§ 165.6. Conversions.—Pecuniary interests and prospect of marriage with a rich heiress led to the conversion, in A.D. 1712, of Charles Alexander while in the Austrian service; but when he became Duke of Württemburg [Württemberg] he solemnly undertook to keep things as they were, and to set up no Catholic services in the country save in his own court chapel. Of other converts Winckelmann and Stolberg are the most famous. While Winckelmann, the greatest of art critics, not a religious but an artistic ultramontane, was led in A.D. 1754 through religious indifference into the Romish church, the warm heart of Von Stolberg was induced, mainly by the Catholic Princess Gallitzin (§ [172, 2]) and a French emigrant, Madame Montague, to escape the chill of rationalism amid the incense fumes of the Catholic services.—Continuation, § [175, 7].
§ 165.7. The Second Stage of Jansenism (§ [157, 5]).—Pasquier Quesnel, priest of the Oratory at Paris, suspected in 1675 of Gallicanism, because of notes in his edition of the works of Leo the Great, fled into the Netherlands, where he continued his notes on the N.T. Used and recommended by Noailles, Archbishop of Paris, and other French bishops, this “Jansenist” book was hated by the Jesuits and condemned by a brief of Clement XI. in A.D. 1708. The Jesuit confessor of Louis XIV., Le Tellier, selected 101 propositions from the book, and induced the king to urge their express condemnation by the pope. In the Constitution Unigenitus of A.D. 1713, Clement pronounced these heretical, and the king required the expulsion from parliament and church of all who refused to adopt this bull, which caused a division of the French church into Acceptants and Appellants. As many of the condemned propositions were quoted literally by Quesnel from Augustine and other Fathers, or were in exact agreement with biblical passages, Noailles and his party called for an explanation. Instead of this the pope threatened them with excommunication. In A.D. 1715 the king died, and under the Duke of Orleans’ regency in A.D. 1717, four bishops, with solemn appeal to a general council, renounced the papal constitution as irreconcilable with the Catholic faith. They were soon joined by the Sorbonne and the universities of Rheims and Nantes, Archbishop Noailles, and more than twenty bishops, all the congregations of St. Maur and the Oratorians with large numbers of the secular clergy and the monks, especially of the Lazarists, Dominicans, Cistercians, and Camaldulensians. The pope, after vainly calling them to obey, thundered the ban against the Appellants in A.D. 1718. But the parliament took the matter up, and soon the aspect of affairs was completely changed. The regent’s favourite, Dubois, hoping to obtain a cardinal’s hat, took the side of the Acceptants and carried the duke with him, who got the parliament in 1720 to acknowledge the bull, with express reservation, however, of the Gallican liberties, and began a persecution of the Appellants. Under Louis XV. the persecution became more severe, although in many ways moderated by the influence of his former tutor, Cardinal Fleury. Noailles, who died in 1729, was obliged in 1728 to submit unconditionally, and in A.D. 1730 the parliament formally ratified the bull. Amid daily increasing oppression, many of the more faithful Jansenists, mostly of the orders of St. Maur and the Oratory, fled to the Netherlands, where they gave way more and more to fanaticism. In 1727 a young Jansenist priest, Francis of Paris, died with the original text of the appeal in his hands. His adherents honoured him as a saint, and numerous reports of miracles, which had been wrought at his grave in Medardus churchyard at Paris, made this a daily place of pilgrimage to thousands of fanatics. The excited enthusiasts, who fell into convulsions, and uttered prophecies about the overthrow of church and state, grew in numbers and, with that mesmeric power which fanaticism has been found in all ages to possess powerfully influenced many who had been before careless and profane. One of these was the member of parliament De Montgeron, who, from being a frivolous scoffer, suddenly, in 1732, fell into violent convulsions, and in a three-volumed work, “La Vérité des Miracles Opérés par l’Intercession de François de Paris,” 1737, came forward as a zealous apologist of the party. The government, indeed, in 1732 ordered the churchyard to be closed, but portions of earth from the grave of the saint continued to effect convulsions and miracles. Thousands of convulsionists throughout France were thrown into prison, and in 1752, Archbishop Beaumont of Paris, with many other bishops, refused the last sacrament to those who could not prove that they had accepted the constitution. The grave of “St. Francis,” however, was the grave of Jansenism, for fanatical excess contains the seeds of dissolution and every manifestation of it hastens the catastrophe. Yet remnants of the party lingered on in France till the outbreak of the Revolution, of which they had prophesied.
