The Age of Louis XIV
Page 13
Bossuet’s royal pupil did not appreciate the honor of having great books written for his instruction. And Bossuet’s spirit was too serious and severe to be an ingratiating teacher. He was more in his element when he gently-guided Louise de La Vallière out of adultery into a nunnery. He preached the sermon when she took the vows; and in that year 1675 he spoke up again in reproof of the philandering King. Louis heard him impatiently, but restored him to the episcopate as bishop of Meaux (1681), near enough to Versailles to let Bossuet savor the pomp and splendor of the court. Through that proud generation he was the authoritative exponent and leader of the French clergy. For them he drew up the Four Articles that reaffirmed the “Gallican liberties” of the French Church as against papal domination. Bossuet forfeited thereby a cardinal’s hat, but he became the pope of France.
FIG. 1—GIRARDON: Louis XIV. Louvre, Paris
FIG. 2—JEAN NOCRET: Anne of Austria. Château de Versailles (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 3—ANTOINE COYSEVOX: Colbert. Château de Versailles (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 4—PIERRE MIGNARD: Cardinal Mazarin. Musée de Condé, Chantilly (Photo Giraudon)
FIG. 5—UNKNOWN ARTIST: Ninon de Lenclos. Château de Versailles
FIG. 6—PIERRE MIGNARD: Madame de Montespan. From Pierre Pradel, L’Art au siècle de Louis XIV (Paris: Éditions de Clairefontaine, 1949; Photo by J. E. Bulloz)
FIG. 7—JOOST VAN EGMONT: The Great Condé. Château de Versailles
FIG. 8—N. DE L’ARMESSIN: Louise de La Vallière (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 9—HYACINTHE RIGAUD: Henrietta Anne, Duchess of Orléans. Private Collection, Paris (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 10—Death Mask of Blaise Pascal. From Ernst Benkard, Undying Faces (London: Hogarth Press, 1929)
FIG. 11—JOSEPH VIVIEN: Fénelon. Alte Pinakothek, Munich (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 12—HYACINTHE RIGAUD: Jacques Bossuet. Louvre, Paris (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 13—Church of Val-de-Grâce (1645), Paris. Courtesy of the French Cultural Services, New York (Photo by Molinard, Couleurs du Monde)
FIG. 14—GIRARDON: Bathing Nymphs. Château de Versailles
FIG. 15—ANDRÉ CHARLES BOULLE: Ebony cabinet. The Wallace Collection, London
FIG. 16—The Louvre Colonnade (Photo Giraudon)
FIG. 17—Church of St.-Louis-des-lnvalides (1670), Paris. Courtesy of the French Embassy Press and Information Division, New York
FIG. 18—CHARLES LE BRUN: Gobelin Tapestry: The Family of Darius at the Feet of Alexander. Louvre, Paris (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 19—Chapel at Versailles (1699). Château de Versailles
FIG. 20—ANTOINE COYSEVOX: Duchess of Burgundy. Château de Versailles
FIG. 21—DESJARDINS: Pierre Mignard. Louvre, Paris
FIG. 22—PIERRE MIGNARD: Duchess of Maine as a Child. Château de Versailles
FIG. 23—La Rochefoucauld. From Memoirs of Madame de Motteville, Vol. II (Boston: Hardy, Pratt & Co., 1901)
FIG. 24—HOUDON: Molière. Joseph Duveen Collection (Bettmann Archive)
He was not a bad pope. Though he insisted on the dignity and ceremony of the episcopal state, he remained humane and kind, and spread his mantle over many varieties of Catholic belief. Without condoning the passion and scorn that sharpened the Provincial Letters, he agreed in condemning the excesses of casuistry; in 1700 he persuaded the assembly of the clergy to repudiate 127 propositions taken from Jesuit casuists; and he remained on friendly terms with Arnauld and other Jansenists. He was reputed to be lenient in the confessional, and deprecated austerities in laymen, but he warmly approved the asceticism of Raneé, went into frequent retreat at La Trappe, and wished at times that he might win the peace of a monastic cell. The glamour of the court, however, overcame his aspirations to sanctity, and tarnished his theology with ambitions to rise in the hierarchies of Church and state. “Pray for me,” he asked the abbess at Meaux, “that I may not love the world.” 112 In his later years he became more severe. We must excuse him for denouncing the theater and Molière in his Maximes sur la comédie (1694), for Molière had shown religion only in its puritanical and hypocritical forms, hardly doing justice to men like Vincent de Paul.
