At Paris a hot war of letters, pamphlets, and treatises, was maintained by the leaders, whose quarrel everywhere divided the city and the court into two hostile encampments. Fénélon offered a resistance Bossuet had never anticipated, and the veteran polemic was deeply mortified to see public opinion doubtful, whether he or a younger rival had won the laurels in argument and eloquence. In an evil hour for his fame he resolved to crush his antagonist at all costs; he determined that the laws of honourable warfare should be regarded no more, that no confidence should be any longer sacred. In the summer of 1698 the storm burst upon the head of the exile at Cambray. Early in June, Fénélon heard that the Abbé de Beaumont, his nephew, and the Abbé de Langeron, his friend, had been dismissed in disgrace from the office of sub-preceptors to the young Duke of Burgundy; that Dupuy and De Leschelles, had been banished the Court because of their attachment to him; that his brother had been expelled from the marine, and a son of Madame Guyon from the guards; that the retiring and pacific Fleury had narrowly escaped ignominy for a similar cause: that the Dukes of Beauvilliers, Chevreuse, and Guiche, were themselves menaced, and the prospect of their downfall openly discussed; and that to correspond with him was hereafter a crime against the State. Within a month, another Job’s messenger brought him tidings that Bossuet had produced a book entitled An Account of Quietism—an attack so terrible that the dismay of his remaining friends had almost become despair. Bossuet possessed three formidable weapons—his influence as a courtier, his authority as a priest, his powers as an author. He wielded them all at once, and all of them dishonourably. If he was unfair in the first capacity, when he invoked the thunders of royalty to ruin the cause of a theological opponent—if he was unfair in the second, when he denounced forbearance and silenced intercession as sins against God,—he was yet more so in the third, when he employed all his gifts, to weave into a malignant tissue of falsehood and exaggeration the memoirs of Madame Guyon, the correspondence of Fénélon with Madame de Maintenon, and his former confidential letters to himself—letters on spiritual matters to a spiritual guide—letters which should have been sacred as the secresy of the Confessional. The sensation created by the Account of Quietism was prodigious. Bossuet presented his book to the King, whose approval was for every parasite the authentication of all its slanders. Madame de Maintenon, with her own hand, distributed copies among the courtiers; in the salon of Marly nothing else was talked of; in the beautiful gardens groups of lords and ladies, such as Watteau would have loved to paint, were gathered on the grass, beside the fountains, beneath the trees, to hear it read; it was begged, borrowed, stolen, greedily snatched, and delightedly devoured; its anecdotes were so piquant, its style so sparkling, its bursts of indignant eloquence so grand; gay ladies, young and old, dandies, wits, and libertines, found its scandal so delicious,—Madame Guyon was so exquisitely ridiculous,—La Combe, so odious a Tartuffe,—Fénélon, so pitiably displumed of all his shining virtues; and, what was best of all, the insinuations were worse than the charges,—the book gave much and promised more,—it hinted at disclosures more disgraceful yet, and gave free scope to every malicious invention and every prurient conjecture.[[363]]
XII.