§ 165.8. The Old Catholic Church in the Netherlands.—The first Jesuits appeared in Holland in A.D. 1592. The form of piety fostered by superior and inferior clergy in the Catholic church there, a heritage from the times of the Brethren of the Common Life (§ [112, 9]), was directed to the deepening of Christian thought and feeling; and this, as well as the liberal attitude of the Archbishop of Utrecht, awakened the bitter opposition of the Jesuits. At the head of the local clergy was Sasbold Vosmeer, vicar-general of the vacant archiepiscopal see of Utrecht. Most energetically he set himself to thwart the Jesuit machinations, which aimed at abolishing the Utrecht see and putting the church of Holland under the jurisdiction of the papal nuncio at Cologne. On the ground of suspicions of secret conspiracy Vosmeer was banished. But his successors refused to be overruled or set aside by the Jesuits. Meanwhile in France the first stage of the Jansenist controversy had been passed through. The Dutch authorities had heartily welcomed the condemned book of their pious and learned countryman; but when the five propositions were denounced, they agreed in repudiating them, without, however, admitting that they had been taught in the sense objected to by Jansen. The Jesuits, therefore, charged them with the Jansenist heresy, and issued in A.D. 1697 an anonymous pamphlet full of lying insinuations about the origin and progress of Jansenism in Holland.Its beginning was traced back to a visit of Arnauld to Holland in A.D. 1681, and its effects were seen in the circulation of prayer-books, tracts, and sermons, urging diligent reading of Scripture, in the depreciation of the worship of Mary, of indulgences, of images of saints and relics, rosaries and scapularies (§ [186, 2]), processions and fraternities, in the rigoristic strictness of the confessional, the use of the common language of the country in baptism, marriage, and extreme unction, etc. The archbishop of that time, Peter Codde, in order to isolate him, was decoyed to Rome, and there flattered with hypocritical pretensions of goodwill, while behind his back his deposition was carried out, and an apostolic vicar nominated for Utrecht in the person of his deadly foe Theodore de Cock. But the chapter refused him obedience, and the States of Holland forbad him to exercise any official function, and under threat of banishment of all Jesuits demanded the immediate return of the archbishop. Codde was now sent down with the papal blessing, but a formal decree of deposition followed him. Meanwhile the government pronounced on his rival De Cock, who avoided a trial for high treason by flight, a sentence of perpetual exile. But Codde, though persistently recognised by his chapter as the rightful archbishop, withheld on conscientious grounds from discharging official duties down to his death in A.D. 1710. Amid these disputes the Utrecht see remained vacant for thirteen years. The flock were without a chief shepherd, the inferior clergy without direction and support, the people were wrought upon by Jesuit emissaries, and the vacant pastorates were filled by the nuncio of Cologne. Thus it came about that of the 300,000 Catholics remaining after the Reformation, only a few thousands continued faithful to the national party, while the rest became bitter and extreme ultramontanes, as the Catholic church of Holland still is. Finally, in A.D. 1723, the Utrecht chapter took courage and chose a new archbishop in the person of Cornelius Steenowen. Receiving no answer to their request for papal confirmation, the chapter, after waiting a year and a half, had him and also his three successors consecrated by a French missionary bishop, Varlet, who had been driven away by the Jesuits. But in order to prevent the threatened loss of legitimate consecration for future bishops after Varlet’s death in A.D. 1742, a bishop elected at Utrecht was in that same year ordained to the chapter of Haarlem, and in A.D. 1758 the newly founded bishopric of Deventer was so supplied. All these, like all subsequent elections, were duly reported to Rome, and a strictly Catholic confession from electors and elected sent up; but each time, instead of confirmation, a frightful ban was thundered forth. This, however, did not deter the Dutch government from formally recognising the elections.—Meanwhile the second and last act of the Jansenist tragedy had been played in France. Many of the persecuted Appellants sought refuge in Holland, and the welcome accorded them seemed to justify the long cherished suspicion of Jansenism against the people of Utrecht. They repelled these charges, however, by condemning the five propositions and the heresies of Quesnel’s book; but they expressly refused the bull of Alexander VII. and its doctrine of papal infallibility. This put a stop to all attempts at reconciliation. The church of Utrecht meanwhile prospered. At a council held at Utrecht in A.D. 1765 it styled itself “The Old Roman Catholic Church of the Netherlands,” acknowledged the pope, although under his anathema, as the visible head of the Christian church, accepted the Tridentine decrees as their creed, and sent this with all the acts of council to Rome as proof of their orthodoxy. The Jesuits did all in their power to overturn the formidable impression which this at first made there; and they were successful. Clement XIII. declared the council null, and those who took part in it hardened sons of Belial.But their church at this day contains, under one archbishop and two bishops, twenty-six congregations, numbering 6,000 souls.[494]—Continuation, § [200, 3].
