Christian Humanism and the Double Translation of Rome

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Final Proof; forthcoming in Translatio Babylonis, ed. Barbara Vinken. Munich: Fink Verlag, 2015.

ANDREA FRISCH

Christian Humanism and the Double Translation of Rome

The intersection of the Renaissance Humanist project of reanimating the language and culture of classical Rome, on the one hand, with the Reformation, on the other, brought to the fore fundamental tensions that had been brewing in the Eu- ropean West for some time. I want to outline here several configurations of these tensions as they were manifested in the theory and practice of a translatio romae that inevitably shows itself to be equally a translatio babylonis. In order to trace the emergence of this process of double translation, I will move chronologically from Petrarch to Erasmus to Luther, before I turn to the France of the Wars of Religion. The chronological structure is an essential element of the presentation, because each configuration inherits and reacts to the tensions and contradictions of the previous iteration. These broader cultural movements might help us articulate some sort of larger narrative, or at least construct a larger mosaic, of translatio babylonis in the European West.

The first configuration of double translation – of Rome and of Babylon – arises from the premises of Christian Humanism. The Humanist enterprise was predi- cated on the perception that the civilization of contemporary Rome had, in fact, become uncivilized. Petrarch’s melancholy letters to the Ancients are an excellent frame of reference for this crucial, basic point; it is this perception of loss that turns translatio into a conscious undertaking that needs to be designed and explained, as opposed to an organic process that simply unfolds in history. But there is a coun- tervailing defense of Rome in Petrarch’s reflections on the Avignon papacy. If Pe- trarch did not hesitate to qualify Rome’s secular condition as Babylonian, earthly, and not particularly civilized, in a religious context, Rome still stood for him as the seat of the true church as against Avignon, which he figures as a site of Babylonian captivity in some well-known poems of the Canzoniere. If the civilization of Clas- sical Rome had become profoundly degraded for Petrarch, contemporary Rome had a trump card that from our point of view could be seen as counterbalancing its secular losses: it was the seat of the Western Church.

Petrarch’s desire, both as expressed in his prose writings and as enacted in his poetry, which always wavered between the sacred and the secular, was to wed the civilization of classical Rome to the Christianity of contemporary Rome, and thereby to escape Babylon on both a secular and a spiritual level – that is, in terms of both civilization and religion. In Petrarch’s schema, then, translatio romae is at least in part undertaken to secure the future of Christianity.

This was in any case the rhetoric that underlay calls for a crusade against the Ottoman Empire in Petrarch’s writings: in invoking the model of the Roman Em- pire, which had ruled over the territories Petrarch hoped the Christians would re-

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cover (and then some!), alongside religious boilerplate familiar from the crusades of previous centuries, he offered both a transcendent/religious and a historical/secular justification for the conquest of the East. As part and parcel of this dual justification, Petrarch posited not only the religious, but also the more broadly cultural superiority of the West over the East.1 We can see this in poems 27 and 28 of the Canzoniere, and at more length, in the De vita solitaria, where a discussion of Peter the Hermit leads into the topic of Crusade and to some very harsh invective against Muslims and Mohammed, which, drawing openly on the Latin literary tradition, enlists virtually all of the tropes Michèle Lowrie discusses in her contribution to this volume.

Now, I won’t dwell on Petrarch’s representation of the defects of the Ottomans as a clear parallel to, and in many ways as an antidote to or a remedy for, the ills of his beloved Rome, and of the Christian community more generally. The point I want to make here is that even though Crusades rhetoric was always full of the kind of projections we see in Lowrie’s Latin examples, Petrarch adds a new dimension to it by blending the Christian and the Roman iterations. By superimposing classical Rome onto Christian Rome, Petrarch did not so much seek to make classical Rome seem Christian as he did to make Christianity seem – and indeed aspire to be – civilized, since classical Rome, for the Romans, for Petrarch, and for many of the Humanists who followed him, was the very epitome of civilization (as opposed to barbarism).

