THIRD MILLENNIUM LIBRARY
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THIRD MILLENNIUM LIBRARY |
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THE HISTORY OF THE PAPACY IN THE XIXth CENTURY II
L'ESPRIT PHILOSOPHIQUE AND JESUITISM
BEHIND the
Jansenist opposition, which originally spoke in the name of faith and
spirituality, and which, though it was not influenced by English Puritanism,
nevertheless recalled many features of the same, it was possible even before
the middle of the century to observe an opposition of a philosophical nature.
It had been schooled by the English Deists, and by the statesmen and thinkers
of England, and it turned in the name of outraged reason against both Rome and
Versailles with greater energy than Jansenism had shown, and with clear
consciousness of a far more profound divergence. Hatred of Jesuitism, contempt
for the many prelates who were unworthy of their position, the short-sighted
fanaticism which at last desired to exclude all opponents of the Bull Unigenitus from the means of grace, and
even from church burial; the disagreeable scenes of convulsion and alleged
miracles at the grave of the Jansenist Abbé Paris in
the churchyard of St Médard—all this contributed to
stimulate the rising criticism of the Church and of its doctrine. The century
was not half run out, before both Ultramontane and Jansenist were speaking of le siècle irreligieux;
and this century which had begun with theology ended in atheism and
materialism.
The esprit philosophique of the eighteenth century can trace its pedigree up to Rabelais and his Pantagruel philosophy, which stood in near relation to the
Humanism of Erasmus and the Renaissance.
Through Montaigne
and Charron, through De la Mothe le Vayer, Gassend, Huet, and Bayle, skepticism and criticism were kept alive
among many Frenchmen, so that there were signs early in the eighteenth century
of a widespread freedom of thought. The Duchess of Orleans wrote as early as
1722: “I do not believe that there are a hundred persons in Paris, either
amongst the ministers of the Church or amongst men of the world, who hold the
true Christian faith, or who even believe in our Saviour”.
These words certainly contain much exaggeration, but it is a fact that free
thought, in spite of Arnauld and Pascal, and the
great French preachers, had gained a powerful hold. And while the Jansenists
and the Parliamentary Gallicans were carrying on
their brave fight against papal infallibility and royal autocracy,
Montesquieu and Voltaire were making in England preliminary studies for those
works which were to carry the esprit philosophique far beyond the circle of the so-called gens des lettres. But not till after
the middle of the century did the pursuit of philosophy become a power in the
French commonwealth.
Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes,
which appeared in 1721, is commonly considered as the first swallow which heralded
the philosophic spring. In those famous letters the author allows his wit to
play at the expense of “the ancient idol before which people are accustomed to
strew incense”; of “the magician who makes the King believe that Three are only One, and that bread which is eaten is not
bread, and wine which is drunk is not wine”. They contain attacks upon the
celibacy of the clergy, and the life of the convent, upon the confessional and
the Inquisition, and biting mockery over the account of the Fall and of Christ’s miraculous birth.
All the polemic of
Voltaire lays already stored in this bold book, which treats the Church and its
activities with superior irony, and the monks with the greatest contempt. It
came out anonymously; and, although it was printed at Rouen, for the sake of
security it bore the name of Amsterdam upon the title-page. It had the good fortune to pass the censor of the Press,
and within the course of a very short time it appeared in four editions and
four after-impressions. Not so lucky, thirteen years later, were the Lettres Philosophiques of Voltaire, although this book also, because of the censorship of the Press,
bore Amsterdam instead of Rouen as its printing-place. The Parliament of Paris
condemned the philosophical letters to be burned, as injurious to religion and the commonwealth, and the author, in order
to escape the Bastille, was obliged to seek shelter in the Chateau of Cirey, with his friend the Marquise de Chatelet.
Later on Voltaire,
once more, aroused the wrath of Cardinal Fleury by the copies of La Pucelle which
passed from hand to hand; but in 1739, when the Cardinal at the age of
eighty-six was hoping to be the successor of Pope Clement XII, he approached the witty
writer to secure his pen in that war to the death against Jansenism, which was to open for himself the way to the
chair of St Peter. Voltaire then received a commission to write certain letters
against Jansenism, which might form a counterpart to Pascal's famous Provincial Letters against Jesuitism;
and he undertook the work. But before he had got very far with it, to Cardinal Fleury’s exasperation, he threw his manuscript into the
fire.
Shortly after,
Fleury died without seeing his dream of the tiara fulfilled, and under the
direction of the Marquis d’Argenson a great change
took place in the attitude of the government towards philosophy. D’Argenson,
who had sat beside Voltaire on the benches of the Jesuit College
Louis-le-Grand, was equally removed from Jansenism and from Jesuitism; but the
latter was a power which he was obliged, as a statesman, to reckon with. His
private religion was like the Deism which lay behind Voltaire's religious
polemic. In 1754 he wrote in his diary:
“We are assured
that everything in France is preparing for a great religious reformation, which
will be something very different from that coarse Reformation, that mixture of
superstition and free thought, which in the sixteenth century came to us from
Germany. Both have overtaken us in consequence of the encroachments of tyranny
and the covetousness of the priests; but as our people and our century are very
differently instructed from those of Luther, things will go as far as they ought
to go; all priests, all revelation, all mysteries, will be put under the ban;
and men will from henceforth only see God in His great beneficent works”.
Starting from this
conception of the circumstances of his time, D’Argenson labored earnestly for tolérantisme, and
for a few years the French philosophers were able to set forth their views
without danger, so long as they could escape offending the Jesuitism which
still steadily prevailed at Court.
VOLTAIRE AND THE ENCYCLOPEDIA
Voltaire was one
of those who made good use of the tolerance now begun, and he understood better
than most how to flatter the Pope and the Jesuits. The learned and vivacious
Bolognese, Prosper Lambertini, who, as Benedict XIV,
won the tiara when Cardinal Fleury coveted it, accepted the dedication of
Voltaire's drama of Mahomet, in which the Arabian prophet, amidst frequent
sallies against fanaticism, is depicted as a coarse impostor, and as a Tartuffe
with sword in hand. In 1742 the production of Mahomet was still prohibited at
Paris, but the Pope sent the author a mirthful and most gracious letter of
thanks for the dedication.
Voltaire had also
the pleasure of seeing two of his dramatic works produced at Versailles in
1745, at the wedding of the Dauphin. He became royal historiographer, and
obtained the permission of Louis XV to seek admission into the Academy.
To obtain this
long desired honor, he was obliged to court the good-will of the Jesuits; and
he found no difficulty in doing so. A Jansenist church newspaper had spoken of
Benedict XIV's friendly communication to the French poet, and had upbraided the
latter with his affection for the Jesuits. This gave Voltaire the opportunity
of making a public declaration of his love for Jesuitism, which was at the same
time a declaration of submission to the Church. He sent a letter to Père de la Tour, the principal of the Collège Louis-le-Grand, in which he assured him that he had never seen anything but
what was fair and good—diligence, moderation, and order—in his old school, and
that he could not conceive how people had come to ascribe bad morals to the
Society of Jesus.
