The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  Thus disappears the distinct and specific character of the individual, which is the source of all malice. The Almighty sends His own Wisdom before Him, even as fire will be sent upon the earth, to consume whatsoever is impure in man. The fire consumes all things, and whatsoever resists it, that, too, is consumed. It is even so with Wisdom, it consumes whatsoever is impure in the creature, so as to prepare it for union with the Divine. Such union is ineffable. If, however, one were to attempt to express it in words, we might say that we experience an inrush of love which fills us with a flood of happiness. There is, in this abandonment of self, in this possession of the infinite, a degree of bliss of which no human happiness can afford a notion. It is not emptiness, but abundance. To renounce is gain; to surrender all, is to abound in all. Love is all in all.

  Thus does Madame Guyon, condensing for the nonce her over-wordy explanations, furnish all who are interested enough to listen, with a Moyen court et facile pour l’oraison, que tous peuvent pratiquer très aisément et arriver par là en peu à une haute perfection (1685). Combining boldness of design with shrewdness in practice, she conceived a plan for bringing about a wholesale religious revival. Never, when she was journeying along the highways of Piedmont with her henchman Père Lacombe, preaching and spreading abroad the teaching of Molinos, nor, yet, in Paris, had she encountered a man capable of giving her quietist ideas the necessary scope and publicity. But now Fénelon should be the shining light that was to illumine the reawakened Church. He would show how to do battle with the Evil One; in a word, he it was who would usher in, under her guidance, the reign of Divine Love.

  Others might say she was a mere adventuress; to him she was the guide that was to lead him along the road to perfection. How hard he found it to jettison those intellectual faculties of his, at once so delicate and so shrewd; to bid farewell to his worldly wisdom, to all those intrusive elements which vitiated and retarded the fulfilment of his good intentions. But the mystical ardour which emanated from her was gradually consuming these baser elements. “Yours ever more and more unreservedly in Our Lord, and with a gratitude which He alone can measure.” He had his relapses, his distractions, his fits of wilfulness, his dislikes, his moments of impatience, of arrogance, of barrenness both inward and outward; inward because he could not pray as he longed to pray; outward as touching his intercourse with his fellows. But Madame Guyon told him where he went wrong, helped him along and cleared away all his stumbling blocks. He felt that the days of candour, of innocence were coming back to him once more: “O bliss ineffable that flows from lowliness,” and he felt that he was becoming that which he longed to be, a thing of nought, bereft of everything, even as a little child. And he took to writing verses to the tune of well-known songs:

  O pur amour, achève de détruire

  Ce qu’à tes yeux il reste encor de moi.

  Divin vouloir daigne seul me conduire,

  Je m’abandonne à ton obscure foi . . . [3]

  And again,

  C’est peu pour toi que n’avoir plus de vie,

  Et qu’abîmer ce moi jadis si cher.[4]

  But even that was not enough. In those lines there still remained a trace of design, of something that could be understood. What he aimed at was the inconsequent, unintelligible murmuring of the helpless babe. He was continually harping on that theme. “Oh, when one has been a self-sufficient creature, full of guile, a restless, miserable tormented creature—oh, the bliss of being like a little child, asleep in his Father’s arms.” And she: “Some day you must become as simple-hearted as I am. The greater your wisdom now, the more innocent and childlike you will become, provided you sincerely desire to lay aside your greatness and become even as a little babe.” And he to her: “I open all my heart to God, so that I may receive within me that spirit of childlike helplessness of which you speak”—”It seems to me as if God would carry me like a little child in His arms; as though I could not move a step by myself without falling. If only He will work His will in me, and through me, all will be well.”

