On a dark, foggy day in February 1854, a little company of friends
followed the remains of one of France's most notable men to a Paris
cemetery. The procession made its way between two ranks of soldiers,
who were there not to show honour, but to preserve order, to the
"common trench." Such had been the will of the deceased. When the earth
had been thrown on the coffin, the grave-digger asked: "Is there no
cross?" "No," was the answer.
No monument shows where that dead man was laid, though his name was
known throughout Europe, and there is no cross upon his grave, though
he had been an abbé and a priest, in fact for a long period the most
notable champion of the church. It was Lamennais who by his own wish
was buried thus.
[Illustration: LAMENNAIS]
Félicité de la Mennais (it was not till late in life that he gave his
name the more democratic form) was born in 1782 at St. Malo; so he,
like Chateaubriand, is a Breton; and the obstinacy of his race was
innate in his character. The Breton authors constitute what may be
called the Vendée of literature; they continue with words the fight
which their fathers fought with material weapons.
As a youth Lamennais was slight, thin, and of an excitably lively
temperament. At an early age he lost his mother, and after this was
even more determined and self-willed than he had been before. His
religious vocation was long doubtful; as a youth he devoted much time
to music and mathematics, played the flute, and learned the use of
various weapons. He fought a serious duel, which proved a hindrance
to him in the career which he subsequently chose, had love affairs,
and wrote poetry.[1] He was so little inclined to accept the dogmas
of Christianity that he did not make his first communion till he was
twenty-two, when he had attained to settled religious convictions.
After this he began to study theology, and in 1808, at the age of
twenty-six, he took the tonsure. But when the time of his ordination as
a priest drew near, he was seized with such horror of the vow he was
about to take that he again and again postponed the decisive step, and
did not really become a priest until he was thirty-five. His letters
of these years show the distracted condition of his soul; the proud
heart winced and writhed at the thought of giving the power over itself
into strange hands. And things were no better when all was over and
the irrevocable vow taken. The first letter he wrote to his brother
after the dreaded ordination, to which he had finally been persuaded to
consent, had actually taken place, gives a gloomy description of his
mental condition:
"Although silence has been imposed on me, I believe that it is both
allowable and right to let you know once and for all exactly how
matters stand with me. I am extremely unhappy, and it is impossible
that I can henceforward be anything else. They may reason as they
like, may twist and turn things as they please, to persuade me of the
opposite, but there is not the slightest probability that they will
ever succeed in convincing me of the non-existence of a fact which I
perceive. The only consolation I can accept is the cheap counsel to
make a virtue of necessity.... All I desire is forgetfulness, in every
acceptation of the word. Would to God I could forget myself!"
With such throes as these was the birth of Lamennais' faith in his
religious vocation accompanied. He overcame his despair; he, to whom
it was a necessity to be whatever he was with his whole soul--even if
it was the opposite of what he had been before--became with his whole
soul a priest. So absolutely did he feel himself one that his first
angry exclamation when Rome left him in the lurch in 1832 was: "I will
teach them what it means to defy a priest!" He had a strong character
and a narrow mind; a born party man, it was his nature to take a side
obstinately and blindly, to defend what he for the moment regarded
as absolute truth with passionate love and eloquent hate. Hence as
soon as the ruling idea of the period takes hold of him he becomes
its doughtiest champion--the most ardent, the most consistent, the
most sincere and most undaunted defender of the autocratic principle
of authority and the unconditional submission which that principle
demands. The man who had suffered such agony of mind in yielding up
his own reason and will to the will of the church, the one real priest
of the Neo-Catholic school, seems, as it were, to grudge other men
better conditions than had been granted to himself. When, in language
ominous of storm, he proclaims the gospel of authority and obedience,
he, beyond all others, makes us feel how personal passion finds
satisfaction in the sweeping, universal demand, how the Ego which has
felt itself compelled once for all to submit to authority asserts
itself by bending and bowing the wills and thoughts of all other men to
that rule with which it now identifies itself.
Violent and obstinately independent, Lamennais certainly recognised
no authority within his own camp. His remarks upon the other leaders
of the school form a pleasing collection of invectives. Of Bonald,
for instance, he writes: "Poor humanity! How M. de Bonald should be
suggested to me by the word 'humanity' passes my comprehension. The
transition is an abrupt one. They say that the poor man has become
quite feeble-minded lately." Of Chateaubriand: "The King and he, he
and the King--this is the whole history of France.... No one can
understand, he least of all, how Europe is to dispense with his
talents. He prophesies that Europe will fare ill." Of Frayssinous,
who as leader of the Gallican party in the church was his opponent:
"You call him moderate. Why? Because your attention has been drawn to
something cold in him, which you take to be moderation, but which is
only congealed hatred." Such is the tone of Lamennais' letters. There
was, nevertheless, in his vigorous and, if not blindly precipitate, at
least blindly impetuous character the very stuff to make a matchless
champion of the absolute authority of the church--and this, till the
end came, he proved to be--a champion whose capacity of subjecting
others to discipline was greater than his capacity of allowing himself
to be persuaded against his honest conviction.