He thought it
possible that some points which were assailed in the moral system of the
Jesuits were nothing but base falsifications on the part of opponents; his own Henriade had not been printed correctly. “Probably”, he says in this connection, “no
correct edition of my works will be obtainable till after my death”. Like the
great Corneille, he was willing to allow the Church to be the judge of all his
writings. “If at any time”, he wrote, “a single page has been printed in my
name which could offend even one minister of the Church, I am willing to tear it in pieces in his presence. I wish to live peaceably,
and to die in the bosom of the Roman Catholic; Apostolic Church, without
attacking anyone, without injuring anyone, without having one thought that
could offend anyone!”
This hypocritical
letter, which gained access for Voltaire to the French Academy, shows better
than anything else what power Jesuitism still had at Paris in 1746. A couple of
months after Voltaire had in this humiliating fashion attempted to win the
favor of the Jesuits, the Parliament condemned to the bonfire La Mettrie’s Histoire Naturelle de l’Ame, in which
all difference between spirit and matter was denied. The same punishment at the
same time befell Diderot's first work, his Pensées Philosophiques, in which he entirely
rejected positive Christianity. This was the beginning of a combat on the part
of the Parliament of Paris against the materialism which was now raising its
head. Many of the Frenchmen who affected philosophy had forsaken Descartes and
attached themselves to Condillac and his doctrine
that sense was the only source of ideas; and very many passed by degrees from sensualism to pure materialism. In works like Toussaint's Des Moeurs,
Helvetius' De l’Esprit and De l’Homme,
and Baron Holbach's Système de la Nature, materialism came more and more unhesitatingly
forward as a denial of God's Being and Providence, of freedom, and of the
difference between good and evil, of the existence of the soul,
and of everlasting life.
At the same time
that French thought was thus breaking more and more with Cartesianism,
Bossuet’s highly admired Politique tirée de l’Ecriture Sainte was thrown into the shade by Montesquieu's l’Esprit des Lois.
In spite of his Lettres Persanes,
Montesquieu had been exceedingly well received by the Pope when he visited Rome
in 1728. Benedict XIII went so far as to give the distinguished Frenchman, when
he took his leave, a dispensation from fasting without being asked. The next
day a messenger from the Curia brought Montesquieu the dispensation in writing,
in order (amongst other things to obtain the customary fee; but Montesquieu
dismissed the messenger with the remark that Benedict XIII was a man of honor,
whom he could trust upon his word alone. When the Esprit des Lois came out in 1748, there was great excitement in
ecclesiastical circles at the French capital. It was thought that this book ne ménage pas assez la religion; but the Jesuit and Jansenist critics in vain endeavored to
stop its dissemination. Even at Rome, in the immediate entourage of the Pope, Montesquieu
had friends and patrons. In less than two years his book went through
twenty-one editions, and was translated into all languages. When at last, in
1752, Rome put it upon the index of prohibited books, its reputation was so
well established that no one regarded the papal prohibition—which indeed has
attracted so little observation that as late as 1857 Villemain denied its existence.
In the second half
of the century came one after another the successive volumes of the great
Encyclopedia, which gives as trustworthy a picture of the doubt and unbelief of
the eighteenth century as Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae gives of the faith and superstition of the thirteenth. Those who labored
together upon the Encyclopedia showed a clever reticence in those articles
where it might be expected that ecclesiastically minded readers would
especially look for something to take offence at. Voltaire was alarmed when he
saw that the articles on metaphysical
and theological subjects were so orthodox that they might have stood in a
church Encyclopedia. D’Alembert, however, comforted
him by saying that there were other less conspicuous articles in which the
damage was made good; and Diderot in view of Voltaire’s apprehensions expressed
the assurance that time would teach men to make a difference between what the
author had written and what he had thought. This distinction both the Church and the
government quickly learned to make. The Archbishop of Paris, De Beaumont,
immediately complained that daring writers, as if by agreement, were using
their talents and their industry to concoct poison, "and perhaps their
success", he said, "has exceeded their
expectations." Jesuit and Jansenist vied with one another to induce the
state authorities to intervene, and this time their endeavors were successful.
As soon as the second volume of the Encyclopedia was issued, both the parts
which had appeared were confiscated, and this "engine of war for the
de-Christianization of France" was thereby, to outward appearance, rendered
harmless for French Christians.
But the scoffing
criticism of the Encyclopaedists, in spite of all
prohibitions of their work, penetrated further and further into French society.
That philosophy, which sprang from the gilded and silk-upholstered chairs in the
salons, was at first accounted to belong only to “good society”, and it
despised the people, which to most of the philosophers, as to Voltaire, was la canaille. But little by little the
aristocratic philosophy trickled down to the bourgeois, and so became an important power in the French
commonwealth. Contempt for religion and morality; the abstract conception of
Man and of the People (which was little in accordance with reality); the utter
want of historical sense; the superstitious belief in the importance of
philosophy for the life of men and for the commonwealth—all this prepared the
ground, so that it came to bear fearful and bloody fruit for the whole French
nation. And a political criticism grew up side by side with the philosophical
criticism. Its progress was stimulated by the unfortunate Peace of Aachen, by
the heavy taxes, by a terrible famine, and by Louis XV's excesses and
prodigality. A deluge of ballads and satirical pictures fostered contempt for
the King, and hatred for royalty; and many of them, which were directly aimed
at the monarchy, included the Church also in their displeasure, because the
altar was a support to the throne.
PARLIAMENT AND
THE JESUITS
In the very midst
of these threatening conditions, Jesuitism, confident of victory—the Jesuitism
which could bring even a Voltaire, as it appeared, to his knees—ventured to
begin a new war of extermination against its old foe Jansenism. In accordance
with the orders of Archbishop de Beaumont—due, no doubt, to the instigation of
the Jesuits—the priests in Paris who belonged to that party refused the
sacraments to the dying if they could not furnish proof that they had confessed
to priests who had submitted to the Bull Unigenitus;
and many unpleasant scenes took place at death-beds. The Parliament of Paris
stepped in against the Archbishop and those priests in the capital who complied
with his command, and the action caused so great a rejoicing that the
government found it necessary to order silence with regard to the Unigenitus.
But the order was
not obeyed, and the King did not know what to do. When he talked with Madame de
Pompadour, who at that time was influenced by Choiseul, he thought the
Parliament was in the right; but when he had conferred with his Prime Minister, Tencin, who was the tool of the Jesuits, he thought
that the Archbishop was right. Heartily tired of the complaints and
prohibitions of the Parliament, he sent the members of it to Pontoise; but it brought him no rest.
One after another
the friends of Parliament forsook Paris, and the priests of the capital
complained that the number of communicants was steadily going down. D’Argenson,
whose Memoirs make it possible for us to follow almost day by day the conflict
between Parliament and the bishops, writes: “You cannot blame the English
philosophy, which in Paris has only been accepted by some hundred philosophers,
for the harm which has been done to religion in France. It is due to hatred of
the priests, which now passes all bounds. The ministers of religion can
scarcely show themselves in the streets without a hue and cry after them; and
all this arises from the Bull Unigenitus and the disgrace of Parliament”.
In every direction
sympathy for the Parliament was openly displayed; and even the provincial
Parliaments forgot their old jealousy of the Parliament of the capital, and
ranged themselves upon its side.
