is at all times necessarily required for obtaining remission of sins
and justification, is a matter determined by the fathers of Trent. But
mark yet the mystery. They equivocate with us in the term
_contrition_, and make a distinction thereof into perfect and
imperfect. The former of these is _contrition_ properly; the latter
they call _attrition_, which howsoever in itself it be no true
contrition, yet when the priest, with his power of forgiving sins,
interposes himself in the business, they tell us that attrition, by
virtue of the keys, is made contrition: that is to say, that a sorrow
arising from a servile fear of punishment, and such a fruitless
repentance as the reprobate may carry with them to hell, by virtue of
the priest’s absolution, is made so fruitful that it shall serve the
turn for obtaining forgiveness of sins, as if it had been that godly
sorrow which worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of. By
which spiritual cozenage many poor souls are most miserably deluded.”
(Ussher’s Tracts, p. 153.)
Footnote 219:
These quotations, carefully marked in the original, afford a
sufficient answer to Father Daniel’s long argument, which consists
chiefly of citations from Jesuit writers who hold the views above
given.
Footnote 220:
It may be remembered that Diana, though not a Jesuit, was claimed by
the Society as a favorer of their casuists. This writer was once held
in such high repute, that he was consulted by people from all parts of
the world as a perfect oracle in cases of conscience. He is now
forgotten. His style, like that of most of these scholastics, is
described as “insipid, stingy, and crawling.” (Biogr. Univ., Anc. et
Mod.)
Footnote 221:
Esc. Pratique de notre Société, tr. 7, ex. 4, n. 91.
Footnote 222:
Tr. 8, disp. 3, n. 13.
Footnote 223:
Of Trent. Nicole attempts to prove that the “imperfect contrition” of
this Council includes the love of God, and that they condemned as
heretical the opinion, that “any could prepare himself for grace
without a movement of the Holy Spirit.” He is more successful in
showing that the Jesuits were heretical when judged by Augustine and
the Holy Scriptures. (Note 2, sur la x. Lettre.)
Footnote 224:
The Jesuits are so fond of their “attrition,” or purely natural
repentance, that one of their own theologians (Cardinal Francis Tolet)
having condemned it they falsified the passage in a subsequent
edition, making him speak the opposite sentiment. The forgery was
exposed; but the worthy fathers, according to custom, allowed it to
pass without notice, _ad majorem Dei gloriam_. (Nicole, iii. 95.)
Footnote 225:
Tr. 1, ex. 2, n. 21; and tr. 5, ex. 4, n. 8.
Footnote 226:
Shocking as these principles are, it might be easy to show that they
necessarily flow from the Romish doctrine, which substitutes the
imperfect obedience of the sinner as the meritorious ground of
justification, in the room of the all-perfect obedience and oblation
of the Son of God, which renders it necessary to lower the divine
standard of duty. The attempt of Father Daniel to escape from the
serious charge in the text under a cloud of metaphysical distinctions
about _affective_ and _effective_ love, is about as lame as the
argument he draws from the merciful character of the Gospel, is
dishonorable to the Saviour, who “came not to destroy the law and the
prophets but to fulfil.” But this “confusion worse confounded” arises
from putting love to God out of its proper place and representing it
as the price of our pardon instead of the fruit of faith in pardoning
mercy. Arnauld was as far wrong on this point as the Jesuits; and it
is astonishing that he did not discover in their system the radical
error of his own creed carried out to its proper consequences.
(Reponse Gen. au Livre de M. Arnauld, par Elie Merlat, p. 30.)
Footnote 227:
“Nothing on this point,” says Nicole in a note here, “can be finer
than the prosopopeia in which Despréaux (Boileau) introduces God as
judging mankind.” He then quotes a long passage from the Twelfth
Epistle of that poet, beginning—
“Quand Dieu viendra juger les vivans et les morts,” &c.
Boileau was the personal friend of Arnauld and Pascal, and satirized
the Jesuits with such pleasant irony that Father la Chaise, the
confessor of Louis XIV., though himself a Jesuit, is said to have
taken a pleasure in repeating his verses.
