Down to the last quarter of the seventeenth century the Spanish Mystics (§ 149, 16), and especially those attached to Francis de Sales, were recognised as thoroughly orthodox. But now the Jesuits appeared as the determined opponents of all mysticism that savoured of enthusiasm. By means of vile intrigues they succeeded in getting Molinos, Guyon, and Fénelon condemned, as “Quietist” heretics, although the founder of their party had been canonized and his doctrine solemnly sanctioned by the pope. Yet more objectionable to the Jesuits was that reaction toward Augustinianism which, hitherto limited to the Dominicans (§ 149, 13), and treated by them as a theological theory, was now spreading among other orders in the form of French Jansenism, accompanied by deep moral earnestness and a revival of the whole Christian life.
§ 157.1. Francis de Sales and Madame Chantal.—Francis Count de Sales, from A.D. 1602 Bishop of Geneva, i.e. in partibus, with Annecy as his residence, had shown himself a good Catholic by his zeal in rooting out Protestantism in Chablais, on the south of the Genevan lake. In A.D. 1604 meeting the young widowed Baroness de Chantal, along with whom at a later period he founded the Order of the Visitation of Mary (§ [156, 7]), he proved a good physician to her amid her sorrow, doubts, and temptations. He sought to qualify himself for this task by reading the writings of St. Theresa. Teacher and scholar so profited by their mystical studies, that in A.D. 1665 Alexander VII. deemed the one worthy of canonization and the other of beatification. In A.D. 1877 Pius IX. raised Francis to the dignity of doctor ecclesiæ. His “Introduction to the Devout Life” affords a guide to laymen to the life of the soul, amid all the disturbances of the world resting in calm contemplation and unselfish love of God. In the Catholic Church, next to À Kempis’ “Imitation of Christ,” it is the most appreciated and most widely used book of devotion.In his “Theotime” he leads the reader deeper into the yearnings of the soul after fellowship with God, and describes the perfect peace which the soul reaches in God.[461]
§ 157.2. Michael Molinos.—After Francis de Sales a great multitude of male and female apostles of the new mystical gospel sprang up, and were favourably received by all the more moderate church leaders. The reactionaries, headed by the Jesuits, sought therefore all the more eagerly to deal severely with the Spaniard Michael Molinos. Having settled in Rome in A.D. 1669, he soon became the most popular of father confessors. His “Spiritual Guide” in A.D. 1675 received the approval of the Holy Office, and was introduced into Protestant Germany through a Latin translation by Francke in A.D. 1687, and a German translation in A.D. 1699 by Arnold. In it he taught those who came to the confessional that the way to the perfection of the Christian life, which consists in peaceful rest in the most intimate communion with God, is to be found in spiritual conference, secret prayer, active and passive contemplation, in rigorous destruction of all self-will, and in disinterested love of God, fortified, wherever that is possible, by daily communion. The success of the book was astonishing. It promptly influenced all ranks and classes, both men and women, lay and clerical, not only in Italy, but also by means of translations in France and Spain. But soon a reaction set in. As early as A.D. 1681 the famous Jesuit Segneri issued a treatise, in which he charged Molinos’ contemplative mysticism with onesidedness and exaggeration. He was answered by the pious and learned Oratorian Petrucci. A commission, appointed by the Inquisition to examine the writings of both parties, pronounced the views of Molinos and Petrucci to be in accordance with church doctrine and Segneri’s objections to be unfounded. All that Jesuitism reckoned as foundation, means, and end of piety was characterized as purely elementary. No hope could be entertained of winning over Innocent XI., the bitter enemy of the Jesuits. But Louis XIV. of France, at the instigation of his Jesuit father confessor, Lachaise, expressed through his ambassador his surprise that his holiness should, not only tolerate, but even encourage and support so dangerous a heretic, who taught all Christendom to undervalue the public services of the Church. In A.D. 1685 Innocent referred the matter to the tribunal of the Inquisition. Throughout the two