In 1808 he published his _Reflections on the Position of the Church
in France_, a work which was suppressed by Napoleon's government. He
greeted the returning Bourbons with enthusiasm. But he was not yet
famous. Between 1817 and 1823, however, there was published, volume by
volume, a work which kept men's minds in a constant ferment, and gave
occasion to violent controversy; between the publication of the second
and third volumes its author had to take up his pen in his own defence.
This work was the Abbé de la Mennais' _Essai sur l'indifférence
en matière de religion_. In it the period of the restoration of
ecclesiasticism collects all its powers for a last, decisive battle.
We find all the leading principles of the day enunciated with a
peremptoriness and a determined consistency in the drawing of
conclusions which seem to indicate that the revulsion is at hand.
The tendency and even the title of this book suggest comparison with
the work which inaugurated the religious revival in Germany in the
beginning of the nineteenth century, Schleiermacher's famous _Reden
über die Religion an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern_ (Lectures
upon Religion to the Educated amongst those who despise it). Both works
aim at counteracting the same thing, the indifference towards religion,
the positive contempt for it, prevailing amongst the educated classes.
Both make an attempt, now that faith has become weak, to rebuild the
edifice of piety upon a new foundation. It is in this attempt that the
different nationality of the authors makes itself strongly felt.
Schleiermacher, emotional and fervent, is of opinion that the only
hope for religion lies in surrendering all its outworks and leading
it back to its inmost stronghold, the purely personal _feeling_ of
the individual. He tries to penetrate to the very foundation of human
existence, to the depth where both consciousness and action originate,
to the sources of personal life. He calls upon his reader to try to
realise the original condition of the soul, in which the Ego and the
object are blent in one, where there is consequently no question either
of perception of the object or of perception of a self differing from
the object. He describes this as a condition which we are incessantly
experiencing and yet not experiencing, since all life consists in its
perpetual cessation and recurrence. It is, he says, evanescent and
invisible, like the fragrance exhaled by dew-laden flowers and fruits,
chaste and light, like a virginal kiss, and holy and fecund, like a
bridegroom's embrace; nay, it is not only _like_ all this, it _is_
all this; for this condition of the human soul is the marriage of the
universe, of the All, with reason personalised; in this condition the
individual is for a moment the world-soul and feels its infinite life
to be his own. "This," says Schleiermacher, "is the nature of the
first conception of every living and original energising force in your
lives, to whatever province it may belong; it is such a condition that
produces every religious emotion."[2]
In consequence of this theory Schleiermacher regards every feeling,
every emotion, in so far as it expresses the united life of the Ego
and the All in the manner described, as religious. "The feelings, the
feelings alone, provide the elements of religion." He maintains that
there is no feeling which is not religious, unless it is the product
of a diseased or depraved condition, adding a note to the effect that
this holds good even of the feelings of sensual enjoyment, so long as
they are not contrary to nature or depraved. His endeavour is to rescue
religion from antagonism with science and culture by making it out to
be the essence of every noble, nay, of every healthy feeling. A true
German, he pantheistically maintains that the broad stream of life
which flows through all created beings is the sacred fountain of all
piety and all religions. Therefore he would do away with every definite
religious system; even belief in God and immortality does not seem to
him to be essential to religion. He exclaims enthusiastically: "Join
with me in reverently offering a lock to the holy, outcast soul of
Spinoza in the realm of shades. He apprehended the great world-spirit;
the infinite was to him all in all, the universe his one and eternal
love; with holy innocence and deep humility he mirrored himself in it,
and it in return found its most pleasing mirror in him. He was full of
religion and of the spirit of holiness."
Even the age of enlightenment did not deal so-called revealed religion
a severer blow than did this emotionalism. Schleiermacher, as we see,
resolves religion into feeling, and in so doing destroys its authority
by making over this authority to the human soul in all its endless
variability. All rules, ordinances, dogmas, and principles disappear;
each individual is, by a special process, to make everything his
own. For Schleiermacher maintains that "however perfectly a man may
understand such principles, however firmly he may be convinced that he
possesses them, if he does not know and cannot prove that they have
arisen in himself as expressions of his own spiritual life and are
consequently originally his own, we must not let ourselves be persuaded
to believe that such a man is a religious man. He is not; his soul has
never conceived; his religious ideas are only supposititious children,
the offspring of other souls, whom he, in the secret feeling of his own
impotence, has adopted."