LETTER XI.
TO THE REVEREND FATHERS, THE JESUITS.[228]
RIDICULE A FAIR WEAPON WHEN EMPLOYED AGAINST ABSURD OPINIONS—RULES TO BE
OBSERVED IN THE USE OF THIS WEAPON—THE PROFANE BUFFOONERY OF FATHERS
LE MOINE AND GARASSE.
_August 18, 1656._
REVEREND FATHERS,—I have seen the letters which you are circulating in
opposition to those which I wrote to one of my friends on your morality;
and I perceive that one of the principal points of your defence is, that
I have not spoken of your maxims with sufficient seriousness. This
charge you repeat in all your productions, and carry it so far as to
allege, that I have been “guilty of turning sacred things into
ridicule.”
Such a charge, fathers, is no less surprising than it is unfounded.
Where do you find that I have turned sacred things into ridicule? You
specify “the Mohatra contract, and the story of John d’Alba.” But are
these what you call “sacred things?” Does it really appear to you that
the Mohatra is something so venerable that it would be blasphemy not to
speak of it with respect? And the lessons of Father Bauny on larceny,
which led John d’Alba to practise it at your expense, are they so sacred
as to entitle you to stigmatize all who laugh at them as profane people?
What, fathers! must the vagaries of your doctors pass for the verities
of the Christian faith, and no man be allowed to ridicule Escobar, or
the fantastical and unchristian dogmas of your authors, without being
stigmatized as jesting at religion? Is it possible you can have ventured
to reiterate so often an idea so utterly unreasonable? Have you no fears
that, in blaming me for laughing at your absurdities, you may only
afford me fresh subject of merriment; that you may make the charge
recoil on yourselves, by showing that I have really selected nothing
from your writings as the matter of raillery, but what was truly
ridiculous; and that thus, in making a jest of your morality, I have
been as far from jeering at holy things, as the doctrine of your
casuists is far from the holy doctrine of the Gospel?
Indeed, reverend sirs, there is a vast difference between laughing at
religion, and laughing at those who profane it by their extravagant
opinions. It were impiety to be wanting in respect for the verities
which the Spirit of God has revealed; but it were no less impiety of
another sort, to be wanting in contempt for the falsities which the
spirit of man opposes to them.[229]
For, fathers (since you will force me into this argument), I beseech you
to consider that, just in proportion as Christian truths are worthy of
love and respect, the contrary errors must deserve hatred and contempt;
there being two things in the truths of our religion—a divine beauty
that renders them lovely, and a sacred majesty that renders them
venerable; and two things also about errors—an impiety, that makes them
horrible, and an impertinence that renders them ridiculous. For these
reasons, while the saints have ever cherished towards the truth the
two-fold sentiment of love and fear—the whole of their wisdom being
comprised between fear, which is its beginning, and love, which is its
end—they have, at the same time, entertained towards error the two-fold
feeling of hatred and contempt, and their zeal has been at once employed
to repel, by force of reasoning, the malice of the wicked, and to
chastise, by the aid of ridicule, their extravagance and folly.
Do not then expect, fathers, to make people believe that it is unworthy
of a Christian to treat error with derision. Nothing is easier than to
convince all who were not aware of it before, that this practice is
perfectly just—that it is common with the fathers of the Church, and
that it is sanctioned by Scripture, by the example of the best of
saints, and even by that of God himself.