This attempt to meld a notion of Roman civilization as universal, on the one hand, with Christianity, on the other, made it possible to identify Christianity with civilization tout court, thus expanding the arsenal of tropes that could be applied to the East in the course of the West’s attempts to come to terms with what it saw as its own shortcomings. Along with the tropes already articulated in the Latin sources – effeminacy, laziness, love of luxury, and so on – one could now add the stock of Christian invective, including Biblical figurations of Babylon (both as the site of the Babylonian captivity and the Babylon of the Apocalypse). The tension here, however, is obvious: once “civilization” and Christianity are thought to be co-extensive – and again, I want to underline the fact that the Humanists derive the idea of a universal secular civilization from classical Rome; it is certainly not a Christian notion – then the status of ancient, pagan Rome as “civilized” inevitably becomes problematic. And indeed for Augustine, terrestrial Rome was inevitably just another Babylon. Viewed from this perspective, the subsequent Humanist attempt to “translate” Rome would always also be a translatio babylonis.

1 Nancy Bisaha makes this point in an excellent article on “Petrarch’s Vision of the Muslim and By- zantine East”, Speculum 76:2 (April 2001), p. 284-314), noting that Petrarch exhibits “interpretive schizophrenia” when he write about Rome, since he employs “both historical and allegorical rea- dings” (299). See also Bisaha’s book Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks, Philadelphia: UPenn Press 2004, which traces the consequences of Petrarch’s stance for re- presentations of the East. My primary concern here, by contrast, is its impact on the status of Rome in Humanist discourse.

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CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE DOUBLE TRANSLATION OF ROME 45

This inherent, self-contradictory doubleness is clear enough in Petrarch’s Cru- sades rhetoric, in which he urges the conquest of territories far beyond the Holy Land, citing the Roman Empire as his model. This rather troublesome mix of the sacred and the profane, of Jerusalem and Babylon, is a fundamental paradox of Christian Humanism as a discourse that seeks to define the limits of the humane, the morally righteous, the civilized. The two discourses propose very different vi- sions of piety and virtue (quite apart from the very real heterogeneity of views within each discourse). As we have already mentioned, Petrarch characterized the papacy as dwelling in Babylonian captivity during its years in Avignon (this is treated in sonnets 136, 137 and 138 of the Canzoniere). This is one of two striking indices of overt conflict within the Christian Church (we could call it an “inner Babylon”) in Petrarch’s writings.2 Petrarch’s notion of a Babylonian captivity of the papacy does not refer to the contrast between the city of man and the city of God, but rather to that between two earthly cities, Avignon and Rome. Rome – as against Avignon, as well as against Constantinople – is the seat of the true Church. The specific earthly situation of the true Church in Rome is essential to Petrarch’s yoking together of the sacred and the secular, in his attempt to root the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church in the territorial domain of the Roman empire. But this gesture inevitably ties the fortunes of the Church at least in part to those of Rome, the earthly city. As we all know, the crusades undertaken against the Ottoman Em- pire at the end of the 14th century met with very minimal success, and the increas- ing fragmentation and intramural conflict within Europe led to the rise of increased resistance to Rome’s interference in extra-Roman political affairs. Petrarch’s attempt to erect a Christian Empire on Roman foundations made it vulnerable to the fate of the earthly city, and in this context, rather than elevating the Church to ever higher levels of prestige and domination, the “Babylonian” taint of earthly empire is seen by Reformers to have contaminated Rome’s very moral core. The papacy no longer stands as representative of the true church, but rather, as Luther’s famous tract has it, as the site, precisely, of Babylonian captivity.

This brings us to a second configuration of double translation, or what we might want to think of as the Babylonian captivity of the enterprise of translatio Romae, at the moment when the reform of the Catholic Church explodes into the Refor- mation, in Luther’s definitive break with the papal hierarchy. In the time between Petrarch and Luther, we might say that Babylon has moved ever closer to the heart of Christianity, from Byzantium to Avignon to Rome itself. The question of move- ment is of course central here: if we think of translatio in terms of the Christian inheritance, from the perspective of Luther and, later, Calvin, the process has been one of degeneration, with ever more being lost in translation, to the point where

2 The other is Petrarch’s support for a crusade against Byzantium (in two letters, Fam. 14.5 to Genoa, and Sen. &.1 to Pope Urban V). From the “Roman” perspective we are adopting here, it will be obvious that the Byzantine Empire occupies an extremely unstable position between East and West, functioning alternately as an ally in or as the target of Christian crusade in the wake of the schism of 1054.

