BOSSUET AND THE PREACHERS--FENELON
I
"A man set under authority"--these words, better than any other,
define Bossuet. Above him was God, represented in things spiritual
by the Catholic Church, in things temporal by the French monarchy;
below him were the faithful confided to his charge, and those who
would lead the faithful astray from the path of obedience and
tradition. Duty to what was above him, duty to those placed under
him, made up the whole of Bossuet's life. To maintain, to defend,
to extend the tradition he had received, was the first of duties.
All his powers as an orator, a controversialist, an educator were
directed to this object. He wrote and spoke to dominate the intellects
of men and to subdue their wills, not for the sake of personal power,
but for the truth as he had received it from the Church and from the
monarchy.
JACQUES-BENIGNE BOSSUET was born in 1627, at Dijon, of a middle-class
family, distinguished in the magistracy. In his education, pursued
with resolute ardour, the two traditions of Hellenism and Hebraism
were fused together: Homer and Virgil were much to him; but the Bible,
above all, nourished his imagination, his conscience, and his will.
The celebrity of his scholarship and the flatteries of Parisian
_salons_ did not divert him from his course. At twenty-five he was
a priest and a doctor of the Sorbonne. Six years were spent at Metz,
a city afflicted by the presence of Protestants and Jews, where
Bossuet fortified himself with theological studies, preached,
panegyrised the saints, and confuted heretics. His fame drew him to
Paris, where, during ten years, his sermons were among the great
events of the time. In 1669 he was named Bishop of Condom, but, being
appointed preceptor to the Dauphin, he resigned his bishopric, and
devoted himself to forming the mind of a pupil, indolent and dull,
who might one day be the vicegerent of God for his country. Bishop
of Meaux in 1681, he opened the assembly of French clergy next year
with his memorable sermon on the unity of the Church, and by his
authority carried, in a form decisive for freedom while respectful
towards Rome, the four articles which formulated the liberties of
the Gallican Church. The duties of his diocese, controversy against
Protestantism, the controversy against Quietism, in which Fenelon
was his antagonist, devotional writings, strictures upon the stage,
controversy against the enlightened Biblical criticism of Richard
Simon, filled his energetic elder years. He ceased from a life of
glorious labour and resolute combat in April 1704.
The works of Bossuet, setting aside his commentaries on Holy Scripture,
devotional treatises, and letters, fall into three chief groups: the
eloquence of the pulpit, controversial writings, and writings
designed for the instruction of the Dauphin.
Political eloquence could not exist where power was grasped by the
hands of one great ruler. Judicial eloquence lacked the breadth and
elevation which come with political freedom; it contented itself with
subtleties of argument, decked with artificial flowers of style. The
pulpit was the school of oratory. St. Vincent de Paul had preached
with unction and a grave simplicity, and Bossuet, his disciple, felt
his influence. But the offering which Bossuet laid upon the altar
must needs be costly, an offering of all his powers. While an
unalterable good sense regulates all he wrote, the sweep of his
intellect demanded plenitude of expression; his imagination, if it
dealt with life and death, must needs deal with them at times in the
way of magnificence, which was natural to it; and his lyrical
enthusiasm, fed by the prophetic poetry of the Old Testament, could
not but find an escape in words. He sought no literary fame; his
sermons were acts of faith, acts of duty. Out of the vast mass of
his discourses he printed one, a sermon of public importance--that
on the unity of the Church.
At the request of friends, some of the Funeral Orations were published.
These, with his address on the profession of Louise de La Valliere,
were all that could be read of Bossuet's pulpit oratory by his
contemporaries. His sermons were carefully meditated and prepared,
but he would not check his power of lofty improvisation by following
the words of a manuscript. After his death his papers had perilous
adventures. By the devotion of his first editor, Deforis, nearly two
hundred sermons were after many years recovered; later students have
presented them with as close an approximation as is possible to their
original form. Bossuet's first manner--that of the years at Metz--is
sometimes marred by scholastic subtleties, a pomp of quotations, too
curious imagery, and a temper rather aggressive than conciliating.
During the period when he preached in Paris he was master of all his
powers, which move with freedom and at the same time with a majestic
order; his grandeur grows out of simplicity. As Bishop of Meaux he
exhorted his flock out of the abundance of his heart, often without
the intermediary of written preparation.
