The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  Simplicity has departed; balance and moderation are alike no more, now that men have withdrawn their allegiance from authority. However devout, however learned, a man may be, there is no knowing what strange fancies he may not take into his head. We can be sure of nothing, and knowledge is no more. Is there not some talk now of publishing and crying up the book of some Spanish nun, whom they call a mystic but who is in fact a madwoman, Maria de Jesus, Abbess of Agreda? And then Fénelon, his beloved Fénelon, see how grievously he has gone astray! People try to defend the theatre; they cudgel their brains to show that the Church countenances the licence of the Stage; the Fathers are ransacked for quotations to show that they approved of these things; they even quote the Bible to prove that it, too, contains passages about the passions, and that, if things are to be banned because of the undesirable after-effects they might conceivably have on some people, you would have to stop them reading the Latin Bible, since that is the innocent source of all the heresies. And who, pray, is it that gives utterance to these absurdities? Who is it that can lay his tongue to such a string of blasphemies? A monk, of all people in the world, who goes by the name of Père Caffaro! People plunge from one excess to another: on the grounds that they owe obedience to the King, some people, for two pins, would withhold it from the Pope, and the Gallican Church would fall into schism if he were not at hand to see that unto Caesar were rendered the things that are Caesar’s, unto God the things that are God’s. Unceasing were the excursions and alarms. No sooner is an attack driven off in one place, than another develops somewhere else, and he must rush off to repel it. The fact of the matter is, he has got to be everywhere at once. How glad his foes would be to see him depart. From time to time a rumour gets about that he has had a stroke. M. Simon is even reported as saying, “There’s no help for it, we must just let him die; he hasn’t far to go.” But M. de Meaux still holds on.

  It may be because he lives in a constant state of angry vigilance, with never a moment to call his own, that he so furiously condemns this world and all its vain deluding ways; including in one single denunciation the allurements of the flesh, the eyes and the mind. Nothing now finds favour in his stern regard, neither the urge to experiment and discover, nor the love of history, nor the pursuit of knowledge, if it be but pride in another guise, nor the thirst for renown, nor heroic deeds: sick of the countless failings of humankind, he himself puts off his own humanity, and, having done so, turns his gaze to the divine, to Heaven, with a heart that is hungry for consolation. So he returns to the Gospel, not to argue or dispute, but to dwell in pious meditation upon its fairest pages, to taste the joy of calm, unquestioning belief, of tenderness and love. “Read yet again, O my soul, and rejoice in this sweet command to love.” Mounting upward from height to height towards the celestial abodes of joy and love, he reached at last those realms sublime where, Prayer and Poetry merging into one, his words give utterance solely to his spirit’s yearning for Truth and Beauty that will never die.

  [1]Premier avertissement aux Protestants, 1689. Ed. Lachat, vol. XV, p. 184 (Citation de Vincent de Lérins).

  [2]Première instruction pastorale sur les promesses de l’Église, 1700. Ed. Lachat. vol. XVII, p. 112.

  [3]Le Dieu, Journal, 15 May, 1700.

  [4]Le Dieu’s Journal, 1 December, 1703. “In the midst of it all, he said to me, ‘I feel that I cannot bear this burden any longer. God’s will be done. I am ready for death. He will provide other defenders for His Church. If He gives me back my strength, I will use it to that end’.”

  [5]22 December, 1688, to the Abbé Perroudot.

  [6]Deuxième avert. aux Protestants, 1689, Ed. Lachat, XV, 275.

  [7]Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle, 1681, p. 41 et seq.

  [8]Discours sur l’Histoire universelle, Part II.

  [9]To a disciple of Malebranche, 21 May, 1687.

  [10]Ibid., and Lettre à Huet, 18 May, 1689.

  [11]Bossuet to Rancé, 17 March, 1692. “La fausse critique qui est la maladie et la tentation de nos jours”’.

  [12]Oraison funèbre d’Anne de Gonzague, Ed. Lachat, vol. XII, p. 552.

