The beauty of Madame Guyon had cost her tender conscience many a

pang. She had wept and prayed over that secret love of display which

had repeatedly induced her to mingle with the thoughtless amusements

of the world. At four-and-twenty the virulence of the small-pox

released her from that snare. M. Guyon was laid up with the gout.

She was left, when the disorder seized her, to the tender mercies of

her mother-in-law. That inhuman woman refused to allow any but her

own physician to attend her, yet for him she would not send. The

disease, unchecked, had reached its height, when a medical man,

passing that way, happened to call at the house. Shocked at the

spectacle Madame Guyon presented, he was proceeding at once to bleed

her, expressing, in no measured terms, his indignation at the

barbarity of such neglect. The mother-in-law would not hear of such

a thing. He performed the operation in spite of her threats and

invectives, leaving her almost beside herself with rage. That lancet

saved the life of Madame Guyon, and disappointed the relative who

had hoped to see her die. When at length she recovered, she refused

to avail herself of the cosmetics generally used to conceal the

ravages of the disorder. Throughout her suffering she had never

uttered a murmur, or felt a fear. She had even concealed the cruelty

of her mother-in-law. She said, that if God had designed her to

retain her beauty, He would not have sent the scourge to remove it.

Her friends expected to find her inconsolable—they heard her speak

only of thankfulness and joy. Her confessor reproached her with

spiritual pride. The affection of her husband was visibly

diminished; yet the heart of Madame Guyon overflowed with joy. It

appeared to her, that the God to whom she longed to be wholly given

up had accepted her surrender, and was removing everything that

might interpose between Himself and her.[326]

VII.

The experience of Madame Guyon, hitherto, had been such as to teach

her the surrender of every earthly source of gratification or ground

of confidence. Yet one more painful stage on the road to

self-annihilation remained to be traversed. She must learn to give

up cheerfully even spiritual pleasures. In the year 1674, according

to the probable calculation of Mr. Upham, she was made to enter what

she terms a state of desolation, which lasted, with little

intermission, for nearly seven years.[327] All was emptiness,

darkness, sorrow. She describes herself as cast down, like

Nebuchadnezzar, from a throne of enjoyment, to live among the

beasts. ‘Alas!’ she exclaimed, ‘is it possible that this heart,

formerly all on fire, should now become like ice?’ The heavens were

as brass, and shut out her prayers; horror and trembling took the

place of tranquillity; hopelessly oppressed with guilt, she saw

herself a victim destined for hell. In vain for her did the church

doors open, the holy bells ring, the deep-voiced intonations of the

priest arise and fall, the chanted psalm ascend through clouds of

azure wandering incense. The power and the charm of the service had

departed. Of what avail was music to a burning wilderness athirst

for rain? Gladly would she have had recourse to the vow, to the

pilgrimage, to the penance, to any extremity of self-torture. She

felt the impotence of such remedies for such anguish. She had no ear

for comfort, no eye for hope, not even a voice for complaint.

During this period the emotional element of religion in her mind

appears to have suffered an almost entire suspension. Regarding the

loss of certain feelings of delight as the loss of the divine

favour, she naturally sank deeper and deeper in despondency. A

condition by no means uncommon in ordinary Christian experience

assumed, in her case, a morbid character. Our emotions may be

chilled, or kindled, in ever-varying degrees, from innumerable

causes. We must accustom ourselves to the habitual performance of

duty, whether attended or not with feelings of a pleasurable nature.

It is generally found that those powerful emotions of joy which

attend, at first, the new and exalting consciousness of peace with

God, subside after awhile. As we grow in religious strength and

knowledge, a steady principle supplies their place. We are

refreshed, from time to time, by seasons of heightened joy and

confidence, but we cease to be dependent upon feeling. At the same

time, there is nothing in Scripture to check our desire for

retaining as constantly as possible a sober gladness, for finding

duty delightful, and the ‘joy of the Lord’ our strength. These are

the truths which the one-sided and unqualified expressions of Madame

Guyon at once exaggerate and obscure.

During this dark interval M. Guyon died. His widow undertook the

formidable task of settling his disordered affairs. Her brother gave

her no assistance; her mother-in-law harassed and hindered to her

utmost; yet Madame Guyon succeeded in arranging a chaos of papers,

and bringing a hopeless imbroglio of business matters into order,

with an integrity and a skill which excited universal admiration.

She felt it was her duty; she believed that Divine assistance was

vouchsafed for its discharge. Of business, she says, she knew as

little as of Arabic; but she knew not what she could accomplish till

she tried. Minds far more visionary than hers have evinced a still

greater aptitude for practical affairs.

The 22nd of July, 1680, is celebrated by Madame Guyon as the happy

era of her deliverance. A letter from La Combe was the instrument of

a restoration as wonderful, in her eyes, as the bondage. This

ecclesiastic had been first introduced by Madame Guyon into the path

of mystical perfection. His name is associated with her own in the

early history of the Quietist movement. He subsequently became her

Director, but was always more her disciple than her guide. His

admiration for her amounted to a passion. Incessant persecution and

long solitary imprisonment combined, with devotional extravagance,

to cloud with insanity at last an intellect never powerful. This

feeble and affectionate soul perished, the victim of Quietism, and

perhaps of love. It should not be forgotten, that before the inward

condition of Madame Guyon changed thus remarkably for the better,

her outward circumstances had undergone a similar improvement. She

lived now in her own house, with her children about her. That

Sycorax, her mother-in-law, dropped gall no longer into her daily

cup of life. Domestic tormentors, worse than the goblins which

buffeted St. Antony, assailed her peace no more. An outer sky grown

thus serene, an air thus purified, may well have contributed to

chase away the night of the soul, and to give to a few words of

kindly counsel from La Combe the brightness of the day-star. Our

simple-hearted enthusiast was not so absolutely indifferent as she

thought herself to the changes of this transitory world.

VIII.

Madame Guyon had now triumphantly sustained the last of those

trials, which, like the probation of the ancient mysteries, made the

porch of mystical initiation a passage terrible with pain and peril.

Henceforward, she is the finished Quietist: henceforward, when she

relates her own experience, she describes Quietism. At times, when

the children did not require her care, she would walk out into a

neighbouring wood, and there, under the shade of the trees, amidst

the singing of the birds, she now passed as many happy hours as she

had known months of sorrow. Her own language will best indicate the

thoughts which occupied this peaceful retirement, and exhibit the

principle there deepened and matured. She says here in her

Autobiography—

‘When I had lost all created supports, and even divine ones, I then

found myself happily necessitated to fall into the pure divine, and

to fall into it through all which seemed to remove me farther from

it. In losing all the gifts, with all their supports, I found the

Giver. Oh, poor creatures, who pass along all your time in feeding

on the gifts of God, and think therein to be most favoured and

happy, how I pity you if ye stop here, short of the true rest, and

cease to go forward to God, through resignation of the same gifts!

How many pass all their lives this way, and think highly of

themselves therein! There are others who, being designed of God to

die to themselves, yet pass all their time in a dying life, and in

inward agonies, without ever entering into God through death and

total loss, because they are always willing to retain something

under plausible pretexts, and so never lose _self_ to the whole

extent of the designs of God. Wherefore, they never enjoy God in his

fulness,—a loss that will not perfectly be known until another

life.’[328]

She describes herself as having ceased from all self-originated

action and choice. To her amazement and unspeakable happiness, it

appeared as though all such natural movement existed no longer,—a

higher power had displaced and occupied its room. ‘I even perceived

no more (she continues) the soul which He had formerly conducted by

His rod and His staff, because now He alone appeared to me, my soul

having given up its place to Him. It seemed to me as if it was

wholly and altogether passed into its God, to make but one and the

same thing with Him; even as a little drop of water cast into the

sea receives the qualities of the sea.’ She speaks of herself as now

practising the virtues no longer _as virtues_—that is, not by

separate and constrained efforts. It would have required effort

_not_ to practise them.[329]

Somewhat later she expresses herself as follows:—

‘The soul passing out of itself by dying to itself necessarily

passes into its divine object. This is the law of its transition.

When it passes out of self, which is limited, and therefore is not

God, and consequently is _evil_, it necessarily passes into the

unlimited and universal, which is God, and therefore is the true

good. My own experience seemed to me to be a verification of this.

My spirit, disenthralled from selfishness, became united with and

lost in God, its Sovereign, who attracted it more and more to

Himself. And this was so much the case, that I could seem to see and

know God only, and not myself.... It was thus that my soul was lost

in God, who communicated to it His qualities, having drawn it out of

all that it had of its own.... O happy poverty, happy loss, happy

nothing, which gives no less than God Himself in his own

immensity,—no more circumscribed to the limited manner of the

creation, but always drawing it out of that to plunge it wholly into

His divine Essence. Then the soul knows that all the states of

self-pleasing visions, of intellectual illuminations, of ecstasies

and raptures, of whatever value they might once have been, are now

rather obstacles than advancements; and that they are not of service

in the state of experience which is far above them; because the

state which has props or supports, which is the case with the merely

illuminated and ecstatic state, rests in them in some degree, and

has pain to lose them. But the soul cannot arrive at the state of

which I am now speaking, without the loss of all such supports and

helps.... The soul is then so submissive, and perhaps we may say so

passive,—that is to say, is so disposed equally to receive from the

hand of God either good or evil,—as is truly astonishing. It

receives both the one and the other without any selfish emotions,

letting them flow and be lost as they came.’[330]

These passages convey the substance of the doctrine which,

illustrated and expressed in various ways, pervades all the writings

of Madame Guyon. This is the principle adorned by the fancy of her

_Torrents_ and inculcated in the practical directions of her _Short

Method of Prayer_. Such is the state to which Quietism proposes to

conduct its votaries. In some places, she qualifies the strength of

her expressions,—she admits that we are not at all times equally

conscious of this absolute union of the soul with its centre,—the

lower nature may not be always insensible to distress. But the

higher, the inmost element of the soul is all the while profoundly

calm, and recollection presently imparts a similar repose to the

inferior nature. When the soul has thus passed, as she phrases it,

out of the Nothing into the All, when its feet are set in ‘a large

room’ (nothing less, according to her interpretation, than the

compass of Infinity), ‘a substantial or essential word’ is spoken

there. It is a continuous word—potent, ineffable, ever uttered

without language. It is the immediate unchecked operation of

resident Deity. What it speaks, it effects. It is blissful and

mysterious as the language of heaven. With Madame Guyon, the events

of Providence are God, and the decisions of the sanctified judgment

respecting them are nothing less than the immediate voice of God in

the soul. She compares the nature thus at rest in God to a tablet on

which the divine hand writes,—it must be held perfectly still, else

the characters traced there will be distorted or incomplete. In her

very humility she verges on the audacity which arrogates

inspiration. If she, passive and helpless, really acts no more, the

impulses she feels, her words, her actions, must all bear the

impress of an infallible divine sanction. It is easy to see that her

speech and action—always well-meant, but frequently ill-judged,—were

her own after all, though nothing of her own seemed left. She

acknowledges that she was sometimes at a loss as to the course of

duty. She was guided more than once by random passages of the Bible,

and the casual expressions of others, somewhat after the fashion of

the _Sortes Virgilianæ_ and the omens of ancient Rome. Her knowledge

of Scripture, the native power of her intellect, and the tenderness

of her conscience, preserved her from pushing such a view of the

inward light to its worst extreme.

IX.

The admixture of error in the doctrine which Madame Guyon was

henceforward to preach with so much self-denying love, so much

intrepid constancy, appears to us to lie upon the surface. The

passages we have given convey, unquestionably, the idea of a

practical substitution of God for the soul in the case of the

perfectly sanctified. The soul within the soul is Deity. When all is

desolate, silent, the divine Majesty arises, thinks, feels, and

acts, within the transformed humanity. It is quite true that, as

sanctification progresses, Christian virtue becomes more easy as the

new habit gains strength. In many respects it is true, as Madame

Guyon says, that effort would be requisite to neglect or violate

certain duties or commands rather than to perform them. But this

facility results from the constitution of our nature. We carry on

the new economy within with less outcry, less labour, less confusion

and resistance than we did when the revolution was recent, but we

carry it on still—working with divine assistance. God works _in_

man, but not _instead_ of man. It is one thing to harmonize, in some

measure, the human will with the divine, another to substitute

divine volitions for the human. Every man has within him

Conscience—the judge often bribed or clamoured down; Will—the

marshal; Imagination—the poet; Understanding—the student; Desire—the

merchant, venturing its store of affection, and gazing out on the

future in search of some home-bound argosy of happiness. But all

these powers are found untrue to their allegiance. The ermine—the

baton—the song—the books—the merchandize, are at the service of a

usurper—Sin. When the Spirit renews the mind, there is no

massacre—no slaughterous sword filling with death the streets of the

soul’s city, and making man the ruin of his former self. These

faculties are restored to loyalty, and reinstated under God. Then

Conscience gives verdict, for the most part, according to the divine

statute-book, and is habitually obeyed. Then the lordly Will assumes

again a lowly yet noble vassalage. Then the dream of Imagination is

a dream no longer, for the reality of heaven transcends it. Then the

Understanding burns the magic books in the market-place, and breaks

the wand of its curious arts—but studies still, for eternity as well

as time. The activity of Desire amasses still, according to its

nature,—for _some_ treasure man must have. But the treasure is on

earth no longer. It is the advantage of such a religion that the

very same laws of our being guide our spiritual and our natural

life. The same self-controul and watchful diligence which built up

the worldly habits towards the summits of success, may be applied at

once to those habits which ripen us for heaven. The old experience

will serve. But the mystic can find no common point between himself

and other men. He is cut off from them, for he believes he has

another constitution of being, inconceivable by them—not merely

other tastes and a higher aim. The _object_ of Christian love may be

incomprehensible, but the affection itself is not so. It is

dangerous to represent it as a mysterious and almost unaccountable

sentiment, which finds no parallel in our experience elsewhere. Our

faith in Christ, as well as our love to Christ, are similar to our

faith and love as exercised towards our fellow-creatures.

