Priests, Women, and Families

by Jules Michelet

CHAPTER V.

REACTION OF MORALITY.—ARNAUD, 1643.—PASCAL, 1657.—BASENESS OF THE JESUITS.—HOW THEY GET HOLD OF THE KING AND THE POPE, AND IMPOSE SILENCE UPON THEIR ENEMIES.—DISCOURAGEMENT OF THE JESUITS.—THEIR CORRUPTION.—THEY PROTECT THE FIRST QUIETISTS.—IMMORALITY OF QUIETISM.—DESMARETS DE SAINT SORLIN.—MORIN BURNT, 1663.

Morality was weakened, but not quite extinct. Though undermined by the casuists, Jesuitism, and by the intrigues of the clergy, it was saved by the laity. The age presents us this contrast. The priests, even the best of them, the Cardinal de Bérulle for instance, rush into the world, and into politics; while illustrious persons among the laity, such as Descartes and Poussin, retire to seek solitude. The philosophers turn monks, and the saints become men of business.

Each set of people will acquire what it desires in this century. One party will have power; they will succeed in obtaining the banishment of the Protestants, the proscription of the Jansenists, and the submission of the Galileans to the pope. Others will have science; Descartes and Galileo give the movements; Leibnitz and Newton furnish the harmony. That is to say, the Church will triumph in temporal affairs, and the laity will obtain the spiritual power.

From the desert where our great lay-monks then took refuge a purer breeze begins to blow. We feel that a new age now commences, modern age, the age of work, following that of disputes. No more dreams, no more school-divinity. We must now begin to work in earnest, early and before daylight. It is rather cold, but no matter; it is the refreshing coolness of the dawn, as after those beautiful nights in the North, where a young queen of twenty goes to visit Descartes, at four in the morning, to learn the application of algebra to geometry.

This serious and exalted spirit, which revived philosophy and modified literature, had necessarily some influence on theology. It found a resting point, though a very minute and still imperceptible one, in the assembly of the friends of Port-Royal; it added grandeur to their austerity, morality asserted its own claims, and religion awoke to a sense of her danger.

Everything was going on prosperously for the Jesuits; as confessors of kings, grandees, and fine ladies, they saw their morality everywhere in full bloom; when in this serene atmosphere, the lightning flashes and the thunderbolt falls. I speak of Arnaud's book, entitled "Frequent Communion" (1643), so unexpected and so overwhelming.

Not only the Jesuits and Jesuitism were struck by the blow, but, in general, all that portion of Christendom, which was enervated by an easy indulgence. Christianity appeared again austere and grave; the world again saw with awe the pale face of its crucified Saviour. He came to say again, in the name of grace, what natural reason equally asserts, "There is no real expiation without repentance." What became of all their petty arts of evasion in presence of this severe truth? What became of their worldly devotions and romantic piety, together with all the Philotheas, Erotheas, and their imitations? The contrast appeared odious.

Other writers have said, and will say, all this much better. I am not writing here the history of Jansenism. The theological question is now become obsolete. The moral question still survives, and history owes it one word, for it cannot remain indifferent between the honest and the dishonest. Whether the Jansenist did or did not exaggerate the doctrine of grace, we must still call this party, as it deserves to be, in this grand struggle, the party of virtue.

Arnaud and Pascal are so far from having gone too far against their adversaries, that one might easily show they stopped short of the mark, of their own accord, that they did not wish to make use of all their arms, and were afraid (in attacking, on certain delicate points, the Jesuitical direction) of doing harm to direction in general, and to confession.

Ferrier, the Jesuit, avows that, after the terrible blow inflicted by the Lettres Provinciales, the Jesuits were crushed, and that they fell into derision and contempt. A multitude of bishops condemned them, and not one stood up in their defence.

One of the means they employed to mend their case was, to say boldly that the opinions with which they were reproached were not those of the Society, but of a few individuals. They were answered that, as all their books were examined by the chief, they belonged thus to the whole body. No matter: to amuse the simple, they got a few of their order to write against their own doctrine. A Spanish Jesuit wrote against Ultramontanism. Another, the Father Gonzales, wrote a book against the casuists: he was very useful to them. When, in course of time, Rome was at last ashamed of their doctrine, and disavowed them, they put Gonzales forward, printed his book, and made him their general. Even in our own time, it is this book and this name that they oppose to us. Thus they have an answer for everything. Should you like indulgence, take Escobar; should you prefer severity, take Gonzales.

