Abbey of Thélème

Thélème means “goodwill” in Greek. The abbey of Thélème is a utopian abbey described by Rabelais at the end of Gargantua. Rabelais, monk of its state, knows the life monacale well, and in the description of this fictitious abbey it presents its idea of a humanistic abbey where beautiful young people people, from the two sexes, would come to study within an ideal framework of life. A large amphitheater, to current the Université of Turns bears the name of Thélème.

Summary

The country of Gargantua is devastated by a war born of the ambitious mood of Picrochole, close to Grandgousier (father of Gargantua). Jean brother of Entommeures, monk “bold, adventurous, high, thin, split well mouth, favoured well nose…” will resist Picrochole and will fight at the sides of Gargantua. To reward it valiantly to have fought at his sides, Gargantua makes him build the Abbaye of Thélème, splendid castle intended for the life joint of young people of the two sexes, beautiful, rich, quite born and which are subjected to L `single rule of the house “ Fais what will want ”. Is it about an already existing abbey, for example that of Seuilly? Impossible to know it.

At all events, Frère Jean wants any at no price: “Because how could I, says it, to control others, which myself to control would not know? ”. It is in this remark, struck with the corner of the most authentic good sense, than resides the secrecy of Thélème. Up to now in the monasteries, the monks were subject to a severe rule, which dictated their actions to them, not leaving to the free will, on the initiative individual, any chance to be exerted. All would go from there differently if, in an abbey created according to exactly contrary principles, one treated people as free and responsible adults, able to control themselves. For Rabelais, the symbol of this alienation, of this castration of the personality, it is the bell which, in the convents, regulates the timetable and fixes, of day and night, the time division monastic life. For him, the great scandal is “oneself to control with the sound of a bell and not with dictated good sense and understanding”. There will be no bells with Thélème!

Moreover, by principle, the founders of the abbey will run the counter to what existed before, and in particular at these Cordeliers that Rabelais knew well and that, to be avenged, it called “bordeliers”.

The name even of Thélème is with him alone a whole program. It comes from the Greek thélo (I want), and this assertion of the personal will is already a cry of revolt against passive obedience and docility. In Thélème, there is no enclosing wall. One enters there, one leaves there freely, and if one remains there, it is that one has good reasons to remain there. When there is a wall, said Rabelais, “there is force murmurs, desire and mutual conspiracy”. One envies only that which one is private. In Thélème, there is no Horloge. What good is it to worry about the hour, when one is not dependant on time, when one decides oneself of the moment when one will rise, eat, work or devote oneself to the pleasure of the conversation?

Thélème is a castle Renaissance hexagonal of five stages hundred times more splendid than Bonnivet, Chambord, Chantilly, built with invaluable materials. The rooms vast and clear, are decorated paintings and tapestries. There are gardens and orchards, full of fruit trees. 9332 rooms, with each one a particular vault are ready to accommodate the boarders.

Lifestyle

Thélème is a mixed community. The founders of Thélème do not want that the vice takes the hypocritical mask of the virtue. The trade in love will naturally take its place in a unit where will appear also the study and the trade of the spirit. Before returning visit to the ladies in their private apartments, the men will pass in the hairdresser, the barber and the masseur to be as well as possible of their form.

Here for the first time since antiquity the concept of “Eugénisme appears”. The boarders of Thélème will be selected. The women “beautiful, will be well trained and well naturées, the beautiful, very trained men and well natures”. These men and these women joined together in the same place, are not only of beautiful animals; they belong to an elite by the birth and the richness, certainly, but especially by the intellectual curiosity. The Library of Thélème, according to the plans establish by Gargantua himself, includes/understands innumerable works in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, Italian, Spanish. The walls are decorated with frescos evoking the history of the ground and the men. It is clear that the thelemists will not reach a raised morals, based on personal liabilities and self-determination, that if they acquire a high culture.

They, moreover, are delivered of any material concern: a many domesticity, craftsmen attached to the monastery provide for their needs and their requirements the most refined. The religion is obviously not excluded from the establishment, but it is a Christianity purified by a return to the primitive Évangile, source of major faith. But here, not of wishes which engage for the life. Elsewhere one requires chastity, poverty and obedience. In Thélème, one is not pure, one is rich, one is free and one can leave when one wants. “Sympathy” is so large between men and women whom they endeavor to carry the same ornaments the same day, and an officer is charged to inform the first of the colors whose those, mistresses of the choice, decided “to adorn themselves”. Thélème, it is thus the golden age, the terrestrial paradise before the fault. It is also an aristocratic morals with the use of the happy few . Thus a Lyons business man having made fortune on Internet gave festivals libertines in his property, baptized Abbaye of Thélème . But Rabelais, at the same time as it formulated a judgment of the traditional monastic life implicitly, wanted to as show as the morals of an elite could be that of all the men, provided that the acquisition of all the knowledge of their time makes them adults. By opposing to the free will to the imposed rule, it makes confidence with the man. Thélème wants to show the value of an experiment which can be generalized, wide, gradually, with all the men as soon as they are worthy to control themselves.

Analyzes

Ultimately, it “Do what will want” can become most severe of the rules, as of the moment when a scrupulous and demanding spirit for itself is essential an art of living all the more accurately respected that no external or supernatural force dictated it to him. It is the negation even, note it with the passage, of catholic morals…

The morals of Rabelais is summarized very whole in the principle of Thélème: Do what will want . Since nature is good, no manifestation of nature could be bad (at least “at released people, born, well educated well, conversing in honest companies”): nature always wants what must be, when it neither is deviated nor compressed. The pantagruelism will thus consist in unslinging all the forces to be it and satisfying them as completely as possible.

Doesn't the evil thus exist? If. It is precisely all that opposes and mutilates nature: religious morals, catholic asceticism, rigorism huguenot, the fast, cloistering, all diabolic inventions of hideous Antiphysie, here are the things which excite the contempt or the indignation of Rabelais. On the other hand the selfishness which it releases in freedom is about inoffensive, because it is offered in its primitive and natural simplicity without becoming complicated ambition nor of interest.

Such a morals, if not very moral, indicates in its author a fundamentally generous nature. Rabelais set up its instinct in natural law of humanity. It felt in him the good will, the heat sympathy, the affectionate forms of the selfishness; it allotted its natural good sense to the other men; it was made optimists illusions on their leaning innate do “all that with only one saw liking”. Moreover, being eminently reasonable, it counted that in any thing the man would act naturally according to the reason.

It is thus necessary to see in the rules morals that the thélémites are essential themselves freely, a humanistic profession of faith and the solemn proclamation of the human ideal of the Rebirth.

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