Priests, Women, and Families Part 12

The heart, a more n.o.ble organ, had the advantage of furnishing a number of dubious though decent expressions, a whole language of equivocal tenderness which did not cause a blush, and facilitated the intrigue of devout gallantry.

In the very beginning of the seventeenth century, the directors and confessors find a very convenient text in _The Sacred Heart_. But women take it quite differently, and in a serious sense: they grow warm and impa.s.sioned, and have visions. The Virgin appears to a country girl of Normandy, and orders her to adore the heart of Mary. The Visitandines called themselves the daughters of the _Heart of Jesus_: Jesus does not fail to appear to a Visitandine, Mademoiselle Marie Alacoque, and shows her His heart and wound.

She was a strong girl, and of a sanguine temperament, whom they were obliged to bleed constantly. She had entered the convent in her twenty-fourth year, with her pa.s.sions entire; her infancy had not been miserably nipped in the bud, as it often happens to those who are immured at an early age. Her devotion was, from the very first, a violent love, that wished to suffer for the object loved. Having heard that Madame de Chantal had printed the name of Jesus on her breast with a hot iron, she did the same. The Lover was not insensible to this, and ever after visited her. It was with the knowledge, and under the direction of a skilful superior, that Marie Alacoque made this intimate connection with the Divine Bridegroom. She celebrated her espousals with Him; and a regular contract was drawn up by the superior, which Marie Alacoque signed with her blood. One day, when, according to her biographer, she had cleaned with her tongue the lips of a sick person, Jesus was so satisfied with her, that He permitted her to fix her lips to one of His Divine wounds.

There was nothing in this relating to theology. It was merely a subject of physiology and medicine. Mademoiselle Alacoque was a girl of an ardent disposition, which was heightened by celibacy. She was by no means a mystic in the proper sense of the word. Happier far than Madame Guyon, who did not see what she loved, she saw and touched the body of the Divine Lover. The heart He showed her in His unseamed breast was a b.l.o.o.d.y intestine. The extremely sanguine plethory from which she was suffering, and which frequent bleeding could not relieve, filled her imagination with these visions of blood.

The Jesuits, who were great propagators of the new devotion, took good care not to explain precisely whether homage was to be paid to the symbolical heart and celestial love, or whether the heart of flesh was to be the object of adoration. When pressed to explain themselves, their answers depended on persons, times, and places. Their Father Galiffet made, at the same time, two contradictory replies: in Rome he said it was the symbolical heart; and in Paris he said in print that there was no metaphor, that they honoured the flesh itself.

This equivocation was a source of wealth. In less than forty years four hundred and twenty-eight brotherhoods of the Sacred Heart were formed in France.

I cannot help pausing a moment, to admire how Equivocation triumphed throughout this age.

On whatever side I turn my eyes, I find it everywhere, both in things and persons. It sits upon the throne in the person of Madame de Maintenon. Is this person a queen who is seated by the king's side, and before whom princesses are standing--or is she not? The equivocal is also near the throne in the person of the humble Pere la Chaise, the real king of the clergy of France, who from a garret at Versailles distributes the benefices. And do our loyal Galileans and the scrupulous Jansenists abstain from the equivocal? Obedient, yet rebellious, preparing war though kneeling, they kiss the foot of the pope, while wishing to tie his hands; they spoil the best reasons by their _distinguo_ and evasions. Indeed, when I put in opposition to the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries this Ja.n.u.s of the seventeenth, the two others appear to me as honest centuries, or, at the very least, sincere in good and in evil. But what falsehood and ugliness is concealed under the majestic harmony of the seventeenth! Everything is softened and shaded in the form, but the bottom is often the worse for it. Instead of the local inquisitions, you have the police of the Jesuits, armed with the king's authority. In place of a Saint Bartholomew, you have the long, the immense religious revolution, called the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, that cruel comedy of forced conversion; then the unheard-of tragedy of a proscription organised by all the bureaucratical and military means of a modern government!--Bossuet sings the triumph; and deceit, lying, and misery reign everywhere! Deceit in politics; local life destroyed without creating any central life. Deceit in morals: this polished court, this world of polite people receives an unexpected lesson from the _chamber of poisons_: the king suppresses the trial, fearing to find every one guilty!--And can devotion be real with such morals?--If you reproach the sixteenth century with its violent fanaticism, if the eighteenth appear to you cynical and devoid of human respect, confess at least also that lying, deceit, and hypocrisy are the predominant features of the seventeenth. That great historian Moliere has painted the portrait of this century, and found its name--Tartuffe.

