Rabelais, a humanist gourmet

“To live in peace, joy, health and always eat well” – this is how Rabelais formulated his life ideals in 1532. A true humanist, he drew his philosophy from the ancient Greeks, whom he studied in preparation for taking the holy orders. From Plato he borrowed a passion for dialogue, from Aristotle – respect for nature and human instincts, from Epicurus – the idea of ​​​​pleasure as the main good, from the Stoics … a critical look at all teachers combined.

Frustrated by the spirit of hypocrisy that reigned at the Sorbonne, where Greek texts were confiscated from him under the pretext that “here they read only Latin”, Rabelais took off his monastic cassock and turned to medicine. From that moment on, he never denied himself the pleasure of criticizing the church for dogmatism and indulgence in superstition. Later, in “Gargantua”, he will come up with the Abbey of Theleme, “the monastery in reverse”, where everyone is guided only by natural instincts and the rule “Do what you want.” The theological faculty of the Sorbonne banned both Gargantua and Pantagruel immediately after publication. Having taken up medicine, Rabelais also made people talk about himself: he was the first to perform an autopsy on the corpse of a hanged man. At the same time, they began to suspect him of involvement in the “poster case”: one night in 1534, someone posted posters on the walls of Paris and Amboise, ridiculing the saints and the sacraments of the Catholic Church. Under the conditions of the Counter-Reformation and increasingly bloody repressions, Rabelais began to behave more quietly so as not to endanger his life. However, defending his right to freedom and laughter, he parted with the anagram Alcofribas Nazier, which served him as a pseudonym for the first two novels, and signed with his real name “Third” and “Fourth” books “Gargantua and Pantagruel” – naturally, immediately banned censorship.

Keys to Understanding

learn humanism

Education is one of Rabelais’ favorite themes. The reader can follow every stage of Gargantua’s upbringing, from his search for the best way to wipe his butt (“The best wipe in the world is a fluffy gosling, only when you slip it between your legs, hold it by the head”) to learning the Latin alphabet (“Master Tubal Holofernes was so good at teaching him the alphabet that he learned it by heart in reverse order, which took five years and three months. Ridiculing the old, scholastic approach to learning, Rabelais always defended the idea of ​​a living humanistic education based both on experiment and on the study of ancient texts to develop critical judgment.

Learn the truth while laughing

“Laughter is human,” wrote Rabelais in Gargantua. It brings people together and makes communication pleasant. Laughter expresses pleasure and at the same time symbolizes the release of the animal nature in a civilized person. But the main task of humor in the work of Rabelais is a parody, a clever technique that allows you to convey your thoughts to the reader, hiding behind a farce and grotesque a harsh criticism of the moral norms of his era.

Draw life in your body

Rabelais was both a monk suffering from abstinence, and a doctor who knew almost everything about physiology, and the father of a large family (he had, as far as is known, three children). The body was at the center of his life: in his novels, he exalted it with scenes of gluttony, frivolous plots, the very gigantism of Pantagruel and Gargantua … Reducing a person to the continuous satisfaction of the needs for food and reproduction could not but make Rabelais a heretic in the eyes of the Christian church. He is indifferent to this: he praised the body in all its excesses and tirelessly ridiculed scientists and saints who presented themselves as the incorporeal personification of the mind, showering them with curses drawn from the sex-toilet lexicon.