François Rabelais
François Rabelais (UK: /ˈræbəleɪ/ RAB-ə-lay, US: /ˌræbəˈleɪ/ -LAY,[2][3] French: [fʁɑ̃swa ʁablɛ]; born between 1483 and 1494; died 1553) was a French Renaissance writer, physician, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He is primarily known as a writer of satire, of the grotesque, and of bawdy jokes and songs.
Ecclesiastical and anticlerical, Christian and considered by some as a free thinker, a doctor and having the image of a "bon vivant", the multiple facets of his personality sometimes seem contradictory. Caught up in the religious and political turmoil of the Reformation, Rabelais showed himself to be both sensitive and critical towards the great questions of his time. Subsequently, the views of his life and work have evolved according to the times and currents of thought.
Admirer of Erasmus, handling parody and satire, Rabelais fights for tolerance, peace, evangelical faith and the return to the knowledge of ancient Greco-Roman, beyond the "Gothic darkness" that characterizes the Middle Ages, taking up the theses of Plato to counter the excesses of Aristotelianism. He attacks the abuses of princes and men of the Church, and opposes to them on the one hand evangelical humanist thought, and on the other hand popular culture, bawdy, "joking", marked by the taste of wine and games, thus manifesting a humble and open Christian faith, far from any ecclesiastical weight. He shared with Protestantism the criticism of scholasticism and monasticism, but the religious reformer John Calvin also attacked him in 1550.
Because of his literary power and historical importance, Western literary critics consider him one of the great writers of world literature and among the creators of modern European writing. His best known work is Gargantua and Pantagruel, tales with their giant characters, heroic-comic parody, epics and novels of chivalry, but which also prefigure the realist, satirical and philosophical novel, and are considered to be one of the first forms of the modern novel.
His literary legacy is such that the word Rabelaisian has been coined as a descriptive inspired by his work and life. Merriam-Webster defines the word as describing someone or something that is "marked by gross robust humor, extravagance of caricature, or bold naturalism".
- Wikipedia article: François Rabelais
In 1532, under the pseudonym Alcofribas Nasier (an anagram of François Rabelais), he published his first book, Pantagruel King of the Dipsodes, the first of his Gargantua series. The idea of basing an allegory on the lives of giants came to Rabelais from the folklore legend of les Grandes chroniques du grand et énorme géant Gargantua, which were sold as popular literature at the time in the form of inexpensive pamphlets by colporteurs and at the fairs of Lyon. Pantagruelisme is an "eat, drink and be merry" philosophy, which led his books into disfavor with the church but simultaneously brought them popular success and the admiration of later critics for their focus on the body. This first book, critical of the existing monastic and educational system, contains the first known occurrence in French of the words encyclopédie, caballe, progrès, and utopie among others.
Thélème
- see also Thelema
In François Rabelais' second novel, Gargantua, M. Alcofribas narrates the Abbey of Thélème, built by the giant Gargantua. It differs markedly from the monastic norm, as the abbey is open to both monks and nuns and has a swimming pool, maid service, and no clocks in sight. Only the good-looking are permitted to enter. The inscription on the gate to the abbey first sets out who is unwelcome: hypocrites, bigots, the pox-ridden, Goths, Magoths, straw-chewing law clerks, usurious grinches, old or officious judges, and burners of heretics. When the members are defined positively, the text becomes more inviting:
- Honour, praise, distraction
- Herein lies subtraction
- in the tuning up of joy.
- To healthy bodies so employed
- Do pass on this reaction:
- Honour, praise, distraction
Tr title page of a 1571 edition containing the last three books of Pantagruel: Le Tiers Livre des Faits & Dits Heroïques du Bon Pantagruel (The Third Book of the True and Reputed Heroic Deeds of the Noble Pantagruel) The Thélèmites in the abbey live according to a single rule:
- All their life was regulated not by laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their free will and pleasure. They rose from bed when they pleased, and drank, ate, worked, and slept when the fancy seized them. Nobody woke them; nobody compelled them either to eat or to drink, or to do anything else whatever. So it was that Gargantua had established it. In their rules there was only one clause:
- DO WHAT YOU WILL
because people who are free, well-born, well-bred, and easy in honest company have a natural spur and instinct which drives them to virtuous deeds and deflects them from vice; and this they called honor. When these same men are depressed and enslaved by vile constraint and subjection, they use this noble quality which once impelled them freely towards virtue, to throw off and break this yoke of slavery. For we always strive after things forbidden and covet what is denied us.