He appeared at Port-Royal with a commissary and two exons. He asked for the prioress; she was at church: when service was over, he summoned all the nuns; one, old and very paralytic, was missing. “Let her be brought,” said M. d’Argenson. “His Majesty’s orders are,” he continued, “that you break up this assemblage, never to meet again. It is your general dispersal that I announce to you; you are allowed but three hours to break up.” “We are ready to obey, sir,” said the mother-prioress; “half an hour is more than sufficient for us to say our last good by, and take with us a breviary, a Bible, and our regulations.” And when he asked her whither she meant to go, “Sir, the moment our community is broken up and dispersed, it is indifferent to me in what place I may be personally, since I hope to find God wherever I shall be.” They got into carriages, receiving one after another the farewell and blessing of the mother-prioress, who was the last to depart, remaining firm to the end there were two and twenty, the youngest fifty years old; they all died in the convents to which they were taken. A seizure was at once made of all papers and books left in the cells; Cardinal Noailles did not interfere. M. de St. Cyran had depicted him by anticipation, when he said that the weak were more to be feared than the wicked. He was complaining one day of his differences with his bishops. “What can you expect, Monsignor?” laughingly said a lady well disposed to the Jansenists; “God is just; it is the stones of Port-Royal tumbling upon your head.” The tombs were destroyed; some coffins were carried to a distance, others left and profaned; the plough passed over the ruins; the hatred of the enemies of Port-Royal was satiated. A few of the faithful, preserving in their hearts the ardent faith of M. de St. Cyran, narrowed, however, and absorbed by obstinate resistance, a few theologians dying in exile, and leaving in Holland a succession of bishops detached from the Roman church,—this was all that remained of one of the noblest attempts ever made by the human soul to rise, here below, above that which is permitted by human nature. Virtues of the utmost force, Christianity zealously pushed to its extremest limits, and the most invincible courage, sustained the Jansenists in a conscientious struggle against spiritual oppression; its life died out, little by little, amongst the dispersed members. The Catholic church suffered therefrom in its innermost sanctuary. “The Catholic religion would only be more neglected if there were no more religionists,” said Vauban, in his Memoire in favor of the Protestants. It was the same as regarded the Jansenists. The Jesuits and Louis XIV., in their ignorant passion, for unity and uniformity, had not comprehended that great principle of healthy freedom and sound justice of which the scientific soldier had a glimmering.
The insurrection of the Camisards, in the Cevennes, had been entirely of a popular character; the Jansenists had penitents amongst the great of this world, though none properly belonged to them or retired to their convents or their solitudes; it was the great French burgessdom, issue for the most part of the magistracy, which supplied their most fervent associates. Fenelon and Madame Guyon founded their little church at court and amongst the great lords; and many remained faithful to them till death. The spiritual letters of Fenelon, models of wisdom, pious tact, moderation, and knowledge of the human heart, are nearly all addressed to persons engaged in the life and the offices of the court, exposed to all the temptations of the world. It is no longer the desert of the penitents of Port-Royal, or the strict cloister of Mother Angelica; Fenelon is for only inward restrictions and an abstention purely spiritual; from afar and in his retreat at Cambrai, he watches over his faithful flock with a tender pre-occupation which does not make him overlook the duties of their position. “Take as penance for your sins,” he wrote, “the disagreeable liabilities of the position you are in: the very hinderances which seem injurious to our advancement in piety turn to our profit, provided that we do what depends on ourselves. Fail not in any of your duties towards the court, as regards your office and the proprieties, but be not anxious for posts which awaken ambition.” Such are, with their discreet tolerance, the teachings of Fenelon, adapted for the guidance of the Dukes of Beauvilliers and Chevreuse, and of the Duke of Burgundy himself. He went much further, and on less safe a road, when he was living at court, under the influence of Madame Guyon. A widow and still young, gifted with an ardent spirit and a lofty and subtile mind, Madame Guyon had imagined, in her mystical enthusiasm, a theory of pure love, very analogous fundamentally, if not in its practical consequences, to the doctrines taught shortly before by a Spanish priest named Molinos, condemned by the court of Rome in 1687. It was about the same time that Madame Guyon went to Paris, with her book on the Moyen court et facile de faire l’Oraison du Coeur (Short and easy Method of making Orison with the Heart). Prayer, according to this wholly mystical teaching, loses the character of supplication or intercession, to become the simple silence of a soul absorbed in God. “Why are not simple folks so taught?” she said. “Shepherds keeping their flocks would have the spirit of the old anchorites; and laborers, whilst driving the plough, would talk happily with God: all vice would be banished in a little while, and the kingdom of God would be realized on earth.”
