Priests, Women, and Families

by Jules Michelet

CHAPTER XI.

NO MORE SYSTEMS;—AN EMBLEM.—BLOOD.—SEX.—THE IMMACULATE WOMAN.—THE SACRED HEART.—MARIE ALACOQUE.—DOUBLE MEANING OF SACRED HEART.—THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY IS THE AGE OF DOUBLE MEANING.—CHIMERICAL POLICY OF THE JESUITS.—FATHER COLOMBIERE AND MARIE ALACOQUE, 1675.—ENGLAND;—PAPIST CONSPIRACY.—FIRST ALTAR OF THE SACRED HEART, 1685.—RUIN OF THE GALLICANS, 1693;—OF THE QUIETISTS, 1698;—OF PORT ROYAL, 1709.—THEOLOGY ANNIHILATED IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.—MATERIALITY OF THE SACRED HEART.—JESUITICAL ART.

Quietism, so accused of being obscure, was but too evident. It formed into a system, and established frankly, as supreme perfection, that state of immobility and impotency which the soul reaches at last, when it surrenders its activity.

Was it not simplicity itself to prescribe in set terms this lethargic doctrine, and give out noisily a theory of sleep? "Do not speak so loud if you want to make people doze?" This is what the theologians, men of business, instinctively perceived; they cared little for theology, and only wanted results.

We must do the Jesuits the justice to confess that they were disinterested enough in speculative opinions. We have seen how, since Pascal, they themselves wrote against their own casuistry. Since then they had tried Quietism: at one time they let Fenelon believe they would support him. But as soon as Louis XIV. had declared himself, "they ducked like divers," preached against their friend, and discovered forty errors in the Maxims of Saints.

They had never well succeeded as theologians. Silence suited them better than all their systems. They had got it imposed by the pope upon the Dominicans, in the very beginning of the century, and afterwards upon the Jansenists. Since then their affairs went on better. It was precisely at the time they ceased writing, that they obtained for the sick king the power of disposing of benefices (1687), and thus, to the great surprise of the Gallicans, who had thought them conquered, they became the kings of the clergy of France.

Now, no more ideas, no more systems; they had grown tired of them. Long ago we mentioned the prevailing lassitude. Besides, there is, we must confess, in the long lives of men, states, and religions; there is, I say, a time when, having run from project to project, and from dream to dream, every idea is hated. In these profoundly material moments, everything is rejected that is not tangible. Do people then become positive? No. But they do not return any more to the poetical symbols which in their youth they had adored. The old doter, in his second childhood, makes for himself some idol, some palpable, tangible god, and the coarser it is, the better he succeeds.

This explains the prodigious success with which the Jesuits in this age of lassitude spread, and caused to be accepted, a new object of worship, both very carnal and very material—the Heart of Jesus, either shown through the wound in His partly opened breast, or as plucked out and bloody.

Nearly the same thing had happened in the decrepitude of paganism. Religion had taken refuge in the sacrifice of bulls, the sanguinary Mithraic expiation—the worship of blood.

At the grand festival of the Sacred Heart which the Jesuits gave in the last century, in the Coliseum of Rome, they struck a medal with this motto, worthy of the solemnity, "He gave Himself to the people to eat, in the amphitheatre of Titus:"[[1]] instead of a system, it was an emblem, a dumb sign. What triumph for the friends of obscurity and equivocation! no equivocation of language can equal a material object, which may be interpreted in a thousand ways, for rendering ideas undecided and confused. The old Christian symbols, so often translated, and so variously interpreted, present to the mind, at first sight, too distinct a meaning. They are austere symbols of death and mortification. The new one was far more obscure. This emblem, bloody it is true, but carnal and impassioned, speaks much less of death than of life. The heart palpitates, the blood streams, and yet it is a living man who, showing his wound with his own hand, beckons to you to come and fathom his half-opened breast.

The heart! That word has always been powerful; the heart, being the organ of the affections, expresses them in its own manner, swollen and heaving with sighs. The life of the heart, strong and confused, comprehends and mingles every kind of love. Such a sentence is wonderfully adapted to language of double meaning.

