato dall’affetto dell’anima,’ where ‘stracciato’ means ‘torn,’ ‘rended,’ or ‘lacerated’: Oftentimes, through the perfect union which the soul has made with Me, she is raised from the earth almost as if the heavy body became light. But this does not mean that the heaviness of the body is taken away, but that the union of the soul with Me is more perfect than the union of the body with the soul; wherefore the strength of the spirit, united with me, raises the weight of the body from the earth, leaving it as if immovable and all pulled to pieces in the affection of the soul.165

In the Life of Teresa, cited by William James, the Carmelite says: Often, infirm and wrought upon with dreadful pains before the ecstasy, the soul emerges from it full of health and admirably disposed for action ... The soul after such a favor is animated with a degree of courage so great that if at that moment its body should be torn to pieces for the cause of God, it would feel nothing but the liveliest comfort.166

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It should be made clear that the poet-lover does not so much dispute the fact that in ecstasy the body leaves the soul. Rather, he finds it rebarbative. In this sense, his criticism of ecstasy’s effects on the body could not be more diametrically oppossed to the approval of this separation by Catherine or Teresa. He feels pain not health, betrayal rather than courage, consternation rather than union. While this is not to say that he rejects ecstasy, he does, like Acteon, look back in tragic stupefaction at the cause of his bodily dispossession. ‘Mortal coil’ though it be, it is still his companion.167 In the textual notes to his edition of Délie, Defaux is alert to the irony of poetic sounds capturing the lover’s body being set in its coffin (‘enchassé,’ v. 6) and to the fate of being driven out by his own faculties (‘deschassé,’ v. 9). He points to other paradoxes accentuated by assonance and homophony: ‘Admirer ici l’assonance “chiens/siens” et le retournement (Actéon est “des chiens chassé”, et ces chiens sont les siens’).168 Like Acteon who incurred unjust fate by wandering into the view of nude Diana, the purification required by ecstasy sweeps away the poet-lover’s body. In dizain 168, ecstasy mimes a sweet unknowing which glides into the body in pieces. In dizains 157 and 168 the state of ecstasy is momentary and there are physical traits, some painful, which accompany or conclude that state. These effects are well within the patterns of mystical experience, and they only validate expected or predictable consequences of aesthetic or ascetic ecstasis. However, given the importance that Délie attaches to the varieties of death, it is essential to inquire into the status of the body. What value does the poet-lover accord the body in mystical love? Reading Délie dialectically we will see that the poet does try to overcome the tensions between the body and the soul by spiritualizing the physical and by embodying the spiritual. He accomplishes the first by looking upon the cosmos from above, from the perspective of the Creator, to show that all things sublunar and celestial obey the laws of Délie’s ‘doulce rigueur’ ( D 259, v. 6). He brings about the second by likening Délie’s ‘sainct nom’ (v. 9) to the tangible sensation of sailing above the stars. De toute Mer tout long, et large espace, De Terre aussi tout tournoyant circuit, Des Montz tout terme en forme haulte, et basse, Tout lieu distant, du jour et de la nuict, Tout intervalle, ô qui par trop me nuyt, Seront rempliz de ta doulce rigueur. Ainsi passant des Siecles la longueur,

Via unitiva Surmonteras la haulteur des Estoilles Par ton sainct nom, qui vif en ma langueur Pourra par tout nager à plaines voiles.

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[Every Sea’s length and breadth, Earth’s every perimeter, The Mountains’ every boundary, whether high or low, Every distant place, the day’s and night’s Every interval, which does me such harm, Will be filled with you sweet severity. Thus passing through the centuries’ length You will rise above the Stars’ Height By means of your holy name, which, alive in my languor Will sail everywhere at full sail.]

The speaker acts as a prophet who foresees the ever rising, ever expanding presence of Délie’s ‘doulce rigueur’ (v. 6) through each degree and interval of the universe. As poet, the speaker is spreading the woman’s virtue throughout creation and announcing its ever permeating force. As spiritual lover, he finds himself already benefitting from his own vision and absorbed in seeing the woman’s virtue planing at full sail beyond the celestial heights. Through her ascent he himself takes flight above the globe, moving from the spans of ocean (‘toute Mer,’ v. 1) to the surface of the ‘Terre’ (v. 2) to the summits of the ‘Montz’ (v. 3). Finally, he closely follows Délie’s ‘rigueur’ (v. 6) as it penetrates and surpasses each interval (‘Tout intervalle,’ v. 4) of space and time. The Neoplatonic basis of this poetic transport is what Ebreo calls ‘The Universality of Love.’169 In the Dialoghi Sophia says to Philo, ‘For love is a vivifying spirit penetrating all the world and a bond uniting the whole Universe.’170 Also, the dizain has religious resonances as a kind of Magnificat which magnifies the beloved’s ‘sainct nom’ (v. 9) soaring beyond the stars: ‘Surmonteras la haulteur des Estoilles’ (v. 8). Marot’s translation of Psalm 8, ‘Domine, Dominus noster, quam [admirabile]’ projects a similarly omniscient view of creation in rank order: ‘Mais quand je voy & contemple en courage/Tes cieulx, qui sont de tes doigts hault ouvrage,/Estoilles, Lune, & signes différents/Que tu as faictz et assis en leurs rengz ...’ (vv. 9–12).171 Before directly addressing the relation between the body and the soul, it is appropriate to sketch the mystical framework of the poem. The poet-lover’s elevated vision and his prophetic voice correspond to Richard

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of Saint Victor’s ‘sublevatio mentis’ or raising up of the mind. Richard states that this level of contemplation, exceeding the ‘dilatio mentis,’ confers extraordinary powers of seeing the past, the future, and events at a distance.’172 The poet-lover’s supercelestial vision, first of standing above space and time and then of foreseeing Délie surmount (‘surmonteras,’ v. 8) the height of ‘Estoilles’ (v. 8), and the breadth of ‘Siecles’ (v. 7) is also reminiscent of Bernard’s account of ecstasy in the Sermones super Cantica Canticorum. In the description of his flight, he uses such terms as ‘transvolare’ (to fly over), ‘avolare’ (to fly away), and ‘transcendere’ (to go beyond).173 In her critical edition of Délie, Joukovsky praises this dizain as ‘superbe’ (1996 edition, 313), and the image of sailing beyond the centuries and the stars contributes to its success. Since mystical experiences reveal similar patterns throughout the ages, it is not surprising that the poet-lover’s two images of the heavenly circuit and oceanic ecstasy will also be found in works of Helfta mysticism. I am referring to the Liber specialis gratiae appearing in the last decade of the thirteenth century and attributed to Mechthild of Hackeborn, the younger sister of Gertrude the Great. Mechthild, like Gertrude, possessed an extraordinary visualizing power that produced what I would term ‘ecstatic ekphrasis.’ As a community the Helfta nuns recounted in striking pictures the mystical bond among them, the Eucharist, the Sacred Heart, and Christ as sponsus in the spiritual nuptials.174 Regarding the similarity to dizain 259 it is recorded in one passage of Liber specialis gratiae that Mechthild saw love as a fair Virgin going round the consistory singing, ‘Alone I have made the circuit of heaven, and I have walked on the waves of the sea.’175 A final point is in order regarding the mystical lineaments of the poem. With the mention of Délie’s ‘sainct nom’ (v. 9) as opposed to her nom divin associated with Pseudo-Dionysius, it would have been virtually impossible for the reader to ignore the Christian devotion to the Holy Name. The early Christians had special reverence for the name of Jesus indicated by its inscription on manuscipts and monuments under the abbreviated form of IH – the first two letters (iota and eta) of the Greek IHEOYE. In time the final sigma was added giving IHE or IHS. Following the practice of Saint Paul, who concluded his Epistle to the Romans with a doxology to Christ, the work titled the Shepherd of Hermas extolled the power of the Saviour by writing, ‘The name of the Son of God is great and all powerful: He it is Who sustains the entire world.’176 In the fourth century the donation of Constantine gave impetus to the Chi-Rho monogram which provided the first two letters of the name Christos (XPICTOC), and this

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could be seen on sarcophagi, Eucharistic vessels, lamps, and vestments. In the fifteenth century Saint Bernadino had much influence on making the trigram IHS popular through his preaching, and Joan of Arc had it embroidered on her standard. Many Christians had the name of Jesus inscribed over the doorways of their houses. In the sixteenth century Clement VII, who is mentioned in Délie (D 28), permitted the Order of the Friars Minor to celebrate a feast in honour of the Holy Name each year, and the Jesuits would later adopt the IHS as an abbreviation for ‘Iesus Hominum Salvator.’ Following ths tradition we can say the ‘sainct nom’ (v. 9) in dizain 259 is the nodal point of a number of mystical nuances that I will develop in subsequent paragraphs. First, ‘sainct’ (v. 9) refers to the lover’s participation in what is divine in Délie that is praised as the sacred life-force pulsating throughout sublunar, celestial, and supercelestial worlds. Second, the divinity that Délie inspires in the poet-lover is recognized as the Lord of All to whom he bows in reverence and obedience in recognition of its world ordering ‘rigueur’ (v. 6). Third, echoing the Shepherd of Hermas and the psalm paraphase of Marot, the poet-lover views the infinite as the vast domain of the Creator and that, by the example of Délie, everlasting shall be her name. To understand in dizain 259 how the body and the soul accompany one another in this ascent, it is necessary to concentrate on the noun ‘intervalle’ (v. 5). Délie’s ‘doulce rigueur’ (v. 6), shared by the poet-lover, moves through intervals to attain to higher and higher degrees of spiritual elevation. In the Commentary, in the section ‘Painting and Love’ (V:6), Ficino defines the interval as follows: ‘Arrangement is nothing other than an appropriate interval between parts. But what do we mean by “interval” if not the distance between the parts?’177 With respect to the notion of degree in contemplation, Ficino holds that degree is the definite attainment of each of the powers of the hierarchy as a progressive movement of stages – nature, soul, angel, God. The One is the term and the limit of this ascension and so puts an end to ascension in rest. As Ficino says, ‘[The mind] would proceed in this way without end if it did not impose a limit to itself and conclude that there is some infinite spirit which surpasses any angel ... by innumerable degrees.’178 These comparisons show two principal differences between the poet-lover and Ficino at the level of contemplation and ecstasy. First, for Scève’s persona every benefit of transcendence is shared by both the body and the soul. Second, whatever the poet-lover’s participation in the divine, he will have no rest. The lover’s blissful view of Délie perceives her ‘doulce rigueur’ (v. 6) to

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be the motor of ascent. When reviewing the meanings of ‘rigueur’ and its forms in Délie, one finds that it denotes, first and foremost, moral severity. It is the quality of the woman, sometimes sweet, sometimes benign, which binds the lover to adhere to the rules of honnêteté with respect to the body and the soul. Yet, this regulating function is not only that of discipline and order, but also of perseverance and medicine as well. Honnêteté and perseverance can be seen in dizain 373 where love is described in the following terms: ‘A son aspect mon oeil reveremment/S’incline bas, tant le Coeur la revere,/Et l’ayme, et craint trop perseveramment/En sa rigueur benignement severe’ (vv. 1–4). Since Délie functions like the pharmakon, the speaker’s infirmity of unrequited love is ironically ministered by the woman’s rigour: ‘Où ma santé je voy estre pansée/Par la rigueur et celle extremité’ (D 348, vv. 2–3). By virtue of its connotations ‘doulce rigueur’ (v. 6) not only functions to maintain the orderly operations of the macrocosm and the microcosm but also to allow the whole of being, the body and the soul, to enjoy the bliss of transport while progressing to higher stages of perfection. If Délie’s virtue is here termed ‘doulce rigueur,’ then its purpose is to fill the lover’s being and the cosmos with its galvanizing governance: ‘[Ils] seront rempliz de ta doulce rigueur’ (D 259, v. 6). Though ecstasy is the discourse par excellence of the unbounded and the personal, all the dynamism of being in this poem comes forth through Délie’s law of universal rigour. This gives us the paradox inhabiting both beloved and lover of the individual in the law, the personal in the impersonal, and the dynamic in the bounded. A telling image of this paradox is the cosmological expression ‘tournoyant circuit’ (v. 2), which is governed by Délie’s severity. It is usually translated as ‘perimeter’ in the static sense of ‘perimeter of the heavens,’ communicating the sense of bounded discipline conserved by Délie’s rigour. However, the circuit is forever ‘tournoyant’ (v. 2) and in this sense it is dynamic – twirling, whirling, spinning, and wheeling in myriad departures and returns – which in Délie is not rote repetition but renewal. There is no spiritual movement in the poem that is not accompanied by its physical companion. Délie’s rigour animates and orders the cosmological degrees and intervals from the sea to the earth and the mountains to all things visible to the grand diurnal movement of day and night. Whatever Délie decrees in the macrocosm will also take place in the micrososm of the lover’s being. The connection between the two worlds is made clear when the lover says that the pervasiveness of Délie’s ‘sainct nom’ is ‘vif en ma langueur’ (v. 9). This is a highly subtle point. As defined by Joukovsky ‘langueur’ means maladie épuisante.179 In other words, the lover’s sacri-

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fice (‘qui par trop me nuyt,’ v. 5) is part of the overall dialectic in which the woman’s ‘doulce rigueur’ (v. 6) is in some sense disseminated by the toll it takes on the lover’s vital spirits. Délie’s rigour, however enervating, produces energy and perseverance. Like so many cases in Délie, obstacle leads to invigoration and transcendence. Thus, the lover’s ‘langueur’ (v. 9), which applies both to the body and the soul, combines with the woman’s ‘rigueur’ (v. 6) to lift both of them beyond the stars. In intratextual terms Délie’s effects as perseverance and medicine energize the poet-in-the-lover to disseminate the woman’s ‘sainct nom’ (v. 9) throughout creation. Thus, body and soul, obstacle and ascent, superior Délie and aspiring lover, are inextricably mixed – all contributing to the ascent which reverses the downward viewpoint of the sizain. It is also through imagery that one can appreciate the poet-lover’s desire in ecstasis to unite the body and the soul rather than to separate them. First of all, in the sizain, sea, earth, mountains, day and night, and all distant places are viewed from high above,which suggests that they participate in the ordered intervals of the cosmos governed by the spiritual force of Délie’s ‘rigueur’ (v. 6). In this sense they are ensouled. Also, this omniscient vantage point places the cosmos in the vast depth and breadth of endless space, an image that will subsequently be transformed into the infinite ocean of ecstatic, transcendent sailing. Finally, beholding the immensity of the cosmos from the supercelestial heights gives a sensation of freeing creation from the burdens of gravity and from the constraints of time. Is it not soul-like to see the world enveloped in infinite space displaying its paradigmatic patterns and rhythms? The poet-lover is somewhat of a mystical astronomer and geometer. The ‘Mer’ (v. 1) is admired in its length and breadth (‘tout long, et large espace, v. 1), the ‘Terre’ (v. 2) is seen as part of the heavenly circuits (v. 2), the boundary of mountains is perceived as vertical extension, high and low (‘haulte, et basse,’ v. 3), and all these tangible elements become more ethereal and celestial when the poet-lover-prophet invites us to behold ‘tout lieu distant’ (v. 4). Chronological phenomena, such as night and day, are also spatialized by wording them as collective nouns, ‘jour’ and ‘nuict’ (v. 4), thereby lending them a generalized quality as cosmological laws. They are not ‘days’ and ‘nights’ but rule-directed operations obeying the immense movement of the ‘tournoyant circuit’ (v. 2). If in the sizain the cosmos is spiritualized by spatial metaphors, making it lighter, freer, and more distant, then the concluding quatrain materializes the spiritual by viewing transport as a sailing transcendence: ‘Pourra par tout nager à plaines voiles’ (v. 10). Délie’s ever-rising ‘sainct nom’ (v. 9) is transformed into a metaphor which lends a tangible quality to its

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spiritual meaning. This is the movement of sailing in the wind, one of the fundamental elements of the cosmos, but which here connotes invisible propulsion, effortless freedom, and the divine breath of life. Though the image of surmounting the heavens appeals to vision, the word ‘nager’ (v. 10) synaesthetically brings touch into the mix of sensations, suggesting oceanic gliding beyond the stars. Taking the poem as a whole, transport is a movement in which the body is ensouled and the soul is embodied. What kind of ecstasy carries the speaker to transport? It is prophecy, one of the four fureurs identified by Plato and advocated by Ficino and Pontus de Tyard. In the Solitaire premier, Scève’s friend and admirer views prophecy as the third form of manie where one is seized ‘par ravissement de prophetie, vaticination, or divination souz Apollon’ (Tyard, 185). Tyard describes this third step as part of the upward return of the soul to its divine origins: ... la troisieme fureur est necessaire pour eslongner les discours de tant de ratiocinations intellectuelles à l’entour des principes et conclusions, et reduire l’Entendement en union avec l’Ame: ce qui advient par le ravissement des propheties et divinations. Aussi quiconque est esmeu de fureur divinatrice, ou prophetique, tout ravi en interieure contemplation il conjoint son Ame et tous ses espris ensemble, s’eslevant haut outre toute apprehension d’humaine et naturelle raison, pour aller puiser aux plus intimes, profonds, et retirez secrets divins la prediction des choses, qui doivent advenir.180

Closely following Tyard’s criteria for ‘prophetie,’ we see that the poetlover’s experience fulfils Solitaire’s criteria. For Tyard, prophecy is ravishing elevation, since one is ‘tout ravi’ and lifted (‘s’eslevant haut’) to divine prediction (‘prediction’). Similarly, the poet-lover’s vision is one of cosmological prophecy, using the future tense to declare how all degress of the sublunar world ‘Seront rempliz de ta doulce rigueur’ (v. 6). Even space has a future trajectory as the poet-lover’s expanding vision moves to ‘Tout lieu distant’ (v. 4). Second, in the concluding quatrain there is a transcendent prediction of Délie’s ‘sainct nom’ (v. 9) going beyond celestial time and space. The quickly disappearing intervals of this ascension are the passing of time (‘passant des Siecles la longueur,’ v. 7) and the surmounting of celestial limits (‘Surmonteras la haulteur des Estoilles,’ v. 8). The dizain also conforms to two other points of Tyard’s description: the ravishing itself (‘tout ravi en interieure contemplation’) and the consolidation of the soul with all its vital spirits (‘il conjoint l’Ame et tous ses espris ensemble’). Both these states merge in the poet-lover as a pro-

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gressive, double transfiguration. This transfiguration, proceeding from the lover-prophet, is the ethereal spatialization of the bodily macrocosm and the embodiment of Délie’s ‘sainct nom’ (v. 9) sailing in supercelestial joy. By this transformation each of the two main principles of Délie, body and soul, reaches out to share the other’s properties, an act which impels ascent. Also, when Tyard states that prophetic ravishment exceeds ratiocination in its certitude (‘qui doivent advenir’), he alerts us to the poet-lover’s voice of unshakable faith and confidence. His prediction of transcendence sweeps past the challenges of exhaustion and langour (‘qui trop me nuyt,’ v. 5, ‘langueur,’ v. 9) through the verbal forms of a perpetually dynamic excelling (‘passant,’ v. 7) to the future (‘Surmonteras,’ v. 8), already able to plane above the stars (‘pourra par tout nager,’ v. 10). Of course, the one divergence between the poet-lover and Tyard’s Solitaire is that in this dizain there is no ‘alienation,’ but rather a progressive exchange of properties between the body and the soul, which makes them both beneficiaries of ecstasy. The figure of an ever-perduring, embodied soul soaring above celestial limits mirrors the kind of transcendence here depicted. What precisely does ‘transcendence’ mean in this context? Certainly the poet-lover rises through the three orders of the sublunar, the celestial, and the supercelestial. That is, he moves from the ‘Terre’ (v. 2) to the ‘tournoyant circuit’ (v. 2), then beyond the ‘Siecles’ (v. 7) to the ‘Estoilles’ (v. 8). On the one hand, the speaker seems to have taken the path of the well-measured road of peras, the Pythagorean metaphysics of limit, to achieve transport by reference to these three familiar coordinates. Yet, his apophatic language of ‘passant’ (v. 7) and ‘surmonteras’ (v. 8) suggests a boundlessness that propels him beyond measure, degree, and interval. Where, therefore, can he be located, if it is even appropriate to use the word locus? There is no point in trying to reduce the paradoxical fact that, if the poet-lover swims in oceanic boundlessness, then he seeks to maintain this perpetual progress within the incessant dialectic of ‘rigueur’ (v. 6) and ‘langueur’ (v. 9) characteristic of his terrestrial world. This is why, in loving union with Délie, his body can never be shed from his soul. By virtue of Délie as an infinite principle of energy – a disciplined dialectical force – the lover paradoxically straddles two dimensions, for he wishes to attain the heights of ecstasy by reference to humanly known boundaries. This is not the same as saying that the poet-lover is simply reverting to imaginative constructs to try to find words for this ascension, or to attempt to concretize something which cannot otherwise be embodied. There is a real persistence of the body that is not mere metaphor but that makes metaphor the sign of a transfigured body. The dizain clearly shows

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that the drama of transport is not the death of the body and the flight of the soul, but their indissociable companionship in spiritual progress. This is one of the ‘secrets’ of Délie’s ‘sainct nom’ (v. 9). In Délie prophetic poems having a mystical tone generally resemble dizain 259 in viewing the life beyond as an embodiment of the soul. However, there are great tensions in this cycle taken as a whole, indicated by the poet-lover’s tendency to deploy the sequence of Délie’s poems by opposition. This is the sceptical antidote to the undermining of prudence. For example, a poem of mystical expansion, dizain 11, foresees that Délie’s virtues will not follow the perishable course of her body (‘Ses virtues donc, qui ton corps ne suyvront,’ v. 9), but will be diffused over the whole world. This is precisely the contrary of dizain 259 which conserves the body. Though dizain 259 does not evince ecstasy as separation of the body from the soul, two poems which do portray aesthetic ecstasis have contrary tones. One connected with the rising phoenix (D 278) is highly exuberant, while another, expressing the ravishment of separation as violence, portrays the flight of the senses as abandonment: ‘Mon ame ainsi de son object pourveue/De tous mes sens me rend abandonné’ (D 443, vv. 5–6). These opposite ecstasy experiences can be attributed to the poet-lover’s fear of physical death. This hantise is explicitly expressed in dizain 446, where the anticipated separation of the body from the soul causes considerable apprehension: Rien, ou bien peu, faudroit pour me dissoudre D’avec son vif ce caducque mortel: A quoy l’Esprit se veult tresbien resouldre, Jà prevoyant son corps par la Mort tel, Qu’avecques luy se fera immortel, Et qu’il ne peult que pour un temps perir.

(D 446, vv. 1–6)

[It would take nothing, or at least very little to separate My feeble mortal frame from my vital principle, A thing upon which my Spirit wishes to be resolved, Already foreseeing its body made such by Death That, along with it, it will make itself immortal, And such that only for a time can it perish.]

Reflecting issues examined by Speroni, the poet-lover takes stock of the ravages of amorous war and finds that his feeble body, prone to dissolution, could very easily dissipate at the very moment it is untied from his

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soul. Death is always imminent. However, verse 6 offers the consolation that this separation would be only temporary, which leads to an apparent affirmation of resurrection: ‘Doncques, pour paix à ma guerre acquerir,/ Craindray renaistre à vie plus commode?/Quand sur la nuict le jour vient à mourir,/Le soir d’icy est Aulbe à l’Antipode’ (vv. 7–10). Some critics view this conclusion as a rhetorical question leading to a foretaste of the body’s rebirth, for the fear of lines 7–8 gives way to the rising dawn of verses 9–10. Hans Staub sees certitude in this conclusion: ‘Contre l’angoisse de la dissolution par la mort, le symbole maintient ainsi la certitude d’une union éternelle’ (Staub 1967, 82, n. 77). Yet, there is reason to be sceptical of this critical optimism. In line 1, ‘bien peu’ lessens the force of the absolute ‘Rien,’ a hesitation and quick adjustment suggesting that the speaker, even while resigned to death, is quick to claim at least some resources capable of resisting death’s inevitability. It is curious that in the anticipation of death and resurrection, the ‘corps’ (v. 4) remains silent on its destiny; only the ‘Esprit’ (v. 3) is willing to consent to ‘Mort’ (v. 4). However, even the ‘Esprit’’s attitude is qualified, for on the matter of separation, it does not achieve a resolution, but wishes for a resolution: ‘A quoy l’Esprit se veult tresbien resouldre’ (v. 3). While the sense of verse 6 is that the lover assures himself that the body will only perish ‘pour un temps,’ the word that ends this line is ‘perir’ whose priviliged position and strong accent tonique appear to withdraw some of that confidence. Under the circumstances, can lines 7–8 be considered a grammatical rather than rhetorical question? Are the final two lines, worded with the impersonality of a proverb, only a wish predicated on a geographical law or an affirmation of the speaker’s personal certitude? The poet-lover leaves the reader wondering if the resurrection of the body is truly as predictable as the cosmological phenomenon that ‘Evening here is Dawn in the Antipodes’ (v. 10). However, the overwhelming majority of dizains concentrating on loving union – whether referring to the lover or the beloved, whether mystical or not – view the body as integral to the soul and the cobeneficiary of spiritual progress and immortality. Reviewing the mystical poems of the prophetic cycle, we find that this is the case. In dizain 346 the spiritual marriage of the Rhone and Saone moves as an oceanic body towards the mors mystica. Similarly, Délie as the antidote to incorruptibility is predicted as the conserving ‘Myrrhe’ (v. 9) bringing the lover happiness in fatality: ‘Mais toy, qui as (toy seule) le possible/De donner heur à ma fatalité’ (D 378, vv. 7–8). The poems of expansion and enlargement are especially apt in foreseeing incessant growth, such as dizain 407 where Délie’s virtue, figured as living

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‘soubs verdoyant escorce,/S’esgallera aux Siecles infiniz’ (vv. 9–10). Two other prophetic poems not yet discussed also bring the body into mystical ravishment. Dizain 58 uses the symbol of the peacock not to signify pride as in impresa 34, but to celebrate immortality where even the slightest sight of Délie immerses the speaker in an overflowing lake of joy: Quand j’apperceu au serain de ses yeulx L’air esclarcy de si longue tempeste, Jà tout empeinct au prouffit de mon mieulx, Comme un vainqueur d’honnorable conqueste, Je commençay à eslever la teste: Et lors le Lac de mes novelles joyes Restangna tout, voire dehors ses voyes Assez plus loing, qu’onques ne feit jadis. Dont mes pensers guidez par leurs Montjoyes, Se paonnoient tous en leur hault Paradis.

(D 58)

[When I saw, by the serenity of her eyes, The air cleared of such a long storm, Already tasting my best profit, Like a conqueror of honorable conquest, I began to hold up my head. And then the Lake of my new joys Flooded everything, even overflowing its banks, Farther than it ever had before, Such that my thoughts, guided by their beacons, Strutted in their high Heaven.]

Glossing this poem, the critic Albert Béguin invites the reader to appreciate Scève’s concretizing of contemplative ecstasy: ‘Citons enfin, pour revenir à la qualité de l’expression poétique chez Scève, et à la traduction imagée, concrète, on pourrait dire savoureuse, de l’extase, un merveilleux dizain, dont les métaphores accumulées donnent une extraordinaire impression de béatitude contemplative, qui élève peu à peu la pensée, des yeux de Délie, à un Paradis de bonheur parfait.’181 Whereas in certain mystical models such as Plato’s, the passage to ecstasy involves death of the body, here the signs of rapture are demonstrably embodied in the peacock. Derived from Aristotle’s contention that the flesh of the peacock is incorruptible because it did not decay or putrify after death, this phenomenon was declared a marvel in Augustine’s Civitate Dei.182 Scève’s mysticism is

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transcendent not because the soul is freed by leaving the body, but because it is accompanied by the body to the highest modes of consciousness. The micro-narrative is that of a slow but ever-progressing enhancement of vision, a kind of transfigured innamoramento where the storms of desire give way to the crescendo of elevation. As the lover lifts his head from the lower type of physical pleasure described as a ‘si longue tempeste’ (v. 2), he ascends to an exalted renewal called ‘le Lac de mes novelles joyes’ (v. 6), where the profusion of new waters immerses him in hitherto unknown and distant spaces (‘Restangna tout, voire dehors ses voyes,’ v. 7). Then, his rational powers, led by carefully placed guideposts (‘Montjoyes,’ v. 9), accelerate into a strutting bliss (‘se paonnoient,’ v. 10) as they enter their high heaven (‘leur hault Paradis,’ v. 10). The image of the peacock in the last line asks the reader to perform a retroactive, emblematic reading of the poem where the associations of the bird as pride change into impressions of the peacock as spiritual bliss. In line 4 the poet-lover is emerging from the carnal storms of pride, too much relishing what he had seen as a ‘conqueror of honorable conquest’ (‘Comme un vainqueur d’honnorable conqueste’). Having raised his rational faculties to better account (the ‘pensers’ are now guided by ‘Montjoyes,’ v. 9), he struts like a peacock into the joys of paradise. There is a celebration of effort and self-determination in the possessive phrase referring to ‘pensers’ (v. 9) worded as ‘leur hault Paradis’ (v. 10). The ‘leur’ (v. 9) implies that the poet-lover’s rise to heaven is merited, owned, and in his possession. A second poem fully integrating the body into mystical transport is dizain 367. To the poet-lover, the sight of Délie’s return after a ‘Siecle Platonique’ (v. 1) is like a prophecy fulfilled which exceeds the powers of human apprehension and judgment (vv. 1–6). The final four lines rise to erotic ecstasy where the interior act of the soul reentering the lover’s body is externally completed by a sensual embrace from neck to haunches: ‘Car en mon corps: mon Ame, tu revins,/Sentant ses mains, mains celestement blanches,/Avec leurs bras mortellement divins,/L’un coronner mon col, l’aultre mes hanches.’183 Roubichou-Stretz has given one of the best commentaries on this conclusion, saying that it ‘se charge de tout le poids d’un geste sculptural, propre à conférer à l’instant la dure éternité du marbre et à lui donner valeur de talisman: la rencontre du poète et de Délie exprime, en effet, une extase qui réconcilie la chair et l’âme dans une perfection qui permet au temps de s’arreter et de s’abolir.’184 To the sculptural properties brought out by Roubichou-Stretz, one can add the figure of a crown crowning the lovers’ embrace which Defaux characterizes as a ‘glorieuse épiphanie.’185 The very flesh of the lovers is further transfigured by the

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word ‘hanches’ (v. 10) because as a feature of bodily curvature, ‘hanches’ is also an architectural term referring to either side of an arch, ‘roughly midway between the springing line and crown, where the lateral thrust is strongest.’186 Thus, the phrase ‘mortellement divins’ (v. 9) is particularly rich in connotations, for just as Délie is a mortal goddess, so can the lover envisage a permanence in the capacity of art to immortalize love. If the Rhone and Saone cannot be disunited, neither can the sculptural ideal of loving union be separated from the pulsating flesh of sensual embrace where the divine is discovered in the human. Dizain 449 aptly concludes Délie with its swell of enlargement and expansion, and gives the most decisive response to the lover’s fearful fibrillations concerning the fate of the body uttered in dizain 446: Flamme si saincte en son cler durera, Tousjours luysante en publicque apparence, Tant que ce Monde en soy demeurera, Et qu’on aura Amour en reverence. Aussi je voy bien peu de difference Entre l’ardeur, qui noz coeurs poursuyvra, Et la vertu, qui vive nous suyvra Oultre le Ciel amplement long, et large. Nostre Genevre ainsi doncques vivra Non offensé d’aulcun mortel Letharge.

(D 449)

[A so holy Flame will remain, in its brightness, Always shining, for all to see, As long as this World will last And Love will be held in reverence. And so I see little difference Between this ardour which will pursue our hearts And the living virtue which will follow us Beyond the amply long and wide Heavens. Thus will our Juniper live, Uninjured by any mortal Oblivion.]

The everlasting flame of love persists as a negation of human limits, but also in terms of those boundaries. The poet-lover’s prophecy first moves in a geotropic direction, projecting the interplay of ‘ardeur’ (v. 6) and ‘vertu’ (v. 7), physical and spiritual love, to take place only as long as this world itself will last: ‘Tant que ce Monde en soy demeurera’ (v. 3). In these

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terms the body is necessarily folded into the soul in an ever-brightening ‘Flamme si saincte’ (v. 1). When the poet-lover lifts his vision upwards, he foresees this pursuit of higher virtue extending beyond the heavens, ‘amplement long, et large’ (v. 8). This negation of limits is measured by looking back at ‘le Ciel’ (v. 8) for its reference point, and the transcendence achieved, are expressed by tangible, geometrical coordinates: ‘amplement long, et large’ (v. 8). From this embodiment of virtue, calculated as spatial energy, the reader is moved to the vision of immortality as a resistance against ‘Letharge’ (v. 10). That is, virtue and ardour guarantee the perpetual expansion of the human powers as a dialectical energy exerted against oblivion and the entropy of exhaustion. This would be an entirely human aspiration were it not for the indices of the sacred (‘saincte,’ v. 1; ‘reverence,’ v. 4) that view expansion and enlargement as a sign of what is God-like in human aspiration. The Divine, Deification, and Immortality: ‘Making Trial of His Own Power’ Augustine, De Trinitate (XII:13) In Délie the poet-lover makes references to many concepts of the divine but not to any single, dominant doctrine or dogma. As already seen, the lover explores a range of encounters from pagan to Judeo-Christian, from Orphic to Aristotelian, from naturalistic to the miraculous, from natural contemplation to mystical identifications with Prometheus and Christ. In addition, both the lover and beloved have the power of immortalizing one another, she with her virtue, he with his song. In the De Trinitate, Augustine notes that while humanity is the imago dei, the discovery of likeness may urge it improperly to love itself above and beyond the divinity. For Augustine, the soul occupies the intermediate position between God and the beasts. However, through the miscalculation of ‘making trial of his own power,’ of testing the potential of ‘becoming like God,’ individuals find themselves in ‘the slippery movement of falling away’ from both their own natures and that of God.187 Of course, the Renaissance is the epoch par excellence of testing the human powers, and its major voices did construe the imago dei as an occasion for unfettered optimism. One of the strongest proponents of this outlook was Pico Della Mirandola who, in the De hominis digitate, took the voice of God (without Augustine’s caution) and proclaimed to Adam, ‘Thou art confined by no bounds; and thou wilt fix limits of nature for thyself.’188

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Délie is precisely one of those quests that seeks to make an épreuve of human powers with the word ‘human’ including consciousness of the divine. Instead of approaching the divine as an article of faith, the work taps the experience of the divine from the assumption that no individual person can be said to be human without fully responding to his/her inherent sense of something greater. The poet-lover measures and actualizes his capacities to a large extent by reference to the divine not only to project what Paul Ricoeur calls ‘limit-expressions,’189 but also to situate himself properly in the abysses and summits of what those limits can bring. It is possible to outline those limit-expressions, provided they be seen as demarcations rather than reductions to any one source. The lover’s principal path to divinity is through macro/microcosmic correspondences where the speaker places love in the order of celestial perfection and planetary influence. This occurs in dizain 4 where he says, ‘Voulant tirer le hault ciel Empirée/De soy grand’satisfaction./Des neuf Cieulx à l’influence empirée/Pour clorre en toy leur operation/Où se parfeit ta decoration’ (vv. 1–5). According to Cotgrave, ‘le hault ciel Empirée’ (v. 1) is ‘The Imperall or the highest heaven; the mansion and dwelling place of God, and his elect.’190 The poem is inspired by Platonic and biblical sources, and as Pantin has clarified, the phrase ‘l’influence empirée’ (v. 3) means that ‘L’Empyrée transmet sa vertu de feu et de lumière aux autres cieux’ (1995, 82, n. 40). There is a twofold order of specular admiration where just as God reflects in satisfaction on the perfection of his creation embodied in Délie, so the lover imitates God in attributing the higest level of heavenly perfection to the woman. At the farthest extreme from divinity are poems that treat the universe as an essentially cosmological and terrestrial order ruled by the vicissitudes of fortune and chance. In dizain 175, which suggests pantheism, it is the neutral, impersonal agent, ‘le donneur’ (v. 6) associated with nature itself that ultimately gives and takes the fragile moments of light and glory and imposes the order which makes transitory pleasures and illusory vainglory decline and die: ‘Toute hautesse est soubdain abatue,/De noz deduitz tant foible est le donneur’ (vv. 5–6). At times the agents of superhuman powers are simultaneously pagan divinities and Christian figures, but in either case they come down to earth to admire and praise their creatures, rather than the reverse. This is seen in dizain 149 where not only the Muses (v. 2), Venus (v. 4), the Graces (v. 5), but also ‘les Cieulx’ (v. 8)191 testify to the heavenly treasures that Délie brings to terrestrial existence. Added to this is Defaux’s observation that this descent is reminiscent of Mariolotry: ‘Thème fréquent dans la poésie

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mariale, du Créature tombant amoureux de sa creation – en admiration devant elle.’192 The lover foresees the day when the divinities descend to earth (‘Se demettront en ce bas Caucasus,’ v. 3) and confesses without constraint (v. 6) the Deity imprinted on Délie’s soul: ‘La Deité en ton esprit empraincte’ (v. 7). Though it is not strange in the Renaissance to see pagan and Christian divinities happily coexisting within the same universe of discourse, the poem does emphasize the recognition of the divine in the human, even to the point of the Creator freely lowering himself to see himself mirrored in one of his creatures. In this case the boundary between the human and the divine will appears either ambivalent, fluid, or idolatrous depending on one’s viewpoint, but through this implied challenge to break boundaries up and down the ladder of being, there is an implied test of our origins, nature, and potential. Most times it is Délie who deifies the lover. The decisive example of Délie’s power to deify the lover derives from the talismanic metamorphoses recounted by mythology. This example appears in dizain 436 where Délie’s virtue transmutes the lover with the same astonishing potency as the grass that Glaucus tasted which transformed him into a god: ‘Car sa vertu par voye perilleuse/Me penetrant l’Ame jusqu’au mylieu,/Me fait sentir ceste herbe merveilleuse,/Qui de Glaucus jà me transforme en Dieu’ (vv. 7–10). This myth, recounted by Ovid and Speroni, condenses a number of elements central to the poet-lover’s conversion: the purification of his mortal nature, the dangers of amatory aspiration, the recreation of the self from death to life, the gods’ acceptance of the lover in their own company, the evergreen promise of immortality, and the equation of art with divinity.193 Most important, the poet-lover’s use of the myth mimes the double nature of Délie as goddess and human being. Other poems in which Délie deifies the lover are problematic. The concept of divinity that fortifies waning perseverance with the medicine of virtue is seen in dizain 398 where the poet-lover declares, ‘Et lors je croy, que ses Graces benignes/Dedans mon coeur la deifieront’ (vv. 9–10). Literally these lines mean, ‘And then I believe that her benign graces/Will deify her in my heart.’ What/Who is the cause/agent of deification? On the surface these lines say that the woman’s graces will be felt by the lover as the realization of divinity in his heart. More subtly they intimate that in some way it is the lover’s heart that will crystalize Délie as a deity. The same question of who deifies whom is raised in the opening lines of dizain 75: ‘Pour me despendre en si heureux service,/Je m’espargnay l’estre semblable aux Dieux./Me pourra donc estre imputé à vice,/Constituant en elle mes haultz Cieulx?’ (vv. 1–4). In lines 1–2 the poet-lover states that his

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devoted service to Délie makes him god-like, but in lines 3–4 he suspects that she may be a false idol. Rather than seeing dizains 75 and 398 as statements of idolatry, it would be more accurate to say that the lover’s scepticism preys on him to decide whether he is inadvertently and subjectively constituting a human as a divinity (an erreur), or whether there is an objective divinity separate from himself that deifies him. This dilemma has its roots in whether the imago dei is felt as a latent power in humanity itself or whether the human is entirely dependent upon the activity of the divine. It is quite a quandary that one of the strongest ways of sensing the divinity is by humanity’s fullest realization of its own powers. In this respect device 44 titled ‘Le mort ressuscitant’ is most instructive. Showing a dead man lifting up the top of his coffin, its motto reads, ‘Plus que ne puis.’ The devise ‘More than I am able,’ poses questions. Do human powers, thust into the worst adversity, exceed all expectations? If so, what are those limits? Is there a latent god developing in the human? Less frequently it is the poet-lover who immortalizes Délie. One striking poem is dizain 240 where the poet-lover’s offering of service and death gives the woman ‘vie immortellement saincte’ (v. 10). Going beyond the Horatian exegi monumentum, this line confers an immortality beyond the powers of art, which would make love itself the agent of endurance and transcendence, and indeed a type of love predicated on the power of sacrifice. The high point of the lover’s immortalization of the beloved occurs in dizain 445 where reversing his previous inability to sway the woman by his poetic lyre, he is urged by ‘Amour’ (v. 1) to summon his inner Orpheus to rescue Eurydice from the hell of eternal oblivion: ‘Hors des Enfers de l’eternel obly’ (v. 10). This is one of the most beautiful poems in the French language. Its chiaroscuro of the flame of love overcoming blinding darkness allows the reader to witness the poet’s heroic torch of devotion light a path to enlightenment, redemption, and immortality: Ainsi qu’Amour en la face au plus beau, Propice object à noz yeulz agreable, Hault colloque le reluysant flambeau Qui nous esclaire à tout bien desirable, Affin qu’à tous son feu soit admirable, Sans à l’honneur faire aulcun prejudice. Ainsi veult il par plus louable indice, Que mon Orphée haultement anobly, Maulgré la Mort, tire son Euridice Hors des Enfers de l’eternel obly.

