Talk:Thelema/Rabelais

This is broken down into two sections, quotes from sources and a draft version of the article section in question.

Sources

"Questions of prophecy aside, Rabelais was no precursor of Thelema. Joyous and unsystematic, Rabelais blended in his heterodox creed elements of Stoic self-mastery and spontaneous Christian faith and kindness."

Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt p 126. Talks about the Abbey story.

Supporting:

"most critics nowadays accept Screech's Rabelais the Evangelical Christian humanist," also talks about the Abbey story.

Bowen, Barbara, p. 2 of "Rire est le propre de l'homme," Ch. 1 in Enter Rabelais, Laughing. Vanderbilt University Press 1998. ISBN 0-8265-1306-9.

"Rabelais, like his protectress Marguerite de Navarre, was an evangelical rather than a Protestant," definition follows.

Catharine Randall, "Reformation" entry in The Rabelais Encyclopedia, edited by Elizabeth Chesney Zegura. p. 207. Greenwood Press, Westport, CT. 2004. ISBN: 0–313–31034–3

the reference to the Greek word θέλημα "declares that the will of God rules in this abbey".

Marian Rothstein, "Thélème, ABBEY OF" entry in The Rabelais Encyclopedia p. 243.

more like that, if it matters.

on the existence or nonexistence of a Rabelaisian "philosophy of life" that isn't Christian humanism:

"creation of the philosophy of Thelema",

Ash, Steven J. "Rabelais, Dashwood, and Proto-Thelema" in Journal of Thelemic Studies, V. 1, No. 2.

"Our religion is that of Thelema. Our Thelema is not some meaningless diversion like this so-called “Rabelaisian” Thelema—Saint Rabelais never intended his satirical, fictional device to serve as a practical blueprint for a real human society. And it is not some revisionist imposture, such as that put forth by some of the proponents of the so-called “New Aeon English Qabalah.” Our Thelema is that of the Book of the Law and the writings of Aleister Crowley—the Master Therion, the Prophet of the Aeon of Horus."

Sabazius X°, speech to the Sixth National Conference of the U.S. O.T.O. Grand Lodge, August 10, 2007.

and in response,

"It was far braver for Rabelais to write about an Abbey of Thelema in the 1500's than it was for AC to actually start an Abbey of Thelema in the 20th century...Rabelaisian Thelema isn't really about Rabelais or his book...Rabelais is a convenient name to show that Crowley borrowed his ideas and was just one thread in much wider fabric." suggests however that Rabelais described Crowley's non Christian-Humanist philosophy.

Jason Miller, "Rabelaisian Rebuttal" in Silver Star 8.

Section

Rabelais' Thélème

Main article: François Rabelais

François Rabelais

François Rabelais was a Franciscan and later a Benedictine monk of the 16th century. Eventually he left the monastery to study medicine, and so moved to Lyon in 1532. It was there that he wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel, a connected series of books. They tell the story of two giants—a father (Gargantua) and his son (Pantagruel) and their adventures—written in an amusing, extravagant, and satirical vein.

It is in the first book (ch. 52-57) where Rabelais writes of the Abbey of Thélème, built by the giant Gargantua. It pokes fun at the monastic institutions, since his abbey has a swimming pool, maid service, and no clocks in sight.

One of the verses of the inscription on the gate to Thélème says:

Grace, honour, praise, delight,
Here sojourn day and night.
   Sound bodies lined
   With a good mind,
Do here pursue with might
Grace, honour, praise, delight.

But below the humour was a very real concept of utopia and the ideal society. Rabelais gives us a description of how the Thelemites of the Abbey lived and the rules they lived by:

All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good; they did eat, drink, labour, sleep, when they had a mind to it and were disposed for it. None did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor to do any other thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one clause to be observed,

Do What Thou Wilt;

because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved; for it is agreeable with the nature of man to long after things forbidden and to desire what is denied us.

Rabelais has been variously credited with the "creation of the philosophy of Thelema", "one of the earliest mentions of this philosophy", and with being "the first Thelemite".

Most critics today agree that Rabelais wrote from a Christian humanist perspective, as Crowley biographer Lawrence Sutin says when he contrasts this religious view with the Thelema of Aleister Crowley. In the story of Thélème, which critics analyze as referring in part to the suffering of loyal Christian reformists or "evangelicals" within the French Church, the reference to the Greek word θέλημα "declares that the will of God rules in this abbey", which accords with the views of some modern Thelemites.