And who will understand it best? Women. With them the life of the heart is everything. This organ, being the passage of the blood, and strongly influenced by the revolutions of the blood, is not less predominant in woman than her very sex.

The heart has been, now nearly two hundred years, the grand basis of modern devotion; as sex, or a strange question that related to it, had, for two hundred before, occupied the minds of the middle ages.

Strange! in that spiritual period, a long discussion, both public and solemn, took place throughout Europe, both in the schools and in the churches, upon an anatomical subject, of which one would not dare to speak in our days, except in the school of medicine! What was this subject? Conception. Only imagine all these monks, people sworn to celibacy, both Dominicans and Franciscans, boldly attacking the question, teaching it to all, preaching anatomy to children and little girls, filling their minds with their sex and its most secret mystery.

The heart, a more noble organ, had the advantage of furnishing a number of dubious though decent expressions, a whole language of equivocal tenderness which did not cause a blush, and facilitated the intrigue of devout gallantry.

In the very beginning of the seventeenth century, the directors and confessors find a very convenient text in The Sacred Heart. But women take it quite differently, and in a serious sense: they grow warm and impassioned, and have visions. The Virgin appears to a country girl of Normandy, and orders her to adore the heart of Mary. The Visitandines called themselves the daughters of the Heart of Jesus: Jesus does not fail to appear to a Visitandine, Mademoiselle Marie Alacoque, and shows her His heart and wound.

She was a strong girl, and of a sanguine temperament, whom they were obliged to bleed constantly. She had entered the convent in her twenty-fourth year, with her passions entire; her infancy had not been miserably nipped in the bud, as it often happens to those who are immured at an early age. Her devotion was, from the very first, a violent love, that wished to suffer for the object loved. Having heard that Madame de Chantal had printed the name of Jesus on her breast with a hot iron, she did the same. The Lover was not insensible to this, and ever after visited her. It was with the knowledge, and under the direction of a skilful superior, that Marie Alacoque made this intimate connection with the Divine Bridegroom. She celebrated her espousals with Him; and a regular contract was drawn up by the superior, which Marie Alacoque signed with her blood. One day, when, according to her biographer, she had cleaned with her tongue the lips of a sick person, Jesus was so satisfied with her, that He permitted her to fix her lips to one of His Divine wounds.

There was nothing in this relating to theology. It was merely a subject of physiology and medicine. Mademoiselle Alacoque was a girl of an ardent disposition, which was heightened by celibacy. She was by no means a mystic in the proper sense of the word. Happier far than Madame Guyon, who did not see what she loved, she saw and touched the body of the Divine Lover. The heart He showed her in His unseamed breast was a bloody intestine. The extremely sanguine plethory from which she was suffering, and which frequent bleeding could not relieve, filled her imagination with these visions of blood.

The Jesuits, who were great propagators of the new devotion, took good care not to explain precisely whether homage was to be paid to the symbolical heart and celestial love, or whether the heart of flesh was to be the object of adoration. When pressed to explain themselves, their answers depended on persons, times, and places. Their Father Galiffet made, at the same time, two contradictory replies: in Rome he said it was the symbolical heart; and in Paris he said in print that there was no metaphor, that they honoured the flesh itself.

This equivocation was a source of wealth. In less than forty years four hundred and twenty-eight brotherhoods of the Sacred Heart were formed in France.

I cannot help pausing a moment, to admire how Equivocation triumphed throughout this age.