(D 445)

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[Just as Cupid, in the presence of that most beautiful of things Propitious object agreeable to our eyes, Placed high the shining torch Which lights our way to every worth-while good, So that its fire may be marvelled by all, While doing no harm to honour: Just so does he indicate, by a more laudable sign, His wish that I, as a highly ennobled Orpheus, In spite of Death, should draw my Eurydice From the Hell of eternal oblivion.]

The tensions of this dizain bear on the efficacy of agency to realize Amour’s wish that the lover draw his Eurydice from death. The sizain states the Platonic principle that love, once pursued with honour (v. 6), becomes the exemplary guiding torch lighting its return to the source of immortality. How many times does Ficino cite the authority of Orpheus to define the genealogy and eschatology of love? In I:3 of the Commentary he states, ‘Orpheus rightly called love the oldest of the gods. Also, perfect in himself, self-perpetuating.’194 In the same chapter he adds, ‘Orpheus also called love best counseled. And rightly. For all wisdom, to which counsel belongs, was given to the Mind, because it turned toward God through Love and shone with his glory.’195 Can it be said, however, that in dizain 445 the speaker actualizes Love’s counsel? The concluding quatrain is set in the subjunctive (‘Ainsi veult-il,’ v. 7) in the sense that Love wishes the lover to perform his salvific act. To that extent lines 7–10 occupy a hypothetical zone, constituting the lover’s avowal that he understands Amour’s intentions. His poetic prayer utters the terms of those intentions in the context of the Orpheus myth, but strictly speaking he remains somewhat of an inspired Pythia, not an agent but transported by Love’s imperative and communicating it to the initiates. From another perspective, he is like a dreamer perfectly playing out this wish, but who never awakens to perform it in ‘real’ life. Thus, the character of that wish is the Orpheus myth, but agency is blurred in the gap between Love’s imperative and the lover’s hypothetical but victorious scenario. Who is rescued in the poem? Ostensibly it would be Délie, the poetlover’s ‘Euridice’ (v. 9). It is also the poet-lover who, when speaking of ‘mon Orphée’ (v. 8), feels the presence of his poetic mastery over the Shades. In drawing himself by Orphic meditation in, down, and up, he also saves Délie-Euridice and, by symbolic extension, humanity. There is no point in attempting to reduce these ambivalences, since they are built into the poem under the influence of Persephone threatening to

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douse the reader’s clarity with the same darkness staved off by the lover’s torch. Our knowledge of Orpheus and Orphism comes from classical mythology, the writings attributed to Orpheus, and the practices of the Orphic way of life recounted by such writers as Plato and Herodotus. In his Orpheus and Greek Religion W.K.C. Guthrie summarizes his nature by saying that ‘Orpheus was not regarded as a God but as a hero, in the sense of someone who could claim close kinship with the gods in virtue of which he had certain superhuman powers ... He was, however, essentially a prophet and high priest of religion’ (1993, 41). The son or pupil of Apollo and of a muse, probably Calliope, Orpheus was the supreme citharist of Greek mythology whose voice, like no other, could enchant nature, calm unruly spirits, heal the sick, lull serpents to sleep, and overcome the seduction of the sirens. His greatest feat was to descend into the jaws of Taenarum to rescue his wife Eurydice from death by striking awe in the Shades, rousing sympathy in the watchdog Cerberus, softening Hades, drawing tears from the Furies, and winning a pact from Persephone herself. That agreement was permission to recover Eurydice on condition that he not look back at her until reaching the upper air. Tragically, Orpheus’s excess of love caused him to gaze at his wife’s face, whereupon she slipped back into the depths, dying a second time.196 These points allow us to nuance how the poet-lover situates himself in relation to immortality and the divine in the context of Orphic mythology and theogony. First of all the poet-lover’s Orphic imago makes him semidivine, occupying the transitional space between human and god. As Guthrie states in regard to Orphic religion, ‘The beginnings of salvation lie within every one of us, since they are identical with the germ of divinity which it is our nature as humans to possess’ (1993, 156). Without the lyric powers of Orpheus, Eurydice, whose name means ‘wide-ruling,’ is a Thracian nymph or dryad, who compelled a love so strong as to awaken Orpheus to sacrifice unto death (ibid., 30–1). Like Orpheus, the poetlover descends to hell without dying and in this regard claims power over death. In Délie that hell may be considered the lover’s commitment to incur incessant wandering in the Shades imposed by Proserpina in order to convert death into life. Like Orpheus, the speaker of Délie has a triple vocation. In the liminary huitain, he is poet and lover combined, since he composes ‘durs Epygrammes’ (v. 6) under the aegis of ‘Amour’ (v. 7). In dizain 15 he is Délie’s prophet understood not only as one who sees through but also beyond, for he predicts the woman’s mission to crush vice and to draw the world’s adoration: ‘l’Univers ... T’adorera soubz tes

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piedz combatu,/Comme qui es entre toutes parfaicte’ (vv. 8–10). Finally, the speaker has a ministerial function, viewing himself as the instrument of Jupiter who was the father of love. The poet-lover, through his travail, is thereby privileged as a priest of the gods and the minister of their will to seek the highest good : ‘Qui d’Amour fut par sa voulenté pere/A plus grand bien, et non à fin sinistre,/M’a reservé voulant qu’à tous appere/Que j’ai esté de son vouloir ministre’ (D 441, vv. 7–10). As also seen in previous poems and devices the poet-lover’s Orphic aspirations are constantly blunted, particularly in dizains 316 and 337 and most dramatically in the twentieth illustration.197 One sees a picture of Orpheus sitting against a tree playing a stringed instrument, charming animals including a unicorn. The motto reads, ‘A tous plaisir et a moy peine.’ However, the poet-lover’s triumphant song in dizain 445 reverses both the tragic ending of the Orpheus myth and his own lyric dispossession. To be precise, the name of this reversal should be termed the desire for efficacy. This is true in several respects. Unlike Orpheus, the poet-lover does not look back, but in virtue of his prophetic voice looks forward to drawing out his Euridice (his song and her love) from the abyss of ‘Enfers’ (v. 10). If in some sense this dizain is inspired by Speroni, then the lover, by not turning back his gaze, signals that his vita nuova has arisen from the depths by conquering refractory appetites and disorderly pleasures. In the Dialogo Grazia interprets Orpheus’s fault in the following manner: In questo modo e par questa via la sua amata Euridice dal profondo dell’abisso levata (mal grado di morte), a nuova e gioiosa vita riconduceva E fatto l’avrebbe se, vinto da disordinato appetito, troppo tosto agli usati piaceri di vedere e abbracciare lei non si rivolgeva; per la qual cosa, comme omicida della sua donna, d’altre savie e prudente matrone, a guisa d’incontinente, con atti e parole ignominiose, meritamente insino alla morte fu lacerato e traffitto.198

Augustine’s viewpoint that divinity is closely tied to virtue as ordered love is reinforced by the historical tradition that makes Orpheus a reformer who, while devoted to Dionysius, moderated the excesses of that god. In fact, Orpheus has many Apollonian traits due to his peace-inducing music, his tranquility, and what Guthrie calls ‘his civilizing air’ (1993, 39– 40). Like Orpheus, the lover wishes to tame nature and love, though this is ironically played out in Délie. In device 48 the lover sees the woman as the uncapturable fly (‘La Mouche’) that frustrates his efforts to domesticate her: ‘Plus se hante moins s’apprivoyse.’ However, this type of taming connotes bringing the woman to heel sexually where the lover’s unbridled pas-

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sion would circumscribe her freedom. In fact, it the beloved’s rigour that tames the lover, thus freeing his prophetic song in dizain 445 to predict its redemptive efficacy. Orpheus, omnipotent in swaying nature, winds up losing Euridyce, while the poet-lover, initially impotent in moving Délie, gains Orphic powers over life and death by reordering his faculties. In addition, Orpheus suffers two separations from Eurydice because she dies twice. However, toward the end of Délie the lover’s physical separation from the beloved allows him to reunite immortally with her, since distance permits his ‘honneur’ (v. 6) to ennoble love, igniting the ‘reluysant flambeau’ (v. 3) which forever strikes out on a path through the sea of darkness. Furthermore, dizain 445 enacts the three moments of purification, illumination, and love, rising to the rewards of redemption and salvation. Like Orpheus’s descent into Hades, purification is a trial of the lover’s virtue in spite of the threat of death, ‘Maulgré la Mort’ (v. 9). Illumination is enacted because Délie’s very countenance (‘la face au plus beau,’ v. 1) is propitious to the highest power of sight (‘Propice object à noz yeulx agreable,’ v. 2), making it well disposed to follow the shining torch (‘le reluysant flambeau,’ v. 3) to every worthwhile good (‘à tout bien desirable,’ v. 4). It would seem that the speaker here alludes to his motto ‘Souffrir non souffrir,’ since the darkness of the underworld makes the torch even brighter. Finally, the act of love is not only loyality to ‘Amour’ (v. 1), but the saving gesture of rescuing it from ‘eternel obly’ (v. 10). This is a somewhat paradoxical formulation, but it serves to accentuate the poet-lover’s desire to resist time. The word ‘obly’ (v. 10) is ostensibly the obliteration of love and art wrought by time, whereas the noun ‘eternel’ (v. 10) suggests what is beyond time. An insight into the poet-lover’s meaning is gained when one considers the positive reverse of ‘obly,’ which would be the equally paradoxical notion of eternal remembrance. This act of remembering would be something time-bound, since it suggests human recollection, and yet it would also have the attributes of the semipiternal as everlasting memory. Another inversion of the Orpheus myth is seen in the fact that the supreme lyricist is content to bring back Eurydice to terrestrial existence. In Virgil’s Georgics Orpheus is said to be leading his wife ‘back into the world above,’199 and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses the couple is described as almost reaching ‘the margin of the upper earth.’200 Like Orpheus, the poet-lover would like to have power over death, but a power that is both continuous with his world and transcendent in overcoming extinction. In the last poem of Délie this paradoxical concept of immortality is caused neither by the poet-lover alone nor by the beloved, but by their mutual effort. The speaker refers to ‘Nostre Genevre’ (v. 10) whose ever-

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green persistence is a resistance against ‘mortel Letharge’ (v. 10) through the incessant pursuit of ‘vertu’ (v. 7) by ‘ardeur’ (v. 6). It is more useful in understanding the lover’s concept of immortality to place the final dizain in a family of notions relating to time and space. Negating Time and Space without Leaving Them The clearest notion of spiritual transcendence in Délie emerges from the patterns of temporal and spatial order that traverse the entire text. The most evident is that chronological time understood as unbroken, serial succession is suppressed, or if one wishes to express this in positive terms, time is congealed in exemplarity and ideal paradigms. Let us start with the emblematization of an event, a state, or a situation, which is key to understanding the treatment of time in Délie. In any illustration time is frozen to capture the law of an event or a paradigm of the lover’s situation. In impresa 18 titled ‘Le Cerf’ one sees a deer with an arrow in its side, and around the scene is inscribed the motto,’ Fuyant ma mort j’haste ma fin.’ Not only is time frozen to capture the pregnant moment of the deer’s self-entrapment, but the iterative aspect of the motto alerts the reader that this is a repetitive conundrum whose emblematization reveals the law of antiperistasis. Illustrations that are conditions or states of an entirely positive nature function the same way. In device 16 titled ‘La Cycorée’ one sees a succory plant facing, if not reaching for, the sun. Its motto says, ‘En tous lieux je te suis.’ Here as in the eighteenth device, time is congealed to study the law that just as the sunflower unfailingly seeks its source of sustenance so the lover faithfully follows Délie as the light of his life. Paulette Choné has termed this emblematic scene ‘la prière de l’héliotrope.’201 In both illustrations what is sought is a knowledge-experience of an event or condition that leads the poet-lover to discover either a temporal cycle, paradigm, or permanent object of being. The dehistoricizing of chronological time is another aspect of emblematization where the moral lesson is abstracted from the ruptures and flux of contemporary instability. This is most clear in the case of the political dizains where the order of discourse bears little relation to the chronology of events or the explicit temporal references. Thus, in 1525 there occurs the Battle of Pavia mentioned in D 53, but it is related in dizain 28 after Pope Clement’s 1533 visit to Marseille. More important to the poet-lover is to use events as exempla of the moral order in order to emphasize what is paradigmatic in good or bad human action. One of the lessons of the historical dizains frequently emblematized is the Platonic teaching that

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the political order should be governed by the same standards of virtue and wisdom that rule the individual soul. In the structure of Délie’s dizains which symbolize the perfect square and the perfect number, the poet-lover makes moral measurements of his state against the high standard of the Pythagorean Tetraktys. In similar fashion the balladic rhyme scheme of ABABBCCDCD (the miroir inversé) creates the endless circle of reversion to the source, and its mirror-like quality facilitates a dramatization of specularity itself measuring act and effort to the contemplative ideal. The divine Délie who permeates every aspect of the text is the moon goddess who herself is the one over the many. The second impresa makes this point well. Titled ‘La Lune à deux croiscentz,’ one sees the face of the moon dominating the centre of a circular frame surrounded by a myriad of lesser stars and flanked by two of her cresents. The motto reads, ‘Entre toute une parfaicte,’ indicating that her unique brilliance eclipses both her own calendrical changes and the multiplicity of lesser lights that surround her. In poems of ecstasy, such as dizain 79, Délie changes into her brother Apollo, thus moving the speaker to call her ‘le Soleil de ma vie’ (v. 10). Again the reader sees that the poet-lover rapidly absorbs temporal diversity into a symbolic paradigm that creates permanence in the flow of time. A fourth treatment of time is evident in the Augustinian mode of meditation where the past, present, and future are contracted and deepened into the meditative moment. As seen in dizain 143 of the brazen serpent there is a present of the past, a present of the present, and a present of the future concentrated and condensed in the limitless point of the introspective moment. Augustine, envisioning God as the point, called him ‘the supreme hub of causes’ (summus causarum cardine),202 similar to Boethius’s image of divine eternity as the centre of the circle through which all must pass (Chadwick 1981, 242). Within this introspective point or complicatio there is an unfolding or explicatio where the paradigm of the point sets the pattern for successive dizains. In this way the paradigm reproduces and deploys its own law at the syntagmatic level. The wheel of Délie has a cyclical quality that allows the poet-lover to discover the law of becoming in the flow of time. This is seen not only in the revolving alternations of the Triple Way, but also in the nature of Scève’s poetry. The linguist Roman Jakobson theorized that ‘the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.’203 In the case of Délie this means that a single instance of introspection can regulate the unfolding of major parts of the poetic sequence. In this way the metaphor of the point

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projects itself onto the diversity of time’s flow, giving a rule of order to disparity and change. We can clearly see this in the antiperistatic cycle. If one were to begin tracking it from dizain 46 one would seize upon lines 7–9 which read: ‘Plus fuit le Cerf, et plus on le poursuyt,/Pour mieulx le rendre, aux rhetz de servitude:/Plus je m’absente, et plus le mal s’ensuyt.’ The rule is that the poles of a contrary are mutually reinforcing, a phenomenon which recurs in a variety of circumstances laid out by the poetic sequence. An overarching view of Délie reveals that the various efforts to sublimate constantly fall into the impasses they intended to resolve. Thus, ‘esperance,’ once construed as ‘patience’ (D 430, v. 7) is later scorned as vain ambition (D 437); ‘travail’ is no longer fidelity (D 249, v. 7), but frivolous hope (D 431); at the end of Délie ‘raison,’ which balanced and vivified the vital spirits (D 413, v. 9), has been stolen by an overweening ‘Vouloir’ (D 448, v. 1). Dramatically dizain 441 and the penultimate dizain bitterly challenge the very goals of the work – the praise of love and the desire to communicate. Each theme spawns its countertheme as the cycles of aspiration are continually pulled back by the tugs of perplexity. Consequently the rhythm of the poetic sequence appears as a kind of immobile mobility or agitated stasis in which each moral advance is set back by its own designs. This same complusion to repeat is distributed throught the imprese.204 Scève invented a perfect iconic language for this sensation in the antiperistatic imprese. In device 35 (‘L’Asne au Molin’) a docile donkey, blindfolded, walks the never-ending circle of a treadmill surrounded by the motto, ‘Fuyant peine travail me suyt’ (figure 7). The rhetoric and the verbal aspect of the antiperistatic devise are important in that they join the frustration of the scene to the movement of the work as a whole. In the chiasmus structuring the motto (AB/BA) one can see a figure reflecting the lover’s psychological reversals and the continual turning of theme and countertheme. Similarly, the motto is expressed in the iterative. It thus suggests the cycle’s sense of permanent, inescapable constriction mirroring the self-engendering nature of the perplexity. Just as the antiperistatic imprese visually condense Délie’s sequential movement, so they depict its basic dilemmas – the tugof-war (‘L’Homme et le Boeuf’), gluey entrapment (‘L’Oyseau au glus’), self-consuming desire (‘Le Coq qui se brusle’), inadvertently cornering oneself (‘Le Chamoys et les chiens’). The lover’s attempt at self-initiated voice reversal is a boomerang, since recourse to master his problems by repetition only exacerbates their effects. The poet-lover’s working of time makes a knowledge-experience proceed from his meditative distentio animi which allows him to live in the

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Figure 7 ‘L’Asne au Molin,’ from Scève, 143.

stable and elevated paradigms of knowledge. So far I have described an intellectual zone of the text that is akin to Ficino’s angels, since, even though the lover incurs temporal changes, he nevertheless attempts to free himself from time and place.205 Reverting even farther into history one might say that he inhabits the Ideas in Plotinus’s sense of the term, the archetypes or intellectual forms (Enneads, II, 9, 1). In Augustine’s framework he is between science and divine ideas since so much of his understanding takes place through inference from personal experience. That is, he is between inferior and superior reason, the latter giving order to corporeal existence: ‘Et in hominibus quidem heec ita discerni probabiliter solent, ut sapientia pertineat, ad intellectum aeternorum, scientia vero ad ea quae sensibus corporis experimur.’206 Within the order of Aquinas’s intellectual virtues the poet-lover inhabits a zone between intellectus (awareness of first principles) and scientia which uses intellectus to grasp causes and effects (Summa, Ia 2ae. 57, 2).

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These points are not meant to suggest that there is a systematic Platonic itinerary in Délie, but rather, they show a textual dimension which counterbalances and integrates the wandering, errors, and deceptions challenging the equilibrium of virtue. The main question is, however, whether the poet-lover achieves a transitus beyond time and space, and if so, whether into the realm of union with the divine. The answer to this question must be very finely nuanced. To answer these questions we must return to the dizains of enlargement, including the final poem of Délie, to make precise the distinctions between Scevian transport and that of other mystical models: Ses vertus donc, qui ton corps ne suyvront, Dès l’Indien s’estendront jusqu’au More. Premier le Coeur, et puis l’Ame ceingnit En noud si doulx, et tant indissolvable, Qu’oultre le bien, qui me tient redevable, J’espereray en sure indamnité, Et preuveray par effect jà prouvable En Terre nom, au Ciel éternité. De toute Mer tout long, et large espace, De Terre aussi tout tournoyant circuit Des Montz tout terme en forme haulte, et basse, Tout lieu distant, du jour et de la nuict, Tout intervalle, ô qui par trop me nuyt, Seront rempliz de ta doulce rigueur. Ainsi passant des Siecles la longueur, Surmonteras la haulteur des Estoilles Par ton sainct nom, qui vif en ma langueur Pourra par tout nager à plaines voiles. Doncques ainsi elle se recongnoit, Que son mortel est du vif combat? Certes, estant ton corps foible abatu, Par un debvoir de voulenté libere Adoreront ta divine vertu Et Tanais, et le Nil, et l’Ibere. Posterité, d’elle privée, infame,

(D 11, vv. 9–10)

(D 135, vv. 5–10)

(D 259)

(D 283, vv. 5–10)

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Barbares gentz du Monde divisez Oultre Thyle, et le Temps, et la Fame Alterneront ses haultz honneurs prisez.

(D 284, vv. 7–10)

Parquoy, vivant soubz verdoyant escorce, S’esgallera aux Siecles infiniz.

(D 407, vv. 9–10).

Flamme si saincte en son cler durera, Tousjours luysante en publicque apparence, Tant que ce Monde en soy demeurera, Et qu’on aura Amour en reverence. Aussi je voy bien peu de difference Entre l’ardeur, qui noz coeurs poursuyvra, Et la vertu, qui vive nous suyvra Oultre le Ciel amplement long, et large. Nostre Genevre ainsi doncques vivra Non offensé d’aulcun mortel Letharge.

(D 449)

[Your virtues, then, which will not follow your body, Will be diffused over the whole world.]

(D 11, vv. 9–10)

[First the Heart and then the Soul it [the bond of love] encompassed In a knot so sweet and so indissoluble That, besides experiencing the good, which makes me beholden, I will hope in absolute security, And will experience, by proof in hand, Renown on Earth and eternity in Heaven.] (D 135, vv. 5–10) [Every sea’s length and breadth, Earth’s every perimeter, The Mountains’ every boundary, whether high or low, Every distant place, the day’s and the night’s Every interval, which does me such harm, Will be filled with your sweet severity. Thus passing through the centuries’ length You will rise above the Stars’ height By means of your holy name which, alive in my languor Will sail everywhere at full sail. ] [Does she thus realize

(D 259)

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That her mortal being is outweighed by her spiritual? Surely when your feeble body is cast down, Obeying a law of free will, The Don, the Nile and the Ebro Will adore your divine virtue.]

(D 283, vv. 5–10)

[Posterity, infamous because deprived of her, Barbarous people from the world scattered Beyond Thule and Time and Fame Will alternately sing her prized and lofty honours.]

(D 284, vv. 7–10)

[Thus, living under a green bark, It [your virtue] will be the equal of the infinite Centuries.]

(D 407, vv. 9–10)

[A so holy flame will remain, in the brightness, Always shining, for all to see, As long as this World will last And Love will be held in reverence. And so I see little difference Between this ardour which will pursue our hearts And the living virtue which will follow us Beyond the amply long and wide Heavens. Thus will our Juniper live, Uninjured by any mortal Oblivion.]

(D 449)

In these dizains of mental enlargement and mystical transport the poetlover’s prophetic visions are thoroughly embodied, whereas in Plotinus the imperative of ascent is to ‘Take away everything’ (V, 3, 17). As Arnou says of the Enneads, ‘This “everything” includes equally sensible and corporeal realities, which are exterior and inferior, and the multiplicity of concepts and ideas, also conceived as exterior and inferior to the pure unity of selfwith-self and self-with-God.’207 In Délie there are geographical and cosmological coordinates through which the woman’s ‘divine vertu’ (D 283, v. 9) takes its trajectory ‘au Ciel éternité’ (D 135, v. 10). Each level of ascent is demarcated by the farthest reaches of the human eye. First, there is the circular, global vision of Délie’s virtues spreading all over the world, ‘Dès l’Indien s’estendront jusqu’au More’ (D 11, v. 10). Call this the gaze of the cosmographer. An equally expansive temporal vision reckons infinity by the passing of centuries: ‘ta vertu ... S’esgallera aux Siecles infiniz’ (D 407, vv. 5, 10). In the final dizain there is the view of the cartographer moving

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to that of the astronomer and beyond, where love takes flight ‘Oultre le Ciel amplement long et large’ (v. 8). Call this the gaze of the astronomer imbued with the vision of the mystic, for what is seen is the length and the breadth of the world beyond the sky which offer ‘amplement’ (v. 8) the nutrition of copious, abundant, uninhibited freedom and growth. The means by which the eye has extended its vision is not merely the telescope, but the transfigured flame of love made potent and everlasting by its holy clarity (‘Flamme si saincte en son cler durera,’ v. 1). Enduring in glory, it is publicly manifested and celebrated ‘Tousjours luysante en publicque apparence’ (v. 2), just before the reader’s eyes are made to ascend beyond the oceanic skies (v. 8). What we witness is the quantification of virtue and the praise of its efficacy imbued with mystical reverence. The poet-lover is at the same time between the cosmographer, the astronomer, and the mystic, taking flight beyond the cosmos but still in relation to it.208 A second distinction is helpful. In Bonaventure there is a ‘passing beyond,’ a ‘transitus,’ exceeding the rational illumination of ‘intelligentia’ en route to what I would term the qualitative change of the apex mentis. The best illustration of this is contained in the final chapter of the Itinerarium where the soul in divine donation abandons all for the mors mystica and the superessential ray of darkness: ‘abandon the senses, intellectual activities, and all visible and invisible things – everything that is not and everything that is – and oblivious of yourself, let yourself be brought back, in so far as it is possible,to union with Him ... and transcending yourself and all things, ascend to the superessential gleam of the divine darkness.’209 However, in dizain 449 the negations that propel transport are not passages into a completely new spiritual dimension nor are they dispossessions. Rather, they are a virtually seamless progression from cosmological wonderment to interior oceanic expansion which conserves, rather than abandons, the myriad levels of existence that preceded the culminating moment. The best illustration of this is in dizain 259 where there is a two-part progession. First the speaker’s visual voice speaks prosopopoeially overlooking every level of the cosmos (vv. 1–6). It is mystically lifted by the sight of Délie’s ‘sainct nom’ (v. 9) planing above the stars and the centuries. Swelling in expansion, the woman’s virtuous ‘rigueur’ (v. 6) fills every interval of the world and its surrounding skies, moving from the length and the breadth of the sea around the earth’s perimeter, up and down mountains, through every distant place, and through day and night. In the second stage (vv. 7–10) the poet-lover’s vision is perfectly integrated with cosmological wonderment, since the oceanic image of Délie’s surpassing flight (‘tout nager à plaines voiles,’ v. 10) retrospectively evokes the physical world’s

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‘toute Mer tout long, et large espace’ (v. 1) This type of movement is not like Bonaventure’s abandonment of the world into a domain of ‘divine darkness’ incommensurate with cosmological substance. The poet-lover’s phrase ‘sainct nom’ (v. 9), alluding to Pseudo-Dionysius’s Divine Names, suggests that the terrestrial world’s farthest and widest limits have been preserved in a total and continuous ascent that lifts the lover’s being into the angelic realm. In the Celestial Hierarchary it is ‘Authorities’210 that elevate the lower ranks toward divinity, a power that is strongly analogous to the major virtue praised in this dizain, Délie’s ‘rigueur’ (v. 6). Though it may be strange that Délie, notorious for its lack of transitions, displays a poem that unfolds seamlessly, it is nonetheless true that the poet-lover has discovered a mode of spiritual ascension that bridges the frightening rupture of physical death. In the opening paragraph of the Confessions, Augustine confesses to the Lord that ‘our hearts find no peace until they rest in you’ (I:1).211 However, at the end of Délie’s final dizain where the lover’s pursuit of virtue opens to the heavens ‘amplement long, et large’ (v. 8), there is a prediction that the evergreen sempiternality of love is guaranteed by resisting mortal oblivion: ‘Non offensé d’aulcun mortel Letharge,’ v. 10). This is the third principal distinction between the transport of Scève’s persona and that of his predecessors. There will be no peace for the poet-lover, since agitation itself actualizes the virtues. The struggle against ‘Letharge’ (v. 10) accompanies the lover unto death as foreseen by the final illustration, where a coffin covered with a cross is surrounded by the legend, ‘Apres la mort ma guerre encor me suyt.’ After Augustine, Richard of St Victor in his Benjamin major speaks of one of the attainments of ecstasy as ‘supreme tranquility.’ On the seventh day upon the mountain our soul in imitation of Moses’s sublimity ‘is finally at some time composed in supreme tranquility so that it lays aside ... all care and anxiety.’212 Similarly, Bonaventure’s ‘unitive way’ arrives at the contemplative, seventh step of ‘quiet, when reposing in the shade of Christ,’213 and García de Cisneros in the Perfective Way of his Spiritual Exercises welcomes the exercitant to ‘Security’ before the Spouse, ‘tranquility so secure,’ and the ‘Perfection of Repose.’214 However, in Scève, dialectic is never-ending in the mutuality of want and pursuit personified by ‘ardeur’ (v. 6) and ‘vertu’ (v. 7), for it lifts itself beyond the skies (vv. 6–8) and sustains its evergreen activity by five forceful negations – ‘Non,’ ‘offensé,’ and ‘aulcun’ resisting both ‘mortel’ and ‘Letharge’ (v. 10). In the approximately ninety-seven times that non is used in Délie, most of its meanings function to make distinctions of exclusion, such as ‘Non de Paphos, delices de Cypris,/Non d’Hemonie en

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son Ciel temperée:/Mais de la main trop plus digne fus pris’ (D 9, vv. 1–3). In the few other times that non is used, its meaning is to negate a negation or to negate limits, as in apophatic theology where non signifies not only denial, but above and beyond in some supereminent way. Thus, in dizain 11 the poet-lover says of Délie’s virtue that it is ‘Proeuve pour ceulx, qui le bien poursuyvront/De non mourir, mais de revivre encore’ (vv. 7–8). Here non means ‘not to die,’ but in the supereminent sense of immortality where Délie participates in the life of the gods. This is also the use of ‘Non’ in the last line of dizain 449 where it implies four positive meanings. In and of itself ‘Non’ is the perpetual energy generated by ‘Souffrir non Souffrir.’ The expression ‘Non offensé’ (v. 10) suggests not sinning or violating the sacred as an offence against God; rather the lover will maintain sacred dignity by the observance of limitless effort. Third, ‘aulcun mortel’ (v. 10) invokes a categorical, absolute halting of human decline, otherwise understood as perpetually thriving virtue. Finally, ‘aulcun Letharge’ (v. 10) is the triumph of energy, memory and human consciousness against the extinction of Lethe. There will be no peace for the poet-lover, since agitation is the motor of virtue. A fourth distinction relates to the goal of memory in dizain 449. This study has noted a number of meanings of memory in regard to whether it is considered an operation of the mind, an object of thought, or an institutional reserve of facts. Thus, we have seen the reconstituting memory, memory as recollection of past events, memory in anticipation of consequences, memory of dreams, imaginative religious memory such as the composition of place, imaginative sensual memory that eroticizes events, paradigmatic memory of exempla, and textual memory in the form of the ars memorativa. In the last line of the poem, we read that the lovers’ ‘Genevre’ will remain ‘Non offensé d’aulcun mortel Letharge’ (v. 10). Thus, when the poet-lover culminates the poetic sequence, he predicts the indefinite, permanent, and ever-developing memory of his work and his love predicated on the power of his writing to outlast all possibility of perishing. Note that while Plato, Plotinus, and Augustine see purified memory as a return to one’s divine origin, promising both peace and transport, the poet-lover’s memory is the confidence in his literary art and love to remain evergreen in the growth of human progress. This is neither a final reversion to beginnings, nor anamnesis, but the hallowed prediction of efficacy. A fifth distinction relates to the poet-lover’s meaning of time and eternity. Close attention to dizain 449 shows that the meaning of time is constantly measured by references to the spatio-temporal order. In the first

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stanza the flame of love will last (‘durera’) contingent upon how long this world will remain and hold Love in reverence (‘Tant que ce Monde en soy demeurera,/Et qu’on aura Amour en reverence’ (vv. 3–4). There are two strong contingencies – the first is ‘this World as long as it remains’ and the future tense verbs which are dependent on the perdurance of the World (‘durera,’ v. 1, ‘demeurera,’ v. 3, and ‘aura Amour en reverence,’ v. 4). Also, the flame of love is ‘Tousjours luysante’ (v. 2) in its glory, but this is conditioned upon public recognition (‘publicque apparence,’ v. 2). In the second quatrain there is again the mention of virtue that will last based on spatio-temporal coordinates, but now the coordinates are supercelestial: ‘Et la vertu, qui vive nous suyvra,/Oultre le Ciel amplement long, et large’ (vv. 7–8). Here not only does the flight of virtue reach the ‘Ciel,’ but it has surpassed it, ‘Oultre le Ciel’ (v. 8). There are three alternatives in interpreting these lines, and they pertain to what the lover is seeking as the ultimate object of virtue. One is that since the poet-lover expands his vision by reference to the world below him, his geotropic orientation would suggest that his ideal of immortality is that of a perpetual, never-ending enhancement of the human powers as long as this world persists. Here he is at the height of natural contemplation, which means that he remains entirely within time, but a time that is completely open-ended and dynamically evolving in furthering human progress. This is strongly implied by the images of the evergreen (‘Nostre Genevre,’ v. 9) and the conservation and the enhancement of memory and human consciousness (‘Non offensé d’aulcun mortel Letharge,’ v. 10). Second, in Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae, the concept of eternity is a state outside of time, beyond past, present, and future, in what he called ‘interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta,’ that is, ‘the perfect possession of interminable life held wholly at once.’215 Where does the poet-lover stand in relation to the tota simul? Like his mirror exemplar, Délie, he is not God but a creature wishing to be God-like. Thus, there is a simultaneity that he seeks, and that is the angelic-like power of instantaneous knowledge. But this immediacy of knowledge is not nor will it ever be ‘total’ since dizain 449 stresses in its future tense verbs an indefinite and limitless development: ‘l’ardeur, qui noz coeurs poursuyvra,/Et la vertu, qui vive nous suyvra/Oultre le Ciel amplement long, et large’ (vv. 6–8). The irreducible paradox is that while the poet-lover wishes to be unencumbered by spatio-temporal limits in regard to knowledge he nonetheless wants to conserve his more purified body in the everlasting expansion of his intellectual powers. This interpretation of ‘Oultre le Ciel’ (v. 7) is recommended by the lover’s atemporal contemplation of paradig-

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matic exempla, and the transposability of devices unhindered by place, plot, or sequence. A third understanding of these lines, compatible with the second option but seeking higher spirituality, is that ‘amplement long, et large’ (v. 8), because of its connotation of unlimited, unbounded, unfettered expansion, is reminiscent of Ruusbroec’s ‘blissful crossing over and self-transcending immersion ... where all the divine names and modes and all the living ideas which are reflected in the mirror of divine truth all pass away into simple ineffability, without mode and without reason’ (SE, 152). But in dizain 449 there is no qualitative leap into an entirely different zone of awareness that is typical of religious ecstasy, but rather, the rapture of an ever progressing and enlarging view of the future. The real transitus or passing over in Scève is the attempt through the exhilaration of transport to elide physical death through the mort mystique. How should one understand these three most characteristic aspects of Délie? It is clear that the logic of mutual exclusivity will not resolve the question of what the work ultimately means because all three traits are equally supported by textual evidence. However, a dialectical conclusion may be warranted since these characteristics represent three planes of being: human history, angelic aspiration, and ecstatic transport that reflect the Triple Way of refining the civic virtues, enlightening the soul with the beam of intelligence, and lifting loving union to mystical heights. Yet, this viewpoint may be a temptation to treat Délie as a purely logical or theoretical entity divorced from the real tensions resisting such a synthesis. First, the text conserves the body at all three levels suggesting that spiritual transcendence must be accompanied by familiar, human history. Second, there is nothing like a Platonic itinerary traversing the text that would correspond to Diotima’s speech in the Symposium or Bonaventure’s Itinerarium mentis in Deum – a steady progression from the awareness of the higher human powers to the soul’s discovery that it is the imago dei to the transitus of the apex mentis. Third, poetic metaphors project their paradigms onto the sequence, but paradigmatic variations do not resolve into unified syntheses. Instead, there are two apparently incommensurate but ever-present features which are born from the tensions of le bien du mal: cycle and juxtaposition. The text surely alternates in cycles roughly corresponding to each of the Three Ways, but it does not ultimately subsume them into a complete whole. To visualize this phenomenon, we should imagine passing before our eyes the oscillations of these cycles on a screen, observing their relative high and low points that unfold next to one another but which are never fully integrated. Délie would be this

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never-ending succession of rebirths through death, each point having the immense power to recreate itself but doing so within the habitus of its incessant alternations. Here succession would not be completely causal, but simultaneity would not be entirely autonomous. Succession would give way to the relative independence of the creative moment, but the limitless possibilities for existential expansion emerge from a repeated family of moral quandaries. These paradoxes are the result of the poet-lover’s desire to have history accompany its own transcendence. This irony leads to the question of whether Délie fully integrates its human preoccupations with its aspiration to the divine. To summarize our findings we should return to a few revealing examples, beginning with the twenty-seventh device, ‘La Vipere qui se tue.’ The picture of the viper giving birth to its infants is surrounded by the legend, ‘Pour te donner vie, je me donne mort.’ With no explicit religious reference the illustration alludes to Pliny’s Natural History where vipers were said to die in giving birth to their children. Yet, in the companion dizain this is the basis for the lover’s sacrifice that will give him ‘mort sainctement glorieuse’ (v. 9) and the beloved ‘vie immortellement saincte’ (v. 10). Similarly we can take the scene of Prometheus heroically hanging from his crag in the Caucasus as a symbol of human martyrdom. But the poet-lover’s stress on the power of innocent suffering for honouring the woman and saving mankind is certainly evocative of Christ on the cross. Dizain 136 is a welling prayer to Cupid giving thanks for the bien du mal of exchanging souls, but the Ficinian implication that this mystery will be rewarded by eternal bliss is belied by the conclusion that such moments remain only as long as the breath of human life: ‘Fais que puissions aussi long temps sentir/Si doulx mourir en vie respirable’ (D 136, vv. 9–10). In the last dizain of Délie, we see the clear flame of love publicly praised for being ‘si saincte’ (D 449, v. 1). But in lines 3–4, the life of this flame is contingent upon the longevity of the world. Yet, in line 8, in spite of this contingency, ardour and virtue pursue the couple ‘Beyond the heavens, amply long and wide.’ Is Délie using religion not to integrate it into the human but to set a standard for what humanity can do on its own? Or does the poet-lover discover the divine in the human? I am inclined to favour the second possibility. The second interpretation is what Rudolph Otto has called the ‘numinous.’216 It is the overplus of religious consciousness embedded in human experience, the feelings of awe, majesty, urgency, mystery, and fascination that naturally arouse the sense of that which is above us and of a wholly different order. The poet-lover’s discourse, which appears entirely naturalistic, is shadowed by divine ghosts casting religious significance on purely

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human activity, which does not fully assimilate them. This is not only indicative of ineffability and the unknowableness of the divine. It also points to the symbolism tautly condensed into the poet-lover’s imago of himself as the solitary Prometheus hanging from the crags of a mountain. Délie’s form of self-sufficiency, an ironic imitatio Christi, is the power to endure and grow stronger through and by means of powerlessness. The drive for human self-sufficiency discovered insufficient in overcoming physical death must ultimately summon a certain numinous. In Scève’s vision this is awe of the mysterium tremendum217 that gives infinite spiritual value to Prometheus’s lonely, contingent heroism. In addition to the obvious conclusion that Délie is irreducibly situated between the heritage of religious traditions and the humanist drive for human self-sufficiency, one must also say that this tension plays itself out in highly paradoxical ways. In many respects this fundamental problem turns Délie into a stage of contortions. The individual dizain appears self-standing in its existential capacity to redeem or destroy the lover in cosmic self-sufficient moments. Yet, the lover’s voice is that of utter dependence on the will of the woman. Though such self-sufficiency appears to make the individual dizain the meditative point of complete power in the instant of self-creation, each dizain is nevertheless a variation within a family of repeated moral considerations. The lover’s voice is thereby both self-abiding, but also, part of an unfolding community of familiar terms: amour, travail, ardeur, vertu, espoir, flamme, and on to the unlimited future. If one says that this very deployment of vicissitudes makes Délie a history-bound movement caught in the contingencies of time, one can also say that, like Jakobson’s definition of poetry, these ups and downs attempt to free themselves from the complete control of temporality by generating relatively independent emblematic paradigms. Wishing to conquer ‘mortel Letharge’ (D 449, v. 10) through the poesis of difficulty – the wisdom of adversity – the speaker must risk losing his public in forging a language that ranges from ambiguity to near incomprehensibility. Contantly rebuffed and frustrated in the étouffement of sexual desire, he buries his body in abstractions only to reemerge in the eroticism of the mors mystica. Unable to achieve knowledge that would be ‘total,’ he attempts to recapture his divinity in the simul, the instantaneous awareness of a concept. Incapable of foreseeing all of history he envisages the promise of unlimited development in and beyond his last words – dizain 449. If God is beyond time, history is beyond closure. Thus, we have the paradox that knowledge of all is knowledge of its own incompletion, which is to say, the promise of its infinite development.