He is primarily a doctor of the faith: dogma first, determined by
authority, and commending itself to human reason; morality, not
independent, but proceeding from or connected with dogma, and while
truly human yet resting upon divine foundations. But neither dogma
nor morals are presented in the manner of the schools; both are made
living powers by the preacher's awe, adoration, joy, charity,
indignation, pity; in the large ordonnance of his discourse each
passion finds its natural place. His eloquence grows out of his theme;
his logic is the logic of clear and natural ideas; he is lucid, rapid,
energetic; then suddenly some aspect of his subject awakens a lyrical
emotion, and the preacher rises into the prophet.
Bossuet's panegyrics of the saints are sermons in which doctrine and
morals are enforced by great examples. His _Oraisons Funebres_ preach,
for the uses of the living, the doctrine of death. Nowhere else does
he so fill the mind with a sense of the greatness and the glory of
life as when he stands beside the bier and reviews the achievements
or presents the characters of the illustrious deceased. Observing
as he did all the decorum of the occasion, his discourses do not
degenerate into mere adulation; some are historic surveys,
magnificent in their breadth of view and mastery of events. He
presents things as he saw them, and he did not always see aright.
Cromwell is a hypocrite and an impostor; the revocation of the edict
of Nantes is the laudable act of a king who is a defender of the faith.
The intolerance of Bossuet proceeds not so much from his heart as
from the logic of his orthodoxy. His heart had a tenderness which
breaks forth in many places, and signally in the discourse occasioned
by the death of the Duchess of Orleans. This, and the eloquent
memorials of her mother, Henrietta, Queen of England, and of the
Prince de Conde, touch the heights and depths of the passions proper
to the grave.
Bossuet's polemic against Protestantism is sufficiently represented
by his _Exposition de la Doctrine Catholique_ (published 1671) and
the _Histoire des Variations des Eglises Protestantes_ (1688). The
latter, in its fifteen books, is an attempt to overwhelm the
contending Protestant communions by one irresistible attack. Their
diversities of error are contrasted with the one, unchanging faith
of the infallible Church. Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, the
Albigenses, the Hussites, the Wicliffites are routed and slain, as
opponents are slain in theological warfare--to rise again. History
and theology co-operate in the result. The characters of the
Protestant Reformers are studied with a remorseless scrutiny, and
an art which can bring into relief what the work of art requires.
Why the children of the infallible Church rose up in disobedience
against their mother is left unexplained. The great heresy, Bossuet
was persuaded, had almost reached its term; the intellectual chaos
would soon be restored to universal order under the successors of
Innocent XI.
In the embittered controversy with his brother-Bishop of Cambrai,
on the significance of which the singular autobiography of Madame
Guyon[1] throws much light, Bossuet remained the victor. It was a
contention between dogmatic rectitude and the temper of emotional
religion. Bossuet was at first unversed in the writings of the
Catholic mystics. Being himself a fully-formed will, watchful and
armed for obedience and command--the "man under authority"--he
rightly divined the dangers to dogmatic faith arising from
self-abandonment to God within the heart. The elaborate structure
of orthodoxy seemed to dissolve in the ardour of a personal emotion;
it seemed to him another form of the individualism which he condemned.
The Church was a great objective reality; it had laid down a system
of belief. A love of God which ignored the method of God, was but
a spurious love, leading to destruction.
[Footnote 1: Translated into English for the first time in full, 1897,
by T. T. Allen.]
Protestant self-will, mystical private emotion--these were in turn
met by the champion of tradition, and, as he trusted, were subdued.
Another danger he perceived, not in the unregenerate will or wandering
heart, but in the critical intelligence. Bossuet again was right in
viewing with alarm the Biblical studies of Richard Simon. But his
scholarship was here defective. He succeeded in suppressing an
edition of the _Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament_. There were
printers in Holland beyond the reach of Bossuet's arm; and Simon
continued the work which others have carried further with the aids
of more exact science.
To doubt the government of His world by the Divine Ruler, who assigns
us our duty and our place, is to sap the principles of authority and
of obedience. The doctrine of God's providence is at the centre of
all Bossuet's system of thought, at the heart of his loyal passions.
On earth, the powers that be; in France, the monarch; in heaven, a
greater Monarch (we will not say a magnified Louis XIV.) presiding
over all the affairs of this globe. When Bossuet tried to educate
his indocile pupil the Dauphin, he taught him how God is above man,
as man is above the brute. Monarchy--as he showed in his _Politique
Tiree de l'Ecriture Sainte_--is hereditary and absolute; but
absolute power is not arbitrary power; the King is God's subject,
and his laws must conform to those of his Divine Ruler. The _Discours
sur l'Histoire Universelle_ (1681) was written in the first instance
for the Dauphin; but its purpose was partly apologetic, and Bossuet,
especially in the second part of the book, had the errors of
free-thinkers--Spinoza and Simon--before his mind.