Yet the Jesuits
did not despair. They got the King to banish the members of the Parliament of
Paris to Soissons without giving them anything to do, and to decree that a “Royal Chamber” should take the place of Parliament; and
as soon as this was accomplished, they advanced with even greater boldness.
Their adherents throughout France refused the sacraments to the opponents of
the Bull Unigenitus, and in the Holy
Week of 1754 a Jesuit preacher admonished Louis XV that heresies always have to
be extinguished in blood, and that it would be best to shed a few drops in
time, in order to avoid a whole flood afterwards. To D'Argenson it looked as if
all were moving towards a great religious and political revolution. It was no
longer Jansenists and Jesuits who stood opposed to each other; it was a
national party and a church party—Frenchmen, and the partisans of the Inquisition
and of superstition.
The revolution,
however, which threatened to break out in 1754, was fortunately averted by the
King’s dissolving the “Royal Chamber”, calling the members of the Parliament
back, and banishing the Archbishop and two other episcopal fire-brands to Conflans. In his distress De Beaumont
wrote to Madame de Pompadour to implore her good offices; but from that quarter
he got no consolation. “I wish”, answered the Marquise, “that certain prelates,
instead of considering themselves Church Fathers and issuing pastorals which
Parliament burns and the nation despises, would give us an example of
self-control, moderation, and love of peace. Bills of confession are certainly
a remarkable institution, but charity is better still”
In this letter can
already be discerned the storm which was rising against the Jesuits in France. “Your
Jesuits”, the Marquise writes again, “ought to be left to the justice of the
Parliaments. A man who knows them well said to me yesterday that the only good
thing they had ever done was to furnish us with quinine from Peru. But they
have been a scourge to those kings and states which have tolerated them. It is
not possible for me to do the Jesuits any service; but even if I could, I would not; I tell
it you straight out. My opinion is that they deserve to be abolished. Now
abolish them!”.
The letter has the
following characteristic ending: “I have this moment received a great budget of
letters. They are from bishops who beg me to use my influence in favor of the
Society. By this I see that almost the whole clergy of the country has formed a
league to save the Society, while almost all the lay people are united to
destroy it—and with good reason. I shall beg those bishops also to let me have
peace and to give me their episcopal blessing”.
When such was the
feeling at Court, it was not wonderful that the Parliament became bolder. Paris
rejoiced again when the Parliament forbade the ministers of the Church,
whatever might be their rank—the bishops were thus included—to give the Bull Unigenitus the authority of a rule of
faith. Thereby the importance of the detested Bull for France was for the time
destroyed; but the opponents of the Jesuits were still not propitiated. The
priests were so hated, says D'Argenson, that it was at
the risk of their lives that they went through the streets in their long
clothes; and in good society people no longer dared to say a word in defense of
the priests or of the Unigenitus. The clergy of the Jesuit party talked already
of a persecution like that of Diocletian; but there were signs that they would
not behave themselves so quietly as the ancient
Christians did in the days of Diocletian.
D’Argenson was
told that in the Bastille there was a priestly fanatic on behalf of the Unigenitus, who was accused and
convicted of an attempt upon the King's life; and there were other priests who
went so far as to hint that there were still Ravaillacs to be found. In these circumstances it made no impression upon the King when
the bishops informed him that they should feel themselves tempted to the
uttermost if he would not interfere against the Parliament. Louis XV, on the
contrary, gave permission for the Encyclopedia to appear again; Protestants in
many places obtained leave to build churches, and there was some talk of
putting the Edict of Nantes in legal force once more. At the carnival of 1756
there were so many caricatures of bishops, abbés,
monks, and nuns, that D'Argenson said it looked as if the French were falling
away to the doctrines of Luther and of Calvin.
The strenuous
labors of the Jesuits, however, succeeded in disturbing the good relations
between the King and the Parliaments. The supreme tribunal of France, le Grand Conseil,
at the instigation of the Jesuits, applied to Louis XV, requesting him to put a
stop to the resistance offered to the Unigenitus;
and in court circles plans were discussed for giving to the Grand Conseil the place of the Parliament of Paris; by which means Ultramontanism would have
won the game. Madame de Pompadour, who at an earlier time had broken with the
bishops in order to side with the Parliament, now threw herself into the arms
of the Jesuits. By February 1756 the Marquise, who from thenceforth was to be
only Louis XV’s friend, had taken the Jesuit De Sacy for her confessor; and she, who shortly before had felt highly flattered when
Voltaire called her “one of ours”, now after her change followed with the
greatest zeal all her confessor's advice and commands. The morals of the Court
however, were not improved. Louis XV took two new mistresses; and according to
D'Argenson the tone at Versailles was no purer than that of a common brothel.
The courtiers followed Louis XV’s example; and everywhere in the passages of
the Court chamber-maids were met carrying letters of assignation. But this
corrupt Court was in religious matters decidedly Jesuit. Madame de Pompadour
became more and more the First Minister of France, and
her efforts were directed towards binding the King to the order of Loyola, so
that the Parisians thought that Louis XV was more popish than Louis XIV had
ever been.
At this time the
humiliations and disappointments of the Seven Years’ War filled the minds of
all Frenchmen with grief and anger; but in spite of these misfortunes the
Jesuit party kept up internal dissension by constant attacks upon the
Parliament of Paris. The Bishop of Troyes ordered his priests to offer prayers
for its conversion, and in a pastoral letter he declared at length that all the
misfortunes of France were owing to the Parliament's lack of right devotion to
the Blessed Virgin, and its unbelief in the Immaculate Conception. Parliament
took action against these and similar utterances on the part of the episcopate,
and it was proposed to throw the Bishop of Troyes into prison. Before this was
done, Louis XV once more became irresolute, and in his distress besought
Benedict XIV to find some means of appeasing the raging billows. The reply of
Rome was a brief which insisted that the Unigenitus was a law of the Church, and must be obeyed if men did not wish to forfeit
eternal happiness. In view of this brief the French priests might at their own
risk give the sacraments to dying people who were only suspected of Jansenism;
but from henceforth they were to refuse them to open Jansenists. When the
Parliament of Paris desired to have this brief suppressed, Madame de Pompadour
addressed the King thus: “Stand fast; you have the Pope on your side”.
Whereupon Louis XV, in December 1756, after hearing Mass in the Sainte Chapelle and kissing the splinter of the True Cross, held a lit de justice, at which he ordered the acceptance of the Bull Unigenitus as a law of the Church, and
made a decree with regard to the future position of Parliament which stripped
it of any importance.
This arbitrary
proceeding on the part of the King aroused the greatest exasperation at Paris.
It was whispered in corners that the time for resistance would soon come, and
one of the members of Parliament, the Abbé Chauvelin, hinted that this lit de justice was “the last sigh of the expiring monarchy”. The
attempt of Damiens upon the life of Louis XV, which
took place on 5th January 1757, threw men's minds into still stronger
excitement. Both Jesuits and Jansenists were credited with the attempt, and
Louis XV profited by the occasion to publish a threat of death against all who
ventured in print to attack religion or the royal authority, or to disturb the
public peace. But as soon as quiet appeared to have returned, the feeble King
abandoned his strong measures, and Parliament recovered its ancient position.
