[727] Bibliothèque Universelle, iii. 39, vii. 335, xxii. 120. Biogr. Universelle. Œuvres de Bossuet, vol. xxx. Dupin seems not to have held the superiority of bishops to priests jure divino, which nettles our man of Meaux. Ces grands critiques sont peu favorables aux supériorités ecclésiastiques, et n’aiment guère plus celles des evêques que celle du pape, p. 491.
Fleury’s Ecclesiastical History. 7. Dupin was followed a few years afterwards by one not his superior in learning and candour (though deficient in neither), but in skill of narration and beauty of style, Claude Fleury. The first volume of his Ecclesiastical History came forth in 1691; but a part only of the long series falls within this century. The learning of Fleury has been said to be frequently not original; and his prolixity to be too great for an elementary historian. The former is only blameable when he has concealed his immediate authorities; few works of great magnitude have been written wholly from the prime sources; with regard to his diffuseness, it is very convenient to those who want access to the original writers, or leisure to collate them. Fleury has been called by some credulous and uncritical; but he is esteemed faithful, moderate, and more respectful or cautious than Dupin. Yet many of his volumes are a continual protest against the vices and ambition of the mediæval popes, and his Ecclesiastical History must be reckoned among the causes of that estrangement, in spirit and affection, from the court of Rome which leavens the literature of France in the eighteenth century.
His Dissertations. 8. The dissertations of Fleury, interspersed with his history, were more generally read and more conspicuously excellent. Concise, but neither dry nor superficial; luminous, yet appearing simple; philosophical without the affectation of profundity, seizing all that is most essential in their subject without the tediousness of detail or the pedantry of quotation; written, above all, with that clearness, that ease, that unaffected purity of taste, which belong to the French style of that best age, they present a contrast not only to the inferior writings on philosophical history with which our age abounds, but, in some respects, even to the best. It cannot be a crime that these dissertations contain a good deal which, after more than a century’s labour in historical inquiry, has become more familiar than it was.
Protestant Controversy in France. 9. The French protestants, notwithstanding their disarmed condition, were not, I apprehend, much oppressed under Richelieu and Mazarin. But soon afterwards an eagerness to accelerate what was taking place through natural causes, their return into the church, brought on a series of harassing edicts, which ended in the revocation of that of Nantes. During this time, they were assailed by less terrible weapons, yet such as required no ordinary strength to resist, the polemical writings of the three greatest men in the church of France, Nicole, Arnauld, and Bossuet. The two former were desirous to efface the reproaches of an approximation to Calvinism, and of a disobedience to the Catholic church, under which their Jansenist party was labouring. Nicole began with a small treatise, entitled La Perpétuité de la Foi de l’Eglise Catholique, touchant l’Eucharistie, in 1664. This aimed to prove that the tenet of transubstantiation had been constant in the church. Claude, the most able controvertist among the French protestants, replied in the next year. This led to a much more considerable work by Nicole and Arnauld conjointly, with the same title as the former; nor was Claude slow in combating his double-headed adversary. Nicole is said to have written the greater portion of this second treatise, though it commonly bears the name of his more illustrious colleague.[728]
[728] Biogr. Univ.
Bossuet’s exposition of Catholic faith. 10. Both Arnauld and Nicole were eclipsed by the most distinguished and successful advocate of the Catholic church, Bossuet. His Exposition de la Foi Catholique was written in 1668, for the use of two brothers of the Dangeau family; but having been communicated to Turenne, the most eminent protestant that remained in France, it contributed much to his conversion. It was published in 1671; and though enlarged from the first sketch, does not exceed eighty pages in octavo. Nothing can be more precise, more clear, or more free from all circuity and detail than this little book; everything is put in the most specious light; the authority of the ancient church, recognised by the majority of protestants, is alone kept in sight. Bossuet limits himself to doctrines established by the Council of Trent, leaving out of the discussion not only all questionable points, but, what is perhaps less fair, all rites and usages, however general, or sanctioned by the regular discipline of the church, except so far as formally approved by that council. Hence, he glides with a transient step over the invocation of saints and the worship of images, but presses with his usual dexterity on the inconsistencies and weak concessions of his antagonists. The Calvinists, or some of them, had employed a jargon of words about real presence, which he exposes with admirable brevity and vigour.[729] Nor does he gain less advantage in favour of tradition and church authority from the assumption of somewhat similar claims by the same party. It has often been alledged that the Exposition of Bossuet was not well received by many on his own side. And for this there seems to be some foundation, though the Protestant controvertists have made too much of the facts. It was published at Rome in 1678, and approved in the most formal manner by Innocent XI. the next year. But it must have been perceived to separate the faith of the church, as it rested on dry propositions, from the same faith living and embodied in the every-day worship of the people.[730]
[729] Bossuet observes that most other controversies are found to depend more on words than substance, and the difference becomes less the more they are examined; but in that of the eucharist the contrary is the case, since the Calvinists endeavour to accommodate their phraseology to the Catholics, while essentially they differ. Vol. xviii., p. 135.
[730] The writings of Bossuet against the Protestants occupy nine volumes, xviii.-xxvi., in the great edition of his works. Versailles, 1816. The Exposition de la Foi is in the eighteenth. Bausset, in his life of Bossuet, appears to have refuted the exaggerations of many Protestants as to the ill reception of this little book at Rome. Yet there was a certain foundation for it. See Bibliothèque Universelle, vol. xi., p. 455.
His conference with Claude. 11. Bossuet was now the acknowledged champion of the Roman church in France; Claude was in equal pre-eminence on the other side. These great adversaries had a regular conference in 1678. Mademoiselle de Duras, a protestant lady, like most others of her rank at that time, was wavering about religion, and in her presence the dispute was carried on. It entirely turned on church authority. The arguments of Bossuet differed only from those which have often been adduced by the spirit and conciseness with which he presses them. We have his own account which of course gives himself the victory. It was almost as much of course that the lady was converted; for it is seldom that a woman can withstand the popular argument on that side, when she has once gone far enough to admit the possibility of its truth by giving it a hearing. Yet Bossuet deals in sophisms which, though always in the mouths of those who call themselves orthodox, are contemptible to such as know facts as well as logic. “I urged,” he says, “in a few words what presumption it was to believe that we can better understand the word of God than all the rest of the church, and that nothing would thus prevent there being as many religions as persons.”[731] But there can be no presumption in supposing that we may understand anything better than one who has never examined it at all; and if this rest of the church, so magnificently brought forward, have commonly acted on Bossuet’s principle, and thought it presumptuous to judge for themselves; if out of many millions of persons a few only have deliberately reasoned on religion, and the rest have been, like true zeros, nothing in themselves, but much in sequence; if also, as is most frequently the case, this presumptuousness is not the assertion of a paradox or novelty, but the preference of one denomination of Christians, or of one tenet maintained by respectable authority to another, we can only scorn the emptiness, as well as resent the effrontery of this common-place that rings so often in our ears. Certainly, reason is so far from condemning a deference to the judgment of the wise and good, that nothing is more irrational than to neglect it; but when this is claimed for those whom we need not believe to have been wiser and better than ourselves, nay, sometimes whom without vain-glory we may esteem less, and that so as to set aside the real authority of the most philosophical, unbiassed, and judicious of mankind, it is not pride or presumption, but a sober use of our faculties that rejects the jurisdiction.
[731] Œuvres de Bossuet, xxiii., 290.