The appearance of a work by the Hon. W. Gibson on _The Abbé de
Lamennais, and the Catholic Liberal Movement in France_, invites us to a
new attempt to grapple with a problem which has so far met with no
satisfactory solution, and probably never will. Up to a certain point we
seem to follow more or less intelligently the working of the restless
soul of De Lamennais; but at the last and great crisis of his life we
find all our calculations at fault; "we try to understand him; we wish
that penetrating into the inmost recesses of his wounded soul, we could
force it to yield up its secret, and once more sympathize with him,
perhaps console him; but we cannot. He is an enigma, as impenetrable as
the rocks on his native shore."
From whatever point of view the story of his life is regarded, it
presents itself as a tragedy. The believing Catholic sees there the ruin
of a vocation to such a work as only a few souls in the history of the
Church are called to accomplish--a ruin desperate and deplorable in
proportion to the force of the talents and energies diverted from the
right path. The non-Catholic or unbeliever cannot fail to be moved by
contemplating the fruitless struggles of a mind so keen, a heart so
enthusiastic in the cause of light and liberty--struggles ending in
failure, perplexity, confusion, and misery. But while we allow a large
element of mystery in his character which will never be eliminated, yet
as we return time after time to gaze upon the picture of his life, as a
whole, and in its details, the seemingly discordant items begin quietly
to drop into their places one after another, and to exhibit unnoticed
connections; and the idea of his distinctive personality begins to shape
itself into a coherent unity.
It is not our purpose here to summarize Mr. Gibson's admirable work, or
to give even an outline of so well-known a history; but rather to
attempt some brief criticism of the man himself, and incidentally of his
views.
Temperament and early education are among the principal determinants of
character; and certainly when we contrast Féli with his brother Jean,
who presumably received the same home-training, we see how largely he
was the creature of temperament. Jean was by nature the "good boy,"
tractable and docile; Féli, the unmanageable, the lawless, the violent.
While Jean was dutifully learning his lessons to order, Féli, the
obstreperous, imprisoned in the library, was feeding his tender mind
with Diderot, Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, and similar diet,
and at twelve exhibited such infidel tendencies as made it prudent to
defer his first Communion for some ten years.
From first to last, whether we consider his childish waywardness and
outbreaks of violent passion, which persevered in a less childish form
through manhood; or the fits of intense depression and melancholy,
alternating with spells of high nerve-tension and feverish excitement;
or the restlessness and impatient energy which showed themselves always
and everywhere, and at times drove him like a wild man into the woods,
"seeking rest and finding none;" or the prophetic, not to say, the
fanatical strain which breaks out in so much of his writing, especially
in the _Paroles d'un Croyant_,--in all alike there is evident that
predominance of the imaginative and emotional elements which, combined
with intellectual gifts, constitute genius as commonly understood. For
such a character the training which would suffice for half a dozen good
little Jeans would be wholly inadequate. So much fire and feeling ill
submits to the yoke of self-restraint in matters moral or intellectual.
The mind is apt to be fascinated by the brilliant pictures of the
imagination and to become a slave to the tyranny of a fixed idea; while
the strength of passionate desire paralyzes the power of free
deliberation. It is precisely this self-restraint, the fruit of a
careful education given and responded to, that we miss in De Lammenais
both in his moral character and in his mind. Peace and tranquillity of
soul are essential to successful thinking, more especially in
philosophy; and in proportion as a brilliant imagination is a help, it
is also a danger if let run riot. At times, wearied out with himself, he
seems to have felt the need of retreat and quiet; but he was almost as
constitutionally incapable of keeping still, as certain modern statesmen
in their retirement from public life. We smile when we hear him in the
violent first fervour of his conversion, talking about becoming a
Trappist, and, later, a Jesuit. He knew himself better when he shrank so
long and persistently from the yoke of priesthood, and when, having
yielded against his truer instincts to the indiscreet zeal of pious
friends, he experienced an agony of repugnance at his first Mass. With
different antecedents he might have profited by the yoke, but as things
stood it could but gall him.