Regeneration imparts no new faculty, it gives only a new direction

to the old.

X.

Quietism opposed to the mercenary religion of the common and

consistent Romanism around it, the doctrine of disinterested love.

Revolting from the coarse machinery of a corrupt system, it took

refuge in an unnatural refinement. The love inculcated in Scripture

is equally remote from the impracticable indifference of Quietism

and the commercial principle of Superstition. Long ago, at

Alexandria, Philo endeavoured to escape from an effete and carnal

Judaism to a similar elevation. The Persian Sufis were animated with

the same ambition in reaction against the frigid legalism of the

creed of Islam. Extreme was opposed to extreme, in like manner, when

Quietism, disgusted with the unblushing inconsistencies of nominal

Christianity, proclaimed its doctrine of _perfection_—of complete

sanctification by faith. This is not a principle peculiar to

mysticism. It is of little practical importance. It is difficult to

see how it can be applied to individual experience. The man who has

reached such a state of purity must be the last to know it. If we do

not, by some strange confusion of thought, identify ourselves with

God, the nearer we approach Him the more profoundly must we be

conscious of our distance. As, in a still water, we may see

reflected the bird that sings in an overhanging tree, and the bird

that soars towards the zenith—the image deepest as the ascent is

highest—so it is with our approximation to the Infinite Holiness.

Madame Guyon admits that she found it necessary jealously to guard

humility, to watch and pray—that her state was only of

‘_comparative_ immutability.’ It appears to us that perfection is

prescribed as a goal ever to be approached, but ever practically

inaccessible. Whatever degree of sanctification any one may have

attained, it must always be possible to conceive of a state yet more

advanced,—it must always be a duty diligently to labour towards it.

Quietist as she was, few lives have been more busy than that of

Madame Guyon with the activities of an indefatigable benevolence. It

was only self-originated action which she strove to annihilate. In

her case, especially, Quietism contained a reformatory principle.

Genuflexions and crossings were of little value in comparison with

inward abasement and crucifixion. The prayers repeated by rote in

the oratory, were immeasurably inferior to that Prayer of Silence

she so strongly commends—that prayer which, unlimited to times and

seasons, unhindered by words, is a state rather than an act, a

sentiment rather than a request,—a continuous sense of submission,

which breathes, moment by moment, from the serene depth of the soul,

‘Thy will be done.’[331]

As contrasted with the mysticism of St. Theresa, that of Madame

Guyon appears to great advantage. She guards her readers against

attempting to form any image of God. She aspires to an intellectual

elevation—a spiritual intuition, above the sensuous region of

theurgy, of visions, and of dreams. She saw no Jesuits in heaven

bearing white banners among the heavenly throng of the redeemed. She

beheld no Devil, ‘like a little negro,’ sitting on her breviary. She

did not see the Saviour in an ecstasy, drawing the nail out of His

hand. She felt no large white dove fluttering above her head. But

she did not spend her days in founding convents—a slave to the

interests of the clergy. So they made a saint of Theresa, and a

confessor of Madame Guyon.

XI.

In the summer of 1681, Madame Guyon, now thirty-four years of age,

quitted Paris for Gex, a town lying at the foot of the Jura, about

twelve miles from Geneva. It was arranged that she should take some

part in the foundation and management of a new religious and

charitable institution there. A period of five years was destined to

elapse before her return to the capital. During this interval, she

resided successively at Gex, Thonon, Turin, and Grenoble. Wherever

she went, she was indefatigable in works of charity, and also in the

diffusion of her peculiar doctrines concerning self-abandonment and

disinterested love. Strong in the persuasion of her mission, she

could not rest without endeavouring to influence the minds around

her. The singular charm of her conversation won a speedy ascendency

over nearly all with whom she came in contact. It is easy to see how

a remarkable natural gift in this direction contributed both to the

attempt and the success. But the Quietest had buried nature, and to

nature she would owe nothing,—these conversational powers could be,

in her eyes, only a special gift of utterance from above. This

mistake reminds us of the story of certain monks upon whose cloister

garden the snow never lay, though all the country round was buried

in the rigour of a northern winter. The marvellous exemption, long

attributed by superstition to miracle, was discovered to arise

simply from certain thermal springs which had their source within

the sacred inclosure. It is thus that the warmth and vivacity of

natural temperament has been commonly regarded by the mystic, as

nothing less than a fiery impartation from the altar of the

celestial temple.

At Thonon her apartment was visited by a succession of applicants

from every class, who laid bare their hearts before her, and sought

from her lips spiritual guidance or consolation. She met them

separately and in groups, for conference and for prayer. At

Grenoble, she says she was for some time engaged from six o’clock in

the morning till eight at evening in speaking of God to all sorts of

persons,—‘friars, priests, men of the world, maids, wives, widows,

all came, one after another, to hear what I had to say.’[332] Her

efforts among the members of the House of the Novitiates in that

city, were eminently successful, and she appears to have been of

real service to many who had sought peace in vain, by the

austerities and the routine of monastic seclusion. Meanwhile, she

was active, both at Thonon and Grenoble, in the establishment of

hospitals. She carried on a large and continually increasing

correspondence. In the former place she wrote her _Torrents_, in the

latter, she published her _Short Method of Prayer_, and commenced

her _Commentaries on the Bible_.[333]

But alas! all this earnest, tireless toil is unauthorized. Bigotry

takes the alarm, and cries the Church is in danger. Priests who were

asleep—priests who were place-hunting—priests who were

pleasure-hunting, awoke from their doze, or drew breath in their

chase, to observe this woman whose life rebuked them—to observe and

to assail her; for rebuke, in their terminology, was scandal.

Persecution hemmed her in on every side; no annoyance was too petty,

no calumny too gross, for priestly jealousy. The inmates of the

religious community she had enriched were taught to insult

her—tricks were devised to frighten her by horrible appearances and

unearthly noises—her windows were broken—her letters were

intercepted. Thus, before a year had elapsed, she was driven from

Gex. Some called her a sorceress; others, more malignant yet,

stigmatized her as half a Protestant. She had indeed recommended the

reading of the Scriptures to all, and spoken slightingly of mere

bowing and bead-counting. Monstrous contumacy—said, with one voice,

spiritual slaves and spiritual slave-owners—that a woman desired by

her bishop to do one thing, should discover an inward call to do

another. At Thonon the priests burnt in the public square all the

books they could find treating of the inner life, and went home

elated with their performance. One thought may have embittered their

triumph—had it only been living flesh instead of mere paper! She

inhabited a poor cottage that stood by itself in the fields, at some

distance from Thonon. Attached to it was a little garden, in the

management of which she took pleasure. One night a rabble from the

town were incited to terrify her with their drunken riot,—they

trampled down and laid waste the garden, hurled stones in at the

windows, and shouted their threats, insults, and curses, round the

house the whole night. Then came an episcopal order to quit the

diocese. When compelled subsequently, by the opposition she

encountered, to withdraw secretly from Grenoble, she was advised to

take refuge at Marseilles. She arrived in that city at ten o’clock

in the morning, but that very afternoon all was in uproar against

her, so vigilant and implacable were her enemies.

Note to page 214.

_Autobiography_, chapp. viii. and x. In describing her state of mind at

this time, she says,—‘This immersion in God immerged all things. I could

no more see the saints, nor even the blessed Virgin, out of God; but I

beheld them all in Him. And though I tenderly loved certain saints, as

St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Mary Magdalen, St. Theresa, with all those who

were spiritual, yet I could not form to myself images of them, nor

invoke any of them out of God.’ Here a genuine religious fervour,

described in the language of mystical theology, has overcome

superstition, and placed her, unconsciously, in a position similar to

that of Molinos with regard to these professedly subordinate objects of

Romanist worship. It may be observed, in passing, that while Rome

pretends to subordinate saint-worship, she denounces those of her

children who really do so, as heretical, _i.e._, reformatory, in their

tendency.

Madame Guyon was enabled at this period to enjoy a habitual inward

prayer,—‘a prayer of rejoicing and possession, wherein the taste of God

was so great, so pure, unblended, and uninterrupted, that it drew and

absorbed the powers of the soul into a profound recollection, without

act or discourse. For I had now no sight but of Jesus Christ alone. All

else was excluded, in order to love with the greater extent, without any

selfish motives or reasons for loving.’ With much good sense, she

declares this continual and immediate sense of the Divine presence far

safer and higher than the sensible relish of ecstasies and

ravishments,—than distinct interior words or revelations of things to

come,—so often imaginary, so apt to divert our desires from the Giver to

the gifts;—this is the revelation of Jesus Christ, which makes us new

creatures, the manifestation of the Word within us, who cannot

deceive,—the life of true and naked faith, which darkens all

self-pleasing lights, and reveals the minutest faults, that pure love

may reign in the centre of the soul. Thus, while inheriting the

phraseology of the mystics (and we discern in these accounts of her

early experience the influence of her later readings in mystical

theology), she is less sensuous than Theresa, less artificial than John.

Like the latter, she assigns to love the office of annihilating the

will, to faith that of absorbing the understanding, ‘so as to make it

decline all reasonings, all particular brightnesses and illustrations.’

The Annihilation of the Will, or the Union in the Will of God, consists,

with her, simply in a state of complete docility, the soul yielding

itself up to be emptied of all which is its own, till it finds itself by

little and little detached from every self-originated motion, and placed

‘in a holy indifference for willing;—wishing nothing but what God does

and wills.’—P. 70.

Note to page 218.

She describes herself, when at Thonon, as causing sundry devils to

withdraw with a word. But the said devils, like some other sights

and sounds which terrified her there, were probably the contrivance

of the monks who persecuted her, with whom expertness in such tricks

was doubtless reckoned among the accomplishments of sanctity. When

at the same place (she was then a little past thirty), Madame Guyon

believed that a certain virtue was vouchsafed her—a gift of

spiritual and sometimes of bodily healing, dependent, however, for

its successful operation, on the degree of susceptibility in the

recipients.—_Autobiography_, part II. c. xii.

There also she underwent some of her most painful and mysterious

experiences with regard to Father La Combe. She says,—‘Our Lord gave me,

with the weaknesses of a child, such a power over souls, that with a

word I put them in pain or in peace, as was necessary for their good. I

saw that God made Himself to be obeyed, in and through me, like an

absolute Sovereign. I neither resisted Him nor took part in anything....

Our Lord had given us both (herself and La Combe) to understand that He

would unite us by faith and by the cross. Ours, then, has been a union

of the cross in every respect, as well as by what I have made him

suffer, as by what I have suffered for him.... The sufferings which I

have had on his account were such as to reduce me sometimes to

extremity, which continued for several years. For though I have been

much more of my time far from him than near him, that did not relieve my

suffering, which continued till he was perfectly emptied of himself, and

to the very point of submission which God required of him.... He hath

occasioned me cruel pains when I was near a hundred leagues from him. I

felt his disposition. If he was faithful in letting SELF be destroyed, I

was in a state of peace and enlargement. If he was unfaithful in

reflection or hesitation, I suffered till that was passed over. He had

no need to write me an account of his condition, for I knew it; but when

he did write, it proved to be such as I had felt it.’—_Ibid._ p. 51.

She says that frequently, when Father La Combe came to confess her, she

could not speak a word to him; she felt take place within her the same

silence toward him, which she had experienced in regard to God. I

understood, she adds, that God wished to teach me that the language of

angels might be learnt by men on earth,—that is, converse without words.

She was gradually reduced to this wordless communication alone, in her

interviews with La Combe; and they imagined that they understood each

other, ‘in a manner ineffable and divine.’ She regarded the use of

speech, or of the pen, as a kind of accommodation on her part to the

weakness of souls not sufficiently advanced for these internal

communications.

Here Madame Guyon anticipates the Quakers. Compare Barclay’s _Apology_,

Prop. xi. §§ 6, 7.

Shortly after her arrival in Paris, she describes herself as favoured,

from the plenitude which filled her soul, with ‘a discharge on her

best-disposed children to their mutual joy and comfort, and not only

when present, but sometimes when absent.’ ‘I even felt it,’ she adds,

‘to flow from me into their souls. When they wrote to me, they informed

me that at such times they had received abundant infusions of divine

grace.’—_Ibid._ part III. c. i.

Note to page 223.

_Autobiography_, part I. c. xiii. Here Madame Guyon has found confessors

blind guides, and confessions profitless; and furthermore, she is

encouraged and instructed in the inward life by a despised layman. There

is every reason to believe that the experience of Madame Guyon, and the

doctrines of the beggar, were shared to some extent by many more. Madame

Guyon speaks as Theresa does of the internal pains of the soul as

equivalent to those of purgatory. (c. xi.) The teaching of the quondam

mendicant concerning an internal and present instead of a future

purgatory, was not in itself contrary to the declarations of orthodox

mysticism. But many were beginning to seek in this perfectionist

doctrine a refuge from the exactions of the priesthood. With creatures

of the clergy like Theresa, or with monks like John of the Cross, such a

tenet would be retained within the limits required by the ecclesiastical

interest. It might stimulate religious zeal—it would never intercept

religious obedience. But it was not always so among the people—it was

not so with many of the followers of Molinos. The jealous vigilance of

priestcraft saw that it had everything to fear from a current belief

among the laity, that a state of spiritual perfection, rendering

purgatory needless, was of possible attainment—might be reached by

secret self-sacrifice, in the use of very simple means. If such a notion

prevailed, the lucrative traffic of indulgences might totter on the

verge of bankruptcy. No devotee would impoverish himself to buy

exemption hereafter from a purifying process which he believed himself

now experiencing, in the hourly sorrows he patiently endured. It was at

least possible—it had been known to happen, that the soul which

struggled to escape itself—to rise beyond the gifts of God, to God—to

ascend, beyond words and means, to repose in Him,—which desired only the

Divine will, feared only the Divine displeasure,—which sought to ignore

so utterly its own capacity and power, might come to attach paramount

importance no longer to the powers of the priesthood and the ritual of

the Church. Those aspirations which had been the boast of Rome in the

few, became her terror in the many. The Quietest might believe himself

sincere in orthodoxy, might choose him a director, and might reverence

the sacraments. But such abasement and such ambition—distress so deep,

and aims so lofty—would often prove alike beyond the reach of the

ordinary confessional. The oily syllables of absolution would drop in

vain upon the troubled waves of a nature thus stirred to its inmost

depths. And if it could receive peace only from the very hand of God,

priestly mediation must begin with shame to take a lower place. The

value of relics and of masses, of penances and paternosters, would

everywhere fall. An absolute indifference to self-interest would induce

indifference also to those priestly baits by which that self-interest

was allured. Such were the presentiments which urged the Jesuits of Rome

to hunt down Molinos, with all the implacability of fear. The craft was

in danger. _Hinc illæ lachrymæ._

Note to page 224.