It was a far cry from the sanguinary struggle against sin and the armed Christianity of the Jansenists; the sublime and specious visions of Madame Guy on fascinated lofty and gentle souls: the Duchess of Charost, daughter of Fouquet, Mesdames de Beauvilliers, de Chevreuse, de Mortemart, daughters of Colbert, and their pious husbands, were the first to be chained to her feet. Fenelon, at that time, preceptor to the children of France (royal family), saw her, admired her, and became imbued with her doctrines. She was for a while admitted to the intimacy of Madame de Maintenon. It was for this little nucleus of faithful friends that she wrote her book of Torrents. The human soul is a torrent which returns to its source, in God, who lives in perfect repose, and who would fain give it to those who are His. The Christian soul has nothing more that is its, neither will nor desire. It has God for soul; He is its principle of life. “In this way there is nothing extraordinary. No visions, no ecstasies, no entrancements. The way is simple, pure, and plain; there the soul sees nothing but in God, as God sees Himself and with His eyes.” With less vagueness, and quite as mystically, Fenelon defined the sublime love taught by Madame Guyon in the following maxim, afterwards condemned at Rome: “There is an habitual state of love of God which is pure charity, without any taint of the motive of self-interest. Neither fear of punishment nor desire of reward have any longer part in this love; God is loved not for the merit, or the perfection, or the happiness to be found in loving Him.” What singular seductiveness in those theories of pure love which were taught at the court of Louis XIV., by his grandchildren’s preceptor, at a woman’s instigation, and zealously preached fifty years afterwards by President (of New Jersey College) Jonathan Edwards, in the cold and austere atmosphere of New England!
Led away by the generous enthusiasm of his soul, Fenelon had not probed the dangers of his new doctrine. The gospel and church of Christ, whilst preaching the love of God, had strongly maintained the fact of human individuality and responsibility. The theory of mere (pure) love absorbing the soul in God put an end to repentance, effort to withstand evil, and the need of a Redeemer. Bossuet was not deceived. The elevation of his mind, combined with strong common sense, caused him to see through all the veils of the mysticism. Madame Guyon had submitted her books to him; he disapproved of them, at first quietly, then formally, after a thorough examination in conjunction with two other doctors. Madame Guyon retired to a monastery of Meaux; she soon returned to Paris, and her believers rallied round her. Bossuet, in his anger, no longer held his hand. Madame Guyon was shut up first at Vincennes, and then in the Bastille; she remained seven years in prison, and ended by retiring to near Blois, where she died in 1717, still absorbed in her holy and vague reveries, praying no more inasmuch as she possessed God, “a submissive daughter, however, of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church, having and desiring to admit no other opinion but its,” as she says in her will. Bourdaloue calls mere (pure) love “a bare faith, which has for its object no verity of the gospel’s, no mystery of Jesus Christ’s, no attribute of God’s, nothing whatever, unless it be, in a word, God.” In the presence of death, on the approach of the awful realities of eternity, Madame Guyon no doubt felt the want of a more simple faith in the mighty and living God. Fenelon had not waited so long to surrender.
The instinct of the pious and vigorous souls of the seventeenth century had not allowed them to go astray: there was little talk of pantheism, which had spread considerably in the sixteenth century; but there had been a presentiment of the dangers lurking behind the doctrines of Madame Guyon. Bossuet, that great and noble type of the finest period of the Catholic church in France, made the mistake of pushing his victory too far. Fenelon, a young priest when the great Bishop of Meaux was already in his zenith, had preserved towards him a profound affection and a deep respect. “We are, by anticipation, agreed, however you may decide,” he wrote to him on the 28th of July, 1694: “it will be no specious submission, but a sincere conviction. Though that which I suppose myself to have read should appear to me clearer than that two and two make four, I should consider it still less clear than my obligation to mistrust all my lights, and to prefer before them those of a bishop such as you. You have only to give me my lesson in writing; provided that you wrote me precisely what is the doctrine of the church, and what are the articles in which I have slipped, I would tie myself down inviolably to that rule.” Bossuet required more; he wanted Fenelon, recently promoted to the Archbishopric of Cambrai, to approve of the book he was preparing on Etats d’Oraison (States of Orison), and explicitly to condemn the works of Madame Guyon. Fenelon refused with generous indignation. “So it is to secure my own reputation,” he writes to Madame de Maintenon, in 1696, “that I am wanted to subscribe that a lady, my friend, would plainly deserve to be burned with all her writings, for an execrable form of spirituality, which is the only bond of our friendship? I tell you, madame, I would burn my friend with my own hands, and I would burn myself joyfully, rather than let the church be imperilled. But here is a poor captive woman, overwhelmed with sorrows; there is none to defend her, none to excuse her; they are always afraid to do so. I maintain that this stroke of the pen, given by me against my conscience, from a cowardly policy, would render me forever infamous, and unworthy of my ministry and my position.” Fenelon no longer submitted his reason and his conduct, then, to the judgment of Bossuet; he recognized in him an adversary, but he still spoke of him with profound veneration. “Fear not,” he writes to Madame de Maintenon, “that I should gainsay M. de Meaux; I shall never speak of him but as of my master, and of his propositions but as the rule of faith.” Fenelon was at Cambrai, being regular in the residence which removed him for nine months in the year from the court and the children of France, when there appeared his Explication des Maximes des Saints sur la Vie Interieure (Exposition of the Maxims of the Saints touching the Inner Life), almost at the same moment as Bossuet’s Instruction sur les Etats d’ Oraison (Lessons on States of Orison). Fenelon’s book appeared as dangerous as those of Madame Guyon; he himself submitted it to the pope, and was getting ready to repair to Rome to defend his cause, when the king wrote to him, “I do not think proper to allow you to go to Rome; you must, on the contrary, repair to your diocese, whence I forbid you to go away; you can send to Rome your pleas in justification of your book.”
