The Catholic World Volume Ii Part 68

If the propositions of which Spinola was the bearer were warmly supported in Germany, they were no less warmly supported at Rome. The interest which the chief of the Church could not fail to take in the re-establishment of Catholic unity, was greatly enhanced at the time by the special need which that wise and prudent pontiff, Innocent XI., felt of creating in Europe allies for the Holy See against the offensive pretensions of France. At Rome as in Germany Louis XIV. was the target and the bugbear. That most Christian king, who consented to protect the faith in his own kingdom on the condition of tacitly subjecting it to his royal will, took strange liberties, as everybody knows, with the common Father of the faithful. Innocent XI., almost besieged in his palace by the arms of France, and seeing his bulls handed over, by magistrates sitting on _fleurs de lis_, to the common hangman to be publicly burned, was strongly tempted to seek in converted schismatics, and in prodigal sons returning to the fold, a support against the arrogant pretensions of the _elder_ son of the Church. {437} Spinola, therefore, was everywhere well received. Rome listened to him, entered into his views, even annotated the bases of the negotiation he was charged to transmit, and for several years the winds on both sides of the Alps blew in favor of peace.

Leibnitz, holding relations with both Spinola and the princ.i.p.al Protestant doctors, serving as the medium of intercommunication between them, and frequently taking his pen to give precision to their respective views, was already the king-bolt of the negotiation, and very early in its prosecution. Bossuet's name began to be mentioned.

The controversies of this great prelate with the French Protestants, his writings, strongly marked by a doctrine at once so firm and enlightened, and which placed Catholic truth on so broad and so solid a foundation, were more than once used to smooth the way to reunion, either by solving difficulties or by reconciling differences. Twice he was even directly solicited to give his advice, and to put his own hand to the work; but he gave vague and embarra.s.sed answers, and refused to accept the overtures made to him. Wherefore? Is it necessary to think, as M. Foucher de Careil leaves it to be understood, that the King of France viewed with an evil eye a reunion not likely to turn to his profit, or to strengthen his influence, and that as on other occasions the submission, a little blind, of the subject to his sovereign, arrested with Bossuet the accomplishment, I will not say of the duty, but of the desire of the Catholic bishop?

Such was the first phase of this remarkable negotiation, related, or more properly exhumed, with details very curious and perfectly new.

The characters, the parts, the motives, of the various actors in the scene are fairly set forth and a.n.a.lyzed by M. de Careil, and we congratulate him on having added a new and piquant page to the diplomatic history of the seventeenth century. A single gap, however, very important and very easy to fill he has left, which renders his exposition a little obscure and uncertain. We nowhere find the text of the propositions, the instruments, to speak the language of cabinets, which made during twenty years the bases of the negotiation. They were in great number, M. de Careil informs us, drawn up under different circ.u.mstances, and by different authors. The Protestant theologians a.s.sembled at Hanover, and especially the most ill.u.s.trious of them, Gerard Mola.n.u.s, abbot of Lock.u.m, drew up, collectively or individually, complete plans or _methods_, as they called them, of reunion, in which they expressed at the same time their views and their wishes, the sacrifices which they believed their communions would consent to make, and those which they expected from Rome in return for the re-establishment of unity. The Bishop of Neustadt, on his part, produced several compositions of the same kind, the t.i.tles of which, as given by M. de Careil, are, _Regulae circa Christianorum omnium eccesiasticam reunionem--Media conciliatoria incitantia, praestanda ad conciliationem._ And, in fine, under the name of _Propositiones novellorum discretiorum et praecipuorum_, he himself made a methodical abstract, in twenty-five propositions, or heads of chapters, of the views and wishes of Protestants, a capital doc.u.ment, which was discussed and corrected at Rome in a congregation of cardinals, and sent back to Germany with an approbatory brief of His Holiness. Leibnitz had it under his eye, and copied it with his own hand at Vienna, carefully marking the corrections and additions made by the Sacred College, and we understand M. Foucher de Careil to have had personal knowledge of the copy taken by Leibnitz.