The generous Fénélon, more thoughtful for others than for himself, at first hesitated to reply even to such a provocation, lest he should injure the friends who yet remained to him at Versailles. But he was soon convinced that their position, as much as his, rendered an answer imperative. He received Bossuet’s book on the 8th of July, and by the 13th of August his defence had been written, printed, and arrived at Rome, to gladden the heart of poor Chanterac, to stop the mouth of the enemy, and to turn the tide once more in behalf of his failing party. This refutation, written with such rapidity, and under such disadvantages, was a masterpiece,—it redeemed his character from every calumny,—it raised his reputation to its height,—it would have decided a fair contest completely in his favour. It was composed when his spirit was oppressed by sorrow for the ruin of his friends, and darkened by the apprehension of new injuries which his justification might provoke,—by a proscribed man at Cambray, remote from the assistance and appliances most needful,—without a friend to guide or to relieve the labour of arranging and transcribing documents and of verifying dates, where scrupulous accuracy was of vital importance,—when it was difficult to procure correct intelligence from Paris, and hazardous to write thither lest he should compromise his correspondents,—when even his letters to Chanterac were not safe from inspection,—when it would be difficult to find a printer for such a book, and yet more so to secure its circulation in the metropolis. As it was, D’Argenson, the lieutenant of police,—a functionary pourtrayed by his contemporaries as at once the ugliest and most unprincipled of men,—seized a package of seven hundred copies at the gates of Paris. The Reply appeared, however, and was eagerly read. Even the few who were neutral, the many who were envious, the host who were prejudiced, could not withhold their admiration from that lucid and elegant style—that dignified and unaffected eloquence; numbers yielded, in secret, at least, to the force of such facts and such arguments; while all were astonished at the skill and self-command with which the author had justified his whole career without implicating a single friend; and leaving untouched the shield of every other adversary, had concentrated all his force on exposing the contradictions, the treachery, and the falsehood of Bossuet’s accusation.[[364]]
The controversy now draws to a close. Bossuet published Remarks on the Reply of Fénélon, and Fénélon rejoined with Remarks on the Remarks of Bossuet. Sixty loyal doctors of the Sorbonne censured twelve propositions, in the Maxims, while Rome was yet undecided. Towards the close of the same year (1698) Louis wrote a letter to the Pope, yet more indecently urgent than his former one, demanding a thorough condemnation of so dangerous a book; and this epistle he seconded by depriving Fénélon, a few weeks afterwards, of the title and pension of preceptor—that pension which Fénélon had once nobly offered to return to a treasury exhausted by ambitious wars.[[365]]
Innocent XII. had heard, with indignant sorrow, of the arbitrary measures adopted against Fénélon and his friends. He was mortified by the arrogance of Louis, by the attempts so openly made to forestall his judgment. He was accustomed to say that Cambray had erred through excess of love to God; Meaux, by want of love to his neighbour. But Louis was evidently roused, and it was not safe to provoke him too far. After a last effort at a compromise, the Pope yielded; and the cardinals pronounced a condemnation, far less complete, however, than the vehemence of the accusers had hoped to secure. Twenty-three propositions extracted from the Maxims, were censured, but the Pontiff openly declared that such censure did not extend to the explanations which the Archbishop of Cambray had given of his book. This sentence was delivered on the 12th of March, 1699. The submission of Fénélon is famous in history. He received the intelligence as he was about to ascend the pulpit; he changed his subject, and preached a sermon on the duty of submission to superiors.[[366]] Bossuet endeavoured, in vain, to represent the obedience which was the first to pronounce the sentence of self-condemnation, as a profound hypocrisy.
XIII.
Madame Guyon lingered for four years a solitary prisoner in the dungeons of the Bastille. In the same tower was confined the Man of the Iron Mask, and she may have heard, in her cell, the melancholy notes of the guitar with which her fellow-prisoner beguiled a captivity whose horrors had then lasted seven-and-thirty years. There, a constitution never strong, was broken down by the stony chill of rigorous winters, and by the noxious vapours which steamed from the stagnant moat in summer.[[367]] She was liberated in 1702, and sent to Blois,—a picturesque old city, whose steep and narrow streets, cut into innumerable steps, overlook the Loire,—crowned on the one side by its fine church, and on the other by the royal chateau, memorable for the murder of the Guises; its massive proportions adorned by the varying tastes of successive generations, then newly beautified after the designs of Mansart, and now a ruin, the delight of every artist. There she lived in quiet, sought out from time to time by visitors from distant provinces and other lands,—as patient under the infirmity of declining age as beneath the persecutions of her earlier years,—finding, as she had always done, some sweet in every bitter cup, and a theme for praise in every trial, purified by her long afflictions, elevated by her hope of glory, full of charity and full of peace, resigned and happy to the last. Her latest letter is dated in 1717,—Bossuet had departed, and Fénélon,—and before the close of that year, she also, the subject of such long and bitter strife, had been removed beyond all the tempests of this lower world.
