LAMENNAIS
Félicité de la Mennais (it was not till late in life that he gave his name the more democratic form) was born in 1782 at St. Malo; so he, like Chateaubriand, is a Breton; and the obstinacy of his race was innate in his character. The Breton authors constitute what may be called the Vendée of literature; they continue with words the fight which their fathers fought with material weapons.
As a youth Lamennais was slight, thin, and of an excitably lively temperament. At an early age he lost his mother, and after this was even more determined and self-willed than he had been before. His religious vocation was long doubtful; as a youth he devoted much time to music and mathematics, played the flute, and learned the use of various weapons. He fought a serious duel, which proved a hindrance to him in the career which he subsequently chose, had love affairs, and wrote poetry.[1] He was so little inclined to accept the dogmas of Christianity that he did not make his first communion till he was twenty-two, when he had attained to settled religious convictions. After this he began to study theology, and in 1808, at the age of twenty-six, he took the tonsure. But when the time of his ordination as a priest drew near, he was seized with such horror of the vow he was about to take that he again and again postponed the decisive step, and did not really become a priest until he was thirty-five. His letters of these years show the distracted condition of his soul; the proud heart winced and writhed at the thought of giving the power over itself into strange hands. And things were no better when all was over and the irrevocable vow taken. The first letter he wrote to his brother after the dreaded ordination, to which he had finally been persuaded to consent, had actually taken place, gives a gloomy description of his mental condition:
"Although silence has been imposed on me, I believe that it is both allowable and right to let you know once and for all exactly how matters stand with me. I am extremely unhappy, and it is impossible that I can henceforward be anything else. They may reason as they like, may twist and turn things as they please, to persuade me of the opposite, but there is not the slightest probability that they will ever succeed in convincing me of the non-existence of a fact which I perceive. The only consolation I can accept is the cheap counsel to make a virtue of necessity.... All I desire is forgetfulness, in every acceptation of the word. Would to God I could forget myself!"
With such throes as these was the birth of Lamennais' faith in his religious vocation accompanied. He overcame his despair; he, to whom it was a necessity to be whatever he was with his whole soul—even if it was the opposite of what he had been before—became with his whole soul a priest. So absolutely did he feel himself one that his first angry exclamation when Rome left him in the lurch in 1832 was: "I will teach them what it means to defy a priest!" He had a strong character and a narrow mind; a born party man, it was his nature to take a side obstinately and blindly, to defend what he for the moment regarded as absolute truth with passionate love and eloquent hate. Hence as soon as the ruling idea of the period takes hold of him he becomes its doughtiest champion—the most ardent, the most consistent, the most sincere and most undaunted defender of the autocratic principle of authority and the unconditional submission which that principle demands. The man who had suffered such agony of mind in yielding up his own reason and will to the will of the church, the one real priest of the Neo-Catholic school, seems, as it were, to grudge other men better conditions than had been granted to himself. When, in language ominous of storm, he proclaims the gospel of authority and obedience, he, beyond all others, makes us feel how personal passion finds satisfaction in the sweeping, universal demand, how the Ego which has felt itself compelled once for all to submit to authority asserts itself by bending and bowing the wills and thoughts of all other men to that rule with which it now identifies itself.
Violent and obstinately independent, Lamennais certainly recognised no authority within his own camp. His remarks upon the other leaders of the school form a pleasing collection of invectives. Of Bonald, for instance, he writes: "Poor humanity! How M. de Bonald should be suggested to me by the word 'humanity' passes my comprehension. The transition is an abrupt one. They say that the poor man has become quite feeble-minded lately." Of Chateaubriand: "The King and he, he and the King—this is the whole history of France.... No one can understand, he least of all, how Europe is to dispense with his talents. He prophesies that Europe will fare ill." Of Frayssinous, who as leader of the Gallican party in the church was his opponent: "You call him moderate. Why? Because your attention has been drawn to something cold in him, which you take to be moderation, but which is only congealed hatred." Such is the tone of Lamennais' letters. There was, nevertheless, in his vigorous and, if not blindly precipitate, at least blindly impetuous character the very stuff to make a matchless champion of the absolute authority of the church—and this, till the end came, he proved to be—a champion whose capacity of subjecting others to discipline was greater than his capacity of allowing himself to be persuaded against his honest conviction.
In 1808 he published his Reflections on the Position of the Church in France, a work which was suppressed by Napoleon's government. He greeted the returning Bourbons with enthusiasm. But he was not yet famous. Between 1817 and 1823, however, there was published, volume by volume, a work which kept men's minds in a constant ferment, and gave occasion to violent controversy; between the publication of the second and third volumes its author had to take up his pen in his own defence. This work was the Abbé de la Mennais' Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion. In it the period of the restoration of ecclesiasticism collects all its powers for a last, decisive battle. We find all the leading principles of the day enunciated with a peremptoriness and a determined consistency in the drawing of conclusions which seem to indicate that the revulsion is at hand.