On whatever side I turn my eyes, I find it everywhere, both in things and persons. It sits upon the throne in the person of Madame de Maintenon. Is this person a queen who is seated by the king's side, and before whom princesses are standing—or is she not? The equivocal is also near the throne in the person of the humble Père la Chaise, the real king of the clergy of France, who from a garret at Versailles distributes the benefices. And do our loyal Galileans and the scrupulous Jansenists abstain from the equivocal? Obedient, yet rebellious, preparing war though kneeling, they kiss the foot of the pope, while wishing to tie his hands; they spoil the best reasons by their distinguo and evasions. Indeed, when I put in opposition to the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries this Janus of the seventeenth, the two others appear to me as honest centuries, or, at the very least, sincere in good and in evil. But what falsehood and ugliness is concealed under the majestic harmony of the seventeenth! Everything is softened and shaded in the form, but the bottom is often the worse for it. Instead of the local inquisitions, you have the police of the Jesuits, armed with the king's authority. In place of a Saint Bartholomew, you have the long, the immense religious revolution, called the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, that cruel comedy of forced conversion; then the unheard-of tragedy of a proscription organised by all the bureaucratical and military means of a modern government!—Bossuet sings the triumph; and deceit, lying, and misery reign everywhere! Deceit in politics; local life destroyed without creating any central life. Deceit in morals: this polished court, this world of polite people receives an unexpected lesson from the chamber of poisons: the king suppresses the trial, fearing to find every one guilty!—And can devotion be real with such morals?—If you reproach the sixteenth century with its violent fanaticism, if the eighteenth appear to you cynical and devoid of human respect, confess at least also that lying, deceit, and hypocrisy are the predominant features of the seventeenth. That great historian Molière has painted the portrait of this century, and found its name—Tartuffe.

I return to the Sacred Heart, which, in truth, I have not quitted, since it is during this period the illustrious and predominant example of the success of the equivocal. The Jesuits who, in general, have invented little, did not make the discovery, but they perceived very plainly the profit they might derive from it. We have seen how they gradually made themselves masters of the convents of women, though professing all the time to be strangers to them. The Visitation, especially, was under their influence. The superior of Marie Alacoque, who had her confidence, and directed her connection with Jesus Christ, gave timely notice to Père La Chaise.

The thing happened just in time. The Jesuits sadly wanted some popular machine to set in motion, for the profit of their policy. It was the moment when they thought, at least they told the king so, that England, sold by Charles II., would, in a short time, be entirely converted. Intrigue, money, women, everything was turned to account, to bring it about. To King Charles they gave mistresses, and to his brother, confessors. The Jesuits, who, with all their tricks, are often chimerical, thought that by gaining over five or six lords, they would change all that Protestant mass, which is Protestant not only by belief, but also by interest, habit, and manner of living; Protestant to the core, and with English tenacity.

See then these famous politicians, gliding as stealthily as wolves, and fancying they will carry everything by surprise. An essential point for them was to place with James, the king's brother, a secret preacher, who, in his private chapel, might work silently, and try his hand at a few conversions. To act the part of a converter, they required a man who was not only captivating, but especially ardent and fanatical; such men were scarce. The latter qualifications were deficient in the young man whom Père La Chaise had in view. This was a Father La Colombière, who taught rhetoric in their college at Lyons; he was an agreeable preacher, an elegant writer, much esteemed by Patru, mild, docile, and a good sort of man. The only thing that was wanting was a little madness. To inoculate him with this, they introduced him to Mademoiselle Alacoque: he was sent to Paray-le-Monial, where she resided, as confessor extraordinary of the Visitandines (1675). He was in his thirty-fourth year, and she in her twenty-eighth. Having been well prepared by her superior, she immediately saw in him the great servant of God, whom her visions had revealed to her, and the very same day she perceived in the ardent heart of Jesus her own heart united to the Jesuit's.

La Colombière, being of a mild and feeble nature, was hurried away unresistingly into this ardent vortex of passion and fanaticism. He was kept for a year and a half in this spiritual furnace; he was then snatched away from Paray, and hurled red-hot into England. They were, however, still mistrustful of him, fearing he might cool, and sent him, from time to time, a few ardent and inspired lines: Marie Alacoque dictated, and the superior was her amanuensis.

He remained thus two years with the Duchess of York in London, so well concealed and shut up, that he did not even see the town. They brought to him, mysteriously, a few lords, who thought it advantageous to be converted to the religion of the heir presumptive. England having at last discovered the Papal conspiracy, La Colombière was accused, brought before Parliament, and embarked for France, where he arrived ill; and though his superior sent him to Paray to see whether the nun could revive him, he died there of a fever.

