Upwellings: First Expressions of Unbelief in the Printed Literature of the French Renaissance.

Max Gauna. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992. 322 pp. $45.

In three very long chapters, Max Gauna surveys the essentially Rationalist-Epicurean dissident tradition of unbelief in the literature and cultural-ideological history from antiquity to the early Renaissance, and then analyzes its "upwellings" or resurgent qualities in the Cymbalum Mundi, usually attributed to Bonaventure des Periers, and in Jacques Tahureau's Dialogues. The author is concerned with "printed matter disagreeing with or attacking the dominant Christian ideologies" (9), that is, classical, medieval, and Renaissance writings containing subversive content and oriented toward parodic (Lucianic) or invective satire of "a ruling and repressive ideology" (11). Gauna also relies in his first chapter on the works of apologists such as Guillaume Farel and especially Pierre Viret to construct the Renaissance figure of the "libertin spirituel" or "revolte," who falls into one of two broad categories: the intellectual dissenter embracing rationalism and skepticism (Des Periers sustained by the commentaries of Averroes) and the existential dissenter espousing naturalism and eroticism (Tahureau following Epicurus).

In the case of the highly enigmatic Cymbalum Mundi, Gauna's thesis requires that he challenge prevailing views of this work: those oriented, to one degree or another, toward Christian interpretation as put forth by V.-L. Saulnier (his celebrated definition of the work's evangelical "hesuchisme"), by Peter H. Nurse (the work's assimilation to a spiritualizing mysticism), and by M. A. Screech (the work's total orthodoxy). For Gauna, the doubting and dissident and nihilistic opposite is what the Cymbalum Mundi is truly about. Its four dialogues are "profoundly Lucianic" and constitute an "almost uninterrupted satirical attack" against Christian faith and belief As Gauna puts it: "What on earth would doubting Thomas be writing to Peter the Believer about if not about doubt, belief [this is where other readers stop], and the reason for doubt?" (180). As for the Dialogues of Tahureau, Gauna is spared opposing the views of colleagues here since this work has usually been read as anti-Christian (i.e., Henri Busson on its "rationalism" and C. A. Mayer's 1949 thesis on its satirical attack on Christianity). Gauna simply elaborates on the work's dissident views which he first suggested in his 1981 Droz edition: the "Epicurean yardstick" which determines, and with which to assess, everything in the dialogues their basic Lucretian ethical principles of sense and feeling), the attack on gloria to debunk the Christian belief in the immortality of the soul, the unmasking of impostors (including Moses, Mahomet, and Christ), and so forth.

Gauna's Upwellings is well documented and passionately presented. Its weakness, for this reader, lies in its overly assured anti-Christian interpretation of the Cymbalum Mundi, obviously intended to be the book's critical and scholarly centerpiece. Others, as indicated above, have argued just as persuasively and with equally impressive documentation on this work's overall Christian orientation and meaning. The latter scholars would surely, but one has the impression in reading Gauna that he would never, compromise or at least consider the possibility of a middle hermeneutic ground. Is it possible that the "libertine" or "dissident" pronouncements and pages of the Cymbalum Mundi just may be pointing, intentionally enigmatic as they are, somewhere between spirituality and skepticism? Just as most readers of Montaigne would agree that he railed against human presumptuousness in matters of religion but not against the religious principle, might the humanist author of the Cymbalum Mundi also have been counseling some sort of "evangelical" reform? The final word cannot go to Gauna. There is still much to be unraveled and to be said on the enigma that is the Cymbalum Mundi, a singular Renaissance work which may (it must at least be recognized) remain forever resistant to definitive interpretation.