I return to the Sacred Heart, which, in truth, I have not quitted, since it is during this period the ill.u.s.trious and predominant example of the success of the equivocal. The Jesuits who, in general, have invented little, did not make the discovery, but they perceived very plainly the profit they might derive from it. We have seen how they gradually made themselves masters of the convents of women, though professing all the time to be strangers to them. The Visitation, especially, was under their influence. The superior of Marie Alacoque, who had her confidence, and directed her connection with Jesus Christ, gave timely notice to Pere La Chaise.

The thing happened just in time. The Jesuits sadly wanted some popular machine to set in motion, for the profit of their policy. It was the moment when they thought, at least they told the king so, that England, sold by Charles II., would, in a short time, be entirely converted.

Intrigue, money, women, everything was turned to account, to bring it about. To King Charles they gave mistresses, and to his brother, confessors. The Jesuits, who, with all their tricks, are often chimerical, thought that by gaining over five or six lords, they would change all that Protestant ma.s.s, which is Protestant not only by belief, but also by interest, habit, and manner of living; Protestant to the core, and with English tenacity.

See then these famous politicians, gliding as stealthily as wolves, and fancying they will carry everything by surprise. An essential point for them was to place with James, the king's brother, a secret preacher, who, in his private chapel, might work silently, and try his hand at a few conversions. To act the part of a converter, they required a man who was not only captivating, but especially ardent and fanatical; such men were scarce. The latter qualifications were deficient in the young man whom Pere La Chaise had in view. This was a Father La Colombiere, who taught rhetoric in their college at Lyons; he was an agreeable preacher, an elegant writer, much esteemed by Patru, mild, docile, and a good sort of man. The only thing that was wanting was a little madness. To inoculate him with this, they introduced him to Mademoiselle Alacoque: he was sent to Paray-le-Monial, where she resided, as confessor extraordinary of the Visitandines (1675). He was in his thirty-fourth year, and she in her twenty-eighth. Having been well prepared by her superior, she immediately saw in him the great servant of G.o.d, whom her visions had revealed to her, and the very same day she perceived in the ardent heart of Jesus her own heart united to the Jesuit's.

La Colombiere, being of a mild and feeble nature, was hurried away unresistingly into this ardent vortex of pa.s.sion and fanaticism. He was kept for a year and a half in this spiritual furnace; he was then s.n.a.t.c.hed away from Paray, and hurled red-hot into England. They were, however, still mistrustful of him, fearing he might cool, and sent him, from time to time, a few ardent and inspired lines: Marie Alacoque dictated, and the superior was her amanuensis.

He remained thus two years with the d.u.c.h.ess of York in London, so well concealed and shut up, that he did not even see the town. They brought to him, mysteriously, a few lords, who thought it advantageous to be converted to the religion of the heir presumptive. England having at last discovered the Papal conspiracy, La Colombiere was accused, brought before Parliament, and embarked for France, where he arrived ill; and though his superior sent him to Paray to see whether the nun could revive him, he died there of a fever.

However little inclined people may be to believe that great results are brought about by trifling causes, they are obliged, however, to confess that this miserable intrigue had an incalculable effect upon France and the world. They wanted to gain England, and they presented themselves to her, not in the persons of the Gallicans, whom she respected, but in those of the Jesuits, whom she had always abhorred. At the very moment when Catholicism ought, in prudence at least, to have discarded the idolatries with which the Protestants reproached it, they published a new one, and the most offensive of all, the carnal and sensual devotion of the Sacred Heart. To mingle horror with ridicule, it was in 1685, the sad and lamentable year of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, that Marie Alacoque raised the first of those altars which overspread the whole of France. We know how England, confirmed in her Protestantism and horror of Rome by the Jesuits, took to herself a Dutch king, carried away Holland in her movement, and by this conjunction of the two maritime powers obtained the dominion of the seas.

The Jesuits may boast that they have been the means of setting Protestantism in England upon a very solid foundation. All the Father Mathews in the world will never be able to remove it.

Their political work, as we have seen, is important: it ended in marrying England to Holland--a marriage nearly fatal to France.

And what was their religious work among us in the old days of Louis XIV.? What was the last use made of the omnipotent sway of the La Chaises and the Telliers? We well know: the destruction of Port-Royal, a military expedition to carry off fifteen old women, the dead dragged from their graves, and sacrilege committed by the hands of authority.

This authority expiring in the terrible year 1709, which seemed to carry off at one blow the king and the kingdom, was employed by them, in all haste, to destroy their enemies.