The seventeenth century had not contributed largely to historical
literature, save in the form of memoirs. Mezeray, in the first half
of the century, Fleury, in the second, cannot be ranked among those
writers who illuminate with profound and just ideas. The Cartesian
philosophy viewed historical studies with haughty indifference.
Bossuet's _Discours_ is a vindication of the ways of God in history,
a theology of human progress. He would exhibit the nations and
generations of human-kind bound each to each under the Providential
government. The life of humanity, from Adam to Charlemagne, is mapped
into epochs, ages, periods--the periods of nature, of the law, and
of grace. In religion is found the unity of human history. By religion
is meant Judaism and Christianity; by Christianity is meant the
Catholicism of Rome.
Having expounded the Divine policy in the government of the world,
Bossuet is free to study those secondary causes which have determined
the rise and fall of empires. With magisterial authority, and with
majestic skill, he presents the movements of races and peoples. His
sympathy with the genius of ancient Rome proceeds not only from his
comprehensive grasp of facts, but from a kinship between his own and
the Roman type of character. The magnificent design of Bossuet was
magnificently accomplished. He hoped to extend his studies, and apply
his method to other parts of his vast subject, but the hope was not
to be fulfilled. A disinterested student of the philosophy of history
he is not; he is the theologian who marshals facts under an accepted
dogma. A conception of Providence may indeed emerge from the
researches of a devout investigator of the life of humanity as their
last result; but towards that conception the secular life and the
various religions of the world will contribute; the ways of the Divine
Spirit will appear other than those of the anthropomorphic Ruler of
Bossuet's imagination. He was not an original thinker; he would have
scorned such a distinction--"l'heretique est celui qui a une
opinion"; he had received the truth, and only gave it extended
applications. He is "le sublime orateur des idees communes."
More than an orator, before all else he was a combatant. Falling at
his post as the eighteenth century opened, he is like some majestic,
white-haired paladin of old romances which tell of the strife between
French chivalry and the Saracenic hordes. Bossuet fell; the age of
growing incredulity and novel faiths was inaugurated; the infidels
passed over the body of the champion of conservative tradition.
II
Bossuet's contemporaries esteemed him as a preacher less highly than
they esteemed the Jesuit Bourdaloue. The life of LOUIS BOURDALOUE
(1632-1704) is told in the words of Vinet: "He preached, confessed,
consoled, and then he died." It does credit to his hearers that they
valued him aright--a modest man of simple probity. He spoke, with
downcast eyes and full harmonious voice, as a soul to souls; his
eloquence was not that of the rhetorician; his words were grave and
plain and living, and were pressed home with the force of their reality.
He aimed never at display, but always at conviction. When the crowd
at St. Sulpice was moved as he entered the church and ascended the
pulpit, "Silence!" cried the Prince de Conde, "there is our enemy!"
Bourdaloue marshalled his arguments and expositions with the
elaborate skill of a tactician; he sought to capture the judgment;
he reached the heart through a wise director's knowledge of its inmost
processes. When his words were touched with emotion, it was the
involuntary manifestation of the life within him. His studies of
character sometimes tended to the form of portraits of moral types,
features in which could be identified with actual persons; but in
these he was the moralist, not the satirist. During four-and-thirty
years Bourdaloue distributed, to those who would take it, the bread
of life--plain, wholesome, prepared skilfully and with clean hands,
never varying from the evenness and excellence of its quality. He
does not startle or dazzle a reader; he does what is better--he
nourishes.
Bourdaloue pronounced only two _Oraisons Funebres_, and those under
the constraint of duty. He thought the Christian pulpit was meant
for less worldly uses than the eulogy of mortal men. The _Oraison
Funebre_ was more to the taste of Mascaron (1634-1703), whose unequal
rhetoric was at its best in his panegyric of Turenne; more to the
taste of the elegant FLECHIER, Bishop of Nimes. All the literary
graces were cultivated by Flechier (1632-1710), and his eloquence
is unquestionable; but it was not the eloquence proper to the pulpit.
He was a man of letters, a man of the world, formed in the school
of preciosity, a haunter of the Hotel de Rambouillet; knowing the
surface of society, he knew as a moralist how to depict its manners
and the evil that lay in them. He did not apply doctrine to life like
Bossuet, nor search the heart with Bourdaloue's serious zeal; to save
souls was indeed important; to exhibit his talents before the King
was also important. But the true eloquence of the pulpit has deeper
springs than lay in Flechier's mundane spirit. Already the decadence
has begun.
