The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  On the 23rd March, 1692, Fénelon wrote him saying: “I rejoiced to see the vigour of the old teacher, the old bishop still unimpaired. I seemed to see you in your big skull-cap, grasping M. Dupin, as an eagle grips a frail sparrowhawk in its talons.” It was all very well for Fénelon to treat the matter lightly; the Lord’s sheepfold would be grievously infested if the eagle of Meaux were not on the look-out. But times there were when a sense of mortal weariness descended upon him.[4]

  He was fated never to complete the Défense de la tradition et des Saints Pères, or the Politique tirée des propres paroles de l’Écriture Sainte—ah! how many were the works he was destined never to complete!— all of them of essential and urgent importance. He longed ardently to go to England, to discuss matters with the theologians there, to open their eyes; but to England he never went. England was deep in schism; England had driven out her King and taken in his stead the bitterest foe of France and the Catholic faith. “I can but mourn for England!”[5] Time was when he had dreamed of raising a crusade against the Turks: Ah! for the days when he pronounced the panegyric of Saint Pierre de Nolasque in the Church of the Fathers of Mercy, when he gave such passionate utterance to his indignation at the great and terrifying inroads of Islamism! Or when he lamented that the most redoubtable empire beneath the sun was being abandoned to that arch-enemy the Turk. “O Jesus, Lord of Lords, Ruler of all Empires, King of all earthly Kings, how long wilt thou suffer thine arch-enemy, seated on the throne of Constantine the Great, to uphold with his many armies the blasphemies of his Mahomet, to cast down thy Cross beneath his Crescent, and day after day, with fortune-favoured arms, to encroach farther and farther upon the realms of Christendom?” In those days, Louis XIV—he was a young man then—looked with approving eye on this and suchlike high adventures. But no one now thought of setting out for that far-off East. Farewell, now, to all such dreams! Whenever the word “crusade” was mentioned, the sceptics smiled, and even devout ecclesiastics deemed it best to leave the Turks alone: “Crusades! We are past all that sort of thing”, said the Abbé Fleury, “only a few flowery and romantic poets clamour for crusades these days”.

  He was still the same; still as staunch and unshakable as ever; yet somehow it seemed as if things were eluding him, presenting themselves in such novel and unwonted colours that he failed to recognize them for what they really were. He had always been treated with consideration; even in the cut and thrust of the liveliest debates, his zeal, his charity, his good faith had always commanded respect. To him Bishops in other lands, and foreign rulers, had paid their tributes of veneration, showering marks of distinction upon him. But since the Reformers had taken root in Holland, this deference had disappeared. Even the marks of ordinary civility were lacking. Insults were now the order of the day. Jurieu, who hit at everyone all round, fell upon Bossuet with peculiar ferocity. He charged him with deceit, with downright lying; he hinted that his morals were not everything they should be, and muttered dark things about concubinage. He was coarse and ill-bred in his mode of attack, as here for example:— Bossuet liked people to address him as “Monseigneur”; Ah, ha! Those episcopal gentry have gone up a peg or two since the days of the founders of Christianity whose only title was Servants of Jesus Christ. Bossuet is a ranting cushion-thumper devoid alike of honour and sincerity; Bossuet has neither common sense nor common decency; his ignorance is vast, his impudence prodigious. To deny the things that Bossuet denies you must either have a face of brass, or be abysmally ignorant.

  There are some people who are quite insensitive to insults, who even feel a certain satisfaction at provoking them, and at being a target for obloquy. But Bossuet was not one of these. He had outbreaks of impatience, of wrath which showed how deeply he could suffer. He was terribly hurt when anyone whom he had greatly loved turned against him; Fénelon for example; or when vituperation seemed calculated to diminish his authority, to make him appear unworthy to be the interpreter of God’s word.

  As he trod his via dolorosa, Jurieu was there to fling mud at him, to call him a man devoid of faith and honour, a liar and a hypocrite. Then at last a cry escaped him, a moving appeal to One to whom all things are known, and who orders all things for the best.