Thus essentially Protestant in the good (hence not the sectarian) sense
of the word is the religious revival in Germany in its beginnings.
It asserts _personal_ originality to be the one essential factor in
religion, and defines as the province of religion the whole widespread
realm of our warm, true feelings. Natural, healthy feeling is always
holy, at no time peculiarly holy.
A marked and significant contrast to all this is provided by the
principles set forth in Lamennais' great work, which forms the
Latin and Catholic counterpart to Schleiermacher's Lectures. These
principles, the programme of pure externality, are as follows:
1. That _feeling_ or indirect revelation is not the means by which men
are intended to attain to the knowledge of true religion.
2. That _scientific research_ or _reasoning_ is not the means by which
men are intended to attain to the knowledge of true religion.
3. That _authority_ is the means by which men are intended to attain to
the knowledge of true religion; and that consequently the true religion
is unquestionably the religion which rests upon the strongest possible
visible (!) authority.
It is to prove these three remarkable and droll assertions that
Lamennais has written his four thick volumes. Let us make ourselves
acquainted with their very imperfect chain of reasoning.
It is of paramount importance to us human beings to discover an
infallible criterion of what is true and what is false. What we seek is
_certainty_. But where are we to find it?
We cannot derive it from our senses, for our senses deceive us, says
Lamennais. That the senses conjointly correct such false impressions
as each sense separately produces, is a fact of which he does not take
cognisance. We are, in his opinion, the less certain of any necessary
connection between the impressions of our senses and the reality of
things, from our not even being certain of our own existence. How we,
if we are not certain of that, can be certain of anything whatsoever,
is a question he leaves unanswered.
Conviction, the inward feeling that the thing must be so, is, he
affirms, as deceptive as are the impressions of the senses. The
irresistible force with which a principle imposes itself upon our
reason affords no proof of the truth of that principle. Error is
always possible. That one may quite well acknowledge one's fallibility
generally speaking, and yet regard one's self as certain of the truth
in many single, definite cases, is another fact he leaves out of
reckoning.
Next comes the turn of scientific research or reasoning. This, he
maintains, leads to doubt of everything, for the highest of all
principles do not admit of proof; we are not certain, moreover, of the
reliability of memory. It is impossible to parry this attack upon the
scientific method in so far that it is of course impossible to prove
the reliability of memory without pre-supposing the reliability of
the memory which is to be proved. But of the indirect proofs of the
reliability of memory provided by human experience Lamennais does not
say a single word.
He touches provisionally upon the subject of complete doubt. Complete
doubt would lead to complete insanity. The spirit of self-preservation
compels us to believe and to act according to our belief. It is, in
the Abbé's opinion, this want of ability to doubt, or the knowledge
that one will, if one doubts, be regarded by other men as ignorant or
mad, which forms the foundation of all human certainty. Common consent
(_sensus communis_) thus becomes for us the seal of truth, and there is
no other. Difference of opinion at once begets uncertainty. A principle
or a fact is more or less certain according as it is more or less
universally accepted and borne witness to. Hence Lamennais' definition
of a science is: A science is a collection of thoughts and facts on
which all men are agreed. Though his standpoint is a different one, he
resembles the English empirical philosophers of a later day in refusing
even to such a science as geometry any foundation but that of common
consent. The fact that many a mistaken scientific conclusion has been
taken for truth is due, he believes, to the circumstance that science
has reached only a small number of human beings. What, he exclaims, are
a few hundred savants compared with the whole human race! He strangely
enough forgets that the human race has never unanimously accepted a
single scientific truth previous to its discovery by men of science, in
fact has never shown original unanimity in any belief.
Lamennais asks: When two persons disagree, what do they do after they
have in vain attempted to over-persuade one another? and he answers:
They appeal to arbitration. But what is arbitration? Arbitration is
_authority_, and this authority declares with which of the differing
opinions certainty, or if not certainty, at least probability rests.
The fact that the arguments of reason, as such, only create doubt, and
the fact that the strongest proof of the mistakenness of an assertion
always is: "You are the only one who thinks thus," direct us to the
_principle of authority_ as the only true and final principle.
Lamennais' theory, consistently developed, would lead to acceptance
of the vote of the majority as the proof of truth. But our final
destination is, as we know, the Catholic religion. It is interesting to
follow the vaults by which the principle of authority, conceived of as
it is in this work, carries us straight into the arms of the church.
