I. The regular clergy.
The regular clergy.--Difference in the condition of the two
clergies.--The three vows.--Rules.--Life in common.--Object
of the system.--Violent suppression of the institution and
its abuses in 1790.--Spontaneous revival of the institution
free of its abuses after 1800.--Democratic and republican
character of monastic constitutions.--Vegetation of the old
stock and multiplication of new plants,--Number of monks and
nuns.--Proportion of these numbers to the total population
in 1789 and 1878.--Predominance of the organizations for
labor and charity.--How formed and extended.--Social
instinct and contact with the mystic world.
However correct the life of a secular priest may be, he stills belongs
to his century. Like a layman, he has his own domicile and fireside, his
parsonage in the country with a garden, or an apartment in town--in
any event, his own home and household, a servant or housekeeper, who is
often either his mother or a sister; in short, a suitable enclosure
set apart, where he can enjoy his domestic and private life free of the
encroachments on his public and ecclesiastical life, analogous to that
of a lay functionary or a bachelor of steady habits. In effect, his
expenses and income, his comforts and discomforts are about the same.
His condition, his salary,[5301] his table, clothes and furniture, his
out-of-door ways and habits, give him rank in the village alongside of
the schoolteacher and postmaster; in the large borough or small town,
alongside of the justice of the peace and college professor; in the
large towns, side by side with the head of a bureau or a chief of
division; at Paris, in certain parishes, alongside of the prefect of
police and the prefect of the Seine.[5302] Even in the humblest curacy,
he regulates his budget monthly, spending his money without consulting
anybody. When not on duty, his time is his own. He can dine out, order
for himself at home a special dish, allow himself delicacies. If he does
not possess every comfort, he has most of them, and thus, like a
lay functionary, he may if he chooses get ahead in the world, obtain
promotion to a better curacy, become irremovable, be appointed canon and
sometimes mount upward, very high, to the topmost rank. Society has a
hold on him through all these worldly purposes; he is too much mixed
up with it to detach himself from it entirely; very often his
spiritual life droops or proves abortive under so many terrestrial
preoccupations.--If the Christian desires to arrive at the alibi and
dwell in the life beyond, another system of existence is essential for
him, entailing a protection against two temptations, that is to say the
abandonment of two dangerous liberties, one consisting in the power
by which, being an owner of property, he disposes as he likes of what
belongs to him, and the other consisting in the power by which, being
master of his acts, he arranges as he pleases his daily occupations. To
this end, in addition to the vow of chastity also taken by the secular
priest, the members of religious orders also take two other distinct and
precise vows. By the vow of poverty he (or she) renounces all property
whatever, at least that which is fully and completely his own,[5303]
the arbitrary use of possessions, the enjoyment of what belongs to
him personally, which vow leads him to live like a poor man, to
endure privations, to labor, and beyond this, even to fasting, to
mortifications, to counteracting and deadening in himself all those
instincts by which man rebels against bodily suffering and aims at
physical well being. By the vow of obedience he (or she) gives himself
up entirely to a double authority: one, in writing, which is discipline,
and the other a living being, consisting of the superior whose business
it is to interpret, apply and enforce the rule. Except in unheard-of
cases, where the superior's injunctions might be expressly and directly
opposed to the letter of this rule,[5304] he interdicts himself from
examining, even in his own breast, the motives, propriety and occasion
of the act prescribed to him; he has alienated in advance future
determinations by entirely abandoning self-government; hence-forth,
his internal motor is outside of himself and in another person.
Consequently, the unforeseen and spontaneous initiative of free will
disappears in his conduct to give way to a predetermined, obligatory and
fixed command, to a system (cadre) which envelops him and binds together
in its rigid compartments the entire substance and details of his life,
anticipating the distribution of his time for a year, week by week, and
for every day, hour by hour, defining imperatively and circumstantially
all action or inaction, physical or mental, all work and all leisure,
silence and speech, prayers and readings, abstinences and meditations,
solitude and companionship, hours for rising and retiring, meals,
quantity and quality of food, attitudes, greetings, manners, tone and
forms of language and, still better, mute thoughts and the deepest
sentiments. Moreover, through the periodical repetition of the same acts
at the same hours, lie confines himself to a cycle of habits which are
forces, and which keep growing since they are ever turning the inward
balance on the same side through the ever-increasing weight of his
entire past. Through eating and lodging together, through a communion
of prayer, through incessant contact with other brethren of the same
religious observances, through the precaution taken to join with him one
companion when he goes out and two companions when he lodges elsewhere,
through his visits to and fro to the head establishment, he lives in a
circle of souls strained to the same extent, by the same processes,
to the same end as himself, and whose visible zeal maintains his
own.--Grace, in this state of things, abounds. Such is the term bestowed
on the silent and steady, or startling and brusque, emotion by which
the Christian enters into communication with the invisible world, an
aspiration and a hope, a presentiment and a divination, and even often a
distinct perception. Evidently, this grace is not far off, almost within
reach of the souls which, from the tenor of their whole life, strive
to attain it. They have closed themselves off on the earthly side,
therefore, these can no longer look or breathe otherwise than
heavenward.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the monastic institution no longer
produced this effect; deformed, weakened and discredited through
its abuses, especially in the convents of males, and then violently
overthrown by the Revolution, it seemed to be dead. But, at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, behold it springing up again
spontaneously, in one direct, new, strong and active jet and higher than
the old one, free of the excrescences, rottenness and parasites
which, under the ancient régime, disfigured and discolored it. No more
compulsory vows, no "frocked" younger sons "to make an elder," no girls
immured from infancy, kept in the convent throughout their youth, led
on, urged, and then driven into a corner and forced into the final
engagement on becoming of age; no more aristocratic institutions, no
Order of Malta and chapters of men or of women in which noble families
find careers and a receptacle for their supernumerary children. No more
of those false and counterfeit vocations the real motive of which was,
sometimes pride of race and the determination not to lose a social
standing, sometimes the animal attractions of physical comfort,
indolence and idleness. No more lazy and opulent monks, occupied,
like the Carthusians of Val Saint-Pierre, in overeating, stupefied
by digestion and routine, or, like the Bernardines of Granselve[5305]
turning their building into a worldly rendezvous for jovial hospitality
and themselves taking part, foremost in rank, in prolonged and
frequent parties, balls, plays and hunting-parties; in diversions and
gallantries which the annual fête of Saint Bernard, through a singular
dissonance, excited and consecrated. No more over-wealthy superiors,
usufructuaries of a vast abbatial revenue, suzerain and landlord
seigniors, with the train, luxury and customs of their condition,
with four-horse carriages, liveries, officials, antechamber, court,
chancellorship and ministers of justice, obliging their monks to address
them as "my lord," as lax as any ordinary layman, well fitted to cause
scandal in their order by their liberties and to set an example of
depravity. No more lay intrusions, commendatory abbés or priors,
interlopers, and imposed from above; no more legislative and
administrative interferences[5306] in order to bind monks and nuns
down to their vows, to disqualify them and deprive them almost of
citizenship, to exclude them from common rights, to withhold from them
rights of inheritance and testamentary rights, from receiving or making
donations, depriving them in advance of the means of subsistence, to
confine them by force in their convents and set the patrol on their
track, and, on trying to escape, to furnish their superior with secular
help and keep down insubordination by physical constraint. Nothing of
this subsists after the great destruction of 1790. Under the modern
régime, if any one enters and remains in a convent it is because the
convent is more agreeable to him than the world outside; there is no
other motive no pressure or hindrance of an inferior or different kind,
no direct or indirect, no domestic or legal constraint, no ambition,
vanity and innate or acquired indolence, no certainty of finding
satisfaction for a coarse and concentrated sensuality. That which now
operates is the awakened and persistent vocation; the man or the woman
who takes vows and keeps them, enters upon and adheres to his or her
engagement only through a spontaneous act deliberately and constantly
renewed through their own free will.
Thus purified, the monastic institution recovers its normal form, which
is the republican and democratic form, while the impracticable Utopia
which the philosophers of the eighteenth century wanted to impose on
lay society now becomes the effective régime under which the religious
communities are going to live. In all of them, the governors are elected
by the governed; whether the suffrage is universal or qualified, one
vote is as good as another; votes are counted by heads, and, at
stated intervals, the sovereign majority uses its right anew; with the
Carmelites, it is every three years and to elect by secret ballot, not
alone one authority but all the authorities, the prior, the sub-prior
and the three clavières.[5307]--Once elected, the chief, in conformity
with his mandate, remains a mandatory, that is to say a laborer assigned
a certain work, and not a privileged person enjoying a gratification.
His dignity is not a dispensation, but an additional burden; along with
the duties of his office, he subjects himself to an observance of the
rules--having become a general, he is no better off than the simple
soldier; he rises as early and his daily life is no better; his cell is
as bare and his personal support not more expensive. He who commands
ten thousand others lives as poorly, under the same strict instructions,
with as few conveniences and with less leisure than the meanest
brother.[5308] Over and above the austerities of ordinary discipline
this or that superior imposed on himself additional mortifications which
were so great as to astonish as well as edify his monks. Such is the
ideal State of the theorist, a Spartan republic, and for all, including
the chiefs, an equal ration of the same black broth. There is another
resemblance, still more profound. At the base of this republic lies
the corner-stone designed in anticipation by Rousseau, then hewn and
employed, well or ill, in the constitutions or plébiscites of the
Revolution, the Consulate and the Empire, to serve as the foundation of
the complete edifice. This stone is a primitive and solemn agreement by
all concerned, a social contract, a pact proposed by the legislator and
accepted by the citizens; except that, in the monastic pact, the will of
the acceptors is unanimous, earnest, serious, deliberate and permanent,
while, in the political pact, it is not so; thus, whilst the latter
contract is a theoretical fiction, the former is an actual verity.
For, in the small religious cité, all precautions are taken to have the
future citizen know for what and how far he engages himself. The copy of
the rules which is handed to him in advance explains to him the future
use of each day and of each hour, the detail in full of the régime to
which he is to subject himself. Besides this, to forestall any illusion
and haste on his part he is required to make trial of the confinement
and discipline; he realizes through personal, sensible and prolonged
experience what he must undergo; before assuming the habit, he must
serve a novitiate of at least one year and without interruption. Simple
vows sometimes precede the more solemn vows; with the Jesuits, several
novitiates, each lasting two or three years, overlie and succeed each
other. Elsewhere, the perpetual engagement is taken only after several
temporary engagements; up to the age of twenty-five the "Fréres des
Ecoles Chrétiennes" take their vows for a year; at twenty-five for three
years; only at twenty-eight do they take them for life. Certainly,
after such trials, the postulant is fully informed; nevertheless, his
superiors contribute what they know. They have watched him day after
day; deep down under his superficial, actual and declared disposition
they define his profound, latent, and future intention; if they deem
this insufficient or doubtful, they adjourn or prevent the final
profession: "My child, wait-your vocation is not yet determined," or "My
friend, you were not made for the convent, return to the world!"--Never
was a social contract signed more knowingly, after greater reflection
on what choice to make, after such deliberate study: the conditions of
human association demanded by the revolutionary theory are all fulfilled
and the dream of the Jacobins is realized. But not where they planned
it: through a strange contrast, and which seems ironical in history,
this day-dream of speculative reason has produced nothing in the lay
order of things but elaborate plans on paper, a deceptive and dangerous
Declaration of (human) Rights, appeals to insurrection or to a
dictatorship: incoherent or still-born organizations, in short,
abortions or monsters; in the religious order of things, it adds to the
living world thousands of living creatures of indefinite viability. So
that, among the effects of the French revolution, one of the principal
and most enduring is the restoration of monastic institutions....
