The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  [6]Book 1, chap. II.

  [7]Ibid., Preface.

  [8]Book, I, ch. 5.

  [9]Book III, ch. 9.

  [10]Arnauld to Bossuet, July, 1693.

  [11]Dryden, Religio laici, 1682.

  [12]Bruzen de Lamartinière, Éloge de Richard Simon.

  [13]Baron de Lahontan, Dialogues curieux, 1703, p. 163. Ed. G. Chinard.

  IV

  BOSSUET AT BAY

  WHENEVER we think of Bossuet, we always behold him in his sovereign majesty, as Rigaud depicted him in his famous portrait. It may be a commonplace to bring in a reference to that magnificent work of art; if so, it is an excusable commonplace, for the simple reason that it is unavoidable. The manner of the thing, its pomp and splendour, once seen, never fade from the recollection. Or again, we may behold the great orator delivering one of his famous funeral panegyrics. From the very opening sentences, we feel as though borne aloft into the realms of the ineffable; the swelling flood of eloquence, thrilling with the sound of tears and passionate entreaty, awakens in our hearts emotions so deep and so poignant as to be almost beyond endurance. And when, at last, that religious music culminates in a paean to the world beyond the grave, it is as though we had been listening to some prophet of God, some dweller in a region more than human.

  Such an idea of Bossuet is a perfectly true one; but it implies that we are viewing him in one particular aspect. The river of time has borne everything away save the noble, the majestic, the triumphant. But there was another Bossuet, a Bossuet humbled and plunged deep in sorrow. In saying this, we are urging nothing against his convictions, at once so admirable, so simple, so profound. Once, and for all, he had dedicated himself to the Eternal, the Universal: quod ubique, quod semper . . . “The truth that came from God was perfect from the beginning.” In that statement is mirrored his unshakable belief; there exists a truth which God revealed to man; that truth is contained in the Gospel, it is attested by miracles, and, being divine and therefore perfect, it is unchangeable; if it admitted of variation it would not be the truth. The office of the Church is to be the guardian thereof: “The Church of Jesus Christ, watchful guardian of the dogmas committed to her charge, makes no change in them; she adds not, neither does she take away, robbing them of nought that is essential, adding to them nought that is superfluous. Her sole task is to keep burnished the things entrusted to her from of old, to confirm what has been sufficiently explained, to guard and protect whatever has been confirmed and defined.”[1] To this sole and immutable truth it is the duty of everyone to conform, for if everyone took it into his head to embrace what he individually looked on as the truth, chaos and confusion would result, it being clear that in regard to any given question there cannot be a million truths, nor a thousand, nor a hundred, nor ten, nor two, but one and only one. “And so we get a clear idea of the real fundamental meaning of the words Catholic and Heretic. A heretic is one who has his own opinion. What does having an opinion mean? It means following one’s own ideas, one’s own particular notions. Whereas the Catholic, on the other hand, is what the name signifies, that is to say one who, not relying on his own private judgment, puts his trust in the Church, and defers to her teaching.”[2]

  O Bible, beloved Bible, how beautiful, how rich in colour, how moving is the manner in which thou makest known to man the history of his race and settest forth the rules of conduct he should follow. In the Bible are the principles on which the Catholic faith is based, interpreted in the light of tradition; the Bible is the authority which prevents those principles from being incessantly called in question. Bossuet never gave up his Bible; from his early childhood he had loved it dearly, and dearly he continued to love it, till the end of his days; he could not do without it; it was his sustenance, his daily bread. Just as some humble country curé will con over and over again his book of prayers, albeit he knows those prayers by heart, so did Bossuet, who knew his Bible by heart, continue to read it again and again. Since it was the Fathers of the Church who had expounded, confirmed and developed the original deposit of truth, what wonder that he should betake himself so frequently to them? He had a passion for the printed word. No sooner did a controversy spring up than he collected all the documents he could that bore upon the matter. His faith, indeed, was firmly based, but that was no reason for his not seeking all the information he could gather; to do so was at once his duty and his pleasure. But of all the books that were, those which he consulted most freely, most eagerly, were the Fathers, the servants of the Church; and of these, most especially, most particularly, St. Augustine; a fact that Le Dieu, his secretary who narrowly scanned his ways and habits, does not fail to record. “He was so steeped in St. Augustine’s teaching, so deeply attached to his principles, that he never explained a dogma, never gave an instruction, never replied to an argument without first having recourse to St. Augustine. In him he found all. When he had to preach a sermon to his flock he would ask me for his Bible and for St. Augustine.”