In spite of Mr. Gibson's contention to the contrary, it can hardly be
maintained that De Lamennais was well educated in the strict sense of
the expression. The evidence he adduces points to a marvellous diversity
of interests, and even to close and careful reading. But on the whole he
was self-taught, and a self-taught man is never educated. Without
intercourse with other living minds, education is impossible. This is
indeed hoisting De Lammenais with his own petard. For, according to
"Traditionalism," the mind is paralyzed by isolation, and can be duly
developed only in society. An overweening self-confidence and slight
regard for the labours of other thinkers usually characterizes
self-taught genius. This it was that led him to cut all connection with
the philosophy of the past, and to attempt to build up, single-handed, a
new system to supplant that which had been the fruit of the collective
mind-labour of centuries. "I shall work out," he writes calmly to the
Abbé Brute, "a new system for the defence of Christianity against
infidels and heretics, a very simple system, in which the proofs will be
so rigorous that unless one is prepared to give up the right of saying
_I am_, it will be necessary to say _Credo_ to the very end." Only a man
with a very slight and superficial acquaintance with the endeavours of
previous apologists, and the extreme difficulty of the problem, could
speak with such portentous self-confidence. And the result bears out
this remark. For grand and imposing as is the structure of the _Essai
sur l'Indifférence,_ it rests on fallacies so patent that none but a man
of no philosophical training could have failed to perceive them. Here it
is that the self-taught man comes to grief and often misses the mere
truisms of traditional teaching.
Doubtless ecclesiastical philosophy and theology was then more than ever
painfully fossilized, and altogether lifeless and out of sympathy with
the spirit of the age. It needed to be quickened, adapted and applied to
modern exigencies. The undue intrusion of metaphysics into the domain of
positive knowledge needed checking; the value of _consensus communis_ as
a criterion required to be insisted on, defended, and exactly defined.
With characteristic impetuosity, De Lamennais, like Comte, must bundle
metaphysics out of doors altogether as a merely provisional but illusory
synthesis, necessary for the human intellect in its adolescence, but to
be discarded in its maturity; and thereupon he proceeds to erect his
system of Traditionalism mid-air, quite unconscious that in clearing
away metaphysics he has deprived the structure of its only possible
foundation. But this is the man all over. Because there is a truth in
Traditionalism, therefore, it is the whole and only truth; because
metaphysics alone can do little, it is therefore unnecessary and
worthless. Had he spent but a fraction of the time and trouble he gave
to the elaboration of his own system, in a liberal and critical study of
that which he desired to supersede, his genius might have accomplished a
work for the Church which is still halting badly on its way to
perfection. One feels something like anger in contemplating such
hot-headed zeal standing continually in its own light, and frustrating
with perverse ingenuity the very end which it was most desirous to
realize. For no one can deny that from his first conversion to his
unhappy death De Lamennais was dominated by the highest and noblest and
most unselfish motives; that he was a man of absolute sincerity of
purpose.
His earliest enthusiasm was for the defence and exaltation of the
Catholic Faith, for the liberation of the Church from the bonds of
nationalism and Erastianism. Even those who repudiate altogether the
extreme Ultramontanism of De Maistre and De Lamennais must allow their
conception to be one of the boldest and grandest which has inspired the
mind of man. He realized more vividly than many that the cause of the
Church and of society, of Catholicism and humanity, were one and the
same. It was the very intensity and depth of his convictions that made
him so importunate in pressing them on others, so intolerant of delay,
so infuriated by opposition. For indeed nothing is more common than to
find a thousand selfishnesses co-existing and interfering with a
dominant unselfishness, lessening or totally destroying its fruitfulness
for good. A man who is unselfish enough to devote his fortune to charity
will not necessarily be free from faults which may more than undo the
good he proposes.
