Cauvin will use the image of the mirror almost obsessively, in this same way, to describe a state of being that is experiential, fluid, momentary and relational, and which reveals, without in any sense limiting or becoming identical with the thing revealed. In this sense the natural world mirrors God, a human being mirrors God. The vision of the unworthy soul in an unmediated encounter with Christ, for all the world as if there were no other souls in the universe whether more or less worthy, as if there were no time, no history, certainly neither merit nor extenuation — this is the classic Calvinist posture, though it should be called Margueritist, clearly, since she described it before he did.
The voices of the first two poems in Marguerite’s little volume sound not so much like confession as shocked self-recognition. Both begin abruptly, sudden cries of frustration at the subjective burden of human self-defeat. This is like the despair of the self that prepares the mystic for his or her encounter with the divine, with the important difference that this self-recognition is not the preparation, but is in fact the encounter. She says, in the words of Elizabeth Tudor’s translation, “He doth see the evil that I have, what and how much it is … And this the same unknown sight doth bring me a new desire, shewing the good that I have lost by my sin, and given me again through his grace and bounty, that which hath overcome all sin.” In the Institutes, Cauvin will likewise say, “It is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself.” The first poem differs from other mysticism also in the fact that in place of the vision of the Spouse one finds in John of the Cross, for example, there is Scripture, which for Marguerite, as later for Cauvin, is itself a visionary experience. She says, “Now, my lord, if thou be my father, may I think that I can be thy mother? Indeed I cannot well perceive how I should conceive thee that createdest me … I believe then, that hearing and reading thy words which thou hast taught and uttered by thy holy prophets, the same also which through thy true preachers, thou dost daily declare unto men, in believing it and steadfastly desiring to fulfill, I conceive thee and bear thee by love.” As Cauvin will do, Marguerite makes a great point of staying close to the text, actually setting it beside her poems. At the same time, as he will do, she evokes a sense of astonished realization, of a constant, overwhelming present moment.
The second, shorter poem in the book is titled “Discord existing in mankind on account of the contrariety of the spirit and the flesh and his peace through spiritual life, which is an annotation of the end of the seventh chapter and the beginning of the eighth, of the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans.” It is hard, though clearly possible, to overlook the theological seriousness of the writer’s intentions. In this poem, the speaker, again a universalized soul, confesses its mingled nature, the simultaneity of faith and disbelief, of love and hatred of the law, of serenity and turmoil, in an intricately rhymed paraphrase of the passage from Romans in which Paul laments: “For I allow not that whiche I do: for what I would, that do I not: but what I hate, that doe I. If I doe then that which I would not, I consent to the Law, that it is good. Now then, it is no more I, that doe it, but sinne that dwelleth in me … I finde then that when I would do good, I am thus yoked, that evill is present with me … O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death!” (Geneva Bible, Romans 7:15–17, 21, 24). This same passage is a point of departure for the first poem. Its significance for Marguerite is clearly very great indeed.
The second poem concludes that we must try to avoid sin or error, and when we fail we must turn to God’s unfailing clemency. This is the Lutheran doctrine of salvation by faith alone. The insistence on the experience of persisting sinfulness in the soul, even as the soul is the object of grace, can be considered as reinterpreting Paul’s passage to remove the implication that sin resides in the literal flesh or body, as distinct from the soul. But it also makes the point that perfection is not possible to anyone. The poem recovers the psychological, dramatic quality of Paul’s outcry, making it feel more like grief and frustration, less like philosophy or doctrine; more like a realization of inextricable complexity, less like a formula for creating ontological categories of good and evil, pure and impure. Perhaps this is the emergence of the modern self.
Cauvin’s first commentary, published in 1539, was on the Epistle to the Romans, although, as he notes in the preface, a number of commentaries had been written on it already, including a notable one by Luther. Clearly he is eager to give his own inflection to Protestant interpretation of this key text. In his gloss of the end of the seventh chapter, which he interprets as Marguerite had done years before, he concludes, “This is a suitable passage to disprove the most pernicious dogma of the Purists, (Catharorum,) which some turbulent spirits attempt to revive at the present day.” In every context in which he mentions Catharism, it is to refute its teachings about perfection. Cauvin is known not only for the doctrine of predestination but also for the doctrine of “total depravity,” a phrase so forbidding one hesitates to ponder it. In Genevan French dépraver is clearly still near its Latin root, which means “to warp” or “to distort.” The word does not have the lurid overtones it has for us. Jérôme Bolsec was banished for, among other things, having dépravé plusieurs passages de l’Éscriture pour soustenir ceste faulse et perverse doctrine — the doctrine that predestination would make God a tyrant like Jupiter. This is Cauvin’s characteristic use of the word, to refer to distortion of the meaning of a text. Corruption, in the French of the period, can mean “exhaustion” or “brokenness,” or it can be used just as we use it now when we speak of the corruption of a text.
In Cauvin’s mind, the mirror is by far the dominant metaphor for perception and also for Creation, so distortion would be a natural extension of the metaphor, especially in a time when the art of making glass mirrors was newly recovered and flaws and distortions would have been inevitable. Yet it is also true that, in its essence, experience is a text he reads. That is why the very textuality of Scripture gives it such authority, and why his scholarly struggles with the flaws in the text, the mistranslations and scribal errors and forced interpretations, are identical in his understanding with the problem of discovering and establishing truth — a thing which he is too good a scholar to imagine can ever really be achieved. It is strikingly true of Cauvin that his sense of things is overwhelmingly visual and cerebral, that the other senses do not interest him. Ignatius, in his meditation on hell, wishes “with the sense of smell to perceive the smoke, the sulphur, the filth, and corruption.” Cauvin says, “[B]ecause no description can deal adequately with the gravity of God’s vengeance against the wicked, their torments and tortures are figuratively expressed to us by physical things, that is, by darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Hell is “to be cut off from all fellowship with God.” Making perception and understanding the primary locus of reality rescues the world and the flesh from dualism, whether Cathar or Augustinian. They are rescued from the opprobrium of existing in a state of opposition to the soul because they are addressed to and exist for the soul, for perception and understanding. Marguerite anticipates him in this. Her modern self has no grounds for rejecting or despising what is, therefore, the modern world.