Bossuet was more intolerant in theory than in practice. He thought it absurd that any individual mind, however brilliant, should think to acquire in one lifetime the knowledge and wisdom fitting him to sit in judgment upon the traditions and beliefs of the family, the community, the state, and the Church. The sens commun was more trustworthy than individual reasoning; not “common sense” as the thought of common persons, but as the collective intelligence of generations taught by centuries of experience, and taking form in the customs and creeds of mankind. What man could pretend to know better than so many men the needs of the human soul, and the answers to questions unanswerable by knowledge alone? Consequently the human mind needs an authority to give it peace, and free thought can only destroy that peace; human society needs an authority to give it morals, and free thought, by questioning the divine origin of the moral code, brings the whole moral order into ruin. Hence heresy is treason to society and the state as well as to the Church, and “those who believe that a prince should not use force in religious matters . . . are guilty of an impious error.” 113 The bishop favored persuasion rather than force in the conversion of heretics, but he defended force as a last resort, and hailed the Revocation as “the pious edict that will give the deathblow to heresy.” In his own district he enforced the decree with such lenience that the intendant reported, “Nothing can be done in the diocese of Meaux; the weakness of the Bishop is a hindrance to conversion.” 114 Most of the Huguenots in that area persisted in their faith.
He hoped to the last that argument could win even Holland, Germany, and England to the old faith, and we shall see him negotiate for years with Leibniz over the philosopher’s plan for reuniting the severed segments of Christianity. In 1688 he wrote his masterpiece, Histoire des variations des églises protestantes, which Buckle rated as “probably the most formidable work ever directed against Protestantism.” 115 The four volumes were distinguished by painstaking scholarship; every page was propped up with references—a type of conscience that was just beginning to take form. The bishop made an attempt at fairness. He acknowledged the ecclesiastical abuses against which Luther had rebelled; he saw much to admire in Luther’s character; but he could not stomach the jolly coarseness that mingled, in Luther, with patriotic courage and masculine piety. He drew almost a loving picture of Melanchthon. Nevertheless he hoped, by showing the personal weaknesses and theological disputes of the Reformers, to loosen the attachment of their followers. He ridiculed the idea that every man should be free to interpret the Bible for himself and found a new religion on a new reading; anyone acquainted with human nature could have foreseen that this, if unopposed, would result in the fragmentation of Christianity into a wilderness of sects, and of morals into an individualism in which the instincts of the jungle could be checked only by the endless multiplication of police. From Luther to Calvin to Socinus—from the rejection of the papacy to the rejection of the Eucharist to the rejection of Christ—and then from Unitarianism to atheism: these were easily descending steps in the dissolution of belief. From religious to social revolt, from Luther’s theses to the Peasants’ War, from Calvin to Cromwell to the Levellers to regicide: these were slippery steps in the disintegration of social order and peace. Only a religion of authority could give sanction to morals, stability to the state, and strength to the human spirit in the face of bewilderment, bereavement, and death.
It was a powerful argument, impressive with learning and eloquence, containing pages unsurpassed in the French prose of that age except by the polemics and Pensées of Pascal. It might have had more success if its appeal to reason had not been stultified by the appeal to force in the barbarities of the Revocation. A hundred refutations appeared in Protestant lands excoriating the pretense to reason in a man who approved spoliation, banishment, confiscation, and galley sla
very as arguments for Catholic Christianity. And—asked the rejoinders—were there not variations in Catholicism too? What century had passed without divisions in the Church—Roman Catholics, Greek Catholics, Armenian Catholics, Uniates? Were not the Jansenists of Port-Royal at that moment warring with their fellow Catholics of the Society of Jesus? Was not the Gallican clergy, led by Bossuet himself, in bitter dispute with the Ultramontanes, almost to the point of schism with Rome? Was not. Bossuet fighting Fénelon?