  Sure in his belief, enlightened by recourse to books, Bossuet integrates himself into an order which justifies his own existence, and the significance of what he was and what he did lies in his adherence to this conception of the world, and in the way in which he established it and rendered it visible to the minds of others. He did not chafe at the limits imposed, he accepted them. In the inwardness of his own consciousness, he felt perfectly free to devise a scheme of life for himself: our effort in life should not be perpetually directed to criticizing a rule freely and deliberately accepted, but to profiting by the certitude created by it that we may live a life of charity and good deeds. There was an admirable saying of his which he borrowed from the Book of Kings: “Obedience is better than sacrifice”. We obey; we obey God; we obey the King, God’s representative on earth; and we have the comfort of consciously acting in accordance with the will of Him who established the order by which we live, and which is indeed the Truth and the Life. We are done now with guesses at truth, with anxious searchings of the heart. He was even as a writer of the classical school who, having subscribed once for all to the law of the Three Unities because it seemed to him to be sound and based on reason, takes his stand inside the limits it prescribes and, within their protecting shelter, constructs a masterpiece.

  Temperamentally, he was no ascetic. He regarded Rancé with esteem and affection. When he went to visit him at la Trappe the monks saw their Prior and the Bishop walking and talking for long periods together, devoting to friendly intercourse the time which they did not spend in prayer. But he did not prolong his stay at the monastery. Like the classic again, he shunned excess of every kind; there was danger, he thought, even in an excess of piety. Implacable towards the obstinate, the self-opinionated, he was gentle towards the weak, and charitable to the poor. His table, to which the wines of Volnay and Saint-Laurent were no strangers, was liberal, but not luxurious. He was susceptible to the charm of nature, he admired the comeliness of the gardens of Germigny, the finest in the world; he dearly loved a tree-shaded alley, where he could read and meditate at his ease upon his breviary, and with the emotions that a piece of landscape may sometimes awaken in a sensitive heart he was far from being unfamiliar. There were times when he could be very stern, yet he was capable also of extraordinary tenderness. And he had the gift of friendship. In his bosom, St. Augustine was on the best of terms with St. Vincent de Paul, his master. If his attitude towards life was sturdy and robust, it was also evenly balanced.

  Doubt gained no entry into a mind and soul thus constituted, a mind which yielded allegiance to nothing which had not satisfied the tribunal of its own judgment, a mind which possessed the clearest possible consciousness of its own ideas, its own aims; for Bossuet, quite as much as the most exacting sceptic, took accurate note of the trend of his ideas and of the goal to which they were tending. Chatting one day with his nephew, the Abbé, he told him about a question that had once been put to him by a dying man, and the answer he had given.

  An unbeliever, being on his dea
th bed, sent for me and asked me to come to him. “Sir”, he said, “I have always regarded you as an upright man. Now that I am near to death, speak frankly to me, for I trust you, and tell me truly what you hold about religion.”

  “I tell you that it is sure and certain, and that I have never had any doubts about it.”[3]

  About that ineradicable faith there is no more to be said. But instead of viewing him in his solitary splendour, let us put him back into the throng and press of his contemporaries, let us try to visualize him amid that restless welter of disputes, trials, frustrations that were his portion; let us contemplate him, not in his younger days, or in the period that witnessed his glorious rise to the plenitude of his power and influence, but in his later years, when the burden of old age lay heavy upon him; let us try to see him, not as he is within the gilded frame of that famous portrait, but in actual life, as the champion of a tradition that was now attacked on every side, as one forsaken and, as it were, left derelict by his time.

  The Tractatus Theologico-politicus, which Antoine Arnauld sent him, and of which he had a copy in his own library, was not merely an impious book, it was an exasperating one. What! This Spinoza fellow! This wretched Dutch Jew, giving himself these high and mighty airs simply because he knew Hebrew! According to his ideas, Latin was not enough; no, nor Greek either. Don’t talk about the Bible at all, or else learn Hebrew!