From the Consulate down to the present day they can everywhere be seen
sprouting and growing. Early, new sprouts shoot out and cover the old
trunks of which the revolutionary axe had cut off the branches. In 1800,
"the re-establishment of a corporation shocked current ideas."[5309] But
the able administrators of the Consulate required volunteer women for
service in their hospitals. In Paris, Chaptal, the minister, comes
across a lady superior whom he formerly knew and enjoins her to gather
together ten or a dozen of her surviving companions; he installs them in
the rue Vieux-Colombier, in a building belonging to the hospitals, and
which he furnishes for forty novices; at Lyons, he notices that the
"Sisters" of the general hospital were obliged, that they might perform
their duties, to wear a lay dress; he authorizes them to resume their
costume and their crosses; he allows them two thousand francs to
purchase necessaries, and, when they have donned their old uniform, he
presents them to the First Consul. Such is the first sprout, very small
and very feeble, that appears in the institution of Saint-Vincent
de Paule at Paris and in that of Saint-Charles at Lyons. In our
days[5310](around 1885), the congregation of Saint-Charles, besides
the parent-house at Lyons, has 102 others with 2,226 nuns, and the
congregation of Saint-Vincent de Paule, besides the parent-house at
Paris, has 88 others with 9,130 nuns. Often, the new vegetation on the
trunk amputated by the Revolution is much richer than on the old one;
in 1789, the institution of the "Fréres des Ecoles Chrétiennes" had
800 members; in 1845, there were 4,000; in 1878, 9,818; on the 31st of
December, 1888, there were 12,245. In 1789, it counted 126 houses; in
1888, there were 1,286.--Meanwhile, alongside of the old plantations, a
large number of independent germs, new species and varieties, spring up
spontaneously, each with its own aim, rules and special denomination.
On Good Friday, April 6, 1792, at the very date of the decree of the
Legislative Assembly abolishing all religious communities,[5311] one is
born, that of the "Soeurs de la Retraite Chrétienne," at Fontenelle, and,
from year to year, similar plants constantly and suddenly spring out of
the ground for a century. The list is too long to be counted; a large
official volume of more than four hundred pages is filled with the
mere statement of their names, localities and statistics.--This volume,
published in 1878, divides religious institutions into two groups. We
find in the first one, comprising the legally authorized societies, at
first 5 congregations of men possessing 224 establishments with 2,418
members, and 23 associations of men with 20,341 members and supplying
3,086 schools; next, 259 congregations of women and 644 communities
which possess 3,196 establishments, supplying 16,478 schools and
counting 113,750 members. In the second group, comprising unauthorized
societies, we find 384 establishments of men with 7,444 members, and 602
establishments of women with 14,003 members,--in all, in both groups,
30,287 brethren and 127,753 sisters. Considering the total population,
the proportion of brethren in 1789 and in our day is about the same;
it is their spirit which has changed; at the present day, all desire to
remain in their profession, while in 1789 two-thirds wanted to withdraw
from it. As to the proportion of Sisters, it has increased beyond all
calculation.[5312] Out of 10,000 women in the population, there were, in
1789, 28 Sisters; in 1866, 45; in 1878, 67.[5313]
Carmelites, Clarisses, Filles du Coeur de Jésus, Réparatrices, Soeurs du
Saint-Sacrament, Visitandines, Franciscaines, Benedictines and others
like these, about 4000 nuns or sisters, are contemplatists. The
Carthusians, Cistercians, Trappists, and some others, about 1800 monks
and brethren who, for the most part, till the ground, do not impose
labor on themselves other than as an accessory exercise; their first and
principal object is prayer, meditation and worship; they, too, devote
their lives to contemplation on the other world and not to the service
of this one. But all the others, more than 28,000 men and more than
123,000 women, are benefactors by institution and voluntary laborers,
choosing to devote themselves to dangerous, revolting, and at least
ungrateful services--missions among savages and barbarians, care of the
sick, of idiots, of the insane, of the infirm, of the incurable, the
support of poor old men or of abandoned children; countless charitable
and educational works, primary schools, orphan asylums, houses of refuge
and prisons, and all gratuitously or at the lowest wages through a
reduction of bodily necessities to the lowest point, and of the personal
expenditure of each brother or sister.[5314] Evidently, with these
men and with these women, the ordinary balance of motives which prompt
people is reversed; in the inward balance of the scale it is no longer
selfishness which prevails against altruism, but the love of others
which prevails against selfishness.--Let us look at one of their
institutions just at the moment of its formation and see how the
preponderance passes over from the egoistic to the social instinct.
The first thing we always find at the origin of the enterprise is
compassion; a few kind hearts have been moved at the aspect of misery,
degradation and misconduct; souls or bodies were in distress and there
was danger of shipwreck; three or four saviors have come to the rescue.
At Rouen, in 1818, it is a poor girl who, by advice of her curé, brings
together a few of her friends in her garret; during the day they study
in a class and at night they work for their living; today, under the
title of "Soeurs du Sacré-Coeur de Jésus," they number 800. Elsewhere, at
Laval, the founder of the House of Refuge for poor repentants is a
plain ironing-girl who began her "House" by charitably harboring two
prostitutes; these brought others, and there are now a hundred of
similar institutions. Most frequently, the founder is the desservant or
vicar of the place, who, moved by local misery, fancies at first that
he is doing only local work. Thus, there is born in 1806 at
Rouissé-sur-Loire the congregation of "La Providence," which now has 918
"Sisters," in 193 houses; in 1817, at Lovallat, the association of "Les
Petits-Frères de Marie," which numbers to-day 3600 brethren; in 1840,
at Saint-Servan, the institution of "Les Petites-Soeurs des Pauvres," who
now number 2685, and, with no other help but alms-giving, feed and care
for, in their 158 houses, 20,000 old men, of which 13,000 live in their
93 domiciles in France; they take their meals after the inmates, and eat
only what they leave; they are prohibited from accepting any endowment
whatever; by virtue of their rules they are and remain mendicants, at
first, and especially, in behalf of their old men, and afterwards and
as accessory, in their own behalf. Note the circumstances of the
undertaking and the condition of the founders--they were two village
work-women, young girls between sixteen and eighteen for whom the vicar
of the parish had written short regulations (une petite règle); on
Sunday, together in the cleft of a rock on the seaside, they studied
and meditated over this little summary manual, performed the prescribed
devotions, this or that prayer or orison at certain hours, saying their
beads, the station in the church, self-examination and other ceremonies
of which the daily repetition deposits and strengthens the supernatural
mental conception. Such, over and above natural pity, is the superadded
weight which fixes the unstable will and maintains the soul permanently
in a state of abnegation.--At Paris, in the two halls of the Prefecture
of Police, where prostitutes and female thieves remain for a day or two
in provisional confinement, the "Sisters" of "Marie-Joseph," obliged by
their vows to live constantly in this sewer always full of human dregs,
sometimes feel their heart failing them; fortunately, a little chapel is
arranged for them in one corner where they retire to pray, and in a few
minutes they return with their store of courage and gentleness again
revived.--Father Etienne, superior of the "Lazarists" and of the
"Filles de Saint-Vincent de Paule," with the authority of long
experience, very justly observed to some foreign visitors,[5315] "I have
given you the details of our life, but I have not told you the secret
of it. This secret, here it is--it is Jesus Christ, known, loved, and
served in the Eucharist."
II. Evolution of the Catholic Church.
The mystic faculty.--Its sources and works.--Evangelical
Christianity.--Its moral object and social effect.--Roman
Christianity.--Development of the Christian idea in the
West.--Influence of the Roman language and law.--Roman
conception of the State.--Roman conception of the Church.
In the thirteenth century, to the communicant on his knees about
to receive the sacrament, the Host often faded out of sight; it
disappeared, and, in its place, appeared an infant or the radiant
features of the Savior and, according to the Church doctors, this was
not an illusion but an illumination.[5316] The veil had lifted, and the
soul found itself face to face with its object, Jesus Christ present in
Eucharist. This was second sight, infinitely superior in certainty and
reach to the former, a direct, full view granted by grace from above,
a supernatural view.--By this example, which is an extreme case, we
comprehend in what faith consists. It is an extraordinary faculty
operating alongside of and often in conjunction with our natural
faculties; over and above things as our observation naturally presents
them to us, it reveals to us a beyond, a majestic, grandiose world, the
only one truly real and of which ours is but the temporary veil. In the
depths of the soul, much below the superficial crust of which we have
any conscience,[5317] impressions have accumulated like subterranean
waters. There, under the surging heat of innate instincts, a living
spring has burst forth, growing and bubbling in the obscurity; let a
shock or a fissure intervene and it suddenly sprouts up and forces its
way above the surface; the man who has this within him and in whom it
overflows is amazed at the inundation and no longer recognizes himself;
the visible field of his conscience is completely changed and renewed;
in place of his former and vacillating and scattered thoughts he finds
an irresistible and coherent belief, a precise conception, and intense
picture, a passionate affirmation, sometimes even positive perceptions
of a species apart and which come to him not from without but from
within, not alone mere mental suggestions, like the dialogues of
the "Imitation" and the "intellectual locutions" of the mystics, but
veritable physical sensations like the details of the visions of Saint
Theresa, the articulate voices of Joan of Arc and the bodily stigmata of
Saint Francis.
In the first century, this beyond discovered by the mystic faculty was
the kingdom of God, opposed to the kingdoms of this world;[5318] these
kingdoms, in the eyes of those who revealed them, were worthless;
through the keen insight of the moral and social instinct, these large,
generous and simple hearts had divined the internal defect of all the
societies or States of the century. Egoism in these was too great;
there was in them a lack of charity,[5319] the faculty of loving another
equally with one's self, and thus of loving, not only a few, but all
men, whoever they might be, simply because they were men, and especially
the meek, the humble and the poor; in other words, the voluntary
repression of the appetites by which the individual makes of himself a
center and subordinates other lives to himself, the renunciation of "the
lusts of the flesh, of the eyes and of vanity, the insolence of wealth
and luxury, of force and of power."[5320]--Opposed to and in contrast
with this human order of things, the idea of a divine order of things
was born and developed itself--a Heavenly Father, his reign in heaven,
and very soon, perhaps on the morrow, his reign here below; his son
descending to the earth to establish his reign and dying on the cross
for the salvation of men; after him, his Spirits, sent by him, the
inward breath which animates his disciples and continues his work; all
men brethren and beloved children of the same common father; here and
there spontaneous groups who have learned "these good tidings"
and propagated them; small scattered communities which live in the
expectation of an ideal order of things and yet, by anticipation,
realizing it from this time forth; "All[5321] were of one heart and one
soul,... for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them,
and brought the prices of the things that were sold and laid them
down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man
according as he had need," all happy in being together, in mutual love
and in feeling themselves regenerate or pure.