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what pretends to be the true source turns out to be its opposite. Rather than Christ’s representative on Earth, the Pope is the Antichrist. Just as Augustine posited two cities, Luther would come to posit two (Western) Christian churches: the “true” Church, on the one hand, and the church ruled by the papal hierarchy, on the other. The former was imprisoned by the latter, just as the Jews had been held cap- tive by the Babylonians.

Erasmus’s version of Babylonian captivity – in the form of the Turkish scourge – offers a further configuration of a translatio romae that is simultaneously a translatio babylonis. Just as Petrarch’s Muslims were an essential catalyst for his attempt to yoke together imperial and papal Rome, as the impetus for trying to graft the secular prestige and power of the former onto the sacred authority of the latter, the Ottoman Turks served as a fundamental term of reference for a critique of the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century. For most of that century, culminating in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, Christian Europe was under threat of attack from the Ottoman Empire under Suleiman the Great. The Turks had attacked Hungary and were at the gates of Vienna in March, 1532, and there were many treatises written on the question of war with the Turks, including Erasmus’s De bello Turcico (1530). Like Luther, Erasmus characterized the Turkish threat as God-sent, as both a punishment and a warning to Christians whose piety was questionable. Under the terms of this vision, Erasmus characterized the Turks as cruel and decadent, exhibiting the very vices of which too many of his fellow Catholics were guilty. Indeed, Erasmus argued that the Turks would be converted only if Christians first reformed themselves, since “there can be no doubt that the Turks have won an immense empire less by their own merits than because of our sins.”3

In these kinds of texts, the moral distinction between Turks and Christians becomes increasingly difficult to bring into focus, even as a religious distinction is maintained at all costs. Erasmus characterizes the vices of his coreligionaries as, precisely, “Turkish”: “If we wish to succeed in ridding ourselves of the Turks, we must first cast out from ourselves all our loathesome ‘Turkish’ vices: avarice, ambi- tion, power-lust, self-satisfaction, impiousness, luxury, love of pleasure, fraudu- lence, anger, hatred, envy” (324). The two sites of moral authority embodied by Rome before the Reformation – on the one hand, that of a great and powerful civilization, and, on the other, that of the seat of the Christian Church – are both in a state of serious decay. The might of Petrarch’s beloved imperial Rome has been transferred to Babylon, Rome having been contaminated by the very Church that was supposed to guarantee its eternal victory.

The conflation of the Roman church with Babylon led to the association of papal Rome with the Ottoman Empire in a large body of religious polemic in the sixteenth century. The parallel was frequently established through the trope of the Babylon of Book of Revelations. Phillip Melanchthon’s commentary on the Book of Daniel, for example, is a strongly figural one that, through a reading of Paul,

3 I cite from the excerpt presented in the Erasmus Reader, ed. E. Rummel, Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1990, p. 361.

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applies the prophet’s description of the conflict between Antiochus and the Jews to that between the Antichrist and Christians. For Melanchthon and his followers in Germany, France and Geneva, the Gog and Magog of Revelations, the beast and the false prophet, stand for the Turks and the papal Rome of the sixteenth century, respectively. Obviously, in the context of Protestant historicist interpretations of the Bible, we have reached a point where the presence of Babylon on domestic ground is a first premise rather than a latent trope.

This brings me, finally, to the France of the Wars of Religion, which is the focus of my own research. All of the twists and turns in the attempts to “translate” Rome that I have described up until now either predate or accompany the emergence of French Humanism, which is usually ascribed to the reign of Francois I (r. 1515 to 1547). They certainly predate the text that is usually cited as the manifesto for the French appropriation of the Roman cultural heritage, Joachim Du Bellay’s well- known Deffense et illustration de la langue francoyse of 1549. In other words, even if Du Bellay was the first to put it in such stark terms, his observation that he who looks for Rome in Rome “rien de Rome en Rome n’aperçois” is the culmination of a long historical process in which translatio Romae had been repeatedly shown to entail a translatio babylonis. Was Rome ever simply Rome? Had it ever been possible to translate Rome without translating Babylon along with it?4

The tension inherent in Renaissance French attempts to appropriate Roman cultural models (literary, legal, political) reached its highest pitch in the period of France’s Wars of Religion, for it is in this context that the Roman cultural heritage is linked most tightly and inevitably not just to Babylon or Oriental despotism and debauchery, but also to outright civil war. France’s poets were in fact latecomers to this conversation, and it is in poetic texts like those of Du Bellay that one can ob- serve the simultaneous idealization and demystification of Rome, and thus the in- tense condensation of the various stages of the process of translatio Romae/Babylonis that I have been tracing here.