Protestantism had its preacher in JACQUES SAURIN (1677-1730), clear,
logical, energetic, with negligences of style and sudden flashes of
genius. But he belongs to London, to Geneva, to the Hague more perhaps
than to France. An autumnal colouring, bright and abundant, yet
indicative of the decline, is displayed in the discourses of the
latest of the great pulpit orators, JEAN-BAPTISTE MASSILLON
(1663-1742), who belongs more to the eighteenth than to the
seventeenth century. "He must increase," said Bourdaloue, "but I must
decrease." Massillon, with gifts of person and of natural grace,
sensitive, tender, a student and professor of the rhetorical art,
sincerely devout, yet with waverings towards the world, had something
in his genius that resembled Racine. A pathetic sentiment, a feeling
for human passions, give his sermons qualities which contrast with
the severer manner of Bourdaloue. They are simple in plan; the
preacher's art lay in deploying and developing a few ideas, and
infusing into them an imaginative sensibility; he is facile and
abundant; faultless in amenity, but deficient in force and fire. Yet
the opening words of the Funeral Oration on Louis XIV.--"God alone
is great, my brethren"--are noble in their simplicity; and the thought
of Jesus suddenly appearing in "the most august assembly of the
world"--in the chapel at Versailles--startled the hearers of the
sermon on the "small number of the elect." "There is an orator!" cried
the actor Baron, "we are only comedians;" but no actor would have
instituted a comparison between himself and Bourdaloue. "When one
enters the avenue at Versailles," said Massillon, "one feels an
enervating air."
He was aware of the rising tide of luxury and vice around him; he
tried to meet it, tracing the scepticism of the time to its
ill-regulated passions; but he met scepticism by morality detached
from dogma. The _Petit Careme_, preached before Louis XV. when a child
of eight, expresses the sanguine temper of the moment: the young King
would grow into the father of his people; the days of peace would
return. Great and beneficent kings are not effeminately amiable; it
were better if Massillon had preached "Be strong" than "Be tender."
Voltaire kept on his desk the sermons of Massillon, and loved to hear
the musical periods of the _Petit Careme_ read aloud at meal-time.
To be the favourite preacher of eighteenth-century philosophers is
a distinction somewhat compromising to an exponent of the faith.
III
Bossuet's great antagonist in the controversy concerning Quietism
might have found the approval of the philosophers for some of his
political opinions. His religious writings would have spoken to them
in an unknown tongue.
FRANCOIS DE SALIGNAC DE LA MOTHE-FENELON was born in Perigord (1651),
of an ancient and illustrious family. Of one whose intellect and
character were infinitely subtle and complex, the blending of all
opposites, it is possible to sustain the most conflicting opinions,
and perhaps in the end no critic can seize this Proteus. Saint-Simon
noticed how in his noble countenance every contrary quality was
expressed, and how all were harmonised: "Il fallait faire effort pour
cesser de le regarder." During the early years of his clerical career
he acted as superior to female converts from Protestantism, and as
missionary among the unconverted Calvinists. In 1689 he was appointed
tutor to the King's grandson, the Duc de Bourgogne, and from a
passionate boy he transformed his pupil into a youth too blindly
docile. Fenelon's nomination to the Archbishopric of Cambrai (1695),
which removed him from the court, was in fact a check to his ambition.
His religious and his political views were regarded by Louis XIV.
as dangerous for the Church and the monarchy.
Through his personal interest in Mme. Guyon, and his sympathy with
her mystical doctrine in religion--one which inculcated complete
abnegation of the will, and its replacement by absolute surrender
to the Divine love--he came into conflict with Bossuet, and after
a fierce war of diplomacy and of pamphlets, in which Fenelon displayed
the utmost skill and energy as tactician and dialectician, he received
a temperate condemnation from Rome, and submitted. The death of the
Dauphin (1711), which left his former pupil heir to the throne,
revived Fenelon's hopes of political influence, but in the next year
these hopes disappeared with the decease of the young Duc de Bourgogne.
At Cambrai, where he discharged his episcopal duties like a saint
and a _grand seigneur_, Fenelon died six months before Louis XIV.,
in 1715.