See the _Life and Religious Opinions and Experience of Madame de la

Mothe Guyon_, &c., by Thomas C. Upham (New York, 1851); vol. i. p. 153.

Mr. Upham, in this and in some other parts of his excellent biography,

appears to me to have fallen into the same error with Madame Guyon. He

perceives her mistake in regarding the absence of joy as evidence of the

absence of the divine favour. But he contrasts the state in which we are

conscious of alacrity and joy in religion—as one in which we still live

comparatively by _sight_, with that condition of privation in which all

such enjoyment is withdrawn—a state wherein we are called to live, not

by sight, but by pure and naked _faith_. Now, faith and sight are not

thus opposed in Scripture. In the New Testament, faith is always

practical belief in what God has revealed; and sight, as the opposite

course of life, always so much unbelief—undue dependence on things seen

and temporal. It is quite true that too much stress should not be laid

by us on the intensity or the displays of mere emotion,—since religion

is a principle rather than a sentiment. But not a few have been nursed

in dangerous delusion by supposing that when they feel within them

scarce a trace of any of those desires or dispositions proper to every

Christian heart—when they have no glimpse of what they incorrectly term

‘sight’—then is the time to exercise what they suppose to be faith,—that

is, to work themselves up to the obstinate persuasion that they

personally are still the children of God.

It may well be questioned, moreover, whether we have any scriptural

ground for believing that it is usual with the Almighty, for the growth

of our sanctification, to withdraw Himself,—the only source of it. To

these supposed hidings of His face Madame Guyon, and every Quietist,

would patiently submit, as to the sovereign and inscrutable caprice of

the divine Bridegroom of the soul. Rather should we regard such

obscurations as originating with ourselves and not with Him, and at once

make the lost sense of His gracious nearness the object of humble and

earnest search. ‘Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation!’

Madame Guyon describes her ‘state of total privation’ in the

twenty-first chapter of the _Autobiography_, part I.

Footnote 315:

See the first six chapters of her _Autobiography_. This life was

published posthumously at Cologne, in 1720. I have used an anonymous

English translation, published at Bristol, in 1772.

Footnote 316:

See Note on p. 238.

Footnote 317:

_Autobiography_, chap. x.

Footnote 318:

_Autobiography_, chap. xii. p. 87.

Footnote 319:

See second Note on p. 238.

Footnote 320:

Görres, _Die Christliche Mystik_, b. IV. c. i.

Footnote 321:

Görres, _Die Christliche Mystik_, pp. 70-73.

Footnote 322:

Specimens of the language may be seen in Görres, p. 152.

Footnote 323:

Görres, _Die Christliche Mystik_, pp. 465, &c.

Footnote 324:

_Ibid._ pp. 532, &c.

Footnote 325:

See Note on p. 239.

Footnote 326:

_Autobiography_, part I. c. xv.

Footnote 327:

See Note on p. 240.

Footnote 328:

_Autobiography_, part I. c. xxviii. p. 163.

Footnote 329:

This spontaneity she likens to a fountain, as compared with a pump;

love in the heart prompts every issue of life: outward occasions and

stimulants are no longer awaited; and a glad inward readiness gives

facility in every duty, patience under every trial. Such also is the

teaching of Fénélon here—the genuine doctrine of spiritual life. But

the enemies of Quietism were not slow to represent this ‘practising

the virtues no longer as virtues,’ as a dangerous pretence for evading

the obligations of virtue altogether.

Footnote 330:

Upham, vol. I. pp. 262, 263.

Footnote 331:

This Prayer of Silence became hers at an early period in her religious

career, not as the result of direct effort in pursuance of a theory,

but simply as the consequence of overpowering emotion. She says, ‘I

had a secret desire given me from that time to be wholly devoted to

the disposal of my God, let it be what it would. I said, ‘What couldst

Thou demand of me, that I would not willingly sacrifice or offer Thee?

Oh, spare me not.’ I could scarce hear speak of God, or our Lord Jesus

Christ, without being almost ravished out of myself. What surprised me

the most, was the great difficulty I had to say the vocal prayers I

had been used to say. As soon as I opened my lips to pronounce them,

the love of God seized me so strongly that I was swallowed up in a

profound silence, and a peace not to be expressed. I made fresh

essays, but still in vain. I began, but could not go on. And as I had

never before heard of such a state, I knew not what to do. My

inability therein still increased, because my love to God was still

growing more strong, more violent, and more overpowering. There was

made in me, without the sound of words, a continual prayer, which

seemed to me to be the prayer of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself; a

prayer of the Word, which is made by the Spirit, which, according to

St. Paul, ‘asketh for us that which is good, perfect, and conformable

to the will of God.’—_Autobiography_, part I. c. xiii.

Here we find genuine devout fervour, emancipating itself, very

naturally in private, from allotted forms of prayer; but no mysticism,

till we come to the last sentence—even that, admitting a favourable

explanation.

Footnote 332:

_Autobiography_, part II. c. xvii. ‘God supplied me,’ she adds, ‘with

what was pertinent and satisfactory to them all, after a wonderful

manner, without any share of my study or meditation therein. Nothing

was hid from me of their interior state, and of what passed within

them. Here, O my God! thou madest an infinite number of conquests,

known to Thyself only. They were instantly furnished with a wonderful

facility of prayer. God conferred on them His grace plentifully, and

wrought marvellous changes in them. The most advanced of these souls

found, when with me, in silence, a grace communicated to them, which

they could neither comprehend nor cease to admire. The others found an

unction in my words, and that they operated in them what I said to

them. They said they had never experienced anything like it. Friars of

different orders, and priests of merit, came to see me, to whom our

Lord granted very great favours, as indeed he did to all without

exception, who came in sincerity. One thing was surprising, and that

was, that I had not a word to say to such as came only to watch my

words and to criticise them. Even when I thought to try to speak to

them, I felt that I could not, and that God would not have me do

it.... I felt that what I spoke flowed from the fountain, and that I

was only the instrument of Him who made me speak.’—P. 86.

Footnote 333:

The little book to which she gave the name of _The Torrents_, was

written, she tells us, at the suggestion of La Combe. When she took up

her pen she knew not what she was to say, but soon came thoughts and

words abundantly—as, indeed, they were sure to do. She compares the

different kinds of spiritual progress to the mountain streams she had

seen hurrying down the sides of the Alps. She describes the varieties

in the gravitation of devout souls toward God—the ocean which they

seek. Some proceed slowly, by means of meditations, austerities, and

works of charity,—dependent mostly on outward appliances,—deficient in

spontaneity and ardour,—little exercised by inward experience. Another

class flow in a fuller stream,—grow into laden rivers—haste with more

strength and speed; but these are apt to dwell, with too much

complacence, on those rich gifts for which they are conspicuous. A

third order (and to these she herself belonged) dash out from the

poverty of the rocks, impetuous, leaping over every obstacle,

unburdened by wealthy freightage, inglorious in the eyes of men, but

simple, naked, self-emptied, with resistless eagerness foaming up out

of abysmal chasms that seemed to swallow them, and finding, soonest of

all, that Sea divine, wherein all rivers rest.

Her commentaries on Scripture were written with extraordinary

rapidity. The fact that she consulted no book except the Bible in

their composition must doubtless have contributed to their speed:

certainly not, as she fancied, to their excellence. No writers are so

diffuse as the mystics, because no others have written so fast,

imagining headlong haste an attribute of inspiration. The transcriber

could not copy in five days what she had written in one night. We may

conjecture that the man must have been paid by the day. The commentary

on the Canticles was written in a day and a half, and several visits

received beside.—_Autobiography_, part II. c. xxi.

CHAPTER II.

O Mensch wiltu geimpffet werdn,

Und sein versetzt in d’himlisch erdn!

So mustu vor dein ästen wilt,

Gantz hawen ab, das früchte milt

Fürkommen nach Gotts ebenbildt.[334]

HYMN OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.

_Part II.—The Quietist Controversy._

I.

In the year 1686, Madame Guyon returned to Paris, and entered the

head-quarters of persecution. Rumours reached her, doubtless, from

beyond the Alps, of cruel measures taken against opinions similar to

her own, which had spread rapidly in Italy. But she knew not that

all these severities originated with Louis XIV. and his Jesuit

advisers,—that her king, while revoking the Edict of Nantes, and

dispatching his dragoons to extirpate Protestantism in France, was

sending orders to D’Estrées, his ambassador at Rome, to pursue with

the utmost rigour Italian Quietism—and that the monarch, who shone

and smiled at Marly and Versailles, was crowding with victims the

dungeons of the Roman Inquisition.

The leader of Quietism in Italy was one Michael de Molinos, a

Spaniard, a man of blameless life, of eminent and comparatively

enlightened piety. His book, entitled _The Spiritual Guide_, was

published in 1675, sanctioned by five famous doctors, four of them

Inquisitors, and one a Jesuit, and passed, within six years, through

twenty editions in different languages. His real doctrine was

probably identical in substance with that of Madame Guyon.[335] It

was openly favoured by many nobles and ecclesiastics of

distinguished rank; by D’Etrees among the rest. Molinos had

apartments assigned him in the Vatican, and was held in high esteem

by Infallibility itself. But the Inquisition and the Jesuits,

supported by all the influence of France, were sure of their game.

The audacity of the Inquisitors went so far as to send a deputation

to examine the orthodoxy of the man called Innocent XI.; for even

the tiara was not to shield the patron of Molinos from suspicions of

heresy. The courtier-cardinal D’Etrees found new light in the

missives of his master. He stood committed to Quietism. He had not

only embraced the opinions of Molinos, but had translated into

Italian the book of Malaval, a French Quietist, far more extreme

than Molinos himself.[336] Yet he became, at a moment’s notice, the

accuser of his friend. He produced the letter of Louis rebuking the

faithless sloth of the pontiff who could entertain a heretic in his

palace, while he, the eldest son of the Church, toiled incessantly

to root out heresy from the soil of France. He read before the

Inquisitorial Tribunal extracts from the papers of Molinos. He

protested that he had seemed to receive, in order at the proper

juncture more effectually to expose, these abominable mysteries. If

these professions were false, D’Etrees was a heretic; if true, a

villain. The Inquisitors, of course, deemed his testimony too

valuable to be refused. In the eyes of such men, the enormous crime

which he pretended was natural, familiar, praiseworthy. Depths of

baseness beyond the reach of ordinary iniquity, are heights of

virtue with the followers of Dominic and Loyola. Guilt, which even a

bad man would account a blot upon his life, becomes, in the annals

of their zeal, a star. The Spanish Inquisitor-General, Valdes, who

raised to the highest pitch his repute for sanctity, secured the

objects of his ambition, averted the dangers which threatened him,

and preserved his ill-gotten wealth from the grasp of the crown,

simply by his activity as a persecutor, made a practice of sending

spies to mix (under pretence of being converts or inquirers) among

the suspected Lutherans of Valladolid and Seville. Desmarets de St.

Sorlin denounced, and caused to be burnt, a poor harmless madman,

named Morin, who fancied himself the Holy Ghost. Counselled by the

Jesuit confessor of Louis, Father Canard, he pretended to become his

disciple, and then betrayed him. This Desmarets, be it remembered,

had written a book called _Les Délices de l’Esprit_, happily

characterised by a French wit, when he proposed for _délices_ to

read _délires_. Those immoral consequences which the enemies of

Madame Guyon professed to discern in her writings are drawn openly

in the sensual and blasphemous phraseology of this religious

extravaganza. But because Desmarets was a useful man to the

Jesuits—because he had drawn away some of the nuns of the Port

Royal—because he had given the flames a victim—because he was

protected by Canard,—the same Archbishop of Paris who imprisoned

Madame Guyon, honoured with his sanction the ravings of the

licentious visionary.[337] So little had any sincere dread of

spiritual extravagance to do with the hostility concentrated on the

disciples of Quietism. The greater portion of the priesthood feared

only lest men should learn to become religious on their own account.

The leaders of the movement against Madame Guyon were animated by an

additional motive. They knew they should delight his Most Christian

Majesty by affording him another opportunity of manifesting his zeal

for orthodoxy; and they wished to strike at the reputation of

Fénélon through Madame Guyon. The fate of Molinos decided hers, and

hers that of the Archbishop of Cambray.

The only crime brought home to the followers of Molinos was a

preference for the religion of the heart to that of the rosary; the

substitution of a devout retirement for the observance of certain

superstitious forms and seasons. His condemnation was determined.

After an imprisonment of two years he was exhibited in the Temple of

Minerva, his hands bound, and a lighted taper between them. A

plenary indulgence was granted to all who should be present; a vast

concourse listened to the sentence; hired voices cried, ‘To the

fire! to the fire!’ the mob was stirred to a frenzy of fanaticism.

His last gaze upon the world beheld a sea of infuriate faces, the

pomp of his triumphant adversaries,—then to the gloom and solitude

of the dungeon in which he was to languish till death bestowed

release.[338]

II.