Fenelon departed to an exile which was to last as long as his life; on his departure, he wrote to Madame de Maintenon, “I shall depart hence, madame, to-morrow, Friday, in obedience to the king. My greatest sorrow is to have wearied him and to displease him. I shall not cease, all the days of my life, to pray God to pour His graces upon him. I consent to be crushed more and more. The only thing I ask of his Majesty is, that the diocese of Cambrai, which is guiltless, may not suffer for the errors imputed to me. I ask protection only for the sake of the church, and even that protection I limit to not being disturbed in those few good works which my present position permits me to do, in order to fulfil a pastor’s duties. It remains for me, madame, only to ask your pardon for all the trouble I have caused you. I shall all my life be as deeply sensible of your former kindnesses as if I had not forfeited them, and my respectful attachment to yourself, madame, will never diminish.”
Fenelon made no mistake in addressing to Madame de Maintenon his farewell and his regrets; she had acted against him with the uneasiness of a person led away for a moment by an irresistible attraction, and returning, quite affrighted, to rule and the beaten paths. The mere love theory had no power to fascinate her for long. The Archbishop of Cambrai did not drop out of that pleasant dignity. The pious councillors of the king were working against him at Rome, bringing all the influence of France to weigh upon Innocent XII. Fenelon had taken no part in the declarations of the Gallican church, in 1682, which had been drawn up by Bossuet; the court of Rome was inclined towards him; the strife became bitter and personal; pamphlets succeeded pamphlets, letters. Bossuet published a Relation du Quietisme (An Account of Quietism), and remarks upon the reply of M. de Cambrai. “I write this for the people,” he said, “in order that, the character of M. de Cambrai being known, his eloquence may, with God’s permission, no more impose upon anybody.” Fenelon replied with a vigor, a fullness, and a moderation which brought men’s minds over to him. “You do more for me by the excess of your accusations,” said he to Bossuet, “than I could do myself. But what a melancholy consolation when we look at the scandal which troubles the house of God, and which causes so many heretics and libertines (free-thinkers) to triumph! Whatever end may be put by a holy pontiff to this matter, I await it with impatience, having no wish but to obey, no fear but to be in the wrong, no object but peace. I hope that it will be seen from my silence, my unreserved submission, my constant horror of illusion, my isolation from any book and any person of a suspicious sort, that the evil you would fain have caused to be apprehended is as chimerical as the scandal has been real, and that violent measures taken against imaginary evils turn to poison.”
Fenelon was condemned on the 12th of March, 1699; the sentence of Rome was mild, and hinted no suspicion of heresy; it had been wrested from the pope by the urgency of Louis XIV. “It would be painful to his Majesty,” wrote the Bishop of Meaux in the king’s name, “to see a new schism growing up amongst his subjects at the very time that he is applying himself with all his might to the task of extirpating that of Calvin, and if he saw the prolongation, by manoeuvres which are incomprehensible, of a matter which appeared to be at an end. He will know what he has to do, and will take suitable resolutions, still hoping, nevertheless, that his Holiness will not be pleased to reduce him to such disagreeable extremities.” When the threat reached Rome, Innocent XII. had already yielded.
Fenelon submitted to the pope’s decision completely and unreservedly. “God gives me grace to be at peace amidst bitterness and sorrow,” he wrote to the Duke of Beauvilliers on the 29th of March, 1699. “Amongst so many troubles I have one consolation little fitted to be known in the world, but solid enough for those who seek God in good faith, and that is, that my conduct is quite decided upon, and that I have no longer to deliberate. It only remains for me to submit and hold my peace; that is what I have always desired. I have now but to choose the terms of my submission; the shortest, the simplest, the most absolute, the most devoid of any restriction, are those that I rather prefer. My conscience is disburdened in that of my superior. In all this, far from having an eye to my advantage, I have no eye to any man; I see but God, and I am content with what He does.”