§ 165.9. Suppression of the Order of Jesuits, A.D. 1773.—The Jesuits had striven with growing eagerness and success after worldly power, and instead of absolute devotion to the interests of the papacy, their chief aim was now the erection of an independent political and hierarchical dominion. Their love of rule had sustained its first check in the overthrow of the Jesuit state of Paraguay; but they had secured a great part of the world’s trade (§ [156, 13]), and strove successfully to control European politics. The Jansenist controversy, however, had called forth against them much popular odium; Pascal had made them ridiculous to all men of culture, the other monkish orders were hostile to them, their success in trade roused the jealousy of other traders, and their interference in politics made enemies on every hand. The Portuguese government took the first decided step. A revolt in Paraguay and an attempt on the king’s life were attributed to them, and the minister Pombal, whose reforms they had opposed, had them banished from Portugal in A.D. 1759, and their goods confiscated. Clement XIII., A.D. 1758-1769, chosen by the Jesuits and under their influence, protected them by a bull; but Portugal refused to let the bull be proclaimed, led the papal nuncio over the frontier, broke off all relations with Rome, and sent whole shiploads of Jesuits to the pope. France followed Portugal’s example when the general Ricci had answered the king’s demand for a reform of his orders: Sint ut sunt, aut non sint. For the enormous financial failure of the Jesuit La Valette, the whole order was made responsible, and at last, in A.D. 1764, banished from France as dangerous to the state. Spain, Naples, and Parma, too, soon seized all the Jesuits and transported them beyond the frontiers. The new papal election on the death of Clement XIII. was a life and death question with the Jesuits, but courtly influences and fears of a schism prevailed. The pious and liberal Minorite Ganganelli mounted the papal throne as Clement XIV., A.D. 1769-1774. He began with sweeping administrative reforms, forbad the reading of the bull In cœna Domini (§ [117, 3]), and, pressed by the Bourbon court, issued in A.D. 1773 the bull Dominus ac Redemtor Noster suppressing the Jesuit order. The order numbered 22,600 members and the pope felt, in granting the bull, that he endangered his own life. Next year he died, not without suspicion of poisoning. All the Catholic courts, even Austria, put the decree in force. But the heretic Frederick II. tolerated the order for a long time in Silesia, and Catherine II. and Paul I. in their Polish provinces.—Pius VI., A.D. 1775-1799, in many respects the antithesis of his predecessor, was the secret friend of the exiled and imprisoned ex-Jesuits. After the outbreak of the French Revolution, a proposal was made at Rome, in A.D. 1792, for the formal restoration of the order, as a means of saving the seriously imperilled church, but it did not find sufficient encouragement.