Let us now see what was the result of this general contempt into which they fell after the Provinciales. Public conscience having received such good warning, every one apparently will hasten to shun them. Their confession will be avoided and their colleges deserted. You think so? Then you are much mistaken.

They are too necessary to the corruption of the age. How could the king, with his two-fold adultery posted up in the face of all Europe, make his devotions without them? Fathers Ferrier, Canard, and La Chaise, will remain with him till the end, like pieces of furniture that are too convenient to be dispensed with.

But does not Rome perceive how much she is compromised by such allies? It is not incumbent on her to separate from them?

Feeble attempts were not wanting. A pope condemned the apology of the casuists that the Jesuits had risked. The energy of Rome went no further: if any remained, it was employed against the enemies of the Jesuits. The latter got the upper hand; they had succeeded, in the beginning of the century, in getting the head of the Church to impose silence on the doctrine of grace, as defended by the Dominicans; and they silenced it again, in the middle of the century, when it recommenced speaking by the mouth of the Jansenists.

The Jesuits showed their gratitude to Rome, for imposing this silence a second time, by stretching still farther the infallibility of the pope. They did not fear to build up still higher this falling Tower of Babel; they increased it by two stories: first, they asserted the infallibility of the pope in matters of faith. Secondly, when the danger had become imminent, they took a bold and foolish step; but it secured to them the friendship of Rome; they made the pope do in his decrepitude what he had never dared to do in his power—declare himself infallible in matters of fact.

And this at the very moment that Rome was obliged to confess that she was wrong about the greatest facts of nature and history. Not to speak of the New World, which she was obliged to admit, after having denied it, she condemns Galileo, and then she submits to his system, adopts and teaches it: the penance that she imposed on him for one day has, since Galileo, been inflicted upon herself for two hundred years.

Here is another fact, still graver in one sense:—

The fundamental right of popes, the title of their power, those famous Decrees which they quoted and defended, as long as criticism, unaided by the art of printing, failed to enlighten mankind;—well! the pope is obliged to confess that these very Decrees are a tissue of lies and imposture.[[1]]

What? when popery has disclaimed its own word, and given itself the lie on the fundamental fact, upon which its own right depends, is it then that the Jesuits claim for her infallibility in matters of fact?

The Jesuits have been the tempters and corrupters of popes as well as of kings. They caught kings by their concupiscence, and popes by their pride.

It is a laughable, but touching sight to see this poor little Jansenist party, then so great in genius and heart, resolute in making an appeal to the justice of Rome, and remaining on their knees before this mercenary judge!

The Jesuits were not so blind but that they saw that popery, foolishly propped up by them in theology, was miserably losing ground in the political world. In the beginning of the 17th century the pope was still powerful; he whipped Henry IV. in the person of the Cardinal d'Ossat. But in the middle of that century, after all the great efforts of the Thirty Years' War, the pope was not even consulted in the Treaty of Westphalia; and in that of the Pyrenees, between Catholic Spain and very-Christian France, they forgot that he existed.

The Jesuits had undertaken what was perfectly impossible; and the principal engine they employed for it—the monopoly of the rising generation—was not less impossible. Their greatest effort had been directed to this point; they had succeeded in getting into their hands the greater part of the children of the nobility and of people of fortune; they had contrived, by means of education, a machine to narrow the mind and crush the intellect. But such was the vigour of modern invention, that in spite of the most ingenious machinery to annihilate invention, the first generation produced Descartes, the second the author of Tartuffe, and the third Voltaire.

The worst of it is, by the light of this great modern flambeau which they had been unable to extinguish, they saw their own deformity. They knew what they were, and began to despise themselves. No one is so hardened in lying as to deceive himself entirely. They were obliged tacitly to confess that their probabilism, or doctrine of probability, was at bottom but doubt, and the absence of all principle. They could not help discovering that they, the most Christian of all societies, and the champions of the faith, were only sceptics.

Of faith?—what faith? It was not, at any rate, Christian faith: all their theology had no other tendency than to ruin the base on which Christianity is founded—grace and salvation by the blood of Jesus Christ.

Champions of a principle? No; but agents of a plot, occupied with one project, and this an impossible one—the restoration of popery.

Some few Jesuits resolved to seek a remedy in themselves for their fallen condition. They avowed frankly the urgent need that the Society had of reform. Their chief, a German, dared to attempt this reform; but it went hard with him: the great majority of the Jesuits wished to maintain the abuses, and they deprived him of all power.