VIII. FÉNELON: 1651–1715
Nobly born and trebly named, François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon was also orthodox and ambitious, a bishop and courtier, a royal tutor and master of prose, but elsewise all the world away from Bossuet. Saint-Simon was impressed:
A very tall, thin man, well-built, pale, with a large nose, and eyes that flashed with fire and intelligence. His physiognomy seemed composed of contradictions, yet, somehow, these contradictions were not disagreeable. It was grave yet gallant, serious yet gay; it expressed equally the doctor, the bishop, and the aristocrat; and, perceptible above everything else, in his face as in himself, were delicacy, modesty, and, supremely, nobility of mind. It required an effort to take one’s eyes from his face. 116
Michelet thought him un peu vieux dès sa naissance 117—“a bit old from his birth”—as the fruit of the final flowering of an aging seigneur in Périgord, who, over the groans of his grown sons, had married a poor but noble demoiselle. The new son was put out of the money by being dedicated to the Church. Brought up by his mother, he developed an almost feminine grace of speech and delicacy of feeling. Well educated in classical lore by a tutor and the Jesuits of Paris, he became a scholar as well as a priest. He could bandy pagan quotations with any heretic, and wrote a French style nervous, delicate, and refined, at the other end of the scale from the masculine and rotund oratory of Bossuet.
Ordained at twenty-four (1675), he was soon made superior of the Convent of New Catholics, where he had the difficult task of reconciling to the Roman faith young women recently separated from Protestantism. They listened to him at first unwillingly, then resignedly, then affectionately, for it was easy to fall in love with Fénelon, and he was the only man available. In 1686 he was sent to the region of La Rochelle to aid in the conversion of Huguenots. He approved the Revocation, but deprecated the violence, and warned the King’s ministers that forced conversions would be superficial and transient. Returning to the convent in Paris, he published (1687) a Traité de l’éducation des filles, almost Rousseauian in its advocacy of gentle methods. When the Duc de Beauvilliers was appointed by the King as governor of his eight-year-old grandson Louis, Duke of Burgundy, he called upon Fénelon to tutor the boy (1689).
The young Duke was proud, headstrong, passionate, sometimes ferocious and cruel, but possessed of a brilliant mind and a vivacious wit. Fénelon felt that only religion could tame him; he instilled in him both the fear and the love of God; at the same time he won the respect of his pupil by a discipline tempered with sympathetic understanding of adolescence. He dreamed of reforming France by forming its prospective king. He taught the lad the absurdity of war, and the necessity of promoting agriculture instead of discouraging the peasantry with taxes to build luxurious cities and finance aggressive wars. In the Dialogues of the Dead that he wrote for his pupil he stigmatized as “barbarous that government where there are no laws but the will of one man. . . . He who rules should be pre-eminently obedient to the law; detached from the law, his person is nothing.” All wars are civil wars, since all men are brothers; “each one owes infinitely more to the human race—which is the great country—than to the particular country in which he was born.” 118 The King, not privy to this esoteric instruction, and seeing a wondrous improvement in his grandson’s character, rewarded Fénelon with the archbishopric of Cambrai (1695). Fénelon put many prelates to shame by living nine months of each year at his see. The rest he spent at the court, anxious to influence policy, and occasionally continuing his instruction of the Duke.
Meanwhile he had met the woman who was to be, in a real sense, his femme fatale. Mme. Jeanne Marie de La Motte-Guyon, married at sixteen, widowed and pretty and wealthy at twenty-eight, had the world of suitors at her feet. But she had received an intensive religious training as a necessary protection against ambitious males; she had found no adequate outlet for her piety in the external observance of Catholic worship; and she listened responsively to the mystics of her time, who offered peace of soul not so much through confession, Communion, and the Mass as through absorption in the contemplation of an omnipresent deity, a complete and loving surrender of the self to God. In such a divine love affair no worldly matters counted; in that exaltation of the spirit one might neglect all religious ritual and yet attain to heaven not only after death but in life as well. The Spanish priest Miguel de Molinos had been condemned by the Inquisition (1687) for preaching such “quietism” in Italy; but the movement was spreading throughout Europe—in the “Pietism” of Germany and the Netherlands, among the Quakers and the Cambridge Platonists in England, among the dévots in France.
