From the sacred to the secret: Shifting ideals of contemplative life in Renaissance France (Lefevre d'Etaples, Guillaume Briconnet, Desiderius Erasmus, Marguerite de Navarre).

摘要

This thesis takes as its hypothesis the idea that secrecy is a principle of metaphysical union that lies at the threshold of transcendence and immanence, of the sacred and the profane. It explores why secrecy became a relevant and pressing question in France at during the sixteenth-century. In particular, it studies the theological and literary thought of four sixteenth-century Catholic reformers (Lefevre d'Etaples, Guillaume Briconnet, Marguerite de Navarre, Desiderius Erasmus). I argue that these reformers invoked concepts of secrecy in response to a perceived degeneration of devotional practices. The centrality of the question of contemplation for their works has not been studied in relation to the idea of secrecy, yet this connection clarifies the strategies they adopted to redefine the nature of contemplative life in ways that were both historically and culturally specific. Each author developed a model of contemplation by transposing the idea of secrecy into four interrelated fields of inquiry: (1) to theories of the soul; (2) to the objects the soul apprehends; (3) to the disciplines of study that correspond to those objects; (4) to the modes of communication proper to those disciplines. Although there is considerable bibliography on each of these authors, none bring them together to explore the relation between the sacred and the profane. I examine how these authors draw a concept of secrecy from the domain of metaphysical speculation and extend it into the field of moral educational, moral, and aesthetic thought. By creating new thresholds between the sacred and the profane, the innovations of these authors, who used secrecy as a principle of intellectual and artistic synthesis, participated in the rise of humanist thought and early modernity.