[Footnote 50: "Considérations sur le Dogme Générateur de la Piété Cathiolique." 4e édition, chez Vaton. 1859]
For a long time I have been reserving this subject for some feast-day, for Corpus Christi or some festival of Mary, feeling that holiness belongs to it; unction, grace mingled with science, and a reverential smile. "But why," some of our readers will say,--"why does l'Abbé Gerbet's name imply all this?" I shall try to show them the reason and give some idea of one of the most learned, distinguished, and truly amiable men that the church of France possesses, as well as one of our best writers; and, without embarking on vexed or doubtful questions, to delineate for them in soft tints the personality of the man and his talent.
But in the first place, that I may connect with its true date this modest name, which has rather courted oblivion than notoriety, let me remind my readers that during the Restoration, about the year 1820, when that regime, at first so unsettled, was beginning to enter into complete possession of its powers, a movement arose on all sides among the youthful spirits, ardently impelling them to literary culture and philosophical ideas. In poetry Lamartine had given the signal of revival, others gave it in history, others again in philosophy; and among the young people there sprang up a universal spirit of emulation, a unanimous determination to begin anew. It seemed as if, like a fertile land, the French mind, after its compulsory rest of so many years, were eagerly demanding every kind of cultivation. Yes, in religion then, in theology, it was the same; a generation had sprung up full of zeal and animation, who tried, not to renew what is in its nature immutable, but to rejuvenate the forms of teaching and demonstration, adapt them to the mental condition of the times, and make the principle of Catholicity respected even by its opponents. For, in the words of one of these young Levites in the beginning of the movement, "to act upon the age, we must understand it."
I could cite the names of several men who, with shades of difference known in the ecclesiastical world, had this in common, that they stood at the head of the studious and intelligent young clergy: M. Gousset, now cardinal archbishop of Rheims, and standing in the first rank of theologians; Mgr. Affré, who met his death so gloriously as archbishop of Paris; M. Douey, the present bishop of Montauban; and M. de Salinis, bishop of Amiens. But at that time, between the years 1820 and 1822, one name alone among the clergy offered itself to men of the world as a candidate for widespread fame. M. de Lamennais in his first Catholic fame had enforced the attention of all by his "Essay on Indifference," stirring a thousand thoughts even in the minds of the astonished clergy.
And here for the first time we meet l'Abbé Gerbet. He was born in 1798 [{309}] at Poligny, in the Jura. After completing his first studies in his native town, he passed through a course of philosophy in the academy of Besançon; and in obedience to an instinctive vocation, which awoke within him at the age of ten years, began his theological studies in the same city. During the dangers of invasion, in 1814-1815, he went into the mountains to visit a curate, a relation or friend of his family, and remained there to study. Thither came one day a young student of the Normal School, Jouffroy, two years his senior, who in going home to pass his vacation in the village of Pontets, had paused a moment on the way. Jouffroy, though in the first flush of youth and learning, and wearing the aureole upon his brow, did not disdain to enter into discussion with the young provincial seminarian. He combated the proofs of revelation, and especially contested the age of the world, relying upon the testimony of the famous Zodiac of Denderah, so often invoked in those days, and so soon destroyed. The young seminarian, in the presence of this unknown monument, could only answer: "Wait." These two young men never met again, compatriots though they were, and from that day forth adversaries; but l'Abbé Gerbet and Jouffroy, while carrying on a war, pen in hand, never failed to do so in the most dignified terms of controversy, and Jouffroy, whose heart was so good despite his dogmatic language, always spoke of l'Abbé Gerbet, if I remember rightly, with feelings of affectionate esteem.
On arriving in Paris at the close of the year 1818, l'Abbé Gerbet entered the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, but his health, which was already delicate, not allowing him to stay there long, he established himself as a boarder in the House of Foreign Missions, where he followed the rules of the seminarians. He was ordained priest in 1822 at the same time with l'Abbé do Salinis, whose inseparable friend he has always remained.
A little later he was appointed assistant professor of the Holy Scriptures in the Theological Faculty of Paris, and went to live in the Sorbonne. Having no lectures to deliver, he soon began to assist M. de Salinis, who had been made almoner in the college of Henry lV., and it was at this time that he first knew M. de Lamennais.