Lamennais begins by defining all learning, all apprehension, as the
obeying of an authority. This is the same as Bonald's theory, that we
accept language upon the authority of those who teach us it, and accept
along with it the truths which are necessary to self-preservation,
truths which God in his all-powerful word (_i.e._ language) has
revealed to every people upon earth. Our intellectual life, _the law of
which is obedience_, is, then, simply a participation in the highest
reason, a perfect harmony with the witness which the infinite being has
borne of himself. Divine reason, which communicates itself by means of
language, is the first cause of the existence of reasonable beings, and
faith their necessary manner of being. Thus the principle of certainty
and the principle of life are one.
Man being created for truth, the reason of universal humanity cannot
err. Very different is it with the reason of the individual, which
can be overwhelmed by doubt. If it separates itself from society it
dies. _Væ soli!_ exclaims Lamennais. The proud man imagines when he
is required to bow to authority that what is demanded of him is that
he shall yield up his reason. He is mistaken. Authority is simply
universal reason, reason revealed through a witness. "It animates and
preserves the universe which it has created. Without it no existence,
no truth, no order."
It is, then, authority alone which gives us certainty concerning
religion. "Religion is not only doctrine, not only systematised
knowledge--it is also, it is essentially, a law." But there is no law
without authority; these two ideas involve each other. Thus religion
is necessarily based upon authority--the true religion upon supreme
authority. It is defined as: "The sum of the laws which follow from
the nature of reasonable beings;" and to learn what these are we must,
consequently, have recourse to authority.
Let us follow the connecting thread in this network of sophisms, that
we may be able to pull it to pieces. It runs thus: Reason is developed
only by the aid of language, the witness. The witness is only to be
found in society. Hence man can only live in society. Hence there
must have been society, intercourse, between God and the first man.
(Observe the unproved assertion of the existence of an Adam, also
Bonald's doctrine that God gave Adam language--in short, elements taken
from so-called revealed religion as authority, employed to prove that
so-called revealed religion rests upon authority.) The necessity of
witness involves the necessity of faith, without which witness would
be of no effect. Hence faith lies in the very nature of man, is the
first condition of life. The certainty of faith is founded upon its
harmony with reason, _i.e._ upon the strength of the authority which
bears witness. Hence the witness of God is infinitely certain, since
it is nought else but the revelation of infinite reason or of supreme
authority. No witness is possible except where there is society. Hence
no authority or certainty is possible without a society. No human
society can exist except in virtue of that original society of God and
man which came into being by virtue of the truths or laws originally
revealed by his word. Hence these truths cannot be lost in any society
without the destruction of that society resulting from the loss.
They are consequently to be found in every society. These essential
truths are preserved only by means of witness, which has no power or
effect without authority. Hence, as there is no authority except in
society, there is also no society without authority; where there is
no authority, there is no society. But it is to be noted that there
are two species of society; for man stands both in temporal relations
to his fellow-men, and in eternal relations to them and to God. These
two societies are the political or civil (temporal) society and the
spiritual (eternal) society. Consequently there are two authorities,
and these authorities are _infallible_, each in its own domain.
This all sounds extraordinarily logical; if _ergo_ were a sufficient
proof, there would be no want of proofs. But let us examine one or two
of the links in the chain of argument.
The Ego, says Lamennais, cannot alone, in solitude, develop
self-consciousness. The premise is correct, and we infer from it what
there is to infer when we say that the _I_ has consequently developed
with the assistance of a _you_. This is a thought to which Feuerbach
has devoted special attention, and which he has followed out in a
variety of directions. But Lamennais, taking as his premise the Old
Testament supposition of a single man existing before the rest of the
race, builds the doctrine of the communication between this man and
God, and all that follows thereon, upon this foundation, which sinks
with the edifice erected on it.
Lamennais declares the infallible sign of the truth to be universal
consent. _But upon what does the authority of this consent rest?_ Has
it a cause, or is it simply a fact?
If it has a cause, if the reason of all is to provide the law for the
reason of the individual, then that very individual reason for which
Lamennais has such a profound contempt is, after all, the supreme judge
of the truth. For it is it which, in the first place, invests universal
consent with its great importance, and in the second, determines in
each separate case whether or not universal consent is to be bestowed.
If, on the other hand, the authority of common consent is a fact,
that is to say, a thing which simply follows from our nature, then
the certainty with which it inspires us is in no wise different from
any other certainty. But Lamennais himself has just been opposing the
idea of certainty resulting from an inward feeling, been denying our
certainty even of our own existence, the certainty which we require
being _infallible_ certainty. What on earth should make belief in
authority more infallible than any other certainty?