Do we not find that God at once hates and despises sinners; so that even
at the hour of death, when their condition is most sad and deplorable,
Divine Wisdom adds mockery to the vengeance which consigns them to
eternal punishment? “_In interitu vestro ridebo et subsannabo_—I will
laugh at your calamity.” The saints, too, influenced by the same
feeling, will join in the derision; for, according to David, when they
witness the punishment of the wicked, “they shall fear, and yet laugh at
it—_videbunt justi et timebunt, et super eum ridebunt_.” And Job says:
“_Innocens subsannabit eos_—The innocent shall laugh at them.”[230]
It is worthy of remark here, that the very first words which God
addressed to man after his fall, contain, in the opinion of the fathers,
“bitter irony” and mockery. After Adam had disobeyed his Maker, in the
hope, suggested by the devil, of being like God, it appears from
Scripture that God, as a punishment, subjected him to death; and after
having reduced him to this miserable condition, which was due to his
sin, he taunted him in that state with the following terms of derision:
“Behold, the man has become as one of us!—_Ecce, Adam quasi unus ex
nobis!_”—which, according to St. Jerome[231] and the interpreters, is “a
grievous and cutting piece of irony,” with which God “stung him to the
quick.” “Adam,” says Rupert, “deserved to be taunted in this manner, and
he would be naturally made to feel his folly more acutely by this
ironical expression than by a more serious one.” St. Victor, after
making the same remark, adds, “that this irony was due to his sottish
credulity, and that this species of raillery is an act of justice,
merited by him against whom it was directed.”[232]
Thus you see, fathers, that ridicule is, in some cases, a very
appropriate means of reclaiming men from their errors, and that it is
accordingly an act of justice, because, as Jeremiah says, “the actions
of those that err are worthy of derision, because of their vanity—_vana
sunt et risu digna_.” And so far from its being impious to laugh at
them, St. Augustine holds it to be the effect of divine wisdom: “The
wise laugh at the foolish, because they are wise, not after their own
wisdom, but after that divine wisdom which shall laugh at the death of
the wicked.”
The prophets, accordingly, filled with the Spirit of God, have availed
themselves of ridicule, as we find from the examples of Daniel and
Elias. In short, examples of it are not wanting in the discourses of
Jesus Christ himself. St. Augustine remarks that, when he would humble
Nicodemus, who deemed himself so expert in his knowledge of the law,
“perceiving him to be puffed up with pride, from his rank as doctor of
the Jews, he first beats down his presumption by the magnitude of his
demands, and having reduced him so low that he was unable to answer,
What! says he, you a master in Israel, and not know these things!—as if
he had said, Proud ruler, confess that thou knowest nothing.” St.
Chrysostom and St. Cyril likewise observe upon this, that “he deserved
to be ridiculed in this manner.”
You may learn from this, fathers, that should it so happen, in our day,
that persons who enact the part of “masters” among Christians, as
Nicodemus and the Pharisees did among the Jews, show themselves so
ignorant of the first principles of religion as to maintain, for
example, that “a man may be saved who never loved God all his life,” we
only follow the example of Jesus Christ, when we laugh at such a
combination of ignorance and conceit.
I am sure, fathers, these sacred examples are sufficient to convince
you, that to deride the errors and extravagances of man is not
inconsistent with the practice of the saints; otherwise we must blame
that of the greatest doctors of the Church, who have been guilty of
it—such as St. Jerome, in his letters and writings against Jovinian,
Vigilantius, and the Pelagians; Tertullian, in his Apology against the
follies of idolaters; St. Augustine against the monks of Africa, whom he
styles “the hairy men;” St. Irenæus the Gnostics; St. Bernard and the
other fathers of the Church, who, having been the imitators of the
apostles, ought to be imitated by the faithful in all time coming; for,
say what we will, they are the true models for Christians, even of the
present day.