It is difficult, therefore, to explain why M. de Careil has thought it necessary to subject our curiosity to the veritable punishment of Tantalus by simply mentioning the existence of a doc.u.ment of such great importance {438} without reproducing it. That he should believe it his duty not to swell his volume--though the previous editors of Leibnitz and Bossuet did it--by inserting the private lucubrations of Protestant theologians, we can, in rigor, comprehend, but not approve.

As in almost all the letters he has published, especially those of Mola.n.u.s, these writings are discussed and commented on, it would, we think, have much facilitated the clear understanding of the subject, to have given at least the more important of them _in extenso._ But after all, the reformed doctors the most accredited spoke only in their own private names, for themselves alone, without any authority to bind their contemporary co-religionists, and _a fortiori_ without any authority to bind their Protestant posterity. Little imports it to know what Mola.n.u.s or any other Protestant in 1680 thought of the points in controversy between the Church and the Reformation. But an act of the Court of Rome, discussed in a congregation, and clothed with the pontifical sign-manual--an official decision defining the maximum of concessions either as to language or practice which the Church could make to her separated children in order to bring them back to her bosom, Protestant propositions in their origin, indeed, but, as says M. de Careil--in a note written, I know not wherefore, in Italian--_accommodate secundo il gusto di Roma_(modified to suit the taste of Rome), is a doc.u.ment of a value very different, and yields in historical interest only to its dogmatic importance. It would be a doc.u.ment to place by the side of the most celebrated Professions of faith, and even above them, and to present, along with the excellent _Exposition_ by Bossuet, to all those troubled souls, so numerous in Protestant communions, who discern the truth only through the mists of prejudice, or misconceive it when stated to them in terms the real sense of which has for them been distorted or perverted from their childhood.

What Leibnitz in various places, and M. de Careil after him, show us of the propositions submitted to Rome, increases not a little our desire to know precisely what she replied to them. It seems from all that is told us, that the process or method of affecting reunion uniformly, or very nearly so, indicated by the Protestant doctors, was to place in two distinct categories the several points of difference which separate the Protestant communions from the Catholic Church; then place in the first category all the questions on which agreement may be hoped either by way of accommodation, if matters of simple disciplinary usage, if susceptible of modification; or by way of explanation, if points of dogmatic dispute turning on words rather than on ideas. On all these, agreement being easy, it should be immediately effected and proclaimed. In the second category must be placed all disputed questions too important, or on which minds are too embittered, to admit of their settlement by previous explanation.

These must not be treated immediately, but be left in suspense, and reserved for discussion and final settlement in a future council.

Meanwhile the Protestant doctors, pastors, ministers, and their flocks must be received into the Roman communion on the simple declaration that they acknowledge the infallibility of the Church in matters of dogma, and the promise, beforehand, that when she has freely decided with certainty, clearness, precision, and without ambiguity or equivocation, the several points reserved for adjudication, they will accept her decisions and offer no resistance to her decrees.

Such was the method proposed, which Leibnitz calls by turns the method of _mutual tolerance, abstraction, suspension,_and to which he reverts so frequently, and on which he insists with so much complaisance, under so many forms, and in so many different writings, that it is hardly possible not to regard him as its inventor. In his {439} view, this method has the merit of cutting off with a single stroke the interminable debates in which the sixteenth century was consumed, and of making the peace of nations no longer depend on the quibbling spirit of theologians. We shall soon briefly examine whether this abridgment of controversies might not have the inconvenience of leaving out the truth, or of spurning it aside; but for the moment we would simply remark that the method suggested or eagerly adopted by Leibnitz involved, with him, a grave consequence, so obvious that n.o.body can mistake it.

The questions proposed to be placed in the second category, or the points of controversy too important to be treated in advance, and to be reserved for discussion and settlement in a council to be convoked and held after reunion, had every one of them already been examined, one by one, discussed, and determined without appeal, in the celebrated a.s.sembly whose fame still filled all Europe, and whose decrees were read from the pulpits of more than half of Christendom.

During twenty-five years, athwart the intrigues of courts, the ravages of war, and even the unchained plagues of heaven, three times interrupted, but as often resumed, the whole cause of the Reformation, dogmas and discipline, had been presented and argued at Trent.