We can see how Pierre de Ronsard, for example, seems immediately to intuit that Du Bellay’s project of literary imitation of the Ancients, far from offering an unencumbered route to cultural prestige, is fraught with peril. In an élégie published as a preface to Jacques Grevin’s tragedy on Julius Caesar, published in 1561, one of the very first antique-style French tragedies and a matter of no little pride on the part of the author for this reason, Ronsard observes that while the subject of a comedy can be drawn from any time and place,

…celuy du Tragicque est de peu de maisons. D’Athenes, Troye, Argos, de Thebes & Mycenes Sont pris les argumens qui conviennent aux scenes. Rome t’en a donné que nous voyons icy Et crains que les François ne t’en donnent aussi. 5

4 Joachim Du Bellay, Les Antiquitez de Rome, Paris: Frédéric Morel 1558, sonnet 3: „Nouveau venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome/Et rien de Rome en Rome n’aperçois….“

5 Le Théâtre de Jacques Grevin. Paris: Vincent Sartenas 1561, n.p.

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In keeping with the poetic program urged by Du Bellay, for whom French literature was to be the descendent of Greco-Roman letters, Ronsard here figures the relationship between antique and French tragedy in terms of a westward translatio. Yet Ronsard is ambivalent about the inheritance he claims, because it ultimately involves not just poetry, but history.

This is tantamount to realizing that, in fact, poetry exists within history rather than transcending it. Just as “Rome Rome a vaincu seulement,” as Du Bellay put it in the sonnet we have already cited, France was now destroying herself; was this perhaps the price of great tragic poetry? In any case, the historical fact of civil war inevitably complicated the French humanist program for the recovery and appropriation of the cultures of Antiquity, both Greek and Roman, although the Roman figures are the ones repeatedly enlisted. What Ronsard seems to be discovering here are the full consequences of an embrace of Roman poetic exemplarity (and of course, tragedy is the privileged genre through which to make such a discovery), consequences that could only really be appreciated by a civilization that was situ- ated at a sufficient distance from Classical Rome so as to be able to conceive of itself as standing on the outside, looking in.

The project to reanimate classical Rome was, in a sense, all too successful, ultimately bringing its oriental underside, its babylonic shadow, into the light along with its own self-glorifying myths. Once these aspects of Rome come into view, the Roman model functions at once as a source of cultural renewal and as a mauvaise augure, a bad omen – a lurking monster. This realization happens, as I have been insisting, in the context of a civil war that is also a religious war (Du Bellay died just before war broke out on a large scale). In such a context, the tropes we have been tracing – both those associated to the Orient in Latin literature and those assigned to Babylon in the Christian tradition – are everywhere, and fly in all directions. The tenor of the polemic can be gleaned from the title of Catholic Artus Désiré’s 1550 dialogue, “Les combats du fidelle papiste, pèlerin romain, contre l’apostat priapiste tirant à la synagogue de Genève, maison babilonicque des luthériens” – a mélange that provides a vivid illustration of the accretions that the basic figure of the babylonian acquired in cultural translation, as well as evidence of the hysterical exagger- ation to which these figures were subject during the wars of religion.6

Sexual profligacy and the inversion of typical gender roles is rampant in the religious polemic of this period, and Désiré’s dialogue is no exception. The “priapiste” is a member of the Genevan Church drawn away from Catholicism by his “pail-

6 No place of publication is indicated on this unpaginated dialogue, which is housed in the Biblio- thèque Nationale and which stretches over two hundred pages. Désiré (c. 1510-1579) was a Nor- man priest and poet who published numerous anti-protestant satires, including a parody of Clé- ment Marot’s French paraphrases of the Psalms. There are numerous studies of French religious polemic of this period. A recent entry that catalogues many of the accusations of sexual debauchery (among other things) is Luc Racaut, Hatred in Print: Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity during the French Wars of Religion, Aldershot: Ashgate 2002.

