St. Sulpice, in short, when I went through it forty years ago,
provided, despite its shortcomings, a fairly high education. My
ardour for study had plenty to feed upon. Two unknown worlds unfolded
themselves before me: theology, the rational exposition of the
Christian dogma, and the Bible, supposed to be the depository and
the source of this dogma. I plunged deeply into work. I was even more
solitary than at Issy, for I did not know a soul in Paris. For two
years I never went into any street except the Rue de Vaugirard,
through which once a week we walked to Issy. I very rarely indulged
in any conversation. The professors were always very kind to me. My
gentle disposition and studious habits, my silence and modesty, gained
me their favour, and I believe that several of them remarked to one
another, as M. Carbon had to me, "He will make an excellent colleague
for us."
Upon the 29th of March, 1844, I wrote to one of my friends in
Brittany, who was then at the St. Brieuc seminary:
"I very much like being here. The tone of the place is excellent,
being equally free from rusticity, coarse egotism and affectation.
There is little intimacy or geniality, but the conversation is
dignified and elevated, with scarcely a trace of commonplace or
gossip. It would be idle to look for anything like cordiality between
the directors and the students, for this is a plant which grows only
in Brittany. But the directors have a certain fund of tolerance and
kindness in their composition which harmonises very well with the
moral condition of the young men upon their joining the seminary.
Their control is exercised almost imperceptibly, for the seminary
seems to conduct itself, instead of being conducted by them. The
regulations, the usages, and the spirit of the place are the sole
agents; the directors are mere passive overseers. St. Sulpice is
a machine which has been well constructed for the last two hundred
years: it goes of itself, and all that the driver has to do is to
watch the movements, and from time to time to screw up a nut and oil
the joints. It is not like Saint-Nicholas, for instance, where the
machine was never allowed to go by itself. The driver was always
tinkering at it, running first to the right and then to the left,
peering in here and altering a wheel there, not knowing or remembering
that the best mounted machine is the one which requires the least
attention from the man who sets it in motion. The great advantage
which I enjoy here is the remarkable facility afforded me for work
which has become a prime necessity to me, and which, considering
my internal condition, is also a duty. The lectures on morals
are excellent, but I cannot say as much of those on dogma, as the
professor is a novice. This, coupled with the great importance of the
_Traités de la Religion et de l'Église,_ especially in my case, would
be a very serious drawback, but for my having found substitutes for
him among the other professors." As a matter of fact, I had a special
liking for the ecclesiastical sciences. A text once implanted in my
memory was never forgotten; my head was in the state of a _Sic et Non_
of Abélard. Theology is like a Gothic cathedral, having in common with
its grandeur its vast empty spaces and its lack of solidity. Neither
to the Fathers of the Church nor to the Christian writers during the
first half of the Middle Ages did it occur to draw up a systematic
exposition of the Christian dogmas which would dispense with reading
the Bible all through. The _Summa_ of St. Thomas Aquinas, a summary of
the earlier scholasticism, is like a vast bookcase with compartments,
which, if Catholicism is to endure, will be of service to all time,
the decisions of councils and of Popes in the future having, so to
speak, their place marked out for them beforehand. There can be no
question of progress in such an order of exposition. In the sixteenth
century, the Council of Trent settled a number of points which had
hitherto been the subject of controversy; but each of these anathemas
had already its place allotted to it in the wide purview of St.
Thomas, Melchior Canus, and Suarès remodelled the _Summa_ without
adding anything essential to it. In the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries the Sorbonne composed for use in the schools handy treatises
which are for the most part revised and reduced copies of the _Summa_.
At each page one can detect the same texts cut out and separated from
the comments which explain them; the same syllogisms, triumphant,
but devoid of any solid foundation; the same defects of historical
criticism, arising from the confusion of dates and places.