At Paris, Madame Guyon became the centre of a small but illustrious

circle, who listened with delight to her exposition of that Quietism

to which the tender earnestness of her language, and her manner lent

so indescribable a charm. There were the Duke and Duchess of

Beauvilliers, the Duke and Duchess of Chevreuse, the Duchess of

Bethune, and the Countess of Guiche. The daughters of Colbert and of

Fouquet forgot the long enmity of their fathers in a religious

friendship, whose tie was yet more closely drawn by their common

admiration for Madame Guyon.[339] But letters filled with complaints

against La Combe and Madame Guyon poured in upon Harlay, Archbishop

of Paris.[340] He procured the arrest of La Combe, who spent the

remainder of his days in various prisons. A little calumny and a

forged letter obtained from the king a _lettre de cachet_ confining

Madame Guyon to an apartment in the Convent of St. Marie. The

sisters were strongly prejudiced against her, but her gentle

patience won all hearts, and her fair jailors soon vied with each

other in praises of their fascinating prisoner. An examination

elicited nothing decidedly unfavourable. Not a stain could be

detected in her character; she offered to submit all her papers and

her writings to investigation. The intercession of Madame Miramion

and other friends with Madame de Maintenon, procured her release,

after a captivity of eight months.

The most dangerous enemy Madame Guyon had as yet was her own

half-brother, Père La Mothe. He had calumniated her in secret while

in Switzerland; he was still more active now she was in Paris. He

wished to become her Director, but La Combe was in the way. The

artifices of La Mothe procured his arrest. He advised Madame Guyon,

with hypocritical protestations of friendship, to flee to Montargis

from the scandalous reports he himself had circulated, and from

adversaries he himself had raised up. Then she would have been at

his mercy—he would have pointed to her flight as a proof of guilt,

and her own property and the guardianship of her children might have

been secured for himself. He injured her as a relation only could.

People said her cause must be a bad one, since her own brother was

constrained, from regard to the credit of religion, to bear witness

against her. A woman who had committed sacrilege at Lyons, and had

run away from the Convent of Penitents at Dijon, was employed by him

to forge letters which should damage the character of Madame Guyon;

to personate one of her maids, and to go from confessor to confessor

throughout Paris, asserting that after living sixteen or seventeen

years with her mistress, she had quitted her at last, in disgust at

her abominable life.

III.

Released from the Convent of St. Marie, Madame Guyon was conducted

by her court friends to express her thanks to Madame de Maintenon at

St. Cyr. This institution had been founded, ten years previously,

for the education of the daughters of noble but impoverished

families. The idea originated with Madame de Maintenon: it was

executed with royal speed and magnificence by Louis, and St. Cyr

became her favourite resort. In fifteen months two thousand six

hundred workmen raised the structure, on a marshy soil, about half a

league from Paris. The genius of Mansart presided over the

architecture. The style of the ordinances was revised by Boileau and

Racine. There three hundred young ladies of rank, dressed in gowns

of brown crape, with white quilted caps, tied with ribbons whose

colour indicated the class to which they belonged in the school,

studied geography and drawing, heard mass, sang in the choir, and

listened to preachments from the lips of Madame Brinon—who

discoursed, so swore some of the courtiers, as eloquently as

Bourdaloue himself. Tired out with the formal splendours of

Versailles, Madame de Maintenon was never so happy as when playing

the part of lady abbess at St. Cyr. Often she would be there by six

in the morning, would herself assist at the toilette of the pupils,

would take a class throughout the day, would give the novices

lessons on spiritual experience; nothing in its routine was dull,

nothing in its kitchen was mean. She hated Fontainebleau, for it

tore her from her family at St. Cyr. For the private theatricals of

St. Cyr, Racine wrote _Esther_, at the request of Madame de

Maintenon. Happy was the courtier who could obtain permission to

witness one of these representations, who could tell with triumph to

envious groups of the excluded, what an admirable Ahasuerus Madame

de Caylus made, what a spirited Mordecai was Mademoiselle de

Glapion, how the graceful Mademoiselle de Veillenne charmed the

audience in the prayer of Esther—in short, how far the Esther

surpassed the Phedra; and the actresses excelled the Raisins and the

Chammelés of the Parisian boards. Louis himself drew up the list of

admissions, as though it were for a journey to Marly—he was the

first to enter—and stood at the door, with the catalogue of names in

one hand and his cane held across as a barrier in the other, till

all the privileged had entered.[341] But the fashion of asceticism

which grew with every year of Maintenon’s reign threw its gloom over

St. Cyr. The absolute vows were introduced, and much of the

monotonous austerity of conventual life. Religious excitement was

the only resource left to the inmates if they would not die of

ennui. This relief was brought them by Madame Guyon.

Madame de Maintenon was touched with pity for the misfortunes of

Madame Guyon, with admiration for such patience, such forgetfulness

of self,—she found in the freshness and fervour of her religious

conversation, a charm which recalled the warmer feelings of youth;

which was welcome, for its elevation, after the fatigue and anxiety

of state, for its sweetness, as contrasted with the barren minutiæ

of rigid formalism. She invited her constantly to her table—she

encouraged her visits to St. Cyr—she met with her, and with Fénélon,

at the Hôtels de Chevreuse and Beauvilliers, where a religious

coterie assembled three times a week to discuss the mysteries of

inward experience. Thus, during three or four years of favour with

Madame de Maintenon, Madame Guyon became in effect the spiritual

instructress of St. Cyr, and found herself at Paris surrounded by

disciples whose numbers daily increased, and whom she withdrew from

the licentious gaieties of the capital. At St. Cyr the young ladies

studied her books, and listened to her as an oracle—the thoughtless

grew serious—the religious strained every faculty to imitate the

attainments of one in whom they saw the ideal of devotion. In Paris,

mystical terminology became the fashionable language—it was caught

up and glibly uttered by wits and roués—it melted from the lips of

beauties who shot languishing glances at their admirers, while they

affected to be weary of the world, and who coquetted while they

talked significantly of holy indifference or pure love. Libertines,

like Treville, professed reform, and wrote about mysticism,—atheists

turned Christians, like Corbinelli, now became Quietists, and might

be seen in the salon of Madame le Maigre, where Corbinelli shone,

the brilliant expositor of the new religious romanticism.[342]

IV.

During this period, Madame Guyon became acquainted with Fénélon. At

their first interview she was all admiration, he all distrust. ‘Her

mind,’ she says, ‘had been taken up with him with much force and

sweetness;’ it seemed to be revealed to her that he should become

one of her spiritual children. Fénélon, on his part, thought she had

neglected her duty to her family for an imaginary mission. But he

had inquired concerning her life at Montargis, and heard only

praise. After a few conversations his doubts vanished: he had

proposed objections, requested explanations, pointed out unguarded

expressions in her books—she was modest, submissive,

irresistible.[343] There was a power in her language, her manner,

her surviving beauty, which mysteriously dissipated prejudice; which

even Nicole, Bossuet, Boileau, Gaillard, could not withstand when

they conversed with her,—which was only overcome when they had

ceased to behold her face, when her persuasive accents sounded no

longer in their ears. She recalled to the thoughts of Fénélon his

youthful studies at St. Sulpice;—there he had perused the mystical

divines in dusty tomes, clasped and brazen-cornered,—now he beheld

their buried doctrine raised to life in the busy present, animating

the untaught eloquence of a woman, whom a noble enthusiasm alone had

endowed with all the prerogatives of genius, and all the charms of

beauty. This friendship, which events rendered afterwards so

disastrous for himself, was beneficial to Madame Guyon. Fénélon

taught her to moderate some of her spiritual excesses. Her

extravagance reached its culminating point at Thonon. At Paris,

influenced doubtless by Fénélon, as well as by more frequent

intercourse with the world, she no longer enjoys so many picturesque

dreams, no more heals the sick and casts out devils with a word, and

no longer—as in her solitude there—suffers inward anguish consequent

on the particular religious condition of Father La Combe when he is

three hundred miles off.[344] It is curious to observe how the

acquaintance of Fénélon with Madame Guyon began with suspicion and

ripened into friendship, while that of Bossuet, commencing with

approval, and even admiration, ended in calumny and persecution.

Bossuet declared to the Duc de Chevreuse that while examining her

writings, for the first time, he was astonished by a light and

unction he had never before seen, and, for three days, was made to

realize the divine Presence in a manner altogether new. Bossuet had

never, like Fénélon, studied the mystics.[345]

V.

The two most influential Directors at St. Cyr were Godet des Marais,

Bishop of Chartres, and Fénélon. These two men form a striking

contrast. Godet was disgusting in person and in manners—a sour

ascetic—a spiritual martinet—devoted to all the petty austerities of

the most formal discipline. Fénélon was dignified and gentle,

graceful as a courtier, and spotless as a saint—the most pure, the

most persuasive, the most accomplished of religious guides. No

wonder that most of the young inmates of St. Cyr adored Fénélon, and

could not endure Godet. Madame de Maintenon wavered between her two

confessors; if Fénélon was the more agreeable, Godet seemed the more

safe. Godet was miserably jealous of his rival. He was not sorry to

find that the new doctrines had produced a little insubordination

within the quiet walls of St. Cyr—that Fénélon would be compromised

by the indiscretion of some among his youthful admirers. He brought

a lamentable tale to Madame de Maintenon. Madame du Peron, the

mistress of the novices, had complained that her pupils obeyed her

no longer. They neglected regular duties for unseasonable prayers.

They had illuminations and ecstasies. One in the midst of sweeping

her room would stand, leaning on her broom, lost in contemplation:

another, instead of hearing lessons, became inspired, and resigned

herself to the operation of the Spirit. The under-mistress of the

classes stole away the enlightened from the rest, and they were

found in remote corners of the house, feasting in secret on the

sweet poison of Madame Guyon’s doctrine. The precise and methodical

Madame de Maintenon was horrified. She had hoped to realize in her

institute the ideal of her Church, a perfect uniformity of opinion,

an unerring mechanism of obedience. We wished, said she, to promote

intelligence, we have made orators; devotion, we have made

Quietists; modesty, we have made prudes; elevation of sentiment, and

we have pride. She commissioned Godet to reclaim the wanderers, to

demand that the books of Madame Guyon should be surrendered, setting

herself the example by publicly delivering into his hand her own

copy of the _Short Method_. She requested Madame Guyon to refrain

from visiting St. Cyr. She began to doubt the prudence or the

orthodoxy of Fénélon.[346] What would the king say, if he heard of

it—he, who had never liked Fénélon—who hated nothing so much as

heresy—who had but the other day extinguished the Quietism of

Molinos? She had read to him some of Madame Guyon’s exposition of

the Canticles; and he called it dreamy stuff. Doctrines really

dangerous to purity were insinuated by some designing monks, under

the name of Quietism. The odium fell on the innocent Madame Guyon;

and her friends would necessarily share it. Malicious voices charged

her with corrupting the principles of the Parisian ladies. Madame

Guyon replied with justice,—‘When they were patching, and painting,

and ruining their families by gambling and by dress, not a word was

said against it; now that they have withdrawn from such vanities,

the cry is, that I have ruined them.’ Rumour grew more loud and

scandalous every day: the most incredible reports were most

credited. The schools, too, had taken up the question of mysticism,

and argued it with heat. Nicole and Lami had dissolved an ancient

friendship to quarrel about it,—as Fénélon and Bossuet were soon to

do. No controversy threatened to involve so many interests, to fan

so many passions, to kindle so many hatreds, as this variance about

disinterestedness, about indifference, about love.

The politic Madame de Maintenon watched the gathering storm, and

became all caution. At all costs, she must free herself from the

faintest suspicion of fellowship with heresy. She questioned, on the

opinions of Madame Guyon, Bossuet and Noailles, Bourdaloue, Joly,

Tiberge, Brisacier, and Tronson; and the replies of these esteemed

divines, uniformly unfavourable, decided her. It would be necessary

to disown Madame Guyon: her condemnation would become inevitable.

Fénélon must be induced to disown her too, or his career was at a

close; and Madame de Maintenon could smile on him no longer.[347]

Madame Guyon, alarmed by the growing numbers and vehemence of her

adversaries, had recourse to the man who afterwards became her

bitterest enemy. She proposed to Bossuet that he should examine her

writings. He complied; held several private interviews with her, and

expressed himself, on the whole, more favourably than could have

been expected. But these conferences, which did not altogether

satisfy Bossuet, could do nothing to allay the excitement of the

public.[348]

VI.

Madame Guyon now requested the appointment of commissioners, who

should investigate, and pronounce finally concerning her life and

doctrine.[349] Three were chosen—Bossuet; Noailles, Bishop of

Chalons; and Tronson, Superior of St. Sulpice. Noailles was a

sensible, kind-hearted man; Tronson, a worthy creature, in poor

health, with little opinion of his own; Bossuet, the accredited

champion of the Gallican Church, accustomed to move in an atmosphere

of flattery—the august dictator of the ecclesiastical world—was

absolute in their conferences. They met, from time to time, during

some six months, at the little village of Issy, the country

residence of the Superior of St. Sulpice. When Madame Guyon appeared

before them, Bossuet alone was harsh and rude; he put the worst

construction on her words; he interrupted her; now he silenced her

replies, now he burlesqued them; now he affected to be unable to

comprehend them; now he held up his hands in contemptuous amazement

at her ignorance; he would not suffer to be read the justification

which had cost her so much pains; he sent away her friend, the Duke

of Chevreuse. This ominous severity confused and frightened

her.[350] She readily consented to retire to a convent in the town

of Meaux, there to be under the surveillance of Bossuet. She

undertook this journey in the depth of the most frightful winter

which had been known for many years; the coach was buried in the

snow, and she narrowly escaped with life. The commissioners remained

to draw up, by the fireside, certain propositions, which should

determine what was, and what was not, true mysticism. These

constitute the celebrated Articles of Issy.