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Thus, Délie is a text whose historical unfolding must to a certain extent dehistoricize itself. Or rather, its history is to unfold the renewal of its own angelic aspiration. As we have seen in the case of espoir and prudence and in the approximately one hundred moral terms that people Délie’s universe, there is always repetition with a difference, but that difference must be encompassed within an undulating family of cycles that acts as familiar measures of development and growth. This conservation of embodiment is carried to the highest levels of ecstasy in the mors mystica: ‘Souffrir non souffrir.’ This motto can easily be translated as mourir non mourir, and it is in these terms that the poet-lover is God-like. For he elides his fear of physical death by surpassing it in the life and death of ecstasy. It is unwise to try to disambiguate this paradox since it is the humanistic equivalent of apophatic theology. For this reason, Délie overflows its boundaries, and as we see in dizain 449 it does so with religious overtones. It is the humanistic counterpart to the mystical fountain. In the confidentia of its ever-flourishing present participle, ‘Flamme ... Tousjours luysante’ (vv. 1–2) thrust forward by bold, future tense verbs – ‘durera’ (v. 1), ‘demeurera’ (v. 3), ‘aura Amour en reverence’ (v. 4), ‘poursuyvra’ (v. 6), ‘suyvra’ (v. 7), ‘vivra’ (v. 9) – it projects itself beyond its putative closure outside the constraints of a tightly knitted plot. The pivot where history and paradigm meet is memory – ‘aulcun mortel Letharge’ (v. 10) – both preservative and proleptic, the then and the future nows. The rise beyond the astronomer’s telescope is negative mysticism, but somehow, the poetlover would like familiar stars to accompany a flight that would transcend them. Never fully resolving the question of physical death but striving in human time to overcome it through natural intimations of the divine, he has one foot on earth, the other in heaven: ‘Tousjours en Terre, et au Ciel residentz’ (D 64, v. 10).

8 Conclusion

Délie is a text composed of poems and illustrations functioning together to produce a canzoniere based on meditative poetics. The devices are integral components of Délie’s introspective organization serving as compositions of place for the tripartite introspective movement of memory, understanding, and will. In addition, the impresa itself is a compression of the threefold structure of meditation containing a vivid scene that fuses memory, analysis, and affective response clinched by the motto. In poems not accompanied by devices, there is frequently a verbal description functioning as the composition, and when placed at the beginning of a dizain, it often takes the form of pictorial periphrasis. Abstract poems which have little or no visual imagery themselves are often related in subject matter to one or more of the fifty illustrations, and in that case, the imprese serve as an arsenal of virtual compositions that can be moved and repositioned according to the reader’s response to the text. Because of the transposability of the pictures, Délie can be understood as a form of impresa writing for the author, the poet-lover, and the reader. That is, the devices can be fragmented and recombined within the text much as any impresa could be appropriated for social, artistic, pedagogical, political, or religious function. In every case where the device is used it contains in embryo the full purport of meditative movement, and it is a tribute to Scève’s genius that his mastery of the short form – the pictorial epigram – enabled him to condense to great effect both the longer ladders of meditation, such as Mauburnus’s Scala, and its more concise reformulation associated with Ignatius. Indeed, this is another distinction of historical importance that one can confer upon Scève in addition to having been the first French Petrarchist and the first writer of French imprese in a sustained work on love. Describing himself as the all-seeing Argus, the poet-lover uses the devices to dramatize the power of

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the gaze, which operates both transitively in picturing the verbal text for the reader and reflexively in mirroring his own abyme of self-analysis. So all encompassing are the textual eyes that they rival Délie and the Creator for omniscience. Sometimes their breadth and depth of insight appear to make action redundant, which is belied by the obstacles to prudence. As in Augustine’s Confessions, the very powers that would serve as the basis not only for sight but also for memory, understanding, and will are themselves objects of scepticism. Providential vision understood as the ability to foresee danger seems to foist itself on its own petard. On the other hand, if the poet-lover cannot in some respects surmise the consequences of his actions, the very opposite is also true. Frequently, the pictura of a device, being a compression of the unfolding dizain, appears to be the compulsive reenactment of a foregone conclusion. If etymologically the word impresa comes from imprendere, meaning ‘to intend,’ ‘to undertake,’ ‘ to announce a line of conduct,’ then the device often depicts itself as antiaction, such as the self-inflicted antiperistatic dilemmas that can temporarily set back the whole meditative scheme of moral improvement. On balance, however, the device as symbol and technique counteracts a number of vision’s failings. The mirror of interiority would easily glide into the prison of narcissism without Délie’s luminous emblematic example of higher knowledge that both inspires and guides the poet-lover. Thus, we have impresa 3, the lamp of light and life, with the motto, ‘Pour te adorer je vis.’ However fragmented and dissociated the lover, the device in conjunction with the meditative method act at the very least as magnets of agglomeration drawing together the lover’s scattered being into one illuminated locus. Here there is the possibility that the pictura as the visible and the motto as the sayable (the two primordial acts of knowing) can reciprocally reconstruct the poet-lover and his world after the first shattering innamoramento. The reader’s difficulty in grappling with the meaning of an impresa establishes empathy with the poet-lover’s problem of thwarted speech, and if such difficulties are pursued from device to dizain to neuvaine to the work as a whole, the reader’s reward is to discover the lover’s angelic vision of paradigms that rule his existence. The use that Scève makes of the devices in conjunction with the problems of representation foresee the wealth of epistemological problems explored by such impresa theoreticians as Caburacci, Taegio Capaccio, and Tasso regarding semiotic mediation. To the degree that Scève’s imprese are coloured with religious significance, they herald more explicit theological appropriation by Protestants (Georgette de Montenay, Théodore de Bèze) and Catholics (the Imago primi saeculi Societas Jesu).

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Meditation arises from struggling with the earth-shattering experience of love, and Scève’s filiation with Platonic philosophy is to pursue higher virtue as a spiritual refinement of Eros. The starting point in dizain 1 has a twofold dimension. First, the pursuit will be a microcosmic epic unfolding from the poet-lover’s heart. While Scève’s Microcosme begins by God’s creation of the world, Délie starts with a new life in the terrestrial world. Second, the inaugural moment of constituting Délie as ‘Idole de ma vie’ (D 1, v. 10) is suffused with the numinous in its symbolism of sacrificial life-in-death (‘Piteuse hostie au conspect de toy, Dame,’ D 1, v. 9) and awe-struck reverence (‘ô peur d’agreables terreurs,’ D 1, v. 3). With the renovatio commencing on earth, with human rebirth of love permeated with sacred veneration, there arise problems of whether value and power are derived from human or divine sources or whether humanity naturally bears the imprint of the divine. It is precisely the tentative nature of this question that makes of Délie an essay or exploration rather than a doctrine or explicit theology. For this reason, Sceve could not have selected a better title for his work, a pagan deity having human and divine attributes who energizes and destabilizes ancient and new perceptions of the world. As a result, virtually every avenue of power and value are scrutinized, including classical mythology, Old Testament wisdom, Christianity, Neoplatonism, scholasticism, natural religion, alchemy, medicine, physiology, astrology, astronomy, and pantheism. In all, the lover is struck by the stark questions awakened in him by Délie of whether he is the solitary source of meaning or whether the growth of his virtue is a realization of divinity. The double function of Délie as energizer and destabilizer, perpetrator of suffering and agent of deliverance is but one manifestation of a deeper ontological constant termed ‘le bien du mal.’ One may wish to call this the coexistence of contraries, but there is an operational definition that must be stated for greater precision. This is the notion that the negative pole is not only opposed to the positive but also the means through which the positive is realized. This dialectic cuts across the poet-lover’s experiences. In dizain 136, for example, it is manifested as the Neoplatonic paradox of ‘doulx desplaisir’ (v. 3) where, in the exchange of souls, loss is gain. In the Prometheus myth, it is the power of powerlessness reflected in the motto ‘Souffrir non souffrir.’ In the Old Testament context, the ‘Serpent esleve’ (D 143, v. 10), and even in dizains suggesting a universe ruled by physical nature, the very summit of glory is its decline and fall: ‘Legere gloire, en fin en terre tumbe’ (D 175, v. 8). The final, triumphant dizain sees little difference between ‘ardeur’ (v. 6) and ‘virtue’ (v. 7), but the first emerges from want and the second from ennobling desire with the highest states of

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human and religious attainment. The bien du mal/mal du bien is the volatile and reversible kernel of the lover’s experience composed of poles that never separate (break away from one another) through countless dialectical vicissitudes and wrenching oscillations to enhanced powers. Meditation is the mental discipline that attempts to make sense of this inherently unstable ontology and to lift the lover to higher levels of love, knowledge, and moral and spiritual enhancement. Because the poet-lover hallows his efforts with religious sentiment, both classical and Christian, it is appropriate to view the structure of the dizain as an incorporation of sacred models. This reflects the reality of the text and the tensions between human self-sufficiency and the lover’s search for the divine exemplar. While the dizain is a rich, multilayered set of discourses, the two that speak to meditation are a model of ideal introspection combined with another model that represents the possible pitfalls, errors, and dilemmas of concrete practice. In other words, the play of freedom and error must be maximized. Just as Délie is the ideal for the poet-lover’s pursuit of virtue, so are the high goals of the Ignatian method confronted by Augustine’s meditative pragmatics. The triple relation of lover, beloved, and the meaning of love is exercised by judging how well the Augustinian scheme measures up to the Ignatian ideal deployment of the three powers of the soul. What are the components of this praxis? As in Augustine and following Charles Taylor, the ‘Je’ of the speaker orients the world to his own particular circumstances (‘radical reflexivity’),1 and in the throes of a question, unfolds an agon through the reconstituting memory that puts acute rhetorical pressures on sharpening terms and arriving at a solution. The press of urgency is created by a rich spectrum of aspectual features that heighten the agon between instantaneity and stasis, momentariness and habituation, completion and process, event and iteration. Taking into account aspect and other linguistic categories, it is a wonder of meditative language that, in the service of intensifying the agon, it can so thoroughly compress the contrasting sensations of tenseless law and present progressivity, habit and punctual awareness, non-agental and agental movement, the always and the now: Le souvenir, ame de ma pensée, Me ravit tant en son illusif songe, Que n’en estant la memoyre offensée, Je me nourris de si doulce mensonge. [Remembrance, the soul of my thought,

(D 143, vv. 1–4)

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Enchants me so in its illusive dream That memory, not being offended by it, I nourish myself with a so sweet lie.]

The moment of introspection contracts the macrocosm of time and space into the microcosm of a momentous hic et nunc – the present of the past, the present of the present, and the present of the future. At this meeting point between history and eternity, dramatic self-analysis brings under one purview the entire significance of the meditator’s life to be judged under the highest standards of love. In Augustine, supernatural grace is invoked, in Scève the presentiment of his own inspired powers. The agon may conclude with an intensification of the dilemma. However, under the best circumstances, meditative contraction opens to contemplative expansion where the present of the future raises a horizon of hope that can culminate in an array of spiritual senses including mystical transport and ecstasy. The organization of meditation at the level of the dizain reflects the overarching method of spiritual progress in Délie as a whole. The deployment of memory, understanding, and will in the individual poem reflects the constant recourse of the poet-lover to purificatio, illuminatio, and perfectio in the entire work. Just as recollection is the first level of meditative reconstruction, so is purification the initial phase of orienting conversion to trials that would overcome resistance to Délie’s will. Just as the understanding in the individual dizain is invoked to plumb the truths presented by memory, so the lover calls on ‘the beam of intelligence’ to penetrate deeper into the virtues that would imitate preeminent models of moral dignity such as Marguerite de Navarre, François Ier, Diotime, and the beloved herself. Finally, if the meditative movement of the individual dizain turns from contraction to emotional expansion, so does the via unitiva conclude in a range of spiritual tones from natural contemplation to mystical ecstasy The correspondence of the Ignation scheme in single poems with the Triplici via in the work as a whole unites microcosm to macrocosm and reveals the poet-lover’s most coherent attempt to overcome the gravity of succession by the transport of spontaneity. The microcosmic and macrocosmic exercise of the virtues strengthens the poet-lover’s capacity to convert ‘le mal du bien’ into the ‘bien du mal.’ It is important to spell out the particularly intractable and insidious forms of evil as well as their counteracting virtues. This first are the failures of phronesis in which the will is portrayed as the adversary of its own designs. The degree of self-inflicted torture not only depends on the impact of the boomerang, but also on the fact that knowledge at its very highest

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reaches only exacerbates its own bafflement. So pervasive is this problem that the movement of the entire poetic sequence takes the form of antiperistasis which can only be assimilated by confessions of honesty (D 413) and the knowledge that the universe is maintained by ‘elementz contraires’ (D 447). To a large extent the poet-lover addresses this particular failing of prudentia by envisioning moderation not as the mean between two extremes, but, as we see in the dispositio of the entire work, the measuring and counterbalancing of contraries. This is evident in the way that the lover views Délie – as both poison and remedy, as Hecate or Luna, as Daphne or Diotima. Just as ardeur can be a searing fire so it can become the eternal flame of love. Just as the lover is undone by one side of his designs, he remakes himself by reversion to its opposite. The second important mal is the mechanism of the parasite that we have examined in impresa 17 titled ‘L’Hyerre et la Muraille.’ The wall welcomes the support of the ivy until it is strangled by its very embrace. But similar dilemmas are seen throughout the sequence where the poet-lover admits into his being an undermining quality disguised as an enhancing one. Thus, reason is inhabited and directed by emotion; narcissistic specularity takes its own desire for that of Délie; foresight when only ‘cault’ (D 1, v. 1) confuses calculation with prudence; memory fixes on its self-created phantasma; and cupidinous hope takes persistence as perseverance. In many respects Délie is a sustained meditation on the Plotinian problem of the one and the many. The unseen doubles of the self within the self which perpetrate self-deception are somewhat rectified by exchanging the interior dédoublement for the united action of two reciprocally cooperative beings. The narcissistic mirror gives way to the mirror of the other. This is accomplished in two ways: through Délie’s authority as the absolute Non to the lover’s desires, but also, in the last dizain, through the mutual cooperation of two individuals called nous who retain their otherness in love. The third mal which is both devastating and energizing is the fear of death: Doncques, pour paix à ma guerre acquerir,/Craindray renaistre à vie plus commode?’ (D 446, vv. 7–8). In considering the many ways in which the poet-lover treats this dread, the phenomenon of repetition which characterizes the work is the most instructive. As we have seen, the many modes of repetition are enigma-producing activities which, through antiperistasis, keep renewing themselves. This can be a torture rack of suffering, but it counterbalances this pain with the consolation that they not only resist a plot that would bring absolute closure, but in the paradigms of knowledge they constitute, they allow the poet-lover to inhabit the world of angelic ideas.

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The final dizain of Délie (D 449) is a study in sprezzatura in which its very marks of closure are at the same time signs of infinite beginnings. Its retrospective celebration of love is also a future gaze into unending development. The exaltation of the ‘Flamme si saincte’ (v. 1) which epitomizes Délie’s inspiration will last as long as this world, wherever love is revered and glorified: ‘Tousjours luysante en publique apparence/Tant que ce Monde en soy demeurera,/Et qu’on aura Amour en reverence’ (vv. 3–5). The dialectic that has energized the entire work, ‘ardeur’ (v. 6) and ‘vertu’ (v. 7), expands into the sky ‘amplement long, et large’ (v. 8). The extinction of memory termed ‘mortel Letharge’ (v. 10) will always be averted by the evergreen juniper of love and literature. While the last dizain rings true as a finale, the reader may very well sense that it could have been replaced by any number of previous dizains culminating in contemplation or mystical ecstasy which, in turn, were followed by countless vicissitudes. Thus, dizain 449 in effect tells the reader that its putative ending is actually return and renewal. The poem bears the quintessential marks of Augustine’s sense of time: the present of the past, of the present, and of the future. However, it heightens the sensation of sempiternity because the past and future are seamlessly interwoven into the present where the now of discourse includes its past and projection to the future – the poet-lover’s equivalent through prophecy of the simul of knowledge. Throughout Délie values are challenged and transformed, but their new formulations are uneasy accommodations with tradition rather than stark ruptures with the past. In the context of Ficino’s philosophy of action, the poet-lover stresses vertu as operatio not essentia, and without diminishing the latter, places a premium on efficacy or the will’s raw power to realize its own desires. Connected with what one might call this physics of virtue is the quantification of virtue best shown in apophatic dizains of ecstasy where the beloved’s force extends to unlimited, dynamic development beyond the earth to the heavens. It would not be inaccurate to call this the vision of the mystical astronomer. In this phrase, one sees Scève the humanist tensely balancing the coexistence of reason and religion that had been split by Ockhamist nominalism. Another distinction is in order. Platonism, Neoplatonism and Christian Platonism consider the apex of spiritual fulfilment as a return to the One or to the Creator, the source of life and light. While Délie does endorse the views of Plato and Plotinus that the divine spark is inherent in human nature, it deviates from the notion of a specific terminus that would satiate desire. There might be moments in Délie such as the conclusion of dizain 79, which suggest such an end-point where the lover, writhing up from Stygian dreams suddenly

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sees ‘le Soleil de ma vie’ (D 79, v. 10). However, the preponderance of dizains ending in the unitive way are open-ended flights beyond earthly boundaries that project indefinite and progressive growth and joy: ‘Ainsi passant des Siecles la longueur,/Surmonteras la haulteur des Estoilles/Par ton sainct nom, que vif en ma langueur/Pourra par tout nager à plaines voiles’ (D 259, vv. 7–10). One of the humanist stamps of Délie is the revolt of the poet-lover against the Platonic and medieval experience of ecstasy whereby the body is abandoned by the soul. On the contrary, the poetlover bristles at this phenomenon even as he experiences it, and he would rather have the body enjoy all the fruits of mystical realization as the soul does. Moreover, Scève is quite in agreement with Augustine and Ficino that human unrest and dissatisfaction awaken the desire for the Divinity. However, he tends to place higher value on agitation, unfufilment, illusion, and blindness as sources of knowledge and motivators of human aspiration. Ficino says, We are all like Tantalus. We are all thirsty for the true goods, but we all drink dreams. While we absorb the deadly waves of the river of Lethe through our open throats, we scarcely lick with our lips a shadowlike bit of nectar and ambrosia. Therefore, a troublesome thirst continually burns us, oh we poor Tantali.2

The crux of the difference between Scève and Ficino concerning unrest is that for the former, it is not something to be transcended en route to higher things, but an ever conserved obstacle motivating moral and spiritual improvement. This is why in the last dizain the everlasting nature of the juniper can only be conceived as a constant resistance to Lethe: ‘Non offensé d’aulcun mortel Letharge’ (v. 10). This principle is another affirmation of ‘le bien du mal’ and ‘Souffrir non souffrir,’ and it also bears a relation to Scève’s treatment of emblematics. If so many devices picture cruel scenes of self-deception, it is because Scève is sceptical about the claims of prudence to forewarn against error and to avert its consequences. Rather, he searches out the problems of prudence to study it and to consolidate his stoic resolve that if one cannot achieve the desired outcome, one’s self-realization must necessarily be limited to what can be controlled. This implies an emphasis not on perfection viewed as avoidance of error but on perfection considered as achieving excellence in certain endeavours that would exceed expectations. In fact, in Délie the strictures of meditative discipline liberate rather than constrict the view of eternity. However, while Scève’s persona strives to achieve the experience of Boetheus’s ‘to-

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tum simul,’ he can only realize the simul and this by transforming it into a rhetorical simulation. The key to understanding his position is rooted in his emblematic vision where history is present in the fleeting moment of an action, event, process, or state, but also, where laws of existence are frozen in a spontaneous condensation of a paradigm. This outlook is mirrored in Délie as a whole. The microcosmic kernel of the tripartite meditative scheme in individual dizains develops and grows in the macrocosmic succession of the Triple Way. The history of an unfolding is consonant with the laws of a paradigm, but it is only through history that simultaneity is grasped. One foot on earth, the other in heaven.

Appendix 1

‘Scala Meditatoria’ From the Rosetum of Joannes Mauburnus Zwolle, 1494 (By the kind permission of the Pierpont Morgan Library)

Appendix 2

Augustine, Confessions, X:30 Oxford, OUP, 1992. Ed. James J. O’Donnell Vol. I, pp. 135–6. Iubes certe ut contineam a concupiscentia carnis et concupiscentia oculorum et ambitione saeculi. (1 John 2:16).* iussisti a concubitu et de ipso coniugio melius aliquid quam concessisti monuisti. et quoniam dedisti, factum est, et antequam dispensator sacramenti tui fierem, sed adhuc vivunt in memoria mea, de qua multa locutus sum, talium rerum imagines, quas ibi consuetudo mea fixit, et occursantur mihi vigilanti quidem carentes viribus, in somnis autem non solum usque ad delectationem sed etiam usque ad consensionem factumque simillimum. et tantum valet imaginis inlusio in anima mea in carne mea, ut dormienti falsa visa persuadeant quod vigilanti vera non possunt. numquid tunc ego non sum, domine deus meus? Et tamen tantum interest inter me ipsum et me ipsum intra momentum quo hinc ad soporem transeo vel huc inde retranseo! ubi est tunc ratio qua talibus suggestionibus resistit vigilans et, si res ipsae ingerantur, inconcussus manet? numquid clauditur cum oculis? numquid sopitur cum sensibus corporis? et unde saepe etiam in somnis resistimus nostrique propositi memores atque in eo castissime permanentes nullum talibus inlecebris adhibemus adsensum? et tamen tantum interest ut, cum aliter accidit, evigilantes ad conscientiae requium redeamus ipsaque distintia reperiamus nos non fecisse quod tamen in nobis quoquo mode factum esse doleamus.

*Indicates Augustine’s use of scriptural passages.

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Numquid non potens est manus tua, deus omnipotens, sanare omnes languores animae meae atque abundantiore gratia tua lascivos motus etiam mei soporis extinguere? augebis, domine, magis magisque in me munera tua, ut anima mea sequatur me ad te concupiscentiae visco expedita, ut non sit rebellis sibi, atque ut in somnis etiam non solum non perpetret istas corruptelarum turpitudines per imagines animales usque ad carnis fluxum, sed ne consentiat quidem, nam ut nihi tale vel tantulum libeat, quantulum possit nutu cohiberi etiam in casto dormientes affectu, non tantum in hac vita sed etiam in hac aetate, non magnum est omnipotenti, qui vales facere supra quam petimus et intellegimus (Ephes. 3:20). nunc tamen quid adhuc sim in hoc genere mali mei, dixi bono domino meo, exultanis cum tremore (Psalms 2:11) in eo quod donasti mihi, et lugens in eo quod inconsummatus sum, sperans perfecturum te in me misericordias tuas usque ad pacem plenarium (Psalms 30:7–8), quam tecum habebunt interiora et exterior mea, cum absorpta fuerit mors in victoriam (1 Cor. 15:54).

Appendix 3

Intersections of Illustrations and Dizains: Translation of Mottoes Rubrics are in alphabetical order. Upper and lower case letters in titles of the illustrations follow the text. Adoration of the Beloved 2 – The Two Crescent Moon – ‘Among many, one perfect’ 3 – The Lamp and the Idol – ‘To adore you, I live’ 16 – The Succory Flower – ‘To all places I follow you’ 28 – The Armorer – ‘My work gives glory to two’ (1, 2, 11, 15, 23, 44, 124, 127, 208, 240, 259, 284, 319, 407, 435, 449) Antiperistase 4 – The Man and the Ox – ‘The more I restrain it, the more it drags me’ 12 – The Bird in glue – ‘The less I fear the more I’m caught’ 18 – The Stag – ‘Fleeing my death, I hasten my end’ 35 – The Donkey in the Mill – ‘Fleeing pain, travail follows me’ 40 – The Coq on fire – ‘The more I extinguish the flames, the more I ignite them’ 47 – The Woman churning butter – ‘The more I soften it, the more I harden it’ 48 – The Fly – ‘The more familiar, the less tameable’ 49 – The Chamois and the dogs – ‘Saving myself, I find myself enclosed’ (46, 120, 215, 263, 289, 293, 317, 320, 333, 352)

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Attrition 22 – The Boat with broken oars – ‘My strength from day to day weakens’ 29 – The Saw – ‘Little by little its force saps me’ 32 – The Mule Driver – ‘Double pain toiling for another’ (39, 99, 121, 164, 174, 260, 393) Concealment/The Hidden/Revealing 23 – The Alembic – ‘My tears reveal my fire’ 36 – The Pot on the fire – ‘Inside I am consumed’ 38 – Europa on the bull – ‘To security goes who hides his deed’ 41 – Leda and the Swan – ‘I hide in others what I find in myself’ (Revealing: 95; the hidden: 53; concealing: 59, 117, 226, 299, 314, 315, 359, 361) Constancy/Firmness 9 – The Target – ‘My firmness harms me’ (14, 78, 150, 415) 15 – The Weathervane – ‘A thousand turns have not yet budged me’ (17, 54, 151, 233, 247, 248, 274, 346, 426) Dispossession/Estrangement 1 – The woman and the Unicorn – ‘To see you, I lose my life’ 17 – The Ivy and the Wall – ‘To love, I suffer ruin’ 21 – The Basilisk, and the Mirror – ‘My glance from your eyes kills me’ 26 – The Unicorn seeing itself – ‘Of myself I am terrified’ 27 – The Viper who kills herself – ‘To give you life, I give myself death’ 37 – The Moon in shadows – ‘My brightness is always in shadows’ (6, 164, 232, 263, 270, 278, 306, 351, 401) Exile/Exclusion 6 – The Candle and the Sun – ‘To all brightness, to me shadows’ 19 – Acteon – ‘When Fortune changes, my own run me down’ 20 – Orpheus – ‘To all pleasure, to me pain’ 42 – The Bat – ‘When all repose, I never cease’ (18, 52, 71, 98, 111, 125, 129, 161, 203, 218, 238, 241, 242, 260, 295, 324, 396, 427) Hoping for an End to Travail 7 – Narcissus – ‘He dies enough who loves in vain’ (motto related: 41, 63, 91, 261, 297, 353, 442; allusions to Narcissus myth: 141, 230, 235, 307, 335, 409, 415)

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8 – The Woman spinning yarn – ‘After long travail an end’ (218, 326, 337, 412) Inescapable Cycles of Suffering 43 – The Clock – ‘In my labor, day and night I keep vigil’ 45 – The Lamp on the table – ‘By day I die, by night I burn’ 50 – The Coffin and the candles – ‘After death, my war still follows’ (25, 35, 68, 92, 112, 158, 167, 224, 331, 402, 403, 446) Power/Powerlessness 5 – The Lantern – ‘Hide it I cannot’ 14 – Tower of Babel – ‘Against Heaven there is no victory’ 44 – The Dead Man rises from his coffin – ‘I do more than I am able’ (power: 109. 182, 378, 436; powerlessness: 74, 107, 197, 209, 216, 264, 291, 304, 320, 376; powerlessness as victory: 139). Prudence/Imprudence 33 – The Cat and the rat trap – ‘Prison is hard, even more so freedom’ (1, 6, 3, 362, and the dizains and devices dealing with antiperistase and self-deception) Rebirth 11 – The Phoenix – ‘From death to life’ (48, 76, 79, 278, 300, 333, 409, 446) Self-Deception/Deceit/Lucidity 24 – The Axe, and the Tree – ‘Harming you, I injure myself’ 25 – The Stool, and the two men – ‘Easy to deceive the confidant’ 31 – The Butterfly and the Candle – ‘My joy is my woe’ 34 – The Peacock – ‘Seeing oneself well is humbling’ 46 – The Spider – ‘I have tightened the snare in which I die’ (deceit: 50; lucidity: 291; self-deception: 38, 57, 126, 143, 187, 244, 291, 297, 341, 371, 434, 437 Sweetly Ravished 39 – The Cross-Bowman – ‘More by gentleness than by force’ (81, 136, 306, 314) The Sweetness of Travail 10 – Two Oxen Ploughing – ‘Sweet the pain that is shared’ (87, 174, 294, 398, 440)

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Welcoming Death 13 – Dido who consumes herself in flames – ‘Sweet the death that from grief delivers me’ 30 – Cleopatra and her serpents – ‘One lives enough who dies when he/ she wishes’ (45, 71, 154, 337, 446)

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Notes

Preface 1 Lefèvre d’Étaples 1972, xxiv. See also La Garanderie (1995) who is particularly good in teasing out the tensions between secular and the sacred. 2 Skenazi 1992; Defaux 2004; Donaldson-Evans 1989; Rigolot 1994; Béguin 1947; Giudici 1969, 707–71; Old and New Testament perspectives are offered by Ardouin 1989. 3 The following list of studies on Délie is only meant to support my point about the predominance of non-religious research on the work and does not attempt to furnish a comprehensive bibliography: Books: Saulnier 1948a; Henri Weber 1948 and 1955; Glauser 1967; Staub 1967; Risset 1971; Coleman 1975 and 1981; Fenoaltea 1986; Tetel 1983; DellaNeva 1983; Baker 1986; Nash 1991; Frelick 1994a; Helgeson 2001; Hunkeler 2003. Articles: Poulet 1967; Greene 1972; Cool 1979; Cottrell 1985 and 1988; Cave 1985 and 2000; Goyet 1987; Duval 1979, 1980, and 1994; De Rocher 1987 and 1991; Kritzman 1991; Mathieu-Castellani 1994 and 2001; Conley in Nash 1994; Kotin Mortimer 1994; Maira 2003; Alduy 2004; Risset 2007. 4 This is W.H. Mitchell’s translation of Guigo quoted in Pierre Pourrat, Christian Spirituality 1953, 3:7. ‘Ex his possumus colligere, quod lectio sine meditatione arida est, meditatio sine lectione erronea, oratio sine meditatione est tepida, meditatio sine oratione infructuosa: oratio cum devotione contemplationis acquisitiva; contemplationis adeptio sine oratione, aut rara aut miraculosa’ (PL, vol. 184, col. 482). 5 Summa, IIa IIae, q. 180, 3, vol. 46, 22: ‘ad intuitium simplicis veritatis.’ 6 Translation mine. ‘Theologia mystica est cognitio experimentalis habita de Deo per amoris unitivi complexum.’ Gerson 1962, 3:274. 7 McFarlane 1966 edition, 43–6; Goyet 1987; Duval 1994; Cave 2000; Alduy 1998.

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8 Bonaventure 1882–1902, 8:3–27. 9 Kristeva 1969, 146. Translation by Culler 1975, 139. 10 There may be one exception to this in dizain 287 when the poet-lover says to Délie, ‘Ta coulpe fut, et ma bonne aventure’ (it was your fault and my good luck, v. 10). Yet the wording of these lines is so veiled and indirect that it is difficult indeed to infer sexual consummation. 1 Two Models of Meditation for Délie 1 Commenting on the ‘abondance même des contradictions’ in the sixteenth century, Daniel Ménager wisely warns, ‘L’erreur de l’historien serait alors de ramener cette multiplicité à une illusoire unité’ (1968, 5). 2 Copleston1963, 3:37–54. 3 Ovide moralisé 1954. 4 As Peter Dronke states, the mixture of sacred and profane in the amatory lyric is as old as the Song of Songs, and its manifestation in amour courtois ‘as old as Egypt of the second millennium B.C.’ (1968, 1:xvii). Dronke goes on to say that, in the amour courtois love lyric of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the apparent incommensurability of the human and the divine was reconciled by a ‘unity-in-diversity’ (1:75). In another statement that resonates with the problematics of Délie, Dronke says, ‘a wealth not merely of love-language, but of precisely that kind of love-language which is most consonant with amour courtois, had accumulated over the centuries in the mystical and theological tradition itself. This is to me the most striking thing: the more deeply religious the language, the closer it is to the language of courtoisie. The virtues acquired by the soul illuminated by divine grace are exactly those which the lover acquires when his soul is irradiated by his lady’s grace’ (1:62). In Délie, there is a reverse mirror image of these two languages. The more deeply the poet-lover contemplates the human qualities of the beloved, the more apt he is to compare them to the divine. It is the divine in the human that he sees. 5 See Coleman 1975, 138–40. See also Coleman 1964, 1–15. On the connection between Délie and the anima mundi, see Duval 1979, 19. 6 On the relations between Délie and its religious imagery, see DonaldsonEvans 1989. 7 The Dialogo d’Amore is the first of the Dialoghi (Venice: Aldus, 1542), but some lines (ll. 1–4, dizain 444) are also drawn from the second dialogue. See Fenoaltea 1976, 224. For the edition of the Dialogo d’Amore, I have used Speroni 1998. See also Hébreu 1974. 8 Dagens 1952, 9–11. While the development of technology is associated with the secularization of values, this is not necessarily the case in the relation

Notes to pages 7–11

9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16

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between printing and devotional works: ‘Les influences nouvelles n’ont pas aboli les anciennes. L’imprimerie a assuré aux écrits spirituels des grands théologiens du Moyen Age une diffusion qu’ils n’avaient jamais eue’ (ibid., 10). Ferguson 1992, 10–49; on Castel 13–14; on Brodeau 6. Ferguson 54–6. See Rice 1971, 89–124. See Salunier 1:560. On Rhétoriqueur traits in Arion, see Saulnier 1:98–102. McFarlane (1966 edition, 476) has drawn attention to dizain 421 as an example of the persistence of Rhétoriqueur style in Scève: ‘Voulant je veulx, que mon si hault vouloir/De son bas vol s’estendre à la vollée,/Où ce mien vueil ne peult en rien valoir,/Ne la pensée, ainsi comme avolée,/Craingnant qu’en fin Fortune l’esvolée’ (vv. 1–5). On philosophic music, see Skenazi 1994, 90. Background on Cajetan, Pomponazzi, and scholasticism can be found in Schmitt and Skinner 1988, 507ff. See also Copleston 1963, 3:27–31, 157–72. See the excellent study by Miller 2003, 36. Heninger1974. In the De docta ignoratia, Cusanus holds that the universe is a contraction of divine being, and each finite entity is a contraction of the universe. In each human being there is a union of extremes such as the finite and the infinite, the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul, which make of the individual not only a microcosm but also a coincidentia oppositorium. God is viewed as omnia complicans in the sense that all is contained in the divine simplicity. Also, God is omnia explicans in that all things in creation and his creatures come forth and unfold from him (Miller 2003, 12–67). Staub (1967, 100) sees Scève’s Délie and his Microcosme through the constructs of Cusanus. Man, the microcosmic mirror of God, is gifted with inexhaustible intellectual vitality, a complicatio whose potential is actualized through explicatio in which his efforts in achieving progress become themselves instruments of knowledge. Pico della Mirandola also considers the individual human being as a microcosm, and in his work states that each of us unites three different worlds within the same universe: ‘the elemental world,’ ‘the celestial world,’ and ‘the angelic and invisible world’ (1977, 85, 94, 106). In the Oratio de hominis dignitate Pico places individuals in the middle of creation to emphasize their freedom in either making themselves like God or descending to lower things. In God’s rousing prosopopeia to Adam, the former proclaims: ‘We have given thee, Adam, no fixed seat, no form of thy very own, no gift peculiarly thine, that thou mayest feel as thine own, have as thine own, possess as thine own seat, the form, the gifts which thou thyself shalt desire. A limited nature in other creatures is confined within the laws

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written down by us. In conformity with thy free judgment, into whose hands I have placed thee at the centre of the world, that from there thou mayest more conveniently look around and see whatsoever is in the world. Neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal have we made thee. Thou, like a judge appointed for being honourable, art the moulder and maker of thyself; thou canst grow downward into the lower natures which are brutes. Thou canst again grow upward from thy soul’s reason into the higher natures which are divine’ (4–5). [Nec certam sedem, nec propriam faciem, nec munus ullum peculiare tibi dedimus, o Adam, ut quam sedem, qua faciem, quae munera tute optaveris, ea, pro voto, pro tua sententia, habeas mirabile ... Definita ceteris natura intra praescriptas a nobis leges coercetur: Tu, nillis angustiis coercitus, pro tuo arbitrio, in cuius manu te posui, tibi illa praefinies. Medium te mundi posui, ut circumspiceres inde commodius quicquid est in mundo. Nec te caelestem, neque terrenum, nec mortalem, nec immortalem fecimus, ut tui ipsius quasi arbitrarius honorariusque plastes et fictor, in quam malueris tute forman effingas. Poteris in inferiora quae sunt bruta degenerare; poteris in superiora quae sunt divina ex tui animi sententia regenerari’] (1942, 104–6). As Cassirer points out about Pico, the scholastic proposition operari sequiter esse is valid for the world of things, but in the human world the formula is reversed: ‘the being of every individual follows from his doing’ (1963, 84). Charles de Bovelles’s work De sapiente (1509) parallels that of Pico and invokes the concept of the microcosm to project the growth and development of human power. Proceeding from a Neoplatonic framework abounding in analogies, Bovelles states that the world has four levels, esse, vivere, sentire, intelligere, which enable humanity to progress from substance to self-conscious thought. Through the power of freedom that harnesses both virtus and ars, mankind engages in a continual process of becoming by dialectically overcoming the differences and contradictions in being. Achieving self-consciousness through reason, humanity returns to nature not as sheer matter, but as a higher order of subjective actualization. It must also be mentioned that Bovelles’s Ars Oppositorum, a treatise dealing with logic and encyclopedism, reflects the work of Cusanus and Lull. On this matter, see Victor 1978, 73–87. 17 Most research on Scève following Saulnier (2:158), gives 1549 as the first date of publication. However, it has been discovered that 1542 is the earliest known date of publication. See Ardouin 1989, 133. See also Guégan 1927 edition, 293–7. 18 See Guégan 1927 edition, 290–1. 19 See the edition of Giudici 1976.