However little inclined people may be to believe that great results are brought about by trifling causes, they are obliged, however, to confess that this miserable intrigue had an incalculable effect upon France and the world. They wanted to gain England, and they presented themselves to her, not in the persons of the Gallicans, whom she respected, but in those of the Jesuits, whom she had always abhorred. At the very moment when Catholicism ought, in prudence at least, to have discarded the idolatries with which the Protestants reproached it, they published a new one, and the most offensive of all, the carnal and sensual devotion of the Sacred Heart. To mingle horror with ridicule, it was in 1685, the sad and lamentable year of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, that Marie Alacoque raised the first of those altars which overspread the whole of France. We know how England, confirmed in her Protestantism and horror of Rome by the Jesuits, took to herself a Dutch king, carried away Holland in her movement, and by this conjunction of the two maritime powers obtained the dominion of the seas.

The Jesuits may boast that they have been the means of setting Protestantism in England upon a very solid foundation. All the Father Mathews in the world will never be able to remove it.

Their political work, as we have seen, is important: it ended in marrying England to Holland—a marriage nearly fatal to France.

And what was their religious work among us in the old days of Louis XIV.? What was the last use made of the omnipotent sway of the La Chaises and the Telliers? We well know: the destruction of Port-Royal, a military expedition to carry off fifteen old women, the dead dragged from their graves, and sacrilege committed by the hands of authority. This authority expiring in the terrible year 1709, which seemed to carry off at one blow the king and the kingdom, was employed by them, in all haste, to destroy their enemies.

Port-Royal came to an end in 1709, Quietism had finished in 1698, and Gallicanism itself, the great religion of the throne, had been placed at the feet of the pope by the king in 1693. Behold Bossuet laid in the tomb by the side of Fenelon, and the latter next to Arnaud. The conquerors and the conquered repose in a common nullity.

The emblem prevailing, and being substituted for every system, people felt less and less the need of analysing, explaining, and thinking; and they were glad of it. The explanation the most favourable to authority is still a giving of accounts, that is to say, a homage paid to the liberty of the mind. But in the shadow of an obscure emblem one may henceforth without shaping any theory, or allowing any advantage to be taken, apply indifferently the practice of all the various theories that had been abandoned, and follow them alternately or conjointly, according to the interest of the day.

Wise policy, excellent wisdom, with which they cover their nothingness! Having dispensed with reasoning for others, they lose the faculty of reasoning altogether, and, in the hour of danger, they find themselves disarmed. This is what happened to them in the eighteenth century. The terribly learned contest that then took place found them mute. Voltaire let fly a hundred thousand arrows against them, without awakening them. Rousseau pressed and crushed them without getting one word out of them.

Who then could answer? Theology was no longer known to the theologians. The persecutors of the Jansenists mingle in their books published in the name of Marie Alacoque, both Jansenist and Molinist opinions, and without being aware of it. They composed in 1708 the manual which has since become the basis of instruction adopted in our seminaries; and this manual contains the entirely new doctrine, that on every Papal decision Jesus Christ inspires the pope to decide, and the bishops to obey: every thing is an oracle and a miracle in this clownish system. Reason is decidedly rooted out of theology.

From that time there is very little of a dogmatical character, and still less of sacred history; an instruction which would be void, if ancient casuistry did not assist in filling up the vacuum with immoral subtilties.

The only part of mankind to whom they have addressed themselves for a long time, namely, women, is the world of sensibility. They do not ask for science; they wish for impressions rather than ideas. The less they are busied about ideas the easier it is to keep them ignorant of outward events, and make them strangers to the progress of time.

When they maintain that holiness consists in sacrificing the mind, the more material the worship, the more it serves to attain that end; the more the mind is degraded the holier it becomes. To couple salvation with the exercise of moral virtues, would be to require the exercise of reason. But what do they want with virtue? Wear this medal: "It will blot out your iniquities." Reason would still have a share in religion, if, as reason teaches us, it was necessary for salvation absolutely to love God. Marie Alacoque has seen that it was sufficient not to hate Him; and those who are devoted to the Sacred Heart are saved unconditionally.