Mme. Guyon, in several books, expounded her views with moving eloquence. Souls, she taught, are torrents that have issued from God, and that find no quiet until they lose themselves in Him like rivers swallowed by the sea. Then individuality fades away; there is no further consciousness of self or the world, no consciousness at all, only identity with God. In such a state the soul is infallible, beyond good and evil, virtue and sin; whatever it does is right, and no force can injure it. She could not ask forgiveness for her sins, Mme. Guyon told Bossuet, because in her world of ecstasy there was no sin. 119 Some ladies of the aristocracy saw in this mysticism a noble form of piety; Mme. Guyon numbered among her disciples the Mmes. de Beauvilliers, de Chevreuse, de Mortemart, even, in a degree, Mme. de Maintenon. Fénelon himself was attracted by this fascinating union of piety, wealth, and loveliness; his own character was a complex of mysticism, ambition, and sentiment. He persuaded Mme. de Maintenon to let Mme. Guyon teach in the school that the secret wife of the King had founded at St.-Cyr. Maintenon asked her confessor to advise her about Mme. Guyon; he consulted Bossuet, who invited the mystic to expound her doctrines to him. She did. The cautious bishop saw in them a threat to the theology and practices of the Church, for they seemed to dispense not only with the sacraments and the priest, but with the Gospels and Christ. He reproved her, gave her the Eucharist, and asked her to leave Paris and cease teaching. At first she consented, then she refused. Bossuet had her confined in a convent for eight years (1695–1703), after which she was released on condition that she live quietly on her son’s estate near Blois. There she died in 1717.
To define the limits of permissible mysticism Bossuet composed an Instruction on the States of Prayer (1696). He showed Fénelon a copy of the manuscript, and asked his approval. Fénelon demurred, and wrote an opposed work, Explanation of the Maxims of the Saints on the Internal Life (1697). The two books, published almost simultaneously, became a matter of widespread discussion as lively as in the furor over Port-Royal. The King, trusting Bossuet, removed Fénelon from his position as instructor to the Duke of Burgundy, and bade him stay in his diocese at Cambrai Urged on by Bossuet, Louis demanded a papal condemnation of Fénelon’s book. Innocent XII, remembering Bossuet’s Gallicanism and Fénelon’s Ultramontane defense of the papacy, hesitated; pressure was brought upon him; he yielded, but condemned the Maxims as mildly as he could (March, 1699). Fénelon submitted quietly.
At Cambrai he performed his duties with a devotion and conscience that won him the respect of France. Bossuet and the King might have been appeased had not a printer published (April, 1699), with the consent of the author, a romance that Fénelon had written for his royal pupil under the apparently harmless title of Suite de l’Odicée d’Homère (Continuation of Homer’s Odyssey), known to us as Les Aventures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse. Here, in a style of smooth grace and almost feminine tenderness, the ingratiating teacher had
expounded again his idealistic political philosophy. Mentor, his mouthpiece, having persuaded the kings to peace, warns them:
Henceforth, under divers names and chiefs, you will be all one people . . . All the human race is one family . . . All peoples are brothers . . . Unhappy the impious men who seek a cruel glory in the blood of their brothers. . . . War is sometimes necessary, but it is the shame of the human race. . . . Do not tell me, O kings, that one should desire war to acquire glory. . . . Whoever prefers his own glory to sentiments of humanity is a monster of pride and not a man; he will gain only false glory, for true glory is found only in moderation and goodness. . . . Men should not think well of him, since he has thought so little of them, and has shed their blood prodigally for a brutal vanity. 120