Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 05

by Unknown

Bossuet, while constantly improving his knowledge of the writings of the Fathers, especially of St. Augustine, threw himself into the contest with characteristic energy. As against the Jews he tried to demonstrate that the coming of Christ is clearly foretold in the Prophecies. He thus became more familiar with the Old Testament than any other Catholic theologian of his time, and so far molded his style on that of the Bible that it soon became difficult to distinguish in his productions that which came out of the sacred writings from the utterances which belonged only to him. This was done, however, strange to say, without any knowledge of the Hebrew language. Bossuet never read the Bible except in Greek or Latin. There was no good French version of the Bible; and it may be stated here that there is none to the present day which occupies in the French language anything like the position held in English by the Bible of King James, or in German by Luther's version.

His attitude in regard to the Protestants is more interesting, because more characteristic of the time in which he lived. France in the seventeenth century had become convinced that harmony, unity, fixedness, are the clearest manifestations of truth, the best guarantees of peace, happiness, and prosperity; that variety and change are signs of error and harbingers of disaster. Bossuet's whole effort in his controversy with Protestantism was directed towards demonstrating that Protestantism lacks and that Catholicism possesses the traits which were considered by his contemporaries to clearly belong to truth; and as his opponents were not unwilling to follow him on his chosen ground, as they never for a moment denied his main proposition,--his statement of the characteristics of truth,--as he even managed during the controversy to bring about a number of conversions to Catholicism, he left Metz fully convinced that he was waging a successful warfare upon unassailable ground.

He had been in Paris less than a year when an event happened which made him doubly sure of the soundness of his position, and tenfold increased his belief in the ultimate victory of his Church over all other denominations. The Commonwealth of England collapsed, and Charles II. was called to the throne from which his father had been hurled by Oliver Cromwell. Nothing can give any idea of the shock experienced by France on hearing of the development and success of the Great Rebellion in England. No Frenchman at that time understood what the English Constitution was. The course of French history had led the people of France to put all the strength they possessed in the hands of their kings, and to treat as a public enemy any one who resisted, or even attempted to limit in any way, the royal authority. To people holding such opinions the English nation after the month of January, 1649, appeared as a nation of parricides. And the feeling was intensified by the fact that the wife of the beheaded king, Henrietta Maria, was a sister of the King of France, a daughter of the beloved Henry IV., whose death by Ravaillac's dagger was still mourned by every French patriot. The triumph of Cromwell, the proud position which England occupied in Europe during his protectorate, left however hardly any hope that the rebellious nation would ever acknowledge the errors of her ways; and lo! in a moment, without any effort on his part, without any struggle, the dead king's son resumed his rights, and every one who had been in arms against him lay prostrate at his feet. The same nation that had rebelled against the levying of the "ship money" and the proceedings of the Star Chamber allowed Charles II. almost as absolute an authority as ever the King of France possessed. Once cured of her political errors, was England not to be soon cured of her theological errors? After repenting her rebellion against the King, was she not to repent her rebellion against the Pope? Such were the questions which Bossuet, which the whole of France, began to ask. Or rather, these were to them no longer questions: the people of France began to look across the Channel with confident expectation of a religious counter-revolution. The collapse of the Commonwealth could not but be followed by the collapse of the Reformation.

When Louis XIV., after Cardinal Mazarin's death, took in his own hands the management of the affairs of the State; when the marriage of the brilliant Henrietta of England with the Duke of Orleans made the sister of the English King a sister-in-law to the King of France; when triumph after triumph on the field of war, of diplomacy, of literature, of art, added to the power and glory of France, which had never swerved in her allegiance either to King or Church,--the feeling grew that only in unity of Faith, Law, and King were truth and prosperity to be found by nations. The saying "Une foi, une loi, un roi" (one faith, one law, one king), which may be said to sum up Bossuet's religious, social, and political beliefs, seemed to all an incontrovertible and self-evident axiom.