  “O Lord, hear my prayer. O Lord, I have been called to Thy dread judgment seat as a slanderer, as one who charges the reformers with impiety, with blasphemy, with intolerable errors, and as one who not only imputes these crimes to them but has further accused one of their ministers of making open confession of them. Lord, it is before Thee that I have been accused. . . . If I have spoken the truth, if I have convicted of blasphemy and of calumny those same persons who have called Thy judgment upon me as a slanderer, a deceiver, dishonourable, conscienceless, vindicate me before them. Let them be covered with shame and confusion, but O God, I implore Thee, let their confusion be such that from it may spring repentance and salvation.”[6]

  Every passing breath of unbelief caused him a pang; what the Freethinkers were putting into print he knew well enough. He was not satisfied merely to study Grotius the Socinian; he took the trouble to read up what Crellius had written in the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum, and Socinius the originator of the doctrine. This was the very source whence the poison had spread far and wide and infected so many minds. Do not let us imagine that he was unaware of all the talk that was going on about those Austral Lands; and how people were using them as an argument against Catholicism: How could Catholicism be universal when there was a whole continent which had never so much as heard of the name of Christ? He knew all about that. Go and take your wrangles to St. Paul and Jesus Christ Himself and tell them about these Austral Lands, and argue with them about the tidings heard throughout all the earth.

  Nor is he unaware of those embarrassing Chinese: on the contrary he himself is in the plot which the Reverend Fathers of the Foreign Missions are hatching against the Jesuits to make them confess that the ceremonies practised by the Chinese are nothing more nor less than downright idolatry. It was under his roof that a decision was arrived at to print the Lettre au Pape sur les idolâtries et les superstitions chinoises before it was shown to the King, since he might have vetoed it out of regard for the Reverend Fathers. Missionaries came in numbers to the Palace to tell him about all that was happening in Peking: “M. de Lionne, Bishop of Rosalia, came this morning and again this afternoon, and told M. de Meaux all about the country, the manners and customs of the people, their national characteristics, and so on”. All this talk about a Chinese Church was sheer blasphemy. “A queer sort of church!” he indignantly exclaimed; “No creed, no promise to hold out, isolated, no sacraments, no trace of divine sanction, knowing not what it worships, to whom it offers sacrifice, whether to heaven or earth, or to the spirits of rivers and mountains, an inextricable tangle of atheism, politics, godlessness, idolatry, magic, soothsaying and sorcery!”

  He knows about the chronologists and their recondite investigations. Who that knew the man would have been surprised to find on his shelves Marsham’s Chronicus Canon Aegyptiacus? Jean Le Clerc accuses M. de Meaux of borrowing from Marsham without acknowledgment. The fact is that in his Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle, which was published in 1681, he recorded his own reactions to the discrepancies which were becoming glaringly apparent between sacred and profane history, and causing so much agitation among his contemporaries. He took his stand on the side of Tradition, and thought that it was his duty to give the Dauphin some of his reasons for so doing. “What a quandary these chronologists are in, to be sure! Holy Writ, on the one hand, tells us how Nabuchodonosor made beautiful the city of Babylon, which had grown rich on the spoils of Jerusalem and the East; how, after him, the Babylonian Empire, unable to brook the might of the Medes, made war upon them; how the Medes chose for their general, Cyrus, son of Cambyses, King of Persia; how Cyrus overthrew the Babylonians, and united the Kingdom of Persia, hitherto unknown to fame, with the Kingdom of the Medes, the extent of which had been so largely increased by conquest. Thus he beca
me the peace-loving ruler of all the East, and founded the greatest empire that the world had yet seen. Not so the writers of profane history, Justinian and Diodorus, and the majority of the Greek and Latin authors whose works have come down to us. They tell a different tale. They know nothing of these Babylonian kings; they assign them no place among the dynasties of whose successive representatives they make mention. We find little or nothing in their works concerning those famous kings Teglathphalasar, Salmanasar, Sennacherib, Nabuchodonosor, and all those many others renowned in Scripture and the histories of the East.”