  V

  AN ATTEMPT AT REUNION AND WHAT CAME OF IT

  “HE was a pale-faced wisp of a man; long, tapering fingers extended from hands that were criss-crossed with innumerable lines. His eyes, never very keen-sighted, had left him with no very clear-cut visual impressions; he walked along with his head well forward and he disliked sudden, jerky movements. He delighted in sweet scents and derived much comfort from them. Talking had no great attractions for him; he would much rather be alone, so that he could read and meditate in peace; all the same, if a conversation did happen to start up in his neighbourhood, he would play his part with zest. He liked to work at night. In things that were past and done with he took but little interest; but anything that had a bearing on the present, however slight, held his attention far more closely than the most outstanding events of bygone days. So it came about that he was always starting to write on something new, and always leaving it unfinished; if next day he had not forgotten all about it, he, at all events, made no effort to take it up again.”[1]

  Such was Leibniz. What an appetite for knowledge his many-mansioned mind displayed! Knowledge was his ruling passion. He longed to know everything there was to know, and, reaching the confines of the real, to invade the realms of the imaginary. He declared that the man who had studied the largest number of pictures of plants and animals, of drawings of machines, of descriptions or plans of houses or fortresses, who had read the greatest number of ingenious romances, listened to the greatest number of strange narratives—that man would possess more knowledge than his fellows, even though there were not a grain of truth in all that he had heard, read, or seen depicted. He had mastered every branch of study; Latin and Greek to begin with, rhetoric, poetry. . . . His tutors, amazed at his insatiable zeal, began to fear lest he should remain for ever fettered to these preliminary studies, whereas the truth was he was even then beginning to slip away from them. From scholastic philosophy and theology, he passed on to mathematics, in which department he was destined to make discoveries that marked him down a genius. From mathematics, he turned to jurisprudence. He took up alchemy, attracted as he was, by all that was rare, secret, out of the way, by things which, by ways inaccessible to the common run, might peradventure furnish a key to the world of phenomena. Every book he took up, every person he fell in with, he regarded as a means of learning something new. “To fix, to nail himself down”, to one particular spot, to one unvarying routine, to one solitary subject—that was a thing he could not endure at any price. To choose some particular calling, lawyer or schoolmaster, to do the same things day after day, at the same fixed times—not he! He travelled about, he visited various towns in Germany, he went abroad, to France, England, Holland, Italy; visited museums, attended the meetings of learned societies, enriched his mind through innumerable different contacts. Life for him, was always a bringer of new things. He consented to become a librarian, with an ear open to the ceaseless appeals of every branch of human thought; an historiographer, so that he might embrace as much as he could of past and present; a world-correspondent; a counsellor of princes; an encyclopaedia always open for consultation. But his real mission was to give the world an example of a dynamic force that seemed to be inexhaustible, because it never ceased to replenish its stock of facts, ideas, sentiments and human interests.

  From a mind that gave itself no rest, mingling together and brewing all manner of fresh additions to its stock, there issued, as time went by, practical inventions, philosophical systems, noble dreams. In the end, he came to possess all the sciences, all the arts, to say nothing of the inexhaustible materials whereof his dreams were woven. He was, as someone described him, “mathematician, physicist, psychologist, logician, metaphysician, historian, jurist, philologist, diplomat, theologian, moralist”. And, in all this prodigious intellectual activity, which perhaps no other mortal ever rivalled, what most delighted
him was the variety of it all: utique enim delectat nos varietas.

