A Book of the Riviera

by S. Baring-Gould

Marchi, the gaoler, protested that he had only allowed Bazaine the liberty he enjoyed, because the latter had given his word of honour not to attempt an escape. Bazaine’s valet, Barreau, was certainly implicated in the matter; so was a Colonel Doineau, who, as head of the Bureaux Arabes in Algeria, had been sentenced to death for murder and robbery, but had been pardoned by Napoleon II. He had managed the correspondence between Bazaine and his wife. Several of the warders were guilty at least of negligence, but were let off very easily with one, two, or six months’ imprisonment.

The island of S. Honorat is smaller than Ste. Marguerite. It is a poor little stony patch in the sea, a miniature of the larger isle, a bank of rocks covered with a thin bed of soil, and rising not above four feet over the sea level. And yet this isle, whose meagre clumps of pines and whose battered tower hardly attract the attention of the tourists, played a considerable part, through long centuries, in the history of intellectual and religious growth in Europe. In 375 S. Honoratus founded there his religious community, and grouped about him a little family of earnest and intellectual men. In a few years it grew in power, not the power of the sword, but of brain and earnestness of purpose; and this island saved Western Christendom from a grave disaster.

The Mussulman has a legend of Creation. According to that, when God was creating man, He took a pellet of clay in His left hand, moulded it into human shape, cast it aside to the left, and said, “This goes to hell, and what care I?” In like manner He worked another ball of clay with His right hand, flung that aside, and said, “And this goes to heaven, and what care I?”

Now the master mind of Western Christendom, Augustine of Hippo, had devised the same theory of caprice in the Most High, predestinating to good or ill without reason, and that before Mohammed was born. Divine Grace, he held, was paramount and irresistible, carrying man to happiness or damnation without man being able to determine his course one way or the other. Man, according to Augustine, was a mere “Lump” of sin, damnable, utterly damnable. But God, in His inscrutable providence, indistinguishable from wantonness, chose to elect some to weal, and leave the rest to woe. This was a doctrine that did away with the necessity of man making the smallest endeavour after righteousness, from exercising the least self-control; of man feeling the slightest compunction after committing the grossest sins. Augustine sent his treatise to Abbot Valentine of Adrumetium. Valentine, in calm self-complacency, sitting among the ashes of dead lusts, highly approved of this scheme of Predestination. But a monk, Felix, when he heard it read, sprang to his feet and uttered his protest. This protest was reported to Augustine, who boiled over with bad temper at any opposition; and he wrote a violent rejoinder “On Grace and Freewill,” in which he insisted again on his doctrine of Fatalism.

The theses of Augustine reached Lerins, the nursery of the Bishops of Gaul, and were read there with indignation and disgust. The monks drew up a reply to Augustine that was temperate in tone and sound in argument. Grace, they said, was mighty, but man had freewill, and could respond to it or rebel against it.

Augustine answered. He attempted to browbeat these insignificant monks and clergy on a petty islet in the sea. But they were not men to be intimidated by his great name and intellectual powers, not even by his sincere piety.

They argued that if his doctrine were true, then farewell for ever and a day to all teaching of Christian morality. Man was but a cloud, blown about by the wind, where the wind listed to carry it.

But for these stubborn monks of Lerins it is possible enough that Western Christendom would have accepted a kismet as fatal as that of Mohammedanism, and that, indeed, it would have differed in name and certain outside trimmings only from the Moslem religion. Rome was much inclined to accept Augustine’s view, and give it definite sanction. But the Gaulish bishops, bred in the nursery of Lerins, would not hear of this. Finally, in the Council of Orange, in 529, they laid down the main principle: “We do not believe,” they boldly said, “that God has predestined any men to be evil.”

S. Patrick, the apostle of Ireland, was at one time a pupil at Lerins. The “Confessions of Augustine” are indeed a beautiful picture of the workings of a human soul; but not more tender and beautiful than that revelation of a noble heart given to us in the “Confession of Patrick.”

Lerins—that is, especially Saint Honorat—was the refuge of the intellect, the science, the literature, of a civilised world going to pieces into utter wreckage.