  Now trust them not, Monseigneur, those profane historians. There are Greek histories that have been lost to us, and it may well be that they contained just what we find in the Scriptures. The Greeks, whom the Romans copied, wrote at a later date. Putting style above accuracy, they aimed not so much at instructing, as at diverting, the people of Hellas with their tales of far-off days, based on vague and floating hearsay. Believe them not, I say. Put your trust, rather, in the Holy Scriptures, which are more especially concerned with the things of the East, and therefore more likely to be true—and that, apart from the fact that we know them to have been divinely inspired.[7]

  But it was in 1700, when he brought out the third edition of his aforesaid Discours, that his deep anxiety of mind became more apparent still. Père Pezron’s Antiquité des temps had come out in 1687, Père Martianay’s and Père Lequien’s replies followed in 1689 and 1690. The mass of facts and theories which they contain, Bossuet had duly mastered. As with the chronologists, his trouble was the Egyptians, the Assyrians and, in particular, the Chinese, who claimed such an immense period of time for the unfolding of their history that they altogether exceeded the limits of ecclesiastical chronology. Like Père Pezron, he favoured, as a way out of the difficulty, the adoption of the Septuagint version, as that allows an additional five centuries for the accommodation of these importunate gentry; like him, he felt that a date was the ruling factor in settling his choice between two versions of Scripture that were chronologically at variance. Never had he found himself on the horns of such a cruel dilemma.

  Gradually the lineaments of the real man come into focus, grow more and more distinct. No imperturbable, untroubled builder, he, of some splendid cathedral in the sumptuous Louis XIV style; no, not that, but much rather a harassed workman, hurrying away, without a moment to lose, to patch up cracks in the edifice that every day grow more and more alarming. He sees deep down into the underlying principles of things. He was not deceived about the extent, the power, the diversity of what the sceptics had done, and were doing, to undermine and destroy the very foundations of the Church of God.

  Spinoza, by rejecting miracles, would make God subservient to the laws of Nature. Ah! let not men suffer themselves to be led astray by this God-Being idea, a God that is no more than a shadow. Mightier by far is the God of Moses, “He can make and unmake at will; He dictates laws to Nature and revokes them at His pleasure. If, in times when His name had been forgotten of men, He wrought miracles and compelled Nature to break even the most constant of her laws, in order that He might make His presence known to them, He did not cease to show in like manner that He was the absolute ruler of all things and that His sovereign will, His sovereign will alone, prescribes and maintains the Natural Order.” Take the Creation: “By calling the world into being by His mere word, God shows that nothing is an effort to Him; and in doing so repeatedly, He proves that He has sovereign power over His material, over His own actions, over all that He undertakes, obeying no law but His own infallible will”. Concerning the Deluge: “Let it not be thought that the world goes on of its own accord, and that what has been hitherto, will be so for ever, by virtue of its own momentum. God who made all things and to whom all things owe their continued existence, will, if it so please Him, drown all the animals on earth, and, with them, all men, that is to say the fairest portion of His handiwork.”[8] Bossuet is thinking of the dangerous notions that the God of the Ethic may engender in Christian consciences, and it is on their account that this God fills him with apprehension.