At last, in the year 1757 commands were once more issued not to name the Bull Unigenitus in public writings, theses,
or discussions; but in order, at the same time, to show kindness to the
episcopate the Archbishop of Paris received permission to return. When the
Sorbonne, indignant at the King's vacillation and arbitrariness, offered a
reminder that the renowned faculty had promised to defend the Roman Catholic
religion usque ad effusionem sanguinis, the Dean was immediately banished a hundred
miles from the capital, and the Archbishop, who was at the back of these
proceedings of the Sorbonne, was sent to Perigord.
At the same time
the Jesuits suffered another defeat. In the hope of better days they had caused
the famous Moral System of their Westphalian brother,
Hermann Busenbaum—the
Medulla Theologies Moralis—to be printed, in an
edition, moreover, which was in many points enlarged. The Parliament of
Toulouse immediately ordered this book to be burnt by the hangman, because it
appeared to contain propositions which were in conflict with divine and human
laws, and might induce subjects to make attempts upon the sacred person of the
King. Busenbaum in fact taught the infallibility of
the Pope, and the supremacy of the Papal Chair over secular princes, and in his
utterances about certain cases in which manslaughter and theft were
permissible, the Parliament of Toulouse, which was joined by the Parliament of
Paris, found a pernicious morality. It was in vain that the heads of the Jesuit
houses declared that they had always bowed to the Gallican Articles, that they abhorred the murder of kings, and disliked the propositions
which were assailed. They were not believed. The Jansenist newspaper! Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques, expressed its astonishment that such men were still
tolerated in France, and public opinion was so incensed against the Jesuits
that no one dared to speak against the King's proceedings with regard to the
Sorbonne and the Archbishop of Paris.
PORTUGAL AND THE
JESUITS
At this moment
Pope Benedict XIV died (3rd May 1758), and the Jesuits used every effort to
secure the election of a new pope who was favorable to their order. The merry,
witty Benedict XIV had never been altogether a friend to Jesuitism. As Cardinal
and Archbishop of Bologna, he had once cried to the renowned French Benedictine Montfaucon: “If there were rather less of Gallican liberties on your side, and fewer ultramontane
demands on ours things would quickly right themselves”.
As Pope he had
been compelled by circumstances to maintain the Unigenitus, and personally he valued highly the General of the
Jesuits, Visconti; but it sounded like an anticipation of what was to befall
the order of Loyola, when he said to Visconti's successor, Centurioni,
“It is an article of faith that I should have a successor; but no General of an
order can say the same of himself”. His closest friend in the College of
Cardinals, Passionei, was an open enemy of the
Jesuits. One day Benedict XIV, to tease Passionei,
placed a copy of Busenbaum’s Moral System in a conspicuous place in his library. As soon as the
learned Cardinal spied the book, he flung it angrily out of the window. Passionei was not the only one of the high princes of the
Church who nurtured a dislike for Jesuitism. Therefore it was of the utmost
importance for the Jesuits to procure a successor to Benedict XIV who would not
give ear to the opponents of the order, and all the more because the deceased
Pope had entrusted to their enemy, Cardinal Francisco de Saldanha,
the office of investigating, as visitor and reformer, the operations of the
Jesuits, in Portugal and in the East and West Indies.
Portugal, which is
seldom heard of in church history, had already begun under Benedict XIV that
conflict with the Jesuits, which led at last to the expulsion of the order from
the country. At Lisbon the disciples of Loyola were not only, as almost
everywhere in Europe, confessors to the royal family, but also the advisers of
the King and of the Ministers; and no great office in state or Church was
filled without their opinion being heard.
The Portuguese
Minister, Sebastian Carvalho, Count of Oeyras, afterwards Marquis of Pombal,
like others, owed his elevation to the Jesuits. But he had long been secretly
their opponent. Even whilst he was Ambassador of Portugal at Vienna he had been
indignant at their religious and political power. When he became Portuguese
Minister, his indignation grew to hatred, because his schemes of reform were
opposed at every point by the members of the powerful order. The Society of
Jesus was at that time a great commercial company, which, by its bold
speculations and great command of money, threatened in certain regions of the
New World to crush all other commercial enterprises; and the Jesuit state of
Paraguay had long been a sore to the statesmen of Spain and Portugal alike. An
exchange in South America between Spain and Portugal could not for many years
be brought into operation, because the Indians, supported and led by the
Jesuits in Paraguay offered an armed opposition to it.
The fatal
earthquake of Lisbon (1st November 1755), by which 30,000 people lost their
lives, called forth the first collision between Pombal and the Jesuits. The Jesuits intimated that that appalling natural occurrence
was Heaven's punishment for the sins of the Prime Minister and of the King; and
they went out to the palace of Belem to warn King Joseph to do public penance.
When the Jesuits in Paraguay refused any longer to obey commands, Pombal determined to take revenge upon the refractory
order. One September night, in 1757, the Jesuit confessors at Court were
banished to their Novice House, and at the same time the members of the order
were forbidden to show themselves at the palace without the express permission
of the King. Next the Minister turned to Benedict XIV complaining of the
trickeries and covetousness of the Jesuits. He informed the Pope that a Portuguese Jesuit had said from the
pulpit, in order to defend the monopoly of his order, that anyone who took a
share in any rival commercial company would have no part in the fellowship of
Jesus Christ; and Jesuits were said to have affirmed that wine bought of other
dealers could not be used for the Holy Eucharist.
It was on the
ground of these and similar accusations that Benedict XIV, a month before his
death, had nominated Cardinal Saldanha as Apostolic
Visitor. As soon as the Cardinal had obtained his powers from Rome, he
published a decree which forbade the Jesuits to carry on trade after their
usual manner to the infringement of divine and human law. A little later, a
second decree ordered them, till further notice, to desist from occupying the
confessional and the pulpit in Portugal. In these circumstances it was of the
utmost importance for the disciples of Loyola that a Pope should be chosen who
would stop this visitation, which was very irksome to the order; while on the
other side the opponents of Jesuitism did their utmost to promote the election
of an enemy of the Jesuits. The Jansenists, who could reckon upon no small
number of their own persuasion in the College of Cardinals, had immediately
sent confidential agents to Rome to influence opinion; and the envoy of
Portugal at Rome, Almada,
had shortly after het publication of the papal brief to Saldanha requested his
government to send some articles of value as presents to the two Cardinals Passionei and Archinto, who
without doubt had been especially active in procuring that brief, and who might
act in the interests of Portugal in the approaching Conclave.
As a counterpoise
to these anti-Jesuit efforts, twenty-two cardinals, led by Gianfrancesco Albani, entered into a sworn agreement by which they
pledged themselves not to choose an opponent of Jesuitism. After long
discussions the votes of the College of Cardinals appeared to gather round the
Sardinian Cavalchini, who had voted for the canonization
of Bellarmine, and now apparently was the Jesuits'
candidate; but when France employed its right of veto against him, the
cardinals hastened to choose the Venetian Rezzonico,
who was scarcely less acceptable to the Jesuit party, and after the lapse of
eight months Rezzonico came out of the Conclave as
Clement XIII.
The new Pope was a
pious but very weak man, well suited to become a tool in the hands of the
Jesuits. When people on every side praised his good-heartedness, Cardinal Passionei, who more than anyone else had the credit of
wrecking the scheme for Bellarmine’s canonization,
remarked: “Jesus Christ bore the same testimony to Nathaniel, but he did not
make Nathaniel an Apostle”.
