Fénelon: The Mystic

by James Mudge

His enemies, we are told, practiced the shameful artifice of placing about him an ecclesiastic of high birth whom he considered only as one of his grand vicars, but who was to act as a spy upon him. The man who had consented to take so base an office had, however, the magnanimity to punish himself for it. Utterly subdued by the purity and gentleness of spirit that he witnessed in Fénelon, he threw himself at his feet and confessed the unworthy part he had been led to act, and withdrew from the world to conceal in retirement his grief and shame.

As will be inferred from these incidents his hospitality to those who came to him from all parts of Europe, as well as from near by, was unbounded. In spite of the urgency and multiplicity of his employments he was always ready, with the greatest kindness of feeling, to pay the utmost attention to all who had the slightest claim upon his time. He did not hesitate to drop his eloquent pen, with which he conversed with all Europe, whenever Providence called him to listen to the awkward utterances of the most ignorant and degraded among his people. His practice and his preference was to suffer any personal inconvenience, or sacrifice any private interest, rather than injure the feelings of a fellow-man or omit an opportunity of usefulness. Writing to a friend about his daily routine he says: “I must confer with the Chapter on a lawsuit; I must write and dispatch letters; I must examine accounts. How dreary would be life made up of these perplexities and details but for the will of God which glorifies all He has given us to do!” This is the keynote on which Fénelon toned and tuned his life at Cambrai, making himself the servant of all, ministering rather than being ministered unto, glorying in the honor of such services, fearful of the outward pomps the Church conferred upon him, yet accepting them in all simplicity because he fully believed the Church to be directed by his Master.

“I have seen him,” says the Chevalier Ramsay, “in the course of a single day, converse with the great and speak their language, ever maintaining the episcopal dignity; afterwards discourse with the simple and the little, like a good father instructing his children. This sudden transition from one extreme to the other, was without affectation or effort, like one who, by the extensiveness of his genius, reaches to all the most opposite distances. I have often observed him at such conferences, and have as much admired the evangelical condescension by which he became all things to all men as the sublimity of his discourses. While he watched over his flock with a daily care, he prayed in the deep retirement of internal solitude. The many things which were generally admired in him were nothing in comparison of that divine life by which he walked with God like Enoch, and was unknown to men.”

The Abbé Galet, another of Fénelon’s contemporaries, bears loud witness to the fact that, however grand the outside accommodations were, the archbishop’s personal appointments were of the most modest description. He says that “in the meager simplicity of his private living rooms, fitted up plainly in serge, of his dress—a long velvet cassock trimmed with scarlet, but without gold tassels or lace—even of his ecclesiastical vestments, Fénelon did homage to that idea of holy poverty whose actual practice was forbidden by his station in the world.”

But when it came to others, Fénelon was very considerate and very generous. When he had cause to send his chaplains into the country on any business of the diocese, it was always in one of his own carriages and with one of his own attendants, that the respect which he showed them might conciliate to them the general respect of his flock. He took, so far as possible, the burdens of his clergy on himself, offered to pay more tax than he needed to, even wasted (as it would now seem) money on beggars whose appearance moved his sympathies. Yet he also practiced sound economy, that he might have the more to give, held a careful audit of his household accounts, and set aside large portions of his income for the starving soldiers, or the interests of his seminary, or the education of his nephews and their maintenance in the army. He educated great numbers of students at his own expense, sending them to Paris; especially the young men that were likely to prove good priests, but were too poor to bear the financial burden. He had always a whole string of his nephews and grandnephews or other relatives gathered about him, young people whose education he was asked to take charge of or those whose interests, for friends’ or relationship’s sake, he was desirous to promote. He was never without the presence of children in the palace. A suite of rooms above his own was reserved for them. Not only his relatives, but the sons of his intimate friends, were placed in his care, that he might train them to be good and chivalrous gentlemen. Very few of these boys were intended for the priesthood, but the confidence that Fénelon inspired was so great that it was believed a child reared under his eye would be better fitted for court or camp than if he spent his early years in the company of princes at St. Germain or Versailles. The last of his little guests were the grandchildren of his friend, De Chevreuse, and, harassed though he was by national disasters, he could spare time to study and report upon them and express his pleasure in their company. He wrote of the children, “I delight to have them here; I love them dearly; they cheer me much; they do not trouble me in any way.” They were with him to the end; so that from the day he entered on his duties at Versailles until his death he may be said to have given a definite proportion of his time and energy to the practical demonstration of his excellent theories of education.