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lardise.” Contrary to what we might expect from sober French Calvinists, Désiré’s protestants follow only their “sensualité.” They preach “la liberté diabolicque/ Pleine de vanité superbe”; they adore “la friandise/de la charogne libertine.” Désiré announces that “aujourd’huy y a beaucoup/de Pedagogues Priapistes,/Qui font les enfans Lutheristes,” and warns that access to the Bible in the vernacular will inevitably lead to the participation of prostitutes in theological disputes, and thus to the “grande putrefaction/De voir des theologiennes/faulces dyabologiennes,” coining two feminine neologisms to make the threat manifest. Though parts of Désiré’s dialogue do engage in matters of real dispute, passages like the ones I cite here clearly fall outside of the realm of ecclesiological and theological conflict, dredging up deeply entrenched stereotypes of a highly sexualized Other who refuses to obey gender norms.

We have come to a point where Petrarch’s initial joining of the fate of Rome and the fate of Christianity has come to its full and terrible endpoint, as religious and civil war have conjoined in France. In this context, there is no longer any widely accepted paradigm of the (Christian) (French) self, only myths and counter-myths, vigorously contested. All is otherness, and Babylon, lust, and debauchery seem to be everywhere, the virulent internal polemic that targeted priests, pastors, poets and princes only really subsiding (if not disappearing entirely) in the wake of the Edict of Nantes in 1598.

Of course, the Turkish threat was still looming in the background while the French Wars of Religion raged. The Battle of Lepanto took place in 1571; the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, in 1572. The Turk thus remained a frame of reference for thinking about internal conflict, and the figure of the Turk – who is, in Renaissance Europe, the quintessential Eastern Other – appears in numerous po- lemical texts of the period (in the dialogue by Désiré, for example, the papist ac- cuses the ‘priapiste’ of following Mahomet). One of the best places to see how all of these strands come together is in Pierre de Ronsard’s suite of “Discours sur les misères de ce temps,” first published at Paris in 1562 and 1563 at the beginning of the wars but reissued repeatedly throughout the period of the conflicts. These are long poems that deal directly with the civil wars: two addressed to the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medicis (also known in some circles, of course, as the whore of Babylon); one addressed to the boy king Charles the IX, who would later preside over the St Bartholomew’s Day massacres; two addressed to fellow poets; one to “the people of France”; and one to Ronsard’s Protestant detractors. The sheer range of addressees gives one a sense of what Ronsard considered to be the scope of the enterprise of discoursing on the miseries of his time, embroiling him in political, religious, poetic and personal quarrels. As I have been insisting, in this context, the presence of an inner Orient, an inner Other, that is dehumanized and made to embody all that the body politic, corporate Christianity, and the self intends to expel, is patent rather than latent.

What, then, could be the role of the Turk – again, a real and present military threat – what could be the role of the Turk in such a configuration, when the French were openly calling one another “Turkish dogs”? One way in which the Turk

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is figured, and which seems to me new, is as a spectator at the theater of French tragedy, as a neutral observer to whom one appeals to arbitrate the inner conflict. Now, one could argue that the spectator is the ultimate outsider, offstage, as it were; but in Ronsard’s Discours, and in a number of other examples, one could argue that the figure of the Turkish spectator is intended to function as a conscience, as an internalized observer through whose figuration the French reader – of whichever party, of whichever confession – will see himself through Turkish eyes and be shamed into mending his ways (in whichever direction the author sees fit).

This way of figuring the Turk has its roots in the critique of Christian mores, but it does not entail a negative portrait of the Turk, who is present only as an observer. Here is how Ronsard puts it in his “Remonstrance au peuple de France,” the third poem in his suite of Discours:

Mais qui seroit le Turc, le Juif, le Sarrasin, Qui voyant les erreurs du Chrestien son voisin, Se voudroit baptiser?…. Le connaissant leger, mutin, seditieux, Et trahir en un jour la Foy de ses ayeux? Inconstant, incertain, qui aux propos chancelle Du premier qui luy chante une chanson nouvelle? Le voyant Manichée, & tantost Arrien, Tantost Calvinien, tantost Lutherien…. Et qui seroit le Turc lequel auroit envie De se faire Chrestien en voyant telle vie!