Here is to be found in the soul a new regulator and motor, and moreover
a powerful organ, appropriate and effective, obtained through internal
recasting and metamorphosis, like the wings with which an insect is
provided after its transformation. In every living organism, necessity,
through tentative effort and selections, thus produces the possible and
requisite organ. In India, five hundred years before our era, it was
Buddhism; in Arabia, six hundred years after our era, it was Islam;
in our western societies it is Christianity. At the present day, after
eighteen centuries on both continents, from the Ural to the Rocky
Mountains, amongst Russian moujiks and American settlers, it works as
formerly with the fishermen of Galilee and in the same way, in such a
way as to substitute for the love of self the love of others; neither
in substance nor in use has any change taken place; under its Greek,
Catholic or Protestant envelope, it is still, for four hundred millions
of human beings, the spiritual means, the great, indispensable pair
of wings by which man rises upward above himself, above his groveling
existence and his limited horizons, leading him on through patience,
hope and resignation to serenity, and beyond to temperance, purity,
goodness, and self-devotion and self-sacrifice. Always and everywhere,
for the past eighteen hundred years, as soon as these wings grow feeble
or give way, public and private morals degenerate. In Italy, during
the Renaissance, in England under the restoration, in France under the
Convention and Directory, man becomes as pagan as in the first century;
the same causes render him the same as in the times of Augustus and
Tiberius, that is to say voluptuous and cruel: he abuses himself and
victimizes others; a brutal, calculating egoism resumes its ascendancy,
depravity and sensuality spread, and society becomes a den of
cut-throats and a brothel.[5322]
After contemplating this spectacle near by, we can value the
contribution to modern societies of Christianity, how much modesty,
gentleness and humanity it has introduced into them, how it maintains
integrity, good faith and justice. Neither philosophic reason, artistic
or literary culture, or even feudal, military or chivalric honor, nor
any administration or government can replace it. There is nothing else
to restrain our natal bent, nothing to arrest the insensible, steady,
down-hill course of our species with the whole of its original burden,
ever retrograding towards the abyss. Whatever its present envelope may
be, the old Gospel still serves as the best auxiliary of the social
instinct.
Among its three contemporary forms, that which groups together the most
men, about 180 millions of believers, is Catholicism, in other words,
Roman Christianity, which two words, comprising a definition, contain
a history. At the origin, on the birth of the Christian principle, it
expressed itself at first in Hebrew, the language of prophets and
of seers; afterwards, and very soon, in Greek, the language of the
dialecticians and philosophers; at last, and very late, in Latin, the
language of the jurisconsults and statesmen; then come the successive
stages of dogma. All the evangelical and apostolic texts, written in
Greek, all the metaphysical speculations,[5323] also in Greek, which
served as commentary on these, reached the western Latins only
through translations. Now, in metaphysics, Latin poorly translates the
Greek[5324]; it lacks both the terms and the ideas; what the Orient
says, the Occident only half comprehends; it accepts this without
dispute and confidently holds it as truth.[5325] At length in its turn,
in the fourth century, when, after Theodosius, the Occident breaks loose
from the Orient, it intervenes, and it intervenes with its language,
that is to say with the provision of ideas and words which its culture
provided; it likewise had its instruments of precision, not those of
Plato and Aristotle, but others, as special, forged by Ulpian, Gaius
and twenty generations of jurists through the original invention and
immemorial labor of Roman genius. "To say what is law," to impose rules
of conduct on men, is, in abridged form, the entire practical work of
the Roman people; to write this law out, to formulate and coordinate
these rules, is, in abridged form, its entire scientific work, and
with the Romans in the third, fourth and fifth centuries, during the
decadence of other studies, the science of law was still in full
force and vigor.[5326] Hence, when the Occidentals undertook the
interpretation of texts and the elaboration of the Creed it was with
the habits and faculties of jurisconsults, with the preoccupations and
mental reservations of statesmen, with the mental and verbal instruments
which they found suitable. In those days, the Greek doctors, in conflict
with the monophysites and monothelites, brought out the theory of
the divine essence; at the same date, the Latin doctors, opposing the
Pelagians, Semi-Pelagians and Donatists, founded the theory of human
obligation.[5327] Obligation, said the Roman jurists, is a lien of law"
by which we are held to doing or suffering something to free us from
indebtedness. Out of this juridical conception, which is a masterpiece
of Roman jurisprudence, issued, as with a bud full of sap, the new
development of the Creed.--On the one hand, we are obligated towards
God, for, in relation to him, we are, in legal terms, insolvent debtors,
heirs of an infinite debt, incapable of paying it and of satisfying
our creditor except through the interpostion of a superhuman third
person[5328] who assumes our indebtedness as his own; still more
precisely, we are delinquents, guilty from birth and by inheritance,
condemned en masse and then pardoned en masse, but in such a way that
this pardon, a pure favor, not warranted by any merit of our own, always
remains continual and revocable at will; that, for a few only, it is
or becomes plenary and lasting, that no one amongst us can be sure of
obtaining it, and that its award, determined beforehand on high, forever
remains for us a State secret. Hence the prolonged controversies
on Predestination, Free-will and Original Sin, and the profound
investigations on man before, during and after the Fall. Hence, also,
the accepted solutions, not very conclusive and, if one pleases,
contradictory, but practical, average and well calculated for
maintaining mankind in faith and obedience, under the ecclesiastical and
dogmatic government which, alone, is authorized to lead man on in the
way of salvation.
On the other hand, we are obligated to the Church, for she is a cité,
the city of God, and, following the Roman definition, the cité is not an
abstract term, a collective term, but a real, positive existence,
"the commonwealth" (chose publique), that is to say a distinct entity
consisting of generations which succeed each other in it, of infinite
duration and of a superior kind, divine or nearly so, which does not
belong to individuals but to which they belong, an organized body, with
special form and structure, based on traditions, constituted by laws and
ruled by a government. The absolute authority of the community over its
members and the despotic leadership of the community by its chiefs--such
is the Roman notion of the State and, for much stronger reasons, of
the Church. She, thus, is a militant, conquering, governing Rome,
predestined to universal empire, a legitimate sovereign like the other
one, but with a better title, for she derives hers from God. It is God
who, from the beginning, has preconceived and prepared her, who has
bodied her forth in the Old Testament and announced her through the
prophets; it is the Son of God who has built her up, who, to all
eternity, will never fail to maintain and guide her steps, who, through
his constant inspiration, ever remains present in her and active through
her. He has committed to her his revelation. She alone, expressly
delegated by Christ, possesses second sight, the knowledge of the
invisible, the comprehension of the ideal order of things as its Founder
prescribed and instituted, and hence, accordingly, the custodianship
and interpretation of the Scriptures, the right of framing dogmas and
injunctions, of teaching and commanding, of reigning over souls and
intellects, of fashioning belief and morals. Henceforth, the mystic
faculty is to be confined within dikes. At bottom, this is the faculty
for conceiving of the ideal, to obtain a vision of it, to have faith in
this vision and to act upon it; the more precious it is the greater the
necessity of its being under control. To preserve it from itself, to
put it on guard against the arbitrariness and diversity of individual
opinions, to prevent unrestrained digression, theoretically or
practically, either on the side of laxity or of rigor, requires a
government.--That this is a legacy of ancient Rome the Catholic Church
does not dispute. She styles herself the Roman Church. She still writes
and prays in Latin. Rome is always her capital; the title of her chief
is that which formerly designated the head of the pagan cult; after 1378
all the Popes except five, and since 1523 all, have been Italians; at
the present day, thirty-five out of sixty-four cardinals are likewise
Italians. The Roman stamp becomes still more evident on comparing the
millions of Christians who are Catholics with the millions of Christians
who are not. Among the primitive annexations and ulterior acquisitions
of the Roman Church, several have separated from her, those of the
countries whose Greek, Slavic and Germanic populations never spoke Latin
and whose language is not derived from the Latin. Poland and Ireland
are alone, or nearly so, the only countries which have remained loyal,
because, with these, the Catholic faith, under the long pressure of
public calamities, has become incorporated with national sentiment.
Elsewhere the Roman deposit is non-existent or too thin. On the
contrary, all the populations that were once Latinized have at bottom
remained Catholic; four centuries of imperial rule and of Roman
assimilation have deposited in them of layers of habits, ideas and
sentiments which endure.[5329] To measure the influence of this historic
layer it is sufficient to note that three elements compose it, all three
contemporary, of the same origin and of the same thickness, a Roman
language, the civil law of Rome, and Roman Christianity; each of these
elements, through its consistence, indicates the consistence of the
others.
Hence the profound and established characteristics by which the Catholic
branch now distinguishes itself from the other two issuing from the same
Christian trunk. With the Protestants, the Bible, which is the Word
of God, is the sole spiritual authority; all the others, the Doctors,
Fathers, tradition, Popes and Councils, are human and, accordingly,
fallible; in fact, these have repeatedly and gravely erred.[5330] The
Bible, however, is a text which each reader reads with his own eyes,
more or less enlightened and sensitive, with eyes which, in Luther's
time, possessed the light and sensibility of the sixteenth century, and
which, at the present time, read with the sensibility and light of
the nineteenth century; so that, according to epochs and groups, the
interpretation may vary, while authority, if not as regards the text, or
at least its meaning, belongs wholly to the individual. With the Greeks
and Slavs, as with the Catholics, it belongs only to the Church, that is
to say to the heads of the Church, the successors of the apostles.
But with the Greeks and Slavs, since the ninth century, the Church had
decreed no new dogmas; according to her, revelation had stopped; the
creed was finished, final and complete, and there was nothing to do but
to maintain it.--On the contrary, with the Catholics, after as before
that date, the creed never ceased developing itself, always becoming
more precise, and revelation kept on; the last thirteen councils were
inspired like the first seven, while the first one, in which Saint Peter
at Jerusalem figured, enjoyed no more prerogatives than the last
one convoked by Pius IX. at the Vatican. The Church is not "a frozen
corpse,"[5331] but a living body, led by an always active brain which
pursues its work not only in this world but likewise in the next world,
at first to define it and next to describe it and assign places in
it; only yesterday she added two articles of faith to the creed, the
immaculate conception of the Virgin and the infallibility of the Pope;
she conferred ultra-terrestrial titles; she declared Saint Joseph patron
of the universal Church; she canonized Saint Labre; she elevated Saint
François de Sales to the rank of Doctor. But she is as conservative as
she is active. She retracts nothing of her past, never rescinding any
of her ancient decrees; only, with the explanations, commentaries and
deductions of the jurist, she fastens these links closer together, forms
an uninterrupted chain of them extending from the present time back to
the New Testament and, beyond, through the Old Testament, to the origins
of the world, in such a way as to coordinate around herself the entire
universe and all history. Revelations and prescriptions, the doctrine
thus built up is a colossal work, as comprehensive as it is precise,
analogous to the Digest but much more vast; for, besides canon law and
moral theology, she includes dogmatic theology, that is to say, besides
the theory of the visible world, the theory of the invisible world
and its three regions, the geography of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise,
immense territories of which our earth is merely the vestibule, unknown
territories inaccessible to sense and reason, but whose confines,
entrances, issues and subdivisions, the inhabitants and all that
concerns them, their faculties and their communications, are defined, as
on Peutinger's map and in the Notitia imperii romani, with extraordinary
clearness, minutia and exactitude, through a combination of the
positive spirit and the mystic spirit and by theologians who are at once
Christians and administrators. In this relation, examine the "Somme"
of Saint Thomas. Still at the present day his order, the Dominican,
furnishes at Rome those who are consulted on matters of dogma; or
rather, in order to abridge and transcribe scholastic formula into
perceptible images, read the "Divine Comedy "by Dante.[5332] It is
probable that this description, as far as imagination goes, is still
to-day the most exact as well as most highly-colored presentation of
the human and divine world as the Catholic Church conceives it. She has
charge of its keys and reigns and governs in it. The prestige of such
a government over multitudes of minds and souls, susceptible to
discipline, without personal initiative, and in need of firm and
systematic guidance, is supreme. It is equal to or superior to that of
the ancient roman State with its 120 million subjects. Outside of
the Empire all seemed to these souls anarchy or barbarism; the same
impression exists with the Catholics in relation to their Church.