Judgment was there rendered on all the counts in the indictment, and the Reformation was henceforth _res judicata_. Consequently, to propose to reserve and open anew for discussion, were it only the least point of doctrine, was to forfeit the whole work of Trent, and to declare that great a.s.sembly illegal and all its decrees vacated.

The Protestant proposition amounted, then, simply to this: Annul the Council of Trent, and convoke a new council in which Protestants _en ma.s.se_ will have the right to sit!

Under what form was such a proposition presented to Rome? What impression on Rome did it make? Was there really found a Catholic bishop to support it? Was it really discussed in a Congregation of Cardinals? Was it really included in the list of propositions admitted to discussion by the Papal brief whose existence is enigmatically revealed to us? If we understand certain phrases of M. de Careil, all these questions must be answered in the affirmative. He himself firmly believes that this project was accepted by the Bishop of Neustadt; he even believes that it was not discouraged at Rome; and that, the suspension of the Council of Trent was counted among the concessions which the bishop returned from Rome authorized to lead the Protestants, who had charged him with their interests, to hope would be granted.

It is certainly very embarra.s.sing for us to question an a.s.sertion by M. de Careil, who seems to speak with the doc.u.ments before him, while we, in the darkness in which he leaves us, can reason only from conjecture. We can only express our deep surprise, and ask him, if he is quite sure of having carefully read what he relates, or duly reflected on what he a.s.serts? What, the Court of Rome authorized a bishop to promise Protestants, in its name, the suspension of the Council of Trent! Rome, with a stroke of the pen, pledged herself to permit the destruction of the work to which she had, during four glorious pontificates, devoted the persistent perseverance which she owed to the Holy Ghost, and all the traditional resources of her policy--the work which, in reaffirming the immovable foundations of the Christian faith, had at the same time drawn tighter, to the profit of the Holy See, the loosened bonds of the hierarchy! Rome exposed herself to see effaced, on the one hand, those dogmatic decrees in which the magnificence of the language rivals the depth of the ideas, and which have taken rank in the admiration of the world by the side of the Nicaean symbol, and on the other, those canons of discipline for which she had {440} maintained with the great Catholic powers a persistent struggle from which nothing could divert her, no, not even the fear of seeing France follow in the footsteps of England! And for what this condescension? For a negotiation of doubtful success, and the success of which, were it certain, would have restored to her communion only Germany, leaving outside of Catholic unity the Protestant centres of London, Geneva, and Amsterdam! Moreover, under what form would such a concession be made? By a confidential act, by a secret power given to an obscure agent! The Council of Trent would have been thus disavowed in the shade by one Congregation of Cardinals, whilst another, inst.i.tuted expressly to give it vigor, continued, as it does still at Rome itself, to comment and develop it in public, and while at the foot of all altars the decisions of that great council received the solemn adhesion of all those whom the episcopal invest.i.ture raised to the rank of judges of the faith!

M. de Careil must not think us too difficult, if we hesitate to admit on his bare word, or even on that of Leibnitz, the reality of so strange a fact. Leibnitz was a party interested, and very deeply interested, in the success of a project for which he had a paternal affection, and his testimony is here too open to suspicion of at least involuntary illusion for us to receive it as conclusive proof.

Leibnitz, beside, whatever was his intimacy with the Bishop of Neustadt, doubtless did not know thoroughly the confidential instructions of the plenipotentiary with whom he negotiated. The slightest affirmation of the bishop himself would have incomparably more weight with us, but that prelate, from whom M. de Careil publishes several doc.u.ments, so far from ever mentioning any such engagement, takes special care, on the contrary, to avoid giving any personal opinion of his own on any of the plans presented to him. He takes care to remark to Leibnitz, in a special letter, that in the whole matter he acts only as a simple reporter, guards himself from supporting any proposition made to him, and simply promises the Protestant theologians to labor to secure a favorable reception to any overtures they might make consistent with Catholic principles. _Ego_, says he, _nullibi causae susceptae agam doctorem, sed simplicem apud utramque partem solicitatorum... Nihil aliud polliceor quam quod . .

ego theologicam et tam favorabilem ac principia nostra patiantur, approbationem procurare laborabo_. Such a promise, which lends itself indeed to everything, engages a.s.suredly to nothing, and if it in some measure explains the hopes which Leibnitz cherished, it is far from sufficing to remove our doubts.