years during which the investigation proceeded all arts were used to secure condemnation. Extreme statements of fanatical adherents of Molinos were not rarely met with, depreciating the public ordinances and ceremonies, confession, hearing of mass, church prayers, rosaries, etc. The pope, facile with age, amid groans and lamentations, allowed things to take their course, and at last confirmed the decree of the Inquisition of August 28th, A.D. 1687, by which Molinos was found guilty of spreading godless doctrine, and sixty-eight propositions, partly from his own writings, partly from the utterances of his adherents, were condemned as heretical and blasphemous.The heretic was to abjure his heresies publicly, clad in penitential garments, and was then consigned to lifelong solitary confinement in a Dominican cloister, where he died in A.D. 1697.[462]
§ 157.3. Madame Guyon and Fénelon.—After her husband’s death, Madame Guyon, in company with her father confessor, the Barnabite Lacombe, who had been initiated during a long residence at Rome into the mysteries of Molinist mysticism, spent five years travelling through France, Switzerland, Savoy, and Piedmont. Though already much suspected, she won the hearts of many men and women among the clergy and laity, and enkindled in them by personal conference, correspondence, and her literary work, the ardour of mystical love. Her brilliant writings are indeed disfigured by traces of foolish exaggeration, fanaticism and spiritual pride. She calls herself the woman of Revelation xii. 1, and the mère de la grace of her adherents. The following are the main distinguishing characteristics of her mysticism: The necessity of turning away from everything creaturely, rejecting all earthly pleasure and destroying every selfish interest, as well as of turning to God in passive contemplation, silent devotion, naked faith, which dispensed with all intellectual evidence, and pure disinterested love, which loves God for Himself alone, not for the eternal salvation obtained through Him. On her return to Paris with Lacombe in A.D. 1686 the proper martyrdom of her life began. Her chief persecutor was her step-brother, the Parisian superior of the Barnabites, La Mothe, who spread the most scandalous reports about his half-sister and Lacombe, and had them both imprisoned by a royal decree in A.D. 1688. Lacombe never regained his liberty. Taken from one prison to another, he lost his reason, and died in an asylum in A.D. 1699. Madame Guyon, however, by the influence of Madame de Maintenon, was released after ten months’ confinement. The favour of this royal dame was not of long continuance. Warned on all sides of the dangerous heretic, she broke off all intercourse with her in A.D. 1693, and persuaded the king to appoint a new commission, in A.D. 1694, with Bishop Bossuet of Meaux at its head, to examine her suspected writings. This commission meeting at Issy, had already, in February, A.D. 1695, drawn up thirty test articles, when Fénelon, tutor of the king’s grandson, and now nominated to the archbishopric of Cambray, was ordered by the king to take part in the proceedings. He signed the articles, though he objected to much in them, and had four articles of his own added. Madame Guyon also did so, and Bossuet at last testified for her that he had found her moral character stainless and her doctrine free from Molinist heresy. But the bigot Maintenon was not satisfied with this. Bossuet demanded the surrender of this certificate that he might draw up another; and when Madame Guyon refused, on the basis of a statement by the crazed Lacombe, she was sent to the Bastile [Bastille] in A.D. 1696. In A.D. 1697 Fénelon had written in her defence his “Explication des Maximes des Saintes sur la Vie Intérieur,” showing that the condemned doctrines of passive contemplation, secret prayer, naked faith, and disinterested love, had all been previously taught by St. Theresa, John of the Cross, Francis de Sales, and other saints. He sent this treatise for an opinion to Rome. A violent controversy then arose between Bossuet and Fénelon. The pious, well-meaning pope, Innocent XII., endeavoured vainly to bring about a good understanding. Bossuet and the all-powerful Maintenon wished no reconciliation, but condemnation, and gave the king and pope no rest till very reluctantly he prohibited the objectionable book by a brief in A.D. 1699, and condemned twenty-three propositions