In following such examples, I conceived that I could not go far wrong;
and, as I think I have sufficiently established this position, I shall
only add, in the admirable words of Tertullian, which give the true
explanation of the whole of my proceeding in this matter: “What I have
now done is only a little sport before the real combat. I have rather
indicated the wounds that might be given you, than inflicted any. If the
reader has met with passages which have excited his risibility, he must
ascribe this to the subjects themselves. There are many things which
deserve to be held up in this way to ridicule and mockery, lest, by a
serious refutation, we should attach a weight to them which they do not
deserve. Nothing is more due to vanity than laughter; and it is the
Truth properly that has a right to laugh, because she is cheerful, and
to make sport of her enemies, because she is sure of the victory. Care
must be taken, indeed, that the raillery is not too low, and unworthy of
the truth; but, keeping this in view, when ridicule may be employed with
effect, it is a duty to avail ourselves of it.” Do you not think,
fathers, that this passage is singularly applicable to our subject? The
letters which I have hitherto written are “merely a little sport before
a real combat.” As yet I have been only playing with the foils, and
“rather indicating the wounds that might be given you than inflicting
any.” I have merely exposed your passages to the light, without making
almost a reflection on them. “If the reader has met with any that have
excited his risibility, he must ascribe this to the subjects
themselves.” And, indeed, what is more fitted to raise a laugh, than to
see a matter so grave as that of Christian morality decked out with
fancies so grotesque as those in which you have exhibited it? One is apt
to form such high anticipations of these maxims, from being told that
“Jesus Christ himself has revealed them to the fathers of the Society,”
that when one discovers among them such absurdities as “that a priest
receiving money to say mass, may take additional sums from other persons
by giving up to them his own share in the sacrifice;” “that a monk is
not to be excommunicated for putting off his habit, provided it is to
dance, swindle, or go incognito into infamous houses;” and “that the
duty of hearing mass may be fulfilled by listening to four quarters of a
mass at once from different priests”—when, I say, one listens to such
decisions as these, the surprise is such that it is impossible to
refrain from laughing; for nothing is more calculated to produce that
emotion than a startling contrast between the thing looked for and the
thing looked at. And why should the greater part of these maxims be
treated in any other way? As Tertullian says, “To treat them seriously
would be to sanction them.”
What! is it necessary to bring up all the forces of Scripture and
tradition, in order to prove that running a sword through a man’s body,
covertly and behind his back, is to murder him in treachery? or, that to
give one money as a motive to resign a benefice, is to purchase the
benefice? Yes, there are things which it is duty to despise, and which
“deserve only to be laughed at.” In short, the remark of that ancient
author, “that nothing is more due to vanity than derision,” with what
follows, applies to the case before us so justly and so convincingly, as
to put it beyond all question that we may laugh at errors without
violating propriety.
And let me add, fathers, that this may be done without any breach of
charity either, though this is another of the charges you bring against
me in your publications. For, according to St. Augustine, “charity may
sometimes oblige us to ridicule the errors of men, that they may be
induced to laugh at them in their turn, and renounce them—_Hæc tu
misericorditer irride, ut eis ridenda ac fugienda commendes_.” And the
same charity may also, at other times, bind us to repel them with
indignation, according to that other saying of St. Gregory of Nazianzen:
“The spirit of meekness and charity hath its emotions and its heats.”
Indeed, as St. Augustine observes, “who would venture to say that truth
ought to stand disarmed against falsehood, or that the enemies of the
faith shall be at liberty to frighten the faithful with hard words, and
jeer at them with lively sallies of wit; while the Catholics ought never
to write except with a coldness of style enough to set the reader
asleep?”
Is it not obvious that, by following such a course, a wide door would be
opened for the introduction of the most extravagant and pernicious
dogmas into the Church; while none would be allowed to treat them with
contempt, through fear of being charged with violating propriety, or to
confute them with indignation, from the dread of being taxed with want
of charity?
Indeed, fathers! shall you be allowed to maintain, “that it is lawful to
kill a man to avoid a box on the ear or an affront,” and must nobody be
permitted publicly to expose a public error of such consequence? Shall
you be at liberty to say, “that a judge may in conscience retain a fee
received for an act of injustice,” and shall no one be at liberty to
contradict you? Shall you print, with the privilege and approbation of
your doctors, “that a man may be saved without ever having loved God;”
and will you shut the mouth of those who defend the true faith, by
telling them that they would violate brotherly love by attacking you,
and Christian modesty by laughing at your maxims? I doubt, fathers, if
there be any persons whom you could make believe this; if, however,
there be any such, who are really persuaded that, by denouncing your
morality, I have been deficient in the charity which I owe to you, I
would have them examine, with great jealousy, whence this feeling takes
its rise within them. They may imagine that it proceeds from a holy
zeal, which will not allow them to see their neighbor impeached without
being scandalized at it; but I would entreat them to consider, that it
is not impossible that it may flow from another source, and that it is
even extremely likely that it may spring from that secret, and often
self-concealed dissatisfaction, which the unhappy corruption within us
seldom fails to stir up against those who oppose the relaxation of
morals. And to furnish them with a rule which may enable them to
ascertain the real principle from which it proceeds, I will ask them,
if, while they lament the way in which the religious[233] have been
treated, they lament still more the manner in which these religious have
treated the truth. If they are incensed, not only against the letters,
but still more against the maxims quoted in them, I shall grant it to be
barely possible that their resentment proceeds from some zeal, though
not of the most enlightened kind; and, in this case, the passages I have
just cited from the fathers will serve to enlighten them. But if they
are merely angry at the reprehension, and not at the things reprehended,
truly, fathers, I shall never scruple to tell them that they are grossly
mistaken, and that their zeal is miserably blind.