Notes to pages 12–14

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20 Saulnier 1:113–17. See also Parturier (1961 edition, xxxi) who quotes Fontaine’s poetic address to Scève: ‘Tes vers ... requierent un docteur.’ 21 1993, 272.: ‘Scève ne cessera d’ailleurs de le rappeler tout au long de son canzoniere: Délie est sa déesse, l’ “idole de [s]a vie,” “son idole à lui—l” “idole mienne,” souligne-t-il en D 297, en parlant de son “sainct Pourtraict,” c’està-dire, une fois encore, de son image; il ne vit que pour lui dresser des autels, lui sacrifier son coeur, l’adorer, l’idolâtrer. Son Décalogue à lui, c’est celui de l’Amour, pas celui du “Dieu jaloux” (“Je preferoys à tous dieux ma Maistresse,/Ainsi qu’Amour le m’avoit commandé” [D 16]—et son geste se veut consciemment geste de provocation, audacieux défi lancé à la divinité.’ 22 The aforementioned points on the history of Renaissance Lyon are taken from Baur 1906 and Kleinclausz 1939. Also in Kleinclausz, see the preamble to the city charter discussing liberty (210); see also Wadsworth 1962, 68; Saulnier 1:18–19; McFarlane 1966 edition of Delie, 6–7; Zemon Davis 1975, 65–95 and Rigolot 1997, 17–29. 23 Pourrat 1953, vol. 3; Gilson 1955; Bouyer, Leclercq, Vandenbroucke, and Cognet 1962; Cave 1969; Martz 1954; Lawalski1979. 24 Guibert 1953, 101–2, 158–9. Ignatius attended the Collège de Montaigu in Paris in 1528 where it is likely that he studied Latin and the humanities according to the scholastic model of logic, dialectics, and disputation. However, in 1529 he attended the Collège de Sainte-Barbe where he encountered a much more humanistic curriculum emphasizing grammar, the arts, and rhetoric (Quintillian and Cicero). In fact, his Paris days had a strong impact on the educational reforms he recommended for Jesuit education that take shape in the Ratio Studiorum. He advocated the ordo Parisiensis and practical theology and sought to cultivate the eloquentia perfecta whose goal was to use rhetoric to arouse the emotions. See Dimler 2007, 55–60. 25 Ignatius of Loyola 1991, 117. 26 Ignatius of Loyola 1969. Henceforth, the letter A will designate this edition of the Autograph. See also Ganss 1991 edition, 117. 27 See Pourrat 1953, vol. 3, ch. 2: ‘At the end of the evolution of methodical prayer we find a masterpiece: The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. These are the crown of the systemization of the spiritual life which was slowly wrought age after age by the pressure of circumstances and difficulties and was completed at the time of the Renaissance’ (23). De Guibert states that the most authoritative witnesses place the origins of the book at Manresa in 1522. Ignatius spent seven years (1528–35) in Paris attending both the Collège de Montaigu and the Collège de Saint-Barbe. While in that city, he was already administering the Exercises to fervent followers (101–2). Henri

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32 33

34 35 36 37 38

39

40

41

Notes to pages 15–19 Watrigant (1919) provides an introduction to and the principal texts of three theoreticians of methodical prayer. Gansfort 1966, 287–9. See Mauburnus 1603. See Rice 1971, 111–12. One of the most authoritative studies of Mauburnus is Debongnie 1927. On the Rosetum see especially chs 2, 7, and 8. On the Scala, see especially ch. 10. For the Scala, Mauburnus was greatly indebted to Wessel Gansfort, also a member of the Brethern of the Common Life. See Gansfort 1966, 287–9. On the sources of the Spiritual Exercises, in addition to De Guibert, one will profit from Watrigant, 1897. On Ludolph as a source for Loyola, see Guibert 1953, 154. See also Conway1976, 127–8; 138–9. Recordatio and Compassio are a virtual poetics of Ignatius’s composition of place and the application of the senses. Regarding the codes and means of interartistic translation in the fourteenth-century and beyond, Conway concludes: ‘Few sources show us as well as does the Vita Christi the actual process by means of which abstract ideas were transformed into pictures and images in the later Middle Ages’ (146). DS, vol. 2, col. 1322 (entry by Michel Olphe-Galliard). See also Watrignant 1897, 72:200–3. Watrigant 1919, 2–28. A, 184. The translation I use is that of Mottola in Ignatius of Loyola, 1964 edition, 59. Future references to the Spiritual Exercises will be to SEM. Olphe-Galliard, vol. 2, cols 1322–3. SEM, 55. ‘El primer puncto será traer la memoria sobre el primer pecado, que fue de los ángeles, y luego sobre el mismo el entendimiento discurriendo, luego la voluntad, queriendo todo esto memorar y entender, por más me enuergonçar y confundir; trayendo en comparación de vn pecado de los ángelos tantos pecados míos, y donde ellos por vn pecado fueron al infierno, quántas vezes yo le he merescido por tantos’ (A, 188). Of course Ignatius gives the director instructions who in turn guides the exercitant. But the text could and was taken in hand directly by a readermeditator. SEM, 54. ‘El primer preámbulo es composición viendo el lugar. Aqui es de notar, que en la contemplación o meditación visible, así como contemplar a Xpo nuestro Señor, el qual es visible, la composición será ver con la vista de la ymaginación el lugar corpóreo, donde se halla la cosa que quiero contemplar’ (A, 184). SEM, 71. ‘El primer puncto es ver las personas; es a saber, ver a nuestra Señora y a Joseph y a la ancilla, y al niño Jesú después de ser nascido; haziéndome

Notes to pages 19–27

42 43

44

45 46 47

48

49

50

51

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yo vn pobrezito y esclauito indigno, mirándolos, contemplándolos, y seruiéndolos en sus neccessidades, como si presente me hallase, con todo actamiento y reuerencia possible’ (A, 230). SEM, 55–6. ‘y conseqenter discurrir con el entendimiento más particularmente, vsando de la voluntad como está dicho’ (A, 190). SEM, 56. ‘El colloquio se haze propriamente hablando, así como vn amigo habla a otro, o vn sieruo a su señor; quándo pidiendo alguna gracia, quándo culpándose por algún mal hecho, quándo comunicando sus cosas, y queriendo consejo en ellas’ (A, 192). Agricola’s use of enargeia, though not in a religious context, is a telling indication of the problems of forging the visual from the verbal. See Cave 1979, 12–18. Malinowski 1946, 315. Jakobson 1960, 355. See Coleman 1975, ch. 4, as well as Coleman 1964a, 1–15. From Paolo Giovio’s Raggionamento in the sixteenth century to Dominique Bouhours Les Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène in the seventeenth century it was commonplace for theoreticians of the impresa to use the body/soul distinction. See Russell 1985, 40–6. This rule has come to life in many ways and may be seen in Saulnier’s reaction to the ‘emblesmes’ where he found it ‘remarquable’ that in a love cycle there were so few illustrations directly concerned with love. See 1:212. Quoted from Praz 1964, 64. Here Praz cites Emanuele Tesauro’s Tenth Proposition, ‘The Body of the Perfect Device must be wonderful.’ I have used Tesauro 1968, 649: ‘tengono l’animo alquante sospeso & maravigliato.’ Pliny the Elder 1983, Book X, LXXXII: ‘viperae mas caput inserit in os, quod illa abrodit voluptatis dulcedine. terrestrium eadem sola intra se parit ova unius coloris et mollia ut pisces. tertio die intra uterum catulos excludit, dein singulis diebus singulos parit, xx fere numero; itaque ceteri tarditatis inpatientes perrumpunt latera occisa parente’ (400). For documentation and discussion on Horapollo and Valeriano, see Coleman 1981, 52–3. In the Christian Pauline context Paul, in his Letter to the Romans (6:4–7, 11) establishes an analogy of conversion: just as the death of Christ leads to his resurrection, so through baptism does the convert move through the death of sin to the renewal of spiritual life. See Skenazi 1992, 19. In the Neoplatonic traditions of France and Italy which include Antoine Héroet, Marguerite de Navarre, and Leone Ebreo, death is understood as asceticism or a purification from corporeal bonds that liberates the soul to intellectual and mystical contemplation of the divinity. See Perry 1976, 2–13. Plato’s Phaedo, translated into Latin by Ficino in 1536, was a popular contemporary source of such ideas. Finally, when Scève writes ‘L’Esprit ravy d’un si doulx sentement,/En

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55 56

57

58 59

Notes to pages 29–32 aultre vie, et plus doulce trespasse’ (D 168, vv. 3–4), he takes up a topos from the amatory lyric extending from the troubadours to the dolce stil nuovo to Petrarch’s Rime where the spiritual and the erotic are mixed. On this point see Weber 1955, 165–6. Cave 1985, 112–24. Du Bellay 2001, 143–4. The notion of glory as illustrious brightness publicly witnessed appears in the last dizain of Délie: ‘Flamme si saincte en son cler durera,/Tousjours luysante en publique apparence’ (D 449, vv. 1–2). Defaux 2004 edition, 2:283. ‘As I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, nor to occupy themselves with myths and endless genealogies which promote speculations rather than the divine training that is in faith; whereas the aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and sincere faith’ (1 Timothy 1:3–5). Russell 1985, 190. See also Saunders 1988, 78. In Hieroglyphica, Horapollo shows a serpent eating its tail showing that all things produced by the world are consumed. See the Kerver 1543 edition, aiii r (1:2). SEM, 59; A, 200–2. It will be objected that a better model for Délie’s meditative dimension would be Marguerite de Navarre rather than Augustine. This may best be seen in her poetry such as the Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne (1524) or the Miroir de l’ame pécheresse (1531). To a certain extent I am sympathetic with this point of view. Not only were Scève and Marguerite French contemporaries, but they also had great admiration for one another. Both were inspired by Neoplatonism. In addition, Marguerite’s work mirrors the meditative criteria that underpin much of Délie. Self-knowledge is predicated on meditative poetry which is circulated in a highly refined lay setting. Since Marguerite places a premium on amour-charité, she establishes an analogous communication circuit consisting of lover, love, and beloved. From Briçonnet she learns the vital lesson that verbal language is the discourse of interior illumination and redemption. Finally, in such works as La Coche she uses emblems to capture the paradox of flesh and spirit, temporality and permanence. Yet, I opt for Augustine. He is one of the major sources of religious and philosophic thought bequeathed to the Renaissance in addition to being one of Marguerite’s most significant models. Moreover, his analysis of the powers and effects of memoria correspond to Délie’s preoccupation with memory as a problematic ground of identity. Both Scève and Augustine view moral fault as a kind of error, and both stage passionate but highly analytical battles be-

Notes to pages 32–5

60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

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tween the flesh and the spirit. Most importantly, Augustine resembles Scève in his searching philosophic reflections and in his impulse to push metaphysical and epistemological interrogations to the brink of enigma, paradox, and perplexity. Both think in questions, and it is this sceptical spirit that motors their thought. Stock 2001, 35–6. Monfasani 1999, 1, 156. ConfPC, X:8, p. 216. ‘multa mihi super hoc oboritur admiratio, stupor apprehendit me. Et eunt homines mirari alta montium et ingentes fluctus maris et latissimos lapsus fluminum et oceani ambitum et gyros siderum, et relinquunt se ipsos ...’ (Conf, 124). Gorce 1958, 238. Quotation taken from Wendel 1963, 125. ‘Sequi illum [Augustine] incipio.’ Quoted from Sturm-Maddox 1985, 140. See also Courcelle 1963, 329–51. Concerning Petrarch’s revisions, see Quillen 1998, 122. On Scève’s ‘parody’ of Petrarch, see DellaNeva 1983, 101–3. ConfPC, 13; Conf., 10. ConPC, 62; Conf., 27, 121. As for the English translation of the X:5 passage, I have preferred that of Bourke 1992, 63. ‘You who hear in scattered rhymes/The sound of those sighs which I nourished in my heart/During my first youthful error’ (R 1, vv. 1–3). Quoted from Sturm-Maddox 1985, 96. [‘Ex quo fit ut, quotiens Confessionum, tuarum libros lego, inter duos contrarios affectus, spem videlicet et metum, letis non sine lacrimis interdum legere me arbitrer non alienam sed propriam mee peregrinationis historiam.’] See Petrarca 1992b, 1:114. Sturm-Maddox 1985, 160. Sturm-Maddox refers the reader to Musa 1974, 166 for her point. ConfPC, 55. ‘et oderam securitatem et viam sine muscipulis’ (Conf., 23). See Conf., X:34: ‘nam ego capior miserabiliter, et tu evellis misericorditer aliquando non sentientem, quia suspensius incideram, aliquando cum dolore, quia iam inhaeseram’ (140). [I am caught and need your mercy, and by your mercy you will save me from the snare. Sometimes, if I have not fallen deep into the trap, I shall feel nothing when you rescue me; but at other times, when I am fast ensnared, I shall suffer the pain of it] (ConfPC, 241). See also Conf., IV:7: ‘non enim tu eras, sed vanum phantasma et error meus erat deus meus. si conabar eam ibi ponere ut requiesceret, per inane, labebatur et iterum ruebat super me, et ego mihi remanseram infelix locus, ubi nec esse possem nec inde recedere. quo enim cor meum fugeret a corde meo? quo a me ipso fugerem? quo non me sequerer?’ (37–8). [It was not you that I believed in,

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78 79

80 81

82 83 84

Notes to pages 35–9 but some empty figment. The god I worshipped was my own delusion, and if I tried to find it in a place to rest my burden, there was nothing there to uphold it. It only fell and weighed me down once more, so that I was still my own unhappy prisoner, unable to live in such a state yet powerless to escape from it. Where could my heart find refuge from itself? Where could I go, yet leave myself behind? Was there any place where I should not be a prey to myself?] (ConfPC, 78). Finally, see Conf., IV:12: ‘quo itis in aspera? quo itis?’ (40). [What snags and pitfalls lie before you? Where do your steps lead?] (ConfPC, 82). For example, poems 59, 99, 142, 165, 195, 211, 257. ‘The result is to enlime our souls more deeply’ (R 99, v. 8). ‘o comme novo augello al visco in ramo’ (R, 257, v. 8). ‘Phantasms are nothing but figments of corporeal shapes appearing to bodily sense. It is the easiest thing in the world to commit them to memory as they appear or, by thinking about them, to divide or multiply, contract or expand, set in order or disturb, or give them any kind of shape.’ See Of True Religion, trans. Burleigh 1953, 234. The PL gives the following: ‘Mutari autem animam posse, non quidem, localiter, sed tamen temporaliter, suis affectionibus quisque cognoscit. Corpus vero et temporibus et locis esse mutabile, cuivis advertere facile est. Phantasmata porro nihil sunt aliud quam de specie corporis corporeo sensu attracta figmenta: quae memoriae mandare ut accepta sunt, vel partiri, vel multiplicare, vel contrahere, vel distendere, vel ordinare, vel perturbare, vel quolibet modo figurare cogitando facillimum est, sed cum verum quaeritur, cavere et vitare difficile’ (X:18, vol. 34, col. 130, stress mine). See Saint Augustine: The Trinity, trans. McKenna 1963, 326–9; PL 42, col. 990. Translation by Hans Nachod, ‘The Ascent of Mont Ventoux’ in Cassirer, Kristeller, and Randall 1948, 44. ConfPC, 23. ‘deus meus, vita mea, dulcedo mea sancta, aut quid dicit aliquis cum de te dicit? Et vae tacentibus de te, quoniam loquaces muti sunt’ (Conf., 4). ConfPC, 198. ‘rapiat et absorbeat’ (Conf., 114). ‘Né giamai lingua umana/contar poria quel che le due divine/luci sentir mi fanno’ (R, 72:10–12). ‘Ond’io non pote’ mai formar parola/ch’altro che da me stesso fosse intesa,/così m’à fatto Amor tremante et fioco./Et veggi’ or ben che caritate accesa/lega la lingua altrui, gli spirti invola:/chi po dir com’ egli arde è ’n picciol foco’ (R, 170, vv. 9–14). The subject of ineffability will be developed in chapter 3. Quignard 1974, 33. ‘aeterno in silentio verbo,’ Conf. (XI:7), 151. Quoted from Durling 1976, 20.

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85 Saulnier 1:238. 86 This is divine illumination of the mind in which the soul discovers knowledge through God’s presence. In Augustine’s later formulations this is neither Platonic preexistence in which the soul remembers the intelligible from a past life, nor ‘nativistic Innatism’ which is ‘a congenital gift.’ Rather, as Etienne Gilson formulates it, ‘as the sun is the source of the physical light which makes things visible, so God is the source of the spiritual light which makes the sciences intelligible to the mind.’ See 1960, 76–7. 87 Conf., 27. The translation is mine 88 Noth 1990, 442. Burke (1961) also takes up the rhetoric of the Confessions. 89 These are Augustine’s words quoted by Brown 1967, 166. 90 The points made in this paragraph concerning verbal language are based on Colish 1968, 44, 42, 39. See also Jackson 1972. 91 ConfPC, IV:11, Conf., 81, 39. 92 This apt phrase is coined by Colish 1968, 33. 93 ConfPC, X:14, 220; Conf., 127. On Augustine’s metaphors for memory (treasures, caves, recesses) within the context of medieval culture, see Carruthers 1990, 22, 35, 40, 146. 94 Marcus 1967, 201. 95 ConfPC, X:11, 218–19. ‘nam cogo et cogito sic est, ut ago et agito, facio et factito, verum tamen sibi animus hoc verbum proprie vindicavit, ut non quod alibi, sed quod in animo conligitur, id est cogitur, cogitari proprie iam dicatur’ (Conf., X:11, 126). 96 This term is used by Marrou 1949, 209–327. 97 One of the most important instruments of speech is expression per speculum in aenigmate. Cicero classified aenigma as a figure of speech, and towards the end of De Trinitate Augustine reminds us that it is one of the tropes of allegory: ‘a kind of simile, but obscure and difficult to understand’ (quoted from Colish 1968, 53). Rather than defeating meaning, the inherent difficulty of the aenigma enhances understanding by pushing one to locate analogies between human and divine speech. An example of such conceptual perplexities was how to understand ‘three in one’ regarding the Trinity. Addressing this question, Augustine had recourse to the human personality, the soul, and the lover: being, knowing, and willing are mutually interconnected and of equal significance as are other triads such as memory, intelligence and will; mind, knowledge, and love; lover, beloved, and love. As the believer progresses in spiritual wisdom, the temporal analogy with the Trinity (memoria, intellectus, and voluntas) is replaced by an eternal analogy: memoria Dei, intellectus Dei, and amor Dei. In the final books of the De Trinitate, in order to stress the dynamic activity of the mental faculties, the nouns are dropped and the

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105 106 107 108 109

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Notes to pages 43–5 verbal forms meminit, intellegit, and diligit are emphasized. On these points see Colish 1968, 34–5, 52 ff. as well as Chadwick 1986, 91–2. On the relation between language and purification in the Confessions, see Vance 1973a. See DellaNeva 1983, 96–103. See also Frelick 1994a, 133–4. It is likely that Scève met some of the meditative traits of Augustine and Bonaventure through his most influential model, Petrarch. As Giuseppe Mazzotta observes, ‘In theology he [Petrarch] replaces Aquinas’s abstractions with the detailed, steady self-analysis of St. Augustine’s Confessions and the meditative strains of St. Bonaventure’s Itinerarium mentis in Deum.’ See 1993, 23. Conf., X:3, 120. ConfPC, X:3, 209; Conf., 120. ConfPC, XI:2, 254; Conf., 148–9. Beaujour 1991, 39. In this chapter, Beaujour is laying the foundation for his concept of the literary self-portrait as an encyclopedic speculum, which is opposed to such narrative structures as autobiography. While autobiography reconstitutes and recuperates a chronological self, the auto-portrait probes the very notion of subject. In the introduction Beaujour situates Augustine’s paradoxical place in the history of self-portraiture: ‘Indeed, a careful examination of Saint Augustine’s Confessions, especially Book X, does enable one to grasp certain essential traits of the self-portrait in a perspective that may seem paradoxical, since Book X constitutes a template for self-portrayal, a self-portrait without a Self, without epithets or predicates, with nothing but the lineaments of the machine that produces any self-portrait once God keeps aloof from man, and His death incites the individual to set himself up in His place, in the tomb of writing, between Invention and Memory’ (7). 1 John 2:16. These are the three temptations that structure the chapter. Ephesians 3:20. Psalms 2:11. 1 Corinthians 15:54. ConfPC, X:30, 233–4; Conf., 135–6. Augustine’s identity as a lover and a lyric poet is felicitously captured by Philippe Sellier’s observation (1995, xii): ‘Augustin demeure le grand poète de la naissance de l’amour dans les âmes ... Il a communiqué à ses disciples les plus doués un véritable lyrisme de la grâce.’ According to Nichols (1993, 798–9), monologue ‘is used in a number of senses in discussing poetry, all of which suggest the idea of a person speaking alone, with or without an audience. Thus prayers and laments are monologues, as are many lyric poems. At the same time, monologue has a clearly dramatic element, since no speaker ever speaks in complete isolation ...

Notes to pages 45–8

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112

113 114 115 116

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Devotional and meditative poetry in all traditions tends to canonize monologue, as in speeches by the Virgin to the Cross or direct addresses to the deity.’ ‘So there are two wills in us, because neither by itself is the whole will, and each possesses what the other lacks’ (ConfPC, VIII:9, 172). ‘et ideo sunt duae voluntates, quia una earum tota non est et hoc adest alerti quod deest alteri’ (Conf., VIII:9, 98). ConfPC., I:13, 34: ‘O God, you are the Light of my heart, the Bread of my inmost soul, and the Power that weds my mind and the thoughts of my heart.’ ‘Deus, lumen cordis mei et panis oris intus animae meae et virtus maritans mentem meam et sinum cogitationis meae?’ (Conf., I:13, 11). Taylor 1989, 130. Quoted from Bourke 1992, 22. The italics are used by Pegis. Augustine’s retrospective comment on the discourse of the Soliloquies is made in the Retractationes. See Watson 1990 edition, iv. Judicial rhetoric is central not only to meditation but to autobiography as well. Mathieu-Castellani (1995, 19) writes, ‘Celui qui écrit “le discours de sa vie” ouvre un procès, soutient une cause, convoque des témoins à la barre du tribunal, en appelle à un juge, à des juges, ou au Juge, se détend et s’accuse, s’accuse et refuse de se défendre.’ ConfPC, X:5, 210; Conf., X:5, 121. ConfPC, X:4, 210; Conf., X:4, 120–1. The vision at Ostia is a particularly good example of such ascents. See ConfPC, IX:10, 197–8; Conf., IX:10, 113–14. ‘The source of all life,’ and ‘fontis vitae’ are taken from section 10 and come from Psalms, 35:10 (36:10). See Bourke (1992, 135) who distinguishes the various terms that Augustine uses for different functions of love such as amor, voluntas, facultatem voluntatis, vis, and the aesthetic attraction of modus, species, ordo (137). The use of the will in love is clearly analysed by Gilson 1960, 132–42. Augustine’s penchant for moral distinctions regarding love is concisely observed by Stock (1996, 195) in the context of De Doctrina Christiana: ‘Of many useful things, only four kinds are to be loved: those above us, in us, equal to us, and below us (I.23.6–9). Above us lie God and the angels, who enjoy what we desire (1.30.2); below us lies carnal and material lust (I.24). Within us is a natural love of self (I.35.4–5); this should be present not as an end but as a means, so that we can master the skill of loving ourselves profitably (I.25.1–2). Loving our equals means loving our fellow men (I.28.1–4); however, the most important type of desire, and the summation of Augustine’s thinking in Book I, is the “love of a thing that can be fully enjoyed,” namely God.’ ConfPC, X:6, 211–12. See the Latin text of the Conf.: ‘quid autem amo, cum

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126 127

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Notes to pages 48–50 te amo? non speciem corporis nec decus temporis, non candorem lucis, ecce istis amicum oculis, non dulces melodias cantilenarum omnimodarum, non florum et unguentorum et aromatum suaviolentiam, non manna et mella, non membra acceptabilia carnis amplexibus: non haec amo, cum amo deum meum, et tamen amo quandam lucem et quandam vocem et quendam odorem et quendam cibum et quendam amplexum, cum amo deum meum, lucem, vocem, odorem, cibum, amplexum interioris hominis mei, ubi fulget animae meae quod non capit lucus, et ubi sonat quod non rapit tempus, et ubi olet quod non spargit flatus, et ubi sapit quod non minuit edacitas, et ubi haeret quod non divellit satietas. hoc est quod amo, cum deum meum amo’ (X:6, 121–2). The simultaneity of past and future in Augustine is, as Stock has pointed out, ‘a type of mimesis.’ Stock explains as follows: ‘One speaks or writes the self, then, because minds are unknowable. What takes place in the hearer’s or the reader’s mind is a type of mimesis: not the imitation of outer action, as in a set speech, a rhetorical debate, or a dramatic performance, but, as proposed in books 7 and 8 [of the Confessions], the recreation of the self from within, by which an already existing narrative, one’s past life, is traced over by the shape of another, a life to come. Both are representations, one pointing to the past, the other to the future – whence the centrality of memory in sorting them out.’ See 1996, 214. ConfPC, XI:14, 264; Conf., XI:14, 154. See Conf., XI:26, 161: ‘inde mihi visum est nihil esse aliud tempus quam distentionem.’ Also, ‘In te, anime meus, tempora metior’ (XI:26, 162). Lloyd 1999, 56. ‘Sed quomodo minuitur aut consumitur futurm, quod nondum est, aut quomodo crescit praeteritum, quoid iam non est, nisi quia in animo qui illud agit tria sunt? nam et expectat et attendit et meminit, ut id quod expectat per id quod attendit transeat in id quod meminerit.’ Conf., XI:28, 162. ConfPC, XI:27, 277; Conf., XI:27, 162. ‘affectionem quam res praetereuntes in te faciunt et, cum illae praeterierint, manet, ipsam metior praesentem, non ea quae praeterierunt ut firet’ (Conf., XI:27, 162). This section of the Confessions alludes to the following time periods: the period of concubinage, permitted by Roman law, forbidden by Christian law; the youth who in his late teens fathered the boy Adeodatus; life as a government official; Monica’s disapproval of his marriage with the unnamed mother; the abandonment of Monica’s plan in Milan for an arranged marriage with another woman due to his conversion. ConfPC, X:30, 233; Conf., X:30, 135.

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130 The Confessions are pervaded with language denoting agonistic trials, inner contention, and contestatory forces – a fact which reminds one of the title of Augustine’s late fourth-century work De agone christiano. A sampling of passages from the Confessions gives the reader a flavour of Augustine’s way of construing the world as agon, struggle, adversity, trial, or conflicting wills. (The English is given by Pine-Coffin, the Latin by the O’Donnell 1992 edition.): ‘But what sort of pity can we really feel for an imaginary scene on the stage? The audience is not called upon to offer help but only to feel sorrow, and the more they are pained, the more they applaud the author. Whether this human agony is based on fact or simply imaginary, if it is acted so badly that the audience is not moved to sorrow, they leave the theatre in a disgruntled and critical mood; whereas, if they are made to feel pain, they stay to the end watching happily’ (ConfPC, III:2, 56). ‘sed qualis tandem misericordia in rebus fictis et scenicis? non enim ad subveniendum provocatur auditor sed tantum ad dolendum invitatur, et actori earum imaginum amplius favet cum amplius dolet. et si calamitates illae hominum, vel antiquae vel falsae, sic agantur ut qui spectat non doleat, abscedit inde fastidiens et reprehendens; si autem doleat, manet intentus et gaudens lacrimat’ (Conf., III:2, 23). ‘But why do I talk of these things? It is time to confess, not to question. I lived in misery, like every man whose soul is tethered by the love of things that cannot last and then is agonized to lose them’ (Conf., IV:6, ConfPC, 77). ‘Quid autem ista loquor? Non enim tempus quaerendi nunc est, sed confitendi tibi. Miser eram, et miser est omnis animus vinctus amicitia rerum mortalium, et dilaniatur cum eas amittit, et tunc sentit miseriam qua miser est et antequam amittat eas’ (Conf., IV:6, 36–7). ‘During this agony of indecision I performed many bodily actions, things which a man cannot always do, even if he wills to do them’ (Conf., VIII:8, ConfPC, 171). ‘Denique tam multa faciebam corpore in ipsis cunctationis aestibus, quae aliquando volunt homines et non valent’ (Conf., VIII:8, 97). ‘So there are two wills in us, because neither by itself is the whole will, and each possesses what the other lacks’ (Conf., VIII:9, ConfPC, 172). ‘et ideo sunt duae voluntates, quia una earum tota non est et hoc adest alteri quod deest alteri’ (Conf., VIII:9, 98). ‘If there were as many different natures in us as there are conflicting wills, we should have a great many more natures than merely two’ (Conf., VIII:10, ConfPC, 173). ‘Nam si tot sunt contrariae naturae quot voluntates sibi resistunt, non iam duae sed plures erunt’ (Conf., VIII:10, 98). ‘Is not man’s life on earth a long, unbroken period of trial?’ (Conf., X:28, ConfPC, 232). ‘numquid non temptatio est vita humana super terram sine ullo interstitio?’ (Conf., X:28, 134). ‘In the midst of these temptations, I struggle daily against greed for food and drink’ (Conf., X:31,

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139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149

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Notes to pages 50–6 ConfPC, 237). ‘In his ergo temptationibus positus certo cotidie adversus concupiscentiam manducandi et bibendi’ (Conf., X:31, 137). ConfPC, X:30, 233; Conf., X:30, 135. ConfPC, X:30, 233; Conf., X:30, 135. ConfPC, X:30, 233; Conf., X:30, 135. For this observation I am indebted to Bourke (1992, 207). ConfPC, X:30, 233–4; Conf., X:30, 135. ConfPC, X:30, 234. ‘nos non fecisse quod tamen in nobis quoquo modo factum esse doleamus’ (Conf., X:30, 135). ConfPC, X:30, 233; Conf., X:30, 135. See Dulaey 1993, 105–7; 129–39; 227–30. In the Index des références (237–9) there is a list of Augustine’s discussions on dreams taken not only from the Confessions but from his other works. Another important place where Augustine discusses sexual dreams is De Genesi ad litteram, 12, 15, 31. Mann 1999, 140–65. See also Haji 1999 and Matthews 1992, 98. In a similar vein see the article by Matthews, ‘On Being Immoral In a Dream’ (1981). On additional information concerning the linguistic concept of aspect within the field of semantics, see Lyons 1977, 2:703–17. ConfPC, X:30, 233. Conf., X:30, 135. ConfPC, X:30, 233. Conf., X:30, 135. ConfPC, X:30, 233–4. Conf., X:30, 135. ConfPC, X:3–4, 208–9: ‘What I once was,’ ‘What I am now,’ Conf., X:3–4, 119–20. Book X, chapters 30–41. Speaking of the immense activity and contents of the memory, Augustine discovers: ‘All this goes on inside me, in the vast cloisters of my memory. In it are the sky, the earth, and the sea, ready at my summons, together with everything that I have ever perceived in them by my senses, except the things, which I have forgotten. In it I meet myself as well’ (ConfPC, 10:8, 215) (stress mine). ‘Intus haec ago, in aula ingenti memoriae meae. Ibi enim mihi caelum et terra et mare praesto sunt cum omnibus quae in eis sentire potui, praeter, illa quae oblitus sum. Ibi mihi et ipse occuro.’ Conf. X:14, 124. ‘See how much I have explored the vast field of my memory in search of you, O Lord! And I have not found you outside it. For I have discovered nothing about you except what I have remembered since the time when I first learned about you. Ever since then I have not forgotten you. For I found my God, who is Truth itself, where I found truth, and ever since I learned the truth I have not forgotten it. So, since the time when I first

Notes to pages 56–67

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159 160 161 162 163

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learned of you, you have always been present in my memory’ (ConfPC, X:24, 230). [Ecce quantum spatiatus sum in memoria mea quaerens te, domine, et non te invent extra eam. Nec enim aliquid de te inveni quod non meminissem, ex quo didici te, nam ex quo didici te non sum oblitus tui. Ubi enim inveni veritatem, ibi inveni deum meum, ipsam vetitatem, quam ex quo didici non sum oblitus. Itaque ex quo te didici, manes in memoria mea] (Conf., X:24, 133). On the concepts of the Trinity of the last three books of the Confessions, see O’Donnell’s 1992 edition, 3:301 ff. ‘sperans perfecturum te in me misericordias tuas’ (Conf., X:30, 136). On the rhetorical category of prolepsis, see Genette 1972, 105–15. ConfPC, X:30, 233–4; Conf., 135–6. See Vance 1982, 27. I have omitted the word ‘universal’ in deference to Bourke’s point in his analysis of the concept of the light of human reason in Augustine: ‘The socalled Thomistic explanation – that this is the Aristotelian agent intellect which abstracts universals from sense phantasms – has no foundation in Augustine’s texts. Yet the light of the mind is some created aid that enables people to make true judgments’ (1992, 133). Brown (1967, 196), observing Augustine’s discourse in adjudicating quarrels and lawsuits arising in his flock, notices that ‘Augustine thought of himself as the successor of the upright judges of Israel. And, in delivering judgement, he would always look forward, with terror, to the Last Judgement.’ Brown also says: ‘The God of the African Church was very much the awe-inspiring Judge. A streak of this primitive terror was strong in Augustine; even when he seemed to be very far from his roots, as a successful rhetor in Milan, he was haunted by “fears of death and Judgement”’ (ibid.). See Conf., I:20: ‘et ero ipse tecum, quia et ut sim tu dedisti mihi’ (15); V:1: ‘et ibi refectio et vera fortitudo’ (46); X:6: ‘iam tu melior es [the soul], tibi dico, anima, quoniam tu vegetas molem corporis tui praebens ei vitam, quod nullum corpus praestat corpori. Deus autem tuus etiam tibi vitae vita est’ (X:6, 123–4). That dizain 143 is more than challenging to the reader is indicated by Roubichou-Stretz’s reaction: ‘Ce dizain particulièrement obscure’ (1973, 55). D 419. See Saulnier 1:236–40. Saulnier 1:236–40. See ibid., 1:240. According to Peirce, ‘An Index is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that Object.’ See ‘Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,’ in Peirce, Buchler ed. (1955), 107–8. Saulnier 1:237.

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165 See Cave 1988. Cave begins his study explaining the Aristotelian word anagnorisis, and says that ‘in Aristotle’s definition, anagnorisis brings about a shift from ignorance to knowledge; it is the moment at which the characters understand their predicament fully for the first time, the moment that resolves a sequence of unexplained and often implausible occurrences; it makes the world (and the text) intelligible’ (1). 166 ‘And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live”’ (Num. 21:8) [et locutus est Dominus ad eum/fac serpentem et pone eum pro signo qui percussus aspexerit eum vivet]. See also 2 Kings 18:4. 167 The Book of Numbers uses imagery derived from magic to describe the Israelites’ bodily and spiritual redemption through the mediation of the serpent. Verses 8–9 of chapter 21 refer to the Israelites who were saved from death by gazing upon the serpent: ‘echo serpent magic, as practiced, e.g. in ancient Egypt. The bronze serpent (Nehushtan) was an object of popular worship during the Israelite monarchy (2 Kg. 18.4).’ See The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, 191. 168 Saulnier 1:237. 169 See McFarlane 1966 edition, 413, who in turn quotes Cotgrave and Huguet. 170 These pressures of rhetoric contribute to Scève’s stylistic intensity. This trait of intensity, according to Paul Veyne, is a component of modernist aesthetics, which distinguishes Scève from his ancient, lyric forbears. Veyne describes the modern viewpoint in this way: ‘Do the Roman elegists bore us because they are “insincere”? Lamartine, a sincere elegist, no longer impassions us much. He lacks thrust. When we think of a real poet, it is Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Montale, Hölderlin, or Rilke who comes [sic] to mind. Scève seems to us closer to the essence of poetry than does Ronsard. A real poet is recognizable to us by a certain intensity that passes for the true mark of lyricism. The poetry of love is a strong drink and has been so for two centuries now. Our modern aesthetics is an aesthetics of intensity’ (1988, 180–1). I have reservations about Veyne’s use of the word ‘real.’ 171 The Symposium of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett in Plato 2001, 259. See also McGinn 1997, 27. 172 See Rigolot 1994, 59: ‘Le désir de remplacer le nom de Jésus-Christ par celui de Délie n’est pas une projection critique arbitraire puisqu’il se trouve confirmé par la composition numérique du recueil scévien.’ 2 Meditative Praxis and the Tensions of Transvaluation 1 Defaux 2004 edition, 2:278, 283–5.

