Earthly Treasures: Material Culture and Metaphysics in the Heptameron and Evangelical Narrative

Conclusion: From Self to Soul: Treasures of the Heart

276 Conclusion From Self to Soul Treasures of the Heart For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Matt. 6.21 The eventual eschatological transformation of materiality manifests itself progressively as the earlier nouvelles of the Heptaméron, saturated with objects, are replaced in the text by a different sort of object in Books Six and Seven; more explicitly associated with economy, accounting, profit, and commercial transaction, these objects increasingly illustrate the conceits of contemporary commodity culture. However, the stories resolve materiality’s unreliability by progressively moving away from reliance on objects as textual motors, so that by the final Day of the Heptaméron, the material presence is virtually non-existent. This shift in emphasis begins as early as the Fourth Day, when the prologue constructs a rapprochement between secular stories and sacred narrative. Each narrative type produces its own sort of joye, but the former sort of story may only be profitable when re-read and interpreted in the new light of scriptural perspective. Secular stories thus experience the same treatment as do material objects: a useful starting-point, but never the final destination. On the path to salvation, they must either be discarded or transformed by faith: quant il congnoist … que ès choses territoires n’y a perfection ne felicité, [il] desire chercher le facteur et la source d’icelles … si Dieu … luy … ouvre l’œil de foy … car foy seullement peult monstrer et faire recevoir le bien que l’homme charnel et animal ne peult entendre. 277 Conclusion (“but once the soul has searched out these things and tried and tested them, once it has failed to find in them Him whom it loves, it passes beyond …Yet, if God does not open the eyes of faith, they will be in danger of leaving ignorance behind only to become infidel philosophers. For only faith can reveal and make the soul receive that good which carnal and animal man cannot understand …”—Hept. 2.19.152; Chilton 229) The secular story is analogous to the space of the unrepentant human heart before it has received and responded to God’s Word. Using the evangelical phrase sola fidei, Marguerite underscores the close relationship between the transformation in the tales she tells and the reforming of subjectivity to a spiritual perspective : “foy … foy seullement.” By turning away from the objects that decorate it, secular narrative imitates the necessary swerve away from self, an objectification, to establish identity in Christ: for an evangelical, spirituality constitutes true subjectivity. Things function in the stories as components in the construction of a metaphorical bridge uniting man and God, moving from solipsism and self-scrutiny to salvation, a focus on soul that renounces earth in favor of heaven: “l’ame, qui n’est creéé que pour retourner à son souverain bien, ne faict, tant qu’elle est dedans ce corps, que desirer d’y parvenir” (“for the soul, which was created solely that it might return to its Sovereign Good, ceaselessly desires to achieve this end while it is still within the body”—Hept. 2.19.151; Chilton 229). How does this happen? Creation is a paradoxical phenomenon. It makes concrete and literal a separation from the Creator, and its creatures henceforth can only know, and be fully known, through reintegration with their source: Mais, à cause que les sens, par lesquelz elle en peut avoir nouvelles, sont obscurs et charnelz par le peché du premier pere, ne luy peuvent monstrer que les choses visibles plus approchantes de la parfection, après quoy l’ame court, cuydans trouver, en une beaulté exterieure, en une grace visible et aux vertuz moralles, la souveraine beaulté, grace et vertu. (“But the senses, by means of which the soul is able to have intelligence of its Sovereign Good, are dim and carnal 278 Conclusion because of the sins of our forefather Adam and consequently can reveal to the soul only those things which are visible and have some nearer approximation to perfection. The soul runs after these things, vainly thinking that in some external beauty, in some visible grace and in the moral virtues it will find the sovereign beauty, the sovereign grace and the sovereign virtue.”—Hept. 2.19.151; Chilton 229) Objects are thus artifacts attesting to “otherness.” Consequently , they must be removed from earthly existence. Here, the narrative develops a morphology of the transformation whereby the soul, embodied in...