Bossuet repeatedly visited Madame Guyon at Meaux. The great man did

not disdain to approach the sick-bed of his victim, as she lay in

the last stage of exhaustion, and there endeavour to overreach and

terrify her. He demanded a submission, and promised a favourable

certificate. The submission he received, the certificate he

withheld. He sought to force her, by threats, to sign that she did

not believe in the Incarnation. The more timid she appeared, the

more boisterous and imperative his tone. One day, he would come with

words of kindness, on another, with words of fury; yet, at the very

time, this Pilate could say to some of his brethren, that he found

no serious fault in her. He declared, on one occasion, that he was

actuated by no dislike—he was urged to rigorous measures by others;

on another, that the submission of Madame Guyon, and the suppression

of Quietism, effected by his skill and energy, would be as good as

an archbishopric or a cardinal’s hat to him. Justice and ambition

contended within him; for a little while the battle wavered, till

presently pride and jealousy brought up to the standard of the

latter, reinforcements so overwhelming, that justice was beaten for

ever from the field. After six months’ residence at Meaux, Madame

Guyon received from Bossuet a certificate attesting her filial

submissiveness to the Catholic faith, his satisfaction with her

conduct, authorizing her still to participate in the sacrament of

the Church, and acquitting her of all implication in the heresy of

Molinos.[351]

Meanwhile, Fénélon had been added to the number of the commissioners

at Issy. He and Bossuet were still on intimate terms; but Bossuet,

like all vain men, was a dangerous friend. He knew how to inspire

confidence which he did not scruple to betray. Madame Guyon,

conscious of the purity of her life, of the orthodoxy of her

intention, persuaded that such a man must be superior to the meaner

motives of her persecutors, had placed in the hands of Bossuet her

most private papers, not excluding the _Autobiography_, which had

not been submitted even to the eye of Fénélon. To Bossuet, Fénélon

had, in letters, unfolded his most secret thoughts—the conflicts and

aspirations of his spiritual history, so unbounded was his reliance

on his honour, so exalted his estimate of the judgment of that

powerful mind in matters of religion. The disclosures of both were

distorted and abused to crush them; both had to rue the day when

they trusted one who could sacrifice truth to glory. At Issy, the

deference and the candour of Fénélon were met by a haughty reserve

on the part of Bossuet. The meekness of Fénélon and the timidity of

Madame Guyon only inflamed his arrogance; to bow to him was to be

overborne; to confront him was at once to secure respect, if not

fairness. The Articles were already drawn up when the signature of

Fénélon was requested. He felt that he should have been allowed his

fair share in their construction; as they were, he could not sign

them; he proposed modifications; they were acceded to; and the

thirty-four Articles of Issy appeared in March, 1695, with the name

of Fénélon associated with the other three.[352]

VII.

To any one who reads these Articles, and the letter written by

Fénélon to Madame de la Maisonfort, after signing them, it will be

obvious that the Quietism of Fénélon went within a moderate compass.

When he comes to explain his meaning, the controversy is very much a

dispute about words. He did not, like Madame Guyon, profess to

conduct devout minds by a certain method to the attainment of

perfect disinterestedness. He only maintained the possibility of

realizing a love to God, thus purified from self. He was as fully

aware as his opponents, that to evince our love to God by

willingness to endure perdition, was the same thing as attesting our

devotion to Him by our readiness to hate Him for ever. This is the

standing objection against the doctrine of disinterested love. The

great Nonconformist divine, John Howe, urges it with force. It is

embodied in the thirty-second of the Articles in question. But it

does not touch Fénélon’s position. His assertion is, that we should

will our own salvation only because God wills it; that, supposing it

possible for us to endure hell torments, retaining the grace of God

and our consciousness that such suffering was according to His will,

and conducive to His glory, the soul, animated by pure love, would

embrace even such a doom.[353] It is but the supposition of an

impossible case,—a supposition, moreover, which involves a very

gross and external conception of hell. It could find no place in a

mysticism like that of Behmen or Swedenborg, where hell is regarded,

much more truly, less as an infliction from without, than as the

development of dominant evil from within. The Quietism of Fénélon

does not preclude the reflex actions of the mind, or confine the

spirit of the adept to the sphere of the immediate. It forbids only

the introspection of self-complacency.[354] It does not merge

distinct acts in a continuous operation, nor discourage effort for

self-advancement in holiness, or for the benefit of others—it only

teaches us to moderate that impatience which has its origin in self,

and declares that our own co-operation becomes, in certain cases,

unconscious—is, as it were, lost in a ‘special facility.’[355] The

indefatigable benevolence of his life abundantly repudiates the

slanderous conclusion of his adversaries, that the doctrine of

indifference concerning the future, involves indifference likewise

to moral good and evil in the present. Bossuet himself is often as

mystical as Fénélon, sometimes more so.[356] St. Francis de Sales

and Madame de Chantal said the very same things,—not to mention the

unbridled utterances of the earlier and the mediæval mystics

canonized by the Church of Rome. Could the controversy have been

confined to the real question, no harm would have been done. It

would have resembled the duel, in Ben Jonson’s play, between

Fastidious Brisk and Signor Puntarvolo, where the rapiers cut

through taffeta and lace, gold embroidery and satin doublets, but

nowhere enter the skin. Certain terms and certain syllogisms, a

well-starched theory, or an argument trimmed with the pearls of

eloquence—might have been transfixed or rent by a dexterous pen, on

this side or on that, but the prize of the conqueror would not have

been court favour, nor the penalty of the conquered, exile.

Theologians might have written, for a few, the learned history of a

logical campaign, but the eyes of Europe would never have been

turned to a conflict for fame and fortune raging in the Vatican and

at Versailles, enlisting every religious party throughout

Roman-catholic Christendom, and involving the rise or fall of some

of the most illustrious names among the churchmen and nobility of

France.

VIII.

The writings of Madame Guyon had now been condemned, though without

mention of her name; Bossuet had intimated that he required nothing

further from her; she began to hope that the worst might be over,

and returned with her friends from Meaux to Paris, to live there as

much retired as possible. This flight, which he chose to call

dishonourable, irritated Bossuet. She had suffered him to see that

she could trust him no longer. He endeavoured to recover the

certificate he had given. An order was procured for her arrest. The

police observed that a house in the Faubourg St. Antoine was always

entered by a pass-key. They made their way in, and found Madame

Guyon. They brought away their prisoner, ill as she was, and the

king was induced, with much difficulty, to sign an order for her

incarceration at Vincennes. The despot thought a convent might

suffice,—not so the persecutors.[357]

Bossuet had been for some time occupied in writing a work which

should demolish with a blow the doctrine of Madame Guyon, and hold

her up to general odium. It consisted of ten books, and was entitled

_Instructions on the States of Prayer_. He showed the manuscript to

Fénélon, desiring him to append a statement, approving all it

contained, which should accompany the volume when published. Fénélon

refused. Six months ago he had declared that he could be no party to

a personal attack on Madame Guyon: the _Instructions_ contained

little else. That tremendous attack was no mere exposure of

unguarded expressions—no mere deduction of dangerous consequences,

possibly unforeseen by a half-educated writer; it charged Madame

Guyon with having for her sole design the inculcation of a false

spirituality, which abandoned, as an imperfection, faith in the

divine Persons and the humanity of Christ; which disowned the

authority of Scripture, of tradition, of morality; which dispensed

with vocal prayer and acts of worship; which established an impious

and brutal indifference between vice and virtue, between everlasting

hate of God and everlasting love; which forbade resistance to

temptation as an interruption to repose; which taught an imaginary

perfection extinguishing the nobler desires only to inflame the

lower, and clothing the waywardness of self-will and passion with

the authority of inspiration and of prophecy. Fénélon knew that this

accusation was one mass of falsehood. If Bossuet himself believed

it, why had he suffered such a monster still to commune; why had he

been so faithless to his high office in the Church, as to give his

testimonials declaring the purity of her purpose and the soundness

of her faith, when he had not secured the formal retraction of a

single error? To sign his approval of that book, would be not merely

a cowardly condemnation of a woman whom he knew to be innocent—it

would be the condemnation of himself. His acquaintance with Madame

Guyon was matter of notoriety. It would be to say that he—a student

of theology, a priest, an archbishop, the preceptor of princes—had

not only refrained from denouncing, but had honoured with his

friendship, the teacher of an abominable spiritualism which

abolished the first principles of right and wrong. It would be to

declare, in fact, such a prelate far more guilty than such a

heretic. And Bossuet pretended to be his friend—Bossuet, who had

laid the snare which might have been the triumph of the most

malignant enemy. It was not a mere question of persons—Madame Guyon

might die in prison—he himself might be defamed and disgraced—he did

not mean to become her champion—surely that was enough, knowing what

he knew,—let her enemies be satisfied with his silence—he could not

suffer another man to take his pen out of his hand to denounce as an

emissary of Satan one whom he believed to be a child of God.[358]

Such was Fénélon’s position. He wished to be silent concerning

Madame Guyon. To assent to the charges brought against her would not

have been even a serviceable lie, if such a man could have desired

to escape the wrath of Bossuet at so scandalous a price. Every one

would have said that the Archbishop of Cambray had denounced his

accomplice out of fear. Neither was he prepared to embrace the

opposite extreme and to defend the personal cause of the accused,

many of whose expressions he thought questionable, orthodox as might

be her explanation, and many of whose extravagances he disapproved.

His enemies wished to force him to speak, and were prepared to

damage his reputation whether he appeared for or against the

prisoner at Vincennes. At length it became necessary that he should

break silence; and when he did, it was not to pronounce judgment

concerning the oppressed or her oppressors, it was to investigate

the abstract question,—the teaching of the Church on the doctrine of

pure love. He wrote the _Maxims of the Saints_.

IX.

This celebrated book appeared in January, 1697, while Fénélon was at

Cambray, amazing the Flemings of his diocese by affording them, in

their new archbishop, the spectacle of a church dignitary who really

cared for his flock, who consigned the easier duties to his vicars,

and reserved the hardest for himself; who entered their cottages

like a father, listened with interest to the story of their

hardships or their griefs; who consoled, counselled, and relieved

them; who partook of their black bread as though he had never shared

the banquets of Versailles, and as though Paris were to him, as to

themselves, a wonderful place far away, whose streets were paved

with gold. Madame Guyon was in confinement at the village of

Vaugirard, whither the compassion of Noailles had transferred her

from Vincennes, resigned and peaceful, writing poetry and singing

hymns with her pious servant-girl, the faithful companion of her

misfortunes. Bossuet was visiting St. Cyr—very busy in endeavouring

to purify the theology of the young ladies from all taint of

Quietism—but quite unsuccessful in reconciling Madame de la

Maisonfort to the loss of her beloved Fénélon.

The _Maxims of the Saints_ was an exposition and vindication of the

doctrines of pure love, of mystical union, and of perfection, as

handed down by some of the most illustrious and authoritative names

in the Roman-catholic Church, from Dionysius, Clement, and

Augustine, to John of the Cross and Francis de Sales;—it explained

their terminology;—it placed in juxtaposition with every article of

legitimate mysticism its false correlative—the use and the

abuse;—and was, in fact, though not expressly, a complete

justification (on the principles of his Church) of that moderate

Quietism held by himself, and in substance by Madame Guyon.[359] The

book was approved by Tronson, by Fleury, by Hébert, by Pirot, a

doctor of the Sorbonne, by Père La Chaise, the King’s Confessor, by

the Jesuits of Clermont,—but it was denounced by Bossuet; it was

nicknamed the Bible of the Little Church; Pontchartrain, the

comptroller-general, and Maurice Le Tellier, Archbishop of Reims,

told the King that it was fit only for knaves or fools. Louis sent

for Bossuet. The Bishop of Meaux cast himself theatrically at the

feet of majesty, and, with pretended tears, implored forgiveness for

not earlier revealing the heresy of his unhappy brother. A

compromise was yet possible; for Fénélon was ready to explain his

explanations, and to suppress whatever might be pronounced dangerous

in his pages. But the eagle of Meaux had seen the meek and dove-like

Fénélon—once almost more his disciple than his friend—erect the

standard of independence, and assume the port of a rival. His pride

was roused. He was resolved to reign alone on the ecclesiastical

Olympus of the Court, and he would not hear of a peace that might

rob him of a triumph. Did Fénélon pretend to shelter himself by

great names,—he, Bossuet, would intrench himself within the awful

sanctuary of the Church; he represented religion in France; he would

resent every attack upon his own opinions as an assault on the

Catholic faith; he had the ear of the King, with whom heresy and

treason were identical; success was all but assured, and, if so, war

was glory. Such tactics are not peculiar to the seventeenth century.

In our own day, every one implicated in religious abuses identifies

himself with religion,—brands every exposure of his misconduct as

hostility to the cause of God,—invests his miserable personality

with the benign grandeur of the Gospel,—and stigmatizes as troublers

in Israel all who dare to inquire into his procedure,—while

innumerable dupes or cowards sleepily believe, or cautiously pretend

to do so, that those who have management in a good object must

themselves be good.

X.

Fénélon now requested the royal permission to appeal to Rome; he

obtained it, but was forbidden to repair thither to plead in person

the cause of his book, and ordered to quit the Court and confine

himself to his diocese. The King went to St. Cyr, and expelled

thence three young ladies, for an offence he could not in reality

comprehend,—the sin of Quietism.[360] Intrigue was active, and the

Duke de Beauvilliers was nearly losing his place in the royal

household because of his attachment to Fénélon. The Duke—noble in

spirit as in name, and worthy of such a friendship,—boldly told _Le

Grand Monarque_ that he was ready to leave the palace rather than to

forsake his friend. Six days before the banishment of Fénélon, Louis

had sent to Innocent XII. a letter, drawn up by Bossuet, saying in

effect that the _Maxims_ had been condemned at Paris, that

everything urged in its defence was futile, and that the royal

authority would be exerted to the utmost to execute the decision of

the pontifical chair. Bossuet naturally calculated that a missive,

thus intimating the sentence Infallibility was expected by a great

monarch to pronounce,—arriving almost at the same time with the news

of a disgrace reserved only for the most grave offences,—would

secure the speedy condemnation of Fénélon’s book.

