In spite of Mr. Gibson's contention to the contrary, it can hardly be maintained that De Lamennais was well educated in the strict sense of the expression. The evidence he adduces points to a marvellous diversity of interests, and even to close and careful reading. But on the whole he was self-taught, and a self-taught man is never educated. Without intercourse with other living minds, education is impossible. This is indeed hoisting De Lammenais with his own petard. For, according to "Traditionalism," the mind is paralyzed by isolation, and can be duly developed only in society. An overweening self-confidence and slight regard for the labours of other thinkers usually characterizes self-taught genius. This it was that led him to cut all connection with the philosophy of the past, and to attempt to build up, single-handed, a new system to supplant that which had been the fruit of the collective mind-labour of centuries. "I shall work out," he writes calmly to the Abbé Brute, "a new system for the defence of Christianity against infidels and heretics, a very simple system, in which the proofs will be so rigorous that unless one is prepared to give up the right of saying I am, it will be necessary to say Credo to the very end." Only a man with a very slight and superficial acquaintance with the endeavours of previous apologists, and the extreme difficulty of the problem, could speak with such portentous self-confidence. And the result bears out this remark. For grand and imposing as is the structure of the Essai sur l'Indifférence, it rests on fallacies so patent that none but a man of no philosophical training could have failed to perceive them. Here it is that the self-taught man comes to grief and often misses the mere truisms of traditional teaching.
Doubtless ecclesiastical philosophy and theology was then more than ever painfully fossilized, and altogether lifeless and out of sympathy with the spirit of the age. It needed to be quickened, adapted and applied to modern exigencies. The undue intrusion of metaphysics into the domain of positive knowledge needed checking; the value of consensus communis as a criterion required to be insisted on, defended, and exactly defined. With characteristic impetuosity, De Lamennais, like Comte, must bundle metaphysics out of doors altogether as a merely provisional but illusory synthesis, necessary for the human intellect in its adolescence, but to be discarded in its maturity; and thereupon he proceeds to erect his system of Traditionalism mid-air, quite unconscious that in clearing away metaphysics he has deprived the structure of its only possible foundation. But this is the man all over. Because there is a truth in Traditionalism, therefore, it is the whole and only truth; because metaphysics alone can do little, it is therefore unnecessary and worthless. Had he spent but a fraction of the time and trouble he gave to the elaboration of his own system, in a liberal and critical study of that which he desired to supersede, his genius might have accomplished a work for the Church which is still halting badly on its way to perfection. One feels something like anger in contemplating such hot-headed zeal standing continually in its own light, and frustrating with perverse ingenuity the very end which it was most desirous to realize. For no one can deny that from his first conversion to his unhappy death De Lamennais was dominated by the highest and noblest and most unselfish motives; that he was a man of absolute sincerity of purpose.
His earliest enthusiasm was for the defence and exaltation of the Catholic Faith, for the liberation of the Church from the bonds of nationalism and Erastianism. Even those who repudiate altogether the extreme Ultramontanism of De Maistre and De Lamennais must allow their conception to be one of the boldest and grandest which has inspired the mind of man. He realized more vividly than many that the cause of the Church and of society, of Catholicism and humanity, were one and the same. It was the very intensity and depth of his convictions that made him so importunate in pressing them on others, so intolerant of delay, so infuriated by opposition. For indeed nothing is more common than to find a thousand selfishnesses co-existing and interfering with a dominant unselfishness, lessening or totally destroying its fruitfulness for good. A man who is unselfish enough to devote his fortune to charity will not necessarily be free from faults which may more than undo the good he proposes.
The same hastiness of thought which moved him to a wholesale, indiscriminate condemnation of metaphysics, led him to conclude that because hitherto no happy adjustment of the relations between Church and State had been devised, there could be no remedy save in their total severance. Doubtless such a severance would be better, if Gallicanism were the only alternative; or if the Church's liberty and efficiency were to be seriously curtailed. A superficial glance might fancy a fundamental discrepancy in this matter, as well as in the questions of toleration, and of the freedom of the press, between the official teaching of Gregory XVI. and Pius IX., and that of Leo XIII. But a closer inspection shows no alteration of principle, and only a recognition of altered circumstances, either necessitating a connivance at inevitable evils, or totally changing the aspect of the question. But De Lamennais should have learnt from his own teaching that liberty does not mean the independence of isolation, but the full enjoyment of all the means necessary for perfect self-development; that it does not mean the weakness of dissociation, but the strength of a perfectly organized association for mutual help and protection. And this holds good, not for individuals alone, but for societies, and for Church and State. Aiming at one common end, the perfection of humanity, they cannot but gain by association and lose by dissociation. Each is weaker even, in its own sphere, apart from the other. It is an unreal abstraction that splits man into two beings—a body and a soul; that draws a clean, hard-and-fast line between his temporal and eternal welfare; that commits the former interest to one society, the latter to another, absolutely distinct and unconnected. But all this holds true only in the hypothesis of a nation of Christians or Theists.