The same hastiness of thought which moved him to a wholesale,
indiscriminate condemnation of metaphysics, led him to conclude that
because hitherto no happy adjustment of the relations between Church and
State had been devised, there could be no remedy save in their total
severance. Doubtless such a severance would be better, if Gallicanism
were the only alternative; or if the Church's liberty and efficiency
were to be seriously curtailed. A superficial glance might fancy a
fundamental discrepancy in this matter, as well as in the questions of
toleration, and of the freedom of the press, between the official
teaching of Gregory XVI. and Pius IX., and that of Leo XIII. But a
closer inspection shows no alteration of principle, and only a
recognition of altered circumstances, either necessitating a connivance
at inevitable evils, or totally changing the aspect of the question. But
De Lamennais should have learnt from his own teaching that liberty does
not mean the independence of isolation, but the full enjoyment of all
the means necessary for perfect self-development; that it does not mean
the weakness of dissociation, but the strength of a perfectly organized
association for mutual help and protection. And this holds good, not for
individuals alone, but for societies, and for Church and State. Aiming
at one common end, the perfection of humanity, they cannot but gain by
association and lose by dissociation. Each is weaker even, in its own
sphere, apart from the other. It is an unreal abstraction that splits
man into two beings--a body and a soul; that draws a clean,
hard-and-fast line between his temporal and eternal welfare; that
commits the former interest to one society, the latter to another,
absolutely distinct and unconnected. But all this holds true only in the
hypothesis of a nation of Christians or Theists.
When a large fraction of the community has ceased to believe in
Christianity and the Church, the demands of justice and reason are
different. It may well be allowed that, to determine the exact relation
of the Catholic Church and Christian State, and the law of their
organization into one complex society, is a problem for whose perfect
solution we must wait the further development of the ideas of
ecclesiastical and civil society. But to wait for growth of subjective
truth was just what De Lamennais could not do. He saw that past
solutions of the problem had been unsuccessful; that in most cases the
Church was eventually drawn into bondage under the State as its creature
and instrument in the cause of tyranny and oppression; that it was
insensibly permeated with the local and national spirit, differentiated
from Catholic Christendom, and severed from the full influence of its
head, the Vicar of Christ. The independence of the Church he rightly
judged to be the great safeguard of the people against the tyranny of
their temporal rulers. In the face of that world-wide spiritual society,
whose voice was at once the voice of humanity and the voice of God, he
felt that "iniquity would stop its mouth," and injustice be put to
shame. Yet all this seemed to him impossible so long as the Church
depended on the State for temporalities, and because he could devise no
form of association that would be guarantee against all abuses, he
therefore insisted on total, severance, not merely as expedient for the
present pressure, but as a divine and eternal principle.
When, therefore, it seemed to him that Gregory XVI. had condemned
Ultramontanism, it was, to De Lamennais, as though he had condemned the
cause of the Church and of humanity, and thrown the weight of his
authority into that of Gallicanism. Here again we see how his mental
intensity and impatience reduced him to the dilemma which found solution
in his apostasy. Holding as he did to the Papal infallibility in a form
far more extreme than that subsequently approved by the Vatican Council,
he was bound in consistency to accept the Pope's decision as infallible
in respect to its expediency and in all its detail. Thus it seemed to
him that the ideal for which he had lived was shattered by a
self-inflicted blow. The infallible voice of humanity had declared
against the cause of humanity. He found himself compelled, in virtue of
his principles, to choose between two alternatives. Either the cause of
humanity, as he conceived it, was not the cause of God; or else the Pope
was not the Vicar of Christ and the divinely-appointed guardian of that
cause. But of the two denials the former was now to him the least
tolerable. "Catholicism," he said, "was my life, because it was that of
humanity." _Sacramenta, propter homines_; the Church was made for man,
and not man for the Church. Given the dilemma, who shall blame his
choice? But the dilemma was purely subjective and imaginary. Though
truths are never irreconcilable, the exaggerations of truth may well
be so.
Had he possessed that intellectual patience in perplexity, without which
not only faith, but true science, is impossible, he would have been
driven not to apostasy, but to a careful re-sifting of his views,
issuing, perhaps, in a reconciliation of apparently adverse positions,
or at all events in a confession of subjective, uncertainty and
confusion. Faith, in the wider sense of the word, would have bid him to
believe, without seeing, what we have lived to see under Leo XIII.
