Pierre de Bérulle and the possessed: teratology and apology (Paris, 1599)

DEL OLMO, ISMAEL

Lyon

Congreso; Monstres et christianisme, monstres du christianisme (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle); 2016

Université Lyon III- Universität Erlangen

This presentation deals with the connections between atheism, teratology, and demonology in early modern Europe. We will concentrate particurarly in the way in which the possessed functioned as physical evidence of Christianity?s essential, invisible truths ?we must bear in mind that faith is the substance of things hoped for and evidence of things not seen (Heb. 11, 1). We will analyse Pierre de Bérulle?s Traité des energumenes and Discourse sur la possession de Marthe Brossier (Paris, 1599), brandished against those atheists and libertins who, at least he thought, were ravaging fin-de-siècle France. Those men incapable of convincing themselves of metaphysical truths by attending the school of God and of Nature must be dragged to a third school, that of demonic experience.The possessed appears as a pure liminal phenomenon, a being reduced to an intermediary state between life and death. A pseudo-corps, a monster. In the possessed, hell occurs, he is the ‟vive-eternelle-mort?.