Till a contrary proof--and I mean by a contrary proof an authentic and official doc.u.ment, not such or such an allusion, or _it is said_, collected at random from a private correspondence--I shall continue to believe that the suspension of the Council of Trent, all though making an essential part, and const.i.tuting, as it were, the keystone of the Protestant plan of pacification, was never conceded in principle at Rome, probably was never entertained; that Bishop Spinola was never authorized to treat on that basis, and that if he did not wholly refuse to converse on that point, it was in order not to discourage benevolent dispositions which he judged it wise to manage.

He also may have hoped that when the Protestants had taken the great step of admitting the infallibility of Catholic authority, they would be led easily, by means of some historical explanations, to agree that the aid of the Holy Ghost did not fail the sessions of Trent, any more than any of the grand a.s.sizes of the Christian Church. If I am deceived in this negative conclusion, nothing would have been more easy for M. de Careil than to prevent my error by a more complete publication.

The sequel of events will show why I attach so much importance to the {441} establishment of the truth on this point. Let us resume, therefore, with M. de Careil the thread of the narrative. In spite of the general desire in 1670 to effect an understanding between Protestants and Catholics, and perhaps because of the ardor of that desire, all parties avoided explaining themselves fully on delicate points, and the negotiation and the _irenique_, as M. de Careil calls it, dragged itself along and reached no result. Twenty years after it continued still, languishing, indeed, but not abandoned. The Bishop of Neustadt was still living, hoping, laboring, and travelling constantly, intent on effecting peace; the Protestant doctors continued to pile up notes upon notes, and blackened any quant.i.ty of paper; but if in the theological world the affair remained on foot, though not advancing, in the political world the favor which had sustained it was singularly cooled. The spirit of resistance to the preponderating influence of Louis XIV., more determined than ever, had suddenly changed its course, and sought no longer its support in Catholicity, but, on the contrary, in the most advanced party of the Reformation, which suddenly raised up a champion of European independence. The Protestant chief of a petty maritime republic, elevated by a daring movement to the throne of a great monarchy--the grandson of William the Taciturn, became master of the heritage of the Stuarts, rallied around his standard all the hopes of national freedom and all the animosities caused by oppression. Beside, from the fatal edict of 1685, which brutally thrust out of France a whole peaceable people, brought up under the shelter of the laws in the ignorance of an hereditary error, the armies, the councils, and the large industrial towns of all Europe became gorged with French exiles, who united in the same execration Louis XIV. and the Church in which they saw only the b.l.o.o.d.y image of her implacable minister. On this stormy sea of excited pa.s.sion and intense hatred the humble project of union, which Spinola and Leibnitz had so much difficulty in keeping afloat in calm weather, had little chance of surviving.