Whether spiritual or temporal, an authority is more likely to be
approved and venerated when, always visible and everywhere present, it
is neither arbitrary nor capricious, but orderly, restrained by texts,
traditions, legislation and jurisprudence, derived from above and from
a superhuman source, consecrated by antiquity and by the continuity,
coherence and grandeur of its work, in short, by that character which
the Latin tongue is alone capable of expressing and which it terms
majesty.
Among the acts which religious authority prescribes to its subjects,
there are some which it imposes in its own name--rites, outward
ceremonies and other observances--of which the principal ones, in the
Catholic catechism, form a sequence to the "commandments of God,"
and which are entitled the "commandments of the Church."--With the
Protestants, where Church authority is almost gone, rites have almost
disappeared; considered in themselves, they have ceased to be regarded
as obligatory or meritorious; the most important ones, the Eucharist
itself, have been retained only as commemorative or as symbolic; the
rest, fasts, abstinences, pilgrimages, the worship of saints and the
Virgin, relics of the cross, words committed to memory, genuflections
and kneeling before images or altars, have been pronounced vain; in the
way of positive injunctions none remain but the reading of the Bible,
while duty in outward demonstration of piety is reduced to piety
within, to the moral virtues, to truthfulness, probity, temperance and
steadfastness, to the energetic determination to observe the watchword
received by man in two forms and which he finds in two concordant
examples, in the Scriptures as interpreted by his conscience, and in his
conscience as enlightened by the Scriptures. As another consequence,
the Protestant priest has ceased to be a delegate from on high, the
indispensable mediator between man and God, alone qualified to give
absolution and to administer the rites by which salvation is obtained;
he is simply a man, graver, more learned, more pious and more exemplary
than other men, but, like the others, married, father of a family and
entering into civil life, in short a semi-layman. The laymen whom
he leads owe him deference, not obedience; he issues no orders; he
sentences nobody; speaking from the rostrum to a gathering is his
principal, almost unique, office, and the sole purpose of this is
instruction or an exhortation.--With the Greeks and Slaves, with whom
the authority of the Church is merely of a preservative nature, all
the observances of the twelfth century have subsisted, as rigorously in
Russia as in Asia Minor or in Greece, although fasting and Lents, which
Southern stomachs can put up with, are unhealthy for the temperaments
of the North. Here, likewise, these observances have assumed capital
importance. The active sap, withdrawn from theology and the clergy,
flows nowhere else; these, in an almost paralyzed religion, constitute
almost the sole vivifying organ, as vigorous and often more so,
than ecclesiastical authority; in the seventeenth century, under the
patriarch Nicon, thousands of "old believers," on account of slight
rectifications of the liturgy, the alteration of a letter in the Russian
translation of the name of Jesus, and the sign of the cross made by
three instead of two fingers, separated themselves and, to-day, these
dissenters, multiplied by their sects, count by millions. Defined by
custom, every rite is sacred, immutable, and, when exactly fulfilled,
sufficient in itself and efficacious; the priest who utters the words
and makes the motions is only one piece in the mechanism, one of
the instruments requisite for a magic incantation; after his
instrumentation, he falls back into his human negativity; he is nothing
more than an employee paid for his ministration. And this ministration
is not exalted in him by an extraordinary and visible renunciation,
by perpetual celibacy, by continence promised and kept; he is
married,[5333] father of a family, needy, obliged to shear his flock to
support himself and those belonging to him, and therefore is of little
consideration; he is without moral ascendancy; he is not the pastor who
is obeyed, but the official who is made use of.
The role of the priest in the Catholic Church is quite different.
Through her theory of rites she confers on him incomparable dignity
and real personal power.--According to this theory, observances and
ceremonies possess intrinsic and peculiar virtue; undoubtedly, these
require some mental base, which is found in earnest piety; but
earnest piety independent of these is not enough; it lacks its final
consequence, its praiseworthy completion or "satisfaction,"[5334] the
positive act by which we atone for our sins to God and demonstrate our
obedience to the Church.[5335] It is the Church, the living interpreter
of God's will, which prescribes these rites; she is then the mistress of
these and not the servant; she is empowered to adapt their details and
forms to necessities and circumstances, to lighten or simplify them
according to time and place, to establish the communion in one shape, to
substitute the Host in place of bread, to lessen the number and rigor of
the ancient Lents, to determine the effects of diverse pious works, to
apply, ascribe and transfer their salutary effects, to assign proper
value and reward to each devotional act, to measure the merit derived
from them, the sins they efface and the pardons these obtain not only in
this world but in the next one. By virtue of her administrative habits,
and with the precision of a bookkeeper, she casts up her accounts
of indulgences and notes on the margin the conditions for obtaining
them,--a certain prayer repeated so many times on certain days and
what for, so many days less in the great penitentiary into which every
Christian, however pious, is almost sure to get on dying, this or that
diminution of the penalty incurred, and the faculty, if the penitent
rejects this deduction for himself, of bestowing the benefit on another.
By virtue of her authoritative habits and the better to affirm her
sovereignty, she regards as capital sins the omission of the rites
and ceremonies she commands,--"not going to mass on Sunday or on
fête-days;[5336] eating meat on Friday or Saturday unnecessarily;" not
confessing and communing at Easter, a mortal sin which "deprives one of
the grace of God and merits eternal punishment" as well as "to slay
and to steal something of value." For all these crimes, unforgivable in
themselves, there is but one pardon, the absolution given by the
priest, that is to say, confession beforehand, itself being one of the
observances to which we are bound by strict obligation and at the very
least once a year.
Through this office the Catholic priest rises above human conditions to
an immeasurable height; for, in the confessional, he exercises
supreme power, that which God is to exercise at the Last Judgment,
the formidable power of punishing or remitting sins, of judgment or
of absolution, and, if he intervenes on the death-bed, the faculty of
consigning the impenitent or repentant soul to an eternity of rewards
or to an eternity of damnation.[5337] No creature, terrestrial or
celestial, not even the highest of archangels, or St. Joseph or the
Virgin,[5338] possesses this veritably divine prerogative. He alone
holds it through exclusive delegation, by virtue of a special sacrament,
the order which assigns to him the privilege of conferring five others,
and which endows him for life with a character apart, ineffaceable and
supernatural.--To render himself worthy of it, he has taken a vow of
chastity, he undertakes to root out from his flesh and his heart the
consequences of sex; he debars himself from marriage and paternity;
through isolation, he escapes all family influences, curiosities and
indiscretions; he belongs wholly to his office. He has prepared himself
for it long beforehand, he has studied moral theology together with
casuistry and become a criminal jurist; and his sentence is not a vague
pardon bestowed on penitents after having admitted in general terms that
they are sinners. He is bound to weigh the gravity of their errors and
the strength of their repentance, to know the facts and details of
the fall and the number of relapses, the aggravating or extenuating
circumstances, and, therefore, to interrogate in order to sound the soul
to its depths. If some souls are timorous, they surrender themselves to
him spontaneously and, more than this, they have recourse to him outside
of his tribunal; he marks out for them the path they must follow, he
guides them at every turn; he interferes daily, he becomes a director as
was said in the seventeenth century, the titular and permanent director
of one or of many lives.[5339] This is still the case at the present
day, and especially for women and for all nuns; the central conception
around which all Roman ideas turn, the conception of the imperium and
of government, has here found its perfect accomplishment and attained to
its final outermost limits.
There are now of these spiritual governors about 180,000, installed in
the five regions of the world, each assigned to the leadership of about
1000 souls and as special guardian of a distinct flock, all ordained by
bishops instituted by the Pope, he being absolute monarch and declared
such by the latest council. In the new Rome as in the ancient Rome,
authority has gradually become concentrated until it has centered in
and is entrusted wholly to the hands of one man. Romulus, the Alban
shepherd, was succeeded by Cæsar Augustus, Constantine or Theodosius,
whose official title was "Your Eternal," "Your Divine," and who
pronounced their decrees "immutable oracles." Peter, the fisherman of
Galilee, was succeeded by infallible pontiffs whose official title is
"Your Holiness," and whose decrees, for every Catholic, are "immutable
oracles" in fact as in law, not hyperbolically, but in the full sense
of the words expressed by exact terms. The imperial institution has thus
formed itself anew; it has simply transferred itself from one domain
to another; only, in passing from the temporal order of things to the
spiritual order, it has become firmer and stronger, for it has guarded
against two defects which weakened its antique model.--One the one hand,
it has provided for the transmission of supreme power; in old Rome, they
did not know how to regulate this; hence, when an interregnum occurred,
the many violent competitors, the fierce conflicts, the brutalities,
all the usurpations of force, all the calamities of anarchy. In Catholic
Rome, the election of the sovereign pontiff belongs definitively to a
college of prelates[5340] who vote according to established formalities;
these elect the new pope by a majority of two-thirds, and, for more than
four centuries, not one of these elections has been contested; between
each defunct pope and his elected successor, the transfer of universal
obedience has been prompt and unhesitating and, during as after the
interregnum, no schism in the Church has occurred.--On the other hand,
in the legal title of Cæsar Augustus there was a defect. According to
Roman law, he was only the representative of the people; the community
had delegated all its rights incorporate to him; but in it alone was
omnipotence vested. According to canon law, omnipotence was vested
solely in God; it is not the Catholic community which possesses this and
delegates it to the Pope;[5341] his rights accrue to him from another
and higher source.[5342] He is not the elect of the people, but the
interpreter, vicar and representative of Jesus Christ.
III. The Church today.
Existing Catholicism and its distinctive traits.--Authority,
its prestige and supports.--Rites, the priest, the Pope.
--The Catholic Church and the modern State.--Difficulties in
France born out of their respective constitutions.--
Such is the Catholic Church of to-day, a State constructed after the
type of the old Roman empire, independent and autonomous, monarchical
and centralized, with a domain not of territory but of souls and
therefore international, under an absolute and cosmopolite sovereign
whose subjects are simultaneously subjects of other non-religious
rulers. Hence, for the Catholic Church a situation apart in every
country, more difficult than for Greek, Slavic or Protestant churches;
these difficulties vary in each country according to the character of
the State and with the form which the Catholic Church has received in
them.[5343] In France, since the Concordat, these difficulties are of
greater gravity than elsewhere.
When, in 1802, the Church initially received her French form, this was
a complete systematic organization, after a general and regular plan,
according to which she formed only one compartment of the whole.