  Bossuet had been quite satisfied with the Vulgate. Of Hebrew he knew not a word. This was a serious matter, and he realized that it was so. If he was to reply on equal terms, as one who was well up in his subject; if he was not to seem old-fashioned, behind the times, and, maybe, ridiculous; if, moreover, he was to obey the still small voice which spoke within telling him where his duty lay, he would have to put himself to school again. That was easier said than done. But he worked with a will. It is pleasant to conjure up the picture of those little gatherings; a few serious-minded laymen and some priests meet at regular intervals; each one brings his Bible. One of the party reads the Hebrew version, another the Greek. Then they look up St. Jerome and the doctors of the Church; comments are offered, the passage is discussed, Bossuet sums up and pronounces judgment, the Abbé Fleury writes the minutes of the meeting. They form a definite group. They are anxious to increase their knowledge; they brace themselves for the struggle, for something tells them there is trouble ahead. But Hebrew—will Bossuet ever master it? On Maundy Thursday, 1678, the Abbé Eusèbe Renaudot, a member of the group, acquaints the Bishop with the contents of a work which is just about to be published. It is the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, by Richard Simon. The book had been granted the royal licence, it had been passed by the ecclesiastical censors, it had been approved by the Superior General of the Congregation of the Oratory; the King was on the point of accepting the dedication of the book, for Père La Chaise had undertaken to use his good offices to that end. Bossuet was filled with indignation. This so-called “critical” history was nothing more nor less than a mass of impiety, a fortress for sceptics. It must not appear. Despite the sacred character of the day, despite the ceremonies and penitential observances connected with it, Bossuet hurries away to the Chancellor, Michel Le Tellier; he puts the case before him; he uses all his powers of persuasion; he brings to bear all the pressure he has at his command, and at last he gains his point: the book shall be banned.

  But the pity of it all! That a priest, of all people in the world, a priest of the Oratory, should treat the Bible in such a manner! All his life long Richard Simon was fated to be a grief and a trial to Bossuet. He might show him the most attentive deference, might do his utmost to prove that he was not a rebel, Simon could not conceal from those keen and watchful eyes the real nature of the impulse that was bearing him irresistibly along. He would fain dethrone theology, and set up grammar in its place: the man was a criminal!

  If, when reading the second part of the Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle, we recall how Spinoza and Richard Simon haunted and obsessed the mind of Bossuet, we shall the better understand, not only the passionate language of the champion of Catholic orthodoxy, but the real nature of the book itself. His purpose is not so much to expound as to refute. He has to reply to arguments which are, in their nature and essence, completely foreign to his own. No easy task to apply to a profession of faith, to an a priori principle, the sort of historical method of proof which his adversaries demand of him and which he must inevitably adopt if he is really to come to grips with them. His position is clearly laid down. The Scriptures, being of divine origin, must not be treated as if they were mere mundane compositions. This said, he has now, in order to reply to these new exegetists, to look at matters from their level, to examine them from a purely human standpoint. That was where Bossuet’s difficulty came in. He has to explain how Moses got together the material for his history; he has to dispose of the hypothesis which would ascribe to Esdras the authorship of the Pentateuch. He must examine the text qua text, dispel the obscurities, explain the difficulties, account for the alterations to be found in it. Impatient to get clear of these profitless disputes, he drives straight ahead. Never mind details; let us come to essentials. In all the versions of the Bible, we find the same laws, the same miracles, the same prophecies, the same historical sequence; in all, the doctrinal content, in a word, the substance, is the same. What signify a few trifling differences of detail, when we contemplate the massive and immutable whole? Perfectly frank and above-board as he always is, he makes no attempt to evade the case against him; he faces it fairly and squarely, and then essays to demolish it by the sheer sweep and impetus of his attack.

  “Finally, and this is the gravamen of the charge, have not things been added to what Moses wrote? And how is it that we find an account of his death at the end of the very book he himself is supposed to have written? Well, what is there to marvel at if the writers who continued his narrative added an account of his edifying end, by way of rounding off the story? As for the other additions, what do they amount to? Are we told about some new law, some new rite, or dogma, or miracle, or prophecy? No one dreams of such a thing, nor is there the faintest trace of it. That would have been tantamount to adding something to God’s own work. The law forbade such a thing, and the outcry would have been tremendous. Well then, what are they, these additions? Perhaps someone continued an uncompleted genealogy, or supplied information about some town that had changed its original name, or, in regard to the manna wherewith the people were fed for forty years, had stated the time when this celestial food had ceased to descend, and this piece of information, taken from some other book, was recorded in the book of Moses in the form of a note or memorandum regarding something of common interest and common knowledge. Four or five such notes added by Joshua or Samuel, or some other prophet of like antiquity, inasmuch as they related only to matters within everybody’s cognizance, matters of plain fact, may easily have been incorporated into the text, and tradition, which brought us the rest, would have brought them along with it. Is there anything so very terrible about that?”