§ 165.10. Anti-hierarchical Movements in Germany and Italy.—Even before Joseph II. could carry out his reforms in ecclesiastical polity, the noble elector Maximilian Joseph III., A.D. 1745-1777, with greater moderation but complete success, effected a similar reform in the Jesuit-overrun Bavaria. Himself a strict Catholic, he asserted the supremacy of the state over a foreign hierarchy, and by reforming the churches, cloisters, and schools of his country he sought to improve their position. But under his successor, Charles Theodore, A.D. 1777-1799, everything was restored to its old condition.—Meanwhile a powerful voice was raised from the midst of the German prelates that aimed a direct blow at the hierarchical papal system. Nicholas von Hontheim, the suffragan Bishop of Treves, had under the name Justinus Febronius published, in A.D. 1763, a treatise De Statu Ecclesiæ, in which he maintained the supreme authority of general councils and the independence of bishops in opposition to the hierarchical pretensions of the popes. It was soon translated into German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. The book made a great impression, and Clement XIII. could do nothing against the bold defender of the liberties of the church. In A.D. 1778, indeed, Pius VI. had the poor satisfaction of extorting a recantation from the old man of seventy-seven years, but he lived to see yet more deadly storms burst upon the church. Urged by Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavaria, the pope, in A.D. 1785, had made Munich the residence of a nuncio. The episcopal electors of Mainz, Cologne, and Treves, and the Archbishop of Salzburg, seeing their archiepiscopal rights in danger, met in congress at Ems in A.D. 1786, and there, on the basis of the Febronian proofs, claimed, in the so called Punctation of Ems, practical independence of the pope and the restoration of an independent German national Catholic church. But the German bishops found it easier to obey the distant pope than the near archbishops. So they united their opposition with that of the pope, and the undertaking of the archbishops came to nothing.—More threatening still for the existence of the hierarchy was the reign of Joseph II. in Austria. German emperor from A.D. 1765, and co-regent with his mother Maria Theresa, he began, immediately on his succession to sole rule in A.D. 1780, a radical reform of the whole ecclesiastical institutions throughout his hereditary possessions. In A.D. 1781 he issued his Edict of Toleration, by which, under various restrictions, the Protestants obtained civil rights and liberty of worship. Protestant places of worship were to have no bells or towers, were to pay stole dues to the Catholic priests, in mixed marriages the Catholic father had the right of educating all his children and the Catholic mother could claim the education at least of her daughters. By stopping all episcopal communications with the papal curia, and putting all papal bulls and ecclesiastical edicts under strict civil control, the Catholic church was emancipated from Roman influences, set under a native clergy, and made serviceable in the moral and religious training of the people, and all her institutions that did not serve this end were abolished. Of the 2,000 cloisters, 606 succumbed before this decree, and those that remained were completely sundered from all connexion with Rome. In vain the bishops and Pius VI. protested. The pope even went to Vienna in A.D. 1782; but though received with great respect, he could make nothing of the emperor. Joseph’s procedure had been somewhat hasty and inconsiderate, and a reaction set in, led by interested parties, on the emperor’s early death in A.D. 1790.—The Grand-duke Leopold of Tuscany, Joseph’s brother, with the aid of the pious Bishop Scipio von Ricci, inclined to Jansenism, sought also in a similar way to reform the church of his land at the Synod of Pistoia, in A.D. 1786. But here too at last the hierarchy prevailed.
§ 165.11. Theological Literature.—The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, A.D. 1685, gave the deathblow to the French Reformed theology, but it also robbed Catholic theology in France of its spur and incentive. The Huguenot polemic against the papacy, and that of Jansenism against the semi-pelagianism of the Catholic church, were silenced; but now the most rabid naturalism, atheism, and materialism held the field, and the church theology was so lethargic that it could not attempt any serious opposition. Yet even here some names are worthy of being recorded. Above all, Bernard de Montfaucon of St. Maur, the ablest antiquarian of France, besides his classical works, issued admirable editions of Athanasius, Chrysostom, Origen’s “Hexapla,” and the “Collectio Nova Patrum.” E. Renaudot, a learned expert in the oriental languages, wrote several works in vindication of the “Perpétuité de la Foi cath.,” a history of the Jacobite patriarchs of Alexandria, etc., and compiled a “Collectio liturgiarum Oriental,” in two vols. Of permanent worth is the “Bibliotheca Sacra” of the Oratorian Le Long, which forms an admirable literary-historical apparatus for the Bible. The learned Jesuit Hardouin, who pronounced all Greek and Latin classics, with few exceptions, to be monkish products of the thirteenth century, and denied the existence of all pre-Tridentine general councils, edited a careful collection of Acts of Councils in twelve vols. folio in Paris, 1715, and compiled an elaborate chronology of the Old Testament. His pupil, the Jesuit Berruyer, wrote a romancing “Hist. du Peuple de Dieu,” which, though much criticised, was widely read. Incomparably more important was the Benedictine Calmet, died A.D. 1757, whose “Dictionnaire de la Bible” and “Commentaire Littéral et Critique” on the whole Bible are really most creditable for their time. And, finally, the Parisian professor of medicine, Jean Astruc, deserves to be named as the founder of the modern Pentateuch criticism, whose “Conjectures sur les Mémoires Originaux,” etc., appeared in Brussels A.D. 1753.—Within the limits of the French Revolution the noble theosophist St. Martin, died A.D. 1805, a warm admirer of Böhme, wrote his brilliant and profound treatises.