The princes abandoned it as no longer serving their political interests. But other auxiliaries, however, offered themselves, endowed with less power indeed, but hardly less brilliancy. These were no other than great ladies, delighting in the commerce of the learned, and retaining in their convents or the interior paths of piety the habits of a cultivated education, and sometimes pretensions to political ability. In the seventeenth century, especially in France after the Fronde, it is well known that theology often became the refuge of those high-born beauties whom scruples or repentance kept aloof from the pleasures of the court, whilst the jealous despotism of the sovereign would no longer permit them to make a figure on the theatre of public affairs. Several of these elegant, n.o.ble, and even royal lady-theologians were attracted by the report of the negotiation in which Leibnitz took part, and perhaps by the renown of that negotiator himself, and in the hope either of aiding in dressing the wounds of Europe, or at least of securing so precious a conquest in the net of faith, opened communications and displayed in their correspondence with him those severe graces of which their piety had not despoiled them. The Abbess of Maubuisson; Louise Hollandine, sister of the palatiness, Anne of Gonzaga; that celebrated princess herself; the sprightly Madame de Brinon, for a long time the confidant of Madame de Maintenon at Saint-Cyr, but whose enterprising spirit could not be anywhere contented with a subordinate part; in fine, the queen of the _Precieuses_, Mademoiselle Scudery, who neglected no opportunity of shining in an epistolary correspondence, and who was by no means sorry to show that her merit could surpa.s.s the limits of the Carte de him, such are the {442} unexpected figures which M. de Careil makes pa.s.s before us, and in painting them he borrows some colors from the palette of the great philosopher of our days, M. Cousin, who has devoted himself to the good fame of the ladies of the seventeenth century. In the train of the ladies appear the literary gentlemen of their society, accustomed to make with them, in courteous jousts, the a.s.saults of wit. As the friend of Madame de Brinon, for instance, we see intervene the historian of the French Academy, the best pen of the royal cabinet, the celebrated Pellisson. All these epistles, very numerous, in which the variety of tone relieves the monotony of subject, form the most agreeable part of the new publication--too agreeable, indeed, for seriousness is sadly wanting, and more still in Leibnitz himself than in his graceful correspondents. A tone of subtle badinage, a mistimed display of literary and philosophical erudition, the pleasure of discussing without care to conclude, are, unhappily, but too apparent in everything that emanates from his pen during this second period. We might say that he took pleasure in prolonging a situation which procured him advances so flattering, and in which, without pledging himself to any one, he could let himself be lulled by sweet compliments from the most beautiful mouths in the world.

However that might be, this slumber, sustained by such sweet words, was all at once rudely broken. Madame de Brinon, the most active brain of the feminine congress, seeing that after all they talked much and said nothing, and that, by a supple and undulating argumentation, Leibnitz always escaped at the decisive moment, and r.e.t.a.r.ded more than he advanced a solution, formed the project of calling to her aid a more vigorous athlete, who could grapple with him body to body. She addressed herself to Bossuet, and this time the Bishop of Meaux found more leisure and more freedom of action. The political situation had changed. Coming out from that cold distrust in which he intrenched himself in the beginning, he requested to have communicated to him the doc.u.ments of the negotiation, especially the writings of Mola.n.u.s, and made it his duty to give his own views of the matter. The entrance of this great man upon the scene, a long time announced, a long time expected, and who appeared, as in certain tragedies, as the hero of the third act, has, in M. de Careil's publication, all the effect of a theatrical surprise.

No sooner, in fact, has he opened his mouth, than a puff of his stiff, strong speech tumbles down the frail scaffolding on which Leibnitz had placed his hopes of the peace of Christendom. Placing his finger at once on the weak spot in the system, he has no difficulty in showing that, however disguised, the real proposition returns always to the demand that the Church shall suffer to be called in question points already adjudicated, and tolerate doubt where she has already defined the faith. Now, if such condescension is possible in the order of human decrees, which, providing for local and transitory interests, may and ought to yield to differences of time and place, it would be absurd to suppose it possible in the order of eternal truths, proclaimed by an authority conceded to be infallible. Infallibility carries with it immutability as a necessary consequence. The mirror of an unalterable truth can reflect only a single image; the echo can repeat only a single sound. Comment, explain, as much as you please, clothe the old faith with new forms if you will, smooth the paths which conduct to it by removing all offensive terms which are a stumbling-block to the weak, save self-love the humiliation of a position disavowed by treating error as a misunderstanding which is now enlightened, even charity exacts in this respect all that dignity permits; but to alter, attenuate, or {443} merely to debate the truth transmitted can in no sense be permitted without killing with the same blow both the Church and the truth, without either denying the truth or that the Church has always been its interpreter.