  All would be well. Even the persecution, even the false interpretations that were put upon Madame Guyon’s teaching; for false he considered them, seeing in her, as he did, only what we find in the greatest mystics, such as are recognized by the Church, like Saint Teresa of Jesus, Saint John of the Cross. It was only people who were incapable of enjoying the sweetness of pure love, who, bruising this delicate flower of sublime devotion with their clumsy hands, declared that she was unworthy to approach the altar. Even the condemnation that came from Rome at the end of that long-protracted controversy, was for him but yet another test. To humble himself, to accept the verdict, to publish it in a pastoral letter addressed to the faithful of his diocese, all this was but a means vouchsafed him of mortifying the Old Adam, of submitting to the supreme sacrifice, of sweeping away the final barrier of human pride and of triumphing in God at last. Inveni portum: he had found peace, a peace such as, before his meeting with Madame Guyon, he had never known, a peace which he resolved never to forgo till his dying day. He recognized her errors, if errors they must be called; he would humbly submit to doing penance, if he himself had gone astray: but in his mind there was no room now for error, and his heart was incapable of sin. He was veritably nothing; a cinder; the relic of a love so vehement that it could find requital only in the death of him whom it had chosen to contain its fires. The drama of his soul’s long journey towards the goal of perfect love was of far greater moment to Fénelon than those aspects of the matter which usually engage attention—the quarrel with Bossuet, the letters, the polemical prints, the rejoinders, the counter-rejoinders, the examinations, the speeches for and against, and then the verdict. That other drama was a hidden one, a drama of which the multitude had not an inkling. Could they even faintly guess at the pathos, at the awe-inspiring character of that transmutation of the human essence into the divine, of that purification by fire? “When I speak of pure love, I do not mean that fervour whose sole aim is to lend beauty to the possessor of it, and which seems to appertain to that person alone. The only love which I regard as pure, is love which relentlessly destroys, which, far from embellishing and adorning its subject, tears from it everything it has, so that when at last nothing remains to be taken, it will pass without hindrance to its destined end. For, apart from that end, it can in no wise endure. Its sole aim is to deface, to rend asunder, to destroy, to bring to nought; it lives only to destroy; it is even as the beast which the prophet Daniel saw, and which rends, crushes and devours all.”

  Madame Guyon had disciples all over Europe; Poiret published her writings, Poiret who was by no means the least considerable of those who professed the theology of the heart. It was useless to try to put down these Enthusiasts; useless to attempt to repress them by force. As for appealing to reason, what was the use of that with people who declined to recognize that reason had any jurisdiction in the matter? They multiplied; they swarmed like ants; hungry-hearted, passionate, sick in mind, for, at last, out Heroding Herod, they came to seeking God in their own pathological disorders, their mental aberrations, in stark lunacy. Impatient of all order and discipline, they turned their backs on the National Churches, which they compared to prisons; on the ministers of religion, whom they called tyrants; and even on society, for society persecuted them. Progress they called corruption; science, perversion. They admitted, for the most part, the doctrine of the Fall and the Redemption. But the benefits that flowed from that first redemption being exhausted, a second was needed, and it would come. The days were accomplished; Antichrist was reigning over a world where true Christians were no more.

  Cet Antéchrist est né

  Ja plus d’un an passé

  Le temps est arrivé

  Qu’il soit manifesté.

  Je l’ai vu en esprit

  Par une claire nuit,

  Sur un thé âtre grand

  Riche et resplendissant,

  Couvert d’un pavillon

  Bordé à l’environ,

&nb
sp; Tout tendu de velours

  Incarnat à l’entour.

  Dessus un lit mollet

  Demi couché il est,

  Il n’est plus en bas âge

  Ains un grand personnage.

  Sa gloire est sans pareille;

  On l’estime a merveille;

  Fait paraître son train

  De nuit, en grand festin;

  Il a valets en nombre,

  Comme une armée innombre

  Du peuple aux environs

  De toute nation. . . .[5]

  The first of the plagues had begun—War! The rest would follow: Pestilence, Fire, Famine. But God would not suffer His faithful to perish. Christ would come in all the glory of His Godhead. Then would begin the age of true happiness. Often they formed communities, as, for instance, Johann Georg Gichtel, who founded the confraternity of Angelic Brethren: abstaining from all labour or business of whatever kind, devoting themselves wholly to contemplation and to the abandonment of self, his disciples were to transform men into angels. Then there was Jane Lead who established the cult of the mystical Sophy, and founded the sect of the Philadelphians. Gichtel, however, looked on her as somewhat limited in outlook, and rather too moderate for his taste. She was satisfied with having frequent visions and with foretelling things to come, as this, for example: the mystic seals of the Book of the Lamb shall be opened, the great Attila shall put the Dragon to flight, the Philadelphians shall raise on high the banner of Love, embroidered with the royal name, the Gospel shall be spread over the whole world and the remotest nations of the earth shall belong to Christ the Saviour. . . .