This seems to be the intellectual aspect of his defection, though of
course there were many accelerating causes at work. Perhaps if Gregory
XVI. had met his appeal with a few words of simple explanation and
advice, instead of with that mysterious reticence which is falsely
supposed to be the soul of diplomacy, the issue might have been as happy
as it was miserable. De Lamennais himself, in his _Affaires de Rome_,
makes the same remark in so many words. Again, the illiberal and
ungenerous persecution of his triumphant adversaries, who endeavoured to
goad him into some open act of rebellion in order to bring him under
still heavier condemnation, can scarcely have failed to embitter and
harden a soul naturally disposed to pessimism and melancholy. Nor can we
omit from the influences at work upon him, that dramatic instinct which
makes a mediocre and colourless attitude impossible for those who are
strongly under its influence. Perhaps no nation is more governed by it
than the French, with their partiality for _tableaux_ and _sensation_;
and in De Lamennais its presence was most marked, as the pages of his
_Paroles_ will witness. In the _Too Late_ with which he received the
overtures of Pius IX.; in the studied sensationalism of his funeral
arrangements, and in many other minute points, we are made sensible that
if his life culminated in a tragedy, the tragic aspect of it was not
altogether displeasing to him. Still it would be a grievous slur on so
great a character to suppose that such a weakness could have had any
considerable part in his steady and deliberate refusal to see a priest
at the last. This is sufficiently accounted for by the fact that he
believed he could not be absolved without accepting the condemnation of
his own views, and so abandoning the cause of humanity. While under the
spell of his imaginary dilemma, he was constrained to follow the rule
for a perplexed conscience, and to choose what seemed to him the less of
two evils.
After his ideal had been destroyed, and the Church could no longer be
for him the Saviour of the Nations, he threw himself without reserve
into the cause of humanity and liberty. But his aims were now almost
entirely destructive and revolutionary. His enthusiasm was rather a
hatred of the things that were, than an ardent zeal for the things that
ought to be; and the bitter elements in his character become more and
more accentuated as he finds himself gradually thrust aside and
forgotten--cast off by the Church, ignored by the revolution. Even his
friends, with one or two exceptions, dropped off one by one; some
fleeing like rats from a sinking ship, others perplexed at his obstinacy
or offended by his violence; others removed by death or distance; and we
see him in his old age poor and lonely, and intensely unhappy.
When dangerously ill in 1827, he exclaimed, on being told that it was a
fine night, "For my peace, God grant that it may be my last." The prayer
was not heard, for, as he felt on his recovery, God had a great work for
him to do. How that work was done we have just seen. Féli de Lamennais,
who would have been buried as a Christian in 1827, was buried as an
infidel in 1854.
It is vain to contend that he was not a man of prayer. That he had a
keen discernment in spiritual things is evident from his _Commentary on
the Imitation_ and his other spiritual writings, as well as from the
testimony of his young disciples at La Chênaie, to whom he was not
merely a brilliant teacher, a most affectionate friend and father, but
also a trusted guide in the things of God. Yet this would be little had
we not also assurance of his personal and private devoutness.
All this would make his unfortunate ending a stumbling-block to those
who cannot acquiesce in the fact that in every soul tares and wheat in
various proportions grow side by side, and that which growth is to be
victorious is not possible to predict with certainty; who deem it
impossible that one who ends ill could ever have lived well; or that one
who loses his faith, or any other virtue, could ever at any time have
really possessed it. There is indeed some kind of double personality in
us all which is perhaps more observable in strongly-marked characters
like De Lamennais, where, so to say, the bifurcating lines are produced
further. Proud men have occasional moods of genuine humility; and
habitual bitterness is allayed by intervals of sweetness; and
conversely, there are ugly streaks in the fairest marble.
And as to the fate of that restless soul, who shall dare to speak
dogmatically? We cling gladly to the story of the tear that stole down
his face in death, and would fain see in it some confirmation of the
view according to which the soul receives in that crucial hour a final
choice based on the collective experience of its mortal life. We would
hope that as there is a baptism of blood or of charity, so there may
perhaps be some uncovenanted absolution for one who so earnestly loved
mankind at large, and especially the poor and the oppressed; who in his
old age and misery was found by their sick-bed; who willed to be with
them in his death and burial. And yet we feel something of that
agonizing uncertainty which forced from the aged Abbe Jean the bitter
cry, "Féli, Féli, my brother!"
_Jan._ 1897.