from it as heretical. Fénelon, strongly attached to the church, and a bitter persecutor of Protestants, made an unconditional surrender, as guilty of a defective exposition of the truth. But Madame Guyon continued in the Bastile [Bastille] till A.D. 1701, when she retired to Blois, where she died in A.D. 1717. Bossuet had died in A.D. 1704, and Fénelon in A.D. 1715. She published only two of her writings: “An Exposition of the Song,” and the “Moyen Court et très Facile de faire Oraison.”Many others, including her translation and expositions of the Bible, were during her lifetime edited in twenty volumes by her friend, the Reformed preacher of the Palatinate, Peter Poiret.[463]
§ 157.4. Mysticism Tinged with Theosophy and Pantheism.—Antoinette Bourignon, the daughter of a rich merchant of Lille, in France, while matron of a hospital in her native city, had in A.D. 1662 gathered around her a party of believers in her theosophic and fantastic revelations. She was obliged to flee to the Netherlands, and there, by the force of her eloquence in speech and writing, spread her views among the Protestants. Among them she attracted the great scientist Swammerdam. But when she introduced politics, she escaped imprisonment only by flight. Down to her death in A.D. 1680 she earnestly and successfully prosecuted her mission in north-west Germany. Peter Poiret collected her writings and published them in twenty-one volumes at Amsterdam, in A.D. 1679.—Quite of another sort was the pantheistic mysticism of Angelus Silesius. Originally a Protestant physician at Breslau, he went over to the Romish church in A.D. 1653, and in consequence received from Vienna the honorary title of physician to the emperor. He was made priest in A.D. 1661, and till his death in A.D. 1677 maintained a keen polemic against the Protestant church with all a pervert’s zeal. Most of his hymns belong to his Protestant period. As a Catholic he wrote his “Cherubinischer Wandersmann,” a collection of rhymes in which, with childish naïveté and hearty, gushing ardour, he merges self into the abyss of the universal Deity, and develops a system of the most pronounced pantheism.
§ 157.5. Jansenism in its first Stage.—Bishop Cornelius Jansen, of Ypres, who died in A.D. 1638, gave the fruits of his lifelong studies of Augustine in his learned work, “Augustinus s. doctr. Aug. de humanæ Naturæ Sanitate, Ægritudine, et Medicina adv. Pelagianos et Massilienses,” which was published after his death in three volumes, Louvain, 1640. The Jesuits induced Urban VIII., in A.D. 1642, to prohibit it in his bull In eminenti. Augustine’s numerous followers in France felt themselves hit by this decree. Jansen’s pupil at Port Royal from A.D. 1635, Duvergier de Hauranne, usually called St. Cyran, from the Benedictine monastery of which he was abbot, was the bitter foe of the Jesuits and Richelieu, who had him cast into prison in A.D. 1638, from which he was liberated after the death of the cardinal in A.D. 1643, and shortly before his own. Another distinguished member of the party was Antoine Arnauld, doctor of the Sorbonne, who died in A.D. 1694, the youngest of twenty children of a parliamentary advocate, whose powerful defence of the University of Paris against the Jesuits called forth their hatred and lifelong persecution. His mantle, as a vigorous polemist, had fallen upon his youngest son. Very important too was the influence of his much older sister, Angelica Arnauld, Abbess of the Cistercian cloister of Port Royal des Champs, six miles from Paris, which under her became the centre of religious life and effort for all France. Around her gathered some of the noblest, most pious, and talented men of the time: the poet Racine, the mathematician and apologist Pascal, the Bible translator De Sacy, the church historian Tillemont, all ardent admirers of Augustine and determined opponents of the lax morality of the Jesuits. Arnauld’s book, “De la fréquente Communion,” was approved by the Sorbonne, the Parliament, and the most distinguished of the French clergy; but in A.D. 1653 Innocent X. condemned five Jansenist propositions in it as heretical. The Augustinians now maintained that these doctrines were not taught in the sense attributed to them by the pope. Arnauld distinguished the question du fait from the question du droit, maintaining that the latter only were subject to the judgment of the Holy See. The Sorbonne, now greatly