  Not content with spiritual self-abandonment, they had their miraculous visions, their raptures, their ecstasies. Nor were their experiences confined to spiritual delights. The senses also played their part. They fought with the Evil One, who appeared before them in hideous shapes, and they emerged triumphant from these exhausting combats. They were prophets, healers, wonder-workers. Alas, those poor hapless wonder-workers, flung into prison, stoned, wandering from town to town, from country to country, driven along by the authorities and the tempest of their own frenzy. They soothed their tortured spirits by telling themselves that it was Satan who was thus tormenting them, because he beheld in them the destroyers of his kingdom and the chosen instruments of God. They died miserable deaths in hospital or poorhouse. Sometimes they met their end by torture, like Quirinus Kuhlmann, who journeyed all over Germany, Holland, England, France, Italy and Turkey, casting his seed on stony ground, trying to found communities as he went along, proclaiming that Babel was about to fall, and that the advent of the Fifth Kingdom of the Just was at hand. Finally, he went to Moscow and was burnt at the stake in 1689.

  Think what a number of them there were; bear in mind the relationships between them, their different branches, the correspondence exchanged between them; think of the writings which they disseminated in such profusion, and which, wherever they originated, never failed to find translators, thus forming a vast network of theosophical ideas covering the whole of Europe. Then let us consider another category of people, people whose ideas were of a totally different order; people like the mysterious Rosicrucians, members of secret societies, adepts in search of the philosopher’s stone, dimly fancying it possible to transmute from one to another the various outward manifestations of the one, solitary, Universal Substance. All this will at least give us the notion of a vast and ceaseless fermentation of ideas.

  Sentiment is conquered by reason; but sentiment declines to accept defeat. As compared with knowledge, as the philosophers understand it, the illuminati laid claim to a fire which at once enlightened and inflamed them. Science, in the commonly accepted sense of the term, is progressive, it advances step by step, it is a matter of indefinite future development. In contrast with this, the theosophists claim that their science is immediate, intuitive, and, according to them, it alone is real and authentic. The majority of the thinkers of the period laid emphasis on the word know; but some, and they were a minority, put the stress on love. There was Antoinette Bourignon, a strange, aggressive and much persecuted woman who, at the end of an adventurous career, became purely a creature of the emotions; she held direct communication with God; she despised worldly knowledge, because it merely darkened the light of the wisdom within her, a wisdom which satisfied all her needs. She declared that, even if the Gospel itself were to perish, the created being would find within itself a guiding law that would suffice to lead it to the goal of truth and happiness.[6] On one occasion Antoinette did battle with some Dutch disciples of Descartes. “She had some conferences with the Cartesians and formed a sorry notion of their principles. They, for their part, were as little pleased with her as she with them. The Cartesian method did not suit her at all. She was against judging things in the light of reason, whereas their guiding principle is that everything should be submitted to that tribunal. She assured them that God had shown her and expressly declared that Cartesianism was the worst of all errors and the most accursed heresy the world had ever seen, being a formal declaration of atheism or rejection of God, for whom corrupt human reason was to be substituted.” This is of a piece with what she used to tell the philosophers, namely, “that their malady arose from their trying to understand things in the light of human reason without preparing for the illumination of divine faith which required that we should abrogate our reason, our intellect, our feeble understanding so that God might kindle and diffuse His divine light within us. Unless this be done not only is God imperfectly recognized, but He and His truth are excluded from the soul by this activity of our reason, and the workings of our corrupt intelligence; and that, in itself, is a kind of atheism and denial of God. . . .”[7]

  “When, after long and arduous toil, the eighteenth century had abolished or—which amounts to the same thing—believed it had abolished, the idea of God as an old man with a white beard gazing down upon all mankind and protecting them with His right hand, it had not, ipso facto, finally disposed of the religious problem. Mystical aspiration is one thing; the symbol offered for its satisfaction is another. We may destroy the symbol, but the aspiration remains. Man is eager to find above him something, somewhere, whereunto he may pour forth the inarticulate prayer which, do what he will, never ceases to well up from the depths of his being.”[8]

  [1]Isaac Jaquelot, Dissertations sur l’existence de Dieu, The Hague, 1697. Preface.