Napoleon, by his Concordat, organic articles and ulterior decrees,
in conformity with the ideas of the century and the principles of the
Constituent Assembly, desired to render the clergy of all kinds,
and especially the Catholic clergy, one of the subdivisions of his
administrative staff, a corps of functionaries, mere agents assigned
to religious interests as formerly to civil matters and therefore
manageable and revocable. This they all were, in fact, including the
bishops, since they at once tendered their resignations at his
order. Still, at the present day all, except the bishops, are in
this situation, having lost the ownership of their places and the
independence of their lives, through the maintenance of the consular and
imperial institutions, through removal, through the destruction of
the canonical and civil guarantees which formerly protected the
lower clergy, through the suppression of the officialité; through the
reduction of chapters to the state of vague shadows, through the rupture
or laxity of the local and moral tie which once attached every member of
the clergy to a piece of land, to an organized body, to a territory, to
a flock, and through the lack of ecclesiastical endowment, through the
reduction of every ecclesiastic, even a dignitary, to the humble and
precarious condition of a salaried dependent.[5344]
A régime of this kind institutes in the body subject to it an almost
universal dependence, and hence entire submission, passive obedience,
and the stooping, prostrate attitude of the individual no longer able to
stand upright on his own feet.[5345] The clergy to which it is applied
cannot fail to be managed from above, which is the case with this
one, through its bishops, the Pope's lieutenant-generals, who give the
countersign to all of them. Once instituted by the Pope, each bishop
is the governor for life of a French province and all-powerful in
his circumscription we have seen to what height his moral and social
authority has risen, how he has exercised his command, how he has kept
his clergy under discipline and available, in what class of society he
has found his recruits, through what drill and what enthusiasm every
priest, including himself, is now a practiced soldier and kept in check;
how this army of occupation, distributed in 90 regiments and composed
of 50,000 resident priests, is completed by special bodies of troops
subject to still stricter discipline, by monastic corporations, by four
or five thousand religious institutions, nearly all of them given to
labor and benevolence; how, to the subordination and correct deportment
of the secular clergy is added the enthusiasm and zeal of the regular
clergy, the entire devotion, the wonderful self-denial of 30,000 monks
and of 120,000 nuns; how this vast body, animated by one spirit,
marches steadily along with all its lay supporters towards one end. This
purpose, forever the same, is the maintenance of its dominion over all
the souls that it has won over, and the conquest of all the souls over
which it has not yet established its domination.
Nothing could be more antipathetic to the French State. Built up like
the Church, after the Roman model, it is likewise authoritative and
absorbent. In the eyes of Napoleon, all these priests appointed or
sanctioned by him, who have sworn allegiance to him, whom he pays
annually or quarterly, belong to him in a double sense, first under the
title of subjects, and next under the title of clerks. His successors
are still inclined to regard them in the same light; in their hands the
State is ever what he made it, that is to say a monopolizer, convinced
that its rights are illimitable and that its interference everywhere
is legitimate, accustomed to governing all it can and leaving to
individuals only the smallest portion of themselves, hostile to all
bodies that might interpose between them and it, distrustful and
ill-disposed towards all groups capable of collective action and
spontaneous initiation, especially as concerns proprietary bodies.
A self-constituted daily overseer, a legal guardian, a perpetual and
minute director of moral societies as of local societies, usurper of
their domains, undertaker or regulator of education and of charitable
enterprises, the State is ever in inevitable conflict with the Church.
The latter, of all moral societies, is the most active; she does not let
herself be enslaved like the others, her soul is in her own keeping;
her faith, her organization, her hierarchy and her code are all her own.
Against the rights of the State based on human reason, she claims rights
founded on divine revelation, and, in self-defense, she justly finds
in the French clergy, as the State organized it in 1802, the best
disciplined militia, the best classified, the most capable of operating
together under one countersign and of marching in military fashion under
the impulsion that its ecclesiastical leaders choose to give it.
Elsewhere, the conflict is less permanent and less sharp the two
conditions which aggravate it and maintain it in France are, one or
both, wanting. In other European countries, the Church has not the
French form imposed upon it and the difficulties are less; in the
United States of America, not only has it not undergone the French
transformation, but the State, liberal in principle, interdicts
itself against interventions like those of the French State and the
difficulties are almost null. Evidently, if there was any desire to
attenuate or to prevent the conflict it would be through the first
or the last of these two policies. The French State, however,
institutionally and traditionally, always invasive, is ever tempted to
take the contrary course.[5346]--At one time, as during the last years
of the Restoration and the first years of the second Empire, it allies
itself with the Church; each power helps the other in its domination,
and in concert together they undertake to control the en tire man.
In this case, the two centralizations, one ecclesiastic and the other
secular, both increasing and prodigiously augmented for a century,
work together to overpower the individual. He is watched, followed up,
seized, handled severely, and constrained even in his innermost being;
he can no longer breathe the atmosphere around him; we can well remember
the oppression which, after 1823 and after 1852, bore down on every
independent character and on every free intellect.--At another time, as
under the first and the third Republic, the State sees in the Church a
rival and an adversary; consequently, it persecutes or worries it and we
of to-day see with our own eyes how a governing minority, steadily,
for a long time, gives offence to a governed majority where it is
most sensitive; how it breaks up congregations of men and drives free
citizens from their homes whose only fault is a desire to live, pray
and labor in common; how it expels nuns and monks from hospitals and
schools, with what detriment to the hospital and to the sick, to the
school and to the children, and against what unwillingness and what
discontent on the part of physicians and fathers of families, and at
what bungling waste of public money, at what a gratuitous overburdening
of taxation already too great.
IV. Contrasting Vistas.
Other difficulties of the French system.--New and scientific
conception of the world.--How opposed to the Catholic
conception.--How it is propagated.--How the other is
defended.--Losses and gains of the Catholic Church.--Its
narrow and broad domains.--Effects of Catholic and French
systems on Christian sentiment in France.--Increased among
the clergy and diminished in society.
Other disadvantages of the French system are still worse.--In (the
nineteenth) century, an extraordinary event occurs. Already about
the middle of the preceding century, the discoveries of scientists,
coordinated by the philosophers, had afforded the sketch in full of
a great picture, still in course of execution and advancing towards
completion, a picture of the physical and moral universe. In this sketch
the point of sight was fixed, the perspective designed, the various
distances marked out, the principal groups drawn, and its outlines were
so correct that those who have since continued the work have little
to add but to give precision to these and fill them up.[5347] In their
hands, from Herschel and Laplace, from Volta, Cuvier, Ampère, Fresnel
and Faraday to Darwin and Pasteur, Burnouf, Mommsen and Renan, the
blanks on the canvas have been covered, the relief of the figures shown
and new features added in the sense of the old ones, thus completing it
without changing in any sense the expression of the whole, but, on the
contrary, in such a way as to consolidate, strengthen and perfect the
master-conception which, purposely or not, had imposed itself on the
original painters, all, predecessors and successors, working from
nature and constantly inviting a comparison between the painting and
the model.--And, for one hundred years, this picture, so interesting, so
magnificent, and the accuracy of which is so well guaranteed, instead
of being kept private and seen only by select visitors, as in the
eighteenth century, is publicly exposed and daily contemplated by an
ever-increasing crowd. Through the practical application of the same
scientific discoveries, owing to increased facilities for travel and
intercommunication, to abundance of information, to the multitude
and cheapness of books and newspapers, to the diffusion of primary
instruction, the number of visitors has increased enormously.[5348] Not
only has curiosity been aroused among the workmen in towns, but also
with the peasants formerly plodding along in the routine of their daily
labor, confined to their circle of six leagues in circumference. This or
that small daily journal treats of divine and human things for a million
of subscribers and probably for three millions of readers.--Of
course, out of a hundred visitors, ninety of them are not capable of
comprehending the sense of the picture; they give it only a cursory
glance; moreover, their eyes are not properly educated for it, and they
are unable to grasp masses and seize proportions. Their attention is
generally arrested by a detail which they interpret in a wrong way, and
the mental image they carry away is merely a fragment or a caricature;
basically, if they have come to see a magisterial work, it is most of
all due to vanity and so that his spectacle, which some of them enjoy,
should not remain the privileged of a few. Nevertheless, however
imperfect and confused their impressions, however false and ill-founded
their judgments, they have learned something important and one true idea
of their visit remains with them: of the various pictures of the world
not one is painted by the imagination but from nature.[5349]
Now, between this picture and that which the Catholic Church presents
to them, the difference is enormous. Even with rude intellects, or minds
otherwise occupied, if the dissimilarity is not clearly perceived it
is vaguely felt; in default of scientific notions, the simple hearsay
caught on the wing, and which seem to have flickered through the mind
like a flash of light over a hard rock, still subsists there in a latent
state, amalgamating and agglutinating into a solid block until at
length they form a massive, refractory sentiment utterly opposed to
faith.--With the Protestant, the opposition is neither extreme nor
definitive. His faith, which the Scriptures give him for his guidance,
leads him to read the Scriptures in the original text and, hence, to
read with profit, to call to his aid whatever verifies and explains an
ancient text, linguistics, philology, criticism, psychology, combined
with general and particular history; thus does faith lay hold on science
as an auxiliary. According to diverse souls, the role of the auxiliary
is more or less ample it may accordingly adapt itself to the faculties
and needs of each soul, and hence extend itself indefinitely, and
already do we see ahead the time when the two collaborators, enlightened
faith and respectful science, will together paint the same picture, or
each separately paint the same picture twice in two different frames.--
With the Slavs and Greeks, faith, like the Church and the rite, is a
national thing; creed forms one body with the country, and there is less
disposition to dispute it; besides, it is not irksome; it is simply a
hereditary relic, a domestic memorial, a family icon, a summary product
of an exhausted art no longer well understood and which has ceased
to produce. It is rather sketched out than completed, not one feature
having been added to it since the tenth century; for eight hundred years
this picture has remained in one of the back chambers of the memory,
covered with cobwebs as ancient as itself, badly lighted and rarely
visited; everybody knows that it is there and it is spoken of with
veneration; nobody would like to get rid of it, but it is not daily
before the eyes so that it may be compared with the scientific
picture.--Just the reverse with the Catholic picture. Each century, for
eight hundred years, has applied the brush to this picture; still, at
the present time we see it grow under our eyes, acquiring a stronger
relief, deeper color, a more vigorous harmony, an ever more fixed and
striking expression.--To the articles of belief which constitute the
creed for the Greek and Slavic church, thirteen subsequent Catholic
councils have added to it many others, while the two principal dogmas
decreed by the last two councils, Transubstantiation by the council of
Trent and the Infallibility of the Pope by that of the Vatican, are just
those the best calculated to hinder forever any reconciliation between
science and faith.
Thus, for Catholic nations, the dissimilarity, instead of diminishing,
is aggravated; both pictures, one painted by faith and the other
by science, become more and more dissimilar, while the profound
contradiction inherent in the two conceptions becomes glaring through
their very development, each developing itself apart and both in
a counter-sense, one through dogmatic verdicts and through the
strengthening of discipline and the other by ever-increasing discoveries
and by useful applications, each adding daily to its authority, one by
precious inventions and the other by good works, each being recognized
for what it is, one as the leading instructor of positive truths and the
other as the leading instructor of sound morality. That is why we find a
combat in each Catholic breast as to which of the two concepts is to
be accepted as guide. To every sincere mind and to one capable of
entertaining both, each is irreducible to the other. To the vulgar mind,
unable to combine both in thought, they exist side by side and clash
with each other only occasionally when action demands a choice.
Many intelligent, cultivated people, and even savants, especially
specialists, avoid confronting them, one being the support of their
reason and the other the guardian of their conscience; between them, in
order to prevent any possible conflict, they interpose in advance a wall
of separation, a compartment partition,[5350]" which prevents them from
meeting and clashing. Others, at length, clever or not too clear-sighted
politicians, try to force their agreement, either by assigning to each
its domain and in prohibiting mutual access, or by uniting both domains
through the semblance of bridges, by imitation stairways, and other
illusory communications which the phantasmagoria of human eloquence can
always establish between incompatible things and which procure for man,
if not the acquisition of a truth, at least a pleasure in the play
of words. The ascendancy of the Catholic faith over these uncertain,
inconsequent, tormented souls is more or less weak or strong according
to time, place, circumstance, individuals and groups; in the larger
group it has diminished, while it has increased in the smaller one.