Port-Royal came to an end in 1709, Quietism had finished in 1698, and Gallicanism itself, the great religion of the throne, had been placed at the feet of the pope by the king in 1693. Behold Bossuet laid in the tomb by the side of Fenelon, and the latter next to Arnaud. The conquerors and the conquered repose in a common nullity.

The emblem prevailing, and being subst.i.tuted for every system, people felt less and less the need of a.n.a.lysing, explaining, and thinking; and they were glad of it. The explanation the most favourable to authority is still a giving of accounts, that is to say, a homage paid to the liberty of the mind. But in the shadow of an obscure emblem one may henceforth without shaping any theory, or allowing any advantage to be taken, apply indifferently the practice of all the various theories that had been abandoned, and follow them alternately or conjointly, according to the interest of the day.

Wise policy, excellent wisdom, with which they cover their nothingness!

Having dispensed with reasoning for others, they lose the faculty of reasoning altogether, and, in the hour of danger, they find themselves disarmed. This is what happened to them in the eighteenth century.

The terribly learned contest that then took place found them mute.

Voltaire let fly a hundred thousand arrows against them, without awakening them. Rousseau pressed and crushed them without getting one word out of them.

Who then could answer? Theology was no longer known to the theologians. The persecutors of the Jansenists mingle in their books published in the name of Marie Alacoque, both Jansenist and Molinist opinions, and without being aware of it. They composed in 1708 the manual which has since become the basis of instruction adopted in our seminaries; and this manual contains the entirely new doctrine, that on every Papal decision Jesus Christ _inspires_ the pope to decide, and the bishops to obey: every thing is an oracle and a miracle in this clownish system. Reason is decidedly rooted out of theology.

From that time there is very little of a dogmatical character, and still less of sacred history; an instruction which would be void, if ancient casuistry did not a.s.sist in filling up the vacuum with immoral subtilties.

The only part of mankind to whom they have addressed themselves for a long time, namely, women, is the world of sensibility. They do not ask for science; they wish for impressions rather than ideas. The less they are busied about ideas the easier it is to keep them ignorant of outward events, and make them strangers to the progress of time.

When they maintain that holiness consists in sacrificing the mind, the more material the worship, the more it serves to attain that end; the more the mind is degraded the holier it becomes. To couple salvation with the exercise of moral virtues, would be to require the exercise of reason. But what do they want with virtue? Wear this medal: "_It will blot out your iniquities_." Reason would still have a share in religion, if, as reason teaches us, it was necessary for salvation absolutely to love G.o.d. Marie Alacoque has seen that it was sufficient _not to hate Him_; and those who are devoted to the Sacred Heart are saved unconditionally.

When the Jesuits were suppressed, they had in their hands no other religious means than this paganism, and in it they placed all their hope of coming to life again. They had engravings made, to which they added the motto, "I will give them the shield of my heart."

The popes, who, at first, were uneasy about the weak point which such a materialism would offer to the attacks of the philosophers, have found out in our time that it is very useful to them, being addressed to a cla.s.s of people who seldom read the philosophers, and who, though devout, are nevertheless material. They have therefore preserved the precious equivocation of the ideal and the carnal heart, and forbidden any explanation as to whether the words "_Sacred Heart_" designated the love of G.o.d for man, or some bit of bleeding flesh. By reducing the thing to the idea, the impa.s.sioned attraction in which its success consisted would be taken from it.

Even in the last century, some bishops had gone farther, declaring that _flesh_ was here the _princ.i.p.al_ object; and they had placed this flesh in certain hymns, after the Trinity, as a fourth person. Priests, women, and young girls have all since then vied with one another in this devotion. I have before me a manual, much used in country places, in which they teach the persons of their community, who pray for one another, how they join hearts, and how these hearts, once united, "ought to desire to enter into the opening of the heart of Jesus, and be incessantly sinking into that amorous wound."

The brotherhood, in their manuals, have occasionally found it gallant to put the heart of Mary above that of Jesus (see that of Nantes, 1769). In their engravings she is generally younger than her Son, being, for instance, about twenty, whereas he is thirty years old, so that, at first sight, He seems to be rather her husband or lover than her Son.

This very year I saw at Rouen, in the Church of St. Ouen, in the Chapel of the _Sacred Heart_, a pen-and-ink drawing, by young ladies, having the written approbation of the ecclesiastical authorities, in which Jesus is represented on His knees before the Virgin, who is also kneeling.

The most violent satire against the Jesuits is what they have made themselves--their art, the pictures and statues they have inspired.