Lamennais' chain of argument leads us finally to two infallible
authorities. The word "infallible" tells us that the Roman Catholic
Church is not far off. Infallibility insinuates itself as an inevitable
consequence of authority.
There is one point on which all the writers who help to bring about
the revival of ecclesiasticism agree, on which Joseph de Maistre, the
inaugurator of the revival, is in perfect harmony with Lamennais, its
last exponent, little favour though he shows to the other paradoxes
of his latest disciple. This point is the infallibility of the Pope.
It must be remembered that in the eighteenth century the Papal power
had appeared to be defunct. A Pope had corresponded with Voltaire and
accepted the dedication of his _Mahomet_. The Pope had himself done
away with his faithful Janissaries, the Jesuits. The religious reaction
begins by the re-assertion, nay, by the exaggeration even from a Roman
Catholic point of view, of the power and importance of the Pope. De
Maistre said: "Without the Pope, no authority; without authority, no
faith"--that is, without a Pope, no faith. The supremacy of the Pope
thus becomes the very fountain, the very kernel of Christianity; in our
days (in the writings of Bishop Ségur) the Pope has actually become a
sacrament, "the real presence of Jesus upon earth."
De Maistre argued thus: There is no religion without a visible
church; there is no church without government, no government without
sovereignty, and no sovereignty without infallibility. He cited
the principle of the irresponsibility of the king, which, in his
estimation, was essentially the same as that of the infallibility
of the Pope. Every government, he insisted, is from its very nature
absolute, endures no insubordination; from the moment when it becomes
permissible to oppose it, on the pretence of its being unjust or
mistaken, it can no longer be called a government. And he attempted,
as we have already seen, to prove, by appeal to the unquestioned
discipline prevailing on board ship and the unquestioned decisions of
the courts of justice, how familiar men are in all other domains of
life with that idea of infallibility which it is considered correct to
take umbrage at where the Pope is concerned.
This dexterous defence has every merit conceivable in a defence of an
irredeemably lost case. That we are obliged to regard the temporal
sovereign, though he is not infallible, as being so, does not prove
that the Pope, as the spiritual sovereign, really is infallible. The
fact that there must always be a supreme power, qualified to demand
outward submission, does not prove that this power has also the right
to demand intellectual submission. But perhaps outward submission is
sufficient? Joseph de Maistre in reality grants that it is. He writes:
"As regards the dogma of the infallibility of the Pope, we have no
_interest_ in throwing doubt upon it. When one of those theological
questions which must of necessity be submitted to the arbitration of a
supreme court occurs, it is of no interest to us whether it is decided
in this way or that, but it is of great interest that it should be
decided at once and without appeal."
Lamennais, who like De Maistre arrives at the conclusion that there
are two infallible authorities, the authority of the state and the
authority of the church, goes, as being a generation younger than his
master, a stage farther on the road they both tread. When it proves
to be impossible in the long run to uphold the two authorities, each
in its own domain, he does not hesitate to decide which of them, in
case of a collision, must give way to the other. He draws his final
inference thus; "Spiritual authority corresponds to the inalterable
law of justice and truth, temporal authority to the force which
compels rebellious wills to submit to this law. _Force is necessarily
subordinate to the law, the state to the church_. Otherwise we should
have to acknowledge two independent powers--the one the preserver
of justice and truth, the other blind, and therefore by its nature
destructive of justice and truth."[3] A haughty conclusion this, and
most characteristic of the beginning of the nineteenth century!
It proves what power Lamennais desired the Catholic Church to possess.
We have still to note the last vault, by which it is proved that the
Catholic Church _is_ the authority of which so much has been written.
Lamennais writes: "In the choice of a religion, then, the question
reduces itself to this--Is there anywhere to be found such an authority
as that which we have described, or, in other words, is there a
spiritual and visible society which declares (!!) that it possesses
this authority? We say a visible society, for every witness is external
(remember that the witness of the inward voice is rejected), and we
affirm that such witness would afford conclusive proof of the authority
spoken of, because it would be the expression of the most universal
reason."
"If such a society did not exist, the only true religion would be the
traditional religion of the human race, _i.e._ the sum of the dogmas
and precepts which are hallowed by their being traditional in every
nation, and which were originally revealed by God."
"But if there is such a society, then its dogmas and precepts
constitute the true religion." From this climax the rest of the
argument follows of itself: "Since the death of Jesus Christ Christian
society has incontestably been in possession of the highest authority.