Soon after Clement
XIII had ascended the Chair of St Peter, the General of the Jesuits, Lorenzo
Ricci, presented to him a petition with reference to the visitation in
Portugal. In it Ricci declared that he had heard nothing whatsoever of the
disorders which were said to have taken place in Portugal, and he proposed that
the enquiry into the situation there should be conducted from Rome, affirming
that if the opposite course were adopted, the visitation might easily lead to
greater disturbances. Clement XIII answered by recommending to the order three things—silence, patience,
and prayers; the rest, he said, he would see to himself. And thereupon he
ordered his nuncio at Lisbon “in a friendly manner, and as if of his own motion”
to let Saldanha know that people at Rome were
displeased at his decrees, anon especially at his attempt to bar the access of
the Jesuits to the confessional and the pulpit.
Saldanha, however, had
died a few weeks before Ricci had his audience of Clement XIII, and accordingly
the visitation was for the time at a standstill. But in spite of the friendly
attitude of the new Pope towards the order of Loyola, the dislike of it at Rome
increased day by day. Almada obtained—it is not known
by what means—a copy of Ricci's petition, and had it printed with the addition
of certain remarks which renewed the old charges against the Jesuits. Out of
regard for the Court of Lisbon, Clement XIII dared not forbid the dissemination
of this writing; and Almada ventured to publish a
supplement, in which he described the Jesuits as rebels both against the Pope
and against temporal rulers, accusing them of having taken the lives of more
than twenty royal personages by means of poison and the dagger. From the
archives of the Propaganda itself he succeeded in obtaining a document, which
formed the basis of an attack on the hated order. On the gate of the Jesuit’ seminary were read the lines:
"L'Ispano e il
Portughese
V'aborre e vi
discaccia.
II Gallico paese
Spero che presto il
faccia."
And a French
Jansenist wrote home that he had the best hopes of the ruin of the order; that
even if the Pope wished to protect it, his efforts in that direction would not
be crowned with success.
While in Rome the
enemies of the Jesuits thus gained courage, the order fared badly in Portugal.
The attempted assassination of King Joseph (3rd September 1758), not only gave Pombal an opportunity of taking vengeance on a few of those
noble families, which stood in the way of his reforms and his personal wishes,
but also had fatal consequences for the Portuguese Jesuits. In the night between
the 11th and 12th of January 1759 ten Jesuits were arrested as members of the
conspiracy against the King's life. Among these was Malagrida,
a Milanese, who was confessor to the Tavora family.
The tribunal appointed to try them found them guilty. Some of the accused
noblemen made confessions which were very damaging, especially to Malagrida; and several witnesses said they had heard the
Jesuits talk of a divine judgment which was soon to fall upon the Portuguese
Court. Among contemporaries, however, opinions were divided as to the guilt of
the order, and Jesuit authors still affirm that the part alleged to have been
taken by the members of their order in the attempted assassination was only a fable, which had
sprung from Pombal’s wish to assure his power over
the weak and suspicious King.
The case against Malagrida and the other members of his order gave Pombal the desired opportunity of getting at the Jesuits. A
note was sent to Clement XIII, which pointed to their probable expulsion, and
called upon the Chair of St Peter to join with the royal authority in putting
an end to those acts of violence, which filled the whole of Europe with disgust
and indignation. The Portuguese bishops sided with the government and sent out
pastoral letters condemning the errors of the Jesuits and forbidding anyone to
have anything to do with the members of the order. But the papal Secretary of
State, Cardinal Torregiani, as well as Clement XIII
himself, took part with the order, and as it appeared impossible for Rome and
Lisbon to make common cause against the Jesuits, a royal edict was issued (3rd
September 1759) ordering all Jesuits to leave Portugal and the Portuguese colonies. Seven vessels of transport were
made ready to carry all the Portuguese members of the order to the Papal
States; but first an attempt was made to induce the younger men, who had not
yet taken the solemn vows, to draw back. With most of them it was labor in
vain; all but a few went on board singing the Psalm, In exitu Israel de Egypto, domus Jacob de populo barbaro. The departing Jesuits had no doubt hoped that
this scene would touch the spectators; but in this respect they were
disappointed. The crowd watched their departure without showing sympathy, and
the Portuguese clergy even struck a medal to celebrate their expulsion. Later
on all the possessions of the Jesuits in Portugal and the colonies were
confiscated by the State; and Malagrida, who in
prison had solaced himself with writing fanatical books about the immaculate
conception of St Anne, and about Antichrist, was condemned to be led through
the streets of Lisbon with a rope round his neck, and then to be strangled and
burnt—not as a political I offender, but as a heretic.
Events in Portugal
were watched in the salons of Paris with mixed feelings. The philosophers were
filled with contempt for Pombal, who during the trial
had constantly feigned the greatest affection for the order of Loyola; and
Voltaire thought it cowardice to condemn as a heretic the man who was accused
of high treason. On the other hand, advanced minds in Paris wished that
Jesuitism, as the bulwark of superstition, might disappear from the face of the
earth; and what happened in Portugal made people begin to talk loudly in France
of expelling them from that country also. For the time, however, the Parliament
of Paris was mostly occupied with a strenuous attempt to check the tide of
materialistic and anti-christian literature.
Helvetius' work De l’Esprit and Voltaire's poem on Natural
Religion were condemned to the flames, and the great Encyclopedia which now had reached its seventh volume, was
committed for closer examination to a committee of lawyers and divines. On 8th
March 1759 the privileges for printing this work were withdrawn, and some
months later Clement XIII issued a solemn condemnation of the Encyclopedia, and laid an interdict on
its circulation. Shortly afterwards the Archbishop of Paris received permission
at last to come back from Perigord, after a
banishment of one-and-twenty months. This put new life into the attacks upon
philosophy. In the Academy, Lefranc de Pompignan made a violent speech against the philosophers, and at the Théâtre Francais a play by Palissot was acted, in which a servant, while stealing something from his master, says: “Now
I shall become a philosopher”. The Church and the government had a
meeting-point in their common hatred of philosophy, and henceforth the
philosophers were confronted by both opponents, who in their eyes became more
and more a single enemy.
JESUITS EXPELLED
FROM FRANCE
Under these
strained conditions the attention of all was suddenly drawn to a lawsuit in
which the Jesuits were involved. Upon
the island of Martinique Loyola's order had a great trading station which was
in brisk communication with Europe, and especially with France. A firm at
Marseilles issued a bill of exchange for about three million francs, for which
colonial produce was due. The ships which were to bring these wares to
Marseilles were seized by the English, and the loss had serious consequences. Pére La Valette, the director of
the trade in Martinique, was obliged to offer to say Masses instead of repaying
the large sum, and in consequence the firm at Marseilles was compelled to stop
payment. Although the Jesuits could easily have raised the three million
francs, they let the matter go to law, and on 8th May 1761 the Grande Chambre unanimously sentenced them to pay the sum with
interest and compensation. When the rumors of this sentence reached Paris,
there was general rejoicing. It was plain that people wished the French Jesuits
to share the fate of the Portuguese. And ruin was much nearer at hand than the
arrogant disciples of Loyola imagined.