The latter comprises the regular and secular clergy with its approximate
recruits and its small body of supporters; never was it so exemplary and
so fervent; the monastic institution in particular never flourished so
spontaneously and more usefully. Nowhere in Europe are more missionaries
formed, so many "brethren" for small schools, so many volunteers, male
and female, in the service of the poor, the sick, the infirm and of
children, such vast communities of women freely devoting their lives to
teaching and to charity.[5351] Life in common, under uniform and strict
rules, to a people like the French, more capable than any other of
enthusiasm and of emulation, of generosity and of discipline, naturally
prone to equality, sociable and predisposed to fraternity through the
need of companionship, sober, moreover, and laborious, a life in common
is no more distasteful in the convent than in the barracks, nor in
an ecclesiastical army more than in a lay army, while France, always
Gallic, affords as ready a hold nowadays to the Roman system as in the
time of Augustus. When this system obtains a hold on a soul it keeps
its hold, and the belief it imposes becomes the principal guest, the
sovereign occupant of the intellect. Faith, in this occupied territory,
no longer allows her title to be questioned; she condemns doubt as a
sin, she interdicts investigation as a temptation, she presents the
peril of un belief as a mortal danger, she enrolls conscience in her
service against any possible revolt of reason. At the same time that she
guards herself against attacks, she strengthens her possession; to
this end, the rites she prescribes are efficient, and their efficiency,
multiplicity and convergence--confession and communion, retreats,
spiritual exercises, abstinences, and ceremonies of every kind, the
worship of saints and of the Virgin, of relics and images, orisons on
the lips and from the heart, faithful attendance on the services and the
exact fulfillment of daily duties--all attest it.
Through its latest acquisitions and the turn it now takes, Catholic
faith buries itself in and penetrates down to the very depths of
the sensitive and tried souls which it has preserved from foreign
influences; for it supplies to this chosen flock the aliment it most
needs and which it loves the best. Below the metaphysical, abstract
Trinity, of which two of the three persons are out of reach of the
imagination, she has set up an historical Trinity whose personages are
all perceptible to the senses, Mary, Joseph and Jesus. The Virgin, since
the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, has risen to an extraordinary
height; her spouse accompanies her in her exaltation;[5352] between them
stands their son, child or man, which forms the Holy Family.[5353] No
worship is more natural and more engaging to chaste celibates in whose
brain a pure, vague vision is always present, the reverie of a family
constituted without the intervention of sex. No system of worship
furnishes so many precise objects for adoration, all the acts and
occurrences, the emotions and thoughts of three adorable lives from
birth to death and in the beyond, down to the present day. Most of
the religious institutions founded within the past eighty years devote
themselves to meditation on one of these lives considered at some one
point of incident or of character, either purity, charity, compassion
or justice, conception, nativity or infancy, presence in the Temple,
at Nazareth, at Bethany, or on Calvary, the passion, the agony, the
assumption or apparition under this or that circumstance or place, and
the rest. There are now in France, under the name and patronage of Saint
Joseph alone, one hundred and seventeen congregations and communities
of women. Among so many appellations, consisting of special watchwords
designating and summing up the particular preferences of a devout
group, one name is significant there are seventy-nine congregations or
communities of women which have devoted themselves to the heart of Mary
or of Jesus or to both together.[5354] In this way, besides the narrow
devotion which is attached to the corporeal emblem, a tender piety
pursues and attains its supreme end, the mute converse of the soul, not
with the dim Infinite, the indifferent Almighty who acts through general
laws, but with a person, a divine person clothed with the vesture of
humanity and who has not discarded it, who has lived, suffered and
loved, who still loves, who, in glory above, welcomes there the
effusions of his faithful souls and who returns love for love.
All this is incomprehensible, bizarre or even repulsive to the public at
large, and still more so to the vulgar. It sees in religion only what
is very plain, a government; and in France, it has already had enough of
government temporally; add a complementary one on the spiritual side and
that will be more and too much. Alongside of the tax-collector and the
gendarme in uniform, the peasant, the workman and the common citizen
encounter the curé in his cassock who, in the name of the Church,
as with the other two in the name of the State, gives him orders and
subjects him to rules and regulations. Now every rule is annoying and
the latter more than the others; one is rid of the tax-collector after
paying the tax, and of the gendarme when no act is committed against the
law; the curé is much more exacting; he interferes in domestic life and
in private matters and assumes to govern man entirely. He admonishes his
parishioners in the confessional and from the pulpit, he lords it over
them even in their inmost being, and his injunctions bind them in every
act, even at home, around the fireside, at table and in bed, comprising
their moments of repose and relaxation, even hours of leisure and in the
tavern. Villagers, after listening to a sermon against the tavern and
drunkenness, murmur and are heard to exclaim: "Why does he meddle with
our affairs? Let him say his mass and leave us alone." They need him
for baptism, marriage and burial, but their affairs do not concern him.
Moreover, among the observances he prescribes, many are inconvenient,
tasteless or disagreeable--fasting, Lent, a passive part in a Latin
mass, prolonged services, ceremonies of which the details are all
insignificant, but of which the symbolic meaning is to-day of no account
to people in attendance; add to all this the mechanical recitation of
the Pater and of the Ave, genuflections and crossing one's self, and
especially obligatory confession at specified dates. Nowadays the worker
and the peasant manage without these constraints. In many villages,
there is nobody at high mass on Sundays but women, and often, in small
numbers, one or two troops of children led by the clerical instructor
and by the "Sister," with a few old men; the great majority of the men
remain outside, under the porch and on the square before the church
chatting with each other about the crops, on local news and on the
weather.
In the eighteenth century, when a curé was obliged to report to the
"intendant" the number of inhabitants of his parish, he had only to
count his communicants at the Easter service; their number was about
that of the adult and valid population, say one half or two fifths of
the sum total.[5355] Now, at Paris, out of two millions of Catholics who
are of age, about one hundred thousand perform this strict duty, aware
of its being strict and the imperative prescription of which is
stamped in their memory by a rhyme which they have learned in their
infancy;[5356] out of one hundred persons, this is equal to five
communicants, of which four are women and one is a man, in other words,
about one woman out of twelve or thirteen and one man out of fifty. In
the provinces,[5357] and especially in the country, there is good reason
for doubling and even tripling these figures; in the latter case, the
most favorable one and, without any doubt, the rarest, the proportion of
professed Christians is that of one to four among women and one man
out of twelve. Evidently, with the others who make not attend Church
regularly, with the three women and the eleven other men, their faith is
only verbal; if they are still Catholics, it is on the outside and not
within.
Besides this separation from the main body and this indifference, other
signs denote disaffection and even hostility.--In Paris, at the height
of the Revolution, in May and June 1793, the shopkeepers, artisans
and market-women, the whole of the common people, were still
religious,[5358] "kneeling in the street" when the Host passed by, and
before the relics of Saint Leu carried along in ceremonial procession,
passionately fond of his worship, and suddenly melted, "ashamed,
repentant and with tears in their eyes, when, inadvertently, their
Jacobin rulers tolerated the publicity of a procession. Nowadays,
among the craftsmen, shopkeepers and lower class of employees, there
is nothing more unpopular than the Catholic Church. Twice, under
the Restoration and the second Empire, she has joined hands with a
repressive government, while its clergy has seemed to be not merely an
efficient organ but, again, the central promoter of all repression.--
Hence, accumulated bitterness that still survives. After 1830, the
archbishopric of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois is sacked; in 1871 the
archbishop and other ecclesiastical hostages are murdered. For two
years after 1830 a priest in his cassock dared not show himself in
public;[5359] he ran the risk of being insulted in the streets; since
1871, the majority of the Parisian electors, through the interposition
of the Municipal Council which they elect over and over again, persists
in driving "Brethren" and "Sisters" from the schools and hospitals in
order to put laymen in their places and pay twice as much for work not
done as well.[5360]--In the beginning, antipathy was confined to the
clergy; through contamination, it reached the doctrine, to include the
faith, the entire Catholicism and even Christianity itself. Under the
Restoration, it was called, in provocative language, the priest party,
and under the second Empire, the clericals. Afterwards, confronting the
Church and under a contrary name, the anti-clerical league was formed by
its adversaries, a sort of negative church which possessed, or tried
to, its own dogmas and rites, its own assemblies and discipline: and for
lack of something better, it has its own fanaticism, that of aversion;
on the word being given, it marches, rank and file, against the other,
its enemy, and manifests, if not its belief, at least its unbelief in
refusing or in avoiding the ministration of the priest. In Paris, twenty
funerals out of a hundred, purely civil, are not held in a church; out
of one hundred marriages, twenty-five, purely civil, are not blessed by
the Church; twenty-four infants out of a hundred are not baptized.[5361]
And, from Paris to the provinces, both sentiment and example are
propagated. For sixteen years, in our parliaments elected by universal
suffrage, the majority maintains that party in power which wages war
against the Church; which, systematically and on principle, is and
remains hostile to the Catholic religion; which has its own religion for
which it claims dominion; which is possessed by a doctrinal spirit, and,
in the direction of intellects and souls, aims at substituting this new
spirit for the old one; which, as far as it can, withdraws from the
old one its influence, or its share in education and in charity; which
breaks up the congregations of men, and overtaxes congregations of
women; which enrolls seminarians in the army, and deprives suspect curés
of their salaries; in short, which, through its acts collectively and
in practice, proclaims itself anti-Catholic. Many of its acts certainly
displease the peasant. He would prefer to retain the teaching "brother"
in the public school and the "sister" in the hospital as nurse or as
teacher in the school; both would cost less, and he is used to their
dark dresses and their white caps; moreover, he is not ill-disposed
towards his resident curé, who is a "good fellow." Nevertheless, in sum,
the rule of the curé is not to his taste; he does not wish to have him
back, and he distrusts priests, especially the aspect of their allies
who now consist of the upper bourgeoisie and the nobles. Hence, out
of ten million electors, five or six millions, entertaining
partial dislikes and mute reservations, continue to vote, at least
provisionally, for anti-Christian radicals. All this shows that,
through an insensible and slow reaction, the great rural mass, following
the example of the great urban mass, is again becoming pagan[5362]; for
one hundred years the wheel turns in this sense, without stopping, and
this is serious, still more serious for the nation than for the Church.
In France, the inner Christianity, has, for all that, through the dual
effect of its Catholic and French envelope, grown warmer among the
clergy especially among the regular clergy, but is has cooled off among
the people and it is especially here that it is needed.
*****
Post Scriptum:
Taine died in 1893 not long after having written this. Much has happened
since and the struggle between "Lay Republicans" and the Catholic
Church has continued. In "QUID 2000," a French popular reference manual
containing on page 515 some notes on the evolution of the Catholic
religion in France, we can read the following:
"1899-11-11 the police occupies l'Assomption, 6, rue François Ier. The
Augustin brothers are accused in court for breaking the law forbidding
unauthorized assemblies... 1900 Thomas, mayor of Kremlin-Bicêtre,
forbids the wearing of the ecclesiastical costume in his town. This
example is followed by others..." Reading further we may learn that
later in 1901 to 1904 the various Catholic orders are forbidden
or dissolved and most French Church property seized. In 1905 a law
decreeing a separation between the State and the Church is narrowly and
bitterly voted and a struggle between France and the Pope begins ...
Between 1914 and 1918 25 000 priests and seminarians are mobilized and
app. 5000 among them fall. This disarms many of the Church's enemies and
in 1920 funds are appropriated for the re-establishment of the French
embassy to the Pope in Rome. etc. etc. Today the Catholic religion is
tolerated more or less in the same manner as Judaism, Islam etc. (SR.)