Theology may be divided into dogmatics and ethics. Dogmatic theology,
in addition to the Prolegomena comprising the discussions relating
to the sources of divine authority, is divided into fifteen treatises
upon all the dogmas of Christianity. At the basis is the treatise
_De la vraie Religion_, which seeks to demonstrate the supernatural
character of the Christian religion, that is to say of Revealed Writ
and of the Church. Then all the dogmas are proved by Holy Writ, by the
Councils, by the Fathers, and by the theologians. It cannot be denied
that there is a very frank rationalism at the root of all this. If
scholasticism is the descendant in the first generation of St. Thomas
Aquinas, it is descended in the second from Abélard. In such a system
reason holds the first place, reason proves the revelation, the
divinity of Scripture and the authority of the Church. This done, the
door is open to every kind of deduction. The only instance in which
St. Sulpice has been moved to anger since the extinction of Jansenism
was when M. de Lamennais declared that the starting-point should be
faith, and not reason. And what is to be the test in the last resort
of the claims of faith if not reason!
Moral theology consists of a dozen treatises comprising the whole body
of philosophical ethics and of law, completed by the revelation and
decisions of the Church. All this forms a sort of encyclopaedia very
closely connected. It is an edifice, the stones of which are attached
to one another by iron clamps, but the base is extremely weak. This
base is the treatise _De la vraie Religion_, which treatise does not
hold together. For not only does it fail to show that the Christian
religion is more especially divine and revealed than the others, but
it does not even prove that in the field of reality which comes within
the reach of our observation there has occurred a single supernatural
fact or miracle. M. Littre's inexorable phrase, "Despite all the
researches which have been made, no miracle has ever taken place where
it could be observed and put upon record" is a stumbling-block which
cannot be moved out of the path. It is impossible to prove that a
miracle occurred in the past, and we shall doubtless have a long time
to wait before one takes place under such conditions as could alone
give a right-minded person the assurance that he was not mistaken.
Admitting the fundamental thesis of the treatise _De la vraie
Religion_, the field of argument is narrowed, but the argument is a
long way from being at an end. The question has to be discussed with
the Protestants and dissenters, who, while admitting the revealed
texts to be true, decline to see in them the dogmas which the Catholic
Church has in the course of time taken upon herself. The controversy
here branches off into endless points, and the advocates of
Catholicism are continually being worsted. The Catholic Church has
taken upon herself to prove that her dogmas have always existed just
as she teaches them, that Jesus instituted confession, extreme unction
and marriage, and that he taught what was afterwards decided upon
by the Nicene and Trent Councils. Nothing can be more erroneous. The
Christian dogma has been formed, like everything else, slowly and
piecemeal, by a sort of inward vegetation. Theology, by asserting the
contrary, raises up a mass of objections, and places itself in the
predicament of having to reject all criticism. I would advise any one
who wishes to realise this to read in a theological work the treatise
on Sacraments, and he will see by what a series of unsupported
suppositions, worthy of the Apocrypha, of Marie d'Agreda or Catherine
Emmerich, the conclusion is reached that all the sacraments were
established by Jesus Christ during his life. The discussion as to the
matter and form of the sacraments is open to the same objections. The
obstinacy with which matter and form are detected everywhere dates
from the introduction of the Aristotelian tenets into theology in the
thirteenth century. Those who rejected this retrospective application
of the philosophy of Aristotle to the liturgical creations of Jesus
incurred ecclesiastical censure.
The intention of the "about to be" in history as in nature became
henceforth the essence of my philosophy. My doubts did not arise from
one train of reasoning but from ten thousand. Orthodoxy has an answer
to everything and will never avow itself worsted. No doubt, it is
admitted in criticism itself that a subtle answer may, in certain
cases, be a valid one. The real truth does not always look like the
truth. One subtle answer may be true, or even at a stretch, two.
But for three to be true is more difficult, and as to four bearing
examination that is almost impossible. But if a thesis can only be
upheld by admitting that ten, a hundred, or even a thousand subtle
answers are true at one and the same time, a clear proof is afforded
that this thesis is false. The calculation of probabilities applied
to all these shortcomings of detail is overwhelming in its effect
upon unprejudiced minds, and Descartes had taught me that the prime
condition for discovering the truth is to be free from all prejudice.
THE ST. SULPICE SEMINARY.