During the lawsuit
it was urged that the statutes of the order were a social danger, and the
Parliament ordered them to be produced. The Jesuits dared not disobey, but got
the King to demand that the statutes should be delivered up to him in order
that (as it was said) he might have them examined. Meanwhile "an angel or
a charitable soul" obtained another copy for the Parliament, and the
members now took the examination into their own hands. By this examination it
came to light that the Jesuits had been banished from France in 1594, and that when they returned in 1603 it was only on
sufferance and without express permission. The Advocate-General now demanded
that they should endeavor to procure such permission and receive no novices
until it was granted. At the same time he accused them of holding pernicious
doctrines, especially of defending murder and regicide. On the strength of this
plea the Parliament condemned four-and-twenty Jesuit writings to the flames,
and forbade the Jesuits to carry on their work of teaching until the whole case
was sufficiently investigated.
This step made an
immense sensation in Paris. It was expected that the Grand Conseil would interfere and prevent the decision of the Parliament from being carried
out. This did not take place; but the King commanded that the case should be
postponed for a year, and forty-five out of fifty French bishops publicly
declared that no fault could be found with the conduct or doctrines of the
Jesuits. But the other Parliaments placed themselves on the side of the
Parliament of Paris and began to examine the statutes of the order of the
Jesuits. In order to ward off the
threatening storm a royal commission called upon the French Jesuits to declare,
that they rejected every doctrine which
could possibly permit the use of violence against the sacred person of a king;
and that in their public and private theological lectures they would never
advance anything contrary to the Gallican Articles. A
hundred and sixteen French Jesuits at once signed the declaration, but Ricci refused
to acknowledge the step; when Louis XV, to save the order, proposed the
appointment of a native Vicar-General who should rule the French Jesuits with a
general's authority, this also was rejected. As soon as the Bishop of Laon had stated the King's wishes to the General of the
Jesuits, Ricci put the case before his assistants; and they referred the
decision to the Pope. Clement XIII saw clearly that other rulers could easily
be tempted to demand a similar concession, and that a separate French
General-Vicar would divide the French Jesuits from the rest of the order.
Therefore he uttered the famous words: Aut sint ut stint, aut non sint, and when Ricci
brought this answer to the Bishop of Laon the
negotiations were broken off.
Louis XV still
sought to shield the order by proposing to make it undergo a reformation, but
Parliament would not yield. At the appointed time, 1st April 1762, the Jesuits were
forced to stop their teaching, and all their papers were seized. On 6th August
the same year, exactly a year after the commencement of the enquiry, the
Parliament condemned a hundred and sixty-three Jesuit writings to the flames,
and declared the Society on French territory to be dissolved. The philosophers
triumphed as if the victory were due to them. Diderot imagined how Voltaire,
when he heard the news, would lift up his hands and eyes to heaven and say: “Lord,
now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace; for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation!” But Voltaire himself saw more
clearly the real cause of the defeat of the Jesuits. He says: “It is neither
Sanchez nor Lessius nor Escobar, nor the absurdities
of the Casuists, which have ruined the Jesuits; it is Le Tellier, and the Bull (Unigenitus), that have extirpated them
in nearly the whole of France. The plough, which Le Tellier,
the Jesuit, drove over the ruins of Port Royal, has produced those fruits which
are now gathered after the lapse of sixty years”.
The course of
events in France awoke the greatest consternation in Rome. On 3rd September
Clement XIII called together a secret Consistory, where he eased his sorrowful
mind by making a speech exceedingly hostile to France. The General of the Jesuits and those cardinals who were
friends to the order at once urged him to print the speech. But the more
moderate members of the Sacred College, headed by Lorenzo Ganganelli,
the future Pope Clement XIV, begged him earnestly to refrain; for one reason, because
he had started with the false premise that the Parliaments had forced the French
Jesuits to acknowledge the Gallican liberties, while the
truth was that the Jesuits had taken this step voluntarily, hoping to save
their order from the threatening danger. This discovery made such an impression
upon the weak Clement XIII that he put his speech under lock and key, and
forbade the cardinals to say a word more about publishing it, though he sent
letters to several of the French prelates exhorting them to shield the persecuted
Jesuits.
But from the midst
of the French episcopate itself a vehement accusation was launched against the Society of Jesus.
Fitz James, Bishop of Soissons, a son of the Duke of Berwick, the illegitimate
son of James II, could not forget the misfortunes of his family, and at every opportunity laid the blame for them upon the Jesuits. He now wrote
a pastoral letter in which he condemned the Jesuit doctrines; and three other
bishops joined him. In order to crush these attacks upon the Jesuits, Clement
XIII made the Inquisition issue a decree forbidding the circulation of Fitz
James' pastoral letter; but the Parliament simply rejected the decree of the
Inquisition. Still the Jesuits would not give in. One of their friends, a member
of the episcopate, sent an open letter to the King in which he informed him
that all good citizens and virtuous souls were horrified at what had befallen
the Jesuits. Pamphlets appeared accusing the Parliament of violating justice;
but others also appeared containing violent attacks upon the Jesuits. In one of
these, which professed to treat of three "necessary" things, the
writer advocated the banishment of the Jesuits, the extirpation of
Christianity, and the killing of the Dauphin, who was a friend of the
Jesuits. Many thought that this daring
book originated in the camp of the Jesuits themselves, in order to frighten the
Court and the moderates.
After the dissolution of the order in France,
most of the members found shelter in the provinces with bishops, noblemen, and
people of wealth; but many still lived together as priests under their old
rules, hoping that the tide would soon turn, when they could quickly reorganize
themselves. For the time there was no prospect of such a turn. After a new
royal edict had shut them out from the schools, another declared that all their
property now belonged to the State. In vain the Archbishop of Paris again dared
to raise his voice on their, behalf. The Parliament burnt his pastoral letter
and begged the King to punish the "incorrigible" prelate. Louis XV
granted their prayer, and banished Beaumont to a distance of forty miles from
Paris.
In order to strike
the Jesuits still more sensibly the Parliament demanded (February 1764) that
they should swear that they would neither singly, nor together, follow the
constitutions of their order, that they would break off all connection with
their leaders, and would abjure the doctrines set forth in an anthology of
their assertions. A subsequent Act of Parliament further decided that any
Jesuit who would not within eight days take this oath should leave the kingdom.
Consequently exile was the only possible thing for most of them. In these
desperate circumstances many friends of the Jesuits advised Clement XIII to
summon a French National Council, in hopes that it would protect the order.
This was certainly a most unfortunate plan. It was opposed, among others, by
Cardinal Ganganelli, who represented to the Pope that
such a Council would probably lead to a schism.
Louis XV now
thought that there was nothing else to be done but to issue a new decree
(November 1764) abolishing forever the Society of Jesus in his kingdom. At the
same time he decided that all lawsuits against the Jesuits and their friends
should be stopped immediately; and the Archbishop of Paris received permission
to return. Former Jesuits were also allowed to remain in France if they would
break off all connection with their order and act as priests under the usual
superintendence of the bishops. Only from Paris and its immediate neighborhood were they ordered temporarily to keep aloof; but a prospect
was opened to them of entering the capital if they behaved well and gave no
cause for complaint.