At Rome commenced a series of deliberations destined to extend over

a space of nearly two years. Two successive bodies of adjudicators

were impanelled and dissolved, unable to arrive at a decision. A new

congregation of cardinals was selected, who held scores of long and

wearisome debates, while rumour and intrigue alternately heightened

or depressed the hopes of either party.[361] To write the _Maxims of

the Saints_ was a delicate task. It was not easy to repudiate the

mysticism of Molinos without impugning the mysticism of St. Theresa.

But the position of these judges was more delicate yet. It was still

less easy to censure Fénélon without rendering suspicious, at the

least, the orthodoxy of the most shining saints in the Calendar. On

the one hand, there might be risk of a schism; on the other pressed

the urgency and the influence of a powerful party, the impatience,

almost the menaces of a great king.

The real question was simply this,—Is disinterested love possible?

Can man love God for His own sake alone, with a love, not excluding,

but subordinating all other persons and objects, so that they shall

be regarded only in God who is All in All? If so, is it dangerous to

assert the possibility, to commend this divine ambition, as Fénélon

has done? But the discussion was complicated and inflamed by daily

slander and recrimination, by treachery and insinuation, and by the

honest anger they provoke; by the schemes of personal ambition, by

the rivalry of religious parties, by the political intrigues of the

State, by the political intrigues of the Church; by the interests of

a crew of subaltern agents, who loved to fish in muddy waters; and

by the long cherished animosity between Gallican and Ultramontanist.

Couriers pass and repass continually between Rome and Cambray,

between Rome and Paris. The Abbé Bossuet writes constantly from Rome

to the Bishop of Meaux; the Abbé de Chanterac from the same city to

the Archbishop of Cambray. Chanterac writes like a faithful friend

and a good man; he labours day and night in the cause of Fénélon; he

bids him be of good cheer and put his trust in God. The letters of

the Abbé Bossuet to his uncle are worthy a familiar of the

Inquisition. After circulating calumnies against the character of

Madame Guyon, after hinting that Fénélon was a partaker of her

immoralities as well as of her heresy, and promising, with each

coming post, to produce fresh confessions and new discoveries of the

most revolting licentiousness, he sits down to urge Bossuet to

second his efforts by procuring the banishment of every friend whom

Fénélon yet has at Court; and to secure, by a decisive blow in

Paris, the ruin of that ‘wild beast,’ Fénélon, at Rome. Bossuet lost

no time in acting on the suggestion of so base an instrument.[362]

XI.

At Paris a hot war of letters, pamphlets, and treatises, was

maintained by the leaders, whose quarrel everywhere divided the city

and the court into two hostile encampments. Fénélon offered a

resistance Bossuet had never anticipated, and the veteran polemic

was deeply mortified to see public opinion doubtful, whether he or a

younger rival had won the laurels in argument and eloquence. In an

evil hour for his fame he resolved to crush his antagonist at all

costs; he determined that the laws of honourable warfare should be

regarded no more, that no confidence should be any longer sacred. In

the summer of 1698 the storm burst upon the head of the exile at

Cambray. Early in June, Fénélon heard that the Abbé de Beaumont, his

nephew, and the Abbé de Langeron, his friend, had been dismissed in

disgrace from the office of sub-preceptors to the young Duke of

Burgundy; that Dupuy and De Leschelles, had been banished the Court

because of their attachment to him; that his brother had been

expelled from the marine, and a son of Madame Guyon from the guards;

that the retiring and pacific Fleury had narrowly escaped ignominy

for a similar cause: that the Dukes of Beauvilliers, Chevreuse, and

Guiche, were themselves menaced, and the prospect of their downfall

openly discussed; and that to correspond with him was hereafter a

crime against the State. Within a month, another Job’s messenger

brought him tidings that Bossuet had produced a book entitled _An

Account of Quietism_—an attack so terrible that the dismay of his

remaining friends had almost become despair. Bossuet possessed three

formidable weapons—his influence as a courtier, his authority as a

priest, his powers as an author. He wielded them all at once, and

all of them dishonourably. If he was unfair in the first capacity,

when he invoked the thunders of royalty to ruin the cause of a

theological opponent—if he was unfair in the second, when he

denounced forbearance and silenced intercession as sins against

God,—he was yet more so in the third, when he employed all his

gifts, to weave into a malignant tissue of falsehood and

exaggeration the memoirs of Madame Guyon, the correspondence of

Fénélon with Madame de Maintenon, and his former confidential

letters to himself—letters on spiritual matters to a spiritual

guide—letters which should have been sacred as the secresy of the

Confessional. The sensation created by the _Account of Quietism_ was

prodigious. Bossuet presented his book to the King, whose approval

was for every parasite the authentication of all its slanders.

Madame de Maintenon, with her own hand, distributed copies among the

courtiers; in the salon of Marly nothing else was talked of; in the

beautiful gardens groups of lords and ladies, such as Watteau would

have loved to paint, were gathered on the grass, beside the

fountains, beneath the trees, to hear it read; it was begged,

borrowed, stolen, greedily snatched, and delightedly devoured; its

anecdotes were so piquant, its style so sparkling, its bursts of

indignant eloquence so grand; gay ladies, young and old, dandies,

wits, and libertines, found its scandal so delicious,—Madame Guyon

was so exquisitely ridiculous,—La Combe, so odious a

Tartuffe,—Fénélon, so pitiably displumed of all his shining virtues;

and, what was best of all, the insinuations were worse than the

charges,—the book gave much and promised more,—it hinted at

disclosures more disgraceful yet, and gave free scope to every

malicious invention and every prurient conjecture.[363]

XII.

The generous Fénélon, more thoughtful for others than for himself,

at first hesitated to reply even to such a provocation, lest he

should injure the friends who yet remained to him at Versailles. But

he was soon convinced that their position, as much as his, rendered

an answer imperative. He received Bossuet’s book on the 8th of July,

and by the 13th of August his defence had been written, printed, and

arrived at Rome, to gladden the heart of poor Chanterac, to stop the

mouth of the enemy, and to turn the tide once more in behalf of his

failing party. This refutation, written with such rapidity, and

under such disadvantages, was a masterpiece,—it redeemed his

character from every calumny,—it raised his reputation to its

height,—it would have decided a fair contest completely in his

favour. It was composed when his spirit was oppressed by sorrow for

the ruin of his friends, and darkened by the apprehension of new

injuries which his justification might provoke,—by a proscribed man

at Cambray, remote from the assistance and appliances most

needful,—without a friend to guide or to relieve the labour of

arranging and transcribing documents and of verifying dates, where

scrupulous accuracy was of vital importance,—when it was difficult

to procure correct intelligence from Paris, and hazardous to write

thither lest he should compromise his correspondents,—when even his

letters to Chanterac were not safe from inspection,—when it would be

difficult to find a printer for such a book, and yet more so to

secure its circulation in the metropolis. As it was, D’Argenson, the

lieutenant of police,—a functionary pourtrayed by his contemporaries

as at once the ugliest and most unprincipled of men,—seized a

package of seven hundred copies at the gates of Paris. The _Reply_

appeared, however, and was eagerly read. Even the few who were

neutral, the many who were envious, the host who were prejudiced,

could not withhold their admiration from that lucid and elegant

style—that dignified and unaffected eloquence; numbers yielded, in

secret, at least, to the force of such facts and such arguments;

while all were astonished at the skill and self-command with which

the author had justified his whole career without implicating a

single friend; and leaving untouched the shield of every other

adversary, had concentrated all his force on exposing the

contradictions, the treachery, and the falsehood of Bossuet’s

accusation.[364]

The controversy now draws to a close. Bossuet published _Remarks_ on

the _Reply_ of Fénélon, and Fénélon rejoined with _Remarks_ on the

_Remarks_ of Bossuet. Sixty loyal doctors of the Sorbonne censured

twelve propositions, in the _Maxims_, while Rome was yet undecided.

Towards the close of the same year (1698) Louis wrote a letter to

the Pope, yet more indecently urgent than his former one, demanding

a thorough condemnation of so dangerous a book; and this epistle he

seconded by depriving Fénélon, a few weeks afterwards, of the title

and pension of preceptor—that pension which Fénélon had once nobly

offered to return to a treasury exhausted by ambitious wars.[365]

Innocent XII. had heard, with indignant sorrow, of the arbitrary

measures adopted against Fénélon and his friends. He was mortified

by the arrogance of Louis, by the attempts so openly made to

forestall his judgment. He was accustomed to say that Cambray had

erred through excess of love to God; Meaux, by want of love to his

neighbour. But Louis was evidently roused, and it was not safe to

provoke him too far. After a last effort at a compromise, the Pope

yielded; and the cardinals pronounced a condemnation, far less

complete, however, than the vehemence of the accusers had hoped to

secure. Twenty-three propositions extracted from the _Maxims_, were

censured, but the Pontiff openly declared that such censure did not

extend to the explanations which the Archbishop of Cambray had given

of his book. This sentence was delivered on the 12th of March, 1699.

The submission of Fénélon is famous in history. He received the

intelligence as he was about to ascend the pulpit; he changed his

subject, and preached a sermon on the duty of submission to

superiors.[366] Bossuet endeavoured, in vain, to represent the

obedience which was the first to pronounce the sentence of

self-condemnation, as a profound hypocrisy.

XIII.

Madame Guyon lingered for four years a solitary prisoner in the

dungeons of the Bastille. In the same tower was confined the Man of

the Iron Mask, and she may have heard, in her cell, the melancholy

notes of the guitar with which her fellow-prisoner beguiled a

captivity whose horrors had then lasted seven-and-thirty years.

There, a constitution never strong, was broken down by the stony

chill of rigorous winters, and by the noxious vapours which steamed

from the stagnant moat in summer.[367] She was liberated in 1702,

and sent to Blois,—a picturesque old city, whose steep and narrow

streets, cut into innumerable steps, overlook the Loire,—crowned on

the one side by its fine church, and on the other by the royal

chateau, memorable for the murder of the Guises; its massive

proportions adorned by the varying tastes of successive generations,

then newly beautified after the designs of Mansart, and now a ruin,

the delight of every artist. There she lived in quiet, sought out

from time to time by visitors from distant provinces and other

lands,—as patient under the infirmity of declining age as beneath

the persecutions of her earlier years,—finding, as she had always

done, some sweet in every bitter cup, and a theme for praise in

every trial, purified by her long afflictions, elevated by her hope

of glory, full of charity and full of peace, resigned and happy to

the last. Her latest letter is dated in 1717,—Bossuet had departed,

and Fénélon,—and before the close of that year, she also, the

subject of such long and bitter strife, had been removed beyond all

the tempests of this lower world.

In the judicial combats of ancient Germany, it was the custom to

place in the centre of the lists a bier, beside which stood the

accuser and the accused, at the head and at the foot, leaning there

for some time in solemn silence before they laid lance in rest and

encountered in the deadly shock. Would that religious

controversialists had oftener entered and maintained their combat as

alike in view of that final appeal in the unseen world of truth—with

a deeper and more abiding sense of that supreme tribunal before

which so many differences vanish, and where none but he who has

striven lawfully can receive a crown. Bossuet was regarded as the

champion of Hope, and drew his sword, it was said, lest sacrilegious

hands should remove her anchor. Fénélon girded on his arms to defend

the cause of Charity. Alas! said the Pope—heart-sick of the

protracted conflict—they forget that it is Faith who is in danger.

Among the many witty sayings which the dispute suggested to the

lookers-on, perhaps one of the most significant is that attributed

to the daughter of Madame de Sévigné. ‘M. de Cambray,’ said she,

‘pleads well the cause of God, but M. de Meaux yet better that of

religion, and cannot fail to win the day at Rome.’ Fénélon undertook

to show that his semi-Quietism was supported by the authority of

ecclesiastical tradition, and he was unquestionably in the right. He

might have sustained, on Romanist principles, a doctrine much less

moderate, by the same argument. But it was his wish to render

mysticism as rational and as attractive as possible; and no other

advocate has exhibited it so purified from extravagance, or secured

for it so general a sympathy. The principle of ‘holy indifference,’

however, must be weighed, not by the virtues of Fénélon, but

according to the standard of Scripture,—and such an estimate must,

we believe, pronounce it mistaken.

XIV.

The attempt to make mysticism definite and intelligible must always

involve more or less of inconsistency. Nevertheless, the enterprise

has been repeatedly undertaken; and it is a remarkable fact, that

such efforts have almost invariably originated in France. Mysticism

and scholasticism—the spirit of the cloud and the spirit of the

snow—reign as rivals throughout the stormy region of the Middle Age.

The reaction against the extreme of each nourished its antagonist.

Hugo and Richard of St. Victor endeavoured to effect a union, and to

reconcile these contending products of the heart and brain. In that

ascetic abstraction, which hides in darkness all the objects of

sense, they sought to develop, from the dull and arid stem of school

divinity, the most precious blossoms of the feeling; and their

mysticism resembles those plants of the cactus-tribe which unfold,

from their lustreless and horny leaves, gorgeous flowers, that

illumine, with phosphoric radiance, the darkness of the tropical

night. The Victorines were succeeded in the same path by

Bonaventura, a Frenchman by education, if not by birth, more a

schoolman than a mystic; and, in the fifteenth century, by Gerson.

These are mystics who have no tales to tell of inspiration and of

vision—their aim is to legitimize rapture, to define ecstasy, to

explain the higher phenomena of the spirit on the basis of an

elaborate psychology, to separate the delusive from the real in

mysticism, and to ascertain the laws of that mystical experience, of

which they acknowledged themselves to be but very partially the

subjects. With this view, Gerson introduced into mysticism, strange

to say, the principle of induction; and proposed, by a collection

and comparison of recorded examples, to determine its theory, and

decide its practice. In the _Maxims of the Saints_, Fénélon carries

out the idea of Gerson, as far as was requisite for his immediate

purpose. Both are involved in the same difficulty, and fall into the

same contradiction. What Molinos was to Fénélon, Ruysbroek was to

Gerson. Fénélon wished to stop short of the spiritualism condemned

as heretical in Molinos; Gerson, to avoid the pantheism he thought

he saw in Ruysbroek. Both impose checks, which, if inefficacious,

amount to nothing; if effective, are fatal to the very life of

mysticism,—both hold doctrines, to which they dare not give scope;

and both are, to some extent, implicated in the consequences they

repudiate by the principles they admit.

