In imitating Boccaccio, Marguerite was turning to a writer who died more than 120 years before she was born. And she was identifying herself with the old vernacular literary culture of southern France and northern Spain and Italy. From childhood, she was instructed in Spanish and Italian, as well as Latin and some Greek and Hebrew, so this literature would have been very available to her. Before Boccaccio, there was Petrarch, and before him, Dante, who makes a place in hell for the pope who called down Crusader armies from the north to extirpate the culture of the Cathar heretics and the troubadour poets, centered in the region of France which came to be called Languedoc. Religious dissent and vernacular literature were powerfully associated in French history, and extraordinary piety was associated with the celebration of courtly life and profane love. If one may judge from Marguerite’s writing, and from the writing she encouraged, it was the disrupted culture of southern Europe, not the forgotten culture of antiquity, that she most hoped to see renascent. This includes the translation of the New Testament she commissioned from Lefèvre d’Étaples — vernacular New Testaments (the language of the region, Occitan, was closer to Spanish than to French) were at the center of Cathar piety.
If France was feeling the stimulus of the Lutheran movement, as the disorders and persecutions make clear, and elements of Catharism were still abroad, as Cauvin’s mention of them proves, then problems might be anticipated from the fact that the Cathars really were heretics. That word must have been used very loosely — Ignatius of Loyola was a student in Paris when Cauvin was, having come there to escape repeated arrest for heresy in Spain, and Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross also underwent painful scrutiny. French Waldensians, English Lollards, Bohemian Hussites were all condemned and suppressed as heretics, and, when one looks at whatever remains in the way of evidence about their beliefs, they are precursors of the Reformation, neither more nor less. But there was an exotic element in Cathar doctrine, a departure much more profound than disputes about the authority of the institutional church or the nature of the priesthood or even about the Eucharist. They believed in a good or “true” God, and in a false and evil god, who created the world. They believed that those who belonged to the true God could be perfect, and that those who were initiated into their clergy must be perfect, or their administration of the Cathar sacraments was of no effect.
Catharism is traceable to a Bulgarian named Bogomil, whose teachings spread to Bosnia and were carried by missionaries across the Adriatic to France and Italy. Its adherents are said to have believed, like Servetus, that the Old Testament was essentially the chronicle of the evil god, though their texts quote the Old Testament frequently and respectfully. They are said also to have believed in the reincarnation of souls, leading finally to the perfection and salvation of all of them. This seems actually to obviate the dualism of the orthodox understanding, which would leave Satan everlastingly in possession of some fair part, at least, of humankind. (Interestingly, Cauvin’s account of hell does not mention Satan. But this is a merely technical solution to the problem.) To propose an alternative scheme of salvation, however, as both the Bogomils and Cathars did, is to depart very essentially from the broadest Christian tradition. In a daunting, and rare, display of like-mindedness, the Eastern church destroyed the Bogomils in its territories at the same time and by the same means that the Cathars were destroyed in western Europe.
Catharism seems to have flourished for about two centuries, and to have enjoyed the respect of those it did not convert, who were always the great majority. Its clergy, male and female equally and indifferently, were chosen out of the general Cathar population as people who lived godly lives, and were instructed and initiated as “good people” or “good Christians.” History and their detractors call them “Perfecti.” These people lived in the world, but as ascetics, refusing meat and wine and other comforts and luxuries. They wandered and preached, barefoot and simply clothed, always carrying their Bibles. When Rome first began to try to deal with the heresy, delegations were sent to preach to the people and to debate with the Perfecti, but without success because of their opponents’ great mastery of Scripture. They had no churches, no images or symbols of any kind, no hierarchy. They were completely nonviolent, laying great stress on the love of enemies. They absolutely refused to take oaths. For a long time they were resolutely defended, and rarely betrayed, by people who were not themselves Cathars.
If one were to compare Calvinism to Lutheranism, one would note its absence of hierarchy, the abandonment of the idea of apostolic succession, and the fact that its clergy are, in effect, elected by the congregations they serve. Certainly Calvinism positively refused the use of images and symbols, which Lutheranism retained, though with the understanding that they were not to be objects of veneration. Its understanding of the sacraments tended to grant them a spiritual reality as opposed to the objective reality implied in Catholic transubstantiation or Lutheran consubstantiation. Calvinism emphasized preaching and almost eliminated liturgy, which remained important in Lutheranism. It had no clearly formalized relation with civil authority. It rejected the idea of free will. In all this, it departs from Lutheranism and resembles Catharism. Even the strange this-worldly asceticism always associated with Calvinists, which Cauvin seems to have epitomized but which in fact his theology does not at all require, has a Cathar feeling about it. This would perhaps account for the affinity, in fact the deep attachment, of worldly people like Marguerite de Navarre and Clément Marot to a religious movement that seems, superficially, at least, to have been of another spirit entirely.
Let us say that the grafting of certain essential Lutheran doctrines to the stock of Catharism was Marguerite’s idea. She was of Luther’s generation and attentive to his writing from the beginning. Let us say she set out to ensure that there would be a reformation in France, one that would stay within the bounds of orthodoxy, and would be aesthetically and temperamentally pleasing to the French. So she wrote and published anonymously a book of poems, Miroir de l’Âme Pécheresse — The Mirror of the Sinful Soul. (The only translation of the book into English seems to have been the prose one made in 1548 by the young princess Elizabeth Tudor as a gift for Catherine Parr, titled A Godly Medytacion of the Christen sowle concerning a love towards God and Hys Christe …) The full title of Marguerite’s first poem is “The Mirror of the Sinful Soul in which she recognizes her faults and sins — also the graces and kindnesses done her by Jesus Christ her spouse” (my translation). Of course it was entirely conventional to speak of the soul as female, as the bride of Christ — John of the Cross did, Jean Cauvin did — so there is no reason to assume that the first readers of these poems thought of the writer or even the speaker of the poems as female.
As the book first appeared, passages of Scripture which the poem interpreted were printed in French in the margins, so that the poem was in effect an interpretive gloss on texts which assert human sinfulness («Rom. vii. Peché habite en moy»), and texts which assert divine grace («Jehan iii. Car Dieu a tant aymé le monde, qu’il a donné son seul filz»). The poem is ingeniously constructed so that a series of narratives of God’s faithfulness and the soul’s infidelity — its failure as mother, paraphrasing the narrative of the judgment of Solomon; as child, paraphrasing the parable of the prodigal son — reads like the experience of a single soul, always failing and always meeting new and constant grace. The metaphor of the book as mirror was well worn by the time Marguerite took it up, but her use of it is, again, ingenious. The mirror of the soul is Scripture, the poem says, and the narratives in it are its living image, straying and restored, offending and forgiven, so that these two states are in effect simultaneous, integral. And the mirror is Christ, whose fidelity is the measure of the soul’s inevitable failure, and also of its undiminished worth. In either case, the metaphor is an allusion to the figure of the mirror in the Epistle of James, a text full of implied dualism which Marguerite seems to be reinterpreting here. The Christian soul is perfect in the sense that its imperfections are made good by God’s faithfulness and grace — and perfect in no other sense.