Monstrous Athéistes and Marvellous Demoniacs : Teratology and Apology in Sixteenth-Century France

DEL OLMO, ISMAEL

Monstres et christianisme, monstres du christianisme. 16e -18e siècles

Peter Lang

Lugar: Berna; Año: 2018;

This chapter will analyze a few accounts regarding demoniacs to trace some connections between monstrosity, possession, and unbelief in sixteenth-century France. It will deal first with the way in which several Christian intellectuals understood «atheism» as a monstrous denial of divine and natural orders, of man?s place in these orders, and of the traditional paths that led to the knowledge of this metaphysical structure: reason and Scripture. Then, it will analyze a peculiar apologetic strategy against this threat. To counter the monster of doubt, some Catholic authors resorted to a well-known teratological figure of Christianity, the demoniac. Possession is a liminal experience with providential and eschatological overtones, a violent spiritual and corporeal affliction that defies ontological boundaries and runs contrary to nature. And, as we shall try to show, it is above all a visible experience: we will concentrate particularly in the way in which the possessed functioned as physical evidence of Christianity?s metaphysical and salvational structure, as a tangible proof of the world of the spirit against those who were deemed impervious to any biblical or philosophical account of its existence. Catholic intellectuals like Guillaume Postel, Ambroise Paré, François de Belleforest, Pierre Charron, and Pierre de Bérulle thus instrumentalized the visible marvel of demonic possession against the monstrous unbelievers that were (or so they thought) infecting France.