Fénelon: The Mystic

CHAPTER I.
FROM YOUTH TO MANHOOD.

Christian perfection, or the highest possibilities of Christian grace and growth, is a theme of intense interest to every true lover of the Lord. There are many ways of promoting it, widely differing in their merits and their helpfulness. Without disparaging other methods, it may be safely said that nothing can be better than example. Christianity centers around a person; and personal experience perennially appeals. Better than abstract discussion is concrete practice. More profitable than speculation and controversy is an actual life on highest levels. There is also a large advantage in beholding such a life in another age and land and Church, thus noting how God can magnify and fulfill Himself in very diverse circumstances, and amid intellectual influences that to us are quite obnoxious.

We invite, therefore, the attention of the thoughtful reader to a man who presents one of the most perfect types of human purity that the world has ever seen; one who for two hundred years has stood among the choicest few of those universally esteemed to be authorities in spiritual things; one endowed with a luster which the lapse of time can not tarnish,—a luster far brighter than can be bestowed by mere worldly honors or temporal prosperity, however high. He not only had a heart filled with the love of God and glowing with pure devotion, but also a mind capable of the closest analysis and the keenest discrimination. He was not only a saint, but also a scholar and a genius, an original thinker as well as a pursuer of holiness. Such combinations are very rare. His thirst for perfection has probably never been surpassed. Seldom, if ever, has such a remarkable combination of high qualities tabernacled in the flesh. He had both modesty and majesty, both simplicity and sublimity, unconquerable firmness in duty, unsurpassed meekness in society; he was equally eminent for piety and politeness, for morals and manners; he was sympathetic and chivalrous, severe to himself, indulgent to others. In the midst of a voluptuous court he practiced the virtues of an anchorite; with the revenues of a prince at command he hardly allowed himself ordinary comforts. His abilities awaken our admiration, his afflictions excite our compassion. Born among the nobility of earth, he resisted the blandishments of earthly pomp, and became crowned with the far higher nobility of heaven. He was truly humble and truly heroic; good as well as great; skillful in teaching, wise in counsel, master of an elegant style both in composition and discourse; faithful to his friends and kind to his foes; devoted to his native land, generous to his family, a man of peace yet ready to fight for the faith, true to his convictions, tolerant toward those of other beliefs, tenderly affectionate, vigorously diligent; the glory of his country, the joy of mankind, the beloved of the Lord. He had an intense nature, and was, as has been said, “One whose religion must be more loving than love, his daily life more kind than kindness, his words truer than truth itself.” Lamartine calls him “beautiful as a Raphael’s St. John leaning on the bosom of Christ.” He had the imagination of a woman for dreaming of heaven, and the soul of a man for subduing the earth. The especially feminine qualities were prominent in him, yet he strikes no one as effeminate, and when he felt himself set for the defense of the truth he showed a power that greatly surprised his enemies. “His soul was like a star and dwelt apart,” “alone with the Alone.” And yet he was so deeply interested in the welfare of France and his fellow-men that he has been called a politician; statesman would be the word more befitting the facts, for his ideas as to the measures and policies necessary to make the land prosperous were in the main very wise, and he had no personal ends to serve. In whatever capacity we consider him—poet, orator, moralist, metaphysician, politician, instructor, bishop, friend, persecuted Christian—he excites our keenest interest, our warmest admiration. He greatly desired to please every one, and succeeded so far as circumstances allowed; but the desire was held in strictest control by a strong sense of duty, which compelled him at times to do and say things most unacceptable to many. He was no courtier, no flatterer, he could not make his own interests the first consideration. He was a prophet in Gomorrah, charged with a message which pressed upon him for utterance, and for the delivery of which the time was short. At the court of Louis XIV—a spot above all others on the face of the earth, perhaps, in that century, disgraced by selfishness, hypocrisy, and intrigue—he bears not a little resemblance to a seraph sent on a divine mission to the shades of the lost. There is endless fascination in his story. He was not without faults, but his faults were those of his age; his virtues were his own. He turned a haughty, irritable, overbearing young prince, an incipient Cæsar Borgia, into the mildest, most docile, obedient of men. He possessed his soul in peace amid provocations that would have been far too much for most of us. Neither public disgrace nor personal bereavement had power to embitter him. He listened to the voice of God within him, and marched straight on, breast forward. In the language of Herder, “His Church indeed canonized him not, but humanity has.” He is a saint in the eyes of multitudes not attracted by official sanctity; an apostle of liberty that dared withstand the Grand Monarque; a martyr spending half a life in exile, through the machinations of a court faction which dreaded his incorruptible goodness. “Being dead, he yet speaketh.” “One of the noblest men who ever lived,” says Dr. John Henry Kurtz, the distinguished Church historian. Joseph de Maistre exclaims: “Do we wish to paint ideal greatness? Let us try to imagine something that surpasses Fénelon—we shall not succeed.” Let us, then, putting aside imagination, endeavor to rescue from the musty record of the misty past, a lifelike image of this many-sided, multiple, versatile personality.

CONTENTS

Fénelon: The Mystic

CHAPTER I.FROM YOUTH TO MANHOOD.

CHAPTER I.
FROM YOUTH TO MANHOOD.