When a large fraction of the community has ceased to believe in Christianity and the Church, the demands of justice and reason are different. It may well be allowed that, to determine the exact relation of the Catholic Church and Christian State, and the law of their organization into one complex society, is a problem for whose perfect solution we must wait the further development of the ideas of ecclesiastical and civil society. But to wait for growth of subjective truth was just what De Lamennais could not do. He saw that past solutions of the problem had been unsuccessful; that in most cases the Church was eventually drawn into bondage under the State as its creature and instrument in the cause of tyranny and oppression; that it was insensibly permeated with the local and national spirit, differentiated from Catholic Christendom, and severed from the full influence of its head, the Vicar of Christ. The independence of the Church he rightly judged to be the great safeguard of the people against the tyranny of their temporal rulers. In the face of that world-wide spiritual society, whose voice was at once the voice of humanity and the voice of God, he felt that "iniquity would stop its mouth," and injustice be put to shame. Yet all this seemed to him impossible so long as the Church depended on the State for temporalities, and because he could devise no form of association that would be guarantee against all abuses, he therefore insisted on total, severance, not merely as expedient for the present pressure, but as a divine and eternal principle.
When, therefore, it seemed to him that Gregory XVI. had condemned Ultramontanism, it was, to De Lamennais, as though he had condemned the cause of the Church and of humanity, and thrown the weight of his authority into that of Gallicanism. Here again we see how his mental intensity and impatience reduced him to the dilemma which found solution in his apostasy. Holding as he did to the Papal infallibility in a form far more extreme than that subsequently approved by the Vatican Council, he was bound in consistency to accept the Pope's decision as infallible in respect to its expediency and in all its detail. Thus it seemed to him that the ideal for which he had lived was shattered by a self-inflicted blow. The infallible voice of humanity had declared against the cause of humanity. He found himself compelled, in virtue of his principles, to choose between two alternatives. Either the cause of humanity, as he conceived it, was not the cause of God; or else the Pope was not the Vicar of Christ and the divinely-appointed guardian of that cause. But of the two denials the former was now to him the least tolerable. "Catholicism," he said, "was my life, because it was that of humanity." Sacramenta, propter homines; the Church was made for man, and not man for the Church. Given the dilemma, who shall blame his choice? But the dilemma was purely subjective and imaginary. Though truths are never irreconcilable, the exaggerations of truth may well be so.
Had he possessed that intellectual patience in perplexity, without which not only faith, but true science, is impossible, he would have been driven not to apostasy, but to a careful re-sifting of his views, issuing, perhaps, in a reconciliation of apparently adverse positions, or at all events in a confession of subjective, uncertainty and confusion. Faith, in the wider sense of the word, would have bid him to believe, without seeing, what we have lived to see under Leo XIII.
This seems to be the intellectual aspect of his defection, though of course there were many accelerating causes at work. Perhaps if Gregory XVI. had met his appeal with a few words of simple explanation and advice, instead of with that mysterious reticence which is falsely supposed to be the soul of diplomacy, the issue might have been as happy as it was miserable. De Lamennais himself, in his Affaires de Rome, makes the same remark in so many words. Again, the illiberal and ungenerous persecution of his triumphant adversaries, who endeavoured to goad him into some open act of rebellion in order to bring him under still heavier condemnation, can scarcely have failed to embitter and harden a soul naturally disposed to pessimism and melancholy. Nor can we omit from the influences at work upon him, that dramatic instinct which makes a mediocre and colourless attitude impossible for those who are strongly under its influence. Perhaps no nation is more governed by it than the French, with their partiality for tableaux and sensation; and in De Lamennais its presence was most marked, as the pages of his Paroles will witness. In the Too Late with which he received the overtures of Pius IX.; in the studied sensationalism of his funeral arrangements, and in many other minute points, we are made sensible that if his life culminated in a tragedy, the tragic aspect of it was not altogether displeasing to him. Still it would be a grievous slur on so great a character to suppose that such a weakness could have had any considerable part in his steady and deliberate refusal to see a priest at the last. This is sufficiently accounted for by the fact that he believed he could not be absolved without accepting the condemnation of his own views, and so abandoning the cause of humanity. While under the spell of his imaginary dilemma, he was constrained to follow the rule for a perplexed conscience, and to choose what seemed to him the less of two evils.
After his ideal had been destroyed, and the Church could no longer be for him the Saviour of the Nations, he threw himself without reserve into the cause of humanity and liberty. But his aims were now almost entirely destructive and revolutionary. His enthusiasm was rather a hatred of the things that were, than an ardent zeal for the things that ought to be; and the bitter elements in his character become more and more accentuated as he finds himself gradually thrust aside and forgotten—cast off by the Church, ignored by the revolution. Even his friends, with one or two exceptions, dropped off one by one; some fleeing like rats from a sinking ship, others perplexed at his obstinacy or offended by his violence; others removed by death or distance; and we see him in his old age poor and lonely, and intensely unhappy.
When dangerously ill in 1827, he exclaimed, on being told that it was a fine night, "For my peace, God grant that it may be my last." The prayer was not heard, for, as he felt on his recovery, God had a great work for him to do. How that work was done we have just seen. Féli de Lamennais, who would have been buried as a Christian in 1827, was buried as an infidel in 1854.