Of the various Christian communities the Catholic Church is clearly
stamped as that possessing most authority. In it alone are to be found
all the truths of which man stands in need; it alone provides him with
perfect knowledge of the duties or laws of reason; in it alone he finds
certainty, salvation, and life."
Now we have reached the desired haven. But it is not enough that we
have reached it in a perfectly disabled condition--we suffer shipwreck
within the harbour. For Lamennais frankly confesses at the end of his
book that all religions rest upon authority, but that nevertheless
the original traditions of all except one have been more or less
corrupted by additions which must be regarded as errors. These errors
have, however, also been validated by authority, exist only by its
permission. What a confession! It destroys the virtue of his whole
argument.
But of this Lamennais is quite unconscious. He approvingly quotes
the following utterance of a Catholic writer: "The Catholic religion
is a religion of authority, and therefore it alone is a religion of
certainty and peace," and triumphantly recalls Rousseau's saying, that
if any one could persuade him on Sunday that he was in duty bound to
submit in matters of faith to the decision of another, he would on
Monday become a Catholic, and that every thoughtful, truthful man
placed in the same position would act in exactly the same manner.
Lamennais claps his hands with delight at having produced such a proof
of its being right for the individual to submit to authority in matters
of faith. A pretty proof!
One of two things must be the case. The authority of the Catholic
Church either does, or does not, rest upon the universal acknowledgment
of its validity. If it does, then the authority of the church _is_
universally acknowledged and needs no vindication, since no one denies
it. If it does not, then, according to Lamennais' own theory, it is
invalid, and no defence is of any avail.
But we cannot stop here. The doctrine that universal consent is the
criterion of what is true, must itself prove its truth by being
universally accepted. Can one imagine a more cruel instance of the
irony of fate than that the doctrine in question should have been
not only universally disputed but actually (in 1832) repudiated by
the church itself? Lamennais was then suddenly left in the lurch,
_alone_ with the doctrine that it is the complete unanimity of all
which proves truth. Can one imagine a more absurd contradiction? Yes,
a more absurd is possible, namely, the very thing which presently
happened--Lamennais, the obedient son of the church, bowing to its
authority, himself renounced and abjured his doctrine that the
authority of the church is the infallible seal of the truth.
But we do not need to look so far ahead as 1832 to see how the
supporters of the principle of authority came into conflict with their
own principle. Whatever men may support, their first requirement
is liberty to speak. The divine thing about liberty is that even
those who hate it need it and demand it. The _Conservateur_ began by
ardently vindicating the liberty of the press, but was soon exceedingly
inconvenienced by it. One party could not well deny the other's right
to a liberty which it had claimed for itself; it could not well do
it--but it did it. And the very same thing happened in the matter of
parliamentary government, or, as it was then called, _the parliamentary
prerogative_. It was the journalists and orators of the Catholic and
royalist school who, immediately after the restoration of the monarchy,
overthrew the first ministry, a ministry chosen by the king. The
Catholics desired to get the helm of the state into their own hands.
Thus it was the school of the principle of authority which first
sanctioned the very opposite principles--liberty of the press in the
widest sense of the word and the power of the parliamentary majority.
It undermined the ground upon which authority rested.
Following the career of the haughty, passionate priest, Lamennais, we
can trace the process stage by stage. The constitution (_la Charte_),
between which and the monarchy there was an inseparable connection,
ensured liberty of religion, on paper at least. But this liberty of
religion incensed Lamennais, who knew that one religion alone was
the true one. The foolish phrase was then in vogue, that the right
to freedom of conscience is the right to be free from conscience.
Lamennais and his followers maintained that a man ought to obey his
conscience; and this, in their opinion, their opponents did not do. But
they forgot that there is a duty which comes before that of obeying
one's conscience, namely, the duty of enlightening it. If it be immoral
to act against one's conscience, it is not less immoral to manufacture
a conscience with the aid of false and arbitrary principles.
In the name of conscience and authority, then, Lamennais published
a protest against the irreligion of the state, that is, against its
recognition of no confession--what he called "political atheism." He
started the cry: The laws of France are atheistical. He went farther.
In a famous letter addressed to Bishop Frayssinous, and published in
the newspaper _Le Drapeau blanc_, he declared that as the generation
now to be brought up was a generation born in blood, hard by the
scaffold of Louis XVI. and the altar of the goddess of reason, it
could only be saved by Christ, only educated by Christianity. But all
education in France was, he maintained, atheistic. "Am I exaggerating,
Monseigneur, when I say that there are in France educational
institutions, more or less closely connected with the University,
where children are brought up in practical atheism and hatred of
Christianity? In one of these horrible dens of vice and irreligion
thirty of the pupils have been known to approach the table of the
Lord, receive the sacred wafer, keep it, and commit a sacrilege which
formerly would have been punished by law, namely, use it to seal the
letters which they wrote to their parents. ... The influence of the
University is producing an ungodly, depraved, rebellious generation."