  Malebranche also adds to his misgivings; at the root of his philosophy he discerns the same idea. “How I despise”— he exclaims in the funeral oration he delivered over Maria Theresa of Austria on the 1st September, 1693— “how I despise those philosophers who, making their own intelligence the measure of God’s purposes, would regard Him merely as the creator of a certain general order which He then left to develop as best it might. As if, like ours, God’s aims were vague and confused generalities, as if His sovereign intelligence were powerless to include in its scheme those individual existences which alone, strictly speaking, can be said to live.” That Père Malebranche was a modest man, that his intentions were excellent, he did not deny; nevertheless, he, Bossuet, knew perfectly well that his disciples were heading straight for heresy. When you manage to find your way through the fearsome jargon in which he envelops himself, you discover that his philosophy is based on a theory of life which wholly excludes the supernatural, and that same theory is itself dependent on a method which involves some “terrible drawbacks”. Nowhere does Bossuet show himself more clear-sighted or more admirably himself than here:

  Arising out of these principles imperfectly understood, another idea, involving the gravest difficulties, insensibly gains possession of men’s minds. For, on the ground that we ought not to assent to anything which we do not perfectly understand—which, within limits, is a perfectly sound contention—everyone considers himself entitled to say: “I understand this; I do not understand that”; and with that as a starting point, he accepts or rejects just whatever he likes, forgetting that, above and beyond our own clear and definite ideas, there are other ideas of a vague and general character which, though not clearly definable to our intelligence, nevertheless contain truths so fundamental that to deny them would be to reduce everything to chaos. In this way he invests himself with a right to accept or reject which ends in his discarding Tradition and boldly adopting whatever conclusions he, as an individual, may happen to come to.[9]

  But from whom does Malebranche derive? From Descartes. Living in an age that was intoxicated with Cartesianism, and, up to a point, a Cartesian himself, Bossuet meditates, draws distinctions, and defends his own position. In Descartes we find at least three things: in the first place, sound arguments against the atheists and the freethinkers; then, physical theories which we are free to accept or reject, but which, having no bearing on religion, are of no great intrinsic importance; and lastly, a principle which threatens the very foundations of religion:

  I see . . . preparations for a great onslaught on the Church in the name of Cartesian philosophy. From the womb of that philosophy, from its principles, to my mind imperfectly understood, I foresee the birth of more than one heresy. I foresee also that conclusions deduced from it hostile to the dogmas our fathers taught us will bring down hatred upon the Church and rob her of the fruit she was entitled to expect from them by enabling her to implant in the philosophic mind a firm belief in the divinity and immortality of the soul.[10]

  Might there not be an attitude of mind of which the philosophy of Descartes was, to begin with, merely the exponent, but which, later on, it reinforced? Might we not discover, more widely diffused, more deeply interwoven in men’s lives, a fixed resolve all-embracing in its objects, a resolve to renounce allegiance to authority, an invincible urge to criticize, which was at once “the disease and the temptation of our time?”[11] Time was when men humbled themselves before God, when they rendered obedience to their King. That day was past. It was now the day of “intellectual intemperance”. In this passage, eloquence adorns the truth which Bossuet discloses, and in these solemn words it is the preacher who sets forth the attitude of mind which is constantly gaining ground, which bids fair to achieve a universal victory, and which fills him with nothing short of terror:

  “Reason is the guide of their choice, but reason only brings them face to face with vague
conjectures and baffling perplexities. The impossible positions into which they are forced by their rejection of religion are found in time to be more untenable than those truths whose loftiness astounds them, and, because they refuse to put their faith in mysteries beyond their understanding, they go on from error to error, all of them as far beyond their comprehension as the mysteries. What, then, Gentlemen, when all is said and done, is this lamentable unbelief of theirs but one interminable error, temerity that exposes everything to hazard, bewilderment deliberately sought, pride which can suffer no curb, a pride, that is to say, which cannot brook the restraint of legitimate authority. Do not imagine that it is only by their sensual desires that men are swept off their feet; intellectual desires are no less alluring. They, too, have their clandestine pleasures, they, too, are made the keener by opposition. Look at this man, puffed up with pride, who deems that he rises superior to everyone, superior to himself, when he rises superior, as he imagines, to the religion he had so long held sacred. He regards himself as one of the enlightened. He flatters himself that he is not one of those weak-minded people who blindly follow in the footsteps of others, never making the slightest effort to strike out a line on their own account. And so, becoming the sole object of his own admiration, he ends by becoming a god unto himself.”[12]