§ 165.12. In Italy the most important contributions were in the department of history. Mansi, in his collection of Acts of Councils in thirty-one vols. folio, A.D. 1759 ff., and Muratori, in his “Scriptores Rer. Italic.,” in twenty-eight vols., and “Antiquitt. Ital. Med. Ævi,” in six vols., show brilliant learning and admirable impartiality. Ugolino, in a gigantic work, “Thesaurus Antiquitt. ss.,” thirty-four folio vols., A.D. 1744 ff., gathers together all that is most important for biblical archæology. The three Assemani, uncle and two nephews, cultured Maronites in Rome, wrought in the hitherto unknown field of Syrian literature and history. The uncle, Joseph Simon, librarian at the Vatican, wrote “Bibliotheca Orientalis,” in four vols., A.D. 1719 ff., and edited Ephraem’s [Ephraim’s] works in six vols. The elder nephew, Stephen Evodius, edited the “Acta ss. Martyrum Orient. et Occid.,” in two vols., and the younger, Joseph Aloysius, a “Codex Liturgicus Eccles. Univ.,” in thirteen vols. Among dogmatical works the “Theologia hist.-dogm.-scholastica,” in eight vols. folio, Rome, 1739, of the Augustinian Berti deserves mention. Zaccaria of Venice, in some thirty vols., proved an indefatigable opponent of Febronianism, Josephinism, and such-like movements, and a careful editor of older Catholic works. The Augustinian Florez, died A.D. 1773, did for Spain what Muratori had done for Italy in making collections of ancient writers, which, with the continuations of the brethren of his order, extended to fifty folio volumes.—In Germany the greatest Catholic theologian of the century was Amort. Of his seventy treatises the most comprehensive is the “Theologia Eclectica, Moralis et Scholastica,” in four vols. folio, A.D. 1752. He conducted a conciliatory polemic against the Protestants, contested the mysticism of Maria von Agreda (§ [156, 5]), and vigorously controverted superstition, miracle-mongering, and all manner of monkish extravagances. To the time of Joseph II. belongs the liberal, latitudinarian supernaturalist Jahn of Vienna, whose “Introduction to the Old Testament,” and “Biblical Antiquities” did much to raise the standard of biblical learning. For his anti-clericalism he was deprived of his professorship in A.D. 1805, and died in A.D. 1816 a canon in Vienna. To this century also belongs the greatly blessed literary labours of the accomplished mystic, Sailer, beginning at Ingolstadt in A.D. 1777, and continued at Dillingen from A.D. 1784. Deprived in A.D. 1794 of his professorship on pretence of his favouring the Illuminati, it was not till A.D. 1799 that he was allowed to resume his academic work in Ingolstadt and Landshut. By numerous theological, ascetical, and philosophical tracts, but far more powerfully by his lectures and personal intercourse, he sowed the seeds of rationalism, which bore fruit in the teachings of many Catholic universities, and produced in the hearts of many pupils a warm and deep and at the same time a gentle and conciliatory Catholicism, which heartily greeted, even in pious Protestants, the foundations of a common faith and life. Compare § [187, 1].—Continuation, § [191].