  Utique delectat nos varietas, sed reducta in unitatem. To reduce to unity; such was, indeed, Leibniz’s second love, more prone to see where things agreed than where they differed, eager to detect the imperceptible gradations which link light with darkness, zero with infinity. He would have liked to persuade the scientists of every kind to pool their knowledge and ideas; for what is it that accounts for the slow progress that is made by science, if not the lack of contact between those who pursue its several branches? Academies should be created in every country in order to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and ideas among the various nations. Before very long, those intellectual conduits, carrying the streams of new discoveries, would fertilize the world. But more than that, Leibniz would institute a universal language. Truly the world presents a dismal spectacle of strife and misunderstanding; barriers everywhere; questions left unanswered; soaring guesses at truth, fated to fall, like birds on broken wing, into the void again; a welter of confusion that has prevailed for centuries. Would it not be possible to do away with some, at least, of the stumbling-blocks, the very sight of which is an outrage on good sense? And, as a beginning, could not some agreement be arrived at regarding the meaning of words? It might be possible to invent a language which everyone could use, and which would not only facilitate international intercourse, but carry with it such intrinsic merits of clearness, precision, adaptability, richness, that it would be a truly rational and unequivocal medium of expression. It could be used in all departments of intellectual activity, just in the same way as mathematicians make use of algebra, only this would be algebra in a concrete form, every term offering at a glance the vision of its possible relations with the terms next to it. Thus we should have a universal medium of expression, the most telling instrument ever placed at the service of mankind.

  He is pained by the disunity of Germany, by the disunity of Europe, to which he would bring peace, even if that meant letting loose against the East the overflow of its warlike energies. And if we penetrate into the inmost recesses of his mind, there too we shall find a kindred longing. His great mathematical discovery, the infinitesimal calculus, is the transition from the non-continuous to the continuous; his great psychological law is the law of continuity: a clear perception is linked to obscure perceptions by a series of insensible degrees which lead us ever closer and closer to the initial vibration of the vital principle. Harmony is ever the supreme metaphysical verity. Diversities which seemed irreconcilable end by merging together at last in one harmonious whole, where each component has the place designed for it by a divinely constituted order. The universe is one vast choir. Each individual has the illusion that he is singing independently of all the others, whereas, in reality, he is singing the part allotted to him in one mighty score, wherein every note is so placed that all the voices have their answering counterparts, the whole creating a concord more perfect than that music of the spheres dreamed of by Plato.[2]

  Let us here read over again that noble passage in which Émiel Boutroux put on record the difficulties which such a thinker would have had to encounter at the time of his entry into the world: “The problem does not present itself to him under the same conditions as it did to the Ancients. He finds confronting him, developed by Christianity and the influence of modern thought, sharply opposed ideas and contrarieties, if not downright contradictions, such as the Ancients never knew. The general and the particular, the possible and the real, the logical and the metaphysical, the mathematical and the physical, mechanism and finality, mind and matter, experience and instinct, universal co-ordination and individual spontaneity, concatenation of causes and human liberty, providence and evil, philosophy and religion—all these contraries more and more divested of their common elements by the process of analysis, have now reached such a degree of divergence that their reconciliation seems no longer possible, so that to choose one to the complete exclusion of the other seems the only course open to a mind that has any regard at all for clarity and consistency. To resume, in such conditions, the task of Aristotle, to try to arrive at that underlying unity and harmony in things which man seems to despair of ever finding, which, perhaps, he even regards as non-existent, such was the task that Leibniz set himself.”[3]

  And so this admirable intelligence, daring but serene, at a time when ideas were warring with one another with unprecedented vehemence and wrath, resolutely posted himself on a height so lofty that any choice which excluded a contrary seemed to him a sign, not of strength, but of weakness and surrender. Would he succeed in his high emprise? When Leibniz comes down to earth, exchanging the airy heights of speculation for the ground of solid fact, when he essays to heal the religious consciences of his contemporaries, so lacerated and so bruised, by offering them the balm of peace and reconciliation, will he succeed, or will he but deepen the existing rift between them and prove it beyond repair? Would it be possible for anyone, no matter how great a genius, among such a diversity of religious traditions, to rescue and preserve the true spirit of Christianity?