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2 Augustine, Sermones, PL, vol. 38, Sermo 331, col. 1461. See also Aimé Solignac’s historical review of prayer in DS. 3 See Liszka 1989, 14–15: ‘Transvaluation is based on the insight that all sign systems involve a valuative and evaluative aspect, an aspect which is superordinate in the sense that it gives formal coherence to semiotic systems. In its most general form it takes its cue from the semiotics of Peirce and argues that any sign-referent relation is always mediated by a process which revaluates the perceived, conceived, or imagined valuation of the referent within the pragmatic value structure of the sign user.’ 4 According to Réau (1955–9, 2:120), the iconography of the Tour Babel as recounted in Genesis is that the Hebrews, in an effort to save themselves from another deluge, constructed a gigantic tower reaching to the heavens. The Lord, taking exception to their orgueil, punished them by confusing their language and scattering them over the face of the earth. In dizain 123 this iconography is used mainly to communicate the poet-lover’s orgueil in attempting to compromise the woman’s moral rectitude and the punishment he incurs as a result of this transgression. To the extent that much of Délie constitutes a complaint of the loss of poetic speech, both parts of the Tour Babel myth are highly pertinent to the work as a whole. 5 See Hick 1966, 5 n. 1: ‘The dilemma was apparently formulated by Epicurus (341–270 B.C.), and is quoted as follows by Lactantius (c. A.D. 260–c. 340): “God either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is able, and is unwilling; or He is neither willing nor able, or He is both willing and able. If he is willing and is unable, He is feeble, which is not in accordance with the character of God; if He is able and unwilling, He is envious, which is equally at variance with God; if He is neither willing nor able, He is both envious and feeble, and therefore not God; if He is both willing and able, which alone is suitable to God, from what source then are evils? or why does He not remove them?”’ 6 Among the definitions Huguet gives for cas are ‘membre viril’ as well as ‘organe sexuel de la femme.’ 7 See Copleston 1963, 3:117 ff. 8 The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha, 13. 9 See Giordano 1982b. 10 For the classical view, see Pliny the Elder: ‘Verum in his sunt quidem virtutis opera magna, sed majora fortunae’ (1940, vol. 7 par. 104). For the Renaissance view see Cartari 1556, s.v. Fortuna. 11 This may be seen in such paintings as El Greco’s Burial of Count Orgaz where the lower horizontal plane of earth and the upper horizontal plane of heaven are obliquely related through contrast and juxtaposition rather than

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13 14

15 16

17 18 19

Notes to pages 90–4 by organic plan. The lower plane shows the calm and serene atmosphere of the count’s burial surrounded by gracefully smug Spanish grandees, while the upper plane depicts a celestial scene of swirling, spiralling, flimsy clouds precariously balancing the weighty figures of St John and the Virgin receiving the count’s soul. The angel bearing the soul to heaven is at the centre of the painting, which itself is decentred by other clusters of activity that compete for our attention. For example the vertical axis continually moves the eye up and down between the count’s burial below and the Almighty above with equally concentrated points of energy between the burial below and the reception of the soul by the Virgin and St John, framed by the heavy golden brocades of the dalmatics worn by St Augustine and St Stephen. Compounding this constant displacement of the eye is that, in both upper and lower planes, virtually everyone is looking in a different direction. At the top of the vertical axis, heaven itself, presided over by the Almighty, appears to compete with the infinite expanse of space at the very centre of the painting which is both everywhere and nowhere. Below is the highly concrete detail of the grandees’ clothes and facial expressions while above is the gauzy swirl of mystical vision. In all, this mannerist masterpiece dislocates centres, dissociates actions, and makes detail and whole, form and meaning compete for attention. It juxtaposes rather than connects earth and heaven, death and life, burial and resurrection. See the reproduction of this painting in Gudiol 1983, 114. Commentarium, I:4, 143. ‘Hence it happens that every love is virtuous, and every lover is just. For every love is beautiful and proper and naturally loves the proper’ (Commentary, 41). Peirce 1931–58, 3:362; 2:277. See McFarlane 1966 edition, 123. However Beverly J. Evans argues to retain the ‘le,’ not as a direct object but as a definite article preceding the substantivized infinitive ‘veoir.’ In this case the meaning would be, ‘Through sight I lose my life.’ See 1979, 351–2. This is known as the ‘virgin-capture story.’ See Shephard 1982, 47–58, 61–9. SEM, 60. ‘Asimismo, en el 2o exercicio, hazi éndome peccador grande y encadenado, es a saber, que voy atado como en cadenas a parescer delante del sumo Juez eterno’ (A, 206). SEM, 85. ‘El primer puncto es, proponer delante la cosa sobre que quiero hazer electión’ (A, 270). SEM, 55–6. ‘discurrir con el ententimiento más particularmente’ (A, 190). See Mulhauser 1965, 81. Her analysis is based on a class of ‘emblems’ having a tree trunk with some leafing branches. According to Tervarent (Mulhauser notes), the reader should consider the tree as an ‘Elément constant d’allégories exaltant le culte de la vertu, de la sagesse, des joies de l’esprit par

Notes to pages 94–8

20

21

22

23 24 25 26 27

28

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opposition aux plaisirs vulgaires’ (ibid.). See Tervarent, s.v., Tronc brisé dont une branche reverdit, 449. ‘The purpose of these Exercises is to help the exercitant to conquer himself, and to regulate his life...’ (SEM, 48) [Exercicios espirituales para vencer a sí mismo y ordenar su vida, sin determinarse por affección alguna que desordenada sea. A, 164]. SEM, 38. ‘Como en todos los exercicios siguientes spirituales husamos de los actos del entendimiento discurriendo y de los de la voluntad affectando’ (A, 142). Steiner (1982) finds that the ‘pregnant moment’ in painting corresponds to the ‘still-moment topos’ in literature both of which are based on ekphrasis, 40–1. SEM, 129. ‘Llamo consolación, quando en el ánima se causa alguna moción interior, con la qual viene la ánima a inflamarse en amor’ (A, 376). SEM, 87. ‘ … y en otras cosas piás, no queriendo ny buscando otra cosa alguna, sino en todo y por todo mayor alabanza y gloria de Dios’ (A, 278). SEM, 85. ‘El primer puncto es, proponer delante la cosa sobre que quiero hazer electión’ (A, 270). Melançon 1975, 50. See Whittlesey 1972, 323. The Bible has numerous references to the staff of travellers: Gen. 32:9, Ex. 12:11, Mk. 6:8, Lk. 9:3. Tervarent (66) notes that the bâton is an attribute of Constance. Mitchell 1986, 5. Mitchell usefully observes: ‘Any attempt to grasp ‘the idea of imagery’ is fated to wrestle with the problem of recursive thinking, for the very idea of an “idea” is bound up with the notion of imagery’ (ibid.). The brazen serpent image of D 143 serves to underscore that for the poetlover, Délie is both the perpetrator of suffering and the agent of deliverance. This double and opposite effect is symbolized by the biblical account in Numbers 21:5–9 in which God punished the Israelites for speaking against him and Moses: ‘Then the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died’ (21:6). [‘quam ob rem misit Dominus in populum ignitos serpentes ad quorum plagas et mortes plurimorum.’] The pole/brazen serpent image marks by contiguity the authority granted to Moses through the Lord to interpret God’s redemptive work, to act as mediator of the covenant, and to turn the Israelites from sin and heal them: ‘And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten when he sees it, shall live.” So Moses made a bronze serpent, and set it on a pole; and if a serpent bit any man, he would look at the bronze serpent and live’ (21:8–9). [et locutus est Dominus ad eum fac serpentem et pone eum pro signo qui percussus aspexerit eum

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31

32

33

34

35

36 37

Notes to pages 98–103 vivet/fecit ergo Moses serpentem aeneum et posuit pro signo quem cum percussi aspicerent sanababtur.] Moses’s authority to destroy idols and to affirm true images is best illustrated in Exodus 32:20 where he demolished the golden calf made by Aaron after receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. According to Foucault ‘aemulatio’ is one of the four similitudes marking Renaissance epistemology: ‘La seconde forme de similitude, c’est l’aemulatio: une sorte de convenance, mais qui serait affranchie de la loi du lieu’ (1966, 34). The other three are ‘convenientia,’ ‘analogie,’ and ‘sympathie’ (32–8). SEM, 47. ‘Principio y Fundamento: El hombre es criado para alabar, hazer reuerencia y seruir a Dios nuestro Señor y, mediante esto, salbar su ánima … Por lo qual es menester hazernos indiferentes a todas las cosas criadas’ (A, 164–6). See the Commentary, II:8, 57. ‘Amorem procreat similitudo. Similitude natura quedam est in pluribus eadam ... Accedit quod amans amati figuram suo sculpit in animo’ (Commentarium, II:8, 158). Conf.: ‘septies numeravi scriptum esse te vidisse quia bonum est quod fecisti; et hoc octavum est quia vidisti omnia quae fecisti, et ecce non solum bona sed etiam valde bona tamquam simul omnia. nam singula tantum bona erant, simul autem omnia et bona et valde’ (XIII:28, 201). In the Amorum emblemata, Vaenius appears to have imitated two of Scève’s devices. The first is ‘Au dedans je me consume’ (cf. Délie, no. 36, ‘Le Pot au feu,’ ‘Dedens je me consume’) and the second is ‘Pour un plaisir mille douleurs’ (cf. Délie, no. 31, ‘Le Papillon et la Chandelle,’ ‘En ma joye douleur’). Scève had first treated the myth of Clytie in dizain 11. The Emblemata amatoria of Daniel Heinsius also takes two of its devices from Délie. The motto of Heinsius’s second emblem, ‘Au dedans je me consume’ is very close to the motto of device 36 (‘Dedens je me consume’) and Heinsius’s emblem 7 (‘Je ne le puis celer’) recalls Scève’s ‘Celer ne le puis’ of device 36. See Praz 1973, 88–91. Ovid 1984, IV, vv. 226–73. Girolamo Ruscelli, Le Imprese illustri (Venice: Monferrato, 1572), 419–26. See, DA, 122: ‘ ... della cui vista si pasca l’amore, che elle governa non altramente che de’ razi del sole si pascono e fiori la primavera.’ Choné 2004, 214–16. The Amorum emblemata contains a heliotrope emblem as well: ‘Qvo pergis, eodem vergo.’ Cupid is sitting on his left leg looking at a sunflower. With his right hand, he points at the heliotrope, with his left the sun, thereby completing the circle of love. In spite of the erotic figure of nude Cupid, this scene is emotionally less intense than the heliotrope scene in the Amoris divini

Notes to pages 103–11

38 39 40 41

42 43 44

45 46

47 48 49

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emblemata. In fact, the light in the Amoris divini is purified and infuses the landscape with an almost providential spiritual glow. In Amorum emblemata, the landscape is slightly more sombre, the sun’s rays appear remote from Cupid, Anima does not take human form, and the sunflower only slightly tips its upper stem toward the sun. In the Amoris divini, the brilliant rays of the sun permeate the skies and dramatically reach their destination just above the heads of Anima and Cupid, made more brilliant by the god’s halo. Cupid’s arm is embracing the waist of Anima, and most of all, both figures are entranced by the contemplation, he of the sunflower, she of the sun. Physically together, but not looking at one another, they are almost miraculously rejoined in unity on another more celestial plane by spiritual transport. For the historical and philosophical trajectory of this change, see Spica 1996. On the use of emblematic meditative rhetoric in sacred emblem books, see the excellent article by Chatelain 1992. See Aresi 1613; Hugo 1624; Imago primi saeculi, 1640; Massen 1650; Ricci 1654; and Fuesslin 1696. The French quotation is the translation of Guillaume de Saint-Thierry 1975, 345, by Jean Déchanet, who is also the editor of this magisterial critical edition of one of the most informative records of monasticism and one of the most suave. The Latin text says: ‘Sed modus hic cogitandi de Deo, non est in arbitrio cogitantis, sed in gratia donantis; scilicet cum Spiritus sanctus, qui ubi vult spirat, quando vult et quomodo vult, et quibus vult, in hoc aspirat’ (344). See also 332 n. 1. See the distinctions between meditation, contemplation, and mystical rapture offered by Martz 1954, 15–20. SEM, 59; A, 200–2. Defined by Cave as ‘the evocation of a visual scene, in all its details and colors, as if the reader were present as a spectator’ (1979, 27–8). The opening of this poem is testimony to Scève’s enargeia that such concise description becomes so vividly evocative. McFarlane’s note on hautesse gives ‘“height, greatness,” without pejorative nuance’ (1966 edition, 423). My formulation of this point is slightly different from that of Gisèle MathieuCastellani who was the first to make this observation. See Mathieu-Castellani 1994. Quoted from Steiner 1982, 4. See the 1997 edition of Alison Adams. SEM, 129–30. ‘Finalmente, llamo consolación … toda letiçia interna … de su ánima’ (A, 376). And then farther down we read: ‘Llamo desolaçión todo el

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53 54 55 56 57

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Notes to pages 112–17 contrario de la terçera regla, así como escuridad del ánima, turbación en ella, moción a las cosas baxas y terrenas’ (A, 376). Karl Jaspers concisely states the issue of use and goal in Augustine: ‘Either the movement of love is toward an object of desire that I have not, or else I have arrived at my goal and am in possession of it. On the way, I love something for the sake of something else; at the goal, I love it for itself. On the way, I can use (uti) something for the sake of something else; at the goal I can enjoy (frui) it for itself. But since only God is worthy to be loved for Himself and the only true love is the love of God, the frui is justified only in connection with God, while in connection with earthly things only an uti is in order’ (1962, 96–7). For the relation between moral allegory and prophecy in the Renaissance, see Murrin 1969, 18, 51, 42, 115–26. For Thomas Sébillet, poets are prophets divinely inspired (1988, 7–15). Also, see Castor 1964, 24–7. The verdant tomb of Délie also recalls the myth of Apollo and Daphne where the former, seized by passion, pursed the huntress until she was transformed into a laurel. Petrarch appeals to this myth when punning on Laura-lauro to express his desire to achieve immortality through love and poetry. See sonnets 107, 188, and 255. DellaNeva 2000, 196–7. On the notion of the matrix as a textual generator, see Riffaterre 1978, 19–21. Donaldson-Evans 1989, 14. Joukovsky 1996, 246. Commentary, II:8, 55. Commentarium, II:8: ‘Amoris due sunt speties, amor alter simplex, mutuus alter. Simplex amor, ubi amatus non amat amantem. Ibi omnino mortuus est amator. Nam nec vivit in se, ut satis iam demonstravimus, nec in amato etiam, cum ab eo reiciatur. Ubi ergo vivit? Numquid in aere vel aqua aut igni vel terra, aut aliquo bruti corpore? Nequaquam. Animus enim humanus non in alio vivit corpore quam humano. An forte in alio quodam corpore hominis non amati vitam ducet? Nec istud quidem. Nam si in eo non vivit, ubi vivere vehementissime concupiscit, quonam pacto vivet in alio? Nusquam ergo vivit qui amat alium, ab alio non amatus. Propterea omnino mortuus est non amatus amator. Nec reviviscet umquam, nisi indignatio suscitet’ (156). For two examples of débat poems, see the Rime di Serafino de’ Ciminelli dall’ Aquila a cura di Mario Menghini (Bologna: Presso Romagnoli dall’Acqua, 1896), XL; XLII. See, for example, the opening of Book II of the Soliloquies which uses the débat to confront questions testing the relations between unity and multiplicity, transience and immortality, knowledge and happiness and whether

Notes to pages 117–22

60 61

62

63 64

65

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the last two persist in time through immortality. See Augustine 1990, 69– 73. Ibid., 22ff. Examining the function of allegory in Délie whose role is to maintain an ambivalent distance from the desired sexual object, Lawrence D. Kritzman observes: ‘What Scève characterizes as the “sainct obiect de mon affection” (D 361), functions as a divine force accounting for the libidinal drives from which allegorical representation poses the question of the ambivalence of love or the poet’s complex relation to a figure constituting both intense sensuality and deep spirituality. “Que presque mort, sa Deité m’esveille,/En la clarté de mes desirs funebres” (D 7). Thus, one could conceivably argue, as in the case of Angus Fletcher, that “anxiety ... is the most fertile ground from which allegorical abstractions grow.” In studying “the psychoanalytic analogues” of allegorical writing, Fletcher associates compulsive and obsessional behavior with narratives of purification which usually transmit an ethical imperative’ (1991, 156). J. Laplanche and J-B. Pontalis define this term as a ‘procedure whereby the subject, while formulating one of his wishes, thoughts or feelings which has been repressed hitherto, contrives, by disowning it, to continue to defend himself against it’ (1973, 261). Klein 1976, 259–97, 305–7. Commentary, VII:14, 170, titled ‘By What Grades the Divine Madness Raises the Soul’ is but one of several places where love is described as a kind of madness. See the Latin chapter title as well in the Commentarium: ‘Quibus gradibus divini furores animam extollant.’ Another context for ‘madness’ relating to dizain 71 is Commentarium VI:10. For phrenesie, Cotgrave gives frenzie, lunacie. According to the Robert’s Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique (1970), the word is derived from a Latin medical term phrenesia which in the medieval period (the thirteenth century) meant ‘Nom donné autrefois au délire violent provoqué par une affection cérébrale aiguë.’ By extension, the sixteenth century defined it as an ‘État plus ou moins durable d’agitation fébrile, d’égarement, d’exaltation violente qui met hors de soi celui qui l’éprouve.’ Commentary VI:9, 123. ‘Sine domicilio. Humane cogitationis domicilium anima ipsa est; anime domicilium spiritus; domicilium spiritus huius est corpus. Tres habitatores sunt, tria sunt domicilia. Quisque istorum naturali amisso exulat domicilio. Nam cogitatio omnis non ad animi sui disciplinam et tranquilitatem sed ad dilecti hominis se vertit obsequia. Et anima corporis et spiritus sui deserit ministerium, in amati corpus nititur transilire. Spiritus anime currus, dum alio properat animus, alio quoque evolat exalando. Propria

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71 72

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

Notes to pages 122–44 itaque domo exit cogitatio, exit anima, exit et spiritus. Primum exitum insania et inquietudo, secundum debilitas mortisque formido, tertium trepidatio, pavor et suspirium comitatur. Quocirca propriis Laribus, naturali sede, optata quiete privatus est amor’ (Commentarium, VI:9, 216). ConfPC, X:40, 249. ‘Neque in his omnibus quae percurro consulens te invenio tutum locum animae meae nisi in te, quo conligantur sparsa mea nec a te quicquam recedat ex me’ (Conf., 145). Commentary, VI:10, 129. ‘Quid agas, o miser? Quo te vertas nescis, heu, o perdite, nescis? Cum tui hoc homicida esse nolles. Nolles etiam sine beato spectaculo vivere. Cum hoc esse non potes qui te perdit, qui enecat. Sine hoc non potes vivere qui tam miris illecebris te tibi surripit, qui totum te sibi vendicat’ (Commentarium, VI:10, 222). Commentary, II:8, 55–6: ‘At quomodo accipiant alterum, non intelligo. Nam qui seipsum non habet, multo minus alium possidebit’ (Commentarium, II: 8, 156). Commentary, II:8, 56. ‘Immo vero habet seipsum uterque et habet alterum. Iste quidem se habet sed in illo. Ille quoque se possidet, sed in isto. Equidem dum te amo, me amantem, in te de me cogitante me reperio, et me a me ipso negligentia mea perditum in te conservante recupero. Idem in me tu facis’ (Commentarium, II:8). Hyde 1986, 93. For useful definitions of antiperistase and its role in Délie and in other works, see in chronological order Weber 1948, 11; McFarlane 1966 edition, 448; Quignard 1974, 134–5; Giordano 1982a, 17–19; S. Murphy 1993; Cave 1999, 49; Defaux 2004 edition, 2:333. Rymes, édition critique, avec une introduction et des notes par Victor E. Graham (Geneva: Droz, 1968). Héroët 1943, 11: ‘O beau mourir, pour en celluy revivre,/La mort duquel double vie delivre!’ vv. 145–6. Commentary, V:4, 74; Commentarium, V:4, 184. Commentary, IV:3, 74; Commentarium, 170. Copleston 1963, 1:28. See Morier 1961, 1044–5; Elwert 1965, 15, 173–4; and Guiraud 1978, 35. Mazaleyrat 1974, 86. Mazaleyrat 1974, 96. See also Mazaleyrat 1978, s.v. ‘strophe.’ Charpentier 1987, 38: ‘le dizain de ballade revu par Scève interdit qu’aucune configuration soit stable.’ On the psychological anatomy see Saulnier 1:236–40. In Ficino, a similar process holds beginning with the sensus communis, to the imagination, to fantasy (a preconceptual determination of the image), to thought. See Kristeller, 234–7.

Notes to pages 145–58

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83 Bembo 1954, 46. ‘Cosi dal primo disiderio, che sorge in noi, come da largo fiume, mille altri ne dirivano’ (Bembo 1554, 26). 84 For example, dizains 413 and 434. 85 In Délie various forms of ceint are used to refer to Diana. This is most notably true in the first two lines of dizain 131: ‘Delia ceinte, hault sa cotte attournée,/La trousse au col, et arc, et flesche aux mains.’ The identification of Délie with Diana in dizain 93 is reinforced by the word ‘traictz’ (v. 4) which are metaphors of the piercing rays of the sun. 86 ‘Ceinte en ce point et le col, et le corps/Avec les bras, te denote estre prise/ De l’harmonie en celestes accordz,/Où le hault Ciel de tes vertus se prise’ (dizain 173, vv. 1–4). See also dizain 127: ‘L’esprit, qui fait tous tes membres movoir/Au doulx concent de tes qualités sainctes,/A eu du Ciel ce tant heureux povoir/D’enrichir l’Ame, où Graces tiennent ceintes/Mille Vertus de mille aultres enceintes,/Comme tes faictz font au monde apparoistre’ (vv. 1–6). See Skenazi 1994 for her seminal article on music in Scève. 87 ‘Reversion’ is the term philosophers use to describe the soul’s return to the One in Plotinus. The term ‘procession’ is used to name the One’s emanations. See Bussanich 1999, 53. 88 Commentary, VI:13, 135. ‘Hoc quidem lumen in corporibus reflexum oculus percipit, ipsam vero in fonte suo lucem minime substinet’ (Commentarium, VI:13). In Plato’s Republic, Book VII, we read the following: ‘But a sensible man, I said, would remember that there are two distinct disturbances of the eyes arising from two causes, according as the shift is from light to darkness or from darkness to light, and believing that the same things happen to the soul too, whenever he saw a soul perturbed and unable to discern something, he would not laugh unthinkingly, but would observe whether coming from a brighter life its vision was obscured by the unfamiliar darkness, or whether the passage from the deeper dark of ignorance into a more luminous world and the greater brightness had dazzled his vision’ (518b). 89 See Sébillet 1988, 10. The editor Félix Gaiffe notes that in edition ‘B’ Sébillet had said ‘Nombres de Pythagoras au Timée de Platon’ in this context. 90 Summa, vol. 46 (2a 2ae, 180, 3). 91 Pythagoras’s concept of the limited and the unlimited comes to us through various philosophic traditions and sources such as The Fragments of Philolaus or The Fragments of Archytas. See Guthrie 1987, 168–72, 181–3. 92 Giudici 1976 edition, 185. 93 See The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, compiled and edited from the original manuscripts by Jean Paul Richter, commentary by Carlo Pedretti, 2 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), vol. 2, par. 1211, 255: ‘Omjra bile necessita tu cõ sõma ragione cõstrignj (co somo ragio) (ne) tuttj

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Notes to pages 158–63

li effetti a participare delle lor chavse e cõ soma e irevochabile legie (cõstri) (gnj) ognj attione naturale colla brevissima (leg) operatione atte obbedjsscie ... omagnja actio ne qualle ingiegnjo (potra) potra penetrare tale natura qual linghua fia quella che ch(e)splicare possa tal maraviglia cierto nessuna. Questo djriza lumano djscorso alla cotenplatione djujna ec.’ See also under Da Vinci, Leonardo On Painting, edited and translated by Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 50. 94 Conf., X:26, 134. ‘Where, then, did I find you so that I could learn of you? For you were not in my memory before I learned of you. Where else, then, did I find you, to learn of you, unless it was in yourself above me?’ (ConfPC, 231). 3 Lyric Dispossession and the Powers of Enigma 1 Tyard’s use of semer and semence to communicate the fact that facile writers and superficial public have not properly seeded their knowledge in the substance of fertile soil recalls Plato’s use of similar words in the Phaedrus. Here Plato criticizes the sclerosis of the written word that is more recreational than dialectical: ‘[The writer] will sow his seed in literary gardens, I take it, and write what he does by way of pastime ... [But] the dialectician selects a soul of the right type, and in it he plants and sows his words founded on knowledge’ (276d–277a). 2 Translation mine. After this passage Tyard mentions that a visitor picked up Délie, and after reading the first two verses, dropped it on the table. Then he adds: ‘Oh, si fais deà (respondy-je) et ay bien memoire qu’entre autres choses, quand je le vy autant nouveau et incapable d’entendre la raison, que les doctes vers du seigneur Maurice Scaeve (lequel vous sçavez Pasithée, que je nomme tousjours avec honneur) je luy respondis, qu’aussi se soucioit bien peu le seigneur Maurice que sa Délie fust veuë, ny maniée des veaux’ (Tyard, 68). 3 ‘Donc, la langue est: un ensemble de conventions nécessaires adoptées par le corps social pour permettre l’usage de la faculté du langage chez les individus. La faculté du langage est un fait distinct de la langue mais qui ne peut s’exercer sans elle’ (Saussure 1997, 4). 4 ‘Par la parole on désigne l’acte de l’individu rélisant sa faculté au moyen de la convention sociale qui est la langue. Dans la parole il y a une idée de réalisation de ce qui est permis par la convention sociale’ (Saussure 1997, 4). 5 For stimulating readings on ineffability as well as an informative introduction, see Hawkins and Schotter 1984. 6 Here I am in agreement with Wolfgang Iser (1978, 107) who states: ‘our concern will be to find the means of describing the reading process as a dynamic interaction between text and reader.’

Notes to pages 164–80

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7 See also D 388: ‘Donc ce Thuscan pour vaine utilité/Trouve le goust de son Laurier amer:/Car de jeunesse il aprint à l’aymer’ (vv. 5–7). 8 On further distinctions between enargeia and energeia, see Cave 1979, 27–8; Lanham 1991, 64–5; and Hagstrum1958, 12. My formulation of the problem is slightly different than the way Lanham distinguishes between energia and enargia. See also Murphy 1974. 9 I use the term ‘indexical’ to mean the context-dependent function of words to point to, to signal, or to indicate an unnamed thing where there is some existential relation between the sign and the referent. In Scève important uses of indices are found in deictics, especially in pronouns. Lyons gives informative linguistic and pragmatic definitions of the indexical function (1977, 105–9). 10 On the development of these terms, see Austin 1962. John Lyons gives succint definitions: ‘Constantive utterances are statements: their function is to describe some event, process or state-of-affairs, and they (or the propositions expressed) have the property of being either true or false. Performative utterances, by contrast, have no truth-value: they are used to do something, rather than to say that something is or is not the case’ (1977, 2:726). 11 See McGinn 1997, 108, 140–2, 155, 159, 161, 173, 182, 206, 223–4, 237, 240–1, 253, 258, 274, 292. 12 ‘Signum est enim res praeter speciem quam ingerit sensibus aliud aliquid ex se faciens in cogitationem venire.’ See Augustine 1995, 56–7, hereafter cited as DC. 13 ‘illud lignum quod in aquas amaras Moysen misisse legimus, ut amaritudine carerent, neque ille lapis quem Iacob sibi ad caput posuerat, neque illud pecus quod pro filio immolavit Abraham’ (DC, 13–15). 14 ‘Caritatem voco motum animi ad fruendum deo propter ipsum et se atque proximo propter deum’ (DC, 148–9). 15 ‘Duabus autem causis non intelleguntur quae scripta sunt, si aut ignotis aut ambiguis signis obteguntur’ (DC, 70–1). 16 ‘Sunt autem signa vel propria vel translata. Propria dicuntur, cum his rebus significandis adhibentur propter quas sunt instituta, sicut dicimus bovem, cum intellegimus pecus quod omnes, nobiscum latinae linguae homines hoc nomine vacant, Translata sunt, cum et ipsae res quas propriis verbis significamus, ad aliquid aliud significandum usurpantur, sicut dicimus bovem et per has duas syllabas intellegimus pecus quod isto nomine appellari solet, sed rursus per illud pecus intellegimus evangelistam, quem significavit scriptura interpretante apostolo dicens, bovem triturantem non infrenabis’ (DC, 70–1). 17 These terms taken from De Trinitate (XV:9, 15) are quoted from Todorov (1982, 41–2). 18 ‘Demonstrandus est igitur prius modus inveniendae locutionis, propriane an figurata sit. Et iste omnino modus est, ut quidquid in sermone divino neque

578

19 20

21 22

23

24

25 26

27

Notes to pages 180–3 ad morum honestatem neque ad fidei veritatem proprie referri potest figuratum esse cognoscas’ (DC, 146–7). ConfPC, I:1, 21. ‘Magnus es, domine, et laudabilis valde. Magna virtus tua et sapientiae tuae non est numerus ’ (Conf., 3). ConfPC, I:4, 23. ‘deus meus, vita mea, dulcedo mea sancta, aut quid dicit aliquis cum de te dicit? Et vae tacentibus de te, quoniam loquaces muti sunt’ (Conf., 4). ConfPC, I:5, 24. ‘quid mihi es? miserere ut loquar’ (Conf., 4). ConfPC, XIII:11, 318. ‘Trinitatem omnipotentem quis intelleget? et quis non loquitur eam, si tamen eam? Rara anima quae, cum de illa loquitur, scit quod loquitur’ (Conf., 188). ConfPC, XI:25, 273. ‘Et confiteor tibi, domine, ignorare me adhuc quid sit tempus, et rursus confiteor tibi, domine, scire me in tempore ista dicere, et diu me iam loqui de tempore, atque ipsum diu non esse diu nisi mora temporis. quomodo igitur hoc scio, quando quid sit tempus nescio? an forte nescio quemadmodum dicam quod scio?’ (Conf., 160). ‘videmus nunc per speculum in enigmate tunc autem facie ad faciem nunc cognosco ex parte tunc autem cognoscam sicut et cognitus sum’ (I Cor. 13:12). PL, vol. 32, cols 1197–8; 1215–20. See also Mazzeo 1964, 16. PL, vol. 37, col. 1274. For the English edition and translation of the Enarrationes, I have used the 2000 edition by Rotelle. The Expositions begin in vol. 15 with an introduction by Michael Fiedrowicz, 13–66. All references to Expositions of the Psalms will be to this edition. For the passage just quoted, see 19:18. See also The Confessions, X:5: ‘this much I do know ... at present I am looking at a confused reflection in a mirror, not yet face to face’ (ConfPC, 211). [et certe visemus nunc per speculum in aenigmate, nondum facie ad faciem (Conf., 121)]. Expositions on the Psalms, 19:18. ‘Ante enim quam sentires, dicere te putabas Deum; incipis sentire, et ibi sentis dici non posse quod sentis. Cum autem ibi didiceris dici non posse quod sentis, tacebis, non laudibus? Ergo mutus eris in laudibus Dei, et gratiarum actionem non reddes ei qui voluit se notum tibi facere? Laudabas, cum quaereres; silebis, cum inveneris? Nullo pacto; non eris ingratus. Debetur honor, debetur reverentia, debetur magna laudatio. Adtende te qui sis, terra et cinas; vide quis meuruerit, quid videre; vide quis, quid, homo Deum. Agnosco non meritum homnis, sed misericordiam Dei. Lauda ergo miserantem. Quomodo, inquis, laudabo? Modicum ipsum quod sentire possum ex parte in aenigmate per speculum, jam explicare non possum. Audi ergo Psalmum: Jubilate Domino, omnis terra. Intellexisti jubiliationem omnis terrae, si jubilas Domino. Domino jubila; noli jubilationem tuam

Notes to pages 183–8

28 29

30 31

32

33 34

35 36

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in alias atque alalias res dividere. Postremo ecetera dici possunt utcumque: ille solus est ineffabilis, qui dixit, et facta sunt omnia. Dixit, et facti sumus: sed nos eum dicere non possumus.’ Enarrationes In Psalmos, PL, vol. 37, cols 1274–5. Cited in English by Colish 1968, 26–7. ConfPC, IX:10, 198 (Conf., 113–14). Ibid. There are abundant studies on Augustine’s vision at Ostia. One of the best starting points is Henry 1938, 1–7. Henry places primacy on Plotinus as a source of inspiration for Augustine and pinpoints V: 1 and I: 6 of the Enneads. For other useful commentaries see Stock 1996, 116–21; Louth 1981, 133–41; and André Mandouze’s comparison between the vision at Ostia and that of Milan (1968, 690–9). McKenna 1963 edition of Saint Augustine: The Trinity, XV:11, 476–80. See also Gilson 1960, 217–24. Colish 1968, 54. In a chapter entitled ‘Naming God’ Paul Ricoeur points out that the expressive challenges posed by naming the divinity require the difficult task of reversing the referent of anthropomorphic models from idols to God even as this challenge requires the subversion of such models in order to think beyond them: ‘Just as, according to Kant, the Idea requires the surpassing of not only the image but also the concept, in the demand to “think more,” the Name subverts every model, but only through them’ (1995, 233). Cicero 1942, vol. 2, III, xli, l. 167: ‘Est hoc magnum ornamentum orationis. In quo obscuritas fugienda est; etenim ex hoc genere fiunt ea quae dicuntur aenigmata’ (131). McKenna 1963 edition, 472. For the Latin text, see PL, vol. 40, cols 4068–9: ‘Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmata.’ ‘de Canticus Canticorum ubi dictum est ecclesiae, cum tamquam pulchra quaedam femina laudaretur: Dentes tui sicut grex detonsarum ascendens de lavacro, quae omnes geminos creant, et sterilis non est in illis? Num aliud homo discit quam cum illud planissimis verbis sine similitudinis huius adminiculo audiret? Et tamen nescio quo modo suavius intueor sanctos, cum eos quasi dentes ecclesiae video praecidere ab erroribus homines atque in eius corpus emollita duritia quasi demorsos mansosque transferre. Oves etiam iucundissime agnosco detonas, oneribus saecularibus tamquam velleribus positas, et ascendentes de lavacro, id est de baptismate, creare omnes geminos, duo praecepta dilectionis, et nullam esse ab isto sancto fructu sterilem video’ (Augustine 1995, 62). ConfPC, X:22, 228–9; Conf., 132. Jakobson has written extensively on this subject (1956, 1971a, 1971b). ‘See also Child Language Aphasia and Phonological Universals (The Hague: Mou-

580

37

38 39 40 41

42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Notes to pages 188–91 ton, 1968). Overviews of Jakobson’s work are given by Holenstein 1976, and Waugh 1976. See Holenstein 1976, 143–7. Jakobson (1971b) assimilates these linguistic symptoms to Luria’s aphasia typology and links them to brain functions. Under the category of encoding disorders Jakobson lists efferent, afferent, and dynamic aphasia; difficulties in decoding may be divided into sensory, semantic, and amnesic aphasia. The term ‘neurolinguistics’ gained currency through the seminal studies of R.A. Luria. He gives an excellent summary of this field in ‘Basic Problems in Neurolinguistics,’ 1974. On anaphora and related matters see Lyons 1977, 2:657–77. To repeat a clarification mentioned in chapter 2, aspect accounts for such linguistic phenomena as states, events, or processes. See Lyons 1977, 2:703–18. Bembo 1954, 21. ‘Percio che amare senza amaro non si puo: ne per altro rispetto si sente giami & si pate alcuno amaro; che per amore’ (Bembo 1554, 13). Bembo 1954, 68. ‘Tu d’amaritudine ci pasci: tu di dolor ci guiderdoni: tu degli uomini mortalissimo idio in danno sempre della nostra vita ci mostri della tua deità fierissime & acerbissime pruove: tu del nostra mali c’indisii: tu di cosa trista ci rallegri tu ogni ora ci spaventi con mille nuove & disusate forme di paura: tu in angosciosa vita ci fai vivere: & a crudelissime & dolorosissime morti c’insegni la via’ (Bembo 1554, 36 and 39 (page after 36 is numbered 39). On the expression ‘c’indisii,’ see Dionisotti,1978, 376, n. 5. Pierre de la Ramée: Dialectique (1555), édition critique avec introduction, notes et commentaires, ed. Michel Dassonville (Geneva: Droz, 1964). Though Délie appears slightly before the Dialectique, it is contemporaneous with the tendency towards what Walter Ong has termed ‘spatialized conceptualization’: ‘The whole process through Agricola and Ramus is thus of a piece with the tendencies ... to deal with reality in a more visualist, observational, “objective,” and, finally, mechanistic way’ (Ong 1958, 114). See also François Rigolot: ‘Si la Délie précède de quelques années la Dialectique de La Ramée (1544 contre 1555), les deux ouvrages procèdent du même outillage mental et fonctionnent à partir des présupposés semblables’ (1982, 176). Ramus 1555, 119. Ibid., 63 Ibid., 66. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 76. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 85.

Notes to pages 191–212

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53 Ibid., 90. 54 Bossière 1654, 2. 55 Alciato’s Emblematum liber was first published in Augsburg in 1531. The second edition (Emblematum libellus) was published in Paris in 1534. The first French translation, titled Livret des emblemes, was done in 1536 by Jehan Lefevre (Paris: Christian Wechel). 56 Jakobson 1960, 353. The emotive function orients the message toward the speaker. 57 Of course, Scève’s ambiguous grammar (which creates polyvalent references) admits of more than one antecedent for ‘sa lumiere,’ which could also refer to ‘Ma vie’ (v. 3). 58 Délie is inscribed as the reader of this work as well as the dedicatee in the liminary huitain. 59 Olivier Pot draws attention to Renaissance views of melancholia as a principle of inspiration as well as to the historical tensions between naturalistic and mystical concepts of this emotion. He reminds us of the use of this word in dizains, 369 and 444 which cause similar ambiguities as those I have observed in dizain 330 (1990, 26–8). 60 Comparing Scève to Petrarch, François Rigolot also notes the change of emphasis from the voice to the written text: ‘Ainsi à la chaîne pétrarquienne qui relie des fragments d’expérience passées pour leur donner un sens rétrospective a fait place un ensemble de textes isomorphes aux propriétés. L’encodage de la Délie est tout différent: la répétition des signes a remplacé la présence de la voix’ (1982, 176). 61 In addition to I.D. McFarlane and Thomas Greene, Jones and von Ohlen have analysed the functions of periphrasis in Délie (1977). 62 Quintilian 1976, 335–7. 63 Barthes 1970, 220. 64 See Genette 1967, 1:221. 65 Tervarent 1997, 302, s.v. Lune; Promesse d’avenir: ‘Un vers d’Ovide ... “totum quae gloria compleat orbem” a été adapté pour faire du croissant de lune une promesse d’avenir: “Donec totum impleat orbem”, en attendant qu’il remplisse l’orbe entière. Avec ces mots, Henri II, encore dauphin, prit le croissant pour “devise.”’ 66 Dauzat, Dubois, and Mitterand 1971, 24–5, s.v. allier, aloi. 67 Laisse LXIX begins the ‘Vantances’ of the Saracens where a number of Marsile’s soldiers boastingly predict their victory over Roland at Roncevaux. After Malprimis de Brigant sets the pattern (‘Je mènerai mon corps à Roncevaux,’ LXXI), other Saracens in turn rhythmically repeat their vow and the site of battle. For example, Turgis de Tortelose (‘A Roncevaux, j’irai joindre

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68 69 70 71

72

73 74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

Notes to pages 212–32 Roland,’ LXXIV), then Escremis de Valterne (‘A Roncevaux, j’irai abbatre l’orgueil,/Si je trouve Roland ...’ LXXV), then Marsile to Esturgant and Estramaris (‘J’irai à Roncevaux au passage des ports/Et vous aiderez à conduire mon armée,’ LXXVI), then Margaris de Séville (‘A Roncevaux, j’irai tuer Roland,/et Olivier non plus ne gardera pas la vie,’ LXXVII). See La Chanson de Roland, 1969, 83–91. Though the moon is frequently associated with silver, Scève here places it in the context of gold, fire, and starlight. Rothery 1985, 52–3. According to Rothery, the ostrich ‘was regarded as a symbol of endurance and martial ardour, partly owing to its swiftness of foot’ (1985, 52). Since this devise is placed after the dedication, ‘A sa Délie,’ it is a properly textual component of the work identifying the speaker of this liminary huitain with the poet-lover of Délie. Praz 1964, 89–91. Also, La Perrière’s Theatre des bons engins shows the picture of blind Cupid fanning the flames of an alembic with his bellows (1967, emblem 79). See Pernety 1971, 115: ‘La distillation] change la nature & les propriétés des choses, d’ameres elle les rend douces, & de douces ameres.’ Commentary, VII:5, 162. ‘Quia subtilis, celerime convolat in percordia. Inde facilime per venas et arterias in corpus permanat universum’ (Commentarium, 249). Hutin 1995, 71–3. Le Grand Robert de la langue française, ed. Paul Robert, 2e édition par Alain Rey (Paris: Le Robert, 1985), vol. 2. Dauzat, Dubois, and Mitterand 1971, 186. See also Mathieu-Castellani 2001. Parturier 1961, 328, notes that se converser en is a Latinism meaning se trouver en, vivre dans. Rigolot 1977, 105–26, gives considerable attention to the phrase ‘ce surnom louable,’ but not in the context of the poet-lover’s speech debilities. See Frelick 1994b, Risset 1971, and Ruynon 1973, 1974, and 1988. Coleman 1964b. Commentary, V:4, 89. ‘Divina potestas omnia supereminens statim a se natis angelis atique animis, suum illum radium in quo fecunda uis inest ominium creandorum, tamquam filiis, clementer infundit. Hic in eis utpote sibi propinquioribus totius mundi dispositionem et ordinmem multo pingit exactius quam in mundi materia. Quamobrem hec mundi pictura quam cernimus universa in angelis et animis lucet expression ... Picture huiusmodi in angelis, exemplaria et idee, in animis, rationes et notiones, in orbis materia, forme atque imagines a Platonicis nominantur’ (Commentarium, 184–5).

Notes to pages 233–48

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84 Colonna 1999. The entire text was translated for the first time into English with an introduction by Joscelyn Godwin, with the original woodcut illustrations. 85 Ibid., 243–4. 86 The text I have used is Colonna 1994, 229. 87 Colonna 1999, 144. 88 Bellenger 1994. I have listed these dizains in the same order as Bellenger. 89 Mathieu-Castellani 1994, 159. 90 Horapollo 1543, ciij r (Horapollo 1993, 73). 91 ‘Pour signifier vng homme bruslé du feu ilz paignoient vne salemandre pource que chascune teste elle occit’ (II:62). Horapollo 1993, 84. 92 Some of the most obvious correspondences between Alciato’s emblems (A) and Délie’s dizains (D) or impresa (I) are the following: A 61, 62, ‘Vespertilio,’ I 42, ‘Le Vespertilion or Chaulvesory’; A 50, ‘Dolus in suos,’ A 52, picture of Acteon, I 19, picture of Acteon; A 160, ‘Amicitia etiam post mortem durans,’ opposite theme from I 17, ‘L’Hyerre et la Muraille’; A 205, picture of ‘Hedera,’ I 17 picture of ‘L’Hyerre et la Muraille’; A 69, Narcissism, opposite theme from I 7 ‘Narcissus’; A 211, picture of ‘Laurus,’ D 417, ‘Ce Thuscan Apollo’ and D 388, ‘Trouve le goust de son Laurier amer’; A 164 ‘In detractores,’ D 85, ‘Que veoir Amour ceder à Calumnie,’ D 211, ‘Car sa foy est venin à Calumnie’; A 122, ‘Picture of Occasionem,’ D 137, 292, 301, 337, motifs of ‘occasion’; A 112, ‘Dulcia quandoque amara fieri,’ D 46, ‘De ce doulx bien, Dieu de l’amaritude’; A 111, ‘Amor virtutis, alium Cupidinem superans,’ contrasting theme from Délie’s liminary huitain dealing with Eros and Anteros; A 85, motto, ‘Avarita,’ and A 86, motto. ‘In avaros,’ D 15, ‘Toy seule as fait, que ce vil Siecle avare’; A 103, picture of Prometheus chained to a mountain in the Caucasus, his liver being pecked out by an eagle, D 77, ‘Au Caucasus de mon souffrir lyé/ ... Prometheus tourmente innocemment’; A 56, ‘In temerarios,’ picture of Phaeton plunged from the Sun, D 62, ‘Nous fait sentir de Phaeton l’erreur’ and D 93, ‘Oeil Aquilin, qui tant osas souffrir’; A 55, ‘Temeritas,’ picture of team of horses out of control, D 274, lover-horse-rider out of control, ‘Je cours soubdain, où mes tourmentz m’appellent’; A 163, ‘Gratiae,’ picture of the three Graces, D 127, ‘D’enrichir l’Ame, où Graces tiennent ceintes,’ and D 241, ‘Graces rendez, vous mettant à dancer’; A 42, picture of steadfast oak tree, motto, ‘Firmissima convelli non posse,’ oak tress in background of imprese 17, 19, 20, 24, 26 (see Mulhauser 1965); A 43, ‘Spes proxima,’ picture of sailing ship assailed by waves and wind, D 260, ‘Sur fraile boys ... Bien pres du Port’; A 132, motto, ‘Ex arduis perpetuum nomen,’ D 240, ‘Affin que Fame ... Me donnant mort sainctement glorieuse’; A 133, picture of the oroboros, I 27, picture of a viper coiling in a full circle. More loose associations are found in the following: A 15 weathercocks standing on

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93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106

107

Notes to pages 249–58 towers, opposite theme from D 1, ‘L’Oeil trop ardent ... Girouettoit,’ and I 15, ‘La Girouette,’ similar theme to A 15; A 120, motto, ‘Fortuna virtutem superans,’ opposite theme from D 240; A 197, motto, ‘In Pudoris statuam,’ D 413, ‘En chaste esbat, et pudique plaisir’; A 165, ‘Inanis impetus’ or ‘Futile efforts,’ corresponds to the class of antiperistatic imprese in Délie. Most pronounced between Alciato and Scève is the stark contrast between the former’s confidence in prudentia and the latter’s scepticism: A 18, ‘Prudentes’ the ‘Janus-bifrons,’ vs D 362, ‘Ne peut en moy la sage providence.’ Réau 1995–9, 1:108. Horapollo 1543, 2:53. Tervarent, s.v. chauve souris, 117. La Perrière 1967, 189. McFarlane 1966 edition, 431. See Klein 1979 and 1960. Indispensable as well is Drysdall 1992. Klein 1979, 9. Caldwell 2001, 201. Klein 1979, 22. Drysdall 1992, 25. Caldwell 2001, 57. Drysdall 1992, 29. Klein 1960, 135–8. See also Yates 1979, 335. According to Jakobson, the communicative function of conative discourse is to produce a specific reaction in the addressee, which is the job of vocatives and imperatives (1960, 355). Luca Contile ranks the impresa first among visual signs for its power of invention. See Pinkus 1996, 137–9.