Mysticism in France contrasts strikingly, in this respect, with

mysticism in Germany. Speaking generally, it may be said that

France exhibits the mysticism of sentiment, Germany the mysticism

of thought. The French love to generalize and to classify. An

arrangement which can be expressed by a word, a principle which

can be crystallized into a sparkling maxim, they will applaud. But

with them conventionalism reigns paramount—society is ever present

to the mind of the individual—their sense of the ludicrous is

exquisitely keen. The German loves abstractions for their own

sake. To secure popularity for a visionary error in France, it

must be lucid and elegant as the language—it must be at least an

ingenious and intelligible falsehood; but in Germany, the most

grotesque inversions of thought and of expression will be found no

hindrance to its acceptability, and the most hopeless obscurity

may be pronounced its highest merit. In this respect, German

philosophy sometimes resembles Lycophron, who was so convinced

that unintelligibility was grandeur, as to swear he would hang

himself if a man were found capable of understanding his play of

_Cassandra_. Almost every later German mystic has been a secluded

student—almost every mystic of modern France has been a brilliant

conversationalist. The genius of mysticism rises, in Germany, in

the clouds of the solitary pipe; in France, it is a fashionable

Ariel, who hovers in the drawing-room, and hangs to the pendants

of the glittering chandelier. If Jacob Behmen had appeared in

France, he must have counted disciples by units, where in Germany

he reckoned them by hundreds. If Madame Guyon had been born in

Germany, rigid Lutheranism might have given her some annoyance;

but her earnestness would have redeemed her enthusiasm from

ridicule, and she would have lived and died the honoured precursor

of modern German Pietism. The simplicity and strength of purpose

which characterize so many of the German mystics, appear to much

advantage beside the vanity and affectation which have so

frequently attended the manifestations of mysticism in France. In

Germany, theosophy arose with the Reformation, and was as much a

theology as a science. In France, where the Reformation had been

suppressed, and where superstition had been ridiculed with such

success, the same love of the marvellous was most powerful with

the most irreligious—it filled the antechamber of Cagliostro with

impatient dandies and grandees, trembling, and yet eager to pry

into the future—too enlightened to believe in Christ, yet too

credulous to doubt the powers of a man before whose door fashion

drew, night after night, a line of carriages which filled the

street.

Note to page 245.

A full account of the proceedings against the Quietists will be found in

the narrative above referred to and in Arnold’s _Kirchen-und-Ketzer

Geschichte_, th. III. cap. xvii.

The motive of Père La Chaise in urging this prosecution appears to have

been twofold: partly, to start heretics whom his Most Christian Majesty

might magnificently hunt, and still more to weaken the Spanish party and

embarrass the Pope, who was suspected of leaning toward the house of

Austria. The audacity of the Jesuits—so formidable always, from their

numbers, their union, their unscrupulousness, and now emboldened by

support so powerful, struck all Rome with terror. A man widely reputed

for sanctity, throughout a period of twenty years—an honoured guest

within the walls of the Vatican—who had long enjoyed, and not yet

forfeited, the warm friendship of the Head of the Church—was suddenly

declared the most dangerous enemy to the faith of Christendom. To

accomplish the ruin of this victim, a venerable pontiff was threatened

with the most grievous insult which infallibility could suffer. Within a

month, two hundred persons were thrown into the dungeons of the

Inquisition,—and many of these were eminent for rank, for learning, or

for piety. Only the grossly stupid or the scandalously dissolute could

feel themselves secure. To hint a question concerning the justice of a

single step in prosecutions remarkable, even at Rome, for the baseness

and illegality of their agents and their acts—to live a quiet and

retiring life—to appear infrequently at confession or at mass,—these

were circumstances sufficient to render any man suspected of Quietism;

and if the informer were hungry, or a private enemy alert, from

suspicion to conviction was but a step.

But the persecutors were destined to meet with many mortifications in

their course. Molinos and his friend Petrucci—a bishop, and afterwards a

cardinal—defended themselves, on their first summons, with such skill

and intrepidity, that the writings which had been circulated against

them were condemned as libellous. The case of Petrucci represents that

of the great majority against whom the charge of Quietism was brought.

Not an accusation could be substantiated, save this,—that blameless as

his life might be, he had grown remiss in some of those outward

observances which are the pride of Pharisaic sanctity. Thus defeated at

the outset, the Jesuits were reinforced and rendered victorious by the

falsehoods of D’Etrees, who refused to hear a word Molinos had to say in

defence of his own writings. The Count and Countess Vespiniani were

arrested, with other persons, to the number of seventy. They were

accused of omitting the exterior practices of religion, and of giving

themselves to solitude and prayer. The Countess bravely answered, that

she had discovered her manner of devotion only to her confessor; he must

have betrayed her; who but idiots would confess, if confession was made

the engine of the persecutor—if no secret was sacred—if to confess might

be to lie at the mercy of a villain? Henceforward she would confess to

God alone. A rank so high must be respected. Words so bold were

dangerous. So the Vespiniani were set free. The circular letter sent out

against the Quietists was treated with indifference by most of the

Italian bishops—not unleavened, many of them, by this obnoxious kind of

piety. Nay, worse! for once, an epistle from the Inquisition was

published. The unfortunate letter escaped somehow—was translated into

Italian—all Rome was reading it. The world looked in on the procedure of

the Holy Office, to the shame and bitter vexation of its holy men. It

was said that the Inquisition collected some twenty thousand letters, or

copies of letters, sent and received by Molinos, and that when he was

arrested, twenty crowns’ worth of letters addressed to him were seized

at the post-office. So extended was the influence of the heretic—so

little likely, therefore, to perish with him. Some ecclesiastics had the

candour to admit that most of the Quietists showed themselves better

instructed than their accusers, and confronted their judges so ably,

with passages, authorities, and arguments, that they could only be

silenced by authority and force.

The letter of Cardinal Caraccioli to Innocent, about the Quietists,

represents them as persons who attempt passive mental prayer and

‘contemplatio,’ without the previous preparation of the ‘via purgativa.’

Dreadful to relate, some of them had been known to leave their rosaries

unfingered, to refuse to make the sign of the cross, to declare

crucifixes rather in their way than otherwise! They trusted rather to

their inward attraction than to directors. Some, though laymen, and

though married, communed daily—an ominous sign—for it betokened the

lowering (in their minds, at least) of that high partition wall, which

Rome had made so strong, between clergy and laity—between the religious

_par excellence_ and the vulgar herd of Christians, who were to be saved

only through the former. See _Bausset’s Histoire de Fénélon_, liv. ii.;

_Pièces Justificatives_, No. II.

Note to page 259.

Fénélon could with ease bring from the arsenal of tradition even more

proofs than he needed for the establishment of his doctrine. No

prevarication or sophistry could conceal the fact that Bernard, Albertus

Magnus, Francis de Sales, Theresa, Catharine of Genoa, and other saints,

had used language concerning pure love, authenticating more than all

that Fénélon was solicitous to defend. Thus much was proven,—even

subtracting those passages which Fénélon unwittingly cited from an

edition of De Sales’ _Entretiens_, said to be full of interpolations.

The spiritual history of Friar Laurent and of Francis de Sales furnished

actual examples of the most extreme case Fénélon was willing to put.

Bossuet’s true answer was the reply he gave on the question to Madame de

la Maisonfort,—such rare and extraordinary cases should be left out of

our consideration, they should not be drawn within the range of possible

experience, even for Christians considerably advanced. (_Phelipeaux_,

liv. i. pp. 165-176.) In dispute with Fénélon, instead of admitting the

fact, as with La Maisonfort, the polemic gets uppermost, and he tries

very dishonestly to explain away the language of De Sales, while he

misrepresents and garbles that of Fénélon. See _Cinquième Lettre en

Réponse à divers Ecrits_; _Première Lettre en Réponse à celle de M.

L’Evêque de Meaux_; _Maximes des Saints_, art. v.

Fénélon draws a subtile distinction between the object of love and the

motive of love. That love in God which renders him our eternal

blessedness, is among the _objects_ of our love—for God has so revealed

himself, but is not the _motive_ of it. (_Max. des Saints_, art. iv.) Do

we desire happiness less, he asks, because we desire it from a worthy

motive,—_i.e._, as desired by God? Do we extinguish hope by exalting and

regulating it? (_Entretiens sur la Religion_; Œuvres, tom. i. p. 35.) If

any one of us knew that he should be annihilated at death, ought he less

to love the infinitely Good? Is not eternal life a gift which God is

free to grant or to withhold? Shall the love of the Christian who is to

have eternal life be _less_ than that of him who anticipates

annihilation, just because the love of God to him is so much _more_?

Shall such a gift serve only to make love interested? (_Sur le Pur

Amour_, xix. Compare also _Max. des Saints_, art. 10, 11, 12;

_Correspondance_, let. 43.)

Fénélon is very careful to state that disinterested love is put to its

most painful proof only in rare and extreme cases,—that the love which

is interested is not a sin, only a lower religious stage, and that he

who requires that staff is to beware how he throws it aside prematurely,

ambitious of a spiritual perfection which may be beyond his reach.

Bossuet endeavoured to show that if Fénélon’s doctrine were true, any

love except the disinterested was a crime. (_Instructions et Avis_, &c.,

xx.; _Sur le Pur Amour_, p. 329; _Max. des Saints_, art. iii., and

sundry qualifications of importance, concerning self-abandonment in the

‘épreuves extrêmes,’ art. ix.)

Note to page 259.

Such is the explanation in the letter to La Maisonfort. But Fénélon is

not always—perhaps, could not possibly be—quite consistent with himself

on this most delicate of questions. Beyond a doubt, the attempt

practically to apply this doctrine concerning reflex acts constitutes

the morbid element in his system—is the one refinement above all others

fatally unnatural. There is great truth in Fénélon’s warnings against

nervous, impatient introspection. Against an evil so prevalent, and so

constantly fostered by the confessional and the directors, it was high

time that some one should protest. But, alas! not only does Fénélon

himself uphold, most zealously, that very directorship, but this strain

after a love perfectly disinterested tempts the aspirant to be

continually hunting inwardly after traces of the hated self, which will

never quite vanish. Happy, according to Fénélon, is that religionist who

can sacrifice, not only himself, but the sacrifice of himself—who burns

the burnt offering—who gives up the consciousness of having given

himself up—and who has reached, without knowing it, the pinnacle of

Christian perfection. The reader will find specimens of his more guarded

language in the letter referred to in the _Instructions et Avis_, &c.

xx.; _Max. des Saints_, art. xiii.; _Lettres Spirituelles_, xiii. This

last, a letter to Sœur Charlotte de St. Cyprien, is of importance, as

containing definitions of mystical terms, similar in substance to those

given in the _Maximes_, and moreover, highly approved by Bossuet, a year

after the conferences at Issy. The strongest expressions are found in

the _Instructions et Avis_, xxii. xxiii. He says,—Pour consommer le

sacrifice de purification en nous des dons de Dieu, il faut donc achever

de détruire l’holocauste; il faut tout perdre, même l’abandon aperçu par

lequel on se voit livré à sa perte.—P. 342. Compare the allusion to the

unconscious prayer of St. Anthony, _Max. des Saints_, art. xxi.

Note to page 259.

L’activité que les mystiques blâment n’est pas l’action réelle et la

co-opération de l’âme à la grâce; c’est seulement une crainte inquiète,

ou une ferveur empressée qui recherche les dons de Dieu pour sa propre

consolation.—_Lettres Spirituelles_, xiii. So also, in the letter to La

Maisonfort, he shows that the state of passivity does not preclude a

great number of distinct acts. This is what the mystics call

co-operating with God without activity of our own—a subtlety which those

may seek to understand who care. Fénélon means to forbid a selfish

isolation, which, on pretence of quietude, neglects daily duty. True

repose in God calmly discharges such obligations as they come. We have

seen an example of this in St. Theresa. Fénélon is not prepared to go

the length of John of the Cross, who denies our co-operation

altogether.—_Maximes des Saints_, art. xxx. and xxix. Ils ne font plus

d’actes empressés et marqués par une secousse inquiète: ils font des

actes si paisibles et si uniformes, que ces actes, quoique très-réels,

très-successifs, et même interrompus, _leur paraissent_ ou un seul acte

sans interruption, ou un repos continuel.

Fénélon is at any time ready to endorse all the counsels of John of the

Cross, as to the duty of leaving behind (_outre-passer_) all

apparitions, sounds, tastes, everything visionary, sensuous, or

theurgic. With the grosser forms of mysticism he has no sympathy. He

even endeavours to represent St. Theresa as an advocate of the purer and

more refined mysticism, adducing the scarce-attainable seventh _Morada_,

and overlooking the sensuous character of the preceding six. Theresa

might, in the abstract, rate the visionless altitude above the valley of

vision; but she preferred, for herself, unquestionably, the valley to

the mountain. (_Max. des Saints_, xix.; _Lettres Spirituelles_, xiv.

xvi. xvii.) In a letter on extraordinary gifts, he repeats the precept

of John—‘Aller toujours par le non-voir;’ and ‘outre-passer les grands

dons, et marcher dans la pure foi comme si on ne les avait pas reçus.’

