This new Chantal required a St. François de Sales; she found one in Fenelon, who was less serene and innocent, it is true, and less refulgent with boyhood and seraphic grace, but eminently noble and shrewd, subtle, eloquent, close, very devout, and very intriguing.
She laid her hands upon him, seized and carried him by an easy assault. This great genius, whose mind was stored with every variety and every contradiction, would probably have continued to waver, had it not been for this powerful impulse that forced him all on one side. Till then he had wandered between different opinions, and opposite parties and communities, so that every one claimed him as his own, and thought to possess him. Though assiduous in courting Bossuet, whose disciple he said he was, never leaving his side in his retirement at Meaux, he was not less friendly to the Jesuits, and, between the two, he still held fast to Saint-Sulpice. In his theology, at one time inclining towards Grace, at another towards Free-will, imbued with the oldest mystics, and full of the presentiments of the eighteenth century, he seems to have had, beneath his faith, some obscure corners of scepticism which he was unwilling to fathom. All these divers elements, without being able to combine, were harmonised in his outward actions, under the graceful influence of the most elegant genius that was ever met with. Being both a Grecian and a Christian, he reminds us at the same time of the fathers, philosophers, and romancers of the Alexandrian period; and sometimes our sophist turns prophet, and, in his sermon, soars on the wings of Isaiah.
Everything inclines us to believe, for all that, that the astonishing writer was the least part of Fenelon—he was superlatively the Director. Who can say by what enchantment he bewitched souls, and filled them with transport? We perceive traces of it in the infinite charms of his correspondence, disfigured and adulterated as it is;[[1]] no other has been more cruelly pruned, purged, and designedly obscured. Yet in these fragments and scattered remains, seduction is still omnipotent: besides a nobleness of manner, and an animated and refined turn of thought, in which the man of power is very perceptible under the robe of the apostle, there is also what is particularly his own, a feminine delicacy that by no means excludes strength, and even in his subtilty an indescribable tenderness that touches the heart. When a youth, and before he was tutor to the Duke of Burgundy, he had, for a long time, directed the newly converted. There he had the opportunity of well studying woman's character, and of acquiring that perfect knowledge of the female heart, in which he was unrivalled.
The impassioned interest they took in his fortune, the tears of his little flock, the Duchesses of Chevreuse, Beauvilliers, and others, when he missed the archbishopric of Paris, their constant fidelity to this well-beloved guide during his exile at Cambrai, which ended only with his death—all this fills up the void of the lost letters, and conveys a strange idea of this all-powerful magician, whose invincible magic defied every attack.
To introduce spirituality so refined and so exalted, and such a pretension to supreme perfection into that world of outward propriety and ceremonial at Versailles, and this, at the end of a reign in which everything seemed rigidly frozen—was, indeed, a rash undertaking. There was no question here of abandoning one's self, like Madame Guyon in her retreat among the Alps, to the torrents of divine love. It was necessary to have the appearance of common sense, and the forms of reason even in the madness of love; it was expedient, as the ancient comic writer says "to run mad with rule and measure." This is what Fenelon attempted to do in the Maxims of Saints. The condemnation of Molinos, and the imprisonment of Madame Guyon at Vincennes, were a sufficient lesson: he declared himself, but with prudence, and though perfectly decided, maintained an outward show of weak indecision.
Nevertheless, with all his skill, cunning, and prevarication, if he differs from the absolute Quietists whom he affects to condemn, it is less in any fundamental part of doctrine, than the degree in which he admits that doctrine. He thinks he goes far enough in saying, that the state of quiet in which the soul loses its activity is not a perpetually, but an habitually passive state. But in acknowledging inaction to be both superior to action and a state of perfection, does he not make us wish that the inaction might be perpetual?
The soul habitually passive, according to him, is concentrated above, leaving beneath her the inferior part, whose acts are those of an entirely blind and involuntary commotion. These acts being always supposed to be voluntary, he avows that the superior part still remains responsible for them. Will they then be governed by it? By no means; it is absorbed in its sublime quietude. What, then, is to interfere in its place? What is to keep order in this lower sphere, where the soul no longer descends? He tells us plainly—it is the director.
His modification of Molinos in theory is less important than it seems to be. The speculative part, with which Bossuet is so much occupied, is not the most essential in a point where practice is so directly interested. What is really serious is, that Fenelon, as well as Molinos, after having traced out a great plan of regulations, has not enough of these rules; he has to call in, at every moment, the assistance of the director. He establishes a system; but this system cannot work alone; it wants the hand of man. This inert theory continually requires the supplement of an especial consultation, and an empirical expedient. The director is a sort of supplementary soul for the soul, who, whilst this last is sleeping in its sublime sphere, is leading and regulating every thing for it in this miserable world below, which is, after all, that of reality.
Man, eternally man! this is what you find at the bottom of their doctrines in sifting and compressing them. This is the ultima ratio of their systems. Such is their theory, and such their life also.
I leave these two illustrious adversaries, Fenelon and Bossuet, to dispute about ideas. I prefer to observe their practice. There, I see that the doctrine has but a little, and man a very great part. Whether Quietists or Anti-quietists, they do not differ much in their method of enveloping the soul, and lulling the will to sleep.