These were the times when Bossuet's utterances grew in power and magnificence. He was heard in a number of Parisian churches; he was heard at court, where he several times was appointed preacher either for Advent or Lent; he delivered panegyrics of saints, and was called upon to eulogize in death those who had held the highest rank in life. He had just delivered the most splendid and the most touching of his funeral orations, those on Henrietta of France, widow of Charles I. of England (November 16th, 1669), and less than a year later, on her unfortunate daughter, Henrietta of England, Duchess of Orleans (August 21st, 1670), when the King, at the request of the upright Duke de Montausier, called him to court from the bishopric of Condom to which he had been raised, and intrusted to him the education of his son and heir-apparent, the Dauphin of France.

Bossuet's royal pupil never reigned. He died in 1711, four years before his father's death: and it must be admitted that during the thirty-one years that elapsed between the moment when he came out of Bossuet's hands and the end of his life, he gave no evidence of being anything except a very commonplace sort of a man. No such halo surrounds him as surrounds his unfortunate son, the Duke of Burgundy, whose death two years after that of the Dauphin was mourned as a public calamity. Whether Bossuet's failure to make a great prince out of the Dauphin was due to a faulty system of education or to the unresponsive nature of the pupil, can hardly be considered to-day a matter of great interest. But French literature was certainly the gainer by the appointment of Bossuet to the post of tutor to the Prince. Three of his most remarkable works--his 'Discourse upon Universal History,' his 'Policy according to the Holy Writ,' and his 'Treatise on the Knowledge of God and Man'--were written especially for the Dauphin, and read by him as textbooks a long time before their publication. The opening sentence of the 'Discourse' tells us clearly the author's purpose: "Were history useless to other men, it would still be necessary to have it studied by princes."

In 1680 Bossuet left the Dauphin, who then married a Bavarian princess, and one year later he was called to the bishopric of Meaux. Louis XIV. was then taking steps leading to the important and fatal venture by which three years later he repealed the Edict of Nantes, and forbade the existence in France of the Protestant religion. No one can deny Bossuet's share in determining the king to follow a policy so fatal to the interests of France, but at the same time so much in accord with the views of Rome. A natural outcome would have been the raising of Bossuet, who was certainly then the greatest orator, the greatest writer, and the greatest theologian in the Catholic clergy, to the Cardinalate. Still Bossuet was never a cardinal.

The explanation lies in Bossuet's conduct in the year 1682. The King of France in that year called together a General Assembly of the clergy of France, a kind of National Council. His object was to have the clergy assert its national character, and to state that in civil matters it was subject not to the Pope, but to the King. The various statements to that effect constitute what is known as 'The Liberties of the Gallican Church.' The statements were adopted after being drafted by Bossuet, who had at the opening of the sessions delivered before the Assembly his celebrated 'Sermon on the Unity of the Church,' the main part of which is an eloquent defense of the above-stated views. France was too powerful then for the see of Rome not to yield, but no favors were thenceforth to be expected for the spokesman of the French national clergy.

Still the great divine continued his efforts, and in 1688 he put forth the most complete and masterly exposition of his beliefs, his 'History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches.' The Revolution of 1688-89 in England did not in the least, sad though it seemed, weaken his faith in the ultimate triumph of Catholicism. In France at that time the English revolution was not considered an assertion by the people of political and religious rights, but the carrying out of a detestable family conspiracy of a daughter and son-in-law with their father's enemy. This better than anything else explains the hatred which was harbored against William III., and which found expression in the works even of as free-minded a writer as La Bruyère. It is during the period of the fiercest struggle between Louis XIV. and William III. that Bossuet carried on with the German philosopher Leibnitz a series of negotiations, the object of which was the return to Catholicism of Protestant Germany. We need hardly state that the negotiations utterly failed.

In another controversy which occupied Bossuet's last years he was entirely successful. The most eloquent of his disciples, Fénélon, then Archbishop of Cambrai, seemed to him to have fallen into dangerous errors. He had adopted the mystic doctrine of Quietism, which had been made known to him first by an erratic woman, Madame Guyon. Bossuet determined that the eloquent archbishop must be compelled to recant. A number of works were published by him in support of his position, the most important one being his 'Relation on Quietism'; and he did not rest until the Pope had condemned his rival, and Fénélon had submitted to censure in his own cathedral at Cambrai. Some accuse Bossuet of too much harshness in the contest. The Pope himself was reported to have said, "The Archbishop of Cambrai sinned by too much love of God, the Bishop of Meaux by too little love of his fellow-man."