  [2]Fénelon, Démonstration de l’existence de Dieu tirée de la connaissance de la nature, 1713.

  [3]O pure love, destroy in me whatever, in your eyes, remains of self. O Will Divine, only deign to be my guide, I resign myself to thy secret guidance.

  [4]It is a small thing for thee to have done with life

  And to sink that “self” which once thou lovedst so dear.

  [5]This Antichrist was born more than a year ago. It is now time for him to be made manifest. I beheld the vision of him one moonlight night on a great stage rich and resplendent, covered with an awning fringed all round with crimson velvet. On a soft couch he was half reclining; he is no longer young this great personage; his glory is unrivalled and he is held in wondrous great esteem. He comes forth with all his train by night and holds high festival; he has numerous lacqueys and a vast army of people of every nation. . . . Antoinette Bourignon, L’Antéchrist découvert, Amsterdam, 1681, chap. XXIII.

  [6]La lumière née en ténèbres, Antwerp, 1669. 2nd edn., Amsterdam, 1684.

  [7]Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire, art. Bourignon, note K.

  [8]Pierre Abraham, Créatures chez Balzac, 1931, p. 15.

  CONCLUSION

  WHAT, then, is Europe? A cockpit, a seething cauldron of neighbours fighting one against another. There is England at grips with France, and France with Austria. There is the war of the League of Augsburg; the war of the Spanish Succession. War everywhere, say the history books, hard put to it to follow all the ramifications of the universal mêlée. Rulers may sign treaties, but the treaties do not last. Peace is what every
one is longing for and no one ever gets. The nations are sick to death of the interminable strife, but still the wars go on. Year by year, as Spring returns, the armies take the field again.

  Leibniz, seeing it was useless to try to keep the Europeans from fighting one another, suggested that it would be a good thing to divert their bellicose activities to places beyond the European continent. Sweden and Poland might overrun Siberia and Russia; England and Denmark could have each their slice of North America; Spain would come in for South America, and Holland for the East Indies. France had Africa before her very eyes; let her seize it, then, and push right on to Egypt, let the fleur de lys advance in triumph to the very fringes of the desert. In this way, all those soldiers, all those firearms, all those guns, if busy they must be, would at all events have savages and heathens for their victims. National ambitions and interests, with plenty of elbow room in distant quarters of the earth, would never again come into conflict.

  The Abbé de Saint-Pierre did not deem it sufficient merely to extra-domiciliate war. “When I came to ponder on the cruelties, the bloodshed, the outrages, the conflagrations, and all the havoc and destruction to which wars give rise, I asked myself whether war really was an evil beyond all cure, whether it was indeed impossible to bring about a lasting peace.”[1] Yes, by all means let us have a lasting, nay, an ever-lasting peace. This was the plan: the rulers of the different countries were to sign a pact undertaking, for themselves and their successors, to renounce all existing claims against one another. What they then held was to be considered theirs in perpetuity. In order that no single power should have more men under arms than any of the others, military establishments were to be strictly limited; the number of troops should be definitely fixed, twelve thousand dragoons at the most. If, in spite of these measures, hostilities were to break out somewhere, the matter in dispute was to be referred to the Union for arbitration. If necessary, force was to be brought to bear on any sovereign who refused to abide by the ruling of that body. A permanent council of plenipotentiaries should function in some free and neutral city, such as Utrecht, Cologne, Geneva, Aix-la-Chapelle. . . . Like all Utopians, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre was marvellously precise in filling in the details of his visionary scheme; however, there was one word beyond all others which intoxicated him like some heady wine, a word on which, it seemed to him, all hopes were founded, and that was the word European: a European Court of Justice, a European military force, a European republic. If only people would listen to his words and act on them, Europe, instead of a battle-ground, a shambles, would become a friendly association of law-abiding, peace-loving nations.