Such was the reasoning, perfectly simple, and the principle of the infallibility of the Church once admitted, unanswerable, which Bossuet with his well known majesty, and from the height of his episcopal dignity, urged in reply to the method supported by Leibnitz. Was Leibnitz taken by surprise? Had he seriously thought of becoming a Catholic without submitting in the process to this consequence? Such a defect of logic in a rival of Newton is not supposable. But he was neither accustomed to be treated so loftily, nor in a humor to march so directly to the point. A cry of astonishment and despite involuntarily escaped him, sharp complaints of _the haughtiness of M.

de Meaux, of the tone of superiority which eloquence and authority give to great men,_and bitter denunciations of the exclusive spirit and obstinacy of theologians, betray this sentiment, very natural, and as it would seem even in some measure contagious, for M. de Careil, now and then making himself one with his hero, suffers himself to be gained by it. All good Catholic as he would be, he himself also in his two introductions regrets that the conciliating spirit and eclectic methods of Leibnitz were not accepted. Conciliation is an excellent thing, and pleases me much, some say, pleases me too much, and I have been more than once accused of carrying in religious matters my love for it a little too far; but there are limits fixed in the very nature of things, and which a little common sense will always, I hope, prevent me from transgressing. Who says _Church_, says permanence in the truths of faith; and who says _Catholics_, says a union of men who think alike of those truths. Now what, stripped of all ambiguity of language, would have been the practical effect of the proposition of Leibnitz, if it had been carried into execution? The points of doctrine (and what points! the most important not only for faith but also for reason, affecting the basis as the supreme destiny of the soul) touching the accord of grace and free will, the conditions of eternal salvation, the mysterious operations of the sacraments, taught in the Christian pulpit from the very cradle of Christian antiquity, and for more than a hundred years clothed in new and more precise forms, would have been at a single dash erased from the catechism and suspended in doubt till the uncertain action of a future council! The Church would have suffered an interrogation point to be placed indefinitely before affirmations which she had only the day before imposed on the faithful under sanction of an anathema! Meanwhile, the faithful, divided on the very foundations of their belief, would have met before the same altar to repeat the same prayers while understanding them in contradictory senses, and to receive the same sacraments while holding entirely different views of their value and efficacy! What in this strange _interim_ would have become of the dignity and stability of Catholic doctrine? And what were the utility of an external and nominal union which could only cover a real internal difference?

To sustain himself, if not his firm and piercing genius, in an illusion which held him captive and would not relax its grasp, Leibnitz had two, only two, arguments in his repertory; but he had the art to make them take so many different forms, and to make with these two arms so many pa.s.ses and counter-pa.s.ses of logic and erudition, that more than an entire volume is taken up by M. de Careil with the writings which contain them, and which may be read even now without other fatigue than that produced by their continual dazzle. Faithful to our task of reporter, we must strip these two arguments of the brilliant garments with which his luxurious {444} eloquence adorns them. Divested of their flesh, so to speak, stripped naked, and subjected to the treatment to which the scholastics subject all arguments to ascertain their value, these two arguments are very simple and easily comprehended. In the first place, they consist in denying the antiquity, and therefore the authority, of the Council of Trent. Leibnitz in this respect only repeats the allegations of all Protestant doctors, and which were old even in his time. The number of prelates present at that a.s.sembly was relatively small, and were taken almost exclusively from the churches of Spain and Italy, and as several Catholic sovereigns refused to publish the council in their respective states, because some of its disciplinary canons appeared to strike at their temporal rights, there had been no opportunity to heal its original defect by the a.s.sent of the Church dispersed.

In the second place, granting that the Council of Trent had the character and authority which are questioned, it was in good faith and in the sincerity of their hearts that Protestants refused to acknowledge them. They in whose names Leibnitz was charged to negotiate gave manifest proofs of that good faith in adhering beforehand to the decision of a future council, and consequently in rendering full homage to the principle of ecclesiastical authority.

Now error, if sincere, is not heresy, and has only its appearance. It is only voluntary, deliberate, and obstinate rebellion that makes the heretic. A man who submits in advance to the authority of truth, and waits only a knowledge of it to arrange himself under its banner, counts from that moment among those to whom the Church may open her maternal bosom.

These few sentences embrace--every attentive reader will be convinced of it--the substance of the whole argumentation, extended by Leibnitz, enriched and enlivened by a thousand piquant expressions, through many years, in a series of more than a hundred letters. It needs fewer words still, after Bossuet, to expose in its poverty and nakedness the ground-work concealed by the richness and splendor of the ornaments.