At this moment the General of the Jesuits
prevailed upon the feeble Clement XIII, without the knowledge of his Secretary
of State, to issue a document, which reestablished the Society of Jesus and
defended it against those unjust charges, as the Pope considered them, which
had been brought against it. This was the Constitution Apostolicum pascendi of
7th January 1765. This Constitution had been composed with the greatest secrecy
by Ricci and a few prelates at the papal Court who were friends of the order.
Its appearance caused anxiety to some of the best friends of the Jesuits in
Rome, but great joy to others, as can be seen from the grateful letter sent to
Clement XIII by the Bishop (since canonized) of Sant' Agata dei Goti. Every bishop was immediately made acquainted with
this Constitution through the nuncios; but only thirteen Spanish prelates, two
French, seven Italian, and one Bohemian, thanked the Pope for this defense of
Jesuitism, and through the replies of these prelates the Pope learned once more
how numerous were the enemies of the order in all countries. Before long this
enmity showed itself more strongly. Tanucci, the
well-known reforming minister of the King of the Two Sicilies,
immediately informed the papal nuncio at Naples that the latest Constitution
was a very unwise document, and its circulation in the united kingdoms was forbidden under penalty of heavy fines.
Venice, Tuscany, Parma, and Modena all followed the example of Naples with more
or less severity; in Lombardy the Governor of Milan prohibited not only this
document, but the notorious Maundy Thursday Bull (In cena Domini). The Parliament of Paris
likewise immediately prohibited this untimely Constitution and in Portugal it
was decided that anyone who should dare to have it in his possession or to
distribute it among others, should be guilty of high treason and forfeit his
honor, office, and property. The rage against Rome and the Jesuits had now
reached such a point in Portugal, that they would not even receive a letter
from the Pope.
SPANISH JESUITS EXPELLED
In Spain also the new Constitution caused the smoldering a hatred of the
Jesuits to leap into flame. Already in January 1762, King Carlos III had issued
a so-called Pragmatic Sanction, which limited considerably the privileges of
the religious orders; and in Spain the Jesuits had many opponents in the
episcopate. When a good number of the fugitive Jesuits from France sought
shelter there, some of the bishops even refused them permission to say Mass. As
soon as the new Constitution was published, the papal nuncio in Spain reported
to Rome that nearly all were agreed that it was untimely and harmful, and that
it was generally looked upon as a work of the Jesuits, and an evidence of the
power which they possessed in the immediate entourage of the Pope.
This rash Constitution only had the effect of increasing ill-will
towards the Papacy in all Roman Catholic states. Decrees were everywhere passed
which made even the smallest documents proceeding from St Peter's Chair the
object of searching suspicion, and their publication without royal consent was
forbidden. In Spain, where the Jesuits had long enjoyed much power in the
schools, people began to criticize their educational labors, and their friends
and adherents lost their high offices in Church and State. As a counter-move
the Spanish Jesuits attacked several of the reforms which had lately been set
on foot. This attack on the work of the government caused serious disturbances.
When Aranda and others of Carlos III's Ministers were
pointed out by the Jesuits as being the cause of all the disturbances in Spain,
a royal decree was issued on 2nd April 1767, abolishing the Society of Jesus as
far as Spain was concerned, and banishing all Spanish Jesuits from the country.
After the publication of this decree nearly five thousand Spanish Jesuits were
put on board transports and sent to Cività Vecchia. There they were driven away with cannon shot. It
was already difficult enough for Rome to provide for their brother Jesuits who
had fled from Portugal and France; so the unfortunate exiles were compelled to
roam about on the sea until the Duke of Choiseul gave the Governor of Corsica
permission to open that island to them. In spite of all that these poor
wretches had suffered, they could not resist the temptation of making an
attempt to get back to Spain. In Spanish convents which had had Jesuit
confessors, visionary women had proclaimed that great judgments were coming
upon Spain, the destruction of all the Bourbons, and the overthrow of religion.
As soon as this report reached Corsica two hundred and fifty Jesuits ventured
to creep back into Spain. Their audacity was at once discovered, and new and
severe penal laws were enacted, to be enforced also in the Spanish possessions
in America and India, to keep the Jesuits for ever away from the fatherland of
the Founder of their order.
The banishment of the Jesuits from Spain came as a complete surprise to
the Pope. Rome had not expected such a measure from a prince whose father had
been the first to choose Jesuits for his confessors, and whose mother was a
Farnese, of, the family of Pope Paul III. The worst of it was that events in
Spain added fresh fuel to the hatred of the Jesuits in France. Carlos III at
once sent the “Pragmatic Sanction” to Louis XV with an explanation of the
reasons which had led to its issue. In the course of the negotiations which
were opened; between the cabinets of Madrid and Versailles, the Duke of
Choiseul said: “If the Pope were wise, enlightened, and of a firm character, he
would not attempt any other remedy than the total abolition of the order by
means of a Bull”. Already before the end of April the Parliament of Paris had
decided that the Jesuits should be turned out of all French possessions and on
8th May a decree was issued commanding all Jesuits to leave France within
fourteen days. After short intervals the Parliaments in the provinces followed
the example of Paris, that of Aix even proposed that
the Jesuits should be banished from the papal territories of Avignon and Venaissin, and that these should be annexed if Rome would
not agree. This bold Parliament of Aix even proposed that the Pope should be
forced to abolish the Society of Jesus forever.
The desire for the total abolition of the order became more and more
marked. When Portugal made overtures to Rome Clement XIII declared that the
recall of the Jesuits was an indispensable condition of the restoration of
former relations. But Pombal would not hear of it. On
the contrary, he formed a plan that Spain, France, and Portugal should unite in
a league and demand the abolition of the order, threatening to call a General
Council if this demand were not acceded to. The Portuguese statesmen even
thought of coming to an understanding with the Jansenists at Utrecht, and so
causing an open schism. Clement XIII tried in vain to make an impression on
King Joseph by writing him a letter with his own hand. The King answered that
Portugal would not come to terms with St Peter's Chair before the order of the
Jesuits was abolished. At the same time, Tanucci, on
behalf of the King of the Two Sicilies, had all the
Jesuits from Naples and Sicily conveyed in a miserable plight to the frontier
of the Papal States, and the Grand Master of the order of St John sent away the
Jesuits who were in Malta. Everything indicated that the days of the order
would soon be numbered, for popular feeling rose against them everywhere. Even
in Rome, in some circles, there was much ill-will against them, because of the
humane manner in which Clement XIII had provided for the expelled Portuguese
Jesuits, and passed over others to make them chaplains to the Roman hospitals,
confessors in nunneries, parish priests, and canons.
EMILE AND THE
CONTRAT SOCIAL
In spite of all,
some of the French philosophers watched the death struggles of Jesuitism with
much sympathy. They hated the Jesuit canaille just as much as that of the Jansenists and of the Parliaments, but they were
disgusted at the hypocrisy which made many statesmen, like Pombal,
allege zeal for the Church as their reason for persecuting the order of Loyola.
In their view of the matter the King of Sardinia was right when he gave to Cordara, as the true and real reason for hating the
Jesuits, their riches and the predominance of their order over all others. The
French philosophers had no appreciation of the moral wrath which found vent in
Jansen's Augustinus and Pascal's Provincial Letters,
and the earnestness of the Jansenists was very irksome to them.