  No sooner do we come to contemplate Europe as a whole than it is its divided state that forces itself upon our attention. Ever since the Reformation, its moral unity has been shattered. Its peoples are divided into two hostile camps, each bidding defiance to the other. Wars, persecution, bitter feuds, cruel words, such are the things that fill the daily lives of these contentious brethren. Whoever longs for harmony must first of all essay to cure an evil that every day grows more acute. Since 1660, in fact, the quarrel between Catholics and Protestants had been raging with renewed and ever increasing intensity, and there was no telling to what extremes of violence it might not ultimately lead. If it continued very much longer it would soon be all over with Christianity, indeed with religion of any kind. Deists, and atheists, too, are waging against religion a joint campaign, which grows bolder every day, opposed only by forces fatally weakened by division. How different it might be if Catholics and Protestants could compose their quarrel. Then would all Christians, united once again, and invincible in their union, triumphantly confront the forces of impiety, and save the Church of God.

  This task of reconciliation Leibniz was to pursue with all the power he could command. He was thoroughly versed in the claims of the two sides. He had for a long time been conversant with the works bearing on the controversy, and found in them, on the whole, nothing to commend. He knew his men. Nor, on his side, was he an unknown quantity, a mere “man in the street”, so to speak. He had shown, by what he had achieved, that he was a force to be reckoned with in the intellectual field. In every country in Europe, scholars, intellectuals of the first rank, could testify to his worth. He was a Lutheran, but, to quote an admirable remark of his own, in the pursuit of so grand an aim as that of reunion, he was not going to dwell on fine distinctions, “he was not out to split hairs”. As for choosing a plan of campaign, a modus operandi, he had but to follow his natural inclination and make it clear that the points of difference were not essential, that the points of resemblance were so numerous as to amount to something like identity, and then to call for a united rally to formal professions of faith at once the simplest and the most profound.

  In the course of his stay in Paris, he had paid a visit to Arnauld, the Jansenist, and recited to him a Paternoster, to which, he claimed, everyone could assent: “O God, who alone art eternal and almighty, the one true and infinite Lord of all, I, Thine unworthy creature, do put my faith and trust in Thee. Thee do I love above all, to Thee do I send forth my prayers, to Thee do I give praise, and into Thy hands I resign my spirit. Pardon me for all my sins, and be pleased to vouchsafe unto me and unto all men whatsoever may accord with Thy will and be expedient for us in this world and in the world to come, and keep us from all evil. Amen.” But Arnauld considered this prayer inadmissible, because it did not include the name of Jesus Christ. Well; there would always be people to reject his formulas, and his task was not going to be an easy one; all the s
ame he was going to shoulder it. If he succeeded, he would have played his part in restoring that harmony which is the law of the universe. If he failed, then others, the stubborn, the blind, must be answerable for the failure. They it would be who would perpetuate the schism, and render it irremediable, and bring ruin, final and complete, upon the cause of religion in Europe.

  The preliminary stages were gradual, and extended over some years. As far back as 1676, when Leibniz was in the early, tentative stages of his studies in alchemy, he fell in, at Nuremberg, with an adept called the Baron de Boinebourg, a convert from Protestantism, who devoted the best part of his life to what in those days were known as “irenical negotiations”. Boinebourg took him to Frankfort, and from there on to the Court at Mainz, where religious controversies were in full swing. On his return from Paris, he accepted, in 1676, an appointment as librarian at Hanover and there met, in the person of Duke John Frederick, a Catholic prince ruling over Protestant subjects, the man through whom Rome hoped to bring Northern Germany into the Catholic fold. The movement gathered impetus; the actors on the Hanoverian stage got busy. There was Ernest Augustus, John Frederick’s successor; Bishop Spinola, a protégé of the Emperor’s, who kept going to and fro between Vienna, the German principalities and Rome, spinning the threads of union. In 1683, Spinola produced a formula designed to serve as a basis for discussion, Regulae circa christianorum omnium ecclesiasticam reunionem. Theologians from both sides assemble, confer together, and, under the inspiration of Molanus, abbé of Lockum, a broad-minded, large-hearted man, elaborate a plan which is to lead at last to the long desired reconciliation: Methodus reducendae unionis ecclesiasticae inter Romanenses et Protestantes.