These indiscreet revelations were very unwelcome to the party in
power, who were much annoyed by such attacks on the constitution from
a quarter where they had looked for warm support. When Lamennais found
that he was treated with coldness and received reprimands instead of
thanks, he went a step farther.
We have already seen that his doctrine led to the sacrificing of
secular to ecclesiastical infallibility in cases of collision between
them. But this was in reality equivalent to acknowledging that the
heretical, free-thinking school was right in repudiating the quality of
inviolability and irreversibility which the royalist writers ascribed
to the monarchy by the grace of God. It moreover made the temporal
power dependent on the spiritual, namely, on the Pope. All the bishops
of France responded with a manifesto in which they declared the secular
to be independent of the Papal power.
Lamennais, the champion of _authority_, now stood in the most strained
relations with both the ecclesiastical and the temporal authorities.
His democratic period does not lie within the scope of the present
work. We shall only note the germs of the later development which exist
in his original theory of authority. This new theory of authority is
fascinatingly unlike the good old hard and fast doctrine propounded by
Bonald and De Maistre immediately after the Revolution. The reaction
is now much more an affair of reason, consequently much less an affair
of immovable principles. Every serious attempt to show the grounds
upon which the principle of authority rests must inevitably deal the
principle a death-blow; for authority does not rest upon grounds.
Lamennais' doctrine, which at first sight seemed so favourable to
autocracy, proved on closer inspection to be extremely democratic. The
whole edifice rested upon the principle of the authority of the human
race. But beneath this fundamental idea--the authority of the human
race--another was perceptible; and what was this other but the idea so
repugnant to the reactionaries, Rousseau's old idea--_the sovereignty
of the people!_ Lamennais' readers did not observe this at once; he did
not see it himself; but it lay dormant there, and one fine day it awoke
and was recognised by all.
Lamennais desired to substitute theocracy for monarchy. But theocracy
was not popular, was at any rate only popular when the word was
interpreted in the sense of the old proverb: _vox populi, vox
Dei_--when God's voice meant the voice of the people. The practical
result of his doctrine was, then, merely the weakening of that secular
authority which it asserted to be subject to the fiat of the reason of
all; for the reason of all, which had at first been personified in the
sovereign church, was very soon personified in the sovereign people.
When Lamennais at last, in _Les Paroles d'un Croyant_, instigated to
intellectual revolt, all the difference in his position was that he now
desired theocracy for the sake of the people, instead of, as formerly,
for the sake of their rulers.
The Revolution of July produced liberty of the press, and the first use
Lamennais made of this was to publish a demand for the emancipation
of education from state control and for the separation of the church
from the state. He hoped by this means to get education altogether
into the hands of the church, and thereby restore its old religious
tendency. In the autumn of 1830 he started the famous newspaper
_L'Avenir_, the watchword of which was the separation of church and
state. Appeal to Rome was his answer to every attack; his newspaper
was supposed to reflect the exact state of opinion there; but the
Vatican remained obstinately silent. The fact of the matter was that it
regarded Lamennais' liberal ideas with anything but favour, and had no
inclination whatever to relinquish the state grant to the church. His
opponents continuing to maintain that his opinions were incompatible
with Catholic orthodoxy, Lamennais went to Rome in February 1831, to
inquire of the Pope if it was (as he himself put it) a crime to fight
for God, justice, and truth, and if it was desirable that he should
continue his efforts. He was detained in Rome on one pretext or another
until August 1832.
Presently the bull was published in which he, the opponent of
indifference on the subject of religion, is declared guilty of
religious indifferentism. In it we read: "From the impure source of
this indifference springs also the erroneous and absurd, or, more
correctly speaking, insane theory that liberty of conscience should be
allowed and secured to all.... But, as St. Augustine said, _what worse
death is there than liberty to go astray?_ For it stands to reason
that when every restraint is removed that can keep men to the paths
of truth, their nature, which inclines to evil, will plunge into the
abyss.... Amongst these must be reckoned that abominable liberty which
we can never sufficiently loathe and dread, the liberty of the press to
publish any work whatsoever, a liberty which some dare to champion with
such ardour".[4]
This was plain speaking. Lamennais made submission, and his newspaper
stopped appearing. But the cup given him to drink was gall and
wormwood, and only a drop was needed to make it overflow. From this
time onwards he stood prepared to throw himself into the arms of the
Revolution. And ere long he took the leap.