*****
[Footnote 5301: The Budget of 1881. 17,010 desservans of small parishes
have 900 francs per annum; 4500 have 1000 francs; 9492, sixty years of
age and over, have from 1100 to 1300 francs. 2521 curés of the second
class have from 1200 to 1300 francs; 850 curés of the first class, or
rated the same, have from 1500 to 1600 francs; 65 archiprêtre curés have
1600 francs, that of Paris 2400 francs; 709 canons have from 1600 to
2400 francs; 193 vicars-general have from 2500 to 4000 francs.--Abbé
Bougaud, "le Grand Péril," etc., p.23. In the diocese of Orleans, which
may be taken as an average type, fees, comprising the receipts for
masses, are from 250 to 300 francs per annum, which brings the salary of
an ordinary desservant up to about 1200 francs.]
[Footnote 5302: The fees, etc., of the curé of the Madeleine are
estimated at about 40,000 francs a year. The prefect of police has
40,000 francs a year, and the prefect of the Seine, 50,000 francs.]
[Footnote 5303: Prælectiones juris canonici, II., 264-267.]
[Footnote 5304: Ibid., II., 268.]
[Footnote 5305: "The Ancient Régime," pp. 119, 147. (Ed. Laffont I. pp.
92, 115.) (On the "Chartreuse" of Val Saint-Pierre, read the details
given by Merlon de Thionville in his "Mémoires.")]
[Footnote 5306: Prælectiones juris canonici, II.,205. (Edict of Louis
XIII., 1629, art. 9.)]
[Footnote 5307: The following are other instances. With the "Filles de
Saint-Vincent de Paule," the superior of the "Prètres de la Mission"
proposes two names and all the Sisters present choose one or the other
by a plurality of votes. Local superiors are designated by the Council
of Sisters who always reside at the principal establishment.--With the
"Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes," assembled at the call of the assistants
in function, a general chapter meets at Paris, 27 rue Oudinot. This
chapter, elected by all professed members belonging to the order,
comprises 15 directors of the leading houses and 15 of the older
brethren who have been at least fifteen years in profession. Besides
these 30, the assistants in function, or who have resigned, and the
visitors of the houses form, by right, a part of the chapter which
comprises 72 members. This chapter elects the general superior for ten
years. He is again eligible; he appoints for three years the directors
of houses, and he can prolong or replace them. With the Carthusians,
the superior-general is elected by the professed brethren of the Grande
Chartreuse who happen to be on hand when the vacancy occurs. They vote
by sealed ballots unsigned, under the presidency of two priors without a
vote.]
[Footnote 5308: The reader may call to mind the portrait of Brother
Philippe by Horace Vernet. For details of the terrible mortifications
inflicted on himself by Lacordaire see his life by Father Chocarne.
"Every sort of mortification which the saints prized, hair-cloth jackets
of penance, scourges, whips of every kind and form, he knew of and
used.... He scourged himself daily and often several times during the
day. During Lent and especially on Good Friday he literally scored and
flayed himself alive."]
[Footnote 5309: Notes (unpublished) by Count Chaptal.]
[Footnote 5310: "État des congrégations, communantés et associations
religieuses, autorisées et non-autorisées, dressé en execution"
according to article 12, law of Dec. 28, 1876. (Imprimerie nationale,
1878)--"L'Institut des frères des écoles chrétiennes," by Eugène Rendu
(1882), p. 10.--Th. W. Allies, "Journal d'un voyage en France, p.81.
(Conversation with Brother Philippe, July 16, 1845.)--"Statistique de
Institut des Frères des Ecoles Chrétiennes," Dec.31, 1888. (Drawn up by
the head establishment.) Out of the 121 houses of 1789, there were 117
of these in France and 4 in the colonies. Out of the 1,286 houses of
1888, there are 1,010 in France and in the colonies. The other 276 are
in other countries.]
[Footnote 5311: Émile Keller, "Les Congrégations religieuses en France"
(1880), preface, xxIII., xvIII., and p. 492.]
[Footnote 5312: In 1789, 37,000 Sisters; in 1866, 86,000 Sisters
("Statistique de la France," 1866); in 1878, 127,753 Sisters ("État des
congrégations," etc.).]
[Footnote 5313:. (But today, around 1990, there are only 5 nuns per
10,000 inhabitants. SR.)]
[Footnote 5314: Émile Keller, ibid., passim.--In many communities of
men and of women the personal expenses of each member are not over
300 francs per annum; with the Trappists at Devielle this is the
maximum.--If the value of the useful labor performed by these 160,000
monks and nuns be estimated at 1000 francs per head, which is below the
real figures, the total is 160 millions per annum; estimate the expenses
of each monk or nun at 500 francs per head and the total is 80 millions
a year. The net gain to the public is 80 millions per annum.]
[Footnote 5315: "La Charité à Nancy," by Abbé Girard, p. 245.--The
same judgment is confirmed by the Rev. T. W. Allies, in a "Journal d'un
voyage en France," 1848, p. 291. "The dogma of the real presence is the
centre of the whole religious life of the Church (Catholic): it is the
secret support of the priest in his mission, so painful and so
filled with abnegation. It is by this that the religious orders are
maintained."]
[Footnote 5316: This question is examined by St. Thomas in his Summa
Theologica.]
[Footnote 5317: For the past twenty years, owing to the researches of
psychologists and physiologists, we have begun to know something of the
subterranean regions of the mind and the latent processes taking place
there. The storing, the residue and unconscious combination of images,
the spontaneous and automatic transformation of images into sensations,
the composition, disassociations and splitting into dual personalities
of the ego, the alternate or simultaneous coexistence of two, or more
than two, distinct persons in the same individual, the suggestions
accomplished later and at fixed dates, the chock of the return from
the inside to the outside, and the physical effect on the nervous
extremities of the mental sensations, all these late discoveries have
resulted in a new conception of mind, and psychology, thus renewed,
throws a sharp light on history.]
[Footnote 5318: See in "Herodiade," by Flaubert, the depicting of
these "kingdoms of the world or of the century," as they appeared to
Palestinian eyes in the first century. For the first four centuries we
must consider, confronting the Church, by way of contrast and in full
relief, the pagan and Roman world, the life of the day, especially in
the baths, at the circus, in the theatre, the gratuitous supplies of
food, of physical enjoyments and of spectacles to the idle populace of
the towns, the excesses of public and private luxury, the enormity of
unproductive expenditure, and all this in a society which, without
our machines, supported itself by hand-labor; next, the scantiness and
dearness of available capital, a legal rate of interest at twelve
per cent, the latifundia, the oberati, the oppression of the working
classes, the diminution of free laborers, the exhaustion of slaves,
depopulation and impoverishment, at the end the colon attached to
his glebe, the workman to his tool, the curiale to his curie, the
administrative interference of the centralized State, its fiscal
exigencies, all that it sucked out of the social body, and the more
strenuously inasmuch as there was less to be sucked out of it. Against
these sensual habits and customs and this economic system the Church has
preserved its primitive aversion, especially on two points, in relation
to the theatre and to loaning money at interest.]
[Footnote 5319: See St. Paul's epistle to the Romans, ch. I., 26 to 32;
also the First Epistle to the Corinthians, ch. XIII.]
[Footnote 5320: The First Epistle of John, II. 16.]
[Footnote 5321: Acts of the Apostles, ch. IV.,32, 34 and 35.]
[Footnote 5322: I cannot help but conclude that the two world wars,
started by Christian Governments, led to socialism and religious decay.
How large a role television played in removing the need for clerical
guidance and comfort is hard to determine, the fact is that the Churches
in Europe stand mostly empty and Taine's description fits rather will on
today's society. (SR.)]
[Footnote 5323: Saint Athanasius, the principal founder of Christian
metaphysics, did not know Latin and learned it with great difficulty
at Rome when he came to defend his doctrine. On the other hand, the
principal founder of western theology, Saint Augustin, had only an
imperfect knowledge of Greek.]
[Footnote 5324: For example, the three words which are essential and
technical in metaphysical speculations on the divine essence, have no
real equivalent in Latin, while the words by which an attempt is made
to render these terms, verbum, substantia, persona, are very inexact.
Persona and substantia, in Tertullian, are already used in their Roman
sense, which is always juridical and special.]
[Footnote 5325: Sir Henry Sumner Maine, "Ancient Law," p. 354. The
following is profound in a remarkable degree: "Greek metaphysical
literature contained the sole stock of words and ideas out of which
the human mind could provide itself with the means of engaging in the
profound controversies as to the Divine Persons, the Divine Substance,
and the Divine Natures. The Latin language and the meager Latin
philosophy were quite unequal to the undertaking, and accordingly
the western or Latin-speaking provinces of the Empire adopted the
conclusions of the East without disputing or reviewing them."]
[Footnote 5326: Maine, "Ancient Law," p.357 "The difference between the
two theological systems is accounted for by the fact that, in passing
from the East to the West, theological speculation had passed from a
climate of Greek metaphysics to a climate of Roman law." Out of this
arose the Western controversies on the subject of Free-will and Divine
Providence. "The problem of Free-will arises when we contemplate a
metaphysical conception under a legal aspect."]
[Footnote 5327: Ibid. "The nature of Sin and its transmission by
inheritance; the debt owed by man and its vicarious satisfaction; the
necessity and sufficiency of the Atonement; above all the apparent
antagonism between Free-will and the Divine Providence-these were the
points which the West began to debate as ardently as ever the East
had discussed the articles of its more special creed." This juridical
fashion of conceiving theology appears in the works of the oldest Latin
theologians, Tertullian and Saint Cyprian.]
[Footnote 5328: Ibid. Among the technical notions borrowed from law and
here used in Latin theology we may cite "the Roman penal system, the
Roman theory of the obligations established by Contract or Delict," the
intercession or act by which one assumes the obligation contracted
by another, "the Roman view of Debts and of the modes of incurring,
extinguishing and transmitting them, the Roman notion of the continuance
of individual existence by Universal Succession,"]
[Footnote 5329: Cf. Fustel de Coulanges, "La Gaule Romaine," p.96
and following pages, on the rapidity, facility and depth of the
transformation by which Gaul became Latinized.]
[Footnote 5330: The Church of England, in its confession of faith, makes
this express declaration.]
[Footnote 5331: As called by Joseph de Maistre, referring to the Greek
church.]
[Footnote 5332: Duke Sermoneta-Gaetani has shown in his geographic map
of the "Divine Comedy" the exact correspondence of this poem with the
"Somme" by Saint Thomas.--It was already said of Dante in the middle
ages, Theologus Dantes nullius dogmatis expers.]
[Footnote 5333: Cf. "L'Empire des tsars et les Russes," by Anatole
Leroy-Beaulieu, vol. III., entire, on the characteristics of the
Russian clergy.]
[Footnote 5334: Bossuet, ed. Deforis, VI., 169. The Meaux catechism
(reproduced, with some additions, in the catechism adopted by Napoleon).
"What works are deemed satisfactory?"--"Works unpleasant to us imposed
by the priest as a penance."--"Repeat some of them."--"Alms-giving,
fastings, austerities, privations of what is naturally agreeable,
prayers, spiritual readings."]
[Footnote 5335: Ibid. "Why is confession ordained?"--"To humble the
sinner.. . "--"Why again?"--"To submit one's self to the power of the
Keys and to the judgment of the priests who have the power to punish and
remit sins."]