Strange zeal, indeed! which gets angry at those that censure public
faults, and not at those that commit them! Novel charity this, which
groans at seeing error confuted, but feels no grief at seeing morality
subverted by that error! If these persons were in danger of being
assassinated, pray, would they be offended at one advertising them of
the stratagem that had been laid for them; and instead of turning out of
their way to avoid it, would they trifle away their time in whining
about the little charity manifested in discovering to them the criminal
design of the assassins? Do they get waspish when one tells them not to
eat such an article of food, because it is poisoned? or not to enter
such a city, because it has the plague?
Whence comes it, then, that the same persons who set down a man as
wanting in charity, for exposing maxims hurtful to religion, would, on
the contrary, think him equally deficient in that grace were he not to
disclose matters hurtful to health and life, unless it be from this,
that their fondness for life induces them to take in good part every
hint that contributes to its preservation, while their indifference to
truth leads them, not only to take no share in its defence, but even to
view with pain the efforts made for the extirpation of falsehood?
Let them seriously ponder, as in the sight of God, how shameful, and how
prejudicial to the Church, is the morality which your casuists are in
the habit of propagating; the scandalous and unmeasured license which
they are introducing into public manners; the obstinate and violent
hardihood with which you support them. And if they do not think it full
time to rise against such disorders, their blindness is as much to be
pitied as yours, fathers; and you and they have equal reason to dread
that saying of St. Augustine, founded on the words of Jesus Christ, in
the Gospel: “Woe to the blind leaders! woe to the blind followers!—_Væ
cæcis ducentibus! væ cæcis sequentibus!_”
But to leave you no room in future, either to create such impressions on
the minds of others, or to harbor them in your own, I shall tell you,
fathers (and I am ashamed I should have to teach you what I should have
rather learnt from you), the marks which the fathers of the Church have
given for judging when our animadversions flow from a principle of piety
and charity, and when from a spirit of malice and impiety.
The first of these rules is, that the spirit of piety always prompts us
to speak with sincerity and truthfulness; whereas malice and envy make
use of falsehood and calumny. “_Splendentia et vehementia, sed rebus
veris_—Splendid and vehement in words, but true in things,” as St.
Augustine says. The dealer in falsehood is an agent of the devil. No
direction of the intention can sanctify slander; and though the
conversion of the whole earth should depend on it, no man may
warrantably calumniate the innocent: because none may do the least evil,
in order to accomplish the greatest good; and, as the Scripture says,
“the truth of God stands in no need of our lie.” St. Hilary observes,
that “it is the bounden duty of the advocates of truth, to advance
nothing in its support but true things.” Now, fathers, I can declare
before God, that there is nothing that I detest more than the slightest
possible deviation from the truth, and that I have ever taken the
greatest care, not only not to falsify (which would be horrible), but
not to alter or wrest, in the slightest possible degree, the sense of a
single passage. So closely have I adhered to this rule, that if I may
presume to apply them to the present case, I may safely say, in the
words of the same St. Hilary: “If we advance things that are false, let
our statements be branded with infamy; but if we can show that they are
public and notorious, it is no breach of apostolic modesty or liberty to
expose them.”