Beyond the controversy with Bossuet, which, during the lifetime of Leibnitz, made, in fact, very little noise, and the partial publication of which was already ancient, there exists, as is known, wholly in the handwriting of that great man, a small work on religious questions, which remained unknown up to his death and even for a long time after, and which was discovered and published only at the beginning of the present century. When this little work, baptized, I know not by whom, Systema Theologicum, for the first time saw the light, it was perceived, not without surprise, that on all the points, even those on which in his known writings Leibnitz was the furthest removed from the doctrines of the Church, his conclusions conformed to the purest Catholic teaching. From that arose a great discussion among the learned, all astonished, some agreeably, some disagreeably, to find in Leibnitz this posthumous and unexpected evidence of orthodoxy. Commentaries, conjectures, explanations, were called forth in abundance, often ingenious, but rarely impartial, each writer interpreting the tract after his own manner—Protestants anxious to keep Leibnitz in their ranks, and Catholics intent on conquering him for theirs. I myself hazarded some conjectures on the subject, but timidly, as was proper on such a matter, and without much expectation of making them prevail, the first to acknowledge their insufficiency, and persuaded that the existence of the Systema Theologicum, like the birth-place of Homer, and the name of the author of the Imitatione Christi, would remain a sort of biblical quadrature of the circle, destined to supply for ever to the learned a subject of discussion, and to students a thesis.
If we believe M. de Careil, the mystery is now unveiled; the new discovery explains the old; the Judicium Doctoris Catholici is the key to the Systema Theologicum, of which it is substantially only a rough sketch, and the first edition. In the one as in the other, Catholicity is only a borrowed vestment, momentarily worn by Leibnitz to disguise his uniform of a negotiator. It was a ruse not of war but of diplomacy. On the plan of pacification the success of which he was bent on securing, Leibnitz, in order to beguile the malevolent, by a premeditated design impressed pressed on it the Catholic seal instead of the Protestant stamp. He was no more a Catholic when he wrote the Systema Theologicum than he was when he prepared, to deceive the vigilant eye of Bossuet, the Judicium Doctoris Catholici; he only wished to appear one in order to secure a full hearing for the conditions on which he could become a Catholic. [Footnote 67]
[Footnote 67: A similar view, in some respects, to this is taken and urged with much plausibility by Dr. Guhrauer In his German work which formed the basis of J. M. Mackie's "Life of Godfrey William von Leibnitz," published at Boston by Gould, Kendall & Lincoln, 1845; and the refutation of it, indirectly given by the Prince de Broglie in the text, is by no means unwelcome.—THE TRANSLATOR.]
The natural consequence of such a supposition has been for M. de Careil to make the Systema Theologicum figure by the side of the Judicium Doctoris, at such a date as he judged the most convenient, for example, among the documents of the negotiation of which he was drawing up a statement (procès verbal). But since one of these documents was, in his view, only the detailed reproduction of the other, it seems to us he should have placed them in face of each other, so as to facilitate their comparison. We regret that he has not so placed them, for we are convinced that even he himself, in re-reading them in connection for the press, would have had no difficulty in perceiving that the assimilation imagined has not the least foundation in fact. Although signed by the same hand, the two documents, which he would confound, do not in any manner whatever bear witness to the same state of mind, or to having been both designed to aid a common object. Everything in them differs, not merely in tone, which in one is [{448}] grave and full of emotion, subtle and light in the other, but, above all, in the plan and very substance of the argument. The Judicium is a series of arguments, very brief, which tend directly to a foregone conclusion, namely, the pacification of the schism, and as the means of effecting it, the suspension of the Council of Trent. Not an idea, not a word, that does not tend directly to this conclusion, nor the slightest effort to dissemble it. It is a skilful, but adroit pleading against the Council of Trent. The Systema, on the contrary, is a detailed exposition, often eloquent, of the entire Catholic faith, point by point, dogma after dogma, of those which Protestants reject as well as of those which they admit with the Church. And what authority does this dogmatic exposition appeal to as its support? The oftenest is to the Council of Trent itself, openly invoked, on the ground that the voice of the universal Church is the invariable rule of faith. The Council of Trent in every line is called holy, venerable, and sometimes even the Council, by way of eminence. After this, what place would M. de Careil give to this writing in a negotiation, the precise object of which was to efface that council from the memory of the faithful, and the annals of the Church? A singular pleasure assuredly Leibnitz must have found in belying himself, in playing a ridiculous farce, and of doubtful morality, only to end in yielding to his opponent the ground disputed between them!