"The most original intellect--if we set Pascal aside--of the
seventeenth century"--so Fenelon is described by one excellent
critic. "Antique and modern," writes his biographer, M. Paul Janet,
"Christian and profane, mystical and diplomatic, familiar and noble,
gentle and headstrong, natural and subtle, fascinating the
eighteenth century as he had fascinated the seventeenth, believing
like a child, and daring as Spinoza, Fenelon is one of the most
original figures which the Catholic Church has produced." His first
publication was the treatise _De l'Education des Filles_ (written
1681, published 1687), composed at the request of his friends the
Duc and Duchesse de Beauvilliers. It is based on a recognition of
the dignity of woman and the duty of a serious effort to form her
mind. It honours the reason, opposes severity, would make instruction,
as far as possible, a delight, and would exhibit goodness in a gracious
aspect; commends object-lessons in addition to book-learning,
indicates characteristic feminine failings (yet liveliness of
disposition is not regarded as one of these), exhorts to a dignified
simplicity in dress. The range of studies recommended is narrow, but
for Fenelon's time it was liberal; the book marks an epoch in the
history of female education.
For his pupil the Duc de Bourgogne, Fenelon wrote his graceful prose
_Fables_ (which also include under that title short tales, allegories,
and fairy stories), the _Dialogues des Morts_, aiming at the
application of moral principles to politics, and his _Telemaque_,
named in the first (incomplete) edition _Suite du IVe Livre de
l'Odyssee_ (1699). In this, for long the most popular of tales for
the young, Fenelon's imaginative devotion to antiquity finds ample
expression; it narrates the wanderings of Telemachus in search of
his father Ulysses, under the warning guidance and guardianship of
Minerva disguised as Mentor. Imitations and borrowings from
classical authors are freely and skilfully made. It is a poem in prose,
a romance of education, designed at once to charm the imagination
and to inculcate truths of morals, politics, and religion. The
didactic purpose is evident, yet it remains a true work of art, full
of grace and colour, occasionally, indeed, languid, but often vivid
and forcible.
Fenelon's views on politics were not so much fantastic as those of
an idealist. He dreamed of a monarchy which should submit to the
control of righteousness; he mourned over the pride and extravagance
of the court; he constantly pleaded against wars of ambition; he
desired that a powerful and Christian nobility should mediate between
the crown and the people; he conceived a system of decentralisation
which should give the whole nation an interest in public affairs;
in his ecclesiastical views he was Ultramontane rather than Gallican.
These ideas are put forth in his _Direction pour la Conscience d'un
Roi_ and the _Plan de Gouvernement_. Louis XIV. suspected the
political tendency of _Telemaque_, and caused the printing of the
first edition to be suspended. Fenelon has sometimes been regarded
as a forerunner of the Revolutionary movement; but he would rather,
by ideas in which, as events proved, there may have been something
chimerical, have rendered revolution impossible.
Into his controversy with Bossuet he threw himself with a combative
energy and a skill in defence and attack that surprise one who knows
him only through his _Lettres Spirituelles_, which tend towards the
effacement of the will in a union with God through love. Bossuet
pleaded against the dangers for morals and for theology of a false
mysticism; Fenelon, against confounding true mysticism with what is
false. In his _Traite de l'Existence de Dieu_ he shows himself a bold
and subtle thinker: the first part, which is of a popular character,
attempts to prove the existence of the Deity by the argument from
design in nature and from the reason in man; the second part--of a
later date--follows Descartes in metaphysical proofs derived from
our idea of an infinite and a perfect being. To his other distinctions
Fenelon added that of a literary critic, unsurpassed in his time,
unless it be by Boileau. His _Dialogues sur l'Eloquence_ seek to
replace the elaborate methods of logical address, crowded with
divisions and subdivisions, and supported with a multitude of
quotations, by a style simple, natural, and delicate in its fervency.
The admirable _Lettre a l'Academie_, Fenelon's latest gift to
literature, states the case of the ancients against the moderns, and
of the moderns against the ancients, with an attempt at impartiality,
but it is evident that the writer's love was chiefly given to his
favourite classical authors; simplicity and natural beauty attracted
him more than ingenuity or wit or laboured brilliance. He feared that
the language was losing some of its richness and flexibility; he
condemns the use of rhyme; he is hardly just to Racine, but honours
himself by his admiration of Moliere. In dealing with historical
writings he recognises the importance of the study of governments,
institutions, and social life, and at the same time values highly
a personal, vivid, direct manner, and a feeling for all that is real,
concrete, and living. To his rare gifts of intellect and of the soul
was added an inexpressible personal charm, in which something that
was almost feminine was united with the reserved power and authority
of a man.