changed in composition and character, expelled him on account of this position from its corporation in A.D. 1656. About this time, at Arnauld’s instigation, Pascal, the profound and brilliant author of “Pensées sur la Religion,” began, under the name of Louis de Montalte to publish his famous “Provincial Letters,” which in an admirable style exposed and lashed with deep earnestness and biting wit the base moral principles of Jesuit casuistry. The truly annihilating effect of these letters upon the reputation of the powerful order could not be checked by their being burnt by order of Parliament by the hangman at Aix in A.D. 1657, and at Paris in A.D. 1660. But meanwhile the specifically Jansenist movement entered upon a new phase of its development. Alexander VII. had issued in A.D. 1656 a bull which denounced the application of the distinction du fait and du droit to the papal decrees as derogatory to the holy see, and affirmed that Jansen taught the five propositions in the sense they had been condemned. In order to enforce the sentence, Annal, the Jesuit father confessor of Louis XIV., obtained in 1661 a royal decree requiring all French clergy, monks, nuns, and teachers to sign a formula unconditionally accepting this bull. Those who refused were banished, and fled mostly to the Netherlands. The sorely oppressed nuns of Port Royal at last reluctantly agreed to sign it; but they were still persecuted, and in A.D. 1664 the new archbishop, Perefixe, inaugurated a more severe persecution, placed this cloister under the interdict, and removed some of the nuns to other convents. In A.D. 1669, Alexander’s successor, Clement IX., secured the submission of Arnauld, De Sacy, Nicole, and many of the nuns by a policy of mild connivance. But the hatred of the Jesuits was still directed against their cloister. In A.D. 1705 Clement XI. again demanded full and unconditioned acceptance of the decree of Alexander VII., and when the nuns refused, the pope, in A.D. 1708, declared this convent an irredeemable nest of heresy, and ordered its suppression, which was carried out in A.D. 1709.In A.D. 1710 cloister and church were levelled to the ground, and the very corpses taken out of their graves.[464]—Continuation, § [165, 7].
§ 158. Science and Art in the Catholic Church.
Catholic theology flourished during the seventeenth century as it had never done since the twelfth and thirteenth. Especially in the liberal Gallican church there was a vigorous scientific life. The Parisian Sorbonne and the orders of the Jesuits, St. Maur, and the Oratorians, excelled in theological, particularly in patristic and historical, learning, and the contemporary brilliancy of Reformed theology in France afforded a powerful stimulus. But the best days of art, especially Italian painting, were now past. Sacred music was diligently cultivated, though in a secularized style, and many gifted hymn-writers made their appearance in Spain and Germany.
§ 158.1. Theological Science (§ 149, 14).—The parliamentary advocate, Mich. le Jay, published at his own expense the Parisian Polyglott in ten folio vols., A.D. 1629-1645, which, besides complete Syriac and Arabic translations, included also the Samaritan. The chief contributor was the Oratorian Morinus, who edited the LXX. and the Samaritan texts, which he regarded as incomparably superior to the Masoretic text corrupted by the Jews. The Jansenists produced a French translation of the Bible with practical notes, condemned by the pope, but much read by the people. It was mainly the work of the brothers De Sacy. The New Testament was issued in A.D. 1667 and the Old Testament somewhat later, called the Bible of Mons from the fictitious name of the place of publication. Richard Simon, the Oratorian, who died in A.D. 1712, treated Scripture with a boldness of criticism never before heard of within the church. While opposed by many on the Catholic side, the curia favoured his work as undermining the Protestant doctrine of Scripture. Cornelius à Lapide, who died A.D. 1637, expounded Scripture according to the fourfold sense.