What mattered it, in reality, to examine whether the Council of Trent in its origin or at any moment of its duration had united a full representation of the universal Church? To what good to seek if it had received in its text and in every part official promulgation by the political power in each sovereign state? One fact was certain, and that was enough. At the time when Leibnitz was writing, the doctrine defined by the Fathers of Trent on all the points controverted between Catholics and Protestants was, without a single exception, the law in all the churches of the Catholic world. From the basilica of Michael Angelo to the humblest village church, under the purple as under the serge soutane, every pontiff, every cardinal, every bishop, every parish priest, in the confessional as in the pulpit, scrupulously conformed to its language. If the consent of the Church is not recognizable by such signs, by what signs could it be recognized? Only they whom Trent condemned persisted in withholding their adhesion to its decrees. But Arius protested also against Nicaea, and it has never depended on a few voices raised by spite or chagrin to disturb the harmony of symbols with which the concert of nations makes resound the vaults of the universal Church.

What, again, avails it to allege the good faith, the involuntary ignorance, of Protestants in resisting the Council of Trent? That good faith, if real, may excuse them in the eyes of G.o.d, who reads the heart; it opens not the doors of the visible Church, which can admit to her external communion only those who make an explicit profession of her doctrine. Where, in fact, should we be, what chimera would be the authority of the {445} Church, and in what smoke would vanish the obedience of the faithful, if every man could at pleasure retrench this or that article from the _Credo_, under the pretext that he could not in his conscience recognize in it the marks of divine revelation?

Certainly it is obstinacy in error that makes the heretic, for a just G.o.d can punish only the adhesion of the will to error. So in that terrible and solemn day which will rend the veil which covers the inmost human conscience, not only of those in separated Christian communions, but even those in the darkness of paganism and idolatry, many souls may be discovered who for their constant fidelity to the feeble gleams of light vouchsafed them, will have deserved to have applied to them the merits of the sacrifice of the Son of G.o.d. More than one Queen of Saba will come up from the desert to accuse the children of Abraham of a want of faith, and in that supreme moment the Church will recognize more than one

"Enfant qu'en sol sein elle n'a point porte."

(Child which she has not brought forth.)

But it is given to no one to antic.i.p.ate that hour of mystery and revelation, and so long as here below, and knowing one another only by words and external acts, it is, by our beliefs that we must, at least externally, as to the body, if not to the soul, separate ourselves.

Sole certain guide to salvation, sole confidant of the mysteries of grace, the Church d.a.m.ns not in advance all those whom she excludes, any more than she saves all those whom she admits; but she can relinquish to n.o.body a single one of the articles of faith, nor knowingly allow a single farthing to be subtracted from the deposit confided to her keeping.

Against these two fixed points, imperturbably sustained by the hand of Bossuet, the inexhaustible dialectics of Leibnitz, always repulsed, ever returning anew to the charge, beats and breaks, without relaxation, precisely as the waves of the ocean against the rock. The contrast between the flexibility of one of the adversaries and the immobility of the other is about all the interest that, in the midst of continual repet.i.tions, is offered by this interminable debate. We subjoin, however, to conclude our a.n.a.lysis, the recital of two inventions of doubtful loyalty imagined by Leibnitz to give the change to his adversary, and which out of respect for the memory of so great a man we will call not artifices, but with M. Foucher de Careil simply expedients.

The first consisted in pa.s.sing over the head of Bossuet, in order to crush him with the heavy hand of his sovereign, Louis XIV.

Europe knew, or at least believed that it knew, both Bossuet and Louis XIV. It knew that the one suffered from temperament, and the other from principle, hardly any limit to the royal authority. The susceptibility of the monarch and the conscience of the subject being of one accord, Leibnitz thought that by disquieting the monarch he could easily bring the subject to reason. So in a note, ably and skilfully drawn up, addressed to the Duke of Brunswick, who was to send it to the French king, he represented that the work of peace at the point reached was arrested by an obstacle in reality more political than religious; that the Council of Trent, which was the real stumbling-block, interested Rome in her struggle with the temporal powers far more than in her controversies with heresy. Hence an intervention of the royal authority to remove that obstacle, so far from being an invasion of the domain of faith, would be only a very proper act defensive of the legitimate attributes of the temporal authority, only a continuation and a consequence of the struggle against ultramontane pretensions inst.i.tuted and sustained by all the parliaments of France, and for the clergy something like a supplementary article to the declaration of 1682. Let the king make felt in this languishing {446} negotiation that hand which nothing in Europe can resist. Let him p.r.o.nounce one of those sovereign words which have so often fetched an echo even in the sanctuary, or let him simply join to the theologians and bishops, too submissive by their quality to the spiritual authority, an ordinary representative of the regalian rights--a lawyer, a statesman, or a magistrate, and all will speedily return to order, and march rapidly toward a solution.