§ 165.13. The German-Catholic Contribution to the Illumination.—The Catholic church of Germany was also carried away with the current of “the Illumination,” which from the middle of the century had overrun Protestant Germany. While the exorcisms and cures of Father Gassner in Regensburg were securing signal triumphs to Catholicism, though these were of so dubious a kind that the bishops, the emperor, and finally even the curia, found it necessary to check the course of the miracle worker, Weishaupt, professor of canon law in Ingolstadt, founded, in A.D. 1776, the secret society of the Illuminati, which spread its deistic ideas of culture and human perfectibility through Catholic South Germany. Though inspired by deadly hatred of the Jesuits, Weishaupt imitated their methods, and so excited the suspicion of the Bavarian government, which, in A.D. 1785, suppressed the order and imprisoned and banished its leaders.—Catholic theology too was affected by the rationalistic movement. But that the power of the church to curse still survived was proved in the case of the Mainz professor, Laurence Isenbiehl, who applied the passage about Immanuel, in Isaiah vii. 14, not to the mother of Christ, but to the wife of the prophet, for which he was deposed in A.D. 1774, and on account of his defective knowledge of theology was sent back for two years to the seminary. When in A.D. 1778 he published a learned treatise on the same theme, he was put in prison. The pope too condemned his exposition as pestilential, and Isenbiehl “as a good Catholic” retracted. Steinbühler, a young jurist of Salzburg, having been sentenced to death in A.D. 1781 for some contemptuous words about the Catholic ceremonies, was pardoned, but soon after died from the ill-treatment he had received. The rationalistic movement got hold more and more of the Catholic universities. In Mainz, Dr. Blau, professor of dogmatics, promulgated with impunity the doctrine that in the course of centuries the church has often made mistakes. In the Austrian universities, under the protection of the Josephine edict, a whole series of Catholic theologians ventured to make cynically free criticisms, especially in the field of church history. At Bonn University, founded in A.D. 1786 by the Elector-archbishop of Cologne, there were teachers like Hedderich, who sportively described himself on the title page of a dissertation as “jam quater Romæ damnatus,” Dereser, previously a Carmelite monk, who followed Eichhorn in his exposition of the biblical miracles, and Eulogius Schneider, who, after having made Bonn too hot for him by his theological and poetical recklessness, threw himself into the French Revolution, for two years marched through Alsace with the guillotine as one of the most dreaded monsters, and finally, in A.D. 1794, was made to lay his own head on the block.—At the Austrian universities, under the protection of the tolerant Josephine legislation, a whole series of Catholic theologians, Royko, Wolff, Dannenmayr, Michl, etc., criticised, often with cynical plainness, the proceedings and condition of the Catholic church. To this class also, in the first stage of his remarkably changeful and eventful career, belongs Ign. Aur. Fessler. From 1773, a Capuchin in various cloisters, last of all in Vienna, he brought down upon himself the bitter hatred of his order by making secret reports to the emperor about the ongoings that prevailed in these convents. He escaped their enmity by his appointment, in 1784, as professor of the oriental languages and the Old Testament at Lemberg, but was in 1787 dismissed from this office on account of various charges against his life, teaching, and poetical writings. In Silesia, in 1791, he went over to the Protestant church, joined the freemasons, held at Berlin the post of a councillor in ecclesiastical and educational affairs for the newly won Catholic provinces of Poland, and, after losing this position in consequence of the events of the war of 1806, found employment in Russia in 1809; first, as professor of oriental languages at St. Petersburg, and afterwards, when opposed and persecuted there also on suspicion of entertaining atheistical views, as member of a legal commission in South Russia. Meanwhile having gradually moved from a deistical to a vague mystical standpoint, he was in 1819 made superintendent and president of the evangelical consistory at Saratov, with the title of an evangelical bishop, and after the abolition of that office in 1833 he became general superintendent at St. Petersburg, where he died in 1839. His romances and tragedies as well as his theological and religious writings are now forgotten, but his “Reminiscences of his Seventy Years’ Pilgrimage,” published in 1824, are still interesting, and his “History of Hungary,” in ten volumes, begun in 1812, is of permanent value.