[Footnote 5336: Bossuet, ibid., Catéchisme de Meaux, VI., 140-142.]
[Footnote 5337: "Manreze du prêtre," by Father Caussette, I., 37.
"Do you see that young man of twenty-five who will soon traverse the
sanctuary to find the sinners awaiting him? It is the God of this earth
who sanctifies him... Were Jesus Christ to descend into the confessional
he would say, Ego te absolvo. He is going to say with the same
authority, Ego te absolvo. Now this is an act of the supreme power;
it is greater, says Saint Augustin, than the creation of heaven and
earth."--T. W. Allies, "Journal d'un voyage en France," 1845, p.97.
"Confession is the chain which binds all Christian life."]
[Footnote 5338: "Manreze du prêtre," I., 36. "The Mother of God
has undoubtedly more credit than you, but she has less authority.
Undoubtedly, she accords favors, but she has not given one single
absolution."]
[Footnote 5339: Could one imagine that Stalin, that that apostate former
student expelled from the Tiflis Theological Seminary, would, on reading
Taine's text, have conceived the idea of having communist missionaries,
directed by the KGB in Moscow, direct an army of agents inside the
capitalist world? (SR.)]
[Footnote 5340: Like a central committee of the communist party? (SR.)]
[Footnote 5341: Prælectiones juris canonici, I., 101. "The power
entrusted to St. Peter and the apostles is wholly independent of the
community of believers."]
[Footnote 5342: Here Lenin pretended to install the Proletariat and
announced its (his own) dictatorship. (SR.)]
[Footnote 5343: Here we have a clear model for an International
Communist Party, tasked with the creation of a visible organization
whenever this is possible, but with an invisible structure of
missionaries, recruiters, controllers, policemen and agents, since any
bourgeois state must, once it discovers the party's true aims, forbid it
and drive it underground. To the Christian dream of an eternal life in
heaven or hell, the communist movement has its promise of a millenary
on earth contrasted by the immediate annihilation of any traitor or
dangerous opponent. (SR.)]
[Footnote 5344: "Cours alphabétique et méthodique du droit canon," by
Abbé André, and "Histoire générale de Église, vol. XIII., by Bercastel
et Henrion. The reader will find in these two works an exposition of
the diverse statutes of the Catholic Church in other countries. Each of
these statutes differs from ours in one or several important articles;
the fixed, or even territorial, endowment of the clergy, the nomination
to the episcopate by the chapter, or by the clergy of the diocese, or
by the bishops of the province, public competition for curacies,
irremovability, participation of the chapter in the government of the
diocese, restoration of the officialité; return to the prescriptions of
the Council of Trent (Cf. especially the Concordats between the Holy
See and Prussia, Bavaria, Wurtemberg, Baden, the two Hesses, Belgium,
Austria, Spain, and the statutes accepted or established by the Holy See
in Ireland and the United States.)]
[Footnote 5345: The brothers Allignol, "De l'État actuel du clergé en
France," p.248. "The mind of the desservant is no longer his own. Let
him beware of any personal sentiment or opinion!... He must cease
being himself and must lose, it may be said, his personality."--Ibid.,
preface, XIX. "Both of us, placed in remotes country parishes,... are
in a position to know the clergy of the second class well, to which, for
twenty years, we belong."]
[Footnote 5346: The principal means of action of the State is the right
of appointing bishops. The Pope, however, installs them; consequently,
the Minister of Worship must have an understanding beforehand with
the nuncio, which obliges it to nominate candidates irreproachable in
doctrine and morals, but it avoids nominating ecclesiastics that are
eminent, enterprising or energetic; once installed and not removable,
they would cause trouble. Such, for example, was M. Pie, bishop
of Poitiers, nominated by M. de Falloux in the time of the
Prince-President, and so annoying during the Empire; in order to keep
him in check, M. Levert, the cleverest and most adroit prefect, had to
be sent to Poitiers; for many years they waged the most desperate war
under proper formalities, each playing against the other the shrewdest
and most disagreeable tricks. Finally, M. Levert, who had lost a
daughter and was denounced from the pulpit, was obliged, on account of
his wife's feelings, to leave the place. (This happened to my own
knowledge, as between 1852 and 1867 I visited Poitiers five times.) At
the present day, the Catholics complain that the government nominates
none but mediocre men for bishops and accepts none others for cantonal
curés. (Today, in 1999, we can look back on a century of quarrelling,
even war, between Rome and Paris with the separation of the Catholic
Church and the State in 1905, sequestration of all church property,
impoverishment of the clergy, interdiction of the different orders,
papal bulls, ending in 1914 when the State had to concentrate all effort
towards winning the war. Today the church is allowed to operate but its
influence is much reduced as it the case for all the religions since the
advent of the consumer society with television etc. SR.)]
[Footnote 5347: "The Ancient Régime," pp 171, 181, 182. (Ed. Laffont I.,
p. 129 to 139.)]
[Footnote 5348: M. de Vitrolles, "' Mémoires," I., 15. (This passage
was written in 1847.) "Under the Empire, readers were to those of the
present day as one to a thousand. Newspapers, in very small number,
scarcely obtained circulation. The public informed itself about
victories, as well as the conscription, in the articles of the
'Moniteur,' posted by the prefects."--From 1847 to 1891, we all know
by our own experience that the number of readers has augmented
prodigiously.]
[Footnote 5349: I wonder what Taine would have said of television, that
system which allows its producers to make all mankind believe that the
lies and figments of the imaginations put in front of them show the true
and real world as it is. (SR.)]
[Footnote 5350: An expression by Renan in relation to Abbé Lehir, an
accomplished professor of Hebrew.]
[Footnote 5351: Th. W. Allies, rector of Launton, "Journal d'un voyage
en France," p.245. (A speech by Father Ravignan, August 3, 1848) "What
nation in the Roman church is more prominent at the present day for its
missionary labors? France, by far. There are ten French missionaries
to one Italian." Several French congregations, especially the "Petites
Soeurs des Pauvres" and the "Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes," are so
zealous and so numerous that they overflow outside of France and have
many establishments abroad.]
[Footnote 5352: "Manreze du prêtre," by Father Caussette, II.,419: "Now
that I have placed one of your hands in those of Mary let me place the
other in those of Saint Joseph.... Joseph, whose prayers in heaven are
what commands to Jesus were on earth. Oh, what a sublime patron, and
what powerful patronage!... Joseph, associated in the glory of divine
paternity;... Joseph, who counts twenty-three kings among his ancestors!"
Along with the month of the year devoted to the adoration of Mary, there
is another consecrated to Saint Joseph.]
[Footnote 5353: "État des congrégations," etc. (1876). Eleven
congregations or communities of women are devoted to the Holy Family and
nineteen others to the Child-Jesus or to the Infancy of Jesus.]
[Footnote 5354: One of these bears the title of "Augustines de
l'intérieur de Marie" and another is devoted to the "Coeuragonisant de
Jésus."]
[Footnote 5355: At Bourron (Seine-et-Marne), in 1789, which had 600
inhabitants, the number of communicants at Easter amounted to 300; at
the present day, out of 1200 inhabitants there are 94]
[Footnote 5356: Th. W. Allies, "Journal d'un voyage en France," III., p.
18: "M. Dufresne (July 1845) tells us that out of 1,000,000 inhabitants
in Paris 300,000 attend mass and 50,000 are practising Christians."--(A
conversation with Abbé Petitot, curé of Saint-Louis d'Antin, July
7.1847.) "2,000,000 out of 32,000,000 French are really Christians
and go to confession."--At the present day (April 1890) an eminent and
well-informed ecclesiastic writes: "I estimate the number of those who
observe Easter at Paris at about 100,000."--"The number of professing
Christians varies a great deal according to parishes: Madeleine, 4,500
out of 29,000 inhabitants; Saint Augustin, 6,500 out of 29,000; Saint
Eustache, 1,750 out of 20,000; Bellancourt, 500 out of 10,000; Grenelle,
1,500 out of 47,500; and Belleville, 1,500 out of 60,000 inhabitants."]
[Footnote 5357: Abbé Bougaud, "Le Grand Péril," etc., p.44: "I know a
bishop who, on reaching his diocese, tried to ascertain how many of the
400,000 souls entrusted to his keeping performed their Easter duties. He
found 37,000. At the present day, owing to twenty years of effort,
this number reaches 55,000. Thus, more than 300,000 are practically
unbelievers."--"Vie de Mgr. Dupanloup," by Abbé Lagrange, I., 5'.
(Pastoral letter by Mgr. Dupanloup, 1851.) "He considers that he is
answerable to God for nearly 350,000 souls, of which 200,000 at least
do not fulfill their Easter duties; scarcely 45,000 perform this great
duty."]
[Footnote 5358: "The Revolution," II.,390. (Ed. Laff. I., p. 177.)]
[Footnote 5359: Th.-W. Allies, "Journal," etc., p.240 (Aug. 2, 1848,
conversation with Abbé Petitot):" In 1830, the priests were obliged
for two years to abandon wearing their costume in the street, and only
recovered their popularity by their devotion to the sick at the time
of the cholera."--In 1848, they had won back respect and sympathy; "the
people came and begged them to bless their liberty-poles."--Abbé Petitot
adds: "The church gains ground every day, but rather among the upper
than the lower classes."]
[Footnote 5360: Émile Keller, "Les Congrégations," etc., p.362 (with the
figures in relation to Schools).--"Débats" of April 27, 1890 (with
the figures in relation to hospitals. Deaths increased in the eighteen
secularized hospitals at the rate of four per cent).]
[Footnote 5361: Fournier de Flaix, "Journal de la Société de
Statistique," number for Sep. 1890, p.260. (According to registers kept
in the archiepiscopal archives in Paris)--"Compte-rendu des operations
du Conseil d'administration des pompes funèbres à Paris" (1889):
funerals wholly civil in 1882, 19.33 per cent; in 1888, 19.04 per cent;
in 1889, 18.63 per cent.--"Atlas de statistique municipale." ("Débats"
of July 10, 1890:) The poorer the arrondissement, the greater the
number of civil funerals; Ménilmontant wins hands down, one third of the
funerals here being civil.]
[Footnote 5362: Abbé Joseph Roux (curé at first of Saint-Silvain, near
Tulle, and then in a small town of Corrèze), "Pensées," p. 132 (1886):
"There is always something of the pagan in the peasant. He is original
sin in all its brutish simplicity."--"The peasant passed from paganism
to Christianity mostly through miracles; he would go back at less cost
from Christianity to paganism.... It is only lately that a
monster exists, the impious peasant.... The rustic, in spite of
school-teachers, even in spite of the curés, believes in sorcerers and in
sorcery the same as the Gauls and Romans."--Therefore the means employed
against him are wholly external. ("Vie de Mgr. Dupanloup," by Abbé
Lagrange, pastoral notes of Mgr. Dupanloup, I., 64.) "What has proved
of most use to you in behalf of religion in your diocese during the last
fifteen years? Is it through this--is it through that? No, it is through
medals and crosses. Whatever is given to these good people affords them
pleasure; they like to have presents of Our Lord and the Blessed Virgin.
These objects, with them, stand for religion. A father who comes
with his child in his arms to receive the medal will not die without
confessing himself."--The reader will find on the clergy and peasantry
in the south of France details and pictures taken from life in
the novels of Ferdinand Fabre ("L'abbé Tigrane," "les Courbezons,"
"Lucifer,," "Barnabé," "Mon Oncle Célestin," "Xavière," "Ma Vocation").]