In 1765 D’Alembert published anonymously a book entitled Histoire de la destruction des Jesuites. According to Diderot this caused more
sensation in Paris than the author's four Volumes of mathematics. D’Alembert's sympathy with the persecuted order is apparent
throughout the book. His lucubrations issue in the
assertion that the destruction of Jesuitism will certainly be of great
advantage to “Reason”, but only on condition that Jansenist intolerance be not substituted for that of the Jesuits. At all events
the Jesuits were reasonable people who could wink at the ways of others, and
allow them to keep their thoughts in peace, if only the outward part was right!
But the Jansenists were not so considerate; therefore they seemed to D’Alembert to be barbarians worse than the English
Puritans. And Voltaire wrote after the expulsion of the Jesuits from France: “It
is dreadful to be exposed to the attacks of wolves when you have got rid of the
foxes”.
Doubtless many of
the other spokesmen of the Esprit philosophique agreed with D’Alembert and Voltaire. Sympathy with the Jesuits could only show itself in glimpses, for
in many cases it was choked by that hatred of the Church which found its classic
expression in the watchword of Voltaire and the philosophers: Ecrasez l'infâme, ecrasez la, first heard in 1762, when the first violent
blow was struck at Loyola's French disciples.
In this memorable
year Rousseau's Emile and Contrat social both saw the light. Emile, which
was printed in Holland was burnt by the Parliament,
and the Archbishop of Paris warned people against it in a special pastoral
letter. But everybody read it, and at the end of half a year it was in all the
booksellers' windows in Paris. This Natural Gospel of Education gained an
influence which few books attain. The Savoyard priest, who, in spite of the
shipwreck of his Christian faith, wished to remain in his office, became a
pattern for many French priests. And his deistic confession, with its easily
perceptible reminiscences of Descartes, carried on a quiet Propaganda, until
one day it became the official creed of France. Emile gave the impulse to a brisk discussion of educational problems,
during which it became apparent that the French schools had really entered
on a new phase, in spite of the outward likeness to the old.
The Encyclopedia,
which in this case is an unwilling witness, declared as early as 1751 that the
pupils as a rule left the schools “with such a superficial knowledge of
religion, that the first ungodly conversation, or the first dangerous reading,
was too much for them”. The pupils soon encountered the “ungodly conversations”
and the “dangerous reading” in the schools themselves. L'esprit philosophique soon penetrated the
Sorbonne to such an extent that the Abbé Morelles, who belonged to that school of thought, could
rejoice that Reason was getting by degrees the better of theological
stupidities. In the Sorbonne, they began to defend theses which bore the
impress of Locke's and Condillac’s philosophy; even
in Saint Sulpice the philosophic spirit was felt. The pupils at the seminary thought the
old prayers too long and too mystical. A deacon was caught reading Helvetius’ de l'Esprit during a procession, and there were complaints from all sides of the
worldly-mindedness of the future priests. The expulsion of the Jesuits had
important consequences in the schools. It was not easy for the teaching
communities such as the Benedictines and Oratorians to get the requisite number of Christian teachers in a hurry, and they often
had to resort to lay masters who were more or less tainted with the Esprit philosophique.
At the same time
that Emile was influencing parents
and teachers, the Contrat social made an immense impression on
statesmen and thoughtful citizens. In the remarkable eighth chapter, where
Rousseau treats of the so-called civic religion, he counts the Romish Church with Lamaism and the Japanese religion among
those curious systems “which give men two sets of laws, two sovereigns, and two
countries; and which lay upon them duties which are mutually contradictory, and
prevent men from being at the same time good citizens and pious men”. The
Christianity of the Gospel is in his opinion immeasurably better, but it is
contrary to the social spirit. A community of real Christians would not be a
community of men and women.
It is in the
interest of the State that every citizen should have a religion which inspires
him with love of duty, but the doctrines are a matter of indifference to the
State. There are, however certain sentiments
de sociabilité, without which one can neither be a good citizen nor a loyal subject. These dogmas in the
civic religion are of a moral, rather than a religious, nature, and should be
as few as possible. They could really be limited to the Savoyard priest's
belief in a Supreme Being, conscience, and the immortality of the soul. It is
the business of the sovereign to decide upon these articles of faith; he should
not force anyone to believe them, but he may exile those citizens who do not
accept them, not for impiety, but on the ground of their being insociables.
Besides these dogmas the State should maintain the principle that intolerance
is altogether objectionable. “Anyone who says, Outside the Church there is no
salvation! should be expelled from the State”.
Voltaire, himself
also a deist, agreed with Rousseau in his views on the relations between Church
and State. He exerted himself to make princes see that priests were the greatest
enemies of monarchy, and the philosophers the best support against the
encroachments of the clergy. He thought the time had come for the State to
resume the power which the Church had usurped in the Middle Ages. The Church should no longer be allowed to rule the community. He took up
Boniface VIII's old idea about the impossibility of the Church and State having
equal power, but came to the opposite conclusion. In his opinion it was the
State, not the Church, that should rule. Could two
masters be tolerated in a house, the father and the children's teacher, who is
paid by the father? For himself and a little band of superior intellects he
claimed full freedom of thought, but a positive religion was necessary to
preserve order in the community. A philosopher might be an atheist, but a
statesman should be a theist. Nevertheless he sent out from Ferney a succession of writings which all more or less tended to undermine the
inherited faith of the French people. Most of these books were small, because
it was easier to get books of that kind distributed among young men and women.
He felt himself to be the apostle of a new church, the chief dogma of which was
Tolerance, which he preached with enthusiasm in his Traité de la Tolerance and other works; and when he heard that this book
was read at Court, and saw its effect in the trial of Jean Calas,
he cried: “The scales are falling from men's eyes; the kingdom of Truth is at
hand!”. “God is blessing our new Church”.
The Parliaments
had great difficulty in stopping the circulation of these dangerous books, but
they did their best. Fr Melchior Grimm foresaw that the time would soon come
when it would be just as difficult to find philosophical books in Paris as in
Constantinople. Yet in spite of the vigilance of the police the prohibited
books were circulated. Even among the police officials “the new Church” had
willing “brethren” and “confederates” who saw to the distribution of the works
of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists. And the
government often hesitated to deal too violently with persons who received
autograph letters from the King of Prussia, and one sign of favor after another
from the Empress of Russia. The freethinkers held well together.
Ever since 1759,
when the Encyclopedia was forbidden, the Encyclopaedists and those who thought with them had formed a league, the object of which was “to
raise the throne of Reason upon the ruins of dogma”. To many it appeared that
this object would soon be gained. When Diderot, in 1767, during a visit to
Baron Holbach at Grandval,
received a parcel of books attacking the Church and Christianity, he wrote:
"I do not know what is to become of the poor Church of Jesus Christ or of
the prophecy that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." And a
bishop is reported to have said: “At the rate at which everything is going now,
religion cannot have fifty years to live”.
The adherents of
the Esprit philosophique were still more confirmed in their triumphant conviction that the future
belonged to them, when they saw the Society of Jesus abolished by a brief from
the Pope.
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