4 The Triple Way 1 See Watrigant 1897; ‘Pourrat 1953, 3:1–22; Bouyer 1988; Garrigou-Lagrange 1951; Solignac, DS, vol. 16, cols 1200–16. For analyses of the Triple Way regarding Marguerite de Navarre, see Sommers 1989. 2 SEM, 39. ‘la vida ylluminativa’ and ‘vida purgativa’ (A, 150). 3 ‘Considera quod hodie proposuerim in conspectu tuo vitam et bonum et e contrario mortem et malum/ut diligas Dominum Deum tuum et ambules in viis eius/et custodias mandata illius et caerimonias atque iudicia et vivas ac multiplicet te benedicatque tibi in terra ad quam ingredieris possidendam/ sin autem aversum fuerit cor tuum et audire nolueris atque errore deceptus adoraveris deos alienos et servieris eis/praedico tibi hodie quod pereas et parvo tempore moreris in terra ad quam Iordane transmisso ingredieris possidendam’ (Deut. 30:15–18).

Notes to pages 259–70 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

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Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, 161–3. Ibid., 200, 216. Origen 1979, 1–37, 217–44. Pourrat 1953, 3:11. Bonaventure 1971, 3:62. The Latin edition of Bonaventure’s works that I use is Bonaventure 1882–1902, vol. 8. Pourrat 1953, 3:18. Froehlich 1987, 37. Commentarium, speeches II:1; III:1; IV:1. See Ficino 1985, 5; Froehlich 1987, 33; Ficino 2002, lxxxvi–lxxxvii. Bonaventure 1882–1902, De triplici via, 8:6.

5 Via purgativa 1 A, 164. ‘Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul’ (SEM, 47). 2 Giordano 2001. 3 Commentary, II:6, 52. ‘Hinc etiam semper accidit, ut amantes amati aspectum timeant quodammodo atque venerentur ... Sed divinitatis fulgor ille in formosis emicans, quasi dei simulacrum, amantes obstupescere, contremiscere et venerari compellit’ (153). Pierre Laurens, in his revised edition of Marcel’s translation of the Commentarium (1956), translates ‘dei simulacrum’ as ‘statue divine’ (36). 4 Pliny the Elder 1940, VIII:33: ‘Eadem et basilisci serpentis est vis. Cyrenaica hunc generat provincia, duodecim non amplius digitorum magnitudine, candida in capite macula ut quodam diademate insignem. Sibilo omnes fugat serpentes, nec flexu multiplici ut reliquae corpus inpellit sed celsus et erectus in medio incedens.necat fruitices non contactos modo verum et adflatos, exurit herbas, rumpit saxa. talis vis malo est.’ 5 ‘de radice enim colubri egredietur regulus et semen eius absorbens volucrem’ (Is. 14:29). 6 ‘super aspidem et basiliscum calcabis conculcabis leonem et draconem’ (Ps. 90:13). 7 See Defaux 2004 edition, 1:cv–cx. 8 See the Kerver 1543 edition, ‘Comment & par quelles figures ilz [les Égyptiens] signifioient laage & les ans du temps,’ I:1. 9 Aristotle 1984 (Poetics), II:1452a30. Here the edition by Jonathan Barnes translates the Greeek term as ‘discovery.’ Again I refer to Terence Cave’s treatment of anagnôrisis in his book Recognitions (1988), defined in the Aristotelian sense as ‘a shift from ignorance to knowledge’ that makes comprehensible a sequence of events that had resisted explanation (1). In the first

586

10

11 12 13 14

15 16 17

18 19

20

21 22 23 24 25 26

Notes to pages 271–5 dizain the poet-lover moves from moral indifference to religious awe, but the whole length of the poetic sequence is taken up with rising from constructive ignorance to higher knowledge. PL, vol. 42, col. 1044: ‘Ecce ergo mens meminit sui, intelligit se, diligit se: hoc si cernimus, cernimus trinitatem; nondum quidem Deum, sed jam imaginem Dei.’ Bonaventure 1882–1902, 5:297. Quoted from McGinn 2001, 45. R.P. Reypens, ‘Ame,’ DS, vol. 1, cols 450–1. See also McGinn 2001, 44–52. Reypens, ‘Gamüt’ DS, vol. 1, col. 454. See also Josef Schmidt, who places Tauler’s mystical terms in the context of Middle High German in his introduction to Johannes Tauler: Sermons (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), ‘Mystical Language,’ 22–6. Reypens, ‘Ame’ DS, vol. 1, col. 454. Bouyer et al. 1961, 482. ‘Magnus Dominus et laudabilis nimis et magnitudinis eius non est finis/ generatio et generatio laudabit opera tua et potentiam tuam pronuntiabunt/ magnificentiam gloriae sanctitatis tuae loquentur et mirabilia tua narrabunt/et virtutem terribilium tuorum dicent et magnitudinem tuam narrabunt’ (Ps. 144:3–6). ‘ ... admiratio est species timoris consequens apprensionem alicujus rei excedentis nostram facultatem’ (Summa, 2a 2ae, 180, 3), 24–5. Richard of St. Victor 1979, 327. ‘Meditation perfecto assurgitur in contemplationem, contemplatione in admirationem, admiratione in mentis alienationem’ (PL, vol. 196, col. 181). Ibid., 322. ‘Et unde, quaeso, admiratio nisi ex inopinato incredibilique spectaculo? Habet itaque ipsa admiratio lucem subitam tenebrisque permistam, lucem visionis, cum quibusdam reliquiis incredulitatis, ambiguitatisque tenebris, ita ut modo mirabili mens absque dubio videat, quod credere vix valeat’ (PL, vol. 196, col. 178). ‘Si enim conplantati facti sumus similitudini mortis eius simul et resurrectionis erimus’ (Ad Romanos, 6:5). Pseudo-Dionysius, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 1967, 207–8. Quoted from Gilson 1960, 170. The Triple Way, 76. ‘Non solum voluntarium, sed etiam avidissimum ad moriendum pro salute proximorum’ (1882–1902, 9). Clarified by personal communication with Brian Davies, author of The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (1992). It is a characteristic of Renaissance writers to mix secular and sacred. See Camporeale 1993. However common this mixture may be, it remains for the critic to sort out the two and if necessary state their tensions.

Notes to pages 276–86

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27 See the Blason de la gorge, in Guégan 1927 edition, 40:285. 28 Defaux 1994. 29 ‘In die illo visitabit Dominus in gladio suo duro et grandi et forti super Leviathan serpentem vectem et super Leviathan serpentem tortuosum et occidet cetum qui in mari est’ (Is. 27:1). 30 ‘Ubi est mors victoria tua ubi est mors stimulus tuus’ (I Cor. 15:55). 31 See the Oxford Classical Dictionary (1996), 675, 1114. 32 ‘Sicut Filius hominis non venit ministrari sed ministrare et dare animam suam redemptionem pro multis’ (Matt. 20:28). 33 ‘Non estis vestri/empti enim estis pretio magno’ (1 Cor. 6:19–20). 34 ‘Scientes quod non corruptibilibus argento vel auro redempti estis de vana vestra conversatione paternae traditionis’ (1 Peter 1:18). 35 New Catholic Encyclopedia 2003, 3:798. 36 ‘Si non credideritis non permanebitis’ (Is. 7:9). 37 ‘Quoniam Deus ego et non homo’ (Hos. 11:9); ‘Inseretur autem velum per circulos intra quod pones arcam testimonii et quo sanctuarium et sanctuarii sanctuaria dividentur’ (Ex. 26:33); ‘De civitate enim sancta vocati sunt et super Deum Israhel constabiliti sunt’ (Isa. 48:2); ‘Et super haec quae obtuli in domum Dei mei de peculio meo arum et argentum do in templum Dei mei exceptis his quae paravi in aedem sanctam’ (1 Chron. 29:3; Libro Paralipomenon, 29:3). 38 ‘Dixit quoque Dominus ad Mosen loquere ad sacerdotes filios Aaron et dices eis ne contaminetur sacerdos in mortibus civium suorum/nisi tantum in consanguineis ac propinquis id est super matre et patre et filio ac filia fratre quoque et sorore virgine quae non est nupta viro’ (Lev. 21:1–3). 39 Summa, 7–33. See Hebrews, 12:14, which Aquinas quotes as follows: ‘Pacem sequimini cum omnibus, et sanctimoniam [hagiasmon], sine qua nemo videbit Deum’ [Strive for peace with all men, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord]. He also cites Romans 8:38 to emphasize firmness and constancy: ‘I am sure that neither death nor life ... shall be able to separate us from the love of God’ [Certus sum quod neque mors, neque vita ... separabit me a caritate Dei]. 40 ‘Vestra enim oboedientia in omnem locum divulgata est gaudeo igitur in vobis sed volo vos sapientes esse in bono et simplices in malo/Deus autem pacis conteret Satanan sub pedibus vestris velociter’ (Rom. 16:19–20). 41 Petrarch 1924, 220. For the Italian text, I have used Petrarch 1992a, ‘La solitudine – a volerla debitamente definire – è di tre tipi: del luogo ... del tempo ... dell’animo’ (197). 42 See Joukovsky on vv. 1–2 of dizain 379: ‘D’après Galien (De usu partitum, X, 4), ces esprits vitaux transportés par le sang se purifient en esprits animaux (çàd des esprits subtils qui transmettent les effets des facultés psychologiques)

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43

44

45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56

57

58 59

Notes to pages 287–91 dans le “rhet merveilleux,” un réseau d’artères situé à la base du cerveau’ (1996 edition, 355). On the Renaissance’s understanding of the elements of the cosmos, see Tillyard 1944), 55–60. For Petrarch’s intertexts using synonyms for the French aure, see the Rime, nos 194, 196, 197, 198, 246, 327, 356. In this dizain, the lover muses, ‘Car soit devant, ou apres le repas,/…Vois mesurant, et les champs, et mes peines’ (vv. 7–10). Thus, the mention of ‘repas’ functions as a temporal demarcation for hours propitious to meditation and not primarily as a reference to eating. Huguet, vol. I, s.v. Aure. See dizain 187: ‘Car à mon Hydre incontinent succede/Un mal soubdain à un aultre repris’ (vv. 5–6). In this pun dizain 379 is related to another mention of ‘L’Aure’ (v. 2) in dizain 246 having the similar theme of the fear of dispersion. See DellaNeva 2000, 205. ‘Formavit igtur Dominus Deus hominem de limo terrae et inspiravit in faciem eius spiraculum vitae et factus est homo in animam viventem’ (Gen. 2:7). CisP, 38, 60, 64, 83. ConfPC, IV:5, 76. ‘Tu in te menes, nos autem in experimentis volvimur? Et tamen nisi ad aures tuas ploraremus, nihi residu de spe nostra fieret, unde igitur suavis fructus de amaritudine vitae carpitur, gemere et flere et suspirare et conqueri’ (Conf, 36). See also Lamentations, 2:18: ‘Cry out to the Lord!/O daughter of Zion!/Let tears stream down like a torrent day and night!/Give yourself no rest,/your eyes no respite!’ [Clamavit cor eorum ad Dominum super muros filiae Sion deduc quasi torrentem lacrimas per diem et per noctem non des requiem tibi neque taceat pupilla oculi tui (Lam 2:18)]. ‘Sed unus militum lancea latus eius asperuit et continuo exivit sanguis et aqua’ (Jn 19:34). Joukovsky 1996 edition, 409. Auguste Hamon, DS, vol. 2, cols 1023–46. See also Réau 1955–9, 2:47–51. Hamon, DS, vol. 2, col. 1024. Homer 1999, 2:601. In Revelations, see especially 11:19 and 17:17–20. See also Psalms 144:6 and Exodus 20:16. In Lamentations, there are images of the Lord as an avenging storm and an armed fiery fury in 2:1–5. ‘Eritique repente confestim a Domino exercituum visitabitur in tonitru et commotione terrae et voce magna turbinis et tempestatis et flammae ignis devorantis’ (Is. 29:6). ‘Cristo ... È sempre presente, infatti, chi è sempre in ogni luogo’ (77). Petrarch 1924, 299. 1992a: ‘un luogo estremamente propizio alla libertà, alla quiete, alla vita libera da incombenze, alla scienza, all virtú’ (325).

Notes to pages 291–6

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60 Petrarch 1992a, 219–27. 1924, 232. 61 Petrarch 1924, 181. 1992a: ‘In ogni periodo dell’anno appartenere a se stessi ...’ (85); ‘senza disturbo di folla, senza noia, senza alcuna angoiscia ...’ (135). 62 Montaigne 1957, 175. ‘D’avantage, pour nous estre deffaits de la Cour et du marché, nous ne sommes pas deffaits des principaux tourmens de nostre vie’ (Montaigne 1967, 1:268–9). 63 Ibid., 176. ‘L’ambition, l’avarice, l’irresolution, la peur et les concupiscences ne nous abandonnent point pour chander de contrée’ (ibid., 1:269). 64 Petrarch 1924, 32. 65 ConfPC, IV:7, 78. ‘Quo enim cor meum fugeret a corde meo? Quo a me ipso fugerem? Quo non me sequerer?’ (Conf., 38). 66 CisP, Book I, chapter XII, 62. ‘Exasperativa’ (Cis., 35). Examination of the Rime will bear out this point. For Petrarch’s lover, alone in nature, the solitary life offers commiseration and consolation (35), care and relief (116); it also recreates the beautiful presence of the beloved (125), and brings new birth in spring (209). See also Coleman (1975) who, in comparing Petrarch and Scève, concludes: ‘But in Scève both the aspect of nature and the quality of his suffering are sharper and more anguished’ (180). 67 Thomas Greene, ‘Scève’s Saulsaye: The Life and Death of Solitude,’ Studies in Philology, No. 2 (1973), 136. 68 Brown describes Augustine’s ideal at Cassiciacum as ‘Christianae vitae otium’ (1967, 115–27). 69 Defaux places the site for both these poems at the ‘île Barbe.’ Defaux identifies ‘ce saint lieu’ (D 242, v 1) as ‘l’abbaye bénédictine de Saint-Martin, dans l’île Barbe.’ See 2004 edition, 2:283–4. McFarlane notes that these two dizains ‘seem to be inspired by the poet seeing pilgrims in the neighbourhood of Lyon, no doubt on their way to Notre-Dame de Fourvière’ (1966 edition, 437). 70 ‘Ad primum ergo dicendum quod non est necessarium nos Deo preces porrigere ut ei nostras indigentias vel desideria manifestemus, sed ut nos ipsi consideremus, in his ad divinum auxilium esse recurrendum’ (Summa, 2a 2ae, 83, 2). Also, ‘oratio nostra non ordinatur ad immutationem divine dispositionis, sed ut obtineatur nostris precibus quod Deus disposuit’ (ibid.). 71 Saulnier, vol. 1, reproduces an églogue by Philibert Girinet that also refers to the pilgrimages on the island: ‘Haud procul urbe locus, labens quem fluminis unda/Lenti Araris cingit, uetus est cui, Barbara nomen Insula’ (1948, 197). Scève’s contemporary, Bonaventure Des Periers, master of the short story, refers to the island as ‘L’isle gentille,’ (contrary to the poet’s statement ‘Barbare à moy,’ v. 3). Among its churches was the famous Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Martin (Saulnier 2:95).

590

Notes to pages 296–303

72 Plato, Statesman, 273d; Plotinus, Enneads, I, 8, 13; Augustine, Conf., VII:10 (Commentary, 147). ‘in regione dissimilitudinis’ (Conf., 82). In Plotinus, the ‘mud’ is of Orphic origins and borrowed by Plato. See Ennead 1:308–9, note 1. 73 Stock (1996, 15) here paraphrases and quotes from Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos and his Epistulae. 74 Stock 1996, 15. 75 See Conley 2007 on the symbolic significance of the site occupied by Antire and Philerme as depicted by one of Bernard Salomon’s woodcuts accompanying Jean de Tournes’s edition of the Saulsaye: ‘The woodcut places them in an intermediate or transitional area between Lyon in the distance and the image of the sylvan landscape that is literally behind them 10 pages infra’ (155). 76 Defaux 2004 edition, 2:453. 77 Dauzat, Dubois, and Mitterand 1971, 470. 78 Enneads (I, 6, 7) speaks of the deranging effects of beauty on one who looks upon it. Stephen MacKenna’s translation reads: ‘ ... he will be flooded with awe and gladness, stricken by a salutary terror.’ See Plotinus: The Enneads. Trans. Stephen MacKenna. Fourth Edition Revised by B.S. Page, with a Foreword by E.R. Dodds and an Introduction by Paul Henry. (New York: Pantheon, 1969), 62. In the Commentary, speaking about one who gazes upon the divine light of God in the soul, Ficino says: ‘The eye certainly can look at this light reflected in objects, but it cannot bear to look at the light itself at its source’ (VI:13, 134). [Hoc quidem lumen in corporibus reflexum oculus percipit, ipsam vero in fonte suo lucem minime substinet, Commentarium, 228.] 79 Joukovsky states that ‘interposée’ se rapporte à la memoyre’ (1996 edition, 378). But this is incorrect by the logical thrust of the poem in which separation from the beloved allows reason to improve the function of memory, which disperses deception and allows the poet-lover to enjoy the woman’s ‘vertu’ and ‘grace’ (v. 6). It is also incorrect by reference to Scève’s intertext, Speroni’s Dialogo, which places the emphasis on reason to stand aside from the emotions to see the beloved with greater clarity: ‘cosi allora comincia ad esser nota all’ amante la sua amorosa felicità quando, scostato da’ sentimenti, la ragione a guisa di sole l’illumina ...’ (157, italics mine). 80 In the Republic the wise man of the polis will attend to the ‘ordering and harmonizing’ of his outer and inner life, especially the latter: ‘He will ... keep his eyes fixed on the constitution in his soul, and taking care and watching lest he disturb anything there either by excess or deficiency’ (Book X, 591e). 81 Chronological scrambling refutes Doranne Fenoaltea’s notion that Délie is built upon calendrical or ‘lunar cycles.’ See 1986, 65–83. Criticizing Fenoaltea is Frelick 1994a, 138–9. Helgerson (2001, 102–3) is also sceptical of Fenoal-

Notes to pages 303–12

82 83 84

85

86 87 88

89

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tea’s chronological approach. Two critics have advanced numerological rationales for the sequential organization of Délie: Raffini 1988, and Graff 1980. The major objection to these approaches is that the original 1544 edition of Délie had numbering errors in pagination and in the order of dizains, and the fact that this edition numbered the dizains 1–458, instead of 1–449, indicates that neither Scève nor the printer, Sulpice Sabon, nor the publisher, Antoine Constantin, considered numbering of prime importance. One need only examine Dudley Wilson’s facsimile of the 1544 edition to see the implausibility of numerological theses. See his Maurice Scève Délie 1544 (1972), Bodleian Library, Oxford, Douce S 35. One of the best refutations of esoteric numerology applied to Délie, especially that of F. Brunetière, is by Staub, ‘Scève, poète hermétique?’ The point is a properly scientific or logical one. If a number has in theory multiple referents or meanings, how can one show that the desired meaning is the relevant one? If some number has so many meanings, how can one falsify the irrelevant meanings, or disqualify other numbers that have the same meaning as the preferred one? The best argument for the way that Délie’s dizains are numbered is given by Duval (1980), who shows that novenary groupings were based on contemporary printing practices. Lyons 1989, 6. Cook, ‘The Political dizains of the Délie,’ 351. See also Skenazi 1992, 107–22, and the Defaux 2004 edition, 2:357–9. Parturier (1961 edition, 207) traces this topos to Britonio’s Gelosia del Sole, but as McFarlane (1966 edition, 450) and Defaux (2004 edition, 2:343) note that this theme appears regularly in Petrarch. For example, in the Rime sparse, nos 9, 12, 37, 90, 100, 115, 222, 223, 231. Summa, ‘anima regit corpus despotico principatu’ (Ia 2ae, 58, 2). See also Aristotle 1984, Politics: ‘the soul rules the body with a despotical rule’ (Book I, 1254b–5). Quoted from Perry 1976, 5. For Prisons see Marguerite de Navarre 1896, 174. Quoted from Perry 1976, 6. Commentary, 56. ‘Tibi propinquior quam mihi sum’; ‘quo quis se ipsum tradit pro alio’; ‘sui obliviscuntur’; ‘cum se negligit’; ‘mea perditum’; ‘nam ego postquam me ipsum amisi’ (Commentarium, II:8, 156–7). ‘Mutual indwelling is both a cognitive and oretic effect of love. Cognitively, the person loved Y, is said to dwell in the lover X, in the sense that he is constantly present in X’s thoughts: as St. Paul wrote to the Philippians, I hold you in my heart. On the other hand, X is cognitively present in Y in the sense that he is not satisfied with a surface knowledge of him, but strives for personal insight into everything about him, and penetrates into his very soul. Thus St. Paul says of the Holy Spirit, who is the love of God, He searches

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90 91 92 93

94 95

96 97 98 99 100

101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108

Notes to pages 312–25 everything, even the depth of God.’ [Dicendum quod iste effectus mutuae inhaesionis potest intelligi et quantum ad vim apprehensivam, et quantum ad vim appetitivam. Nam quantum ad vim apprehensivam, amatum dicitur esse in amante, inquantum amatum immoratur in apprehsione amantis; secundum illud Philipp., eo quod habeam vos in corde’] (Summa, Ia 2ae, 28, 2). ConfPC, III:6, 62. ‘Tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo’; Conf. 27. Cottrell 1985, 5. Defaux 1993, 287. See also Cottrell 1985, 6. DA, 93–4: ‘Ma chiunque teme ove e quando egli devrebbe sperare; e diffidando di sé medesimo a guisa di prodigo dona altrui la speranza, di che è virtù l’essere avaro, gia è geloso l’inamorato.’ Summa 1a 2ae, 40, 1: ‘Spes praesupponit desiderium.’ William of Ockham, Opera philosophica et theologia (Opera theologica), 9:585–7. In regard to nominalist conceptions in Renaissance literature, see Langer 1990, 92–3. My viewpoint on nominalism is that though scholastic terminology was attacked by the humanists, nominalist thinking continued through the Renaissance and Reformation not only as a school of thought under John Major (Jean Mair) but also as a cultural optic of individuality, a contributor to empirical science, and as the separation of philosophy from theology and devotion. Huguet, s.v. cas. Joukovsky 1996 edition, 318. Graves 1968, 1:148. Oxford Classical Dictionary, 28. ‘And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job, when he had prayed for his friends; and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before’ (42:10) [Dominus quoque conversus est ad paenitentiam Iob cum oraret ille pro amicus suis et addidit Dominus omnia quaecumque fuerant Iob duplicia]. Roubichou-Stretz 1973, 41. Colemen 1975, 153. Matt 27:46. ‘Hoc est Deus meus Deus ut quid dereliquisti me.’ Matt 27:45. ‘A sexta autem hora tenebrae factae sunt super universam terram ...’ Luke 23:47. ‘Videns autem centurio quod factum fuerat glorificavit Deum dicens vere hic homo iustus erat.’ As is well known, the xenium was practised by the Neo-Latin poets of Lyon such as Jean Visagier. Scève assimilates this genre well to Délie. See Lecoq 1987, 393–433. On Ficino’s extensive use of Aquinas’s Summa contra gentilis, see Collins 1974.

Notes to pages 325–9

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109 Commentary VI:7, 116–17. ‘Cur partim dives, partim egenus est amor? Quia neque quod perfecte possidemus neque quo caremus omnino ardere solemus’ (Commentarium, 145). 110 ‘We are now in a position to arrange all of the emotions in the order of their actual occurrence. First come love and hatred; second, desire and aversion; third, hope and despair; fourth, fear and courage; fifth, anger; sixth and last, joy or sadness, which come after all the emotions, as Aristotle says.’ [Sic ergo patet quod spes est prima inter omnes passiones irascibilis. Et si ordinem omnium passionum secundum viam generationis scire velimus, primo occurrunt amor et odium; secundo, desiderium et figa; tertio, spes et desperato; quarto, timor et audacis; quinto, ira; sexto et ultimo, gaudium et tristitia, quae consequuntur ad omnes passiones, ut dicitur in 2 Ethic] (Summa, Ia 2ae, 25, 4). Anger has no opposite in Aquinas’s scheme. Leone Ebreo in his Dialoghi d’Amore, Dialogue I, also engages the question of whether there is a distinction between love and desire, and eventually, the interlocutor named Philo agrees that one can determine a difference between the two. Coincidence and non-coincidence between love and desire should be judged by the quality of their objects, which, broadly speaking, fall into three categories: the useful, the pleasant, and the good. See The Philosophy of Love, 12 ff. 111 McFarlane 1966 edition, 361. 6 Via illuminativa 1 Bonaventure 1971, 68–9. ‘Secundo loco post viam purgativa sequitur illuminativa, in qua exercere se debet homo ad radium intelligentiae ... Et cum haec diligenter pensatur, per radium intelligentiae tenebrae nostrae illuminantur’ (Bonaventure 1882–1902, 8:6). 2 Itinerarium mentis in Deum, in Bonaventure 1882–1902, 5:296–313. 3 Ibid., ch. 7: ‘ ... postquam mens nostra contuita est Deum extra se per vestiga et in vestigiis, intra se per imaginem et in imagine, supra se per divinae lucis ...’ (312). 4 McGinn 1998, 108. 5 For the reference to ‘passing over,’ observe the title of chapter 7: ‘De excessa mentali et mystico, in quo requies datur intellectui, affectu totaliter in Deum per excessum transeunde’ (Itinerarium mentis in Deum, 312). 6 Itinerarium mentis in Deum, 297. 7 Bonaventure 1993, 36. ‘ ... atque ex omnibus praedictis summam cointimitatem ...’ (Itinerarium, 311). 8 See McGinn’s useful comment on grammar: ‘This shift from objective theological analysis in the third person to invitation in the second person

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16 17 18 19 20

21 22

23 24

25 26 27

Notes to pages 329–33 underlines the fact that the Itinerarium is not to be read as an academic presentation ... rather, it must be personally appropriated through contemplative practice’ (1998, 109). McGinn 1997, 164. Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, Celestial Hierarchy, 162. Summa, 47:12–13, note a. ConfPC, X:40, 249. ‘sparsa mea’ (Conf., 145). Augustine 1993, 1. ‘Dic mihi, quaeso te, utrum Deus non sit auctor mali?’ (De Libero Arbitrio , PL, vol. 32, col. 1221). Summa, Ia 2ae, 57, 5. ‘Ad hoc autem quod aliquis nene operetur non solum requiritur quid faciat, sed etiam quomodo faciat, ut scilicet secundum electionem rectam operetur, non solum ex impetu aut passione.’ McGinn and McGinn 2003, 117. Quoted from ibid., 122. CisP, 112. ‘Sic via illuminativa appellatur illuminativa , quia accedit, provocat et illuminat hominem ad dilectionem Dei’ (Cis., 73). CisP, 121. ‘Qui mihi dedisti in bonis naturae sensum capacem, memoriam tenacem’ (Cis., 80). CisP, 121. ‘Qui mihi singularem meditandi et interius me exercendi gratiam contulisti illuminando intellectum, excitando affectum, cooperando effectum’ (Cis., 80). CisP, 123. ‘Gratias tibi ago, supersumme Domine, Deus meus: Qui mihi gaudia Paradisi promisisti, scilicet Supra me’ (Cis., 82). CisP, 127. ‘Recipit quoque haec via illuminativa influentiam sui luminis ex vitis sanctorum patrum, quae nobis in exempla datae sunt prudenter nobis imitanda. Recipit quoque haec via influxum ab omnium creaturarum solicita consideratione, a sanctarum scripturarum assidua lectione, a divini verbi crebra auditione, a continua et praecipue Dominica oratione’ (Cis., 85). CisP, 107. ‘Negligentiae, Concupiscentiae, Nequilae’ (Cis., 69). CisP, 110. ‘Tertio recogitanda est nequita acediae, ex qua oriuntur Suspiciones malignae, Cogitationes blasphemae, Detractiones iniquae. On vigilance: ‘Non enim oportet te tam prolixe semper post Completorium examinare, praecipue si in tui custodia pervigil fueris, quin potius breviter te examinans, quomodo diem illum expenderis, debes postulare tibi veniam a Deo, dicens generalem confessionem ...’ (Cis., 72). CisP, 113. ‘Et ne discurras per diversas materias’ (Cis., 73). CisP., 116. ‘in singulis articulis demorandum accendens amoris igne animam tuam, Quousque in admirationem redigatur’ (Cis., 76). Bonaventure 1993, 6. ‘Let us, then, die and enter into this darkness’ (ch.

Notes to pages 333–49

28

29 30 31

32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

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VII, p. 39). ‘Moriamur igitur et ingrediamur in caliginem’ 1882–1902, 5:313). CisP., 128. ‘Nam sicut stupa madefacta in igne posita, primo exiccatur, deinde accenditur, sic et cor multo plus ignescit et in Deum elevantur per praecedentum meditationem’ (Cis., 85–6). SEM, 129. ‘Reglas para en alguna manera sentir y cognoscer las varias mociones que en la ánima se causan’ (A, 374). See impresa 31 and dizain 449. DA, Speroni, 111. ‘One acts well when by deliberation one makes good use of foresight in regard to food, riches, prosperity, adversity, rewards, troubles, all mortal things like us, some at times given to misfortune, others ruled by the good government of a person or a city’ (translation mine). Corrozet 1997, E 17. ‘Providentia, per quam futurum aliquid videtur ante quam factum est.’ See Cicero 1949, De Inventione, II, LIII. See also Langer 1999, 162–3. CisP, 107. ‘Egressus a completorio non expedit tibi, diu extra cellam demorari, aut per signa vel verba dissolvi’ (Cis., 69). The iconography of prudence that I use is found in Tervarent (1997) in the following places: 27, 58, 89, 90, 139, 150, 184, 292, 298, 321, 375, 394, 405, 416, 433, 465, 468. Ibid., 184. Montaigne 1967, 2:459. Tervarent (1997), s.v. Visage (Trois), 471. Alciato portrays ‘Prudentes’ by the picture of Janus bifrons in Emblem 18. DA, 113–14. ‘Therefore, Love composed a cruel and pestiferous mixture of sighs, tears, fear, anger, disdain, jealousy, and all other oppressive torments that a lover can feel’ (translation mine). Donaldson-Evans, 1980, ch. 1. ‘Si Filius Dei es dic lapidi huic ut panis fiat’ (Lk 4:3). ‘Si tu es Christus die nobis’ (Lk 22:67) ‘Si tu es rex Iudaeorum salvum te fac’ (Lk 23:37). ‘On the contrary, whoever loves perfectly fears and loves the thing loved’ (translation mine). Aristotle 1994, Eudemian Ethics, 1232a30. ‘Ergo magnamimitas maxime debet dici principalis virtus’ (Summa, Ia 2ae, 61, 3). Eudemian Ethics, 1233a15. Ibid., 1232b7. Ibid., 1232b2. Shakespeare 1974, 1160. Quoted from Parturier (1916 edition, 301) who was one of the first to point

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53 54

55 56 57

58 59 60 61

62

63 64 65 66

Notes to pages 350–64 out the relation between dizain 444 and Speroni’s Della dignita delle donne, followed by Fenoaltea (1976, 221–2), Joukovsky (1966 edition, 382–3), and Defaux (2004 edition, 2:480). ‘My understanding was turned to a heaven other than Aristotle’s’ (translation mine). See also Katharine Park, ‘The Organic Soul,’ in Schmidt and Skinner 1988, 470–1. For this quotation, I have preferred and used the translation by Oesterle 1984, 77. For Aquinas, ‘deliberation’ is broken down into ‘eubulia,’ ‘synesis,’ and ‘gnome.’ The Latin text of the Summa reads: ‘Videtur quod inconvenienter adjugantur prudentiae eubulia, synesis, et gnome. Eubulia enim est habitus que bebe consiliamur, ut dicitur in Ethic. Sed eubulia non est virtus adjuncta prudentiae, sed magis est ipsa prudentia’ (Ia 2ae, 57, 6). See NE, 2:2474. Ebreo, 321. This section on proportion begins with Sofia’s question, ‘E donde viene che li proporzionati corpi ne paiano belli?’ [Why, then, do proportionate bodies appear beautiful?] (see Philosophy of Love, 382–3). These are 32, 34, 65, 210, 211, 219, 225, 226. See Tervarent, s.v. Juge Le Mauvais. Tervarent translates Lucien’s dictum as ‘Qu’il ne faut pas croire légèrement la délation’ (271–2). DA, 93. ‘The one who fears, when and where he should hope, mistrusting himself in the manner of a wasteful person, gives hope to others’ (translation mine). Among other problematic statements on freedom, see dizains 104, 111, 225, 289, 296, 427. Discours des vertus intellectuelles et morales in Ronsard 1950, 2:1032. Epictetus 1989, 30–1, 22–3. On Stoicism and Neo-Stoicism, see Jill Kray’s entries in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, 360–74. See also Kraye, 1997, 1:197–225. Useful as well is Copleston 19631:129–81. Finally, see Ménager 1968, 89–90. Joukovsky points out that this dizain uses imagery reminiscent of Mellin de Saint Gelais’s Le Bracelet de cheveux as well as from the blason anatomique collections such as Jean de Vauzelles’s blason des cheveux (1996 edition, 218). ‘Constantiam hic appello, rectum et immotum animi robur, non elati externis aut fortuitis, non depressi’ (Lipsius 1675, 530–1) (I. 4). Augustine 1993, 57, 76. ‘Voluntas illius mihi est necessitas’ (PL, vol. 32, col. 1274). Ibid., 84. ‘Si autem potentior te infirmiorem habebit in potestate, nullo modo tam rectam ordinationem recte injustam putabis’ (PL, vol. 32, col. 1280). See Taylor on Plato: ‘There is no way one could be ruled by reason and be mistaken or wrong about the order of reality’ (1989, 122–3).

Notes to pages 366–71

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67 Speroni’s Dialogo provides an intertext for this line: ‘Può ben essere, e voi forse il provaste, che un cuore amoroso viva alcun tempo intra due, vicendo finalmente la speranza il timore’ (DA, 94). 68 See Trinkaus 1970, 1:116–17, and Friedrich 1968, 196. 69 Cicero 1949, II, LIII, 327. ‘Quod aut totum aut aliqua ex parte propter se petitur, honestum nominabimus ... Est igitur in eo genere omnes res una vi atque uno nomine amplexa virtus. Nam virtus est animi habitus naturae modo atque rationi consentaneus. Quamobrem omnibus eius partibus cognitis tota vis erit simplicis honestatis considerata’ (II, LIII, 326). 70 Cicero 2001, I, XXVIII, 101. ‘Sic hoc decorum, quod elucet in vita, movet approbationem eorum, quibuscum vivitur, ordine et constantia et moderatione dictorum omnium atque factorum’ (I, XXVIII, 100). 71 Ibid., II, III, 178. 72 Ibid., III, XXI, 357. ‘Honestate igitur dirigenda utilitas est’ (III, XXI, 356). See also, III, XXVIII: ‘Pervertunt homines ea, quae sunt fundamenta naturae, cum utilitatem ab honestate seiungunt.’ 73 This is Walter Miller’s translation of Cicero: ‘The foundation of justice is good faith’ (2001, 25). 74 PL vol. 40, Book I, XXX, col. 19. Translation mine. 75 In De Libero Arbitrio, Augustine addressing Evodius says: ‘Vide etiam aliud: nam credo te memoria tenere quam dixerimus esse bonam voluntatem: opinor enim, ea dicta est qua recte atque honeste vivere appetimus’ (PL, vol. 32, I, XIII, col. 1236). 76 ‘Ratio ista ergo, vel mens, vel spiritus cum irrationales animi motus regit, id scilicet dominatur in homine, cui dominatio lege debetur ea quam aeternam esse comperimus’ (ibid., I, VIII, col. 1231). 77 This is Miller’s translation in Cicero (2001). See, for example, 24, 25, 382, 383, 390, 391. 78 ‘Debbi sapere che negli uomini si truovano due sorti di ragione: l’una chiameremo ordenaria e l’altra estraordenaria. L’intento de la prima è reggere e conservare l’uomo in vita onesta; donde tutte l’altre cose s’indirizzano a questo fine; e tutto quello che impedisce la buona vita umana, la ragione il desvia e reprova ... Ma de la ragione estraordenaria l’intento suo è conseguire la cosa amata; e non attende a la conservation de le cose proprie, anzi le pospone per l’acquisto de la cosa che s’ama, come si debbe posponere il manco nobile per il piú eccellente’ (Ebreo, 1:57). [You must know: there are two sorts of reason found in men: the one we may call ordinary, the other – extraordinary reason. The purpose of the former is to sustain and preserve men in the good life; hence all other things are subordinated to this end, and whatever affords an obstacle to the good life of man is by this reason reprehended and rejected

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81

82

83 84

85 86 87

Notes to pages 373–6 ... Whereas the purpose of extraordinary reason is attainment of the beloved; and it takes no care for the safeguarding of our own interests, but prefers before them possession of the beloved, even as the best is to be preferred before the good’ (The Philosophy of Love, Book I, 62–3). Skenazi 1992, 85–94. Chapter 5 of Tradition and Originality is titled ‘Précieux Poet.’ Coleman takes préciosité in Scève as bad and/or artificial style. For example, commenting on dizain 11 (‘Le Phenix’) and its companion poem (96), she says: ‘The motto and the last line do bring in a whole range of associations, but although potentially rich and intense they merely evoke a surprised smile in the reader because the metaphor is trite and conventional and it has not been knit in with the dizain’ (1975, 84). Saulnier, 1:238. ‘It – Reason – can come to inspire the man, and, to guide the cogitations of the Mind, take the Senses as its minister, be they faithful or unfaithful instruments. But Reason, the nurse of the soul, can stop its duties ... The enemy of Reason is Love, it is not the Heart. Just as there are hearts without love, (the theme of freedom in April), so are there minds without reason: this is the major theme of the lover in grief. In the battle of emotions, when reason presents itself, they painfully and uselessly clutter and congest Thought with “a thousand arguments,” since it is always Love that carries Thought off, and the Mind that withdraws.’ Kristeller, 372. The idolum is the life inherent in the ethereal body which is one of three vehicles of the soul responsible for sense perception and fantasy. As Ficino says, the rational Soul ‘sends into the vehicle an animating act, which we have called the idolum of the Soul’ (translation by Kristeller, 372). [Sed rationalem ipsam animam quantum & rationalis est, & comes coelestium animarum, aethere actum vivificum in vehiculum, quod anime idolum saepe iam appellavimus (Ficino 1959, 1:404).] Park 1998, 466. See also McFarlane: ‘Scève is more concerned with the different “faculties,” as earlier psychology used to term them’ (1966 edition, 32). To get an idea of this work, see the 1583 edition which shows the reader the ‘Elenchus Librorum’: I. Grammaticae Latinae; II Dialectica; III Rhetorica; IIII. Arithmetica; V. Musica; VI. Geometria; VII. Astronomia & Astrologia; VIII. Physices principia; IX. Rerum naturalium origo; X. De Anima vegetativa & sensitiva; XI. De Animi rationali; XII, Ethica, seu moralis Philosophia. Following this is an ample, six-book ‘Elenchus Appendicum.’ See Kraye 1998, 334. Le Roman de la Rose par Guillaume De Lorris et Jean De Meung, 5 vols., ed. Pierre Marteau. Reprint of 1878 edition (Weisbaden: Kraus, 1970). Robin Smith in Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 232.