Till M. de Careil responds to this difficulty, to which we had previously invited his attention, we must continue to guard ourselves against confounding works so dissimilar in their tone, design, and substance as the Judicium and the Systema, and continue also to see in the one only a pastime without value, which ought not to have occupied even the waste moments of a great man, and still less cause the loss of that time so well filled by his editor; and in the other, on the contrary, the expression of a sincere conviction, very proper to throw light on the nature of the beliefs of the soul that conceived it. It is of the state of that soul, and of those beliefs, that it remains for us to say a few words, by attempting to enlighten the confused impressions produced by the voluminous papers of which we have just finished the analysis.
II.
Three things, I think, must have struck those who have had the patience to follow me in this long exposition: 1. The singularly narrow ground on which Leibnitz consented to place the negotiation; 2. This perseverance in pursuing it; 3. This resistance to bringing it to a conclusion. Cantoned in very narrow quarters, he maintained himself there with obstinacy, reanimating the combat whenever it slackened, but escaping from every solution whenever it approached.
They, for example, who, attracted by the antithesis of the two great names, should imagine that they were about to hear debated between the last of the Fathers and the ancestor of modern philosophy the great question everywhere agitated in the sixteenth century, and on which the future of society depends—they who should expect to see a mortal struggle in the listed field between a champion of free inquiry and a representative of authority, would, I fear, be greatly disappointed. Not a word of the mutual relations of faith and reason, of the rights of private judgment, or of the principle of authority, is, I think, met with in the whole twelve hundred pages comprised in these two volumes; and for the very simple reason, that the terms to which the discussion was restricted raised no question of the sort between the two opponents. Faithful to the constant traditions of the Church, and imbued with the rules of the Cartesian method, Bossuet contested none of the prerogatives of [{449}] reason in the order of our natural powers; Christian by profession, Leibnitz recognized in faith the right to reveal and to impose on man knowledge superior to nature—pretending to become and even to be a Catholic in potentia and in voto, Leibnitz declared himself ready to seek the rule of faith, not in the mute text of a book, but in the living voice of an organized Church, and this Church he distinctly acknowledged to be in the hierarchy of pastors whose head is the Roman Pontiff. Consequently there was and could be no debate either on the existence or the composition, the mode of action or the seat, of the ecclesiastical authority. There was between them only a simple and humble question of fact—of history. Certainly the Church has the plenary right to be heard and obeyed when she speaks; but did she speak in the Council of Trent? The contest Leibnitz sustained went no further than this, and rose no higher. Persons in our day, curious in theology and metaphysics, those who take an interest in reconciling free will with grace, or the foreknowledge of God, those who like to carry either the torch of dogma or the scalpel of analysis into the very depths of the soul, will find very little satisfaction in reading them. None of the psychological or moral problems raised by the Reformation, and with which it had troubled men's minds, and filled the schools with the serf-will of Luther, nor the foreordination of Calvin, nor the subtle distinctions in regard to the intrinsic nature of moral evil and the effects of original sin, obtained from Leibnitz, from first to last, even so much as a simple allusion. On the concurrence of the divine action and that of the human will in the work of moral progress and the hope of eternal salvation, he thought and spoke as the Church. His criticisms affect the form of the Council of Trent rather than the substance of its decisions. It is the competency of the court to which he pleads, rather than its decrees. Aside from the canon of the Scriptures, which, for the Old Testament, he would restrict to the Hebrew books properly so-called, and exclude therefrom the books in Greek transmitted only by the Septuagint, I am aware of no dogmatic point, defined at Trent, which creates with him any serious difficulty. And even on this subject of the canonicity of the sacred books, he has nothing that resembles that audacious criticism to which Richard Simon, in the seventeenth century, opened the way, and which, a very few years after, all Germany was to rush into and level and broaden. It was not the criticism of our days, which pretends to an imprescriptible right over the entire text of the Scriptures, and to serve as the ground of all certainty, moral and philosophical. The criticism of Leibnitz takes not such lofty airs. It is restricted to some accessory parts of the Old Testament, and presumes not to go beyond. And when Bossuet, adopting a method familiar to logicians (though not always prudently employed), would push it to the extreme, to absurdity even, and prove that its principles logically carried out would ruin entirely the Holy Scriptures, Leibnitz recoils, frightened at the last word of his own logic.
