While looking up examples of "brethren adieu" (cf. Jacob 7:27) in historical literature, I came across the following from Antónia Szabari, Less Rightly Said: Scandals and Readers in Sixteenth-Century France (2010):
HUGENOT HUMOR IN LYON
In Lyon, as the city turned
Protestant for a brief period in 1562 after it was occupied by the Protestant
army during the first civil war, monasteries were closed and Catholics, along
with their "idols," were driven out of the city. The space of the
city had to be filled with a new and true form of the sacred. Polemicists
contribute to this restructuring of urban space poetically. Against the
backdrop of the rich tradition of the arts and of artisanal culture in the
city, which included poetry and the fabrication of printed books, these poems
appear rushed and rudimentary. They nonetheless reach back to poetic models and
rhetorical games in order to circulate common themes of the Reformation. The
papal "cauldron"-well-established topos of the "idolatry"
prevalent in the Roman Church-reappears in several of them. In the Discours
de la vermine et prestraille de Lyon ("Treatise of the Vermin and the
Clerical Riffraff of Lyon"), we find a monk who is worried that his
cauldron will be overturned and that the soup spill. The monk says good-bye in
a lengthy poem that catalogues all the idols that he adores as his god:
Mondieu, alas! My joys, my
darlings,
Adieu pleasure, and adieu
all merriment
Adieu comfort, and adieu contentment
Adieu cloister and adieu trickeries [fins tours],
Adieu my grub and adieu
monk-hood,
Adieu, I say to you, tripe
and potbelly
Adieu greasy cabbage,
meadows, wells, and fountains,
Adieu orchards in which I
take no more pleasure,
Adieu to you, luxurious
riff raff [frippons & racaille]
Adieu vermin and the whole
clerical riff raff [prestraille]
Adieu to all the others,
for we have to go
Adieu my days, my bed, and
my sleep [mon repos]
Adieu my wine, and adieu
my cups [mes pots]
Adieu to you, henchmen of
the Antichrist
Adieu my nymph, my little
girl, my sweetheart.
Adieu falcons, joyful
venery
Adieu birds, adieu my
little dogs,
Adieu my spaniel, whom I
will no longer groom,
Adieu cards, dice, and
trickery
Adieu, alas, our
extravagance
Adieu partridge, quail,
hens, and plover,
Adieu to the sauce that we
eat with turtledove,
Adieu chapels and the
bread of deliverance
Adieu I say to you,
without fail, indeed.
Adieu chateau, mansion,
and farmyard,
Adieu the amorous juice of
my vineyard
Adieu I say to you my
thousands of brethren
Adieu lay brethren and all
you Cordeliers
Adieu tapestry and plates
Adieu to you Jacobins and
prelates,
Adieu canons, adieu fun
Adieu all, I am weary, and I’m gone [car ie suis las] (Discours de la
vermine et prestraille de Lyon ([Paris]: 1562), 10– 12)
From an aesthetic or poetic
viewpoint, there is nothing innovative about this poem. It does not invite the
reader into a storehouse of learning, nor does it require the reader to possess
a reading culture. The poem only evokes culinary art, venery, and venereal
pursuits, and those also only superficially. The monk depicted in it is not
interested in any pleasures beyond the simple ones of the body. The anaphoras
repeated at the beginning of each verse lend a monotonous rhythm to the monk's
catalogue of pleasures, yet this poetic device becomes the carrier of a
theological message. The monk's anaphoric "adieus" are his way of
saying goodbye to those objects that he venerates as his god. He speaks to
(his) god (à-dieu), but it is to be understood that this god is an idol.
The desolation of the monk (car ie suis las) so vividly depicted in this
poem is a parody of his idolatry, for his god is his belly, all those things
that he can stuff into it, and all his other pleasures. The irony of the monk's
adieus is that the god he invokes as his god is not permanent; he is a
"god" whose time is over (that is, an idol, in theological terms),
one who is lost and with whom the monk must part. The monotonous repetition of
adieus serves the iconoclastic function of both representing the monk at the
moment of invoking his god and revealing the transient nature of the object of
his devotion. The simple poetic construction (the diametrical opposite of the
crammed, multifaceted poetic edifice of the Satyres chrestiennes)
succeeds in evoking a theological dilemma, that of the idol, with which the
deceived believer enters into an intimate spiritual contact, only to find out
that the presumed sacred other is not available, it is not sacred, not the
Other. The poem thus does not simply mock Catholic monks as gluttons (although
that is part of it), but also reorients the reader's view away from a familiar
material space and hence toward an invisible, immaterial space, that of the
Spirit. Such a reorientation was necessary in the attempt to refashion the city
and fill it with the "true" sacred. Viewed from the perspective of a
larger theological and philosophical tradition, however, the anaphoras of the
anxious monk reveal the tautology that founds the sacred in any tradition,
Catholic or Protestant. The god of Protestantism, always absolutely Other, deus
absconditus, is always withdrawn from everything. The monk is parodied and
his "god" is made into a comic idol, but his experience of fear and
dismay, of anxiety, at the disappearance of the sacred is very close to the
religious world of Protestantism. This anxiety is the one against which
Protestantism offers help, but which it also maintains. In Lyon, not only fear
and laughter but also Catholic monk and reformed reader possess an uncanny
resemblance. Both the Satyres chrestiennes and this poem show,
unwittingly, that while engaging in verbal denigration and ridicule, the
Calvinist self was locked in rivalry with the despised other. (Antónia Szabari,
Less Rightly Said: Scandals and Readers in Sixteenth-Century France [Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010], 122-24)