In the judicial combats of ancient Germany, it was the custom to place in the centre of the lists a bier, beside which stood the accuser and the accused, at the head and at the foot, leaning there for some time in solemn silence before they laid lance in rest and encountered in the deadly shock. Would that religious controversialists had oftener entered and maintained their combat as alike in view of that final appeal in the unseen world of truth—with a deeper and more abiding sense of that supreme tribunal before which so many differences vanish, and where none but he who has striven lawfully can receive a crown. Bossuet was regarded as the champion of Hope, and drew his sword, it was said, lest sacrilegious hands should remove her anchor. Fénélon girded on his arms to defend the cause of Charity. Alas! said the Pope—heart-sick of the protracted conflict—they forget that it is Faith who is in danger. Among the many witty sayings which the dispute suggested to the lookers-on, perhaps one of the most significant is that attributed to the daughter of Madame de Sévigné. ‘M. de Cambray,’ said she, ‘pleads well the cause of God, but M. de Meaux yet better that of religion, and cannot fail to win the day at Rome.’ Fénélon undertook to show that his semi-Quietism was supported by the authority of ecclesiastical tradition, and he was unquestionably in the right. He might have sustained, on Romanist principles, a doctrine much less moderate, by the same argument. But it was his wish to render mysticism as rational and as attractive as possible; and no other advocate has exhibited it so purified from extravagance, or secured for it so general a sympathy. The principle of ‘holy indifference,’ however, must be weighed, not by the virtues of Fénélon, but according to the standard of Scripture,—and such an estimate must, we believe, pronounce it mistaken.
XIV.
The attempt to make mysticism definite and intelligible must always involve more or less of inconsistency. Nevertheless, the enterprise has been repeatedly undertaken; and it is a remarkable fact, that such efforts have almost invariably originated in France. Mysticism and scholasticism—the spirit of the cloud and the spirit of the snow—reign as rivals throughout the stormy region of the Middle Age. The reaction against the extreme of each nourished its antagonist. Hugo and Richard of St. Victor endeavoured to effect a union, and to reconcile these contending products of the heart and brain. In that ascetic abstraction, which hides in darkness all the objects of sense, they sought to develop, from the dull and arid stem of school divinity, the most precious blossoms of the feeling; and their mysticism resembles those plants of the cactus-tribe which unfold, from their lustreless and horny leaves, gorgeous flowers, that illumine, with phosphoric radiance, the darkness of the tropical night. The Victorines were succeeded in the same path by Bonaventura, a Frenchman by education, if not by birth, more a schoolman than a mystic; and, in the fifteenth century, by Gerson. These are mystics who have no tales to tell of inspiration and of vision—their aim is to legitimize rapture, to define ecstasy, to explain the higher phenomena of the spirit on the basis of an elaborate psychology, to separate the delusive from the real in mysticism, and to ascertain the laws of that mystical experience, of which they acknowledged themselves to be but very partially the subjects. With this view, Gerson introduced into mysticism, strange to say, the principle of induction; and proposed, by a collection and comparison of recorded examples, to determine its theory, and decide its practice. In the Maxims of the Saints, Fénélon carries out the idea of Gerson, as far as was requisite for his immediate purpose. Both are involved in the same difficulty, and fall into the same contradiction. What Molinos was to Fénélon, Ruysbroek was to Gerson. Fénélon wished to stop short of the spiritualism condemned as heretical in Molinos; Gerson, to avoid the pantheism he thought he saw in Ruysbroek. Both impose checks, which, if inefficacious, amount to nothing; if effective, are fatal to the very life of mysticism,—both hold doctrines, to which they dare not give scope; and both are, to some extent, implicated in the consequences they repudiate by the principles they admit.