They are at once characterised by the severe sentence of Poussin, whose Christ did not appear to them pretty enough: "We cannot imagine a Christ with His head on one side, or like Father Donillet's." Yet Poussin saw the best days of the Jesuit art: what would he have said if he had seen what followed? all that decrepid coquetry that thinks it smiles whilst it grimaces, those ridiculous glances, dying eyes, and such like deformities. The worst is, they who think only of the flesh know no longer how to represent it. As the thought grows more and more material and insipid, the form becomes defaced, degraded from picture to picture, ign.o.ble, foppish, affected, heavy, dull--that is to say, shapeless.[2]

We may judge of men by the art they inspire; and I confess it is no easy task to augur favourably of the souls of those who inspire this art, and recommend these engravings, hanging them up in their churches and distributing them by thousands and millions. Such taste is an ominous sign. Many immoral people still possess a sentiment of elegance. But willingly to take to the ign.o.ble and false discovers a sad degradation of the soul.

An undeniable truth is here made manifest; which is, that art is the only thing inaccessible to falsehood. Being the offspring of the heart and natural inspiration, it cannot be allied to what is false, it will not be violated; it protests, and if the false triumphs, it dies. All the rest may be aped and acted. They very well managed to make a theology in the sixteenth and a morality in the seventeenth century; but never could they form an art. They can ape the holy and the just; but how can they mimic the beautiful?--Thou art ugly, poor Tartuffe, and ugly shalt thou remain: it is thy token. What! you reach the beautiful, or ever lay a finger upon it? This would be impious beyond all impiety!--The beautiful is the face of G.o.d!

[1] In 1771. On Sacred Hearts (by Tabaraud), p. 82.

[2] In 1834, being busy with Christian iconography, I looked over the collections of the portraits of Christ in the Royal Library. Those published within the last thirty years are the most humiliating I have ever seen, both for art and human nature. Every man (whether a philosopher or a believer) who retains any sentiment of religion will be disgusted with them. Every impropriety, every sensuality and low pa.s.sion is there: the childish, dandified seminarist, the licentious priest, the fat curate who looks like _Maingrat_, &c. The engraving is as good as the drawing--a skewer and the snuff of a tallow candle.

PART II.

ON DIRECTION IN GENERAL, AND ESPECIALLY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

CHAPTER I.

RESEMBLANCES AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE SEVENTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES.--CHRISTIAN ART.--IT IS WE WHO HAVE RESTORED THE CHURCH.--WHAT IT ADDS TO THE POWER OF THE PRIEST.--THE CONFESSIONAL.

There are two objections to be made against all that I have said, and I will state them:--

First. "The examples are taken from the seventeenth century, at a time when the direction was influenced by theological questions, which now no longer occupy either the world or the Church; for instance, the question of grace and free-will, and that of Quietism or repose in love." But this I have already answered. Such questions are obsolete, dead, if you will, as theories; but, in the spirit and practical method which emanate from these theories, they are, and ever will be, living.

There are no longer to be found speculative people, simple enough to trace out expressly a doctrine of lethargy and moral annihilation; but there will always be found enough quacks to practice quietly this lethargic art. If this be not clear enough, I will, in a moment, make it clearer than some people would desire.

Secondly. "Are the examples you have shown from the books and letters of the great men of the famous age sufficiently conclusive for our own time? Might not those profound and subtle men of genius, who dived so deeply into the science of directing souls, have entered into refinements, of which the common herd of confessors and directors cannot now conceive any idea? Can you fear anything of the sort from the poor simple priests whom we have now? Pray where are our St.

Francois de Sales, our Bossuets, and our Fenelons? Do you not see that not only the clergy no longer possess such men, but that they have degenerated generally, and as a cla.s.s. The great majority of the priests are of rustic families. The peasant, even when he is not poor, finds it convenient to lighten the expenses of his family, by placing his son in the seminary. To nursery education, that which we receive from our parents before any other, they are total strangers. The seminary by no means repairs this inconvenience of origin and former condition. If we judge by those who come from the hands of the Sulpicians, Lazarists, &c., we shall be inclined to believe that there has been a deep plan laid among the upper leaders, to form none but indifferent priests, who would be so much the more dependent, and blind to the influence exercised over them contrary to their real interests.

What then do you fear? Is not this intellectual degradation of the clergy sufficiently comforting? How could such men follow, in the confession and direction, the learned tactics of the priests of former ages? The dangers you point out are imaginary."

To this it is easy to answer:--