Leibnitz, having never been accused of a narrow or timid mind, of any lack of boldness in his principles or of force in deducing from them their logical consequences, it is necessary to believe that if he avoided the debate between the Reformation and the Church under its grander aspects, it was solely because he was separated from Catholic beliefs only by the narrow trench which he himself has traced, and because his own Protestantism, so to speak, was neither longer nor broader. Certainly he can be very little of a Protestant who acknowledges all the councils less one alone, and even all the decrees of that one save a single exception—who speaks as a Catholic of the Church, of tradition, of the priesthood, and of the sacraments. That to these sentiments, so near to those of a Catholic, [{450}] Leibnitz joined the sincere desire to take the final step; that, having reached the threshold, he was strongly pressed to cross it, we must believe, in order not only not to throw doubt on his often repeated protestations, which have every appearance of being made in good faith, but to account for his perseverance, meritoriously displayed on more than one occasion to sustain or revive, against all hope, the flickering flame of the languishing negotiation. Neither the growing coldness of the powers of the earth, who after having started it abandoned it midway, nor the haughtiness of Bossuet, a little contemptuous, which exposed without any mercy the vanity of his projects, succeeded in discouraging him. He was proof against all disgusts; he knocked at every door, and the crooked methods he adopted to open or turn them, not according to the rules of loyal warfare, attest at least an ardent desire to enter the place. Yet, in spite of this agreement on principles, this heartfelt desire for union, and the feeble distance which remained for him to traverse to become a Catholic, Leibnitz never in his life traversed it. The end of the discussion found him just where he was at its beginning, always debating, never advancing. When the reasoning of Bossuet became urgent and victorious (and it will be admitted that with the choice of ground, and the advantages conceded him, one needs not to be a Bossuet to conquer)—whenever it took a turn ad hominem, and passed from the general interests of Protestantism to the particular duties of individual conscience—whenever the question was no longer of concluding a treaty of peace between two hostile powers, but of articulating the submission of a believer, Leibnitz drew back, and escaped. The tone becomes sharp and sour, recriminations are mingled with reasoning, subterfuges retract the concessions. Broad and easy in regard to principles, he haggles at consequences. What are we to think of that alternation, of those constant advances followed by as constant retreats? What was the after-thought back of the exterior motives of that intermittent resistance? For no one can be persuaded that a man of a serious character, and a mind which stops not at trifles, admitting in the outset the necessity and the right of an infallible authority in matters of faith, could remain a Protestant, that is, a rebel to that acknowledged authority, because the bishops, united at Trent, admitted Ecclesiasticus and Macchabees into the canon of the Scriptures.
The moral problem being curious and complex, every one has a right to offer his own solution. I formerly, in this periodical, offered mine, and I shall hold to it till a better and a more satisfactory solution is discovered. In my judgment, all is explained, if we suppose that Leibnitz became a Catholic in intellect and by study, yet remained a Protestant by force of habit, interest, and self-love. The first part is not even a supposition, but a fact. For, waiving the disputed value of the Systema Theologicum, the documents which we have before us contain alone avowals amply sufficient to prove it. When one admits the concurrence of free will and the divine will in the work of salvation, the mysterious virtue and efficacy of the sacraments, the transubstantiation of the elements in the eucharist—when one recognizes the sacred character of the priesthood, the Primacy by divine right of the bishops of Rome, and, above all, the infallibility of the Church (and Leibnitz accords all this to Bossuet, always by implication, and often under the form of explicit concession), one is willingly or unwillingly a Catholic, or at least has lost all right not to be one. In such a case the defect is in the will, not the intellect. Let nothing be said here of invincible ignorance, for never was there ignorance more vincible, more completely conquered, subjected, drowned in floods of light, than in the case of Leibnitz.