What most interests us, who are confining our attention to the first
stage of Lamennais' psychological development, is to observe the
manner in which his childish faith in authority is undermined as soon
as he has the opportunity of seeing the holy thing close at hand. He
writes from Rome in a private letter: "The Pope is pious, and has the
best intentions; but he has little knowledge of the world, and is
completely ignorant of the condition of the church and of society; he
sits immovable in the darkness which closes in ever thicker round him,
weeping and praying; his task, his mission is to prepare and hasten
the final catastrophes which must precede the regeneration of society,
and without which this regeneration would either be impossible or
incomplete. Therefore God has given him into the hands of men who are
as base as it is possible to be. Ambitious, greedy, and depraved, in
their foolish frenzy they call on the Tatars to produce in Europe what
they call _order_."
Is it not a remarkable coincidence that Lamennais, too, should end
by finding a stumbling-block in the word which had determined the
intellectual development of the whole generation? Victor Hugo in his
endeavour to vindicate the principle of authority in matters of taste
at last feels himself obliged to criticise and enlarge the idea of
order; Lamennais in his battle for Catholicism is compelled to do the
same. With what passionate grief does he describe in his letters the
corruption which he finds prevailing amongst the props and pillars of
_order_ in Rome!
"Catholicism was my life, because it is the life of humanity; my desire
was to defend it, and to rescue it from the abyss into which it is
sinking deeper every day. Nothing would have been easier. It did not
suit the bishops that I should do it. There remained Rome. To Rome I
went, and there I saw the most shameful sewer that has ever defiled
the sight of man. The gigantic _cloaca_ of the Tarquinii would be too
strait for so much filth. No god but self-interest reigns there; they
would sell nations, sell the human race, sell the Three Persons of the
Holy Trinity, for a piece of ground and a few piastres."
Such was the appearance at close quarters of the power whose most
dauntless knight Lamennais had been. Was it any wonder that he turned
round! Was it any wonder that he, like the priests of the ancient
Saxons to whom Renan has compared him, cut down with a well-directed
blow of his axe the divinity to whose altar he had summoned the
reluctant world!
But even more remarkable than this clearsightedness in a single matter
are the gleams of profounder general insight which we now find in
Lamennais' letters. Hitherto he had sought absolute truth, and had
looked to authority to ensure this. Now he suddenly arrives at the idea
of relativity, the idea which most thoroughly and utterly demolishes
the principle of authority.
"The older I grow the more it astonishes me to see how all the beliefs
which are deepest rooted in us depend upon the age in which we live,
the society into which we have been born, and a thousand other equally
accidental circumstances. Only think what our beliefs would be if we
had come into the world ten centuries earlier, or had been born in this
century at Teheran, at Benares, or on the Island of Otaheite!"
There is more philosophy in these two sentences, which forestall
Taine's theory of the influence of surroundings, than in all the
volumes of Lamennais' famous chief work.[5]
[1]
The following verses date from his earliest youth:
On a souvent vu des maris,
Jaloux d'une épouse légère;
On en a vu même à Paris,
Mais ce n'est pas le tien, ma chère.
On a vu des amants transis,
Ainsi qu'une faveur bien chère,
Implorer un simple souris,
Mais ce n'est pas le tien, ma chère.
[2] _Reden über die Religion_. Fifth edition, pp. 50, 54, 56.
[3] _Du progrès de la révolution et de la guerre contre l'église_.
[4] Atque ex hoc putidissimo _indifferentismi_ fonte absurda illa fluit
ac erronea sententia, seu potius deliramentum, asserendam esse ac
vindicandam cuilibet _libertatem conscientiæ_.... _At quæ pejor mors
animæ quam libertas erroris?_ inquiebat Augustinus. Freno quippe omni
adempto, quo homines contineantur in semitis veritatis, proruit jam in
præceps ipsorum natura ad malum inclinata.... Huc spectat deterrima
illa ac nunquam satis execranda et detestabilis libertas artis librariæ
ad scripta quælibet edenda in vulgus, quam tanto convicio audent
nonnulli efflagitare ac promovere.
[5] Lamennais, _Essai sur l'indifférence; Progrès de la révolution et
de la guerre contre l'église; Correspondance par M. Forgues; Œuvres
inédits par M. Blaize_; Schleiermacher, _Reden über die Religion_;
Renan, _Essais de morale et de critique_; Schérer, _Mélanges de
critique religieuse_.