During the contest for the Spanish succession, in the early years of the eighteenth century, between France and Bavaria on the one side, and England, Holland, and Austria on the other, the diocese of Cambrai, not far from the Netherlands, which has sometimes been denominated the battle-field of Europe, was within the realm of war, and suffered much from the cruel ravages of the advancing and retreating armies. Under these circumstances, Fénelon continued his constant visitations to every part of the district, and all the writers dwell upon the singular marks of homage paid on these occasions to his eminent virtue by people of every name. So far from putting any obstacle in his way, the English, Germans, and Dutch took every means of showing their admiration and veneration for the archbishop. All distinctions of religion and sect, all those feelings of hatred or jealousy which divide nations, disappeared in his presence. He was often obliged to resort to artifice to avoid the honors which the armies of the enemy intended him. He refused the military escorts which were offered him for his personal security in the exercise of his functions, and, with no other attendants than a few ecclesiastics, he traversed the countries desolated by war. His way was marked by his alms and benefactions, and by a suspending of the calamities which armies bring. In these short intervals the people breathed in peace, so that his pastoral visits might be termed a truce of God. The Duke of Marlborough, the Prince of Orange, the Duke of Ormond, the distinguished commanders who were opposed to France, embraced every opportunity of showing their esteem. They sent detachments of their men to guard his meadows and his corn; they caused his grain to be transported with a convoy to Cambrai, lest it should be seized and carried off by their own foragers. St. Simon, by no means his friend, can not say enough in panegyric for his never-ending kindness to the troops brought through Cambrai during the war. The duke paints him as moving among the sick and the whole, the known and the unknown, the officers and the common soldiers, with a knowledge of the world which understood how to gain them all by treating each in his due degree, and yet a true and cheerful shepherd of their souls, as constant in his ministration to the humblest as though he had no other business in life. And he was no less careful for their bodily comfort; lodged officers innumerable in his palace; hired other houses besides for the same purpose; filled them with the sick and wounded, and with poor people driven from the neighboring villages; tended the sick with his own hands, sometimes for many months, until their entire recovery; supplied the hospitals with costly drugs and endless streams of food and delicacies, sent out, for all their abundance, in such perfect order that every patient had exactly what he needed. He was on the best of terms with the nobles and government officials, not only of his diocese but of all Flanders, even as far as Brussels, and used his influence with them to beg many temporal favors for his people; got his village schoolmasters exempted from service in the army, saved the farmers and their horses from forced labors in the winter, and even warned the Ministry at Paris that the devastated country could be the theater of no more campaigns. When the commissariat of the king was in extreme want of corn, the archbishop emptied his immense granaries for their subsistence, and absolutely refused all compensation. He said, “The king owes me nothing, and in times of calamity it is my duty as a citizen and a bishop to give back to the State what I have received from it.” It was thus he avenged himself for his disgrace. At another critical moment, only a timely advance from his own purse prevented the garrison of St. Omer from going over in a body to the enemy, as other unpaid regiments had done. It is no wonder that he became the idol of the troops, who sang his praises even in the antechambers of Versailles. And his fame stood equally high with those who were fighting against the king.

He was loved by so many because he was himself so full of love. An instance of his largeness both of mind and heart occurred during these closing years, which deserves to be recorded, for it certainly does not stand alone. The English prince known as the Old Pretender was an officer in the French army in 1709, and his duty took him near to Cambrai. In the conversations which passed between them, the archbishop recommended to him very emphatically never to compel his subjects to change their religion. “Liberty of thought,” said he, “is an impregnable fortress which no human power can force. Violence can never convince; it only makes hypocrites. When kings take it upon them to direct in matters of religion instead of protecting it, they bring it into bondage. You ought therefore to grant to all a legal toleration; not as approving everything indifferently, but as suffering with patience what God suffers; endeavoring in a proper manner to restore such as are misled, but never by any measures but those of gentle and benevolent persuasion.”

Even against the Jansenists, who were fierce Augustinians, the ultra Calvinists of that time in the matter of the Divine decrees, and whom he thoroughly disliked, being himself a firm friend of free will, he would by no means have harsh measures taken. The sweetness of his disposition and his idea of the meekness of God, made him strongly averse to the doctrines of Quesnel and Jansen, which he considered as leading to despair. “God,” he said, “is to them only a terrible Being; to me He is a Being good and just. I can not consent to make Him a tyrant who binds us with fetters, and then commands us to walk, and punishes us if we do not.” In this he was at one with John Wesley. But he would not, any more than the Methodist, permit persecution of them in his diocese. “Let us,” said he, “be to them what they are unwilling that God should be to man, full of compassion and indulgence.” He was told that the Jansenists were his declared enemies, that they left nothing undone to bring him and his doctrine into discredit. “That is one further reason,” said he, “for me to suffer and forgive them.”

On hearing that some peasants in Hainaut, who were descended from Protestants, and who held still the same opinions, had received the sacrament from a minister of their own persuasion, but that, when discovered, they disguised their sentiments and even went to mass, he said to the Reformed minister: “Brother, you see what has happened. It is full time that these good people should have some fixed religion; go and obtain their names, and those of all their families; I give you my word that in less than six months they shall all have passports”—that is, to go where they like. The same clergyman, whose name was Brunice, he received at his table as a brother, and treated him with great kindness.

To an officer of the army who consulted him to know what course he should adopt with such of his soldiers as were Huguenots, Fénelon answered: “Tormenting and teasing heretic soldiers into conversion, will answer no end; it will not succeed; it will only produce hypocrites. The converts so made will desert in crowds.”