Notes to pages 376–81

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88 Foulquié 1949, 5. 89 Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 232–3. 90 Kahn 1979. On the union of opposites, Heraclitus says (through Aristotle’s report): ‘“the counter-thrust brings together,” and from tones at variance comes the finest attunement (harmonia), and “all things come to pass through conflict”’ (ibid., 193). 91 ‘They do not comprehend how a thing agrees at variance with itself: [it is] an attunement (or “fitting together,” harmonie) turning back [on itself], like that of the bow and the lyre’ (ibid., 195). 92 Ibid., 47, 53, 65, 71, 75, 75, 85. 93 See his article ‘Heraclitus of Ephesus’ in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Borchert, 2nd ed. (2006), 4:316–21. 94 Foulquié 48. Cusa’s use of dialectic with geometrical diagrams is a frequent example of humanistic dialectic. For an in-depth study of his use of geometrical figures as signs of the existence and nature of God, see Miller 2003, 25–6, 79, 89, 93. 95 See Miller 2003, 12–67; also Staub 1967, 100. 96 For example, The City of God, Book V chapter 11, is titled ‘God’s Universal Providence by Whose Laws the Whole Scheme of Things is Governed.’ The relevant passage is as follows: ‘He is the God omnipotent, creator and maker of every soul and every body; participation in him brings happiness to all who are happy in truth and not illusion ... From him derives every mode of being, every species, every order, all measure, number, and weight ... He has not abandoned even the inner parts of the smallest and lowliest creature, or the bird’s feather (to say nothing of the heavens and the earth, the angels and mankind) – he has not left them without a harmony of their constituent parts, a kind of peace.’ [De universali providentia Dei, cujus legibus omnia continentur: – Deus unus omnipotens, creator et factor omnis animae atque omnis corporis: cujus sunt participatione felices ... a quo est mensura, numeris, pondus ... qui non solum coelum et terram, nec solum angelum et hominem; sed nec exigui et contemptibilis animantis viscera, nec avis pennulam, nec herbae flosculum, nec arboris folium sine suarum partium convenientia, et quadam veluti pace dereliquit (PL, vol. 41, col. 154).] 97 Burkert 1985, 105–7, 233–5, 312. 98 The paradoxes of copia and emptiness in the Renaissance are examined by Cave 1979, 3–34. 99 La Dialectique, 22. 100 Jaspers 1962, 35–9. 101 ‘Therefore the source of all beauty is God. Therefore the source of all love is God. Moreover, the light of the sun in water is a kind of shadow compared

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105 106 107

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109 110 111 112

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Notes to pages 383–9 to its brighter light in the air. Similarly, the brightness in the air is a shadow compared to its brilliance in the fire; its brilliance in fire is a shadow compared to the light of the sun shining in the very sun itself’ (Commentary, 140). Festugière 1941, 94. ‘In this quite solid dizain, with great precision, Scève marks the diverse stages of this ascent ... First, the poet loved exterior beauty, then interior beauty, the grace of the soul, finally, Virtue itself whose grace was its sign: he [the poet] will no longer leave it’ (translation mine). ‘O crudelem amantium sortem! O vitam omni morte miseriorem, nisi forsitan vester animus, hac amoris violentia proprio ex corpore raptus, negligat insuper amati figuram atque in divini splendoris edem’ (Commentarium, VI:9, 217). ‘Quapropter te obsecro, o Socrates, ut certo quodam modo, et termino, cetera diligas; deum vero amore diligas infinito neque ullus divino modus amori’ (Commentarium, VI:18, 239). ‘Corporis utique forman vides. Vis ne animi quoque spetiem intueri?’ (Commentarium, VI:17, 234). Commentary, 138. ‘Cernis quanta sit, quam varia in angelo multitudo atque compositio’ (Commentarium, VI:15, 232). Commentary, 79. ‘Cognoscere quidem illum vere omnino presenti in tempore impossibile est. Vere autem amare quoquomodo cognitum et possible est et facile’ (Commentarium, IV:6, 176). Commentary, IV:6, 79. ‘Hunc vos, convive prestantissimi, deum, quem pre ceteris diis generi humano beneficum esse. Aristophanes ait, omni sacrificiorum genere vobis propritium facite. Hunc piis precibus invocate, hunc toto corde capessite’ (Commentarium, 176). Commentary, VII:14, 171. Commentarium, 259–60. La Ramée 1964. For example, Homer, 51; Cicero, 64; Ovid, 67; Ronsard, 67; Virgil, 68; Terence, 97; Juvenal, 70; Pasquier, 140. See Kneale and Kneale 1991, 391, on proportion. See ‘Cajetan,’ in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Audi, 111. McInerny gives a critique of Cajetan’s reasoning in De nominum analogia concluding that he, like Plato, confused the order of knowing and the order of being (1966, 162–3). For an overview of the types of analogy in Aquinas’s philosophic system, see Copleston 1963, 2:72–81 Studies concentrating on analogy itself in Aquinas are McInerny 1961, especially 6–13; and McInerny 1966, which contains a critique of Cajetan (3–29) and a redressing of philosophical historiography concerning Aristotle, Thomas, and Cajetan (30–47). On a concise exposition of one-to-one, many-to-one, many-to-many analogies, see. Klubertanz and Holloway 1963, 69–79.

Notes to pages 389–401

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114 Klubertanz and Holloway 1963, 77. 115 Here is a partial list of references to enthymeme in the Rhetoric: 1355a6–13; 1356b1–25; 1357a14–22; 1358a2–35; 1394a26–b6; 1395b20–1400b24. 116 Ovid 1984, Book III, vv. 340–508. 117 Quoted from Baker 1986, 3–5. 118 Commentary, 140–1. ‘Narcissus quidem adolescens id est, temerarii et imperiti hominis animus. Sui vultum non aspicit, propriam sui substantiam et virtutem nequaquam animadvertit. Sed eius umbram in aqua prosequitur et amplecti conatur, id est, pulchritudinem in fragili corpore et instar aque fluenti, que ipsius animi umbra est, ammiratur. Suam quidem figuram deserit. Umbram numquam assequitur. Quoniam animus corpus sectando se negligit et usu corporis non impletur. Non enim ipsum revera appetit corpus sed sui ipsus spetiem a corporali forma, que spetieri sue imago est, illectus, quemadmodum Narcissus, affectat. Cumque id minime advertat, dum aliud quidem cupit, aliud sequitur, desiderium suum explere non potest. Ideo in lachrimas resolutus consumitur’ (Commentarium, VI:17, 235). 119 Ovid 1984, Book III, v. 425. ‘Spem sine corpore amat ... se cupit inprudens et, qui probat, ipse probatur.’ 120 Commentary, 57. ‘Accedit quod amans amati figuram suo sculpit in animo’ (Commentarium, II:8, 158). 121 Commentary, 56. ‘Ulterque amando suam tradit et redamando per suam restituit alienam’ (Commentarium, II:8, 157). 122 Commentary, 56–7. ‘Uterque amando suam tradit et redamando per suam restituit alienam. Quapropter iure ipso amare debet quisquis amatur. Qui vero non amat amantem, homicidii reus est habendus. Immo vero fur, homicida, sacrilegus. Pecunia a corpore possidetur, corpus ad animo. Qui ergo, animam arripit, a quo tam corpus quam pecunie possidentur, animum simul corpusque et pecunias arripit. Quo fit ut tamquam fur, homicida, sacrilegus triplici morti sit obnoxius, ac velut infamis penitus atque prophanus impune a quo libet interfici possit, nisi ipsemet sponte sua legem illam impleat, amet videlicet amatorem’ (Commentarium, II:8, 157). 123 Commentary, 129. ‘Quis illi non indignetur, qui ipsi abstulerit animum? Ut enim pre ceteris grata libertas ita servitus onerosa. Itaque formosos odis simul et amas; odis tamquam fures et homicidas, tamquam specula celesti fulgore micantia mirari cogeris et amare. Quid agas, o miser? Quo te vertas nescis, heu, o perdite, necis’ (Commentarium, VI:10, 222). 124 Commentary, 57. ‘Amorem procreat similitudo’ (Commentarium, II:8, 158). 125 In speaking about why Narcissus melted away and was ‘destroyed,’ Ficino says: ‘It was undoubtedly in order that Socrates might avoid such a death that Diotima led him from the Body to the Soul, from this to the Angel, and

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126 127 128 129 130

Notes to pages 405–15 from this back to God’ (Commentary, VI:17, 141). [Quam utique mortem ut Socrates devitaret, Diotima ipsum a corpore ad animum, ab hoc in angelum, ab eo reduxit in deum (Commentarium, VI:17, 235).] Sypher 1955, 101–17. Ibid., 111. On the identification of Saint Jerome as the diminutive figure holding the scroll, see Gould 1994, 144. Commentary, 169. ‘Ratio anime, multitudo notionum argumentationumque mobilis, sed ordinata’ (Commentarium, VII:13, 257). DA, 160. ‘Certainly, holding oneself far from the thing loved, only so much and no more than the affectionate memory in itself ruminates on the food devoured by the emotions – this distance engenders in the Lover not only the cause of all his good, but also, it gives him the occasion to make it more lovable day by day ... a little time later, instructed by Reason and returned to himself, he shows his virtues one after the other by doing with them what the confused feeling of new joy prevented him from doing’ (translation mine).

7 Via unitiva 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

McGinn 1997, 24–5. See Appendix 3 titled ‘Contemplation’ in vol. 49 of the Summa, 103. McGinn 1997, 34. Symposium, 201d, 205d, 211c–d. NE, 1177a25–7; 1178b29. Gatti 1996, 21. McGinn 1997, 165. Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, Celestial Hierarchy, 161. McGinn 1997, 174. Ibid., 175. Bonaventure 1971, 64. ‘igniculus sapientiae’ (1882–1902, 8:3). Ibid., 75. ‘modicitatem tuam’ (1882–1902, 8:9). Ibid., 86–7. ‘ut laetitia te delectet propter Sponsi plenitudinem adeo’ (1882– 1902, 8:14). 14 Ibid., 86. ‘dulcorem caritatis’ (1882–1902, 8:12). 15 CisP., 172. ‘In prima itaque via mundanae concupiscentiae deseruntur. In secunda mens illustratur. In tertia jam quietata quiescit in Deo’ (Cis., 118). 16 CisP, 163. ‘Caput XXIX: Quod exercitator plus sentit et diligit quam videt et intelligit’ (Cis., 111).

Notes to pages 415–23

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17 CisP., 142. ‘Acquiritur autem haec via per intimam recollectionem ab exterioribus ad interiora, ab infinis ad summa, a temporalibus ad aeterna’ (Cis., 94). 18 CisP., 182. ‘Et ideo secundum nominis etymologiam sapientia interpretatur quasi sapida scientia, qui saper pertinet ad affectionem, desiderium, appetitum’ (Cis., 124). 19 CisP, 140. ‘Anima mea liquefacta est, ut dilectus locutus est’ (Cis., 94). 20 CisP., 167, 170, 171. ‘Illuminatio, Inflammatio, Suavitas, Desiderium, Saturitas, Raptus ... Huic sexto gradui annectunt Doctores hos duos sequentes ... Primus dicitur securitas ... Secundus est plena tranquillitas’ (Cis., 114, 117). 21 ConfPC, III:6, 62. ‘Tu autem eras interior intimo meo’ (Conf., 27). 22 ‘mutuae inhaesionis,’ Summa, Ia 2ae, 28, 2. 23 Summa, vol. 46, Appendix 3, p. 103. Jordan Aumann’s words in his commentary on ‘Contemplation.’ 24 James 2004; Maréchal 1926 and 1937; Bouyer 1982; Underhill 1990; Butler 1967; Inge 1960; Katz 1992; McGinn 1998 and 1999. Each of McGinn’s volumes has extensive bibliographies of primary and secondary sources and abundant notes. Finally, Fanning has an excellent chronological chart (2002, 257–8). 25 Bouyer 1963, 406–10. 26 ‘Theologia mystica est cognitio experimentalis habita de Deo per amoris unitivi complexum’ (Gerson 1962, 3:274). 27 See McGinn 1997, 24–32 (Plato) and 44–55 (Plotinus). 28 Summa vol. 46, Appendix 3, 106. Thomas did admit to infused wisdom, which is a gift of the Holy Spirit and this knowledge is quasi-conatural (107). 29 Ruusbroec 1985, 134. See Underhill’s comments on this passage which she summarizes as ‘restful fruition’ and ‘active love’ (1990, 436). 30 CisP, 312. ‘ut dicit Gerson in sua mystica theologia; in via enim Dei non progredi retrogredi est’ (Cis., 217). 31 Bonaventure 1971, 88. ‘concupiscentia te inflammet’ (1882–1902), 15. 32 Ibid., 82. ‘admirationis aspectum’ (ibid., 13). 33 ‘The Ascent of Mont Ventoux,’ trans. Hans Nachod in Cassirer, Kristeller, and Randall, Jr. 1948, 44. For the Latin text, see Petrarch, 1933–42, 1:158: ‘Rodanus ipse sub oculis nostris erat.’ 34 Nachod translation, 39. The Latin text of the Familiari reads: ‘per valles errabam,’ ‘perplexi pigeret erroris,’ ‘anfractus oblitus,’ ‘in longam difficultatem incido’ (155). 35 Nachod translation, 46. ‘et luna pernox gratum obsequium prestabat euntibus’ (Familiari, 160). 36 Nochod translation, 40. ‘Ac nescio annon longe facilius esse debeat quod per

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42 43

44

45

46

47 48

49 50 51

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Notes to pages 423–8 ipsum animum agilem et immortalem sine ullo locali motu in ictu trepidantis oculi fieri potest’ (Familiari, 156). Nachod translation, 40. ‘Multi quoque colles intereminent et de virtute in virtutem preclaris gradibus ambulandum est’ (Familiari, 156). Nachod translation, 45. ‘prae altitudine contemplationis humane’ (Familiari, 160). Nachod translation, 46. The following Latin passage concludes the letter: ‘ad unum, bonum, verum, certum, stabile se convertant’ (161). ‘On the twenty-sixth day of April, at Malaucène,’ Nachod translation, 46. Nachod translation, 42. ‘Hodie decimus annus completur, ex quo, puerilibus studiss dimissis, Bononia excessisti; et, o Deus immortalis, o immutabilis, Sapientia’ (Familiari, 157). Gilson expresses this point well: ‘Such are the passions which are, as it were, the matter on which the virtues are exercised’ (1956, 285–6). Montaigne 1957, 56. This quotation is taken from ‘Que philosopher, c’est apprendre a mourir’ (1:20, ed. Maurice Rat): ‘Quoy qu’ils dient, en la vertu mesme, le dernier but de nostre visée, c’est la volupté’ (82). Commentary, 54. ‘Quo qui recte utitur corporis quidem formam laudat, sed per illam excellentiorem animi mentisque et dei spetiem cogitat camque vehementius ammiratur et amat’ (Commentarium, II:7, 155). ‘Si perversa est voluntas, perversos habebit hos motus, scilicet passionum; si autem recta est, non solum inculpabiles, verum etiam laudabiles erunt’ (Summa, 1a 2ae, 59, 2). Commentary, VI:18, 144. ‘Quapropter te obsecro, o Socrates, ut certo quodam modo et termino cetera diligas; deum vero amore diligas infinito neque ullus divina modus assit amori’ (Commentarium, VI:18, 238–9). ‘Motus autem virtus est e converso principium habens in ratione, et terminum in appetitu, secundum quod a ratione movetur’ (Summa, Ia 2ae, 59, 2). Commentary, 86. ‘Merito igitur amorem ad scientias, figuras et voces dumtaxat volumus pertinere. Atque iccirco gratia illa solum que in tribus iis reperitur, animi virtute, figura, voce, quia maxime animum provocat, a kavlevw, quod significat kavllo~, id est provocatio, nominatur. Kavllo~ vero grece pulchritudinem latine significat’ (Commentarium V:2). Skenazi 1994, 87–99. Quoted from Fideler’s introduction to Guthrie 1987, 28. Commentary, 65. ‘Solus horum omnium tu regis habenas’ (Commentarium, III:2, 162). On p. 69, n. 15 in Commentary, Jayne states that Ficino takes this quotation from Orpheus Hymn 58 (To Eros). ‘By “these things” are meant “things in this world.”’ See Guthrie 1987, 28. Theoretical music and the virtues are invariably men-

Notes to pages 429–35

53 54 55 56

57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64

65

66 67 68

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tioned in accounts of Pythagoras. For example, in his Life of Pythagoras (ed. Guthrie 1987), Iamblichus states that he ‘discovered the harmonic science and ratios’ (86), and in later sections, stresses the importance of ‘Temperance and Self-Control’ (103) and ‘Courage or Fortitude’ (108). See. Guthrie 1987, 167. See Guthrie 1987, 171. A useful glossary, ‘Select Pythagorean Terms,’ is found in Guthrie 1987, 333–4. ‘Contemplationis donum Saturnus per Saturnios demones roborat. Gubernandi et imperandi potentiam Iupiter Iovialium demonum ministerio. Magnitudinem animi Mars per demones Martiales. Sensum opinionisque claritatem, unde vaticinium nium sequitur, Sol demonum solarium adiumento. Amorem per Venereos Venus inspirat. Pronunciandi et interpretandi solertiam, Mercurialibus intercedentibus Mercurius adiuvat. Luna postremo lunaribus demonibus conferentibus fovet generationis officium’ (Commentarium, VI:4, 204). ‘Scimus quoniam cum apparuerit similes ei erimus quoniam videbimus eum sicuti est’ (1 John 3:2). The chuch takes no position on whether Mary was assumed into heaven after or before death, but simply holds that, at the end of her life, she was taken up body and soul. Defaux 2004 edition, 2:165. See Parturier 1961 edition, 94; Defaux 2004 edition, 2:165. Johannes Tauler: Sermons 24–5. Conf., III:6. ConPC 62. Ruusbroec 1985, 75. For all his metaphors of merging and sinking into, I do not believe that Plotinus is saying that the union of souls creates or supposes a complete and undifferentiated identity of the human soul with the One. The theme of the beloved’s image etched in the lover’s soul is a common theme of the Renaissance in such writers as Serafino, Tebaldeo, Michel d’Amboise, Marot, and Ficino. See Defaux 2004 edition, 2:267–9. However, Scève’s treatment of this topos emphasizes the problems of representation and the attempt to raise them to spiritual value. Oxford Classical Dictionary, 318. ‘And what is this definition?’ (Book III, 386). ‘Et qual saria la loro diffinizione?’ (Ebreo, III, 324). The Philosophy of Love, Book III, 386. ‘Grazia formale che diletta e muove chi la comprendre ad amor; e questa grazia formale, cosi comme ne li belli naturali è di forma naturale, cosi ne li belli artifiziati è di forma artifizale’ (Ebreo, III, 324).

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Notes to pages 435–49

69 The Philosophy of Love, III, 387. ‘Resta adunque che la forma senza corpo è bellissima si come il corpo senza la forma è brutissimo: e de la maniera de le cose artifizali sono le naturali, ché quelle forme che li corpi naturali fan belli è manifesto che la mente del sommo artifice e vero architettore del mondo, cioè ne l’intelleto divino, si truovino molto piú belle, però che ivi son tutte insieme, astratte di materia di mutazione o alterazione e d’ogni maniera di divisione e moltitudine, e la bellezza di tutte insieme fa bella ognuna e la bellezza di ciascuna si trova in tutte’ (Ebreo, III, 325). 70 McGinn 1998, 82. 71 Ibid., 21. 72 New Catholic Encyclopedia, 12:439–41. 73 Ibid., 441. 74 ‘Media autem nocte clamor factus est ecce sponsus venit exite obviam ei’ (Matt. 25:6). 75 See James A. Wieseman’s introduction to Ruusbroec 1985, 8. 76 On this point, see Prince 2003, s.v. actant, actantial role, actor, contract, 1, 2, 3, 17. 77 Scève models his poem on Rime 208 of Petrarch. See also DellaNeva 1983, 33. 78 CisP, 147. ‘Nisi tu Deus meus, quia tu es mihi sufficientissimus’ (Cis., 98). 79 CisP, 155. ‘... qui nullius indiget, quia est sibi sufficientissimus’ (Cis., 104). 80 Introduction to Ruusbroec 1985, 20–1. 81 ConfPC, IX:10, 197. ‘ ... erigentes nos ardentiore affectu in idipsum, perambulavimus gradatim cuncta corporalia et ipsam caelum, unde sol et luna et stellae lucent super terram. Et adhuc ascendebamus interius cogitando et loquendo et mirando opera tua. Et venimus in mentes nostras et transcendimus eas, ut attingeremus regionem ubertatis indeficientis, ubi pascis Israhel in aeternum veritate pabulo, et ibi vita sapienta est, per quam fiunt omnia ista, et quae fuerunt et quae futura sunt, et ipsa non fit, sed sic est ut fuit, et sic erit semper. Quin potius fuisse et futurum esse non est in ea, sed esse solum, quoniam aeterna est: nam fuisse et futurum esse non est aeternum. Et dum loquimur et inhiamus illi, attingimus eam modice toto ictu cordis’ (Conf., IX:10, 113). 82 Richard of Saint Victor 1979, 36. 83 Ibid., 312. I refer to Book V, chapter 3, whose title is ‘De mentis dilatatione, quibus modis soleat accrescere.’ The opening lines read: ‘Ille autem contemplationis modus qui fit mentis dilatatione, attentione tribus solet gradibus excrescere, arte, exercitatione’ (PL, vol. 196, col. 171). 84 Ibid., 313. ‘Ad hoc enim speculam erigimus, ut in hoc longinquum videre, et visum nostrum in omnem partem dilatare possimus’ (PL, vol. 196, col. 172] 85 Eckhart 1981, 220: ‘Und dar nâch daz die krette der sêle durnehtiger und vür

Notes to pages 452–69

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96 97

98 99

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101 102

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blôz sint, dar nâch nement sie mê durnehticlîcher und wîter, swaz sie nement, und enpfâhent wîter und hânt groezer wunne und werdent mê ein mit dem, daz sie nement, alsô verre, daz diu oberste kraft der sêle, diu aller dinge blôtz ist und mit nihte niht gemeine enhât, enniment niht minner dan got selben in der wîte und vulle des wesens.’ See also Eckhart 1936, 1:28–9. McGinn 1997, 242. Ibid. Greene 1972, 63. Commentary, 94. ‘Spetiem quoque in luminum, umbrarum, linearum iocunda concordia non in materia collocamus’ (Commentarium, V:6, 189). Greene 1972, 73, 74. Underhill 1990, 381, 384, 392–4. Ibid., 402. Defaux 2004 edition, 2:129. Ibid. Gerson 1998, 81, 83, 84, 88, 95, 103, 107, 110, 113, 116. For the French text, see Gerson 1966, vol. 7: ‘... que on [sic] reçoit en la delectation ou plaisance espirituelle que on sent en l’ame quant il [Dieu] la visite secretement’ (20–1); ‘par inspirations et mouvemens segrez par dedans sans moyen’ (23); ‘on peut trouver son lieu secret pour estre en sa paix et en silence’ (32); ‘Les lieus segrez des bois ou des foretz ou des desers’ (33); ‘le segret et la silence de l’ame par dedans’ (32). Ficino, Commentarium VI:18; Plato, Symposium 196c-d; Plotinus, Enneads I, 2, 1–2. ‘Sed quantum ad id quod est formale, remanebunt in beatis perfectissime post hanc vitam, inquantum ratio uniuscujusque rectissima erit circa ea quae ad ipsum pertinent secundum statum illum; et vis appetitiva omnio movebitur secundum ordinem rationis, in his quae ad statum illum pertinent’ (Summa, Ia 2ae, 67, 1; 23:222). See Corrozet 1997, emblem H 90 and accompanying gloss poem. ‘Shall we, then, start the inquiry at this point by our customary procedure? We are in the habit, I take it, of positing a single idea or form in the case of various multiplicities to which we give the same name’ (X, 596a820). Eckhart 1941, 108: ‘Wan als got unmaezic ist an dem gebenne, alsô ist ouch diu sêle unmaezic an dem nemenne oder enpfâhenne. Und als got ist almehtic an dem würkenne, alsô ist diu sêle abgründic an dem lîdenne. Und dar umbe wirt si überformet mit gote in gote.’ See Eckhart 1936, 424–5 for the original. Underhill 1990, 447. Eckhart 1941, 108, Blakney translation of sermons with some changes. ‘Jâ,

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103 104 105 106 107

108

109

110 111 112 113

Notes to pages 470–4 von unmaeziger minne hât got unser saelicheit geleget in ein lîden, wan wir mê lîden dan würken und unglîche mê nemen dan geben. Und ein ieglîchiu gâbe wîtert die enpfenclicheit und die bergerunge ze einem mêrern und groezern ze enpfâhenne.’ See Eckhart 1936, 423–4 for original. See the article titled ‘Oraison’ by Michel Dupuy in DS, cols 841–4. Eckhart 1941, 104–5. ‘Her umbe, wil si krefticlîche würken inwendic, sô muoz si wider heim ruofen.’ See Eckhart 1936, 416 for original. Underhill 1990, 315. Ibid., 64. In The Spiritual Espousals, Ruusbroec inveighs against what he calls ‘false emptiness.’ This is the state of ‘seeking rest in things which are apart from God’ (1985, 136). He specifies instances of false emptiness as ‘empty idleness into which a person falls and in which he becomes forgetful of himself, of God, and of all things as regards any activity’ (ibid.). Such ‘empty idleness’ ‘spiritual pride,’ and ‘self-complacency’ is devoid of true rest in God which performs ‘works of virtue’ and ‘charity’ (136–7). Commentary, 56. ‘Nam ergo postquam me ipsum amisi, si per te me redimo, per te me habeo; si per te habeo, te prius ac magis habeo quam me ipsum, tibi propinquior quam mihi sum, quippe cum mihi non aliter quam per te medium inherescam’ (Commentarium, II:8, 157). ‘Thus there is reason, not only in the love of the inferior for the superior and desire to be united therewith, but no less the love of the superior for the inferior and desire to unite therewithal, to the end that each in his degree may be perfect without flaw and that the Universe may be progressively united and bound with the bond of love, which unites the corporeal with the spiritual world and the lower with the higher: this union with all diversity co-ordinated and all plurality unified being the chief end of the Supreme Artificer, Almighty God, when he created the world’ (The Philosophy of Love, 2:182). [Onde con ragione non solamente l’inferiore ama e desidera unirsi col superiore, ma ancora il superiore ama e desidera unir seco l’inferiore, acciò che ognuno di loro sia perfetto nel suo grado senza mancamento, e acciò che l’universo s’unisca e si leghi successivamente col legame de l’amore, che unisce il mondo corporale col spirituale e l’inferiori con li superiori: la quale unione è principal fine del sommo opifice e omnipotente Dio ne la produzione del mondo, con diversitá ordinata e pluralitá unificata.] Ebreo, 2:157–8. See these in Fanning 2001, xvi and xix. See Defaux 2004 edition, 2:183–4. On the Ficinian context of causality, see Kristeller, 136–9, 136–40, 187. See Commentary, IV:3, 74: ‘to be passive pertains to the body, but to act pertains to something incorporeal ... This higher substance is the soul, which

Notes to pages 476–9

114

115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127

128 129 130 131 132

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though present and dwelling in bodies, sustains itself, and gives bodies the quality and power of complexity through which, as through organs, the soul carries out various operations in and through the body.’ [sequitur ut pati ad corpus, agere ad aliquid incorporale pertilneat ... Huiusmodi anima est, que corporibus presens et insidens, ipsa se substinet et qualitatem vimque complexionis corporibus tribuit, per que tamquam instrumenta in corpore et per corpus varias operationes exercet (Commentarium, IV:3, 170).] John 19:39. Naturally, the Old Testament frequently refers to myrrh. For example, it is used in the confection of perfumes (Esther 2:11; Psalms 45:8; Proverbs 7:17) as well as in oil for anointing (Exodus 30:23). The myrrh brought to the infant Jesus by the Wise Men designates both a precious gift and a presage of his passion (Matthew 2:11). On Mariology, see Defaux 2004 edition, 2:413. See Donaldson-Evans 1989, 12, on myrrh as a ‘purifying and preserving’ agent. ‘quia non erit inpossible apud Deum omne verbum,’ Luke 1:37. McGinn 1997, 27. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 172. Conf., IX:10. ‘We came to our own souls, and passed beyond them to that place of everlasting plenty.’ McGinn 1997, 206. Ibid., 224. Butler 1967, 83. Ibid., 115. McGinn 1999, 335. PL, vol. 196, col. 174. Bonaventure 1882–1902, 5:313. Angela of Foligno 1985, 356, section 35. ‘The soul delighted unspeakably therein, yet it beholdeth naught which can be related by the tongue or imagined in the heart. It seeth nothing, yet seeth all things, because it beholdeth the Good darkly – and the more darkly and secretly the Good is seen, the more certain is it, and excellent above all things’ (Angela of Foligno 1966, 182). Catherine of Siena 1980, 148. ‘Ché l’occhio vedendo non vede, l’orecchia udendo non ode, la lingua parlando non parla’ (Catherine of Siena 1928, 154). Schürmann 1978, 84–5, 257–8. Kemp 1998, 1:36, 134. Quoted from Cottrell 1986, 78. Rabelais 1994, 341: ‘Purified mind, ravished in ecstasy,/Who haunting the heavens, your origin,/Has abandoned your host and home,/Your body ...’ (translation mine).

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Notes to pages 479–83

133 Quoted from Cottrell 1986, 117: ‘Love, love, you have brought them together, uniting death with life. But the union gives life to death. Life dying with love confirms that life without end has given life to our death. Death gave life a natural death. By this death, I, dead, receive life; and I am borne away to the living by death. In you I live; when in myself I am dead, death is nothing more to me than a door out of a prison. Life is death for me.’ 134 The Philosophy of Love, Book III, 226. ‘Cosi quando s’interpone l’anima fra l’intelletto e il corpo, cioè coppulandosi e unendosi con l’intelletto, riceve l’anima tutta la luce intellettuale ne la sua parte superiore e de la parte inferiore corporea resta oscura, e il corpo da lei non illuminato perdre l’essere, e lei si dissolve da lui. E questa è la felice morte che causa la coppulazione de l’anima con l’intelletto, la quale hanno gustata i nostri antichi beati Moisé et Aron, et gli altri de’qualli parla la sacra Scrittura, che morirono per bocca di Dio baciando la divinitá (comme t’ho detto)’ (Ebreo, 194–5). 135 Quoted from Perry 1976, 6. 136 James 2004, 364. Allen 1993, 148, states in the conclusion: ‘... the Ion commentary presents us with the arresting idea, implicit in Socrates’s argumentation undoubtedly but fully extrapolated by a Neoplatonist Ficino, that the soul itself is a rhapsode and its song an ascent into a divine poem, into the mind of the poet who is God, The Homer of Homers, the Orpehus of Orpheuses. It is a measure of the Quattrocento’s accommodating spirit that such a flamboyantly pagan formulation would have undoubtedly appealed to, and not unnerved, the majority of Ficino’s auditors.’ Scève, though not a Ficinian à la lettre, is also intermingling pagan and Christian concepts but with greater edginess than his Italian forebear. 137 Tyard, 10. ‘But it will please you to know, Pasithée, that transport, which I define with you as alienation of the mind ... contains in itself two kinds of alienation. The first, proceeding from the bodily illnesses of which you have spoken and correctly named madness and defect of the brain; the second, being engendered by a secret, divine power, through which the rational soul is made evident; and we name it divine madness, or with the Greeks, a ravishing of the mind ... for its purpose is to elevate the soul from the body to the heavens, which from the Heavens has descended into this body’ (translation mine). 138 Commentary 170–1; Tyard 1950, 12–20. 139 Helgeson 2001, 80. 140 Tyard 1950, 19: ‘Poetic transport is charged with the specific duty of accomplishing this goal, namely, awakening the sluggish soul by musical tones and comforting the disturbed part by the smoothness and sweetness of harmony; then by the well accorded variations of the musicians, accords chasing dis-

Notes to pages 484–7

141 142 143 144

145 146

147 148

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sonant discords; finally by reducing disorder into proportionally firm and steady evenness, that is uniformly distributed by the graceful and solemn facility of verses encompassed in precise observance of numbers and measures’ (translation mine). ‘Canzon, tu puoi ben dire:/‘Queste sei visioni al signor mio/àn fatto un dolce di morir desio’ (R 323, vv. 73–5). Defaux 2004 edition, 2:196; Roubichou-Stretz 1973, 57. Tyard, 18–19. Catherine of Siena 1980, 57. For the Italian text see Catherine of Siena, 1928, 41: ‘Alora quella anima come ebbra e quasi fuore di sé, crescendo el fuoco santo desiderio, stava quasi beata e dolorosa. Beata stava per l’unione che aveva fatta in Dio, gustando la larghezza e bontá sua, tutta annegata nella sua misericordia: e dolorosa era vedendo offendere tanta bontá. E rendeva grazie alla divina Maiestá, quasi cognoscendo che Dio avesse manifestato e’ difetti delle creature perché fusse costretta a levarsi con piú sollicitudine e maggiore desiderio. Sentenosi rinnovare il sentimento dell’anima nella Deitá eterna, crebbe tanto el santo e amoroso fucco che il sudore dell’acqua, el quale ella gittava per la forza che l’anima faceva al corpo (perché era piú perfetta l’unione che quella anima aveva fatta in Dio, che non l’unione fra l’anima e il corpo, e però sudava per forza e caldo d’amore), elle lo spregiava per grande desiderio che aveva di vedere escire del corpo suo sudore di sangue; dicendo a se medesima:—O anima mia, oimè! Tutto il tempo della vita tua hai perduto, e però sonno venuti tanti danni e mali nel mondo e nella santa Chiesa; molti, in comune e in particulare. E però Io voglio che tu ora rimedisca col sudore del sangue.’ Suso 1989, 34. Suso 1994, 80. According to Colledge, the Watch ‘was in the fourteenth century and thereafter, one of the three most popular devotional treatises in Western Europe’ (15). The other two were Pseudo-Bonaventure’s Meditations on the Life of Christ and Ludolph of Saxony’s Life of Christ. For the Latin text, see Suso 1977, 387: ‘Egressus cum undecim abii in montem Oliveti, ubi factus in agonia, cum prolixius orassem et intelligerem tam crudelia suppliciorium genera mihi iam imminere, tunc factus est sudor ieus sicut guttae sanguinis decurrentis in terram.’ In as much as Suso’s work is titled Horologium sapientiae it is rewarding to compare its connotations to Scève’s forty-third impresa, ‘L’Horloge’ whose devise intones ‘A mon labeur iour et nuict veille.’ Angela of Foligno 1966, 186–7. Teresa of Ávila 1957, 210. ‘Veíale en las manos un dardo de oro largo, y al fin del hierro me parecía tener un poco de fuego. Este me parecía meter por el

612

149 150 151

152 153

154

155

156 157 158

159

160

Notes to pages 488–93 corazón algunas veces, y que me llegaba a las entrañas. Al scarle, me parecía las llevaba consigo, y me dejaba toda abrasada en amor grande de Dios’ (Teresa of Ávila 1966, 178). Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, 19. See also Chase 2002, 19. James 2004, 329. ‘Et dum loquimur et inhiamus illi, attingimus eam modice toto ictu cordis. Et suspiravimus et religuimus ibi religatas primitias spiritus et remeavimus ad strepitum oris nostri’ (Conf., IX:10, 113). Quoted from Butler 1967, 83. Theresa of Ávila 1989, 185–6. ‘Cuando Nuestro Señor es servido de regalar más a esta alma muéstrale claramente su sacratisima Humanidad ... Y aunque es con tanta presteza que lo podriamos comparar a la de un relámpagno ... Mas habéis de entender que, aunque en este se detenga algún espacio, no se puede estar mirando más que estar mirando al sol, y así esta vista siempre pasa muy de presto’ (see Teresa of Avila 1966, 9:467–8). Tyard, 6: ‘If, however, you judge my face to show some interior change, your usual perspicacity has not at all deceived you; for ordinary thoughts that cause me harsh and continual war have not given rest to my exercised mind, so much so that the indisposition that you have thought to know in me should rather be named transport, which vexes and agitates my mind, but it is not an illness that distempers or weakens my person’ (translation mine). Tyard wishes to make the distinction that poetic transport is neither his laboured thoughts, from which he was carried off by Pasithée’s music, nor physical or mental illness. Philosophy of Love, Book III, 203–5. ‘Ché quando l’amante è in estasi, contemplando in quel che ama ... raccoglie a sé tutta l’anima, tutta restringendosi in una indivisibile unità ...’ (Ebreo, 176–7). Ibid., 204. ‘... sol comanda il corpo umano a la virtù vitale del cuore, la quale t’ho detto che è guardiano uniforme de la vita’ (Ebreo, 177). Ibid., 205. ‘luogo e dignitá’ (Ebreo, 177). Ibid., 205. ‘E cosi è mezzo tra la parte inferiore notritiva, che è nel ventre, e la superiore conoscitiva, che è ne la testa. Onde per mezzo suo queste due parti e virtú si collegano ne l’essere umano; sí che, se ’l vinculo di questa virtú non fusse nostra mente e anima, nelle affettuosissime contemplazioni dal nostro corpo si dilacceria e la mente volaria da noi talmente, che ’l corpo privo de l’anime resterebbe’ (Ebreo, 177). Ibid., 205. ‘In modo che, afferrandosi l’anima affettuosamente col desiderato e contemplato oggetto, potria prestamente lassare il corpo esanimato del tutto’ (Ebreo, 178). Ibid., 205. ‘Dolce sarebbe tal morte’ (Ebreo, 178).