  Thereupon, Richard Simon chuckled to himself and indulged in a little mocking laughter. The concession was vastly important. So His Lordship of Meaux does admit that additions were made to Moses’ writings, he does admit that the Pentateuch was tampered with. That being so, His Lordship the Bishop of Meaux (as well as M. Huet, the Bishop of Avranches) is, in the eyes of the theologians, a Spinozist, and deals a death blow to the Bible.

  Irony is not at all to Bossuet’s taste. “Right-minded people have little liking for jests of that kind.” The thing would not have mattered so much if he had not felt that it was not going to stop there, that there was more to come, that Richard Simon was getting more and more daring with every successive attack, and that “the whole affair was becoming one of extreme importance for the Church”. In his already overtaxed existence there was no room for any other task; there was the Dauphin’s education, all the work of his diocese, the guidance of the Church of France, whose moral lead
er he had now become, heresies springing up all round him that had to be coped with, the sermons he was called upon to preach, his official attendances at Court—ah! what a life of toil it was, toil that took up, not only his days, but his nights as well. When all the palace is wrapt in slumber, he rises, lights his lamp, turns to his notes, and begins to write. Something must be done to curtail his multifarious responsibilities, so that he may strike a blow for Tradition and the Fathers, against the onslaughts of Richard Simon; nothing could be more urgent than that.

  When the translation of the New Testament appeared, his indignation burst forth anew: Quick! there’s not a moment to lose. The book must be stopped, even as the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament had been stopped. He must see to it immediately. But four and twenty years have hurried by since then, and we are now in the year 1702. He himself had pronounced the funeral oration over Michel Le Tellier, who had always been so willing, so obedient to his wishes—in the days gone by. But now Pontchartrain was Chancellor in his stead, and Pontchartrain was not compliant, nay, he was hostile, and actually wanted to make him submit to the censors the Instructions he was writing with the object of confuting Monsieur Simon. Had it not been for the King, who still stood by him, he must have lost the game. What! Was he, Bossuet, to knuckle under to the Censor? Was he to be bearded by a civil magistrate? Was he to be looked on as a mere drag on the wheel, a hindrance, something out of date and done with? His authority was slipping away from him. Times had changed; the Freethinkers were getting the upper hand; and nothing pained him so cruelly as that.

  Often he called for his magnum opus, his Défense de la tradition et des Saints Pères. He conned it over, he set to work on it again. But he was never to finish it. He must needs go on adding chapter upon chapter, the trouble being that he was combating, not so much some definite person, as something impalpable, an influence, a spirit which permeated everywhere, on every possible occasion. The Richard Simon affair was no sooner disposed of than the case of Ellies Du Pin had to be dealt with. He, too, was a priest, less recalcitrant than the other, it is true, but evincing an air of bland and tranquil innocence that was highly significant. In a voluminous compilation of extracts from various ecclesiastical writers which he brought out, he went the length of saying that sometimes heretics had had deeper insight, and come nearer the truth in their enquiries into the sacred texts than had the Catholics. And he went on to say—a monstrous thing, this!— that some points of capital importance regarding the sacraments, even some of the Church’s fundamental dogmas, were still not settled, still undecided in the minds of the Fathers, as late as the third century A.D. The first to commit himself to a definite statement about Original Sin was St. Cyprian, who was also the first to treat fully of penance, and the power of the priesthood to bind and loose; and more in like vein. Bossuet was keeping a wary eye. He did not want to come down too heavily on Ellies Du Pin, who was a relation of M. Racine’s, and who, moreover, was always quite willing to confess himself in the wrong. But there were some things he could not tolerate: this soft-soaping of the heretics, to begin with: and this belittling of what Tradition had taught about Original Sin; these, and a good many other things besides. He could not bear to hear the Fathers spoken of with an off-handedness which Catholics in bygone days had never permitted themselves. The most glaring licence was becoming the fashion of this age of ours, “so critical is its temper”.