Numerous adulations of the wisdom of the king, and even of his theological knowledge, followed by honeyed insinuations against the Bishop of Meaux, terminate this singular appeal to the secular arm, the discovery of which will hardly count among the t.i.tles to glory of philosophy, and which, moreover, was no more successful than estimable.

The king, old, weary of those religious discussions which were the plague of his reign, and even to his last days the chastis.e.m.e.nt of his intolerable despotism, communicated the note to Bossuet without comment, perhaps even without having paid it the least attention.

Bossuet, strong in the solidity of his arguments, declared himself perfectly willing to receive such lay a.s.sociate as should be chosen, and Leibnitz, having no reason after that to desire what Bossuet so little dreaded, the proposition fell through, and left no trace.

The other snare was not less adroit, but more innocent. In his attachment to his favorite plan, Leibnitz could not persuade himself that it could possibly be resisted by any reasons drawn from conscience alone. The party taken, the point of honor, scholastic obstinacy, were, it seemed to him, the princ.i.p.al reasons for rejecting his plan. It was with Catholics a matter of vanity not to yield to demands made by Protestants. But what they refused from the hand of a stranger, they would, perhaps, accept more willingly from the hand of a friend, a member of their own communion. A pious fraud would relieve the plan of all suspicion of heresy. A consultation, for example, of a supposed Catholic doctor, who should show himself favorable to it, would, perhaps, be all that was required to disarm prejudice, and the flag would pa.s.s the merchandise. The great philosopher, therefore, set himself at work. a.s.suming the paternal tone and authoritative air of a Catholic priest, taking care that no expression smacking of heresy should escape his lips, playing a part, so to say, with all the gravity in the world, and, without a single smile, produced in eight or ten pages that little doc.u.ment which he ent.i.tled _Judicium Doctoris Catholici_, and which, proceeding from principles in appearance the most Catholic, and advancing in ways the most orthodox, arrived at the foot of the Council of Trent itself, to mine in silence its very foundation. If M. de Careil had not this time conscientiously printed the entire text of this discovery, we should find it very hard to believe that a mind so great could descend to such a puerile game, and of which we seek in vain the fruit he evidently hoped. With whom, then, did Leibnitz imagine he had to do? Do people disguise their ideas, as they counterfeit their voices? Is the Church a citadel so poorly guarded that one can enter it by stratagem, by simply turning his c.o.c.kade or dissembling his uniform? Took he Bossuet for an imbecile sentinel who could be imposed upon by pa.s.sports so evidently forged?

For the honor of Leibnitz and of philosophy we would pa.s.s over in silence this crotchet of misplaced gaiety, if M. de Careil did not force us to pause on it for a moment longer before including, by attaching to it an undue importance, by pretending to see in it the solution of a literary problem, which we formerly made a subject of some observations. A few words will dispose of this incident, which beside is not wholly foreign to the princ.i.p.al object of our present reflections.

{447}

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 Theologic.u.m_, 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 Theologic.u.m_, 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 Theologic.u.m_, 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 Theologic.u.m_ 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 G.o.dfrey 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 Theologic.u.m_ figure by the side of the _Judicium Doctoris,_at such a date as he judged the most convenient, for example, among the doc.u.ments of the negotiation of which he was drawing up a statement (_proces verbal_). But since one of these doc.u.ments 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 a.s.similation imagined has not the least foundation in fact. Although signed by the same hand, the two doc.u.ments, 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 a.s.suredly 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 a.n.a.lysis.

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 ant.i.thesis 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 G.o.d, those who like to carry either the torch of dogma or the scalpel of a.n.a.lysis 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.