When the Jesuits were suppressed, they had in their hands no other religious means than this paganism, and in it they placed all their hope of coming to life again. They had engravings made, to which they added the motto, "I will give them the shield of my heart."

The popes, who, at first, were uneasy about the weak point which such a materialism would offer to the attacks of the philosophers, have found out in our time that it is very useful to them, being addressed to a class of people who seldom read the philosophers, and who, though devout, are nevertheless material. They have therefore preserved the precious equivocation of the ideal and the carnal heart, and forbidden any explanation as to whether the words "Sacred Heart" designated the love of God for man, or some bit of bleeding flesh. By reducing the thing to the idea, the impassioned attraction in which its success consisted would be taken from it.

Even in the last century, some bishops had gone farther, declaring that flesh was here the principal object; and they had placed this flesh in certain hymns, after the Trinity, as a fourth person. Priests, women, and young girls have all since then vied with one another in this devotion. I have before me a manual, much used in country places, in which they teach the persons of their community, who pray for one another, how they join hearts, and how these hearts, once united, "ought to desire to enter into the opening of the heart of Jesus, and be incessantly sinking into that amorous wound."

The brotherhood, in their manuals, have occasionally found it gallant to put the heart of Mary above that of Jesus (see that of Nantes, 1769). In their engravings she is generally younger than her Son, being, for instance, about twenty, whereas he is thirty years old, so that, at first sight, He seems to be rather her husband or lover than her Son.

This very year I saw at Rouen, in the Church of St. Ouen, in the Chapel of the Sacred Heart, a pen-and-ink drawing, by young ladies, having the written approbation of the ecclesiastical authorities, in which Jesus is represented on His knees before the Virgin, who is also kneeling.

The most violent satire against the Jesuits is what they have made themselves—their art, the pictures and statues they have inspired. They are at once characterised by the severe sentence of Poussin, whose Christ did not appear to them pretty enough: "We cannot imagine a Christ with His head on one side, or like Father Donillet's." Yet Poussin saw the best days of the Jesuit art: what would he have said if he had seen what followed? all that decrepid coquetry that thinks it smiles whilst it grimaces, those ridiculous glances, dying eyes, and such like deformities. The worst is, they who think only of the flesh know no longer how to represent it. As the thought grows more and more material and insipid, the form becomes defaced, degraded from picture to picture, ignoble, foppish, affected, heavy, dull—that is to say, shapeless.[[2]]

We may judge of men by the art they inspire; and I confess it is no easy task to augur favourably of the souls of those who inspire this art, and recommend these engravings, hanging them up in their churches and distributing them by thousands and millions. Such taste is an ominous sign. Many immoral people still possess a sentiment of elegance. But willingly to take to the ignoble and false discovers a sad degradation of the soul.

An undeniable truth is here made manifest; which is, that art is the only thing inaccessible to falsehood. Being the offspring of the heart and natural inspiration, it cannot be allied to what is false, it will not be violated; it protests, and if the false triumphs, it dies. All the rest may be aped and acted. They very well managed to make a theology in the sixteenth and a morality in the seventeenth century; but never could they form an art. They can ape the holy and the just; but how can they mimic the beautiful?—Thou art ugly, poor Tartuffe, and ugly shalt thou remain: it is thy token. What! you reach the beautiful, or ever lay a finger upon it? This would be impious beyond all impiety!—The beautiful is the face of God!

[[1]] In 1771. On Sacred Hearts (by Tabaraud), p. 82.

[[2]] In 1834, being busy with Christian iconography, I looked over the collections of the portraits of Christ in the Royal Library. Those published within the last thirty years are the most humiliating I have ever seen, both for art and human nature. Every man (whether a philosopher or a believer) who retains any sentiment of religion will be disgusted with them. Every impropriety, every sensuality and low passion is there: the childish, dandified seminarist, the licentious priest, the fat curate who looks like Maingrat, &c. The engraving is as good as the drawing—a skewer and the snuff of a tallow candle.