He consigns the soul, in like manner, to a blank abstraction—to what

Luther would have called ‘a void tedium.’ Tout ce qui est goût et

ferveur sensible, image créée, lumière distincte et aperçue, donne une

fausse confiance, et fait une impression trop vive; on les reçoit avec

joie, et on les quitte avec peine. Au contraire, dans la nudité de la

pure foi, on ne doit rien voir; on n’a plus en soi ni pensée ni volonté;

on trouve tout dans cette simplicité générale, sans s’arrêter à rien de

distinct; on ne possède rien, mais on est possédé.—_Lettre_ xxiii. The

very acts of which Contemplation is made up, are, says Fénélon—‘Si

simples, si directs, si paisibles, si uniformes, qu’ils n’ont rien de

marqué par où l’âme puisse les distinguer.’—_Max. des Saints_, art. xxi.

What such acts can be, must remain for ever a mystery unfathomable. It

is for these inexplicable ‘_actes distincts_’ that the convenient

‘_facilité spéciale_’ is provided. (_Correspondance_, lettre 43; comp.

_Lettres Spirituelles_, xiii. 448.)

Fénélon is also careful to guard his mysticism against the pretences of

special revelation and any troublesome insubordination on the part of

the ‘inner light,’ or l’attrait intérieur. The said ‘attrait,’ he justly

observes, ‘n’est point une inspiration miraculeuse et prophétique, qui

rende l’âme infaillible, ni impeccable, ni indépendante, de la direction

des pasteurs; ce n’est que la grâce, qui est sans cesse prévenante dans

tous les justes, et qui est plus spéciale dans les âmes élevées par

l’amour désintéressé,’ &c.—_Loc. cit._ p. 450; _Max. des Saints_, art.

xxix. and vii.

Note to page 262.

Fénélon gives his reasons for refusing to affix his approval to

Bossuet’s book, in letters to Tronson and Madame de Maintenon, and in

the _Réponse_. (_Correspondance_, lettres 52, 53, 57; _Réponse à la

Relation_, chap, v.) It was a strong point for Fénélon against Bossuet

that the latter had administered to Madame Guyon the sacraments, and

granted her a favourable certificate, after reading the very books in

which he professed afterwards to discover the most flagitious designs.

In thinking better, therefore, of her intentions than of her language,

Fénélon was no more her partisan or defender than Bossuet himself had

been, up to that point. The act of submission Bossuet made her sign was

not a retractation of error, but simply a declaration that she had never

held any of the errors condemned in the pastoral letter,—that she always

meant to write in a sense altogether orthodox, and had no conception

that any dangerous interpretation could be put upon the terms which, in

her ignorance, she had employed. (_Réponse à la Relation_, chap. i.)

Phelipeaux sees in everything Fénélon wrote—the notes for the

_Maxims_—the memoranda he sent to Bossuet, only one purpose—an insane

resolve to defend Madame Guyon at all costs. He chooses to imagine that

every step taken by her was secretly dictated by Fénélon. In fact,

however, from the time the first suspicions arose, Fénélon began to

withdraw from Madame Guyon his former intimacy. Nothing could exceed his

caution in the avoidance of all implication with one whose language was

susceptible of such fatal misconstruction. He could probably have taken

no better course. He endeavoured to retain the controversy about the

real question, that she might be forgotten. But it soon became evident

that he himself was the party attacked, and with a virulence for which

the scandals attributed to Madame Guyon furnished an instrument too

tempting to be neglected. The charges against Madame Guyon increased in

magnitude—not with her resistance, for she made none—but with that of

Fénélon. (_Réponse_, xxiii. lxxxiv. lx.)

Note to page 264.

The motives with which Fénélon wrote and published the _Maxims_ are

fully stated by himself. It was not to defend Madame Guyon, but to

rescue the doctrine of pure love, threatened with destruction by the

growing prejudice against the religion of the ‘inward way.’ It was not

to excuse the Quietists, but to preserve, by due distinctions, souls

attached to the true mysticism, from the illusions of the false. It was

to give their full and legitimate scope to those venerable principles

which a heretical Quietism was said to have abused. Mysticism was not to

be extinguished by denying the truth it contained. Let, then, the true

be separated from the false. The _Maxims_ were believed by Fénélon to

contain no position contrary to the articles of Issy. The passages which

cannot be reconciled with the limitations imposed by those articles are

not his own, but quotations from De Sales and others. The Andalusian

Illuminati had rendered the greatest saints suspected. Theresa, Alvarez,

John of the Cross, stood in need of defenders. Ruysbroek, whom

Bellarmine called the great contemplatist; Tauler, the Apostle of

Germany, had required and had found champions, the one in Dionysius the

Carthusian, the other in Blosius. The Cardinal Berulle felt compelled to

enter the lists on behalf of St. Francis de Sales, for suspicions had

been cast upon the wisdom of that eminent saint. Such examples might

well alarm all those whose religion was embued with mysticism,—all those

to whom a faith of that type was a necessity. Let it be openly declared

where the path of safety lies, and where the dangers commence. The

_Maxims_ were to furnish a _via media_ between the extreme of those who

repudiated mystical theology altogether, and the excesses of the false

mystics. The doctrines stigmatized as false throughout the _Maxims_, are

what Fénélon supposed to be the tenets of Molinos, judging from the

sixty-eight propositions condemned at Rome. The _Faux_, therefore, which

opposes to the _Vrai_ is, for the most part, a mere chimera—made up of

doctrines really believed by scarcely any one,—only taught, perhaps, now

and then, by designing priests to women, for the purposes of seduction.

See the ‘Avertissement’ to the _Maxims_; _Première Lettre en Réponse_,

&c. p. 111; _Correspondance_, lettre 59; and the letter on the _Maxims_,

to the Pope, _Phelipeaux_, p. 239.

Note to page 265.

Among the expelled was the brilliant, unmanageable Madame de la

Maisonfort—the last woman in the world to have been shut up in the small

monotony of St. Cyr. The history of mysticism at St. Cyr is a miniature

of its history at large. The question by which it is tried is simply

practical. Will it subordinate itself? If so, let it flourish. If not,

root it out. Jean d’Avila, in his _Audi, Filia, et Vide_, has a section

entitled _Des Fausses Révélations_. The whole question turns on this

point. Is the visionary obedient to director, superior, &c.? If so, the

visions are of God. If not, the visions are of the Devil. (_Œuvres du B.

Jean D’Avila, Audi, Filia, et Vide_, chapp. 50-55.)

Madame Guyon, in becoming a religious instructress, as she did, only

followed examples honoured by the Romish Church. Angela de Foligni, the

two Catharines of Siena and of Genoa, St. Theresa, and others, had

become the spiritual guides of numbers, both men and women, lay and

ecclesiastic. At another juncture the kind of revival introduced by

Madame Guyon might have met with encouragement. But her tendency was

precisely that of which the times were least tolerant, and her

disposition to follow her inward attraction rather than the counsels of

prelates was magnified to proportions so portentous as to exclude all

hope. The mysticism of Fénélon, judged by the test of obedience, should

certainly have been spared. With an anxiety almost nervous, he

inculcates wherever he can, those precepts of abject servility towards

the director which are so agreeable to his Church. Wherever the director

is in question, we lose sight of Fénélon, we see only the priest. But

neither his own sincere professions of submission, nor his constant

effort to place every one else under the feet of some ecclesiastic or

other, could save him from a condemnation pronounced, not on religious,

but political grounds.

In this respect Fénélon was anything but the _esprit fort_ which the

scepticism of a later age so fervently admired. His letters on

religious subjects abound in directions for absolute obedience, and in

warnings against the exercise of thought and judgment on our own

account. Though Madame de la Maisonfort knew herself utterly unfit for

the religious vocation which Madame de Maintenon wished her to

embrace, Fénélon could tell her that her repugnance, her anguish, her

tears, were nothing, opposed to the decision of five courtly

ecclesiastics, affirming that she had the vocation. He writes to say,

La vocation ne se manifeste pas moins par la décision d’autrui que par

notre propre attrait.—_Correspondance_, lettre 19. See also _Lettres

Spirituelles_, 18, 19, 169. The inward attraction presents some

perplexity. In one instance it is only another word for taste (_Ibid._

35), and in another place the attraction of grace is equivalent to an

act of observation and judgment (_Ibid._ 176). Here, with so many

mystics, Fénélon can only follow the ‘_moi_,’ from which he fancies he

escapes (441). The knot of these interior difficulties is cut by the

directorship.

If Fénélon speaks uncertainly as to what is the inward attraction, and

what is not, much more would the majority of mystics be sorely perplexed

in their own case. The mystic, bewildered and wearied with intense

self-scrutiny, sees all swim before his eyes. He can be sure of nothing.

Whatever alternative he chooses, he has no sooner acted on the choice

than he finds self in the act, and fancies the other road the right one.

He is distressed by finding inclination and inward attraction changing,

while he gazes, into each other, and back again, times without number.

He is afraid to do what he likes—this may be self-pleasing. He is afraid

to do what he does not like—for this may be perverseness—some culpable

self-will, at least. The life of a devotee, so conscientious and so

unfortunate, is rendered tolerable only by the director. The man who can

put an end to this inward strife about trifles—which are anything but

trifles to the sufferer—is welcomed as an angel from heaven. Casuistry,

the creature of the confessional, renders its parent a necessity.

Fénélon laments the abuses of the system, but he will rather believe

that miracles will be continually wrought, to rescue the faithful from

such mischiefs, than question (as bolder mystics, like Harphius had

done) the institution itself. Even the mistakes and bad passions of

superiors will be wrought into blessings for the obedient. (_Sur la

Direction_, pp. 677, 678.)

Footnote 334:

O man, wouldst thou be grafted, and to the heavenly soil transplanted?

then must thou first thy branches wild hew quite away, that kindly

fruits may come forth in God’s image.

Footnote 335:

As far as his doctrine differs from that of Madame Guyon, it is for

the worse, because he approaches more nearly the extreme language of

some of the orthodox mystics in his communion.

Footnote 336:

This Dialogue of Malaval’s, which goes much beyond the mysticism of

Molinos, was approved by the Sorbonne, and found so conformable to the

teachings of St. Theresa, that the translation of it was dedicated to

the bare-footed Carmelites. The unobtrusive and not unqualified

mysticism of Molinos was stigmatised by the new epithet of Quietism,

and condemned as deadly error. The extravagant and wonder-working

mysticism of Theresa was extolled as the angelic life. See the

_Account of Molinos and the Quietists_, appended to the

_Autobiography_ of Madame Guyon: translated, I believe, from a French

work, entitled, _Recueil de Diverses Pièces concernant le Quiétisme et

les Quiétistes_.

Footnote 337:

Michelet, _Priests, Women, and Families_, p. 74.

Footnote 338:

See Note on p. 276.

Footnote 339:

_Upham_, vol. ii. pp. 3, &c. We find among these persons of rank a

religion of some vitality—no court-fashion merely. It was to the

_Introduction à la Vie Dévote_ (1608) of St. Francis de Sales that

Romanism was indebted for such hold as it really had on the upper

classes. None of the great ecclesiastical writers of France—not even

that darling of the fifteenth century, the _Imitatio Christi_, could

win the ears of people of the world. In the _Introduction_, however,

religion appeared neither ruthlessly stern, nor hopelessly

fantastical. It was not, on the one side, scowling, unkempt, sordid,

morose; it was not, on the other, impalpable, supersensuous, utterly

unintelligible, as well as undesirable, to worldly common sense.

Fashion and devotion met; piety and politeness embraced each other.

The _Introduction_ leaves to others the pains and raptures of the

mystic. It is written for the Marthas, not the Marys. Its readers,

personified in Philothea, are not supposed to be covetous of any

extraordinary gifts. De Sales possessed a lively fancy, and the tender

religious sentiment of his book, graced and lightened by its rainbow

illustrations, was a bright-winged Psyche, welcome everywhere. These

illustrations are drawn, sometimes from the farms, the flower-valleys,

and the snow-peaks of his native Savoy; sometimes from fabulous

natural history, from classic story, from the legends of the Church,

or the forms and usages of the world,—oftenest of all, from the ways

of infants and children, and from the love of mothers. St. Beuve

happily characterises the work, as ‘un livre qui, sur la table d’une

femme comme il faut ou d’un gentilhomme poli de ce temps-là, ne

chassait pas absolument le volume de Montaigne, et, attendait, sans le

fuir, le volume d’Urfé.’—_Causeries du Lundi_, tom. vii. p. 216.

Footnote 340:

This Harlay had owed his archbishopric to his libertinism in the days

of Madame de Montespan. His sun was now setting, ingloriously enough,

under the decent régime of the Maintenon, and there was nothing for it

but to atone for the scandals of his life and diocese by exemplary

rigour in matters of doctrine. The letters sent, and the documents

shown him, were the fabrication of La Mothe and his creature the

scrivener Gautier. They forged a letter from Marseilles, pretending

that La Combe had slept in the same chamber with Madame Guyon—and also

eaten meat in Lent. La Combe was further accused of having embraced

and taught the heresy of Molinos.

The real letters which followed Madame Guyon from the scenes of her

former activity breathe no suspicion of her character or motives. The

Bishop of Geneva, in a letter quoted by Fénélon, declared that his

only complaint against her was the indiscreet zeal with which she

everywhere propagated truths which she believed serviceable to the

Church. With that exception, ‘he esteemed her infinitely, and

entertained for her the highest imaginable regard.’ This was in 1683.

In 1688 he prohibited her books. But even in 1695, the same bishop

repeats his praise of her piety and morals, and declares that his

conscience never would have suffered him to speak of her in other than

respectful language.—See _Memoirs for the History of Madame de

Maintenon_ (London, 1757), vol. III. bk. xi. c. 2. _Autobiography_,

part III. chapp. i. ii. iii. Fénélon’s _Réponse à la Relation sur le

Quiétisme_, chap. i.

Footnote 341:

_Memoirs for the History of Madame de Maintenon_, bk. ix. Madame

Guyon’s doctrine entered St. Cyr while the absolute vows were yet

under discussion.

Footnote 342:

_Memoirs for the History of Madame de Maintenon_, bk. xi. chap. v.

Footnote 343: