Gospel & Universe ♒️ A River Journey

French Currents

🇫🇷

Imagine spending your days like Montaigne, surrounded by streams and grape vines and philosophizing in your library — assuming of course that you’ve somehow managed to rent his gorgeous chateau overlooking the vineyards of the Dordogne…

Imagine finding yourself in the library gazing upward at the words Que sais-je? which he wrote over 400 years ago on the rafters, along with other quotes in Latin and Greek:

If you can imagine this, you’re well on your way to knowing one important thing: in the end — au fond, et au plafond! — the answer to the question What do I know? is Not much.

🇮🇳

I ask as a fool who doesn’t know his own spirit:

Where are the hidden traces of the gods?

— Rg Veda 1.164

🇫🇷

Even though the rhetorical question Que sais-je? comes to Montaigne from his deep Classical learning, all of the loftiness involved in that learning comes down to a paradox: all the learning in the world can only teach us that we know next to nothing at all.

You gaze at the rafters, yet you think of the stars. You remember that the word paradox comes from the Greek words para, beyond, and dokein, to think. The rafters, with all their sturdy wisdom, are themselves inscribed with their own frailty, as if the heavens themselves saw right through them.

The light from above pierces the rooftops and penetrates the rafters, falling all the way into your soul. Or is it into your mind? Or is there a difference? Is it Je pense donc je suis or Je suis donc je pense? Is it I think therefore I am or I am therefore I think? Do you think and therefore have a being or soul, or do you have a being or soul and therefore you think?

This reminds you that in historical terms you’ve gone decades past Montaigne: Descartes’ maxim Je pense donc je suis doesn’t make its appearance until 1637, and Montaigne died in 1592. Descartes was even closer in time to Pascal, with his adding machine, his abyss, and his argument about betting on God, written on scraps of paper sometime around 1655. According to Pascal, the only thing that can save us from the abyss of our own ignorance is the infinity of God. But then the definition of God shifts. He becomes more a disinterested Clockmaker than a benign Father. In Voltaire’s Candide — written in 1759, exactly one hundred years before Darwin’s 1859 Origin of Species — heavenly compassion seems to go out the window: “What does it matter if there’s good or evil? … When His Highness sends a ship to Egypt, does it bother him if the mice on board are comfortable or not?” Even before our understanding of natural selection, neurons, and genetics, Voltaire pushes the rational argument toward its grim conclusion. Based on astronomical and geological findings, as well as on the empirical theories of John Locke (who argued that we’re largely a product of our senses), Voltaire prefigures the conclusion that we find in the Naturalists of the late 19th century and in the existentialists of the mid 20th century: we’re simply not as important as religion has led us to believe.

While Voltaire still believed in a Clockmaker God who had little time for human history, later French thinkers take this a step further: there’s no God, no soul, and no Grand Plan at all. With Sartre comes a resounding hollowness, a free-fall down a deep well reminiscent of Pascal’s void — yet here there’s no Divine Infinity to rescue us from meaninglessness. Sartre argues that existence comes first, and only later do we delude ourselves with the illusion of essence. Existence precedes essence. We don’t think because we have a soul, we imagine we have a soul because we think. We yearn for a meaning that we’ll never attain, and as a result our situation is absurd. Which leads to Camus, who accepts this absurdity, yet allows room to breathe by opening up to Nature. Like Keats, he suggests that we accept our place in the unknowable schemelessness of things. Our being is like water flowing through our fingers.

You imagine the currents of French thinking, all flowing toward the Pont-Neuf, which you took a photo of back in 1985, when the bridge was wrapped by the artist Cristo. You imagine the famous writers about to flow beneath the bridge, down the river of that nation’s history:

As you put the names (in the Frenchest of blue) onto the old photo, you realize that you haven’t yet mentioned one of the major figures in the history of French doubt. You left out a writer who came before the philosophical seriousness and the rational angst. Oddly, you omitted the riot and learning, the debauchery and playfulness of Rabelais! In doing so, you omitted one of the most famous of French notions: la joie de vivre. Such an omission is like writing about the English Middle Ages and leaving out Chaucer. Or like writing about the Age of Reason in England and leaving out Swift, who was a great admirer of Rabelais. At the end of the previous chapter, you went on and on about the intoxication of wine (even comparing it to the Eucharist and to the Soma of Vedic India!) and yet you left out a writer who begins his ambitious writing project with the following words: “Most noble boozers, and you my very esteemed and poxy friends.” Later in the same prologue, Rabelais praises Socrates, who questioned everything and who “was always laughing, always drinking glass for glass with everybody, always playing the fool, and always concealing his divine wisdom.”

Rabelais reflected the energy of the Renaissance, and anticipated the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. He celebrated the light even before it shone into the dark alleys of Paris and London. He danced with it like a drunkard making love to a wench in the store-room of a tavern. In Gargantua (1534), he wrote about the ridiculousness of pretension and dogma, about natural curiosity, and about the joyous energies that our lives should unleash. He delighted in breaking the taboos of body, and refused to fret about sin and retribution while all around him the world waited to be explored. The following two illustrations get at this rebellious spirit, for while it’s still not acceptable for a little boy (who in this case isn’t so little, being a giant!) to be curious about what’s beneath a dress or to fondle his governess, neither is it a cosmic sin:

Gargantua tests the waters around him so voraciously that he’s soon put on a more balanced course. Yet Rabelais doesn’t recommend an education in dry texts and moral principles. Rather, he recommends a wisdom of the ages that’s integrated into the activities, curiosities, and appetites that are natural to a young man. This integration can be seen when Gargantua swims with dynamic relish in the waters of the Seine — all the while holding a book above the water:

He did swim in deep waters on his face, on his back, sidewise, with all his body, with his feet only, with one hand in the air, wherein he held a book, crossing thus the breadth of the river Seine without wetting, and dragging along his cloak with his teeth, as did Julius Cæsar; then with the help of one hand he entered forcibly into a boat, from whence he cast himself again headlong into the water, sounded the depths, hollowed the rocks, and plunged into the pits and gulfs.

Like Swift, Rabelais blasted through human folly, with the hope that reason and the real world might some day prevail over superstition. Yet neither Rabelais nor Swift could have predicted how the light would explode and then dim. Living before the Industrial Revolution with its ‘dark satanic mills,’ and before the unnerving discoveries of Lamarck in Philosophie Zoologique (1809) and Darwin in The Origin of Species (1859), they couldn’t possibly have foreseen in what way a closer look at Nature would reveal more than the wonders of God.

From Rabelais to Sartre, the currents get rough indeed.

🇫🇷

Next: Riverboats & Sheep

Back to Top

Table of Contents - Annotated Contents - Layout - Core Beliefs