At twenty-four years of age, l'Abbé Gerbet had given evidence of remarkable philosophical and literary talent, and had sustained a Latin thesis with rare elegance in the Sorbonne. By nature he was endowed with all the gifts of oratory, a sense of rhythmic movement, measure, and choice of expression, and a graphic power which, in one word, must become a talent for writing. To these endowments he added an acute and elevated faculty for dialectics, fertile in distinctions, which he sometimes took delight in multiplying, but without ever losing himself among them. In the very beginning of his friendship with M. de Lamennais, he felt, without perhaps acknowledging it to himself, that that bold and vigorous genius, who was wont to open new views and perspectives, as it were by main force, needed the assistance of an auxiliary pen, more tempered, gentler and firm,--a talent that could use evidence judiciously, fill up spaces, cover weak points, and smooth away a look of menace and revolution from what was simply intended as a broader expression and more accessible development of Christianity. L'Abbé Gerbet clothed M. de Lamennais' system as far as possible with the character of persuasion and conciliation that belonged to it: to soften and graduate its tendencies was properly the part he filled at this time of his youth.
Upon this system I shall touch in a few words that will suffice to explain what I have to say of l'Abbé Gerbet's moral and literary gifts. Instead of seeking the evidences of Christianity in such and such texts of Scripture, or in a personal argument [{310}] addressed to individual reason, M. de Lamennais maintained that it should, in the first place, be sought in the universal tradition and historical testimony of peoples, for he believed that even before the coming of Jesus Christ and the establishment of Christianity a sort of testimony was to be traced, confused certainly, but real and concordant, running through the traditions of ancient races and discernible even in the presentiments of ancient sages. It seemed to him demonstrable that among all nations there had been ideas, more or less defined, of the creation of man, of the fall and promised reparation, of the expiation or expected redemption--in short, of all that should one day constitute the treasures of Christian doctrine, and was then only the scattered and persistent vestige of the primitive revelation. From this he argued that the lights of ancient sages might be considered as the dawn of faith, and that without, of course, being classed among the fathers of the primitive church, Confucius, Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates, and Plato should be considered up to a certain point as preparers for the gospel, and not be numbered among the accursed. They might almost be called, in the language of the ancient fathers, primitive Christians--at least they were like so many Magi travelling more or less directly toward the divine cradle. By this single view of an anterior Christianity disseminated through the world, by this voyage, as it were, in search of Catholic truths floating about the universe, the teaching of theology would have been wonderfully widened and enlarged, for it necessarily comprised the history of philosophical ideas. M. de Lamennais' system, which is especially attractive when developed historically by the pen of l'Abbé Gerbet, has not since then been recognized by the church. It appeared to be at least delusive, if not false; but perhaps, even from the point of view of orthodoxy, it can only merit the reproach of having claimed to be the sole method, to the exclusion of all others; combined with other proofs, and presented simply, as a powerful accessory consideration, I believe that it has never been rejected.
It may be understood, however, even without entering into the heart of the matter, that in 1824, when l'Abbé Gerbet, in concert with M. de Salinis, established a religious monthly magazine, entitled the "Catholic Memorial," and began to develop his ideas therein with modesty and moderation, but also with that fresh confidence and ardor that youth bestows, there was, to speak merely of the external form of the questions, a something about it that gave the signal for the struggle of a new spirit against the stationary or backward spirit. The old-fashioned theologians, whether formalist or rationalistic, who found themselves attacked, resisted and took scandal at the name of traditions which were not only Catholic but scholastic and classic. But in l'Abbé Gerbet they had to deal with a man thoroughly well read in the writings of the fathers, and possessed of their true significance. He could bring forward, in his turn, texts drawn from the fountain-head in support of this freer and more generous method; among other quotations, he liked to cite this fine passage from Vincent de Lérius: "Let posterity, thanks to your enlightenment, rejoice in the conception of that to which antiquity gave respectful credence without understanding [its full meaning]; but remember to teach the same things that have been transmitted to you, so that, while presenting them in a new light, you do not invent new doctrines." Thus, while maintaining fundamental immutability, he took pleasure in remarking that, in spite of slight deviations, the order of scientific explanation has followed a law of progress in the church, and has been successively developed; a fact which he [{311}] demonstrated by the history of Christianity.