Page:Imperialdictiona03eadi Brandeis Vol3b.pdf/7



RAB RABANUS MAURUS, was born of French parents at Mayence in 776. After completing his studies at Fulda in Hesse, he became deacon in 801, and retired to Tours to enjoy the tuition of Alcuin. He seems also to have travelled as far as Palestine. At the age of twenty-five he became the head of a conventual seminary at Fulda, and was very successful as a teacher. Nor did he give up this situation when he was made abbot in 822. In 847, after some years of seclusion, he was consecrated archbishop of Mayence, and he died in 856. Rabanus wrote commentaries on all the canonical books of scripture, and on many of the apocryphal ones. His works appeared in six folios at Cologne in 1627. He possessed no little erudition, and his influence was great; but he employed it with great bitterness and fury against Gotteschalcus, his opponent on the doctrine of predestination.—J. E.  RABAUT ST. ETIENNE, J., son of Paul Rabaut, a zealous minister of Nimes, whose zeal in the cause of protestantism often endangered his life, was born in that town in 1743, and like his father became a protestant minister. From the first an ardent promoter of the Revolution, he became a member of the Constituant assembly, and there signalized himself as an enemy of the clergy. Subsequently in the convention he joined the party of the Girondists, and shared the fate of its chiefs in 1793. He wrote an account of the Revolution, and "Lettres à Bailly sur l'histoire primitive de la Grèce."—J. S., G.  RABELAIS,, one of the most famous, but also, it must be confessed, one of the most filthy of satirical writers, was born near Chinon in Touraine in 1483. It has been noticed by biographers that the same year was made memorable by the birth of Luther and of Raphael. And like Luther, Rabelais was a great reformer, though of a peculiar stamp; like Raphael, a great painter, though of a far coarser kind. Rabelais was the son of an innkeeper, and this origin seems to have moulded his whole tastes, coloured his whole destiny. Of the sixteenth century it has been said, that it was at once the most earnest and the most joyous. Wildest orgies strangely blended or contrasted with fiercest battles for sternest truths. No less its earnestness than its joyousness Rabelais represented. A clear and connected outline of this writer's career it is difficult to furnish, since besides that, for the early part at least, the sources are scanty, the statements confused and contradictory; there is furthermore a mingling of the legendary with the historical. Long a careless student, Rabelais having entered a Franciscan monastery at Fontenay-le-Comte in Poitou, and having received consecration as a priest, began to lay the broad and solid foundation for the most comprehensive knowledge. Astronomy, philosophy, law, grammar, medicine, poetry; Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, German, Arabic—gave Rabelais a cyclopædic panoply which did not hinder the throbbing of the profoundest, as well as the most popular sympathies. As an accomplished scholar, Rabelais belonged to the past; as a man of the world and of the people to the present; as a bold innovator to the future. This singular priest concealed not his hatred to the priesthood. His brethren envied his learning, and they could not pardon him his crushing scorn, his reckless, audacious buffoonery. The Franciscan monks calumniated, tormented him. To escape from their petty persecutions he was, at the intercession of the powerful patrons whom his wit, joviality, and genius had gained him, permitted by Clement VII. to leave the surly Franciscans, whereupon, when about forty, he joined the Benedictines at Maillezais in Poitou. After a while he quitted the Benedictines abruptly. He went to Montpellier to devote himself more completely to medical pursuits. Lectures, public disputatious, medical and other treatises, procured him a conspicuous place among the learned, but did not reveal that one who has been called the Shakspeare of French comedy had arisen. Passing from the theoretical to the practical, Rabelais was for a time physician to the hospital at Lyons. Perhaps the daily sight of human pain intensified that sensibility to the grotesque, in which he has never been surpassed. It is in the humanest minds that the perception of the grotesque is always the keenest. Rabelais was probably unburdening his heart, as much as he was obeying his riotous phantasy, when in 1533 he published a portion of his immortal work. In the same year he accompanied to Rome Jean Du Bellay, as this distinguished diplomatist's physician. Jean Du Bellay was one of four brothers who all attained eminence, and who all were authors; Guillaume Du Bellay, John's elder brother, being every way the most notable. It was at a period peculiarly trying to the papacy, that Jean Du Bellay and his physician went to Rome. That conflict had commenced which was to render England protestant for ever. Clement VII, however, in the throng of his cares and his anxieties, deigned a glance no doubt to Francis Rabelais. Yet it was not to Clement VII., but to Pope Paul III., that Rabelais was indebted for absolution from the penalties which he had incurred by his abrupt departure from the Benedictine monastery. It was from Paul likewise that Jean Du Bellay received the cardinal's hat. Rabelais could not have had a more active or enlightened protector than the Cardinal Du Bellay, who though a pliant courtier, a supple negotiator, the companion and the counsellor of unscrupulous monarchs, and of bigoted or worldly pontiffs, was yet zealous for those humanizing influences of which Erasmus had been the mightiest minister. The cardinal first procured for Rabelais in 1536 a place in the abbey St. Maur, and then in 1545 the curacy of Meudon, near Paris, which he held till his death in 1553. It has been asserted, however, that the year before his death he accepted the curacy of St. Paul's at Paris. The life of Rabelais at Meudon was that of a faithful most charitable parish priest. Not ascetic himself, he was not inclined to impose on others the bondage of asceticism. He believed that as labour is worship, happiness is worship too. Rabelais was able to be a physician to the bodies as well as to the souls of his parishioners, and he saw that he could best be the physician to both soul and body by being the bountiful almoner. His ministrations of mercy did not interrupt his intercourse with scholars, and wits, and courtiers—did not condemn his pen to idleness. Fresh books were added to the former books, which did not hinder the "Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel" from at last being a fragment, as well as a chaos. It was the good fortune of Rabelais to live in the main undisturbed, and to die in peace, at a time when persecution was as capricious as it was cruel. When we recall the names of Clement Marot, of Bonaventure Desperriers, of Etienne Dolet, and of other victims, vulgar or illustrious, we marvel how Rabelais escaped. Often a fugitive or in chains, Clement Marot had once to suffer imprisonment for the heinous offence of eating lard in Lent. Desperriers wrote dialogues in imitation of those of Lucian. The obstructives and obscurantists denounced them as heretical, drove Desperriers to a wandering life, and at last to suicide. Dolet was tortured, strangled, and burned at Paris, because the Faculty of Theology there decreed heretical his translation of a passage in Plato. Perhaps it was his abounding geniality, still more than the protection of the powerful, which shielded Rabelais from a doom so general and so terrible. Prodigally gifted, but more genial than gifted, it was always with honest, cordial, overflowing laughter that Rabelais flung 