§ 165.14. The French Contribution to the Illumination.—The age of Louis XIV., with the morals of its Jesuit confessors, the lust, bigotry, and hypocrisy of its court, its dragonnades and Bastille polemic against revivals of a living Christianity among Huguenots, mystics, and Jansenists, its prophets of the Cevennes and Jansenist convulsionists, etc., called forth a spirit of freethinking to which Catholicism, Jansenism, and Protestantism appeared equally ridiculous and absurd. This movement was essentially different from English deism. The principle of the English movement was common sense, the universal moral consciousness in man, with the powerful weapon of rational criticism, maintaining the existence of an ideal and moral element in men, and holding by the more general principles of religion. French naturalism, on the other hand, was a philosophy of the esprit, that essentially French lightheartedness which laughed away everything of an ideal sort with scorn and wit. Yet there was an intimate relationship between the two. The philosophy of common sense came to France, and was there travestied into a philosophy d’esprit. The organ of this French philosophy was the “Encyclopédie” of Diderot and D’Alembert, and its most brilliant contributors, Montesquieu, Helvetius, Voltaire, and Rousseau. Montesquieu, A.D. 1689-1755, whose “Esprit des Lois” in two years passed through twenty-two editions, wrote the “Lettres Persanes,” in which with biting wit he ridiculed the political, social, and ecclesiastical condition of France. Helvetius, A.D. 1715-1771, had his book, “De l’Esprit,” burnt in A.D. 1759 by order of parliament, and was made to retract, but this only increased his influence. Voltaire, A.D. 1694-1778, although treating in his writings of philosophical and theological matters, gives only a hash of English deism spiced with frivolous wit, showing the same tendency in his historical and poetical works, giving a certain eloquence to the commonest and filthiest subjects, as in his “Pucelle” and “Candide.” He obtained, however, an immense influence that extended far past his own days. To the same class belongs Jean Jacques Rousseau, A.D. 1712-1778, belonging to the Roman Catholic church only as a pervert for seventeen years in the middle of his life. Of a nobler nature than Voltaire, he yet often sank into deep immorality, as he tells without reserve, but also without any hearty penitence, in his Confessions. His whole life was taken up with the conflict for his ideals of freedom, nature, human rights, and human happiness. In his “Contrat Social” of A.D. 1762, he commends a return to the natural condition of the savage as the ideal end of man’s endeavour. His “Emile” of A.D. 1761 is of epoch-making importance in the history of education, and in it he eloquently sets forth his ideal of a natural education of children, while he sent all his own (natural) children to a foundling hospital.—The physician De la Mettrie, who died at the court of Frederick the Great in A.D. 1751, carried materialism to its most extreme consequences, and the German-Frenchman Baron Holbach, A.D. 1723-1789, wrote the “Système de la Nature,” which in two years passed through eighteen editions.[495]
§ 165.15. These seeds bore fruit in the French Revolution. Voltaire’s cry “Écrasez l’infame,” was directed against the church of the Inquisition, the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the dragonnades, and Diderot had exclaimed that the world’s salvation could only come when the last king had been strangled with the entrails of the last priest. The constitutional National Assembly, A.D. 1789-1791, wished to set aside, not the faith of the people, but only the hierarchy, and to save the state from a financial crisis by the goods of the church. All cloisters were suppressed and their property sold. The number of bishops was reduced to one half, all ecclesiastical offices without a pastoral sphere were abolished, the clergy elected by the people paid by the state, and liberty of belief recognised as an inalienable right of man. The legislative National Assembly, A.D. 1791, 1792, made all the clergy take an oath to the constitution on pain of deposition. The pope forbad it under the same threat. Then arose a schism. Some 40,000 priests who refused the oath mostly quitted the country. Avignon (§ [110, 4]) had been incorporated in the French territory. The terrorist National Convention, A.D. 1792-1795, which brought the king to the scaffold on January 21st, A.D. 1793, and the queen on October 16th, prohibited all Christian customs, on 5th October abolished the Christian reckoning of time, and on November 7th Christianity itself, laid waste 2,000 churches and converted Notre Dame into a Temple de la Raison, where a ballet-dancer represented the goddess of reason. Stirred up by the fanatical baron, “Anacharsis” Cloots, “the apostle of human freedom and the personal enemy of Jesus Christ,” the Archbishop Gobel, now in his sixtieth year, came forward, proclaiming his whole past life a fraud, and owning no other religion than that of freedom. On the other hand, the noble Bishop Gregoire of Blois, the first priest to support the constitution, who voted for the abolition of royalty, but not the execution of the king, was not driven by the terrorism of the convention, of which he was a member, from a bold and open profession of Christianity, appearing in his clerical dress and unweariedly protesting against the vandalism of the Assembly.Robespierre[496] himself said, “Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer,” passed in A.D. 1794 the resolution, Le peuple français reconnait l’Être suprême et l’immortalité de l’âme, and issued an order to celebrate the fête de l’Être suprême. The Directory, A.D. 1795-1799, restored indeed Christian worship, but favoured the deistical sect of the Theophilanthropists, whose high-swelling phrases soon called forth public scorn, while in A.D. 1802 the first consul banished their worship from all churches. But meanwhile, in A.D. 1798, in order to nullify the opposition of the pope, French armies had overrun Italy and proclaimed the Church States a Roman Republic.Pius VI. was taken prisoner to France, and died in A.D. 1799 at Valence under the rough treatment of the French, without having in the least compromised himself or his office.[497]