These good workmen, who had been so successful in justifying the enjoyments of others, wanted to enjoy themselves in their turn. They chose for their general a man after their own heart, amiable, gentle, and kind, the epicure Oliva. Rome, recently governed by Madame Olympia, was in a season of indulgence; Oliva, retiring to his delightful villa, said, "Business to-morrow," and left the Society to govern itself after its own fashion.

Some became merchants, bankers, and cloth-makers for the profit of their establishments. Others following more closely the example of the pope, worked for their nephews, and transacted the business of their families. The idle wits frequented the public walks, coquetted, and made madrigals. Others again found amusement in chatting to the nuns, in the little secrets of women, and in sensual inquisitiveness. Their rulers, lastly, who found themselves excluded from the society of women, became too often the Thyrsis and Corydons of the Colleges; the consequence was in Germany a formidable investigation; when a great number of the proud and austere German houses were found to be criminal.

The Jesuits, who had fallen so low both in theory and practice, increased their party at the risk of the strangest auxiliaries. Whoever declared himself an enemy of the Jansenists became their friend. Hence arose the immoral inconsistency of the Society—its perfect indifference to systems. These people, who for more than half a century had been fighting for free will, formed a sudden alliance, without any intervening period of transition, with the mystics who confounded all their liberty in God. Just before they had been reproached with following the principles of pagan philosophers and jurisconsults, who attribute everything to justice and nothing to grace or love; now they receive quietism at its birth with open arms, and the preacher of love, the visionary Desmarets de St. Sorlin.

Desmarets had, it is true, done them some essential service. He had succeeded in dismembering Port-Royal, by gaining over some of the nuns. He assisted them powerfully in destroying poor Morin, another visionary more original and more innocent, who fancied himself to be the Holy Ghost. He tells us himself how, being encouraged by Father Canard (Annat) the king's confessor, he gained the confidence of this unfortunate man, made him believe he was his disciple, and drew from him written documents, by means of which he caused him to be burnt (1663).

The protection of this all-powerful confessor gained for the most extravagant books of Desmarets the approbation of the Archbishop of Paris. He declared in them that he was a prophet, and undertook to raise for the king and the pope an army of a hundred and forty-four thousand devots, as knights of papal infallibility, to exterminate, in concert with Spain, the Turks and the Jansenists.

These devots, or victims of love, were self-sacrificed people, who affected a sort of inward annihilation, and who lived henceforth only in God. Hence they could do no harm. The soul, said this prophet, having become a nonentity, cannot consent; so that whatever it may do, inasmuch as it has not consented, it has not sinned. It no longer thinks at all, either of what it has done, or of what it has not done; for it has done nothing at all. God being all in us, does all, and suffers all; the devil can no longer find the creature, either in itself or in its acts, for it acts no longer. By an entire dissolution of ourselves, the virtue of the Holy Ghost flows into us, and we become wholly God, by a miraculous deiformity. If there be still anything jarring in the grosser part, the purer part knows nothing of it; but both these parts, being subtilised and rarefied, change at last into God; "God then abides with the emotions of sensuality, all of which are sanctified."[[2]]

Desmarets did not confine himself to printing this doctrine with the privilege of the king and the approbation of the archbishop. Strongly supported by the Jesuits, he ran from convent to convent preaching to the nuns. Layman as he was, he had made himself a director of female youth. He related to them his dreams of devout gallantry, and inquired about their carnal temptations. It seemed that a man so perfectly self-annihilated might write fearlessly the strangest things—the following letter for instance:—"I embrace you, my very dear love, in your nonentity, being a perfect nullity myself, each of us being all in our All, by our amiable Jesus," &c.

What progress is here made in a few years, since the "Provincial Letters!" What has become of the casuists? Those simple people who took and effaced transgressions one by one, giving themselves immense trouble. They are all scattered to the winds.

Casuistry was an art that had its masters, doctors, and cunning men. But now, what need of doctors? Every spiritual man, every devout person, every Jesuit in a short robe can speak as well as he in the long one the soft language of pious tenderness. The Jesuits have fallen, but Jesuitism has gained ground. It is no longer requisite to direct the attention every day, for every distinct case, by special equivocations. Love that mingles and confounds everything is the sovereign, most gentle, and powerful equivocation. Lull the will to sleep and there is no longer any intention, "The soul, losing its nonentity in its infinity," will be gently annihilated in the bosom of love.

[[1]] By two cardinals and librarians of the Vatican, Bellarmin and Baronius, one of whom was the confessor of the pope.

[[2]] Desmarets de St. Sorlin's Delight of the Spirit, 29th journée, p. 170.