—In systematic theology the old scholastic method still held sway. Moral theology was wrought out in the form of casuistry with unexampled lasciviousness, especially by the Jesuits (§ 149, 10). The work of the Spaniard Escobar, who died in A.D. 1669, ran through fifty editions, and that of Busembaum, professor in Cologne and afterwards rector of Münster, who died A.D. 1668, went through seventy editions. On account of the attempted assassination of Louis XV. by Damiens in A.D. 1757, with which the Jesuits and their doctrine of tyrannicide were charged, the Parliament of Toulouse in A.D. 1757, and of Paris in A.D. 1761, had Busembaum’s book publicly burnt, and several popes, Alexander VII., VIII., and Innocent XI., condemned a number of propositions from the moral writings of these and other Jesuits. Among polemical writers the most distinguished were Becanus, who died in A.D. 1624, and Bossuet (§ [153, 7]). Among the Jansenists the most prominent controversialists were Nicole and Arnauld, who, in order to escape the reproach of Calvinism, sought to prove the Catholic doctrine of the supper to be the same as that of the apostles, and were answered by the Reformed theologians Claude and Jurieu. In apologetics the leading place is occupied by Pascal, with his brilliant “Pensées.” Huetius, a French bishop and editor of Origen, who died in A.D. 1721, replied to Spinoza’s attacks on the Pentateuch, and applying to reason itself the Cartesian principle, that philosophy must begin with doubt, pointed the doubter to the supernatural revealed truths in the Catholic church as the only anchor of salvation. The learned Jesuit Dionysius Petavius, who died in A.D. 1652, edited Epiphanius and wrote gigantic chronological works and numerous violent polemics against Calvinists and Jansenists. His chief work is the unfinished patristic-dogmatic treatise in five vols. folio, A.D. 1680, “De theologicis Dogmatibus.” The Oratorian Thomassinus wrote an able archæological work: “Vetus et Nova Eccl. Disciplina circa Beneficia et Beneficiarios.”
§ 158.2. In church history, besides those named in § 5, 2, we may mention Pagi, the keen critic and corrector of Baronius. The study of sources was vigorously pursued. We have collections of mediæval writings and documents by Sirmond, D’Achery, Mabillon, Martène, Baluzius; of acts of councils by Labbé and Cossart, those of France by Jac. Sirmond, and of Spain by Aguirre; acts of the martyrs by Ruinart; monastic rules by Holstenius, a pervert, who became Vatican librarian, and died at Rome A.D. 1661. Dufresne Ducange, an advocate, who died in A.D. 1688, wrote glossaries of the mediæval and barbarous Latin and Greek, indispensable for the study of documents belonging to those times. The greatest prodigy of learning was Mabillon, who died in A.D. 1707, a Benedictine of St. Maur, and historian of his order. Pet. de Marca, who died Archbishop of Paris A.D. 1662, wrote the famous work on the Gallican liberties “De Concordia Sacerdotii et Imperii.” The Jansenist doctor of the Sorbonne, Elias du Pin, who died A.D. 1719, wrote “Nouvelle Bibliothèque des Auteurs Eccles.” in forty-seven vols. The Jesuit Maimbourg, died A.D. 1686, compiled several party histories of Wiclifism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism; but as a Gallican was deprived of office by the pope, and afterwards supported by a royal pension. The Antwerp Jesuits Bolland, Henschen, Papebroch started, in A.D. 1643, the gigantic work “Acta Sanctorum,” carried on by the learned members of their order in Belgium, known as Bollandists. It was stopped by the French invasion of A.D. 1794, when it had reached October 15th with the fifty-third folio vol. The Belgian Jesuits continued the work from A.D. 1845-1867, reaching in six vols. the end of October, but not displaying the ability and liberality of their predecessors. In Venice Paul Sarpi (§ [155, 2]) wrote a history of the Tridentine Council, one of the most brilliant historical works of any period. Leo Allatius, a Greek convert at Rome, who died in A.D. 1669, wrote a work to show the agreement of the Eastern and Western churches. Cardinal Bona distinguished himself as a liturgical writer.—In France pulpit eloquence reached the highest pitch in such men as Flechier, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Fénelon, Massillon, and Bridaine. In Vienna Abraham à St. Clara inveighed in a humorous, grotesque way against the corruption of manners, with an undercurrent of deep moral earnestness. Similar in style and spirit, but much more deeply sunk in Catholic superstition, was his contemporary the Capuchin Martin of Cochem, who missionarized the Rhine Provinces and western Germany for forty years, and issued a large number of popular religious tracts.—Continuation, § [165, 14].