There are echoes of Erasmus here, but the parallel between the debauched Chris- tian and the Turk has disappeared entirely, leaving only the seditious, inconstant, uncertain Christian as an object of poetic contemplation, through Turkish eyes.

In his elegy to fellow poet Guillaume Des Autels, Ronsard again situates the Turk as the spectator and the beneficiary (but not the cause) of Christian discord:

du grand Turc les peuples infidelles/ [Rient], en nous voyant sanglans de nos querelles/ Et en lieu qu’on les deust par armes surmonter,/ Nous vissent de nos mains nous-mesmes domter

Here, the Turks are undeniably infidels; but they have no other qualities, and undertake no action other than to laugh at the warring French. No actual Turks are required to defeat the French; instead, the Turks have merely to sit back and watch as the French destroy themselves. This is especially ironic and painful since, as Ron- sard takes care to point out, France had long considered itself to be the “fille ainée de l’Eglise,” the eldest daughter of the Church and its greatest defender:

Sceptre qui fut jadis la terreur des Barbares,/ Des Turcs, des Mammelus, des Perses & Tartares!/ Bref par tout l’univers tant craint et redouté!/ Faut-il que par les siens luy-mesme soit domté!

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What’s more, this dire situation is precisely what links France to Rome:

Ainsi Rome jadis des choses la merveille,/ (Qui depuis le rivage où le Soleil s’éveille,/ Jusques à l’autre bord son Empire estendit)/ Tournant le fer contre elle à la fin se perdit

The ever-present Turk even becomes a standard of civility to which the Huguenots do not measure up in the second “Discours.” Addressing the Huguenots, Ronsard claims, “Je connois quelques-uns de ces fols qui vous suivent/Je sçay bien que les Turcs & les Tartares vivent/Plus modestement qu’eux…” Morally, the Huguenots are not Turks – since they do not even reach the bar set by the Turks! The Turk is similarly set up as a standard against which the poet’s personal adversaries – all Huguenots – fall short when Ronsard writes a letter to preface his poetic Response to Protestant satires against his poetry and his person, a Response that his persecu- tors, having chosen to remain anonymous, cannot accept in person. “Un Turc, un Arabe me permettroit facilement cette license, & me donnerait avecques toute modestie congé de luy responder” (83). Perhaps ironically – or at least unexpect- edly, especially in light of the paradigm we have been examining – the Turk also functions as a term by which Ronsard can recognize a common humanity and potential for justice and right living within the Huguenot ranks. When he acknowledges that some of the Huguenots are in fact admirable men, he is quick to insist that this has nothing to do with their religious beliefs: “Telle bonté ne vient pour croire en telle loy,/Ains [=mais] pour estre bien né, car s’il fust d’avanture/Un Turc, il garderoit ceste bonne Nature” (72). This is obviously an elitist discourse – goodness is ascribed to the well-born as an inherent attribute – but here, Ronsard acknowledges that given noble birth, even the Turk is naturally good; and if one can conceive of a good Turk, one can conceive of a good Huguenot, which really was the more pressing issue.

Although what I have just been describing is in a sense an inversion of the process that Michèle Lowrie finds in her Latin sources, I believe that we are nonethe- less dealing with the same paradigm: the Oriental – and later Babylonic, anti-Chris- tian other – still functions in this context as a putatively external screen onto which internal conflicts can be projected. However, in a religiously divided France, they are not projected in the sense of being attributed or assigned to the Turk; rather, they are projected in the filmic sense of being exhibited or shown, with the Turk accorded the role of discerning spectator. It is telling, I believe, that Ronsard so frequently turns to an outside arbiter in order to focalize his view of the Hugue- nots, for these are conflicts that the French will never really work through, prefer- ring, as the Edict of Nantes has it, simply to abolish the memory of their internal differences. This will make it possible for the French monarchy to undertake the process of appropriating Roman models anew under Louis XIII and especially Louis XIV, the ideology of absolutism styling the divinely-appointed king as a transcendent power out of the reach of Babylon.

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Christian Humanism and the Double Translation of Rome

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