Notes to pages 494–9

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161 Ibid., 203. ‘e non è piú anima ed essenzia di quel che ama, ma sol spezie attuale de la persona amata’ (Ebreo, 176). 162 See James 2004, 328–71; Underhill 1990, 359–66; Maréchal 1937, 102–10. The whole of Marghanita Laski’s study on ecstasy (1976) considers physical as well as psychological states. 163 The Philosophy of Love, Book III, 203. 164 Ibid. ‘anzi in tutto è di se stesso alieno’ (Ebreo, 176). 165 See Catherine of Siena 1928, 154: ‘Unde spesse volte il corpo è levato dalla terra per la perfetta unione che l’anima ha fatta in me, quasi come il corpo grave diventasse leggiero. Non è però che gli sia tolta la gravezza sua, ma perché l’unione che l’anima ha fatta in me è piú perfetta che non è l’unione fra l’anima e ‘l corpo; e però la fortezza dello spirito unita in me leva da terra la gravezza del corpo. El corpo sta come immobile, tutto stracciato dall’affetto dell’anima ...’ For this passage, I have preferred the translation of Underhill 1990, 365. 166 Quoted from James 2004, 359. 167 ‘For in the sleep of death what dreams may come,/When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,/Must give us pause; there’s the respect/That makes calamity of so long life.’ Hamlet, III. i. vv. 65–8. 168 2004 edition, 2:210. 169 The Philosophy of Love, Book II, 68. ‘l’universalitá de l’amore’ (Ebreo, 62). 170 Ibid., 191. ‘È cosi, perché l’amore è un spirito vivicante, che penetra tutto il mondo, ed è une legame che unisce tutto l’universo’ (Ebreo, 165). 171 Marot 1990–3, 2:577–8. 172 Richard of Saint Victor 1979, 316. Chapter V:4 is titled ‘De mentis sublevatione, quibus soleat gradibus assurgere,’ and the end of the chapter reads: ‘Nonne enim supra humanam naturam est, videre de praeterits, quod jam non est; videre de futuris, quod nondum est: videre de praesentibus, quod sensibus absens est’ (PL, vol. 196, col. 172). 173 Butler 1967, 115. 174 McGinn 1998, 267–82, 270. On the differences among Mechthild of Magdeburg, Gertrude the Great, and Mechthild of Hackeborn, see Bynum 1982. 175 English translation mine. ‘Amor veer in specie Virginias pulcherrimae consistorium circuibat decantans: Gyrum coeli circuivi sola ... et in fluctibus maris ambulavi’ (Mechthild von Hackeborn 1877, 180–1). 176 The Catholic Encyclopedia, 7:31. 177 Commentary, V:6, 94. ‘Accedit quod ordo nihil est aliud quam decens partium intervallum. Intervallum vero quid aliud dicemus quam distantiam partium’ (Commentarium, V:6, 189). 178 Translated by Kristeller, 223. ‘Atque ita sine termino progrederetur, nisi

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179 180

181

182

183

184

Notes to pages 500–7 ipsamet sibi modum imponeret, concluderetque esse spiritum aliquem infinitum, qui omnem angelum, & qui esse, & qui cogitari potest, innumeris gradibus superet’ (Ficino 1959, 1:201). 1996 edition, 315. Tyard, 19–20. ‘The third madness is necessary to keep thoughts away from so many intellectual arguments surrounding principles and conclusions, and to lead the understanding to union with the soul. This is what occurs through the ravishing of prophecies and divinations. Also, whoever is moved by the transports of divination or prophecy, completely ravished in interior contemplation, this person conjoins together his soul and all his spirits, lifting them high beyond all human comprehension and natural reason, in order to dip into the most intimate, profound, and remote divine secrets for the prediction of things that must come about’ (translation mine). Béguin 1947, 22: ‘To return to the quality of poetic expression in Scève, and to its concrete, vivid, and, one could even say, savoury translation of ecstasy, let us cite a marvellous dizain whose accumulated metaphors give an extraordinary impression of contemplative beatitude, that lifts little by little one’s thoughts from the eyes of Délie to a paradise of perfect happiness’ (translation mine). Augustine 1972, 968: ‘For who but the Creator of all things gave to the peacock the power of resisting putrefaction after death?’ ‘Quis enim nisi Deus creator omnium dedit carni pavonis mortui ne putresceret?’ (PL, vol. 41, col. 711). These lines are a reminiscence of Petrarch’s Rime 37: ‘la man bianche sottili/et le braccia gentili’ (vv. 97–8). Just as dizain 367 is one of a number of poems either anticipating or answering the lover’s apprehension of death in dizain 446, so does Petrarch’s persona begin and end Rime 37 reflecting on the precarious thread of life. Like dizain 446, he begins: ‘Sí è debile il filo a cui s’attente/la gravosa mia vita/che, s’altri non l’aita/elle fia tosto di suo corso a riva’ (vv. 1–4). Petrarch’s third stanza, like dizain 446, uses geographical imagery to symbolize life and death. Time passes so quickly that, no sooner is the sun seen in the east, then it reappears in west. At the conclusion of Rime 37, Petrarch’s persona, like Scève’s, wonders not only if, but in what state, he will be reunited with the beloved: ‘le di’io sarò tosto ch’io possa,/o spirto ignudo od uom di carne et d’ossa’ (vv. 119–20). Roubichou-Stretz 1973, 91. ‘It [the poem] is charged with all the weight of a sculptural gesture, appropriate for conferring, in an instant of time, the hard eternity of marble, giving it talismanic value. In effect, the meeting of the poet and Délie expresses an ecstasy that reconciles the flesh and the spirit in a perfection that allows time to stop and abolish itself’ (translation mine).

Notes to pages 507–19

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185 Defaux 2004 edition, 2:403. 186 Fleming, Honour, and Pevsner 1991, 203, 16. 187 Augustine, quoted from Trinkaus 1970. ‘Cupiditate vero experiendae potesatis suae, quodam nutu suo ad se ipsum tanquam ad medium proruit. Ita cum vult esse sicut ille sub nullio, et ab ipsa sui medietate poenaliter ad ima propellitur, id est, ad ea quibus pecora laetantur: atque ita cum sit honor ejus similitudo Dei, dedecus autem ejus similitudo pecoris ...’ (PL, vol. 42, XI:12, cols 1006–7. 188 Pico della Mirandola 1977, 5. ‘Tu, nullis angustis coercitus, pro tuo arbitrio, in cuius manu te posui, tibi illam praefinies’ (1942, 106). 189 Ricoeur 1995, 228. 190 Cotgrave, s.v. Empyré. 191 As Defaux points out, the ‘Cieulx’ of verse 8 is ‘le Dieu chrétien’ (2004 edition, 2:187). 192 Ibid., 188. 193 DA, 138. 194 Commentary, I:3, 39. ‘Merito igitur antiquissimum hunc Orpheus nominavit. Preterea seipso perfectum, quasi dicat seipsum perficientem’ (Commentarium, 140). 195 Ibid. ‘Consultissimum insuper nominavit. Nec iniuria. Nam omnis sapientia cuius proprium est consilium, ideo menti data est, quia amore in deum conversa ipsius fulgore refulxit’ (Commentarium, 140). 196 Ovid 1984, Book X, vv. 1–106. 197 See Helgeson (2001) for the full complement of Délie’s poems that directly refer or allude to Orpheus. 198 DA, 166–7. ‘In this way and by this path, in spite of death, he drew his beloved Euridice from the deep abyss and led her back to new and joyful life. This might have proved true if Orpheus, vanquished of his disordered appetite, had not turned back so soon to see her and embrace her in his usual pleasures. But for the fault that he committed in doing this, he was considered immoderate and inconstant and pursued by other advised and wary women who, thinking him the murderer of his wife, and with words and other ignominious acts, tore him up, pierced him, and put him to pieces. 199 Virgil: The Georgics, trans. Wilkinson (1982), 141. 200 ‘nec procul afuerunt telluris margine summae’ (Ovid 1984, X:55, vol. 2, p. 68). 201 Choné 2004. 202 De Trinitate, PL, vol. 42, col. 878, III, 9, 16. Also, see Chadwick 1981, 242. 203 Jakobson 1960, 358. 204 Giordano 1982a, 27.

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Notes to pages 520–5

205 Commentarium, VI:16–17. 206 De diversis quaestionibus VII ‘ad Simplicianum,’ II, 3, quoted from Gilson 1960, 303. 207 In this quotation, Paul Henry introduces the MacKenna translation of Plotinus (1969, lxv) by citing the words of Arnou, which are given in my text. 208 See Conley 1994, 129. Speaking of the middle third of the sixteenth century, Conley states: ‘Those who held to a cosmological vision believed in an infinity of creation that knows neither border nor artificial limit of any kind, whereas the empirical geographer called for a detailed and projective account of areas that, once answered, could display on a paginal surface, an illusion of the variety of the visible world ... the poetry of Maurice Scève moves between these two poles or concurrent conceptions, and that its creative urgency becomes most evident when it rivals with the world it otherwise represents ...’ (130–1). In The Self-Made Map (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), Conley points out that geography and cartography attempt to bring the unknown into control by spatial placement and the naming of coordinates relative to what is known. This had a function: ‘Because the unknown was located by being named, it became a form of a relation rather than an unfathomable menace or delusion’ (8). The poet-lover in Délie projects his progress into the supercelestial unknown not only to attempt to name, but to somehow embody terrestrial coordinates and physical traits into the mystical flight that would transcend them. 209 Bonaventure 1993, 39. Here Bonaventure is quoting Pseudo-Dionysius: ‘Tu autem, o amice, circa mysticas visiones, corroborato itinere, et sensus desere et intellectuales operationes et sensibila et invisibilia et omne non ens et ens, et ad unitatem, ut possibile est, inscius restituere ipsus, qui est super omnem essentiam et scientiam. Etenim te ipso et omnibus immensurabili et absoluto purae mentis excessu, ad superessentialem divinarum tenebrarum radium, omnia deserens et ab omnibus absolutus, ascendes’ (Bonaventure 1882–1902, 5:313). 210 ‘The holy “authorities” ... are so placed that they can receive God in a harmonious and unconfused way and indicate the ordered nature of the celestial and intellectual authority ... They are likened, insofar as they can be, to that authority which is the source of all authority and creates all authority; and they make that authority evident, to the extent that angels can, in their harmonious orders of authoritative power’ (Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, 167). 211 ConfPC, 21. ‘Et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te’ (Conf., 3). 212 Richard of Saint Victor 1979, 303. ‘Quasi ad septmum jam diem pertigitur, quando in illo sublimatatis statu, tandem aliquando, ad summam animus

Notes to pages 525–39

213 214 215 216 217

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tranquillitatem componitur, ut non solum omnem curam et sollicitudinem deponat, imo universas pene humanae passibilitatis metas excedat’ (PL, vol. 196, col. 165). Bonaventure 1971, 3:81; Bonaventure 1882–1902, 12. ‘sopor in obumbratione Christi.’ CisP., XXX, 170–1. ‘Primus dicitur securitas ... Secundus est plena tranquillitas’ (Cis., 117). Boethius, PL , vol. 63, col. 858 (translation mine). Otto 2003. Ibid., 148.

Conclusion 1 Taylor 1989, 131. 2 Translated by Kristeller, 210. ‘Tantali enim sumus omnes. Sitimus quidem bona omnes vera, omnes insomnia bibimus. Dum vero letales lethei fluminis undas faucibus plenis ingurgitamus, interea umbratilem quandam nectaris & Ambrosiae gustus lam summis labris fere iam lambimus. Unde miseros continuo Tantalos sitis exurit anhela’ (Ficino 1959 1:749).

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Primary Sources Editions of Délie 1544. Délie, object de plus haulte vertu. Lyon: Sulpice Sebon pour Antoine Constantin. 1564. Délie, object de plus haulte vertu. Paris: Nicolas du Chemin. 1961. Maurice Scève: Délie, object de plus haulte vertu. Ed. Eugène Parturier. Paris: Didier. Repr. of original 1916 edition. 1966. The ‘Délie’ of Maurice Scève. Ed. I.D. McFarlane. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Excellent introduction and notes, but see Dudley Wilson’s list of transcription errors and omissions in article 1967b 1972. Délie 1544. Intro. Dudley Wilson. Repr. of first edition with an appendix from the edition of 1564. Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar Press. Offers valuable printing and publishing observations. 1984. Délie, Object de plus haulte vertu. Ed. Françoise Charpentier. Based on the 1544 edition. Illustrations from the 1564 edition. Paris: Gallimard. 1996. Délie, Object de plus haulte vertu. Ed. Françoise Joukovsky. Paris: Dunod, Classiques Garnier. 2001. Maurice Scève. Délie, object de plus haulte vertu. 2001. Preface and bibliography Cécile Alduy. Intro. and notes Eugène Parturier. Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes. 2004. Délie, Object de plus haulte vertu. Ed. Gérard Defaux. 2 vols. Geneva: Droz. Other Works of Scève 1535. La Deplourable fin de Flamete, elegant invention de Jehan de Flores Espaignol, traduicte en Langue Françoyse. Lyon: François Juste.

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Index

active passivity, 468 admiration, xviii, 22, 78, 86, 100–1, 112, 153, 176, 240, 272–3, 278, 362, 380, 407–8, 414, 422, 453, 454, 464– 5, 478, 510–11, 586n19, 594n27, 603n32 Aeschylus, 318, 320 affaire des placards, 10 aggressive eye topos, 342 agnosia, 414 agon, xix, 31, 45, 49–50, 53, 56, 60, 63, 69, 71–3, 75, 79, 84–5, 107, 117, 119, 123, 138–9, 146, 156, 190, 292, 298, 310–19, 379–80, 386, 407–8, 412, 428, 485, 535–6, 563n130, 616n146 Alan of Lille, 488 alchemy, 154, 217, 251, 343, 534 Alciato, Andrea, 109, 193, 195, 245, 248, 581n55, 583n92, 595n39 Alcmaeon of Croton, 428 Ambrose, Saint, 360, 477 Ammirato, Scipione, 254 amour ardens, 415 amour courtois, xx, 29, 80, 85–6, 88, 218, 222, 263, 324, 346, 550n4 anagnorisis, 270, 566n165, 585n9 analogy, 9, 101, 163, 166, 173, 186,

191, 330, 387–90, 393, 399, 408, 559n97, 600n114 androgyne, 215, 224, 365–6, 476 angel, angelic, 18–21, 130, 175, 177, 183, 229–33, 235, 239, 245, 253, 259, 261, 329, 334, 344, 381, 383–4, 386, 401, 405, 407, 414–15, 420, 423, 468, 476, 480, 487–8, 520, 523, 527–8, 531, 533, 537, 616n210 Angela of Foligno, 478, 487 Angeriano, Girolamo, 344 Anselm, Saint, 281, 289 antiperistase, 95, 132, 153, 226, 544, 546, 574n72 apeiron, 155, 429 aphaeresis, 414 apophatic, 329, 414, 450, 461, 484, 503, 526, 531, 538 Argus, 274, 319, 491, 532, 155, 221 Aristophanes, 384 Aristotle, 9, 276, 298–9, 303, 307, 312– 13, 321, 331–2, 334, 348, 352, 374–5, 380, 388–91, 396, 412–13, 416, 425, 428–9, 506, 566n165 ars memorativa, 95, 230 askesis, 412 aspect, 27, 53–4, 58, 61, 65, 73, 128,

660

Index

130–1, 189, 300, 342, 436, 470, 500, 517, 519, 535, 580n140, 585n3, 603n32 astronomy, xx, 349, 501, 524, 531, 534, 536, 538 Augustine of Hippo, xv, xviii, xix, 13, 32–82, 101, 107, 110, 112, 117, 122, 179–85, 330, 333, 334, 360, 362, 366, 367–8, 379, 416, 423, 425, 427, 432, 433, 438, 448, 452, 456, 464, 466, 477, 489, 506, 509, 515, 518, 520, 525–6, 533, 535, 536, 538–9, 542–3, 559n97, 560nn100, 104, 561n119, 562n121, 563n130, 564n149, 565n156, 572n50 Bade, Josse, 33 ballade, 136 baratin d’amour, 170 Barbo, Louis, 18 basilisk, ix, 7, 227, 255, 269–71, 281, 286, 354, 545 Béda, Noël, 9 Bembo, Pietro, 145, 190, 431, 575n83 Bernard of Clairvaux, 477, 489 Bèze, Théodore, 7 blason anatomique, xxi, 149, 205, 213, 215, 268, 323, 327, 341 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 3 Bodin, Jean, 301 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus, 363, 427, 518, 527 Bonaventure, Saint, 14, 16, 99, 257, 260–1, 263, 265, 271, 274, 328–9, 333–4, 414–15, 420, 422, 432, 437, 478, 488, 524–5, 560n100 Botticelli, Sandro, 233 Bouchet, Jean, 7 Bovelles, Charles, 10 Briçonnet, Guillaume, 10, 13, 261,

273, 556n59 bridegroom, 184, 439, 441–2, 444 Brodeau, Victor, 8 Bruno, Giordano, 253–4 Budé, Guillaume, 33, 261, 301, 308 Caburacci, Francesco, 253 caduceus, 96, 98 Caesar, Julius, 441 Cajetan (Thomas de Vio), 9, 389, 551n14, 600n114 calumny, 252, 276, 350, 352–7 Calvin, Jean, 3, 4, 7, 33 Canticle of Canticles, 184, 260, 414 Capaccio, Giulio, 253 cartography, 523 Castel, Jean, 7 cataphatic, 329, 414 Catherine of Siena, 484 Catullus, C. Valerius, 376 Cavalcanti, Giovanni, 399 Celestinus, Pope, 291 chanson de geste, 136, 212, 581–2n67 Charles V of Spain, 301–2, 304, 307, 210, 213, 214 Chassignet, Jean-Baptiste, 12 cheminement spirituel, 260 chiaroscuro, xxiv, 107–8, 195, 197, 199, 200, 237–8, 248–9, 406, 453–6, 512 chiasmus, 138, 141, 425, 519 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 3, 12, 184, 291, 336, 366–7, 369, 387, 553n24, 559n97 Cisneros, García, xv, 15, 257, 261, 265, 267, 289, 292, 332–5, 337, 415, 446, 525 Clément VII, Pope, 22, 178, 302, 499, 517 Clement of Alexandria, 176, 281, 417 cogitare, 43

Index Colonna, Francesco, xix, xxv, 233, 235 compassio, 16 composición viendo el lugar, xviii, xix, 13, 15–19, 25–8, 31, 69, 74–5, 78, 83–4, 87, 90–8, 106, 116, 118, 122–4, 126–7, 129, 140–1, 148–9, 154, 156, 197, 282, 381, 481, 487, 526, 532, 554n33 Connétable de Bourbon, 206, 208, 210–12, 214, 276, 301, 303, 307, 316, 353 constancy, 246, 275–6, 307, 337, 350, 361–2, 442, 460, 545 contemplation, xvii, xviii, 8, 16, 19, 31, 96, 100, 103, 105, 135, 151, 153–5, 257, 259–61, 264, 272–3, 282, 291–2, 297–8, 309, 312, 326, 328, 332, 367, 381, 407, 412–21, 423–4, 426, 429, 436–7, 440, 443, 446–7, 449, 451, 453, 461, 464–5, 472, 479, 489, 493, 498–9, 502, 509, 527, 536, 538 conversion, 28, 42–3, 43, 49, 52–3, 58–9, 68, 79, 80, 82, 157, 258, 263, 266–7, 271, 273, 275, 423, 431, 511, 536, 555n51 Corpus Hermeticum, 10 Corrozet, Gilles, 109, 245–6, 250–1, 336, 467 Counter-Reformation, 12, 14, 77, 104, 253, 265 courage, 209, 230, 376, 307, 349, 356, 381, 428–9, 452, 469, 495–7, 593, 604–5n52. See also constancy; faith Crysippus, 394 Cusa, Nicholas, 3, 4, 10–11, 13, 33, 377–8, 551n6, 559n95 D’Amboise, François, 91, 216 Dante, 80 D’Aubigné, Agrippa, 12

661

débat, 115–17, 285, 297, 343–4, 403, 572nn58–9 decad, 152, 498 Denis the Carthusian, 8, 257, 262, 271 Devotio Moderna, xv, xviii, 6, 13, 15, 74, 257, 261, 289 dialectic, 23, 55, 75, 121, 126, 134, 149, 158, 191, 259, 265, 329, 336, 366, 375–6, 378–82, 390, 391, 401–2, 405, 410, 470–1, 496, 503–9, 525, 528, 534–5, 538, 562n16, 576n1, 599n95 Diana, 5, 86–7, 93–4, 148–50, 194, 198, 208, 225, 232, 249, 341, 406, 429, 454, 456, 465, 496, 575n85 Diogenes Laertius, 340, 429 Diotima, 73, 225, 264, 314, 325–6, 375, 383–4, 399, 412, 426, 528, 536–7, 601n126 distentio animi, 49 Dolet, Étienne, 10–11 doxa, 412 dreams, 51 Du Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste, 12 Du Bellay, Joachim, xv, 9, 29, 39, 161, 225 Du Guillet, Pernette, xv, 126, 131, 133–5, 162, 365 Ebreo, Leone, 223, 262, 284, 309, 335, 356, 371–2, 435, 472, 479–80, 492–5, 497, 593n110, 597n79 Eckhart, Meister, xxiv, 271–2, 432, 449, 459, 468–70, 478 ecstasy, 416, 477–509 eidos, 98, 267 ekphrasis, 107, 109, 202, 232, 498 Elizabeth of Schönau, 8 emblem, xxi, 10, 23–4, 36, 41, 69, 73, 75, 77, 91, 102–4, 108–10, 113–15, 126, 129, 139, 149–51, 154–6,

662

Index

159–60, 175, 184, 191, 193, 205, 208–10, 213–14, 216–17, 221, 225, 230, 232–6, 239, 241, 245–6, 248–54, 283, 293, 303–8, 334–6, 421, 427, 467, 494–5, 507, 517, 530, 539–40, 556n59, 568n19, 570nn4, 37, 571n39, 581n55, 582n72, 583n92, 595n39 emblesme, 6, 23, 103, 209, 230, 236, 239, 555n48 enargeia/energeia, 168 enigma, 58, 75, 129, 159, 175, 178–9, 183–6, 189, 191, 193, 195, 197–8, 215, 233, 235, 238, 255, 264, 373, 537, 556–7n59, 559n97, 578n24 Epictetus, 360 epiphenomenalism, 135 episteme, 412 épreuve, 5, 61, 75, 79, 99, 120, 156, 229, 233, 289, 313, 319, 411, 419, 510 Erasmus, 3, 7–8, 291, 301, 308, 360, 372 erotic mysticism, 471, 473, 475 erreur, 34–5, 70, 88–9, 266–7, 270, 274, 299, 316, 319, 337, 345, 349, 354, 369–71, 512, 630, 634, 637, 654 estrangement, 32, 95, 198–9, 210, 213, 215, 223, 225, 227, 255, 269, 277, 285, 296, 347, 367, 490, 494, 545 eternity, 55–7, 59, 89, 112, 115, 242–3, 270, 278, 319, 328, 338, 415, 426, 428, 430, 463–4, 469–71, 482, 518, 526–7, 536, 540, 614n184 Étienne, Henry, 91, 363 Euclid, 388 Eudoxus, 388 evangelical, 6, 10, 261 exemplum, 301, 303, 306–7, 311, 348–9

faith, fidelity, firmness, 3–4, 7, 29, 37, 46, 70, 89–90, 102, 171, 180–3, 185, 203, 227, 241, 250, 275–6, 319, 327, 334–5, 348, 350–1, 364–7, 369–71, 381, 434, 442, 446, 503, 510, 597n74 fame, 80–1 Farra, Alessandro, 253 Favre, Antoine, 12 fear, 22, 121–2, 160, 170, 177, 185, 190, 200, 205, 242, 246, 263, 266, 268, 270, 272–3, 282–3, 292, 314, 317, 320, 334, 336–46, 350–3, 355, 366 fervida dilectio, 415 Ficino, Marsilio, 33, 70, 90, 99, 115, 122, 128, 130, 135, 148, 151, 156, 219, 231–2, 246, 262, 264, 268, 309, 311–13, 325, 344, 364, 366, 373, 381–6, 396–9, 401, 407, 409, 415, 422, 425–9, 435, 450, 455, 465, 471, 474–5, 479, 482–4, 499, 502, 513, 520, 538–9, 598n83, 610n136 filiation: Augustine, Petrarch, Scève, 32–41 Fontaine, Charles, 12, 39, 161, 553n20 foregrounding, 173, 326 forgetting the self, 178, 240, 284, 309, 312, 480. See also oubli Fourvière, Mont, 291, 416, 419–24, 441, 445, 589n69 Fra Angelico, 233 Francis I, xvii, 9–10, 113, 206, 210, 213, 246, 248, 302, 304, 305 François de Sales, 12 freedom, 30–1, 50, 54, 61, 75, 115, 117, 125, 131–3, 137, 157–8, 166, 203, 289, 292, 308, 316, 330, 353, 358–60, 362–4, 370, 373, 385, 413, 422, 502, 516, 524, 535, 546, 551, 596n59

Index fureur divine, 457 Galen, 286–9 Gallus, Thomas, 436 Gansfort, Wessel, 15, 17, 554n31 geography, 423, 438, 441–2, 445, 459, 454, 616n208 geometry, 173, 299, 406 Gerson, Jean, xviii, 261, 415, 418, 420–1, 447, 461, 603n30 Giovio, Paolo, 91, 216, 555n47 Gourmont, Jean, 232 Graces (The Three), 435 Granada, Luis, 257 Gregory the Great, 437, 488 Gringoire, Pierre, 9 Groote, Gerald, 16 Guazzo, Stefano, 254 Guicciardini, Francesco, 366 Guigo II, xvii Guillaume de Saint-Thierry, 106, 437 harmonia mundi, 487 Harphius, Henricus, 271 Hecate, 5, 28, 35, 118, 123, 194, 198, 200, 208, 225, 337, 430, 456, 537 henosis, 414 Henri II, 12 Henry VIII, 4, 210, 301–2, 307 Heraclitus, 376, 377, 599n91 hermaphrodite, 224, 347, 350, 365, 375, 476 Héroet, Antoine, 134, 262, 309, 480, 555n51 Hildegard of Bingen, 8 Hippocrates, 340 Homer, 29, 50, 290, 387, 610n136 honesty, 5, 81, 275, 348, 354, 366, 537

663

hope, 312–27 Horace, 292 Horapollo, xix, 10, 19, 26, 207, 233, 245–6, 248–9, 270, 555n50 Hugh of Balma, 260 Hugh of Saint Victor, 8 hypostase de la forme, 154 icon, 81, 91, 97, 138, 155, 157, 188–9, 192, 100, 202, 247–8, 253, 251, 354, 422, 519 Iconomystica, 104 idol, 4–5, 10, 12, 36, 43, 69–70, 81, 96–100, 196, 208, 227, 236–7, 240–1, 243, 263, 266–8, 272–4, 281, 284, 334, 456, 511–12, 534, 544, 553, 570, 579n31 idolum, 373, 598n83 Ignatius of Loyola, xv, xvii, xviii, xix, 13–14, 15–20, 25–7, 30, 74, 93–5, 99, 104, 154, 257, 267, 332–4, 532, 553nn24, 27 imago dei, 271, 328, 509, 512, 528 Imitatione Christi, 17 impresa, xix, 18, 22–8, 30, 74–5, 77, 81, 90–1, 93–6, 99, 103–4, 106, 118, 138, 146, 159–160, 163, 174, 193, 195–6, 203, 205–6, 208–9, 213–15, 226–9, 238, 240, 243, 269, 532–3, 544–8, 537, 555n48 indexicality, 66, 103, 138, 169, 175, 188–9, 192, 243, 254, 406, 577n9, 585n163 ineffability, 37–9, 159–60, 163, 166–7, 175, 178, 180, 185–6, 205, 209, 215, 254–5, 434, 450, 478, 528, 530, 576n5 innamoramento, 36, 93, 97, 171, 173, 196, 267, 275, 283, 336, 397, 399, 507, 533

664

Index

interiorism, 46 Italian impresa and emblem theoreticians, 252–5 jealousy, 263, 335–7, 345–50, 352–6, 397 Job, 86, 89–90, 318–19, 489 judicial rhetoric, 47, 84 juniper, 115, 538 justice/injustice, 88, 252, 293–4, 301, 308, 315–17, 322, 331, 345, 349, 351–2, 355–6, 362, 367, 381, 399, 400, 414, 421, 425, 427, 492, 597n74 kallos, 427 kata prosopon, 360, Kempe, Margery, 478 Labé, Louise, xv, 365 La Ceppède, Jean, 12 langue/parole, 182 Laura, xvii, 5, 35–6, 38–9, 112–13, 164, 572n52 Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques, xv, xvi, 5, 13, 15, 226, 308 LeFevre, Jehan, 109 Lemaire de Belges, 8 Leonardo Da Vinci, 157–8 Leviathan, 101, 278, 285, 320, 326, 367, 587n29 Limbus, 421 ‘limit-expressions,’ 510 longissima via, 98 Ludolph the Carthusian, 16, 225, 261, 554n33 Lull, Raymond, 8 Luna, 5, 28, 194–5, 207, 342, 406, 430, 456, 461, 537 Luther, Martin, 4 Lyon, 11

lyric, xv, xix, 29, 32, 41, 60, 80, 136, 146–7, 150, 159, 161, 164, 173, 217, 285–6, 288, 290, 428, 486, 490, 514–16, 550n4, 560nn109, 110 Machiavelli, Niccoló, 301, 366 magnanimity, 347 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 380 Marcus Aurelius, 360 Marguerite de Navarre, xv, 6–8, 11, 13, 22, 33, 136, 251, 261, 301, 307–9, 312, 323, 478–9, 536, 555, 556n59, 584n1 Mariolatry, 270, 431 Marot, Clément, xv, 6–7, 13, 217, 277, 497, 499 Mary, Mother of Christ, 94, 115, 268, 320, 430–1, 476 Mauburnus, Joannes, 13, 17, 20, 25–8, 30, 94, 106, 116, 123, 149, 287, 532, 541 Mechthild of Hackeborn, 498 meditative contraction/expansion, 17, 56–7, 60, 79, 81, 95, 128, 286, 319, 464, 536, 551n16 meditative praxis, 30–2, 41, 60, 79–158 memoria: in Augustine, 43, 48–9, 51, 53–4, 56, 59, 66, 158, 542, 553n77, 559n97, 564n149, 565n150, 597n76 memory, 40, 49–50, 53–8, 60, 62–7, 69, 72, 74–5, 78–9, 84, 95, 117–18, 143, 145–7, 154, 156, 264, 301, 336, 470, 477, 526, 535 Menestrier, Claude-François, 174, 647 moderation, 151, 289, 299, 306, 312, 360, 384, 416, 424, 426–7, 429, 515, 537 Molinet, Jean, 8 monad, 152

Index Montaigne, Michel de, 3, 13, 292, 339, 366, 425 Montenay, Georgette de, 103, 533 Mont Ventoux, 423 More, Thomas, 278, 301–2, 308 mort mystique, 446, 480, 528, 643 music, xv, 9, 39, 147, 151, 231, 233, 294, 375, 427–8, 469, 478–9, 481–2, 483–7, 490, 515, 551n13, 610n140 musica instrumentalis, 487 musicam poesimque, 487 mystical enlargement, 448 mysticism, 233, 272, 412–13, 416–17, 431, 436, 447, 459, 469–70, 473, 477–8, 481, 484–5, 494, 498, 506, 531 mystikos, 417 Narcissus, 228, 249, 274, 294, 354, 394–8, 400–1, 545, 601nn119, 126 narratology, 440–1 necessity, 75, 115, 117, 123, 125–6, 130–3, 156, 157–8, 242, 270, 316, 334, 357–60, 362, 385–6, 427 nominalism, 4, 538, 592n95 non, 240, 243, 251, 264, 312–15, 317, 320, 322, 336–7, 339, 349, 356, 359, 362, 365, 394, 407, 421, 446, 455, 461, 480, 490, 525–6, 537 Nous, 90, 411 numinous, 527 Ockham, William, 4, 15, 85, 315, 538, 592n95 ontology of le bien du mal – le mal du bien, 126, 132–3, 135, 155–8, 215, 263, 337, 339, 369, 378, 528, 539 operatio, 366, 475 oraison de recuillement, de quiétude, 470, 477–8

665

Origen, 257, 259, 284 Orpheus, 102, 113, 228, 427–8, 481–2, 512–16, 545, 610n136, 615nn197, 198 oubli, 178, 240, 310, 318–19, 327, 365, 375, 480, 512, 516 Ovid, 94, 100, 102, 222, 376, 387, 394–5, 397, 401, 511, 516 Ovide moralisé, 4 Palladio, Andrea, 96 Parmigianino, Francesco, il, 405 passions, 87, 94, 173–4, 250, 289, 295, 312–13, 321, 325, 331–2, 337, 346, 359, 372, 374–5, 391, 402, 408, 416, 422–4, 604n42 Paul III, Pope, 304 Peirce, C.S., 91, 565n163, 567n3 Peletier Du Mans, Jacques, 39, 161 peras, 155, 429, 503 per speculum in aenigmate, xix, 43, 129, 182–3, 186, 237, 264, 559n97, 578nn24, 26, 27 Perugino, Pietro, 233 Petrarch, Francesco, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, 5, 14, 27, 29, 32–41, 80, 83, 92–4, 112–16, 122, 136, 153, 164–6, 168–9, 179, 190, 195–7, 200, 206, 209, 217, 246, 262–3, 267, 285, 287, 289–94, 297–8, 301, 306, 313, 334, 345, 360–1, 364–5, 376, 423, 431, 464, 483–4, 532, 560n100, 589n66 pharmakon, 70, 75, 249, 500 phatic function, 23, 78 philautia, 274, 432 Philolaus of Tarentum, 429 Pico de la Mirandola, 4, 10, 509, 551n16 pity, 147–8, 150, 165, 177, 206, 268–9, 271, 297, 320, 341, 348, 563n130

666

Index

Plancus, Munatius, 441 Plato, xv, 102, 152, 231, 257–8, 260, 262, 296, 301–2, 309, 325, 364, 366, 375–6, 380, 381–2, 384–6, 399, 412– 13, 416, 418, 427–9, 434, 465, 468, 472, 477–8, 481–2, 494, 502, 506, 514, 526, 538, 575n88, 576n1 Pliny the Elder, 26, 28, 86, 269, 353, 529, 587n10 Pliny the Younger, 291 Plotinus, xv, 102–3, 129–30, 157, 178, 246, 257–60, 296, 301–3, 305, 311, 331, 412–13, 418, 420, 433, 448, 450, 452–3, 454–8, 465, 468, 472, 477, 489, 520, 523, 526, 538 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 9, 135, 551n14 Porphyry, 152 potentia absoluta, ordinata, 85–6, 315, 358 Plutarch, 152, 427 prayer, xv, xvii, xviii, 12–17, 30, 43, 77–8, 80–2, 97–8, 103, 112–13, 126–7, 135, 257, 293–5, 333, 384, 414–15, 431, 447, 453, 470, 485, 513, 529, 553–4n27, 567n2 prolepsis, 45, 56, 69, 110, 117, 155, 169, 210, 392, 531 Prometheus, 86, 317–21, 326, 398, 509, 530, 534, 583n92 proportion, 48, 108, 112, 153–4, 335, 354, 356–7, 363, 368, 389, 390, 393, 405, 427–8, 464, 483, 596n55, 611n140 Proserpina, 5, 28, 197, 208, 225, 456 Protestants, 12, 33, 533 prudence, 332, 334–42, 345, 349, 352–4, 356–60, 362, 364–6, 368, 372–4, 381, 504, 531, 533, 537, 539, 546, 596n36 Pseudo-Bonaventure, 16, 611n146

Pseudo-Dionysius, xv, 10, 13–14, 153, 178, 232, 253, 257, 259–60, 262, 271, 274, 329, 334, 413–14, 417, 438, 450, 454, 470, 477, 488, 498, 515, 525, 528 Puente, Luis, 257 Pulci, Luca, 94 puys, 7 Pythagoreanism, 11, 152–6, 388, 412, 416, 424, 428–9, 503, 518 quaternion, 152 Rabelais, François, 6, 7, 13, 235, 301, 479 radical reflexivity, 46, 58 raison, 175, 212, 264, 266, 300, 323–4, 353, 369, 372–6, 402–3, 407, 409, 411, 435, 502, 519 Ramus, Petrus, 191, 390, 580n43 Raphaël, Sanzio, 233 reciprocity, xx, 12, 23, 30, 41, 70, 81–2, 108, 112, 127, 129, 127, 130, 132–3, 135, 155, 193, 224, 263, 318–19, 338–9, 354, 356, 365, 380, 386, 435, 471, 533, 537 recordatio, 16 regiratio, 438, 446 Reisch, Gregor, 9, 347, 375, 428 response, xviii, 5, 14–15, 30–1, 53, 59, 60, 72, 74, 89, 90, 92, 107, 113, 116, 121, 134, 156, 159–60, 162, 185–6, 189, 195–6, 198, 215–16, 220, 255, 273, 294, 383–4, 386, 400 retroactive reading, 69, 75, 98, 114, 281, 444, 507 Rhétoriqueurs, 8, 9, 142, 162 Rhosne and Saone, 214, 277, 398, 416, 419–21, 423, 437–48, 505, 508 Richard of St Victor, 8, 153, 261, 272,

Index 332, 415, 420, 437, 449, 477, 497–8, 525 Roman de la rose, 375, 467 Rosetum, 15, 16, 17, 20, 541 Ruusbroec, John, van, 8, 271–2, 416, 420, 432–3, 437–47, 528, 603n29, 606n75, 608n107 Sacred Heart, 289, 498 Scala Paradisi, xvii Scève, Maurice: entrée royale of Henri II, 12; first French canzoniere, xviii; first French writer of imprese, xviii; granted a priory, 11; Microcosme, xvi, 157, 192, 321, 354, 471–3; mystical community, 467; Privilege du Roy, 23; problems of poetic speech, 159–75; religious tone, 21–2; Saulsaye, 297, 590n75; ‘Soldalitium lugdunense,’ 12; ‘Souffrir non Souffrir,’ xx, 132, 216, 264, 275, 359, 516, 526; versification, 136–55 scholastic, 3, 9, 14–15, 85, 286, 331, 332, 334, 373–5, 386, 415, 434, 551n14, 551–2n16, 553n24, 592n95 Scotus, Duns, 362 Sebillet, Thomas, 136, 142–3, 146, 151, 161, 572n51, 575n89 Seneca, 9, 291–2, 360 Serafino dell’Aquila, 217 serpent, 7, 23, 28, 30, 24, 62, 69–70, 72–3, 75, 98, 137, 206, 229, 247, 251, 269–70, 278, 335, 338, 355, 418, 514, 518, 534, 547, 556n57, 569n29, 585n4 Shakespeare, 349 Shepherd of Hermas, 428 Simonides of Ceos, 109 sola fides, 261 soliloquy, 47

667

solitude, 210, 263, 278, 285–6, 290–3, 297–8, 347, 367, 420–1, 461, 598n67 space, spatial, 27, 31, 48, 51, 58, 60, 75, 87–8, 93, 121–4, 103, 109, 156, 191– 2, 291, 298, 300–1, 397, 419, 426, 430, 433, 441, 461, 482, 501–3, 507, 509, 514, 517, 521, 536, 567–8n11, 580n43 specularity, 27, 31, 47, 93, 139, 151, 270, 306, 338, 365, 401, 491, 518, 537 Speroni, Sperone, 90, 102, 262, 284, 313, 325–6, 335–6, 340, 345–7, 349, 356, 392, 408–9, 479, 504, 511, 515, 590n79, 597n68 Sponde, Jean, 12 still-moment topos, 95–6, 569n22 stoicisim, 3, 193, 276, 355, 357, 359– 62, 425, 539, 596n62 strophe composée, 141–2 surrogate languages, 146, 159, 165, 185, 188, 194, 204, 287, 641 Suso, Henry, 485, 611n146 syllogism, xxiv, 9, 191, 175, 254, 334, 387–91, 393–6, 398, 400–5, 408, 437 symphonia, 428 Taegio, Bartolomeo, 253 Tasso, Torquato, 253 Tauler, Joannes, 271, 432, 586n14 Teresa of Ávila, 487 Tetraktys, 518 Theodocy, 35, 391, 342, 344 theologia contemplatrix, 261 theological virtues, xxiv, 22, 250, 275 Theon of Smyrna, 152 theoria, 412 three presents, 49, 58, 154 time, 29–30, 35, 37–9, 42–3, 48–9, 55–6, 59, 61, 71, 74, 78–9, 81, 139,

668

Index

153–4, 172, 179, 181, 195, 199, 202, 211, 231, 243, 246, 259, 274, 285, 291, 298, 300, 302, 311, 348, 354, 358, 378–9, 420, 424, 426, 428, 430, 438, 441, 451, 465, 480, 482–3, 492, 504, 516–17, 520, 523, 527, 531 Titian (Tiziano, Vecellio), 340 tota simul, 527 Tour Babel, 6, 83–4, 86–8, 108, 163–4, 175, 228, 277, 316, 359, 465, 567n4 transfiguration, 492, 503, 507 transitional viewpoint, 109–10, 238, 298, 386, 406, 453–4, 514, 590n75 transitus, 449, 521, 524, 528 transvaluation, xvi, xix, 5, 77, 80, 244, 271, 567n3 transverberation, 486–8 Triple Way, xix, 14, 257, 265, 329, 334, 415, 518, 528, 540 Tyard, Pontus, 12, 161, 217, 264, 309, 416, 428, 457, 482–6, 490, 502–3, 516n12, 612n154 unicorn, 92–4, 296, 354, 454, 476, 494, 515, 545 utile, 199, 210–11, 277, 366–8, 413 utilitas, 366, 597n73

Vaenius, Otto, 102, 103, 570n34 Valeriano, Pierio, 26, 249, 340 Vierge au Serpent, 7, 276 Virgil, 9, 292, 297, 333, 387, 516 virtue, xviii, 5, 25, 61, 73, 76, 86, 99, 101–2, 112, 141, 146, 148, 151, 155, 175, 210–11, 215, 231, 235, 275–6, 298–9, 301–3, 307, 312, 314, 321, 331–5, 343, 352–3, 355, 357, 360, 366, 368–70, 373–4, 381, 385, 408, 411–16, 424–5, 431, 452, 464, 487, 530, 526, 534 Vivès, Juan Luis, 33 wandering, 5, 34–5, 70, 123, 142, 194, 258, 267, 270, 285, 330, 334, 337, 342, 345, 359, 423, 430, 442, 454, 456, 496, 514, 521 wisdom, 8, 24, 45–6, 86, 94, 155, 180, 182–3, 255, 261, 308, 329, 331, 338, 355, 373, 381, 408, 411–12, 414, 424–5, 448–9, 452, 464, 485, 489, 492, 513, 518, 530, 534 Zerbolt, Gerald, 16